A session, and what it does not do

Nobody writes an accurate description of their own community. The page on this site listing the shape of a meeting is a fair list, and it is written by the people who run the room, which is the least reliable evidence there is. This page is the attempt, and it is less flattering than the page it corrects.

What a session is: a passage is read, the room discusses what it means, and the argument goes wherever the room takes it. Nothing else is layered on top of that. And a format’s most important feature is often the thing it declines to do, which is why descriptions of gatherings, this one included, spend nearly all their length on what happens instead.

Figure 01

A session, and the four things it will not do

The order, and the length I will not print

The first five minutes are not an exercise. People arrive, the room settles, nobody is asked what they are working on. Then a short opening, held the same way each time, which marks the hour as set apart from ordinary traffic. Nothing is required during it, including attention. Then the passage, read aloud, usually by me.

I am not going to print a length in minutes. Sessions here have ranged from a weekly Saturday evening with a recording attached to two people talking because two people turned up. A number would be a fiction. What is true is that the clock is stated in the announcement and the session ends when it said it would.

One passage, and why

One passage at a time is a decision, and it is older than this community. The material has something to say about meeting a text this size, and what it says is narrower than it first appears.

It is appropriate to study one form of constructed and organized distortion of the archetypical mind in depth in order to arrive at the position of being able to become and to experience archetypes at will.

Ra is answering about the archetypal mind, not about a meeting, and the step from that answer to a Tuesday evening is ours. What we take is only this: one form in depth is worth more than a survey.

I used to do the other thing, and it should be said plainly. The announcements went out with key takeaways attached, so people could read the conclusions before they arrived. It was warmer, it served a person in a hurry, and it removed the work the evening existed to do.

What the silence is

The conversation is the event. The room talks about what the passage means in an ordinary week, and nobody is called on.

Silence is what newcomers misread, so it is worth being exact. A silence here is not a gap waiting to be filled and not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is a working condition, and the material puts silence first in mental work rather than after it.

The prerequisite of mental work is the ability to retain silence of self at a steady state when required by the self. The mind must be opened like a door. The key is silence.

That is Ra on a capacity in one practitioner, not meeting procedure, and the two are not the same claim. Our reading is narrower and is the only one we act on: in a room of free agents, a silence filled because it is uncomfortable has cost the room a judgement it was about to make.

Someone will arrive who has not read the passage. It is not a problem to be managed. Such a person usually says some version of a question nobody else was going to ask, because everyone else has an interpretation to defend. A decade of reading earns a position in the room, and that position is not authority but one more reading to argue with.

When somebody says the passage is wrong

It happens, and the commitments are written for it: say what the other person has said in your own words first, then give your reason. A precise disagreement is a contribution and “that is nonsense” is not. What I do is make sure that order is followed, then stay out of it. The room is allowed to end an hour unresolved, and often does. The essay on disagreeing well treats it at length.

What the facilitator actually does

Stated plainly, because “facilitator” carries more than the job deserves. My work is procedural, not interpretive: the opening, the clock, the conventions, and making sure one voice does not become the room. It sits closer to chairing a difficult meeting than to anything else. I do not interpret your life, I do not decide what a passage means for you, and I do not hold your practice.

The reason is the material’s first principle made practical, and the material states it by refusing the job people most want a teacher to do.

I will not suggest the proper series of questions. This is your prerogative as free agent of the Law of One having learn/understood that our social memory complex cannot effectually discern the distortions of the societal mind/body/spirit complex of your peoples.

That is a social memory complex declining to sequence its own questions, and its stated reason is that it cannot effectually discern the distortions of the mind it would have been sequencing. The model for a room is the same refusal: the passage is chosen by the room and not by me, and a session that goes somewhere I would not have chosen is the format working.

A borrowed map, named because the essay uses one. The developmental line on learning distinguishes a teacher transmitting a conclusion from a group building a capacity, and gives conditions for the second: a text open to disagreement, a procedural leader, enough time. Those sit close to what this format does. What it does not do is tell you whether the text is worth a capacity, and nothing about whether the Law of One is true. It is not evidence for the material, and that limit is why it is useful.

The four things it will not do

No guided practice at the opening. No ritual performed on the group’s behalf at the close. No round-the-circle reports. And nobody left standing in the position of the one who knows.

The first is the one I have been asked about most. A guided opening turns a study session into something else: a technique delivered by someone who knows it. The material refuses that shape directly.

It is important to allow each seeker to enlighten itself rather than for any messenger to attempt in language to teach/learn for the entity, thus being teach/learner and learn/teacher.

The second is below, with the ritual. The third is a matter of what a group is for. Round-the-circle reports turn a study session into a progress instrument, and a group that measures progress can hold a person’s development over them. The commitments say it in a line, and they are right: growth here is not something a community can hold hostage.

The fourth is the deepest and the least popular. A room that produces an authority has changed what it is, and the change is invisible from inside until somebody is appointed. The only reliable defence is structural, which is why this format is built out of refusals.

The one ceremonial thing, named

I would rather you heard this from me than worked it out.

The small group performs the banishing ritual of the Lesser Pentagram before a sitting. I recommend it as protection around work of this kind, which is a different claim from saying the material asks for it. It marks the hour. It is short.

The material does name it, and I should say so before I say what follows.

This group’s use of the Banishing Ritual of the Lesser Pentagram has been increasingly efficacious. Its effect is purification, cleansing, and protection of the place of working.

And the second record is blunter, asking for it to be repeated:

The lack of regular repetition of the so-called Banishing Ritual is the lack of which we spoke.

The ritual is the material’s, it is named in two records, and the material asks for it to be repeated.

What the group does with that is still my own decision, and I took it knowing the record. I recommend it. I do not require it, I do not lead it, and you may sit it out and nothing changes. It is not an initiation and confers nothing. Nobody will ask you afterwards whether you took part. The difference worth being exact about is not between the ritual and the material — 103.18 settles that — but between a requirement and a recommendation. A practice the material asks for, and a community that makes it optional, are two different things, and only the second one is mine.

And we do not print its words. That is the same reason the rest of this library prints no technique: a ritual handed to a stranger is an imbalance in free will that the person receiving it cannot see, because the giving feels generous. The condition on every mystic art is the full statement.

The parts that are dry

Now the section the warm version leaves out.

A session can be dry. It can be one person reading aloud to a room three passages ahead of him, which has happened and is nobody’s failure of nerve. It can run its whole hour without touching anything, and everyone can leave polite and slightly flat. I have held sessions that were two people and a silence. I have had a run of weeks when attendance was low enough that the reading sessions stopped, and I announced that with the reason attached, because the reason was the size of the room and not a failure of it.

I could tell you those evenings went well and you would not be able to tell. So I am not going to.

What the format gives up to get that honesty is real, and it is the whole argument for keeping it. A session that guaranteed an experience every week would be doing something other than studying. The material is blunt that this work is not for a spectator.

It is well to investigate each discipline, not as a dilettante, but as one who seeks the touchstone, one who wishes to feel the pull of the magnet.

Ra is answering about how a person investigates a discipline, so the sentence is about a stance, not about whether an evening went well. Our reading, and it is ours: an hour in which nothing happened is not a failed hour of the discipline. It is an hour of the discipline in which nothing happened. A room promising a result per sitting would be promising something the source does not contain.

What you will actually get

You will be welcomed and given nothing to do. You will hear one passage named so you can check it, in a room where a precise question counts and where “I think this is wrong, because” counts. You will leave when you were told you would.

You will not get a technique, a conclusion, an experience, or a reason to come back next week. If what you want is to be told what a passage means for your life, this is the wrong room, and the community page says where the right one is.