WTM Southern Highlands

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Transcript of Annabelle West’s WTM Southern Highlands Centre video

Hi, and welcome to the World Transformation Movement Centre in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, Australia. My name is Annabelle West, otherwise known as Bella, and I wish to establish this Centre here to support the work of biologist Jeremy Griffith and the World Transformation Movement team.

This work is a scientific explanation for the human condition and looks into the function of the human brain at its core, explaining two different learning systems. But it’s all the ramifications of that [difference] that are reflected in our current lives that are truly mind-blowing and exciting to learn about.

I came across the work of Jeremy Griffith when I was in my last year of school and in the subsequent years it has never disappointed me and has made sense of so much. Naturally I wish to share this relieving and critical information for anyone who is interested.

This book, FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, is just one example of the publications Jeremy and the World Transformation Movement have on tap, all available from the main WTM website. The information within this book can make so much sense of the world around us, and the baffling or intriguing nature of so many things, that I kind of take it for granted now that I have this understanding. It’s so powerful in its ability to bring compassion to both sides of a polar opposite situation, because with understanding all the anger diffuses. It is a mind-fulfilling, intellectually-satisfying, curiosity-satisfying source of information. Not to mention soul-fulfilling, angst-calming and rehabilitating.

I remember at the age of 17 just being so excited to have come across this work in another of Jeremy’s books at the time, Beyond The Human Condition, and I felt like one of the luckiest people in the world to be involved with something so profound and so beautiful and something that was going to truly make a difference. I wanted to share it with all of my friends. I still feel the same about this. I’m immensely lucky to be involved in this moment in history and to have come across this understanding, this work, Jeremy, these people. It’s very, very exciting that we can now go global and share this with everyone and hopefully more and more people will just keep seeing the value in this.

And in case you’re thinking that this could be similar to other movements or organisations out there, nothing I have encountered is similar to this. The difference is that self-help courses don’t answer the questions that we have, nor do they deal with the deepest issue of the human condition that we have before us; they just tell you how to cope with it. There’s so many self-improvement courses and meditation courses you can do to enable yourself to better cope with life and be more successful, but don’t you think we’ve lost sight of the original question, which is why is life like this? What’s happened to people, and to myself, that we’ve become so uncaring, angry, hard, driven by greed, money and success? Why is life stressful, and kids are caught up in a modern, fast-paced world with little values and no family time anymore. It’s just chaotic and success-driven with everyone trying to compete to make the difference, leaving everyone angry and ‘out of room’ for each other, and unable to bring up new, loved generations.

From any angle you look at—whether it’s in the Western world with depression, or the immense suffering of poverty, displacement and war, and environmental degradation, in other parts of the world—it’s just disintegrating, falling apart and there is just so much suffering. That’s where explanation of the human condition comes in and makes sense of what is going on in all humans and why it’s actually getting exponentially worse without understanding. So this understanding is critical to all of us, in order to make the changes we need to understand ourselves and others.

This information covers so many topics that nothing isn’t explained; it covers subjects like men and women, politics, art, beauty, sensitivity, poetry—it just goes into everything—the sensitivity of animals, how artists can capture the truth that most people can’t admit. So that’s really invigorating and brain-satisfying. It just enables us to bring understanding and compassion to ourselves, to understand yourself and to have compassion for our friends, for our family, and then take it further to the world. It even explains the differences between races, the differences in a single family—the massive differences between races, between different countries, between different upbringings. It’s fascinating.

Something that I’ve always loved about the information are the things that Jeremy has quoted in FREEDOM, such as songs that talk about the arrival of the truth. If you think of John Lennon’s song Imagine, or Cat Stevens’s song Where do the children play, or Tracy Chapman when she sang [Talkin’ ‘bout a] Revolution—I’m definitely talking revealing my age here; I’m 46 by the way—and the Holy Grail by Hunters & Collectors, just to name a few songs that are just really uplifting and talk about what’s going on in the world quite honestly and anticipate a better time, or yearn for a better time. [The band] Supertramp…anyway, the list goes on and on.

I just found that quote in FREEDOM that I remember from uni days; I’d just come across this information then and I remember reading this quote in one of the books in our tutorial and just being really moved by it and I think Jeremy’s just quoted a little bit of it here; it’s in Chapter 9: The Transformation of the Human Race and the poem is by William Blake: ‘Tiger, Tiger, burning bright’, which ‘asks in the simplest words the question which has troubled the mind of man—both believing and non believing man — for centuries: “When the stars threw down their spears / And watered heaven with their tears / Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the lamb make thee?”.’ That line, ‘Did he who made the lamb make thee?’ was pretty powerful.

There’s so many of Laurens van der Post’s quotes that I really love. One quote that Jeremy has talked about is that “in the sense to which exploration is both an exploration into the physical and into the spirit of man there is a lot ahead to do…the future is in your keeping…there is exploration in reverse to do. We must go sharply into reverse…we must rehabilitate ourselves; we must get our old natural selves to join with our other conscious, wilful, rational, scientific selves…Your job is not over.” That quote just confirms to me, as do many, the importance of everything Jeremy has presented in his work. Jeremy has done the ‘exploration’ for us and we have the job to make these ideas available and accessible to everyone.