That being said, anyone was permitted, though not encouraged, to walk out of the room at any time for whatever reason (e.g. You've got some racket going on!" Landmark Education suffers humiliating legal defeat in New Jersey Federal . Seven months on, I can see that they were absolutely right – and that the Landmark Forum was one of the most pivotal experiences on my inner journey to date. Also as a professor, I am used to manipulation from students who have not done their homework and risk failing a course: they will use any method to get me to "weaken" my stand. Such as reminding me of my own faults in a course, or using a charming smile, or, as Sophie was doing, sidling up and standing two inches away from me as she asked me if people did not like me. The Landmark Forum is designed to bring about positive, permanent shifts in the quality of your life—in just three days. His performance was rich with humor and personal anecdotes. Thanks for sharing this blog with us. Another woman claimed that if I had only participated in the Landmark Forum, my relationship with my partner would have been saved. At this, I felt something in my mind strain and then give way, with a little click. (For a more formal explanation, read their website or Wikipedia page). This inspiration is clear in a lot of the language that I encountered in the Forum – “thank you for sharing yourself with us”, “let’s acknowledge so-and-so”, and so on. Some of the key messages that I received are: My experience was also filtered through my past experience of movies and books that were known to have been influenced or inspired by the Forum. It’s well known, for example, that Chuck Palahniuk attended a Forum before writing Fight Club, the novel that was turned into the greatest and most inspirational movie ever. Landmark's entry course, the Landmark Forum, is the default first course for new participants and provides the foundation of all Landmark's other programs. Microphones flank the stage, where the participants go to share their stories and receive live coaching from the Forum leader. Yes even little ones have rackets. (“I’m not shouting at you, I’m shouting at your stuff. What could be at stake was a re-evaluation of the meaning of "parental love", unsettling cherished French clichés about how relationships worked. The woman who objected to the hysteria was asked if there was "something behind her question": perhaps a further disagreement with her estranged husband? Great post man, keep the nice work, just shared this with my friends. "No," I said. The specific knowledge I acquired was relatively simple and straightforward. You're not listening! The Landmark Forum is a 3 day personal development seminar. Online rumors that I had read about “not being allowed to go to the bathroom” were totally unfounded. I would be shunned. I had noticed that all questions objecting to the Forum were turned into problems of the self: the ad hominem argumentative strategy seemingly working on all 150 participants, who cheered as any person with an objection was pushed to confront the fact that their own lives were a wreck, from whence came their question. At the testimony session on the last day, each contestant reported the same sort of "breakthrough", a trauma at age seven and a subsequent script, as if dutifully following a blueprint. Sophie moved closed, circled to me next to the mike, and looked deeply into my eyes. Tears followed. There’s no meaning intrinsic to events that happened in our lives. Participants were invited to the microphone to present their problems, and while speaking, Sophie would begin to smile, circle closer to the participant, look them up and down with a steady glance, keeping her two feet firm on the ground, a rather effective theater technique, and then suggest: "tell me what happened to you when you were seven. The Landmark Forum: 42 Hours, $500, 65 Breakdowns My lost weekend with the trademark happy, bathroom-break hating, slightly spooky inheritors of est. Should you do the Forum yourself? Many theorists have even developed whole systems of thought from this premise: Freud, for example. I clocked four hours devoted to this subject on Saturday. The most criminal aspect of the Landmark Forum's insistence on its methodology is precisely that: its insistence on its methodology. In contrast, most of my fellow participants threw out whatever value system or philosophy they had ever had and began speaking of everything in their lives as either "rackets" or "strong points." ETs & UFOs 5. Why were they all waiting in gleeful anticipation for me to break? Instead, Sophie gave a brilliant, truly brilliant, performance of how human beings are like donkeys (this said, running around the stage following an imaginary carrot at her nose), who are always pursuing an imaginary "someday" of satisfaction. of being judged and criticized – to do any judging themselves. One thing I’ve learned in the last seven years: in every game and con there’s always an opponent, and there’s always a victim. Make it last for 29 years so you suffer and die.". The extent of my unpopularity was revealed when I sat down, and all the participants avoided my eyes, except three people who came and put their hands on my shoulder, as if I needed comfort for my "humiliation." And I expect to put the experiences and learnings into practice in my life in the days, weeks, and months ahead. One husband of a participant even came to an evening session to thank the leader for giving him back his wife. I did see how I used my past in my future; I did contemplate the rackets I laid on my friends and family. life coaching|personal growth|peak performance|personal development. At one point, during a high-tension moment in a sharing session in my Forum, the leader shouted at the participant: You don’t see that I’m on your side. You ruined her life, admit it, for your own selfish purposes. If you want to help her now, you can go kill yourself. I hear it's kind of like Scientology & you have to keep paying money & these seminars are all day long into the night. We stood in silence in a truce. "I'm not racketing," I said. Informational learning is primarily based on moving things from the category “we know that we don’t know” into the category “we know that we know”. I realized I would probably not be able to get the private interview I wanted with her for my article. Over the past year, I encountered many different opinions, both online and in person. They are both strong individuals who have experienced both triumph and tragedy in their lives. I’m on your side. We are constantly affixing "stories" to events rather than seeing the separation between "event" and "interpretation," and these stories are usually based in our self-righteous feeling of being wronged. Thanks for sharing, Hello , Associate Professor of Cinema and Theater at the University of Paris 8; member of the TransCrit Research Group. Reporters hiding secret cameras had snuck into the Landmark, a self-help program launched in 1991 as the successor to Est, after Werner Erhard, the founder of the organization, escaped from the United States a millionaire, to avoid possible imprisonment for tax evasion. The truth was that we had breaks every two hours, at which point I stuffed myself with delicacies at various local London diners. Without exception, each participant would burst into tears and realize what a "worm" she or he was. Not only for people with massive emotional blocks due to traumatizing circumstances in their life, but for people who are seekers, artists, businessmen, and even Perhaps the Forum had changed its Draconian techniques since that TV program. (Apparently, I later learned, some people put down a deposit or pay in full, and then chicken out and decide not to show up.). This program will make YOU transform, as well as enhance your bank account (we are told in the closing remarks, that Landmark Forum participants tend to make 30 percent more money after taking the Forum). His most urgent philosophy, repeated throughout his speeches, is that one must have a commitment to truth without ever presuming its absolute nature. The Forum cycles between a few main activities. From that awareness comes a fundamental shift that leaves people more fully in accord with their own possibilities and those of others. Yes, they urge us to proselytize, which rather than a cult technique, might just be an unfortunate mistake in marketing strategy: I would never urge anyone to do the Forum precisely because they urged me to do the Forum. Frauds, Hoaxes, Conspiracies 6. And of course, in the words of Caesar (echoed by the movie): The greatest enemy will hide in the last place you would ever look. The Landmark Forum is the streamlined, slightly gentler offspring of that pinnacle of the ’70s encounter movement, est. I quickly ran through my appallingly brief list of friends and wondered if she was right. And it’s a good thing, too, because now it’s time for the phone calls! Philosophically, the concepts are too sensible to be controversial. Are you always such a know it all?" If we don’t “complete” the past, we bring the injuries and complaints of the past – i.e. She also mentioned her personal life again, how upset she had been when on her honeymoon, as a young girl married to an elderly millionaire, the man sadly had an aneurism and died (leaving her millions), and how she would have continued to live in disappointment, with rackets, but the Landmark convinced her to leave the past behind. In his words: "When the symbol (of any given religion) is made into a fetish and an instrument of proving the superiority of one's religion over others, it is fit only to be discarded.". The end. But I urge you to spend the weekend questioning your integrity. It didn’t seem to be the main point of the experience. It is done quietly and without confrontation. Its basic as well as advanced courses are so effective that you can surely excel in your field of interest and gift infinite life to yourself. They take what would otherwise be an inspiring but artificial exercise (whether it be a conversation in a conference room, or a bare-knuckle boxing match in a dive bar’s basement), and redirect that newly liberated energy into transforming participants lives and the environments around them. We are all inauthentic assholes who lie and cheat our way through life, take the easy way out, and blame other people for our own problems. I arranged with the Landmark Education Forum to take the seminar in London with Sophie McLean, a charismatic 47 year old French Moroccan, self-proclaimed to have once been a socialite, jet-setting from party to party until she too, at age 33, took the Landmark course and realized she wanted "to contribute to society." The rules-based, tough-love framework, guided and led by a theatrical and charismatic leader, is reminiscent of the Forum experience. You don't love your daughter. For 13 hours a day. Interestingly, the only way to get these individualists back on track--to feeling some sense of "religious" duty and inspiration--is to appeal to their individualism. I now went to the microphone, and asked my question. Forgiveness is a key feature of most of the world religions; so is living for a clean present. Change is based on adjusting, modifying, always having the past dragging behind you (like the chair she dragged behind her, in demonstration). I noted I agreed with the basic tenets of the program, but I questioned the slippery propagation of these tenets: the idea that these tenets were original to the Forum, rather than an intelligent hodgepodge of the best of East and Western philosophy; the evangelical emphasis on telling our friends; the insistence that integrity should be applied to us spreading the word of the Forum, rather than to beliefs we already had developed in our lives and professions. 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