You Don’t Alter What You Know, You Alter the Way You Know It:

“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, Northeast Edition, Volume 1, Number 4, September 1983.

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 as well, and the seminar leader, Dick Anthony, later commented that it was “one of the important turning 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. While The est Training is not a therapy or a religion, the conversation between Werner and members of the seminar clearly applies to the issues raised by the book, and to everyday living.   Read the entire interview at www.wernererhard.net/alter.html

Werner Erhard on the Tonight Show with John Denver

Eliezer Sobel, The author of 99th Monkey – One man’s spiritual quest—and his continuous and utter failure to find the answers writes in his recent blog post on Psychology Today:

As Werner Erhard once bluntly put it to me, staring right into my eyes, “There isn’t ANYTHING that is EVER going to come along that is going to make you happy. NOTHING. Getting that is the entrée into the system in which the truth lies, for the truth is always and only found now, in the circumstances you’ve got.”   That was quite sobering news for a truth-seeker.

Psychology Today, October 16, 2009

Early flyer of the est training and Werner Erhard

est Reunion website

A reunion for all the people who dared to create a new possibility for themselves and their lives.

It is now the 21st Century and there is much talk of possibility and transformational leadership – but where did this all start?

In 1971, in a hotel ballroom in San Francisco over 35 years ago, transformation burst on to the national stage. Werner Erhard and his est Training brought to the forefront the ideas of transformation, personal responsibility, accountability, and possibility – and over the next decade, over a million people “Got it”.

Erhard Seminars Training was as much a sign of the times as bell bottoms, peace rallies and space travel.

Over the years, more than two million people from all walks of life participated in est or the programs that grew out of Erhard Seminars Training. Professionals and leaders from government, business and health industries, as well as people in the fields of arts and entertainment actively participated in the programs of est.

Enjoy the essence of what est created and the impact it has made on society through the archives, video and vivid shares at www.erhardseminarstraining.com. Stand up and acknowledge how you have made a difference in this world out of having participated in the est Training. Celebrate in this moving tribute to the est Training, Werner Erhard and you.

Werner Erhard and the est Training

Werner Erhard Photo Experience

Celebrating Your Relationships (Part 1)

 

from the September 1978 Graduate Review

During a day-long conversation with graduates in 1978, Werner Erhard said: “In Making Relationships Work I, II, and III, people had to really work. The processes, for in­stance, were quite long and required a lot of con­centration and intention.

“There is not much work to be done here,” Werner said. “This is about celebrating the miraculous, the magical, the unreasonable, things about which you can’t do anything anyway.

“This is not about doing. It is about being. This is not about the world in which explanation occurs. It is about the world in which creation occurs.

“This course is not, strictly speaking, what we’ve come to call in est an ‘experience.’ What we’re up to here is contextual rather than experiential. It is about that from which experience comes. It is about lighting the fire, not about warming yourself at it.”

Pleasure as an expression of love

…… Ordinarily I would prefer to keep myself as a persona out of this, to deliver the material and stay out of the way. For this course, I want to shift that. I want to make something available to you out of my experience. So I want this course to be about you and me as much as we can make it that way…. You and I are going to be lovers.

“Being lovers has nothing to do with one’s mas­culinity or femininity. It’s much more fundamental than that. What we’re talking about is not the lover as man or woman, it’s the lover that is the basis of man and woman.”

For this course, Werner said, leave behind what­ever ideas about your relationships you brought with you. You might have some relationships that are not working, or you might have some you con­sider perfect; you might want to fix some up and keep others as they are. Let all of that go. Open yourself to the unknown.

“When you allow yourself to let go completely, as if you’re falling back freely into what I call a great blue void—it could be something else for you—and you surrender into the experience, you might won­der where you’re going to land. It’s frightening to let go, to fall out of this reality and fall back into the mysterious.

“I want to tell you that when you stop holding on, when you allow yourself to be in the experience now, when you stop checking it all out, when you surrender and fall back, where you always land is right here. But suddenly, when you’ve arrived here by letting go into your experience, ‘here’ is a brand-new, sparkling, and brilliant place….

“This is about the realization of ecstasy, of joy, of pleasure—but not pleasure in the way we ordi­narily hold it, in which we find we’re a little reluc­tant and a little bit guilty about the expression of pleasure. We’re talking not about pleasure as a measure of gratification but pleasure as an ex­pression of love, pleasure as ecstasy. An incom­parable pleasure.

“Ecstasy isn’t what we often think it is, either. The ecstasy I’m talking about is a loss of persona, a loss of personality, in which you realize some­thing more profound, more magnificent, than that which you’ve been calling your self.

“One falls back into and realizes one’s true self. That ecstatic experience is the loss of one’s self as a position.”

(excerpt courtesy of http://www.erhardseminarstraining.com)

What did you create out of the est Training?

The following appears in a post in response to the question, “What did you create out of the est Training?” on http://www.erhardseminarstraining.com :

Awakening to Alivenenss by David Hallmark  http://davidhallmark.blogspot.com/

Although it has been 32 years since I completed my own est Training in July 1977, I still very much carry in me the experience of “aliveness” which I describe as “a condition or state of being alive, such that I am fully present and participating in any given moment of life without the patterns of judgment, emotion or other blocks to that state of being exactly whom I am and exactly who I am not.”
Being awake to my “aliveness” requires that I look within to discover my “shadow”, described by the late Swiss psychologist, C. G. Jung, as “everything in us that is unconscious, repressed, undeveloped and denied.” Outof my experience of “aliveness” and “shadow”, I am now publishing a Blog “AWAKENING to ALIVENESS” at the website listed above which acknowledges Werner and the Training as a profound contribution to my life and more importantly, to my experience of being alive.

 

Werner listening to a participant  sharing

Werner Erhard

Werner Erhard appeared on the cover of the Family Networker magazine.

Werner Erhard

The Indescribable Experience

October 1978, Vol. 7, No.10 – by Eleanor Links Hoover: From Human Behavior
One reason why the public seldom sees much deep, penetrating reporting and/or commentary about any contemporary psychological movement is that it is distinctly unfashionable for journalists to write anything that may be interpreted as favorable about such phenomena. Never mind whether it’s true or not. The silent rule is, “If you can’t be critical, don’t write it.”

Well, this is to serve notice to any potential head-lopper that I choose not to be intimidated. Sorry. I just can’t join the cynical press bandwagon. est is – and remains – one of the most fascinating movements, events, phenomena (take your pick, it still defies analysis) I have ever observed and reported on. The fact that it isn’t what it seems to be (what is?) and that it is as elusive as quicksilver to describe only enhances the fascination as far as I’m concerned. For me, it is, among other things, an excursion into High Philosophy – a miniseries of sorts into issues raised by Plato, Sartre, Wittgenstein. Bill Bartley, philosophy professor at California State University at Hayward once told me, “What est is doing is making available for the first time on a wide, popular basis, the key ideas and problems of philosophy.”

Roy Scheider

Roy Scheider

From The Graduate Review Jan/Feb 1981

In September’s Playboy interview, Roy Scheider, star of The French Connection, Jaws, and All that Jazz, talked about his est training as an experience of theater: “You come to understand that within each of us is a tremendous beauty, passion, joy, and love for life; you realize that everyone is you… I’ve never had a better time in my life. I never laughed so much, I never cried so much. I was actually dazzled. I couldn’t believe that degree of intimacy could be achieved in a hotel room with 300 people… And I was one of the actors in the show. It was sensational.”

TRANSFORMATION: THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF WERNER ERHARD – Review by Howard Schumann

TRANSFORMATION: THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF WERNER ERHARD

Directed by Robyn Symons (2006)

“Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come” – Victor Hugo

Building from the momentum generated by the youth counter-culture in the sixties, the human potential movement burst upon the scene in the seventies and found its most vocal expression in a training known as est (derived from the Latin verb meaning “to be). The training, created by Werner Erhard in 1971, promised to transform the quality of the lives of 200 to 250 participants in two weekends, spent in a hotel ballroom. People enrolled in est because they were looking for something they considered to be missing in their life, be it expansion, clarity, definition, or a new direction. What they received was much, much more – a multi-level introduction to self-realization and a new definition of reality that pioneered what is generally known as New Age Spirituality.