2. ABOUT JEREMY GRIFFITH
WTM FAQ 2.5 Is Jeremy Griffith’s family — his father, mother and three brothers — supportive of his work on the human condition?
Jeremy Griffith’s response (written in 2023):
My father Norman Lionel Griffith was a grazier (sheep farmer) who, during the Second World War, rose to the rank of officer in Australia’s legendary Z force commandos. He died in a tractor accident on the family’s sheep station near Guyra in north-west New South Wales in 1971 at the age of 57 when I was 25 years old and had only begun to put my thoughts together about the human condition.
My mother Jill Griffith (née Pountney), who died in 2008 at the age of 86 when I was 62 years old, was a great lover of plants, especially trees, planting them everywhere she went, even co-founding the now renowned Burrendong Botanic Garden & Arboretum near Mumbil in central west New South Wales where we had a sheep station for many years.
With regard to her and my elder brother John’s and younger brothers Gervase’s and Simon’s interest in my studies of the human condition, the following is an edited version of what I wrote in my 2003 book A Species In Denial in the chapter titled ‘Why prophets were ‘without honour’ in their ‘own home’ and ‘own country’’.
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The reason I want to explain why it is that, to quote the Bible, ‘Only in his home town, among his relatives and in his own house is a prophet without honour’ (Mark 6:1-6) is because, as I will summarise shortly, and as is described in some detail in the essay about my Griffith Tablecraft project at www.humancondition.com/griffith-tablecraft, this lack of ‘honour’ is what I experienced in my family.
As is explained in FAQ 6.4, prophets are people who are able to confront and thus think truthfully about the corrupted state of the human condition, and since what I do in all my thinking and writing is look into the human condition, I have been described as a prophet. Most people, however, are very different from prophets in that most people have resigned during their adolescence to living in fearful denial of the issue of their and the human race’s corrupted condition (the psychological process of Resignation is explained in Freedom Essay 30). It is therefore completely understandable why human-condition-confronting, truthful thinking prophets are shunned and even persecuted by the resigned world which is terrified of the issue of the human condition. As the quote from the Bible says, prophets are ‘without honour’ in a world that is totally avoiding any confrontation with the human condition. So even though I’m presenting the redeeming and healing explanation of the human condition, I have to be patient with the resigned world because it will take time for it to realise that the issue of the human condition is now safe to look at.
In order to properly context why prophets are not ‘honour[ed]’, it is necessary to look at the overall journey that humanity has been on searching for this redeeming understanding of our corrupted condition.
The more corrupted humanity became in its heroic search for this understanding, the more confronting innocent, uncorrupted prophets were, and the more they were denied honour or recognition or acknowledgment. What resigned humans were alienating or separating themselves from when they resigned was the confronting and condemning truth of the existence of our species’ original instinctive soul’s all-loving and all-sensitive, innocent state, and therefore of their lives’ extreme corruption of that state. It is understandable then that in a world that is now almost devoid of innocent, sound soulfulness, an emissary from the soul’s world, which is what a prophet effectively is, was actively avoided, denied, persecuted, and even, in the case of Christ, eliminated by being murdered. The basic activity of resigned humans was not to honour the sound, truthful, soulful existence that prophets represented, but to ignore and even persecute it.
However, while this is the fundamental situation, it has also been explained [earlier in A Species In Denial] that while resigned humans needed to deny and repress the soul’s truthful world, when those resigned humans became overly corrupted they needed to find their way back to acknowledgement and support of some truth and soundness in order to counter, and even repair, their overly corrupted condition. While the presence of truthful prophets was something resigned humans tried to ignore and even destroy, over time they also came to need and appreciate—even to the point of revering—their existence, which is how religions developed.
While there emerged a need to recognise or honour prophets, it was still difficult to acknowledge their immediate presence because the resigned humans’ embattled ego came into play. As briefly mentioned earlier [in A Species In Denial], it was difficult for resigned, egocentric people to acknowledge the gifts of any individual when that individual was in their presence, nearby, or even still alive. The greater space and time between the presence of the especially gifted person and the average person, the easier it became for the average person to acknowledge their gifts without being made to feel inferior or worthless in comparison. Such was the level of insecurity in humans under the duress of the human condition. A great sportsperson often only received due credit for their achievements after they died, while many gifted individuals died in extreme poverty and anonymity, only to be resurrected and glorified by subsequent generations. Van Gogh managed to sell only one painting in his lifetime, yet his paintings now sell for millions of dollars.
While all talented and gifted people encountered this problem, there was no talent or gift as threatening to the ego of resigned humans as the gift of soulful soundness. Egocentricity in resigned humans was all about trying to establish worthiness at the exclusion of the truth of their corrupted condition, and so the presence of a sound prophet made that exclusion almost impossible to maintain.
A prophet’s uncompromising truthfulness was both extremely confronting and extremely ego-deflating. It follows that the closer in both time and space resigned humans were to an unresigned prophet, the more difficult it was for them to acknowledge the prophet’s essential difference. And a prophet’s immediate associates, especially his own family, were the closest in both time and space to him, so it makes sense they would find it the most difficult to recognise his soundness and truth.
The very great denial-free, truthful thinking prophet Jesus Christ suffered from this problem. To quote from the Bible, ‘Now Jesus himself had pointed out that a prophet has no honour in his own country’ (John 4:44). Christ also said ‘no prophet is accepted in his home town’ (Luke 4:16-30), and ‘Only in his home town and in his own house is a prophet without honour’ (Matt. 13:54-57), and ‘Jesus left there and went to his home town…When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were amazed. “Where did this man get these things?” they asked…Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James…Jesus said to them, “Only in his home town, among his relatives and in his own house is a prophet without honour.”…he was amazed at their lack of faith’ (Mark 6:1-6).
It makes sense that the first place a prophet would go for support for his truthful way of thinking would be his own family, but ‘a prophet is not recognised in his own home’. Tragically, his family is in fact the very last place he can expect to find support. As mentioned, having grown up with the prophet, his family are the closest people to him in both time and space and so suffer the most from the problems of being confronted by his honesty, soundness and truthfulness, and by having all their artificial and superficial reinforcements that they depend on for their sense of wellbeing exposed and made transparent.
A prophet’s mother is the closest of all people to him, but the reason for her inability to recognise the importance of his work is different to the other members of the family, who, unlike her, are resigned individuals. As explained earlier [in A Species In Denial in the section titled ‘Prophets and the concept of the ‘Virgin Mother’ demystified’ at www.humancondition.com/asid-prophets-and-the-virgin-mother-demystified], an unresigned prophet’s mother is also necessarily unresigned. Being unresigned and thus having not taken up an egocentric attitude to life, the prophet’s mother was not confronted by his honesty, or faced with having an artificial world of reinforcement made transparent. Being unresigned herself, the problem the mother of a prophet has is that she cannot see anything unusual about her unresigned son’s way of thinking and behaving. To her he is just an extremely enthusiastic, energetic, soulful person, and as he grows up and begins to resist and fight the world of denial, she, being a woman and thus relatively unaware of the nature of the battle that men are involved in of having to defy and overthrow the ignorant, condemning world of our ideal-behaviour-demanding instinctive soul [see chapter 8:11B in FREEDOM about the difference between men and women], can be persuaded by her other children that what he is doing has no meaning, is unnecessarily uncompromising, destructive, and even that he is mad.
The potential trap for the prophet, of hopelessly trying to have his family appreciate and benefit from his work, has a dangerous capacity to exhaust and destroy him. A sound, unresigned person will naturally try extremely hard to have his family appreciate him and his work, however he simply has to be strong and enduring enough to at some stage realise the futility of trying to ‘reach’ his own family and be prepared to get on with his work without their support. In taking this step he can draw some comfort from the knowledge that all people constitute family and that his love for humanity simply has to take precedence over his love of his own family. An unresigned prophet intuitively knows how precious his honest way of thinking is to a world that finds itself totally unable to think truthfully. He knows therefore that he must not fail to contribute his enlightening honesty to that world of terrible darkness and suffering, and so no matter how much he loves his family—and being free of corruption his love for them is without blemish and thus total—he must not cave in to their coercion to abandon his work. In terms of the value of the contribution that the unresigned prophet Christ has made to the world by providing a sanctuary of truth, honesty and soundness for overly exhausted humans to live through, Australia’s greatest ever educator, and my headmaster when I was at Geelong Grammar School, Sir James Darling, wrote that Christ’s life ‘was incalculably the most important event in human history, as we understand it, up to the present’ (The Education of a Civilized Man, 1962, p.206 of 223). And knowing the immense responsibility he had to offer humans a sanctuary from all their upset, Christ knew he could not cave into condemnation and ill-treatment from them; even ill-treatment from his own family. [For an appreciation of the life of Christ and of his human-race-saving contribution to the world, see my Freedom Essay 39.]
So now we can understand Christ’s behaviour when he began his ministry and his family heard about it, and accused him of having gone mad, and acting on that belief, tried to take charge of him as if what he was doing was wrong, dangerous and destructive. To quote the Bible, ‘When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind”‘ (Mark 3:21); ‘For even his own brothers did not believe in him’ (John 7:5); ‘but his own did not receive him’ (John 1:11); and ‘Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.” “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother”’ (Mark 3:31-35).
The persecution that unresigned prophets have had to endure for all their integrity and honest truthfulness and the inevitable estrangement from their family is also described in the Bible in Psalm 69 about the prophet David: ‘Those who hate me without reason outnumber the hairs of my head; many are my enemies without cause, those who seek to destroy me…O God of Israel. For I endure scorn for your sake, and shame covers my face. I am a stranger to my brothers, an alien to my own mother’s sons; for zeal for your house consumes me [I stand resolutely against the world of denial], and the insults of those who insult you fall on me’ (4,6,7,8,9).
In the case of the prophet Moses, he taught his people to stand by the truth he was presenting against all resistance, and, when they did, he said to them, ‘You have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day [because you did not give in to the world of denial]’ (Exod. 32:29).
The initial divisiveness of a prophet’s work also obviously impacted upon the personal lives of his followers. To stand against the world of denial in the early stages of the development of support of a prophet’s teachings was an extremely lonely occupation and it often left followers isolated from society and without honour in their own family. Christ, being such an exceptional resigned-world-defying prophet—possibly more than any other prophet—knew this would happen and braced his followers for it, saying, ‘Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn “a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.” Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me’ (Matt. 10:34-37), and, ‘You will be betrayed by parents, brothers, relatives and friends, and they will put some of you to death’ (Luke 21:16). And Christ gave this succinct description of the loneliness he himself had to endure for defying the dishonest world of denial and introducing a much more truthful and loving way of living to the world: ‘Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man [the uncorrupted expression of the Godly, integrative state] has no place to lay his head’ (Matt. 8:20). [Again, for a much more complete description of the life of Christ and of his human-race-saving contribution of providing a sanctuary of truth, honesty and soundness for overly exhausted humans, see my F. Essay 39—and to encourage everyone to read this essay, the WTM has received many comments saying it is ‘the best account and explanation of Christ I have ever read’.]
It should be emphasised that Christ was introducing a religion to the world, he was establishing a place of soundness that people could defer to and live through when they became overly corrupted. When sound explanation of our corrupted human condition arrives in the world, as it now has, while it will also be confronting of the world of denial, and thus initially divisive, it shouldn’t be as divisive as the situation faced by Christ because explanation can be understood. Religions were about supporting the embodiment of the ideals in the form of the prophet they were founded around. What happens with the arrival of understanding of the human condition is people live in support of those understandings. There is no faith involved. As emphasised in my 1991 book Beyond The Human Condition, ‘This is the end of faith and belief and the beginning of knowing’ (p.166 of 203). With tolerance and patience, and a preparedness to accept logic, the explanations being presented can be evaluated as true or not. Faith can’t be argued but logic can. If people are prepared to consider and accept reasoned argument there doesn’t have to be conflict and division. The whole purpose of the human journey was specifically to find understanding because it ends the need for misunderstanding, both in ourselves and in others.
It should be explained here why some expressions of Christianity place so much emphasis on the Virgin Mother. The more corrupted humans became, the more important nurturing became, because nurturing is what was needed to bring about a less corrupted generation. Thus, the more a society became corrupted the more emphasis it placed on the Virgin Mother, the symbol of nurturing. Also, for an overly corrupted human it was much easier to defer to the Virgin Mary and the world of gentle nurturing, than to relate to the strong, bold, confronting truthfulness of Christ.
Christ’s acknowledgment that his mother and family sided against him and his ministry, and even questioned his sanity, puts those expressions of Christianity that emphasise the Virgin Mother in an extremely difficult and compromised position. The reader can imagine how difficult a truth this would be to accept for those who worship, or at least venerate, the Virgin Mary, and it follows that the Biblical passage that mentions Christ’s family questioning his sanity, varies with different versions. The passage is Mark 3:21 and only the New International Version (NIV) gives what I believe is the real account. I am confident that the other versions have translated this passage in a way that does not imply that Christ’s mother failed in her support of him. In the following, the underlinings have been added for emphasis.
The New International Version says ‘When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him for they said “He is out of his mind.”’
The King James Version says ‘And when his friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on him: for they said, He is beside himself.’
The New King James Version says ‘But when his own people heard about this, they went out to lay hold of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”’
The New American Standard Bible says ‘And when His own people heard of this, they went out to take custody of Him; for they were saying, “He has lost His senses.”’
The New Revised Standard Version says ‘When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.”’
The Good News Bible says ‘When his family heard about it, they set out to take charge of him, because people were saying, “He’s gone mad!”’
I trust the New International Version because of the effort made in it to be accurate and because of the relative soundness or innocence of those involved in the translation. The preface to the NIV translation says that the project began in 1965 (a very idealistic and sound period) with more than 100 scholars working ‘directly from the best available Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts’. These scholars came from the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (all relatively uncorrupted, innocent, sound cultures) and from Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist and other denominations, none of which are regarded as particularly fundamentalist. I think it is significant that the Catholic Church, which is so orientated to venerating the Virgin Mother, was not included in this process.
I might mention here, that within the various NIV editions of the Bible, I prefer the first edition over later ones. The 1960s, when work on the first edition commenced, was such an idealistic, innocent time. Subsequent decades were less idealistic and I think the revisions of the NIV Bible they made in those subsequent periods reflect this. For example, in the first 1978 NIV edition, Matthew 24-27 reads, ‘For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.’ In the second, 1983 NIV edition, this text has been changed to, ‘For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.’ Christ was clearly using the most powerful metaphor available to express how exposing and thus confronting the truth about human nature would be when it arrives—that it will be like the onset of a great clashing and flashing thunderstorm. The revised version has corrupted this all-important point and changed it to using the brightness of lightning to illustrate the visibility of the second coming. It is the confrontational nature of the truth, not its visibility, that warrants the use of the metaphor of a thunderstorm. [Again, for a much more complete description of Christ’s life and why it ‘was incalculably the most important event in human history, as we understand it, up to the present’, see my F. Essay 39.]
For the reasons that have been explained, any unresigned, denial-free thinking prophet will necessarily experience great difficulty in having his family appreciate his work—again as Christ said, ‘Only in his home town, among his relatives and in his own house is a prophet without honour’. The reason I have sought to clearly understand why unresigned prophets are not recognised in their own home is because I encountered this problem. As will be explained shortly, to be able to wander around in the realm of the human condition as easily as I have I must necessarily be an unresigned, denial-free thinker or prophet, albeit a contemporary, scientific, understanding-based one. In my family I am the second of four sons. My older brother John once described my extremely idealistic and truthful way of thinking as ‘dangerous’, and on more than one occasion my younger brother Gervase (the third son) described me as being ‘mad’. This attitude led to a serious rift in the family in 1991 where John and Gervase and my mother Jill, who sided with them, forced me to leave Griffith Tablecraft, a wooden furniture business I had created. As noted earlier, the events that led to this horrible division in our family are described in some detail in the Griffith Tablecraft essay at www.humancondition.com/griffith-tablecraft.
As I mentioned, my mother, to whom I attribute all my strength to be able to defy the world of denial, and whom I love more than anybody in the world, sided with these two brothers, even repeating to me that one of them thought I was mad. Incidentally, my father had died in a farming accident on our sheep property when I was 25 years of age, which was many years before this rift occurred. I had done all I possibly could over the years, short of self-destroying, to try and have my family understand the importance of my work, and once the rift occurred I had to decide whether or not to condone their extreme dismissiveness of my work. Obviously I could not condone it and had to persevere with my work without them. Thankfully, my youngest brother, Simon, stood by me throughout this terrible experience and has continued to support me in this undertaking to bring understanding to the human condition. John and Gervase are relatively close to me in age while Simon is eight years younger than me, and it is the gap in both time and space that this age difference produced that has undoubtedly contributed to Simon being able to appreciate the real nature of my work.
Of the founding members of the World Transformation Movement, whose support of this project has been more precious than I am able to describe—this book [A Species In Denial] is dedicated to them—the three who have been my closest supporters in this struggle to bring this denial-free information to the world [when A Species In Denial was published in 2003] have been my brother Simon, my partner Annie Williams, and the eminent Australian mountaineer, Tim Macartney-Snape.
Whenever an extremely difficult impasse for the resigned mind loomed in this undertaking, my brother Simon has always been there to tackle it. In particular Simon and two other WTM Founding Members, Richard Biggs and Anthony Landahl, developed the techniques for dismantling the denial that resigned humans adopted at Resignation, paving the way for others in the WTM, and ultimately all resigned humans, to renegotiate Resignation. The support Simon has given me personally, and given my life’s work of bringing understanding to the human condition, all through the years we grew up together, through the trauma of our family rift, through the years of persecution I have been subjected to for daring to grapple with the human condition, and throughout the development of the WTM that he initiated the formation of, has truly been saint-like. On a large card that all of us at the WTM gave Simon on his 50th birthday recently, I wrote: “To the best brother a brother could ever have. You have given every last ounce of energy in your body to help me and I love you like there is no tomorrow, no yesterday, no anything else in the universe. Dear God thank you for Simon.”
Annie has worked by my side for 23 years now, helping with research, doing all the typing and computer work and looking after me practically. We began with one of the first word processors and the writing and research has been going on almost daily ever since. The contribution Annie has made to my work is incalculable and she is a model to all in the WTM of the selfless potential that these understandings make possible. I love her like the summer sun that envelopes everyone with its generous warmth.
My close friend, Tim Macartney-Snape, is a twice honoured Order of Australia recipient. He is a world renowned mountaineer, he and Greg Mortimer being the first Australians to climb Mt Everest. He is also a biologist and former student of Geelong Grammar School, the school that Simon and I and others in the WTM also attended. With his high public profile, Tim has had to endure terrible damage to his reputation and career as a result of his unwavering support of the WTM following the 1995 media attack on the WTM. [Read about the 1995 media attack on the WTM in Persecution of the WTM.]
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This ends the edited extract about my family that appears in my 2003 book A Species in Denial. Obviously, since it was published an immense amount of progress has been made in developing, promoting and gaining appreciation for my understanding of the human condition. At the time of writing this FAQ, which is October 2023, which is 20 years on, the 50 founding members of the WTM have built a fabulous base of support where, for example, we now have a comprehensive website at www.HumanCondition.com, over 55,000 Facebook Group members, over 60 WTM centres around the world, and many commendations for my understanding of the human condition from extremely eminent thought leaders, which you can view at www.humancondition.com/commendations.
Again, much more can be read about the horrible event where I was forced out of Griffith Tablecraft by my brothers John and Gervase and by my mother Jill, in the Griffith Tablecraft essay at www.humancondition.com/griffith-tablecraft.
As mentioned, you can also read about the terrible media attack on myself, Tim Macartney-Snape and the WTM that occurred in the years after I was thrown out of Griffith Tablecraft, which we eventually exposed the despicable dishonesty and malice of by winning what at the time was described as the biggest defamation trial in Australia’s history, in the Persecution of the WTM essay at www.humancondition.com/persecution.
And lastly, at www.humancondition.com/jeremy-griffith, you can read my biography, which is largely drawn from Professor Harry Prosen’s Introduction to my 2016 book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, the definitive presentation of my explanation of the human condition.
