Hello everyone, I would like to post a prayer request for my daughter. She is going into a Landmark Forum this week and I've done a bit of research on it. It was begun by Werner Erhard who is somewhat shady and believes in the "human potential" movement. This movement's basic tenets are spiritualism, the esoteric, and mysticism. I believe it is clever and satanic. My daughter believes that the Lord will protect her (as she's already paid - I think it may have more to do with that than anything else), but if she is going into something she knows is wrong with her eyes open, I believe she is on her own. I would love you to pray for her, but also, if anyone else has had experience with Erhard, est or Landmark, I would love to hear about it. I want to stop her, but she has her own mind and is going to do something she knows is wrong. Your thoughts would be great please, please, please. I can then show her what other believers in Christ feel about this. Thank you and much love in the name of Jesus, megs56,

I hope she was sent and not just went. I am praying for her safety.

Hello Meg,

"The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective." (James 5:16) Even so the prayer from a Mother's heart.

Praise God that we as Christians were given "the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever we bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever we loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” (Matthew 16:19)

Father I ask in Jesus' name that You would place a hedge of protection around this young lady's life and if it is not in Your will for her to go into the Landmark Forum that You will block the way. I also ask Lord that plans and purposes for this young lady will fulfilled. We praise and thank You for answered prayer. All glory and honour to You. Amen

Blessings,
Snowrose

It is better to trust in the LORD than to put confidence in man.
Psalm 118:8

Will join in prayer for your dear daughter Megs56, that she is lovingly and powerfully convicted in her heart and mind to not attend this cultist forum.

And that instead of using her time to seek out her worldly potential.....she prayerfully realises the fullness, beauty, wonder and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ, putting Him first above all else.


Blessed is that man that maketh the LORD his trust
Psalm 40:4

Erhard's Life After Est

Common Boundary, published March/April 1994

By Dan Wakefield

ERHARD IN EXILE
A tall, well-built, black-haired man, sharply dressed in a gray tweed jacket, gray slacks, and black shirt buttoned at the neck without a tie, Erhard is handsome. He’s also surprisingly fit at 58, although he smokes cigarettes (after giving up cigars), loves fine wine and gourmet food, and doesn’t work out. He told the workshop participants, “In Zen, they say there’s the high road to enlightenment and the low road. I took the low road. On the low road, you do everything that doesn’t work.”

Werner Erhard has done a lot that “doesn’t work” in the rollercoaster course of his life, which has had enough twists of plot and identity for a John le Carre spy novel. Born John Paul Rosenberg to an Episcopal mother and a Jewish father who became an evangelical Christian convert (Erhard was raised in the Episcopal Church), he sold used cars in Philadelphia as Jack Rosenberg, married his high-school sweetheart, then abandoned her and four children for a blonde named (stranger than fiction) June Bryde. On a plane fleeing west he read an article on the “New Germany” and picked names from physicist Werner Heisenberg and economics minister Ludwig Erhard, transforming himself into Werner Erhard.

Successful as a manager for encyclopedia sales, Erhard was also cramming for enlightenment by studying Gestalt and Zen; Plato; Freud; Jung; Heidegger; and Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Fritz Perls (theorists of the human-potential movement). He participated in encounter groups and took courses from Dale Carnegie, Scientology, and Mind Dynamics, plucking ideas he’d later use in his programs.

Driving to work on the freeway to San Francisco in March 1971, Werner Erhard underwent a “peak experience,” or what Zen calls satori (“I saw that everything is just the way it is – and the way it isn’t”), and that September he launched est, his own crash course in transformation. He publicly apologized to his first wife and family and made “completing” relationships one of the bedrocks of his programs, which drew not only Hollywood stars like Raul Julia and Ted Danson and studio executives (one studio was dubbed “Werner Brothers”) but also Buzz Aldrin, Joe Namath, Yoko Ono, John Denver, and Harvard professor of psychiatry John Mack, whose Biography of Lawrence of Arabia, A Prince of Our Disorder, won a National Book Award. Many participants had “breakthroughs,” like Henry Hampton, who was stuck in his efforts to produce a documentary on civil rights. At a friend’s urging, he went into est “with absolute “disbelief” and “came out with a new energy” that resulted in Eyes on the Prize, his Emmy-winning PBS series.

Werner Erhard was also making enemies, beginning with L. Ron Hubbard, who was angry that the upstart salesman had taken Scientology courses and lifted some of its methodology. Abrasive as well as unconventional, with no academic credentials beyond a high-school diploma, Erhard managed to alienate roomfuls of strangers with a single talk. One memory that still rankles MIT professors is of Erhard’s telling a faculty audience, including Nobel Prize winners, that they were ********. “You can’t speak that way to such people!” one recently steamed. But Erhard did – and earned their enmity.

Thank you all so much - Boanerges, Snowrose, Fragrant Grace and David777. Thank you for your prayers and David, for your helpful background on Werner.

I prayed for her as well to escape any evil........ God bless