There are those things which garner a lot of our
attention
(everyone's talking about them, and everything's focused on them) for
what seems like it'll be forever. Then, looking back at them from some
point in the
future,
you ask yourself "Whatever
happened
to (fill in the blank)?". Those once epitomes of ubiquity, have
disappeared. And when they disappeared, they disappeared so quickly and
so thoroughly you didn't even notice they were gone, and neither did
you notice exactly when they went. They were there. Then they weren't.
Fashion fads, for example. The paisley shirts and the bell-bottomed
jeans were relegated to a box in the attic, then ended up in a garage
sale. White Zinfandel. Politicians' promises. Tastes in popular
music.
35¢ a gallon gasoline. Segregationist regimes (ask
Nelson Mandela).
They come - they go.
Does
transformation
qualify for that category? Really. Does it? Does it come and go? Is it
a fad? Forty five years later (that's both forty five continuous
calendar years later, as well as forty five continuous
experiential years later) it's OK to say it's not a fad -
not unless you're also going to call breathing a fad. Yet built into
the nature of
transformation,
and in particular, built in to the very nature of the
experience of
transformation,
is its
coming-then-going-ness (if you will). It's even really
natural
(ie quite typical) for the experience of
transformation
to come, and then for it to go away again. Allow me to qualify this
assertion so we're
clear
about what it implies.
Transformation
comes and goes continuously - ongoingly, daily, if not
hourly, if not every minute. That's what it does.
When you get it, you get
it.
Then it goes away, perhaps imperceptibly, so imperceptibly that you may
not even notice it's gone ie that you may not even notice you haven't
got
it anymore. But then, as soon as you notice (ie as soon as you
get)
you don't have it any more, you can choose to generate it again. When
you generate it again, it's back - as if it was always there ie as if
it never went away. People ie us / we are ongoingly
transformed
- not to the degree that
transformation
has somehow become permanently imbued in our lives and so it never goes
away, but rather we're ongoingly
transformed
to the degree that we're willing to re-generate
transformation
again quickly as soon as we notice it's gone.
By its very
nature
(it would seem),
transformation
comes and goes ... and comes and goes ... and comes ...
and goes. And also by its very nature (so it would seem),
transformation's
permanence is always here. Wait!
How
can this be?
How
can it come and go and yet be permanent? Here's
how:
once you've experienced it, it's
cleartransformation
always had, has, and always will have permanence like a
possibility - that is to say its permanence lives in our
always ongoing possibility of generating and re-generating
transformation,
and you and I have that possibility ie that
power
at every moment of our lives,
under all circumstances
(as
Werner
may have said).
To those who say "Yeah but ... I
gottransformation
for a while - and then it went away" (like those paisley shirts and
bell-bottomed jeans), I say "No, it didn't.
What happened
was you stopped generating it. When you
got
it for the first
time,
I assert you also
got
you can generate it any
time
you like, didn't you? And then you just stopped generating it. That's
what happened.
That's all. And you always have the possibility of generating it again
- any time you like. You always have that
power.".
Transformation
began for me when
I met Werner
nearly thirty eight years ago. Something became possible for me
in that meeting
which life had only hinted at before, the outcome of which was I
beganstanding
for my own life, for peoples' lives, and for
Life itself
- not like a new fad nor like another popular new
belief
nor even like another good idea but as an access to, and
an expression of
who I really am
ie of
who we really
are.
Since
that meeting
nearly thirty eight years ago,
transformation
has come and gone, and come and gone, and come and gone again many,
many times every day, every hour, indeed every minute of my life ...
and I'm still
standing.