est: 'There Is Nothing to Get'

"What is, is," says Werner Erhard, 40, a former trainer of encyclopedia salesmen and founder of Erhard Seminars Training Inc., one of the more mind-boggling of the many self-help programs to come out of California. In 70 hours over two marathon weekends, est aims at "transforming your ability to experience living "through techniques apparently derived from Scientology, psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, Arica, Gestalt, transactional analysis and various Eastern religions. Since 1971, est has "graduated" 83,000 people in twelve cities.

TIME Behavior Writer John Leo enrolled in an est course in New York, endured the first weekend, and reconstructed the second from interviews. His report:

We are an assortment of 250 therapy collectors, baffled housewives, cynical intellectuals, secretaries with love problems, businessmen and ex-hippies. At 8:30 a.m., having paid our $250 each, we gather in the New York Sheraton ballroom--$62,500 worth of troubled or venturesome New Yorkers eager to change the brain patterns of a lifetime in just two abuse-filled weekends.

A drill-sergeant type named Marvin rants a bit and goes over the rules four or five times. We already know them: no chatting, smoking or notetaking; no getting out of the chair for any reason except for "the maximum" of one food break per day and widely spaced bathroom breaks. Around Manhattan, est is known as the "no-pee therapy." Bladder control is crucial. At some sessions, trainees have been known to announce "I have just wet my pants and it doesn't matter," sitting down happily, if soggily, to tumultuous applause.

Our "trainer" bounds onstage. Ron is a California golden boy, 32, blond, handsome and curiously innocent. Many of the men shift uneasily. Can this recycled surfer unlock the mysteries of our souls? Ron sternly announces we are "assholes" and he doesn't care about us in the slightest. He's already got what he came for: our $250 fee. It's up to us to get what we want. Our lives don't work. That's why we're here.

A girl named Wendy insists that her life works. She's come straight from Transcendental Meditation, and she's just here to seek further enlightenment. Ron observes she is full of shit. He launches into a banal ten-hour lecture on est epistemology. Most of what we know consists of received ideas and secondhand experiences. We see the world through a glaze of beliefs and ideas. Thinking is crap--the yammering in the back of our heads. Ron wiggles his fingers behind his head to show us how foolish thinking is.

Booby Prize. "How many believe what I've said?" Ron asks, and the hands shoot up. "Then you're assholes. Don't believe or disbelieve any of it. Just hold onto it like a brick on your lap." Our aim should just be to "get it"--acknowledge what has been said. Many fear that the philosophy is too deep for them, but Ron says it will all become clear later. Hostile questioners are verbally thrashed and told to "come off your act." Intellectuals, who are already guilty of thinking, are tripped up by est's Catch-22: "All criticism is self-created and says more about the critic than the subject discussed."

Asking questions is a minefield, because words do not mean the same thing in est as they do in English. "Understand" is intellectual and bad ("Understanding is the booby prize in life"); "get" is experiential and good. "Try" is bad. You either do it or you don't. A woman rises to defend her secretary, who "tries" hard at some jobs and sometimes fails. "You're a self-righteous bitch!" Ron screams. She collapses in tears; Ron says she is patronizing the secretary by approving her failures. A man rises to offer sympathy to the woman. "Don't help her!" Ron yells. "Help," we learn, is another "crap" word. Helping people keeps them infantile and teaches them to play for sympathy.

A girl insists that the trouble is not in her but in the men she goes out with. She is loving and loyal, but men always betray her. "Lady, you're a professional victim, doing your niceness act." A hundred female heads nod in agreement.

Nausea, boredom and physical discomfort set in, and a few people begin raising their hands for the official silver-colored est bags to throw up in. By around midnight (no watches are allowed in the room), we have been going more than 15 hours with only two bathroom breaks and no food. Ron announces we will go without a food break today (groans) but we will just do a few exercises and go home (sighs of relief). We go another two or three hours, of course, so the anger can build into fury. We do "processes" (relaxation and meditation exercises) to "experience" our boredom, anger and headaches and "digest" them.

We assemble again at 10:15 a.m.

Sunday. Following the est script, the "logistics team" has set the air conditioners on extra cold. Room temperature is perhaps in the low 40s, and going down. A woman announces that she was so high after yesterday's session that she felt no need for food. A man says that on the way home, Seventh Avenue smelled of clover. A hefty housewife, who is wearing a heavy sweater over a wool dress, asks if the air conditioners could be turned off. Ron says "the temperature will be what it will be," but she is allowed to fetch her coat.

A junior est employee named George comes onstage to demonstrate "the personality profile"--or how to experience people we have never met. George settles into a trance to experience a New Jersey housewife who is not in the group but is an acquaintance of Carol's, a sixtyish woman who is. Does the housewife like playing cards? "Yes," says George, clawing the air with both hands for inspiration. He sees a happy card game with a bowl of peanuts on the table. "No," says Carol, "she never plays cards." George gets about 80% of the questions wrong.

A man asks a sensible question: Why is George trying to guess about a woman he's never met? Ron tears into him --it isn't guessing, it's experiencing, and George's experience of the woman is simply different from Carol's.

A bearded young man rises, says calmly that he is nervous and rattled by the icy temperature, but that George's nondemonstration is the last straw. He concludes that est is "utter and complete bullshit." Ron says he just hasn't got it yet. "Got it?" says the man. "The only thing I got so far is hemorrhoids." After thunderous applause, Ron calls the man "a self-righteous s.o.b."

Ron launches into an abusive harangue, the arctic blasts keep blowing, and the room grows tense. A woman breaks down. It is Wendy, yesterday's enlightenment-seeker with no problems. Hefty housewife now has her coat over her head and is bouncing in her chair. Finally she pops, moaning, screaming and shaking violently. Ron says: "How old are you now? And where are you? Don't think, just look." The woman says she is ten years old and with her parents. She screams that her mother hates her, always has, because she's jealous of her father's love for her, the child. "How old are you now?" asks Ron. She is three. Ron asks again, and she says she is three months in the womb, knowing that her mother does not want to bear her. "Be your mother now," says Ron. "Do you hate the child or are you just afraid of losing your husband?" The woman takes the hint and, still vibrating rapidly in her chair, forgives her mother.

Half the women and a few of the men are now sobbing. A few more women shriek and moan into the microphones, then the temperature is raised a bit and the Holy Roller phase is over.

We are told to remain silent during the break. "I don't care, I've got something to say," says Joan, a trim woman of about 30, as a few of us stood around outside the hotel. "I don't care how much of this is crap. It's changed my life. My father walked out on my mother right after I was born. She kept telling me men--people--were unreliable. I see now that I screwed up my marriage, all my love affairs, all my jobs, just to prove that my mother was right. It's all bullshit and I'm not going to do it any more." One of the men says he can't get over the feeling that est is a gigantic fraud. A dapper fellow with a mustache says coolly that nothing in the proceedings has touched him so far.

Letting Go. Next comes a three-hour process, or exercise, about troubling "items" in our lives, such as anger and loneliness. Everyone lies on the floor, eyes closed. Ron tells the crowd to concentrate on different parts of the body, shouts "Let go, let it all out!" For the first time, some of the men lose control, including the dapper Mr. Cool, now convulsed and flailing his limbs. The crescendo comes when Ron directs attention to our diaphragms. Deafening whoops of pain, and some of pleasure. "We became a goddam mob," one disillusioned estie says afterward.

As a change of pace, everyone is marched up to the stage, row by row, to confront the crowd, est workers eyeball each trainee from a few feet away, while Ron screams to "get rid of that phony smile, drop that face!" Legs buckle. Four people faint; one throws up. Then two more processes. One on danger: as we lie there for hours, eyes closed, listening to Ron conjure up images of danger, est attendants clump ominously around our bodies. More agonized screaming. Last, a "reverse danger" process. We are told everyone around us--in fact millions of people --are afraid of us. This one at last brings giggling and relief. Everyone is just as afraid of us as we are of them.

According to interviews with trainees, the second weekend features more est metaphysics and more difficult exercises. "Being" is far more important than "doing" or "having." We are all "perfect" and only our "barriers" keep us from experiencing our perfection. In one exercise, trainees imagine or "build" a perfect house in their minds, install perfect furniture, then conjure up a file cabinet with complete folders on everyone they know or ever wanted to know.

Daisy Atoms. After one break, trainees discover beneath their chairs a daisy, a cherry tomato and a strawberry, and do an exercise to put themselves inside each object. "You're part of every atom in the world and every atom is part of you." We are all gods who create our own worlds. The central est message appears around 6 p.m. on the last day: What you do has no effect on anything else. You are a machine, and if you accept that fact you will have a rich life, because you will know that it doesn't matter. Choose to let the world be and it won't bother you any more.

Much of the thought is borrowed from Zen Buddhism: the need to "stop thinking and let go" (the "slaying of the mind" in Buddhism), the invitation to live a life of pure experience and alert passivity. But in est "you get what you get," and Erhard stirs an activist message into his intellectual pudding for those who want it. The urging to "be the cause, not the effect of your life" seems to work well with est trainees who are blamers or professional victims. In est it is very important to change the world or very important to give up the illusion that you can. Take your choice.

One New Yorker who took est a year ago got the Zen message and plunged into depression. "I was in a black hole for weeks. Nothing mattered, nothing would change." Others report increased capacity for work and euphoria ("like a drug high," said one) that gradually fades. A few say their lives are permanently changed and free of neuroses.

Just before graduation, the trainer always asks if people "got it." Some say yes and are applauded. Another group isn't sure. The trainer talks to them and they all say they got it. Finally only one or two people are sure they haven't got it. and the trainer says: "Well, you got it, because there's nothing to get." The whole thing is treated as a joke, discomforting the new converts. But it makes sense in Zen--nothingness is what you get. The passive message is given the hardest sell. One of the aphorisms in the graduation booklet says, "Obviously the truth is what's so. Not so obviously, it's also so what." What is, is. So what.

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