Wednesday 8 July 2009

Does Landmark Teach You To Tell the Truth?

Of course it does! Isn't that the principle? To live your life with integrity and authenticity. You wish and don't hold your breath.

My former partner who succumbed to the lure of Landmark as a way through a mid-life crisis took an advanced course on "communication". One of her tasks was to speak to me about something she had withheld from me. I recall a long and tortuous phone call as she attempted to reveal to me her "omissions", "avoidances", or to be plain, how she had been living a lie.

Her mentor in the course had insisted she carry through her task. At the time I believed her. Why not? Well, because in the end even she couldn't bring herself to tell me the truth.

The truth implicated other friends and actually it was through one of them that I learned the truth when she herself learned it. She passed it on to me. Now I know. The strange effect of this knowledge is to help me come to terms with my situation, not my former partner's.

Landmark didn't help her. But what it did was rather more insidious. It gave her a pretext, a cover, a smokescreen that she could use to pretend to be playing the game and thereby hope to sucker others into believing it. As I did for a while.

Any system or course can be abused as my former partner did with Landmark. That's why it is important to have ways of verifying and testing one's procedures. Landmark resolutely sets itself against any of this.

If it did it would not be scraping the barrel for its suckers to get their money.

2 comments:

Simorgh-e Sabz said...

Please read my article. I recently tool the forum:
http://simorghesabz.blogspot.com/2010/08/how-landmark-rips-you-off.html

Anonymous said...

Landmark teaches you to tell the truth if you are brave enough. I have been through it and there is a precise nature to the program. I had to work hard to follow it but basically they appear to have integrity and be authentic. This is achieved by making their framework 100% true but not in the way you are intended to see it. Firstly, they will tell you that at the heart of it, they don't care about you or what happened, the care about the transformation. And they are 100% true in both these statements. They don't care about you and they do care about the transformation they are preparing you for.
Next you learn your life is empty and meaningless. You spent it all trying to look good, and doing that is simply empty and meaningless!
You're a participant. And when you speak up they smugly smile and say empty, meaningless. You got it all wrong.
Then the gold comes, we're introduced to rackets. The rackets we run to get our way. Because this is transformative learning, and getting us out of this horrible place we live, the focus is entirely internal. Trust me, there will be break throughs but it's really just a diversion tactic, because by now you're coming back for the Advanced course.
Day one, Laurence Jacks, Life is a game, blurring the line between work and play. Landmark at it's hottest, 100% practising what they preach. Because it is just a game, in fact all that you learned about Rackets, are there in front of you being played out, to the letter. But all done with integrity and authenticity! The game is "Bums on Seats" It's a racket. After they cleared the space for possibility in your life they remind you how empty and meaningless you are and you're still trying to look good, you can't do it without the platform and structure they provide. But oh, by the way you will look good with a yellow name tag sitting at the back of the room! And remember they don't care about you, they don't care how much it will cost you to be there, what sacrifices you will have to make. Simply don't care, and they were straight about that with you on day one. The racket to steal your space for possibility has almost closed around you. No one is ready to stand up and challenge it now. The truth for the moment is hidden inside you. but it's not feeling right.
Then luckily you get to look for your act, and if you're lucky enough to find it you begin to see theirs too. And you're pushed unreasonably to find integrity, in self serving assignments. So you begin to look for theirs, if you're paying attention and learning to be authentic yourself. And voila, there is is,just as they said all along. A platform and structure just for you. The platform is a sound one of Transformative, break through education. A straight line. And then A structure on top of it, two lines meeting at the top to form a triangle. A structure with pure structural integrity, the right, the justification for the racket it truly is. Participants sit along the bottom, and enrol others in the education while the racket collects money for, let's face it, next to nothing.
To tell the truth,... It's really quite open and simple, there for all to see. And what's more they gave you the tools to find it!
Then you go on-line and find out the founder was a sales man, who changed his name, failed to file tax returns and hid in the Cayman Islands. He and Landmark have been to court not to save their integrity, but to win a racket. Time and time again. and we're the ones paying for their lawyers.
I hope more come out to speak the truth.