est

by Adelaide Bry

  The trainer exists not as a teacher but as a catalyst, to allow experience. He never interprets what's happening, as would a therapist. He gets out of your way, leaving you alone with your resistance, your vomit, your headaches, your backaches, your hunger, thirst, or bursting bladder. He's there to hack away at your belief system. And to do that he has to be Dale Carnegie, John Barrymore, Jack Kennedy -- and Werner Erhard -- all rolled into a neat super-guru package.

  In return for hard work and dedication -- trainers work eighteen to twenty hours at a clip -- est staff members get free medical examinations, insurance, and medical, dental, and chiropractic maintenance. And, of course, Werner's love.

  One staff member described to me the value she received from being on staff: "I've experienced being supported by the others on staff and accepted as being O.K. just the way I am. I've begun to experience serving people, not coming from the position of need or help, but getting satisfaction just from serving. I've also experienced an increased amount of energy, getting things done that my mind says is impossible, and most of all, an enthusiasm for living."

  est is all business and yet it is not business. The seeming contradiction arises because the staff at est really wants to be there. At staff meetings they share honestly what is on their minds without fear of repercussions and, according to Don Cox, president of est, "they aim at one hundred percent efficiency all the time and hit it frequently."

  Don told me that "many high-powered executives who leave other jobs and come to work for est hit bottom for a couple of months. They are just not accustomed to people really working and really getting the job done. What happens is they discover that they have barriers to operating at their full potential, and that's tough to look at."

  Even the decor at est fits in with a total attention to detail and emphasis on beauty. The offices are elegantly simple and efficient. Don's office, decorated in shades of beige and with a few treasured art objects, reflects excellent and individual taste.

  At the same time that he demands a total commitment, Werner also expects his staff to remain non-attached, both to him and to est. "You know," an insider told me, "if everybody dropped out of the seminar series that would be O.K. with him. Even if est were to fold that would be all right."

  Here, again, was the theme of the SO WUT license plate. It took me a while before I got it and recognized it as ancient wisdom from Himalayan caves and Japanese monasteries transplanted to the opulent and elegant San Francisco town house from which est is produced and directed.

  Werner Erhard is an exceedingly complex man. Those who have summarily dismissed him as a con artist offering personal salvation to the tune of $250 have fallen into the trap of an easy, superficial explanation. It's an assumption based on conventional associations.

  He is obviously brilliant and for some it may be more comfortable to label him charlatan than to look at what he has to say and what he's doing. Anyone who has experienced the training and who also has knowledge about the mind of man, and the traditions of philosophy, theology, and psychology, cannot fail to see how Werner has pulled them all together in a meaningful way that people who aren't philosophers, theologians, or psychologists can grasp.

  It is easy, also, to write off what Werner is doing by seeing it merely as the sum of its parts: some basic Zen, a little Gestalt, a dash of Psychosynthesis, and some shrewd business management. That's like saying Picasso's work is merely the integration of all the brush techniques and stylistic devices ever created by all the great artists who came before him.

  This point of view fails to recognize the mark of genius. Werner's genius becomes evident when you see that what a lot of great thinkers have been saying for centuries is what est is essentially saying, too. The difference is that est doesn't say it. Werner has developed a way for people to experience truth through their own experience.

  With other teachers, you read what they have to say. With Werner you get it.

  Aunt Anna and Uncle Harry

  The following is an experience I had shortly after I completed the est training. The event was not hugely important. But it showed me how different things could be for me in all areas of my life.

  I went with reluctance to pay a courtesy visit to my beloved Aunt Anna and Uncle Harry, who are eighty-three and ninety-one respectively. Although they have been an enormous and generally benign influence in my life, for the past year I had disliked going there because I was usually so uncomfortable during our visits. Uncle Harry is deaf, so it's almost impossible to talk with him. And Aunt Anna, once our opening platitudes are over, has nothing to say.

  Driving to their apartment, I prepared myself for a miserable time. "They're not real to me anymore," I told myself. "They're among the living dead." I cried inside at what they had been -- alive, vital, beautiful.

  We greeted each other with hugs. From nowhere, suddenly, tears welled up in my eyes. I shared with them how much I loved them and how beautiful they both had been to me. I also told them how very much they had meant to me.

  My uncle's face came alive. He said, "I didn't do anything special. I was just me and I cared for you."

  I shared with my aunt my excitement about the publication of my latest book, The Sexually Aggressive Woman. I had not told her about it before, less out of concern for her reaction to the subject and the frankness with which I discussed it than for the fact that I had written on such an unintellectual subject. That was my evaluation.

  My aunt asked me to put a copy in the mail to her when I got home. I definitely detected a gleam in her eye. And my uncle told me that he had, over many years, acquired a collection of great masterpieces on sex. Among them were a rare and beautiful copy of the Kamasutra and photographs taken at the famous Temple of Kondar.

  Suddenly, we were all involved in an animated and fascinating conversation about, of all things, sex. This was because I had put away my preconceptions about what the visit would and should be. And allowed it to unfold spontaneously.

  I had only thought my Aunt Anna and Uncle Harry were dead, which had almost deprived me of a beautiful experience of being with them.

  9

  Something About Nothing

  One creates from nothing. If you try to create from something you're just changing something. So in order to create something you first have to be able to create nothing. -- Werner Erhard

  The street was filled with well-dressed, overwhelmingly white, predominantly young people. As I emerged. from a cab into the cool August evening, I caught the excitement. The event that we all had came for was spelled out on the marquee. It said, simply, "Werner Erhard, est."

  We were all est graduates who had come to hear Werner present "Something About Nothing." There were 5,000 of us who each had paid $4.50 in advance to fill every last seat of New York's Felt Forum. Werner had appeared at San Francisco's Cow Palace, before an audience of 11,000, and at the Los Angeles Sports Arena he talked to over 9,200, on the same topic. It was a major happening, a gathering of "the faithful" to be with their leader.

  It seemed like an enormous family reunion. I ran into people from my training and we swapped "shares." People I didn't know introduced themselves and then launched into conversation like long-lost cousins. I remembered the first morning of my training when 250 "assholes" had stood around awkwardly -- the only ones talking those couples or friends who had arrived together, the air heavy with anxiety, people looking isolated and alone. We had come a long way, judging from the intense interaction that evening.

  At 7:00 p.m. sharp (est events start exactly on time) the doors of the Forum opened. I rushed for a seat close to the stage. I had heard that Werner was going to talk about his recent trip to Japan and his meetings with Zen masters. I had a special interest in Zen and was particularly interested in hearing what he had to say about it.

  At that time, I had not yet met Werner. A friend had told me that "he makes you feel as though you are the whole world, as though nothing else exists." He had also been described to me as "contained
," "complete," "dynamic," "beautiful," and "self-realized." Marcia Seligson, now a member of est's Advisory Board, described her first impression of him, in her New Times article, as "a slick, slightly oily salesman-type, too good-looking and funny, a man who reminded me of the arrogant Jewish princes I went to high school with, who then went to N.Y.U. School of Business, married girls named Bernice, and took over their father's clothing business." * I was eager to see for myself.

  * October 18, 1974.

  The air was alive with anticipation as we waited for the man who was to occupy the space defined by a lone stool under a white spotlight against a black backdrop. It was a setting for a torch singer, not a messiah, in an arena built for sport events, not enlightenment!

  The lights dimmed promptly at 8:00 and Werner emerged from the wings. There were no tambourines or trumpets, no M.C., no benediction, no entourage, no props, no spectacle. Just Werner, looking much younger than his forty years, his skin and eyes incredibly clear, dressed in an impeccably tailored beige jacket, open-necked white shirt, and dark slacks. The audience rose and applauded. Werner had come to be with them.

  He began quietly, undramatically. I found myself straining to listen to him. It took me a while to tune in to the way he was using words and the staccato rhythm of his speech.

  "I do welcome you with all my heart," he said, "and tell you that this really is my living room for tonight and I'm thrilled to be with you. As I said to Marcia [Marcia Martin, est staff member], I want to go to New York to be with the graduates and their guests. I said the whole point is really just to be there -- not necessarily to do anything.

  "My real purpose in being here," he explained, "is not for me to be but for you and me to be. . . . I'm here to create the space for you to be and I'm here to be in the space that you create for me to be. And that's the whole purpose, that's the whole point, and as you'll notice we've already achieved that so the night's a success as far as I'm concerned."

  The audience responded to this introduction with enthusiastic applause. I was unmoved, waiting for something I considered "meaningful" to happen. Later I realized that one of my expectations was to be entertained. The circumstances of the evening -- the theater, lots of people, an entrance fee -- should produce entertainment, I thought.

  "There really isn't anything to do," he said to my resistance. "I love you and I'm here to be with you. Besides which you will all get the chance to be with each other -- and that's all that's going on.

  "Sometimes people get very uncomfortable when all there is to do is nothing. See, in order to be, you don't have to do anything. It's terrific! There's nothing to do! It's really important to get clear about the fact that you don't need to do anything to be."

  The audience had settled in and was intensely focused on this magnetic and attractive (but not quite handsome) man with the body of a tennis player and the eyes of a prophet.

  "In the ordinary course of events, we organize our lives to figure out what to do to get where we want to get. The point is, this is it. You got where you're going. Wherever you were heading, this is where you wound up. And that's how it is. You're here. Experience that you are. That's the purpose of this evening."

  I felt as though he were talking directly to me as he continued on the theme that there was nothing for us to do that evening but sit back, relax, and just experience who we are. Because I wanted something -- anything -- to happen, I had a hard time relating to "nothing."

  "I used to worry about what I was going to say in public before I got the training," he shared to laughter and applause. "I mean, what is the difference what I say tonight? It won't expand that you are one iota. And it won't contract that you are one iota.

  "The entire universe comes out of the fact that you are," he explained. "Without you there wouldn't be any your-universe. What you call the universe is your universe. And there are a lot of your universes. The whole universe springs from that you are. You don't need to do anything, say anything, prove anything. It is. You don't have to work on it for it to be there. It comes from the fact that you are."

  It seemed so simple. And so reassuring. To the thousands in the audience and the millions beyond the theater who had been raised on a diet of striving to please (Mommy, Daddy, teacher, boss), of trying to be better, richer, smarter, happier, this was heresy. But it was also manna. I processed his words and let them filter through all my "musts." It felt good.

  He continued, enunciating the next words as though each were a universe unto itself. "The most fundamental experience you can have is that. There is no more fundamental experience than to experience that you are. From that experience, all other experiences arise."

  He talked about all of our relatedness. "By the fact that you exist, my existence is. And by the fact that I exist, you exist. And we are. So we don't have to do anything to be with each other. We don't have to make our relationship work. We are related."

  Then he spoke about his visit to Japan, where, he said, what he experienced was "being with life."

  In a valley on the side of a mountain in an old monastery he met with a Zen master and seven monks. After a few polite interchanges they wanted to find out who he was and so they decided to test him. "It's customary," he told us.

  "The Zen master showed me a very old tea bowl with strange symbols on it that had been used by many renowned Zen masters, and asked me, 'What is the most important part of this bowl?' If you say the wrong thing," Werner explained, "they go back to being polite and remote. I looked the bowl over slowly and answered, 'The space inside.' " It was the answer. They became friends.

  He said that the Zen masters he met with were "blown away" by the fact that so many thousands of people in this country had taken the est training in only four years. He explained that a Zen master would consider that he had spread the word to vast numbers if he had trained a thousand monks in his own lifetime.

  One of the things they had all talked about was the relationship of self experience to world experience. Contrary to our beliefs that those such as monks who live away from the world are aloof and removed, interested only in their own inner worlds, his new friends told him that experiencing the self takes you out into experiencing the world, which, in turn, takes you further into your experience of yourself.

  Months later, in a letter to est graduates, Werner elaborated on this theme. "One of the ways you can recognize people who don't know who they are," Werner wrote, "is if they think that when you realize your self, it cuts you off from other people. Somebody who thinks that self-realization is the road to political irresponsibility has demonstrated an absence of experience of self. When you have experienced your self, you will know it because it will take you out into the world."

  Werner then talked about est and its genesis. "est," he announced, "does not come out of the world. It doesn't try to give people what they need. It doesn't come from responding to people's deficiencies. est actually didn't come from any place or any thing. It comes to the world from nothing, from the fact that being just is, and there's nothing to be done about that."

  (When I was working with this material weeks later it occurred to me that Werner's insistence on word precision often had the effect of making things more, rather than less, confusing to those not on his wavelength. I respect his work to revolutionize language and develop new modes of communication and agree that it is absolutely essential that we develop more effective ways to communicate. On the other hand, I think he defeats his purpose of communicating when his message doesn't get across to those who haven't yet achieved his clarity.)

  Werner went on to speak of his doubts. He acknowledged that he has them and, "I let them be," he said, "and they let me be. They don't run me."

  He related what he had once told a reporter in answer to a question about him as the source of est. "I am the source of est. I've created the opportunity for others to be responsible in their own lives, and they create the opportunity for me to be responsible. A source," he told us, "creates something from nothing
." As the source of est it is his responsibility to create the space for the people in est to do their jobs.

  I was becoming restless. I noticed that others were also. The material was familiar and not sufficiently dramatic to command my attention.

  He returned to his discussion of where est came from, and told us, in answer, that it came from the experience that life doesn't work. "That's the most fundamental fact in est.

  "Because people are always working at making it work, and getting those things which prove that life works, it doesn't." He leaned forward and readied us for a question. "If something actually worked, why would anybody be working so hard at making it work? See," he explained, "the work we do to make life work is an absolute statement that life does not work. If it worked, would you be working so hard to make it work?"

  The audience giggled nervously. He was reaching us. His voice rose as he reminded us of what we all really knew. "There's nothing you can do to make it work.