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


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"Something's Wrong" Isn't Wrong

Platt Park, Denver, Colorado, USA

April 22, 2023



This essay, "Something's Wrong" Isn't Wrong, is the companion piece to Something's Wrong.

It is also the second in a trilogy written in Platt Park, April 2023: The trilogy written in Platt Park, April 2023 is the sequel to My Baby Girl, Now A Bride.

Conversations For Transformation receives its one million seven hundred thousandth view with the publishing of "Something's Wrong" Isn't Wrong.




I've a question for you: what if we didn't make anything wrong? That's right: whatever "it" is, what if we didn't make it wrong? (and "it" could be anything). Now that would be an interesting place, an interesting place to stand, an interesting place from which to view life, an interesting place from which to come.

I've been looking into the possibility of not making anything wrong (perhaps that's better phrased as "I've been looking from  the possibility of not making anything wrong."). In trying that on, what I'm noticing is making wrong is embedded in the machinery. Like breathing, like digesting, I don't own the doing of it. It's on automatic. When something's wrong (the government, the politics, the economy, a person etc), then it is  wrong. I don't relate to it like I make  it wrong. Rather, I'm merely reporting  (ie I "tell the truth") that it's wrong. It just is  wrong. It's not like it's my opinion that it's wrong, nor that I have any authorship in its wrongness. It's like the entire process of making wrong is immutably automatic, and I'm just the messenger, a reporter carrying the news.

My inquiry started dislodging that entrenched way of looking at things. If it's true that the entire process of making wrong is immutably automatic, then who am I in the matter of making wrong? If something / someone occurs for me as wrong, and that's an automatic process, then they're not really wrong as a quality I imbue it / them with. If it / they occur as wrong, and I then relate to them as wrong, I miss / don't get that their wrongness is my doing, not theirs.

So what if nothing in the world, is wrong? Phrased another way, what if nothing's wrong with the world? That's my next question. But that question, floating in and out of Buddhism, is an almost impossible question to be with in its current form. The way we listen, "What if nothing's wrong with the world?" is it's untenable. It's too reactivating. What it reactivates is our opinionated arrogance, clamoring to offer why  "What if nothing's wrong with the world?" is wrong.

The question (if we're going to grapple with it in a way that makes a difference) needs to be rephrased. Instead of asking "What if nothing's wrong with the world?", let's rephrase it as "What if everything in the world is exactly the way it is, and exactly the way it isn't?". There's no "wrong" in that phrasing. And there's nothing wrong in things being exactly the way they are, and exactly the way they aren't. Things are just that way  obviously. Then the spring-loaded judgement that something's wrong, is sharply differentiated, being laid bare as just an opinion, not as some inside scoop about the way things actually are.

Would the Buddha be pleased? Can we have things be exactly the way they are, and exactly the way they aren't, including our own opinion that something's wrong? Is it possible that even "Something's wrong" isn't wrong  ie that it's just an automatic opinion we have on top of things being exactly the way they are, and exactly the way they aren't? Maybe what's also exactly the way it is and exactly the way it isn't, is our immutably automatic opinion "Something's wrong.". And so what?! Maybe "Something's wrong" isn't significant after all. Maybe things are just the way they are, and aren't the way they aren't. Totally.

I've got a sneaking suspicion that this (or something very close to it) would be OK with the Buddha.



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