est

Years ago, for the sake of love, I took an est seminar.  est was an acronym for Eberhard Seminar Training and not the Latin verb to be.  Werner Eberhard was a con artist  who developed this training which was based on sleep deprivation and two weekends of concentrated personal self annihilation wherein one would emerge late the second Sunday evening as a new person.   What I got out of it, other than nothing, was the concept that moment by moment this is as good as it gets.  I laughed my ass off for an hour contemplating this, my navel and the two wasted weekends, while others gave testimony to Werner for turning their shallow lives around.  It has been likened to a cult experience and I do tend to agree with that assessment.   See:  est

But, for the sake of argument, let us assume that, indeed, moment by moment, this IS as good as it gets.  One moment depressed as hell...that's as good as it gets.  The next moment full of confidence and oneness and that is as good as it gets.  I don't think I got what I was supposed to have received from the training, that being losing myself and a beloved.  At one break during the training I called my parents and told them I loved them which gave them great concern for my well-being.  I was drinking myself out of graduate school and lost in the early stages of being bipolar, throwing money away on an expensive and worthless self-improvement cults for the sake of a love that would only be mine transitionally.  But that was the essence of est.  You got what you gave and the more you gave the more you would get to the point that the whole nonsense was that this is as good as it gets and it gets better the more you give.  As testament to this the last est training was in 1984.  It came, it saw profit, it profited and it died.  It imploded on the personality cult of Werner, aka John Rosenberg.  It actually did some good but the MAN became more important than the message.  Actually, getting the massage/message that this is as good as it gets is useful, in a Zen-like way, but personalities of the organization got in the way and the more Werner/John tried to transform himself the further away from its utilitarian purpose it grew. 

But I digress.  Or do I?  After almost sixty hours of training I was no closer to my goal than I am now.  Still in therapy, denying the love of my life, the life of my love and my family.  Grieve no more my lady, as it were.  But did I ever grieve?  I think Zen is a powerful idea and message.  And the Zen in est was a strong influence in my nascent life at that point.  But looking back I have lost the Zen and Tao of life.  The then and now. 

Oh, well, baby, this is as good as it gets.