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




Empty And Marvelous

Cowboy Cottage, East Napa, California, USA

6:37am November 15, 2005



This essay, Empty And Marvelous, is the first in a septology inspired by the distinction Empty And Meaningless:

This gorgeous  sunrise.

There's freshly minted pristine heaven light bursting forth everywhere as the windless balmy dawn eclipses up all night sleepy stars. It's a clear teal sky tinged with amber cream cloud wisps. Now, barely winking over the hill, here's the sun. Wrens a-twitter greet the new day.

There's nothing going on but this gorgeous sunrise. Nothing at all. And I'm not here.

These privileged moments of emptiness. These moments of I'm not here-ness. These moments of sheer marvelousness. Everything in its place, God is in his heaven and everything's right with the world  (as Robert Browning may have said). Life lives itSelf. This magic feeling: nothing to do ... nowhere to go ... and there's all the time in the world.

This is being. This is The Being. This is all. This is everything. This is You. This is I. And I'm not here.

No one teaches this in school. Absolutely nothing in the society I grew up in, in the many societies I've lived in, in the two countries I'm a citizen of, in the five countries I've been a resident of, or in the dozens of countries around the world I've explored gives permission to be this all, this everything, this nothing (this I'm not here). Indeed, after the rapture of it I notice even my imprinting has the "something's wrong" going on about loving my Self. No wonder day to day ecstasy is hard. We're programmed to reject it in the name of being unselfish people.

It's not what I figure out, clear up, inquire into, think through, or even what I create in my speaking, regardless of the value in all that, which grants access to emptiness and marvelousness. It's where I'm coming from that's the access to being empty and marvelous. I'm always coming from where I'm coming from. Always. No exceptions. Ever. As such nothing but an on a dime U-turn of my gaze is required to access it.

You're enough. If not, nothing works, no one's satisfied, and there's troubles a-brewin' everywhere.



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