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

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On Knowing Nothing

Barnhouse Napa Brews, Napa, California, USA

August 26, 2026

"What happened to me on the Golden Gate Bridge was I realized I knew nothing. Everything I thought I knew I only knew 'in order to'."


...

sharing his experience with Professor William Warren "Bill" Bartley III, Werner's official biographer, in the account titled "Once Upon A Freeway" in chapter nine called "True Identity" in part III, "Transformation", of "Werner Erhard - The Transformation of a Man, The Founding of est"

This essay, On Knowing Nothing, is the companion piece to No "I / me" is involved.

Werner's work delivers its heralded results not through activities or disciplines or practises to follow which brings things forth rotely through repetition. It doesn't operate like a meditation or an affirmation which, the more it's repeated, the more its results are internalized (its not like dying a cloth which holds its color ever firmer the more it's dipped into the dye). All of those practises are useful, elegant, even (in the case of the yogic disciplines) ancient. Instead, Werner's work delivers its results ontologically ie by engaging being directly. Its methods are effective in ways that make it powerful and easily accessible to anyone anywhere, and with minimal setup. It delivers transformation* / enlightenment through conversations ie through simple speaking and listening.

So when Werner says "What happened to me on the Golden Gate Bridge was I realized I knew nothing; everything I thought I knew I only knew 'in order to'", if I'm going to be in a conversation with him, I ask myself "What does he mean by that?" (and while "meaning" per se isn't significant in and of itself in Werner's work, in this sense its usage is prudent ie good enough for jazz). In particular, what does he mean by "I knew nothing"? What does it mean to "know nothing"? Don't we all know so much? or think we do? I don't have the right answer for you. But I'm willing to speculate on what he's referring to.

Werner, following the extraordinary moment out of time on the Golden Gate Bridge, often reflects on the implicit error in the phrase "I think". It implies "I" is what's doing the thinking ie that "I" is what's doing the knowing. Implicit in "I think" is the faux certainty that knowing / thinking is something "I" does. In realizing "I knew nothing", he realized two essentials of transformation / enlightenment at once. The first is "I" is not the one doing the knowing. The second is the domain of knowing is distinct from who I really am. The domain of knowing / thinking is what we call "mind". These essential distinctions allow transformation / enlightenment to occur. Werner's "I knew nothing" is quite literal. It's mind that knows, not "I". Realizing that it's not "I" that's doing all the knowing, and thereby realizing who he really is, was his moment of transformation / enlightenment. To know who you really are, is to know nothing ... because ... who you really are isn't that which knows or thinks anything at all. It's the mind that knows and thinks, and who you are is not your mind.

<aside>

To take Werner's "I knew nothing" literally to be an indicator of ignorance is to miss his point entirely.

<un-aside>

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On knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on knowing nothing on.

Footnote: is transformation enlightenment?:

In the account titled "Once Upon A Freeway" in chapter nine called "True Identity" in Part III, "Transformation", of Professor William Warren "Bill" Bartley III's official biography of Werner titled "Werner Erhard - The Transformation of a Man, The Founding of est", Bill asks Werner if what happened to him on the Golden Gate Bridge was enlightenment.

Werner says he sometimes calls it enlightenment yet he has two reservations with describing it as such. Firstly enlightenment connotes a kind of eastern mysticism, a context he doesn't require. Secondly his experience on the Golden Gate Bridge wasn't so much an enlightenment experience as it was a shift of the context in which he holds all content and all processes including experience and including enlightenment. Hence he refers to what happened on the Golden Gate Bridge as transformation and prefers not to use the word enlightenment at all.

[... being tightened up ...]

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