Part 1.7  What the human condition really is

What now needs to be pointed out, AND THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, is that our conscious thinking self wasn’t in defiance of just any dictatorial instincts, which would have been upsetting enough, we were in defiance of our particular cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts. What this means is that when we became competitive, selfish and aggressive, that response was extremely offensive to our particular cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts. We, our conscious mind, had turned utopia into dystopia, destroyed paradise!

Yes, as has been explained, we humans once lived instinctively in a nurtured-with-unconditional-love, cooperative, selfless and loving innocent state. It follows that since our particular instinctive orientation is to behaving cooperatively, selflessly and lovingly, the competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour that resulted from becoming angry, egocentric and alienated only compounded the condemnation from our instincts, making us, our conscious thinking mind, extremely, excruciatingly angry, egocentric and alienated. And while we blocked out of our mind any criticising truth and as a result became separated from or alienated from so many truths, the most condemning of all truths that we were blocking out and repressing and alienating ourselves (our conscious thinking self) from was our condemning moral instinctive self or soul—we were having to destroy the most wonderful part of ourselves; but we had no choice because we were being so unjustly condemned by our soul. So our mind has been EXTREMELY angry, egocentric and alienated—which means we now have the reason for our capacity for shocking acts of violence, depravity, indifference and cruelty! We humans have endured intolerable guilt and shame for not only having defied our instincts, but having defied them in a way that drew tremendous, unbearable condemnation from our particular cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts!

So, as I point out in chapter 3:5 of FREEDOM, we (our conscious mind) have suffered from a ‘double whammy’ of condemnation for being competitive, selfish and aggressive. In fact, we have suffered from a ‘triple whammy’ of condemnation because our competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour was divisive behaviour, so we were behaving entirely inconsistently with the Integrative Meaning of existence, we were seemingly out of step with creation—we were (as was explained earlier in paragraph 61 when ‘God’ was explained) offending ‘God’! Of course, our mind hasn’t been able to comprehend this thought journey, it has just felt extremely upset, which we can now fully unpack and understand the reasons for.

To repeat what happened: our species’ original cooperative, selfless and loving moral instinctive self, the ‘voice’ or expression of which is our ‘conscience’, is what we have historically been referring to as our ‘soul’ or ‘psyche’, and it was this cooperative, selfless and loving instinctive part of ourselves that resisted, in effect condemned, our conscious mind’s experiments in self-management. This ‘condemnation’ naturally upset our conscious mind, causing it to become defensively angry, egocentric and alienated, which resulted in it becoming competitively, selfishly and aggressively behaved. Since our particular instinctive self or soul was orientated to behaving cooperatively, selflessly and lovingly, it was extremely offended by this competitive, selfish and aggressive response. Our conscious self defied our instincts by experimenting in understanding, then further offended our integrative, cooperative, selfless and loving instincts by behaving in a divisive, out-of-sync-with-the-meaning-of-existence ‘unGodly’, competitive, selfish and aggressive way. So our instinctive soul was extremely offended and distressed by our conscious intellect having corrupted or destroyed its all-harmonious, all-loving and all-sensitive world—it was deeply hurt by the brutal, seemingly unGodly, competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour that had appeared. But from our conscious mind’s point of view, it was being made to suffer a double and triple whammy of condemnation, which naturally upset it a great deal, causing it to become extremely determined to try to attack, prove wrong, and deny this further condemnation. And the best way for our mind to deny that condemnation was for it to block out from its thoughts, and by so doing repress the presence of our extremely condemning instinctive self or soul—with the result being the extremely upset state of our mind or nerves or neurons, which is our mind’s neurotic neurosis, and our mind’s extreme repression of our instinctive soul or psychotic psychosis. We, our conscious mind, became neurotic and psychotic—basically, mind-mad and soul-dead!

So, overall, OUR INSTINCTIVE SOUL WAS EXTREMELY OFFENDED, DISTRESSED AND HURT, AND OUR CONSCIOUS MIND WAS EXTREMELY UPSET, which was a horrific state or condition, OUR HUMAN CONDITION, that we humans have had to endure!

Looking at the etymology of the terms being used, our ‘conscience’ is defined by the Concise Oxford Dictionary as our ‘moral sense of right and wrong’, and our ‘soul’ as the ‘moral and emotional part of man’, and as the ‘animating or essential part’ of ourselves (5th edn, 1964), while the Penguin Dictionary of Psychology’s entry for ‘psyche’ reads: ‘The oldest and most general use of this term is by the early Greeks, who envisioned the psyche as the soul or the very essence of life.’ Indeed, as the ‘early Greek’ philosopher Plato wrote about our innate, ideal-or-Godly-behaviour-expecting moral nature, we humans have ‘knowledge, both before and at the moment of birth…​of all absolute standards…​[of] beauty, goodness, uprightness, holiness…​our souls exist before our birth…​[our] soul resembles the divine’ (Phaedo, c.360 BC; tr. H. Tredennick, 1954, 65-80). So the word ‘psychology’ literally means ‘science or knowledge of soul’, and ‘psychosis’ literally means ‘soul-illness’, and ‘psychiatry’ literally means ‘soul-healing’ (derived as they are from psyche meaning ‘soul’, ology meaning the ‘branch of knowledge or science’, osis meaning ‘abnormal state or condition’ (Dictionary.com), and iatreia meaning ‘healing’ (The Encyclopedic World Dictionary)). Yes, the ‘double and triple whammy’ finally explains our extremely soul-repressed psychosis or ‘soul-illness’, and our extremely mind-upset neurosis or neuron or nerve or ‘intellect-illness’. And again, as I said in paragraph 23, according to the Cambridge Dictionary ‘psychological’ means ‘relating to the human mind and feelings’, which we can now understand is our mind’s upset neurosis and soul-repressed psychosis, WHICH IS ALL WHAT OUR HUMAN CONDITION REALLY IS!!

It is obviously very important to properly understand this situation that created our mind-mad and soul-dead human condition. When our fully conscious mind emerged some 2 million years ago its experiments in understanding (in the bird analogy, the bird’s deviation from its migratory path to explore an island) were in effect condemned by our instincts, and that condemnation upset our conscious mind, causing it to become defensively angry, egocentric and alienated, the effect of which was that we, our conscious thinking self, became competitive, selfish and aggressively behaved. Since our instinctive orientation was to be cooperative, selfless and loving, this response from our conscious mind was doubly OFFENSIVE AND DISTRESSING to our moral instinctive self or SOUL, making us, our conscious MIND, extremely UPSET with defensive anger, egocentricity and alienation. There was also the triple whammy of criticism because our divisive behaviour was inconsistent with the Godly Integrative Meaning of existence. No wonder we, us conscious thinking humans, have been so extremely psychotic or soul-repressed, and so extremely neurotic or mind-upset!

So we defied our instincts, we offended our moral conscience, and we also insulted the very meaning of existence or ‘God’! We humans could hardly have become more guilt-ridden when we became conscious and set out in search of understanding; ultimately for understanding of why, through undertaking that search, we destroyed or corrupted the all-harmonious, all-loving and all-sensitive world of our soul. And all this shame and guilt, which we can now understand was completely unjustified, made us excruciatingly guilt-ridden and overwhelmed with depression—and furiously angry, which, as I said, is why we have been capable of horrific acts of brutality, barbarism, sadism and cruelty. While we have tried to stay away from the deep depression by constantly maintaining a positive, buoyant, laughing, happy, ‘we-are-absolutely-fine’ persona, and tried to restrain and conceal the anger within us—be ‘sociable’ and ‘civilised’ as we say—there is a deep underlying depression which we are always trying to stay away from, and, in truth as well, a volcanic anger within us that we’re always trying to restrain. So thank goodness we can now at last compassionately understand that we humans are fundamentally good and not bad, and by so doing lift forever an underlying dark shadowy world of depression within us and be truly happy instead of artificially happy—and also end forever our deep seated anger and be truly kind and loving towards ourselves, others and the whole world instead of being artificially restrained and civilised! End forever all the psychological upset neurosis and psychosis in the world; let the sunshine of understanding in and flood the dark world we have been living in with true and real peace, love and happiness!

 

 

Yes, most wonderfully, since we became defensively angry, egocentric and alienated because we couldn’t explain why we were defying our instincts, now that we can explain why, those defensive behaviours are no longer needed and can end, and by doing so all our psychosis and neurosis will disappear—which is a dreamed-of transformation that is going to be explained more fully later in Part 2.9!

As I said in the Brief Summary, it is science that has made this redeeming, reconciling and rehabilitating explanation for why we became angry, egocentric and alienated possible because it wasn’t until science revealed the difference between the gene-based and nerve-based learning systems—which is that genes can orientate but nerves need to understand—that we were finally in a position to explain the good reason for our mind’s extremely upset angry, egocentric and alienated neurosis and its extremely soul-repressing psychosis. And I should say, as I mentioned in paragraph 7, now that it has been explained, this Instinct versus Intellect, soul versus mind, genes versus nerves, two-basic-parts-of-our-evolutionary-makeup-that-when-you-think-about-the-nature-of-them-have-to-have-clashed, explanation for the human condition is a reasonably obvious, straightforward and simple explanation—which bears out biologist Allan Savory’s observation that ‘whenever there has been a major insoluble problem for mankind, the answer, when finally found, has always been very simple’ (Holistic Resource Management, 1988, 1st edition, p.3).

 

 

The Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden that Moses wrote so long ago in about 1,500 BC actually perfectly describes the soul-offending and mind-upsetting clash that emerged between our fixed, dictatorial, moral instincts and self-managing conscious intellect. It says Adam and Eve (we humans) took the ‘fruit’ (Genesis 3:3) ‘from the tree of knowledge’ (Gen. 2:9, 17) and were ‘disobedient’ (the term widely used in descriptions of Gen. 3); in other words, we developed a conscious mind and free will. But in that pre-scientific story it says Adam and Eve then became ‘evil’ (Gen. 3:22) perpetrators of ‘sin’ (Gen. 4:7) because, as we can now understand, they had become angry, egocentric and alienated, and as a result Moses said Adam and Eve (we humans) were ‘banished…​from the Garden of Eden’ (Gen. 3:23) state of cooperative, selfless and loving innocence.

Not knowing how naturally selected instincts differ from cause and effect-operating consciousness, this story of Adam and Eve becoming conscious could only conclude that the angry, egocentric and alienated, soul-corrupted condition that emerged when we became conscious was a bad, evil, sinful state, but this scientific presentation says, ‘No, no, that pre-scientific story got it wrong’. Adam and Eve, we humans, are actually not just good but the heroes of the whole story of life on Earth—because surely the conscious mind is nature’s greatest invention and to be given the task of searching for understanding while the whole world’s condemning you was the hardest and toughest of tasks—because that condemnation was universal. All of nature—the rain, the clouds, the trees, and other animals—are all associated with, and are thus, as it were, friends of our original innocent instinctive self or soul that was condemning us no-longer-innocent, seemingly bad, awful conscious humans! The whole world, in fact the whole of the integrated universe, in effect, ganged up on Adam and Eve, i.e. on us conscious humans—and yet all the time we were good and not bad but we couldn’t explain why, but now at last through the benefit of science, we can. We can now explain and understand that we conscious humans are immensely heroic, and not villains after all!

Yes, this ability to understand and know there was a good reason why the human race became so psychologically distressed—so mind-upset or neurotic with anger, egocentricity and alienation, and so soul-repressed or psychotic—is the key, relieving understanding of ourselves that we have been in search of ever since we became conscious some 2 million years ago and our horrifically neurotic and psychotic human condition emerged. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung famously said that ‘wholeness for humans depends on the ability to own our own shadow’, but we have never been able to ‘own’ the ‘shadow’ of our species’ horrifically 2-million-year mind-upset and soul-repressed condition and become ‘whole’; ‘explain’ to our original instinctive self or soul that we, our fully conscious thinking self, is good and not bad and by so doing reconcile and heal our split selves—but now at last we can. As it says in the Bible, ‘the truth will set you free’ (John 8:32), and that is what has happened: the redeeming truth about our divisive mind-enraged and soul-destroyed behaviour has set us free from the insecurity and horror of that condition! We have the key understanding that takes the pain out of our brains! One of the founders of the 1980s pseudo idealistic New Age Movement (see three paragraphs below), the author Marilyn Ferguson, was actually hoping for the psychologically redeeming understanding of the human condition that we now have when she wrote: ‘Maybe [the Jesuit priest, scientist and philosopher] Teilhard de Chardin was right; maybe we are moving toward an omega point [a final genuine unification/​individuation of our split selves]…​Maybe…​we can finally resolve the planet’s inner conflict between its neurotic self (which we’ve created and which is unreal) and its real self. Our [original all-sensitive and loving instinctive] real self knows how to commune, how to create…​From everything I’ve seen people really urgently want the kind of new beginning…​[that I am] talking about [where humans will live in]…​cooperation instead of competition’ (New Age mag. Aug. 1982; see www.wtmsources.com/174).

 

 

Of course, the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is far from the only recognition from ancient times of the elements of our moral instincts and our conscious intellect being involved in producing our distressed human condition. Indeed, as the journalist and author Richard Heinberg summarised in his 1990 book Memories & Visions of Paradise, ‘Every religion begins with the recognition that human consciousness has been separated from the divine Source, that a former sense of oneness…​has been lost…​everywhere in religion and myth there is an acknowledgment that we have departed from an original…​innocence and can return to it only through the resolution of some profound inner discord…​the cause of the Fall is described variously as disobedience, as the eating of a forbidden fruit [from the tree of knowledge], and as spiritual amnesia [forgetting, blocking out, denial, alienation, which is our psychosis]’ (pp.81-82 of 282). So all our religions and most of our mythologies have recognised the basic conflict within us—that the emergence of ‘consciousness’ caused our ‘Fall’ from ‘innocence’. The quotes from Hesiod and Plato that were included earlier in paragraphs 49-50 are examples of mythologies that recognised our species’ time in innocence before we became conscious. What was needed in all these religious and mythological recognitions of our species’ pre-conscious time in innocence was the redeeming good reason for WHY ‘a former sense of oneness…​has been lost’ and ‘we…​departed from an original…​innocence’, and HOW we ‘can [now] return to it…​through the resolution of some profound inner discord’, which is the ‘instincts can orientate but nerves need to understand’ explanation that we now have.

So our competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour is not due to savage, must-reproduce-our-genes instincts but to an extremely upset conscious mind and an extremely distressed soul. Basically, becoming upset, angry, egocentric and alienated, and, as a result, competitively, selfishly and aggressively behaved, and as a result of that becoming neurotic and psychotic, has been the price we conscious humans had to pay for our heroic search for knowledge, ultimately for self-knowledge, the redeeming biological explanation for why this all happened, which is the explanation that has just been provided. In the words of the song The Impossible Dream from the musical the Man of La Mancha, we had to be prepared to ‘march into hell for a heavenly cause’ (lyrics by Joe Darion, 1965). We had to lose ourselves to find ourselves; we had to suffer becoming angry, egocentric and alienated and as a result competitively, selfishly and aggressively behaved and neurotic and psychotic until we found sufficient knowledge to explain why this all happened.

We humans have been trapped in a horrifically paradoxical situation where to free ourselves from being angry, egocentric and alienated, and competitive, selfish and aggressive, we had to continue behaving like that until we found the explanation for why we were behaving like that! Only having the freedom to be competitive, selfish and aggressive could lead to the finding of the understanding of ourselves that would enable us to stop having to be competitive, selfish and aggressive! As I explain in my book Death by Dogma, and in many of my presentations, the dogmatic insistence by the left-wing in politics that everyone stop being competitive, selfish and aggressive actually blocked the heroic competition-selfishness-and-aggression-producing search for knowledge needed to find the redeeming understanding for why we were being competitive, selfish and aggressive that was required to end the need to be defensively competitive, selfish and aggressive! It is actually the right-wing’s support of the competition, selfishness, aggression-producing search for knowledge that held the moral high ground, not the left-wing’s dogmatic, pseudo idealistic insistence on cooperative, selfless and loving behaviour and its dogmatic, pseudo idealistic oppression of competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour. Thank goodness, the redeeming explanation for our soul-corrupted angry, egocentric and alienated human condition has now been found, so the corrupting anger, egocentricity and alienation-producing search for that redeeming self-knowledge is over, and the whole torturous business of politics, which only existed in order to manage life under the duress of the human condition, comes to an end!

 

 

I should explain that in THE Interview and in a number of my shorter presentations where I have needed to keep the explanation of the human condition brief, I limited the explanation of the human condition to the clash between our instincts and intellect and didn’t go into the ‘double and triple whammy’ effects on our moral instincts when we became angry, egocentric and alienated. As will likely be very apparent by now, even in this somewhat longer presentation, there are so many new truthful-human-condition-confronting-not-dishonest-human-condition-avoiding insights to have to be introduced and grasped that presenting the ‘double and triple whammy’ effect would be too much to include in a shorter version like THE Interview. While I didn’t explain the ‘double and triple whammy’ effects in those shorter presentations, they are inferred because I do point out in them that we have cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts, and that we suffered from extreme guilt and shame.

 

IN SUMMARY, WHAT HAS NOW BEEN EXPLAINED FINALLY ENABLES US TO APPRECIATE WHAT THE ISSUE OF THE HUMAN CONDITION REALLY REFERS TO. It is the horrific shame and guilt we humans have suffered from for not only having defied our instinctive orientations to the world but having defied them in a competitive, selfish and aggressive way that drew tremendous condemnation from our particular cooperative, selfless and loving, Integrative-Meaning-complying moral instincts. Basically, the human condition is the unbearable shame and guilt of having corrupted/​destroyed the original all-harmonious, all-loving and all-sensitive, innocent instinctive world of our soul!

This insufferable guilt and shame we conscious thinking humans have experienced for destroying the magic world of our soul has, in fact, been so unbearably depressing, indeed so suicidally depressing, that the only sensible way that we have been able to cope with our seeming horrific crime while we couldn’t explain it was to deny that we ever lived in a cooperative, selfless and loving, innocent state, and, by extension, by denying that we suffer from any soul-repressed, psychotic and mind-upset, neurotic, mad, deranged, profoundly-disturbed state, when we actually certainly do! The truth is we humans developed an extreme ‘psychosis’ or ‘soul-illness’, and also an extremely upset mind, a ‘neurosis’ or neuron or nerve or ‘intellect-illness’. We have a very sick mind and very sick soul!

Indeed, it makes sense that this practice of denial of our extreme soul-corrupted psychosis and extreme mind-distressed neurosis has been so important to us that it has been the dominant feature of our behaviour. We have been ‘A Species In Denial’, as I titled my 2003 book that became a bestseller in Australia and New Zealand. The polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was truthfully recognising the extent of our immensely soul-repressed (psychotic) and mind-upset (neurotic) state when he famously said, ‘We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe’, as was the playwright George Bernard Shaw when he famously said, ‘The longer I live, the more convinced am I that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum’!

Given this desperate need to deny we ever lived in a cooperative, selfless and loving innocent state while we couldn’t explain our seemingly evil instinctive-self-or-soul-corrupted condition, we can now appreciate that even though the must-reproduce-our-genes-like-other-animals, savage instincts excuse was an obviously false excuse it was an absolutely brilliantly helpful excuse because instead of our instincts being all-loving and thus unbearably condemning of our present non-loving state, they were made out to be competitive, selfish and aggressive must-reproduce-your-genes instincts like other animals have; and, instead of our conscious mind being the instinct-defying cause of our corruption, which it actually was, it was made out to be the blameless mediating ‘hero’ that had to step in and try to control those supposed savage instincts within us! What complete reverse-of-the-truth lies, but so relieving to have while we searched for the real explanation for our psychologically distressed condition! And I should also mention our evasive tactic where those who dared to admit the truth of our cooperative, selfless and loving past, like Hesiod and Plato (in paragraphs 49-50), were dismissed as deluded romantics, and the whole idea of an innocent, Edenic past was said to be nothing more than a nostalgia for the security and maternal warmth of infancy; that it was ‘never an historical state’ as the human-condition-avoiding Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann said in his book The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949, p.15 of 493). What another brilliant but outrageous reverse-of-the-truth lie! As I said earlier in paragraph 65, lying has absolutely been a human specialty—well, most unfortunately, it had to be, but thank goodness all that horrific lying now stops! As I said, we now let the light of honesty in to replace all that lying darkness. We, the human race, are coming home to peace, truth and happiness at last!

This necessary denial of our soul-corrupted condition while we couldn’t explain it is why all these truths that are being revealed have been hidden from us—such as the truth of the Integrative Meaning of existence; the truth that our savage, must-reproduce-our-genes excuse for our divisive behaviour is a false excuse; the truth that we have cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts; the truth that nurturing created our moral soul and enabled us to develop a fully conscious mind—and, as will be pointed out in the next few paragraphs, the truth about why we have lived such an extremely fearful, psychologically insecure, superficial and artificial existence; and about how finally having the redeeming Instinct vs Intellect good reason for our soul-corrupted condition lifts the great so-called ‘burden of guilt’ from our species’ conscious mind, and liberates the entire human race from that tortured condition, making possible a whole new, neurologically relieved and psychologically rehabilitated, sane, peaceful and loving transformed world—hence why we are called the World Transformation Movement!

Even though we have had to resign ourselves to living in determined denial of the truth that our species did once live in a cooperative, selfless and loving, innocent state, and in determined denial of the issue it raises of why we committed the seemingly horrific crime of destroying such a peaceful and loving ‘Garden of Eden’ existence, these truths of our species’ original innocence and the issue it raises of are we despicable monsters have been subconsciously preoccupying our mind every minute of our lives! We have, in truth, spent every moment making ourselves feel good, keeping at bay the unbearably depressing thought that we are seemingly bad, unworthy, even evil beings. We have constantly sought reinforcement for ourselves, and always tried to stay positive to hold at bay the underlying depressing fear that we might indeed be dreadful mistakes on Earth!

SO, THANK GOODNESS A MILLION TIMES OVER, ALL THAT INSECURE BEHAVIOUR CAN END. As the wonderfully transformed WTM founding member Tony Gowing has said, ‘We don’t have to be ashamed. We don’t have to shake our fists at the heavens anymore and prove to everyone and everything that they have been wrong about us. First-principle science has proven that we are worthwhile; that we are gloriously heroic beings. It had to be the way it’s been—there was no other way—but it’s all over now. The relief of finally being able to understand floods through our whole being; the anger and frustration dissipates; all the bullshit, falseness and lies end. We can finally love ourselves and participate in the world instead of constantly fighting it. No longer preoccupied with proving our self-worth, we will finally have the room in ourselves to properly help others; to selflessly participate in stopping the suffering everywhere we look’ (Video/​Freedom Essay 5). Yes, the human race returns home now to a state of human-condition-free sanity, peace, togetherness and happiness. As the poet T.S. Eliot so truthfully anticipated, ‘We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’ (Little Gidding, 1942).

 

 

SO THAT IS WHAT THE HUMAN CONDITION REALLY IS:: the torturous underlying neurological insecurity and psychological distress we fully conscious humans have suffered from for some 2 million years for having committed the seemingly inexcusable crime of corrupting our all-harmonious and all-loving and all-sensitive original instinctive self or soul!

And yes, as explained more fully in Part 4 of THE Interview, and much more fully in the latter part of chapter 3 of FREEDOM, since we now have the redeeming and reconciling Instinct vs Intellect good reason for why we corrupted our original cooperative, selfless and loving instinctive self or soul, the immense underlying neurological insecurity and psychological distress about our corrupted condition comes to an end—and the complete neurological and psychological rehabilitation and transformation of our species can now take place! As Professor Harry Prosen, a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, said, ‘I have no doubt Jeremy Griffith’s instinct vs intellect biological explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race.’

So, we, the human race, has achieved Martin Luther King Jr’s yearned-for ‘dream’ to be ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ (‘I Have A Dream’ speech, 28 Aug. 1963).