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In the currency of the internet where a well trafficked website can receive that many views in an hour, fourteen thousand six hundred views in twelve months is chump change. But in the currency of possibility and enrollment, fourteen thousand six hundred views is that many new worlds of transformation.
In my school years, I enjoyed writing (we called it "composition"). My teachers said that while my compositions were straight and accurate, they had no zest. How I tried to change that then! How I aspire to write more that way now! The first transformational writings fell out of my mouth (or perhaps I should say "fell out of my pen") in 1969. They are some of the koans which appear in my koan collection Not Writing.
At first I had no intention to express transformation in writing. In fact I had no idea either, for that matter, that transformation could be expressed in writing. And even now that I am that transformation can be expressed and received by writing and reading, I personally regard this form of communication as one degree of separation away from what is arguably the way transformation is expressed and received: by speaking and listening face to face.
Ever since I was born I have been aware that my true nature is transformation. When I met Werner Erhard in 1978, his friendship and education enabled me to eventually marshal my language to express that transformation in my day to day conversations and inspired me to write some of them down.
Fulfilling a promise I made to him in the kitchen of the Franklin House in San Francisco at 2:00am one morning in 1979, I went to South Africa and over the course of a year led the first series of ten guest seminars around the country in the major cities which resulted in the first thousand enrollments in South Africa, starting Werner's work there completely.
But that environment and that experience wasn't just any environment and nor was it just any experience. That environment was endarkened by the halcyon apartheid years during which inviting both black guests and white guests to my seminars was a criminal act. Cohabitation among black people and white people contravened the so-called "Immorality Act" in South Africa which was a capital offense.
Speaking transformation into that listening trained me in ways the depths of which I am still plumbing twenty five years later. I got totally clear in that experience that expressing transformation is not sanctioned by the environment. For me, you express transformation in order to express transformation. There is no ulterior motive.
Today Nelson Mandela's grandchildren are graduates of Werner's work in South Africa, and Mark Shuttleworth is the second civilian on the planet to pay a space agency $20,000,000.00 to travel by rocket into outer space, having invented the possibility of doing so in his Landmark Advanced Course in South Africa.
