More from Tim’s Talks
Excerpts from several of the talks given by Tim Jackins at the World Conference
We Get to Choose Our Perspective
It’s important that we know that we get to choose our perspective. It doesn’t have to be chosen by our restimulations. You get to choose your attitude toward life.
We’re going to have a mini-session. In it I’d like you to decide that you are going to change. I’m not saying when. But making the decision is important.
In an oppressive society, we have to figure out how to function within it. But we don’t have to give up our thinking. We don’t have to give up our perspective. The challenge is to figure out how best to use our mind under societal conditions. There may be moments when it’s truly best to hide our mind. But almost always there’s a better approach than that. Almost always there’s a way we can use our mind to move reality forward at least a little, to move the bow of the ship a little more in the direction we want.
Our fears want solutions to come right now, quickly—to have it all be over. But I think real long-term solutions come with a lot of slow work, with intelligent minds figuring out how far things can be pushed under current conditions.
I don’t think solutions will come from waiting for better conditions. That’s the position we were forced into as children. We had to give up, and wait, and hope that something rational would happen. I want us to learn to fight for our own perspective.
Why Aren’t We in Agreement?
Groups of people have tried to think about every piece of the Guidelines. I hope you’ve had a chance to be a part of one of those groups.
We tried to do almost all the work on the Guidelines in advance of the World Conference, when there was more time to meet, discuss, think, be upset, get a few Co-Counseling sessions, and come back to the group—still disagreeing but not so upset. Each time we did this, we were more able to understand a viewpoint that wasn’t ours.
When there’s a heated disagreement, I try not to think, “Why don’t they understand that I’m right?” or, “Why are they so irritatingly stupid?”
Instead I try to think, “Why don’t we reach the same conclusion?” “Why aren’t we in agreement?” “What are the things that have led our minds in different directions?” “What’s interfering with our being able to come to agreement? Is it their distress, my distress, different information?” “What do I need to look at in my mind?” “What might I need to discharge on?” “Are they talking about something real that I don’t understand?” These are the interesting questions.
Each of us can think well. Each of us, with distresses out of the way, thinks very well. I see our task as trying to get us to a place together—not trying to get us to where each of us as individuals thinks we should be.
In RC when we use the word “rational” (for example, in “a rational solution”), it means uninfluenced by distress recordings. As far as we’ve been able to test it, we’ve always found that when people counsel on the distresses in their way, and share information fully, they reach similar and compatible decisions.
The Guidelines have great benefit for the Communities. As just a dry printed document, they are useful. But they also live in the minds of the people who have worked on them. These people understand them in practice. And they’ve had the chance to see and work on the distresses, both their own and other people’s, that have gotten in the way.
Doing this is a bit different from counseling someone who goes off into their life and uses the freeing effect of discharge there. With the Guidelines, people go off, discharge, and come back, and we get to hear what has and has not changed in their minds. It’s an interesting way that we use RC amongst ourselves, on our issues.
How Do We Make Ourselves Understood?
We’ve been pretty [quite] good—compared to any other group I know of—at handling upsets with each other. A sizable percentage of groups blow themselves up [destroy themselves] because they can’t handle the upsets. We’ve been working on this RC project for seventy years now, and we have more understanding, diversity, and cohesion than ever before.
The ways we’ve figured out to handle upsets and mistakes have been good for us as a Community. But do we have ways that will work for every individual? Do we have ways that will work for someone whose distresses have them hiding a difficulty, because they’ve always had to? Can we figure out how to do things so that no one has to leave the Community because of a restimulation they couldn’t tell anybody about?
We are also trying to make ourselves more clearly understood by people outside of RC. That’s not simple. We are very human, very attractive, because of the work we’ve done in RC. But we are also quite restimulating, because we do many things that society opposes.
It’s not our goal to be acceptable to society. I don’t see any benefit in trying to be acceptable by changing what we’ve developed. However, it is important to make clear what we are trying to do, and the humanness of it.
We want people to understand how important it is to us to solve problems between people without imitating how society condemns and punishes people for actions they’ve taken because of their distresses. We want to make clear that we recognize that people hurt each other and we always intend to move quickly to interrupt that. At the same time, we want to show that we try to keep hurts from happening again—that we don’t punish people for acting out distresses that were installed on them but rather give them the opportunity to discharge enough that they are never pulled to act them out again.
We think that everyone can free themselves from any distress and that the solution to conflicts, difficulties, and misconduct lies in that direction.
How do you write a Guideline that says all this clearly and succinctly? It can be a lot of work, but it’s useful work. We understand the issues so much better now, since we’ve made that effort.
Why Do We Need Goals?
Sometimes I’m barely going forward. I’m in a fogbank, with my eyes on the ground in front of me, feeling like I have to watch where I put my next footstep. I’m not moving quickly in those moments. I’m not able to see a larger picture of the reality around me.
A goal is something that rides out in front of me above the fogbank. If I can remember to raise my eyes off my worries, there’s something that I’ve already chosen to do out there in front of me. I’ve put it there to remind me, in exactly those moments when I’ve lost perspective, that there’s something bigger I’m trying for.
Because of distress, many of us often feel that the best we can do is survive. We lose perspective. Setting a goal for ourselves, and getting used to looking at it, can let us climb out of that hole and regain perspective. It’s wonderful to have a Co-Counselor nearby at confusing moments, but we don’t always have one.
The time to set a goal is when we can think about larger things. Most of us do this best at the end of a good Co-Counseling session—when, because of discharge, we can see a larger, clearer picture of reality. If we, or our counselor, can remember that, we can make good use of these moments to think about what we want—for ourselves, for those close to us, for our people, for the Earth.
Goals work when we actually try to reach them—not when we just say a good idea out loud and call it a goal. They work when we look at the first steps we need to take to head toward a goal. We don’t need to be impatient with ourselves when we can’t leap there right now.
Many of us have a goal of creating a just society. And many of us have distresses that make us condemn ourselves for not having done more already or make us feel like we have no idea of what to do. We often fail to recognize that that’s where we can start—we can start by counseling on those hurts.
For many of us, doing this involves facing the feeling that we don’t want to have goals. In our distresses, a goal can seem like just one more way to fail. Lots of things happened to us that left us feeling incapable of making any change. We also spent a lot of time waiting for someone else to think well enough to change things that we couldn’t. We are not there anymore, but the feelings persist until we can discharge enough.
In fact, we have a tremendous ability to change anything. And often the place we must start is in a session. After discharge, we can choose some little step in the right direction.
We do have things we want to make happen. In the beginning, every human wants to try everything. And underneath our discouragement and glumness, we probably still do. What would we be like if we all did the work to become enthusiastic? Do you remember the last time you felt enthusiastic? Think hard. You did feel that way, and you can feel that way again.
Why Is the Unified Goal on the Climate So Long?
This year I proposed for our Community a new Unified Goal on the Climate. In earlier years, we tried to state our Goals succinctly, to make them easy to communicate. I didn’t try to do that with this Goal. We’re in an exceptional circumstance now, unlike any our species has faced before. The circumstance is, of course, the climate crisis. And its cause is human irrationality, which has been acted out using all the oppressions of our societies. Because of how these oppressions have been used, all our earlier Goals about oppression are relevant to this new Goal.
The climate is changing so rapidly that it demands precedence. But giving it precedence does not change or lessen any of our other Goals. They are all central to accomplishing this new Goal. Therefore, they are listed within it.
I’ve called this Goal a “goal” because that’s the word we have used in the past, but in some way it’s halfway between a goal and a program.
I’m proposing it because the climate crisis is that important. I’m proposing it because the next four years are vitally important in terms of this crisis. Our other Goals are also important, very important. They are crucial long-range. But the climate crisis is crucial short-range. Certain battles must be fought and won soon, or the costs will be enormous. That is my view of the situation.
I think humans can figure out how to handle the crisis, and will. But doing so will take new thinking and bold actions.
I’d like as many of us as possible to adopt this new Goal for ourselves. I’d like as many of us as possible to be examples for other people outside of RC. I’d like us to be a catalyst. In chemistry, a catalyst is a tiny amount of a substance that, when dropped into a vast container of certain elements, causes things to happen between those elements that wouldn’t happen otherwise. This seems like a good image for us.
(Present Time 209, October 2022)