Kool Aid

A friend of mine recently attended a course and she wanted to spread the gospel to everyone. It’s not a religious course, even though parts of it sounds like being a born again Christian.

We had a long conversation. We were uni mates: friendships formed during those days can last a long time. I suppose you would have had to rely on each other. She confessed that she hadn’t thought very much about life up till that point other than being the “typical Singaporean”.

I suppose we got to talking. There were 2 years in my life that I would call the spiritual years, I would call them periods in my life when I achieved spiritual breakthroughs. We compared notes. I suppose it’s quite funny when you’re young, you think you have had a great spiritual breakthrough, and 10 years later you find yourself in a rut – again. But I digress.

In the end, I said, no no no. There was no way I would fork out $1K, even though it was going to change my life. But she managed to get me to attend an introductory session which was free.

The course is wonderfully unspecific. The premise is very simple: you are in a rut and you want to get out of it. This happens to all sorts of people, the best people. It helps you to look beyond yourself and tap into your blind spots.

Your situation that you find yourself in is entirely the result of you putting yourself in a context and, through habit, you find yourself trapped in it. The course probably aims to break through all these habits that hinder your personal development, and help you achieve your “break through”.

There were a few eyebrow raising turns of phrase. One of them was: “we are not trying to affect change. Change is difficult. What we are aiming for is transformation.” Yeh? What’s the difference? Suppose they were different. Suppose you were going to be able to transform yourself, but your external circumstances did not change. Then what’s the bloody point?

There were some concepts like “enrolling”. I suppose that had something to do with the Buddhist concept of living in the moment, and not letting thoughts of the future of the past affect you. There were others like “making a declaration”, where you just had to announce the change you were making to the world, and that was one of the steps.

Before the talk began I said loudly, “is this where we sign up for the 12 step program?” But people either didn’t get the AA allusion or they didn’t think it was funny.

There were people who gave testimony: a “graduate” is somebody who went through the course. There was one, a woman nearing 40 who was quite successful in her career and justifiably so: but her workaholic lifestyle had cost her a marriage. So she resolved to lead her life with more grace. She very self-consciously admitted that she liked to talk a lot.

There was this Malay guy who was always told by his father that he wouldn’t amount to anything, and was always second best to his elder brother. He felt that he got more self esteem for himself by getting over his shyness and getting some people to introduce himself to the course.

There was an Indian lady who was stuck in her entry level job for quite some time, but later on took the initiative and made her long overdue step up.

Then there was my friend. She thought that she was doing fine, and keeping within the analytical aspects of her job without being able to make that switch over to the operational part. Although I wish she had not mentioned the fact that she had attended prestigious universities. People should never mention that until you get to know the other person better. She should also not have said stuff like “I didn’t really know about it but I had been going through life with a paper bag over my head.”

It was a fairly developed set-up, with offices all over the world (although mainly in the English speaking world. There was even one in Kenya.)

The course always begins on a Friday, and it’s 3 consecutive days of starting at 9 in the morning and ending at 11 at night. Then you go back to your own life on Monday, you have 2 days to start changing the rest of your life, and you go back on Tuesday night to report and reassess.

Well 3 full days is pretty damn intense. At first I rationalised it away as being a more intense form of training, where you need that intensity in order to break down your mental resistance, and enable you to really change your life.

There was the brochure, which doesn’t say very much. The website is actually more informative. The cover of the brochure says, “Of course, everyone wants an extraordinary life. The question is, what does it take to have an extraordinary life every single day?”

Wow. Sounds like it’s as painful as having a permanent erection. I don’t want an extraordinary life. Spiritual experiences may lead to people trying a lot of interesting things to get out of their rut. But they also lead to some personal upheaval, and after everything is settled and done with, they want a nice quiet life for a while.

At the end of the day, I pulled that excuse on her, that I didn’t want to part with $1000. They don’t call it “course fees”. They call it “tuition”. I suppose, if you call it tuition, like you call uni education, then that sorda justifies it being expensive like uni tuition.

I thought there was something to this training. I thought that it’s possible to be ambitious enough to change – sorry – transform yourself and go out and do something that you never thought was possible. I suppose I want to achieve something like that. But I don’t want to go splash out on a course, when I can just go and do it myself. Yes, not much has happened since I declared that I was going to quit being a bookworm 1 week ago, but it’s still early.

Out of curiosity, though, I followed up and started looking up landmark education on the internet. I was a little surprised to find that people had charged that it was a cult, although that question was playing in my head.

Turns out that Landmark education is a continuation of what was called “est”. This was a school which conducted self-improvement courses in the 1970s. During the 70s, new age philosophies and weird cults were quite fashionable.

Some people criticised est for being very exploitative of their students. What happens is that you sign up for a 3 day seminar, and you find that your life is getting better. Then everything’s good. After that, they start getting you involved in recruitment activities, like they involved my friend, and suddenly you find yourself working for them for free.

I never really had very much patience for “self improvement” courses. Even the more mainstream ones, like Anthony Robbins. I thought that a lot of them just played on your low self esteem. They gave you a placebo to make you feel better: sometimes the placebo really is the cure, but sometimes it ends up screwing up your life instead, or at best, it doesn’t do anything.

My mother used to listen to these self-improvement tapes a lot. I got very irritated by them, but I couldn’t say anything: I was just a kid. Some of the things they said were very wise and useful. A lot of it was just psychobabble, mumbo jumbo. They appeal to your vanity by telling you that inside that ugly veneer of yourself there is a wondrous work of nature just bursting to get out. When I see a beautiful woman something in my trousers is a wondrous work of nature just bursting to get out. Otherwise I don’t believe in that shit.

In part I didn’t believe it because I didn’t see it as having positive effects on my mother. On one hand I grew up with my father telling me stories of his childhood, especially the part where he was schooling, having a heavy ECA workload, working part time, disciplining his siblings (grandmother was not at home), and fending off loansharks (that’s the reason why grandmother was not at home). OK, I had stories like that. So why do I need the mumbo jumbo psychobabble to inspire me?

Do you know what true beauty is? True beauty is not the “I take some collagen pills every day and my skin is shiny” beauty. To me it is “I spend 4 hours in the gym every day and suddenly I have the perfect ass”. That is true beauty for you.

Nevertheless I attended a seminar. It was a “superteen” seminar conducted by some Ernest Wong guy. I was only 11, and was the second youngest guy there. (My sister was the youngest.)

OK, some of the stuff there that they taught was useful. Like how it was important to approach the task with the right mental attitude, and if you tried to karate chop a block while thinking “I love you” it wouldn’t work. (For me it was not about being too tender with the board, but being completely grossed out by the thought – yes, numbernine has been grossed out before.)

There were the mind maps, which were later used in Tony Buzan’s stuff. OK, it was alright for cramming, but my style of learning things is always that I had a very in-depth understanding of what I was supposed to learn. I was only 11, but my intellectual snobbery was already there. I sniffed at that stuff.

There was what music was suitable for listening when you are studying. The answer? Baroque music, like Handel or Bach. Maybe Mozart. Beethoven? Absolutely not. I don’t know about you guys, but even if there’s music playing in the background my mind will gravitate towards it. So I never listen to music while studying.

Was it all useful? I don’t know. Sometimes I was a good student, sometimes I was a mediocre student. When I was good, I survived largely on my talent for understanding things quickly. I don’t know if the mind mapping helped me much. Maybe my talent was precisely that my brain was good at organising facts, and everything found its proper place quickly.

Then, at the climax of the (rather expensive) 3 day course, there was this touchy feely session, where we get all precious and the instructor tells us to value ourselves a lot more. We are all champion sperm! (I’m not kidding, he said that.) Every ejaculation contains 25 million sperm and we are the winners of an incredibly difficult to win lottery. The fact that we are living today is a result of an incredible coincidence of conditions: water on earth. Low concentrations of CO2. Land and sea. Ozone layer. Etc etc etc. How could we not understand that life is precious, a miracle, nothing to be fucked around with?

Being the class clown that I was, I could not resist throwing in 1 or 2 snide remarks. I may not be the smartest person in all respects, but my nose can smell kool-aid from a mile away. I am famously resistant to being a cult member. If I were older and wiser, I would have just shut up. I would have rolled my eyes at this spectacular piece of buffoonery, and just laughed at it later. But I had to be the motherfucker who tells the emperor that he’s naked. At first, Ernest Wong ignored a few of my comments. But later on, he got worked up in such a rage that he ended up screaming into my face, and he told me to leave the room.

I was stunned, and too shocked, and then I burst into tears. Later on, he said to me, “you’re a smart kid, but you just weren’t getting it.” Soon after, I began to grasp that there was something hollow, showy about his act. I really really hate being emotionally manipulated. My verdict was that was a really polished, well executed act, but also a big waste of money.

Then there were letters written by my mother to me. To my great surprise, I read that she had always loved me in spite of everything. (It is always a surprise when a grouch tells you that she loves you.) I was touched, until my sister and I exchanged letters and found that, except for a few words, the letters were identical. Then we were touched that she was so fair minded as to treat the brother and the sister equally.

There is an expression in American English. In the 1970s (yes it’s that decade again) there was a cult, led by the Reverend Jim Jones. He managed to persuade 1000 of his followers to go to his camp in Guyana, and it was called Jonestown. At the end, he persuaded everybody to drink Kool-aid, which is like American ribena. Except that the Kool-aid had cyanide in it. Thereafter, “to drink the kool-aid” connotes some sort of susceptibility to being enrolled in some religious cult.

I’m not a kool aid drinker.