Werner Erhard: Thing

“Something experienced is true; the same thing believed is a lie.”

[39, Psychobabble: The Failure of Modern Psychology - and the Biblical Alternative, Richard L. Ganz, 1993, Crossway Books, 0891077340]
Attributed

“When my integrity is lacking, I am clear that I just got to be a bit smaller as a person. That keeps me working on my integrity. And the thing about integrity is it’s a mountain with no top.”

Werner Erhard

[Peter Haldeman, w:Peter Haldeman, The Return of Werner Erhard, Father of Self-Help, The New York Times, November 28, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/fashion/the-return-of-werner-erhard-father-of-self-help.html?ref=fashion&_r=0]

“If you’re going to be a leader, you’re going to have to have a very loose relationship with this thing you call ‘I’ or ‘me’. Maybe that whole thing in me around which the universe revolves isn’t so central! Maybe life is not about the self but about self-transcendence.”

Werner Erhard

[Peter Haldeman, w:Peter Haldeman, The Return of Werner Erhard, Father of Self-Help, The New York Times, November 28, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/fashion/the-return-of-werner-erhard-father-of-self-help.html?ref=fashion&_r=0]

“Here’s my definition of a hero. A hero is an ordinary person given being and action by something bigger than themselves. One thing I’m sure about is I’m real ordinary. Yet I’ve had the chance to touch the lives of a lotta people.”

Werner Erhard

Interview with The Financial Times — [Lucy Kellaway, w:Lucy Kellaway, Lunch with the FT: Werner Erhard, The Financial Times, April 28, 2012, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/feb214a8-8f88-11e1-98b1-00144feab49a.html#axzz1v4NTTdmJ]

“Of all the disciplines that I studied, practiced, learned, Zen was the essential one. It was not so much an influence on me, rather it created space. It allowed those things that were there to be there. It gave some form to my experience. And it built up in me the critical mass from which was kindled the experience that produced est.”

Werner Erhard

Interview with William Warren Bartley, cited in [Bartley, William Warren, w:William Warren Bartley, Werner Erhard: the Transformation of a Man: the Founding of est, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1978, New York, 121, 0-517-53502-5]

“I got a lot of benefit from auditing. It was the fastest and deepest way to handle situations that I had yet encountered. I immediately wanted to learn to do it. … With Scientology, I was able to characterize the Mind more accurately, and to cease justifying it. This greatly clarified what I was doing. … After my experience with Scientology, I saw what it means to see the Mind as a machine. I can now operate my Mind accordingly, with exactitude. I can do the familiar mind over matter experiments - the control of pain and bleeding, telepathy, those things. Many people can do such things, and they are well known in the yogic tradition.”

Werner Erhard

Interview with William Warren Bartley, cited in [Bartley, William Warren, w:William Warren Bartley, Werner Erhard: the Transformation of a Man: the Founding of est, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1978, New York, 146-47, 0-517-53502-5]

“There are only two things in the world — nothing and semantics.”

Werner Erhard

[Prologue, The Program, Gregg Hurwitz, HarperCollins, 2004, 0060530405]
Attributed

“[Alan] Watts did two main things for me. He opened up the connections between what I was doing and the traditional Oriental philosophies. And he pointed me toward the distinction between Self and Mind.”

Werner Erhard

Interview with William Warren Bartley, cited in [Bartley, William Warren, w:William Warren Bartley, Werner Erhard: the Transformation of a Man: the Founding of est, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1978, New York, 118, 0-517-53502-5]