The Present Conditions and Tasks
Society is collapsing, and it’s going to wear on everybody everywhere, including us. We are not going to change the fact of society collapsing around us. We can recognize it as part of what is going to happen. We can also understand that the difficulties it causes are not because we made a mistake. It’s not that if we just functioned better, things would be all right. The message aimed at us is that it is our fault that things are not working. This is not accurate, of course. Our society is unworkable long-term. It is, however, ours to handle.
As we continue to work to end irrationality, the collapse will get harsher. Meanwhile, we in RC are doing a different piece of work than we have had a chance to do before.
Our earliest distresses appear to have had a major effect on each of us. Part of the effect has been to lock down the distresses, so that we have great difficulty discharging them and thinking about freeing ourselves from them. The defeats included in the distress recordings feel absolute, unquestionable, and ongoing, and they are dragged into every present-day challenge we face.
The feelings of defeat, and disconnection, are simply distress recordings and, as such, can be discharged. We know this from our theory, and each of us has a great deal of supporting evidence from our own lives. Still, they are hard for us to push aside and step out of. And because they are chronic, we often unawarely accept them. We do this even though they stand in direct contradiction to what we know, which is an indication of how heavy the early hurts were.
As we learn to work on these early distresses and clear them from our minds, we can also challenge the effects they have had on us—in particular, on our Co-Counseling, as both client and counselor.
As client, because of the isolation we feel, we often have our sessions by ourselves. We use our Co-Counselors’ presence, but it can be difficult to fully use their attention and mind. The distress recordings from early in our lives of no one paying attention to us leave us not looking closely for attention or expecting another mind to be thinking about us.
Challenging the early isolation requires that we use our counselors’ attention and mind more fully. We can consciously decide to look past our lack of expectation, and the distresses that show on our counselors. We can remember that they want to be with us, want to be a resource in our work to liberate ourselves from distress. We can look for them past the distresses that both of us carry.
When we are the counselor, the early defeats can make us hesitant to take a position of being a resource for our clients. We can be hesitant to share our perspectives and thoughts and especially our caring. We can be timid about encouraging our clients to take a position of defying their distress and the limitations it has put on their lives. We do not have to follow the feelings that we cannot play a significant role in someone’s liberation. We can challenge those feelings by our actions as counselors, and discharge them as clients.
This work is important now, because we need to learn how to do new and effective things as society collapses.
We have worked successfully to build Communities in which we can communicate RC effectively and people can have the safety and aware attention they need to begin removing the distress recordings from their minds. There is a steadily growing number of these Communities in the world.
There are also large populations of people that we have not reached yet. We can and will reach them, and we will do this more effectively as we discharge our defeats and isolation and especially our fears of other people. We need to be able to build Communities of people who restimulate distresses that can have us, in the beginning, feeling like we don’t like them very much or feeling unliked by them. We need to be able to help people new to RC stand firm against their restimulations and not have to do it alone. This will depend on our being able to form solid connections with them, and with each other.
In this period, more and more blatant attempts are being made to manipulate people’s distresses, to allow for the installation of ever more irrational policies. Speaking up against irrational policies, opposing them in practice, and putting forward rational policies are all important, and we can do these things. But unless people have a chance to discharge their distresses and understand the effect of distresses on human minds, they remain vulnerable to manipulation.
What we have accomplished in building the RC Communities is extraordinary, unprecedented, and a tremendous success. As reality changes around us, we can build on what we have learned from this effort, and on the discharge we’ve made possible for ourselves, and keep developing RC further—building more and more Communities and reaching a wider and wider population in the world.
Seattle, Washington, USA
(Present Time 186, January 2017)