I've seen and heard the grand spectrum of
reactions
to
Werner
and
his work
of
transformation
over the nearly forty years I've been sharing it with people. Sometimes
I've been the first person they've heard it from at a level deeper than
mere pedestrian guy-in-a-diner gossip tabloid fodder.
Oftentimes their first
reaction
has been skepticism. I'm OK with that. Not only is it to be expected,
but skepticism is actually
healthy.
People have the capacity to think critically for themselves. Can
anything really produce what
Werner
claims to produce in the brief timeframe in which he claims to produce
it?
There are various reasons even the die-hards give up or overcome their
own skepticism. Sometimes they overcome their skepticism because over
time, they develop a trust with the person who brought
Werner's work
to their
attention.
Sometimes it's because they see something in that person's life which
they admire. Sometimes it's because they see its possibility in their
own lives. Sometimes it's because they simply get tired of being
skeptical. Being skeptical, after all, is just a racket, yes? It's
entirely possible (and also
healthy)
that people get tired of their own rackets. Like giving up smoking and
/ or drinking, people get tired of their own rackets and simply drop
them without much further ado. One of my close
friends
was a hold-out from my sharing for many, many years before eventually
registering himself to
participate
with
Werner.
I asked him about it (just curious), saying "That's awesome. But
why
now? What made you change your
mind?".
He told me he'd held out for so long because although he sensed some
good would come of it, he was equally certain he was going to get
conned. Now something had shifted (perhaps he trusted me more),
and the
fear
of getting conned, while still there, simply wasn't running him
anymore.
After he
graduated
and we had a chance to
speak
at length about his experience, I winked at him and asked what he now
felt about getting conned. He
laughed
at my playful dig at his erstwhile
conversation.
What happened,
he told me, is that nobody tried to con him after all - instead (much
to his delight) he was un-conned. He got that prior to
being with Werner,
it was life and everything about it which had conned him. It had conned
him big time: conned him into not being
himSelf,
conned him into becoming
resigned
to a life that didn't
work
and wasn't satisfying, conned him into becoming blind to his purpose in
life etc.
Participating
with
Werner
empowered him to un-con himself and (arguably for the first time
ever) live
authentically.
It was a huge turn-around for him: from being
afraid
he'd be conned, to realizing he'd already been conned by life itself,
to being empowered by
Werner
to un-con himself. His sharing was riveting.
I asked him if he had any regrets about finally
accepted
my
dare
to register. "Yes I do" he told me "but only one, and it's a big one: I
regret I didn't
participate
much, much sooner, maybe thirty or forty years ago when you first
brought this to my
attention
and invited me. I can only
imagine
what my life would look like today, had I done this forty years ago",
his sentiments echoing what millions of people before him have
realized
worldwide.
I bumped into him again a few months later. "Well" I asked him, "does
the world
occur any differently for you these days, now that you're a
graduate?".
"Oh boy! Does it ever!" he said. "Now that I have a sense of what's
possible coming from
transformation,
it's suddenly so obvious that without it, we ie people, do the
strangest things ...". "Like what?" I asked,
interested.
He had a list. I thought his examples were great. We've built our
mountains
of governing processes on an adversarial model from childhood - which
comes down to
nothing
more than the juvenile sandbox altercation "Didn't!", "Did
too!", "Didn't!", "Did too!". We fight to dominate rather
than
work
together. We've constructed most of our societal norms based on an
"us versus them" model which has never
worked,
rather than on "we" which has a good chance of
working
very well. We almost always
project
our own situational prejudices onto
the world
and onto people. Yet we've invested almost zero time learning how to
see
the world
and people as they really are. Our first response to input is likely to
be defensiveness rather than
accepting
it as a
contribution.
We start relationships then break them up when they don't give us what
we want, without considering what we could bring to
relationships (this harkens to President John Fitzgerald Kennedy's "Ask
not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your
country."). We do that a lot. We live that life is unsatisfying, and we
assume this is just the way it's going to be ... etc etc.
He went on for quite a while. I heard everything he said. Once you
realize what's possible with
transformation,
it's hard not to notice it's missing everywhere, and how strange things
are without it. It's also hard not to notice that we've settled for
lives in which we don't express ourselves fully, and (worse) in which
we've assumed there's no other way we could possibly live. Based on the
limited set of options that being this way makes available, it's no
wonder people do the strangest things.
For years I've looked at the question
"Why
do some people discover
transformation
for themselves, and others don't?". I still don't have a definitive
answer. And I'm not talking about
transformation
the way the
word
has become clichéd today to mean change. I'm
referring to
transformation
as the shift in our experience from identifying with who we think we
are and who we consider ourselves to be, to being
who we really are
(which brings on
Jose Ortega y
Gasset's infamous point blank reference to living
life).
Furthermore I'm referring to
transforming
ourselves from blaming others for our situation, to taking
responsibility for how we wound up being. Indeed, without
transformation,
it's clear people do the strangest things. Actually without
transformation
there's no room to do anything but do something strange.
My own personal approach to this anomaly (which is to say my own
personal
contribution
to it) is to not spend a lot of time on the specifics of the strange
things we people do, because given the way we wound up being in the
absence of
transformation,
it's inevitable we'll all do strange things, and it's inevitable we'll
continue to do strange things for a long, long time to come. Rather,
it's to bring
Werner's work
and the possibility of
transformation
to bear. That way we don't need to directly take on the strange things
we do. Instead, like giving up smoking and / or drinking, we'll tire of
them, they'll lose their grip on us, and we'll discard without further
ado.
We ie the human race ie all of us are capable of doing
some really strange things (in case you haven't noticed). The thing is
we're also capable of unbridled greatness. What I told my new
graduatefriend
is if I were to pick just one thing to say about
Werner's work
of
transformation,
it's that it calls forth the latter like a possibility.