The Serpentine Serenity of EST

The wary, darting eyes of my friend Leslie had always betrayed the tension beneath her airy isn’t-it-grand approach to life. Serious, realistic conversations threatened her; Leslie refused to become involved. One evening, over coffee and a discussion of politics, it seemed that tension had disappeared. She made several pointed comments and, unusual for her, remained calm. Responding to a remark about her new serenity she excitedly told us she had learned how silly it was to become excited. She had discovered this at something called Erhard Seminars Training, a two-weekend therapy program that teaches people—for $250—how to become and stay serene. As of late last summer more than 80,000 people, some of them ministers, priests, and nuns, had already taken the training. And the organization expected to add 12,000 to its graduate list by the new year. Among its adherents is the singer John Denver, who calls Werner Erhard “a god.”

I became curious about Leslie’s change as more friends began talking of their great experience in the training sessions of what they called “est.” I saw one major change: my friends were not interested in anything that didn’t directly affect their comfort. Their bland smiles and uniform responses to controversial topics disturbed me. I called the est office to find out how Erhard training accomplishes these changes. After an impressively incoherent conversation I was invited to attend a guest seminar at a New York Hotel.

When I arrived at the hotel I immediately saw my first examples of the estian inner corps. They stood lined up from the entrance steps to the elevator, their stone faces occasionally lit by quick, mechanical smiles. They imposed an atmosphere of precision on the usually comfortable disorganization of a hotel lobby. Like sentinels on a precarious jungle trail, the people of est showed an uncanny ability to pick out their charges and impel them to the proper place.

When I arrived at the training room, I immediately received a highly legible name tag. Everyone was hailing everyone else with the air of people trying to overcome the differences that keep long-standing feuds alive. A voice called my name. But when I turned a stranger hurtled herself at me, arms spread wide. My reluctance to embrace her was only partly due to the fact she was a stranger; the deadness of her eyes belied her surface affection. No warmth, no life. The hallmark of est.

After the guest seminar I stayed for a meeting primarily for those who had already completed the training. The leader bounded onto the stage to welcome the guests to est. He mechanically announced that our friends in est loved us and welcomed the chance to assist us in creating our own experience of est.

His assistant then led the non-initiates to another room where she gave an enthusiastic sales pitch based on what est had done for her. But beneath her ready smile and wholesome appearance lurked an anger she betrayed when she faced a difficult, critical question. She could not conceal contempt for those who challenged Erhard.

She attributed superhuman qualities to Erhard. She stressed personal power over all events and laced her comments with derision for such things as guilt, unease, and ambivalence. These silly blocks to true experience would, of course, disappear once we had the training. The idea of salvation would become passé after we accepted the fact that we were already perfect.

Est has reluctantly made public the details of Erhard’s background. His mother was an Episcopalian, his father a Jewish convert to the Episcopal Church. Werner was baptized John Paul Rosenberg. New Times (March 19, 1976) points out that Erhard has always considered Nietzsche his intellectual mentor; the creation of a super-race is his highest ambition.

And thus—est. Werner received—not, he claims, conceived—the idea in a whooosh while driving his wife’s Mustang, somewhere in the vicinity of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. (The exact locale varies from telling to telling.) The force of the cosmos enlightened him by blinding his senses. This modern-day equivalent of Saint Paul’s Damascus-road experience is merely the beginning of contemptuous distortion of Scripture.

Erhard learned in his freeway conversion that “What is, is. What ain’t, ain’t.” He denies the past; its reminders encumber “the now.” And he thinks we should ignore the future consequences of our actions. Having removed moral and ethical considerations, Erhard decided he was “God in my universe.” According to est, each of us is God in his own universe.

In a radio interview printed in the New Age Journal (Sept. and Oct., 1975) Werner said, “I confronted myself as ultimately evil. What I saw in that car was that I was never going to make it; I had spent my whole life struggling to become spiritual, to become whatever that means. And I discovered in that car that I wasn’t going to make it; I was never going to be all right. You know, I was going to be no good forever.” He confronted original sin, but instead of seeking God’s redemptive grace, Werner determined to make himself his own redeemer. He justified his own sin. All men are liars, he admits, himself included: “I don’t mind being called a con man as long as when you’re calling me a con man you recognize you’re also a con man.”

Yet followers adore him, almost as a spirit. “When Werner wants to move from here to there, his body just moves him, like floating almost” says the devotee who gave the sales pitch at the seminar I attended. They emphasize the importance of love and claim Werner has what this follower called “this incredible sense of truth.” She buttressed her sales talk with references to est’s need to “give” the training to others in love. When I asked how she showed love to those who had had severe mental breakdowns after the training, she laughed contemptuously. Her reason—“Some people really want to freak out and make the training an excuse.” She and other esties deny that they have any responsibility for those in the training; est precludes compassion for others. But when Jesus saw the grief of Lazarus’s family he wept. When this woman was reminded that her master’s voice had contributed to other people’s anguish, she laughed with scorn. That kind of love has nothing to do with the love taught by Christ.

What is the training like? A trainee, confined to a hotel room with 249 other people for up to eighteen hours a day, undergoes four days of passivity exercises. He’s insulted—“You’re all a bunch of turkeys. Your lives don’t work and that’s why you’re here!” His beliefs are undermined—“Belief in God is the greatest single barrier to God in the universe.” Group pressure is a major psychological tool. Personal autonomy does not exist. The trainer attacks those who try to defend any beliefs. Verbal abuse and denial of physical comfort are punctuated by instruction in meditation technique. Of course, the trainer tells the students what to meditate about and for how long. Then he tells them how to use what they’ve been taught.

In his prophetic work, The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis underscores the vapidity of the argument that all one can ever express in language is personal feeling. He points out that when one is prompted by an event or circumstance to say, “This is sublime,” one cannot mean, “I have sublime feelings”; “the feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration.” “This is sublime” is properly translated “I have humble feelings.” The argument that all value judgments are merely subjective undermines any theological and philosophical discussion of ethics. It assumes that emotions are contrary to reason and in themselves contemptible. Calling something sublime, far from simply describing one’s feelings, also contains the implicit statement that what prompted the comment merited the emotion of humility. Those who deny this, which is in effect a denial of all objective reality, are forced to regard all sentiments as non-rational, as mist between us and reality. They must then decide to remove all emotions or to tolerate them regardless of whether they are “just” or not. Lewis points out that those who do this must create in others “by suggestion or incantation a mirage their own reason has successfully dissipated.”

Werner and est do just that. A former est assistant says she was encouraged to regard all emotions as “hindrances to real experience.” As Lewis makes clear, the truth is the exact opposite. Emotions are the result of one’s mind responding to one’s surroundings.

Est uses meditation to bypass emotion. For example, if you get angry about a situation, imagine yourself twenty feet away, twenty feet above the horizon, and looking angry. If you are displeased with that image, concentrate until the imaginary vision of yourself conforms to your desires. Est promises you will quickly match the image. Serenity is yours for the imagining.

The technique works because it removes you from direct sense stimulation. No emotional response will intrude on your fantasy, no logical argument will convince you that you are removed from reality. My friend Leslie used that to keep herself calm. She mentally moved into a fantasy world.

Est hammers away at previously held perceptions of reality, particularly a Christian world view. Eventually most trainees are convinced that they do indeed distort reality. Once they agree to that the trainer screams, “See, it was all illusion! There is no objective reality!” The group, tired and nervous, long to have their confused perceptions soothed, and est quickly supplies the longed for salvation. If everything is illusion, you are free to choose your illusion—you, therefore control your world. Freedom lies in choosing your illusion. Play it Erhard’s way and you, imitating him, are God in your universe.

In his classic explanation of the Christian faith, Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton reminds us that logic alone is not enough. “If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humor or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” Werner’s trainees do not lose the complements to reason; they willingly allow est to wrest them away. Knowing this, and knowing that the trainee will need a source of relief, est teaches them how to create the center of their lives.

Realizing that the world will infringe upon any carefully constructed fantasy, Erhard suggests that a person should drift into a meditative reverie called “your space.” Once there you construct a little mental room where you are safe to practice your perfection.

While mentally following the instructions of the trainer you physically act out the steps. You pretend you are hammering, sawing, moving things about, and putting up various pieces of paraphernalia. In your center, where Erhard assures you that you are free to experience your reality, you mentally place a chair, a desk, a telephone, a bookcase, a cassette file with tapes of all the things you know (according to one insider there should also be a few empty tapes), a television set, a large movie screen, a closet that contains the regalia for your favorite role (such as skier, spaceman, ballerina) and a few empty hangers (one should also have a shirt with epaulets—a pervading hint of est’s martial tendencies; the trainers wear such shirts), and a platform twenty feet away, twenty degrees above the horizon, where you can happily watch yourself practice your perfection.

All this is fantasy. Its purpose is to teach you to experience life. But the reality est proclaims is a retreat into illusion. As Lewis and Chesterton remind us, a Christian who tries to imitate Christ must face emotion and strive to make it one with reason—a move toward reality, not away from it.

Est’s theological pretensions have never been clearly stated, though Adelaide Bry’s authorized book, est, Sixty Hours That Transform Your Life, mentions them. She quotes Erhard: “The heart of est is spiritual people, really.… That’s all there is, there isn’t anything but spirituality, which is just another name for God, because God is everywhere.” The same book quotes a young man on his estian understanding of Jesus: “[Jesus] kept telling everyone over and over that everybody was like he was: perfect.” Werner’s “Bible” classes must leave out Judas Iscariot, the Pharisees, the people Jesus drove from the Temple, and Peter. Despite our imperfections, Christ forgives us when we repent, just as he forgave Peter for denying him. Jesus understands our weaknesses, our imperfections. He never claimed that we were, or could be, in this life, perfect.

On October 15, 1975, a letter mailed to est graduates quoted Erhard on religion: “One of the purposes of religion is to serve people by providing the space in which an experience can take place. And it is the responsibility of the clergy to communicate the experience—the aliveness—that is inherent in the world’s religions in a way that allows people to create that experience within themselves. It is est’s intention to support those people who have dedicated themselves to communicating the experience of religion.” But as we have seen, Erhard is adamantly opposed to Christianity—to the need for repentance, and forgiveness. Christians cannot serve Erhard and Christ.

Several weeks ago, on one of those turbulent days when Canadian air roars down the Hudson Valley driving out the pollution-laden smog of New York, Leslie met me for coffee again. Her air of calm was enthrallingly real, unlike that produced by est. She had been released from the inner qualms that had engulfed her; she was free from her former turmoil. Her eyes were now alive, and she laughed spontaneously. To help explain what had happened to her, she read from a book, The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis.

She told me she had always wanted to be loved but never felt worthy. Est, she explained, had for a while convinced her that the desire for other’s love was merely an illusion. She tried to imagine that other people did love her. That ended in disappointment. An alternative illusion, that she did not require love, proved equally painful. Her involvement with est caused a deep gap between her and her old friends. The people in est were no help. Whenever she tried to express her desires, they attacked her about why she couldn’t go along with the group.

A friend helped Leslie find what she was searching for. And C. S. Lewis helped her see the falseness of est: “We easily imagine conditions far higher than any we have really reached. If we describe what we have imagined we may make others, and make ourselves, believe that we have really been there. And if I have only imagined it, is it a further delusion that even the imagining has at some moments made all other objects of desire—yes, even peace, even to have no more fears—look like broken toys and faded flowers? Perhaps. Perhaps, for many of us, all experience merely defines, so to speak, the shape of that gap where our love of God ought to be. It is not enough. It is something.”

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