Have you ever met a friend that suddenly was acting like a Machine? He is repeating the same “exiting” story all the time. He has found IT and IT is about self-empowerment. I am sure he has invited you to come to a free seminar.
He will tell you that he is learning to become a coach. He has to learn the trade and the trade is learnt from the bottom up. That’s why he is a volunteer. He has aquired many new friends (Buddies) who are also volunteers. You have to meet them! They will tell the same exiting story about becoming a new empowered person.
Probably he did not tell you that he has already spend an enormous amount of money. He will not tell you that to reach the next levels he needs more and more money. Perhaps he is even lending money because this is the best investment there is. It will be payd back with interest when he is at the top of the pyramid.
In the pyramid game you let people pay to sell the product they already use. They are so motivated that their enthusiasm will motivate you also and the first try is always for free! It is called a pyramid because the first person who starts the pyramid makes the most out of IT.
Brainwashing is a result of a long history of training (and torturing) English Children and English soldiers. The English training system was so successful that it was copied all over the world. It used verbal manipulating, bull baiting, confronting, frightening, confessing and group-pressure.
The System uses a person called a Bully (Drill-Sergeant). The Bully is surrounded by potential heros. They are being prepared to go to a war called Life. If you show that you are a coward the bully uses you to show the others how strong they are. In the first phase you have to pass many tests.
You fail when you cry, shout, vomit and even shit in your trousers. If this happens all the potential heros laugh at you. They look when the Bully is doing the dirty work. He is responsible and they are just taking the orders.
A very interesting verbal manipulating technique was copied out of the old art of Rhetoric’s. It is now called Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). NLP chains arguments that are proven right in isolation into a highly convincing chain of words.
People that are not educated in reasoning cannot find the flaw in the argument. When they have found the flaw the Bully uses his tricks and they just stop asking nasty questions.
Let’s start the SEMINAR
The seminar will take many days in an isolated expensive location. It will be full of long (6 hour(!)) Pep Talks. You are not allowed to ask stupid questions, eat, drink and go to the toilet without permission. When you are asking clever questions you are asked to show your intelligence on stage. The super bull (the Coach) will show you that you are stupid.
Members of the gang (Volunteers) are watching the behavior of the trainees all the time. The only thing you are allowed is to do is to agree with the Coach on stage. You have to show your approval by clapping or stamping with your feet. The Coach will tell you when this has to happen. You will rise very early and you will go to bed very late but you are strong.
This will not break your resistance. You know that in the end you will feel EMPOWERED. The Coach has literally blown your mind. You are transformed in a happy mindless person.
Silence. Attention please. The coach is talking.
“IN THIS TRAINING, YOU’RE GOING TO FIND OUT YOU’VE BEEN ACTING LIKE ASSHOLES. ALL YOUR FUCKING CLEVERNESS AND SELF-DECEPTION HAVE GOTTEN YOU NOWHERE!”
“I’ll tell you everything there is to know about life,” “What is, is, and what ain’t, ain’t.” And that’s about all there was. True enlightenment, is knowing you are a MACHINE“.
To understand you are a machine you are treated like a machine and the result is a human machine that is able to sell the concept to the next victim who is not aware he is a machine. He is still conscious, thinking, feeling, creating and sensing and this is utterly stupid.
The only one who is allowed to feel, think, sense, create is Your TEACHER. He is the programmer and the only thing you have to do is run his programs.
Remember all the problems in your life are caused by fear, the fear of failure, rejection, ridicule and humiliation. He will show you your fears. He will reject you, ridicule your stupid questions, force you to admit all your failures he has invented for you and he will humiliate you all the time.
Embrace your fears. If your relationship ends what do you do? You can dwell on it, crawl into yourself, withdraw, and surrender. Shit happens but you can learn from it, grow, develop, be prepared for a better relationship in the future. Stop being afraid.
Look at him. He is strong. He is The Father, Your only Friend, the Cowboy, The Perfect Lover, The Entrepeneur. He is rich. His relationships are perfect. Confess you are poor because you are creating your own reality and you are doing something wrong.
Confess you have left your partner because you are unable to give. Confess your parents did not treat you the way you needed to be treated because of You! You are the reason of all the shit in your whole life.
Forget your past. Live in The Now. Give your love to Him. He is the Stage Magician. He will show you all his tricks. The only thing you have to do is believe him. Somewhere in the future you will find the perfect relationship. This will be another machine, your BUDDY, your mate.
It’s Up to You.
In the end the Coach will have total control over your MIND. Than he will tell you the final message: “YOU ARE WHAT YOU ARE“. Finally You are Perfect. You are his little machine and he will Love You For That.
In 1960 John Rosenberg left his wife and children. He went to St. Louis, changed his name into Werner Erhard and sold cars. Until 1971 he was selling and managing salespersons. Suddenly he got “IT (Latin “EST”)”. He could make a lot of money in the self-empowerment movement and created Erhard Seminar Training. The first seminar was held in October, 1971, at the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco with nearly a 1,000 trainees in attendance.
During the first year, Erhard himself led all the trainings, since he was the only one who had mastered the hours of materials he had stitched together from his Sales Experience (Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich), Freud, Hinduism, Maslow, Hubbards Scientology, Mind Dynamics, Dale Carnegie, Maxwell Maltz Psycho-cybernetics, Carl Rogers Client Centered Therapy, Alan Watts Zen Buddhism and anything else that Erhard’s intuition told him would work in the exploding human potential market.
After a while others bounded onto the stages to repeat the same lines and deliver the same material. Always they conducted the EST training exactly the way Erhard had done. They trained countless hours to do it the way he told them to. The trainers are salesman. They are paid commissions for the number of people they recruit and train, not for the number of people they truly help.
Erhard loved to play the drill-sergeant. A huge part of the seminar consisted of a nonstop barrage of verbal insults, taunting the participants in the straight-backed chairs, insisting they were all worthless human beings who clung to beliefs about themselves and their own lives that were rooted in ridiculous notions about reason, logic, and understanding.
“Don’t give me your goddamn belief system, you dumb motherfucker!” one of Erhard’s est trainers once thundered at a man who had raised his hand on the first day with a question about the need to believe in something, in anything. What Erhard left out of the training was any sense of human compassion and emotion. He and his trainers angrily rejected such trivialities in the training sessions. Compassion, after all, was something reserved for life’s “victims.” In the world of est, as in the world of Werner Erhard, there were no victims.
It is estimated that some 700,000 people did the training before the seminars were halted in 1991. EST was transformed in the Landmark Forum. Harry Rosenberg, Erhard’s brother, heads Landmark Education Corp. (LEC), which does some $50 million a year in business and has attracted some 300,000 participants. LEC is headquartered in San Francisco, as was EST, and has 42 offices in 11 countries.
One of the trainees of an EST seminar asked Werner Erhard the question he was waiting for. “I don’t get it“. Werner answered the stupid question with the perfect answer. “There’s nothing to get so you got it”. “I get it” the trainee said, “So getting it is whatever you get” “If that’s what you got.” Got it?
You get what you want when you got it. That is the only thing you have to learn. You got it when you sell the seminar to your family and friends. You hope that things will go the way you want and if they don’t go the way you want, you still have not understood that:
YOU’RE ACTING LIKE A ASSHOLE. ALL YOUR FUCKING CLEVERNESS AND SELF-DECEPTION HAVE STILL GOTTEN YOU NOWHERE.
WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO IS MOVE TO THE NEXT LEVEL AND PAY.
THERE IS STILL HOPE FOR YOU.
AND HOPE IS WHAT I AM SELLING!
NOTHING MORE ASSHOLE!
