Hi again,

For those that remember, my husband and I have (had) a friend who went over the edge in Landmark.

Today he wrote me a nasty email, nothing to do with Landmark, it was about some trouble his teenage son got into (had to do with drinking - he's a friend of my son). I'm not going to post the email, but he wrote some strange things that didn't related to what he was saying.

To me he said, "You messed up Flounder" (didn't fit with anything he wrote), and then he said, "I think you should take a serious look in the shallow end."

I've been sitting here baffled by what he wrote - of course none of it made sense, but those two phrases were very strange. Has anyone heard these before?

I never heard those in any Landmark seminars

He's calling you a "bottom feeder", and implying that you are in over your head.

Pardon the pun, but this kind of response is way too deep for him.

It's just weird, he must've taken it from somewhere else - sure didn't fit with what he was writing about.

Thanks for the replies!

He probably heard it in a movie.

He's also probably implying that you should look closer to home, in you own territory.

(It's a very nasty way of putting it.)

Sometimes there are things and phrases that the leader or coach will make up that infects the sheep and becomes part of their language (outside of loading the language, which are universal Landmark terms like "racket" and "empty and meaningless".) I'll give you an example, in the advanced course, the forum leader was constantly talking about "being a flame for someone," and that meant, being a support or a supporting influence that becomes reciprocated. Now I went up and talked to another Landmark friend of mine who was higher up and I literally said "I want to be your flame!" and he was like :confused:

In retrospect, I must have sounded a bit strange!! :roll:

Somewhere along the course of my life I began to notice how highly educated people spoke and thought differently form moderately educated or uneducated people. This isn't to say that people without good formal educations can't be damn smart. Or that those with good educations necessarily have exceptional brain power.

Solid, real, sustained, high quality education appears to have a focusing effect on language... people use language that has clearly understood, specific, and [i:be16907e34] mutually agreed upon [/i:be16907e34] meaning and purpose. If educated speakers use abstractions and generalities, those abstractions have been carefully thought through, discussed, debated until they have what you might call [i:be16907e34] bounded meaning [/i:be16907e34]....

In other words, even abstractions, metaphoric imagery, abstract generalization can, and should go through a careful process of establishing exactly "what they are about"....

LGATs and other setting where language is routinely [i:be16907e34]vandalized[/i:be16907e34] ignore.... or is it defy ?.... this fundamental, common sense process of language refinement. Things mean sort of this and sort of that without actually meaning this other thing, except when they do.

Sloppy, irresponsible, (and thereby manipulative as all get out) use of language effectively becomes a shell game whre "the house" always wins.

If you have ever lived in a large metropolitan area and seen street con games, such as three card monte or shell games, you will notice that they are structured frightenly like LGATs are....

There is the "dealer" (think... "trainer") with his tabletop made from stacked cardboard boxes, the promise of a quickie payoff, a cloud of shills hanging around who are delighted with their "winnings".... the dealer is talking trash a mile a minute as the fishies wander by, some know better and some are drawn in, soon to be relieved of excess cash... there are lookouts and bodyguard figures hovering around, pretending to be uninterested folks on the street.... in reality it is a highly structured illusion organized to appear like a simple game of wits...

The major structural difference between street games and LGAT games is that the street game is played with walnut shells, and the LGAT game is played with "meaning shells".... both require rapid shifting and misdirection technique... so you believe you art talking about one thing and then you are informend that, no, that actually isn't [i:be16907e34] the essential thing [/i:be16907e34] , you must be confused, there is this other thing, you see, the "not this thing thing" which is not "not that thing not this thing"....

those are not landmark phrases.