When I first heard
Werner
say that, it was hard for me to wrap my head around it (to deploy a
colloquial expression). Try it out for yourself: I'll bet it's hard for
you too. Later I came to realize that's precisely the
point:
we have many profound experiences of awesome depth and great beauty
and pristine clarity which are cheapened by our
futile
attempts to wrap our heads around them. And we
human beings
(left to our own devices) are thrown to try to wrap our
heads around our experiences instead of simply experiencing
them.
Transformation
is one such experience. It (and
Werner's
definition of it) are best just
gotten.
And they can be
gotten.
You can
gettransformation.
But any attempt to wrap your head around it, diminishes its
power.
No, it's actually worse than that: it kills it off entirely.
There's another characteristic of
transformationworth
noting: after a while, even its compelling
"This is
IT!"
becomes passé (what that
means
is it becomes overly conceptualized) and has to be
re-createdagain.
That's a statement both about
humannature,
as well as about the
nature
of
transformation.
At your college
graduation
ceremony, you receive your
master's
degree once, after which you're forever
considered
to be a
master of
your discipline. It's conferred on you for life. However you're only
considered
to be a
master of transformation
on the other hand, if you
re-create
it over and over and over
again.
That's its ongoing requirement.
This is perhaps its most enigmatic aspect: it goes away,
and it comes back
again,
and it goes away
again,
and it comes back
again.
It lasts as long as I'm
creating
it lasting. I'm thrown to have experiences
(love,
accomplishment, realization etc) I expect to last. In that
vein, I expect the experience of
transformation
itself to last. That's an ordinary
human
expectation to have. But it doesn't seem to work that
way.
Look:
people whom we
consider
to be permanently
transformed
are simply those who, once they've realized it's gone away,
re-create
it
again
faster than the rest of us. Many ongoing and continuous
re-creations
give the appearance of permanence.
When life
transforms,
I'm left with the astonishing realization
"This (after all) is, was,
and always will be IT!"
- astonishing, because until then, I was certain there was
someplace else to
get
to, some other
way
to be, indeed some other
way
of holding
the whole
of whatever it is to be
alive.
But no: this place, thisway,
with
nothing
changed, exactly
the way
it is (and exactly
the way
it isn't), is IT. That's where my experience stays. For a while. My
realization that
"This is IT!"
stays too. For a while. For a long while. At least, that's
the idea ie that's our expectation. But we're
human beings,
remember?
When anything becomes IT, there's a real likelihood that sooner
or later, it will be taken for granted. That's
humannature.
Without paying
closeattention,
there's no immunity from that for any of us, nor for any of our
experiences. The essence of the experience of
transformation
is it's
created
- or, if you allow the first
time
to be spontaneous (ie if you allow the first
time
to simply
happenfreely
by itself), then from then on, you
re-create
it. Over and over. And over
again.
And
again.
