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Werner Erhard has been quoted often in this blog and elsewhere in a way that makes him appear to be an oracle spouting words of wisdom. Werner, however, is not a guru or a saint. He is an academic and intellectual whose current teaching at universities has made it clear that the EST Training that he put together in the 1970s was a rigorous intellectual exercise that produced real transformation in people’s lives and has had an enormous impact on our culture. A man of enormous intellectual and spiritual power, he challenges us every single minute to be as powerful as we can be. His life is about making others understand their own greatness and act on it. “The one thing I’m clear about,” he said, “is everyone is capable of being great.”
According to Werner, fear is something to include in your experience, not one that runs your life and control is available to everyone. “At all times and under all circumstances,” he said, “we have the power to transform the quality of our lives.” When he says that we are the author of our own experience in life, we instinctively remember something that we always knew but have forgotten. Werner is not a man who tells you what you want to hear and temporarily made you feel better but a truth-teller who is not afraid to confront people and have them experience who they really are. He is an educator who challenges us to transform our life right now, not step-by-step over a period of years. His message is clear, sharp, and free of dogma, ritual, or psychological clichés.
Because of the influence of his programs, millions of people’s participation, engagement, and contribution in life have expanded exponentially. I had the great privilege of doing many of his programs such as EST and the Landmark Forum and assisted in the EST seminar leaders program over the course of seven years. His programs not only challenge each individual to rise to a new level of awareness, but also question society’s reliance on “mental health professionals” to solve their problems. EST did not pat people on the back or blow sweet nothings in their ear, but allowed people to look at their lives and take responsibility for them. There was never any attempt in the training to blame anyone for the circumstances of their life.
Responsibility was talked about as a context in which to hold events, one that did not imply blame, shame, regret or remorse. Yet even when the EST trainer was telling you an uncomfortable truth about yourself in a powerful and direct manner, he never sacrificed where he was coming from, a ground of being of intense love and support. As one anonymous blogger once said, “sometimes the hardest things you hear, the stuff that really infuriates you, is the stuff you need to hear.” Unable to comprehend the transformative power of a group of several hundred people sharing their lives over the course of two weekends in the EST Training, the media could only report on bits and pieces that they heard from those who could not get past their ego limitations.
To know whether Werner’s programs worked, all you had to do was to look at people’s faces before and after they completed the training. The media wanted to know what happens in EST but, like the experience of a great book or a great film, the power of the training was built on the element of engagement and surprise. You can no more convey the cumulative power of the training in so many words than you can explain the experience of watching Casablanca, 2001, or The Godfather. The word “spiritual” has taken on so many meanings over the years that it has lost much of its meaning, but it can truly be said that what Werner has accomplished is the beginning not only of the transformation of each individual, but of life on the planet. Like all great teachers, Werner Erhard shows us the way.
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