Actually :oops:, Socrates, I own you an apology. For some reason I thought the post with Cleckly was from someone else. Guess I should have stopped for breakfast before writing my reply!!! I misinterpreted your entire post and in fact, agree. Please excuse the, "if you were really understanding what Cleckly had written" statement as I was not understanding what you had written.

Again, Socrates, I am sorry.

I think my point was that otherwise clear headed, good intentioned people may be more easily duped than they believe they can, especially if they never have had to interact with a sociopathic person or organization. The kids I saw were a heck of a lot more immune to this because they had to protect themselves against it from an early age. They knew the little signs, the minimal cues, the tells that gave it away. The secure people from educated, comfortable backgrounds, the Harvard grads and the Yalies seem to fall for it more easily because they have never been so thoroughly wanked before.

As for me, I did get a tremendous education from EST, albeit one about 180 degrees out of phase from the one they intended. I got much more thorough in the way I would analyse ideas, and much less trusting of self professed authority figures. I learned to think much more about boundaries and why it was necessary to understand and respect them.

In the good old days before there was a forum we had an advanced training that was held in an isolated location. There was no coming or going, maybe more like a moonie camp or something. At one point, the trainer asked everyone who had engaged in anal sex to please stand up and almost everyone in the room stood up. You can't make this stuff up. It was surreal. I laughed at the trainer and he stormed over and grabbed me by the throat and threw me back in my seat. OK, he won that round....
If you were losing concentration you were supposed to stand up by the side of the room and hold a small log over your head. We accessed our rage by beating up on pillows. Looking back on it, as ridiculous and bizarre as it was, I really wish all my constipated, uptight, play by the rulebook friends had been there too just to get the orgone moving. We'd still be laughing about it today. But noooooo, they wanted to quietly watch TV and dig themselves ever deeper into their ruts where you will find them today, arthrits, cihrossis and all the rest of age's gifts....

I honestly don't see it as black, white or grey. It looks like a white field covered with tiny black polka dots that only seems grey when you stand back from it at a middle distance. Kind of a rhythm of cool-stupid-cool-stupid-cool-stupid-cool-stupid-cool-stupid. But then, I was also studying with Bandler, who was at the hight of his powers then, before the long decline set in, I think that allowed me to see the process through bandler's warped but brilliant iconoclastic model of things. The Mr. Tony showed up on the scene, I had just about OD'd on the consciousness movement, no more breakthroughs please dammit, enough transformation already, I needed to regress into meaninglessness for a while...

Alexis wrote:

Posted: 06-07-2004 01:45 PM Post subject:

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Wary,

"Saying you are not insulted, then saying that I'm attacking you or naming-calling really means you are insulted and are "choosing" to ignore what you perceive as an insult."

Alexis,
I don't care if you insult "warytraveller2". If my wife insults me, I care. Or if my boss or customers insult me I also care. They don't know me by "warytraveller2."

You are only diminishing your own arguments by attacking an anonymous post with assumptions about their intent.

I made the incendiary comment that I liked the Est Training more than 25 years ago. I don't expect you to agree with me. Nor would I expect you to change your mind based on what I say about it. In fact the only thing I said positive about Est was I liked it. There were many things that I mentioned that I didn't like. I actually agreed more with you than I disagreed.

But you chose to attack the fact I thought it was good. Paul Firestone has written a testimonial praising Landmark and it is posted on their website. I guess you can now include the CEO of Reebok in the "unwitting dupe" department.

You see, as hard this will be for you to believe, I'm not writing these posts to change the minds of those that hate Landmark. Or to agree with those that love it. This is recorded for public record and for the perusal of the "undecided."

Given the negative things I've said about my Est days in regard to their organization and recruiting practices, it surprises me that folks like you aren't cheering me on in my posts.

e.g.

Here is a guy who liked the Est Training but still warns people about getting involved in recruiting for the "company" and was concerned about the potential damage to people who might be predisposed to manic/depression. (see some of my other posts)

But how you want to interpret my posts is entirely up to you. Call me names if you wish. I'm a lot like Templar. I don't care. I'm trying to be on my best behaviour. So I'll suppress the sardonic wit, for now.

As I write I'm watching the Wizard of Oz with my 5 year old daughter. I derive my sense of self-worth and sef-esteem from sources other than the imaginary "warytraveller". Although this is a source of amusement for me.

Thanks for the attention you are giving to my posts.

Wary get a grip. Dont insinuate that you are like me.

Were you paying attention? I was ripping on you.

You more or less said that you expect hostility here.

To me that means you came here looking for a fight.

I think you got what you came for, but quite frankly I'm not impressed.

Socrates wrote:

"As for me, I did get a tremendous education from EST, albeit one about 180 degrees out of phase from the one they intended. I got much more thorough in the way I would analyse ideas, and much less trusting of self professed authority figures. I learned to think much more about boundaries and why it was necessary to understand and respect them. "

Same here. Although I never thought there intention was the opposite of what I got. And I too became less trusting of self professed authority figures. That probably was not their intention.

I think you make a great point about respecting and maintaining boundaries. It could just be a male perspective, but the "sharing" was far to intrusive for me. I didn't think it was all that healthy and it made me uncomfortable. Although I learned how to "connect" more deeply with people after the Est Training the concept of constantly opening can be dangerous, even to the strongest of constitutions. And this may sound sexist, but I think alot of this appealed to the women more then the men.(just look at the percentage of women in the Centers)

"Socrates", you described something that sounded like the 6 day. Is that what you were talking about? If so, you went way further than me. Some of my freinds did it. I said no way. Detailed divulging of intimate details of your sex life....yikes!!! I was way to square back then to be part of that! And I know how to keep those healthy boundaries now!

Great post!

Quote
warytraveller2
I understand this is true for you. And for others a diifferent opinion is rendered. Ana323 and dpa10 had overall positive experiences. Mine with Est was positive as well. But I didn't go as deeply into as dpa10, gc4062 or yourself.

"True for you": phrases like that strike me as a way to deflect criticism or maybe it strikes me as bad word usage.

Will also point out that you won't nessecarily have had to take a course to have an experience with Landmark. We can observe the effect on Landmark on others in our lives.

Quote
Alexis
I also was raised Catholic. And I can say that I have learned that any person can take any doctrine or belief and construe it to feed their own egos. The Catholic Church is not inherently a cult. Neither is Judaism or Muslim or any other religion that teaches people to live good, upstanding, moral lives. But there are sects that pervert their teachings and in essence are not truly following the religion they claim to be.

The Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Muslim, have a history of murder and much else that tends to go against your claim that they teach people to live good lives.

Unless your concept of good lives includes the warfare and slavery and colonialism in which these religions have engaged.

Ooooohh, so we are unwitting pawns for your amusement, :wink: eh Wary?

*yawn* I’ve seen that tactic used before, not only by landmarkians, but from others whom want to humiliated by portraying dissagreements as facetious. *yawn*

""Socrates", you described something that sounded like the 6 day. Is that what you were talking about? If so, you went way further than me. Some of my friends did it. I said no way. Detailed divulging of intimate details of your sex life....yikes!!! I was way to square back then to be part of that! And I know how to keep those healthy boundaries now! "

The course was called The Six Day then later became the Advanced seminar or along those lines ? This was twenty years ago, Six Day was the big kahuna. It was real different from the into EST training in many way. We had loads of physical activities, a morning run, crossing gorges suspended from ropes, ... we had one exercise where we had to stand up and sit down in our chairs for what seemed like 100 or 200 times, in silence with the trainer commanding UP ! DOWN ! UP ! DOWN ! The first guy who lost his concentration and missed a beat was given some fairly intense "processing"...

I later concluded to some degree what I had concluded about psychedelics, especially psilocybin mushrooms. If your head was in the right place, at the right time, they could show you a lot of interesting things. If they became your religion, lifestyle, or what you turned to to deal with all of your problems, you needed big time help that neither EST nor Psilocybin was equipped to give you.

Just like EST, the trippers saw themselves on a new level because they had been somewhere that not everybody else had been. They could talk about their trips, hang out with their tripper friends, and bemoan how plastic and fake the straight people were. I admit, the trippers were interesting (for a while, then they became hopelessly tedious when they strated repeating themselves) and they had their share of outrageous stories, and eventually their lives got all screwed up because they got too involved in their corner of life and didn't notice larger life moving on all around them.

When I tried to get back into the non-EST , didn't get it and didn't want to get it world, I was pained at how much of my newfound EST enlightenment didn't wash. In fact it irritated people and made them sort of worried-suspicious about me. Was I a budding ESThole and didn't realize it ? The NLP training, thank the Universal Creative Force, had done a good job of teaching me to detect subtle social cues, not my forte by a long shot, and I felt incoming messages that said "weirdo". Got it, exit stage right....

What would have happened if I had retreated back into ESTness, or the isolated comfort of the ESTworld, or blew off everybody with my newfound "outrageousness".... one shudders to think...

Let me just say that I did post to jump on the band wagon of attacking Warytraveller.

That "true for me" phrase irritates me whoever uses it and has nothing to do with the person who uses it.