I was with
Werner
when he led a seminar for a group of four hundred people. It was both
rigorous
and exacting, as are all
Werner's
presentations.
All the conversations
were in English (there were no interpreters). With
interest,
I kept my eye on one of the
participants:
a
black-robed
Japanese
ZenBuddhist
monk. I had learned earlier that he didn't speak English, so he
couldn't understand the seminar nor its processes nor its sharing.
Nonetheless he was in it, proving he had
committed
to being in its intensive inquiry. In the midst of it, I wondered from
time to time what he or anyone else who didn't speak any English, would
get from it. That said, I've
been around Werner
enough to know that more often than not, the extraordinary simply
becomes de rigueur.
Finally when the seminar reached its
inexorable
conclusion, I watched him walk over to
Werner
who was surrounded by new, elated
graduates.
When the opportunity presented itself and
Werner
recognized him, he put his palms together, bowed to
Werner,
and said in a very thick guttural Japanese accent "I ...
gaht ... it!".
Werner's
recognition of him and his recognition of
Werner
left no doubt in my mind that he did gaht it. Totally.
Look: that is extraordinary.
But that's exactly what happens with people, especially with
non-graduates
who are in a
conversation for transformationwith Werner.
Any
conversation for transformation's
subject material is of a different order of things than that of an
ordinary conversation. There's something else to get, something else at
stake in this arena. Yet it's more than that actually. It's
much more. It's that they get there's something
qualitatively different at play in a
conversation for transformation
than in any ordinary conversation, which even
non-graduates
(and even people who speak no English) get,
and they get transformed too anyway, in an incredulous
"What just happened? What was that?" kind of way. I say
"incredulous" because just by
being around it
ie just by being within earshot of it, whether they're fluent in its
language or not, they know something of another order of things has
happened. It's
"transformation by
osmosis".
Listen: I've been around the block a few times on this one. This is
not my first rodeo. I'm not just a
guy in a
diner
about this. I'm not about to fall into the trap of
explaining this. The trap is that explaining it (or at
least attempting to) drives it into the realm of
understanding which renders it unrecognizable at worst or
confused at best. Transformation simply doesn't occur in that realm.
Rather, it's a being thing (if you will). There's no
explaining being. You just be it - in other words, you just be being.
Explaining it simply obfuscates it. And it's not just that we're
attracted to explaining things: it's we're addicted to it.
And being addicted and being at choice are mutually exclusive: you're
either the one, or you're the other, but you can't be both at the same
time. Really.
Back to that
black-robed
Japanese
ZenBuddhist
monk in
Werner's
seminar: without English, he couldn't possibly have understood any of
it. And yet being immersed in it,
being around it,
he absolutely could (and he did) get all of it. To be
sure, the former alone would give it some of its validity (the
intellectual analysis is useful up to a point). But it's the latter,
it's its totally immersive experience, its willingness to "take what
you get", its "don't try to figure this out" approach, from which it
derives its awesome, great power. Listen: if you're skeptical, if you
dismiss all of this as mere paeans to
Werner,
that's a great place to be. It'll ensure you question
his work
even closer. It'll ensure that whatever you do get, you'll have
discovered it for
yourself.
That's the Socratic method.