The Rational Needs of Human Beings
(Talk at New Windsor II-October 12-14, 1974)
There is a great deal we don't know about rational relationships between humans as yet because the phenomenon of human irrationality has interfered with and obscured this area. We hear about some famous friendships-Damon and Pythias or David and Jonathan or the Three Musketeers ("All for one and one for all")-and we hear about examples coming out of wartime experiences. The distress patterns are sometimes pushed aside by the overriding urgency of a desperate situation and the people involved sometimes get into close contact with each other and come to depend on each other. Often the best examples of profound, mutually supportive relationships are from extreme stress situations. So as far as saying precisely that this or that is what relationships should be like, we just don't have clear data yet.
This does not mean that we are completely ignorant or have to be pragmatic or eclectic. There are clearly discernable trends. We can make good guesses at what rational relationships will be like by looking at the directions in which people are moving as they recover more and more of themselves. We are not, any of us, yet in a position to urgently need precise knowledge of a completely rational relationship anyway until we have done much more work and are able to function that way, but it is valuable to know what the direction is that we are going. I would like to comment on what I have observed and then speculate a little beyond that.
It is useful to recall exactly what a distress pattern is-it is a literal recording of everything that went on during the time of the distress. Sometimes we hear Co-Counselors talking about the "motives" of recordings. This is misleading; they have picked up some confusion from other systems of thought. Distress patterns don't have motives, they are scratchy grooves in some kind of recording. They are a literal reproduction of what went on during a past time of hurt, complicated by later additions because, of course, additional layers are added on through restimulation. The entire content of a distress pattern is simply the accumulation of superimposed recordings of what went on in a series of miserable once-upon-a-times.
"FROZEN NEEDS"
If one of the factors that were present during the distress was a need, an unfilled need, that unfilled need becomes part of the recording. In Co-Counseling slang we refer to it as a "frozen need."
Let's start out with the sources of irrational relationships. We have relationships between patterns, of course, (look at any marriage)-but behind the interlocking of patterns there is often the phenomenon of a human trying to fill a frozen need. This leads many relationships astray.
We have become clearer recently about the impossibility of meeting or filling frozen needs, have gotten a better look at this phenomenon. Once we look awarely it's apparent that most human beings as they currently function spend a good deal of their efforts toward other people in trying to fill a need that was recorded.
Once we look hard at them it's fairly obvious that most presently-observable attempts at adult relationships are attempts to fill frozen needs. Most seeking for spouses is an attempt to get parented. In fact, a large part of our activities with other people are attempts to find parenting that we needed or didn't get, so that the need froze.
With a clearer perspective from lots of experiences we come to the fact that a frozen need cannot be filled, it can only be discharged. If you didn't get that parenting when you should have gotten it, you are never going to get it. Worse, if you "fortunately" find another pattern that gives the appearance of filling your frozen need, then you are in deep trouble. The two patterns walk off into the sunset.
I think most of us have observed at some time or other a "devoted" couple of whom people might say, "Isn't that nice, so devoted, after 10 years of marriage they have eyes only for each other. " Sure enough, they have eyes only for each other. They stand and say soupy things back and forth. Yes, it's nice, it's nice, it's lovely, it's lovely, it's lovely; you gradually get sick to your stomach. No one can stand to be around them long because one knows intuitively that it's inhuman. They are acting out these recorded little roles and are helplessly stuck in them. If you can get these people to discharge, they may temporarily hate each other, but eventually feel only relief that they have gotten out of the compulsive "sweetness."
CAN'T BE FILLED
Frozen needs cannot be filled. They can only be bade farewell to. It's similar to the fact that you can't bring the lost beloved who died back to life. You can only face the fact that s/he died, say goodbye repeatedly while you sob from the bottom of your being and finally find some peace in realizing that you haven't lost anything that you ever had, and that there is more to life than what you have lost. I imagine that most of you have had experience in cleaning up or at least partially cleaning up something like this. It is very worthwhile to clean it up completely if you can bring yourself to do it.
The frozen need can only be farewelled and discharged. (This doesn't mean that as a counseling tactic you won't try to catch the frozen need off balance by appearing to overfulfill it in order to get discharge started. )
FUTILE TO TRY
You undoubtedly have known someone who set out to have you fulfill some frozen need he or she had. You remember how tiresome that became. They called in the middle of the night. They had you doing their shopping for them. You kept trying to find some way to make them feel good. They were delighted and full of grateful appreciation and cried a lot on Tuesday, but on Wednesday the ante had gone up. What you did on Tuesday no longer overfulfilled and brought discharge. It wasn't enough. They now needed your attention for a few more hours per day. You can't fill these needs, you can only help them to discharge.
There are frozen needs for lots of things besides parenting. Whatever need was around at the time of distress is what is present now as a sort of demanding fossil. There can be a frozen hunger, a compulsive hunger, if the person was hungry during distress. (Sometimes the hunger was the distress.) So now they chronically have a huge appetite. Sometimes a client coming out of heavy fear and getting the first chunk of heavy fear off, goes wild with appetite. I have had a professional client say, "I can't go on. Have you got anything in the icebox?" and go back and eat all the way through the stale bread. (It might have been better if I could have kept them discharging but my chronic hunger pattern sympathized with their hunger and I let them go.)
Any need can become frozen. So we look with skepticism at simple sentimental descriptions of people's "ideals" for relationships because they are quite likely to be recorded.
RATIONAL NEEDS
Are there some rational needs? With this warning in mind, can we get a picture of what a rational relationship might be?
Yes, apparently there are rational needs. These rational needs can get frozen by distress and have to be discharged to be free, but apparently they are an ongoing need for human beings even when the humans are free from distress. These needs exist even for mature, in-charge human beings. Not all of the needs involve other people directly.
NUTRITION
There certainly is a need for good nutrition, for adequate amounts of good food. We have a lot to learn here. The choices that immediately confront us are not inviting. We can go on eating the processed frauds that are pushed by heavy advertising, empty calories baited with sugar, salt and fat and laced with dangerous chemical flavors and preservatives. Or we can trust academic nutrition experts to prescribe adequate diets and ignore the obvious irrationalities of their viewpoint-the unaware warping of judgment by tradition and by the pressures of the commercial food industries. Or we could go over to the farther-out school and eat by unchecked hypothesis and mystic slogan.
The plain fact seems to be that if there is going to be an adequate policy on nutrition we are going to have to think it out because it doesn't exist. The commercial advertising school is probably poisoning much of the population. The far-out school is a great thrower of light on the stupidities of the academic nutrition viewpoint. (You have heard that "everybody needs fresh milk." Recent research has indicated that only a tiny minority of the population can digest fresh milk after they are two years old.) Yet the health-food school is riddled with inconsistency, irrationality and illogical conclusions. We need new thinking there. We need food. We need good nutrition.
EXERCISE
We need exercise. This is something almost entirely obscured in the American culture. Most people work very hard when they have to and the rest of the time they watch TV. Yet there is no question that fun exercise is an essential need for everyone. Someday we will break out of the TV conditioning and make vigorous physical games a common activity again.
Both nutrition and exercise also generally tend to involve relationships with others. We don't like to eat alone and exercising alone is about as boring as anything I can think of.
CLOSENESS
There are other real needs. There are other needs that seem to be real, to be rational, seem to be inherent in the actual make-up of the human being. Some of them we have discovered or re-discovered in Re-evaluation Counseling. All some people know about RC is that we try to encourage meeting one of these needs-the need for closeness. My understanding of this was very slow to evolve. I don't know all about it yet. We have got so far as saying people should have a minimum of four hugs a day. There are people who don't know any more than that about RC and think it's great on that basis. There are even a few institutions where hugging has become common practice and the people have no notion that it was started by an RCer.
The fact that people actually cannot remain emotionally healthy without regular physical closeness with other humans was obscured in our culture. It's still obscured for most of the population.
It was completely obscured for me. There was no closeness for anyone where I grew up. It took my clients in the throes of heavy discharge to convince me that I should hold their hands or, later, put my arms around them. I suffered terribly from my own fear and embarrassment, but I did notice what a big difference it made in their ability to discharge.
Check on the quality of hugging. Is it good? Some places in RC it deteriorates into unawareness. The patterns take over.
(Demonstration) Can we demonstrate hugging?
First, some of the familiar ways you shouldn't hug.
I didn't see that.
I hugged myself behind her back. I didn't really touch her. A person acting like this is afraid he might notice that she has a body. That wasn't really a hug. It was a glassy, unaware avoidance. The essence of good hugging is awareness. Here she is. A delightful person. May I hold you? She feels so good, so warm, so soft. Just exactly the right shape. Our phoney culture has identified this, through imposing distress, as sex; but sex is one thing and closeness is another. As little as we have been able to do to get the distress off of sex compared to how much there is on there, we have moved far enough that most people in the RC Community can pretty well see that closeness has essentially nothing to do with sex. They are completely separate things. You can enjoy closeness with someone four times your age or one fourth your age; and this is just great. There are other clues besides our own experience. Our closest cousins, the great apes, spend their days grooming each other. Apparently closeness is a real need. This seems to be a rational need, the need to be close to one another.
TOUCH
A little separate from closeness is touching. (The separation may be just for the purposes of communication.) We have a real need to touch awarely, to touch another person. There is healing in the touch. "Mama kisses it and makes it well" is a very real phenomenon. Focusing outside attention on the hurt allows one's own attention to get outside the hurt and re-evaluate it. The pain is felt and finished, and healing does progress very rapidly.
It's good to touch, just to touch. Although our culture proscribes this, and also tries to tie it up through distress with sexual feelings, it's a very separate thing. Awareness, again, of course, is everything. To be really aware of touching and being touched. The aches and pains that you didn't even know were there surface and dissipate if somebody strokes your tired head or tired feet after a long, hard day. We need to touch each other and we have rational intuitions in this direction.
BEING LOVED
There seems to be a continuing rational inherent need to be loved. This, of course, has been widely celebrated and agreed to, although the meaning of love has been greatly distorted by our culture.
RC has several definitions of love, because we certainly haven't intellectually encompassed the whole concept yet. The workhorse definition, the one that seems to be most useful in coping with problems is that love is the way people naturally feel about each other if they don't have any distresses in the way. They love each other to the degree that they know each other. The more they know each other the more they love each other. It's simply there, you don't have to impose love and you don't have to manufacture it. Rather, love is there if you get the distress out of the way. I think all of us have had at least glimpses of this feeling, this experience. When we give our clients a good session, when the clients are discharging well, then the lid or facade is jiggled enough so that you can see underneath it to the real persons and you fall in love with them forever. I have fallen in love with every client I ever had and I remain in love with them. The love can get obscured or occluded, of course. If they dramatize at me and kick my crutch out from under me I may forget that I love them because of my distress. But the basic relationship is there, you don't have to manufacture it or impose it.
We need to feel loved, we need to receive love, we need to feel that there is some human somewhere who has, at least potentially, this loving attitude toward us.
LOVING OTHERS
Now this need is widely celebrated and we are not breaking any new paths in saying this. What I think we do need to say, and clearly, is that far more important than the need to be loved is the need to love. This is enormously more important than receiving love, than being the recipient of love. You can get along without being loved over long periods of time if necessary, but if you have allowed your outlet of loving others to be sealed then you are in trouble, you are in real trouble. There are devastating effects on people who have allowed their ability to love to get plugged up.
We don't have to allow it to get plugged up. The last cover of Present Time is quoting Mary McCabe on just this question. "To love someone is available to all of us. Let us therefore think on what are the rational means of accomplishing this-and then act." This we can realize. It may be very difficult to obtain love or an expression of love from someone. If you are in a strange place and you don't know the language-to find and receive love may be hard.
Giving love is always possible, however. This is very much to the point. This is the greater need. Once we realize this nobody can stop us. There are situations and cultures that can make it very difficult to obtain expressions of love that are at all rational, but no one can stop you from loving. You can love, you can look at the individual behind the pattern and love. This is an essential and an important continuing need.
There's an old story, but a good one. There was a little girl in an old-fashioned orphanage where strictness was the word and harshness was the custom, and where the children were forbidden to have any communication with anyone outside the orphanage. Someone reported seeing the little girl throwing a note over the stone wall. She was called on the carpet, very frightened, and was forced to admit she had thrown the note. When the note was brought in and read aloud it said, "If anyone finds this, I love you."
We need to love. With a little theory, a little discharge, we can fill that need anytime. You couldn't stop me from loving you. We can be very sure that we have a rational, continuing need to love, a need that no one can frustrate.
ACCEPTING LOVE AS COUNSELORS
As counselors you had better get used to being loved. I don't care how embarrassing it feels. I don't care how much it restimulates and scares you, you are going to have to get your head straight and simply stand still and let people love you. This is uncomfortable for me, but I have learned. I let people love me. I have adjusted. I stand still for it.
I learned to do that because it became obvious that it was important to my clients and students to have someone to love. My uneasy feeling was, "Why me?" I'm sure many of you would feel the same way. You won't know what to do with this love. You will feel embarrassed, you will be scared, you won't know how to accept this role. Nothing in your childhood prepared you for this. Yet it is clear that for their progress, their re-emergence, it is important to your clients to love you. They work better, they move faster if they can love you, if they can believe in you, if they can have faith in you. It doesn't really hurt one in spite of the embarrassment. They need to love somebody, trust somebody, believe in somebody, have confidence in somebody. Why me?, I asked. Then I started looking around at what the choices were. Between me and Nixon I'd better let them love me, I decided.
You'll have to get accustomed to this. Don't blow your cool and think that you are in a major crisis-"Oh my God! What will I do? My client loves me!" The first client that insisted that she tell me her love told me against my protests. She finally said, "Now shut up and listen; I'm paying for this time." At the end of two hours of heavy discharge and telling me that she loved me, she said, "I feel better. You know, kid, you are all right, but you aren't that much." My relief was enormous. That was long ago.
Face this. It is a real need. You are not violating the no-socializing rule if you allow them to love you. The no-socializing rule doesn't say "Don't love your Co-Counselors " It says "Don't mess around." Just stand still. If they start to hang other reactive demands on you, handle them. You say, "No, I have a date already." "Sorry, I don't think my wife/husband would approve." "Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom." Any clever little dodges. You handle their reactive demands, but in terms of their loving you, just accept-that's all it takes. It really won't hurt you. It may restimulate some of your own distress. I discharged much distress over my clients' attempts to love me. Great gobs of goo came off.
The need to love is a rational need.
COMMUNICATING
We need to communicate. We need to interchange rational thought with others. This seems to be a continuing need.
(This gets stultified in some of the irrational, compulsive "clienting and counseling" that goes on. The kind of thing that happens when you try to say something meaningful and you are told, "Say that again." It's as bad as the behaviorists who try to explain everything about human beings on the basis of their patterns. This is reactive.)
THE INTERACTION OF THOUGHTS
We have a need to think in interaction with someone else's thinking-to know that another intelligence is hearing us or is trying to hear us and to think back. It is delightful, the interchange of sparkling fresh ideas from each other. This is what we see in a concentrated form in a good think-and-listen session. This is a real need. We need this interchange with other human minds.
This gets masked and frustrated to a great extent out in the world, because if anyone has any slack showing, the desperate need to be counseled turns everybody else into a client. They notice that you have a little light in your eye and begin, "Did I ever tell you about the time---" You have the choice of changing the subject skillfully, retreating, or sitting down and taking on the burden.
Nevertheless, the other need is there, and I think all of us recognize it. We need everyday to have some rational intercommunication with the stimulus of another functioning mind.
SOLITUDE
There seems to be a rational need for solitude. In between the interrelation time we really need to be ourselves, by ourselves. This is going to be a powerful force for cutting population growth off at the point that there will still be the chance to be by ourselves, to take a look at our own identity. To tighten the guy wires connecting us to the general universe, as well as to the group interaction, solitude is also important and nourishing.
SLEEP, AIR, WATER, REST
What else are rational needs? Sleep. Very much so. Sleep, of course, can get spoiled and become a time when recordings are restimulated so we don't get the full benefit from our sleep. Sleep is not a time of unconsciousness. It is a time of thinking fast and hard to catch up on the information as far as we can, dealing with the things we can't easily think through because of restimulated distress, by the use of dreams, which usually allow us to at least take the sharp corners off the restimulations and throw them back in the bin.
We need sleep. We need fresh air. We need clean water. We need rest.
MEANING AND PURPOSE
We need to have meaning to our existence. We need to know a purpose for living. We need to know that we are going somewhere and that there is meaning in what we are doing.
This is one of the real rewards, of course, of becoming an RC leader, a teacher, a permeator. (Another reward is the pressure to force you into re-emergence faster. To undertake to be a model forces you to straighten out your own mind.) It is a need and a great satisfaction to be meaningful. To be a human being, to master the environment, is great. It is even greater to be a human intelligence playing a key role in assisting other human intelligences to free themselves. To catalyze other human intelligences to work together to accomplish worthwhile things-this is very satisfying. If you are an RC teacher, you need never again in your life feel meaningless. There is a great satisfaction in "serving the people." This is a real reward.
There is another reward, that of being in communication with your peers. RC teachers love to be at workshops with other RC teachers and communicate with the people who have taken on the same degree of responsibility. It's just great. Reference Persons feel the same way. There was a discussion on this once at a Reference Persons' Workshop. All agreed that one of the basic reasons why they wanted to stay Reference Persons was because the association with other people who were taking equal responsibility was richly rewarding.
We each need a meaningful role individually. I think we also have a need for an interrelationship about a meaningful purpose-a joint purpose. We need to be associated with other people in serving humanity, in assisting the development of the universe. We need to play the role which reality has assigned us of guiding the leading edge of the great pervasive tendency of the universe toward integration, toward meaning, towards organization, towards independence, towards mastery.
(This tendency is counterposed to the one that has been given so much attention, the equally pervasive tendency towards entropy, towards disorganization, towards randomness, towards chaos. That tendency is always there and, quantitively, is larger, but the movement toward integration, toward complexity, toward meaning, toward coherence, independence, intelligence, and mastery moves faster, and human beings are right on the leading edge.)
We are the most meaningful, the most complex, independent, masterful entities in the universe that we know about. I have a hope, of course, that somewhere out in the Galaxy our older brothers and sisters who are ahead of us are on their way to some day take us by the hand and help us over the next rough spots; but we can't count on it. We don't know they exist yet. It just seems likely.
SEX?
As of now, is sex a need? We don't know. Is sex an inherent ongoing need for human beings? We don't know. There is a conjecture that if we were completely rational we would only resort to sex for reproductive purposes. There are people who say, "That's quite an interesting idea." A number of other people say, "Nonsense!" I will have to admit that if that conjecture is rational, I'm not that rational yet.
There is a reason for the conjecture, which is that, observably, the enormous pre-occupation reinforced by our culture that sex is an urgent need, a need, a need, loses almost all of its thrust as people become rational enough to separate the real needs from it. It's plain that the great "need" character of sex in the past has been because our culture has made it almost the only avenue toward closeness, toward touch, toward love, toward affection, even toward awareness; and frequently the only outlet for discharge.
I would guess that about 70% of the population thinks that a climax is largely shaking and crying. That's the only time people get close enough to feel secure enough to do a little discharging and they feel it's marvelous. They feel they have to have sex because it's the only discharge they get. As people re-emerge through Co-Counseling almost all the feelings that are assumed to be sexual to start with turn out to be distress feelings. Almost all of them, certainly.
A lot of us have gotten to the point that sexual feelings are very relaxed and voluntary. It appears that, without distress, sex feelings are under the control of the rational faculty and not in any sense a "drive." People have simply observed that as they get more rational their pre-occupation with sex goes down. This conjecture, that if we get completely rational, it will disappear entirely, except for reproduction, is completely a conjecture and not my own guess. We don't know whether sex is a rational need in the sense of this discussion or not.
REPRODUCTION
I would guess that reproduction-the emergence of new human beings-is a rational but not an individual need. Even if we solve the question of immortality, I think we are going to want to find some ways to provide for the emergence of new human beings. I can't imagine us functioning well without having new babies in our arms once in a while. As an ex-parent I feel this relief from anxiety-thank God, they are all grown-and then somebody hands me a baby to hold for a minute and I think how in the world do I get along without this? It may be, of course, that when we are rational, this precious thing that we see in a child will be in all our faces and eyes and we won't have to turn to the child to get again that fresh glimpse of what we are really like.
EXCLUSIVE RELATIONS
Do you suspect that once we reach freedom, the mating need with one special person will turn out to be irrational?
One alone to be my own?
I mean, will rational people pick someone to marry?-'til death do us part kind of?
Forsaking all others? I don't know. I think it would be premature for us to be very sure either way. People ask me what marriage in the future is going to be like. I suspect it's going to be of infinite variety. That in the same residential block you are going to have 27 different forms of marriage.
I'm pretty sure they are all going to have one thing in common, however. They are all going to be aware and caring, full of affection awarely expressed and received, whatever form the relationship takes. People say, "But it's so inconvenient to have more than one love." OK, that's an argument for forsaking all others under present conditions at least. I don't know about the future. I don't think any of us have any cIear notion. We are still so far from being rational and free on this subject.
What we can do is to take the things that do seem to be emerging clearly and hang on to those. We can see to it that we don't have any relationships that aren't thoughtful and aware and caring, no relationships where we don't look out for each other.
AWARENESS
Awareness is the touchstone here as well as a rational need itself. I can't define or describe awareness precisely. It's more than intelligence-the fresh response to each new situation-because we do a great deal of that below awareness. We couldn't stay alive on the freeway if we didn't do a lot of intelligent thinking below awareness. We would be in a wreck immediately otherwise because we usually pay little attention to how we drive. We are often talking and listening to the radio and eating a sandwich at the same time.
I once made a conjecture that we might define awareness as thinking about thinking while thinking; but that's not a final definition. Everybody knows intuitively what awareness is. You know the difference between awareness and non-awareness. So, for now, we will say that it is an undefined term. Mathematicians say you either know what a point and a line are, or you don't, but they're not defined. You either know what awareness is, or you don't.
The thought entered my head when you were talking about sex a minute ago, that through the centuries we kept thinking that sex was getting in the way of the worship of God, getting in the way of making money-I guess Calvinists got into that. I get the feeling that a lot of people have put sex down because it got in the way of things. What I'm suggesting is that every time that has happened, the pendulum has swung back because of the force of the need for sex-that sex needed to come back. And I'm almost hearing that same pendulum move saying that it's in the way of rationality. I'm not so sure that it can't be used as a positive force. Would you like to comment on that?
Well, you see, we are talking about distressed sex. There hasn't been any other kind. We are talking about sex as it is, loaded up with all these griefs and fears and embarrassments and shames and guilts. And I don't think that this kind of sex will make a comeback once we are rational. You are speculating that a pendulum is going to swing. Sure, it has swung. Every collapsing society gets very libertine about sex as the present one is doing. That doesn't have anything to do with the rational roles of sex. We have got to get the distress out of the way before we can even glimpse what that will be. Historical trends don't tell us very much because the history of sex has been the history of irrational sex.
Not all religions were repressive of sex. The traditional ones that we are familiar with in our culture were, but the Polynesians' religion was pretty good on at least this one question.
I don't think we have much to guide us in historical trends because this history has been a kind of monstrous thing.
BEAUTY AND ORDER
How about beauty and order?
Good! The need to keep our environment reflecting our own humanness. I'm sure that's a need. We pay penalties immediately when we don't. The restimulation of having the cluttered environment shout at us that we are slobs is very real.
MEETING RATIONAL NEEDS
Where will we find these relationships? A good many of the things that I have talked about we can find with our Co-Counselors. We can practice them with our Co-Counselors, practice in the Co-Counseling Communities. At Gather-ins it's generally permitted to hug somebody if you do it awarely and ask permission first. You look at each other and make sure that you both want to. You don't enforce a hug on someone else in the name of RC.
You can touch. You can have think-and-listens. You can arrange to have solitude.
DON'T HUDDLE
You can do a lot of things at workshops; but certainly all this would only be a warm-up for the establishment of these relationships outside the RC Community. It's true that many of the people we establish good relationships with will come into the RC Community; but that's not the point of doing it. The point is to have the good relationships.
We have to influence a large share of the four billion people out there before they ever become Co-Counselors, in order for our goal of a non-destructive transition of society to take place.
Skills to learn
Tim's proposal could be the beginning of some real thought about mastering the skills of making friends. There are a few people who intuitively have these skills. Some have become mayors or heads of political machines, and they do their friend-making in a reactive way; but there are real skills involved which can be used rationally. Just because we have been conditioned to be inhibited in these skills is no reason we should settle for that state. Why shouldn't we grasp the plow handles and plow our way out to where we, too, become expert friend-makers, making friends for good purposes.
I have had some question as the RC Communities grow bigger and bigger whether, if we put our energies into growing and have more and more activities that we do together, gather-ins and Area meetings and Area Reference Committees-activities where we see each other a lot-and also Co-Counsel, won't we get preoccupied with the RC Community and get isolated from the world as a whole?
There is a danger, but it's just a danger, it doesn't have to happen. If we organize our Communities correctly, they will not be a burden on our time, they will be springboards from which we move out into the wide world. Permeation is going to become at least as big an item in our theory and practice as recruitment has been. It's already happening.
As we develop new leadership, we are going to free some of the experienced leaders for new jobs. Experienced ex-Reference Persons, for example, are taking on jobs as directors of permeation. (Others are assuming responsibility for outreach.) When these skilled leaders start moving in this area (of permeation), when someone like this starts to think about it full time, then all kinds of good developments will start to take place. Our attention will be more on the world as a whole than ever before.
GROW ON ALL LEVELS
The growth of Re-evaluation Counseling is integral. Clienting, Co-Counseling, recruiting, teaching, building a Community, permeating-all these activities depend on and support each other. It is to everyone's advantage to have good teachers and excellent classes, Fundamentals as well as Ongoing, to have brilliant people recruited for them and to have them successful in every way, even if you have to give a hand folding the chairs or picking up the paper cups afterwards. The effectiveness of the class feeds right back into your own session. It's all of one piece. The effectiveness of the Community feeds right back into the class and into your own session.
Traveling around as I do, I can observe clearly that where the Community is well-organized and effective, everybody's sessions go better. It's just so clear. There are many excellent Communities (including the local one, of course). In Albuquerque or Palo Alto conditions are outstanding in slightly different ways. When Co-Counselors report on their sessions in those places, their tone is high. They give you the feeling that things are moving, things are happening, they are on top of the situation. You can get this impression from anybody there. In the business-like atmosphere of the Palo Alto Community, dramatizations stick out like a thistle in a cabbage patch and tend to quickly wilt when they do occur. People quickly go back to being responsible and business-like. The Co-Counseling goes well in part because of the overall organization and expectation. You can sense this.
The growth and strength of the International Community also feeds back into our individual sessions and into our classes and our Area Communities and is a source of support and strength to them all.
There are certainly other rational needs of humans. Physical work, continual contact with a fresh supply of new interesting information, an opportunity to create-all would certainly be in this category. I invite you to join me in seeing how complete a list we can assemble in the next few months.