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




You Are A Machine

San Jose, California, USA

August 18, 2002



"You are a machine."  ... 
This essay, You Are A Machine, is the companion piece to It is also the first in the septology You Are A Machine:
  1. You Are A Machine
  2. Confronting The Machinery
  3. You Are A Machine II
  4. Machinery Embedded In Hamburger
  5. You Are Still A Machine
  6. A Million Ways A Machine, One Free?
  7. On Full Automatic
in that order.

It is also the prequel to You Are A Machine II.




I love watching and listening to Werner working. There's an art and an accuracy to creating a conversation for transformation, and I love watching and listening to Werner creating it just as much as I would if, say, I could be in his studio and watch Michelangelo hew La Pieta out of the marble slab.

There was a point in the est  Training where the participants got how they're completely run by the machinery of their lives. They get the futility of it all.

Seeing the way Werner directs that particular process and all the resistance that flies up around that in the face of it is always a highlight for me. At that point the very clothes the participants are wearing literally reek of congested thought, as Professor William Warren "Bill" Bartley III (Werner's biographer) put it.

I watched as one fellow rose up, anguished, to challenge Werner. He explained to Werner and to the rest of the participants how mistaken Werner was. He argued fervently he was a human being and not a machine.

Not atypically he had collapsed both distinctions leaving neither of them powerful or useful.

But Werner has directed this process more than anyone else in the entire universe today. He didn't just start preparing to direct it for the first time on his way to the training room. He's a veteran. He's not merely a national treasure. He is a planetary treasure. He really knows who he is, and if you're going to dispute you are a machine, Werner Erhard is not someone to tangle with lightly.

* * *

After their exchange reached its inexorable conclusion, when Werner Erhard asked him "Did you get it?" he responded beaming "Yes! But I don't like it ...".

I could see all his resistance had flattened out. He was radiant. He was at the start of a whole new way of being in the world.



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