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
Golden Gate Bridge
Exertec Health and Fitness Center,
Napa,
California, USA
August 5, 2013
I am indebted to Judy Golden who inspired this conversation.
Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, California, USA
Werner
Erhard's
explicit, riveting
sharing
of his
ineffable experience of
transformation
he had while driving to work heading west on the Golden Gate Bridge one
midweek morning in March 1971 started this
conversation for
transformation
we're all in. And it's been going on ever since then
24 / 7 / 365
non-stop without pause or let-up for forty two years. Rather than
showing signs of ending or of having run its course any time soon, the
evidence shows it's expanding, accelerating today. Whether
you've just joined this
conversation
or whether you've been engaged in it since day one, it always
starts now. It always starts now when you open your mouth and
speak
transformation
and what becomes possible as a result of it which wasn't possible
before, indeed which couldn't have been possible before.
The event
transformation
doesn't happen in space or in time. Rather it's a
contextual
shift
which happens out of time. What happened on the Golden
Gate Bridge could have happened to anyone at any time anywhere. It just
so happens that it happened to
Werner
in March 1971. And according to
Werner,
there's nothing particularly significant about him being on the
Golden Gate Bridge
when it happened. He just happened to be there at the time it occurred.
What
Werner
got from his March 1971 experience on the Golden Gate Bridge became an
inexhaustible, limitless fuel supply
driving
a global engine, a veritable worldwide powerhouse which makes
transformation
and all the programs grounded in it, easily and readily available to
millions of people. So has today's experience of
transformation
changed since that midweek March morning in 1971 on the Golden Gate
Bridge? Is what
Werner
got back then, the same as what people
participating
in
his programs
get today? And: what's its place in
Werner's evolving work
today, forty two years later?
To a degree, what today's
work of transformation
on the
leading edge
is ongoingly
committed to,
ever more
rigorously,
is distinguishing, documenting, and deploying the
languaging
which, when spoken and listened, teases out
transformation
making it tangible and available. To another degree, we're building
new worlds
made possible by that first experience,
new worlds
which simply weren't possible until that first experience
- the first experience when that fish walked up on land for the first
time, bringing forth
elephants
and eagles like a possibility.
To address the first question,
transformation
is
transformation.
What
Werner
got on the Golden Gate Bridge is what people
participating
in
his programs
get today. For each person there's an individual expression of their
experience of
transformation.
But the experience of
transformation
itself is universally the same for every human being. And if it weren't
universally the same for every human being, it wouldn't be
transformation,
yes? A peak experience, maybe. But
transformation?
No.
To address the second question,
transformation
is central, pivotal, seminal to all of
Werner's work,
programs, courses, and expressions today and for the future. What it
provides by way of what's possible has led to heretofore
unthinkablebreakthroughs
in being for human beings. It's these new
breakthroughs
in being (for example
breakthroughs
in
leadership
and its sub-areas integrity, performance, and
mastery) which are
explored in current iterations of
Werner's work.
Werner's work
has been called a rich body of distinctions. This rich body of
distinctions keeps on getting richer and fuller and more comprehensive
and all inclusive. But at
the heart
of it all there's
transformation,
a requirement, a pre-requisite if there's going to be any new
real possibility. And that's not just because we like
it that way and want to continue building courses around it
because we've figured out the recipe for success using it that way. No,
it's a requirement, a pre-requisite if there's going to be any new real
possibility, because
standing
stone cold flat footed looking into your experience and telling the
truth about what's there, shows it just
works
this way.
Werner's
experience on the Golden Gate Bridge in March 1971 isn't still
alive
and surging today because it's been continued since 1971. It's
alive
and surging today because it's being
recreated
newly every moment right now24 / 7 / 365
by millions of people worldwide. It hasn't persisted because it was
once
created
so it's now somehow become permanent like the Golden Gate Bridge
itself. It's persists because we ongoingly
recreate
it newly. That's the nature of
transformation.
If you and I don't ongoingly
recreate
it newly, it disappears. And it's in mastering ongoingly
recreatingtransformation
newly that new possibilities for being which weren't possible before,
come into view.
The Golden Gate Bridge itself hasn't changed since it was built -
unlike the possibilities which continue to unfold from that single
holographic experience for which it was such a magnificent and
appropriate backdrop that midweek morning in March 1971, forty two
short years ago.
