By Theresa J. Thurmond Morris
The following is an alien ET UFO Global Community change in awareness discussion by TJ an alien ET Contactee who began the Ascension Center that deals with the many levels and dimensions in our omniverse. The mind is a terrain in the brain unless we master all levels.
Thinking with only what our minds can conceive and believe means we can achieve to some. However, Positive thoughts and controlled environmental perceptions help us excel in evolutionary progress only with the fruits of our own labor. We can open our minds to better exploratory explanations from our own experiences in this physical realm. Our experiences in this physical realm are considered reality. But, we can experience worlds in our dream state of mind that seem as real as our awakened reality.
We have some levels of life that have not been known to be obvious and that could be controversial. We are approaching a time on earth when we will become involved in our alternate states of reality similar to quantum entanglement. Stay involved with the latest information in space and in quantum physics. The mind is being explored for inner worlds.
We are now embarking on an adventure not only involving research of world science but neural science and how our outer and inner worlds connect. We all have access to certain levels of our existence and how we connect to energy in space. Our essence may not only exist in our own inner being which we call body-mind-spirits but our outer worlds.
The Quantum world is the smallest part of our daily reality of research theory and practice. We are involved in cyber security and nuclear cold fusion education for the future.
Choosing our battles facing us in daily reality takes precedence today but what about tomorrow? Short term goals are a part of our long term journey. We each learn in different ways at different speeds. Some of us learn from mental models at our own pace. Some of us learn alone while many of us learn together.
We are all sharing our new views in the ascension age as shift and uplift our own thoughts and the entire worlds evolution in space and in this universe. We are all a part of a much larger omniverse.
I am sharing this essay for those who keep up with those of us who have had ET contact, NDE, OBE, and UFO and paranormal experiences in this lifetime.
I have memories of past lives and memories in other worlds and dimensions. So do many sentient intelligent beings. I and others who believe in our future hope to share energy as thoughts with others. Those that want to know more about how we exist on this planet and in other realities will want to share and become aware of others on earth.
This is a general discussion and gives time to reflect on our past general understanding of our shared worldviews. We are changing our generalizations of our worldviews.
Antiwar Movement Against Vietnam In The US. (1965-1971)See www.cyberessays.com for further information. The summer of 1965, other types of protest grew through 1971 soon replaced it. All of these movements captured the attention of the White House and the intelligence community. There were many explanations.
We have shared our emotional responses to September 11, 2001 worldwide. There is a price we must pay for our truths we receive in this shared exposure to a world and species.
As an ET Experiencer Contactee or Abductee depending on one’s own perceptions about that which I share as a paranormal writer and journalist, I foresee changes that we will share in awareness with each other in our own alien ET UFO global community.
We share a new awareness of our ET UFO Community with those we call Alien Believers and Alien Theorists. Many of us who believe in aliens as ET come from all walks of life.
How we shall provide information and become an important part of our world is up to us as a particular ET UFO believer social networking group.
We are educators and share information. We care to share and allow others to become aware of our belief system. We will learn that some of us take a leap of faith based on other’s experiences. We will learn that many of us are experiencing more UFO sightings and some of us actually do have ET encounters.
ET encounters are probably the hardest part of our world’s integration belief system to understand and fathom. This is why quantum scientists are joining with science fiction writers and paranormal fans in the future. We all want to become futurists involved in the leading and cutting edge. Our own minds will be plugged into the world wide web and Internet not just in mind games but with brain training in the near future.
The future will have various levels dealing with the mind and computers. The security of our world matters. We all matter and we now realize that every single being regardless of their background, profile, location, and cultural prerequisites deserve an education. Education is being challenged due to the information available for free via the Internet in cyberspace. College courses are now offered on the Internet.
This is why there is such a scramble and control for the Internet. The world leaders know that the future will deal not only in real time but virtual reality time. We are adding another layer of our ET existence to this world.
We are going to learn about the six directions we consider in space and in other dimensions.
We will soon learn about parallel worlds and worm hole travel that will take us to other universes. Some people ask me where I get my information and how can I be chosen to receive information direct. I believe it is based on my past life experiences as essence that chooses to be reincarnated at various times in various dimensions, places as planes of existence based on those who I choose to call God and Goddess of Divine power.
Since I have died in this life as in flat-lined, I have seen a part of me that I believe others have as well. Some choose to call this a near death experience or NDE. This allowed me to learn first hand of out
body experiences or OBE before it was fashionable to do so through meditation techniques.
Many may have participated in the human potential movement. I read Napolen Hill, Zig Zigler, Wayne Dyer and went to PSI Seminars. I studied world religions and business. I made a living mainly in research and investigations most all my adult life.
I went to some seminars with hundreds of professionals wanting to share in business success in America. We were entrepreneurs with a purpose to assist not only ourselves but others. This allowed us to share in the creation of our future.
Some went even further including Stephen Hawking and Leonard Susskind who allegedly met at Werner Erhard’s home. Werner Erhard was the founder EST.
Werner Erhard emerged on the Human Potential scene in 1971 with L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology, and a book by Napoleon Hill called Think and Grow Rich.
Topics included knowing how to inject thoughts and the power to persuade others as in neural linguistic programming or NLP. This was a part of many peoples social and mental education in seminars in the twentieth century. We learned about Dianetics, Scientology, People Synergistically Involved at PSI. I am including further information on Erhard at the bottom of this essay for those interested. There were many people participating but the name that came up in most circles of the movers and shakers of the times was Erhard. There were about five main names at the time.
Seminars and how to gain friends and influence people. We read a lot of self help books.
We became interested in space and science and some of us learned this through science fiction.
The way we think will be like taking the red pill or blue pill scenario regarding the Matrix movie.
One quick way is to simply view an open mind is by seeing the movie Inception. There are levels of our minds that we will be exploring that deals with levels of our minds, which creates our reality. We will learn about dreams and thoughts, which are important.
We will learn how to control our dreams the same as we learn to create virtual reality worlds on our gaming systems. Games and entertainment are an important part of our world because they not only increase our ambidexterity and use of both parts of our brains simultaneously but also allow us to learn to create worlds in our own minds.
What we must be consciously searching and seeking for is our own truth as individual inspiration.
This is why I share the Ascension Center. I was told by certain beings that I perceived as divine extraterrestrials to create the Ascension Center. I share stories freely online to acquaint others with various levels of being besides what has been openly accepted in the past.
We can go to this place in this world and in others. We can use the Ascension Center to access other dimensions. We can learn to understand more about our own individual worlds and how we choose to combine our energies in this world, we call reality.
The movie Inception takes the viewers on a trip inside the main characters dream worlds. I will not give away the plot but I can tell my readers that it will challenge one’s own mind to keep up with the various levels of dream virtual worlds. I actually chose to watch the movie a second time although the second time did not hold my interest as well because I was looking for certain parts that I wanted to understand about the writers and the director’s who created the movie. I like to use parables in my stories that I create in words. I have been a songwriter and producer in the past and have learned to use gifts and talents that I have been given. However, my calling seems to be in sharing words as content on the Internet dealing with the paranormal and time travel.
I am sharing this general discussion for a way to end this year 2010. We are going to be challenged to move more expedient in the future. I for one am willing to test others on the cusp of our intelligence with the energy that travels at the crest of the vibrations of the inspiration energy.
We all should share in the challenge to create inspiration and the way we do this is in not only our conscious awareness but also our subconscious awareness. We can share our dreams. This is not a new frontier but will be for some. Many of us have been trained since the early 1970s to challenge our world. This includes our virtual and dream worlds as remote viewers and psychics. We will share ESP in the future of our world with others.
We have various categories and topics we will be expanding in the future. I have always been interested in just about all topics on earth that was offered me in education in schools. As an adult, I learned that although I had a general knowledge of how my world worked I could have been better prepared about the world in not just geography and history but a general education that pertained to life in general on how to support our basic survival needs. I believe that if we are to define our world with a monetary system then we should educate and train our humankind to the basic needs to survive.
We have in the past century in this world allowed too many young children and young adults to learn on their own how to survive in the culture they are born into. This must change in the future. We must become aware of every living creature born in all parts of the world. We need continental educators in skilled leadership. We need global leaders who want to see the future of humankind advance in awareness of what will make this planet great!
For now, we seem to accept that capitalism and international trade is the best way to go forth for this planet as far as global community survival is concerned.
There are countries that are considered super powers.
We will have to navigate our entire future generations based on these global super powers and make sure that there is room for the smaller countries to grow in international trade and commerce.
The entire world belongs to the global community social network. We can now learn more about all the beings on this planet. We have to explore all land and all oceans while not forgetting where we originally came from in space.
We of the alien ET UFO community accept that we came from space.
We accept that our original energy was created somewhere else in space. This allows us to accept that we are Starseeds, which can be proven, from our core elements. This should be our core belief system as well.
However, there will be some who are still not convinced because one man declared his ideas at one time on earth and a Darwinian theory came to be thought of as evolution.
Until we can all agree that we are of intelligent design in this century, we will have to allow for those who still believe as some of our past thinkers and educators did as they allowed another’s ideas and perception enter their thoughts as their own.
We who have been participating with Internet presences as writers, and publishers on the Internet have been sharing our stories and are now linking together and using RSS feeds.
We allow others to view our ideas, thoughts, and belief systems as writers. We hope to expand our topics of interests.
Some of us are part of the paranormal category that includes many genres and subjects.
There is no one category and the main keywords that stand out on the Internet are aliens, ET, UFO, contactees, abductees, paranormal, supernatural, mysteries, time-travel, 2012 and so on as one can view on most our websites such as the ones called UFO Digest and the UFO magazine. These are two of the oldest ones we share with each other.
We are learning to share our ideas with each other on the internet along with our photos and videos. In order that we become more productive, we may want to begin linking our websites for our readers by main interests.
We can all become social entrepreneurs, which allow us all to spread the word of our interests in the alien ET UFO spiritual history.
The recent ancient alien episodes on the History Channel have been covering many of our topics that we see in our paranormal community. We enjoy mysteries and how they involve space and our alien ancestors.
This has been very beneficial to the global community and I perceive the future to be more interested in our ancient ancestors, and spiritual cultural interests that created our traditions.
Many of us who grew up as Baby Boomers were raised with the three main television channels as ABC, CBS, and NBC. Now we have over 150 channels available to us via satellite. In addition, people are becoming so mobile that we have need for our mobile phones, during our new information and communication age of involvement with social networks.
We still desire to know the news and how it will change our lives and our history.
We will now also begin defining that which we can break down into those who believe in benevolent ET and malevolent Aliens. This is part of our world in which we exist with our own perceptions, and projections onto animate and inanimate objects.
We all have a purpose and part of our present way of being is to define meaning in our own lives.
We who are at a level of awakening our inner spiritual selves are part of our soul’s essence with intelligent levels of thoughts, memories, perceptions, and projections of our own minds. How we begin to create our world as the architects of our own existence is now a larger part of our entire global community existence.
We will now here of many who have become active in the entire global community social network. We will begin seeing more areas of life not just in reality around us at the daily basic levels where we live and work to make our lives better but, now thanks to our upgrade into the information technology levels of this world’s existence we are going to experience more awareness of the expansion.
We are in a world that is expanding in many directions. It is time to increase our awareness in this time of revelation. We are going to being sharing more information in less time on this plane of existence. We are all going to begin as of January 1, 2011 becoming more of who we are not just as individuals but also as one global community.
We are expanding our global awareness in this information age. We are expanding our cultures with the sharing of innovative technological information. We are sharing education with what was once considered third world countries. We are becoming more of the way we believe that the general population of earth should be.
We are becoming aware of the way we should all share with those who have been on the fringe of our larger global society. We are expanding our world’s membership to include everyone. This means every living creature that is considered a humanoid or one unit in the sentient intelligent being species on earth.
We can see and feel the unrest in us all. The governments and religions of this world are becoming undefined and unsettled in the changes occurring that is out of the control of our world leaders. This is disconcerting to say the least to our world leaders. There is a reason that energy is changing so fast that the information that they world leaders receive is outdated and in some cases outmoded. The world leaders are being our maneuvered and outplayed in the game of life at this time. There is a reason and the power that was once controlled by the few is now being taken back by the many in this global society.
We are aware of certain beings for instance that have made global changes. The world is preparing the planet for international markets. We have seen commercial businesses that began in the United States and other countries expand their franchises into other parts of the world. Companies that once spoke about taking an idea from one location to a second and third are now taking their company ideas, products, and services to not only the national but also the international expansion levels on this planet. We can all relate to the major icons such as Coca Cola, Pepsi, Wal Mart, Mc Donald’s, and brand names that we have seen expand their products brands throughout the world.
We are going to learn from the top of the food chain down on this planet what is important to our survival and this includes more than food, clothing, shelter, the air we breathe, and the trees that make oxygen. As we do begin to increase our entire world’s population survival and awareness of the basics, we shall also have higher expectations.
This is part of every sentient intelligent beings evolution.
We have now begun understand that there was human beings on this planet prior to that which we believed in the last century. Our latest archaeologist’s discoveries have found proof of older civilizations than those, which we thought of in the past. The more we learn about ourselves, the more we shall learn about our past and our future. We are now learning more about this planet and all those we would consider our ancestors. There are governments that will have to change in order to survive as we grow forward into this century.
We now have the United Nations that affords us a general alliance for world peace.
We are going to see that all of these manmade products and services are going to become awakened and aware to the fact that we the general populace are more intelligent and more involved in our own welfare and that of all sentient intelligent beings on this planet.
This is where the alien ET UFO believers play a large and important part in the future of humankind. We shall be activating that awareness with our own individual DNA as memory codes of how we perceive our own worlds and how they combine together.
The primordial soup does have meaning and in the past, those who were involved with a higher spiritual soul level if you will allow the general term were considered the holy men and women. The past cultures were tribe like and we always had our spiritual leaders who were considered medicine men and women in our clans.
We had Shaman, healers, sages, and those who we had deal with the higher energies that we believed dealt with death and dying and all our ancestors who passed over to the higher dimension or went to another world. Most all of our past ancestors believed in another place of existence where we must travel too at the time of death. They could see that we were born and that we could die. Our immortality was part of our existence in all cultures and societies around the world.
Our part as those in the occult metaphysical world in the English speaking cultures are those who have come together with the believers in those who believe in a higher power or those from the heavens came as aliens or extraterrestrials to this world.
We are now seeing in this world that the Internet online has increased and advanced our awareness and communication information and social networking.
Alien Extraterrestrials or ET is who we suspect are controlling the unidentified flying objects or UFOS. I give the meaning of UFOS as flying saucers also from the old term used in the last century for that which we cannot explain as being created on earth but is a flying object.
The world has always had those who from the heavens came including those we called the star people and sky people. Most of our world inhabitants will know what one means in a general meaning when we used the word God. Meaning a higher power or omnipotent being not of earth. Many cultures believe that God is the creator of this world and all that is in it. Meaning all people, places, things, as all creations in our own world.
We now take this for granted. We use the word alien as members of another intelligent life form not from earth. Granted we use the word alien for those who are not also not of our own country or naturalized residents in this world of ours. We are now using the last 20th century terms in this 21st century with more awareness for the entire global community.
We have been able to generalize around the world our own meaning for God, ET, and aliens.
Now, we shall begin to define exactly what we will separate from the last century in terms of aliens, ET, UFOs, flying saucer shapes and any and all other shapes that are seen in our skies overhead.
We know that we now have smart cars and smart computers that will challenge the innovators and engineers to offer us more for less time and expense in the future.
We had a global scare of the international world economic levels in 2009 and 2010. We can now put the international market of all the learning curves at the forefront of our minds as that which will far exceed our individual needs. We shall now all participate together in the global community with interests in sharing a better middle class lifestyle with all inhabitants of this planet.
We must not only think of our own personal and family needs at the local community level but also expand our awareness to that of our country and our international needs to participate in the global markets. We will have to combine our needs in the G20 as we reflect on our world governments that must be involved with keeping our planet safe and secure from the new threats that will come from near earth objects as NEOs in space.
All our arts and sciences have been developed over time through our ancestor’s philosophical thoughts, ways, means, and deeds of the past. We now realize how important our past has become to those who are now born on earth. This will include how our ancient ancestors educated past societies that dealt with politics and religions of the world. We are now combining all world religions as we combine our global community.
We will now see more education on all topics including how governments and religions are formed around the world in cultures and societies that have traditions. We will now learn about all the older ancient traditions of all tribal cultures that are the oldest in the world and will soon discover that which was even older on this planet.
We are going to learn that those who from the heavens came in the past will come again.
It is just a matter of when.
Whether they will be benevolent or malevolent we do now know. We believe that our ancestors have shared their observations of both. Some of our religions may be based on our ancestors observations.
We base most of our world’s religions on our ancestors beliefs and holy scripts. We choose to follow moral laws that were founded upon our past religions in most all our present cultures. We formed most all societies based on the main world religions as Buddhism · Christianity · Hinduism · Islam · and Judaism.
We may be ready to make our future decisions based on whether we believe in benevolent or malevolent superior intelligent beings. This is now part of our framework for the ascension age of humankind on earth. We are entering the new ascension age as of December 21, 2012. This is the day that we shall come to know as a date that changed our world’s thoughts and perception of our global community in our history.
Please test yourself and share in the further adventures of our minds together as we expand our ET UFO paranormal community together with our stories.
We can create whatever we want in our future. Do what one must to survive day to day and ask for your higher power to grant you divine inspiration. Ask for that which you desire in your own mind and world from your higher power. I did and I have experienced extraterrestrials, and divine inspiration. I would like everyone to know more about life on earth and in other realities that I call parallel worlds and the various levels of dimensions in space. Some call this science fiction on this planet because it requires us to use our minds imaginations as inspiration.
Ascension is raising our spiritual soul’s awareness of our entire sentient intelligent being species on this planet as we relate to others in this universe, multiverse, metaverse, xenoverse and omniverse.
Inspiration of receiving direct ideas from the omniverse is the closest one being can get to the divine omnipotence in this Omniverse. Stay tuned. TJ
Source: Debunker’s Dictionary
“In life, understanding is the booby prize.” — Werner Erhard
Werner Erhard’s est [Erhard Seminar Training and Latin for “it is”] was one of the more successful entrants in the human potential movement. est is an example of what psychologists call a large group awareness training program.
The first est seminar was held in October, 1971, at the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco with nearly 1,000 in attendance. Erhard and est were known for training people to get “It”, a concept taken from author, teacher and expert communicator Alan Watts. At the time Erhard arrived in the Bay Area, Watts was teaching his version of Zen to small groups on his houseboat in Sausalito. Erhard, like Watts, would teach people to “Get It.” Watts, however, did most of his teaching through books. His seminars were small. Erhard and his trainers would not teach through books, but in large hotel ballrooms and auditoriums to hundreds at a time.
(Writing about a program that no longer exists and that was taken by hundreds of thousands of people is risky, to say the least. Clearly, the experiences of those who took the program varied greatly. Whatever I say that resonates with one group of participants will seem false to another group. What follows is an attempt to reflect the background and the experience of est, but the reader should realize that whatever I say will be inadequate, perhaps even false, for some participants.)
Est adopted, in part, the Zen master approach, which was often abusive, profane, demeaning, and authoritarian. (One of my favorite Zen stories is of the master who asks his disciple a series of questions. No matter what the disciple answers, the master hits him with a stick. Even contradictory answers are met with the stick. The result is not resentment but enlightenment. If you stick around long enough, life will teach you this lesson for free: no matter what you do, it hits you with its stick!)
While many participants did not perceive the training as particularly abusive, some were not used to the discipline requested of them. Some have claimed that one typically abusive approach was the requirement of extraordinary bladder control in est training. Participants were advised not to leave the room, even to go to the toilet, during training. According to one est participant, however, “bathroom breaks were scheduled at regular and reasonable intervals….Two or three rows at the back of the room were reserved for those who required more frequent bathroom breaks (and I think either some sort of documentation or personal insistence were required to qualify). No one was ever physically required to stay in the room at any time” (personal correspondence). (This aspect of est training was humorously ridiculed in the movie “Semi-Tough” (1978) with Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristoferson.) In any case, one should expect some sort of discipline and required order for this kind of training. Having people come and go as they please is distracting and not conducive to the concentration necessary for such a program.
Erhard and Scientology
In the late 1960s, Erhard studied Scientology and L. Ron Hubbardbecame a significant influence. Scientologists to this day accuse Erhard of having stolen his main ideas for est from Hubbard. We do know that when Erhard set up est he considered making it a non-profit, as Hubbard had done with dianetics and the Church of Scientology. But Erhard decided to incorporate as an educational firm for profit in a broad market.
Erhard and his supporters accuse Scientology of being behind various attempts to discredit Erhard, including hounding by the IRS and accusations of incest by his children. Erhard won a lawsuit against the IRS and the incest accusations were recanted. Erhard has claimed he has good evidence that Scientologists made a strong and concerted effort to destroy him.
est is not dianetics
est bears little resemblance to Dianetics or Scientology, however. est is a hodgepodge of philosophical bits and pieces seemingly culled from the carcasses of existential philosophy, motivational psychology, Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-cybernetics, Zen Buddhism, Alan Watts, Freud, Abraham Maslow, L. Ron Hubbard, Hinduism, Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, P. T. Barnum, and apparently anything else that Erhard’s intuition told him would work in the burgeoning human potential market.
(I’m not saying that such eclecticism is a bad thing or that Erhard consciously constructed est out of just these sources. I employ bits and pieces from many of the same sources in my teaching. In fact, after a Socratic performance on the first day of an Introduction to Philosophy course, a student once blurted out: “This is just like est!”)
What did Erhard promise those who would shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars for his programs? He promised he would “blow their minds”* and “empower” them “to produce effective action.” He would enable them “to produce new ways of working.” He would transform the basis of their communication. They would be able “to cause life instead of just living it.” “Werner Erhard held out the tantalizing promise of transformation, a word and a concept never precisely defined in the fuzzy syntax-twisted jargon of est”(Pressman 1993).
Erhard’s Self Training
Where did Erhard get his training?
Mostly, he is self-taught. His study was undirected and accidental. In 1960 he was John Rosenberg, a 25-year-old married with children. Apparently dissatisfied with his life but with no Large Group Awareness Training available to him, he did what many unhappy men have done: he abandoned his family. He left Philadelphia and went to St. Louis, changed his name and sold cars. Some might find it interesting that a man with a Jewish father whose parents had him baptized in the Episcopal church would come to identify himself with a German name. Of more interest to his transformation, however, are the books he read and was influenced by. William Warren Bartley III (Werner Erhard: the Transformation of a Man) tells us that Erhard was “profoundly dissatisfied with the competitive and meaningless status quo” and was deeply affected by Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich.
Hill’s three basic principles are: every achievement begins with an idea; plans call for their implementation and; what you think is what you do. Think positive, you will do positive deeds.
Hill also advised visualizing objectives and selecting similar-minded friends. Hill gives good advice, but it is very vague and is not very systematic. It doesn’t offer much to people who haven’t got a clue what their objectives are or should be. Some of his ideas can be harmful, if not properly applied.
For example, some people are taught that they should always talk positive, even if this means lying. Even if you haven’t made a sale in two years, you must put on a positive front and tell everyone that business couldn’t be better. Even if you know nothing about the product you are selling, you must praise it beyond belief. Even if you are experiencing one failure after another, you must lie to yourself and tell yourself that you are doing great. You must never blame the product for not selling. You must try harder, have more faith, be more positive.
The est training was not, however, a prelude to, say, The Secret, where the message is an extension of Hill’s think it and it will become so philosophy. Est was not just more Norman Vincent Peale.
Another significant influence on Erhard was Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-cybernetics. As a young man, Erhard apparently had a lot of negatives in his self-image and was deeply affected by Maltz who emphasized, among other things, self-hypnosis.
Erhard put his new ideas and new self to work as a traveling salesman for a correspondence school. The basic idea he came to espouse is that we’ve developed debilitating habits and beliefs. The point is to get rid of them and replace them. As one participant said, his est trainer told them that
the brain always was functioning as a self-perpetuating machine, programmed to repeat over and over again the same mechanistic responses to similar situations facing people in their daily lives.
“I’ll tell you everything there is to know about life,” the trainer gleefully announced. “What is, is, and what ain’t, ain’t.” (Pressman 1993)
Another participant describes what he got out his est training this way:
Perhaps the most eloquent and concise description of “it” that I have ever come across is from an Alan Watts essay, “This Is It”:
“To the individual thus enlightened it appears as a vivid and overwhelming certainty that the universe, precisely as it is at this moment, as a whole and in every one of its parts, is so completely right as to need no explanation or justification beyond what it simply is the mind is so wonder-struck at the self-evident and self-sufficient fitness of things as they are, including what would ordinarily be thought the very worst, that it cannot find any word strong enough to express the perfection and beauty of the experience.
The central core of the experience seems to be the conviction, or insight, that the immediate now, whatever its nature, is the goal and fulfillment of all living.”
That, in a nutshell, is “it,” and as Watts indicates, it occurs now. And I do believe, some two decades later, that that is what I got at the est training. Of course, that was then. (Although when I got it, it was now.) (Sobel 1998)
For Sobel, the training was something like one might expect in a Zen Buddhist retreat:
And so yes, I did “get it” at the est training twenty years ago, and what I got is that it always already is (and isn’t), so therefore I still have it today (and don’t), and it includes at times having the absolute certainty that I in fact never truly got it (or lost it) and nor do I still have it (although I do.) Get it?
He became part of the self-help movement after hiring Robert Hardgrove, who introduced Erhard to the work of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. Maslow and Rogers were unique in psychology at the time, for they emphasized not the disturbed or ill person, but the healthy, happy, satisfied, accomplishing person.
The human potential movement was just getting started and Erhard would be in on the ground floor.
It is estimated that some 700,000 people did the trrining before the seminars were halted in 1991, when Erhard packed up and left the country [Faltermayer]. There must have been a lot of satisfied customers to rack up that kind of participation over little more than a decade. He sold the est “technology” to some followers who established Landmark Forum. Erhard’s brother, Harry Rosenberg, heads Landmark Education Corp. (LEC), which does some $50 million a year in business and has attracted some 300,000 participants. LEC is headquartered in San Francisco, as was est, and has 42 offices in 11 countries. Apparently, however, Erhard is not involved in the operation of LEC.
See also firewalking, Landmark Forum, large group awareness training program, neuro-linguistic programming and New Thought.
Books and articles
Ankerberg, John and John Weldon. Encyclopedia of New Age Beliefs (Harvest House Publishers, Inc., 1996).
Barry, Dave. “Altered States” in The Miami Herald, April 13, 1997. (Humorist Dave Barry takes Peter Lowe’s SUCCESS 1997 12-hour success seminar featuring Anthony Robbins, Elizabeth Dole, Rabbi Harold Kushner, Brian Tracy, Lou Holtz, Jim Morris, Peter Lowe, Pat Riley, Dr. Ted Broer, George Bush, and Dan Kennedy.)
Pressman, Steven. Outrageous Betrayal: The Dark Journey of Werner Erhard From est to Exile (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).
Salerno, Steve. (2006). Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless. Three Rivers Press.
websites
Enlightenment in Two Weekends – The est Training (1993) by Stephen Pressman from the book Outrageous Betrayal published by St. Martin’s Press
This is It: est, Twenty Years Later (1998) by Eliezer Sobel
Why We Love Gurus by Wendy Kaminer (Newsweek Magazine, October 20, 1997)
“The Best Of Est? Werner Erhard’s legacy lives on in a kinder, gentler and lucrative version of his self-help seminars” by Charlotte Faltermayer
The Sorrows of Werner: For the founder of est, a fresh round of charges Newsweek, February 18, 1991
”We’re Gonna Tear You Down and Put You Back Together” by Mark Brewer, Psychology Today, August 1975
Abstracts of Articles in Psychological Journals concerning est and The Forum
Leader of Est Movement Wins $200,000 from IRS
News Articles on Werner Erhard
Scientologists Ran Campaign to Discredit Erhard, Detective Says -L.A. Times (12-29-91)
The Awareness Page – everything you wanted to know about various LGATs
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