Behavior: est: 'There Is Nothing to Get'

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"What is, is," says Werner Erhard, 40, a former trainer of encyclopedia salesmen and founder of Erhard Seminars Training Inc., one of the more mind-boggling of the many self-help programs to come out of California. In 70 hours over two marathon weekends, est aims at "transforming your ability to experience living "through techniques apparently derived from Scientology, psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, Arica, Gestalt, transactional analysis and various Eastern religions. Since 1971, est has "graduated" 83,000 people in twelve cities.

TIME Behavior Writer John Leo enrolled in an est course in New York, endured the first weekend, and reconstructed the second from interviews. His report:

We are an assortment of 250 therapy collectors, baffled housewives, cynical intellectuals, secretaries with love problems, businessmen and ex-hippies. At 8:30 a.m., having paid our $250 each, we gather in the New York Sheraton ballroom—$62,500 worth of troubled or venturesome New Yorkers eager to change the brain patterns of a lifetime in just two abuse-filled weekends.

A drill-sergeant type named Marvin rants a bit and goes over the rules four or five times. We already know them: no chatting, smoking or notetaking; no getting out of the chair for any reason except for "the maximum" of one food break per day and widely spaced bathroom breaks. Around Manhattan, est is known as the "no-pee therapy." Bladder control is crucial. At some sessions, trainees have been known to announce "I have just wet my pants and it doesn't matter," sitting down happily, if soggily, to tumultuous applause.

Our "trainer" bounds onstage. Ron is a California golden boy, 32, blond, handsome and curiously innocent. Many of the men shift uneasily. Can this recycled surfer unlock the mysteries of our souls? Ron sternly announces we are "assholes" and he doesn't care about us in the slightest. He's already got what he came for: our $250 fee. It's up to us to get what we want. Our lives don't work. That's why we're here.

A girl named Wendy insists that her life works. She's come straight from Transcendental Meditation, and she's just here to seek further enlightenment. Ron observes she is full of shit. He launches into a banal ten-hour lecture on est epistemology. Most of what we know consists of received ideas and secondhand experiences. We see the world through a glaze of beliefs and ideas. Thinking is crap—the yammering in the back of our heads. Ron wiggles his fingers behind his head to show us how foolish thinking is.

Booby Prize. "How many believe what I've said?" Ron asks, and the hands shoot up. "Then you're assholes. Don't believe or disbelieve any of it. Just hold onto it like a brick on your lap." Our aim should just be to "get it"—acknowledge what has been said. Many fear that the philosophy is too deep for them, but Ron says it will all become clear later. Hostile questioners are verbally thrashed and told to "come off your act." Intellectuals, who are already guilty of thinking, are tripped up by est's Catch-22: "All criticism is self-created and says more about the critic than the subject discussed."