It’s been more than thirty years since Werner Erhard issued his challenge to create a world that works. He said in 1977:
“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.
“What we create together is a relationship in which our work can show up as making a difference in people’s lives. I welcome the unprecedented opportunity for us to work globally on that which concerns us all as human beings.
“If not you, who?
If not now, when?
If not here, where?” (1)
He called the event announcing his intention to build such a world “the shot heard round the world.”
Well, I can tell you, it was certainly a shot that resonated throughout my being. I wept when I heard him lay out his vision. And I was so grateful to him for having given it words.
I wondered for years how it could be done. And now here we are, doing it.
And it turns out to be easy peazy. That world that works for everyone? That’s a Fifth-Dimensional world. That’s exactly the world that awaits us after Ascension. You could sit back and do nothing and still arrive in such a world. It’s laid on.
But what isn’t laid on is how soon it happens. And what isn’t laid on is whether we’ll play a part in it. What isn’t laid on is whether we’ll recognize the opportunity it represents to grow and evolve.
Ascension happens when our vibrations reach a certain stage where we can energetically “support” such a world. It happens when our vibrations reach the stage where the largest possible number of people (some will choose not to go) ascend with us.
But we won’t sit back and wait for it because for every minute we delay getting to work to create such a world, more babies die of famine, more fathers and mothers weep over their loss, more kidnapped girls suffer in sexual slavery, more women are attacked by acid-throwers or killed in honor deaths, on and on the list goes of tragedies and atrocities which we’re going to address, just as soon as abundance arrives.
We are, are we not? I’m not speaking into a vacuum, am I?
I’m not just dreaming that there are a small army of lightworkers out there who, when abundance arrives, are ready to set to work with a portion of their gifting to make a difference in the world, to build the New Earth, am I?
Tell me we’re not all going to buy yachts in Florida or castles in France. Tell me that some lightworkers seriously intend to build a workable world, no kidding, like “we’re the ones!”
We have the opportunity to fire the shot heard round the world. We have the ability to cause a creative explosion in our world when our gifting shows everyone that there’s a new marshall in town, the old order has fallen, and we, the new wealth holders, are here, not to corral wealth, not to misuse it or use it poorly, but to transform the world to planetary workability with the funds being channeled through us.
We are incorruptible. People will try to trip us up. And occasionally we’ll trip ourselves up. We are human. But neither money, sex nor power (or what the Divine Mother called “control, greed and lust”), (2) will in the end have us stand down and leave our posts.
How many of us have had a dream in which we saved the world? How many of us ever, ever thought that we’d be doing it?
Well, as soon as someone shakes the tree, we’re going to do just that.
Don’t worry about how you look. You look outlandish. Will people talk about you behind their back? Yes, they’re doing so right now. Will they will say bad things about you? Guaranteed.
Will you let that stop you?
Will you, once abundance arrives, project your vasanas onto other people? Probably. So simply watch yourself and know when you’re acting from ancient wounds and incidents that happened to you when you were a child, that they have nothing to do with the poor bloke standing right there in front of you. And stop.
Example: Why do I react so badly when someone discusses a financial arrangement with me and wants deference from me in return? When I was seven, I went to a Montreal hospital with my wealthy Grandfather. He’d donated the money to add a room on to a complex and his name appeared on a plaque above the door.
A doctor kindly guided us to the room and my Grandfather argued with the doctor because the plaque was bolted to the wall. He wanted an extender put in that would have the plaque be four inches out from the wall, so more people could see it. Oh my. Can I have the Mother’s cloak of invisibility please? This is my Grandfather?
I have to watch that I don’t project my feelings of embarrassment and disgust onto others who demand my deference because they contributed, coming from the triggered memory of that incident.
It isn’t all going to be easy. We’ll lose friends in the process. We’ll wonder at times why we signed on for this work.
I have a newspaper photo on my wall of a woman in Darfur, crying. Underneath is the final line from a positive Canadian refugee claim, the formula that all refugee claimants are waiting to hear: “…and I extend to you Canada’s protection.” How proud I was to say those words. How proud I was of my country that had such a robust human-rights system.
That woman is my employer. She’s who I work for.
You have the power to fire the shot heard round the world. Just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
In fact we are the shot heard round the world. We are the world that works for everyone, in bud and blossoming. We simply need to get that intention, that commitment, that impetus out from our hearts and into the world.
Heroes are ordinary men and women who dare to see and meet the call of a possibility bigger than themselves.
Breakthroughs are created by such heroes, by men and women who will stand for the result
while it is only a possibility – people who will act to make possibility real. (3)
Footnotes
(1) The quote “a world that works for everyone” is found here:
“Each of us has the opportunity, the privilege, to make a difference in creating a world that works for all of us.” (Werner Erhard, A World That Works, 1980, cited at https://www.worldthatworks.org/.)
“Transformation does not negate what has gone before it; rather, it fulfills it. Creating the context of a world that works for everyone is not just another step forward in human history; it is the context out of which our history will begin to make sense.” (Werner Erhard – A Shot Heard Round the World: A World that Works for Everyone at https://www.scribd.com/doc/143329822/Werner-Erhard-A-Shot-Heard-Round-the-World-A-World-that-Works-for-Everyone
See also Werner Erhard, The Hunger Project: The End of Starvation. Creating an Idea Whose Time has Come. San Francisco: Hunger Project, n.d., p. 3.
(2) The Divine Mother in a personal reading with Steve Beckow, through Linda Dillon, June 7, 2015.
(3) Werner Erhard, at https://www.wernererhard.com/thatworks.html.