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




Unoriginal Original

Jessup Cellars, Yountville, California, USA

February 5, 2015



"I've had the opportunity and the privilege to count some great men and women among my friends. They all have the same problem: they cannot get their students to be masters as they are - even students with all the intellectual equipment you can imagine. I tell them that the reason why they can't turn their students into masters is that they are fibbing to themselves about the source of their own mastery. They attribute their own mastery to everything other than its actual source: creation. Creating and being, exist in the same domain. And there is a discipline to being, to creation. The domain of being has its own rigor. Being is approachable. It is masterable. It's not nebulous."
 ... 


The whole idea ie the raison d'etre  of these Conversations For Transformation is to be an internet presence of Werner's work, not to explain  Werner's ideas. Sharing them like this, is intended to leave you with an experience of transformation rather than to impart new information. That's it. There's nothing else going on over here.

To be sure, the vast majority of the new ideas presented in this series are Werner's - which is to say, most by far of the new ideas presented here are my re-creations of how Werner's ideas occur for me. I've never been certified or qualified to do anything in particular like this. I'm just a regular guy who finds Werner's ideas not only engaging but worthwhile and inspiring. I've made no attempt to pass his ideas off as mine. The exact opposite is true in fact: I go to great lengths (as you can see in every heading on every one of the nearly one thousand two hundred pages comprising this website) to credit and acknowledge the source of these essays' inspiration.

Yet there are times when, in pursuing a train of Werner's thought so I can re-create it myself accurately in writing, I get to experience the material so up close  and so intimately and so profoundly that it becomes inevitable I'll be trained simply by the process of discovery itself  to express related ideas which do have some semblance of originality. That, however, isn't my primary objective. My primary objective with regard to originality, I suppose you could say is to originally re-create Werner's ideas. In this process it's inevitable I'll invent something truly original of my own. When this happens, it works best when it complements my re-creation of Werner's ideas. It's not a workable situation when it gets in its way, no matter how original it is. I don't know why it works this way - it's just the way this seems to work best.

No proprietary raw material is given to me to reproduce. I get no preferential treatment. The substance of each of these essays is made up (literally). I draw inspiration from many sources when it's closing in on midnight and there's nothing but a black backlit laptop screen (that's right: a "black backlit"  laptop screen ...) and a rapidly looming publishing deadline staring me down. The Self  however is always  expressing. So it's a matter of prudently getting out of its way  and observing that process as it manifests itself - listening, and taking notes if necessary. Sometimes I have a background of jotted down titles waiting to be written. Sometimes this background is recalled conversations, meetings, and courses I've participated in, or ideas that surprise me, turn me on, and fire me up. And sometimes, when I can't draw on any real life episodes with and / or around Werner to cite from, it's my own dogshit reality  set of experiences as seen in the light of the overhead lamp of transformation.

The ante is up. I've committed my life to do this twice a week every week with no end in sight. When my second objective of one million page views is fulfilled which I estimate will happen sometime in November 2015 having taken twelve years (the first objective of one thousand essays written was fulfilled on Christmas Day 2014 having taken eleven years), I'll rethink the game plan, or rework it, or change it entirely, or take a sabbatical, or do something else with it as yet unknown and as yet un-thought-through. Of course there's always the possibility of changing nothing at all and simply continuing doing this uninterrupted (transformation has no end).

These ideas which engage me, these ideas which I find worthwhile and inspiring, the ones which surprise me, turn me on, and fire me up, certainly carry a great value just by being known. Speaking for myself, when I'm merely aware of them ie just knowing about the ongoing work of transformation, I derive value. But to get its full, whole, extraordinary impact, I have to engage with it, make it my own, and re-create it anew. This is what I do. Notice that which I re-create with love, I myself didn't create originally in the first place. So I guess you could call me an unoriginal original:  to the unoriginal Life itself, I bring my own original voice. It's who I really am.



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