The Complete Goodness of Reality
Our understanding of and our use of the counseling process (the contradicting, discharging, re-emerging process) has been progressing by leaps and bounds. Substantial numbers of experienced counselors have been taking charge of their lives, handling and triumphing in many difficult and challenging situations, and gaining wide influence and leadership in the process.
Individuals new to Co-Counseling are grasping the advanced techniques and approaches from the literature, and from the instructions and modeling of the successful experienced leaders, very rapidly. There are many signs that re-emergence in the future for new people will not have to be a laborious, difficult procedure as it has often been in the first forty-four years of RC. The last four major advances in techniques (the Exchange of Roles, the "Why do you love me, counselor?", the Reality Agreement, and the "You and me, Elizabeth") have changed the atmosphere in our organized Communities dramatically.
The general understanding that discharge takes place whenever a distress pattern is "contradicted" sufficiently and that "contradiction" consists of anything that allows the client to view the distress as not present time reality provides a never-ending stream of effective techniques in every Co-Counseling (or living) situation where it is applied. From this, we can, at this point, generalize that the basic contradiction which is at the heart of every useful contradiction, is the contradiction between reality and the great mass of recordings which constitute pseudo-reality, whether this pseudo-reality is embodied in the distress recordings and "feelings" of an individual, in false information, or in any of the oppressive functionings of a world-wide oppressive society. This insight becomes explored in the successful operation of "Reality Agreement" counseling. I propose that we extend this exploration further by reference to, and use of, one of the basic insights of our theory.
We have announced, and to some extent have proclaimed, this basic insight over a period of many years. I do not think we have until now grasped and employed it to the extent that is useful. This insight is the one which has resolved the "ancient philosophical dilemma" of Determinism versus Free Will.
There is no general description of reality on the issue of determinism versus free will which can apply accurately to both the past and the future. The ever-moving line of present time divides the past and the future inexorably into two domains which are forever separate. The future is the domain of free will, the past is completely determined.
Everything in the past is determined. Nothing in the past can be altered. It was the way it was. It is sealed forever in inexorable completion. No matter how the feelings of our undischarged painful emotion recordings may yearn to change the past, it cannot be changed.
(The ever-moving instant of "present time" offers free choices and moves us along with this ever present free choice into the future. If we failed to make the free choice that we now (painful emotionally) wish we had, the new present instant still allows it in some form or other.)
We may feel (and "think" we think) that the past (immutable, fixed) was "bad," but the truth of the matter has to be that the past was just fine in every way. It was the way it was. It happened and therefore it is necessarily completely acceptable. All our mental exercises in regretting it, "condemning" it, etc. are simply expressions of our understandably confused attempts to find some way to discharge the emotional distress which has stuck to us in the form of "congealed past pretending to still be present."
I think if we can make direct contact awarely with this necessarily excellent nature of the past, the discharge process will be able to accelerate. We already have examples of Co-Counselors acting brilliantly, successfully, and creatively while at the same time discharging voluminously. It has been established that it is possible to think brilliantly, act successfully and creatively, re-evaluate, and discharge in one big, ongoing process.
I do not yet know how to do this in a way that I can inform you, the reader, with any detailed instructions. I may never be able to tell anyone how to reach this point in such a manner. I can, and do, however, suggest that it is possible. I can share these insights as far as I have developed them with you, the reader, and I can tell you that I am approximating this process for short periods as a logical outcome of my previously-established directions for re-emergence.
Everything of the past was and is fine. It happened the way it happened. Therefore, it follows inevitably in logic that it happened the way it had to happen. If it had to happen, and happened, it is completely acceptable, deserving of no regret. If someone whom we have loved has died, for example, that is just fine. We may need to say "goodbye" to that person a hundred thousand times in session as a means of shedding all the tears that must be shed before our mind can accept reality and be at ease with that reality, but we may be able to speed the process by facing clearly the fact that our feelings of distress are pseudo-reality. We may need to face, for example, that all we ever "possessed" of the departed beloved was the information about him or about her which was contained in our memories of that person, and that we have all that information still with us (once the occluding grief is out of the way) and that the actual "companionship" with that person which is available in the continuing information we have about him or about her cannot be destroyed, cannot be lost, and can become and be kept unoccluded.
Our entire pasts are completely satisfactory, completely fine, completely enjoyable. Our ever moving present is filled with complete freedom of choice. Our entire future deserves delighted anticipation of the sort which we observe in a well-treated, healthy two-year-old who "cannot wait to get out of bed in the morning because there is so much delightful living to do."
Harvey Jackins