Werner Erhard

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I didn't arrive at the opportunity to make the world work for everyone by figuring out how to do it.

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.

Contents

Quotes [edit]

  • 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.
  • I didn't arrive at the opportunity to make the world work for everyone by figuring out how to do it.
    • 60 Minutes, broadcast on Werner Erhard, March 3, 1991, CBS, Produced by David Gelber.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • At all times and under all circumstances,we have the power to transform the quality of our lives.


Attributed [edit]

  • You can either have your reason or results.
    • Jinny Ditzler, 2012: Your Best Year Yet -- Sticking With Your Plan, Huntington Post [1], Feb 14, 2012
  • Happiness is a function of accepting what is.
    • Aldridge, Alan (2007) Religion in the Contemporary World: A Sociological Introduction Cambridge, England: Polity, p. 53 ISBN 0745634044
  • What I recognized is that you can't put it together. It already is together and what there is to do is to experience it being together.
    • Larry Chang, Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing, page 527, Gnosophia Publishers;(April 28, 2006), ISBN-10: 0977339106
  • There are only two things in the world — nothing and semantics.
  • I take responsibility for ending starvation within twenty years. The Hunger Project is not about solutions. It's not about fixing up the project. It's not about anybody's good idea. The Hunger Project is about creating a context - creating the end of hunger as an idea whose time has come. (Quote from 1977, re: The Hunger Project)
  • 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.
    • Tucker, Ruth (2004) Another Gospel: Cults, Alternative Religions, and the New Age Movement Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, p.367 of 464. ISBN 0310259371.
  • 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, Instant Inspiration: Using Quotes to Guide You to Your Goals, Instant Wisdom Publishing (February 1, 2003), page 65, ISBN-10: 097261690X
  • Mastering life is the process of moving from where you are to where you want to be.
    • Jerry Jerome, Instant Inspiration: Using Quotes to Guide You to Your Goals, Instant Wisdom Publishing (February 1, 2003), page 62, ISBN-10: 097261690X
  • Miracles occur in direct proportion to our willingness to have them.
    • Jerry Jerome, Instant Inspiration: Using Quotes to Guide You to Your Goals, Instant Wisdom Publishing (February 1, 2003), page 35, ISBN-10: 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.
    • Twist, Lynne (2003) The Soul of Money: Transforming your Relationship with Money and Life New York, NY: W.W. Norton., page 252. ISBN 039305097.
  • 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 are God in your own universe. There is no God unless it is self.
    • Page 39. Psychobabble: The Failure of Modern Psychology - and the Biblical Alternative, Ganz, Richard L., (1993), Crossway Books, ISBN 0891077340
  • Something experienced is true; the same thing believed is a lie.
    • Page 39. Psychobabble: The Failure of Modern Psychology - and the Biblical Alternative, Ganz, Richard L., (1993), Crossway Books, ISBN 0891077340
  • 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.
  • Here is where it is. Now is when it is. You are what it is.
    • Bry, Adelaide (1976) est, 60 Hours that Transform Your Life, New York: Avon, page 216.
  • Here is where it is. You are what it is.
    • Est, 60 Hours that Transform your life, Adelaide Bry, (1976) pg. 218
  • Man keeps looking for a truth to fit his reality. Given our reality, the truth doesn't fit.
    • Est, 60 Hours that Transform your life, Adelaide Bry, (1976) pg. 17

Undated [edit]

  • Most of our notions about the world come from our 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 assumption, we think from them.
    • Quoted in Thank God for Evolution, by Michael Dowd, Viking Press

Quotes about Erhard [edit]

  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Ries, Al (2005). Focus. HarperCollins Publishers. p. 164. ISBN 0060799900. 
  • 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.
    • MacCleary, John Bassett. (2004), The Hippie Dictionary: A Cultural Encyclopedia of the 1960s and 1970s, Page 165., Ten Speed Press, ISBN 1580085474
  • California est guru Werner Erhard ... would find himself the subject of a 60 Minutes investigation ... during which some of his children and former est associates made public charges about physical and mental cruelty ... he continues to live outside the country.
    • Downing, Michael (2002). Shoes Outside the Door. Counterpoint. p. 341. ISBN 1582432546. 
  • 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.
    • Vitz, Paul C. (1994). Psychology As Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. p. 26. ISBN 0802807259. 
  • 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.
Image of money movements quoted by Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain, from a United States Tax Court filing.
  • Erhard maintains that he had a clear business purpose for engaging in the transactions because he desired to terminate his relationship with Margolis... However, even if Erhard had a legitimate business purpose for terminating his relationship with Margolis, that did not give him a business purpose for engaging in the specific transactions at issue here. The fact that he may have had a good business reason for separating from Margolis does not necessarily justify resorting to circular money movements (that just happened to create tax benefits) to effectuate that separation.

External links [edit]

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  • Home page, official site for Werner Erhard.
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