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

Waiting For You

Napa Valley, California, USA

January 22, 2019
"Love is granting another the space to be the way they are and the way they aren't so they can change if they want to and they don't have to."  ... 
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"Maybe, just maybe, of all the quotes ever uttered about love, this one of Werner's is the essential  one." ... Laurence Platt 

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This essay, Waiting For You, is the eighteenth in a group of twenty one on Love: It is also the fifteenth in an ongoing collection with embedded Music Videos: It is also the sequel to If You're Not Then Don't.


You won't find these Conversations For Transformation in the "self-help"  section of your local bookstore. That's not just because I eschew the label "self-help" (which I do: the Self  doesn't need help, yes?), or books or the value of bookstores (which I don't). Indeed, sometimes I'll browse through my local biblioteque, noting what's popular, reading the dust covers, flipping books open to random pages and sampling what's there, and getting familiar with who the big name authors of the day are.

with Alexandra - Real Love (The Beatles)
It's that in truth, the likelihood of authentic transformation being conveyed by their writing (and my reading) is low, if not remote. And so that there's no doubt about this, I include my own writing (and your reading) in this opinion. At best, the written word is a pointer  to transformation. At worst, when it's taken to be  authentic transformation itself, it's become an impediment. Transformation is gotten in face to face, real-time speaking and listening between human beings who are committed to discovering the distinctions of transformation for themselves - not like an intellectual understanding, but rather like a vibrant, real, living, thrilling  experience.

With all that said, what can possibly be written about transformed love which points to the experience, rather than merely providing a distracting, clever explanation of it, or (worse) a how-to  help tutorial ie a substitute?

It's often touted in all our "self-help" folk lore, that before you can really love another, you have to be able to (quote unquote) love yourself. Frankly that's waaay  too bon-mot-ish for me. It's just too ... well ... loose  (no rigor). Because of that, it's likely to become ego-contaminated  (if you will). What works better, I say, is this: before you can love another (ie before you can really  love another), you have to be 100% OK  with yourself - which is to say you have to be 100% OK with who you really are. That's  the springboard to real love. It's in the being of "being 100% OK with who I really am", that it becomes possible for me to really love you. "Loving myself" as a prerequisite to really loving you, might sound  good. But it's not a graduate  distinction.

There's one kind of possibility that arises when I love someone because they (quote unquote) "complete  me", a classic line which is voiced in a few romantic movies I've watched. Another kind, transformation, reveals my being already complete. What's possible for love when I being already complete, experience you being already complete? That's an entirely new order of love, one in which you and I don't depend on each other to be complete. This kind of love is "granting each other the space to be the way we are and the way we aren't so we can change if we want to and we don't have to". It's the possibility whence real love comes. Look: it's so obvious  when you inquire honestly into it: of course  it's whence real love comes. We've simply been too tied up by our preconceptions of real love, to see the truth about it.

Of all you could do to get  complete, consider just standing in a space where you're already  complete. Man! That  would be something: a space where there's nothing to get, where this is "IT", where you're OK with who you really are. That's the space where real love shows up (it's the only  space in which real love can  show up).


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