1. ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION
AND ITS RESOLUTION
WTM FAQ 1.29 Is the human condition a biological or a psychological problem?
The answer is that it is a psychological condition derived from our biology.
Someone once made the insightful comment that ‘all our human problems are ultimately biological problems’, and it’s true that even our psychologically upset human condition is biologically derived, and, further, that the upset can only be healed through understanding its biological origins.
As Jeremy Griffith explains in THE Interview, our competitive and aggressive behaviour is not due to us having savage, must-reproduce-our-genes animal instincts, it is due to us having a conscious-mind-based, psychologically troubled condition that can be healed through understanding the biological origins of that troubled, guilt-stricken, conscious-mind-based state. As Jeremy points out in THE Interview, the word ‘psychosis’ literally means ‘soul-illness’ and ‘psychiatry’ literally means ‘soul-healing’ (derived as they are from psyche meaning ‘soul’, osis meaning ‘abnormal state or condition’ and iatreia meaning ‘healing’). And what is our soul? As Jeremy also explains, it is our original, nurtured, cooperative and loving, moral, biologically-derived instinctive self. And so to resolve our human condition and heal our soul, achieve psychotherapy, the fundamental need has been to explain why we corrupted our soul, because that’s the reconciling understanding that removes our need to psychologically dissociate or split from our soul and become psychotic or alienated.
So the truth is any therapy of our now massively upset, 2-million-years-troubled, condition can only effectively begin when we can understand biologically the difference between the gene-based and nerve-based learning systems and how that difference resulted in us corrupting our soul, which is the key insight Jeremy provides. It’s only now with that biological understanding in place that we are in a position to effectively therapise our psychologically upset condition, and end our 2 million years of distress and alienation.
