Transformation

The Graduate Review

 

Thinking for Yourself

From the May 1979 Graduate Review

(Excerpted from a talk by Werner during “Making the World Work for Everyone”)

Thinking for yourself isn’t easy. It takes real courage. You need courage to break through the cultural set, or paradigm, that you’ve been given – courage to go along with your personal experience instead of the attitudes and opinions that other people have given you.Thinking for yourself requires the courage to make mistakes, sometimes to make a fool of yourself. It takes work, too – hard work. And it won’t make life any easier for you, or make you popular. If what you want is for people to build monuments to your memory, don’t talk outside the cultural set you’ve been given. Go for agreement instead. You won’t get any statues if what you want is to make a difference. You’ll get workability. If you want a real monument to your Self, don’t accept anything less than a world that works for everybody, with nobody left out.Einstein worked to discover the great principles on which the universe works, but he didn’t win a Nobel Prize for it. He got the 1921 Nobel Prize officially for his work on the photoelectric effect – the thing that opens the doors to supermarkets before you push on them.

If you want to make a difference, to have some impact on life, if you want to commit your life to making the world work for all of us, with nobody and nothing left out, then you must be willing to get the truth for yourself. That means you must be willing to do your own thinking.

Operating Principles for a You and Me World

From the March 1980 Graduate Review report on ‘A World That Works For Everyone’  

Since we have been raised and educated in a you or me world, and since very few of us have noticed the shift to you and me, we are going to have to work out the rules for living on our own. We won’t get much help. Werner shared his own perceptions of some of the other new rules, or operating principles, for the you and me context.

Respect the other person’s point of view, whether or not you agree with it. Recognize that if you had their history, their circumstances, and the forces that play on them, you would likely have their point of view.

2. Consider life a privilege – all of it, even the parts that are difficult or seem a waste of time.

3. Give up the islands that reinforce mediocrity, the safe places where we gossip and complain to one another, where we are petty.

4. Take a chance. Be willing to put your reputation on the line; have something at stake.

5. Work for satisfaction rather than for credit.

6. Honor your word. There will be times when the circumstances of life will make you forget who you are and what you’re about. That is when you need to be committed to honoring your word, making what you say count.

Watch Werner Erhard on YouTube:
A You and Me World – Part 1
A You and Me World – Part 2
A You and Me World – Part 3

Then and Now at est

From The Graduate Review   January 1977

 A look at the early days when est was coming into existence.

They don’t mean anything, mind you – and they did happen.

During the past few years, it has been getting increasingly clear that est- the training, the organization, the graduates and participation – is about manifesting transformation.  To say it another way, est is a space that people can use to complete their transformation by brining it into the world.

           

“If you don’t take it out into the world,” Werner has said, “you didn’t get it in the first place.  What I got clear about was that it would require an organization – and a particular kind of organization – to take the experience of transformation out into society.” 

Lately we have been looking at est as organization, and it seems worthwhile to supplement the big abstractions with flashbacks, as it were, to est’s earliest days and some of the people who were there.  Where did the organization, the doing as well as the being, begin to appear?