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
Mindblower
Walker Creek, California, USA
February 3, 2006
This essay,
Mindblower,
was written at the same time as
Voice? What Voice?.
She didn't want him inside her. She thought he would do something leery
to interfere with her. She characterized her concern as the fear of
being brainwashed by him. But when pressed, she couldn't say exactly
what she meant by being brainwashed. Yet she
resisted
him anyway.
Then when he didn't intrude she felt slighted and got mad
at him. But he didn't respond or react. By then he had moved on and was
no longer in a conversation with her.
Regardless of her preconceptions, the mindblower doesn't stay where
he's not wanted. What he does isn't an inside job. He dances just out
of reach so if you want him you have to reach for him. That's how he
ensures your stake in declaring your choice in the matter. It's your
ante. He's playing for nothing.
Other than tease you to inquire into your
epistemology,
the mindblower doesn't do anything. That's not only because it's good
economics. It's because having life work requires it.
What's the already always listening for the mindblower? Indeed, what
exactly is the already always listening for "blowing the mind"? For the
most part, there's a concern that something will be damaged, that
something will be taken away, that something extremely valuable will
become irretrievably lost. What all that brings forth is the basic
reaction to hang on tighter, to
resist,
to survive at any cost. In fact the first connotation of blowing
something (up) is to explode it with great force.
That's one way of listening it.
Another way of listening it would be far less extreme, far less
austere, far less dangerous even. It could simply be
freeing the stranglehold the mind has on the being yet leaving all
systems intact, as they are, free. Nothing is damaged, nothing is taken
away, nothing is lost, and in the aftermath of that scenario, something
wonderful becomes possible, something that until then was only possible
in the quietest of quiet contemplative moments, in the deepest depths
of adventuresome dreams, something which is assumed to be so rare that
to consider having it is already always deemed to be sheer folly ie
wishful thinking.
The mindblower has no hydrogen bomb. The mindblower has nothing,
nothing at all. Just one light touch of it ... and the
whole thing is forever shifted.