It runs against the grain of our work ethic. It's contrary to our sense
of entitlement. It doesn't play well with our desire to
accumulate, to amass. Neither does it sit right with our
survival instinct, and it's rough on the self-serving injunction to
"take care of #1". It's the realization, the
paradox
that in order to keep transformation once you get it you have to give
it away - no ifs, ands, or buts.
Werner
Erhard
says
"If you don't take it out
into the world you didn't get it in the first place.".
It's worth inquiring into what this implies, what's its impact is for
generating and re-generating enduring, real, alive,
thrilling transformation, possibility, and enrollment moment by moment,
hour by hour, day by day for the rest of your life.
A trivial
interpretation
of Werner's assertion is Werner's a salesman, he wants his
products to sell well. He is, he does (they do). Personally I take no
umbrage with the business of educating for
transformation ie apropos what it takes to make transformation
available. Making a no-nonsense, stone cold, flat-footed observation of
what's required to bring anything of value to human beings given the
way we've set up the world, it's sheer naïveté to imagine
it can be done free of charge.
Fees are required, are paid to register into, to participate in, and to
realize the value of Werner's programs. When the regents of the
University of California school system offer their sky high priced
educational programs for reduced rates or (better yet) free,
then we'll have leveled the playing field. Is that likely to happen?
Hardly. Is it realistic to pay for education? Yes. Wouldn't it be nice
if education were free? Of course. Is Werner requiring people pay to
participate in his programs an issue for me? It's not even the lowest
blip on my radar. To those who expect them to be free, I say "Get
real!". Try that approach at UCLA on the first day of admissions. It
won't get you very far.
So the coaching to take transformation out into the world (as Werner
says) or to give it away (as I say) exists in a different domain than
the cost of production of Werner's programs which appropriately merit
registration fees. It has nothing to do with selling even
though salespeople may indeed become more effective out of
participating in Werner's programs, and many of them have. What, then,
does it have to do with?
It's the nature of transformation itself which supports
Werner's assertion regarding taking transformation once
gotten out into the world, which supports giving it away - OR
" ... you didn't get it in the first place ...".
If you got it, you got it through speaking and listening. Who we are is
constituted in language.
If you're speaking it, it lives. Transformation lives in conversations
for transformation. When you're not speaking it, when you're no longer
in conversations for transformation, you're no longer transformed.
Now, the trouble with saying what I just said is it sounds like a
recipe, like a rule. Once I've accumulated enough recipes, enough
rules, I've acquired the beginnings of a belief system. Once I
start living inside a belief system, I'm living in a conceptual
approximation of the
direct
experience
about which I made up those recipes and rules. Once the
direct experience
is relegated to the domain of beliefs and concepts,
it no longer lives, it's as good as dead.
So it is with transformation. When transformation is
spoken and listened, it lives. In other words when
it's given away, when it's shared, it's alive. But
transformation believed, conceptualized, understood, even
transformation remembered simply isn't transformation
anymore. As a cliché, "Transformation remembered is a shadow of
its former Self" is closer to actuality than it sounds.
While it's not "the truth", it's useful to consider
transformation as Self by itSelf. When you're
transformed, when you become Self, when I'm transformed, when I
become Self, there's no "Self for you" distinct
from "Self for me". It's all Self.
Self by definition is beyond and inclusive of me for me
and you for you. Its essential nature, its true nature, its
Buddha
nature is its shared-ness. Self is shared oritain'tSelf! Hence Werner's "If you don't take
it out into the world you didn't get it in the first place." - no ifs,
ands, or buts.
Give it away, and you get to keep it. Keep it without giving it away,
and you don't get to have it.
