The Journey: The Landmark Education Forum Part 1
During my thirties, I attended three different programs, all of which I consider having contributed to my spiritual development. The first of these was the Landmark Education Forum. This was a three day workshop, or seminar...whatever.
Roscoe had done this workshop and invited me into it. So I first attended an introductory lecture. I don't remember much about that lecture in general, other than that there was a lot of vague talk about "becoming more human". What I do remember was that after the initial lecture, we were separated into different groups, with those groups adjourning to separate rooms. Here we got another lecture, albeit a shorter one, about the nature of complaints, what it means to complain and what it accomplishes. The group leader handed out paper and pens and asked everyone to think of a complaint. She encouraged us to find one that really bothered us, something that we think about at least somewhat frequently. Then we were to write down the complaint. I believe my complaint was something along the lines of "I hate that people are so driven by money and materialism and don't seem to want to live for the experience of life." The group leader asked us to share our complaints with the group. Suddenly, I felt vulnerable, but I went ahead and raised my hand and she called on me and I recited my complaint. She made a strange, sarcastic remark: "Of course. All we care about is money and a brand new TV." She said it offhandedly and quickly and then called on someone else, thus not allowing me time to respond. In doing so, I have to admit though that I had a moment of enlightenment because I listened to some other person's complaint and it sounded ridiculous to me. She answered his complaint with a similar sarcastic answer, one I rather agreed with. And it went on like this. I had a glimpse of myself in other people. I saw how I piss and moan about things, just like other people do.
She had us draw a line down the middle of the paper, dividing it into two columns. The first column would then be called "Payback" and the second column would be called "Cost". So she asked us to list some paybacks for the complaint. We were all a bit confused so she explained some more that, believe it or not, we all get a payback from our complaints. Up until this point, she was being what I would consider somewhat authoritarian and coldhearted in her approach. But then she sort of softened up and said, "This is a serious exercise. I'm asking you to dig deep. You're going to find some things that show us that...sometimes we're not very good people." It is difficult to describe but, in seeing her face, her body language, her use of the word "we" instead of "you", the fact that she was asking, that she had suddenly dropped the hardline attitude and seemed to be reaching out to us, and that very gentle way of saying "...sometimes we're not very good people," I found myself opening up a bit more and other people did too.
Someone raised her hand and meekly said, "I get to be a victim."
"Yes," the group leader said, still gently, and wrote it on the chalkboard behind her, which paralleled our papers. More paybacks came through: get to look down on others, get to feel superior, get obsess over other people's problems instead of addressing our own, get to feel entitled, get to hold grudges.
"Now let's examine the costs," she said and we did some thinking and wrote stuff down. When time came to share out loud, I raised my hand and said something like "I stay angry." She nodded and wrote it down. Other costs: close people out, dwell on the negative, loss of happiness, feel powerless, "go through the motions" of socializing instead of really being present, and the ultimately, the complaint seemed to give birth to other complaints.
She talked about how so many people live their lives with all of these complaints. They get all of "this", (pointing at the payback column), and sacrifice all of "this" (pointing at the cost column). She explained that this mentality actually molds your entire perception of reality and thus...your life. And she explained that the Landmark Education Forum's design, purpose and goal was to help people break out of this and become empowered, to make their lives really work for them.
The meeting was finished, we were handed little folders with information and a kind of application of sorts and people filed out and reconciled with the people who had invited them in (like the way Roscoe had invited me in). I had a brief conversation with an old lady who was part of the Forum. I was having difficulty with the application because it was asking for a goal...what did I want from the Forum? And I was not sure how to put it into words. The old lady asked me some questions and I told her that I basically felt like my life was really fucked up and that I was a failure and that I felt trapped. I explained a bit about BCTI scam that left me paying on a student loan for a worthless "education" and how I just didn't feel like my life was going the way I wanted it to go, that I was stuck in some sort of socially commanded lifestyle. I wanted to feel like I was an okay individual, and not a total fuck up. "You want to be free," she said and I nodded. She seemed like she understood and, oddly enough, she did not try to push the Forum on me, but just said to think about it carefully, because it was an intense workshop. In retrospect, I think she sold me on it by way of reverse psychology. Had she said, "We can help! We can show you the way!" I would have been skeptical and maybe passed on this.
There was a problem with cost. The workshop cost some $375. I discussed it with Roscoe and he offered to pay the $375 up front, with an agreement that if I did the program and got something out of it, then I would pay him back. If it didn't work for me, I owed him nothing. So I enrolled.
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I attended the three day workshop at the end of April in 2002. First, worth mentioning was that my three card tarot reading for that week was:
Atu VII: The Chariot
Atu XIII: Death
7 of Disks: Failure
I'm pretty sure I was using the Thoth deck at this time.
I had an idea that the Forum would be a course in applied existentialism, and I was correct, for the most part. The Forum presented many conceptual elements of Zen Buddhism, western occultism and existentialism. However, I should add that Scientology also contains variations on these conceptual elements. I have occasionally referred to Scientology as "a cult for people who think they are too smart to get sucked into a cult"...which is to say that because Scientology derives from some of those things I mentioned, it is a very intelligently crafted cult. Your average trailer trash or ghetto resident would not get Scientology...too far over their heads. But its method appeals to the college intellectual. And I mention this because I think that the Landmark Education Forum is somewhat like the Church of Scientology, with a noted exception that, instead of advertising as a religion, it advertises as education. Yes, very clever. Nevertheless, I walked into the Forum with as open a mind as I could.
As I said, the Forum's workshop lasted three days. Each day was a session starting at 9AM and going on until almost midnight, with three half hour breaks and an hour and a half lunch. This is a long time to be all cooped up in a room, sitting on rather uncomfortable chairs amidst a crowd of people you don't know, listening to a speaker.
The Forum Leader looked a lot like my father and that immediately made me uncomfortable. I can see now, in retrospect, the synchronistic confrontation involved there. And I also got an uneasy sense in my gut when, just as the Forum was starting, the Leader spotted a man sitting on a pillow on the floor at one end of the audience. The Forum Leader asked him to sit in a chair. The fellow said something about being Native American and that it was traditional for him to sit on the floor and that he was perfectly comfortable this way. The Forum Leader insisted that he sit in a chair and held up the Forum until the man became embarrassed and found a chair to sit in. I interpreted this as an authoritarian leverage for conformity.
The Forum Leader then started with a question: "Are you coachable?" This to mean, are you willing to lay down what you already think you know, and allow someone else to guide you? It is interesting to me, to note how often the wrong questions are asked and for what purpose. For instance, when interviewing at BCTI, I kept asking the recruiter the wrong questions...questions that usually required a "yes" or "no" answer. I always got a "yes". I should have asked something more like "What things does BCTI teach that would help me start my own business?" Likewise, more responsible questions at the Forum would be "How coachable are you?" or "How willing are you to be guided?". But he simply asked "Are you coachable?" and, knowing now what I didn't know at that outset, he was addressing a great number of people who were unhappy with their lives and really wanted some serious changes for the better, but didn't know how to make that happen. They were there because they WANTED to be coached. So, of course, they all nod their heads. The Forum Leader re-emphasized the question and made suggestions about how intense the situation could get and then continued asking "Are you coachable?"
The idea here was to get people to let their guards down and really open up. Which is good. And not so good.
He started a lecture on what we "know". More specifically, what we know that we know. Then what we know that we DON'T know. A brief word to what we don't know that we know, and finally, the emphasis on what we don't know that we don't know. He drew a circle on the chalkboard and made it into a pie chart showing the rough estimates of what we know that we know, what we know we don't know, and on and on, with "what we don't know that we don't know" encompassing a very large part of the pie. All this to sort of say, "See? You ain't so smart. So get over yourself about how smart you think you are."
He explained what the Forum was all about in an almost riddle-like manner, so that you suddenly realized that the Forum had already started and you were participating, even before you understood it. From there, he introduced many different ideas, which I would call linguistic restructuring. That's my term, not theirs. What is important here is to understand that a word is only a word. It symbolizes a thing. It is not the thing itself. Thus, as Robert Anton Wilson has said in his books, "the map is not the territory." But we don't just use words. We don't just speak them. We think them. We think in the language we speak and we get used to the symbols having a certain meaning and then attribute that meaning on a fairly regular basis. So a big part of the Landmark Education Forum, at least as far as that workshop went, was to cancel out certain words and replace them with others so that you're entire thinking begins to change and you see your reality from a similar, yet somewhat different perspective.
Two great examples: the Forum Leader introduced the words transform and breakthrough. He talked about how everyone was unhappy and wanted to change things in their lives and he discarded that. "You are not going to change anything," he said. Then he introduced the idea that we could transform our reality. He talked at length about transformation. And all this made sense to me, except that I kept thinking...the word "transform" simply means "change". And "breakthrough" also refers to change. Those two words are particularly important because I have two cards in my Osho Zen deck that are called Transformation and Breakthrough...AND, my tarot reading, for that week included the Death card, which usually means "change" or "transformation".
But the word "transformation" has a certain emotional content. It is dramatic and exciting. It stirs up energy in a way that the word "change" does not. So here we have the linguistic restructuring taking effect. Simply by using the word "transform", people already begin to feel more empowered to make certain critical changes in their lives. Again, having read Robert Anton Wilson's Quantum Psychology and Prometheus Rising, I was familiar with these ideas, but I had read those books back in my early twenties, and, despite my suspicions, I was actually enjoying the fact that I was having some of these concepts re-introduced into my mind...sort of dust out the cobwebs and reinvigorate great, powerful ideas. For other people, this sort of applied existentialism was brand new and so they were really having a great experience with the whole thing.
Another good example was the Forum Leader's doing away with the ideas of "good and bad" or "right and wrong" and replacing them with the ideas of "what works and what does not work." This I particularly liked. Focusing on what works or does not work has been a big part of my politics, in addition to my personal thinking. Notice that "works" and "does not work" are actual verbs, whereas "good", "bad", "right" and "wrong" are merely adjectives. This separates abstractions from concrete phenomena, turns an idea in your mind into something that can be realized in action on the material world.
But existentialism has another key element in it, and element that separates it from postmodernism. And that is the insistence that you are responsible for your thoughts and interpretations. And it was here that the Forum became more intense. The Forum Leader started to talk about "what happened" and then "your story". He gave several theoretical examples. "What happened" refers to the actual events in a situation. "Your story" refers to your own opinions, projections, feelings, theories, motives. This was where he invited people to come up to a microphone and talk to him and tell them what was going on in their lives and he would help them sort it out. I heard all kinds of stories about crumbling marriages and falling outs between people and their parents. The Forum Leader would listen to what they said, and then say, "That's your story. Now here's what happened." and he would reduce the entire thing down to actions, with the addition of the person's own motives and feelings. The person would then start in with "But she thinks..." or "But he just doesn't understand..." and the Forum Leader would correct them, pointing out that they don't necessarily know what the other person thinks or understands, except insofar as what was actually said.
Next on the list was the "racket". A racket is a sleazy deal. A con. A swindle. The Forum Leader explained that most people do the things they do to look good. We always want to look good. We don't want to face the fact that sometimes...as that group leader once said, "We're not very good people." What's more, we get so caught up in notions of "good and bad" or "right and wrong" that we forget that we sometimes do shitty things AND good things. We neglect to see the humanity. In fact, we may come to see humanity itself as "inherently good" or "inherently evil". So everyone is running a racket. Everyone is using his story to make himself look good and someone else look like a cad. You're either a victim or a martyr...not a person who neglected to set and enforce boundaries or to stand up for what you believe in and not the person who's being held responsible for saying unkind things to someone. You're a righteous crusader, "telling the truth"...not a gossip or a backstabber. Everything you do is the right thing to do...even if it all blows up in your face. When that happens, it's the other person's fault...or the world's fault. You're now the victim. You're never the villain. You're never the coward. You're never the flake. You're always the hero. You're always the do-gooder. You're always the responsible one. Right? This is the racket that the Forum Leader was talking about. How we use our words to make ourselves look good and how those words mold our thinking so that...we actually are believing our own lies.
Another term: "authentic". He discarded the word "honesty" and replaced it with "authentic". The difference? Ever meet someone who brags about being "brutally honest"? In my experience, such people deliberately make the truth hurt, and then shrug innocently, stating that they just "tell it like it is". But if we're all interpreting things differently, then nobody ever really tells anything "like it is". This "brutal honesty" business is a racket. The proof here is that these kinds of people don't like having someone "tell it like it is" to them. I've experienced this double standard in the vast majority of "tell it like it is" types. They can't take it, but they dish it out in great quantities. What's more, they make a point to be brutally honest in order to keep the other parties on the defense. As long as you're telling him what he's about, chances are, he's now on the defense and has no chance to tell you what you're about. Like the old saying goes, "The best defense is a good offense." So you speak a little louder and a little more abrasively and don't have to worry about someone else challenging you. By being confrontational, you avoid being confronted. And that may be "honest" but not authentic. See how that works? And all this is justified by the insistence on "telling the truth". Notice the use of the word "the". THE truth. Not your truth. Not truth as you see it. But THE truth. Because you have clear vision and you can see THE truth where others can't. Right? That's your racket, your sleazy maneuver to make you look better than other people.
So..."authentic" means you don't just "tell the truth" but that you take responsibility for your choice of words and your intention behind it. "Authentic" means you are honest with yourself. That you present yourself honestly, as a real person, who sometimes doesn't do the right thing, or does the right thing for the wrong reasons. Not the do-gooder, not the victim of everyone else's dishonesty, or everyone else's "inability to deal with your honesty." You are a human being who runs a racket, just like everyone else does.
Of course, I noted a certain irony. Here was the Forum Leader lambasting "honesty" in favor of "authenticity", yet he was accusing people of being sleazy, using the same "brutal honesty" that he condemned. As people continued to walk up and describe certain things in their lives that bothered them, and tried to spin their "innocence" on the matter, the Forum Leader would just outright tell them, "You're lying!" and then explain the story back to them according to facts and explain the racket they ran. It got very intense. Brutal. People protested and he ran them down. He exposed them. And it hurt. It was brutal.
But then again, we all made a choice to enroll in the Landmark Education Forum. We all took that chance. And what he was doing wasn't so terribly crooked. Zen Masters do their own spin to break down the ego. We wanted the transformation. The whole idea here is that if you want a transformation, then you must be ready and willing to be broken down. This is reprogramming, using linguistic restructuring. And when we take this chance, all we have to cling to is trust. Trust that this person is going to build us back up into a better person. Even as I use the term "reprogramming", I can feel the negative connotation it involves. We like ourselves to some degree. We want to hold on to what we like. Even if we want to become another kind of person, possibly a better person...we are wary of trusting another person to make us into that. And the Forum Leader addressed that to some degree. He kept reminding us, "Are you coachable?" Are you willing to be guided? Are you willing to be reprogrammed? If you are unhappy with certain things in your life, only YOU can change them, but you can't if you stay with the same programming. So is reprogramming really all that bad?
For the record, "reprogramming" is a term used in Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising and it was never used in the Landmark Education Forum.
And I can also understand that, in order to really breakthrough, as they put it, to transform yourself, or to "create possibilities" (another term the Forum Leader threw at us), you may have to reverse the polarity in yourself. You stop with the BS about what a great person you are, what a do-gooder, and what a victim, and you throw yourself into the Abyss, you face all your shitty deeds. You take responsibility for your actions, without labeling yourself either good or bad, but simply human, and you forgive yourself, and you start dealing with people on a different level.
Now, I was not just sitting there going "Mm hmm...yes, I'm familiar with this." I was busy examining myself as he told us we needed to. Despite the fact that the Forum Leader looked like my father, that didn't become an issue for me. But what did become an issue was my mother. I felt that she didn't accept me for who I really was, was always trying to mold me into something more suitable to her tastes, and I felt she didn't allow me to be angry. She criticized me for being angry. Now that last statement was an actual event. My mother DID make statements like "You're so angry all the time." with a tone of blame...like I had no reason to be angry, like there was something wrong with me because I was angry. Hearing her chastise me for being angry made me more angry. And as a result, I was growing to hate her and then...I was projecting that hate onto other women. I was turning into a misogynist. It seemed to me, that all women were manipulating bitches. I kept "seeing" all the strange and different ways that women play themselves off as victims in order to leverage control over men. I kept thinking how gloriously lucky I was to be a fag, because I don't have to deal with women so I could fuck them. Being attracted to men, I could write women off in a way that a straight dude could not. But I felt my mother had her talons sunk into me. I felt like "a Momma's boy" or that she wanted to keep me that way. That she kept me weak and sissy-ish. That she made sure I would never be a "real man".
And actually, this fits in with the father issue as well for me because there has been some research done on the business with single mothers...particularly raising boys. Boys raised by single mothers tend to grow up a bit maladjusted. They either overidentify with the female or they go the opposite. Young men who were raised by single mothers are more prone to violent crime. It's a hard call because...what are the single mothers to do? If the father is a deadbeat or an abuser, he has to be removed for the sake of the child. On the other hand, I also know that courts tend to rule in favor of the mother in custody cases, even where the mother is clearly less capable than the father of caring for the children. I've seen a few cases personally in which the father was more stable and could easily care for the child, male or female, than the mother, but the courts gave custody to the mother anyway. And in my case, I may have turned out somewhat maladjusted, but I would have preferred to be put with my mother than my father. After all...HE was the one who thought I was possessed by Satan every time a stove electrocuted me.
So we had to do an exercise. We had to confess a dirty secret to the person next to us. Something that really bothered us. Something that the Forum itself was bringing up to the surface. Well, it just so happened that I was sitting next to an older woman, who was married. So here I had to confess this to her and she had to confess her thing to me. She went first and I don't remember much of her confession. I think it had something to do with her marriage, that she took her husbund for granted and didn't really pay much attention to him anymore and yet, imagined that their marriage had become estranged because of him. I think that was it. Might have been more. I was, quite honestly, not really listening to her confession because I was feeling the anxiety over mine. So then came time for mine. It was VERY uncomfortable to look that woman in the eyes and say, "I hate women. I hate them because I hate my mother and I know I project what I perceive in her onto other women."
And to be honest, when I was done, neither of us really felt that much better. I didn't get a sympathetic look from her. She was not the warm, understanding female who would see beyond this and know the "goodness" in me. She was an ordinary woman with her own problems, most likely not used to dealing with a gay guy who hated women and she offered nothing to me. My confession disturbed her and I could tell from the way she pulled herself in very slightly afterwords, that she did not want to be next to me. And we had to keep sitting next to each other for another hour or so.
The next step was to actually call the person we had a problem with and make our confessions. This was now the end of the second day and it was after midnight. So lots of people were calling their parents or spouses and then standing in corners or in hallways or even outside the building, and sobbing and confessing over their cellphones. Some waited until they went home to call and confess.
I did not call my mother to confess. Why? I told myself that it was because she would not understand what all I was going through, this whole Landmark Education Forum thing. But I think more because I wasn't ready to forgive her for her part in it. Despite what I could see in myself, I still had some realization that she too played a role in the dysfunction. I needed her to be okay with me being angry. I needed her to listen to me, to try and understand my anger and to realize I may have a right to some of it. I didn't feel she was ready for that. I may have been wrong. Or I may have been right. Who know? But I was still angry at her and I could not confess in that state of anger. It felt...humiliating...to even think of it. In recall, I can say that, this was way back in 2002 and since then, my mother and I have worked a lot out together. I have forgiven her and have even come to realize I was wrong in a few assumptions, and she even still feels guilty for things that don't even bother me, things she wished she could have done differently.
And in recall, I am actually glad I didn't call my mother at 1am to confess. Because my mother absolutely HATES to have her sleep interrupted and I really doubt that she would have appreciated what I had to say, in light of me interrupting her sleep.
The Forum Leader had also lectured on the illusory nature of the word "is". How we use that word to establish an innate essence or quality of something, rather than describing its properties. For example, we say "Martin is a thief" instead of "Martin stole a bottle of booze last Friday." See the difference? If Martin only stole that one bottle and never steals anything else again, IS he still a thief? If we say, "Judy IS a liar," because we caught Judy lying about something, could that not imply that Judy lies all the time, even though we may witness her telling the truth about other things? Again, Robert Anton Wilson's Quantum Psychology tackles the problem of the word "is" in much greater detail than I care to do here.
He lectured on the number 2, what it means philosophically. Our logical minds divide things up between this and that. He was outlining the philosophy of dualism, and then followed it up with non-dualism, which could be said to provoke the mind into action better than monism. Crowley talks about this in his chapter on the 0=2 equation in Magick Without Tears.
So again, more concepts I was familiar with, yet being re-introduced to them through a different means and a different language...linguistic restructuring. In case I haven't made it clear thus far, I rather enjoy linguistic restructuring and, in fact, I think it's a necessary tool for keeping us in a state of genuine understanding, rather than the degraded state of "knowing". The former remains vibrant and active in the mind. The latter stagnates and begins to fuse the symbol to the object symbolized until the mind no longer perceives the difference.
...to be continued
Roscoe had done this workshop and invited me into it. So I first attended an introductory lecture. I don't remember much about that lecture in general, other than that there was a lot of vague talk about "becoming more human". What I do remember was that after the initial lecture, we were separated into different groups, with those groups adjourning to separate rooms. Here we got another lecture, albeit a shorter one, about the nature of complaints, what it means to complain and what it accomplishes. The group leader handed out paper and pens and asked everyone to think of a complaint. She encouraged us to find one that really bothered us, something that we think about at least somewhat frequently. Then we were to write down the complaint. I believe my complaint was something along the lines of "I hate that people are so driven by money and materialism and don't seem to want to live for the experience of life." The group leader asked us to share our complaints with the group. Suddenly, I felt vulnerable, but I went ahead and raised my hand and she called on me and I recited my complaint. She made a strange, sarcastic remark: "Of course. All we care about is money and a brand new TV." She said it offhandedly and quickly and then called on someone else, thus not allowing me time to respond. In doing so, I have to admit though that I had a moment of enlightenment because I listened to some other person's complaint and it sounded ridiculous to me. She answered his complaint with a similar sarcastic answer, one I rather agreed with. And it went on like this. I had a glimpse of myself in other people. I saw how I piss and moan about things, just like other people do.
She had us draw a line down the middle of the paper, dividing it into two columns. The first column would then be called "Payback" and the second column would be called "Cost". So she asked us to list some paybacks for the complaint. We were all a bit confused so she explained some more that, believe it or not, we all get a payback from our complaints. Up until this point, she was being what I would consider somewhat authoritarian and coldhearted in her approach. But then she sort of softened up and said, "This is a serious exercise. I'm asking you to dig deep. You're going to find some things that show us that...sometimes we're not very good people." It is difficult to describe but, in seeing her face, her body language, her use of the word "we" instead of "you", the fact that she was asking, that she had suddenly dropped the hardline attitude and seemed to be reaching out to us, and that very gentle way of saying "...sometimes we're not very good people," I found myself opening up a bit more and other people did too.
Someone raised her hand and meekly said, "I get to be a victim."
"Yes," the group leader said, still gently, and wrote it on the chalkboard behind her, which paralleled our papers. More paybacks came through: get to look down on others, get to feel superior, get obsess over other people's problems instead of addressing our own, get to feel entitled, get to hold grudges.
"Now let's examine the costs," she said and we did some thinking and wrote stuff down. When time came to share out loud, I raised my hand and said something like "I stay angry." She nodded and wrote it down. Other costs: close people out, dwell on the negative, loss of happiness, feel powerless, "go through the motions" of socializing instead of really being present, and the ultimately, the complaint seemed to give birth to other complaints.
She talked about how so many people live their lives with all of these complaints. They get all of "this", (pointing at the payback column), and sacrifice all of "this" (pointing at the cost column). She explained that this mentality actually molds your entire perception of reality and thus...your life. And she explained that the Landmark Education Forum's design, purpose and goal was to help people break out of this and become empowered, to make their lives really work for them.
The meeting was finished, we were handed little folders with information and a kind of application of sorts and people filed out and reconciled with the people who had invited them in (like the way Roscoe had invited me in). I had a brief conversation with an old lady who was part of the Forum. I was having difficulty with the application because it was asking for a goal...what did I want from the Forum? And I was not sure how to put it into words. The old lady asked me some questions and I told her that I basically felt like my life was really fucked up and that I was a failure and that I felt trapped. I explained a bit about BCTI scam that left me paying on a student loan for a worthless "education" and how I just didn't feel like my life was going the way I wanted it to go, that I was stuck in some sort of socially commanded lifestyle. I wanted to feel like I was an okay individual, and not a total fuck up. "You want to be free," she said and I nodded. She seemed like she understood and, oddly enough, she did not try to push the Forum on me, but just said to think about it carefully, because it was an intense workshop. In retrospect, I think she sold me on it by way of reverse psychology. Had she said, "We can help! We can show you the way!" I would have been skeptical and maybe passed on this.
There was a problem with cost. The workshop cost some $375. I discussed it with Roscoe and he offered to pay the $375 up front, with an agreement that if I did the program and got something out of it, then I would pay him back. If it didn't work for me, I owed him nothing. So I enrolled.
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I attended the three day workshop at the end of April in 2002. First, worth mentioning was that my three card tarot reading for that week was:
Atu VII: The Chariot
Atu XIII: Death
7 of Disks: Failure
I'm pretty sure I was using the Thoth deck at this time.
I had an idea that the Forum would be a course in applied existentialism, and I was correct, for the most part. The Forum presented many conceptual elements of Zen Buddhism, western occultism and existentialism. However, I should add that Scientology also contains variations on these conceptual elements. I have occasionally referred to Scientology as "a cult for people who think they are too smart to get sucked into a cult"...which is to say that because Scientology derives from some of those things I mentioned, it is a very intelligently crafted cult. Your average trailer trash or ghetto resident would not get Scientology...too far over their heads. But its method appeals to the college intellectual. And I mention this because I think that the Landmark Education Forum is somewhat like the Church of Scientology, with a noted exception that, instead of advertising as a religion, it advertises as education. Yes, very clever. Nevertheless, I walked into the Forum with as open a mind as I could.
As I said, the Forum's workshop lasted three days. Each day was a session starting at 9AM and going on until almost midnight, with three half hour breaks and an hour and a half lunch. This is a long time to be all cooped up in a room, sitting on rather uncomfortable chairs amidst a crowd of people you don't know, listening to a speaker.
The Forum Leader looked a lot like my father and that immediately made me uncomfortable. I can see now, in retrospect, the synchronistic confrontation involved there. And I also got an uneasy sense in my gut when, just as the Forum was starting, the Leader spotted a man sitting on a pillow on the floor at one end of the audience. The Forum Leader asked him to sit in a chair. The fellow said something about being Native American and that it was traditional for him to sit on the floor and that he was perfectly comfortable this way. The Forum Leader insisted that he sit in a chair and held up the Forum until the man became embarrassed and found a chair to sit in. I interpreted this as an authoritarian leverage for conformity.
The Forum Leader then started with a question: "Are you coachable?" This to mean, are you willing to lay down what you already think you know, and allow someone else to guide you? It is interesting to me, to note how often the wrong questions are asked and for what purpose. For instance, when interviewing at BCTI, I kept asking the recruiter the wrong questions...questions that usually required a "yes" or "no" answer. I always got a "yes". I should have asked something more like "What things does BCTI teach that would help me start my own business?" Likewise, more responsible questions at the Forum would be "How coachable are you?" or "How willing are you to be guided?". But he simply asked "Are you coachable?" and, knowing now what I didn't know at that outset, he was addressing a great number of people who were unhappy with their lives and really wanted some serious changes for the better, but didn't know how to make that happen. They were there because they WANTED to be coached. So, of course, they all nod their heads. The Forum Leader re-emphasized the question and made suggestions about how intense the situation could get and then continued asking "Are you coachable?"
The idea here was to get people to let their guards down and really open up. Which is good. And not so good.
He started a lecture on what we "know". More specifically, what we know that we know. Then what we know that we DON'T know. A brief word to what we don't know that we know, and finally, the emphasis on what we don't know that we don't know. He drew a circle on the chalkboard and made it into a pie chart showing the rough estimates of what we know that we know, what we know we don't know, and on and on, with "what we don't know that we don't know" encompassing a very large part of the pie. All this to sort of say, "See? You ain't so smart. So get over yourself about how smart you think you are."
He explained what the Forum was all about in an almost riddle-like manner, so that you suddenly realized that the Forum had already started and you were participating, even before you understood it. From there, he introduced many different ideas, which I would call linguistic restructuring. That's my term, not theirs. What is important here is to understand that a word is only a word. It symbolizes a thing. It is not the thing itself. Thus, as Robert Anton Wilson has said in his books, "the map is not the territory." But we don't just use words. We don't just speak them. We think them. We think in the language we speak and we get used to the symbols having a certain meaning and then attribute that meaning on a fairly regular basis. So a big part of the Landmark Education Forum, at least as far as that workshop went, was to cancel out certain words and replace them with others so that you're entire thinking begins to change and you see your reality from a similar, yet somewhat different perspective.
Two great examples: the Forum Leader introduced the words transform and breakthrough. He talked about how everyone was unhappy and wanted to change things in their lives and he discarded that. "You are not going to change anything," he said. Then he introduced the idea that we could transform our reality. He talked at length about transformation. And all this made sense to me, except that I kept thinking...the word "transform" simply means "change". And "breakthrough" also refers to change. Those two words are particularly important because I have two cards in my Osho Zen deck that are called Transformation and Breakthrough...AND, my tarot reading, for that week included the Death card, which usually means "change" or "transformation".
But the word "transformation" has a certain emotional content. It is dramatic and exciting. It stirs up energy in a way that the word "change" does not. So here we have the linguistic restructuring taking effect. Simply by using the word "transform", people already begin to feel more empowered to make certain critical changes in their lives. Again, having read Robert Anton Wilson's Quantum Psychology and Prometheus Rising, I was familiar with these ideas, but I had read those books back in my early twenties, and, despite my suspicions, I was actually enjoying the fact that I was having some of these concepts re-introduced into my mind...sort of dust out the cobwebs and reinvigorate great, powerful ideas. For other people, this sort of applied existentialism was brand new and so they were really having a great experience with the whole thing.
Another good example was the Forum Leader's doing away with the ideas of "good and bad" or "right and wrong" and replacing them with the ideas of "what works and what does not work." This I particularly liked. Focusing on what works or does not work has been a big part of my politics, in addition to my personal thinking. Notice that "works" and "does not work" are actual verbs, whereas "good", "bad", "right" and "wrong" are merely adjectives. This separates abstractions from concrete phenomena, turns an idea in your mind into something that can be realized in action on the material world.
But existentialism has another key element in it, and element that separates it from postmodernism. And that is the insistence that you are responsible for your thoughts and interpretations. And it was here that the Forum became more intense. The Forum Leader started to talk about "what happened" and then "your story". He gave several theoretical examples. "What happened" refers to the actual events in a situation. "Your story" refers to your own opinions, projections, feelings, theories, motives. This was where he invited people to come up to a microphone and talk to him and tell them what was going on in their lives and he would help them sort it out. I heard all kinds of stories about crumbling marriages and falling outs between people and their parents. The Forum Leader would listen to what they said, and then say, "That's your story. Now here's what happened." and he would reduce the entire thing down to actions, with the addition of the person's own motives and feelings. The person would then start in with "But she thinks..." or "But he just doesn't understand..." and the Forum Leader would correct them, pointing out that they don't necessarily know what the other person thinks or understands, except insofar as what was actually said.
Next on the list was the "racket". A racket is a sleazy deal. A con. A swindle. The Forum Leader explained that most people do the things they do to look good. We always want to look good. We don't want to face the fact that sometimes...as that group leader once said, "We're not very good people." What's more, we get so caught up in notions of "good and bad" or "right and wrong" that we forget that we sometimes do shitty things AND good things. We neglect to see the humanity. In fact, we may come to see humanity itself as "inherently good" or "inherently evil". So everyone is running a racket. Everyone is using his story to make himself look good and someone else look like a cad. You're either a victim or a martyr...not a person who neglected to set and enforce boundaries or to stand up for what you believe in and not the person who's being held responsible for saying unkind things to someone. You're a righteous crusader, "telling the truth"...not a gossip or a backstabber. Everything you do is the right thing to do...even if it all blows up in your face. When that happens, it's the other person's fault...or the world's fault. You're now the victim. You're never the villain. You're never the coward. You're never the flake. You're always the hero. You're always the do-gooder. You're always the responsible one. Right? This is the racket that the Forum Leader was talking about. How we use our words to make ourselves look good and how those words mold our thinking so that...we actually are believing our own lies.
Another term: "authentic". He discarded the word "honesty" and replaced it with "authentic". The difference? Ever meet someone who brags about being "brutally honest"? In my experience, such people deliberately make the truth hurt, and then shrug innocently, stating that they just "tell it like it is". But if we're all interpreting things differently, then nobody ever really tells anything "like it is". This "brutal honesty" business is a racket. The proof here is that these kinds of people don't like having someone "tell it like it is" to them. I've experienced this double standard in the vast majority of "tell it like it is" types. They can't take it, but they dish it out in great quantities. What's more, they make a point to be brutally honest in order to keep the other parties on the defense. As long as you're telling him what he's about, chances are, he's now on the defense and has no chance to tell you what you're about. Like the old saying goes, "The best defense is a good offense." So you speak a little louder and a little more abrasively and don't have to worry about someone else challenging you. By being confrontational, you avoid being confronted. And that may be "honest" but not authentic. See how that works? And all this is justified by the insistence on "telling the truth". Notice the use of the word "the". THE truth. Not your truth. Not truth as you see it. But THE truth. Because you have clear vision and you can see THE truth where others can't. Right? That's your racket, your sleazy maneuver to make you look better than other people.
So..."authentic" means you don't just "tell the truth" but that you take responsibility for your choice of words and your intention behind it. "Authentic" means you are honest with yourself. That you present yourself honestly, as a real person, who sometimes doesn't do the right thing, or does the right thing for the wrong reasons. Not the do-gooder, not the victim of everyone else's dishonesty, or everyone else's "inability to deal with your honesty." You are a human being who runs a racket, just like everyone else does.
Of course, I noted a certain irony. Here was the Forum Leader lambasting "honesty" in favor of "authenticity", yet he was accusing people of being sleazy, using the same "brutal honesty" that he condemned. As people continued to walk up and describe certain things in their lives that bothered them, and tried to spin their "innocence" on the matter, the Forum Leader would just outright tell them, "You're lying!" and then explain the story back to them according to facts and explain the racket they ran. It got very intense. Brutal. People protested and he ran them down. He exposed them. And it hurt. It was brutal.
But then again, we all made a choice to enroll in the Landmark Education Forum. We all took that chance. And what he was doing wasn't so terribly crooked. Zen Masters do their own spin to break down the ego. We wanted the transformation. The whole idea here is that if you want a transformation, then you must be ready and willing to be broken down. This is reprogramming, using linguistic restructuring. And when we take this chance, all we have to cling to is trust. Trust that this person is going to build us back up into a better person. Even as I use the term "reprogramming", I can feel the negative connotation it involves. We like ourselves to some degree. We want to hold on to what we like. Even if we want to become another kind of person, possibly a better person...we are wary of trusting another person to make us into that. And the Forum Leader addressed that to some degree. He kept reminding us, "Are you coachable?" Are you willing to be guided? Are you willing to be reprogrammed? If you are unhappy with certain things in your life, only YOU can change them, but you can't if you stay with the same programming. So is reprogramming really all that bad?
For the record, "reprogramming" is a term used in Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising and it was never used in the Landmark Education Forum.
And I can also understand that, in order to really breakthrough, as they put it, to transform yourself, or to "create possibilities" (another term the Forum Leader threw at us), you may have to reverse the polarity in yourself. You stop with the BS about what a great person you are, what a do-gooder, and what a victim, and you throw yourself into the Abyss, you face all your shitty deeds. You take responsibility for your actions, without labeling yourself either good or bad, but simply human, and you forgive yourself, and you start dealing with people on a different level.
Now, I was not just sitting there going "Mm hmm...yes, I'm familiar with this." I was busy examining myself as he told us we needed to. Despite the fact that the Forum Leader looked like my father, that didn't become an issue for me. But what did become an issue was my mother. I felt that she didn't accept me for who I really was, was always trying to mold me into something more suitable to her tastes, and I felt she didn't allow me to be angry. She criticized me for being angry. Now that last statement was an actual event. My mother DID make statements like "You're so angry all the time." with a tone of blame...like I had no reason to be angry, like there was something wrong with me because I was angry. Hearing her chastise me for being angry made me more angry. And as a result, I was growing to hate her and then...I was projecting that hate onto other women. I was turning into a misogynist. It seemed to me, that all women were manipulating bitches. I kept "seeing" all the strange and different ways that women play themselves off as victims in order to leverage control over men. I kept thinking how gloriously lucky I was to be a fag, because I don't have to deal with women so I could fuck them. Being attracted to men, I could write women off in a way that a straight dude could not. But I felt my mother had her talons sunk into me. I felt like "a Momma's boy" or that she wanted to keep me that way. That she kept me weak and sissy-ish. That she made sure I would never be a "real man".
And actually, this fits in with the father issue as well for me because there has been some research done on the business with single mothers...particularly raising boys. Boys raised by single mothers tend to grow up a bit maladjusted. They either overidentify with the female or they go the opposite. Young men who were raised by single mothers are more prone to violent crime. It's a hard call because...what are the single mothers to do? If the father is a deadbeat or an abuser, he has to be removed for the sake of the child. On the other hand, I also know that courts tend to rule in favor of the mother in custody cases, even where the mother is clearly less capable than the father of caring for the children. I've seen a few cases personally in which the father was more stable and could easily care for the child, male or female, than the mother, but the courts gave custody to the mother anyway. And in my case, I may have turned out somewhat maladjusted, but I would have preferred to be put with my mother than my father. After all...HE was the one who thought I was possessed by Satan every time a stove electrocuted me.
So we had to do an exercise. We had to confess a dirty secret to the person next to us. Something that really bothered us. Something that the Forum itself was bringing up to the surface. Well, it just so happened that I was sitting next to an older woman, who was married. So here I had to confess this to her and she had to confess her thing to me. She went first and I don't remember much of her confession. I think it had something to do with her marriage, that she took her husbund for granted and didn't really pay much attention to him anymore and yet, imagined that their marriage had become estranged because of him. I think that was it. Might have been more. I was, quite honestly, not really listening to her confession because I was feeling the anxiety over mine. So then came time for mine. It was VERY uncomfortable to look that woman in the eyes and say, "I hate women. I hate them because I hate my mother and I know I project what I perceive in her onto other women."
And to be honest, when I was done, neither of us really felt that much better. I didn't get a sympathetic look from her. She was not the warm, understanding female who would see beyond this and know the "goodness" in me. She was an ordinary woman with her own problems, most likely not used to dealing with a gay guy who hated women and she offered nothing to me. My confession disturbed her and I could tell from the way she pulled herself in very slightly afterwords, that she did not want to be next to me. And we had to keep sitting next to each other for another hour or so.
The next step was to actually call the person we had a problem with and make our confessions. This was now the end of the second day and it was after midnight. So lots of people were calling their parents or spouses and then standing in corners or in hallways or even outside the building, and sobbing and confessing over their cellphones. Some waited until they went home to call and confess.
I did not call my mother to confess. Why? I told myself that it was because she would not understand what all I was going through, this whole Landmark Education Forum thing. But I think more because I wasn't ready to forgive her for her part in it. Despite what I could see in myself, I still had some realization that she too played a role in the dysfunction. I needed her to be okay with me being angry. I needed her to listen to me, to try and understand my anger and to realize I may have a right to some of it. I didn't feel she was ready for that. I may have been wrong. Or I may have been right. Who know? But I was still angry at her and I could not confess in that state of anger. It felt...humiliating...to even think of it. In recall, I can say that, this was way back in 2002 and since then, my mother and I have worked a lot out together. I have forgiven her and have even come to realize I was wrong in a few assumptions, and she even still feels guilty for things that don't even bother me, things she wished she could have done differently.
And in recall, I am actually glad I didn't call my mother at 1am to confess. Because my mother absolutely HATES to have her sleep interrupted and I really doubt that she would have appreciated what I had to say, in light of me interrupting her sleep.
The Forum Leader had also lectured on the illusory nature of the word "is". How we use that word to establish an innate essence or quality of something, rather than describing its properties. For example, we say "Martin is a thief" instead of "Martin stole a bottle of booze last Friday." See the difference? If Martin only stole that one bottle and never steals anything else again, IS he still a thief? If we say, "Judy IS a liar," because we caught Judy lying about something, could that not imply that Judy lies all the time, even though we may witness her telling the truth about other things? Again, Robert Anton Wilson's Quantum Psychology tackles the problem of the word "is" in much greater detail than I care to do here.
He lectured on the number 2, what it means philosophically. Our logical minds divide things up between this and that. He was outlining the philosophy of dualism, and then followed it up with non-dualism, which could be said to provoke the mind into action better than monism. Crowley talks about this in his chapter on the 0=2 equation in Magick Without Tears.
So again, more concepts I was familiar with, yet being re-introduced to them through a different means and a different language...linguistic restructuring. In case I haven't made it clear thus far, I rather enjoy linguistic restructuring and, in fact, I think it's a necessary tool for keeping us in a state of genuine understanding, rather than the degraded state of "knowing". The former remains vibrant and active in the mind. The latter stagnates and begins to fuse the symbol to the object symbolized until the mind no longer perceives the difference.
...to be continued