Coz is quite happy, all things considered.
If you want to be happy, try reading Bertrand Russell's "The Conquest Of Happiness".

[www.phil-books.com]

or, Authentic Happiness, by Martin Seligman
[www.authentichappiness.org]

Coz

(I'm happy because the Cultists can kiss my ass!)
:)

Such a pathetic attepmt to hide yourself. What exactly was the purpose of using a second name on the MB only to reveal your original ID? Not a very clever tactic I must say. If anything Aaron every time you post something here you 'chip' away at your own credibility. Keep up the good work.

There's a third and maybe fourth name to add to the Gremlin/Aaron name game....

I know you're here....
I saw you log on....

Come on, now don't be shy....
We can handle all your personalities...

I know you're just dying to have a thread where your voices have more to say than anyone elses.

Are you going to flame this board too???

We saw it on alt.fan.landmark...
And now you're here.

TA DAAAAAAAAAA!!!!
:rolleyes:

I am glad that Gremlin/Aaron made the name error, as evidenced in this thread. That is why i copied it as a quote, so he can't delete it.

If there are any folks who read these threads to find out the Truth about Landmark, THAT IS ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW.

Look at the bad faith, and the deliberate conscious deception.
Blatant LIES.

What kind of Values/Ethics would a person have to have, to deliberately engage in conscious deception?
These are what these Landmark propagandists are all about.

Blatant, conscious lies.
Manipulation.

They think that this makes them powerful.
That comes from Werner Erhard, the sociopath.
Sociopaths think that lying is the path to power.

What they don't realize is that they are wrong.
It catches up to you.
Its bites you in the ass.

The path to power is having honour and integrity, over time.
Then people respect you.
Then they hire you, and you get repeat business.
Then people can love you.

Friends, again we see the Landmark propagandists coming here, and engaging in blatant, conscious lies and attempts at deception.

Wolves in sheeps clothing.
This is what you are walking into if you go to a Landmark seminar.
People who will lie to you, and trick and deceive you.
They think it makes them powerful, and if you are stupid enough to get fooled, then you deserve it.
Those are the thoughts of the sociopath, and those with anti-social personality disorder.

Remember, every time you are speaking with someone from Landmark, they could be LYING right to your face.
They are trying to manipulate you.
They want your money.

Coz

>>Im moaning about nothing, im not unsuccessful, i love life and have loved it more since doing the forum. I agree the marketing tactics are strong, but listen to the negativity between the critics and the positivity between the sceptics.>>>


You are lucky if you got out unscathed. Or relatively so. I hope your sentence above isn't an indication of some kind of Forum-iinduced brain damage.



>>I love life, i love not blaming myself for things, i love not hating people, i love doing what i always wanted to do without holding back, i love not having a chip on my shoulder like so many people i have met.>>>


Were you doing all these things before you went to the Forum? The Forum admonishes that it is for "healthy" people. If you were blaming yourself for things that weren't your fault, hating people, holding yourself back from doing what you love, and walking around with a chip on your shoulder, you should have been advised to see some type of therapist. Landmark claim that they exclude people who are not "healthy."


>>A few notes:
$400 was a tiny amount, it was a hard 3 days, but brilliant, and long lasting.>>>

Lucky you that you think $400 is an inconsequential amount. I'll bet you don't make many $400 charitable contributions.


>>They are definitely too pushy with the sales tactics, you'll find those pushing others get nothing monetery out of the persuasion.>>>

Is that supposed to make it OK?


>>Cosmophilospher -youre really negative, i bet youre really unhappy inside.

Theres no dehuminisation, i am a lay man, no philospher or scientist, im just glad i tried it.

I took the forum in 1998, that was a while back.


I love life!>>>


Your reasoning is faulty here. If you exclude negative information, you may be excluding the most important part of the picture. Recognizing that there are negative aspects of a situation doesn't mean someone is unhappy, just that they are willing to look at the whole picture.

There are intelligent, thoughtful, careful, and educated people who post to this site. You have blown them all off with your breezy dismissals. If you already know everything you need to know about Landmark, why did you come here? No one here is going to be joining up any time soon.


Ellen

Quote
Cosmophilospher
Coz is quite happy, all things considered.
If you want to be happy, try reading Bertrand Russell's "The Conquest Of Happiness".

[www.phil-books.com]

or, Authentic Happiness, by Martin Seligman
[www.authentichappiness.org]

Coz

(I'm happy because the Cultists can kiss my ass!)
:)

Hi, Coz:

I really get sick of all the negative labels many LEC grads. resort to whenever they've run out of intellectual ammunition:

"Cosmophilospher -youre really negative, i bet youre really unhappy inside."

You're in good company, Coz.

The LEC crowd loves that line over at the Awareness Page. If you don't agree therefore you're soooooooooo "bad/negative/intolerant/small minded!"

Ooops! Was that the sound of the so-called "transformed" regressing into their dreaded "meaning-making" machine mode?

LOL: You weren't "bad," Coz, Aaron just interpreted you that way in his "meaning-making machine" mode.

It's fairly naive how some of these LEC's here complain about the so-called "negativity," but they have no idea what REAL forum negativity can be.

If they were ever to start their proselytizing at the compuserve religion/philosophy forums at:

Compuserve.com

then they'd get cut a new one pretty quick from what I've seen there.
The last Church of Scientology person who was there got raked over the coals for at least a year.

SS

Quote
corboy
......... a number of LEC graduates (Hope, Elena) all describe crippling problems they've suffered from concentration difficulty they'v experienced after doing the Forum.......

Elena has not done the Forum. She must have a different excuse for her concentration difficulty. :)

>>Elena has not done the Forum. She must have a different excuse for her concentration difficulty. >>>


I hated it from the beginning. There were plenty of people who saw right through it

I thought there was something creepy about it the first time I heard someone describe it in 1974.

It wasn't until I read the passage in Adam Smith's book about the scientology connection that it all clicked.

As far as I know, I haven't complained about any concentration problems either, though I have a menu of other problems and assess blame as warranted or not.


Ellen

iterate and reiterate:


Landmark is full of well-meaning, good-intentioned people who were, for any number of reasons, snookered by the seduction and lured into an evil organisation inside of which it is very difficult to see your way out. The clues most outsiders hear or see become inaudible or invisible once "transformed" and what would appear obvious to the unindoctrinated becomes obscure to the faithful. Though the "product" or results of a Landmark involvement are often in the evil category, the people were not of malevolent intent beforehand. There is a passage somewhere someone wrote about his experience in the New York (I believe) offices of Landmark where he talks about seeing a phenomenal number of kind, hard working, generous people abused shamelessly. It is well written and I'll post it if I come across it again.

This does not include, however, the small number of enrollees who see in Landmark a path to their own Werner Erhard-like success in controlling, manipulating, intimidating, exploiting, and abusing other people. I don't know what this percentage is. I suspect it is small. A fair number of those do seem to wash up on the shores of the various chatrooms and newsgroups, though why they are busy defending Landmark or denouncing the critics rather than out scamming people or starting their own cults escapes me. Perhaps they have some hidden remnants of a conscience, unlike ole Werner who wouldn't waste his time when he saw he'd been recognized and exposed. True or efficient sociopaths rarely expend energy where there's no perceived payoff.


Ellen

Ellen wrote:

“Landmark is full of well-meaning, good-intentioned people who were, for any number of reasons, snookered by the seduction and lured into an evil organisation inside of which it is very difficult to see your way out.”

I heard from a lot of old friends over Christmas (letters in Xmas cards) who I haven’t heard from since last Xmas. What struck me is that there are two clear groups of these friends (we’re all baby-boomers from the ‘60s).

There are those who never got drawn into the Human Potential movement and have had largely successful lives without major traumas, sure they still have family and work troubles but they seem content and mentally ‘whole’. Their letters are up-beat and they sound like healthy people.

Then there’s the other group (myself included) who did get involved with ‘groupwork’ in the ‘70s or ‘80s (and some are still involved to-day). We by comparison have large incidences of divorce, mental health issues, failures at work, family dysfunctions, and money and relationship problems generally. Our letters were either full of our problems or full of our escapist displacement activities. Definitely more narcissistic than our contemporaries.

I think Ellen is being kind to us when she says we were “well-meaning, good-intentioned people”. I think we were idealistic and unrealistic, we were pro-freedom, anti-establishment (for which, read “issues with authority and parental figures”) and generally had low EQ and did not progress normally through all the childhood developmental stages into adulthood.

Sure, we can make excuses for our cultic involvement, we were sad, unhappy and confused people seeking answers or truth or fulfilment or enlightenment etc., we were just looking in all the wrong places, and we were naïve and ill-informed about psychological abuse and cultic manipulation.

I’d like to see some studies of the baby boomers to see how psychological profiles matched cultic involvement, and how cultic involvement affected the later lives of participants.

I was part of the Human Potential scene from 1983 to 2001. Prior to that I had a stable career and marriage, and no obvious problems with money or work or family. The first major ~result~ was my divorce in 1986 (my wife did not share my new-found beliefs and I neglected her in favour of my demanding new ‘friends’ in my encounter groups who took over my social life).

I re-married with a woman who was more on my new ‘wavelength’. After another 7 years I lost my job and career (a secure and well-paid conventional accounting career), again through neglect, and decided to ~transform~ myself into a New Age type with a career in alternative health. This decision cost me major debt (6 figures), re-possession of my home, total loss of pension, total loss of savings etc etc.

And all the time I convinced myself completely that I was doing the right thing, becoming enlightened and the quality of my life would improve ! Ha ha. It didn’t, it went down the pan. I started to steal money from friends and family, and committed frauds and criminal offences (all in the name of my new-found ~integrity~, ~ethics~ and ~creating my own reality~). I cheated on my second wife (I never cheated on my first ‘pre-enlightenment’ wife) in the name of finding my ‘soul-mate’.

It makes me sick now to see how badly I behaved, I want to wipe out the last 20 years but I can’t.

I’ve dropped the group ‘friends’ I had but I can’t face up to meeting old school or college friends yet. The guilt and shame is too strong, it will take years to move on. I can take the personal consequences, the worst thing is I don’t know the long-term effect of my behaviour on my children.

So don’t give us ex. cultists too easy a time or too many excuses Ellen, we don’t deserve endless sympathy, we need psychiatric help from people who specialise in our disorder.

Chris