WTM Herefordshire

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Transcript of Beth Williamson’s WTM Herefordshire Centre video

Hi, everyone. My name is Beth and I am 38 years old [at time of filming in 2023], and I’m really excited to be setting up a World Transformation Movement Centre here in the UK. And the reason why I’m doing this is because I want to do everything in my power to look after and support the information in this incredible book, FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition by Jeremy Griffith.

I first came across this book when I was mindlessly scrolling on Instagram one day and Jeremy popped up saying that the human condition had been solved, and I was like, “Well, what’s the human condition?” I’d never really understood what it was and people only ever use that term when they were trying to sound really profound. And then you’ve got Professor Harry Prosen, the former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, on the front [of the book] saying “This is the book that’s going to save the world.” I was like, “bold claims”, I was quite sceptical, but it was free so I downloaded it and that’s when my journey began—and I’m so, so pleased that I did. And I remember being really touched because they didn’t even ask for my email address or anything like that.

I thought it might be quite useful for me to go through some of the parts of the book that I found instantly really relieving. But I would say with absolute conviction that this book is unlike anything you have ever read before. And the more that you return to it, the layers and layers just peel away. It’s phenomenal.

So the first part that was really illuminating was when Jeremy explains our tumultuous teenage years and he terms it ‘Resignation’ [see Freedom Essay 30 and chapter 2.2 of FREEDOM on the psychological process of Resignation.]. I was a secondary school teacher for ten years or so. I taught English to 11 to 18 year olds, and I guess I saw thousands of students going through this change and I desperately wanted to do something to help but I just didn’t have the answers. I only had my own blurry memories of being 14 or 15 years old and it wasn’t until this book provided me with bulletproof biological explanations as to why teenagers were going through, you know, what they go through in those years. And Jeremy completely blew all the other explanations out of the water. I mean, I’d always thought, oh, it’s their hormones or their brains are developing and they need more sleep, or their phones and their games are disconnecting them from reality somehow. But Jeremy explains that this is the age where we first start to try and look at the issue of our human condition. You know, we ask questions like “Are we good?”, “Are we bad?”, “Why is the world such a crazy place?”, “Where’s my place in the world?”, “My life doesn’t have any meaning”. And Jeremy explains that this is a time, it’s a psychological process, where teenagers have to kind of split themselves off because just looking at the issue of the human condition is too destabilising. It’s so confronting that those of us don’t even know what it means. So, teenagers with this explanation no longer have to suffer with all that pain. They can finally understand themselves and bring meaning to their lives. And I just think it’s absolutely brilliant that teenagers don’t have to suffer in silence anymore. All they ever had was silence from the adult world and now they have the answers that they’ve been looking for.

I did spend some time as a teenager looking for answers and that began again when I became a mother. I’m a mother to two young children and I began searching to try and find out how I could be better. I wanted to know what was going on in the world. I wanted to know that my children had a future and that they were going to be safe. I guess I have always believed that nobody pops out of the womb bad. You know, we’re all good to begin with. What is it that happens to us that causes some of this absolutely crazy behaviour? So I looked into things like conscious parenting, gentle parenting, meditation, yoga, some kind of new age bits and bobs, and I found that I wasn’t really very good at it, to be honest with you. It felt like I had to kind of civilise myself, that my brain was there to kind of control myself in some way. But then when I read FREEDOM, I learned that we don’t have animal savage instincts that need to be controlled. We have human instincts, and they are loving and cooperative and that’s our base, that’s our starting point. And these loving and cooperative instincts have been developing for 10 to 12 million years and it was nurturing of our young that created our species, instinctive moral self. And that part of us, that soul in us is still around today. You know it’s why we help the old lady crossing the road. It doesn’t do anything to further our genes or guarantee that we will reproduce, we’re doing it because we have a moral conscience. So for me, when Jeremy explains the role of nurturing and our species development and this process of ‘love indoctrination’ and the fact that it is so embedded in our genes, honestly, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read, actually [see Freedom Essay 21 and chapter 5 of FREEDOM on the origin of our moral instincts].

But after we, you know, brought more integration into our species, we went one step further and developed our conscious thinking brain, which is incredible, we’re the only animal in the known universe who has this. But with this brain came our human condition and we’ve been suffering a torturous existence for the last 2 million years, trying to figure out how this thing works, trying to understand if we’re good or if we’re bad, trying to understand why we’re diverting from this loving and cooperative, instinctive past. And we’ve been looking for self-understanding for so long but Jeremy has unravelled the whole thing using first principle-based biology, and I can’t believe that it’s been achieved in my lifetime. I feel so, so lucky to have this. So with this self-understanding, we can finally reconcile these two parts of ourselves: our instinct and our intellect. And it just means that the children in the future will be able to live as our genes expect but with complete self-understanding.

We don’t need to search anymore, we don’t need to bury our heads in the sand. It is completely over. And the answers, believe it or not, have all been found and they’re all in this book. And the story of our species, the story of those last 12 million years is just so heroic and I’m just so thankful to all those generations who have gone before us who have led up to this point.

And the beauty of this information is that, as I’ve said, it brings together those two parts of ourselves, but it also brings together subjects that have always been at odds with each other, like science and religion, and they just fit so neatly into place. It’s like the jigsaw puzzles are just falling, falling, falling with every single page that you read.

Jeremy references all religions and mythologies and legends, and classic writers, and art, and films, and philosophers, and anthropology, and scientists like Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, and the music as well—the music had a really, really big impact on me and now, because things just suddenly seem to have become so transparent, I don’t listen to music in the same way as I used to. Those lyrics, now, it’s through those expressive arts that we could kind of fly so close to this unbearably confronting issue of the human condition and I feel like I’m hearing music for the first time. It’s really wonderful, really wonderful. [See Freedom Essay 45 on Prophetic Songs.]

So as I said, I’m 38, so I just scrape in as being a millennial. And my degree was basically a critical theory and gender theory and I was taught predominantly left-wing texts; I taught literature to my students that was predominantly left-wing. And after I had children and I left teaching, I forged a new career in the green movement and environmentalism and socialism. I changed careers to start to run small-scale, county-wide environment projects, which essentially were all about galvanising action in local communities. I was a local Green councillor and, you know, I dragged my family along to all sorts of protests and things and at no point did I ever think that I was wrong about this. I couldn’t understand why people just wouldn’t want to be nice to each other. Why would you not want to protect the planet? But I hadn’t considered the fact that all of these battles I was fighting were a direct result of our human condition. It was like I was manically running around trying to put plasters over everything whilst ignoring this gaping, festering wound that was staring me in the face. And in his book Death by Dogma Jeremy explains that the Left’s insistence that we behave in this cooperative and loving way, actually blocks the search for knowledge, the search that we’ve been looking for, the self-understanding that we’ve needed to reconcile these two parts of ourselves. But now with this information, it all stops. There is no need for polarised politics anymore. The true understanding of ourselves has been found. So now we can return to this cooperative and loving past but this time, we have the information that we need to satisfy our conscious thinking brains.

This understanding is the most truthful information you will ever receive. And I can say that with conviction. It’s been long enough now for me. I have tried to find fault in this and I absolutely can’t. So I would say just give it a little bit of your time, test it, critique it, assess it, because it’s all about you—it’s about human beings. You’ll know whether it’s true or not. And I think that anybody who is listening to this will agree that for all of our progress, we’ve been taking steps backwards in so many ways, the world is completely spiralling out of control. And if there is any speck of light, it’s worth investigating. So, yeah, it’s free, have a look. Go on to YouTube, have a look at THE Interview first and it’s your chance to read the greatest thing in the world. I’m so pleased that I did. Thank you.