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

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A Portal Not A Fixture

Barnhouse Napa Brews, Napa, California, USA

November 15, 2022
"Transformation is the space in which the event  'transformation' occurs." ... 
"Transformation is simple but it's not easy. If transformation were easy, the whole world would be transformed by now." ... 
"Those who tell don't know, and those who know don't tell." ... Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
"Those who don't know tell, and those who know speak." ... Laurence Platt
This essay, A Portal Not A Fixture, is the companion piece to Losing Access To Our Humanity.


Here's the plain truth of this matter: if you believe you've understood ie are au fait  with the notion of transformation before  you've accessed transformation through the portal that is transformation, that's not transformation  (in case you were keeping track, there's not one single superfluous word, not one single word out of place in that entire preceding sentence). Said another way (albeit not necessarily less self-referentially  compact), transformation is the space in which the event  'transformation' occurs. The former is a Laurence original. The latter is not. Absorb the latter completely. It's rare genius. It's Werner at his brilliant best. What it says is the access to transformation is a space / an opening / a context. I call it a portal  not a "fixture". Let's consider each separately.

It's a portal in the sense that to get transformation, you'll navigate (or in the process of Life itself, fortuitously drift through) an opening in possibility  (if you will). Predictably upon traversing transformation's portal, you'll have the experience of yourself as a new kind of human being, a kind of human being we do not ordinarily consider it possible to be - or that the odds of us ending up that way are seeded near plenty to nothing. Don't be overly skeptical of the latter. We don't know what we don't know, yes? When what we do not know that we don't know  is revealed, how can it not be revelationary, shocking, stunning?

A portal to transformation is not a fixture, a thing, or an object. Neither would it be a dogma or a belief system. A portal is a gaping gateway in experience  - not a book nor a movie nor a smart-phone app. You won't get transformation by reading or watching or tapping or clicking. The reading and watching and tapping and clicking are likely to seduce, distract, or mislead at best, and outright impede at worst. In the context discovered by traversing transformation's portal, you'll get the experience of transformation by being transformed  (yes, there it is again: transformation is an arena peppered with self-referentiality).

Look: if referring to the access to transformation as a "portal" sounds clunky, there may be no better way to say it. Referring to the access to transformation as a "portal" just works  if you're telling the experiential truth not the believable truth about it. If not, it's unlikely a so-called "portal" to transformation has a chance of showing up, given our tired, old, untransformed beliefs. So what is the vehicle for having a real-deal, authentic portal to transformation show up?

Consider this: an authentic portal to transformation shows up in language, is accessed through language, indeed is constituted  in language. When I say "is constituted in language" I'm saying that to traverse the portal to being transformed, we speak. It's what human beings do (it's our ToysЯUs). And language is the portal's token ie language is transformation's coin of the realm. Watch: the way its scripts (ie all those hieroglyphs and runes on its walls) work when navigating through transformation's portal, is simple: they espouse a razor thin line traversing the portal, confronting / discarding everything transformation is not  ... until finally there's nothing left to confront except what it is. There's no mystery to it: the vehicle (if you will) of the portal experience, is language.

Please notice I've intentionally deployed the descriptor "simple". I did not say transformation was "easy". It isn't. The truth of it is closer to: if transformation were easy, the whole world would be transformed by now (the accuracy of which is self-evident). Indeed transformation is simple ... but it's not easy. Really.


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