Finally the leader said that if we wanted to
get
the training, all
we needed to do was keep our soles in the room and follow instructions.
He pointed to the bottom of his shoe in case any of us thought he meant
something more esoteric.
I looked around at the people who were taking this in. The man on my left
was a Park Avenue surgeon whose nephew, children, and wife had taken the
training. Behind me was a well-known art director of a leading magazine.
Another man, with whom I had a friend in common, was the producer of a
national television news program. There was also a well-known actor, a
woman president of an advertising agency, and a physicist -- to name just
a few of the outwardly successful among us. We all sat there, ostensibly
passive, until the entire list had been read. Then the hands shot up.
Most of the questions, not surprisingly, were about what went in and came
out of the body. This corroborated the tube theory expounded in the guest
seminars, which would be repeated during the training. Toileting got the
most attention. "Not being able to go to the bathroom is unreasonable,"
one man complained. "Yes," came the matter-of-fact answer. "It's
unreasonable. That's what the training is. Unreasonable. The opposite
not of reason but of reasonableness."
Other questions dealt with food and physical comfort. A woman asked for,
and was given, permission to bring a pillow to the training. On Saturday a
number of people showed up clutching pillows in their arms. "Legitimatized
security blankets," I thought.
Werner later told me that although the physical dis- comfort was a
valuable aspect of the training, it was not essential and, since people
got stuck on it, for many months now there have been shorter hours and
more frequent breaks without any difference in results.
After the rules came the pitfalls, which were all the traps we would
get ourselves into; while nothing can keep you from
getting it
,
the pitfalls would be barriers to the growth process. At one time or
another, I was to fall into each of them. At the moment, though, I was
convinced I was beyond them. In fact, the more rigorous and unyielding
the whole process sounded, the more I felt I could endure it. Those were
the kinds of barriers I loved to hurdle. The barriers I was unprepared
for, which would almost be my undoing, were the soft, pliable things:
boredom, sleepiness, feelings that nothing was happening.
The evening moved through more data and a couple of exercises. One involved
introducing ourselves. We were told that when most of us encounter somebody
on the street we're more aware of what their shoes look like than their eyes.
Everyone found that one funny. I was noticing that we laughed longest and
loudest when we were most uncomfortable. Being made aware of our acts --
our fronts to the world -- produced the most discomfort of all.
By the time the pre-training evening session was over, I felt good
about what was to come. I had laughed a lot. And nothing
seemed beyond my considerable repertoire of responses to
encounter/feeling/self-examination-type growth experiences.
It was a lovely, if short-lived, delusion.
I noticed later on my way back to Philadelphia that my jaws ached and
my shoulders and neck felt as if they had weights hanging from them. If
I had thought earlier that it was going to be painless or that I could
somehow remain detached, I now was forced to reconsider what I was
getting myself into.
THE FIRST WEEKEND
Saturday dawned gray and merciless. I debated how much to eat and drink
for breakfast, given that neither our bathroom nor our meal break might
come until evening. I settled on two cups of coffee and made a note to
stop in the ladies' room just before the training began. Then I dressed,
in layers; I had heard that the training rooms are kept cold to keep
people awake. (I found out later that this was not true; the training
rooms are kept at a constant temperature of 70-73 degrees. The apparent
changes in temperature are merely changes in people's experience.)
The hotel this time was the New York Sheraton. All I saw of it that
morning were the gold-colored name tags graced with the
est
orchid leaves worn by volunteer greeters. Outside the training room I
made my way past more name tags to find my own and get my bearings.
The previous Wednesday we had all been exhorted to make eye contact
with people. You would hardly have known it by the performance that
morning. Except for a dozen or so couples, everyone else had staked out
an isolated hunk of carpeting as his or her turf, from which beneath
lowered eyelids the quiet confusion was surveyed. Here and there people
chatted distractedly. In a corner a young woman twisted a cord on her
handbag and seemed about to cry. A toothless man in his middle years, who
I later learned was an elevator operator, kept loosening and tightening
his tie. The successful were indistinguishable from the less successful,
with most people dressed in the weekend uniform of our time: blue jeans.
The doors to the training room opened at 7:30. We were reminded, again,
to sit in "the front-most, center-most chair." Those of us who had
disregarded instructions to leave our watches home now checked them at
the door. The mood was somber. To break the heavy silence, I started a
conversation with a good-looking man alongside me.
He had come to
est
, he told me, on the recommendation of a woman
friend. The friend had been, like him, an advertising account executive.
During the training, she
got
that she was frigid. She subsequently
left her high-status and well-paying job to work full time producing
pornographic films. I thought he was putting me on. He wasn't.
Promptly at 8:30 the doors were closed. What the trainer later called
"the roller coaster ride" had begun.
After a re-reading of the ground rules by a training supervisor in the
by-now-familiar humorless, no-nonsense style, the trainer -- the star --
arrived and strode purposefully to the platform at the front of the room.
He wasted no time in getting down to business. There were no introductions,
no preliminaries, no niceties. He glowered at us and announced that we
were all assholes. I knew it was coming but I flinched anyway. A woman
in front of me began to shake.
"You are an asshole," he repeated loudly. "You are a machine. Your life
doesn't work. You're an asshole because you pretend that it does." He
paced from one end of the platform to the other, punctuating each staccato
statement with a thrust of his arm.
The verbal flagellation continued. "You people are here today because
all of your strategies, your smart-ass theories, and all the rest of
your shit hasn't worked for you. In this training you're going to find
out you've been acting like assholes. All of your fucking cleverness
and self-deception have gotten you nowhere."
As I noticed people squirm, I was delighted that I wasn't bothered
by the four-letter words; I had done enough encounter to handle the
fuck-shit-cunt routine like a street kid. Later I learned that people
occasionally leave the training ostensibly because the language is too
raw for them. The trainer's response to a woman who questioned the use
of these words was " 'Spaghetti' and 'fuck' are the same. They're only
words. The difference is the significance you add to them."
It seemed to me that the idea was to reduce us to pulp, to attack us
where we're most vulnerable, to eventually have us identify those areas
of our lives that don't produce results. "When you reach a critical mass
of observation," Werner says, "things can begin to disappear."
I looked around and noted that all but one of the exit doors had signs
across them saying "NO EXIT"; the other door had an
est
volunteer
in front of it to prevent entry from outside. Although the doors are
not locked and no one is ever barred from leaving, I resigned myself to
accepting that I was going to feel trapped, like it or not.
I turned my full attention to the trainer, Stewart Emery. Incredibly
handsome, his suntanned face was set off by a luxurious head of
silver-gray hair. I judged him to be about thirty-seven. At that
moment he didn't look like someone I could snuggle up with, but I saw
the potential. Many women friends who trained with some of the other
trainers developed crushes on them; it seems to be part of the syndrome --
the need for transference and identification.
Stewart told us what we needed to do to
get
the training. "If you
stay in the room during the training, you'll get it. If you sleep through
the training, as long as you are in this room sleeping, you'll get it.
"Trying to understand the training, using your head to understand the
training, and trying to figure it all out are inappropriate ways to get
this training. What you need to do to get the training is just to follow
instructions and take what you get."
I was surprised about the permission to nod out. I also wondered how
it was possible in those straight-back chairs lined up with no space
right and left and only a foot or so in front. When I heard the first
blissful snores that afternoon, and dozed off myself the next morning,
I stopped wondering.
Stewart said, "The truth puts people to sleep. It goes right to what's
unconscious in them, and most people are unconscious. For the truth to
get to the truth in people, it has to get through the unconscious. So if
you can make people uncomfortable in their unconsciousness, enough just
to make them aware they are unconscious, then you have a better chance
of letting some truth strike the truth in them."
The process of getting the truth, whether we got it in a conscious or
unconscious state, wasn't going to be painless. "You are going to be
intimidated, insulted, frightened, nauseated, enraged, and humiliated,"
Stewart told us. "You are going to feel every feeling there is to
feel." He added that we might vomit, cry, get the shakes. We might
also get bellyaches, headaches, and every other kind of ache before
the training was over. After he described the training he told us that
we now had an opportunity to leave if we wanted. We would get our full
tuition back by mail.
It sounded grim -- but it was also a challenge. I opted to stay. Others
weren't so sure. A dozen or so hands went up, waving frantically.
To share, a trainee raises his hand and waits for the trainer to
acknowledge him. He then stands up and waits for a member of the volunteer
logistics team to rush forth with a microphone. Then he shares whatever
is on his mind: a thought, an experience, an objection, anything that
he wants to say, however irrelevant or irreverent. The trainees are
instructed to applaud following each sharing. The applause does not
signify agreement; it only denotes an acknowledgment that the trainees
got
what the speaker shared.
"I don't like paying $250 to be called an asshole," one man complained.
Stewart flashed an enigmatic, generous smile, his first of the day.
"Thank you. I got that." The questioner, looking slightly dazed, sat down.
A woman asked why she couldn't sit next to her husband.
"We do what works for the training," came the blunt response.
A man suddenly got up and headed for the door as if going to the men's
room. Stewart asked him if he had forgotten his agreement. He shook his
head and returned, flushed and angry, to his seat. A few minutes later
he waved his hand for the microphone. "I want to share that any time I
want to get out of listening, I go to the bathroom," he told us. Stewart
beamed. "You got it about the bathroom."
Hour after hour people shared their points of view. For me it became
boring, inane, exhausting. My chair became a jail cell. Of all the genius
that had gone into
est
, I decided, the most ingenious was making
people sit and do nothing and become aware of how hard it is to sit and
do nothing. I was so accustomed to my physical comfort that to sit for
sixty hours in that uncompromising chair seemed, that first couple of
hours, something I could not or would not endure. It occurred to me that
one of the problems with psychoanalysis was that the required couch was
too damn comfortable. As I ruminated on all the objectionable aspects
of the seating arrangements I realized that I was on the brink of rage
over, of all things, my chair. From that I
got
that I had never
let anyone tell me where and when to sit. Or to do anything else, for
that matter. I saw that it was going to be almost impossible to avoid
myself as long as I remained in the training.
I looked up from my reveries to see
est
volunteers collecting
candy bars. Candy bars, for God's sake! It seemed that people had begun
to feel guilt about holding on to goodies they had hidden in their
handbags and pockets contrary to their agreement. As one confessed
and turned over her cache, others followed. The room was soon a sea
of raisins, peanuts, apples, chocolate bars, sandwiches, chewing gum,
and an assortment of other forbidden fruits being passed to the waiting
volunteers. The trainer didn't seem to find it funny, but the rest of
us were hysterical. Long after the first rush to cleanse ourselves was
over, periodically someone would call for a microphone to share that he
or she wanted to turn in a guilt-laden edible.
Stewart told us that by the following weekend two-thirds of us would have
broken at least one of our agreements. I thought the figure unfairly
high and was certain I would not be among the defaulters. I was wrong
on both counts. About half the room would stand up the next weekend to
acknowledge they had cheated and another large contingent would join
them when Stewart said that if we weren't sure if we'd cheated or not,
we had. I was in the second group. For a glass of red wine I drank after
agreeing not to.
The hours rolled by. Without a watch and with the hotel drapes pinned
closed, I had no sense of time. The training was just barely endurable
and mostly agonizing. I yearned for activity, interaction, anything to
escape from the endless passivity I had been thrust into from a life
that was a model of motion.