Video & Transcript of the
Akritidis family’s Commendation

 

(To learn more about the Akritidis family, see www.wtmmelbourne.com)

 

 

Ari Akritidis: I’m Ari Akritidis. I came across the WTM about 15 years ago through my youngest brother, Sam. He read the book A Species In Denial (one of Jeremy’s earlier books) and shared it with me in around 2005. It took a while for me to really get my head around the information. But eventually it’s just ecstasy—when you read and listen with an open mind, it’s ecstasy.

On a personal level, the information has helped me massively; it’s helped me in my relationship with my wife, it’s helped me in my relationship with my children. I sympathise with my kids and every human that’s lost touch with their child-self, because we had to, and that includes my own children; I had to realise that they’ve gone through a process of Resignation that was largely because of my behaviour—so my compassion for them and for all children today is beyond anything that was possible pre-understanding. [Resignation is the psychological process whereby adolescents wrestle with and ‘resign’ to the horror of the human condition].

So as a dad and a husband: my wife and I, like all couples, we fight, we love each other. We’ve been married 27 years, but we fight because we don’t understand each other. Men and women are different. And Jeremy explains it; he explains so succinctly the different strategies we had to adopt as men and women to deal with the human condition. So I have compassion for my wife, I understand her journey, both on an individual and at a gender level. And she can understand me, which is just fantastic! [The difference between men and women is explained in Freedom Essay 26: Men and women reconciled.]

Before I came across this information, I now realise that I was a ‘power addict’, what we would refer to in the old world as a control freak, with an addiction to power at a subconscious level [the ‘power addicted’ state is explained in chapter 8:16D of FREEDOM]. What I needed to realise was how much that power was important to me to reinforce my own goodness, because I didn’t know if I was good. There’s a part of me that was wrestling with this underlying question: “Am I good or am I bad?” It’s there, it’s festering below the surface and that’s what feeds your behaviour. And to break free of that, to be able to see that clearly now, can only be done when you’re understood, when you understand yourself. Certainly, being able to see that now and appreciate the necessity of that strategy has been gold for me, it’s absolutely gold.

You can look at yourself, you can rat on yourself, you can laugh at yourself, because you’re completely defended and you’re a hero.

This information will completely liberate everybody and free you of all of the uncertainty. And it’s not describable—our vocabulary unfortunately hasn’t caught up with the excitement that this information brings. Jeremy’s explanations are more meaningful than any brain can possibly imagine. We actually now have a pathway to healing! It’s the greatest, the greatest gift anybody could have given us.

 

Desi Akritidis: I believe I never would have been interested in embracing the information had it not been for the kids, because for me I felt “I don’t need it, it’s not going to help me”; I didn’t understand it. So I learnt a lot initially through conversations; I was very lucky with Sam, my brother-in-law, as a trusted person, so obviously over the years I learned a lot through him and I’ve learnt a lot through my eldest son, Chris.

 

Chris Akritidis: I’m 22 and I’m down in Melbourne. My sibling Nicoletta here is 17, and my brother is 18, my girlfriend is 21, and on the other screen you will see my other sister [Katarina, who is also 17], so we’re all quite young and it’s an interesting time for us because we have information and we can see an honesty well beyond our years.

Being an eldest son, it was incredibly important for me to understand my own father’s egocentricity because growing up as a son I always wanted dad’s love, and as I got older it became quite combative between me and my father, because you start to retaliate. And really, I started to see in my dad things I didn’t like about myself, and it was only again through understanding the human condition within myself that it dissipated that to the degree where I’m able to have a genuine, honest, great relationship with my father, and understand the amazing heroics, and see the goodness in the degree of egocentricity someone like my father has had to have to partake in the human journey, as opposed to resenting it, which was just coming from my retaliation of not knowing why it is that this behaviour was present, and why I was subjected to it. And I’m just able to leave that whole mess behind! And it does wonders for any part of a relationship and that’s just an example of it.

And I’ve been fortunate enough that my dad actually has now been able to understand the human condition as well, which has just paved a gateway for a whole different kind of relationship that I never actually expected I’d experience in my life-time, and I imagine that a lot of young men don’t expect to experience with their father on a certain genuine level, where it’s okay to reintroduce sensitivity and honesty, and all the old egocentric hierarchies can just go, and you can just talk to your father on an equal footing, honestly about the world, and you can just see the fundamental goodness in each other, and genuinely start to sympathise with each other’s situation, which just makes the relationship unlike anything you experienced prior to understanding the human condition.

 

Alex Akritidis: This information has completely changed my life, my relationship with family, my uncle and my little cousins. The way I approach my life is in such a different way, especially with my siblings. To be able to compassionately understand them and just be happy when they walk through the door, unlike when I was younger—because we have very different strategies so it was very easy to have a conflict there without understanding. So it’s beautiful, absolutely beautiful.

This has just changed my life. I remember the moment the information sunk in enough that I just saw that this is THE solution to the world’s problems. I was on cloud nine. It brought me and my brother together, because me and my brother had opposite strategies [for managing life]—opposite strategies—and there was just no way in the resigned world without understanding that we were ever going to get along. And the same with my other siblings, and my family—before the information, my family was so dysfunctional and we would go out parading as if our family was more functional than others, and then now it’s like I can see how dysfunctional it was and it’s so relieving to now lift that burden of guilt. And obviously the rest of my family has this understanding, so we can all just come together. I always have visions of everybody just being at one—adults and kids, no hierarchy; they’re all just playing together and there’s just unconditional nurturing and everyone is—not from a non-understanding point of view, not controlled by instincts—finally genuinely behaving cooperatively and lovingly, through understanding, and it’s just crazy and it’s just going to solve all the world’s problems. I can see every problem right now is run by the human condition and once this understanding gets out there, everybody’s just going to come together.

 

Katerina Akritidis: I wanted to say before when you said how you and your son can talk as equals, that’s how we are in our family—because now we can understand each other, in mostly all our conversations there’s no hierarchy involved; we can just talk on equal terms, it’s good.

 

Desi: Without meaning to, the conversations just start on a daily basis; they’re just constantly bouncing off ideas.

 

Katerina: A year ago when mum and dad weren’t so involved, the conversations at the dinner table were just old world, resigned stuff but now the human condition comes up all the time. We talk about it all the time.

 

Nicoletta Akritidis: Even if we’re not talking about the WTM, it’s just always honesty and like you’re always talking about things from a base of understanding and honesty and truth, so it’s always good conversations, good conversations.

 

Desi: Two years ago I would be saying whenever the kids amongst each other would be talking and I’d walk in I’d say, “Oh my God, again, you’re talking about the human condition! How much can you talk about the human condition?!” And it’s funny now because we’ve come so far…well, we’ve got a long way to go, I’ve got a long way to go…but yeah, now the conversations are happening and I don’t see a problem, I’m actually liking the conversations!

 

Nicoletta: It has changed my life completely. I have gotten a much better relationship with my siblings, from fighting most days, to now when I can finally understand everyone. Like my brothers, we’ve all got different strategies: one is quite ‘power-addicted’ and egocentric. That’s kind of similar to my dad as well, and all the men in my family—always kind of being oppressive and telling me what to do—but then through the information I’ve been able to understand where that’s coming from, and I can understand the role that men have played in the whole journey of understanding the human condition. And also with my dad—I mean, everyone really, all adults—I love when Jeremy says how you can understand why people have so much frustration, like volcanic amounts of anger, because we’re suffering, and we’ve been suffering, from the human condition, for two million years, but I’ve definitely seen recently a big transformation within him.

The family is meant to be something that represents togetherness and love, but that’s not really common now, or ever, because we haven’t ever understood the human condition. I think this understanding has really helped bring my family together, especially between the men and women in my family. When you can’t stand each other, you’re always conflicting, always fighting; my parents were always fighting, at one stage really badly, and now they don’t fight as much, and nowhere near to the extent that they used to, because they can understand each other. We are genuinely a much more together, happy, secure family, not all the time of course, but you don’t need to fake that anymore to the world because it’s actually true. A lot of the time we are happy and actually loving and living with each other so genuinely and excitedly. We can actually spend hours on end all together. Just being able to enjoy each other’s company is so special where families can’t nowadays; people don’t understand each other, everyone feels condemned by everyone around them, and you just can’t talk deeply and honestly, and I think that’s so special that we have that connection and I just want to make every person in the world be able to have the connection that I have with my family. One day every family…I mean the whole world will be one big family…but immediate families can spend time with each other, can actually truly love each other and feel connected. That’s a really nice vision to have.