Video & Transcript of Gerald Zarfl,
WTM Graz Centre

 

(To learn more about Gerald Zarfl, see www.wtmgraz.com)

 

 

Hi, my name is Gerald Zarfl and I’m very pleased to be opening a World Transformation Movement Centre here in Graz in Austria.

I was born in Austria, in a little area called Obdach in the province of Styria. I grew up there, went to school there, then I studied in Graz, moved back home again and then when I met my girlfriend I moved to Graz again and I’m now living and working in Graz, since 2015. I’m currently working as a database developer in an IT company that provides business intelligence solutions for the healthcare sector.

I was always fascinated with human behaviour but I couldn’t understand it. Why we are the way we are; why we’re so destructive, when we’re such a highly intelligent species. We should have known better, right? So, I couldn’t understand it. I tended to be very judgmental about other people because I could not understand them, and also about myself because essentially I couldn’t understand myself. I read some books on philosophy and self-awareness and stuff like that, but no real answers came out of that.

Once you really immerse yourself in this information, you start to see more and more clearly how this really explains everything about us humans; how this conflict between our intellect and our instincts caused all this mess. And what I find such a good picture of Jeremy’s is the valley drawing, because in one picture you see where we started as a cooperative and loving species, and then we got corrupted and had to go through this wasteland just to come out on the other side, and know why, you know? So that’s pretty big for me because it’s such a good reminder of where it all came from, what we went through, what we had to go through, and where we can go now with understanding and with an explanation of ourselves.

How humans don’t have any other choice and tend to put up with how things are and resign to a very superficial life, which is horrible in one sense, when you think about it, but also amazing when you think about how we as a human race still carried on and wanted to find the answers until they would be there someday. So, it’s just amazing. [The explanation of the human condition is presented in THE Interview, freely available at www.HumanCondition.com.]

We had to lose ourselves to find ourselves. It had to be that way. Yeah, I like that very much, because it puts everything so much in perspective, right? We had to go through that hell, but for a really good cause, namely to find answers, to explain ourselves. Once you understand yourself and you understand your upset, you start to see what other people are going through and you get a real appreciation and you’re not judging them anymore—you just understand them, you understand yourself. You start to see where all of this is coming from, right? All the upset, all the destructive behaviour, and also our loving nature, our moral sense, our conscience. [Humans’ moral conscience is explained in Freedom Essay 21.] Because I always wondered, why do we have a conscience? [Why do we] have we a moral sense? And you start to see that and also understand why we had to be corrupted—that we had to go through this; where this [upset] all comes from—and when you understand that, and when you finally can explain that, that’s what we needed, right? We needed those answers to those questions, and we never dared to ask them anymore because we were so deadly afraid of them. And once you know that, really a whole new world opens up. On a personal level, I really feel now that I don’t have to worry much about life anymore, because all I have to do is provide for my family, I have to take care of my family and friends, and I have to live in support of this information. That’s pretty much it, right? I don’t have to worry about anything else anymore, because our self worth is established with this explanation. We don’t have to prove ourselves anymore. So with this understanding, that’s real freedom.

I guess Integrative Meaning is pretty much, a pretty big thing, because I wouldn’t have thought it possible to understand what ‘God’ really is, you know? And that everything is connected and everything follows a direction in life. And yet, with this [explanation] you don’t have to believe in ‘God’ anymore, you just know there is something you might call ‘God’ or whatever you want to call it, right? So that definitely hit home for me because I suddenly could understand my own religion, what people were saying in church, and I couldn’t understand it before, really, and now I can. And it’s almost funny too, sometimes I go to church and you sit there and you listen really attentively. So basically that changed even my own view of my religion, if you like. [Integrative Meaning is explained in F. Essay 23: Integrative Meaning or ‘God’.]

What’s talked about in the Bible and what the priests all say in church, it’s really good stuff, you just can’t make anything out of it, and you just have to believe that we are good. Also the part with the guilt involved: you really start to understand what religions in general are all about, why we had to invent them, and really what we’ve called ‘God’ in the end because it all fits together. We are all part of it and Integrative Meaning is everything we are seeing; and we humans are the part of it that got conscious about it, right? So to finally explain ourselves and to explain the world we are in, it’s so amazing that that was our task, really, to think about that. It was our task to find the answers so that we could explain everything. I’m not really a very spiritual person, but that makes me just excited to think about it, it’s all part of a big plan; it’s all connected. We are all connected. We got disconnected from each other and from nature and everything else but with this explanation we can reconnect to everything.

Having children, and the day of his [my son’s] birth was quite emotional, but even more so because now with understanding of ourselves, I really feel that I can really give him answers to his questions, not leaving him wondering and blaming himself, right, because that’s what children have to do because they don’t get any answers. And that’s a pretty good vision, you know, in general when you think about it. At some point, there will more and more parents that can give those answers to their children, and in some distant future, I don’t know how long it might take, but I’m very confident that at some point children won’t have to resign anymore. And that’s a pretty good picture to work for, right? [The psychological event of adolescents ‘resigning’ to the imperfection of the human-condition-stricken is explained in F. Essay 30: Resignation.]

So that’s pretty much why I want to open this World Transformation Movement Centre in Graz, because I really want everybody to know about this information—because it really affects everybody, it doesn’t matter where you come from, it doesn’t matter how old you are, whatever: if you’re a human being, this is for you and this affects you.