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




To A Fault

A&W, St Helena, California, USA

September 22, 2017



"Truth is like the sun: you can shut it out for a while, but it ain't goin' away." ... Elvis Aaron Presley

This essay, To A Fault, is the ninth in a group of fourteen written Out-Here:
  1. Out Here
  2. Out Here II: Out-Here
  3. Out-Here III
  4. Transforming Life Itself: A Completely Started Inquiry
  5. Being And Acting Out-Here: Presence Of Self Revisited
  6. Hiking In A Painting
  7. Out-Here IV: Clearing For Life
  8. Something Bigger Than Oneself II
  9. To A Fault
  10. Where The Action Is
  11. Step Outside Your Head: A Call To Action
  12. More Than Being With The World
  13. It's Never Over There
  14. Life Is What's Happening
in that order.

It is also the sequel to No, It's What You Say  About It.




Without our intervention ie without our say so  in the matter, circumstances would rampantly determine the quality of our lives. They'd be external circumstances (what goes on out there  in the world) and internal circumstances (what goes on internally  with us, if you will). Internal circumstances include what goes on with our bodies (what physical sensations we have), our feelings (our emotional state), and our thoughts (what we're thinking ie our mental state aka our state of mind).

Once you've distinguished this for yourself and owned  it, it becomes abundantly clear that life as it's lived  doesn't happen internally. And contrary to what you may assume I'm leading up to, life as it's lived doesn't happen "externally" either. Where then does life as it's lived, actually happen? Life as it's lived happens "out-here".

<aside>

Be careful: that's not a typo. It's not "out there". It's life as it's lived happens "out-here". And neither is it life as it's lived happens "out here". It's "out-here". That hyphen is critical (if you speak "out-here" for yourself ie if you language  it for yourself, you'll get it). Life as it's lived really happens out-here, not "in here" ie not internally. The only aspects of life which happen internally are like machinery embedded in hamburger.

<un-aside>

You're a human being. So you've had glimpses  of living life out-here, some of which have already  dispelled all lasting doubts that this is where life as it's lived, really happens. But then you allowed yourself to be seduced again by what happens internally, and you identified with it again. You justified  dwelling internally again, even while fully knowing life as it's lived happens out-here, and not internally (that's a graduate  distinction).

While we're thrown to try to simplify the aspects of life which happen internally, to fix them, to solve  them, all such approaches are little more than icing the cow pie. If out-here is where life as it's lived really happens (those glimpses you had? they substantiate it) then the degree to which we succumb to being seduced to dwelling internally, is the degree to which we've traded being fully alive, for survival. This idea (on the surface, at least) may seem to confront the eastern dictum "Go within!". To "go within" is to deal with life (or to try to deal with life) by dealing with what goes on internally. In contradistinction, to be fully alive, is to distinguish "out-here", then to get out-here, then to stay out-here and to live out-here ... where life as it's lived, actually happens.

Living out-here calls for a somewhat different approach to internal circumstances, a more courageous approach - spoken more rigorously, living out-here calls for recontextualizing  (I love that word) internal circumstances. While we're thrown to try to simplify bodily sensations, to fix them, to solve them, consider just letting them be, and living out-here anyway, almost to a fault. While we're thrown to try to simplify our feelings and emotional state, to fix them, to solve them, consider just letting them be, and living out-here anyway, almost to a fault. While we're thrown to try to simplify our thinking and mental state, to fix them, to solve them, consider just letting them be, and living out-here anyway, almost to a fault.

Now, is it really a "fault"  to live out-here regardless of our internal circumstances? No, not really - not if you consider life as it's lived, really happens out-here anyway, and not "in here" ie not internally. It's one of the great enigmas of being human that we're thrown to dwell internally, and yet life as it's lived, always and only happens out-here.



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