Werner Erhard and est

Werner Erhard was born John Paul Rosenberg in 1935

After completing high school, Erhard married and worked in sales

1960 he disappeared and moved west. He left his family, changed his name to Werner Erhard, and remarried

1960s Erhard sold Britannica encyclopedias door-to-door. He studied Dale Carnegie's positive thinking, hypnosis, Gestalt psychology, Zen Buddhism, Scientology, Mind Dynamics, Silva Mind Control, Swami Muktananda's yoga system, and Subud (a Javanese-based synthesis of yoga and meditation)

1971 Erhard founded est

1984 est is replaced by The Forum after participation in est declined dramatically

1991 The Forum became Landmark Education Corporation, headed by Erhard’s brother Harry Rosenberg

1991 Erhard sold the company to a consortium of employees, severed his formal ties with the corporation, and disappeared from public view.

Currently Landmark claims 42 offices in 11 nations and 300,000 participants during the 1990s
 

Nothingness is the context for everything. Creation can only occur out of nothingness

Beings begin as pure context and manifest themselves through content

Every being is coextensive with all existence and therefore has created everything else. Everything that exists arises from the self. There is no other reality. “This is it, and that’s that.”

All beings operate within two distinct types of reality

true reality, which is experiential (accepting, observing, participating, sourcing)
 
ordinary reality, which is illusory and involves non-experiential concepts (e.g., beliefs, values, attitudes, and rules)

While ordinary reality is compelling, its concepts are no more than agreements about what is true rather than experiential truth.

As soon as concepts (beliefs) become detached from experience, they lose their experiential truth value because truth can only be experienced. The truth believed is a lie.

Since the individual creates everything that is real, all concepts through which life is organized ultimately are the product of individual agreement. This means that the normative order on which society is based actually is a set of agreements to which the individual subscribed at some prior point. Every aspect of individuals’ lives was chosen at some time.

Since individuals have chosen the rules governing the social order, they should embrace those rules as their own choices. You should choose what you have got because you have got what you chose.

The conclusion is that the world and individual beings are perfect just the way they are because they have been chosen

The problem of humanity is that beings operate through concepts and develop an investment in them, treating them as true reality. Behavior is therefore shaped by beliefs that in turn condition behavior. Individuals then justify their beliefs and behavior, creating the illusion that they are free when in fact they are trapped in their own concepts

The mind, which is a being’s survival mechanism, ends up undermining the individuals' capacity for direct experience and hence for survival

To make life work what is necessary is to keep one’s agreements, and keeping agreements requires making them on the basis of experience rather than concepts

The standard by which acts should be measured is aliveness, which is defined in terms of such individual qualities as spontaneity, naturalness, centeredness, wholeness, awareness, and fulfullment.

Most people trade aliveness for survival

When individuals recognize that they have in fact chosen their own circumstances,  then it makes little sense to blame others and conflict vanishes. The method for achieving this recognition is fully experiencing the source of conflict

Individuals “get it” when they recognize that they are ensnared in their own beliefs and that they are free to create their own experience. Getting it means being able to discover that you are holding a position (a context) which costs you more in aliveness than it is worth and being able to choose to give up (or transform) that position

Getting it is therefore not learning new facts (additional content), it involves understanding those facts in a new way (a change of context). The result is that previously experienced conflicts simply disappear

The test is whether an individual is able to experience living so that the situations you have been trying to change or have been putting up with clear up just in the process of life itself

Once a sufficient number of individuals have transformed their lives, a societal transformation will occur
 

Seminar training spans sixty hours over two weekends  – pre-training, seminar training, mid-week meeting, post-training seminar

Each day is a marathon-style experience of sixteens-hour sessions with one meal break and two or three water and bathroom breaks

Sessions involve periods of lecture, questions, sharing, and processes

The pre-training seminar is devoted to eliciting from the trainee what specific goals they hope to achieve through the training and reaching agreements about trainee behavior through the seminar. There is a long list of prescribed (name tags, changing seats, punctuality) and proscribed behavior (eating, taking notes, leaving seat)

First Day  –  Trainees engage in three processes the first day designed to experience experiencing and to understand one's self in terms of space. The trainer informs them there are powerful barriers to direct experience.

Identifying space   –  the trainer methodically lists parts of the body and asks trainees to locate space within each

Creating safe space  –  trainees are asked to locate spaces with various parts of their bodies and then to locate a safe, idyllic interal space

Recreating and experiencing conditions  –  One of the fundamental assertions of est is that conditions persist if they are resisted. By contrast, re-creating and experiencing conditions causes them to disappear. Trainees identify a discomfort they are feeling; by fully experiencing its location, size, shape, color, etc., they experience it out and it disappears.

Experiencing out   –  trainees engage in the truth process in which they identify some longstanding physical or psychological hurt and experience it out.

Danger process  –  trainees are to get in touch with their acts and rackets. Groups of trainees in groups come up to the stage and stand and face with the trainer’s assistants. The difficulty that many trainees have in just being is attributed to their inability to relate except through their acts and rackets.

Fear process  – trainees are instructed to be terrified of those around them and then are confronted with a room full of fear and dread.

Fourth Day  –  The trainer lectures on the “anatomy of the mind.” He teaches that the mind is a survival mechanism that records all past experiences. Since the number of traumatic experiences increases through life, an ever larger proportion of the mind's records come to be of the traumatic time. This means that over time the mind
increasingly works on a mechanical stimulus-response basis. He concludes that individuals are just machines, with totally mechanical, stimulus-response lives. There is neither meaning nor control. This leads to est's definition of enlightenment, knowing that you are a machine.

The trainer concludes that enlightenment means doing nothing, simply accepting  what is, because what is is, whether we accept it or not. The assertion that the being is nothing but space creates an initial sense of emptiness for trainees, but the trainer reminds trainees that nothingness is the transition point between non-experience and experience. Creating one's own life requires beginning from nothingness.

All current personal problems are attributable to a connection to memory records. When the being concludes that it is the mind and joins with the mind, ego is created. The being's conflation of itself with the mind/ego is problematic because the mind relies on accumulated records of experience (beliefs, thoughts, decisions, points of view) in which it has a vested interest. And so the mind is continually engaged in trying to prove that it is right by seeking agreement from others.
 

est defines itself as an "education corporation"

There is only a tiny paid staff. Most staff are volunteers

Other organizations founded or closely associated with est include

Transformational Technologies, Inc. (TTI), a licensing company that licenses other firms to train managers

Breakthrough Foundation –  assists at-risk youth

Holiday Projects   –  assists the elderly

Werner Erhard Foundation  –  supports research on crisis management

Eduation Network  – works to reduce drop-out rates among high school students

Prison Possibilities  –   offers est training to incarcerated individuals

Hunger Project  – combats world hunger