A Brief Summary of each Chapter
Pages 8-18 Tim Macartney-Snape’s Foreword
Tim briefly traverses the contents of Beyond concluding that ‘Jeremy Griffith’s explanations have clarified so much that was inexplicable about myself and what goes on in the world. It is like having mist lift from country you’ve never seen in clear weather’ (p.18).
P.19-25 Introduction
Introduces the problem of the human condition—‘the eternal question is why evil’ (p.22).
P.26-39 The Story of Adam Stork
An excellent analogy to explain the all-important ameliorating insight of how the upset state of the human condition emerged, namely that a battle between our instinct and intellect caused us to ‘become upset, that is angry, egocentric and alienated’ (p.31)—‘A nerve-based learning system can associate information, it can reason how experiences are related. It can learn to understand and become conscious of the relationship of events through time. A genetic learning system on the other hand can’t become conscious. When the fully conscious mind emerged, it wasn’t enough for it to be orientated by instincts. It had to find understanding to operate effectively and fulfil its great potential to manage life. Tragically the instinctive self didn’t “appreciate” that need and “tried to stop” the mind’s necessary search for knowledge, that is, its experiments in self-management. A battle between instinct and intellect developed’ (p.30).
Examples of other thinkers, such as Arthur Koestler (p.31) and Eugène Marais (p.34) and Jules Jaynes (p.36) recognising the problem of the instinct versus intellect conflict—but they couldn’t explain WHY the conflict occurred—as stated on page 37: ‘Throughout our history, theologians, writers, poets and artists have described and represented our predicament (as the story of the Garden of Eden does so well), but they couldn’t explain it. And only explanation could clarify the question of our guilt. We needed clear biological understanding. The discipline of science had to be developed. With it came all the details, or mechanisms, of our world. Science made possible a clarifying, biological explanation of why we became upset. It was only in this century that science achieved understanding of the gene and nerve based learning systems, with which we at last have the means to resolve the riddle of human nature. We can explain that there were two different learning systems, each of which needed to learn about integration in its own way. The result was our upset state or condition. Knowing that genes can orientate but only nerves can understand explains our “mistakes”. We can now see that we weren’t bad or guilty after all, which frees us from our sense of guilt and ends the human condition.’
The psychological rehabilitation of humanity is made possible by this all-important reconciliation of the underlying, fundamental ‘good’ and ‘evil’ forces in our human make-up—‘we can love ourselves and each other now’ (p.37).
P.40-48 Science and Religion
Introduces the concept of integrative meaning, ‘the holistic tendency in nature to form wholes’ (p.41), with an excellent chart depicting this development of order of matter (p.44). It is explained that integrative meaning is a truth we ‘had to evade or deny because it unjustly condemned our unavoidable divisiveness’ (p.41), our divisiveness being our upset anger, egocentricity and alienation that the Adam Stork Story explains the origins of.
Once integrative meaning is admitted then we can think about biology truthfully, namely that the replicating genetic DNA molecule that gave rise to natural selection is a tool for ‘developing greater order of matter’ (p.42). Even though genetic traits have to be selfish to survive (because obviously a selfless trait self-eliminates) the whole genetic process is still dedicated to integrating matter—the ‘survival of the fittest’, ‘selfish gene’ emphasis is a false representation of the genetic process—‘genetic refinement is not about competition for survival, it’s about developing order’ (p.42).
While ‘science had to evade recognition of integrative meaning because it unjustly psychologically condemned humans’ (p.45) religions maintained recognition of the truth of integrative meaning with their recognition of the concept of ‘God’ (p.45). The law of physics that causes matter to integrate is ‘the Second Path of the Second Law of Thermodynamics’ (p.46) or what is referred to as ‘negative entropy’, so ‘God is negative entropy’ (p.46).
While science as a whole has maintained denial of integrative meaning, some scientists like ‘Charles Birch’, Jeremy Griffith’s university biology professor, have acknowledged it (p.48).
The scientist-philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin recognised the time when understanding of the human condition was found and integrative meaning could finally be acknowledged by science when he said ‘I can see a direction and a line of progress for life, a line and a direction which are in fact so well marked that I am convinced their reality will be universally admitted by the science of tomorrow’ (p.47).
P.55-67 The Story of Homo—answers the question but ‘what was our instinctive orientation’ (p.55) since we are not migrating birds.
The large domed skull to accommodate the large conscious, thinking, ‘association cortex’ appears 2 million years ago in the fossil record (p.56)—we can assume therefore that consciousness began challenging the instinct then and with it the upset state of the human condition emerged.
To cope with our corrupted condition we started to invent contrived excuses for our divisive condition, such as the ‘survival of the fittest’ theory (p.60), we developed language to try to explain ourselves (p.60), and we began to attack innocence, which is what ‘hunting’ was about (p.61). And also what sex as humans practice it was about, although on a more noble level it was also an act of love (p.92).
Upset intensified quickly, but the truth is our distant ancestors weren’t ‘bloodthirsty brutes’ (p.65) as denial-complying scientists have claimed. Our mythologies were right: ‘Every mythology remembers the innocence of the first state: Adam in the Garden, the peaceful Hyperboreans, the Uttarakurus or “the Men of Perfect Virtue” of the Taoists. Pessimists often interpret the story of the Golden Age as a tendency to turn our backs on the ills of the present, and sigh for the happiness of youth. But nothing in Hesiod’s text exceeds the bounds of probability. The real or half-real tribes which hover on the fringe of ancient geographies—Atavantes, Fenni, Parrossits or the dancing Spermatophagi—have their modern equivalents in the Bushman, the Shoshonean, the Eskimo and the Aboriginal’ (p.66).
P.68-69 A very brief two page Summary of the Concept
‘To end the upset adolescent state and enter adulthood the intellect has to find the understanding that explains it is not bad or guilty for searching for knowledge. Adolescence is the time of the search for the intellect’s or conscious mind’s identity—specifically for finding understanding of why the intellect is good and not bad. Finding this understanding, as has now happened, allows the upset to subside. Humanity is about to leave the turbulent insecure adolescent stage and enter the peaceful maturity of secure adulthood’ (p.69).
P.73-76 Politics
We had to be ‘free’ to defy our conscience but not over do it and become too corrupted. Materialism and its money or capital was needed to give us some relief from the unjust condemnation of the world (p.74). The flaw of socialism was that it was too oppressive (p.74). Only ‘the removal of the criticism of our intellect can end the repression of our soul’—and by so doing end the need for politics (p.75), which is what this book’s presentation achieves.
P.77-82 Psychiatry
Adam Stork has a son Tom who comes into a world already upset and his father can’t explain it (p.77)—we had to ‘march into hell for a heavenly cause’ (p.78). ‘What happened in our lives was not the problem so much as our inability to understand why it was happening’ (p.78).
As stated on page 79: ‘Since upset first appeared, each new generation has had to learn to repress its true self and adopt prevailing levels of evasion, denial and silence. Now, suddenly this pattern is broken and we can speak the truth…Children will no longer have to die inside themselves, adrift on a sea of silence, superficiality and what appear to be lies. They can be told why we are the way we are and be given the ability to reconcile the upset adult world with the ideal world they instinctively expect. Children will now cope with reality. They won’t have to resign themselves to a horrible world of evasion of the truth and repression and denial of the magic world of their souls. The critical psychological point in our lives came when we resigned ourselves to reality. We were born into the world expecting it to be ideal and still like it was before upset appeared, only to discover it wasn’t. “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau).’
On pages 81-82 Jeremy Griffith explains that these insights into the human condition had to come from a relatively unalienated, unresigned, innocent position: ‘This book breaks this great silence on Earth; it flouts the rules of evasion. Coming from the unresigned, unevasive, unalienated world, it’s looking on our alienated world from outside. Because it’s unevasive it leaves most adults in shock and unable to respond to it. We have had to be evasive because we couldn’t defend ourselves but having found our defence, I know I have the right and most importantly, the responsibility to break the silence. While the information in this book is innocent unevasive thought it has reached all the way to the full truth—it doesn’t criticise us as innocent thought almost always has done in the past—it is not another naive condemnation of humanity…The number of people in recorded history who have been sufficiently innocent to avoid resignation can probably be counted on one hand and yet there are thousands of books claiming access to the truth!’
New generations will be the real beneficiaries: ‘Again, the exciting prospect now is that children will not have to resign themselves to reality. The most effective way to preserve the soul is not to let it go under in the first place. Avoiding resignation, they will retain the ability to think truthfully and thus effectively and, able to stay alive inside themselves, they will retain all their youthful happiness forever. They will be like gods compared to us, but doesn’t the world need them!’ (p.82).
P.83-97 How We Acquired Our Conscience (our altruistic moral sense)
This is Jeremy Griffith’s love-indoctrination explanation—while maternalism is a selfish trait, as genetic traits have to be to carry on, it appears to be altruistic (the mother is giving its offspring food, shelter, protection and warmth for apparently nothing in return) and therefore the infant’s brain is only aware that it is being treated altruistically or lovingly—it is being trained or indoctrinated in love. This is how altruism was able to be developed in our primate forebears. Nurturing created humanity. Bonobos illustrate the process, as described under the photos of bonobos (pp.95-97). There is more of the love-indoctrination process and more about bonobos in the next chapter.
P.101-129 How We Acquired Consciousness
Explains that ‘consciousness is the ability to understand the relationship between cause and effect’ (p.102), and that ‘consciousness has been a difficult subject because admitting information could be associated and simplified was only a short step from realising the ultimate insight of integrative meaning which condemned us’ (p.104).
The reason other animals haven’t developed full consciousness is that once an animal starts to become effective in understanding cause and effect they quickly discover that the meaning of existence is to be selfless but because genetics actively blocks selfless, self-destructive behaviour any animal that begins to act on its realisation that selflessness is meaningful is genetically selected against—just as surely as kittens were selected to not go over a cliff and self-destroy. Kittens have a block in their brains stopping such self-destructive practice and animals other than humans have a similar block stopping them from thinking sufficiently clearly to recognise that selflessness is meaningful (p.108).
Animals other than humans have genetically selected blocks in their minds stopping the development of sufficient consciousness to recognise the truth of selfless, integrative meaning. If you can’t recognise the truth of integrative meaning you can’t begin to think truthfully and thus effectively. You are alienated from effective thinking, just as humans today are alienated from effective thinking because they live in denial of integrative meaning. The reason we became conscious is that once we developed love-indoctrinated brains we had brains that were trained in selflessness and were thus free of the block against thinking that love / selflessness is meaningful. Our brains ‘had been stimulated by the truth at last’ (p.110).
Evidence for this explanation is that primates, especially the exceptionally nurturing bonobos, are exceptionally intelligent (pp.111-112). Matata’s nurturing of Kanzi is especially revealing (pp.114-117). Also Dian Fossey’s studies of gorillas (pp.119-121). The neotenising effect of the love-indoctrination process is shown in pictures (pp.128-129).
Once a species has completed the nurturing infancy stage all the stages that follow the emergence of consciousness and with it the battle of the human condition follow rapidly (pp.125-126). The charts describing the development of upset following the development of intelligence depict the process (pp.130-131), also the diagram on pages 132-133.
P.135-158 Illustrated Summary of the Development and Resolution of Upset
This is a description of all these stages in the development of upset illustrated with Jeremy Griffith’s cartoons.
P.159-167 Developing Answers
This describes how denial-complying, evasive, mechanistic science had to find all the pieces of the jigsaw of explanation of the human condition but at the end our soul, represented by innocence, had to put the jigsaw together, produce the reconciling explanation (p.164)—‘Prophets were truth tellers while most people had to evade the truth. Prophets were able to “delight in the fear of the Lord [integrative meaning]” (Isaiah 11:3)’ (p.167).
P.168-189 Adjusting to the Truth
How we are to cope with the exposure of our corrupted condition that the arrival of understanding of the human condition unavoidably brings. ‘Essentially all we have to do now is support the unevasive truth, it is not necessary to confront it’ (p.169). Innocence comes to the fore now to lead us home—‘The meek…will inherit the earth (Matt. 5:5)’ (p.173). But initially ‘Everyone who does evil [becomes upset] hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed (John 3:20)’ (p.175). As Christ predicted ‘another Counsellor to be with you forever—the Spirit of truth [ie the intellect, in particular science]…will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you (John 14:16,17,26)’ (p.186).
In truth it is science that has liberated humanity from the human condition. Jeremy Griffith’s work is messianic because it dares to engage the issue of the human condition but science is the messiah or liberator of humanity from the human condition and Jeremy just the synthesiser. As Jeremy truthfully and humbly says on page 163: ‘I stress again that science, and in fact humanity as a whole, is the real liberator of humanity from the human condition. In many ways prophets only got in the way while we were searching for understanding because they confronted us with truths that depressed us and which we therefore had to evade. Exceptional innocence played an important but minuscule concluding role in our search for knowledge. In gridiron football the team as a whole (with one exception) does all the hard work gaining yardage down the field. Finally when the side gets within kicking distance of the goal posts a specialist kicker, who until then has played no part, is brought onto the field. While he—in his unsoiled attire—kicks the winning goal, the win clearly belongs to the exhausted players who did all the hard work.’