CULTURE - MEMOIR - Sweet Nothing Part 2: The Rocky Road to Nirvana

"O.T"(38)/ 2009, Peter Feichter

I have often thought of writing a novel, similar to Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, which would be the life story of a charlatan making out as a master guru . . . It would be a romantic and glamorous tale . . . also raise some rather unexpected philosophical questions as to the relations between genuine mysticism and stage magic. But I have neither the patience nor the skill to be a novelist, and thus can do no more than sketch the idea for some more gifted author. The attractions of being a trickster guru are many. There is power and there is wealth, and still more the satisfactions of being an actor without need for a stage, who turns 'real life' into a drama. . . It must be understood from the start that the trickster guru fills a real need and performs a genuine public service. . . A judicious use of hypnosis . . . will produce pleasant changes of feeling and the impression of attaining higher states of consciousness. . . charge rather heavily, making it dear that the work is worth infinitely more . . . Insist on some special diet, but do not follow it yourself. Indeed, you should cultivate small vices, such as smoking . . . On the one hand, you yourself must be utterly free from any form of religious or parapsychological superstition, lest some other trickster should outplay you. On the other hand, you must eventually come to believe in your own hoax, because this will give you ten times more nerve. This can be done through religionizing total skepticism to the point of basic incredulity about everything – even science. . . Disappear from time to time by taking trips abroad, and come back looking more mysterious than ever. . . If the universe is nothing but a vast Rorschach blot upon which we project our collective measures and interpretations, and if past and future has no real existence . . . The past is held against you only because others believe in it, and the future seems important only because we have conned ourselves into the notion that surviving for a long time, with painstaking care, is preferable to surviving for a short time with no responsibility and lots of thrills. . . Perhaps it all boils down to the ancient belief that God himself is a trickster, eternally fooling himself by the power of maya into the sensation that he is a human being, a cat, or an insect . . . How will you avoid being either a fool or a fooler? How will you get rid of the ego-illusion without either trying or not trying? . . . Who will answer these questions if yourself is itself an illusion?. . .

            “...At midnight, the brilliant sun.”

                                                                         -Alan Watts, “The Trickster Guru,” (1974)

PART II

I didn’t like a money-making machine with cultic roots telling me they owned the word “authentic.” Were they kidding? For me it was a cheesy word, akin to sincerity. It was warmed-over Sartrian existentialism, a more “authentic” version of which I had been exposed to as an undergraduate in a class at the erstwhile University of Massachusetts.

And didn’t the beret-wearing coffeehouse intellectual himself take his caffeinated prose from Heidegger?  And this wasn’t just a matter of intellectual appropriation; they also insisted anyone who felt powerless needed to search for how they were being inauthentic. I wanted to know where the “inauthenticity” was in, say, feeling powerless in NYC during the events of September, 2001?

I discussed the point with one of the pretty unpaid volunteers in the back of the room. She said I should talk to the leader about it. I said I’d tried. (He was, alas, an airline pilot and I later did—his answer was that the airplanes hit the buildings, the buildings fell, and a bunch a people died—it happened; the rest was interpretation.)

Imagine you were a fly on the wall she said.

If I were a fly I said, I wouldn’t even be able to perceive it because my perceptual system would not even be attuned to spiders’ webs, let alone skyscrapers. Still, she’d been helpful, allaying my fears that there were taboo subjects.

Lack of sleep, combined with an ill-advised internet search, augmented my intractability. The second day I walked out of the room (glad to be able to escape for numerous “bathroom breaks”) during what I considered to be an offensively silly exercise in closing one’s eyes and imagining absolute fear. I didn’t need to pretend that all of Canada, let alone the world, was coming at me with a knife.

In the hall, after a bracing headstand, I flagged another of the unpaid helpers, a social work student who was surprisingly reading Being and Time, Heidegger’s magnum opus from which, I complained, much gobbledygook (especially the words “being” and “clearing”) had been culled in a philosophical mishmash.

It was a productive if brief conversation in which she worried I might be missing something crucial by leaving the room. What resists persists was a constant refrain, a rhyming  encapsulation of Freud 101. So I returned to the room, defiantly opening my eyes as the group-think sheep tried to imagine the horrors that might befall them, getting in touch with their deepest fears and the notion that others feared them.

Near the end of the lunch break the leader called me over and we had a brief chat. I asked him if he knew the derivation of the stuff he was saying and reading. Did he know Alan Watts? Heidegger? Had he read Being and Time? Was he aware of the irony of claiming wholesale, garbled appropriations of eastern spirituality and western philosophy were Landmark’s intellectual property?  I could not understand why he would use Donald Trump as an example of integrity, even integrity emphasized to stress its secondary definition of structural coherence. He said he hadn’t said that. What about the abuse? Scientology? He looked me in the eye and said I had a lot going on. I was trying to interpret too much. He didn't seem enthused about Scientology. Heidegger he'd not read much, he admitted, though he loved Alan Watts. Me too, I said. We agreed on that one. Then it was back to the pscyho-grind.

Alan Watts

(When I did some research on the matter afterward I found amazing the  meandering intellectual and appropriative trajectory that led to Erhard's efficacious amalgam. One of the most ancient seeds, sprouted as it were in the prehistory of American consciousness raising, was Napoleon Hill’s 1937 Think and Grow Rich. His advice comes after a twenty year engagement suggested by Scottish steel magnate Andrew Carnegie—not to be confused with another influence, Dale Carnegie who said the difference between happiness and success is that the latter entails getting what you want while the former entails wanting what you get.  Hill made a study of success among the rich in the Depression. He strongly advocated planting conscious seeds in your unconscious mind if you didn’t want “weeds” to grow; and he says, rather surprisingly, that effective thoughts should be “colored” by the most powerful sorts of emotions, specifically sex and love. Hill, whose book’s sold 60  million copies,  thereby anticipates neurolinguistic programming, which methodically finds the sensory correlates of good feelings and attaches them by exercises to desired outcomes.

I was struck by Hill’s notion that there are two realms of creativity, one that works by recombination and the other that creates without precedent somehow from scratch via a radical freedom that creates ex nihilo, as he says, from the “infinite intelligence” of the universe.

This is the “creative imagination” which creates from nothing, from pure possibility, and can be clearly seen in est rhetoric and Landmark philosophy. It is ironic that this idea, insofar as it is repackaged as money maker, is itself an example of its opposite, Hill’s “synthetic imagination,” which pieces preexisting stuff together.

Napoleon Hill also stressed that the greatest marketers sold ideas more than things. This must have inspired Erhard, taken with consciousness raising and money making simultaneously. Erhard, who attended Watts’s lectures and listened to his broadcasts, is on record saying that Zen “created the space for est.” And after manically pursuing a thousand different leads, Erhard had an experience, driving over the Golden Gate bridge, of the endless futility of all such purposeful pursuits—in contrast to the infinite potential and desire-less fullness of the infinite now. And he went on, expertly, to market that experience, to retro-engineer satori. Erhard’s great innovation was the serious joke of selling “nothing”—nothingness, the carefully created experience of it.

Even during our chat at the break  I couldn't help but think—and I mentioned this to Will—that at some point Erhard met up with the great Anglo-Californian popularizer of eastern philosophy—especially Hinduism, Taoism, and Zen—and mentioned his con idea. I know because I read about it in one of Watts's tracts. Was it in The Book: Against the Taboo on Knowing Who You Are—a work I read straight through and that had an effect on me almost as strong as the Landmark Forum? In any case, Watts somewhere lets fly the idea of a novel based on a character who, posing as a conman—e.g, posing as someone who’s not a conman, as someone who has “authenticity”—performs a higher level bait-and-switch. Instead of running a sting (solely) for money, for example, the grifter generates a spiritual experience. He leaves the sucker not only duped but enlightened—and thus not, in the end duped.

How irresistible such an idea must have been to the young Erhard, on the run and in a lucrative but unfulfilling frenzy to come up with the perfect spiritual marketing scheme. Talk about having your cake and eating it too! Combine just the faintest wisp of this idea with Napoleon Hill’s classic marketing insight that the thing people really pay for is not things but ideas and you have a formula beyond winning. Erhard’s most famous quote about his system is that Zen created the space for it.)

At the end of the day, the Leader asked if this day had not been yet more powerful than the previous one.  The room raised their hand as one. Not I. I found the Jerry Springer atmosphere in which people shared their deepest vulnerabilities and childhood traumas to appeal to a prurience, although I did admit to the Leader that in my homework I had had a “breakthrough” in writing “I love you” to a dead family member with whom I’d never gotten complete.

But the nonstop airings of abuse and body image problems, the universal inability to get through to family members, the tales of festering resentments and gastronomic self-sabotage were familiar from daytime television. What was different was the aftermath, in which the vicious cycles of our self-rationalizations were expertly analyzed by a relentless attempt to clearly distinguish facts from interpretations. This made it better than Jerry Springer.

I suggested that if their primary goal was not, as they said, to make money, then they should put such analyses on TV so that people could get beyond the cycles of televised exhibitionism and voyeurism to a healing beyond all gossip. What a show that would be! Still, the initial separation between facts and interpretations was not ironclad, and the idea that we are responsible for everything that happens to us—because that was our interpretation—became rather dicey when people are blamed for the way they feel in the aftermath of spousal dalliance, illness, rape or even, in an infamous example from est’s fearless founder, concentration camp incarceration.

We may be charitable and consider the LGAT’s technique a pragmatic caricature, designed to force us to realize our own role in the continuation of our own unhappiness. However harrowing the initiating events, our mental replay of them partners and participates in additional unnecessary malaise.  Although crudely exaggerated, one can recognize here the essence of wisdom attributed to Buddha, namely that we suffer from the event (he called it the “first arrow”) but need not suffer additionally by dwelling on it—the “second arrow”—with which we stick ourselves.

(A huge est-Landmark source, Max Maltz’s 1960 Psycho-Cybernetics, which I recommend, compellingly argues that happiness is not based on anything so much as a choice we make as we break through the habit of pity and poor self-image. Maltz, whose most striking phrase is “nostalgia for the future,” shows convincingly that consciously changing how we think about ourselves feeds back into how we feel, transforming psychologically negative reinforcing cycles into positive ones.)

This much criticized technique, which often devolves into an impression of an abyssal lack of empathy and poor taste, in fact appears often remarkably effective, especially for those not deeply touched by suicidal tendencies or mental illness. (I am still toying with the idea of a board game called “Blame the Victim.”)

Still low on sleep I badgered my partner with the possibility that I would create the possibility of a public showdown. Alas, it was not to be: my resolve proved no match for their training, my curiosity stole the ball from my ego. After threatening me with bodily removal, our fearless Leader, Will Steele, did a brilliant job of catapulting us into a timeless present akin to the instantaneous enlightenment akin to the kensho* of Japanese Zen. After this threat I planned to leave at the next break but not to storm out, as I wanted to look good, not like a loser intimidated by the practices of the mercantile organization whose cultic practices I’d chosen to condemn. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll agree not to talk unless I raise my hand. You’re the Cult Leader.”

I had been hellbent on drawing the room’s attention to a manipulative technique I noticed when Steele tried to convince a petite Chinese woman that she had been duped into thinking that any part of her mind was not either engaged in vicious cycle-type rationalization or a personality trait developed to compensate for a perceived weakness—what Freud might call a “defense mechanism.” Of course I was right—any time you really meditate, have an orgasm, or lose yourself in work or play you are not really caught up in these ego games—but it didn’t matter.

What I didn’t understand was that the lie was performative, in service not of a truth so much as a kind of psychological theater. It was similar to what the clerics used to call a “pious lie,” one made strategically to take you, like Wittgenstein’s philosophical ladder that you can discard after climbing, to a higher place. The offered, but not real choice was clearly recognizable to me as mental manipulation. It was a force.

When the Chinese woman insisted there were moments when she was not involved in mental vicious cycles or defense mechanisms, and the leader reframed her answer with the request that she identify whether it was a vicious cycle or a defense mechanism—I’m not using Landmark’s own more colorful terms for these things—I recognized it as a linguistic version of a parlor magician forcing a card.

In the end, however, I realized that they were right and I was wrong. Or at least they weren’t any more wrong than I was. For what happened is they did not just intellectually conceive but they—Will—theatrically led us to experience a postmodern fillip, a self-reflexive deconstruction of Sartrian existentialism: that life is not only meaningless and empty but that it’s meaningless and empty that it’s meaningless and empty. Which thus allows it to mean something but not what it used to mean.

A performative, pragmatic version of spiritual askesis, a clearing out of clutter, albeit with some help from some mild, tactical harassment and sketchy, psi-oppy, mind-altering techniques, to bring on enlightenment, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Wipe the dust from the mirror of your mind.

After all the craziness and clutter and confessions they brought us to that fabulous place beyond fable, the pure being of right now. The crazy meaning-making chatter of the monkey minds of the attendees quieted. There were a few final flickers, like embers in a dying fire, and then these people too, stopped trying to make sense of it all. Everything already is—right now.

There’s no place, as Emerson said, to go. Most of us were smiling, and nobody perhaps more than I. When the leader quipped that we’d paid $630 for nothing, the irony that it was well worth the money was not lost on us.

A guy I’d talked to on the street the day before, a successful businessman and veteran of the program who two days later made a point to come up to me to tell me that he loved me, said he’d pay twice that just for the Nothingness part alone.

Of course I still have qualms. I’m not willing to abandon critical thinking or accept philosophical appropriations as the thing itself. I’m still concerned about state coercion, expeditious lying, and even and especially the production of “integrity” and “authenticity” as political commodities. I still enjoy my resentment and the unwarranted rationalizations, helpfully buried in my unconscious, that are expertly designed to make me look good.

On the final day, when registrants are encouraged to bring friends and family to the large hotel ballroom and enroll them in the possibility of changing their lives through Landmark—we had even been guaranteed a “breakthrough” if we brought three or more people—I raised my hand and even stood up, hoping to share a condensed version of my thoughts. I even jumped into the aisle, lurching toward the stage at one point.

Alas, calling on me may not have been the greatest business decision. Who knows what I would have said, but I could certainly see myself saying, with a broad, appreciative smile, that despite my initial resistances I learned a lot from the experience. I might have underlined that I got nothing out of it, and that that was a good thing. It’s hard for you to understand but I literally got Nothing out of Landmark, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart.

And Nothing is better than nothing.

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Bibliography

Bartley, William Warren, (1978). Werner Erhard, The Transformation of a Man: The Founding of est. New York, New York, USA: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc.

Hargrave, Robert (1976). est: Making Life Work. Delacorte.

Maltz, Maxwell (1960). Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Technique for Using Your Subconscious Power, Wilshire Book Co.

Pressman, Steven, (1993). Outrageous Betrayal: The Dark Journey of Werner Erhard from est to Exile

Rhinehart, Luke (1976). The Book of Est. Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston.

Watts, Alan (1974). The Essential Alan Watts, Celestial Arts.

*  This is the Rinzai Zen Buddhist idea that you use personality shock techniques to efface the ego or mind—showing it to be illusory, an effect of position and habit rather than in possession of a rock-solid reality—and thus achieve enlightenment instantly, in contrast to the Soto Zen idea of working gradually toward enlightenment through long practice.

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