The Age of Heretics by Art Kleiner

Author:Art Kleiner [Kleiner, Art]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2010-05-11T04:00:00+00:00

As early as 1957, the center began to unravel at NTL.10 Every year more of the trainers slipped out for visits or sabbaticals to the new, looser, encounter group centers in California such as Esalen or the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in San Diego, where personal growth was expected to be part of the purpose of the T-Group, body work was an integral part of therapy, and understanding group power dynamics was less and less important. More and more, the western influence trickled back to Bethel and the other NTL gatherings. It became normal to touch, and then to hug, the other people in your T-Group.The oak tables gave way to chairs without tables, then to cushions on the floor. On the West Coast, they were taking off their clothes and taking psychedelics; in the East, they never went that far, but they did invite business executives to crawl around on the floor, in the dark, bumping into each other in an effort to experience each other in a fresh way.11

NTL trainers also began to employ the techniques of self-hypnosis. Instead of merely talking about their “preferred vision,” stolid corporate engineers or school administrators were now encouraged to visualize every aspect of it, as if it hung in the air before them. If they couldn’t master visualization, they could attend training sessions where the leader handed them a lemon and told them to acquaint themselves with every minuscule detail of the pitted, sour fruit. Then they’d throw their lemons into a big pile in the center of the room. “Go get your lemon,” the trainer would say. Each participant’s citrus stood out from its fellows as clearly as a lover’s face.

Dick Beckhard, conducting this exercise with a group of rear admirals of the U.S. Navy, daydreamed about snapping a photograph of them crawling on the floor, in uniform, grabbing their lemons from the pile. He could send it with a note to the secretary of defense: “Dear Mr. Secretary. We are learning. Love, your boys.” And there was, in fact, a valuable lesson here: if you could learn to recognize your lemon in a crowd by moving past your ordinary preconceptions, then consider how much you could see in the people around you, or in your own aspirations, if you gave yourself the time to really look.12

“I can remember working with a group in the Connecticut mountains,” an organizational development pioneer named Kathy Dannemiller recalled years later. “We were rocking this man. He was about fifty or sixty years old and I was holding his head. He was bald. When we rocked someone, at some point we’d say, ‘Let go. You can let go now’—meaning that they could let themselves move into heavy-duty emotional release. At that moment, I leaned down and kissed him, and I suddenly saw two tears come out of his eyes, which were closed. He opened them and looked up at me and said, ‘Was that you that kissed me?’ I said yes. He said, ‘I think that was the first kiss I ever felt.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.