Section 4

Membership of the
World Transformation Movement

 

The following is an expanded transcript of Jeremy Griffith’s immensely exciting ‘Introduction to the Transformation’ video which was filmed in Sydney in October 2011. You can view this video at <www.humancondition.com/2011-intro-to-the-transformation>.

 

Section 4:1 ‘Along the pathway of the sun’ to ‘The vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended’, by Jeremy Griffith

I want to begin this presentation about membership by restating the fabulous situation you, and all other humans, are now in.

I’ve just got to begin by playing some of Jerry Lee Lewis’ Long Tall Sally from his famous 1964 performance at the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany, which ‘many music journalists…regard…as one of the…greatest rock and roll concert[s]…ever’ (Wikipedia 2011).

[Music plays]

I know that such excitement and happiness may seem insensitive to all the suffering in the world, but this joy and enthusiasm is not out of place because ‘the cavalry is coming’—well, that is the phrase used in ‘Cowboys and Indians’ folklore; in more contemporary ‘Star Wars’ terms, ‘the Force’ is with us—everything is possible now, help is on its way to every person in every corner of the world. Love has come to the world in its absolute purest form, namely as relieving understanding. We humans are free now of the agony of the human condition. Everyone in every situation and predicament can now rise up as radiant new beings from their corpse-like state. A great rising up of humans will now occur across the world. Everyone is now able to come back to life—to wake up from a human-condition-afflicted torpor and look outwards and see each other and the world for the first time, and move across and help each other, and do anything and everything that needs doing to end the suffering and pain that plagues this planet.

The great awakening of the human race is on! We humans have, in truth, all been asleep, owned by so much pain and suffering. Certainly we are going to be in shock for a little while absorbing the realisation that we have finally won our freedom from the agony of the human condition—but it’s on, the great awakening, the rising up of the human race from its deep slumber.

From the festering, stalled state it has been in for far too long, waiting for these liberating understandings of the human condition, the human race is finally on its way. What did Doug Lobban say in his Affirmation in Section 3:4? ‘I’ve got this image of marching straight forward with incredible purpose, straight out of a massive swamp into long green grass with flowers and butterflies and sunshine, and never ever looking back, just keep marching forward. Everyone together, we are going to have so much fun.’ (You can watch or read Doug’s testimonial in Transformation Affirmation 10.) Yes, the door is wide open and sunlight is now streaming into our world. We can all wake up now; we can all break out of our chrysalis, our human-condition-afflicted straitjacket, where we have been constrained, letting the wings of our great potential unfold in the sunshine of relieving understanding to reveal the fabulously beautiful creatures we really are.

As explained in Part 3:4 of Freedom Expanded: Book 1, our species’ original, natural instinctive state is to be cooperative, selfless and loving. We have a cooperative, loving, instinctive, moral soul, which means that serving others is our original, innate, natural inclination, but this instinctive aspect of ourselves has had to be ruthlessly oppressed by our conscious intellect because of its naive, unjust criticism of our conscious mind’s search for knowledge—but thankfully our intellect has been championed, soul and intellect are at last reconciled and so that horrible and tragic situation is now over, which means our original, natural, soulful, true self can re-emerge. Behaving selflessly is our natural inclination. It’s a capacity that has been sitting inside us waiting for the time when it could be liberated, which has at last arrived.

This amazing situation will, at first, seem a little odd because it has taken such a long time, two million years in fact, to get to this point where we could genuinely abandon the upsetting battle that the human race has been involved in and let our unconditionally selfless, all-loving soulful, true selves free. So it does take a little bit of effort to let go of our habituated but now obsoleted egocentric, must-prove-ourselves, power-fame-fortune-and-glory-seeking way of living and bring the incredibly loving side of ourselves to the fore. However, it’s really not that difficult a step to take. Once a few people discover this amazingly free, alive, all-meaningful, sensitive-to-and-aware-of-everything-for-the-first-time-in-our-lives TRANSFORMED LIFEFORCE WAY OF LIVING—a discovery that has already occurred in the WTM as all the Affirmations by members in Section 3 evidence—it will catch on and spread like wildfire. As the Jesuit priest and scientist Teilhard de Chardin recognised: ‘The Truth has to only appear once…for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting everything ablaze’ (Let Me Explain, 1966; tr. René Hague & others, 1970, p.159 of 189).

It’s on, humanity is coming home—our real self is going to come thundering through to the forefront now and the world will open up for everyone, and everyone will help everyone else. We CAN leave our old ego-embattled lives behind now and metamorphose into free, empowered lifeforce beings.

This is not some dream I’m having; I haven’t lost my mental marbles or something. It’s 100% dinky-di, true-blue, fair-dinkum, solid-gold, ice-diamond-real what I’m saying. WE ARE FREE NOW.

Listen to Jerry Lee again! [Short burst of music plays.]

I’ll tell you something: when I had my furniture business I lived near a country town where there was a large Seventh-Day Adventist Christian community. Living for their faith rather than for themselves, and selflessly supporting and helping each other, and working together, it was amazing how functional and successful they were. I think they ran most of the successful businesses in town and owned a lot of the real estate—and yet, the overall situation in the valley where the town was located was, like everywhere else in the world, essentially sad and lonely, with ‘the good old boys’ of the town huddled together in pubs drowning their angst with alcohol and betting on horseraces to try to get a win for their embattled egos, with their unhappy, obese women folk at home screaming at the kids, and in the streets just dust and sparrows. Well, imagine you’re in that valley walking around those depressed streets, where, sure, there is a group of Seventh-Day Adventists defying the great oppressive shadow of life under the duress of the human condition by getting together and being selfless and thus to some degree functional, but basically life for humans is still all drab and depressed—and then you look up towards the skyline and you see something absolutely amazing coming towards you. From one end of the horizon to the other an army in its millions appears of TRANSFORMED, human-condition-liberated, empowered people living for each other and for the world—because their old egocentric existence has finally been understood and thus obsoleted, put away forever, gone, done-its-job, finished with.

The point is, in all the false starts to a human-condition-free world (and they were ‘false starts’ because the upsetting battle to find liberating understanding of the human condition still had to continue), such as in the communal functionality of the Seventh-Day Adventist community, or in the example I mentioned in Section 1:12 of the functionality of Ned Flanders’ Christian life compared to Homer Simpson’s embattled one, we can see the rudiments, the prototype, of the huge potential of the selfless, ego-eliminated TRANSFORMED LIFEFORCE WAY OF LIVING. There have been many examples of the cooperative, amazingly functional way of living in all the false starts to a new world for humans that have been occurring regularly throughout history (humanity has certainly been chaffing at the bit to get to the new world!), but it is only now that the upsetting battle to find liberating understanding of the human condition has been won that the human race as a whole leaves the old individualistic, egocentric, power-fame-fortune-and-glory-seeking way of living. It is only now that we are going to see the true power of all-out and all-pervading selfless communalism come into being.

Again, this vision I’ve described of the liberation of the whole human race from the horror of the self-obsessed, must-prove-our-worth, egocentric way of living is not some mad dream I’m having—it is a vision, a hope and faith that the whole of the human race has firmly held onto since our journey to overcome ignorance about our true worth as humans first began some two million years ago! As I have mentioned before, in the Bible the prophet Joel perfectly articulated the vision of our species’ liberation from the human condition when he said, ‘Like dawn spreading across the mountains a large and mighty army comes, such as never was of old nor ever will be in ages to come…Before them the land is like the garden of Eden, behind them, a desert waste—nothing escapes them. They have the appearance of horses; they gallop along like cavalry. With a noise like that of chariots…like a mighty army…They all march in line, not swerving from their course. They do not jostle each other’ (Joel 2).

The exact same vision of our species’ liberation from the human condition and the emergence of an amazingly cooperative, loving, selfless, functional, empowered, nothing-is-too-difficult new world was also given by the prophet Isaiah when he said: ‘He lifts up a banner [that is, the human race finds understanding] for the distant nations, he whistles for those at the ends of the earth. Here they come, swiftly and speedily! Not one of them grows tired or stumbles, not one slumbers or sleeps; not a belt is loosened at the waist, not a sandal thong is broken. Their arrows are sharp, all their bows are strung; their horses’ hoofs seem like flint, their chariot wheels like a whirlwind. Their roar is like that of the lion, they roar like young lions; they growl as they seize their prey and carry it off with no-one to rescue. In that day they will roar over it like the roaring of the sea [there will be immense excitement, enthusiasm and commitment]’ (Isa. 5:26–30).

(Please note, for the sake of brevity, only some of the following songs by contemporary musicians have been included in this video. Also, more on the Australian character is included in this transcript than appears in the video.)

And the same vision appears in the Irish band U2’s songs: in God Part II (1988) Bono sang of wanting to ‘kick the darkness [of denial/​alienation] till it bleeds daylight [the truth]’; and in I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (1987), where he sang, ‘I believe in the Kingdom Come when all the colours will bleed into one’; and in Where The Streets Have No Name (1987), which says, ‘I want to tear down the walls [of our prison of having to live in denial/​alienation] that hold me inside, I want to reach out and touch the flame [I want the truth even though it’s going to be searing], where the streets have no name [where humans no longer have to egocentrically own and name everything]. I want to feel sunlight [of liberating enlightenment] on my face, see that dust cloud [of all the destructive effects of our upset] disappear without a trace, I want to take shelter from the poison rain, where the streets have no name…We’re beaten and blown by the wind, trampled in dust. [But] I’ll show you a place, high on a [uncorrupted] desert plain, where the streets have no name…Then there will be no toil or sorrow, then there will be no time of pain’; and in Love Rescue Me (1988), which can be read as ‘Truth Rescue Me’ because the ultimate love for humans is really the truth, Bono sang, ‘Love [truth] rescue me, come forth and speak to me, raise me up and don’t let me fall [give me the relieving, reconciling explanation of the human condition]. No man is my enemy [I don’t want to be living with so much hate inside me anymore], my own hands imprison me [but I’m imprisoned by the unbearable dilemma of my own flawed, imperfect human condition], love [truth] rescue me… the sun in the sky, makes a shadow of you and I [exposes the imperfection of our lives]…In the cold mirror of a glass, I see my reflection pass, I see the dark shades of what I used to be [see the depressing contrast of what I am now with my lost state of innocence]…Yeah I’m here without a name, in the palace of my shame, I said love rescue me. [At this point in the song there is a very long pause, then suddenly the song picks up again but this time describing a whole new situation and world.] I’ve conquered my past, the future is here at last. I stand at the entrance to a new world I can see. The ruins to the right of me, will soon have lost sight of me, love rescue me [I have finally found the redeeming, reconciling and thus TRANSFORMING understanding of myself]’; and in When Love Comes To Town (1987), which includes the lines, ‘I was a sailor, I was lost at sea, I was under the waves…But I did what I did before love [truth/​understanding] came to town…I’ve seen love [truth] conquer the great divide [between ‘good and evil’]…When love comes to town I’m gonna jump that train’—because, as the singer-songwriter Cat Stevens foresaw (in his 1971 song Peace Train), ‘out on the edge of darkness there rides a peace train’ that has at last arrived to ‘take’ us ‘home again’.

Along with U2’s Bono, and also The Beatles’ John Lennon and The Doors’ Jim Morrison, the other awesomely prophetic songwriter of our times is, of course, Bob Dylan, whose lyrics also contain exactly the same vision of our species’ liberation from the human condition. Firstly, like Bono describing our present lost, seemingly meaningless, desolate, drowned situation as being ‘beaten and blown’ and ‘trampled in dust’, ‘lost at sea’ ‘under the waves’, Dylan wrote in Like A Rolling Stone (1965), ‘how does it feel to be on your own with no direction home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone’; and in Mr. Tambourine Man (1964), ‘I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to…I’m branded on my feet, I have no one to meet, and the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming…Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind, down the foggy ruins of time…far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow…Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me.’ And then, in When The Ship Comes In (1963), Dylan anticipated our liberation from the human condition, singing, ‘Oh the time will come up when the winds let up and the breeze will cease to be breathing, like the stillness in the wind before the hurricane begins, the hour that the ship comes in [when the all-liberating but, at the same time, all-exposing understanding of the human condition arrives]. And the sea will split and the ships will hit, and the sands on the shoreline will be shaking, and the tide will sound and the waves will pound, and the morning will be a-breaking [again, when the liberating but also all-exposing and confronting truth about humans finally arrives]. The fishes will laugh as they swim out of the path, and the seagulls they’ll be a-smiling, and the rocks on the sand will proudly stand, the hour that the ship comes in [nature is going to be so relieved by the ending of human upset]. And the words that are used for to get the ship confused [all our false denials], will not be understood as they’re spoken [the denials will be seen through]. For the chains [holding the truth back] of the sea will have busted in the night and be buried on the bottom of the ocean [the denial will try to reimpose itself but the truth will fight back and the lies won’t be allowed to succeed]…Oh the foes will rise with the sleep still in their eyes, and they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreaming. But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal and they’ll know that it’s for real, the hour that the ship comes in. And they’ll raise their hands saying “we’ll meet all your demands”, but we’ll shout from the bow “your days are numbered”, and like the Pharaoh’s tribe they’ll be drowned in the tide [of enthusiasm and excitement], and like Goliath [all our denials] they’ll be conquered.’ And also in The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1963), when Dylan anticipated how ‘the [human-condition-afflicted] present now will later be past’; and in All Along the Watchtower (1968), when he demanded that ‘There must be some way out of here…There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief…There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke…So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late. All along the watchtower, princes kept the view [waiting and watching for the time when understanding of the human condition would finally arrive]…Two riders were approaching [the approaching duality of the wonderfully all-liberating but at the same time all-exposing truth about our human condition], the wind began to howl [the arrival of the storm of liberating but at the same time all-exposing truth—as Christ said in the Bible, you will know when the truth about the human condition arrives because it will be ‘like the lightning, which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other’ (Luke 17:24 & Matt. 24:27)]’; and, finally, in Blowin’ In The Wind (1962) Dylan pleaded, ‘how many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?’

(Note, many more songs that anticipate humanity’s liberation from the human condition are included in Part 3:12 of Freedom Expanded: Book 1.)

In Australian mythology this vision of the liberation of humanity from the human condition is incredibly strong—and it’s not just the vision of that liberation, it is also a vision of that liberation being initiated here in Australia!

As I have mentioned before, the Australian rock band Hunters and Collectors’ 1993 song Holy Grail perfectly described the vision of humanity’s liberation: ‘Woke up this morning from the strangest dream, I was in the biggest army the world had ever seen, we were marching as one on the road to the Holy Grail [to liberating understanding]. Started out seeking fortune and glory, it’s a short song but it’s a hell of a story, when you spend your lifetime trying to get your hands, on the Holy Grail. Well have you heard about the Great Crusade? We ran into millions but nobody got paid [selfless cooperation replaced selfish greed], yeah we razed four corners of the globe for the Holy Grail. All the locals scattered, they were hiding in the snow. We were so far from home, so how were we to know there’d be nothing left to plunder when we stumbled on the Holy Grail? We were so full of beans but we were dying like flies [humans were pretending to be happy but in truth they were all but dead with alienation], and those big black birds, they were circling in the sky, and you know what they say, yeah nobody deserves to die [humanity was entering the end play state of terminal alienation]. Oh but I’ve been searching for an easy way, to escape the cold light of day [I have tried to live in denial]. I’ve been high and I’ve been low [I have lived a manic depressive, bipolar existence of oscillating between being able to block out the reality of my immensely corrupted condition enough to feel some relief, and being unable to block it out], but I’ve got nowhere else to go [trying to live through denial had run its course]. There’s nowhere else to go! I followed orders [I have tried to live through deferment to laws, rules and faith], God knows where I’ve been, but I woke up alone, all my wounds were clean [I woke up in the human-condition-reconciled, liberated, TRANSFORMED state].’

Banjo Paterson is one of Australia’s most celebrated poets and in his 1889 poem Clancy of The Overflow he, like Bono and Dylan, described the world as it currently really is when he wrote, ‘I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall, and the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all…I can hear the fiendish rattle of the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street, and the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting, comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet. And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me, as they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste, with their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy.’ Then, from this ‘foul’, ‘foetid’, ‘dingy little office’ world, Paterson envisioned the liberation of humanity from the human condition, writing, ‘In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me…[from] the bush [the source of innocence, which] hath friends to meet…and their kindly voices greet…[and where you hear] the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars, and [from there are able to]…see…the vision splendid of the sunlit [truth-filled] plains extended and at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars [everlasting truth].’ Incidentally, the wonderful phrase ‘vision splendid’ was also used by William Wordsworth in his incredibly honest 1807 poem Intimations of Immortality.

Paterson was even more explicit in his anticipation of the liberating understanding of the human condition emerging from the Australian bush (innocent countryside) in another of his works from 1889, his aptly titled poem Song of the Future. Using the analogy of the pioneers who finally forged the path through our eastern coastal mountain range (appropriately enough called ‘The Great Dividing Range’) that had barred the way to Australia’s interior during the early days of white settlement, Paterson envisaged ‘the future’ heroic, Australian-led expedition humanity would take from the alienated bondage of the human condition to the fertile, sun/​understanding-drenched freedom of a human-condition-resolved new world. These are the key verses: ‘Tis strange that in a land [Australia] so strong, so strong and bold in mighty youth [innocence], we have [back then in 1889] no poet’s voice of truth to sing for us a wondrous song [explain the human condition]…We have no tales of other days, no bygone history to tell. Our tales are told where campfires blaze at midnight, when the solemn hush of that vast wonderland, the Bush, hath laid on every heart its spell [sheltered innocence]. Although we have no songs of strife, of bloodshed reddening the land, we yet may find achievements grand within the bushman’s quiet life. Lift ye your faces to the sky, ye far blue mountains of the west, who lie so peacefully at rest enshrouded in a haze of blue; ’Tis hard to feel that years went by before the pioneers broke through your rocky heights and walls of stone, and made your secrets all their own [broke through the wall of denial blocking access to the truth about the human condition]. For years the fertile western plains were hid behind your sullen [alienated] walls, your cliffs and crags and waterfalls all weatherworn with tropic rains. Between the mountains and the sea, like Israelites with staff in hand, the people waited restlessly: They looked towards the mountains old and saw the sunsets come and go with gorgeous golden afterglow that made the west a fairyland, and marvelled what that west might be of which such wondrous tales were told…At length the hardy pioneers by rock and crag found out the way, and woke with voices of today, a silence kept for years and years [brought an end to the silence of the resigned world of denial]…The way is won! The way is won! And straightway from the barren coast there came a westward-marching host, that aye and ever onward prest with eager faces to the west along the pathway of the sun [what a lovely phrase: the pathway of the sun—the pathway to understanding]…Could braver histories unfold than this bush story, yet untold—the story of their westward march…Our willing workmen, strong and skilled, within our cities idle stand and cry aloud for leave to toil. The stunted children come and go in squalid lanes and alleys black [the end-play state of terminal alienation that humanity has arrived at prior to breaking through to self-understanding]…And it may be that we who live in this new land apart, beyond the hard old world grown fierce and fond and bound by precedent and bond [bound up in sophisticated, intellectual denial], may read the riddle [of the human condition] right and give new hope to those who dimly see [those who are embedded in blind denial/​alienation], that all things may be yet for good and teach the world at length to be one vast united brotherhood. So may it be, and he who sings in accents hopeful, clear, and strong, the glories which that future brings shall sing, indeed, a wondrous song.’

 

 

While these two poems by Banjo Paterson are extraordinarily prophetic I have not yet included his most prophetic work, which is his 1895 poem The Man From Snowy River. Undoubtedly our most celebrated literary work, the poem lies at the very heart of Australian mythology—in fact, Australia’s $10 note (pictured above) features Paterson’s image and, in microprint, all the words to The Man From Snowy River. Mythologies only develop and endure if they contain a resonating deep truth and The Man From Snowy River certainly does. Ostensibly the poem is about a great and potentially dangerous ride undertaken by mountain horsemen to recapture an escaped thoroughbred that joined the brumbies (wild horses) in the mountain ranges, but what the poem is really recognising is that it is from the Australian bush that the answers about the human condition would finally emerge. In The Man From Snowy River, the character Clancy (the fictional stockman of Paterson’s aforementioned poem Clancy of the Overflow reappears in this poem) persuades the station owner Harrison to let a ‘stripling’ ‘lad’—a boy—on his ‘hardy mountain pony’ join their expedition to retrieve the escaped thoroughbred; Clancy argues, ‘I warrant he’ll be with us when he’s wanted at the end.’ A boy is the embodiment of the innocence that is needed ‘at the end’ of humanity’s heroic journey of accumulating sufficient scientific understandings of the mechanisms and workings of our world to make it possible for innocence to assemble the denial-free explanation of the human condition. In fact, the story of David and Goliath in the Bible that Dylan referred to is actually another anticipation of this time when innocence, represented in that instance by David, would slay Goliath, would overcome the monstrous, all-pervading and all-powerful hold denial has on the world. Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fable The Emperor’s New Clothes contains the same truth that it would take a small boy to break the spell of the denial that has enslaved the human race—in that fable a child breaks the spell of the emperor’s, and everyone else’s, delusion that the emperor is clothed in fabulous garments by pointing out that the emperor is, in fact, naked; he was not the secure, confident person he was pretending to be but in fact an alienated wreck. So, in The Man From Snowy River, when ‘the best and boldest riders’ (the resigned, alienated adults) finally ‘took a pull’ on their reins at the edge of a ‘terrible descent’ of a steep mountainside where the brumbies had gone and where ‘any slip was death’, the ‘stripling’ ‘lad’ ‘let his pony have his head, and swung his stockwhip round and gave a cheer, and raced him down the mountain like a torrent down its bed, while the others stood and watched in very fear’—the innocent was able to confront the truth that so terrified resigned adults. The boy then ‘ran [the brumbies]…till their sides were white with foam. He followed like a bloodhound on their track till they halted, cowed and beaten—then he turned their heads for home’ and ‘brought them back’—he fought all the denial and its alienation that has been enslaving the world to a standstill until it finally gave up the truth, which is what I had to do to find understanding of the human condition. Again, as I emphasised in Section 1:14, while it is a great story and one that had to be told so that we understand how the human condition was solved, being innocent enough to solve the human condition doesn’t make me special, not in the slightest. Who is innocent and who is not innocent just doesn’t matter anymore because we can now understand that all humans are equally good—and we are also all free of the human condition now. That old way of thinking about who is good and who is bad, who is better or worse, superior or inferior, is all cast on the rubbish heap of history now. In fact, as I said before, if you are determined to think in those obsoleted terms then those most upset, most alienated, least innocent are the true heroes/​legends/​stars of the world because they necessarily have been most involved in humanity’s great battle to overthrow ignorance. I am relatively innocent, and I needed to be to solve the human condition, but I’m the very last person in the order of greatness of humans if you are determined to judge in those terms. But really, as I say, that sort of thinking is all over now; it’s redundant. I am just another human doing his best from his particular situation—which happens to be from the innocent end of the spectrum of alienation that naturally exists among humans after our species’ heroic two million year journey through ignorance—but we do have to get the truth up about all that happened and how it happened, so that we can move on from it.

Banjo Paterson also wrote the words of Australia’s national anthem—well, it should be Australia’s national anthem, at least it is widely-regarded as our unofficial national anthem—namely Waltzing Matilda. This ballad is really about the core characteristic of the Australian character: non-conformity with the sophisticated, intellectual, bullshit, false world of denial. Convicts formed the basis of European settlement in Australia (especially in the eastern states) and many of them were essentially non-conformists—often fey Irish (like our folk hero Ned Kelly) who wouldn’t go along with the artificial, sophisticated, intellectual, resigned world of denial and, as a result, ended up as petty criminals. Waltzing Matilda tells the story of a non-conformist petty criminal ‘swagman’, or hobo, who chose to drown in a ‘billabong’, or waterhole, rather than fall into line with the bullshit, sophisticated, establishment ‘squatter’/​station owner mounted on his bullshit, sophisticated ‘thoroughbred’ and backed up by the bullshit, sophisticated, establishment troopers ‘one, two, three’.

I won’t include the words of Waltzing Matilda because they are well-known, but before describing the next anticipation from Australia of humanity’s liberation I might mention that the Australian journalist Stuart Rintoul recognised the influence of the Irish in the Australian make-up when he wrote, ‘The distinctive Australian identity was not born in the bush, nor at Anzac Cove: these were merely situations for its expression. No; it was born in [the relatively innocent, truthful, instinctual, Celtic] Irishness protesting against the extremes of [the more alienated, dishonest, intellectual, Anglo-Saxon] Englishness’ (Weekend Australian, 7–8 Nov. 1998). This resistance to the sophisticated, intellectual, world of denial that was so strong in the Australian character while I was growing up helped me enormously to hold onto my denial-free way of thinking. In fact, this characteristic has been so precious to me that I have even designed an Australian flag (see next image, on the left) that features Ned Kelly’s famous bullshit/​denial/​intellectualism-deflecting armour that he ingeniously and self-sufficiently forged out of plough shears and in which he fought his last great battle against the establishment at Glenrowan in Victoria in 1880. I know people once visited Australia just to savour its irreverent, no-bullshit, so-called ‘fair-dinkum’ character—it’s the same reason people still want to visit Ireland. The Irish are probably the most loved race in the world and with good reason: they have simply refused to embrace the sophisticated intellectual world of denial. Australia has been an amazing last bastion of soundness in the world, and what a crucial role it has played in being able to, as Banjo Paterson anticipated, ‘read the riddle right and give new hope to those who dimly see…and teach the world at length to be one vast united brotherhood.’

I should explain that the reason I said that this denial-defying characteristic ‘was’ and ‘has been’ so strong in the Australian character is because while, as Richard Reid, senior curator of the National Museum of Australia, reported, ‘up until 1945 [the year I was born], up to one-third of Australians had some ancestral connection to Ireland’, ‘proportionately…more people of Irish descent than any other spot outside of Ireland’ (‘A celebration of Irish-Australian culture’, Australian Geographic mag. 17 Mar. 2010), Australia has now merged into the great melting pot of alienation in the world. The innocence didn’t last long, as it rarely does, but in that brief period ‘achievements grand’ were certainly achieved—as the song Holy Grail said, ‘it’s a short song but it’s a hell of a story’. As such, Australia’s flag now is part of the world flag, which has the words ‘human condition’ writ large across it, from corner to corner. Thank heavens a new world flag can now be hoisted for the whole exhausted human race—a flag that shows human-condition-liberated humans of all degrees of upset, hand-in-hand and jumping for joy in front of an immense rising sun, with the words FREEDOM written across it! Again, it has to be emphasised that while we couldn’t explain and defend the upset state of the human condition, we couldn’t admit who was upset/​alienated/​had lost their innocence without leaving them condemned as bad or unworthy, but, now that we can explain and defend upset, it’s both safe to acknowledge it and also necessary to acknowledge it if we are to understand, make sense of, and by so doing heal human behaviour. As Christ said, only ‘the truth will set you free’ (Bible, John 8:32)—but of course it had to be the full truth that explained the good reason why the human race lost its innocence. When Christ said that ‘the meek…inherit the earth’ (Matt. 5:5) he was recognising that a time would come when we would be able to safely recognise who is meek/​innocent/​sound, and who is not. As the science historian Jacob Bronowski once said, ‘Self-knowledge is our destiny’ (The Ascent of Man, 1973, p.437 of 448), but, again, it had to be the compassionate all-encompassing truth about our variously upset states. Much more is said about the inevitably different degrees of upset amongst humans in Part 7:4 of Freedom Expanded: Book 1.

 

 

With regard to innocence not lasting long, but long enough to deliver the liberating understanding of the human condition, the French Algerian Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for literature, wrote a phenomenally prophetic essay in 1940 titled The Almond Trees precisely about how, despite all the upset, all the corruption of soul in the world, in ‘those shining lands where so much strength is still untouched’ that ‘shining’ innocence would still last ‘just long enough to prepare the fruit’—find the world-saving liberating understanding of the human condition. He wrote that ‘men have never ceased to grow in the knowledge of their destiny. We have not overcome our condition [the human condition], and yet we know it better. We know that we live in contradiction [between good and evil], but that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as men is to find those few first principles [biological understanding] that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must stitch up what has been torn apart [find the reconciling understanding of the human condition]…Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But tasks are called superhuman when men take a long time to complete them, that is all. Let us then know our aims, standing steadfast on the mind…The first thing is not to despair…When I lived in Algiers, I would wait patiently all winter because I knew that in the course of one night, one cold, pure February night, the almond trees of the Vallée des Consuls would be covered with white flowers. I was then filled with delight as I saw this fragile snow stand up to all the rain and resist the wind from the sea. Yet every year it lasted, just long enough to prepare the fruit. This is not a symbol. We shall not win our happiness with symbols. We shall need something more weighty. All I mean is that sometimes, when life weighs too heavily [with depression] in this Europe still overflowing with its misery [alienation], I turn towards those shining [innocent] lands where so much strength is still untouched. I know them too well not to realize that they are the chosen lands where courage [to defy all the dishonest denial in the world] and contemplation [denial-free, honest thought] can live in harmony…Before the vastness of the undertaking, let no one in any case forget strength of character. I do not mean the one accompanied on electoral platforms by frowns and threats. But the one that, through the virtue of its whiteness [innocence] and its sap [soul strength], stands up to all the winds from the sea [stands up to all the denial]. It is that which, in the winter for the world, will prepare the fruit [find the liberating understanding of the human condition]’ (Summer, 1954, pp.33-35 of 87).

To return now to the Australians who anticipated the emergence of understanding of the human condition in Australia.

Henry Lawson, who was introduced in Section 1:4 when his poem about Resignation, The Voice from Over Yonder, was included, is another of Australia’s greatest poets, and he too wrote about the role of the ‘strength of character’ of the ‘fragile’, ‘still untouched’, ‘pure’, innocent, ‘shining’ ‘chosen land’ of Australia to ‘stand up to’ all the denial in the world and ‘find those few first principles that…stitch up what has been torn apart’, which weren’t able to be found in the upset, corrupted, soul-exhausted ‘winter for the world’ of ‘Europe [which is] still overflowing with its misery’ of alienation. Making the same insights, employing the same comparisons and using the same imagery as the other songs and poems that have been mentioned, Lawson wrote in one of his poems of 1892, the appropriately titled When the Bush Begins to Speak, that ‘They know us not in England yet, their pens are overbold. We’re seen in fancy pictures that are fifty years too old. They think we are a careless race—a childish race, and weak. They’ll know us yet in England, when the bush begins to speak [when innocence makes its contribution]…“The leaders that will be”, the men of southern destiny, are not all found in cities that are builded by the sea. They learn to love Australia by many a western creek. They’ll know them yet in England, when the bush begins to speak…All ready for the struggle, and waiting for the change, the army of our future lies encamped beyond the [coastal] range. Australia, for her patriots, will not have far to seek, they’ll know her yet in England when the bush begins to speak…We’ll find the peace and comfort that our fathers could not find, or some shall strike the good old blow that leaves a mark behind. We’ll find the Truth and Liberty [the truth about the human condition that brings liberating understanding to humanity] our fathers came to seek, or let them know in England when the bush begins to speak.’

In another extraordinarily prescient work (which again has the same insights, comparisons and imagery), the Australian poet A.D. Hope also wrote of the role of the relatively innocent continent of Australia in delivering liberating understanding of the human condition. In his 1931 poem, actually titled Australia, Hope wrote of ‘A nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey…Without songs, architecture, history…And her five cities, like five teeming sores, each drains her, a vast parasite robber-state, where second-hand Europeans pullulate timidly on the edge of alien shores. Yet there are some like me turn gladly home from the lush jungle of [alienated, dishonest, intellectual] modern thought, to find the Arabian desert of the human mind, hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets [innocent, unresigned, denial-free, truthful, profound, effective thinkers] come. Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare, springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes the learned doubt, the [dishonest, intellectual as opposed to the honest, instinctual] chatter of cultured apes which is called civilization over there [in England].’

In his exceptionally prophetic 1995 book, Edge of the Sacred, the Australian academic David Tacey similarly anticipated Australia’s pivotal role in lifting the siege humanity has been under of the dilemma of the human condition. In the book’s final chapter, titled ‘The Transformation of Spirit’, Tacey wrote: ‘Australia is uniquely placed not only to demonstrate this world-wide experience but also to act as a guiding example to the rest of the world. Although traditionally at the edge of the world, Australia may well become the centre of attention as our transformational changes are realised in the future. Because the descent of spirit has been accelerated here by so many regional factors, and because nature here is so deep, archaic, and primordial, what will arise from this archetypal fusion may well be awesome and spectacular. In this regard, I have recently been encouraged by Max Charlesworth’s essay “Terra Australis and The Holy Spirit”. In a surprisingly direct—and unguarded?—moment, Charlesworth says: “I have a feeling in my bones that there is a possibility of a creative religious explosion occurring early in the next millennium with the ancient land of Australia at the centre of it, and that the Holy Spirit [denial-free thinking—‘holy’ actually has the same origins as the Saxon word ‘whole’, which means ‘well, entire, intact’, so ‘holy’ is actually a recognition of soundness, of lack of alienation, of lack of separation from the truth, of lack of denial] may come home at last to Terra Australis”. I am pleased that this has already been said, because if Charlesworth had not said it, I would have been forced to find within myself exactly the same prophetic utterance’ (p.204 of 224). (I should clarify that while the arrival of understanding of the human condition brings about an incredible spiritual awakening in humans—as if rising from the dead—it does not bring a ‘religious explosion’. As was explained in Section 1:10, in a religion you do give up living out your upsets and instead defer to and live through your support of the sound life and words of the prophet around whom the religion is founded, which is similar to the TRANSFORMED WAY OF LIVING, which involves letting go of living out your upset state, however, in the new TRANSFORMED WAY OF LIVING you are giving your support not to the embodiment of the ideal state in the form of a religion’s prophet, but to the understanding of the ideal state and the good reason for our species’ historic departure from it. This is all about the end of faith and dogma and the beginning of knowing. And as we will discover, living through a framework based on actual scientific understanding of our human condition—the complete explanation and defence of each of us no matter who we are or what we have done—is like nothing we or the world has ever experienced. The relief and happiness that will flow through our veins and through the world now is almost incomprehensible.

This ‘prophetic’ anticipation by Tacey and Charlesworth of the ‘transformational’ liberation of humanity from the human condition being initiated in Australia reinforces U2’s lead singer Bono’s intuition (which was mentioned in Section 1:14) that ‘in Australia…a new society [is] being dreamt up…to lead the world’.

The vision, the hope, the faith, the belief in humanity’s eventual liberation from the human condition has existed within us all since time immemorial—and all the false starts to that fabulous future that have been occurring throughout history serve to reveal just how much humanity has hungered for its arrival. They also serve to show how gloriously functional an ego-less existence for humans is going to be. The apostle St Paul gave possibly the best sales pitch ever for Christianity when he compared Christianity (where deferment to the embodiment of the ideals in Christ made you feel you were good or ‘righteous’) with the previous best way of coping with the upset state of the human condition, which was Moses’ Ten Commandments (where you restrained your upsets out of fear of punishment). St Paul said, ‘Now if the ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters on stone, came with glory [glorious because those laws restrained excessive upset and by so doing brought society back from the brink of destruction]…fading though it was [there was no sustaining positive in having discipline imposed on you], will not the ministry of the Spirit be even more glorious? If the ministry that condemns men is glorious, how much more glorious is the ministry that brings righteousness! For what was glorious has no glory now in comparison with the surpassing glory’ (2 Cor. 3:7–11). Well, if religion was an infinitely more ‘glorious’ way of living to living out of fear of punishment, the new ‘surpassing glory’ to religion of the TRANSFORMED LIFEFORCE WAY OF LIVING, which the ending of the battle to find understanding of the human condition brings, is so wonderful, so ‘glorious’ that it is completely beyond comparison with any way of living conscious humans have ever experienced. The ‘glory’ that comes to the human race now is unimaginably exciting—well, what did Beethoven’s symphony say? ‘Joy’, ‘Joyful, as a hero to victory!’, ‘Join in our jubilation!’, ‘We enter, drunk with fire, into your sanctuary…Your magic reunites…All men become brothers…All good, all bad…Be embraced, millions! This kiss for the whole world!’

So the message is clear: become a member of the WORLD TRANSFORMATION MOVEMENT and ‘Join in our jubilation!’—don’t miss out on the most exciting event in the history of the world!