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

Everyone's In Love With Everyone

Monticello Road, Napa Valley, California, USA

September 22, 2014

"Everyone's in love with everyone."


...

"When you've said all of the bad things and all of the good things you haven't been saying, you will find that what you've really been withholding is 'I love you.'."


...

"I never worry. God is in his heaven and everything is right with the world - even though it doesn't always look like it."

... Dorothy, 99, improving on Robert Browning

This essay, Everyone's in Love With Everyone, is the companion piece to No Precedent (Get Over It).

It is also the nineteenth in the complete group of Experiences Of A Friend (click here for the open group Experiences Of A Friend II):

so far, in that order.

It is also the eleventh in a group of twenty one on Love:

It is also the prequel to So Stoopid, Given What's Possible.

Here's an idea from Werner, an idea I first heard him utter almost as a throwaway line, as an off the cuff remark he made in passing, a feather in a breeze comment (if you will), like a newly fallen autumn leaf flying off a parked car as it accelerates. It wasn't the main focus of what he was speaking at the time. Rather, it was a spontaneous aside, one I almost missed ... then later, one I couldn't get out of my mind.

This is what he said, with a pause both before and after speaking it (the pauses bracketed it ie they made it parenthetical to his ongoing conversation), a brief, unplanned side bar to his current train of thought:

"Everyone's in love with everyone.".

Everyone's ... in love ... with ... everyone ... Wow! We're not likely to collect much evidence for that by watching the news on television or from reading the newspaper, will we? If you look there, the idea that everyone's in love with everyone, isn't immediately apparent. It doesn't exactly jump out at us - just the opposite, in fact: there's no common sense evidence in our group behavior as evidenced by what's shown on the news (and by group here, I'm referring to all of us, to the entire population of our planet) for "Everyone's in love with everyone.". There's more common sense evidence, in fact, that the opposite is true. It's more than that, actually. It's everyone knows "Everyone's in love with everyone" can't be true and / or could never happen, yes?

Now, I'm not asserting he expressed the idea that everyone's in love with everyone, as a dream, as something to aspire to, as something to hope for, as a "What if ... ?" fantasy scenario (indeed it may sound like some or all of the above, but if you hear it in any of those ways, you'll actually miss it completely): that's not how I'm sharing what he said. That's not the way I heard him speak it. Rather, the way I heard him speak it is it's already in place, it's already occurring. It may not look like it's already in place. It may not look like it's already occurring. But yes, it's actually already in place, and yes, it's actually already occurring - just don't look for evidence of it on the evening news.

Where, then, do we look for it?

Where we look for "Everyone's in love with everyone" (and even better than "Where we look for 'Everyone's in love with everyone'" is "What we look to, for 'Everyone's in love with everyone'") is our ground of being. Our ground of being is where we come from. I say "where we come from" not in the national sense (as in "I come from Napa Valley, California, USA") but rather in the experiential sense - like an epistemology, like that which shapes our lives and our world view (knowingly or unknowingly), like the space we're born into, like the natural knowing we're born with - or (if you prefer), like the natural knowing we're born from.

"Everyone's in love with everyone" is both a space to live from, and a space to live into. It's a way of being. This is not your parents' "Make love not war" (not that there's anything at all wrong with that) because this isn't a making (and it's not a doing either): it's a being - or (if you prefer) it's a possibility, a context, a distinction that's brought into play by consideration alone.

Look: even that way of articulating it ie "brought into play by consideration alone", is risky business because saying it that way may sound like it's bringing something into being which wasn't already here. No, it was already here. When I say it's brought into play by consideration alone, that's the same way you differentiated physical reality: it was always here, and once you distinguished it, you considered it to be what's so. That's the same way you differentiated gravity: it was always here, and once you (and Sir Isaac Newton) distinguished it, you considered it to be what's so. So try on the idea that everyone's in love with everyone, as simply what's so. And that's the way I'm sharing it ie that's the way I heard him speak it.

<aside>

"Everyone's in love with everyone" harkens to another earlier Werner classic "When you've said all of the bad things and all of the good things you haven't been saying, you will find that what you've really been withholding is 'I love you.'.".

The latter speaks to you, the individual. The former speaks to everyone, to all of us, to humanity at large.

This exponentially expanded shift in impact is dramatic, awesome.

<un-aside>

Now, really: is there any basis for asserting everyone's in love with everyone? There is. We all know what possibility is, although some of us speak it more than others, and some of us talk about it more than others. All that said, I assert possibility, being what it is, is known by everyone. Even those who say they don't know it, have a sense of it. And everyone knows the difference between "the way life is (sigh!)" and "the way it could be". Sometimes this difference is spoken as a complaint. Sometimes it's spoken more wistfully, more sagely. But however it's spoken, I say we all know the difference between the two ie we can all tell the difference.

Our visions, our speculations of the way it could be, almost always, almost without any exceptions, include co-operation and a mutually sustainable future for everyone and for the planet with no one and nothing left out. Even if it isn't articulated quite as comprehensively as "co-operation and a mutually sustainable future for everyone and for the planet with no one and nothing left out", there's a palpable sense of it with people everywhere, which even children know from a very early age.

It's this sense, this sense of love, this sense of decency, this sense of the common good, this sense of the greater good which is the evidence of ie which is the basis for asserting everyone's in love with everyone - that, plus the way we're naturally playful, the way we're naturally able to get another and be gotten by another (getting another and being gotten by another, incidentally, are the two basic acts of making love).

What goes on in the world ie the things we see on the evening news, doesn't negate Werner's assertion "Everyone's in love with everyone.". The things we see on the evening news, are the things we do. "Everyone's in love with everyone" is who we are. Who we are is not (yet) the things we do. This glaring difference, this rude rip between "the way life is (sigh!)" and "the way it could be", this gaping chasm between who we are and the things we do, unerringly highlights what's possible for the future. It shows we have work to do. Everyone's in love with everyone ... and ... we have work to do. It's work worth doing. Like a beautiful love affair, it's a game worth playing. In fact it's the only game in town.

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