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
un
attached 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.
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