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 Michaelangelo hew La Pieta
out of the marble slab.
There was a point in the
est training
where the participants get how they're completely run by the machinery
of their lives, and 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
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 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.
