Penny,
From 'Only Don't Know' by Zen writer, Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn (aka Soen sa Nim) [
www.cizny.org] ISBN 0-87704-054-0.
'A don't know mind is a before-thinking mind. Before thinking is clear like space. Clear like space is clear like a mirror.'
In other words, ‘only don't know’ means choosing to pay attention, in order to dispel confusion, to be non-judgmental, to see reality as it really is, 'just like this'. Everything just is what it is - a pencil is a pencil, Landmark is Landmark, a cult is a cult - without interpretations or opinions. It's not nihilist, it's not like E&M, it's about stripping reality down to the bare essentials of love and compassion. Very different to the cynical Landmark use of DKDK as a hypnotic enrolment technique.
Zen teaches that there are 4 (main) levels of enlightenment (or 'don't know mind'). I suspect that the lower levels (the 'Landmark levels') are hypnotic dissociations, and as for the upper, top level, well - either it's a higher level of dissociation and the whole concept of enlightenment is a fraud, or it's something else, a different order of 'being' that is valid in and of itself.
(Personally I find the levels of enlightenment make sense viewed from a scientific perspective of trial and error, where you 'try on' a new theory or idea, test it against reality, and gradually refine it until you have a working model that fits the known evidence - a bit like the concept of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Landmark's 'philosophy' is at the lower end of the scale, a set of theses that has not been tested or peer reviewed,
and which fails at the first hurdle of rational examination.)
The 4 levels of enlightenment, according to some Zen traditions, for example Seung Sahn in my favourite Zen book ‘Dropping Ashes on the Buddha’, are :
1. attachment to thinking (0=1, 1=0; all things are the same, all things come from emptiness and will return to emptiness; form is emptiness, emptiness is form; the pencil is a bird; “your complaint is a ~racket~”)
2. attachment to emptiness (1x0=0, 10000x0=0; no thinking, no words, no speech, no God, nothing at all except the Zen belly shout KATZ; no form, no emptiness; the pencil does not exist; “life is empty and meaningless, and it’s empty and meaningless that it’s empty and meaningless”)
3. attachment to freedom (1+2=3000, 100x1000=-4; the arena of magic and miracles, no hindrance in space or time; freedom form, freedom emptiness; the pencil is choosing how it’s being; “I manage myself to create your listening”)
4. “just like this” = no-attachment thinking (3x3=9; all things are just as they are, the truth is ‘just like this’; form is form, emptiness is emptiness; the pencil is a pencil; Landmark is Landmark)
Another way of explaining it is that “first enlightenment” is attachment to thinking, attachment to emptiness and attachment to freedom; “original enlightenment” is no-attachment thinking (‘like this’, the sky is blue, the grass is green, the pencil is black); and “final enlightenment” is ‘just like this’ (when hungry eat, when tired sleep; the pencil is a pencil).
I think Landmark’s non-linear, ontological ‘empty and meaningless’ paradigm (and Landmark work in general) is level 1, attachment-thinking, or “first enlightenment”, which is a type of hypnosis, a form of dissociation from normal, everyday ‘like this’ or 'just like this' reality.
Chris