Вернер Эрхард: Өзін-өзі жетілдіру және «est» тренингінің негізін қалаушысы

American author, lecturer, founder "est"

Werner Hans Erhard (born John Paul Rosenberg; September 5, 1935) is an American lecturer known for founding est (offered from 1971 to 1984). In 1985, Erhard replaced the est Training with a newly designed program, the Forum. Since 1991, the Forum has been kept up to date and offered by Landmark Education. He has written, lectured, and taught on self improvement. In 1977, Erhard co founded The Hunger Project, an NGO. In 1991, he retired from business and sold his existing intellectual property to his employees, who then adopted the name Landmark Education, renamed in 2013 Landmark Worldwide.

John Paul Rosenberg was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 5, 1935. His father was a small restaurant owner who left Judaism for a Baptist mission and then joined his wife in the Episcopalian denomination. Rosenberg attended Norristown High School in Norristown, Pennsylvania, where he received the English award in his senior year. In the summer of 1962, he became territorial manager for California, Nevada, and Arizona, and moved to San Francisco, and in the spring of 1963 he moved to Los Angeles. In Bartley's biography, Werner Erhard: The Transformation of a Man, the Founding of est (1978), Bartley quotes Erhard as acknowledging Zen as an essential contribution that "created the space for" est. In 1970, Erhard became involved in Mind Dynamics and began teaching his own version of Mind Dynamics classes in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Starting in 1971, est, short for Erhard Seminars Training and Latin for "it is", offered in depth personal and professional development workshops, the initial program of which was called "The est Training". The est Training's purpose was to transform the way one sees and makes sense of life so that the situations one had been trying to change or tolerating clear up in the process of living itself. The est Training was experiential and transformational in nature. The workshops were offered until 1984, when the est training was replaced by the Forum. As of 1984, 700,000 people had completed the est training. and a form of "Socratic interrogation". Erhard challenged participants to be themselves and live in the present instead of playing a role imposed on them By the mid 1970s Erhard had trained 10 others to lead est courses. with the aim of "providing financial and organizational support to individuals and groups engaged in charitable and educational pursuits—research, communication, education, and scholarly endeavors in the fields of individual and social transformation and human well being." The Foundation supported projects launched by people committed to altering what is possible for humanity, such as The Hunger Project, The Mastery Foundation, The Holiday Project, and the Youth at Risk Program, programs that continue to be active. It also organized presentations by scholars and humanitarians such as the Dalai Lama and Buckminster Fuller The annual conference was designed to give physicists an opportunity to work with their colleagues on what they were developing before they published, and was attended by such physicists as Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, The origin of the Hunger Project can be seen in the 1977 source document "The End of Starvation: Creating an Idea Whose Time Has Come", written by Erhard.

In the 1980s, Erhard created a new program called the Forum, which began in January 1985. Also during that period he developed and presented a series of seminars, broadcast via satellite, that included interviews with contemporary thinkers in science, economics, sports, and the arts on topics such as creativity, performance, and money. In October 1987, Erhard hosted a televised broadcast with sports coaches John Wooden, Red Auerbach, Tim Gallwey and George Allen to discuss principles of coaching across all disciplines. They sought to identify distinctions found in coaching regardless of the subject being coached. Jim Selman moderated the discussion and, in 1989, documented the outcome in the article "Coaching and the Art of Management."

In 1991, the group that later formed Landmark Education purchased Erhard's intellectual property. In 1998, Time magazine published an article about Landmark Education and its historical connection to Erhard. The article stated: "In 1991, before he left the U. S., Erhard sold the 'technology' behind his seminars to his employees, who formed a new company called the Landmark Education Corp., with Erhard's brother Harry Rosenberg at the helm." According to Landmark Education, its programs have as their basis ideas originally developed by Erhard, but Erhard has no financial interest, ownership, or management role in Landmark Education. In Stephanie Ney v. Landmark Education Corporation (1994), a court ruled that Landmark Education Corporation did not have successor liability to Werner Erhard & Associates, the corporation whose assets it purchased. According to Steven Pressman's 1993 book Outrageous Betrayal, Landmark Education agreed to pay Erhard a long term licensing fee for the material used in the Forum and other courses: "Erhard stood to earn up to $15 million over the next 18 years." In 2001, New York Magazine reported that Landmark Education CEO Harry Rosenberg said that the company had bought Erhard's license outright and his rights to the business in Japan and Mexico. From time to time, Erhard acts as a consultant to Landmark Education.

Erhard became the object of popular fascination and criticism, with the media tending to vilify him over several decades. Michael E. Zimmerman, chair of the philosophy department at Tulane University, wrote "A Philosophical Assessment of the est Training", in which he calls Erhard "a kind of artist, a thinker, an inventor, who has big debts to others, borrowed from others, but then put the whole thing together in a way that no one else had ever done." Sacramento City College philosophy professor Robert Todd Carroll has called est a "hodge podge of philosophical bits and pieces culled from the carcasses of existential philosophy, [and] motivational psychology." Social critic John Bassett MacCleary called Erhard "a former used car salesman" and est "just another moneymaking scam." NYU psychology professor Paul Vitz called est "primarily a business" and said its "style of operation has been labeled as fascist." In 1991, Erhard "vanished amid reports of tax fraud (which proved false and won him $200,000 from the IRS The March 3, 1991, episode of 60 Minutes covered these allegations and was later removed by CBS due to factual inaccuracies. On March 3, 1992, Erhard sued CBS, San Jose Mercury News reporter John Hubner and approximately 20 other defendants for libel, defamation, slander, invasion of privacy, and conspiracy. On May 20, 1992, he filed for dismissal of his own case and sent each of the defendants $100 to cover their filing fees in the case. Erhard told Larry King in an interview that he dropped the suit after receiving legal advice telling him that in order to win it, he would have to prove not just that CBS knew the allegations were false but that CBS acted with malice. Erhard told King that his family members had since retracted their allegations, which according to Erhard had been made under pressure from the 60 Minutes producer. Celeste Erhard, one of the daughters featured on 60 Minutes, sued Hubner and the San Jose Mercury News for $2 million, accusing the newspaper of having "defrauded her and invaded her privacy", Celeste claimed that her quotes in the Mercury News article were deceitfully obtained. The case was dismissed in August 1993, the judge ruling that the statute of limitations had expired, that Celeste "had suffered no monetary damages or physical harm and that she failed to present legal evidence that Hubner had deliberately misled her", A disclaimer said, "this segment has been deleted at the request of CBS News for legal or copyright reasons". The appellate court stated that he had not been personally served and was not present at the trial. In 1993, Erhard filed a wrongful disclosure lawsuit against the IRS, asserting that IRS agents had incorrectly and illegally revealed details of his tax returns to the media. In his suit, Erhard stated that he had never refused to pay taxes that were lawfully due,

A private investigator quoted in the Los Angeles Times stated that, by October 1989, Scientology had collected five filing cabinets' worth of materials about Erhard, many from certain graduates of est who had joined Scientology, and that Scientology was clearly in the process of organizing a "media blitz" aimed at discrediting him. According to Erhard's brother Harry Rosenberg, "Werner made some very, very powerful enemies. They really got him."