I felt somewhat stuck during 1999 and thought about doing a course to get myself going again. A friend had just done Landmark Forum and was raving about it, so I decided to do it too. I told myself that if I got 10% as much out of it as she had then I would be happy.
The Landmark Forum course I did in June 2000 ran for three consecutive fifteen-hour days. Unlike most of the other personal development courses I have done, this one was not experiential. An experiential personal growth course is one where people are instructed to imagine emotional situations, role-play, and reflect on their experiences. There was only one experiential 'process' - an access to fear - which did not work for me.
Instead, Forum consists of long lectures interspersed with people sharing with the other participants. Like some of the other courses I had done in 1985, Forum is based on 'est'. It has been called 'kinder and gentler', which it probably is, but I suspect it is also less powerful. NB Self-Transformations in its current incarnation ("Zoeros") may also be a watered-down version of what I did in 1985.I learnt I was wrong: personal growth courses do not 'work' at a 10% setting. You are either on a high because it has really come through for you, or you are annoyed because you haven't gotten what others have. My observation of the other course participants was that some got a great deal out of it, others a moderate amount, whereas still others, like me, got little. At a rough guess, I'd say that each of these groups were of comparable size.
In common with other personal growth courses, Forum says to you, "You know there is more to life than what you are getting. What is stopping you is yourself." Both statements are true. The problem is that the course is actually empty. This is not meant as a criticism: it is only what the course draws out of you that counts. In other words, everything depends on your personality and how you respond to the course material.
I have a number of criticisms of Forum. Firstly, the class size - around 200 - is far too big. Even at the end of the course, many people were not familiar to me as faces, let alone as anything more. Compared to other courses, it is impersonal since interaction with fellow course participants was minor. No hugs.
Forum is not a cult and it is not pyramid selling, but at times it felt like both rolled together. There is a very aggressive marketing orientation and evangelical zeal is the normal state of the course leaders, as well as the intended state of the participants.
Why didn't it work for me? When he was asked what people were the most difficult to counsel, the psychiatrist Jung instantly replied, "Habitual liars and intellectuals." I plead guilty to at least one of these charges. If Forum had been my very first encounter with the world of personal growth then it may well have had a great impact on me; though almost certainly not as great an impact as Self-Transformations, because the latter was experiential. The first course I did opened me up to a new world I had been unaware of. All the subsequent courses merely added bits here and there, with nothing radically new. For me, attending personal development courses is very much a case of diminishing returns. Each one seems to give me less than the one before.
So is there a point to such courses? Yes. If only to open one up to the importance of emotions and to the breadth of ideas about how to live, taken from New Age, Jung, Eastern philosophy and other sources. For me, the first course opened a door I did not know existed. Since then, my outlook has integrated rationality and emotions, or so I like to believe.
However, I'm glad I did Forum because it made me realise something I should have known already: that I need to direct my personal growth in my own way, not according to someone else's recipe. Finishing the course has given me a feeling of freedom, as the Forum was making me feel constrained and manipulated. I dropped out of the (free) weekly follow-up course (LFIA) because I was getting very little out of it. Insights are nice, but they have no power unless applied and somehow I didn't see how to apply them. What really cemented my decision was that session 5 was mainly a marketing exercise, paving the way for an all-out marketing push to enrol more people, in session 6. Had I been very enthusiastic about Forum and what it had done for me, I would have gone along with what they wanted.
I think that many people are attracted to a course such as Forum because they believe, or hope, that someone smarter than them has "the answers", and that they can learn important truths about life in this way. On reflection, I think this is an illusion. There are lots of clever people and many know things I do not, yet I think that no-one has the answers to the question of how best to live life. They may be able to share some hints, techniques and approaches, but they cannot answer the basic questions of life.
David's method was to firstly convince us that we are all zeros. That we are machines, "jerks", amateur con-artists (ie conning ourselves), that all our beliefs and perceptions of the world are at best suspect, and at worst downright harmful. We were encouraged to view our 'story' as just another story, with no real validity. He even stated that we don't have minds, though whether this was serious or said in jest, I could not tell.
Having reduced us to formless jelly, and convincing us that life has no meaning, and even that the fact of its having no meaning has no meaning, he had us where he wanted us. He then dangled the idea that we can be anything we want to be, provided we followed his teachings. That we can obliterate the influence of the past and bootstrap the future out of nothing, simply by declaring what it is that we want to be. A precondition is to admit our inauthenticity and inspire someone. The Forum logic is: if life has no meaning then we can make it mean anything we want, create anything we want.
I find it hard to accept the claim that once one does Forum one is a free human being, that one has been "transformed" and hence is radically different from people who have not done the course. This aspect of the course is cult-like.
It seems to me that the basic message of the Forum reduces to choosing your goals and then using your will-power to pursue them consistently, regardless of your feelings. Put like that, it is pretty obvious and old-fashioned. They add to this by stressing the need to break with the past and make us focus on inspiring ourselves, but the essential message remains: "Don't make excuses, just do it!"
I see the presenter of the Forum course as being poised on a knife's edge. On the one hand, they need to make people understand the convoluted and radical ideas of the Forum, so that they can apply them and get results. On the other hand, the ideas have to be made so abstruse and hard to explain that course participants will not be tempted to try to explain them to people who have not done Forum. The idea is to make sure that the content of the course can only be learned by doing the course. Unlike Self-Transformations, which was much more experiential, the Forum course can be reduced to words. As David admitted, "All we do is talk".
One of my criticisms of Forum and other such courses is that, in common with religions, Marxism and Freudian psychology, they are self-validating. A system is self-validating if any result whatever can be construed as confirmation of the ideology in question. Take the statement, "If you read this book enough times you will understand it." Such a statement is self-validating, ie unfalsifiable. Forum is self-validating because it determines the way in which its teachings are to be validated. Eg we were specifically urged against saying, "I am not getting it" and using this to invalidate the Forum. If I disagree with something Forum says, or have trouble applying it, this means I am 'resisting'. Critical thought, if applied to Forum, is construed as a form of resistance. In other words, Forum cannot be wrong.
Another aspect that such courses share with religions is that they are ahistorical. They pretend that they are like Athena, who sprang fully-formed from Zeus' head. In truth, each course grew up over time based on the input of various people and schools of thought, as well as previous courses. For instance, Scientology features in the background of est and other courses. Religions are ahistorical because they want to conceal the fact that they are the results of a historical process in which fallible human beings create doctrine and institutions. The same applies to organisations like Landmark.
Yet all these and other intellectual objections to Forum, or other personal growth courses, are beside the point. The crux is how much do people get out of the experience of submitting themselves to the process of re-programming. For to get any value out of a course such as Forum one needs to go along with what they are saying, suppressing any intellectual objections. To answer this question one needs to look at the medium term, say 1-2 years after the course, not just the temporary high that follows a workshop. For my part, I got no temporary high, and years later, I have virtually forgotten Forum. This is in sharp contrast to Self Transformations, which I did 34 years ago. The effects of that course are still very much with me.
I am sure that to a Forum leader, all my criticisms will appear as nothing but resistance. My summing-up is that, though Forum did not work for me, it could be a powerful experience for someone who has had no exposure to personal development courses.