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

World Traveler:

A Straight Love Song

Manhattan, New York, USA

September 9, 2008

This essay, World Traveler: A Straight Love Song, is the companion piece to Friend Of The Planet.

I am indebted to John Frederick "JFH" Hammond who inspired this conversation.

I've seen places. I've traveled. I've traveled to far off lands to experience their people, cultures, and vistas for myself. I've traveled on business. I've traveled because it seemed like a good idea at the time. I've traveled to discover myself. I've traveled to get away from myself. Those are some of my reasons for traveling and therefore, by inference, why I think all people travel. But there's one reason I'd never assigned to traveling until I noticed why you travel. Your reason for traveling the world (besides the Zen "you travel the world because you travel the world") is you travel the world to share your Self with the world. You travel to make who you are like a possibility available in the world.

When I travel the world that doesn't work, it's the old cliché which says "everywhere you go, there you are". When I travel the world that works for everyone, it's I who says "everywhere I go there you are".

I plan the way to reach you with sextants, compasses, maps, and Global Positioning System satellites. I follow you hiking down the trails and on the back roads. I watch you on the beaches. I recognize you in the country inns, the bed and breakfasts, the hotels and the hostels. I climb to you up hills and up mountains. I kayak to our rendez-vous down streams through river rapids. I meet you in the boardrooms and on cobble stone village squares. I hitchhike to our tête à tête, picking up rides with long haul truckers at freeway onramps. I spot you in the airports. I take cabs from the railway stations to our meetings. I read you in the newspapers. I hear you on the radio. I see you on TV.

You're everywhere. Thank You for being everywhere I am. Your OK-ness is everywhere. You bring your "It's OK" to every place on the planet. It's OK the way it turns out by declaration if not in reality then like a possibility. The way it turns out is the way it turns out. It's always OK. It's always been OK. It always will be OK - everywhere. From time to time the human condition looks to the world and, losing experience of experience, doubts it's OK or, from time to time righteously assesses it's not OK. I share your stand. Your "It's OK" isn't an argument against or a retort to "It's not OK". Coming from profound compassion, your "It's OK" is simply something new for "It's not OK" to try on. It's simply something new to consider like a possibility.

<aside>

Be careful! Be very careful. "It's OK" is a statement coming from and about experience. It's not a statement or an assessment about living conditions. It's not a justification for apathy or insensitivity toward what's wanted and needed in the world. As soon as you make "It's OK" mean no compassion is called for, no humanitarian action is necessary, or there's no work to do, you've missed the impact and power of "It's OK" entirely - in fact, you damage it. People who fully realize in their experience "It's OK" are the hardest working most compassionate, inspired people I know. It's more than that, actually: coming from "It's OK" drives working hard with great velocity and compassion way beyond what for coming from struggle would be the burn out point.

<un-aside>

Your worldwide international gift of "It's OK" creates the possibility of people dealing with issues, indeed mastering issues without having their lives be about issues. Your "It's OK" allows the grip of issues and survival to let up so what they've always hidden, what they've always covered up is freed: it's who we really are like a possibility rather than whatever our strategies for survival in the current pressing situations are.

Speaking from our strategies for survival, it's never OK anywhere. Speaking from who we really are, speaking from the Self, it's always OK everywhere. When I see myself as the Self, then I see you as the Self, and I see you as the Self everywhere. I see you in the Amazon jungle as a young bare breasted girl looking at me with such ferocity of naked Self that I'm nearly, quite literally, blinded by the light coming out of her. I must avert my eyes to regroup. I see you as the Self in Drury Lane and the West End as the very best of human creativity and Self expression in acts which, outside the agreement of dramatic arts and theatre, have no reality, little congruence with daily life. Yet I'm fascinated, privileged, unable to look away. I see you as the Self in the Fiji Islands as pristine tropical splendor, rippling orange flamed sunsets beaming down on blue lagoons skirted by fine pure white sands unmarred by footprints. Sailing, I see you as Self in the middle of the great oceans of the _lanet thousands of miles from land in the dead of cloudless moonless endless nights under a canopy of billions and billions of stars so dazzling bright, so clear and so close I can reach out and grab handfuls.

Introducing Transformation to Australia - Sydney Opera House Event - April 1987

Werner Erhard

The lines are drawn on the chart of your travels from every place in the world to every other place in the world. When we connect the dots there's ignition, spontaneous combustion of the critical mass of transformed experience in the lives and institutions and cultures your ideas have touched. It's a breakthrough in what's possible for being for human beings, and it's irreversible. The fish has walked up on the land, bringing with it elephants and eagles like a possibility. The genie's out of the lamp, and she ain't going back in again.

Who you are brings forth renewed milieus wherever you go, in whichever countries you travel. Who you are brings forth milieus already understood. Yet you bring them forth newly so they're experienced for the first time outside of realms limited by mere understanding. The new milieus you are are air for the bird, water for the fish. Who are you for me?

"You are my deepest love. My life is for you."

Communication Promise

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