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


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Wonderful With People

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."
... Ron Baldwin, President of Parents' Magazine, sharing his experience of Werner with Professor William Warren "Bill" Bartley III, Werner's official biographer, in intersection 2 "Hypnosis", in chapter five called "Out to Beat the Game" in part II, "Education", of "Werner Erhard - The Transformation of a Man, The Founding of est"
This essay, Wonderful With People, is the companion piece to I'll Always Say I Love You.

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):
  1. Friend, Partner, And Ally
  2. Go To The Beach
  3. Proof Of Life
  4. Going Out Like A Supernova
  5. Relationships: They Start, They End
  6. Evidence Of Source
  7. On Knowing When To Be Ordinary
  8. Letting Be
  9. Transforming The Untransformable
  10. There's Always The Next Piece
  11. Plastic Chandelier II
  12. Yes You Really Are That Big
  13. A Way With Words
  14. The Quietest Mind
  15. Approaching Integrity
  16. Dancing With Life II
  17. Staying In Integrity
  18. Ordinary People Star, Extraordinary People Recreate Themselves
  19. Committed Existence
  20. When You're Being Like Werner, You're Not Being Like Werner
  21. "There's Life Happening Where You Are"
  22. At The Level Of Self-Expression
  23. Intergalactic Dude
  24. Wonderful With People
  25. The Piercing Essay
in that order.




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.



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