Anotherblog

Landmark Forum

Von and I and friend A went to one of the Landmark Forum graduation things for our friend N. We were a bit worried. A cursory browse of the web shows up all kinds of worrying business practices, and Germany have them on their list of cults. They are, as far as I can tell, a group therapy self-help course centred around the idea that people are too obsessed with how they appear to others.

So we prepared ourselves and went along, braced against the hard-sell, but with relatively open minds because N is smart and it would be rather condescending to assume she was being suckered. She’d done a three-day course for $500-odd, which is definitely pushing her budget, but she was very happy with it and we wanted to show support (though we did recognise she was inviting us because that’s how the forum gets new recruits, which is a bit cultish).

Anyway, the talk was mostly testimonials and trueisms, and we left before they separated us into smaller groups (where I suspect the pressure would have started), mostly because it was getting late and we wouldn’t have been with N anyway. However, despite the paucity of data about the course, I left feeling much less concerned. Unlike your typical cult, it seems more about making you reconnect with your friends and family, which is no bad thing. But more importantly, they seem about giving options to people who can’t figure their own way forward (like most other self-help books and programs). That seems OK, even if they did seem to be advising us to turn off our critical thinking (or as they phrased it, the little voice in our heads).

And it did make me think. There’s an implicit challenge with any kind of self-help program – “oh, you think you don’t need us? How little you know.” Von and I have spent a lot of time over the last two years talking about philosophy and truth and meaning, but self-examination is not a normal state of being, and is very hard to do without some kind of support network. You need someone to call you on bullshit. Von’s my anchor. Lots of people have religion, and that’s their anchor. But there are still more for whom religion or relationships doesn’t fulfil that role, and feel adrift. I’m very lucky.

Updates

Let’s see… We did a magic tournament on Friday night (Mr McLeish won with an obscenely powerful Bant deck) featuring nine players, and still finished before midnight.

On Saturday morning I did a bit of coding work on my MMORPG, and played a bit of classical guitar. I’ve memorised Villa Lobos’ Prelude #3, and I’ve started work on Prelude #1, which a year ago I thought would be impossible, and now I consider to be merely difficult.

We went to Von’s work’s Christmas party on Saturday night and discovered what it was like to be having dinner in a room with 1000 people (and ran into old friend and former workmate Carey).

Von and I took her family fishing at Manly on Sunday, as a birthday present for her Dad. Von and her Mum & Dad caught a fish each, while Iona and I gradually turned green. After an hour and a half, we were all feeling that a) that was quite enough fish for dinner, and b) time to get to solid ground. I had three seasickness tablets, and they still didn’t stop me from up-chucking over the edge.

Then a big snooze, an extraordinarily expensive lunch at Bather’s Pavilion in Balmoral, and an afternoon of sleepily pottering around Von’s family home before an excellent dinner of the aforementioned fish and an early night.