Est: Making Life Work

People who slam est the hardest are like those who slam California the hardest -- they are the ones who stayed home, never went, but know all about it.My life definitely benefited from est, though I never took another est course after the basic training. I might have done but was put off by the high pressure sales tactics of graduates who felt compelled to recruit. This does not detract from the benefit I received. Best bucks I ever spent.This book is a reasonably good description of a process that benefited hundreds of thousands of people for each "casuality" story. I'm betting that the percentage of people seeing shrinks to work out what their families and churches did to them is much higher than the percentage of est graduates who felt damaged by the experience.By the way, did you know that, if you randomly call a hundred thousand people and do absolutely nothing with them, then poll them again 60 hours later, several of them will have experienced psychological distress, anxiety and panic attacks? Did your telephone calls "cause" it? Very doubtful. A given number of people in any crowd will experience a meltdown of some kind. This is why you should look at statistics, not individual sad stories.If you look at this book as a kind of papyrus for anthropological, psychological, sociological, and philosophical study, you will find much at which to marvel. Werner Erhard engineered a 60-hour opportunity for me (and hundreds of thousands of others) to have a satori experience that comes to most people only after years of meditation. Zen -- American style! I find that remarkable. The est training was a work of inspiration and genius. If you read the book in this light -- as an opportunity to study a highly engineered social experience -- it is truly fascinating.