Since The Benign Reality, by Harvey Jackins, won’t be reprinted for a while, 
we are continuing to print parts of it in Present Time. Here is another selection.


Think-and-Listens


We have one particular invention in Re-evaluation Counseling that as far as I know is not used elsewhere. I suggest that you use it the next time there is a free-choice period [at a workshop]. I heartily recommend it. This is what we have called the Think-and-Listen session.


It began at the first Profundity Workshop that we held (a gallant name). It was a workshop for trying to think about what we had so far learned in RC. It had valuable results.


We tried Think-and-Listens there for the first time with groups of about four people. This is a good size. (It doesn’t have to be four people but about that size.) These people get together to think out loud with agreement on specific conditions. These are simply that they share the time equally, and each person is free to think as best as they can about anything they want to think about. They may be encouraged ahead of time to think of frontier questions, such as, how do I relate to that blade of grass, what would completely adequate parenting be like, what would it be like to have complete support or a happy childhood, what is the real relationship between me and the most distant star I can glimpse, what will humanity be like in fifty years, what is the reality of my own nature—all kinds of questions like that to encourage daring thinking. But, the person in the session is free to think about whatever they want.


(In the RC Communities the term Think-and-Listen has been sometimes distorted by people announcing, “We will have a Think-and-Listen on how we are going to pay off our literature bill,” but I would rather we called that an “Anybody-Got-Any-Ideas?” session. I would like to reserve the term “Think-and-Listen” for this original form in which each person thinks out loud about whatever he or she wants to think about.)


If the people find they have to discharge, they use the time for discharge. No problem there; but the essential characteristic is that all the other people listen with aware, interested attention but do not respond or interact in any way. Not by posture, facial expression, sound, or any word do the others comment in any sense on what any person says there. Not then, nor in the future. That you are forbidden to do. You enter into an agreement that you will not quote to anyone outside the group what any person there said. You will not in your turn respond to anything that the others said in their turns. Just once in our lives we have the chance to really think and really be listened to with our thinking protected in a crystal chalice of complete non-intervention. 


It has worked differently for different people, but for most of us who have tried this we have found that our thinking is enormously enhanced. Trying this, we realize that the fear of other people’s comments, of other people’s responses to our thinking, has severely inhibited us in the usual discussion group. There is often apparently a large amount of fear and timidity triggered by the presence of other people and what they are thinking of us, or what they are going to say about our ideas, or how they are going to quote us later on. If we try Think-and-Listens a couple of times and can believe this is removed, we get a glimpse of how well we can think under ideal conditions. 


I would certainly recommend that at some time, if not at this conference, each of you organize a whole series of Think-and-Listens. I haven’t done it lately and I just realize as I speak how much I have missed it. I think that you will find that your horizons are pushed back, just by being able to think out loud, knowing that nothing that you will say will ever be quoted at you or anyone else.


If you hear a good idea from somebody at a Think-and-Listen and you want to talk about it in the wide world, talk about it like it was your own idea. Don’t dare connect it to the person who said it, because they must keep this sacred confidence that they can think freely without anybody else’s response coming in, to interrupt.


Question: Would you suggest it is helpful to have a general topic to think about?


No. Exactly not. That is what I said. Call those times “Anybody-Got-Any-Ideas?” sessions. Pre-serve the Think-and-Listen so the person is free, without any restriction at all from any suggestion from outside about what they are going to think about. I mention the horizon-pushing kind of topics ahead of time at workshop Think-and-Listens because people get so in the habit of believing it is their duty to think about how to skip the syrup on their pancakes the next morning, or how to get their underwear washed out so it’s dry by the time they go home, and all these kinds of things. I think it is helpful if the leader raises the possibilities of a lot of other topics than the usual worried ruts, but it is important that each person choose their own topic.