Weird Parallel Universe from the 70s
Ellenestnot
pyramid megalomaniacal con-man. "Dare To Be Great" program's
Glenn
Turner. Something triggered a weird memory and here it is,
similar
to Holiday Magic and Mind Dynamics. What on earth was going on
in
the 70s to spawn these wacko schemes, and I wonder if we have to
look
forward to a resurrection of this one, (with a new name)?
Ellen
(more from Amazon's book reviews):
Dare to Be Great
by Rudy. Maxa
Ten feet tall and bullet proof!, May 17, 2002
Reviewer: d
There is no doubt that Glenn W. Turner was the icon of both personal
development and network marketing. This man makes you believe in
yourself. His personal development program was and still is the
standard of excellence in the industry. The Koscot products were state
of the art for the times and still better than comparable products
being offered today.In addition to this book, I also recommend The
SALES BIBLE, Turner, Turner, Turner: The King of Network Marketing,
Con Man or Saint? And The Unstoppable American.Glen Turner is the
unstoppable American. Great books about a great man.
Positively impacted the lives of millions!, May 12, 2002
Reviewer: D
Isn't it interesting that a man like Glenn W. Turner can positively
impact the lives of literally millions, be named American of the Year,
help the handicapped, support so many non profit organizations and
charities, but some people still allow themselves to be influenced by
the media?Unbelievable!!!Glenn W. Turner change my life
too---positively. Thank you GWT!!!
Changed my life!, May 2, 2001
Reviewer: A reader from New York City
It's a riveting account of a Glenn W. Turner -- mastermind conman and
international rip off artist. After reading Maxa's reportage, which is
basically a "how-to" told through investigative journalism, I was
inspired! I'm not international yet, but just give me some time.
Turner, Turner, Turner by Glenn W. Turner
Multiple Streams of Income by Robert G. Allen
Magic of Thinking Big by D.J. Schwartz
Dare to Dream and Work to Win by Thomas, Dr. Barrett, Dr. Thomas
Barrett
Customer Satisfaction Is Worthless, Customer Loyalty Is Priceless by
Jeffrey
Ellenestnot
>>>After a pep breakfast at one of those dark, woody, brocade covered bourgeois
suburban dinner clubs where there was a lot of talk about
"distributorships," "prospects," and "area saturation," stuff that was
incomprehensible to me, we all piled back into the '69 Ford Countrywood
wagon (which was not by a long shot the promised Cadillac El Dorado) and
drove downtown to the Curtis Hotel. Once we were through the revolving
doors and into the lobby, we were immediately greeted by a small throng of
people gathered about the entrance to the "Golden Room" one of the many
meeting halls on the ground floor of this grand and venerable downtown
Minneapolis hotel. At a table after surrendering my name, I was presented
with a lapel tag, and then shown into the Golden Room. It was crowded with
people, door to dais, wall to wall and dense with tobacco smoke, thank God,
else it would've been like those rooms are these days: dense with scents of
onion breath, halitosis, flatulence, pussy smell and b.o. thinly veiled by
weak deodorant.
A gnomish, red-haired fellow in a red, white and blue suit with a mink tie
and diamond stick pin who had the posture of a hunchback but without the
excuse of a hump was on the dais waving his arms and shouting the room to
quietude, and when at last the riot of noise was reduced to a rumble he
barked into a hand held mike three words: "Bring It On!" I heard the
stampeding sound of heavy soles thudding over the floor. Being myself in
the privileged status of a new "prospect", one of the elder members had
sacrificed to me his seat in an enameled folding chair. I turned to look
over my shoulder and saw three men running, coming up all three aisles, each
of them bearing large boxes decorated with red, white and blue wrapping
paper. The man on the dais received the first box, upended it over a table,
doing the same with all three boxes until there was a mound some two or
three feet high of money cascading down the sides of the little green
mountain to the floor.
All the while there was cheering from the audience, people clapping,
stamping their feet, leaping into the air as a chant went up among them,
"Dare! Dare! Dare to be Great! Dare to be Great. Great! Great! Great
to Dare! Dare to be Great! Yay!" Above this din came the sound of the
amplified voice of the redheaded guy in the mink tie and stickpin, "Bring It
On!" Another stampede of running feet, and three more boxes of money were
spilling out over the dais. The hooting and hollering around me was
approaching orgasmic levels such that it could only remind me of my first
experience, at eight years old, of a fundamentalist Bible meeting when some
guy had leaped to his feet in the pew behind me, yielding a shout which came
out of such force of howling, all too apparently pent up sexual tension that
it forced me to fly forward only to crack my head on the back of the pew
ahead of me. I'd been used to quiet services in a strictly orthodox
denomination where people pray silently, if not on their knees, head bent,
eyes shut, a posture which had been precisely mine when that explosion of
libido virtually raped me from behind and sent me flying into a brain
concussion, not to mention the resultant life long trauma you can well
imagine I still suffer, and my mother never forgave my aunt for having
coaxed us into coming to pay her church a visit that Sunday.
This meeting was like that, being far removed from anything in my experience
other than charismatic religious euphoria and ecstasis. I was astonished,
awed and fascinated. Next came a period of testimony from salesmen who
ascended the dais one by one, giving witness to their sales victories as
they sang their praises of self in selling so many as ten, three thousand
dollar distributorships in one week--for a sales commission of forty
percent. These guys were claiming to have made upwards of ten grand in one
week? By selling nothing other than a contract of distributorship for these
mink ties, stickpins, striped suits and mink oil based cosmetics?
Yep. Now comes the "Dare to be Great" movie which is the Glenn W. Turner
Story, the tale of a poor man who makes good, of a salesman who nobody
wanted to hire because...he had a harelip. A salesman with a harelip. A
guy who can't talk to make himself understood can't sell! And what company
would want a harelip representing their product? What happened? He was
stopped on the street by a salesman of sewing machines who had been in the
office when Turner had been turned down for the job. This was the salesman
who got the job they wouldn't give to Turner. This salesman got Turner by
the buttonhole and told him, "Look mister, I don't care if you've got a set
of five toes growing out of the front of your head; if you can help me sell
sewing machines, I will share with you half the commission I make on any
machine you can sell for me.
It was a done deal from that day forward. With Turner's help this salesman
made more sales than anyone in the history of that territory. One day,
let's say his name was "Jones", old Jonesie came to Turner and told him
about a new sales opportunity in Chicago called "Holiday Magic", a cosmetic
company which not only sold face cream, lip-stick and five-day deodorant
pads, but it also had a new thing going where a salesman could sell somebody
the right to sell this product within a given sales territory. These were
distributorships. You sell a guy or gal the right to be a distributor of
the product, then this new distributor has the right to sell somebody else a
contract to become a "Sales Manager" for that district under his
distributorship, and then that guy can hire salesmen and women to whom he
has the right to sell product. The best part about it was that a
distributor has the right to sell other distributorships for other yet open
territories with their districts. You could get rich just selling nothing
but distributorships. In essence you were selling the thin air to
people--well, it was an area on a map, and a right, a contract and nothing
more. You make a commission of thirty percent on the sale.
Turner and his pal did get rich with Holiday Magic, but they soon saw the
limitations of that business plan which then led them to break away and form
Turner Enterprises, a company with the capacity to sell unlimited
distributorships to unlimited territories. Now, my question was, like, how
in the hell was that supposed to work, in like, one given geographical area,
if the whole town was being swamped with people looking for "prospects" to
sell these handfuls of air to? I was told not to bother my mind about that,
and rather, I should continue to attend the meetings for the rest of the
day, and the banquet that evening. My questions would soon find their
answer, my fears would be allayed, and I would surely see that the plan was
perfect, that nobody was being left holding the bag.
I went through the meetings that day, the banquet that evening, and by the
time that has half over I had become so high on the jubilant vibrations
animating this celebration that I asked to speak to the thousand-fold
assembly of gathered striped suits, striped chiffon evening shifts, mink
ties and stoles, and speak, I did. I told them that they had discovered
magic. They looked surprised at that notion, then awed as I went on to
describe my vision that this thing was good because it was giving the poor
man a shot at something big and wonderful, and that obviously any fool could
see that it could never get too big, so overly successful that there should
arise a day when there was nobody left to sell a distributorship to because
some people were just too plain uptight to dig it, or already too rich to
care about it. They liked that! It made the whole thing look pretty hip,
what they were up to. I sat down to a rousing round of applause, and my
distributor, let's say his name was "Jack" was proud of his new prospect. I
was asked to share with him his large first class suite that night instead
of taking some other room.
--
Jerv >>>>> (from a old post in alt.writing)
Ellenestnot
>>>>Thank you so much for posting this
article on the Dark Side of MLMs. Over the years, I have had several
friends that have been shuttled into Multi-Level Marketing plans of
various sort. Always, they seemed to immerge from them as if they'd
been to a major cult recruitment, with visions of near instant wealth
promised.
Particularly memorable to me, is a MLM scheme back in the 1960s, that
hatched Koscot Interplanetary. What Koscot sold, in addition to other
things they later expanded into, was cosmetics. These cosmetics were
purported to be wonderful since they contained Mink Oil. Of course I
never understood why women didn't understand that Minks have hairy
faces.
Koscot, began to wane, and they expanded with a sort of subsidiary
company called "Dare to Be Great." Dare to Be Great was created to
sell motivational programs. Yup, you paid something like $5,000. to
get yourself a franchise, and then you immediately had to go to work
to sell the same plan to others, in order to recoup your money and
prosper. It was a classic pyramid sales scheme.
I've had one life-time friend, that began with Koscot Interplanetary,
then on to Dare to be Great (lost their shirt on that one), and then
on to Amway (held their own, but didn't get rich), Princess House
(that one lasted a year), and then Herbalife.
With the story she would tell about the founder of Herbalife, she
would be near tears when she'd recite it. It was about how In the
1970s in Los Angeles, California, a young man named Mark Hughes
watched as his mother struggled with one diet after another in an
effort to reach her "ideal weight," as so many people do. Tragically,
however, Jo Ann Hughes died after following a number of unhealthy
diets. She was only 36.
I ended up buying a few of the products from my friend (I always did),
and the products seem to be OK, albeit a whole lot pricier than what I
could buy by walking into my discount drug store. Things would go
along for awhile, and my friend would periodically repeat the
"wonderful" Mark Hughes story. . .until the year 2000. That year,
Mark died suddenly, and very unexpectedly, in his palatial residence
on the Pacific (gained from being the founder of a major multi level
marketing scheme). . .He was just 44 years of age.
There was much speculation about the cause of death. . . was it heart
disease from being overweight???. . .Absolutely not! Afterall, Mark
was a fantastic appearing man, looking fit, bronzed, and dressed to
the max, and could have been a major model for any men's clothing line
or product. Was it an overdose of his own Herbalife products?. .
.Will we ever really know???
... you and I have had our little discussions about these things in
the past! Your stance appears to be much more ravenous against
alternative therapies, or treatments that are in competition to
"standard" American Medical Society values, and the enormous
pharmaseudical companies that are holding our senior citizen's feet to
the fire each month, because the cost of their prescriptions are so
outrageously expensive they must choose between food, or their meds to
keep their blood pressures down, and their hearts pumping. It is a
sad commentary in this country, that we are supposed to have the most
advanced medicine in the world, but the worst access to it.
The bottom line with MLMs is this. . .If a product is so great, than
why in the world not simply just put it on the shelf, and sell it?
The answer is simple . . . It isn't that the product is great or needs
to be so good, in an MLM, because the motivation is about selling the
marketing plan (pyramid sales scheme), more than it is about creating
a great product that is going to help mankind.
I made a pact with myself about a year ago. I have had far too many
friends that have been burned by these plans (my friend still has
Herbalife in boxes out in her garage, if not some Koscot
Interplanetary from the 1960s). I simply will not buy a product that
is marketed in this way! If a product is that fantastic, it is
available on a shelf (possibly under another name) at your drug store,
the department store, the hardware store, or the cosmetic counter in
your local neighborhood. It is likely as good, or better in quality,
and it is likely to be much cheaper. And it doesn't have the price of
victimizing those that have been harmed financially by those that
lured them into the get rich quick MLM schemes.>>>
Ellenestnot
Magazine.....Anyone familiar with this lady? She sounds like a
reincarnation of Werner.
November 24, 2002
How a Self-Help Guru Is Born
Once Depressed, Overweight and Volatile, Byron Katie Awoke One
Morning to the Sensation of a Cockroach Walking Across Her Foot--and
Found Herself Transformed By
By Allison Adato
Two questions in the interview consume me. Although being a reporter
gives one license to ask just about anything, these two questions
knock around my head, unable to escape my mouth. The first feels
superficial, but I have to know: How does this woman achieve such
perfect fingernails? They are natural, unadorned, tapered to exquisite
ovals. The second question would make me appear uninformed. For some
time now I have been talking to her, to others about her, and
observing her at work. Yet still I want to ask, "What is it you do
exactly?" Finally I blurt out a wimpy, deflected substitute: "When
people ask you what you do, what do you tell them?"
The woman fixes her aquamarine eyes on me, smiles and says, "I clear
people's minds." She illustrates the statement with a flick of those
fingernails, as if brushing crumbs from a tablecloth.
Since 1992, Byron Katie, 59, has traveled the world clearing minds en
masse. She is not a therapist, a counselor or a religious leader,
though her work--which she simply calls "The Work"--suggests elements
of all these professions. She gives an average of three free workshops
per month, teaching people her method to end emotional suffering. She
instructs them to write down their troublesome thoughts: My mother
should love me more. My wife shouldn't cheat on me. I need to lose
weight. Then they apply to each thought the following four questions:
Is it true or can I really know that it's true? How do I react when I
think that thought? Can I find one peaceful reason to believe that
thought? Who would I be without the thought? She then engages what she
calls "the turnaround," flipping those initial statements to see if
their opposites don't feel equally, if not more, true: I should love
my mother more. I shouldn't cheat on myself. I don't need to lose
weight.
Resting on this minimalist method of inquiry and linguistic reversals,
her philosophy can be used, say proponents, to overcome troubled
family relationships, problems at work, even the trauma of rape or the
grief of losing a loved one to terrorism.
While Katie is tentative about saying that her method is for everyone,
the promotional literature for The Work isn't shy about making claims.
Her intensive school, which she holds in various places around the
country, is billed as "not only a way to find freedom, it's a fast
way. In just over a week, the school changes lives radically and
permanently."
The number of people who attest to this statement is growing. Over the
course of a decade, The Work has spread from Katie's hometown of
Barstow and spawned both a nonprofit organization (The Work
Foundation) and a for-profit branch, Byron Katie International, which
has ocean-view offices in Manhattan Beach and an outpost in the
Netherlands. It is accepted as continuing education units for social
workers, nurses and marriage counselors by those professions'
respective governing organizations. Her ideas also are spreading
through the sale of videotapes, audiotapes and a Web site that is
translated into languages including Italian, Dutch, German, French,
Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Macedonian. In California, she has
garnered an eclectic celebrity fan base that she says ranges from
actor Richard Chamberlain to the anger-rock bands Slipknot and Korn.
She has held private workshops for donors such as Norman Lear's wife,
Lyn, who introduced The Work to 50 women friends, and former Warner
Bros. Records exec Jeff Gold, who shared it with his industry pals.
Last spring, Harmony Books--an early publisher of Deepak
Chopra--released Katie's "Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can
Change Your Life," which booksellers could display somewhere between
"self-help" and "New Age." The book is a collaboration with author
Stephen Mitchell, whose own works have topped the spirituality list.
Mitchell, 59, is a translator of religious texts from the "Bhagavad
Gita" to the "Tao Te Ching" to "Genesis." A widely respected
pan-religious scholar, he might be a good person to assess the rise of
Byron Katie--were he not her collaborator and her husband of the last
18 months.
The word "guru" comes to mind. But, says Mitchell, "Gurus are a dime a
dozen. There are people saying, 'Live in the now' or 'There really are
no problems.' It's nothing like what Katie's doing."
So what is she doing? And how does a woman with no psychological,
theological, spiritual or therapeutic training, and who once earned
her living as a landlady, get taken seriously as a self-help
authority?
It helps, for starters, to have a cockroach walk across your foot.
From Aimee Semple MacPherson to Ram Dass to Marianne Williamson,
California has attracted gurus like medflies. But Barstow, the Mojave
desert town where Byron Kathleen Reid spent much of her youth, was a
virtual woo-woo-free zone. Raised by a housewife and a train engineer,
Katie grew up to be a fairly unhappy woman. As she tells it, by the
time she was 43 in February 1986, her life had hit a nadir of
hopelessness. What happened between then and now is an oft-alluded to
but little-probed story in Byron Katie circles.
Every religion has its founding myth. All gurus have a saga of how
they came to know something from which the rest of us could benefit.
Who would buy Richard Simmons' "Deal-A-Meals" if he couldn't credibly
point to his own struggles with food? Katie's story appears in
abbreviated form in her book. Quizzed on many of its particulars, she
is at first cordially hazy.
This is what her friends and family confirm: In 1986 Katie was a
mother of three, on her second marriage and had spent a decade falling
into depression, agoraphobia, overeating and addiction to codeine and
alcohol. They say she rarely left her bed and grew so paranoid that
she sometimes slept with a loaded gun under her bed.
"She was probably one of the saddest, angriest people I've ever
known," recalls her daughter, Roxann Burroughs, who was 16 at the
time. Her sons, then ages 18 and 23, had moved out of the house. "She
was very closed up and volatile," says her eldest son, Bob Robinson.
"Her mood swings were incredible. She came down on me with a lot more
intensity than the other two siblings."
Katie desperately needed help, but the idea of seeing a therapist or
even a religious or spiritual advisor didn't square with her
upbringing. "We're like Barstow desert people," explains Burroughs,
who still lives in the Mojave, where she and her husband own a
construction business. "We didn't know about therapy or 12-step. So
Mom stayed in bed, and we ordered pizza and watched TV."
Eventually, Katie says, she called her insurance company, which
referred her to Hope House, a Los Angeles residential treatment center
for women with eating disorders that has since closed. While there,
she slept in the attic because the other residents were afraid of her.
"It was run like a home with a house mother, so there was some
democracy," recalls Pat Scales, who was a therapist at Hope House but
did not live on the premises. "I remember that she was very emotional,
both with anger and with tears. When she came into my group, she was
so emotionally fragmented there didn't seem to be a self there, which
is not the case with most people with eating disorders. They're fairly
functional. She could easily have scared people."
Less than two weeks into her stay, Katie says she awoke one morning to
the sensation of a cockroach crawling across her foot. She opened her
eyes and, she explains in her book, "It was as if something else had
woken up. It opened its eyes. It was looking through Katie's eyes ...
it was intoxicated with joy." At that moment, she claims, the four
questions appeared in her consciousness.
Applying the questions to her life, she challenged long-held beliefs,
such as "my children should respect me," and felt her emotional
suffering lift.
Scales says that she had never seen anything like it in a therapy
setting. "There was definitely a personality shift," she says. "I was
on a spiritual path at the time. I recognized that something rather
extraordinary had happened to her. She wasn't the same crazy person
that she had been the day before."
"It was like they dropped off a completely different person--the most
innocent, sweetest child you've ever seen," Burroughs says. "There
just aren't programs that produce a different person." Katie's son
Ross Robinson adds, "She seemed like an alien to me."
Katie attributes this difference to waking without memories. She
claims not to have recognized even her own husband and kids at first.
She also forgot conventions of contemporary life. "She would walk out
the door in pajamas," says Burroughs. "I'd say, 'You can't go out in
pajamas,' so she would change. She did it for me."
There were other changes. She dropped 75 pounds. She says she found
that if she ate meat, her tongue spontaneously bled in a stripe down
the center. She meditated, sitting stone-still for hours a day and
perplexing her family.
"I am one of the most down-to-earth, flat-footed people ever, so I had
a really hard time with it," Burroughs says. "We knew nothing of
Buddhism, Hinduism. I thought you were straight-up weird if you
meditated. I'd look at her and think, 'What is she doing?' I went with
the idea that she had had a nervous breakdown."
Katie began taking long walks to rediscover Barstow. On these walks
she would embrace strangers. While some were put off by her guileless
approaches, others saw in her a peace that they wanted for themselves.
"People from the street, people I'd meet in stores," Katie says.
"They would say, 'There are names for people like you. You're
self-realized. You're a mystic.'
"I'd say, 'I'm a married woman with three children.'
"And they would say, 'No, no, there's something else.' "
Unable to offer them advice, Katie invited people home to observe how
she lived. The first was a depressed man she remembers only as Jim,
who saw Katie as his potential salvation. She showed Jim and the
others what she did when she had a problem: She wrote it down and
asked her four questions.
Soon she was like that family in New Jersey whose home drew reverent
pilgrims to see a tablecloth with a spaghetti sauce stain that looked
like the Virgin Mary. Dozens, and eventually hundreds, came to be with
Katie. They stayed for hours or called in the middle of the night.
Some believed that she was healing them, though she insisted that they
were healing themselves. Some wanted to turn her home into an ashram.
These developments, as well as Katie's personality shift, would prove
taxing on her marriage. She and her second husband separated. As her
son Bob, a foreman supervisor, remembers, "We thought it was crazy.
She started caring for other people as much as she did her own family.
We had all these ragamuffins, street people in the house. But we
learned about others through her and became more tolerant of society."
Once skeptics, her children now embrace The Work to varying degrees.
Word of mouth about her living room gatherings led to an invitation to
appear before a small group, composed mainly of psychologists and
therapists near Berkeley, Katie says. She recalls the experience as
"very odd. I was just this woman from Barstow. They knew things that I
had no concept of yet." But the professionals wanted insight into
Katie's practice. Answering their questions provided a format for her
traveling workshops. "That was probably the real beginning of The
Work," says Judith Avalon, who attended that first gathering. Katie
had been "ungroomed as far as doing retreat work. But we were
fascinated by her story and her power to shift people." The experience
also provided Katie with a mandate for deciding with whom she would
share The Work: Only those who ask. She would not evangelize.
Today Katie's schedule remains largely determined by request. If she
is asked to bring The Work to a prison in Texas, as she was in 1996,
she goes. If they want to hear her in Germany again, she returns.
By the early '90s, the workshops began to look much as they do now. At
a Marin County appearance in 1995, Larkspur doctor Kevin Maher, now a
close Katie friend, saw her for the first time. In that part of the
state, he says, "You were used to seeing these neo-bohemian Marinites
who had been to India and declared themselves enlightened beings.
Katie shows up looking like Dolly Parton and Tammy Faye Bakker. She
had no idea of enlightenment or the vocabulary."
Today Katie no longer looks or sounds like a Barstow housewife. Her
flowing clothes, usually in black or earth tones, suggest a
well-tailored Jedi knight. Her personality has evolved into a
compelling set of contradictions. She retains a fair amount of earthy
pragmatism, yet occasionally refers to herself in the otherworldly
third person. She has been called a Bodhisattva--an enlightened being
who selflessly delays nirvana to assist others--but this has fostered
in her no curiosity about Buddhism or any other religion; she has not
read her husband's books on the subject. She rejects such lofty
labels, but sits quietly as Mitchell expounds on her awakening.
"I don't know of an instance of this happening to another human
being," he says. "It's like if you took psychosis or amnesia as a
negative and printed it as a positive photograph."
Unavoidably, she has grown fluent in the language of the New Age
movement. She has refined her ideas into sampler-ready sound bites:
"Arguing with what is is like teaching a cat to bark. Hopeless."
Mitchell has anthologized them in a pamphlet available at Katie's
workshops. Attendees also can buy her tapes, videos, mugs, backpacks
or a $76 fleece jacket with her logo (a heart made of arrows pointing
inward). Revenue from these items goes to Byron Katie International,
not the nonprofit foundation.
At the workshops, scented candles burn as you enter and music is
playing, something affirming such as John Lennon's "Imagine," Alanis
Morissette's "Thank U" or an original composition called "The Work
Rap: No Decision, No Fear." A typical program begins with a volunteer
from the crowd sitting in a chair opposite Katie onstage, a box of
Kleenex between them. All of her events are videotaped and the
volunteers are miked. Katie is introduced with no mention of her
spiritual resume. (Throughout the evening, she rarely alludes to her
past except to empathize. To a woman enduring power struggles with her
kids, Katie offers, "I know. My religion used to be 'pick up your
socks.' ") She starts by asking the volunteer to read his or her
answers to questions on a printed worksheet. "OK, sweetheart," Katie
says. "Do you really want to know the truth? Let's hear No. 1.... "
Though she calls everyone "sweetheart" or "honey," there is little
coddling. Asking someone if the deeply held stories about them are
true requires a bluntness almost incongruous with Katie's Zsa
Zsa-meets-Deepak demeanor. At its most effective, her method can cut
through years of self-delusion and rationalizations; it leaves some
participants in tears of recognition. Many wrestle with Katie's
frequently repeated statement that she loves reality, whatever it
brings, because reality is "kinder than our stories."
"I have a hard time with the passivity--what comes to you, be happy
about it," says Nancy, a Los Angeles lawyer who asked that her last
name not be used. She has been in the chair twice, and the first time
she spoke about losing her mother. "I needed God to put a mother
figure in my life. Katie turned it around: 'You be the mother figure.
It's not God's responsibility to give you that,' " says Nancy. "It
feels hokey. It ticks you off. But it returns the power to you."
Marion Jacobs is a clinical psychologist who has studied self-help
groups. She is not familiar with The Work, although when it is
explained to her, Jacobs suggests it is similar in some ways to
traditional therapy. Katie's first two questions, says Jacobs, "are
fundamental to cognitive behavioral therapy. Then she makes the
connection between thoughts and feelings--any therapist is going to do
that. Finally, she's asking a person to use imagery to see what would
change them. Nothing in there that's new."
While Jacobs isn't troubled by Katie's ideas, the format does raise
questions. "If she just got up and gave a sermon, you could listen and
decide where it fits in your life. But she's working with people
individually. When you do that, you're walking a fuzzy line of what is
therapy."
In 1999 the California Board of Psychology raised that issue after
listening to a tape of Katie working with an incest survivor. Katie
says the board wanted to know what would happen if she were hosting a
session elsewhere and the woman subsequently had a breakdown. Katie
argued that the woman's emotional state after the dialogue was her own
responsibility, just as it had been before they met. Ultimately, with
no finding that she was practicing psychotherapy, the investigation
was dropped. As a matter of policy, the board would not comment for
this story or release records.
Kathy Smith, a self-described "Byron Katie groupie," drove up from San
Diego to hear Katie in L.A. She also has attended the five-day "New
Year's Cleanse," held at a summer camp in Malibu. Smith, an ebullient
woman who first used The Work to explore her struggle with overeating,
says that the only thing that concerned her going into the Cleanse was
the juice fast. The what?
"I brought cheese and crackers--I was sure I wasn't going to make it,"
she says, adding proudly that she existed for three days on
watermelon, beet, lemon, apple and cucumber juices and miso broth.
Katie explains the reasons for relying on juice: "You take away
people's chewing and their mind goes nuts, they start getting angry,
feeling like little children. They feel deprived. It gets really
radical and that's what I want." She says she went through the same
changes in 1986.
Using anger and deprivation is a rarely discussed element of The Work.
I ask if there are any other physical elements to the program. "No
sex, please," says Katie, smiling but serious. "We separate husbands
and wives so they can focus on their thoughts about that. They don't
have to, we just suggest it."
It is virtually impossible to find a Byron Katie critic at a Byron
Katie event. (She more frequently attracts what one volunteer dubs
"Bliss Ninnies.") On three occasions I lurked in the parking lot,
trying to catch people leaving early. At an East Hampton, N.Y.,
workshop, two women emerge before the break, talking and laughing.
Perhaps they found it all too funny, possibly ridiculous.
"Oh, no," one insists. "We love Katie. But we have dinner
reservations." Where, I wonder, are the skeptics?
In Altadena, Calif., as it turns out.
I call the Skeptics Society, a watchdog group that challenges bogus
science. They have not heard of Katie, so I run through the four
questions. "I like that fourth one," says Pat Linse, a Society
co-founder. I try to rile Linse's skeptical side: What about Katie's
lack of training? What about presenting The Work as a charity? What
about the mugs?
"They are supporting themselves," she reasons. "We don't fault people
for making money."
"Her Jaguar was a gift," Roxann Burroughs says, aware that seeing a
quasi-spiritual self-help authority roll up in a Jaguar sends up a red
flag with some people. The car was bought by Katie's son Ross, a
successful record producer who credits The Work with greatly improving
his life.
Even in the depths of her depression, Katie says that she was always
able to make money. Byron Katie International now has a paid staff of
seven, and Katie receives an annual salary of $120,000. Aside from the
free public appearances, Katie charges $250 plus accommodations for
the Cleanse and $1,800 to $3,000 for the school, plus room and board.
"We're not trying to build anything, we're just trying to meet the
call," she says. "I don't have any ambition. I'm a woman without a
future."
Andy Bernstein, director of Byron Katie International, is a bit more
focused than his boss, who doesn't seek out forums for sharing The
Work. "I'm pushing it," Bernstein says. "We don't just answer phone
calls. It's not as passive as it seems. We have a product: four
questions, and a spokesperson: Katie. It moves the way any product
moves, whether it's Nike sneakers or anything else."
Katie plans to continue sharing The Work as long as people ask for it
and she is able. Still, she is preparing for the day when she isn't.
Hundreds of graduates of her school now lead groups of their own, and
her book will eventually reach many more people than her workshops
can. Although her wise pixie face twinkles on the book's cover, Katie
feels that the questions, and not the woman behind them, are what's
worth promoting. But her undeniable charisma is a selling point. She
plays down the import of discussing her awakening, yet she and
Mitchell already are at work on her autobiography. An early draft
suggests it will delve into Katie's cockroach moment, which otherwise
has been excised from her literature.
"The cosmic side of things is a big stumbling block for a lot of
people," says Jeff Gold, who is now on the board of The Work. "It's a
stumbling block for me, but who am I to say it didn't happen? She is
clear in claiming to not be enlightened, but I think they were smart
to keep it out of the first book."
Like many Byron Katie fans, Gold finds her practice useful regardless
of its origins, which is handy, since trying to confirm the more
incredible elements of her story is like looking for the footprints
where Jesus walked on water. Why have some of the key people and
places in her story been lost to history? Why didn't she ever get a
doctor to look at that bleeding tongue? (Her answer: "It was
beautiful, a stripe of red. It didn't hurt.")
With Mitchell conveniently nearby whenever Katie and I sit down to
talk, posing the question about how new religions are born is
irresistible. Is it possible that, generations hence, the story of a
woman with little education, suffering from acute depression and
spontaneously becoming a charismatic teacher will be an article of
some new faith?
"If we're lucky, people will have forgotten all of that, because it's
not about her, it's about The Work," says Mitchell. Still, he will
allow that "this kind of radical questioning is in the lineage of the
great spiritual traditions. The 'inquiry' is in Buddhist traditions
and my own Jewish tradition, from the book of Job to Spinoza." He
won't go so far, however, as to say that they are actively trying to
put a new brand of spirituality on the map. "I've never heard Katie
say, 'I have the truth.' It's not like that. It's not a doctrine," he
says. "She doesn't want to spread the word. She doesn't want a
following."
The Work's simplicity is seductive, as is Katie's apparent happiness.
Her calm acceptance of reality is as enviable as those unbreakable
fingernails. I wonder if a mere mortal can achieve either trait.
One day, Mitchell, Katie and I go to lunch. The restaurant we choose
has a half-hour wait for a table, so we walk to another place. Katie
is pleased: This other restaurant is the right one. No disappointment,
because she always loves what happens. When Katie's salad arrives, she
tastes the vinaigrette and crinkles her nose. She calls the waiter.
Seeming like a gal from Barstow, she asks, "Could I have some ranch
dressing?"
It is a relief to see even this little glimpse of desire in her.
Sometimes getting what one wants tastes even sweeter than accepting
what is.
Linda
> Here's the whole article from the Los Angeles Times Sunday
> Magazine.....Anyone familiar with this lady? She sounds like a
> reincarnation of Werner.
>
Fred Kidd
A Google "Images" search brings up lots of photos of Byron Katie.
It's a slick story almost too slick.
Why doesn't she buy a SuperBowl TV ad and in the style "Apple Corp.",
flash her four questions in large black font against a white
background, one after another with no music, no voice over, no
acknowledgement of who paid for the ad ? She could reach millions for
a very low cost per person.
from
http://www.time.com/time/innovators/spirituality/profile_katie.html
Two chairs face each other on a stage, separated by a table filled
with sunflowers, candles and a box of tissues to catch any tears. In
one chair sits a member of the audience; in the other, Byron Katie,
58, a divorced grandmother with white hair and sparkling blue eyes. In
sessions of her popular self-awareness program, called simply the
Work, the charismatic Katie acts as a combination mystical guide,
wisecracking therapist and knowing parent.
To whatever is upsetting a person—"My husband doesn't understand me,"
for example—Katie poses four questions: Is your problem true? Can you
really know it's true? Can you find a peaceful reason to believe it?
Who would you be without it? Then, through a technique she calls the
turnaround, Katie coaxes the person to look inside rather than outside
for the solution. "He should understand me," for example, may become,
"I should understand him and myself." A woman at this evening's
session gripes that her sister is holier than thou but discovers that
she is doing the same thing. Subjective judgments are vigorously
challenged, seen as personal "projections" or "stories." While the
Work proceeds, two young women clutch each other for comfort; another
fellow gets up and kneels like a puppy at Katie's side as she strokes
his long hair.
Despite such New Age trappings (and the sappy folk music on the P.A.
system), Katie's approach, with elements that recall Zen meditation,
Socratic inquiry and Alcoholics Anonymous' 12-step program, offers a
pragmatic and simple way of getting people to take responsibility for
their own problems. Says Katie: "It's a way to cut through everything.
It puts responsibility back on the person looking for their answers,
not the world's answers."
A former real estate broker and the mother of three, Katie developed
the Work 14 years ago, after suffering from depression, alcoholism and
eating disorders. While lying on the floor of a halfway-house attic,
she suddenly achieved a sense of "clarity," realizing her troubles
stemmed from relating "outward" to the world. She began holding
informal sessions at her Mojave Desert home, and word spread of her
teachings. Supported by donations and sales of audiotapes and videos
from her base in Manhattan Beach, Calif., Katie travels the globe as
host to workshops for corporate managers and bring her message to
everyone from prison inmates to abused children. "I just know that
people want to be free," she says. "And if I have something they
believe will help them, then I give it in the same way I got it."
Linda
> On Tue, 26 Nov 2002 16:10:16 GMT, Linda <linc...@swbell.net> wrote:
>
> >Ellenestnot wrote:
> >
> >> Here's the whole article from the Los Angeles Times Sunday
> >> Magazine.....Anyone familiar with this lady? She sounds like a
> >> reincarnation of Werner.
> >>
> >
> >http://www.thework.org/
>
> A Google "Images" search brings up lots of photos of Byron Katie.
>
> It's a slick story almost too slick.
>
> Why doesn't she buy a SuperBowl TV ad and in the style "Apple Corp.",
> flash her four questions in large black font against a white
> background, one after another with no music, no voice over, no
> acknowledgement of who paid for the ad ? She could reach millions for
> a very low cost per person.
>
>
> "I just know that
> people want to be free," she says. "And if I have something they
> believe will help them, then I give it in the same way I got it."
http://www.panda.org/stopoverfishing/seagullstrikes/
patrick_darcy
rolling on the floor
do u think landmark will sue linda for stealing
the tech. and then theres that other woman who
wants to put on programs.
rolling on the floor
rolling on the carpet
--
*LOVE* is all u need.
patrick_darcy
im still laughing over my brilliant wit :)