How Connected Can Humans Be?
From a talk by Tim Jackins at the East Coast North America Leaders’ Workshop, December 2021
We need to find out how connected humans can be. Because of undischarged distresses, no one has yet had the opportunity or been in shape [in a condition] to push very far in that direction. We are trying to do something that has never happened before.
We are trying to get enough people discharging, and discharging enough, that rationality dominates their behavior and communication. And we have been able to do this widely enough that something different from what has happened before can begin to happen.
We want our societies to be good for everyone. To make them that way, we have to be able to connect more fully and communicate more clearly with a wider and wider array of people.
Trying to install better societies on people isn’t going to work. Getting people in shape to help create better societies is probably the only thing that will lead to lasting change. We all wish for a quick transition to something that works for everybody. I don’t see how that’s possible right now. But what we are doing will lead to something that can make that happen.
We need to discharge the early vulnerability that stops us from connecting more and more deeply with people. If we had the joy, enthusiasm, and interest in other people that a five-year-old has, RC would spread a lot better. We’d have more fun, too.
We are trying for a big change in the functioning of our species, and that takes [requires] a big change in the places where we got hurt early on. Everything we’ve done supports the idea that what stops us are simply distresses that we can discharge with enough resource, attention, and work.
Everything points forward. We just have to do the work. We know well enough how to begin it. All of us have begun it in some form or another. But because the early hurts happened when we were so isolated, we still function in some confusion about them and some hesitation. It seems that we are willing to endure the distresses because we feel like we can’t change them, because we were never able to—a big confusion between the past and the present.
We couldn’t do it then. We had no chance. The conditions did not permit it. That was not our, or our families’, failure. But now we’re approaching the conditions that will let us discharge the confusion we have lived with since those early days, and will keep the hurts from happening to new babies.
(Present Time 210, January 2023)