by Adelaide Bry
* A self-transformation discipline developed by Oscar Ichazo, in Chile, to improve clarity of mind and body through a forty-day curriculum of exercise and movement for the physical body, and meditation, mantram, and individual analysis for spiritual and cognitive growth.
Which gets me back to est. If what you have, what you do, what you think you are supposed to be, isn't working very well; if hard work, success, romantic love and all the other concepts you were taught were important as a child no longer seem to have meaning in your life; then maybe it's time to look elsewhere, away from the tenets of your past into the here and now of your experience. One way to describe what est is all about is to say it's into the here and now of experienced experience.
In experiencing your own nature in the est training, the est literature states, you are able to transform your ability to experience life. More specifically, the training offers an opportunity to realize a transformation of your experience of knowing; of your experience of experiencing; of your experience of self; of your experience of others.
Werner Erhard, est's founder, described the training in an interview in East West Journal (September, 1974) in a characteristically est-ian manner (some call it "mind-fucking"; others, who feel explanations are irrelevant, say that it doesn't really matter what Werner says, it's how he says it; and still others think his style is dynamite and emulate it all the time).
In answer to the Journal's question, "What is est?" Werner said, "est is a sixty-hour experience which opens an additional dimension of living to your awareness. The training is designed to transform the level at which you experience life so that living becomes a process of expanding satisfaction.
"Another part of the answer is there is no 'answer.' est actually is an experience. But if you go around telling people that, you won't have anything to talk about and you need something to say about it. It is a very individual experience. And because of that, it's something that is created by the individual. In other words, est is not created by the trainer or the group that the person goes to train with, it's an experience -- like all experiences -- which is created by the individual who is experiencing the experience. . . . My notion is that what happens in the training is that the individual is given an opportunity to create original experiences, or to re-create original experiences~~experiences which that individual originally created. . . .
"It's definitely a way past the mind. It transcends the mind. Actually, what I would really say -- because I think it communicates better than anything, although it is not totally accurate -- is that it blows the mind." *
* My italics.
A friend of mine put it another way: "What you get out of est is that you stop being an asshole groveling in your shit and you start finding out what being alive is all about."
How's your life?
Gerry and Marcia *
Gerry, thirty, is a real estate salesman. He is quick and friendly and immediately makes people he's with comfortable. Marcia, his wife, is an executive secretary and appears serious and gentle. * This and the other autobiographies of est graduates throughout the book are representative of the many interviews I conducted. I have changed most of the subjects' names, at their request. There are no strongly negative statements simply because I was unable to find any. Just before this book went to press I finally met a woman who felt the training was useless, although not destructive. "I don't feel saved, I don't feel not saved. I don't feel much of anything after est." she told me. "My life was pretty much O.K. way it was and its O.K. now." That was it!
GERRY: Our real estate office is like a branch of est. My uncle, who owns the business, is a graduate and everyone else had taken the training except me. I felt pressured to do est. I didn't want to and, at the same time I also did.
Yeah, it worked. While the real estate business isn't great now, so I can't claim dollars and cents results, I know I'm more confident and aware in dealing with people. I can look them in the eye, literally and figuratively.
Probably the main thing that's resulted from the training is that I've thrown away my Bufferin. For years I had almost daily headaches from tension. They're almost all gone. When I get one now, I don't fight it. I just experience it. I've always had physical ailments. Last year it was simulated heart attacks and pains in my arms and chest, which scared the hell out of me. In college I used to get tonsillitis. I was always sick with something. I was constantly abusing myself.
In the training I saw how I was never happy about anything. Just like my Dad. He gets to feel like a total failure because some other guy has a better car or house or bigger business. But I now see what a racket that is.
My brother-in-law, an orthopedic surgeon, took the training. He went into it skeptical and came out of it really impressed. Now he tells a lot of his patients, "If you want to get rid of your lower-back pain go to est. if you want to hold on to it, you can do that too." It might just ruin his business.
MARCIA: After Gerry took it, I felt out of it. Everyone bugged me to take the training. I'm an optimist. I didn't think I needed it. I finally did the training and found it really good.
Gerry's and my main hang-up was whether or not we should have children. I didn't want them -- not yet, anyway. Otherwise our relationship had been pretty good.
Now we feel we want to have children eventually. And it is all right not to have them now; we don't have to have kids because our friends do. Now I feel more confident about taking care of a child.
Some mornings when I feel that I want to leave my job, or just not bother to show up, Gerry and I talk and I see that I have a choice. And I get there.
We both see, now, how a lot of people cover up what goes on with them. We also see our needs and desires. Having a house and kids is no longer "it."
I'm more involved and aware of myself. That's what life is all about.
2
In the Beginning
QUESTION: Has est changed your life? ANSWER: Yes. Now I carry all my troubles around with me instead of just some of them.
Around New York the est training is called the "no piss training." At the time I was considering taking it, bathroom breaks were up to seven hours apart.*
* They're now down to about four hours.
I very much wanted to take the training -- I had heard strange and wonderful things about it -- but I was hung up on the bathroom thing. The more curious I became, the more I feared I wouldn't be able to maintain control for such a long time.
I blamed this fear on a childhood incident which still haunted me. In the second grade, during a spelling test, my teacher chose to ignore my raised hand signaling that I needed to go to the bathroom. The inevitable happened; I wet my pants. I was so ashamed of this incident that I had never mentioned it to anyone. Now, decades later, I was afraid it would be repeated.
I finally decided to take the training anyway. The decision made, I embarked on the est adventure, a trip that a year later isn't yet over and probably never will be. It now appears to be one of the most valuable experiences I've ever had.
It wasn't until I was well into the training, incidentally, that I got what my fear had really been about. I had always avoided situations in which I felt my freedom would be circumscribed; I cherished my independence too much to allow anyone to tell me what to do. A dozen years . earlier I had walked out on a fabulous job as the only woman account executive in a large advertising agency just because, regardless of how long, hard, and creatively I worked, all account executives had to sign in every morning at 9:00. It wasn't until I went through the training that I really experienced this as a pattern of my life.
est has two meanings. It is the Latin word for "it is." It is also an acronym whose initials stand for Erhard Seminars Training, named, after its creator, Werner Erhard. It is always written in the modest lower case, simple and unostentatious, in quiet good taste. In contrast to its typographical style, est is an ebullient, dynamic, expanding operation.
I heard that the people who were taking the training wer
e not the type of seekers I was used to meeting in the various therapy/encounter/mind-expansion experiences I had had over the past dozen years. A good proportion had never been in therapy and/or been involved in a growth group.
They were young and old, confused and confident, divorced, married, professionals, housewives, students, rich, not-so-rich (but rarely poor). The reason they were all flocking to est? Because, even though most of them were doing well, their lives weren't really satisfying; in est talk, trying to make their lives satisfying wasn't satisfying either.
Almost without exception, they had come to est because someone they knew had been through it, had raved about it, and had become living proof that it "worked." A few had read one of several provocative magazine articles about est. Many were aware that some famous entertainers were among its graduates: John Denver had written songs praising est; Valerie Harper had thanked Werner on TV; and Yoko Ono, George Maharis, Polly Bergen, Joanne Woodward, Cloris Leachman, Jerry Rubin, and Roy Scheider, as well as four of the Fifth Dimension, were also said to be alumni. (est keeps the names of its graduates confidential; many graduates, however, speak publicly about their participation in est.)
Clearly, est was enjoying a smashing success. Wherever I went in New York and San Francisco, I heard remarkable stories from graduates who were effortlessly changing their lives: making decisions to leave or remain in marriages, resuming relationships with aging parents they had avoided for years, getting out of ruts, getting into better jobs and better relationships, losing weight without trying -- continually affirming how much better they were feeling about money, sex, and/or God.
At the same time, a lot of people, weary of the proliferation of all the mind-expanding movements of the last fifteen years, were dismissing est as just one more in a long string of self-helps. The others didn't work for them, and they doubted that est could either.
However, for the same reasons that thousands of others were being drawn to est, I was also curious about it. In addition to the personal benefits that seemed likely, I had a professional interest in finding out what the est game was all about. As a psychotherapist who encountered among my patients many of the problems that people were being "cured" of through est, I wanted to know how the difficult task of changing human beings was being accomplished so quickly and, apparently, so effectively. If est was really doing what everyone said it was doing, and doing it in a span of sixty hours, then it was accomplishing what no person and no one system in Western psychology had yet been able to do. After the training, I saw that est is not "change" but transformation, and emphasizes accepting yourself as you really are.
I was awed by the notion that a simple, quick, relatively inexpensive system (my own psychoanalysis had cost more than $15,000) could help vast numbers of people to transform their lives. I was further impressed with the fact that two professional colleagues of mine were sending their patients to est, claiming that it speeded up the therapy process. In fact, est asks on its application form if the applicant is currently in treatment and, if so, if he's "winning" or "losing" in therapy. If he feels he's losing (that the therapy isn't working), est recommends that he doesn't take the training. In any event, est requires people to inform their therapist.
Despite its glowing references, I still embarked on my est experience behind a mask of skepticism.
Just before I began the training a friend chided me about this latest in a long string of self-improvement ventures. He confided that my forays had become a joke to our mutual friends. I was hurt and angered by what he told me. But then my memory flashed to myself as a young girl -- self-assured on the outside, miserable on the inside, split for so many years by torment -- and I knew that the only reason I was still alive was that I had refused to capitulate to the terror, pain, and confusion that had ruled much of my life. I would continue my search.
I would take the training. But I would reserve judgment -- and attempt to maintain a journalist's detachment.
The adventure began one rainy March evening in New York, where I attended my first est guest seminar, held in a large commercial hotel. (I subsequently attended other guest seminars to take additional notes for this book. The description that follows is a composite of those experiences.) I was barely through the revolving doors when I met my first est representative. She wore an est badge and what looked to me like the vacant, mindless smile I had come to associate with Hare-Krishna-type spiritual disciples. Good God, I thought, what inanities am I getting into this time? In spite of myself, I followed her directions to the seminar, assisted along the short route by other smiling volunteers.
A more prosaic setting for enlightenment would be hard to find. In one of those anonymous hotel ballrooms usually rented for testimonial dinners and political fund-raisers, I joined some 2,000 others, who all looked surprisingly familiar. They were the kind of people I might run into in my local supermarket, or have to dinner, or take an adult-education class with. The majority looked overwhelmingly straight, as if they had just come from an office or a kitchen, leaving behind a sheepskin in the attic and a couple of cars in the garage.
Many of them had come to the guest seminar at the behest of a friend who had graduated; graduates are encouraged (actually, urged) to bring friends, relatives, and acquaintances to these events. (An est mailer I received recently says, in part, "When people choose to take the training, they do so out of their experience of you. Who you are and where you come from inspires people." This is followed by a pitch "to share a Special Guest Seminar with your friends.")
Waiting for the seminar to begin, I perused a booklet describing the est training. It began with a statement of purpose: ". . . to transform your ability to experience living so that the situations you have been trying to change or have been putting up with clear up just in the process of life itself."
I especially connected with the word "trying"; it had characterized my life. I had been trying to get rid of a despised temper, trying to get out or stay out of depressions, trying to be a single parent raising my children with love and wisdom, and trying to get thin or stay thin, depending on the year. At this point, not needing to try seemed beautiful -- but impossible.
I eavesdropped on conversations around me, listening for hope, anxiety, expectations, annoyance. They were all there.
One woman told another that, after est, a long-married couple they both knew were talking for the first time in years.
An elderly man confessed that his nephew had sent him. "He said my kids might even come to see me once in a while. They live in New York but they hate to visit us. That was enough. That's why I'm here."
From another direction, I heard someone say that he was tired of hating himself. "I've spent thirty years doing it and it's time to stop."
Familiar refrains, I thought. Equally familiar was the fact that, like most Americans, they were looking for solutions in quick cures. Aspirin, ten-day diets, speed-reading, courses that promise short-cuts to success -- and now enlightenment in two weekends.
I felt irritable, put-upon, unreceptive. My tape recorder had been temporarily confiscated at the door. I thought that the confiscators were being arbitrary and authoritarian. I was assured that there was a good reason for it, but I suspected paranoia behind the soap-opera smiles. I dug into my handbag for notebook and pen, sorry I had come, anxious to get it over with.
The room quieted when the seminar leaders arrived. Wearing the by-now-familiar beatific smiles, Stewart Esposito and Marcia Martin introduced themselves. They were young and attractive, as were almost all the est volunteers and staff I was to meet.
Marcia began. "The purpose of the training is to transform your ability to experience. We have found the result of that transformed way of experiencing is an expanded experience of aliveness. Our definition of aliveness at est is love, health, happiness, and full self-expression." I had no quarrel with that. I settled in for a sermon, giving only part of my attention to the toothsome twosome.
Before long they had my complete att
ention. Quickly moving from the general to the particular, they took turns describing their experiences and the est experience. if it was less than high drama, it was nevertheless interesting.
Stewart, like Werner, was formerly a management consultant. He had decided to take the training reluctantly. His justification was that he could take what he learned from it to create his own training system. Despite his initial attitude, he began to see changes in his life after attending just a guest seminar.
Before est, he told us, his business ran him. After est, the reverse was true. He had also lost forty pounds and improved his relationship with his kids.
"When I went to high school," he told us, "I thought I would be happy when I graduated. Then I thought I would be happy after college. Then I thought I would be happy after I got a really good job. I was always 'one day in the future.' Meanwhile, the nourishment, the completeness, of life was missing. I was always waiting for one more thing to make me happy."