Werner Erhard: Discovering the Man Redefining What’s Possible
In this episode of Jim Doty’s Into The Magic Shop, Werner shares what drives his desire for self-development and his passion for helping others with their own journeys, through the creation of EST.
EXCERPT OF WERNER ERHARD FROM PODCAST:
“What motivated me was to discover something that actually made a difference in who one is. For a long time, it was about performance. And then it morphed from performance into, who am I really?
What is it to be, really?
That was what moved me. That’s what drove me. That’s what motivated me, so to speak.
I had certain things that really made a difference for me. One of them was a book by psychologist William Glasser, Reality Therapy. That had a really profound impact on me, because I was good at excuses and justifications and rationalizations and explanations and so forth. And in Glasser’s book, I really distinguished between all of that and the reality given by the world. To use a Heideggerian term, the environment, as we would normally call it. But it’s really the world in which one is. And that had a profound impact on me personally. It had a profound impact on the contributions I was able to make to others and moved me from performance to being.
And the thing that then solidified what was happening in me was my entrance into Zen. I lived in Sausalito at the time, and the great exponent of Zen lived on a beached ferry boat, one side of which was an artist by the name of Jean Varda, as I recall. And on the other side was the former Episcopalian minister, Alan Watts. I got to spend a lot of time with Alan Watts. That had a pretty profound impact.
Now I’m going to tell you one of the surprising ones, and that was Richard Pryor.
I just really loved Richard’s comedy. But more important than the comedy for me was that this guy was trying to say it like it really is. Richard was not trying to be cute or nice or anything. He was just trying to be what I call straight, say it like it is rather than glossing it or gilding it. And it was not social grease. In other words, it wasn’t what lets me slip by another human being. It was the really where it’s at that I learned from Richard. Subsequently I got to know him and spend some time with him as well.
Prior to est, they were the three main sources of my development. And I learned something from every discipline I studied and I studied every discipline there was. And you know, I read in all of them or where I could I listened to the people who actually created it, the person who created it. So that was the background before est. That was my own experience that I call a transformation, and it definitely was. I came out the other side able to own who I was and come to be able to be who I was at thirty-three. And none of it was comfortable and none of it was nice.