The Prisoner Wine Company, Rutherford Appellation,
Napa Valley,
California, USA
January 27, 2024
"Meeting
Werner
was really the irreversible encounter in your life. Your
life was just turned around afterwards. You were a better person and
more effective, and more honest and compassionate person.
Werner
was just wonderful with people."
It is also the twenty fourth in the open second group of
Experiences Of A Friend
(click
here
for the complete first group of thirty five
Experiences Of A Friend):
Let's face it: we have our
attention
on our own lives more than on other people's lives; we're
interested
in our own lives more than in other people's lives; we aspire to have
our own lives work, more than to have other people's lives work.
There's nothing wrong with that. It's how we're thrown: to take care of
#1. That's called surviving. To survive, there's a lot to get
handled. So what would it look like if we got our lives handled to the
point that we had the space to have our
attention
on other people's lives, to be
interested
in other people's lives, to make it our
personal business
to have other people's lives work?
Think about that for a moment. If you lived your life that way, people
would experience you as wonderful with them. To have the
space to be wonderful with people ie to be really
wonderful with people, you would have to handle the issues in your life
that keep you stuck taking care of #1, so that you had the space to
have your
attention
on others, the space to be
interested
in others, the space to make it your
personal business
to have others' lives work.
And even if you haven't gotten all the issues in your life handled, you
can make it your
personal business
to have others' lives work (when your main focus is no longer on your
own life, we call that "being selfless"). And if your life
already works (by that I mean you realize your life has
always worked and that there's nothing you have to do to
make it work) (we call that transformation)
and you have your
attention
on others coming from the
workability
of your own life ie from your life already working, people
would experience you as wonderful with them ie you would occur for them
as wonderful with people.
Indeed, people's experience of you paying
attention
to them, being
interested
in them, being committed to their lives working, being compassionate,
kind, and respectful with them, would be nothing short of remarkable.
Ordinarily we're not that way with people. Ordinarily our
attention
is on #1, constraining what's possible for us for others. We may
be wonderful for ourselves, but we're stopped from being
wonderful with people
as our natural
Self-expression.
There's one more thing to distinguish as we flesh this out: this isn't
altruism or self-sacrifice. Neither is it behaving
un-selfishly as a rehearsed, contrived way of acting.
This is
a natural expression
of being transformed in the world. If people don't know
transformation (which is to say if people don't have the distinction
transformation) and they experienced you being that way,
their experience of you would be that you're just somehow wonderful
with people.
Simply put,
Werner
is wonderful with people. It's not something he does (if
it were, he may do something other than be wonderful with
people). It's not even the way he acts (if it were, he may
act in a way other than be wonderful with people). It's who he is ie
it's where he comes from. It's
extraordinary.
For the most part, we don't have it in our categories that it's
possible for human beings to be that way. Even if we had it that it
were possible, we don't have it in our categories that
it's possible for us to recognize another human being,
being that way ie to recognize that they come from being transformed.