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Good afternoon! Does anyone want enlightenment in 60 hours?
Then let me share a documentary about the creator of the EST training, the most popular human-potential training of the 1970s and ’80s. To begin, as always, a little history: America, 1971. In a San Francisco hotel, several dozen people gather to get “it.” In fact, they had no idea what awaited them. But trainings promising to help people get rid of their problems were popular at the time, and EST was different from all of them. First and foremost—in its format. Instead of honey-voiced gurus, there were pragmatic American trainers; instead of promising change, they promised transformation. And in the end, what awaits you is... disappointment! How can this not bring to mind the “harsh Zen stick”? Imagine this: at a time when thousands of Americans were attending business training, studying psychotherapy and religious teachings, something emerged that combined all of this into a single 60-hour product. Personal-growth trainings are popular now, but nothing like that existed then. Essentially, EST training became the forerunner of an entire movement. Whether that was good or bad is another question. But the fact that nothing similar existed either before or afterward is undeniable. And many years have passed since then... At least watch this documentary, in which people talk about what they experienced during the training and how their lives changed—or did not change—afterward. Very interesting. KBesides, the personality of the person behind the creation of something like this is always interesting. Werner Erhard (whose real name was John Rosenberg) was a successful 35-year-old encyclopedia salesman when he experienced “it,” as he put it. He was driving to work across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco when this transformation happened to him. (In New Age terminology—enlightenment.) Before that, he had spent several years studying everything from Subud to Scientology. Initially, however, he was primarily interested in personal effectiveness and ways to increase sales. So, we get an American Buddha of sorts I find it interesting that there is so much mythmaking and outright lying surrounding enlightenment that Werner’s experience seems to say: you don’t necessarily have to sit in meditation for hours, go off somewhere to the Himalayas, engage in ascetic practices, or be a saint. Enlightenment can happen anywhere and to anyone—but only when a person is ready. By the way, the phrase “Understanding is merely a consolation prize” belongs to Erhard.P.S. Some of you may find the format of the training itself rather harsh, but understand that, at the time, this authoritarian style was chosen deliberately—to achieve the stated “transformation.”
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“Context” is mentioned in EST. Here is an example:
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