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Acid Reindeer
midonov123, Landmark doesn't have gurus, not in the classic sense. a guru-chela relationship consists of the teacher (guru) and a student or acolyte (chela).
more broadly, a guru can mean a spiritual teacher who may have influence on followers he or she has never met. pretty much by definition, a guru has their own school or at least their own branch of an existing school.
the Forum Leaders teach Landmark. Landmark insists on doctrinal purity. if they decide they want to deviate from Landmark they go and start their own group.
you also have to distinguish between belief in specific facts or those which you could perhaps call them meta-beliefs. you create your own reality counts as a meta-belief.
about "you create your own reality"...
that meme has a couple of beliefs wedged in there together, which, because we use language get confused.
in its weakest form, it takes note of the subjective as well as objective nature of our experience (or "our reality" or "our realities"). you could call that weak subjectivity.
strong subjectivity takes the approach that subjective experience can self-sustain itself without any other sort of validation or in-validation.
the strongest form of solipsism takes the form of solipsism. maybe you can collapse the second and third stages, regardless, I think you can make distinction. I do believe in, at least, weak subjectivity.
Landmark and fundamentalism collapse all stages down so that you must either reject subjectivity (fundamentalism) or accept it completely (Landmark). neither a Landmarkian or a fundamentalist can really live that way, but they tend to cling onto that model inside their heads.
To whomever:
Solipsism. That's sort of the ultimate guilt trip, right? :lol:
Maybe self-contradiction is one of the major issues insofar as these LGAT's are concerned.
How can an LGAT's "philosophy of living" ***NOT*** be fundamentally flawed and unsound when it's a forced amalgam of at least two fundamentally incompatible philosophies?
Landmark = Existentialism (atheistic) + New Age Philosophy (Polytheistic) = logical contradiction?!!!!
I guess when Landmark claims that they're NOT religious, they probably define "religion" as monotheistic. Therefore it's a true claim, but once again Landmark is equivocating since it's not using the same definition of "religion" in the answer as was defined in the question.
Perhaps that's what many people sense, if only on a subconscious level--this fundamental philosophical contradiction within the Landmark dogma. And maybe that's why it leaves many feeling confused and uncomfortable, that is, if the LGAT doesn't manage to seize control of their discriminative faculties first.
CNFT