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
Up All Night
St Helena, California, USA
December 26, 2007
Recently almost
by accident
I discovered something which turned my pleasure principle
around one hundred and eighty degrees on its
ear.
It's this:
Whenever I, a man, am intent on taking my own pleasure, whenever I
receive pleasure, it's over too soon. Then there's the
obligatory relax and regenerate interval before I can
participate again.
That's not always a break I choose to take. Yet I must - I have no
choice. That's not the way I'd like it to be. I'd prefer to play
on. But I can't. It's certainly not personal. Rather, that's
just the way it is with male physiology.
However, whenever I give pleasure being less interested in
my own in favor of another's, there's no limit. I can go on forever. I
can stay up all night.
This is way more than mere boy talk. This is an adult, senior
conversation which starts off noting obvious differences in male and
female physiology, then continues from there to an even more valuable
observation which is universally applicable regardless of gender and
independent of physiology.
There's something very profound for me in this conversation, something
fundamental dating back to antiquity in this examination of how my male
body really works, something which resonates deeply for
me. When I accept the critical differences in the way my male body
works differently than your female body, when I get
what's so
about where we're different, when I act
congruent withthe way it is rather than with the way I'd like it to be,
something becomes available which was only hinted at before. It's
something which never showed up before as what's possible. Until
now it's only showed up as what's attainable ie as a level
of performance, and only as a level of performance to aspire to
at that.
That's never sat right with me. In fact it's always showed up for me as
a design flaw in
God's
architecture of the way male and female human beings' bodies are
constructed to work together. I'd learned in order to overcome this
design flaw a certain masterful performance was required.
And if that level of masterful performance was attained, it was awarded
the ridiculously furtive label "staying power".
That's how I had it pegged while being resigned to performing like a
trained seal to make this design flaw, this fundamental
incompatibility in our male and female pleasure
machinery.
work.
That's classic, by the way: Laurence criticizing
God
for creating things the way they are ... That's truly wild ...
Then came this. Stepping outside the box, what I saw is while
there's never enough pleasure for me to take, there's more than
enough, there's an abundance of pleasure for me to
give.
It's living proof of all the old adages I've ever heard,
all those wonderfully pithy epithets which speak to the
wealth we already are and which we've long forgotten in
our headlong rush to acquire wealth. We're told by the saints, by the
seers, by the sages of the world how giving is
receiving, how without giving we can't ever get
enough to make us happy. Yet
paradoxically
lasting happiness goeswith giving away whatever it is we
ourselves want (as
Alan Watts
may have said). That's the golden rule. You can't always get
what you want but you can always
give what you want (as Mick Jagger may have said).
What's prudent about this discovery for me, where it's pragmatic and
smart is it's verifiable, it's prove-able, it works
dramatically well, and in all likelihood it works for everyone.