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

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)

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 Erhard appeared on the cover of the Family Networker magazine.

Werner Erhard

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.”

It does lots more, of course. In trying to pin down est, part of the trouble is that it really isn’t like anything else. Remember, in the beginning, how people were always saying, “Oh yes, but it’s really only a pastiche of group therapy, gestalt, encounter, positive thinking, hypnosis, mind control, behavior modification and a half-dozen other things craftily scotch-taped together by Werner Erhard.” Well, I think it’s become clearer by now that such pat reductionism doesn’t apply.
This point is made by New York psychiatrist Joel Kovel, in a fairly recent book, A Complete Guide to Therapy. He writes, “est may be the first major innovation in therapy to owe nothing to tradition.” This, he concludes, “makes est hard to classify . . . for all its mystique, it is perhaps the most highly organized and disciplined of therapies.” est of course, does not regard itself as a therapy nor is it interested in change, as such, but rather transformation.

I guess what tickles me most is seeing that est not only has survived a devastating media attack but shows signs of becoming a permanent part of our cultural fabric. Also, it now is the subject of a steady stream of scholarly studies and articles in professional journals. So much for the plucky upstart who took on the professional pundits. Werner has also survived – beautifully. Nowhere was that more evident than at a recent inaugural by Werner in Los Angeles of a new est event known as “Celebrating Your Relationships” – the newest, fourth and last in a series of all-day workshops titled “Making Relationships Work.” He showed new mellowness and depth as he read “love” poems by e.e.Cummings and St. John of the Cross to an assembly of almost 10,000 people, all of whom, as usual were in their seats promptly at nine o’clock Sunday morning – which shows that est training about the importance of keeping agreements really sticks.
So do many other parts of the complex training, although don’t expect anyone who has been through it to be able to describe it. How would we describe our life or, say, a butterfly? Where would we start? The goal of est, as far as I can see, is Enlightenment; and as Werner points out, the gates of the Far Eastern temples are often guarded by two scowling figurines, keepers of the riches within. One figurine is paradox and the other is confusion. Westerners avoid both like the plague, but est takes people right into the eye of each and out the other side. What est seems to be providing is an extraordinary, virtuoso microcosm of life.

It starts with suffering. To most of us, suffering is an aberration, a mistake, proof we did something wrong – a punishment. In est, as people start out sharing their life stories, one sees that suffering is the very warp and woof of everyone’s life, including one’s own, despite our fun-filled and candy-coated efforts to disguise it. Yet, as the drone of the endless litany of misery-filled life scenarios wears on, it is possible to see that we are not our “stories”; that each, no matter how grim, has a payoff (even, and especially, misery); that we cling to them like security blankets and refuse to give them up. Finally, we may see that it is possible to transcend all that – if we dare.

All the so-called awful stuff that has been so played up in the media stories – the not being able to go to the bathroom when someone wants to or eat three square meals a day or being “insulted” or shouted at – somehow fits in and makes sense when it happens. Admittedly, it isn’t “nice,” but then neither is life. At least in est it all takes place in a safe, protected space and with a purpose – growth. Remember paradox – things are not what they seem. I’ll never forget the astonishment so many people expressed when they learned they could miss a meal without starving or even be bored to tears hours on end and yet stay with it because they wanted something from the experience. That’s all part of it. But don’t expect it to make sense – our usual kind of super rational, logical sense – because it doesn’t. “Understanding is the booby prize,” says Werner. The gold ring is Being – real alive being – which is the capacity to really experience our experience and not just another dead, sterile replay of our “story.”

Does est succeed in all this? We know there is no real, final way of assessing that for all our vaunted professional techniques. At the end of an article titled “A Description of the Erhard Seminar Training (est) in Terms of Behavior Analysis” in the spring 1978 issue of the journal Behaviorism by Drs. Donald Baer and Stephanie Stolz, the authors write with marvelous restraint, “…est is primarily about what the self is and how to be most perfectly in touch with it – to be it. That is not a goal, a process or a lesson amenable to verbal explanation. We offer no explanation of this aspect of est here, because we do not understand it. It is tempting to dismiss est out of hand for just this reason. Not doing so results from the fact that whatever est may be about, it contains within it as impressive a collection of self-control techniques as we have seen, and it seems to be unusually effective in making them available to some of its trainers.”
They conclude, “Whether it often is effective in fact, we are not certain; that it sometimes can be, we are. That can be said of almost any psychotherapy, respectable or otherwise. est training is brief, the principles by which it operates can in part be analyzed in terms of the principles of behavioral science, and as an intervention, it is possibly unusually effective. That accounts for our interest in it. What else it is, is its business.”

A final word about the so-called not-niceness. Of this, Los Angeles psychologist Dr. Thomas Greening says, “People seem to sense that any epithets are directed at the defensive egos and programmed pseudo selves we present to the world. The person beneath that self is greatly respected in est as the source of all meaning and being.”

Eleanor Links Hoover has been a columnist for HUMAN BEHAVIOR since 1973.

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

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.

Shown at the Atlanta Film Festival, Transformation: The Life and Legacy of Werner Erhard, a documentary by two-time Emmy Award winner Robyn Symons looks at est and its creator, showing rare clips from inside the training as well as interviews with est graduates and staff members. Symons brings the story up-to-date, interviewing Werner, now aged 70, talking about the infamous “60 Minutes” broadcast of 1991, his reconciliation with his family thirteen years after he had abandoned them in his twenties, and his activities during the last fifteen years. Werner, considerably mellowed by the passing years, comes across as still dynamic, yet somewhat worn down. For those who participated in either the est training or est’s successor, The Landmark Forum, the film will be a validation of the contribution that Werner has made and will restore some balance in the public mind as to how his legacy is perceived. Unfortunately however, because it is so limited in its time (62 minutes), and lacking in fuller exploration and depth of its topics, it may have limited appeal to those who know little or nothing about est or Werner’s history.

The film traces the beginnings of est to an epiphany Werner had while driving over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco when he realized that, contrary to all that he had been taught, the individual is responsible for the content and decisions that make up his or her life. While est in the seventies engendered a strong positive reaction from the majority of people who finished the course, it also became a source of controversy. Stories circulated about fainting, peeing, vomiting, and sobbing, painting a scene that, taken out of context, seemed frightening. However, the meaning and purpose of the training was lost in these horror stories and Werner’s attempt to explain est to the media was singularly unsuccessful. It also spurred a negative reaction from the psychiatric and academic establishment, unwilling to believe that people could alter the quality of their life in the space of sixty hours, contrary to the deeply ingrained notion that progress had to take months, years, and even decades to be achieved. Consequently, est was labeled “pop psychology”, “brainwashing”, and “a boot-camp approach to psychology”.

Werner’s reputation also took a hit in 1991 with an “expose” on “60 Minutes” in which associates and family members accused him of unsavory acts, all of which were later denied and subsequently recanted by the accusers. Werner, however, left the U.S. shortly thereafter, claiming on a Larry King broadcast that he was being targeted by Scientology. He has not returned in the last fifteen years and, though he has carried on his work abroad, has become largely forgotten in the U.S. While the film attempts to set the record straight about his life and about common misconceptions about the training – its language, physical environment, and whether or not people were prevented from going to the bathroom, the film does very little to clarify the methodology or the true purpose of the training.

Also some clips from inside the training, may actually reinforce the notion in some people’s minds that trainees were being victimized. For example, the film shows a young woman being told by Werner that her experience in foster homes was simply her “story” and her “racket”. In the context of a sixty-hour training, these labels are precisely defined and have a great deal of meaning, and were intended to allow the young woman to realize that her experiences, as painful as they were, do not have to define her life. Outside of that context, however, their meaning is not clear and Werner’s tone comes across as being less than compassionate. Additionally, clips seem to be selected more for shock value than as instructional tools about the meaning and purpose of the training.

While the film does add perspective to his recent trials, it has a “stagy” quality that doesn’t truly capture the excitement and inspiration of those early days when it looked as if est could one day be incorporated into public education. While spokespersons for Werner in the film (mostly former est staff members) are articulate in supporting the goals of the training, the film could have benefited greatly from the comments of those who were outside the organization, perhaps insights from poets such as Allen Ginsberg or psychologists as to why the training was able to produce the kind of results it did in a short period of time. In spite of the film’s shortcomings, however, it is an important first step in acquainting the world with the contributions of this man who dedicated his life to making others great.

Words and phrases such as “transformation”, “empowerment”, “making a difference”, “getting it” and so forth have become part of the vocabulary of the culture, even to the extent that they have been pre-empted by advertising agencies who seek to use them to make a profit. Werner did not write books or go out on the lecture circuit to great applause from true believers and functioned in an atmosphere of non-agreement and non-acceptance. His genius did not lie in any concepts or ideas but in the enormous contribution his programs made to people’s lives (including my own). Although the training, now The Landmark Forum, in recent years has moved away from the fringes and closer to the mainstream, Werner’s programs, in my view, are still extremely valuable tools to deepen our self-awareness and Symon’s film Transformation is a fitting beginning to the acknowledgment of his true greatness.   – Review by Howard Schumann

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:
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