Being a Landmark Forum Graduate
Earlier this year I enrolled on an ‘educational weekend’ called the Landmark Forum. It was a game changing experience.
Out Of Self Experience
Have you ever experienced yourself from the perspective of another person? If no, here’s a quick recipe for how to do it: get yourself in a room full of over 150 people over a 3 day period comprising maybe 30 hours, and spend much of those hours listening to many of them share in excruciating detail intimate details of their lives. Possibly, do it yourself. After a number of hours, the chances are you’ll start to dissociate, and see things strongly from the perspective of the people sharing. It’s like empathizing with a movie character, but far far more so. When you can genuinely see out of other people’s eyes like that, you can take a look at yourself and see things about yourself you’d never previously imagined. That’s pretty powerful. You get a new ability for seeing other people too. That’s pretty powerful as well.
Being Your Word
It’s likely that as a child you learned that ‘keeping your promises’ is a good thing to do. Well, here’s the strongest reason I know, and it’s got NOTHING particularly to do with ethics.
Words are inherently feeble things. Faint vibrations of air don’t, in and of themselves, really change anything. So why do we spend so many of our waking hours hopefully wagging our jaws?
There’s an implicit assumption here: that words precede consequences in the real world. ‘Keeping your promises’ is just the very tiniest tip of the iceberg of what that means. If you keep your promises, then that means that your words have a good track record of preceding consequences that are under your control. It means that your hopeful jaw wagging isn’t entirely in vain.
Now take this to the next level. Imagine BEING your word. You don’t just keep your promises. Everything you say is in accordance with hard reality as perceived by you and your nearest and dearest, and perhaps your less near and dear. Other people, and even more crucially, you, understand that when you open your mouth, something pertaining to reality is going to come out. That’s a good basis from which to be heard.
Another dimension of this is that you can start to THINK in accordance with reality. You can understand just how real or imagined your thinking is. You can start to keep the promises you made to yourself that NOBODY ELSE KNOWS ABOUT. When you imagine fancifully, you know that’s what you’re doing and enjoy it for what it is, and never confuse it for planning things for reality.
That’s powerful.
Knowing Things With Your Whole Being
We all know things with our intellects. The intellect is the great knower after all. But how much experience do we have knowing things with our whole BEING?
What does it feel like to know something with your whole being? The hallmark is that you don’t need to convince yourself. I don’t have to persuade myself to go for a run or a cycle ride, because when it’s time, I KNOW that’s what I want to do. I don’t have to persuade myself that the floor will hold me up, because I KNOW that it will. I KNOW that I ‘should’ be doing my maths assignment, but I’m not doing it, because my being-knowing knows that ‘should’ isn’t good enough. When doing my maths assignment is a high enough priority that it gets to take over my reality, then I’ll KNOW that it’s time to do it, and do it. In the meantime, why have the worry of procrastation? (You might be able to tell that being-knowing when it comes to deadlines is still something I’m working towards :D)
Better still, when you get used to this kind of knowing, you don’t need to depend so much on, or worry about, the other kind of knowing. Intellectual knowing is merely a precursor to being-knowing, and you can learn to give it the appropriate weight.
Perhaps the best thing I learnt during the forum was absurdism. I’ve enjoyed absurdism all my life, but when I understood it with my whole being, that was really ABSURD. Just amazing. You can feel it in your bones. Being-knowing feels so synchronized.
The other cool thing is that being-knowing is totally in-the-moment and provisional. What you know now (that the floor will hold you up, or that somebody feels a certain way), might be synchronized in this moment, but if you tune into being-knowing, as soon as it desynchronizes, you learn not to lend weight to that knowledge. Intellectual knowing, on the other hand, isn’t tuned into reality in that way: intellectual knowing is based on rules and exceptions, and often needs revising, outside of the moment. That’s not to say it’s not useful, it’s just harder to use than being-knowing. Learning to develop intellectual knowledge into being-knowing is an amazing road to go down.
The Breathtaking Breadth Of The Blind Spot
We should all know that we don’t know most things. But to have people point out things you don’t know, that were staring you in the face, that had you known them you would probably have done something else, one after the other, for 30 hours, that’s an exercise in humility, amazement, dizziness and possibility. And typically a whole host of other things :)
Being Coachable
Most of us are stubborn to some degree or other. Typically it’s a survival strategy against having other people use us for their own purposes, and affords us a degree of autonomy.
However, stubbornness isn’t adaptive in all circumstances, and especially so when you ask someone to help you. Asking someone to help you, and accepting their help, should be done on the basis that you trust them to deliver that help. If they try to help you in response to your request, and you reject the help, you are effectively reneging on the initial request for help (which isn’t being your word).
With practice, you can learn to ask the right people for the right help, and place yourself in their hands. When you place yourself in somebody else’s hands, you open yourself up to the possibility of things happening that you couldn’t have caused by yourself. There are a lot more people out there than there are of you, so learning to place yourself appropriately in other people’s hands is a really FREEING skill. This is one of the key foundations of collaboration. (Essentially, trust.)
An Effective Mind Virus
So, clearly, I didn’t learn ALL this in one weekend from one mightily crazy seeming organisation. But they surely provide an environment that is most unusually conducive to such revelations.
And these are fairly game-changing revelations. How to deal with and trust an organisation that sells this wholesale, at a profit, in an evangelical way? (And you understand, if you’ve read this far, an organisation that knows how to get even its most skeptical clients to be ‘evangelical’ too!)
How do I know this particular mind virus isn’t dangerous? Well… the simple answer is I don’t. But I do know that of the seething mass of mind viruses that (we’re) I’m exposed to every day, this one sure seems to be more beneficial than most.
And perhaps paradoxically, not truly knowing if it’s going to end up a mess is part of my motivation for my continuing involvement with them. Really powerful tools have the potential to cause great harm and great good: why should mind tools be any different?
Nothing ventured nothing gained!
