Addendum to the Landmark Education memoir
I was very tired last night when I wrote that second half and wanted to get the memoir completed, and in my haste, I think I left out some important details. So here, I want to go through those:
First, one of the things the Forum Leader talked about was problems. People have problems. We all have problems. But he made a very interesting point: most of us view problems as a problem and we want to live lives WITHOUT problems and so we are constantly trying to REDUCE our problems. But a look at history shows that some of the truly great people in this world, the people who made significant changes, the people we sometimes quote...those people took on GREATER problems.
This was a significant factor in my own breakthrough because, if we remember, I walked into the Forum feeling like this fucked up faggot...no future, body full of disease, constantly living under the great hard rock of depression, and trying to escape through drugs. And there was that wonderful world of well-adjusted, happy and successful people, the married bourgeoisie, the people I silently sneered at as "the middle class mediocrities" as my own way of evading my thought that they had accomplished what I never thought I could and therefore lived "that good life".
In the Forum, I saw one ordinary, bourgeois married person after another go up to the Forum Leader and talk about how their marriage had fallen apart. They had cheated. Or wanted to cheat. Or even if cheating wasn't there, they weren't getting any more sex. Or...at bottom line, they just felt like they were living with and sharing a bed with...a stranger. They no longer knew their spouses. And they were lonely. They didn't even KNOW they were lonely because their minds were conditioned to believe that only single people get lonely. Married or partnered people don't. This was the institution that they'd always been taught was the "norm", was what you were supposed to do, was what gave you happiness. And it wasn't working for them. And so they had just shut down.
Moreover, many of them were also crushed in spirit by financial worries. Living in perpetual debt. Paying and paying and paying. Get up, get dressed, drag your ass to work, do you ritual toil so you can earn that money to PAY, and then go home and dump yourself on the couch and watch TV until it's time to go to bed. Any energy you have left gets spent yelling at the kids or arguing with the husband or wife. In many cases, no energy is left for that.
These people were miserable, living in quiet desperation and just "going through the motions" instead of really LIVING a true, vibrant life!! And there are STILL thousands more people in this sophisticated, post-industrial world living JUST LIKE THAT!! Perhaps...millions?
Seeing all these people in this state really shook me out of my own world of problems. And so...it was this view into other people's...um...pardon me for saying so judgmentally but...their sorry, pathetic, little lives...that made me realize I wasn't doing that bad after all.
I also forgot to mention that I was not the only person there who was sitting through the whole thing with a feeling of suspicion slowly growing. I mentioned that I had to do the exercise of sharing a secret of shame or guilt with another, and I did with that woman and she didn't take it well. We also had to do another exercise where we shared our Forum goal with someone else. At that point, I had been sitting in another seat, next to this older, married man. I shared my Forum goal (to feel like my life wasn't so bad after all, to be free and to feel good about life again). When it was time for him to share, he said, "Oh I didn't do that. No, I'm just here out of curiosity." I asked what he thought about the Forum and he said, "It's an interesting mix of various psychologies and philosophies. I'm familiar with most of it. But they're presenting these ideas as if they thought it all up themselves and that's dishonest. And I think this program is way too expensive." I got the feeling he was holding back in his opinion. The way he said it...it was as though he, himself didn't mind paying $375 for this, but he noted that the Forum seemed to be targeting the middle class and soaking it.
This man was the quiet observer, perhaps in the same way that some Shakespeare plays have a character who acts as an observer. He points out the critical problems or crises going on. He is right there in it, yet remains unaffected by it.
So...it wasn't just that a little scarab appeared coincidentally after I walked out that I feel I had a genuine transformation. It was the whole process of watching how the Forum unfolded for everyone else, the metaphorical value of the Forum Leader at the podium, resembling my father, the hollering preacher, the fact that I followed enough of what he was saying to see the sinister business side of it, and, as I stated in a comment already, how all of this fit together with the 7 of Disks card in my weekly reading. That card meaning "Failure". I didn't technically finish the Forum. One could say I failed. And yet, it was my only rational choice. There was no way for me to return to a rational state otherwise. I spent over an hour, more like two hours, seething with rage. People need to get that anger out, one way or another. You cannot expect someone to settle down in an situation like that. Anger is pressure. When pressure builds up, some sort of valve needs to open to let it out, or the container will explode. In the past, I have endured extremely angering situations because I felt I "should". I did not respect my own psyche and self worth enough to realize that I needed to set a boundary and act accordingly. But in the Forum...I did. How else can I explain the gushing wave of serenity that flooded my soul once I got out of that building? Should I not have felt guilty or ashamed that I couldn't "handle it"? No, I felt nothing of the sort. I felt good. Right. I did what needed to be done. And that was my breakthrough. The scarab was just my Guiding Spirit's little gift in the material world to make that clear to me.
First, one of the things the Forum Leader talked about was problems. People have problems. We all have problems. But he made a very interesting point: most of us view problems as a problem and we want to live lives WITHOUT problems and so we are constantly trying to REDUCE our problems. But a look at history shows that some of the truly great people in this world, the people who made significant changes, the people we sometimes quote...those people took on GREATER problems.
This was a significant factor in my own breakthrough because, if we remember, I walked into the Forum feeling like this fucked up faggot...no future, body full of disease, constantly living under the great hard rock of depression, and trying to escape through drugs. And there was that wonderful world of well-adjusted, happy and successful people, the married bourgeoisie, the people I silently sneered at as "the middle class mediocrities" as my own way of evading my thought that they had accomplished what I never thought I could and therefore lived "that good life".
In the Forum, I saw one ordinary, bourgeois married person after another go up to the Forum Leader and talk about how their marriage had fallen apart. They had cheated. Or wanted to cheat. Or even if cheating wasn't there, they weren't getting any more sex. Or...at bottom line, they just felt like they were living with and sharing a bed with...a stranger. They no longer knew their spouses. And they were lonely. They didn't even KNOW they were lonely because their minds were conditioned to believe that only single people get lonely. Married or partnered people don't. This was the institution that they'd always been taught was the "norm", was what you were supposed to do, was what gave you happiness. And it wasn't working for them. And so they had just shut down.
Moreover, many of them were also crushed in spirit by financial worries. Living in perpetual debt. Paying and paying and paying. Get up, get dressed, drag your ass to work, do you ritual toil so you can earn that money to PAY, and then go home and dump yourself on the couch and watch TV until it's time to go to bed. Any energy you have left gets spent yelling at the kids or arguing with the husband or wife. In many cases, no energy is left for that.
These people were miserable, living in quiet desperation and just "going through the motions" instead of really LIVING a true, vibrant life!! And there are STILL thousands more people in this sophisticated, post-industrial world living JUST LIKE THAT!! Perhaps...millions?
Seeing all these people in this state really shook me out of my own world of problems. And so...it was this view into other people's...um...pardon me for saying so judgmentally but...their sorry, pathetic, little lives...that made me realize I wasn't doing that bad after all.
I also forgot to mention that I was not the only person there who was sitting through the whole thing with a feeling of suspicion slowly growing. I mentioned that I had to do the exercise of sharing a secret of shame or guilt with another, and I did with that woman and she didn't take it well. We also had to do another exercise where we shared our Forum goal with someone else. At that point, I had been sitting in another seat, next to this older, married man. I shared my Forum goal (to feel like my life wasn't so bad after all, to be free and to feel good about life again). When it was time for him to share, he said, "Oh I didn't do that. No, I'm just here out of curiosity." I asked what he thought about the Forum and he said, "It's an interesting mix of various psychologies and philosophies. I'm familiar with most of it. But they're presenting these ideas as if they thought it all up themselves and that's dishonest. And I think this program is way too expensive." I got the feeling he was holding back in his opinion. The way he said it...it was as though he, himself didn't mind paying $375 for this, but he noted that the Forum seemed to be targeting the middle class and soaking it.
This man was the quiet observer, perhaps in the same way that some Shakespeare plays have a character who acts as an observer. He points out the critical problems or crises going on. He is right there in it, yet remains unaffected by it.
So...it wasn't just that a little scarab appeared coincidentally after I walked out that I feel I had a genuine transformation. It was the whole process of watching how the Forum unfolded for everyone else, the metaphorical value of the Forum Leader at the podium, resembling my father, the hollering preacher, the fact that I followed enough of what he was saying to see the sinister business side of it, and, as I stated in a comment already, how all of this fit together with the 7 of Disks card in my weekly reading. That card meaning "Failure". I didn't technically finish the Forum. One could say I failed. And yet, it was my only rational choice. There was no way for me to return to a rational state otherwise. I spent over an hour, more like two hours, seething with rage. People need to get that anger out, one way or another. You cannot expect someone to settle down in an situation like that. Anger is pressure. When pressure builds up, some sort of valve needs to open to let it out, or the container will explode. In the past, I have endured extremely angering situations because I felt I "should". I did not respect my own psyche and self worth enough to realize that I needed to set a boundary and act accordingly. But in the Forum...I did. How else can I explain the gushing wave of serenity that flooded my soul once I got out of that building? Should I not have felt guilty or ashamed that I couldn't "handle it"? No, I felt nothing of the sort. I felt good. Right. I did what needed to be done. And that was my breakthrough. The scarab was just my Guiding Spirit's little gift in the material world to make that clear to me.