The three essays comprising this trilogy are not about
the Mastery Course per se. Neither do they intend to recreate the rich
body of distinctions and the breakthrough in transformation the
Mastery Course unerringly, powerfully,
rigorously,
inexorably
delivers. To get those, register yourself in the next Mastery Course.
There's no investment more worthwhile. Really.
Rather, this trilogy comes from my experience with
Werner
and
Dr Joseph DiMaggio
and over five hundred other
participants,
staff, and people who assist, in the three-day Mastery Course in
London
in November of 2019.
Werner's
leading this three-day course whose over five hundred
participants
who've traveled here for a total of hundreds of thousands of miles from
countries around
the world
to be here with him, surround me. It's not just any course
he's leading with over five hundred
participants.
He's leading the Mastery Course with over five hundred
participants.
More than that, he's already promised each of the over five hundred of
us we'll leave this course having discovered for ourselves what it
takes to be a master of life. Look: if that doesn't
re-write
all the measures in the recordbooks for you of what an extraordinary
promise is, wait a bit: he's only getting started.
It suddenly dawns on me the way in which what
Werner
does in this milieu, is different than the way it's done in, say, a
megachurch.
No, I'm not referring to (nor am I assigning points for) the number of
participants
in each. Yes it's true
megachurches
routinely have audiences of many thousands of people. But even with
that said, remember
Werner
has delivered this ie has delivered at least an earlier iteration of
this, to an ecstatic standing-room-only crowd at the major league
Oakland Coliseum stadium with a capacity of sixty thousand people in
the San Francisco Bay Area, and everyone got it there too ie it worked
equally well there too (just for the record).
The difference lies largely with the method with which the material is
presented, and with the skill required to present it. In a
megachurch
the leader simply speaks to the audience who listens. Theirs is an
already shared belief system. There's hardly any one-on-one interaction
or exchange during the presentation. The leader doesn't offer it. The
participants
don't expect it. The presentation isn't based on the Socratic method of
questioning / inquiry. It's based on one person doing all the talking
and everyone else doing all the listening. Wait: there's nothing wrong
with that. That's the genre. It's just what it is (and just what it
isn't). Yet with that said, leading a course that deploys intimate
interactions as its method of conveyance, in front of a monster crowd
deploying the Socratic method of questioning / inquiry, requires a very
specific skillset, an ability, a faculty, and a mastery which goes
beyond that which it takes to deliver a homily to which people just
listen, regardless of crowd size.
In the Socratic method, the leader facilitates exchanges with the
participants
one-on-one, but not simply to impart new material. In the Socratic
method, that would be way too pedestrian. Rather the idea is for the
participants
to discover the nuances of the material for themselves so that they
originate it for themselves, and claim it. In the
megachurch
model, the leader delivers the material for the
participants
who in turn get whatever they get of the material from the leader.
Intimate one-on-one exchanges aren't built in to its design. Perhaps
that's why, drawing from the Socratic tradition,
Werner's
milieu isn't characterized as a
church
but rather as a
forum.
I've had my eyes and ears on
Werner
for forty one years. When I think he's peaked mastering his dazzling,
self-taught unique skillset, he rocks
my world
by delivering yet another level of power, insight,
brilliance,
and effectiveness in getting people to discover the fulcrum of mastery
for themselves (and primarily they do discover it for
themselves - they only secondarily get it from what he says about it)
with effortlessness and ease. His is no homily. It's an unerringly
certain, confident creation of a complex cognitive space in which
language has the power to alter (indeed to generate) reality. This
isn't your typical beer-after-the-ballgame banter. It's an intricate,
highly sophisticated, interactive
participatory
theatre if you will, for which there are no
how-to books, and for which the manuals are yet still in
the process of being compiled. Where did he get the gift? With his
verve, Hollywood handsomeness, and disarmingly genuine, authentic
humanity and humility, the mixture disconcerts me.
To be honest, I'd rather watch
Werner
do this every day on the
morning news
than watch all those rogues currently encamped there. I'm glad we've
got it all on tape.