Good friend of mine did EST in San Francisco about 1974. What little he said about it was bizarre, like a secret society on par with Scientology, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, or the Knights Templar. It was like they were going to come and get him if he said anything about it at all.
I never saw what he got out of it, but fortunately, it didn’t seem to change him.
What brings this up in 2016?
That was part of the sales plan, if they freely divulged what they learned how would they get more suckers, I mean customers, in the door for the seminars?
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.