1. ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION
AND ITS RESOLUTION
WTM FAQ 1.7 What scientific support does Jeremy Griffith’s explanation of the human condition have?
While biologist Jeremy Griffith’s now absolutely desperately needed understanding of the human condition has received significant scientific evaluation, and, subsequent to that, growing support, mainstream science is yet to recognise and support it—but that is what occurs with paradigm-shifting, breakthroughs in science. When the physicist Max Planck said ‘Science progresses funeral by funeral’ (Marilyn Ferguson’s reference to a comment by Planck in his Scientific Autobiography, 1948; New Age mag. Aug. 1982; see www.wtmsources.com/174) he was recognising how attached each generation of scientists becomes to the way of thinking they grew up with, and therefore how slow science as a whole is to move to a new paradigm of understanding. And the playwright George Bernard Shaw also warned of how difficult it is to introduce a new paradigm of thinking—especially one that dares to confront the historically unbearably confronting and off-limits subject of the human condition—when he said that ‘All great truths begin as blasphemies’ (Annajanska, 1919). So yes, confronting the human condition when everyone has been living in fearful denial of it, even though it has finally been explained and made safe to confront, represents the biggest of all ‘blasphemies’. (You can read more about why the mechanistic scientific establishment as a whole has studiously avoided the true, psychological nature of the human condition in FAQ 1.10, Freedom Essay 40 and in chapter 2:4 of FREEDOM.)
As mentioned, despite this entrenched resistance, there is growing support for Jeremy’s explanation—it has attracted the support of eminent scientists including former President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association Professor Harry Prosen, the esteemed ecologist Professor Stuart Hurlbert from the United States, Australia’s Templeton Prize-winning biologist Professor Charles Birch, and New Zealand’s then foremost zoologist Professor John Morton, as well as other distinguished thinkers such as Sir Laurens van der Post.
Jeremy’s Human Condition Documentary Proposal that puts forward his explanation of the human condition generated marvellous endorsements from over 100 of the world’s leading scientists and thinkers, including Professor Stephen Hawking (Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Cambridge University, world-leading physicist), who, responding through his secretary because he suffers from motor neurone disease, ‘is most interested in your impressive proposal’; Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (former chair, Department of Psychology, University of Chicago), who replied: ‘it might help bring about a paradigm shift in the self-image of humanity—an outcome that in the past only the great world religions have achieved’; and Professor Patricia Glazebrook (Chair of Philosophy, Dalhousie University) who said: ‘Frankly, I am ‘blown away’ as the saying goes…The ground-breaking significance of this work is tremendous.’
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Further responses from thought leaders in the scientific community can be read in the Commendations section of the WTM’s homepage.
