In the small guest seminar I attended, the seminar leader suggested
that we might want to share what we experienced in the process. One man
admitted that he had trouble finding a happy experience. Another shared
that he had
thought
he was happy when his kids were born but he
realized that that wasn't what he had just experienced. A third shared
that he got that he wouldn't let himself have happiness. And a fourth
confessed that absolutely nothing happened to her.
A woman told us that she couldn't let the stranger into her space because
she was in a compromising position. She got that she felt guilty about her
sexual pleasure.
For another the stranger turned out to be the most influential person
in his life. And so it went.
For me, the most fascinating aspect of this exercise was the multiplicity
of individual experiences. No two people saw or felt the same thing. Most
were amazed at the variety and wealth of the material they were able to
call forth.
The leader (in this case, Monique) pointed out that each of us is different
because each of us makes different choices. It is the inability to choose,
she explained, that keeps us stuck in our lives. When you make a choice,
your life moves forward. The choice usually boils down to a simple
"yes" or "no." "I don't know" is also a choice -- the choice to evade
responsibility.
A woman wanted to know what kind of choice she makes when she is depressed.
A lot of people turned to her; it's a universal problem. The leader answered:
"If you're depressed, you can choose to have your depression; you can
take responsibility for it. Or you can choose to resist it and be at
its effect, helpless."
Monique, who is an airline stewardess, concluded this particular seminar
with a confession. "I haven't the foggiest notion what
est
is
all about. I only know my life works better."
I, too, hadn't the foggiest notion of what it was all about. But I knew
that I wanted it. The way I once knew that I wanted an orgasm before I
had ever had sex: Everyone had told me how terrific it was, but no one
could tell me how it worked or what it really felt like.
I found out that orgasms were worth experiencing. I would trust that
est
was, too.
Father Joseph Brendler
Father Joseph Brendler, thirty-two, is a
hospital chaplain, pastoral counselor, and
on the faculty of New Orleans' Notre Dame
Seminary. He is a large and impressive man
whose honesty I found disarming.
I was tremendously nervous before I flew to San Francisco to take the
training. I had no idea what to expect.
The most important thing I got from
est
is acceptance of myself
where I am negative. What has happened is that I have lost my fantasies
about myself and the world. Now I see things as they are. Before I had
this need to always make progress, to be perfect. That's the whole bag
people get into the clergy for.
Now I simply accept the things I cannot change -- and even the things I
don't want to. (My office, for example, is usually a mess. I'm supposed
to keep it neat, but now I just let it be.) The "supposed to" is gone
from my life.
At
est
I got that I am satisfied with being the way I am. I don't
have to be the warm, supportive, bubbly person that I believed my role
as a priest calls for. I can be grumpy. It's O.K. to be grumpy. I can
be the way I feel and I can be honest about it. I can also give other
people the responsibility to be the way they feel.
As a pastoral counselor I am less demanding now of my counselees.
I used to want them to move along, to change. The key word really is
responsibility -- me for my life, they for theirs. I know now that I
can assist, but I don't help.*
* See Glossary for distinction.
I accept the people who come to see me the way they are. At the same
time I am more confronting than I used to be. I am no longer afraid to
tell it like it is. It is O.K. to be honest, to be the way you are.
est
gave me the
experience
of what theology has been
telling
me.
Blessing is acceptance and affirmation of the fact that others are all
right the way they really are. I never really got that before. I could
see that people looked blessed, but I didn't have the power to bless
because of my desire to change people.
The great mystics who were wrapped up with God had that complete acceptance.
I just knew about it through faith. But now I am developing more spirituality
because of my new ability to let go and stop controlling others. And to
experience reality the way it is.
The last night of the training it all made sense to me. Until then it
was total confusion. I finally could feel -- not think or rationalize --
that the responsibility to accept or not accept others and myself was
mine. I knew without a doubt that I couldn't change.
Giving up that illusion of control threw me into a deep depression for a
month after I returned to New Orleans following the training. Previously,
I had been in therapy in New Orleans with a psychiatrist. He helped me
through that month of depression and now I have given up therapy.
Soon after the training I was scheduled to give a weekend retreat for
about forty men in northern Louisiana. As I was preparing my sermon
the connection dawned; I saw that letting go of life, relinquishing
my control, was the answer. That entire weekend retreat I wrote about
my
est
experience without identifying
est
. That was the
turning point. Putting that weekend together pulled the whole
est
experience together for me and gave me new enthusiasm and new energy in
my life.
I haven't any idea how the training works, how what happened to me
happened and what motivates me to feel the way I do now. I only know
that I feel different than I ever have before. Sure, I still go up and
down. I have moods like anybody else. But it's O.K. I simply experience my
moods as they happen. And my relationships in every area of my life have
improved because I can experience them. I no longer try to control them.
I handle confession differently, too. The theology of grace, that you
don't have to earn salvation, I had previously accepted. But I still
measured people by my standards. I was condescending.
I'm really in touch with compassion now. Beneath the garbage of fear that
we all have, we really want to be good, warm, friendly, and loving. Even
though a person might be a thief, cruel, mean, I can sense the lonely
person underneath.
My idea of right and wrong is simply that if one does injury to another
person, that is wrong. Judging something as sinful is judging that someone
has hurt another person.
I am much closer to God now. I see God's relationship to us. It really
doesn't matter what we do; God's love of us doesn't change. In the parable
of the Prodigal Son, which I had never really understood, I identified
with the long-suffering elder son and was angry at the acceptance of
the younger son. Now I see that it is O.K. for me to be this way and it
doesn't matter.
I wouldn't trade my
est
experience for the world. Looking back
I see that I was so uptight that if I hadn't paid the $250 in advance
I would have left after that first weekend and never returned.
3
Beliefs
"Belief is a disease."
-- Werner Erhard
Werner says, "The truth believed is a lie. If you go around preaching the
truth, you are lying. The truth can only be experienced. This illuminates
the old Zen koan: 'Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.'
The horrible part about it is that the truth is so damn believable,
people usually believe it instead of experiencing it."
Because so much of what
est
is about is related to people's
beliefs, to what they think "the truth" is, I digress here to explore
what
est
calls "belief systems."
Everyone has belief systems, formed when we were children. Some samples:
Daddies go to work and Mommies stay home and take care of the children. If
you're good, you go to heaven. People have to eat three square meals a day
to stay healthy. Being in love is not having to say you're sorry. I must be
strong or nobody will love me. Hard work is good (bad) for you.
Ad infinitum
.
Our beliefs about romantic love, and what a man-woman relationship should
be, as opposed to the reality of what it actually is, are probably the
main reason why the divorce rate in this country continues to soar. The
belief about the relationship seldom meshes with what goes on between
any couple on a daily basis.
est
defines love as "giving someone
the space to be the way they are and the way they are not."
Some of the beliefs I grew up with are: blond, blue-eyed children are
prettier than those who, like me, have curly brown hair and green eyes.
The way to be happy is to acquire a lot of college degrees and a lot
of money. Men are weak. It's just as easy to marry a rich man as a poor
man. Tears and headaches are a woman's lot in life -- sometimes curable
by long hot baths.
est
allows us to see that not until we separate what we
believe
from what we
experience
can we begin to run our own lives.
The belief systems
est
talks about (called parental injunctions
in Transactional Analysis) are the concepts we use to run our lives. The
problem with a belief is that we take it to be truth -- and get stuck
in it. That means that most of us persist in thinking and doing what we
learned long ago, rather than acting out of our experience in response
to whatever is happening now.
A classic story illustrates this point: A young bride regularly cuts off
the ends of the ham before putting it in the pan to bake. After watching
her do this several times, her husband asks her why. She answers that
her mother always did it that way. So the husband asks the mother-in-law
why she cut off the ends of the ham. To which she replies, "Because my
mother always did it that way." The old grandmother is still alive,
so he visits her one day and asks the same question. "I cut the ends
off the ham," she explains, "because we were very poor and had only one
pan for all our baking. To get a large ham into the small pan, we had
to cut the ends off."
Most of us are cutting the ends off something in our lives to fit into a
pan that's no longer too small for it.
est
tells us we are robots,
machines, stuck in the soap opera of our lives, obsessed with the same
four or five problems we've always had, only dressed in new clothes.
For example, you skin your knee at five and mother says, "Don't cry;
crying is bad," so you don't cry. When you are sixteen, you break your
leg skiing, and you keep a stiff upper lip because you are a good boy
or girl, which means you don't cry. Then, at twenty-one, a relationship
with someone ends and you still don't cry. After a while the more you
repress whatever it is you are feeling, the more your consciousness
shuts down, just like a trap door. You are barely alive. You function
mechanically. In some cases, you're successful at it. But mechanical
success is not any more satisfying than failure.
Psychotherapy has always been concerned with the way people are run by
what
was
rather than what
is
, and how to free people from
the prison of their past. The difference between
est
and therapy
is that therapy is concerned with curing people of illness and
est
is concerned with offering people -- sick and healthy -- an experience
of themselves.
est
makes no claims at all.
In an interview with Marcia Seligson,* Werner said,
"A belief system is myth, created by knowledge or data
without experience. If you experience something, it is
real for you, and if you communicate it to somebody,
it's real for them. If they now tell it to somebody else,
it's a lie -- belief without the component of experience.
* New Times (October 18. 1974).
"Now belief is very powerful; you can cure with it or kill with it. I
earned my living for years training peopie to believe in themselves. The
problem is that beliefs are a state of hypnosis, automatic, and totally
non-nurturing. Like, the degree to which I have beliefs about women,
I can't see you; not only that, but I can
prove
to you, from my
beliefs, that what I think I see is actually true." Werner later said,
"That there are people out there believing in us, in me, is a failure
of
est
that we are working to correct."
He distinguishes between looking for answers outside of ourselves
and what's going on within us. "If I get the idea that God is going
to save me, therefore I'm all right, that's salvation. If I get the
idea that nothing's going to save me, therefore I'm all right, that's
enlightenment. . . . People get involved in therapy, groups, and movements
to get better. That's not what people get from us."
Before and after the pre-training, and again during the first days of
the training, I asked people what they
expected
to get out of
est
. A lot of them told me they wanted to fall in love or get
married or get divorced. Some spoke about improving job situations,
family relationships, or the state of their health. Others were more
general: "to make better decisions"; "to have more self-confidence";
"to be more together and less confused." One attractive young man told
me he wanted either to find a way to grow hair on his chest or learn to
accept that he was attractive and virile without it; he was serious.
What they all had in common was a set of expectations. They believed
their happiness was dependent on more love, more money, more sex, more
self-confidence, or more chest hair. Each one had a belief system which
related satisfaction to something he or she was striving for. None of
them saw their happiness as a function of accepting what
is
,
apart and separate from what
was
and what is to come.
I remember an occasion, shortly after I was divorced, when I spent
a weekend alone -- and in one of the worst depressions of my entire
life. I was depressed because I believed that an attractive, vital woman
should be spending that holiday weekend "having fun," which included
every notion I had ever had of what fun was all about. I felt myself
a failure because I was alone, because I hadn't been invited anywhere,
and because, above all, I didn't have a man in my life at the time. That
same holiday weekend eight years later found me holed up in a hotel room
writing this book -- alone and happy in the moment of doing.