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.

Werner Erhard on Transformation

Transformation does not negate what has gone before; rather it fulfills it. Creating the context of a world that works for everyone is not just another step forward in human history; it is the context out of which our history will begin to make sense.

Werner Erhard

Tiger Woods’ father, Earl Woods, credits est for his success as a father:

Tiger Woods:
The 1996 Sports Illustrated
Sportsman of the Year

In the 1996 Sports Illustrated article in which Tiger Woods is named the 1996 Sportsman of the Year, Earl Woods talks about the impact of the est training. He says that what he learned in est allowed him to devote himself to his son and his son’s development into the world’s most renowned athlete.

“Not long after Tiger’s birth, when Earl has left the military to become a purchaser for McDonnell Douglas, he finds himself in a long discussion with a woman he knows. She senses the power pooling inside him, the friction. “You have so much to give,” she tells him, “but you’re not giving it. You haven’t even scratched the surface of your potential.” She suggests he try est, Erhard Seminars Training, an intensive self-discovery and self-actualizing technique, and it hits Earl hard, direct mortar fire to the heart. What he learns is that his overmuscular sense of responsibility for others has choked his potential.

“To the point,” says Earl, “that I wouldn’t even buy a handkerchief for myself. It went all the way back to the day my father died, when I was 11, and my mother put her arm around me after the funeral and said, ‘You’re the man of the house now.’ I became the father that young, looking out for everyone else, and then she died two years later.

“What I learned through est was that by doing more for myself, I could do much more for others. Yes, be responsible, but love life, and give people the space to be in your life, and allow yourself room to give to others. That caring and sharing is what’s most important, not being responsible for everyone else. Which is where Tiger comes in. What I learned led me to give so much time to Tiger, and to give him the space to be himself, and not to smother him with dos and don’ts. I took out the authority aspect and turned it into companionship. I made myself vulnerable as a parent. When you have to earn respect from your child, rather than demanding it because it’s owed to you as the father, miracles happen. I realized that, through him, the giving could take a quantum leap. What I could do on a limited scale, he could do on a global scale.”

At last, the river is undammed, and Earl’s whole life makes sense. At last, he sees what he was searching for, a pattern. No more volunteering for missions — he has his. Not simply to be a great golfer’s father. To be destiny’s father. His son will change the world.”   From, “The Chosen One”, by Gary Smith, published in Sports Illustrated Magazine.  http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/features/1996/sportsman/1996.html

Werner Erhard Leading a seminar