by Werner Erhard, 1977 You and I want our lives to matter. We want our lives to make a real difference – to be of genuine consequence in the world. We know that there is no satisfaction in merely going through the motions, even if those motions make us successful or even if we have arranged to make those motions pleasant. We want to know we have had some impact on the world. In fact, you and I want to contribute to the quality of life. We want to make the world work. When you look at making the world work, you are confronted by, and cannot pass over, the fact that each year 15 million of us die as a consequence of starvation. This unparalleled failure for humanity enables us to see that the world’s unworkability is located in the very condition in which we live our lives. Thus, it is not people “out there” who are starving; people are starving “here” – in the space in which you and I live. You and I are working to make our lives work in the same condition that results in hunger and starvation. Starvation both maintains and dramatizes a world that does not work. Persisting throughout history, it has accounted for more deaths and suffering than all epidemics, wars, and natural disasters combined. During the past five years alone, more people have died as a consequence of starvation than from all the wars, revolutions, and murders of the past 150 years. As you read this, 28 people are dying in our world each minute as a consequence of hunger, three-quarters of them children. The bare statistics are so shocking that we rarely examine the further impact of starvation on our own lives. Hunger, by its persistence, seems to invalidate that our lives could matter. It seems to prove that we are capable only of gestures. It suppresses the space in which each of us lives. Yet, precisely because the impact of starvation on our lives is so great, its existence is actually an opportunity. It is an opportunity to get beyond merely defending what we have, beyond the futility of self-interest, beyond the hopelessness of clinging to opinions and making gestures. In fact, in experiencing the truth underlying hunger, one comes to realize that the ordinarily unnoticed laws that determine the persistence of hunger on this planet are precisely the laws that keep the world from working. And the principles of the end of hunger and starvation in the world are the very principles necessary to make the world work. So this paper is not an explanation, a solution, an opinion, or a point of view about the problem of hunger. It is an examination of what is so about the persistence of hunger, aimed at answering two questions: 1. What are the laws governing and determining the persistence of hunger on our planet? Not the reasons, however cogent; not the justifications, however comforting; not the systems of explanation, however consistent or clever. If we were merely looking for reasons to explain the persistence of hunger and starvation, we could logically deduce them from the facts. Fundamental laws and principles, however, cannot be deduced. One knows them by creating them from nothing, out of one’s Self. One does not arrive at fundamental laws and principles as a function of what is already known. Such laws and principles do not merely explain; they illuminate. They do not merely add to what we know; they create a new space in which knowing can occur. The test of whether we are dealing with …

An Interview with Werner Erhard, by Norman Bodek ReVision: The Journal of Consciousness and Change, Vol 7, No. 2, Winter 1984 / Spring 1985 DO OUR CURRENT PARADIGMS STRANGLE OUR PRODUCTIVE CAPACITY? In 1971, Werner Erhard developed The est Training, an approach to individual and social transformation. He is the founder of Werner Erhard and Associates, which sponsors, in addition to the Training, workshops and seminars on communication, language, and productivity in the United States, Canada, South America, Western Europe, Australia, Israel, and India. He has formed a number of partnerships to apply his method of inquiry to business, education, government, and the health profession, including The Center for Contextual Study (psychotherapy), Transformational Technologies (management and leadership), and Hermenet Inc. (language and computers). Because much of Mr. Erhard’s recent work has focused on transformation in corporations and because his influence has been so broad, we asked our guest editor, Norman Bodek, to interview him in his San Francisco office. What follows is a discussion not only of transformation in the workplace, but of the art and discipline of transformation itself. Norman Bodek: What do you mean by your use of the word “transformation”? Werner Erhard: We use the word “transformation” to name a distinct discipline. Just as psychology, sociology, and philosophy are disciplines, so too we see transformation as a distinct discipline, a body of knowledge, and a field of exploration. I should add that because the discipline of transformation is brand new, it’s likely to be misunderstood—something that happens to a lot of new disciplines. At the beginning of the study of cybernetics, for example, people didn’t know what cybernetics was. They assumed it was a branch of engineering or mathematics. People tried to grasp it in terms already familiar to them. Eventually, however, it became clear that interpreting cybernetics as a branch of anything actually missed the whole point of cybernetics. From our perspective, the same situation is now true of transformation. Most people attempt to understand our work in terms of psychology, philosophy, sociology, or theology. While it is true that almost anything can be analyzed from those perspectives, none of those disciplines is our work. Each can provide a certain perspective on our work, but none of them is the work. Fundamentally, transformation is a discipline which explores the nature of Being. Less fundamentally, but still pretty accurately, we would say it is a discipline devoted to possibility and to accomplishment, in the sense of the source of accomplishment. Read more at wernererhard.net

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.

Follow the ideas of Werner Erhard through time in this compilation of his work and ideas.  The timeline illustrates the development of Werner Erhard’s work, for personal, business and academic communities, including notable expressions and acknowledgements, from the inception of Erhard‘s models for transformation made widely available in 1971 through to the present.

Read more about Werner Erhard’s visits to the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s

5/16/1990 WERNER ERHARD AND ASSOCIATES Werner Erhard RE: My recent trip to Moscow At the beginning of this year, we had an opportunity to look at our work in the context of the beginning of a new decade. We saw that on the one hand, it’s true that this a year like any other year, and on the other, we also had and continue to have an opportunity to generate this year, and this decade, as a powerful springboard into the next century for both our individual intentions and as the conversation we are engaged in together, standing for a new possibility for what it is to be human. In creating this future for ourselves, we allowed ourselves to be inspired by the unprecedented changes which took place in the world, particularly in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. As these changes continue to develop, we might want to look at the most powerful way we can relate to them. One relationship we could have to the changes is what we might call “ethnocentric”. It is, of course, valid to see ourselves as Americans, or Germans, or Australians, or Mexicans, or Japanese, and look out at the changes in the world with a lot of good-will, and hope very intensely that they turn out. We might even see some personal benefit, in that we can clearly see that we and our children are more secure. There is another way we can look at the changes, which is based on our common commitment to generating a new possibility for what it is to be human. In that context, the changes that are taking place are not Soviet changes, or Eastern European changes. We might consider that humanity is working on something, and where it is working on that “something” is in Eastern Europe. From that perspective, it might be useful for us to be engaged in an inquiry caned ”what is it that humanity is working on?” and ”what is the possibility of that work for generating a new possibility for being for human beings?” This, as well, opens up a way for us to relate to what humanity is working on in other locations in the world. As you know, we have been engaged in an exchange with organizations in the USSR for the past ten years, both through Werner Erhard and Associates (which funded our initial work in the USSR), the US/USSR Project of the Werner Erhard Foundation, and more recently, Transformational Technologies, Inc. In April, I traveled to Moscow with Nadja Krylov, the person responsible for coordinating our work in the USSR. Bob Chapman, Partner and President of King Chapman and Broussard (an affiliate of Tn) and Doug and Peg Rowen of Bain and Co. (the largest business strategy consulting firm in the world) also made the trip at their own expense and Doug provided expertise and advice in the area of management training and consulting. The USSR that we found on this visit is palpably at an historical crossroads. While many people are disturbed by the changes that are taking place because of the basic disruption they represent, there are many people who are taking the opportunity, and the sudden lack of guidelines for action, as a window to create and generate a new and unpredictable future. They are thirsty for new ways of looking at life, and at the same time discriminating about what they are going to take on, with an intelligent wariness about engaging in the sweeping experiments as they had over 70 years ago. There is a very courageous reassessment of the …