est

by Adelaide Bry

  What Werner does in the training is to create a space in which the trainee gets to re-experience his experience and to look at the language and concepts that he is using to describe that experience, and to observe the difference between the two. He doesn't just tell people that there is a difference; he gets them to know and experience the difference. And therein lies the power of the training, and its ability to transcend the important contribution of the semanticists.

  Werner once said, "There are only two things in the world, semantics and nothing." Nothing, being the context of everything, represents the ultimate truth. And semantics, being the form of everything, represents the content, or all that appears to exist.

  He realizes that language is inadequate even to report what is going on in this process of distinguishing language from experience. As he puts it, "There is something going on beyond the mind, where you have just being. The being discerns, it differentiates. But here's the trap: The mind works with symbols, it does not work with direct experience. So if you talk to a being and its mind about beingness, no matter what you say, you say it with your mind and the other person hears it with his mind. Therefore it's a lie."

  est and Zen: Werner has observed: "Although the est training is not Zen, some features of the est training coincide with Zen teaching and practice. Of all the disciplines that I studied, practiced, and learned, Zen was the essential one. It was not so much an influence on me; rather, it created space. It allowed those things which were there to be there. It gave some form to my experience. And it built up in me the critical mass from which was kindled the experience which produced est. It is entirely appropriate for persons interested in est to also be interested in Zen." Werner adds, "The form of Zen training is totally different from the form of the est training. And we came from similar abstractions."

  For the Zen adept, it is all-important not to go through life carrying around yesterday and tomorrow. A Zen saying is: When you are hungry, eat. When you are tired, sleep.

  This seems so simple. Yet, how many people do this? Werner has said most of us are asleep when we're awake and awake when we're asleep.

  est and God: Werner has said, "Belief in God is the greatest single barrier to God in the Universe; (it is) almost a total barrier to the experience of God. When you think you have experienced God, you haven't. Experiencing God is experiencing God, and that is true religion."

  est has happened so rapidly that a lot of professionals -- psychiatists and psychologists -- as yet don't even know that it exists. As I sought evaluations from among my colleagues I found that those who knew about it through friends or patients who had been through it were impressed with its results but were skeptical. Those professionals who are est graduates were universally positive about it.

  Dr. Herbert Hamsher, professor of psychology at Temple University, a practicing psychotherapist, a published researcher, and an est graduate, has this to say about it:

  "While Werner Erhard does not offer the est training as therapy -- and it is not -- it is one of the most powerful therapeutic experiences yet devised. The difference between the training and therapy is that it does not focus on or deal with specific problems or conflicts; it deals only with difficulties of living experienced by everyone, although each in their individual way.

  "est is designed to enhance one's capacity to experience oneself and for that purpose it is unassailable. It is sensitively and intelligently constructed with such insight and psychological sophistication that it can't not work. It is virtually impossible to participate in the training and not experience oneself in new ways and to greater depths than previously.

  "My personal experience and my experience with friends, colleagues, and psychotherapy patients convinces me that the est experience is of universal value. The specific reactions and benefits are clearly distinctive to the individual; what is general is the opening up of the person in a way which promotes personal growth and encourages 'here and now' living and experiencing.

  "Far from detracting from or substituting for psychotherapy, my experience is that est enhances therapeutic movement and potentiates the process of therapy."

  Dr. Richard M. Dawes, a New Orleans psychiatrist and trained psychoanalyst who had been in traditional analysis for seven years and subsequently studied Gestalt and TA, says this about est:

  "I have seen [est] work with myself, my patients, and my friends. . . . A colleague who does a group at a hospital where I have individual patients is amazed at the change in my patients [and] how they are breaking through their barriers. . . ." *

  * Dr. Dawes' complete statement appears on pages 11O-113.

  Werner says that est in no way replaces the need for therapy and that he offers est to the psychotherapeutic community as a support to therapy -- as something which may assist the true purpose of all therapists, the well-being of their patients.

  A well-known New York psychiatrist who has attended est workshops (and who asked not to be identified) told me that he believes est's effectiveness is based on dealing with the responsibility of the conscious and in bypassing the neurotic complexes people work through in the therapeutic processes. He feels that any movement that makes people responsible, as opposed to the irresponsibility implicit in work with the unconscious, and that brings this concept of self-responsibility to people who might not be reached in other ways, has value.

  His criticism of est focuses largely on its representations. He feels that it claims (though est denies it makes any claims) to accomplish far more than it actually does, that its depth is minimal, and that it makes change and growth seem easy, which they are not. He also feels there's a dishonesty in its approach, which states, in effect, "We have it; we won't tell you what it is but come and get it anyway." Some professionals are more disturbed by this type of criticism than by what they feel is lacking in the content of the program itself.

  Most criticisms of est come from one of four main points of view: (1) that it is fascistic, (2) that it is brainwashing, (3) that it is too abbreviated to have any long-term or significant effect, and (4) that is is narcissistic. Each of these criticisms has been made in a different context. What follows is a summation:

  (1) While he was president of Esalen, Richard Farson strongly denounced est as a "totalitarian neo-Fascist, crypto-Nazi outfit." In an interview in The Village Voice he described it as "the next step in exaggeration of the things we did innocently and thought were good." Soon after he made these comments, he left Esalen.

  When writing this book I contacted Farson to see if he wanted to stand by the statement he had made to The Village Voice. He said that that quote had been "misleading" and made the following statement: "My main concern about est comes from the fact that in any educational program, public schools included, people tend not to learn much about what is in the subject matter or content of the progam but, at a deeper level, they learn the method by which the program is taught. That is why school children learn more about competition than about algebra, more about sitting still than about history, and more about obeying adult authority than about reading. These lessons are powerful because they are taught not by the curriculum but by the ritual of education. When people learn, as I believe they do in est, that it is acceptable, perhaps even necessary, to coerce, abuse, demean, incarcerate and exhaust people 'for their own good' we have a classic means/ends dilemma and, I'm afraid, the precondition for fascism."

  It's quite true that the structure of the training is predetermined -- that the data and processes emanate in a definitive manner from the trainer. My feeling about the so-called fascism, however, is that those parts of the training which have been criticized were deliberately developed to jolt people into a space from which they could then be open to self-experience. Fascism implies creed and victimization. The est training has no creed, and people have free choice to stay or to leave, to keep their agreements or break them, to respond to instructions or not, to create their own experience or to be angry at the tactics.

  est says that
the real fascism -- the fascism of mechanical conditioned behavior, justified by explanations and protestations, and without the experience of satisfaction -- is alive and well, ruling most of our lives. People who have experienced themselves -- who know the truth directly -- cannot be enslaved.

  (2) The brainwashing charge has been stated most outspokenly by Mark Brewer in Psychology Today (August, 1975). Concluding an article which questions Werner's integrity and est's validity, he wrote: "Any citizen is free to spend money experiencing himself as a mechanical anus, and therefore discovering himself to be perfect. To each his own. However, I personally distrust any organization that transforms and uplifts thousands through the nihilism of a belief system that denies all other beliefs as bullshit. The use of brainwashing techniques, ostensibly to enhance people's lives, becomes bizarre when the outcome is to create unpaid salesmen. Smiling, they march out each week to share their brainwashed joys with friends, neighbors and coworkers. . . ."

  Characteristically, est chose not to refute Brewer's charges, in a letter published in the December, 1975, issue of Psychology Today. But nine Ph.D.'s and M.D.'s, all est graduates, did respond. Ignoring all but the brainwashing issue (the rest was such clear mud-slinging), they wrote that "dehypnosis" and "deconditioning" were more accurate descriptions. They went on to say, "In the est training, people are offered an opportunity to look at and be more aware of the belief systems and automatic patterns of living which get in the way of their experience of living. Unlike brainwashing, which destroys belief [and substitutes another], the est training offers epistemological alternatives in which people can experience their experience rather than reacting automatically or through a system of beliefs. Choice, not brainwashing, is what the est training is about. We have found that there is nothing to believe in est.

  "The central issues for us," they concluded, "are these: (1) Does the est training force or cause anyone, overtly or subtly, to believe anything? (2) Have we, as est graduates, found our experience of loving enhanced by the training? Our answers are (1) No. (2) Yes." The authors of this brief and direct response are an impressive array of well-known professionals in the field.*

  * Earl Babble, Ph.D.: Professor of Sociology, University of Hawaii; Frank Berger, M.D., D.Sc.: Professor of Psychiatry, University of Louisville, School of Medicine; Ouide Bilon, Ph.D.: Workshop Institute of Living Learning, University of Maryland & Gestalt Institute, Washington, D.C.; James Bush, D.S.W.: Mental Health Educational Consultant, Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital; Enoch Callaway, M.D.: Chief of Research, The Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute & Professor of Psychiatry in Residence, School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco; Byron A. Eliashof, M.D.: Psychiatrist, Associate Clinical Professor, University of Hawaii Medical School; Kermit L. Fode, Ph.D.: University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Psychology & Senior Psychologist, Ventura County (California) Mental Health Department; J. Herbert Hamsher, Ph.D.: Associate Professor, Clinical Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia & Head, Research Committee, ITAA; Jack Sawyer, Ph.D.: Fellow, the Wright Institute, Berkeley & Visiting Scholar, University of California, Berkeley.

  When we spoke of this article Werner told me that he feels that mature, intelligent, and thoughtful studies about est, even those which are critical, are important. If est is true in people's experience, it can only be furthered by looking at all its possibilities and by encouraging sincere criticism. If est is not true in people's experience, no matter how many nice things are said about it, and no matter how many people believe in it, it will wither on the vine.

  (3) An article in the July, 1975, issue of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology by Larry LeShan doesn't identify est by name but clearly is referring to est when it pokes fun at a guru who "promised all sorts of wonderful and permanent changes in your life if you attended two weekends with him or one of his students."

  Although LeShan admits that he didn't try the "short method," he is skeptical of its claim of a quick enlightenment. "It tends to distort our entire view of the great work and quest that we are engaged in -- of the gardening of ourselves and others. It leads to simplistic beliefs [and] inadequate conceptualizations . . . There is no easy way to get there. As a matter of fact, there is no place to get to. We are engaged in a process of becoming more and more at home with ourselves, each other and nature, not an attempt to arrive at a place. There is value in most of the methods we are exploring. Someday we will be more successful than we are now in putting the best from each together. When we are, however, there is one thing I can promise you. It still won't be quick and easy."

  He goes on: "Buddha worked on his own development his whole life and not he nor Jesus nor Socrates ever promised it would be easy. . . . Somehow it seems unlikely that the Lord of Compassion would have advised his disciples to give up their hard work and buy an alpha tuner."

  LeShan's style is witty and convincing; I'd love to read what he might write after he took the training. In response to what he says, I'd like to point out that est makes no claims about offering people enlightenment. As I see it, what est proposes to do is to transform people's ability to experience living, so problems clear up "just in the process of life itself." It is not preparation for sainthood. It is merely a beginning, an opening, from which people can move on to new places in their lives.

  About his skepticism regarding the long-term results from such a short-term experience, I would like to say here that I, too, was skeptical about whether or not the est high lasted. I, like so many others, have had high moments after encounter groups, meditation, and other brief or extended mind-expanding experiences. But these feelings were always short-lived.

  My own experience with est, and that of the professionals and graduates I interviewed, is that most people continued to experience growth and change over a long period of time. In many cases, in fact, the experience seems to expand with time. Among those I spoke with were graduates of the earliest trainings in 1971, when est began.

  Werner spoke to this recently when he described, before 6,200 graduates, a reunion of the first thousand or so graduates four years after they had taken the training.

  "My experience of these people," he said, "was absolutely inspiring [because] I could see that est had literally disappeared into their lives. It had become a part of the fabric of their daily experience. They were not stuck with est jargon; they were communicating and they were sparkling, alive, beaming and happy. And when they, share the training with people, they do so totally out of their experience of their lives working.

  "You see," he explained, "the training was no longer an exterior event -- something that had happened to them. It was not a set of rules to follow or something they had to remember. They weren't carrying est around in a basket. It was simply where they were coming from."

  (4) The charge of "narcissism" against est -- the deification of the isolated self -- was spelled out by Peter Marin in Harper's magazine (October, 1975). Like LeShan, he did not take the training; however, his point concerning the isolated self is valuable and reflects the concern of others that the new therapies are "a retreat from the worlds of morality and history, an unembarrassed denial of human reciprocity and community."

  In a long and comprehensive article representing this point of view, he comes down hardest on the assumption that "the new therapies provide their adherents with a way to avoid the demands of the world, to smother the tug of conscience." He is especially concerned that, because of "the unrealized shame of having failed the world and not knowing what to do about it," graduates of est (as well as of the other "new disciplines") will abdicate their social and political responsibilities toward each other and the rest of humanity.

  Ironically, I happened to read this article the same day my mail contained a communication from est with information on how and where to register to vote. The letter from Werner that accompanied this said, in part, "The experience of self takes you out into the world to serve others. . . . It is your willingness to come out of your
experience into the world, to be responsible for its condition, and to participate in life that is making this thing [est] work."

  Werner spoke to this issue in a radio interview: "It is a fact that individual well-being contributes to societal well-being. . . . To weep for the world is to say that I didn't do it. And I did do it. . . . So I have a very large problem with this business about weeping for the world; I think that's nonsense. It belongs to me; I want to be responsible for it, rather than weep for it. I want to get up and do something about it."

  My own feeling about the est training, alone or in combination with the graduate seminar programs, is that it is both incredibly effective and undeniably imperfect.

  I feel that it errs, for example, in not offering body work and an opportunity to experience oneself energetically, despite its concern with body sensations. Exercise and breathing techniques are invaluable for expanding the experience of mind and body. Arica and most of the yogas incorporate body work in their disciplines. And such systems as bioenergetics very effectively work through blocks using a combination of conceptual, emotional, and physical technique. This omission seemed even more significant to me after I heard that Werner gets Rolfed frequently and provides free chiropractic care, and sometimes Rolfing, Feldenkreis, Alexander technique, and other body techniques for his staff, a clear recognition of the importance of a healthy physical body. A graduate seminar titled "The Body" is a step in the right direction but the lack of body work remains a missing link in the training.