Quote
SaneAgainHello fatherof3,
I can relate to what you're saying because its exactly what I would have said if I'd found this forum after doing Quest (South Africa). I remember feeling lighter and more relaxed, more open to fun and less concerned about what people think of me. I thought Quest was great.
Unfortunately since then I've learnt differently.
You said:
Quote
I do see how some people can take it a little to extreme and get a little weird but i feel the percentage of people that take it on come out with a better life then those that go crazy.
There are two common misperceptions about people who "go crazy" from lgats. One is that they were crazy in the first place (this is not true in the majority of cases I've read about), the second is that they went crazy because they were too extreme about it (also not true in the majority of cases I've read about).
Before my involvement in quest I had no history of mental illness or psychological problems. The worst thing I ever had was a few depressed days or anxiety over a specific issue like a presentation, and the normal stresses of modern life. I may not have coped perfectly with those stresses and like you, I felt I was in a rat-race, but I knew who I was and what the world around me was and how to live in it. I was a normal middle class, middle aged person with a responsible job.
I was never extreme about Quest. I did it, enjoyed it, assisted a few times, and eventually did Inquest (equivalent to your summit and liftoff).
After inquest I had a psychosis. Psychosis means losing touch with reality - where your thoughts and perceptions are not in line with the real world. It means you've Created Your Own Reality... and you're living in it. Except of course it wasn't created by me, but by inquest skrewing with my mind.
A panic attack lasts four minutes and is enough to send any normal person rushing to an emergency room thinking they're having a heart attack; a psychosis is like a wave of panic attacks every ten minutes, for days and days on end, combined with confusion over fact and imagination and memory and an inability to make a phone call or drive to a hospital. In some psychotic breaks people get confused and terrified and kill themselves or other people. I was lucky that didn't happen to me. What happened was bad enough. A psychosis is also like a bad acid trip, except on acid people know they took acid and that's why everything is weird and terrifying. With psychosis you don't even have that luxury. The psychosis I had was directly caused by inquest and was made up of inquest people, concepts, words, images and memories. It took over a year for me to recover; some people never recover from things like that.
So while you are welcome to your opinion:
Quote
i feel the percentage of people that take it on come out with a better life then those that go crazy
I strongly suggest you think about how acceptable those percentages would be if you yourself were the next to go crazy. Crazy is not fun. And do you know what those percentages actually are? No, because its never been properly studied. Most breakdowns and suicides don't occur on the same day as the training, but a few weeks or months later and its therefore difficult to establish cause and effect - and most people who have breakdowns don't tell their doctors what they've been through to get into that state - because of the sickening twisted version of "Integrity" these corrupt organisations indoctrinate.
You seem to assume this could never happen to you. Well think of this: if Impact is powerful enough to make you into a different person waking up joyfully each day (which quest did for me for a short while) then they have the power to do the opposite. You are not immune to having your mind f*cked with and f*cked up.
Would the percentages be acceptable if the next 'crazy' one was one of your children?
This is not about statistics and it is not a game. It is not the red-black game where everyone goes home happy and hyped up on endorphins regardless of the vote. There are real people involved in this, real people with real feelings, real lives and people who love and depend on them, as your children I am sure love and depend on you. Businesses like Impact put [i:840a1f8180]your[/i:840a1f8180] mind and life at risk for [i:840a1f8180]their [/i:840a1f8180]profit. Is that the kind of risk you want to take??? Who care what the odds are!!
Please read this entire thread, then do a search on this site on keywords like "psychosis", "psychotic" and "suicide". A quicker route would be to search "Lifespring litigation" on wikipedia.
This is also an excellent article, written by a psychologist who had a psychosis after attending Landmark.
[
www.culteducation.com]
The problem is not only the 'extreme' cases who go psychotic or commit suicide. Those people should be seen as equivalent to the budgies that were used in mines - when there was a gas leak or shortage of oxygen the budgies died, providing a warning to the miners that they were in danger and should leave. Large group awareness training systematically undermines participants identity and grasp of reality, and that is not healthy regardless of where you may fall on the scale.
- Sane