The standard-setter for this sort of thing is "Erhard Seminars Training" or EST, which is these days known as "The Forum". The stuff they teach you doesn't really change you that much, it's just that they create such an emotionally intense experience in their seminars that participants need to believe it was a life-changing event, that it meant something.
It's possible that the emotional high you get at these things can be truly transformative, but only if it serves as a catalyst for you doing the work on yourself that leads to your own self-actualization. Otherwise, the only thing you really learn is how to be really manipulative when they turn you into one of their little shills.
jsut as a note here most (perhapse all but a am no sure) LGAT's are connected to Amway...and that takes you right back to the religious right adn the dominionists...its quite a web they weave.
An interesting website on cults and manipulative groups:
http://www.rickross.com/
Heh..a (now) ex of mine hauled me into a LifeSpring meeting when I was going through a crappy time at law school. Man, they REALLY try to find people's weak spots. He made me cry a lot but at the end of the session, I was like, fuck you, it's still a cult, and get that through your head.
moonglum --
Um, no.
Most LGATs are not connected to Amway.
What Loveandlight said. The Landmark Forum (historically, it followed Werner Erhard & Associates' The Forum, and The est Standard Training which was produced both by WE&A and by est, an Educational Corporation. There were at least one or two other intermediary companies in there as well, but I can't keep track. *laughs*)
Other LGATs include Life Spring, NLP, Tony Robbins, Mind Dynamics, and many others. While there are some which are religious in a fundamentalist sense i.e., as is Amway, the primary focus of most LGATs comes from a heavy new-age self-help component.
Many of these folks have a historical track record of being very aggressive in suing people and companies if they say anything they consider damaging to the companies interests, which is one of the reasons I'm not singling out any particular LGAT.
I'm not sure I agree with the Rick Ross site. He has a bad tendency to think everything is a cult or evil. In my view, you could take the San Francisco Zen Center or Green Gulch (part of SFZC) under a different name, have some of its monks write in to Rick's site and he'd put them up as a dangerous cult demanding people sit in a fixed position for days, even weeks at a time! It must be stopped!!! *cracks up*
Said differently, not all LGATs are necessarily bad in every aspect in my view, just as I don't consider all religions and religious teaching to be bad, including much of what is taught at fundamentalist churches.
My issue is how it gets twisted so that it is the ONLY path, the ONLY truth, and if you don't follow THIS path you are EVIL and DOOMED.
When LGATs do the same thing, they get the same results. It comes out in the sales rooms as pressure, having to make a sale that night or they are doomed because they didn't get their friends and family to know the one true way to good karma.
Absolutely no different in that way than any religion -- and I'm not saying LGATs are religions in disguise.
I thank the Goddess I've never encountered one of these groups. I'll keep my eyes open for them in future.
I got recruited once by a Forum type. Was surrounded by them, they pushed my buttons till I cried...but I still wouldn't give in and demanded to leave. Who the hell were these strangers to dare tell me they knew my life better than I did? My inner bitch kicked in and saved my ass.
Brilliant piece by your friend. Thanks for pointing it out. Eerily on target.
jesse don't call bullshit unless you knwo what you speak off.
tony robbins ahs worked with devos in teh past on a number of joint ventures (the last one was a nutricinal supplaments company) moreover Werner Erhard's crap (that begot all LGTA's) seems to be a mix of amway and scentology wit ha little pscycocbernetis thrown in...all of which he studied pre est.
in the end though its all from the same base. LGTA's amway, dominists, scentology, NLP, the secreate, ect. they all stem from base. "Name it and claim it", think it and it will become so... if you thin khard enough about something it boecomes real...hell even the neocons stem from that philosaphy "we create reality", "we are historys actors"
its all bullshit and its all the same bullshit.
a good intro to it.
http://www.skepdic.com/lgsap.html
oddly navy basic and OCS fallows the same pattern. im guessing army basic is the same way.....navy made a big mistake lettign some oen with a scoicology background into OCS (my wife) the brainwashign dson't work if you can identify all of the techniques. My guess is that would hold true for soemone with social psycology training as well.
moonglum -
Werner Erhard never studied Amway.
Don't call bullshit on what you don't know.
est has NOTHING to do with Amway. This is a fact. I recommend the Bartley biography if you actually care what he did study, as it was an authorized bio which he, his family, and est cooperated with the writing of. I assure you, neither est not Werner had jack to do with Amway. *laughs* This is a field I am an expert in.
I appreciate that you think it's all bullshit. You're welcome to have any opinion you want. But all LGATs are not the same.
Your opinion here is ungrounded, and for those of us with 15+ years of experience you sound like a Christian calling all eastern religions the same, or failing to separate the Japanese from the Koreans.
jesse. take a step back and look at all three. can you see any substantial diference between LGTA's, the christian counciling of domininism, and scientology. they all stem from the same base (hell they all paly to the same base as well) Erhard damm wel did study the amway methodology as well as scentology, psycocybernetics, anda little zen(well alan watt's version of zen) when he put togethere his crap.....that was tehn. as of today, robbins has worked with davos, and most of the amway upstreams "highly" encurage there members to go to LGTA traing seminars.
it may jsut be massive cross contamination relyign on the same base of morons to fund them....praying on teh weak is the favorit tactic of all of these groups. but the use of self and guided hypnosis, high group pressure, emotianl attack to break down ones defense is so similare between the three as well as relieance on word-faith beleive it hard enough and it will happen that it makes it very hard to beleive there wasn't at least a casual connection between the fonders.
Add to that the origin points of all of these groups lay in the very late 1940's to early 1950's.....humm perhaps they are all based on army basic training methods.
moonglum --
I can't stop you from believing things which are untrue.
The Bartley biography which is available on Amazon does not back up your claim that Werner ever had anything to do with Amway.
I don't know enough about the Christian Council to make an assessment as to if the work he did with est is in any way similar, however I can also say categorically that Werner had nothing to do with them in terms of having studied them at any length.
Until you have read the source material, stop making inaccurate factual claims. I'm not kidding.
"Warren noted Scientology,[8] Zen Buddhism, Dale Carnegie courses,[9] Maxwell Maltz's Psycho-Cybernetics, Fritz Perls' Gestalt therapy, Abraham Maslow's transpersonal psychology, and Subud, among other psychological and spiritual methods as further influences." [Wikipedia's Werner Erhard article.]
These comments are getting way off track. LGATs are a sidebar item. The real meat of Jesse's post was Sara's piece at Orcinus, Through the Looking Glass, which was brilliant.
Her message was really, really simple. Listen carefully to the conservatives, because they're going to tell you what they are and what they're capable of and what they intend to do. Right out there in public in front of God and everybody.
They're going to tell you things they don't even know they're saying.
Listen to Stormcrow. It has always been right out there. http://www.newamericancentury.org/
Don't read that without a strong drink in your hand.
Thank you Stormcrow. Much appreciated.
As I demonstrate the point. *laughs and laughs and laughs*
I took one of those courses -- it was called Actualizations. I did another one too, but I don't remember what it was called. I got a lot out of them -- but that may be just me, since I tend to work really hard at that kind of stuff. After the Actualizations weekend, they tried to get us into a follow-up group, but a requirement was to recruit others. A few of us didn't feel comfortable with the selling, so we formed our own group. People from the organization said our group couldn't last -- they gave us a month. We lasted three years.
My sister did it to, and she got a lot out of it. We got my mother to take the course too. She got nothing out of it.
Mrs. Robinson's piece is outstanding, as usual; but as a public service I want to present two arguments that have been used with success in rejecting an LGAT approach.
(Of course I know that logic isn't what rejects them. I've been listening. But maybe the right story will help keep up one's spirits and one's determination?)
Many years ago my wife was going through some bad times. (This was before I married her, of course, but let's not get hung up on that.) And she and a friend went to a LifeSprings meeting to see what it was. They got the usual pressure to join, and each came up an irrefutable reason for not joining.
My Four-Sigma Significant Other said, "My life is fine in every way, and I don't have any problems, so I don't see how your training would help." Did they believe her? Why would this matter?
Her friend came up with an even more ingenious answer: "My problem is that my child is in Nigeria, and I don't think your training will get him out of the clutches of his father, who kindnaped him there." Sadly, yes: her story was true. Good story, though.
My sister did it to, and she got a lot out of it. We got my mother to take the course too. She got nothing out of it.
And the reason for this difference is almost certainly what I said makes the difference in my original comment: the willingness to do the grunt-work of self-actualization.
Anyone have any comments to make about Sara's story?
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