Werner Erhard: Encyclopedia - Werner Erhard

Werner Erhard

John Paul "Jack" Rosenberg, born on September 5, 1935 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, founded the large group awareness training program est, short for Erhard Seminars Training, which later gave rise to WEA (1981 - 1991) and to the "Landmark Forum"/Landmark Education (1991 - ).

Rosenberg married at age 18 and fathered four (some sources suggest three) children. In 1960, he left his wife and travelled west. Rosenberg changed his name to Werner Hans Erhard and his lover, June Bryde, changed hers to Ellen Virginia Erhard. Erhard later said that he chose the last name "Erhard" almost at random, selecting it from a magazine article he happened to read about then-West German economics minister Ludwig Erhard. The newly renamed Erhards moved to St. Louis, where Werner Erhard sold used cars. After a few years, the couple moved further west to California.

After selling correspondence courses and encyclopedias, Erhard trained door-to-door salespeople for Grolier Society until 1971.

Werner Erhard - Philosophies and transformation

In California in the 1960s, Erhard engaged in a wide variety of spiritual disciplines including Zen Buddhism. Pressman details some of Erhard's connections with Scientology in this and subsequent periods (Pressman, 1993, pages 25 - 26, 30 - 31 and 125 - 126). Erhard had a revelation while driving on U.S. Highway 101 in Marin County, California in 1971. He started to see the world as perfect the way it is and had the 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.

In the 1970s Erhard maintained financial links with Jack Sarfatti and the Physics/Consciousness Research Group.

He also attempted to foster links with Michael Murphy and the Esalen Institute, and allegedly contributed funds to the SRI remote viewing project.

Erhard became an instructor of Mind Dynamics (Pressman, 1993, pages 33 - 34).

Werner Erhard - Erhard Seminars Training

After his initial realization Erhard put together an intensive two–weekend course he called est after the Latin word meaning 'It is' and/or as an acronym for 'Erhard Seminars Training'. He designed the course to bring its students into a conceptual place where they could experience a similar realization. This long course, consisting sometimes of 18–hour days, became controversial and, to many people who went through the seminar, exciting. Many participants claimed to experience greatly increased vitality and better self-expression. A weekly seminar program concerned with various aspects of life (integrity, self-expression, sex, money, commitment, etc.) evolved. A more intensive six-day course originated as a communication workshop.

Werner Erhard - The Hunger Project

Main article: The Hunger Project

In 1977, after the great success of 'est' with individuals, Erhard continued to expand his work into the community and society. He began to study the subject of chronic world hunger and declared the end of death-by-starvation as possible. In looking at the condition of hunger or "death by starvation" with some of the world's known experts, Erhard distinguished that the source of death by starvation was not that there was an insufficient amount of food on the planet to feed all those who were suffering from chronic hunger. Instead he blamed the context in which people viewed and interacted with chronic hunger. That context, he said, consisted of a closely-held belief or discourse or conversation that saw hunger as inevitable, a context of scarcity that governed all the interactions and fixes currently applied by those then attempting to fix the problem.

Erhard committed some of himself and some of his resources to the problem and the promise that "The End of Death By Starvation" was indeed an idea whose time had come, and thus originated The Hunger Project.

The Mahatma Gandhi International Foundation awarded Erhard the Gandhi Humanitarian Award in 1988.

Werner Erhard - Werner Erhard and Associates - The Forum

In the 1980s Erhard worked with Fernando Flores [1] - philosopher, ex-senator of Chile and businessman - on aspects of language, setting up a body of work which makes a distinction between, on the one hand 'speaking that describes being' with, on the other hand, 'speaking that brings forth being'. After he retired the est training, Erhard developed a program that allegedly deploys the Socratic method of inquiry, which he called "the Forum". This program continues today in major cities in the USA and worldwide as the "Landmark Forum". (See Landmark Education.)

Werner Erhard - Legal strife

Erhard later faced tax disputes, allegations of domestic violence and an allegation that he had had sex with one of his daughters. (The daughter later recanted this specific allegation, saying that a reporter had offered her two million dollars to make the accusation.) The United States IRS settled with Erhard by paying him $200,000 for wrongful disclosure of false information. [2] In the Stephanie Ney case (resulting from Ney's participation in "the Forum") a U.S. court ordered Werner Erhard (in absentia) to pay more than $500,000 in damages for "mental injuries" (Pressman, 1993: 262).

Werner Erhard - Landmark Education era

Erhard sold his intellectual properties to Landmark Education in 1991 and left the United States. He subsequently worked and/or lived in Costa Rica, Russia, Mexico, Ireland and the Cayman Islands - see the biography. From time to time he consults with Landmark Education, but he has no ownership, management or financial interest in that company outside Japan. Harry Rosenberg, Werner Erhard's brother, currently serves as the Chief Executive Office of Landmark Education.

See also

• Dale Carnegie
• Werner Heisenberg
• Hanns Lilje
• hypnosis (Napoleon Hill, Maxwell Maltz)
• Human Potential Movement (Maslow & Rogers and Esalen Institute)
• martial arts
• Scientology (L. Ron Hubbard)
• Subud
• Zen (Alan Watts)

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Werner Erhard", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki