Page 13 of
Print Edition This book is the condensed version of a much larger 500,000 word book that has taken thirteen years to write and is currently (1988) being edited. To introduce the concepts to be presented and because of their perceived importance this condensed version is being published ahead of the full version.

PART ONE

The Human Condition

FOR MOST OF US our main personal concerns are how to be happy, how to feel good about ourselves and how to establish our sense of worth or find our self-esteem. Our wider concern is how to stop human upset, suffering, conflict and destruction on and of earth.

For a long time we have been able to do little more than resolve these problems superficially. Now patch up repairs — of ourselves and our earth — are no longer sufficient. We are fast approaching a state of complete exhaustion, both of ourselves and our planet. We need a profound solution, the profound solution, if there is one, and there is.

To find the profound solution we have to go back to the basic questions most of us long since gave up struggling with. From there we have to carefully unravel human upset from its beginning. This will take us back through the mists of time to our earliest ancestors. It is a thought journey which will require a little patience as there are many paradoxes to grasp along the way.

Page 14 of
Print Edition As to the truth of the explanations to be given it is worth noting that when Charles Darwin introduced the idea of natural selection, noted scientist Thomas Huxley said ‘how extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that’. The explanations make so much sense that after reading them you similarly will be left feeling how obvious they always were. In fact you will probably feel as though you and all humanity have been brought out of a trance.

Having not read the explanation yet you may be incredulous. In a recent book titled The View from Nowhere, philosopher Thomas Nagal argues that some issues about our world (specifically the age-old problem of good and evil) are so complex that maybe our brains are just not made to get to the bottom of them. While this may be the prevailing view we might recall that before Darwin the picture he was able to explain so simply — namely the variety of life on earth — must also have looked all but inexplicable.

To assist the reader the explanation in Part 1 is presented in steps. These steps will lead to the answer to both our personal problem of wanting to know how to be happy and the wider problem of wanting to know how to end the upset on earth.