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

An Experience Like A Red Balloon, A Life Like A Concrete Form:

A Manifesto

Lodi, California, USA

October 27, 2008
Reposted March 29, 2021

This essay, An Experience Like A Red Balloon, A Life Like A Concrete Form: A Manifesto, is the companion piece to

It is also the prequel to

in that order.

I am indebted to the reinvented Landmark staff, program leaders, and people who assist who inspired this conversation.

Making transformation available in the world is a specific, exact process. While transformation may result, for example, in an expanded ability to create art, poetry, music, literature etc, all of which allow for greater latitude and flexibility in creativity, the source process itself that makes transformation available in the world seems to be specific and exact.

This essay creates two analogies (actually it creates one and recreates another) which I find useful in the context of describing

a)	how these Conversations For Transformation share transformation itself, and
b)	what's required to be an enterprise that makes transformation available in the world.

The first analogy The Red Balloon is mine. The second analogy The Concrete Form is Werner Erhard's.

The Red Balloon

I share transformation most immediately in face to face conversations with real people, with You. As far as I can tell, this is how transformation is shared. I know no better way to share transformation, no way that works better than within a context of face to face speaking and listening.

Can transformation be shared in writing? Can transformation be shared within a related context of writing and reading? "Possibly ... maybe ..." I say, which may sound strange coming from a writer of essays on a website titled Conversations For Transformation Yet in all likelihood, "possibly ... maybe ..." may be close to the truth. Follow this analogy as an expression of this process. This is just an analogy. It isn't "the truth".

I'm letting go of a helium filled red balloon. I'm having it float - gloriously, wonderfully. I'm having it travel like magic over to you, to exactly wherever you are. You take it. Now it's yours. Now it's all gloriously, wonderfully yours.

I'm the source of the experience of transformation. Conversations For Transformation is the context for the experience of transformation. The experience of transformation is the red balloon. The experience of transformation ie the red balloon wants to be shared. It loves to be shared.

Coming from the experience of transformation, I write words pointing to the experience of transformation. My words completely cover the red balloon. I adhere the words to the surface of the red balloon leaving no space uncovered. Then I remove the red balloon, leaving the words in the shape, form, and sense of the red balloon. I publish the words to the internet as Conversations For Transformation You read the words, getting the complete shape, form, and sense of the red balloon they cover. You get the red balloon from the words. You get the experience of transformation.

The red balloon is yours.

The Concrete Form

My life is given to source transformation. Yours is too - or it isn't. There's no worse or better ways of living life in this sense. Our lives are given to source, or they aren't. If yours is, you'll know. That is to say: if yours is, you already know.

Appropriate to this intention, I tighten up my life, I examine where integrity is missing. Where integrity is missing, I put it back in. My life with integrity replenished is now a reliably defined wooden frame. The spaces in my life, the spaces in the wooden frame, are where transformation shows up. To build a structure which will allow transformation to show up, to build a structure appropriate to sourcing transformation, I pour concrete into the spaces of my life bordered by the wooden frame. My life has now become a concrete form. My life now supports a structure appropriate to sourcing transformation. When the concrete sets, I remove the concrete form ie I remove the wooden frame ie I remove my life as I used to know it. My life as I used to know it, is now gone. My life as I used to know it, is over. What's there instead is a new structure appropriate to sourcing transformation.

The new structure appropriate to sourcing transformation is based on my life as I used to know it, and has now wholly filled and replaced my life as I used to know it. Concrete being what it is, this new structure I am, this new enterprise I am which is appropriate to sourcing transformation, is a forever commitment.

An Experience Like A Red Balloon, A Life Like A Concrete Form

Transformation is shared by you and I sourcing transformation in a context of speaking and listening. To a lesser extent, transformation is shared in a context of writing and reading.

Whether through speaking and listening or whether through writing and reading, it requires a certain kind of organization, a certain kind of enterprise to make transformation widely available.

If it's going to work, if it's going to be successful, it won't be through the traditional kind of organization, the traditional kind of enterprise to which individuals belong. It'll be through the kind of individuals to which this enterprise belongs.

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