Page 294 of
Print Edition Renegotiating resignation

Now that it is at last safe to confront the issue of the human condition, the all-important question for almost all adults in the world is, can they renegotiate what happened when they resigned as teenagers and return to a denial-free, unresigned state? Can they hope to stop practicing the denial they have been so dependent on to protect themselves from confrontation with the issue of the human condition? The good news is that to a significant degree they can. People can end their historic denial of our soul’s true world and of integrative meaning and, to a degree, return to a state of alienation-free sanity of mind, happiness and soundness of soul. I say ‘to a degree’ because once a person has lived in total denial of the soul’s true world it is not realistic to hope to completely rehabilitate that sound world of the soul. Realistically, the full rehabilitation of humans’ true selves will take a number of generations.

The WTM has learnt that with understanding of the psychological principles involved in overcoming a denial it is possible to renegotiate resignation. What is required is training in those psychological principles, along with support for coping with the self-confrontation that occurs. By 2002, the year this book was being prepared for publication, the WTM had been developing this know-how and support structure for more than a decade. The 100 plus Members and Supporters of the WTM are all resigned adults yet most of them are in the process of, and some have effectively completed, renegotiating their resigned states, liberating their minds from the denial they had to adopt as teenagers when reconciling understanding of the human condition was not available.

The WTM has significant and ever-growing experience in renegotiating resignation, and is preparing itself to begin helping other people set out towards the liberated position (or ‘LP’ as we refer to it). We are establishing a University For Denial-Free Studies, where people can study the understanding of the human condition that is now available and develop the know-how to liberate themselves and other humans from the resigned, alienated state.

Obviously to develop this university for the world’s new paradigm requires significant resources, especially financial, and the WTM’s extremely limited financial and human resources are currently being Page 295 of
Print Edition stretched to the limit standing up to persecution from sections of the establishment in Australia. (As mentioned, we intend to document this persecution at the conclusion of the legal actions we have taken against it in a book provisionally titled The Attempted Assassination of the WTM: The Denial Tries to Reimpose Itself.) To address the need for funds, those supporting the WTM are developing a number of business ventures. Unlike universities of the old denial-complying world, this new university has no tradition of support from the community, no government funding to rely upon. Financial assistance has been offered to everything—universities that are custodians of denial, cancer research, institutes for depression, drug rehabilitation, etc, etc—except the one thing that can make a real difference, the study of the human condition. In fact, the complete opposite has been occurring—rather than receiving support, study of the human condition has been oppressed and persecuted. That clearly has to change.

All the developments of this new paradigm, from its beginning in the research stages through to the writing of my books, have relied on self-sufficiency. We do however hope to receive corporate sponsorship as we think some business leaders are sufficiently far-sighted to recognise the immense importance of our work. As long as we can survive the extremely difficult pioneering years the future for the WTM is fabulous. It can become the largest organisation in the world; not through the pursuit of financial gain—in fact the WTM is a registered charity and a non-profit organisation—but because of its ability to save the world from destruction and end the suffering in people’s lives. What we have is both the ultimate product for the planet—reconciling, peace-bringing understanding, and the ultimate product for humans—self-knowledge.

The great responsibility of humans living in the affluent parts of the world changes now from trying to derive some relief from their insecurity through power, fame, fortune and glory, to supporting this work that permanently eliminates humans’ insecurity and ends the dilemma of the human condition. Humanity is no longer stalled. With understanding of the human condition found there is suddenly now a great deal of urgent work to be done. Samuel Beckett’s famous 1953 play, Waiting For Godot, is a portrayal of humans’ powerless, stalled state. Unless you could confront and solve the human condition there was little you could do about the awful predicament of humans but wait. This waiting for the God/ truth-inspired/ denial-free understanding that liberates humans from the human condition is now over.

As mentioned earlier in the context of explaining the limitations Page 296 of
Print Edition of the resigned mind, R.D. Laing anticipated this time when humans would finally be able to go to work on their psychosis and dismantle their resigned state of living in denial, saying: ‘Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest, and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of un-learning is necessary of anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love [p.23 of 156]’, and ‘True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality: the emergence of the “inner” archetypal mediators of divine power, and through this death a rebirth, and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer [p.119]’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967).

With understanding of the human condition found, everybody can be shown that it is now safe to sufficiently confront the truth about themselves to live their lives free of denial. In the previous essay, Deciphering Plato’s Cave Allegory, Plato highlighted the need to ‘put sight into blind eyes’, and subsequently went on to say, ‘this capacity [of a mind…to see clearly] is innate in each man’s mind, and that the faculty by which he learns is like an eye which cannot be turned from darkness to light unless the whole body is turned; in the same way the mind as a whole must be turned away from the world of change until it can bear to look straight at reality, and at the brightest of all realities which is what we call the Good [integrative meaning or God]. Then this business of turning the mind round might be made a subject of professional skill, which would effect the conversion as easily and effectively as possible’ (Plato The Republic, tr. H.D.P. Lee, 1955, p.283 of 405). In this passage Plato anticipates the role of psychiatry in liberating humans from their historic practice of denial, a role Laing was also referring to when he said, ‘an intensive discipline of un-learning is necessary of anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love’. Erich Neumann was also anticipating the need for psychiatry to liberate humanity from denial when he wrote, ‘Ego and consciousness identify themselves in principle with one side of the opposition and leave the other [the instinctive soul] in the unconscious, either preventing it from coming up at all, i.e., consciously suppressing it, or else repressing it, i.e., eliminating it from consciousness without being aware of doing so. Only deep psychological analysis can then discover the unconscious counterposition’ (The Page 297 of
Print Edition Origins and History of Consciousness, 1949, p.117 of 493).

The term ‘psychiatry’ literally means ‘soul healing’—from the Greek words psyche, meaning ‘soul’, and iatreia meaning ‘healing’. While a common practice in the 20th century psychiatry really only comes into its own now. While humanity could not explain the human condition, psychiatry or soul-healing, was little use because humans could not heal their soul, could not stop living in denial of it, while they lacked the dignifying understanding of their soul-corrupted state. In fact, during the trial of a psychiatrist accused of negligence, the defence (the Attorney-General of Massachusetts) said, ‘The art of psychiatry is just one step removed from black magic’ (The Australian, 19 July 1983). Essentially, humans were in no position to dismantle their denials, remove their mental blocks, while they lacked the understanding with which to replace them. This is why, as the title of a 1992 book by Hillman and Ventura states succinctly, ‘We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse’. It is little wonder a cover feature in Time magazine asked ‘Is Freud Dead?’ and depicted a psychoanalyst’s couch being thrown out the window (Nov. 1993). Now that understanding of the human condition is found, humans are finally in a position to take down their mental blocks because they have the understandings with which to replace them.

Healing the human soul will be one of the main activities of the human-condition-reconciled new world. It should be emphasised that alongside this task of addressing the psychological devastation of humans will be the task of attending to the physical impoverishment of humans everywhere. Repairing self while others are not yet aware of this liberating knowledge and while there are people desperately impoverished has the potential to become a more extreme form of selfishness than that which accompanied humans’ materialist, escapist existence. In the WTM we describe this danger as ‘pocketing the win’. Plato recognised this potential for people who have become ‘liberated from the cave’—that is liberated from the resigned, alienated state—to ‘pocket the win’ when he said, ‘And when he [the liberated person] thought of his first home and what passed for wisdom there and of his fellow-prisoners, don’t you think he would congratulate himself on his good fortune and be sorry for them?’ (Plato The Republic, tr. H.D.P. Lee, 1955, p.280 of 405). While there is a danger of those who have become liberated resting on their good fortune, our experience is that although people do tend to become selfish with the information initially, those who become more familiar with it and gain a deeper appreciation of Page 298 of
Print Edition it, develop an extremely compassionate, outward-looking, selfless agenda. ‘Pocketing the win’ is merely a temporary phenomenon in the journey to renegotiate resignation.

It was mentioned above that with understanding of the psychological principles involved in overcoming a denial it is possible to renegotiate the denial that occurred at resignation. Given that psychiatry has historically been about as much use as black magic, the reader may wonder how these principles were formulated. Interestingly, the WTM has found that they are most clearly set out in literature written to help victims of incest and other situations of childhood and early adolescent sexual abuse, in particular in the 1988 book, Courage to Heal by Laura Davis and Ellen Bass. The reason these principles have been so clearly articulated for these young victims of sexual abuse is that their situation is one of few in the old resigned, dishonest world where a form of understanding was available to replace the denial they had adopted at the time of the abuse; a denial put in place to insulate themselves from the pain of being unable to understand the violation of their souls. While humanity has not been able to explain the fundamental cause of sexual abuse, when these young victims grew older they developed an appreciation of human sexuality that naturally accompanies adulthood, that could be used to replace the denials they had employed at the time of the abuse in order to cope. Although this adult awareness of sexuality fell far short of an actual understanding of sexual abuse, as an ‘explanation’ of what had occurred it was far superior to the child’s pre-resigned situation of being completely unable to understand the abuse, as such, a much ‘freer’ psychological state was achieved.

The principles of change that the victims of childhood sexual abuse applied in their rehabilitation can be applied to any change in thinking that requires ‘re-routing the brain’, including the ultimate change in thinking—the paradigm shift involved in replacing humans’ resigned state of denial with the truthful explanation of themselves that understanding the human condition makes available.

It might be assumed that if our mind has a certain way of thinking about something and it discovers a superior pattern of thought that this latter way would immediately replace the now defunct way of thinking. This however is not how our brain works. The brain has a tendency to become habituated to a way of thinking and behaving and that habituation cannot be discarded instantly nor easily. There is a process involved in replacing one way of thinking with another.

Page 299 of
Print Edition An understanding of how our brain works will aid the reader’s appreciation of this process. As was briefly mentioned in the Plato essay, the ability of the nerve-based learning system to remember past events enables it to compare past events with current events and identify regularly occurring experiences. This knowledge of, or insight into, what has commonly occurred in the past enables the mind to predict what is likely to occur in the future and to adjust behaviour accordingly. The nerve-based learning system can associate information, reason how experiences are interrelated, learn to understand and become conscious of the relationship of events that occur through time.

In the brain, recordings of experiences (memories) are examined for their relationship with each other. To understand how the brain makes the comparisons, we can think of the brain as a vast network of nerve pathways onto which incoming experiences are recorded or inscribed, each on a particular path within the network. Where different experiences share the same information, their pathways overlap. For example, long before we understood what the force of gravity was, we had learnt that if we let go of an object, it would usually fall to the ground. The value of recording information as a pathway in a network is that it allows related aspects of experience to be physically related. In fact the area in our brain where information is related is called the ‘association cortex’. Where parts of an experience are the same they share the same pathway, and where they differ their pathways differ or diverge. All the nerve cells in the brain are interconnected, so with sufficient input of experiences onto a nerve network of sufficient size, similarities or consistencies in experience show up as well-used pathways that have become highways. (In the vast convolutions of our cortex there are about 8 billion nerve cells with 10 times that number of interconnecting dendrites which, if laid end to end, would stretch at least from Earth to the Moon and back.)

An ‘idea’ describes the moment information is associated in the brain. Incoming information could reinforce a highway, slightly modify it or add an association (an idea) between two highways, dramatically simplifying that particular network of developing consistencies to create a new and simpler interpretation of that information. For example, the most important relationship between different types of fruit is their edibility. Elsewhere the brain has recognised that the main relationship connecting experiences with living things is that Page 300 of
Print Edition they appear to try to stay alive. Suddenly it ‘sees’ or deduces (‘tumbles’ to the idea or association or abstraction, as we say) a possible connection between eating and staying alive which, with further experience and thought, becomes reinforced or ‘seems’ correct. ‘Eating’ is now channelled onto the ‘staying alive’ highway. Subsequent thought would try to deduce the significance of ‘staying alive’ and, beyond that, compare the importance of selfishness and selflessness. Ultimately the brain would arrive at the truth of integrative meaning.

Consciousness has been a difficult subject for humans to investigate, not because of practical difficulties in understanding how our brain works as we’re told, but because we did not want to know how it worked. We have had to evade admitting too clearly how the brain worked because admitting information could be associated and simplified—admitting to insight—was only a short step away from realising the ultimate insight, integrative meaning, and immediately confronting ourselves with our inconsistency with that meaning. It was better to evade the existence of purpose in the first place by avoiding the possibility that information could be associated. For the same reason we evaded the term ‘genetic refinement’, preferring instead the vaguer term genetics. We had to evade the possibility of the refinement of information in all its forms. Admitting that information could be simplified or refined was admitting to an ultimate refinement or law, again confronting us with our inconsistency with that law.

Essentially the brain is a vast network of nerve pathways in which ‘highways’ of regularly occurring associations develop. We can think of it as a ‘jungle’ of nerve connections that initially have no ‘highways’ carved through it. Gradually regularly occurring associations develop as ‘tracks’ through the ‘jungle’. Those ‘tracks’ then become more used and develop into ‘paths’, and if they continue to be used become ‘roads’, and so on until they become reinforced as ‘highways’. Once a ‘highway’ has been established it is not easy to redirect the traffic of information and establish a new route. It takes determined practice to redirect such ‘highways’.

Our brain has a tendency to develop habits. If you have been brushing your teeth a certain way and your dentist tells you to do it another way and you do not apply yourself to practicing the new way you will find yourself automatically reverting to the old method. Established routines take time and much application to change.

In the case of adjusting to change on a large scale there are four Page 301 of
Print Edition basic stages. Firstly there is normally a shocked, even angry reaction to the imposition of the need for such a change. Less reactionary resistance follows as adjustment begins. In this more rational stage the mind experiences a period of procrastination where it carefully and systematically searches for any justification to avoid change. Eventually, when procrastination fails, acceptance of the inevitability of the change occurs. After acceptance there remains the task of adapting to the new paradigm.

These basic stages take a particular form in the case of the very large scale change of having to adjust to the arrival of understanding of the human condition.

The shock stage has two phases. There is the initial shock of reading description and analysis of the human condition. The effect of this shock is that the reader’s mind finds it difficult to take in or absorb or ‘hear’ what is being explained. If the reader is patient and perseveres they can however begin to hear the explanations and an appreciation of them grows rapidly. So powerful is the information’s ability to explain human behaviour that the world of humans starts to become transparent. Albert Einstein once said, ‘truth is what stands the test of experience’ (Out of My Later Years, 1950). Similarly, author Morris West once wrote, ‘Life itself is the best of all lie-detectors’ (A View from the Ridge, 1996, p.89 of 143). The principle being referred to is that of subjecting hypotheses to tests—the basis of ‘the scientific method’—with the greatest test of all obviously being the test of life itself. The fact that this information makes human life transparently understandable convinces the reader of the truthfulness of the explanations and when this happens they normally become extremely excited and enthusiastic about the information.

It is some time after this phase that the reader starts experiencing the effects of this transparency on their own condition. This is the second and main shock phase. The resigned person’s dishonest, deluded way of explaining and defending themselves begins to be exposed. The truth destroys the lies. The more you digest these understandings the more the false forms of reinforcement that you adopted when you resigned are exposed and fail to be effective. You cannot maintain the delusions that you are living off in the presence of the truth. You face exposure day, truth day, come-clean day, honesty day—‘judgment day’ in fact.

As this exposure increases the reader begins to feel a strong need to reject the information, to deny that it is true; revert to the old Page 302 of
Print Edition ’safe’ way of coping with confronting information. Doing this however does not work because it amounts to irresponsibly denying fulfilment of the whole human journey, which was to find these liberating understandings of the human condition. Also, the accountability of the explanations makes it difficult to deny their truth.

A collision occurs between the old and new way of explaining and defending yourself, leaving you in a dilemma, a state of procrastination, a Mexican stand-off in fact. You do not want anything more to do with the new, all-exposing information but on the other hand you do not want to deny it; you cannot advance with the information and you cannot retreat from it. It is at this point that the principles of re-routing the brain become critically important.

The overall requirement is that you have to practice the new way of explaining and defending yourself, otherwise the old, habituated, resigned method of defence will reassert itself. As with breaking any habit, you have to practice thinking with the new understanding. Using the ‘highway’ analogy, a ‘track’ has to be carved out from the established ‘highway’ to form a new ‘route’ through the ‘jungle’ of nerve pathways in the brain, and that ‘track’ then has to be actively maintained and developed if it is to have any chance of becoming a ‘road’, and ultimately the new ‘highway’ of thinking.

Again it has to be emphasised that what is occurring has nothing to do with indoctrination. The Macquarie Dictionary defines ‘indoctrinate’ as, ‘to so instruct someone in a manner which leads to their total and uncritical acceptance of the teaching; brainwash’ (1998 edn). In this case it is the accountability of the explanations of the human condition, the reasoned logic, that leads to people’s initial appreciation of the explanations and eventually to the Mexican stand-off, a process that is the very opposite of ‘uncritical acceptance’. This information is brain nourishment, not brain anaesthetic; it is about being mindful not mindless. What is occurring is actually the dismantling of indoctrinated thought, the dismantling of the delusions, lies and denials that people forced their mind to accept when they resigned.

The difficulty with this re-routing of the brain, this adoption of the new way of thinking is that it is not easily achieved. Courage to Heal describes the tenacity of habituated ‘highways’: ‘A pattern is any habitual way of behaving. By its nature it is deeply entrenched, set by repetition, and brings a familiar result. Even if that result is not, ultimately, what you want, its predictability is part of its grip. Patterns usually start unconsciously as a way of coping when your options are limited. They serve Page 303 of
Print Edition you, but at a cost. Patterns have a life of their own, and their will to live is very strong. They fight back with a vengeance when faced with annihilation. Once you recognise a pattern and make the commitment to break it, it often escalates’ (p.175 of 495).

The resigned highway of living in denial of the human condition and deriving your reinforcement from false, survival-of-the-fittest, competitive success through winning power, fame, fortune and glory, has an exceptionally strong hold in the mind because of what happened at resignation. At resignation the fear of depression absolutely ‘cemented’ the denial in place. While the mind forgets the depression soon after resignation, the entrenchment of the denial remains and as a result the denial does ‘fight back with a vengeance when faced with annihilation’.

It is the crisis brought about by the Mexican stand-off, by the logic and understanding exposing and destroying your ability to lie, that eventually brings about acceptance of the need to change. What happens is the crisis becomes sufficiently unbearable—you are actually renegotiating resignation—for you to accept that you have to let the truth into your life, admit that you are a victim of the human condition. Honesty is what relieves the situation. An alcoholic who joins Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is told that they will initially try to deny that they are an alcoholic but for any real rehabilitation to take place they have to accept this truth. Until you reach acceptance of your human-condition-afflicted, corrupted state it is difficult to make any real progress from the exposed, frustrated state of the Mexican stand-off.

This acceptance and subsequent honesty fractures the hold the resigned ‘highway’ of denial has on your mind. It releases you from being a total victim of your old resigned strategy, where you cannot think any other way than from a base of denial. This critical stage of adopting and practicing honesty initially benefits from the help of others who have experience in this process of change. For instance, it is initially easier if others go through and acknowledge for you your true situation; that you are a corrupted but heroic victim of humanity’s great battle to defeat the ignorance of our instincts. Using the true, honest defence for yourself becomes easier with practice because you discover that the true defence works—it does stop the anger, pain and depression that comes from being exposed by the truth. You enter a positive feedback loop.

The way to survive exposure is to use the truth now available to Page 304 of
Print Edition explain why humans became corrupted. By surviving the exposure, through using the understanding that is now available of why humans became corrupted, you gain your first foothold in the new human-condition-free world. From there it is only a matter of applying yourself to holding onto the true explanation for your corrupted condition and the new ‘highway’ will gradually replace the old. You adapt to the new world, you achieve liberation from the human condition, you achieve the liberated position or LP as it is termed.

In Courage to Heal there is a poem titled Autobiography in Five Short Chapters that describes the process of dismantling an established ‘highway’ of thinking. It uses the example of falling into a hole as an analogy for succumbing to the old way of thinking: ‘I walk down the street / There is a deep hole in the sidewalk / I fall in / I am lost—I am helpless / It isn’t my fault [that I fell in because I am still learning not to, learning that there is another way of thinking] / It takes forever to find a way out // I walk down the same street / There is a deep hole in the sidewalk / I pretend I don’t see it / I fall in again / I can’t believe I am in the same place / But it isn’t my fault / It still takes a long time to get out // I walk down the same street / There is a deep hole in the sidewalk / I see it is there / I still fall in—it’s a habit / My eyes are open / I know where I am / It is my fault [I should know by now to think differently, to not “fall in the hole”] / I get out immediately // I walk down the same street / There is a deep hole in the sidewalk / I walk around it // I walk down another street’ (p.183 of 495).

The following drawing illustrates the same transition from being owned by the old highway, to being sufficiently free of it to be able to view it honestly.

 

 

 

Page 305 of
Print Edition The drawings below summarise the journey from living in denial, through exposure, to the liberated position or LP. The key symbolises the liberating understanding of the human condition—the true defence for humans’ divisive, corrupted state—that humanity has been in search of for 2 million years.

 

 

Most importantly, in the years ahead, people will increasingly realise they do not have to go through the agony of trying to fully confront the issue of the human condition, and, with it, their own condition. All people need to do is study the explanations sufficiently to confirm for themselves that the truth about humans has at last been found and then offer the explanations their support. It is not necessary to fully confront the information to support it. You can live in semi-denial of it. As long as there is support of this all-important information, future generations can be given the true explanation of the world of humans, and their part in that world, and as a result they will not have to resign nor encounter the problem of renegotiating a resigned state of denial.

It is only necessary for people to confront the truth to the extent that they feel secure to do so. The more corrupted will only be able to confront it to a small degree, but everyone will live in support of the truth.

This situation is described in the last chapter of Beyond, ‘Adjusting to the Truth’, and illustrated with the following drawing. It shows different forms of participation in the new human-condition-ameliorated world, each of which requires a varying amount of confrontation with the truth.

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Some more intelligent and highly educated people, accustomed to their ability to closely scrutinise all before them, will find this need to live with the truth at arms length difficult to accept and offensive to their intellect. However such responses will decrease as the enthusiasm for the new humanity-liberating way of living spreads, and everybody supports the truth and goes to work for the new world, each in a way that accommodates their level of soundness.

Page 307 of
Print Edition It should be pointed out that this situation, where individuals only confront the truth to the extent that they are secure enough to do so, is really no different from the situation in the old resigned world where those who were not clever were excluded from universities and higher study because they could not be trusted to maintain the denial, the great lie. As was explained in the Introduction, human intelligence to date has largely been concerned with the art of denial, not with truthful thinking. Artful, sophisticated, evasive, esoteric, cryptic, intellectual cleverness was needed to establish, defend and maintain the safe, non-confronting, escapist, alienated state. Universities selected for cleverness (that is, attendance at university was dependent on passing exams that tested for mental aptitude), not because cleverness was a prerequisite for thinking and learning, as those living in denial have evasively maintained, but because ‘dumbness’ or lack of intelligence could not be trusted to maintain the denial. The truth is the average IQ or intelligent quotient of humans is quite adequate for understanding. A high IQ or ‘cleverness’ was needed to deny and evade the truth. That was the real art. Universities have had high IQ entrance requirements because they have been the custodians of denial, keepers of ‘the great lie’. A student had to be able to investigate the truth and talk about the truth without confronting it or admitting it, a very difficult, IQ-demanding undertaking.

Just as the old evasive world had to emphasise cleverness, so the new unevasive world has to emphasise soundness. This is the meaning of the Biblical references, that ‘The meek…will inherit the earth’ (Matt. 5:5) and ‘many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first’ (Matt. 19:30,20:16; Mark 10:31; Luke 13:30). Humanity has turned its head for home, ‘home’ being the denial-free world of soundness, togetherness, peace and happiness, and it is those who are already sound who can show humanity the way.

In an ideal situation, as I have stressed in my earlier books, counselling support would accompany the introduction of understanding of the human condition. The reality however is that the WTM, while it is doing all it can to supply assistance and support, is stretched to the limit defending these revolutionary ideas. As the progenitor of this information I have a responsibility to offer as much help as I can, however there is also a responsibility on the part of those immersing themselves in this information to heed this advice about how to manage the effects of this information. The unavoidable situation Page 308 of
Print Edition is that until substantial support develops for our work, people have to responsibly manage their situation so as to not overly confront the information if they are not sufficiently sound and secure. This is not easy advice to accept because, for instance, it is so at odds with the old resigned world tradition of intelligence being able to pursue any interest. The overall reality we are faced with is that any pioneer project is inherently problematic and, given the scale of the change that understanding of the human condition brings, the difficulties this project faces in its pioneer stage are bound to be substantial. It is a ‘brave new world’ that humanity is entering.

The following is an account of someone who is learning how to support the truth without overly confronting it. Jeremy Schroder from the Australian state of Victoria, illustrates all that has been said about the stages of adjusting to the arrival of the truth about the human condition. Jeremy has kindly given the WTM permission to include these extracts from his correspondence. While the WTM has corresponded with Jeremy we have not met.

‘Three years ago I read Jeremy [Griffith]’s book and something happened that I have since been trying to deal with. At the time I was halfway through enlisting for the army when Jeremy’s words truly hit home. Nothing could touch me in that time, everything made perfect absolute sense. Then things started to change. I wanted to go further but something stopped me and when I pushed I felt the worst fear I have ever known. Fear doesn’t even go close to expressing it. What do you suppose you do when you find the most fearful thing you’ll ever encounter is yourself.

I understand Jeremy’s message in having to distance yourself from the truth. I don’t know how to give in. All my life I have looked for understanding and when I find it it doesn’t sit well with me to have to run away from it. If I let it go I may never be able to find it again. I have found ways to block but I will never again be able to deny. I know I have to let it go but where do my responsibilities truly lie, in seeking truth and finding paths or in denial. It was so beautiful, a whole other world exists inside our minds that we have rarely seen. I will keep trying to find the middle ground and thank you for being there.’

At this point the WTM emphasised to Jeremy that, ‘Until proper preparation can be made for exposure day it will be necessary for each of us to rely on block-out or evasion to cope’ (Free, p.212 of 228) and that ‘Essentially all we have to do now is support the unevasive truth (hold the key aloft). It is not necessary to confront it. This is the way to cope with judgment day’ (Beyond, p.169 of 203). Jeremy Schroder gave the following response: Page 309 of
Print Edition ‘I have taken on board our last conversation. At the moment I am in still waters, but eventually a storm will no doubt arise, but as you have said there is a difference in looking for them and avoiding them. That is something that I have to deal with. I have you because a strong man stood up for what he knows and believes in; it’s not even a belief, it transcends belief, it is pure truth. The storms are brewing and there is a big one on the 26th of May [the WTM’s first major court hearing]. Within that storm I am trying to give you as much cover as I can. My thoughts are with you. Bow your head to no-one. I will leave you with something that offered me strength for some time now and I hope it will do the same for you in a time which finds us fragmented and alone. “It fortifies my soul to know that tho I perish, truth is so that however I stray and range and whatever I do thou does not change. I steadier step when I recall that if I slip thou dost not fall.” Love you guys heaps’ (WTM records, Mar. 2003).

With regard to Jeremy’s comment about a ‘strong man’, that is an old world prejudiced interpretation. I am simply sound enough to confront the truth. We are now able to understand that the truly strong people are those who have survived unjust condemnation from the human condition. They are the real heroes of life under the duress of the human condition.

Despite the pioneering difficulties that have to be overcome it is obviously immensely exciting to know that people who have resigned can renegotiate their life of living in denial. It means all humans can look forward to becoming, to varying degrees, free from the historic psychosis that has beset our species since the emergence of consciousness 2 million years ago.