Video & Transcript of Linda MacCarthy’s Commendation of FREEDOM as the gift that will end desolation amongst young people and bring reconciling peace to us all
(To learn more about Linda MacCarthy, founder of the WTM Dublin Centre,
visit www.wtmdublin.com)
My name is Linda MacCarthy and I live in Dublin Ireland, and I am delighted to have this opportunity to speak to people about Jeremy Griffith’s wonderful book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition.
This book [FREEDOM] to me is one of the most exciting discoveries I have come across on my inner journey, and I can only really reiterate what Professor Harry Prosen said about this book. He said, ‘I have no hesitation’ (and I think, “Yes, this is true!”), ‘I have no hesitation in saying this is the Holy Grail’. This is the Holy Grail of understanding that we have all been searching for, and now we can be reconciled within ourselves, and see ourselves as being innocent, the heroes. And when I say ‘heroes’, I mean for young men getting out of bed in the morning and suffering as they do with all the trauma that is within them—they are heroes for getting up out of bed and starting the day in this chaotic crazy world that we live in. And now this book is giving us the gift to say to other people, “I know what you are suffering; I have been there, and we can get out of there together; we can realise and be reconciled together.”
I am very upset and concerned about younger generations; from people as young as 13, 14, 15 onwards. And to see such desolation within human beings and the struggling and the despair makes me feel that there has to be something, there has to be some understanding where we can acknowledge and validate; we can say to somebody, “I know, I have been there”, because I have been there: I know what it’s like to suffer in that way.
[The great Scottish psychiatrist] R.D. Laing has said that the most obvious thing about the human condition is that we are invisible to each other—and to see a struggling soul, a struggling human being, and to know that whatever is going on inside them, all this turbulence and turmoil, is invisible to us—but we can know that there is a reason for it. And we can help them to find a way out of that chaos in their lives.
I studied philosophy and sociology. I had two or three specifically wonderful lecturers there, but I found that it was lacking for me, that there was a lack of some kind of total overarching sense of philosophy and sociology, and that would be an interpretation of what it is to be a human being in the totality of the human-life world.
As Jeremy says, this book is not about ideology. It’s not about religion—it is in a certain perspective—but it’s not dogma; it’s not doctrine; it’s not religion; it’s not ideology; it’s not the evasive mechanistic science that reduces everything. This book allows us to have the capacity to comprehend the wholeness, the holistic sense of our being. And that’s what Jeremy Griffith’s work does, and I think it’s so powerfully important to recognise that.
You feel in your heart and soul that you’ve only been given piecemeal explanations, and all these partial understandings don’t cohere. Coherence and reconciliation is of paramount importance to me, and this is where I think the book brings all that together; and it’s accessible and it’s understandable and it’s scientific and it’s just everything I hoped for.
I’m so thankful to the World Transformation Movement for making this all possible. With Jeremy Griffith’s work we can make sense of the life-world. Well, hallelujah, hallelujah!
And being Irish, I think the Irish have a certain reticence and they hold back. And whereas I feel within myself, I feel this surge of excitement, and this surge of being overwhelmed; and I’m trying to contain it at the same time! So it’s difficult for me, because I do have that reticence. And so it’s very hard for me sometimes to express the exuberance that I feel. But I do feel an ebullience of joy—an ebullience of joy!
