Video & Transcript of Joseph Wood,
WTM Edmonton Centre

 

(To learn more about Joseph Wood, see www.wtmedmonton.com)

 

 

Hi, I’m Joseph Wood. I’m happy to be opening a World Transformation Movement Centre in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

We lived in England till 1957 when my dad and family came to Canada. We came to the Northwest Territories. It was a gold mine. Unfortunately there were no schools there that I could go to, and so what happened is I spent about a year running around in the bush having a wonderful time on my own.

My education: I went to the U of A [the University of Alberta] in Edmonton. I’ve got a B. Ed [Bachelor of Education] in secondary education with a major in English and a minor in psychology. I’ve also got an NLP [Neuro Linguistic Programming] practitioner certificate and I’m a hypno[therapy] certified technical therapist as well, so I’ve got a few different things. I’ve always been interested in learning new things, and especially learning new things about the mind—that’s really fascinated me all my life.

For some reason I just saw it [came across the World Transformation Movement] as an ad, I believe, that’s the WTM, and so I started to investigate and I started reading some of the books—well actually I was looking at the videos first, that was very important. I like videos so I got quite a bit out of the videos [the Introductory Video Series found at the top of the WTM website at HumanCondition.com]. Then I started reading some of the books and I was very interested in the way that Jeremy [Griffith] actually documented or resourced his material, which I had not usually seen before except in writings for university, where you have to write a paper and then you have to substantiate your argument. And I really found these arguments very, very compelling about the human condition. As far as the human condition goes, I’d really never heard of it. I didn’t really know what it was and I didn’t really think it was a problem. However, the more I dug into the books and started reading FREEDOM, I started to realise that yes, I guess it’s a huge, unspoken thing that as somebody says is, you know, ‘the brain’s black box that nobody wants to look at’ and stuff like that.

While I was reading FREEDOM and all the other books, I found them very, very interesting and just kept continuing reading. I really found that Jeremy really substantiated everything that he was talking about. And he had such a wide range—he was pulling in religion, he was pulling in rock ’n roll songs (I mean, I grew up with rock ’n roll). He was pulling in poetry and art and philosophy, but also biology. And of course the human condition has, as far as Jeremy is concerned, and as far as I’m concerned now, has actually been solved. It came about because of the dissonance between the thinking mind and also the gene-based instinctive mind, and that is in our own mind. And of course it’s psychological and he’s talking about psychosis and things. So all of that stuff, it really, really interested me and kind of got me going and hooked me and kept me going, basically. [Watch THE Interview for a summary of the explanation of the human condition.]

My view of the world before finding this information, this very enlightening information, by the way, was that…I was kind of brought up in a very tough family. If you got in a fight when you were a kid, my dad would make you go out and fight the kid again and all that kind of stuff. It was a fairly brutal upbringing, I guess. And I was very fortunate too because of my grandparents, especially my grandmother. She was very loving, very supportive; she was very proud of me. But my view of the world was, I was always told, ‘be honest,’ you know, ‘be truthful’, you know, ‘don’t screw people over’. I don’t know if I should use those words, but you know it’s that kind of thing—try to help people. And all of my life as I started to grow older, I really did try to be a good person and help people. That was definitely one thing that I’ve tried to do all my life. But with reading Jeremy’s works and understanding the human condition, I’ve realised that yes, there’s a whole other element to it.

The one thing that really hooked me in a way was the actual [primate species] bonobos in the Congo [in Africa], and their compassionate, loving, instinctive way of doing things, I found quite wonderful, and I could picture that this is the way humans were originally two million years ago, or before the idea of knowledge actually started to emerge in our own brains [see Freedom Essay 21: How did we humans acquire our all-loving, unconditionally selfless moral conscience?]. And they really fascinated me. I had never heard about them before, and it was really, really amazing and it kind of brought into focus the idea of when Jeremy is talking about Adam Stork and how that kind of dissonance or upset actually came about. [The ‘Adam Stork’ analogy is explained in THE Interview and in Video/​Freedom Essay 3.] Humans have done amazing things. I mean, we’ve flown to the moon. We’ve done all kinds of stuff. But for me, the whole thing was not the outer knowledge/experience, but much more of the inner knowledge/experience, that we could now achieve and overcome the psychosis. Honestly, it really is.

[What resonated with me was] Definitely the Adam Stork story because it’s very simple. It’s the crux of the whole issue in a sense, and it’s very, very easy to understand.

The other thing I really thought about and was impressed with was the negative entropy [explanation, which is provided in Freedom Essay 23], which is the explanation in the sense of instead of things decaying, actually building and growing: one-celled organisms becoming multi-celled, which become, you know thinking little beings and so on. And so everything is actually on a path, if you look at it, on a pathway to actually increase and become bigger and better, and that is done through cooperation and through various other things that Jeremy really, really talks about. And I think that really was very important to me.

One thing I really liked about the World Transformation Movement is that everything is free. Quite often you get free things, and then by the time, yeah, ‘now you have to pay’ or you’re given a little enticement and then you have to pay. But with the World Transformation Movement, there’s absolutely none of that. Yes, you can buy the hardcover book or whatever book it is that Amazon has, but you really don’t need to because you’ve got everything that is actually on the website, and it’s absolutely available. [All materials are freely available at HumanCondition.com.] Nobody is asking you for any money. I know it’s a non-profit organisation; I imagine people could donate if they wish to (I’m not sure about that), but nobody’s ever asked me to donate or anything like that. And that was the thing that really, really appealed to me. That really it is a scientific endeavour and that the information is absolutely free. If you want the information, it’s absolutely there, as much as you can handle, which I thought was absolutely wonderful. And all the people in the WTM are absolutely wonderful. They are really genuine people and you can see that certain people are really enthused about certain things. I’m thinking of [WTM founding member] Tony Gowing, because he’s really, really into it and his explanation of everything is very solid and very inspiring in actuality. Yes. Now, if you can get yourself going and get on the ‘Sunshine Highway’, that kind of life would be quite wonderful! [See Freedom Essay 15 on ‘How understanding the human condition can immediately transform your and every other human’s life and save the world’.] Everybody would be compassionate. Everybody would be helpful. Everybody would be not divisive, as we are now in our own particular world at this particular time unfortunately, but things would be much more harmonious and things would people would get along much better with each other. And I’m talking about countries, races, all of those kind of things.

The reason I’d like to open a WTM Centre in Canada is right now I do have time and I thought what way could I actually help the WTM actually with its expansion, because we have one WTM Centre over in, I don’t know if it’s in Vancouver, but it’s in BC. We have about three down in the east around, you know, Ottawa, Toronto, that kind of thing, but there’s really none in our area, we’re on the prairies, and so I thought it would be quite a good thing for people on the prairies to actually be able to access the WTM if there is one in Edmonton. And if anybody is interested, please contact me, I’d love to have a conversation with you or respond to you if you have any questions about the WTM. If I don’t know them, I’ll find somebody that really does because I am in touch with people like [WTM founding member] Tony Miall and some of the other original members, and we can certainly get answers for you. So I’m very pleased to have that happen.