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
No Boundaries
Carmel By The Sea, California, USA
January 7, 2008
I was on the outside of a conversation looking in. The discussion
centered on pet peeves. The pet peeve of the moment, the
flavor of the month, was "people who don't respect boundaries".
I listened intently for a while. It seemed like something interesting
might come out of it. When it comes to pet peeves, when it comes to
complaining, I assert there's really only four ways to be:
complain;
create completion with whatever the complaint is about thereby
disappearing the complaint;
do something about whatever the complaint is about;
complain to someone who can do something about it.
This discussion never left the domain of the first option, and so soon
I lost interest and went away. The thing is
boundaries are there to be respected ... AND ...
there are no boundaries.
If it could be said there's one thing the ends of all the so-called
spiritual paths open to all human beings have in common, if
there's a confluence where all individual hejiras focus,
if there's any one thing similar about all the multifarious ways we
human beings articulate the overly glamorized and fatuously
misunderstood state we call enlightenment, it's the awareness
of, it's the experience of no boundaries.
Werner
Erhard
dryly observes enlightenment has a certain eastern connotation which
isn't really required at all. He enunciates his experience as
transformation and doesn't use the term enlightenment much. For the
sake of intelligent argument, I'm willing to stake ie I'm going to ante
the experience no boundariesis enlightenment, and
the freedom to consider and to choose and to own the
possibility of living powerfully with no boundaries is transformation.
When I look at the skies at night and see worlds upon worlds upon
worlds without end, I see no boundaries. When I watch your face
watching mine as I love you, I see no boundaries. When I consider
what's possible for all human beings, when I imagine how
life could be for every one of the six billion strong
family of man, I see no boundaries.
Yet what would life in the world be with no boundaries, other than
pie in the sky, other than vacuous thinking, other than pipe
dreams? We don't live in a discorporate state ie we have
corporeal frames. We're not bodyless ghosts. We have zip codes and
counties. We're expected to drive in our lane on our side of the road.
We knock or ring the door bell when we arrive for a visit at someone's
home. We, society, agree we don't enter someone's personal space
without permission. And the last time I looked, none of us had
feathered wings between our shoulder blades.
Evidently, as Werner points out,
Goddidn't mean man to fly.
Plainly there's physical and abstract boundaries everywhere, and we've
got no means to be without them or to avoid them. We haven't got wings
to fly around them, past them, or above them. Where, then, is the realm
of no boundaries?
In who we really are, in the intimacy of our
direct experience
of our own very being, in the all too fleeting yet profoundly moving
moments of awareness of Self for itSelf by itSelf ... this is where
there's patently no boundaries. There's no realm of no boundaries to
go to. There's no place without edges anywhere on
Planet Earth.
The realm of no boundaries is a realm to come from. This is
where it is. This is where it always is. It's been here
for all eternity right up until this very moment. It'll be here from
this very moment on until beyond the end of time.
The physical boundaries of which side of the road to drive on, what zip
code to mail your electricity bill to, the proper way to set a dinner
table for your guests, the date by which to pay your property taxes on
etc, and the abstract boundaries of being appropriate, respecting
privacy etc, demand and command respect - or life doesn't work. But
when I'm with you, when I'm really with you, if I don't
grant you permission to be who you really are around me, when I don't
give you the space to have the experience you're having, when I'm
invested in you having another experience other than the
experience you're having, when I'm enrolled in the boundaries you've
determined for yourself, that's when I'm your co-dependent in
keeping you small, in preventing you finding out who you really are, in
interfering with your possibility of transforming your
life.
Until there's transformation, the possibility of living a life with no
boundaries is completely unreal. The miracle of transformation
is it restores reality to no boundaries, to who we really
are.
Only a fool intentionally drives on the wrong side of the road. And if
he drives on the correct side of the road while resenting the
dictatorial nature of boundaries, he's still a fool. A wise man lives
from no boundaries ... AND ... drives without question on the correct
side of the road because that's what it takes to make a life with no
boundaries work.
To live and to make a life with no boundaries work you must be honest
(as Bob Dylan may have said).