Source:(Google.com.pk)
In 1824 Francisco Goya arrived in the city of Bordeaux as a self-imposed exile from Spain. He was seventy-eight years old, stone deaf (since 1793) and profoundly out of favor with a political regime that had been his essential form of support. "Goya in fact arrived, deaf, old, awkward and weak," his old friend and protector Leandro Fernandez de Moratin reported in a letter back to Madrid, "and without knowing a word of French and without bringing a servant (that no one needs more than he), and so happy and desirous of seeing the world."3 He would live four more years, long enough to return briefly to Madrid to gain his official release with full pension from his post as Principal Court Painter. While in Bordeaux, Goya began a set of highly experimental miniatures on ivory, creating haunting images. He also produced a large set of lithographs called the Bulls of Bordeaux, working like a painter on the large lithographic stones on a scale completely new to him. In these prints he was able to merge the qualities of painting, drawing, and print-making in a manner that makes these powerful images justly stand as his last masterpieces.
Goya was buried in Bordeaux. His remains were exhumed at the turn of the century and taken to Madrid as part of a huge celebration commemorated with a statue of the artist placed at the north entrance of the Prado museum, in a plaza that still bears his name. Then interred in the Pantheon of Illustrious Men of the Sacramental Cemetery of San Isidro, he was finally laid to rest in 1929 in the church of San Antonio de la Florida in Madrid beneath his most ambitious mural program.
While it is often said that Spain was at an economic and cultural nadir by the mid-eigh-teenth century, a mere shadow of the splendor and world dominance that had held sway in the previous century, its empire was never more vast nor its international bureaucracy more sophisticated and cosmopolitan. Spanish culture is often defined as if under a bell jar characterized in terms of a "golden age" and the inevitable decline from that moment whereas, of course, Spain has as restless and changeable an artistic history as any country. This is no better demonstrated than by the series of "reforms" that occurred shortly after Goya's birth, marked by the founding of a new arts academy in Madrid, the Royal Academy of San Fernando (of which Goya would one day become Director of Painting). Eighteenth-century Spain was opened to a great range of international talent with three of the most celebrated artists in Europe employed there in public works during Goya's youth: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo from Venice, Anton Raphael Mengs from Dresden then Rome, and Corrado Giaquinto from Naples, also via Rome. Goya's early work in Zaragoza with his future brother-in-law, Francisco Bayeu, introduced him to a charmingly suave and blended international rococo style much dependent on the work of Giaquinto, and it is this part of his training that probably encouraged Goya at the age of twenty-four to go to Rome for a year.
Goya's early success seems to have come relatively easily, and he was involved with his in-laws in an ambitious set of new decorations for the cathedral of Zaragoza. Although he failed in his first attempts to win competitions at the newly founded Royal Academy in Madrid, by 1775 he was in the employment of the Royal Tapestry Factory of Santa Barbara in Madrid, designing series of tapestries that were the factory's principal productions over the next fifteen years. During this same time, Goya received his first commission to paint religious works and portraits, the latter from an increasingly more elevated group of patrons. By 1786 he was made Painter to the King, and, in I799, Principal Court Painter, a level beyond which an artist could not succeed unless he was elevated to the nobility, like Velazquez, who preceded him in this post. Goya kept company with the most liberal aristocrats of the court, many determined to reform Spanish civil and religious life; these men and women became his patrons and often, true friends. There is no evidence that Goya himself was active politically or even held strong political views.
Through the ensuing war with Britain and the occupation of Spain by French troops, Goya loyally served two successive Spanish monarchs, Carlos IV and Fernando VII. While executing with great alacrity and swiftness the number of official commissions required of him, he also worked independently for other patrons and created works of art on speculation, often small paintings of horrific subjects, which sold very well. Printmaking provided him a serial form (not unlike the early tapestry productions) in which to explore a wider range of ideas, and he is justly ranked as one of the greatest printmakers of any century. Some of his prints were in part commercial ventured in 1803 Goya sold the crown the rights to reproduce his Los Caprichos in return for an endowment for his son while other prints were not published during his lifetime, never leaving the closed, very personal world that Goya, a highly public and civic figure, managed to retain his entire life.
He had eight children by the same wife, Josefa Bayeu, only one of whom, Francisco Javier, survived to adulthood. He seems not to have been particularly loyal to Josefa but his affection for his son was profound and he made vigorous efforts to advance Javier's social status and property as his sole heir. A severe and still incompletely diagnosed disease he suffered in 1792 while in the south of Spain left Goya completely deaf and, in many ways, cut off from his previous life. But it would be wrong to exaggerate as occurs in the case of Beethovem the tragedy of this isolation. One of the most remarkable aspects of Goya's life is how successfully he retained friendships and, in fact, maintained royal and aristocratic favor. In turn, as evidenced by his retreat to France in 1824. the deeply oppressive quality of the restored monarchy in Spain following the French defeat in 1813 must have certainly pressed on Goya sorely. But perhaps political analogies to artistic patterns of creation are too facile. We have no notion of Goya's response to the opening in 1819 of the Prado museum as a public institutiom a moment of great liberality nor do we know what he thought of Fernando VII's suppression of a liberal constitution the following year.
Today, Goya is regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. The subversive imaginative element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a model for the work of later generations of artists, notably Claude Monet, and Pablo Picasso. In his honour, Spain's main national film awards are called the Goya Awards.
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Salvador Dali, and his paintings
Salvador Dali PhotoSalvador Dali's paintings immediately recall the personality of the artist and his eccentric behavior. History has taught us, however, that with the passage of time, the details of an artist's life and his opinions are forgotten, and his fame comes to depend entirely on his paintings. Thus, to have a clear idea of Dali as an artist, it is important to look at the paintings. There is no doubt that they have made an extraordinary impression. They have been violently attacked, but they have also been passionately admired, and they have fascinated the general public. They have been acquired by museums all over the world, and are often more popular than works of artists long recognized as the greatest.
What is about Salvador Dali's paintings that gives them this impact and that makes them immediately recognizable as his? Partly, of course, the subject matter, which is often weird and fantastic. But much more important is Dali's own highly personal quality. This is difficult to define. Its effect is both pleasing and shocking, a mixture of a clear, insistently present, almost tactile feeling of reality with a mood that is utterly unreal, impossible, often nightmarish, evoking something that we are conscious of but do not quite understand - perhaps would prefer not to understand. The painter almost succeeds in giving tangible form to dreams.
Salvador Dali arouses an exciting feeling of reality by his exceptionally sensitive rendering of the effect of light on surfaces, whatever they represent - skin, cloth, fur, sand, or stone. His ability to do this is exceptional. He reproduces textures in a startlingly life-like way, always bringing out expressive and unexpected details. Inner structure and solidity, on the other hand, are usually lacking, which brings out the liveliness of the surface even more.
Familiar surroundings are constantly reflected in Dali's paintings. The landscape around his house at Port Lligat recurs frequently, like the Montagne St.Victoire and Provencal pine woods in Cezanne. Dali's wife reappears as model for most of his female figures. Her personality, so well known to us from photographs in the press, is difficult to dissociate from the artistic meaning of the pictures. But with time, this will change. We have only to think of how Helene Fourment's face and figure, appearing in every one of Rubens' paintings, mythological or religious, must have affected her contemporaries in seventeenth-century Antwerp. Today this no longer interferes with our appreciation of her husband's works.
The technique of the paintings contributes to making them attractive. Highly controlled, it takes full advantage of the many possibilities of the oil medium, and gives the pleasure that one derives from seeing good craftsmanship. In Dali's case, this is even more impressive because of the contrast with the distressing lack of technique that mars the work of so many contemporary painter.
The strange mood of Salvador Dali's paintings result from the shock that follow this initial pleasure. These beautifully painted forms are treated in the most surprising way. Normal objects are found next to, or even growing out of, the fantastic creations of the artist's imagination - suggestive, erotic, and sometimes even repulsive. In some paintings, the eye suddenly discovers forms hidden within form to which they are totally foreign, seemingly the accidental result of changes of color or the effect of shadows, but really deliberate and full of subtle and disturbing meaning.
Much of what Dali does has its roots in the great traditions of painting, and the artist has always freely acknowledged his debt to the great masters, such as Raphael, Vermeer, and Velazquez. His technique is traditional. His treatment of surfaces recalls Flemish painting of the time of van Eyck, and work of the Dutch little masters of the seventeenth century. He has painted still life resembling that of his great compatriot, Zurbaran. HIs drawing often has Renaissance qualities. His fantastic compositions have been likened to those of Hieronymus Bosch, and mythological and religious themes that he has used are centuries old. "Hidden forms" recur constantly in the history of painting, most recently in Redon and the Nabis, Bonnard and Vuillard. Some of Dali's later work, with splashes of paint or the effects of "shots" and "explosions", reminds us of what Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his "Treatise on Painting" quoting Botticelli, who said that
by throwing a sponge full of color at a wall it leaves a stain in which a fine landscape can be seen... as well as heads of men, animals, battles, rocks, seas, clouds and other things...In this you will find marvelous ideas because the mind of the painter is stimulated to new inventions by obscure things. ”
Despite his respect for the pasta and his attachment to it, Salvador Dali is essentially a man of the twentieth century. This is evident both in his state of mind as an artist and in his efforts to relate his work to the problems of our time. One of the characteristics of the last few decades has been revolt in every phase of human thought and action. This came naturally to Dali, a native of Catalonia, and, indeed, his first and most lasting success was as a leader of one of the most revolutionary literary and artistic movements of all time, Surrealism. In the early 1920's, the Surrealists proclaimed that all traditional rules and beliefs should be destroyed and new inspiration sought in the hitherto unexplored depths of man's mind and spirit. They took much of their material from the realm of the subconscious, of dreams, and of the instincts, normally repressed, which Freud was revealing to the world. This appealed powerfully to Dali's imagination, and his paintings were by far the richest and most exciting inspired by the movement. He has since broken with Surrealism, but it spirit has never disappeared from his work.
There are many other ways in which Dali shows he is intensely involved in his own times. He has been interested in many trends of modern thought, scientific, philosophical, and religious. His has been interested in many trends of modern thought, scientific, philosophical, and religious. His cult of originality at almost any price, though also a Catalan trait, is typical of today, and so is his desire for publicity. His analysis and "Paraphrasing" of famous paintings is also a phase of artistic activity shared by other modern artists.
In the future, when Dali's paintings have fallen into the proper perspective with the work of artists of all periods, much that seems significant to us today may lose its interest. However, he will always stand out as one of the very few twentieth-century painters who combines a profound respect for the traditions of the past with intensely modern feelings. People will always look at his work because of his extremely personal and always surprising imagination, for that is where his genius lies.
The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret. ”
-Salvador Dali
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Pablo Picasso biography Pablo Picasso Biography - Famous Spanish Artist
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Biography about the life of the famous Spanish Artist Pablo Picasso
born Pablo Ruiz Picasso - Malaga, Spain - 25th of October, 1881 / Died - April 8, 1973
Popular Pablo Picasso paintings include "Family of Saltimbanques", "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", "Three Musicians", and "Guernica".
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"Pablo Picasso Biography"
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By Robert Hughes - TIME magazine art critic
To say that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace. Before his 50th birthday, the little Spaniard from Malaga had become the very prototype of the modern artist as public figure. No painter before him had had a mass audience in his own lifetime. The total public for Titian in the 16th century or Velazquez in the 17th was probably no more than a few thousand people--though that included most of the crowned heads, nobility and intelligentsia of Europe. Picasso's audience--meaning people who had heard of him and seen his work, at least in reproduction--was in the tens, possibly hundreds, of millions. He and his work were the subjects of unending analysis, gossip, dislike, adoration and rumor.
He was a superstitious, sarcastic man, sometimes rotten to his children, often beastly to his women. He had contempt for women artists. His famous remark about women being "goddesses or doormats" has rendered him odious to feminists, but women tended to walk into both roles open-eyed and eagerly, for his charm was legendary. Whole cultural industries derived from his much mythologized virility. He was the Minotaur in a canvas-and-paper labyrinth of his own construction.
He was also politically lucky. Though to Nazis his work was the epitome of "degenerate art," his fame protected him during the German occupation of Paris, where he lived; and after the war, when artists and writers were thought disgraced by the slightest affiliation with Nazism or fascism, Picasso gave enthusiastic endorsement to Joseph Stalin, a mass murderer on a scale far beyond Hitler's, and scarcely received a word of criticism for it, even in cold war America.
No painter or sculptor, not even Michelangelo, had been as famous as this in his own lifetime. And it is quite possible that none ever will be again, now that the mandate to set forth social meaning, to articulate myth and generate widely memorable images has been so largely transferred from painting and sculpture to other media: photography, movies, television. Though Marcel Duchamp, that cunning old fox of conceptual irony, has certainly had more influence on nominally vanguard art over the past 30 years than Picasso, the Spaniard was the last great beneficiary of the belief that the language of painting and sculpture really mattered to people other than their devotees. And he was the first artist to enjoy the obsessive attention of mass media. He stood at the intersection of these two worlds. If that had not been so, his restless changes of style, his constant pushing of the envelope, would not have created such controversy--and thus such celebrity.
In today's art world, a place without living culture heroes, you can't even imagine such a protean monster arising. His output was vast. This is not a virtue in itself--only a few paintings by Vermeer survive, and fewer still by the brothers Van Eyck, but they are as firmly lodged in history as Picasso ever was or will be. Still, Picasso's oeuvre filled the world, and he left permanent marks on every discipline he entered. His work expanded fractally, one image breeding new clusters of others, right up to his death.
Moreover, he was the artist with whom virtually every other artist had to reckon, and there was scarcely a 20th century movement that he didn't inspire, contribute to or--in the case of Cubism, which, in one of art history's great collaborations, he co-invented with Georges Braque--beget. The exception, since Picasso never painted an abstract picture in his life, was abstract art; but even there his handprints lay everywhere--one obvious example being his effect on the early work of American Abstract Expressionist painters, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, among others.
Much of the story of modern sculpture is bound up with welding and assembling images from sheet metal, rather than modeling in clay, casting in bronze or carving in wood; and this tradition of the open constructed form rather than solid mass arose from one small guitar that Picasso snipped and joined out of tin in 1912. If collage--the gluing of previously unrelated things and images on a flat surface--became a basic mode of modern art, that too was due to Picasso's Cubist collaboration with Braque. He was never a member of the Surrealist group, but in the 1920s and '30s he produced some of the scariest distortions of the human body and the most violently irrational, erotic images of Eros and Thanatos ever committed to canvas. He was not a realist painter/reporter, still less anyone's official muralist, and yet Guernica remains the most powerful political image in modern art, rivaled only by some of the Mexican work of Diego Rivera.
Picasso was regarded as a boy genius, but if he had died before 1906, his 25th year, his mark on 20th century art would have been slight. The so-called Blue and Rose periods, with their wistful etiolated figures of beggars and circus folk, are not, despite their great popularity, much more than pendants to late 19th century Symbolism. It was the experience of modernity that created his modernism, and that happened in Paris. There, mass production and reproduction had come to the forefront of ordinary life: newspapers, printed labels, the overlay of posters on walls--the dizzily intense public life of signs, simultaneous, high-speed and layered. This was the cityscape of Cubism.
Picasso was not a philosopher or a mathematician (there is no "geometry" in Cubism), but the work he and Braque did between 1911 and 1918 was intuitively bound to the perceptions of thinkers like Einstein and Alfred North Whitehead: that reality is not figure and void, it is all relationships, a twinkling field of interdependent events. Long before any Pop artists were born, Picasso latched on to the magnetism of mass culture and how high art could refresh itself through common vernaculars. Cubism was hard to read, willfully ambiguous, and yet demotic too. It remains the most influential art dialect of the early 20th century. As if to distance himself from his imitators, Picasso then went to the opposite extreme of embracing the classical past, with his paintings of huge dropsical women dreaming Mediterranean dreams in homage to Corot and Ingres.
His "classical" mode, which he would revert to for decades to come, can also be seen as a gesture of independence. After his collaboration with Braque ended with his comment that "Braque is my wife"--words that were as disparaging to women as to Braque--Picasso remained a loner for the rest of his career. But a loner with a court and maitresses en titre. He didn't even form a friendship with Henri Matisse until both artists were old. His close relationships tended to be with poets and writers.
Though the public saw him as the archetypal modernist, he was disconnected from much modern art. Some of the greatest modern painters--Kandinsky, for instance, or Mondrian--saw their work as an instrument of evolution and human development. But Picasso had no more of a Utopian streak than did his Spanish idol, Goya. The idea that art evolved, or had any kind of historical mission, struck him as ridiculous. "All I have ever made," he once said, "was made for the present and in the hope that it will always remain in the present. When I have found something to express, I have done it without thinking of the past or the future." Interestingly, he also stood against the Expressionist belief that the work of art gains value by disclosing the truth, the inner being, of its author. "How can anyone enter into my dreams, my instincts, my desires, my thoughts ... and above all grasp from them what I have been about--perhaps against my own will?" he exclaimed.
To make art was to achieve a tyrannous freedom from self-explanation. The artist's work was mediumistic ("Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do what it wants"), solipsistic even. To Picasso, the idea that painting did itself through him meant that it wasn't subject to cultural etiquette. None of the other fathers of Modernism felt it so strongly--not Matisse, not Mondrian, certainly not Braque.
In his work, everything is staked on sensation and desire. His aim was not to argue coherence but to go for the strongest level of feeling. He conveyed it with tremendous plastic force, making you feel the weight of forms and the tension of their relationships mainly by drawing and tonal structure. He was never a great colorist, like Matisse or Pierre Bonnard. But through metaphor, he crammed layers of meaning together to produce flashes of revelation. In the process, he reversed one of the currents of modern art. Modernism had rejected storytelling: what mattered was formal relationships. But Picasso brought it back in a disguised form, as a psychic narrative, told through metaphors, puns and equivalences.
The most powerful element in the story--at least after Cubism--was sex. The female nude was his obsessive subject. Everything in his pictorial universe, especially after 1920, seemed related to the naked bodies of women. Picasso imposed on them a load of feeling, ranging from dreamy eroticism (as in some of his paintings of his mistress Marie-Therese Walter in the '30s) to a sardonic but frenzied hostility, that no Western artist had made them carry before. He did this through metamorphosis, recomposing the body as the shape of his fantasies of possession and of his sexual terrors. Now the hidden and comparatively decorous puns of Cubism (the sound holes of a mandolin, for instance, becoming the mask of Pierrot) came out of their closet. "To displace," as Picasso described the process, "to put eyes between the legs, or sex organs on the face. To contradict. Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them! My painting is a series of cock-and-bull stories."
There seems little doubt that the greatest of Picasso's work came in the 30 years between Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937). But of course he didn't decline into triviality. Consistently through the war years and the '50s, and even now and then in the '60s and '70s, he would produce paintings and prints of considerable power. Sometimes they would be folded into series of variations on the old masters and 19th century painters he needed to measure himself against, such as Velazquez and Goya, or Poussin, Delacroix, Manet and Courbet. In his last years particularly, his production took on a manic and obsessive quality, as though the creative act (however repetitious) could forestall death. Which it could not. His death left the public with a nostalgia for genius that no talent today, in the field of painting, can satisfy.
TIME art critic Robert Hughes is the author of The Fatal Shore and American Visions
Article from the TIME 100 - The Most Important People of the 20th Century...
We can choose to be audacious enough to take responsibility for the entire human family. We can choose to make our love for the world what our lives are really about. Each of us has the opportunity, the privilege, to make a difference in creating a world that works for all of us. It will require courage, audacity and heart. It is much more radical than a revolution – it is the beginning of a transformation in the quality of life on our planet. What we create together is a relationship in which our work can show up as making a difference in people’s lives. I welcome the unprecedented opportunity for us to work globally on that which concerns us all as human beings.
If not you, who?
If not now, when?
If not here, where?”
Werner Erhard, 1977
Report on the est Training by Humberto Maturana
Friday, December 13th, 2013 at 10:22 pm Comments Off
“The training is a set of interpersonal interactions that lead to emotional and intellectual experiences that provide a circumstance and an intrument for self awareness, self observation and reflection on the circumstances of the subject trainee, both in his individual life and as a social being.” – Humberto Maturana Read more
Werner Erhard Interviews Robert Reich – 1988
Saturday, November 23rd, 2013 at 3:47 am Comments Off
Saturday Satellite Seminar Program
Monday, September 30th, 2013 at 11:45 pm Comments Off
Every era has a relatively small number of original and influential persons, those who generate initiative, discoveries, achievements and insights which shape our own cultures and societies — and often those of future generations. If we know these people well, it is through their works: their campaigns and institutions, their books and inventions, their vaccines, their symphonies, their monuments and their firms.
The Saturday Satellite Series with Werner Erhard was a program designed to give us a new access to such people — a glimpse of the commitments and visions that inform such lives, and that serve as the source of their creations. The series was conducted as a dialogue between Werner Erhard and prominent guest speakers who are widely recognized for their achievements and expertise. These dialogues were designed not to present particular views, but to open an inquiry that elicits creative thinking and productive action from and for all participants.
Each session provided a platform for speakers to generate their own discussion, to share influences and experiences, to pose provocative questions, and to allow participants to share in a candid, dynamic and creative exchange. By way of these dialogues, the Satellite Series offered new perspectives, new insights and new ways of approaching key public issues and concerns.
Broadcast live to thousands of participants throughout the United States, each series focused on a particular theme, exploring key principles and assumptions and leading-edge insights that govern the relevant fields.
Leading public figures being interviewed included Alice Cahana, Robert Reich, Milton Friedman, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Milton Friedman, Mike Wallace, Stephen Jay Gould, James Burke, Andrew Tobias, and Senator Daniel Inouye. These interviews are available in their entirety at http://wernererhardvideo.com/
Werner Erhard, host and moderator of the Series, has dedicated his life to transforming people’s experience of what is possible for human beings, and their ability to act on that possibility.
A Breakthrough in Individual and Social Transformation
Monday, September 2nd, 2013 at 11:48 pm Comments Off
Presentation By Werner Erhard At The Eranos Conference 2006
Ascona, Switzerland
18 June 2006
While I was asked to speak about individual and social transformation, I will start by talking about knowing.
Think of the circle I have drawn here as containing all knowledge. The circle is divided into three sections. The first section of all knowledge is called, “What I know that I know.” We all know what to do with what we know that we know – we put it to use. The next section of all knowledge is called, “What I know that I don’t know.” Again, we all know what to do with what we know that we don’t know – we learn. Finally, there is this vast remaining section of all knowledge called, “What I don’t know that I don’t know.” What to do about what we don’t know that we don’t know is something of a dilemma. And, what we don’t know that we don’t know about human beings is an important question when it comes to individual and social transformation.
I am reminded of a physics paper entitled “Chaos” that I read some years ago about the discovery of the chaotic nature of certain physical phenomena, where a small input could result in a very large scale output, while a large scale input could result in a very small output. As I read the article it occurred to me that chaos theory certainly applied to human beings. For example, with very little said, a person might get massively upset, while years of training have very little impact on some people. Chaos theory was followed by complexity theory where, to oversimplify somewhat, the whole was not merely the sum of the parts, but the sum of the parts plus the interaction between the parts. Again, complexity certainly applies to human beings.
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Managing Time
Tuesday, August 27th, 2013 at 7:53 pm Comments Off
One of the fundamental aspects of unworkability in the world is time. That’s the first lie. That’s the first apparency. That’s the beginning of the end of the truth. Time. You need to master time to have any mastery in the world. People who are at the effect of time, people who can’t create time, people who can’t manage time, people who can’t move time around, people who can’t handle time, people who are overwhelmed by time, have no mastery and no basis for mastery. The basis for mastery in the world is being able to handle time. So what we’re talking about instead of some new problem to handle is an enormous opportunity to create a context in the space, in a sense, and in an environment of workability. And that environment’s generated out of a mastery of time.
If you attempt to take a computer approach to the control, efficacy, workability, results, viability, and getting the job done, what you wind up with is a clear statement that an organization is driven by its scheduling. And you know about computers? When you take a computer approach you have to break things down to the smallest possible, controllable variable. Computers are absolutely stupid. They have to reduce things to absolute know-ability. There are no black boxes. You’ve got to know what’s happening. So a computer approach forces you to tell the truth; to look at what’s actually happening. You’ve got to get all your attitudes out of the way and all of your leaps of faith and all of your beliefs and all of the things you thought were true and all of the things that everybody knows are true and start dealing with the basic, raw, hard, little facts. Then you have to see the basic, stupid, simple way that those facts relate to each other. In other words, you’ve got to get clear about it.
Now what we’ve got is a bunch of people trying to be geniuses about something that doesn’t require any genius. We’ve been wasting people’s genius on stuff that could get handled by discipline and work. If you’ve got any genius, you aren’t ever going to get to use it unless you can discipline yourself and work. You know, work.
Work, it’s when you sit down or stand up and go to work. You literally confront things and handle things. You start at the beginning and you work your way through step-by-step until you get to the end. That’s what work is. You start at the beginning and you work step by step until you get to the end. And you don’t skip steps, you don’t explain steps way, and you don’t look in your head to find out what’s so about steps. You start at the beginning, you take every one of the steps between the beginning and end, and you stick at it. You put your nose against the grindstone with respect to it, you stick at it, work on it until you get to the end. You handle each one of the steps. You don’t leave any one out. You don’t jump over any one. That’s how you do work. You do work by being systematic and methodical. And people who can discipline themselves to be systematic and methodical have enough of themselves left over to express and contribute and use their genius.
See, it’s like people are real confused about what’s going on. All these things to do and there’s all this work to be done. All these results to get accomplished and all these people here and all this stuff and all these plans and all these words and “Gee, I don’t …” …. JUST GO TO WORK! Everything will clear up. Start disciplining yourself. Start keeping your agreements. Discipline yourself to keep your agreements and you go back to where you work, sit down and go to work. That means start at the beginning, cover all the steps between the beginning and the end, do it completely, don’t mess around in your head about it. Go to it, step by step, systematically, until you get to the end. You will have then performed work. Which results in productivity. Any small amount of which will leave some room for a contribution. Without which there is no room for contribution. Real simple. Get out of your head. Cut out all that explanation about the difficulty. And your complaints and criticisms and what we need and what we don’t need. What we need right now is for people to go to work.
WORKING AND MANAGING TIME
From an est Staff Meeting on June 10, 1980
est: A Philosophical Assessment
Thursday, August 15th, 2013 at 12:17 am Comments Off
Michael E. Zimmerman
March, 1982
Est: A Philosophical Assessment
Introduction.
The purpose of this report is to provide a philosophical assessment of est training. I first took the training in New Orleans in January, 1981, and reviewed it as an observer in Sacramento in February, 1982.
My analysis of the training is guided by my understanding of the philosophy Of Martin Heidegger, existential psychotherapy, and Eastern religions. The following appraisal arises not only from my theoretical training as a philosopher, however, but also from my own personal experience. This report is by no means exhaustive; much more could have been said about the topics covered below. Moreover, many more
issues could have been dealt with. Because of my own philosophical expertise and personal interest, however, I chose to focus my attention on those aspects of the training that bear on the topic of authenticity. I hope that this report will prove to be of some help in resolving whatever problems remain in what is already an excellent training.
My analysis of the training addresses itself, in part, to four questions posed by Jack Mantos:
1) Can the authenticity of the training be established more directly and explicitly at the start of the training?
2) How can one speak more effectively of the Self as emptiness or nothingness?
3) How is one to understand the notion of resoluteness i.e., the notion that the authentic Self takes a stand on itself as the context of contexts?
4) Is there too much subjectivism in the idea that we “create” our own experience?
Answers to these questions will be found in the body of the text, a summary of which follows.
Summary of Findings:
1) The “authenticity” of the training may be more firmly established initially if the trainer explicitly asserts that the trainer and support team are prepared to enter into agreement with the trainees. The agreement would be that everyone give 100% of himself or herself to the training.
2) There is a tendency to speak as if the training will provide more “satisfaction” in life, but if satisfaction is made the goal by trainees, they will never find it. Satisfaction ensues; it cannot
be pursued. At times, the training conveys the impression that the reason for keeping one’s agreements is to gain satisfaction. Such a utilitarian view of behavior is inimitable to the fundamentally sound view, expressed elsewhere in the training, that the key is to act impeccably: from this, everything else–including satisfaction as well as unhappiness–follows.
3) More explicit treatment of death, and the attendant phenomena of anxiety and guilt, are needed to provide a more complete account of human existence. Anxiety is constriction of the self that occurs in
the face of the disclosure of mortality, but only such disclosure enables us to make the leap from mechanicalness or inauthenticity to aliveness or authenticity. Guilt is the ontological self-corrective
that reminds a person that he or he is failing to repay the loan of life by experiencing everything there is to experience. Guilt and anxiety call the individual to the resolution or decision to live.
4) Resoluteness refers to the decision of the individual to experience whatever there is to experience. Resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) is authentic openness or disclosedness (Erschlossenheit). The decision in favor of being openness is a free choice to be the freedom that we already are, ultimaletly, freedom is not a human possession, but instead the openness or no-thingness into which we are thrown. Human existence or Dasein constitutes the clearing or openness in which the Being of beings manifests itself.
5) While the training currently makes some reference to time and temporality, a more thorough discussion is probably in order. Such a discussion would show that the leap from inauthenticity to authenticity
involves a transformation in temporality: from linearity to the circling temporality called eternity or “Now.” Linear time arises from the constriction of human openness to that of the ego/mind, which reveals things merely as objects to be exploited for human ends. Circular or eternal time arises when human existence opens up and lets beings be just what they are.
6) The training needs to define more .carefully what it means by the notion that I am responsible for all my’ experience.’ that :r am God in my universe. Apparently derived in part from Hindu doctrines of Atman or the Transcendental Self, this conception of responsibility is too easily confused with more ordinary notions. The notion that I somehow create my experience is metaphysical speculation that cannot be verified. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to redefine creating. Instead of speaking of creating as a kind of producing or making, we could say that creating is a letting-be. The former notion of creating
is masculine and typically Western, while the latter is feminine and more in line with Eastern views of reality. We could then say that I am responsible for all of my experience in the sense that I am called
on to experience whatever it is that manifests itself within the openness that I call me.” The true “I,” of course, is not ego/mind but the temporal-historical clearing called Dasein.
7) While the training speaks of everything/nothing, Heidegger speaks of Being/nothingness. Although what both parties mean by nothingness or nothing is similar, they differ considerably on what they mean Being and everything. For Heidegger, Being does not mean the totality of things, but the presencing or self-manifesting of beings. To identify Being with every thing to make a category-mistake.
8) Although the training currently emphasizes the importance of participating and sharing with other human beings, the implicit idea of the training is that we humans should share ourselves with all
beings. Hence, the Hunger Project should naturally lead into the Planet Project designed to save the earth from environmental destruction.
9) Heidegger claimed that everything great happens from within a heritage or tradition. Perhaps it is time for est to acknowledge that it is part of the great wisdom traditions of East and West. One goal of est would then be to empower people to revitalize their own traditions.
10) Miscellaneous Observations.
11) Conclusion.
12) Appendices.
A) Michael E. Zimmerman, “Heidegger’s ‘Existentialism’
Revisited.
B) Michael E. Zimmerman, “Towards a Heideggerean Ethos
for Radical Environmentalism.”
Read the Full Paper
Four Ways of Being that Create the Foundations of A Great Personal Life, Great Leadership and A Great Organization
Monday, May 20th, 2013 at 11:43 am Comments Off
“We argue here that the four factors we identify as constituting the foundation for being a leader and the effective exercise of leadership can also be seen as the foundations not only for great leadership, but also for a high quality personal life and an extraordinary organization. One can see this as a “value free” approach to values because, 1) integrity as we define it (being whole and complete) is a purely positive proposition, 2) authenticity is also a purely positive proposition (being and acting consistent with who you hold yourself out to be for others and who you hold yourself to be for yourself), 3) being committed to something bigger than oneself is also a purely positive proposition (that says nothing about what that commitment should be other than it be bigger than oneself), and 4) being cause in the matter as a declaration of the stand you take for yourself regarding everything in your life is also a purely positive proposition”
- Werner Erhard and Michael C. Jensen
Instead of looking for a great leader, we are in an era where each of us needs to find the great leader in ourselves
Friday, May 17th, 2013 at 11:48 pm Comments Off
If you are empowered, you suddenly have a lot of work to do because you have the power to do it. If you are unempowered, you are less dominated by the opportunities in front of you. In other words, you have an excuse to not do the work. You have a way out. You have the security of being able to do what you have always done and get away. If you are empowered, suddenly you must step out, innovate and create. The cost, however, of being unempowered is people’s self-expression. They always have the feeling that they have something in them that they never really gave, never really expressed. By simply revealing the payoffs and costs of being unempowered, people have a choice. They can begin to see that it is possible to make the choice to be empowered rather than to function without awareness. Empowerment requires a breakthrough and in part that breakthrough is a kind of shift from looking for a leader to a sense of personal responsibility. The problems we now have in communities and societies are going to be resolved only when we are brought together by a common sense that each of us is visionary. Each of us must come to the realization that we can function and live at the level of vision rather than following some great leader’s vision. Instead of looking for a great leader, we are in an era where each of us needs to find the great leader in ourselves.
- Werner Erhard, Scene Magazine/September-October 1982
Purpose and Aliveness
Tuesday, April 9th, 2013 at 2:43 am Comments Off
The only two things in our lives are aliveness and patterns that block our aliveness. As patterns are experienced out, our lives become clearer. Things begin to make more sense. What we do makes more sense.
It’s funny, but when the alive you emerges from behind the smokescreen of all those patterns and begins to participate in life directly, life really does have purpose. It all somehow makes sense, in a fantastic way.
When you get rid of the blocks, what you have is aliveness, and when the blocks are gone, purpose emerges. There is no use searching externally for purpose, or trying to “pull it in.” It is already there. Just focus on clearing out what is between you and aliveness, so every time we create greater aliveness, the purpose is being served.Aliveness and purpose are practically the same thing. The purpose is greater aliveness, so every time we create greater aliveness, the purpose is being served.
As more and more of us get to see that the purpose is greater aliveness, it happens that all of us start to do the same thing – we start serving the purpose. Life comes on to us in our own terms, and so does the opportunity to serve.
That everyone is serving the purpose in a different way does not mean that everyone is doing something different. That’s the illusion. We do the same thing in different ways. As each of us makes our part of the whole really work, the purpose is being served.
The purpose is life and that it be, completely.
The commitment is: aliveness
- By Werner Erhard..
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