Return to: Landmark Forum: Rants and Raves
Safeguards I use in dealing with Landmark Education
My Forum Story: The beginning
To give you my background: I am, a forty year old male with an M.D., Ph.D. (biochemistry) with boards in Anesthesia & Internal Medicine. I am presently a Professor at a major medical center in the northeast. I have been married for 18 years and have two children (12 & 9).
That should give you some basis from which to listen to my story....
It is important that those of you who may read this and have not done the Forum understand that my experience is considered atypical by Landmark and my Forum leader.
This is my Advanced Course material. It may not make much sense to those who have been there. I am not sure where to start regarding my experience with the Advanced Course. This is material I need to share but it is at the edges of my ability to express in a coherent fashion. Even the language of the Forum is not powerful enough or at least not well distinguished enough for me to use.
Those of you who have taken the course know that it is a powerful and pervasive presentation about what it means to be a human being and possible ways we can gain an element of control over our lives. It goes deeply in the roles of commitment, integrity and enrollment in our lives. It goes beyond that into what I can only call "possibility thinking".
It was this new area that had the greatest impact on me. During the course I seemed to progress with the rest of the group. As much as possible, I once again engaged the Forum Leaders. Fear of failure quickly faded. I know that it is in the struggle and willingness to let go of self that the greatest gains can be made.
Tuesday night came and my entire family came to the last session. It was moving and powerful having them there. We were the only one's who brought our children fully prepared to play the Game. Since my own Forum, the level of integration that has existed in my family has been phenomenal. We now function as a unit. We train together now in both the Work and in the Martial Arts. I am humbled by their emotional and physical courage to follow these difficult paths with me. I am presently completely convinced that by combining these two forms of training I am giving my sons the tools they will need to live in the next century. I guess that tells you a bit of my dark vision of the future. It is a place where you will need the physical conditioning & destructive capabilities of a martial arts master combined with the mental discipline & enrolling powers of a forum leader to survive.
Interestingly, I was still found myself terrified that something unacceptable would be required of me. I fully expected that we would be told that SELP was the next MUST do step. I came in completely prepared to tell them no way. I so frightened at the thought of losing control to "them". Of course, the SELP was never mentioned on Tuesday night! I should know better then to try and out-guess LandMark...
Let's see if I can begin to tackle sharing some of my experiences from the Advanced Course. These experiences may be very obvious to Others but they were nothing like anything I knew before...
The first one I call...
The morning after the Advanced Course my family and I had planned a trip to Mexico. We, of course, had gotten little sleep the night before. It was a late night between the night session and all the talking we had done when we back to the apartment. The first job that morning was to drive from New York to Philadelphia to catch a plane. Being new to some of the technology we decided to Commit to a Safe, Pleasant and Fun trip (my eight year old added the Fun part - one of many reasons why it is great doing this work with your kids...).
Once we started to drive Stacey (my wife) and I began to engage in an amazing conversation about life and the way the world occurs for us. As we spoke reality began to began to shift dramatically for me. Despite the lack of sleep, I felt fully focused and in excellent shape. As I watched the New York City traffic struggle before my eyes, insights began to flood my mind. The moment to moment Miracle of it all became obvious. I started to see this reality as a great random event machine with my only real control being my response to it all. As each moment went by, I became more and more aware of each moment.
I looked at the time and noted it was 11:30 AM. Time continued to collapse for me, till I seemed to exist only in the span of a thought. Hundreds, thousands of thoughts passed by. I shared each as they occurred with my wife. Each thought seemed like a great insight. Our conversation as I can remember sounded like verses from the Tao or Zen koans. It was clear to us that to maintain the state of conscious each thought had to be experienced and then discarded. It was as if each moment the same Great Insight had to be rediscovered. There was no past, no future, just Now, occurring moment to moment. The experience was far more intense than any drug experience I know of.
Life just kept unfolding in front of my eyes.
The next moment, I was Back and the clock had jumped to 3:00 PM and we were just outside the airport. My wife seemed to have snapped back just before me. I could not believe what had happened. My wife later described it as like having an orgasm lasting for three hours. For me it was a taste of Enlightenment. My wife called it Being in the Present. I called it Something Happened...
After my Advanced Course I found myself in one of three places.
My Remembered Self -my normal way of thinking.
Being in the Present - with no future or past and
Possibility Thinking.
I can now understand why the Forum Leader had such a hard time rationally describing Possibility. It really is like trying to describe balancing on a bike or how an orgasm feels, you sound like a fool till the other person experiences it.
I experienced what I call Possibility Thinking a number of times during the plane trip. Mostly in relation to my two sons. I sat with them during the trip. I remember early in the trip looking over at them and suddenly seeing all that was Possible for them. My eyes welled up with tears as I experienced an avalanche of all that potential. There was such a clarity of vision in that moment. My love for them and my possible roles in their lives were clear.
We begin to play a card game together. It was with real joy I was interacting with them. There was no "in order to" in my being with them. I was not being a "good father" to them. I was just Being with them. Next thing I noticed the stewardess was looking over my shoulder watching us intensely. She quickly joined in the card game and then an passenger walking by become deeply involved. They were totally Enrolled in this card game and my sons. I realized that by my way of Being with my sons had opened up possibility for these strangers.
After the card game, my younger son , Jason (8 years old) complained to me "I'm bored". I asked my wife how much time till we landed (It has the connection city for our next flight). She told me "15 minutes". As a side note, time became very important to me There. I knew I could do Anything but it would take a finite amount of time to Accomplish it.
I looked back at Jason and could see at least 15 different possibilities we could do together in that time with the resources I had at hand. In that moment it was just so obvious all the things I could do that would Make a Difference... So I asked him if he wanted me to create a possibility. I could sense his growing excitement.
With that I took out my wallet. I had remembered finding my wallet "messed up" by Jason and yelling at him to "stay out of my stuff". I suddenly saw that for Jason a wallet carried the secrets of Adulthood and of his Father. Well, we went through my entire wallet, card by card - everything. I first had him describe the story he had about the card and then I told him mine. We talked about credit cards, calling cards, bank cards, business cards etc. I went over all the little notes I had written to myself and had forgotten. As we talked, I realized that I was describing to him what it was like to be an adult in our society. The paradox of power and helpless we all face. Our glory and worries about the world we have created around us. By the time the plane landed I knew I had shifted his conversation of me and the world I live in. We have not related the same way since... That is a natural outgrowth of Possibility Thinking.
I wanted to share another Advanced Course experience that for me demonstrates
how one can go wrong with this technology. By the way I am starting to
understand how foolish it is to try and "understand" this stuff.
But old habits die hard...
This experience I call it...
From a place of Being in the Present the real world and its concerns can look very foolish. One almost has to be reminded to act normal. I particular found that transitions between states of conscience can be difficult periods.
A dramatic example occurred for me we before landed in Mexico. We had been traveling for close to fourteen hours at that point. I was deep into Possibility Thinking with my older son. While sitting next him I discovered him repeatedly practicing his middle school Spanish to say two sentences. "I know a little Spanish" and "My family knows no Spanish." As I watched him at this work I had a clear vision of what could occur at the Leon Airport. He was already very nervous. He was acting as if the very survival of the family was going to depend on his knowledge of Spanish. He desperately wanted to make a Contribution to the family.
My old self would have told him not to worry and demonstrated enough Spanish to convince that I did not need his help. From how I was being the answer was clear. I would have him teach me Spanish. The last hour of the flight he Coached me in Spanish. For both of us it was a remarkable experience. He had never seen me suffer to learn new knowledge. I guess as far as he was concerned I was born with my knowledge and my degrees. He also made a very real contribution to the family. For the rest of the trip I demonstrated my new knowledge as often as possible.
This wonderful breakthrough for us leads though directly to my Crash. Just after finishing with my son teaching (with exams and test scores - the whole bit), it was suddenly clear that my wife needed me right away. She had started to fill out the visa forms and was having a hard time. I could clearly sense a rapidly rising panic on her part. The plane landed and it was time to get off.
I knew that she needed my old self back right away. I felt stuck on the other side of the wall. I knew I could with concentration and time I could reconstitute myself but I lacked both. As I started to struggle the most remarkable thing happen I fell out of Possibly and "locked down". My language began to fall apart. My ability to communicate progressively collapsed. A bizarre and complex model & understanding was getting in the way. I was really living and viewing the world from an alternative reality. I quickly reverted to one word answers since my sentences clearly made no sense here. Luckily, my wife is fast on her feet and I was fully functional as long as I kept my mouth shut. As I watched the cascade of possibilities for the world I knew the only way out was to "crash out". I had a choose a new Possibility and make it Reality. I did it in the time it takes to take one foot step. I looked up at my wife and said "I'm back".
And I was completely back except I was stuck with a new unique, very detailed and believable model about the world worked. Every memory I had about the world seemed to confirm my new understanding. Like an episode from "Sliders" I found myself in a new reality...
"Crashing out of Possibility" is similar to looking through a telescope through the wrong direction. Instead of seeing what is possible one finds an explanation for everything one sees. Put another way, one looks backwards towards the past instead to the future. All your breakthroughs are about what has occurred instead of what will occur.