WTM Madrid

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Transcript of David Garcia’s WTM Madrid Centre video

Hello everyone. I’m presenting World Transformation Movement Madrid, the first Centre in Spain. On this website we will discuss the publications of the Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, especially the book FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition in which Jeremy explains what the human condition is and warns of the great problem we are facing as a species and the need for us to make an effort to understand and change our condition.

My name is David. I am 54 years old [at time of filming in 2023]. I was born in Valladolid, Spain. I live in Madrid and have been working as an airline pilot for 30 years now. I’m on long-haul flights and currently I am also working in the Flight Safety Department. Before the School of Aeronautics I had begun studies in Chemistry at the School of Sciences in the University of Valladolid in Spain.

My hobbies are sports, nature in general, and since 2020, with the lock-downs, I began to translate the writings of Jeremy Griffith into Spanish [see translations here].

And finally I am a father of three children, and I mention that because we can all agree that nurturing and educating children is a great responsibility, a very important task but after reading the book FREEDOM, I have learned the incredible role of nurturing and education in the evolution of the human species. Nurturing made possible the emergence of our moral instincts, our natural altruism, and made possible the development of our social intelligence and our singular conscious mind. So if you are a mother or a devoted father you will feel proud if you read FREEDOM. But above all, nurturing and education remain a key to our destiny as a civilization and as a species. [See chapter 5 of FREEDOM or Freedom Essay 21 for explanation of the origin of humans’ moral soul.]

I don’t remember how I came across the book FREEDOM. I guess someone passed me the PDF or a link, since it can be downloaded for free from the HumanCondition.com website. I later bought this paper copy from Amazon [showing the book]. At first glance it seemed like just another self-help book, but I decided to read at least the excellent introduction by Professor Harry Prosen, a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association and in doing so I realised that this book was something different and something really important.

When I started reading FREEDOM it struck me that Jeremy is all the time including quotes from other writers and providing the original sources of all the explanations he presents in his book. It is to be appreciated for all the enormous work he has done for us reading and selecting very interesting knowledge and insights. He quotes classical writers, philosophers, ancient poems, the Bible and texts of other religions, in which we may not be very interested initially, but he is able to extract what is really important. And on the other hand, he reveals little-known thoughts of famous scientists, such as Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking, and above all he is able to link all that knowledge with the latest scientific discoveries and make sense of very deep and serious explanations, and even connecting that with modern lyrics of songs of U2 or The Doors, with films, paintings or contemporary novels like The Catcher in the Rye, for example. Spanish readers will like to read explanations of Goya’s paintings, of the musical The Man of La Mancha and Don Quixote by Cervantes. All this shows that Jeremy has read and studied a lot about different subjects, and being a biologist he has not limited himself to his scientific field, but he has opened his mind to a broader vision of knowledge about the human condition, and has been able to provide us with his explanations, ideas and very important conclusions, reaching beyond what anyone has done before.

One of the key words of the book is in the title: FREEDOM. I am a freedom enthusiast. But because of it we are having adapting problems since, in our evolution, we got a conscious mind about two million years ago, when that gave us a freedom that we did not have before. Since then our free-thinking mind has been in conflict with our natural genetic instincts, and falling into a more and more psychologically troubled condition that is the Human Condition.

Many philosophers and thinkers have written about this internal struggle in the past, such as Plato with his Allegory of the Cave and the Allegory of the Winged Chariot (The Two-Horse Chariot). Other more modern writers such as Eric Fromm, in his famous book The Fear of Freedom, also explained our problems living with true freedom because we don’t feel safe with it. But Jeremy is now providing “the before and after” of that. He is explaining how we got to this situation — our Human Condition — and most importantly, how we can overcome and end all the suffering we are experiencing as individuals, as a society and as a species.

Jeremy also, in the style of Plato, has created his own allegory to explain the human condition with “Adam Stork”. Adam is a stork that suddenly acquires a conscious mind. This story, with even its pictures, is included in the book and makes it very clear to understand how distressing and disturbed our condition can be from an initially positive event. Since we as a species gained a conscious mind, our situation has actually been more and more difficult, because we have lived thousands of human generations in an upset and corrupted human condition to finally arrive at these modern times in which if we look honestly at the state of the human race and the world situation, we must admit that things are not going well. Despite the great technological and scientific progress, the great new constructions, with democracy and laws spreading all over the world, the United Nations, a lot of non-government organisations working for the good of humanity, the Davos Forum, many environmental movements, international conventions, etc., we are supposed to be progressing, but it seems that nothing is really working. Just look at how many wars are now ongoing in the world even though they don’t report much about them, rising social inequality and crime, corruption from the highest institutions to ordinary people; drugs, depressions and mental disorders are now a real epidemic in the world. We should recognize that we are sinking, but we have a whole entertainment and media industry diverting our attention and helping us to deny the situation. The Titanic is leaking and the band keeps playing. We are at risk of being a fallen race, another extinct species in the Homo kind.

But the last thing Jeremy wants is to make us feel even more guilty of our condition, and guilty of all the problems and catastrophic events that occur in the world. Obviously we are involved in them, but all our problems are only a consequence of our evolution, of our human condition. We have always been told that we are essentially evil, that we are born as wild animals and need to be educated and civilised in order to live in peace and respect for others in a cooperative order. We have been told that all the aggressive, competitive, selfish behaviour we see in the world is just our animal instincts fighting internally to control us. THAT’S A BIG LIE as now demonstrated in the book FREEDOM [see Video/F. Essay 2 on the false ‘savage instincts’ excuse]. The truth now revealed is that we are the most incredible species on our planet, the true heroes of creation. We have natural altruistic and moral instincts for a peaceful, loving, selfless, cooperative and inclusive life, all together in harmony with nature, and the proof of this incredibly has always been there, it is in our history. Now we even have the fossil record found by anthropologists to prove our almost godly past. [See F. Essay 22 on the fossil discoveries that evidence our nurtured origins.] It was an obvious truth, but it has been ignored, denied or hidden by everyone, starting with the scientists themselves.

So the reason we are at risk of disaster is not because of our animal instincts but because of our human condition. More than ever, in this age we are living in, we need to understand ourselves, understand others, and understand our human condition, as is done by reading FREEDOM. That realisation gives you some relief because you can stop feeling guilty and crying out to heaven, as we often do, asking “How can someone be so cruel, so selfish, so aggressive?” So understanding is the beginning, but the most important thing is to know what to do to overcome our condition. So there is some work to do, but Jeremy has given us all the understandings and tools to fulfil the human journey and bring peace and light to the earth.

To quote the Man of La Mancha, we have had to “march into hell for a heavenly cause.”

So let’s start reading this very important book, FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition.