There were so many stories related to how the environment of the room in where you did your course is manipulated and controlled, let's have a discussion here where we can collect all of the experiences.

Hi there

In my forum it seem to fluctuate about 4 or 5 times during each day between warm and cold.

I noticed that with the evening sessions it became cooler, I normally do not feel the cold but on those ocassions I did. So does this mean that using a cooler tempearture is one way of perking or waking participants up after being the room for over 8 hours.

Psychologically I'm not sure if it made much of an impact on me I did find concentrating somewhat difficult. Noticed a few people seem to nod off or close their eyes temporarily whether this is directly related or not I am not 100% certain.

Would find it hard to state out right whether it speeds up indoctrination or not, the problem is by the end of day 1 a majority of the participants (more women then men) have all had their input through the mic's by sharing so whether this becomes a craving or opens the mind up to more suggestions I cannot say.

Bottled water was allowed - anyone that got a headache was given a routine to follow by the course leader - who made a vague statement that the headache is all in your mind - no aspirin was allowed to be taken.

The conference room that we were in was completely bare and devoid of all colour - it was your typical landmark set up!

I first wondered about room set up when I attended a lecture given by an obscure group.

This was a traditionalist Catholic group, so the lecture began with recitation of the rosary. All that chanting, combined with the dry atmosphere in the room was guaranteed to leave us feeling parched with thirst.

The organizers had a tray with glasses of ice water available at break, and I guzzled that water avidly, feeling puzzled because I usually had difficulty remembering to drink enough water, so it was atypical to find myself craving water.

But after sitting through their second lecture (full of ghastly conspiracy theories and a revolting amount of anti-semitism) I knew they were dangerous (and completely crazy). I left at the second intermission.

They were very upset that I departed after having listened to their inflammatory material, some of them followed me to the taxi stand outside the hotel, trying to persuade me to stay. But there was no way they could keep me from leaving the hotel, and as I fled home, I was glad I put a fake name and address on the registration form.

At the intermission between the first and second lecture, I gulped down the water provided by the organizers, feeling grateful to them for having provided it.

Afterward, I remember being surprised by how cold the room was. I was even more puzzled when I developed a raging thirst after just one hour. It was already very cold weather in the area where the meeting took place, so it would not have been necessary to run the airconditioner full blast. The room was so very cold that I had to keep my coat on the entire time, and so did the rest of the audience.

All of this made me wonder if something could have been done to the tempreture of the room or to dry out the air.

I didn't experience those things (excessively dry air, therefore excessive thirst). At my Forum, we were allowed to bring water to our seats.

Some people timidly asked if the AC could be turned down and their requests were met with some nonsense about how the people who run the forum know what works for most people, how they cannot adjust the thermostat to meet everyone's needs, blah, blah, blah. Within 15 minutes, however, the AC was turned down and many sighed a big sigh of relief. The interruption of the sighing, however, brought on another lecture from the leader.

What I found uncomfortable were the chairs and the lack of space between them. I'm small, and the people on either side of me were big. When we all sat back, I had their elbows in front of me. In order for this not to happen, they would have had to lean forward or turn in their chairs. So it was pretty uncomfortable.

What was the most infuriating thing for me was the lying about the schedule. I did not get out of that damned building before 12:30 a.m. on any of the weekend sessions of the Forum, one night it was after 1 a.m. When we finally had the 1-1/2 hour dinner break, since the building was in a corporate complex, there was no where to eat except for one place, a 20-minute drive away. So we had a 40 minute commute, 50 minutes to eat AND assignments that they expected us to do.

FWIW, it's not a simple matter to manipulate temperature and humidity independently, unless the HVAC system is designed from the start to do this.
99.9% of the time you can only manipulate temperature. Air conditioning removes moisture from the air by passing it over very cold coils.
So the only choices are really cold and dry or warm and wet.

and a happy medium depending on the weather too, I suppose.

My forum was done in a LEC building, not a hotel ballroom, so I'm sure they were able to set it us the way they wanted.

HI GC,

The attached file, (hope it worked this time), is an indepth writeup of the Landmark room setup. Of interest to me was the extent Centre Management went to to make a door open and close silently to aviod distraction by the leader, supervisor and attendees. All door hinges were machine olied and striker plates and lock tongues were fastened with masking tape to deaden noise. - wow we..
Oz

[b:6d48420dc4]The Room Arrangement Deserves Our Close Attention[/b:6d48420dc4]

All of these are guesses, but are educated guesses based on material from persons who participated in Landmark.

Concerned OZ and kittypaw have found the URL for a paper written by Drew Kopp a former LEC volunteer who had set up rooms for many such events and who wrote a scholarly analysis of the special features of the LEC seminar room set up, and how social intereactions are scripted in very specific ways during the seminar.

Kopp's 40 page analysis, entitled 'Invisible Bodies, the Disinherited, and the Production of Space in the Landmark Forum maybe accessed here.


www.u.arizona.edu/~kopp/Finalmat3.doc

Many enthusiasts/publicists for LEC emphasize LEC's verbal content and philosophy and are convinced that these transformed them.

But Kopps data and line of reasoning invite us to speculate that focusing exclusively on LEC's verbal content may keep us from examining from something very important: what Kopp describes as the room set up.

With Drew Kopps material in mind, Look at what Hope has told us in one of the posts above in this thread:

''What I found uncomfortable were the chairs and the lack of space between them. I'm small, and the people on either side of me were big. When we all sat back, I had their elbows in front of me. In order for this not to happen, they would have had to lean forward or turn in their chairs. So it was pretty uncomfortable.'

Hope wrote:

'Some people timidly asked if the AC could be turned down and their requests were met with some nonsense about how the people who run the forum know what works for most people, how they cannot adjust the thermostat to meet everyone's needs, blah, blah, blah. Within 15 minutes, however, the AC was turned down and many sighed a big sigh of relief. The interruption of the sighing, however, brought on another lecture from the leader.'

Dont go nuts trying to analyse the semantics. It is like trying to calculate the number of digits in PI--you'll go on forever and never reach an end to it.

If you consider Kopp's descriptions of the uncomfortable room arrangements, -you'll be able to spot similar layouts elsewhere and [b:2225ceab00]stay out of the room.[/b:2225ceab00]

THis is just my guess but from what Kopp has written and former participants have mentioned elsewhere on this thread, the effect of the LGAT on the participant's bodies may perhaps be as important, perhaps more important than its verbal material.

Hope told us that for her this was the most obnoxious thing--she wasnt told the that the schedule plus commute time would add up so that she'd be awake until 12:30 am and that doing the homework after the group would've kept her up until 1 pm.

Under those conditions, how can tired people remember that the leader told them 'Be back from dinner at 7:35 pm' and not '7:25 pm'?

As long as you're aware of this, you can recognize similar LGAT romm arrangements and *stay away from them* and warn your friends to *stay away.*

Just keep your eye on the stuff you can directly observe using your senses

Thanks again to Concerned OZ for finding this!

[www.u.arizona.edu]

[b:f1a91407d4]Invisible Bodies, the Disinherited, and the Production of Space in the Landmark Forum [/b:f1a91407d4]by Drew Kopp

Kopp's 40 page paper is the mental equivalent of a triathlon--gruelling, but well worth it. At the end, he comments:

'I would contend that this is a fundamental inauthenticity of Landmark Education, to use its own term to describe this dynamic and Landmark’s [u:f1a91407d4]lack of transparency [/u:f1a91407d4]of its operation.

'Landmark Education, in the form of any and all of its representatives, pretends to their customers, that participants can acquire this technology, its consequent powers, and then drop the tools that granted these powers at any given time in the future. For instance, the Course Leader, at the very end of the LF, will say, “I take it all back,” claiming that everything said in the course possesses absolutely nothing to believe in.

Yet, this is said against a background of [i:f1a91407d4]materially enforced re-conceptualizations [/i:f1a91407d4] (the special room set up, the scripted social interactions-Corboy) that have inscribed participants into a social space [i:f1a91407d4]the existence of which is completely tied up with continuing to participate with Landmark Education[/i:f1a91407d4].

Thus, Landmark’s technology compels participants to inscribe themselves further into more extensive and elaborate social spaces the organization offers participants to inhabit. This is the Faustian relationship with Mephistopheles, wherein desires are granted, [i:f1a91407d4]but only if the means used are promoted endlessly, ultimately gaining importance over the participant’s original aims. [/i:f1a91407d4]' (end of quote)