The boundary of this space

The first thing I wrote down for this community was not a vision. It was a line. Collective study and facilitation, with a deliberate refusal of personal counselling, therapy, and individual healing work. I have come to think of that as the founding decision, because everything since has been an attempt to live honestly inside it rather than a list of things added afterwards.

A charter is not a description of what a community enjoys doing. It is a set of decisions about what the community is able to hold, and every one of those decisions has a cost. The cost is easy to lose sight of, because the decision reads as prudence in the document and arrives as absence in somebody’s life. So the whole of it belongs here, including the part I would rather argue about than publish.

The field, and what it permits

Concretely. The material is read in company. A session is held, and a facilitator holds the discussion, which is real work and not a hosting fee. A question can be asked out loud, argued about, and left unresolved. The library is essays rather than instruction. And a person can sit in a room twice a month without having to explain what brought them there.

That is a shorter list than a reader arriving from a tradition with a teacher in it may expect, and the shortness is the point. Here is what the material says a group can actually do for a person.

It is impossible to help another being directly. It is only possible to make catalyst available in whatever form, the most important being the radiation of realization of oneness with the Creator from the self, less important being information such as we share with you.

Whatever the form. The words about information such as we share with you are in that sentence, and they are not the softer part of it. A group cannot do the thing. A group can make the conditions in which the thing becomes possible for the person who is actually doing it. Everything this community offers sits in that field, and I have stopped apologising for the size of it.

The field, and what it refuses

Three things, and they are not three versions of one thing. Counselling one person, however kind. Therapy, diagnosis, and individual healing work. And any promise that a particular outcome will follow from a particular practice.

The reasoning is not ours and it is not a policy. It comes from the material declining to sequence the questions put to it.

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.

Read the reason before the refusal. What is given there is not a wish not to decide. It is that the perception a decision would rest on is not good enough to make it with. A group in that position has no business exercising authority over a member beyond what it can see, and a study community knows its members well enough to enjoy their company and no better. The boundary is not prudence. It is the arithmetic of what any group can know about one person.

Speaking to the intention of your question, the best way for each seeker in third density to be of service to others is unique to that mind/body/spirit complex. This means that the mind/body/spirit complex must then seek within itself the intelligence of its own discernment as to the way it may best serve other-selves. This will be different for each. There is no best. There is no generalization. Nothing is known.

Two readings of that, and only one carries weight. The flat one, that there is no best way and so nobody should try, is contradicted in the same answer, which names the best way in the highest terms available. What holds is transfer. What is right for one person is not transportable, and an institution that published the formula would put a general rule in the place of a particular judgement, which is the one thing this line exists to prevent.

The internal version of that argument is ours, and it did not come out of a document. It came from the person who runs the sessions, arguing that handing someone your own lessons is a disservice to them, and that somebody whose balance is already sound can be put off balance by another’s enthusiasm. The damage arrives wearing the name of service. That is why the boundary is a discipline and not a caution.

The cost, which is not a side effect

A charter excludes a category of need. The category is not chosen, and it is not chosen because those people deserve it least. It is the need a study community is least equipped for, and those are not the same set of people.

To attain fifty-one percent dedication to the welfare of other-selves is as difficult as attaining a grade of five percent dedication to other-selves. The, shall we say, sinkhole of indifference is between those two.

The material puts a small increment and a large one in the same place, with the indifference lying between. Every community that calls itself about service is living in that sinkhole, and a charter exempts nobody from it. What a charter can do is stop the community pretending otherwise, which is a good deal of why this one exists.

Figure 01

The charter in two fields, and the three cases that stand on the line

What happens at the edge

The fields above are a description. The edge is where the charter is actually operated, and it is where a page like this one usually goes vague. Three cases, answered.

Someone arrives in genuine crisis. Not here, not in a follow-up message, and not after a week of consideration. A crisis line, a doctor, or someone professionally answerable for that person. What I will not do is hold a conversation that looks like help and is not, and I will not do it on the ground that the person would rather be talking to us than to a stranger with the training. The honest cost is that somebody who found this site first has to find their way twice, and a redirection can fail. We are the right answer and the wrong place, and both are true at once.

A member wants to counsel another. In a session, in the group, in private. The answer is no, given warmly and without a scene, because the care is in the manner and the care is not what is withheld. Our written rules already carry a ladder of consequences for how members speak to each other and a rule against selling paid personal work into the discussion. Counselling a member inside a session changes what the session is, and a facilitator will stop it. The person being counselled is usually the last to notice, which is the strongest argument against doing it.

A reader for whom the refusal reads cold. This is where the monastic comparison earns its place, and I want to be careful with it. In a sangha a communal discipline is ordinary. A teacher declining to advise you on your marriage is not withholding something from you; that is what the rule is for, and it carries a long institutional record of being a form of care rather than an absence of one. Part of what a cold reader is reading is the tradition they arrived from, and this community is not in a position to tell them their expectation is wrong. What the record does not settle is whether this refusal is the right one. Our own judgment, argued rather than borrowed. A refusal is competent when it is warm in what it does offer and unmoved about what it does not, and a refusal delivered as a boundary and a refusal delivered as indifference are different acts, of which only the first is a discipline.

The part that is uncomfortable

Stated as a judgment and not softened into a policy statement. A sacred-space boundary is a real constraint on care. It is not a formality and it is not free. Some people who arrive will not be helped here and will be told so plainly, and a community that claims otherwise is selling something, either a service it will not render or the feeling that a rule is wisdom. Every such choice leaves somebody outside who wanted a different one.

The price falls hardest on the people with the fewest options. Somebody who can afford a therapist does not need a study community to be one, so this line is paid for disproportionately by the people it costs most to reach. That is an argument against a great many charters and it is an argument against this one. We do not get to net it out.

The trade is still worth making, and here are the reasons, and none of them reassuring. A group that takes over its members’ judgement has spent its authority and can no longer be asked anything. A group that renders the thing itself has stopped doing what the material says a group can do. And a group that has sat with one person in crisis becomes that person’s first call and last resort, which is where institutions fail people rather than hold them. Three reasons, and all of them enough.

The Buddhist account of this, taken at its strongest, would say the boundary is a form with no owner, held by the community that holds it and revisable whenever that community changes. That is a fair description of what a monastic rule is, and it explains why this charter should be examined often and treats the examining as the point. It is also the limit of that reading. It accounts for a boundary’s dependence on the community that keeps it and settles nothing about whether this boundary is the right one, and a form’s revisability is no reason to stop leaning on it. This library keeps both. The review, and the refusal. They are not the same thing, and the sentence about reviewing this is not available as a substitute for the sentence about not doing it.

The sentence I am signing

I have been asked whether the line is worth it. I answer yes, and I answer knowing the price, and I expect to answer it in every session for as long as this community exists, which is the correct number of times to be asked.