Werner Erhard in the 1970s
In his career as a trainer, Werner Erhard continued to move the edge of his work forward. He continually pushed the extent to which he took responsibility for the shape his world was in.
In February 1977, he made an important announcement to his staff: “I take responsibility for ending starvation [on the planet] in 20 years.” (1) Three years later in an event that grew out of that declaration, he said:
“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.” (2)
Now we lightworkers are his heirs in that we actually will end hunger on this planet, an event which Werner will live to see. And homelessness, and disease and all other aspects of global unworkability. Yes, we can and, yes, we will.
It will require courage, audacity and heart. And we won’t have a roadmap. We’ll only have the evidence of the trailing edge of our leading foot as we take one step after another towards the end of unworkability on this planet.
But what does it mean to take responsibility for the shape the entire world is in? Werner explained that “responsibility begins with the willingness to experience yourself as cause in the matter.” (3)
Responsibility has nothing to do with blame, shame, fault or guilt. It has everything to do with seeing our own input as important and in some instances as critical to the outcome of a matter and acting as if it were.
It has nothing to do with whether we actually caused hunger to arise on the planet or not. It has everything to do with being willing to experience ourselves as having a causal role to play in the end of the unworkable conditions in question, to act as if our input has an important, even crucial, role to play, in the dissolution of the unworkable conditions.
It has everything to do with getting that our input makes a difference; that what we do makes a difference simply because of who we are – and to come from the realization of that.
We’re embedded in a cultural environment that says that nothing meaningful can be done about such global situations as homelessness and hunger. Taking responsibility for our world requires us to see through our feelings of hopelessness, to the problem itself: our false belief systems. Bob Larzelere wrote some years ago:
“Your environment is a reflection of your beliefs. Your beliefs come first, then they are materialized in the illusion-reality. You are the source of your beliefs. Your environment is not.
“The only place you can effectively take responsibility for your reality is in looking at, and taking responsibility for, your beliefs. How do you do that? By doing it. Responsibility is a generating context. There is no technique for it. It is a choice you make.” (4)
If we’re willing to experience ourselves as cause in the matter, then responsibility as a generating or generative context points us in the direction of action that addresses the problem (the unworkability) and action that has a hope of succeeding because it’s based on being willing to be at cause or causal in the matter rather than being at effect or driven by shame and guilt.
I want to acknowledge that any program of global proportions must have well-thought-out deadlines to allow the social coordination of actions, without going into that aspect of things in detail here.
It won’t work to say we shall overcome some day. Like Werner with the Hunger Project, if we want to generate globally-coordinated action, we must know the dates we’re all working towards. More on that in a future post.
As soon as we take responsibility for the shape our world, we feel moved to act on it, no matter what the scope of that action may be. We’re encouraged to think globally but act locally. That distinction reminds us that, whether or not whatever we do has an impact on the world or on our block, taking action is what’s important.
And the more coordinated and integral that action is, the better the likelihood and extent of its success.
Moreover, the more responsible it is, the less residue it’ll create to threaten the permanence or stability of the overall action project and its dissolution of the unworkability.
Responsibility, in est’s terms, is in the last analysis not reasonable. It doesn’t proceed by or through reasons.
In our society, we use reasons to justify all our failures, lapses, and changes of mind. Anything contextual, in a Third-Dimensional world, is not reasonable – i.e., it doesn’t fit into the limitations or limited world view that our reasons create and sustain.
When we take responsibility for something as large as our world, immediately what arises all around us is unworkability. And the first variety of unworkability that confronts us is our own. Werner said of that situation:
“The bigger you are, the more will come up. The more you take responsibility for yourself, the more will come up. Don’t let the failures invalidate you and your life.” (5)
Of course unworkability will come up. That’s what taking responsibility reveals: what is not working in our lives that we’re not being responsible for.
Our store of reasons allows us to skirt any instance in which the unworkability peaks out from behind our well-manicured image. But in boldly declaring our responsibility, we’re also declaring that we won’t continue to cover up or turn a blind eye to the shape our world is truly in.
So:
“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.”
We can act so big that we burst the chains of our conditioning, of the belief systems that we have taken on and that define the way our world shows up for us.
Certainly the challenge has been declared in our world: “Each of us now has the opportunity, the privilege, to make a difference in creating a world that works for all of us.”
In a certain sense, Werner was a very brave, eloquent and audacious harbinger of things to come. The world he saw and described so eloquently, and worked so hard to bring about, is now taking shape before our eyes.
Seminar leader Morley Lipsett once said that “we live in a world that is hostile to transformation, that is hostile to getting off it, that is hostile to making other people right.” (6) Some elements of that world brought Werner down with charges that were later acknowledged to be false.
I’m not sure if Werner ever dreamed of the help it would require to dislodge the forces ranged against the world working out. We of this generation are still being helped by allies so unusual that if I were to name them here, I’d probably lose half my more general readers.
It took an army of loving, responsible and powerful beings to turn the tide of unworkability in our world and prevent us from ending up in nuclear war. And now that the re-establishment of love and peace is so well advanced in our world, it’s time for us to take up our role in creating a world that works, a world based on the divine qualities and universal laws.
Footnotes
(1) Steven M. Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change at httpss://tinyurl.com/yaendpqk
(2) “Werner Erhard,” Wikiquotes, at https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Werner_Erhard.
(3) Ibid., November 1979, 4.
(4) Bob Larzalere, The Harmony of Love. Context Publications, 1982, 71.
(5) Werner Erhard at the Werner Event, c1980.
(6) est Seminar Leader Morley Lipsett, 3 Dec. 1980.