I've read a few things about how Mr. Rosenberg chose the name Werner Erhard, but was curious if others have opinions.

My friend says it's nothing more complex than 'weiner is hard'. lol

He was also known as Jack Frost and Kurt Wilhelm Von Savage... by the way... that's Werner Hans Erhard .... did no one in his milieu find these identity shifts more than a little bizarre ?

!!!

or it could trace back to a severe head injury as a child... a surprising number of guru figures have had diseases like meningitis, head trauma, or clinical depression, like Baghwan Rajneesh... seems like something switches around in their minds... it does sound like "von savage" and "erhard" have strong power/dominance cravings associated with them in a connotative way... would be funny if the entire Rosenberg clan renamed itself Erhard... [b:49a35ac468] Harry Erhard [/b:49a35ac468] doesn't work on some primal branding level... both vaguely obscene and nebbishy...

He took Werner from Werner Eisenberg, the german physicist who enunciated the Uncertainty Principle in Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics was always a part of EST and today, Landmark zealots fantasize on the New Age cult movie "What The Bleep ...", a movie about Quantum Mechanics in a weird and distorted package. It's all about the culture of Uncertainty and the paradigm shift in science.

There are some similarities between QM and EST in that it cannot be fully understood. For example, Neils Bohr used to say about QM "If you don't feel dizzy when you think about it (QM), it's because you don't understand it". Uncertainty says it all.

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midonov123
There are some similarities between QM and EST in that it cannot be fully understood..

What are these people thinking ? Did it never cross their minds that quantum events take place [i:f6067edcdb] at quantum scales [/i:f6067edcdb] ??? The Erhardians appear to have made some fantastic, untenable extrapolation from a model, a set of hypotheses, an attempt to form useful abstractions about things that are very tiny and occur in miniscule passages of time, which is what quantum mechanics attempts to do, and macro scaled "walking around reality" ... Did Erhard actually believe that day to day physical stuff behaved, in some mysterious way when our backs were turned, like elementary particles ? Was he never informed that the integration of massive numbers of quantum scale events resolve into a totally different state of reality ? Unless they, the Landmark intelligensia or whoever have some clarification of this point.... which does raise the question... if they've invested so much of their valuable energy playing with this idea, why has the world.... meaning, you know, US... the not-as-of-yet illuminated... not had this earth shattering news shared with it ? It sounds like, as far as QM and perceivable reality is concerned, these guys are whacking off behind the barn....

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nutrino

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midonov123
There are some similarities between QM and EST in that it cannot be fully understood..

What are these people thinking ? Did it never cross their minds that quantum events take place [i:13d22d097d] at quantum scales [/i:13d22d097d] ??? The Erhardians appear to have made some fantastic, untenable extrapolation from a model, a set of hypotheses, an attempt to form useful abstractions about things that are very tiny and occur in miniscule passages of time, which is what quantum mechanics attempts to do, and macro scaled "walking around reality" ... Did Erhard actually believe that day to day physical stuff behaved, in some mysterious way when our backs were turned, like elementary particles ? Was he never informed that the integration of massive numbers of quantum scale events resolve into a totally different state of reality ? Unless they, the Landmark intelligensia or whoever have some clarification of this point.... which does raise the question... if they've invested so much of their valuable energy playing with this idea, why has the world.... meaning, you know, US... the not-as-of-yet illuminated... not had this earth shattering news shared with it ? It sounds like, as far as QM and perceivable reality is concerned, these guys are whacking off behind the barn....

I contacted Jack Sarfatti last year, the founder of the Physics of Consciousness Research Group (PCRG) at Esalen in 1974. The PCRG was funded by Werner Erhard at the time and Erhard used to invite Sarfatti to talk about Quantum Mechanics during the EST seminars according to Sarfatti himself. He also told me that Erhard was interested in UFOs and in the Psychics among other stuff.

Aspects of Quantum Mechanics remain incomprehensible even to physicists, so how could you expect EST participants to understand anything? Even today, Landmark people talk about the movie "What the Bleep ..." but they don't understand what's behind. One of the similarities that I have identified is that QM places the scientists in a state of cognitive dissonance when trying to rationalize what atomic constituents are really made of. With EST, everything is designed to put the participant in a state of cognitive dissonance using all sorts of skewed logic and other types of deception. When you are in a state of cognitive dissonance, people will submit to the nearest authority (the guru in case of EST). It's a way of gaining control over people. In physics, when QM leads to cognitive dissonance (and it does!), people sometimes refer to God (the nearest authority here!) in order to find meaning (for example Einstein used to say "God doesn't play dice" when talking about QM).

One could opine that using one specialized area of knowledge, such as physics, to talk about another area of knowledge, such as human behavior is in poor form....

Educated people seem to understand the difference between a [b:2b852466be] metaphor [/b:2b852466be] ... where one thing is used as an image to refer to something else because of some meaningful similarities, and that comparison is made to assist the receiving mind in forming a clear idea of it... we know from the outset that this is a mataphor, a teaching device, or an explanatory aid that is used for the purpose of clarification... and an [b:2b852466be] equivalence [/b:2b852466be] which is a different can of worms... an equivalence suggest a much closer implicit relation, like they share some kind of underlying reality....

So to say a leap of understanding is like, [b:2b852466be] in the metaphoric sense [/b:2b852466be] an elementary particle transiting from one energy band to another might be an excusable use of poetic imagery... nobody said that it is the same process... however, when the speaker slides from there to saying that a leap in mental state shares some fundamental physical [b:2b852466be] equivalence [/b:2b852466be] with something fascinating, that we don't fully understand at the quantum scale.... is well... like taking a blind leap into the deep end of a very large intellectual sewerage processing tank swarming with quantum poo...

Then, to go flying off into the left field of grandiose specualtion with one's mental gyroscopes disabled, one could extend Heisenberg's idea that [i:2b852466be] quantum [/i:2b852466be] events are observer dependent into the mundane realm we live in and insist, after executing a double backflip into the quantum poo, that any act of observation, contemplation, or languaging somehow, quantumly we suppose, tempers that mundane reality...

[b:2b852466be] Does this not sound like a deranged, bloated, otiose overextension of an idea from its proper realm into places it has no applicability ? [/b:2b852466be] Inquiring minds would like to know.

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nutrino
[b:e9c819ff16] Does this not sound like a deranged, bloated, otiose overextension of an idea from its proper realm into places it has no applicability ? [/b:e9c819ff16] Inquiring minds would like to know.

It does indeed! QM has inspired New Agers for decades and that includes "Werner". Today, this mouvement is manifest with the popularity of the New Age movie "What the Bleep ..." a movie about Quantum Mechanics! Yes, the same Quantum Mechanics "Werner" Eisenberg pioneered about 100y ago. It's all about "creating your own reality"!!! Sounds a bell doesn't it? For a critic of the movie, see:

[www.publishersweekly.com]