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

Speaking To People's Relationship With Werner

Domaine Chandon, Yountville, California, USA

August 21, 2015


This essay, Speaking To People's Relationship With Werner, is the twenty fifth in the complete group of Experiences Of A Friend (click here for the open group Experiences Of A Friend II):
  1. Stepping Back
  2. At Home As Self
  3. Empty Windows
  4. Futile Like A Freedom
  5. Shut Up And Do What You're Doing
  6. Werner As Intention
  7. Who He Is For Himself
  8. Source Quote
  9. Puzzle Solved, Mind Unraveled
  10. Eye To Eye
  11. Mystical Connection II
  12. Relentless
  13. Being Around Werner
  14. Being Always In Action
  15. Shaken Up And Teary
  16. On Being Sad
  17. The Complete Presentation
  18. Force Of Nature
  19. Everyone's In Love With Everyone
  20. I'm Old School
  21. Werner At The Speed Of Choice
  22. I Get Who You Are From What They Do
  23. The Significance - Not What Happened
  24. You Know I Love You - And I Know You Love Me
  25. Speaking To People's Relationship With Werner
  26. A Master At Being (And Having People Be)
  27. Werner As Source
  28. A Man Who's All There
  29. My Heart And You
  30. Mind Control
  31. Again And Again And Again And Again And Again And Again
  32. Unwavering
  33. The Leadership Course III: Pillar Of The Community
  34. American Genius
  35. Legacy II
so far, in that order.

It is also the sequel to Essays - Twelve Years Later: A New Beginning.

I am indebted to Roger Smith and to Kathleen Morris who inspired this conversation.


Harvard Kennedy School's Center For Public Leadership Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 6:48pm Thursday August 28, 2014 Click to expand
Werner Erhard with Friends
I'm deeply touched and very moved by your responses to Essays - Twelve Years Later: A New Beginning - that's the twelfth annual State Of The Union  celebration of this Conversations For Transformation internet series of essays. Each of these now over one thousand essays elicits responses ongoingly. It's inevitable they will. That's just their nature (but it's not why I write them). Most responses come to me via e-mail. The e-mail responses to Essays - Twelve Years Later: A New Beginning, were of an order of things I've never experienced before - I'm referring to both their sheer volume, as well as the profound depth of the sentiment they communicated.

I'm clear about your acknowledgement. "Thank You" and "You're Welcome". Really. Mostly I'm clear about your generosity. Generosity? When we have an intimate relationship with another human being, that relationship is often off limits, private, and its intimacy sacrosanct. Yet for the most part, you allow me to speak to your intimate relationship with Werner. That's generosity.

Furthermore I'm clear that's why these Conversations For Transformation are successful - and by that I mean why, for the most part, they work. They work not because there's anything special about Laurence or about things I say, but because they speak to people's relationship with Werner. Perhaps it's "just me", but I'm willing to bet hard cash that "people's relationship with Werner" includes everyone - people who already have a relationship with Werner, as well as people who resist having one and / or people who are yet to discover they already have one.

I've got my own thoughts about why people get what they get from being around Werner ie my own thoughts about how transformation is communicated - none of which, by the way, are necessarily "The Truth"  just because I think them. Having said that, what's always interested me about this is the way people, when they're around Werner, don't become more like Werner:  no, instead they become more like themselves. To me that demonstrates an incredible trust, a profound unimaginable intimacy. What allows for this? ie what could possibly  allow for this, I wondered. So I asked him (what better way is there to find out?). I asked "More people trust you being more intimate with them than anyone else in history. Why do so many people open to you so deeply, so fully, so freely?". After a quiet moment, he replied


<quote>

BEST TO ASK THEM. BUT, MY SENSE OF WHAT IS SO ABOUT THIS IS THAT THEY SOMEHOW SENSE OR KNOW THAT FOR ME THEY ARE OK THE WAY THEY ARE AND THAT I AM PASSIONATELY COMMITTED TO THE POSSIBILITY THAT THEY ARE.

<unquote>


Brilliant. Clear. It's the "... they somehow sense or know ..."  part which just blows me away. Is there any terser validation of who we really are than that? And yes, it fits with the way people show up around him, as well as with the way he shows up around people. More than that, it fits with people's relationship with Werner, and it fits with Werner's relationship with people. Consider it's you (yes it's you) who creates the space in which Werner shows up (some of you are already clear you do, and others of you are still looking to see whether you do or you don't, yes?). So arguably if you don't create that space, Werner won't show up at all in the first place.

No relationship could be more intimate than that. Really. None. And that's exactly the relationship these Conversations For Transformation speak to. And yours is the generosity for allowing me to speak to that intimacy ie to your  intimacy - and mine is the privilege for doing so. While I don't claim to have any privilege of my own outside the privilege of the generous listening you afford me, given this generosity and this privilege, it's no mystery these Conversations For Transformation work.


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