Nothing here will counsel you

You have arrived with something specific. A marriage. A body that will not settle. A grief with no date on it. A question about whether any of this is worth what it is costing you. I am not going to ask you to set it down, and I am not going to treat the fact that you brought it here as the part that needs explaining.

What I am going to do is tell you plainly that this is not the room for it, and then tell you what the room is for. A refusal on its own is a subtraction. You would arrive with more than you left with, and I would rather say the second thing than leave you to infer it.

The refusal is not ours

Start with the part that is easy to get wrong. A reader can reasonably assume that a community which will not counsel you arrived at that position through caution, or liability, or a preference for its own quiet. None of those is true here, and the reason is that the material keeps this posture already.

It is asked about the archetypal mind, in session sixty-six, and the answer declines to add to the account it has just given. It asks instead for the student’s own observations.

You must realize that we offered these concepts to you so that you might grow in your own knowledge of the self through the consideration of them. We would prefer, especially for this latter query, to listen to the observations upon this subject which the student of these exercises may make and then suggest further avenues of the refinement of these inquiries. We feel we might be of more aid in this way.

Read the end of it. The entity says it would be of more aid this way. Not more accurate, and not more authoritative. More aid. Being the second voice in your own thinking beats being the first.

Then the standard it holds itself to about what you actually asked.

We may have misperceived your query. We were under the distortion/impression that we had responded to this particular query. Would you restate the query?

That is the material at its most attentive, and it is asking you to say it again, because it may have answered a question you did not bring. A room that told you what you meant, without checking, would be doing the thing this passage is careful not to do.

And then the reason given for a refusal.

It is necessary that each being use free and complete discernment from within the all-self which is at the heart of the mind/body/spirit complex.

Ra declines the question it was asked and gives that as the reason. The refusal and the faculty arrive in one sentence. I do not think a community can improve on that as a description of what it owes the person in front of it.

What the refusal is for

The rest of this is ours, and I am saying so because it is ours.

The comfortable account of a boundary is that it protects the institution. That account is not only unkind to the institution, it is wrong about what is at stake. Counselling, however kind, is not a smaller version of help. It substitutes one person’s discernment for another’s, and that substitution is the entire content of the act. A room that hands you the conclusion has removed the thing you came for and given you a copy of it.

The material is asked, in session fifteen, whether its exercises may be published and handed out. The answer is not caution.

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.

A messenger who teaches or learns on an entity’s behalf inverts the balance of the exchange, and the material calls that a distortion of free will. A counsellor standing in a session is the messenger in that sentence, whatever that counsellor intended and however much they care. The care is never the thing in question. The position is.

The cost, and who pays it

This is the part that most pages of this kind get wrong, and they get it wrong in the direction that makes them feel better.

One of the primal distortions of the Law of One is that of healing. Healing occurs when a mind/body/spirit complex realizes, deep within itself, the Law of One; that is, that there is no disharmony, no imperfection; that all is complete and whole and perfect.

The corpus names healing as one of the primal distortions of the Law of One, and puts the whole of its claim in the last clause. Then, in the answer just before it, it is blunter.

It is to be once again iterated that healing is but one distortion of the Law of One. To reach an undistorted understanding of that law, it is not necessary to heal or, indeed, to show any manifestation but only to exercise the disciplines of understanding.

I want to sit with how that reads if you are the person this page is addressed to. If you are ill, or frightened, or your mind is doing something you did not ask it to do, then a sentence saying that understanding does not require healing is a sentence that can be heard as saying your condition is a distortion to be got past. This library is not going to soften that by pretending the passage is warmer than it is. It is what the material says, and disagreeing with the material is not what this page is for.

What follows is the community’s own position, and it is the reason we do no individual healing work even though the corpus has a word for exactly that.

The healer acts as energizer or catalyst for this completely individual process.

Look at where the process is put. Completely individual. The healer is a catalyst for work belonging to the person doing it, not the author of it. The material describes a relation, and the relation points away from the helper. A community is handed no technique and no licence by it.

I will be plain about the limit of that passage, because it is the limit of this page. It is the material’s account of a process and it is not a medical account. Nothing here diagnoses anything, nothing here promises anyone an outcome, and this community makes no therapeutic claim of any kind.

If you are unwell, a physician. If you are in crisis, a hospital, a doctor, or one of the telephone helplines that exist for exactly this, tonight rather than after you have finished reading. I am not going to have that conversation with you anyway. I have no training that would make it any good, and there is a version of it that would feel like help, and feeling like help is precisely the failure this page has been describing.

Figure 01

The two doors, and the one that is shut

And here is the cost, in the second person, because that is the register it arrives in.

You came here first. That is the ordinary order of things, and it means you will have to begin again somewhere else, and you will have to do it while you are still the one who is unwell. This line is paid for hardest by the people who can least easily make another start, because somebody who can pay for a therapist has never had a reason to mistake a study community for one. I state that as a cost. I do not propose to set it against anything, and I will not tell you that paying it makes the library virtuous.

What the room is for

So: what is it for. If the answer were only the refusal, you would be right to close this page.

Here is what you can expect if you come. The material gets read out loud, in a room, by people who have read it, and the reading is followed by disagreement rather than by applause. Someone holds the discussion. That is the whole of the job and it is the part that is hard. You may bring a question and get no answer to it, which in most rooms of this kind is the one thing nobody offers you, and it is the thing I would ask for. You may say that you have read nothing at all. You will not be asked to account for what brought you there.

The practice pages teach what this community actually teaches rather than describing it, the community page sets out who is in the room and what is consented to there, and the start-here page answers the question I know you are holding, which is whether any of this is for you at all.

The design is one bet, that the faculty is yours and not the library’s, and the material’s own words for the bet are the last line of the first quotation on this page. Sitting among other people reading the same difficult material, and being asked what you make of it, is the aid. It is much smaller than what you came looking for. It is also the thing that stays.

Does the refusal pay for itself

There is a question underneath all of this, and it is very likely the one you arrived with, so I will put it last.

Does the refusal pay for itself. I think it does, and I would rather be exact about why than reassuring. A room that answers the question you brought has taken your judgement out of your hands, and a community will not give it back to you. A room that will not is smaller, slower, and sometimes no use at all, and it leaves you holding the thing you came for. I would rather be the second voice in your thinking than the first. That is the whole of my case, and it is not more than the whole of it.