by Adelaide Bry
Trembling, suddenly not so sure of himself, he shared that he felt he was superior to other people, that his interest and knowledge set him apart.
I spoke to him later because I was interested in what he had been into and how he felt about est. "There was nothing wrong in my search," he told me. "It was my attachment to being special on the path that upset me here. The trainer was giving out this special stuff to everyone. I didn't like not being different."
An overweight computer programmer shared that he had been in therapy for ten years and that now, for the first time, he felt that he didn't need it anymore. He had clung, he said, to the fact that his mother was a horrible mother, a hang-up that had destroyed every relationship he'd ever had with a woman. "I'm going to call my therapist tomorrow and tell him good-bye," he announced. "I don't need him, because I'm not clinging to that belief anymore."
I shared only once. A Gestalt therapist tried to provoke the trainer into an argument. He declaimed interminably about how est was wrong telling us we were causing all our experiences. Stewart let him talk on and on, and then finally asked him to sit down. He refused. Stewart told him that if he wouldn't sit down, he would have to call a policeman. The confused psychologist still wouldn't budge. Eventually he gave up and turned in his microphone.
I was both ashamed and angry. I stood up to say that all therapists were not like the one who had just spoken. The trainer asked me if I knew what I was doing. I did, I told him. I admitted that I love to make a fuss and blow off my anger by getting angry at something I "believe" in. It was a beautiful opportunity for me. I could put another person down, get sympathy from the rest of the group and unleash some of my excess anger. I had a good time. And I knew, also, that I was running my racket.
The day droned on. It was exquisitely boring. It was like the meditation called in Zen "just sitting." And "just sitting" may release hidden inner volcanos. Dr. Charles Tart, psychologist, author of Altered States of Consciousness, and Professor at the University of California at Davis, often refers in his lectures to this kind of situation as being the precedent to a disruptive patterning that must necessarily precede a transformation of consciousness.
Late Sunday evening we finally got to one of the major events of the training, the Truth Process. The day before we had been told to pick an "item," something that had been bothering us: a problem, a feeling, a situation we weren't handling. I picked my anger at my friend and lover of the past eight years. I periodically became uncontrollably angry at him; although I understood all the "reasons," knowing them hadn't changed anything.
Two hundred and fifty of us stretched out on the floor to begin the process. The trainer gave us specific instructions. "Locate a space in your right foot," he began, and then he went through the entire body, bringing us to a state of deep relaxation, allowing us to become more aware of ourselves. He then read us a very beautiful poem, written by Werner, based on the writings of the psychologist Abraham Maslow, in which we heard that we are perfect and good, that we can be positive and full of love, and that we can experience good things in our lives.
Stewart's prediction, "You are going to feel every feeling there is to feel," was about to happen.
His directions continued, and the scene grew noisy; an incredible cacophony of sound erupted as each one of the two hundred and fifty men and women, lying flat on their backs on the floor of the giant ballroom, went into their "item." Two hundred and fifty people in every form of emotion, giving free vent to vomiting, shaking, sobbing, hysterical laughing, raging -- re-creating experiences in a safe space. No one paid the slightest attention to anyone else. Each person there was concentrating wholly on his own mind/body experience.
In all my years in analysis and through all the other disciplines in which I had received training or treatment, I had never before gotten in touch with the feelings of the incident that came to me in that process.
I was a little girl of nine. I could see myself taunting my father. Furious, he chased me to the bathroom. I ran into it and slammed the door in his face. In the process, I could see him, wild and out of control, trying to push the door in. "You can't catch me," I screamed. At that moment, I felt the tingling in my fingers and the throbbing of my heart that I had experienced when pushing the door shut so many years before. For the first time, I felt "physically" how I had actually separated myself from men by putting a locked door between us, and at that moment I was overcome with feelings of my own goodness and beauty. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before.
The feeling released in that one incident has had continuing and profound effects on me. I can still feel myself responding in anger when my buttons are pushed. But the dimension and the force of the anger have changed. For the first time I feel that I can actually be at its cause, and not at its effect.
At the end of the process we were asked to return to a beach of our own creation. It was to become a place I loved to go to in the processes. Some people experienced it as a place of tranquility and beauty. Others, like a good friend of mine, turned it into a setting for further drama.
On one occasion she vividly saw a figure she identified as death walking toward her, its arms outstretched in supplication. She backed away, frightened but not repulsed. Then she saw a beautiful and loving man coming toward her from the horizon. She was torn. Finally she threw a kiss to "death" and gently told it that she chose to opt for life. She and the man were united.
When we talked about this incredible fantasy my friend told me that she felt deeply liberated by it. She had the sense that it marked an end and a new beginning in her life.
Sunday night included the much-discussed Danger Process. The room was rearranged into eight parallel rows from which, one row at a time, we filed to the stage to confront -- and be confronted by -- the audience. As we stood there the trainer exhorted us to "be yourself with people . . . just be with people . . . get what it's like to be with people for the first time in your lives . . . be yourself . . . be who you really are . . . be yourself with people."
I awaited my turn coolly, in contrast to the anguish and agony it evoked in those who preceded me. At other times and in other places (especially at Arica), I had had long, unflinching eye-to-eye contact with people.
When my row moved up front and I looked out on the mass of faces looking right back at me, my back ached but I felt more at ease than I would have dreamed possible. Thus, I was really surprised when a woman next to me fainted, and a man a few steps away began to cry uncontrollably. Later a number of people shared how liberating the anguish they had experienced was. On my way home that night I felt amazingly refreshed.
BETWEEN THE WEEKENDS
The mid-training the following Wednesday evening saw us all reunited like long-lost relatives. Although I had left the training high the previous Sunday, the few days since then had been singularly unremarkable. Not so for most of the others. One by one they got up to share the miracles they had experienced since the weekend.
One man had settled a long-standing hassle with the telephone company. Another had seen his parents for the first time in twelve years. A woman had returned to her husband. Another had had a long-overdue confrontation with her boss. People were needing less sleep, less food, and getting along without painkillers.
There were also more broken agreements. A confessed "pot-head" had gotten stoned and experienced total disorientation. A woman had gone on an eating binge which, although not specifically forbidden in the ground rules, was her way of "going unconscious."
An elderly artist complained bitterly that he hadn't been able to sleep, eat, or move his bowels since the training began. "It's unendurable," he said. Later I asked him if he would return to the training the following weekend. "Are you kidding?" he asked. "Leaving now would be like getting off the operating table during mid-surgery."
Before we left, we had a process. I went on an incredible cosmic journey that began over Manhattan and ended at the end of the universe. But I went home depressed. It wa
sn't enough of a miracle for me.
GETTING IT
The second weekend began, again, with sharing. I was in a foul mood born of disappointment.
Early in the day the trainer reminded us that what we get from the training is nothing. "The problem," he told us, "is that you think nothing is something." Then how come, a woman wanted to know, it takes sixty hours? "Because," he told her, "you have to move through all the somethings you're stuck with to get to nothing."
"To get nothing," he explained, "you have to get what you've got and that your life is the way it is." I was confused and getting tired of what I saw as nothing. I desperately wanted something, preferably a break.
The day stretched out interminably. We were coming into the homestretch. The final weekend, we were told, was 85 percent of the training. The data was coming fast and furious now. We had moved from belief systems to very complex material relating to knowledge and reality. On Sunday, we would do "The Anatomy of the Mind," which was what everything was leading up to. In that process we would grasp -- and ultimately experience -- the nature of mind. (This experience is the foundation for the entire est epistemology.) It was heavy stuff. It would jolt a lot of our cherished beliefs about man, the nature of man, the mind, and the universe.
Adam Smith, in Powers of Mind,* compares the est training to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which I had seen many years before. In the play two old tramps wait by a tree on a road for Godot, who doesn't come. One of them says, "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful." Recently when I read Smith's discussion of the play in relation to his experience of est, I found myself nodding in agreement. I, too, had spent the training waiting for nothing to happen and nobody to come. I was suddenly able to recall the play vividly. And get it.
* New York: Random House, 1975.
Later that same day I had an extraordinary clear flash of my mother. I saw her in a housedress in the kitchen of my childhood home admonishing me in Latin to do something. I listened carefully and heard her say familiar words, "Carpe diem, Adelaide. Seize the day; do it now!"
My mother was a frustrated intellectual who often told me that it was important to do rather than just be. I had bought it. Now, many, many years later, I was able to respond to her words in my own way. I was "seizing the day." I was discovering, in the est training, who I really was. I was beginning to experience aliveness!
Sunday was when we got it. And graduated.
"I'll tell you everything there is to know about life," the trainer said on that final day. "What is, is, and what ain't, ain't.
"Enlightenment," he continued, "is knowing you are a machine. You are a machine!" He paused to let that sink in. "You thought" -- he glared at us -- "that the heavens would part and there would be visitations of angels. That ain't so. You're machines, machines, machines. Whether you accept this or not, it is so."
I chuckled to myself. What a put-on, I thought, and how clever. I waited to hear what getting it was really about. Along with at least half of the trainees. Hands began to wave frantically.
"I don't get it," the first protester announced.
"Good," came the reply. "There's nothing to get, so you got it."
From someone else, angrily, "Then why are we here?"
"No special reason," Stewart answered calmly, unconcerned with the growing uproar. People began to laugh, some with recognition, some with anxiety. Some muttered an assortment of obscenities under their breath. The normally quiet room suddenly became alive with chatter. People felt angry, confused, betrayed, disappointed, incredulous.
"I get it," one man volunteered. "Getting it is whatever you get."
"If that's what you got," came the response.
Some of the trainees got realizations about concrete things such as that they wanted a divorce, or to make a relationship work better. Or that they had blamed others for the way they were. Or that they had created their own backaches, migraines, asthma, ulcers, and other ailments.
(The remission of physical ailments is not surprising if one accepts, as many physicians do these days, that mind and body are one and that illness doesn't just happen to us. It was remarkable to watch person after person get up and admit that they and they alone were responsible for their physical ailments. Once these people faced the experiences of their lives honestly, their ailments vanished.)
The trainer then asked those of us who were absolutely certain that we didn't get it to stand up. I wasn't sure whether I had or hadn't so I stood up. He then went from one to another of us to find out what we were experiencing.
"Nothing," I told him. "And cheated." "Fine," he responded, "you got it." "How come," I persisted, "I feel rotten when everyone else seems to feel good?" To which he answered, "That's the way you feel. Rotten." He smiled at me. "Take what you get!"
Eventually I did get it. It was just the way he said it would be. I was "enlightened."
My very last experience -- at 3:00 a.m. and as part of the graduation ritual -- was to do an est "personality profile." Each of us was told certain data about a person known by one of the attending graduates but absent from the training room. We then went into our "space" and from that place described aspects of that person's personality. I was accurate except on one minor detail. Others without any previous experience had the same kind of incredible accuracy.
The way est describes what happens in this process is that people have abilities that were previously considered impossible. "The ability to do personality profiles isn't something that's learned," est explains. "It's something that is uncovered as the result of the training. What is uncovered is the essence of your ability to communicate. When most of us look at people, we really don't see what's there -- we see our idea of what's there . . . our picture of what's there. . . . The personality profile is one centered individual experiencing life through the eyes of another and getting what's really so for him. It's called communication."
We finally graduated early Monday morning to the applause of over a hundred prior graduates and with a handshake and good wishes from the trainer. His parting words were: "If you want your life to work, make it work. If you fuck it up, you fuck it up." I got that, too.
AFTERWARD
I hauled my exhausted body and soul back to my hotel room at 4:30 a.m. The tattered brocade drapes and the peeling paint of the once-elegant hotel seemed to mock me, but I didn't care. I turned the light on in the bathroom and a huge black cockroach scurried across the floor. Incredibly, I knew that I had created the experience of the cockroach being there; I had bet of couple of friends there were roaches in that hotel, and now it was fact! What was even more incredible was that I felt benign toward it; it existed, and so did I.
The following morning my train back to Philadelphia got stuck for an hour in the tunnel under the Hudson River. When the conductor announced the delay, I observed passenger reactions. Instead of dealing with the reality that the train was stopped, most of them went into panic behavior. One overweight man became hysterical about being delayed for an appointment. Another took off for the bar. A third went to sleep. They seemed to me to be responses out of each of their belief systems. It struck me as a microcosm of how most of us respond to life; like machines, for every button pushed, we have a predictable reaction.
THE POST-TRAINING
It wasn't until I went to the post-training several days later that I began to see how deeply est had affected -- and would continue to affect -- my life.
It was like a rehash of a weekend party. I've attended a few other post-trainings in the service of this book and they're remarkably alike wherever they're held. There's a feeling of being among dear friends and of belongingness. It's not unlike a reunion of an encounter group or college class -- we had all experienced similar input. The significant difference, however, is the absence of judgments. One person's experience is as valid as another's. This willingness to acknowledge and accept where another person is at is probably why many est graduates make long-time friendships among fellow tr
ainees. (I've also heard from women friends that it's a terrific place to meet eligible men.)
The kind of enthusiasm est graduates share at a post-training is exemplified by singer John Denver's dedication on his Back Home Again album. "My purpose in performing is to communicate the joy I experience in living," he's written on the inside jacket. "It is the aliveness already within you that my music is intended to reach. Participating in est has created an amazing amount of space for joy and aliveness in my life. It pleases me to share est with you."
My own post-training, if not as lyrical, was equally eulogistic.
An elderly man who had experienced tremendous withholding through most of the training and cried his eyes out on the final day (I cried along with him) shared that he had been in this world for over seventy years and had only just now begun to live. Because he was living with his full being, he told us, he no longer feared death.