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 Everything To Me

Connolly Ranch, Browns Valley, California, USA

June 26, 2016
"We all have relationships, and if you can complete your relationship with your parents, you can have incredible relationships, magical relationships, miraculous relationships." ... 
"We can work it out." ... The Beatles

This essay, You Are Everything To Me, is the thirteenth in a group of twenty on Parents:
I am indebted to my mother Andee Platt and to my father Dr Asher Manfred Platt who inspired this conversation.


Some researchers say it's impossible for people to remember their births. That's what they say. They say memories of childhood before three years old are unavailable due to what they've labeled "childhood amnesia". In an earlier intersection  with regression, I experimented with seeing how far back I could go in my memory. I recalled my birth ie I recalled being born, and earlier. That's no big deal to me. I can't prove it empirically. It's something I wanted to try for myself. Soon after I was born I began noticing my new surroundings. I also noticed I had needs - that is to say I experienced  I had needs. I needed food. I needed warmth. I needed drying. I needed to be held. I needed to be loved. My needs were always (more sooner than later) met. Always. And when they were, it was the best  feeling there could be.

At that tender age, I didn't articulate those needs in exactly this way. But those were my needs - as were they probably the needs of any and all children - articulated today in the way I recall my experience of them. Eventually (it was a recurring realization) I began noticing who was supplying  what I needed. Pretty soon it became clear to me that whenever my needs were met, be they for food, for warmth, to be dried, to be held, or to be loved, lo and behold  there were always one of two people there (and sometimes they were both there at the same time) who gave me what I needed.

Later I would learn they were my mother and my father, Andee and Manfred, my parents. They were the Jor-El  and Lara  to my Kal-El. And our idyllic Krypton  would soon be changing in ways I hadn't yet begun to imagine.

I loved them so  much. There was no manipulation in the way I loved them. There was no reason in the way I loved them. I just loved them. I lived in my love for them (no, we all  lived in my love for them) like fish swim in water, like birds fly in air. My love for them (and theirs for me) was the milieu  in which Life itself  showed up. I loved them for who they were, for what they were for me, for what they did for me, for what they gave me, for loving me. I loved them because I loved them. It was a love that was my whole life which, as it grew, almost eclipsed Life itself - indeed at that young age, it was  Life itself for me. And my unmanifest communication to my parents through my eyes as a child (language was yet to come) was "I love you so much, you are everything  to me.". They were. Everything. It was perfect.

As an adult I realized there were issues I had to complete with my parents. How and why those issues got there in the first place (given the fabulous start we had to it all) I don't try to understand. Life, I guess, throws curveballs our way, perhaps to keep us alert, perhaps to keep us straight, perhaps to give us a worthwhile game to play. What I do know is whatever issues there were to work out and complete with my parents, I (which is to say we)  finally met them head-on and worked them all out. Though I didn't know how we would ever do it (my "Job #1"  was overcoming my resistance to making my parents right ie my self-righteousness), I could always re-create (as a platform on which to stand) "I love you so much, you are everything  to me.". It was my model of being complete with them, with nothing in the way.

Once I got my relationship with my parents complete, what happened to (which is to say where was)  "I love you so much, you are everything  to me" like a declaration, like a possibility ie like an underlying communication? Did it go away? Was it forgotten? The question intrigued me. I looked ... and I noticed it hadn't gone away. It wasn't forgotten. It's still here. It's always  here, now transformed, like the coloring  for all relationships, like their background, like the context for them, like their platform. It's the space for all  interactions - like water in which fish swim, like air in which birds fly. It's the milieu of Life itself, and it's everything to me.


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