Part 2.8  Resignation

Since we are not born practising denial of our 2-million-year, soul-corrupted, innocence-destroyed condition, the question arises when did humans individually take up this practice of denial? The answer is that for generation after generation, almost everyone during their early adolescence had no choice but to resign themselves to living in determined denial of that unbearably depressing subject of humanity’s soul-corrupted human condition, and of their own soul-corrupted condition as a result of their encounters with the soul-corrupted condition in others while they were growing up. This extremely torturous process of ‘Resignation’ to living in denial of the human condition that virtually all adolescents have, up until now, had to agonisingly go through is explained in chapter 2:2 of FREEDOM, and slightly more fully in Freedom Essay 30—and this historically denied process of Resignation is so important to understand that I strongly urge readers of this book to read that essay if they haven’t already done so. And yes, the process of Resignation is another very important truth that we couldn’t admit while we couldn’t explain our corrupted human condition.

As I will explain more fully in paragraphs 194-195, the reason I have said ‘almost’ and ‘virtually’ everyone had no choice but to resign to living in denial of the human condition is because there have always been rare individuals who were fortunate enough to have sufficiently escaped encountering the soul-corrupted state of the world during their upbringing to not be terrified by the issue of the human condition and so not have to resign to living in denial of the human condition—see for example the description of the unresigned prophet Noah in the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark and The Flood further on in paragraph 176.

The next four paragraphs (which are mostly taken from that Freedom Essay 30 about Resignation) give an insight into how horrifically agonising the process of Resignation to living in denial of the human condition has been for young adolescents—especially in a world of resigned adults who haven’t acknowledged what they are going through.

The English rock band the Beatles’ 1970 song Let It Be—consistently voted one of the most popular songs of the twentieth century—is actually an anthem to this adjustment that adolescents have historically had to make when confronted with the unbearable ‘hour of darkness’ that came from grappling with the issue of all ‘the broken hearted people living in the world’, to ‘let it be’ ‘until tomorrow’ when ‘there will be an answer’ (Lennon/​McCartney) to all the wrongness in the world, which is the issue of the human condition. So, again, when the great English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote about the unbearably depressing subject of the human condition in his aptly titled 1885 poem No Worst, There Is None, his words ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall, frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’ did not exaggerate the depth of depression humans faced if they allowed their minds to think about the human condition while it was still to be ‘fathomed’/​understood/​‘answer[ed]’. Yes, the situation for almost all young adolescents has been that when, in ‘my hour of darkness’, ‘Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be, let it be’—accept the adults’ ‘wisdom’ and don’t allow your mind to go there!

 

Catherine Yeulet/iStockphoto; yamasan/AdobeStock; Al Troin/AdobeStock

 

Of course adolescents haven’t wanted to resign to living in denial of the human condition because it meant blocking out all memory of the innocent, soulful, true world and adopting a completely dishonest, superficial and artificial, effectively dead existence. Although rarely shared, adolescents in the midst of Resignation quite often write excruciatingly honest poetry about their impending fate, such as this heartbreaking Resignation poem by 13-year-old Fiona: ‘You will never have a home again…​Smiles will never bloom from your heart again, but be fake and you will speak fake words to fake people from your fake soul…​From now on pressure, stress, pain and the past can never be forgotten / You have no heart or soul and there are no good memories / Your mind and thoughts rule your body that will hold all things inside it; bottled up, now impossible to be released / You are fake, you will be fake, you will be a supreme actor of happiness but never be happy…​You will become like the rest of the world—a divine actor, trying to hide and suppress your fate, pretending it doesn’t exist…​you spend the rest of life trying to find the meaning of life and confused in its maze’. Clearly, the price of Resignation is enormous, but the alternative for virtually all humans of not resigning has been an even worse fate because it meant living with constant suicidal depression.

 

 

It’s little wonder then that the human condition has, as I mentioned earlier in paragraph 14, been described so vehemently as ‘the personal unspeakable’ and as ‘the black box inside of humans they can’t go near’—and why it is so very rare to find a completely honest description by adults of adolescents going through the excruciating process of Resignation where they have to block out from their mind the seemingly inexplicable question of their and the human race’s soul-corrupted condition. Having already been through this terrible process of Resignation, most adults simply couldn’t allow themselves to recall, recognise and thus empathise with what adolescents were experiencing. And so our young have been alone with their pain, unable to share it with those closest, or with the world at large. All of which makes the following account of a teenager in the midst of Resignation, by the American Pulitzer Prize-winning child psychiatrist Robert Coles, incredibly special: ‘I tell of the loneliness many young people feel…​It’s a loneliness that has to do with a self-imposed judgment of sorts…​I remember…​a young man of fifteen who engaged in light banter, only to shut down, shake his head, refuse to talk at all when his own life and troubles became the subject at hand. He had stopped going to school…​he sat in his room for hours listening to rock music, the door closed…​I asked him about his head-shaking behavior: I wondered whom he was thereby addressing. He replied: “No one.” I hesitated, gulped a bit as I took a chance: “Not yourself?” He looked right at me now in a sustained stare, for the first time. “Why do you say that?” [he asked]…​I decided not to answer the question in the manner that I was trained [basically, ‘trained’ in avoiding what the human condition really is]…​Instead, with some unease…​I heard myself saying this: “I’ve been there; I remember being there—remember when I felt I couldn’t say a word to anyone”…​The young man kept staring at me, didn’t speak…​When he took out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes, I realized they had begun to fill’ (The Moral Intelligence of Children, 1996, pp.143-144 of 218). The boy was in tears because Coles had reached him with some recognition and appreciation of what he was wrestling with; Coles had shown some honesty about what the boy could see and was struggling with, namely the horror of the utter hypocrisy of human behaviour, including his own—the hypocrisy being that we should be ideally behaved but we aren’t.

 

Stanislaw Mikulski/AdobeStock; mitarart/AdobeStock

 

The middle picture above is particularly revealing of this utter hypocrisy of human behaviour. It is clearly a picture created by an adolescent girl in the midst of Resignation. Having not yet blocked out from her mind the extreme contrast between our species’ original cooperative, selfless and loving moral instinctive self or soul (which she, like every other human, is born instinctively aware of and instinctively expecting to encounter) and our present horrifically soul-corrupted, angry, egocentric and alienated condition (symbolised by the green-eyed, snarling wolf drawing she has made of herself), she is still wrestling with the horror of the utter hypocrisy of our horrifically corrupted or ‘fallen’, soul-devastated condition. Saying ‘It’s not a phase Mom! This is who I really am!’ is in response to her mother having likely dismissively said, “Look, you’ll get over it, it’s just the ‘puberty blues’ stage all adolescents go through”, which is how the resigned, human-condition-avoiding adult world, including Reductionist, Mechanistic scientists, have been dishonestly explaining the cripplingly distressed and depressed stage adolescents go through during Resignation—yes, the resigned world has had a dishonest, human-condition-avoiding reason for everything! The truth is that what the adolescent girl is going through has nothing to do with the hormonal changes of puberty, it is to do with trying to face down the truth of the horrifically soul-corrupted state of the human condition in the human race, and in herself as a result of her own encounters with the horrifically corrupted state of the human condition in others while growing up.

R.D. Laing was a very experienced and brilliant psychiatrist, and he perfectly understood what happens when an adolescent goes through Resignation, and its effects, which is apparent in his aforementioned quote (see paragraph 149) where he wrote that ‘The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal [resigned to living in denial of the human condition] man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves [become resigned] and to become absurd, and thus to be normal…​we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them…​To adapt to this world the child abdicates its ecstasy…​the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be. As adults, we have [resigned and] forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavour; as men of the [resigned] world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world [of our soul]’.

 

 

After what has now been explained about the human condition, resigned adults will, with patience to absorb what has been said, now be able to see that they have so blocked out the issue of the human condition that it is the real ‘elephant in our living rooms’ that everyone has long recognised existed but could never allow their minds to actually identify. Even though the issue of the human condition is the one great outstanding and all-important issue that had to be addressed and solved, it is the one great issue all resigned adults, which is virtually all adults, have pretended doesn’t even exist. As R.D. Laing was also quoted as saying earlier in paragraph 149, the ‘desperately urgently required project for our time – [is] to explore the inner space and time of consciousness [explore what our conscious mind really thinks about]…​[yet] We are so out of touch with this realm [living in such fearful denial of the issue of our corrupted human condition] that many people can now argue seriously that it does not exist. It is very small wonder that it is perilous indeed to explore such a lost realm’! The extreme fear that resigned adults have of ‘explor[ing] such a lost realm’, even though it has now finally been explained and rendered safe to look at, is what causes the initial problem people have of the ‘Deaf Effect’ that was described earlier.

 

 

A clear example of a pre-resigned honest mind that can still see the human condition can be found in the lyrics of the American heavy metal band With Life In Mind’s 2010 album Grievances, which were written by one of the band’s members when he was still a young teenager. And look at the cover [above]: the world is mad, there is a person screaming, getting beaten up. ‘With Life In Mind’ actually should be ‘With The Human Condition In Mind’! These are the extraordinarily unresigned, truthful lyrics: ‘It scares me to death to think of what I have become…​I feel so lost in this world’, ‘Our innocence is lost’, ‘I scream to the sky but my words get lost along the way. I can’t express all the hate that’s led me here and all the filth that swallows us whole. I don’t want to be part of all this insanity. Famine and death. Pestilence and war. A world shrouded in darkness…​Fear is driven into our minds everywhere we look’, ‘Trying so hard for a life with such little purpose…​Lost in oblivion’, ‘Everything you’ve been told has been a lie…We’ve all been asleep since the beginning of time. Why are we so scared to use our minds?’, ‘Keep pretending; soon enough things will crumble to the ground…​If they could only see the truth they would coil in disgust’, ‘How do we save ourselves from this misery…​So desperate for the answers…​We’re straining on the last bit of hope we have left. No one hears our cries. And no one sees us screaming’, ‘This is the end.’ So that is how honest an unresigned mind can be, and by inference how dishonest a resigned mind is! Saying ‘Everything you’ve been told has been a lie’ emphasises the extent of the dishonest denial in the world of resigned adults, and saying ‘So desperate for the answers’ confirms how incredibly precious are the redeeming ‘answers’ about our corrupted human condition that have now been found—and are being made available to everyone free of charge on our WTM website.

 

 

The earlier mentioned 1893 iconic painting by Edvard Munch, The Scream, is a truly exceptional example of the honesty some artists have been capable of—because in this painting Munch has dared to depict the ‘scream’ that With Life In Mind said ‘no on hears’ or ‘sees’. No one has ever properly explained it, but we now can: The Scream is a deservedly famous picture for its portrayal of the human condition—its revealing honesty is why many pre-resigned teenagers have it pinned up in their rooms. It is an extremely honest and revealing picture because we can see two ‘normal’ people in the background promenading down the pier—‘normal’ being totally resigned to pretending everything is fine and the world is as it should be. So they’re swanning along the pier saying, we can imagine, ‘That’s a lovely sunset, should we go down and have an ice cream?’, and yet this person in the foreground is screaming, and the whole realm is resonating with the horror of humans’ true situation. Yes, these two people, contrasted with the person screaming, is a powerful representation of how dreadful our human situation really is, which people resigned to living in denial of the human condition can’t see. The bravery of Munch daring to confront the human condition and reveal the terminal state of alienation in the human race that R.D. Laing described was made clear when Munch said that at one time in his life, ‘My condition was verging on madness—it was touch and go’ (Edvard Munch: Paintings, Sketches, and Studies, ed. Arne Eggum, 1984, p.236 of 305).

The honesty of Munch’s The Scream is truly extraordinary; no wonder in announcing its May 2012 auction of the only one of four versions of the Scream that was still held privately, Sotheby’s auction house described Munch’s work as ‘the defining image of modernity’ and said they were expecting it to attract one of the highest prices ever for a painting (The Australian, 23 Feb. 2012). And indeed it did, selling for almost $US120 million—$US40 million above expectations!

Given how incredibly valuable paintings that only manage to allude to the horror of the human condition are, the WTM’s presentations of the actual explanation of the human condition should make them the most valuable commodities on Earth, yet, as I describe later in Part 2.12, instead of financial reward, appreciation and support we are attacked and, at great financial, practical and emotional expense for our small charity, have to fight vicious persecution—yet our generosity and integrity is such that we make all our presentations available free of charge! We humans have been able to cope with the human condition being alluded to, such as in another example, Bob Dylan being given the Nobel Prize for Literature for alluding to the human condition in his songs (see later in paragraph 284), but it takes adjustment time for us humans to cope with the actual truth about the condition. It does need to be said however that given the serious plight of the world now, that adjustment time does need to end SOON and at least some serious recognition be given by the establishment to our human-race-saving work at the WTM.

So to be an artist and try to ‘cut a window’, as it were, through all the pretence and denial to the truth, like Munch did, and Vincent van Gogh also did in his paintings, was incredibly brave. Van Gogh painted light; he taught us to see light. We couldn’t see light until Van Gogh painted it. That is true! He was just so honest, and he just kept making himself more and more honest in how he saw the world, until eventually he was able to see the true illuminated beauty of the world! So he painted these amazing pictures and when you look at them you can really see light for the first time, the true brightness of it.

 

 

Van Gogh could paint anything, even these sunflowers in a vase, so they would suddenly come alive. But tragically, in the end, being so honest was unbearable for him and he despaired and went mad and suicided. To be an artist of any sort and dig into and reveal the truth about human life was a tortuous existence—but confronting the truth no longer is because we can now understand the whole immensely, absolutely incredibly heroic journey we humans have been on! So the depth of sensitivity and the extent of creativity we are going to be capable of now will be truly astonishing—but our first task is to disseminate this redeeming and healing understanding of the human condition and stop all the suffering in the world.

All these descriptions about the human condition make it very clear just how insecure we humans have been about our corrupted condition and therefore why we have been living such a superficial and artificial existence since Resignation became an almost universal feature of human life around 9,000 BC following the development of agriculture and the sedentary, living-on-top-of-each-other, stressful, alienation-spreading life it created—as the Australian historian Manning Clark said, ‘The bush [wilderness] is our source of innocence; the town is where the devil prowls around’ (The Sydney Morning Herald, 18 Feb. 1985).

Interestingly, in paragraph 750 of FREEDOM and also in Freedom Essay 38, I explain that the Genesis story in the Bible of Noah’s Ark and The Flood is actually a metaphorical recognition of how, after the development of agriculture, the human race became so soul-corrupted, so psychologically mind-upset and soul-repressed, that the need to resign to denying the subject of the by then extremely corrupted and thus unbearably depressing issue of the human condition had become an almost universal necessity. So, the story recognises the time when Resignation ‘flooded’ the world and truth and honesty ‘drowned’ and only a rare few unresigned truthful thinkers we call ‘prophets’ survived—like Noah did in his ark because, as it says in Genesis, he ‘was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God [he was innocent and sound enough to not have to resign to living in denial of Integrative Meaning and any other truth that brings the issue of the human condition into focus, which is most truth]’ (Gen. 6:9).

 

The Dove Sent Forth From The Ark, Gustave Doré, 1866

 

So the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark and The Flood doesn’t literally refer to a time when a great flood of water destroyed lost ancient civilisations with advanced technologies, as Graham Hancock, Brian Foerster, Randall Carlson, Ben van Kirkwyk and others would have us believe, but to a time when the great flood of neurosis and psychosis and resulting Resignation destroyed humans’ ability to think truthfully, effectively and creatively, leaving only a rare few honest thinkers left on Earth—it refers to a time when ‘righteous[ness]’ and ‘God[liness]’ disappeared! It is a metaphorical story, yet people are forever trying to find, and claiming to have found, the actual remains of ‘Noah’s Ark’!

One consequence of the emergence of such extreme mind-madness or neurosis and soul-death or psychosis in the human race has been the development of extremely paranoid bewilderment that there is something terribly wrong that we are unable to recognise, which we can now understand is the almost universal denial of the human race’s now horrifically corrupted human condition. And an expression of that extremely insecure paranoia has been all manner of conspiracy theories, such as Hancock’s and others’ belief that the establishment is denying the existence of lost ancient civilisations with advanced technologies. I am currently writing a book about this great paranoia and the conspiracy theories it has given rise to. In that book I explain that there IS a very great conspiracy being perpetrated by the ‘establishment’—and paranoic conspiracy theorists prey on people’s underlying awareness of it. They make a financial fortune from stories of aliens visiting Earth or lost ancient civilisations with advanced technologies—like the precisely fitted polygonal walls that the engineer Henrique Agostinho posts such interesting YouTube videos about, etc, etc—which the establishment is supposedly supressing. As Christ said, ‘Wherever there is a carcass [the extremely psychologically disorientated], there the vultures will gather [to prey on them]’ (Matt. 24:28). But, as I have explained, the very great conspiracy isn’t about aliens or lost worlds—it’s the human race’s outrageously dishonest, almost total denial of our 2-million-year soul-corrupted human condition! On the whole I think YouTubers such as the historian Dr David Miano and history documentary maker Stefan Milo do an excellent job of countering conspiracy theories about lost ancient civilisations with advanced technologies. However, when YouTuber Ben van Kirkwyk made the accusation that the theory he supports—of lost ancient civilisations possessing advanced technologies—is being resisted by the ‘mainstream’ because it ‘threatens the authority and power of its high priests, our academic establishment’, and Dr Miano responded by insisting, ‘For the last time, there is no such vested interest [in such a denial], it’s a myth’ (Historian reacts to Evidence for Ancient High Technology in Egypt, ‘World of Antiquity’ YouTube channel, 22 Nov. 2021), the truth is that both van Kirkwyk and Miano were, in a sense, wrong. There is a massive ‘vested interest’ by the ‘mainstream’ ‘academic establishment’ in denial—but not of lost ancient civilisations with advanced technologies. Rather, it is denial of our horrifically soul-corrupted human condition. Everyone feels the now absolutely desperate need for truth to replace all the lying that everyone senses is going on in the world, and in that vacuum of bewilderment, lostness and desperate need for the lying to stop, all manner of morbid derangements, conspiracy theories and the like are appearing. The dialogue of one character in the 1991 film Separate but Equal accurately recognised the plight of our species when he said, ‘Struggling between two worlds; one dead, the other powerless to be born’—words that echo those of the philosopher Antonio Gramsci: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears’ (Prison Notebooks, written during Gramsci’s 10-year imprisonment under Mussolini, 1927-1937). Thank goodness a sound and truthful, human-condition-free new world is no longer ‘powerless to be born’, because we have finally found the redeeming understanding of the human condition that enables the human race to be freed and transformed from that dreadful existence.

In earlier times before Resignation and its crippling of our capacity to think and create became universal, people had extraordinary powers of thought, creativity and sensitivity. Look at all that I have been able to explain and create as a result of not having resigned to living in denial of the human condition—my few books of truth have replaced vast libraries of human-condition-avoiding, dishonest, mind-mad and soul-dead books, answers everywhere where there were no answers anywhere.

 

 

Yes, R.D. Laing was right when he wrote (see paragraph 149), ‘Our alienation goes to the roots. The realization of this [truth] is the essential springboard for any serious [truthful, effective, penetrating] reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life…​the ordinary [resigned] person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be. As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavour; as men of the [resigned] world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world…​Our capacity to think…​is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of un-learning is necessary of anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love…​The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal [resigned] man…​Man cut off from his own mind, cut off equally from his own body – a half-crazed creature in a mad world…​between us and It [our true selves or soul] there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete…​To adapt to this world the child abdicates its ecstasy…​There is a prophecy in [the Old Testament book of] Amos that there will be a time when there will be a famine in the land, “not a famine for bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord [words of truthfulness].” That time has now come to pass. It is the present age’, and ‘We are dead, but think we are alive. We are asleep, but think we are awake. We are dreaming, but take our dreams to be reality. We are the halt, lame, blind, deaf, the sick. But we are doubly unconscious. We are so ill that we no longer feel ill, as in many terminal illnesses. We are mad, but have no insight [into the fact of our madness].’

A further example of an unresigned, immensely truthful and creative mind that is free from the ‘fifty feet of solid concrete’ ‘between us and’ our soul, and whose ‘capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell’ is not ‘pitifully limited’, was Imhotep, the incredibly creative, clearly unresigned, mastermind architect of the great pyramids in ancient Egypt. The following are some extracts from the brilliant art historian Lord Kenneth Clark’s wonderfully illuminating 1975 BBC documentary In the Beginning—note that since this documentary was made in 1975 there may be some archaeological interpretations in these extracts that more contemporary archaeologists might contest (such as who were the first stone builders in the world), however the absolutely magnificent capabilities of the creators of the pyramids that were built during the Old Kingdom of Egypt (c.2,700-2,200 BC) comes through in Lord Clark’s commentary: ‘[Pharoah] Djoser built…​the earliest pyramid. This is Saqqara, to my mind, one of the sacred places of the world, the real birthplace of civilisation. The first thing that strikes one about Saqqara is its lightness and clarity. It’s built of an exquisite, creamy, golden limestone. It’s the earliest stone building in the world. The cutting is of such perfection, never equalled in Greece or Rome…​The love of perfection could not go further…​What a refined, sophisticated style. Very far from our idea of what ruins or primitive architecture should be, very far from Stonehenge, which was built considerably later…​One is completely baffled by the extreme sophistication and the incalculable purpose of this exquisite architecture. Combination of measuring mind and responsive hand cannot go further. The date? 2,770 BC…​The man who dominates Saqqara is not King Djoser, but a mysterious haunting character named Imhotep. According to Egyptian legend, he was a sort of Prometheus, the first student of medicine, the first student of geometry, the first architect…​Imhotep may have been, no must have been, the first man to build in stone. No doubt he was a pioneer, and a universal man of almost legendary stature’ (see www.wtmsources.com/307).

 

 

The above is a photo of part of the Saqqara mortuary complex designed by Imhotep that reveals the fabulous unadorned, unembellished, egocentricity-free, madness-absent, sound cleanliness and purity of the ‘lightness and clarity’ of Imhotep’s creativity. Most wonderfully, no longer do we have to be ‘completely baffled by the extreme sophistication and the incalculable purpose of this exquisite architecture’ because we can now understand that it wasn’t ‘lost ancient civilisations with advanced technologies’ but lost innocence that explains the extraordinary ingenuity and creativity of early civilisations like the ancient Egyptians. And most wonderfully, no longer does the human race have to suffer in this current state of lost innocence, which is the horrifically mind-and-soul-crippled state that R.D. Laing, Christ and the band With Life In Mind described so truthfully, because, with redeeming understanding of the human condition, the whole human race can be transformed back to soundness, sanity, sensitivity, ingenuity and creativity—that fabulous transformation of the human race will be described next in Part 2.9.

One especially exciting and relieving change that happens now that we can be honest about our corrupted condition is that the whole of anthropology can be reinterpreted truthfully. As explained in paragraph 95, instead of our ancestors being brutal savages aggressively competing with each other to reproduce their genes like other animals, which supposedly gave us brutal competitive, selfish and aggressive instincts that our conscious mind has to always try to restrain, our ancestry is revealed to be the opposite. Some 2 million years ago we began our heroic but horrifically upsetting journey to find conscious understanding of ourselves—and we did so in an all-loving and all-sensitive state. That original state is beautifully captured in Vanessa Woods’s description of bonobo behaviour (in paragraph 47): ‘Bonobo love is like a laser beam. They stop. They stare at you as though they have been waiting their whole lives for you to walk into their jungle. And then they love you with such helpless abandon that you love them back. You have to love them back.’ It wasn’t until the extremely upset-escalating advent of agriculture around 9,000 BC that upset became so great that virtually everyone resigned to living in fearful denial of the issue of the human condition—the result being the ‘fifty feet of solid concrete’ ‘between us and’ ‘our true selves’ or soul and ‘Our capacity to think [becoming]…​pitifully limited’, to use R.D. Laing’s description. It is now thought that the ruins at Göbekli Tepe—dating to around 9,500 BC and discovered in 1994 on a hilltop in south-east Turkey—was not a residential settlement but a gathering and ceremonial place for people in the region whose way of living was in transition from hunter-gathering to farming. It is thought that around 500 people—seemingly peacefully—came and worked together to build the structures there that feature large 5-metre tall T-shaped pillars (below). They didn’t know of the wheel, and while they had stone vessels, they had yet to develop pottery, and they carved the pillars out of the local limestone using flint tools, and also made a mortar from the limestone for the floors. These T-shaped pillars that surround each enclosure at the site have belt and arm markings around their waist indicating they represent people, so they very likely represent ancestors. So the inference is that these people who built Göbekli Tepe weren’t so upset that they had started warring with each other, which is the extreme upset that close-living agriculture led to, yet they were no longer innocent enough, and thus free enough of insecurity about their corrupted condition, to not feel the need for the reassuring and comforting presence of their ancestors to counter the utter loneliness of being condemned as evil angry, egocentric and alienated beings. Loneliness of soul had become apparent but not yet ferociously psychologically upset warfare.

 

 

This is something else I want to explain. As I briefly mentioned in paragraph 41, and explain more fully in chapter 5 of FREEDOM, nurturing is what created our moral soul, which means nurturing was the priority throughout our species’ early development. As briefly mentioned in paragraph 135, and explained much more fully in paragraphs 769-770 of FREEDOM, at 2 million years ago when humans became conscious this female-focused matriarchal situation changed to a male-focused patriarchal situation because, as group protectors, it was men who had to take on the corrupting job of championing our conscious thinking self or ego over the threat to our species of the ignorance of our instinctive self or soul—but this transition wasn’t easy. As I explain in chapter 8:11B of FREEDOM, women are soul sympathetic, not ego sympathetic, so sooner or later ‘ego sympathy’, support for our species’ upsetting battle to find knowledge, ultimately for understanding of ourselves, which was men’s responsibility, had to take over. So the well-established, strong-willed female matriarchy didn’t give in to patriarchy for a long time. It took millennia before men were able to contain women’s expressed lack of empathy for men’s all-important but extremely upsetting battle to defy the ignorance of our instinctive self—a lack of empathy that was evident in Leunig’s Garden of Eden cartoon in paragraph 133, and referred to in paragraphs 135 and 54. Indeed, women were seemingly treated as goddesses in central Europe during the Upper Paleolithic (50,000 to 10,000 BC) and Neolithic (10,000 to c.4,000 BC) periods, as evidenced by the many so-called ‘Goddess’ or ‘Venus’ figurines, such as the one pictured below from Çatalhöyük, which is also a Neolithic ruin in southern Turkey some 700 kilometres from Göbekli Tepe. Çatalhöyük is dated from approximately 7,500 to 5,600 BC, which is somewhat more recent than Göbekli Tepe, and unlike Göbekli Tepe is thought to be an agriculture-based residential settlement. As I explain in paragraph 810 of FREEDOM about this figurine, we can see from the extremely regal stature of the very well-nourished figure seated on her throne of cheetahs just how revered and in control of their societies such strong women must have been.

 

‘Goddess’ statue, Çatalhöyük, southern Turkey, c.6,000 BC

 

Interestingly, anthropologists don’t know why the people at Göbekli Tepe avoided putting faces on the head pieces of their pillars but I think with our ability to admit the truth of our lost state of innocence we can understand why. To engrave the faces of beloved ancestors would have required depicting something of their tortured human condition when what the people sought was just their comforting presence. I wrote about how our soul couldn’t and didn’t want to draw our alienated faces in FREEDOM in paragraphs 831-834. I point out there that the fabulously sensitive and empathetic 30,000 BC drawings of our early ancestors’ very special friends, the animals at the Chauvet Cave in France (below), contain virtually no drawings of humans, and none of human faces. As the author Barbara Ehrenreich noted, ‘If the Paleolithic cave painters could create such perfectly naturalistic animals, why not give us a glimpse of the painters themselves? Almost as strange as the absence of human images in the caves is the low level of scientific interest in their absence’ (‘The Humanoid Stain’, The Baffler, No.48, Nov. 2019). I think that even then the facial expressions of humans were so alienated, so devoid of the innocence that our faces must have once exhibited, that our instinctive self or soul couldn’t relate to it; it couldn’t, and perhaps didn’t want to, draw humans. Even the plentiful goddess figurines typically don’t show facial expressions and only have a blob for a head, with the one shown above being a rare exception, and that exception is from less innocent and thus less sensitive times. As R.D. Laing said, we were becoming ‘a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be’. Yes, we were far more honest back then about our corrupted condition, especially since we hadn’t yet resigned to where ‘our innocence is lost’ and ‘everything you’ve been told has been a lie’ as the band With Life In Mind sang (paragraph 169), and we had ‘darkened…​[our] hearts’ and ‘all dwell among those who lie’ as Christ said (paragraph 152). I haven’t at all been trained to be an artist but, as I have discovered with my writing, if I let my instinctive soul express itself, it is capable of being extraordinarily truthful and empathetic, hence I can sometimes, when my soul feels like expressing itself, create astonishingly empathetic drawings, like my drawing of Christ’s mother with Christ as a baby in paragraph 54, or my drawing of Christ in paragraph 152, and in my many other drawings. Truly, as the very great English poet William Wordsworth wrote, ‘trailing clouds of glory do we come, From God [the integrated, loving, all-sensitive state], who is our home’ (Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, 1807).

 

 

The situation at Göbekli Tepe is very similar to what happened in Britain around 3,000 BC where the early Britons were still sufficiently innocent, peaceful and egalitarian that they were able to gather together from all over the British Isles for ceremonies at Stonehenge in southern England. In fact, it has been revealed that the central alter stone was brought all the way from the Orkneys in northern Scotland. Possibly, when anthropology becomes capable of honesty, the circle of huge stones at Stonehenge will also be recognised as primarily representations of soul-and-loneliness-comforting ancestors. I should point out that (as I explain in paragraph 32 of Death by Dogma where I talk about ancestor worship) when upset became really extreme following the development of agriculture, we could hardly live with ourselves let alone each other, and when this happened our original love for each other very often became a case of being antagonistic towards each other. (As I explain in paragraphs 906-908 of FREEDOM, the Genesis story in the Bible of the struggle between the settled farmer Cain and the nomadic Abel is a recognition of the appearance of this antagonism. Note the incredibly honest and thus insightful anthropological thinking in earlier times when Moses, who wrote Genesis, gave the descriptions in Genesis of the fundamental events in human history of Adam and Eve taking the fruit from the tree of knowledge and being banished from the Garden of Eden of original innocence, i.e. becoming conscious and as a result upset; and of Cain and Abel to describe the upsetting effects of settled agricultural life on our original innocent soul; and of Noah’s Ark and The Flood to describe when humanity was psychologically drowned by Resignation to living in truth-and-soul-destroying denial of the human condition!) And so the more we stopped being fond of each other, the more we stopped wanting to remember our not-so-lovable ‘loved ones’. But before love died like this, we did so love each other that we didn’t want to let their memory go when they died, and so in those more innocent, less upset times, adoration of our ancestors did play a very important part in our lives. I should also explain, as I do in paragraphs 909-915 of FREEDOM, that once agriculture was underway and upset began increasing at a very rapid rate, it wasn’t long before it became an ‘arms race’ of who could become toughest and more brutal and ruthless first, the winners of which in Europe were the Indo-European speaking Yamnaya from the Caspian steppe who wiped out most of the more innocent peoples in Europe. As described in paragraphs 1036-1037 of FREEDOM, a descendant of some of the more innocent living in the remote mountains of Wales who survived this rapid development of upset wrote this book. Again, thank goodness all humans can return to peace and togetherness now!

 

To return to describing Resignation, now that we can explain and defend our horrifically soul-corrupted condition we can at last acknowledge the agonising process adolescents have, until now, had to go through of resigning themselves to living in fearful denial of the unbearably depressing subject of our ‘fallen’, innocence-destroyed, soul-corrupted human condition. For example, we can at last understand the great Spanish artist Francisco Goya’s famous, yet-never-properly-understood-until-now, 1797 etching that he titled The sleep of reason brings forth monsters that is reproduced below. ‘Why should ‘the sleep of reason bring…​forth monsters’; has this poor gentleman suffered a terrible financial loss that he can’t bear thinking about; what great tragedy has befallen him’—resigned, human-condition-avoiding minds wonder. No, what Goya graphically depicted is how depressing it has been for us humans to drop our mental guard and think deeply about our horrifically soul-corrupted condition. In the picture we see ‘bats from hell’—extremely serious worries—tormenting the person’s mind!

 

Goya’s The sleep of reason brings forth monsters, 1796-1797

 

‘The sleep of reason brings forth monsters’ because trying to think about the human condition has led to thoughts that are both monstrously large in size, and monstrous in that they are about the possibility that we are monsters. Yes, we can understand very well why, up until now, we’ve had to have the attitude described in the Irish rock band U2’s 1997 song Staring At The Sun: ‘It’s been a long hot summer, let’s get under cover, don’t try too hard to think, don’t think at all. I’m not the only one staring at the sun, afraid of what you’d find if you take a look inside. Not just deaf and dumb, I’m staring at the sun, not the only one who’s happy to go blind.’ The sun is clearly the unbearably confronting and exposing, glaring light of truth about our corrupted condition that has at last been explained and made safe to confront!

 

 

It is true that up until now almost any thinking brought the resigned adult mind into contact with the unbearably depressing issue of our diabolically soul-corrupted, competitive, selfish and aggressive, seemingly-utterly-evil condition. Virtually any thinking was ‘too hard’ so best ‘don’t think at all’—‘Oh, that’s a lovely sunset, ooohh, I wonder why I’m not lovable!’; ‘Pass me the salt, yes, have I told you about me, okay, I know, I’m so focused on me, I’m a fucking insecure, egomaniac wreck of a person, get off my case!’

The absolute reality for virtually everyone has been that trying to confront the issue of our corrupted human condition while we haven’t been able to explain it has been such a ‘shattering experience’, as Jung described it (see paragraph 126), that virtually any deeper meaningful thinking would bring your mind into contact with that intolerably, suicidally depressing issue! The Australian comedian Rod Quantock certainly wasn’t joking when he said, ‘Thinking can get you into terrible downwards spirals of doubt’ (‘Sayings of the Week’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 Jul. 1986). And the great truthful-thinking French Nobel Laureate for Literature, Albert Camus, certainly wasn’t overstating the difficulty of thinking when he said, ‘Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined’ (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942); nor was another Nobel Prize winner in Literature, the Welshman Bertrand Russell, when he said, ‘Many people would sooner die than think’ (Antony Flew, Thinking About Thinking, 1975, p.5 of 127), and nor was yet another Nobel Laureate for Literature, the American-English poet T.S. Eliot, when he wrote that ‘human kind cannot bear very much reality’ (Burnt Norton, 1936). And what did R.D. Laing say (see paragraph 149), he said ‘Our capacity to think…​is pitifully limited’. And the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky was essentially referring to our inability to engage with the issue of our corrupted condition when he wrote that ‘Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth’ (Crime and Punishment, 1866, ch.4). Also, that very great Greek philosopher Plato recognised the problem of our species’ core insecurity about facing exposure to the issue of our corrupted condition when he is widely attributed as having said, ‘We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.’

‘The sleep of reason’, letting down our mental guard and allowing ourselves to think at a deep level, most certainly has brought ‘forth monsters’, and so the human race certainly has had to live in denial of our 2-million-year soul-corrupted condition while we couldn’t explain it! While we humans will readily focus on a safely sectioned-off area of inquiry or activity, such as solving a maths equation, or mastering a computer problem, or remembering an endless stream of meaningless facts for an exam like Queen Isabella the 5th married King Fred the 12th in 1522 and together they fought The War Of The Itchy Bums in 1591, or glamorising our wardrobe, or purchasing a flash car, or even sending a man to the Moon, we won’t go beyond those safe limits and risk encountering anything to do with the unbearably depressing subject of our and the human race’s corrupted human condition. As a result, there is an immense disparity between our superficial outer world and the miles-deep inner world that we won’t go near. R.D. Laing’s description of there being ‘fifty feet of solid concrete’ ‘between us and…​our true selves [or soul]’ is so true! And yes, this means the real frontier is not outer space but inner space—which is what, in my book Death by Dogma, I told Elon Musk, that promoter of outer space exploration and hugely successful innovator and champion of free speech. Hopefully someone will show him the comment in that book.

Our species’ extraordinary, indeed mad, situation was well summarised by the American General Omar N. Bradley when he said, ‘The world has achieved brilliance…​without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants’! (Armistice Day Address, 10 Nov. 1948, Collected Writings of General Omar N. Bradley, Vol.1).

Given how fearful of the issue of our corrupted human condition we have been, it is not surprising that we have hardly been able to think truthfully and effectively at all, and therefore why we have hardly made any real headway in understanding ourselves and ending our situation of being ‘ethical infants’. The great Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev recognised not only how difficult confronting the human condition has been, but also how finding knowledge depends on confronting not avoiding the human condition, when he wrote that ‘Knowledge requires great daring. It means victory over ancient, primeval terror…​it must also be said of knowledge that it is bitter, and there is no escaping that bitterness…​Particularly bitter is moral knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil. But the bitterness is due to the fallen state of the world…​There is a deadly pain in the very distinction of good and evil, of the valuable and the worthless’ (The Destiny of Man, 1931; tr. N. Duddington, 1960, pp.14-15 of 310). Yes, trying to confront the issue of our corrupted or ‘fallen’ condition without the explanation for it only left us with the ‘bitter’ ‘ancient, primeval terror’ that we humans have had to endure of thinking we must be ‘evil’, ‘worthless’ monsters—and yet confronting it is what was ‘require[d]’ to find ‘knowledge’, ultimately self-knowledge, the redeeming understanding of our ‘good and evil’-stricken human condition.

Berdyaev has made the point here that while virtually everyone has lived in fearful terror of the human condition, ultimately it had to be confronted to be solved. And to do that was going to require very rare individuals who were fortunate enough to have sufficiently escaped encountering the soul-corrupted state of the world during their upbringing to not be terrified by the issue of the human condition and, as a result, to not have to resign to living in denial of it—like Noah was able to avoid doing. It is this unresigned ability to confront and think truthfully and thus effectively about the human condition that the South African philosopher Sir Laurens van der Post and I possessed, and as a result of the confirmation of my truthful thinking that I derived from the honesty of Sir Laurens’s writings, and from the honest thinking of others like him, I was able to find ‘the knowledge of good and evil’ explanation of the human condition.

You can read more about Sir Laurens’s life in Freedom Essay 51, and in my book How Laurens van der Post Saved The World—and also about my life in my biography, and also where I talk about my life in How Laurens van der Post Saved The World, and also in Part 7 of another of my books, Don’t Stand In The Way, For The Times Are A-Changin’, where I describe ‘The Golden Thread’ of sound thinkers who helped preserve my soul so that I could go on and think sufficiently truthfully to solve the human condition. Those Golden Thread members and their effects are Plato’s soul-preserving, ‘philosopher kings’-producing attitude for education, which inspired Dr Kurt Hahn to create the soul-preserving Gordonstoun school in Scotland, which in turn inspired Sir James Darling to create the soul-preserving Geelong Grammar School in Australia that I was so exceptionally fortunate to attend (although I should say that the school lost its Darling-inspired focus for education as soon as Sir James retired). Then there was Sir Laurens van der Post who was one of Sir James’s two favourite authors. And then there was my good friend Steve van Hemert, whose wild, larger-than-life, expose-the-world-of-denial-for-the-crap-it-really-is carryings-on were so relieving for me to be part of as a young man. And, above all of course, in terms of the soul-preserving influence in my life, there was the exceptionally unconditionally nurturing love I received from my parents Norman and Jill Griffith. This was ‘The Golden Thread’ of influences that, as R.D. Laing said (see paragraph 149), allowed me to ‘leave the formation [that]…​is itself off course [stay away from the resigned world of denial of the human condition]’ and ‘get ‘on course’’ and solve the human condition. That Part 7 about ‘The Golden Thread’ in Don’t Stand In The Way, For The Times Are A-Changin’ is very revealing of how I was able to confront and solve the human condition. It does make understandable why Professor Anthony Barnett, zoologist, author and broadcaster of a popular science program in Australia, said to me back in 1983 that ‘you are being very arrogant to think you can answer questions on this scale [confront the human condition as he recognised I was doing]. In the whole of written history there are only two or three people who have been able to think on this scale about the human condition’ (from a recorded interview with Jeremy Griffith, 15 Jan. 1983).

The following is a drawing (which also appears on this book’s cover) I have done to depict our situation now. On the left is our present dying world which has become a dystopian wasteland where human progress has founded and science has lost all credibility due to dishonest Reductionist, Mechanistic science’s fearful avoidance of the ‘fire’ of the human condition. On the right of the fire are the only people able to confront and think truthfully about the human condition—the very rare human-condition-confronting truthful thinkers or ‘prophets’, symbolised by those with halos around their heads. The circular glow of light or ‘halo’ often drawn around the heads of prophets was used to indicate their soulful purity, innocence, soundness and holiness; indeed, the word ‘holy’, so often used to describe prophets, has the same origins as the Saxon word ‘whole’, which means ‘well, entire, intact’, and is thus a recognition of the prophets’ wholeness or soundness or lack of separation or alienation from our species’ sound, innocent, all-loving and all-sensitive original instinctive self or soul. Such soundness was needed to synthesise the redeeming explanation of humans’ corrupted condition, which is symbolised by a prophet putting the fire out with a bucket of water/​truth. Then, as depicted on the right, with the ‘fire’ finally put out, in other words with our fear of the truth of our corrupted condition at last extinguished, the whole human race can finally progress to a fabulous ‘sun’/​truth-drenched, transformed world free of the agony and horror of the human condition!

I should mention that it is not surprising that throughout history fire has been used as a metaphor for the great fear humans have had of the unbearably depressing—‘incinerating’—issue of the human condition. For example, in religious texts, fire appears as a metaphor for the integrative, Godly ideals of life whose condemning, scorching glare humans have had to hide from. For example, in the Zoroastrian religion, ‘Fire is the representative of God…​His physical manifestation…​Fire is bright, always points upward, is always pure’ (Edward Rice, Eastern Definitions, 1978, p.138 of 433). In the Bible, Moses’s story in Genesis features ‘a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life’ (3:24), and the Bible also records the Israelites as saying, ‘Let us not hear the voice of the Lord our God nor see this great fire any more, or we will die’ (Deut. 18:16). And, as mentioned in paragraph 155, Plato wrote about the ‘fire’ that ‘corresponds…​to the power of the sun’, which the ‘cave’ prisoners have to hide from because its searing, ‘painful’ ‘light’ would make ‘visible’ the unbearably depressing issue of ‘the imperfections of human life’, which is the issue of ‘our human condition’.