As a baby boomer I remember well the influence of EST and then The Forum on friends who partook. They became obnoxiously pushy, know-it-all, and spoke a new jargon-filled language. A cult of the first order. And Esalen at Big Sur was all the rage. I recall the name Fritz Perls.
Excellent interview! I have some past experience with Gestalt Therapy, in that I used to go to group meetings at this guy’s house. He pulled people in word of mouth, but would also troll Landmark meetings for people wanting to take things up a level. I eventually quit because it got too cultish and manipulative. Also, yeah, people were pushed into reliving traumas and sexual stuff in very intense and confrontational ways. It can result in an immediate cathartic release. But yeah, not sure about long term result or potential for damage. But a person trained in Perls’ and Reich’s methods could become highly adept at gaining human intelligence.
The cabal are masters at creating half-truth cults. Seems they've been at it for thousands of years, creating one cult then another. Half-truths cleverly manipulate. I'd say most of what we understand is "reality" around us has been crafted in this way. Time to pull our energy out of the charades.
As a really old pre baby boomer person, I recall the entire culture getting excited over EST and The Forum as well. I actually attended some of these 'seminars' and was convinced of their evil intentions. The language aspect was very annoying and spooky. So I sent my teenage son and a friend to the EST cult and they came back horrified and inoculated against this crap for life. The son later became a psychologist...
I started out a grunt in a manufacturing plant. Teamsters Union. Worked my way to second shift supervisor, then first shift, then Plant Manager. Voluntarily left to run my own business. After that I worked in cardiothoracic coding compliance and reimbursement at a major hospital. Retired. I’ve supervised as many as 150 people in all manner of settings and ranks. Blue and white collar. And, one thing is for sure, no disrespect to the lady you interviewed but OMG! the overwhelming majority of these managerial seminars, workshops, training classes, tutorials, engagement surveys, et al, are absolute crap. The so-called managers that are so weak and impressionable that they actually absorb this flotsam as gospel and return “changed” are people that had no business being in management in the first place. The larger the company the more these idiots proliferate. I’ve witnessed such terrible management in so many places I marvel that anything gets accomplished in this country at all.
Now do Thomas leonard (who started at EST, if i read correctly) and John maxwell, high profile coaching companies. I think I would lump Joe dispenza in here too.
I listened to a book recently, "tribal leadership" (targeted to upper management).The thing that struck me was that leadership is being "taught" in a cult like fashion. I happened upon the book in some "resources" from BNI (business networking). It occurred to me that if business execs are treating their company as a tribe, then that explains how DEI and other nonsense can spread like wildfire within an org.
This is one hot mess. It is a mixture of legitimate programs, with overtones of abuse. Landmark/est seems very much cult-like in the manipulative ways in which it's training is accomplished. It seems to me that in many cases, all of the exploration can be beneficial at times, but can also be abused. You can't always clearly sort out where ideas are legit, and when the abuse starts. No doubt in my mind that some of the bad press Frits Perls got was deserved, still there was a legitimate psychotherapeutic component, in the form of gestalt therapy. I lived with a woman in the mid seventies who was a clinical psychotherapist and trained under Perls, and to her it was a very positive experience. I have met many people who had positive experiences at Esalen. Not easy. We need to be very nuanced in sorting this out.
Weird story I was told once by a self described "sound guy" who worked on sound equipment for some pretty big concerts in my area. He said several of these empowerment type of events wanted sound but barely audible. Soothing sounds, not music, that would "relax" people. What is the first stage of hypnosis? Relax the subject. He would watch from backstage and said he'd never be in the audience. They were totally under the spell but backstage wasn't.
I don't know if it's true but those are not just feel good sessions. They are mind manipulation events.
I attended the Landmark Forum and Advanced Course in 1997.
That was after having heard about EST over the years as early as the mid-1970s and not enrolling.
With at least one very important exception, I would continue to tell anyone that what's good about Landmark outweighs (or outweighed, if it has changed) what's bad. It has done a lot of good for a lot of people.
I'm still very glad I did it. Helped me get through some of life's challenges.
The exception is, inside all the good stuff, the loud pounding of a drum about what amounts to very strongly promoting relative morality (silencing discussion of universal morals) and the idea that humans are machines. That's a big deal.
But I was old enough and not-suggestible enough and morally-developed enough and comfortable-with-my-opinions-and-life-experience enough that I was able to repel the bad and soak in the good.
I really did get a lot of benefit from Landmark. You set aside some time to consciously reflect on how you're living your life, and how you could be living your life, in the company of other people thinking about the same puzzles under the guidance of a course leader who has been thinking about these things longer than the students have. (Most of them quite good at that job; some not-so.)
I didn't know back then and didn't really care... but now having read more about Jack Rosenberg Werner Erhard... that he was an extremely flawed, almost or maybe even actual criminal, person.
But he had what it took to advance a consciousness-shift whose time had come. The shift being demand for personal improvement courses. The time being prosperous enough that people could pause from endless survivors' overwork and exhaustion, and inquire a bit about spiritual growth and the art of being human. Someone very flawed caused some other people to invent something very good with what he started. CONTINUES. (IN CASE LINK TO "CONTINUE READING" IS GONE.)
The craving wasn't for religion or politics. Everybody'd had enough of the limitations of that. It was craving for help with being better at getting through life. For some, it was getting through it at all. For others, it was looking at, learning about, practicing, and succeeding at being themselves and, with whatever that self is and possibly can be, causing what they want from life. Which included figuring out how to do what needed to be done so "the world works for everyone, with no one left behind." On the seized assumption that this was/is something that can be "taught" and learned.
That zeitgeist started probably in the 1940s. Many of its of leaders found each other in and around San Francisco (and other places). Virginia Sapir (NLP), Gregory Bateson. L Ron Hubbard ("scientology"). Paramahansa Yogananda (Self-Realization Fellowship). George Leonard. Lots of others. Jack Rosenberg Werner Erhard's EST was one of the inventions that emerged to fill the demand that grew a lot in the 1960s and '70s.
What I find in almost all cases is that people who disapprove of Landmark the most have never taken a course. They're put off by the enthusiasm and other annoying stuff. But it's like thinking you dislike a movie you've never seen or book you've never read or place you've never visited. With a background in discourse/communication/argumentation/rhetoric, I figured I was strong enough to remain objective and be immune to any possible harmful psy-opping. And I was. So I got the good without being harmed by any bad.
Since 2020, I've given some thought to seeds that have been planted in Landmark "graduates'" lives and communities, wondering how much, or if, it has helped the good forces in the battle against the evil forces. I think what was/is taught at Landmark could be used for good or bad. I'm unspeakably disappointed that the personal-growth movement didn't stop the evil hell that was planned and built and is now here.
But few disciplines demand disciples strive to rise to highest standards of integrity. Landmark does that. Few inspire as much passion for the value of the human spirit and reveal how much good is possible as Landmark does. That might sound naive. But it does achieve that. Those are two of the main reasons people come out of there raving about it and pleading with people to check it out. The influence of Landmark on many communities is one thing I'm consciously grateful for post 2020. One of the greatest leaders of the great awakening we're now in is David Martin, who seems to me and probably others who've taken classes at Landmark or EST to be one of its grads.
Here's my brief assessment and subjective opinion of a few of these inventions:
Neuro-Linguistic Programming - very good! Its inventors didn't know how misleading that label would one day be when they named the set of ideas and techniques they developed "neuro-linguistic programming." Sounds like Co-Intel Pro and Tavistock, right? But what NLP is about (among other things) is ways YOU can adjust/change/cultivate/choose YOUR OWN thoughts (neuro) and conversations (linguistic). For just three examples: heal a traumatic memory, recognize a certain thought is chosen but not necessarily useful, explore and create and have fun with your freedom to consciously "program" a lot of who and what you are and what your own life is and can be and what you believe it is and can be.
Self-Realization Fellowship - pretty good, not bad, OK -- if you like or don't mind a cleric in a robe speaking to a congregation of listeners. Just my humble and limited impression.
Scientology - way too much bad for the amount of good.
LifeSpring/WorldWorks - pretty much all bad.
Landmark - in spite of its origins with JR-WE as EST can be and has been and usually is extremely good for most of the people who enroll, even those not grounded in dialog/argumentation/philosophy about universal values -- because they kind of gloss over the counter-argument anyway, and nobody really thinks about the practical implications of the counter-argument let alone lives by it, and the rest of what goes on (could be 95 percent of it) brings out way more good in people than probably would have ever happened if they hadn't taken the class/es. (After-thought: I don't think an online Landmark Forum or Advanced Course could get the results that they get from in-person courses. Maybe the seminars for people who've taken the Forum and Advanced Courses in person could work online. But I hope the Forum and Advanced Course will always be available in person! Don't bother if not!)
Byron Katie and The Work is also extremely good stuff.
Oh, in case anybody ever reads this, and in case I haven't already rankled you enough: the craft of Freemasonry is good too. That's why people keep it going over the centuries. Like the other inquiry-inventions discussed here, it probably has been used by bad people in bad ways. But the instrument is good. An orchestra can produce beauty from a musical score -- but it can also produce cacophony from that same score.
Mathew, you're sounding like Alex Jones. I suspect you don't think much of him, but pretty much has the same "grand conspiracy" that globalists are using various mechanisms such as this, to erode US culture so a new system can be brought in.
Have you ever seen his interview with Aaron Russo? Aaron said was told things along these lines, by Nicholas Rockefeller: for example, the idea that women's lib was funded and pushed by the Rockefellers, in order to get women out of the home, and for kids to see the state more as the parent.
It's the idea that a long game is being played, to create a population more willing to accept totalitarian control.
As a baby boomer I remember well the influence of EST and then The Forum on friends who partook. They became obnoxiously pushy, know-it-all, and spoke a new jargon-filled language. A cult of the first order. And Esalen at Big Sur was all the rage. I recall the name Fritz Perls.
Excellent interview! I have some past experience with Gestalt Therapy, in that I used to go to group meetings at this guy’s house. He pulled people in word of mouth, but would also troll Landmark meetings for people wanting to take things up a level. I eventually quit because it got too cultish and manipulative. Also, yeah, people were pushed into reliving traumas and sexual stuff in very intense and confrontational ways. It can result in an immediate cathartic release. But yeah, not sure about long term result or potential for damage. But a person trained in Perls’ and Reich’s methods could become highly adept at gaining human intelligence.
The balloon sez Alsous Huxley.
I like your model of the situation. It has many compelling elements and connexions.
The cabal are masters at creating half-truth cults. Seems they've been at it for thousands of years, creating one cult then another. Half-truths cleverly manipulate. I'd say most of what we understand is "reality" around us has been crafted in this way. Time to pull our energy out of the charades.
As a really old pre baby boomer person, I recall the entire culture getting excited over EST and The Forum as well. I actually attended some of these 'seminars' and was convinced of their evil intentions. The language aspect was very annoying and spooky. So I sent my teenage son and a friend to the EST cult and they came back horrified and inoculated against this crap for life. The son later became a psychologist...
put bakagirl on again. she has lots pf good insights and info
Dang. You really nailed the target with this one Mathew. Thanks!
I started out a grunt in a manufacturing plant. Teamsters Union. Worked my way to second shift supervisor, then first shift, then Plant Manager. Voluntarily left to run my own business. After that I worked in cardiothoracic coding compliance and reimbursement at a major hospital. Retired. I’ve supervised as many as 150 people in all manner of settings and ranks. Blue and white collar. And, one thing is for sure, no disrespect to the lady you interviewed but OMG! the overwhelming majority of these managerial seminars, workshops, training classes, tutorials, engagement surveys, et al, are absolute crap. The so-called managers that are so weak and impressionable that they actually absorb this flotsam as gospel and return “changed” are people that had no business being in management in the first place. The larger the company the more these idiots proliferate. I’ve witnessed such terrible management in so many places I marvel that anything gets accomplished in this country at all.
Now do Thomas leonard (who started at EST, if i read correctly) and John maxwell, high profile coaching companies. I think I would lump Joe dispenza in here too.
I listened to a book recently, "tribal leadership" (targeted to upper management).The thing that struck me was that leadership is being "taught" in a cult like fashion. I happened upon the book in some "resources" from BNI (business networking). It occurred to me that if business execs are treating their company as a tribe, then that explains how DEI and other nonsense can spread like wildfire within an org.
This is one hot mess. It is a mixture of legitimate programs, with overtones of abuse. Landmark/est seems very much cult-like in the manipulative ways in which it's training is accomplished. It seems to me that in many cases, all of the exploration can be beneficial at times, but can also be abused. You can't always clearly sort out where ideas are legit, and when the abuse starts. No doubt in my mind that some of the bad press Frits Perls got was deserved, still there was a legitimate psychotherapeutic component, in the form of gestalt therapy. I lived with a woman in the mid seventies who was a clinical psychotherapist and trained under Perls, and to her it was a very positive experience. I have met many people who had positive experiences at Esalen. Not easy. We need to be very nuanced in sorting this out.
Weird story I was told once by a self described "sound guy" who worked on sound equipment for some pretty big concerts in my area. He said several of these empowerment type of events wanted sound but barely audible. Soothing sounds, not music, that would "relax" people. What is the first stage of hypnosis? Relax the subject. He would watch from backstage and said he'd never be in the audience. They were totally under the spell but backstage wasn't.
I don't know if it's true but those are not just feel good sessions. They are mind manipulation events.
I attended the Landmark Forum and Advanced Course in 1997.
That was after having heard about EST over the years as early as the mid-1970s and not enrolling.
With at least one very important exception, I would continue to tell anyone that what's good about Landmark outweighs (or outweighed, if it has changed) what's bad. It has done a lot of good for a lot of people.
I'm still very glad I did it. Helped me get through some of life's challenges.
The exception is, inside all the good stuff, the loud pounding of a drum about what amounts to very strongly promoting relative morality (silencing discussion of universal morals) and the idea that humans are machines. That's a big deal.
But I was old enough and not-suggestible enough and morally-developed enough and comfortable-with-my-opinions-and-life-experience enough that I was able to repel the bad and soak in the good.
I really did get a lot of benefit from Landmark. You set aside some time to consciously reflect on how you're living your life, and how you could be living your life, in the company of other people thinking about the same puzzles under the guidance of a course leader who has been thinking about these things longer than the students have. (Most of them quite good at that job; some not-so.)
I didn't know back then and didn't really care... but now having read more about Jack Rosenberg Werner Erhard... that he was an extremely flawed, almost or maybe even actual criminal, person.
But he had what it took to advance a consciousness-shift whose time had come. The shift being demand for personal improvement courses. The time being prosperous enough that people could pause from endless survivors' overwork and exhaustion, and inquire a bit about spiritual growth and the art of being human. Someone very flawed caused some other people to invent something very good with what he started. CONTINUES. (IN CASE LINK TO "CONTINUE READING" IS GONE.)
The craving wasn't for religion or politics. Everybody'd had enough of the limitations of that. It was craving for help with being better at getting through life. For some, it was getting through it at all. For others, it was looking at, learning about, practicing, and succeeding at being themselves and, with whatever that self is and possibly can be, causing what they want from life. Which included figuring out how to do what needed to be done so "the world works for everyone, with no one left behind." On the seized assumption that this was/is something that can be "taught" and learned.
That zeitgeist started probably in the 1940s. Many of its of leaders found each other in and around San Francisco (and other places). Virginia Sapir (NLP), Gregory Bateson. L Ron Hubbard ("scientology"). Paramahansa Yogananda (Self-Realization Fellowship). George Leonard. Lots of others. Jack Rosenberg Werner Erhard's EST was one of the inventions that emerged to fill the demand that grew a lot in the 1960s and '70s.
What I find in almost all cases is that people who disapprove of Landmark the most have never taken a course. They're put off by the enthusiasm and other annoying stuff. But it's like thinking you dislike a movie you've never seen or book you've never read or place you've never visited. With a background in discourse/communication/argumentation/rhetoric, I figured I was strong enough to remain objective and be immune to any possible harmful psy-opping. And I was. So I got the good without being harmed by any bad.
Since 2020, I've given some thought to seeds that have been planted in Landmark "graduates'" lives and communities, wondering how much, or if, it has helped the good forces in the battle against the evil forces. I think what was/is taught at Landmark could be used for good or bad. I'm unspeakably disappointed that the personal-growth movement didn't stop the evil hell that was planned and built and is now here.
But few disciplines demand disciples strive to rise to highest standards of integrity. Landmark does that. Few inspire as much passion for the value of the human spirit and reveal how much good is possible as Landmark does. That might sound naive. But it does achieve that. Those are two of the main reasons people come out of there raving about it and pleading with people to check it out. The influence of Landmark on many communities is one thing I'm consciously grateful for post 2020. One of the greatest leaders of the great awakening we're now in is David Martin, who seems to me and probably others who've taken classes at Landmark or EST to be one of its grads.
Here's my brief assessment and subjective opinion of a few of these inventions:
Neuro-Linguistic Programming - very good! Its inventors didn't know how misleading that label would one day be when they named the set of ideas and techniques they developed "neuro-linguistic programming." Sounds like Co-Intel Pro and Tavistock, right? But what NLP is about (among other things) is ways YOU can adjust/change/cultivate/choose YOUR OWN thoughts (neuro) and conversations (linguistic). For just three examples: heal a traumatic memory, recognize a certain thought is chosen but not necessarily useful, explore and create and have fun with your freedom to consciously "program" a lot of who and what you are and what your own life is and can be and what you believe it is and can be.
Self-Realization Fellowship - pretty good, not bad, OK -- if you like or don't mind a cleric in a robe speaking to a congregation of listeners. Just my humble and limited impression.
Scientology - way too much bad for the amount of good.
LifeSpring/WorldWorks - pretty much all bad.
Landmark - in spite of its origins with JR-WE as EST can be and has been and usually is extremely good for most of the people who enroll, even those not grounded in dialog/argumentation/philosophy about universal values -- because they kind of gloss over the counter-argument anyway, and nobody really thinks about the practical implications of the counter-argument let alone lives by it, and the rest of what goes on (could be 95 percent of it) brings out way more good in people than probably would have ever happened if they hadn't taken the class/es. (After-thought: I don't think an online Landmark Forum or Advanced Course could get the results that they get from in-person courses. Maybe the seminars for people who've taken the Forum and Advanced Courses in person could work online. But I hope the Forum and Advanced Course will always be available in person! Don't bother if not!)
Byron Katie and The Work is also extremely good stuff.
Oh, in case anybody ever reads this, and in case I haven't already rankled you enough: the craft of Freemasonry is good too. That's why people keep it going over the centuries. Like the other inquiry-inventions discussed here, it probably has been used by bad people in bad ways. But the instrument is good. An orchestra can produce beauty from a musical score -- but it can also produce cacophony from that same score.
I’m convinced MK-ULTRA has been used for many of not all of these mass shootings; note almost all shooters were known to the FBI in advance.
My whole family, save me, got mixed up in this mess for YEARS. I never understood why. they spent fortunes on Landmark meetings.
Mathew, you're sounding like Alex Jones. I suspect you don't think much of him, but pretty much has the same "grand conspiracy" that globalists are using various mechanisms such as this, to erode US culture so a new system can be brought in.
Have you ever seen his interview with Aaron Russo? Aaron said was told things along these lines, by Nicholas Rockefeller: for example, the idea that women's lib was funded and pushed by the Rockefellers, in order to get women out of the home, and for kids to see the state more as the parent.
It's the idea that a long game is being played, to create a population more willing to accept totalitarian control.
Is DEI training intentionally put in place like this Eslan stuff was?