1. ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION
AND ITS RESOLUTION
WTM FAQ 1.50 How do I not become frustrated when the people I want to share this information with can’t get through the Deaf Effect? / What do I do when my family and friends can’t ‘hear’ this? / How do I deal with the world’s scepticism and apathy to this breakthrough?
[Note, this answer concludes with communications from Jeremy Griffith, Tony Gowing and other WTM members that offer further helpful counsel on this issue.]
The short answer:
Biologist Jeremy Griffith’s redeeming, reconciling and rehabilitating explanation of the human condition makes so much sense and is so exciting and so relieving that people naturally want to share it with their family and friends, but in doing so you may encounter what is termed the ‘Deaf Effect’, in which the people you want to share it with can’t ‘hear’ the explanation, which can be very frustrating, even bewildering.
Historically, the human condition has been so terrifying that trying to think about our seemingly horribly flawed, corrupted human condition while we couldn’t understand it only led to suicidal depression, and so we blocked it out—we vowed never again to engage with it. So when you raise the explanation of the human condition, despite our corrupted condition now being defended, discussion of it can initially cause people’s minds to go into shock; their protective denial blocks the words and their meaning from entering their conscious awareness—their minds effectively become ‘deaf’ to any more discussion of the human condition.
The key to not becoming bewildered or frustrated by encountering the Deaf Effect is to have a deep understanding of why it occurs. This will ensure you aren’t destabilised when people can’t ‘hear’ what you are telling them, and will actually allow you to respond with great empathy and patience, making you the best possible advocate for this information. In order to gain this deep understanding, you need to become very familiar with our key Deaf Effect presentations: The Great Guilt that causes the Deaf Effect, Freedom Essay 1, Freedom Essay 11, FAQ 1.16 and chapters 1:4–1:5 of FREEDOM.
The elaboration:
As Jeremy Griffith explains in The Great Guilt that causes the Deaf Effect, the human condition is the incredible guilt and shame we humans experienced when we became conscious and started being competitive, selfish and aggressive when our instinctive self or soul expected us to behave cooperatively, selflessly and lovingly. The human condition is the guilt we feel for having corrupted our soul. This shame, this historic shame, is what Jeremy’s work is all about explaining—why we corrupted our soul.
Understandably then, this whole subject of our human condition has been so terrifying that trying to think about it while we couldn’t properly explain it only led to suicidal depression, and so generally as adolescents people ‘resigned’ themselves to never again engaging with the subject (see Freedom Essay 30 about the psychological process of Resignation).
It follows that when you attempt to discuss Jeremy’s psychosis-addressing-and-solving, real biological explanation of the human condition, even though the redeeming and relieving understanding has finally been found, that discussion can cause people’s minds to go into shock; their protective denial blocks the words and their meaning from entering their conscious awareness—their minds effectively become ‘deaf’ to any further discussion of the human condition.
This Deaf Effect can be overcome by a readiness to re-read and/or re-listen to explanation of the human condition, which erodes our historic denial, allowing the compassionate and immensely relieving insights to become accessible (see Freedom Essay 11). However, depending on how much hurt to their instinctive self or soul someone experienced growing up, this process of erosion can be very difficult. In some cases only humanity achieving a critical mass of people who are appreciative of Jeremy’s breakthrough explanation will be motivation enough to persuade them that it is actually now possible to confront the human condition. This means that in this project’s pioneering stage the reality may be that your family and friends may not be able to access this understanding.
The way to avoid becoming frustrated, or even bewildered or undermined by the Deaf Effect, is to have a deep understanding of it. Everyone needs to keep their feet firmly grounded in the understanding of humanity’s journey that we now have—that when finally the hard-won insights that we have been in search of for two million years are found, the majority of humans are too habituated to living in fear and denial of the human condition to initially be able to easily access them, and therefore suffer from a Deaf Effect. This understanding allows us to move forward with great compassion, patience and steadiness. To achieve this deep understanding of the Deaf Effect, we urge you to watch and/or read The Great Guilt that causes the Deaf Effect, as well as Freedom Essay 1, Freedom Essay 11, FAQ 1.16 and chapters 1:4–1:5 of FREEDOM.
Again, it’s easy to be daunted by the denial, apathy, scepticism and even hostility that can be directed at the explanation of the human condition (see Freedom Essay 56: Why there have been ferocious attacks on the WTM). For example, in the absence of the true explanation of our psychologically troubled condition we humans came up with a host of false excuses in order to cope with the negative implications of our behaviour, with the main one being that our ‘human nature’ is really no different from that seen in the animal kingdom; that we humans are competitive, aggressive, and selfish because of a need to reproduce our genes. Scientists embraced this excuse and developed it into a series of extremely dishonest, human-psychosis-avoiding theories—such as Social Darwinism, Evolutionary Psychology, and Multilevel Selection. (You can read about the dishonesty of mechanistic science in The Great Guilt that causes the Deaf Effect and Freedom Essay 14, and exposés of the main dishonest theories employed by mechanistic science in chapter 2 and chapter 6 of FREEDOM.) When you try to raise the true psychosis-confronting explanation of the human condition, people will resort to these denial-based arguments and they can seem very authoritative and confident, which can leave you extremely perplexed and confused, not knowing whether you have lost the plot or the people you are talking to have! But you are on safe ground, because the information you are supporting is a fully accountable, rational explanation, and can always be verified. Again, the reason that people react dismissively is because of the Deaf Effect, and the way to not become frustrated or even destabilised by their reaction is to fully understand it—which means understanding the terrible guilt and shame we have felt for corrupting our all-loving instinctive self or soul.
As you bring this calming understanding to the Deaf Effect you will start to see that your family and friends are anxious to understand what is making you so excited—being so close to you they will very much want to assess what you have become so enthusiastic about, especially a new idea that is as unorthodox and paradigm-shifting as this one. What will reassure them this isn’t just ‘pseudo idealism’, yet another false start to a human-condition-ameliorated world (see Jeremy’s book Death By Dogma), is the security of self and centredness you are gaining from being able to understand the human condition. This secure strength and your authoritative leadership will encourage them to become at least tolerant of this understanding, if not also appreciative and supportive themselves—and our experience is that often those people who were once sceptical end up being amongst our best supporters! Slowly everyone will see that they don’t have to be blocked by fear; that this realm of the human condition is no longer off-limits—that it’s now safe and that real, lasting freedom from the torment of the human condition is all-possible.
So the ‘deafness’ of the world around you is absolutely manageable once you understand why it exists, and in the meantime we can all keep living for this world-saving understanding and doing our best to share it; we just keep supporting it in whatever way we can (see our How To Help page) and that is completely fulfilling (see our Transformation page), and unstoppable momentum will build. It may take time for people to realise this breakthrough is what it says it is but once it catches on—through people such as yourself recognising the importance of it, and influential thought leaders becoming aware of it—the infectious enthusiasm and selfless love it liberates will spread like wildfire! And every day the WTM is breaking through the wall of denial and silence about the human condition more and more, and so our numbers are growing all the time, which you can be inspired by and take comfort in! As Jeremy writes in Sermon On The Beach, ‘It won’t be long before everyone you walk past will be smiling and happy because they know about the Transformed Way of Living and how it saves the world. This eleventh hour breakthrough redeeming understanding of ourselves means the outlook of the human race is going to change from terror about the state of the world to sublime relief and happiness!’ So yes, that inner knowledge that we now have the means to transform ourselves and the world through understanding provides us with a completely contented and meaningful, and absolutely exciting way to live.
You can see the growing momentum of support that is already building around the world in the impressive commendations Jeremy’s work has already received, the thousands of enthusiastic responses that appear on the slider underneath THE Interview on our homepage, and the scores of WTM Centres all around the globe. Also we have thousands and thousands of members in our Facebook Group so if you haven’t yet joined it is a wonderful place to share in the discussion and fellowship that is available.
Helpful counsel from Jeremy Griffith and others about dealing with the Deaf Effect in the world around us
The following communications from Jeremy Griffith, Tony Gowing and other WTM members offer further helpful advice on how to deal with encountering the Deaf Effect in those we are close to, and the wider world.
Jeremy Griffith, about taking our inspiration from helping to bring about a world free of the human condition (2020)
I was moved by your struggle to get others interested in this all-precious understanding. I just wanted to say that the Deaf Effect is especially shocking when you first encounter it, but you see we are, bit by bit, working our way through that tragic wall of denial and silence. Bit by bit we’re finding people who can hear this and respond excitedly and positively to it. Their numbers are growing all the time, and that’s what we take comfort in because it’s only a matter of patience and perseverance and time and we will achieve a critical mass of appreciation before which the walls of denial will just crumble. Already, as has been recognised, ‘the army is beginning to march’, a new world for the human race is coming—and as one African member said, even all those who are especially suffering in Africa are going to be freed. So, we just wrap our arms around the truth and calmly and determinedly keep moving forward to the promised land—as I mentioned in par. 1217 of FREEDOM, in his ‘Lord’s Prayer’, Christ instructed us to pray for the time when ‘Your [Godly, integrated, peaceful] kingdom come, your [integrative] will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ (Matt. 6:10 & Luke 11:2), and in par. 1148 of FREEDOM, I mentioned that in his poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake dreamed of a time ‘When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern’. WELL, GOD’S KINGDOM AND TRUE PERCEPTION IS COMING FOR ALL HUMANS!
YOU’RE AMONGST THE FIRST HUMANS ON EARTH TO COME UPON THE RECONCILING UNDERSTANDING OF ALL THE MADNESS. So it seems to me that from time to time you’re going to oscillate from feeling vanquished by all that darkness to being exhilarated by the emerging light of understanding that is going to spread across the world. So it further seems to me that whenever you feel the darkness you need to just swamp all that with the much, much greater truth of our freedom from all that suffering. Don’t let the dark get in the way of the light because all that darkness is just crap now and all that lightness is just truth on truth on truth. The darkness cannot stand against the light now. So you can be strong now, hold tight and let all the good light come flooding in, which is only going to increase in intensity from here on.
Tony Gowing, on how accepting the human condition in ourselves reassures people (2023)
I agree the deafness and madness out there is definitely difficult to deal with and I certainly know of the frustration you speak of times a million, but as with everything to do with the human condition, the issue isn’t everybody else, the problem is inside ourselves, which sucks to start with, because one of our greatest tools to help us survive under the duress of the human condition has been to blame others and pretend that they are worse than us and we personally are wonderfully virtuous, or at the least trying the best we can, but they aren’t trying at all! But what we find, in my experience anyway, is that the beauty of the problem being with me is that I can do something about it anytime I like.
The Transformed State is about putting our egocentric, hurt, insecure lives/selves to rest and becoming servants for humanity (see Jeremy’s presentation The Great Transformation). Our task is colossal—I have heard Jeremy describe it as turning the Amazon river around in its bed and making it run the other way. We can’t do it alone and it can’t be done overnight. But as more people actually come and participate and selflessly add their support and momentum to the effort, things will start to change and they will speed up over time.
Humans hate the human condition and are so, so, so, so fearful of it, they have spent their entire lives, every second of them working out how to live with and around the human condition without thinking about it or acknowledging it AT ALL. So it just makes complete sense that if we/anyone starts talking openly about the human condition, the natural response is going to be one of hatred, anger, fear, loathing albeit with the greatest amount of civility a person can muster at that moment. This is just a truth; it is the nature of our super human task of bringing this redeeming understanding to the world, but we just need to calm down and apply ourselves to the problem as it exists. It is difficult, but the rewards are SO WONDERFUL, SO AMAZING, SO LIBERATING, extraordinarily, incandescently sublime it makes it all worthwhile times infinity!
Our job is to help break down the fear of the human condition, not only with words but with our actions—the happier/more-easy-going/relaxed we are with the human condition inside of ourselves, the more we are able to be honest about it and accept it and realise the immense difficulty of the subject, the more empathetic we can be. The human condition has been raging for 2 million years, we don’t need everybody to get it overnight, we know the world will be free if we keep this information alive and slowly but surely understanding will take hold. All the panic and anger and frustration is our human-condition-afflicted, egocentric selves talking. We love all humans because they are all so, so, so, so courageous. We certainly don’t want to pander to the bullshit that is continuing everywhere we look, but our job is to build and continue to build the wonderful island of sanity in the sea of madness. So we just take up any tiny task, something that will help build the momentum in any tiny way, write a post or comment on this group, send FREEDOM/THE Interview to a thought leader, give a dollar to the advertising campaign, clean our own human-condition-afflicted lives up, the more we keep ourselves together the more generous to others and humanity we can be, the more they will notice and ask what the difference is. We now have the ultimate meaning in our lives to live for, the more we live that meaning, allow it into our lives rather than tacked on the side of them, or fitted into our old egocentric human-condition-afflicted lives the more momentum, happiness, freedom we are helping to build.
The more we take in the understanding of the human condition the more we see how everything is actually as it should be and with this understanding we can start to feel totally secure about the whole horrific situation that exists in all our lives and not insecure, bewildered and anxious. We can truly know that we really are wonderful, genuinely heroic legends who can now use this understanding of ourselves to begin to heal the world. To take all the insecurity out of the world for every single human, and the more insecurity we take out of the world, the more upset, mean, dismissive etc behaviour that it has been driven by the insecurity will disappear too. Being secure of self is the most wonderful relief, and starting to participate in a project to bring understanding of the human condition to the entire world is actually the most meaningful and satisfying task to be part of imaginable.
So in the end, yes, everywhere we go now in the human condition afflicted world we are going to find people who don’t treat us as we expect or ‘should’ be treated, with kindness and empathy and openness, but that is because the human condition is everywhere and in everyone, the only people we can change initially are ourselves and the more secure and upright we become through using this understanding in our own lives the more others will see just what an island of sanity the WTM is and all the people who understand the human condition are. We can now radiate secure assuredness about every single situation on earth because we have the answer that allows us to solve any and every problem on earth, we just have to allow ourselves to access it and use it. And as more and more people come to know this same truth about our species freedom from the human condition after 2 million years, they will be begging us to find out what it is that is make us so excited, happy and secure.
The human-condition-afflicted world is dying fast now, every day droves of humans are losing their interest in what the world has had to offer under the duress of the human condition, the pain is too much, but we know that that can all turn around instantly, just by understanding the human condition, by listening to and taking in the logic of a 1 hour interview, their whole world can take a 180 degree turn to happiness, joy and freedom. This is great news, this what we can live off and feed our enthusiasm with. The answer is simple once we all get used to the fact that not only is it not scary but the best thing ever to appear on planet earth as Professor Prosen was always saying!
Bill McCaugherty (member of the WTM West Coast Canada Centre), on how he had been ‘deaf to the Deaf Effect’ (2024)
I thought it might be of use or of interest to some of you to relate my experience regarding introducing my wife to the instinct versus intellect explanation of the human condition. Not suffering from the Deaf Effect myself, I really did not understand why she did not love the information from day one like I did and was even more perplexed by her genuine inability to read or hear Jeremy’s writings for herself [some rare individuals don’t ‘resign’ at adolescence to a life of denying the human condition, and as a result don’t suffer from the Deaf Effect—see Freedom Essay 60 about these ‘Ships at Sea’]. Her attention would drift off or she would complain that it was poorly written or just plain wrong when some bits started to leak through. Regardless, I just kept at it and would read to her most days. In retrospect, I may not have been as charitable as I should have been, as on too many occasions I would admonish her for not understanding what seemed to me such basic and simple concepts. Oh what irony in the fact that I was deaf to the Deaf Effect! In the end with a combination of her patience and genuinely caring personality (I knew she cared about me and did recognize how important this information seemingly was to me) and my persistence (or obstinance!), after some months, she did have her breakthrough moment. I am not recommending this approach (especially the admonishment and inconsiderate part), as it likely will not work and may even back fire with the majority of people (especially loved ones or close friends or relatives) but the patience, persistence and perseverance part is what is important and what will in good time erode the Deaf Effect. Her ‘seeing the light’ moment was years ago and since then she has become a staunch supporter and promoter of this world saving understanding.
We now both love this information dearly and spend one or two hours almost every morning reading aloud to each other and discussing something Jeremy has written. It has become the highlight of our day!
I do think that it’s so true that once a critical mass of people realise that this understanding of the human condition is what the human race has been searching for, the Deaf Effect will no longer be a problem because there will be sufficient incentive for everyone to persevere enough to overcome the Deaf Effect. All new ideas take time to replace old ideas, but the more people there are who have adopted the new idea the less resistance there is to the new idea, that’s the basic principle at work.
As well, the pent-up demand for this understanding, hiding just below the surface of our collective awareness, must be astronomical and when realization that this all-important understanding of the human condition has at last been found becomes well known, there will be an unstoppable stampede for the exits from the dark cave world into the healing, redeeming and liberating light of truth. [This comment from Bill calls to mind the words of the exceptional denial-free thinking prophet Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote, ‘The Truth has to only appear once…for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze.’]
Cindy’s and my video endorsement on our WTM West Coast Canada Centre that we made in 2019 of our two very different experiences encountering the explanation of the human condition may be of some help to others.
James Moffett (founder of the WTM Cape Town Centre), brings self-understanding to why the Deaf Effect was frustrating him so much (2023)
With time and experimentation I have realised I was still trying to “get a win” by introducing and successfully bringing someone new to this life-saving information: I was still seeking validation, still stuck in my egocentric power, fame, fortune and glory mindset or paradigm—I was in the Mexican Stand-off (see FAQ 1.23 ‘What is the significance of the ‘Mexican Standoff’ where you don’t want to deny the truth of the explanation of the human condition but also don’t want to accept all its exposing and confronting implications?’).
