"IN THIS TRAINING, YOU'RE GOING TO FIND OUT YOU'VE BEEN ACTING LIKE ASSHOLES. ALL YOUR FUCKING CLEVERNESS AND SELF-DECEPTION HAVE GOTTEN YOU NOWHERE!"

"Good," Emery replied. "There's nothing to get so you got it."

"I get it," the trainee said, as a broad grin slid across her face "So getting it is whatever you get."

"If that's what you got."

Let's see: Synanon, Heaven's Gate, The People's Temple, Mentalphysics, Unarius, the Theosophists, Scientology

And yeah, the Soka crew is starting to turn up over at the UCI library in dribs and drabs (because we actually HAVE a library, I'm guessing).

Aimee Semple McPherson was based in Los Angeles. And lets not forget Dr. Gene Scott

The Mentalphysics people. They've been around since the 50s.

Sorry, the "Unarius Academy of Science"

Probably similar to the ratio of sincere cult leaders to fraudsters that drank the purple Kool-Aide and ate the apple sauce.

Creepy!

Me and and a friend of mine checked out a Dianetics video from the library once.

Jus' kiddin.

(countdown till someone chimes in claiming one of the groups above is actually very good and helped them change their life, etc. begins NOW)

So many successful and famous people have used it: John Travolta, Lisa Marie Presley, Kirstie Alley...

http://lvl5.org/

LevelFive is a live role-playing event focused on critically exploring self actualization seminars from the 1970’s. The LevelFive performance will loosely follow the structure of early Large Group Awareness Training sessions like Erhard Seminars Training, but it is not a re-enactment. The open-ended live role-playing environment provides a space in which players are free to explore self actualization issues with varying degrees of personal intensity, but via an alibi or fabricated character.

During the 1970’s hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans came for weekend seminar sessions, to be taught how to free themselves from the restraints of contemporary society. Intended as a kind of self transformation for the masses, the seminars utilized a combination of various philosophic and spiritual teachings focused on “allowing participants to achieve, in a very brief time, a sense of personal transformation and enhanced power.” Quickly copied, successors included not only similar self actualization seminars, but also grew into the mass of success and corporate training seminars that we are familiar with today.

Players will arrive as their characters, and are expected to emote, and experience as their characters, with minimal interruptions for the 2-3 day duration of the game. LevelFive is a live game based on the Nordic style of progressive live role-play that explicitly works with “bleed”. In role-playing games, bleed happens when the thoughts and feelings of the character starts affecting its player, or vice-versa. Rather than forgetting the existence of an original self, the character becomes a tool for projection, self-exploration and experimentation.