Been reading and lurking for a long time (love the place, by the way), and I finally feel that I have a question that is worth signing up for to ask.
Anyone know anything about Landmark Education? I have a friend who has recently gotten involved with them and it strikes me as a bit off. I googled and everything I got came up either glowingly, gushingly wonderful (and was usually associated with the organization’s main web-site), or creepy and cult-like.
These kinds of polarized results sound the warning bells for me.
I figured if anyone could give me the straight dope it would be you guys.
A couple of previous threads with doper experiences: here and here. There’s also a very extensive writeup of doper rackensack’s experiences with the Forum here.
For Sunspace: From what I understand, it’s sort of a productivity/inspirational/personal power-type seminar. The (a?) twist is that you hard-sell the program to friends and family by inviting them to the final session. You are also “encouraged” to take their more “advanced” (and, coincidentally, more expensive) seminars as well.
A couple friends of mine went through this a couple years ago, and they were so glowingly positive and encouraging of me to try it, it was off-putting. One of them even made me out a signed check for $700 as a guarantee that I would get my money’s worth out of the program (if I didn’t, he said, the money was mine).
Oyoyoy! My sister-in-law has started with this crapola, and gotten my mother-in-law into it as well. If I never get another phone call from saying that they want to “open themselves to a deeper relationship” with me, it’ll be too soon.
Where’s that barfing smilie? I need a barfing smilie.
Not surprising that the ol’ SIL is now all into Landfill. A look at her bookshelf reveals about 75% self-help books. (In case you’re interested, the remainder is about 15% work-related texts, 5% Dean Koontz novels, and 5% other.) I have wasted Og knows how many hours listening to her go on and on about how the key to all happiness can be found in the Celestine Prophecy or Who Moved my Cheese? or 101 Uses for Baking Soda.
Both my SIL and MIL are the types of people who don’t want to deal with reality, so they stubbornly insist on behaving as if the reality that they want to exist is the reality that does exist. And I don’t mean that they take a “don’t dream it, be it” approach. I mean that they ignore all evidence that contradicts whatever rosy picture they want to believe in.
My MIL was married to the biggest jackass imaginable for 8+ years. We put up with all sorts of insults and outrageous behavior from him, while she smiled insipidly and offered us more kugel. She finally filed for divorce last fall. And now she says things like “Who could have known what he was really like?” She wants to believe he was a genius manipulator who cleverly managed to hide his evil nature for nearly a decade. Never mind that everybody who met him loathed him immediately, and would do pretty much anything to avoid being around him. She lost virtually all social contact she had with friends and family while she was with him. (Once she filed for divorce, however, the old friends came out of the woodwork.) My SIL bought into this whole line of crap. When the MIL was married to him, it was all “Nimrod is a great guy” and “He loves her so much” and “He’s part of her family, and I love him.” Now it’s all “Can you believe he did this or that?” Well, yeah, I can believe it. He’s been doing this or that for a decade, or doing other stuff that makes it real easy to believe that he would do this or that.
Anyway, sorry for the rant. The point I was trying to make is that Landfill seems to cater to people who are looking for superficial solutions, adn who are trying to FEEL better without actually BECOMING better.
I can easily see how their methods and such would focus on this type of person, but FWIW, one of the two friends I mentioned was one of the most intelligent, most motivated, most successful people I know…and that was all BEFORE attending the Forum. Landmark just seemed to “kick it up a notch” or make him want to go for even more. He always cites it as one of the most important things he’s ever done, and his life has become, as rackensack said in the link I provided, demonstrably better due to the choices he’s made and ways of thinking he’s implemented because of the Landmark Forum.
I’m sure the average experience (especially the results as seen by other people) lies somewhere between these two extremes, but it isn’t ALL fake or superficial.
I know a few people who got involved with Landmark and liked it a lot, but I tend to get skeeved out by the hard sell.
Bear in mind that, as the old saying goes, there’s more than one way to the top of the mountain. Landmark does their thing, and it works for some people. But other organizations do their thing, and it works for other people. For example, there’s Context Associated or the Excellence Foundation that are local to my area, and I’m sure there are others all over.
They are the newst incarnation of EST. And by everything I’ve seen, are cult-like and disturbing. I’ve had a few friends get sucked in, and become hive mine Landmark-spewing zombies within weeks. Really freaky to watch. Of course, once Landmark sucked all their money out, they left them alone.