Werner Erhard with quotes from Camus and Rilke

Werner Erhard on the Tonight Show with John Denver

One man’s spiritual quest—and his continuous and utter failure to find the answers

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 entree 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

est

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 (est) 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 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

Transformation

The Graduate Review

 

Werner Erhard Leading a seminar

Werner Erhard Quote

“Heroes are ordinary men and women who dare to see and meet the call of a possibility bigger than themselves. Breakthroughs are created by such heroes, by men and women who will stand for the result while it is only a possibility—people who will act to make possibility real.”

Werner Erhard