I remember when I first heard Werner Erhard say these words. I was moved to tears.
“We can choose to be audacious enough to take responsibility for the entire human family. We can choose to make our love for the world be what our lives are really about.
“Each of us now has the opportunity, the privilege, to make a difference in creating a world that works for all of us. It will require courage, audacity, and heart.
“It is much more radical than a revolution – it is the beginning of a transformation in the quality of life on our planet. You have the power to fire the shot heard ‘round the world.'” (1)
At that time I had no idea that I was a starseed and I wouldn’t have called myself a lightworker. The drive was there, the commitment, the yearning. But I knew nothing then of what I do now.
Archangel Michael said to me in a personal reading on Oct. 2, “You’ve been talking to me all your life,. You know that.” No, I did not. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
He also told me that Werner is active in the world today and operates interdimensionally.
It was Werner who popularized the phrase “making a difference.” He popularized many words and phrases that have entered our common vocabulary and affected the way we see things today. Getting it, getting off it, getting conscious, at cause, at effect, what you resist persists, conscious awareness, Everything/Nothing – a lot of what he said shaped my way of thinking perhaps more than anyone else I can think of save, perhaps, Sri Ramakrishna.
And Werner and his work received the same disrespect that much of what we’re doing today does. No different then.
But what he said in this paragraph burned itself into my memory. We can choose to be audacious enough to take responsibility for the entire human family. The entire human family….
Take responsibility for: see ourselves as cause in the matter and our input as crucial. (2) My heavens, could I ever dream of such a thing? I can today.
We can choose to make our love for the world be what our lives are really about. Can we really? Can we be so big and live so boldly?
Each of us now has the opportunity, the privilege, to make a difference in creating a world that works for all of us. A world that works for all of us. Is such a thing possible? Yes, when viewed from Fifth Dimensionality, which is where I assume Werner was viewing things.
He saw that such a world could be and we’re now bringing it into being. A world that works for everyone. A world that really works. We can do this.
It will require courage, audacity, and heart. Yes, it does require that and it requires it from us every day, day by day.
Elsewhere he said that yesterday’s share (3) was now dead and only today’s share lives. To share ourselves honestly and transparently requires audacity and courage, but what a difference it makes for us. How freeing it is.
And heart – yes. In a world that valued craftiness, strategy, looking out for number one and getting to personal success by climbing over everybody, the willingness to love was downright dangerous and only the hardy and foolhardy risked it.
I remember having a shining transformational experience in a Communication Workshop and coming home glowing, only to have my girlfriend shout at me: “Stop that, right now!” I swallowed my original face. Werner would have said the world is hostile to transformation. Yes, we wanted to remain in our comfort zones and transformation was not comfortable.
He used to say if we wanted to remain in our comfort zone, he could oblige. He’d remove our guts and suspend us in tepid water. But if you wanted to live, to love, THAT was dangerous.
It’s much more radical than a revolution – it’s the beginning of a transformation in the quality of life on our planet. Yes, not a violent overthrow of existing institutions but their transformation, just as Archangel Michael has said the chosen route of the Company of Heaven is.
Transformation isn’t a mere shuffling of the deck, not simply moving our Scotty dogs around the Monopoly board. It isn’t simply “change,” which causes persistence of the present condition. Transformation is an alteration of the context in which things are held, which alters everything, not a mere repositioning of the content.
You have the power to fire the shot heard ‘round the world.’ The shot heard round the world – the declaration on our part that hunger would end in the world by the year 2000 (we were perhaps 14 years premature, but Werner must have known or suspected), that peace would be achieved in the world by the year X, that honor killings would end by the year Y, that sexual slavery would end by the year Z – on and by our say-so.
Always a deadline so that social action could be coordinated. We will have a man on the moon by the end of this decade: Werner’s favorite example of how a deadline works. But boldly declaring what we were about, a shot heard round the world, an idea whose time has come.
And soon, because of the reval, many lightworkers will find themselves uniquely in the position of having the resources to take the first steps into this new domain, the domain of coordinated, committed social action, firing the shot heard round the world. We CAN choose to be audacious enough to take responsibility for the whole world, not just the human family but all life on Earth.
I’m game for what comes next. I’m willing. I want a world that works for everyone and all my actions from here on in are aimed at achieving that world right now.
Footnotes
(1) Werner Erhard, Graduate Review, February 1980.
(2) “Responsibility begins with the willingness to take the stand that one is cause in the matter of one’s life. It is a declaration not an assertion, that is, 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 the stand you choose to take on what’s so. 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.” (http://wernererhardquotes.wordpress.com/tag/responsibility/.)
(3) A share is a statement of our personal truth, a bearing of the truth for us, an honest and transparent communication.
