A talk by Tim Jackins at the West Coast (Canada, Latin America, USA) Leaders’ Workshop, January 2025


How do we think afresh about building our RC Communities? We already have the theory and the experience that we need. What’s in our way is our distress—and I think patterned modesty [being shy, unassuming, humble] is part of that.


Every person here has a good understanding of RC. Good enough that you have changed your life over and over again. You have helped change hundreds of minds in a way that nobody was ever capable of before. That’s new in the world, and you did it! 


You have every reason to be pleased about the work you’ve done to get here. Nobody gave this to you. Someone showed you a possibility, and you worked for it against all your discouragements. You have accomplished a significant thing. But you are very modest about it.


Modesty is not something we choose. It is one of our distresses. It’s not based on thinking. It is compulsive, and it misleads people by hiding ourselves from them. 


It confuses people when out of modesty you keep your accomplishments a secret. They need to see that it is possible to do significant things. You need to open the door a crack for them to peek through and see if they want to follow. 


Modesty sometimes appears to work to keep us from being attacked. I’m sorry, but you are going to be attacked, so that’s a lousy reason to be modest. 


Some of the RC Community’s patterns of modesty are my fault: I’m a very modest person. I felt that I had to be. I learned that from the House Un-American Activities Committee [a U.S. congressional committee that violated civil rights while investigating citizens’ ties to the Communist Party from the 1930s to 50s.] We all had reasons to learn it; it was the best way we could figure out to navigate an oppressive society.


WE IGNORE EACH OTHER


Another pattern that interferes with building our Communities is that most of the time we ignore almost everyone—just like we’ve been ignored. We can also be scared not to ignore people, as if there were some real and big danger to it. There are people with dangerous patterns, but we can make decisions based on our aware judgment, not on our fears. We ignore ninety-eight people because two people might be dangerous. We don’t know which ones are dangerous, so we’d better ignore them all. That’s the way our fears work.

But we are aware enough now to make good and interesting decisions about moving toward people. 


What if we decided to experiment, to see if what we know about humans is true? What if we tried to be openly human with somebody that we didn’t know? What if we decided to be straight-out [directly and honestly] human with them, right in their face? We need to try out things like this.


We’re not going to be able to build the RC Community the way we want to unless we’re moving 
outward in lots of different directions.


What makes you ignore most of the people around you? What scares you? What are you afraid might happen?


ISOLATION AND SEPARATION


Of course, our Communities suffer from whatever patterns of isolation and separation we ourselves carry. Our early material left us all feeling separate from everybody else. It’s almost comical—that every one of us sits here feeling, “It’s just me. It will always be just me. And nobody knows how hard I have to work to be here.” Sound familiar? 


We all got hurt early enough and our discharge was suppressed enough that we couldn’t make it through intact. 


What do you wish somebody would do if they recognized your material? You wouldn’t want them to believe it, be upset about it, or give up and go away. You would want them to signal to you that they recognize you despite those distresses, and that they know you are more than those distresses. That’s what we get to figure out with everybody we run into [encounter]. We can use our knowledge to reach through their material and get them in close.


As RCers, we get to be together in significant ways. We get to help each other with our struggles around isolation and separation and enjoy each other’s existence. Building our Communities is a way to be sure that others get access to what we know, but as we set out to help other people do battle with their isolation, we need to keep challenging our own.


We will have to challenge the effects of the isolation, not just discharge on the causes. 


DARE TO THINK BIG


We’ve all done miraculously well with what we have been allowed to keep. Somehow this collection of us got lucky and managed to get access to these people and these ideas. We have steadily worked toward getting back a fuller version of humanity. We’ve reached the point where we can’t easily be confused about it any longer. There’s nothing that happened to any of us that’s out of our reach to recover from. 


I want you to dare to think that you can fix everything.


This is for you personally. It’s in everybody’s interest that it be for you personally. We all get to fight for ourselves as fully as we can figure out, and we all get to back [support] each other as we learn how to do that.  


START WITH OURSELVES


I think you should be proud of your abilities, all of them, but in particular the ones you’ve learned here. You are a powerful person in ways that are very unusual. You could change any life you chose to. We have a new power that didn’t exist before. We have learned how to use it through decades of hard effort, and we’re rather good at it now. We’re damn good at it now. But there’s some piece of our distress that keeps us from fully showing and using our abilities to reach the people around us. There’s a challenge to use what we’ve accomplished to think afresh about how we build our Communities. 


And then there’s the larger question about what roles to play in the world.


But we start with us. We start with your mind. Yes, yours first. And we accept no boundaries. Whatever happened to you doesn’t get to keep limiting you. We need to learn and work to challenge our limitations, and to use that knowledge and ability to build the RC Community and all our other communities. We can do Think-and-Listens to push ourselves to show our minds more fully to each other.


Underneath it all is the task of breaking through the isolation that we were brought up in. Isolation and separation are the biggest impediments to sharing what we know with the world. We all still think by ourselves, and we don’t share our thoughts very fully with each other. We had to do that in our early lives, but it’s no longer necessary. We need to keep coming together and reminding ourselves that we are not alone—and then take the next steps together.