Mar
2
EST Six-day Experience
Filed Under Awakening
Back in the old est days (the est training was a grueling, delicious, personal growth seminar created by Werner Erhard which promised transformation in two weekends to its participants) Werner developed an advanced seminar called The Six Day. Held in New York and California, The Six Day went 24-6, twenty-four hours a day for six days. If you started to doze off during the long lectures in a tightly packed course room with 99 other participants, you would get up from your chair and stand at the side of the room while holding a log above your head. These logs, conveniently lined along both sides of the room, where used to ensure you stayed awake while confronting coma inducing self realizations. This was intense stuff.
I remember being an assistant for The Six Day course when a blind participant was enrolled. One of the days of the course was particularly memorable for me; the day all course participants, and assistants, wore bathing suits. Ten participants at a time would stand on a small riser in front of the room with the rest of the group looking at them. Standing in a bathing suit in front of a group of people without talking takes the fear of public speaking to the next level. This was the fear of public silence. The people in front of the room would cry, shake, and wail as they confronted their own personal fears, inhibitions, self image, and feelings of self worth. Everything they did impacted their experience. Clocks, watches, and timepieces were not allowed in the course room, but it was obvious people would stand until they had nothing left. Some people would fall down, not from fatigue but from the weight of the experience.
My job, as the chosen assistant, was to be the blind man’s eyes for the full fourteen hours or so of the experience. I was to keep an ongoing descriptive monologue into the blind man’s ear. My observations, not judgments, were translated into his experience, every second of every minute of every hour of fourteen hours of self realization for 100 participants. Imagine. When he went to the front of the room I went with him so he could visualize the experience of the group seeing him. He “saw” everything there was to see that day through my reports.
I gave birth to his visual experience; healing the blind, allowing him to see. It took me days to recover from that experience. If I did.
You can have your own version of this experience with a friend. Try being blind, have your friend lead you around. Then step up the game by having your friend be blind and you speak to them continually describing so they can “see”.
Many years later, with the birth of a witness within me, I have had similar experiences. It seems that a particularly scary and universal aspect of waking up is having attention without an object to put it on. In most people’s unawakened lives they are surrounded by objects that consume their attention the way Tums consumes 27 times its weight in excess stomach acid. As long as we don’t have excess attention, life is OK. We can get behind, lose ourselves, and fall into a kind of waking sleep. But when you exit the world of crazy busyness with extra attention you begin to wake up. As you wake up you simply have way too much attention. This attention produces a kind of insanity, being ahead of experience rather than behind it. It has you discover that you are creating everything rather than continually reacting to a sequence of stimuli.
While this attention without object may sound like fun the experience of it is terrifying. It is anxiety squared. Waking up, which is what happens as attention without objects persists, brings you to the present. In the present there is really nothing to do, nowhere to go, you sit with the sensations of existing. In this pregnant state, giving birth to yourself, each moment is over the top. Among other things you discover that life before this experience was a bit like being a Hermit Crab. You find a shell to live in, and you try not to outgrow that shell. Even after you outgrow it you still hang out in it for as long as you can, but when you really don’t fit anymore you leave your shell and find another. As you look for another shell you are vulnerable and in great danger. When you find a new shell you, again, try not to outgrow it. This shell game is what life without waking up amounts to.
Waking up isn’t easy, but it is worth it. Attention without object is actually something we practice in my workshops. The simple exercises provide you with the tools you will need when your time to awaken arrives.
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I enjoyed the recollection of your 6 day experience assisting and regret I wasn’t around for it. Imagine a toddler standing against the wall holding up a log…
Sometimes, my inner world feels a bit like a tornado. Thoughts and emotions start in unassumingly and quickly spin out of control. I’ll claim this is a result of some external event, but know it’s not. Is the energy fueling this storm Attention Without Object? And since the force is so great, I’ve got to pin it on Some Thing, giving away my agency and leaving me wiped out.