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:
  1. complain;
  2. create completion with whatever the complaint is about thereby disappearing the complaint;
  3. do something about whatever the complaint is about;
  4. 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 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 boundaries  is 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, God didn'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).



Communication Promise E-Mail | Home

© Laurence Platt - 2008 through 2017 Permission