There are so many wildly differing things we
human beings
are willing to do and try on, in order to get in touch with ie to find
out
who we really are.
Now that right there, my
friends,
when you come to think about it, is a very odd
state
of affairs indeed, isn't it? The
question
shouldn't be "How can we find out
who we really are?"
but rather "How is it ever possible to not be
who we really are?".
How can a dog ever not be
a dog?
And yet we have (ie all of us - I know because I have) invested a not
insignificant amount of
time
trying to find out
who we really are.
Yet if there's one thing people's experiences have in
common
when we discover
who Werner is,
it's we realize (astonished .. and then ever more astonished that
we're astonished) we've always been
who we really are
all along.
There's nothing to get.
This is it!
In the
interests
of openness and full disclosure, I've documented all if not most of my
own
intersections
in the three hundred and fiftieth essay in this
Conversations For
Transformationinternet
series of essays, titled
Laurence Platt
Intersections.
In this account I share my experiences of people, disciplines,
lifestyles, and religions etc etc who and which shaped many of the
experiences I went through which later culminated in me instantly
recognizing
who Werner is,
the moment
I met himface to face
for the first time with no prior knowledge of him at all. One of these
intersections
in particular, shares the
extraordinarily
beautiful, valuable years I spent with a Hindu
master
from Shankaracharya Nagar, Rishikesh (in the Himālayan foothills),
India:
Mahesh Prasad Varma - better known by the name
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Now all of the preceding commentary, description, and raconteuring is
the gist of a
conversation
I was having with an old
friend
of mine - who also just so
happens
to be my
personalcoach.
I showed him the above
photograph of me
with
Maharishi
which was captured in 1971. He took it, looked at it, then looked back
at me, then looked back down at the
photograph
again, then back at me again. He seemed puzzled. With a quizzical tone
in his
voice,
he asked me "Which one is
Maharishi?".
It stopped me. Excuse me? At first, all that came up for
me was my own perplexity (he doesn't know? he
can't tell?) associated with which I had two thoughts, the
first of which jarringly comprised two
words
"Say whut?", and the second of which was "Are you kidding me?".
It was only then that I realized while his
voice
had a quizzical tone in it, his
face
had a beatific smile on it: he was
joking
(in a very specific
way)
... and suddenly I
got
it ... and I was beaming too. What a
marvelous
thing to say! What a
brilliant
thing to say. You can tell it's no
accident
he's my
personalcoach
ie you can tell I don't allow him to be my
personalcoach
for
nothing.
Each of us are
source
in the matter of our own experience. Interimly you could temper that by
saying each of us are
source
of the quality of our own experience. But ultimately we're
the
source
of our own experience - period. The final step in (and the greatest
possible acknowledgement of) any
relationship
with a great
master,
is to disappear the gap between the two of you, and to
get
it's you who's the
source
of the great
master
(and of your
relationship
with him or her) in the first place.
In this regard particularly, I've long always asserted there's a
difference between between
being around Werner
and being around other great men and women, which essentially comes
down to this: when I'm around other great men and women, I
gethow
great they are (I do); when I'm
around Werner,
I
get
my own greatness.
But that's a subject for another
conversation
on another occasion.