Werner Erhard's Enlightenment

Somewhere on the Golden Gate bridge in 1971, Werner Erhard woke up. He would go on to found est and Landmark and change an entire culture

Somewhere between Corte Madera and the Golden Gate Bridge, the man in the car on the freeway was transformed: the individual who emerged from the Mustang in San Francisco a half hour later was a different kind of being. Werner had had an extraordinary experience, and found what he had been searching for, in one discipline after another, for nearly eight years.

I met with him to ask him who, what, when, where, why, how.

"What happened? How did it happen?" Werner asked. "To relate the experience to time and place is to falsify it. It did not happen in time and space. Either I am inadequate to explain what happened or it simply cannot be explained in words. Or both. All my efforts to put it into words damage it.”

"What happened had no form. It was timeless, unbounded, ineffable, beyond language. There were no words attached to it, no emotions or feelings, no attitudes, no bodily sensations. What came from it, of course, formed itself into feelings and emotions and words, and finally into an altered process of life itself. But that is like saying that the hole in the sand looks like the stick that you made the hole with. Holes in the sand and sticks are worlds apart. To put what happened into language would be like trying to describe a stick by telling you about the hole in the sand.

Part of it was the realization that I knew nothing. I was aghast at that. For I had spent most of my life trying to learn things. I was sure that there was some one thing that I didn't know, and that if I could find it out, I would be all right. I was sure that there was a secret, and I was determined to find it.

"Then this happened — and I realized that I knew nothing. I realized that everything I knew was skewed toward some end. I saw that the fundamental skew to all knowledge, and to unenlightened mind, is survival, or, as I put it then, success. All my knowledge up to then had been skewed toward success, toward making it, toward self-realization, toward all the goals, from material to mystical.

"In the next instant — after I realized that I knew nothing — I realized that I knew everything. All the things that I had ever heard, and read, and all those hours of practice, suddenly fell into place. It was so stupidly, blindingly simple that I could not believe it. I saw that there were no hidden meanings, that everything was just the way that it is, and that I was already all right. All that knowledge that I had amassed just obscured the simplicity, the truth, the suchness, the thusness of it all.

“I saw that everything was going to be all right. It was all right; it always had been all right; it always would be all right—no matter what happened.I didn't just think this: suddenly I knew it. Not only was I no longer concerned about success; I was no longer even concerned about achieving satisfaction. I was satisfied. I was no longer concerned with my reputation; I was concerned only with the truth.”

"I realized that I was not my emotions or thoughts. I was not my ideas, my intellect, my perceptions, my beliefs. I was not what I did or accomplished or achieved. Or hadn't achieved. I was not what I had done right—or what I had done wrong. I was not what I had been labeled—by myself or others. All these identifications cut me off from experience, from living. I was none of these.

"I was simply the space, the creator, the source of all that stuff. I experienced Self as Self in a direct and unmediated way. I didn't just experience Self; I became Self. Suddenly I held all the information, the content, in my life in a new way, from a new mode, a new context. I knew it from my experience and not from having learned it. It was an unmistakable recognition that I was, am, and always will be the source of my experience.

"Experience," Werner said, is simply evidence that I am here. It is not who I am. I am I am. It is as if the Self is the projector, and ev- erything else is the movie. Before the transformation, I could only recognize myself by seeing the movie. NowI saw that I am prior to or transcendent to all that.

"I no longer thought of myself as the person named Werner Erhard, the person who did all that stuff. I was no longer the one who had all the experiences I had as a child. I was not identified by my 'false identity' any more than by my 'true identity.' All identities were false.

"I suddenly saw myself on a level that had nothing to do with either Jack Rosenberg or Werner Erhard. I saw that everything is just the way it is—and the way it isn't. There was no longer any need to try to be Werner Erhard and try not to be Jack Rosenberg. Werner Erhard was a concept—just like Jack Rosenberg.

"Nor was I my Mind, patterned unconsciously, as it was, on identities taken over from my mother and father. I was whole and complete as I was, and I now could accept the whole truth about myself. For I was its source. I found enlightenment, truth, and true self all at once.

"I had reached the end. It was all over for Werner Erhard."

Was this enlightenment?

Werner sometimes calls it so, yet has expressed two reservations. First, the connotations of the word "enlightenment" suggest a kind of Eastern mysticism, whereas, as he puts it, "I don't require that context." Second, the transformation that he underwent was not in itself so much an experience, as a shift of the context in which he held all content and all process, including experience. Hence he sees what happened in 1963 as a "peak experience," and what happened in 1971 as a "transformation," and prefers not to use the word "enlightenment" at all.

From p.166 of Bartley Biography of Erhard (1978)

A shorter video version can be found here: