u/WenevaSoots

I read this extract from FREEDOM, chapter 8:11C 'Other adjustments to life under the duress of the human condition that developed during the reign of Adventurous Adolescentman' which someone shared in the FIX THE WORLD Facebook Group recently. It was in response to someone else saying they'd lost a loved one and how heartbroken they were. I was hit with a stunning realisation that we are now able to scientifically understand what love really is, why it's so important to us, why we grieve and that we can place our grief, this enormous force that overwhelms us, into the enormous context of the whole human journey from instinctive ignorance to conscious understanding. We can really start to appreciate how much love drives everything and why, and understand the deeper significance of ceremonial monuments like Stonehenge and Göbekli Tepe (see The Great Guilt That Causes The Deaf Effect). This whole section will also give you a sense of the profound love and sensitivity of the person who wrote it.

> “Of course in addition to the practical need for inspired guidance from our ancestors, we also wanted to perpetuate our love for them and theirs for us. Humans now are so toughened—so soul-destroyed—by the levels of anger, egocentricity and alienation in human life today that it is hard for us to imagine how loving and empathetic humans once were, but the truth is the emotional need to put flowers on the graves of those ‘near to us’ would have been so much stronger and purer in earlier times when humans were stronger and purer in soul. The emotion of love would have been so powerful that everyone would have been ‘near to us’ and remained ‘near to us’ after they died. A truly loving universe is such a different universe to the one we inhabit now. Basically people didn’t ‘die’ in earlier times—they died physically of course, but their entire spirit lived on with us. Love and feeling and emotion and togetherness was everywhere and in everyone—as Hesiod was recorded as describing life before the ‘fall’ in par. 180, ‘When gods alike and mortals rose to birth / A golden race the immortals formed on earth…​Like gods they lived, with calm untroubled mind / Free from the toils and anguish of our kind / Nor e’er decrepit age misshaped their frame…​Strangers to ill, their lives in feasts flowed by…​Dying they sank in sleep, nor seemed to die’. It is only the extremely alienated disconnection from our all-sensitive and all-loving soul in humans of more recent times that has left us needing to believe in a physical ‘afterlife’—needing to construct pyramids as a vehicle to supposedly carry us on to another life after we died, or needing to hold onto a belief in reincarnation, etc, etc. But it is love, and our love of love, that is what is truly universal and eternal/​everlasting/​immortal. So it wasn’t so much ancestor worship that humans once practised but ancestor love. For instance, Stonehenge in Britain (and other such similar sacred sites) would have originally been a place to let all the love of, and from, our ancestors not only look after us but surround and embrace us, and we them in return. Likewise, the big old oak trees that the druids revered were similarly sacred beings that were ‘near to us’ when we were still open to the loving life that they were so full of. Love (which, as explained in chapter 4, is the unconditionally selfless theme of the integration of matter) was everywhere we walked, but as humans became more upset and alienated we began to need to create places like Stonehenge and sacred groves of oak trees to remind ourselves of that loving, connected state.”

From the Fix The World Facebook Group.

The whole subject of the human condition really is something that we humans have lived in absolutely massive fear of, I know I certainly did! And I've always loved this extract below from Jeremy Griffith's incredible Freedom Essay 30 [about the process of Resignation that teenagers go through] which talks about this, including the powerful quote from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Thank God with understanding of the human condition it has all been made safe to confront so we no longer have to live in fear of it at all and can move on to a whole new world free of the human condition altogether!

What a break through for humanity!

>“It is a measure of just how unbearable the issue of the human condition has been that while Resignation has been the most important psychological event in human life, the process is never spoken of and has virtually gone unacknowledged in the public realm, with only a rare few of our most accomplished writers even managing to write about the suicidally depressing experience of engaging the subject of the human condition itself. To this end, many ‘philosophers and psychologists’ consider that the great Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s ‘analysis on the nature of despair is one of the best accounts on the subject’—with the ‘nature of despair’ being as close as the reviewer could go in referring to the worse-than-death, suicidal depression that the human condition has caused humans, but which Kierkegaard managed to give such an honest account of in his aptly titled 1849 book, The Sickness Unto Death: ‘the torment of despair is precisely the inability to die [and end the torture of our unexplained human condition] that despair is the sickness unto death, this tormenting contradiction [of our ‘good and evil’, human condition-afflicted lives], this sickness in the self; eternally to die, to die and yet not to die’. Kierkegaard went on to include these unnervingly truthful words about how, even when the blocks were in place in our minds against recognising the existence of the issue of the human condition, the terrifying ‘anxiety’ it caused us still occasionally surfaced: ‘there is not a single [adult] human being who does not despair at least a little, in whose innermost being there doesn’t dwell an uneasiness, an unquiet, a discordance, an anxiety in the face of an unknown something, or a something he doesn’t even dare strike up acquaintance with…he goes about with a sickness, goes about weighed down with a sickness of the spirit, which only now and then reveals its presence within, in glimpses, and with what is for him an inexplicable anxiety.’”