Looking back on the weeks, days, and hours before I experienced
Werner's work
for the first time in the final weekend of August 1978, I had
expectations (and opinions) of what it would deliver. But what it
actually delivered was nothing like what I expected it to
deliver. Somewhere along the line I'd surmised ie I had it that it
would deliver
enlightenment.
Wow! How pretentious that sounds in retrospect. Instead, what I
discovered was that
Werner's work
doesn't focus on
enlightenment.
What it delivers is transformation. As I came to see later,
that's not a trivial difference. It's not just playing with semantics
either.
Werner
has two reservations with describing what
his work
delivers, as
enlightenment.
The first is
"enlightenment"
connotes a kind of eastern mysticism, a context he doesn't
require. Secondly,
the transformation he
experienced
on
the Golden Gate Bridge
wasn't so much
an enlightened
experience,
as a shift in the context in which we hold all content and all
processes, including experience and including
enlightenment.
Hence he describes what happened to him as "transformation", and
prefers not distinguishing it as
enlightenment
/
buddhahood
/ satori / nirvana / salvation /
moksha /
Self-realization
et al at all.
What I expected to get from
Werner's work
(enlightenment), was the
sacred; what I actually got (transformation), was the profane. It's
certainly the latter. That's also not a trivial point. If it's not the
profane, then it runs a risk of turning our essentially
ordinary
day-to-day living into something overly
significant.
Definition
profane
adjective
showing no respect for
a god
or
a religion,
often through
language
<unquote>
Refering to
enlightenment
as "sacred", and contrasting that with refering to transformation as
"profane", teases out the essential difference between them. We
consider
that we aren't
enlightened,
and that the way to get
enlightened
is to aspire to and to work to attain its sacredness. Transformation
however, is a totally different story: we're already
transformed, so what there is to do in order to be transformed, is to
stop aspiring to and working to be transformed, to see things are the
way they are and the way they aren't. Recognizing that things are
exactly the way they are (and exactly the way they aren't) without
being trapped
by the compulsion to make sacredness significant, is what I call the
"profanity" of transformation / what I call the profanity of
Werner's work.
At some point in the realization that things are always just the way
they are, and are never the way they aren't, what becomes unavoidable
is that it's all sacred, on the other side of which is the
realization that it's also all profane, and that the only real
difference between the two is determined by how much
significance
we pile on to the delusion that things could ever be other than the way
they are, or that they could ever be the way they aren't. Our essential
interpretive machinery ie our
epistemology
doesn't always work in our favor in this regard. But when it does, the
possibility of being transformed emerges.
