Re: Beliefs
Date: February 19, 2008 02:05AM
I just read the beginning of this thread.
Skeptic, I'm wondering how you're doing with gaining some ground under you. I understand perfectly where you were in your initial post, which was some time ago. How has it been going for you since?
When I was a teenager I did a lot of LSD and other psychedelics, and they basically stripped away my entire frame of reference for reality. It's terrible to realize that cults and LGATs can do the same thing -- they seek to do the same thing -- so they can indoctrinate you into their reality. The danger of this practice cannot be overstated.
After reading this board for weeks, I can see how people have entered the same kind of spiritual/existential crisis that very powerful mind-altering drugs can create, just by being brainwashed and manipulated by Landmark! That is stunning, really, but obviously their techniques are powerful as well and certain people are in just the right place to be fully destabilized by their "technology."
My ex, who seemed brainwashed by LE almost before he walked through the door (!), would tell me very different things when he came out of The Forum. On the one hand, he was clearly taken in by LE, he had the full-on "fear" experience during the group hypnosis, and he emerged "transformed." He told me it was an emotionally powerful and very difficult experience, and I got the sense he was even playing it down because he was a bit embarrassed perhaps. He also would say that LE was nothing, really. Just a bunch of people sitting around talking. These two realities were totally incompatible. I got the feeling like his mind was already splitting. His emails to me in the week after the Forum talked about an unpleasant "emotional roller coaster" and how he couldn't quite keep in his mind that he was "just a machine" and "life was meaningless" but he kept trying.
The thought that he was actually trying to further drive these warped meme viruses into his brain was so distressing to me.
When you are under the influence of psychedelics, reality is stripped away, your frame of references are dissolved, and you are left essentially floating in the cosmic soup. In the right setting, with the right people, and the right guidance, this can be an amazing, beautiful and powerfully liberating and transformative experience. However, you're absolutely vulnerable to ideas at that time, because you are looking for some kind of absolute "truth." And if you panic and descend into a "bad trip" you will be grasping desperately for anything to cling to. I had this experience, and it took me years to recover from it. I know many others who went through this, and some who never recovered.
On the positive side, in some respects this experience does help you to find "truth" because anything less simply won't hold water, won't support you, won't stay solid beneath your feet. My experience during the "bad trip" was that I couldn't relate anymore to anything in my life, except one thing. I knew that I had a mother, and that she loved me. That love was real. I knew it was real, and that I could call her, and she would come for me. I was 16, and that's what I did -- actually, I had my best friend call her because I was curled in the fetal position watching the walls melt into the floor.
Anyway.
My point is, it wasn't a philosophy or ideology that saved me that day. It was love. It was the relationship with another person that truly had MEANING to me. My own personal meaning, my own personal relationship. My story, my life. Not something I read in a book, or something anyone else could tell me.
When I emerged from that state it took years to reconstruct my full reality, and I was in a crisis like you have described after coming out of the LGAT. I wanted to know what to believe, but I couldn't believe anything, really. That's when I discovered nature and the larger intelligence that governs Creation, and I began to learn to trust that, ever changing and evolving, always magnificent and infinitely mysterious "reality." Also I learned more about the human mind and how we can drive ourselves mad, by reading a book called "The Seduction of Madness." Great book.
Now I am very careful about what I expose myself to. Just as I will not expose myself to physical viruses, I won't expose myself to mental ones either, unless I'm protected. When you go to Landmark or other LGATs, their purpose is to strip you of protection through hypnosis, brainwashing and physical deprivation. This makes you open to their mind viruses in ways you wouldn't be if you were just sitting around in a cafe talking and exchanging ideas.
It's like having unprotected mental sex with a nasty sociopathic money grubbing sleaze bag!! Ew!!
Anyway, I'm just sharing my stories, and I hope you're finding your way back to yourself again. You'll be much stronger for this journey.