Werner Erhard wrote a very challenging essay in 1977, called The End of Starvation: Creating an Idea Whose Time Has Come. (1)
In it he explained, from his point of view, how life worked. I can’t think of any other way to describe it. His book utterly bewitched me when I first read it.
I try to imagine what changes Werner might make in his discussion if he were to have it now. Let’s take one notion.
Let me discuss what he said about the power of an idea whose time has come. I choose that notion because it confirmed some things I’ve been saying and so struck me.
Initially in the trainings he used the word enlightenment; then it became transformation, context, etc. More and more he left aside any wording that was at all religious.
Werner joked about not discussing “the black Lady [God]” in his trainings and other events. That certainly eliminated sectarian rivalries.
Everyone in an educational position, I imagine, faces the need to put their message in terms their readers or viewers can understand. But it meant that there’d be no place for the Divine Plan in his training. Or the universal laws.
If we allow for these constraints, the juice of what he’s saying is still very nourishing.
The juice is:
“When the time for things comes, they happen by whatever means are available. When an idea’s time comes, the forces in the world are transformed so that, instead of what you do being unworkable, what you do works. And you do what works.” (2)
Chrikey. That’s so absolutely true. And it becomes even more true when one factors in the Divine Plan.
Let’s look more closely at what he just said.
“When the time for things comes, they happen by whatever means are available.” Absolutely. In today’s terms, when the time comes in the Divine Plan for something to occur, it’ll happen by whatever avenue there is.
This isn’t an example we like to think about but it does illustrate the principle: If a person’s time to go arrives, Michael has told me, they’ll exit by whatever means presents itself – Fentanyl, accident on a motorcycle, fall off a kitchen stool.
Many times Michael has said to me that it wasn’t my time to go and so he prevented my death or injury. I nearly electrocuted myself once and he, in his words, diverted the electrons, a simple matter for him apparently.
On another occasion, I took a toxic chemical – and in large amounts – without any noticeable effect. He said he was not about to lose me to that.
I also had a confirming incident in the rental of this apartment. Seemingly-impossible time and other constraints presented themselves. Not only were the difficulties cleared up as if by a wave of the hand, but I ended up in the one location in Vancouver I’ve always dreamed of – the exact building and setting.
Michael said “they” took all the criteria in my mind for my next location and this one was the top choice. Every event that happened in the next 24 hours, which is all the time I had to rent a place without incurring another month’s rent, was handled magically.
After this series of events, I needed no further demonstrations of exactly what Werner is talking about here. Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come; only I’d add that the angels may also conspire to make it happen. Again not a subject to be discussed in the growth workshops of the time. (3)
The question then becomes (1) what makes an idea’s time come and (2) what can we do to make one an idea whose time has come?
Oh, let me take the second one first. It’s easy. Love. <——- Answer.
Come from love. Frame the project in love. Extend love. Push the edge of loving further. Serve love. Receive love. Speak love. Hear love.
Easy, easy peasy to answer. Not so easy to do … or even to remember.
If one cannot live by love, for whatever reason, the next best answer in my books is to follow the universal laws.
They’re designed to move us out of the experience of the lower emotions like jealousy, anger, and hatred and into the experience of love.
The answer to the second one is equally obvious: God. God is what determines whether something is an idea whose time has come.
I personally worship God in the form of the Mother. Of the duet of One – as Ramesh Balsekar called it – the Mother/Father One. When the Mother wills it, an event happens. If she doesn’t will it, the event will not happen. As she herself said to me in a reading recently:
“I know very clearly, Sweet One, as do you, if it is not my plan, then it will not occur.” (4)
Whatever qualms we have about God, a plural God, divine intervention, angels, etc., I still see this as the way things happen. What makes an idea one whose time has come is the Divine Will.
That is not to say it isn’t my will. Since the Divine is all there is, I must also be the Divine. You are the Divine. We all are the Divine, here in ignorance to recapture the knowledge we once had of who we are. (5) What God wills, we will, although in our everyday consciousness, we’re very far away from being aware of it.
Footnotes
(1) Werner Erhard, The End of Starvation: Creating an Idea Whose Time Has Come. San Francisco: The Hunger Project, 1977.
(2) Loc. cit.
(3) Human-growth leaders were often ridiculed in the press, the way of handling anyone who stepped outside prescribed boundaries in society. The entire growth movement was ridiculed as “the Me Generation” – as if Self-Realization, the purpose of life, was selfish.
Growth leaders seemed to be careful to eliminate any topics, like politics and religion, which could both distract attendees and also make them targets of ridicule in the press.
I have to add here that I now watch what happens when I say something to a service provider – providing I come from love. I keep thinking to myself that Michael is putting thoughts in the other person’s head as we speak. I keep expecting cooperation.
(4) The Divine Mother in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, April 30, 2019.
(5) Hindus call life a leela, a divine play. The object – the purpose of life from God’s perspective – is for God to meet God in a moment of our enlightenment. That is the only way the All can know itself. Forget and create a drama to remember.