Landmark promises life-changing weekends at $625; its critics call it a cult; John McCrone goes along to find out for himself
Who are you? Who are you really once you get behind the mask, once your strip away all the niceties and pretences; the smiling face you present to the world? Is there even a ‘you’ in there, or just a tangle of memories, bits and automatic responses?
In a conference room above Christchurch Town Hall, 120 people — a complete cross-section of Kiwi society from Maori gang members to tongue-tied Southland farmers – truly want the answer.
They want to “pop”. They want to be transformed. They want the promise of this being the first day of their new lives fulfilled. They’ve paid for it: $625 for the Landmark Forum: a three-day course with a grueling 9am to 10pm schedule.
It’s now Sunday afternoon. The near-end of three days of tears and revelations – infidelity, abuse, cancer, crime and bankruptcy. And of all the everyday stuff we don’t usually care to admit to: displays of fickleness, inconsistency, procrastination, stubbornness and general confusion.
In a tightly controlled environment — this is no New Age encounter group – facades are stripped as people confront the truth about themselves, the human condition and the meaning – or non-meaning of life.
A lean-cut lad has stepped up to the microphone to share. He’s a bit of a self-development junkie last weekend he was doing another course, The Journey, where he went deep underground into a cave to find himself.
He smiles gamely — boyish charm being one of his coping mechanisms – but he’s a possum in the blaze of the seminar leader’s headlights.
“You are a machine that is its rackets and strong suits, designed by a child. And nothing else,” thunders Cathy Elliott. “Life is meaningless and empty. And the fact it is meaningless and empty is also meaningless.”
It is, perhaps, a liberating truth. Realise this, and you can “complete on your past”; put it behind you in a good way and create a space in which an entirely new and chosen future grows.
Some of the Forum have got it. The baker, farmer, teacher and construction worker have all raced up to the microphone, radiating joy and enlightenment. Each knows they will never be the same person again.
One describes it like the moment when you finally set down your pack after a day’s tramping: “This weight has just gone. It’s like when you’re walking around the camp and you’re so light you’re almost floating.”
But Mr. Clean-Cut’s still troubled. A meat machine constructed of habits and rackets? No, there must be a ‘me’; a spiritual essence that is my core.
A ‘me’ to be preserved against the assault of this programme — against what cult-watch websites call an American mind-control scheme; a network-marketing scam. Even if it’s the t me’ that keeps screwing up my life.
Landmark feels it is a much misunderstood organization.
It is hard to name names, says media spokeswoman Deb Beroset, on the phone from Chicago. You have to respect people’s confidentiality when they expose themselves so nakedly at Landmark’s training seminars. But some famous individuals, statesmen and chief executives are graduates.
One million people in almost every country have been transformed.
In New Zealand, Landmark runs weekends in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. It is expanding into work with children. It operates in prisons, corporations, and government departments.
Yet some still react as if it is a secretive, brain-washing, money-grabbing cult. “Australian Defence Department funds controversial development training,” shrieked headlines in Australia this year, after it was found $A 12,300 had been spent sending staff on Landmark courses.
Google “Landmark Forum”, click on the link to the cults New Zealand website, and you’ll see ‘Landmark’ emblazoned with a flashing red danger warning.
A large group awareness training (LGAT) organization. Hideously overpriced, pyramid-selling, a hodge-podge of ideas borrowed from New Agers, Scientology and Dale Carnegie positive thinking, quick to sue anyone who criticizes. Your get the picture, the site warns.
And who wouldn’t be suspicious? Like anyone, over the years I’ve had friends who have returned from mysterious weekend courses all shiny-eyed, wanting to offer me a an extraordinary opportunity usually the chance to become a distributor of water filters or vitamin pills.
In the 1980s, there was a fad for est seminars created by Werner Erhard, former Californian Scientologist, used-car and encyclopedia salesman.
They sounded freaky. Friends told of being trapped in a conference room, forbidden to take pee breaks, harangued all day about their miserable ineptitude as human beings.
In 1991, Erhard sold his seminar “technology” to his brother, sister and former employees so they could set up the private company, Landmark Worldwide.
Quite frankly, how could the red lights not be flashing when I got the call from Beroset? If you’re so keen to write about this mind transformation business, she said, you had better come along and do a course yourself. Judge us from the inside for a change.
It begins on a Friday morning. I have mixed feelings as I climb the steps of the Town Hall.
Who could not like the idea of personal transformation? Live a life of power, the life you yourself choose, as Landmark’s slogan goes. All you Toyota Corollas out there can become Ferraris. Over a long weekend.
But at the last minute, Beroset springs a media agreement on me. I will have to commit to do the whole three days, plus the Tuesday evening completion night. I’ll have to participate , not just sit back and observe. No note-taking or unauthorized interviews. The article will be fact-checked.
In the end, the contract is waived. But it makes me wonder about the organisation’s motives. That perhaps it is after my brain.
Forum really is a slice of society. A young woman has an offender’s electronic bracelet around her ankle. Others are in suits. A youth drags his legs behind a walking frame.
Our Australian seminar leader bounds onto the stage. She says that some of you are here because you want results in your business. Others want personal transformations. But you are all here because someone in your social network loved you enough to give you this gift. And you, in turn, will have the opportunity to pass the gift along to others; those whom you’ll be inviting to share your graduation night next Tuesday.
Now, says Elliott. , let’s get into it.
I will answer the question right now. Landmark is not a mind-control cult.
It is a powerful experience. Forget the $625 entry fee; what they get out of it is literally priceless. And for those on the sidelines, the programme must at least be thought-provoking.
There is an ethical issue when it comes to Landmark’s business model – enrolling through social networks. And as the three days progress, I can see that there is an unusual level of discipline demanded. It is expected you will follow schedules; do your homework.
But there are no locked doors or shouting sessions. Elliott is one of those supremely skilful presenters who mixes directness with warmth and humour. It’s needed. There are some damaged individuals here; easy targets who come up to admit their worst.
A mild but anguished man tells how he’s had an affair and a baby is on the way. His children pressed their faces to the window this morning; fearful he may not come back.
Another woman has had a bad year; breast cancer followed by two affairs. Her husband is in the room — A Landmark graduate helping out and supporting her. Elliott says infidelity seems to be a particular problem with Kiwis.
A thickset man in a baseball cap tells how he was raped by an uncle, got into gangs and went to prison for nearly killing someone.
Everyone has a story — even the suits who confess to being bull-headed or lost. No-one is rushed or belittled, their words twisted.
Elliott says the forum is a Socratic dialogue, a proper philosophical inquiry into the meaning of being human — something that few ever stop to do. Then it’s about equipping people with the tools to deal with it.
A cult is where people are trained not to think encouraged to cut themselves off from the regular world, to obey and conform – quite the opposite of what is going on here.
Elliott spends a lot of time delivering theory. But we are called upon at regular intervals to discuss our own experiences with the person next to us. Volunteers are also called to the front to share – mini therapy sessions to illustrate the message.
There is a relentless pace to the three days, giving little time for independent thought. And no-one is allowed to take notes during the seminar. Elliott explains we need to be the change, experience it directly, not distance ourselves by playing the role of observers.
This is a key of the Landmark style of training — and what can sound uncomfortable to others before they do it. The tight structure is designed to make people actually do the actions needed to achieve a transformation.
The pressure is meant to be creative.
Landmark has its own jargon, intellectual property licensed from Erhard’s est seminars. There’s rackets, strong suits, the scriptwriter and the act, the sea of opinions, completing the past, creating clearings, enrollment, collapsing Let’s see if I can translate.
The key insight, one that will be familiar to anyone who’s studied post-modernism, social constructionism or Vygotskian psychology, is that humans are social creatures and our minds are social creations.
Words are like encoding genes for social ideas. Good, bad; right, wrong; friend, enemy; love hate we use them all to frame our reactions to the world.
And the talk talked, especially when we are growing up, shapes who we think we are. We internalise opinions and attitudes as truths — the truth about ourselves.
Most religions have the same spirit-based model: Go within to rise above.
But Landmark instead applies a Humanist understanding of the human condition. Our essential being lies in our social interactions. Meaning is created and enjoyed in the actions which bind individuals to their cultures. It is not static but negotiated. And consequently, dysfunctional lives need to be fixed not by going inside a person’s head, looking for the broken bit, but by tackling the social sphere where the self really exists.
Over the three days, Elliott leads the group towards this realization. She says we need to distinguish between what happens — the events — and the interpretations we build up around them. She says things do not have to mean anything unless we choose it.
If someone looks at us funny, we make it mean something. Likewise if we are beaten or raped. There’s no denying the concrete event, Elliott agrees. But we need to take responsibility for the interpretations we add.
Because interpretations, once they become fixed truths, also become constraints. Our worlds close in around our and we’re no longer open to growth.
So our job is to ‘unconceal’ the decisions and attitudes that have been blocking us, to make them visible. Then to let them go. Elliott says we have to put the past in the past and create a “clearing”, in which some more inspiring ambition has the room to develop.
And the trick is not just to talk about it, but to get doing it right now, here, today.
Which leads to the phone calls and letter writing that fill every break. Attendees are told to get in touch with the people who they’re the most upset with and let them know that whatever has happened has now been truly forgiven. Or that you truly apologise for your own behaviour. Whatever it takes to create a blank social canvas in which a new understanding can grow.
This is another controversial aspect. Call the uncle who raped you? Write a letter to the employees you’ve been brow-beating?
Yet tearfully, a stream of people step up to the microphone to tell how a step so huge turned out to be so simple. And so liberating.
Nothing would have made them do it before. They would have carried those grudges, that righteousness, that guilt, to their graves. But then they just did it.
Thank you Landmark. We’re transformed because we have the techniques to transform the social setting that has been shaping and constraining us all along.
Yes, you get it! Elliott is triumphant. And wouldn’t it be great if the whole world got it? If everyone you knew was a Landmark Graduate? How much easier would your lives be then?
This is the big justification for Landmark’s business model, the way participants are encouraged to sell its courses.
A big chunk of the course — many hours — is devoted to developing the ability to “enroll” – or to ‘move, touch and inspire others” by communication a vision of something of value.
It is at the heart of transformation, this ability to persuade others around us to open up and be ready for change.
Naturally, Landmark Forum is also so good we will want everyone we know to take the course. So why not combine the two in a practical exercise?
When you reach out to touch people during the break with your letters and phone calls, communicate the value of them making the effort to be with you at Tuesday night’s graduation. While there, they can sign up for the next Forum.
On Tuesday evening, the room booked at the Grand Chancellor hotel is full of parents, cousins, neighbours, friends and colleagues.
At the back of the room volunteers, graduates of previous years, sit at tables waiting to register the fresh batch of recruits. Meanwhile this weekend’s graduates are being enrolled in Landmark’s followon courses.
Elliott says the Forum is only your introduction, the one that sets you up. The advanced course discounted to $925 if you sign the cheque today — is where you will actually choose your goals, painting the life detail on your blank canvas.
Landmark calls this word-of-mouth marketing. If something is good, like a new movie, you will tell others about it. Landmark just encourages you to take the action.
But over the weekend some confess they don’t like the sales pressure. An Otago fertilizer agent says there is the sense that something lofty an pure is being tarnished for him: “I really want this, I want what they’re offering. But it’s like going to a car yard to buy a Mercedes and being told you can’t have one until you’ve sold five others yourself.”
On the phone from London the next day, Joe DiMaggio, Landmark’s head of research, design and development, agrees. DiMaggio says it was a business approach that was right for its time, but Landmark sees it now constrains its growth.
The firm wants to expand out of the personal transformation business and do more work with corporations, schools and government departments. And it is difficult while questions still hang over its head.
DiMaggio says other changes are possible. Landmark has debated becoming a public company. It’s ready for a new phase, but it may take another year to finalise.
And what about my transformation?
I did not participate in the way Landmark intended. I made no calls, wrote no letters. But I felt the framework was basically the way I was brought up.
It was an invigorating weekend. It was refreshing to be with people willing to open up; speak deeply and demonstrate that the world could be a more creative place with the right tools and commitment. I left with a bounce in my step.
SEVEN PRINCIPLES
Landmark Forum’s seven principles for being an extraordinary person:
- Be Racket-Free: give you being right — even when you know you are.
- Be Powerful: be straight in your communication and take what you get.
- Be Courageous: acknowledge your fear and then act.
- Be Peaceful: give up the interpretation that there is something wrong.
- Be Charismatic: give up trying to get somewhere. Be entirely fulfilled in the present moment.
- Be Enrolling: share your new possibilities in a way that people are touched, moved and inspired.
- Be Unreasonable: in your expectations of yourself and of others.
story by John McCrone
