Check list for potential difficulties: 1. Is there a charismatic leader who cannot be directly approached or criticized ? 2. Is the organization transparent or opaque ? 3. Do they state their claims about life, human nature, or "reality" as infallible or unquestionable truths ? Or do they frame their beliefs as mere hypotheses and imperfect understandings ? 4. Do they engage
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

It is fairly axiomatic that linguistic rigidty is the external symptom of cognitive rigidity which is the result of institutional calcification ... IMHO (and who knows, Siegmund Freud might even agree with me) ESTmark's language (both the words they use and the way they physically speak them... their.... utteranceness ) is a from of displaced masturbation .... Freud often wrote of t
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

Owwwww! My aching head!!!... "I have experienced being made wrong and not even for being a critic, but for communicating that I don't get a basic tenet. That's what started the whole trouble in my seminar that I got kicked out of! At session #2, the concept of 100%/0 was introduced. Now I totally get this model for relationships we are already in, but for a new relationship,
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

Alejandro "I have the equivalent to a dual degree in Philosophy" Reyes gives us a piece of his mind (why do ESTmark gerbils always seem to need to reinforce their credentials with PhD or references to their academic attainments... as if this confers a higher order of validity to their "story"... ahem... ): Alejandro informs us that : "It's amazing the clarity
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

Imagine trying to think straight about anything with your little chimp brain stuffed with imbecilic garbage like: "As our methodology and founding principals are outside of certain agreements shared by many in the Landmark community, it is not unusual for people coming from within those agreements to feel that something is wrong with this conversation, and coming from "something i
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

Harry was not altogether pleased with how they danced with the way the listening was spoken ? What have we here ? The semanitc equivalent of Chinse water torture ? Not to fear. Harry and the gang are busy working on the new product lineup: "We can see through your writings that each proposed reform has come out of actual negative experiences. While we continually strive to deliver
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

You would think that if any product with claims as grand as ESTmarks's was nearly as effective as the they purported it to be... no enrollment efforts would be needed. They're in denial about this gaping flaw in their own logic. Historically, those things that are profoundly effective and profoundly beneficial sell themselves... word of mouth travels exceeedingly rapidly.. ESTmark
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

Quote There's a recent (?) photo of the dude and I think it looks as though he's had some fat injections into his cheeks. Either he has a lousy dermatologist or he has Cushing's Syndrome.... like he would do OK selling Ginzu Knives and hot dog roasting gadgets...
Forum: "Cults," Sects, and "New Religious Movements"

Hooooo boooyyyyy.... quoth he: "If you require a way out of that dilemma, the way out is more ironic than the dilemma itself. The way to reinstate authenticity when you discover you're an imposter is to be an imposter. Choosing to be an imposter when you're an imposter creates the possibility of being authentic. It's pretending to be authentic when you're an impost
Forum: "Cults," Sects, and "New Religious Movements"

Quote It's an idiotic, simplistic, almost infantile concoction "designed" by a half-wit low-life slickster named Werner Erhard. Ummmm... this is a debatable point. John Rosenberg is a highly intelligent man with an extrordinary charisma and psysical drive. Regrettably, he is also a poorly educated man whose exotic pastiche of beliefs, notions, theories, quotable sound bites
Forum: "Cults," Sects, and "New Religious Movements"

A common feature of every LGAT, Cult, human potential MindTrip, whatever similar organism that I have encountered or heard of or read about is that they have a gambit of semanticizing all discussion, most particularly discussion that concerns the Dominant Organism... Pay close attention to the nature of this gambit and do not take your eye off the ball for a second... To semanticize
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

The poor thing has never left her ESTmark bubble since she wandered in... and what a shock to hear non-agreement ! Worse.... authentic non agreement ... how.... uh... how real ..... how unlike the mind numbing drone of rightness that is everything ESTmark...
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

QuoteMaggie and then a couple weeks later the boss kept yelling at me "WE REALLY WANT YOU TO GO. WE REALLY WANT YOU TO GO!". Werer Hans' magic spell for turning humans into parrots. Squawk!
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

Quote Then, one day, after that last promise, she came up with this: "Landmark is the best thing that ever happened to your life ... You just don't know it yet"! Ummmmm... that technique was "liberated" from NLP... who "liberated" it from Milton Erikson ... it falls into the category of Time Line work if you're of the NLP persuasion, and post hypnotic s
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

Isn't that fetching. What one often encounters in LGATish situations and cultish situations is psychic splitting which permits the mind to accept saying one thing and doing another.... on a behavioral level this is known as incongruity . Our evolutionary alarm system has been designed from the ground up to be exquisitely sensitive to congruity and incongruity. Incongruity gives us, ins
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

They are suffering deep inside. What they are suffering from is a sense of absence, an incompletion of the self... a persistant nagging of unfinished business, parents who were not emotionally available, either lack of early structure giving them a powerful hunger for structure OR a sterile, one dimensional excess of structure without emotional balance. There is a distinction between those w
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

Sure 'nuff. If you asked an ESTmarkian what motivated their continued involvment with the organization, we're talking about the serious players, the company boys and girls here, they give you the palatable answer.... Their high ideals, their love of this great project, completions, and so on... which well may be partially true... What they won't tell you, and what I d
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

Werner Erhard used to refer to women as "clocks with tits"... Harumph... how base of that awful man. ESTmark WernerBlather training involves a rather revolting amount of highly manipulative emotional validation, also referred to as "stroking", when you behave the way they want you to behave, and they have no qualms about shutting you out emotionally or using de-validat
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

Pay close attention to the structure of this game. It has two distinct parts. One is known as the Yes! set or Yes! ladder ... whereby one is asked a series of rhetorical questions, each one having the obvious answer of an enthusiastic Yes! ... which concludes with the "hook" ... goes like IF A=Yes!, and IF B=Yes!, and IF C=Yes!, then naturally D=Yes! .... How great is would be
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

I think they're have finally, at long last, awoken to the fact that they must either make significant improvements, which won't be easy, considering how deeply addicited they are to their collective identity, or they are inevitably going to be blown off the map by the rising tide of NLP... the reason I say this is because NLP is rapidly generalizing into the culture at large, and radi
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

There no conflict between discussing their stuff over here and engaging them over there... when you think about it the most genuinely powerful conversation you could have with them is the conversation that assists them in making core level changes... they are no exception to the rule of senior managment anxiety about the unruly upstarts, they people at the top have a great deal more invested (in
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

The oddest thing about this dynamic organization that is always reinventing themselves on another level of sourcitude and out of body grooviness is that..... this verbal diarrhea sounds exactly like the verbal diarrhea they were spewing 20 years ago... their "powerful conversations" and their powerful conversations about their powerful conversations are the same mind numbing intellect
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

egad... my brain is imploding: "One final note to you Jennifer. You may be be as smart or smarter than every forum leader, they are just more trained in distinctions, it doesn't matter to bring ideas and suggestions. Thinking they must have already thought of that is just suppressing yourself and letting your conversation take over." Uhhhhh.... thinking=suppressing yourse
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

back at genius central: "I know you took TRS a long time ago (20 years?), and you appear >fixated on how Wrong your leader was. I have shared in detail that the >TRS offered today differs considerably from back then, but you don't >acknowledge any part of that. You are still complaining to whoever will >listen about what a bum deal you got, and I don&#
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

and this dazzling piece of logic: "To say that car factories produce cars and Landmark produces transformed lives as not to say that Landmark participants come out having four wheels and going beep beep....." Really ? You don't say .
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

oh, right.... Bwahahahaha.... Velcome to Transylvania, my child.... "Guests add value to the impact of the course on the participants by being there and inducing the participants to call themselves forth in sharing. Guests especially add value to the course for the individuals who invited them. It's like sharing a beautiful sunset with a friend. It really adds to one's own exp
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

This is simply delightful, a Landmarkian quasi-reformer who, quelle suprise manages to talk out of both sides of his mouth while thinking he's just sunk on in the 18th hole of truth: "What is intended to redeem the practice is that over the weeks you are to transmute the self-hyped excitemnt into genuine enthusiasm.. It's .. fake it and then...make it. I've always b
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

well, at least it wasn't for the latest Scientology transporter unit-coffee grinder-Xenu vaporizer... BTW our good friends down at the org office appear to be testy over all the bad publicity they're receiving... this just in from Xenu.net: "Scientology is up to their old "fair game" tactics again. For the uninitiated, "fair game" is a policy developed be
Forum: Celebrities associated with "cult-like" groups

Screenwriters know that there aren't all that many stories in the whole world, usually every new fable is a rework of an old fable... and the art of a good movie is the skill with which you make the Same Old Shit feel like a brand new "breakthru" experience... the sophists were running the same rackets in ancient Athens... they all study each other, they all steal from each other,
Forum: Large Group Awareness Training, "Human Potential"

Meanwhile... Mission Impossible III... The New York Times concludes the review with this paragraph: "Although he slams into stationary objects with his customary zeal, the usually dependable Mr. Cruise is off his game here, sabotaged by the misguided attempt to shade his character with gray. The domestication of Ethan Hunt may have seemed like a good idea, a humanizing touch, perhaps,
Forum: Celebrities associated with "cult-like" groups