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




Mom Dearest

Cowboy Cottage, East Napa, California, USA

March 28, 2009



"How can someone who is Dorothy escape from Dorothy? You cannot do that by traveling in space and time."
... 
sharing his experience of his mother Dorothy with Professor William Warren "Bill" Bartley III, Werner's official biographer, in the account titled "Jack Frost Meets June Bryde" in chapter four called "Derailed" in part I, "Shadow Play", of "Werner Erhard: The Transformation of a Man - The Founding of est"
This essay, Mom Dearest, is the fourth in a group of twenty one on Parents: I am indebted to my mother Andee Platt who inspired this conversation.




In the world of transformation, it's often said (or perhaps it's not said often enough, depending on your listening) you can't transform your life until you've completed your relationship with your parents ie until you're complete  with your parents.

To be sure, you can transform aspects  of your life, critical  aspects of your life without completing your relationship with your parents. But until you've completed your relationship with your parents, you can't TRANSFORM  your LIFE. It can't be done. Not possible. You just can't do it.

Since transformation is, after all, a conversation, it's easier to complete a relationship with anyone while you're both alive, face to face, here, together. But they and you alive, face to face, here, together and in a conversation for the possibility of being complete in relationship is really just a matter of pragmatism  ie of simplifying things - it's not a requirement. You can create completion with anyone, dead or alive, remotely or face to face, there or here, apart or together. Completion isn't a matter of bringing your own bottle  to their party. Completion is a matter of bringing everything  to their party.

You can create completion with your parents even if you don't know who they are. If that's the relationship you have with your parents ie if the relationship you have with your parents is you don't know who your parents are, that's what there is to be complete about. Not knowing who your parents are is one form of relationship to have with your parents. Somewhere between not knowing who your parents are, and having parents who actively participate in your life, is your particular point on the continuum of what the possibility is for relationship with parents.

There's no exception, not one, in the entire history of the human race: everyone human being has two parents - a father and a mother. Only some of us are  parents. But each of us have parents. - a father and a mother. There's no exception. And there aren't too many things, when it comes to human beings, about which it can be said there's no exception.

It's often assumed men  have further to go to complete with their mothers, and women  have further to go to complete with their fathers  (as Sigmund Freud may have said). This is a tenuous assumption. It's not powerful. What's closer to the truth is this: those men and  women who initiate a conversation for the possibility of being complete with their parents, don't have as far to go to complete with their parents as men and women who don't initiate a conversation for the possibility of being complete with their parents.

Being complete with your parents is being OK with them the way they are, however it is they are, and being OK with them the way they aren't, however it is they aren't. If you're not OK with your parents the way they are and they way they aren't, you can't be complete with them. The degree to which you're incomplete with your parents is the degree to which your life can't ever be 100% totally transformed.



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