Re: Do LGATs restrict access to water? Dehydration decognition

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The Room Arrangement Deserves Our Close Attention

All of these are guesses, but are educated guesses based on material from persons who participated in Landmark.

Concerned OZ and kittypaw have found the URL for a paper written by Drew Kopp a former LEC volunteer who had set up rooms for many such events and who wrote a scholarly analysis of the special features of the LEC seminar room set up, and how social intereactions are scripted in very specific ways during the seminar.

Kopp's 40 page analysis, entitled 'Invisible Bodies, the Disinherited, and the Production of Space in the Landmark Forum maybe accessed here.


www.u.arizona.edu/~kopp/Finalmat3.doc

Many enthusiasts/publicists for LEC emphasize LEC's verbal content and philosophy and are convinced that these transformed them.

But Kopps data and line of reasoning invite us to speculate that focusing exclusively on LEC's verbal content may keep us from examining from something very important: what Kopp describes as the room set up.

With Drew Kopps material in mind, Look at what Hope has told us in one of the posts above in this thread:

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''What I found uncomfortable were the chairs and the lack of space between them. I'm small, and the people on either side of me were big. When we all sat back, I had their elbows in front of me. In order for this not to happen, they would have had to lean forward or turn in their chairs. So it was pretty uncomfortable.'

Hope wrote:

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'Some people timidly asked if the AC could be turned down and their requests were met with some nonsense about how the people who run the forum know what works for most people, how they cannot adjust the thermostat to meet everyone's needs, blah, blah, blah. Within 15 minutes, however, the AC was turned down and many sighed a big sigh of relief. The interruption of the sighing, however, brought on another lecture from the leader.'

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Manipulating the room's environment
Posted by: corboy
Date: May 12, 2004 03:59PM

Dont go nuts trying to analyse the semantics. It is like trying to calculate the number of digits in PI--you'll go on forever and never reach an end to it.

If you consider Kopp's descriptions of the uncomfortable room arrangements, -you'll be able to spot similar layouts elsewhere and [b:2225ceab00]stay out of the room.[/b:2225ceab00]

THis is just my guess but from what Kopp has written and former participants have mentioned elsewhere on this thread, the effect of the LGAT on the participant's bodies may perhaps be as important, perhaps more important than its verbal material.

Hope told us that for her this was the most obnoxious thing--she wasnt told the that the schedule plus commute time would add up so that she'd be awake until 12:30 am and that doing the homework after the group would've kept her up until 1 pm.

Under those conditions, how can tired people remember that the leader told them 'Be back from dinner at 7:35 pm' and not '7:25 pm'?

As long as you're aware of this, you can recognize similar LGAT romm arrangements and *stay away from them* and warn your friends to *stay away.*

Just keep your eye on the stuff you can directly observe using your senses

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[www.u.arizona.edu]

Invisible Bodies, the Disinherited, and the Production of Space in the Landmark Forum by Drew Kopp

Kopp's 40 page paper is the mental equivalent of a triathlon--gruelling, but well worth it. At the end, he comments:

'I would contend that this is a fundamental inauthenticity of Landmark Education, to use its own term to describe this dynamic and Landmark's lack of transparency of its operation.

'Landmark Education, in the form of any and all of its representatives, pretends to their customers, that participants can acquire this technology, its consequent powers, and then drop the tools that granted these powers at any given time in the future. For instance, the Course Leader, at the very end of the LF, will say, "I take it all back"; claiming that everything said in the course possesses absolutely nothing to believe in.

Yet, this is said against a background of [materially enforced re-conceptualizations (the special room set up, the scripted social interactions-Corboy) that have inscribed participants into a social space [the existence of which is completely tied up with continuing to participate with Landmark Education.

Thus, Landmark's technology compels participants to inscribe themselves further into more extensive and elaborate social spaces the organization offers participants to inhabit. This is the Faustian relationship with Mephistopheles, wherein desires are granted, but only if the means used are promoted endlessly, ultimately gaining importance over the participants' original aims. )