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."
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
trainedsimply 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-createWerner'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.