Landmark and Children?
Date: February 22, 2006 08:27AM
Let me pause a moment to barf.
Today I was reading a blurb on EST-Landmark thinking... what struck me is that is appears to regress to the great bifurcation of Faith and Reason that happened during the Enlightenment... although it positions itself, or frames itself, as a quantum leap in thought, the image that comes to mind is that reasoning and rational understanding constitute ordinary three dimensional macro-space, and they appear to be suggesting that they have discovered a way of generating wormholes that permit faster than the speed of light travel to distant regions... at least that is the tachyonic, quasi-LR Hubbard, mind energy Uber Alles sci-fi zen Kabala infomercial TONE of their whole transformative dreamscape.... by tweaking the will just so one breaks quantum wind and is propelled to uncharted regions where anything is possible.... or did they just forget to take their meds ?
So, fine, whatever... when you pull out your magnifying glass and read the philosophical fine print (and that, friends and neighbors, is what good philosophers do, they read, and re-read the fine print of "common knowledge") a very different picture emerges...
At one of the signal point of the Enlightenment, early on, Francis Bacon succinctly stated that "knowledge is power"... meaning, the more accurately you know, the wider the net of your learning, the more detailed your knowledge, the more operationally specific your knowledge, the more you understand the patterns, sequences, components, motivation, consequences, dynamics of things, the better you can explicate them so others can understand... the less you rely on unquestioned authority, the less you rely on superstition and dogma, the greater your POWER will be...
This directly collided with the establishement philosophy that power derived from "inherent worth" or divine dispensation. It was the new thing.
Power was a direct function of the quality of one's knowledge.
So, I am reading a blurb speaking to the contents of an EST inspired book, and their (the author's, presumably parroting the thought processes behind EST and Landmark) is that FREEDOM (not knowledge) is power, BECAUSE "true freedom" arises from a ground plane of nothingness, a sort of "day of creation minus 1", when all was darkness and void, and to fully grasp, or tap into this condition of Source was to (somehow, someway...one day... somewhere over the rainbow, waaaaaay up hiiiiigh) was to experience the primal condition of Possibility, where letting go of the nasty, icky old Ego and sense of self permitted a Kirkegaardian leap of faith into this great lake of light and possibility, i.e. Source, where anybody could manifest more or less anything....
"Oh Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz.... my friends all drive porsches, I must make amends..."
Very sweet, a delicious daydream indeed, except it is pretty much a complete load of shit.
"Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends, so Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?"
Once you Get, in unvarnished philosophical nitty gritty realism, what a steaming pantload of bizarro unreality is holding up this entire Transformational Technology illusion, you do begin to wonder.... do these poor souls have the first idea of what they are getting themselves into ? That glowing orifice into hypespace is transporting them unawares back to the 16th century, before the West got hip to the scientific method ? Would make a good treatement for a sci-fi scriptwriter though... coming soon to theaters near you.
"Oh Lord, won't you buy me a color T.V. ? Dialing For Dollars is trying to find me... I will wait for delivery each day until three, so Lord won't you buy me a color T.V.?"
Pretty please ?