Two hundred and fifty of us stretched out on the floor to begin the
process. The trainer gave us specific instructions. "Locate a space in
your right foot," he began, and then he went through the entire body,
bringing us to a state of deep relaxation, allowing us to become more
aware of ourselves. He then read us a very beautiful poem, written by
Werner, based on the writings of the psychologist Abraham Maslow, in
which we heard that we are perfect and good, that we can be positive
and full of love, and that we can experience good things in our lives.
Stewart's prediction, "You are going to feel every feeling there is to
feel," was about to happen.
His directions continued, and the scene grew noisy; an incredible
cacophony of sound erupted as each one of the two hundred and fifty men
and women, lying flat on their backs on the floor of the giant ballroom,
went into their "item." Two hundred and fifty people in every form of
emotion, giving free vent to vomiting, shaking, sobbing, hysterical
laughing, raging -- re-creating experiences in a safe space. No one
paid the slightest attention to anyone else. Each person there was
concentrating wholly on his own mind/body experience.
In all my years in analysis and through all the other disciplines in which
I had received training or treatment, I had never before gotten in touch
with the feelings of the incident that came to me in that process.
I was a little girl of nine. I could see myself taunting my father.
Furious, he chased me to the bathroom. I ran into it and slammed
the door in his face. In the process, I could see him, wild and
out of control, trying to push the door in. "You can't catch me,"
I screamed. At that moment, I felt the tingling in my fingers and the
throbbing of my heart that I had experienced when pushing the door shut
so many years before. For the first time, I felt "physically" how I had
actually separated myself from men by putting a locked door between us,
and at that moment I was overcome with feelings of my own goodness and
beauty. It was like nothing I had ever experienced before.
The feeling released in that one incident has had continuing and profound
effects on me. I can still feel myself responding in anger when my buttons
are pushed. But the dimension and the force of the anger have changed.
For the first time I feel that I can actually be at its cause, and not
at its effect.
At the end of the process we were asked to return to a beach of our own
creation. It was to become a place I loved to go to in the processes. Some
people experienced it as a place of tranquility and beauty. Others,
like a good friend of mine, turned it into a setting for further drama.
On one occasion she vividly saw a figure she identified as death walking
toward her, its arms outstretched in supplication. She backed away,
frightened but not repulsed. Then she saw a beautiful and loving man
coming toward her from the horizon. She was torn. Finally she threw a
kiss to "death" and gently told it that she chose to opt for life. She
and the man were united.
When we talked about this incredible fantasy my friend told me that she
felt deeply liberated by it. She had the sense that it marked an end
and a new beginning in her life.
Sunday night included the much-discussed Danger Process. The room was
rearranged into eight parallel rows from which, one row at a time,
we filed to the stage to confront -- and be confronted by -- the audience.
As we stood there the trainer exhorted us to "be yourself with people
. . . just be with people . . . get what it's like to be with people for
the first time in your lives . . . be yourself . . . be who you really
are . . . be yourself with people."
I awaited my turn coolly, in contrast to the anguish and agony it evoked
in those who preceded me. At other times and in other places (especially
at Arica), I had had long, unflinching eye-to-eye contact with people.
When my row moved up front and I looked out on the mass of faces looking
right back at me, my back ached but I felt more at ease than I would have
dreamed possible. Thus, I was really surprised when a woman next to me
fainted, and a man a few steps away began to cry uncontrollably. Later a
number of people shared how liberating the anguish they had experienced
was. On my way home that night I felt amazingly refreshed.
BETWEEN THE WEEKENDS
The mid-training the following Wednesday evening saw us all reunited like
long-lost relatives. Although I had left the training high the previous
Sunday, the few days since then had been singularly unremarkable. Not so
for most of the others. One by one they got up to share the miracles
they had experienced since the weekend.
One man had settled a long-standing hassle with the telephone company.
Another had seen his parents for the first time in twelve years. A woman
had returned to her husband. Another had had a long-overdue confrontation
with her boss. People were needing less sleep, less food, and getting
along without painkillers.
There were also more broken agreements. A confessed "pot-head" had
gotten stoned and experienced total disorientation. A woman had gone on
an eating binge which, although not specifically forbidden in the ground
rules, was her way of "going unconscious."
An elderly artist complained bitterly that he hadn't been able to sleep,
eat, or move his bowels since the training began. "It's unendurable," he
said. Later I asked him if he would return to the training the following
weekend. "Are you kidding?" he asked. "Leaving now would be like getting
off the operating table during mid-surgery."
Before we left, we had a process. I went on an incredible cosmic journey
that began over Manhattan and ended at the end of the universe. But I went
home depressed. It wasn't enough of a miracle for me.
GETTING IT
The second weekend began, again, with sharing. I was in a foul mood born
of disappointment.
Early in the day the trainer reminded us that what we get from the
training is nothing. "The problem," he told us, "is that you think
nothing is something." Then how come, a woman wanted to know, it takes
sixty hours? "Because," he told her, "you have to move through all the
somethings you're stuck with to get to nothing."
"To get nothing," he explained, "you have to
get
what you've got
and that your life is the way it is." I was confused and getting tired of
what I saw as nothing. I desperately wanted something, preferably a break.
The day stretched out interminably. We were coming into the homestretch.
The final weekend, we were told, was 85 percent of the training. The data
was coming fast and furious now. We had moved from belief systems to very
complex material relating to knowledge and reality. On Sunday, we would do
"The Anatomy of the Mind," which was what everything was leading up to. In
that process we would grasp -- and ultimately experience -- the nature
of mind. (This experience is the foundation for the entire
est
epistemology.) It was heavy stuff. It would jolt a lot of our cherished
beliefs about man, the nature of man, the mind, and the universe.
Adam Smith, in
Powers of Mind
,* compares the
est
training
to Samuel Beckett's
Waiting for Godot
, which I had seen many years
before. In the play two old tramps wait by a tree on a road for Godot,
who doesn't come. One of them says, "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody
goes, it's awful." Recently when I read Smith's discussion of the play
in relation to his experience of
est
, I found myself nodding in
agreement. I, too, had spent the training waiting for nothing to happen
and nobody to come. I was suddenly able to recall the play vividly. And
get
it.
* New York: Random House, 1975.
Later that same day I had an extraordinary clear flash of my mother.
I saw her in a housedress in the kitchen of my childhood home admonishing
me in Latin to do something. I listened carefully and heard her say
familiar words, "
Carpe diem
, Adelaide. Seize the day; do it now!"
My mother was a frustrated intellectual who often told me that it was
important to
do
rather than just
be
. I had bought it. Now,
many, many years later, I was able to respond to her words in my own
way. I was "seizing the day." I was discovering, in the
est
training, who I really was. I was beginning to experience aliveness!
Sunday was when we
got
it. And graduated.
"I'll tell you everything there is to know about life," the trainer said
on that final day. "What is, is, and what ain't, ain't.
"Enlightenment," he continued, "is knowing you are a machine.
You are
a machine!
" He paused to let that sink in. "You thought" -- he glared
at us -- "that the heavens would part and there would be visitations of
angels. That ain't so. You're machines, machines, machines. Whether you
accept this or not, it is so."
I chuckled to myself. What a put-on, I thought, and how clever. I waited
to hear what
getting it
was really about. Along with at least half
of the trainees. Hands began to wave frantically.
"I don't get it," the first protester announced.
"Good," came the reply. "There's nothing to get, so you got it."
From someone else, angrily, "Then why are we here?"
"No special reason," Stewart answered calmly, unconcerned with the
growing uproar. People began to laugh, some with recognition, some
with anxiety. Some muttered an assortment of obscenities under their
breath. The normally quiet room suddenly became alive with chatter. People
felt angry, confused, betrayed, disappointed, incredulous.
"I get it," one man volunteered. "Getting it is whatever you get."
"If that's what you got," came the response.
Some of the trainees got realizations about concrete things such as that
they wanted a divorce, or to make a relationship work better. Or that
they had blamed others for the way they were. Or that they had created
their own backaches, migraines, asthma, ulcers, and other ailments.
(The remission of physical ailments is not surprising if one accepts,
as many physicians do these days, that mind and body are one and that
illness doesn't just happen to us. It was remarkable to watch person
after person get up and admit that they and they alone were responsible
for their physical ailments. Once these people faced the experiences of
their lives honestly, their ailments vanished.)
The trainer then asked those of us who were absolutely certain that we
didn't get it to stand up. I wasn't sure whether I had or hadn't so I
stood up. He then went from one to another of us to find out what we
were experiencing.
"Nothing," I told him. "And cheated." "Fine," he responded, "you got it."
"How come," I persisted, "I feel rotten when everyone else seems to feel
good?" To which he answered, "That's the way you feel. Rotten." He smiled
at me. "Take what you get!"
Eventually I did get it. It was just the way he said it would be. I was
"enlightened."
My very last experience -- at 3:00 a.m. and as part of the graduation
ritual -- was to do an
est
"personality profile." Each of us was
told certain data about a person known by one of the attending graduates
but absent from the training room. We then went into our "space" and from
that place described aspects of that person's personality. I was accurate
except on one minor detail. Others without any previous experience had
the same kind of incredible accuracy.
The way
est
describes what happens in this process is that
people have abilities that were previously considered impossible. "The
ability to do personality profiles isn't something that's learned,"
est
explains. "It's something that is uncovered as the result
of the training. What is uncovered is the essence of your ability
to communicate. When most of us look at people, we really don't see
what's there -- we see our idea of what's there . . . our picture of
what's there. . . . The personality profile is one centered individual
experiencing life through the eyes of another and getting what's really
so for him.
It's called communication.
"
We finally graduated early Monday morning to the applause of over a
hundred prior graduates and with a handshake and good wishes from the
trainer. His parting words were: "If you want your life to work, make
it work. If you fuck it up, you fuck it up." I got that, too.
AFTERWARD
I hauled my exhausted body and soul back to my hotel room at 4:30 a.m.
The tattered brocade drapes and the peeling paint of the once-elegant hotel
seemed to mock me, but I didn't care. I turned the light on in the bathroom
and a huge black cockroach scurried across the floor. Incredibly, I knew
that I had created the experience of the cockroach being there; I had bet
of couple of friends there were roaches in that hotel, and now it was fact!
What was even more incredible was that I felt benign toward it; it existed,
and so did I.
The following morning my train back to Philadelphia got stuck for an
hour in the tunnel under the Hudson River. When the conductor announced
the delay, I observed passenger reactions. Instead of dealing with
the reality that the train was stopped, most of them went into panic
behavior. One overweight man became hysterical about being delayed for an
appointment. Another took off for the bar. A third went to sleep. They
seemed to me to be responses out of each of their belief systems. It
struck me as a microcosm of how most of us respond to life; like machines,
for every button pushed, we have a predictable reaction.
THE POST-TRAINING
It wasn't until I went to the post-training several days later that I
began to see how deeply
est
had affected -- and would continue
to affect -- my life.
It was like a rehash of a weekend party. I've attended a few other
post-trainings in the service of this book and they're remarkably alike
wherever they're held. There's a feeling of being among dear friends
and of belongingness. It's not unlike a reunion of an encounter group or
college class -- we had all experienced similar input. The significant
difference, however, is the absence of judgments. One person's experience
is as valid as another's. This willingness to acknowledge and accept
where another person is at is probably why many