Draft of first chapters of

Therapy For The

Human Condition

Jeremy Griffith

Please Note (Dec. 2022): Since the WTM mentioned Jeremy is

writing a book about the therapy for the human condition there
have been so many people asking for it that we decided to make
available on our website this draft of chapter 1 and the first half of
chapter 2, as they are virtually completed. As more of the book is
finished, more is being added.
Therapy For The Human Condition by Jeremy Griffith
Pre-publication version 1 published in 2022, by WTM Publishing and Communications Pty Ltd
(ACN 103 136 778) (www.wtmpublishing.com).

All enquiries to:

WORLD TRANSFORMATION MOVEMENT
®

Email: info@worldtransformation.com
Website: www.humancondition.com ​or ​www.worldtransformation.com

The World Transformation Movement (WTM) is a global not-for-profit movement represented by WTM
charities and centres around the world.

ISBN 978-1-74129-082-0

CIP – Psychology, Biology, Philosophy, Health

COPYRIGHT NOTICE
This booklet is protected by Australian copyright laws and international copyright treaty provisions. All
rights are reserved. You may download, copy or distribute this booklet for your personal, non-commercial
use provided that you do not edit, add to or otherwise modify the booklet and that you keep intact all
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Therapy For The Human Condition copyright © Fedmex Pty Ltd (ACN 096 099 286) 2022. The moral rights
of the author Jeremy Griffith is asserted.

Cover: Cringing in Terror (c.1794-96) and Albion Arose (c.1794-96) by William Blake; coloured impression
of Albion Arose by Carol Marando. Design by Jeremy Griffith and Tess Watson.

The drawings by Jeremy Griffith, copyright © Fedmex Pty Ltd (ACN 096 099 286) 1991-2022.

Trade marks: WORLD TRANSFORMATION MOVEMENT, WTM, and the arms-raised man before the
rising sun logo, are registered trade marks of Fedmex Pty Ltd (ACN 096 099 286).
 Contents (as of Dec. 2022)
PAGE

Background ...................................................................... 6

Chapter 1 The structure of this book. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

1.1. Readers will need to be familiar with the main concepts in FREEDOM. . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.2 Why did this book need to be written, and how is it structured?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.3 Summarising The Main Therapy that understanding of the human condition
makes possible. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.4 Summary of The Therapy For Childhood Hurts that plague our adult lives. . . . . . . . 12
1.5 Summary of The Transformed Way Of Living. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Chapter 2 Summary of the contents of Therapy For The Human Condition.. . . . . . . . . . 17

2.1 The desperate need for therapy for the human condition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.2 What exactly is the human condition? And why have humans been so fearful
of it? And why do most people suffer from a ‘Deaf Effect’ when they try to read
or listen to discussion of the human condition? And why can analysis of the
human condition cause an extremely angry response?.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.3 While denial of our corrupted condition has been necessary, the practice is
threatening to trap humanity in a state of human-race-destroying permanent
darkness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2.4 The honest and dishonest paths of thinking.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.5 The truthful, ‘look under the bonnet’, not-hiding-in-Plato’s-dark-cave,
effective therapy path. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.6 Since the human race once lived in an innocent, loving state, children are
born instinctively expecting to encounter such a world, which means the
psychological consequences of not encountering it are immense. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

To be continued…
 Background
Jeremy Griffith is an Australian biologist who has dedicated his life to bringing
redeeming and psychologically healing biological understanding to the dilemma of
the human condition—which is the underlying issue in all human life of our species’
extraordinary capacity for what has been called ‘good’ and ‘evil’.
Jeremy has published nine books on the human condition, including:
— Beyond The Human Condition (1991), his widely acclaimed second book;
— A Species In Denial (2003), an Australasian bestseller;
— FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition (2016), his definitive treatise;
— THE Interview (2020), the transcript of acclaimed British actor and broadcaster
Craig Conway’s world-changing and world-saving interview with Jeremy about
his book FREEDOM;
— Death by Dogma: The biological reason why the Left is leading us to extinction,
and the solution (2021), which presents the biological reason why Critical
Theory threatens to destroy the human race; and
— The Great Guilt that causes the Deaf Effect (2022), which describes how lifting
the great burden of guilt from the human race initially causes a ‘Deaf Effect’
difficulty in taking or ‘hearing’ what’s being presented.
— The Shock Of Change that understanding the human condition brings (2022),
which addresses how to manage the shock of change that inevitably occurs when
the redeeming understanding of our corrupted condition arrives.
This book, Therapy For The Human Condition, is about the therapy that is desperately
needed to rehabilitate the human race from our psychologically upset state or condition,
elaborating on what is presented in FREEDOM.
Jeremy’s work has attracted the support of such eminent scientists as the former
President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association Professor Harry Prosen, Australia’s
Templeton Prize-winning biologist Professor Charles Birch, the Former President of the
Primate Society of Great Britain Dr David Chivers, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Stephen
Hawking, as well as other distinguished thinkers such as the pre-eminent philosopher Sir
Laurens van der Post.
Jeremy is the founder and a patron of the World Transformation Movement (WTM)—
see www.humancondition.com.
 Chapter 1
The structure of this book

Please Note (Dec. 2022): Since the WTM mentioned Jeremy is writing a book about
the therapy for the human condition there have been so many people asking for it that we
decided to make available on our website this draft of chapter 1 and the first half of chapter
2, as they are virtually completed. As more of the book is finished, more is being added.

1.1 Readers will need to be familiar with the main concepts in FREEDOM
The focus of this book is on the therapy that is desperately needed to rehabilitate
the human race from our psychologically upset state or condition. While it does contain
summaries of the key explanations that make this therapy possible, it is recommended that
readers have already at least watched/​read THE Interview I did with Craig Conway, and
ideally have also read my book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition (both of
which are freely available at www.HumanCondition.com), so that you have a grounding of
understanding of those key explanations.
Those key explanations you need to be familiar with, and where summaries of them
appear in this book, are as follows:
1) the ‘instinct v intellect’ explanation of the human condition (summary in
paragraphs XX-XX);
2) the Negative Entropy-driven integrative, unconditionally selfless and loving
meaning of existence (summary in pars XX-XX);
3) the nurtured origins of our cooperative, selfless and loving moral instinctive self or
soul (summary in pars XX-XX);
4) how truthful, selflessness-is-meaningful, effective thinking allowed us humans to
become fully conscious (summary in pars XX-XX).

1.2 Why did this book need to be written, and how is it structured?
It might be asked why this book, Therapy For The Human Condition, is needed since
what is contained in my main book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition has
supposedly, according to its title, presented what is needed for the human race to become
psychologically free of the human condition.
FREEDOM does present the main explanations needed for the psychological
rehabilitation of the human race, however there are aspects of the explanations and their
therapeutic effects that warrant elaboration. Further, given the rapidly increasing levels
of psychological distress everywhere that are plunging the human race headlong towards
terminal psychosis and extinction, there is a particular need for this book that focuses on
how understanding the human condition therapises psychosis and neurosis.
8 Therapy for the Human Condition

FREEDOM does present the all-important human-condition-unlocking explanation

of all the psychologically upset anger, egocentricity and alienation that has been building
throughout humanity’s 2-million-year-long, immensely heroic journey from ignorance
to enlightenment—that is, from a situation of not understanding why we corrupted our
species’ original cooperative, selfless and loving instinctive self or soul, to finally now
having the psychologically redeeming, reconciling and healing explanation for why that
corruption occurred. So, there is sufficient explanation in FREEDOM for the psychological
rehabilitation of the human race to occur, however, it is clear that an elaboration would
be beneficial that focuses on how understanding the human condition is able to bring
therapeutic relief to the now extreme levels of psychosis and neurosis in the world. Indeed,
as mentioned, there are some aspects of the explanation and their therapeutic effects that
would particularly benefit from elaboration.
As to what those aspects are that would particularly benefit from elaboration, having
had to live in determined denial of the truth that our species once lived an innocent,
cooperative, selfless and loving state, it hasn’t been recognised that infants are born
instinctively expecting to encounter a cooperative, selfless and loving world. If our
ancestors were brutal savages, as we have been taught, then our instinctive expectations
would be of encountering a brutal and aggressive world, but our instinctive expectations
are actually of encountering a loving and gentle world. And since we can now admit that
truth, we are suddenly in a position to see how incredibly psychologically damaging it is
for infants to be born into a world that is horrifically angry, egocentric and alienated! It is
this aspect of how shocking it is for children to encounter our soul-dead, mad and crazed
world that particularly needs elaboration.
What will be explained is how that initial shock and hurt to children has often been so
damaging that its effects have been negatively affecting our whole lives—and how those
negative effects can be very effectively managed. Basically, the honesty that understanding
of the human condition makes possible finally allows for the real therapy of the human
race to occur!
So if someone was to fully digest what is presented in FREEDOM there is enough
redeeming explanation of all the main aspects of our corrupted human condition for that
person to achieve the complete psychological rehabilitation of their version of that corrupted
state. However, as will be talked more about later, such complete therapy would take so
much study and digestion of how those explanations dismantle all the psychological upsets
that occurred during that person’s life, that such complete therapy would not be realistic.
A person would be in deep therapy for years, and in any case, given the immense amount
of psychological relief everyone can gain relatively quickly and easily from understanding
the main upsets in human life, and given the urgent need now to spread this understanding
of the human condition, and to bring the human race back from the brink of destruction
everywhere we look, such complete therapy would be an obscene indulgence. The reality
is that the complete psychological rehabilitation of the human race will take a number of
generations, but present generations can gain sufficient therapy for their corrupted condition
from what is presented in FREEDOM and in this book to become operational enough to be
effective participants in the all-exciting, transformed new world that has opened up for the
human race now that we have the redeeming understanding of the human condition.
 1.3 The Main Therapy that understanding of the human condition makes possible 9

Yes, as will be briefly summarised shortly, and in more detail later in chapter XX
(and as is fully explained in chapter 9 of FREEDOM), what especially contributes to
this potential for everyone to joyously participate in this all-exciting, human-condition-
understood, psychologically-relieved-although-not-completely-psychologically-healed
new world is the adoption of the Transformed Way of Living where you live in support
of the redeeming understanding of our corrupted condition. As will be explained, this
Transformed Way of Living or State is a critical part of how the human race is now
transformed from having to live with the agony of the human condition to living a life that
is effectively free of that agony.
In summary, there are three important aspects to this Therapy For The Human
Condition book.
First, there is how being able to understand all the important aspects of our troubled
human condition that are presented in FREEDOM is the main therapy that the human
race has needed. This will be referred to as ‘The Main Therapy’. (See a summary next in
chapter 1.3.)
Secondly, there are the effects upon innocent children of being born into a massively
upset world, and how to manage those effects in our adult lives. This will be referred to as
‘The Therapy For Childhood Hurts’. (See a summary shortly in chapter 1.4.)
And thirdly, there is how the Transformed Way of Living enables everyone to fully
participate in a human-condition-free world even though their psychologically upset
condition is not fully ameliorated. This will be referred to as ‘The Transformed Way Of
Living’. (See a summary shortly in chapter 1.5.)
There are other important components of this book, such as a description of the
limitations of the existing human-condition-denying, superficial therapies, and how they
fit into the truthful, human-condition-confronting, real therapy that is now finally possible,
however these are the three main aspects of this book.

1.3 Summarising The Main Therapy that understanding of the human

condition makes possible
Firstly, of the four key explanations in FREEDOM that were listed in chapter 1.1, it
is the first and third explanations—of the redeeming ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation of
our corrupted human condition, and the nurturing explanation of our cooperative, selfless
and loving moral instinctive self or soul—that particularly enable the human race to be
rehabilitated or healed or therapised from its psychologically upset angry, egocentric
and alienated condition. In fact, as this book will endeavour to make very clear, these
two insights are so explanatory and relieving for our corrupted condition that they make
the process of psychologically rehabilitating the human race reasonably straightforward,
obvious and easy. Once a person overcomes the subconscious fear that almost everyone
initially suffers from when confronted with the previously unexplained, and thus
previously unbearably depressing, issue of our species’ and of their own corrupted
condition, the explanations in FREEDOM bring such rapid healing relief to every aspect of
human existence that, as Darlene, a member of our WTM Facebook Group, excitedly put
it, ‘this information has catapulted us into warp speed! LOL! Woohoo!’ (3 Feb. 2023)!
10 Therapy for the Human Condition

Basically, with these two insights, the whole psychological journey of our species,
which we are individually the products of, can finally be fully understood—it can all be
made compassionate, loving, healing sense of! With the redeeming understanding of what
actually happened to our species and to us individually, all the misunderstandings and
grievances and heartaches and hurts and feelings of doubt about the human race’s and our
own worth and meaning can end. In particular, having found the redeeming explanation
for why we humans corrupted our species’ original cooperative, selfless and loving
existence, all the upset angry, egocentric and alienated defensive behaviours that resulted
from not having that explanation can be let go. Compassionate, psychologically relieving
understanding of our species’ corrupted condition, and, as a result of that, of our own
corrupted condition, comes to the human race. As Professor Harry Prosen, a psychiatrist
with almost 60 years’ experience (including chairing two departments of psychiatry and
serving as president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association), said about FREEDOM in
his Introduction to it: ‘I have no doubt this biological explanation of the human condition is the
holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race.’ So yes,
with the psychosis-addressing-and-solving, instinct vs intellect, fully accountable and
understandable, biological explanation of our corrupted human condition, together with
the truth of the nurtured origins of our moral instincts, that are presented in FREEDOM,
the ‘psychological rehabilitation of the human race’ can now at last take place.
Once someone breaks through the great steel-like casing of denial that has been
imprisoning the human race, then that person is finally free to plunder the truth of every
aspect of human existence, which is what I do in FREEDOM. I’m not clever to find all
these answers about human existence, just sheltered enough from all the upset in the world
during my infancy and childhood to be able to get inside the human condition and from
there tell everyone all the reasonably obvious truths that can be found there.
There were many earlier versions of FREEDOM, going right back to my first book
in 1988, Free: The End of the Human Condition, and in each version I fleshed out the
explanation of the human condition more until I produced the version that all my honest
thinking tells me covers all the main aspects of our distressed condition, which is my
definitive 2016 treatise in FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition (which is a
similar title to my first book).
So FREEDOM is where the all-important, human-race-redeeming-and-healing,
truthful, makes-sense-of-everything, description of our species’ journey from ignorance to
enlightenment is presented. While the concepts in FREEDOM that particularly relate to our
psychologically distressed lives are summarised in subsequent chapters of this book, the
following is a stripped-down summary of the sequence of FREEDOM’s main insights.
We can now understand that our distant ape ancestors were able to develop a
completely cooperative and loving existence through nurturing, as the bonobo species of
ape (pan paniscus) are currently in the process of doing—and then, some 2 million years
ago, this nurtured selflessness allowed us to develop a truthful, selflessness-recognising,
effective-thinking conscious brain—then this nerve-based conscious brain’s ability to
understand the relationship of events that occur through time meant it could take over
management of our lives from our gene-based, naturally-selected, orientating-but-not-
understanding instincts—a take-over that our dictatorial instincts in effect resisted and
condemned—condemnation we, our conscious thinking mind, didn’t feel was deserved,
 1.3 The Main Therapy that understanding of the human condition makes possible 11

but lacking the explanation for why it wasn’t deserved, all we could do was retaliate
against the condemnation, find ways to demonstrate that we were good and not bad, and
mentally block out or repress the condemnation—we became upset sufferers of the angry,
egocentric and alienated ‘human condition’—which was a psychologically upset state we
have had to endure while we searched for the redeeming ‘instinct vs intellect’ explanation
of that corrupted condition—which we have now found, the result of which is that all our
defensive, upset, angry egocentric and alienated ways of coping are no longer needed and
can subside, and, over a few generations, disappear—the immense insecure shame and
guilt we humans have felt for having become corrupted can end and the whole human race
can be psychologically rehabilitated and become secure, sane and happy!
And the following is a summary of the actual subjects that FREEDOM presents the
redeeming, reconciling and healing biological explanation of. It explains the human
condition, the reason humans are competitive, aggressive and selfish when the ideals
are to be cooperative, loving and selfless; it also explains and ends the need for humans’
alienated state; explains and makes possible the end of loneliness and depression;
explains and ends the need for egocentricity; explains the origin of war and aggression
amongst humans and brings an end to the cause of war and aggression; explains and
ends the need for materialism; explains and ends the need for a superficial, artificial, self-
distracting way of living; explains biologically how humans acquired our altruistic ‘soul’
and its cooperation-demanding ‘conscience’; describes and explains the psychological
act of Resignation; explains the stages of maturation of infancy, childhood, adolescence
and adulthood that both humanity and humans individually go through; explains the
importance of nurturing in our species’ development and in our individual lives; explains
the consequences on children of mothers’ inability to nurture; explains the impact of
egocentric fathers on children; explains the Negative Entropy-driven integrative meaning
of life; explains why ‘evolution’ is in fact the purposeful process of ordering matter;
explains the reasons for the limitations of mechanistic science; relates all the disciplines
of the sciences and the humanities; explains in biological terms how humans became
fully conscious and why other animals have not; explains why and when humans learnt to
walk upright, lost their body hair, developed language, left Africa, began tool use, began
hunting and meat-eating; reconciles science with religion; explains religion and renders
it fulfilled and obsolete, in the process explaining all manner of religious metaphysics,
including the concepts of God, the Trinity, prophets, the Virgin Mary, the resurrection,
miracles, Judgment Day, the Battle of Armageddon, the story of Noah’s Ark, after-life,
heaven and hell, good and evil; deciphers humanity’s legends and myths; explains and
reconciles the left and right wings of politics; ends the reason for prejudice and the cause
of inequality between individuals, sexes, ages, generations, races and cultures, in the
process reconciling the worlds of men and women, the young and the old, the innocent
and the corrupted; explains the pseudo idealism of the New Age, Peace, Green, Feminist,
Indigenous, Animal Rights, Multicultural, Politically Correct, Postmodern, Critical
Theory, ‘Woke’ Movements; explains sex, heterosexuality, homosexuality, love, beauty,
the attraction of youth, romance, rape, envy and lust; explains humour; explains human
sensitivity and creativity, especially art and music; explains away the main underlying
cause for human sickness; explains away the psychological basis of all psychological
disorders; explains near-death experiences; provides the means for the psychological
12 Therapy for the Human Condition

repair of the human race; saves the human race from self-destruction; brings peace to the
human situation, and so on. So that is comprehensive demystification, clarification and
redeeming, reconciling and healing therapy for all the main aspects of our deeply troubled
human condition!
This ability to gain therapeutic relief from understanding the main aspects of
our species’, and, as a result of it, our own, corrupted condition that are presented in
FREEDOM is marvellously illustrated by the immense amount of psychological therapy
that many, many people are gaining. If you look at the ‘daily ecstatic responses’ slider
under THE Interview at the top of www.humancondition.com you will see the endless
comments the WTM receives about how relieving and healing being able to understand
the human condition is. As I write this, the following are three comments from a few days
ago: ‘The more I’m watching and reading, the more understanding I’m gaining’, and ‘Love this,
learning more and more’, and ‘Understanding the human condition makes me feel free and happy’.
And these are some more from today, 3 February 2023: ‘My attitude has changed, I’m not upset
with myself anymore, I’m free of guilt and full of love’, and ‘So wonderful to understand yourself
and the whole world’, and ‘Once you get your head around it, it’s light bulb time!’, and ‘I always
knew that one day understanding of ourselves would save us from ourselves’. The Akritidis family
from WTM Melbourne provide a marvellous example of how much therapeutic relief
can be derived from the understandings that are presented in FREEDOM and elaborated
upon in my other presentations. You can view videos of the Akritidis family talking
incredibly honestly and freely about their various versions of the human condition, and
about the fabulous healing effects they have gained from all the explanations, at www.
humancondition.com/transformation.

1.4 Summary of The Therapy For Childhood Hurts that plague our
adult lives
While there is sufficient explanation of the human condition in FREEDOM for the
therapy of the human race to occur, as has been mentioned, the aspect that can particularly
benefit from further explanation is of how the hurts, terrors and anxieties that we can
experience when we are young can plague our adult lives, and how even though they can
be extremely stubborn, there are therapeutic practices that can enable adults to be relieved
of them.
This Therapy For Childhood Hurts that plague our adult lives will be looked at in
detail later in chapter XX, but just to give some initial insight into what will be explained
there, the third key explanation that readers are asked to be familiar with in chapter 1.1 is
of the nurtured origins of our cooperative, selfless and loving moral instinctive self or soul.
This insight—that the redeeming explanation of our corrupted human condition finally
allows us to admit—is all-important in being able to understand how what happened in
our childhood has had such an immense influence on our lives. In fact, our childhood
hurts have been so immensely influential that they basically form our personality. As the
great South African author Olive Schreiner wrote, ‘The souls of little children are marvellously
delicate and tender things, and keep for ever the shadow that first falls on them…​The first six years
of our life make us; all that is added later is veneer’ (The Story of an African Farm, 1883, p.193 of 300).
Along with the overall explanation of our corrupted human condition, understanding how
 1.4 Summary of The Therapy For Childhood Hurts that plague our adult lives 13

damaging that corrupted world has been for the innocence of children is the key insight
that makes the real therapy of our psychologically distressed lives possible.
Now able to admit that nurturing created our species’ moral all-loving and all-
sensitive instinctive self or soul, we can realise and appreciate that we are born
instinctively expecting to encounter an unconditionally loving, happy and reassuring
world. Having only lived in an extreme psychologically upset state for a few hundred
thousand years, which is a very short amount of time for natural selection to produce
any significant change in our genetic makeup, we humans are born with very little
instinctive expectation of encountering an immensely psychologically upset existence.
It follows that it has been such an incredible shock for our innocent instinctive soul to
encounter an almost completely unloving, unhappy and traumatised world that it is no
wonder the human race has now become so extremely soul-hurt or psychotic and mind-
distressed or neurotic!
In fact, as will be emphasised when this is all explained more fully later, in the
absence of understanding children have been so prone to misunderstand the 2-million-year
psychologically upset, loveless, soul-obliterated situation they find themselves in that they
almost always blame themselves for the shortfall in love. Indeed, children have more often
than not concluded that the reason they are not encountering a loving world is because
they are an unlovable, bad person! Their souls are so trusting that they are in a world
where everyone is loving that they find themselves unable to avoid the conclusion that for
some reason they must be the aberration; they must be the ones causing the world to not
love them!
So devastating have these pains been that almost without exception children have
been left with no choice but to split themselves off from the terrible thoughts and feelings
and create an entirely false place to live in their minds!
The consequence of all this repression of hurt that occurred in our early formative
years when we were so sensitive to hurt, and so prone to misunderstanding hurt, is that a
whole world of pain has been pushed down into our subconscious mind and body, cut off
from our everyday conscious mind’s awareness.
Then, since this blocking out or repressing or burying of childhood hurt is never
completely successful for most people, especially with the levels of upset that generations
are experiencing today, the distressed, anxious, negative feelings and thoughts keep
bubbling up from our subconscious and expressing themselves throughout our lives.
Having not admitted how nurturing created our species’ moral instinctive expectations
of being unconditionally loved and how corrupted the human race now is, there has been
no real insight into, and thus understanding of, this source of the main mental health issues
troubling our species, and thus no effective therapy has been possible of those mental
health issues.
To give one quick illustration, having no understanding at all of what was happening
to cause her to suffer extreme anxiety attacks, the actress Jean Seberg ended up suiciding,
only able to say in her tragic suicide note, ‘Forgive me. I can no longer live with my nerves.’
As will be explained in chapter XX, the difference now with this full understanding
of the vulnerability of children, and where so much of the distress in our adult lives is
actually coming from, is that real, effective therapy and management of those childhood
upwellings can be achieved.
14 Therapy for the Human Condition

1.5 Summary of The Transformed Way Of Living

More will be explained about the Transformed Way of Living in chapter XX, but, as
has been mentioned, while we now have the psychologically relieving understanding of
our corrupted human condition that has been needed to rehabilitate the human race, the
complete psychological rehabilitation of the human race will naturally take a number of
generations. However, what is of immense importance, and is so spectacularly wonderful,
is that every human can immediately know that he or she is fundamentally good and not
bad, and that this knowledge puts each of us in a very powerful position because it means
we can legitimately decide not to live in accordance with whatever psychological upset
remains unhealed within us.
The logic behind making this decision is irrefutable: now that the great goal of the
whole human journey of conscious thought and enquiry is achieved and we have found
the redeeming understanding of our conflicted and distressed human condition, all the old
retaliatory, defensive and insecure behaviours of anger, egocentricity and alienation that
we had to employ to cope while we couldn’t defend ourselves with understanding are no
longer needed. They are obsoleted, brought to an end. In fact, with this knowledge of the
human condition now found, it would be an act of total irresponsibility, indeed madness,
to continue down that old, insecure, defensive and destructive road. The truth is, there is
nothing in the way now of every human taking up a magnificent, unburdened, human-
condition-free, transformed life!
And, gloriously, what happens when we give up our old way of living and take up
the new way of living that understanding of the human condition has made possible, is
we transition from a competitive and selfishly behaved individual to a cooperative and
selflessly behaved person, a truly integrative part of humanity. Even though we are not
yet free of the psychologically upset state of our own personal human condition, we can
immediately have a change of attitude and decide not to live out that upset state that
remains within us. The overall effect in our lives is that, despite our retention of some
of the upset state of the human condition, we are effectively free from its hold and its
influence, which is an absolutely fabulous transformation to have made in an instant—in
one simple decision!
You and every other human can, as it were, put the issue of all your upsets/​corruptions
in a ‘suitcase’, attach a label to it saying ‘Everything in here is now explained and
defended’, and simply leave that suitcase behind at the entrance to what we in the WTM
call the Sunshine Highway, and set out unencumbered by all those upset behaviours into a
new world that is effectively free of the human condition. (I explain how the Transformed
Way of Living is adopted in Video/​Freedom Essay 33.)
It should be emphasised that this is the real transformation of the human race, not
the pseudo idealistic, false start to a transformed world that the completely dishonest,
human-condition-avoiding, no-relieving-understanding-at-all-of-our-corrupted-condition
New Age, Politically Correct, Woke, Critical Theory, Great Reset advocates have so
dangerously been promoting—an extreme threat to our species’ survival that is fully
explained in my booklet Death by Dogma.
 1.5 Summary of The Transformed Way Of Living 15

As I wrote in paragraph 1166 of FREEDOM about this fabulous real transformation

of the human race that understanding of the human condition makes possible: “The
excitement and relief of being effectively free of the human condition—the joy and
happiness of being liberated from the burden of our insecurities, self-preoccupations and
devious strategising; the awesome meaning and power of finally being genuinely aligned
with the truth and actually participating in the magic true world; the wonderful empathy
and equality of goodness and fellowship that understanding of the human condition
now allows us to feel for our fellow humans; the freedom now to effectively focus on
repairing the world; and, above all, the radiant aliveness from the optimism that comes
with knowing our species’ march through hell has finally ended and that a human-
condition-free new world is coming—CAN NOW TRANSFORM EVERY HUMAN AND
THUS THE WORLD.”
------------------

That completes a brief description of the three main aspects of this book about the
Therapy For The Human Condition. As I have mentioned, there are other important
components in this book, such as the explanations and descriptions that will be given
of the main human-condition-avoiding, superficial therapies that humans have been
practising, and how these practices fit into the truthful, human-condition-confronting real
therapy that is now possible. This will be similar to the clarifying description I gave in
FREEDOM of all the main false, human-condition-avoiding biological theories, however,
unlike those human-condition-avoiding biological theories, some of the techniques
associated with the superficial, human-condition-avoiding therapies do have an application
in the real therapy that is now possible in the human-condition-confronted-and-explained
new world for humankind.
What follows is a summary of the contents of Therapy For The Human Condition.
 Chapter 2
Summary of the contents of
Therapy For The Human Condition
2.1 The desperate need for therapy for the human condition
What has been presented so far is a brief description of the structure of this book.
From here on, a summary of the contents of Therapy For The Human Condition
commences.
Our species’ psychologically distressed, ‘good and evil’-conflicted, so-called ‘human
condition’ is the underlying issue in all human affairs that had to be explained, understood
and healed for there to be a future for the human race. With every day bringing more
evidence of unbearable amounts of distress in human life, and of the devastation of our
planet from the effects of the now extreme levels of psychosis and neurosis in us humans,
finding the redeeming, reconciling and rehabilitating understanding of our psychologically
upset condition had become a matter of very great urgency.
Conflict between individuals, genders, ages, races, cultures and countries abounds.
There are wars, genocide, terrorism, mass displacement of peoples, starvation,
environmental devastation, unbridled greed, gross inequality, racial and gender oppression,
polarised politics, rampant corruption and other crimes, runaway diseases, family
breakdown, drug abuse, homelessness, and epidemic levels of anxiety, depression,
unhappiness and loneliness—all of which are being exacerbated by the immense, ever-
growing world population. Improved forms of management of our societies, such as
better laws, politics and economics—and better self-management, such as new ways of
disciplining and motivating ourselves, or improved ways of trying to at least superficially
therapise and even transcend our psychologically troubled human condition—have all
failed to end the march towards ever greater levels of distress, unhappiness, conflict,
devastation and destruction.
As the American psychotherapist Arthur Janov said about the dire straits of our
species’ predicament in the revised 1990 version of The Primal Scream, his famous book
therapising human psychosis and neurosis, ‘The world is having a nervous breakdown. People
are irritable, aggressive, tense, and anxious. Neurosis is on the march. It is galloping ahead at full
speed and no one seems to know what is going on or why. Above all, no one seems to know how to stop
this inexorable march to destruction. Year after year there is more illness, more suicide, more violence,
more alcoholism and drug addiction. The world is coming apart at the seams’ (The New Primal Scream,
1990, p.3 of 396).
(Please note, the underlining throughout this book, including within quotes, is my
emphasis.) And since that frightening passage was written over 30 years ago, the situation
now is that ‘the world is coming apart at the seams’ to such an extent that there is a growing
concern around the world that we are facing the end of human civilisation—that the
human race is in its death throws!
It is therefore of incalculable significance and beyond-all-imaginings relief that the
efforts of every human who has lived, but in particular of scientists, to make sense of our
existence, has finally, at the eleventh hour, led to the finding of the redeeming, reconciling
18 Therapy for the Human Condition

and psychologically healing ‘instinct vs intellect’, biological explanation of our species’

‘good and evil’-conflicted human condition that saves the human race from extinction!
As is explained in paragraphs XX-XX, science has explained how the gene-based and
nerve-based learning systems work, which has made it possible to understand that when
we humans developed an understanding-based, self-adjusting conscious mind some 2
million years ago, a battle unavoidably developed between it and our already established
non-understanding, dictatorial instincts. Basically, gene-based natural selection can
orientate a species, but the nerve-based conscious mind needs to understand the world to
operate, and therein lay the basis of a great clash. And the result of this conflict between
our intolerant, condemning, dictatorial instincts and our necessarily defiant intellect was
that we unavoidably became psychologically defensive, angry, alienated and egocentric—
which is the upset state we refer to as the human condition. But now that we can explain
and understand this conflict, all those insecure, defensive behaviours are obsoleted,
brought to an end, and we free ourselves from the human condition. Again, as Professor
Harry Prosen, a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, said about this
biological synthesis presented in FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, ‘I have no
doubt this biological explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for
the psychological rehabilitation of the human race.’
So this ability to understand ourselves is the ‘holy grail of insight’, the ultimate
breakthrough of breakthroughs! In Janov’s terms, FREEDOM finally enables us to explain
and understand ‘what is going on’ and ‘why’, and to ‘know how to stop this inexorable march to
destruction’, stop ‘the world…​coming apart at the seams’!!
Yes, without this redeeming insight into our psychologically insecure and upset
condition we were never going to be able to start loving ourselves, but with it found we
now can. As the following picture intimates, understanding of the human condition is the
key to our ‘psychological rehabilitation’—without it our mind was forever falling into deep
whirlpools of confusion, bewilderment, self-doubt, anxiety and depression.
Illustration by Matt Mahurin for 'Time', Nov. 29 1993

Illustration by Matt Mahurin for TIME, 29 Nov. 1993

 2.1 The desperate need for therapy for the human condition 19

I believe there is no better place to go to describe the courage of the whole human
race in accumulating the knowledge that would finally make the redeeming understanding
of our corrupted human condition possible than the words of that song of songs, The
Impossible Dream from the 1965 musical, Man of La Mancha. The human race has
completed its ‘glorious quest’; with our ‘last ounce of courage’ and ‘scorned and covered with
scars’ we have achieved the seemingly ‘impossible dream’ and reached the seemingly
‘unreachable star’ of beating the seemingly ‘unbeatable foe’ by righting the seemingly
‘unrightable wrong’ of having to ‘bear the unbearable sorrow’ (Joe Darion) of the condemnation
that we psychologically upset, angry, egocentric and alienated humans are dreadful,
worthless, evil monsters—by finding the ‘holy grail’ of the redeeming, reconciling and
psychologically rehabilitating explanation of our seemingly, but, as we are now finally
able to explain, not actually, despicable human condition!

Drawing by Jeremy Griffith © 2015 Fedmex Pty Ltd

Since we have finally, at the death knell, found the human race liberating and saving
redeeming understanding of our species’ seemingly deplorable, corrupted or ‘fallen’
human condition, it is appropriately therapeutic to consider why Miguel de Cervantes’s
1605 novel Don Quixote, upon which the musical Man of La Mancha is based, has been
voted ‘The Greatest Book of All Time’ by the world’s most acclaimed writers in a poll
arranged by the Nobel Institute. Well, Don Quixote is the story of an elderly man who gets
out of bed, re-names himself ‘Don Quixote of la Mancha’, dons an old suit of armour,
takes up an ancient shield and lance, mounts his skinny old horse, and calls on his loyal
but world-weary companion Sancho to join him on the most spectacular of adventures.
As I have depicted above, coming across a field of large windmills, the noble knight says,
‘Look yonder, friend Sancho, there are…​outrageous giants whom I intend to…​deprive…​of life…​
and the expiration of that cursed brood will be an acceptable service to Heaven’. And so the crazed
and hopeless adventure goes on, gloriously doomed battle after gloriously doomed battle.
But that has been the lot of every human for some 2 million years: hopeless battle after
hopeless battle, feeble beings charging at and trying to vanquish the ‘outrageous giant’
ignorance-of-the-fact-of-our-species’-fundamental-goodness! Wave after wave of quixotic
humans have thrown themselves at that ‘outrageous giant’ of ignorance for eons and eons,
as bit by tiny bit we accumulated the knowledge that finally made possible the redeeming
explanation of our seemingly destructive and evil human condition! Surely the most
amazing and heroic story ever told is our species’ story!
20 Therapy for the Human Condition

So we humans, the bravest of brave species, have had to ‘march into hell for a heavenly
cause’ (The Impossible Dream), suffer having to become psychologically upset, seemingly
evil, corrupted in soul and ‘fallen from grace’ until we found sufficient knowledge to
explain why we developed such a soul-destroyed, corrupted condition. We had to find the
answer to the greatest of all paradoxes and riddles of how could we humans possibly be
considered good when all the evidence seems to unequivocally indicate we are a deeply
flawed, bad species.
The magnificence of having finally lifted the proverbial ‘burden of guilt’ from the
human race, found the explanation for why we humans are good and not bad after all,
is that we can not only know that the whole human race is good and not bad, but that
while we each suffer from different amounts of this psychological upset as a result of our
particular encounter with the great battle humanity has been waging against ignorance,
each human is also fundamentally good, special and wonderful. The whole human race is
immensely, immensely good and heroic, and every human is an equally good, special and
wonderful hero. That is the truth that we can now understand from scientific, biological
first principles. As the title of FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition proclaims,
the whole human race is now free from the excruciating agony of our seemingly evil
human condition.
And most wonderful of all, what that redeeming breakthrough understanding means is
that everyone can now ‘march’ straight out of the ‘hell’ of the insecure, not-sure-if-we-are-
good-or-bad, human-condition-stricken state into a fabulously psychologically relieved
and transformed existence. And what is presented in FREEDOM, and is elaborated upon
in this book, explains how everyone can make this deeply, deeply longed-for glorious
transformation!

2.2 What exactly is the human condition? And why have humans been so
fearful of it? And why do most people suffer from a ‘Deaf Effect’ when
they try to read or listen to discussion of the human condition? And why
can analysis of the human condition cause an extremely angry response?

What exactly is the human condition?

It is not uncommon for people to think that the term ‘human condition’ refers to
the state of poverty and inequality and other practical hardships and imperfections in
human life, but such problems are only superficial manifestations and aspects of the
human condition. Much less superficial interpretations of what the term human condition
means are that it refers to ‘the riddle of why we humans are competitive and selfish not
cooperative and loving’, and ‘the issue of good and evil in our make-up’, and even ‘the
issue of why we are the way we are’. However, the human condition is actually a much,
much deeper issue than even these last interpretations.
As I explained in THE Interview and in all my other presentations, we humans once
lived in a nurtured-with-unconditional-love, cooperative, selfless and loving innocent
state, which bonobos are presently on the threshold of achieving. If we stand back and
think about this original cooperative, selfless and loving state and then think about how
competitive, selfish and aggressive we humans now are, the contrast between the two
 2.2 What exactly is the human condition? 21

states couldn’t be greater. And if we think about that extreme contrast and then think about
the situation we have been stuck in for some 2 million years where we haven’t been able to
explain our so-called ‘fall from grace’, the corruption of our original all-sensitive and all-
loving, innocent instinctive self or soul, then how deeply traumatised with guilt and shame
must we humans have been all that time! Certainly, as I will write much more about, we
learnt to block the horror of this situation out of our mind, but that has been the underlying
psychological predicament we humans have been enduring. So having had to live with this
insufferable, unbearably depressing guilt and shame for having destroyed the magic world
of our soul is what the human condition really is!

And why have humans been so fearful of it?

As I said about this horror situation in paragraphs 110-111 of THE Interview—to
appreciate how much upset exists in us humans now, imagine living for just one day
with the injustice of being condemned as bad, even evil, when you intuitively knew but
were unable to explain that you were actually the complete opposite of evil, namely truly
wonderful, good and meaningful—in fact not just good but the hero of the story of life
on Earth! You would be hurt to the core and furious, wouldn’t you! Now extrapolate
that experience over 2 million years and we can begin to appreciate just how much
volcanic frustration and anger must now exist within us humans! While we have learnt to
significantly restrain and conceal—‘civilise’ as we refer to it—the phenomenal amount of
upset within us, under the surface we all must be boiling with rage, and sometimes, when
our restraint can no longer find a way to contain it, that anger must express itself—hence
our capacity for shocking acts of cruelty, sadism, hate, murder and war. And no wonder we
have led such an evasive, denial-practising, lying, avoid-any-criticism, escapist, alienated,
superficial and artificial, greedy, egocentric, power, fame, fortune and glory-seeking
existence. We have had to smother ourselves with material glory while we lacked the
spiritual glory of compassionate understanding of ourselves.
The following are some examples of how excruciatingly depressing the issue of our
corrupted condition has been while we couldn’t explain it, and therefore why, generation
after generation, almost everyone during their early adolescence had no choice but to
resign themselves to living in determined denial of the unbearably depressing issue.
(This process of Resignation to living in denial of the human condition that almost all
adolescents have had to go through is summarised later in XX, and fully explained in
Freedom Essay 30, and also in chapter 2:2 of FREEDOM.)
This is a description of how the French philosopher and scientist René Descartes
felt when he confronted the horror of his, and the human race’s, corrupted condition: ‘So
serious are the doubts into which I have been thrown…​that I can neither put them out of my mind
nor see any way of resolving them. It feels as if I have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool
which tumbles me around so that I can neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the top’ (Second
Meditation, 1641; tr. J. Cottingham, 1984).
And this is another person’s description of what he experienced when he tried to
confront the human condition: ‘I felt the worst fear I have ever known. Fear doesn’t even go close to
expressing it. What do you suppose you do when you find the most fearful thing you’ll ever encounter
is yourself’ (see par. 1185 of FREEDOM). Yes, when in a rare moment of perfect clarity a person
sees the contrast between how all-sensitive and all-loving our species once was, which our
22 Therapy for the Human Condition

instinctive soul has the memory of, and how horrifically soul-destroyed virtually everyone
now is, the contrast is so great that, without the redeeming explanation for our corrupted
condition, its revelation has been ‘fearful[ly]’, unbearably, even suicidally depressing.
And this is the deadly accurate description psychoanalyst Carl Jung (who will be
talked more about shortly) gave of the ‘rare and shattering experience’ that can occur in
moments of clarity about a person’s seemingly ‘absolute evil’ condition while it wasn’t yet
explained: ‘When it [the shadow of our corrupted condition] appears…​it is quite within the bounds
of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering
experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil’ (Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self,
1959; tr. R. Hull, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 9/2, p.10).
This next honest description, from the great Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev,
recognises not only how difficult confronting the human condition has been, but also how
finding knowledge depends on confronting not avoiding the human condition: ‘Knowledge
requires great daring. It means victory over ancient, primeval terror…​it must also be said of knowledge
that it is bitter, and there is no escaping that bitterness…​Particularly bitter is moral knowledge, the
knowledge of good and evil. But the bitterness is due to the fallen state of the world…​There is a deadly
pain in the very distinction of good and evil, of the valuable and the worthless’ (The Destiny of Man, 1931;
tr. N. Duddington, 1960, pp.14-15 of 310). Yes, trying to confront the issue of our corrupted or ‘fallen’
condition without the explanation for it only left us with the ‘bitter’ ‘ancient, primeval terror’
that we humans have had to endure for some 2 million years of thinking we must be ‘evil’,
‘worthless’ monsters—and yet confronting it is what was ‘require[d]’ to find ‘knowledge’,
ultimately self-knowledge, understanding of our ‘good and evil’-stricken human condition.
So Berdyaev made the point that while virtually everyone has lived in fearful terror
of the human condition, ultimately it had to be confronted to be solved. And to do that
was going to require very rare individuals who were fortunate enough to have sufficiently
escaped encountering all the upset in the world during their upbringing to be uncorrupted
in soul enough to not be terrified by the issue of the human condition. As will be described
later in this summary, it is this ability to confront and think truthfully and thus effectively
about the human condition that the South African philosopher Sir Laurens van der Post
and I possessed, and so were able to find ‘the knowledge of good and evil’ explanation of the
human condition.
Yes, for virtually everyone, trying to confront the issue of our corrupted human
condition has been such an ‘ancient, primeval terror’ that, as the comedian Rod Quantock
said, ‘Thinking can get you into terrible downwards spirals of doubt’ (‘Sayings of the Week’, The Sydney
Morning Herald, 5 Jul. 1986). The Nobel Laureate Albert Camus wasn’t overstating the ‘deadly
pain’ either when he wrote that ‘Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined’ (The Myth of
Sisyphus, 1942); nor was another Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Bertrand Russell, when he
said, ‘Many people would sooner die than think’ (Antony Flew, Thinking About Thinking, 1975, p.5 of 127).
And nor was the equally acclaimed poet T.S. Eliot when he wrote that ‘human kind cannot
bear very much reality’ (Burnt Norton, 1936). The truth is the human race has been living in such
deep fear of the issue of our corrupted condition that virtually everyone has been living on
just the meniscus of existence, too afraid to look very deeply at all into the real nature of
human existence! Recognising this underlying fear of the human condition enables you to
see through our behaviour, see what is behind it, what is causing it—to such an extent, in
fact, that our behaviour becomes transparent!
 2.2 What exactly is the human condition? 23

And why do most people suffer from a ‘Deaf Effect’ when they try to read or
listen to discussion of the human condition? And why can analysis of the human
condition cause an extremely angry response?
What now needs to be pointed out, and this follows from what has been explained
about humans’ historic fear of the human condition, is that when the understanding of
our corrupted condition is finally found, as it now has been, even though it is redeeming,
trying to read about or listen to discussion of that corrupted state is going to trigger
extreme subconscious fear in virtually everyone, and this fear will express itself by their
mind not allowing what is being talked about to be tolerated. The blocks they have been
employing to protect themselves from confronting the human condition will come into
play and their mind won’t allow what is being talked about to be taken in and absorbed.
Then, not aware that their mind is blocking out what is being discussed (we can’t block
something out and know we’re blocking it out or we wouldn’t be blocking it out), they
will blame the quality of the presentation for the difficulty they are having reading or
listening to the presentation. And that is what happens: people typically say that what is
being presented is ‘impenetrably dense’, ‘confusingly worded and long-winded’, ‘unnecessarily
repetitive’, ‘desperately needs editing’, and that it is ‘exceedingly boring and tedious’, and even
that it is ‘completely lacking in any substance or meaning’. Quite often people even request
‘an executive summary so I have some idea of what it is that you’re trying to say’! This is the
well-known ‘Deaf Effect’ that many people experience—at least initially, because with
perseverance the redeeming nature of the explanation gradually reassures a person’s
mind that it is finally safe to look into the human condition—and from there they become
extremely excited to be able to understand the human condition, and from there every
aspect of human existence!
Of course this fear of the human condition can also cause some to try to put the
blocks to confronting the human condition back in place by contriving all manner of
false arguments against the fully accountable, biological explanations of the human
condition that are being put forward. Indeed, what is being presented can cause such an
angry response that those supporting the fully accountable, genuinely redeeming, human-
race-saving, biological explanation of the human condition are viciously attacked and
persecuted!
Amazingly, everything that has been said about how fearful the human race has
been of the human condition and about all the defensive responses that the arrival of
its explanation initially causes, was fully anticipated by that exceptionally truthful and
effective thinking Greek philosopher, Plato. Plato was such a magnificent philosopher
(philosophy being the study of ‘the truths underlying all reality’ (Macquarie Dictionary, 3rd edn,
1998)) that Alfred North (A.N.) Whitehead, himself one of the most highly regarded
philosophers of the twentieth century, described the history of philosophy as being
merely ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’ (Process and Reality [Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University
of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28], 1979, p.39 of 413). So, way back in the Golden Age of
Greece, some 360 years BC, this is what Plato wrote: ‘I want you to go on to picture the
enlightenment or ignorance of our human conditions somewhat as follows. Imagine an underground
chamber, like a cave with an entrance open to the daylight and running a long way underground. In
this chamber are men who have been prisoners there’ (The Republic, c.360 BC; tr. H.D.P. Lee, 1955, 514;
or see all these quotes in The Republic highlighted at www.wtmsources.com/227). Plato described how the
24 Therapy for the Human Condition

cave’s exit is blocked by a ‘fire’ that ‘corresponds…​to the power of the sun’, which the cave
prisoners have to hide from because its searing, ‘painful’ ‘light’ would make ‘visible’ the
unbearably depressing issue of ‘the imperfections of human life’ (516-517). Fearing such self-
confrontation, the cave prisoners have to ‘take refuge’ ‘a long way underground’ in the dark
‘cave’ where there are only some ‘shadows thrown by the fire’ that represent a ‘mere illusion’
of the ‘real’ world outside the cave (515). The allegory makes clear that while ‘the sun…​
makes the things we see visible’ (509), such that without it we can only ‘see dimly and appear
to be almost blind’ (508), having to hide in the ‘cave’ of ‘illusion’ and endure ‘almost blind’
alienation has been infinitely preferable to facing the ‘painful’ issue of ‘our [seemingly
imperfect] human condition’.

Computer graphic by James Press © 2018 Fedmex Pty Ltd

And, with regard to the problem of the ‘Deaf Effect’ response the ‘cave’ ‘prisoners’
would have to reading or hearing about the human condition, Plato then described what
occurs when, as summarised in the Encarta Encyclopedia, someone ‘escapes from the cave
into the light of day’ and ‘sees for the first time the real world and returns to the cave’ to help the
cave prisoners ‘Escape into the sun-filled setting outside the cave [which] symbolizes the transition
to the real world…​which is the proper object of knowledge’ (written by Prof. Robert M. Baird, ‘Plato’; see
www.wtmsources.com/101). Plato wrote that ‘it would hurt his [the cave’s prisoner’s] eyes and he
would turn back and take refuge in the things which he could see [take refuge in all the dishonest,
illusionary explanations for human behaviour that we have become accustomed to from human-
condition-avoiding, mechanistic science], which he would think really far clearer than the things
being shown him. And if he were forcibly dragged up the steep and rocky ascent [out of the cave
of denial] and not let go till he had been dragged out into the sunlight [shown the truthful, real
description of our human condition], the process would be a painful one, to which he would much
object, and when he emerged into the light his eyes would be so overwhelmed by the brightness of it
that he wouldn’t be able to see a single one of the things he was now told were real.’ Significantly,
Plato then added, ‘Certainly not at first. Because he would need to grow accustomed to the light
before he could see things in the world outside the cave’ (The Republic, 515-516). Yes, reading and
listening to discussion of the human condition can ‘at first’ cause an extreme deaf effect,
but that can be overcome by patiently becoming ‘accustomed to the light’.
 2.2 What exactly is the human condition? 25

Plato went on to also warn that when understanding of the human condition
eventually arrives it will not only cause a ‘Deaf Effect’, it will also cause an extremely
defensive and angry response in some—writing that some of the ‘cave’ ‘prisoners’ ‘would
say that his [the person who attempts to bring understanding to the human condition] visit to the
upper world had ruined his sight [they would treat him as mad], and that the ascent [out of the cave]
was not worth even attempting. And if anyone tried to release them and lead them up, they would kill
him if they could lay hands on him’ (ibid. 517)! Thankfully, we live in more civilised times, but
we in the WTM have endured years of this vicious, try-to-‘kill him’-type persecution (as
documented in the Persecution of the WTM section on our website, and in chapter 6:12 of
FREEDOM and F. Essay 56).
Since it is well known by psychologists that ‘denials fight back with a vengeance when
faced with annihilation’, it is not surprising that this most denied and repressed of all truths
of the issue of the human condition was going to meet extreme resistance when the real
and true analysis of it appeared. Additionally, being a scientific insight, this understanding
of the human condition has to endure the initial resistance new ideas in science have
typically encountered—as playwright George Bernard Shaw pointed out about important
breakthrough insights into the nature of our existence, ‘All great truths begin as blasphemies’
(Annajanska, 1919). And since there is no greater ‘blasphemy’ to mechanistic science’s
established way of thinking (which I will talk more about next) than confronting the
human condition, it is not surprising that appreciation and support for this most needed of
all scientific breakthroughs was going to take time to build—nevertheless, the scientific
establishment, and the establishment in general, needs to support this breakthrough SOON
or the human race will very soon become so exhausted with unbearable, excruciating,
suicidal psychosis and depression that it will become extinct!
The arrival of the all-redeeming but at the same time inevitably all-exposing
understanding of the human condition is actually the long-feared ‘judgment day’. When
the understanding of the human condition is finally found and the ‘curtains are drawn open
at last’, or ‘when the lights are finally turned on’, revealing our 2-million-year corrupted
human condition, it can’t help but be a great shock. However, because this exposure day,
or truth day, or honesty day, or transparency day, or revelation day, or come-clean day is
actually a day when compassionate understanding comes to the human race, it is actually
a day of universal relief from excruciating bondage and suffering. Yes, as an anonymous
Turkish poet once recognised, judgment day is ‘Not the day of judgment but the day of
understanding’ (Merle Severy, ‘The World of Süleyman the Magnificent’, National Geographic, Nov. 1987).
26 Therapy for the Human Condition

2.3 While denial of our corrupted condition has been necessary, the
practice is threatening to trap humanity in a state of human-race-
destroying permanent darkness
What now has to be emphasised is that while the human race was still searching for
the fully accountable, true ‘instinct vs intellect’ redeeming explanation of our corrupted
human condition, the only way we could cope with the unbearably depressing truth of our
psychologically upset, soul-corrupted, seemingly evil condition was to deny it. In fact, we
have been so deeply committed to living in denial of the truth of our species’ 2-million-
year corrupted state or condition, and of our own personal corrupted condition as a result
of our encounters with it when we are young, that even referring to the issue of ‘the human
condition’ has been avoided, with the term ‘human condition’ only rarely mentioned in
moments of profound thought. And when pressed to say what the human condition is, I
have heard it loathsomely described as ‘the personal unspeakable’, and as ‘the black box inside
of people they can’t go near’! (personal conversations, WTM records, Feb. 1995).
So while the human condition is the one issue that had to be addressed and solved
for there to be a future for the human race, it has been the one issue that has been totally
ignored. It is the real unacknowledged, proverbial enormous elephant that has been
standing right in the middle of the living room of our lives.

Drawing by Jeremy Griffith © 2015 Fedmex Pty Ltd

The result of this situation where the only way we could cope with the truth of our
corrupted condition while we couldn’t explain it was to deny it, is that a whole world of
human-condition-avoiding, dishonest thinking has developed, which has culminated in
the vast superstructure of whole-view-of-our-corrupted-condition-avoiding, details-and-
mechanisms-only-focused, so-called ‘mechanistic’ or ‘reductionist’ science—‘science’ being
society’s designated vehicle for searching for knowledge; in fact, ‘science’ literally means
‘knowledge’, derived as it is from the Latin word for knowledge, scientia.
It should be said that this is an absolutely extraordinary situation where our search
for knowledge has been denying the issue that we have been searching for, which is
understanding of our corrupted condition—the effect being that we have been searching
but didn’t know why we were searching, or what we were searching for—a paradox that
 2.3 The danger of denial trapping us in darkness 27

left us completely bewildered, feeling like we were meaningless, purposeless, aimlessly

wandering, lost souls—when we weren’t, since we have actually been determinedly
participating in humanity’s immensely heroic search for the explanation of our corrupted
condition. Living in denial saved us from unbearable self-confrontation, but it left us stupid!
So yes, as will be evident again and again throughout this book, virtually every
question about humans has been ‘answered’ with human-condition-avoiding, hiding-in-
Plato’s-dark-cave, truthless, non-explaining, non-answers—all of which have made any
real healing understanding and thus therapy of our corrupted human condition impossible!
To help the reader become familiar with this truth-avoiding strategy of denying the
issue of our corrupted human condition, paragraphs that describe this evasion will have
the word ‘CAVE’ (meaning ‘belonging to Plato’s dark cave world of dishonest denial’)
inserted at the beginning of them—which means this paragraph and the previous three
should have ‘CAVE’ at the beginning of them. I originally tried putting a grey background
on paragraphs that mention all this evasive denial, or ‘bullshit’ as it has long been
intuitively and appropriately referred to, as the greyness would reflect the deadness that
such truthlessness led to, but printers would sometimes make the grey too dark or too
light, so I had to abandon that idea.
CAVE Yes, since you can’t find the truth with lies, that being a contradiction in
objectives, living in denial of our corrupted condition and of our meaning and purpose,
has meant that truth is nowhere to be found. As one of those rarest of rare, exceptionally
denial-free, honest thinking prophets, Isaiah, said: ‘justice is far from us, and righteousness
does not reach us. We look for light, but all is darkness; for brightness, but we walk in deep shadows.
Like the blind we grope along the wall, feeling our way like men without eyes…​Truth is nowhere to be
found’ (Bible, Isa. 59).
CAVE As Plato said, having to hide in a metaphorical dark cave of denial of the
‘painful’ issue of ‘our [seemingly imperfect] human condition’ meant that everyone living in
the ‘cave’—which is almost the entire human race, including mechanistic, reductionist
scientists—can only ‘see dimly and appear to be almost blind’!
CAVE As Charles Birch, my very honest, Templeton-Prize-winning professor of
biology when I was a student at Sydney University, admitted, ‘[mechanistic] science can’t
deal with subjectivity [the issue of our corrupted human condition]…​what we were all taught in
universities is pretty much a dead end’ (from recording of Birch’s 1993 World Transformation Movement Open
Day address).
CAVE The physicist Paul Davies, who is another winner of the prestigious Templeton
Prize (which is awarded for ‘increasing man’s understanding of God’, basically for
thinkers who are trying to be holistic rather than mechanistic), similarly observed that ‘For
300 years science has been dominated by extremely mechanistic thinking. According to this [whole-
view-evading, human-condition-psychosis-avoiding, mechanisms-only-focused] view of the world
all physical systems are regarded as basically [robotic] machines…​I have little doubt that much
of the alienation and demoralisation that people feel in our so-called scientific age stems from the
bleak sterility of mechanistic thought’ (‘Living in a non-material world—the new scientific consciousness’, The
Australian, 9 Oct. 1991). (By the way, ‘holism’ means ‘the tendency in nature to form wholes’ (Concise
Oxford Dictionary, 5th edn, 1964),
so it recognises the wholes-forming, Negative-Entropy-driven,
integrative meaning of existence, which, as is explained in chapter 4 of FREEDOM and in
F. Essay 23, is an honest, human-condition-confronting-not-avoiding truth.)
28 Therapy for the Human Condition

CAVE The great Hungarian-English polymath and remarkably denial-free-effective-

thinker Arthur Koestler was another who was frustrated by mechanistic, reductionist
science’s avoidance of our species’ conscious-mind-induced, soul-corrupted, psychotic
human condition, writing that ‘symptoms of the mental disorder which appears to be endemic
in our species…​are specifically and uniquely human, and not found in any other species. Thus it
seems only logical that our search for explanations [of human behaviour] should also concentrate
primarily on those attributes of homo sapiens which are exclusively human and not shared by the
rest of the animal kingdom. But however obvious this conclusion may seem, it runs counter to the
prevailing reductionist trend. “Reductionism” is the philosophical belief that all human activities
can be “reduced” to – i.e., explained by – the [no-psychosis involved] behavioural responses of
lower animals – Pavlov’s dogs, Skinner’s rats and pigeons, Lorenz’s greylag geese, Morris’s hairless
apes [and, as will be described in the next paragraph, the false excuse of blaming our divisive
condition on the savage, competitive, selfish and aggressive, must-reproduce-their-genes situation
that other animals operate under]…​That is why the scientific establishment has so pitifully failed
to define the predicament of man’ (Janus: A Summing Up, 1978, p.19 of 354). Like Davies, Koestler
complained too of ‘the sterile deserts of reductionist philosophy’, making the fundamental
point that ‘a correct diagnosis of the condition of man [had to be] based on a new approach to
the sciences of life’ (ibid. pp.19-20), concluding that ‘the citadel they [mechanistic scientists] are
defending lies in ruins’ (p.192).
CAVE Yes, the main device employed by this immense, ‘blind’, ‘dead end’, ‘sterile
desert’, ‘bleak’, ‘dark’, truth-nowhere-to-be-found, cave-dwelling academic superstructure
that has been dedicated to keeping the truth of our species’ 2-million-year corrupted
condition hidden, was to deny that our ape ancestors lived a nurtured-with-unconditional-
love, cooperative, selfless and loving existence. This denial was achieved by using the
outrageously false claim that our ancestors were competitive, selfish and aggressive
savages preoccupied trying to reproduce their genes like other animals. Instead of the truth
that our divisive, selfish and aggressive condition is a psychologically derived state that
developed when we became conscious, it was asserted that our divisive behaviour is just
our savage animal instincts expressing themselves. This ‘savage instincts’ excuse is so
important in understanding the foundations of all the dishonest thinking that’s been going
on everywhere in the ivory towers of academia, that I focus on this great lie at the very
beginning of THE Interview that exposes all the terrible denial that has been imprisoning
the human race in a dark dungeon, Plato’s dark cave.
CAVE Again, as a result of all this denial/​lying, especially of our cooperative and
loving heritage, all manner of ultimately ineffective therapies based on human-condition-
avoiding, false biological theories, and even on dogmatic forms of non-thinking, and on
non-understanding spiritual and religious practices like meditation and prayer, have been
attempted—which is why we have had thousands of years of therapeutic practices and
the human race has only become more psychotic. How can you heal psychosis if you
have no idea what is causing it? Obviously you can’t. Trying to heal our corrupted human
condition while committed to living in denial of it has been like trying to understand
how a car works while refusing to look under the bonnet! As Berdyaev wrote, ‘Knowledge
requires great daring. It means victory over ancient, primeval terror…​of [the issue of] good and evil’,
which is the human condition.
 2.3 The danger of denial trapping us in darkness 29

CAVE So science’s practice of searching for knowledge while denying the truth
of our corrupted condition has led to all manner of false and misleading and ultimately
ineffectual ‘answers’. However, on the positive side—and this is a world-saving
positive—it did lead to the finding of how genes are able to orientate behaviour and nerves
are able to understand the relationship between cause and effect, which finally made the
instinct vs intellect explanation of our corrupted human condition possible.
CAVE The problem is that science’s practice of determinedly denying our corrupted
condition has become so entrenched that the scientific establishment is refusing to
recognise and support this most needed and precious of all scientific breakthroughs.
Science is actually the great liberator or saviour or messiah of the human race (as I explain
in paragraph 296 of FREEDOM), but its entrenched practice of denial could end up making
it the great imprisoner of the human race in darkness, a darkness that will very soon, if it’s
not ended, lead to the extinction of our species from unbearable levels of psychosis!
CAVE So while denial has been necessary, denial-practicing mechanistic science is
now in danger of trapping humanity in a tortured-by-the-scorching-fire-of-the-human-
condition, crawling-hardly-can-move, psychotic state of living death, when it could
be supporting the human-race-liberating, breakthrough biological explanation of the
human condition that it made possible. Yes, all human-condition-avoiding, mechanistic,
reductionist scientists can become human-condition-confronting, truthful-thinking, holistic
scientists. Dishonest scientists can become honest scientists. The ivory towers of academia
can change from being ivory towers of lies to ivory towers of truth. Insecure humans can
become secure humans. This is our species’ freedom, it is the end of the human condition.
Living in Plato’s dark cave of denial is no longer necessary; everyone can come out into
the warm healing sunshine of understanding, and that includes scientists. The arrival of
understanding of the human condition does bring immense change, but no one needs
to feel obsoleted, left out, or bypassed. There are infinite opportunities for everyone to
now help with the great transformation of the human race where humans live in a state
of radiant, exhilarated, unimaginably excited aliveness—a transformation that these two
illustrations by William Blake perfectly depict, which is why they were chosen to decorate
the cover of this book.
30 Therapy for the Human Condition

2.4 The honest and dishonest paths of thinking

To now look at the history of trying to therapise our corrupted, 2-million-year-
developed, psychologically upset human condition. There have been two paths of
thinking, the path of honest, truthful, human-condition-confronting, look-under-the-
bonnet, not-hiding-in-Plato’s-dark-cave thinking that a rare few thinkers in history
have taken, and the path almost all thinkers have taken, which is the dishonest, human-
condition-avoiding, don’t-look-under-the-bonnet, hide-in-Plato’s-dark-cave path. As we
will see, the latter dishonest, human-condition-avoiding path could only ever provide
extremely superficial and thus ineffective forms of therapy for the now horrifically
psychologically upset human race.
Chapters 2.5 to XX will look at the truthful, effective therapy path, and chapter XX will
look at the dishonest, superficial, ineffective therapy path.

2.5 The truthful, ‘look under the bonnet’, not-hiding-in-Plato’s-dark-cave,

effective therapy path
To firstly look at the truthful path to effective therapy for the human condition, and, as
mentioned, this will be covered from this chapter 2.5 through to XX.
The Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud is regarded as the father of modern
psychoanalysis. He began this terrifying journey into the issue of our seemingly
indefensible, angry, egocentric and alienated, soul-corrupted, we-must-be-‘evil’-‘worthless’-
monsters human condition, when, after great personal difficulty, he was sufficiently able to
penetrate the terrifying depths where the issue of the human condition resides to discover
the truth that everyone has a ‘personal unconscious’, a personal repressed psychologically
distressed condition or psychosis. As the British psychiatrist D.W. Winnicott wrote,
‘The word “unconscious”…​has been used for a very long time to describe unawareness…​there are
depths to our natures which we cannot easily plumb…​a special variety of unconscious, which he
[Freud] named the repressed unconscious…​what is unconscious cannot be remembered because of its
being associated with painful feeling or some other intolerable emotion’ (Thinking About Children, 1996
posthumous publication of his writings, p.9 of 343). The Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing described
how difficult the journey into this ‘repressed unconscious’ world was for Freud when he
wrote that: ‘The greatest psychopathologist has been Freud. Freud was a hero. He descended to the
“Underworld” and met there stark terrors…​We who follow Freud have the benefit of the knowledge
he brought back with him’ (The Divided Self, 1960, p.25 of 218).
CAVE Having heroically dug up the truth of a personal repressed unconscious, Freud
then however veered off that path of truthful thinking and reverted to the escape-from-the-
human-condition ‘savage instincts’ excuse. Freud believed that the ‘ID’, our unconscious,
instinctive mind, contained primitive selfish ‘savage’ urges that the conscious mind or
‘ego’ has to control, writing, for example, that ‘men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing
for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but that a powerful measure of desire
 2.5 The truthful, not-hiding-in-Plato’s-dark-cave, effective therapy path 31

for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment (Civilization and its Discontents,
1930, tr. Joan Riviere, ch. V, p.85 of 144),
and ‘Culture has to call up every possible reinforcement in
order to erect barriers against the aggressive instincts of men’ (ibid. p.86). The truth is that our
instinctive self is completely cooperative, selfless and loving and comes from a time when
our ape ancestors lived in that state; and further, our aggressive and selfish behaviour is
psychological in origin, the result of a clash between our instincts and intellect. Freud
also falsely maintained that our morals are learnt and held by the ‘superego’ as a way of
restraining our ‘instinctual’ ‘aggression’, when the truth is our morals are the expression of
our loving, cooperative instincts or soul. Freud even directly denied that our species once
lived in a ‘golden age’ of cooperative and loving innocence by claiming that this idea of
a ‘golden age’ in our species’ past was nothing more than nostalgia for the protected bliss
of infancy. As the author Richard Heinberg noted, this ‘Paradise myth as an unconscious
projection of memories of infancy…​is what Freud proposed in his theory of the development of the
personality—that infancy is a Paradise lost’ (Memories & Visions of Paradise, 1990, pp.193-194).

Freud’s protégé, the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, was an honest, actually partially
honest, thinker who took the next step towards achieving real therapy for humans
by trying to recognise and bring understanding to our psychotic and neurotic human
condition. Jung added to Freud’s acknowledgement that we have a personal unconscious
the recognition that we also have a ‘collective unconscious’, a collective, shared-by-
all part of ourselves that we have also repressed. In his 2000 book, Life of Jung, Ronald
Hayman gave this summary of Jung’s ‘heroic’ journey into the ‘unconscious counterposition’
in us humans, and how the confronting truths that exist there nearly destroyed Jung, but
also how facing those truths allowed him to think truthfully and thus effectively enough
to come up with the important insights about human existence he found. Hayman wrote:
‘He [Jung] claimed to have acquired the knack of catching unconscious material “in flagrante”,
and his [1962] book Memories, Dreams, Reflections suggests his behaviour was heroic—that he was
making a dangerous expedition into the unconscious for the sake of scientific discovery…​In December
1913, he says, he decided to drop downwards. “I let myself fall, it was as if the floor literally gave way
underneath me and I plummeted into dark depths”…​It took about three years to recover from the
[resulting psychological] breakdown…​It was during Jung’s breakdown that he arrived at some of his
most important concepts’ (‘An edited extract from Life of Jung’, Good Weekend mag. Sydney Morning Herald, 5
Feb. 2000; see www.wtmsources.com/265).
For a description of the most important of the ‘important concepts’ Jung found on his
heroic journey into the unconscious, Jung’s friend, Sir Laurens van der Post, reported
that firstly, Jung was heroically motivated by concern that ‘Man everywhere is dangerously
unaware of himself. We really know nothing about the nature of man, and unless we hurry to get
to know ourselves we are in dangerous trouble’ (Jung and the Story of Our Time, 1976, p.239 of 275); in
fact, Jung is renowned for emphasising the truth that ‘wholeness for humans depends on the
ability to own our own shadow’. Van der Post then went on to describe how Jung achieved
a ‘breakthrough into this great new world within. It was as momentous as the breakthrough into
32 Therapy for the Human Condition

the nature of the atom’ (Jung and the Story of Our Time, p.61), ‘he was the very first great explorer in the
twentieth-century’ (p.63), the result of which was that ‘Jung went deeper [than Freud’s ‘personal
unconscious’], to uncover below what one might call a racial or historical unconscious, leading finally
to the greatest area of all which he called the “collective unconscious”’ (p.145).
CAVE However, while Jung managed to recognise that we have a ‘collective
unconscious’, he was not able to go beyond that with his courageous-but-ultimately-afraid
thinking and admit that our instinctive, shared-by-all, ‘collective unconscious’ is our
species’ instinctive memory of once living in a cooperative and loving state. In fact, like
Freud, Jung veered off from his brave truthful thinking and reverted to the escape-from-
the-human-condition, hide-in-Plato’s-dark-cave, ‘savage instincts’ excuse for our divisive
behaviour. For example, Jung wrote that ‘The shadow is that hidden, repressed, for the most part
inferior and guilt-laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our
animal ancestors’ (Aion, p.266), and that ‘Man has developed consciousness slowly and laboriously, in
a process that took untold ages to reach the civilized state. And this evolution is far from complete,
for large areas of the human mind are still shrouded in darkness’ (Man and His Symbols, 1964, Part 1, p.6
of 415). Indeed, like Freud, Jung directly denied the truth of our species’ cooperative and
loving instinctive past by dismissing the idea of a ‘golden age’ in our species’ collective
memory as nothing more than, as Richard Heinberg noted, ‘an analogy for the mother-infant
relationship…​Carl Jung went on to incorporate the Paradise-as-infancy concept into his theory of the
archetypes. For Jung, Paradise is the positive aspect of the archetypal mother, the infant’s source of
security and nourishment…​[subscribing to the view] that the Garden of Eden was not a geographical
place, but a metaphor for the womb’ (Memories & Visions of Paradise, pp.193-194).

CAVE So, while Freud and Jung bravely revealed that we humans are living in
denial of a great deal of truth—that, as they described it, we suffer from a ‘personal’ and
‘collective’ psychosis—neither attempted to confront what it was that we were particularly
repressing or living in unconscious denial of, which is our species’ cooperative and loving
past. They talked a lot about our psychosis and how it wrecks our lives and how we need
to do something about that if we are to become ‘whole’ or sane, but they weren’t able to
confront what our psychosis actually is, which is denial or repression of our cooperative
and loving instinctive self or soul. Freud had people lying on his iconic couch opening
up about their insecurities and psychological pain, which was a big step in honesty from
the resigned strategy of every moment determinedly denying that there was anything
particularly wrong in our lives and that everything was basically fine; and Jung spoke
of archetypes and encouraged people to analyse the expressions of their subconscious in
their dreams, and emphasised the need to ‘individuate’ or unify our split selves. But the
‘elephant in the living room’ of human life of how we had almost completely corrupted
our species’ original instinctive self or soul was being avoided. Basically, Freud and Jung
 2.5 The truthful, not-hiding-in-Plato’s-dark-cave, effective therapy path 33

didn’t take people outside of Plato’s metaphorical dark cave where they were living in
fearful denial of the issue of the human condition. And what is significant about them not
taking people outside Plato’s cave of denial where they would have to actually confront
the human condition, the truth of our species’ 2-million-years corrupted state, is that
everyone could relatively easily relate to Freud and Jung, which is why they became such
famous therapists. As the human race has become increasingly upset, people have found
the superficial honesty of talking about psychosis and neurosis, of discussing how much
they are suffering psychologically, of admitting to being ‘damaged’, and of referring to
the ‘hurt child within’, to be quite cathartic. Indeed, such superficial honesty where you
pretend to be talking about the human condition when you actually aren’t could be very
relieving—which is why dishonest, non-human-condition-confronting, superficial ‘pop
psychology’ and pseudo therapy is now immensely popular; however, because it is only
superficial it is ultimately ineffective, and as a result the human race has continued to
plunge to terminal levels of psychosis!
The next step in the all-important, if the human race is to be saved from extinction,
journey of honest thinking about our species’ psychologically upset condition was by
someone who was not psychologically insecure like Freud and Jung were, and virtually
every human is. Rather, the next step was taken by someone who must have largely
escaped encountering the horrors of the human condition during his upbringing and as a
result was exceptionally uncorrupted in soul and thus exceptionally sound and secure in
himself, because he was able to think sufficiently truthfully about the human condition
to admit that our much denied and repressed shared-by-all ‘collective unconscious’
is our species’ instinctive memory of having once lived cooperatively, selflessly and
lovingly. That person was the just mentioned friend of Jung, the very great South African
philosopher Sir Laurens van der Post, because it was he, in his many books, especially
in his books about the relatively innocent Bushman or San people of southern Africa,
who acknowledged the truth of our species’ original state of innocence. For instance, Sir
Laurens wrote about the Bushman that ‘mere contact with twentieth-century life seemed lethal to
the Bushman. He was essentially so innocent and natural a person that he had only to come near us for
a sort of radioactive fall-out from our unnatural world to produce a fatal leukaemia in his spirit’ (The
Heart of the Hunter, 1961, p.111 of 233). Even more explicitly, he wrote that ‘This shrill, brittle, self-
important life of today is by comparison a graveyard where the living are dead and the dead are alive
and talking [through our soul] in the still, small, clear voice of a love and trust in life that we have for
the moment lost…​[There was a time when] All on earth and in the universe were still members and
family of the early race seeking comfort and warmth through the long, cold night before the dawning
of individual consciousness in a togetherness which still gnaws like an unappeasable homesickness at
the base of the human heart’ (Testament to the Bushmen, 1984, pp.127-128 of 176).
34 Therapy for the Human Condition

However, while Sir Laurens was able to resurrect the truth of our species’ original
state of innocence, there still remained the task of finding the testable, verifiable,
understandable, science-based, reconciling explanation for why we corrupted such a
wonderful, cooperative and loving existence. As Sir Laurens wrote: ‘I had a private hope of
the utmost importance to me. The Bushman’s physical shape combined those of a child and a man:
I surmised that examination of his inner life might reveal a pattern which reconciled the spiritual
opposites in the human being and made him whole…​it might start the first movement towards a
reconciliation’ (The Heart of the Hunter, p.135).

It was this final step in the honest journey of addressing-not-avoiding the human
condition that I was able to contribute, presenting the fully accountable, instinct vs intellect
biology ‘which reconciled the spiritual opposites’ of our lost state of innocence with our present
corrupted, seemingly evil human condition and makes us ‘whole’. Greatly assisted by the
honesty of Sir Laurens’s writings about the relatively innocent Bushman, I was able to hold
onto all the truthful thoughts I had as a young man, especially about the original innocence
of the human race, and from there go on to find the biological defence for our corrupted
condition that makes the effective therapy of our corrupted condition possible.

© 2021 Fedmex Pty Ltd

Showing how precious Sir Laurens’s writings have been to me, this is my present set
—my original set being so tattered I could no longer use them—of Sir Laurens’s two main
books about the Bushman, The Lost World of the Kalahari and The Heart of the Hunter.
 2.6 The psychological effect on children of not encountering a loving world is immense 35

2.6 Since the human race once lived in an innocent, loving state, children
are born instinctively expecting to encounter such a world, which means
the psychological consequences of not encountering it are immense
What follows is a summary of the explanation, that is extra to what is presented in
FREEDOM, of how and why the hurts and misreadings that we adopt during our formative
childhood years plague our adults lives, and why these hurts and misreadings are so
difficult to overcome. Shortly after this, in chapter XX, I will provide a summary of how
we can effectively manage the anxieties and terrors caused by the upwellings of these
childhood hurts and misreadings.
Now that we have found the redeeming explanation for our corrupted condition and
can admit that nurturing created our moral all-loving and all-sensitive instinctive self or
soul, we can realise and appreciate that we are born instinctively expecting to encounter
an unconditionally loving, happy and reassuring world. Having only lived in an extreme
psychologically upset state for a few hundred thousand years, which is a very short
amount of time for natural selection to produce any significant change in our genetic
makeup, we humans are born with very little instinctive expectation of encountering an
immensely psychologically upset existence. It follows that it has been such an incredible
shock for our innocent instinctive soul to encounter an almost completely unloving,
unhappy and traumatised world that it is no wonder the human race has now become so
extremely soul-hurt or psychotic and mind-distressed or neurotic!
At this point it is helpful to look at what is actually meant by the terms ‘psychosis’
and ‘neurosis’, and by the terms relating to the therapy of them, because if we do that we
will see that all the aspects of our corrupted condition, and what is required to heal that
condition, are actually recognised in those terms. Since we didn’t want to confront what
the human condition really is, namely our soul-corrupted lives, we have bandied around
the terms ‘psychosis’ and ‘neurosis’ without ever stopping to think about what the terms
actually mean. We humans live on the surface, afraid to look deeply, even into what we are
saying! The dictionary 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’ (Penguin Dictionary
of Psychology, 1985 edn), and ‘soul’ is defined as the ‘moral and emotional part of man’, and as
the ‘animating or essential part’ of us (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 5th edn, 1964). Therefore, since osis
is defined as ‘abnormal state or condition’ (Dictionary.com), ‘psychosis’ means ‘the abnormal
state or condition of our soul’, or ‘soul-illness’; and ‘neurosis’ means ‘the abnormal state
or condition of our neurons or nerves’, or ‘mind-illness’. So, the preoccupation of our
nerve or neuron-based conscious intellect with repressing our condemning gene-based,
instinctive, loving, ‘moral’, ‘emotional’, ‘animating’, ‘essence of life’ ‘soul’, such that we suffer
from an ‘abnormal state or condition’, means we humans have been experiencing both a
‘psychosis’ and a ‘neurosis’. Also, the word ‘psychiatry’ literally means ‘soul-healing’,
36 Therapy for the Human Condition

since iatreia means ‘healing’ (The Encyclopedic World Dictionary); and ‘psychology’ literally
means the ‘study of the soul’, since the Greek word logia means ‘study of’. But again, the
situation we have been in is that we couldn’t effectively practice psychiatry and ‘heal
our soul’, or effectively practice psychology and ‘study our soul’, until we could explain
why our conscious thinking, self-adjusting self had to destroy the wonderful world of our
cooperative and loving instinctive self or soul; understand why our conscious thinking self
is actually good and not bad, and, by so doing, reconcile and heal our instinct vs intellect
split selves.
To now look at how this psychosis and neurosis from encountering such a corrupted
world developed.
In creating our cooperative and loving moral instincts through the nurturing ‘love-
indoctrination’ process (which will be explained later in chapter 4), natural selection
would have acted on all aspects of our physiology or physical make-up—such as the
nervous, hormonal, circulatory, digestive, immune, muscular and skeletal systems—to
ensure we received that unconditional love. So the distress we feel when we don’t receive
unconditional love and don’t encounter a loving world are those naturally selected
instincts expressing themselves. When we cut our finger we feel pain, and that pain
response was naturally selected to alert us to the threat that cutting ourself poses to our
wellbeing, to make us avoid cutting ourself. If you felt good when you cut yourself then
everyone would cut themselves, which would not be beneficial for our lives. In a similar
way, instincts were selected to make us feel distress, hurt and pain if we don’t encounter
an unconditionally loving world.
CAVE By the way, chapter 4:2 of FREEDOM and F. Essay 23 explain that the actual
meaning of the word ‘love’ is the unconditional selfless consideration of the larger whole
above the individual, which is what is required to bind wholes of matter together in the
Negative Entropy-driven process of integrating matter. It is also explained there that while
we couldn’t explain our divisive competitive, selfish and aggressive human condition,
the truth of the integrative meaning of existence, and therefore the truth of what ‘love’
actually is, was denied. The linguist Robin Allott summed up human-condition-avoiding,
mechanistic science’s attitude to love succinctly when he wrote that ‘Love has been described
as a taboo subject, not serious, not appropriate for scientific study’ (‘Evolutionary Aspects of Love and
Empathy’, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 1992, Vol.15, No.4). The amount of lying that has
been going on in Plato’s cave has been incredible!
This extract from the anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s extraordinarily honest 1970
paper, ‘A Scientist Looks at Love’ acknowledges the depth of the pain we feel when we
don’t receive love: ‘love is, without question, the most important experience in the life of a human
being…​One of the most frequently used words in our vocabulary…​[yet] love is something about
which most of us are still extremely vague…There is a widespread belief that a newborn baby is a
selfish, disorganized wild creature who would grow into a violently intractable savage if it were not
properly disciplined. [However,] The newborn baby is organized in an extraordinarily sensitive
manner…​He does not want discipline…​he wants love. He behaves as if he expected to be loved, and
when his expectation is thwarted, he reacts in a grievously disappointed manner…the mother-infant
 2.6 The psychological effect on children of not encountering a loving world is immense 37

relationship perhaps more than any other defines the very essence of love…​survival alone is not
enough—human beings need and should receive much more…​We now know that babies which are
physically well nurtured may nevertheless waste away and die unless they are also loved’ (The Phi Delta
Kappan, Vol.51, No.9). And,
as mentioned earlier, Olive Schreiner summarised how children
are so vulnerable to being hurt by our loveless world that our personalities are basically
formed by that soul-destroying experience in childhood when she wrote: ‘The souls of little
children are marvellously delicate and tender things, and keep for ever the shadow that first falls on
them…​The first six years of our life make us; all that is added later is veneer.’
With regard to ‘the mother-infant relationship’ being ‘the very essence of love’, for the
nurturing love-indoctrination process to have been so successful in creating our loving
instincts, there has obviously been selection for very strong instincts for parents, especially
mothers, to nurture their offspring with unconditional love. As the author Jean Liedloff
wrote, ‘We have had exquisitely precise instincts, expert in every detail of child care, since long
before we became anything resembling Homo sapiens’ (The Continuum Concept, 1975, p.34 of 168). As I’ll
talk more about shortly, with these nurturing instincts being so strong, parents have felt
immense distress and guilt when, because of the imposition of the corrupting battle of the
human condition, it has been impossible to comply with their ‘precise instincts’ for ‘child
care’.
So all aspects of our physical make-up have been acted on by natural selection to
make us feel distress, hurt and pain when we don’t encounter the unconditional love
our instincts expect during the early stages of our life. These hurtful feelings from not
receiving or encountering love when we are young can be described as our ‘PRIMARY
HURT’.
To make matters worse, as a result of being a fully conscious thinking species we
humans also suffer from ‘SECONDARY HURT’. These secondary hurts are those that we
experience from our conscious mind dwelling on, trying to understand and make sense of,
primary hurts. Animals who are not fully conscious, like dogs, don’t dwell on traumatic
events in their lives, they don’t wonder or worry or try to understand hurtful events; their
orientation is to just move on from past experiences to dealing with their present situation.
As the ‘dog whisperer’ Cesar Millan says, ‘Dogs do not worry about the future or dwell on the
past. They exist in the moment’ (Cesar Millan’s Short Guide to a Happy Dog, 2013, p.60 of 208).
So, being born with instinctive expectations of encountering an unconditionally loving
world, it is obviously a very great shock to find ourselves in an almost completely, soul-
destroyed, unloving world. Our sensitive instinctive self or soul has to feel like it’s been
thrown into a brutal, toxic cesspit, with the hurt and pain from that traumatic experience
being our primary hurt. And when our conscious thinking mind becomes sufficiently
developed in understanding the relationship between events that occur through time
and able to make sense of experience enough to try to understand that primary hurt, in
particular try to understand why we are not encountering a loving world, it has been left
completely bewildered. It is only now that we can explain the human condition that we are
in a position to admit and talk openly about the corrupted state of the world to anybody,
including children.
38 Therapy for the Human Condition

In fact, as was mentioned in chapter 1.4 and will be emphasised when this is all
explained more fully later, in the absence of understanding children have been so prone to
misunderstand the loveless situation they find themselves in that they almost always blame
themselves for the shortfall in love. As the earlier mentioned psychotherapist Arthur Janov
wrote, ‘I must emphasize that whatever goes wrong, the child, with no other frame of reference,
whose parents are the world to him, thinks it is his fault’ (The New Primal Scream, 1990, p.8 of 396). In
fact, children have more often than not concluded that the reason they are not encountering
a loving world is because they are an unlovable, bad person! Their souls are so trusting
that they are in a world where everyone is loving that they find themselves unable to avoid
the conclusion that for some reason they must be the aberration; they must be the ones
causing the world to not love them!

(This cartoon was published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 Jul. 1995.)
How brave was the honesty of this 1995 cartoon by Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig given
the redeeming explanation of our corrupted human condition, and with it the good reason why
mothers haven’t been able to adequately nurture their offspring, wasn’t widely known!

Thankfully, as I said, with the redeeming explanation of our species’ corrupted

condition now available, children can have our corrupted world admitted and explained to
them, and so will not have to suffer from such horrific misreadings as blaming themselves
for our ‘horrendous’ loveless world.
In fact, as will also be explained much more fully later, the ‘codependency’ of
children to our soul-corrupted adult world has been made so much worse by adults being
‘resigned’ to living in total denial of their and the world’s corrupted condition and, as a
result, pretending there is nothing wrong with them or the world. They have maintained
what is in effect a deafening silence about all the soul-corruption that surrounds new
 2.6 The psychological effect on children of not encountering a loving world is immense 39

arrivals to our world. (As I mentioned earlier, the process where young adolescents
have had to resign to living in denial of the, until now, unexplained and thus unbearably
depressing issue of their and the world’s corrupted condition that has produced this
situation where almost all adults have been living in complete denial of our corrupted
human condition, is briefly explained later in XX, and more fully explained in chapter 2:2
of FREEDOM and in F. Essay 30.)
The effects on the minds of vulnerable, impressionable, formative young humans
from resigned adults’ total lack of any real honesty—their deadly silence about the real
darkness and horror of the world we are living in, and their outrageously dishonest
pretence that everything is fine and wonderful—has been to greatly compound the young’s
already trusting tendency to decide they must be at fault for not being loved. It is a further
reason why the young have often so misread their situation that they have concluded that
it can’t be the fault of the adult, especially their ‘font of all goodness and warmth’, ‘above
reproach’, ‘wonderful mother’ who they ‘think the world of’, but rather it is ‘all my fault’, ‘it’s my
problem’, because ‘I’m so stupid’, ‘a fool’ and ‘such a bore’, in fact a ‘I must be…​repulsive’, an
evil monster, such that ‘I hate myself for this. I’m angry at myself’, and will ‘get myself back for
this’, ‘I’ll punish myself’ and ‘serves me right too’!
What immediately needs emphasising, and this is stressed later in chapter XX, is
that while these are some of the devastating effects on infants and children of parents’
inability to provide the unconditional love their child expects, it is not something parents
are fundamentally at fault for, or should feel guilt-stricken about—because after 2 million
years of humanity’s heroic but immensely upsetting battle to solve the human condition,
all humans are variously immensely soul-destroyed. Parents have felt excruciating guilt
from not being able to nurture their offspring as much as both their instinctive self and
conscious thinking self would like to—as the bestselling children’s author John Marsden
said, ‘The biggest crime you can commit in our society is to be a failure as a parent and people would
rather admit to being an axe murderer than being a bad father or mother’ (‘A Single Mum’s Guide to
Raising Boys’, Sunday Life, The Sun-Herald, 7 Jul. 2002)—but we have the greater understanding now
that brings compassion and love to every aspect of human dysfunction.
So, in summary, when we are young, our all-loving and all-sensitive instinctive self
or soul has inevitably suffered primary hurts from not receiving love or encountering a
loving world, and secondary hurts from our conscious mind worrying about and trying
to understand why primary hurts are happening, with one of the most damaging of all
secondary hurts being self-blame, the erroneous conclusion a child’s mind so readily
comes to that they are an unworthy, bad person.
The question to look at now is how does an infant or child try to cope with these
primary and secondary hurts?
Basically the only means available has been repression or block-out of these
overwhelming hurts. As Arthur Janov wrote, ‘Without those gates [blocks] there would be no
way to get through life. One would be in excruciating pain all the time’ (The New Primal Scream, p.37).
So as we have grown up we have had to try to repress any awareness of pain coming
from the primary hurt to our soul of not encountering love, and we have also had to try to
block out any excruciating secondary hurt, especially maintain block-out of unbearable
misreadings by our mind that we must be unlovable, evil monsters. So devastating have
40 Therapy for the Human Condition

these pains been that almost without exception children have been left with no choice but
to split themselves off from the terrible thoughts and feelings and create an entirely false
place to live in their minds!
The consequence of all this repression of primary and secondary hurts that
occurred in our early formative years when we were so sensitive to hurt, and so prone
to misunderstanding hurt, is that a whole world of pain has been pushed down into our
subconscious mind and body, cut off from our everyday conscious mind’s awareness.
Janov gave these descriptions of a person’s coping mechanism of repression of
painful experiences: ‘He puts away the pain, or rather it is automatically put away from him by
our miraculous system of repression. This repression effectively produces two selves at war with each
other: the real self, loaded with needs and pain, and the unreal self, the self out of touch with the other
self that was still able to deal with the outside world. The function of the unreal self is to keep the real
self from showing its face. Its role is to make the body perform despite the turmoil going on below’
(The New Primal Scream, p.xix). And, ‘The gating system [repression] allows us to feel one way and act
another. It allows us to be in contradiction with ourselves. It allows us to remember the times tables we
learned at the age six in school, while having no memory of the emotions we had at the time’ (ibid. p.36).
As to how ‘our miraculous system of repression’ works, basically the whole organism,
both our body and mind, goes into defence mode to cope with the extremely hurtful
assault on, or offence to, our instincts; we use all the mechanisms of repression at our
disposal to try to contain and limit the overwhelming effects of the hurt. When we
experience overwhelming physical or psychological pain, our whole organism blocks the
perception of that pain. As Janov wrote, ‘Any pain which threatens the threshold of tolerance
sets in motion a built-in anti-suffering mechanism which ensures that we do not suffer inordinately’
(ibid. p.32). And
he gave an extreme example from hypnosis to demonstrate how strong
our powers of repression are, writing that ‘Blocked communication, or repression, is well
demonstrated in hypnosis, where psychological techniques can shut off the experience of pain and its
memory. It is possible in hypnosis to achieve gating [repression] so profound that a person becomes
rigid, can be stretched between two chairs (with the head on one chair and the ankles on another) and
not feel a two hundred pound weight on his stomach’ (ibid. p.34).
So our body automatically responds in ways that contain and limit the effects of
the hurts on its ability to function, which our bodies are highly trained to be able to do
in response to any threat to its integrity. For example, if it can’t heal an injury fully, it
will departmentalise it off in our body and focus on maintaining the body’s essential
functions. In the case of extreme psychological hurts, our body can hold the effects of
them in various parts of our body throughout our life. For example, it is recognised that
the fascia, which is the connective tissue around our organs, muscles, joints, bones, and
nerve fibres (it’s a bit like a second skin), is where we store a lot of our trauma. As this
helpful summary from a health professional explains, ‘Our bodies are able to “remember” or
“store” emotions. Because our fascia makes up such a large part of our physical being, it is also the
primary source for storing our emotions. Our bodies hold this information below the conscious level
as a protective mechanism and become state or position-dependent. Although the information is stored
in our fascia, we are not consciously aware of it. However, the body’s own protective mechanism
steers us away from the position that our mind/body awareness considers painful or traumatic. The
images of trauma and injuries held by our fascia battle the forces of our body’s every day movement,
 2.6 The psychological effect on children of not encountering a loving world is immense 41

creating holding or bracing patterns to avoid the original pain; e.g. a stiff neck, tight upper back and
constricted shoulders’ (Dr Amy M. O’Donnell, ‘How stress influences fascia’, 12 May 2021).
Yes, ‘we are not consciously aware of’ the protective repressions that our body has
adopted, but nevertheless, once someone has experienced early hurts, their body is in
full-time repression mode, and these repressions can manifest themselves in such ways
as increased bodily tension, elevated blood pressure, increased body heat, and a flurry
of hormonal activity. Thus, as Janov wrote, ‘A person is certain he is relaxed, while repressed
rage elevates his blood pressure. He sees no connection between his blood pressure and feelings. If
someone were to ask, “What’s making you tense?” he wouldn’t know what the person was talking
about. “I’m not at all tense,” he would reply. Gating [repression] has sealed off awareness’ (The New
Primal Scream, p.36).
In the case of our conscious mind, it uses its tremendous ability to block painful
feelings and avoid confrontation with any painful thoughts; as Janov has written, we use
our ‘cerebral’ mind ‘to use ideas to block feelings, to rationalize to keep from hurting, to deny a
reality that is right in front of him or her’ (ibid. p.37).
CAVE Of course, not only have we had ‘to deny a reality that is right in front of’ us of our
own pain and misreadings from encountering a loveless world, we’ve also, and much more
importantly, had to deny the real issue before us of why the human race isn’t cooperative,
sensitive and loving, which is the issue of the human condition. Janov does acknowledge
that there is the evasive view that all the pain and suffering in human life ‘is everybody’s
fault and nobody’s fault. It seems to be [just] part of the human condition’ (ibid. p.5), and adds that
he doesn’t agree, saying ‘I think we need to understand more about…​[our] pervasive need to be
loved…​and the pain it leads to when it is not fulfilled’ (ibid). So he was exceptionally honest about
the need for a deeper analysis, but he still didn’t actually try to confront the underlying
issue of the human condition. Janov was certainly remarkably honest about the devastating
effects of lack of love during our formative years, and he also pioneered his brilliant
PRIMAL THERAPY techniques that help ‘patients go back and relive the original overwhelming
scene, feeling or need [such as being rejected by their mother, or ignored by their father], bit by bit
over time until it is finally resolved and out of the system’ (ibid. p.xix)—which is an excruciating
connection that can cause a ‘primal scream’ in the patient, as he titled his first book.
But, again, as helpful as his therapeutic insights are, Janov didn’t confront and explain
our corrupted human condition, and thus he wasn’t able to provide the all-important,
redeeming, therapising explanation of our psychologically distressed human condition
that allows us to understand the origin and good reason for all the pain he was witnessing
every day in his therapy rooms—nor did he know why we are born with ‘a pervasive
need to be loved’; he didn’t know how nurturing created our species’ loving instinctive
soul. He even had a totally false theory for how we became a conscious species, writing
that ‘Pain may be one of the prime reasons for the development of the thinking brain. Adversity
“demanded” a higher brain to handle overwhelming input. In the same way that we flee to our cortex
and its thoughts to handle upcoming pain, the lower brain cells seemed to have migrated upwards
in evolution to form a cortex in the face of adversity’ (ibid. p.40). (The fully accountable, truthful
biological explanation for how we humans actually became fully conscious when other
species’ haven’t is described later in paragraphs XX-XX.) So for all of Janov’s honesty and
helpful therapy, he was still not looking into the real issue of the human condition.
42 Therapy for the Human Condition

CAVE Later, in chapter XX, I summarise other even more human-condition-avoiding,

superficial therapies that health practitioners have been teaching, and describe how some
of their techniques fit into the new human-condition-explained, real therapy. These will
include the ‘just think positive and you’ll be well’ practitioners like Bruce Lipton and Joe
Dispenza, the ‘just focus on the present’ teachers such as Eckhart Tolle, and mindfulness
meditation practices.
An important aspect of having been a conscious human living in a human condition-
stricken world, and this will be explained more fully later in chapter XX when the ‘stages
with ages’ are presented, is that through a person’s own experiences they gain some
appreciation and defeated acceptance that the world of humans isn’t ideal. As a child they
gradually become less naive, and more deeply thoughtful, until eventually at about the
age of 12 they became sufficiently able to think constructively about the deeper issue of
the imperfections of human life, which is the issue of the human condition. And since
there hasn’t been, until now, truthful explanation of the human condition they eventually,
at around the age of 14 or 15, had no choice but to resign themselves to never trying
to wrestle with the unbearably depressing issue of the human condition again. This
‘Resignation’ during early adolescence is actually only the ‘main’ resignation or reluctant
acceptance of the imperfection of the world, because there are many ‘mini’ resignations
that occur from infancy onwards—many mini defeated acceptances that the world isn’t
an ideal place and that you just have to cope with it as best you can, mostly by denying
or blocking out the issue of the hurtful imperfections of life. For example, the so-called
‘terrible twos’ is actually a stage of feeling distressed by, and being forced to accept, the
imperfect world at large. The ‘naughty nines’ is a similar stage of distressed protesting
against the world, which also ends in a mini defeated acceptance.
In the following descriptions from Janov of the progressions in the way we respond
to hurts as we grow up, you can see how the conscious mind becomes more involved and
more capable of thinking effectively, albeit futilely. He describes how we have a mainly
‘visceral’ response to and ‘imprint’ of hurt during our womb life, birth and early infancy; to
a more ‘feeling’, ‘emotional’ response to and ‘memory’ of hurt during our later infancy and
childhood; to a more ‘logic’-preoccupied, ‘cortical, thinking’ response from ‘around the age of
twelve’, where we ‘attempt to make sense out of the hurt’, become concerned about ‘trying to
explain the inexplicable [of why we weren’t loved]’ (The New Primal Scream, pp.58-59 & 55).
So it can be seen from the summary that has been given so far in this chapter 2 that
while we humans have been living under the threat of unbearable depression if we tried to
confront the issue of our corrupted human condition, block-out or denial has been a life-
saver. While Janov didn’t recognise the source reason for our soul-repression or psychosis
and our mind-distress or neurosis, he witnessed how important repression has been, saying
it has had ‘an important reason for its existence: nothing less than survival’ (ibid. p.36).
What now needs to be explained about our repression, and this will be described
much more fully in chapter XX, is that while we have used all manner of repression
to try to block out both the pain we feel from our primary hurt and our exacerbating
secondary hurt of worrying about and misinterpreting our primary hurt, this blocking
out or repressing or burying is never completely successful, which means the distressed,
negative feelings and thoughts keep bubbling up from our subconscious and expressing
themselves throughout our lives.
 2.6 The psychological effect on children of not encountering a loving world is immense 43

As Janov wrote, ‘When pains are massive and continuous, and repression is equal to the
task, there is global repression with little chances for major act-outs. But more often there is some
repression with leakages of the feeling upwards towards conscious-awareness. What the person
does with that leakage is employ secondary defences…​But the modes of defence are as diverse as
there are people. Some defend by fleeing to their head, with ideas, philosophies and belief systems.
Others defend by a flurry of activity which keeps the feeling away. Still others talk incessantly…​The
function of the secondary defences is to take up the slack where repression leaves off…​So we have
one defence, repression, and then secondary defences which are the idiosyncratic ways each of us
find to avoid pain and fulfil our unmet needs, while binding or releasing the energy of the [painful]
feeling’ (The New Primal Scream, p.41).
Thus, while everyone tries valiantly throughout their life to block out and repress
the often extreme primary and secondary hurts they experienced in their formative years
when they were so innocent in soul and so naive in their ability to understand all the upset
in the world, how successful they are at doing this varies. Some people are so successful
at repressing primary and secondary hurts that they aren’t consciously aware that they
suffer from them—in fact, Janov even makes the point that ‘the strong, well-encased neurotic
is often highly functional in this society’ (ibid. p.xxiv). Others struggle to keep their hurts down
and as a result suffer immeasurably. With the levels of upset in the world now so great, a
rapidly increasing proportion of the population fall into this second category of finding it
near impossible keeping hurts repressed. For many people now these early hurts are being
so easily triggered by life’s stresses back into their everyday conscious mind’s awareness
that they suffer from incapacitating symptoms like anxiety, depression, incessant negative
thinking and extreme feelings of worthlessness. To use evasive, human-condition-
avoiding CAVE language, they suffer from debilitating ‘mental health issues’. In truth,
the whole human race suffers from one big mental health issue, which is our species’
immensely psychologically upset human condition—which has become so extreme
in younger generations now that the human race is rapidly heading to extinction from
unbearable levels of soul-numb psychosis and mind-disconnected neurosis. Hopefully the
rehabilitating understanding of the human condition has arrived in time to save our species
from this end game nightmare—which means all these understandings of the human
condition in my books and essays and on the WTM’s www.HumanConditon.com website
need to receive wide recognition and support soon!
A very important summary of how to manage the anxiety, unremitting negative
thoughts and general overwhelm that these bubblings up from our subconscious childhood
terrors can cause us will be described next in chapter XX.
But before doing that, the following is a collection of clearly unresigned, denial-free,
honest lyrics from the young American heavy metal band With Life In Mind’s 2010 album
Grievances. These lyrics make very clear the end game situation of the just mentioned
threat of terminal psychosis facing the human race; they also reveal how traumatising
our world is for young minds that haven’t yet resigned to blocking out the issue of our
corrupted human condition; and they also make very clear how desperate the human race
has been for the answers we now have of why our corrupted condition occurred and how
that redeeming understanding allows us to heal that tortured condition: ‘It scares me to death
to think of what I have become…​I feel so lost in this world’, ‘Our innocence is lost’, ‘I scream to the
sky but my words get lost along the way. I can’t express all the hate that’s led me here and all the
44 Therapy for the Human Condition

filth that swallows us whole. I don’t want to be part of all this insanity. Famine and death. Pestilence
and war. A world shrouded in darkness…​Fear is driven into our minds everywhere we look’, ‘Trying
so hard for a life with such little purpose…​Lost in oblivion’, ‘Everything you’ve been told has been
a lie…​We’ve all been asleep since the beginning of time. Why are we so scared to use our minds?’,
‘Keep pretending; soon enough things will crumble to the ground…​If they could only see the truth
they would coil in disgust’, ‘How do we save ourselves from this misery…​So desperate for the
answers…​We’re straining on the last bit of hope we have left. No one hears our cries. And no one sees
us screaming’, ‘This is the end.’
And these extracts from the writings of the fearlessly honest, great Scottish
psychiatrist R.D. Laing make it clear how extremely alienated, separated from our true
self, we humans have become; and how determinedly we have been practising denial of
this corrupted condition; and also how it was only by confronting and solving the human
condition that we could end our species’ extreme madness and sickness: ‘Our alienation goes
to the roots. The realization of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection on any aspect
of present inter-human life…​We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially
men, but are in an alienated state [p.12 of 156] …​the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated
fragment of what a person can be. As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its
contents but its flavour; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world [p.22]
…​The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the
condition of the normal man [p.24] …​between us and It [our true selves or soul] there is a veil which
is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded [p.118] …​The outer
divorced from any illumination from the inner is in a state of darkness. We are in an age of darkness.
The state of outer darkness is a state of sin—i.e. alienation or estrangement from the inner light [p.116]
…We are all murderers and prostitutes…​We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true
selves, to one another’ [pp.11-12] (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967). ‘We are dead,
but think we are alive. We are asleep, but think we are awake. We are dreaming, but take our dreams
to be reality. We are the halt, lame, blind, deaf, the sick. But we are doubly unconscious. We are so ill
that we no longer feel ill, as in many terminal illnesses. We are mad, but have no insight [into the fact
of our madness]’ (Self and Others, 1961, p.38 of 192). ‘We are so out of touch with this realm [where the
issue of the human condition lies] that many people can now argue seriously that it does not exist’
(The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, p.105).

So a summary will now be given of the real therapy that is at last possible now that
we have the redeeming understanding of our ‘alienated’, ‘shrivelled’, ‘bemused’, ‘crazed’,
‘dark’, ‘dead’, ‘sick’, ‘unconscious’, ‘ill’, ‘mad’ state or condition—especially the therapy
techniques to manage early childhood hurts and misreadings that can cause so much
anxiety and suffering throughout our lives.
Following that will be chapter XX which summarises the dishonest, ‘refuse to look
under the bonnet’, hide-in-Plato’s-dark-cave, ‘argue seriously that it [the human condition] does
not exist’, ineffective therapy path that virtually all therapists have been practising.

Note: This is merely the beginning of this book. As more of the book is
finished, more is being added here……so this is to be continued.
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