Coombsville Appellation,
Napa Valley,
California, USA
July 27, 2026
"Responsibility begins with the willingness to be
cause in the matter
of one's life. Ultimately, it is a
context
from which one chooses to live. Responsibility is not burden, fault,
praise, blame, credit, shame or guilt. In responsibility, there is no
evaluation of good or bad, right or wrong. There is simply
what's so,
and your
stand.
Being responsible starts with the willingness to deal with a situation
from the view of life that you are the generator of what you do, what
you have and what you are. That is not
the truth.
It is a place to
stand.
No one can make you responsible, nor can you impose responsibility on
another. It is
a grace
you give yourself - an empowering
context
that leaves you with a say in the matter of life."
...
"She took responsibility for being there. It's that
god-damned
simple."
"There are two sides to his nature: the rough-cut, self-taught
philosopher with the dazzling gift for philosophy ... where did he get
it? He hasn't read the texts, he has no
academic background.
And there is the supersalesman, the founder of an autocratic
organization held in reverence by
staff and graduates.
The mixture is disconcerting."
This essay,
A Discourse On Responsibility,
is the companion piece to
Blameless.
Werner's
widely known quote
distinguishing responsibility (which I've included at the top of this
page as a step-off into this conversation) is remarkable on any number
of fronts. For starters, even before we have the
laser-like
accuracy of the material itself dissected and teased out, there's a
pivotal
question,
secondarily about
the source
of his material, and primarily about his ability to articulate and
share it. That
question,
best posed by Michael Murphy, founder of Esalen, is "Where did he get
it?", "it" being
Werner's
dazzling gift for philosophy especially since he has no
academic background
or training in the genre.
Well ... where did he get it? It's a great
question,
arguably provoking a long debate. As I see it, there are two possible
origins of his knowledge, and what Michael Murphy calls his "dazzling
gift for philosophy". They are: one, he is entirely self-taught (which
includes putting himself in conversations with
people
from whom he could learn), and two, he was born that way. There is
actually a third possibility: a combination of both. It's the third
option which seems to be most likely. In
the wayour brains
are
wired
more adept at some skills than others,
Werner
(as Jack Rosenberg) was born with
a brain
which was
wired
in a certain way (just as all of us are born with
brainswired
in a certain way): ideally suited to philosophical inquiry - a happy,
random co-incidence maybe.
Assessing whether his "dazzling gift" works or not, isn't a matter of
background-checking
his credentials. Instead, it's a matter of exposing oneself to his
work and
ideas,
and seeing if they have value or not. Of the millions and millions of
people
who have exposed themselves to his work and
ideas,
those who say it was the most impactful experience of their lives are
north of 90%, both for
people
voting he is self-taught and for those voting he was born that way.
In considering his
ideas
on responsibility, on taking responsibility, and on being responsible,
as well as his
coaching
(as an example) of that
survivor of a nazi
concentration camp
such that she could get off the horror of it and transform her life,
the most dramatic addition of
an idea
pertaining to responsibility (and there are many new ones, especially
given that he doesn't place much stock in responsibility as burden,
fault, praise, blame, credit, shame or guilt) is
the idea
that
whatever happens
to me, from whatever
the source,
it is I who am ultimately responsible for my own
experience of it. Try that on for size.
"Your own experience of what,
Laurence?"
you may ask, to which the most pointed answer is "Of nothing in
particular.". If I'm responsible for my own experience (and how
can I not be responsible for my own experience?) then I'm
responsible for
my whole life
and for everything that
happens
to me - not like a blame but like a place to
stand.
Now watch: it's not
"The Truth"
that I'm responsible for
my own life
and for everything that
happens
to me. If you turn it into
"The Truth",
you'll drain any
power
it may have. But as a place to
stand
and look at life (ie "What if I'm responsible for my own experience
and therefore for
my life
and for everything that
happens
to me in
my life?"),
the idea
that I'm responsible for everything that
happens
(again, not like blame) is
extraordinarilypowerful.
Said another way, as a living, breathing, experiencinghuman being,
I'm responsible for it all ie for
the way
it
shows up
for me.
A pitfall here is you can't get this intellectually. You can't explain
your experience. But if you
sit
in a space of "I am experiencing ...",
it's eminently getable.
