Hi everyone,

I want to thank everyone who has contributed to this uniquely fascinating board over the years. I have to say, the insight and intelligence exhibited by the people here are of an unusual caliber.

I'm interested in beginning a dialogue about LGATs and the way people see they are influencing politics and the culture at large, as they clearly have an enormous reach.

This has been discussed many times in other threads, but I think the posts have been dispersed, I'm going to track down some of the best of them and post them here.

This topic has fascinating implications, beginning with Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis all the way to the possible LGAT involvement of people like Donald Rumsfeld. The bizarre "mission accomplished" philosophy behind the War on Terror and in Iraq have cause people to connect the dots to the LGAT philosophy of creating your own reality. I lived in the same town for years with Donald Rumsfeld. He seems to be a classic sociopath with no remorse or conscience -- or does that make him a psychopath? I can imagine that he believes the millions of Iraqi dead are "responsible" for creating their reality.

(This conversation is not about taking political sides, by the way, it's about examining what is really happening in our world right now)

Additionally, with untold millions of people being exposed to the caustic philosophy of LGATs, what is the cumulative effect on the culture as a whole, and how do people see it manifesting today? Combining this with the enormous reach of self-help marketing like "Chicken Soup for the Soul" and movies like "The Secret" and "What the Bleep do we KNow" -- and then considering the upswelling of religious fundamentalism, and the fight against science and reason being taught in the classroom -- what exactly are we dealing with here?

The more I learn, the more concerned I become, and I think we need to keep this dialogue going and find ways to bring it more and more into the mainstream.

One thing that really bothered me the most about my ex boyfriend's involvement with Landmark was simply the lax approach he had to discerning what is really the truth. He did not seem to value truth, or the rigorous requirements of its pursuit.

Is what Landmark teaches really "true"? I don't think so.

Is evolution true, or is creationism true? Does it matter?

Does it matter to have personal truth? Does it matter to have an empirical understanding of what constitutes truth?

How does the philosophy and methods of LGATs impair the process of understanding truth? What does it mean to tell yourself life is meaningless and you create your own meaning?

These are big questions, I know. I'm asking them of myself every day.