IF, like me, you are not in the habit of sharing highly personal tidbits of your life with 148 strangers for 13 hours a day, three days in a row, then let me, uh, share with you what that experience feels like. It feels like intergalactic jet lag, or like someone has pumped your head full of a global weather system, heavy on the cumulonimbus. Some of the 148 strangers were crying so much, they looked as if they had been boiled.

We had all paid $550 each to spend a glorious summer weekend in a fluorescent-lighted basement meeting room near Madison Square Garden, at the Landmark Forum. Taught in 7 languages in 20 countries and, according to its Web site, boasting more than a million attendees, the Forum is the cornerstone workshop of Landmark Education, a company formed in 1991 when Werner Erhard sold the “technology” behind his EST seminars to his employees, who then devised a kinder and gentler approach to human development.

Though Landmark is viewed by some as an incubator for overly assertive or blissed-out automatons who bear a strange predilection for the phrase “got it,” the eight-time Oscar-winning composer Alan Menken, the Boston Philharmonic conductor Benjamin Zander and Paul Fireman, the former Reebok chief executive, are all Landmark graduates, as are employees of Exxon Mobil, JPMorgan Chase, NASA and the Pentagon, who have been coached by the company’s consulting firm, the Vanto Group.

Just then we were each sharing with the person sitting next to us the previous night’s homework  write a letter to someone you’ve been “inauthentic” with, to tell about “the possibility you have invented for yourself,” and then “extend an invitation.” I was sharing with Loretta  a 40-something former stand-up comic who thought she might have to end her 13-year relationship with the father of her two children because she had had an affair with a 19-year-old. Gulp.