Section 3:15 Pete Storey (recorded December 2009)

I was born in Brisbane and was introduced to the understandings of the human condition by my girlfriend Annabel in my early 20s when she explained the Adam Stork picture to me once after we had seen a movie [in Video/​F. Essay 3 the human condition is explained using the Adam Stork analogy]. I had been to art school and I had gone down a lot of roads in myself looking for understanding of what I considered the crisis of my childhood to be, which was meaninglessness. The world was a bleak place in terms of love. I looked out at the world thinking, ‘Where do I fit in?’, ‘Who am I?’, ‘What is all this selfishness and aggression about?’ Ultimately I was asking why is the world so non-ideal. You look around and you can’t seem to make sense of anything and there are apparently no answers to these questions. Then, as you grow up, you see that lack of ideality in yourself and that’s something that you just cannot face down or answer and without an explanation you are left with some terrifying conclusions that you are bad and unlovable. So, as Jeremy explained very well in chapter 2:2 of FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition [for an introduction to Resignation, we recommend you read F. Essay 30], you just cut out at that point and you cease asking those questions of ‘why?’ and you resign. You take up completely some artificial way of life in order to feel good about yourself and to prove your self worth. Once I heard the Adam Stork story, the penny dropped for me. I just knew in my bones it was true and I remember saying to Annabel, ‘Yeah, that’s it!’

I’ve been a founding member of the WORLD TRANSFORMATION MOVEMENT (WTM) since then and I’ve been quietly digesting this information. That digestion leads you to a point where you do know that the information is true but you have committed to a life of proving your self worth and taken up a strategy to try and achieve that and have become massively addicted to that way of life, which leaves you in a Mexican Standoff with this information, where you are effectively saying, ‘Yeah Jeremy, that’s a great idea, but in lieu of not having those answers when I was young I’ve got something going here that I’m addicted to now. I’ve developed a strategy which gives me a lot of wins and sustenance and I’m doing pretty well. So how do I maintain this strategy and support something that explains and ultimately obsoletes that way of living?’ [F. Essay 33 contains an important presentation by Jeremy Griffith on how to resolve the ‘Mexican Standoff’.]

But the whole point of when the dignifying understanding arrives for real is that you can have a very serious chat with yourself and say, ‘Look, is this the truth about my situation or not?’ It’s testable in your own life and I’ve done it and I’ve tested it and all that meaninglessness can now be explained.

I look around at the suburb I grew up in and it is not unlike the picture Jeremy presented of suburban California in Part 2:5 of Freedom Expanded: Book 1 and it was bleak [see below]. I remember, as I said earlier, just thinking ‘Where is something meaningful?’, ‘I’m looking for something that isn’t here’ and people are going about life in a way that is alien to me and there were these pieces to the puzzle of life that just didn’t connect.

This information has logically answered all those questions for me and that’s what I love about it and it resonates in me in a purely logical way and I don’t have to defer to anything or anyone, it’s not a stretch of your imagination or anything like that and for a boy who grew up seeing the world as a complete mystery, now I see it through this information, everything has been explained and therefore resolved, so whatever happened to me in my life is all explicable in terms of this information.

Now the beautiful gift about it is, as Jeremy says, you don’t have to go and look at the catalogue of your pain and say, ‘I’ve got to work out that, that, that, that and that’. When the big answer comes, when the answer to ‘What is the meaning of life?’ is here, you can say, ‘Yes that’s it, game over, we are defended’. The amazing thing that happens after you realise that you no longer have to be preoccupied with proving your self worth because we are defended, is that a new realm of possibility opens up that you could never imagine before. You start thinking ‘Okay, if there isn’t any mystery to life, if everything has been explained and if a child can have that explanation growing up when they begin to ask all those real questions, they won’t have to resign and will grow up in a world where there isn’t any anger, competitiveness and selfishness’.

I have wondered how the concept of ‘self worth’ will be viewed in the future and where it will fit in? Because if you ask a child in the future, once this explanation is universal, ‘What is the meaning of the word “worth”?’, they’ll say, ‘Um, it’s not money, it’s not material things…​what, self worth? Was that ever in question?’ and you’ll say, ‘Well, it was at one point!’

That’s what I live for, the potential of what this can do and it’s once you can have that chat with yourself and fully understand that this is the answer to all your problems, then a world of unlimited possibility opens up to you. As a conduit generation, we can live through the vision of what is possible now and that is what is happening here in real time in real life; it’s living for an amazing future. I’m doing all I can for this information to reach the world in honour of ‘little’ Pete who didn’t get told what the world was about and couldn’t be told because the human condition hadn’t been explained, but now that the human condition has been solved, anything can happen and it’s going to be so good!