It is more about ‘getting’ the experience rather than gaining information to use. The usefulness of information serves to enhance our ego, which can actually contribute to the problem. I think the goal is to achieve the experience rather than taking something from it. I also don’t think this means it takes something from you ( Aside from taking advantage of your allegiance to further recruit new participants and sign up for more courses. That aspect is the business model that is unfortunately attached to it. )

It isn’t going to harm anyone or completely strip you of anything. It actually leaves you with the ability to know what you want to keep and what you want to lose. It does give you permanent knowledge and the ability to make important and insightful distinctions about yourself and your life. You can gain back your ego anytime you want actually. However you probably won’t want to. Not exactly as it was anyway.

Immediately after people go through this transformation, they are going to act a little strangely and maybe be a little annoying to those around them. I must have been, although annoying people isn’t in my nature. Even a hypnotized person won’t completely abandon their core values, so I didn’t choose to spend too much time recruiting or ‘enrolling’ others. I just told them about my own experience and what I knew myself ( I wasn’t hypnotized but I was enthusiastically stupified ).

After 10 or more years of looking back at my experience and what it has done for me, I feel it was an enormously rewarding experience in my life. I felt as if I’d received 5-10 lifetimes of wisdom and experience in a few days. It correlated with a lot of the eastern mysticism and Buddhism I was studying at the time and made all of it more accessible to me as well.

I was not an atheist before I took the course nor am I one now. I was an agnostic before and still am. All possibilities were there and are there. It doesn’t necessarily make a person Godless or atheist. Like you said existentialism isn’t something new. A person doesn’t need to choose that afterwards either. That is a temporary space created to allow anything to exist as choice.

Milla, it seems to me that you ‘got’ some of the stuff that was given and missed some of the stuff which ended in an incomplete sort of take on it. I can’t fault anyone for not ‘getting it’. Everyone is different and I wish everyone was a little more open to things and not quite so guarded. It’s a very idealistic idea but in the right setting it can be beneficial. I know at some of these courses that the environment( because of some of the people running it ) can be a hit or miss situation and that is very unfortunate. Being a very guarded and analytical person myself, If I’d been at a different one with different people I might not have ‘got it’ either. It’s not always 100% but I think the vast majority of people will be still able to have a great experience from it.

I do not continue with the group and feel no desire to. I actually think there should be more focus on making the education free and offered to anyone without the sales pressure added to it. It’s an unnecessary and ugly side to what is otherwise such a great and truly beneficial experience for so many.

First 5 years of life my mom didn’t speak the best English. My dad, the best EST/Landmark you could hear. In fact, I had NO IDEA that how he used those words was not how … others did until I showed up for Landmark Day 1.

How did I end up there – WITH ANGIE AS MY LEADER? Well… I moved to san Francisco 9 mos prior for a job opportunity I had recently been sacked from

I had been seeing a guy. The first DAY we met I asked if he was into EST. I had no idea why, I just felt something, he talked like my dad. He was too young for EST? That’s when he told me about the Forum and insisted I take it. He would continue to do so for the next 7 mos

So, I signed up. I was in a place of … malleability. I had a chance to move in a direction of my own choice and was looking forward to seeing if I could find out what that was.

Angie expelled me from the course DAY 2, Hour 6.

Reasons not made clear to me until I badgered their global staff into remarking something to the effect of.. a misconcommuniction led to the actions that took place that day. friggin circular talking!

I was refunded on the spot. ask to leave immediately.

You say we were told we were told to open ourselves up, that this was a place of trust. I gave in (odd since I rarely do … in life). and after they had broken me down but before they built me up they stranded me. WTF. That what you call… integrity.

All im sayin.. I did what they said. They didn’t.

Yet what is it about not being allowed something makes u want it oh so much more??

Expert angie? trying not knowing any other meaning for the word “story” that what you defined it as to a group of 20-60 year olds hearing it for the first time. I don’t claim to know the techniques of training, but, I think … I have a grasp on the general concepts.

Now. We cant ask them shit. engage in any dialogue with them. they refuse me in the course. so?? just.. continue to be frustrated???

You didn’t fail. I failed.

One does not become an automaton out of the Forum. One simply becomes a purer version of themselves without the limits they had imposed on themselves through the simple process of surviving as a human being.

To anyone else who is interested in the Forum, I would say: Go in skeptical but open. Do the work. Don’t expect them to save you – just be open to another possibility of being. If you try to prove them wrong by resisting, you might, because you won’t have allowed them to teach you. Everyone gets something different out of it – people with bigger issues maybe have bigger “Aha!’s”, but I went in having a great life, great relationships, successful career, and I still found that it altered me – and I am thankful for that. Don’t let the marketing strategy push you away – think of it as a Tupperware party where they try to get you to invite your friends – except in this one they are more convincing and you don’t get any free Tupperware. The Tupperware is good, it works, you don’t hate your Tupperware because of how it was sold to you. This is way better than Tupperware. :)