Authors: Adelaide Bry
est (20 page)
not talk unless we are recognized by the trainer. That is why we agree to
sit for up to seventeen hours at a stretch (relieved by one brief meal
break and two or three briefer bathroom breaks). That is why we agree
not to read, knit, smoke, eat, or engage in any of the usual diversions
which take us away from ourselves. And that is why we agree to forgo
tranquilizers, booze, grass, ups, downs, or the other things that make
it easier on our heads -- including aspirin for the almost inevitable
headache. We agree simply to be there, without any of the props with which
we usually avoid ourselves (TV, telephones, and toilets, among them).
We agree to abide by the rules of
est
for approximately sixty hours.
The reason we do this for sixty hours is that Werner has discovered in
his experience and observation of people during the training that this
amount of time is "what works." By the end of the second weekend we
get
it.
As I experienced
est
, this is what you need to know (as opposed
to what you experience) to get it.
The value of knowledge is determined by the
way
in which it is known.
In other words, it's not only
what
you know, but
how
you know it, that determines how you
use
what you know.
All of our knowledge is held (or known) in a system which says that
things work on a stimulus-response basis. When I communicate with you,
whether verbally or nonverbally, you respond. (A nonresponse is a kind
of response.) It's as if your computer buttons have been pushed, and
whatever your response, it was programmed. While a computer may have
a range of responses, we can only get from a computer the range of
responses we programmed into it.
Werner says this about the way we function as human beings:
"We are stuck in the way we know -- in a particular epistemology.* In
common terms, we are stuck in our system of beliefs. Our whole language
is based on this epistemology, on the idea that what we believe is
actually so; in fact what we believe is based on a system of agreements
which merely symbolize what is so. Neither our system of knowing nor
our language is experiential. It only symbolizes our experience."
* An epistemology is like the canvas we paint concepts on, or theHow can we talk about experience without a language to describe it?
container we use to hold ideas -- epistemology is a way of knowing
rather than what we know.
We can't. Language, at best, only conveys something
about
experience.
The training introduces another way of knowing, a sort of direct exposure,
or what Werner says is a natural knowing, where real communication
takes place. It is neither verbal nor nonverbal, since both of these
come from and are perceived by the stimulus-response system. This other
way of knowing Werner calls abstraction.
It's beyond believing. It's beyond thinking. It's beyond feeling.
It's beyond sensing. It's even beyond doing. It's something like the way
Einstein must first have known about relativity, as an abstraction beyond
sensation, perception, imagination and even beyond understanding. It's
akin to that moment when it all suddenly becomes clear after you've
been working for days on a problem. Without the addition of new facts,
a clarity unfolds allowing you to see the facts in a novel way, which
dissolves the problem and reveals the truth.
QUESTION: How can you create something beyond knowing when all you know
is knowing?
ANSWER: By experiencing it.
Experience
, or what you and I normally call experience, is
the stuff that comes in from the outside. "But that," Werner told me,
"is part of what I call nonexperience.
"To explain that, let's oversimplify the process of life. Let's enter
the process at a point where something is happening to a person. What
happens is a memory is made and to the memory we attach a system of
concepts to explain it and make it reasonable. Now the memory and the
system of concepts begin to determine what happens. When what happens
comes out of the memory and system of concepts, it is nonexperience.
"It's like a dog chasing his tail. Certain types of behavior are
reinforced by what we believe, and what we believe is reinforced by that
behavior, which strengthened belief more totally determines behavior,
which behavior strengthens the belief,
ad infinitum
. We become
automatons -- with a slight difference. The difference is the ability
to justify and explain the behavior. However, the behavior doesn't
arise from the justification or the explanation. It comes out of those
belief-behavior patterns and the explanations and justifications allow
us to
pretend
we are free. My notion is that what happens in the
training is that the individual is given an opportunity to create original
experiences or to re-create original experiences instead of merely
repeating concepts and beliefs -- that is, imitating past experiences."
One way to get in touch with the abstraction from which experience comes
is by "looking," really
being
with our body sensations, feelings,
points of view, behaviors, considerations, and images from the past.
When we give up thinking, so-called logical inconsistencies become
clearly compatible.
A Zen koan asks, "What is the sound of one hand
clapping?" Answer: The sound of one hand clapping. The answer is not,
as it might appear, insignificant or irrelevant.
There are two realities:
The ordinary reality, which Werner calls
duality or illusion, and the genuine experiential reality, which Werner
calls abstraction. What we call experience (sensation, feeling, emotion,
mental strain, action, behavior, etc.) lies between our concepts and our
abstractions. The truth starts out as an abstraction -- experiential
reality -- and then becomes a felt, perceived phenomenon -- what we
usually mean when we use the word experience.
Then
the truth
becomes a concept, memory, idea about what happened. Abstraction is
all that is real to each of us
in our experience
and thus, Werner
says, is the true reality. In order to live fully, we need to recognize
and operate within both realities and keep one foot in each.
Although the true reality is our own experience, we still must function
in the ordinary reality as though it were fully real. We do not have
the option of jumping out a window and not falling. By choosing not to
jump, we go along with ordinary reality, that is, the reality we agree
on. Everything we don't know by experience, we know by agreement. This
includes all of physical reality -- that which has dimension, form,
and exists in time.
This is what getting clear is all about: to accept life exactly the way
we experience it to be and acknowledge that we are responsible for the
way we experience it regardless of our beliefs, expectations or desires.
As Werner puts it: "Life is a rip-off when you expect to get what you
want. Life works when you choose what you've got. Actually what you got
is what you chose even if you don't know it. To move on, choose what
you've got."
Once we choose what we've got, in other words, once we accept that
we
choose our experience, then it becomes impossible to blame
others
-- parents, mate, boss -- for our experience. And when we
accept that whatever we're doing is O.K., that our choices are our own,
then the conflict disappears. The prisoner who
got
that he chose
to be where he is, ends up eliminating this conflict -- and being able
to be with his choice. It is resistance to what
is
that causes
anguish. The only way to chip away at resistance is by getting into it,
creating it, allowing it.
Conflict disappears when we experience something totally rather than
storing it up in a matrix of concepts and beliefs. When we experience
something so totally that there is no need to explain it, justify it, or
understand it, it vanishes. Obviously, when it's completely experienced,
the experience is complete. Nothing remains; it has disappeared. This is
what
est
calls "experiencing it out."
When Dr. Dawes (see
page 110
) tells his young
schizophrenic patient to force-feed his depression, he is saying, in
effect: Experience your depression totally. Don't repress it or pretend to
feel better or justify it with rationality. Don't ask for explanations or
"How can I get rid of it?" Just let it be there. Experience it out.
Obviously something which is experienced completely disappears. Obviously,
when a thing is complete, there's nothing more left of it -- it disappears.
There are notions within contemporary theoretical physics that tend to
support this phenomenon.
When we are dissatisfied with a situation in our lives, and we try to
change it, solve it, fix it,
do
something about it, we end up
with a modified dissatisfaction. On the other hand, when we take complete
responsibility for our dissatisfaction and experience it, it experiences
out. Then and only then can we move on. In the training, people are given
the space to both create original experiences, and to complete experiences
they've been "repeating."
Taking responsibility is being cause, not effect.
If you feel that
no one ever listens to you and you want to be heard, you have a choice:
You can find reasons, which might go something like, "My mother never
listens to me." Or you can take responsibility for not being heard, in
which case you have created the space to be heard. What happens next is
you are heard.
When we put responsibility or blame or fault for a situation on someone
or something else -- tbat is, when we attribute
cause
to that
other person or situation, we become the
effect
of that person or
situation. As long as we continue to do that, we can never be in control
of our own lives. What we create, instead, is our own variation of not
wanting our mother to understand, or anyone to care, or anyone to listen.
Werner says, "If you keep saying it the way it really is, eventually
your word is law in the universe."
We are the source of our own experience.
All that we each
experience in our lives emanates from ourselves. No one else makes us
experience anything unless we choose that experience. Every human being
bears the responsibility for "sourcing" his own life. In this way,
as source, each one of us is "God" in his universe.
Where and what we are:
We are much more separate and alone than we
think. There is aloneness even in the most intimate relationships. Each of
our realities, from the moment of birth, is ours alone.
Both psychologists and mothers, in their concern to be nurturing and
loving, often deny what existentialists have accepted -- that human
separateness is unavoidable.
Everyone begins life simply being. Then the mind develops.
est
's
description of mind is hard to grasp, but here it is to ponder: "Mind is
a linear arrangement of multisensory total records of successive moments
of now."
The mind
is
pictures or records of events past. It predicts
the recurrence of such events, and survives by being right about its
predictions -- by winning, by dominating, and conversely, by avoiding
being wrong, losing, and being dominated. It is often easier for the
mind to focus on proving how right it is ("See, I can't do blah-blah
because I never got enough blah-blah as a kid") than it is to accept
that being right is simply one of the mind's ploys for survival --
and then to move on.
The more energy invested in being right (or wrong*), the less energy
there is for aliveness. The paradox is that while mind exists to protect
our being, it actually prevents us from experiencing it.
* Wrong is actually a version of right. If you're always wrong --Ego
you're right!
is the mind in operation. Werner says that "the people who are
interested in Ego or Ego Strength or Ego Reduction or Ego whatever would
be well off to be clear about what Ego is. Ego is the mind in operation
under a specific circumstance where the mind thinks that the being is the
mind. That is all Ego is, and the 500 books written in Western psychology
about Ego are confusing and the 1,000 the Hindus have written are even
more confusing."
Ego begins when the being considers itself to be its own point of view,
Werner explains. "It thinks survival is maintaining that point of view.
An ego, therefore, is a point of view attempting to cause its own survival.
So its purpose is domination of everything and everybody from that point
of view. Ego will sacrifice its own body just to be right. This is the
actual source of illness."
When we are afraid of something, we become
more
of it. The more
important it is for us not to be greedy, the greedier we get to accumulate
the symbols of not being greedy. The more we resist anything, the more
we become what we're resisting. It's obvious that resistance to something
is a strong relationship to it -- perhaps stronger than attachment. When
we are resisting we often don't notice that what we resist is limiting
what we can be.
If we don't acknowledge we're assholes because somewhere in our belief
systems we're hanging on to "it's bad to be an asshole," then we are
really assholes. And it doesn't make any difference. An asshole is
someone resisting being an asshole.
If it doesn't matter, why est?
Since we lie to ourselves about
our experiences, we end up feeling confused and unhappy. The defenses
we create are simply the mind protecting itself -- surviving against
experiences which would challenge its point of view. We then look
for something -- therapy, success, marriage -- anything to bolster
our defenses.
The problem with some therapies is that the "experiences" they foster are
often only meaningful within the confines of the therapy relationship. The
truth imposed from a place of authority only succeeds in further hiding
one's own truth. Our own truth can only be known by creating it and
recreating it.
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