est Page 4

  In the small guest seminar I attended, the seminar leader suggested that we might want to share what we experienced in the process. One man admitted that he had trouble finding a happy experience. Another shared that he had thought he was happy when his kids were born but he realized that that wasn't what he had just experienced. A third shared that he got that he wouldn't let himself have happiness. And a fourth confessed that absolutely nothing happened to her.

  A woman told us that she couldn't let the stranger into her space because she was in a compromising position. She got that she felt guilty about her sexual pleasure.

  For another the stranger turned out to be the most influential person in his life. And so it went.

  For me, the most fascinating aspect of this exercise was the multiplicity of individual experiences. No two people saw or felt the same thing. Most were amazed at the variety and wealth of the material they were able to call forth.

  The leader (in this case, Monique) pointed out that each of us is different because each of us makes different choices. It is the inability to choose, she explained, that keeps us stuck in our lives. When you make a choice, your life moves forward. The choice usually boils down to a simple "yes" or "no." "I don't know" is also a choice -- the choice to evade responsibility.

  A woman wanted to know what kind of choice she makes when she is depressed. A lot of people turned to her; it's a universal problem. The leader answered: "If you're depressed, you can choose to have your depression; you can take responsibility for it. Or you can choose to resist it and be at its effect, helpless."

  Monique, who is an airline stewardess, concluded this particular seminar with a confession. "I haven't the foggiest notion what est is all about. I only know my life works better."

  I, too, hadn't the foggiest notion of what it was all about. But I knew that I wanted it. The way I once knew that I wanted an orgasm before I had ever had sex: Everyone had told me how terrific it was, but no one could tell me how it worked or what it really felt like.

  I found out that orgasms were worth experiencing. I would trust that est was, too.

  Father Joseph Brendler

  Father Joseph Brendler, thirty-two, is a hospital chaplain, pastoral counselor, and on the faculty of New Orleans' Notre Dame Seminary. He is a large and impressive man whose honesty I found disarming.

  I was tremendously nervous before I flew to San Francisco to take the training. I had no idea what to expect.

  The most important thing I got from est is acceptance of myself where I am negative. What has happened is that I have lost my fantasies about myself and the world. Now I see things as they are. Before I had this need to always make progress, to be perfect. That's the whole bag people get into the clergy for.

  Now I simply accept the things I cannot change -- and even the things I don't want to. (My office, for example, is usually a mess. I'm supposed to keep it neat, but now I just let it be.) The "supposed to" is gone from my life.

  At est I got that I am satisfied with being the way I am. I don't have to be the warm, supportive, bubbly person that I believed my role as a priest calls for. I can be grumpy. It's O.K. to be grumpy. I can be the way I feel and I can be honest about it. I can also give other people the responsibility to be the way they feel.

  As a pastoral counselor I am less demanding now of my counselees. I used to want them to move along, to change. The key word really is responsibility -- me for my life, they for theirs. I know now that I can assist, but I don't help.*

  * See Glossary for distinction.

  I accept the people who come to see me the way they are. At the same time I am more confronting than I used to be. I am no longer afraid to tell it like it is. It is O.K. to be honest, to be the way you are.

  est gave me the experience of what theology has been telling me.

  Blessing is acceptance and affirmation of the fact that others are all right the way they really are. I never really got that before. I could see that people looked blessed, but I didn't have the power to bless because of my desire to change people.

  The great mystics who were wrapped up with God had that complete acceptance. I just knew about it through faith. But now I am developing more spirituality because of my new ability to let go and stop controlling others. And to experience reality the way it is.

  The last night of the training it all made sense to me. Until then it was total confusion. I finally could feel -- not think or rationalize -- that the responsibility to accept or not accept others and myself was mine. I knew without a doubt that I couldn't change.

  Giving up that illusion of control threw me into a deep depression for a month after I returned to New Orleans following the training. Previously, I had been in therapy in New Orleans with a psychiatrist. He helped me through that month of depression and now I have given up therapy.

  Soon after the training I was scheduled to give a weekend retreat for about forty men in northern Louisiana. As I was preparing my sermon the connection dawned; I saw that letting go of life, relinquishing my control, was the answer. That entire weekend retreat I wrote about my est experience without identifying est. That was the turning point. Putting that weekend together pulled the whole est experience together for me and gave me new enthusiasm and new energy in my life.

  I haven't any idea how the training works, how what happened to me happened and what motivates me to feel the way I do now. I only know that I feel different than I ever have before. Sure, I still go up and down. I have moods like anybody else. But it's O.K. I simply experience my moods as they happen. And my relationships in every area of my life have improved because I can experience them. I no longer try to control them.

  I handle confession differently, too. The theology of grace, that you don't have to earn salvation, I had previously accepted. But I still measured people by my standards. I was condescending.

  I'm really in touch with compassion now. Beneath the garbage of fear that we all have, we really want to be good, warm, friendly, and loving. Even though a person might be a thief, cruel, mean, I can sense the lonely person underneath.

  My idea of right and wrong is simply that if one does injury to another person, that is wrong. Judging something as sinful is judging that someone has hurt another person.

  I am much closer to God now. I see God's relationship to us. It really doesn't matter what we do; God's love of us doesn't change. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, which I had never really understood, I identified with the long-suffering elder son and was angry at the acceptance of the younger son. Now I see that it is O.K. for me to be this way and it doesn't matter.

  I wouldn't trade my est experience for the world. Looking back I see that I was so uptight that if I hadn't paid the $250 in advance I would have left after that first weekend and never returned.

  3

  Beliefs

  "Belief is a disease." -- Werner Erhard

  Werner says, "The truth believed is a lie. If you go around preaching the truth, you are lying. The truth can only be experienced. This illuminates the old Zen koan: 'Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.' The horrible part about it is that the truth is so damn believable, people usually believe it instead of experiencing it."

  Because so much of what est is about is related to people's beliefs, to what they think "the truth" is, I digress here to explore what est calls "belief systems."

  Everyone has belief systems, formed when we were children. Some samples: Daddies go to work and Mommies stay home and take care of the children. If you're good, you go to heaven. People have to eat three square meals a day to stay healthy. Being in love is not having to say you're sorry. I must be strong or nobody will love me. Hard work is good (bad) for you. Ad infinitum.

  Our beliefs about romantic love, and what a man-woman relationship should be, as opposed to the reality of what it actually is, are probably the main reason why the divorce rate in this country continues to soar. The belief about the relationship seldom meshes with what goes on betwee
n any couple on a daily basis. est defines love as "giving someone the space to be the way they are and the way they are not."

  Some of the beliefs I grew up with are: blond, blue-eyed children are prettier than those who, like me, have curly brown hair and green eyes. The way to be happy is to acquire a lot of college degrees and a lot of money. Men are weak. It's just as easy to marry a rich man as a poor man. Tears and headaches are a woman's lot in life -- sometimes curable by long hot baths.

  est allows us to see that not until we separate what we believe from what we experience can we begin to run our own lives.

  The belief systems est talks about (called parental injunctions in Transactional Analysis) are the concepts we use to run our lives. The problem with a belief is that we take it to be truth -- and get stuck in it. That means that most of us persist in thinking and doing what we learned long ago, rather than acting out of our experience in response to whatever is happening now.

  A classic story illustrates this point: A young bride regularly cuts off the ends of the ham before putting it in the pan to bake. After watching her do this several times, her husband asks her why. She answers that her mother always did it that way. So the husband asks the mother-in-law why she cut off the ends of the ham. To which she replies, "Because my mother always did it that way." The old grandmother is still alive, so he visits her one day and asks the same question. "I cut the ends off the ham," she explains, "because we were very poor and had only one pan for all our baking. To get a large ham into the small pan, we had to cut the ends off."

  Most of us are cutting the ends off something in our lives to fit into a pan that's no longer too small for it. est tells us we are robots, machines, stuck in the soap opera of our lives, obsessed with the same four or five problems we've always had, only dressed in new clothes.

  For example, you skin your knee at five and mother says, "Don't cry; crying is bad," so you don't cry. When you are sixteen, you break your leg skiing, and you keep a stiff upper lip because you are a good boy or girl, which means you don't cry. Then, at twenty-one, a relationship with someone ends and you still don't cry. After a while the more you repress whatever it is you are feeling, the more your consciousness shuts down, just like a trap door. You are barely alive. You function mechanically. In some cases, you're successful at it. But mechanical success is not any more satisfying than failure.

  Psychotherapy has always been concerned with the way people are run by what was rather than what is, and how to free people from the prison of their past. The difference between est and therapy is that therapy is concerned with curing people of illness and est is concerned with offering people -- sick and healthy -- an experience of themselves. est makes no claims at all.

  In an interview with Marcia Seligson,* Werner said, "A belief system is myth, created by knowledge or data without experience. If you experience something, it is real for you, and if you communicate it to somebody, it's real for them. If they now tell it to somebody else, it's a lie -- belief without the component of experience.

  * New Times (October 18. 1974).

  "Now belief is very powerful; you can cure with it or kill with it. I earned my living for years training peopie to believe in themselves. The problem is that beliefs are a state of hypnosis, automatic, and totally non-nurturing. Like, the degree to which I have beliefs about women, I can't see you; not only that, but I can prove to you, from my beliefs, that what I think I see is actually true." Werner later said, "That there are people out there believing in us, in me, is a failure of est that we are working to correct."

  He distinguishes between looking for answers outside of ourselves and what's going on within us. "If I get the idea that God is going to save me, therefore I'm all right, that's salvation. If I get the idea that nothing's going to save me, therefore I'm all right, that's enlightenment. . . . People get involved in therapy, groups, and movements to get better. That's not what people get from us."

  Before and after the pre-training, and again during the first days of the training, I asked people what they expected to get out of est. A lot of them told me they wanted to fall in love or get married or get divorced. Some spoke about improving job situations, family relationships, or the state of their health. Others were more general: "to make better decisions"; "to have more self-confidence"; "to be more together and less confused." One attractive young man told me he wanted either to find a way to grow hair on his chest or learn to accept that he was attractive and virile without it; he was serious.

  What they all had in common was a set of expectations. They believed their happiness was dependent on more love, more money, more sex, more self-confidence, or more chest hair. Each one had a belief system which related satisfaction to something he or she was striving for. None of them saw their happiness as a function of accepting what is, apart and separate from what was and what is to come.

  I remember an occasion, shortly after I was divorced, when I spent a weekend alone -- and in one of the worst depressions of my entire life. I was depressed because I believed that an attractive, vital woman should be spending that holiday weekend "having fun," which included every notion I had ever had of what fun was all about. I felt myself a failure because I was alone, because I hadn't been invited anywhere, and because, above all, I didn't have a man in my life at the time. That same holiday weekend eight years later found me holed up in a hotel room writing this book -- alone and happy in the moment of doing.

  "Belief is a structure which can contain very little information in terms of making it useful in one's consciousness or well-being," says Werner.

  The alternative to belief is what the yogis call witness and what est calls observation. "Observation," Werner says, "has nothing to do with my senses, perceptions, or my belief system. It has to do with my direct experience. . . . Don Juan gives it another name: stopping the world."

  When we're convinced that someone is wrong we're often quarreling with his observations because they don't mesh with our beliefs. Everyone has his own experience of anything and everything, and, in addition, his own way of conceptualizing.

  I feel that it's because formal religion has become so removed from our own personal experience that our churches are empty today. "God believed," I've heard Werner say, "is a lie." A beautiful young woman from New Orleans who works as a hospital chaplain told me her faith was deeply reinforced after the training.

  "I had given up the church in which I had been raised," she shared, "because there was a lot of talk about God there that didn't mean anything to me. I was studying primitive religions; they were much more involved with feelings. Now, since est, I've had the most incredible sense of mission -- and of God. I am back in divinity school. And I am going to church again. est brought me back to my religious feelings in a new and deeper way."

  Werner says that "life could be considered to be three feet long, and the first two feet, eleven and three-quarter inches are about the material aspects of life, (e.g., food, clothing, and shelter) and what we call the psychological needs. You need someone to love you and probably somebody to love. You need self-esteem, recognition, the respect of others.

  "After people become sophisticated enough in their development to fill their needs, to begin to look at what it means to fill one's needs, and even to begin to realize that there's no true satisfaction in merely filling one's needs, then they begin to look for what's beyond that. And that is the last quarter inch -- that's what consciousness is about for me -- the last quarter inch."

  It is this last quarter.inch that this book is all about. And to get it, you're going to have to suspend some of your beliefs. "est talk" may sound like double-talk to non-est graduates.