est

by Adelaide Bry

  "It's like a dog chasing his tail. Certain types of behavior are reinforced by what we believe, and what we believe is reinforced by that behavior, which strengthened belief more totally determines behavior, which behavior strengthens the belief, ad infinitum. We become automatons -- with a slight difference. The difference is the ability to justify and explain the behavior. However, the behavior doesn't arise from the justification or the explanation. It comes out of those belief-behavior patterns and the explanations and justifications allow us to pretend we are free. My notion is that what happens in the training is that the individual is given an opportunity to create original experiences or to re-create original experiences instead of merely repeating concepts and beliefs -- that is, imitating past experiences."

  One way to get in touch with the abstraction from which experience comes is by "looking," really being with our body sensations, feelings, points of view, behaviors, considerations, and images from the past.

  When we give up thinking, so-called logical inconsistencies become clearly compatible. A Zen koan asks, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Answer: The sound of one hand clapping. The answer is not, as it might appear, insignificant or irrelevant.

  There are two realities: The ordinary reality, which Werner calls duality or illusion, and the genuine experiential reality, which Werner calls abstraction. What we call experience (sensation, feeling, emotion, mental strain, action, behavior, etc.) lies between our concepts and our abstractions. The truth starts out as an abstraction -- experiential reality -- and then becomes a felt, perceived phenomenon -- what we usually mean when we use the word experience. Then the truth becomes a concept, memory, idea about what happened. Abstraction is all that is real to each of us in our experience and thus, Werner says, is the true reality. In order to live fully, we need to recognize and operate within both realities and keep one foot in each.

  Although the true reality is our own experience, we still must function in the ordinary reality as though it were fully real. We do not have the option of jumping out a window and not falling. By choosing not to jump, we go along with ordinary reality, that is, the reality we agree on. Everything we don't know by experience, we know by agreement. This includes all of physical reality -- that which has dimension, form, and exists in time.

  This is what getting clear is all about: to accept life exactly the way we experience it to be and acknowledge that we are responsible for the way we experience it regardless of our beliefs, expectations or desires.

  As Werner puts it: "Life is a rip-off when you expect to get what you want. Life works when you choose what you've got. Actually what you got is what you chose even if you don't know it. To move on, choose what you've got."

  Once we choose what we've got, in other words, once we accept that we choose our experience, then it becomes impossible to blame others -- parents, mate, boss -- for our experience. And when we accept that whatever we're doing is O.K., that our choices are our own, then the conflict disappears. The prisoner who got that he chose to be where he is, ends up eliminating this conflict -- and being able to be with his choice. It is resistance to what is that causes anguish. The only way to chip away at resistance is by getting into it, creating it, allowing it.

  Conflict disappears when we experience something totally rather than storing it up in a matrix of concepts and beliefs. When we experience something so totally that there is no need to explain it, justify it, or understand it, it vanishes. Obviously, when it's completely experienced, the experience is complete. Nothing remains; it has disappeared. This is what est calls "experiencing it out."

  When Dr. Dawes (see page 110) tells his young schizophrenic patient to force-feed his depression, he is saying, in effect: Experience your depression totally. Don't repress it or pretend to feel better or justify it with rationality. Don't ask for explanations or "How can I get rid of it?" Just let it be there. Experience it out.

  Obviously something which is experienced completely disappears. Obviously, when a thing is complete, there's nothing more left of it -- it disappears. There are notions within contemporary theoretical physics that tend to support this phenomenon.

  When we are dissatisfied with a situation in our lives, and we try to change it, solve it, fix it, do something about it, we end up with a modified dissatisfaction. On the other hand, when we take complete responsibility for our dissatisfaction and experience it, it experiences out. Then and only then can we move on. In the training, people are given the space to both create original experiences, and to complete experiences they've been "repeating."

  Taking responsibility is being cause, not effect. If you feel that no one ever listens to you and you want to be heard, you have a choice: You can find reasons, which might go something like, "My mother never listens to me." Or you can take responsibility for not being heard, in which case you have created the space to be heard. What happens next is you are heard.

  When we put responsibility or blame or fault for a situation on someone or something else -- tbat is, when we attribute cause to that other person or situation, we become the effect of that person or situation. As long as we continue to do that, we can never be in control of our own lives. What we create, instead, is our own variation of not wanting our mother to understand, or anyone to care, or anyone to listen.

  Werner says, "If you keep saying it the way it really is, eventually your word is law in the universe."

  We are the source of our own experience. All that we each experience in our lives emanates from ourselves. No one else makes us experience anything unless we choose that experience. Every human being bears the responsibility for "sourcing" his own life. In this way, as source, each one of us is "God" in his universe.

  Where and what we are: We are much more separate and alone than we think. There is aloneness even in the most intimate relationships. Each of our realities, from the moment of birth, is ours alone.

  Both psychologists and mothers, in their concern to be nurturing and loving, often deny what existentialists have accepted -- that human separateness is unavoidable.

  Everyone begins life simply being. Then the mind develops. est's description of mind is hard to grasp, but here it is to ponder: "Mind is a linear arrangement of multisensory total records of successive moments of now."

  The mind is pictures or records of events past. It predicts the recurrence of such events, and survives by being right about its predictions -- by winning, by dominating, and conversely, by avoiding being wrong, losing, and being dominated. It is often easier for the mind to focus on proving how right it is ("See, I can't do blah-blah because I never got enough blah-blah as a kid") than it is to accept that being right is simply one of the mind's ploys for survival -- and then to move on.

  The more energy invested in being right (or wrong*), the less energy there is for aliveness. The paradox is that while mind exists to protect our being, it actually prevents us from experiencing it.

  * Wrong is actually a version of right. If you're always wrong -- you're right!

  Ego is the mind in operation. Werner says that "the people who are interested in Ego or Ego Strength or Ego Reduction or Ego whatever would be well off to be clear about what Ego is. Ego is the mind in operation under a specific circumstance where the mind thinks that the being is the mind. That is all Ego is, and the 500 books written in Western psychology about Ego are confusing and the 1,000 the Hindus have written are even more confusing."

  Ego begins when the being considers itself to be its own point of view, Werner explains. "It thinks survival is maintaining that point of view. An ego, therefore, is a point of view attempting to cause its own survival. So its purpose is domination of everything and everybody from that point of view. Ego will sacrifice its own body just to be right. This is the actual source of illness."

  When we are afraid of something, we become more of it. The more important it is for us not to be greedy, the greedier we get to accumulate the symbols of not being greedy. The more we resist anything, the m
ore we become what we're resisting. It's obvious that resistance to something is a strong relationship to it -- perhaps stronger than attachment. When we are resisting we often don't notice that what we resist is limiting what we can be.

  If we don't acknowledge we're assholes because somewhere in our belief systems we're hanging on to "it's bad to be an asshole," then we are really assholes. And it doesn't make any difference. An asshole is someone resisting being an asshole.

  If it doesn't matter, why est? Since we lie to ourselves about our experiences, we end up feeling confused and unhappy. The defenses we create are simply the mind protecting itself -- surviving against experiences which would challenge its point of view. We then look for something -- therapy, success, marriage -- anything to bolster our defenses.

  The problem with some therapies is that the "experiences" they foster are often only meaningful within the confines of the therapy relationship. The truth imposed from a place of authority only succeeds in further hiding one's own truth. Our own truth can only be known by creating it and recreating it.

  est says what it offers is an opportunity to create and recreate one's own experience and, in so doing, to "open an additional dimension of living to your awareness. The training is designed to transform the level at which you experience life so that living becomes a process of expanded satisfaction."

  There are no promises, no specific goals. Trainees are told from the beginning to "take what you get." est takes them past the illusion of personality, past the mind, and on to transcend the mind by creating the space (the opportunity) for each person to experience himself or herself.

  Werner says that est wants to accomplish what is already so. "You are. If that were understood totally," he explains, "then you could understand why it doesn't take twenty years. It happens like that [snaps fingers]. . . "

  Isn't this just another belief system? Some graduates use it that way for a while. Werner says, "est is a pretty strong experience and people who are looking to get attached to something will come and get attached for a while. They do that because they have a pattern of attachment -- a need for attachment. Eventually even these people let go because the est experience allows people to become unattached from the need to be attached. They experience out their need for attachment."

  The brilliance of est is that Werner, after experiencing the truth, was able to form a presentation of it that included what is known about the mind, and a number of points of view that had been held about it, in a unique and original way. He then developed a way for people to experience the truth beyond points of view. What I do in the pages that follow is take a brief look at est from within several of those points of view: the Freudian, semantical, and philsophical, among others.

  Werner's position differs radically from that of Freud. Nevertheless, they have one important point they share: their understanding of traumas, or painful experiences which have been masked, repressed, and thus made unconscious.

  In the Freudian model, primary process (the so-called id) consists of images of what's going on in the body, hunger, sex, thirst. What's happening here are "species-wide" patterns of survival.

  Secondary process (or ego) is the relation of primary process to the "world." For Freud, ego is the way the fundamental instincts for survival are expressed by each individual in society. Ego reshapes our basic drives into a form more or less acceptable to society.

  Ego is blinded when it is overpressured from below to gratify the basic needs of the organism. Primary processes (basic drives) intrude into ego* awareness, clouding it and rendering it unclear.

  * Freud used the word "ego" to represent a mature, balanced adult attitude, rather than a subjective self-centered infantile preoccupation, as the term suggests in common usage.

  Freud said that the most basic characteristics of the primary process are unawareness, nondiscrimination, and irrational association, in which reason does not exist. It is in this space that we began life. It is what our relationship to the world rests on. When we become upset or frightened, we react, out of primary process. The secondary process (mind or ego) gets lost or -- more frequently -- anxious.

  Thus, Freud showed that ego is often driven to irrationality -- and often disregards the reality it evolved to perceive, hiding the primary process beneath it.

  What Freud describes as existing underneath the functioning of the mind is what Werner is able to assist people to consciously experience during the training.

  Freud's original purpose in psychoanalysis was to create a situation in which a person could go beneath his mind (through free association) to "re-experience" early traumas and then, through that "re-experiencing," to have abreaction. In est, when a painful memory enters consciousness, it can be completely experienced. And est has demonstrated that such things completely experienced disappear.

  In psychoanalysis and many other therapeutic modalities as commonly practiced today, feelings are often used as a substitute for experience rather than as an entree to experience. The development of the humanistic psychologies was primarily an effort to get patients into feeling and beyond words. In the newer therapies, subjects talk less and experience more. In est, one goes yet a step further -- back to the source. One goes to the abstractions (what est calls true experience) from which sensations, feelings, emotions, attitudes, mental states, behavior, thoughts, and concepts arise.

  Among Western psychologists, Werner has probably been most influenced by Abraham Maslow (Self-Actualization) and Fritz Perls (Gestalt therapy). Maslow, to whom Werner pays tribute during the training, focused on healthy people and healthy needs, rather than on the pathological. His idea of normalcy was "the highest excellence of which we are capable" which, he said, "is not an unattainable goal . . . rather it is actually within us, existent but hidden, as potentiality rather than as actuality." *

  * Maslow, A. H., Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1954).

  Maslow's theory recognized that every person has a hierarchy of needs. Only after a need with low priority is satisfied can one seek the gratification of a need with higher priority. First, obviously, are the physiological needs. Until a person has sufficient food, shelter, and safety he will not worry about psychological needs.

  est has come into existence at a time in our society when many people have met their basic physiological and psychological needs and can now pay attention to satisfaction. The est trainees are, by and large, a successful group of people. I've met doctors, lawyers, a symphony conductor, business executives, artists, therapists, and scientists, all of whom would be classified in our society as "winning."

  They are discovering that once their material wants have been satisfied, personal satisfaction comes next. The est maxim that life is three feet long and that a lot of us can now be concerned with that last quarter inch called satisfaction is why est is easily comprehended by people who are winning. And Werner acknowledges that satisfaction is not the primary concern of hungry people.

  Fritz Perls' work is a brilliant application of a theory of perception to emotional functioning. He took Freud's principle of the unconscious and his own concern with the "here and now" and put them together to focus experiences for his patients. He demanded that his patients attend to all the aspects of their experiences, including the entire pattern or form. This he called the Gestalt. Closing the Gestalt, was, to him, simply getting the patient to re-experience all of his experiences. Unlike many of his students, he was an undisputed master at getting out of the way of his patients.

  The est training is set up so that the trainer, like Gestalt, focuses (creates space for) the experience. The trainer is not the source of it. And the 250 participants, all sitting face forward in identical, uncomfortable chairs, agree not to interact with each other so that they, too, know that they -- not each other -- create their experience. The trainee chooses to listen to the trainer or not, to other people sharing or not, and to experience his response as he wishes.

  Another insight into the form of the
training is the work of the late Roberto Assagioli, creator of Psychosynthesis (whom Werner visited in Italy in 1974, shortly before his death.) This system employs techniques of imagery to release the person from the boundaries of words, so that he can experience seeing with the mind's eye.

  est and semantics: About the time that Freud was developing the theory of the unconscious, a well-known writer named Alfred Korzybski was developing the theory of general semantics.

  General semantics deals with our symbolic functions and the way in which words conceal experience. Korzybski was concerned with communication between people and, specifically, with the discrepancy between the way things are and the way we say they are.

  The semanticists recognized that we can never describe our experience with total accuracy -- our experience of, say, a tree, or a feeling, or of anything else. We can look at it and know it as a total experience, but we can talk about it ad infinitum without at all conveying the experience. The semanticists identified the various ways in which language functions to represent, but not reveal, our experiences. They saw that language may hinder rather than assist in re-creating experience.