I’m Jeremy Griffith.
For the last 40 years I have dedicated my career as a biologist
to understanding and explaining the human condition.
Our very physiology has been driving
our behaviour, which ranges from incredible acts of love to unimaginable violence and
horror.
But we can finally provide the scientific explanation for why this is, and through that
understanding of the human condition we can free ourselves of all the guilt and uncertainty,
and in turn transform ourselves and the world.
In this short video I’ll explain the core ideas of the human condition and
why up until now others have failed to offer true solutions.
I will help prepare you for
the confronting realities and resulting transformation that will, most wonderfully, end all the suffering
and conflict in the world.
The great philosopher Plato was among the first to explore the human condition, and
over 2,000 years later his writings are still relevant.
Plato put forward the idea that
all of humankind lives in a cave, hiding from the truth that is the human condition.
In his analogy,
the fire that blocks the exit of the cave is the searing painful light of
truth—a light we naturally fear because it makes the unbearable imperfections of human
life visible.
So we hide deeper and deeper within the darkness of the cave.
This analogy is a perfect representation of the human condition.
It shows truth can only
exist outside the cave, but since our entire existence has been spent sheltered within,
everywhere you look you will find nothing but a great mountain of lies—determined
efforts to deny and evade the existence of the human condition.
Instead of truth, false
biological excuses (such as that we are victims of savage animal instincts within us) and
unfounded, feel-good explanations have been pushed, each with its own ulterior motive.
So what is the human condition and how are we to truthfully explain and solve it?
Basically, when we humans developed a fully conscious
mind some 2 million years ago, a battle unavoidably
developed between it and our already established instincts.
The result of this conflict between
our instinct and intellect was that we became psychologically defensive, angry, alienated
and egocentric—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.
The easiest way to understand this tragic conflict within us and its solution is to
apply our situation to another species.
Imagine a stork: we’ll call him Adam.
Each Summer, Adam instinctually migrates North
with the other storks to breed.
Since he has no conscious mind he doesn’t think about
or question his behaviour, he just follows what his instincts tell him to do.
But what if we give Adam a large brain capable of conscious thought?
He will start to think
for himself, but many of his new ideas will not be consistent with his instincts. For
instance, while migrating North with the other storks Adam notices an island full of apple
trees.
He makes a conscious decision to divert from his migratory path and explore the island.
It’s his first grand experiment in self-adjustment/​self-management.
But when Adam’s instincts realise he has strayed they criticise his deprogrammed behaviour
and dogmatically try to pull him back on his original course.
In effect, they condemn him
as being bad.
Imagine the turmoil Adam will experience: he can’t go back to simply following his
instincts; his instinctive orientations to the migratory flight path were acquired over
thousands of generations of natural selection, but those orientations are not understandings.
Since his conscious mind requires understanding through experimentation, inevitably a war
breaks out with his instincts.
Ideally at this point, Adam’s conscious mind would sit down and explain to his instincts
why he’s defying them.
He would explain that the gene-based, natural selection process
only gives species instinctive orientations to the world, whereas his nerve-based, conscious
mind, which is able to make sense of cause and effect, needs understanding of the world
to operate.
But Adam doesn’t have this self-understanding.
He’s only just begun his search for knowledge.
In fact, he’s not even aware of what the problem actually is.
He’s simply started
to feel that he’s bad, even evil.
So, tragically, while searching for understanding, three things unavoidably happened.
Adam defensively
retaliates against the criticism, he tries to deny it and block it out of his mind, and
he desperately seeks any reinforcement he can find to relieve himself of the negative
feelings.
He has become angry, alienated and egocentric, a psychologically upset state
we call the human condition.
Adam’s intellect or ‘ego’ (and ego is just another word for the intellect since
the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘ego’ as ‘the conscious thinking self’) so Adam's
intellect or ego became ‘centred’ or focused on the need to justify itself—Adam became
ego-centric, selfishly preoccupied aggressively competing for opportunities to prove he is
good and not bad, to validate his worth, to get a ‘win’; to essentially eke out any
positive reinforcement that would bring him some relief from criticism and some sense
of worth.
He unavoidably became self-preoccupied or selfish, and aggressive and competitive.
Basically suffering psychological upset was the price we conscious humans had to pay for
our heroic search for understanding.
In the words from the song 'The Impossible Dream'
from the musical the Man of La Mancha, we had to be prepared to ‘march into hell for
a heavenly cause’.
We had to lose ourselves to find ourselves; we had to suffer becoming
angry, alienated and egocentric until we found sufficient knowledge to explain ourselves.
The Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden accurately describes the primary
situation involved in our human condition of the psychologically upsetting battle that
emerged between our instincts and our conscious intellect’s search for knowledge.
It says
Adam and Eve/​we took the ‘fruit’ ‘from the tree of knowledge’ and were ‘disobedient’.
In other words, we developed a conscious mind and free will.
But in that pre-scientific
story it says Adam and Eve then became perpetrators of ‘sin’ and as a result were ‘banished…from
the Garden of Eden’ state of our species’ original innocence for having become ‘evil’,
whereas this scientific presentation says, ‘No, no, that story got it wrong’.
Adam and Eve are actually the heroes of the whole story of life on Earth because surely
the conscious mind is nature’s greatest invention and to be given the task of searching
for understanding while the whole world’s condemning you was the hardest and toughest
of tasks—because that condemnation was universal.
All the other innocent storks are condemning
the search for knowledge, and since all of nature, the rain, the clouds, the trees, other
animals, are all associated with our original instinctive self, the whole world, in effect,
ganged up on Adam and Eve/​i.e. us humans—and yet all the time we were good and not bad
but we couldn’t explain why, but now at last we can.
Our species has lived with the human condition for some 2 million years—the probable time
we have been conscious—and it’s taken tremendous courage to withstand the relentless
criticism from our instincts.
But finally the knowledge that science has given us of
the difference between instinctive orientations and conscious understandings allows us to
explain that we didn’t deserve this criticism—that we conscious humans are good and not bad after
all.
And significantly, now that we are able to understand from scientific first principles
that upset is not an ‘evil’, worthless, bad state, but an immensely heroic state,
we can know that while, inevitably, all humans are variously upset from their different encounters
with humanity’s epic search to find knowledge, ultimately
for self-knowledge, understanding of the human condition, ALL HUMANS ARE EQUALLY GOOD.
Everyone
is variously angry, egocentric and alienated, but everyone is good, and not just good but
a hero of the story of life on Earth!
So no longer do we have to rely on dogmatic assertions
that ‘all men are created equal’ purely on the basis that it is a ‘self-evident’
truth, as the United States’ Declaration of Independence asserts, because we can now
explain, understand and know that the equality of goodness of all humans is a fundamental
truth.
We can now understand why everyone is equally worthy, and that no one is superior
or inferior.
Indeed, through this understanding, the whole concept of good and bad disappears
from our conceptualisation of ourselves.
Yes, and best of all, through this clarifying insight all our psychologically defensive
angry, alienated and egocentric behaviour—which has been destroying both ourselves and our
world—IS obsoleted, made redundant.
We are redeemed.
The great burden of guilt has been
lifted from the human race, and that old insecure, upset life that went with it is over—which
means we go from living with the trauma of the human condition to living free of it.
You could say that—in the nick of time—we humans have won the race between self-destruction
and self-understanding!
I want to mention that there have been many thinkers throughout history who have, like
Moses in his Garden of Eden story, recognised that our psychologically upset human condition
is a result of us humans becoming conscious and at odds with our species’ particular
cooperative and loving, Edenic, moral instincts, but, as I said, it wasn’t until science
revealed the difference between instinctive orientations and conscious understandings
that we were finally in a position to explain that humans are actually good and not bad.
The instinct vs conscious intellect explanation of the human condition is actually very obvious,
and it shows just how wrong the old excuse is that ‘we are competitive and
aggressive because we have savage animal instincts’!
As you work through this material, expect to find some extremely confronting revelations.
There will be times where you may feel it’s easier to go back to denying the human condition
rather than facing it.
We have been hiding in Plato’s dark cave of denial
and evasion for so long that when the blinds are suddenly drawn and we see the liberating
explanation of our condition, that revealing light can be overpowering as the dishonesty
and horrible truths of humankind are exposed all at once.
But there is an immensely relieving and easy way of coping with the arrival of this liberating
understanding.
As emphasised, once we know that our angry, alienated and egocentric condition
is finally explained and defended, there’s no longer any need to continue with it.
With this knowledge in place it would be irresponsible to continue along
that old road.
There is an unburdened life waiting for all of us outside the cave in
the warm, relieving sunlight, free of the human condition.
Now that you have a slightly better understanding of the human condition and what to expect,
I urge you to continue with it.
Everything you need to
know is in my book 'FREEDOM' which you can download for free from www.humancondition.com,
or purchase from bookstores such as Amazon.
We have also set up the World Transformation
Movement, a non-profit organisation offering free support, context and community for everyone.
The human condition has caused unmentionable suffering, and held us back as a species for
millions of years.
It’s time to take our power back and start living to our species’
fabulous real potential—and transform our world.