Coming Back from Exile
From a talk by Tim Jackins at the Asian and Pacific Islanders Leaders’ Workshop, on Zoom, in August 2020
We exist at a very interesting time. The irrationalities of our societies are about to destroy the societies. And the destructive policies are being carried out by people who are governed by their restimulations.
It’s very understandable that people get hurt and act out their distresses. We all do. There’s little sense in blaming people for the ways they were hurt. Our goal has to be removing the hurts from every human mind. We all have the chance to take part [participate] in that.
It does mean challenging our own distresses. For example, there are a lot of people I’d rather not talk to. I feel like “it’s their fault,” but really it’s that I’m restimulated by them. I don’t always think well about them. I don’t always decide that they are worth reaching for. That’s throwing away someone because they got hurt. I need to make better, more rational decisions than that; and I need to work on the things that are in my way.
If you’re here [at this workshop], you probably realize that ours is a very long project. (laughter) But every step taken in it benefits you as well as other people. Everything we know, we want to make available to everybody. I think it’s in each of our interest to take steps in that direction.
Our societies have tried to keep us small. It may have started with our parents’ behavior toward us as children. Someone expected us to be quiet. We got messages that we didn’t know enough, that none of our ideas were any good. If we didn’t understand quickly, they got quite upset. Each of us had years of this. Those distresses still affect us.
Oppressive societies exist until there’s opposition. They manipulate the material [distress] that was installed in our childhoods. This keeps us small, separate, and feeling like we don’t know enough to change things.
But we have human minds. The characteristic we value most of human minds is that they come up with [think of] new ideas and solutions. We can all do that. We have all done that. However, too much of the time we stay alone, small, and quiet about our ideas. The distresses that make us do that are costly, and especially costly in this time of societal collapse.
WE CAN SHOW A FULLER VERSION OF OURSELVES
Let’s do a mini-session on how difficult it has been to go against the conditioning to not fully show our mind and ideas, and what made it that way.
(Mini-session)
We’ve been hurt in many ways, and we’ve had to hide many of the ways we’ve been hurt. As children we had to hide most of ourselves. We hid much of our intelligence. Why? Because no one could respond intelligently so we gave up. Then we had to hide much of how we got hurt. People would get restimulated if we showed much of it, and they would add to the hurt instead of helping.
In RC we’ve slowly learned to show our Co-Counselors some of how we got hurt. It’s often a very cleaned-up version. We try not to lose control of it. We had to learn to control it when we were children. It feels dangerous to feel and show how hard things were for us. None of us want to show how helpless and hurt we sometimes felt. We still feel vulnerable in those places. Why? Because we never had the chance to discharge enough.
Each of us seems to have three different models of ourselves:
- Our public model (we control how much of ourselves we show)
- Our RC model (we loosen up and show a little more)
- Our internal model (the way things actually run in our minds)
There are significant differences in these models. Ideally, as we discharge, they will coalesce. We will get to be who we are.
Our current task is showing our Co-Counselors a fuller version of ourselves. This means taking chances—chances that our Co-Counselors will still be able to think about us even after we tell them something we’ve hidden for decades. (I suspect you’ve got a long list of such things to choose from.) We want to know each other completely, and we can’t wait until we are free of distress for this to happen. We need to know where each of us gets confused.
There is no reason to think less of anyone because they got hurt and have not yet had the resource to discharge and recover. That does not change anyone’s inherent worth or intelligence.
One of our jobs as leaders is to be the first to take steps that we want everyone in the Community to take. It is good to do this by our own initiative, to not wait until circumstances restimulate us enough that we have to do it.
So sometime today, in some little piece of some session or group, try telling someone one little thing you’ve not said about yourself and your life. Just as a starting place. We need to break down the isolation that was pushed on all of us. We have lots of discharging to do, in addition to challenging the effect of distress in the present.
Do you think there’s something in your life that I would not understand? Using me as an example, do you think my knowing that thing would make me think less of you? We know better than that—if we think about it. To challenge these tendencies, we have to think about them. I think we can do that now and not wait.
WE CAN CHOOSE TO THINK AND DO HARD THINGS
We are engaged in a very big undertaking. Our goal is to see that rationality becomes the basis of policy everywhere. This clearly has never yet happened anywhere for very long. To achieve the goal will require many minds, and we’re starting with our minds.
Another goal is to always have our minds, to never lose them to restimulation. We don’t have to be right all the time, but we need to be able to think all the time. None of us is likely to be without restimulation (perhaps that will happen in four or five generations), but we can practice thinking in spite of restimulation. It appears that the human mind always has a choice. The more undischarged distress there is, the harder the choice, but it appears that the possibility of thinking is always there.
We don’t always remember that we have a choice to think. I think some of this is from childhood. We were not allowed to have many choices. It didn’t matter how good our thinking was. The adults chose their ideas. That makes it hard to remember that we have a choice. But we can choose to think in spite of the way we feel, in spite of restimulation. We can choose to do things we don’t feel like doing. There’s probably no limit to how hard a choice we can make, but we all feel there are limits. We all have times when we feel “I can’t do that”—not for any objective reason in the present but simply because our distresses make it feel like too much. Anytime something feels like “too much to bear,” we should be suspicious.
For us to fully develop this project, for us to get RC tools into everyone’s hands, we will probably all need to do things that feel “too hard,” that feel like “it’s asking too much of us.” There is so much restimulation about the unfair ways we were treated and the ways people did not think about us. We need to look more closely at those things. And we need practice choosing to do “unbearable” things.
We want the world to be different, and we will have to face many old distress recordings to not be confused and make that happen. We need to practice. One place we get to practice is in RC, by going back to face the early times and hurts that separated us from everyone else. As near as I can tell, no human separated easily. No human separated until it was impossible to stay. But being a newborn among unthinking adults is an impossibly difficult situation. We were all left with unbearable feelings connected to that time. Those feelings can change, and our understanding of what happened can change as we discharge on the early hurts. But we need to decide to take on [undertake] that struggle, to go back and see how bad it was and begin discharging.
WE CAN COME BACK
I want us all to come back. We are all lovely, intelligent, wonderful people. But I know there’s so much of each of us that none of the rest of us get. It’s as if all of us were sent off into exile, and they didn’t even notice they’d done it. They didn’t notice we were gone. We’ve finally noticed. And it’s time to call us back from exile so that we can see what humans can really be.
We’ve wandered around and done the best we could but never quite in common effort. Maybe this is our first chance. Hopefully it’s the only chance we need. Each of us has to decide for ourselves that we want to come back, that it’s possible to come back, that it’s worth anything, any struggle, to come back. I think it is.
(Present Time 201, October 2020)