>>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...>>>


If you are really curious, take a look at Jim Tsutsui's writings on Delphi "Rants & Raves."

More dangerous, or perhaps more insidious, in my opinion, are the people who wandered away but retained one or a few of the more deadly or destructive est/Landmark ideas, impressions, philosophical convictions, "distinctions," or whatever you want to call them. There are certain "implants" that are designed to find a resting place in the innermost core of a person's personality or character and alter the rest of his or her beliefs, ideas, impressions, feelings, and behavior. Nothing wrong with "taking responsibility" for one's life, but in est/Landmark terms that often involves an over-estimation of one's own influence, potential, or control to a pathological or predatory level.


Ellen

"There are certain "implants" that are designed to find a resting place in the innermost core of a person's personality or character and alter the rest of his or her beliefs, ideas, impressions, feelings, and behavior. "

Implants ? My girlfriend had them, firm silicone gel, looked great in a tight sweater though...

Seriously, that's a fascinating idea. How would you characterize these implants ? Werner is the Messiah ? Core beliefs ? Physical reality responds directly to our thought processes ?

I recently received a copy of Amy Irving's book about her guru, the most disgusting Carlos Castenada... man o man that guy took the cake when it came to getting innocent young vaporbrains to internalize such wacked out thinking as you couldn't begin to imagine. It was also surprising at how much Casteneda influenced the thinking of a generation of seekers. I must now wonder how great Casteneda's influence may have been on EST or Werner at that time ? Did these people start to believe they were covert sorcerers or "naguals" that would get magical powers if they kept at their "impeccability" ? To this day the NLP teacher John Grinder asserts that his work is substantially influenced by Casteneda, and he too loves to talk about "impeccability". I have yet to see anyone offer a coherent definition of "being impeccable" other than a dictionary definition.

My BEST posts are always edited. And never due to choice language. Ah well the cliff notes convey the mesage just not with the same Templar flare. Rick man I get loads of compliments on my material, let it be !!!

>>Implants ? My girlfriend had them, firm silicone gel, looked great in a tight sweater though...>>>



Good analogy to est/Landmark. They look/seem good but watch out, there are problems! Ask your girlfriend if she was informed of the fact that they are always "cold," (having no blood supply), hard (the surrounding tissue can contract down into a tough, fibrous scar), that the procedure usually destroys nipple sensation, that she mightn't be able to nurse a baby, that it is almost impossible to get a good mamogram with implants, that the procedure is PAINFUL, or that if she decided she didn't want them anymore she would be left with what are called "empty pockets?" Amazing but true, the pitch for these things is to mostly young, gullible, foolish, vain, and insecure women. Kinda like the Landmark profile.



>>Seriously, that's a fascinating idea. How would you characterize these implants ? Werner is the Messiah ? Core beliefs ? Physical reality responds directly to our thought processes ?>>>


Happy to oblige, and yes, your examples are good. But let me ask you first if you have read or heard of "Snapping," by Conway and Siegelman and also the best examination, in my opinion, of the phenomenon by Ofshe and Singer, "Attacks on Peripheral versus Central Elements of Self and the Impact of Thought Reform Techniques," which is an essay available from AFF?


Ellen

Quote
Acid Reindeer

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.

I never said I blanketly agreed with anything anyone does or has done in the name of religion. Any historian will say it is not wise to judge our ancestors with our present day morals or ethics. The concepts we have today on individual rights and freedoms are not the same as the ones held in the past.

Plus, in any religion there is often great disparagement between what is taught and what is practiced. But that disparagement also shows how different genuine religions are from cults and cult-like groups. Cults demand uniformity; free thought is not an option. Religions know people will fail because we’re all human; we all f*** up.

searched around, these came up:

"Attacks on Peripheral versus Central Elements of Self and the Impact of
Thought Reforming Techniques" Richard Ofshe and Margaret T. Singer, The Cultic
Studies Journal, Vol. 3 #1, Spring/Summer 1986; American Family Foundation, P.O. Box
1232, Gracie Station, New York, NY 10028 (212) 533-0538

"The Utilization of Hypnotic Techniques in Religious Conversion" Jesse S.
Miller, The Cultic Studies Journal,Vol. 3 #2, Fall/Winter 1986


I seem to remember in Varieties Of Religious Experience, William James told of examples of sudden and dramatic personality chage, too...

Acid reindeer wrote:

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

Poor choice of words on my part. I f I knew I had to walk on eggshells I would have parsed my words more carefully.

Templar. Gee, I thought it was a love letter. I'll bet you stayed up all night thinking that stuff up. I'm glad you owned up to your hatred of Landmark and your wishes for 9/11 and more casualties. It did a good job of illustrating your character and intellect!

Wary I bet your daughter was explaining The Wizard of Oz to you!! Too late for you to back track now, you already said you admire me. You can only wish to be like me. Its funny that you compliment my posts that are clearly ripping you. Better luck trolling on another board ;).

I believe that I'm beginning to see a pattern here. You have an article by A. Gottleib posted on your website that discusses the bad influence of Martin Heidegger on philosphy, language, and, ummmmm..."being in time".

Heidegger was the house philosopher of the Third Reich. They made him the rector of Freidburg Unviersity:

"Before Heidegger became the Nazi rector of the University of Freidburg in 1933, he served as teacher and sage to four gifted students of assimilated German Jewish backgrounds. Hannah Arendt, who at 18 began a three-year love affair with Heidegger, achieved fame as a political thinker. Herbeert Marcuse, denounced by the Pope in the late 1960s, became a philosophical guru for the New Left. Hans Jonas matured into a pioneering theorist of environmentalism, serving as a touchstone for the German Green Party. And Karl Lowith became a distinguished scholar of modern historical consciousness.
- “Heidegger’s Children”: Sins of the Father; reviewed by James Ryerson, New York Times on the Web Book Review; December 21, 2001"


Heidegger was also in many ways the hidden philosophical inspiration behind Werner Erhard (via his compadre Fernando Flores, whose seminars I personally attended, Flores believed that Heidegger was the salvation of mankind through "linguistic authenticity") and, I have recently discovered, supposed to have been a large influence on Carlos Casteneda too.... scary, but interesting that the New Age may have been profoundly tainted by a professed Nazi !

According to Gottleib:

"This is the part of Heidegger's thought that most influenced Sartre and the existentialists. The void created by existentialist anxiety - the recognition that there are no abstract principles to follow - is filled by nonrational commitment. With hindsight, it can also be seen as the part of Heidegger's work that meshes with inspirational totalitarian movements such as Nazism. The rhetoric of destiny, of a driving current of history to which man must commit himself, dovetails all too easily with some of Heidegger's early thinking, particularly his main work, ''Sein und Zeit'' (''Being and Time'') which was first published in 1927.

His later work developed several new themes. For one thing, his writing became more historical. He tried to give an account of man's understanding of the nature of being in different epochs - especially in ancient Greece - leading up to the 20th-century view of life, which he found to be deeply flawed. In particular, he regarded it as overly technological, by which he meant that modern man saw everything, even himself, as a resource to be exploited to the maximum efficiency. Salvation was to be found in overcoming this technological view of life - an ever-popular theme. In Heidegger's case it resulted in a romantic idealization of German rural life. He came to enjoy simple pastimes, and sometimes seems to have thought that drinking local wine in a forest hut was the pinnacle of human achievement.

Despite their historical turn, Heidegger's works did not become any easier to understand. If anything, they became more difficult as he sank ever deeper into his own tortuous neologisms and crank etymology. As part of his intensifying reflection on language itself, he came to espouse perhaps his least original, and certainly one of his least plausible, theses. He came to think that language is what creates the world we inhabit. It is by virtue of having a certain vocabulary and way of speaking, he thought, that we are capable of drawing distinctions; and it is the distinctions we draw that make the world. But there have been many objections to this - for example, that all sorts of skills, from that of the chess master to that of a musician, involve grasping distinctions that have no expression in language."

So there, pass the implants if you would.

you may find the whole article here:

BTW, that's Freiberg, not Freidberg, university, or University of Freiberg for you purists reading this... sorry about the spelling error on the last post...

[www.visi.com]

Contra Mundum
No. 13 Fall 1994
Heidegger Deconstructed
by Peter J. Leithart

(please note some very curious correspondences between Heidegger and Landmark philosophy: " the great noble awareness of the insecurity of "existence"", "the necessity for order", "the total transformation of our [German] being", "the claim that the individual is a "fiction", and so on... does any of this sound familiar ????)




A pastor attending Heidegger's pro-Nazi summer camp in 1933 summarized Heidegger's argument that a philosophical critique of Christianity cannot begin with the second article of the creed:

One must start by rejecting the first article, that the world was created and sustained by a God, that what exists is merely an artifact, something that has been made by a divine craftsman. This was the origin of that false devaluation of the world, that contempt for the world and denial of the world - and the source of that false feeling of comfort and security, founded on subjective ideas about the world that are untrue compared with the great noble awareness of the insecurity of "existence" (quoted on p.227).

In truth, Heidegger formulated his own gnostic religion, centered on a hope for the eschatological Advent of Being, which had been forgotten throughout the history of post-Socratic Western philosophy. Ott calls attention to the prominence of the Advent theme in Heidegger's thought. In 1932, he wrote to Karl Jaspers about his hope that men were coming on the scene who "bear a distant dispensation within them" (quoted on p. 22). The following year, he was more confident: "I feel more and more that we are emerging into a new reality, and that the old era has run its course" (quoted on pp. 24-25).
Karl Lowith summed up Heidegger's shift in these dramatic words:

A Jesuit by education, he became a Protestant through indignation; a scholastic dogmatician by training, he became an existential pragmatist through experience; a theologian by tradition, he became an atheist in his research, a renegade to his tradition cloaked in the mantle of its historian (quoted on p. 120).
Ott's middle and later chapters provide a detailed examination of Heidegger's brief term as the rector of Freiburg University under the Nazi regime. Using new archival evidence, he supports beyond reasonable doubt the conclusions of Victor Farias,[1] that Heidegger was an active supporter of the Nazi regime who sought to bring Freiburg into conformity with the genius of Nazism, the "leadership (Fuhrer ) principle." Heidegger discovered in Nazism stirrings of the secular Advent for which he yearned. Though Heidegger's philosophy was not crassly anti-Semitic, Ott found evidence that Heidegger had denounced one of his Jewish colleagues, and his treatment of his friend and mentor, the "non-Aryan" Husserl, was ugly. Ott also demonstrates that Heidegger's later attempts at self-justification were distorted in many particulars and in their general thrust. More on these matters below.
Whereas Ott gives detailed attention to the life of Heidegger, Hans Sluga's Heidegger's Crisis is an attempt to "contextualize" Heidegger by surveying the philosophical currents before, during, and after the Nazi regime. Sluga argues that the basic philosophical division of the time was between "conservatives" (inspired by Fichte) and "radicals" (disciples of Nietzsche). This essential division existed before Hitler and continued to define German philosophy after the war. Though there are significant differences between the two traditions, both groups shared what Sluga calls a "four-fold template" of issues: a sense that the world faced a cultural crisis of massive proportions; a belief in the primordial uniqueness of the German race and in the spiritual mission of the German nation in the world-historical crisis of modernity; Germany's need for a strong leader (Fuhrer ); and the necessity for order. Beginning with Fichte, these issues shaped much of German philosophy. Heidegger's Freiburg rectorial address rang the changes on several of these themes."