Landmark Advanced Course Review

It’s 2am in the morning on a Thursday and I’m trying so desperately to sleep, but I can’t. You see, tomorrow was the first day of my Landmark Advanced Course and I was starting to have serious doubts.

When I did The Landmark Forum, it was a little different, I had absolutely no expectations, I simply walked in on Friday and was pretty happy about the whole experience by Sunday night. This was different.

I’d now spent about 3 months casually reading and researching articles and reviews on Landmark as an organization and things weren’t looking good.

There are youtube videos that discuss how people have had mental breakdowns and psychotic episodes after the Landmark Forum, but it gets even worse for the Advanced Course.

When I Twitted that I am doing the Landmark Advanced Course, I had replies telling me to stay away at all costs and it could cause me serious emotional and psychological damage.

So, as you can imagine, it was 2am and I was frantically reading everything I could about the Landmark Advanced course, in a way, I was making sure that no matter what they were going to teach or ‘trick’ me with, I had enough capacity and mental energy to resist it.

Unlike the Forum, the Advanced Course starts at 10am and runs until midnight, that’s 14 hours per day for 3 days straight, followed by four or so hours on the Tuesday. Not exactly a small feat by any means.

First things first, I originally didn’t realise there was a Tuesday session and had booked my flights accordingly, having found out, I was determined at the beginning that I would not attend the Tuesday session regardless.

After reading what must have been 100+ opinions on the Landmark Advanced Course, I finally decided it was time for sleep. I was still petrified, so much so that I opened up a new document on my Laptop and wrote in my half-asleep state the following (posted here without edit):

I am a believer in finding freedom. I love who I am, I believe in my self and will not allow anyone to tell me otherwise.

I am an excellent person with extreme potential and I will further succeed in life.

I need to work on my integrity and commitment to goals and pursue my dreams, I need to sacrifice and stop being lazy. I need to work much harder to get the results I want.

I appreciate the person I am and will grow in to a better person.

Not exactly my finest work but I was so scared that I would walk out on Sunday night brainwashed and have my personality broken that I needed a point of reference to remind me of the person I was prior to walking in to the Landmark Advanced Course.

I come from a background in Psychology which I’ve studied at University and in my spare time, so in many ways that gives me the ability to meta-analyse some situations and perhaps extract something different from them. My initial aim was to be more of an observer than a participant.

As far as I was concerned on Thursday, the Advanced Course was more about seeing what Landmark does to change the attitudes of its graduates than anything else. I wanted to learn what the psychological trigger points were, I wanted to understand how the whole operation worked, what “manipulation” tactics were in play. For many, Landmark is seen as a psychotherapy cult and in many ways I can see how that statement can be validated.

I woke up. It was 8am. I’d had about 5 hours of sleep and the last thing I wanted to do was go to a 14 hour personal improvement course which if the internet was anything to go by, is nothing short of a cult. Eventually I made my way into Sydney CBD. It was cold and I was trying to work out why on earth I’d signed up to the course. “It’s for work, I can tell people how it is after I do it” I kept telling myself.

I came, collected my name tag, signed their disclaimer, which essentially says that if you have any psychological issues you should do the course at your own risk. Ironic, because I imagine the ones that get the most out of Landmark are the ones with deep rooted psychological issues.

Whilst I did the Forum in Brisbane, the Advanced Course is only offered in Sydney and as a result I saw a fair few Brisbane Forum graduates at the course. It was interesting to see who had decided to come. I sat down next to a young Indian man and we began talking.

He had come at the request of his wife who got an enormous amount out of the Advanced Course, they had both done the Forum and found it very useful both in their marriage and in every other aspect of their lives.

One of the fundamental flaws and advantages of the entire Landmark Curriculum of Living (as they call it) is that it needs the participation and enrollment of all in order to work. This is also why it gets that cult feeling, it becomes rather annoying when you’re interacting with someone that is hung up on the most basic things, you feel like shouting at them “Mate! It’s a Story, In Your Head! It has NO meaning, Stop giving it meaning”.

11 am and the introductions were just about done. The first day was by far, the most boring. Similar to the Forum. I had a close friend who was doing the Forum back in Brisbane on the same day and he had indicated to me that he was leaving, which didn’t help my motivation to stay in the advanced course. Of course, the power of consistency works rather well on my decision making, once I make a decision I tend to stick with it.

The main reason Landmark is so affective is that it creates a whole new form of thinking. It’s a bullet proof concept that regardless of how much you want to argue with it, you can’t.

Even if it inherently feels wrong, you can argue and argue but there is always a response from one of the leaders, and it always comes back to your act striving for its existence. It’s that your act won’t let it go and that it’s fighting hard to keep you stuck, etc etc.

To set the tone, we are shown some footage from Karate Kid, the long scene where Mr Miyagi is teaching Daniel to simply obey his orders without question. Where he gets him to paint the fence, wash the cars etc etc. in particular ways. You find out in the end that by letting go of his internal resistance to the training (which doesn’t seem like training at all), he is actually learning Karate without realizing.

From here on in, the phrase, “Wax On, Wax Off” is used by the Landmark Leaders almost to the point of being frustrating. If you have a point to argue against the teachings, you’re simply told to ‘try it on’ give the teachings a chance, Wax On, Wax Off. Hello Cult.

The Forum is meant to give you Freedom with the past, the Advanced Course is meant to give you power. Does it? Perhaps.

The idea behind the Advanced Course is to make you differentiate between the Identity and the Self. The Act and the Self. The person that you are to the world and the person that you are suppose to be: the fully self-expressed individual.

There are far too many ideas to write here, besides I would ruin the Advanced Course for you if I was to do that. However I want to dispel some myths about the experience.

I didn’t have a mental breakdown. I didn’t have emotional trauma and frankly, nor did anyone else. If you’re right now researching to know whether or not to do the Advanced Course, I highly recommend it, just for the experience. Doesn’t matter if it can help you the way it claims, it can certainly open your eyes to things you haven’t been aware of.

The focus on Language in the Advanced Course is an interesting one. Philosophy students would already be aware of a significant portion of the ideas, however the realization that Language is the source of all meaning is an interesting theory.

If you have stage fright, I highly recommend this course more than anything I’ve done so far. I can’t imagine anyone walking out of the Landmark Advanced Course still suffering from Stage Fright. The involvement is rather high and every single person has to speak to the group, if that scares you, good, that’s another sign that you should do it.

The Advanced Course breaks participants into groups, assigns a group leader and brings the onus of responsibility upon the entire group as a whole. The idea is that if one member of the group doesn’t get it, no one gets it.

Transformation can only happen if you help another to “get it”.

The focus on enrollment is perhaps not as strong in the Advanced Course as it was in the Forum. There is no huge push to get others involved in the same way, sure it is still emphasized greatly but not to the extent of the Forum.

By Sunday night, I had done an exercise where I stood toe to toe with three random strangers and starred into their eyes for a few minutes each. Imagine being about 5 centimeters away from another human being and trying to focus on nothing but their eyes. You have to ‘be with them’, be present in the moment with them.

It’s hard. It’s bloody hard. Every instinct tells you to walk away, tells you this is not normal, tells you everything you can think of. Every prejudice you’ve had about a race, a culture, anything, it all comes surfacing to your mind to try to remove you from the situation. But you stay. You look straight ahead, you focus, you be with the person.

Some participants cry, some laugh uncontrollably and then cry. By the end of it, there is peace. The idea is to realise that no matter how different you think you are, how special you feel, how ever which way you wish to be able to differentiate yourself from others to feel superior, inferior, miserable, happy etc, every human being is still in their core, a human being. We all face the same problems, we all face the same dilemmas and even though the way we’ve learnt to deal with them may be different to another, we’re all, at our cores, the same.

Sounds like a whole bunch of new age crap. But wait till you try it.

When I twitted this exercise someone messaged me to tell me, it’s suppose to put me in a state of trance so that I am more susceptible to what I’m being told. Rubbish. Someone will always find something wrong with everything and if they are determined to make sure everyone believes Landmark is nothing but a Cult, then that’s what they’ll do regardless of the reality.

If your psyche is weak, if you’re personality is broken, Landmark can either tare you down and rebuild you, or tare you down and destroy you. I think the later is far less likely.

It’s not a big deal. If you’re like me and you try and find a flaw in every argument, you’ll soon get rather tired and frustrated. The majority of what the Advanced Course has to offer was hugely valuable. The technology and techniques behind the methodology is genius.

At one point you will write down the most traumatic experience of your life where you’ve experienced pain, failure and suffering. You will then read this out to another person over and over again until such time that you come to the realization that, hey, this is a really boring, sad and pathetic story, I don’t want to keep holding on to it. Then it goes away.

One of the rather peculiar reasons I didn’t enjoy the Advanced Course as much I could’ve, was their emphasis on punctuality and the responsibility of every single person to ensure the entire group was punctual.

If one person was late (not that I was at all), even by 2 minutes, we would then spend 20 minutes discussing (as a collective) why the group had failed in keeping its word to be back on time. There were arguments, shouting, and disunity. Because if one person doesn’t get it, no one gets it. I was starting to think we were being trained to be brainless honey bees working for a hive.

The power of group dynamics is amazing. The fear of public scrutiny can be extremely strong and if you’re unaware of its affect, you can fall victim to it.

However the power of the observer is even stronger. No doubt the Landmark Leaders will argue that this is part of my act, the one which I put out to the world to stop the real me from getting out, however being able to run the entire three day event through my filter gave me a really interesting experience.

My Landmark Advanced course had worked so well that it had trained 80 or so Landmark mini leaders, as I call them. So many times participants started to coach other participants and the Landmark Leaders would sit back and enjoy the show with a smile “that’s just your act, do you not see how this relates to XYZ”. Oh dear. It was fascinating to watch the empowerment that certain people would get out of knowing the technology and having the ability to ‘fix’ others.

Landmark insists that none of its graduates should attempt to go out and coach anyone, and I agree with them entirely. The ramifications can be catastrophic.

The ability to separate your Act and the Self can certainly cause serious issues for some. Frankly I think it can even be the early signs of Multiple Personality Disorder. Having the realization of what your act is, (the idea is to not go looking for it, but to catch it… in the act) and then noticing it when it resurfaces is quite bizarre.

What I’ve got more than anything from Landmark is the ability to refocus. If something bothers me or if I start to give something that is negative any meaning, I can stop, realise what I am doing and quickly move forward.

This makes it somewhat hard to be sad. You can still get down but if you apply what you’ve learnt, being sad becomes trivial as it seems useless. Now if you told any normal psychologist that being sad is useless because the reason you’re sad is just a story and has no meaning, he or she will most likely press that little red button on their desk and you’ll be in a mental hospital. Well maybe not, but they’ll be concerned as sadness is a normal human condition which can then allow for the appreciation of happiness.

Interestingly, you can also apply the same set of tools to happiness. I am not really happy because the reason I’m happy is due to giving happy meaning to an event. The event has no real meaning, something happened and I am making meaning from it. The only meaning that exists comes from Language and only I can give it that meaning. So I can give it a happy meaning or a sad meaning. You can start to really break everything down.

I got a speeding ticket, I missed the bus, I didn’t make enough sales this month, I’m struggling financially. Lots of similar things happen to most of us that get us down. What we then do is spend so much time and enormous effort giving it meaning. I got a speeding ticket because I’m unlucky and stupid, can’t believe I didn’t know that camera was there, how come the guy who was speeding before me didn’t get one, why do I always get this sort of crap. The universe hates me.

If that even remotely correlates with how you might think of things. Do the Advance Course.

Sunday night came and I had realised (and admitted to myself, even though I didn’t want to) that I’d actually got a lot of out the Advanced Course. My initial massive resistance to the course was trying really hard to get my attention but it was failing and I was still the same person. There was no brainwashing, sure there was some heavy material in there and given the nature of the course, you’re guaranteed to have a few tears but if you have a strong personality you can take it in and see if it works for you.

By about 8pm it became clear to the group that I would not be attending Tuesday’s session. “Why Not?” I was asked every two minutes. If one person doesn’t get it, the whole group fails. Oh dear.

“How come you’re not coming?” I had no real reason, the whole idea was to be honest and authentic, and frankly it was because I had chosen not to come. Because I was determined that group social dynamics cannot force me to do something which I didn’t want to. “Do you realise this is part of your act?” – Yes, funny that I do. My act? I have to be different. I have to find a way to differentiate my self from others so to feed by desire for recognition.

Eventually they gave up. It was a case of stubbornness on my part, the harder they tried the more power it gave my act. I actually realised this on the plane trip home the next day. I was so determined not to be part of something with a set belief system. Landmark is not a religious organization but in some ways, they’ve taken the best marketing tools from the world of religion and applied it to their teachings.

I still don’t recommend the Tuesday session for the Forum, it’s nothing but a night to get others signed up to the Forum and you to the Advanced Course. It’s your choice that should be influenced by you not by social group dynamics and high pressure sales tactics.

As for the cult factor. I was called twice after the Advanced Course asking if I was going to do the Seminars that I had delayed since doing the Forum. I wasn’t. I simply told them the night clashed with something else (true) and that was the end of it. They called again to offer me another night and I still said no. That was it.

What kind of lame cult does that? Obviously it’s not a cult.

I can sum up the entire 3,000 words above in a few sentences (don’t you wish you’d read this first?)

The Landmark Advanced Course is worth doing simply to understand the technology and teachings behind it. Generally I can’t imagine there being a risk to your emotional or psychological state. Landmark Education is not a Cult. The benefits of the courses teachings are enormous and something that you will carry with you for a lifetime. Would I recommend it to someone I know? Absolutely.

Make sure you read: Landmark Forum review.

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1. Landmark Forum Review
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4. How to stop worrying
5. Mental Discipline an introduction