Werner's
work as a spectacle, as participatory theatre if you will,
has been around in one finer tuned iteration after another for fifty
years - and counting. It could never have remained authentic all this
time if it provided tools for its participants to ongoingly
break throughbarriers
ie impediments to transformation, without doing so itself. New ways
for, and new
accesses
to bringing critical abstracts into reach are continually being
discovered, developed, and included in all its current deliveries. In
the process, new critical abstracts are distinguished as well ("The
more the view clears up, the more there is to see" - it's almost an
adage, yes?). In many respects,
Werner's work
as delivered today, bears scant resemblance to its first delivery. Yet
a few critical features, distinctions, and processes remain unchanged
from when they were first teased out and delivered as
accesses
to transformation five
decades
ago. They just work. They've become the bedrock ie
the boilerplate of
Werner's work.
One boilerplate which requires a certain bigness and courage for us to
realize and 'fess up to, is we have a fixed view of life.
We do. And we don't know that we have a fixed view. We pretend
we don't. But we do. We pretend we see life the way it is. But we
don't. Arrogance is when you don't 'fess up to that you have a fixed
view.
I'm committed to not being the smart aleck ie a Mr
"Know-It-All". I'm committed to listening the distinctions of
transformation as if I've never heard them before (and
I've heard them before many times) because if I've "heard them before",
I stick them in the past which renders them powerless. On the other
hand, if I listen them as if I've never heard them before, they come
alive newly, powerfully, and ongoingly. And that's the way I was
listening a friend distinguishing our fixed view. He was saying
(something like) "What's possible in life, is given by your view of
life. And you
think
your view of life, is the way it is.". Sounds familiar?
Embarrassingly so.
There's a trifecta that's become axiomatic in providing an
access
to transformation. There's what I know - said with
rigor,
there's what I know that I know. What I do with what I know that
I know (like I know that I know how to
drive
a car) is I apply it ie I use it. Then there's what I
don't know - said with
rigor,
there's what I know that I don't know. What I do with what
I know that I don't know (like I know that I don't know how to run
DOS -
Disk Operating System
- and Windows 7 software on a Windows 10 computer) is I learn it. And
then there's what I don't know that I don't know. And
what I do with what I don't know that I don't know (and I don't even
know that I don't know what I do with it) is I'm
run by it. It's the latter area that's a blindspot which
hides my undistinguished, fixed view of life.
Distinguishing the view of life we already have yet don't realize it's
just a view we have, alters the way life
shows up
for us. Not knowing we're looking at life through a view, we
think
we're looking at life the way life is. How much aliveness
is there in discovering we're run by a fixed view of life in which
we've become heavily invested! It's a realization that makes available
new openings and new freedom, and an enhanced congruency with life the
way it is, that's senior to our view of the way life is.
So what is my
access
to what I don't know that I don't know, which would reveal my fixed
view ie the view of life I don't know that I don't know I have? The
access
to my fixed view inter alia and to what I don't know that
I don't know,
Werner's work
delivers. But it's no formulaic delivery. There are no
tips, helpful hints, strategy, or fortune cookie bon mots. No,
the
access
it delivers is one to discover for yourself. One view I didn't know
that I didn't know I had, was that people can't be trusted. It
wasn't a view for smart me. It was the way life is.
The cost of having that view as the way life is, was huge, its impact
on my love life and intimacy staggering. I've invented the possibility
of being trusting. People ordinarily wait for others to prove
themselves trustworthy before they trust them. In this new possibility
I don't wait.