est

by Adelaide Bry

  Mason's concept of time is that it exists by agreement and that the agreement states that time only moves forward and can't be changed.

  He gave me an example of how this affects his own life. "I know that if something bad has happened, like when the atom bomb fell on Japan, it's not something I can care about. It's already happened and I can't take it back. If could, I would care."

  He related things of the past to things of the present with a "for instance." "If my Dad fell off a cliff and got beat up, I would say I half cared and half didn't." He thought about that for a minute and then added, "I guess I would take it back if I could." There was neither guilt nor remorse in that remark. He simply accepted that most of the time he cared about his father and sometimes he didn't.

  Mason's parents were happy to share with me their experience since his training. They were grateful for it and spoke about their post-est relationship frankly and openly.

  "One thing that's different now," his father told me, "is that I no longer keep the things from him that I used to because I thought he was too young to understand. I was totally wrong. There is nothing I can't talk about that he wouldn't be able to get, regardless of how complex I think it is.

  "One day I was in a rotten mood and he said, 'Something is going on with you; is anything wrong?' I told him I was thinking about what had produced my bad mood, and he got it. I didn't know it was so easy. I thought kids didn't understand that kind of thing. After that, I stopped hiding myself from him."

  He and his wife had sent Mason to the training because it had changed their own lives dramatically and they wanted him to have that experience. But they weren't quite prepared for the results.

  "On the last day of Mason's training, when we went to pick him up, I naturally asked him what he got out of the training." This, from his mother. "He just looked at me calmly and said, 'I don't really need you.'

  "I felt my head spin and my stomach turn over. I had learned long ago (a belief) that a child shouldn't feel that way about a parent. But now after est, I see that he may not need me or sometimes even want me. And that sometimes I don't need or want him. It is simply truth. But at that moment, I still couldn't handle my own child saying this to me.

  "He could see how hurt I was. I turned my face away to hide my tears. When he went to bed that evening and I went in to kiss him good night, he was very loving and he said to me 'You're being the victim, Mom.'

  "And suddenly I got that he was able to say this to me because he knew that I loved him. And he knew that I knew that he loved me. And that sometimes we both need each other very much and love each other and want each other. And sometimes we don't. And that he knew that I was being a sucker for plugging in to what he told me."

  These parents were in touch with their emotional rackets, their games, their impositions on their child. He, in turn, saw not only Through their rackets but also through his own. With that clarity there was space for all of them to be together. And to love each other.

  If we multiply this kind of relationship many times over, we will get an entirely different notion of what being a family is all about. Once we can detach ourselves from the belief that children must love and need their parents all the time, and that parents must love and want their children always; once we accept that all feelings and experiences between parents and children are acceptable, then we can free ourselves and our children from guilt and dishonesty and allow ourselves simply to be together.

  We can really love each other only if we can let each other be who we really are. I got that at est.

  Janet

  Janet at forty-eight is a beautiful bundle of energy. She is divorced and has five children ranging in age from fifteen to twenty-seven.

  Talking about my est experience is like trying to share how I felt about my first trip to Rome with someone who never left Kansas. Or like telling how it was to have a baby.

  I can't believe it. I can't believe the way I feel now. Just before my divorce in 1965, I had a nervous breakdown and I've been seeing a psychiatrist ever since then. He wasn't in favor of my going to est. He thinks my problems center around anger and he felt est might be a shocking way for me to get through to my anger. "Shocking" is his word. If I got those feelings out of my system, he told me, and if anything bad happened, it could cause another breakdown. He added that if the breakdown did occur, it wouldn't necessarily be unhealthy.*

  * est has a screening policy whereby anyone who has been hospitalized for psychiatric care or a mental disorder, or is in therapy now and not "winning," or who has been in therapy within six months of taking the training and not "winning," is recommended not to take the training. If the person does not accept est's recommendation, the enrollee must have a letter on professional letterhead from his therapist. The letter must state the following: (1) that the therapist approves of the person's taking the training; (2) that the therapist will be available to the enrollee during the training; (3) that the therapist will be available to the enrollee after the training.

  I weighed what he said and decided to do it. I felt that if I had another breakdown because of feelings I couldn't express, I would benefit from it. I was going against him but it was my decision. I just said to myself, "O.K., my mother and father will freak out if I lose control, but my children are strong enough to take it. I'm doing it, anyway." Now I'm glad I did.

  The first day of the training was just dumb. I called the friend who had recommended it to me and he said that at the end of his first day he wanted to call the attorney general because it was such a rip-off.

  On the second day I went back into my past and the feelings spilled out. I saw and felt myself as a child of about five. I felt unbelievable pain. I felt a ball in my left side as though I had just been hit. Then I saw myself as an uncertain, goody-goody little girl torn between my mother and father. I had never gotten anything like this kind of experience in therapy.

  Now, since est, I can sit in my psychiatrist's office and be conscious of my body. When I get physical sensations, I know that what I'm saying is important. I might get a sharp pain in my stomach and, wow, I experience my anger. That's the anger I locked up in my body and never told my mother and father about.

  Now I'm beginning to question what my psychiatrist is doing. I'm getting dissatisfied with him because I've gotten so much more out of est. I've been feeling a lot more. A lot of my pain about my breakdown and other things is coming out. And I can get angry at the children. The most important thing is that I'm not afraid now to get angry, right or wrong.

  I only shared once in the training. I told people that my breakdown was a copout, that it was my way of escaping so I would have the support of a doctor. I said, maybe I didn't need that breakdown. Maybe I could have stayed strong and still gotten my divorce.

  8

  Werner and His Business

  "I know that you know that I love you. What I want you to know is that I know you love me." -- Werner Erhard

  There's a photograph of Werner Erhard that appeared in print which makes him look larger than life. I had bought this image. When I finally got to meet him I was surprised to see that he is only six feet tall. Life-size. It was a little like finding out about Santa Claus; I was both disappointed and relieved.

  Unquestionably one of the most charismatic of contemporary heroes -- or anti-heroes, depending on which side you're coming from -- Werner has in just a few years in the limelight become the focus of massive adoration, speculation, criticism, support, and controversy. Everything he has done and does is a strong statement. And a lot of it seems contradictory.

  Witness:

  On the one hand, he's the most influential person in the self-improvement field today; he's been invited to conduct grand rounds at the Langley Porter Neuro-psychiatric Institute and he's spoken at such distinguished places as the University of California Medical Center, Stanford University, and the University of Munich. On the other hand, in a field where graduate degrees are an essential passport to success, his formal
education ended with high school.

  On the one hand, his main theme is self-responsibility. On the other, he walked out on a wife and four children, sixteen years ago, to do his own thing.

  On the one hand, he is regarded as the brilliant mastermind and director of est. On the other, he is absolutely dedicated to minutiae (how to clean toilets; how to arrange chairs for a training).

  On the one hand, he was born with a Jewish name (used until his mid-twenties). On the other, he adopted a name that sounds as though it comes direct from the Weimar Republic.

  On the one hand, he appears the ultimate realist; to the marital status line on est's application form, he added LWS -- living with someone. On the other, he appears a hopeless romantic; he expects forty million Americans to take the est training.

  He makes terrific copy. He's a sinner and a saint, a super-salesman and a mystic, a preacher of pleasure and a workhorse, driven and peaceful, loving and demanding, and according to those who work closely with him, both sexy and neuter. He neither defends those parts of his life that don't fit into the American superman image nor does he hype his "good guy" stuff.

  From my point of view, the main thing you have to get about Werner is that he's dramatically changing people's lives. "It's possible for you to walk out of here turned around 180 degrees," the trainers tell you, and it's true. It's tempting to knock who Werner is because of what he's doing, which is giving people what they want and making lots of money at it. It's also tempting to see him as a laugh on the psychological establishment with its rats and computers and unintelligible papers. As far as I'm concerned, that's not what Werner's about. He's a brilliant and effective superproduct of our times. And his work, I believe, is making a difference.

  Werner Erhard was born Jack Rosenberg in Philadelphia on September 5, 1935. When he was five his family moved to Bala Cynwyd, my own Philadelphia suburb -- a comfortable middle- and upper-middle-class environment with old Colonial houses and tree-lined streets. He spent one year at the same high school, Lower Merion, that my two children attended. He then transferred to another, from which he graduated in 1952. He may have hung out at the same local delicatessen which attracted my own teen-agers on spring afternoons.

  I've had a chance to observe his parents on two occasions, and my impression is that they are gracious, successful, and affluent people with a strong and positive sense of themselves.

  After a thirteen-year period during which he had no contact with any of his family, Werner now has a close and loving relationship with all of them. Including his ex-wife, who has taken the est training.

  I was extremely moved on one occasion when he shared his feelings about his parents. His mirror-deep blue eyes unwavering, he thanked his mother for teaching him about commitment (although, obviously, that seed took a long time to sprout), and he thanked his father for teaching him to be open and to love.

  From high school, Werner had a quick succession of jobs: working in an employment agency; lugging beef in a meatpacking plant; and helping out in his father's restaurant.

  He learned construction estimating and became a construction supervisor. For a short time, he worked in the automobile business as a salesman and as a sales manager. During this period, he also managed a business which sold medium-duty industrial equipment.

  Shortly after he finished high school, he married his high school girl friend, Pat, and they subsequently had four children: Clare, Lynn, Jack, and Debbie.

  In 1959, when he was twenty-four, he left his family "to avoid the responsibilities I had," he says honestly. He took off with Ellen, who later became his second wife and with whom he has had three children -- Celeste, Adair, and St. John.

  I thought of all this when I heard him talk recently about doing right and wrong things in life. "We make mistakes in life. When something is wrong, you have to acknowledge it's wrong. You also have to allow others to be wrong. Otherwise, you get stuck in being right." And later that same evening, "The soap opera you call your life is just a melodrama, evidence of the instant story you call your life."

  When Jack left Philadelphia, he headed for St. Louis, the first stop in a long and arduous odyssey. En route, to avoid being traced by his family he changed his name. He read an article about physicist Werner Heisenberg and Ludwig Erhard, the German finance minister (later chancellor) and took his new name from a combination of theirs. He later said that "I had a very determined mother and an uncle who was a captain in the police department, so I wanted a name as far from John Paul Rosenberg as I could get."

  (There has been a lot of flak about Werner's name change and the presumed disavowal of his Jewish heritage. He has never publicly denied this, perhaps out of respect for his father's family. In fact, he was baptized John Paul in the Episcopal church. His mother, Dorothy, is Episcopalian, and his father, Joe, was a Jew who converted to Christianity around the time of Werner's birth.)

  With a new name, one suitcase, and "a life full of pretense and lies," Werner Hans Erhard disembarked in a new place and embarked on a new life.

  He went to work in St. Louis as a registrar for a school that taught the operation of heavy construction equipment and sold used cars. He then headed for California, where he represented a correspondence school and enrolled students. Sometime afterward he went to Spokane, where he managed an office that sold Britannica's Great Books.

  In 1963, Werner went to work for the Parents Cultural Institute, a division of Parents' Magazine. Recently, in response to a published attack on Werner's integrity, the man who was president of Parents' at the time of Werner's employment wrote about this period with high praise. In a letter which would make any mother proud, he said "Werner's very considerable reputation was based on his ability to develop personnel and train executives. His development courses were used by many other executives both inside P.M.C.I. and in other organizations as well. Werner's integrity, honesty and contribution to the well-being of the thousands of human beings he worked with earned him the respect and acknowledgment of the old and respected company for which he worked." Werner was vice president of this organization for the last three of the six years he was there.

  He must have been a dynamite executive, given his charisma and his sensitivity to people. Fred Lehrman writes in New Age Journal: "He seems to be a friend to everyone who wants to know him. I once went ice-skating with the est staff. Stumbling around on the ice for the first time in twenty years, I heard someone call my name. It was Werner. How the hell did he remember my name out of 30,000 graduates?" *

  * September 15, 1974.

  Werner left P.M.C.I. (which went out of business a year later), and became a division manager with the Grolier Society, Inc. A former associate and self-described friend of Werner's who worked with him at Grolier (and asked not to be identified) describes him as "supercool, aloof, and secretive. You never knew what he was thinking," he told me, "but he often said that he was going to build and make a fortune. I don't like the est organization," he added. "I went to several guest seminars but my ego wouldn't allow me to get into it." When I quoted all this to Werner, he laughed. "By that point I was long past wanting to make a fortune. I had already realized that money was no substitute for satisfaction."

  Another view of Werner during his time at Grolier comes from his former boss, who was then the vice president. "Werner had a demonstrated ability to develop people's talents," he wrote. "He had a reputation for adding dignity and a sense of satisfaction to the lives of the people with whom he associated."

  A friend of a friend sent me a copy of the Grolier house organ at the time Werner was there. It notes that the operation under his management was unique because, among other things. "The sales staff is comprised only of women. Recruitment is almost entirely in the hands of young enthusiastic women," it stated without comment, and then went on to note that "they consistently show up on the top ten producers list" and were challenging their male counterparts." Even then he was top dog in his way, and his way was to do things in ways nobody else ha
d.

  During his employment with (Grolier, Werner took the Mind Dynamics course and went on to study with its founder, Alexander Everett, finally becoming a part-time instructor. According to a former associate, "he worked with people to enable them to become more aware of themselves, even resorting to humiliation when necessary." Werner was offered a bigger job when the Holiday Magic people began to take over the active management of Mind Dynamics. Several months earlier he had had his experience "out of space and time" on which the est training was to be built. He declined the offer and left Mind Dynamics to start est.

  Werner's wife, Ellen, was a very real support during the years he was developing est. She was a successful businesswoman in her own tight, managing a natural vitamin and food supplement company which, Werner told me in her presence, he had started in order to give her an opportunity to experience her capability. She has since given the business to the employees and has gone on to assist Werner at est.

  The motivation techniques Werner studied and taught with great success in business have also been translated for est use. Graphs and charts are maintained for all business functions, including statistics on how many people are enrolled in seminars and training. These sheets, which look like stock market analyses, are referred to and compared proudly; volunteers are apparently willing and happy to be "on the line" in their performances.