fucking douchebags

Now, maybe all those people were twisting things. But that’s the source of the fear.

OTOH, it’s not all fear. Some EST people are just annoying. Pushy about recruitment, that sort of thing. So you’re seeing that too.

I was encouraged to take it as well, but not through a high pressure sales pitch. The folks that thought it was a valuable experience felt it could help me, and they even offered to loan me money to pay the tuition (which was about $300, a lot of cash for a new college graduate with no job and sleeping on a friends couch). I did take a three hour “pre-est” introduction to the concept, but decided I simply didn’t have the money and wasn’t in such a terrible psychological state that I needed something like that to be happy.

A few years later, I did take a week-long course modeled after est (sponsored by the ARAS Institute, or something similar) that Paul Williams talked me into, but I didn’t feel I got much out of it. The book provided most of the information on personal empowerment that was reinforced during the training. And I honestly felt I got a lot more insight into my psyche from a good acid trip than I ever got from ARAS training, and a tab of acid was a hell of a lot cheaper.

The individual who comes into the Forum, typically comes into the Forum looking for a “fix”, a “formula for success”, a “recipe/how to”, typically, for an issue/problem that is not easily resolved. For instance, you know how to get a job, a degree, a car, a house, etc. If one goes into the Landmark Forum looking to get common/easily acquired knowledge, then you’ve wasted your time and money.

If you go to the Forum to find “better ways of getting more money” – I personally think you’ve also wasted your time/money as well, with one exception – that is, if the Forum allows you to see who you _SHOULD_ be being in life to get more money, _AND_ (a BIG f-ing -AND-) you actually DO what you’re supposed to do as a result of what you got out of the Forum, which should result in you getting more money, then you haven’t wasted your time/money by attending it.

Given that the general populace in the United States and most of the G7-8-9, whatever they’re up to now, countries, aren’t dealing with survival issues, e.g. the standard of living is fairly high in these countries, people typically come into the Forum dealing with “small” issues like, personal happiness/satisfaction/inner peace/spirituality, or the most profound one, and why YOU SHOULD do the forum – _INTEGRITY_ and _RELATIONSHIPS_ (there’s a couple of others too, but in my view these are the top 2).

The only thing you get out of the Forum, is a breakdown (in terms that _anyone_ can understand without getting a Ph.D. in psychology/socilolgy/anthropology) of how you got to be the way you are today, right now, in that moment as you sit in the chair and listen to others/the Forum leader. This, in my view, nearly perfect ontological re-creation of what a human being is, allows _YOU_ (for your hard earned cash/time spent on the Forum) to see who _YOU_ are in the scheme of things called your own life!

The pitfall to people who HAVEN’T done the Forum is to think/assume – “BUT I KNOW WHO I AM and WHO I AM BEING IN MY LIFE”. The lithmus test to whether you know yourself and who you’re being in your life is – “is there one person in my entire life I’d rather avoid permanently than talk to and communicate with?” or “Is there one lofty goal in my life that I soo badly wanted to achieve but gave up on?”. If the answer to either one or both is ‘yes’ – and I haven’t found anyone that isn’t a ‘yes’ to these yet…. then by all means, spend the few hundred bucks and do yourself a favor by attending the Landmark Forum.

You are guaranteed to like it, get new views about yourself, your life, who you’ve been being in life, why people are a “certain way” around you, or in general, why your boss seems to follow you around from one job to another, etc :).

Do you have to do _anything_ about the insights you get in the Forum? Hell no. But then if you don’t, you get to keep your old life too. :) It’s as simple as that. The only difference between then and after the Forum – you will run out of excuses very quickly as to why you’re not doing what you want to do or what you need to be doing …. to get to where you want, to mend the relationships you want. And more than ever, it will become crystal clear to you that the cornerstone of everything in life is 1) integrity, 2) relationships….

In a nutshell – you will be hard pressed to find a better mirror of whom you’ve been being in your own life than the Landmark Forum.

I can not recommend it enough. As to what “I got out of it” :) – promotion, 20% pay in increase (although I had to lose one job to realize this is what needed to happen to move on… thanks to the reality check I got out of the Forum), and I tell my wife what I want now, instead of keeping quiet/reserved/unworthy/not good enough for her… the same way as I was for my mother. (go figure eh? , we all “marry” our mothers somehow… or their exact opposite :).

I get that he may not have been the ideal father, but he at least came back and cleaned up.

Metaphysically speaking, maybe what his daughter did was the cost he had to pay for abandoning his family, beyond just the personal cost he endured by hiding and running away from himself…

In the end, he got hit by God…. and woke up.

They’re also both totally empty and meaningless, as is the rest of life. Or not.

And do you not know people who told you stories about situations where their physical safety became an issue from someone who had not done est? (which we both know has not existed for 26 years.)

Do you not know people who are just annoying and pushy who have never done “est”?

I think the conclusion you draw is a bit distorted. Between “est” (which no longer exists) and Landmark Education, millions of people have done these courses and if you take any group that size, you will have extreme cases and annoying odd people, that is life on earth. Most people are great who did est and who did not do est and are good and safe to be around.

I know people in every walk of life who fit the description of peole people you described – it has nothing to do with some course from 26 years ago. It’s a big planet and there are all kinds here. I remember people like that in high school and at places I worked. You?

How about some rules of evidence. Find me a more reliable source.

And if they did recant, why would I want to follow a father whose own children would lie about him on national TV?

Yeah, but their former friends stop answering their phone calls.

It would be so wonderful to get YOUR personal life up on the table, or maybe some member of your families personal life up on the table, and every single one of both your friends and siblings and family members and see if or they or any of them were ever disenchanted with you and put you and them them under the microscope, offer them money, maybe some fame, maybe some pay back. And see how you hold up. No life self-righteous finger pointers like yourself usually have the most fascinating skeletons in your closet and under your bed.

How any of us would hold up.

Personally I try to avoid giving money to scumbags to the extent possible. Werner Erhard is a scumbag. Even if they weren’t a creepy cult offshoot of Scientology, I’d avoid Landmark for that reason.

Most of this comes from exploitation of a few simple psychological phenomena, whereby exposure to the right kind of controls, environment, and stimuli, produces a predictable response. Especially in LGAT settings, which amplify the effect: groups have an infective influence on one another (see the Asch conformity experiments) for lots of reasons, not only psychologically but also neurologically (internal synthesis of remotely observed/identified experiential stimuli via mirror neurons).

These are exploited by, as the responses are evoked, framing them according to the principles and philosophies one desires to inculcate. Those without exposure to or training regarding the underlying science will be affected, often deeply and profoundly, and readily accept the explanation for the nature of the experience. Combine that with novel components and you have instant and fairly deep classical associations as well.

Couple of pithy generalizations I’ll also toss in here: the ends do not justify the means (there’s protein in excrement, but that doesn’t mean I want to eat it to get it), and the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few is simply wrong (a well informed contribution is one thing, one extracted through coercive means is something else entirely). Following the money in these situations is pretty revealing.

I will also state that there are protections from the EEOC (at least in the US) about attendance at these things in relationship to work environments.

So he got rid of the flying saucer mythology and replaced it with psycho-babble for marketing purposes (ideology and theology is always irrelevant) and upped the rate of psychological pressure on the potential dupes to suck more money out of a lower percentage of the initial attendees: causing more serious collateral damage to people’s brains in the process. Early on one set of fanatics stopped an ambulance crew from attending to a heart attack victim inside one of the seminars because they didn’t want any of “the secrets of EST” to leak out via the first-responders. The attendee croaked.

http://en.allexperts.com/e/j/ja/james_slee.htm

Of course, that’s not what bothered L. Ron Hubbard’s gang: it was the threat to their market share. So platoons of private eyes and Scieno spys hit the streets and pur Werner and his operations under a microscope. There was plenty to find and more was manufactured: for example undercover Scienos would attend the seminars and fake total nervous breakdowns in the middle of them – not that that didn’t happen for real anyway. All of this was leaked to the media through a series of cut-outs to avoid revealing who was bankrolling the investigation.

Erhard eventually got so worried by all this that he went into self-exile in Mexico.

In William Warren Bartley III biography, “Werner Erhard The Transformation of a Man: The Founding of EST” (approved by Werner Erhard), it states that Werner was involved in Scientology and the relationship of Scientology to Werner’s ideas.

We were both polite but obviously there as observers. The EST people tried everything in the book to throw us out, while at the same time hanging on to their new potential convert.

It took quite a lot of determination on our part to take her with us when we left. From what I read above (in the comments), it’s still a cult, and a creepy one at that.

I’ve seen “The Forum” encarnation and now Landmark. It’s still a steaming crock of shit.

And suddenly, years later it’s back in the news: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/inmarin/detail?entry_id=45934