Posted on 12/01/2016 5:57:49 PM PST by Steely Tom
I knew people who became followers back then in Bay Area. It had a lasting influence on me listening to them explain how they had the ability to tune into people through their minds. Hippie stuff that Erhard dropped later. I learned about the predator and the prey. There were other flourishing groups who required submission to a leader. But EST was the one that stood out as preying upon weak but nice types who were in pain emotionally. After I’d spent several years watching how people got nowhere in their quest for happiness, I rejected all forms of mysticism in favor of reason as a guide to life. (Maybe the fact you were not allowed to leave the group meeting to use the restroom was the thing that clued me in. Why make people suffer in the name of curing what ails them!?)
When I was a teen, a cute girl approached me in San Francisco and tried to recruit me into the Scientologists. Would have been about 1973.
When I was driving my son back to college last Sunday, we had a long talk. He's having trouble figuring out how to proceed. He just turned 20, and is finishing fall semester of his junior year.
Some of the things he tried to express sounded so much like myself. I tried to say things to help him out, but I've said them all before. At one point he said "I've heard all this before," not in a mean way, more like in a desperate way, like what I had told him wasn't helping.
So I was thinking about trying to help him, and the whole subject of leaving the baggage of your youth — and the ball of angst your parents leave you with — behind you, moving on, realizing that it's up to you what happens in your life, that if you try to please your parents on top of trying to figure out your own path, you can never do it. Too many constraints. An over-constrained system.
And as I turned all this over in my mind last night (well, the early hours of this morning really) a memory of something I read about Erhard and est training came to me. And I was wondering if there was anything there that might help him.
Then it occurred to me that the people here at FR are so widely experienced, and so articulate and thoughtful, that this might be a good place to ask the question.
Stan (the FBI agent) goes to EST, and eventually Philip (the KGB sleeper agent) goes with him.
The show is set in the 80's when EST was all the rage. But, I have no idea if it is representative of what EST was really like.
And every five years, some other management philosophy came down the pike. Somebody was fluffing up their resume by introducing this stuff, while the rest of us ‘imposed-upon’ folks recognized the smoke and mirrors.
An interesting old book:
watch the americans. they cover est pretty well. all that’stuff to me is bs, but i can see for people who never had anything to begin with, it might be serious for’them.
i think it partly depends on what people want to believe. for some dianetics worked. for some, other wacky bs worked.
TM (Transcendental Meditation) Even more smoke & lava lamps!
Today it is the “Landmark” training. Same exact crap.
I know a guy, a formerly close friend from college, who reported exactly the same experience! He went out to San Francisco in the summer of 1973 (the summer before he started college) and met a really beautiful girl who was super friendly and nice, but he realized after talking to her for awhile that she was trying to recruit him into some cult. He thought it was scientology, but wasn't 100% sure.
That might have been the same girl!
There’s a lot of Tony Robbins stuff out there that probably is now seen as dated but might be helpful. Problem I have with Tony Robbins though is to me a lot of his motivation stuff is negative. Like if you want to achieve something, visualize the negative consequences if you do not. And some of it I just found weird. Or maybe I was just not paying very good attention at the time.
Thanks! I will.
No, but I did take Qi training under Master Jun Wui Sui where I mastered the “Ascending Heavenly Steps” technique which allows me to fly into the sky, and the “Whirlwind of Never Ending Pain” kick, which is done by kicking the opponent in the balls repeatedly.
A talk as in "check into it," or as in "stay away from it."
Check into it.
Sorry I wasn’t clear.
I actually took a date to that movie who was an EST “true believer”. It was a “blind date” set up by my cousin’s wife both were in med school at the time & I was in grad school in physics. The “date” was one of their classmates and intending to specialize in Psychiatry. It was not a “match” made in heaven! To make a short story shorter, I thought the movie nailed the “self help” movement & the whole “touchy feelie” life outlook. I was constantly roaring with laughter to point I would almost fall out of my seat. My date was not impressed. It was a very short night, we were quite happy to be rid of each other.
I think “insensitive clod” was term she used in describing me back to my cousin’s wife. My comment, “I’ve been called worse things!”
The experience was an early aphorism about the chacteristics of those I have met in Psychology & Psychiatry - They are in these fields to solve their own problems rather then the problems of others!
Most wouldn’t trust with burnt soggy match!
There was an equivalent thing in Nashville called “ISA” (Institute for Self Actualization) and it was lame to a then 19yo me
I know this will sound insane BUT Trump when to Norman Vincent Peale’s church in NY and says it had a uuuugggeee impact on him.
I am in fact re-reading “The Power of Positive Thinking” again after learning this about Trump.
You might recommend his writings to your son.
I went once in hunt valley, md. Early 70’s. I was invited by a young lady.
They told me it was $600 bucks for the course and I couldn’t use the bathroom during the sessions. Erhard Sensory Training as I recall.
Buckminster Fuller if I remember correctly. They lost me at $600. I remember leaving and going to a bar on York Rd.
Might be worth feeling him out on.
He’s pretty cool with political correctness, which he might get a lot of in ROTC, at least these days.
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