Werner Erhard What is Est

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WERNER ERHARD WHAT IS ESThttp://www.wernererhard.net/standardtraining.html

The est Standard TrainingWerner Erhard and Victor Gioscia, San Francisco, Calif.

From the Journal of Individual Psychology, Volume 31, Number 1, May, 1975

Abstract. The format of the est standard training is described. Relationships which participantsdevelop in the training are: to the trainer, to the group, and to self. Three aspects of self are presented: self as concept, self as experience and self as self. Relation of these three aspects of self to the epistemology of est are discussed, as are the experiences of aliveness andresponsibility.

Introduction

Since fundamentally, est is a context in which to hold one's experience, I want to begin this essay by thanking a number of people for providing me with a context in which to write it. To begin, Iwant to thank those who attended the panel discussion at the APA meetings in May 1976, and, inaddition, I want to thank the reader for this opportunity to discuss the est Standard Training.

In the paragraphs that follow, I will present some information which may be useful as a contextin which to examine est as an example of an 'awareness training' in relation to contemporary psychiatry. I want to say at the outset that I am not qualified to write about large scale awarenesstrainings in general, and I will not presume to tell you anything about psychiatry. What I want todo is share with you some of the format, intended results, and 'theory' of est as an example of alarge-scale awareness training.

My intention is to provide a context in which the reader can have something of an experience of est and to create an opportunity for the reader, not simply to have some new concepts but to havean experience of what est is, insofar as that is possible in an essay.

So, I want the reader to know that my ultimate purpose is not to tell you some facts you did notknow. I do ask you to entertain the possibility that there is something you do know, which youhave not been aware that you know. The est training is an opportunity to become aware that youknow things you did not know you knew, so it is not a 'training' in the usual `rule-learning' senseof the word, nor is it an ingraining, by repetition or any other means, of behaviors, attitudes or beliefs.

Fundamentally, then the est training is an occasion in which participants have an experience,uniquely their own, in a situation which enables and encourages them to do that fully andresponsibly. I am suggesting that the best way to learn about est is to look into yourself, becausewhatever est is about is in your self. There are some who think that I have discovered somethingthat other people ought to know. That is not so. What I have discovered is that people knowthings that they do not know that they know, the knowing of which can nurture them and satisfythem and allow them to experience an expanded sense of aliveness in their lives. The training is

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an occasion for them to have that experience - to get in touch with what they actually alreadyknow but are not really aware of.

Format

The est Standard Training is designed to be approximately 60 h long. It is usually done on twosuccessive weekends - two Saturdays and two Sundays -beginning at 9 a.m. and going untilaround midnight. Sometimes a day's session takes longer, sometimes a little less, since thesessions go until the results for that day are produced.

There are breaks about every 4 h for people to go to the bathroom, have a cigarette, talk, or dowhatever they like. In addition, there is one break for a meal during the day. People usually eat breakfast before and dinner after if they are less tired than hungry. We have altered these timeson occasion to adapt, for instance, to institutional schedules. The same results have been produced doing the training over ten weekday evening sessions of 6 h each with a break in themiddle of each session, and over three consecutive weekend sessions of 10 h each with three

breaks including a meal break. The point is there is nothing in the duration of the training that isintrinsic to the training.

Included in the tuition (now $ 300.00), in addition to the two weekends, are three optionalseminars, called the pre-training, the mid-training, and the post-training seminars. These areapproximately 3 h long, and are conducted in the evenings a few days before, between and a fewdays after the weekend training sessions.

The training is held for about 250 people at a time, who are seated on chairs, arranged theater style, in a hotel ballroom. The trainer stands on a low platform in the front of the room so that thetrainer can see and be seen by everyone. There are support personnel who sit in the back of theroom, who manage the logistics of the training. For instance, they inform those participants onmedication (who sit in the back row), when it is time to take it. There are microphones, tofacilitate people who want to say something or ask a question, and everyone wears a nametag sothat the trainer can address people by name.

Sometimes people wonder about what might be called the harshness of the training - why therules are so unbending. It became very clear to me about 5 years ago that the rules in life do not bend. In other words, if I fall down, gravity does not say 'Well, we're going to relax the rules a bit since you hurt yourself . I think that it is important for people who are being given anopportunity to discover themselves, to discover for themselves that there are stableenvironments, certain facts of living, they cannot 'con' or persuade into changing for them, nomatter how pitiable they are, and no matter how intelligent and dominant they are. So the peoplewho handle the supervision of the training -the room, the number of chairs, etc. - have beentrained to be very consistent -to go by the book. The purpose of going by the book is not that wethink you ought to go by the book all the time - that kind of rigidity in a person is obviously amistake. It is to accentuate that the physical universe always goes by the book and that, likegravity, life does not relax the rules just because you want it to or even because you need it to.Gravity does not care, you see. It simply is. At the same time, the training is conducted with loveand compassion (not sympathy and agreement) and anyone who completes the training is clear in



their experience of this love and compassion. They know that their true power and dignity has been recognized from the very beginning of the training.

There are three relationships which develop during the course of the training which provide aframework for the material of the training.

One is a relationship with the trainer, who begins the training with what resembles a lecture,although trainees soon realize that it is not actually a lecture. To be sure, the trainer stands infront of the room talking, but he says things like 'If you experience something completely, itdisappears', and since he says that early on in the training, almost everybody thinks that it is nottrue. Some people reinterpret it to mean something else like that, but not quite that, which could be true for them. In other words, people begin to develop a relationship to the trainer, who presents certain data about experiencing life, which trainees can examine to see if what he issaying is true for them in their experience. There may be a give and take between the participantsand the trainer for a while until everyone is very clear what the trainer said. That does not meananyone has accepted it. In fact, people are effectively cautioned against merely believing

anything presented in the training. It just means everone knows that is what the trainer said, andeveryone begins to develop his or her own unique relationship with the material the trainer presents, by seeing the unique relevance of what the trainer has to say to his or her own beliefsabout and/or experience of living.

Another relationship which develops in the training is the trainee's relation to the group and tothe individual members of the group. This develops out of an aspect of the training we callsharing, by which we simply mean telling others what is going on in the realm of your ownexperience. Initially, people raise their hands, one of the support people brings them amicrophone, and they talk about something - be it an annoyance, or an insight, or their theory of the training, etc. Then, as the training goes on, people begin to share more fully what they areactually experiencing, until, toward the end of the training, people become able to share in a waywe call 'getting off it' - relating things they have held on to perhaps for their entire lives - thingsthey have been stuck with yet were unable to reveal they were holding onto, and now find theycan let go of. About a quarter of the people in a given training share meaningful things of thissort. The rest either do not share or say conceptual kinds of things.

There is no confrontation from the group to a trainee or from the trainer to a trainee except inrare instances by the trainer. We ask trainees not to evaluate, judge or analyze each other'ssharing, not to engage in a dialogue with each other, and on that basis to say whatever they haveto say to the trainer, so that the training can occur within each indidivual's own experience, rather than in others' concepts or in the dynamics of the group. Those who choose to share, do so, andthose who choose not to, find it is not required to realize the results of the training.

When people share, other trainees often find they can see their own story more vividly insomeone else's experience than they can in their own. So a large part of the value people get inthe training is the view they see of themselves in others' sharing.

The third relationship people experience in the training is an enhanced relationship tothemselves, which in part, occurs during what we call processes. These are techniques in which



people switch their attention from seeing their concepts about themselves, others and life, toobserving directly their experience of themselves, others and life. This is done in an environment- or 'space' - that is safe enough for them to do that. That is, in a safe space, there is noexpectation that you prove anything, or demonstrate anything, or keep up any appearances. In asafe space, whatever is so is not used to justify or explain or be consistent with a point of view.

Processes are simply an occasion to look directly into one's experience and observe what's goingon there, in safety.

For example, there is a process in which people are asked to select a problem from among thosethey have in life and to see specifically which experiences are associated with that problem -which body sensations in which specific locations in the body, which emotions or feelings,which attitudes, states of mind, mental states or points of view, which postures, ways of holdingthemselves, gestures, ways of moving, habitual actions and countenances, which thoughts,evaluations, judgements, things they have been told or read, conclusions, reasons, explanationsand decisions, and which scenes from the past are associated with that problem. People discover remarkable things about their problems - for instance that there are body sensations felt when

and only when that problem intrudes into their lives - a fact they had not noticed before.

Some processes last for 20 min, others for 90 min. People are usually seated during them, andafterwards they are invited to communicate whatever insights or awareness they had. Ina veryreal sense, then, the trainees literally create the training for themselves.People think there is an est training, when in fact, there is not. There are actually as manytrainings going on in each training as there are individuals in the training, because peopleactually 'train' themselves, by handling on an individual basis those aspects of living that arecommon to all of our lives. Each part of the training becomes real for participants by virtue of experiencing themselves, not concepts derived from someone else's experience.

Thus, the training is not like a classroom in which the aim is to agree or disagree with a conceptor a theory. In the training, we present spaces, or contexts, or opportunities, in a way that allows people to discover what their actual experience is. Participants in the training report and giveevidence of obtaining value from getting beneath their concepts, their points of view, their unexamined assumptions, explanations, and justifications, to the actual experience of themselves,others and life.

To know oneself, as Socrates suggested, does not seem to provide the experience of satisfaction -of being whole and complete if one knows oneself in the same way as one knows about things.Thus one can know about love and not know love, just as one can know all the concepts of bicycle riding without having the experience or the ability to actually ride a bicycle. The trainingis about the experience of love, the ability to love and the ability to experience being loved, notthe concept or story of it - and it is about the experience of happiness, and the ability to be happyand share happiness, not the concept, story or symbols of it. In short, the training is about whowe are, not what we do, or what we have, or what we do not do or do not have. It is about the self as the self, not merely the story or symbols of self. People often ask if the training is somethingone needs. The training is not something one needs. Now this statement is usually met, if not bysurprise, then with outright disbelief. For, if the training is not something one needs, why shouldone do it.



The fact is, people usually come to introductory seminars when they see that their friends or family or associates who went to the training experienced a transformation or enlightenmentwhich they themselves would like to experience. It is a natural part of the experience of transformation to share the opportunity to have the experience of transformation with others.

This becomes amusing after the people who had the hardest time understanding why their friendsor loved ones were so excited and enthusiastic and eager for them to know about the training,finally do take the training, they then meet the same bewilderment in their friends and loved oneswhen they try to share it, because now their friends insist they do not need it either.

The fact is, no one needs the training. It is not medicine. If you are ill, you need medicalattention. If you are mentally ill, you need therapy. The training is not medicine or therapy. If you are hungry, you need food. You need air. Actually you need someone to love and someoneto love you. You need to feel some self-respect and the esteem of others. Without these, we donot function very well as human beings.

The training is none of these. It does not solve problems. It is true that some problems dissolve inthe training, but not because it is the purpose of the training for people to work on their problemsin the training. The training is not about people's problems per se. What the training is about isrelated to those rare moments in life, which while rare, seem to come into everyone's life at sometime or another. They are moments in which one is absolutely complete, whole, fulfilled - that isto say, satisfied. (I limit the word gratification to mean the filling of a need or desire, or theachievement of a goal. I use the word satisfaction to mean the experience of being complete.)

Each of us has experienced moments in our lives when we are fully alive -when we know -without thinking - that life is exactly as it is in this moment. In such moments, we have no wishfor it to be different, or better, or more. We have no disappointment, no comparison with ideals,no sense that it is not what we worked for. We feel no protective or defensive urge - and have nodesire to hold on - to store up - or to save. Such moments are perfect in themselves. Weexperience them as being complete.

We do not need to experience completion. People function successfully without such moments.Like the training, such moments are not something we `should' have. Like the training, suchmoments do not make us any better. We are not smarter or sexier or more successful or richer or any more clever. These moments, these experiences of being complete, are sufficient untothemselves. Like the training, such moments are not even 'good' for you - like vitamins or exercise or things of that sort.

In the training, one finds there is something beyond that - the < opportunity to discover thatspace within yourself where such moments originate, actually where you and life originate. Inthe training, one experiences a transformation -a shift from being a character in the story of lifeto being the space in which the story occurs - the playwright creating the play, as it were,consciously, freely, and completely.

Because the experience of being complete is a state change from the rest of life, the questionsand instruments we usually apply to measure life do not apply. We shall need to develop a whole



new set of questions - a new paradigm to approach the experience of being complete.

In the training, the experience of being at the effect of life - of having been put here, and havingto suffer the circumstances of life, of being the bearer or victim of life, or at best, of succeedingor winning out over the burdens of life -shifts to an experience of originating life the way it is -

creating your experience as you live it - in a space uniquely your own.

In that space, the problems of life take on an entirely different significance. They literally pale,that is, become lighter - or enlightened. One sees, quite sharply, that who one is simplytranscends and contextualizes the content with which one has been concerned. The living of life begins to be what counts, the zest or vivacity with which one lives, what matters.

It has been said that this is a polyanna view - that I think there's no pain and suffering in life.That is not my view at all. There is no doubt whatsoever in my experience and observation that people do suffer, that there is pain in life. If we were to sit quietly in an empty room for a fewminutes looking at what we do and how we live, and at how much time we spend doing things

that we pretend are important to us, most of us would find that we spend more time pretendingnot to suffer than in creating the experience of our lives.

In my observation of life, I find that during most of the time we are interacting with others, weare pretending, and we get so proficient at pretending that we eventually no longer even noticethat we are pretending. We become 'unconscious' of pretending. We forget that the actualexperience of loving someone - in contrast to the pretense or concept of loving someone, or the'act' or drama of loving someone - leaves one absolutely high, vivacious, and alive.

Yet, each of us behaves as if we were really three people. First, there is the one we pretend to be. No one escapes this. Every one of us has an act - a front - a facade - a mask we wear in the worldthat tells the world who we are pretending to be. We think we need this to get along in life and besuccessful.

Underneath that mask is the person we are afraid we are - the person who thinks those small,nasty, brutish thoughts we try to hide, because we think we are the only one who thinks them,until we are willing to accept that we do actually think them, and only then notice everyone elsedoes too. Until we confront our own smallness, we do not experience our real size. The truth is,we can only be as high as we can confront and take responsibility for being low.

I am suggesting that it is useful from time to time to get in touch with why it is we have to beintelligent or successful or wonderful or kind. I am suggesting that when we look underneath thefacade we present, we will find a cluster of thoughts, emotions, attitudes, etc. which are the exactopposite to what we have presented. All of us who are given credit for being intelligent havefeelings, thoughts, etc. of stupidity and ignorance. All of us who are given credit for beingwonderful have doubts. In my observation (which includes a fairly intimate interaction with over 90,000 people) we all have doubts about the authenticity of the way we present ourselves in theworld.

Some people find this idea annoying. If you have spent your whole life proving you are not a



fool, it is annoying to be called a fool. (A fool is one caught in his own pretense.) We are all verycareful not to make fools of ourselves or not be fooled. Many see it as the ultimate disgrace.Only a fool pretending not to be a fool would be afraid of making a fool of himself. A fool presenting himself as a fool would have no problem with it, just as one who knows he is not afool would have no problem making a fool of himself. Similarly, a man secure in his masculinity

has no problem expressing feminine qualities. Each time we try to prove we are not fools wereinforce the belief that we must prove that we are not.

Underneath these two 'selves' - the 'front' and the 'hidden' - is the one we really are - under theone we work at being, the one we try to be, the one we are pretending to be, and underneath theone we do not want to be, the one we are avoiding being, and the one we fear we are. The extentto which we can allow ourselves to confront - to experience and be responsible for - the pretenseand trying, the avoidance and fear, is the extent to which we can be who we really are.

The experience of being yourself is innately satisfying. If who you really are does not give youthe experience of health, happiness, love and full self-expression - or 'aliveness' - then that is not

who you really are. When you experience yourself as yourself, that experience is innatelysatisfying. The experience of the self as the self is the experience of < satisfaction. Nothingmore, nothing less.

Satisfaction is not 'out there'. It cannot be brought in. You will never get satisfied. It cannot bedone. When you want more and different or better, that is gratification, and while that isgratifying, we always want even more or even better. Satisfaction is completion, being complete- what has been called 'the peace that passeth all understanding'. It is a condition of well-being - asense of wholeness and of being complete right now - a context of certainty that right now iscompletely all right as right now and that the next moment will similarly be, fully itself. Not a judgment of good or bad, right or wrong, just what is.

I do not refer to smugness or to naivete, or to a preoccupation with self achieved by shutting outthe world. I do not mean narcissism. I refer to the quality of participation which generatesenthusiasm in its performance and in its beholders. I refer to the kind of invigorating vitality thatmakes a difference in the world. Most of those who explain what we ought to do in the world donot make a difference in the world.

To summarize what happens in the est training, then, I would say the following. It is atransformation - a contextual shift from a state in which the content in your life is organizedaround the attempt to get satisfied or to survive - to attain satisfaction - or to protect or hold on towhat you have got - to an experience of being satisfied, right now, and organizing the content of your life as an expression, manifestation and sharing of the experience of being satisfied, of being whole and complete, now. One is aware of that part of oneself which experiencessatisfaction - the self itself, whole, complete, and entire.

The natural state of the self is satisfaction.

You do not have to get there. You cannot get there. You have only to 'realize' your self, and, asyou do, you are satisfied. Then it is natural and spontaneous to express that in life and share that



opportunity with others.

This explains, I think, the fact that people from all walks of life take the training, so that, with theexception that the group of graduates includes a higher percentage than the average population of better educated people and therefore the group also includes a higher percentage than usual of

professionals, they are representative of the community at large. I say 'explains' with tongue incheek of course, for by now you will have perceived that the only quality one must have to 'get'the est training is self.

So everyone 'gets' it, that is, has an experience of self as self. A few 'desist' because they have patterns of resistance that they are now completing (rather than dramatizing or reinforcing) as a part of expressing their being complete. Some do not 'like' it, others delay their acceptance, bothalso patterns now to be completed. Even these, in my experience, have it, and are covering itover, for a while, with considerations, explanations, or other contents which they are completing.

This is not a matter of concern to us, since the principal intended result of the est training is a

shift in the person's relationship to their system of knowing contents, or technically a shift intheir epistemology. Thus, the contents of people's lives are not worked on per se during thetraining, since it is not the purpose of the training to alter the circumstances of lives or to alter peoples' attitudes or point(s) of view about the circumstances of their lives. It is the purpose of the training to allow people to see that the circumstances of their lives and that their attitudesabout the circumstances of their lives exist in a context or a system of knowing, and that it is possible to have exactly the same circumstances and attitudes about these circumstances held in adifferent context, and that, as a matter of fact, it is possible for people to choose their owncontext for the contents of their lives. People come out of the training 'knowing' that in a newway. Now I mean something larger than 'knowing' or understanding. I mean that peopleexperience being empowered or enabled in that respect. They no longer are their point of view.They have one, and know that the one they have is the the one they chose, until now, and thatthey can, and probably will, choose to create other points of view. They experience, that is, thatthey are the one who defines the point of view, and not the reverse. They experience the intendedresult of the training, which is a shift in what orients people's being from the attempt to gainsatisfaction - a deficiency orientation - to the expression of satisfaction already beingexperienced - a sufficiency orientation.This is so even for the experience of psychosis. In our research , we have asked independentinvestigators to look very carefully at the issue of harm. And while I am not fully qualified todiscuss the intricacies of research , I can report that none of the research has shown any evidencethat est produces harm. Now, although it has not proven that est does not harm, it is noteworthythat investigators asked to look carefully at this question have not found evidence of harm. Everyindication we have suggests that there is a lower incidence of psychotic episodes either duringthe training or among the graduates after the training than in a comparable group.

Interestingly, those graduates of the training who have experienced psychotic episodes after thetraining, report that they experienced the episode in a different way after the training than whenthey had such episodes before the training. For example, in Honolulu, at the general hospitalthere, two of the people who had psychotic episodes were graduates, as were some of thehospital staff. The graduates who had psychotic episodes said that their experience of psychosis



after the training differed from their experience of it before the training in that they had somehowgained the ability to complete their experience rather than manage it or control it, or suppress it.We could say that they seemed to move to mastery of the psychotic material rather than be theeffect of it. So it would appear that the epistemological shift at the core of the est training is onewhich can be used to recontextualize even psychotic episodes, although they are so rare in our

experience that this tentative generalization must be regarded as based on a very small sample.We are currently planning systematic controlled research on this and other issues.

The Epistemology of est

Properly speaking, est is not an epistemology, since epistemologies are ordinarily defined asways of understanding the contents of experience, and est is not about understanding the contentsof experience; it is about the source or generation of experience. We enter here into a region of discourse laden with initially baffling paradoxes, since we are dealing now with understandingunderstanding, as it were, a task perhaps not unfamiliar to psychiatry.

What makes est not simply another discipline or epistemology, as far as I can tell, is what makesrelativity and quantum mechanics different from the disciplines which preceded them and that isthat the disciplines which preceded relativity and quantum mechanics derived fromepistemologies based on the sensorium. What is very clear to me is that est is not based on thesensorium, so I employ relativity and quantum mechanics because I need examples of disciplineswhich do not derive from sense experience. There are facts in relativity which do not 'makesense' yet there is a logic in relativity which is as hard and certain as the epistemology of classical physics, without being based on sense data, although - in an expanded context - inaccord with it, i.e., allowing and even giving insight into it.

And, just as it is actually impossible to hold the data of relativistic physics in a classical context,so it is simply impossible to hold the data of est in the context of classical epistemology. In other words, I am using words derived from a prior epistemology to describe a later epistemology thatdoes not fit within the prior epistemology. This is why a good deal of what I have to say oftensounds uncomfortably paradoxical, and in some views, 'foolish'.

I am saying that what is different about the epistemology of est is that it moves beyond thesensorium to a reality which, while allowing sense experience, is not confined within it. It isneither rational, in the usual conceptual meaning of that term, nor irrational, in the usualemotional or affective meaning of that term. It is a supra-rational epistemology, beyond both of these classical alternatives. Just as we cannot reduce a relativistic space into Cartesiancoordinates of x and y, so I hold, we may not reduce the space from which epistemologiesderive, the context of epistemologies - what I call self - into classical conceptions of self, the self as a thing or as a point or at best as a process.

I do not mean to be arrogant in citing Einstein as a case in point of paradoxes of this sort. I do so because he represents the most familiar example of someone who somehow managed to conveyrelativity to a world in which there was no basis for understanding it. He often referred to the factthat it is theory which tells us what to look for, and initially put forward his theory without benefit of experimental verification. Then, when we looked, we found that light rays did bend on



their way around the sun. Somehow, he said what could not be said. Similarly, in the est training,we say things you cannot say and people get things you cannot tell them.

Now, this is not really as paradoxical as it sounds, because the truth is, although you cannot fit anexpanded context into a contracted one, you can fit a contracted context into an expanded one. It

is simply the case that most of us are very reluctant to come up with an expanded context for our experience, because we think that it invalidates our previous limited context, and thus presents athreat to what we think our survival is based on. Now, there is a paradox worth reckoning with,since, in my view, it is precisely the expansion of limiting contexts which not only vouchsafessurvival but generates those rare experiences I have referred to as moments of spontaneoustranscendence, or transformation. I mean experiences of self - not self as concept, or self as peak experience (the experience of self by self) - but the direct and unmediated experience of self asself, not limited by previous context. Or, indeed, by any context.

There you have it. For most humans, self is positional - a location in time and space - a point of view which accumulates all previous experiences and points of view. You are there and I am

here. During the training there is a shift in the way one defines oneself - not merely in the wayyou think about your definition of self - nor merely in the way you believe your self to be - but inthe actual experience of who you are as the one who defines who you are, not the definition. Asself, you are no longer a content - another thing in the context of things - but the context in whichcontexts of things occur. You become a space in which one of the things, one of the contents isyour point of view about who you are. You are no longer that point of view. You have it, as oneof the experiences you have. You experience you as the one who is experiencing you. I knowthis is an unusual way to use the words self and experience, and since I have no intention tomystify, let us move towards a schematic that may be useful in illustrating what I mean.

There is the experience of self as self, the experience of self by self, and the experience of self assymbol or thing.

If I ask you to describe what you are experiencing right now, almost everyone who decides to goalong at all, without considering whether it is possible, starts a process in which they try toarticulate what they are experiencing. That we experience is axiomatically assumed by almost allof us all of the time. It is as though it were a given. (Back in the 'old days' people may have saidsomething like, 'What I'm experiencing is that I don't like it in this room. It's terrible. The wholething is awful. I just got up on the wrong side of the bed today and nothing is going to work out.'Today we know better than that. Today we are hip. We know to describe what we areexperiencing in experiential terms, rather than in conceptual terms.) We might begin with adescription of the perception of our senses; go on to describing our body sensation; emotions andfeelings; attitudes; states of mind, 'mental states'; our fundamental approach to circumstances,and our < way of looking at things, i.e., our point of view; we might describe our motion or movement, kinesthesia; and we might describe the actual thoughts we are thinking right now;and what we are imagining or remembering. Let us locate all of these components of experiencewithin the square in figure 1.

The square itself represents the instant-by-instant nature of the experience



Fig. 1. of life - not the process, or the accumulation of these instances. The square stands for now, and then now, and then now.

Of course, when I ask you to describe what you are experiencing right now, I have actually askedyou to do the impossible. By the time you apprehend your experience - that is to say, when you

stop to see or note what it is that you are experiencing, you are no longer denoting what you areexperiencing now. You are, in fact, denoting what you experienced a moment ago. Actually, it ismore elusive than that, because experience itself has no quality of persistence. In other words,what you experienced a moment ago is now gone as experience. What remains of what youexperienced a moment ago is not experience but a record of what you did experience in thatmoment (commonly called memory). In other words, when you stop to formulate what it is youare experiencing so that you can note it and think about it or realize it or describe it, it is not onlynot now, it is not even experience. It is, in fact, merely a record of what you experienced - arecord consisting of a collection of symbols which you use to represent what you experienced.So the best you can hope to do when I ask you to describe or take note of what you areexperiencing right now is to describe or take note of the symbols of what you experienced a

moment ago. These records or symbols of experience are represented in figure 2 as a circle.

To review: The square represents the instant-by-instant process of living. It is for the most partunformulated until it is formulated as symbol in a manner dictated by our concepts and thenretained as concepts. the square represents experience or process. The circle represents symbolsand concepts. The function of the concepts (the circle) is to organize experience or process (thesquare). In other words, the function of concepts is the organization of experience intomeaningful patterns, then groups of patterns and the relationships of groups of patterns.

For example, if you were to see a ghost walking in front of you, you probably would not say,'Terrific, my first ghost'. More likely, you would say, 'I must have eaten something strange for dinner', or 'Perhaps I have been hypnotized'. In other words, your mind's concepts will organizethe raw experience -that is to say, formulate it (represent or symbolize it) so that it is consistentwith your concepts. If it were not for this organizing ability, you would grope around your ownroom to discover the way out. As a matter of fact, without this organizing ability even theexperience and the resultant idea that there was an outside of the room would occur only byaccidently falling through the doorway each time you are in a room.

So in the circle we have the organizing principles of experience or the organizing principles of process or the organizing principles of what we generally call life. Conversationally, we use theword explaining rather than organizing, so conversationally, organizing principles becomeexplanatory principles. Unfortunately, most of us make no distinction for ourselves betweenmoment-bymoment experiencing and the concepts which are records and organizations of thoseexperiences.

Our language even uses the same symbol (the word experience) for these entirely different phenomena. We say, 'I am experiencing talking to you' and 'I remember the experience of havingtalked to you'. What I really remember is the symbols and concept I used to record theexperience of talking to you, and I use the same word for both of these.



What ordinarily happens is our concepts begin to determine what we experience. These concept-determined experiences (mechanicalized experiences) then reinforce the concepts from whichthey arose, which reinforced concepts further determine experience, and so on. In thisconceptualized or mechanicalized condition of living, one is at best successful and at worst afailure or pathological. As far as I can tell, when we said something was 'wrong' with people,

what we have often attempted to do in our society was to get them to give up `bad' concepts or take on 'good' concepts. In modern therapies, we now attempt to break the hold of concepts onexperience so that people can be more directly aware of their experience and experience moredirectly.

I am suggesting a third possibility, beyond experience or process and beyond symbol or concept.The third possiblity is represented in figure 3 by the space in which the square and circle aredrawn on the page. In other words, it is the page itself. This space of the diagram represents whatI call a generating principle - that which gives rise to experience, as distinguished fromexperience/process, or the organization/explanation of experience. It is the source or creation or generation of experience or process or, if you will, life. Rather than organizing or explaining, it

generates or creates. And rather than being conceptual and symbolic, it is abstract.

In Zen, they say that those who know don't tell. What they may mean is that self as self (represented by the space of the diagram) generates experience, sources life. It does not explain itor 'organize' it. In Zen, they also say that those who tell don't know. What they mean is that self as symbol or thing (represented by the circle in the diagram) can explain it but cannot source or generate it. We all know people who can explain and rationalize their entire lives and everyoneelse's, for that matter, who do not generate real satisfaction, fulfillment or aliveness in life. At best they present a good facade.

Traditionally, the world is usually divided into two groups: people who experiential or intuitiveor feeling or emotional or non-rational and the other camp, people who are intellectual, verbal,conceptual and rational. I am suggesting a third possibility which requires a new paradigm of understanding and a logic, philosophy, language and syntax which are appropriate to it. To pointin the direction of what I mean here, I use the analogy of relativity and quantum mechanics,which required physics to generate a new paradigm not understandable in the old classical paradigm, but which is a state change or, as I prefer to call it, a transformation. Relativity andquantum mechanics also require a new logic, philosophy, language and syntax of the physicist,which in the old logic, philosophy, language and syntax sound paradoxical and irrational - butonce apprehended are seen to be fully logical, rational and consistent and even allow the oldlogic, philosophy, language and syntax - perhaps even illuminate it. This is not anti-intellectualor irrational or even non-rational. It is a kind of supra-rationality, a context in context.

The difficulty I have with the prevailing scientific epistemology is that it tends to move backwards - from content to context (from the circle to the square) which in my view forces us tolocate the source of experience in the result of experience.

I suggest there is another way and that is, to come from the source of experience - which has alogic all in its own - to experience - which too has a logic - and move on to the symbolic recordof experience - which also has a logic, or order all its own.



What we ordinarily call logic is actually a specialized logic which is consistent with asymbolized and conceptualized sense-perceived reality. It is the logic of content, object or thing -a logic of, reality of parts. There is another, separate and distinct logic which is consistent with a process (experiential-here-and-now) based reality. It could be said that this logic is consistent

with a sense-perceived reality which has not been symbolized and conceptualized. Actually, thereality with which this logic is consistent includes - in addition to sense perception - such itemsas body sensation, emotion, feeling, attitude, state of mind, movement, motion, kinesthetic,thought itself, imagination, and memory. An example of this is the logic of art, dance and musicwhich, by the way, often appears illogical and irrational when seen from the logic of thesymbolized and conceptualized sense-perceived reality. (It is a fundamental malady in our culture that as we become more enculturated we become more likely to try to make sense out of our experience-process with a logic of symbols and concepts.)

While the first of these two logics does not include the second, the second includes the first. Thatis, the second one is the context for the first one.

There is a third logic which is distinct and separate from the first and/or second of these twologics. It is even further removed from what we ordinarily call logic, and, as a matter of fact, itseems completely paradoxical, non-sensical and strange when viewed from the perspective or ordinary logics. It is a logic which is consistent with a source-of-form rather than form - source-of-time rather than time - source-of-position rather than position-based reality. It is the logic of context and creation - a logic of a reality of wholes. It is a logic of universals, of ultimatecontexts, which allows for process, change, experience, and particular sets of contents.

This logic system of self as self is not 'sensible'. It seems paradoxical, because it must speak alanguage based on a logic of the senses, in which the subject of the verb must be different fromthe object of the verb. Self as self does not 'make sense'.

Self as self is represented in figure 3 as the space or content of the diagram. The experience of self by self is represented by the square in the diagram. Self represented as symbol, or self experienced as an object or thing, is represented by the circle in the diagram. Self as self does notexplain behavior, it generates it. Self as concept does not generate life - it only explains it.Generating principles generate and explaining principles explain.

This brings us to the final notion I want to present in this essay - the notion of responsibility. Inordinary discourse, I find the idea of responsibility almost totally buried under concepts of fault,guilt, shame, burden, and blame, so that a discussion of responsibility almost invariably elicits adefensive response, as if to say, 'it wasn't my fault', or a brave, 'I did it.

And yet, the experience of responsibility for one's own experience is the awareness that I am thesource of my experience. It is absolutely inseparable from the experience of satisfaction.Satisfaction is the natural concomitant of the experience of self as generating principle or abstraction or source or cause. Only if I love you do I love you, and if I am not responsible for (the source of) loving you - then 'obviously', I am not loving you. I might have love for you or dolove for you but I am not loving you. Having or doing love can be gratifying, need-fulfilling, and



cannot be satisfying, whole or complete.

Similarly, if I am not responsible for (the source of, the cause of) my experience of the predicaments in my life, then I can only resist, fix, change, give into, win out over, or dominate.Paradoxically, the experience of helplessness or dominance results from the attempt to locate

responsibility outside of self and sets up a closed system out of which it is sometimes verydifficult to extricate a valid experience of self; since the self which might otherwise beresponsible has been excluded in the attempt to protect it from guilt, shame, blame, burden andfault.

I am sometimes asked whether I 'really' mean that people are wholly responsible for their experience of life, as if I wished to blame people in poor circumstances. For example, I am askedwhether accident victims are 'responsible' for having accidents. I hope it has become clear in thecontext I have developed above that such questions might involve an oversimplification.Responsibility, in my view, is simply the awareness that my universe ofexperience is my ownincluding the experiences of those events in my life I call accidents.

Responsibility begins with the willingness to acknowledge that my self is the source of myexperience of my circumstances. And yet, on occasion, some people think that I think accidentsdo not happen - or would not happen, if I were 'really' responsible. I am sure you will understandmy occasional dismay when I am asked questions of -this sort. On reflection, I usually recall thatsuch questions derive from a well-intentioned (though perhaps limited) view of human dignity,an intention with which I can align myself, since my own intention is precisely to show that theexperience of responsibility is enabling, not disabling.

I have no interest in the justification of circumstances or producing guilt in others by assigningobligation. I am interested in providing an opportunity for people to experience mastery in thematter of their own lives and the experience of satisfaction, fulfillment, and aliveness. These area function of the self as context rather than thing, the self as space rather than location or position, the self as cause rather than self at effect.

I am not saying that you or anyone else is responsible. Trueresponsibility cannot be assigned from outside the self by someone else or as a conclusion or belief derived from a system of concepts. I do not say that you or anyone is responsible. I do say- with me, you have the space to experience yourself as responsible - as cause in the matter of your own life. I will interact with you from my experience that you are responsible - that you arecause in your own life and you can count on me for respect and support as I am clear that I amfully responsible for my experience of you, that is to say, from my experience of the way youare.

Ultimately, one experiences oneself as the space in which one is and others are. I call this thetransformation of experience. At the level of source - or context - or abstraction - I am you. Thatis beyond responsibility.

In sum, I affirm that human experience is usually though not necessarily ensnared in a trap of itsown devising, born of a wish to survive and remain innocent. And ironically, our stubborn wish



to survive prompts us to rely on concepts of life built with records of past survivals, thusreducing self to victim, or at best to survivor or dominator, on which spectrum, every position isone of effect.

Victor Gioscia, PhD, Director of Research and Development, EST, 765 California Street, San

Francisco, CA 94108 (USA)

So, I want the reader to know that my ultimate purpose is not to tell you some facts you did notknow. I do ask you to entertain the possibility that there is something you do know, which youhave not been aware that you know. The est training is an opportunity to become aware that youknow things you did not know you knew, so it is not a 'training' in the usual `rule-learning' senseof the word, nor is it an ingraining, by repetition or any other means, of behaviors, attitudes or beliefs.

Fundamentally, then the EST training is an occasion in which participants have an experience,uniquely their own, in a situation which enables and encourages them to do that fully and

responsibly.I am suggesting that the best way to learn about EST is to look into yourself, because whatever EST is about is in your self. There are some who think that I have discovered something thatother people ought to know. That is not so. What I have discovered is that people know thingsthat they do not know that they know, the knowing of which can nurture them and satisfy themand allow them to experience an expanded sense of aliveness in their lives. The training is anoccasion for them to have that experience - to get in touch with what they actually already know but are not really aware of.

Format

The EST Standard Training is designed to be approximately 60 h long. It is usually done on twosuccessive weekends - two Saturdays and two Sundays -beginning at 9 a.m. and going untilaround midnight. Sometimes a day's session takes longer, sometimes a little less, since thesessions go until the results for that day are produced.There are breaks about every 4 h for people to go to the bathroom, have a cigarette, talk, or dowhatever they like. In addition, there is one break for a meal during the day. People usually eat breakfast before and dinner after if they are less tired than hungry. We have altered these timeson occasion to adapt, for instance, to institutional schedules. The same results have been produced doing the training over ten weekday evening sessions of 6 hours each with a break inthe middle of each session, and over three consecutive weekend sessions of 10 hours each withthree breaks including a meal break. The point is there is nothing in the duration of the trainingthat is intrinsic to the training.

Included in the tuition (now $ 300.00), in addition to the two weekends, are three optionalseminars, called the pre-training, the mid-training, and the post-training seminars. These areapproximately 3 h long, and are conducted in the evenings a few days before, between and a fewdays after the weekend training sessions.The training is held for about 250 people at a time, who are seated on chairs, arranged theater style, in a hotel ballroom. The trainer stands on a low platform in the front of the room so that the



trainer can see and be seen by everyone. There are support personnel who sit in the back of theroom, who manage the logistics of the training. For instance, they inform those participants onmedication (who sit in the back row), when it is time to take it. There are microphones, tofacilitate people who want to say something or ask a question, and everyone wears a nametag sothat the trainer can address people by name.

Sometimes people wonder about what might be called the harshness of the training - why therules are so unbending. It became very clear to me about 5 years ago that the rules in life do not bend. In other words, if I fall down, gravity does not say 'Well, we're going to relax the rules a bit since you hurt yourself. I think that it is important for people who are being given anopportunity to discover themselves, to discover for themselves that there are stableenvironments, certain facts of living, they cannot 'con' or persuade into changing for them, nomatter how pitiable they are, and no matter how intelligent and dominant they are. So the peoplewho handle the supervision of the training -the room, the number of chairs, etc. - have beentrained to be very consistent -to go by the book. The purpose of going by the book is not that wethink you ought to go by the book all the time - that kind of rigidity in a person is obviously a

mistake. It is to accentuate that the physical universe always goes by the book and that, likegravity, life does not relax the rules just because you want it to or even because you need it to.Gravity does not care, you see. It simply is. At the same time, the training is conducted with loveand compassion (not sympathy and agreement) and anyone who completes the training is clear intheir experience of this love and compassion. They know that their true power and dignity has been recognized from the very beginning of the training.

There are three relationships which develop during the course of the training which provide aframework for the material of the training. One is a relationship with the trainer, who begins thetraining with what resembles a lecture, although trainees soon realize that it is not actually alecture. To be sure, the trainer stands in front of the room talking, but he says things like 'If youexperience something completely, it disappears', and since he says that early on in the training,almost everybody thinks that it is not true. Some people reinterpret it to mean something else likethat, but not quite that, which could be true for them. In other words, people begin to develop arelationship to the trainer, who presents certain data about experiencing life, which trainees canexamine to see if what he is saying is true for them in their experience. There may be a give andtake between the participants and the trainer for a while until everyone is very clear what thetrainer said. That does not mean anyone has accepted it. In fact, people are effectively cautionedagainst merely believing anything presented in the training. It just means everone knows that iswhat the trainer said, and everyone begins to develop his or her own unique relationship with thematerial the trainer presents, by seeing the unique relevance of what the trainer has to say to hisor her own beliefs about and/or experience of living.

Another relationship which develops in the training is the trainee's relation to the group and tothe individual members of the group. This develops out of an aspect of the training we callsharing, by which we simply mean telling others what is going on in the realm of your ownexperience. Initially, people raise their hands, one of the support people brings them amicrophone, and they talk about something - be it an annoyance, or an insight, or their theory of the training, etc. Then, as the training goes on, people begin to share more fully what they areactually experiencing, until, toward the end of the training, people < become able to share in a



way we call 'getting off it' - relating things they have held on to perhaps for their entire lives -things they have been stuck with yet were unable to reveal they were holding onto, and now findthey can let go of. About a quarter of the people in a given training share meaningful things of this sort. The rest either do not share or say conceptual kinds of things.

There is no confrontation from the group to a trainee or from the trainer to a trainee except inrare instances by the trainer. We ask trainees not to evaluate, judge or analyze each other'ssharing, not to engage in a dialogue with each other, and on that basis to say whatever they haveto say to the trainer, so that the training can occur within each indidivual's own experience, rather than in others' concepts or in the dynamics of the group. Those who choose to share, do so, andthose who choose not to, find it is not required to realize the results of the training.

When people share, other trainees often find they can see their own story more vividly insomeone else's experience than they can in their own. So a large part of the value people get inthe training is the view they see of themselves in others' sharing.

The third relationship people experience in the training is an enhanced relationship tothemselves, which in part, occurs during what we call processes. These are techniques in which people switch their attention from seeing their concepts about themselves, others and life, toobserving directly their experience of themselves, others and life. This is done in an environment- or 'space' - that is safe enough for them to do that. That is, in a safe space, there is noexpectation that you prove anything, or demonstrate anything, or keep up any appearances. In asafe space, whatever is so is not used to justify or explain or be consistent with a point of view.Processes are simply an occasion to look directly into one's experience and observe what's goingon there, in safety.

For example, there is a process in which people are asked to select a problem from among thosethey have in life and to see specifically which experiences are associated with that problem -which body < sensations in which specific locations in the body, which emotions or feelings,which attitudes, states of mind, mental states or points of view, which postures, ways of holdingthemselves, gestures, ways of moving, habitual actions and countenances, which thoughts,evaluations, judgements, things they have been told or read, conclusions, reasons, explanationsand decisions, and which scenes from the past are associated with that problem. People discover remarkable things about their problems - for instance that there are body sensations felt whenand only when that problem intrudes into their lives - a fact they had not noticed before.

Some processes last for 20 min, others for 90 min. People are usually seated during them, andafterwards they are invited to communicate whatever insights or awareness they had. Ina veryreal sense, then, the trainees literally create the training for themselves.

People think there is an EST training, when in fact, there is not. There are actually as manytrainings going on in each training as there are individuals in the training, because peopleactually 'train' themselves, by handling on an individual basis those aspects of living that arecommon to all of our lives. Each part of the training becomes real for participants by virtue of experiencing themselves, not concepts derived from someone else's experience.



Thus, the training is not like a classroom in which the aim is to agree or disagree with a conceptor a theory. In the training, we present spaces, or contexts, or opportunities, in a way that allows people to discover what their actual experience is. Participants in the training report and giveevidence of obtaining value from getting beneath their concepts, their points of view, their unexamined assumptions, explanations, and justifications, to the actual experience of themselves,

others and life.

To know oneself, as Socrates suggested, does not seem to provide the experience of satisfaction -of being whole and complete if one knows oneself in the same way as one knows about things.Thus one can know about love and not know love, just as one can know all the concepts of bicycle riding without having the experience or the ability to actually ride a bicycle. The trainingis about the experience of love, the ability to love and the ability to experience being loved, notthe concept or story of it - and it is about the experience of happiness, and the ability to be happyand share happiness, not the concept, story or symbols of it. In short, the training is about whowe are, not what we do, or what we have, or what we do not do or do not have. It is about the self as the self, not merely the story or symbols of self.

People often ask if the training is something one needs. The training is not something one needs. Now this statement is usually met, if not by surprise, then with outright disbelief. For, if thetraining is not something one needs, why should one do it.

The fact is, people usually come to introductory seminars when they see that their friends or family or associates who went to the training experienced a transformation or enlightenmentwhich they themselves would like to experience. It is a natural part of the experience of transformation to share the opportunity to have the experience of transformation with others.

This becomes amusing after the people who had the hardest time understanding why their friendsor loved ones were so excited and enthusiastic and eager for them to know about the training,finally do take the training, they then meet the same bewilderment in their friends and loved oneswhen they try to share it, because now their friends insist they do not need it either.

The fact is, no one needs the training. It is not medicine. If you are ill, you need medicalattention. If you are mentally ill, you need therapy. The training is not medicine or therapy. If you are hungry, you need food. You need air. Actually you need someone to love and someoneto love you. You need to feel some self-respect and the esteem of others. Without these, we donot function very well as human beings.

The training is none of these. It does not solve problems. It is true that some problems dissolve inthe training, but not because it is the purpose of the training for people to work on their problemsin the training. The training is not about people's problems per se.

What the training is about is related to those rare moments in life, which while rare, seem tocome into everyone's life at some time or another. They are moments in which one is absolutelycomplete, whole, fulfilled - that is to say, satisfied. (I limit the word gratification to mean thefilling of a need or desire, or the achievement of a goal. I use the word satisfaction to mean theexperience of being complete.)



Each of us has experienced moments in our lives when we are fully alive -when we know -without thinking - that life is exactly as it is in this moment. In such moments, we have no wishfor it to be different, or better, or more. We have no disappointment, no comparison with ideals,no sense that it is not what we worked for. We feel no protective or defensive urge - and have nodesire to hold on - to store up - or to save. Such moments are perfect in themselves. We

experience them as being complete.

We do not need to experience completion. People function successfully without such moments.Like the training, such moments are not something we `should' have. Like the training, suchmoments do not make us any better. We are not smarter or sexier or more successful or richer or any more clever. These moments, these experiences of being complete, are sufficient untothemselves. Like the training, such moments are not even 'good' for you - like vitamins or exercise or things of that sort.

In the training, one finds there is something beyond that - the opportunity to discover that spacewithin yourself where such moments originate, actually where you and life originate. In the

training, one experiences a transformation -a shift from being a character in the story of life to being the space in which the story occurs - the playwright creating the play, as it were,consciously, freely, and completely.

Because the experience of being complete is a state change from the rest of life, the questionsand instruments we usually apply to measure life do not apply. We shall need to develop a wholenew set of questions - a new paradigm to approach the experience of being complete.

In the training, the experience of being at the effect of life - of having been put here, and havingto suffer the circumstances of life, of being the bearer or victim of life, or at best, of succeedingor winning out over the burdens of life -shifts to an experience of originating life the way it is -creating your experience as you live it - in a space uniquely your own.

In that space, the problems of life take on an entirely different significance. They literally pale,that is, become lighter - or enlightened. One sees, quite sharply, that who one is simplytranscends and contextualizes the content with which one has been concerned. The living of life begins to be what counts, the zest or vivacity with which one lives, what matters.

It has been said that this is a polyanna view - that I think there's no pain and suffering in life.That is not my view at all. There is no doubt whatsoever in my experience and observation that people do suffer, that there is pain in life. If we were to sit quietly in an empty room for a fewminutes looking at what we do and how we live, and at how much time we spend doing thingsthat we pretend are important to us, most of us would find that we spend more time pretendingnot to suffer than in creating the experience of our lives.

In my observation of life, I find that during most of the time we are interacting with others, weare pretending, and we get so proficient at pretending that we eventually no longer even noticethat we are pretending. We become 'unconscious' of pretending. We forget that the actualexperience of loving someone - in contrast to the pretense or concept of loving someone, or the'act' or drama of loving someone - leaves one absolutely high, vivacious, and alive.



Yet, each of us behaves as if we were really three people. First, there is the one we pretend to be. No one escapes this. Every one of us has an act - a front - a facade - a mask we wear in the worldthat tells the world who we are pretending to be. We think we need this to get along in life and besuccessful.

Underneath that mask is the person we are afraid we are - the person who thinks those small,nasty, brutish thoughts we try to hide, because we think we are the only one who thinks them,until we are willing to accept that we do actually think them, and only then notice everyone elsedoes too. Until we confront our own smallness, we do not experience our real size. The truth is,we can only be as high as we can confront and take responsibility for being low.

I am suggesting that it is useful from time to time to get in touch with why it is we have to beintelligent or successful or wonderful or kind. I am suggesting that when we look underneath thefacade we present, we will find a cluster of thoughts, emotions, attitudes, etc. which are the exactopposite to what we have presented. All of us who are given credit for being intelligent have

feelings, thoughts, etc. of stupidity and ignorance. All of us who are given credit for beingwonderful have doubts. In my observation (which includes a fairly intimate interaction with over 90,000 people) we all have doubts about the authenticity of the way we present ourselves in theworld.

Some people find this idea annoying. If you have spent your whole life proving you are not afool, it is annoying to be called a fool. (A fool is one caught in his own pretense.) We are all verycareful not to make fools of ourselves or not be fooled. Many see it as the ultimate disgrace.Only a fool pretending not to be a fool would be afraid of making a fool of himself. A fool presenting himself as a fool would have no problem with it, just as one who knows he is not afool would have no problem making a fool of himself. Similarly, a man secure in his masculinityhas no problem expressing feminine qualities. Each time we try to prove we are not fools wereinforce the belief that we must prove that we are not.

Underneath these two 'selves' - the 'front' and the 'hidden' - is the one we really are - under theone we work at being, the one we try to be, the one we are pretending to be, and underneath theone we do not want to be, the one we are avoiding being, and the one we fear we are. The extentto which we can allow ourselves to confront - to experience and be responsible for - the pretenseand trying, the avoidance and fear, is the extent to which we can be who we really are.

The experience of being yourself is innately satisfying. If who you really are does not give youthe experience of health, happiness, love and full self-expression - or 'aliveness' - then that is notwho you really are. When you experience yourself as yourself, that experience is innatelysatisfying. The experience of the self as the self is the experience of satisfaction. Nothing more,nothing less.

Satisfaction is not 'out there'. It cannot be brought in. You will never get satisfied. It cannot bedone. When you want more and different or better, that is gratification, and while that isgratifying, we always want even more or even better. Satisfaction is completion, being complete- what has been called 'the peace that passeth all understanding'. It is a condition of well-being - a



sense of wholeness and of being complete right now - a context of certainty that right now iscompletely all right as right now and that the next moment will similarly be, fully itself. Not a judgment of good or bad, right or wrong, just what is.

I do not refer to smugness or to naivete, or to a preoccupation with self achieved by shutting out

the world. I do not mean narcissism. I refer to the quality of participation which generatesenthusiasm in its performance and in its beholders. I refer to the kind of invigorating vitality thatmakes a difference in the world. Most of those who explain what we ought to do in the world donot make a difference in the world.

To summarize what happens in the est training, then, I would say the following. It is atransformation - a contextual shift from a state in which the content in your life is organizedaround the attempt to get satisfied or to survive - to attain satisfaction - or to protect or hold on towhat you have got - to an experience of being satisfied, right now, and organizing the content of your life as an expression, manifestation and sharing of the experience of being satisfied, of being whole and complete, now. One is aware of that part of oneself which experiences

satisfaction - the self itself, whole, complete, and entire.The natural state of the self is satisfaction.

You do not have to get there. You cannot get there. You have only to 'realize' your self, and, asyou do, you are satisfied. Then it is natural and spontaneous to express that in life and share thatopportunity with others.

This explains, I think, the fact that people from all walks of life take the training, so that, with theexception that the group of graduates includes a higher percentage than the average population of better educated people and therefore the group also includes a higher percentage than usual of professionals, they are representative of the community at large. I say 'explains' with tongue incheek of course, for by now you will have perceived that the only quality one must have to 'get'the est training is self.

So everyone 'gets' it, that is, has an experience of self as self. A few 'desist' because they have patterns of resistance that they are now completing (rather than dramatizing or reinforcing) as a part of expressing their being complete. Some do not 'like' it, others delay their acceptance, bothalso patterns now to be completed. Even these, in my experience, have it, and are covering itover, for a while, with considerations, explanations, or other contents which they are completing.

This is not a matter of concern to us, since the principal intended result of the est training is ashift in the person's relationship to their system of knowing contents, or technically a shift intheir epistemology. Thus, the contents of people's lives are not worked on per se during thetraining, since it is not the purpose of the training to alter the circumstances of lives or to alter peoples' attitudes or point(s) of view about the circumstances of their lives. It is the purpose of the training to allow people to see that the circumstances of their lives and that their attitudesabout the circumstances of their lives exist in a context or a system of knowing, and that it is possible to have exactly the same circumstances and attitudes about these circumstances held in adifferent context, and that, as a matter of fact, it is possible for people to choose their owncontext for the contents of their lives. People come out of the training 'knowing' that in a new



way. Now I mean something larger than 'knowing' or understanding. I mean that peopleexperience being empowered or enabled in that respect. They no longer are their point of view.They have one, and know that the one they have is the the one they chose, until now, and thatthey can, and probably will, choose to create other points of view. They experience, that is, thatthey are the one who defines the point of view, and not the reverse. They experience the intended

result of the training, which is a shift in what orients people's being from the attempt to gainsatisfaction - a deficiency orientation - to the expression of satisfaction already beingexperienced - a sufficiency orientation.

This is so even for the experience of psychosis. In our research , we have asked independentinvestigators to look very carefully at the issue of harm. And while I am not fully qualified todiscuss the intricacies of research , I can report that none of the research has shown any evidencethat est produces harm. Now, although it has not proven that est does not harm, it is noteworthythat investigators asked to look carefully at this question have not found evidence of harm. Everyindication we have suggests that there is a lower incidence of psychotic episodes either duringthe training or among the graduates after the training than in a comparable group.

Interestingly, those graduates of the training who have experienced psychotic episodes after thetraining, report that they experienced the episode in a different way after the training than whenthey had such episodes before the training. For example, in Honolulu, at the general hospitalthere, two of the people who had psychotic episodes were graduates, as were some of thehospital staff. The graduates who had psychotic episodes said that their experience of psychosisafter the training differed from their experience of it before the training in that they had somehowgained the ability to complete their experience rather than manage it or control it, or suppress it.We could say that they seemed to move to mastery of the psychotic material rather than be theeffect of it. So it would appear that the epistemological shift at the core of the est training is onewhich can be used to recontextualize even psychotic episodes, although they are so rare in our experience that this tentative generalization must be regarded as based on a very small sample.We are currently planning systematic controlled research on this and other issues.

The Epistemology of est

Properly speaking, est is not an epistemology, since epistemologies are ordinarily defined asways of understanding the contents of experience, and est is not about understanding the contentsof experience; it is about the source or generation of experience. We enter here into a region of discourse laden with initially baffling paradoxes, since we are dealing now with understandingunderstanding, as it were, a task perhaps not unfamiliar to psychiatry.

What makes est not simply another discipline or epistemology, as far as I can tell, is what makesrelativity and quantum mechanics different from the disciplines which preceded them and that isthat the disciplines which preceded relativity and quantum mechanics derived fromepistemologies based on the sensorium. What is very clear to me is that est is not based on thesensorium, so I employ relativity and quantum mechanics because I need examples of disciplineswhich do not derive from sense experience. There are facts in relativity which do not 'makesense' yet there is a logic in relativity which is as hard and certain as the epistemology of classical physics, without being based on sense data, although - in an expanded context - in



accord with it, i.e., allowing and even giving insight into it.

And, just as it is actually impossible to hold the data of relativistic physics in a classical context,so it is simply impossible to hold the data of est in the context of classical epistemology. In other words, I am using words derived from a prior epistemology to describe a later epistemology that

does not fit within the prior epistemology. This is why a good deal of what I have to say oftensounds uncomfortably paradoxical, and in some views, 'foolish'.

I am saying that what is different about the epistemology of est is that it moves beyond thesensorium to a reality which, while allowing sense experience, is not confined within it. It isneither rational, in the usual conceptual meaning of that term, nor irrational, in the usualemotional or affective meaning of that term. It is a supra-rational epistemology, beyond both of these classical alternatives. Just as we cannot reduce a relativistic space into Cartesiancoordinates of x and y, so I hold, we may not reduce the space from which epistemologiesderive, the context of epistemologies - what I call self - into classical conceptions of self, the self as a thing or as a point or at best as a process.

I do not mean to be arrogant in citing Einstein as a case in point of paradoxes of this sort. I do so because he represents the most familiar example of someone who somehow managed to conveyrelativity to a world in which there was no basis for understanding it. He often referred to the factthat it is theory which tells us what to look for, and initially put forward his theory without benefit of experimental verification. Then, when we looked, we found that light rays did bend ontheir way around the sun. Somehow, he said what could not be said. Similarly, in the est training,we say things you cannot say and people get things you cannot tell them.

Now, this is not really as paradoxical as it sounds, because the truth is, although you cannot fit anexpanded context into a contracted one, you can fit a contracted context into an expanded one. Itis simply the case that most of us are very reluctant to come up with an expanded context for our experience, because we think that it invalidates our previous limited context, and thus presents athreat to what we think our survival is based on. Now, there is a paradox worth reckoning with,since, in my view, it is precisely the expansion of limiting contexts which not only vouchsafessurvival but generates those rare experiences I have referred to as moments of spontaneoustranscendence, or transformation. I mean experiences of self - not self as concept, or self as peak experience (the experience of self by self) - but the direct and unmediated experience of self asself, not limited by previous context. Or, indeed, by any context.

There you have it. For most humans, self is positional - a location in time and space - a point of view which accumulates all previous experiences and points of view. You are there and I amhere. During the training there is a shift in the way one defines oneself - not merely in the wayyou think about your definition of self - nor merely in the way you believe your self to be - but inthe actual experience of who you are as the one who defines who you are, not the definition. Asself, you are no longer a content - another thing in the context of things - but the context in whichcontexts of things occur. You become a space in which one of the things, one of the contents isyour point of view about who you are. You are no longer that point of view. You have it, as oneof the experiences you have. You experience you as the one who is experiencing you. I knowthis is an unusual way to use the words self and experience, and since I have no intention to



mystify, let us move towards a schematic that may be useful in illustrating what I mean.There is the experience of self as self, the experience of self by self, and the experience of self assymbol or thing.

If I ask you to describe what you are experiencing right now, almost everyone who decides to go

along at all, without considering whether it is possible, starts a process in which they try toarticulate what they are experiencing. That we experience is axiomatically assumed by almost allof us all of the time. It is as though it were a given. (Back in the 'old days' people may have saidsomething like, 'What I'm experiencing is that I don't like it in this room. It's terrible. The wholething is awful. I just got up on the wrong side of the bed today and nothing is going to work out.'Today we know better than that. Today we are hip. We know to describe what we areexperiencing in experiential terms, rather than in conceptual terms.) We might begin with adescription of the perception of our senses; go on to describing our body sensation; emotions andfeelings; attitudes; states of mind, 'mental states'; our fundamental approach to circumstances,and our way of looking at things, i.e., our point of view; we might describe our motion or movement, kinesthesia; and we might describe the actual thoughts we are thinking right now;

and what we are imagining or remembering. Let us locate all of these components of experiencewithin the square in figure 1.

The square itself represents the instant-by-instant nature of the experience of life - not the process, or the accumulation of these instances. The square stands for now, and then now, andthen now.

Of course, when I ask you to describe what you are experiencing right now, I have actually askedyou to do the impossible. By the time you apprehend your experience - that is to say, when youstop to see or note what it is that you are experiencing, you are no longer denoting what you areexperiencing now. You are, in fact, denoting what you experienced a moment ago. Actually, it ismore elusive than that, because experience itself has no quality of persistence. In other words,what you experienced a moment ago is now gone as experience. What remains of what youexperienced a moment ago is not experience but a record of what you did experience in thatmoment (commonly called memory). In other words, when you stop to formulate what it is youare experiencing so that you can note it and think about it or realize it or describe it, it is not onlynot now, it is not even experience. It is, in fact, merely a record of what you experienced - arecord consisting of a collection of symbols which you use to represent what you experienced.So the best you can hope to do when I ask you to describe or take note of what you areexperiencing right now is to describe or take note of the symbols of what you experienced amoment ago. These records or symbols of experience are represented in figure 2 as a circle.

To review: The square represents the instant-by-instant process of living. It is for the most partunformulated until it is formulated as symbol in a manner dictated by our concepts and thenretained as concepts. the square represents experience or process. The circle represents symbolsand concepts. The function of the concepts (the circle) is to organize experience or process (thesquare). In other words, the function of concepts is the organization of experience intomeaningful patterns, then groups of patterns and the relationships of groups of patterns.

For example, if you were to see a ghost walking in front of you, you probably would not say,



'Terrific, my first ghost'. More likely, you would say, 'I must have eaten something strange for dinner', or 'Perhaps I have been hypnotized'. In other words, your mind's concepts will organizethe raw experience -that is to say, formulate it (represent or symbolize it) so that it is consistentwith your concepts. If it were not for this organizing ability, you would grope around your ownroom to discover the way out. As a matter of fact, without this organizing ability even the

experience and the resultant idea that there was an outside of the room would occur only byaccidently falling through the doorway each time you are in a room.

So in the circle we have the organizing principles of experience or the organizing principles of process or the organizing principles of what we generally call life. Conversationally, we use theword explaining rather than organizing, so conversationally, organizing principles becomeexplanatory principles. Unfortunately, most of us make no distinction for ourselves betweenmoment-by moment experiencing and the concepts which are records and organizations of thoseexperiences. Our language even uses the same symbol (the word experience) for these entirelydifferent phenomena. We say, 'I am experiencing talking to you' and 'I remember the experienceof having talked to you'. What I really remember is the symbols and concept I used to record the

experience of talking to you, and I use the same word for both of these.

What ordinarily happens is our concepts begin to determine what we experience. These concept-determined experiences (mechanicalized experiences) then reinforce the concepts from whichthey arose, which reinforced concepts further determine experience, and so on. In thisconceptualized or mechanicalized condition of living, one is at best successful and at worst afailure or pathological.< As far as I can tell, when we said something was 'wrong' with people,what we have often attempted to do in our society was to get them to give up `bad' concepts or take on 'good' concepts. In modern < therapies, we now attempt to break the hold of concepts onexperience so that people can be more directly aware of their experience and experience moredirectly.

I am suggesting a third possibility, beyond experience or process and beyond symbol or concept.The third possiblity is represented in figure 3 by the space in which the square and circle aredrawn on the page. In other words, it is the page itself. This space of the diagram represents whatI call a generating principle - that which gives rise to experience, as distinguished fromexperience/process, or the organization/explanation of experience. It is the source or creation or generation of experience or process or, if you will, life. Rather than organizing or explaining, itgenerates or creates. And rather than being conceptual and symbolic, it is abstract.

In Zen, they say that those who know don't tell. What they may mean is that self as self (represented by the space of the diagram) generates experience, sources life. It does not explain itor 'organize' it. In Zen, they also say that those who tell don't know. What they mean is that self as symbol or thing (represented by the circle in the diagram) can explain it but cannot source or generate it. We all know people who can explain and rationalize their entire lives and everyoneelse's, for that matter, who do not generate real satisfaction, fulfillment or aliveness in life. At best they present a good facade.

Traditionally, the world is usually divided into two groups: people who experiential or intuitiveor feeling or emotional or non-rational and the other camp, people who are intellectual, verbal,



conceptual and rational. I am suggesting a third possibility which requires a new paradigm of understanding and a logic, philosophy, language and syntax which are appropriate to it. To pointin the direction of what I mean here, I use the analogy of relativity and quantum mechanics,which required physics to generate a new paradigm not understandable in the old classical paradigm, but which is a state change or, as I prefer to call it, a transformation. Relativity and

quantum mechanics also require a new logic, philosophy, language and syntax of the physicist,which in the old logic, philosophy, language and syntax sound paradoxical and irrational - butonce apprehended are seen to be fully logical, rational and consistent and even allow the oldlogic, philosophy, language and syntax - perhaps even illuminate it. This is not anti-intellectualor irrational or even non-rational. It is a kind of supra-rationality, a context in context.

The difficulty I have with the prevailing scientific epistemology is that it tends to move backwards - from content to context (from the circle to the square) which in my view forces us tolocate the source of experience in the result of experience.

I suggest there is another way and that is, to come from the source of experience - which has a

logic all in its own - to experience - which too has a logic - and move on to the symbolic recordof experience - which also has a logic, or order all its own.

What we ordinarily call logic is actually a specialized logic which is consistent with asymbolized and conceptualized sense-perceived reality. It is the logic of content, object or thing -a logic of, reality of parts. There is another, separate and distinct logic which is consistent with a process (experiential-here-and-now) based reality. It could be said that this logic is consistentwith a sense-perceived reality which has not been symbolized and conceptualized. Actually, thereality with which this logic is consistent includes - in addition to sense perception - such itemsas body sensation, emotion, feeling, attitude, state of mind, movement, motion, kinesthetic,thought itself, imagination, and memory. An example of this is the logic of art, dance and musicwhich, by the way, often appears illogical and irrational when seen from the logic of thesymbolized and conceptualized sense-perceived reality. (It is a fundamental malady in our culture that as we become more enculturated we become more likely to try to make sense out of our experience-process with a logic of symbols and concepts.)

While the first of these two logics does not include the second, the second includes the first. Thatis, the second one is the context for the first one.

There is a third logic which is distinct and separate from the first and/or second of these twologics. It is even further removed from what we ordinarily call logic, and, as a matter of fact, itseems completely paradoxical, non-sensical and strange when viewed from the < perspective or ordinary logics. It is a logic which is consistent with a source-of-form rather than form - source-of-time rather than time - source-of-position rather than position-based reality. It is the logic of context and creation - a logic of a reality of wholes. It is a logic of universals, of ultimatecontexts, which allows for process, change, experience, and particular sets of contents.

This logic system of self as self is not 'sensible'. It seems paradoxical, because it must speak alanguage based on a logic of the senses, in which the subject of the verb must be different fromthe object of the verb. Self as self does not 'make sense'.



Self as self is represented in figure 3 as the space or content of the diagram. The experience of self by self is represented by the square in the diagram. Self represented as symbol, or self experienced as an object or thing, is represented by the circle in the diagram. Self as self does notexplain behavior, it generates it. Self as concept does not generate life - it only explains it.

Generating principles generate and explaining principles explain.

This brings us to the final notion I want to present in this essay - the notion of responsibility. Inordinary discourse, I find the idea of responsibility almost totally buried under concepts of fault,guilt, shame, burden, and blame, so that a discussion of responsibility almost invariably elicits adefensive response, as if to say, 'it wasn't my fault', or a brave, 'I did it.

And yet, the experience of responsibility for one's own experience is the awareness that I am thesource of my experience. It is absolutely inseparable from the experience of satisfaction.Satisfaction is the natural concomitant of the experience of self as generating principle or abstraction or source or cause. Only if I love you do I love you, and if I am not responsible for

(the source of) loving you - then 'obviously', I am not loving you. I might have love for you or dolove for you but I am not loving you. Having or doing love can be gratifying, need-fulfilling, andcannot be satisfying, whole or complete.

Similarly, if I am not responsible for (the source of, the cause of) my experience of the predicaments in my life, then I can only resist, fix, change, give into, win out over, or dominate.Paradoxically, the experience of helplessness or dominance results from the attempt to locateresponsibility outside of self and sets up a closed system out of which it is sometimes verydifficult to extricate a valid experience of self; since the self which might otherwise beresponsible has been excluded in the attempt to protect it from guilt, shame, blame, burden andfault.

I am sometimes asked whether I 'really' mean that people are wholly responsible for their experience of life, as if I wished to blame people in poor circumstances. For example, I am askedwhether accident victims are 'responsible' for having accidents. I hope it has become clear in thecontext I have developed above that such questions might involve an oversimplification.Responsibility, in my view, is simply the awareness that my universe ofexperience is my ownincluding the experiences of those events in my life I call accidents.

Responsibility begins with the willingness to acknowledge that my self is the source of myexperience of my circumstances. And yet, on occasion, some people think that I think accidentsdo not happen - or would not happen, if I were 'really' responsible. I am sure you will understandmy occasional dismay when I am asked questions of -this sort. On reflection, I usually recall thatsuch questions derive from a well-intentioned (though perhaps limited) view of human dignity,an intention with which I can align myself, since my own intention is precisely to show that theexperience of responsibility is enabling, not disabling.

I have no interest in the justification of circumstances or producing guilt in others by assigningobligation. I am interested in providing an opportunity for people to experience mastery in thematter of their own lives and the experience of satisfaction, fulfillment, and aliveness. These are



a function of the self as context rather than thing, the self as space rather than location or position, the self as cause rather than self at effect.

I am not saying that you or anyone else is responsible. True responsibility cannot be assignedfrom outside the self by someone else or as a conclusion or belief derived from a system of

concepts. I do not say that you or anyone is responsible. I do say - with me, you have the space toexperience yourself as responsible - as cause in the matter of your own life. I will interact withyou from my experience that you are responsible - that you are cause in your own life and youcan count on me for respect and support as I am clear that I am fully responsible for myexperience of you, that is to say, from my experience of the way you are.

Ultimately, one experiences oneself as the space in which one is and others are. I call this thetransformation of experience. At the level of source - or context - or abstraction - I am you. Thatis beyond responsibility.

In sum, I affirm that human experience is usually though not necessarily ensnared in a trap of its

own devising, born of a wish to survive and remain innocent. And ironically, our stubborn wishto survive prompts us to rely on concepts of life built with records of past survivals, thusreducing self to victim, or at best to survivor or dominator, on which spectrum, every position isone of effect.

Victor Gioscia, PhD, Director of Research and Development

© Copyright 2008 - 2010 Werner Erhard

WERNER ERHARD

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You Don't Alter What You Know,You Alter The Way You Know It

A CONVERSATION WITH WERNER ERHARD about The est Training, philosophy,

"enlightenment," authoritarianism and legitimate authority, arrogance, leadership, and vision.

The Network Review, Volume 1 Number 4, September 1983

From their base at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, members of theCenter for the Study of New Religious Movements have been exploring ways to evaluate theconfusing array of activities they define as spiritual, self development, or consciousness oriented.A continuing seminar at the Center has worked on criteria which lay people and professionalscan use to discriminate between harmful and helpful conditions in groups pursuing suchactivities.

Werner and 17 members of the seminar met in April 1981 to discuss some of the distinctions between authoritarianism and legitimate authority. The conversation covered other topics aswell, and the seminar leader, Dick Anthony, later commented that it was "one of the importantturning points in our meetings.” An edited transcript of the interview is scheduled to appear in a book, Spiritual Standards for New Age Groups and Therapies, due to be published next spring.While The est Training is not a therapy or a religion, the conversation between Werner andmembers of the seminar clearly applies to the issues raised by the book, and to everyday living.

JOHN WELWOOD: I have questions about whether The est Training is a quasi religious phenomenon. I've known a lot of people who've done it, and I've been impressed with the factthat it helps make their lives more workable. But then there's something else that seems a little bit suspect to me, which is that they seem to have a certain kind of-

WERNER ERHARD: Fervor?

JOHN: Fervor, yes, and also a certain arrogance, as if this were it as if The est Training wereeverything, including a substitute for any other spiritual practice or meditation, or any kind of transpersonal and transcendental path. I wonder if you could comment on that.

WERNER: It's helpful to recognize right away that the training is not the end of anything, or substitute for another path to some end point. Interpreting it as either of those will skew your assessment of it. At most, the training is a way to examine whatever path you happen to be on; but the training doesn't tell anyone what the path is, or what it should be.

So far, it looks like it's working that way, too. People who take the training haven't reported to usthat they got any kind of end or answer out of it. Also, the research done so far on the results of the training indicates very strongly that results occur over time, that whatever occurs in thetraining is an ongoing process, and that the only ingredients, necessary to keep that process goingafter the training are the normal, everyday circumstances of life.



The most difficult part of this whole process for some people comes just after they complete thetraining. And I'll tell you what, in part anyway, makes that so.

I remember the first time I swam underwater with a mask, in water clear enough to be able tosee. For three days afterwards, whenever I closed my eyes, I saw what I had seen underwater. I

talked about that experience to everybody; it had been very moving for me. Since then, I've hadone or two other experiences like that, and I've behaved the same way when they happened. Over time, I'd integrate the experience, and instead of bringing it up all the time, I'd start bringing it uponly when it was appropriate. So, I think people's reactions when they first get out of the trainingare related to that kind of enthusiasm for the experience they've had.

JOHN: Are you saying that what people get out of the training is equivalent to some kind of enlightenment experience, that there are transcendental realizations, and that it's a substitute for what we normally would think of as religious or spiritual goals?

WERNER: No. First. I wouldn't say that it's a substitute for anything, and second, I wouldn't say

that it's religious at all. I also think most religions aren't very religious. So with respect to thereligion issue, let's talk first about the practices associated with religion, then let's talk about the"truth" of religion.I don't think that the training has any of the practices of a religious exercise, at least not the way Isee religion being practiced. There is no worship in the training, no theological body of knowledge, no particular dogma or code of beliefs to be propagated, and a long fist of other differences which, I think, clearly distinguish the training from what we commonly think of asreligious practice.

Of course, the practices of religion are not the whole story of religion. There is also the "truth" of religion, the "nature" of it, so to speak. Without getting into a long discourse on what religion provides for people, my assertion is that the training provides a fundamentally differentexperience from what religion is intended to provide. The training simply provides anopportunity for people to discover, or in some cases recover, their own natural ability todiscriminate effectively between the different ways that you and I can know and can be.

People express a lot of things in the training, and the training is designed to deal with thoseexpressions so that people can get a different grip on them. For example, a person might findhimself or herself operating in life as if they were obliged in some way to respond to somethingwhich to them seems real. As they participate in the training, they may discover that this"something" is not a concrete reality at all but is only a memory, recent, distant, it doesn't matter;it's still just a memory. That discovery allows the person to behave appropriately to the"something" rather than inappropriately to it. We call that "completing the experience." Whatoccurs, simply, is a shift in the epistemological domain, from a place where there's nodiscrimination about something to a place where there is discrimination. What is known is notaltered; the way it is known is altered.

So, to answer your question, I'd say that people in the training experience some enthusiasm,which is natural; it happens to everybody not just in the training when they have an excitingexperience. Nothing pernicious about that. Then there's something like fervor, which can have



elements of perniciousness in it; and as far as we can tell, that's a phase through which many people go but in which almost no one seems to get stuck. People seem to go through it fairlyquickly, but, unfortunately, with a very high profile. If we had our choice, we'd rather that phasewere a little more quiet.

JOHN: What I'm trying to get at is your view of whether or not what people get from the trainingis somehow equivalent to what in Zen, for instance, would be called enlightenment.

WERNER: You're not going to trap me into saying that, because that's nonsense. It's the samekind of nonsense that keeps people from realizing that they're already enlightened.

Here's an observation that I know will parallel what you've seen. People are willing to give upanything to get enlightened. You and I both know people who've given up wealth, given up jobs,families, their health people will give up anything to get enlightened. Give up talking, give upsex, give up you name it, they will give it up. There's only one thing people will not give up toget enlightened. They will do everything they know to hold on to this thing that they will not

give up no matter what. The one thing people will not give up to get enlightened is the idea thatthey're not enlightened. That's the big holdout, not anything else.

JOHN: In the traditions there's a lot of warning about thinking that you're enlightened, that that'sone of the greatest dangers of them all.

WERNER: Yes, it is. Yes.

JOHN: It's equivalent. You could get that in two weekends?

WERNER: Yes, it is equivalent, and no, you can't get it in two weekends. If it takes twoweekends, you didn't get enlightened. Enlightenment does not take two weekends.Enlightenment takes no time. The two weekends are a waste of time. If we could eliminate those,and just have the enlightenment we would do that. By the way, I know that lots of people areinfuriated by the suggestion that enlightenment is possible without long practice and greatstruggle. I consider the notion of the necessity of practice and struggle to be nothing more than anotion. It may be a notion borne out by lots of experience, but so was the notion that the earth isflat.

JOHN: Well, the Buddhists, for example, would say that your true nature is enlightened already, but nonetheless, you still have to practice because there's a long path to realization. We can act asthough we're enlightened, but there's still some kind of realization that has to happen, over a long period. You can even have enlightenment experiences, but they're not particularly trusted.

WERNER: I agree with everything you've said, and I'm not simply being nice about it. What yousaid actually reflects my own experience and my own observations. At the same time, I know it's possible to put the end of the process at the beginning, and then do the process.

JOHN: So, just to get it on the record, you are saying that the training does the same thing as thespiritual traditions



WERNER: Discussing enlightenment or thinking about enlightenment is not enlightenment. Infact, we don't talk about enlightenment in the training very much at all. We do talk about it, butnot much.

JOHN: I'm wondering why you're avoiding the question of whether this is the same kind of enlightenment that's talked about in the spiritual traditions.

WERNER: Because those who know don't tell, and those who tell don't know.

DICK ANTHONY: I'd always heard that the training does seem to claim that it providessomething that is the equivalent of enlightenment, and is just as serious an experience, just asserious or valuable a state as is provided in Zen or Hindu traditions, and I thought that that wasimplausible, that it must be some kind of exaggeration.

WERNER: Well, I have never said that, nor would I say it.

DICK: But when I went through the training-

WERNER: Nor would I say the opposite was true.

DICK: When I went through the training, the trainer did in fact seem to be saying that. I don'tknow if that was an eccentric trainer, but in fact, that was my understanding, and it was theunderstanding of the other people in the training that I talked to, that this man was telling us thatwhat was happening to us was enlightenment, and was just as genuine an enlightenment ashappened in any Zen monastery or up in the Himalayas, and that there were no degrees of enlightenment; it was enlightenment. Now, that seems like an outrageous claim to me; much of what goes on in that training seems outrageous to me. Now, if I understand that to be what theclaim is, then I don't think that I agree with it.

WERNER: As far as I know, that claim is not made. I appreciate that you were there and Iwasn't. I still don't think it was made. The reason I don't think so is that I've listened to manyhours of trainers doing the training, and they don't make that claim. At the same time, I dounderstand how you could come to that conclusion.

But none of that is the point. The point is this: I think that discussions about enlightenment areuseless, and I think making enlightenment sacred is even more futile. My question is, what's allthis conversation about?

What I'm trying to get across is that the structure of your questions and our conversation doesn'tallow for enlightenment. We're not really talking about anything. I don't know how else torespond to you. You can't ask, "Is this enlightenment like that enlightenment?" That's countingenlightenments. That's nuts! That's truly nuts!

JOHN: Would the training then be a substitute for any other spiritual practice?



WERNER: No! That's craziness, that one thing substitutes for another. In the realm of enlightenment, there aren't substitutions. That kind of mentality can't hold enlightenment.

JOHN: Would there by any value, for example, in meditating and practicing

WERNER: One of our trainers is a Zen Buddhist. He goes away and spends long times sitting,meditating and practicing.

JOHN: Why would he do that if he's done the training?

WERNER: He would do that because he's done the training. Look, can't you hear what you'resaying? You keep saying that one thing substitutes for another thing; your notions aboutenlightenment are all tied up with exclusivity and ideas about "one path" and "if this, then whythat?" and ideas that there's someplace to get to. None of that is the way enlightenment works.You need to go back to whomever is talking to you about enlightenment and get them to talk toyou about it some more. You're talking about it inaccurately. I'm not kidding. In Suzuki Roshi's

book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, he said if you are enlightened, then you're out doing whatenlightens people. Enlightenment is not a stage you reach, and your statements seem to comefrom the idea that enlightenment is a place you reach. There's no such thing as enlightenment toget to.

JOHN: Where my question comes from is my perception of some people I've seen-

WERNER: The arrogance.

JOHN: Yes, and smugness, like: "We've done it. This is it, you don't need to do any of that other stuff. This is the whole thing."

WERNER: No, no, no, no. I can't imagine anybody saying that they don't need to do that other stuff, since people who've completed the training we poll them every once in a while to find outwhat they're doing report that they are doing all that other stuff.

Half the room here has taken the training. Right here in this room are those arrogant peopleyou're talking about. I want to find the person who says to me, "This is the only thing." All I canfind are people who say, "I know people who say that this is the only thing." They've got to betalking about somebody and I'm trying to find that person. The people in here who havecompleted the training don't think that it's the only thing. I certainly don't think it is.

So let me try to answer in this way. The arrogance that you perceive, I think, is there. The degreeto which you think it's there, I don't think it's there. That is to say, I don't think it's something to be overly concerned about, but maybe that's because I've watched people from the time they getout of the training. I go out of my way to make sure I have interactions with people whocompleted the training early, in 1971, '72, '73, and '74, just to watch what's happening to those people. I had a gathering in the country to which we invited those people. The result was veryinteresting. I could remember when those people were talking about the training, and "thetraining" was every third word. This time nobody even mentioned it. Yes, they looked great: they



talked about the things they were doing, and how wonderful things were; but nobody mentionedthe training.

It's like the stink of Zen. There's the stink of est. The question is not whether the stink exists, butwhether it's pernicious and whether it's long lasting. As far as I can tell, the answer is no to both

questions. I keep watching, because there's always the possibility for the answer to become yes.

As to the discussion about the real nature of it, is it really enlightenment yes, it's reallyenlightenment. So is sitting in a room. Here. This is enlightenment. You think I'm just sayingthat. I actually mean it. You think that's some philosophy. It isn't. I think many enlightenmentgames are pointless because they're all about getting enlightened. Getting enlightened is a cheat, because the more you do of that, the more the message is that you aren't enlightened. Clearly, the practice is necessary. The practice of enlightenment is necessary, but it can be done from beingenlightened, rather than getting enlightened. When you do the practice from being enlightened,then each one of the steps becomes a step in the expression of the enlightenment.

JOHN: What's the difference between being "totally enlightened" and just believing that you'reenlightened?

WERNER: The primary difference, technically, is that each exists in a different domain.Believing that you're enlightened exists in the epistemological domain of belief. It's totallydifferent from being enlightened, which exists in an epistemological domain that I callabstraction or context. The language structures of belief and the epistemological domain of belief are insufficient to apprehend the domain of context or abstraction. The opposite, however, is nottrue; the domain of context or abstraction does include the structures of belief.

PAUL REISMAN: During The est Training, the trainer frequently calls the trainees "assholes."Doesn't calling people assholes tell them that they're not enlightened, or don't you intend it thatway?

WERNER: First of all, no, calling people anything doesn't necessarily make any statement abouttheir state of enlightenment. If I call you an asshole in the context of your being enlightened, itenlightens you. If I call you an asshole to get you enlightened because you aren't enlightened, itendarkens you. None of us understands very much about the power of context. It's useful to distinguish between believing that something is so and its actually being so, because the belief in that thing which isso is totally different from its so-ness. As a matter of fact, the belief that something is so keepsyou from experiencing its being so. It actually ceases to be so, because you've got a barrier between you and it; and the barrier is your belief that it's so. A belief in the truth is not the truth;yet the same thing, without the belief, is the truth.

JOHN: Maybe it's only the fervent followers who ' have just graduated, but it seems to me that alot of people who have taken the training say some of them have that belief, the belief thatthey're enlightened. How does the training cut through that?

WERNER: Well, first, I'd like to leave open the possibility that some of what you have perceived



as arrogance is not, in fact, arrogance. It may be, but I want to leave open the possibility that itisn't. Second, although you haven't said it, it is clear you have a very strong belief, very strong belief, that people who take the training are not enlightened.

JOHN: I don't know whether it's a belief; it's more a sense that they're on a trip about it.

WERNER: Okay. That's true, too. You have a sense of it. But preceding the sense, before youever got to have any sense of it, you believe very powerfully and deeply that they are notenlightened, or that it's not possible to be enlightened that way, or some such belief.

JOHN: Well, if we get into the metaphysics of it, then we would have to-

WERNER: No, we don't have to get into the metaphysics; I'm talking about something reallysimple. You believe that those people are not enlightened and your belief is a matter of fact, not amatter of metaphysics.

JOHN: In the absolute sense, we're all enlightened.

WERNER: Never mind that part of it. I'm talking about the belief. You believe that those peoplearen't enlightened. And that's a very strongly held belief for you.

JOHN: I'm wondering how est deals with the fact that people walk around believing that they'reenlightened.

WERNER: Oh, I leave room for it, number one. Because they're enlightened. It really is perfectly appropriate if enlightened people happen to believe they're enlightened.

JOHN: But you said that belief also keeps them from being enlightened.

WERNER: Yes. That's right; it becomes a barrier, but that's okay. Enlightened people can and dohave many barriers. I have many barriers, and I'm clearly enlightened, aren't I?

JOHN: We got you to say it!

DICK: We got it on the tape.

WERNER: I really did a better job when I was kidding about it, but to answer the question theway you want me to answer it people who complete the training and believe they are enlightenedare still enlightened. They are, in addition to being enlightened, simply moving through thatspecific expression of being enlightened called believing you're enlightened. Believing you'reenlightened when you are enlightened is an entirely different phenomenon from believing you'reenlightened when you're not.

I know it might not make sense to you, but it is possible that people who have been through thetraining are actually enlightened, and then, from being enlightened, they may go through thesteps of achieving enlightenment. I know you don't believe that. I don't want you to believe it. I



do want you to allow that it's possible; that when people go through this silly little thing calledthe training, they actually come out enlightened; and that what you observe afterwards is the process of the expression of their enlightenment. I know you know it's impossible, but I just wantyou to keep it open as a possibility.

JOHN: They were enlightened already, right?

WERNER: No, no, no, no. They were not enlightened until they got into the training. Nowremember, I didn't say that was true, I said I want you to entertain that possibility.By the way, I want you to know that I think that one of the things that makes the training potentis that there are some things in it which are very accurate. If you try to practice medicine with theidea that people are sick because of spirits, you have a certain amount of success; but if you practice medicine with the idea that people are sick because there are microbes and viruseswhich can't be seen, you have greater success. You see, there's something workable about beingaccurate, and there's a lot of inaccuracy in life, some of which can actually be made accurateeven by people like you and me, unenlightened people.

PAUL: Would you say something now about what the training is, what it's supposed to do, andhow it does it?

WERNER: The training is 60 hours long, done in four days of roughly 15 hours each. Thetrainers are virtually all people with professional backgrounds, people who are already highlyaccomplished, in the sense in which society generally considers people highly accomplished.After a person decides he or she is going to be a trainer, it takes an average of two and a half tothree years to actually become one. Trainer candidates work at their training all the time they become immersed so, in effect, it's more like a five year program.

I'll briefly describe a few parts of The est Training. The first part is designed to let people seethat some of the things which they say they "know" to be true, they only believe to be true, andthat there's a distinction between what you believe and what's true. The first day is designed togive people an opportunity to recognize that they have lots of pretense in their lives, and thatthey're pretending they don't. They're pretending, for instance, that their marriage works; or thatthey want to do the work they do; or that their life works, to say it in general terms, and then ontop of all that, they're pretending that they're not pretending at all.

In the first part of the second day, people see that there's a distinction between concepts aboutliving and the experience of living, and they discover that they have not been experiencing life;they've been conceptualizing life.

For instance, people begin to observe that the idea, "I love my wife," is different from theexperience, "I love my wife;" that for the most part, they live with the idea of something andvery infrequently have the experience of it. They also discover that the experience of somethinghas a much different outcome than the idea of something.

The last portion of the second day is called the "danger process." About 25 trainees stand at thefront of the room, facing the other 225, with the instruction to do nothing but just be there, just



standing. While standing there, of course, they begin to notice all of the thoughts, fears,concerns, pretenses, and the like which they carry with them all the time, which have come to beeven somewhat automatic, and which seriously impair their ability to be with other people. The people standing there end up doing everything except nothing, and in the process they start to seethat.

The process is very, very useful for them. It becomes clear to them that they've got an act, amechanism, a collection of behaviors and actions and feelings and thoughts that may not be whothey really are after all. They see it for themselves. It isn't something you're told by someoneelse. You see it yourself, and it is undeniably clear and undeniably true about you. And it opensup whole new possibilities for ways of being. It reveals a fundamental inauthenticity about our mode of living, and allows for the possibility of authentic living.

After everybody has been up front and has watched everyone else being up front, they sit downand close their eyes. From previous parts of the training they're able to become quickly andaccurately aware of what they're experiencing; now what they become aware of about

themselves can be frightening, because they realize that what's driving their behaviors is their fear of people.

Macho men find out that they're macho because they're afraid, a discovery they make for themselves. People who are stupid or intelligent or sexy find out that they are stupid or intelligent or sexy because they are afraid of other people. You find out that you're the way youare because you're afraid.

At some point there's a breakthrough, and people get the joke. The joke is that other people look frightening to you because they are frightened. The boss is the boss because he's afraid; just likeyou're whatever you are because you're afraid. In the environment of the training, this becomes amajor breakthrough experience for people, and it makes life profoundly different.

One of the things that I think it is very important for you to know is that while we present thetraining to large groups, it is totally individualized. If there are 250 people in the training, thereare 250 different trainings. That's one of the beauties of the training. It's tailor made for each person. If you are the kind of person who can't handle much emotion, you just don't have muchemotion in the training. It's that simple. And yet, it works for you.

Very little of the training is done at you as an individual, and if it is, it’s clearly done that way toillustrate some point. In the moment, you might not remember that, but after you sit down it’svery clear to you that you have contributed a useful example for everyone, and the truth of thematter is, it doesn't make any difference whether you stand up or I stand up in an interaction withthe trainer; the example is useful to both of us.

The training has acquired a reputation of harshness, and in some cases crudeness. I am not goingto say that trainers in the training are not straight and honest with people if they need to be, butthe accusations of harshness, crudeness, authoritarianism and the like are largely propagated by people who have not directly experienced the training, and in all these accounts, one thing isalways left out: the compassion in the training.



I know because I'm the guy who trained the people who are leading the training that the trainingis done with absolute compassion, and that toughness, when and if it occurs, including calling people assholes, comes from a deep respect for people, from an intention to get straight withthem, with absolutely no intention to demean them. As a matter of fact, in terms of results,

people are not demeaned; they are enhanced.

The training is done with what might be called ruthless compassion, but it's done withcompassion,. And it's done with a real sense of the dignity of human beings not the ordinarysocial grease called "respect for each other," but a really deep kind of respect, the kind of respectthat lets you know you'd be willing to be in the trenches with the person alongside you. It is areally empowering thing to discover that you've been relating to the people you love out of theconcept of love, and denying yourself the experience of love, and sometimes you've got to bevery intrusive with people to get that up on the mat. But I tell you, that comes from a respect for them, and a commitment to them.

I want to tell you one thing that I think is kind of funny. I have a constitution that makes going tothe bathroom not very important to me. I go to the bathroom about as often as anybody else does,except that if I'm doing something interesting, I just don't go. I was the only person who did thetraining in the beginning, so the sessions would go on forever, because I never felt like going tothe bathroom. People were studying how I was doing the training, and they figured that this notgoing to the bathroom was a very important part of it. I mean, it's just so stupid, because it'sliterally that silly people had those great theories about deprivation and whatnot. Nobody bothered to say, "Hey, Werner, what about going to the bathroom?" I'd have said, "Well, go if you've got to."

I also don't need a lot of sleep, so the trainings would go long into the night. The people in thetraining needed a lot of sleep, but I didn't. So we trained a lot of people who were asleep duringthe training, but it works just as well whether you're asleep or awake.

DICK: So you really don't think that those features are an essential part of the training?

JOHN: Why do you maintain it then? Why not just let it go?

WERNER: Oh, in part we have let it go. There's an automatic break every four hours now. Wekeep doing the training an average of 15 hours a day because if we did it in any less time per day,it would take more than the four days, which are already a problem for some people.

That should give you some idea of the spirit of the training. I think it would take more time thanwe want to spend here to describe the whole thing.

By the way, let me tell you something about whether the training is authoritarian. Go into a prison and not be part of the system and get into a room with inmates where there are no guards,and I want to see you be authoritarian. We've done the training in San Quentin Prison with noguards in a room with prisoners, 250 of them and five of us. And the training worksspectacularly. It works just as well in Israel as it does in New York City. It works just as well in



Davenport, Iowa, as in Los Angeles. It works as well with Harvard professors as it does with Idon't know. What's the opposite of a Harvard professor?

NEVITT SANFORD: A Yale professor.

BRUCE FIREMAN: Do you think that the people on the staff of Werner Erhard and Associateshave the frame of mind in which they can assess your actions, and should your actions be bad for the goals you're trying to promote, that they would get rid of you and carry on the work withoutyou? Are there procedures in place by which -

WERNER: They don't need any procedures. They don't need to get rid of me. You see, I have noauthority.

BRUCE: But could they, if they did need to get rid of you?

WERNER: I don't wonder about it. I know that they would do that, and could do that, and as a

matter of fact, since the organization's inception they've always had the wherewithal to do it, because I never held any position of authority. I had no formal authority, my power in theorganization was exactly equal to my ability to be useful to the people in the organization.

The actual fact about it is that I do have a lot of authority, and I consider the authority to becounter productive. I don't like authority it just doesn't work. It's nowhere near potent enough for the kinds of things that I'm interested in achieving.

So we've worked at the job of undermining my position of authority. When you have authoritywith people, they can't hear you. They can neither hear whether you're saying nonsense, nor canthey hear whether you're saying something useful.

So, that's a problem for us, as it is in any organization, and it's a problem that I think we havedealt with. We have forums for people to express themselves; the first "rule" as a staff member isto agree to open, honest, and complete communication. We have structures to support peoplewhen they don't feel powerful enough to make those communications. We have an ombudsmanwho's paid to keep whatever he or she hears in strict confidence, and whose job it is to make surethat a staff member is not damaged by any communication addressed to another staff member.

We don't think that any of those things are necessary, because we don't think we operate in waysthat will damage anyone. But we think that it's possible for staff members, when they're lookingfor an excuse not to be responsible, to say to themselves, "Hey, I can't tell the truth here, becauseI'll get in trouble." So we've just destroyed the opportunity to use that as an excuse. There's noway that you as a staff member cannot say exactly what's on your mind, because there are somany systems to protect you.

So, yes, I get called to task. I don't get called to task often, because I happen to be able to operatewith a lot of accuracy. I also have one other endearing quality. When I make a mistake I get off itfast. Maybe that’s not an endearing quality-



ROGER WALSH: One of the purposes of this group that's interviewing you is to try to delineatesome guidelines for what constitutes beneficent versus harmful groups and teachers. You've beenthrough myriad groups and trainings of one type or another, and certainly met a lot of peopleclaiming to be teachers over the last 20 years. What would you tell us, or what would you tellanyone, about how to differentiate between beneficent and harmful teachers and groups?

WERNER: This question is something that I feel a responsibility for, first off because of my ownopportunities and the opportunities of my associates, and also because of the larger issue. Thewhole issue of leadership, authority, etc., seems to me to be a basic problem in our society - anysociety.

When the source of the authority lies outside of those with whom the authority is exercised,you've got the beginnings of a possible problem. You're not necessarily going to definitely windup with a problem, but you'd damn well better be careful. See, if Dick is the leader of the group,and is its leader because God has given Dick a mission, and God is not directly available to therest of us to discuss Dick's designation, that for me is the harbinger of a problem. If Dick's

authority is based on anything that is inaccessible to the rest of the people in the group, then I amconcerned.

The times when I'm least concerned are when Dick's authority and then I would not call itauthority is in the hands of the people with whom the authority or power is being exercised,when it's clear to everybody that this is the case. I think you can con people into agreeing withyour position of authority, but you can only con them if they don't know that they are the sourceof your authority. I think that if you're attempting to avoid the evils of authoritarianism, one of the things that should happen is that the people in the group should be very clear that there is nonatural leader; that there are people who have natural leadership qualities, but that doesn't makeany of them the leader. There is no outside authority which is unavailable to the people in thegroup selecting the leader; the group is empowering the people who are being empowered.

One of the other things and this one is a lot more subtle, so I think a lot more dangerous is the prevailing intellectual level or the prevailing epistemological domain, the realm of knowing that prevails in the group. If that realm of knowing is conceptual - ideas, beliefs, slogans that for meis almost certainly going to wind up with a problem someplace. If it doesn't, somebody is goingto have to be working really hard to make sure that it doesn't become a problem. It's almost anatural disaster.

When I see that conceptualization, though present, exists within a larger epistemological domainthat I call experience, I'm then a lot more relaxed, because if somebody tries to say, for instance,that Jews are bad, and in the group it's agreed upon that we verify things in our experience, I'mnot so concerned that whoever is trying to get that one across is going to prevail. If experience isallowed, and if experience is recognized and respected, then I have less concern.

I begin to have almost no concern when in addition to the domain of concept or explanation andthat of experience or process, there the domain of context or creation. It's a aim in which people,look not only at what they think, but at the realm in which their thinking takes place. Attitude iscertainly there in this realm, and allowed and appreciated and a change or process of attitudes is



respected, but when the group deals in the epistemological domain of the context of attitudesthen I become even less concerned.

BRUCE: One of the things that you referred to Earlier was that people were too deferent to your authority. That's something that everybody notices, these charges that people are rather slavish in

their adulation of you. I want you to talk about the specific changes that you're making that willreduce the excessive deference or adulation.

WERNER: We all know that a hundred thousand people can't love one person. If they could,nobody would be able to observe them doing it, because that isn't possible in the structurethrough which we'd look at the situation. If what's occurring is actually what it's concluded to beslavish adulation I want somebody to explain why it nurtures those people, because adulationdoesn't nurture people. It only makes them right; it does not nurture them. People who areadulating don't get healthier, they don't get more self-expressive they don't get more capable. The people who are supposed to adulate me are healthy, expressive, able, and capable. I'd like tosuggest to you that the way you're looking at it is a part of the evil that you're looking at it in a

way that says: "These are the alternatives: pick one."

BRUCE: I'm asking you how you're looking at the matter, and what you're doing about it.

WERNER: I'm going to get to that.

BRUCE: We've had person after person come in here from different groups and tell us abouthow their relationship with their leader has empowered them people who were in fact veryslavish in their adulation of that leader they were set on fire; they were "empowered;" they wentout and "dealt" with their problems. We've seen this time and time again. Now, in order toaccomplish your goals for people, which is that you want them to be empowered and not slavish,you're making changes in your organization. I want to know what problems you see, and howthose changes are going to contribute to the relationship between you and your underlings in theorganization

WERNER: See, but that's the whole problem.

BRUCE: Well, perhaps I'm using the wrong word. But rather than make an issue of my words –

WERNER: I'm not making an issue of the words you use. I'm making the system from which thewords are derived the problem. Given the system, I can't answer the question. You see, it's notsimply the words you're using that are the problem. What I want to convey to you is this: In theassumptions from which you are asking the question, you allow for no truthful answer to thequestion. The words you use reflect your assumptions accurately, and given your assumptions,there's no solution to the problem. One cannot solve the problem in the system you are using. Infact, that system is the problem.

Now, I'm going to answer your question, because, you know, I came here and agreed to do that, but I want to tell you the truth before I answer the question. So I'm telling you that my answer will make no sense if you listen to the answer in that system from which you asked the question.



The answer is that the organization has for several years been shifting away from a structure thathas a central place or a top place from which decisions are made and passed on. We always triednot to operate that way, and over the years we've become more and more successful at notoperating that way. The structure of just about any ordinary organization, however, is that way.

So when you're trying to go left in a structure that's going right, you can't get very far. Werecognized that what needed to happen was what we called a transformation of the structure, because no matter what our intentions were, as long as they were being expressed in a structureof authority, we would not achieve our ends.

The structure we have in mind is a network of people, the center of which is wherever you are.Decisions get made locally. By contrast, if we're all operating as a hierarchical organization, youknow, you might be the boss; you'd tell us what to do. We tell you what's going on; you tell uswhat to do. In a system which is network like rather than pyramidal, what gets done in any givenspot gets decided at the spot. The information flows to there from all over that network, and theinformation from there flows all over the network.

This is something that I've been studying now for two and a half years, and I actually think we'vecome up with some breakthroughs. est came to an end this year [1981], literally went out of existence, because we're evolving into a network and we wanted to put the old organizationalmodel to bed. So, for instance, the Master Therapist program is done by the entity called Werner Erhard and Associates in a partnership with Dr. Robert Shaw, who's a psychiatrist. Lots of programs are done as partnerships, and more will be done that way in the future, where our network will be affiliated with other networks.

Just let me cover a couple more things very quickly. We started a pilot program in 1981 in SanFrancisco with a thousand people, a workshop on community in which we've been developing a program to be made available around the country and around the world, so that people in anycommunity can work on the community - make community their business.

The Hunger Project, which was really created by people who have taken The est Training but isnow much larger than est graduates, has two million people who've enrolled.

The Breakthrough Foundation works in international development in rural villages and urbanghettos, on the thesis that self-sufficiency is never achieved unless there's individual and societaltransformation. We feel we've developed a technology that allows people to effect thosetransformations for themselves, independent of any outside personality.

By the way, many of these organizations are wholly independent of Werner Erhard andAssociates.

DICK: That seems like a natural conclusion to that line of questioning. Another line to consider will take a minute to develop. I know people who work for your organization, or in it, and whatthey seem to have in common is that they work very hard and very long hours, and that theydon't have much going on in their lives except est. Now, a certain kind of fantasy about est getsset off by this fact. It combines with other things I seem to have noticed about est: It is a very



rapidly expanding organization; it has very high ambitions in terms of wanting to transform thesociety or perhaps the world; it hopes to be able to end hunger in a certain number of years, andother things that seem implausible from a normal frame of reference; it proselytizes veryforcefully, with very great energy. Putting all those things together, it's easy to view est as agroup of people with a self involved, very convoluted system of beliefs that achieve their

plausibility by the apparent ability of est to grow very rapidly.

WERNER: So that growth backs up the belief, appears to back up the belief.

DICK: Yes, so people feel that they're really somehow achieving something important withrespect to their own consciousness. Now, what would happen if suddenly est peaked, and someof the plausibility structure started to break down? Some of the other groups that we've looked athave really only gotten into trouble when it started to look as if they weren't going to change theworld after all, and as if the system that, people had been devoting themselves to whole heartedlyfor five, ten, or fifteen years wasn't really omnipotent. The whole shared group fantasy started to break apart, and things got crazy. Could you respond to that?

WERNER: I know everybody's trying to be polite, and I appreciate your being nice about it. But,you see, it's not just trying to be polite, and it's not just trying to be nice about it; it's a flat out lie.And language carried on in lies, even if they're well meaning lies, leads you to inaccurateconclusions.

What offends me is our willingness to carry on the conversation without getting at the truth of it.I think there's a very big possibility of missing some of the real power and value in the work thatwe are doing and in the whole development of that work, if you attempt to force it into thecategories which you bring to it to try to understand it, because est is really about the very natureof your inquiry. The est Training is aimed at grasping the categories with which one deals withthe world. It's not aimed at what one puts into those categories.

You assume that the long hours and the high commitment of staff members must be broughtabout by some great vision. I deny that that's true. That isn't why I work long hours. I'm verycommitted I say "committed" and I know the thought that goes through people's minds: "He believes in what he's doing." I don't believe in what I'm doing at all. I have absolutely no belief in what I'm doing. I already know how it's going to turn out. I know it's going to turn out exactlyas it turns out. It's been doing that for eons.

So you say, "But then, Werner, what's your motive, what the hell are you working all those hoursfor?" I'm not motivated. There isn't any motive. There's no damn vision motivating me. Youknow, if I stopped doing it tomorrow, it wouldn't make one bit of difference, and if I keep doingit right to the end, it won't make any difference. The only thing that's going to happen is whathappens.

Now, that doesn't fit into our structure, into our categories. We know that you don't get up in themorning unless you've got a motive. That's a great explanation. Maybe you can explain people's behavior, but you can't do one thing to bring an ounce of wholeness and completeness into people's lives with that theory, because the theory is essentially a theory of explanation and



doesn't get at the cause of things.

So I don't have a vision. I'm not selling some ideal. I don't know where I'm going. I know whereI'm coming from. And I think that the people on the staff know where they're coming from. Ithink it's a great excitement to them to discover where that takes them, day by day, week by

week. It's why we don't have any problem throwing things out. See, if my life is about where I'mgoing to get to, and you make me change, then you've upset me. If my life is about where I'mcoming from, change is no problem if I'm starting at the end, and going then through the process,instead of going through the process to get to the end.

So why do people work long hours? They work long hours because there's work to be done, anddoing the work is very satisfying. I didn't say it was easy, or pleasant; I said it was satisfying.They work long hours because in that opportunity they experience the opportunity to make adifference. Not to make things different, see, but to make a difference. They experience theopportunity of being able to be useful and they don't experience that opportunity in a lot of places in the world.

DICK: You're saying, I think, that est people won't flip out and get crazy if the world isn'ttransformed, because they don't have a certain point of view about how the world is going to betransformed; they don't have a belief structure that has to be confirmed.

WERNER: That's right.

DICK: I think that's valid. I think that that is a difference between est and some of the other groups that we've seen.

WERNER: The other thing is that they don't think they're "good;" therefore, they're not madecrazy by somebody saying they're bad. I don't think The est Training is good. I don't think it'srighteous, I don't think it's God's work. God is not talking to me personally any differently thanShe talks to everybody. You know, there's no great mission. Or, yes, there is a great mission, butit's the great mission everybody is on. We have no private access to the mission and no specialknowledge about the mission.

By the way, before est I was an expert in motivation. In the realm of motivation experts, onemeasures expertise by income. Given my income, before est, I was an expert in motivation. Thatwas my business. At one time, I was fairly clear, I was one of the few people in the country whoknew what motivation was. I knew it "up on the line" my income depended on being able toteach it to people. Ultimately motivation is counterproductive, because inherent in it is themessage that you're not. It teaches you that you're not, and it reinforces that you're not. Evenachieving that towards which you were motivated just seals the fact that you're not.

So, for example, if you examine intelligent people particularly people who wear their intelligence on their coat sleeves and you get down underneath it, you find invariably that theyare intelligent to avoid being stupid. Invariably, when intelligence is not nurturing, it is a devicefor overcoming something, it is a motivated kind of intelligence. In my experience and in myobservation, intelligence is a natural expression of self. One's self is intelligent.



I don't mean that we should throw all motivation out, because motivation is useful as an interimdevice, as something through which to go, something to master. But ultimately motivation is atrue exercise of authoritarianism. Our whole society is based on it, and I say that people are notfreed by the values of this society, or ennobled by them; they're dominated by them. And nobody

is really teaching anybody about the science and the technology and art of coming from.

The thing which is really difficult and we notice this a lot in the work that we're doing indevelopment around the world is that people cannot believe that there is something that moves people other than motivation. There's just no possibility of ontology being behind it. That is notheld as possible. Therefore, if you see somebody moving, by God, they've got to be up tosomething. They've got to be moving towards something. It can't be that they're just moving.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO: Doesn't The Hunger Project have a vision?

WERNER: Yes. I suggest that if you read what we call the "source document" for The Hunger

Project, you would see both that what I've just said is true and that they have a vision the visiondoesn't preclude what I just said.

The Hunger Project's mission is to create a context for the end of hunger. Now, to do only thatwould be half assed, if you will. Therefore, you have to face up to also creating a goal, the end of hunger; but it's the context which is The Hunger Project's job, and in the context "the end of hunger," what is is the expression of the end of hunger. Therefore you don't fail, in the context.

PHILIP: But you could fail in that vision.

WERNER: Yes. You can fail and - no, you know you will fail in the objectives. One hopes not tofail ultimately, but one knows one will fail in the objectives. That's a part of the expression of acontext of succeeding. In the context of succeeding, failure is contained; therefore, failure is notinvalidating. Failure doesn't destroy anything. As a matter of fact, it forwards things. Errors areimportant. They're how you get there. Mistakes are the path.

I'll tell you the one thing that burns our people out. It's when they think they got it. It starts tohappen at exactly that moment when they figure they have it made, they have it together, theyunderstand it now. And it's so deadly, it's really sad. They may go on to be very successful, buttheir success never has the quality of making a difference again.

JOHN: Do they come out of it?

WERNER: Some do. The jury's still out on some, and I think some won't. And you see, it's veryclear to me that everybody will. So I'm now talking in that context. Maybe this time around,some won't, but ultimately we all will.

Published in The Network Review, Volume 1 Number 4, September 1983. Reprinted by special



arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1920 13th Street, Boulder, CO 80302. Thisarticle is excerpted from the book, Spiritual Standards for New Age Groups and Therapies,edited by Dick Anthony, Bruce Ecker and Ken Wilber, published Spring 1984.

© Copyright 2008 - 2010 Werner Erhard

Werner Erhard What is Est

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