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




Gravity

765 California Street, San Francisco, California 94108, USA

February 13, 2006

"If you keep saying it the way it really is, eventually your word is law in the universe." ... 
This essay, Gravity, is the companion piece to I am indebted to Mark Kamin who inspired this conversation.




Photography by Fred Ortiz, San Francisco Examiner
Werner Erhard being gravity announcing The Forum during a press conference
at 765 California Street, San Francisco, California 94108, USA Thursday December 13, 1984.

Werner says "If you keep saying it the way it really is, eventually your word is law in the universe.".

That doesn't imply if you simply say anything  long enough, eventually the universe will agree. Try swimming underwater without scuba equipment telling the universe you don't need air.

It implies if you say what's already so  ie what's already  law in the universe, then your word, being congruent with law in the universe, is law in the universe!  When your word is law in the universe you're gravity in the matter.

Laying down the law is a matter of saying it the way it is, the way it really  is. If you live outside the law you can't lay down the law. By living outside the law I mean living out of integrity.

Consider this: you don't have integrity, you've never had integrity, you never will have integrity. You aren't born with integrity. You can't claim integrity as your birthright. If you don't create integrity, if you don't manufacture integrity out of nothing, that is to say if your speaking doesn't lay down the law, integrity doesn't show up for you by itself.

That's interesting to me. You can't lay down the law unless you have integrity. But you don't have integrity. So to lay down the law, first you have to make up integrity.

Isn't that wild? Law  and making something up  at first seem as if they can't both be spoken in the same breath.

It's not interesting to me like some après diner  intellectual parlor chat over liqueurs and a nice cigar. Speaking as a parent of three teenage children I find the responsibility for laying down the law, for being gravity in the matter, intriguing and challenging. Glaringly absent from the package when each of my three children were delivered was an instruction manual. What I know I bring with me into parenthood is its biological reality. Beyond that, I have no idea  how to be a good parent.

Children don't know what's so. Children only know what they want. They do anything  to get it. They pull your heartstrings. They unbashedly manipulate like master fiddlers.

What I've figured out ... so far ... is my job as a parent is to be gravity for my children no matter what. Then, not if but when  they violate the law, my job as a parent being gravity is to forgive them. A being has compassion and can forgive. A mind, an identity, might not have and may not.




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