I tame every bear. I make even buffoons behave.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
THE TRAINING
The est Standard Training, which Werner began to present in October 1971, creates an econiche for transformation on an individual level.
What is the Standard Training?
Many accounts of its details and circumstances have been published. The best of these is the novelist Luke Rhinehart's dramatic recreation of it in The Book of est.1 My aim here is not to duplicate what has been done, but to give an account of the structure of the training, and to relate it to the philosophical ideas supporting it.
The est Standard Training is a new form of participatory theatre that incorporates Socratic method: the artful interrogation that is midwife at the birth of consciousness.
Like most drama, it has catharsis as one of its aims. Unlike most drama, it also aims to bring the participant to an experience of him or herself which is tantamount to transformation.
It is not the purpose of the training—although it is often misunderstood to be its purpose—to bring the trainee to a single
"high" experience. Although people frequently do have peak experiences in the course of the training, the aim is not to produce some such experience for its own sake, but to transform the trainee's ability to experience so that he encounters all of living in an expanded way. Such a transformation is a contextual shift, from a deficiency orientation to a sufficiency orientation, "from a state in which the content in your life is organized around the attempt to get satisfied or to survive . . . to an experience of being satisfied, right now, and organizing the content of your life as an expression, manifestation and sharing of the experience of being satisfied, of being whole and complete, now."2 Such a transformation may be crystallized in an instant, but it is not necessary for this to happen.
What the training does promise is that after such an experience—
after the encounter with the Self—life is transformed in the sense that it becomes the process of freeing oneself from the past, rather than enmeshing oneself more deeply in it. Patterns and problems continue to appear; but instead of acting them out, dramatizing them, one begins to experience them—and eventually to "experience, them out." As will become apparent in the next chapter, Werner's own life story provides an example of this process. And his story about sailing with his son also illustrates what happens. Prior to experiencing, and thereby transcending, his fear, St. John was imprisoned within it: he had no alternative but to express it mechanically. By noticing, and thereby
stepping outside it, he could begin to watch it. come up, and play itself out, from a. vantage point beyond it. This is what is involved in what Werner calls "experiencing" a pattern. It is one thing to be the prisoner or captive of an ordinary automatic fear-reaction pattern; it is quite another thing to watch fear arise from a context in which the fear pattern itself has been transcended.
How is this transformation of the ability to experience accomplished?
The training provides a format in which siege is mounted on the Mind. It is intended to identify and bring under examination
presuppositions and entrenched positionality. It aims to press one beyond one's point of view, at least momentarily, into a perspective from, which one observes one's own positionality. Teaching no new belief, it aims to break up the existing "wiring of the Mind," and thereby to trap the Mind, to allow one to take hold of one's own Mind, to blow the Mind. Such tactics create the conditions into which Self can be revealed, into which transformation can occur, into which a mutant of higher consciousness can be born.
The setting for the training is arduous and its style is irreverent and intrusive.3 There is a way to do things, a way that is not bent to the personalities or acts—the Minds—of the participants. As Werner puts it, "Your Mind can't get sympathy from this environment." In the training, ordinary ways to escape confronting one's experience are—
with the agreement of the participants—sealed off in advance. On the concrete level this means limited access to food, water, toilets, bed.
Alcohol and drugs are forbidden. There is limited movement; there are no clocks or watches by which to tell the time; one may not talk with others; nor may one sit beside friends. Internal crutches and barriers to experience—such as one's own belief systems—are also challenged by means of philosophical lectures and exercises in imagination.
No matter which trainer is leading it, the external form of the training remains the same. The trainer is a performer, leading trainees through it in a firmly set and artfully designed order. The dramatic integrity of the training is in part dependent on suspense and surprise, and on the juxtaposition of levels that is the essence of both humor and discovery. But like any good theatre, knowing the plot doesn't ruin the performance.
Within this setting, three different kinds of things take place.
First, there are presentations by the trainer, providing information and philosophical analysis, distinctions and definitions, and charts of different levels of experience and kinds of knowing. Second, there is
"sharing" and questioning by participants. Participants are encouraged, but not required, to share what is happening to them, their realizations about their lives, their problems. Finally, there are "processes,"
exercises in imagination that may be done in an altered state of consciousness, usually sitting in a chair or lying on the floor with eyes closed.
All three of these activities—the sharing and the processes as well as the presentations—are designed to bring various areas or levels of unconsciousness into clearer relief. These areas fall into four categories:
1) Mind structures, or the "organizing principles" of Mind 2) Mind traps
3) Life programs
4) Repressed incidents of a traumatic character.
The first two categories are generated by the Mind state as such—
indeed, they define the Mind state—and they relate to all persons, who are in the Mind state. The contents of the third and fourth categories vary from individual to individual. Only the fourth category is unconscious in the Freudian sense of being blocked from awareness.
The first three categories are usually not blocked, but are unconscious in the sense of never having been examined.
1) The first category—Mind structures, or the organizing principles of Mind—includes the nature and design function of the Mind, the manner in which ego is generated, the mechanisms that reinforce positionality in all its forms. These mechanisms provide the conditions under which any specific Mind content operates. That is, any Mind content whatever will serve the structure and design function of the Mind: it will be used to further survival. Any Mind content whatever will be used to make the Mind right and others wrong; to dominate and avoid being dominated; to justify the Mind and invalidate others.
Mind structures are thus not composed of specific belief systems, attitudes, or points of view. Rather, Mind structures governs all belief systems, attitudes, and points of view that arise in the Mind state; all such things must conform to the Mind structures. These structures govern the way in which men believe what they believe and know what they know. They define where one is "coming from" vis a vis belief and knowledge. .That is, in the Mind state, one is coming from, survival, domination, perpetuation of positionality; and will use belief, knowledge, attitudes, points of view on behalf of such aims. 'One will not live to know, but will know to live.
In a fundamental sense, the principles of Mind define the structure of one's world. This is why the training is so often, and so aptly, called philosophical. During the training, the trainee's philosophical context, the organizing structure of life in the Mind state, is displayed. He sees his way of knowing (his epistemology), his way of being (his ontology), and his morality as skewed toward positionality and domination, toward the survival of the Mind state.
2) .Secondly, there are what might be called "traps of the Mind state." Among the most important of these are resentment, regret and righteousness, which were treated earlier, particularly in the discussion of the self-image merchants Napoleon Hill and Maxwell Maltz.
Although insufficiently basic to be themselves organizing principles of Mind, these traps define contextual styles of operation engendered by Mind structures regardless of specific content. Any person who is in the Mind state will tend to operate in life in a righteous, regretful and.
resentful style. These traps deter escape from the Mind state, and deflect attack on it. The training relates them explicitly to the organizing structures, demonstrating how righteousness, regret and resentment reinforce positionality. Although abandoning the traps does not in itself destroy the Mind structure, it weakens its defenses.
3) Thirdly there are "life programs," as in the case of the misunderstood genius discussed earlier. Each person has such life programs, or "stories," which determine how his or her life is lived.
These consist in specific unconscious contents on the level of belief systems, identifications, fantasies, emotions. A life program differs from a Mind structure or Mind trap in that it defines the specific content of an individual life rather than the conditions under which all life in the Mind state occurs. Yet this specific content, whatever it is, is
still controlled by and operates in terms of the design function of the Mind and is protected by the Mind traps.
4) Finally, there is specific repressed material in the Freudian sense: unconscious contents that had once been conscious and that were blocked from awareness traumatically. Such individual traumas act on particular Minds in accordance with the generating principles and traps that apply to all Minds, and also in accordance with individual life programs.
The purpose of uncovering these four areas and levels of unconsciousness is not simply to inform, but to put participants in a position to observe the Mind, and to become aware of its power and mechanical nature. A remarkable thing begins to occur when the trainee begins to examine the unexamined, and becomes aware, experientially. of these areas: part of their power evaporates. In the act of observing Mind, the individual expands beyond Mind, and becomes more open to experience and life. The temptation to belief, for
instance, dramatically diminishes: one is now so aware of unconscious committments and their imprisoning effects that one is less tempted deliberately to add further commitment to the baggage. Thus, a transformed individual is unlikely to become a "true believer."
To the extent that consciousness in these four areas does pierce through the "wiring" of the Mind, to that extent the power of the past over the individual is removed, bringing him to the state of
transformation—or of "completion"—with regard to his own past.
This is the state of here and now.
To achieve such a state of completion, all four areas may need to be dealt with. Yet it is, in Werner s view, much more empowering to deal with the first category than the second, the second than the third, the third than the fourth. The key fault of much of psychotherapy, and also of most disciplines in the self-help movement—Maltz and Hill, Mind Dynamics, Scientology, and such—has been to be preoccupied with the third and fourth categories, particularly with the fourth.
Preoccupation with these last two ccategories—and with explanations in terms of them—can jam the individual further into the Mind system.
Therein, he can achieve explanation but not mastery. Preoccupation with explanation—and with the content, as opposed to the context, of life—elevates the environment and belittles the individual in order to service the mental machinery. Explanation alone gives no power.
Mastery, as Werner puts it, comes from realizing one's philosophical context—which operates chiefly on the first and second levels—and transcending one's attachments and circumstances.
The est training presents and examines the ideas and assumptions that I have described. By discussing them in this way, in a chapter of a book, I may have given the misleading impression that the training aims chiefly to convey information. It has to be emphasized again that the training aims to enable transformation to occur, not to convey information. The information presented provides only a multilevel commentary that intensifies the experience leading to transformation.
The actual presentation of the training thus has a kind of spiral structure. The individual trainee begins at the edge of the spiral, where he immediately encounters all the content of the training; as he goes through succeeding layers of the spiral, that same information is conveyed again and again—holographically, as it were—more and more intensely, and more and more experientially. By the time he
reaches the center of the spiral, the center of the cyclone, the eye of the hurricane, the initial content has become contextual.
The training is about sixty hours in length, and is held on two successive weekends. The four days of the training begin at nine in the morning and continue until late at night. These sessions usually take place in a hotel ballroom. The training usually ends between midnight and 2:00
A.M., and has been known occasionally to last until five in the morning.
The first day of the training is the most conceptual, least experiential of the four. For it has to begin at the level where people ordinarily operate, and where trainees themselves initially find themselves: at the level of concepts. This starting point, as the trainer quickly demonstrates, itself defines the chief issue of the training. The trainees begin to confront conceptual systems as things that
devastatingly limit and shape not only the content but also the quality of their lives. They also begin to confront the whole issue of
conceptuality itself.
To present the issue starkly, the trainer raises the question of how life's problems may be dealt with. His answer seems simple: all one needs to do is to tell the truth about them! What prevents people from telling the truth about their problems? They are imprisoned in their concepts, and thus never even confront their problems. Rather, they fit what is so into their preexisting conceptual frameworks. The difficulty is twofold. First, any concept, by its very nature, being a symbol for experience rather than experience itself, can serve to cut one off from experience. Second, the concepts are contained in a Mind system the function of which is to perpetuate all aspects of itself; including its concept-contents, regardless of experience. As a result, one tends to settle in life for a form of conceptualized non-experience. The issue, then, is to break through the concepts, or hidden barriers," which are self-imposed which stand in the way of telling the truth, about problems..
The trainer illustrates these suggestions with practical examples, which the trainees themselves offer him. Here is a more abstract, but simple and clear illustration of the kind of point that is being made.
Consider the following nine circles:
The problem is to connect the circles with four straight lines without lifting one's pencil or pen from the paper. Most people find this problem inordinately difficult. A typical attempt to solve it may look like this:
The individual who produced this attempt vowed that it was impossible to connect the circles with fewer than five straight lines.
In fact, however, the solution is simple, and goes as follows:
What prevents people from seeing this obvious solution is that they create—no one else does it; it is not in the directions!—an invisible barrier around the circles. I have drawn in a dotted line to show this
"invisible barrier."
In effect, people form what Werner calls a "concept" about this problem—the concept of a box—which creates an invisible barrier preventing them from dealing effectively with it. Once one achieves a position "at cause" vis a vis the problems of life, one is no longer imprisoned by such barriers, but gains immense imagination and power. One can then expand into the space created by removing the barriers.
Suppose the problem to be changed somewhat. Suppose we are asked to connect the circles with three lines!
Here is a solution:
Many people—even those who managed to solve the first problem—
will be unable to reach this solution because they have created a different invisible barrier: they suppose that the circles are points. And indeed, one could not connect nine such points with three straight lines. But with circles it is easy.
Take yet another example. Suppose the problem is to connect those circles with one straight line! Impossible? Hardly. All one needs is a very very large pencil or brush wide enough to cover all nine circles at once. For who said that the pencil or pen to be used must be one of ordinary size? That limitation too was a imposed, self-created barrier to the solution of the problem.4
To illustrate further what is involved in confronting and telling the truth about life's problems, the trainer makes use of a "cycle of existence" that is due to the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.5 All existence, on this account, can be categorized under being, doing, and having. As an individual goes through life, he comes from being, a state of creativity, through doingness, activity, to havingness.
Untransformed life, life in the Mind state, as Werner sees it, is lived backward: life in the Mind state is the attempt to go from having to doing to being—and to define one's being or identity in terms of what one has or does. As a result, one becomes imprisoned in
havingness, which shapes doingness, and prevents one from achieving any longer the creativity of being. One becomes limited by what one possesses, including, especially, patterns of behavior, points of view, and systems of self-identification and presentation. One is indeed possessed by things. Life becomes circumscribed by self-created,but seemingly intractable problems. "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind." One is the victim of circumstances: the past, the environment, relationships, behavior patterns. One is under the influence of everything one has gone through, done, or achieved. For
example: one selects a specialty, and then goes about trying to be the
example: one selects a specialty, and then goes about trying to be the