The Difficulty of Adjusting to the
Compassionate but Unevasive Full Truth

While the evasive mechanistic approach was the only approach humanity could take it meant it would have to rely on ‘hope and faith’ that it could eventually liberate itself from the resultingPage 201 of
Print Edition mountain of evasion. Now that hope and faith have been fulfilled and the full liberating truth found one more serious problem remains as a hangover from this evasive mechanistic approach. It is how are we to accept and adjust to the truth now that it has arrived.

Given our evasive approach it was inevitable there would come a time when the mountain of accumulated evasions would have to be dismantled — our revelation or ‘judgement’ day. When we consider what this actually entails, we can see the magnitude of such a confrontation. Inevitably it must be traumatic. No matter how compassionate the revelations, the adjustment itself will be difficult. It will be a shock. We are accustomed to our old ways of coping, our old evasive defences and justifications for our conscious thinking self or ego, and can’t easily accept their destruction and the adoption of a whole new way of justifying ourselves, of behaving. Men especially have had fragile embattled egos, as has been explained (which is the main reason it will be easier for women, who don’t have embattled egos, to acknowledge the truth of, and act on the information in this book), which means men won’t easily abandon the justifications they have been using to uphold their egos. Men quickly became so embattled, so ‘punch drunk’, that any step back or aside would seem to them like a retreat, like admitting defeat. The defiant expressions ‘give me liberty or give me death’ and ‘winning is all that matters’ are expressions of this madness. In order to go forward it is often necessary to go back, to change tack, to re-adjust, but the male ego could become so embattled men could refuse to change the defensive position they have adopted and become entrenched in.

We are all being asked to re-model our whole life with a new way of justifying it. As has been explained earlier, our personalities are the expressions of the way we have coped with life under the pressures of the human condition (of living with an unfairly critical conscience) and we can’t be expected to change our personalities overnight. We would have to expect that many among us, especially the more ego-embattled and morePage 202 of
Print Edition exhausted with most to adjust to and be exposed will tend to resist such confrontation/exposure. As it says in the Bible, albeit in our old often critical metaphysical terms, about those who fear exposure ‘Everyone who does evil hates the light’ (John 3:20) and about those unable to re-adjust their thinking ‘new wine must be poured into new wineskins [because] no-one after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says “The old is better” ’ (Luke 5:38,39). In the past we have found even relatively small adjustments to our accepted (evasive) framework of understanding difficult to make; how much more difficult, then, the adjustment of adopting a whole new unevasive framework of understanding. Thomas Kuhn, a science historian, has said that old scientists who become established within the dominant paradigm (way of explaining/defending/justifying ourself and our world) will virtually never accept the new paradigm, they have to die off before a new idea gains momentum; and Max Planck, a famous physicist, has said ‘science progresses funeral by funeral’¹.

Another consequence of our evasive approach in inquiry was that our evasions would become so effective we would lose all awareness that they were evasions — that they served to repress another world and truth. To varying degrees, according to our degree of battle-fatigue/alienation, we would lose memory of that unbelievably beautiful world; that world we deliberately caused ourselves to become ‘lost’ from in order to one day have it restored permanently to earth. To varying degrees we would forget that we were fighting for the unevasive world. To varying degrees we would come to believe there was no other world but the horrible and unhappy world full of suffering that we were living in. Using our old metaphysical terms again, we would become ‘a slave to [the world of] sin’ (John 8:34) where ‘men loved darkness instead of light’ (John 3:19). When such disbelief in another better world, such cynicism, took hold of us we would Page 203 of
Print Edition find ourselves actively resisting, to varying degrees, any recognition or reintroduction of the beautiful world; we would find ourselves advocating staying in the suffering world even though we had initially set out to transcend it!

As well as these ‘punch drunk’/embattled/exhausted states there was also the problem of believing it was possible for anyone to dismantle all our evasions. Reflecting or expressing our own inability to confront the truth we would find it hard to see that anyone else could do it. In our evasion of the existence of innocence (because innocence criticised our lack of it), of the less embattled states, we were not aware of what such innocence was capable of seeing and doing. In the introduction to this book it was mentioned that the philosopher Thomas Nagal thought our brains were not made to get to the bottom of the problem of good and evil. When we reflected on our own utterly lost and bewildered state, as Nagal was doing, we could easily become incredulous and pessimistic. We could lose hope and faith that freedom for humanity was possible.

Further, we could become so embattled, our soul could become so repressed, we would lose all ability to recognise what was sound and what was not. In such a state we could become what we call paranoid, unable to know or trust the real truth of a situation. The more insecure we became the harder it was for us to recognise what was sound explanation and what was not. If the mongol hordes of Genghis Khan had been attacking our country for thousands of years and then one day returned to Mongolia it would take many months before we would be able to trust they were actually gone. It would be a brave man who would first venture out of the woods and caves where we had been hiding.

For all these reasons it is expected that initially great resistance and scepticism will meet this book. The very last thing we will believe is that it is what it claims to be — the full liberating truth about ourselves. We will suspect it to be an expression of some form of disguised psychosis and will see its authority, its sense of conviction, as offensive arrogance. (We are not at allPage 204 of
Print Edition familiar with the holistic/subjective/introspective approach. Living with the truth instead of evading it, holistic inquiry can know when it is right and when it is wrong. It is the difference between finding your way around a room with the light on and trying to find your way around it in the dark. Objective inquiry had to grope, as it were, its way round the room step by proven step. Objective mechanistic inquiry was a blind form of inquiry that naturally lacked confidence and authority; we, being familiar only with the mechanistic approach, imagined everyone was similarly insecure.) But this book will survive our disbelief. Normally when we read a book we soon discover its particular level of superficiality. This book however will be different. We will continually think we have found a weakness — that we have been disappointed — that we have ‘hit bottom’ — only to discover later it was not so. We will not discover its level of insecurity/superficiality/alienation because it doesn’t have one, it goes all the way to the full truth about ourselves. That this happens will bear witness to the soundness of the information. ‘By their fruits we can recognise them’ (Math 7:16).

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¹ The Kuhn and Planck quotes were mentioned by Marilyn Ferguson, author of The Aquarian Conspiracy, in an interview published in the New Age magazine, August 1982.