est

by Adelaide Bry

  In contrast, Werner once told an interviewer that "motivation is kind of a joke that keeps people from finding out who they are. If they knew who they were, they wouldn't need motivation. They would be expresing themselves." He added that he doesn't think that he comes from motivation anymore. "I used to and taught others to. I was my own star pupil. Now it's almost like it just happens -- it comes as an expression of my inner self -- and the motives come afterward to explain it."

  Werner is proud of his business background and credits it with being an important factor both in his enlightenment and as the school in which he learned much of what preceded est.

  He says: "Business is such a beautiful place to [test disciples]. If I had been at a university, I would only have dabbled in these things, because they would have been out of my department. . . . Had I been in a religious order or any church or monastery, I definitely could not have done any of this. It would have been heresy. One place you are really allowed to do things like this is business, because business doesn't care what you do as long is it isn't illegal and produces results.

  "So when I told the boss I was going to use Zen with the sales force, he said, 'Great, don't get any on the walls.' So I got a chance to take my experience in Zen and translate it from the usual setting to a new setting. . . . The thing that was really beautiful about this translation of disciplines into business -- you really had to find out what the hell was trappings and drop it fast. Also, translating demanded a deeper experience of the material to start with."

  He went on to say that he was doing something at the time called "executive development and motivation" and that his job was to increase productivity, leadership, and executive ability. A figure that Werner likes to use, and which is bandied around a lot by est seminar leaders, is the 36,000 hours someone figured out he spent in one-to-one and group sessions with people. "Six solid years, night and day, if you count it up," they report.

  In another context, when talking about spirituality, he says, "I spent thirteen years earning my living in the business jungle. And that is where I learned about spirituality." He adds, "That's all there is, there isn't anything but spirituality, which is just another word for God, because God is everywhere."

  While part of Werner's road to est was through his career, the other part was through the various humanistic, psychological, and Eastern systems he pursued.

  "I was a discipline freak," he says. "I did everything that I could find and I found some stuff you wouldn't believe. I put myself through as many different disciplines as I could find. I either studied them or I practiced them or had people do them to me or I learned to do them with people or whatever."

  While he was in Spokane, he was involved with hypnosis, motivation, yoga, mind science, and the study of brain function. While working at Grolier, he took up Scientology, as well as Mind Dynamics. Because the Church of Scientology automatically expels members if they involve themselves in any other discipline, Werner was expelled when he started est.

  At one time or another, he told me, he also got into Plato, Whitehead, Hubbard, Wittgenstein, Maslow, Sartre, Fromm, Heisenberg, Carnegie, Heidegger, Wiener, Watts, Von Neumann, Ram Dass, Napoleon Hill, Maxwell Maltz, William James, Rogers, Perls, Freud, Jung, Bateson, Silva, Skinner, Norman Vincent Peale, and Einstein. What he didn't actually participate in, he managed to study and read about. Although he hasn't talked about it, I would guess that he also was into some of the hallucinogens -- LSD, mescaline, marijuana -- that were popular in the sixties and that heavily influenced the consciousness movement of the seventies.

  Werner says he got "the message" while driving south on California's 101. He had a direct experience of himself. He explained, "It meant that I no longer identified myself with my body or my personality or my past or my future or my situation or my circumstances or my feelings or my thoughts or my notion of myself or my image. . . . I have to tell you that I realized immediately that verbalizing it was irrelevant. What I considered relevant was being it.

  "I didn't find out another new thing -- I didn't add to my store of fact and information," he explained to me. "This experience transformed the quality of everything I knew -- of my whole store of facts, memories, etc. Even the way I felt in my little finger was transformed. I didn't add any new facts -- everything I knew, I knew now in a new way.

  "It's like reading a book on bicycle riding. You know about balancing on a bicycle in one way. If you sit on the bicycle and fall off a couple of times you now know the same thing but in a new way. At that moment when it clicks and you can balance on the bicycle and actually ride it, you have not really learned anything new. You just know what you knew before, but you know it now in an entirely new way. That's analogous to what happened -- it all clicked into place."

  It was about eight years after his first experience of higher consciousness (which lasted three months and then was gone) that he experienced it again. In striving to regain that first experience, it continued to elude him.

  "The secret," he found, "was that it [life] is already together, and what you have to experience is experiencing it being together. The striving to put it together is a denial of the truth that it is actually already together and further striving keeps you from getting it together. When I realized that, everything I'd already learned became transformed and I began from a whole new space.

  "My enlightenment was perhaps somewhat unusual because I had an unusual disciplinary life up until that time. I lived in the toughest monastery in the universe, called the 'world,' only I did if as a monastic discipline.

  "You know, most people fuck around with life. I did not fuck around with it. I did not handle life strategically. I handled it all out. I never got enlightened from doing it that way, incidentally. The discipline of working twenty-two, twenty-three hours a day and sleeping one, two, three, four hours a night and being always 'at it' for a period of perhaps thirteen years and less intensively for a long period before -- that provided the 'stuff' to present the space for the experience of enlightenment. But that was not the enlightenment experience itself. est came out of my taking responsibility for and completing my own life."

  est evolved out of Werner's own evolution. He says: "From all outward appearances, like most people, I was O.K. I had all the symbols: a wife who knew how to look and how to act, kids who were all right, and all the right material things. I had gotten good at pretending I was all right. I had enough of the things we all agree make a person O.K. But I didn't feel O.K. inside because I hadn't 'experienced' my O.K.'ness.

  "After I got it, I began to see the truth behind what I'd done and studied. I realized: you can't learn truth from anyone; you've got to get truth from yourself.

  "Of course I then discovered that it all had already been said. Buddha had said it. Christ had said it. Socrates and Plato had said it. Gandhi had said it.

  "When I realized the truth it was so stupidly simple; I couldn't believe I hadn't noticed it before. Finding what the truth actually is makes you humble."

  'What is the truth? "What is, is. What isn't, isn't." From there it was just one short step to the est training.

  The product is consciousness -- some people call it higher consciousness, expanded consciousness, deeper consciousness. Looking at the set-up -- the numbers (250 people a clip at $250 per), the trappings (offices, houses, vehicles) -- one can't help but conclude that est is giving people what they want. The product is a smashing consumer success.

  Werner says he's not in it for the money. "I've worked on becoming a millionaire and I'm totally clear on how much bullshit that is.... Where I'm at with money is that I'm not attached to it. I don't shun it, I don't avoid it, and I don't run after it. I am responsible for it and it isn't what determines who I am or what I do."

  However much he has or doesn't have (his salary is reported to be $48,000 a year), money certainly isn't a problem for him. He works and lives in two houses -- an old Victorian town house which he restored in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco, a
nd a country house in Marin County.

  The San Francisco house, exquisitely decorated with Oriental antiques and starkly simple furnishings, embodies the essence of est. "This house represents a lot of the est spirit," Werner says proudly. Fine food, good conversation, and hard work are all part of it. Thus, on one occasion you might be served dinner by a doctor or lawyer or restaurateur est graduate. On another you might be serving one of the same people. On still another you might be a guest at one of Werner's salons experiencing a physicist or mathematician discuss his work in relationship to consciousness. And on still another, although rare occasion, you might find yourself downstairs doing the hustle at a staff champagne party with the same people you worked with upstairs the night before.

  Werner leases and pilots a small plane, a twin-engine Cessna 414. He wears impeccably tailored clothes. And he drives a Mercedes. The way he sums it all up is spelled out on his license plate: so WUT.

  But there's nothing offhand or flip about the way he has his business run.

  At this writing, est has existed for four-and-a-half years. It now has offices in a dozen cities and runs training in all of these cities, as well as in schools and in prisons. In 1975, est grossed around $9,300,000 with a paid staff of about 230 and the assistance of 6,000 to 7,000 unpaid volunteers. Thus, est is clearly good business.

  According to est's chief executive officer, Don Cox (Werner is listed in the est brochure simply as founder), est wasn't founded for profit. "Technically est is owned by a trust which operates it for the benefit of the public, to whom the value of est ultimately belongs," Don says.

  Where, then, does the money go? Werner told me. "The purpose of est is to serve people, and to support those institutions of society that have as their purpose to serve people." As a result, est's philanthropic work has included six trainings, representing a contribution of well over $350,000; scholarships to clergy and to recently released convicts; and donations to hospitals and pediatric centers for work in child development.

  During the last couple of years, est and the est graduates have supported a foundation that was founded by Werner Erhard. The Foundation makes grants for a wide range of activities in research, education, and public communication in various disciplines in the areas of consciousness, human potential, and the experience of the transformation of consciousness. During this period of time, The Foundation has made grants totaling $250,000.

  An interesting aspect of the organization, which describes itself as an educational institution, is the way it emphasizes its contributions to education and its relationship to the educated. Werner, whose formal education never went beyond high school, has created an advisory board notable for the number and variety of higher degrees. In est's brochure, two pages out of fifteen of text describe "est in Education" and preface a listing of its programs and accomplishments with the proud statement that over 14 percent of its graduates -- a total of almost 11,000 -- are educators.

  Despite the good works est is doing, a lot of people distrust it because of its slick, big-business image. Mark Brewer summed up what I had been hearing among some skeptical colleagues in his put-down of est in Psychology Today:

  "est is no ordinary California cult. It is a multi-million dollar corporation that has doubled in size each year and operates nationwide with the efficiency of a crack brigade. It boasts a President who taught at Harvard Business School and left the position of General Manager of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of California to join Werner; it has been endorsed and even joined by prominent lawyers, doctors and psychologists; it has trained California schoolchildren under a Federal grant, and its Advisory Board is chaired by a former chancellor of the University of California Medical School, San Francisco." *

  * August, 1975.

  (I recently heard that a businessman from the Midwest who was planning to fly to New York to take the training cancelled his trip after he read the Psychology Today article. Like some others I've talked with, he apparently would prefer to entrust his pysche to a more modest, less successful savior.)

  Others on the impressive est advisory board are Dr. Frank Berger, a psychiatrist who, among other things, discovered the tranquilizer meprobamate; the musician, John Denver; a total of eight physicians, three of whom are faculty members of the School of Medicine, University of California; two scientists, one an M.D. and one a Ph.D.; the dean emeritus of the University of California School of Nursing; a judge; an author and an editor; two attorneys; a community organizer; two educators; a dentist; two businessmen, a social worker with a D.S.W.; a federal government official; and a local mayor.

  The meticulousness with which Werner chose est's Advisory Board extends to every aspect of est's business. During the training, I was struck by how every conceivable possibility had been anticipated and prepared for. The printed materials are meticulous. The format for communications is meticulous. Even the ways est staff members dress is meticulous.

  More attention to the particular can be seen in the number and kind of communications emanating from est. Once you actually take the training, your mailbox will never again be empty. I get phone calls and monthly mailings. After I signed up for the training, I received two or three mailings and a couple of phone calls that reminded me that I had signed up, providing information to make certain that I got there.

  No aspect of est's operation is left to chance or whim, least of all the staff. Those who work for Werner are carefully chosen and precisely trained. A San Francisco graduate who had once been invited to join the staff, and declined, told me, "He doesn't want people at headquarters who think they're doing him a favor. You've got to choose to be there, for no reason other than that you choose to be there."

  The trainers fall into a very special category. As Werner's emissaries (I've heard them referred to, affectionately, as sub-gurus) the fourteen trainers are alter egos if not quite carbon copies and yet each has an individual personality and is his or her own person. They are rigorously trained over a long period. I understand that the main concentration of their apprenticeship is to learn to re-create "where Werner comes from" (with the use of videotape among other things) and for the trainer-trainee to get his or her own personality out of the way so the regular trainees can "be there" with themselves. That they all have the same air is, I suppose, a way of saying that the differences between them is irrelevant to the training. There are three women trainers, one of whom does the children's training. Word is that Werner is not a male chauvinist.

  There are no specific standards for becoming a trainer -- no tests, no job descriptions, no applications for this position. Werner says that "many people come out of the training wanting to be a trainer. What I do is to set up an obstacle course and whoever gets through it is a trainer. The course is made up of anything they've been unwilling to give up, anything they're attached to, anything they need in order to survive. It's a huge sacrifice. What they really have to give up is their ego."

  Trainer Randy McNamara used to travel with Werner and one of his jobs was to prepare Werner's tea during trainings. He says there is no difference between making tea and doing the training. Landon Carter began his job as trainer by being custodian of the San Francisco office. He says that he spent a lot of that time cleaning toilets; he, too, feels that doing the training is the same as doing menial work.

  I watched trainer Tony Freedley conduct a Graduate Seminar Leaders Program one afternoon. The program gives graduates who have completed the Guest Seminar Leaders Program an opportunity to be trained to lead Graduate Seminars. He was putting the trainees through a mock seminar in which, one by one, they mounted the platform. and delivered a portion of the seminar material. Tony was tough; he demanded nothing less than perfection from them.

  I found the scene interesting. In addition to the trainees, there were est graduates who had come to participate and comment. (Several of them told me they came to anything est did as often as possible because the more they hung around est the clearer they got.) Tony put the trainees through th
eir paces over and over. One was told, à la Dale Carnegie, to project his voice. Another was teased to lighten up his heavy approach. And another was chastised for not knowing his material perfectly. I felt that they got a sense of what it really is to communicate with people.

  The trainers have gone through this kind of preparation -- and more. The nine trainers whom I've seen in action have in common a kind of transparency, an objective quality, that transcends personality, judgments, and biases so that the only experience you get is your own right back again.

  When I mentioned this to someone who had taken the training, she disagreed with me vehemently. "But they're always 'on,'" she said. "They're brilliant actors -- stern and unbending sometimes, clowning and funny at others, beautiful, polished, clever. . . ." Exactly. What you experience from the trainers during the training is a duplication, out of their own experiences with Werner, of the training he created. Although they have a set format and a map of the ground to be covered and certain techniques and material to be presented, each particular training is shaped by the experience of the trainees in that training.