philosopher Werner Erhard
"At all times and under all circumstances,
we have the power to transform the quality of our lives."
— Werner Erhard

      John Paul Rosenberg was born in Pennsylvania on 5 September 1935, and called Jack. He was raised in a family of Jewish heritage on his father's side, and the Episcopalian faith on his mother's. His early years were unremarkable.
      In May 1960, he was married with four children and was working as a car salesman and quite unhappy. He broke with that identity and headed West with June Bryde, who he had been seeing secretly. The story goes that he and June noticed the headlines in a news magazine on the airplane and chose the most-opposite new name they could think of: 'Werner' from physicist Werner Heisenberg, 'Hans' from Bishop Hans Lilje, and 'Erhard' from then-economics minister of West Germany, Ludwig Erhard. June took the name Ellen, and they got married. They went first to St. Louis, Missouri, to Spokane, Washington, and then to San Francisco, California.

      In California, Werner began studies of all kinds of metaphysical and religious disciplines – even taking a trip to India – while being very successful selling educational materials of various sorts. While working in Beverly Hills, California in October 1963, a 'peak experience' occurred, which he characterizes as 'the experienced context of Self', which was followed by a complete reorganization of his value system.
      He continued to study metaphysics and to apply what he learned to his career managing sales of books for Encyclopedia Britannica and for Parents Magazine and for Grolier.

      He experienced the epiphany that is central to his subsequent work in March 1971, while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, when he realized that, contrary to all that he had been taught, the central truth of human existence is 'This Is It': the life that an individual leads is the only life that they will have, and that the individual is responsible for the content and decisions that make up that life.

      Other concepts followed from that epiphany:
              •  Everything is a conversation. Conversations are malleable, therefore change can
                  be realized by alteration of the conversation.
              •  The individual can have anything that he/she can enroll another into having gotten.
              •  Truth, believed, is a lie.
              •  The purpose of life is not survival, but to be complete.
              •  The most powerful access to the present is akin to Zen, the existential mode of
                  full consciousness, which he termed 'Being With'.
              •  The distinction 'What's So' leaves one in the eternal question 'So What?', which in
                  turn requires moment-by-moment inquiry into the ethical value of one's actions.
              •  Any problem can be resolved thru communication.

      He defined three tasks that he must fulfill:
         1) to share his transformation;
         2) to be responsible and 'at cause' in all matters; and
         3) to confront and acknowledge the past and the present, so as to have choice.

      The immediate alteration in Werner's manner and actions was so dramatic that others remarked upon it and wanted to know more. Thus was born the seminars, at first taking place in Werner's living room. Dramatic results in seminar participants' lives led to expansion, and he and his existing staff developed the est Training, delivering the first course to about 250 participants in October 1971.
      [ The word 'est' is Latin for 'it is'. When Werner filed for incorporation, the state bureaucrats refused on the basis of an obscure rule that did not permit corporate names to be in a foreign language. Werner's on-the-spot solution was to state that 'est' stood for 'Erhard Seminars Training'; the bureaucrats were satisfied, and that expansion of the company's name was seldom used officially. ]

      Werner's next project was to reconcile with his family back in Pennsylvania. Subsequent business success led to artificial controversy. Scientology swore a vendetta, which is active to this day. The abreactions of a few psychologically-weak course participants was cited as proof of the 'dangers' inherent in est's programs. But the benefits of the programs in the lives of thousands of other participants overcame the negative reports.
      In the late 1970s, Werner expanded and refined the programs, and even travelled with inventor-thinker R. Buckminster Fuller [1898-1983] in a lecture tour across America, circa 1977-79.
      In Summer of 1984, Werner announced the retirement of the est Training and his own planned departure. The courses were then produced by a corporate entity called Werner Erhard & Associates. The primary course was further redesigned and retitled the Forum in 1985.
      In January 1991, the company was reorganized as Transnational Education Corp., forming itself under ownership of the employees – and without Werner – basically buying all intellectual property rights from the prior corporate entities. Around the same time, Werner left the United States, partly because of threats on his life and partly because his direct participation with the company was no longer necessary. (The personal attack aired on "60 Minutes" on 3 March 1991, was coincidental and not the cause of his departure; see the book below.) The company was renamed Landmark Education Corp. the following year.
      The new organization has been very successful, under the leadership of Werner's brother and sister and others, expanding operations to 32 cities in the U.S. and 23 cities around the world, most recently opening in Italy, Jamaica & the Philippines. The primary course, the Forum, was again redesigned in mid-2000, now structured on the 'design principles' of Transformation, Possibility and Enrollment. A redesigned L.E.C. website was also rolled out in 2000.

      The 'Work of Transformation' continues while Werner has moved on to other concerns. He is neither in hiding – from the law or from assassins – nor is he living in obscurity in some remote hamlet. I am not privy to any details, but am certain in my bones that Werner Erhard is generating Possibility and other transformational distinctions in each and every situation where he is present. I imagine him in one-on-one meetings with powerful individuals and also leading seminars from Asia to Moscow to the European Union and beyond, where, as always, the results are intangible and unexplainable in the short term but obvious in subsequent concrete action in the world.
      And I sometimes wonder if Werner's favorite poet is still E.E. Cummings.

      I owe my life to the gametes of my parents but I owe the transformed quality of my life to the ideals of the U.S. Constitution, to Ayn Rand, to Werner Erhard, and to my own developing inner Self.
      The contents of this philosophy website are the result of the freedom & expansion of Who I Am that has come about from my committed engagement with the tools provided by est and Landmark Education.

      ADDED 2013: Werner is getting active in the world again, teaching courses at Harvard University and in India and elsewhere; books & links are added below.