WERNER ERHARD WHAT IS EST

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The est Standard Training

Werner Erhard and Victor Gioscia, San Francisco, Calif.

From the Journal of Individual Psychology, Volume 31, Number 1, May, 1975

Abstract. The format of the est standard training is described. Relationships which participants
develop in the training are: to the trainer, to the group, and to self. Three aspects of self are
presented: self as concept, self as experience and self as self. Relation of these three aspects of
self to the epistemology of est are discussed, as are the experiences of aliveness and
responsibility.

Introduction

Since fundamentally, est is a context in which to hold one's experience, I want to begin this essay
by thanking a number of people for providing me with a context in which to write it. To begin, I
want to thank those who attended the panel discussion at the APA meetings in May 1976, and, in
addition, I want to thank the reader for this opportunity to discuss the est Standard Training.

In the paragraphs that follow, I will present some information which may be useful as a context
in which to examine est as an example of an 'awareness training' in relation to contemporary
psychiatry. I want to say at the outset that I am not qualified to write about large scale awareness
trainings in general, and I will not presume to tell you anything about psychiatry. What I want to
do is share with you some of the format, intended results, and 'theory' of est as an example of a
large-scale awareness training.

My intention is to provide a context in which the reader can have something of an experience of
est and to create an opportunity for the reader, not simply to have some new concepts but to have
an experience of what est is, insofar as that is possible in an essay.

So, I want the reader to know that my ultimate purpose is not to tell you some facts you did not
know. I do ask you to entertain the possibility that there is something you do know, which you
have not been aware that you know. The est training is an opportunity to become aware that you
know things you did not know you knew, so it is not a 'training' in the usual `rule-learning' sense
of the word, nor is it an ingraining, by repetition or any other means, of behaviors, attitudes or
beliefs.

Fundamentally, then the est training is an occasion in which participants have an experience,
uniquely their own, in a situation which enables and encourages them to do that fully and
responsibly. I am suggesting that the best way to learn about est is to look into yourself, because
whatever est is about is in your self. There are some who think that I have discovered something
that other people ought to know. That is not so. What I have discovered is that people know
things that they do not know that they know, the knowing of which can nurture them and satisfy
them and allow them to experience an expanded sense of aliveness in their lives. The training is
an occasion for them to have that experience - to get in touch with what they actually already
know but are not really aware of.

Format

The est Standard Training is designed to be approximately 60 h long. It is usually done on two
successive weekends - two Saturdays and two Sundays -beginning at 9 a.m. and going until
around midnight. Sometimes a day's session takes longer, sometimes a little less, since the
sessions go until the results for that day are produced.

There are breaks about every 4 h for people to go to the bathroom, have a cigarette, talk, or do
whatever they like. In addition, there is one break for a meal during the day. People usually eat
breakfast before and dinner after if they are less tired than hungry. We have altered these times
on occasion to adapt, for instance, to institutional schedules. The same results have been
produced doing the training over ten weekday evening sessions of 6 h each with a break in the
middle of each session, and over three consecutive weekend sessions of 10 h each with three
breaks including a meal break. The point is there is nothing in the duration of the training that is
intrinsic to the training.

Included in the tuition (now $ 300.00), in addition to the two weekends, are three optional
seminars, called the pre-training, the mid-training, and the post-training seminars. These are
approximately 3 h long, and are conducted in the evenings a few days before, between and a few
days after the weekend training sessions.

The training is held for about 250 people at a time, who are seated on chairs, arranged theater
style, in a hotel ballroom. The trainer stands on a low platform in the front of the room so that the
trainer can see and be seen by everyone. There are support personnel who sit in the back of the
room, who manage the logistics of the training. For instance, they inform those participants on
medication (who sit in the back row), when it is time to take it. There are microphones, to
facilitate people who want to say something or ask a question, and everyone wears a nametag so
that the trainer can address people by name.

Sometimes people wonder about what might be called the harshness of the training - why the
rules are so unbending. It became very clear to me about 5 years ago that the rules in life do not
bend. In other words, if I fall down, gravity does not say 'Well, we're going to relax the rules a
bit since you hurt yourself . I think that it is important for people who are being given an
opportunity to discover themselves, to discover for themselves that there are stable
environments, certain facts of living, they cannot 'con' or persuade into changing for them, no
matter how pitiable they are, and no matter how intelligent and dominant they are. So the people
who handle the supervision of the training -the room, the number of chairs, etc. - have been
trained to be very consistent -to go by the book. The purpose of going by the book is not that we
think you ought to go by the book all the time - that kind of rigidity in a person is obviously a
mistake. It is to accentuate that the physical universe always goes by the book and that, like
gravity, life does not relax the rules just because you want it to or even because you need it to.
Gravity does not care, you see. It simply is. At the same time, the training is conducted with love
and compassion (not sympathy and agreement) and anyone who completes the training is clear in
their experience of this love and compassion. They know that their true power and dignity has
been recognized from the very beginning of the training.

There are three relationships which develop during the course of the training which provide a
framework for the material of the training.

One is a relationship with the trainer, who begins the training with what resembles a lecture,
although trainees soon realize that it is not actually a lecture. To be sure, the trainer stands in
front of the room talking, but he says things like 'If you experience something completely, it
disappears', and since he says that early on in the training, almost everybody thinks that it is not
true. Some people reinterpret it to mean something else like that, but not quite that, which could
be true for them. In other words, people begin to develop a relationship to the trainer, who
presents certain data about experiencing life, which trainees can examine to see if what he is
saying is true for them in their experience. There may be a give and take between the participants
and the trainer for a while until everyone is very clear what the trainer said. That does not mean
anyone has accepted it. In fact, people are effectively cautioned against merely believing
anything presented in the training. It just means everone knows that is what the trainer said, and
everyone begins to develop his or her own unique relationship with the material the trainer
presents, by seeing the unique relevance of what the trainer has to say to his or her own beliefs
about and/or experience of living.

Another relationship which develops in the training is the trainee's relation to the group and to
the individual members of the group. This develops out of an aspect of the training we call
sharing, by which we simply mean telling others what is going on in the realm of your own
experience. Initially, people raise their hands, one of the support people brings them a
microphone, and they talk about something - be it an annoyance, or an insight, or their theory of
the training, etc. Then, as the training goes on, people begin to share more fully what they are
actually experiencing, until, toward the end of the training, people become able to share in a way
we call 'getting off it' - relating things they have held on to perhaps for their entire lives - things
they have been stuck with yet were unable to reveal they were holding onto, and now find they
can let go of. About a quarter of the people in a given training share meaningful things of this
sort. The rest either do not share or say conceptual kinds of things.

There is no confrontation from the group to a trainee or from the trainer to a trainee except in
rare instances by the trainer. We ask trainees not to evaluate, judge or analyze each other's
sharing, not to engage in a dialogue with each other, and on that basis to say whatever they have
to say to the trainer, so that the training can occur within each indidivual's own experience, rather
than in others' concepts or in the dynamics of the group. Those who choose to share, do so, and
those who choose not to, find it is not required to realize the results of the training.

When people share, other trainees often find they can see their own story more vividly in
someone else's experience than they can in their own. So a large part of the value people get in
the training is the view they see of themselves in others' sharing.

The third relationship people experience in the training is an enhanced relationship to

themselves, which in part, occurs during what we call processes. These are techniques in which
people switch their attention from seeing their concepts about themselves, others and life, to
observing directly their experience of themselves, others and life. This is done in an environment
- or 'space' - that is safe enough for them to do that. That is, in a safe space, there is no
expectation that you prove anything, or demonstrate anything, or keep up any appearances. In a
safe space, whatever is so is not used to justify or explain or be consistent with a point of view.
Processes are simply an occasion to look directly into one's experience and observe what's going
on there, in safety.

For example, there is a process in which people are asked to select a problem from among those
they have in life and to see specifically which experiences are associated with that problem -
which body sensations in which specific locations in the body, which emotions or feelings,
which attitudes, states of mind, mental states or points of view, which postures, ways of holding
themselves, gestures, ways of moving, habitual actions and countenances, which thoughts,
evaluations, judgements, things they have been told or read, conclusions, reasons, explanations
and decisions, and which scenes from the past are associated with that problem. People discover
remarkable things about their problems - for instance that there are body sensations felt when
and only when that problem intrudes into their lives - a fact they had not noticed before.

Some processes last for 20 min, others for 90 min. People are usually seated during them, and
afterwards they are invited to communicate whatever insights or awareness they had. Ina very
real sense, then, the trainees literally create the training for themselves.
People think there is an est training, when in fact, there is not. There are actually as many
trainings going on in each training as there are individuals in the training, because people
actually 'train' themselves, by handling on an individual basis those aspects of living that are
common to all of our lives. Each part of the training becomes real for participants by virtue of
experiencing themselves, not concepts derived from someone else's experience.

Thus, the training is not like a classroom in which the aim is to agree or disagree with a concept
or a theory. In the training, we present spaces, or contexts, or opportunities, in a way that allows
people to discover what their actual experience is. Participants in the training report and give
evidence of obtaining value from getting beneath their concepts, their points of view, their
unexamined assumptions, explanations, and justifications, to the actual experience of themselves,
others and life.

To know oneself, as Socrates suggested, does not seem to provide the experience of satisfaction -
of being whole and complete if one knows oneself in the same way as one knows about things.
Thus one can know about love and not know love, just as one can know all the concepts of
bicycle riding without having the experience or the ability to actually ride a bicycle. The training
is about the experience of love, the ability to love and the ability to experience being loved, not
the concept or story of it - and it is about the experience of happiness, and the ability to be happy
and share happiness, not the concept, story or symbols of it. In short, the training is about who
we are, not what we do, or what we have, or what we do not do or do not have. It is about the self
as the self, not merely the story or symbols of self. People often ask if the training is something
one needs. The training is not something one needs. Now this statement is usually met, if not by
surprise, then with outright disbelief. For, if the training is not something one needs, why should
one do it.
The fact is, people usually come to introductory seminars when they see that their friends or
family or associates who went to the training experienced a transformation or enlightenment
which they themselves would like to experience. It is a natural part of the experience of
transformation to share the opportunity to have the experience of transformation with others.

This becomes amusing after the people who had the hardest time understanding why their friends
or loved ones were so excited and enthusiastic and eager for them to know about the training,
finally do take the training, they then meet the same bewilderment in their friends and loved ones
when they try to share it, because now their friends insist they do not need it either.

The fact is, no one needs the training. It is not medicine. If you are ill, you need medical
attention. If you are mentally ill, you need therapy. The training is not medicine or therapy. If
you are hungry, you need food. You need air. Actually you need someone to love and someone
to love you. You need to feel some self-respect and the esteem of others. Without these, we do
not function very well as human beings.
The training is none of these. It does not solve problems. It is true that some problems dissolve in
the training, but not because it is the purpose of the training for people to work on their problems
in the training. The training is not about people's problems per se. What the training is about is
related to those rare moments in life, which while rare, seem to come into everyone's life at some
time or another. They are moments in which one is absolutely complete, whole, fulfilled - that is
to say, satisfied. (I limit the word gratification to mean the filling of a need or desire, or the
achievement of a goal. I use the word satisfaction to mean the experience of being complete.)

Each of us has experienced moments in our lives when we are fully alive -when we know -
without thinking - that life is exactly as it is in this moment. In such moments, we have no wish
for it to be different, or better, or more. We have no disappointment, no comparison with ideals,
no sense that it is not what we worked for. We feel no protective or defensive urge - and have no
desire to hold on - to store up - or to save. Such moments are perfect in themselves. We
experience them as being complete.

We do not need to experience completion. People function successfully without such moments.
Like the training, such moments are not something we `should' have. Like the training, such
moments do not make us any better. We are not smarter or sexier or more successful or richer or
any more clever. These moments, these experiences of being complete, are sufficient unto
themselves. Like the training, such moments are not even 'good' for you - like vitamins or
exercise or things of that sort.

In the training, one finds there is something beyond that - the < opportunity to discover that
space within yourself where such moments originate, actually where you and life originate. In
the training, one experiences a transformation -a shift from being a character in the story of life
to being the space in which the story occurs - the playwright creating the play, as it were,
consciously, freely, and completely.

Because the experience of being complete is a state change from the rest of life, the questions
and instruments we usually apply to measure life do not apply. We shall need to develop a whole
new set of questions - a new paradigm to approach the experience of being complete.

In the training, the experience of being at the effect of life - of having been put here, and having
to suffer the circumstances of life, of being the bearer or victim of life, or at best, of succeeding
or winning out over the burdens of life -shifts to an experience of originating life the way it is -
creating your experience as you live it - in a space uniquely your own.

In that space, the problems of life take on an entirely different significance. They literally pale,
that is, become lighter - or enlightened. One sees, quite sharply, that who one is simply
transcends and contextualizes the content with which one has been concerned. The living of life
begins to be what counts, the zest or vivacity with which one lives, what matters.

It has been said that this is a polyanna view - that I think there's no pain and suffering in life.
That is not my view at all. There is no doubt whatsoever in my experience and observation that
people do suffer, that there is pain in life. If we were to sit quietly in an empty room for a few
minutes looking at what we do and how we live, and at how much time we spend doing things
that we pretend are important to us, most of us would find that we spend more time pretending
not to suffer than in creating the experience of our lives.

In my observation of life, I find that during most of the time we are interacting with others, we
are pretending, and we get so proficient at pretending that we eventually no longer even notice
that we are pretending. We become 'unconscious' of pretending. We forget that the actual
experience of loving someone - in contrast to the pretense or concept of loving someone, or the
'act' or drama of loving someone - leaves one absolutely high, vivacious, and alive.

Yet, each of us behaves as if we were really three people. First, there is the one we pretend to be.
No one escapes this. Every one of us has an act - a front - a facade - a mask we wear in the world
that tells the world who we are pretending to be. We think we need this to get along in life and be
successful.

Underneath that mask is the person we are afraid we are - the person who thinks those small,
nasty, brutish thoughts we try to hide, because we think we are the only one who thinks them,
until we are willing to accept that we do actually think them, and only then notice everyone else
does too. Until we confront our own smallness, we do not experience our real size. The truth is,
we can only be as high as we can confront and take responsibility for being low.

I am suggesting that it is useful from time to time to get in touch with why it is we have to be
intelligent or successful or wonderful or kind. I am suggesting that when we look underneath the
facade we present, we will find a cluster of thoughts, emotions, attitudes, etc. which are the exact
opposite to what we have presented. All of us who are given credit for being intelligent have
feelings, thoughts, etc. of stupidity and ignorance. All of us who are given credit for being
wonderful have doubts. In my observation (which includes a fairly intimate interaction with over
90,000 people) we all have doubts about the authenticity of the way we present ourselves in the
world.

Some people find this idea annoying. If you have spent your whole life proving you are not a
fool, it is annoying to be called a fool. (A fool is one caught in his own pretense.) We are all very
careful not to make fools of ourselves or not be fooled. Many see it as the ultimate disgrace.
Only a fool pretending not to be a fool would be afraid of making a fool of himself. A fool
presenting himself as a fool would have no problem with it, just as one who knows he is not a
fool would have no problem making a fool of himself. Similarly, a man secure in his masculinity
has no problem expressing feminine qualities. Each time we try to prove we are not fools we
reinforce the belief that we must prove that we are not.

Underneath these two 'selves' - the 'front' and the 'hidden' - is the one we really are - under the
one we work at being, the one we try to be, the one we are pretending to be, and underneath the
one we do not want to be, the one we are avoiding being, and the one we fear we are. The extent
to which we can allow ourselves to confront - to experience and be responsible for - the pretense
and trying, the avoidance and fear, is the extent to which we can be who we really are.

The experience of being yourself is innately satisfying. If who you really are does not give you
the experience of health, happiness, love and full self-expression - or 'aliveness' - then that is not
who you really are. When you experience yourself as yourself, that experience is innately
satisfying. The experience of the self as the self is the experience of < satisfaction. Nothing
more, nothing less.

Satisfaction is not 'out there'. It cannot be brought in. You will never get satisfied. It cannot be
done. When you want more and different or better, that is gratification, and while that is
gratifying, we always want even more or even better. Satisfaction is completion, being complete
- what has been called 'the peace that passeth all understanding'. It is a condition of well-being - a
sense of wholeness and of being complete right now - a context of certainty that right now is
completely all right as right now and that the next moment will similarly be, fully itself. Not a
judgment of good or bad, right or wrong, just what is.

I do not refer to smugness or to naivete, or to a preoccupation with self achieved by shutting out
the world. I do not mean narcissism. I refer to the quality of participation which generates
enthusiasm in its performance and in its beholders. I refer to the kind of invigorating vitality that
makes a difference in the world. Most of those who explain what we ought to do in the world do
not make a difference in the world.

To summarize what happens in the est training, then, I would say the following. It is a
transformation - a contextual shift from a state in which the content in your life is organized
around the attempt to get satisfied or to survive - to attain satisfaction - or to protect or hold on to
what you have got - to an experience of being satisfied, right now, and organizing the content of
your life as an expression, manifestation and sharing of the experience of being satisfied, of
being whole and complete, now. One is aware of that part of oneself which experiences
satisfaction - the self itself, whole, complete, and entire.

The natural state of the self is satisfaction.

You do not have to get there. You cannot get there. You have only to 'realize' your self, and, as
you do, you are satisfied. Then it is natural and spontaneous to express that in life and share that
opportunity with others.

This explains, I think, the fact that people from all walks of life take the training, so that, with the
exception that the group of graduates includes a higher percentage than the average population of
better educated people and therefore the group also includes a higher percentage than usual of
professionals, they are representative of the community at large. I say 'explains' with tongue in
cheek of course, for by now you will have perceived that the only quality one must have to 'get'
the est training is self.

So everyone 'gets' it, that is, has an experience of self as self. A few 'desist' because they have
patterns of resistance that they are now completing (rather than dramatizing or reinforcing) as a
part of expressing their being complete. Some do not 'like' it, others delay their acceptance, both
also patterns now to be completed. Even these, in my experience, have it, and are covering it
over, for a while, with considerations, explanations, or other contents which they are completing.

This is not a matter of concern to us, since the principal intended result of the est training is a
shift in the person's relationship to their system of knowing contents, or technically a shift in
their epistemology. Thus, the contents of people's lives are not worked on per se during the
training, since it is not the purpose of the training to alter the circumstances of lives or to alter
peoples' attitudes or point(s) of view about the circumstances of their lives. It is the purpose of
the training to allow people to see that the circumstances of their lives and that their attitudes
about the circumstances of their lives exist in a context or a system of knowing, and that it is
possible to have exactly the same circumstances and attitudes about these circumstances held in a
different context, and that, as a matter of fact, it is possible for people to choose their own
context for the contents of their lives. People come out of the training 'knowing' that in a new
way. Now I mean something larger than 'knowing' or understanding. I mean that people
experience being empowered or enabled in that respect. They no longer are their point of view.
They have one, and know that the one they have is the the one they chose, until now, and that
they can, and probably will, choose to create other points of view. They experience, that is, that
they are the one who defines the point of view, and not the reverse. They experience the intended
result of the training, which is a shift in what orients people's being from the attempt to gain
satisfaction - a deficiency orientation - to the expression of satisfaction already being
experienced - a sufficiency orientation.
This is so even for the experience of psychosis. In our research , we have asked independent
investigators to look very carefully at the issue of harm. And while I am not fully qualified to
discuss the intricacies of research , I can report that none of the research has shown any evidence
that est produces harm. Now, although it has not proven that est does not harm, it is noteworthy
that investigators asked to look carefully at this question have not found evidence of harm. Every
indication we have suggests that there is a lower incidence of psychotic episodes either during
the training or among the graduates after the training than in a comparable group.

Interestingly, those graduates of the training who have experienced psychotic episodes after the
training, report that they experienced the episode in a different way after the training than when
they had such episodes before the training. For example, in Honolulu, at the general hospital
there, two of the people who had psychotic episodes were graduates, as were some of the
hospital staff. The graduates who had psychotic episodes said that their experience of psychosis
after the training differed from their experience of it before the training in that they had somehow
gained the ability to complete their experience rather than manage it or control it, or suppress it.
We could say that they seemed to move to mastery of the psychotic material rather than be the
effect of it. So it would appear that the epistemological shift at the core of the est training is one
which can be used to recontextualize even psychotic episodes, although they are so rare in our
experience that this tentative generalization must be regarded as based on a very small sample.
We are currently planning systematic controlled research on this and other issues.

The Epistemology of est

Properly speaking, est is not an epistemology, since epistemologies are ordinarily defined as
ways of understanding the contents of experience, and est is not about understanding the contents
of experience; it is about the source or generation of experience. We enter here into a region of
discourse laden with initially baffling paradoxes, since we are dealing now with understanding
understanding, as it were, a task perhaps not unfamiliar to psychiatry.

What makes est not simply another discipline or epistemology, as far as I can tell, is what makes
relativity and quantum mechanics different from the disciplines which preceded them and that is
that the disciplines which preceded relativity and quantum mechanics derived from
epistemologies based on the sensorium. What is very clear to me is that est is not based on the
sensorium, so I employ relativity and quantum mechanics because I need examples of disciplines
which do not derive from sense experience. There are facts in relativity which do not 'make
sense' yet there is a logic in relativity which is as hard and certain as the epistemology of
classical physics, without being based on sense data, although - in an expanded context - in
accord with it, i.e., allowing and even giving insight into it.

And, just as it is actually impossible to hold the data of relativistic physics in a classical context,
so it is simply impossible to hold the data of est in the context of classical epistemology. In other
words, I am using words derived from a prior epistemology to describe a later epistemology that
does not fit within the prior epistemology. This is why a good deal of what I have to say often
sounds uncomfortably paradoxical, and in some views, 'foolish'.

I am saying that what is different about the epistemology of est is that it moves beyond the
sensorium to a reality which, while allowing sense experience, is not confined within it. It is
neither rational, in the usual conceptual meaning of that term, nor irrational, in the usual
emotional or affective meaning of that term. It is a supra-rational epistemology, beyond both of
these classical alternatives. Just as we cannot reduce a relativistic space into Cartesian
coordinates of x and y, so I hold, we may not reduce the space from which epistemologies
derive, the context of epistemologies - what I call self - into classical conceptions of self, the self
as a thing or as a point or at best as a process.

I do not mean to be arrogant in citing Einstein as a case in point of paradoxes of this sort. I do so
because he represents the most familiar example of someone who somehow managed to convey
relativity to a world in which there was no basis for understanding it. He often referred to the fact
that it is theory which tells us what to look for, and initially put forward his theory without
benefit of experimental verification. Then, when we looked, we found that light rays did bend on
their way around the sun. Somehow, he said what could not be said. Similarly, in the est training,
we say things you cannot say and people get things you cannot tell them.

Now, this is not really as paradoxical as it sounds, because the truth is, although you cannot fit an
expanded context into a contracted one, you can fit a contracted context into an expanded one. It
is simply the case that most of us are very reluctant to come up with an expanded context for our
experience, because we think that it invalidates our previous limited context, and thus presents a
threat to what we think our survival is based on. Now, there is a paradox worth reckoning with,
since, in my view, it is precisely the expansion of limiting contexts which not only vouchsafes
survival but generates those rare experiences I have referred to as moments of spontaneous
transcendence, or transformation. I mean experiences of self - not self as concept, or self as peak
experience (the experience of self by self) - but the direct and unmediated experience of self as
self, not limited by previous context. Or, indeed, by any context.

There you have it. For most humans, self is positional - a location in time and space - a point of
view which accumulates all previous experiences and points of view. You are there and I am
here. During the training there is a shift in the way one defines oneself - not merely in the way
you think about your definition of self - nor merely in the way you believe your self to be - but in
the actual experience of who you are as the one who defines who you are, not the definition. As
self, you are no longer a content - another thing in the context of things - but the context in which
contexts of things occur. You become a space in which one of the things, one of the contents is
your point of view about who you are. You are no longer that point of view. You have it, as one
of the experiences you have. You experience you as the one who is experiencing you. I know
this is an unusual way to use the words self and experience, and since I have no intention to
mystify, let us move towards a schematic that may be useful in illustrating what I mean.

There is the experience of self as self, the experience of self by self, and the experience of self as
symbol or thing.

If I ask you to describe what you are experiencing right now, almost everyone who decides to go
along at all, without considering whether it is possible, starts a process in which they try to
articulate what they are experiencing. That we experience is axiomatically assumed by almost all
of us all of the time. It is as though it were a given. (Back in the 'old days' people may have said
something like, 'What I'm experiencing is that I don't like it in this room. It's terrible. The whole
thing is awful. I just got up on the wrong side of the bed today and nothing is going to work out.'
Today we know better than that. Today we are hip. We know to describe what we are
experiencing in experiential terms, rather than in conceptual terms.) We might begin with a
description of the perception of our senses; go on to describing our body sensation; emotions and
feelings; attitudes; states of mind, 'mental states'; our fundamental approach to circumstances,
and our < way of looking at things, i.e., our point of view; we might describe our motion or
movement, kinesthesia; and we might describe the actual thoughts we are thinking right now;
and what we are imagining or remembering. Let us locate all of these components of experience
within the square in figure 1.

The square itself represents the instant-by-instant nature of the experience

Fig. 1. of life - not the process, or the accumulation of these instances. The square stands for
now, and then now, and then now.

Of course, when I ask you to describe what you are experiencing right now, I have actually asked
you to do the impossible. By the time you apprehend your experience - that is to say, when you
stop to see or note what it is that you are experiencing, you are no longer denoting what you are
experiencing now. You are, in fact, denoting what you experienced a moment ago. Actually, it is
more elusive than that, because experience itself has no quality of persistence. In other words,
what you experienced a moment ago is now gone as experience. What remains of what you
experienced a moment ago is not experience but a record of what you did experience in that
moment (commonly called memory). In other words, when you stop to formulate what it is you
are experiencing so that you can note it and think about it or realize it or describe it, it is not only
not now, it is not even experience. It is, in fact, merely a record of what you experienced - a
record consisting of a collection of symbols which you use to represent what you experienced.
So the best you can hope to do when I ask you to describe or take note of what you are
experiencing right now is to describe or take note of the symbols of what you experienced a
moment ago. These records or symbols of experience are represented in figure 2 as a circle.

To review: The square represents the instant-by-instant process of living. It is for the most part
unformulated until it is formulated as symbol in a manner dictated by our concepts and then
retained as concepts. the square represents experience or process. The circle represents symbols
and concepts. The function of the concepts (the circle) is to organize experience or process (the
square). In other words, the function of concepts is the organization of experience into
meaningful patterns, then groups of patterns and the relationships of groups of patterns.

For example, if you were to see a ghost walking in front of you, you probably would not say,
'Terrific, my first ghost'. More likely, you would say, 'I must have eaten something strange for
dinner', or 'Perhaps I have been hypnotized'. In other words, your mind's concepts will organize
the raw experience -that is to say, formulate it (represent or symbolize it) so that it is consistent
with your concepts. If it were not for this organizing ability, you would grope around your own
room to discover the way out. As a matter of fact, without this organizing ability even the
experience and the resultant idea that there was an outside of the room would occur only by
accidently falling through the doorway each time you are in a room.

So in the circle we have the organizing principles of experience or the organizing principles of
process or the organizing principles of what we generally call life. Conversationally, we use the
word explaining rather than organizing, so conversationally, organizing principles become
explanatory principles. Unfortunately, most of us make no distinction for ourselves between
moment-bymoment experiencing and the concepts which are records and organizations of those
experiences.

Our language even uses the same symbol (the word experience) for these entirely different
phenomena. We say, 'I am experiencing talking to you' and 'I remember the experience of having
talked to you'. What I really remember is the symbols and concept I used to record the
experience of talking to you, and I use the same word for both of these.
What ordinarily happens is our concepts begin to determine what we experience. These concept-
determined experiences (mechanicalized experiences) then reinforce the concepts from which
they arose, which reinforced concepts further determine experience, and so on. In this
conceptualized or mechanicalized condition of living, one is at best successful and at worst a
failure or pathological. As far as I can tell, when we said something was 'wrong' with people,
what we have often attempted to do in our society was to get them to give up `bad' concepts or
take on 'good' concepts. In modern therapies, we now attempt to break the hold of concepts on
experience so that people can be more directly aware of their experience and experience more
directly.

I am suggesting a third possibility, beyond experience or process and beyond symbol or concept.
The third possiblity is represented in figure 3 by the space in which the square and circle are
drawn on the page. In other words, it is the page itself. This space of the diagram represents what
I call a generating principle - that which gives rise to experience, as distinguished from
experience/process, or the organization/explanation of experience. It is the source or creation or
generation of experience or process or, if you will, life. Rather than organizing or explaining, it
generates or creates. And rather than being conceptual and symbolic, it is abstract.

In Zen, they say that those who know don't tell. What they may mean is that self as self
(represented by the space of the diagram) generates experience, sources life. It does not explain it
or 'organize' it. In Zen, they also say that those who tell don't know. What they mean is that self
as symbol or thing (represented by the circle in the diagram) can explain it but cannot source or
generate it. We all know people who can explain and rationalize their entire lives and everyone
else's, for that matter, who do not generate real satisfaction, fulfillment or aliveness in life. At
best they present a good facade.

Traditionally, the world is usually divided into two groups: people who experiential or intuitive
or feeling or emotional or non-rational and the other camp, people who are intellectual, verbal,
conceptual and rational. I am suggesting a third possibility which requires a new paradigm of
understanding and a logic, philosophy, language and syntax which are appropriate to it. To point
in the direction of what I mean here, I use the analogy of relativity and quantum mechanics,
which required physics to generate a new paradigm not understandable in the old classical
paradigm, but which is a state change or, as I prefer to call it, a transformation. Relativity and
quantum mechanics also require a new logic, philosophy, language and syntax of the physicist,
which in the old logic, philosophy, language and syntax sound paradoxical and irrational - but
once apprehended are seen to be fully logical, rational and consistent and even allow the old
logic, philosophy, language and syntax - perhaps even illuminate it. This is not anti-intellectual
or irrational or even non-rational. It is a kind of supra-rationality, a context in context.

The difficulty I have with the prevailing scientific epistemology is that it tends to move
backwards - from content to context (from the circle to the square) which in my view forces us to
locate the source of experience in the result of experience.

I suggest there is another way and that is, to come from the source of experience - which has a
logic all in its own - to experience - which too has a logic - and move on to the symbolic record
of experience - which also has a logic, or order all its own.
What we ordinarily call logic is actually a specialized logic which is consistent with a
symbolized and conceptualized sense-perceived reality. It is the logic of content, object or thing -
a logic of, reality of parts. There is another, separate and distinct logic which is consistent with a
process (experiential-here-and-now) based reality. It could be said that this logic is consistent
with a sense-perceived reality which has not been symbolized and conceptualized. Actually, the
reality with which this logic is consistent includes - in addition to sense perception - such items
as body sensation, emotion, feeling, attitude, state of mind, movement, motion, kinesthetic,
thought itself, imagination, and memory. An example of this is the logic of art, dance and music
which, by the way, often appears illogical and irrational when seen from the logic of the
symbolized and conceptualized sense-perceived reality. (It is a fundamental malady in our
culture that as we become more enculturated we become more likely to try to make sense out of
our experience-process with a logic of symbols and concepts.)

While the first of these two logics does not include the second, the second includes the first. That
is, the second one is the context for the first one.

There is a third logic which is distinct and separate from the first and/or second of these two
logics. It is even further removed from what we ordinarily call logic, and, as a matter of fact, it
seems completely paradoxical, non-sensical and strange when viewed from the perspective or
ordinary logics. It is a logic which is consistent with a source-of-form rather than form - source-
of-time rather than time - source-of-position rather than position-based reality. It is the logic of
context and creation - a logic of a reality of wholes. It is a logic of universals, of ultimate
contexts, which allows for process, change, experience, and particular sets of contents.

This logic system of self as self is not 'sensible'. It seems paradoxical, because it must speak a
language based on a logic of the senses, in which the subject of the verb must be different from
the object of the verb. Self as self does not 'make sense'.

Self as self is represented in figure 3 as the space or content of the diagram. The experience of
self by self is represented by the square in the diagram. Self represented as symbol, or self
experienced as an object or thing, is represented by the circle in the diagram. Self as self does not
explain behavior, it generates it. Self as concept does not generate life - it only explains it.
Generating principles generate and explaining principles explain.

This brings us to the final notion I want to present in this essay - the notion of responsibility. In
ordinary discourse, I find the idea of responsibility almost totally buried under concepts of fault,
guilt, shame, burden, and blame, so that a discussion of responsibility almost invariably elicits a
defensive response, as if to say, 'it wasn't my fault', or a brave, 'I did it.

And yet, the experience of responsibility for one's own experience is the awareness that I am the
source of my experience. It is absolutely inseparable from the experience of satisfaction.
Satisfaction is the natural concomitant of the experience of self as generating principle or
abstraction or source or cause. Only if I love you do I love you, and if I am not responsible for
(the source of) loving you - then 'obviously', I am not loving you. I might have love for you or do
love for you but I am not loving you. Having or doing love can be gratifying, need-fulfilling, and
cannot be satisfying, whole or complete.

Similarly, if I am not responsible for (the source of, the cause of) my experience of the
predicaments in my life, then I can only resist, fix, change, give into, win out over, or dominate.
Paradoxically, the experience of helplessness or dominance results from the attempt to locate
responsibility outside of self and sets up a closed system out of which it is sometimes very
difficult to extricate a valid experience of self; since the self which might otherwise be
responsible has been excluded in the attempt to protect it from guilt, shame, blame, burden and
fault.

I am sometimes asked whether I 'really' mean that people are wholly responsible for their
experience of life, as if I wished to blame people in poor circumstances. For example, I am asked
whether accident victims are 'responsible' for having accidents. I hope it has become clear in the
context I have developed above that such questions might involve an oversimplification.
Responsibility, in my view, is simply the awareness that my universe ofexperience is my own
including the experiences of those events in my life I call accidents.

Responsibility begins with the willingness to acknowledge that my self is the source of my
experience of my circumstances. And yet, on occasion, some people think that I think accidents
do not happen - or would not happen, if I were 'really' responsible. I am sure you will understand
my occasional dismay when I am asked questions of -this sort. On reflection, I usually recall that
such questions derive from a well-intentioned (though perhaps limited) view of human dignity,
an intention with which I can align myself, since my own intention is precisely to show that the
experience of responsibility is enabling, not disabling.

I have no interest in the justification of circumstances or producing guilt in others by assigning

obligation. I am interested in providing an opportunity for people to experience mastery in the
matter of their own lives and the experience of satisfaction, fulfillment, and aliveness. These are
a function of the self as context rather than thing, the self as space rather than location or
position, the self as cause rather than self at effect.

I am not saying that you or anyone else is responsible. True

responsibility cannot be assigned from outside the self by someone else or as a conclusion or
belief derived from a system of concepts. I do not say that you or anyone is responsible. I do say
- with me, you have the space to experience yourself as responsible - as cause in the matter of
your own life. I will interact with you from my experience that you are responsible - that you are
cause in your own life and you can count on me for respect and support as I am clear that I am
fully responsible for my experience of you, that is to say, from my experience of the way you
are.

Ultimately, one experiences oneself as the space in which one is and others are. I call this the
transformation of experience. At the level of source - or context - or abstraction - I am you. That
is beyond responsibility.

In sum, I affirm that human experience is usually though not necessarily ensnared in a trap of its
own devising, born of a wish to survive and remain innocent. And ironically, our stubborn wish
to survive prompts us to rely on concepts of life built with records of past survivals, thus
reducing self to victim, or at best to survivor or dominator, on which spectrum, every position is
one of effect.

Victor Gioscia, PhD, Director of Research and Development, EST, 765 California Street, San
Francisco, CA 94108 (USA)

So, I want the reader to know that my ultimate purpose is not to tell you some facts you did not
know. I do ask you to entertain the possibility that there is something you do know, which you
have not been aware that you know. The est training is an opportunity to become aware that you
know things you did not know you knew, so it is not a 'training' in the usual `rule-learning' sense
of the word, nor is it an ingraining, by repetition or any other means, of behaviors, attitudes or
beliefs.

Fundamentally, then the EST training is an occasion in which participants have an experience,
uniquely their own, in a situation which enables and encourages them to do that fully and
responsibly.
I am suggesting that the best way to learn about EST is to look into yourself, because whatever
EST is about is in your self. There are some who think that I have discovered something that
other people ought to know. That is not so. What I have discovered is that people know things
that they do not know that they know, the knowing of which can nurture them and satisfy them
and allow them to experience an expanded sense of aliveness in their lives. The training is an
occasion for them to have that experience - to get in touch with what they actually already know
but are not really aware of.

Format

The EST Standard Training is designed to be approximately 60 h long. It is usually done on two
successive weekends - two Saturdays and two Sundays -beginning at 9 a.m. and going until
around midnight. Sometimes a day's session takes longer, sometimes a little less, since the
sessions go until the results for that day are produced.
There are breaks about every 4 h for people to go to the bathroom, have a cigarette, talk, or do
whatever they like. In addition, there is one break for a meal during the day. People usually eat
breakfast before and dinner after if they are less tired than hungry. We have altered these times
on occasion to adapt, for instance, to institutional schedules. The same results have been
produced doing the training over ten weekday evening sessions of 6 hours each with a break in
the middle of each session, and over three consecutive weekend sessions of 10 hours each with
three breaks including a meal break. The point is there is nothing in the duration of the training
that is intrinsic to the training.

Included in the tuition (now $ 300.00), in addition to the two weekends, are three optional
seminars, called the pre-training, the mid-training, and the post-training seminars. These are
approximately 3 h long, and are conducted in the evenings a few days before, between and a few
days after the weekend training sessions.
The training is held for about 250 people at a time, who are seated on chairs, arranged theater
style, in a hotel ballroom. The trainer stands on a low platform in the front of the room so that the
trainer can see and be seen by everyone. There are support personnel who sit in the back of the
room, who manage the logistics of the training. For instance, they inform those participants on
medication (who sit in the back row), when it is time to take it. There are microphones, to
facilitate people who want to say something or ask a question, and everyone wears a nametag so
that the trainer can address people by name.

Sometimes people wonder about what might be called the harshness of the training - why the
rules are so unbending. It became very clear to me about 5 years ago that the rules in life do not
bend. In other words, if I fall down, gravity does not say 'Well, we're going to relax the rules a
bit since you hurt yourself. I think that it is important for people who are being given an
opportunity to discover themselves, to discover for themselves that there are stable
environments, certain facts of living, they cannot 'con' or persuade into changing for them, no
matter how pitiable they are, and no matter how intelligent and dominant they are. So the people
who handle the supervision of the training -the room, the number of chairs, etc. - have been
trained to be very consistent -to go by the book. The purpose of going by the book is not that we
think you ought to go by the book all the time - that kind of rigidity in a person is obviously a
mistake. It is to accentuate that the physical universe always goes by the book and that, like
gravity, life does not relax the rules just because you want it to or even because you need it to.
Gravity does not care, you see. It simply is. At the same time, the training is conducted with love
and compassion (not sympathy and agreement) and anyone who completes the training is clear in
their experience of this love and compassion. They know that their true power and dignity has
been recognized from the very beginning of the training.

There are three relationships which develop during the course of the training which provide a
framework for the material of the training. One is a relationship with the trainer, who begins the
training with what resembles a lecture, although trainees soon realize that it is not actually a
lecture. To be sure, the trainer stands in front of the room talking, but he says things like 'If you
experience something completely, it disappears', and since he says that early on in the training,
almost everybody thinks that it is not true. Some people reinterpret it to mean something else like
that, but not quite that, which could be true for them. In other words, people begin to develop a
relationship to the trainer, who presents certain data about experiencing life, which trainees can
examine to see if what he is saying is true for them in their experience. There may be a give and
take between the participants and the trainer for a while until everyone is very clear what the
trainer said. That does not mean anyone has accepted it. In fact, people are effectively cautioned
against merely believing anything presented in the training. It just means everone knows that is
what the trainer said, and everyone begins to develop his or her own unique relationship with the
material the trainer presents, by seeing the unique relevance of what the trainer has to say to his
or her own beliefs about and/or experience of living.

Another relationship which develops in the training is the trainee's relation to the group and to
the individual members of the group. This develops out of an aspect of the training we call
sharing, by which we simply mean telling others what is going on in the realm of your own
experience. Initially, people raise their hands, one of the support people brings them a
microphone, and they talk about something - be it an annoyance, or an insight, or their theory of
the training, etc. Then, as the training goes on, people begin to share more fully what they are
actually experiencing, until, toward the end of the training, people < become able to share in a
way we call 'getting off it' - relating things they have held on to perhaps for their entire lives -
things they have been stuck with yet were unable to reveal they were holding onto, and now find
they can let go of. About a quarter of the people in a given training share meaningful things of
this sort. The rest either do not share or say conceptual kinds of things.

There is no confrontation from the group to a trainee or from the trainer to a trainee except in
rare instances by the trainer. We ask trainees not to evaluate, judge or analyze each other's
sharing, not to engage in a dialogue with each other, and on that basis to say whatever they have
to say to the trainer, so that the training can occur within each indidivual's own experience, rather
than in others' concepts or in the dynamics of the group. Those who choose to share, do so, and
those who choose not to, find it is not required to realize the results of the training.

When people share, other trainees often find they can see their own story more vividly in
someone else's experience than they can in their own. So a large part of the value people get in
the training is the view they see of themselves in others' sharing.

The third relationship people experience in the training is an enhanced relationship to

themselves, which in part, occurs during what we call processes. These are techniques in which
people switch their attention from seeing their concepts about themselves, others and life, to
observing directly their experience of themselves, others and life. This is done in an environment
- or 'space' - that is safe enough for them to do that. That is, in a safe space, there is no
expectation that you prove anything, or demonstrate anything, or keep up any appearances. In a
safe space, whatever is so is not used to justify or explain or be consistent with a point of view.
Processes are simply an occasion to look directly into one's experience and observe what's going
on there, in safety.

For example, there is a process in which people are asked to select a problem from among those
they have in life and to see specifically which experiences are associated with that problem -
which body < sensations in which specific locations in the body, which emotions or feelings,
which attitudes, states of mind, mental states or points of view, which postures, ways of holding
themselves, gestures, ways of moving, habitual actions and countenances, which thoughts,
evaluations, judgements, things they have been told or read, conclusions, reasons, explanations
and decisions, and which scenes from the past are associated with that problem. People discover
remarkable things about their problems - for instance that there are body sensations felt when
and only when that problem intrudes into their lives - a fact they had not noticed before.

Some processes last for 20 min, others for 90 min. People are usually seated during them, and
afterwards they are invited to communicate whatever insights or awareness they had. Ina very
real sense, then, the trainees literally create the training for themselves.

People think there is an EST training, when in fact, there is not. There are actually as many
trainings going on in each training as there are individuals in the training, because people
actually 'train' themselves, by handling on an individual basis those aspects of living that are
common to all of our lives. Each part of the training becomes real for participants by virtue of
experiencing themselves, not concepts derived from someone else's experience.
Thus, the training is not like a classroom in which the aim is to agree or disagree with a concept
or a theory. In the training, we present spaces, or contexts, or opportunities, in a way that allows
people to discover what their actual experience is. Participants in the training report and give
evidence of obtaining value from getting beneath their concepts, their points of view, their
unexamined assumptions, explanations, and justifications, to the actual experience of themselves,
others and life.

To know oneself, as Socrates suggested, does not seem to provide the experience of satisfaction -
of being whole and complete if one knows oneself in the same way as one knows about things.
Thus one can know about love and not know love, just as one can know all the concepts of
bicycle riding without having the experience or the ability to actually ride a bicycle. The training
is about the experience of love, the ability to love and the ability to experience being loved, not
the concept or story of it - and it is about the experience of happiness, and the ability to be happy
and share happiness, not the concept, story or symbols of it. In short, the training is about who
we are, not what we do, or what we have, or what we do not do or do not have. It is about the self
as the self, not merely the story or symbols of self.

People often ask if the training is something one needs. The training is not something one needs.
Now this statement is usually met, if not by surprise, then with outright disbelief. For, if the
training is not something one needs, why should one do it.

The fact is, people usually come to introductory seminars when they see that their friends or
family or associates who went to the training experienced a transformation or enlightenment
which they themselves would like to experience. It is a natural part of the experience of
transformation to share the opportunity to have the experience of transformation with others.

This becomes amusing after the people who had the hardest time understanding why their friends
or loved ones were so excited and enthusiastic and eager for them to know about the training,
finally do take the training, they then meet the same bewilderment in their friends and loved ones
when they try to share it, because now their friends insist they do not need it either.

The fact is, no one needs the training. It is not medicine. If you are ill, you need medical
attention. If you are mentally ill, you need therapy. The training is not medicine or therapy. If
you are hungry, you need food. You need air. Actually you need someone to love and someone
to love you. You need to feel some self-respect and the esteem of others. Without these, we do
not function very well as human beings.

The training is none of these. It does not solve problems. It is true that some problems dissolve in
the training, but not because it is the purpose of the training for people to work on their problems
in the training. The training is not about people's problems per se.

What the training is about is related to those rare moments in life, which while rare, seem to
come into everyone's life at some time or another. They are moments in which one is absolutely
complete, whole, fulfilled - that is to say, satisfied. (I limit the word gratification to mean the
filling of a need or desire, or the achievement of a goal. I use the word satisfaction to mean the
experience of being complete.)
Each of us has experienced moments in our lives when we are fully alive -when we know -
without thinking - that life is exactly as it is in this moment. In such moments, we have no wish
for it to be different, or better, or more. We have no disappointment, no comparison with ideals,
no sense that it is not what we worked for. We feel no protective or defensive urge - and have no
desire to hold on - to store up - or to save. Such moments are perfect in themselves. We
experience them as being complete.

We do not need to experience completion. People function successfully without such moments.
Like the training, such moments are not something we `should' have. Like the training, such
moments do not make us any better. We are not smarter or sexier or more successful or richer or
any more clever. These moments, these experiences of being complete, are sufficient unto
themselves. Like the training, such moments are not even 'good' for you - like vitamins or
exercise or things of that sort.

In the training, one finds there is something beyond that - the opportunity to discover that space
within yourself where such moments originate, actually where you and life originate. In the
training, one experiences a transformation -a shift from being a character in the story of life to
being the space in which the story occurs - the playwright creating the play, as it were,
consciously, freely, and completely.

Because the experience of being complete is a state change from the rest of life, the questions
and instruments we usually apply to measure life do not apply. We shall need to develop a whole
new set of questions - a new paradigm to approach the experience of being complete.

In the training, the experience of being at the effect of life - of having been put here, and having
to suffer the circumstances of life, of being the bearer or victim of life, or at best, of succeeding
or winning out over the burdens of life -shifts to an experience of originating life the way it is -
creating your experience as you live it - in a space uniquely your own.

In that space, the problems of life take on an entirely different significance. They literally pale,
that is, become lighter - or enlightened. One sees, quite sharply, that who one is simply
transcends and contextualizes the content with which one has been concerned. The living of life
begins to be what counts, the zest or vivacity with which one lives, what matters.

It has been said that this is a polyanna view - that I think there's no pain and suffering in life.
That is not my view at all. There is no doubt whatsoever in my experience and observation that
people do suffer, that there is pain in life. If we were to sit quietly in an empty room for a few
minutes looking at what we do and how we live, and at how much time we spend doing things
that we pretend are important to us, most of us would find that we spend more time pretending
not to suffer than in creating the experience of our lives.

In my observation of life, I find that during most of the time we are interacting with others, we
are pretending, and we get so proficient at pretending that we eventually no longer even notice
that we are pretending. We become 'unconscious' of pretending. We forget that the actual
experience of loving someone - in contrast to the pretense or concept of loving someone, or the
'act' or drama of loving someone - leaves one absolutely high, vivacious, and alive.
Yet, each of us behaves as if we were really three people. First, there is the one we pretend to be.
No one escapes this. Every one of us has an act - a front - a facade - a mask we wear in the world
that tells the world who we are pretending to be. We think we need this to get along in life and be
successful.

Underneath that mask is the person we are afraid we are - the person who thinks those small,
nasty, brutish thoughts we try to hide, because we think we are the only one who thinks them,
until we are willing to accept that we do actually think them, and only then notice everyone else
does too. Until we confront our own smallness, we do not experience our real size. The truth is,
we can only be as high as we can confront and take responsibility for being low.

I am suggesting that it is useful from time to time to get in touch with why it is we have to be
intelligent or successful or wonderful or kind. I am suggesting that when we look underneath the
facade we present, we will find a cluster of thoughts, emotions, attitudes, etc. which are the exact
opposite to what we have presented. All of us who are given credit for being intelligent have
feelings, thoughts, etc. of stupidity and ignorance. All of us who are given credit for being
wonderful have doubts. In my observation (which includes a fairly intimate interaction with over
90,000 people) we all have doubts about the authenticity of the way we present ourselves in the
world.

Some people find this idea annoying. If you have spent your whole life proving you are not a
fool, it is annoying to be called a fool. (A fool is one caught in his own pretense.) We are all very
careful not to make fools of ourselves or not be fooled. Many see it as the ultimate disgrace.
Only a fool pretending not to be a fool would be afraid of making a fool of himself. A fool
presenting himself as a fool would have no problem with it, just as one who knows he is not a
fool would have no problem making a fool of himself. Similarly, a man secure in his masculinity
has no problem expressing feminine qualities. Each time we try to prove we are not fools we
reinforce the belief that we must prove that we are not.

Underneath these two 'selves' - the 'front' and the 'hidden' - is the one we really are - under the
one we work at being, the one we try to be, the one we are pretending to be, and underneath the
one we do not want to be, the one we are avoiding being, and the one we fear we are. The extent
to which we can allow ourselves to confront - to experience and be responsible for - the pretense
and trying, the avoidance and fear, is the extent to which we can be who we really are.

The experience of being yourself is innately satisfying. If who you really are does not give you
the experience of health, happiness, love and full self-expression - or 'aliveness' - then that is not
who you really are. When you experience yourself as yourself, that experience is innately
satisfying. The experience of the self as the self is the experience of satisfaction. Nothing more,
nothing less.

Satisfaction is not 'out there'. It cannot be brought in. You will never get satisfied. It cannot be
done. When you want more and different or better, that is gratification, and while that is
gratifying, we always want even more or even better. Satisfaction is completion, being complete
- what has been called 'the peace that passeth all understanding'. It is a condition of well-being - a
sense of wholeness and of being complete right now - a context of certainty that right now is
completely all right as right now and that the next moment will similarly be, fully itself. Not a
judgment of good or bad, right or wrong, just what is.

I do not refer to smugness or to naivete, or to a preoccupation with self achieved by shutting out
the world. I do not mean narcissism. I refer to the quality of participation which generates
enthusiasm in its performance and in its beholders. I refer to the kind of invigorating vitality that
makes a difference in the world. Most of those who explain what we ought to do in the world do
not make a difference in the world.

To summarize what happens in the est training, then, I would say the following. It is a
transformation - a contextual shift from a state in which the content in your life is organized
around the attempt to get satisfied or to survive - to attain satisfaction - or to protect or hold on to
what you have got - to an experience of being satisfied, right now, and organizing the content of
your life as an expression, manifestation and sharing of the experience of being satisfied, of
being whole and complete, now. One is aware of that part of oneself which experiences
satisfaction - the self itself, whole, complete, and entire.
The natural state of the self is satisfaction.

You do not have to get there. You cannot get there. You have only to 'realize' your self, and, as
you do, you are satisfied. Then it is natural and spontaneous to express that in life and share that
opportunity with others.

This explains, I think, the fact that people from all walks of life take the training, so that, with the
exception that the group of graduates includes a higher percentage than the average population of
better educated people and therefore the group also includes a higher percentage than usual of
professionals, they are representative of the community at large. I say 'explains' with tongue in
cheek of course, for by now you will have perceived that the only quality one must have to 'get'
the est training is self.

So everyone 'gets' it, that is, has an experience of self as self. A few 'desist' because they have
patterns of resistance that they are now completing (rather than dramatizing or reinforcing) as a
part of expressing their being complete. Some do not 'like' it, others delay their acceptance, both
also patterns now to be completed. Even these, in my experience, have it, and are covering it
over, for a while, with considerations, explanations, or other contents which they are completing.

This is not a matter of concern to us, since the principal intended result of the est training is a
shift in the person's relationship to their system of knowing contents, or technically a shift in
their epistemology. Thus, the contents of people's lives are not worked on per se during the
training, since it is not the purpose of the training to alter the circumstances of lives or to alter
peoples' attitudes or point(s) of view about the circumstances of their lives. It is the purpose of
the training to allow people to see that the circumstances of their lives and that their attitudes
about the circumstances of their lives exist in a context or a system of knowing, and that it is
possible to have exactly the same circumstances and attitudes about these circumstances held in a
different context, and that, as a matter of fact, it is possible for people to choose their own
context for the contents of their lives. People come out of the training 'knowing' that in a new
way. Now I mean something larger than 'knowing' or understanding. I mean that people
experience being empowered or enabled in that respect. They no longer are their point of view.
They have one, and know that the one they have is the the one they chose, until now, and that
they can, and probably will, choose to create other points of view. They experience, that is, that
they are the one who defines the point of view, and not the reverse. They experience the intended
result of the training, which is a shift in what orients people's being from the attempt to gain
satisfaction - a deficiency orientation - to the expression of satisfaction already being
experienced - a sufficiency orientation.

This is so even for the experience of psychosis. In our research , we have asked independent
investigators to look very carefully at the issue of harm. And while I am not fully qualified to
discuss the intricacies of research , I can report that none of the research has shown any evidence
that est produces harm. Now, although it has not proven that est does not harm, it is noteworthy
that investigators asked to look carefully at this question have not found evidence of harm. Every
indication we have suggests that there is a lower incidence of psychotic episodes either during
the training or among the graduates after the training than in a comparable group.

Interestingly, those graduates of the training who have experienced psychotic episodes after the
training, report that they experienced the episode in a different way after the training than when
they had such episodes before the training. For example, in Honolulu, at the general hospital
there, two of the people who had psychotic episodes were graduates, as were some of the
hospital staff. The graduates who had psychotic episodes said that their experience of psychosis
after the training differed from their experience of it before the training in that they had somehow
gained the ability to complete their experience rather than manage it or control it, or suppress it.
We could say that they seemed to move to mastery of the psychotic material rather than be the
effect of it. So it would appear that the epistemological shift at the core of the est training is one
which can be used to recontextualize even psychotic episodes, although they are so rare in our
experience that this tentative generalization must be regarded as based on a very small sample.
We are currently planning systematic controlled research on this and other issues.

The Epistemology of est

Properly speaking, est is not an epistemology, since epistemologies are ordinarily defined as
ways of understanding the contents of experience, and est is not about understanding the contents
of experience; it is about the source or generation of experience. We enter here into a region of
discourse laden with initially baffling paradoxes, since we are dealing now with understanding
understanding, as it were, a task perhaps not unfamiliar to psychiatry.

What makes est not simply another discipline or epistemology, as far as I can tell, is what makes
relativity and quantum mechanics different from the disciplines which preceded them and that is
that the disciplines which preceded relativity and quantum mechanics derived from
epistemologies based on the sensorium. What is very clear to me is that est is not based on the
sensorium, so I employ relativity and quantum mechanics because I need examples of disciplines
which do not derive from sense experience. There are facts in relativity which do not 'make
sense' yet there is a logic in relativity which is as hard and certain as the epistemology of
classical physics, without being based on sense data, although - in an expanded context - in
accord with it, i.e., allowing and even giving insight into it.

And, just as it is actually impossible to hold the data of relativistic physics in a classical context,
so it is simply impossible to hold the data of est in the context of classical epistemology. In other
words, I am using words derived from a prior epistemology to describe a later epistemology that
does not fit within the prior epistemology. This is why a good deal of what I have to say often
sounds uncomfortably paradoxical, and in some views, 'foolish'.

I am saying that what is different about the epistemology of est is that it moves beyond the
sensorium to a reality which, while allowing sense experience, is not confined within it. It is
neither rational, in the usual conceptual meaning of that term, nor irrational, in the usual
emotional or affective meaning of that term. It is a supra-rational epistemology, beyond both of
these classical alternatives. Just as we cannot reduce a relativistic space into Cartesian
coordinates of x and y, so I hold, we may not reduce the space from which epistemologies
derive, the context of epistemologies - what I call self - into classical conceptions of self, the self
as a thing or as a point or at best as a process.

I do not mean to be arrogant in citing Einstein as a case in point of paradoxes of this sort. I do so
because he represents the most familiar example of someone who somehow managed to convey
relativity to a world in which there was no basis for understanding it. He often referred to the fact
that it is theory which tells us what to look for, and initially put forward his theory without
benefit of experimental verification. Then, when we looked, we found that light rays did bend on
their way around the sun. Somehow, he said what could not be said. Similarly, in the est training,
we say things you cannot say and people get things you cannot tell them.

Now, this is not really as paradoxical as it sounds, because the truth is, although you cannot fit an
expanded context into a contracted one, you can fit a contracted context into an expanded one. It
is simply the case that most of us are very reluctant to come up with an expanded context for our
experience, because we think that it invalidates our previous limited context, and thus presents a
threat to what we think our survival is based on. Now, there is a paradox worth reckoning with,
since, in my view, it is precisely the expansion of limiting contexts which not only vouchsafes
survival but generates those rare experiences I have referred to as moments of spontaneous
transcendence, or transformation. I mean experiences of self - not self as concept, or self as peak
experience (the experience of self by self) - but the direct and unmediated experience of self as
self, not limited by previous context. Or, indeed, by any context.

There you have it. For most humans, self is positional - a location in time and space - a point of
view which accumulates all previous experiences and points of view. You are there and I am
here. During the training there is a shift in the way one defines oneself - not merely in the way
you think about your definition of self - nor merely in the way you believe your self to be - but in
the actual experience of who you are as the one who defines who you are, not the definition. As
self, you are no longer a content - another thing in the context of things - but the context in which
contexts of things occur. You become a space in which one of the things, one of the contents is
your point of view about who you are. You are no longer that point of view. You have it, as one
of the experiences you have. You experience you as the one who is experiencing you. I know
this is an unusual way to use the words self and experience, and since I have no intention to
mystify, let us move towards a schematic that may be useful in illustrating what I mean.
There is the experience of self as self, the experience of self by self, and the experience of self as
symbol or thing.

If I ask you to describe what you are experiencing right now, almost everyone who decides to go
along at all, without considering whether it is possible, starts a process in which they try to
articulate what they are experiencing. That we experience is axiomatically assumed by almost all
of us all of the time. It is as though it were a given. (Back in the 'old days' people may have said
something like, 'What I'm experiencing is that I don't like it in this room. It's terrible. The whole
thing is awful. I just got up on the wrong side of the bed today and nothing is going to work out.'
Today we know better than that. Today we are hip. We know to describe what we are
experiencing in experiential terms, rather than in conceptual terms.) We might begin with a
description of the perception of our senses; go on to describing our body sensation; emotions and
feelings; attitudes; states of mind, 'mental states'; our fundamental approach to circumstances,
and our way of looking at things, i.e., our point of view; we might describe our motion or
movement, kinesthesia; and we might describe the actual thoughts we are thinking right now;
and what we are imagining or remembering. Let us locate all of these components of experience
within the square in figure 1.

The square itself represents the instant-by-instant nature of the experience of life - not the
process, or the accumulation of these instances. The square stands for now, and then now, and
then now.

Of course, when I ask you to describe what you are experiencing right now, I have actually asked
you to do the impossible. By the time you apprehend your experience - that is to say, when you
stop to see or note what it is that you are experiencing, you are no longer denoting what you are
experiencing now. You are, in fact, denoting what you experienced a moment ago. Actually, it is
more elusive than that, because experience itself has no quality of persistence. In other words,
what you experienced a moment ago is now gone as experience. What remains of what you
experienced a moment ago is not experience but a record of what you did experience in that
moment (commonly called memory). In other words, when you stop to formulate what it is you
are experiencing so that you can note it and think about it or realize it or describe it, it is not only
not now, it is not even experience. It is, in fact, merely a record of what you experienced - a
record consisting of a collection of symbols which you use to represent what you experienced.
So the best you can hope to do when I ask you to describe or take note of what you are
experiencing right now is to describe or take note of the symbols of what you experienced a
moment ago. These records or symbols of experience are represented in figure 2 as a circle.

To review: The square represents the instant-by-instant process of living. It is for the most part
unformulated until it is formulated as symbol in a manner dictated by our concepts and then
retained as concepts. the square represents experience or process. The circle represents symbols
and concepts. The function of the concepts (the circle) is to organize experience or process (the
square). In other words, the function of concepts is the organization of experience into
meaningful patterns, then groups of patterns and the relationships of groups of patterns.

For example, if you were to see a ghost walking in front of you, you probably would not say,
'Terrific, my first ghost'. More likely, you would say, 'I must have eaten something strange for
dinner', or 'Perhaps I have been hypnotized'. In other words, your mind's concepts will organize
the raw experience -that is to say, formulate it (represent or symbolize it) so that it is consistent
with your concepts. If it were not for this organizing ability, you would grope around your own
room to discover the way out. As a matter of fact, without this organizing ability even the
experience and the resultant idea that there was an outside of the room would occur only by
accidently falling through the doorway each time you are in a room.

So in the circle we have the organizing principles of experience or the organizing principles of
process or the organizing principles of what we generally call life. Conversationally, we use the
word explaining rather than organizing, so conversationally, organizing principles become
explanatory principles. Unfortunately, most of us make no distinction for ourselves between
moment-by moment experiencing and the concepts which are records and organizations of those
experiences. Our language even uses the same symbol (the word experience) for these entirely
different phenomena. We say, 'I am experiencing talking to you' and 'I remember the experience
of having talked to you'. What I really remember is the symbols and concept I used to record the
experience of talking to you, and I use the same word for both of these.

What ordinarily happens is our concepts begin to determine what we experience. These concept-
determined experiences (mechanicalized experiences) then reinforce the concepts from which
they arose, which reinforced concepts further determine experience, and so on. In this
conceptualized or mechanicalized condition of living, one is at best successful and at worst a
failure or pathological.< As far as I can tell, when we said something was 'wrong' with people,
what we have often attempted to do in our society was to get them to give up `bad' concepts or
take on 'good' concepts. In modern < therapies, we now attempt to break the hold of concepts on
experience so that people can be more directly aware of their experience and experience more
directly.

I am suggesting a third possibility, beyond experience or process and beyond symbol or concept.
The third possiblity is represented in figure 3 by the space in which the square and circle are
drawn on the page. In other words, it is the page itself. This space of the diagram represents what
I call a generating principle - that which gives rise to experience, as distinguished from
experience/process, or the organization/explanation of experience. It is the source or creation or
generation of experience or process or, if you will, life. Rather than organizing or explaining, it
generates or creates. And rather than being conceptual and symbolic, it is abstract.

In Zen, they say that those who know don't tell. What they may mean is that self as self
(represented by the space of the diagram) generates experience, sources life. It does not explain it
or 'organize' it. In Zen, they also say that those who tell don't know. What they mean is that self
as symbol or thing (represented by the circle in the diagram) can explain it but cannot source or
generate it. We all know people who can explain and rationalize their entire lives and everyone
else's, for that matter, who do not generate real satisfaction, fulfillment or aliveness in life. At
best they present a good facade.

Traditionally, the world is usually divided into two groups: people who experiential or intuitive
or feeling or emotional or non-rational and the other camp, people who are intellectual, verbal,
conceptual and rational. I am suggesting a third possibility which requires a new paradigm of
understanding and a logic, philosophy, language and syntax which are appropriate to it. To point
in the direction of what I mean here, I use the analogy of relativity and quantum mechanics,
which required physics to generate a new paradigm not understandable in the old classical
paradigm, but which is a state change or, as I prefer to call it, a transformation. Relativity and
quantum mechanics also require a new logic, philosophy, language and syntax of the physicist,
which in the old logic, philosophy, language and syntax sound paradoxical and irrational - but
once apprehended are seen to be fully logical, rational and consistent and even allow the old
logic, philosophy, language and syntax - perhaps even illuminate it. This is not anti-intellectual
or irrational or even non-rational. It is a kind of supra-rationality, a context in context.

The difficulty I have with the prevailing scientific epistemology is that it tends to move
backwards - from content to context (from the circle to the square) which in my view forces us to
locate the source of experience in the result of experience.

I suggest there is another way and that is, to come from the source of experience - which has a
logic all in its own - to experience - which too has a logic - and move on to the symbolic record
of experience - which also has a logic, or order all its own.

What we ordinarily call logic is actually a specialized logic which is consistent with a
symbolized and conceptualized sense-perceived reality. It is the logic of content, object or thing -
a logic of, reality of parts. There is another, separate and distinct logic which is consistent with a
process (experiential-here-and-now) based reality. It could be said that this logic is consistent
with a sense-perceived reality which has not been symbolized and conceptualized. Actually, the
reality with which this logic is consistent includes - in addition to sense perception - such items
as body sensation, emotion, feeling, attitude, state of mind, movement, motion, kinesthetic,
thought itself, imagination, and memory. An example of this is the logic of art, dance and music
which, by the way, often appears illogical and irrational when seen from the logic of the
symbolized and conceptualized sense-perceived reality. (It is a fundamental malady in our
culture that as we become more enculturated we become more likely to try to make sense out of
our experience-process with a logic of symbols and concepts.)

While the first of these two logics does not include the second, the second includes the first. That
is, the second one is the context for the first one.

There is a third logic which is distinct and separate from the first and/or second of these two
logics. It is even further removed from what we ordinarily call logic, and, as a matter of fact, it
seems completely paradoxical, non-sensical and strange when viewed from the < perspective or
ordinary logics. It is a logic which is consistent with a source-of-form rather than form - source-
of-time rather than time - source-of-position rather than position-based reality. It is the logic of
context and creation - a logic of a reality of wholes. It is a logic of universals, of ultimate
contexts, which allows for process, change, experience, and particular sets of contents.

This logic system of self as self is not 'sensible'. It seems paradoxical, because it must speak a
language based on a logic of the senses, in which the subject of the verb must be different from
the object of the verb. Self as self does not 'make sense'.
Self as self is represented in figure 3 as the space or content of the diagram. The experience of
self by self is represented by the square in the diagram. Self represented as symbol, or self
experienced as an object or thing, is represented by the circle in the diagram. Self as self does not
explain behavior, it generates it. Self as concept does not generate life - it only explains it.
Generating principles generate and explaining principles explain.

This brings us to the final notion I want to present in this essay - the notion of responsibility. In
ordinary discourse, I find the idea of responsibility almost totally buried under concepts of fault,
guilt, shame, burden, and blame, so that a discussion of responsibility almost invariably elicits a
defensive response, as if to say, 'it wasn't my fault', or a brave, 'I did it.

And yet, the experience of responsibility for one's own experience is the awareness that I am the
source of my experience. It is absolutely inseparable from the experience of satisfaction.
Satisfaction is the natural concomitant of the experience of self as generating principle or
abstraction or source or cause. Only if I love you do I love you, and if I am not responsible for
(the source of) loving you - then 'obviously', I am not loving you. I might have love for you or do
love for you but I am not loving you. Having or doing love can be gratifying, need-fulfilling, and
cannot be satisfying, whole or complete.

Similarly, if I am not responsible for (the source of, the cause of) my experience of the
predicaments in my life, then I can only resist, fix, change, give into, win out over, or dominate.
Paradoxically, the experience of helplessness or dominance results from the attempt to locate
responsibility outside of self and sets up a closed system out of which it is sometimes very
difficult to extricate a valid experience of self; since the self which might otherwise be
responsible has been excluded in the attempt to protect it from guilt, shame, blame, burden and
fault.

I am sometimes asked whether I 'really' mean that people are wholly responsible for their
experience of life, as if I wished to blame people in poor circumstances. For example, I am asked
whether accident victims are 'responsible' for having accidents. I hope it has become clear in the
context I have developed above that such questions might involve an oversimplification.
Responsibility, in my view, is simply the awareness that my universe ofexperience is my own
including the experiences of those events in my life I call accidents.

Responsibility begins with the willingness to acknowledge that my self is the source of my
experience of my circumstances. And yet, on occasion, some people think that I think accidents
do not happen - or would not happen, if I were 'really' responsible. I am sure you will understand
my occasional dismay when I am asked questions of -this sort. On reflection, I usually recall that
such questions derive from a well-intentioned (though perhaps limited) view of human dignity,
an intention with which I can align myself, since my own intention is precisely to show that the
experience of responsibility is enabling, not disabling.

I have no interest in the justification of circumstances or producing guilt in others by assigning

obligation. I am interested in providing an opportunity for people to experience mastery in the
matter of their own lives and the experience of satisfaction, fulfillment, and aliveness. These are
a function of the self as context rather than thing, the self as space rather than location or
position, the self as cause rather than self at effect.

I am not saying that you or anyone else is responsible. True responsibility cannot be assigned
from outside the self by someone else or as a conclusion or belief derived from a system of
concepts. I do not say that you or anyone is responsible. I do say - with me, you have the space to
experience yourself as responsible - as cause in the matter of your own life. I will interact with
you from my experience that you are responsible - that you are cause in your own life and you
can count on me for respect and support as I am clear that I am fully responsible for my
experience of you, that is to say, from my experience of the way you are.

Ultimately, one experiences oneself as the space in which one is and others are. I call this the
transformation of experience. At the level of source - or context - or abstraction - I am you. That
is beyond responsibility.

In sum, I affirm that human experience is usually though not necessarily ensnared in a trap of its
own devising, born of a wish to survive and remain innocent. And ironically, our stubborn wish
to survive prompts us to rely on concepts of life built with records of past survivals, thus
reducing self to victim, or at best to survivor or dominator, on which spectrum, every position is
one of effect.

Victor Gioscia, PhD, Director of Research and Development

© Copyright 2008 - 2010 Werner Erhard

WERNER ERHARD

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You Don't Alter What You Know,
You Alter The Way You Know It

A CONVERSATION WITH WERNER ERHARD about The est Training, philosophy,

"enlightenment," authoritarianism and legitimate authority, arrogance, leadership, and vision.

The Network Review, Volume 1 Number 4, September 1983

From their base at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, members of the
Center for the Study of New Religious Movements have been exploring ways to evaluate the
confusing array of activities they define as spiritual, self development, or consciousness oriented.
A continuing seminar at the Center has worked on criteria which lay people and professionals
can use to discriminate between harmful and helpful conditions in groups pursuing such
activities.

Werner and 17 members of the seminar met in April 1981 to discuss some of the distinctions
between authoritarianism and legitimate authority. The conversation covered other topics as
well, and the seminar leader, Dick Anthony, later commented that it was "one of the important
turning points in our meetings.” An edited transcript of the interview is scheduled to appear in a
book, Spiritual Standards for New Age Groups and Therapies, due to be published next spring.
While The est Training is not a therapy or a religion, the conversation between Werner and
members of the seminar clearly applies to the issues raised by the book, and to everyday living.

JOHN WELWOOD: I have questions about whether The est Training is a quasi religious
phenomenon. I've known a lot of people who've done it, and I've been impressed with the fact
that it helps make their lives more workable. But then there's something else that seems a little
bit suspect to me, which is that they seem to have a certain kind of-

WERNER ERHARD: Fervor?

JOHN: Fervor, yes, and also a certain arrogance, as if this were it as if The est Training were
everything, including a substitute for any other spiritual practice or meditation, or any kind of
transpersonal and transcendental path. I wonder if you could comment on that.

WERNER: It's helpful to recognize right away that the training is not the end of anything, or
substitute for another path to some end point. Interpreting it as either of those will skew your
assessment of it. At most, the training is a way to examine whatever path you happen to be on;
but the training doesn't tell anyone what the path is, or what it should be.

So far, it looks like it's working that way, too. People who take the training haven't reported to us
that they got any kind of end or answer out of it. Also, the research done so far on the results of
the training indicates very strongly that results occur over time, that whatever occurs in the
training is an ongoing process, and that the only ingredients, necessary to keep that process going
after the training are the normal, everyday circumstances of life.
The most difficult part of this whole process for some people comes just after they complete the
training. And I'll tell you what, in part anyway, makes that so.

I remember the first time I swam underwater with a mask, in water clear enough to be able to
see. For three days afterwards, whenever I closed my eyes, I saw what I had seen underwater. I
talked about that experience to everybody; it had been very moving for me. Since then, I've had
one or two other experiences like that, and I've behaved the same way when they happened. Over
time, I'd integrate the experience, and instead of bringing it up all the time, I'd start bringing it up
only when it was appropriate. So, I think people's reactions when they first get out of the training
are related to that kind of enthusiasm for the experience they've had.

JOHN: Are you saying that what people get out of the training is equivalent to some kind of
enlightenment experience, that there are transcendental realizations, and that it's a substitute for
what we normally would think of as religious or spiritual goals?

WERNER: No. First. I wouldn't say that it's a substitute for anything, and second, I wouldn't say
that it's religious at all. I also think most religions aren't very religious. So with respect to the
religion issue, let's talk first about the practices associated with religion, then let's talk about the
"truth" of religion.
I don't think that the training has any of the practices of a religious exercise, at least not the way I
see religion being practiced. There is no worship in the training, no theological body of
knowledge, no particular dogma or code of beliefs to be propagated, and a long fist of other
differences which, I think, clearly distinguish the training from what we commonly think of as
religious practice.

Of course, the practices of religion are not the whole story of religion. There is also the "truth" of
religion, the "nature" of it, so to speak. Without getting into a long discourse on what religion
provides for people, my assertion is that the training provides a fundamentally different
experience from what religion is intended to provide. The training simply provides an
opportunity for people to discover, or in some cases recover, their own natural ability to
discriminate effectively between the different ways that you and I can know and can be.

People express a lot of things in the training, and the training is designed to deal with those
expressions so that people can get a different grip on them. For example, a person might find
himself or herself operating in life as if they were obliged in some way to respond to something
which to them seems real. As they participate in the training, they may discover that this
"something" is not a concrete reality at all but is only a memory, recent, distant, it doesn't matter;
it's still just a memory. That discovery allows the person to behave appropriately to the
"something" rather than inappropriately to it. We call that "completing the experience." What
occurs, simply, is a shift in the epistemological domain, from a place where there's no
discrimination about something to a place where there is discrimination. What is known is not
altered; the way it is known is altered.

So, to answer your question, I'd say that people in the training experience some enthusiasm,
which is natural; it happens to everybody not just in the training when they have an exciting
experience. Nothing pernicious about that. Then there's something like fervor, which can have
elements of perniciousness in it; and as far as we can tell, that's a phase through which many
people go but in which almost no one seems to get stuck. People seem to go through it fairly
quickly, but, unfortunately, with a very high profile. If we had our choice, we'd rather that phase
were a little more quiet.

JOHN: What I'm trying to get at is your view of whether or not what people get from the training
is somehow equivalent to what in Zen, for instance, would be called enlightenment.

WERNER: You're not going to trap me into saying that, because that's nonsense. It's the same
kind of nonsense that keeps people from realizing that they're already enlightened.

Here's an observation that I know will parallel what you've seen. People are willing to give up
anything to get enlightened. You and I both know people who've given up wealth, given up jobs,
families, their health people will give up anything to get enlightened. Give up talking, give up
sex, give up you name it, they will give it up. There's only one thing people will not give up to
get enlightened. They will do everything they know to hold on to this thing that they will not
give up no matter what. The one thing people will not give up to get enlightened is the idea that
they're not enlightened. That's the big holdout, not anything else.

JOHN: In the traditions there's a lot of warning about thinking that you're enlightened, that that's
one of the greatest dangers of them all.

WERNER: Yes, it is. Yes.

JOHN: It's equivalent. You could get that in two weekends?

WERNER: Yes, it is equivalent, and no, you can't get it in two weekends. If it takes two
weekends, you didn't get enlightened. Enlightenment does not take two weekends.
Enlightenment takes no time. The two weekends are a waste of time. If we could eliminate those,
and just have the enlightenment we would do that. By the way, I know that lots of people are
infuriated by the suggestion that enlightenment is possible without long practice and great
struggle. I consider the notion of the necessity of practice and struggle to be nothing more than a
notion. It may be a notion borne out by lots of experience, but so was the notion that the earth is
flat.

JOHN: Well, the Buddhists, for example, would say that your true nature is enlightened already,
but nonetheless, you still have to practice because there's a long path to realization. We can act as
though we're enlightened, but there's still some kind of realization that has to happen, over a long
period. You can even have enlightenment experiences, but they're not particularly trusted.

WERNER: I agree with everything you've said, and I'm not simply being nice about it. What you
said actually reflects my own experience and my own observations. At the same time, I know it's
possible to put the end of the process at the beginning, and then do the process.

JOHN: So, just to get it on the record, you are saying that the training does the same thing as the
spiritual traditions
WERNER: Discussing enlightenment or thinking about enlightenment is not enlightenment. In
fact, we don't talk about enlightenment in the training very much at all. We do talk about it, but
not much.

JOHN: I'm wondering why you're avoiding the question of whether this is the same kind of
enlightenment that's talked about in the spiritual traditions.

WERNER: Because those who know don't tell, and those who tell don't know.

DICK ANTHONY: I'd always heard that the training does seem to claim that it provides
something that is the equivalent of enlightenment, and is just as serious an experience, just as
serious or valuable a state as is provided in Zen or Hindu traditions, and I thought that that was
implausible, that it must be some kind of exaggeration.

WERNER: Well, I have never said that, nor would I say it.

DICK: But when I went through the training-

WERNER: Nor would I say the opposite was true.

DICK: When I went through the training, the trainer did in fact seem to be saying that. I don't
know if that was an eccentric trainer, but in fact, that was my understanding, and it was the
understanding of the other people in the training that I talked to, that this man was telling us that
what was happening to us was enlightenment, and was just as genuine an enlightenment as
happened in any Zen monastery or up in the Himalayas, and that there were no degrees of
enlightenment; it was enlightenment. Now, that seems like an outrageous claim to me; much of
what goes on in that training seems outrageous to me. Now, if I understand that to be what the
claim is, then I don't think that I agree with it.

WERNER: As far as I know, that claim is not made. I appreciate that you were there and I
wasn't. I still don't think it was made. The reason I don't think so is that I've listened to many
hours of trainers doing the training, and they don't make that claim. At the same time, I do
understand how you could come to that conclusion.

But none of that is the point. The point is this: I think that discussions about enlightenment are
useless, and I think making enlightenment sacred is even more futile. My question is, what's all
this conversation about?

What I'm trying to get across is that the structure of your questions and our conversation doesn't
allow for enlightenment. We're not really talking about anything. I don't know how else to
respond to you. You can't ask, "Is this enlightenment like that enlightenment?" That's counting
enlightenments. That's nuts! That's truly nuts!

JOHN: Would the training then be a substitute for any other spiritual practice?
WERNER: No! That's craziness, that one thing substitutes for another. In the realm of
enlightenment, there aren't substitutions. That kind of mentality can't hold enlightenment.

JOHN: Would there by any value, for example, in meditating and practicing

WERNER: One of our trainers is a Zen Buddhist. He goes away and spends long times sitting,
meditating and practicing.

JOHN: Why would he do that if he's done the training?

WERNER: He would do that because he's done the training. Look, can't you hear what you're
saying? You keep saying that one thing substitutes for another thing; your notions about
enlightenment are all tied up with exclusivity and ideas about "one path" and "if this, then why
that?" and ideas that there's someplace to get to. None of that is the way enlightenment works.
You need to go back to whomever is talking to you about enlightenment and get them to talk to
you about it some more. You're talking about it inaccurately. I'm not kidding. In Suzuki Roshi's
book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, he said if you are enlightened, then you're out doing what
enlightens people. Enlightenment is not a stage you reach, and your statements seem to come
from the idea that enlightenment is a place you reach. There's no such thing as enlightenment to
get to.

JOHN: Where my question comes from is my perception of some people I've seen-

WERNER: The arrogance.

JOHN: Yes, and smugness, like: "We've done it. This is it, you don't need to do any of that other
stuff. This is the whole thing."

WERNER: No, no, no, no. I can't imagine anybody saying that they don't need to do that other
stuff, since people who've completed the training we poll them every once in a while to find out
what they're doing report that they are doing all that other stuff.

Half the room here has taken the training. Right here in this room are those arrogant people
you're talking about. I want to find the person who says to me, "This is the only thing." All I can
find are people who say, "I know people who say that this is the only thing." They've got to be
talking about somebody and I'm trying to find that person. The people in here who have
completed the training don't think that it's the only thing. I certainly don't think it is.

So let me try to answer in this way. The arrogance that you perceive, I think, is there. The degree
to which you think it's there, I don't think it's there. That is to say, I don't think it's something to
be overly concerned about, but maybe that's because I've watched people from the time they get
out of the training. I go out of my way to make sure I have interactions with people who
completed the training early, in 1971, '72, '73, and '74, just to watch what's happening to those
people. I had a gathering in the country to which we invited those people. The result was very
interesting. I could remember when those people were talking about the training, and "the
training" was every third word. This time nobody even mentioned it. Yes, they looked great: they
talked about the things they were doing, and how wonderful things were; but nobody mentioned
the training.

It's like the stink of Zen. There's the stink of est. The question is not whether the stink exists, but
whether it's pernicious and whether it's long lasting. As far as I can tell, the answer is no to both
questions. I keep watching, because there's always the possibility for the answer to become yes.

As to the discussion about the real nature of it, is it really enlightenment yes, it's really
enlightenment. So is sitting in a room. Here. This is enlightenment. You think I'm just saying
that. I actually mean it. You think that's some philosophy. It isn't. I think many enlightenment
games are pointless because they're all about getting enlightened. Getting enlightened is a cheat,
because the more you do of that, the more the message is that you aren't enlightened. Clearly, the
practice is necessary. The practice of enlightenment is necessary, but it can be done from being
enlightened, rather than getting enlightened. When you do the practice from being enlightened,
then each one of the steps becomes a step in the expression of the enlightenment.

JOHN: What's the difference between being "totally enlightened" and just believing that you're
enlightened?

WERNER: The primary difference, technically, is that each exists in a different domain.
Believing that you're enlightened exists in the epistemological domain of belief. It's totally
different from being enlightened, which exists in an epistemological domain that I call
abstraction or context. The language structures of belief and the epistemological domain of belief
are insufficient to apprehend the domain of context or abstraction. The opposite, however, is not
true; the domain of context or abstraction does include the structures of belief.

PAUL REISMAN: During The est Training, the trainer frequently calls the trainees "assholes."
Doesn't calling people assholes tell them that they're not enlightened, or don't you intend it that
way?

WERNER: First of all, no, calling people anything doesn't necessarily make any statement about
their state of enlightenment. If I call you an asshole in the context of your being enlightened, it
enlightens you. If I call you an asshole to get you enlightened because you aren't enlightened, it
endarkens you.
None of us understands very much about the power of context. It's useful to distinguish between
believing that something is so and its actually being so, because the belief in that thing which is
so is totally different from its so-ness. As a matter of fact, the belief that something is so keeps
you from experiencing its being so. It actually ceases to be so, because you've got a barrier
between you and it; and the barrier is your belief that it's so. A belief in the truth is not the truth;
yet the same thing, without the belief, is the truth.

JOHN: Maybe it's only the fervent followers who ' have just graduated, but it seems to me that a
lot of people who have taken the training say some of them have that belief, the belief that
they're enlightened. How does the training cut through that?

WERNER: Well, first, I'd like to leave open the possibility that some of what you have perceived
as arrogance is not, in fact, arrogance. It may be, but I want to leave open the possibility that it
isn't. Second, although you haven't said it, it is clear you have a very strong belief, very strong
belief, that people who take the training are not enlightened.

JOHN: I don't know whether it's a belief; it's more a sense that they're on a trip about it.

WERNER: Okay. That's true, too. You have a sense of it. But preceding the sense, before you
ever got to have any sense of it, you believe very powerfully and deeply that they are not
enlightened, or that it's not possible to be enlightened that way, or some such belief.

JOHN: Well, if we get into the metaphysics of it, then we would have to-

WERNER: No, we don't have to get into the metaphysics; I'm talking about something really
simple. You believe that those people are not enlightened and your belief is a matter of fact, not a
matter of metaphysics.

JOHN: In the absolute sense, we're all enlightened.

WERNER: Never mind that part of it. I'm talking about the belief. You believe that those people
aren't enlightened. And that's a very strongly held belief for you.

JOHN: I'm wondering how est deals with the fact that people walk around believing that they're
enlightened.

WERNER: Oh, I leave room for it, number one. Because they're enlightened. It really is
perfectly appropriate if enlightened people happen to believe they're enlightened.

JOHN: But you said that belief also keeps them from being enlightened.

WERNER: Yes. That's right; it becomes a barrier, but that's okay. Enlightened people can and do
have many barriers. I have many barriers, and I'm clearly enlightened, aren't I?

JOHN: We got you to say it!

DICK: We got it on the tape.

WERNER: I really did a better job when I was kidding about it, but to answer the question the
way you want me to answer it people who complete the training and believe they are enlightened
are still enlightened. They are, in addition to being enlightened, simply moving through that
specific expression of being enlightened called believing you're enlightened. Believing you're
enlightened when you are enlightened is an entirely different phenomenon from believing you're
enlightened when you're not.

I know it might not make sense to you, but it is possible that people who have been through the
training are actually enlightened, and then, from being enlightened, they may go through the
steps of achieving enlightenment. I know you don't believe that. I don't want you to believe it. I
do want you to allow that it's possible; that when people go through this silly little thing called
the training, they actually come out enlightened; and that what you observe afterwards is the
process of the expression of their enlightenment. I know you know it's impossible, but I just want
you to keep it open as a possibility.

JOHN: They were enlightened already, right?

WERNER: No, no, no, no. They were not enlightened until they got into the training. Now
remember, I didn't say that was true, I said I want you to entertain that possibility.
By the way, I want you to know that I think that one of the things that makes the training potent
is that there are some things in it which are very accurate. If you try to practice medicine with the
idea that people are sick because of spirits, you have a certain amount of success; but if you
practice medicine with the idea that people are sick because there are microbes and viruses
which can't be seen, you have greater success. You see, there's something workable about being
accurate, and there's a lot of inaccuracy in life, some of which can actually be made accurate
even by people like you and me, unenlightened people.

PAUL: Would you say something now about what the training is, what it's supposed to do, and
how it does it?

WERNER: The training is 60 hours long, done in four days of roughly 15 hours each. The
trainers are virtually all people with professional backgrounds, people who are already highly
accomplished, in the sense in which society generally considers people highly accomplished.
After a person decides he or she is going to be a trainer, it takes an average of two and a half to
three years to actually become one. Trainer candidates work at their training all the time they
become immersed so, in effect, it's more like a five year program.

I'll briefly describe a few parts of The est Training. The first part is designed to let people see
that some of the things which they say they "know" to be true, they only believe to be true, and
that there's a distinction between what you believe and what's true. The first day is designed to
give people an opportunity to recognize that they have lots of pretense in their lives, and that
they're pretending they don't. They're pretending, for instance, that their marriage works; or that
they want to do the work they do; or that their life works, to say it in general terms, and then on
top of all that, they're pretending that they're not pretending at all.

In the first part of the second day, people see that there's a distinction between concepts about
living and the experience of living, and they discover that they have not been experiencing life;
they've been conceptualizing life.

For instance, people begin to observe that the idea, "I love my wife," is different from the
experience, "I love my wife;" that for the most part, they live with the idea of something and
very infrequently have the experience of it. They also discover that the experience of something
has a much different outcome than the idea of something.

The last portion of the second day is called the "danger process." About 25 trainees stand at the
front of the room, facing the other 225, with the instruction to do nothing but just be there, just
standing. While standing there, of course, they begin to notice all of the thoughts, fears,
concerns, pretenses, and the like which they carry with them all the time, which have come to be
even somewhat automatic, and which seriously impair their ability to be with other people. The
people standing there end up doing everything except nothing, and in the process they start to see
that.

The process is very, very useful for them. It becomes clear to them that they've got an act, a
mechanism, a collection of behaviors and actions and feelings and thoughts that may not be who
they really are after all. They see it for themselves. It isn't something you're told by someone
else. You see it yourself, and it is undeniably clear and undeniably true about you. And it opens
up whole new possibilities for ways of being. It reveals a fundamental inauthenticity about our
mode of living, and allows for the possibility of authentic living.

After everybody has been up front and has watched everyone else being up front, they sit down
and close their eyes. From previous parts of the training they're able to become quickly and
accurately aware of what they're experiencing; now what they become aware of about
themselves can be frightening, because they realize that what's driving their behaviors is their
fear of people.

Macho men find out that they're macho because they're afraid, a discovery they make for
themselves. People who are stupid or intelligent or sexy find out that they are stupid or
intelligent or sexy because they are afraid of other people. You find out that you're the way you
are because you're afraid.

At some point there's a breakthrough, and people get the joke. The joke is that other people look
frightening to you because they are frightened. The boss is the boss because he's afraid; just like
you're whatever you are because you're afraid. In the environment of the training, this becomes a
major breakthrough experience for people, and it makes life profoundly different.

One of the things that I think it is very important for you to know is that while we present the
training to large groups, it is totally individualized. If there are 250 people in the training, there
are 250 different trainings. That's one of the beauties of the training. It's tailor made for each
person. If you are the kind of person who can't handle much emotion, you just don't have much
emotion in the training. It's that simple. And yet, it works for you.

Very little of the training is done at you as an individual, and if it is, it’s clearly done that way to
illustrate some point. In the moment, you might not remember that, but after you sit down it’s
very clear to you that you have contributed a useful example for everyone, and the truth of the
matter is, it doesn't make any difference whether you stand up or I stand up in an interaction with
the trainer; the example is useful to both of us.

The training has acquired a reputation of harshness, and in some cases crudeness. I am not going
to say that trainers in the training are not straight and honest with people if they need to be, but
the accusations of harshness, crudeness, authoritarianism and the like are largely propagated by
people who have not directly experienced the training, and in all these accounts, one thing is
always left out: the compassion in the training.
I know because I'm the guy who trained the people who are leading the training that the training
is done with absolute compassion, and that toughness, when and if it occurs, including calling
people assholes, comes from a deep respect for people, from an intention to get straight with
them, with absolutely no intention to demean them. As a matter of fact, in terms of results,
people are not demeaned; they are enhanced.

The training is done with what might be called ruthless compassion, but it's done with
compassion,. And it's done with a real sense of the dignity of human beings not the ordinary
social grease called "respect for each other," but a really deep kind of respect, the kind of respect
that lets you know you'd be willing to be in the trenches with the person alongside you. It is a
really empowering thing to discover that you've been relating to the people you love out of the
concept of love, and denying yourself the experience of love, and sometimes you've got to be
very intrusive with people to get that up on the mat. But I tell you, that comes from a respect for
them, and a commitment to them.

I want to tell you one thing that I think is kind of funny. I have a constitution that makes going to
the bathroom not very important to me. I go to the bathroom about as often as anybody else does,
except that if I'm doing something interesting, I just don't go. I was the only person who did the
training in the beginning, so the sessions would go on forever, because I never felt like going to
the bathroom. People were studying how I was doing the training, and they figured that this not
going to the bathroom was a very important part of it. I mean, it's just so stupid, because it's
literally that silly people had those great theories about deprivation and whatnot. Nobody
bothered to say, "Hey, Werner, what about going to the bathroom?" I'd have said, "Well, go if
you've got to."

I also don't need a lot of sleep, so the trainings would go long into the night. The people in the
training needed a lot of sleep, but I didn't. So we trained a lot of people who were asleep during
the training, but it works just as well whether you're asleep or awake.

DICK: So you really don't think that those features are an essential part of the training?

JOHN: Why do you maintain it then? Why not just let it go?

WERNER: Oh, in part we have let it go. There's an automatic break every four hours now. We
keep doing the training an average of 15 hours a day because if we did it in any less time per day,
it would take more than the four days, which are already a problem for some people.

That should give you some idea of the spirit of the training. I think it would take more time than
we want to spend here to describe the whole thing.

By the way, let me tell you something about whether the training is authoritarian. Go into a
prison and not be part of the system and get into a room with inmates where there are no guards,
and I want to see you be authoritarian. We've done the training in San Quentin Prison with no
guards in a room with prisoners, 250 of them and five of us. And the training works
spectacularly. It works just as well in Israel as it does in New York City. It works just as well in
Davenport, Iowa, as in Los Angeles. It works as well with Harvard professors as it does with I
don't know. What's the opposite of a Harvard professor?

NEVITT SANFORD: A Yale professor.

BRUCE FIREMAN: Do you think that the people on the staff of Werner Erhard and Associates
have the frame of mind in which they can assess your actions, and should your actions be bad for
the goals you're trying to promote, that they would get rid of you and carry on the work without
you? Are there procedures in place by which -

WERNER: They don't need any procedures. They don't need to get rid of me. You see, I have no
authority.

BRUCE: But could they, if they did need to get rid of you?

WERNER: I don't wonder about it. I know that they would do that, and could do that, and as a
matter of fact, since the organization's inception they've always had the wherewithal to do it,
because I never held any position of authority. I had no formal authority, my power in the
organization was exactly equal to my ability to be useful to the people in the organization.

The actual fact about it is that I do have a lot of authority, and I consider the authority to be
counter productive. I don't like authority it just doesn't work. It's nowhere near potent enough for
the kinds of things that I'm interested in achieving.

So we've worked at the job of undermining my position of authority. When you have authority
with people, they can't hear you. They can neither hear whether you're saying nonsense, nor can
they hear whether you're saying something useful.

So, that's a problem for us, as it is in any organization, and it's a problem that I think we have
dealt with. We have forums for people to express themselves; the first "rule" as a staff member is
to agree to open, honest, and complete communication. We have structures to support people
when they don't feel powerful enough to make those communications. We have an ombudsman
who's paid to keep whatever he or she hears in strict confidence, and whose job it is to make sure
that a staff member is not damaged by any communication addressed to another staff member.

We don't think that any of those things are necessary, because we don't think we operate in ways
that will damage anyone. But we think that it's possible for staff members, when they're looking
for an excuse not to be responsible, to say to themselves, "Hey, I can't tell the truth here, because
I'll get in trouble." So we've just destroyed the opportunity to use that as an excuse. There's no
way that you as a staff member cannot say exactly what's on your mind, because there are so
many systems to protect you.

So, yes, I get called to task. I don't get called to task often, because I happen to be able to operate
with a lot of accuracy. I also have one other endearing quality. When I make a mistake I get off it
fast. Maybe that’s not an endearing quality-
ROGER WALSH: One of the purposes of this group that's interviewing you is to try to delineate
some guidelines for what constitutes beneficent versus harmful groups and teachers. You've been
through myriad groups and trainings of one type or another, and certainly met a lot of people
claiming to be teachers over the last 20 years. What would you tell us, or what would you tell
anyone, about how to differentiate between beneficent and harmful teachers and groups?

WERNER: This question is something that I feel a responsibility for, first off because of my own
opportunities and the opportunities of my associates, and also because of the larger issue. The
whole issue of leadership, authority, etc., seems to me to be a basic problem in our society - any
society.

When the source of the authority lies outside of those with whom the authority is exercised,
you've got the beginnings of a possible problem. You're not necessarily going to definitely wind
up with a problem, but you'd damn well better be careful. See, if Dick is the leader of the group,
and is its leader because God has given Dick a mission, and God is not directly available to the
rest of us to discuss Dick's designation, that for me is the harbinger of a problem. If Dick's
authority is based on anything that is inaccessible to the rest of the people in the group, then I am
concerned.

The times when I'm least concerned are when Dick's authority and then I would not call it
authority is in the hands of the people with whom the authority or power is being exercised,
when it's clear to everybody that this is the case. I think you can con people into agreeing with
your position of authority, but you can only con them if they don't know that they are the source
of your authority. I think that if you're attempting to avoid the evils of authoritarianism, one of
the things that should happen is that the people in the group should be very clear that there is no
natural leader; that there are people who have natural leadership qualities, but that doesn't make
any of them the leader. There is no outside authority which is unavailable to the people in the
group selecting the leader; the group is empowering the people who are being empowered.

One of the other things and this one is a lot more subtle, so I think a lot more dangerous is the
prevailing intellectual level or the prevailing epistemological domain, the realm of knowing that
prevails in the group. If that realm of knowing is conceptual - ideas, beliefs, slogans that for me
is almost certainly going to wind up with a problem someplace. If it doesn't, somebody is going
to have to be working really hard to make sure that it doesn't become a problem. It's almost a
natural disaster.

When I see that conceptualization, though present, exists within a larger epistemological domain
that I call experience, I'm then a lot more relaxed, because if somebody tries to say, for instance,
that Jews are bad, and in the group it's agreed upon that we verify things in our experience, I'm
not so concerned that whoever is trying to get that one across is going to prevail. If experience is
allowed, and if experience is recognized and respected, then I have less concern.

I begin to have almost no concern when in addition to the domain of concept or explanation and
that of experience or process, there the domain of context or creation. It's a aim in which people,
look not only at what they think, but at the realm in which their thinking takes place. Attitude is
certainly there in this realm, and allowed and appreciated and a change or process of attitudes is
respected, but when the group deals in the epistemological domain of the context of attitudes
then I become even less concerned.

BRUCE: One of the things that you referred to Earlier was that people were too deferent to your
authority. That's something that everybody notices, these charges that people are rather slavish in
their adulation of you. I want you to talk about the specific changes that you're making that will
reduce the excessive deference or adulation.

WERNER: We all know that a hundred thousand people can't love one person. If they could,
nobody would be able to observe them doing it, because that isn't possible in the structure
through which we'd look at the situation. If what's occurring is actually what it's concluded to be
slavish adulation I want somebody to explain why it nurtures those people, because adulation
doesn't nurture people. It only makes them right; it does not nurture them. People who are
adulating don't get healthier, they don't get more self-expressive they don't get more capable. The
people who are supposed to adulate me are healthy, expressive, able, and capable. I'd like to
suggest to you that the way you're looking at it is a part of the evil that you're looking at it in a
way that says: "These are the alternatives: pick one."

BRUCE: I'm asking you how you're looking at the matter, and what you're doing about it.

WERNER: I'm going to get to that.

BRUCE: We've had person after person come in here from different groups and tell us about
how their relationship with their leader has empowered them people who were in fact very
slavish in their adulation of that leader they were set on fire; they were "empowered;" they went
out and "dealt" with their problems. We've seen this time and time again. Now, in order to
accomplish your goals for people, which is that you want them to be empowered and not slavish,
you're making changes in your organization. I want to know what problems you see, and how
those changes are going to contribute to the relationship between you and your underlings in the
organization

WERNER: See, but that's the whole problem.

BRUCE: Well, perhaps I'm using the wrong word. But rather than make an issue of my words –

WERNER: I'm not making an issue of the words you use. I'm making the system from which the
words are derived the problem. Given the system, I can't answer the question. You see, it's not
simply the words you're using that are the problem. What I want to convey to you is this: In the
assumptions from which you are asking the question, you allow for no truthful answer to the
question. The words you use reflect your assumptions accurately, and given your assumptions,
there's no solution to the problem. One cannot solve the problem in the system you are using. In
fact, that system is the problem.

Now, I'm going to answer your question, because, you know, I came here and agreed to do that,
but I want to tell you the truth before I answer the question. So I'm telling you that my answer
will make no sense if you listen to the answer in that system from which you asked the question.
The answer is that the organization has for several years been shifting away from a structure that
has a central place or a top place from which decisions are made and passed on. We always tried
not to operate that way, and over the years we've become more and more successful at not
operating that way. The structure of just about any ordinary organization, however, is that way.
So when you're trying to go left in a structure that's going right, you can't get very far. We
recognized that what needed to happen was what we called a transformation of the structure,
because no matter what our intentions were, as long as they were being expressed in a structure
of authority, we would not achieve our ends.

The structure we have in mind is a network of people, the center of which is wherever you are.
Decisions get made locally. By contrast, if we're all operating as a hierarchical organization, you
know, you might be the boss; you'd tell us what to do. We tell you what's going on; you tell us
what to do. In a system which is network like rather than pyramidal, what gets done in any given
spot gets decided at the spot. The information flows to there from all over that network, and the
information from there flows all over the network.

This is something that I've been studying now for two and a half years, and I actually think we've
come up with some breakthroughs. est came to an end this year [1981], literally went out of
existence, because we're evolving into a network and we wanted to put the old organizational
model to bed. So, for instance, the Master Therapist program is done by the entity called Werner
Erhard and Associates in a partnership with Dr. Robert Shaw, who's a psychiatrist. Lots of
programs are done as partnerships, and more will be done that way in the future, where our
network will be affiliated with other networks.

Just let me cover a couple more things very quickly. We started a pilot program in 1981 in San
Francisco with a thousand people, a workshop on community in which we've been developing a
program to be made available around the country and around the world, so that people in any
community can work on the community - make community their business.

The Hunger Project, which was really created by people who have taken The est Training but is
now much larger than est graduates, has two million people who've enrolled.

The Breakthrough Foundation works in international development in rural villages and urban
ghettos, on the thesis that self-sufficiency is never achieved unless there's individual and societal
transformation. We feel we've developed a technology that allows people to effect those
transformations for themselves, independent of any outside personality.

By the way, many of these organizations are wholly independent of Werner Erhard and
Associates.

DICK: That seems like a natural conclusion to that line of questioning. Another line to consider
will take a minute to develop. I know people who work for your organization, or in it, and what
they seem to have in common is that they work very hard and very long hours, and that they
don't have much going on in their lives except est. Now, a certain kind of fantasy about est gets
set off by this fact. It combines with other things I seem to have noticed about est: It is a very
rapidly expanding organization; it has very high ambitions in terms of wanting to transform the
society or perhaps the world; it hopes to be able to end hunger in a certain number of years, and
other things that seem implausible from a normal frame of reference; it proselytizes very
forcefully, with very great energy. Putting all those things together, it's easy to view est as a
group of people with a self involved, very convoluted system of beliefs that achieve their
plausibility by the apparent ability of est to grow very rapidly.

WERNER: So that growth backs up the belief, appears to back up the belief.

DICK: Yes, so people feel that they're really somehow achieving something important with
respect to their own consciousness. Now, what would happen if suddenly est peaked, and some
of the plausibility structure started to break down? Some of the other groups that we've looked at
have really only gotten into trouble when it started to look as if they weren't going to change the
world after all, and as if the system that, people had been devoting themselves to whole heartedly
for five, ten, or fifteen years wasn't really omnipotent. The whole shared group fantasy started to
break apart, and things got crazy. Could you respond to that?

WERNER: I know everybody's trying to be polite, and I appreciate your being nice about it. But,
you see, it's not just trying to be polite, and it's not just trying to be nice about it; it's a flat out lie.
And language carried on in lies, even if they're well meaning lies, leads you to inaccurate
conclusions.

What offends me is our willingness to carry on the conversation without getting at the truth of it.
I think there's a very big possibility of missing some of the real power and value in the work that
we are doing and in the whole development of that work, if you attempt to force it into the
categories which you bring to it to try to understand it, because est is really about the very nature
of your inquiry. The est Training is aimed at grasping the categories with which one deals with
the world. It's not aimed at what one puts into those categories.

You assume that the long hours and the high commitment of staff members must be brought
about by some great vision. I deny that that's true. That isn't why I work long hours. I'm very
committed I say "committed" and I know the thought that goes through people's minds: "He
believes in what he's doing." I don't believe in what I'm doing at all. I have absolutely no belief
in what I'm doing. I already know how it's going to turn out. I know it's going to turn out exactly
as it turns out. It's been doing that for eons.

So you say, "But then, Werner, what's your motive, what the hell are you working all those hours
for?" I'm not motivated. There isn't any motive. There's no damn vision motivating me. You
know, if I stopped doing it tomorrow, it wouldn't make one bit of difference, and if I keep doing
it right to the end, it won't make any difference. The only thing that's going to happen is what
happens.

Now, that doesn't fit into our structure, into our categories. We know that you don't get up in the
morning unless you've got a motive. That's a great explanation. Maybe you can explain people's
behavior, but you can't do one thing to bring an ounce of wholeness and completeness into
people's lives with that theory, because the theory is essentially a theory of explanation and
doesn't get at the cause of things.

So I don't have a vision. I'm not selling some ideal. I don't know where I'm going. I know where
I'm coming from. And I think that the people on the staff know where they're coming from. I
think it's a great excitement to them to discover where that takes them, day by day, week by
week. It's why we don't have any problem throwing things out. See, if my life is about where I'm
going to get to, and you make me change, then you've upset me. If my life is about where I'm
coming from, change is no problem if I'm starting at the end, and going then through the process,
instead of going through the process to get to the end.

So why do people work long hours? They work long hours because there's work to be done, and
doing the work is very satisfying. I didn't say it was easy, or pleasant; I said it was satisfying.
They work long hours because in that opportunity they experience the opportunity to make a
difference. Not to make things different, see, but to make a difference. They experience the
opportunity of being able to be useful and they don't experience that opportunity in a lot of
places in the world.

DICK: You're saying, I think, that est people won't flip out and get crazy if the world isn't
transformed, because they don't have a certain point of view about how the world is going to be
transformed; they don't have a belief structure that has to be confirmed.

WERNER: That's right.

DICK: I think that's valid. I think that that is a difference between est and some of the other
groups that we've seen.

WERNER: The other thing is that they don't think they're "good;" therefore, they're not made
crazy by somebody saying they're bad. I don't think The est Training is good. I don't think it's
righteous, I don't think it's God's work. God is not talking to me personally any differently than
She talks to everybody. You know, there's no great mission. Or, yes, there is a great mission, but
it's the great mission everybody is on. We have no private access to the mission and no special
knowledge about the mission.

By the way, before est I was an expert in motivation. In the realm of motivation experts, one
measures expertise by income. Given my income, before est, I was an expert in motivation. That
was my business. At one time, I was fairly clear, I was one of the few people in the country who
knew what motivation was. I knew it "up on the line" my income depended on being able to
teach it to people. Ultimately motivation is counterproductive, because inherent in it is the
message that you're not. It teaches you that you're not, and it reinforces that you're not. Even
achieving that towards which you were motivated just seals the fact that you're not.

So, for example, if you examine intelligent people particularly people who wear their
intelligence on their coat sleeves and you get down underneath it, you find invariably that they
are intelligent to avoid being stupid. Invariably, when intelligence is not nurturing, it is a device
for overcoming something, it is a motivated kind of intelligence. In my experience and in my
observation, intelligence is a natural expression of self. One's self is intelligent.
I don't mean that we should throw all motivation out, because motivation is useful as an interim
device, as something through which to go, something to master. But ultimately motivation is a
true exercise of authoritarianism. Our whole society is based on it, and I say that people are not
freed by the values of this society, or ennobled by them; they're dominated by them. And nobody
is really teaching anybody about the science and the technology and art of coming from.

The thing which is really difficult and we notice this a lot in the work that we're doing in
development around the world is that people cannot believe that there is something that moves
people other than motivation. There's just no possibility of ontology being behind it. That is not
held as possible. Therefore, if you see somebody moving, by God, they've got to be up to
something. They've got to be moving towards something. It can't be that they're just moving.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO: Doesn't The Hunger Project have a vision?

WERNER: Yes. I suggest that if you read what we call the "source document" for The Hunger
Project, you would see both that what I've just said is true and that they have a vision the vision
doesn't preclude what I just said.

The Hunger Project's mission is to create a context for the end of hunger. Now, to do only that
would be half assed, if you will. Therefore, you have to face up to also creating a goal, the end of
hunger; but it's the context which is The Hunger Project's job, and in the context "the end of
hunger," what is is the expression of the end of hunger. Therefore you don't fail, in the context.

PHILIP: But you could fail in that vision.

WERNER: Yes. You can fail and - no, you know you will fail in the objectives. One hopes not to
fail ultimately, but one knows one will fail in the objectives. That's a part of the expression of a
context of succeeding. In the context of succeeding, failure is contained; therefore, failure is not
invalidating. Failure doesn't destroy anything. As a matter of fact, it forwards things. Errors are
important. They're how you get there. Mistakes are the path.

I'll tell you the one thing that burns our people out. It's when they think they got it. It starts to
happen at exactly that moment when they figure they have it made, they have it together, they
understand it now. And it's so deadly, it's really sad. They may go on to be very successful, but
their success never has the quality of making a difference again.

JOHN: Do they come out of it?

WERNER: Some do. The jury's still out on some, and I think some won't. And you see, it's very
clear to me that everybody will. So I'm now talking in that context. Maybe this time around,
some won't, but ultimately we all will.

Published in The Network Review, Volume 1 Number 4, September 1983. Reprinted by special
arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1920 13th Street, Boulder, CO 80302. This
article is excerpted from the book, Spiritual Standards for New Age Groups and Therapies,
edited by Dick Anthony, Bruce Ecker and Ken Wilber, published Spring 1984.

© Copyright 2008 - 2010 Werner Erhard