Returning back to nonviolent communication, we can see its ideological roots... how it relates to the subjectivity and moral relativism of existentialism and postmodernism, the emphasis on language-as-structure from structuralism and modern linguistics, the emphasis on group dynamics over the individual with the new age and systems theory, the feminist power-dynamic, and cultural marxism (false social revolutions), all of which reinforce our macro-control system.
To add to this: we see pragmatism and the pursuit of getting what you want from people (using them) and the indirect language of hypnosis to get people in a trance-like state towards feeling embeddedness that makes them receptive to control. Rosenberg obviously uses this to sell his NVC ideas to make a living. The Human Potential Movement desired to package manipulative psychological tricks like NLP into financial careers that served globalist interest to psychologically control populations.
We've looked at the constructivism of progressive education with the goal of reframing reality in a self-serving way and in a way that promotes the so-called authority of the environment. We see MKULTRA influence as mind-control is the principal method of government power; we saw diabolical doctors like Ewen Cameron, who destroyed lives with forced electroshock theory, mentioned in the Esalen library, Esalen funded by the Tavistock Institute with the mission to turn feelings into a weapon. What better way to have a totalitarian takeover than to destroy mental discernment and regress people into a childish understanding of the world with the destruction of true psychology.
Humanistic psychology is indeed prominent in NVC with the belief that no one can have more knowledge than you and that there is nothing to teach or learn. This is the pathological feminine where life is about solipsistic expression and connection.
PSYCHOLOGY, NVC, AND THE NEW AGE
In the cultish aspects of NVC, there is aversion to judgment and conflict as it disrupts collective cohesion. NVC users seek to resolve conflict on the surface so that the illusion of peace is kept and the feminine archetype of harmony is maintained. While in communication, conflict can emerge when one person is being mean to another person, but more often than not conflict is simply disagreement. NVC defines “honest self-expression” as expressing oneself in a way that is likely to inspire compassion in others, but this assumes that honesty will always be in agreement with others and that we should always believe what other people say. What if our disagreement conflicts with another's need for agreement? What if their need for agreement disagrees with our need to be honest? This is an example of where needs can be different and how honesty can conflict with needs.
By seeing conflict as existing in the structure of communication rather than content, NVC provides the so-called “language of conflict resolution.” Remember that NVC sees all content of communication to be good in the form of universal needs, which again is a dangerous assumption. The naive belief about human goodness keeps one blind from their own dark side and other people's dark side, which leads them to be taken advantage of or to take advantage of.
Particularly in cults, people can be incredibly blind to the reality of their members, seeking to simply feel good and see each other always in a positive light.
The dark occultists behind the control system want us to conflate truth with violence like the “war means peace” slogan in 1984. The reversal of meaning is an effective tool of mind-control because the less truth we know the more controlled/oppressed we are.
Most people deny and run away from dissonance, but the seeker of truth will be motivated to learn more and get to the bottom of things. If we are in contradiction then we cannot be aligned to truth and there is something false about our worldview that should be identified and eliminated. Gaining knowledge to resolve conflict takes a lot of time and development, as there is no instant solution.
However, NVC wants immediate results and magically poofs conflicts out of existence through a hyper-focus on NEEDS. Consequently, the mind can only be in a state of confusion with NVC as there is no will and care to evolve but to remain identified to unexamined feelings. No contradictions can be examined with rational analysis as ultimately NVC is about ego comfort, not growth.
Before continuing on the subject of CONFLICT, let's make it very clear that we are NOT talking about physical conflict or threat, but conflict that emerges from our common associations and interactions. While no one should be around a person that puts them down all the time or be in a verbally abusive relationship, conflict-as-disagreement carries a different value than simply unpleasantry.
While Nietzsche's perspectivism desired to make all perspectives true, in a non-contradictory reality this cannot be the case. It is actually possible that one person could be right and the other person wrong, a possibility NVC denies.
(Left Image: Conceptual Art by Genis Carreras. It says: Perspectivism: Philosophical view that all ideas come from different perspectives and are caused by specific inner drives, and that any ethical judgment can be made from any number of viewpoints.)
NVC places all conflict as between people when greater conflicts can lie within. In terms of self-development, conflict can alert us that we are not in alignment with truth revealing inner fragmentation and confusion, such as the conflict between thoughts and feelings, or thoughts and actions, or feelings and actions. It can alert us to the fact that our current worldview and way of understanding is not sufficient for our experience. Because of this, conflict can be an important catalyst for personal growth.
Since NVC ignores all issues of MIND, it fails to see that conflict can be the contradiction between two particular assertions that should be evaluated with the Socratic Method. Contradictions arise because of ignorance and lack of understanding as no real conflict and contradiction exists in the nature and structure of REALITY itself.
While outer conflict will break down a person who has no inner unity and strength, it cannot break down the person who has resolved his inner conflict. It is the trait of an adult to handle and face conflict with patience, courage, and self-control. It is when one is lost and cannot access truth that outer conflict breeds inner confusion. By simply seeing conflict as undesirable, NVC limits our understanding of the value of conflict seeking to make us weak and pampered through artificial environments. Yet, the mark of true spiritual development is to be able to handle anything said from anyone's mouth. We should never seek to control language, but learn to control ourselves.
By keeping people safe from conflict, NVC cultivates learned helplessness and emotional weakness so that people cannot confront important uncomfortable truths about themselves and the world. They become too weak to wake up to their psychological problems and our slavery system since they can dismiss any undesirable information as violent communication. The TRUTH actually FEELS violent to them.
The four components of NVC are Observation, Feeling, Need, and Request. Here we see that Observation free of judgment or discernment is considered "the highest form of intelligence" (an idea taken from Krishnamurti). In the Need section, it implies that transcending conditioning is getting in touch with universal needs, a dangerous distortion of truth. Transcending social conditioning requires getting in touch with universal truth as needs can be subjective. Then it conflates values and needs.
Most of the new age sees spiritual growth as just a feeling, rather than the alchemical GROWTH and WORK of transforming the lead of ego into the philosopher's gold. We shouldn't ONLY be mere observers of our thoughts, feelings, and emotions as to passively accept them; we should ACTIVELY work with them and transform them to become more in alignment with the objective good.
While NVC claims to seek awareness of one's feelings and needs, it only does so under the pretense of objectivity, by desiring to express feelings and needs in objective and neutral terms, as factual observations. While this is an important first step, it is not synonymous with true objectivity, as needs and feelings can be based on false realities and can also bias our perception of reality.
NVC assumes that your basic feelings and emotional needs are objectively VALID and considers identification to them and communication of them the end goal. We have to feel our feelings as they are as to not hide from ourselves, but we need to continue self-analysis to discover what is true/false, good/evil, and right/wrong about these needs, as well as get to their core motivation, intention, and origin. To reiterate from earlier, discovering what a need is and where it comes from cannot be done with a tool or methodology but by looking within without prejudice, which meditation can help with.
NVC describes violent and coercive language as the use of a violent strategy to meet needs with the Four D's. The “4 Ds” are considered to be “Life-Alienating Communication,” communication that blocks us from connecting with self and others, “alienating us from our natural state of compassion,” leading us to states of mind that are defensive and aggressive. They are Demand, Diagnosis, Denial, and Deserve.
DEMANDS imply threat or punishment, like “get that proposal out by 5 pm or you'll be suspended.” This is not just the language of punishment, but the actual threat of punishment. Unfortunately, our whole system of control is based on the motivation for reward (greed) and punishment (fear), a false morality of obedience and control. We see this expressed worst with the order-following of the military and police, other bureaucratic systems like taxation, and even the business model as a whole. If your boss asks you to do something, it is usually coupled with the threat that if you don't you'll be potentially fired. We live in an immoral society where we are threatened with survival all the time and coerced to do things against our will. In a higher consciousness world, we would be motivated by care, truth, and goodness, but for now, humans are generally lazy and only motivated by self-interest, thus we get the world we deserve.
While we cannot stop societal coercion (until people evolve), in our personal lives if someone is being demanding in order to control and dominate us, like constantly giving orders, this is obviously a bad relationship. Because NVC sees humans as good (regardless of whether they are evolved or not), it sees that even demands from an asshole are backed by good intentions, just strategically miscommunicated. Try changing the language of an asshole and you will see that it does not help. Sometimes a demand is the inappropriate expression of stress and other things going on in someone, which may be good for them to express. But if a demanding and entitled person has no respect, to begin with then the change of this situation is probably end the relationship.
People that use reward and punishment language to get people to do things are either super egotistical or are often bad parents that have failed to instill real values in their children as to show them the real reasons they SHOULD do things.
Like demands, another form of coercive language is deserve-oriented language, linking behavior with reward. The example here is “if you don't get that project done, don't bother about coming in tomorrow,” which is actually the same as demand; this is a bad example. Again, we could say that all business transactions and the money system at large are motivated by reward as the pragmatic game. You play this game and you'll get some cash. You do this and this and you'll get this. In a way, individuals from NVC/new age had a desire to form relationships without the stain of being business transactions, but then they went from business boundaries to no boundaries—which enters cultish territory. They would be just as opportunistic as businessmen, getting what they want using subtle emotional tactics.
Instead of using violent language, NVC suggests that we use REQUESTS to met unmet needs and resolve conflict. If we never really examine needs and assume they are the same for everyone, does a request really differ from a demand? If we are constantly finding what we can ask of a person is this not a form of control? Like feminism and cultural marxism, NVC perceives language and conversation as structured with the culturally infected power-dynamic. However, “meet my needs” can easily become the new power dynamic and ego game. Power and power-dynamics are merely indicative of lower consciousness and the lack of knowledge (self and cosmic), living blindly in the materialist paradigm where humans are motivated by ego and power until they evolve spiritually to be motivated by love and truth. Because NVC does not discuss spiritual growth, any uncomfortable truth asserted could be perceived as a power dynamic.
According to NVC, anyone who claims to have more knowledge than another would be asserting a power-dynamic. Thus, no one is allowed to diagnose another person. The example given for DIAGNOSIS, or more accurately 'unrequested diagnosis,' is “you are lazy and only care about yourself.” This is considered labeling, judging, or criticizing. NVC and the new age believe that all labels are judgments and all judgments are labels, destroying the law of identity. This is simply saying that people cannot be anything negative, a childish belief. What if it is TRUE that that person is actually lazy and that they only care about themselves?? That doesn't mean one should necessarily yell it at them, but the point is that there is no room for objective truth in the NVC model, as it deems all diagnosis as false, when some criticisms can be true.
This entails the belief that you SHOULD not be talked to in a critical way, unless you have given your permission; this keeps people safe from critical examination. Again, this is the destruction of the sacred masculine (and sacred feminine) encouraging an infantile regressed state, as triggery hypersensitive snowflakes are unaccountable to any moral or rational standards. The more stuck and regressed people are, the more defensive and egoically identified. Desiring to protect yourself from criticism is the will of the ego, not the will of the cosmic adult. While there are constructive and destructive forms of criticism, the adult can handle both, and let go of the destructive aspects, and carry forth the constructive ones. The belief that no one can diagnosis another is the false belief of humanistic psychology. While it is true that no one can know the totality of another person, one can indeed know something about a person based on their patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior based on time spent with them. To claim that the physical wall between people also creates a psychological wall is just another confusion like the confusion between physical violence and verbal harm.
Read short paper on Humanistic Psychology
The final D is DENIAL, or Denial of Responsibility and this is the denial of choice with blame, such as “I have to do what the boss says.” Now, this is actually important for order-followers to understand as they often believe that they must follow orders, abdicating personal responsibility and choice to their order-givers. This following clip is what Rosenberg got right in terms of criticizing order-following. But he criticizes the language that people use to avoid responsibility rather than the people. It is not the language that is to blame as the language merely reflects what one lacks in development and understanding.
From the NVC workshop (at the 10:30 min. mark), Rosenberg gives an example of the denial of responsibility through the German word that translates into “office language.” He tells the story of a Nazi soldier who was asked if it was hard to send tens of thousands of people to their death?” And the solider replied, “it was easy, our language made it easy,” and the interviewer was puzzled to then hear him respond, “in fact, we had our own language, in which you deny responsibility for your actions.” It was similar to saying I was following company policy. The problem isn't the language, but believing that doing your job and obedience is a virtue without any moral considerations.
By removing morality from responsibility, one cannot have True Responsibility. Denying that blame exists removes moral accountability. NVC defines responsibility as owning what you have done but not within any moral context. How can NVC be against order-following when it is against moral judgments?
Looking deeper, isn't requesting that another meet your needs a form of the denial of responsibility in some ways? Especially when these needs come from the pampered child? Will the child throw a tantrum if these needs are not met? With NVC, “needs” become the end-goal rather than needing to be deconstructed with evolutionary truth. Humans become objectified as the fillers of needs rather than ends-in-themselves, generating loss of autonomy and co-dependence. Is it is actually moral to USE people to satisfy your needs? Is this not the epitome of selfishness? When we center reality on our needs, we are no longer concerned with true connection, healing, truth, and reality. When people continually use conversation to make demands in the form of requests, they can be acting very immaturely.
Self-fulfillment means what it means: I fulfill myself. Looking for people to fulfill your needs quickly becomes a destructive cycle, because if you confront people with your unmet needs as to REQUEST that they should fulfill them and they say no, or say yes but don't follow through, downward spiral you go, because now you have the original unmet needs compounded with the new unmet need of the request not being fulfilled!
While NVC appears to be about respecting people's free will choices and boundaries, it actually does the opposite. It makes people dependent on each other to fulfill each other's needs; NVC doesn't respect people's free will choice to express themselves naturally and freely by considering crossing boundaries as discussing anything that would conflict with needs and feelings. It is the circular loop of solipsism through social validation, following the new age model. The social contract is: Only say what fits with my beliefs and I will do the same for you, and as a result we will FEEL GOOD.
More often than not, NEEDS are based on unresolved childhood issues, self-loathing, low self-esteem, insecurity, the ego, the shadow, other psychological imbalances, confusions, and compulsions... and especially the emptiness of spiritual ignorance. In this way, NVC merely enables one to remain in their pathology and neurosis, while relinquishing their responsibility to develop by focusing on another person's communication strategies. In regards to childhood issues, most humans on the planet are victims of bad parenting and have had to parent themselves, often during awkward and weird phases of their adult lives. The NEED for community is commonly the NEED for family healing. If one leads a life merely driven by that need then his ignorance and imbalance can create destruction. Most cultist experiences do not end well as the glamour of a community where everyone is right and good all the time usually has a short life with a devastating end.
These needs can only be fulfilled with psychological growth, by determining our parental issues and purifying the father and mother archetype as an internal structure, as previously discussed. We must heal the mother archetype within so that we feel one with the divine and TRUE CARE is awakened. When we fail to do this, we are compelled to control others or be in a controlled environment, as most demands and requests come from the corrupted feminine. VALUES are an expression of the Feminine, but NVC wrongly associates NEEDS to values.
LOWER
HIGHER
LOWER
HIGHER
The lower feminine expression of the immature child, unhealed self, and ego is through needs, while the higher feminine expression of the cosmic adult, healed self, and balanced ego is through care. CARE (for Truth and Morality) should be our motivating force. Lower needs are driven by inner lack, confusion, and conflict, while the higher needs—for what is good and true—are driven by Knowledge.
Additionally, we must heal the father archetype by gaining control over our own mind and autonomy, to value philosophical education and the learning of language, logic, and ethics. We need to seek truth for ourselves and shed false authority found in many fashionable pseudo-spiritual cul-de-sacs... Values must accompany true morals, as we should value LOVE because it is OBJECTIVELY GOOD.
Another psychological need is to heal from traumatic events and this involves facing the NEGATIVE. Rather than healing trauma, trauma can partner up with the ego, a dangerous combo; the cycle of abuse can perpetuate as the victim easily becomes the perpetrator. The Human Potential Movement is all about the quick fix. But bringing out pain and trauma stored in the subconscious is a life long journey and one can experience very negative states for long periods of time in the proces of integration. These states have to be felt before they can be processed and let go of, which can be a very painful and uncomfortable part of the spiritual journey. This also requires that we deconstruct our defense mechanisms which prevent us from confronting pain as to be able to release and free pain, but NVC crystalizes such self-defense mechanisms making them harder to dissolve, encasing the traumatic wound so that it ends up being the core motivation for everything. One not only aborts the growth process but identifies to his wound so that it becomes a part of his identity. And he will do anything to keep it in place and protect it. While NVC creates a superficial appearance of resolution, in the depths of the subconscious, psychological pressure builds to soon face eruption. This is why those who practice NVC may face the biggest meltdowns, as the psyche attempts to merge the subconscious with the conscious in the fundamental wholeness of Self.
True growth requires authenticity and honesty. When we have to adapt to a model of communication we are no longer being authentic. It is much better for people to be authentic at a lower natural level then inauthentic at a higher artificial level, as inauthenticity prevents growth and keeps people hidden from themselves. The problem with NVC is that it prevents people from being honest and authentic to begin with, which is required on the spiritual path. What if you aren't feeling super compassionate and you are feeling guilt and fear, should you then not speak? Yes, on the one hand, NVC seeks to express one's feelings authentically to express that fear and guilt, but on the other hand, it wants to filter out any authenticity that causes pain, which can be fear and guilt. Essentially, it's a double-bind (a Gregory Bateson reference).
True authenticity is being honest with your emotional states, but NVC only wants you to feel and experience certain states, which is why you make REQUESTS to others. Ultimately, NVC limits the range of emotional reception and expression. Ironically being against conflict, NVC fuels the conflict between the image of an ideal and one's authenticity. NVC tells you that your default setting is compassion and goodness when the reality tells you differently. Like new age religions, NVC helps one create a FALSE PERSONA based on a positive static ideal, which prevents individuals from looking within to face the dark side lurking in their intentions, motivations, and hidden agendas.
To summarize: NVC opposes real psychological development, the minor arcana of Natural Law and STUDY of SELF, including the archetypal hero, the sovereign adult, shadow integration, gender balance, healing mother/father issues, communing with corrected archetypes, and mental discernment of true/false, right/wrong within one's internal landscape.
By placing focus on the means of communication, one is no longer concerned with self-knowledge and self-healing. His only self-criticism is faulty communication rather than something about himself, like his lack of honesty, authenticity, right thinking, good intention, and right action. NVC doesn't value sovereignty or autonomy and the free will of self and others but desires to control the rules of interaction and the use of words so that one never has to reflect on themselves deeply.
When you do the self-healing work of LOVE then loving relationships can be formed. When Self-Knowledge is the foundation of your life, you no longer have to focus on connection as its substitute. This is about your connection to the Infinite All that is ever-present. Our deficiencies and insecurities are part of the materialist paradigm that views man as only his finite material self with his origin and end in this one life. This is the LIE, as we never die and come from Infinite Love. When we are able to heal and find true loving relationships, then there is never a need to control, only positively influence. People have to be in alignment with truth and morality for real community to emerge, which can only emerge spontaneously and organically.
When we are searching for a community to fulfill some internal need, we will often become prey to a power-dynamic because of our unresolved issues. When it comes to having connections and support in community, that can only be done by getting our house in order. First things first. Things must be right within ourselves to a degree for that to manifest without. True connection between people and individuals in a community cannot occur until one has been initiated on the path of truth becoming knowledgeable about the self (psychology) and philosophy (Hermetic Principles, Seven Classical Liberal Arts, etc.).
We should study language as an objective science, rather than simply the subjective tool of expression. Before true initiation, our perceptions will waver from truth most of the time causing one to suffer but this lessens upon alchemical work in which the individual becomes more free and healthy being more in alignment with reality.
NVC creates the dependent and narcissistic child who wants special treatment and to be pampered with modified language, desiring all conversation to be centered around his needs. The child wants things his way and can only interpret criticism, disagreement, and conflict as violent because it opposes ego desires. This is how the new age has actually regressed people rather than helped them move forward. With NVC, one's emotional issues can remain unchecked; he can nurture them and become more stuck and identified. One even becomes more triggered by communication because he has conflated it with his own psychology. Arranging language and linguistic rules never gets to the root problem, thus fueling one's reactive tendencies. Emotional volatile states and reactions are due to a lack of self-knowledge and being confronted with facts that contradict one's delusions.
Emotions naturally go up and down (rhythym) and trying to make them static is unhealthy. Sometimes we have to be in an undesirable emotional state to grow and heal. We also have to understand why certain emotions come about through deep contemplation and self-reflection as they are often tied to past experiences and/or false beliefs. Some negative emotions can be a part of self-loathing which is a calling to embark the healing path.
LGATS/CYBERNETIC CULTS
The Large Group Awareness Training, called LGATS for short, was a phenomenon of the Human Potential Movement that desired to combine ancient occulted spiritual knowledge with the pragmatism of the business world; this merged with the New Age Movement. The goal was to combine Western and Eastern spiritual traditions with self-help, motivational psychology, holistic health, financial abundance, and material success.
We see these ideas in Napoleon's Think and Grow Rich, Deepak Chopra's The Seven Spiritual Law of Success, and the movie The Secret. Also, there's Andrew Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. The bottom-line is how to sell yourself and create more options in our corporate slavery hell hole.
The problem is that success is based on how the world and other people perceive us. In a co-dependent world based in lower consciousness that creates false realities, true value cannot be discerned. In truth, our value and value in general is not dependent on what other people think. Having to make your work dependent to other people's desires is a form of slavery.
Basing value on market desires and the control system at large stops people from growing, which is why the more intelligent of us may seek careers in education independent from the control system. While we understand the desire for financial freedom, these new age matrix-driven ideologies would be about adapting to the social hierarchy to get more for oneself and feed a materialistic lifestyle. When we value the wrong things, we simply bring upon more enslavement, individually and collectively.
(Money isn't necessarily value. Here we see the above art and its money walls to be boring and uninspiring, while below is Vincent Van Gogh's art, who made little to no money for his art.)
The pragmatic models of the LGATS created cult-like environments based on the principles of cybernetics, systems theory, NLP, hypnosis, general semantics, modern linguistics, structuralism, and constructivism, while their philosophical teachings would be based in existentialism, pragmatism, humanistic psychology, and progressive education. Mind-control is integral to all this, and we need to include game theory—which connects psychology to postmodernism and pragmatism.
Let's see how these theories tie together...
Here Paul Pangaro tells us about the basics of cybernetics at a 2018 conference, as I wanted to find something recent to show the tenacity of this mind-virus that is over 70 years old now. www.paulpangaro.com
Referring to the 2-4 min mark, when he defines cybernetics, he states that “cybernetics is about getting what you want.” And we are reminded of Rosenberg stating this as the goal of NVC.
I want to make a quick note about this diagram in Pangaro's lecture. It says “correction of error” but it means “correction of deviation from initial course.” TRUE error correction is NOT DEPENDENT to the initial course, which this model makes confusing. The initial course could be in error.
ERROR?
X
Be sure to watch this excellent documentary called the Minds of Men,
The second part goes into cybernetics.
In a sense cybernetics, systems theory, and the rest are proxies for the Trivium process of information processing, as they pose to be meta-models, when quite the opposite.
In the Trivium model, information is gathered from objective reality as the input and this can be sensory/perceptive data or data in the form of language, as in communication and in texts. The individual processes the information through analysis and then takes actions back into the environment based on that information.
If garbage goes in, then garbage comes out, which is why misinformation and propaganda are unleashed at a massive scale into our environment by dark forces. Consequently, our actions are not in alignment with reality. Yet, their nefarious agendas provide a narcissistic reward and ego payoff, the carrot on a stick being “getting what you want.”
Even though the pragmatist admits that objective reality EXISTS, because he recognizes that he cannot achieve his goals without having some objective standard (which he finds in facts), he still denies objective morality because he denies Absolute Truth. The pragmatist fails to understand the paradox between the Absolute and the relative and thus believes everything is solely dependent on context. Without purifying his spirit/intention, the pragmatist cannot evolve beyond his ego contraction.
Download PDF: A 19th-century philosophy book revealing some of problems with pragmatism, as a Christian interpretation , one must tease apart the threads
Additionally, goals must be adequately contextualized as goals aren't the whole of life which cybernetics tries to make. Astrology divides the archetypes of life into 12 and the focus on achievement is merely one. But even this Capricorn archetype has a lower and higher expression in which worldly achievement reflects the lower mountain goat and spiritual enlightenment the higher sea goat. At the lowest, Capricorn is the businessman but at the highest the priest. (And as an astrological side note, we all have this archetypal expression in our chart regardless of whether our sun sign is Capricorn.)
Contrarily, in this cybernetics model (below the Trivium) you begin with an agenda, develop a plan to implement and then get your results and examine them. If your results deviate from the goal, then you adjust, correct, and steer back into the agenda.
Now, some may ask isn't it okay to create goals to execute? The answer is, of course, yes, but goals are the smaller context that must cohere with the larger context of objective morality, which includes right mind and right intention. We will discuss more about goals soon.
We could say that we have goals in all areas of life, but evolution is not necessarily goal-making as we cannot conceive higher expressions of being and goodness from the level we are at. We cannot dictate what our evolution is in this sense. This is another reason WHY APOPHASIS is the TRUE method of growth, eliminating what is false instead of projecting what is good.
Cybernetics model is a fake META-MODEL that eradicates the true evolutionary goal to perceive, know, and embody objective reality and objective morality, which should be our fundamental aspiration. This is why relativism always underlies these theories so that individuals don't examine the moral value of the agendas present in such environmental systems. If the business is making profit and the hierarchy is sustained then all is well.
Here is a report by the government's DARPA program regarding cybernetics.
Here is another Maslow-type hierarchy applied to corporations, which again reveals the problems of humanistic psychology and its concept of needs. Here the need to be profitable is ABOVE all else, ethics being the least fundamental at the top. Economic responsibility is considered a higher priority than ethical responsibility.
The irony is that by pursuing profit above all else, we create poverty as reality reflects the poor quality of our consciousness. A consciousness based in profit is a consciousness based in the poverty of spirit and truth.
THE UNITED NATIONS
There is such a thing as negative feedback and reflecting on the consequences to our thoughts, feelings, and actions but this cannot be bound to a relativistic model based in ego. When we make our relativistic desires (bound to lower consciousness) the input, our output is necessarily social systems of manipulation and control. Natural Law is about Freedom from the false self-concept and the collective hoax it creates.
Read PDF
The cybernetics model is used by corporations, media, education, and government, all driven towards the collective agenda of totalitarian enslavement. By getting the population to be driven by their own lower selfish desires to play the money game, the business game, the political game, the fame game, all the hierarchical games you can think of, the controllers entrap them in the negative consequences to their lower consciousness.
We think Nietzsche's superman is true SOVEREIGNTY in the pursuit of power and success.
Take for example Jordan Peterson who fuses the cybernetics model with religious allegory. In 2018, Jordan Peterson attended a Trilateral Commission in Europe. This organization was create by David Rockefeller. Stay tuned for my book critiquing Peterson in full. http://www.shadolsonshow.com/2018/11/24/jordan-peterson-attends-trilateral-commission-2018-euro-meeting/
Image from the Movie THRIVE: WATCH
People think that they are becoming more free the higher the go in the socio-political-economic hierarchy, but really the more enslaved they become and we all become (correspondence). We think running from the truth will make it go away.
Most often, the proponents of these theories like cybernetics have the agenda to gain rank in the dominator-hierarchy, to be financially supported as the intellectual elite. While on some level there is a desire to learn, it gets co-opted and one remains stuck in a crystalized belief system of half-truths framed to support collective lies.
When we think our AGENDAS ARE equivalent to reality we have collapsed reality into a self-serving tool. We are no longer students of objective truth and reality which has much to teach us beyond our narrow-minded and socially-conditioned agendas.
Even when we fixate to good goals, we can easily become obsessed with them when we identify to them and allow them to give us a sense of power and control rather than purpose. But ultimately, life is about surrendering that control to become holistic. The goal of evolution is different than our concepts of success. More than worldly achievement, life is about deepening what we perceive and know, and deepening who we are and what we do as to move in unplanned directions through spontaneous evolution. We have to be receptive to what we are here to learn which is beyond what we think we know or (actually) know and our personal agendas can kill that receptivity.
The irony is that when we are aligned to our true purpose that is aligned to Natural Law, we need no models or tools of manipulation to get there, we are supported by the Divine itself and a path organically unfolds for us. Often when we are exerting a lot of energy and control, it is trying to get something to work that maybe shouldn't.
The ultimate goal is evolution of consciousness towards the Infinite All itself, not the social and financial rewards of achieving goals. We do not STEER evolution, we increase our degrees of participation in evolution by increasing consciousness of WHAT IS and discovering what needs to be done. We align to the intelligence inherent in creation, not our finite intellect. The steerer of the ship is the ALL itself AND that aspect within us that is driven to the Ultimate.
Infinity Movement by Erika Bird
Okay, so returning to the LGATS, let me just give you a brief history...
These essentially started in 1968 with Alexander Everett's Mind-Dynamics; Everett is sometimes called the “Father of the Human Potential Movement” as he attempted to unite esoteric philosophy like Theosophy and Rosicrucianism with success strategy to “get people to a higher dimension of mind.”
Werner Erhard was an employee of Everett's Mind-Dynamics workshops and basically took Everett's staff and information to create EST, “Erhard Seminars Training.” Erhard publicly announced this at the end of one of Mind-Dynamic Training sessions. While Everett acted supportive for public face, he was for obvious reasons upset and he later claimed that Erhard organized this behind his back. If this story is true, this is an example of pursuing a goal with no regard for morality. Before that, Erhard was a cars salesman, and we will find that sales is the basis for much of these teachings. (The best salesman are psychologists and the highest level sales can be the mind control of dark occultism.)
EST started in 1971 and it is estimated that 700, 000 people did EST before the seminars halted in 1991 when Erhard left the country and sold the EST technology to some followers. They established Landmark Forum and Erhard's brother is the president. The company makes over 50 million yearly with staff around 500.
I will be interjecting my own personal experience here as I have taken the entire Landmark course, which includes the Forum, the Advanced Class, and Self-Expression Leadership Program.
To go on a short but related tangent here, Erhard was one of the founders of the Hunger Project in 1977 along with John Denver, which became a United Nations organization. The goal was to increase awareness of hunger issues and have a conversation about its root causes, not to actually end hunger and this, of course, stirred controversy.
A six-month investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting of Oakland, California and Mother Jones Magazine found that very little of the money collected for The Hunger Project was used for the purchase and distribution of food, claiming that Erhard was "using the Hunger Project not only for self-aggrandizement but for promoting the for-profit corporation he founded as well." Download Report.
It is suspicious that the Hunger Project has attempted to purge criticism and history from the internet seeking to not be affiliated with Erhard, its founder.
When you look into the Hunger Project, they are doing some good by providing training on some agricultural techniques, but not without a price and the agenda to microfinance. In one of their stories, Moises was given a loan to repay. These types of loan, and loans in general, are scams because money is created from nothing and the interest payment (debt bondage) makes it impossible to pay off. The entire banking system is about creating financial dependence so that we owe the bankers the fruits of our labor when they have pulled magical numbers out of the air.
A look into John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman can give more information on the subject of banking in third world countries deliberately used to prevent their growth and ultimately bring them poverty.
Back to Erhard... Erhard was close friends with Alan Watts who was a main person to bring Zen Buddhism to the Western crowd, combining it with psychotherapy. Now Alan Watts was definitely a mixture of good and bad teachings. He understood the Law of Mind better than some, deconstructing materialism here, saying that an intelligent being is not a mere fluke of a mechanical universe (at the 1:15 min. mark of his talk Nature of God and Death).
The Great Work
Communicating Knowledge
that others don't know.
Yet, in his talk How To Play the Game, (starting at the 23:50 min. mark to the end), he lacks clear understanding of morality and its relationship to the cosmos. (At the 25:40 min. mark) he says, “the universe in its grand design has nothing special to do with morality... The thing-itself is really beyond good and evil.” This relates to the pseudo-transcendence of Nietzsche and false Buddhism.
(Continuing towards the end of the talk) he seems to be mixing game theory with the spiritual concepts of good and evil. He considers good and evil mutually-dependent like buying and selling required to keep “the game going” relating it to winning (good) and losing (evil). He can only see evolution as a game because a part of him is still in a materialistic mindset.
In a sense, he is using the Law of Polarity as a justification for evil, conflict, and suffering and tends to fuse morality as being false religion seeing it separate from spirituality. He also confuses moral polarity with gender seeing good and evil as two sides of the same coin when good is the absense of evil. Ultimately, he fails to see Goodness as the fundamental principle of the cosmos as the Absolute Good exists.
(Starting at the 1:30 min. mark) Watts claims that preaching is moral violence and this is very reminiscent of NVC which considers moral judgment to be violence. He explains that preaching is futile as people don't change when you tell them what they are doing is wrong and and how it can bring negative consequences. However, this does not make preaching violent or violence, just ineffective and purposeless, according to his view. Thus, it is stange he would use the term "violence." He falls into the performative contradiction of all moral relativism, as he is preaching to not preach.
Any time we share important knowledge to others that they don't already know, we are in a sense preaching, and this is even how Watts has loosely defined it, as specifically the preaching of moral causality. Even if it is futile to change the world with knowledge, it is still right to attempt to inform others when the opportunity presents itself, and this can be the Great Work. (But first, we have to understand the principles of morality holistically.)
Watts claims that we change behavior with positivity by just working on ourselves and making our individual lives great and we can see how this directly feeds into the New Age movement of ego desires and “ignore the negative,” that has created a culture of narcissism.
Mark Passio mentions the problems of false Buddhism as devised by the new age in his Fake-Ass Christians seminar, criticizing the idea that mediation is the path to enlightenment when in reality humans have to take action to gain and embody spiritual knowledge in order to change the negative life conditions in which we subsist.
False Buddhism (like Mahayana) inverts metaphysical principles like the self, sharing similarities with nihilism and postmodernism. Selflessness and atruism are confused with the no-self, anatman and false negation is confused with apophasis. False teachings imply that getting in touch with the Ground of all Being means total passive acceptance of everything as being divine and perfect. The Law of Polarity is no excuse to allow evil to run rampant or to rationalize evil as necessary for good. Within our capacity, we should try to make things right and attempt to help others. False teachings are often half-truths that fail to see the paradoxical nature of things, such as between what is and what ought to be.
Nonetheless, Alan Watts was able to expand people's minds through a more holistic analysis of life; Erhard claimed that Watts helped him differentiate the mind from the self. This probably means that Erhard was pretty identified with his mind and so a space of being was opened up to him. While the path of true enlightenment is about dis-identification to limiting self-concepts for evolution and internal freedom, Erhard's goal was to exploit this freedom into cash value and use it as a selling tactic.
More extreme than Watts, Erhard and Landmark went the Buddhist nihilist route to make it the core of their philosophy.
As a side note, with my level of research, I think Buckminster Fuller may have been the best from the Humanistic Potential crowd as he understood the problem of evil found in the self-serving agendas of all human systems that destroy nature through chaos and inefficient design that is mostly waste. Logically, when you are driven for profits you create zero value.
Here is an interview with Mr. Fuller.
Because the agenda is to grow the company and extract profits, this distorts true spiritual teachings, keeping people in a lower vibration for pseudo-evolution. Consequently, many LGAT's would be criticized for pyramid schemes and selling techniques termed “coercive persuasion” by cult researchers, as customers would be recruited into members and then pressured to hard sell every one they know; this is true to my experience.
On his website, Robert Chaen discusses the problems of LGATS, including their hard-core selling tactics using psychological stress and pressure. https://robertchaen.com/2017/09/14/25358/
These large training groups attempted to combine a profitable business model with self-improvement, self-awareness, and self-transformation. What makes these groups particularly attractive is that they are presenting information/education outside of religion and academia, an eclectic blend with occult/esoteric aspects. Yet, these aspects are re-packaged with a modern agenda giving it a new age flavor. Ultimately, these groups are about adapting to our current conditions with useful-pragmatic ideas rather than seeking to understand the diabolical nature of those conditions as well as the spiritual knowledge to make sense out of why negative conditions and suffering exist in the first place (causal factors).
In this video (below), a woman truthfully discusses her Landmark experience and how it's implicit agenda is to transform people into volunteering for the company.
In this video, an author of a book on mind-control discusses how Landmark's use of the word ENROLL has a double meaning to serve the company. They make is seem like this technique is required to accomplish your dreams and goals, as to “enrol”l people into your project, when Landmark's goal is to have you continually enroll people into their program.
While this book isn't available, here is short report called Brainwashing by Schein.
Rick Alan Ross, author of Cults Inside Out has a website called the Cult Education Institute. In this video he discusses Edgar Schein's work, who said that there are three phases to coercive persuasion: 1) to break them down (unfreeze), 2) change them, and then 3) freeze them.
I just want to say that my experience of Landmark definitely followed this three-fold path. The breakdown was very intense, many people cried as their traumas were surfacing and it becomes a huge therapy session. People were making confessions and coming clean with themselves about their deepest darkest troubles.
Landmark reforms you by teaching you how to reframe all those experiences on the basis of nihilism and this gives you a feeling of freedom that mimics HEALING. Recall in part 2, we talked about cults imitating healing so that your trauma and victimhood become attached to it (triangle of co-dependency). By freezing subjects in the state of co-dependency, Landmark uses this to recruit members.
In this podcast, a man talks about his experience at Landmark and how he quit early when he saw some red flags, not just the selling stuff, but the psychological torture and manipulation tricks that he didn't want to support knowing how this could be psychologically damaging/risky for some people. (This part of the conversation starts at the 59:30 min. mark in the video below.)
In part 2, we talked about the APA. Mind-control expert Margaret Singer wrote a report for the APA about LGATS and their unethical use of coercive persuasion as a form of cultish mind control but the APA and its Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology rejected her report, considering it non-scientific. Singer and her associate subsequently sued the APA and a group of scholars and lawyers in 1992 for “defamation, frauds, aiding and abetting and conspiracy” and lost in 1994 having to pay $80,000 in attorney fees for the defense. While I admire Singer's courage for going against this elite institution, sadly this is what happens when you try to use man's law to get justice from the organizations they serve.
In this article (https://www.standleague.org/bigotry-and-hate/exposed/margaret-singer.html#), scientologists attempted to discredit Singer on the basis that she was rejected by the APA (appeal to authority), considering her part of a “hate” group against religion. They list cases where the judicial system and academia reject the validity of brainwashing. But of course!! For those very institutions are dependent on brainwashing!!
(The lesson here: while we cannot through “law” stop people from psychological manipulation, we can educate people and bring evil to people's awareness. Ironically, man's law is psychological manipulation!)
Singer then took the material from her report and wrote Cults in Our Midsts. She was sued by Landmark for defamation. Landmark also sued Rick Ross who had Landmark listed as a cult on his cult education website. Landmark guards their reputation like a hawk, which is considered the 5th law of power in the book The 48 Laws of Power. (The art of re-directing negative feedback is enhanced with wealth.)
In our current degenerate world, we know nothing of Natural Law, but we know a lot about the “laws of power.” Download PDF. It is still good to read a book like this to understand aspects of evil and wrong intention.
Before we examine some of the teachings of Landmark which parallels other LGATS, let's look at the connection between LGATS and cybernetics systems theory models. Recall that the bones of this model are input, analysis, and output, like the Trivium.
In his book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, Robert J. Lipton provides 8 criteria for thought reform programs. The first is milieu control, the control of information, the environment, and control of human communication, thus we see WHY communication has been a theme here with non-violent communication and cybernetics.
LGATS are about controlled information that consists of corrupted spiritual teachings like moral relativism, nihilism, false buddhism along with the Agenda of the Company, which can be related to ANY company and its bottom line of profits organized to support the self-serving interests of those at the top.
There is the purported agenda to help customers and improve the quality of their lives and then the hidden agenda to sustain and grow the company-as-a-collective by getting members/volunteers to sell the program. Ultimately, one's self-development will be seen as his contribution to the collective. This is a mini control system with the goal of wealth and power at the top and exploitation at the bottom. Along with controlled information, individuals are indcotrinated in a stressful environment; Landmark Forum consists of 12 hours sessions, three days in a row with only one meal a day, under the pressure to not take breaks. The stress tends to amplify both peak breakthrough experiences and recalling of traumatic events.
At the end of the course, the actions of the participant are seen as desirable when they are in congruence with the collective's agenda and undesirable when they are not. Desirable action takes the form of agreement, participation, recruiting other members (ENROLLMENT) and giving more of your time, money, and energy by taking another course, going to the next level and/or volunteering. Desirable behaviors are conflated with self-awareness and self-improvement, and members attempt to re-direct you back into the system when you demonstrate undesirable behaviors. NLP and the tactics of communication are used to try to find and exploit your weak spot and NEED (vulnerability), to get you to remain in the system, and this relates to NVC.
Notice how NEED is in this cybernetics model. By controlling needs one can attempt to re-direct existing members back into the system.
If one does not succumb to the re-direction process then he is seen as giving up, not enlightened, or as failing to understand the spiritual ideas taught; he can even be seen as an outcast and ignored.
Let's talk about re-direction for a sec.
Maxwell Maltz's book Psycho-Cybernetics was also a basis for Erhard's EST and the Human Potential Movement as a whole, closely linked with humanistic psychology, as specifically the psychology of success. In this video, he talks about negative feedback in a torpedo missile model (starting at the 3:43 min. mark).
This relates to the larger agenda of the New World Order which is implicit in the hierarchical models that underlie business, economics, politics, education, media, and advertising. When results deviate off course this is sometimes called “negative feedback” and re-direction is sometimes called “co-option” and the creation of controlled opposition.
The Occupy Wall Street Movement is an example of re-direction and controlled opposition, funded by Bilderberg billionaire global elitist George Soros.
The Human Potential Movement and New Age Movement were co-opted as initially they were about spiritual awakening... but then became about supporting the control system.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-option
Hubbard has said that Scientology “forms a bridge between cybernetics and general semantics," and we have just seen how cybernetics is used to create cultish systems of control. We can consider Scientology one of the most aggressive religious control systems stemming from the New Age Movement. Many ex-members report that the upper levels of scientology record all activities of its members to use against them if they try to leave. They don't merely use persuasive coercion, they create fictitious cases against their members if they come forth with truth.
While Landmark comes pretty close to a cult business, Scientology is a full-on cult religion. Yet Scientology contains many similar ideas to Landmark as a mixture between Western psychology and eastern mysticism. When prolific fiction author L. Ron Hubbard lost the rights to his book Dianetics in a bankruptcy, he created a religion to better seize profits under non-taxable status and more pressure could be exerted on the members without scrutiny.
Dianetics attempted to delineate the metaphysical connection between mind and body, as to eliminate blocks in the subconscious and resolve psychosomatic illness. And while this is part of the true work of healing, sovereignty is required for healing which is stifled in any cult-like environment that uses specific language to control thought, feeling, and behavior. Religious authority and evolution in consciousness are opposed.
Check out this channel about an ex-member of Scientology's story (she was in this cult for 30 years).
Werner Erhard was also interested in Dianetics to use as selling techniques. Allegedly, L. Ron Hubbard was furious with Erhard whom he believed stole his ideas to use in EST without giving him a slice. According to Erhard, Scientology engaged in a 20-year campaign designed to destroy his reputation. This is another moral problem of combining spirituality with business, as people are trying to own and control information in a cut-throat competitive environment to make money... when TRUTH cannot be copyrighted. Erhard did consider making EST a religion in order to be non-profit.
L. Ron Hubbard
Werner Erhard
In this video (at the 4:55 min. mark), this person talks about how Landmark borrows from Buddhism when denying the existence of right and wrong. To add to our earlier discussion, moral relativism is a misteaching of Buddhism as it is with Western Philosophy.
EST/Landmark Forum Teachings
One of the first things they tell you at Landmark Forum is that morality is off limits and not a topic they will address, which is a big red flag. While they act as if they are not denying its existence, they imply that it is personal rather than universal and that it is outside the framework they are using. Nonetheless, eliminating it from their model remains a performative contradiction.
Now, this person's analysis on Landmark was not about the veracity of the content, which is what I am going to discuss, but about Landmark not crediting their sources. They don't do this because intellectual property is their commodity.
Commodifying knowledge leads into all sorts of problems, as we have seen with Western philosophers creating their competing philosophical systems with their name on it for their careers. These fragmented and personalized ideologies prevent understanding the noncontradictory structure underneath.
(Starting at the 10:30 mark), Erhard reflects on Being like the existentialist Heidegger as to not seek answers but to activate a field of being to open up the imagination and possibility to usher in more creativity, success, and productivity.
Existentialism and pragmatism go hand and hand. Existentialism “frees” up a person from so-called “metaphysical restraints” and pragmatism comes in to capitalize on it and use it for success. However, this is not true freedom as it is not being steered by the right spirit towards Truth and Morality. “Metaphysical restraints” are better understood as ideological restraints because they are based in falsehoods.
Let's tune Heidegger up a bit... the man who asked what is the meaning of Being?
When we question being and its meaning, it is not that we are creating meaning, because if we were just doing that then there would be no QUESTION. To truly PONDER is to seek meaning beyond our personal fictions as it exists in itself. The journey has meaning because objective meaning exists not because we make it up...
Being driven by personal agendas for power instead of the pursuit of TRUTH, the pragmatist uses inquiry to serve the ego. The pragmatist doesn't ask, what TRUTH do I need to EVOLVE, but what do I need to BELIEVE in order to create a particular response and generate a particular result that will benefit me. The problem is that truth may not provide immediate gratifying results, it doesn't serve the ego, and it deconstructs false structures built on agendas. But in the larger picture and long run, the truth serves one's True Self.
Here is an epistemological matrix of knowledge, ignorance, conscious, and unconscious. Erhard's transformational technology focused on the area of unconscious ignorance, “what we do not know we do not know.” This resonates with the wisdom from the ancients like Socrates and is about bringing into awareness that which is beyond our frame of reference.
Now, the interesting truth in this statement by Socrates: "True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing" (for the advanced Hermetic student to ponder) is that Knowing NOTHING actually means knowing that nothing does not exist. This is the highest level of apophasis. This is knowing that ALL EXISTS. It is the reference point of the ALL that allows us to gain spiritual knowledge to evolve (Law of Mind).
While tapping into the Law of Mind and the potential of the Inifinte can expand consciousness and be a vehicle for evolution, the purpose in the pragmatic-business paradigm is tap into possibility merely to create self-serving OPPORTUNITIES that fit within one's agendas.
Yes, spiritual principles are meant to be embodied and practiced, but until we see how our selfishness and ego comes from lower consciousness and feeds into the control system, we simply become more efficient pawns to be used and discarded. We lay the immoral games of business and politics we get played back. The lack of care for objective morality and care for objective knowledge leads one to an existential dead end.
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Landmark coheres with nihilism by claiming that there is no inherent meaning in events and facts themselves as humans invent meaning. Their big reveal on the last day, the seminar's climax, was to postulate that reality is essentially meaningless and completely dependent on your interpretation. This implies that because you have the capacity to interpret things in any way, then you can be free from the interpretations holding you back (non-useful narratives).
While the epiphany of spirituality is EVERYTHING, the epiphany of anti-spirituality (nihilism) is NOTHING!
What they are doing is a form of intellectual rape, where they are robbing you the value of your experiences and suffering and their meaning in a moral context so that you transfer your co-dependency and victimhood onto THEM. There can also be some trauma experienced when being told your experiences have no inherent meaning in a high-pressured social context (cult setting), which is part of the refreeze phase.
What happened to me is that at the end of the entire course, which was about four month period, a deep trauma had emerged that I had been hiding from my whole life regarding a sexual assault. What I was experiencing could not be whisked away with psychological games and linguistic manipulation, and so I did not attend the final day of class. (In a way, Landmark was helpful by triggering this for me and I did meet volunteers who cared about my personal growth more than Landmark, but this does not justify the immoral aspects of Landmark's message.)
Recall the Three Stages of cultish thought-reform and how they break you down to remold you. Now we can see how existentialism/nihilism is their tool to achieve this. While Landmark helps deconstruct people's perceptions and how they assign meaning as being purely solipsistic, Landmark definitely wants to reform you to associate Landmark as the ultimate meaning in a performative contradiction. By making you think that the epiphany of your healing and deeper insight is based on their teachings, which is nothing other than repackaged existentialism and pushing you over the nihilistic abyss, you form a traumatic bond to them.
Returning to this video (at the 59:30 min. mark), the guest talks about his decision to not return to Landmark seeing how it can disturb people with unresolved psychological issues. They discuss the pros and cons of existential therapy.
Existentialism confuses NOTHINGNESS with UNITY like false Buddhism confuses EMPTINESS with the ALL. This is nothing more than the nothingness and emptiness of the material paradigm that can only ultimately bring ignorance, chaos, and confusion.
The reason why Landmark (and other related methodologies) are so effective is that people hold onto so many false beliefs and false narratives about themselves and reality that the existential purging brings a sense of freedom. They can also confuse freedom with the absence of truth in the false perception that truth is restricting/binding. This is WHY Nietzsche saw nihilism as a basis for the Superman. But in reality, we can only become free from what is false, NOT what is TRUE. And at the Highest Level Truth is Freedom.
Additionally, this meaninglessness technique/trick makes people acutely aware of their free will over their thoughts, feelings, and actions when they remove influence from the external world. While sovereignty is about taking full responsibility for our thoughts, feelings, and actions this doesn't mean being the arbiter of truth or of objective reality. We did not create where we came from (the source of the cosmos) and what this existence is about. Nihilism was the result of scientific materialism, obfuscating Law of Mind.
The ego and unexamined lower desires can only distort spiritual principles resulting in more pain and suffering as our worldview and intention partly determines our reality. This is until we start to understand the lessons of evolution and the objective difference between right and wrong.
The modern linguistic premise that language constructs reality is built on nihilism/relativism and this leads to the belief that we can change our reality by chainging our language. This entails thinking that if people change how they say things, they can alter the meaning of reality as to be more effective in changing events. While there is a half-truth here, unless we attempt to be more accurate and precise in how we think and communicate in relation to objective reality, we ultimately enslave ourselves in a subjective prison.
Put simply, materialism brings suffering. This is what I experienced after Landmark. After manifesting so many opportunities and friending a successful group of artists in LA, my soul was deeply suffering, as pursuing the values of success and status were indeed based in superficial nothingness. I ultimately left that life and lived as a street artist in car, when I discovered that real happiness was ending the shallow games and their shallow prizes.
EST and Landmark use nihilism to create unlimited possibilities and while they may work in a pragmatic context and in regards to climbing the social hierarchy, they cannot help with the real evolution of consciousness.
Even if we FREE the mind from false belief systems to become aligned to truth and the Infinite, if we live in a prison planet of fear, greed, and selfishness then our possibility is limited. We cannot ignore our prison planet. Growth is not just about ourselves, the individual, but about the entire planet and our inter-connectedness. Until we live in a state of External Freedom (Anarchy), possibility will be restricted to the Immoral Authoritarian Control System.
To existentialists, the idea that we create ourselves from nothing was seen as empowerment, but ultimately this is an illusion. To make our consciousness the totality of the cosmos, ultimately leads to solipsism and reduces what evolution and purpose is. In a way, existentialism was the height of philosophical arrogance brought forth by scientific materialism in the belief that man's intelligence surpasses that of his creator.
If existential emptiness were reframed to be true it would merely be APOPHASIS, eliminating the negative and what is false, instead of making the NEGATIVE the end point. While phenomenologically there may be a feeling of freedom in recognizing the so-called inherent nothingness of the cosmos, ultimately this belief will lead one into the darkness of ignorance that no amount of material and social success can conceal. When there is no meaning beyond our arbitrations then there is no meaning at all. If all is based in nothingness, then it ultimately MEANS NOTHING... The twisted Buddhist theme appears again.
Here is a summary of this book, and here is a essay about Nietzsche and Early Buddhism.
All materialist ideologies are in a sense theories of Nothing and if metaphysics is truly NOTHINGNESS then there is no Divine Origin, no Eternal TRUTH, no real SOVEREIGNTY, or REAL SELF. All of those principles are DEEPLY INTER-CONNECTED.
While Landmark's techniques can work to get the life you want, you may discover that some of your desires were empty and superficial. Fulfilling our deeper purpose cannot be done with linguistic tricks or useful “spiritual” ideas but the work of evolution and the process of gaining spiritual knowledge to transform not only our thoughts but feelings and desires, to raise our vibration.
Besides, this overall lesson I did experience a negative interaction at Landmark when I volunteered for the Advanced Class. While I did this for the win-win of hearing the information again, I ended up being the “servant” for the coach/leader who ended up being worse than Maril Streep in the movie The Devil Wears Prada. I make no joke about that. This woman was so egotistical, selfish, entitled, and rude and wanted to be treated like a goddess. “Bossy” is an understatement (thank God the feminists weren't successful in banning that word, lol).At first, I was in utter shock at the caricature of the experience, but I stayed the first day to challenge myself in being able to effectively deal with this type of intolerable character (a futile endeavor).
The next day I was so disgusted to see everyone completely bend and pander to her so-called authority that I walked out in revolt. She called to apologize using Landmark rhetoric and techniques and tried to get me to come back to save her reputation but I didn't. Months later, the Landmark company called me a few times to apologize and find out what happened for their own reputation control. This experience shows how their morality-absent model serves the gigantic ego-complexes of the seminar leaders and ultimately the participants. Wrong only exists in the context of preserving economic status, i.e. what is wrong for business.
EST/Erhard Today...
In my video (at the 1:30:58 hr. mark), I analyze portions from this conversation that will be more fleshed out here.
Here are a few points, with time marks.
(At the 33:40 to 38:22 min. mark) Mr. Doty, who is studying “compassion” at Stanford University, talks about how he was released from his suffering from child abuse just by changing his “story” and perception and shifting out of his narrative (like Nietzsche's perspectivism). This can be regarded as existential “therapy.” But this method promotes spiritual bypass in which no real healing can occur. The perception and story is changed to attempt to alter a negative situation and to also create a positive pragmatic result (such as social validation), resolving issues instantly by “re-framing” them. Rather than learning about the morality of a situation as to learn and grow as a person, the person merely adopts perspectives that serve his personal agendas.
Werner Erhard talks about being driven to discover a new meaning for what it means to be human (at the 38:58 to 52:33 min. mark). He discusses the exercise of self-discovery called “Who Am I Really?” to find the importance of “I” and goes on a rather long rant about it. There is some truth to what he is saying in terms of being able to dis-identify with one's internal contents (to see see thoughts and feelings as objects, not the subject "I") but ultimately he ends on a nihilistic note. He talks about a skeptical woman on a train with him and how he asked her to try to find the "I" through this exercise of observation. When they arrive at their destination, she tells him that she looked all over and couldn't find the damn thing! Erhard acts as if this is the profound truth to be had (postmodern, eh?). He claims that once we can drop this significance of “I” then we can just see life as a game like a game of Monopoly and that the “self” is merely a piece in the game—as the game requires a piece to play with. Reminiscent of game theory? We can see the direct link between existential meaninglessness and pragmatism. (In this controlled game of the MONOPOLY on power, we become more more efficient superman slaves to enslave ourselves, while being rewarded financially and socially.) Because existentialism ended with nihilism instead of spirituality, one can never truly find the True Self because the materialist worldview perceives it as nonexistent since it is not an object of consciousness—nonetheless it is useful to the pragmatist when perceived as an object in a game.
Erhard discusses authenticity and integrity at the 1:08:00-1:13:51 hr. mark.
During my course with Landmark, I particularly liked its message about authenticity, even at the expense of offending others. Werner here says that he doesn't say nice things to be real and this obviously contrasts with NVC which is about changing language to not offend. Recall that Landmark is the masculine side of the Human Potential Movement, but the goal of Landmark and NVC is still the same: to get what you want. Landmark uses authenticity as a tool to achieve that, while NVC in some ways uses inauthenticity to achieve that.
The problem with the authenticity teaching at Landmark is its ulterior motive. Landmark people want you to become authentic as to reveal your vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and traumas to exploit, which is characteristic of a cult-like environment.
Erhard talks about how “integrity” is the wholeness of parts, in terms of functionality, workability, and performance but we have to caution here against DARK UNITY, as one's direction can be towards evil especially when his participation in organizations is tied to diabolical agendas—which ironically can make him more pragmatically “successful.” If you have integrity without morality, you basically have our control system. There is a such thing as practical evil, as integrity is used to create results but the success will be one of darkness, even though some reward/payoff is acquired.
In this diagram, we have unity between mind, spirit, and action, but the central point in which they rest is false. When we align all aspects of ourselves to the wrong thing, like to a false ideology, to a cult or a community, to our ego and self-interest, we may have more success because we are not working against ourselves and the control system will support us. However, we are acting against our evolution in the bigger picture.
Because these are false values, our attachment to them cannot last and there will be an eventual crisis for the soul whether in this life or the next. This goes for the control system as well. Even though it seems like the controllers (globalists/dark occultists) are winning, they cannot conquer Nature, they can not conquer Love. They cannot conquer WHAT IS. All evil agendas come to an end and the truth we find and live is eternal.
Spiritual principles can be used for good or evil, but if we are lost in moral relativism and nihilism we can only use them for evil. Dark occultists consciously use spiritual principles to enslave humanity as we are ruled by the evil of authority. Lower consciousness using higher principles is a very dangerous thing. Thus, glimpsing into a principle itself does not qualify as the totality of understanding as the spirit behind our knowledge matters. The evil genius stops short of his true intelligence because his spirit is not right, which ultimately limits his intellect.
The control system is engineered by the self-interests of the dark occultists, and while there are very few of them, through their dark unity they successfully imprison humanity by creating a false hierarchy of power. Now, most of humanity has no unity in their mind, spirit, and actions and those who do based them in error, but they participate in the control system from the intention of self-interest as well. While there are degrees of evil and degrees of knowing what evil is, when our mind, spirit, and action are aligned to selfishness and just “getting what we want,” we still create slavery individually and collectively... we not only feed into this monstrous control system of fake money, fake truth, fake value, fake hierarchies, and fake authority, but we enslave ourselves, because living in falsehood can only burden us, confine, us, and imprison even in our daily life.
Now light occultists, those who see the illusion of this control system and how it is a product of consciousness, may be just as few as the dark occultists. They embark on the Great Work in the attempt to lift the average mode consciousness of the planet by de-occulting the control system and lower egoic consciousness, so that through apophasis we may evolve.
Light Occultists
Special thanks to Noah A. Kimble for his philosophical contributions to this Essay.
And thanks to the donations from Noah, David M., and Amr Ragab that made this possible.
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