I'm often asked how Werner's work started. The most often asked
question is whether or not his work is a blend of other disciplines,
rituals, and bodies of knowledge. Did he get what he got as some
fortuitous combination, as some lucky fluke amalgam of
everything he read and immersed himself in? Did he simply
repackage all that, unoriginally albeit brilliantly, then
resell it? While that may seem to be a plausible explanation, in truth
it's not what happened.
There is a
razor thin
distinction between what we know, and our direct experience.
Transformation comes out of our direct experience, not out of what we
know. More precisely, transformation comes out of being able to
distinguish the one from the other.
One day in 1971 Werner Erhard got into his Ford Mustang and drove to
work heading south on US Highway 101 from his home in Corte Madera,
towards the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco.
As Professor William Warren Bartley III (Werner's biographer) put it,
"somewhere between Corte Madera and the Golden Gate Bridge, the man in
the car on the freeway was transformed". Werner later specified the
location more exactly as on the Golden Gate Bridge itself.
Werner
had had an
extraordinary
experience
in which he didn't suddenly find out some new thing. Rather, he
realized he had accumulated all the things he already knew in order
to "make it", in order to survive. He realized he really
knew nothing. In that experience, he came to know all the things he
already knew in a whole new way. In other words, he hadn't become aware
of something new to know. Rather, he'd become aware of the
epistemology
of knowledge itself: not what he knew, but rather how he held
everything he knew.
He never made it to work that day. Instead, he spent the day walking on
Twin Peaks, a mountain overlooking San Francisco, looking at what he
was going to do with the experience he had just experienced and how he
was going to share it.
Werner's
work which resulted, isn't (as it's erroneously considered to be) an
amalgam of everything he read and immersed himself in. Neither is it a
repackaging and reselling of other disciplines, rituals, and bodies of
knowledge he'd experimented with. The source of Werner's work is his
own authentic experience of who he really is, of the transformed man's
own experience of himself, of who he became on that fateful day, out of
time, on the Golden Gate Bridge.
There are many articles and books discussing Werner and his work, some
of them great and some of them not so great, some of them laudatory and
some of them outright hostile. I've got no
attachment
to people's opinions - not yours, not my own ...
especially not my own. People have opinions, as widely
differing as they have noses. Listen to everything you possibly can
about Werner, then draw your own conclusions out of your own
experience.
However, there's only one official biography of Werner's life, the one
written by Professor William Warren Bartley III, titled
"Werner Erhard, The
Transformation of a Man: The Founding of est".
It's must read reading not only for people who want to know how
Werner's work started, but also for people who want to know about the
layers upon layers of experiences Werner had along the road to being
transformed.