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pauker
As promised, Elena, I've been giving your questions more thought, and here's something that come up -- tonight, anyway.
The old famous saying that those who fail to understand history are doomed to repeat it flies in the face of Werner's notion that, once transformed, one is freed from one's history to create a new life. This is probably just the magical thinking that ensues when an encyclopedia salesman has a manic episode while driving over a Bay Area bridge. (But I digress.) It is a dangerous idea that one can just walk away from one's past 'stories/conversations' simply by having considered one's self transformed. In fact, it almost guarantees that shit from one's past WILL repeat itself.
I don't know the time line but I think that supposed revelation Werner Erhard had on the Golden Gate Bridge might just have been around the time he was immersed in scientology and his brain might have seized on L. Ron Hubbard's "Bridge To Total Freedom" [TM] and he could have imagined himself as some sort of super-scientological being for which he was being trained which also might explain why he adopted so much of L. Ron's "material" to start his own cult and was never able to dissociate himself from the ~mother cult~ schtick which is at the heart of Landmark still. Just my thought.
Ellen