Question for the curious - what does the "advanced course" involve? I know pretty much what the basic Landmark Forum is. Many of the reported breakdowns I've read about online were after the advanced course - is it more confrontational, intense, or what? I know Landmark took out the more confrontational aspects of the old est training but did they put that in the advanced course instead?

Also, I note with some amusement that the Church of $cientology offers an "est repair rundown" that claims to undo any damage caused by est/The Forum/Landmark. Not that I'd be inclined to take anything offered by $cientology seriously, but does anyone know exactly what this involves? Going from Landmark to $cientology sounds like an "out of the frying pan into the fire" thing to me though.

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wayfarer
Question for the curious - what does the "advanced course" involve? I know pretty much what the basic Landmark Forum is. Many of the reported breakdowns I've read about online were after the advanced course - is it more confrontational, intense, or what? I know Landmark took out the more confrontational aspects of the old est training but did they put that in the advanced course instead?

Also, I note with some amusement that the Church of $cientology offers an "est repair rundown" that claims to undo any damage caused by est/The Forum/Landmark. Not that I'd be inclined to take anything offered by $cientology seriously, but does anyone know exactly what this involves? Going from Landmark to $cientology sounds like an "out of the frying pan into the fire" thing to me though.

In the advanced course the main thing is to prove that nothing real exists. You come down to that what people think is real is actually only agreements between people. If 2 people agree that a chair is a chair it becomes real for those 2 persons. But it does not really exist but these 2 people think it does.

You get a lot of training in enrollment - if I remember correctly now you get some salestraining that is more specialized than what you got during the forum when it was all a matter of just getting people to the graduation.

You write down your whole life story with all your failings (mostly) then you read that story to another person until you start to see it is just a story that you have made up. If something bad happened to you in your childhood you have trapped yourself in your interpretations around that incident. You have built your self image around that story - which of course is not real at all. It has been agreement with yourself. So you in a sence become CLEAR as in scientology. Then of course you have to take more courses to become even CLEARER - just as in Scientology.

People go nuts around these "revelations" - some go into psychosis - most people become very high and feel good.
Making people high and feeling good is a standard way for cults to make people think that what they are experiencing is good for them. Actually this high feeling is not very good for you. You become a junkie looking for getting high again. I redid the forum course a few times to try to get high again. It didn't happen.

The downside of being high is of course depression. I think this is what happened to my friend that ended up killing himself.

I did like the advanced course and enrolled my brother on the graduation night. I was so high and did some "powerful" sharing on stage and my brother didn't hesitate one moment to enroll.

Landmark leaders saw me doing that and the told me I had leadership capabilities and enrolled me into the first step up the ladder towards becoming a top dog leader in landmark. The course was the IFLP - introduction to the forum leader program.

nettie
p-d off but ok - informing the public about the evil deeds of landmark education



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 04/20/2008 01:29PM by nettie.

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nettie

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wayfarer
Question for the curious - what does the "advanced course" involve? I know pretty much what the basic Landmark Forum is. Many of the reported breakdowns I've read about online were after the advanced course - is it more confrontational, intense, or what? I know Landmark took out the more confrontational aspects of the old est training but did they put that in the advanced course instead?

Also, I note with some amusement that the Church of $cientology offers an "est repair rundown" that claims to undo any damage caused by est/The Forum/Landmark. Not that I'd be inclined to take anything offered by $cientology seriously, but does anyone know exactly what this involves? Going from Landmark to $cientology sounds like an "out of the frying pan into the fire" thing to me though.

In the advanced course the main thing is to prove that nothing real exists. You come down to that what people think is real is actually only agreements between people. If 2 people agree that a chair is a chair it becomes real for those 2 persons. But it does not really exist but these 2 people think it does.

You get a lot of training in enrollment - if I remember correctly now you get some salestraining that is more specialized than what you got during the forum when it was all a matter of just getting people to the graduation.

You write down your whole life story with all your failings (mostly) then you read that story to another person until you start to see it is just a story that you have made up. If something bad happened to you in your childhood you have trapped yourself in your interpretations around that incident. You have built your self image around that story - which of course is not real at all. It has been agreement with yourself. So you in a sence become CLEAR as in scientology. Then of course you have to take more courses to become even CLEARER - just as in Scientology.

People go nuts around these "revelations" - some go into psychosis - most people become very high and feel good.
Making people high and feeling good is a standard way for cults to make people think that what they are experiencing is good for them. Actually this high feeling is not very good for you. You become a junkie looking for getting high again. I redid the forum course a few times to try to get high again. It didn't happen.

The downside of being high is of course depression. I think this is what happened to my friend that ended up killing himself.

I did like the advanced course and enrolled my brother on the graduation night. I was so high and did some "powerful" sharing on stage and my brother didn't hesitate one moment to enroll.

Landmark leaders saw me doing that and the told me I had leadership capabilities and enrolled me into the first step up the ladder towards becoming a top dog leader in landmark. The course was the IFLP - introduction to the forum leader program.

nettie
p-d off but ok - informing the public about the evil deeds of landmark education

If someone wants to put together a rationalization for lying, it could be clever to say that nothing exists and everything comes from agreement. Then any statement can be posed as true if you can get enough people to confirm it.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/21/2008 12:18AM by caligari.

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wayfarer
Question for the curious - what does the "advanced course" involve? I know pretty much what the basic Landmark Forum is. Many of the reported breakdowns I've read about online were after the advanced course - is it more confrontational, intense, or what? I know Landmark took out the more confrontational aspects of the old est training but did they put that in the advanced course instead?

Nettie's right - the whole point of the AC is to persuade you that nothing is actually real and that everything is an agreement, which means you can challenge it. I was one of the people who had a brief, but frightening, episode of psychosis during the course, just after this was revealed. I then turned into an zealot. Like you, I had enjoyed the Forum and was felt I had benefited from it. I was persuaded to go for the next step but I really wish I hadn't. The aftermath of the psychosis during the Advanced Course was with me for a number of years, I spent a lot of time at Landmark (seminars + training to lead introductions + coaching) trying to figure out where it had gone wrong.

My advice to Lekkie is - take whatever you got out of the Forum, thank your lucky stars you weren't harmed, and stay the hell away from any future involvement.

Nettie,

Thank you for your description of the Advanced Forum. I only did the Forum, but my sociopathic doc did many courses, and I recall him speaking of the things you described. I had a horrible dissociation and he furthered that by saying what I was going through was growth, that the things I was letting go weren't real. At that point, I still had no idea he was heavily involved in Landmark, and I really had no idea what Landmark was. He actually used the words and phrases you described, about things not being real, and used an apple as the example. "Apple is a sound the comes out of your mouth." It is what we agree to call it, but an apple really doesn't exist, because if you dissect it, you have the seed and the core and the flesh and the skin. And if you dissect all that as far as you can, then you cannot distinguish any of it from anything else. At that point in my naivete, I thought I was dealing with a brilliant scientist and kept going back for more.

it is really scary - you do this disection of your whole life and you see that it was all mistakenly interpreted by in a lot of cases - which in a sense is true. People in general have all sorts of problems in their life that they cannot seem to shake. They are stuck in what a landmarker would call a vicious circle.

The problem with landmark is that they do it way too fast. It becomes an unbearable stress on the brain to have these revelations - even if I can see now that they are just some technique - I thought at the time I did it that "Yes, this is it - I have figured it all out - now I want to help the rest of the world" - any similarities to Tom Cruise stupidities are intentional :-)

So instead of living in your old vicious circle you come to live in a landmark viciouis circle. You have to continue to take courses to stay high and keep the new thought system running. If the new thought system was a good one it would probably be useful. But it is only useful as long as you apply it fully.

Here's how it worked while being an introduction leader; I had to wake up in the morning and read a text that would make my mind think in the way a forum leader would think. Forum leaders were the standard to meet. So it might sound something like "I am the possibility for unity among men". That possibility was now your reality that you would live your day from. Meaning that wherever there was not unity among men you would have to step in and do something about it - if you didn't you would not be in alignement with your word (your word creates who you are) so you loose power.

It becomes a vicious circle where you become obsessed. There of course are different levels of obsession with living your life as "your word". A lot of people that go on staff to fulfill their destiny burn out quickly because the work schedule of a staff member is set up to be impossible to fullfill.

On person who worked at the office when I started my career in landmark got up at 4 am in the morning to sell sandwiches at the train station - she then went to landmark at around 9 and worked till 10-11-12 pm.

I realised later that she wasn't paid by landmark and when she asked the center manager to become a paid employee he said no - so she left being very angry with landmark and never returned.
This is an example how they use people to the max. They don't care if you burn out or develop mental problems as long as you are to any use for them - this will eventually be the downfall of landmark. Their "shop" is setup to fail - as it has done in my country - they have left.

nettie
nothing more to add here at the moment - please enjoy your life!

Its amazing how similiar the responses are from this LGAT to the one that i attended.

nettie - which country are you from? France? I looked up some stuff on this website, sounds like they packed up and left France.

I am in the United States - there are labor laws here that no one, including Landmark Education, can violate when it comes to /paid/ labor - I stress the _paid_ part, because I do not think there's anything out there regulating volunteer time. I have volunteered for United Way, Red Cross, etc - they won't turn you away either if you have time on your hands with nothing better to do, and they too would want your contribution as much as any other organization that relies on human (time) contribution.

Does Landmark provide any sort of kickbacks for signing up people into the Forum? I was told no one gets paid unless you are a Staff member - which I might add is a wise choice in terms of cutting cost, but then again, one should not agree to volunteer their time there if your desire is to be paid. If it's money you are after, then there's plenty of part time jobs in addition to a regular job you could take, if you want extra cash... So I'm unclear why anyone would give up their free time if they saw no value in being there?

Thanks for the overview of the Advanced Course - I haven't done it, but while I was in attendance of the Forum, some of the stuff that had been haunting me for years (since I was basically 4 or 5, did resurface, e.g. an experience I had with a friend of mine telling me to 'f--k off' even though we were best friends at the time, had remained in the "back of my mind" for a long time. Until the Forum I would always repress this, and made it seem insignificant because it didn't make sense to me to be perturbed over something that happened 25+ years ago, but something funny "happened" while in attendance - I got to see how other people's lives were also similarly impacted by even nastier incidents (compared to mine) in their childhood, and as a result of those incidents they felt they either weren't lovable, or that they couldn't trust other people or that they wouldn't play anyone's game so they become isolated, depressed, all around negative with everyone in their life, etc. The friend who told me about the Forum had found it to be a relief because he too was EXTREMELY negative, and guess where he picked it up from? His dad (who is now dead due to a 5 year battle with cancer- makes you wonder if his overall mood in life had anything to do with it... and I usually have seen people who are super negative about life/people in general, can get very ill, in the physical sense too)

So in all honesty, after the Forum, I had to think about what happened between me and my friend at age 4 or 5 (I dont remember exactly when) - and why I thought I'd forgotten all about it, yet in the Forum, it seemed very real all over again....

This is still unresolved in my mind, and based on what you told me about the Advanced Course, I (think) I have developed an agreement with myself that this was traumatic for me - which it was, but I don't see how that has any bearing on my life right now. I mean, my wife tells me I'm emotionally detached sometimes, but wtf does she know, right?.. :)

I dunno - it's still a blur to me as to what happened in the Forum, which is why what people get out of the Advanced Course peaked my interest and me wanting to do it, but you said I should duck and run for the hills.... :(.

What do I do now... I wonder. How do I shake the impact of that stupid little break up between me and my friend?

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AngelofDark
Its amazing how similiar the responses are from this LGAT to the one that i attended.

that is probably because most LGATs come "into existence" by ripping off est/landmark technology. Possibly ex landmark forum leaders who left and started their own business - anyone know anything about this? Or are they all ripoffs from scientology?