The Age of Miracles

from “The Age of Miracles: Embracing the New Midlife”
Marianne Williamson, Hay House Inc. Publishers, January 31, 2008

“According to Werner Erhard, founder of the est organization, we can live our lives either acting out of circumstances or acting out of a vision. And when it comes to midlife, we can forge a new vision, a new conversation, to take us beyond the limited thought-forms that have defined its parameters for generations. The circumstances are fixed, but our experience of them is not. Every situation is experienced within the context of the conversation surrounding it, both in our heads and in our culture.”

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?

Fortune Magazine Acknowledges the Contribution of Werner Erhard to Managment Thinking

Fortune Magazine Quote:

Fortune magazine’s 40th Anniversary issue (May 15, 1995), in examining the major contributions to management thinking, recognized Werner Erhard’s creation of est as the major innovation of the 1970s in shaping modern management thinking toward empowering people.