est

by Adelaide Bry

  "So I'll tell you what," he offered us. "If you stop trying to make life work, you'll have nothing to do. That's the first fundamental fact on which est is built. Life doesn't work. So stop trying. And, if you stop trying, you'll discover the second fundamental fact on which est is built. You are. That's what you discover when you do nothing."

  He chuckled. Some of us chuckled along with him in recognition of a truth.

  "This is it," he announced. "This is it. This is all there is right now. No kidding."

  I got that what he was saying was that all the effort and struggle and tight muscles of our lives came from trying to get our lives to work.

  As I was digesting this and noticing my resistance to it, Werner spoke to what must have been a common experience. "The mind can't handle these facts," he reassured us. "And what happens in the training is that the mind is bypassed so the self can experience itself being."

  The graduates applauded in recognition. As I looked around the auditorium I noticed that some people were deeply absorbed in Werner and others, like myself, were interested but not enthralled. When I was in the est office a few days later and discussed the evening with several people, I found a direct correlation between the depth of commitment to est and how people related to "Something About Nothing." A staff member told me that he had had a moment of enlightenment, "a complete experience of how it really is."

  The evening then took an unexpected turn reminiscent of "This Is Your Life." Werner brought three of his seven children and his parents to the stage and introduced them to us. They were an attractive group, and it was obvious that he had great affection for them.

  He told us that it had taken him a long time to grow up but that he had finally grown up -- when he was almost forty. He then thanked his family for being who they were.

  He then told us softly, "I don't have anything to teach anybody. I don't know anything that you don't know. I haven't got anything I can give you.

  "People don't come to hear me talk because I'm great. They come to hear me talk because they're great. I'd really like you to get that clearly. The only purpose in being here is simply to realize your own worth. And somehow, if you and I just be, we get to participate in that worth."

  I knew and accepted what he was saying but I felt, somehow, that I wanted more and was annoyed that I wasn't going to get it. He thanked us by asking us to consider ourselves thanked "for all the things I should thank you for" and then asked us to end the evening by getting in touch with "what your experience of my experience of you is."

  Then he was gone and the lights came on. I had a fleeting sense that he hadn't yet been there and that the show was yet to begin. It was wishful thinking.

  Exiting the theater and, again, on the street, I asked people to share their reactions, curious to know if I was alone with my feelings of boredom, disappointment, and confusion. Most of those I spoke with felt as I did. A few thought the evening had been wonderful.

  A gray-haired man, who appeared to be about sixty and who was accompanied by his wife and two daughters, summed up what others had said to me. "I never saw Werner before and it was disappointing. And the training changed my life." He added, "I would have died a bitter man if it hadn't been for est."

  A few days later I re-read my notes and thought about what had happened that evening. What I got was that Werner's talk, however obscure it might have seemed, was really what est was all about. It was the philosophy on which est was built.

  I also got that Werner's Something About Nothing was the space he had given us to experience ourselves.

  I felt that the discontent I and others had come away with that evening was because Werner had spoken to the space he thought the graduates were in, and that many of us were not in that space. Like me, they didn't want something about nothing. I felt that they wanted more obvious content -- something about something.

  Soon after this, another event was announced for graduates only, featuring trainers Ted Long and Laurel Scheaf. Ted, a former trial attorney who gave up his practice to become a trainer several years ago, was marvelous and theatrical. Laurel, a trainer-candidate relatively new to the public limelight, would add charm and sex appeal to the evening. It was to be another bona-fide Event.

  Soon after Ted began, I realized that we were being given the pep talk people seemed to want, a review and a reinforcement of the salient parts of the training delivered in the punchy, riveting, straight-faced style est graduates are used to. The subject was "aliveness."

  "There is nothing to do in life except live it," he said with a smile, "and you are qualified if you are living. Life as we know it is made up of concepts: 'I like it; I don't like it; I believe it; I don't believe it.' If you want to experience living, you have to get in touch with those body sensations, attitudes, emotions, points of view, and images from the past, which we're attached to -- concepts which persist. That we get stuck at false cause is the issue. Adding more things to your life simply doesn't produce satisfaction. You only get space for yourself when things are all right the way they are."

  I had heard all this before but, still, I related to it. Our belief systems are so deeply ingrained that if we don't notice them continuously we get stuck [fixated] with them. They are our point of view. In est talk we have to keep "coming off our point of view."

  Just before the break there was the usual pitch for special programs for graduates. A few new ones had been added and we were reminded of those already in existence. I had my usual reaction when I heard this: I bristled. By now I was a confirmed est-er. And sometimes I still resisted what appeared to me to be the hard sell, which was standard at est events.

  Ted came back to "consciousness" by turning to nature for an illustration: "When you plant a tree, you cultivate it, water it, support it, and it blossoms and bears fruit. If you immediately go and pick all the fruit and stop supporting the tree, then the tree dies." His point was that people who enjoy life concentrate their energies on supporting the tree of their life instead of focusing on gathering the fruit.

  There was a process and then the closing message, an est classic: "Be responsible for the way it has turned out. If you can't, it runs you. There is nothing more to do."

  The applause was enthusiastic. It was apparent that the audience had experienced something about something.

  Bailey

  Bailey is an exuberant and warm young man, about thirty, who was one of the early (1971) graduates of est. He did volunteer logistics for est for about a year. He now works for a California group that runs communication workshops.

  Before est I used to blame the world and everyone I knew because my life wasn't working. Since est, I know I'm the source of everything that happens to me. Like, it used to be that if it wasn't for my boss, I would work better hours or make more money. Now I see that wherever I am is where I created myself to be.

  I had been totally dead for twenty-seven years. During the training I really felt I was a machine and it was very traumatic. Werner was talking about how we're all machines and my body suddenly began to feel different. My head got light and I felt like I was going to explode. I screamed out. Then I got up and said, "I am a machine!" It was a big release for me. At that moment I experienced who I was. Ever since then I've watched my life expand more and more.

  I also got to see that my parents brought me up the way they thought it was best to bring up a child. That was all they knew. I had spent a lot of years making my father wrong because of my mother's hatred for him.

  Last summer my father came to see me and I told him all the stuff I'd been carrying around since I was eight, when he and my mother were divorced. I told him, "Dad, you're really O.K. Whatever you want to do in your life is O.K. and I love you." Now we have a great relationship after twenty years.

  My mother still carries all her negative feelings about Dad; she won't let go. She used to really upset me when she'd say I was just like my father. Now she can't pull that on me anymore, because I don't get sucked into her game. But I
don't make her wrong for where she's at. It's her life and there's nothing I can do for her; she's totally responsible for it.

  I really love her a lot. I love both my parents a lot. And I love my woman, who I live with.

  Before est I never thought much about anything. I was just doing my thing, unaware, unconscious. I also handled relationships like my mother had. Like, since I'm perfect, why would a girl want to leave me? That idea would really murder every relationship.

  I used to worry about death a lot, but not since est. Whatever happens, it's O.K. with me. I feel that the only thing that dies is the flesh; your being lives on. When I was a practicing Catholic, I was in fear most of my life. The nuns used to terrify me. I was caught between confessing my sins and going to hell.

  From est I got that religious institutions are into survival, too, and that fear and guilt are their way of keeping you in line. I've read the Bible a lot, and now I see that the church totally misinterpreted what Jesus said. He kept telling everyone over and over that everybody was like he was: perfect. He was experiencing life, like Werner. He knew he was total source, living moment to moment, and was spontaneous.

  Jesus is just another guru who happens to be popular here in Western civilization. I can't go into a church and praise Jesus. But I really got where he is coming from. He wants to let everybody know "I'm you." So my whole point of view about religion has been totally altered.

  About est, I see that people really get attached to it. It becomes a place to hide for some of them, even for some of the staff.

  I've taken all the graduate seminars and now it's all right for me not to go to est anymore. I've gotten what I needed. I created est. I love it. I think the people there are fabulous because every- one wants to be there.

  People expect est graduates to be perfect. They're really just the same as they always were except that now they notice what they're doing. People are also afraid of perfection. They're afraid that if they solve all their problems, there won't be any more.

  There's no shortage of problems. And you can be perfect.

  10

  Where Werner Comes From: Grist for the Mill

  "The truth is: You are." -- Werner Erhard "It's all just a lot of mind-fucking." -- A New York psychiatrist

  Werner says, ". . understanding is the booby prize." He later amplified this to me, saying, "Understanding without experience is the booby prize in life." This chapter, nevertheless, is designed to give you some understanding of est. My intention is to convey a sense of where it comes from and the way it works. And I suggest that you cannot know est from what you are about to read.

  To get the most out of what follows I recommend that you don't try to figure it all out. Maybe read it aloud or maybe just flip through it and read whatever catches your eye. If you don't make an effort to understand it, maybe you will.

  At the gates to certain Eastern temples stand two fierce figures who represent guardians of the truth within; one represents confusion and the other, paradox. To find the truth, one must pass these guardians. est looks confusion and paradox squarely in the eye. And then moves straight through them.

  The est training is a self-confrontation with one's own truth about one's self. Its ancestors, historically, include Zen, Buddhism, Taoism, physics, Vedanta, Yoga, Sufism, philosophy, Christianity, Cybernetics, Scientology, psychology, Existentialism, semantics, and business.

  Werner says, "While est can be interpreted as a compilation or distillation of a lot of disciplines, in fact, it isn't. But you aren't wrong to understand it in that way. Any point of view isn't wrong, as a point of view; and it's important to remember that any point of view is an interpretation -- a way of understanding something."

  I choose to see est as a creation, rather than a compilation. Werner has created est in the way a great artist creates a masterpiece, using techniques and materials that have been perfected over centuries to give his creation form.

  The essence of the est technique, which both produces and is what you get (the medium is very much the message here), is to have people dis-identify from their minds, bodies, emotions, and problems, the story of their lives. This is done in the training by making it safe enough to "get off it" for long enough to step back and look at yourself instead of being forced to be yourself or defend yourself.

  Every time your mind tries to justify a concept you have about who you are or what the truth is, it gets punctured by an insight presented by the trainer. This continuous pummeling of the chatter in your mind stops the noise long enough so you can be in silence. It is then you can experience truth.

  The truth is: You are. For openers.

  While each of us really knows that, the training allows people to know it with their total being -- experientially. In an attempt to avoid discomfort, uncertainty, pain, or just plain boredom, we set up systems of behavior that keep us from being still enough to allow such things to come up. We smoke, make idle conversation and eat at that exact moment when, if we were to be still, the meaninglessness of our lives, the pain which we repress that only pops out as headaches and lower-back pain, the emotions which we suppress, would come to the surface and be experienced.

  In the training people are given the opportunity to be with all those things which they have kept under the surface. As one by one these hidden things come up they seem an enormous burden on physical, mental, and emotional systems. Underneath the things people don't allow themselves to experience is the experience of their truth.

  That is why we are asked to agree to sit in straight-backed chairs and not talk unless we are recognized by the trainer. That is why we agree to sit for up to seventeen hours at a stretch (relieved by one brief meal break and two or three briefer bathroom breaks). That is why we agree not to read, knit, smoke, eat, or engage in any of the usual diversions which take us away from ourselves. And that is why we agree to forgo tranquilizers, booze, grass, ups, downs, or the other things that make it easier on our heads -- including aspirin for the almost inevitable headache. We agree simply to be there, without any of the props with which we usually avoid ourselves (TV, telephones, and toilets, among them).

  We agree to abide by the rules of est for approximately sixty hours. The reason we do this for sixty hours is that Werner has discovered in his experience and observation of people during the training that this amount of time is "what works." By the end of the second weekend we get it.

  As I experienced est, this is what you need to know (as opposed to what you experience) to get it.

  The value of knowledge is determined by the way in which it is known. In other words, it's not only what you know, but how you know it, that determines how you use what you know.

  All of our knowledge is held (or known) in a system which says that things work on a stimulus-response basis. When I communicate with you, whether verbally or nonverbally, you respond. (A nonresponse is a kind of response.) It's as if your computer buttons have been pushed, and whatever your response, it was programmed. While a computer may have a range of responses, we can only get from a computer the range of responses we programmed into it.

  Werner says this about the way we function as human beings:

  "We are stuck in the way we know -- in a particular epistemology.* In common terms, we are stuck in our system of beliefs. Our whole language is based on this epistemology, on the idea that what we believe is actually so; in fact what we believe is based on a system of agreements which merely symbolize what is so. Neither our system of knowing nor our language is experiential. It only symbolizes our experience."

  * An epistemology is like the canvas we paint concepts on, or the container we use to hold ideas -- epistemology is a way of knowing rather than what we know.

  How can we talk about experience without a language to describe it? We can't. Language, at best, only conveys something about experience.

  The training introduces another way of knowing, a sort of direct exposure, or what Werner says is a natural knowing, where real communication takes pla
ce. It is neither verbal nor nonverbal, since both of these come from and are perceived by the stimulus-response system. This other way of knowing Werner calls abstraction.

  It's beyond believing. It's beyond thinking. It's beyond feeling. It's beyond sensing. It's even beyond doing. It's something like the way Einstein must first have known about relativity, as an abstraction beyond sensation, perception, imagination and even beyond understanding. It's akin to that moment when it all suddenly becomes clear after you've been working for days on a problem. Without the addition of new facts, a clarity unfolds allowing you to see the facts in a novel way, which dissolves the problem and reveals the truth.

  QUESTION: How can you create something beyond knowing when all you know is knowing?

  ANSWER: By experiencing it.

  Experience, or what you and I normally call experience, is the stuff that comes in from the outside. "But that," Werner told me, "is part of what I call nonexperience.

  "To explain that, let's oversimplify the process of life. Let's enter the process at a point where something is happening to a person. What happens is a memory is made and to the memory we attach a system of concepts to explain it and make it reasonable. Now the memory and the system of concepts begin to determine what happens. When what happens comes out of the memory and system of concepts, it is nonexperience.