do the landmark forum

Picture this. There’s a 3-day seminar where the instructor continually reminds people that the major breakthrough will occur at 4:18 PM on the third day. As the lesson approaches its apex, the audience reels with the notion that the lives they can create for themselves have to derive from a vacuum, that there is absolutely no meaning inherent in the world, that all its significance is added to it by them and by the people around them. It pricks at people’s fundamental values, religious or not, and there is an uneasy pall cast over the room. A nausea. A peacable old man is at the microphone trying to work through the sticking points with the instructor when someone in the audience says “Look, it’s 4:22!”. We’d missed the deadline for the conclusion of the lesson, the audience realizes. In a flash, the old man at the microphone quips “I’d know what to do if it was 4:20.” Classic timing.

Many people in the room had obviously “popped” by the time the final lesson of the Forum concluded. Later that evening, the instructor asked everyone to raise their hands and when called on, give one-word descriptions of what was present in the room after this enlightenment had been reached. Inspiration! Love! Awareness! Energy! Possibility! Optimism! Awe! Openness! I couldn’t resist raising my hand too, to propose what I thought might’ve been most present: existentialism. It was meant as a half-joke and most of the audience laughed, as did the instructor before he dismissively winced and moved on.

As the Skeptics Dictionary puts it in their article on Landmark, “what is common-sense to an educated and well-read person (in the fields of psychology, philosophy, and communication arts), may seem like golden insights to others.” While I had no major breakthroughs during the forum, either because I was unwilling to participate fully or because I had an intellectual head start on many of the central issues, it was well worth it. Even if I’d only gone for entertainment purposes I think it would have been worthwhile. But I got more than that. Over drinks with friends last night, everything I saw and heard fit some context evoked during the Forum, and I had to refrain as much as possible from regurgitating mottos to people, since the mottos were weightless without the discussions that surrounded them during the Forum. When my friends were being completely open and direct with me, I relished it, and when they were being guarded or ironic, I kept trying to circumvent their barriers. One friend admitted that she was uncharacteristically open during our conversation last night simply because my own openness was contagious.

I don’t expect to attend the Tuesday night wrap-up and recruiting session, so the Forum is over for me. It was exhausting and often annoying (especially the endless upsell), and its effects are probably impermanent in most cases, even for those who had breakthroughs. But it was inspiring to witness people revolutionizing their relationships and claiming more responsibility for how they live, and I’d recommend the Forum without hesitation even to a skeptic like me. The hippie girl I befriended during the weekend considered it an overview of ancient wisdom distilled into a marketable package. I might call it a weekend of intensive, nonlinear, professionally-guided introspection. Whatever it can be called, a weekend at the Forum can definitely not be called dull.

One brilliant technique behind the Forum, since it creates the impression (quite possibly true) that the life-enhancing goals of the process and the business goals of the company can’t be kept distinct, is to continually remind people that a dramatic transformation in their own way of being can only be “made real” by sharing it with others.

The Forum helps people realize, especially if they hadn’t considered it before, that their mind is always interpreting things, writing a story from its own viewpoint, and the interpretation is distinct from what happened. The voice in our head is not us, and it is not telling an objective truth. When someone feels mistreated, the mistreatment is an interpretation by that writer in the mind, and their real selves can ask the writer to cast things that happen in a more positive, interpersonally engaged, and proactive light. “X is doing Y again to me and it’s further proof of Z” is the type of story the Forum gets people to recognize as just that: a story. Opening up to friends and loved ones about the internal storyteller’s role in perpetuating broken relationships, and refusing to let that storyteller bastardize the recipient’s reaction does seem to work most of the time. It becomes a genuine breakthrough in people’s lives because it has a genuine effect on how their relationships will be in the future, releasing them from the patterns of the past. And it is truly inspiring for spectator-participants like me to witness, for instance, housewives who haven’t had genuine, heartfelt communication with their husbands for years come back from a break having just created a brand new level of communication in their marriage. Assuming it lasts, this is great for them.

Of course, entangled with this breakthrough is the notion that the Forum brought it to be, and therefore the breakthroughee ought to show up at the last session to check things out, maybe sign up themselves. Wouldn’t the invitees want to have such breakthroughs in their own relationships, after all? Landmark even picks the perfect word for getting others on board with your own new lease on life and relationships: enrollment. When you contact people and let them know about your “transformation”, you get them enrolled in your new “possibility” to “make it real”. (Landmark then tries to distinguish this from getting them into Landmark via “registration”, which is a totally different word.) They encourage the idea that living an extraordinary life includes being risky and unreasonable, like by making their friends and love ones travel great distances to attend the last meeting, no matter how financially unfeasible it may seem. To a skeptical mind, it all reeks of a marketing scam, yet it involves relationships that really have been repaired or renewed, so it’s difficult to dismiss as underhanded.

That said, while I engaged a bit more today, I’m not having much of a transformation so far. Most people contact their spouses or ex-spouses or abusive family members…the folks with whom a faulty relationship sits like an infected thorn in their psyche for years. I admit to myriad thorns, but there is no giant, obvious one to address at the moment. (Or, I’m in denial.) Still, wanting to play along, today I called an old friend who I’m always trying to fix, and then I called my parents. I was terrified and anxious, shaking despite the fact that what I was trying to defuse in each case was not a bomb but a firecracker. But here’s the proof that I have no storyteller in my head, that there is an objective truth of my friends and family being unavailable to me and causing all of my fucked-upness: nobody was home. Ha!

The centerpiece of today’s session, the part that bleached out almost all the other lessons with its intensity, was something called the Fear Exercise. I am assuming that it employed standard meditative practices to get to the therapeutic part, but having never meditated nor been in therapy, it was all shocking and new and vivid. It was also meant to provide a level of control over and relief from universal social fears. So the fact that all I could think over dinner afterward was “I’m frightened of the contingent of self-help junkies in this Forum and I bet they can see the naïveté, East Coastness, and sarcasm written all over me” was a bit ironic.

Tomorrow is supposed to be the juiciest part. I can’t wait.

According to the instructor, today was 30% of the time of the course and provided 5% of the benefit. I figure I was fully engaged with about 40% of it, so I’ve only lost 3% of the value so far. ($12.75) We’ll see about tomorrow. I feel immune to parts of it as the skeptical side of my brain parses the teacher’s every move for techniques of motivational speaking: embedding with repetition, rule-enforcing, aggressively getting people into states of vulnerability, citing great thinkers to imply intellectual merit, forcing conversations with strangers, employing pseudo-hypnosis, and so on. Sometimes I’m outside of the forum, peering in to witness it affecting others. That’s part of the reason for signing up, after all, to witness commercial self-development functioning. (The fact that a man ostensibly giving people the tools to live extraordinary lives watches enough TV to make frequent references to it is a bit disconcerting.) The other undermining factor is that the Robots have conversations all the time about psychology, sense of self, pattern-breaking, relationships, and self-development. Although we often use different terminology, we’ve collectively and individually covered much of this ground, and the force of the ideas partially rests in their newness.

I’m expecting that tomorrow, when we’ll focus more on the stories we make up about ourselves rather than the stories we make up about others, I’ll engage a bit more in the application of what the Landmark is teaching. Forcing myself to be more open and engaged with people this year has had dramatically positive effects on my social and creative life, so I know that inward work reflects out if you let it, and that I have plenty more work to do. Supposedly, the “big breakthrough” is slated to occur at around 4:18 on Sunday afternoon. While I might not be one of those who “pops” during the Forum, I do appreciate the confidence they have in what they’re doing, and I give them the benefit of the (considerable) doubt.

My favorite joke that he told was to ask, “Do you know the most important factor determining the number of people who show up at your funeral?” In context, everyone’s mind was racing through the way they treat others, how much they allowed themselves to be loved, and all of that.

The answer, though? The weather. This ain’t religion, folks.

I don’t believe in cults, even the ones popular enough to be called religions. So when I go into this in August I go into it as a skeptic. But I hear one of the first things they do is deconstruct your skepticism. One of the next things they do is beat you into a psychological bloody pulp, setting the stage for brainwashing. Then they brainwash you, and you live happily ever after. Then you write a gushing entry about the Forum on 43 Things. This is foreshadowing, folks.