On the Landmark Forum and its earlier incarnation as The est Training and The Forum; the philosophy of Werner Erhard; and the dynamics of these LGAT / Large Group Awareness Trainings (including Landmark, Lifespring, Humanus, Actualizations, Avatar, Access, et al.)

© Copyright 2008 by Timothy Conway, Ph.D.

NOTE: Part I is my overall assessment, both positive and also “concerned,” about LGATs, specifically est and the Landmark Forum. Part II (scroll down about 40% of this page for Part II) is, for the sake of “informed consent” for potential consumers of these LGAT events, a compilation of revelatory excerpts by several different reporters from their media articles about the Landmark Forum, est, and other LGAT psycho-trainings.

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Part I.

A major segment of the “human potential movement” are the LGAT or Large Group Awareness Training “psycho-cults.” The largest and most famous of these was est (Erhard Seminars Training), set up in 1971 by Werner Erhard (née Jack Rosenberg), later, in Jan. 1985, re-named The Forum, and then, when major legal and PR problems arose over several serious allegations of verbal and physical abuse and rape by Erhard, the Forum was sold to his brother Harry Rosenberg and other est/Forum employees in 1991 and renamed The Landmark Forum. Werner still gains substantial financial benefits from Landmark, and has all along been a primary consultant to Landmark, and is the source of all its major ideas and methods. The license for his ideas and methods will revert back to Werner in 2009 (—see Traci Hukill article for the San Jose Metro, quoted below in Part II). Werner was chiefly influenced by Napoleon Hill, Maxwell Maltz’s psycho-cybernetics, hypnosis, Subud, encounter group training like Leadership Dynamics, existentialist philosophy, Gestalt psychotherapy, Alan Watts, Zen Buddhism, Mind Dynamics, and Scientology.

Werner’s interesting life is filled with a contrasting mix of personality strengths and weaknesses, integrity and cunning, insights and strategems, triumphs and trouble, help and harm. May he and all beings be lavishly blessed and divinely liberated! (Note: A very fine if rather uncritical biography of Erhard, with a quite sophisticated discussion of his way of transformation, which has influenced so much of the LGAT scene since Werner, is William Warren Bartley III’s still useful book, Werner Erhard: The Transformation of a Man, the Founding of est, NY: Clarkson Potter, 1978.)

Werner Erhard and his colleagues used to be quite open and informative about the nature and aims of their LGAT work. For instance, this is how they billed The est Training in a 1981 pamphlet, “Questions People Ask About The est Training” (emphasis added in boldface):

“The est Training is an educational experience which creates an opportunity for people to realize their potential to transform the quality of their lives. It is about an expansion of that area of life called aliveness—an expansion of the experience of happiness, love, health, and full expression…. The training operates on the principle that there is only one thing powerful enough to transform the quality of your life in just four days—you…. Our lives can be said to have two components or aspects: the content or facts and circumstances of our lives (including our positions, points of view, information, opinions, beliefs, concepts, rules, and assumptions) and our context—the way in which we hold these facts, circumstances and positions. The training doesn’t change the content of anyone’s life, nor does it change what anyone knows. It deals with the context or way in which we hold these facts, circumstances and positions…. While it might take forever to alter the facts or content of one’s life, it actually only takes an instant to transform the context in which those facts are held—and to realize fully that the ability to transform is actually available to us at any moment. During the 60 hours of the training, people have the opportunity to experience that instant. Transformation occurs as a recontextualization—from a context where you are at the effect of ‘things’ to a context where you are the source (‘at cause’) of ‘things.’… Knowing that you can choose, that you have the power to transform the quality of your life—at every moment, and in all circumstances—is what The est Training is about…. Life is a roller coaster. ‘Positive thinking’ tries to keep in place the ‘ups’ and to minimize, ignore or disguise the ‘downs.’ The training is about life being the way it is—down when it’s down and up when it’s up—and acknowledge the truth about it. The truth, fully recognized and acknowledged, is an enormously liberating and lightening experience. … [Q: If I ‘get it,’ will it last?] The answer is ‘no’ and ‘yes.’ ‘Getting it’ is not simply a ‘peak experience.’ Ultimately, it is knowing from your own experience, that, whatever your circumstances, you have the power to transform the quality of your life at any moment of time. Thus, transformation or enlightenment is not merely a one-time event, but something which continues to unfold and be available to you as a part of everyday living. Every position or point of view we have can be said to have a ‘cost’ (reckoned in terms of aliveness) and a ‘payoff.’ ‘Getting it’ means being able to discover when you have been maintaining (or are stuck with) a position which costs you more in aliveness than it’s worth, realizing you are the source of that position, and being able to choose to give up that position or hold it in a way that expands the quality of your life. Living becomes a continuing and expanding discovery of positions or barriers to your and others’ aliveness, with the attendant opportunity to handle those positions and barriers…. The trainer spends part of each training day presenting data. The people in the training are encouraged to ask questions about the data, and much of each day is devoted to this communication between the trainer and the people in the training. The training is not like an encounter group and is not group therapy or psychotherapy.[Note from Timothy: there are legal reasons why this cannot be called psychotherapy because the American Psychological Association (APA) has a patent on this term.] … Another aspect of the training consists of ‘processes’ and exercises… usually directly related to the data presented the same day…. The training is about a dimension of life beyond success. It is about realizing your true potential for producing aliveness and satisfaction in your life…. Your willingness to be there and your commitment to transform the quality of your life is all you need…. Not everyone ‘enjoys’ every moment of the training and it is realistic to be willing to experience joy, laughter, boredom, anger—the whole range of emotions. Ultimately, enlightenment is about ‘lightening up.’ That result is enjoyable.”

Here are excerpts from printed material in 2008 from Landmark Education on The Landmark Forum, which, though Landmark personnel will deny it or rationalize it away, is effectively a continuation of est's major insights and methods: “The Landmark Forum is a global educational enterprise recognized for a unique educational technology that delivers unprecedented results in a very short amount of time.” Landmark operates in 25 countries around the world, with 41 major centers in more than 125 cities, and has seen “nearly one million people on five continents… participate in Landmark’s programs.” It is “an employee-owned company, with more than 650 professionally trained course leaders worldwide”—though likely not even 1/10th of that last number are actually fully paid trainers.

The LF pamphlet continues:

“The Landmark Forum, the heart of the Landmark Curriculum… provides participants with a transformation, a fundamental breakthrough in their ability to relate to life with new freedom and power…. Landmark Education’s curriculum and programs are specifically designed to bring about positive and permanent shifts in the quality of your life. These shifts are the direct cause for a new and unique kind of freedom and power. The freedom to be absolutely at ease no matter where you are, who you’re with, or what the circumstance—the power to be in action effectively in those areas of your life that are important to you…. The Landmark method is more like coaching than teaching, more like dialogue than lecture … more like acquiring skills than learning tips, rules and information…. The Landmark Forum is not a lecture, motivational techniques, or therapy, but a powerful, accelerated learning experience…. Graduates of Landmark’s programs report immediate, significant, and unexpected positive shifts in their lives. For many people, dramatic results like these in such a short period of time seem difficult to believe.”

Note that all of the above language from Landmark Education on its basic introductory pamphlet on The Landmark Forum is quite nonspecific, i.e., lacking specificity about what particular skills or shifts or transformations will occur. Such language is enticingly “hypnotically suggestive language,” in the style of Milton Erickson’s practice of hypnotherapy.

At the "Media Q&A" of their website, sublink "educational methodology," there is some info which was more extensively elaborated in the older Q&A pamphlet about The est Training. This is the more minimalist version of what one finds today with Landmark's description of its methods and aims: "While conventional education methods focus on content (adding facts, rules, or skills to our knowledge), the Landmark method deals with context - the framework(s) in which content can exist. Whenever we're limited in life, there is something - a context or framework - that we are blind to and that is holding that limitation in place. Landmark's technology allows you to create breakthroughs in a two-step process in which you: • Uncover and examine the blind spots or context holding you back in your life. • Find out where your current context originated and address it for what it really is. Having completed these two steps, a new realm of possibility is available to you. The constraints from the past disappear. Your view of life, your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions, change - and the change is immediate, dramatic, and without effort. It is a breakthrough."

Landmark also makes available a printed brochure and an identical webpage version of the "Syllabus" for its entry-level course, The Landmark Forum. This Syllabus does a good job to lay out an abstract description of what the three days of training and the follow-up 3-hour Tuesday evening will involve, though this Syllabus is predictably silent about the confrontational and emotionally "whipsawing" style of delivery, and the high-pressure tactics to conform and to participate in the corporate growth of Landmark, as actually experienced by Forum attendees.

The link to the webpage for Landmark's 2,100-word airy and cheery text for its Syllabus is here.

Landmark, like its former incarnation as est, emphasizes in its printed literature and on its website that “dozens of psychiatrists, psychologists, clergy members, and other professionals ... have concluded that Landmark's programs are not psychological, cult-like, religious, or sociological in nature.”

But many of us disagree. Whether they call it “psychology” or not, Landmark and other LGATs are clearly working with the psyche, and with cognitive therapy insights and techniques in changing experiential contexts, attitudes, perceptions, reactions, and re-languaging people's experience. And, though Landmark and other LGATs are not presented in any kind of religious way, there is definitely a metaphysics and an “ultimate” spiritual viewpoint that is involved, an idealism-philosophy of awareness, self and world that is promoted (e.g., “you create your world”). And whereas a number of “dysfunctional cult” characteristics are indeed not deployed by Landmark (nor by many other LGATs), some other dysfunctional cult characteristics are obviously present to great degree. For instance, Dr. Arthur Deikman, a spiritually minded psychiatrist and cult-expert in northern California, has identified...

"four basic behaviors found in extreme form in [dysfunctional] cults: compliance with the group, dependence on a leader, devaluing the outsider, and avoiding dissent. These behaviors are not distinct and independent but interrelated. In my view, they arise in part from what I refer to as the dependency dream, the regressive wish for security that uses the family as a model, creating an authoritarian leadership structure (the parent) and a close-knit, exclusive group (the children)...." (Arthur Deikman, The Wrong Way Home: Uncovering the Patterns of Cult Behavior in American Society, Beacon, 1990/1994, p. 48.)

These four cult behaviors, especially #1, 2, and 4 at the entry-level course, and all four behaviors at higher levels of involvement, are, as we shall see, vividly present in LGATs including Landmark Education.

Beyond these dysfunctional cult characteristics—and many more could be identified, such as the use of coercive persuasion, deliberate creation of a psychological sense of incompleteness, insidious use of new language to form insider-outsider dynamics, etc., etc.— the term “cult” was originally defined and is still defined by a few persons today (including myself) quite neutrally as simply “any social group gathered around a charismatic authority figure.” With its (usually quite authoritarian) authority-figure in the person of the Landmark trainer(s), and the behind-the-scenes looming presence of Werner Erhard himself—father-founder figure and license-holder of all the "technology"— Landmark is obviously a cult in the original, neutral definition of the word cultus.

LGATs like Landmark tend, at their entry-course level (e.g., The Landmark Forum), to take the form of an introductory night (heavy on “sharing” of testimonials) followed by an intensive entry-level course structured as three 15-hour days (e.g., 9:00 a.m. to midnight) over a long weekend (Friday-Sunday), usually with a follow-up evening meeting for a few or several hours (usually Monday or Tuesday night). (The old est training was 60 hours over two weekends.)

LGATs promote a non-religious “ultimate” experience in the context of a doctrine or philosophy of authenticity and integrity, improved personal effectiveness and responsibility, total commitment, and greater self-awareness. The attendee of an LGAT is guided to live fully in the present moment by dropping the past. (Werner Erhard’s old saying was that everyone is literally “an imposter,” someone with a fictitious past, “fictitious” because “nothing has ever really happened.”) Basic cognitive therapy techniques are deployed to show people how their problematic interpretations of past/present experiences, their "stories," can be distinguished from the experiences themselves, and these interpretations or "stories" are confining them to certain repetitive patters of emotion and behavior. One is invited or pressured to clear all such beliefs and stories. Our attitude toward whatever happens is emphasized as the crucial ingredient in our life-quality, beyond what actually happens in our life.

In short, as earlier specified by The est Training FAQs pamphlet and current Landmark material, how you contextualize the facts of your life is more important than the specific factual contents of your life. Moreover, as Werner explained to early est personnel (as related in W.W. Bartley’s book), The est Training’s purpose is to transform the trainee’s ability to experience, so that s/he can observe his own positionality, and the point is not to lack a position, but to not be “positional,” that is, not be attached to whatever position one does adopt at any particular moment.

Some of Werner’s sayings from his tiny book of aphorisms, If God Had Meant Man to Fly, He Would Have Given Him Wings--or: Up to Your Ass in Aphorisms (1973), obviously very influenced by his exposure to Alan Watts, Zen, Fritz Perls’ Gestalt Therapy, and L.Ron Hubbard’s Scientology, are provided here to give an idea of the ultimate spiritual philosophy behind the “experience” provided by est, Landmark Forum, and kindred LGATs:

“The truth doesn’t mean anything. It just is.” “If you experience it, it’s the truth. The same thing believed is a lie.” “In life, ‘understanding’ is the booby prize.” “Obviously the truth is what’s so. Not so obviously, it’s also so what.” “You don’t have to go looking for love when it is where you come from.” “Life is a ripoff when you expect to get what you want. Life works when you choose what you got.” “It’s much easier to ride the horse in the direction he’s going.” “Perfection is a state in which things are the way they are and are not the way they are not. As you can see, this universe is perfect. Don’t lie about it.” “You’re god in your universe. You caused it. You pretended not to cause it so that you could play in it, and you can remember you caused it any time you want to.” “If you could really accept that you weren’t ok, you could stop proving you were ok. If you could stop proving that you were ok, you could get that it was ok not to be ok. If you could get that it was ok not to be ok, you could get that you were ok the way you are. You’re ok, get it?” “If you’re not all right the way you are, it takes a lot of effort to get better. Realize you’re all right the way you are, and you’ll get better naturally.” “This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what’s so. A master is someone who found out.” “The end justifies the means, or it doesn’t.” “If God told you exactly what it was you were to do, you would be happy doing it no matter what it was. What you’re doing is what God wants you to do. Be happy.”

On April 23, 1981, there occurred an interesting interview with Werner Erhard and transpersonal psychology-oriented members of the Center for the Study of New Religious Movements, including psychotherapists John Welwood, Dick Anthony, Roger Walsh, et al. The interview was reprinted as “The est Training: An Interview with Werner Erhard,” in D. Anthony, B. Ecker, & K. Wilber, Spiritual Choices: The Problem of Recognizing Authentic Paths to Inner Transformation, NY: Paragon House, 1987, pp. 109-31, with a post-interview analysis by the editors (pp. 131-37). Werner tussled with the interviewers over some basic notions of “enlightenment,” indicating that he comes from a “sudden enlightenment” view rather than holding to a “gradualist” position. It is also clear that his notion of “enlightenment” is more akin to the Zen idea of the initial enlightenment or kensho that the positional ego-self is not any solid reality. Werner seems to know only vaguely about the Zen ideal of anuttara-samyak-sambodhi, the supreme, unexcelled (irreversible) enlightenment, which brings all virtues and attainments in its wake.

Some of the exchanges and revelations are worth quoting here, with occasional comments by myself in brackets:

Welwood: What I’m trying to get at is your view of whether or not what people get from the training is somehow equivalent to what in Zen, for instance, would be called enlightenment. [No distinction is made here by Welwood between temporary kensho and full anuttara-samyak-sambodhi, but he seems to be suggesting the latter.]

Erhard: Yes, it is. Yes.

Welwood: It’s equivalent. You could get that in two weekends? [Note: the old est training occurred over two sequential weekends.]

Erhard: Yes, it is equivalent, and no, you can’t get it in two weekends. If it takes two weekends, you didn’t get enlightened. Enlightenment does not take two weekends. Enlightenment takes no time. … I know that lots of people are infuriated by the suggestion that enlightenment is possible without long practice and great struggle. I consider the notion of the necessity of practice and struggle to be nothing more than a notion….

Welwood: Well, the Buddhists, for example, would say that your true nature is enlightened already, but nonetheless, you still have to practice because there’s a long path to realization. [Note: Welwood is no doubt referring to Buddhist tradition’s recognition of all the various attainments of the highest level bodhisattvas and the super-knowledges of a true Buddha, as well as progressive freedom from the subtlest fetters and forms of bondage.] We can act as though we’re enlightened, but there’s still some kind of realization that has to happen, over a long period. You can even have enlightenment experiences, but they’re not particularly trusted.

Erhard: I agree with everything you’ve said, and I’m not simply being nice about it. What you said actually reflects my own experience and my own observations. At the same time, I know it’s possible to put the end of the process at the beginning, and then do the process. [Note: This is an old Zen idea: get enlightened—free of the notion of a separation self, the first fetter identified by the Buddha—and then work out liberation from all the other fetters and cultivation of all the virtues and bodhisattva attainments.] … The one thing people will not give up to get enlightened is the idea that they’re not enlightened. That’s the big hold-out, not anything else.

Welwood: In the traditions, there’s a lot of warning about thinking that you’re enlightened, that that’s one of the greatest dangers of all.

Erhard: Discussing enlightenment or thinking about enlightenment is not enlightenment. In fact, we don’t talk about enlightenment in the training very much at all. We do talk about it, but not much.

Anthony: I’d always heard that the training does seem to claim that it provides something that is the equivalent of enlightenment, and is just as serious an experience, just as serious or valuable a state as is provided by Zen or Hindu traditions, and I thought that that was implausible….

Erhard: Well, I have never said that, nor would I say it.

Anthony: But when I went through the training…

Erhard: Nor would I say the opposite was true. [Werner is being a bit slippery here, trying to avoid committing to a view, and trying to sound paradoxical like a Zen master.]

Anthony: When I went through the training, the trainer did in fact seem to be saying that…. And it was the understanding of the other people in the training whom I talked to, that that man [the trainer] was telling us that what was happening to us was enlightenment, and was just as genuine an enlightenment as happened in any Zen monastery or up in the Himalayas, and that there were no degrees of enlightenment; it was enlightenment. Now, that seems like an outrageous claim to me; much of what goes on in that training seems outrageous to me….

Erhard: … The point is this: I think that discussions about enlightenment are useless…. What’s all this conversation about?… The structure of your questions and our conversation doesn’t allow for enlightenment…. [Shunryu] Suzuki Roshi wrote a book called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. He said if you are enlightened, then you’re out doing what enlightens people. Enlightenment is not a stage you reach, and your statements seem to come from the idea that enlightenment is a place you reach. There’s no such thing as enlightenment to get to.

Welwood: Where my question comes from is my perception of some people I’ve seen…

Erhard: The arrogance.

Welwood: Yes, and smugness, like: “We’ve done it. This is it, you don’t need to do any of that other stuff. This is the whole thing.”

Erhard: … The arrogance that you perceive, I think, is there. The degree to which you think it’s there, I don’t think it’s there. That is to say, I don’t think it’s something to be overly concerned about…. It’s like [the old Zen story about] the stink of Zen. There’s the stink of est. The question is not whether the stink exists, but whether it’s pernicious and whether it is long-lasting. As far as I can tell, the answer is no to both questions. I keep watching, because there’s always the possibility for the answer to become yes. As to the discussion about the real nature of it, is it really enlightenment—yes, it’s really enlightenment. So is sitting in a room. Here. This is enlightenment. You think I’m just saying that. I actually mean it. You think that’s some philosophy. It isn’t. I think many enlightenment games are pointless because they’re all about getting enlightened. Getting enlightened is a cheat, because the more you do of that, the more the message is that you aren’t enlightened. Clearly, the practice is necessary. The practice of enlightenment is necessary, but it can be done from being enlightened, rather than getting enlightened. When you do the practice from being enlightened, then each one of the steps becomes a step in the expression of the enlightenment. [This is an old Soto Zen Buddhist idea, in contrast to the Rinzai Zen idea of practicing to become enlightened.]… I know it might not make sense to you, but it is possible that people who have been through the training are actually enlightened and then, from being enlightened, they may go through the steps of achieving enlightenment. [Note: does Werner here mean "full" enlightenment--anuttara-samyak-sambodhi?] I know you don’t believe that. I don’t want you to believe it. I do want you to allow that it’s possible. (Spiritual Choices, pp. 112-18)

Erhard: The training is sixty hours long, done in four days of roughly fifteen hours each…. I’ll briefly describe a few parts of the training: …The first day is designed to give people an opportunity to recognize that they have lots of pretense in their lives, and that they’re pretending they don’t…. In the first part of the second day, people see that there’s a distinction between concepts about living and the experience of living, and they discover that they have not been experiencing life; they’ve been conceptualizing life…. The last portion of the second day is called the “danger process.” About twenty-five trainees stand at the front of the room, facing the other 225, with the instruction to do nothing but just be there, just standing. While standing there, of course, they begin to notice all of the thoughts, fears, concerns, pretenses, and the like which they carry with them all the time…. The people who are standing up end up doing everything up there except nothing, and in the process they start to see that. The process is very, very useful for them. It becomes clear to them that they’ve got an act, a mechanism, a collection of behaviors and actions and feelings and thoughts that may not be who they really are after all…. They realize that what’s driving their behaviors is their fear of people…. The joke is that other people look frightening to you because they’re frightened…. (pp. 119-20)

Paul Reisman: During the est training, the trainer frequently calls the trainees “assholes.” [In the Landmark Forum, people are frequently called “disgusting” by the trainer.] Doesn’t calling people assholes tell them that they’re not enlightened, or don’t you intend it that way?

Erhard: … No, calling people anything doesn’t necessarily make any statement about their state of enlightenment. If I call you an asshole in the context of your being enlightened, it enlightens you. If I call you an asshole to get you enlightened because you aren’t enlightened, it endarkens you. … (pp. 116-17)

The training has acquired a reputation of harshness, and in some cases crudeness…. In all these accounts, one thing is always left out: the compassion in the training. I know—because I’m the guy who trained the people who are leading the training—that the training is done with absolute compassion, and that toughness, when and if it occurs, including calling people assholes, comes from a deep respect for people, from an intention to get straight with them, with absolutely no intention to demean them. As a matter of fact, in terms of results, people are not demeaned; they are enhanced. The training is done with what might be called ruthless compassion, but it’s done with compassion. And it’s done with a real sense of the dignity of the human beings… a really deep kind of respect, the kind of respect that lets you know you’d be willing to be in the trenches with the person alongside you. (p. 121)

[Finally, Erhard was asked about the vision or motivation behind est.] Erhard: You assume that the long hours and high commitment of [est] staff members must be brought about by some great vision. I deny that that’s true. That isn’t why I work long hours. I’m very committed…. [But] I have absolutely no belief in what I’m doing. I already know how it’s going to turn out. I know it’s going to turn out exactly like it turns out. It’s been doing that for eons…. I’m not motivated. There isn’t any motive. There’s no damn vision motivating me. You know, if I stopped doing it tomorrow, it wouldn’t make one bit of difference, and if I keep doing it right to the end, it won’t make any difference. The only thing that’s going to happen is what happens…. So I don’t have a vision. I’m not selling some ideal. I don’t know where I’m going. I know where I’m coming from. And I think that the people on the staff know where they’re coming from. I think it’s a great excitement to them to discover where that takes them, day by day, week by week…. They work long hours because there’s work to be done, and doing the work is very satisfying. I didn’t say it was easy or pleasant; I said it was satisfying. (pp. 128-9)

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From this 1981 interview, and from the little 1973 booklet of aphorisms by Erhard, and from his late 1970s discussions with his biographer W.W. Bartley III, I find Werner to be an interesting source for a western nouveau, quasi-Zen/Taoist spiritual philosophy of awareness, with a strong stance in New Age idealism (“you create/cause your universe”), though, as we shall see, there are problems in that the philosophy lacks certain crucial elements and thus seems to me be not quite fully balanced or whole. In any case, Werner’s attempts to create an en masse vehicle for the delivery of this more-or-less enlightening philosophy to large audiences in an intensely experiential context can generally be lauded with appreciation. Many hundreds of thousands of people have reported experiencing major “shifts” or “enlightenments” and a certain amount of “liberation” thereby.

As we shall also see, however, there are problems with the rude, authoritarian form of delivery of the philosophy or experience in the context of the entry-courses, even allowing for Erhard's remark to the interviewers in 1981 about the context of compassion in which such insults are delivered by est/Forum trainers. As will be made clear, people very close to Erhard over the years have found the man himself extremely authoritarian and abusive. There are much more serious problems with the “voracious vortex” nature to the est / Landmark organizational dynamic, which is essentially always really about maximizing further growth and corporate profit, and exploiting (in open violation of labor laws established by the U.S. Dept. of Labor) the free labor, time, energy and money of its participant-“volunteers” via high-pressure tactics and other social psychology dynamics including Cognitive Dissonance.

Psychologist C. DuMerton has described Large Group Awareness Trainings as “teaching simple, but often overlooked wisdom, which takes place over the period of a few days, in which individuals receive intense, emotionally-focused instruction.”

This and other analyses and evaluations of Large Group Awareness Trainings can be further researched at the Wikipedia article and sublinks at the website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Group_Awareness_Training

For a list of over two dozen LGATs past and present, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Large_Group_Awareness_Training_organizations

Specifically on The Landmark Forum, see cult-expert Rick Ross’s extensive collection of media, scholarly, and other materials archived at his website: www.rickross.com/groups/landmark.html (AND NOTE: in 2004, Ross was sued--unsuccessfully, as it turned out-- by Landmark, in typical corporate bullying behavior, for "product disparagement." See details toward end of this webpage.)

An especially useful scholarly analysis of the Landmark Forum is the excerpt from Charles Wayne Denison, "The Children of est: A study of the Experience and Perceived Effects of a Large Group Awareness Training (The Forum)" Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Denver, 1994, posted by Rick Ross at www.rickross.com/reference/forum/Art106.html in 5 parts (including parts devoted to the structure, curriculum and pedagogy of the Landmark Forum).

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At the outset of any LGAT course one hears something of its overall philosophy from the lead trainer, who serves as a “cult figure” (by neutral definition) of authority, charisma, persuasion and/or control.

As noted by Philip Cushman, Ph.D., in his analysis of a "well-known" LGAT, ostensibly Landmark (excerpts from Cushman's The Politics of Transformation: Recruitment-Indoctrination Processes In a Mass Marathon Psychology Organization, St. Martin's Press, 1993, are archived at Rick Ross' webpage of links about Landmark, www.rickross.com/reference/brainwashing/brainwashing44.html):

The trainer begins with a short introduction about life. ... [This includes] the ideas that personal growth is an ongoing process, that an individual's frame of reference and belief system limit personal growth, that experience transcends thinking, that most of an individual's problems come from resisting an experience, and that what one resists one is "stuck with." He encourages them to "let go" of their belief system, and suspend judgement of the training until after it is completed. He tells them that "the diamond within" is what the training is all about. He explains that the training is "unreasonable" and that it's an emotional roller coaster. He cautions participants not to look for the one right way. He then proceeds to explain the right way: "what you deny and avoid is what you are stuck with. Therefore, when you totally experience something, it disappears." [Subjects] reported that this is a constant theme in the training, a central ideological tenet.

Much of the early part of LGAT courses like Landmark is then usually devoted to making agreements, commitments, learning the rules, etc. One signs waivers and releases of legal liability—contracts that, as some experts have clarified, would not stand up in a court of law as valid documents. As some experts have pointed out, this initial stage is crucial, not so much in terms of the rules themselves, but as the first step in "yes-saying" so that the attendee will feel fewer inhibitions about saying "yes" to further demands and requirements as the weekend unfolds.

Then the lead trainer begins to run the exercises—which are mainly about confession, bringing up and utterly letting go one’s painful past, etc. Then, in the one-on-one confrontational dialogues with different people who come to the microphone, the leader or trainer spends many, many minutes haranguing people with “tough love,” confronting them with what they’re “up to” in “their rackets” (Forum-speak), and then breaking them down through certain language games, insults, and oneupsmanship techniques to wield power over attendees. This is all for the sake of helping attendees examine and release current limitations.

The drill-sergeant approach is in some ways rather like Marine bootcamp training, an “ends justify the means” approach, all for the sake of breaking down a recruit to re-make them into the best possible soldier who can fearlessly face hardships and extreme situations, and work most smoothly and loyally with fellow soldiers and superior officers. LGATs, similarly, wish to break a person down so that they can be re-made into a better, more effectively functioning human being with less “blocks” and “baggage,” less conditioning. This can be a tremendously beneficial thing. Looking to another area where this approach has been deployed, from the 1950s onward psychological training groups have been used by corporate bosses and managers to help transform personnel in their sales departments into dedicated, diligent salesmen and women who can fearlessly and equanimously put up with all manner of rejections and humiliation. (Many LGAT leaders like est-founder Werner Erhard were themselves former salesmen. Werner was both a used car salesman and a Britannica “Great Books” and Parents’ Magazine children’s book salesman, who then got involved in psycho-training for sales forces to create the most “empowered” sales personnel possible. It is well known that Werner, while being a trainer in A. Everett’s “Mind Dynamics,” studied Scientology for a time from 1968 on and the techniques of its terribly abusive founder, L.Ron Hubbard, but it is not nearly so well known that for a time in the late 1960s Werner was the very active assistant of the sadistically abusive cult leader Ben Gay, a primary trainer of William Penn Patrick’s Leadership Dynamics Institute [LDI], the first major Large Group Awareness Training, used by Patrick’s corrupt, defunct multi-level-marketing firm “Holiday Magic” to train many of its upward-moving personnel by breaking them down and re-making them. See the revelatory book, The Pit: A Group Encounter Defiled, by Gene Church [who underwent LDI’s brutal “training” experiences] and Conrad Carnes, NY: Pocket Books, 1973 reprint of the 1972 book.)

In normal business relations between a proprietor or manager and the client, the maxim is “the customer is always right.” But in LGATs, because of the need to break down a person’s willful mediocrity and their rationalizations, justifications, denials, delusions and other defense mechanisms, and liberate people from conditioning, the customer is almost always wrong, and the LGAT is most certainly always right—the trainers and staff always holding the position of authority, righteousness, knowledge and wisdom.

Notice how the trainers will always appear completely “congruent,” with no vitiating self-doubts or vulnerable-looking humility. Such “know-it-all” smugness and even arrogance will look very impressive to the majority of people, who tend to suffer self-doubts, confusion, shyness, and not much psycho-spiritual savvy. And this ultra-confidence and/or chauvinist hubris of the trainer tends to promote great confidence in the attendees, a confidence that, if they follow the trainer, this great leader will deliver them to a better place, a place of refuge, of salvation, of fulfillment.

If you are more psychologically savvy or spiritually mature, and you express a valid complaint or question about any of the entrapping dynamics of Landmark (or whatever LGAT), or you wish to air a more sophisticated and nuanced view of spiritual awakening or Self-Realization than Landmark presents (as journalists like Roland Howard and others have done in daring to speak out and confront the trainer--see Part II below), you will be treated by the Landmark trainer and colleauges to “avoid-the-question” misdirection, dismissal, invitations to leave, invalidation and/or ridiculing put-down. These trainers have spent many hours doing prior trainings with people and/or modeling their own behavior on other more seasoned trainers going back to the founding of est and other training groups (a number of Landmark trainers today were, in fact, est trainers from the early years), and the trainers have all learned from this experience and modeling and their own extensive reading and memorization of printed training material all the verbiage for deflecting such questions, insulting and invalidating or simply ignoring the personae of the attendees, and manipulating the attendees’ thoughts, emotions, expectations and orientation.

Keen observers will notice a “closed hermeneutic loop” operating within Landmark and other LGATs: no other meanings about what is happening or evaluations of anyone’s experience is possible or allowable within the context of the LGAT training by anyone other than its trainer(s). What we have here is a “totalitarian” thought-environment. No one’s opinions or judgments really have any value whatsoever unless they are in agreement with the views of the trainer(s). Just like Marine bootcamp training.

If anyone has serious problems with what is occurring during the entry-level training, they will be asked to leave, and, as Cushman has noted, such persons will be referred to by the trainers as having been "kicked out" by the trainers; it will never be framed as the participant having rejected the training.

The trainers are well-trained to be adept at “working the crowd,” pushing their emotional buttons—building people up and breaking them down, praising them and insulting them, inflating them and deflating them, saddening them and gladdening them, scaring them and relieving them, agitating them and relaxing them. Many LGATs will explicitly mention near the outset that the weekend experience will be an emotional “roller-coaster” (and that life is like a roller-coaster). A lot of emotional whipsawing will in fact occur over the weekend—fear, laughter, giddy euphoria, exhaustion, hurt, hope, pessimism, optimism, anxiety, reassurance, shock, calming. A lot of this emotional triggering comes from the trainer-participant confrontations, eyes-closed inward visualizations and meditations, and “dyad” exercises with a partner (especially those exercises dealing with one's early parenting and one's vulnerability around "what one really wants," etc.).

Through it all, people will predictably bond with each other—just like inmates or hostages in a prison, Marine recruits at bootcamp, or any group of people put into a helpless position of stress. LGAT leaders know, on the basis of our ancient, primal-tribal “belonging needs,” that people need and want to bond with one another during times of uncertainty, stress and disorientation. The intense situation created in the long, insulated weekend insures a shared context for creating intimacy (or pseudo-intimacy) when people are either working in those dyad processes with a partner, or when sitting together as a large group of 70-200 persons being condescendingly talked down to and tutored by the authoritarian trainer. Such trainers know that, because of humanity’s hundreds of thousands of years living in tribal societies, people in confined seminars can very easily and quickly be turned into a pack of sheep with a “herd-like” mentality and emotional needs. Dynamics of inclusion or else marginalization and even ostracization are exploited to insure that most people will conform with the agenda and identify with the trainers and their aims. This is akin to the infamous “Stockholm syndrome”, wherein prisoners and hostages begin to identify with their controlling masters and captors for the sake of self-preservation.

One major element in all of this creating of groupthink is the deliberate use of new lingo or jargon, new terms to describe certain known psychological or spiritual phenomena. For instance, a hidden agenda and/or complaining about anything is re-named “running a racket.” A “winning formula” is the name for any charming or inauthentic behavior one enacts for security or personal advantage. Disidentifying from certain personality roles or viewpoints is re-named “getting off it,” “getting off your positionality.” A paradigm shift or major attitudinal change is a “breakthrough.” And so on.

The new language is designed to initially befuddle and mildly disorient people, and then quickly “initiate” people into new group membership, a special club of elite “understanding.” This is an old Dianetics / Scientology trick that L.Ron Hubbard used to induce a new group consciousness and also alienate people from their families, friends and colleagues, so that new members will now identify much more with fellow members and trainers rather than with their old social context.

(Again, it is notable here that Werner Erhard, founder of est and its next incarnation as The Forum, circa 1969-70 was for a time a member of L.Ron Hubbard's Scientology cult, achieving "grade II." Werner has on numerous occasions openly admitted that the “form or structure of est is Scientology,” while claiming that “the essence of est is Zen.” The techniques, language, etc., of est / The Forum and all its courses were, after Werner incurred major legal liability, bought and taken over by his younger brother and est/Forum executive, Harry Rosenberg, and other employees to become “Landmark Education” with its various courses, starting with The Landmark Forum. Harry Rosenberg is the CEO of Landmark Education.)

Continuing with the content of the typical LGAT entry-level seminar (e.g., the Landmark Forum), one will be encouraged to “complete” (get closure on) significant relationships by unconditionally forgiving everyone, taking responsibility (even blame) for everything and anything that ever went “wrong,” and then calling significant persons by phone (or writing letters) to express forgiveness, completion, and the basic message “I love you” while dropping all judgments, blame, withholds and grudges. This is actually a very beneficial result or achievement when it comes off well and when the person on the other end of the phone is at least minimally cooperative and responsive to the healing of the relationship. It will be rather shocking, though, for most attendees to hear from the LGAT trainer that, even if someone raped you or nearly killed you, or killed a family member(s), it is up to you to accept it, take responsibility for it, and stop blaming the other party for the crime. Recall Werner Erhard’s earlier-cited aphorisms to “choose what you got” and “You’re god in your universe. You caused it.”

Toward the end of the seminar’s first day and into the second day there will be more processes, exercises, etc., to produce certain euphoric experiences—a veritable “drugging” of the participants on their own euphoria-producing biochemistry (dopamine, etc.). The euphoria comes in part from learning how to be “completely okay with what is,” accepting the contents of one’s life from a new, open-empty context of pristine awareness, dropping the past and future for the sake of living fully in the present, and other liberating insights. This is all quite basic psycho-spiritual re-orientation that can be learned in an hour with a really good spiritual or psychological mentor or book. But for most attendees, the intense and dramatic emotional dynamics of the large-group training situation will likely make the learning and re-orientation even more powerful and even more of a “high” euphoria. Many observers have noticed that the euphoria often has a rather or very manic edge to it.

It is interesting here to note the big contradiction involved in many LGATs: they all say, in one way or another, that the purpose of their work is to get you “clear,” but along the way their insidious aim is also to manipulate you into feeling “high,” even manically high, in this drug-like euphoria, to better insure that you will fall more in line with the group identity and the group’s agenda and and that you keep coming back for more (i.e., more courses and trainings).

And as for this pressure to keep coming back for more courses, a phenomenon we explore at greater length below, it suffices here to notice how these LGATs all like to talk about your getting “complete” with your relationships and your experiences. Yet, in a COLOSSAL CONTRADICTION, these LGATs will in other insidious ways deliberately (by design) leave you feeling “incomplete” with each LGAT experience so that you will need to return again and again, for additional course after course, incurring $2,000 to $5,000 to $10,000 or more in total, just to “maintain” the awareness or “keep it alive.” You are not really allowed to stand on your own feet, complete, clear and self-sufficient. No, all sorts of social and psychological pressures are aimed at you to make you feel incomplete and keep you never-endingly hooked into the corporate culture of the LGAT for your sense of completion and fulfillment.

As mentioned, there is a totalitarian and/or authoritarian quality to the set-up in the training room over the three 15-hour days, and all sorts of factors insure that a person will be broken down, opened up, subtly hypnotized, re-made and re-programmed to identify with and conform with the group, with the group trainer(s), with the groupthink, and with the large-scale aims of the group—which aim is to spread itself, virus-like, and recruit new members for the sake of maximum profit. LGAT personnel will deny that any brainwashing is occurring, and they will trot out printed opinions from some favorite psychologists who’ve taken the training, given it glowing reviews, and denied that brainwashing ever happens, but many other psychologists will insist that, by clinical definition, brainwashing does indeed occur in these LGATs. (For more on this topic, see the relevant excerpts from Traci Hukill’s important article for the San Jose Metro, reproduced below, and the crucial France 3 television investigative report, cited below.)

Along this line, and to reiterate in new words what was said a moment ago, if Landmark and other LGATs were truly “coming from integrity” they would teach you how to be an effective teacher on your own, so that you could go out and freely help people to undergo their own “transformation” and “clearing.” But these LGATs instead want to insure that you and anyone else will only “get it” (the experience of transformation) within the confines of the organization itself. Indeed, some trainers have been heard by participants to openly state that one can only continue to "recreate the conversation" and "get it" by spending much more time within Landmark circles.

The secret logic of Landmark and other LGATs’ transformational philosophy of fearlessly “getting it,” and their justification for verbally haranguing and “abusing” trainees is that, because everything is a construct and an interpretation, whatever the trainers do is simply “what is,” and your reaction to that is just that: a reaction. The goal is to be lightened up in a context free of your reactions so that you can just be present, clear, empty (a “clearing space for possibilities”) and “response-able” for whatever arises and presents itself.

To this end the trainer of the LGAT is willing to be “unreasonable,” to show you just about any kind of rudeness, nastiness, callousness, even psychological cruelty so that you can learn to be reaction-free with equanimity or equipoise, what might be called Hindu “unattached witnessing,” Buddhist “mindfulness,” or the Zen mind of “nothing matters,” “non-fixating mind,” “non-dwelling mind,” “mind abiding nowhere / now-here.” Of course, if you confronted an LGAT trainer with the idea that they were being “rude,” “nasty,” “callous,” “cruel,” or “abusive,” you would quickly be told that these are just your “judgments” and “interpretations,” more of “your running of rackets.”

The bottom line: the LGAT trainers get to criticize you, but you don’t get to criticize them without, in turn, being further criticized. And they are masters of criticism. You are in an inferior position, and they hold strongly to the superior position. You are vulnerable and they are quite invulnerable. One day you may get to be in a position of equality with them, but only if you, too, become a high-level trainer or staff leader by going through all the hoops—that is, the additional courses and higher-level trainings for which you must pay handsomely with your money, time and energy. Whether you will ever, in fact, get to become a trainer or leader is an uncertain matter—and it is for this reason that some business experts have called such LGAT organizations “pyramid schemes.”

So a lot of the milieu in an LGAT like Landmark is deliberately about unnerving you, intimidating and even shocking and humiliating you when necessary, deconstructing your thoughts and perceptions and values, and taking away your meanings until you are fully “stripped” and feeling invincible, fearless, open and empty in your Voidness as simple, pristine Awareness.

The old Zen attitude, “Nothing matters” is brought home to you—though usually not explicitly worded in those terms. Yet Zen’s balancing perspective, “and everything matters” is usually not emphasized. (The big revelation on Day 3 of Landmark Forum is “Life is empty and meaningless, and it’s empty and meaningless that it’s empty and meaningless.”)

Much of LGAT “awareness” is actually only a quasi-Zen and quasi-Vedanta teaching, which unfortunately leaves out a significant amount of crucial spiritual insight and value. For instance, in August 1980, I and other students from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), a cutting edge graduate school in transpersonal psychology in San Francisco, were permitted to attend The est Communication Workshop for academic credit as an outside “tutorial” (one of CIIS’s consulting board members was Werner Erhard). The est Communication Workshop recapitulated the basic insights of the entry-level est Training, and went on to present more advanced insights and skills. Unlike most LGATs at the entry-level and certain higher courses, we were allowed to take notes and I made quite extensive notes on the fascinating dynamics I witnessed and experienced.

Afterwards I wrote an essay evaluating the Communication Workshop in terms of the Buddha’s sophisticated model of the “Seven Enlightenment Factors.” I clearly found that only about half of the enlightenment factors were being promoted by est, not all seven factors. (The seven factors are mindfulness, inquiry into truth, energy, rapture, serenity, concentration, and equanimity. It seemed to me that est was primarily promoting a non-meditative form of rapture, along with a certain semblance of truth-inquiry, and equanimity about fear, though not equanimity about desire.) One could use similar schemas such as the Buddha’s model of the Ten Fetters (which identifies the subtlest forms of ego-centricity and attachment to heaven worlds) and also several other spiritual models of factors and stages constituting authentic liberation-awakening, a topic on which I later wrote my Ph.D. thesis -- and one could easily see that the Landmark Forum and similar LGATs are promoting only a partial enlightenment or awakening, NOT full, balanced Self-Realization, authentic liberation from all that selfishly binds and contracts.

For instance, these LGATs are very good at promoting euphoria, but not the purest, most sublime type of serene rapture or deepest levels of real peace. They are good at promoting their version of "truth-telling," but not deep empathy. They are good at promoting fearlessness in a social context, but they do not teach desirelessness, thus they can only help one diminish or annihilate some of the old samskaras or vasanas (karmically-binding ego-tendencies) of aversion. But these LGATs are not good at reducing or eliminating many attachments, such as the desire for more money, attractiveness, power and self-importance.

In fact, subtly insidious attachments are actually promoted by LGATs with wording like “getting the results you want,” “getting an extraordinary life,” “having anything you want for yourself or your life,” “achieving all your desires,” and so forth. People, in short, are still treated like donkeys by dangling a big carrot in front of them.

This is not real spiritual liberation or awakening to Zen Mind, Buddha-nature, Atman-Brahman, the Tao, Christ Consciousness, or Absolute Awareness.

I would interject here, though, that I personally (or “transpersonally”) found The est Communication Workshop to be a very valuable opportunity for self-examination and self-transcendence, what I and est might call a “context for experiencing.” I cannot vouch for what might have happened had I first taken the entry-level est Training, but the truth is that by 1980 I had been intensely studying on my own and in various interpersonal contexts profound spiritual and psychological growth (I already had a double major from Univ. of Calif. in psychology and religious studies, and had finished the course-work for my M.A. in East-West Psychology), and I had read widely on these topics and enjoyed much direct experience of meditation, witnessing, self-inquiry, sensory awareness, auto-hypnosis (or de-hypnosis) and ASCs (alternate states of conscious-ness) of nonduality, transcendence, emptiness-fullness, aliveness, peace, bliss, love, empathy, and certain ESP experiences. There is little that any LGAT could have done either to bother me or entice me. Most other persons, because of their different life-experiences, responsibilities, aptitudes, etc., simply did not or do not have the educational and experiential resources I was lucky to have as background for an LGAT training.

Cult experts like Rick Ross, from all their research on how est / Landmark Forum has affected people of all walks of life, have an almost entirely negative view of LGATs such as Landmark Forum. Ross has openly stated: "I would not recommend it under any circumstances whatsoever." For the record, I would put it differently, and say that, if a person feels s/he has done adequate spiritual background work and has learned to adequately “stand free” in a “witnessing” and/or “sensory awareness” and/or “mindfulness” mode, and has a bit of psychological preparedness, and also has sufficient funds so that paying for an LGAT course or two will not preempt other responsible uses of money—especially financial giving to worthwhile charities and public-interest groups—then the LGAT experience may be useful—i.e., further educational and “transformational”—for such a person. Yet, there are certainly other spiritual and psychological involvements I would give much greater priority to in my recommendations, but I think one or perhaps two week-ends at an LGAT can be very useful for many persons. A big caveat, however, that I would here issue is to BEWARE getting seduced into becoming a further paying-participating member of the LGAT organizational cult. Here one needs a tremendous inner resiliency, a strong “internal locus of control,” and an ability to stand in one’s own truth to withstand or transcend the multi-faceted forms of intense social pressure that are brought to bear upon a person by the LGAT psycho-cult with its voracious need to exploit human labor, time, and money.

Back to the subject of the Landmark technique of confrontation. Obviously, much of this can be explained in standard psychological terms as the desensitization technique, with a certain amount of “flooding” the subject with noxious stimuli until they give up resisting and simply “flow” equanimously with whatever is happening. With the fearlessness that results usually comes an amazing, if temporary, euphoria and sense of empowerment.

It must be noted, too, that this technique of desensitization via “noxious flooding” (throwing nastiness in a person’s face) would not work nearly as well unless you have the “captive audience” set-up with all the rules, agreements, commitments, and large-group pressure to render the person “hapless and helpless.” Otherwise, when the trainer begins to get a bit nasty, most people would simply walk out or run away. Even then, some people will occasionally get up and leave the hall, and then usually are confronted and challenged or else consoled by volunteers (a bit of “good cop / bad cop” dynamic is in play at LGATs). So the confining set-up is to insure that people stick around for all sorts of “psychological dismantling,” with faith in the power of their Real Self, Awareness, to weather the insults, humiliations and abuse, and rise above, stand free and transcend such abuse.

It’s a really interesting paradox: people are temporarily (for a long weekend) disempowered, captivated and made afraid so that, on the level of their real Being, they can be empowered, liberated and made fearless.

I would say that, by contrast to most LGATs, the best spiritual paths melt ego-resistance and ego-attachments through love, kindness and compassion in a non-confining, minimal pressure (or no pressure) situation. Such sterling spiritual groups come purely from the heart/Heart and don’t need to engage in all the “break and re-make you” techniques and stratagems. The best spiritual groups simply show you how your Real Nature is right HERE and right NOW nothing other than Pure Awareness, the open-empty-full Divine Void/Presence or God-Self, and that everything in life, your life, anyone’s life, is a dream, an apparent happening or play of phenomena, made of vibrations made of energy made of consciousness, which is the emanating power of Awareness/Self. Realizing this Supreme Spiritual Truth powerfully allows a real freedom from ego-tendencies and engenders the spontaneous urge in people to love and serve other beings in the dream with great compassion, empathy and solidarity, knowing that their true Self is your true Self—One God-Self, playing as all selves, One I Am That Am playing as every "i/me."

Someone like the awesome holy woman Mata Amritanandamayi of Kerala, India, widely known, celebrated and honored by the media, governments and NGOs as “the hugging Mother / Amma” (see www.amma.org) is a remarkable, even paranormally miraculous example of this kind of authentic spiritual empowerment from the pristine clarity and supernal power of Divine Being-Awareness-Bliss-Love-Grace.

But Landmark and other LGATs can’t or won’t tell you all the insights pertaining to real Spiritual Truth and God-Realization, because, again, they want people confined to membership within this organization and its pressurized and entrapping cultic environment of specialized lingo, processes, and structure.

Beyond the logic of “whatever happens is perfect” and being “perfectly okay with what is,” one can argue with great merit that there is something deeply problematic in the way leadership behavior is modeled or exemplified in LGATs: you can’t be subjected to observing, for many minutes or even hours, that intimidating, invalidating, denigrating verbal behavior by the trainer toward individual attendees or toward the entire group of attendees and not begin to perceive on some conscious or subconscious level that this is an acceptable way of acting and treating other human beings. Yet it would seem to most mental health experts that we already have far too much rude, abusive and authoritarian behavior in our society. For instance, the rude, derisive, confrontational "drill sergeant" approach of the LGAT trainer could never work if a participant tried this behavioral style on his/her family members, co-workers, boss, and friends. There is a good reason why it is diplomats, not drill sergeants, who have been sent by the U.S. State Dept. to conduct high-level peace talks and promote conflict-resolution in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, North Korea, South Africa, and other hot spots over the years. Wherever human beings assemble as equals, a diplomatic approach, not an authoritarian drill sergeant approach, is needed. But such non-authoritarian diplomacy is NOT modeled by the LGAT trainers most of the time.

There is a ton of anecdotal material on how the supposedly “enlightened” graduates of LGATs, despite the “I love you” phone calls and letters to significant others that might have been written during or after the training weekend, still verbally treat others with a certain amount—even a greater amount—of selfishness, rudeness, smugness, and lack of empathy, loving-kindness and compassion. And the leadership of LGATs like est and Landmark are notorious for this. Werner himself was, by all accounts, extremely abusive, noxious, threatening and non-empathetic on too many occasions in the way he treated fellow human beings, as several people very close to him openly testified to legal and media personnel. (See Part II, below, for San Francisco Chronicle articles from 1990-1991 on Werner's abusiveness.)

The greatest spiritual masters (from Jesus and the Buddha down to Ramana Maharshi and Amma-Mata Amritanandamayi), by contrast, do not need to engage in all this authoritarian shaming and blaming that LGAT trainers engage in with the attendees of these LGATs. Such bonafide spiritual master can empower people through the verbal and nonverbal behavior of love, compassion, kindness, caring, generosity, fearlessness, desirelessness, bliss, serenity, strength, power and holiness of being rooted in the God-Self and viewing each and every sentient being as the God-Self. These true adepts model and exemplify a shining love and goodness. As for the LGAT trainers, not only do we so often see (or hear reports of) them modeling rudeness and smugness in their “tough love” approach, we actually have no idea how they live their lives outside the context of the LGAT weekends. Do they really “walk the talk” and live what they preach?

One big point to raise here is this: est and Landmark and other LGATs all talk about "actualizing possibilities" and "creating a fresh reality" and so on, and they lure in a lot of people with these high-flown promises, but just look what kind of corporations their leader and top assistants have themselves actually created: top-down authoritarian structures where all the power and wealth is held at the top, and, in "a giant sucking sound," ever-more money and energy are always moving from new recruits and the hordes of insidiously persuaded and programmed "volunteers" to reward the elite bosses at the top. What kind of "reality" is this that the "transformed" LGAT leaders and "adepts" have created? A remarkably disparate system of haves and have-nots, controlling overlords and their hapless underlings. (See more, below, on labor violations by LGATs like Landmark.)

The est Training / The Forum / The Landmark Forum and other similar LGATs persistently denigrate humans as “meaning-making machines.” The Zen-influenced French Zen psychiatrist and author Hubert Benoit, writing some very respected books in the early 1950s, spoke of how the human mind is always “construing for meaning,” and he taught people simple techniques how to transcend this tendency when it becomes problematic. As part of its undoing of all “meaning-making,” the Landmark Forum’s final “big revelation” on Day 3 is that “LIFE IS EMPTY AND MEANINGLESS, AND IT'S EMPTY AND MEANINGLESS THAT IT'S EMPTY AND MEANINGLESS.”

This, again, has a quasi-Zen feel to it, although philosophically, as stated in its limited form this way, it is really a dismal form of postmodernist nihilism, a view shared and promoted by a number of atheist and agnostic academics in the humanities and social science and physical science departments of our heavily-postmodernist-influenced universities. What appears to “save” the Landmark Forum from nihilism is its corollary insistence that “life has whatever meaning you wish to create for it”—an homage to the French existentialists of the mid-20th-century like Sartre, Camus, et al.

But most people come from a non-mystical and not very theologically, metaphysically or philosophically profound religious background, and they live in a modern society that is, via its major media and institutions, often promoting a veritable “absurdist” life-view. Most persons, therefore, simply do not have the spiritual or psychological resources to “just like that” create a new context of meaning for their life after their big LGAT weekend which shatters their particular sense of life’s meaning, even if it is a meaning not well thought out and not very profound. It is known to an increasing number of psychologists that over time many graduates of these “meaning-busting” LGATs fall into depression, despair or malaise. The LGAT, be it Landmark or whatever, does not do the compassionate thing in providing ongoing spiritual or psychological support for graduates, other than to pressure these persons to take further courses and pay even more money. With LGATs, you see, it always comes down to having people take more courses and pay more money.

I daresay, therefore, that whereas the LGAT will chide and castigate people for being “meaning-making machines,” these LGATs are big “MONEY-MAKING MACHINES” run by robotically re-conditioned, self-congratulatory proponents of a flawed psycho-spiritual system of thought-control. But, whereas LGATs are free to “bust” attendees for being “meaning makers” in the context of their long weekends, and will brook no dissenting opinions, anyone who dares to publicly criticize the LGAT runs the risk of brutal legal tactics in the form of costly, frivolous lawsuits from the LGAT’s attack-dog pack of lawyers for “product disparagement / defamation.” Rick Ross, Elle magazine, and others have run into this very ugly side of Landmark and other LGATs. Landmark trainers and their ilk in other LGATs can spend the whole weekend calling you “disgusting” and other vile adjectives, but as soon as one calls any of these LGATs a “dysfunctional cult” one is in serious legal trouble.

Quite obviously the top executives of these LGATs don’t believe in the value of free speech as espoused by democratic societies. Hence, despite all their talk of “integrity,” we must seriously question whether they “walk their talk.”

A number of us who have spent years learning the most elegant and effective forms of spiritual and psychological training, based on the lives and teachings of the world’s most eminent sages (see elsewhere at this author’s massive educational website www.enlightened-spirituality.org for a wealth of resources), would strongly recommend other systems of spiritual views and practices over the “totalitarian” LGATs currently trying to lure unsuspecting persons into their clinging clutches and exploit them for their money, time and energy.

You see, as the weekend in The Landmark Forum or other typical LGAT wears on, there will, unfortunately, be increasingly blatant pitches to take further courses and to “share this great experience with people you care for,” which will finally mean that you are pressured to pitch Landmark to just about everyone you meet. At a certain point you will actually be required as homework to engage in such “sharing” and, at last, to “pledge” to bring as many people as possible to the next Introduction night.

This is where Landmark and other LGATs insidiously conflate goals, and most attendees do not realize how they have been sucked in and manipulated to equate whatever valid benefits they have received with the need to take further courses and enroll others in the entry course and later courses. On the one hand, you have Landmark (or whatever LGAT) doing fairly effective or even very effective group psychology work with people, helping them achieve significant “breakthroughs” in letting go the past, living from clarity in the present, etc. But on the other hand, you have a truly “dysfunctional cult” dynamic of confusing or conflating people’s individual transformation with a hard-sell corporate pitch to ensure that these people will see their psychological transformation and the possibility of ongoing and deeper transformation only in the context of the Landmark Education corporate psycho-cult. You are made to believe that the drug-like euphoria of transformation is only available from the “street corner” of the Landmark seminars and courses. One becomes, as some psychologists have noted, a “junkie” dependent on the Landmark products. People are being played and made dependent on Landmark. This is, ultimately, a con-job. All the energies for individual transformation are insidiously re-directed to make sure the person is diligently working to further the corporate organization’s growth and profit, with their own ongoing positive personal transformation dependent on this growth and profit of the LGAT corporation. Thus, LGATs are promoting consumerism—the consumption of their corporate product. Though they may verbally express a rhetoric about promoting “world peace” etc., they are really in the business of making money, first and foremost. Their behavior proves it, and “actions speak louder than words.”

For the attendees, psychologist Leon Festinger’s idea of the Cognitive Dissonance phenomenon, now well-known to many psychologists and cult-leaders, but still not sufficiently known among the wider lay public, is certainly in play here, given the considerable amount of money, time and emotional/cognitive energy expended by people on LGATs. The empirically proven phenomenon of Cognitive Dissonance reveals that most people lack psychological maturity and cannot handle the “dissonance” of two conflicting self-perceptions (or cognitive images of themselves).

In the specific context of product consumption—as in buying the LGAT course-product—the dissonance is as follows: Perception #1: “I am intelligent and savvy —no one can ever take advantage of me or trick me.” Perception #2: “I just got tricked into paying lots of money for something not really worth all this expense of money, time and energy.”

Most people will be unable to accept Perception #1 as true about themselves, so their mind works overtime (mostly on a subconscious level) to justify that the thing they spent money on really is worthwhile, and such people will thereafter be highly motivated to convince lots of other people to also come spend money on it to prove to themselves that “getting” what the LGAT is teaching/selling really is worth all this money, time and energy. Spiritual cult-leaders and psycho-cult leaders/trainers of LGATs will, of course, justify that “people don’t really value anything unless they pay a substantial amount for it.” But that is a debatable justification, and what they won’t tell you is that Cognitive Dissonance is being used to drive a lot of the graduates’ frenzied “volunteerism” to spread the buzz and convince lots of other people to come “share in the experience.”

Given the cognitive dissonance phenomenon, people will predictably rate the LGAT experience very high on surveys that ask you how “satisfied” you are with the experience(s), how highly you would recommend it to others, etc. And, as we have just shown, many people—especially those of lesser psychological maturity—will be strongly motivated and driven by subconscious cognitive dissonance to bring in other people in their social circle to “share the experience.” We also know that roughly 7 out 10 people who've gone through the entry-level course go on to take the usually more expensive "advanced course(s)" offered by the LGAT, especially if these persons have any doubts whatsoever that they really “got it” (enlightened) over the weekend.

Polled immediately after or within days of taking The Landmark Forum, most attendees, evidently up to 90% or more of the attendees, will report that the experience was, indeed, “transformational” in a positive sense. What is completely missing here are any comparisons to programs like a weekend of Buddhist mindfulness or Christian contemplative training, cognitive therapy (in the style of Albert Ellis or Aaron Beck), or NLP (Grinder and Bandler’s Neuro-Linguistic Programming, made famous by Tony Robbins). Fortunately for people’s mental health, but unfortunately for comparative research purposes, most of these systems (except for certain NLP and Tony Robbins sessions and Rinzai-school Zen Buddhist sesshins) don’t usually create during their trainings the high-pressure milieu and giddy euphoria, and so may not get the kind of 80-90% positive ratings that LGATs claim to be getting.

And here the question comes up about longterm effects. It is apparent to many mental health professionals that so much of the “positively transformative” effect of the Landmark Forum and other LGATs can be attributed in large part to the psychological intensity of the situation, the high-pressure tactics, the insular environment, the emotional whipsawing that occurs, and that euphoria that is deliberately induced to give people the feeling of being “high.” It is questionable as to how well the skill-learning that occurs over the weekend, only minimally reinforced by the subsequent single-evening follow-up session, stands up over time, and how generalizable it is to other situations in the attendee’s life.

Yet leaders of certain businesses, government agencies and other groups have often required their subordinates to attend Landmark, or else face termination of their jobs or positions. And I daresay that the motivation of these business and organizational leaders is usually not about the deep well-being of their employees but about wanting to have more conformity in their organizations and less dissent. For instance, corporate bosses want everyone “on the same page,” and their own corporate “business cults” can be augmented by having everyone coming from the same “psycho cult” as well. (It is well-known in the business world that a corporate boss/manager would prefer the employee to have more loyalty to the firm than to their own family members. When all members of the firm are also initiated into the same psycho-cult, this doubly insures that employees will have less in common with their families.)

Landmark and other psycho-cults (like dysfunctional religious and spiritual cults) engage in big-time exploitation of volunteer labor from their course-graduates to empower their groups, everything from manning phones to scrubbing floors. All this free labor can make an organization very powerful for very low overhead costs.

On the subject of the extensive and indeed excessive volunteerism on the part of persons pressured by LGATs, a great public good would be more extensive investigation and regulatation of Landmark and other LGATs by the U.S. Department of Labor. Back in 1998, reporter Traci Hukill ironically pointed out for the San Jose Metro on her studies of Landmark Education, “I wonder what kind of racket [sic, irony intended] the Department of Labor was running when it investigated Landmark and determined its volunteers were employees subject to the provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Who’s heard of volunteers for a for-profit [corporation]? In the end the Department of Labor dropped the issue, leaving Landmark trumpeting about its volunteers’ choice in the matter.”

As it has turned out, as archived at the aforementioned Rick Ross website on Landmark, one regional investigation of Landmark has recently been conducted (perhaps of other LGATs as well). In what is no doubt a typical pattern, this is what a Dallas, Texas, District Office for the U.S. Dept. of Labor reported on July 7, 2006, in part, about the Landmark Educ. office in Dallas, investigated from 2003 to 2005 (Case ID: 1371610) (full report posted at www.rickross.com/reference/landmark/landmark237.html):

The investigation was initiated by [deleted] who alleged that employees are not paid overtime correctly / volunteer employees are not paid at all for hours worked. The allegation was substantiated.... Minimum wage violation found. Volunteers (Assistants) are not paid any wages for hours worked while performing the major duties of the firm. The assistants set up rooms, call registrants, collect fees, keep stats of classroom data/participants, file, they also are answering phones, training and leading seminars. The assistant's hours are delegated by an employee of the firm, the work is directed and managed by the site manager, the duties performed are vital to the employer’s business. The assistants are not given credit for the hours worked which vary from 10 per week to 60 and up. The assistants are keeping records of attendees, stats on classroom attendance, assisting the instructor with the classes, and also [are] an integral part of the seminars. The employer could not conduct the seminars at the level it has been doing without the enormous amount of assistants (20-40) per seminar. The assistants perform primary functions of the employer such as finance conversations with potential attendees, purchasing, and facility management. A heavy emphasis is put on volunteering at the initial Landmark Forum attended by newcomers. Attendees are influenced to assist (volunteer) at the classes and told they can gain more knowledge without paying any money to attend seminars that they volunteer at.... By volunteering at these seminars and in the business office the assistants are convinced that they are acquiring skills and knowledge required to improve their social and mental skills that they can use in their full-time employment and personal lives. The assistants displace regular employees that would have to be hired. The employer could not operate with the 2-3 full-time employees per site.... Site Manager, paid a salary of $34,000 annually, does meet the duties test.... Seminar Manager, paid a salary of $29,000 annually, does not meet the duties test.... A recordkeeping violation resulted from the firm not keeping a record of hours for non-exempt salaried employees, and for assistants that are actually employees.... The firm denies that the assistants-volunteers are employees. Interviews reveal that the employees [i.e., the assistants-volunteers] are taking payments, registering clients, billing, training, recruiting, setting up locations, cleaning, and other duties that would have to be performed by staff if the assistants did not perform them.... [Dept. of Labor officer] Forte informed Mr. [Robert] Tollen [a lawyer for Landmark Educ.] via phone on June 26, 2006 that the assistants were considered employees and need to be paid MW/OT [minimum wage and overtime], that records needed to be kept of the employees/nonexempt salaried employees, and that CMP’s [penalties] would be assessed in any future investigations. The firm agreed to pay/comply with the non-exempt salaried employee, but did not agree on the assistants. Mr. Tollen stated he understood the findings. "

This Dept. of Labor report of labor violations by Landmark Educ. office in Dallas, TX, with its relatively large number of exploited volunteers and exploited (underpaid) staff person suggests that other, similar violations are widespread through the several dozen offices of Landmark (and other LGATs) worldwide. All of this indicates that Landmark and other for-profit LGAT groups clearly are not aligned with the worldwide religious and spiritual teachings on the dignity of work and the crucial importance of economic justice. Landmark's in-house policies here are a clear instance of "giving more and more to the rich [i.e., the owners of Landmark and the affluent senior trainers] and taking more and more from the poor."

Another major question here is what are people ultimately getting for their money, time, energy and free labor as they proceed further with taking courses by Landmark or another LGAT? For one thing, they are evidently not liberated into their true Divine Identity as the all-pervasive Self or natural (sahaja) Being-Awareness-Bliss, but they are saddled with a new identification as a member of a big, powerful corporate group. The “elite understanding,” the new jargon, and the fearlessly confrontational “truth-telling” social style of interaction make the group seem very “hip” and sophisticated. Who doesn’t enjoy the feeling of being part of such a powerful organizational body? There are, additionally, various ways that the members reinforce for each other that giddy euphoria through comraderie (shared experiences, shared goals, mutually congratulatory backslapping, etc.) and in-house exercises and processes. There’s also a strong sense of identity in being part of a “global mission” to “save-heal-empower the world.” Individually, people will report that they feel more “emotionally authentic” and more energetically “present” and also more present-centered (not stuck in the past); they will report feeling “at cause” or “at Source” with their experiences; more responsible, more empowered, etc.

But, to reiterate, all of these individual benefits can be learned elsewhere without all the cultic identification and entrapment in a powerfully exploitative and controlling corporate group--a group that, after you “graduate” from the entry-level course, wants your free labor and your efforts to bring in new recruits so that the organization can grow ever more exponentially and rake in many millions more dollars. The organization is ultimately quite self-serving and voracious. So, rather than genuinely liberate you, LGATs want to “hook you” and confine you to operating within their organization and evangelically promoting it.

Experiences have shown that the LGAT will brook no dissent or rebellion if you begin to question 1) people’s identification with the LGAT itself or 2) the supreme value of its growth-work or 3) the LGAT’s ultimate integrity in trying to separate so many people from so much of their money for the enrichment of the LGAT’s paid beneficiaries.

And here the “64 million-dollar question” is: where is all the money going? Who benefits? For instance, with Landmark, the current leaders of the movement are the brother, sister and former colleagues of Werner Erhard. Huge profits are being made. To what end is all the money going? One person got an answer from a trainer at the Landmark Forum: “for expanding the program.” —Meaning primarily the income-revenues for the proprietary owners of Landmark (Werner Erhard, now known as Werner Spits, according to reporter Traci Hukill is still getting half of all profits) and also the likely handsome salaries of the trainers (who number only around 45-50 persons) and the in-house long-time VIPs, such as Landmark’s head legal counsel Art Schreiber.

Somewhere here I need to interject a major point: --I find it frankly ridiculous and a big violation of economic justice that LGATs, like most therapists and other providers of mental-emotional-bodily health, do not arrange for a sliding-scale fee-structure. This is complete blindness to the economic realities characterizing today’s world. In the USA, for instance, the current $495 entry-course fee for the Landmark Forum is, for the vast majority of hard-working Americans, anywhere from one-eighth to fully one-third or more of their monthly paycheck, and, because they already have such a tough time making ends meet, the fee will probably wind up being paid on a credit card, where it will likely sit over time as an unpaid balance and incur usurious interest-rate charges from the big banks, eventually amounting to double what the person initially paid for the LGAT course(s). By strong contrast, an elite percentile of Americans, the multi-millionaires, decamillionaires, centimillionaires and billionaires—the top 0.1 to 5 percent of society’s economic strata—are bringing in colossally more income than this every year. For all of these rich and super-rich folks, that $495 fee (or a $250 hour of psychotherapy or a $4,000 weekend retreat at some resort spa) is “chump change,” the equivalent of a mere dime or buck for the majority of Americans.

As part of their pre-screening of attendees, why don’t LGATs (along with psychotherapists, et al.) find out a person’s monthly income and charge a more equitable fee based on a sliding scale? A centimillionaire bringing in annual revenues of over $2 million could easily pay $5,000 for the course, a drop in the bucket, whereas a married father of two kids making only $50,000/year might need to only pay $50, and an infirm person living alone and somehow eking by on their $9,000 annual SSI disability income would be eligible to take the course for free or just $5. This would be a far more fair and realistic arrangement in today’s heavily disparate economy of “have-everythings,” “haves,” and “have-nots”—an economy where some 70% of Americans are the near-poor (a job-loss or medical situation may rapidly put them into poverty), the working poor (not being paid a living wage for their hard work), the officially “poor,” and the destitute (whose incomes are one half of the officially poor). If the LGATs are so supremely beneficial, why isn’t the experience being made available to all, not just to those who can afford it?

Now, back to the question of ongoing revenues for the LGAT: how much of this money is being spent on really helping or empowering any of the world’s poor and needy? Or promoting democratic institutions and justice-promoting movements locally or worldwide? (For instance, major campaign finance reform in the USA to promote real democracy with political representatives who represent the public good over the demands of elite special interests.) How is the world actually being made better by these LGATs other than turning a certain small fraction of its inhabitants into euphoric lackeys for a profiteering corporate agenda?

Along this line, I have one last critique of LGATs like Landmark: in its promotion of the essential idea “whatever happens is what is supposed to happen,” or “whatever happens is perfect,” or, ultimately, “nothing ever really happens,” it can easily lead to apathy about injustices—whether these be issues of political justice, criminal justice, environmental justice, economic justice, racial justice, gender justice, animal rights, etc. It would appear that Landmark and other kindred LGATs are stuck at “level 2” and “level 1” in my model of “the three simultaneously true levels of nondual Reality.” As I have written elsewhere (for instance, at www.enlightened-spirituality.org/3_levels_of_nondual_Reality.html):

Level 3 is the conventional, pragmatic level of mundane reality, entailing the “appropriate and inappropriate,” “helpful and harmful,” “right and wrong,” “justice and injustice”;

Level 2 is the level of Reality which yields the realization or epiphany that whatever happens is "perfect," whatever occurs is the “exquisite manifestation of ‘Life’ or ‘Divine Will’ for everyone”; and

Level 1 is the “Absolute level” of Reality, wherein it is realized that whatever happens is a dream, so nothing is really happening, only GOD or Pure Infinite Awareness is truly HERE, absolutely Real as the ONE Identity (prior to or beyond all persons/souls, events, experiences).

When people don't honor together all three of these "levels" or “domains” of Reality as being simultaneously true (level 1 is Absolutely true, levels 2 and 3, pertaining to multiplicity, are "relatively true"), they tend to fall into a very constricted viewpoint. So, for instance, if people ignore the conventional level (level 3 in this model), they think that being discerning or critical in pragmatic matters of justice-injustice —i.e., critiquing any form of thinking or behavior (in the field of politics, business corporations, spirituality, family or community life, etc.)—is “being reactive" or “negative” or “deluded” or “overly analytical” or “coming from the head.” Yet this is, itself, a negative, reactive judgment or a critique. It is a mind-fixated "position" that violates true freedom by constraining us to always only view whatever happens as "perfect" and beyond reproach, or as "nothing really happening." Again, to hold such a position is to constrain oneself to a uni-level, limited view of Reality.
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According to my triple model outlined above, which accounts for the totality of our spiritual and daily experience, Landmark Education is mainly about non-religiously establishing you in a Level 2 or Level 1 parlance and philosophy: “whatever happens is meant to be happening, otherwise something else would be happening,” and “nothing is really happening.” This may sound mystical and groovy, but by ignoring Level 3, the level of helpful-harmful and justice-injustice within human society, LGATs like Landmark make a mockery of an old tradition of “engaged spirituality,” such as known to the ancient Jews (and early Christians) as tzedek, justice, and to the Hindus as dharma, righteousness. And I daresay we need both a profound, straightforward and truly sublime mystical spirituality of authentic Realization of the infinite-eternal, unmanifest God-Self, and we also need an engaged spirituality of finding, seeing, loving and serving this God-Self plainly manifest as the Heart of all sentient beings. “Love the Lord God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love thy neighbor as thy self/Self.” Anything else is imbalanced and not complete.

Part II--REPORTS BY JOURNALISTS

The reader is especially encouraged to read the transcript and view the downloadable streaming video of the France 3 television show Pieces a Conviction and its special investigative report on The Landmark Forum and behind-the-scenes candid revelations of Landmark’s operations, entitled "Voyage to the Land of the New Gurus: Incriminating Evidence" (Part One), May 24, 2004, directed by Karima Tabti. The airing of this program, viewed by 1.5 million people, led to the shutting down of operations by Landmark Education in France. The main weblink for that French television investigative program is: www.rickross.com/reference/landmark/landmark220.html


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1. Traci Hukill, “The est of Friends,” July 9-15, 1998 issue of Metro (San Jose, CA). www.metroactive.com/landmark/landmark1-9827.html

ON A FRIDAY MORNING IN EARLY SUMMER, 110 Silicon Valley high-tech workers, salespeople and curiosity seekers drift into a conference room on the ground floor at Park Center Plaza in downtown San Jose.

The shiny brochures enrollees received after paying the $325 registration fee for the weekend-long seminar explained little. Steeped in vagaries, they introduced Landmark Education's language, praising The Forum's "technology" and promising "breakthroughs" that would make us happier….

The next three 14-hour days [will be] spent in this stuffy room with our Forum leader. We'll hardly have time to change our underwear. Each day we will be released exactly three times. We will be asked to have dinner with Forum "friends" and to spend our scant hours at home calling family members and pals and telling them about our "breakthroughs."…

Forum leader Brian Regnier strides down the aisle and takes his place on the dais, all smiles and wire-rimmed glasses. A small, neat man of indeterminate age, the charismatic Regnier moves easily around the stage as he tells us what we can expect from our marathon weekend. New life in our relationships. Love for our fellow Forum graduates. Possibilities flowering everywhere we look.

"You'll notice for the first time in your life, 'I'm happy,' " Regnier predicts, beaming like a benevolent uncle. "A miracle is going to take place here."

But we gotta want it. We have to be enrolled, he explains--open to what The Forum can do for us. If we're not, we can leave now and get our money back, even the nonrefundable deposit. No one moves.

Like any exclusive group of people who know something the rest of the world doesn't, Landmark has its own language. It happens to be the same vocabulary esties learned, and it serves to separate the ones who "get it" from those who don't.

A "breakthrough" is Landmark's term for arrival in new psychological terrain--a phenomenon also called a "paradigm shift." Old limitations wither away, replaced by a vital conviction that anything is possible.

"Rackets" are persistent complaints that we orchestrate in order to avoid some kind of responsibility-- complaints like "I have too much to do," which might excuse shoddy performance. Rackets obstruct breakthroughs, Regnier informs us, and we've spent our lives perfecting them in order to get what we want.

We also learn about our "winning formulas," tricks we learn to get along in society, like being charming and smart. Winning formulas, we're told, keep us smug and content, but they also keep us from breakthroughs--and real happiness.

Among our unreasonable, breakthrough-inducing assignments will be telling friends all about The Forum. Sound like a sales pitch? Well [says Brian], why not try to sell the people you love on something this great? Ah--but some of those folks will think we've been hoodwinked….

… One of 53 offices worldwide, including centers in India, Israel, Great Britain and Japan, the San Jose office enrolls about 100 people each month in The Forum. Enthusiastic grads can spend up to $4,000 [1998 prices] completing the Landmark curriculum of courses. For companies the cost ranges from $250,000 to $4 million.

On the last night 39 people sign up for the $700 advanced course--a $27,000 drop in the $48 million-a-year bucket of Landmark revenues [as Hukill reports in 1998; revenues are much greater today]. Last year Landmark Education Corporation spent $13 million on salaries and bonuses for its 451 employees, dedicated $4 million to travel and made $2.5 million in profit. [NOTE from Timothy: doing the math on the salary/bonus figures, those 451 employees would be making an average of $28,825 per person; but we know that top executives at the headquarters-office in San Francisco are paid much more than, say, the "seminar manager" at a local office in India, Canada, or Texas.]

BRIAN REGNIER SMILES A LOT, and with good reason. Performing for a room stuffed with $35,000 worth of hungry souls and a dozen Landmark volunteers drinking in his every gesture, Regnier is the only paid employee of Landmark Education in this room today…. A case study by Harvard Business School reports that nationwide, 7,500 volunteers lend their time and services to Landmark. [See the earlier-cited report in Part I by the U.S. Dept. of Labor on the exploitation of these Landmark Education volunteers, without which Landmark simply could not function.] The corporation only pays 451 people, and only a tenth of them are Forum leaders.

But here at the Forum, we are told, anything is possible. So devotees keep enrolling in courses, keep volunteering to prove their "commitment."

I wonder what kind of racket [sic, irony intended by Hukill] the Department of Labor was running when it investigated Landmark and determined its volunteers were employees subject to the provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Who's heard of volunteers for a for-profit? In the end the Department of Labor dropped the issue, leaving Landmark trumpeting about its volunteers' choice in the matter.

… Werner Erhard and his cohorts coasted on est's enormous success until they reduced their last estie to tears in 1984. The next year Werner Erhard & Associates repackaged est as The Forum, a seminar aimed more at goal-oriented breakthroughs than reprogramming. By 1988 close to a million people had taken est, The Forum or some other Erhard training under auxiliary companies like the Hunger Project. When Erhard's reputation took a nosedive amid tax fraud and incest allegations in the early '90s, he fled the country. (Later the tax charges were dropped, and the accusation of incest was withdrawn.) In the meantime, his disciples conceived a way of continuing to produce The Forum free of the negative publicity attached to Erhard's name.

In 1991, a group of trusted Erhard aides [including his brother Harry Rosenberg and Brian Regnier] started Landmark Education, licensed Erhard's "technology" and incorporated in the state of California. Erhard owns no Landmark stock, but Regnier does. One of the founding members of Landmark, Regnier belongs to a select club of insiders--the same group, according to a Landmark case document, who presented est.

Landmark says that Erhard has nothing to do with The Forum. But the license Landmark obtained from Erhard enabling them to produce The Forum is in fact owned by Erhard, and is scheduled to revert to him in 2009. Erhard's 63 now [in 1998] and is assured 50 percent of Landmark's net pre-tax profit each quarter, not to exceed $15 million in the 18-year lifespan of the license. Furthermore, Erhard's brother, Harry Rosenberg, is currently Landmark's CEO, and sister Joan Rosenberg is listed as a director.

Despite the obvious links [and similarity of content and philosophical perspective], Landmark executives take pains to separate the organization from Erhard and almost all things est, other than to acknowledge its roots. Reports of psychological damage resulting from est sullied Erhard's reputation.

Family members of est graduates complained that est jargon invaded every conversation and that esties--or estholes, as detractors called them--shunned people who didn't "get it." Landmark has not entirely escaped est's fate. A 1993 lawsuit against Landmark by a Maryland woman claimed that The Forum precipitated her psychotic breakdown through negligent infliction of emotional distress. She lost the case, but her legacy lives on: prospective Forum participants must now give verbal attestation and sign two separate documents disclosing their histories of therapy, psychiatric hospitalization and psychoactive drug use. Boxes checked "yes" result in Landmark's recommendation not to participate.

Landmark's "technology" builds on the backs of a few key ideas, most of which make sense if applied with care. In addition to rackets and winning formulas, we learn about "stories." To show how stories work, Regnier draws a diagram of two overlapping circles on the board. One represents the facts of something that happened and the other our interpretation. We can change misery-inducing stories, he explains, by changing our interpretation of events.

"This really works for people," Regnier says, tapping the "interpretation" side of the diagram with a sage nod. "Even Auschwitz," he says cryptically, leaving us to wonder how that particular revision would go. Would it be, "The Nazis tortured my father and gassed my mother by mistake," or "The Nazis tortured my father and gassed my mother, and I'm OK with that"?

The lecture weaves in esoteric threads of ontology and philosophy in the form of puzzling statements like "the only change is no change" and "there is no meaning."

BACK IN 1982, WHEN EST WAS STILL going strong, three Stanford doctors conducted a study of est and a similar seminar called Lifespring [founded by John Hanley, who, like Werner, was a trainer with A. Everett's Mind Dynamics]. They determined that two kinds of harm might result from est training. In the first kind, people who were already on shaky psychological ground might decompensate--what most of us call "snap"--under the stress. In the second kind, people might abandon important psychological defenses necessary to stability. For me, it's almost impossible to observe The Forum's methods without the word "brainwashing" flashing across my intellectual radar screen every 15 seconds or so.

Landmark refers inquiries in this department to a letter by Forum graduate Edward Lowell, a New Jersey psychiatrist who states in no uncertain terms that Landmark does not use brainwashing techniques.

So there we have it.

However, San Jose's own Brian Lippincott, associate professor of psychology at JFK University, calls grouping people close together for long periods a "time-honored method of indoctrination," used since the days of the Roman centurions. "And then you're tired on the second or third day," he says, "and you lose your independent thought process, and the things you're hearing become internally consistent. You kind of lose the ability to check out-- 'Are these assumptions really true?' If I get you to accept three or four premises, then all these things would follow from those assumptions. "They never allow you to go back and check," he says. "Or if you do, one technique is, 'You're not following protocol.'"

'ERHARD GRADUATES WITH GRIPES," read an ad I placed in Metro in an effort to locate people irked with The Forum. Est and Forum grads called me with stories of how they or someone they knew had taken an introductory course, then an advanced course... and eventually started volunteering, spending as many as 20 hours a week in the service of est or Landmark. [NOTE: The U.S. Dept. of Labor in 2003-5 found volunteers in the Dallas, TX, Landmark office working without any pay from 20-60 hours a week.] Most said they thought The Forum itself was fine, even valuable, when kept in perspective. Without exception they asked not to be named.

Once word about my story got around, popping up in an online Landmark newsgroup, it somehow made its way into the office of Art Schreiber, general counsel of Landmark Education Corporation. Schreiber responded swiftly with a 10-page letter advising me of his "serious concern" that I might defame Landmark. What followed were six pages explaining why Landmark is not a cult, a page of why Landmark cannot be said to brainwash its enrollees, a page and a half of why I must not defame Werner Erhard or est, and a tedious summary explaining that should I "leave Landmark and its programs depicted in a false light ... Landmark is fully prepared to take the appropriate legal action."

He included 23 letters of recommendation from happy Forum grads; a letter like mine addressed to Self Magazine, whom Landmark sued in 1994 for calling The Forum a cult; a newspaper article describing a lawsuit by Erhard's daughter against a San Jose Mercury News reporter; and statements from Margaret Singer, author of Cults in Our Midst, and Cynthia Kisser, former director of the Cult Awareness Network, that Landmark is not a cult. Landmark has sued them both.

In Kisser's case, she was co-defendant with the Cult Awareness Network in a $40 million suit brought on because CAN classified est and The Forum as cults that used mind-control techniques unbeknownst to program participants. CAN settled and retracted the statements. Kisser is still defending.

I had a nice chat with Mark Kamin, Landmark's public relations man. He told me, "It is my bias that you have a bias," and said, "There's no real story." Then he appealed to my sense of "integrity"--a word much bandied about in The Forum--to write what "the truth is about us."

Landmark advocates self-expression. Surely, I thought as I hung up the phone, I'm not being discouraged from expressing myself. CEO Harry Rosenberg recently noted that "in the United States, we have altered the public conversation about our work and our enterprise. For example, it is no longer possible for informed people or publications in the United States to pin pejorative labels on us."

"Altering the public conversation." The phrase sends a chill up the spine of anyone who thought it was OK to speak freely in this country without fear of being sued into silence….

SHORTLY AFTER THE FORUM I tried to explain to a friend a peculiar experience that repeated itself many times during the three days and evening I spent listening to Regnier.… I'm open-minded, even suggestible at times…. So when the idea of "rackets" started to make sense, and some of my "stories" emerged as patently ridiculous, I would get this light, spacious feeling in my head, and the possibility of a life released would glimmer beautifully on an expanding horizon. Didn't I owe myself a chance at bliss?

And then the volunteers would pass out registration cards for the next seminar, and the people who didn't fill them out would be called to the back of the room and asked to explain why, and I would be among them, facing a stern volunteer who donates his time to lead that seminar. Or Regnier would mention how important it was to tell our friends about The Forum and bring them to our graduation. And right away it would be as if someone had switched cameras on me, sharpened the focus, turned off the flattering back lighting.

Oh yeah, I'd think. The money.

As harmless, even helpful, as The Forum's ideas themselves are, something about the delivery system just doesn't feel right. The subtle controls, the obvious ones, the glitter of an eye, a 10-page letter [of legal threats]--all add up to something that shifts, vanishes, reappears--does anything but breathe, endure, stand still for inspection.

And still, for a day, I got the result. I got the euphoria the day after The Forum. And then it dissipated. That's what happens--that's why people keep signing up, to keep that feeling fresh.

It was easy to make fun of The Forum until I saw a 45-year-old man choking back tears as he read a letter to his stern Japanese father. He was not stupid or naive or a drama queen. He was in real pain, and The Forum seemed to help.

But it didn't make me think something was right with The Forum as much as it made me realize something is terribly wrong with the rest of the world. It's so sad, I thought, that the most intimate and intense experience these people have had is one they paid to have with a group of strangers. The more I think about it, the clearer it seems that too many people are cut adrift from the organic necessities of love, family and community. In an age when people leave their hometowns as a matter of course, the ties that bind are dissolving, and people are looking for pretty new ribbons to replace the old familiar cords.

Good luck, I say. But I doubt they'll find them here.

===============

2. By Jeannie Marshall, “The est in the business.” That old seventies personal growth fad has been resurrected and retooled, and it's coming soon to a corporation near you. National Post, Canada/June 1997 Vol. 112, Issue 5. Archived at www.rickross.com/reference/landmark/landmark249.html

On the first day of the Forum [in Toronto, Canada]--a workshop for personal growth which is gaining a foothold in the corporate world -- Jinendra Jain, our leader, took pains to explain to us how important it is to be punctual. He made all 150 participants promise to be on time when arriving in the morning, and when returning from breaks. "You must be your word," he told us.

[Partly into the 1st day, after a few people had been late after the second break:] Jinendra's face shifted through many shades of disapproval before settling into sternness. The room became completely quiet. "What is it about Torontonians that they can't keep their word?" he asked, sneering. We shifted uncomfortably, shame on all our faces.

Landmark promises to make you more effective in your personal and professional life by ridding you of the negative habits, formed in the past, that now limit what you see in your future. But what I observed in the Forum was not instruction on how to change your life for the better, but rather how to shut up and do what you're told. Rather than getting angry and upset because your boss wants you to do something you don't want to do, just give in and do it. "Stop running your racket," Jinendra told us. Rather than giving reasons for being late, just be on time and "be your word."…

Landmark Education Corporation is quick to explain how beneficial it is to companies who send their employees. And it seems to be finding a receptive audience. […] What could be more appealing in the 1990s than a multinational educational corporation (fifty-one offices worldwide, including ones in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver) that turns out graduates who follow rules without question and always show up on time?…

What's remarkable in all this is that the blue-chip Landmark Forum has deep roots in one of the flakier chapters of the human-potential movement – est… with Werner Erhard as its charismatic leader. Erhard attracted a lot of publicity, running from laudatory, in the early days,… to critical, as the media got wind of rumours of sexual impropriety with one of his daughters, tyrannical behaviour, and problems with the IRS.

Landmark claims that the Forum does not teach you anything or offer any tips, but that you will leave it free, confident, and powerful. Jinendra told us that you can expect results even if you do not understand the language. All that is required is your presence in the room, and a very open mind, for the lights of self-knowledge to be switched on. At the Forum, such illumination is followed by the phrase "I got it." Once you "get it," there are two things to do with it: one is to sign up for the Advanced Course, which costs $750 [mid-1990s prices], and then on to the Self-Expression and Leadership Programme; the other is to recruit as many of your friends, family, and co-workers as possible.

You want to continue taking Landmark courses, Jinendra told my group, because you have to stay in the "Landmark conversation" for it to keep working for you [NOTE: this is entrapment]. And you want to recruit other people, he told us, because you now think and speak differently from before, making it difficult to communicate with the unenlightened folk in your life [NOTE: this is cultic use of language to create insider-outsider dynamics and exclusivity]. He said that we might care to introduce Landmark in our workplaces too.

"Leave the past in the past," says Jinendra to a woman at the Forum. She has just described an upsetting incident from her childhood that has left her weeping. Jinendra shrugs and smiles at her for a long time. "Get off it," he tells her. "Leave the past in the past." It was a refrain I heard often from Jinendra, and from the other participants, as they began to pick up the lingo. The Forum tries to make you a better person in part by having you face your past, and then letting it go. And leaving the past behind is something Landmark not only preaches but practices. [Irony intended here by Jeannie Marshall.]

At an information meeting for possible new recruits, a guest asked Toni Kendall, a visiting Forum leader, to explain where the programme came from. Toni (everyone at Landmark is on a first-names basis) said that a man named Werner Erhard had a transformational breakthrough one morning in 1971, while driving towards the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Out of this experience came the Forum. Toni may have just been simplifying matters for the sake of brevity. The fact is, it was not the Forum that Erhard created in 1971, but est.

[This admission by Kendall proves that Landmark has a lot more to do with est than their usual statements that “Landmark is different from est.”]

Erhard started out as Jac