4. ABOUT THE TRANSFORMED STATE

WTM FAQ 4.6  What happens to ego now that we have the reconciling understanding of the human condition, is ego going to be obsoleted?

Jeremy Griffith’s response:

As I explain in many of my publications, with the emergence of the upsetting battle of the human condition to defy our dictatorial instincts, our intellect or ‘ego’ (which is just another word for the intellect since the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘ego’ as ‘the conscious thinking self’ (5th edn, 1964)) became ‘centred’ or focused on the need to justify itself—selfishly preoccupied aggressively competing for opportunities to prove it is good and not bad, to validate its worth, to get a ‘win’; to essentially eke out any positive reinforcement that would bring it some relief from criticism and sense of worth.

In summary, I said that our conscious mind’s upset condition was of becoming angry, egocentric and alienated. So we became ‘ego-centric’ when we became insecure about our corrupted condition. It follows that when we find reconciling understanding of our corrupted condition we will no longer be insecure about our corrupted condition and will therefore no longer be egocentric.

So ego-centricity will go, but, importantly, that doesn’t mean we won’t have a healthy ego. In paragraph 723 of FREEDOM, I wrote that “‘Early Happy, Innocent Childhood’ encompasses the time when the intellect becomes sufficiently able to understand the relationship between cause and effect to start actively experimenting—‘playing’—with the conscious power to self-manage and self-adjust. At this stage we are still, as it were, holding onto our mother’s apron strings with one hand while carrying out short experiments in conscious self-management with the other; we are still depending on our instinctive nurtured orientations to love for the overall management of our life. In the case of humans today, it is the ‘Look at me, Daddy, I can jump puddles’ stage where reinforcing admiration from parents of the emerging conscious ability to manage events is so important.”

Drawing by Jeremy Griffith © 2006-2013 Fedmex Pty Ltd

Yes, it’s natural for our conscious thinking mind to marvel in its powers to manage events through time, and yes, it’s healthy for us to seek admiration and reinforcement for those achievements in self-management—because that’s how our sense of self-worth matures. But under the stress of the human condition what has all too often happened is that we didn’t receive that healthy reinforcement and as a result we became insecure, uncertain about our self-worth, and as a result we became excessively needing of reinforcement; we became egocentric (see my book Therapy For The Human Condition for an explanation of how children are affected by childhood hurts). This egocentricity especially arose after Resignation when we needed extra reinforcement to counter our shame for having become corrupted in soul. So egocentricity is an aspect of an extremely soul-corrupted, insecure condition, and with the arrival of the redeeming, reconciling and healing explanation of the human condition that insecurity goes, so egocentricity goes, but not ego.

Drawing by Jeremy Griffith © 2011-2022 Fedmex Pty Ltd

I might mention that while the human race is adapting to the arrival of understanding of the human condition humans will still variously be sufferers of the human condition; they will still be variously angry, egocentric and alienated. As explained and emphasised in chapter 9 of FREEDOM, this still-to-be-healed upset condition can be transcended by adopting the Transformed Way of Living.

We can, and must if we are to save the human race, now own both the positive and negative aspects of our condition

[This aspect is also included in WTM FAQ 4.1.]

Importantly, part of this Transformed Way of Living involves being honest about the soul-corrupted condition. Being able to finally understand and defend our corrupted condition, understand the good reason for what used to be called our ‘badness’ or ‘evil’, enables us to own and acknowledge our corrupted condition. We can now understand that the situation is two sided; everyone is equally good, worthwhile and wonderful but everyone is variously corrupted. There is a downside with the upside that we now can acknowledge—and must acknowledge if we are to rehabilitate and save the human race from terminal alienation and extinction.

As I said, this aspect of finally being able to own our corrupted condition, our ability to be honest about it, is, as emphasised in chapter 9, a critical part of taking up the Transformed Way of Living.

To provide a clear and significant example of this need for honesty now. In many of my presentations, such as in FREEDOM and in Freedom Essay 40, and especially in my book Human History Before And After ‘The Great Flood’ Of Resignation (which will be published in 2024), I emphasise the critically important work that mechanistic science has done finding the details about the workings of our world, particularly the differences in the way genes and nerves process information, that make explanation of the human condition possible. But, I also emphasise how extremely dishonest human-condition-avoiding, mechanistic scientists have been, which they have not been acknowledging at all. Indeed, they have promenaded around as if they’re in the possession of truth and rigorously established insight, when the opposite is the situation. In Freedom Essay 40 I included the below illustration of this delusion and haughtiness, and wherever I have talked about this delusion and imagined authority I have mentioned Christ’s human-condition-confronting-not-avoiding, truthful description of the intellectual-not-instinctual academic teachers of his day. In paragraph 611 of FREEDOM I quote Christ saying, ‘Beware of the teachers of the law. They like to walk round in flowing robes and love to be greeted in the market-places and have the most important seats…​and the places of honour’ (Luke 20:46). So, denial-practising academics want and deserve recognition for their contribution to humanity’s search for knowledge, but now that we can understand the human condition they also have to own the fact that they’ve been killing the truth, blocking access to it with their extremely dishonest denial of our 2-million-year corrupted condition. As Christ also truthfully said, ‘Woe to you experts in the law, because you [your dishonesty] have taken away the key to knowledge’ (Luke 11:52), you have been ‘blind fools’, ‘blind guides’, ‘hypocrites [to not acknowledge that]’, ‘snakes’, a ‘brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned’ (Matt. 23:17-33).

So understanding of the human condition ends a one-sided view of ourselves, such as academics wanting to promenade around, full of conviction of their own brilliance. Basically, the old one-sided ‘I want and deserve to be a hero’, ‘I want to ‘walk around in flowing robes’’, is ended by a fair and balanced and true understanding of ourselves, which is that we are all equally good but variously upset. Everyone has to own their dark side as well as their glory side, otherwise they are not living in the new human-condition-understood world and are merely determinedly staying in the old egocentric, ‘I’m a legend’, power-fame-fortune-and-glory-seeking world. We live in support of the truth now, that is our focus now, not on maintaining all manner of obsoleted shallow, artificial and superficial ways of validating ourselves. We live for a true, genuinely satisfying world, not for the old false, effectively dead world.

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For further explanation and illustration of the Transformed State, visit our Transformation page; as mentioned, we also recommend chapter 9 of FREEDOM.