Jonathan Cloud April 20th, 2025
In the unfolding narrative of American identity, one philosophical movement stands out as a uniquely homegrown creed: Transcendentalism. Emerging in the early 19th century as both a spiritual and intellectual revolution, Transcendentalism was more than just a literary phenomenon — it was, in many ways, the first true expression of an American faith. Rooted in individual freedom, reverence for nature, and an innate trust in the moral compass of the self, it offered a radical alternative to both dogmatic religion and mechanistic materialism. In its core principles, Transcendentalism laid the groundwork for what might be called the American soul.
Origins and Core Beliefs
Transcendentalism arose out of New England, sparked by thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, among others. Drawing on European Romanticism, Eastern philosophies, and Puritan spirituality, Transcendentalists pushed back against both the rigid Calvinism of their forebears and the cold rationalism of the Enlightenment. They believed in the immediacy of truth, accessed not through scripture or reason alone but through intuition, conscience, and a direct connection with the Divine in nature and the self.
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Jonathan Cloud November 16th, 2014
What I’ve gotten out of Landmark
Like a lot of Landmark graduates, I can genuinely say that I’ve gotten much of my life from my participation in the programs. I was introduced to the programs by the woman I am now married to, after having walked out of an introduction session because I considered it to be total hype and completely implausible. This was in 1985, shortly after the transformation of the est training into the Forum (now called the Landmark Forum), in Canada.
My first course was actually the Communication Workshop (now retired), which had a profound and immediate effect on me. I was 41 years old, and had already done an enormous amount in my life, including living in several countries, earning a Commonwealth Scholarship in New Zealand, moving to Toronto and then to Ottawa to work for the Canadian federal government, spending a year in Paris and visiting Israel and Gaza, and returning to Ottawa and starting a passive solar design and construction business, building houses, and moving into real estate development. I had refused to attend the Forum, but I was willing to consider that I might learn something from a course on communication, since I was having trouble keeping my thirty-five employees on track in the construction business. After four years in business I was already a half-million dollars in the hole. That the course was being led by a Montreal real estate developer also appealed to me. But I was still skeptical that this might be some kind of Scientology scam, which I’d already encountered though not fallen prey to.
Unless you’ve done some kind of transformational program such as est, Landmark, Actualizations, LifeSpring, etc. I can pretty much guarantee that you have no idea of what’s possible. In the course of as little as a weekend, your entire world view is exposed as a fabrication, a fabrication you put together in response to whatever incidents happened to occur in your childhood, and how you chose to interpret them at the time. The experience is shattering, but also enormously freeing: you see who you have become, and have the opportunity to choose newly.
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