Transcript of Christos Akritidis’s
WTM Melbourne Centre video

 

(To learn more about Christos, see www.wtmmelbourne.com/testimonials)

 

 

Extract

Hi, my name is Christos Akritidis, I’m 22 years old [at time of filming] and I’m part of the Melbourne World Transformation Movement in Australia [www.wtmmelbourne.com]. My formal education is a Bachelor of Exercise & Sports Science, and I currently work as a strength and conditioning coach in Melbourne.

I’ve been fortunate enough in the last four years to not only delve into these insights in my life, but also to have experienced several people around me also derive an immense amount of relief, excitement, optimism and freedom from their own sort of preoccupation with ‘Am I good or am I bad?’, the underlying question that burns at the heart of every human.

There’s nothing more that I’d like to bring into the world now than to just help any individual and every individual understand these insights, because I have no doubt that I know the immense relief and love and joy, and just honesty and liberation, reconciliation—I could go on all day with words—but all those things, that it now brings to human life, things that almost seem unreal; and the ability to actually properly understand ourselves and our place in the world without a single bit of doubt or a shred of insecurity again, just makes me so excited!

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.

So I really, really encourage everyone to look into this. Yes, these insights will appear confronting at first, because it has just been a long, ‘no-go-zone’ subject for all of us, myself included. I’m no exception; I couldn’t hear the information at first, but I persevered, and sure enough, if you stick it out and you just give it a chance a whole unimaginable world opens up of clarity, and just the ability to own yourself properly for the first time, and there is an immeasurable amount of happiness that awaits after that.

These insights no doubt saved my life and there’s no looking back for me, and I’d love nothing more than to help others do the same.

 

Full Presentation

I came across the World Transformation Movement, and in particular Jeremy Griffith’s definitive book FREEDOM, through my uncle, Sam, who’s actually a co-founder of the World Transformation Movement Centre in Melbourne. I was at the age of about 18, and my uncle had been a long-time supporter of these insights, and there’s a lot of change one goes through when adjusting from being an adolescent to being an adult in the world. There is a lot of unexplained madness, not only in the world, but in myself, and most of which, in fact all of it, I just couldn’t look at. Like most people I wasn’t really looking to find an answer or explain myself, I just didn’t even want to go there; it was a ‘no-go-zone’. But I was fortunate enough to have my uncle who had already understood the human condition by reading and studying Jeremy Griffith’s insights into it, and from there he was able to connect me to the subject and explain basically how it made sense of my entire life: from why I was angry and pissed off with the world, why I was insecure, basically where my capacity for both ‘good’ and ‘evil’ came from—where it stemmed from—where that duality in my behaviour came from. And also where the duality in the environments I was in came from: why wasn’t my family ideal, and why weren’t they always cooperative and loving, and why were people dogmatic with each other, and why we were manipulative. You know, just the differences you deal with at schools, and between mates, and just in the world.

And slowly but surely I actually started to be able to hear, and then see, what it was my uncle was talking about. And then at some point I had built enough courage to want to undergo my own quest for truth; to understand what it was that I was actually here to do, and what it was that was fuelling all the madness around me. And that was when I decided to read FREEDOM for myself, and almost immediately, the excitement and relief that I got from reading the book was immense because I could verify and validate that everything Jeremy Griffith was talking about with regard to the human condition was absolutely true.

The insights are just so honest and that is confronting; that was confronting for me at the beginning, but the more I delved into it the more I just saw that the incredible compassion and honesty that made sense of every part of my being—and everything that had ever underlied any bit of uncertainty or insecurity in my life—slowly but surely just tied all the loose ends. It allowed me to see my own story and my position in the world properly and honestly for the first time.

And then from there was just an incredible journey of unravelling the truth about myself, and being able to see the fundamental goodness in myself. But what’s incredible about understanding the human condition is that through Jeremy’s ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation, the common lie that we’ve all necessarily had to adopt—that we have savage animalistic instincts and that’s the cause of our mad behaviour and that it’s our brain’s job to parent it—turns out to be the exact opposite that science now actually explains. And for me it was amazingly obvious and yet relieving to know that humans actually have loving, cooperative instincts, and that it was when our conscious mind went in search of knowledge that the two [instincts and intellect] came into a clash over the management of the individual’s life in each and every human, and in myself. It was the brain retaliating; the instincts expected a certain way of behaviour, and the brain retaliated, and became angry, egocentric and alienated, or as Jeremy terms, ‘upset’.

But the beauty of understanding that [clash and the ‘upset’ state it produced] is that it’s the angry, egocentric and violent behaviour that we need to love and understand, and that was what I learned to love and understand in myself. And it was only through that [self-understanding and compassion] that I could genuinely start to become free of my own anger, my own retaliations, my own indifference to others, and my own anger, which was fuelled by an insecurity that needed knowledge. The only thing that was going to settle that in me was knowledge of myself—I needed to see how I was fundamentally good in all this. Despite having been an angry, indifferent, divisive individual in my life, underlying all that was that I was still good and there was a very good reason for that.

And Jeremy just explains it so holistically. He credits some of the most honest, profound thinkers in human history and collates them all in one holistic view of the human journey that ties together things like differences between men and women, and difference between races, and polarized politics. It just gets to the bottom of every single controversial topic that has perplexed mankind for so long, and explains it so rationally, so logically, you almost think, ‘How didn’t we see this sooner?’

And yet it’s those exact answers that provide the incredibly optimistic, relieving and exciting future that is now available for all humans. The job has been so far to understand the human condition, first and foremost within ourselves, and how that translated into the world, and into all the angry, upset behaviour that we do live out every day. But it’s been a much too confronting subject to be able to acknowledge until eventually we were able to explain and defend the good reason for it, which is from my experience exactly what FREEDOM has done for me. And now I just have an incredible optimistic view, an exciting view, and it has helped me mend all my relationships with everyone around me because I don’t have to be operating from the basis of ‘I’m not good’ anymore. I get to live each day operating from the basis of knowing my fundamental goodness, and genuinely being absolutely sure in that, because I’ve got a scientific, first principle, biology-based explanation that I can refer to any time if I ever have any uncertainties.

For me with Jeremy’s work, I mean I could really talk for hours on end about how many incredible connections there are to make, but a really big one for me was definitely the Adam Stork story which just so beautifully depicts the clash between the ‘instinct vs intellect’ in a way that has never been depicted before, where for once, the angry, egocentric and alienated guy, or girl, is actually the hero of the story of life on Earth, because that was the job—to search for understanding—and for so long have those traits been condemned in humans, and looked at as bad and undesirable, and for the first time science has the capacity to actually be able to explain and defend and know the good reason for those behaviours having become present in humanity in the first place. And for me that was incredibly relieving, because only now after understanding the human condition do I see how much my life was spent escaping, and not thinking about, and deriving relief from those parts of myself that only ever concluded that I was bad, until I had the very good reason and defence and biological explanation that Jeremy gives us into why it is that I do have these behaviours and I present these behaviours. And more importantly, how I’m still good despite having been all that. So that brought incredible relief to me.

The second thing was that 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.

I’ve been fortunate enough in the last four years to not only delve into these insights in my life, but also to have experienced several people around me also derive an immense amount of relief, excitement, optimism and freedom from their own sort of preoccupation with ‘am I good or am I bad?’, the underlying question that burns at the heart of every human.

There’s nothing more that I’d like to bring into the world now than to just help any individual and every individual understand these insights, because I have no doubt that I know the immense relief and love and joy, and just honesty and liberation, reconciliation—I could go on all day with words—but all those things that it now brings to human life, things that almost seem unreal; and the ability to actually properly understand ourselves and our place in the world without a single bit of doubt or a shred of insecurity again, just makes me so excited!

And I love nothing more than to be able to support it. So I really, really encourage everyone to look into it. Yes, these insights will appear confronting at first, because it has just been a long, ‘no-go-zone’ subject for all of us, myself included. I’m no exception; I couldn’t hear the information at first, but I persevered, and sure enough, if you stick it out and you just give it a chance a whole unimaginable world opens up of clarity, and just the ability to own yourself properly for the first time, and there is an immeasurable amount of happiness that awaits after that.

These insights no doubt saved my life and there’s no looking back for me, and I’d love nothing more than to help others do the same. So I really, really encourage anyone who’s interested to give it a really good crack. Watch THE Interview and the first four videos on the website. They’re all so amazing. Visit www.humancondition.com and get in contact with the team if you’ve got any concerns because we’re all here to help.

There is just an incredibly exciting conclusion for all humans now. We are all good and we’ve been waiting for these answers, and we just needed the proof, and we’ve got that!