Video & Transcript of Sanjoy Pal,
WTM Kolkata Centre

 

(To learn more about Sanjoy Pal, see www.wtmkolkata.com)

 

 

Hello and welcome to the WTM Centre in Kolkata, India. I am thrilled with the opportunity to represent the World Transformation Movement in Kolkata and share Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith’s paradigm-shifting insights into the true nature of us humans.

My name is Sanjoy Pal, and I grew up and lived in West Bengal for a long time. My present home is in Canada, and I visit India with my family and am well-connected with our extended families, friends, and the city of Kolkata. I am an architect by profession and got my bachelor’s degree from Bengal Engineering College, Shibpur, which is now the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology. As an architect I have been working for a little over 30 years and have worked in Kolkata, New Delhi, Muscat, Bahrain, Dubai, and at present as a Senior Project Architect in Toronto, Canada. Working in different parts of the world and with fellow humans of various backgrounds have enriched my experience.

As we all know and I believe you do too, we humans are still not able to reach a consensus on why we are the way we are, and whether we are good or bad or evil, or a mix, and is there a real answer to this? Or are we biologically destined to doom due to our divisive behaviour, selfishness, aggression and violence despite our wonderful mental skills, scientific achievements, creativity, and great acts of kindness.

My feeling about humans was that all are fundamentally good and not that different from one another, but there is also a darker side of the human mind, the reason of which nobody could explain convincingly. So I was confused and had doubts, and a bad feeling of dissatisfaction would engulf me looking at many bad things happening around the world every day. Becoming a fortunate parent of two wonderful children accelerated my urge to know more about the fundamental nature of humans.

Growing up in West Bengal, the works of film director and author Satyajit Ray was a great source of inspiration for me. Satyajit Ray’s characters reflected his conviction and belief that while man is conditioned by his surroundings, he must break free from that conditioning and transform towards a better state and fulfill our human potential. Ray asserted that the light of civilisation will come neither from the West nor from the East but from the depth of the human heart. My other sources of inspiration are Gautama Buddha, Charles Darwin, Aldous Huxley, and J. Krishnamurti. I have great respect for their insightful teachings and all of them recognised the conflicted nature of humans, but unfortunately they also could not explain convincingly the root cause of our conflicted nature and how to solve it or break free.

So, no matter how much I learned from these inspirational sources as well as others, the puzzle of all puzzles, the fundamental nature of humans, eluded me—until I stumbled on THE Interview of Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith. Jeremy’s interview was amazing and astonishingly insightful, as all the missing pieces of the great jigsaw puzzle of human nature fell into their proper places, just like connecting all the dots and providing the solution. In a nutshell, all humans are fundamentally good and not bad or evil according to the non-abstract biological explanation of Jeremy Griffith which is based on evidence and scientific first principle [see Video/​Freedom Essay 3: THE Explanation].

Watching THE Interview inspired me a lot and I explored the works of Jeremy through the WTM website [at HumanCondition.com] and his book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, and here is my copy.

Jeremy’s key revelation or insight is just brilliant but easy to grasp. To quote from Jeremy, “Like all living creatures, our species must once have been instinctively controlled, but then we evolved a conscious mind capable of understanding cause and effect. And from that moment on, our conscious mind has been in a wrestling match with our original instinctive orientations for the control of our lives. And it is this conflict between our instinct and our conscious thinking mind that is the cause of our human condition”, unquote. So, the start of our human condition or upset state of mind goes back to about two million years ago with the emergence of full consciousness in our first human ancestor Homo habilis. The instinct vs intellect conflict is wonderfully explained by Jeremy through the metaphorical story of a migratory bird he named Adam Stork. Please note that the instinct is our moral instinct or moral compass which is gene-based learning that gives genetic orientation to our species, and intellect is our conscious thinking mind, which is a nerve-based system that operates by understanding cause and effect. So, for two million years this upset state of mind has continuously increased and distanced our conscious thinking mind from our moral compass and that impacted our behaviour negatively. Although the conflicted or upset state of mind is nobody’s fault, as it manifested through a natural and biological process which we could not understand or explain for two million years, we humans have suffered and heroically endured the journey. The instinct vs intellect conflict is also recognised in most mythologies, religions, philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry as the self or consciousness being divided. For example, the Bible story of Adam and Eve, the Upanishad story of the two birds Jiva and Atman in ‘Tree of Life’, and the native American parable of the ‘The Story of Two Wolves’, one evil and the other good, both fighting inside every person and the wolf that gets more nourishment, wins the battle.

I also need to share this with you, as I literally had a goosebump moment of awe and excitement when Jeremy was explaining in THE Interview the significance of our ape ancestor mother’s nurturing of her offspring. Although maternalism is a selfish, genetic trait, Jeremy provides the all-important insight; “from the infant’s perspective maternalism does have the appearance of being selfless. From the infant’s perspective, it is being treated unconditionally selflessly—the mother is giving her offspring food, warmth, shelter, support and protection for apparently nothing in return. So it follows that if the infant can remain in infancy for an extended period and be treated with a lot of seemingly altruistic love, it will be indoctrinated with that selfless love and grow up to behave accordingly. So selfish maternalism can train an infant in altruistic selflessness” (see paragraph 84 of THE Interview), unquote. This is simply amazing and blew my mind. And for our upright and hands-free ape ancestors this nurturing process was going on for almost 10–12 million years. One of Jeremy’s profound insights into the human condition is that it was our ape ancestors’ nurturing of their infants that created our species’ selfless instinctive moral self or ‘soul’ through this ‘love-indoctrination’ process of nurturing. [See Freedom Essay 21 on the origins of our all-loving, unconditionally selfless, cooperative moral conscience.] Living evidence is the primate species bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees, who live in the rainforests south of the Congo River in Africa, and I first learned about bonobos from Jeremy in THE Interview. Emerging science suggests that humans are closer to these highly intelligent, peaceful and extremely nurturing bonobos in genetic makeup and genetic orientation than the common chimpanzees. Bonobos’ unconditional loving cooperative bonding with one another is evidence of our human species’ original unconditional loving cooperative selfless instincts.

Please note that the key unlocking insights of Jeremy are the instinct vs intellect conflict, and the nurturing of our ape ancestor’s offspring and Jeremy convincingly presents how, why, when and where this happened in our evolutionary past giving rise to the human condition. Jeremy’s insight shows why ‘Survival of the Fittest’ is incorrect and in fact it was not Darwin’s words but invented by Herbert Spencer. It was a total misapplication on human society by misrepresenting Darwin’s accurate idea of ‘Natural Selection’. ‘Survival of the Fittest’ is like a myth and, as Jeremy explains [in Video/​Freedom Essay 2], it is a convenient excuse (until we had the truthful defence of our aggressive behaviour) which only pushes for ruthless competition, egocentricity, divisive behaviour, selfishness, aggression, and violence. Jeremy clarifies in his explanation that the involvement of our species’ fully conscious thinking mind in our daily affairs and self-management demonstrates that there is a psychological dimension to our behaviour; that we do not suffer from a genetic-opportunism-driven ‘ANIMAL CONDITION’, but a conscious-mind-based, psychologically troubled ‘HUMAN CONDITION’. This has caused widespread problems of poverty, over-population, inequality, dysfunctional families, mental health issues, divisive politics, hatred, anger, depression, human conflict, inadequate nurturing of infants, alienation, etc., etc. Now we urgently need to fix the cause of the problems at its source, which is our ‘HUMAN CONDITION’ or our collective psychosis. And Jeremy brings the wonderful news, since our condition is a psychosis, it can be solved with healing ‘UNDERSTANDING’.

Thankfully with biologist Jeremy Griffith’s decades of research and holistic scientific explanation, the human condition is finally solved, and ‘UNDERSTANDING’ is the medicine we all need that can finally heal, harmonise, and clear up all misunderstanding and confusion about ourselves and others. This would lead to reconciliation of races and religions, left and right in politics, old and young, men and women, etc., etc., and the proper nurturing of our future generations will end our psychologically troubled human condition. Jeremy convincingly resolves that “ALL HUMANS ARE EQUALLY GOOD, SPECIAL AND WONDERFUL”. Now we can transform and shift our attitude towards cooperation and integration, not based on pressure or dogmatic propaganda, but through conscious understanding and create a whole new world full of integrative meaning of existence for all.

The WTM website is full of insightful information and brain-food based on biology and holistic science that synthesises and reconciles many disciplines. We invite and encourage you to learn more about this breakthrough explanation that will transform your life, and the life of every other human, just like the rising sun rejecting darkness and emerging with infinite light for freedom from the human condition. Please watch THE Interview and contact our WTM Centre if you have any questions and if you see the importance of this work as I do, please help share these world-saving ideas and explanations with your fellow humans. Thank you, Namaskar!