"Only much later, when I became aware of the unconscious patterns and identifications that were at the source of my behavior, only then did they lose their power over me."
Werner [Erhard, founder of est, which became Landmark] paused. *As we talk about these things, you may feel uncomfortable. You may feel that we are talking about puppets, not about people. The fact is, until people are transformed, until they transcend their minds, they are simply puppets- perhaps anguished, hurting, strongly feeling puppets, but ones nonetheless limited to a fixed repertoire of responses. And that is what karma is all about. There really is no mystery about karma. In retrospect-only in retrospect -it is. obvious." 45

As he recalled his departure, Werner told me: "I left Philadelphia in a 'screw-you' mood. I still experienced myself as a victim. That requires that someone must have done it to you. That person iS automatically bad and may be punished. As a victim, you get to be righteous, and that is all you get. All that any of us were getting there in Philadelphia was a lot of righteousness.
"I came to see it as righteous to get out of a situation where I was trapped. I had to prove myself outside my mother's arena. In her arena I couldn't win. While Dorothy was no longer going to find out what I did, it was as though I got her permanent attention by withdrawing my attention from her.
Werner shook his head. "What a fool I was. How can someone who is Dorothy escape from Dorothy? You cannot do that by traveling in space and time." 53

In presenting my own ideas, I emphasize their epistemological context. I hold them as pointers to the truth, not as the truth itself.
"I don't think that anyone ought to believe the ideas that we use in est. The est philosophy is not a belief system and most certainly ought not to be believed. In any case, even the truth, when believed, is a lie. You must experience the truth, not believe it. 157

"Who can tell what vagary or what compromise may not be calling itself Christianity?", George Santayana asked more than sixty years ago. A bishop may be a modernist, a chemist may be a mystical theologian, a psychologist may be a believer in ghosts." Santayana was observing, not complain 181 ing. After, all, he described himself as both an atheist and a Roman Catholic. What Santayana believes, someone jibed, is that "there is no God, and Mary is His Mother." 182 181-182

What Werner does do, in pointing to the Self, is to invite people to become philosophers. He has said: "Our culture does not encourage people to be philosophers, and this is perhaps the most devastating denial of freedom in our lives. My own aim is to open to people, through 'philosophical reflection,' a mastery of the philosophical contexts, the ground of being, the presuppositions and models, from which their lives spring. This in turn opens mastery of life. A master is for me someone who has realized his or her own philosophical context, and who transcends his or her attachments in any particular area.' In speaking of "attachment," Werner uses an Eastern terminology for what many Western writers call "commitment." "'When speak of 'attachment,'" he says, "I designate the sine wave 'submission/resistance.' When you submit to something, or resist something, or hate something, or identify with something, you are attached to It."
The Self, for Werner, being the context of all contexts, is then the unsubmitting, unresisting, unformed matrix in which all forms, all processes, all metaphors occur. Who is one really? One is the context of all contexts, the matrix, the mater, the mother. Dorothy, the mother, is still here, but in a transfigured form.
THE MIND STATE
Most people exist not in a state of Self but in a "fallen" or untransformed state: a state of Mind. This is a tragic state in which, as Werner sees it, people consider themselves not as the matrix, but as one of the things created in that matrix. 184

For Werner, the verb "to ego" means "to perpetuate one's own point of view. 191

Any Mind content whatever will be used to make the Mind right and others wrong; to dominate and avoid being dominated; to justify the Mind and invalidate others.
Mind structures are thus not composed of specific belief systems, attitudes, or points of view. Rather, Mind structures govern all belief systems, attitudes, and points of view that arise in the Mind state; all such things must conform to the Mind structures. These structures govern the way in which men believe what they believe and know what they know. They define where one is "coming from" vis à vis belief and knowledge. That is, in the Mind state, one is coming from survival, domination, perpetuation of positionality; and will use belief, knowledge, attitudes, points of view on behalf of such aims. One will not live to know, but will know to live.
In a fundamental sense, the principles of Mind define the structure of one's world. This is why the training is so often, and so aptly, called philosophical. During the training, the trainee's philosophical context, the organizing structure of life in the Mind state, is displayed. He sees his way of knowing (his epistemology), his way of being (his ontology), and his morality as skewed toward positionality and domination, toward the survival of the Mind state. 201

Self is without position; it is space. It is without content; it is context, or matrix—that which has no form or process or content or position but gives rise to them. This is who one really is. 211

As the writer of the Huai Nan Tzu explains: 6

Some may maintain that the person who acts in the spirit of wu wei iS one who is serene and does not speak, or one who meditates and does not move. Such an interpretation of wu wei
- cannot admit. The configuration of the earth causes water to flow eastward, nevertheless man must open channels for it to run in canals. Cereal plants sprout in spring, nevertheless it is necessary to add human labor in order to induce them to grow and mature. . . . What is meant . . . by wu wei is that no personal prejudice (or self-will) interferes with the universal Tao, and that no desires and obsessions lead the true course of techniques astray.
Personal prejudice and self-will, in Werner's view, stem from automaticity and positionality. Thus to act appropriately, to act in the spirit of wu wei, is to act without automaticity and positionality.
The verb form "to appropriate" can be understood similarly. To appropriate is to take over something as one's own. To appropriate each moment as one's own is to be at cause.
The morality of the Mind state, by contrast, is irresponsible. The irresponsible person sees himself, and comes to his experience of
life, as heroic victim -of circumstances, people, things, events. The misunderstood genius discussed earlier illustrates the condition. Preoccupied with the wrongs he supposes others to have done to him, his life is dominated by feelings of resentment and fantasies of revenge. Denied the opportunity to act out his resentments, to exact revenge, he lives not in the here and now but in a world of fantasy-set sometimes in heaven, sometimes in some future utopia - where and when "justice" will one day be meted out. At the same time, his own life story, the story of the injustices done to him, becomes allsignificant. The whole fabric of his judgments and feelings depends upon its significance. 213 #infuriatingunfairness

Government and education, for example, fail to do their jobs; but they are very good at justifying and perpetuating themselves, and dominating others. Like the individuals who created and who sustain them, they come from the Mind state, from survival. Instead of being an acti ctivity to generate a healthy community life, politics becomes an end in itself. Nationalism, which increases positionality, is an epistemological disaster. 214

"That is the only important thing about any relationship. In fact, there are only two games in life. One is to expand—to participate, and play wholeheartedly. The other is to contract. There is no such thing as holding still.
"The secret—as to whether you will contract or expand, in your relationships and in life—has to do with your relationships with your parents. Until you complete your relationships with them, you have little ability to expand. Indeed, you can do little more than act out or dramatize the limitations in your relationships with them.
"The reason why this is not more keenly perceived has to do with change. People mistake change for expansion. In fact, however, change is usually a manifestation of contraction. For change is simply a variation on a theme; and the theme is some unconscious pattern in your relationship with your parents. Thus change is the reenactment of, a variation on, some limited pattern. Such change produces no satisfaction in life, not even when it is undertaken precisely to obtain greater satisfaction.
"Much of my life is the story of such utterly futile change. I fled from Philadelphia westward to Saint Louis. I fled Saint Louis for California and the Northwest. I wandered from one discipline to another trying to change myself—from self-image psychology and psycho-cybernetics to human potential and encounter; to Zen, Subud, and Scientology.
"Of course good things can come out of change: these moves and changes benefited me in obvious ways, as it turned out. In the register of pluses and minuses, they were pluses. But pluses don't produce satisfaction. No amount of pluses can add up to make you whole. Quite the contrary, these changes in my life circumstances were expressions not of my satisfaction in life, but of my lack of it. I was never satisfied where I was, no matter how good it became; and thus I constantly sought to change- within narrowly defined limits. These changes only dramatized my inability to create satisfaction in my life from where I was.
"If I wasn't happy where I was—and I never was—I thought that I could always change or move on. I could always go west. That is the story of most people, perhaps especially in America: they don’t 249 like it where they are; they move or change; and then they make the same mess all over again -just as I did. Their pasts become their futures. People make the same mess over and over again because they carry with them, wherever they go, whatever they do, the patterns and dramatizations stemming from the lack of completion in their relationships with their parents.
"But you can't go west forever.
"Not, at any rate, if you want satisfaction. To be satisfied, to expand, you must first be where you are, and do what you're doing no matter where you are and no matter what you are doing.
"Transformation produces this kind of state; and you can't be transformed without completing your relationships with your par"This doesn't mean that transformed people don't change. To the contrary, when you are transformed, and are coming from satisfactionthat is, when you are coming to your experience of the world from a state of being satisfiedthen you can change. And that iS different from having to change. Now you have a true choice. You can go west, east, or stay where you are. Whatever change occurs, occurs in the context of transformation, and thus occurs in the direction of expansion, workability, and aliveness. Transformation recontextualizes change." 250 249-250

"Self-forgiving, and self-accepting, is an essential part of completing relationships. If there is something about your past that you are ashamed of, or guilty about - if there 1S something in It that you are hanging ontoif there is something there that you are using to burden another person that will prevent you from completing your relationships.
"In order to transcend having to be any particular type of person, you have to make it all right with yourself to be that type of person. The moment when you really experience that you have created yourself being whatever way you are, at the same moment you will never have to be that way again.
"This self-forgiving, self-acceptance, goes hand in hand with forgiving others, making space for others, completing your relationships with others. You cannot complete a relationship with any person whom you do not admire and respect as he or she is, and as he or she is not - rather than the way you think she is or would like her to be. What I told Joan that night outside the house in Plymouth Meeting 1S accurate: 'Rocks are hard, water's wet, and Mother's Mother.' Love for a person iS acceptance of him or her the way he is and the way he is not. "So long as you do not know who you really are, this will be difficult. To complete a relationship, you may have to give up a lot of things to which you may be attached. You may have to give up your resentments, your anger, your upset, your annoyance, your desire to 251 punish. You have not been assigned the job of evaluating your parents, and you will have to give up making them wrong. You will have to give up resisting their domination, and be prepared to have it ap"Thus the only cause for not admiring and respecting someone is something within yourself, something that you are unwilling to create. pear that they win and you lose.

You cannot forgive anyone else until you have forgiven yourself. Once you know who you really are, you can complete all your relationships. By giving myself the space to be bad, by forgiving myself, I created the possibility, for the first time in my life, truly to be good. As soon as I could accept myself, I could accept my parents. That is why I "The only way to deal with the future," Werner said, looking out seemed 'different' when I returned to Philadelphia.
the window at the Philadelphia skyline, which had just come into view as the plane began to descend, "is to put yourself in a space where you are functioning effectively now. My past used to have me. By taking responsibility for it -as those years of disciplines and the particular experience that generated est enabled me to do -I got to get my past. Now no longer am my past; now I have my past, and it does not have me. My past is now my past. It isn't sticking into my present and my future. Now I I have the space to come from the Self, "T don't have to encounter my past in others either-since my and my whole family have also taken responsibility for all of to generate my own experience, here and now. 252 251-252