This new consciousness, essentially an experience of self, ranges from
a new experience of one's body to a new experience of God -- which is
not, as it may appear, contradictory. When
Time
magazine in a
1969 cover story proclaimed that God was dead, it was talking about the
all-powerful Judeo-Christian God, who might zap us (that is, send us to
hell) if we didn't behave ourselves. It was a God beyond us, a Father
whose love was conditional.
The God of the seventies is out of the Eastern tradition. It is God
within, and thus God and the self are inseparable. One can experience
God directly, and thousands are doing just that daily through such
consciousness-altering techniques as meditation and chanting.
William Irwin Thompson, in his brilliant exploration of the new planetary
culture,
Passages About Earth
, writes, "A new ideology is being
created . . . Perhaps it will take no institutional form at all, for it
now seems that social institutions are no longer adequate vehicles of
cultural evolution. We cannot go to church to find radiant Godhead, to
the army to find glory in war, or to the universities to find aesthetic
transfiguration or wisdom. Now only mysticism seems well suited to the
postinstitutional anarchism of technetronic culture, on the one hand,
and the infinite posthuman universe on the other." *
* New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
And Marshall McLuhan, in a
Playboy
interview (March, 1969),
speaks of the imminence of "the universality of consciousness foreseen
by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken
fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness." This
new conscidusness, he says, is now possible with the development of the
electronic media.
If cosmic consciousness is the goal, then inner experience is the
means. Futurists such as Thompson and McLuhan are talking about the mystic
intuitive experience. Others are focusing on the feeling experience. (Note
that no one is talking about the intellectual experience, which is
becoming as passé as psychoanalysis.)
Part of how you feel is how your body feels, which of course is directly
related to how your feelings feel. Wilhelm Reich's theories of character
armor (body defense against feelings) and the flow of energy within
the body foreshadowed the current Western interest in such systems
as bioenergetics, the Alexander technique, Rolfing, Hatha Yoga, and
Shiatsu. All these techniques seek to liberate the body and focus on
inner well-being as opposed to outer success.
Esalen, the number one growth center of the sixties, is now concentrating
on increasing body energy toward flowing with the universe. Among their
"new" techniques: tennis and golf!
Those deeply into body techniques claim that the story of our lives is
stored in aching muscles, low back pains, headaches, and all the other
aches we try to eliminate with tranquilizers, sedatives, and painkillers,
drowning our feelings in order to "feel better."
In accepting the fact that body feelings are inseparable from emotional
feelings, the question "How do you feel?" becomes more relevant today
than ever.
When I was a child, I wouldn't dream of telling people what I felt
unless it was an "up" feeling, nor would I divulge my feelings about
another person unless they were positive. But it was O.K. to describe
the bellyaches and headaches that resulted from the fear or anger or
other taboo emotions I couldn't talk about.
Nowadays people express their feelings about rage, sex, sorrow --
you name it -- with the ease that their parents once talked about the
weather. Which may be one of the factors that led Jean-Paul Sartre,
in a recent interview, to predict a future "transparent man" in whom a
thought would be immediately visible, eliminating the need or desire to
hide it or pretend another.
The keynote of the present is in the words "unity" and "integration."
Thus, the new disciplines seek to integrate mind, body, and soul --
how we sit, the way we breathe, what we eat, what our inner voices tell us,
how our gut reacts, who we really are -- so that we can experience our
totality, our wholeness, our oneness with the universe.
A lot of this may not sound especially new and, in fact, a lot of it
isn't. What is new is the way it is becoming known. In Arica,* I went
through meditations and special exercises to experience my oneness with
all living things and my harmony with the vast universe. In the past,
the closest I might have come to this understanding was by listening to
someone pontificate from a pulpit or lectern on the ways of God.
* A self-transformation discipline developed by Oscar Ichazo,
in Chile, to improve clarity of mind and body through a forty-day
curriculum of exercise and movement for the physical body, and
meditation, mantram, and individual analysis for spiritual and
cognitive growth.
Which gets me back to
est
. If what you have, what you do, what
you think you are supposed to be, isn't working very well; if hard
work, success, romantic love and all the other concepts you were taught
were important as a child no longer seem to have meaning in your life;
then maybe it's time to look elsewhere, away from the tenets of your
past into the here and now of your experience. One way to describe
what
est
is all about is to say it's into the here and now of
experienced experience.
In experiencing your own nature in the
est
training, the
est
literature states, you are able to transform your ability to experience
life. More specifically, the training offers an opportunity to realize
a transformation of your experience of knowing; of your experience of
experiencing; of your experience of self; of your experience of others.
Werner Erhard,
est
's founder, described the training in
an interview in
East West Journal
(September, 1974) in a
characteristically
est
-ian manner (some call it "mind-fucking";
others, who feel explanations are irrelevant, say that it doesn't really
matter
what
Werner says, it's
how
he says it; and still
others think his style is dynamite and emulate it all the time).
In answer to the
Journal
's question, "What is
est
?"
Werner said, "
est
is a sixty-hour experience which opens 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 expanding satisfaction.
"Another part of the answer is there is no 'answer.'
est
actually
is an experience. But if you go around telling people that, you won't
have anything to talk about and you need something to say about it. It
is a very individual experience. And because of that, it's something
that is created
by
the individual. In other words,
est
is
not created by the trainer or the group that the person goes to train
with, it's an experience -- like all experiences -- which is created
by the individual who is experiencing the experience. . . . 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~~experiences which that individual originally
created. . . .
"It's definitely a way past the mind. It transcends the mind. Actually,
what I would really say -- because I think it communicates better than
anything, although it is not totally accurate -- is that it
blows the
mind
." *
* My italics.
A friend of mine put it another way: "What you get out of
est
is that you stop being an asshole groveling in your shit and you start
finding out what being alive is all about."
How's
your
life?
Gerry and Marcia *
Gerry, thirty, is a real estate salesman.
He is quick and friendly and immediately
makes people he's with comfortable.
Marcia, his wife, is an executive secretary
and appears serious and gentle.
* This and the other autobiographies of est graduates throughout
the book are representative of the many interviews I conducted.
I have changed most of the subjects' names, at their request. There
are no strongly negative statements simply because I was unable
to find any. Just before this book went to press I finally met a
woman who felt the training was useless, although not destructive.
"I don't feel saved, I don't feel not saved. I don't feel much
of anything after est." she told me. "My life was pretty
much O.K. way it was and its O.K. now." That was it!
GERRY: Our real estate office is like a branch of
est
. My uncle,
who owns the business, is a graduate and everyone else had taken the
training except me. I felt pressured to do
est
. I didn't want to
and, at the same time I also did.
Yeah, it worked. While the real estate business isn't great now, so I
can't claim dollars and cents results, I know I'm more confident and
aware in dealing with people. I can look them in the eye, literally
and figuratively.
Probably the main thing that's resulted from the training is that I've
thrown away my Bufferin. For years I had almost daily headaches from
tension. They're almost all gone. When I get one now, I don't fight it.
I just experience it. I've always had physical ailments. Last year it was
simulated heart attacks and pains in my arms and chest, which scared the
hell out of me. In college I used to get tonsillitis. I was always sick
with something. I was constantly abusing myself.
In the training I saw how I was never happy about anything. Just like
my Dad. He gets to feel like a total failure because some other guy has
a better car or house or bigger business. But I now see what a racket
that is.
My brother-in-law, an orthopedic surgeon, took the training. He went
into it skeptical and came out of it really impressed. Now he tells a
lot of his patients, "If you want to get rid of your lower-back pain go
to
est
. if you want to hold on to it, you can do that too." It
might just ruin his business.
MARCIA: After Gerry took it, I felt out of it. Everyone bugged me to take
the training. I'm an optimist. I didn't think I needed it. I finally did
the training and found it really good.
Gerry's and my main hang-up was whether or not we should have children.
I didn't want them -- not yet, anyway. Otherwise our relationship had been
pretty good.
Now we feel we want to have children eventually. And it is all right not
to have them now; we don't
have
to have kids because our friends do.
Now I feel more confident about taking care of a child.
Some mornings when I feel that I want to leave my job, or just not bother
to show up, Gerry and I talk and I see that I have a choice. And I get
there.
We both see, now, how a lot of people cover up what goes on with them. We
also see our needs and desires. Having a house and kids is no longer "it."
I'm more involved and aware of myself. That's what life is all about.
2
In the Beginning
QUESTION: Has est changed your life?
ANSWER: Yes. Now I carry all my troubles
around with me instead of just some of
them.
Around New York the
est
training is called the "no piss training."
At the time I was considering taking it, bathroom breaks were up to seven
hours apart.*
* They're now down to about four hours.
I very much wanted to take the training -- I had heard strange and
wonderful things about it -- but I was hung up on the bathroom thing. The
more curious I became, the more I feared I wouldn't be able to maintain
control for such a long time.
I blamed this fear on a childhood incident which still haunted me. In
the second grade, during a spelling test, my teacher chose to ignore my
raised hand signaling that I needed to go to the bathroom. The inevitable
happened; I wet my pants. I was so ashamed of this incident that I had
never mentioned it to anyone. Now, decades later, I was afraid it would
be repeated.
I finally decided to take the training anyway. The decision made,
I embarked on the
est
adventure, a trip that a year later isn't
yet over and probably never will be. It now appears to be one of the most
valuable experiences I've ever had.
It wasn't until I was well into the training, incidentally, that I
got
what my fear had really been about. I had always avoided
situations in which I felt my freedom would be circumscribed; I cherished
my independence too much to allow anyone to tell me what to do. A dozen
years . earlier I had walked out on a fabulous job as the only woman
account executive in a large advertising agency just because, regardless
of how long, hard, and creatively I worked, all account executives had
to sign in every morning at 9:00. It wasn't until I went through the
training that I really experienced this as a pattern of my life.
est
has two meanings. It is the Latin word for "it is." It is also an
acronym whose initials stand for Erhard Seminars Training, named, after
its creator, Werner Erhard. It is always written in the modest lower
case, simple and unostentatious, in quiet good taste. In contrast to
its typographical style,
est
is an ebullient, dynamic, expanding
operation.
I heard that the people who were taking the training were not
the type of
seekers
I was used to meeting in the various
therapy/encounter/mind-expansion experiences I had had over the past
dozen years. A good proportion had never been in therapy and/or been
involved in a growth group.
They were young and old, confused and confident, divorced, married,
professionals, housewives, students, rich, not-so-rich (but rarely
poor). The reason they were all flocking to
est
? Because,
even though most of them were doing well, their lives weren't really
satisfying; in
est
talk,
trying
to make their lives
satisfying wasn't satisfying either.
Almost without exception, they had come to