Werner Erhard's Kevo

Werner Erhard
Born September 5, 1935 (1935-09-05) (age 72)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
United States
Occupation Retired¹
Spouse Patricia Fry, September 26, 1953 - 1960 (divorced)
Ellen Erhard (June Bryde), March 29, 1960 - November 1983 (divorced)
Children 7
Website wernererhard.com

Werner Hans Erhard²:7 (born John Paul Rosenberg) set up "transformational" models and applications oriented towards individuals, groups, and organizations.³ The public memory associates his name primarily with the programs he created:

* the "est Training" (1971 – 1983)
* the “Forum” (1984 – 1991)

Erhard's programs were offered to the public through the organizations:

* Erhard Seminars Training Inc. (1971 - 1975)
* est, an educational corporation (1975 - 1981)
* Werner Erhard & Associates (WEA, 1981 – 1991).

In 1991, about the time of his retirement from WEA, Erhard sold his then-existing intellectual properties to the group that formed Landmark Education. He then left the United States.

Erhard, along with John Denver, Robert W. Fuller, and others, founded The Hunger Project in 1977.

* 1 Early life (1935-1971)
o 1.1 Early influences
+ 1.1.1 Zen
+ 1.1.2 Scientology
* 2 The era of the est training (1971 - 1984)
* 3 Werner Erhard and Associates (1981 - 1991) and "the Forum"
* 4 1991 - present
* 5 Awards and acknowledgments
* 6 Controversies
o 6.1 Scientology
o 6.2 60 Minutes broadcast and subsequent follow-ups
o 6.3 Court rulings
* 7 Related organizations
o 7.1 The Hunger Project
o 7.2 Landmark Education
* 8 Documentaries
o 8.1 The Century of the Self
o 8.2 Transformation: The Life and Legacy of Werner Erhard
* 9 Literature
o 9.1 Biographies
o 9.2 Other books
* 10 See also
* 11 Footnotes
* 12 External links

Early life (1935-1971)

John Paul Rosenberg, "grandson of an immigrant tailor and son of a small-restaurant owner who left Judaism for a Baptist mission before joining his wife in the Episcopalian Church",⁴ graduated from Norristown High School, Norristown, Pennsylvania in June 1953, along with his future wife Patricia Fry.²:30 Rosenberg married Patricia Fry on 26 September 1953⁵:4 and they had four²:51 children together. He then abandoned his first wife and family in Philadelphia (1960) and traveled west with June Bryde. He changed his name to "Werner Hans Erhard". Rosenberg chose his new names from Esquire magazine-articles he read about the then-West German economics minister Ludwig Erhard and the philosopher and physicist Werner Heisenberg.²:57-58 June Bryde changed her name to "Ellen Virginia Erhard". The newly-renamed Erhards moved to St. Louis.

The next year (1961), Erhard sold correspondence courses in the Midwest, then drove to California to seek a better territory, getting assigned to Spokane, Washington.²:85 After a few months, he took a job with Encyclopædia Britannica's "Great Books" program, and soon gained promotion to a position of area training-manager. In January 1962 Erhard switched to the Parent's Magazine Cultural Institute, a child-development materials division of Parents Magazine.²:112 In the late summer of 1962 he won promotion to the position of territorial manager for California, Nevada, and Arizona, and moved to San Francisco; and in the spring of 1963 to Los Angeles.²:82-106 In January 1964, "Parents" promoted Erhard and transferred him to Arlington, Virginia as a southeast manager.²:94 In August 1964, Erhard resigned his position in Arlington over a dispute with the company president and returned to his previous position in San Francisco.²:107-114 Erhard and his second wife moved into an apartment in Sausalito and had a second daughter, Adair, on December 27, 1964. Erhard began a close friendship with Alan Watts[citation needed]. In the next few years, Erhard brought on-staff at "Parents" many people who would become important in est, including Elaine Cronin, Gonneke Spits and Laurel Scheaf. In 1967 Erhard was promoted to vice president.⁶

Early influences

In California in the 1960s Erhard engaged in a wide variety of spiritual, New Age and transformative activities.

Tipton wrote: 'Various observers of est have traced its ideas to Zen, Vedanta, and Christian Perfectionism; behaviorist determinism, Freud, Maslow, Rogers, and Perls; Korzybski's General Semantics, Dale Carnegie's The Power of Positive Thinking, Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, and the self-image psychology of Maxwell Maltz's Psycho-Cybernetics. Its methods have been traced to hypnosis, autosuggestion, revivalism, psychodrama, encounter, Gestalt therapy and behavior modification; Subud and yoga; military, monastic, and penal institutions, sales and business motivation courses. [7]

Bartley noted Scientology,⁸ Zen Buddhism, Dale Carnegie courses,⁹ Maxwell Maltz's Psycho-Cybernetics, Fritz Perls' Gestalt therapy, Abraham Maslow's transpersonal psychology, and Subud, among other psychological and spiritual methods as further influences.

In 1963 Erhard took part in Esalen seminars, becoming involved with encounter groups.¹⁰ In 1967 he completed a Dale Carnegie course in sales and further courses in Gestalt therapy and in transactional analysis.¹¹

Zen

In William Bartley's biography, Werner Erhard: The Transformation of a Man, the Founding of est (1978), Erhard describes these explorations. Bartley quotes Erhard as acknowledging Zen as the essential contribution that "created the space for" est.¹² Bartley details Erhard's connections with Zen beginning with his extensive studies with Alan Watts in the mid 1960s.¹³ Bartley quotes Erhard as acknowledging:

Of all the disciplines that I studied, practiced, learned, Zen was the essential one. It was not so much an influence on me, rather it created space. It allowed those things that were there to be there. It gave some form to my experience. And it built up in me the critical mass from which was kindled the experience that produced est.¹⁴

Scientology

William Bartley, in his biography of Werner Erhard, wrote:

“When I asked Werner to sum up the differences between est and Scientology, he reflected for a moment. '...The essential difference between est and Scientology is twofold. 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.'¹⁵

The era of the est training (1971 - 1984)

Erhard reported having experienced a revelation while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge on U.S. Route 101 in Marin County, California in 1971. He started to see the world as perfect "the way it is" and reported an insight that his attempts to change or modify either his physical circumstances or his mental outlook had their basis in a conception of the world (that it should differ from "the way it is") that precluded or at least limited one's experiential and creative appreciation of it. Erhard, who had become an instructor of Mind Dynamics¹⁶ [17]¹⁸ put together an intensive two–weekend course he called "est". Pressman writes of the origins of the est training in terms of "the hours of materials Erhard had stitched together from Scientology and Mind Dynamics and Dale Carnegie and Maxwell Maltz and a variety of other sources."¹⁹

Erhard constructed the est course in such a way as to attempt to bring its students into a conceptual place where they could experience a realization similar to his own "Highway-101 revelation". The lengthy course (consisting sometimes of 18–hour days) became controversial and (to many people who went through the seminar) exciting.

Michael Zimmerman, Philosophy Professor at Tulane University:

He (Erhard) had no particular formal training in anything, but he understood things as well as anyone I’d ever seen. And I’ve been around a lot of smart people in academia. This is an extraordinary intellect I saw at work here, and a difficult personality. Werner would be the first to admit that he learned a lot from other people. He has debts to other thinkers, to various religious traditions. When I teach my class on Heidegger, for example, I start out with referring to the influences on Heidegger’s thought: Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard – so many thinkers. So Werner, I think, has to be conceived in that way. He’s a kind of artist, a thinker, an inventor, who has big debts to others, borrowed from others, but then put the whole thing together in a way that no one else had ever done.²⁰

Werner Erhard and Associates (1981 - 1991) and "the Forum"
Werner Erhard conducting a seminar
Werner Erhard conducting a seminar

In the 1980s, Erhard worked with Fernando Flores [21] — philosopher, senator [22] of Chile and businessman — on aspects of language, setting up sets of practices which make a distinction between, on the one hand "speaking that describes being" with, on the other hand, "speaking that brings forth being". These seminars culminated in Erhard's announcement in 1984 of the retirement of the est-training, after the participation of 750,000 "graduates", and its replacement by a new program called "the Forum", inaugurated in January 1985.

Erhard intended this new "work" to acquire more mainstream respectability and to appeal to business and management markets. What est had called "space" or the "space of being" now became "the domain of possibility" or the "possibility of being for human beings". Where part of est's "Day 4" had included a "three-circle talk" on "being, doing, and having", the Forum now featured three distinctions of the domains of "possibility, presence, and representation"²³

On February 1, 1991[citation needed], some of the employees of Werner Erhard and Associates purchased the assets of WE&A, licensed the right to use its intellectual property and assumed some of its liabilities, paying $3 million and committing to remitting up to $15 million over the following 18 years in licencing fees.²⁴ Shortly afterwards the new owners established Landmark Education.²⁵ Presentations that evolved from the "Forum" developed by Werner Erhard and Associates continue to take place today in major cities in the USA and worldwide as the "Landmark Forum" under the auspices of Landmark Education.

1991 - present

Since his retirement in 1991, Erhard has kept a low profile, except for a few public appearances. In recent years he has worked in the area of peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland with author Peter Block.²⁶

CBS television's 60 Minutes program in March 1991 broadcast allegations of family abuse, incest and rape against Erhard.²⁷[28] See the section on "controversies" below.

On December 8, 1993, Erhard appeared on Larry King Live in an episode titled "Whatever Happened to Werner Erhard?" via satellite from Moscow in Russia. The show also ran clips from an earlier broadcast in which Larry King interviewed Scientology president Heber Jentzsch on December 20, 1983 (transcript).²⁷

Gonneke Spits accompanied Werner Erhard to a May 11, 2004 event at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, entitled "From Thought to Action: Growing Leaders in a Changing World". The event took place in honor of a longtime friend, Warren Bennis, who had taken Erhard Seminars Training and then consulted for Werner Erhard and Associates. Publicity at the event noted that Spits had "worked with Erhard for the past 40 years." [29]

As of 2001, Erhard reportedly lived at least part time with Gonneke Spits in Georgetown, Cayman Islands³⁰[31] A 2002 self-published book written by est graduates, Self Realization: The Est and Forum Phenomena in American Society, states: "He is married to his third wife, a former est trainer." [32]

In 2006, Erhard appeared in the Robyn Symon documentary: Transformation: The Life and Legacy of Werner Erhard.²⁰

Awards and acknowledgments

* The Gandhi Humanitarian Award³³, 1988, Gandhi Memorial International Foundation.
* "Humanitarian Of The Year", 2003, Youth At Risk, Roosevelt Hotel, New York City³⁴. Erhard founded the Breakthrough Foundation, which later became Youth At Risk.
* Excellerated Business Schools, which offers "transformational, entrepreneurial education", lists "Werner Erhard" in the category of "Other Teachers, Masters and Mentors" on its "Acknowledgments" page.³⁵

Controversies

Warren Bennis in Leaders, Strategies for Taking Charge said, “Werner Erhard’s popular est seminars received so much attention, it was inevitable that some of [the attention] would be vituperative and sometimes unfounded.”³⁶

Scientology

The Church of Scientology included "ERHARD, WERNER"³⁷ on a list of "suppressive persons" and "fair game" (enemies) [38] dating from 1973.³⁹

Erhard's brother Harry Rosenberg called in to Larry King Live when Scientology President Heber Jentzsch appeared on the show on December 20, 1993.⁴⁰ During the call, as "3rd Caller", Rosenberg identified himself and alleged that Jentzsch had utilized the Church of Scientology to threaten Erhard.⁴¹

60 Minutes broadcast and subsequent follow-ups

In a book sometimes critical of Erhard, Outrageous Betrayal: The Dark Journey of Werner Erhard from est to Exile , Steven Pressman recounts how participants in a CBS television 60 Minutes program in March 1991 made allegations of incest and abuse against Werner Erhard.⁵. Due to alleged "factual discrepancies", CBS deleted its archive of the program;⁴² a transcript appears on the Ross Institute archives.⁴³ Erhard filed and then withdrew a lawsuit alleging "false, misleading and defamatory statements" on the part of CBS.⁵:257-258

One source recanted: Landmark Education General Counsel and Chairman of the Board of Directors Art Schreiber noted in a July 31, 1998 letter⁴⁴ to Linda Chase:

There have been allegations that Mr. Erhard was abusive to his family. However, those allegations were later recanted. I am enclosing a copy of the article in the July 16, 1992 edition of the San Jose Mercury News regarding the lawsuit brought by one of Mr. Erhard's daughters against a San Jose Mercury News reporter for fraudulently promising her payment as incentive for her to make such false allegation to the media.

Celeste Erhard filed an unsuccessful $2 million lawsuit against the paper and the reporter, saying she "was defrauded and her privacy was invaded during interviews.... She stated on the record that the articles and her appearance on CBS television's “60 Minutes” were to get publicity for a book.".⁴⁵

Charlotte Faltermayer in “The Best of est?” in Time Magazine, March 16, 1998;⁴⁶ reports that allegations of incest were recanted. It is unclear whether or not the other daughter involved recanted on record.

Court rulings

In 1992 a court ruled that "The Forum" had not caused any “mental injuries” to Stephanie Ney; though it entered a default judgement of $380,000 against Werner Erhard — in absentia.⁵:262

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found Erhard did not have grounds for changing a previous tax decision February 8, 1995, in the case "Werner H. Erhard v. Commissioner Internal Revenue Service.⁴⁷

In September 1996 Werner Erhard received $200,000 from the United States Internal Revenue Service [48] for wrongful disclosure of false information.

Related organizations

The Hunger Project

Along with John Denver and Oberlin College President Robert W. Fuller, Erhard co-founded The Hunger Project in 1977. The project had the initial stated intention of making "The end of starvation within 20 years an 'idea whose time has come.'" Erhard served on the project's board from 1979 to 1990.

Landmark Education

In 1991 the group which would shortly form Landmark Education purchased the intellectual property of Werner Erhard. In 1998, Time Magazine published an article [49] about Landmark Education and its historical connection to Werner Erhard. The article stated that: "In 1991, before he left the U.S., Erhard sold the 'technology' behind his seminars to his employees, who formed a new company called the Landmark Education Corp., with Erhard's brother Harry Rosenberg at the helm." Landmark Education states that its programs have as their basis ideas originally developed by Erhard, but that Erhard has no financial interest, ownership, or management role in Landmark Education.⁵⁰

In Stephanie Ney v. Landmark Education Corporation (1994),⁵¹ the courts determined Landmark Education Corporation did not have successor-liability to Werner Erhard & Associates, the corporation whose assets Landmark Education purchased.

According to Pressman in Outrageous Betrayal: Landmark Education further agreed to pay Erhard a long-term licensing fee for the material used in the Forum and other courses. Erhard stood to earn up to $15 million over the next 18 years."⁵:253-255 However, Arthur Schreiber's declaration of 3 May 2005 states: "Landmark Education has never paid Erhard under the license agreements (he assigned his rights to others)." [52]

In 2001 New York Magazine reported Landmark Education's CEO Harry Rosenberg said that the company had bought outright Erhard's license and his rights to the business in Japan and Mexico.³⁰ From time to time Erhard consults with Landmark Education.⁵³

Documentaries

The Century of the Self

Werner Erhard appeared in the 2002 British documentary by Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self, featuring in episode part 3 of 4⁵⁴. This segment of the video discusses the est Training in great detail, and includes interviews with est-graduates John Denver, and Jerry Rubin.

Transformation: The Life and Legacy of Werner Erhard

In 2006, Erhard appeared alongside Landmark Forum Leader Laurel Scheaf (pictured) and Landmark Forum Leader Randy McNamara (pictured), in the Robyn Symon documentary: Transformation: The Life and Legacy of Werner Erhard.²⁰

Werner Erhard. (2008, January 10). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 01:47, January 17, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Werner_Erhard&oldid=183365706