My personal take on Landmark, and its effect on the people who were in
my Forum, is that it was very empowering for most of them.

I would like to state some of what I personally got out of the
Forum.  I rediscovered my passion for a project I have been working on
now for several years, about language and identity.  Some day I hope to
be a professor, and watching the Forum leader, I saw how important it is
to listen in order to teach anything.  For him, listening had obviously
become something more than even a science.  Also, my love for those who
I am close to became very real for me.

Everything considered, I would say that the Forum can be hugely
beneficial if you are already a well-balanced person who might be
looking for a new perspective through which to see some things.

Infact, I was using this approach in dealing with some of the ideas 
presented in the Forum long before I even did it.  A lot of it is expressed 
elsewhere (i.e. Heidegger and Wittgenstein), and I had come into contact 
with it before.  The Forum, in large part, presents some of these conceptual
frameworks in a very workable and powerful manner, and makes it
experiential instead of intellectual.


One aspect of the Forum's use of language that I find intriguing is the
importance of declarative acts of speech.  It is only in a declarative
act (I think), that language itself becomes an existential act of the
person.  A declarative act of speech (I am...,) does not depend on any
correlation between the linguistic act itself and an objective
reference, other than the self, (but it is questionable whether or not
the self, in a wholly declaritive act, is infact a seperate thing than
the linguistic act.)  This is part of why I think the importance of
keeping your word became so real in the Forum: if your word is given,
you are that word, and invalidating it literally invalidates yourself (I
will be there= I am, that I will be there.)

One of the ideas I'm toying with is that identity is formed out of
something like fundamental declarative acts, and that the power of
transformation first becomes available when we have access to these. 
The Forum, I felt, was a great solvent that worked away some of the
layers to access these, but did not quite reach.  Maybe that was because
I distanced myself too much.  Is it possible to develop the art of
listening to the point that we can hear these declaratives seemingly
arising from nothing?

... I find the exploration of the nexus of language, self and reality
as mysterious and magical as it gets.

Finite games...
"Not allowing the past to be the past may be the primary source for the
seriousness of finite players.  Inasmuch as finite play always has its
audience, it is the audience to whom the finite player intends to be
known as winner.  The finite player, in other words, must not only have
an audience but must have an audience to convince....
...As finite players we will not enter the game with sufficient will to
win unless we are ourselves convinced by the very audience we intend to
convinvce.  That is, *unless we believe we actually are the losers the
audience sees us to be, we will not have the necessary desire to win*...
by proving to the audience they were wrong, we prove to ourselves they
were right."
#54

"The outcome of a finite game is the past waiting to happen. Whoever
plays towards a certain outcome desires a particular past.  By competing
for a particular prize, finite players compete for prized past."
#67

In these terms, the Forum is about rediscovering that we are
self-originatng, infinite players who have gotten trapped in the game of
being finite players, and have forgotten in the mean time that it is a
game.  Personally, the quote that really hit me was about the
seriousness of finite players.  I guess the biggest thing I have to work
on is the seriousness with which I approach this whole game.

My own introduction to the Forum was through a professor of mine, who
was finishing his SELP.  It was a couple of hours long, and very
exciting for me, but it was a situation where a Forum Leader introduced
it, and invited people to share what they had experienced through the
work.  I got to see the Forum somewhat through the eyes of the
participants, and there was a very open feeling to it all.

Although a large part of the criticism directed at LEC is directed from
the "group brain-washing" type of perspective, there is something truly
magical about the interaction of large groups of people actually being
_HONEST_ with each other.  ...  Landmark has created an
incredible system in which this magical thing can happen, well,
systematically.  Rather than being a reason to criticize, I think this
part of the work done at LEC is much to its credit.  People seem to
think that this setting fosters too much of a group mentality.  I had my
own concerns about this.  But what I saw in the Forum was actually just
the opposite.  I saw most people being more true to themselves in their
expression than I have seen anywhere else.  I personally found an open
space where I could express who I was in a way that I usually keep
behind a facade of social nicety.  These type of guest situations seem
to highlight what the Forum actually is.

I am very interested in doing SELP.  I hope to teach philosophy some
day, and I had the wonderful experience of a professor who actually
engaged his students in philosophy, instead of just presenting it (this
was the same professor who introduced me to the Forum.) I would love to
actually enroll others in engaging in the history of thought, and it
seems I can be helped in this through the training of the SELP course.

As far as people losing there relationships, I've seen that happen
also.  Most of those relationships were on the brink before doing the
Forum.  I've seen far more, however, who came out much more fully in
contact with the love that they felt for their partners and families.  I
know that I did.

I personally never experienced anything
in the Forum that even closely resembled an unquestionable, dogmatic
belief, or even the idea that the assuptions were such dogmas.  As far
as doctronaire, I am sure that some people do become doctrinaire about
the concepts of the Forum. But seeing if they work, and continuing to
use them if they do, does not seem to me to be dogmatically holding to a
theory without regard to practicality.  I've found a few instances where
they do not work, and put them back in the tool shed.