While I’ve never attended the Landmark Forum, I’ve been toying for a couple days with an idea I picked up while reading about it: namely, the distinction between “what happened” and the “story about what happened”. In a previous article on the topic, I quoted a Landmark attendee on the subject:

What we humans do, it is explained, is take the simple facts (reality) and combine them with the meanings and interpretations we make up in life, and then begin to relate to the interpretations as though they were the reality.

[…] We take what we made up, we live as though it were real, and finally we begin to make things happen out of the stories which have come to believe are reality.

The best argument I have against this concept is that no matter what we do or what happens, we just aren’t able to separate it from stories. They seem to be the fundamental element of human understanding. Stories imbue sequences and relationships with meaning. Landmark, however, seems to focus on getting people to realize that despite whatever we may graft onto them, these sequences and relationships are inherently meaningless. If you put a dog in between a shoe and an apple, the objects themselves don’t have a meaning; the temporal and spatial relationships are totally arbitrary.

Culture in general seems to rely pretty heavily on the non-abitrary quality of relationships. But only to a degree. Cultural reality relies on maintaining a certain threshold of non-random relationships.

Conspiracy theorists and occultists consistently break the threshold of acceptable non-random relationships. As Robert Anton Wilson writes on the Kabbalah:

To the Cabalist, the whole uni­verse is a network of meaningful connections. The seemingly coinci­dental is as full of meaning as anything else. To begin thinking like a Caba­list you must regard everything as being just as important as every­thing else. All that seems “acciden­tal,” “meaningless,” “chaotic,” “weird,” “nonsensical;’ et cetera is as significant as what seems lawful, orderly and comprehensible.

Dan from Mental Deviance also has a great post on this topic, which highlights the paradox that certain members of society are allowed to cross this threshold of non-randomness without being considered paranoid or crazy:

The whole modern idea of paranoia is total bullshit. The idea is this: if you see meaning or a message where none is supposed to be, you’re nuts, and if you see a connection between any two supposedly unconnected events, you’re crazy.

My girlfriend was watching Oprah the other day, and during the show I heard Oprah say, “If you’re like me, you believe that everything happens for a reason.” I thought, Holy crap, Oprah is paranoid! Call the nut house! Of course I was just having a little joke with myself. I just now found another quote by Oprah: “I don’t believe in coincidences. You call people into your life.” Wow! Oprah gets away with this shit! Why don’t people cart her away as a schizophrenic?

On the other side of the game, if you don’t recognize enough of the non-randomness of culture, you can run into trouble. Maybe the most obvious social example is Law. Remember that whole thing in the news a few years back where if you chew gum in Singapore you get arrested? Such weird rules as that make no sense to somebody from outside the culture. In the US, the relationship between gum and incarceration is meaningless. In Singapore, it’s not.

So I guess my question is: how can you really apply this principle in your life? If you go the route that events are essentially meaningless, what are you left with? Is this what Manson meant when he said: “Prison’s in your mind… can’t you see I’m free?” I guess this question is at the heart of existentialism as well, especially typified by the Camus novel, The Stranger. The main character realizes suddenly that murder is an act rather than a meaning.

Does that also make this ethic of meaninglessness one that’s especially useful for people in positions of power? Supposedly one of Landmark’s (and other similar programs’) main draw is for people to become more successful in business. Kinda reminds me of what Mr. Burns says in that one Simpsons episode:

Family. Religion. Friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business.

Burns seems to typify the almost psychopathic potential that arises from a strict adherence to this principle. On the surface he appears to have rendered normal cultural meaning null and void. But in reality, he has merely replaced them for a secondary set of meanings revolving around the acquisition and maintenance of money and power.

The other thing I’m wondering about is how does this idea of essential meaningless fit into the occult? Is the occult’s “paranoid” insistence of finding meaning in everything really just culture taken to it’s absolute extreme? (Maybe this is somehow related to why shamans or priests were so often seen as leaders within more “primitive” cultures.) Or does the occult somehow try to reconcile the idea that everything is both laden with meaning and without meaning? If that’s the case, how exactly does it reconcile it?