The cost of resignation: ‘fifty foot of solid concrete’ between humans and their souls

The examples given earlier show that even many prophets, the exceptionally sound in society, found the issue of the human condition dangerously confronting and depressing. Those examples should make it very clear that what forced adolescents to resign to living a life of denial of the human condition was the extreme danger of suicidal depression if they continued in their efforts to confront it.

It is necessary then to explain why this danger had to be extreme for resignation to be a responsible alternative. What will be made clear is that the cost of resignation was also very high, almost as bad as Page 257 of
Print Edition death from suicidal depression. In fact resigning to a life of denial meant accepting psychological death, the death of a person’s psyche or soul.

Again, Fiona Miller’s amazing resignation poem described the extent of the psychological death that accompanied resignation: ‘Smiles will never bloom from your heart again, but be fake and you will speak fake words to fake people from your fake soul / What you do today you will do tomorrow and what you do tomorrow you will do for the rest of your life / From now on pressure, stress, pain and the past can never be forgotten / You have no heart or soul and there are no good memories / Your mind and thoughts rule your body that will hold all things inside it; bottled up, now impossible to be released / You are fake, you will be fake, you will be a supreme actor of happiness but never be happy.’

An analysis of the phenomenon of savant syndrome, and of the related condition of autism, will demonstrate just how high the price of resignation has been. It will show just how much sensitivity and capability humans gave up access to when they resigned.

A television program titled Uncommon Genius was broadcast on ABC-TV in Australia on 24 May 2001. The documentary, written and directed by Ian Watson, followed Australian psychologist Dr Robyn Young on a tour of the USA where she met a handful of people described as savants. The program began with the narrative: ‘One of the great unsolved mysteries of the human mind is savant syndrome. This man cannot remember how to clean his teeth, yet he recalls every zip code, every highway, every city in the United States. As a boy, this man was considered mentally handicapped but he can name the day of the week for every date on a forty-thousand-year calendar. And this man, blind, cerebral-palsied and barely able to talk, played Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto flawlessly after hearing it once on television. These genius-like abilities are the product of damaged minds…Most of us were introduced to savants through Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of Raymond in the Oscar-winning movie, Rain Man. Raymond had savant syndrome…Savants are people who produce awesome mental abilities from severely disabled minds.’

The program mentions that ‘savants may abandon their skills as they become more sophisticated socially…The really prodigious savants have a sort of memory super-highway that allows them to access and transfer enormous amounts of information. They develop that memory partly because they don’t get side-tracked by thinking too much.’

‘…for more than half of all savants, the syndrome owes its origins to a familiar condition—autism…[which is] a condition whereby the brain’s ability to organise complex thought is impaired…[The program refers to] Page 258 of
Print Edition the huge increase in autism that we see these days, and massive increase, 273 percent increase, in the state of California over a 12-year period…[with] California’s Silicon Valley [being] home to more autistic children than anywhere [else] in America…’ The narrator continues, ‘Researchers the world over are still seeking a complete understanding of the cause of autism.’

The following quotes were taken from the program’s concluding comments: ‘Led by Dr Bruce Miller, this group of San Francisco researchers discovered people who suffered dementia and then suddenly gained prodigious skills they’d never experienced before. One case was a man who, when his brain degenerated, became a composer as he lost his ability to speak…Another patient won a patent for a chemical detector [at a time] when he could name just one out of 15 items on a word test. Dr Miller’s patients suffered fronto-temporal dementia. They lost cells in parts of the brain that regulate social behaviour. These imaging studies reveal similar left brain injuries to those of savants Robyn had been studying. This is exciting new evidence that for the first time is taking us closer to discovering the cause of savant syndrome. Could savant genius lie dormant deep inside everyone’s brain? Are savant skills merely obscured by layers of normal everyday reasoning? The possibility that we all possess hidden genius is tantalising. But it should not be forgotten that whether extraordinary savant skills emerge at birth or appear later in life, savant syndrome comes at a cost…The musical brilliance of Tony DeBlois exists at the price of blindness and autism. And George Finn is only now emerging from his genius with numbers to engage with a wider world.’

In the course of another television program, The Theories of Everything, producer and presenter David Hunter Tow had the opportunity to describe a person with savant-like mathematical abilities. In the program Tow, a scientist specialising in computer software, says that: ‘In a creative process it [the idea] seems to come out of the inner mind somewhere without you really forcing it, it seems to flow at a certain point. Perhaps the most famous case of this was—and I think one of the most interesting stories that I’ve come across in science—was a young Indian clerk, who lived at the beginning of last century, whose name was Ramanujan [Srinivasa Aaiyangar Ramanujan 1887-1920]. He was possibly the greatest mathematician of all time. He virtually had no education in mathematics beyond one text book that he picked up by chance in Madras one day, by an English mathematician, with a few theorems. In one year Ramanujan had re-invented one hundred years of western mathematics from scratch virtually. He eventually came to England and there he generated Page 259 of
Print Edition over a period of three years 4,000 theorems, which on average took a top mathematician just to prove one or two of those theorems the best part of a year. He generated those theorems virtually subconsciously out of his mind. He would virtually dream them…This young man could go to sleep at night and in the morning wake up and scribble out another half dozen theorems. These theorems he rarely proved but when they were tested and proved they were always absolutely correct. Unfortunately he died of pneumonia three years later. But where did those theorems come from? Where did that knowledge come from? Obviously from the subconscious in a phenomenal way and no one to this day knows how it happened. Other mathematicians can get subconscious insights, generate breakthroughs after being asleep even, or drinking coffee for that matter; however, Ramanujan was just an exceptional case, probably the greatest mathematician in history’ (Australian community TV Channel 31, 3 Dec. 2000).

Dr Young specialises in autism and is head of the Autism Research Unit at Flinders University in South Australia. A summary of the Unit’s current research projects refers to a hypothesis about savant-type abilities: ‘A recent hypothesis that has received much attention is that savant type abilities “reside equally in all of us” (Snyder & Mitchell, 1999, p591). Snyder and Mitchell suggest that we all have access to this fundamental mechanism, perhaps even some privileged information, but because of higher order cognitive processing we are unable to access this or these mechanisms’ (www.ssn.flinders.edu.au/psyc/staff).

In a world that is resigned and as a result committed to denial of the all-sensitive and truthful-thinking world of our soul, this suggestion that savant skills reside equally in all of us is an extraordinary admission because it is tantamount to admitting humans are deeply alienated, deeply estranged from their true self and true potential.

There has certainly been some ‘higher order cognitive processing’ not related to denial that has inhibited savant-type abilities in resigned humans. For example, selective memory has been necessary to stop our conscious mind becoming cluttered with irrelevant information. However, the main ‘higher order cognitive processing’ that has been inhibiting humans’ access to their savant-type abilities is the resigned mind’s denial of any information that brings the issue of the human condition into focus, in particular the repression of the truthful, integrative-meaning-aware, all-sensitive world of our original instinctive self or soul. In Plato’s cave allegory human life in the cave consisted of a world of darkness and shadows, shut off from the world of illuminating sunlight (ie cut off from the all-beautiful Page 260 of
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The point is that if people were not resigned they would have the myriad of capabilities and sensitivities of savants. It is a comparison that gives the resigned world an accurate measure of just how spiritually defunct its world really is. The Macquarie Dictionary (3rd edn, 1998) defines ‘spirit’ as ‘the vital principle in humans, animating the body or mediating between body and soul’; our ‘spirit’ is our aliveness, our sensitivity to all of existence, and it is this capacity to be super-aware that largely dies with resignation. As Fiona Miller said, ‘You have no heart or soul…You are fake, you will be fake, you will be a supreme actor of happiness but never be happy.’

The Russian philosopher George Gurdjieff described the resigned, alienated state truthfully when he wrote: ‘It happens fairly often that essence dies in a man while his personality and his body are still alive. A considerable percentage of the people we meet in the streets of a great town are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead’ (In Search of the Miraculous, P.D. Ouspensky, 1950, ch.8, p.164).

R.D. Laing used the 19th century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s evocative words to similarly elicit this truth about the extent of the psychological estrangement of the resigned, alienated state when he wrote: ‘To adapt to this world the child abdicates its ecstasy (‘L’enfant abdique son extase’: Mallarmé)’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967, p.118 of 156).

Laing elaborated: ‘We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state [p.12]  …the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be. As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavour; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world’ (ibid. p.22).

‘The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man [p.24]  …between us and It [our soul] there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded’ (ibid. p.118).

‘The outer divorced from any illumination from the inner is in a state of darkness. We are in an age of darkness. The state of outer darkness is a state of sin—i.e. alienation or estrangement from the inner light’ (ibid. p.116).

‘We are dead, but think we are alive. We are asleep, but think we are awake. We are dreaming, but take our dreams to be reality. We are the halt, lame, blind, deaf, the sick. But we are doubly unconscious. We are so ill that we no longer feel ill, as in many terminal illnesses. We are mad, but have no Page 261 of
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The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1791–1822) also used the term ‘asleep’ to describe humans’ current state: ‘Our boat is asleep on Serchio’s stream / Its sails are folded like thoughts in a dream’ (Shelley: The man and the poet, Desmond King-Hele, 1960, p.335 of 390).

The mythology of the Superman character is an expression of humans’ suppressed awareness of their alienated state—that resigned humans are Clark Kents (Clark Kent was Superman disguised as a newspaper reporter) with hidden Superman potential.

To think truthfully and thus effectively, to be able to access all the beauty that is in the world, to be able to create and behave naturally without inhibition, requires freedom from the denial that takes place at resignation. The resigned conscious mind was committed to blocking out the truthful, beautiful, intuitive, natural world. Necessary as it has been, the resigned mind’s denial has massively thwarted humans’ real potential. The resigned conscious mind has not wanted access to truth and beauty, it has worked against accessing truth and beauty, so much so that a person had to be free or independent of the will or desire of the resigned conscious mind if they were indeed to access truth and beauty. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer recognised this when he said, ‘The unpremeditated, unintentional, indeed in part unconscious and instinctive element which has always been remarked in the works of genius owes its origin to precisely the fact that primal artistic knowledge is entirely separated from and independent of will, is will-less’ (Essays and Aphorisms, tr. R.J. Hollingdale, 1970, p.158 of 237).

Being unresigned, children have unimpeded access to the truthful, beautiful, alienation-free, natural world, and any adult who has retained such access must have retained that childhood clarity. The Chinese philosopher Mencius made the point, ‘The great man is he who does not lose his child’s-heart’ (Works, 4–3 BC, 4, tr. C.A. Wong).

Another measure of the cost of repressing—living in denial of—the all-sensitive world of our instinctive self or soul can be found in the phenomenon of near-death experiences, or NDEs. As an illustration of NDEs, there are mountain climbers who, having survived a fall from which they thought they would certainly die, reported that in the fall they entered a state of extraordinary euphoria where everything around them was utterly beautiful and radiant. What happens in such NDEs is the mind gives up worrying, and all facades—in particular the denial that they adopted at resignation—become meaningless. If death is inevitable then there is no longer any reason to Page 262 of
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There are many books available now documenting NDEs. Many people who have experienced an NDE tell of a world so wonderful that they have no wish to return to the ‘normal’ (alienated) world. The American social psychologist Kenneth Ring wrote that: ‘For 10 years I have studied cases of persons who have survived episodes of near death or clinical death only to tell of wonders in the land beyond the edge of life. One man speaks of being in a state of “total radiance from absolute knowledge” when he realised that “finally I was alive.” One woman says: “I was enabled to look deeply inside myself. I saw…that my core was perfect love—and that applies to all human beings.” But it is not just that one experiences this truth; one becomes it. The meaning of life has something to do with realizing that our essence is perfect love, then going on to live our lives upon that truth, experiencing each day as a miracle and every act as sacred’ (Life mag. Dec. 1988).

Explaining NDEs is not difficult once it is appreciated how alienated humans have become. An NDE amounts to the purest form of prayer or meditation where the ‘troubles of life’ (essentially, the struggles that emanate from the dilemma of the human condition) are abandoned and the denial and alienation-free, utterly cooperative, unconditionally loving, integrated, all-sensitive, heavenly state reappears. The state that humans once instinctively lived in before the emergence of consciousness, and with it the agonising, worrisome, preoccupying, alienating dilemma of the human condition, emerged. Heaven is not a place up in the clouds somewhere, or a place in another universe, or a supernatural realm, rather it is the human-condition-free, utterly integrated state of being and living; the ultra-natural, rather than super-natural state for humans. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is a state of the heart (of children it is written, “for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven”): it has nothing to do with superterrestrial things’ (The Will To Power, 1901; tr. O. Levy, 1909, p.134 of 384).

The mention of ‘absolute knowledge’ and a ‘core’ of ‘perfect love’ is witness to our instinctive self or soul’s perfect orientation to cooperative, loving integrativeness. People who have returned to the world of our soul, to heaven, to our lost paradise, to the realm that the Roman poet Virgil called ‘arcadia’—to the world before the corrupted state of the human condition emerged—testify to the true extent of Page 263 of
Print Edition the beauty, indeed radiance of that world, and to the certainty and contentment of life in that world. The world humans live in now is a numb, seared, brutalised, dead place compared to it. In truth humans are now so brutalised they merely skate on the surface of existence. If the true world is a bucket full of water, the world that resigned humans are able to experience is only the meniscus. Sadly, because of the soul’s criticism of humans’ apparently imperfect state, resigned humans have been ruthlessly repressing their idealistic soul and in the process all the beauty and truth that it knows of and has access to. This has occurred to such an extent that resigned humans have lost almost all memory of the true world. Without that memory humans walk in meaningless darkness. The word ‘enthusiasm’ is derived from the Greek word enthios, which means ‘God within’. Without some knowledge of the heavenly state that our soul has already experienced, without some knowledge of ‘the God within’, life loses its richness and value.

Fatigue also offers access to our soul. If the mind is exhausted the soul can sometimes surface into the conscious awareness. The Bushman of the Kalahari dance until they become so physically exhausted that the alienation or blocks in their brain subsides, letting their soul through. Sir Laurens van der Post recognised that fatigue can liberate access to the soul when he wrote: ‘fatigue was to the healer what drugs are to the psychiatrist; a means of lowering the level of consciousness and its wilful inhibitions so that the unconscious forces and the instinctive powers at the disposal of all life could rise unimpeded and be released in the healer’ (Testament to the Bushmen, 1984, p.157 of 176).

Rock climbers have a dangerous game they call ‘scree jumping’ where they race down a boulder-strewn hillside with their feet moving from one rock to the next so fast that their conscious mind cannot keep up, at which point the instinctive self takes over and suddenly they seem to acquire a grace and certainty that astonishes them. A good mountaineering book to read that describes this soul-accessing activity is Rob Schultheis’ Bone Games (1985).

One of my close companions on this journey to bring understanding to the human condition is the world-renowned Australian mountaineer, Tim Macartney-Snape. Tim was the first Australian to climb Mt Everest and climbed it a second time solo from sea level. On both occasions the ascent was achieved without the assistance of bottled oxygen. In his 1992 book, Everest from Sea to Summit, which documents this second climb, there is a photo of Tim taken on his arrival back at Page 264 of
Print Edition base camp after his ascent (p.252 of 280). It shows him in a state of utter fatigue but with an expression of child-like radiance on his face. Tim has often described how exhaustion at high altitude brings with it an exhilaration and a heightened state of sensitivity.

Despair can sometimes have the same effect as fatigue. Sometimes when despair overtakes us, our mind gives up trying to cope with and make sense of the world. When the inhibitions, block-outs and denials are relinquished the soul surfaces into conscious awareness. The following quote, from Olive Schreiner’s 1883 book, The Story of an African Farm, has already been referred to in the Introduction, however it is worth including here because it is a marvellous description of how despair can open up access to the soul: ‘There are only rare times when a man’s soul can see Nature. So long as any passion holds its revel there, the eyes are holden that they should not see her…Only then when there comes a pause, a blank in your life, when the old idol is broken, when the old hope is dead, when the old desire is crushed, then the Divine compensation of Nature is made manifest. She shows herself to you. So near she draws you, that the blood seems to flow from her to you, through a still uncut cord: you feel the throb of her life. When that day comes, that you sit down broken, without one human creature to whom you cling, with your loves the dead and the living-dead; when the very thirst for knowledge through long-continued thwarting has grown dull; when in the present there is no craving and in the future no hope, then, oh, with a beneficent tenderness, Nature enfolds you. Then the large white snowflakes as they flutter down softly, one by one, whisper soothingly, “Rest, poor heart, rest!” It is as though our mother smoothed our hair, and we are comforted. And yellow-legged bees as they hum make a dreamy lyric; and the light on the brown stone wall is a great work of art; and the glitter through the leaves makes the pulses beat. Well to die then; for, if you live, so surely as the years come, so surely as the spring succeeds the winter, so surely will passions arise, they will creep back, one by one, into the bosom that has cast them forth, and fasten there again, and peace will go. Desire, ambition, and the fierce agonizing flood of love for the living—they will spring again. Then Nature will draw down her veil: with all your longing you shall not be able to raise one corner; you cannot bring back those peaceful days. Well to die then!’ (p.298 of 300).

Fasting, where the brain is starved of nourishment, has been another means of shutting down the conscious mind and allowing the truthful, all-sensitive world of our soul out.

Hallucinatory drugs also enable the mind to cut through the conscious Page 265 of
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Great artists, be they painters, sculptors, singers, musicians, dancers, poets, writers, architects or designers, are people in whom the denial and subsequent alienation that came with resignation was incomplete. Occasionally a person’s protective block-out develops, as it were, with a crack or tear in it. Through this small rent these people can touch upon and reveal some of the true beauty that exists on Earth. This rent or window can also, to a degree, be cultivated. After years of developing his painting skills Vincent Van Gogh was able to bring out so much beauty that resigned humans looking at his paintings find themselves seeing light and colour as it really exists for possibly the first time in their life: ‘And after Van Gogh? Artists changed their ways of seeing…not for the myths, or the high prices, but for the way he opened their eyes’ (Bulletin mag. 30 Nov. 1993).

The often-referred-to ‘pain’ of being an artist was that while resigned humans coped with life’s deeper questions by evading them, artists continually raised them. By revealing the real beauty on Earth artists continually confronted God in the form of the perfection of beauty, and since humans have been an insecure, God-fearing species, what they were doing was confronting and hurtful. It has been a torturous business confronting God without being able to explain why humans have apparently been so unGodly.

It was described in the previous section how some prophets—the soundest of people—suicided as a result of trying to confront the issue of the human condition. Artists who were too honest for their degree of soundness, artists who tried to confront all the beauty and associated truths that exists on Earth when it was more than they were capable of enduring, could also take themselves to the brink of madness and/or suicidal depression. Van Gogh went over this brink and did suicide. Sir Laurens van der Post described the situation that faced artists and writers in the following remarkably insightful quote: ‘The history of art and literature indeed contains as many examples of persons who have succumbed before the perils encountered in the world within as those who have been overcome by their difficulties in the world without. The asylums of the world are full of people who have been overwhelmed by what has welled up within them: instincts and intuitions shaped over aeons in which they had played no part, and imposed on them by life without their leave or knowledge. The person who enlists in the service of Page 266 of
Print Edition the imagination, as do the artist and writer, has continually to come to terms and make fresh peace with this inner aspect of reality before he can express his full self in the world without. Many are so appalled by the difficulties and terrifying implications of what they see within themselves that, after a few bursts of lyrical fire, they either retreat into the previously prepared positions conventionally provided for these occasions by their social establishments: or else they close up altogether or take to drink or commit suicide. Nor is there any comfort to be found in thinking that this kind of defeat is suffered only by the lesser breeds among artists and writers: there are too many distinguished casualties. There is, for instance, the uncomfortable example of Rimbaud who, though a poet of genius, found the implications of genius more than he could bear and took on the perils of gun-running in one of the most dangerous parts of Africa as a more attractive alternative. Yet before he turned a deaf ear to the profound voice of his natural calling, he had shaped a vision of reality which increased the range of poetry for good. One may regret his desertion, but surely no one who cares for poetry can read “Bateau Ivre” and “Les Illuminations”, for example, without some understanding of the power of the temptation, and an inkling of how exposed and vulnerable the ordered personality is to the forces of this world that the artist carries within him. The suicide of Van Gogh is another instance. We owe it to him that our senses are aware of the physical world in a way not previously possible (except perhaps by the long-forgotten child in all of us when the urgent vision is not yet tamed and imprisoned in the clichés of the adult world). But because of Van Gogh, cypresses, almond blossom, corn-fields, sunflowers, bridges, wicker chairs and even trains are seen through eyes made young and timeless again and our senses are recharged with the aboriginal wonder of things. Here was not only genius but also high courage. Yet nothing so well gives one the measure of these inner forces as the fact that they were able to destroy both courage and genius’ (from Sir Laurens van der Post’s Introduction to the 1965 edn of Turbott Wolfe by William Plomer, first pub. 1925, pp.34–36 of 215).

Beauty could be the greatest inspiration, blindingly so at times. But it could also be condemning and hurtful to humans because it confronted them with their apparent lack of beauty or perfection. The truth is, mere glimpses of beauty were all corrupted humans could cope with. In the Introduction Patrick White and William Wordsworth were quoted as saying that even a flower could give rise to unbearably depressing thoughts about the apparent imperfection of humans. The banning of representations of living things in Islamic art is a means of subsiding the agony arising from the human Page 267 of
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For many people, unnatural, alienated cities offered a refuge from the hurtful glare of the beauty and truth of the natural world. Orienteering, where people race through the forest at break-neck speed to complete a compass course, is a good indication of how little nature humans have been able to tolerate. Humans have been so condemned by the innocence of nature that it has been torture for them to be amidst nature for long. It seems that when humans were with nature they had to be there with something to distract them, such as a river to fish, a peak to climb, or a compass course to complete. Humans could not just be with nature. Nature could inspire and reinforce but it could also condemn. Nature was humans’ instinctive self or soul’s original companion and as such reminded them of their soul’s pure world and their apparent impurity. The beauty of the natural world could inspire and centre humans, but it could also hurt them terribly.

All these examples illustrate the price of resigning. They show how much beauty and truth humans lost access to when they took up a life of denial. The depression that preceded resignation clearly had to be overwhelming for humans to be prepared to pay this immense price.

There was also the cost in terms of human potential involved in resignation. In the Grand Canyon in the USA, a bird called the nutcracker buries 30,000 nuts throughout the summer months, each in a different location. In winter, even under the cover of snow, it remembers the location of 90 percent of them. There is a goby fish that can memorise the topography of the tidal flats at high tide and when the tide goes out it knows the exact location of the next pool to flip to when the one it is in evaporates. The brain of the male common canary dramatically expands every spring in order to learn new mating songs, only to shrink again at the end of the mating season. Although these animals live in an instinct-dominated state, they have not become instinctively integrated as humans did millions of years ago—they have not entered the state of pure, unconditional, ‘heavenly’ love—nor have they become conscious (ie able to make sense of experience). Imagine therefore the abilities humans would have were it not for the emergence of the problem of the human condition and the resultant resigned state of alienation. We could have the capacity to develop amazing abilities, plus access to our instinctive self’s experience of living in an utterly integrated, loving, heavenly Page 268 of
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I have been able to find a veritable avalanche of answers, not because I am clever or more gifted in some physical way than other people, but only because I was exceptionally fortunate in being sufficiently nurtured and sheltered from corrupt reality in my infancy and childhood not to have to resign in my adolescence and adopt a life of living in denial of all the truth and beauty that is in the world. With the benefit of the achievements of the whole human race—in particular the insights into the workings of our world painstakingly found by mechanistic science and the confirmation I have derived for my thinking from the work of many other denial-free thinkers throughout the ages—I have been able to synthesise the biological explanation of the human condition; that is, explain the reason humans are competitive, aggressive and selfish when the ideals are to be cooperative, loving and selfless. In doing so I have been able to explain and end the need for humans’ alienated state; explain and make possible the end of loneliness and depression; explain and end the need for egocentricity; explain the origin of war and aggression amongst humans and bring an end to the cause of war and aggression; explain and end the need for materialism; explain and end the need for a superficial, artificial, self-distracting way of living; explain biologically how humans acquired their altruistic ‘soul’ and its cooperation-demanding ‘conscience’; describe and explain the psychological act of resignation; explain the stages of maturation of infancy, childhood, adolescence and adulthood that both humanity and humans individually go through; explain the meaning of life; explain why ‘evolution’ is in fact the purposeful process of ordering matter; explain the reasons for the limitations of mechanistic science; relate all the disciplines of the sciences and the humanities; explain in biological terms how humans became fully conscious and why other animals have not; explain why and when humans learnt to walk upright, lost their body hair, developed language, left Africa, began tool use, began hunting and meat-eating; reconcile science with religion; explain religion and render it obsolete, in the process explaining all manner of religious metaphysics, including the concepts of God, the Trinity, prophets, the Virgin Mary, the resurrection, miracles, Judgment Day, the Battle of Armageddon, Page 269 of
Print Edition the story of Noah’s Ark, after-life, heaven and hell, good and evil; decipher humanity’s legends and myths; explain and reconcile the left and right wings of politics; end the reason for prejudice and the cause of inequality between individuals, sexes, ages, generations, races and cultures, in the process reconciling the worlds of men and women, the young and the old, the innocent and the corrupted; explain the pseudo-idealism of the New Age, Peace, Green, Feminist, Native Peoples, Animal Rights, Multicultural, Politically Correct, Postmodern Movements; explain sex, heterosexuality, homosexuality, love, beauty, the attraction of youth, romance, rape, envy and lust; explain humour; explain human sensitivity and creativity, especially art and music; explain away the main underlying cause for human sickness; explain away the psychological basis of autism and savant syndrome and all psychological disorders; explain near-death experiences; provide the means for the psychological repair of the human race; save the human race from self-destruction; bring peace to the human situation, etc. Imagine what more I could have done had I not been preoccupied throughout my adult life defying and enduring ostracism and persecution from the resigned world of denial, and instead had been surrounded by other denial-free thinkers.

The point is, imagine what all humans could have achieved had they not had to resign and take up a life of lying. And imagine what the human race will be able to achieve now that resignation is no longer necessary.