Soil and Health Library This document is a reproduction of the book or other copyrighted material you requested. It was prepared on Tuesday, 27 August 2013 for the exclusive use of Joe Welsh, whose email address is [email protected] This reproduction was made by the Soil and Health Library only for the purpose of research and study. Any further distribution or reproduction of this copy in any form whatsoever constitutes a violation of copyrights. Werner Erhard The transformation of a man: The founding of est By William Warren Bartley, III Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. / Publishers New York Distributed by Crown Publishers Copyright © 1978 by William Warren Bartley, III Remarks, original quotations, letters, and literary material by Werner Erhard, copyright © 1978 by Werner Erhard All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., One Park Avenue, New York, N.V. 10016 Printed in the United States of America Published simultaneously in Canada by General Publishing Company Limited First edition Designed by Robert Bull Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bartley, William Warren, 1934— Werner Erhard: the transformation of a man, the founding of est 1. Erhard, Werner, 1935- 2. Erhard seminars training. 3. Psychologists—United States—Biography. RC489.E7B37 158 [B] RC489.E7B37 158 [B] 78-8990 ISBN 0-517-53502-5 Second Printing, November 1978 For Robert Larzelere, M.D. Contents Foreword by Werner Erhard xi Introduction xiii PART I Shadow Play 1 Donning the Mask 3 In Search of Who One Really Is Joe and Dorothy and Their Boy Werner as Oedipus An Interior Dialogue Begins 2 Son and Mother 17 A Chip Off the Old Block The Lacrosse Accident Dependence and Independence 3 Gregarious and Alone 27 Quiet Desperation Pat 4 Derailed 39 Doing the Right Thing A Family Man Selling Cars Victor/Victim Jack Frost Meets June Bryde PART II Education 5 Out to Beat the Game 57 Down and Out in Saint Louis Intersection 1 Motivation and Self-image Psychology Breaking Down the Fixed Reality Intersection 2 Hypnosis To Spokane: A New Beginning in the Book Business Casting Off the Victim's Position: First Breakthrough 6 Conversion 91 Into California Intersection 3 Maslow and Rogers: Human Potential and Determinism Conversion in Beverly Hills Enlightenment Lost 7 Quest 115 Twice Born In Search of Enlightenment Intersection 4 Zen The Zen Art of Bookselling 8 Experiments 138 Perpetration The Dale Carnegie Course Subud and the Martial Arts Change: Stopping and Starting Intersection 5 Scientology Mind Dynamics PART III Transformation 9 True Identity 165 Once upon a Freeway Three Tasks Ellen Starting the est Training 10 Philosophy 179 A Ladder to the Self Proteus/Chameleon/God/Mother The Mind State To Ego The Ecology of Transformation 11 Training 197 The Training The Morality of Transformation Social Transformation PART IV Completion 12 One Big Family 225 Meanwhile in Philadelphia. Hard Times The Prodigal Son Returns Thanksgiving: One Family 13 On an Airplane, Flying East 46 Puppets Playing Out Instructions With Dignity, and Without Righteousness You Can't Go West Forever Forgiveness Epilogue 253 Appendix: A Philosopher's Evaluation of the est Training 259 Notes 269 Acknowledgments 275 Foreword BY WERNER ERHARD This book tells the story of my life. Much of it is in my words, and in the words of my family and friends and close associates in est, as they talked with the author, my friend Bill Bartley. As he explains, I don't think that the story of my life, my personal drama, is very important. The painter Georgia O'Keeffe put it perfectly when she said, "Where I was born and where and how I have lived are unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest." While I have a past, I am not my past. I recognize, however, that people are interested, and since a story will eventually be written, I want to support its being presented accurately. I am particularly pleased that Bill wanted to write this story. I had read his biography of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and knew that he was able to weave together the story of a life and the abstractions in terms of which a life takes place. As I read through the manuscript, I was struck by the quotation from Kierkegaard that Bill uses to open the fifth chapter. It seems to pierce to the heart of what happened: "What our age needs is education. And so this is what happened: God chose a man who also needed to be educated, and educated him privatissime, so that he might be able to teach others from his own experience." I truly did need to be educated. And God did take me and educate me—unconventionally, and very privately: for a long time no one, including myself, knew that anything was happening. This is what did happen. Introduction Convictions and ideas came to him, so to speak, from the subsoil. He had a prophetic sympathy with the dawning sentiments of the age, with the mood of the dumb majority. His way of thinking and feeling represented the true America, and represented in a measure the whole ultra-modern, radical world. —George Santayana (on William James) I first heard about est on a rainy afternoon in March 1972, in the office of a medical doctor in Berkeley. I was at that time living in Pennsylvania, was visiting in California for a few months, and had sought out the doctor on the advice of a friend. My complaint was simple. I had had insomnia for nine years, and had been taking sleeping pills and tranquilizers daily since the spring of 1963. One becomes habituated to these drugs—their effect wears off—and it was time for a change. I asked the doctor, an attentive vibrantly youthful man in middle age, to prescribe a new sleeping pill for me. His eyes sparkled with amusement. He told me that he would be happy to prescribe some sleeping pills for me if that was what I wanted. "You don't have to take sleeping pills. You don't have to have insomnia." he told me. What I could do, he explained, was to take a training course in San Francisco. It lasted two weekends; it cost only a few hundred dollars. And on completing it I would no longer have insomnia. What the doctor said sounded preposterous. I had already taken my insomnia to psychoanalysts. I had had a Freudian analysis, and also a Jungian analysis. Both had benefited me, and neither had touched the insomnia. During my Freudian analysis I explored my childhood memories and my sexuality. And at night when I could not sleep I thought about sex. During my Jungian analysis I explored archetype and symbol in my own existence. And at night when I could not sleep I would think about archetype and symbol. I had spent thousands on these analyses, far more than the comparatively modest cost of this training. I enrolled immediately, by telephone, from the doctor's office. There was no reason in what I did: I was desperate. To be dependent on tranquilizers and sleeping pills is a living death. I would have done anything for a good night's sleep and—more important—for a day free from the stupor of these pills. I would have tried anything to free myself from the pretense into which these drugs forced me. I was a professional philosopher. My job was the life of reason; it was my vocation to be alert. Yet the theme of my life had become the concealment of my stupor—the appearance, not the reality, of alertness. Two weeks later I began the first weekend of the est training. By the end of the second weekend I no longer had insomnia. I no longer take pills of any kind. est is a training program in the expansion and transformation of consciousness which was founded by Werner Erhard in California in 1971. From the beginning it has appeared to be a curious and original, indigenously American blend of Asian and European themes—of Zen and Gestalt and a dozen other paths. Unlike most programs and disciplines with which it can readily be compared, it was never a cult or cultish, and has always aimed at the widest possible audience. In this, it has been eminently successful: at the beginning of 1978, 132,000 persons had graduated from the est training; by the end of that year, another 41,000 will have completed it; by the end of 1979, these numbers will grow by yet another 50,000. It is successful. But is it serious? Is it a fad? Or something of more enduring value? In 1974, when est began to come to national attention, it was often seen as another pop psychology California fad, a kind of psychological Barnum and Bailey, catering to the affluent and narcissistic radical-chic residents of West Coast spas and suburbs: it was a circus that came calling on the freak show. By late 1976, as enrollment climbed, est centers opened throughout the country—in the Midwest and in the South as well as on the two coasts. Symbolizing est's growing reputability, the former chancellor of the University of California's medical campus in San Francisco now sat as chairman of the est Advisory Board, est itself came to be appreciated more broadly as a consciousness training program of wide value, at least comparable to the old Dale Carnegie courses, and perhaps more powerful.