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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Evading* The Possibilities

Wild Horse Valley, California, USA

April 29, 2025

"I have become comfortably numb." ... Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb

This essay, Evading The Possibilities, is the companion piece to Would You Rather Be Right Or Happy?

It has been over fifty years since Werner's work made its first appearance at the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco in 1971. Studies have repeatedly produced evidence of the value it generates for people. People who experience its transformative power, ask (at some point or other) the same basic questions: one, "What took me so long to register / experience it for myself?", and two, "What's with the resistance to an experience that has produced such extraordinary results for literally millions and millions of people worldwide since its inception?". I do not know the answers to them, suffice to say that even if confronted with something which could completely transform our lives, we may (at least at first) opt for something familiar and comfortable ie the same old same old.

It takes a certain bravery to remain stoic in the face of overwhelming evidence of the access to possibility and transformation, yet to resist and to decline it. We're taught from a very early age to "go it alone", to keep a "stiff upper lip", to not be conned. Taking on the possibility of living life transformed, ain't for sissies. You can't take it on and still go it alone, not because there is anything wrong with going it alone, but because possibility and transformation simply do not work that way. Go downtown in any city or village, and look around. Notice there are other people there also, yes? Possibility and transformation are people things. As for being conned, what's with the fear of being conned when, with regard to who we really are, we've already been conned? (BIG time).

The pull to go it alone, is a strong one. And we are all subject to it - at least initially. It's perhaps only through grace that some of us will realize its folly and will push through it (I know: "push through the pull ..."). But it's not the skepticism that is the problem. A healthy, challenging inquiry is always a very good thing. It is the over-zealous, fervent belief that each of us already has all the answers if only we could get clear about what they are, which leaves us alone and effectively beyond the reach of possibility and transformation, that has become a self-imposed straitjacket for life (the inmates are running the asylum).

If I tell the truth about it, before I allowed the space of possibility and transformation to work its magic in my life, it wasn't an easy get for me ie it wasn't an easy get for me at first. It really demanded something from me to step away from my initial resistance to it, away from my righteous indignant opinions of it, away from my erstwhile faux-knowing about it that soon ie someday soon, I would have all of life figured out for myself. It took quite a while for me to guardedly allow Werner's work a chance to make its enormous contribution, after which all doubt vanished like a snowflake in a furnace - not because it had formulae and strategies that were better than mine, but simply because (and for which your own experience will vouch) it has the awesome power to allow who we really are (arguably for the first time) to be ever-present in our lives, front and center stage (the inmates are no longer running the asylum).

Even with another million or more people worldwide cynically and fervently providing reasons for evading the possibilities of being for human beings, it isn't totally clear why anyone would invest in deliberately dodging possibility and transformation suffice to say that it's really just a kind of deeply-rooted defense mechanism which is built into the fabric and structure of our lives, and which is hard-wired to be on automatic. It is what protects us by keeping us the way we have always been (ie in comfortably familiar territory) yet which can be superseded / over-ridden through simple acts of intention any time we want to.

Avoiding or evading?

avoiding: staying away from something (prevention)

evading: a skillful or cunning way of avoiding (actively dodging or outsmarting a threat)

Citation: wikidiff

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