Transformation: The Life and Legacy of Werner Erhard

[Howard Schumann]

Originally posted by editor34
Thank you Howard for your reply.

I am very interested in seeing the movie, only wishing that it were longer than an hour.

I am also interested in reading Chris' reply when he has the chance.

After I completed the Forum, laughing, I wondered why this was not a part of our educational institution. Why is studying 2 years of a foreign language a necessity in high school but LE was not? I'm dumbfounded by that theory. As I result, some of my friends who are educators have taking LE and are introducing it to others in the educational world. I look forward to the outcome.

Thank you for your commitment to the conversation you had with Chris. I found it enlightening from both you and Chris.

Of course, Werner's initial goal was to have the training part of the educational process but I think he was too far ahead of his time for that to happen. Maybe someday in the near future.

If you want Chris to reply, perhaps the best thing to do (if you haven't done so already) is to reply directly to one of his posts.

Best
Howard

[Chris Knipp]

Chris,
Like anything else in life, how can you comment on something you have not experienced? Can you comment on the experience of giving birth to a child? No, because you cannot give birth to a child (unless I am incorrect in thinking that you are a male).

I guess it all depends on what you mean by comment and experience. Elsewhere I have said to Howard that I have participated in 12-Step recovery, and feel that I have gotten some of the same kinds of benefits from that which are attributed to the Werner Erhard programs. If you read through the thread you will see that while the ride was bumpy at times, I performed a useful function as a questioner and devil's advocate, so that the discussion went on. Otherwise it might have stopped shortly after the initial post.

I don't know what "comment" means to you. There are men who know a great deal about what the experience of giving birth is like and are able to articulate it -- to the benefit of women. If one had to "experience" everything one wrote about, there would be no fiction., and perhaps no science, no psychology and no biology. Men can't give birth; indeed that is so. If one were to adhere to your simple assertion, one would have to claim that men couldn't write about what it's like to bewomen and vice versa. Dickens couldn't have written about the death of Little Nell because he hadn't died. Of course he had seen the death of children; and more importantly, he had expeirneced death emotionally and imaginatively. One is able to speak of things one hasn't directly experienced by virtue of imagination, projection, extrapolation. Nonetheless of course there are experiences that one can't truly "know" without experiencing them onself, and est graduates claim that that's the nature of the est experience. But again, what is experience; and what does comment mean, and what does it mean to truly know? These are questions that can be discussed in any program of free and open inquiry, where participants are allowed to discuss ideas and experiences about which they are not certain. One can't really move about in the world of ideas without being willing and able to deal with things one has not directly experienced. To restrict all "comment" to direct "experience" is to limit us to living at a very primitive level.

I approached this topic with great skepticism, having been unconvinced previously of the value of est and the Landmark Forums and wondering about the serious criticisms leveled at them. But as a result of this discussion and the little amount of research that I've done on the Web in connection with it, I have come to believe that many people have in fact greatly benefitted from est and Landmark and are happy with the experience. A lot of the criticisms and rumors about the negative aspects of Erhard's programs seem to have been invented or grossly exaggerated. That's as far as I'm prepared to go, but for a person as skeptical as me, that's going pretty far.

[ajax]

Howard,

Re your discussion of responsibility, I have to take issue with what you were saying to Chris, that we are responsible. First, it is not clear if you are talking about "we" as in "all human beings" as a species, or whether you mean each of us, individually. But I will assume from your examples you mean each of us being responsible for our individual experience.

Now, of course, that is not what I got from the training. What I got was that I was (we all are) essentially an automaton, wired and conditioned for quite predictable behavior (racket) in response to stimuli - in a sense, responsible for nothing, free will being just a meaningless phrase I learned to explain my behavior and hopefully have it look good. There is no ' "is" responsible' in human being, except when we create it.

The transformation comes about in seeing the value of, and choosing to be responsible, by which is meant see myself as the source of my experience and to be ultimately accountable for my response in the world. The question of "blame" is a largely a separate matter.

Until I make this choice of responsibility in all things, despite what the law and conventional morality may say, I am not actually responsible for anything, just essentially a machine or a slave to convention, and this is the way most people go about life, if you look at them objectively.

This and several other points that I think you have inadvertently misdescribed appear to have created some stumbling blocks for Chris. Chris has made some good points in his posts and his skepticism is quite justified in light of the difficulties we all have in talking about this stuff. I would categorically deny that there is anything like promotion of irrationality in Werner's work (I don't end up believing I cause the weather), but there is much that is impossible to transmit in concise everyday English vocabulary. Some people will say that this suggests that it is nonsense (What kind of a nut would say I am responsible for my own persecution?), but that merely indicates they do not realize how much of our thinking and feeling is circumscribed by received vocabulary, or the power of a conversation toward freedom to create a new and better experience of life.

[editor34]

Thank you for replying. I absolutely understanding what you are asking regarding "comment." I honestly mean it in its most simplistic term. Fiction is fiction. To suggest that a human knows the experience of another human is fiction. If I cut my finger from a peice of paper, it may bring up a memory for me of touching fire when I was 5 years old; however, if you were to cut your finger on a peice of paper, it may remind you of being cut by a knife. Two totally different experiences of being cut. Chris, What does it feel like to cut your finger on a piece of paper?

My point is that even two women who have given birth may know the experience of giving birth--they know the experience for themselves, not the whole human species, not every woman. Having said that, we are primitive. Someone tells us what is and we say "okay." Free will? We have it, but how many of us use it? Who told you it was wrong to put your elbows on the table while eating? Someone did, and we believed it. Free will? Hmmm, I question that. I believe we as human beings are capable of free will. In our life, we chose to be who we are, or even better, who we think we are. You wrote that you are a skeptical person. Well of course you are because you said you are. Whatever you say is thruth. What would happen if you stopped being skeptical for one minute?

[Howard Schumann]

Originally posted by ajax
Howard,

Re your discussion of responsibility, I have to take issue with what you were saying to Chris, that we are responsible. First, it is not clear if you are talking about "we" as in "all human beings" as a species, or whether you mean each of us, individually. But I will assume from your examples you mean each of us being responsible for our individual experience.

Yes, we as individuals are 100% responsible for our experience, though as you point out, this may not not be brought into conscious awareness until we can notice that we are playing our mental tape recorder and choose to operate at cause rather than at effect.

The transformation comes about in seeing the value of, and choosing to be responsible, by which is meant see myself as the source of my experience and to be ultimately accountable for my response in the world. The question of "blame" is a largely a separate matter.

I have no problem with that at all.

Until I make this choice of responsibility in all things, despite what the law and conventional morality may say, I am not actually responsible for anything, just essentially a machine or a slave to convention, and this is the way most people go about life, if you look at them objectively.

Yes, from time to time I do things mechanically until I catch myself and remember that I am the cause of my experience.

This and several other points that I think you have inadvertently misdescribed appear to have created some stumbling blocks for Chris. Chris has made some good points in his posts and his skepticism is quite justified in light of the difficulties we all have in talking about this stuff. I would categorically deny that there is anything like promotion of irrationality in Werner's work (I don't end up believing I cause the weather), but there is much that is impossible to transmit in concise everyday English vocabulary. Some people will say that this suggests that it is nonsense (What kind of a nut would say I am responsible for my own persecution?), but that merely indicates they do not realize how much of our thinking and feeling is circumscribed by received vocabulary, or the power of a conversation toward freedom to create a new and better experience of life.

Well, we may have a somewhat different experience of the work. You may be thinking of irrationality in perjorative terms but when Werner says the only reality is experience (consciousness), he is not talking about what is reasonable or even what is rational but about our ability to create from nothing. I would rather state it as that there is no difference between the physical and the mental and that reality is malleable (yes even the weather) . According to physicist David Bohm, "In human life, meaning is being" or in the very act of interpreting the universe, we are creating it. "In a way", he says, "we could say that we are the totality of our meanings." Bohm's ideas as Werner's spring from a vision of wholeness, a vision that allows people to transform their consciuosness and restore to our world a deeper sense of interconnectedness and meaning.