Quote
midonov123
If something goes wrong in your life, it's not always because of you. There are so many examples I could come up with, but the one I prefer is the book of Job which illustrates that Landmark's teaching goes against the Bible.
I'm not really that familiar with the Bible -- what happens in the book of Job?
I've actually been thinking about this whole issue of "personal responsibility" a lot lately. As I've indicated elsewhere, I was brought up with the EST/Landmarkian-type philosophy, and I always rebelled against it (for many reasons, but I think primarily that even as a child I found it extremely manipulative. By the time I was 11 or 12, I was already saying that I would never tell my parents anything personal about myself, because they would only use it against me at some point in the future).
I recently surprised myself though, because I came across a book that I later learned was intended to promote SGI (it's a novel, but written to illustrate the practise of Buddhism a la SGI) and I immediately liked it (I'm a bit more wary now that I've had time to think about it, and also since this site seems to have given SGI a semi-cult status).
The interesting thing to me was that I later realised that all the concepts that I liked in the book were ones that had upset me and that I'd rebelled against as a child. And then I also realised that the most significantly positive things that have happened in my life have come about by me learning how NOT to take responsibility for things, for understanding that not everything is down to me, and not every hardship is due to something bad I've done.
In other words, sometimes concepts can sound good, but not work at all in practise (although LGATs I suppose would say that if they don't work it's because you haven't applied them properly)
I think what makes such philosophies positive or negative is the intent to manipulate. So, if you tell someone that they are in control of their destiny, that can be positive. But if you hark back to someone's failures when you are angry with them, or when they fail to conform to your wishes, that is manipulation. Landmark and EST I believe do a lot of the latter.