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Definition: Also known as "The Forum," Est was created by Werner Erhard as a means to help people unleash their potential and attain new levels of spiritual enlightenment. The name Est stands for Erhard Seminars Training and is perhaps the inspiration behind a plethora of other, similar New Age training courses.
Est typically involves 60 hours of intensive psychological indoctrination with the goal of completely restructuring the person's worldview. The basic seminar is comprised of three parts: lectures, mental exercises and group sharing of feelings and experiences. Some of those who have attended these courses have reported that they have had a rigid, even authoritarian atmosphere.
One of Erhard's basic principles which he tries to teach people is that life has, fundamentally, no rules. One of the consequence of this, which Erhard makes perfectly clear, is that the goal of Est is not to make people better - quite the contrary, Erhard thinks that absolutely everyone is perfect just the way they are. The goal of Est, then, is to get people to realize that they don't need to improve at all.
Another principle of Est, is that, whatever a person's current belief system, it is ultimately destructive because it causes them to assign false meaning and purposes to things in the world. People's problems result from not realizing this and, hence, not realizing their full potential.
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