This is from a 3-part mini-memoir about the Landmark Forum from my old blog in March 2009. It received tens of thousands of views, and I still hear from people about it. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here…
It’s “Day 3”, or, life after the Landmark Forum. Here I will give my final thoughts and opinions on the Forum and how it operates. I think I’ve recalled this subject in an informative manner, and I hope it’s helpful for anyone researching it.
What the Forum is/is not:
After a few years to reflect on my experience with the Landmark Forum, from this distance I can tell people what the Forum truly is, and what it is not. The Forum definitely is NOT a theology or religion. The Forum is also NOT a psychiatric program;however, it does use the power of a group to offer and drive home specific concepts that can relate to mental health. This can be equated to therapy, as people are wont to do with most LGAT programs; however, I don’t believe traditional group therapy lasts just 3 days and smacks your ego around!
As for what the Landmark Forum really is: it is an ongoing 3-day intense conversation. It is a structured deep discussion with exercises designed to help a group of people get certain insights. It’s claimed you will make distinctions that will help empower you to “live in the present”, a concept taught by countless authors, philosophers, and belief systems for centuries. Yet, the Forum’s version of this is fairly strong and more hard-hitting: if you abandon self-defeating complaints, stop needing to be right or for others to be wrong, and be straight in your communication, you become open to new ways of thinking and you can experience life in a different way.
The aim seems like a relatively general one. Who wouldn’t want to live in the now, avoid your past experiences affecting your present thoughts and decisions, and stop struggling with others about who is right or wrong. The aims of most Human Potential movements deal with these issues, and addressing them successfully is the lofty goal of all of them. I know people living in the past, ruining their future, with one self-dwelling pain after another. I also know people who try to dominate, or avoid domination (the Forum says humans usually do one of the two), by trying to “make other people wrong”. Human beings naturally get a bit turned-around during the course of a life, so I think it’s a valiant aim to help people find better ways of being; however, many self-help groups miss their target. I believe no LGAT or seminar is a natural or perfect way to learn these things, including the Landmark Forum. But, ultimately, neither is religion or a host of other philosophies concerning “being”, and our experience of it.
The “Cult” of the Forum?
Obviously the Landmark Forum is frequently branded a self-help machine, harsher critics label the Forum a cult. My take? It’s light on the cult, but heavy on the pushy sell. Sure, they didn’t ask me to leave my family and friends or sell all of my possessions. And, true, they (no longer) can be said to have a single charismatic leader. They never asked me to make a pilgrimage to a foreign countries or mix kool-aid in large bins. Seriously, though, is the Forum actually a cult? No. Are they cult-like? In one singular key way, yes: the Tuesday night session. Those enthusiastic graduates proselytizing the Forum at the Tuesday night “introductory session” just creeps people out. It smacks of zealotry from recent grads, backed by Landmark Education volunteers, and so this hard-sell of the Forum pretty much earns it the cult moniker. But, ultimately, those Tuesday sessions are really more like Amway than they are a cult.
If you look at the Forum’s “7 commandments for being an extraordinary person” you see a lot of common-sense and powerful insights; however, there’s just one that bothers most people (in bold):
Be Racket-Free — give up being right, even if you know you were.
Be Powerful — be straight in your communication and take what you get.
Be Courageous — acknowledge your fear (not necessarily get rid of it) and then act.
Be Peaceful — give up the interpretation that there’s something wrong.
Be Charismatic — give up trying to get somewhere. Be entirely fulfilled in the present moment.
Be Enrolling — share your new possibilities in such a way that others are touched, moved and inspired.
Be Unreasonable — in expectations of yourself and others beyond what you would think they are capable of.
If you look at the “Be Enrolling” commandment, I think this is where it all unravels for me and other graduates of the Forum. “Be Enrolling” has an official meaning of “sharing with others your breakthroughs or new possibilities”; however there’s an implicit definition that “Enrolling” is a recruitment tenet. I saw this at the end of the Forum’s weekend sessions, when our assignment as an exercise in integrity was to bring someone to that weekday Tuesday night session. Those guests received the same heavy-sell on the Forum I got before signing up, and the cycle starts again. Graduates themselves get pressured anew to sign up for the “Advanced” Landmark Forum courses as well.
I cannot speak for other Forum graduates, but I rejected this and I intensely dislike this Multi-Level Marketing aspect of Landmark. People are naturally skeptical of enthusiastic wide-eyed people who experienced a life-changing breakthrough. So it was no surprise to see some visitors walking out of that Tuesday night session. Those who stayed heard testimonies from Forum grads, got acknowledgment (applause etc) with each person’s story, and a genuine palpable excitement in the air amid a kind of evangelism. Cult experts call this “love-bombing”. I’m not so sure it applies here because “acknowledging” people (clapping) was done to positive effect during the actual seminar, and you see this in MLM style companies as well. But this all was just a complete turn-off for me, seeing how people acted in the Tuesday night recruitment effort. The natural push-back, that occurs with their registration recruitment, is likely why Landmark graduates do not number 50 or even 100 million people.
So the Tuesday night “Enrolling” session is a big part of what makes the Forum seem like a cult. But, excluding the Tuesday night session, I must acknowledge that I did get a new perspective and I created several new opportunities for myself with those perspectives — but the recruitment angle just ruins it, and I think they should have re-engineered this part of it long ago. Some Forum grads might say my observation about Landmark Education’s recruitment practices is my “Racket”, or that I don’t “get it”. I’ll not belabor that argument, except to say my complaint is shared by many outsiders and Forum grads alike, and the “Cult” meme is earned by the Landmark Education’s refusal to revisit and change this practice.
Yet, even after consideration of the ugly business of Tuesday night “Enrolling…”, I believe the Forum has two distinctive facts that help it dodge cult status:
As I mentioned earlier, the Forum doesn’t separate people from family or ask graduates to part with personal assets (other than money for the seminars, of course). In fact, the Forum’s 3rd day focuses on improving relationships with family, strengthening familial ties wherever it’s beneficial, and to take responsibility for your relationships. This is something most traditional cults do not want you to do, since no cult is made any stronger when you remain in the orbit of your family and relationships outside of the cult.
The Landmark Forum states forcefully that its own language, insights, and lessons are NOT the truth. On Day One, our Forum Leader said they aren’t out to give some deep, penetrating ultimate “truth”. They make it clear Landmark is not, at all, about “Enlightenment”. Instead, Landmark/est claims to have only created a POSSIBLE way of being, and communicating, which can produce practical results. They are a commercial entity, pay taxes, and they absolutely refuse to venerate Werner Erhard or their CEO (his brother) or company leadership. Forum grads never even hear the names of people who run Landmark, because “it’s meaningless” in the face of what they are offering. Scientology, the Forum’s biggest comparison, is a full-blown religion concerned with whole truths centered around an entire belief system. Scientology is concerned with certain meanings in life (and an alien overlord, but I digress.). If anything, the Forum seems to get its juice from seeing life as “meaningless” and looking at any “truth” skeptically.
Those distinctions, to me, relieve the Forum actually being any kind of cult. Still, Landmark Education does not market the Forum much beyond the word of mouth of “Enrolling”. You can have all the powerful ideas in the world, but the tragedy of Human Potential movements and LGATs is simple: outsiders and insiders often make them more than they are. No powerful ideas are perfect, and imperfect humans blow them out of proportion, and perspective gets skewed. Thus cult or snake-oil claims will happen, real or perceived.
Final thoughts
Would I ever recommend the Landmark Forum? I have never gone out of my way to recommend it in the 15+ years since I attended. If their Tuesday night recruitment sessions go away? Yes, then I could recommend the Forum to some. I must honestly admit the insights and distinctions from my own experience helped me be more confident in my work. The concepts I gained helped me be better at communicating and taking personal responsibility for my relationships, as well. Good or bad. Did it make me a better person? Nah. I do that myself, day by day, learning from my experiences and with help from family and friends. I just have some nice tools to use, to help me continue in my journey and growth.
So I’ll say this: if someone were searching for something that can empower them without becoming their whole life, and they skip the Tuesday night business, the Forum can be a great option. As I repeated a few times, people are imperfect…therefore any organized teaching is always imperfect. I have no doubt a lot of people have benefited from Est and the Forum in spite of the shortcomings I discussed. People should research and make their own determinations, and your mileage may vary. Here is a brief guideline for people considering the Forum:
-If you hold rigid beliefs which help you function in life, the Forum could be more harmful than helpful.
-The more fragile the state of a person’s ego, the more harsh the Forum sessions will feel. Conversely the more ego-centric you are, the more harsh the Forum sessions will be.
-The Forum is definitely NOT for anyone who has ever participated in long-term psychiatric therapy, or is currently undergoing counseling. At all.
-If you are someone who has a strong developed individuality and curiosity, can acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of groups…AND can separate the wheat from the chaff to get practical use from something new…the Landmark Forum can be something worth doing. You have to be a healthy individual who enjoys risk and can appreciate having your worldview challenged and turned on its ear.
It takes guts to plunge into something and allow your everyday notions to be checked, tested, and to try on new ideas. As imperfect as the messengers Werner Erhard and the Forum are, I believe there is value in it for people of certain personality types. I never found the information the Forum imparts to be “the answer”, because nothing is “the answer” (see what I did there?). The Forum simply shares a practical set of tools to use in everyday life.
Since my experience in 1994 I have had my own personal successes, failings, and life-events in between. In finding my own personal peace in the messy and imperfect journey of life, I’ve always been inquisitive and trying new ways of thinking. Did things that I learned in the Landmark Forum help in that journey? Possibly. Is it the reason I am happy? Of course not. A different way of thinking was simply available to me, and I picked the parts that were the most useful to me. And I am absolutely certain my career success owes much to some of the concepts I learned in the Landmark Forum.
The ability view life as moments that I am attaching meaning to, essentially meaningless, and to learn that I’m free to remove and create my own meaning was always a useful thing. To some people that’s Zen Buddhism, to others it’s God. Whatever your own beliefs or thoughts about what it means to be a human being…there are many types of “Forums” out there that you can learn from. Whichever place you choose to get new knowledge from is entirely your own individual choice. As imperfect as beliefs, ideas, and new ways of thinking are….they are out there in the world for us to learn about, and maybe even benefit from. Or discard. Good luck!
Originally published at mydigitalpathos.com in 2009, and re-published at julianwest.me on September 15, 2012.