Welcome to the Amsterdam Centre for the World Transformation Movement!

Download this transcript as an A4 or US Letter PDF

Transcript of Annemieke & Hendrik’s video on why they started the Amsterdam WTM Centre

Hendrik Riksen: By reading Jeremy’s work I experience freedom, and that’s not just a word ‘freedom’—no, it’s really an experience. The freedom that Jeremy is talking about brings an enormous amount of opportunities, which is so liberating! It’s great, and I need to share that. I cannot keep that for myself. We really have to go for it and create the Centre here in Holland because I could sit down here and read FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition and say, ‘I’m free! I’m free!’ but I would be in conflict with my inner self if I just sat down and did nothing. So that’s the reason why we want to open this Centre.

Annemieke Akker: I like it very much that FREEDOM has nothing to do with belief but is proven; it’s a scientific work. For me that was very important because I did not want to spend any more of my life studying any idea unless it was based on solid biological ground.

Hendrik: After reading FREEDOM I found out that all of my knowledge was very superficial. From thinking I knew a lot, I realised I knew nothing about the deeper issues of life. It was like looking at the ocean and only seeing the surface not what is actually in the water—and what is in the water is 99.9999% of the ocean—I had a very limited view of the reality. Also, Jeremy has written this in English and we, Annemieke and I, are translating it at the moment into Dutch, and that’s a process which is very fantastic. It’s really great. It’s a great experience.

Annemieke: Something very, very profound has changed in both of us since coming across FREEDOM, without my noticing it. You tend to only notice the outcome and not the process, and with Hendrik I see that he has changed quite a bit and for the better. I liked him before [Hendrik laughing] but he’s much more authentic and honest now. And he has noticed a change in me: he said last week to me, ‘You’ve become so much stronger within yourself, you hold your ground, you stand upright and powerful’, which I’m not intending to do but it just happens as a result of digesting the explanation of the human condition.

Hendrik: When I first met, via Annemieke, the content of Jeremy’s books and so on, I was really touched by a flash of lightning — ‘This is the truth! This is truth!’— and it really hit me somewhere here in the heart. But that’s not enough, because I have to understand, I have to use my intellect. And so I started reading, and from the first sentence the ‘deaf effect’ was very present and I had to overcome that [note, as soon as discussion of the human condition begins, our minds become subconsciously alert to the fact they are being taken into a historically off-limits realm and start blocking out what is being said — we suffer from a ‘deaf effect’. See Video/Freedom Essay 11 on the WTM’s website for further explanation of the ‘deaf effect’]. But knowing deep inside myself that this is the truth encouraged me to, let’s say, persist, and go on to understand what Jeremy had written.

Annemeike: When you encounter a truth something happens in your body, you can feel there is something there that is true. You can think about it and want to push it aside, but it’s there; it’s simply true. So for my intellect, I needed to be very sure that there were no mistakes in Jeremy’s studies, in his proof that this is actually true. So that is why I was in a terrible hurry to get through the whole book to see whether there were any little things that nagged me, or whether I needed to study it a little more to see whether he was right, whether the information was right, and I must say that I never found anything wrong with it. For me, I am totally convinced that FREEDOM actually explains what has happened to humanity, and what is happening to humanity, and this is the solution to get out of this whole predicament of the human condition.

At first, with the ‘deaf effect’ of course, we were having trouble with this cascade of words and concepts and quotes and everything — how the book is written — but in the process of translating it and going through it again and again, I started to see the brilliance of it. For starters, something I haven’t seen before, is that Jeremy is working with numbered paragraphs which makes the cross-referencing very easy. I really appreciate it as it works very easily and it’s a very original and practical way to write books in which you want to refer to specific passages, and quotes from lots of people. The second thing is that I started to see that in any one sentence, which can be quite long, there might perhaps be eight different layers but I realised that the sentences could not be shorter. It is exactly as they are supposed to be because almost every word is conveying information and if you make the sentences shorter or use other words it wouldn’t have the same effect, and the more I read it, the more I started to appreciate this. Another thing is that the quotes are in another typeset so they stand out, which means you can skip them, or you can read them; you can read all the quotes without reading the text, or you can leave them out and read the sentence. Also, the sources of the quotes are provided at the end of the quotes so you don’t have to go to the back of the book to find out who said it. It’s very practical and effective, and very quickly you get used to this brilliant way of presenting the text.

What I noticed was whenever I had a question, Jeremy had answered it in FREEDOM. Every question that came up in my mind was covered in the book. If you want to know an answer to a question, read the book and you will find the answer: he’s covered it all! It’s incredible! He has thought of everything that was in my mind; of course, there are 7 billion people who may think otherwise. I had lots of questions and FREEDOM needed to answer them because I couldn’t continue with the project if it was not 100% sound. For my mind it must be sound, otherwise I couldn’t have committed myself to the project.

Hendrik: There’s no choice other than to share the information, it’s all I can do. I am in the personal process of transformation of course on one side, but experiencing the enormous effects of the words of Jeremy — I cannot keep that for myself. So I had to find a way to express that, and it’s very nice that there is a beautiful organisation over there, ‘down under’ in Australia, which has already set up an infrastructure which makes it possible to do that work. It’s my motivation to at least spread the word to people who are interested because we are the lucky ones who have recognised the truth in a flash — but there are a lot of other people who are not as lucky as we are. So we would like at least to give them the opportunity to get the same feeling of liberation that we are having now.

Annemieke: I would like to talk with other people about this information, as equals in groups and discuss ‘What do you think?’ and ‘What do you think?’ and ‘Is your life being changed, and in what way?’ Just sharing experiences and sharing the information. And of course it’s very helpful to have a central point in the Netherlands where people can make contact and talk with us in their own language — that and making the material available in Dutch are my main objectives.

I think the best thing actually is that Jeremy makes it totally clear that we can decide here and now to spend the rest of our lives being cooperative and loving [because understanding the human condition ends the need for the artificial reinforcements of power and glory]. We were talking last week about how before we came across FREEDOM we were in a very bad way, due to a lot of health problems, and we were in a state of waiting to die actually. You know when old people say, ‘We only have another twenty years to go’, they don’t know what to do, there is no incentive to do anything. We were talking about this last week, that before we came across this material we were in such a state that we were thinking, ‘Oh my God, how long is this going to last?!’, sort of not physically dead, but mentally or emotionally dead, flat.

Hendrik: No perspective any more.

Annemieke: No perspective; this has changed our lives completely, because it’s very important for people to have a purpose in life, but I did not want to do what I had been doing in other [metaphysical] programs. I did not want to get into an organisation based on belief. For me, supporting Jeremy’s work is something that really needs to be done, because it’s true and because it is of such enormous help. I am very happy that we are the ones that have the time to do this in our country and I am very grateful that this project has emerged, that this information has emerged, because there is nothing else. This is the end of the line in humanity’s search for the information it needed. This is what needs to be done.

Hendrik: Yep. I agree. [Both laugh]