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Werner Erhard

Self-help guru

Werner Erhard (born John Paul Rosenberg on September 5, 1935) is the founder of Erhard Seminars Training ("EST") and The Forum. He also co-founded The Hunger Project.

At all times and under all circumstances, we have the power to transform the quality of our lives.

Quotes

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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’. Maybe that whole thing in me around which the universe revolves isn’t so central! Maybe life is not about the self but about self-transcendence.
 
Inherent in human beings are possibilities which we now can't even entertain. Before the space launch, space travel to many of us was the stuff of fantasy, of science fiction.
  • We can choose to be audacious enough to take responsibility for the entire human family. We can choose to make our love for the world what our lives are really about. Each of us has the opportunity, the privilege, to make a difference in creating a world that works for all of us. It will require courage, audacity and heart. It is much more radical than a revolution – it is the beginning of a transformation in the quality of life on our planet. What we create together is a relationship in which our work can show up as making a difference in people's lives. I welcome the unprecedented opportunity for us to work globally on that which concerns us all as human beings. If not you, who? If not now, when? If not here, where?
    • The Graduate Review (1980)
  • … sometime around now, the rules for living successfully on earth shifted, and an opportunity, unseen before, began to reveal itself. This opportunity is a context-a particular space, or way of being-which unexpectedly creates the possibility for a person’s life to truly make a difference. In this context, the way each of us answers the question, ‘What is my life really going to be about?’ can literally alter the course of humanity.
    • "The Context for Creating a Transformed World: A World That Works for Everyone." 'Article in 'The Graduate Review (April 1980) by Mary Earle & Neal Rogin.
  • The possibility to create the context in which people’s lives really matter is undoubtedly the most profound opportunity available to anyone, ever.
    • The Graduate Review (April 1980)
  • You and I want our lives to matter. We want our lives to make a real difference — to be of genuine consequence in the world. We know that there is no satisfaction in merely going through the motions in life, even if those motions make us successful or even if we have arranged to make those motions pleasant. We want to know we have had some impact on the world. In fact, you and I want to contribute to the quality of life. We want to make the world work.
  • To take a stand for the future is to bring forth a new opportunity, not one derived from the past, but an opportunity created from a future to which we give ourselves.
    • Interview with USA Today, "Mankind Must Find a New Self Awareness", Dan Neuharth and Miles White, December 14, 1982
  • [Alan] Watts did two main things for me. He opened up the connections between what I was doing and the traditional Oriental philosophies. And he pointed me toward the distinction between Self and Mind.
  • The moment when you really experience that you have created yourself being whatever way you are, at that same moment you will never have to be that way again.
  • Does it really work for us to go through our lives as though there were no realizations beyond the grasp of our system-of-concepts, the awareness of which would transform the quality of our lives?
  • Of all the disciplines that I studied, practiced, learned, Zen was the essential one. It was not so much an influence on me, rather it created space. It allowed those things that were there to be there. It gave some form to my experience. And it built up in me the critical mass from which was kindled the experience that produced est.
  • Obviously the truth is what's so. Not so obviously, it is also so what.
    • Quoted by Bernard Roth as the lead in to Chapter 2 "Reasons Are Bullshit", in his book, "The Achievement Habit".[1]
  • I got a lot of benefit from auditing. It was the fastest and deepest way to handle situations that I had yet encountered. I immediately wanted to learn to do it. … With Scientology, I was able to characterize the Mind more accurately, and to cease justifying it. This greatly clarified what I was doing. … After my experience with Scientology, I saw what it means to see the Mind as a machine. I can now operate my Mind accordingly, with exactitude. I can do the familiar mind over matter experiments - the control of pain and bleeding, telepathy, those things. Many people can do such things, and they are well known in the yogic tradition.
  • I am a sort of revolutionary. I have a strange ambition, though. I don’t want any statues. What I want is for the world to work. I want to create a context in which government, education, and families are nurturing. I want to en­able, to empower, the institutions of man. Social transformation doesn’t argue against social change. Radicalism and resistance produce obvious values. But after a while, social change chases its own tail. Social change just produces social change. After most ordinary revolutions, after most social change, the world still doesn’t work. For the world to work you must have social transformation, which creates the space for effective social change.
  • The essential difference between est and Scientology is two-fold. The first has to do with Scientology’s emphasis on survival and its idea that the purpose of life is survival. est sees the purpose of life as wholeness or completion – truth – not survival...The other main difference between est and Scientology lies in the treatment of knowing. Ron Hubbard seems to have no difficulty in codifying the truth and in urging people to believe it. But I suspect all codifications, particularly my own. In presenting my own ideas, I emphasize their epistemological context. I hold them as pointers to the truth, not as the truth itself. I don’t think anyone ought to believe the ideas that we use in est. The est philosophy is not a belief system and most certainly ought not to be believed. In any case, even the truth, when believed, is a lie. You must experience the truth, not believe it.
  • Inherent in human beings are possibilities which we now can't even entertain. Before the space launch, space travel to many of us was the stuff of fantasy, of science fiction. We know what it is to explore the limits of what we consider to be a human being, but if we were to transform our understanding of ourselves, if we were to transform what we knew a human being to be, new possibilities of expression would open. We could function in a more creative way. In a more humane way. In the past we were transformed by the thrust of evolution or by accidental forces. This time we should transform ourselves with a conscious, committed degree of self-awareness.
    • Interview with USA Today, "Mankind Must Find a New Self Awareness", Dan Neuharth and Miles White, December 14, 1982
  • You and I possess within ourselves, at every moment of our lives and under all circumstances, the power to transform the quality of our lives.
  • Most of our notions about the world come from a set of assumptions which we take for granted, and which, for the most part, we don't examine or question. We bring these assumptions to the table with us as a given. They are so much a part of who we are that it is difficult for us to separate ourselves from them enough to be able to talk about them. We do not think these assumptions, we think from them.
  • Until what is significant is created by you, you aren’t living your life, you are living some inherited life.
  • 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.
  • 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’. Maybe that whole thing in me around which the universe revolves isn’t so central! Maybe life is not about the self but about self-transcendence.

Attributed

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Arranged in ascending chronological order
  • Here is where it is. Now is when it is. You are what it is.
    • Adelaide Bry (1976). est, 60 Hours that Transform Your Life. New York: Avon. p. 216. 
  • Man keeps looking for a truth to fit his reality. Given our reality, the truth doesn't fit.
    • Adelaide Bry (1976). est, 60 Hours that Transform Your Life. New York: Avon. p. 17. 
  • You are god in your own universe. There is no god unless it is self.
    • Richard L. Ganz (1993). Psychobabble: The Failure of Modern Psychology - and the Biblical Alternative. Crossway Books. p. 39. ISBN 0891077340. 
  • Something experienced is true; the same thing believed is a lie.
    • Richard L. Ganz (1993). Psychobabble: The Failure of Modern Psychology - and the Biblical Alternative. Crossway Books. p. 39. ISBN 0891077340. 
  • I have a lot of respect for L. Ron Hubbard and I consider him to be a genius and perhaps less acknowledged than he ought to be.
  • You and I possess within ourselves, at every moment of our lives, under all circumstances, the power to transform the quality of our lives.
    • Jerry Jerome (February 1, 2003). Instant Inspiration: Using Quotes to Guide You to Your Goals. Instant Wisdom Publishing. p. 65. ISBN 097261690X. 
  • Mastering life is the process of moving from where you are to where you want to be.
    • Jerry Jerome (February 1, 2003). Instant Inspiration: Using Quotes to Guide You to Your Goals. Instant Wisdom Publishing. p. 62. ISBN 097261690X. 
  • Miracles occur in direct proportion to our willingness to have them.
    • Jerry Jerome (February 1, 2003). Instant Inspiration: Using Quotes to Guide You to Your Goals. Instant Wisdom Publishing. p. 35. ISBN 097261690X. 
  • Transformation does not negate what has gone before; rather, it fulfills it. Creating the context of a world that works for everyone is not just another step forward in human history; it is the context out of which our history will begin to make sense.
    • Lynne Twist (2003). The Soul of Money: Transforming your Relationship with Money and Life. New York, New York: W.W. Norton.. p. 252. ISBN 039305097 Invalid ISBN. 
  • There are only two things in the world — nothing and semantics.
  • Belief in God is the single greatest barrier to God in the Universe. It is almost a total barrier to the experience of God. When you think you have experienced God, you haven't. Experiencing God is experiencing God, and that is true religion.
    • Ruth Tucker (2004). Another Gospel: Cults, Alternative Religions, and the New Age Movement. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan. p. 369. ISBN 0310259371. 
  • What I recognized is that you can't put it together. It's already together, and what you have to do is experience it being together.
    • Ruth Tucker (2004). Another Gospel: Cults, Alternative Religions, and the New Age Movement. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan. p. 367. ISBN 0310259371. 
    • Larry Chang (April 28, 2006). Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing. Gnosophia Publishers. p. 527. ISBN 0977339106. 
  • Happiness is a function of accepting what is.
    • Alan Aldridge (2007). Religion in the Contemporary World: A Sociological Introduction. Cambridge, England: Polity. p. 53. ISBN 0745634044. 

Quotes about Erhard

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Alphabetized by author
  • Werner Erhard is at once a thoughtful student of, and contributor to, the continuing philosophical dialogue that has cradled the world civilization in which we all dwell today. Unlike many philosophers and students of philosophy, he not only originates and develops ideas, but also profoundly touches people with them- thereby transforming people’s experience of what is possible for human beings and their ability to act on that possibility.
  • Without Carl Rogers and Werner Erhard coaching would not exist.
    • Leni Wildflower, The Hidden History of Coaching (2013)
  • “I credit Werner Erhard as one of the founders of contemporary coaching. Werner Erhard introduced the idea of transformation in the early 1970s through his est courses which opened people’s minds to the possibility of their growth and potential."
    • Vikki Brock, Sourcebook of Coaching History (2012)
  • Werner Erhard is virtually the only consciousness leader, and the only person of distinction in American society to have stepped outside this childish quarrel between Scientology and society and to have acknowledged both his indebtedness to Hubbard and his emphatic differences with him.
  • "I became convinced we should work to get this kind of transformational material into the academies,” he said, adding that he considers Mr. Erhard “one of the great intellectuals of the century."
    • Michael C. Jensen, Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration Harvard Business School, Emeritus, New York Times, November 28, 2015
  • Erhard’s exact whereabouts have been somewhat vague these past 20 years, since he was hounded out of the US after some of the worst publicity a man can have, involving allegations of incest, tax fraud and abuse. Even though these were all dropped, he tells me he left the country on his solicitor’s advice and has been based in the Caribbean ever since.
  • Werner Erhard, a former used-car salesman, made millions with EST, but it turned out to be just another moneymaking scam disguised as a form of therapy.
    • John Bassett MacCleary (2004). The Hippie Dictionary: A Cultural Encyclopedia of the 1960s and 1970s. Ten Speed Press. p. 165. ISBN 1580085474. 
  • Est came to an end in the early nineties when critical stories began appearing in the Bay Area. These newspaper reports detailed Erhard's violent temper and included charges that he beat his wife and molested his children. The low point was a March 3, 1991, segment on the CBS program 60 Minutes that interviewed three of his daughters about the alleged abuse. (Erhard denied it.) After an hour of 60 Minutes, Erhard was as dead as Audi. One might have thought that Werner Erhard, the company, was beyond saving. Not true. The name was destroyed, but not the company. Before the CBS program ran, but with knowledge of what it would likely say, Erhard sold the assets of Werner Erhard & Associates to his former employees and moved to Costa Rica. The new name: Landmark Education Corporation.
 
Image of money movements quoted by Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain, from a United States Tax Court filing.
  • “I met Hawking and Gerard’t Hooft in the attic of Werner Erhard’s house where Erhard’s office was located in San Francisco. … Dick Feynman, myself, and David Finkelstein were Erhard’s gurus. … He was very, very smart.”
    • Leonard Susskind. "The Universe” a collection of essays by some of the world's most renowned physicists and cosmologists.". 
  • The American obsession with Transformation isn’t new. It’s about as old as the nation. In the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson preached about tapping into the “infinitude of man.” Norman Vincent Peale was an early bestselling self-help author with The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952. But it was Werner Erhard who created the first modern transformation when he founded est seminars in 1971. It’s a tribute to the power of his central concept that more than 20 years after he sold his ideas to a group of employees Landmark is still the natural first stop in any transformation tour.
  • In the first place, est-Forum was primarily a business, efficiently directed by its founder and head Werner Erhard for the purpose of making a profit. Indeed, the internal discipline of the organization was so strong that its style of operation has been labeled as fascist.
    • Paul C. Vitz (1994). Psychology As Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. p. 26. ISBN 0802807259. 
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  1. ↑ "The Achievement Habit" by Bernard Roth, Publisher - Harper Collins, pg. 39, ISBN: 978-0-06-235610-9
  2. ↑ Article, "Breaking Out of the Box -A Crash Course in Paradigm Thinking" Debra Feinstein, BENCHMARK Magazine, FALL 1989 p.3
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