The Way We Develop [1]
by Harvey Jackins
All of us enter the Co-Counseling Community as clients. The progress of recovering our real nature and our occluded intelligence is a persisting and rewarding motivation for each of us in all our RC activities. None of us ever lose this need to be a successful client.
Each of us soon finds, however, that in order to receive as much good counseling as we desire it is necessary that we counsel others. Only this way is the total store of available counseling enough to go around. So we learn to be counselors.
Then we master the more difficult feat of Co-Counseling, of taking turns at being counselor and client with the same person. This difficult relationship is the hallmark of our Communities. We are communities of Co-Counselors.
Inevitably we find ourselves recruiting new individuals to Co-Counseling, motivated in part by our need for a greater variety of Co-Counselors and in part by the discomfort of maintaining relationships with families and friends unless they, too, gain in awareness.
Then we find it necessary to build Communities so that the relationships between ourselves and our Co-Counselors can operate in the most rewarding manner.
Further, in the very nature of our progress we begin to permeate society and the organizations of society. By precept and by example we begin to change the relationships and behaviors of the individual humans in these social organizations in a rational direction. This kind of influence spreads far beyond the individuals directly involved in Co-Counseling. At some future time this will undoubtedly result in profound changes in the social organizations themselves.
[1] Appeared in Present Time No. 9, October 1972.