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

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On Knowing Nothing

Barnhouse Napa Brews, Napa, California, USA

August 26, 2026

"What happened to me on the Golden Gate Bridge was I realized I knew nothing. Everything I thought I knew I only knew 'in order to'."


...

sharing his experience with Professor William Warren "Bill" Bartley III, Werner's official biographer, in the account titled "Once Upon A Freeway" in chapter nine called "True Identity" in part III, "Transformation", of "Werner Erhard - The Transformation of a Man, The Founding of est"

This essay, On Knowing Nothing, is the companion piece to Laurence Platt Intersections.

Werner's work delivers its heralded outcome not through activities or disciplines or practices to follow which bring forth results rotely through repetition. It doesn't work like a meditation or an affirmation which, the more it's repeated, the more its prizes are internalized (it's not like dyeing a cloth which holds its color ever firmer the more it's dipped into the dye). All of those methods are useful, elegant and even (in the case of the yogic disciplines) ancient. Instead, Werner's work delivers its results ontologically ie by engaging being directly. Its methods are effective in ways that make it powerful and easily accessible to anyone anywhere, and with minimal setup. It delivers transformation* / enlightenment through conversations ie through simple speaking and listening.

So when Werner says "What happened to me on the Golden Gate Bridge was I realized I knew nothing; everything I thought I knew I only knew 'in order to'", if I'm going to be in a conversation with him, I ask myself "What does he mean by that?" (and while "meaning" per se isn't significant in and of itself in Werner's work, in this sense its usage is prudent ie good enough for jazz). In particular, what does he mean by "I knew nothing"? What does it mean to "know nothing"? Don't we all know so much (or think we do)? I don't have the right answers for you. But I'm willing to speculate on what he's referring to.

Werner, following his extraordinary moment out of time on the Golden Gate Bridge, often reflects on the implicit error in the phrase "I think ...". It implies "I" is what's doing the thinking, that "I" is what's doing the knowing. Implicit in "I think" is the faux certainty that knowing / thinking is something "I" does. In sharing "I knew nothing", he distinguishes two essentials of transformation / enlightenment at once. The first is "I" is not the one doing the knowing. The second is the domain of knowing is distinct from who I really am. The domain of knowing / thinking is what we call "mind". These essential distinctions allow transformation / enlightenment to occur. Werner's "I knew nothing" is quite literal. It's mind that knows, not "I". Newly aware that it isn't "I" doing all the knowing, and thereby realizing who he really is, was his moment of transformation / enlightenment. To know who you really are, is to know nothing ... because ... who you really are isn't that which knows or thinks anything anyway. It's the mind that knows and thinks, and who you are is not your mind.

<aside>

To take Werner's "I knew nothing" to be an indicator of ignorance is to miss his point entirely.

<un-aside>

There's a pitfall in any conversations like these, which is to attempt to explain their distinctions. If and / or when we don't understand something, we want it explained. There's nothing wrong with explanations or with having things explained. It does however, leave us in a kind of trap, which is: anything that's explained lands in mind, in rationality, whereas the distinctions of Werner's work are best experienced rather than understood. They work best when they land in the domain of "I knew nothing". Their power is discovered in our experience of them, rather than in our understanding of them. "I knew nothing" has value when we inquire into it, looking for any possible transformative** experience it might bring, rather than what it might mean. And look: don't you go believing any of this just because I said so. Try it on for size to see if it rings for you. It's not necessary for you to agree with me, for these distinctions to work for you. You don't agree with a tool. You don't "agree" with a hammer. You use it. And if it breaks, you get a new one. Distinctions are like that.

Werner's "I knew nothing; everything I thought I knew I only knew 'in order to'" puts knowing (puts what we know) in its proper perspective. Of course we know stuff. And what we know, we know "in order to" ie what we know, we know in order to survive. Mind knows. Who we really are, knows nothing.

Is transformation enlightenment?:

In the account titled "Once Upon A Freeway" in chapter nine called "True Identity" in Part III, "Transformation", of Professor William Warren "Bill" Bartley III's official biography of Werner titled "Werner Erhard - The Transformation of a Man, The Founding of est", Bill asks Werner if what happened to him on the Golden Gate Bridge was enlightenment.

Werner says he sometimes calls it enlightenment yet he has two reservations with describing it as such. Firstly enlightenment connotes a kind of eastern mysticism, a context he doesn't require. Secondly his experience on the Golden Gate Bridge wasn't so much an enlightenment experience as it was a shift of the context in which he holds all content and all processes including experience and including enlightenment. Hence he refers to what happened on the Golden Gate Bridge as transformation and prefers not to use the word enlightenment at all.

Transformational or transformative?

transformational: pertaining to transformation

transformative: causing transformation

Citation: wikidiff

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