Est what is it

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 est 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 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.

All of us who are given credit for being intelligent have feelings, thoughts, etc. All of us who are given credit for being wonderful have doubts. In my observation which includes a fairly intimate interaction with over 90, 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 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 est 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. 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 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.

Let us locate all of these components of experience within the square in figure 1. It chronicles the history of Werner Erhard , his life, the world of the est Training and his work and ideas, all put into perspective through the dozens of stories told by numerous professional and academic experts. Werner Erhard has already changed his life. Outcome Study of The est Training. What is est? An est publication. The est Training in Prisons. Earl Babbie - est in Prisons.

History of The est Training. The Mind's Dedication To Survival. Report on The est Training , Humberto Maturana. Images of the est Training and Werner Erhard. Erhard Seminars Training - Reunion. Peter Gabriel speaks about Werner Erhard and the est Training. I Got It! Did You? Aphorism from est at work today: "Health is a function of participation".

Werner Erhard and Gonneke Spits in India, Lance Reddick talks about working his way up to 'White House Down' : While the est training is no longer offered, it continues to have an impact on the lives of those who took the training, as is shown in this article about the actor Lance Reddick, " Reddick thinks his period with est Erhard Seminars Training - especially a workshop on communication - lent him the ability to ace those early auditions.

My participation had a profound effect on my acting later, and my ability as a seminar leader allowed me to fill in the gaps in my training that I didn't have in auditioning," he explains. When I did est and that was over - I didn't want to think it - but I was thinking, 'What the heck was that? I want my money back. But there was something there that I was curious about, so I kept participating," he says, sipping a glass of water.

I'm shy, an introvert. I was so withdrawn, so self-conscious, but when I came out I was 'Whoa! Werner Erhard and The est Training. The est Training on YouTube. Transformation Film DVD contains rare footage of est seminars. Gonneke Spits on the est Training. Erhard Seminars Training Financial Times. Curriculum Vitae Current Work Connect with others who have done the est training on facebook. The best place to find Werner Erhard's ideas at work for personal and professional training and development is at Landmark.

Over 40 years later est continues to have an impact. Jerome Rabow Ph. Professor Hubert Dreyfus writes, " Moreover, this truth contains radically new insights into the nature of human beings. Werner Erhard on the work of transformation. The est Experience. Werner Erhard Foundation.

Werner H. Visit the website about Werner Erhard and The est Training and participate in a reunion of the ideas, distinctions, and experiences of the est Training.

Erhard Seminars Training.