With a new name, one suitcase, and "a life full of pretense and lies," Werner Hans Erhard disembarked in a new place and embarked on a new life. He went to work in St. Louis as a registrar for a school that taught the operation of heavy construction equipment and sold used cars. He then headed for California, where he represented a correspondence school and enrolled students. Sometime afterward he went to Spokane, where he managed an office that sold Britannica's Great Books . In 1963, Werner went to work for the Parents Cultural Institute, a division of Parents' Magazine . Recently, in response to a published attack on Werner's integrity, the man who was president of Parents' at the time of Werner's employment wrote about this period with high praise. In a letter which would make any mother proud, he said "Werner's very considerable reputation was based on his ability to develop personnel and train executives. His development courses were used by many other executives both inside P.M.C.I. and in other organizations as well. Werner's integrity, honesty and contribution to the well-being of the thousands of human beings he worked with earned him the respect and acknowledgment of the old and respected company for which he worked." Werner was vice president of this organization for the last three of the six years he was there. He must have been a dynamite executive, given his charisma and his sensitivity to people. Fred Lehrman writes in New Age Journal : "He seems to be a friend to everyone who wants to know him. I once went ice-skating with the est staff. Stumbling around on the ice for the first time in twenty years, I heard someone call my name. It was Werner. How the hell did he remember my name out of 30,000 graduates?" *
* September 15, 1974.
Werner left P.M.C.I. (which went out of business a year later), and became a division manager with the Grolier Society, Inc. A former associate and self-described friend of Werner's who worked with him at Grolier (and asked not to be identified) describes him as "supercool, aloof, and secretive. You never knew what he was thinking," he told me, "but he often said that he was going to build and make a fortune. I don't like the est organization," he added. "I went to several guest seminars but my ego wouldn't allow me to get into it." When I quoted all this to Werner, he laughed. "By that point I was long past wanting to make a fortune. I had already realized that money was no substitute for satisfaction." Another view of Werner during his time at Grolier comes from his former boss, who was then the vice president. "Werner had a demonstrated ability to develop people's talents," he wrote. "He had a reputation for adding dignity and a sense of satisfaction to the lives of the people with whom he associated." A friend of a friend sent me a copy of the Grolier house organ at the time Werner was there. It notes that the operation under his management was unique because, among other things. "The sales staff is comprised only of women. Recruitment is almost entirely in the hands of young enthusiastic women," it stated without comment, and then went on to note that "they consistently show up on the top ten producers list" and were challenging their male counterparts." Even then he was top dog in his way, and his way was to do things in ways nobody else had. During his employment with (Grolier, Werner took the Mind Dynamics course and went on to study with its founder, Alexander Everett, finally becoming a part-time instructor. According to a former associate, "he worked with people to enable them to become more aware of themselves, even resorting to humiliation when necessary." Werner was offered a bigger job when the Holiday Magic people began to take over the active management of Mind Dynamics. Several months earlier he had had his experience "out of space and time" on which the est training was to be built. He declined the offer and left Mind Dynamics to start est . Werner's wife, Ellen, was a very real support during the years he was developing est . She was a successful businesswoman in her own tight, managing a natural vitamin and food supplement company which, Werner told me in her presence, he had started in order to give her an opportunity to experience her capability. She has since given the business to the employees and has gone on to assist Werner at est . The motivation techniques Werner studied and taught with great success in business have also been translated for est use. Graphs and charts are maintained for all business functions, including statistics on how many people are enrolled in seminars and training. These sheets, which look like stock market analyses, are referred to and compared proudly; volunteers are apparently willing and happy to be "on the line" in their performances. 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, and 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.