Dear blastedactresses, I am fairly new around here, and I guess I haven't mastered the method of tracking down a post that I once read. For instance, your query about Werner Erhard. Can't find it anywhere, and I have searched long enough. But I would like to elaborate on that incident which I described when Werner attacked me physically (along with his assistants).
You see Werner employs a totalitarian metaphysical technique (est, The Forum, now Landmark Education), which dislocates the person's real personality such that the Landmark graduate IS UNABLE TO REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO BE WHO THEY WERE BEFORE THE TRAINING. I have had plenty of close encounters with est/Erhardized human beings, and what is immediately clear to me is the absence of the ability to reflect critically or objectively upon their experience of est, The Forum, Landmark Education. They have been quite literally reprogrammedseemingly even at a neurological level. They are not the person they once were, and they are convinced ONTOLOGICALLY that the universe and self that Werner (or his trainers) have created for them to experience is the true one. And they look pityingly at those who are not yet existing inside the Werner universe, with the Werner sense of self, the Werner sense of what is real. But the metaphysical context within which they are now held (after undergoing the training) separates them from realityregardless of how much more efficient, clear, and liberated they feeland ACT. For Landmark Education WORKS. Works almost perfectly. But works here means: transforms the context of one's experience of oneself and reality. Only problem is that this new experience of oneself and reality bears no relationship to the real person they once were, nor to the reality they once problematically found themselves inside of. They have been transported out of their past and into a now which deprives them utterly of the complexity, the tragedy, the suffering, the tenderness, the contradiction of what it means to be a human person. It is a hideous state of consciousness, a state of consciousness which anaesthetizes them to all that is vulnerable and terrifying and beautiful about living as a self-conscious being with free will inside the universe. But the indoctrination and reprogramming is so perfect and so subtle that the person is rendered incapable of ever questioning what has happened to themmuch less is the person able to reflect upon the philosophy which they now experience as constituting their relationship to reality. I had the opportunity to meet with Werner at a private house party, and later to meet persons who were undergoing the process of becoming trainers (this was the est era). I started out very open and respectful of Werner and his system, but cameagainst my willto realize he was destroying the actual connection between a human being and reality. Reality came to mean what you choose it to be. And what happened to you was somewhere what you willed to happen. This belief system was instilled at the level of the very nerves of the person who had undergone the trainingso that afterwards they wereI mean this in a very real senseWerner zombieshowever creative, intelligent, successful (more so perhaps than before) they seemed. It was with this perspective, born of my meeting with dozens of est graduates (and especially Werner himself), that I wrote about Werner, and then decided to challenge himnot so much, you must believe me, to vindicate my own philosophy, but to transgress the universe he had createdwhich I knew to be false, and which I knew he was determinedon his lifeto insulate from all criticism. His violent response to mehe instantly knew what I was about to do when I stood up to ask a questionwas shocking, but, in retrospect understandable. Werner will not allow his philosophy to be challenged. In fact the whole training insures that it CANNOT be challenged. There is tremendous power and integrity in all those who have been trained to lead the Landmark Education Seminars. These people feel no pain and they are brilliantly effective in deconstructingand then demolishingevery trace of the conscious and unconscious system the person has employed to make it in the world before they entered that seminar room. It is in my opinion almost impossible to preserve the sensation of what it was like to be who you were once you have been taken through the transformative process of Landmark Education. And once reprogrammed, life has a hard time convincing the person they are profoundly and utterly deceived. They are indeed deceived, but the system Werner has inculcated in them is designed to enable them to defend (without being defensive) the validity of their philosophy because, you see, it is being lived out on the pulse of their very being. Only the est/Landmark Education sense of beingness (Werner's version of beingness) is the enemy of the beingness that first gave existence and consciousness to the person. So unless something intervenes in their life, they are prisoners of this metaphysical systemeven as they are convinced they have found The Answer (although they would never call it that). A thought occurs to me, blastedactresses: You wouldn't by any chance be a graduate of Werner's training would you? If I am going to write anything more about Werner I would like you answer directly and insincerely this question. Because almost every Werner graduate feels the need to work on behalf of his systemthis is virtually an involuntary moral reflex. But I know the est personality (or Landmark personality) about as well as I know anything out there in the world. I was once willing to have Werner convince me that he had set up a context through which human beings could achieve some deliverance from their misery and conditioning. But my experimental knowledge conclusively demonstrated to me not only how false and deleterious Werner's system wastop to bottombut also the means by which it was possible to confront that system so as to make this revelation of its metaphysical falseness a reality. Werner sensed the danger of the collision that was about to happen [when I stood up], and he preempted the threat by physically manhandling me and shouting me down. Werner makes Stalin seem docile and insecure. No one has put Werner in his place. But life will eventually get around to it one way or another. --- In [email protected], blastedactresses <no_reply@...> wrote: > > maskedzerbra > > > "I hate categorical judgmentsespecially when they put me in a negative > light." > > But you are comfortable causally posting "categorical judgments" about > other entities or other people that put them or it in a so called "negative > light". That is the status quo on the internet, yes? >
