Werner Erhard

You are currently browsing articles tagged Werner Erhard.

“You Got A Problem With That?”

November 29, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

erhard99

we (1)erhardestparking7-e1404969614234

Werner Erhard, the shouting est salesman, is still working it, though opinions will vary on what it is.

When you’re born John Rosenberg, rechristen yourself after a Nazi rocketeer (misspelling it!), and unabashedly tell people that you’re a hero, you may be questionable. Nonetheless, the profane self-help peddler who came to wide prominence in the 1970s, with the aid of apostles in entertainment and intellectual circles, from John Denver to Buckminster Fuller, continues apace at 80 and has reinvented himself yet again, after nearly being permanently knocked from his pedestal by health issues, an IRS imbroglio, a shattering 60 Minutes profile and ongoing gamesmanship with Scientologists.

A really fun New York Times piece by Peter Haldeman looks at the latest Erhard iteration, while offering an alternative version of how the Dale Carnegie of sleep deprivation came to rename himself. The opening:

The silver-haired man dressed like a waiter (dark vest, dark slacks) paced the aisle between rows of desks in a Toronto conference room. “If you’re going to be a leader, you’re going to have to have a very loose relationship with this thing you call ‘I’ or ‘me,’” he shouted. “Maybe that whole thing in me around which the universe revolves isn’t so central!”

He paused to wipe his brow with a wad of paper towels. An assistant stood by with a microphone, but he waved her off. “Maybe life is not about the self but about self-transcendence! You got a problem with that?”

No one in the room had a problem with that. The desks were occupied by 27 name-tagged academics from around the world. And in the course of the day, a number of them would take the mike to pose what their instructor referred to as “yeah buts, how ’bouts or what ifs” in response to his pronouncements — but no one had a problem with them.

In some ways, the three-day workshop, “Creating Class Leaders,” recalled an EST training session. As with that cultural touchstone of the 1970s, there was “sharing” and applause. There were confrontations and hugs. Gnomic declarations hovered in the air like mist: “We need to distinguish distinction”; “There’s no seeing, there’s only the seer”; “There isn’t any is.”

But the event was much more civilized than EST. There were bathroom breaks. No one was called an expletive by the teacher.

This is significant because the teacher was none other than the creator of EST, Werner Erhard.•

__________________________

In 1973, Denver, substitute host on the Tonight Show, invited his guru to chat.

Tags: ,

“I Tried Yoga, Dale Carnegie, Zen, Scientology, Encounter Groups, T-Groups, Psychoanalysis, Reality Therapy, Gestalt, Love, Nudity”

July 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The openings of two People articles from several decades ago about a couple of radically different seminar teachers, Moshe Feldenkrais and Werner Erhard, who wanted to help you be the best you that you could be.

From Jon Keller and Bonnie Freer’s 1981 piece, “His Methods May Seem Bizarre“:

Israeli scientist Moshe Feldenkrais is not easily impressed. Over the years he has treated thousands of people, from statesmen (Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion) to violin virtuosos (Yehudi Menuhin), with his unique method of movement that—he claims and his disciples devoutly believe—results in a kind of heightened self-awareness and improved physical coordination. 

So when Julius Erving, the Philadelphia 76ers’ $550,000-a-year star hoopster, recently became interested in the work of the 77-year-old mind-body guru, even Dr. J got a dose of Feldenkrais’ characteristic crankiness. “There shouldn’t be any professional athletes,” huffs Feldenkrais. “Everyone should be athletic. But if someone wants to sell his skills, it’s his business—not mine.”

Erving and more than 200,000 people from Tel-Aviv to Argentina regard Feldenkrais’ curmudgeonly ways as small price to pay for learning what he calls “Awareness Through Movement.” Essentially, the Feldenkrais Method is a program of exercises that suggest mind over matter, with the body programming the brain so that the whole system works in a new way. 

Feldenkrais concedes there are no simple explanations for his approach (he even scoffs at such attempts), but it is akin to the “patterning” technique widely used to treat retarded children. Patterning involves repeated manipulation of the limbs, and the feedback from these motions stimulates the brain to accept the movements as normal. 

“I am not interested in the movements themselves,” explains Feldenkrais, “but rather in how you do them. Any movement which is difficult and done over and over again can actually reorganize molecules in the brain and the way they send impulses.” Taking his mind-body philosophy on the road, Feldenkrais has just completed a four-day-a-week, nine-week training course for 235 of his pupils at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. Fee: $2,000 per person. This week Feldenkrais is leading a four-day workshop in Washington, D.C. before heading home.•

___________________________

From 1975’s “Werner Erhard“:

“I wanted to get as far away from Jack Rosenberg as I could get,” explains Werner Erhard. His reason is clear: Jack Rosenberg was a loser. Born in Lower Merion, Pa., Rosenberg married at 18, fathered four children and worked as a construction company supervisor—until he dropped out in 1960. Leaving his family, he took off for St. Louis with a girlfriend (now his second wife and mother of three). To start fresh, Rosenberg adopted space scientist Wernher von Braun‘s first name (misspelling it) and former West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard’s last name. “Freudians,” Werner Erhard concedes, “would say this was a rejection of Jewishness and a seizure of strength.”

The rest of Erhard’s spiritual hegira has become legend among his cult. For eight years he worked as a crackerjack instructor of encyclopedia salesmen. Then one morning while driving down the freeway south of San Francisco, to which he moved in 1964, he was suddenly struck by the realization that “I was never going to make it. No matter how much money or recognition I achieved, it would never be enough.”

To overcome this hopelessness, Erhard experimented with just about every method guaranteed to bring peace of mind. “I tried yoga, Dale Carnegie, Zen, Scientology, encounter groups, t-groups, psychoanalysis, reality therapy, Gestalt, love, nudity, you name it,” he recalls. “But when it was over, that was not it.”

Once again, Erhard was behind the wheel when he finally “got it”—a religious happening that the faithful call “The Experience.” And what is ‘it’? Replies the Master: “What is it, is it. When you drop the effort to make your life work, you begin to discover that it’s perfect the way it is. You can relax. It’s all going to unfold.”

Not much of a message, perhaps, but as packaged, promoted and proselytized by Erhard in a two-weekend, 60-hour course (price $250), his movement, known as est (Latin for ‘it is,’ as well as Erhard Seminars Training), has turned out more than 63,000 converts in 12 U.S. cities. Another 12,000 hopefuls are on the waiting list. Among the alumni of est’s psychic boot camps are Emmy winner Valerie Harper (who thanked Erhard on TV for changing her life), Cloris Leachman, John Denver, astronaut Buzz Aldrin and activist Jerry Rubin.•

Tags: , , ,

“He Is Raising Consciousness, Not Merely Dust”

October 21, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From a 1979 People article about the auto-racing exploits of Est scream machine Werner Erhard, who has always been a piece of work:

“For hours mechanics have been fine-tuning the squat red-and-silver race car, while assistants check their clipboards and keep the Watkins Glen (N.Y.) bivouac free of litter and strangers. One fan wanders through in a T-shirt with the baffling slogan: ‘Before I was different, now I’m the same.’ Presently the driver emerges from an enormous van, astronaut-like in his creamy flame-proof suit, and heads for the Formula Super Vee racer (named for its Volkswagen engine). At the wave of a flag he will roar around a 3.3-mile Grand Prix course at speeds up to 130 mph. 

There are 29 other qualifiers in this Gold Cup event, but only driver Werner Erhard claims he is here for the sake of mankind. Erhard, the founder of est (Erhard seminars training), says that when he slides into his 164-horsepower Argo JM4, he is raising consciousness, not merely dust. 

‘Real people—you and me—feel like they don’t make any difference in this lousy world,’ says the 43-year-old Erhard. He is tall and loose-limbed with icy blue eyes; he insists on eye contact during a conversation. If his listener looks away, even momentarily, Erhard stops talking. He wants everyone to understand why he is driving fast cars these days in addition to heading the $20 million business that est has become, plus a 1977 spin-off, his program ‘to end world hunger by 1997.’ ‘I wanted to organize a high-performance team,’ Erhard continues, ‘that could master a complex skill in a very short time with winning results and show that everyone involved makes a big difference, from grease monkeys to spectators.’ In order to prove this estian point, Erhard says he considered such adventures as skydiving and karate, but rejected them as not collective enough. ‘Auto racing was perfect!’ he exclaims. ‘I hadn’t driven a car in six years and didn’t know the first thing about racing. Whatever we’d achieve, we’d achieve together.'”

••••••••••

“I found it a remarkable technology”:

See also:

Tags:

“He Solemnly Tells Me That He Is, Without Question, A Hero”

April 29, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

EST salesman Werner Erhard, who converted loads of people in the ’70s and ’80s to a higher level of self-awareness–or some shit–by gathering them in hotel ballrooms and hectoring them, just gave his first interview in a couple of decades. He is still a piece of work. From Lucy Kellaway’s Financial Times article:

“It turns out Werner Erhard sees himself as something far greater than nice. He solemnly tells me that he is, without question, a hero.

‘Here’s my definition of a hero. A hero is an ordinary person given being and action by something bigger than themselves. One thing I’m sure about is I’m real ordinary. Yet I’ve had the chance to touch the lives of a lotta people.’

It is true that Erhard has touched many lives – I’ve come across plenty of his converts – but I’ve never really grasped what it was that they learnt in those long days in hotel ballrooms.

‘People understood that nothing is significant. Life is empty and meaningless, and it’s empty and meaningless, that it’s empty and meaningless.’

I nod, a little confused.

‘Until what is significant is created by you, you aren’t living your life, you are living some inherited life.'” (Thanks Browser.)

••••••••••

John Denver interviews Erhard on the Tonight Show, 1973:

Bucky Fuller + Erhard:

Tags: ,