We Need to Show What’s Possible
From a talk by Tim Jackins at the East Coast North America Leaders’ Workshop, January 2023
We all know that we have work to do to keep our climate livable for us and many other forms of life. The effect of centuries of humans not thinking well enough is showing clearly. The distresses that have left too many people mistreating the environment, thinking it somehow benefits them, have reached horrible proportions.
It’s also clear that many good things are happening. Things that seemed impossible a couple of years ago are beginning to happen. And it’s clear that much more needs to happen, and happen rapidly.
Several governments have taken steps sooner than we would have thought. At the same time, these governments are hampered by the distresses that created the situation. And groups that have benefitted materially from the mistreatment of the world still can’t give up [abandon] the exploitation of people and the environment, and those groups still tremendously influence the governments in the world.
So big changes have to come from some other place. Big changes will have to come from large numbers of people. We can’t just have a coup and think it will stop the destruction in the environment. A great many of us are needed to change what’s happening.
A WIDE RANGE OF ATTITUDES
There’s a wide range of attitudes about this environmental crisis. On one end of the spectrum are people who don’t recognize the crisis as real. Perhaps next to them are people who are so discouraged that they can’t think about it. And then on the other end of the spectrum are people who are desperately active, who are trying to do more and more of something to make things change.
To my knowledge, within Co-Counseling we don’t have many people on either extreme end of the spectrum. I don’t think there are many of us who don’t recognize the crisis as real. And I’ve not heard of any of us performing acts of sabotage. But aside from those ends, I think we have almost everyone else on the spectrum.
WHAT’S DIFFERENT ABOUT US
What’s different about us is that we have our tools to try to think about the crisis. We can recognize the different distresses involved and discharge them. I’ve tried to aim us at two of these distresses this weekend: isolation and discouragement. Someone, and I think it could be us, has to be a model. Someone has to discharge enough of their discouragement that they don’t act it out all the time. Someone has to be able to show that people can move in spite of discouragement.
We have the tools to understand the situation and to free our minds. And we need to demonstrate the possibility of moving forward to people who do not have our resources. We need to show that it’s possible not to be mired in discouragement, no matter what has happened to us in the past.
There are rational motivations that can let us move, change ourselves, and face the situation. We don’t have to depend on desperation. We figured out long ago that motivating people by restimulating them doesn’t work very well or for very long.
DEMONSTRATING WHAT THE HUMAN MIND CAN DO
A large part of what activists call “burn out” is simply the accumulation of restimulations. We need to get our tools out to people so that they can discharge and not be so easily restimulated. We also need to demonstrate what the human mind can do even when it doesn’t get to discharge much.
We try to not let distresses inflict their limitations on us, and we try to discharge the distresses. We know that both are effective, but simply giving people the picture that they’re not helpless, not made helpless by restimulation, is important. Whenever people move against their limitations, it changes their perspective. (It also allows them some discharge, even though they don’t understand its importance.) After every success, every triumph, people are pulled out of their distresses, they see reality more clearly, and something moves in their minds.
We are here too late to get our tools out as widely as would be optimum in this struggle to save the climate. We will have to share RC by our example of what we’ve been able to do with it and our own minds. And we’ll have to do that more and more openly as we discharge our discouragement and the hurts that have left us isolated.
SHARING OUR THINKING AND CHALLENGING ISOLATION
We’ll have to show RC’s ideas and perspectives more and more openly in practice. We’re used to hiding them. We’re also used to hiding ourselves—and not just from people outside of RC. We hide ourselves quite a bit within RC. We hide our thinking, our thoughts.
On this particular topic of the environment, we need a lot of minds openly sharing their thoughts. We need a lot of people out in the world sharing their thoughts and listening to other people, as those people find their own thoughts and try them out. We need to take action in all the ways people have ever successfully taken action; and we need new ways, new thoughts.
We can share our thinking with each other here as a starting place for learning to share our minds openly outside of RC. We are still scared of being attacked, of being criticized, of being isolated by other people’s restimulations. We still feel small and vulnerable. We can move ahead in spite of our fears and discharge as we go forward.
In our Unified Goal on the Climate, I inserted a phrase that more people have questioned than they have any other part of the goal. The phrase was “playing an active role, as large and radical as necessary.” Many of us are scared of the word “radical,” but very big and different things need to happen—not just doing better in our old ways.
As we work on our discouragement and isolation, I want us to experiment and see what we can do despite them—see what little steps we can take that aren’t based on those distresses and take those steps openly enough that people are attracted and step out of their own isolation. We can challenge our isolation enough that people dare to challenge their own. I think we are some of the best people to begin to do this. And we need to spread it to a hundred million people in the next decade.
Now we will do think-and-listens in groups of six people, each person having a three-minute turn. Most of us don’t get to do this very often. The idea is for us to think without limitation or responsibility for what we say. It’s a chance to use our minds without having to defend or justify what we say. Let’s think in the direction of steps we need to take to stop the destruction of the environment.
(Present Time 211, April 2023)