Conversations For Transformation:
Essays Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard
Conversations For Transformation
Essays By Laurence Platt
Inspired By The Ideas Of Werner Erhard
And More
Thank You, I Got It, And Nobody's
Interested
Anymore
Trefethen Family Vineyards, Oak Knoll Appellation,
Napa Valley,
California, USA
November 25, 2013
"The way to handle a monster is to give it lots of space."
...
There's a plethora of amazing materials available on the
internet
which are yours
free
giving direct, intimate access to
Werner's work.
These priceless expositions include
videos
of
Werner
speaking distinctions with
extraordinary
clarity,
videos
of
Wernerinterviewing
men and women who are pioneers, champions, international
leaders
(dare I say
heroes?)
in their individual fields, as well as all of
Werner's publicly available
scholarly papers
- by "publicly available"
papers
I mean those
papers of his
which are now edited and formatted appropriately for public release -
more will follow. If you're going to
surf
the
internet
looking for inspiration, there's plenty of it out there.
So it was one day when a
friend
(he was angry) sent me a link to a
website
which can only be described as outright hostile to
the work of
transformation.
I'd seen this gratuitous sort of thing before on the
internet.
I don't pay as much
attention
to it now as I once did - I hardly pay any
attention
to it at all now, in fact. But I'm totally clear about the broader
genre in which the target of the link belongs. I told him
I've
trained
myself by reading pieces like it. "You've
trained
yourself by reading pieces like it?" he asked. "What do you mean?".
What you read, I told him, in this type of piece is simply someone's
opinion, possibly merely someone venting their vindictiveness. It's
very, very easy to get drawn into an opinion (it's very
human in fact) and in so doing completely lose touch with
your own experience, especially if the opinion is hostile to that for
which you have affinity. Personally I'm skeptical of all
opinions: theirs, yours, mine, especially mine. The idea
with any opinion is to allow it to be, to give it room. This is
particularly true for hostile, vindictive opinions.
The way to handle a monster
is to give it lots of space
(as
Werner Erhard
suggests).
Listen: that's what
transformation
is, yes?: the
mastery
of
creating
space. Responding to any opinion, and particularly responding to an
opinion about
transformation
(and a hostile opinion to boot) by attacking back or even by defending,
is really quite pointless. I suggested to him "You call yourself
'transformed',
yet you get seriously bent out of shape by someone's counter-opinion?
That's not really being a great advertisement for
transformation,
is it? You have to
train
yourself to
create
space for it, to include it.".
This harkens to the one tenet which runs through all martial arts,
which is this:
don't be where the blow
lands.
The battle is lost in the moment you stop to think about
responding to a fighter. Don't be where the blow is
struck. It's a response based in being not in
reacting.
In double Emmy award winning PBS ie Public
Broadcasting Service producer
Robyn Symon's
critically acclaimed sleeper hit
Transformation: The Life and
Legacy of Werner Erhard,
an opportunity to appear and speak is given to a
persistent
self-appointed ombudsman of the value of
Werner's work.
One possible response to his placement in the documentary could be a
huffy "No way! No way does that guy deserve
to be in
this movie ...".
But
Robyn's
masterful
inclusion of footage of him stating his opinion makes a far more
powerful statement than a twenty one gun rebuttal (or even excluding
him entirely) ever could. The guy has an opinion - an opinion, that is,
on to which he seems to hold ferociously and defensively and
righteously. Yet it is his opinion, and in the space of
transformation,
there's a pure sweetness of generosity in not merely listening him
speak it, but (more than that) inviting him to speak it,
even providing an internationally distributed and admired platform for
him on which to speak it and be heard.
And it's even more than all that actually. It's the always ever
gathering momentum of the recognition and acceptance of the value of
Werner's work
in both the public sector and the private sector, in both
the academic sector and
the business sector.
It's the exponential expansion of the numbers of international
participants
in and
graduates
of
Werner's programs
which
demonstrates
in spite of a few virulent and vindictive opinions to the contrary,
the workstands
alone and speaks for itself and proves itself with no defense or
counter-attack required. While there may once have been a time in the
distant past when these hostile postings first appeared on
the internet
and raised a few eyebrows, they've now become like litter on the median
of the highway, litter to which nobody pays much
attention
these days - my own listening for it has settled into a calm "Thank
You, I got it, and nobody's
interested
anymore.".
Really. This is the status quo of the litter of hostility to
the work of
transformation
on
the internet:
it's out there - it's been out there for a while. At first it raised a
few eyebrows. But the truth is now nobody's
interested
anymore.
