Part 10 you ask? Hell yeah.
For those of you who got here through coincidence or pure chance, this discussion is about a group called the Fellowship of Friends. I would recommend starting reading from page 1, as what is being said now is quite far removed from what the discussion was about at the beginning. Find out for yourself whether the Fellowship of Friends is a genuine spiritual school, or a dangerous cult, as believed by many who have left. Or simply enjoy interacting with so many interesting and exciting people.
For part 9 click here.
For part 8 click here.
For part 7 click here.
For part 6 click here.
For part 5 click here.
For part 4 click here.
For part 3 click here.
For part 2 click here.
For the article that I wrote so very long ago, and for the first and potentially most enlightening part of the discussion click here.
For sites in Russian and Italian, click http://fofway.narod.ru/ and http://laliberastrada.blogspot.com/ respectively.
And as always, enjoy and have fun.
To get back to the main page click here: HOME
Animam Recro 
May 22, 2007 at 11:46 pm
Rumours & Lies we need your humour and I`s
Is it possible that RB suffers from a Narcissistic Personality Disorder and from a Compulsive Sexual Behaviour? Could it be true for him, what is true for so many other cult leaders who believe to be superior to others? Cult leaders, who believe they have an important role in the world history to play? Cult leaders who make false prophesies about the end of the world? Is that the secret behind him? We hope not.
We do not want to spread rumours, so we need your help.
Please post a few videos of RB holding meetings on youtube, so we can show them to some professional psychiatrist. Any footage is fine, but would be good if it contains passages, where he explains that he is the brightest light in 2000 years, or something similar, or talks about Armageddon. Also interpretations of cave drawing would be good, even explanations about the sequence. Actually best would be a passage, where he talks about himself as being an angel.
To come to a clearer picture, it would be nice to know about his childhood, especially the first years, when kids are in their oral phase.
Since you seem to have direct access to RB, please verify for us the following rumours:
Is it true that RB mentioned being abused sexually by his mother and elder sister?
Did his father leave the family early?
Was he raised with a stepfather, who was a butcher?
Did he lose his job as a school teacher because of his sexual orientation?
Did Alex Horn kick him out of his group because of his sexual orientation?
Can one say that he is overly preoccupied with sexual activity?
Is his oral fixation possibly linked to an overwhelming and dominant mother?
Did he refuse to go to his mothers funeral?
Did Robert have hundreds of lovers but never a friend?
Is he HIV-positive?
I am sure you can help to clarify and destroy any rumours and lies with facts and humour.
//////////////////////////////////
Thanks begorra 8/431 for linking the video
To Alice in wonder 4/415 Yes, I agree. One ‘key’ to understand RB behaviour lies in his childhood. Who knows something about that time?
May 23, 2007 at 12:17 am
#449
[edit]
Whale Rider
1979-1985
_________________________
Is it really lost on you that this style of sign-off will be interpreted by Fellowship members as your date of spiritual birth and death?
Think about what you are doing and don’t supply the lunatics with what they will interpret as “affirming omens.”
May 23, 2007 at 12:18 am
Dear Friend (419) suffering sucotash,
Thank you for the compliments. They do feel better than the insults.
Your question is pretty straight forward. You agree with this paragraph:
“After all the blog is a kind of mass media and the described things are not that obvious in the school itself. Be sure many students pay more attention to what is going on, but to base a departure on mostly anonymous articles would be a mistake.”
“Things are not that obvious in the school itself”
That is one of the issues that needs to be looked at deeply. Why is there no transparency in a conscious school. Why is it made to look so pretty on the surface and it is so corrupt beneath?
How could it not look good when what students are allowed to do is repeat beautiful angles from great teachers, dress well making them have a good feeling about themselves and make tremendous efforts to support it? What needs to be understood is whether people are making efforts to develop or shun their spirituality. To support Robert Burton’s life-style or to support their own development within a conscious community.
If you listen to Howard Carter:
““Life”, to me meaning the main stream of humanity, the majority of which have no interest in spiritual matters. Even those who profess to be religious only put on the cloak of religion for a few hours a week, if that much, and the rest of the time are oblivious to the needs of the spirit.”
One would have to ask him what he finds spiritual about the life at Isis. Do students really think they are developing their spirituality by going to a job, making money and in their free time go to concerts, ballets and meetings? By judging the people in life they work with as dead, or sleep and not caring for the students in the Fellowship who leave or are thrown out without their even noticing? Isis is an ongoing show. Life people who go to church for an hour a week and work, rest and go to the park with their family then drink themselves out in a bar, are much more honest and have a great deal more integrity than students at Isis. Integrity in the sense that they have not had to separate themselves in different personalities to live their life. One of the problems at Isis is that people actually have to leave half of their life outside to be able to go inside and play the programmed behavior. It is not far from the truth to say that at the gate, each student puts on the student mask, drives in, collects a few things from the car and leaves, tucked beneath the sit of the car, his/her suffering, difficulties, contradictions, so that the good student act can be done with some credibility.
How can Isis not work when it is there that each student makes his/her greatest effort to bring the best part of him/herself to the rest? Do we not buy the best clothes when we are going to visit? Or if we live at Isis, is that not one of the most consistent aspects of our efforts? Does every one who work at Isis not try to do it with the best of his ability, with his utmost presence to get the job done well? But no matter how much we all try, only a few get the opportunity to actualize their need to give and participate and of those few, many, too many, get discarded after they’re talents have been used.
A human being needs to give as much as s/he needs to receive but in the Fellowship of Friends, a good part of the indoctrination tends to install the programming that we are to give, make huge effort and expect not to receive anything back. They dress this aspect of the way of the monk into our lives so that they can get away with not having to give anything in return, it is a one way street with a dead end. The first part is what works and what makes us believe that the school is working because we make the effort, it is the second part that does not work and in the long run, becomes harmful because it slowly installs in the individual the feeling that no matter how much effort s/he makes, it is not good enough. Self deprecation and depression follow and in some cases people are sound enough to leave, others, having no where to go, (because if having invested everything they had to invest, wasn’t good enough), commit suicide or go to the looney bin, and still many others, stay in the Fellowship filled with buffers and anti depressants. I was probably one of the most antisocial students in the Fellowship and hardly knew anybody. I did not know of many stories but it is clear to me that there is a whole subculture of antidepressants and alcoholism. When we got together with Girard he was taking antidepressants every day. The theory was that it was a physical thing. That after the stroke he needed them because his body was demanding them. Having been there I knew that that was a buffer and one of my conditions for continuing the relationship was: no antidepressants and no viagra. We did increasingly well without them.
One of the most striking things about students like Girard and others who I spoke with, who are in the inner circle and believe in Robert Burton’s consciousness, is something I only realized in the last few days before leaving, and it is that they sincerely believe that they are not good enough because they did not become conscious. That they deserve to be discarded, replaced, because they didn’t “make it.” They “disappointed” the teacher. They are frustrated with themselves like so many other students at Isis.
Indoctrinations such as the idea that one is not in one’s ninth lifetime does a great job in “keeping” people who then settle for being a third class citizen because they are in their “seventh” lifetime. Is this not madness? Brainwashing and absolutely sick? There are a hundred indoctrinations like this one that develop attitudes within students that make them self deprecate themselves enough to think it is legitimate of the Fellowship of Friends to treat them like third class citizens. I’ve seen more people lower themselves before Girard than I can bear. In a meeting at Sea Ranch I started crying after hearing one such angle and saying that we did not have to lower ourselves all the time saying that we were not good enough because we couldn’t hold presence consistently. Sea Ranch and symposiums with Girard were closed after that. (Any connection?) It is blatant self deprecation what is consistently going on at Isis and it works very efficiently for those who want to hear nothing from the people that are suffering, except the sound of their pay check falling in their pockets, directly or indirectly.
It is this consistent self deprecation that I find seriously damaging in the Fellowship of Friends. If I simply look at those who have given their lives to developing Isis, it is scary. Some are minding their own little business, others are minding other people’s business and still others are minding their own business and working the best they can. Between the three of them they juggle the rest of the student’s lives, indoctrinating them, making the school look legitimate or not caring at all for them. The sad thing is that those who are working most sincerely don’t realize that in the end it is they who are helping the very corrupt to abuse the rest, convinced by their own vanity that they are the chosen ones and too bad for the poor devils that didn’t get to be chosen by the establishment to participate.
One of the difficulties is that as long as we are unable to look at the community or the whole of the phenomenon and limit ourselves to individuals, then it is easy to justify that this or that individual wasn’t strong enough, good enough, too ambitious, too much pretense, too many expectations, too lunar, too martial, too solar…… On and on, we can find a thousand excuses for individual failures. Then we don’t have to look at the fact that it is not the individuals who failed, they gave everything they had, each one of them, it is Robert and his personal and assisting entourages that used them and discarded them so that they themselves could keep the grip on the miserable bit of power that Robert allows them to have against other students.
Some students, those who made a living outside of the Fellowship and are willing to send in a pay cheque without looking at what is done with it, who don’t care about what else goes on as long as they themselves can hold the imaginary picture that they are developing their own very personal spirituality at no matter whose cost, what is the difference between those and the life person that goes to church once a week when s/he closes his/her eyes to the living tragedy of the students who committed more deeply or the abuse of those who didn’t have time to commit to a spirituality before they got bogged down into a role of prostitutes?
Many students think that the Fellowship of Friends has helped them a great deal because they became good householders and were able to make a decent living for themselves, their family and the Fellowship. For many it meant moving from a hippie life-style with a great deal of tramp to a hard working executive with some appreciation for art. Do these students think it is not spiritual tramp to allow for young men to be used by Robert? And are they really willing to burn their hand to vow that this “modelling act” that we call the Fellowship of Friends, in which we are expected to listen to Robert , Girard and Asaf for the rest of our lives, THE REST OF OUR LIVES, allowing them to make all the decisions in our community, is a conscious school? Or is this just the acceptance of a middle class mentality that conformed itself with a middle class spirituality?
You say:
But you have to back off on carrying out the Saint Elena Rescuer of Students stuff – this country has a first amendment, and I personally think that’s a really good thing. It means that a student can stay in the Fellowship of Friends for as long as it lasts without interference from Righteous Persons.
The Fellowship of Friends and all its leaders have interfered with my life and had me working for them for seventeen years. They have lied and kept things hidden from me that if I had known I would have left or never joined. They have used my good will to support horrible things and I have seen the extreme to which Robert and my husband Girard are damaged, physically, emotionally and mentally damaged people who divided into two personalities: A conscious role and a sick man behind the role. Don’t ask me to not turn the light on the darkness of these happenings. If you don’t find it tragic enough you’re as sick as they are. What amendment is going to heal my husband and the rest of this sick people? Keep looking at the show and paying for it if you wish, but know it is my husband’s spiritual life that is at stake and your own.
May 23, 2007 at 12:42 am
Re Page 9 Post # 395– No Person writes: “Question to Siddiq and Howard Carter (or anyone who wishes to answer) – do you ever see any hypocrisy and falseness in Robert, in Council actions, students behavior, in teaching events? Ever? If yes – what do you say to yourself about it? I am really curious.”
Yes I have seen the false, the hypocritical, the liar, etc., in my friends, my beloved, my family, my teacher, my school, and in the end, mostly myself (because I spend so much time looking in that broken mirror Unanimo wrote about). What matters not is what we see, but what we do about it when we see it.
So, I will admit that I have confronted Robert and friends about certain actions and can truthfully report from personal experience that the one least willing to listen was me…
Good luck to all on this 10th page!
Siddiq
May 23, 2007 at 12:59 am
9-#438 Siddiq Says…
I’ve told my story. I don’t think that my reasons for leaving were directly mentioned in any of my posts. So, for me, your suppositions are made without any corroborating information. Pretty presumptuous of you, ya think? As for my actual reasons and timing for leaving, I don’t make that gift to you. You’ll just have to continue blowing smoke based on nothing. But at least realize that’s what you are doing- trying to lay a linear logic to something that is much more profound than one dimensional thinking will allow.
May 23, 2007 at 1:03 am
“I only wonder if Department of Homeland Security thinks that crossing US or European border under fake name using a forged passport is OK and is no wrong doing…”
What amazes me is that when the boy was caught his only contact in Paris was an actress friend of R. who was to “look after” the boys until they were fetched for his highness.
Of course she risked imprisonment herself and it begs the question why anyone would put oneself in such jeopardy?
The answer? The same as for those who submit to the seduction of R and then WHINE about it: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity…”
May 23, 2007 at 1:07 am
438 Siddiq: While the sex life of the teacher aspects of the FOF are certainly something that can be discussed, it is by no means the largest, or most important part of it.
430 Trademarker: If somebody would tell you that his guru is somebody who is saying about him self he is an angel and at the same time he is asking for money all the time and wants to suck the mens dicks you probably laugh your head off. You would never ever consider this to be a serious choice for a spiritual teacher.
May 23, 2007 at 1:28 am
Hello Inner Jewels!
You wrote “let’s live a little.” on the last page but seem upset that Siddiq is planning to actually attend…why? are you trying to hurt his feelings? were not all former students once current students?
Hey Live & Let Live!
Love to you!
Wild & Free
Inner Jewels wrote: “I ‘m here now because I had made plans to go to the reunion but now I’m not sure I want to go… Will Siddiq actually be there? I thought the splinter group in OH had rules about that!?”
PS to Jewels: The rules are only in your perception. Some 15 of us current members are now planning to be there! W&F
May 23, 2007 at 1:30 am
#9/432 unoanimo:
“…fortunately some of us verified the objective vibratory wave matter of self-exuding hypocrisy while between the eager to know ages of 8-12. “
What about the objective vibratory wave matter of self-exuding, self-satisfied smugness? What would that be issuing from, maybe the five of hearts?
May 23, 2007 at 1:46 am
Whale Rider,
Great posts exposing the double bind. Your most recent post was very powerful.
I don’t agree that people in life are less conscious than people in the “school”.
I thought that as well until I recently left the school and started noticing that if I didn’t judge people, they have a great deal of “life” and there is a great joy in being with others regardless of if they wake up each morning “thinking about what they can do for their soul” (note what a perverse identification this is-live your life now!)
One “life” person I recently met seemed to be more “conscious” than anyone I ever met in the Fellowship, including RB.
Ironically, I doubt this person “thinks about their soul” every morning, but my guess is that she lives her life on a daily basis more in line with her sense of humanity, and humility, rather than living with some fantasy story of “growing her soul”.
FOF students (I was one) blindly accept many apocryphal ideas about the soul, lifetimes, psychology, etc. as part of the FOF mantra.
I believe that a truly “conscious” individual sees the beauty of all people and living things and tries to live in harmony with the world, now. Not in the next lifetime.
Certain posts have highlighted the linkages between behavior of extreme societal cult groups like Nazi’s and FOF. These comparisons seem very valid and tie into the idea of “the third state” or higher states.
I met an old woman who had attended a major rally for the Nazi’s when she was a young woman and she said that the event was like a giant party. The people attending the elaborate and spectacular ceremonies were in awe and in a state of euphoria. All the beautiful and well dressed men and women together by the thousands rallying around the homeland to fight the rest of the world and support their courageous leader…sound familiar?…created an incredibly memorable and high state for her. A state that was beyond time and that she would never forget.
IMO she had a “third state experience” and similar things happen at FOF when you get a bunch of people together, dress them up like dolls, serve fine food, play nice music, in a nice garden, with nice art…These states are due mostly to sex energy and “infrasex” excitement. Since we tend to have these states…and other states of clarity due to tension/fear of uncertainty of the situation…we by necessity have a higher state of consciousness and then equate this “high” with consciousness, or a third state. Since it is out of the ordinary, we assume, because of our need to label and define things into known categories, that this is what Ouspensky meant by the third state.
Could it just be instead that your hormones are going wild looking at some hot chick, or guy, while you buzzed on wine and light headed from the high altitudes at Isis? (Sorry that was facetious but you get the point).
Now that I am out of the school I view myself at the time, and many students I witnessed, as desperate third state junkies. Living like hopeless drug addicts desperate for another high. It is real scary to think about it this way, but look at the eyes of other students next time you are at a reception, or after a meeting lets out, or during a potager, etc. or even at a center meeting or event. You will see that everyone is seeking a high and many have a desperate look in their eyes and everyone tries hard to get a state. Much harder to do away from Isis or other students by the way.
But, under normal circumstances, these states are not maintainable over time and so students get addicted to them and that is, I believe, one reason why so many students find it hard to leave even if their conscience begins to bother them, or they become hurt or desperate in various ways. Third state junkies that cant give up the high. Drug addicts will kill themselves in order to keep getting high, at any cost. The power of addiction to states should not be overlooked when considering the dilemma many current FOF students face.
May 23, 2007 at 2:06 am
Dear Siddiq,
Help me out here, I believe Henry V is saying ;
So, if a student that is by his spiritual teacher sent a fake passport with the will of c-influence implied ends up in the slammer, the teacher can’t be blamed for the jail time since his purpose was merely to service him orally as often as possible.
Besides, there has never been a deluded sociopath, even if his cause is pure who doesn’t end up damaging a lot of people along the way.
Did I get it?
Love,
Ryan.
May 23, 2007 at 2:13 am
From Fellowship of Friends prospective student meeting script, introduction to the first meeting: “We encourage you not simply to believe what you hear, but to listen without either accepting or rejecting what you hear. This will give you the best chance of verifying the truth of these ideas for yourself.”
This later becomes: “The sequence is undeniably objective truth, ancient knowledge possessed by esoteric schools in prehistory. We are one of the greatest schools in recorded history. Eighty billion people have passed through the Earth in a state of imagination, but ours is the good fortune to have been selected by Influence C to evolve. Students are on their seventh and eighth lifetimes, and at death, Influence C will place their souls in limbo to await conscious roles.”
From Scientology official site, front page, welcome text: “In Scientology no one is asked to accept anything as belief or on faith. That which is true for you is what you have observed to be true. An individual discovers for himself that Scientology works by personally applying its principles and observing or experiencing results.”
This later becomes: “You are an immortal thetan who has lived innumerable lifetimes on innumerable planets but are presently degenerated. Our technology will help you become clear and spiritually aware. Only our leader fully understands this new technology, this great new science of the mind. Non-scientologists are so brain-damaged, non-functional, and insane that they are hardly worth dealing with.”
The head thinks it is still verifying. The instinct, after some time, prefers to simply belong.
May 23, 2007 at 3:34 am
Hey, Martha–very good to hear from you, after a quarter-century.
Paul A.
May 23, 2007 at 4:24 am
Dear Howard, hello!
I have to disagree with your generalization that “The ones who stay do so because the school is the all and everything.”
Certainly for some it is true, and I am actually happy for them – people are having a great time, good for them.
But there are many, many others who are not sure why they are staying in the Fellowship of Friends now. They are not at all happy campers. They are disillusioned and disappointed but stuck. Some start to see the teaching as faulty and are appalled by the lies. But most are not sure, scared, confused and are in lots of emotional pain and suffering.
How do I know? I know. I was recently one myself, and it was hell. And now I am in touch with quite a few. You may be surprised how many are actually now unhappy “fence sitters”. They are not waving any flags, you know.
So for these guys the spell is broken – they know too much to quiet the voice of conscience within. More of exposing truth about Robert and Fellowship of Friends helps them to make a healthy transition. You don’t want them around anyway – right?
I totally agree with Ames that persuading satisfied students to leave is a waste of time and is just silly. I don’t think anyone here is trying to persuade you or Siddiq or any other happy student to leave. Why would we? You guys are satisfied with the teaching and the school is obviously working for you. Keep up a good work, I mean it sincerely.
Most of these postings are for friends who need them to make their decision. Also for new potential members as a fare warning.
It’s nice to let our stuck friends know that here are other wonderful spiritual opportunities, nice friendly people and simply full juicy life outside of the FOF. Amazingly, when you quit judging “life” you may see it as something beautiful. And when you quit obsessing with states and “being present” you may discover that presence had been there all the time… Unnoticed.
And it’s nice to get to know the real face of the FOF too- not the smiley one. This face is kind of ugly. Here’s the latest KGB attempt to control our free discussion:
Our friend V. (professional programmer) amongst others was recently asked by Kevin Brown to do some HACKING on this blog to trace who is writing there and basically spy on friends. He refused to do it and left the school.
Nice going, Kevin! Looks like you really sold your soul together with your conscience… What’s next? Whom are you going to hire – snipers, may be? 😉 I already heard some very funny/scary threats coming from “inner circle” towards some bloggers… Not scared, sorry. You guys are simply disgusting… And pathetic.
Dear V., I absolutely admire your noble behavior. You are a hero in my book. Come visit us any time please.
May 23, 2007 at 4:37 am
Dear Shelley,
Thank you immensely for the warmth in your post.
Elena
May 23, 2007 at 6:11 am
Dear Wonder in Alice, (398)
Thank you for your amazing grasp of lying as a phenomenon that actually becomes organic in the every day life of practicing it. This is the tragedy we are seeing in Robert Burton and Friends. If many of us understand, it will be possible to help at least some of them.
Thank you. Elena
P.S. To 417 Suffering Succotash.
The loudness at the end of my post to you is not for you, please do not take it personally.
May 23, 2007 at 7:03 am
Dear Siddiq (#443)
But isn’t it sometimes the king himself who is chopping off all those legs and arms? Or who sinfully miscarries upon the seas? Or who is himself the robber who assails and causes his own servant to die in many irreconciled iniquities?
And yes, I would indeed call the business of this particular master the author of his servants’ damnation. Just ask Mihai and Dorian why they felt so secure in doing what they did.
As for the arbitrement of swords, do you now imagine yourself as one of those soldiers in his spotless cause? I understand you.
With love.
joseph.granados@gmail.com
May 23, 2007 at 7:30 am
This post is dedicated to a particular Russian painter, whose works can be seen upon entry to the Fellowship of Friends ‘Galleria’, particularly visible when looking towards that celestial direction usually associated with recollecting as to whether one has enough money in the checking account to attend the meeting that day.
_______________________________
To Shelley M.,
Thank you for the link to M.M.’s Youtube site.
Somehow seeing her singing “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” to a group of Vietnam Soldiers (American soldiers), created such a juxtaposition, that I related the story I am about to disclose to its symbolic ‘profundity’.
This image of M.M. singing to them, that particular song, the M.M. on the right and the V.S. on the left, these two worlds brought together by ‘this song’ in the middle, wow, it has branded my oscillating psyche with an awe like perplexity that I will have to say will be long in putting away as some ‘coincidence’ or ‘child’s play’.
________________________________________
This post is also dedicated to all the women in the Fellowship of Friends, whose ‘diamonds’ may or may not be your husband’s or lover’s hand upon your hand.
Lastly, this post is dedicated to those students of the Fellowship of Friends who still play smug, intellectualizing the heart of hearts smaller and smaller with each day’s passing, who do incredible mind boggling feats like Post #379/9 & #438/9;
how it is that a human being can type such ‘stew’ and click the ‘Submit Comment’ button, while having a Iliac drain tube in full function within themselves is far beyond my reach of perception, so far.
_________________________________________
Now this story gonna spin some people around a bit, particularly with such ‘other’ more graphic ones such as Whalerider’s posts and others as context to your teacher’s particular ‘consciously prioritizing talent’,
this one is being shown here in a certain context, that I sense, by now, this blog’s audience-being can handle and can appropriate it’s ‘aura’ in true form wherever their conscience takes it.
WhaleRider ~ Please, if you’re gonna do the capital letter thing, do not read this.
_______________________________________
I want to start off by saying ‘I love you’ to my dear Russian friend, this is not gossip, for it may save something within you that I sense is being exploited, strung out thinly, gregariously and in such a naive dangerous way on your part, to except such ‘rituals of being liked & needed’ as ‘okay’ as to possibly risk your very physical well being and sense of conscious individuality for a ‘piece of the pie’ that I intuit will, in the end, be on your face.
This story is one in the top 5 that brought the circle of seeing to ‘full moon’ upon my realization that the Fellowship of Friends is a moon, not a sun.
I wish to thank the young woman who brought this upon my ‘desk’, thank you, I have verified all of it and lay it out here, like a fern leaf between two pages.
__________________________________________
Dear My Russian Friend,
It is no ‘secret’ that you have a drinking problem, that somewhere along the squiggly line of the Fellowship of Friend’s throwing around of Robert Burton’s ‘hot potatoes’ that he and they were involved in some ‘Russian project’ to have a device surgically implanted in your body to quell your ‘problem’.
This device is something very common amongst Russian’s for there is a certain psychic propensity to drink large amounts of grain alcohol to the point of liver failure, alcohol poisoning and death.
Even Ouspensky did not escape this ‘national virus’, it tested him deeply, as I am sure you are being tested.
You traveled to Russia, had the operation and returned to Isis.
It is no secret that you belong to the closer inner, inner, inner circle of Robert Burton’s Boys Part 3 (Yes, for new students who have been in the Fellowship of Friends for 30 years or more, Robert Burton has specific groups that he has ‘put together’, who are predisposed to various levels of debauchery, some are considered ‘soft sex’, while others, ‘infra sex’).
Some time passing after your return from Russia you where approached by two of your closest friends, two people who are known in the Fellowship of Friends as belonging to Robert’s, let us say, rougher, more jagged side of the moon,
They are also known for partaking of illegal drugs, pornography and for being two of the heaviest drinkers in Robert Burton’s ‘circle of distractive self calming’.
Readers,
you may recall my warning to parents concerning a certain ‘R’, by his being the literal ‘driver at the wheel’ of a multitude of teenage children at Isis, going here and there with their particular ‘open curiosities’ in tow, i.e., front and back seats filled. This ‘R’ is one of the two mentioned above.
I wonder what Howard Carter would say if one of Robert Burton’s, more seasoned ‘boys’, wished to date his 16 year old daughter or son (if he has children)?
How deep does the intellectual mashed potatoes really drip and ooze HC?
So, picture this.
We have my beloved Russian painter, whose recently back from Russia for having a device surgically implanted in him so to literally ‘save his physical life from his contradictory spirit inclinations’.
He is then approached by these ‘two of his best friends’ (‘best’ is certainly a relative word here) on the request of Robert Burton and The Fellowship of Friends .
This is their offer and request submitted by Robert Burton to my Russian friend ~
“I wish you to move in together, all three of you, live together in one house.”
That’s covenant Robert Burton, now you don’t have to triangulate so much in finding these ‘men, whose wives (those that have wives) don’t often answer the phone upon hearing one of your boy’s voices calling ‘here kitty, kitty’ looking for someone’s husband so to remind the wife, whose perhaps a Freudian projection of your inner untransformed opinion of ‘mother’, that you’re in in charge now of the sexual abuse and defaming of essence.
______________________________________
I love you all. Intuit this.
P.S.
HC & Siddiq,
let me know when you’re through bobbing for Robert Burton’s ‘diamonds’, there are soldiers out here that simply cannot hear your voices over the real mortar rounds, but hey, you look good from here, just stay on the stage, there are some in this crowd, on the front lines, who we know are daydreaming inside your music and we don’t want to loose them by waking too soon.
_________________________________
Love to you all.
May 23, 2007 at 8:12 am
To WhaleRider,
What I see is that you took one line from post #9/379 – (The ones who stay do so because to them there is no point in leaving.) and turned it into a psychological dissertation in #9/396.
It’s a little like sharing an elevator ride with a stranger and then making an evaluation of what kind of person they are.
Most posters will copy a sentence or paragraph and respond with a comment of a simliar length.
In any event, your intellect is impressive. You being inspired to write all those words off that one comment is flattering in a left handed way. I personally did not think my comment merited the effort.
WhaleRider, #9/449 “Howard Carter, I am your worst nightmare.”
Worst nightmare? Isn’t that redundant?
Actually, nightmares don’t exist in the third state. Real nightmares take place in the second state, and virtual nightmares in the first state. A few minutes of third state will hold off nightmares for months, even years at a time, wouldn’t you agree?
#9/449 “You say, “The ones who stay do so because the school is the all and everything.”
I respectfully disagree. The All and Everything is the Absolute. World 1.”
After reading your above reply I ask your permission once again to revise it to say –
The ones who stay do so because the school is the all and everything, on Earth.
May 23, 2007 at 10:39 am
#410 Hava Naghilla
To you and to the person who said it was an important decision to leave a teacher and to whoever has the patience to read this tripe.
It has been mentioned before and it is true (check the “workbooks” if you don’t think so)
that the only “c-influence” is that which comes from a living, mortal being who has realized his or her true nature as primordial consciousness. They can share their thoughts and experience with us and to a certain degree create a kind of “contact” transmission of peace. That is all. We are on our own.
There are probably 5,10,15 or more beings posting on this blog that live most of the time from the “third state” of consciousness. It is the threshold of the unfolding of ourselves.
You obviously have experience of this and it is often emotion which masks this simple “presence” as you have correctly observed. I feel it is either one of the greatest crimes or greatest tricks of the fof to place things on towering pedestals. Tear them down.
We need to stop straining through high powered binoculars scanning the dense under-brush of a distant shore looking for our eyes.
May 23, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Dear No Person,
I also know many students who are staying in the Fellowship of Friends for the reasons which are related not to ‘awakening’, but to their job commitments (i.e. working for other students); because they have settled around Isis, having family, land, houses there; their children go to the LC school. Some stay because they love their friends and don’t want to leave as they think they’ll lose contact with them (I was one of those and I think it’s the main reason for staying after disillusionment and seeing things as they are in the school and Robert Burton for who he is). And there is fear of being left alone, without communal support. ‘Where would I go?’ question.
One of my friends from a European centre called me recently saying that his centre is so far removed from the main stream events, that they hardly know all those things which are going on in the school now. Sometimes they don’t have enough English to read the blog.
I am in contact with several students, all of them have their reasons to stay. I don’t hold it against them, they do what they have to do. My only reservation about it is that with their money they support the whole thing rolling on. As far as I understand, Robert Burton will ‘teach’ until he runs out of funds.
Thank you for letting us know of V.’s leaving, I am so glad that he didn’t commit to something so vile. V., you are my hero too!
May 23, 2007 at 3:11 pm
Dear No Person–perhaps it is not only about “being happy in the FOF”–I for one think a great deal can be improved so let me ask you for your practical suggestions for those of us who may choose to stay in the FOF–how could we work on making the FOF a better place? Thanks (and I am not being sarcastic here).
Dear Joseph, (10-16)– “I would indeed call the business of this particular master the author of his servants’ damnation. Just ask Mihai and Dorian why they felt so secure in doing what they did.”
Some people incur debt they are not able to pay for–that is probably the case here–their time to pay is proably still coming… But not one of us is spotless, probably far from it…Thanks and be well.
Dear Unanimo (10-17)–the stage is all yours my friend–I hope you use it well for yourself as you are entering and exiting. I enjoy your writing, thanks.
Siddiq
May 23, 2007 at 5:04 pm
To Unoanimo:
Amore, you wrote:
“Concerning Post #314/9
Can someone help me to spin this
quote to form a rap song?”
I would LOVE to help you rap it. Check out my web site http://www.theactorscenter-sf.com My offer still stands.
I think you are channeling Thornton Wilder… Yep! A hip GenX wild thorn. Our Town. Our School… floating in a universe where the only coordinate we can trust is the latitude and longitude where we find ourselves…the point where the horizontal and vertical lines twirl like a combine transforming the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune into something our false personality can’t stand and our king of hearts can’t resist.
Personality——————————–Heart. We ALL make a spectacle of ourselves walking the tightrope stretched between the two. See you at the circus!
…….
To Elena:
Glad you liked my post. It always feels a bit risky letting one’s fingers flap away at the keyboard and pressing that ‘submit’ button. Submit we did, huh?
Love to you both,
Shelley
May 23, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Oh, Siddiq (#9-443), you’ve hit your thumb instead of the nail!
King Henry was justifying his actions to Williams, who was trying to remind him of his true duty, by starting, “But if the cause be not good…” Henry did not have a good cause, was not in France fighting a war of principle, or defending England against imminent danger. He was there trying to hang on to his possessions in France, “his” only by so-called rights of inheritance and conquest from his forebears, and to have the grand adventure of his youth. In other words, Henry was spending the lives of his soldiers to aggrandize himself, just like Bush is doing in Iraq. Just like Bush, he had no conscience. I’m sure Bush sleeps better at night knowing that he is not responsible for the deaths of U.S. soldiers, “because they did not purpose their death” when they signed up. And I’m sure Burton sleeps better at night knowing he is not responsible for the welfare of those he hurts, because they didn’t know that “C-influence wanted them to have sex with Burton” at the time they joined the FOF.
May 23, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Yesri Baba,
Where else have you learn’t to be present if not in the School? How come you know it? Who has taught you that?
I could not have achieved it on such practical level anywhere else outside this school, if at all.
Yes, the work is personal. I might say it is solely personal. Scale is the name of the game and that is so hard to understand.
May 23, 2007 at 6:13 pm
blogbuster in:
9/1
And all of you my friends.
I also heard:
Robert was abused as a 9 year old by a Russian man.
Strange that a conscious teacher with such a past and the knowledge of stopping the chain of negativity is still continuing the chain of negativity and causing suffering many folded. Hard to grasp… for simple souls.
love to all of you.
May 23, 2007 at 6:19 pm
This is another helpful link for those who still believe that FOF is unique.
http://www.freedomofmind.com/resourcecenter/groups/f/fellowship/
May 23, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Hello new member! So happy you are now one us.
The people you are leaving behind are what we call ‘life people’ including your very own mother when she is not interested in our way.
Hi, former friend and my very own mother, I am now a zealot because I believe with all my Being that I’ve found it, won’t you come with me and avoid going to the moon?
My very own mother and former friends and life mate didnt get it. Oh well, they are just life people going to the moon, and I’m going to limbo to serve ascended Masters.
Thank you Rabbi Burns for post 9-24, 9-110 and “just about current student”. I started reading and reacquinted myself.
No real offence to anybody but I think it would help everybody to go and apologize to their mothers for being absolute fools.
May 23, 2007 at 7:04 pm
Hi Blogbuster (post 1, part 10)
I’m afraid I don’t have any video which contains passages where Robert explains he “is the brightest light in 2000 years or something similar”, or talks about Armageddon. I do have some photos somewhere, but if memory serves me, they were either very over-exposed (too light), or else under-exposed (too dark).
At to those moments when he talks about himself as “being an angel” I do have some first hand experience with this, as I heard him announce this this on numerous occasions, but with the lack of tangible and hard evidence on hand, it would be his word against mine and in my experience he always had the last word (though not necessarily the last laugh!)
The good news is, at an earlier point in this blog, when “The Sequence” was in vogue, I asked if some kind student would explain it to me. As I recall there followed a comprehensive post specifically directed at trying to unravel “The Sequence” to a layman such as myself, but I have to confess I had great trouble following it. Though I did gather it was a tool to help prolong presence. I was always under the mistaken illusion that presence is a continual state in itself, so what is there to prolong? However that is my interpretation which is obviously erroneous in the context of “The Sequence”. Perhaps it’s for more moments of presence in a given time period over a given lifetime – but as you can see I’m speculating here.
My interest in The Sequence was mainly due to the fact that during my time in the Fellowship of Friends, it was still unknown / yet to be discovered. It got me thinking that had it been available, maybe it would have changed the psychology of Simon’s possible evolution. All I had back then, as did many, was the tool of self-remembering and though it sustained me for a good decade, it was obvious that the “self”, as I came to understand it, had insurmountable limitations, so a new tool such as “The Sequence” was long overdue. But in my case it arrived too late and I had left before I had an opportunity to get to try it out.
Fortunately, some kind soul must have perceived my dilemma for not long after my initial query on the blog, someone sent me a work sheet complete with photographs, which seemed to contain some vital keys, courtesy of the teacher himself, explaining the practical use of “The Sequence” in one’s day to day life.
Rumours of this valuable document containing Prehistoric illustrations and accompanied by the teacher’s comprehensive notes had been circulating on the blog already, so you can imagine how fortunate I felt when I was able to get my hands on one. Even though a couple of posts pointed out that there was a significant amount or crap mentioned, I was unable to differentiate between what was regarded as crap and what was genuine. However, I put that down to my novice level being when putting “The Sequence” into practice.
That is why Blogbuster, you request has come at a very apropos moment for me and possibly numerous other confused souls. My immediate thought was to post this document on the blog so a few of the more advanced students would be willing to give their thoughts in interpreting its arcane contents and maybe report on the kind of success they’ve had in incorporating the keys into their work. I’m thinking primarily of ubiquitous Howard Carter* who seems to be an authority on most things, though perhaps the tenacious siddiq will give it a bash.
* If I’m not mistaken it was a certain Howard Carter who discovered King Tutankhamen’s tomb, so you too might share the gift of interpreting clues.
However, as I feel the accompanying photos are a vital part of the document and the current format of the blog does not allow for images, I have opted to attempt to create a separate Web page with a link. I have managed to achieve this, but given my limited technical knowledge in this area, I can’t be sure of the accuracy of the finished document. I have been told that when uploading images and text on to a Web site, because they don’t necessarily travel through the ether in the same order, there is no guarantee that they return to their original position precisely, so if a “be” for example seems to be in the wrong place, I do apologise and please mark it down to a technical hitch.
In the meantime I welcome anyone’s feedback (current students especially) as to the interpretation of what is obviously a very important document in helping ex-students such as myself and Blogbuster come to grips with the mentality of the present day Fellowship of Friends.
Yours in anticipation,
Simon
For “The Sequence” explained click below:
http://geocities.com/borne2357/
May 23, 2007 at 7:20 pm
Hi All,
Here’s some snipped googled info on those who have no conscience:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_difference_between_a_narcissist_and_a_sociopath
from: http://www.bullyonline.org/workbully/serial.htm#Guru
The Guru
………
From washington times review of book THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR: THE RUTHLESS VERSUS THE REST OF US By Martha Stout
“The trouble, Ms. Stout says, is that sociopaths “are nearly always invisible to us.” We get to know them for what they are in retrospect, in looking back at our dealings or associations with them. Otherwise, she says, for the most part “we remain effectively oblivious” to them. This is mainly because on the surface they appear normal, and manage in many ways and most times to fake those emotions normal people ordinarily feel, such as love, regret and sympathy.
And fake it they must do, in order to get along in society. But underneath the front they put on, sociopaths just don’t give a hoot for other people or other creatures. Regardless of what they do, sociopaths don’t at all care about the effects of their actions on society, family, associates and persons who consider them their friends. They are, Ms. Stout says, hollow people, unable to feel love, compassion, a desire to help or even feel the need to return a smile.
In spite of the surface advantages a lack of conscience may give sociopaths Ms. Stout fervently believes a person is better off with a conscience. It is conscience, she explains, that blesses our lives with meaning, that allows us to feel such emotions as love and grief and joy. Without it we would be emotionally hollow and bored and “would spend our days pursuing repetitive games of our own misguided creation.” ”
……..
From personal experience (being) I know that sociopaths/psychopaths are truly invisible in many ways. They are different and attractive. They seem to have something we don’t. There have been several posts expressing a sense of failure but I think we are not failures, especially if we come to value our conscience. Leaving the fof is like pumping iron for the conscience. I like the last paragraph quoted above about meaning. I prefer meaning in my life to be brought by patterns and simple things and interests and connections with friends, family and community. Prefer those poetic, deep, subtle meanings to grandiose ones….like, oh, just about anything RB says.
When I moved to another state and started over I still had remnants of the snobbish attitudes about life people – and I moved to a really ‘normal’ neighborhood. But I discovered that those attitudes were very young ones – as in immature, and they had just frozen in me. I joined fof young and just had not matured in many ways. So there I was, and it was painful to have to grow up, alone. But the rewards were absolutely wonderful.
I wish I could comment directly on the wonderful recent posts – but don’t have time. so, simply: Thank you all.
…..
Howard Carter, why are you posting? Are you breaking the rules from curiosity? Why do you care what a bunch of ex fofers say?? What difference does it make to you or your evolution? Go and be in peace.
…….
Siddiq says:
Good luck to all on this 10th page!
YES!
May 23, 2007 at 7:26 pm
Oh Howard, I don’t know why but I get so sad all the time when I read your comments. You sound so empty – so much in illusion. Is this really you? Locked up in some cult. I don’t think I know you but to my idea you are spent your time building a fence around yourself. Become free and please take responsibility for your own life. Don’t be the slave of some freak you hardly know. You are free to be in God.
May 23, 2007 at 7:28 pm
12 Traveller: “The head thinks it is still verifying. The instinct, after some time, prefers to simply belong.”
Thanks for that excellent formulation – I hadn’t seen it that way before. RB
May 23, 2007 at 7:30 pm
Howard Carter #19
“It’s a little like sharing an elevator ride with a stranger and then making an evaluation of what kind of person they are.”
Isn’t that exactly what the Fellowship of Friends taught us to do?
May 23, 2007 at 7:34 pm
19 Howard Carter: “A few minutes of third state will hold off nightmares for months, even years at a time, wouldn’t you agree?”
Actually a few minutes of third state have almost no effect at all after they’ve passed – you’re back where you started. Then you try again. Then you try again. With luck you eventually realise you’re not getting anywhere.
May 23, 2007 at 9:07 pm
To Siddiq (#9-22), I’ve got plenty of time to answer you today because I’m ill at home. But, I’ll still be there at the party this Saturday (though only to help set up, if I’m contagious). Warning to readers, I’m even more likely to go off on tangents today!
It all depends on what you mean by “improve the Fellowship”. From the angle of someone wanting to sincerely become a man number four, the “old-fashioned” way (battering through thirty feet of concrete), do nothing. It can’t be improved. See my post #9-440. There have to be fierce contradictions, tuggings this way and that, real psychological dangers, even the possibility of physical harm (AIDS, STDs, alcoholism, and so on). There have to be the temptations to exercise power, to find an important position, to impress young students, to experience the glow of being near the ‘teacher’ and so on. There must be the opportunities to be deceived, to be betrayed, to be shamed, to be used as a prostitute, to be taken advantage of, to have one’s weaknesses exposed, so one can see oneself, truly. It is good that there is someone who can bullshit all day and have the credulous believe his every word, all the while being told that verification is the absolute test of every one of those words. The tension is what we signed up for. There must be the temptation to go to sleep with the delicious music of “we are so fortunate, you are saved, you are all men number four just by being here, I am here to safeguard you, you can trust me, higher forces are taking charge of your evolution”. The beauty and even friendship are just distractions to those following such a hard path.
You can’t have a situation that generates the necessary amount of tension, the kind that stretches people thin like rubber bands—and simultaneously have the contradictions be removed (have the FOF a better place for those who chose to stay) so that conscience can go back to sleep, and we are all ‘saved’ anyway.
If you want to assuage any feelings of ‘not rightness’ (of course, I’m not talking of inconveniences or regular discomforts here), you have to do whatever is necessary, by yourself. You say you have already found out what you need to know, have verified that the more negative claims made here by bloggers are not true or rather exaggerated. Excellent; then there is no reason for change, is there? If ever you do come to see things in a different light, then you must leave, because the FOF cannot change; it is completely tied to Burton’s vision. A mental exercise. What will happen when Burton retires or dies? There will be a power grab by Girard, Abraham, or Linda. Probably a student council will rise up to try to oppose that. Whatever, civil war on some scale. Even if Burton gave specific instructions as to the succession, it would just delay the war. That is human nature. That is why I give full credit to Burton for holding it all together for so long; he truly does have power.
So if the FOF is perfect in its way, and it is, why do I seem to oppose it on these pages? Because there are better ways to become a man number four, more efficient, and less cruel, less compost. Because it is fair to potential new students to point this out. Because it is fair to potential new students to point out the clauses, in print so fine as to be invisible, that are suddenly produced after the newbie has fully entered the FOF belief field. Because it is fair to point out that the FOF is a dangerous place, that people who have any prior mental health problems, such as Brian Sisler with his schizophrenia, are in double jeopardy if they choose this way. Because the FOF is run by a black magician in a descending octave, and there are better teachers and teachings available.
I don’t know what Burton went through with Alex Horn. I have spoken to a number of Horn’s other students, and it appears that had/has just one tool. Unremitting violence. I don’t know whether Alex Horn was ‘conscious’. Judging by his fruits, I’d say no. But does that mean that Burton could not be jolted awake, unprepared, by accident in the midst of extreme violence? Whatever, the outcome was someone with power who chose to put it into serving his own needs. There were no checks and balances, no restraints. He is the center of the FOF, which will not survive him. He is a cancer that will destroy his host. Thus sayest Ouspensky, one can nevertheless learn something in a school run by a black magician, and so it has been. True, there has been “grade inflation”, claims that anyone who writes a check is automatically a man number four, that Burton is a man 7 point whatever, and so on, but despite that, some were and are able to swim the sea of contradictions.
So, Siddiq, let us leave well alone. Let us shine a light on the FOF as we can, by all means, we can never know too much of the truth, let us put a magnifying glass over the fine print, let us sound a warning foghorn in the mist. The FOF will die in its own good time under its own dead weight, and take down with it all lies and misconceptions.
Wow, I didn’t know aspirin could do this to me… !
Hope to see you Saturday,
with love,
Ames
May 23, 2007 at 9:45 pm
Hava Nagillah (#25): Pardon me for responding to your question posed to Yesri Baba, but hopefully my response is also relevant.
You apparently imagine the Fellowship of Friends is unique in teaching being present. This suggests you’ve had very little, if any, exposure to other traditions, many of which have been around for literally thousands of years and are widely taught and practiced–and I’m not talking about cave paintings. When Gurdjieff and Ouspensky were around, many of these traditions were hard to find in the West, so they had to go through all sorts of heroic and colorful seeking to uncover them. That hasn’t been the case for at leastt thirty-five years. Being present–or whatever you choose to call it–is a core practice of, for example, several schools of Buddhism, including zen and vajrayana (or Tibetan) Buddhism. Just do a little research into shikantaza, or mahamudra, or dzogchen, for example (Google is a good start), and you’ll see. Groups practicing these traditions, some under teachers with documented lineages going back a thousand years, can be found in every major city, and most smaller cities, in the U.S., Europe, and many countries in Asia (and elsewhere, for all I know). While FoF members sooth themselves with their vanity-fueled “we’re the only conscious school on earth, and everyone else is a sleeping machine” routine, thousands of serious practitioners in these other traditions, all around the world, are going about their business of trying to be present. You’ll also find that the supporting practices and intellectual frameworks in at least the Buddhist traditions, having evolved over centuries, are a great deal more sophisticated than the hodge-podge Robert Burton makes up (or “discovers,” if you will) as he goes along. That pathetic “life person” sipping coffee at the counter, assumed to be a “dead machine,” may well have been practicing being present with an excellent teacher for many, many years–I know many such people. I am such a person. I practiced being present for a number of years before I joined the Fellowship of Friends thirty years ago–that’s why I joined it–and I can assure you, I haven’t “died the double death” simply because I found better things to do with my time and money.
The Fellowship of Friends is in many ways an artifact of the Seventies, an anachronism. It’s day is not to come; it’s one of dozens of groups, formed by former hippies who had discovered the world of spiritual practice, decided to create “arks,” (remember My Dinner With Andre?) etc., etc., that went into, and out of, fashion. It’s like the residents of Brigadoon imagining that, because they’ve only known life in their little town, which they can’t leave, the rest of the world doesn’t exist. This isn’t to knock the Fellowship to the extent it teaches being present, just to point out that to imagine this makes the Fellowship unique is very naive. If you choose to accept all the baggage of the Fellowship, be my guest, but don’t imagine it’s a price that must be paid for being around people who value, and practice, being present. And, maybe even more important, don’t imagine that being present, for all its value, is all there is.
May 23, 2007 at 9:59 pm
#328 KofC
In what way is Gurdjieff tradition (Foundation and others) a religion? Do you have experience with these groups?
#393 KofC
What makes you think c influence created The Fellowship of Friends? What to you is c influence?
Some may recognize the enticements of madness but can you really say you recognize the nature of higher consciousness? If so, how? Why do you think that those who have left have ascended with more possibilities and far more consciousness than anyone left behind? Can you support these statements?
May 23, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Re: Cimarron 9/356 and Be Hold Everything 9/439
Yes, the Fellowship of Friends has attracted and proved fertile ground, either for training or as an easily reaped harvest, for many budding psychopaths #5. If you study the lives of the more flamboyant and famous psychopaths, you will usually find something like a mentor who showed by example how best to ruthlessly take advantage of the naive. Robert Burton had his own twisted family (yes BB 10/1, RB has stated this more than once), but more to the point, he had Alex Horn as a brilliant teacher. Robert attended Horn’s 18 month seminar, “How to get people to believe anything you say and do anything for you” and was, seemingly, the star pupil. The Fellowship of Friends in turn, nurtured James Vincent Randazzo and his “Spiral of Friends”, whose escapades with his “students” and sexual abuse of teen boys, international flight and eventual imprisonment are easily researched. His group in turn gave birth to the “New American Wing” cult, very similar to the Fellowship of Friends in its first 10 years etc.
But apart from these more dramatic examples, the Fellowship has always been a fertile ground of trusting souls. It is inevitable that those with opportunistic moral flexibility would be attracted to it. One such was RP. I met him in the mid 80’s, when he was going by the name of Robert. He was an interesting person, somewhat charismatic. I found it inordinately swell that his son played the little boy I had so identified with in my own childhood – the 12 year old “Grasshopper” of the Kung-Fu TV series. Yes, I am easily impressed. Yet, though I could never state exactly why, he made my skin crawl. Something was definitely off with him, insincere, calculating. Years later, it finally surfaced that he had a talent for spotting women with affection/self-confidence deficits and money surpluses and wooed them (in whatever manner necessary) to get them to “invest” in some vaguely defined wondrous new invention he was developing. He had essentially lived this way, leeching from vulnerable women for many years in the school before one of them finally confided in a friend, who in turn brought it to Robert’s attention, who gave RP the boot when the extent and duration of the fleecing came to light. Whether Burton did this out of concern for his students or to get rid of a competitor in the fleecing game is anyone’s guess. By some strange twist of fate, RP returned to the school a few years ago, and I had the (mis)fortune to spend time with him on a few occasions. 20 years later, he still made my skin crawl.
Some question why so few of the young men Robert Burton drew into his intimate web openly complained of it. Here, the fleeced were women and the fleecer no “conscious being”, no god, just another student, yet it took years before the story came out. Judging by what I gleaned from the woman who told me about this – one of his victims – the same mechanics, in many respects, operated – fear, shame, regret, self-blaming etc. This is not an isolated example. I am not inviting a new list of “meetings with remarkably twisted men”, just responding to Cimarron’s question.
This also addresses a concern of another poster who, looking at how much the Fellowship of Friends accomplished with a psycho at the helm, wondered how much could have been accomplished with someone less radically damaged leading it. I suspect the answer, in terms of some of the more external achievements, is: less.
What is charisma? What gives such people such a power to move others? Often, it is the kind of clarity and unwavering purpose that is only possible once one is relieved of this nagging “conscience” thingy. People who doubt themselves, sincerely assert themselves to be no more that those around them, may inspire love and admiration, but never blind, obsessive obedience. As Traveler 9/444 expressed it “why do you think people are so insecure all the time? Because deep down they know they are faking it!”
Wasn’t it much of the thrill people experienced in the presence of Pol Pots, Stalins, Hitlers, Jim Joneses, Adi Das and Burtons the sheer wonder at people who seemed to have no doubts at all of their role and their superiority? No-one could equate the suffering orchestrated by those first three with that orchestrated by the last two, yet it may be more a question of luck/fate/timing than culpability and potential for destruction that separates them. One of the buffers I used for years in order to live with “my teacher’s” more obvious weaknesses was to reflect that he had the right mechanics to achieve something on the scale of the Fellowship. Neither Miles, nor Girard could have played that role. I suspect Miles is grateful for that and hope that Girard can come to it also in a way that is liberating rather than humiliating.
May 23, 2007 at 10:14 pm
Traveler (#12) – this is amazing. Thank you for this post.
Unoanimo – yesterday I was just thinking about our Russian artist friend. Thoughts about him popped into my head – warm thoughts since I always liked him very much. I thought that someone with this kind of talent could do whatever he wants in this country, have a creative and very successful life… Instead he settled for… and his talent was unpaid and abused… oh well… And here is your posting about him. Coincidence. May be it’s because we all wish our friend well.
Dear Siddiq, I appreciate your question (#22) about improvement. But honestly, I don’t know the answer. In a way I feel that if something was based and built on dishonesty – there is not much improvement a simple honest member like you can do. Especially when the hypocrisy and deception is so wide spread and coming from the leadership and the “source” itself.
In Russia in the 80-s we all knew very well that our government was full of shit, they were so obviously liars and hypocrits. And there was no “glorious communist future” to ever be built in this corrupted impoverished country despite of all the slogans and propaganda. We couldn’t escape or leave this regime, there was nothing we could possibly change, so we basically ignored it all or buffered it out. But we never objected or faught it openly -it was too scary. We just lived our little lives, had our kitchen talks, little joys here and there – like picnics with vodka and friends. Sometimes we listened to the radio “Voice of America” (when it wasn’t blocked by KGB), listened to forbidden Pink Floyd and read some dissident books. Discussed it in the kitchens with close friends but never in public. When the Party wanted us to sing communist songs on a holiday and carry the slogans – we did so. Marched, carried the red slogans. It was a pure act, false and unnatural – but we had to do it and we didn’t really care.
And then it all took care of itself – the whole game changed and the old regime based on lies suddenly collapsed. It was a shocking surprise. And all didn’t die, it just became something different. Things eventually changed, but “we” didn’t change them. The time simply has come for something new. Like a change of season in a way.
FOF is a very beautiful place. There are many lovely sincere people in it. But in the same time it is totally corrupted inside, and unfortunately it’s coming from the very top, from the leader… It was based on lies and false promises from the very beginning… It was suppressing free exchange of information and independent critical thinking all along. What can you possibly do to change things that are so deeply rooted? I don’t know.
May be just do what you’re doing, watch you-tube, read the blog (when is not monitored by council), discuss disturbing things with your friends in the kitchens (never in public), do whatever practices work for you – the sequence, 30 I’s , spend time with your friends (vodka helps) – whatever brings you joy. And change may just occur by itself when it’s time for it… Just like a new season.
May be just one advice – don’t lie to yourself. Don’t fake it, don’t pretend, don’t silence your conscience with stupid labels. FOF is so saturated with fakers. Yes, we all may have lied to others sometime in our lives for whatever reason, intentionally or not. Nobody is holy. But try not to lie to yourself and please trust your conscience, do what it tells you. If enough people in FOF try to live like this – who knows what change it can bring.
Best of luck!
May 23, 2007 at 10:53 pm
#438-9 Siddiq
“…they both are remembered by me as two wonderful, strong and healthy individuals- by no means the passive lunar type.”
I am sure you are not implying that “passive lunar types” are dull, weak and sickly. Being one of those types nothing pisses me off more than the adoration and deification of the “type A” personality in this twisted “its all on the outside” culture. It is also a dis-service to those active types that this adoration often smothers their deeper sensitivities.
May 23, 2007 at 11:18 pm
Moon Angel said in post 10/10
“Certain posts have highlighted the linkages between behavior of extreme societal cult groups like Nazi’s and FOF. These comparisons seem very valid and tie into the idea of “the third state” or higher states.”
This relates to the concept of group mind (also addressed here somewhere, but I can’t find the post). Group mind is recognized in psychological, sociological and some esoteric thought as a collective intelligence that seems to have a mind of its own and grows out of the collaboration of a group of people with shared beliefs, values, convictions, emotional attachments, etc.
When a group mind is at work, exalted states are sometimes part of the picture. Perhaps it has something to do with the way emotional center experiences the expanded field of energy — possibly with a dose of endorphins tossed in.
Group mind in itself is *not* a bad thing. It creates loyalty and cohesiveness, and it can bring people together in positive ways. Anyone who has played or sung music with others has probably experienced a form of higher state when everyone is “on” and singing or playing well together. The same thing can happen in sports. A winning team is often one that can work as a unit. Hyper-clarity and a high are often part of it.
It can also bring about a riot or a lynch mob (or a Nazi rally). Something appears to take over that is bigger than the individuals, and when there is emotional energy involved, that energy is amped up by the collective consciousness and may be perceived as a higher state. In those situations, people will sometimes be carried along by the group and do things in a righteous fervor that they wouldn’t have done as individuals.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t appreciate and value the higher states we experience when we enjoy friends, family, share beautiful impressions, discussion of enlightened ideas, spiritual comings together – whatever. Those states feel good, bring us closer and often bring heightened clarity to whatever we are doing. However, they may or may not be indicative of elevated spiritual development or attainment. They may be just states.
Arisha
May 23, 2007 at 11:31 pm
# 10/22 Siddiq says: “I for one think a great deal can be improved so let me ask you for your practical suggestions for those of us who may choose to stay in the FOF–how could we work on making the FOF a better place?”
Dear Siddiq, I suggest going back to page 2 and reading Rabbi Burns’ suggestions along those lines (#2/180) for a start. You sound like a fairly reasonable person. Good luck.
May 23, 2007 at 11:33 pm
To Unoanimo, 10/17,
A small correction? I did not look at the M.M. clip, but if I understand you correctly, M.M. could not be dancing with Viet Nam Vets, as she died in 1962, before America was involved over there.
May 24, 2007 at 12:01 am
To Joe Average (4111/9)
Thank you very much for this important information.
Just for yuor information, in our Center (Milan-Italy), as far as I know (I left at the end of February), at least 8 people have left in the last three months (6 older students between them, 17 to 25 years in the School).
May be more at this point. I do not know.
BACI (Kisses)
GF
May 24, 2007 at 12:10 am
#449
Whale rider
1979-1985
I hope it is not lost on you that this style of sign-off will be interpreted by Fellowship members as your date of spiritual birth and deliverance.
Think about what you are doing and keep supplying the lunatics with “affirming omens”.
May 24, 2007 at 12:38 am
#9/432 unoanimo
“… fortunately some of us verified the objective vibratory wave matter of self-exuding hypocrisy while between the eager to know ages of (8-12)”
What about the objective vibratory wave matter of self-exuding, self-realization? What would that be issuing from, maybe your wonderfully beautiful Self?
(sorry Sheik)
May 24, 2007 at 12:43 am
To Unoanimo:
your “revelation” turn around the fact that, for what you know first hand, some (Russians) agreed “to have a device surgically implanted” to solve a drinking problem.
What are you talking about ?
I just do not understand what you are saying!
Thanks for any clarity you will be willing to bring in.
Gratitude.
May 24, 2007 at 1:14 am
I get confused when I hear things like these:
All students who left are welcome back because RB is conscious, loving and forgiving.
The guy who was suing RB was doing it only for big bucks and would lose the case anyway, so the settlement was actually a form of consideration which his close friend advised him to accept.
The guy who was involved in another lawsuit now re-joined and is in charge of the LCS.
Roger C re-joined and died in the school
Sending the e-mail with the link was a criminal action and when the same political disagreement happened in HP the guy was put in jail.
14 girls who blamed a teacher of sexual abuse confessed the authorities that they lied for the grades. Every one of them confessed. The same with RB accusers. They are lying.
Bloggers are lying.
Students are leaving for the reason that they could not give up their weaknesses or identifications and blame all on RB.
May 24, 2007 at 1:35 am
Part 9 #440
A reason for making the assumption that Robert Burton is a man #5 and The Fellowship of Friends is a real school might be so you can calm yourself into believing that whatever length of time you spent there produced specific esoteric results, ie; you and /or others became men #4. Do you see the weakness in this reasoning? You would have to assume that Alex Horn was a man #5 and that his was a real school. You would also have to assume that Alex Horn’s teacher was a man number——-
Wait a minute, Alex Horn didn’t have a teacher. He was self taught. So Alex Horn’s pseudo school produced pseudo consciousness in its participants and Robert Burton’s pseudo school produced pseudo men #4.
I have struggled for years trying to come to a sense of what I got there. What remained in the early years after leaving, and what inhibited my ability to learn and grow from new teachers (Lord Pentland among others) was an attitude of superiority, especially intellectual, that can only be characterized as arrogance. It is an arrogance that everyone I knew in the school developed regardless of intellectual capacity, position in the school or in life, and without regard to whether they had any particular noticeable talents. It was shepherded by all that was fed to our vanity and self love, “the chosen one syndrome”, that somehow we were better or luckier or smarter or had better magnetic centers or had influence c writing our play and all the other self-inflating
nonsense.
I have only met a few people in my life that seemed like they might be men number 4 and they all had a quality of “not being full of themselves” and none of them were a product of the Fellowship of Friends.
My wife and I spent 10 years working with groups led by a student of Ouspensky. She was one of a small group of people who were referred to as the orthodox Ouspenkians. Some in this group were responsible for the organization and publication of The Fourth Way, Conscience, A Record of Meetings and A Further Record. She was one of a few that did not believe that theses books should be published. Her teaching approach was not strictly rote Ouspensky as she was also a practioner of Integral Yoga and Russian Orthodox Christianity and these influences did enter into her method although she was, at least according to her, attempting to present the Ouspensky approach in as pure a form as possible. That is, in the way that she received it.
I can tell you that what and how she taught was considerably different from The Fellowship of Friends and came directly from the source so to speak. And her approach was considerably different than what can be found in the various Gurdjieff organizations.
Best to you all
Steve Anderson
May 24, 2007 at 1:37 am
Wild and Free (10/8): If you go to the reunion, have fun, ok? Or, are you kidding us and already having some fun? 😉 Remember: It’s a Guru-Free Zone.
Inner Jewels, I hope you can make it!
Best wishes to all: fof, exfof, and nonfof.
May 24, 2007 at 1:39 am
Siddiq 10 / 22
Writes “Some people incur debt they are not able to pay for–that is probably the case here–their time to pay is proably still coming… But not one of us is spotless, probably far from it…Thanks and be well.”
I came to a school of esoteric phychology in the expectation that I would be free of the manipulations of superstition common in human religious groups.
It is not good enough to say to someone from whom you extract a lot ‘you are paying in advance’ and about someone who has abused their power for sexual ends ‘your time to pay for what you did is probably still to come’
These are exactly the kind of lines that paralize us morally. It makes Robert Burton the grand expression of higher purpose and everyone else has to ‘work with their features’. YOu are getting exactly what you need therfore you have nothing to say about anything, just do your work separating from the many ‘i’s.
Wow – I am so glad not to belive this baloney any more. Of course the dangerous thing is that profound ideas have been hashed together in this crazy taxidermists lab and what we get are flightless montrosities. The suspension of reason that is necessary to be a good student is evident in Siddiq’s post. Why not try an experiment, try to neither accept nor reject the idea that the Fellowship of Friends is a bogus cult. Let this theory float and as you go about your daily life at Isis see how well it fits from moment to moment, from day to day. This does not mean that you have to invalidate everything because it is a cult, just as the many sincere young belivers in Nazi Germany were just the kind of people one could have moulded into model students had their magnetic centers attended a prospective meeting instaad of a party rally – they were not really bad people, they just got involved with something they found it hard to leave.
See which the simplest explanation is for the many things one explains by using thories of ‘gods’ working with the school and Robert Burton being a couscious being. Surely if the simpler explanation of the Fellowship of friends being a bogus cult is capable of explaining the form and functions fo the fellowship of Friends, is worthy of consideration and might even be true.
You will probably see some obstacles to being open to this experiment and this will give you interesting material for your ongoing observations.
May 24, 2007 at 2:12 am
“unoanimo Says:
May 23rd, 2007 at 7:30 am
This post is dedicated to a particular Russian painter…blah, blah, blah”
Hey, Sparky, sounds like you’ve been hitting the juice yourself because your post is pointless. Well, at least it was short(er).
May 24, 2007 at 2:49 am
Dear Confused (10/48): Go to the source if you are confused. Go and ask Robert (in person) what is the truth. I dare you. Good luck.
May 24, 2007 at 3:05 am
In Reply to Post #43/10
Dear H.C.,
You wrote ~
To Unoanimo, 10/17,
“A small correction? I did not look at the M.M. clip, but if I understand you correctly, M.M. could not be dancing with Viet Nam Vets, as she died in 1962, before America was involved over there.”
________________________________
(The ‘Vietnam Soldiers’ refers to the American involvement in the Korean War, which took place between 1950 – 1953, M.M. visited there afterwards, 1954) No H.C., you say that M.M. died in 1962 and could not have visited (?) According to the history books the Vietnam conflict occurred from 1959 – 1975… far into and out of M.M.’s life on earth. Too many work books (?)) 🙂
Welp! I see that you still have that Iliac drainage tube connected. Jeepers Creepers Howard ~ “A small correction?” LOL
Just like your naturally inclined automatic feeling apparatus does when glancing at the facts surrounding your teacher Robert Burton, you say
“I did not look at the M.M. clip…”
Had you looked, (as it is your nature not to look at the Fellowship of Friends and Robert Burton) you would have seen M.M. on stage singing (not dancing) to a group of American Vietnam SOLDIERS….
where in the world did you get “Veterans”?
Unfortunately those soldiers were not retired while they were fighting the Vietnam war and dieing by the thousands:
it was not a World of Warcraft game H.C.
ROTL…
“but if I understand you correctly”
Now H.C. can you really say the word “but” and “understand” in the same sentence and finish with some sort of confident point that one’s conscience feels ‘right’ in giving me to grasp?
Now we are having fun in this blog aren’t we?
And….
where in the universe did you get “dancing”?
I never mentioned that M.M. is dancing,
though somehow I can picture you dancing through a Hieronymus Bosch painting throwing flowers, daily cards and bonbons to your left and right, skipping along your merry way, rock on,
are you smoking something acquired through Robert Burton’s third circle?
_____________________________
There is no doubt that this instance between your reading my post and your post to me, i.e., whatever inner galactic stew, that’s burning on the bottom of its kettle, is wafting itself through your house with windows closed tight,
is the best external ‘symbol’ thus far as to your hypnotic state of affairs.
I love you Howard Carter and with all my being, from the depths of both my hearts, welcome your present soul into this third dimensional plane of conscious friends, conscience and just plain love for the space that is you, before our mothers and fathers gave us a name, thus beginning the long and splendorous collecting and severing of millions of intellectual anchors that keep us from rising to the occasion of our hearts, to climb the ladder to the diving board of our cerebral cortex, diving, performing a belly flop into the quivering mass of our now-presence that would pale a blue whale’s splash.
__________________________________
Love to you all.
May 24, 2007 at 3:06 am
Confused (48):
I’m not surprised that you get confused when you’re told this stuff, presumably an attempt at damage control by Fellowship of Friends members. Some of the statements you quote are true and some are false. Some I don’t know about so I’m not commenting on them.
“All students who left are welcome back because RB is conscious, loving and forgiving.” Whether or not Robert Burton has these attributes is something everyone involved has to make up their own mind about. My opinion is that he’s not “conscious” and that he’s more inclined to selfishness and cruelty that love and forgiveness. There’s plenty of evidence for this if you do a bit of research.
“The guy who was suing RB was doing it only for big bucks and would lose the case anyway, so the settlement was actually a form of consideration which his close friend advised him to accept.” I don’t understand why the Fellowship would pay him money if he didn’t have a case, do you? And why did they insist that the evidence be sealed if there was nothing incriminating about it?
“Roger C re-joined and died in the school” True. I’m not sure what it’s meant to prove though.
“14 girls who blamed a teacher of sexual abuse confessed the authorities that they lied for the grades. Every one of them confessed. The same with RB accusers. They are lying.” I’m sure this kind of thing happens, but what do the people accusing Robert Burton of sexual abuse have to gain? Better grades? Actually it’s courageous of them to speak precisely because they have nothing to gain.
“Bloggers are lying.” My impression is that some bloggers on both sides of the fence exaggerate and/or use selective evidence to prove a point, but the majority of posts are honest attempts to express the truth as perceived by the writers. Again, one can only make one’s own mind up about this, but as many have said much of what is being said here does have the ring of truth. Furthermore, I personally know some of the writers and am 100% sure that they’re telling the truth.
“Students are leaving for the reason that they could not give up their weaknesses or identifications and blame all on RB.” Maybe true in some cases. Not true for me or anyone I know who has left. Have a chat with someone who has left and form your own opinion.
Good luck, RB
May 24, 2007 at 3:52 am
I’ll Give It a Try.
Words are very limited, including mine.
You are in sheer imagination if you think that true students would be interested in such magnetic centre stuff.
You must be very naive if you think that the issue of this work is the origin of the ideas or the fact that they appear in many traditions. Of course there are many traditions that express the same ideas, but this is not the point. The point is whether you can actualize them throughout your life.
I got this yesterday from a fellow student. It is from an old tradition: “This is no time to delay, but strike with the sling, stone after stone without interruption, one after the other.”
Goliath is big and strong, but he can be defeated stone after stone without interruption.
May 24, 2007 at 3:54 am
Confused (#48):
Believe whatever you want. It’s your life and your money. Good luck!
P.S. The moon is made of green cheese.
May 24, 2007 at 4:10 am
From Wonderful Gracie Slick and the Jefferson Airplane ala 1967. Fair use, I hope. Seems appropriate to those in transition from the Fellowship.
When the truth is found to be lies
and all the joys within you dies
don’t you want somebody to love
don’t you need somebody to love
wouldn’t you love somebody to love
you better find somebody to love
When the garden flowers baby are dead yes
and your mind is full of red
don’t you want somebody to love
don’t you need somebody to love
wouldn’t you love somebody to love
you better find somebody to love
your eyes, I say your eyes may look like his
but in your head baby I’m afraid you don’t know where it is
don’t you want somebody to love
don’t you need somebody to love
wouldn’t you love somebody to love
you better find somebody to love
tears are running ah running down your breast
and your friends baby they treat you like a guest
don’t you want somebody to love
don’t you need somebody to love
wouldn’t you love somebody to love
you better find somebody to love
Come to the big party at South Columbia on Saturday! You may find a lot of people to love, and be loved.
Sorry to be silent lately, but I’ve been busy with my life.
Love to you all.
Charles
P.S. Oh, I’ll be there for sure.
May 24, 2007 at 4:23 am
Howard Carter – HELLO
I said earlier: “Howard Carter, why are you posting? Are you breaking the rules from curiosity? Why do you care what a bunch of ex fofers say?? What difference does it make to you or your evolution? Go and be in peace.”
Well, I think the “go and be in peace” part sounds pretty stupid -sorry – tho I do wish you well. But the questions were not rhetorical. Really, why are you posting?
You know you are breaking the official rule. Do you have permission to break the rule? Who gave you permission? You don’t seem like someone who is curious about ex fofers, or cares at all, and you seem like someone who works at keeping rules. Why break this one?
If you have permission from RB why should he care? Does he care what the folks at Bud’s trailer park (is it still there?) or the bikers who live in Dobbins think? Do you go argue with them?
Who gave you permission to post?
Best wishes!
May 24, 2007 at 4:34 am
Keep aiming, keep following,
making up your face through a hundred imagined correspondences,
how far will you go to stand where you are?
Let the arrow fly,
be in love with this now,
close your eyes before it hits the target, turn within this void of knowing what score you got,
do not look at what the audience ‘Ah’d’,
move on
and
with one arrow,
shoot a thousand bows.
May 24, 2007 at 4:34 am
In reply to #403 & #438 Siddiq (The ongoing question: why wait after you ‘knew’): I will repeat segments of one of my first posts. #7/197:
After I found out, 10 yrs after joining that RB was homosexual, not celibate heterosexual as I had been led to believe (I was not aware of the multiple relations at that time)…. I still could not focus on RB’s behavior as a reason to leave the school. And I don’t see how anyone who tried to live the teachings could either.
Here is why: If you accept the idea that you are asleep and this other guy may be awake, not just as an idea, but a reality based on 10 years of experiences of altered states of consiousness in which you see what ‘maya’ means, what it means that we are characters in a play, all participants in a dream — it makes perfect mystical sense that this guy who has brought 1500 people together and held them together for 15 years in the name of awakening, well, maybe he IS in a different state of consciousness. You all who have been there know the thinking: “perhaps his behavior, the year’s of misrepresentation, it is crazy wisdom, he is putting us to the test,” on and on, all these explanations for his behaviour cannot be so lightly dismissed with that worldview in place.
Therefore, coming to conclusions, judging, RB’s behavior — was not an option for me, not a solid or acceptable route for making a decision to leave. I could not have been in MY integrity at the time and done that….
My attraction to the school was initially and always at heart an attraction to The System, the amazing impact the ideas had on my sense of myself, my life, the world. I loved the system, I loved Gurdjieff & Ouspensky’s work.
So,what really put a crack in my relationship to FoF were my sojourns into my own psyche with the help of body-centered therapies, vipassana meditation, psychological workshops. And I only permitted myself these sojourns away from The System after I ‘found out’ about RB. As a result of these inner explorations, I began to question the usefulness of The System as practiced in The Fellowship of Friends for my work. Among other things, I became convinced that for many people, myself included, the “nonexpression of negative emotions” was effectively a repressive silencer of conscience, a barrier to truly knowing myself…. ultimately, this knowing allowed me to leave what for me was a toxic emotional environment.”
For what it is worth, of the 20 years I spent in FoF, I spent only four in California, truly isolated from much, including many old friends. In the outer center Fellowship it helped to be a loner.
#9/419: Comrade. You post touched me, the part about how we are meeting each other for the first time here in this medium. I do feel that also, and am so grateful for the opportunity to participate in a discussion that has been (unbeknownst to me) longing to happen for such a long time with so many others who are capable of listening and responding with intelligence, wisdom, humor and heart.
#385 Half Life:
From your comment below, it is clear that you had a big fantasy going about those you describe as “anointed”. Fpr myself, included in your characterization, your description below is about as exact a replica of my (and many of my associates at the time) attitude toward Robert Burton throughout my years there:
“we stayed more relaxed than the driven pioneers, independent, soaking in the pragmatic aspects of the Work, rejecting the exagerated & the fantastic claims of the believers, & we regarded RB from afar as a liability or a sort of a ‘libidinal’ phenomenon that has to be tolerated or studied from afar as a dangerous paradox. There were periods in which it almost seemed that he has retired; those were ‘golden days’”
I discovered later that this convenient self-image of distancing myself from RB’s crazy behavior (angels, predictions, former student horrors) — how many times did I roll my eyes and hope newer students weren’t listening to him — and imagining myself uninfluenced by it, were a convenient way (dare I say ‘buffer’)to perpetuate the split between my precious rational mind (isn’t this a ‘cult for intellectuals’) and what was going on with the scared, dependent emotional being inside me who had projected power onto this big daddy who ran the group of which I was a part, albeit playing the role of ‘the smart one’… Anybody else recognize what I’m talking about?
But maybe it was just me.
#359: Rita: Your post said much I might have wanted to say if you had not. Thank you.
#361: Ames: I caught your enthusiam for getting a group together to discuss some of the tougher questions. Certainly the community support has great healing potential.
#10/3: Fellowship of Friends. Thank you for your comments on integrity. Although I was involved in some kind of therapy or the other for my final ten years in Fof, I never mentioned the Fellowship to any therapists I worked with. Also, of course, no one at my ‘life work’ or my family knew a think about this enormous aspect of my life. Conversely, I rarely if ever discussed my work or my therapy (outside a small group we conducted in NY) to anyone inside FoF. What a split personality.
#9: Haha! Very good.
#49: Keith/Steven: I am curious,how long did you actually stay in The Fellowship of Friends?
WhaleRider: Your posts continue to inspire me with your courage in sharing the rawness of going through the melting down of silence and shame into openness and honesty around your past experiences with Robert Burton.
Martha: Seeing you here brought such a smile to my face. How wonderful to bring you to mind, to hear from you!
Patrick T and James B, so warmed to hear you chiming in here also. Much appreciation for your thoughts and sharing.
With love,
Sandra
May 24, 2007 at 4:59 am
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 11 of Deadly Cults: The Crimes of True Believers
by Robert L. Snow
Publisher: Praeger Publishers (November 30, 2003)
_______________________
“It’s all very stimulating stuff in the beginning…,” said a former member of the Fellowship of Friends in a 1996 Los Angeles Times article. “But there’s no doubt it’s a cult. Our lives were totally controlled.”
Is this man talking about the cult formed around a wild-eyed guru who preaches that all members should embrace poverty and the simple life? Is he talking about the cult that rejects all worldly pleasures, and whose members spend their days praying, chanting, or meditating?
Hardly. According to reports in several California newspapers, the Fellowship of Friends is a pleasure- and consumer-oriented cult. Founded in 1970 by former schoolteacher Robert Burton, the Fellowship of Friends believes that true spiritual awakening can only come through experiencing the finest things life has to offer: fine food, fine wine, great art, great writers, great music. In his book Self Remembering, Burton stresses “the education and discipline of the emotions, the importance of living in the present, a love of beauty, and an understanding of its capacity to create higher awareness.”
True to his beliefs, Burton, who lived out of his car before founding the Fellowship of Friends, has built a lavish mansion… in the style of a French chateau on a 1,300-acre estate in the northern California Sierra foothills. There, among terraced hills supporting a vineyard that produces award-winning wines, the members of the Fellowship of Friends can come and study under a man whom they believe to be both spiritually advanced and a prophet.
Burton, who claims he is guided by 44 angels, including Benjamin Franklin, Jesus, and Plato, is believed by members of the Fellowship of Friends to be near godlike and also privy to information from “higher sources.” As a result of his claimed direct contact with these angels and higher sources, Burton predicted that an earthquake in 1998 would swallow up all of California, except for Apollo. He has also predicted that nuclear holocaust will destroy most of the world in 2006, but again spare Apollo, which will then become the center of the movement to reestablish civilization in the post-holocaust world.
While his prediction of a California-swallowing earthquake, of course, didn’t come true, this didn’t humble Burton. He carries on as though he’d never made a mistake. Like most cult leaders, Burton either ignores or attempts to rationalize his mistakes, while also attempting to control every aspect of his followers’ lives. Within the Fellowship of Friends, this control includes regulating the members’ sex lives and diets, ordering them to abstain from any form of negativity, and even directing them to abstain from the use of certain common words, such as I or thing. Burton has also forbidden members to dye their hair, have mixed-breed pets, ride bicycles, or smoke. Smoking, incidentally, is so strenuously outlawed that Burton has instructed cult members to sniff when greeting each other to catch renegades. Burton fined one couple $1,500 each for violating the no-smoking rule. One former member of the Fellowship of Friends claimed that the cult leaders, besides barring him from having sex with his girlfriend, also ordered him to urinate only on one side of the toilet so as to make less noise. While most Fellowship of Friends members have jobs and homes, Burton discourages members from mingling or socializing with people outside the Fellowship, including family, whom Burton sees as “spiritually dead.”
The leadership of the Fellowship of Friends doesn’t see these constraints as brainwashing, however. “The Fellowship does not engage in brainwashing,” said Girard Haven, a member of the group’s board of directors. “We may have a charismatic leader and strong feelings about higher forces and our own spirituality, but we know what we are doing. We are not doing it blindly.”
Unlike many cults, though, the Fellowship of Friends doesn’t recruit from the masses, but instead recruits mainly from groups of well-educated and well-heeled individuals. New recruits are often located after Fellowship of Friends members go to bookstores and plant Fellowship of Friends’ bookmarks in selected metaphysical books that reflect the beliefs of the cult. Prospective members who respond to the telephone number on the bookmark are invited to attend lavish dinners at expensive homes. Only after being appraised by Fellowship of Friends members can prospective recruits be invited to join the cult, whose membership includes many doctors, lawyers, artists, and musicians.
Recruiting well-heeled members certainly paid off. In the late 1990s, the Fellowship of Friends had 65 centers around the world (in late 2003, their Web site, which is translated into 10 languages, states that they now have only 30 centers) and employed approximately 500 people. The group’s overall worth in the late 1990s was estimated at $26 million, while Burton’s annual salary was at least $250,000. Many of the Fellowship of Friends employees work at the cult’s winery, which is located on their property in northern California. According to recent news articles, the Fellowship of Friends produces 25,000 cases of wine a year, which is reported to be of high quality.
Along with the winery, the Fellowship of Friends has its own collections of fine art and rare literature, as well as its own opera company, orchestra, theater troupe, and museum. In addition, Burton had decorated the mansion at Apollo with expensive antiques and paintings. One of Burtons’ favorites sayings is, “Beauty creates its likeness in those pursue it.”
Because of all these expensive possessions, belonging to the Fellowship of Friends is naturally very costly. The cult requires to tithe 10 percent of their incomes, while wealthy members pay much more, in special assessments, to enable the Fellowship of Friends to purchase sculpture, paintings, rare books, antiques, and other items that will “lift the spirituality” of the cult members. The annual income of the Fellowship of Friends in the mid-1990s exceeded $5 million.
However, all is not rosy for the Fellowship of Friends. In recent years, large numbers of its members have been leaving, causing a serious cash flow problem. The trouble began for the Fellowship of Friends in 1995 when a cult member sent an open letter to the membership accusing Burton of sexually seducing him. He said Burton brainwashes members into a state of “absolute submission,” allowing him to feed a “voracious appetite for sexual perversion.” Following this disclosure, other male members came forward with similar accusations, including the cult’s former financial officer, who said he felt pressured to join Burton’s male harem.
“They don’t see it coming, and when it comes, they don’t know what’s happened,” said Charles R. about Burton’s aggressive homosexual advances toward Fellowship of friends members.
Another male member of the cult who also claimed Burton aggressively pressured him into having sex said, “I never had a homosexual encounter before this. But he [Burton] told me it was the wish of C-influence (the group’s term for higher forces, or gods) that I have sex with him.” At all-male dinners hosted by Burton, members say he has been known to boast that “one hundred boys would not be enough [for his sexual appetite].”
To these charges, Burton’s attorney has responded, “We don’t think a [sexual] relationship between a leader and a member of the congregation is abusive in and of itself.” However, two lawsuits filed by former FOF members have been settled out of court.
Former FOF officials who have left the cult also aren’t kind in their evaluation of Burton and his organization. “The Fellowship is a dictatorship, a predatory dictatorship,” said Thomas E., an artist and former leader who left the cult after a homosexual relationship with Burton. “I should know. I was a leader.”
Former Fellowship of Friends financial officer Charles R. said, “I thought it was the one true way, but as it turns out, it was just a cult.”
The point of the preceding anecdote is that a cult can be formed around almost any belief or philosophy. Also, this anecdote shows that, to succeed, a cult doesn’t have to be aimed at the uneducated, the emotionally challenged, or the poor. As shown by both the Fellowship of Friends and the Solar Temple (discussed in the previous chapter), cults can also attract well-educated, wealthy, and seemingly mentally competent people. All that’s needed is a charismatic leader who followers believe has some type of special insight, some type of special knowledge unknown to the rest of the world, or some type of special direct pipeline to God or ascended beings. To attract followers, the cult leader then offers to share this information or knowledge with cult members. This belief in the leader’s gift quickly becomes a strong magnet that pulls people in because gaining this insight or knowledge from the cult leader, members believe, will make them part of an elite group who are a step above regular human beings.
_______________________________
May 24, 2007 at 5:17 am
#9-428 Across the River: “Dear WhaleRider, Your post (9/378) made me cry. No mind games or vanity there, but the righteous proclamation of a real man who has put his feet down to walk the same road that has dignified all other real men for all time. Indeed, it is not meant to be easy but your instructions are spot on. We have never met but I can tell you that I’m proud of you, and I value your way. Thank you for bringing your clear voice here.”
It takes a real man to recognize another, and I thank you for your acknowledgement. It was deeply felt. Clarity is what I am all about. Crying makes us more human and is a great stress reliever, too. I am grateful my wife and kids remind me of that all the time.
#25 Hava Nagilla: Actually, you’d be surprised at the number of times I have encountered the teaching of being present in life since I left. There are many professions that demand a person be present and pay attention to themselves and what they are doing, otherwise life gets pretty boring. Life might just not be as mechanical and asleep as guess who would like you’d to think. That’s the matrix talkin’, dude. I think it would be more accurate to state that the fourth way books and/or the Fellowship of Friends happened to be the first place you personally heard about the idea of being present or asleep, is that not correct? The truth is out there…
#9-446 Open Your Mind, Quaid: “For an understanding of how the double-bind can be used, intentionally or unintentionally, in spiritual practice, see Alan Watts’ classic Psychotherapy East and West. It had a big impact on me when I was a Fellowship student, and made it impossible for me to ever again take seriously much of the jive that constitutes the Fellowship teachings.”
Like in the FOF, “will you be paying by cash, check or credit card?” Share some of your examples…
#2 What a Maroon.
Whale Rider
1979-1985
“Is it really lost on you that this style of sign-off will be interpreted by Fellowship members as your date of spiritual birth and death? Think about what you are doing and don’t supply the lunatics with what they will interpret as “affirming omens.”
Yup, that one wasn’t even on my radar screen. Hmm…my dates. Let me publicly state that 1979 is the year I took on the Fellowship of Friends’ brand of the fourth way, and 1985 is the year when I abandoned it. I don’t have a problem what that. They can put the spin on that or not, it doesn’t matter to me. (Thanks, Yesri Baba #45, too!)
unoanimo: The story of the implants didn’t quite send me into all caps as did Robert Burton’s assertion that his god was commanding him to be gay and humbled by laboring to seduce young straight men within his spiritual community. I just have one question…what have you done with my toaster? I woke up this morning, and it was gone. Vanished…
Moon Angel #10 What a beautiful post! Sharing your inspiring story gives people who are stuck in limbo the courage, hope, and strength needed to see reality differently than Fellowship of Friends dogma. Why wait? Why not seek to create your own conscious role in life instead of waiting around in limbo to have one assigned? That’s what I took with me when I split. The virtuoso mystic learns to be self-sufficient and can find God in stones.
Howard Carter #19:
To WhaleRider, “What I see is that you took one line from post #9/379 – (The ones who stay do so because to them there is no point in leaving.) and turned it into a psychological dissertation in #9/396. It’s a little like sharing an elevator ride with a stranger and then making an evaluation of what kind of person they are. Most posters will copy a sentence or paragraph and respond with a comment of a similar length. In any event, your intellect is impressive. You being inspired to write all those words off that one comment is flattering in a left handed way. I personally did not think my comment merited the effort.”
Sometimes it’s not what you say, Howard, but what you don’t say that speaks volumes.
In life one tiny cell contains the DNA blueprint for the entire organism. It happens to be my profession to observe people, so consider yourself “thin-sliced”.
BTW I think if I were in your position, I would word it that people stay in the ‘school’ because it is their sole/soul connection to the conscious aspect of the Ray of Creation, but I’d be lying in your case.
“I say: “I am the truth, Howard Carter, I am your worst nightmare.” You say: “Worst nightmare? Isn’t that redundant? Actually, nightmares don’t exist in the third state. Real nightmares take place in the second state, and virtual nightmares in the first state. A few minutes of third state will hold off nightmares for months, even years at a time, wouldn’t you agree?”
I don’t think I’d be a happy camper without my dreams, Howard, all of them. I told you I was the truth, that ineffable being who pursues you in your dreams and who you dream of pursuing while you are awake. You chose to focus on the nightmare…I don’t blame you really, aren’t you living in one called, “the lower cannot see the higher?”
Allah’s sword is the sword of truth.
Question: with all the vigilant self-remembering that Robert Burton and the Fellowship of Friends promotes…do you think the truth is self-evident in the third state or can a person be manipulated in the third state into believing falsehood is truth?
I think you know what I’d say.
WhaleRider
1979-1985
(Served 6 years. I’d say I got off with a light sentence.)
May 24, 2007 at 5:19 am
To Keith (#10-49), you may be quite correct about the self-calming. Yet, in the same post, you do the same. Did you notice? For example, you seem quite attached to the idea of lineage and sources; this comes up both with reference to Alex Horn, and to the teacher who was an ex-student of Ouspensky, and other times in your previous posts. But you are right to point out that we are usually rather desperate to give meaning to our lives.
I can’t tell you whether Alex Horn induced consciousness in Burton, but I have read accounts (for example, some of the saints, some of the people in concentration camps, prisons and other examples of the ilk) where great pain, suffering, or trauma induced either a very long lasting or permanent change in consciousness. I can only go by their descriptions, of course, but their testimony seems credible to me. These folk didn’t have teachers, their extraordinary circumstances were their teacher. So, I am open to the possibility that Burton may have had the same happen to him. Alex Horn organized extremely severe beatings, bullyings, and psychological trauma, we can have reasonable assurance of that because so many different accounts jive. But the whole preceding paragraph could be self-calming…
I don’t know if Ouspensky was conscious. He never claimed he was, to my (limited) knowledge, neither did Gurdjieff. Did his ex-student, your teacher, claim that, for him or for herself? Did you come to any conclusions yourself? Do you think that a teaching is a product of (or reflects or suits) its times, or does it have to be passed on unchanged through the generations?
I don’t claim to be ‘conscious’, but I do claim that in my journey through the FOF, I had a certain amount of the shit beaten out of me, and a lot of imagination (especially about awakening and the nature of consciousness) went bye-bye. I think I was ready for my ‘dark night of the soul’ experience after the FOF in a way I could not have been had I not gone through the FOF. This is supposition, because I could not live two possible life paths at once, obviously. In hindsight, I think I could have got to that ‘stage’ more efficiently had I had some real guidance, but I don’t know.
I will have to think about your angle about being superior or arrogant. I certainly don’t ‘feel that I feel it’ anymore, I feel like a very average, quite ordinary person, but there are always layers behind layers, and maybe you are more perceptive; ‘outsiders’ often are. I certainly still have a vanity feature, I don’t expect it to go away, and I’d be surprised if you had got rid of yours. And the same goes for many of the bloggers here, I don’t get the feeling of arrogance from them.
I’m giving up on ‘sources’, original or not, and am finding my own way (maybe that is a sign of arrogance). I wish you luck in yours.
With thanks,
Ames
May 24, 2007 at 6:33 am
Hello everyone,
I’m wondering if anyone knows how to contact John Morris, who was in the London center of the FOF in the late 1970s. He was a very dear friend of mine. I last saw him in London in 1986, and I’ve since lost contact with him. Any help would be appreciated. You can e-mail me at jonagold1_at_gmail_dot_com.
May 24, 2007 at 6:41 am
Joe Average 10/38: Pure poetry.
Confused 10/48: I’d say you’re confused!
A true believer for 30+ years (in and out of the Fellowship of Friends) I now see that Robert Burton is an evil person and NOT the conscious teacher I imagined (and wanted with all my heart for) him to be. I am deeply saddened that this is true and at the same time, I wail and gnash at him for the countless damage he has done to so many good people.
If only I had the power to prevent him from hurting more people……
My sincere thanks to those who have here bared their souls and for the Sheik who continues to enable this healing process to take place.
May 24, 2007 at 6:48 am
From Elena
Thank you Sheik, for your consistency.
To 9/417 Suffering Sucotash
You say:
“Also, what if you are wrong? It’s not out of the realm of possibility – who reading this can say they know for certain what’s right for someone else, and know the consequences of interfering?”
I’ve been thinking about your question because it is also a question my daughter has. She can’t believe that a housewife, looking after an 87 year old lady with alzheimer’s, could be right, although she finds the arguments quite reasonable. It just shows how seduced she still is by the appearance of greatness of Mr. Burton. I cannot blame her for she’s twenty five but let me try to explore this right and wrong question.
I’ve been rather upset with Robert and Girard but the truth is that soon, the reasons to be upset will have vanished and the reasons to be grateful will remain, like it happens with people that die. One of the problems is that it is not that Robert is not right or was not right. Self remembering was necessary and those of us who went through the training as thoroughly as we possibly could, learned the lesson. The lesson is that man, each man, is. There’s no need to say a man is divine, because he is divine enough if he is truly a man, a woman. Words like divine I think confuse the focus in our times because the problem is not to be God like, the problem is to be truly human, human enough to appreciate the divine in life.
From one angle, our past history shows us more like half animals and half Gods to land the average man into the instinctive man. There is nothing wrong with Robert Burton’s attempt to move us from the instinctive centre to the king of hearts through the practice of self remembering. What is surprising is that he, himself, was not able to move from himself to the community and ended up creating an autocracy demanding the student’s submission to him and not to themselves.
Fortunately, some of us had enough will to know that it was not to be submitted unconditionally and realized, sooner or later that one or twenty five years were enough.
For those who once posed themselves the ideal of working with the fourth way as a system for inner development, can there be any other question than the fact that the fourth way must lead to a conscious community in the long run?
Is it not a fact that The Fellowship of Friends involuted into different forms of the way of the monk and the yogi, in as much as self remembering became an individual practice without social expression and community life became “monk” like, as we marched submissively from one venue to the other without being able to express our selves? Talk with each other? Communicate?
A conscious community is to me, the expression of matured enough individuals who, through the practice of self remembering have acquired control and understanding of their centers to know that it is presence behind each center what allows h/im/er to move through this world of life; that it is the physical world that can refrain and heal his instincts, that the body is noble and necessary and that it is the law within processes that frees h/er/is movements while consistent interaction with others, structures h/er/is heart. From one angle, the mind simply records the lawfulness within the processes, perceives, understands and returns the necessary adjustments.
There can be no consciousness in the instinctive centre if we do not acknowledge the physical world. Food has been sacred in all traditions and in the Fellowship of Friends it is thrown out and replaced with idolatry in dinners with the teacher. Presence in the moving center is expressed in the way we acknowledge each other’s presence and the care with which we handle things. In the Fellowship, objects have much greater value than people. Robert Burton has no consideration for students, he takes them into account only if he can profit from them and consistently shows much more consideration for life people who he wishes to seduce than for students. Our immature hearts have not moved an inch no matter how long we’ve been in this School because the heart can only expand in the interaction with others and we did not interact lawfully, we were taught to let each other come and go without consideration, but for the money we left to buy another cupid. If anything, our hearts shrank in the continued practice of inconsiderateness.
The mind develops in the appreciation of lawfulness in processes. Lawfulness is present in natural processes and the Fellowship of Friends has become so tremendously unnatural that there is no lawfulness for the mind to observe. Only the formatory apparatus can grease its own gear with the imposition of dictatorial acceptance and the programmed behavior becomes more and more repetitive and lifeless.
The functions have been handcuffed. The lack of freedom in communication, the lack of authenticity in the octaves, that can spring from the will of those who practice them and not from the will of Robert’s distortions, expresses itself in the consistently descending octaves within the Fellowship: a collapsing winery, a descending Lewis Carroll School and conversely, a bouyant money making permanent auction. Interestingly, the arts survive, lame, but still, lovingly, and the gardens, with too much mannerism to call them natural. They’ve lost, like everything else in the Fellowship of Friends, the touch of the Gods, that is, the divine within each human being standing for h/er/imself and not for another. Interestingly, a few private businesses of selected students, privileged students, thrive.
Maybe I have deviated from your question about being right or wrong. It is good to realize that this are relative terms. In the long run, what is, is, and it continues to be it for some who cannot move beyond it. How many times in one’s life has had one to move on, on one’s own, because the others did not wish to move? Parents, Friends, children, teachers, husbands….whether one wanted to or not.
It is not I who am right and you don’t need to suffer much sucotash, but the facts must be able to speak for themselves and once understood, each one must act. Crisises are open doors to escape and those that don’t are more tightly trapped after the crisis stops. They tighten and crystallize more deeply and it is difficult to imagine how much more stiff the Fellowship of Friends can get, when even in silk clothes people look like automated robots who left their functions in another dimension, expelling the hideous smell of their neglected will into abused sexuality or passive vouyerism.
Perhaps the only right thing for humans of our kind, is to keep moving like spiritual nomads who understand that we are still far from settling for this state of things, and rejoice in the possibility of finding another river to soak our feet and splash some water on each other’s longings, with a smile for the long road ahead of us.
It is not, without gratitude or pain that I abandon the Fellowship of Friends.
May 24, 2007 at 7:20 am
Thank you JoelF for:
http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-cult_q0.html#cq_guru_right
Totally amazed by this “100 laws of the guru lead organization”.
Again thank you,
Peter
May 24, 2007 at 8:22 am
Moon Angel (10/10): What a fantastic post!:
“I met an old woman who had attended a major rally for the Nazi’s when she was a young woman and she said that the event was like a giant party . . . [it] created an incredibly memorable and high state for her. A state that was beyond time and that she would never forget.”
“IMO she had a ‘third state experience’ and similar things happen at FOF when you get a bunch of people together, dress them up like dolls, serve fine food, play nice music, in a nice garden, with nice art…These states are due mostly to sex energy and ‘infrasex’ excitement. . . . [We] equate this ‘high’ with consciousness, or a third state. Since it is out of the ordinary, we assume, because of our need to label and define things into known categories, that this is what Ouspensky meant by the third state.”
“. . . . Now that I am out of the school I view myself at the time, and many students I witnessed, as desperate third state junkies. Living like hopeless drug addicts desperate for another high.”
For me this cuts to the heart of what the Fellowship of Friends is about: the addictive pursuit of temporary elevated states. The parallel with a Nazi rally is perfect, as are your comments about the whole thing being fueled by sex energy — at least it was so for me!
It has been discussed at some length on this blog that states are not consciousness. Indeed other spiritual traditions warn against being led astray by seeking elevated states.
The Tibetan Buddhist tradition has a thorough analysis of the temporary states that may arise in meditation. These states are called “nyam,” and the main ones are bliss, luminosity and non-thought. While they may be seen as something of a mark of progress, practitioners are instructed not to mistake them for any kind of ultimate realization and to avoid becoming attached to them.
This instruction is necessary because the states can feel incredible and the practitioner can believe that he has achieved a high level of realization; but in truth they are neither particularly good nor particularly bad, and because they are temporary, one lets them go without fixating on them.
In a tradition like the Tibetan, before a lama is released into the world to start teaching, he receives an elaborate and lengthy training supervised by his teachers, who in turn represent an unbroken lineage back to the great teachers of the past. A teacher thus trained will not spread wrong teachings or misunderstand the nature of consciousness; and egotism and narcissism are little tolerated.
Contrast this with Robert Burton. Barely in any kind of school, he has some experiences and decides that they are ultimate realization, and that he is qualified to teach. He has no real understanding of the path because he was never properly trained. He has made it all up himself. Nor, it seems, has he ever worked on his own shadow side.
Thus in turn, students of Robert Burton learn only his self-created teaching, and have no way of knowing how off the mark it is unless they investigate other traditions (which most don’t). They develop a taste for the energy of temporary higher states, and, believing that the states that they experience mean something and are a sign that they are receiving a “real teaching,” become attached to the form of the Fellowship of Friends, and addicted to the very self-centered pursuit of the buzz of states. Very sad indeed.
May 24, 2007 at 9:19 am
Keith #10/37
(keith replying to: 9/#328 The King of Clubs)
>In what way is Gurdjieff tradition (Foundation and others) a religion?
They adopt without verification what can be called Gurdjieffisms, such as psychological ideas like *self-calming*. Mentioned in Gurdjieff’s amateurish and elaborate book, I can’t help but notice that you rely on this term *self-calming* considerably when writing your opinions on this forum. Or do I have you mixed up with someone else?
From Ouspensky: “And so, if after three years of work I perceived that G. was leading us in fact towards the way of religion, of the monastery, and required the observance of all religious forms and ceremonies, there would be of course a motive for disagreeing with this and for going away, even though at the risk of losing direct leadership.”
Gurdjieff tried to establish a harebrained religion and that effort has continued with these Gurdjieff groups, foundations and societies. The books, the dances, the music and the unnecessary instinctive-moving exercises are all part of a man-number-one religion.
>Do you have experience with these groups?
I was in Carla Needleman’s group at St. Elmos in San Francisco. She and her husband were part of the few that began the west coast G. Foundation with Pentland back in the 60’s. One thing that struck me was that the form of meetings and the over-all tone, even some of the same “angles,” found in the Fellowship came directly from the Foundation. When they deny that Alex Horn was a student of Pentland’s they are lying. Clearly Horn got the psychological mood of Gurdjieff’s teaching from Pentland and passed it on. The Gurdjieff Foundation is a manipulative cult populated by self-righteous people that are so certain of their divine calling that they rival Burton himself in terms of authoritarian attitude, they are just not as mentally unstable or irrationally inventive as Burton. Pentland was an unremarkable student of Ouspensky’s for twelve years and after Ouspensky’s death ran to Gurdjieff and de Salzmann, he was around Gurdjieff for a few months before G’s death and thereafter referred to Ouspensky as a far lesser teacher than Gurdjieff. This is a religion, a cult of personality focused on the self-inflated Gurdjieff. These people lie, manipulate, encourage mindless belief and back-stab their perceived detractors, they are as common as they come. Gurdjieff Foundation: cult. Pentland actually became a follower of Krishnamurti, if you read “Exchanged Within” you can see that the formatory jargon is derivative of Krishnamurti’s B influence philosophy. When Krishnamurti or Sabud (sp?) are mentioned in a dismissive way around the Foundation people I met they heatedly defend them as higher men. The meditative “sittings” that are now so prevalent in the Gurdjieff line do not come from Gurdjieff, but rather from de Salzmann’s trip to Japan to meet Zen masters in the late 60’s. These lead people never developed beyond magnetic center and when the 60’s rolled around they dove into the popular counter-culture B influence looking for “something” as if they had never heard of self-remembering.
(keith replying to: #393 The King of Clubs)
First off, I don’t owe you any explanation. My comments in the context they were given are self-explanatory except to the most unintuitive, formatory minded type. Understanding often requires an intuitive leap into the emotions because the mind is too slow to follow. At the same time I don’t like you (based on your various comments on this forum), it seems clear that you are one of these explanation-sinkholes that are never satisfied even if an entire book of justifications for a comment were presented to you because you demand proof of things that cannot be proven. Just for the challenge of explaining the unexplainable I am bothering to respond to your deceptively simple questions even though I already understand that you harbor opposite attitudes and hope that I will give you enough illogical rope to hang me with. Do you understand my attitude toward your questions?
>What makes you think c influence created The Fellowship of Friends?
Nothing connected to the idea of self-remembering is under the law of accident, if people go to the Fellowship and come away understanding self-remembering then C influence is involved. Now, there is no further argument, you either see that this is likely a truism or you continue to demand a proof that only exists in a higher state.
>What to you is c influence?
C influence is an intelligent force operating under less laws in a higher dimension that can shock a man’s psychology and bridge an interval in him that he likely could not bridge himself. This higher force is verified by the sudden acceleration of the perceptions so that the outside intelligence is recognized, that is, a man suddenly sees into a higher dimension.
>Some may recognize the enticements of madness but can you really say you recognize the nature of higher consciousness?
Yes, sometimes.
>If so, how?
By trying to be awake.
>Why do you think that those who have left have ascended with more possibilities and far more consciousness than anyone left behind?
Because they verify that they can work on themselves and remember themselves without paying Burton money, without wasting time helping to preparing an ark for an end of the world that will not come.
>Can you support these statements?
Yes, I can support them indefinitely.
May 24, 2007 at 9:27 am
Hello Sheik:
On post #18/9 of mine could you put next to Vietnam Soldiers this ~ (Americans in the Korean War)
Also in my new post please put the following right above where my reply starts with “Welp!”
(The ‘Vietnam Soldiers’ refers to the American involvement in the Korean War, which took place between 1950 – 1953, M.M. visited there afterwards, 1954) No H.C., you say that M.M. died in 1962 and could not have visited (?) According to the history books the Vietnam conflict occurred from 1959 – 1975… far into and out of M.M.’s life on earth. Too many work books (?)) 🙂
May 24, 2007 at 10:43 am
#36 I’ll give it a try
Thanks for the assist. You said what I would have wanted to say only about 10 times better than i would have.
It seems that all traditions point to the same core. “Before Abraham was I am” Christianity –
“Show me the face you had before your parents were born” Zen Koan. One could probably find similar sayings in all teachings.Then the fundamentalists start chewing on the maps and the teachings become the curse of the world, their own opposite. George Bush says his favorite philosopher is Jesus Christ. Hell, it’s probably a cardinal sin to put those two names in the same sentence.
By the way, what sphincter was that “double death” do-do squeezed through. We should be so lucky to only have to go through two.
May 24, 2007 at 10:54 am
In Reply to Post #47/9
You-me-us-they Says:
May 24th, 2007 at 12:43 am
To Unoanimo:
your “revelation” turn around the fact that, for what you know first hand, some (Russians) agreed “to have a device surgically implanted” to solve a drinking problem.
What are you talking about ?
I just do not understand what you are saying!
Thanks for any clarity you will be willing to bring in.
Gratitude.
________________________________
Dear You-Me-Us-They ~
Dido …
Please re-read my article and
state plainly what you wish me to
clarify for you. As I see it, there’s nothing in your question that would not
suffice as an answer too.
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
Love to you all 🙂
May 24, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Living (Transforming) the contradiction 8
– between “Love they neighbor” and “Remember Yourself”
The number of volunteers in the Fellowship of Friends who want to defend it, is becoming thin, after the first guard in form of sheep like “becareful” and “just observing” has drowned, there seem only to be aggressive, negative, desperate children like “RSVP” or “More Rumors & Lies “ left to defend the sinking ship.
The gods have built them into this unfolding play to make obvious to the last with an open mind and ear, that the teaching has come to an end and that it is leading only into dead-ends of reacting and blaming, finding the negative “Tidbids” in everyone around…
Last weekend I walked-by a church on the Stanford campus and the organ music inside tempted me to come in. This was the first time in a church service in 20 years for me and it was a very revealing experience. It made clear to me why Rodney Collin after being with Ouspensky for so many years converted to the catholic church later on in his life, which I never could understand until now.
The whole setting was created and refined over two thousand years to open and unfold emotions, reverence, awe and I realized how much I had been missing this aspect in 20 years of fourth way work. There it all was about, at least in theory, being an objective observer, not being fooled by the Instinctive or Emotional Center.
Robert Burton had the role to rectify this tendency a bit by introducing a lot of foods for the emotional center like the Arts, but still it was kept on the level of a feeding organism that one should always take a lot of care not to become too identified with, which was considered to be the same as “becoming too emotional”.
On this last Sunday I realized that this equation too-emotional = too-identified , is just faulty and the basis of a lot of misconceptions and miss-developments in the 4th Way tradition in general and in the Fellowship of Friends in particular. This Blog is a great show of so many 3 brained beings that have their emotional center amputated or neglected and this total-indulgement into words really does not help them.
And the gods are not giving Robert Burton this realization but they lead him into the opposite direction with more mind activity and analytical work of all esoteric traditions, at least of that what they left in form of words. But also the gods make the absurdity of this enterprise very obvious by the kind of small brain they have given Robert Burton, who can turn around searching for keys only in those places where there happened to be a street light… and there are not many light posts in the Fellowship of Friends left. The keys have to be found where there is some kind of representation of 6 (SEX).
Experiencing the emotions is an expansive experience whereas the mind is sharp and narrow. The founders of the Christian tradition, who knew what they were doing, were putting a lot of emphasis on work that would express the Christian leit-motive “love thy neighbor” which only had he purpose to develop and unfold the emotions. Now over the centuries, as usual, people miss-took the tool for the goal and went overboard with caring for others, thinking that the more people they helped the surer they would go to paradise.
To balance this miss-understanding that had grown into unacceptable proportions they put the 4th Way into the world and its leit-motive was to “Remember Yourself” rather than “Remember to help other people”. What could have be a good point to give relativity was again, as usual, totally taken out of proportions and created so many of these Objective Egoists that we can also observe here on this Blog, only hoping that “if they just would remember themselves enough they would certainly go to paradise.
This is a kairos time to see what has gone missing and not to be afraid to take the consequences. A way out of a dead-end-road always needs a total turn around. However even long dead-end-roads can be very instructive and we have all learned to taste the appropriate value of “remembering oneself”. Now is the time to realize that it is not the universal key that will open all doors, just as “love thy neighbor” alone was not the way out.
Kiran@beingpresent.net
Some smiling faces at our company celebration last week : http://flickr.com/photos/iloveyou2/sets/72157600224664697/show
May 24, 2007 at 1:18 pm
I’ve met my American friend yesterday, who’s left the school a year ago. He told me a very funny story about the times when he travelled with Robert (only once was enough for him, he had to leave the country after he realized that Robert is grooming him for sex).
He was called to give Robert massage in a hotel where they were staying. Although he was very tired and wanted to take a shower, the guy who summonded him to Robert said ‘But Robert needs you NOW!’ in a panicy tone of voice, so he went to Robert’s suite and started to proceed with a back massage. Then he skipped the bottom part and went on with the legs. Robert said: ‘The cheeks, dear’. My friend pretended that he didn’t hear. Then Robert repeated ‘The cheeks, dear, the cheeks!’ So my friend reached to his face, grabbed Robert’s cheeks and gave them a few circular motions.
He was not asked to perform massage on Robert again, to his relief.
I’m off to Russia now, ‘see’ you all in a couple of weeks. Have fun!
May 24, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Unoanimo (71): It’s not that easy to change old comments, there are too many new ones coming in, I’ll do this one but please, next time check what you have written before posting it.
May 24, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Kiran
The ship is far from sinking. It is your imagination. Actually it is fast-going and solid more than ever.
According to your statement fewer students are here to “defend” the school. That is because most of what is written here is dull magnetic center stuff and has no substance to defend against.
It is pathetic to offer such content and expect real students to “defend” the school against it.
I am writing here as a balance for surfers who enter this forum and might get a one-sided impression. Otherwise I would not bother.
The School does not need my protection.
This forum is an ocean of imagination; the Work is about being present and prolonging it whenever one can and right now is the time.
I am taking the opportunity to tell you bluntly right at your face that what you wrote here about Rowena is a complete lie.
I have checked it thoroughly here and I have no doubt about it.
Though you have left the school, I had appreciation to you and compassion to what you had to go through.
Now, after this slander I think you need to take a deep look inside youself and find this negative place in you that can evoke such “demons”. We all have “demons” inside and I do not judge it in you or in me, yet without observation and control what’s the point?
May 24, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Could it be that Robert suffers from a Narcissistic Personality disorder?
Imagine a man who was rejected by the outside world. A homosexual in the USA in the sixties. Who did not know how to accept himself. He meets the system and sees a chance to escape the dilemma, be reinventing himself, as an angel, a conscious man.
Now he claims that him being different, is due to higher will and he has an important role to play, maybe one of the most important in the world history. The perfect trick, but you have to find people to buy into that. Unfortunately he did.
He takes fragments of the system and groups them in a way that they make sense for himself and are a justification for his own actions. With him in the middle, the man who is under different laws. Isn’t it interesting that he is the only one, who can not lose ‘C-Influence’. All the others will lose it in the moment they stop giving him money. He can do what he wants, give out nonsense prophesies, use students, waste money and it will always be ok, because he made up his own rules in his disturbed world.
Because this is so far away from normal behaviour, we imagine it could be possibly that he is ‘conscious’. But ask yourself, if the state that you know as being conscious, would be permanent, would you want to go around and demand money and sex from other people?
Who would invent a term like “feminine dominance”?
I guess only somebody who had strong experiences with that and for whom that was a key problem in his childhood.
May 24, 2007 at 3:38 pm
Rabbi Burns #403;
“What’s the point of remaining in the school if you don’t believe the teacher?”
& Unoanimo #432;
‘the FOF without RB, while including RB’- students- entities likened to those who settle, despite the reaction of their stomachs, for a harmful ‘Hungry-man’ stew.
& The f.o.f.- Elana #2;
“One would have to ask him (Howard Caretr) what he finds spiritual about life at Isis”.
There is nothing spiritual about life at Isis, with the presence of the teacher or without.
If people congregate around some symbols of what’s sacred to them, behave in a way that ispires them, use certain words that seem to them meaningful, together revere people (the RBs) who according to them have a link to the ‘divine’; all that has to do with communal identity which can be a very sweeping emotion, it makes them feel that they belong, are socially approved, connected, comforted, inspired together. It is probably a normal human need; mostly instinctive & unconscious. This need is answered in secular forms & in the various religious forms.
But ‘spirituality’ is entirely a personal connection to the mystery of being alive. You are alone in a unique connection to the unknown. There is no ‘Robert Burton’ there. Nor ‘school’ or ‘third line’. The communal mannerisms are seen from this perspective as a joke; symbols & forms that are used to inspire are experienced by the sincere individual who desires to live authentically as caricatures of ‘spirituality’. For such a person there is nothing special about RB and his pretentions & fantasies are not particularly shocking; he is seen as an oddity, an absurdity, a grotesque that demonstrates human weaknesses and some aspects of human nature.
He is almost irrelevant to the ‘Work’ of such an individual. It is unfortunate that lately he is taking/given so much space.
People are constantly pressured to conform in order to ‘belong’, and most of the normal ones do, and they are rewarded for it. Most start seeing themselves through other peoples’ eyes. That’s life. Those who do not conform are ‘rebels’,’heretics’,’criminals’, ‘saints’ or simply independents. In a sense the more true to himself a ‘spiritual’ person is, the more ‘heretical’ & ‘independent’ he is. (he may be hiding as well).
What initially attracted me to the Work was the realization that in order to create an antidote to that invasive pressure that molds one into a cultural- social human-thing from inside out, I have to look inside and learn to free myself internally. Be as flexile as possible in terms of the emotional & mental reactions to external & internal events.
The tools & the practices were valuable and still are. So is the context of the school & the sincerity of many of the students it has attracted.
Unfortunately, even among the sincere ones, many have been dazzled by RB’s megalomania magnet and strayed for a long while (or forever); this cannot be helped. It probably would have happened in any other powerful social context to those individuals.
But those who are capable of personal growth and are able to reestablish & maintain their internal independence can continue to use this environement for experimentation, learning about the practices, comparing in person, face -to -face, notes about the Work with friends & students who have different sensibilities, share observations & understandings even with the ‘horrible’ fundamentalists.
The real meaning of the school is entirely within the psyche of the individual. when I recognize sincere ‘Work’ of another person I am humbled, encouraged and inforned by his insights.
That’s where the ‘spirituality’ manifests.
I’m sure you can run everywhere, ocassionaly, into someone with experience in other spiritual practices, but in the school we benefit from the concentration and the coming together of many individuals with similiar aims.
May 24, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Rita,
thank you for the story on post 75!
A little humor is good and I truly hope your friend was able to go to RB’s upper cheeks!
The whole scene even though dramatic in some ways is hilarious, sometimes even the “god” does not get what it wants!
It is interesting how we students learned RB language and the use of “Dear”. Amazingly patronizing!
What an old rotten dirty man is this RB!
May 24, 2007 at 5:45 pm
Hello Half Life
Thanks for your clarifying comments on spirituality and religion, and how both are manifested in the form of the FOF and elsewhere.
“I’m sure you can run everywhere, ocassionaly, into someone with experience in other spiritual practices, but in the school we benefit from the concentration and the coming together of many individuals with similiar aims.”
It’s not just “occasionally” that you run into people with experience in other spiritual practices…other spiritual practices have blossomed in the world at this time; you might be surprised if you looked around. So discrimination becomes even more important.
You rightly value your dear friends with similar aims, your “sangha,” to use a Sanskrit term. You focus on the admittedly wonderful aspect of the FOF, which others here have mentioned: the community of sincere people of like hearts and mind, wishing to awaken.
The question is, could this community of friends continue on its own, without RB? Because you must realize that your participation in the school (with your money, your time, your precious life force) directly supports Robert and his lifestyle, enabling his abuse to continue. And it is abuse: the abuse of power. That should, by now, be abundantly clear from the many stories posted here.
If you are sincere, you will examine this contradiction in your heart of hearts. I would be interested in the results of your inquiry along these lines.
The former members now posting on this blog offer a glimpse of the possibilities beyond the Fellowship. Some of them might be worthy of your investigation, should you decide that your support of RB is no longer in harmony with your spiritual path.
May we all realize our heart’s desire in this lifetime.
May 24, 2007 at 5:51 pm
Sometimes you hear something and it stays with you forever.
One time while walking down(up) a hallway at a teaching center a passerby said,”how did you get here”?
I said, “I rode my bike”. The passerby then responded, “what kind of motorcycle is it”?
At that moment or sometime later in the same
hallway the passerby’s girlfriend met me with clinched fists in a boxing stance.
I actually rode a bicycle. I think what happened is being a new student and fearful, I was prepared and ready.
I am an avid of Gurdjieff and a cult joiner. However, since reading this blog that’s agog negatively or postive about one thing or another, as they say in mystery theater, “as the pendulum swings” I have decided thus:
The next group I join is the Bandido motorcycle cult. I like the way my nape hairs stand at “attention” when I am in their midst.
That never happened in the fellowship of no friends
May 24, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Regarding the splendid PARTY planned for Saturday at the North Columbia Cultural Center…
It occurs to me that I’ve made a wrong assumption—that folks who might want to come to the Sunday brunch would be there on Saturday to pick up directions.
So, I invite people who can only come on Sunday to e-mail me at: nancyames (at) accessbee (dot) com for directions (this step is necessary because the host does wants to maintain privacy as far as possible).
Like the party, the brunch is open to ALL. It is starts at 11 a.m., runs to 4 p.m.
Thank you, all posters, for your many, varied, and always interesting contributions. My education continues, my understanding grows… And many thanks to the Sheik, for your hard work these many months.
With love to all,
Ames
May 24, 2007 at 6:26 pm
From Elena
“I’ve been thinking about your question because it is also a question my daughter has. She can’t believe that a housewife, looking after an 87 year old lady with alzheimer’s, could be right, although she finds the arguments quite reasonable. ”
What if we are learning to value the subtle, the not so apparent, the small voice of conscience? To marry the great voice of consciousness with the deep voice of conscience? What if the quiet soul with a fully functioning conscience is the ‘higher’ that the powerful person with a diminished or non existent conscience (the ‘lower’) who can’t see the higher. Does the search for the miraculous lead us always to the loudest hawker?…..Ooooo, your third state is just so impressive!!!!
……
Don Juan Says: #69 fascinating post – thank you
……..
Hava Nagillah Says:
I got this yesterday from a fellow student. It is from an old tradition: “This is no time to delay, but strike with the sling, stone after stone without interruption, one after the other.”
So you think this blog is some kind of battle field? I for one have no desire to fight with you – and you have your meetings etc so why are you here? I can see breaking a rule out of curiosity, but you appear very incurious and have it all figured out. Why are you breaking the rule? Maybe if I was named Alan in Wonder(land) or better yet Alan W you would deign to comment. Who gave you permission to post??
WHO GAVE YOU PERMISSION TO POST?
May 24, 2007 at 6:48 pm
Hava Nagillah (56) Says:
“I got this yesterday from a fellow student. It is from an old tradition: This is no time to delay, but strike with the sling, stone after stone without interruption, one after the other. Goliath is big and strong, but he can be defeated stone after stone without interruption.”
I think I understand conceptually what you’re trying to say, something like: The lower self can be defeated by frequently using the sequence. But what does this mean in practice, what is your personal experience? Have you defeated Goliath? Do you observe any change in yourself that you can describe?
Half Life (79): You admit that Robert Burton is corrupt and an ineffective teacher, but choose to remain in the Fellowship of Friends because “I’m sure you can run everywhere, ocassionaly, into someone with experience in other spiritual practices, but in the school we benefit from the concentration and the coming together of many individuals with similiar aims.”
You might want to check out some other spiritual groups. There are so many of these around these days. The ones I’ve visited have been infinitely superior to the FOF – not only do they have “many individuals with similar aims” but they have effective, highly principled teachers.
Also, your “independent” stance does not protect you from the pervasive corruption in the FOF, although you may imagine it does. My guess is that you have other unspoken reasons for remaining?
RB
May 24, 2007 at 6:56 pm
To Unoanimo
Is the luna di miele over?
Did my reference to MM stir up such a stew?
…I just wanted to give Elena a few “story before the story” coordinates since most ‘actors’ in and out and on the fence of the Fellowship are painfully uninformed as to the forces and teachers teaching the real live actors and actresses they watch and worship on the altar of their TV screens whilst growing roots into their couch becoming potatoes destined to be sliced and diced for that great goulash that, according to some, may be stewing on the moon. (I would rap this for you if we were face to face.)
Dunque, amore, carissimo Unoanimo with a capital U!
Here’s a few for you from the man who turned the spot light on the anim in your name:
-A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.
Carl Jung
-A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
Carl Jung
-Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
Carl Jung
-The most important psychological task humankind faces in our century is the reintegration of the feminine divine into our religious experience.
Carl Jung
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
Carl Jung
-If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.
Carl Jung
-The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Carl Jung
So, amore, carissimo Unoanimo, I’m goin’ to put on my toe shoes before I step out there on the highwire so I don’t get blisters on my feet.
Bacci and much love,
Shelley
May 24, 2007 at 6:59 pm
I had a thought today as I was walking down the road …
Good householder, resonsible being, obyvatel …
If RB was kicked out himeself would he be able to meet the most basic responsibility of a man … to provide for youself.
In plain english, get a job, pay the bills, and look after your family – like the rest of us. Does that say anything about being?
May 24, 2007 at 8:19 pm
58 Charles R:
“Come to the big party at South Columbia on Saturday!…
Charles
P.S. Oh, I’ll be there for sure.”
Jill and I will be there too. Look forward to seeing all on Saturday.
JoelF
May 24, 2007 at 9:07 pm
To Hava Nagillah 10/77 who said
‘I am writing here as a balance for surfers who enter this forum and might get a one-sided impression.’
It looks like our aims are the same, then – a balanced view of the Fellowship of Friends.
What you don’t know yet – and may not understand for years – is that you who have been tasked with reading and responding to this blog are the lucky ones.
Why?
Any time RB is faced with a crisis (such as the IRS challenge and the various lawsuits) he puts together a defense team. As a side effect of that effort, those team members are forced (allowed) to see the real RB and Fellowship of Friends, not the imaginary teacher and Fourth Way school that we all loved. As a result, almost every one of those members then abandon the ship. And remember, these ‘quitters’ are the ‘strongest students,’ ‘the inner circle,’ the ‘rock stars’ (Miles B., Carl M., Charles R., James B. come to mind).
So, congratulations, Hava Nagillah, your day is coming!
Now, two questions for you:
1) ‘…most of what is written here… has no substance to defend against.’
What written here DOES need to be defended against?
2) ‘The ship is far from sinking.’
How many people are members of the Fellowship of Friends today versus six months ago?
Thanks for sharing – I wish you well.
May 24, 2007 at 9:12 pm
Tim Campion (post 33) wrote:
“Howard Carter #19
“It’s a little like sharing an elevator ride with a stranger and then making an evaluation of what kind of person they are.”
Isn’t that exactly what the Fellowship of Friends taught us to do?”
Good point. It’s good to hear from you again Tim.
Also Howard, isn’t that exactly what you are doing in presuming that the average person you run across in Victoria Station hasn’t done anything for their soul that day? You make that judgment without even the benefit of time in an elevator.
Howard, I personally find your assumptions about people who attend church to be immature, cliched and arrogant. When was the last time you attended church so that you could make this sweeping, generalized observation? It sounds like an attitude you formed as an adolescent, which you never bothered to investigate further.
I happen to be a regular church goer. I have been a Presbyterian all my life. I attended church while a Fellowship of Friends student, and continue now. The congregation at my church is very progressive, meaning the majority of people do not believe in a literal reading of the Christ story. The congregation is intelligent, thoughtful, compassionate and very open and accepting of other religious ways. The thought of walking through a train station and judging humanity the way you do would horrify them. The people I ACTUALLY see week to week do seek to live their beliefs — as opposed to what sounds like your imagination about what “they” do outside their few hours in church each week.
If this kind of smug, self-satisfied superiority is the fruit of decades of effort in your school — your “all and everything” — you can have it. It’s incredibly sad.
May 24, 2007 at 9:53 pm
I have been hearing a lot of comments about the gathering this weekend. From, “Sounds like great fun!” to “I’d rather stand on my head and pour Drano in my ass.” What say we give the attitudes a rest, and just have some fun? Like Freud used to say, “Sometimes a party is just a party.”
May 24, 2007 at 10:03 pm
No Person (10/14) mentions nearly in passing that one or more programmers at Isis were requested to try and tamper with the blog. Could someone supposedly directly involved confirm or deny this, please?
Without going so far as to hack the blog, it is possible for one of the local Internet service providers run by students (Banana Tree, etc.) to show a fake or sanitized blog, rather than the real thing. I was assured by the network people at my place of employment that this is very easy. One guy says he does it to his roommates all the time.
Sheik, any thoughts about how to guard against this?
May 24, 2007 at 10:42 pm
#78–I’m not aware of Burton having brought anything to the table that he didn’t find somewhere else. According to Rick Ross’s site, Burton adopted the term “feminine influence” from Horn’s group and turned it into “feminine dominance.” http://www.rickross.com/reference/theater/theater21.html
By using the term, which has no basis in fact for being gender-specific, not to mention by trumpeting how he supposedly severed feminine dominance by treating his mother to stony silence on her death bed, Burton demonstrates his continuing weakness in that area. “Overcompensation,” I believe, is the term. Protesting too much. (Kind of like saying about the Fellowship of Friends “Actually it is fast-going and solid more than ever.”)
But I agree with your basic assessment of Burton and his sexual, um, issues. It’s so mundane when seen without the trappings of Fellowship propaganda. I’d be interested in hearing from somone with some experience in the area some theories about why Burton feels driven to have sex obsessively, yet finds so little pleasure in having sex with men who actually prefer the type of sex Burton enjoys. I can only suppose it’s more about power than anything a more normal person would associate with pleasurable sex–if it isn’t to some degree against the other person’s will, it isn’t any fun.
Your point is well-put that “Because this is so far away from normal behaviour, we imagine it could be possibl[e] that he is ‘conscious’.” Precisely. No sane person generally familiar with his behavior, sexual and otherwise, would ever imagine that Burton is anything other than a very sick individual. Most people come to that conclusion sooner or later. But there are always some (and apparently, having run out of recruits in the U.S., the gullible are increasingly found in third world countries) who will choose to take the approach, opposite to that offered by Occam’s Razor, that Burton must be anything but sick–in fact, he is god-like.
Anyone remember James Godbe? I’d been told back in the olden days (I think by Richard Focazio, R.I.P.) that Burton had a genuine crush on James, and urged him to run away with him and leave behind the tiresome students, and James declined. I wonder whether Burton ever found anyone else he truly cared for. In my own experience, his reaction when spurned was indistinguishable from that of a petulent child deprived of a toy.
Half-Life (#79)
You’re obviously a perceptive and thoughtful person who doesn’t buy into much of the nonsense. So I ask you with respect and curiousity: Acknowledging, as you do, that there may be other places where similar methods are practiced, and accepting, if you will, for the sake of discussion that such places do, in fact, exist where there are significant numbers of people with similar aims who are serously working on themselves, why do you choose to remain in a place where, in addition, you have a huge financial burden, the absence of leadership that you can truly respect and use as a model, the karmic issues created by contributing, financially if not otherwise, to a situation that pointlessly does some real harm to at least some people, and the prospect that the community will always be disfunctional in some significant ways? You sound like you seriously value your personal work. Why wouldn’t you try to find a situation that offers the good things with less of the crap?
May 24, 2007 at 10:42 pm
It’s not what people say,it’s what they do.
So, lets have a look at what the person behind ‘Howard Carter’does.
He gets into his car and expresses his pent up rage and anger by driving aggressively and dangerously.I’ve seen him in my rear view mirror on several occasions,his face contorted and eyes bulging as he sits on my tail before recklessly overtaking at the first (often illegal-double yellow line )opportunity on the small winding roads here in the Oregon House area.
A couple of years ago he was arrested for causing an accident that killed three people and charged with manslaughter.He had pulled out from behind a vehicle ( probably to overtake but his story to the cops was that he had been looking at the ‘Scenery’and not realised he’d drifted across the center line….) and a vehicle coming towards him swerved to avoid him and hit the other car instead killing three members of a Yuba City family. When we heard about it several people including myself hoped he would get serious jail time.He is a dangerous lunatic.
However,the charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence of dangerous driving.
He STILL drives in the same manner as before…
There is a sordid sequel to this story regarding the Fellowships handling of and attitude towards the families of the victims ( Linda T. and Abe G. again )but i cannot post the details as it will compromise my ‘source’
May 25, 2007 at 12:58 am
to Hava Nagillah (#56)
“Of course there are many traditions that express the same ideas, but this is not the point. The point is whether you can actualize them throughout your life.”
I agree. However, your post #25, to which I responded in my #36, was:
“Where else have you learn’t to be present if not in the School? How come you know it? Who has taught you that? I could not have achieved it on such practical level anywhere else outside this school, if at all.”
I responded that I didn’t learn it in the “School,” have been able to practice it long after leaving the “School,” and know many other people who have had the same experience. Your posts tell us that you, on the other hand, learned about it in the “School,” and don’t believe you could have done so as well somewhere else. Fair enough–that says something about your personal experience and your personal beliefs, and nothing about anyone else or the validity of those beliefs.
Disparaging information that suggests that your personal experience may not reflect all of the opportunities available elsewhere in the world as “magnetic centre stuff” is childish (and your spelling indicates that you’ve adopted RB’s vain desire to ape the British).
Frankly, you sound like a new student, probably from outside the U.S., full of the enthusiasm of the recent convert and furiously protecting not the “School,” but your own identification with it.
I also agree that the “School” doesn’t need your protection. Your angry defensiveness is not much of an advertisement for the effectiveness of the “School.” Is this really what the Fellowship of Friends is churning out these days? Sad.
May 25, 2007 at 1:45 am
Hello all—
Learning about this blog reminded me that I had some detailed notes from a conversation with Robert thirteen years ago. It seems worth sharing in this wild west of free speech and truth telling. Some background: I had been in the FOF for twenty-one years when this conversation took place. My husband and I had led centers in Palo Alto, Zurich, and Rome. We spent five years in Europe. At the time of this conversation, I was recovering from cancer and couldn’t stand on FOF ceremony anymore; my voice—long absent—was waking up.
On 2/24/94 at 10:00 a.m., Robert called me at home. His call was a surprise, but there was a pad by the phone and I scribbled as we talked. Afterwards, I called my husband, Patrick, at work. “Susie”, he said, “While this is so fresh, write it all down. Word for word if you can. Years from now, you will need to know that what you did was right and good and whole. Write it down and save it. For yourself.”
It is tempting to edit this now—to make Robert seem a little stranger, me a little more confident. But I’m not going to do that. The strength of the simple truth is that everybody gets to come to their own conclusions. People who have not had a long conversation with Robert in awhile may be surprised at his inability to do anything more than repeat decades old platitudes. See for yourself if you think it is really worth paying for this:
RB: I’ve just returned from Rome. There were many shocks this time. I missed Lea, and of course, you. We are returning to European Art, we had to study Asian art for a time so that we wouldn’t draw a blank after 2006 when all the world’s treasures come to Renaissance.
ST: I heard some details of the trip from Kristina on her way back home.
RB: Yes, we had many shocks in Milan. A student’s mother had consumed some acid in order to end her life. I said that the shock indicated that acid rain would begin falling on humanity and two days later it rained, an actual acid rain. (more talk about the student and dinners in Milan…..)
ST: I imagine that you are calling because you heard that I was thinking about leaving the school.
RB: Well, I really just called to see how you were doing and also I did hear that you were experiencing some difficulty. (mention of the Dante class, wondering if I was coming up over the weekend….)
ST: Yes, there are a number of growing conflicts in me now related to my commitment to the school.
RB: Well, what is your relationship to influence C?
ST: I believe that I have a connection to C influence now that is my own. I feel very connected to help from the gods. In this past year I have received such specific help that there is no question about it anymore.
RB: Yes, I don’t doubt that you have a connection. The thing is though that there must be three lines of work. You can’t just take, you have to give C influence something for their help.
ST: Robert, I deeply understand payment and efforts and the need to carve out an emotional life. Whether I stay or go I have to do this. But I’m not interested in all the prophesies and in the movement towards Renaissance being a closed community. It’s interesting to me that although C influence is deeply personal for you, it allows you to live in such a way that you don’t have to take any real responsibility for anything.
RB: We are not a closed community, people from Life come and go there a lot, especially to the Winery.
ST: That’s not the kind of closed I’m talking about.
RB: You are somewhat sentimental about Life. Joel is like that too. You want to believe that C influence is for everyone, but they are not. The laws are very hard. Many are called, but few are chosen. (some other quotes about Life and how they are destined to suffer…..)
ST: You gave me that photograph the first time you met me, I’m sure it’s true to some extent, however, I’m not a fool. You talk to me as though I was a fool. It doesn’t take higher centers to see that there are descending octaves all around us.
RB: (Some acknowledgement of that….some loosening up….) Yes, humanity will suffer. Russia and the U.S. have nuclear bombs, etc…(then the story of his mother’s death, ARK KAN C, strange disconnect…..)
ST: It’s very hard for me to continue to hear these things over and over again. You have been my teacher and you have opened my heart and my mind to hundreds of new things. Now, it’s almost like the repeat of all these stories is closing my heart to you. You know, opened it at one level and now closing it at another?
RB: Yes, it is odd, isn’t it? This may be the last conversation we ever have, so I need to say everything I can. I want to feel that, as a teacher, I have done all I can. However, I like the tone of this conversation. It’s like friends talking. You are calm. I am calm.
ST: I am trying to be present and I’m experiencing no fear.
RB: Good. Fear is not self-remembering, nor is power self-remembering.
ST: I want to ask you something important and personal for me. (pause to calm myself…). If I leave the school and discover that I have made a mistake, may I return?
RB: Oh yes, of course. You can pay the re-entry fee of $1,500.00 and return. But I don’t advise it, the odds are only one in forty of staying again. It’s very very bad to lose a school..(some heavy statements about Life People about to be expunged…). When Miles left, sixty people left the school, now this, some people will lose the way, but it is necessary to prune the vine to prepare for 1998.
ST: How do you know what people do when they leave? How can you be sure that they are losers?
RB: I am an experienced teacher and I have been working half of my life with influence C. I understand these things. It’s curious that the two centers that are having the most difficulty are Marin and Palo Alto—places where people are concerned with their careers and with money. The instinctive center begins to take over.
ST: I don’t think this is about people’s instinctive centers. This is mostly an emotional process of loss of confidence in the way the school is working. I have talked to a number of students at Renaissance who would leave too, but they can’t. It’s a little like a poker game where the longer you sit at the table the more you resist folding and walking away—you have so much invested.
RB: That is a good analogy, I like it.
ST: For someone like me, it’s also hard to see that some of the people that I thinking are growing and evolving are leaving, like Molly, whereas others like Helga stay in a very narrow groove.
RB: The school is larger now than it has ever been. And our students re doing so well. Girard is doing very well. Kristina and Peter and Colin are all here.
ST: Yes, you have your ark. You will always have enough people to keep your own ark afloat. I don’t know if it’s my ark anymore.
RB:(Becoming defensive) When you are offered a life boat, you don’t question the color of the raft.
ST: I want to change the subject as long as you have called me and I am very appreciative of the call. I wondered if you’d tell me what you see in me—I mean changes that you see after twenty years with you? This is such an emotional and positive time for me. This past year was the best and the worst of my life.
RB: Oh really? What happened?
ST: You did call me after surgery, remember? I had cancer. You called me in the hospital. (really flustered….can’t believe he forgot….).
RB: I see. Well I’ve lost many of my women students to breast cancer. The last time I saw you…(struggling to answer my question….), you looked healthy, seemed emotionally good and balanced, if anything I would say that maybe you seemed a bit, you know, too successful. Maybe too much A influence.
ST: (Laughter….couldn’t help it….) Well, they took that all away pretty quick, so I’m not nearly so successful anymore. And it wasn’t breast cancer. Well anyway Robert, we pay all our teaching payments in advance, so if I have a re-entry fee, I’ll have a big credit.
RB: (Very surprised) You mean that you are still paying? So even though you don’t go to meetings now, you are still paying? Well, I didn’t realize that, that’s good then.
ST: Yes, you see, it’s not the instinctive center. There’s something else I want to ask you. I haven’t said that I’m leaving yet. This is not a trivial inquiry for me. Please let me do this in my own time.
RB: No one is pushing you out dear.
ST: No, but you have established an attitude about people leaving the school permeates throughout.
RB: I used to make jokes, but then I asked myself if that was necessary. Now I don’t talk about my former students, I just say that they have lost the way and that the instinctive center has won and….(more of the same.)
ST: This is what I mean. You have set the tone. It all comes from you. Robert, you may be able to keep more of your more mature people if you disallow this kind of talk about those who move on. This is just one thing, there are lots of things like that.
RB: Well goodness, I am running out of steam.
ST: I am too. Thank you for calling.
RB: Goodbye dear.
ST: Bye.
Following this phone call, Robert told people, “Susan T. has left the school.” I didn’t get to do it in my own time because my friends wouldn’t speak with me.
Only Abraham G. called. He huffed and puffed and said I was fomenting rebellion; a junta. A junta?? I am not making this up.
Old friends, if any of you are wondering how you will ever survive leaving, you won’t know how strong you are until you do. There may be hard days; how does a person prepare for being “expunged?” But you’ll probably be okay. If you are like me, you’ll have the best days of your life. What is on the line is integrity, that and maybe some real unconditional love, if you are lucky.
I wish you all that and more.
See you down the road,
Susie T.
May 25, 2007 at 1:48 am
Thanks Blogbuster for Post #1–(and Remember no more late fees—EVER!!!)
I am going to answer ALL your questions:
Is it possible that RB suffers from a Narcissistic Personality Disorder and from a Compulsive Sexual Behaviour?
ABSOLUTELY! RIGHT ON! This is totally possible, not likely, but theoretically possible-yes absolutely. and the chances of that are about 100%
Could it be true for him, what is true for so many other cult leaders who believe to be superior to others?
AGAIN YOU ARE RIGHT ON–HE GOT IT RIGHT OUT OF THE HOW TO BE A CULT LEADER MANUAL! the trick is not everyone is able to buy a copy of this book…you have to show your membership card to even buy it! Maybe his old copy can be bought by Kiran, it looks like he needs a few lessons in how to get started.
We do not want to spread rumours, so we need your help.–THANKS, THAT is why I am here!
Please post a few videos of RB holding meetings on youtube, so we can show them to some professional psychiatrist.
NO NEED–this has been done, they concur in your assessment 100%. BTW I am working on some YOuTUbe material–will be posted soon so stay tuned!
Is it true that RB mentioned being abused sexually by his mother and elder sister?
FALSE! But it seems that there is a lot of sexual abuse in the FOF–just read how Kiran was abusing the love of his wife by not keeping his hands off the T&A of every girl that innocently came close to him! Just read how DM & MA sold vouchers for sex! where do you think they learned all of this?????COPYCATS????
Did his father leave the family early?
YES but to go to work!
Was he raised with a stepfather, who was a butcher?
NO–(Question: is this really really important?)
Did he lose his job as a school teacher because of his sexual orientation?
NO–wrong again.
Did Alex Horn kick him out of his group because of his sexual orientation?
NO. Let’s not even go there!
Can one say that he is overly preoccupied with sexual activity?
DUH! Now you really got me!
Is his oral fixation possibly linked to an overwhelming and dominant mother?
Ask his mother! (wait there is another question)
Did he refuse to go to his mothers funeral?
NO, he changed his mind when he was on his way there…
Did Robert have hundreds of lovers but never a friend?
NO–false, it is thousands of lovers and hundreds of true enemies! Read how Joel “Frenchfry–the Weasel” Friedlander was so scared he did not even dare to approach the guy! Read how Charles Randall and Sandra and all the other A-holes bloggers such as Bruce “Shitface” the binder, here wrote nice thank you cards and letters! His true friends are just 5 in number: Howard Carter, Siddiq, Just Observing, Girard and Asaf. Nice Group! Wonder how their discussions sounds! I prefer to stay in this blog!
Is he HIV-positive? NO–but that does not mean that people should not take precautions! Engage in unprotected sex at your own risk–IDIOTS! My word of advise to all the “participants/victims” out there: WTF are you thinking? You are an idiot if you do! Why they dont hand out condoms with the viagra beats me!
I am sure you can help to clarify and destroy any rumours and lies with facts and humour.
YOU GOT IT! LIVE ON HAPPILY EVER AFTER!
Sorry Folks, I dont have the gift of poetry like our friend unanimous…
May 25, 2007 at 1:55 am
To Kiran, I hope you dont lump me in with what you call the “aggressive, negative, desperate children like “RSVP” or “More Rumors & Lies “ left to defend the sinking ship.”
I seek to dispell rumours & lies when people who get hurt by your falsehoods! You are one of the biggest bullshit artists on this blog and I think deep down you know it!
None of the little pictures can hide the shallow pathetic soul that thrives on negativity and seeks justification and ultimately love by whatever means you can!
you have truly been exposed for who you really are and your recent postings have nothing new, nothing original and again all they do is show your real nature–a man without integrity, soulless, asleep–a monkey in white clothes.
May 25, 2007 at 2:28 am
“I love you Howard Carter and with all my being, from the depths of both my hearts, welcome your present soul into this third dimensional plane of conscious friends, conscience and just plain love for the space that is you, before our mothers and fathers gave us a name, thus beginning the long and splendorous collecting and severing of millions of intellectual anchors that keep us from rising to the occasion of our hearts…..etc ad nauseum.”
Hey, why don’t you get a day job or at least take a few classes in creative writing?
Sounds like you have read a few too many EJ Gold books.
Love 2 U 2
May 25, 2007 at 2:57 am
To Unoanimo,
How long has it been since you were a member of the FoF?
May 25, 2007 at 3:11 am
“and imagining myself uninfluenced by it, were a convenient way (dare I say ‘buffer’)”
It is interesting, is it not, that as a Center Director, when Juan sees the contradictions both within the so-called System (Of which there is none. but that is for
another Forum entirely with really Cult-ured intellectuals) and within Juan’s RealSelf, the gut reaction is to buffer, thereby intentionally stopping the right work of that “still, small voice within'” the one Juan would call CONSCIENCE. Think about it.
“I only permitted myself these sojourns away from The System after I ‘found out’ about RB.”
So, Sandy, was it the fact that RB had been buffering his own weirdness or was it that your own weirdness had trumped his?
“As
a result
of these inner explorations, I began to question the usefulness of The System as practiced in The Fellowship of Friends for my work.
Altho
Iwas involved in some kind of therapy or the other for my final ten years in Fof, I never mentioned the Fellowship to any therapists I worked with”
So, you remained in the FOF as a Center Director,also,during this time of soul-searching for 10 years…….?!?!?
Talk about buffers. I remember when Dennis became ill and you asked R for a leave of absence and it was denied, I wondered WHY stay?
It was common knowledge you were involved with all these therapies that worked with the EXPRESSION of negative emotions and yet you still wished to be attached to the FOF? Why? Hmmmm, maybe buffers?
May 25, 2007 at 3:19 am
“I just wanted to give Elena a few “story before the story” coordinates since most ‘actors’ in and out and on the fence of the Fellowship are painfully uninformed as to the forces and teachers teaching the real live actors and actresses they watch and worship on the altar of their TV screens whilst growing roots into their couch becoming potatoes destined to be sliced and diced for that great goulash that, according to some, may be…”
Shelly, you and Unoanimo were made for each other. Caro Mio, a web romance! Guess you’re not on the boards, huh Shelly??
May 25, 2007 at 3:51 am
People have been so brave and generous with their posts that I’m inspired to try to put myself a little bit more out there. Often, I just feel that if you wait long enough, it all gets said, but that is feeling a wee bit passive now at this most unusual juncture of Fellowship of Friends meets blog.
I was very young, lonely and quite sad about the condition of the world in the early 70’s when I was introduced to the fof by a much older man who introduced me to the workbooks. The intellectual stimulation of, what was to me, a whole new way of looking at things really pushed the right buttons. I was introduced to things I knew very little about but again, the receptors were there: fine art, good food, the craft of labor, classical music and a comforting connection to the past. I was comfortable in the large family-like atmosphere, complete with a cold, distant father-figure. Initially, I experienced an emotional setback when it became obvious he was competing with me for the nice boy I met, and then, soon thereafter, when I was told that no female would become conscious in the group. I was dejected and angry for a long time, wanting to succeed in this new milieu, but being “held back” by my conscience (that earlier in my life had saved me from another organized religion). I remember the day I had a strong talk with myself and “decided” that I wasn’t going to evolve if my old parts kept getting in my way. Placing Jiminy Cricket on hold (the willing suspension of disbelief) while I checked out this new and seductive potential seemed my only alternative to leaving and going back to, to what?
After that, things sailed along much more smoothly and, I would have to say, those years were very happy for many parts of me, with less frequent disturbances from my moribund conscience. I’m not proud of many of my actions during that time: my need to be important, the subliminal expression of my negative emotions that had no natural outlet, my selfishness and cruelty. I’d longed for, and bought at the expense of conscience, a feeling of certainty of being on the right path, a “signs and wonders verification” that there was a god (or many gods) that were in control even if I wasn’t, and the feeling (however imaginary) that I was safe. Leaving ten years later was a painful choice between my love for my husband and the “security” of the group. I was like an angry child who was forced to awaken too soon from peaceful slumber and while appreciative, eventually, of having my life back, was in the same pickle as before. Then the work to grow up began.
I wouldn’t say to anyone who is still in the Fellowship of Friends that things will be easier out than in. They might be, then again, they might be much more difficult in some ways. Different for different people. What I’m trying to do now is just love my family and friends, ask hard questions, face my fears, choose uncomfortable truths over convenient lies, do no harm, do more good (and not get too depressed about all the stuff that’s way, way outside my control.)
It’s apparent to me that I still have some processing to do since I keep putting off other things I need and want to take care of, to read this blog. Thanks to the Sheik for maintaining this vehicle for communication that seems to be serving so many different purposes for different people.
May 25, 2007 at 3:57 am
Assuming that I am the “friend V.” referred to in post #14, the story is completely untrue. I was not asked by Kevin or anyone else to do anything illegal or even questionable.
– Vladimir Strugatsky
May 25, 2007 at 4:12 am
Will whoever is pretending to be a Fellowship student by posting as “Rumours & Lies” please stop? It’s not necessary to try to embarrass the Fellowship by posting bogus rants to try to make it seem that students are sneering, foaming-at-the-mouth crazies who can’t control themselves. Fellowship students know very well how to conduct themselves like adults, and whoever is pretending otherwise isn’t going to fool anyone. Come on, now–grow up! (Who’s the prankster? Is it you, Don Juan? Exlax, you potty-mouth? Shelley the actress?)
May 25, 2007 at 4:15 am
These “members” posts are truly unbelievable. What ugly, ignorant and self-satisfied people. You guys don’t have a clue. If it was my “ark” I’d have to throw you the f**k off as being way too diseased. I am so happy that I am here, and you are there. FOF keeps the lunatics off the street, somewhat.
May 25, 2007 at 4:17 am
Caroline Casey
Visionary Activist
Give a listen…
I hope it helps those who have recently left.
http://kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=20389
cheers,
Shelley
May 25, 2007 at 4:18 am
Re # 10/94 about “Howard Carter – reckless driver” – hi “View from the real world” – even if this story is true, it has nothing to do with the validity of Howard Carter’s opinions as expressed here. It seems you are trying to portray him as a mean person so that people would be more likely to “negatively identify” with him. Please don’t do that. Not necessary.
I, for one, could live without the personal attacks and/or arrogant venom spewing on this blog (Exlax, RSVP, etc.). But still, it beats censorship any day.
May 25, 2007 at 4:45 am
Dear Susie T and others.
Thanks for your post..nothing is new…13 years ago thanks for sharing and love to you all.
Thanks to you sheik and other.
Keep your back straight and much joy.
May 25, 2007 at 4:51 am
Post #93:( I think by Richard Facazio R.I.P.).
This is the second time a reference was made about Richard the hair-dresser’s passing.
It’s none of my business but I’m curious. How many others from Richard’s days have passed on?
And, what was that guy’s name who lived on Lake or 10th avenue in San Francisco. He had a mowing service. Somebody mentioned him, also.
May 25, 2007 at 5:07 am
#97
Actually, I never sent RB a letter or card thanking him. Neither did he send me a letter or card to thank me.
Shitface ( I like that).
May 25, 2007 at 5:41 am
I enjoy so much the postings of the people I knew. Joseph, Ames, Ralph, Whale Rider?, Susan T, etc.
I’ve studied some philosophy since I left and have a little to contribute: Life is so packed with rich experiences, whether you get them inside the group or out in “life”. Learn to be happy and appreciate your moments.
The only problem that I personally came to have with the group was that it was founded on falsehoods. Many of us there were sincerely trying to build a conscious community. When I discovered the hypocrisy within the leadership, I realized I couldn’t build my life and beliefs upon that foundation.
I have been humbled by failures in my own life and have learned to judge no one. We each have our own lessons of life.
I do believe, however, that we should all avoid being ruled by our fears. That seems to be a universal truth. Fear inhibits consciousness.
So if your reasons for doing whatever you’re doing are motivated by fears, then maybe you should rediscover your passion and thrill for adventure!
May 25, 2007 at 6:30 am
Gee, RSVP! Lighten up!
We get the idea – you don’t like Kiran. It’s OK. No reason to get so nasty. Write him a personal letter if you must, his e-mail is available. What’s with this public bashing while being anonymous yourself? Very noble.
Are you a student? Then what happened with “non-expression of negativity” aim? Or, as long as you do it on the blog anonymously – it’s OK?
It amuses me how mad and angry some current members get in their postings… I guess you play positive and nice on the Property, or in the Teaching House while being watched, and then you come home and kick your dog…
May 25, 2007 at 8:34 am
Innernaut, hope you are feeling better.
May 25, 2007 at 8:39 am
Well, I’ll be there on Saturday.
Meantime, thanks to all the known and unknown who have posted their insights on this web-log. It is time.
Was really holding out about the party, hoping that the Master of Bullshit would announce his intended Presence there. However, the Master seems to have folded his cards due to the heavy competition in BS; he acknowledged he was out of his league. Or, was it a she, the Mistress of Bullshit?
Dear Ames: sorry to be such a late starter, but I’ll bring plenty of food, and gin enough for myself and more, as usual. XXOO. Hope you’re feeling better.
By the way, IMPORTANT, some apologist for the “system” recently posted some nonsense about a few moments of the so-called third state making up for years of nightmares, or something like that. It clearly indicated that the poor soul had no idea about higher states at all–as may be the case of many sincere, decent people who have been playing the part for all these many years.
Someone who can navigate around this blog (I can’t manage this technological feat myself, being old, drunk, etc.)..someone could profitably pursue the topic of bogus (effort-driven) higher state seeking. One of the reasons I left was this misunderstanding (or mis-guidance)in the FOF that one was attempting to “create” higher centers somehow floating above one’s cranium that belonged to oneself and thereby perpetuated one’s individual existence. All the ages old “wisdom” I have encountered elsewhere (Advaita, etc.) indicates the opposite tactic: the letting go of anything self-created, so that ALL (I AM) can enter the space that has been finally vacated.
Well, this is my first post; may well be my last, but “it is time.” Warmest regards to all,
Janet Marchant
May 25, 2007 at 9:25 am
To alice in wonder: 10/59,
“Howard Carter, why are you posting? You know you are breaking the official rule.”
As far as I know there is no official rule, just a suggestion from Girard; one that I happen to concur with.
There are several people on this blog who would like nothing better than to see the FoF distroyed, or changed beyond recognition. And those people are using their time and energy towards that end, even if its in a virtual way, by writing what they write and supporting others who write in a simliar vein.
Since there are adversaries of the school who feel like that I feel compelled to know that adversary better. It is the first rule in conflicts. There is no better way to know the mind set of these individuals than to post. Hopefully I can take what is needed and not dally any longer than necessary. I also hope I am not encouraging other current students to follow this method; its not for everyone.
I don’t really have anything against anyone here; some of the ones who use their own name I knew and liked well. Others who post anonymously I’m sure I also knew, and probably liked.
I don’t feel particularly annoyed or disappointed by the negative responses. Several here see me as their adversary. I don’t take it personal; we are on different sides of a big issue. I just try not to lose energy to any of it, as long as I am involved.
It helps to know its a play, every word of it written long ago.
May 25, 2007 at 9:36 am
In Reply to Post #86/9 (Shelly M.) and #100/9 (H.C.)
H.C. you wrote ~
“To Unoanimo,
How long has it been since you were a member of the FoF?”
____________________________________
Be it known H.C., this is my last post to you, not to seem dark or anything, simply, I must focus on finding Whalerider’s toaster; thusly I must sever at least two or three ‘subjects of the court’ of equal importance to me as conscious toasters are.
Does your toaster grind coffee beans?
To answer your question ~
Who ever said I was in the Fellowship of Friends? Who ever said I was not in the Fellowship of Friends?
You won’t find it in ‘my’ Posts.
Who ever thought that anyone with a functioning Thalamus and radiates similar to a Plutonium trail, as all anonymous posters here do, would give a Fellowship of Friends bloodhound information like that…
I prefer to rub raw onions on my body and pole vault over barbed wire and raging streams to stay your nose’s abilities.
Remember the immortal words of the ‘goat news reporter’ of the Muppets?
“No ganews is good ganews.”
Ganew you later Howard.
_______________________________________
Hello Shelly:
Thank you. Nope, your post about M.M. did not offend, it was simply a personal experience I had watching her performing for American Korean war soldiers, simply a profound thing to witness… I rarely see such incredible contrasts, I like contrasts.
The rap thing has been on my mind; would love to get down a FoF Rap hit; yes, that’s the 7 of hearts all right…It was simply a joke, it’s when we believe it, then it turns.
I’m trying to figure out a way to communicate or should I say that I am working on taking this Fellowship of Friends thing ‘outside the box’ and of course, trying to put more time into finding Whalerider’s toaster.
The blog is no dim light for sure, a glossary would be nice. Yet, I sense that it will eventually begin to ‘curve’, if you know what I mean…
Something tangible, something official needs to happen to bring all this energy into some level of being so to somewhere stand for a change in standard: it’s certainly implied in here enough,
it would be no Herculean effort on my part or anyone’s to start directing organizations connected to the Fellowship of Friends to this blog and visa versa,
its not a point of revenge, simply, as I sense it, its education and I don’t mean fourth way education, simple essence standards laid down for all to consider applicable to their needs or not.
I don’t want to sound ‘dictator-like’, its an emotional thing. I have already launched a few ‘beacons’ of significant radiance;
can anyone share if they are working towards bringing some form of ‘standard change’ to the initial introduction available to the Fellowship of Friends, both on the web (other than the obvious Wikipedia and Rick Ross sites) and outside cyber space?
For instance, the SF and Sacramento Ballet companies? I’m sure their Board of Directors would like to read the sealed court case involving Robert Burton and Troy Buzbee before writing their ‘teaching payment’ check.
To me, allot may seem ‘ruthless’, yet, well, so what, let them wiggle all they want, if you’re game for being on a hook from the beginning of the Fellowship of Friends fishing trip, how is it that they’re complaining for having assisted ‘catching a big one’ at the end?
Thank you Shelley for your emotion; it’s really great to have a new friend that’s not me. I would be interested in seeing some film that you’ve played in: did you go to this year’s C. Film Festival?
Much love to you and your being.
_______________________________________
Love to you All.
P.S. I like neutrality, some hate, some love, some are present and allow others to flow, they see what’s in between the lines, not the lines, the intent, the purpose in the deed, not the deed. I like it when we can share in the subtle, the mood of being, for none of us can rightly say that he or she came along before the other, age is no proof of depth.
May 25, 2007 at 10:36 am
Innernaut, 10/90,
“Howard, I personally find your assumptions about people who attend church to be immature, cliched and arrogant. When was the last time you attended church so that you could make this sweeping, generalized observation?”
Innernaut, how do you know its an assumption? For one thing, if you challenged every wild assumption on this blog you would need an entire congregation to help you address each one.
You took offence with this posting because it touched an area close to you; it’s understandable.
When I’m in Victoria Station, or Grand Central, or the Yuba City mall, I don’t see people trying to remember themselves; people being aware, watchful, contented. I just see people absorbed in what they are doing, or bored. They are not bad people but if you prick them and they will become agitated.
I see people looking “with, not through the eyes”. If that’s what I see, should I deny it or apologize for it?
May 25, 2007 at 11:24 am
to Rumour & Lies 10/97
Thank you for your answers and clarifying things. See you at the party. Looking forward to your youtube video.
May 25, 2007 at 11:42 am
For weeks now, with profound gratitude, fascination, tenderness and amazement, I have sat on the edges of this gathering. I have shared it with a number of former students and we all have been deeply affected. So I bow to all, the Sheik and all of us, awakening souls… camerados on the Great Way. I joined in 1979, ‘took flight’ in 1988 and “… live my life in growing orbits, moving out over the things of the world”, with my years in the Fellowship beautifully (and for a time painfully) at the center of my being.
I would like to share with you 3 blessings that have come my way: a joke, a quote and a poem.
A joke (from I know not where): A diverse group of newly arrived souls was being given a tour of heaven. A magnificent landscape appeared dotted with stupas, prayer flags fluttering, bodhi trees and lotuses. Ahhh they said, this must be the Buddhist heaven. Eventually, the landscape unfolded to glorious valleys and hills with monasteries on the peaks, a cathedral in the valley, a labyrinth of flowers. Oh, so this is the Christian heaven. Soon, the landscape gave way to an undulating plain with rivers and palms, mosques and towering minarets. Yes, such a glorious Islamic heaven. After a time, the group was asked to be very, very quiet, and to tip toe and not make a sound. They moved silently on the far side of a perfect stream, lined with willows and lilies, and could see up on the far hill a spectacular chateau surrounded by vineyards and gardens. Silently they filed past until the chateau was no longer in sight. Eventually, one of the souls asked what part of heaven was that and why did they need to be silent? Oh, came the reply, that is where the Gurdjieffians are… they think they are the only ones here.
A quote (from the Dalai Lama): “If you see yourself in others, whom then can you harm?”
A poem (from Meister Eckhart):
When I was the stream, when I was the forest,
when I was still the field, when I was every hoof,
foot, fin, and wing, when I was the sky itself,
no one ever asked me did I have a purpose,
no one ever wondered was there anything I might need…
for there was nothing I could not love.
It was when I left all we once were that the agony began,
that the fear and questions came and I wept. I wept.
And tears I had never known before.
So I returned to the river. I returned to the mountains.
I asked for their hand in marriage again. I begged — I begged
to wed every object and creature.
And when they accepted,
God was ever present, in my arms.
I hope that this miracle life is dancing you, healing you and praying you and that grace and the ever-present blessings are finding their way to you! Thank you for all of your gifts. See you Saturday!
With great love,
Sylvia
May 25, 2007 at 11:48 am
I have just found a very suiting definition of
how to find out, if one is more or less awake:
Jon Kabat-Zinn in the book “Sources of healing – talks with spiritual teachers, doctors and healers” by Doris Iding (only published in German so far):
“How awake one is can be measured by the amount of suffering one creates in others.
The less suffering you create in yourself and other human beings and the more you feel a connection to the world – no matter what the external conditions are – the more you are probably waking up.”
wishing all of you a great time at the party!
May 25, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Kiran,
What you wrote here about Rowena is a complete lie!!!
Rowena never asked under any circumstances to have sex with you. All what you wrote in your last post is your obvious suppression of that fact.
There is a corruptive side in you and you keep on nurturing it instead of renouncing it or at least recognizing it.
I think you are getting dirty by your own mud.
And to those who support such lies in this form by their own silence or by declared support, I think you are doing exactly what you are allegedly going against. Your moral standard is based on the rule that as long as someone is slandering the FoF and/or its members all the means are Kosher.
“Cast out first the beam out of thine own eye”
May 25, 2007 at 1:52 pm
#120 Sylvia T.
Great joke. It is so friggin’ true.
May 25, 2007 at 3:54 pm
A note to all you refined folk out in life:
I live in a lead/copper alchemy neighborhood with a sprinkle of silver and gold. Humanity at its best and worse.
My eighty year old neighbor and I sit in my driveway watching with binoculers the activity across the street at a mom and pop grocery store. The only business for blocks and blocks.
We watch whores and druggies buy and sell, we watch kids ride up on their bicyles, we watch gang members leave their markings, and angry motorcycle types sneer in and out. My neighbor said this is better than watching television.
Yesterday a neighbor left his chainsaw in my kitchen while he went to group therapy. Another neighbor who seldom comes over (married female)
dropped off medicine. I had left and gone to a super market. She admonished me for leaving the house wide open. I told her that’s what I always do. And, always is a correct description.
I’ve lived here since 1988 after spending seven years living in dark alleys and passages. I only have one rule that’s pass from old neighbor to new neighbor. I’m crazy! Therefore I leave my house open and drink beer in my driveway with whomever stops by.
Now to the point. In spite of all this, I would like to say to the world wide web that some of the people writing on this blog are simply dogs with rabies.
May 25, 2007 at 4:15 pm
There is an story of false rumours being like a down pillow being ripped open and the feathers flying all over the place.
It may be possible to clean it all up, but it is never possible to put them all back in…
Siddiq
May 25, 2007 at 5:05 pm
This is a fact and something to consider:
When a person becomes HIV positive, the last thing they want to do is sleep with another HIV positive person, because there are different strains. And if an HIV positive person gets more than one strain the meds they are on cease to work and they can become very sick, very quickly and treating them becomes extremely tricky and difficult if not impossible. I hope they are explaining that at the local health clinic.
May 25, 2007 at 6:02 pm
Howard Carter 10/116 says:
“There are several people on this blog who would like nothing better than to see the FoF distroyed, or changed beyond recognition.”
It’s NOT about destroying the Fellowship of Friends.
It’s about exposing the very dark side of Robert Burton to those current students with budding consciences and to those individuals who might be considering to join the Fellowship of Friends.
If the Fellowship of Friends is destroyed or changed beyond recognition in the process, so be it. That just might be the most healthy thing that could happen.
Let those who have ears to hear, hear!!!
May 25, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Howard Carter (118): “When I’m in Victoria Station, or Grand Central, or the Yuba City mall, I don’t see people trying to remember themselves; people being aware, watchful, contented. I just see people absorbed in what they are doing, or bored. They are not bad people but if you prick them and they will become agitated.”
This is what you’ve been programmed to see through long years absorbing Fellowship of Friends dogma. If you could let go of the attitudes that cloud your vision and simply look through your eyes, you might see your fellow humans in a way that is less separating and superiority-inducing. You might, for example, see vibrant creatures who are beautiful in their pure manifestation of beingness and awareness, very much like you.
A monk named Hui Ch’ao said to Fa Yen, “Hui Ch’ao asks the Teacher, what is Buddha?” Fa Yen said, “You are Hui Ch’ao.”
The Blue Cliff Record
May 25, 2007 at 6:37 pm
Kiran (122): “Here again I do not perceive that Robert Burton is doing this from his mechanics or even lower from identifications that he cannot control, but that he is a true channel for the kind of play the gods want to create.”
Surely the one does not exclude the other? And, assuming gods exist, would we not all be “true channels” for the kind of play they want to create? You still seem to be hung up on the idea that Robert Burton is special in some kind of way. Is that perhaps an attempt to validate your view of yourself as being special? Is it not obvious that Robert Burton is at root just an ordinary human being like everyone else, despite his odd life story? Just like you and I.
RB
May 25, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Since FOF looks a lot like a cult I want to ask this:
is this legal for a religious organization to be a cult?
What laws are prosecuting the cults?
May 25, 2007 at 7:45 pm
To Unoanimo, 10/73
Thanks for your reply.
What are the clarifications I would welcome ?
A device ? What device ?
A device chirigically implanted in your body ?
What kind or surgery is that? Which organ is involved?
You mention a risk for the “physical well being”
What danger and what risk ?
You suggest in the same post (10/73) that my question “suffice” as an answer…
Would you be kind enough to explain that as well? I am open…
For now, I still can’t make sense out the all thing!
I take the smily though…
No need to clarify that, so far!
To Kiran, 10/122
The play… Yes!
And the last scene is, once again, written in such a way that your caractere is not yet to act the part in which it will be consciously “forgiving”…
Act X, sc.122
Monologue, Kiran
(All the travels, landscapes, all the Champagne, smiles, and kisses seems helpless…)
Would that not be an appropriate introduction
(small letters) to the actual corpus of the writting (bigger letters)?
You do not have to answer that one.
PS: Looking forward to discover more visual material via You Tube. Thanks for the effort!
Gratitude.
May 25, 2007 at 8:01 pm
A Notice to my friends out there ~
Not that I concur exactly with the mood of Post #105/10 by LifePerson, I will definitely say that Rumour & Lies (Post #97/10)is not a Fellowship of Friend member, the information this ‘blogger’ is giving is simply not what the members would consider ‘traditionally known to have come from the horse’s mouth’.
For instance ~
It is no secret concerning the difficulties RB experienced as a young boy with his mother and sister (or sisters). He openly spoke on many occasions during teaching dinners (very briefly, i.e., less than ten words) of being sexually abused by them. BTW, this was in reply to a question a Fellowship of Friends student asked him, he did not volunteer the information.
Another is concerning the funeral of his mother. Robert Burton changed his mind? No, C-Influence changed it (Gosh, Rumours & Lies, thought you knew that Da Vinci does all the thinking in there, by now.)
As RB was on his way to the funeral he was experiencing contradictory groups of I’s concerning whether or not to go, then he saw some license plate which seemed to lean him towards the ‘no vote’, turned around and did not go, said “C-Influence does not want me to go, would have been Feminine Dominance”.
Now, this is not an unusual set of circumstances (or interpretive leanings) if one puts it in context to the idea that when on her death bed RB could not speak to her because he was (in) his period of ‘self induced silence’.
Perhaps Rumours & Lies is another new student who has been in the Fellowship of Friends for 30 years…
___________________________________
Kiran,
What you stated about the ‘It’s a play’,
well, yes, it is, though somewhere within the pages of its profound unfolding we do make certain choices based upon where to place our energies, somewhere I sense that these ‘energetic choices’ do make some sort of ‘imprint’ on our ‘souls’, after all, what’s the use of being in a play if it does not matter how you act?
I believe it does matter how one plays one’s role, certainly the role is there, regardless of our level of consciousness to it, it simply waits, flips a page forwards, then backwards, dog ears a page, continues… with and without one’s presence.
I’ve seen incredibly insane people, madness that freezes the blood behind one’s eye balls, suffering that simply confounds my understanding of how it is that the soul within this body must endure such atrocities, yet, life rolls on and we say “It’s the play.”
I’m not sure how it is for you, though I’ve given myself an exercise to not say ‘It’s a play’ in regards to denying force being met with the static mood of not being able to transform it immediately upon arrival: too, I’ve not reserved it for the more ‘balanced’ moments either.
For instance, In the Fellowship of Friends, when two opposing ‘grand poba’s’ of the inner circle meet with opposing directions, feature plays, etc., do they traditionally ‘Work it out’? No, they call daddy RB to play the role of ‘holy reconciler’, this teaches the student what? Nothing, simply it leaves the student out of the picture of being their own conscious reconciler; thus, in the end when you meet one of these ‘students of Robert Burton’ there is a sense of a child that has been taught how to follow expertly, though cannot lead themselves from where they are in the moment without making some imaginary reference to the future (what I want to be) or to the past (what I used to do) or the ultimate ‘maybe’.
For me, its not indifference to not see denying force as ‘It’s the play’.
I remember as a child people used to tell me not to pick up little fledglings and put them back in their nests because the mother bird would kill them.
One day I heard a loud chirping on the forest floor and saw a mother bird flying around the ‘chirping area’ quietly. I knew our cat would soon find this situation ‘tasty’. So up the tree I went, fledgling in hand, placed it in the nest.
The mother did not kill it. It seems that there is a deep fear within people that if ‘mother’ can give them life, she can also take it away somehow through the ‘spirit’ of their actions… odd.
I like the ease you’re taking the Fellowship of Friends in stride, certainly on the scale of what is truly valuable in the moment, I would say to defer ‘the whole thing’ to ‘the play’ is useful, to a degree, yet, as your postings prove, we still are somewhere responsible for our ‘little details’ and yet is it not ‘moot’ or ‘indisputable’ to say that (after the fact) “It’s the Play”?
What if one was to say that ‘It’s the play’ before the facts, would that quell the ferocities we often allow to flow from us when being asked to take out the garbage when some other part of ourselves does not wish it or sees it as ‘not my opportune moment to go to the trashcan’?
See, I do sense that we have choices before the page turns to the next scene, how we handle the play as it is spoken from the present moment to us.
The ‘fact’ that people say “It’s a play” after the plays obviousnesses have ‘played out’ is, to me, a hint to its misuse, that most of the time in the Fellowship of Friends it was used to buffer conscience, conscious personal growth, it gave essence a comfortable place, a self calming place to put all those unreconciled issues, much like religion does with the ‘ideas’ of heaven and hell or to call ‘The Teacher’ to direct their ‘move’ on the game board; to me it’s a bit odd for one Pawn to ask another Pawn “How do you get off this game?”
Can we participate in ‘the play’ before ‘after the fact’? Yes. So, from that point of action one can say both, ‘I am I’ and ‘This is a play.’ Though not the other way around;
somewhere Robert Burton and the Fellowship of Friends has reversed the use of this ancient idea in order to cover their bread crumbs with tar, so to catch the hungry birds too.
In other words, in my experience, (not to say that this is the way you’re using it, please clarify if you desire) this phrase has ‘played’ the same function as ‘lifetimes’ and labeling students with numbers, it simply institutionalizes one’s conscious responsibilities into a category removed from the enormous intentional suffering it takes to have real will before and during the next page of the play begins to turn.
One of the biggest obstacles to going beyond relative awakening, which neither Robert Burton or Girard Haven have initiated in the followers of the Fellowship of Friends, is being consciously responsible for what occurs before and after the facts of the play unfold, i.e., certain forms of extreme contradiction.
They say, “It’s the play or It was written long ago by a single conscious being.” Yet, where are you, how is it that you’re here…
Somewhere I sense that the idea of ‘a play’ is simply a ‘hammock’ for most: I try to see the two trees holding the hammock, are they dead or alive?
________________________________
Love to you all.
May 25, 2007 at 8:10 pm
To Exlax101
Post # 102
Sheik, if you have a moment would you please tell this appropriately named a-hole that I only post under my own name. (Thanks.)
I am a woman so the correct form of the Italian if you’re trying to show off your writing style is c-a-r-a m-i-a; unless, of course your ‘style’ is based on the collatral effect Walmart has had on the human psyche.
I will let Unoanimo come to my rescue regarding our extra bloggular activities. You know the old saying about the most powerful sex organ… I confess, I get very excited every time I read one of Uno’s blogs (no need to keep any KY Jelly laying next to the tooth paste around MY bathroom).
On the boards? I’m impressed bubbilah, you’ve really got the vernacular down. But you’re not listening! I’ve been talking about the tightrope… the high wire; THE CIRCUS, B-A-B-Y! However, in thinking about the blessed boards, I bet that if we put YOU on them we could break this country’s addiction to Ambien.
………
Bless you Sheik!
Shelley
May 25, 2007 at 8:18 pm
SylviaT: Deep gratitude to you for your lovely post. And the Meister Eckhart poem…nourishment indeed! Thank you for making my day richer.
Shelly M: and the same to you! That Caroline Casey audio about reclaiming our authority was just RIGHT ON THE NOSE for me at this time, a mind-blowing synchronicity that speaks to me clearly of the deeper connectedness of it all. As Above, So Below, As Within, So Without.
Thank you all for this very juicy blog.
May 25, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Unoanimo
Amor mio you are so gallant… Would you please polish off Exlax101 for me? I think I took care of it myself but if you see any loose ends in the exchange I trust you will enlighten him that Walmart may be the biggest marketplace in the world but it is not a good frame of reference if one is looking for style.
Alas, I did not go to the C. festival. With the blessing of majestic unseen benevolent forces my performing activities are focused like a laser on bringing to life a diary written by four Hungarian artists during the last 17 months of the Holocaust. They had an experience that was DEFINITELY out of the box. About 8000 people have seen it on small wooden stages over the last seven years. http://www.talkingwithangels.com
After being sliced, diced, sautéed and fried in the fof and going to the moon and back http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0593726/ (AND single moming it amongst the soccer moms in Marin county, which, by any standard, rivals surviving the fof!) it has taken all my energy to just put one foot in front of the other every day. My daughter is now seventeen and as you can see I’ve got newfound time to sit here and peck away at this bolg (saving myself thousands of dollars in therapy BTW, thank you again Sheik!). The way I see it amore, schmoozing with the likes of YOU in this esoteric watering hole is more exciting than the C. festival. All those indie films… aren’t they angling at the questions we are all so diligently wrestling with here? I mean what would Darren Aronofsky or Pedro Almodóvar do with some of the stories churning out of this blog?
I was beyond thrilled working with Harvey K. on Holy Smoke. Jane Campion did a fantastic job philosophically on that one. I hope you see it. (I was not in it, I only coached H.K. His monologue describing his cult experience to Kate W. came right out of our conversations. In some respect for me it was the beginning of this blog.)
Harvey K. actually meet RB three times while shopping with the vinyard boys and me near Union Sq. I kid you not! Can you just picture it! He invited me to coffee each time and I told him I was busy being a tour guide for these Gucci clad bumpkins. He looked at me like I was crazy.
You know Harvey Keitel’s production company is called The Goatsingers.
This is what Goat Singers means:
-The word “tragedy” comes from the Greek word “tragos-oidos”, which means goat-singer. The Greeks had wild parades that consisted of people stomping around like wild goats, wearing goatskin. These people often sang, but the viewers of the parade eventually got bored of this. The officials in charge of the parade thought of the idea for the goat singers to stage conversations between each other, which would be considered “acting”. This concept of acting eventually evolved into the grand entertainment of the Greek theatres. This type of acting entertainment became popular and drew large crowds of people. When plays began to be performed on small stages, they also drew a large crowd. When the theatres were built, they became a major part of the lives of all people and also affected play entertainment for decades to come.-
Love to you,
Shelley
……….
Susie T.
We hardly knew each other but I thank you from deep in my heart for your post. One of those situations where there are no words yet words must be spoken.
xox,
Shelley
May 25, 2007 at 8:37 pm
#122
Kiran@beingpresent.net
“…despite having been a member of the Fellowship of Friends for almost 20 years…”
One thing the FOF cannot be faulted on is that it is such an effective force for its students in their effort to minimize chief feature.
May 25, 2007 at 9:12 pm
Yesri Baba (post 114): I’m okay, thanks for thinking of me.
Howard Carter (post 118) wrote:
“When I’m in Victoria Station, or Grand Central, or the Yuba City mall, I don’t see people trying to remember themselves; people being aware, watchful, contented.”
I didn’t realize self-remembering had a particular “look.” If you believe that you can see people remembering themselves, you are deeply in imagination, in my experience. I understand that in the Fellowship of Friends one learns to adopt an act that is equated with the third state — moving intentionally, certain facial expressions that perhaps include a slight, knowing smile, making it apparent to others in some subtle way that “I am awake.”
Once you leave the Fellowship you may discover that these acts are completely independent of the state, and have been adopted through imitation and the desire to draw attention to one’s self.
Example: a couple of hours ago I was in the parking garage at work, walking towards my car. I was late for an appointment, so I was walking quickly, with my head down and eyes on the pavement. Suddenly I was in the third state. As often happens when this occurs, I had a number of extremely rapid realizations. One of them was recalling your comment about “seeing people trying to remember themselves.” (Welcome to my third state, Howard!) I also observed that my external act did not change. I did not appear “aware, watchful or contented.” I was aware and watchful, but I was still late and therefore kept rushing. From the outside, you would not have seen my third state. You would have seen me walking quickly with my eyes on the pavement. And if I could make an “assumption,” you would have lumped me together with the streaming mass of humanity in the train station who had done nothing for my soul today.
May 25, 2007 at 10:12 pm
To WhaleRider: 10/63,
“Question: with all the vigilant self-remembering that Robert Burton and the Fellowship of Friends promotes, do you think the truth is self-evident in the third state or can a person be manipulated in the third state into believing falsehood is truth?”
We can verify that the first and second states have degrees. It ought to be plausible to us that it’s the same for the third state.
But in general the third state is the realm in which we can better know ourselves and the truths we are seeking. I would say we are on a path, and in the second state the path is shrouded with fog. With the third state the fog lifts and we can better see where we’ve been and where we’re going.
Inevitably the fog descends again and our only compass is our attitudes, illusions, programming, fears, bias’ etc., but the memories of our third state experiences are like beacons, that guide us on.
So in that sense I don’t see it like Rabbi Burns, who says when the third state leaves one is right back where one started. That’s where memory enters; what’s the point of verifying something if we do not remember it?
The third state is where spiritual verifications are possible, its the state where we can directly commune with higher forces.
But is it beyond self-manipulation, I would say no, its just worlds better than the lawless second state?
May 25, 2007 at 10:48 pm
And Ames has a great deal too much to say, nowadays, doesn’t he? Oh well…
Kiran (#10-122), you say you are aware “it is a play”, and you refer to this “central idea of the 4th Way” . How have you verified this?
It seems that any argument about this is likely to be circular. For example, I can agree that, yes, I was dealt my “pack of cards”, assorted genes that give my body both fixed and malleable characteristics, which control my physiology and what kinds and amounts of chemicals flood my brain, and so on. Is that preordained? We are born into a certain situation, in a particular cultural milieu. Is that part of a script? So, what about the folks like me, who think that despite the initial set up that we do have a certain degree of freedom. That illusion is written into the play as well? It’s a bit like the creationists saying that the fossil record was laid down on Day 6 to “test our faith”, isn’t it? It’s not provable one way or the other.
And where do you get your notion that the idea of “the play” is embodied in the Fourth Way? True, Burton is heavily into it, which is convenient for him (especially when he claims he gets to read the juicy parts of the script in advance) but, where else?
If the Creator entered into the Creation, a central tenet of Gurdjieff (who had quite a bit to do with the Fourth Way, you’ll remember), then it follows as night follows day that there is no scripted play. As Gurdjieff put it, the Creator hazarded all to defeat the effects of Merciless Heropass, the remorseless passage of time. The Creator, by entering the Creation (this is how we are all God, and God is in all of us, Kiran) became subject to all the laws. That is why there is reciprocal maintenance. The Creator outside his Creation could only order the universe, governing it down to the smallest detail. With the passage of time, it shrank, because time produced and exposed the limitations. Yes, even the Creator experienced limitation, and he was “up to his galoshes in shit”. Wow, a mistake! The answer was to enter the Creation, so the Creator could share the responsibilities and get information and new possibilities from below—Reciprocal Maintenance.
Look, here is Gurdjieff’s thrust, as I see it. Because hazard is the other side of the coin to order, the flow and history of the universe cannot be preordained. There is risk. It is why, as the universe unfolds, there is a bias towards diversity, which becomes a “good”. Experiment is sanctioned, in fact, it Is The Law! New is in, new is good! From the largest cluster of galaxies to mere humans. Order provides our DNA, but our psychologies have the potential for freedom, new expressions, change. There is tension between order and freedom at all levels, and it is what makes our lives so interesting.
And this ‘gods’ thing, this might be a Burtonized habit or thought–form as well. Do you mean C-influence? Did he convince you that C-influence is external, the way the Greeks believed? He tries this on, because it is only when he persuades one that C-influence is external to one that he can also persuade one that he is an intermediary. This is what priests do. It is not possible to have an intermediary between you and God if God is within—unless you choose to create the barrier yourself by adopting such a belief system.
Kiran, I’m not trying to shake you from your story, your worldview, but pointing out that that is all it is, a worldview; mine is just another, and certainly not more valid for you. Maybe I’m misunderstanding you. (I don’t know you, of course, and have never met you. If you have found evidence that it really is just a (scripted) play, I respect that, though I’d appreciate you sharing the evidence. If you instead you meant more like Lela, the dance (the very opposite of a scripted play, or a play in ‘real–time’ if you like), then maybe we are actually agreeing with each other, just “talking past each other”. The way I see it, being able to see patterns and cycles is central to the human condition, why not revel in that gift, let the music enter one, and, as consciously as possible, join in, knowing We are That—what ecstasy, what a way to worship, by living life fully, drinking deeply!
And to Howard Carter (#10-116)… “It helps to know it’s a play, every word of it written long ago”. There is no room for misunderstanding your beliefs, that’s for sure. Pure Burtonism. How desperately sad! Again, how have you verified this? I can tell you, if I really believed that in my deepest center, I’d end it all, but that’s me. What an existential crisis embodied in every moment of this worldview. Even your happiest times—scripted. Your best efforts, or lack of them—written long ago. Your finest thoughts—from another author. In or out of the Fellowship—all pre-ordained. Yourself—a robot set in motion by forces you cannot hope to recognize or understand (this is very different from the ‘mechanicality’ or ‘sleep’ of the Fourth Way). Even the ‘choice’ to worship Burton instead of the God within! What a mockery of your gifts. What a mockery of love.
With love to you all (and thank you for the over 3500 different points of view),
Ames
P.S., I will not be putting on a label “Ames” at the party Saturday (we are giving out labels for anyone who cares to identify themselves, though, many of us have changed beyond recognition, and some of us have never met); I’ll be wearing a t-shirt that says, “I am Howard Carter…”
May 25, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Hello everybody,
I have been a consistently grateful spectator of this blog since March and I decided I was not going to write anything before I was able to do so under my own name: ‘thank you’ Kiran for giving me the third force to finally open my story to the public, as I believe it does belong to everybody.
I guess I should start from the simple facts that have been molded and changed and distorted, partly because the reality was unknown to many, who never bothered to question the accuracy of the voices spreading out. It took me one day to write this: I am sorry about its length, but I wanted to be thorough and to convey at least part of my experience.
Well: I joined the school on September 17, 2000 in New York City – that was the day when Girard had his stroke. A couple of years later I moved to Apollo, following a growing desire to plunge into the very heart of what I had found.
Once in Apollo I started – after ending my relationship with A. – a little fling with a Russian guy V., back then part of Robert’s entourage: I was – and still am – very naïve and had no idea about the rules and the dangers of getting close to R. in that sense – even after being warned. In that occasion R. seemed not to mind and to actually approve of what was happening.
During a trip to NYC for a ballet with Robert, Asaf gently approached me and we became friends; he seemed not preoccupied about my current relationship. Back in Apollo, during the first Russian ballet at the Theatron, V. started to court M. Alexandrova (one of the prima ballerinas in the Bolshoi) before my very eyes and completely forgot about me… R. seemed to approve of his change of mind, as he was very happy to build a strong bound with Masha and the Bolshoi; at the same time Asaf ‘s friendship was growing deeper and stronger; we met, he told me about his feelings and that he wanted to start a relationship with me: he went and asked Robert’s permission. That’s when it all started.
Robert said: NO, Asaf said: YES and for the first time they disagreed and had an argument. RT invited me for tea where she asked me if my relationship with V. was over (well, he went off with Masha!) and then told me Robert was giving me 6 months non-dating exercise. Asaf was asked not to contact me and I was asked to refuse his calls.
During these 6 months (which are still a precious memory), distance made our feelings for one another grow, but we both agreed that we were going to transform them for a higher right … I was not to know until much later that Robert had presented another suggestion to Asaf: given the magnitude of his role, C Influence was preparing a woman for him, who was probably going to be X – who at that time was 13 years old. X and I happened to be very close and actually quite similar (she still is one of my best friends). Asaf took this suggestion very seriously and obviously he felt flattered to have such a special role. We kept crossing each others at X’s house and I started to notice an unusual change in Asaf’s behavior… I kicked that thought aside as it seemed just coming from my Q of hearts.
My task ended and our friendship continued: A. would come over often for tea and we would just share our Work. One night (it was his birthday) everything changed: we became lovers … what to do now? We knew it could not come out! And then he told me about X, but she was only 13… and Asaf (who was then still Robert’s lover) needed desperately some support and love to be able to continue leaving at the Galleria and fulfill his duties; the internal conflict was overwhelming in us both: we couldn’t lie to the teacher, we couldn’t go against his will, but C Influence was weaving us closer and closer; I felt like Joan of Arc – sort of – and vainly and naively I thought: I can do it! I can serve the school and C Influence by offering my support, even knowing that he is destined to somebody else. I will even help him in his pursue of X. That was what the moment required. It all made perfect sense.
I had to fight my Q of hearts (for whoever is not familiar with the term: jealousy, envy, insecurity, anger…) as it was extremely hard to live the – most of the times partial – intimacy with him and seeing him the next day flirting with X in the agora. Plus we both were heavy, carrying the burden of secrecy and of hiding from the teacher on our conscience; we tried many times to stop our intimacy and just pursue our friendship. The Work was strong, though, and was drawing us closer; we both knew that the play was giving us an amazing opportunity to transform all the friction into higher states: we were both very passionate about the school and sincerely wanted to do our best to serve a higher right. Slowly Asaf’s role was changing: he was no longer Robert’s lover, he started to be involved in the preparation of events and had the responsibility to record all Robert’s thoughts during travels, breakfasts, afternoons… His name was even indicative of this: it means ‘the collector’ in Hebrew. Again, everything made perfect sense: the play was unfolding as expected; Asaf was slowly walking toward his ‘seat’. His need for emotional support and warmth – at least until X would become of age and join the school and finally be his girlfriend – was covered by me.
Our ‘companionship’ lasted two and half years, during which the love and support and understanding we shared, despite or because of the circumstances, was completely unformatory and without equal to this day. It was totally worth it, even though extremely hard at times and emotionally painful: as a result of this during the first year my period stopped altogether, partly due to the stress of living a forbidden love, trying to fight it all the time; I became almost sexually numb. Many times I hoped to find somebody else whom I could have a normal and open relationship with, breaking this triangle in which I was stuck; I also could not bear anymore lying to X, too young and unaware of it all. I was not strong enough to face my buffers and take responsibility for what was happening – I was not ready – and the shock I was meant to receive had to be of a different magnitude and much later.
I moved to the Ming House next door to Benjamin, right when the Bible Keys began to appear: it was the beginning of the transformation of the form of the school. It was an exciting time and Asaf and I and Benjamin shared the steps toward it. There was our chance: we finally understood why we were brought so close, even thou ‘illegally’ … working together for the teaching was finally going to stop our intimacy for good, which was going to be transformed into what it had always meant to be; Asaf was finally able to declare his love to X and fulfill Robert’s and C Influence plan. What a relief we felt! Filled with new energy, happy about not having to hide anymore and with a renovated purpose as a student I start using my – limited – savings to travel to be close to Robert and the developing of the new teaching; I always paid for my trips and events, thanks also to the generosity of E. who, involved with another student around Robert, was at times inviting me to share hotel rooms; sometimes Asaf would invite me standing at events – together with other researchers and/or friends – but when I sat it was always with my own money – I still have the receipts. When my ‘role’ became more public as one of Asaf’s assistants, the Fellowship sponsored me in Egypt and Turkey.
And here we get to the core of the story, which led to the explosion: during one of the times in which Asaf and I had stopped our intimacy (for two/three months) M and D – both Asaf’s roommates – approach me with the idea of a ménage a trois … my hormonal balance had just gone back to fairly normal and I was ‘free’; they (M and D) were also ‘free’ at that point – which is not a good excuse for what happened next – so D went to Asaf to ask him if he minded if he were to ‘spend time’ with me. Asaf’s answer was: no, I don’t mind; I am just worried for her to get hurt. When I was reported the answer I thought: well, then if HE does not care why should I? It means it is meant to be!
On a side note: this blog thoroughly painted the level of sexual freedom which was and is present in the Fellowship of Friends; starting from Robert’s entourage outward, the encounters and parties are innumerable, and absolutely boundless, inclusive of people of all ages. There was a whole group of Robert’s Russian guys who were having parties with a good number of friends of mine, we were all living in a surreal atmosphere where everything was possible and where the voice of our conscience had been overruled and buffered by ‘work I’s’; I know now that my emotional center was so anesthetized that I had no idea of what I was doing, neither of the consequences of my actions. I did not believe in suffering, nor in emotional pain: I thought it was just ‘the machine’, and therefore not worth of attention. I thought transformation was about being ‘above’ the machine, identifications were to be despised. I don’t hold anybody else but myself responsible for my lack of conscience. My play was about to teach me that.
Back to the explosion: my encounters with the two ended fairly quickly (btw, Kiran: I never had sex in Robert’s bedroom – ! – that was somebody else; and I never organized any orgy for anybody), but they found the experience worth expanding and started to look for other ladies who could have been interested: they obviously found a few. I honestly do not know about the voucher deal in exchange for sexual encounters, they never mentioned it to me; plus, there were plenty of ladies who did not need that incentive to accept the offer. I warned them to be careful, but they were too naïve themselves and too powerful to be aware of it.
Plus, as I said before, they were not the only ones and definitely not the first ones! Once M told me that the experience they were having with Robert showed them how formatorily life people were seeing sex in general …
Anyways, at a certain point people were starting to talk about them, but nobody had the courage to speak up; some ladies hypocritically pretended to be offended by the request, right after being flattered. A few people asked me if I knew anything about it: I said yes, I did, but then lied and denied my personal involvement… again, no courage to take responsibility.
Well, finally it came out: I will never forget it, it was during the first or second ballet of the season (in July) when M called me and told me that Asaf knew … with me, two other ladies were exposed, and I smiled thinking about all the rest of the community who stayed quietly silent … apparently my role was to be the scapegoat – and I was not without guilt. As I am writing I feel shot back to re-live the state I was filled with that night: I told M: we will take responsibility for our actions – this is the play. Robert did not know yet, and I was sitting right in front of him in the Theatron, helping Frederick to film the show. Robert told me how beautiful the level of the dancers was and that interestingly enough the machine would try to slip into imagination even in front of such an impression. I answered – filled with third state – that C Influence designs amazing plays to keep us out of imagination.
Then I thought: this is the last time I will ever speak to him. X was sitting next to me.
Then Asaf told Robert, who gave me and the other two ladies a 2 weeks out of the property sentence. A warning round of phone calls by the high quarters was made to some of the people not yet exposed; all the others were trembling, afraid to be discovered.
M and D were secluded into a house in the property, waiting for the big smoke to die out.
Last chapter: during the two and half years of Paola and Asaf, Robert was unaware, or better did not want to acknowledge, the fact that we were close. Actually, many times if he spotted a wink or a look between us, he would react quite extremely; that’s why with time Asaf learned to calm him down, reassuring him that he kept pursuing X and giving him accounts of their growing friendship. That maintained our guilt alive and well. We could not be seen together in front of Robert, even though sometimes we did show up together at Apollo d’Oro, especially after we started to work together in the octave.
This is why when the explosion went off, Robert seemed quite surprised at Asaf’s reaction: he asked him, why are you so upset? Asaf answered, because I finally understand how much she means to me… When I was told this, my heart fell apart (remember, Benjamin?) I realized that for all that time I was buffering, buffering, buffering my emotions because I was afraid, under the constant menace of being excommunicated, of offending and disobeying Robert. I felt like my whole being was melting, after a long time of refrigeration. I cried and cried. Asaf called me and we spoke at length and explained ourselves, I thought another era was about to begin, without lies, without hiding… So I asked him what Robert said when he told him about us … Asaf said he did not tell him … what? He did not? … … … Well, I thought, I cannot keep this secret anymore: if A was not ready to speak, then I had to do it. It was my chance: I was already completely covered with mud, my reputation was pretty damn low, I have nothing to lose: if I miss this one there would be no other…So I took pen and paper and write the following:
7/7/05
Dear Robert,
This is the first time that I have the courage to write to you openly, as if the play of the last few months occurred just to make this moment possible.
I have been Asaf’s lover and friend for the last two years, during which time I knew about X and your wish to one day see them together.
Not a day has passed without my gratitude for being close to such a friend, growing through and with him.
My queen of hearts has eaten several times the beauty of our unusual friendship; this happened also few months ago, when we agreed again to keep the intimacy out of the doors and to concentrate on a Work-based relationship: my king of clubs decided to burn down the whole house, just to cover a scar; this showed the self-destructive nature of this terrible brain, it thinks that freedom means being able to do whatever it wants, where instead real freedom is the courage not to lie.
What an opportunity to be real this is.
I was not able to take responsibility for my feelings and actions, not able to be direct and sincere with you, beloved Teacher, with Asaf and with myself.
I realize we are only ponds, moved by the loving hands of the Gods: you once said that a man number four silently agrees to be crucified several times in his life: the play had to go on until this point.
I apologize for having kept all of this hidden from you, and I am now ready to accept the consequences.
I love Asaf dearly, I am sorry for the pain I caused him.
Next time we meet there will be more of Us,
My deepest gratitude and love to you, dear Teacher/Influence C
When the words stop and you can endure the silence, that is the moment to listen to what the Eye of the Beloved most wants to say. Hafiz
I mail it. It was, to this day, the highest moment of my life: the first time I was true to myself.
Up to that point my sentence was pretty mild: I was to take off for three months, go to Egypt with Cassandra and Kiran to help them open the center and then come back to Isis when everything quieted down.
It was a Saturday and I was in Sacramento to with Kiran and H and T and others to help out during one of the inergetix seminar. I get a phone call from Brian: Robert received my letter, he was really upset: he wanted me to take a leave of absence for one year, and then if I managed not to have sex with anybody he might reconsider, that I was worse than alcohol and I had 4 days to get out of the way.
….
So much for my highest moment.
Well, the world span and span … in four days I bought my one way ticket to NY, gathered my stuff, some friends helped me (thank you for that) and I was history.
I had no contacts anymore ‘in life’; all I knew at that point was linked to the Fellowship. There are no words to describe what that felt like. It took a year just to digest the shock itself. I remember Judith saying once: C Influence took 35 years to build up and give me this shock. I understood a little better what she had meant.
My deepest regret and the heaviest burden was and is the betrayal of two of my dearest friends: I am deeply sorry for my behavior and for the pain my complete lack of conscience caused. I hope at some point we will be able to meet again: I think of you every day.
I already took a lot of space here, but please allow me a couple more words.
The wildest aspect of all this is that … it worked! I do not know if outside of the school I would have had an experience of this intensity, but surely I would not have had the tools to deal with it. I am grateful to the Fellowship for being the theater for how much of myself it allowed me to see.
A year after my leave of absence was over, I wrote a letter to Robert: it took him 4 months to reply that he is not sure about what to do with me. To try back in a while. I could not find any other word for him so far, although I know that it is not over yet. Just before leaving for Buenos Aires Linda approached X saying that Robert is evaluating my situation and how was I doing: I found that quite inappropriate as she is not even a student. This is the first time I expose myself publicly (I did share my story with a few students, the other’s q of hearts were just too busy with the scandal).
Siddiq: I agree with you – 10 / 22 “Some people incur debt they are not able to pay for–that is probably the case here–their time to pay is proably still coming… But not one of us is spotless, probably far from it…”
Kiran: that evening with you Cassandra and Benjamin was lovely, there was no sex, just cuddling and it was to me an unusual way to get close to her – even though you wanted more. Your accident happened on my 30th birthday. I was speechless.
Loreta: ciao! E’ bello vederti in foto: sembri rinata.
Elena: It was so nice to read your posts, I wish I got to know you better.
Joseph: I have been wanting to write you an email directly; I hope we can stay in touch … I always remember that new year in NY, and then meeting you on Broadway with your son and family a year ago.
I wish I could come to the gathering this Saturday, but I am in Argentina for a while: next time I will be there!
Thank you all for coming with me through my journey;
Thank you Sheik for creating the space for this to happen, what you are doing is priceless.
If you want to contact me directly:
pgallarato@hotmail.com
May 25, 2007 at 11:59 pm
Gabriella F.
I just had a “vivid” memory today of my staying in the FOF that is helping me to better understand the “mechanics” that can keep us trapped in something like a cult. I would like to share it.
I have a dearest friend who is still in the Fellowship of Friends and who lives at Isis. A very nice person, with good heart and good will; lovely. I always loved being with him and he was a “reference” for me during my 20 years of staying. He was older in the School than I was and, as an Italian, even though I directed several centers, I always nourished the idea that American students were the Fathers, more “conscious” than us.
He is – I am not sure at this point, but I bet he is – a faithful of Robert and the FOF.
One day, perhaps three years ago, we were in a restaurant. At that point, we had not met each other for a couple of years. He was visiting my town, and we decided to have a lunch together. I really wished to meet him, to share our simple thoughts, and just being together, enjoying each other, sharing our presence.
After a while, the atmosphere became “heavier”. He was willing to “teach”, to be extremely serious, for we are supposed to be very serious when we are present… (I do not agree with this, probably I never did. I think that our highest possibilities include “joy”!). I was desperately looking for my friend…
At a certain point, he became very “intense” and said: “One of the hardest thing in our path is to accept that we are so deeply involved in something higher – and Robert was referred – that even people who we love die because us… for our own evolution…”
He told more than this, but I was impressed and I could hardly keep staying at the table… So, it would mean that my brother’s car accident and my mother’s suicide, and the people I loved died for me? And what about all the disasters, the wars, and the misery: All this happens for the Fellowship’s students to evolve? Oh, my God!
I remember a struggle in myself in that moment: It was clear to me that I could trust what he was saying, and be “pushed” into an unreal world where I-We were the only important entities… Where, a fictitious “celestial” atmosphere can make you thinking that you are really part of something divine … Something in me thought (probably vanity) that I was ready to hear that amazing message.
But something else told me that I could not believe it (probably my common sense), and that I had to remain in the real world, where each of us is not more important than anybody else. But, in this case, I would miss such “celestial” C Influence’s message…
Fortunately, I did not believe it. That day, something changed in my relationship with the school, and I am still remembering that moment, emotion after emotion.
I am surprised how vividly this came to my mind today. I wanted to share it because to me it can help to explain how we can believe whatever is being said, the more stupid thing, even the more absurd statement which goes against the common sense that even a child has: In the Fellowship, the way of thinking has been “modeled” (kind of Word template), so we are ready to conceive everything, providing that it sounds OK with OUR evolution.
To be sincere, it is not so easy for me to post this message, even if I left the school…
In the last few months, I learned things that I could not ever imagine about Robert.
Believe me: In 20 years I did not know about orgies, and now I feel like I was participating in a sex-addicted group of people (see Kiran last post…Amazing! How to believe it? I never heard things like that when I was in the FoF: where we in the same School?…).
I am a simple person, with a man who I love, normally.
I am still having a positive actitude toward Robert. I allways thought that he was a poetman in teaching the system, until he did … Furthermore, in a very painful situation for me, I really “felt” his love, his warm kindness, and I do not want to “delete” this beautiful memory.
Yes, I have been a Robert’s student, I trusted him, I trusted my friends, and my friends also trusted me; I received from the FoF, and I also gave. This is something very human.
But then, the game was over. At least, it was over for me. Let us enjoy now, just moving on.
Thank you for reading,
GF
May 26, 2007 at 12:18 am
I am not a student and I really don’t understand all that is being implied by some of these discussions but I still wanted to share my voice.
My husband and I had known Kiran & Cassandra for many years. We were non-Fellowship friends. They had an immensely loyal and loving relationship, one that I admired. They were symbiotic: two entities that thrived on the other. Theirs was a Great Love, respect worthy and filled with an honesty that most people can only dream of. It transcended any group they were part of, any culture, any name.
They had a small houseplant in their house that, for no apparent reason, flourished to be the size of an enormous tree. It was normally the kind of thing you might put on a bookshelf. It literally grew beyong all reason. They had this effect together on all things – BOTH of them. They were like sunlight together. I miss their shine.
I have nothing but respect, adoration and love and I am sorry for the life that he lost and proud of the life he has.
jennifer@jennifersolow.com
May 26, 2007 at 1:02 am
From Elena
I know this post is long. It is dedicated to those students in the Fellowship who are still trying to understand how a cult is damaging to individuals participating in it. The attitude that a post is too long to read is nothing but the same attitude that was instillied in us, that we have no time for each other, that what we have to say is not as worthy as what Robert has to say. I will not excuse myself for sharing my understanding with you even if it is long, in the hope of serving your freedom from the abuses of the Fellowship of Friends on your integrity.
To Alan W 10/84
Thank you for stimulating these thoughts. There is so much to dig out to understand what happened to me and others. I thank you for pushing some of the buttons that otherwise I would not have the third force to bring out.
What if we understand that we are as affected by the things we eat as by the space in which we move, the people and things that evoke emotions and the observation of processes that induce our thoughts? How we eat, move about, feel and think is the expression of both our conscience and consciousness.
While this is a simple, common sense statement, it has become an increasingly disconnected practice in the Fellowship of Friends where students think that the only thing that matters is presence without functions. (Interestinly, the only functions that are considered are being present to washing your teeth, your feet on the ground while you eat, the elimination of the negative half of your intellectual centre that can question the life around you and consequently, express negative emotions…….) Consciousness without functions pretends to strip the individual from his connectedness to the external world. The external world is then approached as a necessary duty, void of love and joy. Serving the school has become a third line obligation in which the students participate only from a place in which they have to give their own self up to be able to perform the service all in the hope that they will be loved by Robert and appreciated by the rest of the students.
Make love with Robert, whether you want it, like it, or need it.
Wash, serve, clean dishes at the galleria for Robert’s events.
Prune, clean, take the weeds out of the Galleria gardens for Robert. Come and visit the gardens because you are only a visitor in the galleria. It is not yours no matter how many years of work you’ve put into it. You stop liking the way things are, too bad for you, leave.
It is the same in all octaves including the Art octave. You do not count as an individual, you count only in as much as you are willing to give yourself up and serve. The question then is, WHAT are you serving?
What works in the Fellowship is the beauty, the love, the essence impulse that every human being has, to participate and be a member of a community. Who amongst us was not seduced by the initial idea of serving a conscious school and preserving culture for humanity?
What needs to be looked at is how we went from that initial idea to supporting supporting only Robert Burton’s lifestyle not only at the cost of our physical, emotional and intellectual work but at the cost of our moral (conscience) and conscious integrity (the integrity or consciousness of the self).
The practice in the Fellowship of Friends that denies students the possibility to make decisions about their participation in the School is what makes it a cult, justified with the ideas that it is Robert Burton’s school, that you are here to work only on yourself, that really all there is for a student to do is to serve dutifully.
We have already much looked on the blog at the consistent indoctrination that supports this state of things.
There is a huge gap between serving a conscious school and serving an individual’s life style. Submitting to serving an individual’s life style while being convinced that one is serving a conscious school is what slowly develops the phenomenon of split personality, or two individuals within the same person.
One personality continues to work lovingly, giving, offering, working and another one keeps condescending, allowing, bearing. In actual practice both personalities are expressed in different practices throughout our daily routines and general life patterns, consistently increasing the sense of self worthlessness that conduces to depression and the lack of meaning in life.
These are things I am myself exploring, as I look back at what was happening to me and others, so do not be surprised if it is not a perfectly layed out understanding.
If we go back to the I and observe how in the Fellowship of Friends students actually have to divide themselves into different compartments it’ll be clearer to understand the phenomenon.
The ideal Fellowship student is someone who has given up his life family totally. The example to follow is Robert giving up his relationship to his mother by not being willing to honour her in her funeral as work on feminine dominance. By not willing to be present to his own mother’s death. Is it not interesting that many, many students have not practiced such things but do not question it either as an aspect of Robert’s psycopathic behavior? The fact that families are increasingly insignificant in the modern world does not make it less psycopathic.
On the other hand, many student’s were conditioned by this behavior to abandon their own families, past or present. Parents, wives or children. I wonder now to what extent that gesture from Robert was more to justify having asked his own students to give up their children, to pretend that that wasn’t really a mistake on his part but something to take beyond into abandoning also their parents. At what point was this decision taken, realizing that the less connection with family, that students had, the more money they had to invest in the Fellowship.
I’ve only recently understood that these are some aspects of the subliminal indoctrination that we slowly and unconsciously adapt to, that is so difficult to perceive when one is still a student.
This idea of biological families is what has made some students leave our children so that we can come to “do conscious work” at Isis, and this has happened in different degrees of extremity. Some of us have left them for short time, some have totally abandoned them and what we need to be clear about here is that this is happening long after the need to develop Isis or the initial justification for doing such a thing, ocurred. It is simply how people have been indoctrinated enough to allow for such ideas to prompt them to such actions, against themselves, their children and their family. Their INTEGRITY, because no matter how sick one’s family might have been, it is still what was given to one to transform, not to eliminate.
It seems it is time to question the deep roots of the freedom from blood ties.
In the idea of feminine dominance what we are working with, although Robert has never been systematic enough to give a clear exposition of it, (and like all his ideas which are given for students to take a good guess to see if they come up with anything that makes sense but that can keep them mauling at it indefinitely convinced that they are in a conscious adventure), but must have picked up from his previous teacher without fully understanding it. What we are dealing with, is the freedom that the individual must come to from his personal programming from his parents, his blood ties, to a place where he can develop enough of a sense of his own humanity to extend it objectively to other human beings, regardless of blood ties, social ties, or nationality ties.
What is abhorent about Robert Burton’s interpretation of this idea is that he used it literally just as the Christians have used so many esoteric ideas, literally, and abandoned his family and promoted the abandonement of biological families in the actual practice of our lives, instead of understanding that this was meant to happen psychologically.
Freeing one’s self from the programming of one’s parents internally, means understanding the difficulties that the man of our times is endowed with. Seeing ones parents objectively means compassionately understanding their play and knowing that they gave the best they could and still were far from the human being that we had in the back gound of our ideals: The essence knowing that things should be in a way that in actual practice of mankind today, they are not. But the imprint of these ideals is in each one of us and it is what consciously or unconsciously we are always refering to, to know that what is actually happening to us, is way away from the mark. The imprint of these ideals, is, if you wish, in our higher centers and we are consistently refering to them to examine our lives.
The psychological study of one’s self is mainly the study of one’s parents, one’s society and one’s nationality. Transforming our sufferings and misconceptions in any of these areas is what opens up our consciousness. It is an extremely practical endeavour that has nothing to do with avoiding to examine one’s thoughts, emotions or sexuality or sit in a mindless state denying the need to examine critically one’s inner and external world.
Robert Burton did nothing to help students study themselves and if any one of us acquired any degree of understanding it wasn’t thanks to Robert’s practice. Robert’s practice tried to deny everything one came to on one’s own by denying one the possibility of confronting those understandings with one’s friends or himself. Girard equally avoided personal discussion and kept conversation tied to the rails of the accepted indoctrination. They impose their vision and eliminate ours. We are only allowed to be in the Fellowship if we are willing to give our selves up to Robert’s vision. This is the Cult.
He thought he addressed the issue of our programming by physically separating students from their biological families. Even if many did not do this in practice, they had to do it psychologically in as much as one’s play with one’s family was never confronted in the Fellowship. If you have problems go to psychoanalisis or a psychiatrist but don’t come to the fellowship with your problems.
In relation to the social programming that each one of us came with, the fellowship pretended to make us all equally “beggers” but in actual practice, only the money making individuals get some attention, and do not beg or participate in the most difficult octaves. Sexually attractive students also get the attention. The inner circle will take care of placing the rest in different octaves where they find them convenient.
No matter how much we mixed, student’s from each different nationality continue to spend time mostly with each other without being able to humanly interact with other nationalities in the deepest sense of the word. In marriages, work and play or art, what continues to condition the life of the Fellowship is the stereotype of the hard working individuals without play in their interactions or Art in their community. The lameness of Art in the Fellowship is that it never, ever, really came close to true Art, or the expression of the spirit. In as much as Robert never allowed for self expression, nothing that could be called Art, could have developed and many an artist stopped trying to develop his art and went into making money.
The same life values that we came with stand within the Fellowship and it is interesting to observe that the phenomenon worked partially because in the subconscious of people from abroad, we were identified with “America”. There are very few Americans joining the Fellowship of Friends. It is no coincidence. Our instinctive center identified with the “American Dream” and our being identified with the sense of strong individuality that Americans incarnate.
None of these aspects of our life have been looked at in the Fellowship of Friends. As we go in, we must leave the stuff we are made of at the door and never again mention it. It is indiscriminately treated as our “lower self”: Your parents, your community and your nationality are worthless. Never talk about yourself is interpreted as not being identified with your life which is ABSOLUTELY false because it simply means that you’ve put your life under the carpet and put another mask on top of your false personality to pretend that you are worthy enough to belong to the Fellowship of Friends, a ruthlessly inhuman institution that has severed its connections with the humanity that each student was coming from and the humanity that each wanted to stand up for when s/he thought s/he was joining a conscious school.
May 26, 2007 at 1:45 am
The hardest thing for a man to bear are the unpleasant manifestations of others (Traveler,Life Person).
May 26, 2007 at 2:40 am
Hello.
Hava Nagillah writes:
“Where else have you learn’t to be present if not in the School? How come you know it? Who has taught you that?”
“I could not have achieved it on such practical level anywhere else outside this school, if at all.”
Hava, regardless of your experience there are, as I’ll Give it a Try states (36), hundreds of traditions in which the main goal is conscious presence.
The presumption that there is only one way is arrogant. Why is it impossible to understand or believe that there are other potential ways of working toward consciousness?
Why would that negate your Way?
The world is so huge.
Hava Nagilla (56) also states:
“You must be very naive if you think that the issue of this work is the origin of the ideas or the fact that they appear in many traditions. Of course there are many traditions that express the same ideas, but this is not the point. The point is whether you can actualize them throughout your life.”
All of these traditions all work toward actualizing consciousness throughout one’s life. There is very little difference, besides the mode in which one works.
The fundamentalist attitude that claims absolute ownership of “life” itself, reminds me of the those held by the Christian right.
Any time someone claims superior knowledge and that they are exclusively right, a war begins.
I’ll Give It a Try (36). Your “Brigadoon” analogy is fabulous.
To Howard Carter:
I appreciate that your communication has a more even tone. Still, the insistence on the idea that anyone who is no longer in the school is doomed is an entirely unconscious and unnecessary theory.
Why must there be only one Way?
To Rumours & Lies (97).
The name calling, (“Joel (French fry the weasel), IDIOTS, A-holes, Shitface”) is amazingly immature and most certainly does not display any level of consciousness.
To RSVP (98)
The shallow, immature insults, which include expletives (i.e., “bullshit artists”) are vulgar and display a deep level of sleep.
I reject, entirely, the Fellowship’s notion that all will remain “asleep” or will be a “monkey in white clothes” (whatever that means) if they don’t join this tiny school.
The possibility that there is only one way to “heaven” is mathematically impossible.
Mostly, I just wish that there could be some acknowledgment by the current members that there are many other modes.
I wish that there was not a need for exclusivity. The necessity for saying, “I’ve got it and you don’t”, is so strange and narcissistic.
I simply do not understand why the members must feel that they are exclusive, special, chosen.
Why is it inconceivable to believe that others may also be seeking through different ways and could, potentially be “successful”.
That is one of the key problems.
I am an artist and that is a very powerful mode toward experiencing higher states.
Hell, sometimes I just need to be out in the country to become present.
Also, only a few of the 44 were Fourth Way Schoolers. How else might they have become “conscious”?
LL
May 26, 2007 at 3:33 am
To All,
I joined the fof in 1974, a young man of 22. Like many who joined in and around that time, my search and subsequent joining were the result of many factors, some personal and some cultural, the search for something higher, for community, for direction and purpose. Also there was the dissatisfaction, unwilligness, and perhaps fear of moving into mainstream culture in this country in the 1970’s.
Fof seemed, at first, to offer almost all of what I/we were searching for. Belonging, community, sense of purpose, presence, direction, comradery, a community of like-minded people.
A few remembered moments from that time –
A meeting at Hiller Highlands, the subject of the holocaust is mentioned, the six million, Ram Pera offers an angle that perhaps the moon needed a higher form of food, Robert Burton blows him a kiss – I feel that perhaps, something is not right
(to be continued)
MarkL
May 26, 2007 at 4:18 am
#123 “And to those who support such lies in this form by their own silence or by declared support, I think you are doing exactly what you are allegedly going against. Your moral standard is based on the rule that as long as someone is slandering the FoF and/or its members all the means are Kosher.”
You’ve posted some really asinine stuff in the past, but this takes the cake. You’re not to be taken seriously. Your thought processes (or lack of) are astounding..
May 26, 2007 at 4:38 am
Thank you, Paola Evelina.
May 26, 2007 at 4:40 am
#129 Rabbi Burns reply to #118 Howard Carter
This exchange reminded me of one of the strangest things that happened to me in fof. I was in Yuba city wandering around doing something, what exactly I don’t remember.
I found myself at this laundramat by some strip mall, that one over behind Denny’s or there abouts. There was no one around but me wandering aimlessly. Then around a bank of washers came this little girl maybe 7 or 8 yrs. old. She was barefoot and smudged with dirt, and wore a dirty whitish-yellow scraggly dress. It was kind of surreal and that is still the strongest sense of my memory of it this surreality of it. I felt this compassion towards her as I watched her kind of mope around. There was no one else there and I wondered where her parents or whoever was taking care of her were. I may have asked her that question but I don’t remember. What I do remember is feeling somewhat compelled to give her a hug. (I was extremely naive and this was back in the days before the paranoia of even speaking to a strange child let alone giving them a hug without becoming branded as a child molester for eternity.) I squatted down to where we were about chest to chest and I gave her a hug and there was this flow of energy, of love between our solar plexus’. Not from me to her nor from her to me. It was clear from her eyes that she was experiencing the same thing I was. I stood up kind of taken aback and I don’t remember if I hunted down her gaurdian or if they came back or what. I just remember kind of looking at her and wondering what the heck just happened. That kind of sensation had not occured to me before nor has it since. She was just a poor, asleep life person Angel.
May 26, 2007 at 5:07 am
MarkL (#148)
see my post 6/53: “When at dinner I listened to Robert say, ‘The Jews finally paid for the crucifixion of Christ through the Holocaust,’ I thought, ‘Not so sure I agree, but, um, the lower cannot see the higher.'”
Remarkable how what passes everywhere else for racism, antisemitism, extraordinary insensitivity, and other forms of idiocy become something else entirely when spoken by someone who informs us he is “conscious.”
May 26, 2007 at 5:20 am
Paola,
I have sent you a private email. I just want to state publicly to the blog my distress at your story.
I have children, cohorts of “X” – I thank God that we had the courage (yes it took courage at the time) to move out of Isis, to Nevada City, 4 years ago, for our children’s sakes. I truly pray that they have as much as possible escaped that environment. The thought of them being caught up in such a twisted manipulation of relationships as what you describe is nauseating to me. I truly mourn the several young girls, children of students, that joined the Fellowship in the past 2 years, some of them now married to Robert’s boys.
Many of us were naive, not just the ones sexually involved with Robert. The exercise of no gossip did stop much of this from being known by many, those of us to whom gossip felt wrong or just vulgar. Especially if we were obviously not ourselves sexually available.
Again, publicly, I thank you for your courage and openness.
May 26, 2007 at 5:20 am
#122 Kiran
“But divine coincidence wanted it that only a week before Rovena Taylor had invited me for the first time in twenty years for a dinner and during this event she made unmistakable indications that she wanted to have sex with me. As I told her that at this moment I was rather up to some nurturing hugging and caressing…”
The implication is that he said he wasn’t in the mood and just wanted to hug.
This account doesn’t add up. I did not know Rowena well while in the Fellowship, for instance I never had a private conversation with her that I can remember, but many times I heard her speak at meetings and talk in conversation at coffees and never once witnessed her say or do anything that wasn’t elegantly appropriate. She seemed to enjoy an inherent sense of polished decorum. Based on this alone I am skeptical of your claim, but when you add in the fact that if she did make it clear to a healthy heterosexual male that she was interested in him I don’t believe that there is anyone that would be ignorant enough to say no or brush the offer off. I’m afraid that your account appears to be another one of those perceptions that is clouded by imagination and an over-estimation of one’s magnetism.
May 26, 2007 at 5:48 am
Vladik, I am really sorry if I got the facts wrong. Someone I trust told me the “blog hacking story” and I just took it “as is” and was deeply touched by it. I was outraged! And didn’t think that may be it was not even true… oops!…
In a way, one never knows what really happened, and even our own memory plays tricks on us.
So, again – sorry for posting unverified rumors, it wasn’t on purpose. My bad.
Stll love you dear friend. And my invitation stays open too – please come visit us.
My sorry applies to Kevin too – yes that’s right! I guess you didn’t quite sell your conscience, at least not this time! 😉
May 26, 2007 at 6:36 am
Innernaut, 10/138,
Glad I could be the mid-wife for your third state; now our spirits have merged.
Actually Self-remembering does have a certain look; it even comes through in photographs – Whitman, Rilke, Ouspensky, G.G. Meher Baba, RB. When hydrogen 12 or 6 is circulating it does produce a palpable quality in the eyes.
The real point is this: before I met the school I could not remember myself; before reading the Fourth Way I did not know it existed. I can also say with some surity that no one I ever knew before the school knew about it.
The odds of finding someone in a crowded place who is remembering themselves would be extremely rare. You did it because you learned it in the school (I feel like I’m channeling Siddiq)
May 26, 2007 at 7:29 am
Dear King of Clubs:
Thank you for putting up with Keith’s oppositional thinking; kings need patience dealing with jacks and queens. Personally, I have healthy respect for my king of clubs. Sharing your experience in Needleman’s group is invaluable to me, since I have no being there. It adds relativity to the discussion and allows us all to perceive schools on a larger scale.
I understand your statements are based upon your personal beliefs relative to your level of being, which do not require you to prove their truth to anyone. I personally avoid those people whom are willing to tell you about their religion, but really don’t want to hear about yours. Are you one of them? Or are you willing to engage in a dialogue about the terms you employ?
In posting #70 above, you state: “C influence is an intelligent force operating under less laws in a higher dimension that can shock a man’s psychology and bridge an interval in him that he likely could not bridge himself.”
I am still of the mind that the three influences, A, B, & C described in the fourth way that a person can be exposed to in life are essentially produced from a human source and human activity, of course some more conscious than others. I am going to presume that the interval that needs bridging here is one of evolution and being, not necessarily just ‘state’ or level of awareness in any given moment. And I don’t believe in angels hovering above the table.
My direct experience of Mr. Robert Burton is that he morphed the idea of c-influence because he is not sophisticated or evolved enough to provide enough consistent conscious influence shocks to his students to produce any permanent conscious ‘being’ due mostly to the distraction of his sex addiction. He relies on “ideas of reference” or synchronicity to do the job for him. Using synchronicity in this manner, such as reading license plates or seeing the number 44 or other, simply to bridge an interval in a ‘state’ may be a novel idea to change one’s ‘state’ in any given moment, but I would argue the accumulation of these ‘mundane’ shocks does not necessarily enhance a person’s overall level of being.
‘Personal’ shocks such as these play into vanity feature, which one could also argue is the chief feature of the Fellowship of Friends. Mr. Burton most certainly does not have a successful track record as a prophet reading the ‘signs’. The trouble is, if you bet the farm on synchronicity, nine times out of ten, you lose the farm. Synchronicity is subjective and dependant upon a person’s level of being. I believe that synchronicity is self-affirming only. No two people share the same synchronicity all the time.
The ‘conscious being’ his ‘school’ is conscious only because “he said so” and he’s the boss.
Mr. King of Clubs, you and I both know that Mr. Burton’s cult of vanity is not the sole recipient of the conscious aspect of the Ray of Creation. Even 22 years after leaving the FOF, I certainly feel and have personally experienced shocks that bridge intervals in my level of being as well as my state. As Goethe put it, only by making efforts, will providence kick in to help. In my case, I just never stopped making efforts.
The fourth way is the way of the householder. If you understand the nature of sleep and consciousness, if you pay attention to your inconsistencies and make choices based on your conscience and virtue, then those conscious choices are the shocks that will bridge the intervals in your state and raise your level of being over time. For example, I would argue that a marriage in good householder between two individuals based on love and commitment could function as the third force that increases the level of being of one’s fourth dimensional time body. Children are an amazing third force in one’s life, too, this I know from experience.
Are not our conscious souls like divine salmon swimming back toward the Absolute, the place of our birth, in the river of the conscious aspect of the Ray of Creation? Our higher states are the leap into the air, having less friction than the medium of water, allowing us to make headway in our swim upstream against the denying force of aging. What is the third force that enables them to achieve success?
The meaning of life, as Rodney Colin puts it, is the evolution of consciousness. The web of life is expansive, with an outward trajectory. Is not the ‘c-influence’ of which you speak…that which is available to us all…is it not the quickening life force, the will to live, within us that propels us beyond our limitations into the next medium, as that first fish had who crawled out of the overpopulated pond onto land in search of food and more life? Or a cosmonaut hurled into space? If life were so mechanical, why haven’t we found more of it in our solar system?
This is what I think you mean by the intelligent force called c-influence:
The force is the will to live…even beyond death
Intelligence is our pursuit of objective truth …that we are interdependent beings on many levels and eventually, we are all one in the Absolute
I would imagine the King of Clubs was privy to the amazing life force we share with all living things. What do you think?
WhaleRider
1979-1985
May 26, 2007 at 8:08 am
I am coming to realize a prejudice I hold, reading the blog. I find I mostly skip posts by current students, believing that most anyone who is currently in the Fellowship of Friends is suffering under a delusion and does not understand the emotional and mental shackles holding them.
As many others have attested here, the closed circle of FoF around RB creates a kind of shock/trance state. So,I don’t understand why people attempt to engage current members, assault their positions, etc.
Engaging in an exchange with someone still in that trance is like trying to have a conversation with someone who is stoned or drunk when you are sober, I am sorry, but it feels like a waste of time in most instances. I am no longer on a salvation mission of anyone else.
I have also stated before that I realize I can’t know why some people need to stay as long as some of us did in this environment, but we did, and apparently many others still do. Bless them until their time comes to get out.
For what it is worth, to contradict myself and reply to one of these posts addressing me directly — I was an utter coward in leaving, no doubt, still full of problems, ‘buffers,’ confusions. I feel fortunate to have eeked my way out of FoF past the formidable psychological obstacles when I did. Thank God for the expression of negative emotions — that step out of the trance gave me some tiny hold on something more real in myself.
In the short departure letter I wrote after learning of my husband’s cancer diagnosis, I believe I said I would prefer a leave of absence, but knew it would not be possible, therefore I even asked that I be readmitted if I ever thought I had made a mistake in leaving. I was still wanting his approval even at this stage, but I forgive myself for being so pathetic!
As I have also posted earlier, I certainly did not have the clarity to confront RB personally at the time. This is the last time I am going to post this assessment, promise.
As I also stated earlier, after I found out about RB’s homosexuality and the lie it implied in 1983, I resigned from directing centers or any other form of active responsibility for the remainder of my time in FoF.
It still took me another ten years to have the strength to leave. And look here now, it has taken me another 15 years to look some of the most disturbing facts about what went on (the sexual acting out is just the most obvious example) in the face.
Thank you anyone reading this.
Sandra
May 26, 2007 at 8:19 am
“I’ve been talking about the tightrope… the high wire; THE CIRCUS, B-A-B-Y!”
You’re spot on Shelly, because that’s where I hear they keep the clowns.
May 26, 2007 at 9:24 am
#141
This reminds me of a similar story I heard about but without all the “gold alchemy”, vanity, angels and stuff.
It began in the spring of 2003 in this trailer park down in ole Alabamy….
May 26, 2007 at 9:43 am
Dear Siddiq, and my other dear old friends still in the Fellowship of Friends,
Trust is an easier word to swallow than integrity.
In a marriage, trust is critical. When it’s gone there is no way to revive it. The relationship between a student and his/her teacher trumps the relationship of a marriage. One’s very soul and sanity are at stake. All throughout In Search Of The Miraculous the reader feels the psychic conflict of instinctive caution vs. incremental spiritual verification as it plays out within Peter Ouspensky’s mind and emotions. As Ouspensky gradually learns to trust Gurdjieff as his teacher, he finds he is able to make efforts that would previously and otherwise have been unthinkable. His apparent verifications build into trust, and his trust builds into resolve, conviction, effort, consciousness. This is the fourth way proposition, unfortunately mimicked by a long list of cults from Sun Myung Moon to Scientology.
I posed questions about the idea of integrity in a previous post. The integrity of others is difficult to judge or describe. Everything one thinks one sees in others tends to be subjective. However, the inside-out of integrity is trust. Integrity inspires trust in those who come into contact with it. This is common sense. Conversely, when something in you begins to lose trust, it is a good idea to listen to that voice. It is the only safe barometer we have. It’s like conscience turned outwards. Trust, confidence is what any smart buyer seeks and relies on; and “Caveat Emptor” most definitely applies to spiritual teachers just as much as it does to used-car salesmen.
Defenders of Robert’s rights to privacy “behind closed doors” miss this point altogether. Robert is selling not buying. If his personal actions smell rotten, let the buyer not only beware but run as fast as he/she can in the opposite direction. E.g. I signed on for practical psychological instruction, not pharaoh-babble 101; and now I find out the teacher has created a destructive homosexual cabal? May be time to go.
What happened to the trust we used to have in Robert? What happened to the teacher we thought we had? What happened to the school we thought we were helping to build?
Do you ever ask yourself these things? Has your own trust been earned, or does it come cheap? Is this how you thought your fourth way school would be when you started out? Or is it really just a bad marriage, a life of quiet desperation?
For me, the growing senility of Robert’s teaching was the red flag. It eroded my trust in him, which then intensified all my other simmering questions about the Fellowship of Friends. Failed prophesies are one thing; playing fast and loose (and fundamentalist) with profound writings throughout the ages is quite another. He just didn’t have it anymore. What I signed on for. He lost his edge.
And then I met this blog.
Do you think there is no connection between the teacher’s undisciplined lifestyle and the teacher’s undisciplined teaching? No connection between the sordid actions of his closest followers and the objective, spiritual integrity at the core of his school?
By their fruits you will know them. Strange fruit this FOF tree is bearing lately.
I do not intend to write more here. It’s out of my system now. Thank you, Sheik and thank you invisible friends. Good luck to all, both in and out. It’s been a great ride but the rest of my life awaits me. I do not intend to spend it looking backward, and I don’t have much time.
With love.
Joseph G.
May 26, 2007 at 9:55 am
There is so much to share with everyone…The honesty and forthrightness here create so much humility and stillness with every reading.
And, to our dearest “Shiek” whatever depth or truth there is in the “play” concept (paradigm, if you will) your “Being Here Now” during these moments in the FOF’s history is a profound “Role” and please let me express my LOVE and Gratitude to You!!! You are adored!!!
Paola Evelina, you have an absolutely beautiful name and your Being is equal to your name. I’d like to share with you a sweet thought to contemplate…
“Honesty is Spiritual Power. Dishonesty is human (mechanical) weakness and forfeits Divine help”.
I’m going to process your honest disclosure to Robert…it will take some inner work and be assured that I will communicate with you again.
At first reading of your post… Feminine Dominance is intertwined here, although I cannot put my finger on the pulse of “The Drama” without doing some deep internal processing. In any case I Love you and your honesty very much!
My experiences were in many ways similiar and processing them may take my entire life. The question that reverberates over and over and over again is “Why are we buying these belief systems and paying toward them??? In so doing (at least in many situations), students cannot afford “food”, Medical care and any possibility of even the most meager future security which is essential as “the machine” ages ???
What have been referred to as “SHOCKS” from “HIGHER FORCES” cause the breakdown of many bodies…
YES, Bodies… to where if they were cars they would be towed to a junkyard and possibly used for parts. I am one of these students…my functioning capacity is about 20% during this precious lifetime.
OKAY…so what is my point??? Thriving on “NO” expression of oneself…not simply the non-expression of negatlve emotions is simply to train oneself in non-existence feature…to buy this as consciousness…when it is so easily verifiable as buying and giving everything one has to give (in every possible way) to “SADISTIC FORCES”…Yes, you have read correctly and I shall repeat “SADISTIC FORCES” married inextricably to “MASOCHISM” (deep masochistic needs, achings, cravings).
We can together take all the incomprehensible sharing and take the pieces of this mysterious complex puzzle… and, all of the sexual perversity with a “Front” of “Pure as the driven snow” that even the most famous of “Mafia Godfathers” would envy, and the “Game” is over.
Try it on for a few minutes, a few days, a few hours or even lifetimes. G said, “Remember yourself always and everywhere”. He also said, “Verify Everything”.
Forgive me if I’m sounding negative…It really is not at all my intention. I’m (or was) a Venutian…mechanically very over protective of those whom I Love dearly.
We pay the highest possible price and then sound just like a peacock pluming in our masochism… that “We” have received the ultimate “SADISTIC SHOCK”…not, mind you from “Higher Forces”…rather from “DEMONIC FORCES”. And, the final piece of the puzzle is the piece named “AWAKENING???????????????????”
Does anyone else hear very loud snoring??????????
I leave you with 2 thoughts, and my Love…
“The fruit of the HOLY SPIRIT is Love, Joy, Peace, Gentleness, Faith, Meekness, Temperance,
…Against such there IS NO LAW”
Christ Jesus
“Being and Love are the only indestructible realities”.
“Angel Aware”
May 26, 2007 at 11:23 am
Not What I Signed Up For
Dear Paola
Fellow soprano. Maybe your free spirit was never meant for this school of repression. Peace and joy to you.
For me, right now, all I really want to do is hang out in Arthur’s driveway. If he will put up with my obscure RnB favourites. BYOB, of course.
Thinking now of that friend of a friend of a friend, living at The Trailer Park, smiling at me with a somewhat toothless smile. “Hey, what the hell were you thinking. You’ll be okay. I have seen worse, a lot worse.”
Silver linings to all
Cake
May 26, 2007 at 12:23 pm
I am sure everybody reading this blog has seen a bitch in heat followed by a pack of dogs.
The problem I’m having is I can’t tell whether the bitches on this blog are male or female, they seem to be both in one.
May 26, 2007 at 1:31 pm
When I left the Fellowship of Friends, an ex-wife and a child, someone asked me how it felt to leave a daughter in the school? I remembered replying at the time, “Thank god it’s a girl”.
Now I’m not so sure, given the post detailing Burton’s fondness for arranged marriages – though I can see why he might want to control that aspect too.
Simon
Postcript: My daughter is happily well away from the Fellowship now and dating a very pleasant “life” boy. She obviously has much more sense than I did at her age!
May 26, 2007 at 1:41 pm
Our Teacher says there is a Virus going around? Here is what Meister Eckhardt has to say:
“A Plague”
What a cruel act to be untruthful.
Earthquakes happen in the heart that hears sounds that are amiss.
Havoc is created in the mind that can no longer trust someone once loved,
And schisms devour alliances that help support our life.
Words can enrich and be as wonderful spices mixed into the days we imbibe with all our senses.
There are fields in the soul – lush organic meadows, though sounds and words that fall there can be, at times, a poison.
A plague is spread by the one who cannot tell the truth.
Meister Eckhardt (1260-1328)
May 26, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Cathie #81,
“You must realize that your participation supports RB…enables abuse of power…If you are sincere, you’ll examine this contradiction in your heart of hearts”
Based on what I knew all along & read here, the moral argument remains a scondary one. When we say here ‘RB’s abuse of power’ we do not usually mean some sort of criminality (there is not evidence of that, except the Troy case; and I’ll wellcome any lawsuit that may curb him a bit), but rather a kind of pressure that comes with his sense of entitelement and the added pressure of the numerous enablers. Those who are naive, needy or ambitious & are getting close to the fire expose themselves to pressure & heat. Paola & Kiran reveered & obeyed RB. whoever believes in the divinity of another person and gives him a carte blanche to behave as he pleases- should take a good look at himself if he gets hurt. And a person can pull back if he or she gets too close for comfort. Relevant here is Rita’s funny story of the friend who ‘misunderstood’ & massaged Robert’s ‘upper cheeks’.
Many small choices are made on the way that leads to servicing him & to his bedroom.
RB’s decadent behaviour in and of itself would not have bothered me if it would not be also narcissist and self serving & combined with the latest free fall of the ‘teacing’ aspect.
His lifestyle & the excesses were percieved by the majority who stayed afar from the ‘inner circle’ action as a ‘necessary evil’ that comes with the entire package of the school, the practices of the Work, this community & a bizzare teacher- king. Since I don’t pay much, no more than I can realistically afford without compromising other interests & needs, until recently I looked more at the ‘balance sheet’ of what I invest & what I get.
Lately, everything that is ‘not Robert’ or near Robert or from the mouth of Robert- has been muted & cancelled. The only show in town is ‘Pharaoh babble 101’ as Joseph G. T. puts it, and that’s not worth much.
That is the main reason behind the Exodus lately.
A person may continue to maintain spiritual integrity & purity amidst corruption, decadence & stupidity.
The automatic association between the individual & the environement he chooses to be , even percieved as ‘endorsing’ by this association
to
I am weighing my options.
May 26, 2007 at 3:13 pm
I pressed the ‘submit’ button by mistake before rereading my post & editing it. Also I didn’t finish a thought at the end:
I meant to say that there is much of the american puritanical values in associating too much the individual with the environement he chooses, and even in some minor ways ‘endorses’ by association.
May 26, 2007 at 3:42 pm
Dear Angel Aware #163
Thank you for trying to be gentle.
Maybe the fact that English is not my first language prevented me to understand exactly what is it that you wanted to tell me… if you wish, please help me understand: I will gladly welcome any comment: I have been starving from second line long enough now…
Cake please #164
Thank you.
Which soprano are you? I’d love to know…
My2bits #151 and everybody
Thanks to take the time to read my post! And Thank you for your responses
pgallarato@hotmail.com
May 26, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Howard Carter (post 157) wrote:
“Glad I could be the mid-wife for your third state.”
I didn’t say you helped “birth” my third state, which is what a mid-wife does. I said that I understood one of your comments to be incorrect while in the third state. I’m afraid this is that Fellowship vanity sneaking in, taking credit for things it has no business doing.
You also wrote:
“Actually Self-remembering does have a certain look; it even comes through in photographs – Whitman, Rilke, Ouspensky, G.G. Meher Baba, RB. When hydrogen 12 or 6 is circulating it does produce a palpable quality in the eyes.”
Please study the definition of “projection.” If it were possible for you to look at these photographs without the interceding layer of Fellowship dogma coloring your perceptions, they might appear rather different. With Robert Burton in particular, I see someone “posing” in a way that he thinks looks awake. The one thing I do see in his eyes is that unmistakable look of the king of clubs — I have always seen this; it just took my de-programming to be able to admit it to myself.
May 26, 2007 at 4:14 pm
Oh Paola, your story made me cry! My heart goes out to you.
You will remember me from your trip to Atlanta, when Robert visited and had events at Sylvia’s. Also from a New Year’s Ball at Apollo. I still don’t know how to dance, but that night was pure magic and you were a great dance teacher. I have fond memories of you.
When you were “asked to leave” along with other students, it was presented as a “sex scandal”. I remember that I didn’t want to know more. My reasoning was that no one is perfect and we all make mistakes, and if Robert thinks it is best for these students to leave, it must be because it is in the best interest of their evolution. Sounds familiar? Also, I was a good student and did not want to participate in gossip, although it was available… Moon Angel made a good point that non-expression, non-judgment, and the task to no gossip made all the dirty and horrifying stuff securely sealed from sincere students that were trying to play by the rules in didn’t happen to be directly involved in the horrors.
I can’t help asking myself, if I knew your story and other things that were revealed on this blog, would I still buffer them? This idea that Robert is conscious and therefore entitled to mess with the lives of beautiful, sincere, and often naive people, causing them tremendous suffering and long-lasting emotional damage! My god, what a monster this man is, just to think that I sincerely believed he was my Teacher!
My heart bleeds just reading about what you, Asaf, and others involved, went through. Anyone who ever suffered (all of us?) will feel your anguish.
In my last months in the Fellowship, my internal conflict was becoming so taxing that my periods stopped for 4 months (and came back after I left). I suppose that “enemy”, my “lower self”, knew how damaging that stifling atmosphere was. There were (still are) some older students in our center, and I can’t help asking myself, did the KNOW??? And if they did, what kind of warped thinking did it take to keep the irreconcilable reconciled?
Sorry if I sound overly emotional. Not my style. But one of the changes I see after having left the Fellowship is that emotions come in powerful waves, now that I am not trying to “non-express” and “transform”.
Dear friends still in the Fellowship, PLEASE, open your eyes and you hearts! No, I am not asking you to leave, each of us has their own path, but just that: open your eyes and your hearts!
Thank you to all the friends for your posts, Innernaut, Traveler, No Person, Rita, Ames, Whale Rider, and Siddiq and Hava Nagillah as well, and many others… Deep gratitude to the Sheik.
Love to you all.
You can write to me if you are moved to:
Ogeecheeyes@yahoo.com
May 26, 2007 at 4:30 pm
#145 Elena
“Who amongst us was not seduced by the initial idea of serving a conscious school and preserving culture for humanity?”
I had an exemple illustrating this topic:
It is like if you went for school to study Architecture. Then the first day you arrive, someone tells you to sweep the room, so that you can comprehend what is a clean space, how a clean and ordered space evoques beauty, and so on…
It makes sense so you just do it.
The next day, the same demand is put upon you.
It still makes sense and you just do it again.
The day after, to prevent receiving an order and to receive the approval of the one dominant in the situation, you just take the broom before he asks you to do so.
And then you end up proud to become the perfect sweeper, forgetting completely your own initial project of becoming an Architect.
You end up having a second hand life.
And from Oscar Wilde a quote that applies to that…..
“I can believe all things, as long as they are completely incredible.” (portait of Dorian Gray)
# 141 Paola
Thank you for your courage to clarify this event.
The rumors and slander circulating after this event were quite different.
Aline
May 26, 2007 at 4:42 pm
WhaleRider: As you may know, Miles said decades ago that vanity had replaced tramp as the Fellowship’s chief feature. At the time it just confirmed something that had been increasingly hard to ignore. At this point it’s like saying “George Bush can be a bit stubborn,” or “Robert Burton has a greed feature.”
Also, I agree with your sentiments about “C Influence,” an embarrassingly clunky term reflecting a willingness to suspend all critical thinking and see the world as someone else has told you to see it, enabling you to feel really superior because you now imagine you’ve confirmed what every young child briefly imagines, that you are the center of the universe. “Verifying C Influence” means agreeing to allow your vanity to completely take over; it’s the mark of the True Believer, the ultimate test. If RB asks whether you “verified C Influence,” you must say yes or else reveal that you’re on the other side of the line. “Oh, yes, I’ve verified it. (Knowing look, half-smile to indicate “I’m a member of the club.”) RB’s version of “C Influence” has nothing in common with any approach to it in any traditional Fourth Way literature; it’s just his conservative Catholicism masquerading as something esoteric. Like “ladders,” his predictions, and so many other concepts, it’s a tool he created to manipulate others; by definition, only he has the inside track. “C Influence” in the traditional sense would have required that he actually possess the ability to provide oral transmission (no pun intended) of important information not otherwise available. But he never had anything like that to transmit, since he was never part of a lineage in which he could have received it himself. He was forced to cobble together his “teachings” from recycled bits and pieces of other people’s writings, and he apparently still does it today, just less coherently. And “C Influence”–the idiosyncratic, manipulative use of synchronicity–is his trump card.
Joseph G: I suppose you won’t be around to read this, but thanks for your sincere posts. And I agree with your observation about trust; everything depends on it in a healthy relationship, and when it’s gone, everything changes, even though the only thing that may actually have changed is the point of view of one person.
Many of the people who went from True Believer to What The Hell Am I Doing In This Cult lost that trust despite wishing it were otherwise. You see something you didn’t, or couldn’t, see before, and then the illusion is over. There’s no longer a choice. The Great and Powerful Oz becomes the hapless man behind the curtain, yanking levers. (I couldn’t resist.) Until then, you can continue to think, maybe for decades, like “Howard Carter.” His recent posts remind me of how I’ve sometimes looked at a stranger and had a judgment, like “sleeping machine,” or “not too bright,” or “geek.” Later, I’d run into that person and he’d be playing the most incredible music on his violin, or I’d have a conversation with him at a party and discover he’s wise and brilliant. Or I’d hear someone’s voice on the telephone and think, “sounds like a lunar, maybe emotionally centered.” Then I’d meet her and she’d be an athletic martial. But vanity can allow us to live in a bubble indefinitely, if we want it to badly enough. Until we see behind the curtain.
May 26, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Thank you Paola for sharing your voyage with us.
Whalerider said it well when he wrote that it is the higher emotional center that discerns truthfulness. It shines through your post and reflects on your beautiful nature/soul.
I hope you will find your way “home” whereever that may be, shortly, it seems that many of the apparent inequities have been transformed by you.
Although this may not make sense for many who are on this blog, as there is so much judgment, one way that I try to form my attitudes is that even despite what appears as a terrible injustice on one level, the way a shock may affect us (such as here being asked by Robert to take a leave of absence) there is something in it for me, the recipient of the shock.
In my own play, receiving shocks I consider to be “from the Gods” I have often seen that, although at times they appear “unjust,” there is another lesson to learn for me rather than the obvious one, denial, justification, or some superficial lesson.
This does not mean being a victim, nor condoning actions that are wrong nor that you cannot stand up for what is right–all can be done–but from a quiet place without judgment for anyone. When we learn this, we can move moutains.
As your post shows, it is your payment that makes this experience of worth to you, not exacting the price or payment someone else needs to make.
My best to you and all,
Siddiq
PS Ames, unfortunately, I cannot make it to the party today because of some job commitments. I hope your event is very succesful.
May 26, 2007 at 4:53 pm
Branding the third state.
As has been pointed out before on this blog, there is a dependency that builds up as one repeats a situation for the sake of ‘entering the third state’. The situation itself needs to be viewed from the point of view of ‘mechanics’- we are in a group situation carried by the wave of common expectation, uncomfortable, looking at the speakers left eye, listening to things that do not make sense and trying not to react the apparent nonsence internally, but just be present. This is an interesting state and the more nonsensical things get the more one has to separate and the deeper presence gets. I dont know how unusual this is, group dynamic underpinning some sort of spirituallity is probably fairly common. Members have to get in closer to be able to stay positive, they have to give up more of what might make them doubt. One sees evidence of this dynamic in politics, sports, bigotry, fan clubs, and probably any cult activity.
I think what people who use this power to dominate others do is to hijack a big idea through mutating it to their own ends and branding it.
In the Fellowship of Friends this means that the third state is something you pay to experience, in money, devotion, belonging, giving up will, etc. What you get is NOT the third state, you get the third state as branded by Robert Burton. In my oppinion it is not the third state in some objective way as though we experience the same third state together and that this is the same state experienced by Goethe, Socrates, various Egyptians and cave painters etc. Yet the idea of the third state as presented to members of the Fellowship of Friends is that it is uniquely avaiable to us by methods that belong to school on earth of which we are the modern expression. Just because you call a fizzy orange sweet bevarage – orange juice does not make it orange juice. It is that this is what you have been taught to call it and you drink it together with those who praise its perfection. The juice of an orange, however is totally different.
May 26, 2007 at 5:14 pm
Half Life (#166)
With all due respect, when you say “When we say here ‘RB’s abuse of power’ we do not usually mean some sort of criminality (there is not evidence of that, except the Troy case)”, I believe you’re setting the bar for criminality rather high. As someone who was pursued by RB and said “no thanks” in his bedroom, I suppose I have the right to join you in saying “Many small choices are made on the way that leads to servicing him & to his bedroom,” and I know how one’s own weaknesses are involved. But without dwelling exclusively on RB’s sex life (which is inseparable from all of his other behavior, and all other aspects of the Fellowship, since it all emanates from the same being), if one takes two giant steps backward, and just absorbs all that has been expressed on this blog, and dismisses some of it as speculation, lies, whatever, but multiplies what remains by the thousands who haven’t happened to have posted (yet), added to what you know from your own experience, the picture that emerges is ugly. To my mind, criminal.
May 26, 2007 at 5:23 pm
“shocks such as these play into vanity feature, which one could also argue is the chief feature of the Fellowship of Friends”
The Chief Feature of the FOF is tramp, which would explain why it takes students so long to process things and then act upon them.
I used to think it was the Kings of centers that dragged their feet and thus had an excuse for not acting faster then I should, but, when the house is on fire the evil Instinctive Center , which is the intelligence behind the machine, doesn’t have to think twice about where the nearest exit is.
May 26, 2007 at 5:23 pm
There are many beautiful sincere people writing here, there are also harsh individuals with anger deep in their bones attacking the others sincere attempts to expose their truths.
Let us be clear about this: every one of us was naive when joined the fof, and continued to be for a long time afterwards!
What to accuse Sandra C. of buffering? and so what? every one buffered! until some of us woke up and could not take the spiritual and physical abuse anymore.
May 26, 2007 at 5:42 pm
Dear Paola,
It’s very brave of you to post your story. I had no idea – what I heard before was so distorted and “made fit”. You were portrayed so badly, like someone I never knew before. I always suspected that there is another side of the story – and yes, here it is, thank you for posting it.
I was wery saddened when you were asked to leave… Hey – may be it’s actually one of the best things that happened to you after all.
I always liked your alive bright energy. Hope to se you soon!
P.S. Could anyone comment on the info about RB’s recent prediction that school will soon shrink to only 400 “best” members?
It made me laugh. I pictured the power struggle among devoted ones to get into Holy 400…
But I don’t know if RB actually said this, may be it’s just another untrue story…
Besides we all know how good his predictions are by now.
malaec@yahoo.com
May 26, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Pharaoh babble – Exodus – Is there a pattern?
May 26, 2007 at 7:02 pm
#156
>What do you think?
We all have different experiences and even different degrees of imagination, but in my experience, if it is not in fact imagination, in a higher state a man understands that he is not alone.
#160
>Defenders of Robert’s rights to privacy “behind closed doors” miss this point altogether.
Here is what is wrong (allegedly), in many if not most cases he uses the chief feature of dominance to press otherwise non-compliant heterosexuals into homosexual acts. Anyone that does not understand that such actions are a crime has no conscience.
May 26, 2007 at 7:07 pm
Dear Howard Carter:
The thought occurred to me today that if Robert has given you the task of reading and responding to this blog, you are incredibly lucky. If not, and you have set this task upon yourself, that’s a smart choice. You are doing a good job sincerely responding to the blog clearly as one of the faithful, but you tend to restrain your personal side. That omission leaves me to the conclusion this is either your job or your posts are just coming from ‘FOF student on Prozac with computer’.
But READING this blog is the one task that might actually raise your level of being. Consider it communing with Pluto, god of the underworld. He has a lot of time on his hands hanging out with everyone who has died. And the dead like to talk about their lives. From kings to slaves, he has intently listened to all those stories! That’s what makes him so incredibly wise and often blunt. He is not afraid of conflict. He cuts to the chase. He has heard it all and knows the truth.
You say above in #139: “We can verify that the first and second states have degrees. It ought to be plausible to us that it’s the same for the third state. But in general the third state is the realm in which we can better know ourselves and the truths we are seeking. I would say we are on a path, and in the second state the path is shrouded with fog. With the third state the fog lifts and we can better see where we’ve been and where we’re going. Inevitably the fog descends again and our only compass is our attitudes, illusions, programming, fears, bias’ etc., but the memories of our third state experiences are like beacons that guide us on. So in that sense I don’t see it like Rabbi Burns, who says when the third state leaves one is right back where one started. That’s where memory enters; what’s the point of verifying something if we do not remember it? The third state is where spiritual verifications are possible it’s the state where we can directly commune with higher forces. But is it beyond self-manipulation, I would say no, its just worlds better than the lawless second state?”
The fog that obscures our path is our unresolved past. It robs us of our free attention and clarity. We are all accountable for our past. It effects us even in the hyper vigilant ‘third state’.
If you have not understood the complexities of our human predicament, memories of your addictive drug of choice, the mania of self-remembering, will only guide you toward more abuse of the drug. It feels good, and we want more. It’s the way our brain’s pleasure/pain center is wired. But the original intense ‘buzz’ is never completely recaptured. So Rabbi Burns understands that when the ‘third state’ leaves, one is right back where one started, tweeking and jones-ing for more. And an addict will do just about anything for a fix…even delude (self-manipulate) himself to ‘verify’ that lying, cheating, and stealing are justifiable ways of being. That is a decidedly unspiritual way of being. Remember that Mr. Robert Burton, above else, claims that the drug ‘self-remembering’ is the cornerstone and currency of his ‘school’.
BTW, it is the fourth state, objective awareness, (not the third where ‘self’ remembering is a joke), when one actually communes with higher forces. The self does not exist there, one BECOMES, for a few brief eternal moments that last forever, All and Everything.
Gurdjieff says that the right work of the third state is to personally grasp, humbly, and with all one’s being, the suffering that the Absolute incurs to extend, in an effort to know Itself, the conscious aspect included in the vast bandwidth of the Ray of Creation. It is out of pure, unconditional compassion. Compassion is the current we ride to higher states, back to our source. Once it radiates within you, you can relax the third state mania a bit, compassion is the radar that cuts through the fog.
You have obviously incorporated the FOF brand of work language into your centers to expound it so well. Are you evolving? Do you strive for the level of being that could allow you to abandon your precious ‘self’?…and labor, in an effort to relieve just a small fraction of the Absolute’s suffering, to BE and ACT completely compassionate to all living things, even when behind the wheel of your car? (Jesus hates SUV’s.)
Is it compassion that enables you to continue supporting a lawless and morally corrupt teacher and his cult that harms the consciences of so many people? Or drivng you, is it the vanity that comes with the role Robert has ‘bestowed’ upon you in the final acts in his play of crime?
Whale Rider
1979-1985
May 26, 2007 at 8:02 pm
#141 Paola, Beautiful Paola!
I am crying. I can’t take it anymore. I hate Robert… I hate Robert…
May 26, 2007 at 8:19 pm
#61 Sandra C.
You were my first teacher in the work. Never mind that fof version of 4th way is distorted, you helped me like no other in understanding the ideas of Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. Your kindness and giving attitude were a guidepost along the way of self discovery for me and I never had a chance to thank you for it.You certainly were not perfect and often contradicted yourself (I’ll never forget you saying, “If you meet the Buddha, kill him”, and wondering why that didn’t apply to Robert Burton), and you also gave sound advice along with the not so sound. I was maybe a little to dumbstruck and contradictory myself to notice the difference at the time. You have opened yourself here in a way that you were probably unable to in years past and my admiration for you grows anew. I think of you (the younger you, as I am just meeting the newer you) often, wish you well and look forward to your messages here. 1974-1979.
#70 KofC
Ouch! I didn’t expect my questions to unleash such a barrage of self-rightous indignation. My apologies for ruffling your features.
#64 Ames Gilbert
“I am NOT attached to the idea of lineage!”
Maybe a buffer, huh? I hadn’t noticed it before. Thanks.
I don’t disagree that others may have attained change of being through pain and suffering and that by accepting it somehow transformed it into a new level of understading. I am talking about something altogether different. Man #4 is a product of school work. And there is right school work and wrong school work. Right work may help us to better balance our centers. Wrong work, work that uses some principles and ignores others, creates an imbalance.
The notion that Robert Burton was beaten and bullied into consciousness is, to me anyway, absurd. I don’t think that conscious evolution is encouraged through lunatic efforts and submission to sadistic treatment. Maybe a certain kind of will can be developed by forcing oneself to live through that kind of experience, but it is the will of the fakir, or so it would seem.
My Ouspensky teacher never made any claims about Ouspensky’s level, nor did he, or to her own. It was not to hard to tell that she had developed something, maybe permanent aim, I don’t know.
I think that the form of the 4th way must always be changing but certain principles must always remain constant. My teacher was close enough to Ouspensky’s teaching, from 1934 until his death, and was given permission by O to teach the system. As far as I know she never used the ideas for personal material gain and attempted to not depart too far from Ouspensky’s method. She did have her own style, she was British, and it certainly made her teaching unique.
I think we became arrogant the moment we divided life into “Fellowship students” and “life people”. Arrogance has moved around a bit in me but has usually shown up when anyone challenges my 4th way opinions. I have been trying to come to terms with it (because it is terribly self-limiting), make peace with it if you will, for the past decade. I didn’t even see it for many years because of my identification with it.
I do get a sense of intellectual superiority (arrogance) from some of the posters, but you are right, in this environment for, the most part, people are plumbing deeper depths than just surface personality. And no, vanity has not taken a vacation from my personality, it is alive and well often hiding behind a thin veil of false humility.
I haven’t given up on “sources” yet, I wouldn’t be dining on this blog if I had.
I hit my “dark side of the soul” several years ago and discovered that my abandonment of system ideas was not an intentional decision but rather a gradual displacement of the ideas with a frantic pursuit of external personal achievement, chasing my own tail so to speak.
Many latent talents that had been lying dorment
were developed at the expense of inner spiritual work and any real sense of being true to myself. I see this as being perhaps necessary in order to allow me to approach 4th way and other higher ideas from a different perspective. I do in a way envy those people who are able to become “the virtuoso mystics” and am trying to learn from them (you) as best as I can, which out of necessity, means to critically question not only what they say but what I think about what they say.
I feel that the experience of sharing with so many like minded people is opening me to new possibilities and for that I am thankful.
I am sorry that I can’t meet you and others this weekend, circumstances would not permit a trip down south. Maybe another time. Be well, I value the efforts that you and all the others bring here.
Steve Anderson
May 26, 2007 at 9:37 pm
Thanks Paola for your extraordinarily vivid and honest post (141).
The depiction of life in the “inner circle” rings very true, particularly the complete subservience to the will of Robert Burton in even the most intimate parts of one’s life: His plan to fix Asaf up with the young X! (One wonders how her parents relate to this.) The role of RT as fixer – she used to be quite a principled person – what a change! The vicious response of Robert on receiving Paola’s letter! And so on… It reads like some weird fantasy, but of course we know it’s true – we lived around this for years.
Then Siddiq’s self-calming reaction (173), typical of the Fellowship of Friends mindset, stating that to take what Paola says at face value and draw the conclusions that any decent person would draw, is “judgement”. Wow! Of course that’s how FOF members have managed to put up with these obvious absurdities for so long.
May 26, 2007 at 10:06 pm
“Gurdjieff says that the right work of the third state is to personally grasp, humbly, and with all one’s being, the suffering that the Absolute incurs to extend, in an effort to know Itself, the conscious aspect included in the vast bandwidth of the Ray of Creation.
It is out of pure, unconditional compassion. Compassion is the current we ride to higher states.”
Hey WhaleRdr, you begin quoting G. here, and then you add your own ideas, thus confusing what G. meant to say in the first place.
Maybe I missed something, but the 4th Way does not encompass compassion, this is a Buddhist idea.
While is may be useful for Juan’s own evolution to mix-and-match different ideas, in the end it might only lead to Roam.
***
“there is a dependency that builds up as one repeats a situation for the sake of ‘entering the third state’.”
Yes, I-C, its called being formatory. It probably marries itself to imagination and thus creates imagination in higher centers. I have to agree with G. that unless Juan knows what Juan is doing, you may as well check into Hotel California.
Unfortunately, the FOF is not the only pseudo-4th Way ‘school’ that has contributed to creating damaged machines. It has probably contributed more on the level of identification with the Sex Center.
While Rajneesh sought to desolve the sexual barriers (by accepting it and embracing sexuality and free the identification with it), R. seems bent on exploiting Juan’s trust and vulnerability. Although, in conversations with heterosexual men who are/were
sexually involved, they seem to focus more on transcending their sexual identification’s rather than on feeling being expolited. To my mind, this means they did not feel either manipulated nor exploited for R’s end’s.
Of course, this could change, when and if they leave the FOF, whereas, as witnessed on this blog from some of those men, they would rather shift the blame on R rather than take responsibility for their action’s.
May 26, 2007 at 10:25 pm
Siddiq #10/173 says in response to Paola and her story with Asaf: “Although this may not make sense for many who are on this blog, as there is so much judgment, one way that I try to form my attitudes is that even despite what appears as a terrible injustice on one level, the way a shock may affect us (such as here being asked by Robert to take a leave of absence) there is something in it for me, the recipient of the shock.”
This is very interesting. Siddiq is compassionate to Paola. What happened to her is seen as coming from higher forces and for the good of her evolution. I think this is a cornerstone of Fellowship thinking, something that allows the whole enterprise to keep going. Siddiq is humble and does not judge. Robert’s actions are not seen as human actions, they are “shocks from higher forces”. Interestingly, Siddiq only mentions the part about being asked to leave the school as unjust. He does not express an opinion about Robert’s other actions, such as scripting the personal lives of his followers and even the future of non-students. I can only guess that Siddiq sees this as just action and totally necessary to fulfil the “wishes of Influence C”, to be part of a great glorious play that is more important than our individual lives. That can fill a person’s life with a lot of meaning, if there happens to be a void there that needs to be filled. That is the spirit of the Japanese kamikaze who willingly killed themselves for the emperor and the cause, sacrificing in the name of something greater than themselves.
A person subject to this kind of thinking can only hope that the cause is a worthy one. Theirs is not to reason why but to submit to the will of whoever they grant the authority of a higher being. Undoubtedly, Paola profited tremendously from this scenario. That’s because this “shock” shook her out of her trance and she realized that the only way it makes sense to continue living is by being truthful and true to herself. Being really truthful always includes being non-judgmental. And I think Paola manages to be incredibly even-toned and mature in her letter, given the circumstances. I think she has learned that lesson well, Siddiq. She learned it because she has a healthy core of being.
So I have to ask myself, where is Robert’s “conscious” role in this? Why do we insist that everything that Robert does is a conscious action for the sake of our evolution? Do you really see that? Isn’t it more likely that Robert was upset because he could not have it his own way, and exercised his power to make things go as he had planned? Would a compassionate teacher acting in my best interest seek out a proxy to deliver his message by phone saying that I am worse than alcohol and that I have four days to leave my only home and disappear from his vicinity? We have been so programmed to “not judge” Robert the conscious being that we are blind to seeing when he is just acting out. Students in the Fellowship have lost discrimination. They have decided in advance that seeing any flaw in their teacher would mean that they are “negative”, and that’s bad.
Intense life experiences have transformative potential. That is true in or out of the Fellowship. It is up to you what you learn from them. Students I have known have been incredible at “not resenting friction”. Maybe the time has come to balance that aspect of work on oneself with some common sense. See when Robert’s role in our learning is circumstantial rather than consciously intended. Or, as someone else already mentioned, a “conscious teaching” has got to be more than just constantly “separating” from Robert’s craziness.
May 26, 2007 at 10:27 pm
Hello again to everyone.
I haven’t posted for some time but Paola’s story really moved me. I have already sent her an email offering her at least some emotional support as late as that might be.
Also I would say to Exlax, whoever you are your nasty comment to Shelley M was completely unwarranted. I am at a loss to say what has happened to Fellowship students that feel they can be so judgmental and vitriolic in the guise of anonymity who have been taught for so long non-judgment and the non-expression of negativity. I find such uncompassionate responses quite appalling, certainly you cannot be a part of the organization I once belonged to.
As for Shelley I didn’t know her well but enough to know that she was a very talented woman and seems still to be so.
Shelley I was that arrogant young actor who thought he knew it all. For that I deeply apologize and hope we might meet for coffee in SF sometime soon.
simmo1954@yahoo.com is my contact email.
As for the rest of the fellowship posters I sincerely hope you can still feel compassion for those people who have left remain and who were never a part of Fof . We are all from the same source share the same pulse of life no matter the outward form or appearance.
I wish you all well and wish the great gift of compassion for you all.
Stephen Simmonds
May 26, 2007 at 10:39 pm
Dear Paola,
Thank you so very much for telling your story.
There are two areas I would particularly like to focus on. One, is the fact that we cannot assume responsibility for each other when we don’t know what is happening which is why Robert keeps us uncommunicated. The fact that there are no open channels for students to express what is happening to them is what guarantees that every small and big abuse of authority from Robert or other students in the inner circle or elsewhere, go unchecked.
I found out by accident about you during those four days that you had to leave and when I asked Girard, he dismissed the question saying something on the lines that you were the only responsible one for what was happening to you. I knew something was very wrong just by the way you were being asked to leave in four days but I couldn’t get any more information, not that my weak position in the Fellowship would have made any difference when Robert Burton was as willing to ask me to take a leave of absence for looking after Dorothy.
The other area worth looking into is the process you tell us about what was taking place in Asaf, needing to live a hidden life to keep himself “sane.” Another lady who knew Asaf before working for Robert and met with him recently, mentioned how much more stiff he has become and is adopting acts of superiority like Robert. He is slowly accommodating to the Asaf role and willing to give up the life that could keep him “sane” or without dividing into two or multiple personalities, like Girard.
I would appreciate someone dropping this lines to Asaf with Paola’s letter.
Asaf,
Girard’s division into multiple personalities is so deep that it even permeates his physical body. It was the right side of his body that paralyzed. Crazy as this may sound, it is the way his higher centers are trying to keep his “drive”, from doing him any further damage allowing only his left side, his essence, to gain some ground.
Your “drive” to serve Robert is pure ambition. Both the ambition to serve the higher and to be in a position. In the Fellowship it is the position that grows, not the serving the higher. You are a wonderfully talented young man, just as Girard was. No matter how much power you gain within the Fellowship of Friends, it is an illusory power that will lead you no where and ruin your life.
You know me well enough Asaf no matter how little we’ve talked, you know I neither love you nor hate you, I am talking to you as someone who cares for what is happening to you. This is just as true for you Mihai, which is not the same as for Dorian. Dorian has never looked beyond himself, that is probably why he is in the end, so much closer to Robert. No matter what the appearances look like.
No being can bend so much without breaking or deforming but when forced to do so at your young age, it is almost impossible to repair. Give yourselves a fairer chance. You are all being used against each other, you’re all afraid of the fact that if you get off the boat, the boat will simply keep sailing without you. You’ve become addicted to the illusion of the ocean but it is a sewage. Let it sail without you so that you can sail your own life without becoming the mast of a doomed sailboat in an ocean of humiliations that you have to impose on others, but unfortunately not just the other countless, indifferent students that you only talk to as a mass but your wife, your friends, your children and yourself who you’ll never again have time for. They will become necessary ills that you try to give as little time as possible. Do not impose on your self the hell that comes from such condescendence. I have seen it closely and no one deserves it. You yourself will suffer more than any one else around you….. sooner or later.
To Half Life, 10/167
“A person may continue to maintain spiritual integrity & purity amidst corruption, decadence & stupidity.
I meant to say that there is much of the American puritanical values in associating too much the individual with the environment he chooses, and even in some minor ways ‘endorses’ by association”.
I thank you for exposing yourself to this blog. Your position is very strongly the position of a majority of students in the Fellowship who unfortunately think that the weaknesses of others don’t touch them, that they can go around the world presenting a blind eye to what is happening in front of them and still get away without being held responsible. It is, sadly, the expression of an individual consciousness that cannot go beyond itself, or hardly be called, consciousness.
You present yourself as someone willing and smart enough to dance on both sides of the show without falling from the rope. You are like those who aim to become conscious through your own effort without ever giving anyone else any credit. No credit, no blame, and you think your integrity depends on having never asked anyone for help, nor shared your most inner self with anyone else. Just taking and leaving, just using and being used, without ever getting involved. You think of your selves as the “untouchables” and cannot embrace others spontaneously and yet, you wonder why no touch of the divine comes close to you, why so many fools describe states you’ve never accessed, why you have never been able to fly beyond your self suited limits.
You work hard and owe nothing to anyone, or maybe just the bank, a totally impersonal entity who you think you’ve had the grace to attract so that you never have to thank anyone for the favor of building your little house.
You are, the men of our times, the individuals who think everything out there was made to serve them, machines to make their lives easier, so that you would never have to ask anyone else for a favor and look at those who ask you for your time as tramps who haven’t done their homework. Your TIME, your unconditional connection to your instincts without ever perceiving the freedom with which eternity is willing to give its time away without ever needing to count it.
You are those who think that doing nothing but your own personal duties for the whole of your lifetime, will deliver you straight to the doors of heaven and are surprised to the ground when life shocks you enough to realize that the only thing that ever matters about being here, is the one moment of love that you shared with another human being, who was willing to touch you beyond the crust that you built around yourself. Then you get glimpses of a consciousness that you label and diminish with: “american puritanical values”, which is just another buffer to keep the crust in place. Know, that it is not you who I am photographing, but your limitations. Similar limitations that I have worked with to be able to recognize them. They are the illnesses of our time.
Thank you 10/171 For the best, for sharing the point shorter and clearer than I could.
To Sandra C. 10/157
“Engaging in an exchange with someone still in that trance is like trying to have a conversation with someone who is stoned or drunk when you are sober, I am sorry, but it feels like a waste of time in most instances. I am no longer on a salvation mission of anyone else”.
I have much respected your contributions to this blog but wonder why you consistently say something like, “It is a horror but don’t try to keep anyone from it” and at the same time wonderfully expose your own horror, like the rest of us.
I do not pretend to be the Mother Teresa of Calcutta saving the counted few in the Fellowship of Friends whom I never addressed and do not expect to be read by, but will feel no less joy when I am stopped by a student in the post office, whom I would have never expected, to thank me for herself and others for what I am writing on this blog, so that they can process their own suffering. It is the whole blog that is necessary because it is proving that it is not just the experience of a lunatic like my husband and others are happy to label me, but many, many people who have suffered sufficiently to deeply question the Fellowship of Friends.
It is surprising that students who are grateful for what is being said here are still afraid enough to not express that same gratitude on the blog without understanding how dry it is to keep trying to push this horrors out while having to fight with ex-students telling one that one should leave people alone. It is not flattery or credit what is needed, but participation and I am grateful for each post.
I have no mission, I am not trying to buy followers but if you call a mission, my affirming myself on my own ground and it helps otheres affirm theirs, then let it be my mission.
I too, thank you, for reading this.
May 27, 2007 at 12:11 am
To All and to Traveler (186) who wrote about my posting (173): “He does not express an opinion about Robert’s other actions, such as scripting the personal lives of his followers and even the future of non-students. I can only guess that Siddiq sees this as just action and totally necessary to fulfil the “wishes of Influence C”, to be part of a great glorious play that is more important than our individual lives.
I would like to state that This is absolutely not how I see it, nor how I live my life–I do however like to think psychologically about these things if I can, keeping in mind we are all different, and need to go through different experiences…
At the time the leave of absence is given to a student, this is a shock that enters one’s play that nothing (almost) can be done about. So it can be seen as coming from the Gods. That does not mean that not a huge amount of human involvement directly lead to it…to the extent we are involved we can do something about that part!
My view, and this is just from being around at events at Isis, is that the relationships described were obvious to all around, perhaps only a “secret” to those directly involved, and that if the people around Robert and those being asked to address this have not the character to stand up for their own life, their loves and their principles, this play would not have unfolded as it did–because everyone would have been so much more honest, and all of this would have taken far less space.
Also, for some there may be a lesson that they would not have let Robert interfere beyond suggestions and advice. We are responsible for everything in our life, including how much we allow Robert’s influence to guide our lives, and in what areas.
The students involved here would not have put themselves in these positions, nor would there have been so much lying.
Also we really would need to know what Robert heard/was told, read and saw and what his reasoning was, so on the most basic level of cause and effect, yes, this play was perhaps attracted by the very secrecy that they felt was required–this is where we can all perhaps learn something.
Perhaps, and this is my view, it was not required at all in the first place but that play I am writing about now is for another day, for a new actor emerging from this plot to play with another actor.
Siddiq
May 27, 2007 at 1:45 am
To Joseph (#160)–As we know each other, I am sad to see you go, from the Fellowship most of all but now also from this Blog, as I appreciated your posts–I would hope you reconsider, and I wish you all the best.
Thank you for your many contributions, most importantly being true to yourself.
Siddiq
May 27, 2007 at 2:26 am
I wish to thank everyone for your response; it feels much better to participate to this ‘gathering’ not being in the protected shade of the backstage; it is also amazing to be able to share my experience with people who can somewhat understand what I am talking about – the hardest part of my exile was to have to process the whole thing pretty much on my own… I guess it was also part of the deal.
A few considerations that took shape responding to some of your emails:
I think something we all share about the school is that we all joined to ‘wake up’ somehow, to reach something higher, to know ourselves… Well, if I had not gone through all that occurred I would have never had the chance to be stripped open and have the truth thrown straight in my face… Sometimes I wonder whether that was actually the real purpose of it all; time will tell.
Sometimes we give the responsibility for our decisions and actions to ‘C Influence’ or to something outside of ourselves, as that gives us reasons and justifications for what we do, it gives us a cause, a purpose.
Then at some point we have to discover and learn to stand on our own feet, and be ourselves, without leaning; and the very land on which we stand has to be pulled off from beneath our feet … hard lesson, yet priceless.
I actually remember saying to X at the Theatron during that night of the ballet: everything can be taken from you, your belongings, your friends, your reputation, your power, your privileges … but in reality nobody can ever touch who you really are: that’s where we need to build ourselves from. I think that was third state.
There is still a lot for me to process; the openness and the neutral ground started by you Sheik are of great and help. Thank you.
On a side note: Asaf is one of the finest men I ever met: he has rare qualities and he does not spare himself when he believes in something, he is bright and profound and tender … and young; a part of his world stays together also through buffers – no different from ours – and as much as I wished his eyes could open, I know it will happen when he is ready to see what is under his carpet; I miss him as well as many of my friends a lot.
#171 Aline: thank you…did we meet?
Siddiq, No person, Confused, Rabbi Burns, Traveler: thank you, you are all very stimulating (PS: RT was just the messenger and I do not think she enjoyed it)
Elena: thank you; please give a hug to Elisa if you have the chance.
May 27, 2007 at 3:13 am
Magnetic center: Sometimes people have what Mr. Ouspensky called false Magnetic Centre–and sometimes they have multiple Magnetic Centre–that is, they have many small, weak Magnetic centres. As a result, they run after every variety of magical and pseudo-occult practice, every kind of mystical cult, or even join end-of-the-world societies, or spend their time in measuring dark passages in the Pyramids and explaining everything by them”. Maurice Nicoll Volume 3, page 994.
May 27, 2007 at 3:27 am
Paola,
I know that what I am about to write here might be unpleasant to your lower self and in particular to your Seven of Hearts. Yet, it might be of help if the part in you that is interested in the work can listen clearly.
Your post is an expression of the Seven of Hearts and so is your letter to Robert.
The Seven of Hearts emotions resemble in content to the Nine of Hearts emotions. I think you do not fully realize that it in yourself, therefore your Seven of Hearts is taking over.
The Seven of Hearts is selfish in the sense that it wants to satisfy its passions and it wants an emotional reward. In your lower self’s psychology the reward the Seven of Hearts is eager to receive is emotional attention and affection. It can be regarded as what we used to call a Feature.
If you read the reactions here in the forum you can see how it worked: you got responses like “Oh, Paola” with lots of sympathy. This is what that part in you wished for and it is a pattern.
I am not saying that you do not have parts in you, who used to work on consciousness, I am sure you did. Yet, the lower self is ambushing those precious moments in various ways, and that is how your lower self has tricked you. That is how it eventually managed to take you out of the school.
It is very much related to imagination. Your imaginary picture of yourself is that close intimacy and romantic emotions, including romantic “sacrifices” are good substitutes for the real emotions required for engaging presence. Even the letter you wrote to Robert is carrying the same kind of emotional energy.
That is the difference between the Seven of Hearts and the Nine of Hearts. The Nine of Hearts emotions are derived from presence itself and not from anything else, not even from beautiful impressions. The Nine of Hearts is firm in its eagerness to reach prolonged presence, yet it is not selfish and it does not have this “I, I, I” thing the Seven of Hearts has.
The Seven of Hearts can often have ‘I’s to be present, but it has a Queeny taste and it cannot engage presence.
This is the level of the school has reach nowadays; the entire focus is on prolonging presence.
I assume Robert wanted to give you time to become mature enough so you are able to realize that you cannot be in the school and base your work on the Seven of Hearts as you used to.
If you can take that in, and you want your work to start again on a new level, you can find a way to return to the school.
You do not owe anything to your lower self, nor do you need to consider you post here. It is feminine dominance. If you are sincere to return as a different person you will find your way to do it.
And finally! You and/or I might get some reactions here after this post. Some might be, as usual, slandering the school and its members. It is your choice where to put your attention.
I wish you good luck.
May 27, 2007 at 3:41 am
Exlax (185)
You can’t seem to let go of the argument that people who resent having been manipulated by RB into having sex with him have only themselves to blame. Post after bitter post. Do you also believe that every female rape victim “wanted it”? Sure, it’s stupid and naive for a young woman to walk alone in a dangerous neighborhood at 2 a.m. So does that mean “she deserved it”? What’s up with that?
Also, I question whether you know enough about “the Fourth Way,” or even Gurdjieff, to claim that compassion isn’t part of that system. And reading books by and about long-dead men and experiencing the Fourth Way according to Burton doesn’t count. In any case, you don’t know much about other spiritual traditions if you say something like “compassion is a Buddhist idea.” The list is a lot longer (“Love thy neighbor as thyself”) than the list that doesn’t include compassion as a fundamental value.
Then there’s always personal experience. Apparently, yours hasn’t yet included the realization that compassion is inseparable from consciousness.
WhaleRider (#181) gets it. I hope you eventually do, too. But he paid for it. The first step might be to think about how you’d like to have been sexually abused, and then told by some anonymous, nasty blogger it was all your fault.
May 27, 2007 at 3:44 am
Exlax #185 says: “Hey WhaleRider, you begin quoting G. here, and then you add your own ideas, thus confusing what G. meant to say in the first place. Maybe I missed something, but the 4th Way does not encompass compassion, this is a Buddhist idea. While is may be useful for Juan’s own evolution to mix-and-match different ideas, in the end it might only lead to Roam.”
Hey Exlax: You did miss something.
WhaleRider
1979-1985
May 27, 2007 at 4:09 am
“Exlax, whoever you are your nasty comment to Shelley M was completely unwarranted.”
Let me see if I got this correct: When I am defending myself from attacks from other people it is deemed ‘unwarranted’?
You mention the word compassion three times in your post. Ironic, is it not, that you do not seem to understand the word, because if you did you would not have needed to be judgemental about my response. A rose is a rose, Rose.
BTW I never thought of you as arrogant. A ham, yes, but modest.
May 27, 2007 at 5:05 am
Still digesting Paola’s post (141), went back to re-read other recent posts. Thanks for yours, Angel Aware (161) – very beautiful. Quite a contrast with drivel from Ex-Lax and co. Cake, I’m with you, a few beers in Arthur’s driveway would surely help us all at this point.
love to all,
RB
May 27, 2007 at 6:09 am
Dear Paola,
Thank you for your very honest post to me. What is your first language? It is possible for you to print the post and have it translated…maybe a friend who understands both languages would tell you my thoughts.
For now, though I said the name Paola Evelina is beautiful and your honesty is very beautiful!!!
The GODS of all BEAUTY, Being and Love are with you NOW and your Honesty is a very big gift to all of us reading this Blog. Where are you now? Are you in the USA? Are you im another country? I would like to meet you someday.
With Love to all as well…
With Love,
“Angel Aware”
May 27, 2007 at 8:23 am
To WhaleRider: 10/181,
“You are doing a good job sincerely responding to the blog clearly as one of the faithful, but you tend to restrain your personal side.”
I’m not sure what you mean; all my words represent my personal beliefs based on verifications, experiences, a looking out from the sum total of my being when composing the response.
The words I write are not to my satisfaction and time is the biggest constraint, many duties take precedence over the blog.
The truths I have learned in the FoF, in retrospect, were the very ones I had hoped to find. Many are my own now.
So if I write in “FoF speak” please know that I am not simply parroting the words or dutifully giving the company line. It’s that these truths work for me. I find no reason to deviate from, or modify, them in any way.
You are right about the fourth state; it obliterates the third state the way the third state obliterates the second. It is the state it took for me to verify the existence of Influence C to the depth required to give up my will to them.
Nevertheless we cannot hang our hats on just those moments. It’s the third state where most of the personal instruction from Influence C takes place, as well as the real seeing of one’s self.
“Is it compassion that enables you to continue supporting a lawless and morally corrupt teacher and his cult that harms the consciences of so many people?”
If I saw him as such I would not support him. We are left only with the raw “facts” about him and often they are jumbled.
His motiviations remain invisible to most, who can only guess and conclude the obvious. His relationship to higher forces remain invisible to most. The Will of higher forces remain invisible to most.
One of the meanings of the word esoteric is hidden. The real Robert is hidden from all of life, I would deduce, as well as from a good many current students.
I doubt that you and I will ever come close to agreeing on what/who Robert is.
May 27, 2007 at 9:37 am
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
May 27, 2007 at 2:12 pm
To Joseph
I understand your wish to get on with your life, but please linger a little longer. Just a line or two here and there for those like me. Brave in the light of day but left aghast in the darkness. Such a solitary journey is this. The loneliest passage of my life.
Past the point of no return
Cake
May 27, 2007 at 3:47 pm
#191 Paola
Yes, we met very briefly once in England for a dinner of Robert.
But, I meet you, now, more because of our stories, although mine was fifteen years ago, and not so much public.
When we split with my husband, after five years of marriage, he went back the same day, to live in Robert’s house.
Robert mentioned that this friction of mine was nothing compared to the history of humanity.
He certainly was right, although this statement was made to serve his own purpose.
I deny, now, the right to anyone, to decide which place I should take in human history.
In the end, this story could have destroyed me completely, but curiously enough it has really brought exactly the opposite.
I wish you will get the best of this too.
Aline C.
May 27, 2007 at 3:47 pm
Life at Apollo/Isis was and is a place of contradictions. To the outsider arriving or visiting is has the illusion and truth of being a place of mystery and wonder and excitement.
To quite a few of the students living there however it is place to be lonely.
Many of the ladies and gents in their later forties or more live out solitary days. There is a pervading sadness. Maybe its that they all know each other too well to bother with a relationship. Not enough choice.Or they have tried it all.
The younger crowd have a different experience.
Young ladies, especially new arrivals, are pursued by the old and young alike, which is always comical, unless your involved.
Promiscuity is there, hidden and obvious.
I dont know that it’s that much diferent then ‘life’. But in some instances it is rife.
The contributions from Paola brought me to write this.
I know her, but not biblically. There has been stories and gossip on this blog, as there will, which I have had no direct experience of, and therefore no place to comment. But here I can, speaking from my own knowledge.
The accounts given by her read well and evoke support, but I know the writer as one who manipulates and changes reality to suit.
Paola did however mention sorrow for some of her behaviour and her treatment of her friends.
I hope that part is true.
May 27, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Hi folks,
Reading through the posts, I’m getting the sense that there is a fair amount of Bob bashing going on. I confess many of my past comments have been non too flattering to the “great” man, however, given some of the stories that have been circulating of late, I feel the need to re-evaluate the more positive aspects Burton and his unique philosophy have brought about in the changing of my life (or death from a Fellowship of Friends point of view.)
Yes, he might well be your typical psychopath with narcissistic tendencies – as alluded to in several posts – but then who among us has not thrown a wobbly at one time or another. I refer to post 182 by Confused: (May 26th, 2007 at 8:02 pm)
I am crying. I can’t take it anymore. I hate Robert… I hate Robert…
So in the spirit of the blog, I shall begin with a verse from a being (a woman) who was on the verge of consciousness – at least she was requested at many of Robert’s dinners in my time – and keeping to the teacher’s tradition, shall change the meaning of the odd word to suit my purpose:
“How do I THANK thee? Let me count the ways.
I THANK thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For… ”
1) Showing me how to accept defeat when playing you at tennis. Knowing that I could have won, even when you cheated.
2) Making me feel I was immortal when I was in you presence and encouraging me to take the risks all lovers should make for their beloved.
3) Helping me to see that what we regard as morality is simply a state of mind and is only pertinent to those who are asleep (and not snoring!)
4) Telling me that getting married was not useful to my evolution. (you were right – I got divorced five years later – though still not bad for a Fellowship marriage.)
5) Giving my girlfriend / lover a year’s leave of absence from the Fellowship to protect me from my pangs of guilt and having to spend so much energy trying to keep the affair hidden from the Fellowship secret police force.
6) Teaching me not to interrupt when you were saying something profound – something which I obviously didn’t understand at the time and now no longer remember.
7) Helping me pay attention to my appearance such as crumbs around the mouth, or stains on my clothes and giving me the insight that fine impressions and bringing up small children don’t mix.
8) Showing by example that it is a worthy action to give away your possessions to the poor. Especially more expensive items which carry with them a special value, even if they’ve been used once.
9) Helping me understand that there is an answer to everything and all I need do is ask (you).
10) Reminding me that there is life beyond the Fellowship of Friends – as it will take me several life times to wake up.
Yes… “I THANK thee with the breath, smiles, tears of all my life*…”
* My PRESENT life that is.
Simon.
p.s. perhaps some of you too out there have certain moment you cherish.
May 27, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Angel Aware – Thank you: I went back to your post and read it another couple of times, I guess I could have done it earlier… The issues you bring to attention are part of the process we are all sharing, and they bring perspective – even though I have yet to find satisfying answers.
I am sure there was plenty of feminine dominance in my writings: I was scared and unsure whether it was all coming from the right intention, although in the moment I just knew I had to do it.
I am currently in Buenos Aires, but I will go to NY at the end of July for a couple of weeks. Maybe our paths will cross…
Hava Nagillah – thank you also. I welcome your observations as I hoped to receive all kinds of feedbacks; I honestly thought that the general reaction would have been more along your lines. The reason for my telling the story was mainly to offer what happened – as subjective as it was – as I knew the information that was circulating was quite different. Plus I was forced to a long silence, during which time I had to come to terms with myself: the only cross reference was my conscience, to find which I had to dig hard; I was unable to give my version, as subjective as it can be. If we don’t expose ourselves we have no chance to see what we carry inside (BTW: I think hiding and swiping dust under the carpets are an ongoing problem within the school, and obstruct second line).
I am far from thinking that all I have done was right and ‘just’, but I believe that the reason for our ‘plays’ is so that we can learn and understand by examining them, trying to bring a more mature conscience to our actions and lives in the present.
There are plenty of aspects I am not proud about, but I cannot erase them: I can only try to transform them – possibly without judgment – just as I cannot change my mechanics or features (i.e. nature), but only try to bring more awareness.
I sincerely want to understand: what would have been a Nine of Hearts behavior – during and especially after the facts had already happened – as an alternative to the letter I wrote?
I also would like to explore more the concept of ‘real emotions required for engaging presence’ and how could they have entered towards a different outcome.
I am grateful for this debate, and if you wish to continue privately you can write me an email.
Siddiq – thank you, your posts and feedback are very inspiring, I wish I knew who you are…
Thank you all!
With gratitude,
Paola Evelina
pgallarato@hotmail.com
May 27, 2007 at 4:49 pm
A wise man told me once: “when you think you know something you can use this as an alarm bell”.
The quality of world 6-12 is palpable in the eyes? I never heard this from our all knowing Robert Burton in the fellowship of friends.
So are you a man # 8 or 9?
Maybe it is time to read the letter from Josep G again # 160. It is shocking to consider the fact that the fellowship of friends started by Robert Burton and mainly for the fulfilling of his own desires?
Just consider this for 20 minutes go sit still and live this mystery…? If you can sit still for 20 and if you conscience will allow you to see.
Call 911 if you flip..would be very human.
Thanks Sheik for your work and all others too.
Joy to all of you.
May 27, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Why the FOF (RB) attracts so many plays of sex and abuse of power???because it is corrupted at the source….Robert B. creates this situations manipulating people features: vanity, ambition, power (Dorian, Mihai, Paola , Allison, Asaf, Edith,Kevin, Rowena Linda and many others, they are all victims in a way…Robert’s victim….he was able to made a parody of them!!He was able to create a fertile ground for all this….they all wants(wanted) to be admired by him, they all wanted to be admired by others, they all need to satisfy their ambition in a way or another. THE SOURCE IS CORRUPTED this is the only problem, all the rest is a war between poor people (Hava Nag… against Paola, Rubbi b against Exlax…..this is non sense….)THE SOURCE WHO ALLOWED ALL THIS IS THE PROBLEM, with his greed for sex, power and money he was able to manipulate everyone.
The school attracts what it deserves and now many people are opening the eyes….
There is an extreme lack of love in this place called FOF but plenty of judgement and brainwashing!
May 27, 2007 at 5:13 pm
……I forgot to say that RB also is a victim
after all!
May 27, 2007 at 6:15 pm
#199 Howard Carter Says:
“One of the meanings of the word esoteric is hidden. The real Robert is hidden from all of life, I would deduce, as well as from a good many current students.”
“I doubt that you and I will ever come close to agreeing on what/who Robert is.”
The esoteric is not hidden from me: you and your teacher are simply what in the Fourth Way are called lunatics. Your school is a “wrong school” and the invisible support that it has enjoyed for so long is being removed. The magic carpet has been pulled out from under you.
May 27, 2007 at 6:44 pm
I had to reread post #141 from Paola Eve. I’m not an Adam, what I am is a formatory centered jack of clubs. A bull chewing his cud in the field of life.
Lets see if I have it right. Robert Burton the Founder and High Priest of the Fellowship of Friends had a fellow named A-sap as a sexual lover. At the same time A-sap was Paola Eve’s lover, and yet at the same time A-sap was sending sexual energy to X a 13 year old girl.
I have a love story too. Yesterday a 13 year old girl and her 7 year old half-sister were in my bedroom alone with me, that’s right alone with me.
In one of my previous posts I mentioned the name bandido. In reference to a motorcycle cult. At the time I wasnt sure of the spelling, so I wrote it out on a Q-tip box in small lettering.
The 13 year old saw it and asked why I had Bandido written down. I dismissed her question and she accepted my response.
Her father and her half-sister’s father are both in prison. They are very familiar with the word Bandido but I’m not sure of the depth because I’ve never mentioned their family upbringing.
Now the love story. The mom and pop grocery store across from my house gave me a large round fiberglass beer cooler which eventually turned into a minnow fish tank with flowering water plants. Five little girls discovered it one day and turned it into daily visitations.
One day years later another neighbor told me that a neighbor of hers found on the police website a list of child molesters in the nighborhood 7 within within two blocks.
I told a friend of mine also a friend of the neighbor who warned me who was going down to the drug house to tell the mother of the children about the child molesters. The children are being taught to be street smart but not yet.
Well, the mother has this Saturn take care of yourself psychology, so I opened up my house to these children. With the fathers in prison and grand-parents too scared to come visit what else could I do.
The children’s lives are an on-going psycho-drama
to beat any child’s psycho-drama. At this very moment they are under the supervision on Child Protective Services for the third time. The only reason they were in my house was to say hello after being gone for 45 days.
Oh, a twist in my love tale. When I told my friend to go down to the children’s home and tell their mother about the neighborhood child molesters he informed me that they were in greater danger down there because of the types of people going and coming. That’s when I opened my house up to them.
And yes they too have sat in my driveway while I drink my dark german beer. And yes I’ve jumped all over them about one thing or another, and yes we laugh and giggle.
But, I would like to send a word to Robert Burton and A-sap. You all better pray to almighty C-fluence not send you to prison. Because you will come out fully awake, it will be one shock after another.
Nice love story, huh.
May 27, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Dear Siddiq (10/89), since you seem like a reasonable person who is able to have an intelligent conversation, I would like to take this discussion of Paola’s play a little further, if you agree. Sorry Paola for “dissecting” you, nothing personal, you are just a good example in a larger picture.
Siddiq, I’m trying to understand your response to my statement: “He does not express an opinion about Robert’s other actions, such as scripting the personal lives of his followers and even the future of non-students. I can only guess that Siddiq sees this as just action and totally necessary to fulfill the “wishes of Influence C”, to be part of a great glorious play that is more important than our individual lives.” You respond that this is absolutely not how you see it but that you like to remember that each of us needs to go through different experiences.
Each of us having to go through different experiences in our lives sounds like a convenient truism. But could you please address the issue here, namely, how do you personally feel about Robert deciding who is to marry who? Do you see it as his prerogative of a conscious being? Or do you see Robert’s directions to students as some impersonal force majeure acting on us, not as the actions of a human but as some inevitable consequence, like a building collapsing if it is not structurally sound? It seems you view it in these impersonal terms when you use the passive voice: “a leave of absence is given to a student… coming from the Gods”. You say that a lot of human involvement does lead to it but again you seem to restrict human involvement to Paola and Asaf and other students, as if Robert were not a human factor at all.
The rest of your letter, summarized, basically says: if Paola and Asaf hadn’t tried to keep their relationship secret, it wouldn’t have turned out as such a big deal. If people had only acted differently, Robert wouldn’t have responded the way he did. People need to stand up for their principles and not let Robert interfere beyond suggestions and advice.
You don’t have a naivete feature by any chance? Out there in “life”, in the 21st century, things do work the way you describe. The US, at least in principle, is founded on the belief that all people are equal, and this can be legally enforced. However, this is the Fellowship of Friends and Robert is king. Not only king, he is a conscious being and he knows the will of the Gods. The Gods! That is what you believe if you are a sincere student. Why do you think Paola and Asaf felt so bad about their love and suffered in honestly trying to mold their plays the way Robert wanted? Was it just their weird misunderstanding of how things really are, when everyone else around them knew that things would be OK if they had just came forward and announced that they had decided to go against the will of the teacher? Do you remember what happened when it first started: Asaf told Robert, and Robert disagreed because he had other plans for Asaf. They were told not to have any contact with each other for 6 months, and that she should not date anybody. But this is just Robert’s suggestion and advice, right Siddiq? We don’t need to let Robert interfere in our personal lives. What he really meant to say was, give it a try, but if you realize that you actually want to stand up for your own principles, you’re always welcome to do that. That’s the Robert we know and love, isn’t it? Nothing serious here, just that immortal Gods have indicated that because of the magnitude of Asaf’s role he should eventually marry X when she comes of age. But you know, if Asaf decided to follow his own heart instead, Robert would be, like, totally cool with that.
Do you see any pattern here, Siddiq? This is a tough one, but I’ll ask you to try and lay aside for just a few moments the belief that Robert is an immortal conscious being and a pure instrument of influence C. Try to just see him as a human being, observe neutrally, you know, like we were taught in the fourth way. Try to let go of the belief that he is an angel in his actions and a god in his apprehension. Just for a few moments, try to see his actions as the actions of a human, the way you would see any other human being on this planet if you did not already have a preconceived notion of their magnanimity.
Now, where is the pattern? This human being tells young men who glorify him: You are to have sex with me because Influence C want us to be together. Then he tells his former lover: You are to marry X because the gods are preparing her to be your wife. Then he tells his students: You are to use the sequence because all ancient civilizations before us have used it.
Question for discussion: Without judgment, what does that tell us about the human being making these statements, and about the people who consider them true?
May 27, 2007 at 7:52 pm
Dear Howard Carter:
Here is part of an article in my paper this morning I’d like to share with you written by psychologist Arthur Janov, who has recently written a book on cults called, “Beyond Belief”:
“It seems that nearly all cults follow a predictable program: There is a charismatic leader, who is dynamic and promises love and paradise for his adepts. He has a mission that he inveigles the followers to embrace; it doesn’t matter if there are causalities because the mission is all (and everthing) and because he, too, is caught in the rhetoric of paradise, of a place where all is love, and for him, all is power.
The leader has inculcated an ideational net inside the follower, which is the most effective possible means of control. Control is in place, and the follower does the dictates of the ideological net. The net is enveloped by the need (for guidance). Fulfilling his own archaic needs (for power), the leader becomes more and more dictatorial, and the followers become more and more needy for guidance. They lose all perspective as to right and wrong, moral and immoral. They simply follow their leader, who assures them that they are doing the right thing, and that everything is for their own good. ‘Obey me if you want a better life. I will bestow upon you justice protection, caring, and understanding’.”
Strange-this article appearing in my newspaper on this particular morning-the timing is impeccable, don’t you think? For me, it’s synchronicity, for you, it’s the hand of ‘c-influence’. What’s the message? I suppose it just depends on what channel you watch.
Once, I had the occasion to speak with a lad about his fundamentalist Christian beliefs. He adamantly believed that the world was created in 6 days and was only about 8,000 years old as stated in the Bible.
“What about the dinosaurs that have been carbon dated to have lived hundreds of thousands of years ago?” I asked.
His reply: “Satan is the ruler of what is below the ground. He is very clever and can manipulate the rocks to form fossils to fool you into doubting the Bible, which is the word of God.”
That’s the kind of faith that blinds you.
You write in 10/199: “His motivations remain invisible to most who can only guess and conclude the obvious. His relationship to higher forces remains invisible to most. The Will of higher forces remains invisible to most. The real Robert is hidden from all of life, I would deduce, as well as from a good many current students. I doubt that you and I will ever come close to agreeing on what/who Robert is.”
It is obvious to many what Robert Burton’s motivations are, just not to you. The real Robert and his behavior must remain in the shadows otherwise he’d have no followers to delude. It’s part of the ‘esoteric’ game.
“When a pickpocket sees a saint, all he sees is his pockets.” When a saint sees a pickpocket, all he sees is dinner.
You are fish and cannot understand the concept of water because you are swimming in it, and it is all you know.
WhaleRider
1979-1985
May 27, 2007 at 8:23 pm
The Coincidence of the “Sequence”
I don’t know exactly what the “sequence” is that ex-FOF people are referring to that seems to be part of the “new teaching,” but as some of the details come out it struck me as somehow familiar. I don’t how a “man number seven” intuits such esoteric ideas (higher mind and such), but coincidentally the following was part of an article I wrote and posted on my website about nine years ago and was posted there for a few years. I post it here as an example of how an ex-student, a “failed experiment” of the only school in existence, can accidentally arrive at the understanding of a man number seven even before the conscious being discovers it himself. Here is the relevant part without any corrections, updates or rewrites:
The word art derives from the Latin ars, which means skill. Art and regeneration are the same process, art expresses regeneration in terms of cultural expression. The articulation of any system of knowledge that has the aim of furthering human consciousness is art. Any endeavor promoting the idea of developing consciousness is art. Anyone working to crystallize his soul in the correct hydrogens is an artist.
On the scale of the cosmos of man, art and religion originally were one and the same activity. Cave paintings of the animals that played a significant role in the life of early man, the herding game animals that the hunter-gathering tribes depended upon for survival, were visually depicted on the interior of caves with the aim of impregnating the symbolic womb of mother earth with unending generations of offspring. The ritual was initiated possibly in response to cycles of drought when game became unusually scarce. The tenuous and minute cosmos that represented the highest evolved animal demanded even then that all six process be manifested, and so a specialized tradition, the prehistoric origin of priests and ways, was perhaps first established with certain chosen individuals wielding the sacred power of creating images of life. Even then men understood the miraculous nature of art and its relationship to states of consciousness. They intuitively sensed the possible influence the production of higher states through the ritual of creation of images might have over external circumstances. Bison meticulously depicted on the interior of caves forty thousand years ago were the Byzantine icons of their age. When man first created art he was imitating the Creator. This is the process of regeneration, the conception of art wherein the creation strives to imitate the Creator. When early man fashioned figurines and cave paintings of the animals he depended on for life, he did so in a symbolic creation, he did this in order that his source of life be eternally regenerated. In art the artist strives to experience a certain emotion and then impart that emotion to the object of art, when others see this object they too will feel the intended emotion. From these early carvings and cave renditions, art developed up through the ascending cycle of culture. In the case of Stonehenge art acquires the scale of an entire culture, the entire society becomes focused on quarrying a certain quality of stone found many miles away and bringing it to a specific site that undoubtedly seemed to encompass unusual properties. The arrangement of the sculpture is precise and not only religious but scientific. The various artificial portals mark the progress of the moon, the planets, the sun and the stars throughout the year. On an even larger scale the building of the Great Pyramids at Giza also consumes the resources and labor force of the entire social order for generations on end. The symbolic aim of the living sculptures is not only scientific in its mathematical relationship to the earth, the moon, the planets and the stars, but it as well represents the regeneration in death of the ruling authority. The pyramids represent a regeneration of the soul and spirit into immortality.
Though monumental in scale and awe-inspiring in solemnity, Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids lack a degree of refinement, they lack a certain loveliness of emotionality. Certainly the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians are beautiful, but distant, symbolic and ritualized so that even the depiction of everyday activity becomes unaccustomed, otherworldly and unfamiliar. Under the Egyptians the natural wombs of the earth, the natural caves of the prehistoric artists, transform into manmade temples with ever deeper inner sanctums reserved for the more highly evolved. These great works are beyond merely human and are designed exclusively for occupation by the state of spirit. Both these manifestations of the regenerative process, the rough and unearthly Stonehenge and the monumentally colossal Pyramids, each produced through the conscious guidance of esoteric authority, are directed at inducing objective states of consciousness. From the static perfection of the Egyptians the river of cultural regeneration flows into Europe. The Greeks received the torch of artistic and spiritual regeneration from the Egyptians, though the Greeks transformed the seed into something infinitely more animated than the frozen stone mannequins of the Egyptians. The Romans received their regenerative inspiration from the Greeks, and though Roman art is impressive, it never actually surpasses the status quo of elaborating on and redefining the sheer inspiration of their Greek mentors. The Greeks and the Romans aim more toward a human depiction of the divine, they introduce the human being into their consciously inspired endeavors of regeneration. The classicism of the Greeks and the Romans seems to allow for living feelings, the art opens in breadth to allow for the experience of living as something other than a preparation for death. Here as well, the activity of the entire culture (or series of cultures occupying the same geography over time) seems ultimately mobilized to produce an infrastructure, a foundation, for the creation of refined classical temples. Under the Greeks beauty, grace and proportion are permanently defined for western civilization, these ideals are only slightly reechoed and elevated by the art of the high Renaissance.
Early Christian and Byzantine art descends significantly in technical perfection from the heights of refined and detailed productions of the Greeks and Romans. Even the spirituality, the esoteric inspiration behind the art, descends in majesty as well. Though westerners tend to think of the Greeks and Romans in terms of pagans believing in an elaborate litany of folk tales known as mythology, what is generally not realized is that beneath the surface of the uneducated interpretation of all these Gods, Goddesses and assorted wild tales is hidden a sophisticated, objective understanding of not only human psychology but knowledge of the objective higher laws and cosmic relationships within and between the planetary beings of our solar system. Though obviously long since forgotten and ignored by the general population of the Roman Empire, particularly during and after the decline of the western European side of the civilization, the objective knowledge encoded into the tales of Greek and Roman mythology, containing as well the keys to esoteric psychology, gradually disappears from the cultural influence.
In comparison early Christianity is annoyingly unsophisticated in its self-absorption, in its self-righteousness and its dichotomy of paranoid psychosis and grandiose narcissism. The chief feature of the early Christian church is lunatic, a form of false personality that routinely attracts hostility when expressed openly. The Christ described in the New Testament appears to be stricken with a common case of delusional psychosis, by imitation such a mentality imparted to the devout passions of the average early Christian, combined with the apocalyptic delusional atmosphere expressed in the Book of Revelations, creates the conditions for centuries of self-fulfilling persecutions. The age-old germ of neurotic fear-based hallucination, borrowed first from ancient Babylonian and Zoroastrian voodoo, and then processed and fermented for centuries into the cultural fetishes of the Jews, now elevated in intensity by a mindset that insists the “Kingdom of Heaven,” the end of the world and the final Judgment, are only days or years away, invades and pollutes Europe with all the delirious fervent of the Bubonic plague. Initially cultural Christianity can be viewed as the neurosis of Judaism exaggerated into full-blown psychosis. Remember, every religious movement has to be seen as spiritually removed and disassociated from any possible conscious intentions of the founder, much of the New Testament was written, revised and enshrined sixty to a hundred years, more than an entire generation, after the death of Christ. The four Gospels of the Christian church are simply four versions of the teachings of Christ chosen from literally hundreds of versions. Nevertheless, the Christian version of the Bible has to be seen as one of the more powerful expressions of the process of regeneration produced by that particular cultural movement.
With the advent of Christianity the culture of Europe moves from the simplicity of an instinctive center of gravity to the complication of an emotional center of gravity. Like a child developing, civilization matures into a new function. It has to be noted that aside from the aggressive sect of Jewish fanatics known as Christians, Europe was also absorbing many traditional Jews. The more invisible influence of the Jewish dispersal on the general culture throughout Europe has to be that of making the social order not only more intelligent, but more emotional. It takes but little more than 300 years for the psychosis of Christ to capture the social order and find itself ritualized into acceptable enough form to emerge as the body politic. When Constantine the Great, Emperor of the Roman Empire, embraces Christianity in 313 AD, he does so as a political ploy to insure military and political consolidation of Italy. Up until that time Christian art takes the form of a primitive kind of iconography, the person of Christ is depicted as a fish, a lamb, and by the symbol of the cross. Christ is even depicted as the pagan god Apollo. After the conversion of the Roman political government to Christianity, Christian expression becomes localized in civic baptisteries, mausoleums, and martyria (martyr shrines), these later to become churches and cathedrals. Though it will take centuries to reach perfection in the high Renaissance, with the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity the transition of culture from an instinctive mentality to the sensitivities of an emotional atmosphere is a significant refinement that generates many of the finer works of art by European creators. Again, it illustrates the interconnection between the process of refinement and the process of regeneration. Regeneration often requires a refined environment in order to express the finer side of itself.
Beginning with the Romanesque and continuing into the Gothic periods, western art is nearly entirely Christian-religious in nature. Though the architecture of the Middle Ages is some of the most inspiring in the history of man, the monotony of hyper-emotional biblical themes becomes hackneyed. Little wonder the initial age of institutionalized religion was once thought of as the Dark Ages. The center of gravity of art during this earlier Christian period declines from the level of objective monuments revealing the operation of higher centers found in the Egyptian civilization, it declines from the level of objective encoding of planetary influences in the art of the Greeks and the Romans, down to an ordinary devotional emotionalism. However, behind the scenes of the devotional emotionalism moves invisible schools of objective knowledge. Evidenced in such creations as Notre Dame and Chartres Cathedral are esoteric freemasons who remain anonymous throughout history yet create ostensibly religious monuments that contain encoded esoteric truths likely quite unfamiliar to the Roman Catholic Church that occupies the building. Even so, again, the entire resources of the community is involved in the development of these monumental expressions of higher reverence. This is indicative of the process of regeneration as it manifests through the cosmos of the social order. Later in this age, psychologically independent of either the Church or of esoteric undercurrents, individual artists begin to create works of inspiring objectivity. Notably Guido Cavalcanti and especially Dante Alighieri during the High Middle Ages produce works of profound vision. Under the influence of the Dominicans, Saint Thomas Aquinas is another creator of inspired spirit. The thousand years that comprise the Middle Ages contain priceless pieces of religious art, this was in fact one of the most productive times for the process of regeneration manifesting through the social order as art. The reason this millennium seems to disappear into history is that before it the highly perfected ideals of the Greeks and Romans exist on an entire order of magnitude above the Christian piousness and the next note, the Renaissance, brilliantly eclipses the characteristically routinely devotional Christian themes.
The high Renaissance seems again to aim for the inducement of the third state of consciousness. Obviously a new birth takes place in the midst of all the religious drudgery. The unequaled genius in this age of geniuses is Leonardo da Vinci. The first thing Renaissance thinkers do is recognize the inherent superiority of Greek and Roman culture over the narrow-mindedness of the last thousand years. They disassociate their artistic inspiration from the Christian dogma and declare a new age. The humanists establish the Platonic Academy in Florence and from this a new mentality sweeps over the darkness of religious Europe. The invention of linear perspective in drawing and painting, the more visually accurate technique of aligning elements in a drawing toward a vanishing point on the horizon using angled lines of perspective, also a method of creating a three dimensional illusion on a two dimensional surface, suddenly opens a new vista within the human vision of life. The world goes from a cramped, stultified reality to one with long panoramas. Space, light and reason open the doors of the belief system. Artists develop from the level of craftsmen creating dogmatic icons to inspired geniuses producing refined, masterful visions of emotional aspiration that startle the local population. Inhabitants go on pilgrimages to witness the latest paintings by men like Raphael, Titian, Da Vinci, Correggio, Michelangelo, Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer and Jan van Eyck. Filippo Brunelleschi, inventor of linear perspective, designs the octagonal dome, the Duomo, of Florence Cathedral. Saint Peter’s Basilica is built in Rome. The exalted standard is now set for individual artistic expression. The Renaissance painters, as individual creators, establish a formidable level of classical realism and a psychological sophistication in subject and composition that will challenge the artistic world for millennia to come. There existed in this age such a richness and concentration of individual understanding within the essence-being of the separate artists, and such a perfection of ability to momentous proportion, that an equal collection of regenerative incarnations never come together in one age again. The entire age is revealed and the subtlety of its elegance is encapsulated in the single elusive masterpiece of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
In the Baroque period artists seem to imitate the high classicism of the Renaissance masters, but fail to achieve the same height of objective principle. It is all just a little too decorative, and the devotional exaggerations begin to creep back in. Gone now is art as a cultural endeavor. Paintings, churches, sculpture are financed by the institution of the Church and by wealthy portions of the social order. Patrons commission works of art, not as a communal endeavor, but in many cases as a means of expressing personal prestige and vanity. The technical realism, the stylized drama, the richness of visual opulence is unsurpassed, but the emotional integrity unquestionably declines from the vision of the Renaissance. Basically painting becomes more or less anecdotal, compositional themes rely on a tediously elaborate sentimental symbolism that today excites ecstatically romantic nuns and other culture aficionados. Even the greatest of the Baroque painters, Rembrandt, Rubens, van Dyck, Velázquez and Vermeer fail to express the same elevation of classicism found in Da Vinci. Though Rembrandt is clearly in a class by himself as a painter of unusual dimensions, still there is just a smudge of romanticism in all of his works that detracts a bit from the technical perfection. There is a hint of a theatrical personality that betrays the high emotional ideals of the previous age. Finally even the remaining quality of ideal maintained within the Baroque period slips into Rococo decadence in some of the Gainsborough portraiture and decidedly in the effeminate self-indulgent flattery of ornate French detailing. Here art serves only to camouflage the doorways and furniture from the emotional sensitivity against naked function. Craftsmen are kept busy doing scrollwork, foliating wood and stone to serve the pretensions of immoderately elegant gentlemen. The line of regenerative effort descends into embellishment and ornamentation.
It is not the aim of this essay to map the entire regenerative process throughout western civilization, it would be impossible without indulging in an encyclopedic undertaking. Literature particularly weaves a thread of regeneration through the lives of the overlapping cultures of the west. Shakespeare alone has produced such a shock to our culture that the psychological influence is incalculable. What does become clear is that at a certain point in modern culture higher aspirations are replaced by personality as the motivator for creative expression. In the last moments of the Twentieth Century false personality is far more prevalent an expression in our so-called art than is even the modest values of true personality, of householder. Esoteric ideals, never mind objective knowledge, though enjoying a momentary popularity thirty or forty years ago, is in no degree a motive for the social order as a whole. The world has become irretrievably large for esoteric forces to permeate the general mentality as was once possible.
By the beginning of the 1800s any clearly defined line of regenerative artistic current flowing through a specific culture dissipates. There is Romanticism and Impressionism, but both these are expressive of the instinctive-moving story of the emotional center. Art becomes entirely anecdotal, there are still-life paintings that are quite elegant, and there are portraits of wealthy merchants and their wives that are quite beautiful, but the element of spirit of emotional exaltation fades quickly away. There are the impressionistic scenes, lovely paintings, even intense, but the inspiration has softened. Van Gogh does possess a certain admirably hysterical force, but compared to the standards of the past the descent is obvious. One area of creative expression that enjoys a period of serious creativity is classical music, however modern ‘classical’ music is as abstractly neurotic as is modern art. During the first World War, beginning with the Dadaist, art, like mankind itself, goes in a lunatic direction. Art becomes indulgently subjective, or perhaps pathological, then art becomes abstract or synthetic. Pablo Picasso mass produces instinctive-moving finger paintings that are primarily motivated by their retail potential. He imitates the natural instinctive expressions of primitive man (African masks) and the world mistakes it for innovation. We live in a synthetic culture and our art is synthetic. With some exceptions, art today is more in the category of commercial design than art. Visual artists work for underwear and cigarette companies. Today painting has splintered into thousands of directions, some of the expressions are enjoyable and some are technically brilliant, but almost none express those higher emotional ideals that inspire higher consciousness or esoteric truth. Art is thoroughly subjective. The modern ‘fine’ arts feature vacuum cleaners and urinals as objects of art, again this is lunatic. Rock musicians look for the formula that will hook the imagination of screaming teenagers. The new mediums of television and film produce primarily sex, stupidity and violence. Art is driven by popularity, by its ability to make money. In the medium of film, nonetheless, there is seemingly a potential for an ascending level of finer expression. The better aspect of the medium seems to strive to replace written literature in depth of intent. The modern literature arrives in the form of the popular novel. Art in the modern world means novelty.
May 27, 2007 at 8:39 pm
I guess there’ll be several responses to Hava Nagillah (193) and Howard Carter (199).
Paola’s posting (141) clearly described the weird, corrupt world created by Robert Burton, where lying to one’s friends and “teacher” is commonplace, and all is justified by the meaningless jargon exemplified by HN in #193. Rather than responding to the content of Paola’s posting, HN gives her a lecture on “the seven of hearts”, thus deflecting attention from what is actually being said, a common Fellowship of Friends method for quashing inconvenient truths.
So what can we deduce from Paola’s posting? She describes some personal events in her own life, but they are significant in that they display the way Robert Burton behaves most of the time. Paola’s story is typical, not unusual. We can see that Robert Burton is obsessed with controlling the behaviour of those around him, from the minutest details to the major events in their lives. As a result he surrounds himself with fear and deception.
What was behind his decision to throw Paola out of the school after reading her positive, indeed worshipful, letter describing her relationship with Asaf? Clearly he was upset because he wanted Asaf to be with X, and he viewed Paola as interfering with his plans. OK, so I’ve written that down, and it looks somewhat logical. But think about it – it’s actually completely insane. Why do these people submit to this interference, even regard it as “helping their evolution”? And why on earth is Robert Burton concerned about these things? Why does he get viciously upset when one of his boys chooses to be with one girl rather than another? And what’s even more amazing is that HN and HC actually think this is normal, a sign of higher consciousness, true connection with “influence C”, etc!!!
So why is Robert Burton so controlling? Most likely because he’s afraid. He knows he’s a fraud and he’s terrified of being seen as he really is. So he surrounds himself with people who would not dream of questioning his behaviour in any way. Then, with all restraints removed, naturally enough he starts behaving more and more strangely.
HC: “ The real Robert is hidden from all of life, I would deduce, as well as from a good many current students.”
Thankfully this blog is making him a good deal less hidden.
cheers, RB
May 27, 2007 at 8:58 pm
Hava Nagillah, your post #193 really shows what you are. No comments needed.
I am very, very sorry for you.
May you find joy, compassion and humility.
May 27, 2007 at 10:25 pm
Hello Everyone-
Having just resigned from the Fellowship of Friends, I would just like to offer to anyone from this blog who visits Los Angeles a free overnight at my home. It’s always nice to spend time with people of similar interests and philosophical background.
A fond farewell to all those that I knew and spent time with over the last 12 years. You will certainly be missed.
I can be reached at stevelangmusic.com
With Love to all,
Steve Lang
May 27, 2007 at 11:08 pm
I wanted to say “Hello”. I was in the FOF from early ’75 through early ’85, mostly in SF and briefly in Salt Lakes City. I met many wonderful people and made sweet enduring friendships during that time. Life was rich. I treasure the practice of observation with rigorous integrity that we shared, that many of us truly cared about and took care of ourselves and each other.
There is so much here in this blog that is interesting, touching, surprising, shocking — a great deal to digest. For now I want to share that after being raised a Mormon and with what I learned therein, what caught and held my attention with the Fourth Way and the FOF was the teaching to observe, observe, observe and observe some more; to question many basic assumptions; that belief, faith, worship, adoration, etc., had no place in that work; and, that verification was a very long neverending process (i.e., be prudent about what you think you have verified).
While many of the blog submissions are poingant and fascinating, many exchanges remind me of political and religious debate. The cutting wit is sad. Debating in an insane asylum seems, well, uh, insane; and, even if one wins, it doesn’t mean one is cured.
If there is an answer it doesn’t seem to lie in “The Effective Management of a Fourth Way School.” The paradigm itself seems flawed. I’m not defending nor attacking anyone for what they do in running or belonging to such an organization. One lesson is probably that in such an organization the results are to be expected.
That said, I doubt that goodness is ever served by a lack of compassion; and, that the one consciousness that all life shares doesn’t afford special dispensation to anyone.
I do recognize some of you and think I may know others. You mean so much to me.
May 27, 2007 at 11:38 pm
Hey folks, I hope that some aspects of the “Poalo story” did not go unnnoticed by all of us bloggers!
As Paola’s post shows Kiran lies not only about things he has no clue about, in other words, he is guilty of spreading unverified rumours & lies (as he has done about many students in his letters and his false postings):
Paola had to correct him:—“(btw, Kiran: I never had sex in Robert’s bedroom – ! – that was somebody else; and I never organized any orgy for anybody)”
But also Kiran is not hesitating to embellish the story of his own sexual “exploits” calling “cuddling” now a threesome!
Paola had to correct him there too: “Kiran: that evening with you Cassandra and Benjamin was lovely, there was no sex, just cuddling and it was to me an unusual way to get close to her – even though you wanted more.”
Folks, what a piece of art is our lying German Guru! Deep down he must be really insecure!
I am speechless too—Folks, Kiran is now a proven liar, now many times unmasked in his self-aggrandizing behavior! It would be comical if it was not so sad that those who read his lies may have believed his nonsense especially where it concerns others he slandered.
Kiran, if only you had the guts to acknowledge your lies and correct your conduct, you would be worthy of respect. As it stands, you are nothing but a coward–a defamer, a liar and worse! As someone wrote–you are obviously still in your coma. Wake Up Man!
Wonder what else on this blog is false—maybe probably surely more than we think!!!!!
But the Truth will Finally Prevail
May 28, 2007 at 12:36 am
Half Life’s post 10/167 says, “…there is much of the american puritanical values in associating too much the individual with the environment he chooses, and even in some minor ways ‘endorses’ by association.”
Half Life, let me edit your words and disclose that you are too smug and show ignorance by discrediting …the value in associating the individual with the environment he chooses and ‘endorses’ by association.
Be assured I associate you with the environment you choose and endorse.
Let me introduce you to another ‘american’ value – freedom. Those that have been damaged in any degree by their own choices and endorsements can fully recover themselves and by this way learn much about the “value” of choices and endorsements.
It’s clear that you don’t yet understand the position you’re in. Choices, my dear, yes, you make choices. Be just a little more humble and take responsibility for your place in the here and now.
I can’t quite see you,
From Across the River
May 28, 2007 at 12:44 am
For two months now intensively and two years more sporadically, I have been trying to make some bridge to what I felt or understood in earlier years. What did I believe? What events led to that “verification”? The results are fragmentary at best. It is like those optical quirks when something in one’s visual field is not resolved into a logical “known”. Once the concept appears “oh that is just a bush or a fire hydrant”, the image is resolved to fit that concept and it becomes difficult or impossible to return to that place of not knowing, of not understanding again.
At each stage of our lives, we reinterpret the past in the light of our new reality. If you pour water from a small glass into a larger glass and ask a small child “Is there more water in this glass than was in the smaller glass?” they will almost always say yes. You can pour the water back and forth from the small glass to the large a dozen times, and the small child will always assume a larger glass has more water. At a certain point, children learn a level of abstraction which allows them to see the glasses and what they contain as separate objects and to understand the constancy of the content as separate from the changing of the vessels. If you film the small child’s response and show it to that same child four or five years later, the child will accuse you of doctoring the audio; “Of course I did not say the larger glass has more water! That’s stupid! I never could have thought something like that….”
One advantage we can acquire by going through such changes in perception and attitude repeatedly as we grow older is seeing the process itself more: seeing not only those new worlds that the conceptual shift allows, but seeing the shift itself and understanding that it is a conceptual shift such as we experienced before and will experience again, if we are open to it.
So what did I feel before the conceptual shift that led me out of the school? I was not hypnotised, stoned or drunk all those years. No-one locked me in a closet and shouted daily card quotes at me for weeks until I capitulated and became a “true believer”. Neither did I have some ecstatic Pentecostal epileptic fit, hard-welding an amygdalian response of gratitude and submission to any reference to “C-Influence”. It was a natural progression from the wild excitement of meeting a group of dedicated people sincerely applying a living system of transformation through the processes of assimilation and clarification of concepts, building a cohesive structure, then defending that structure. That defence usually took the form of various increasingly refined and conceptually validated “self-calming verifications”. Understanding what those were is an important part of my personal work right now.
For that reason, Hava Nagillah’s post(10/93) was very helpful to me. Three or four years ago, I could have written most of it myself. Having had the greater part of my life experienced through the scarlet, vibrating lenses of that romantic and passionate outlook on life that Robert Burton calls “the seven of hearts”, and seen countless times how much destruction, pain, lost time and possibilities that particular flavour of human experience can create, I eventually became thoroughly sick of it, and the school’s official condemnation of it and invitation to an emotional body dysmorphic solution seemed a valid course of action. And indeed, for a limited period of experimentation, it may be. Dissociating the sense of identity from the evocative undulations of our passions is a valid direction for evolution. I am not my left big toe, and understanding that deeply is important, yet I am disinclined to hack it off and place it on a mantelpiece as a trophy of non-identification. It comes in real handy for kicking stones and doing pirouettes or otherwise expressing frustration and joy. Permanent denial of our passions in the hope that this bald-faced lie will result in the flowering of some promised nirvana – itself a wholly imaginary concept, as popularly misinterpreted, of lack of pain, lack of passion rather than non-identification with life’s inescapable pain and passion – leads to an ever more rigid and stultifying straightjacket of fear, repression and further lies.
The Reader’s Digest/Dr. Phil version circulating around the school of what Sandra C. was attempting in the years before her departure was that it was an attempt to sort out which emotions had been, at least partially, acknowledged, addressed and transformed and which had been so entirely repressed as to bring further development to a crashing halt, albeit in a bed of “roses, just roses”. I found it grimly amusing at the time to see how many students were expressing violent negative emotions over Sandra’s heretical suggestion that limited, controlled expressions of negativity might be needed to become aware of the repressed emotions blocking development. The Fellowship Forum/Dr. Bob version was more along the lines of a demented evil bitch wilfully disregarding her noble teacher’s selfless years of teaching that in no case, ever could any degree of the expression of negativity cause anything but the corrosion of your soul.
In Guinevere’s book, “Bread Upon the Water” she recounts how, in the early days when Robert held open court with his students, each devotee wishing Robert’s darshan would be vetted first to see what their concern was. Robert would shunt all the students with “easy questions” about relationships to Guinevere and would take the “hard questions” about body type etc. himself. I can see that looking at someone’s shoe and saying “You have big feet. Work with Saturn. Next!” is lot more challenging and manly than dealing with some weepy female who is upset about being asked to get an abortion because Robert does not want any babies on the ark yet.
Robert, from the first, has been simply incapable of dealing with emotions. His self-image seems centred on the myth of the stoic American Marlboro Man (albeit in a pink suit); “ah got me a passle of peckers tuh polish afore sundown n ah don’t cotton tuh wastin muh time with no pussy emotions. Git along, little queenies”.
In the same manner that Robert felt compelled to transmute his inability to accept his sexual orientation into the pathetic myth that the Gods required an endless cum-fest for him as his particular form of crucifixion, he spun his inability to endure simple human emotion into just another arrogant dominance game: “I don’t have any emotions, emulate me”.
Obviously, this post is just chock full of the kind of nasties that HN so tenderly and condescendingly warned Paola not to listen to, so I will support HN in that:
PAOLA, please ignore everything else in this post except this paragraph. Your heart seems strong, clear, honest and sincere. Just keep listening to it and let go any remaining shadows of fear or guilt. Thank you for your courage in sharing with us.
After so many years of watching Robert “pour from the empty into the void” while hearing him say “See? How much better it is, how much more there is now that I have poured it into the amazing, remarkable, beloved void”, years of regressing from “well, maybe, I mean I will work with that idea to see what happens” to “Yes Robert! It is amazing!”, my penance now is to sit through a lot of reruns from my childhood and just accept that I had partial script approval.
May 28, 2007 at 12:52 am
Since my spirit left the body on Earth and returned to Mars, I have had many affairs to arrange and therefore have not been able to constantly oversee the course taken by my legacy to you earthlings. Not until recently, that is… when I sat again at my teskooano to observe the happenings on Earth, and made the bitter discovery that something had gone really wrong with many followers of my ideas. People fell victims to a certain unbalancedness of mind and swallowed whole and undigested the fragmentary and selectively remembered information prophesized by third-hand pupils from my exoteric group. Interestingly, these sorry prophets of crumbs from my teaching almost ceased to bother about my own self. Now I see myself constrained to invent all kinds of combinations for the regulations of innumerable misunderstadings arising thanks to the pernicious manifestations of various types usually proceeding among degenerated people of our class.
The pupils I had myself assigned to organize Work in, e.g., America, not being yet familiarized with the place and language of their assignment, I considered hiring temporary assistants to help with spreading my ideas on a larger scale. One of these assistants was a former American teacher; due to unfortunate circumstances (arising only partly from my absence) he became the chief leader of a certain group of followers of my ideas; you know whom I am speaking of.
He offered his services and I accepted them at first, as I had thought him suitable for the assistance work, chiefly on account of his knowledge of the language, as well as on account of his smart appearance which of course has a great importance in all business relations, especially among you Americans. As I learned afterwards, the real cause of his offer and his enthusiasm was that he had started a romance…
He started to gather money – which of course up to a point any work needs; but he started also, without my permission for it, to direct all kinds of classes. Seeking, at the same time, to meet the excessive expenditures of his new “family” life, he began, for the purpose of increasing his resources, to organize, as was usual in the Institute life, talks on themes he had learned during his short acquaintance with my legacy. When all this material had been used up by him, not receiving either any new material or any definite indication from me as to what to do or how to proceed further, he had willy-nilly to get along during this time merely with the little he had assimilated while still an ordinary pupil and, with this very limited knowledge, to so to say “manipulate in every way”.
Like a good “juggler”, he took one subject from the totality of information throwing light on all my ideas, which is indeed indispensable at a certain phase and in a certain form for the mentation of man, but which if it becomes the centre of gravity for the mentation of man unfailingly leads to just the result which, to my great regret, I observe now in almost everyone of you. The fact is that some of you, perhaps on account of always being such, or on account of various misunderstandings which took place in the past years in the internal life of your group, do not correspond at all to the requirements which must be put before the members of this first institution proposed to be organized here, namely, such an institution which in my opinion must have for the future a very important character of general human significance. I therefore took a categorical decision: to postpone the organization of these clubs until next year and to devote all the time left of my present session of overseeing you entirely to the personal reorganization of your group, in this sense, to introduce into its internal life principles corresponding to my ideas which must unfailingly be actualized and which could contribute, in the general psyche of some of you, to the accelerated crystallization of corresponding data for the possibility of being deemed worthy of becoming, by the time of my visit to you next year, competent “kernel-composing” members of the said first institution; and principles which contribute, in the general psyche of others, data for a sincere confession of their unworthiness to be members of this first model institution with the result that they, having understood this, withdraw themselves. In other words, to consecrate all my free time, first, to establishing personally in the required tempo everything corresponding for a right work with the person whom I intend to send to you for directing everything that is necessary for that attainment in strict accordance with my ideas of my fixed aims; and, second, to purifying your group of those elements, which in the existing conditions not only cannot gain any profit for themselves, but may, for the formation as well as the actualizing of the general aim in this newly formed group, be very, very pernicious.
The second part of this plan designed by me, that is to say, the purification of undesirable elements from your group, will
manifest itself from the very beginning of the formation of this new group because there will be placed before its members among other things several very definite conditions, allowing of no compromise whatsoever, to which in all probability not all of you will be able to agree, and in this way some of the members of the former group will naturally fall away.
Detailed explanation of the significance of all conditions will be given by me in advance exclusively to those members of the former group who agree to and bind themselves under a special oath, the form of which I shall indicate partly at once, partly later on, to fulfill exactly the first of the aforementioned conditions.
First you must become acquainted with the following obligation:
“I, undersigned, after mature and profound reflection, without being influenced by anyone else at all, but of my own free will, promise under oath not to have, without instructions from Mr. Gurdjieff or a person officially representing him, any relations whatsoever, spoken or written, with any of the members of the former group existing till now under the name of ‘fof group’ of the followers of Mr. Gurdjieff’s ideas and also not to have any relations without the special permission of Mr. Gurdjieff or his substitute with that group’s leader himself.
“I am to have relations exclusively with those members of the former group, a list of whose names will be given to me during the general meetings of the newly formed exoteric group.”
Finishing today with this our meeting, I will merely add the following: Those of you who agree ‘after mature and profound reflection’ to sign this paper must do so before twelve o’clock noon the day after tomorrow in the presence of my secretary-translator. As to when and where the first general meeting of this new exoteric group will be held, all those who have signed the paper by the time set will be informed in due course.
–
In order that all my explanations and elucidations, as well as the lectures and reports of different instructors specially prepared for applying my ideas practically in life, whom it is my intention from this year to adjoin to your group from time to time also, should be productive and give real results during your future general meetings and your private encounters and exchanges of opinion, in other words, in order that all your talks having relation to my ideas should not assume such a character as they have had till now, namely, as I have recently called them, “meetings for collective titillation,” I want today, already at this what may be called “first meeting on new principles,” to give you, as a so to say precept, some advice which has relation only to you Americans in general and especially to those composing the given group, the infallible fulfilling of which advice may alone, in my opinion, in the now created conditions, stop the development of the disastrous consequences of the causes provoked by the errors in the past.
This benevolent advice of mine to you Americans, composing in the given case this group, and who became, thanks
to a series of accidentally arranged circumstances of life, my nearest essential friends, consists in indicating the categorical
necessity that each of you should cease entirely, at least for three months, the reading of your newspapers and magazines,
and during this time should become as well acquainted as possible with the contents of all three books of the first series of
my writings entitled An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man.
May 28, 2007 at 12:56 am
I want to describe several events which took place then among the members of this — group, after I proposed to them to
sign the “receipt obligation” mentioned in a previous paragraph.
I want to describe these events and the different consequences deriving from them … for the purpose of understanding how strongly is developed in these Americans, considered all over the Earth among contemporary people as the most cultured, the feeling which is called “herd instinct,” which has become an infallible inherency of contemporary people in general, and is manifested in the fact that a man does not guide himself in his acts by his own reasoning but follows blindly the example of others, and how the degree of development of his mentation—in the sense of his ableness to make logical confrontations—is really of a very low level. I wish also to show that, thanks to these descriptions of mine, there will be elucidated for every reader of my writings at least that side of the custom, spread everywhere, especially among Americans, consisting in that people, in their striving to achieve the same aim, are divided into various so-called “parties” which, in my opinion, especially in these last years, have assumed the character of one of the biggest so to say “plagues” of our contemporary common life.
After I had announced at the general meeting the indispensability of signing the mentioned obligation and had set a
definite time by which it had to be signed, they almost all in the same evening, as I learned afterwards, dividing into sepa-
rate groups, first walked about the streets and then, taking themselves off to various nocturnal “Childses,” as they call
them, or to the apartments of those whose what is called “domestic tyrant,” usual in every contemporary household,
was on that day absent, discussed and argued excitedly almost till morning as to what they should do.
On the next day, from the early morning, also meeting and talking by telephone with those of their comrades who had
not been present at this general meeting, they continued their exchange of thoughts and opinions, and as a result of all these discussions and deliberations of theirs there were formed by that same evening three independent parties with various
attitudes toward everything that had occurred.
The first party consisted of those who decided not only to sign the obligation required by me but also in the future
unconditionally to fulfill all kinds of orders and indications issued exclusively only by me personally.
The second consisted of those in the psyche of whom there was formed in this short time a strange factor, bidding their whole peculiar individuality not to recognize
anything whatsoever issuing from me, but to remain true to the one who for several years had been for them, as one of
them expressed himself, “not only teacher and mentor but also, as it were, their own ‘loving father'”.
The third party consisted of those who postponed their decision, awaiting the reply to the letter they had sent to
their leader asking what they should do.
All of those who joined the first party had to the last man signed the obligation before the appointed time was up.
In the psyche of those composing the second party, as it subsequently became clear, the mentioned strange factor progressively increased in its force up to the moment when the time appointed for the signing of the obligation had elapsed,
and reached such a point that every one of them, in his so to say “belligerent animation” and fury in the fight with me,
would have gone “a dozen better” than the famous ancient Balshakarians protecting their idol “Tantsatrata” from the
devils specially sent to them from Hell.
And as regards those of my charming “dainty” American followers of my ideas who then made up the third party, it is just they who have shown and proved the degree of contemporary development of the logical mentation of people of
their grouping, which is considered in contemporary life everywhere on Earth as one of the most civilized.
Having received the news of the arrival
soon of their ‘teacher’ himself on the field of action, as he was already on his way, they began, namely, to invent all kinds of “crafty” circumstances supposedly independent of them, and began to bring these “ideally well” invented circumstances of theirs to the attention of my poor secretary, and did this moreover not themselves but through others by telephone.
All this they did for the purpose of putting off their final decision until the response of their ‘teacher’, preparing thus at all events a respectable justification for not signing the obligation at the proper time.
May 28, 2007 at 3:18 am
#181 Whalerider
I liked your equating “Self-remembering” with addiction. Being alchohlic myself and dealing with the insanity of that condition and its root structure which branches down into the darkest places of the past I have come to see some things about addiction. Primarily, everybody has them. It could even be said to be the definition of “second state”. We all know that the common view of addiction is a physical dependance on some substance ingested to a tipping point of brain and body chemistry change but what about sex, gambling, work, adrenilin junkies, money. To name “third state” as hyper vigilent even bends it toward an addictive mind. Better to say hyper-subtly vigilent.
Sometimes in meditation I will see my mind trying to become more void. This is how I have verified over and over again that I am retarded. We forever have the “euphoric memory” of freedom somewhere within us. It is our mind’s ignorance that keeps us returning to the phenomenon that brought us temporarily back to freedom with ever diminishing success until those things become chains binding us further. We sroke ourselves emotionally and physically to an intesity that awakens us but we fail to see we are more bee than “buzz”.
IMO it is an indication of immaturity to stay addicted to that stimulus to evoke ourselves and we need to be trained to stay aware in dull times, mundane and depressed times though by its very nature the “peaks and valleys” level off.
If we become mature and are able to stay awake despite the addictions we may develope the courage to let go when that wave pulls us out to sea to drown.
May 28, 2007 at 3:44 am
Random questions:
Why aren’t there any prominent women who are conscious?
—–
Why are men always cult leaders?
—
It seems like men want something women already have.
-0-
Re recent pro school posts:
Do you gain consciousness by losing your conscience?
-1-
What is conciousness?
-2-
To current FOF students:
In your opinion what is the purpose of being in the school?
May 28, 2007 at 4:29 am
Paola #141 & #191;
Aside from the virtual sympathies for the suffering here (it evoked some ‘crying’ & some parental emotions); I don’t get the impression that, given the chance, she would not trade back in an instant her ‘illuminating exile’ with the sick reality of the ‘inner circle’ and the attention of the deluded henchman Asaf. Her emotional age is probably that of a teenager (her ‘best friend’, she says, is 14 year old X with whom she shares her ‘wisdom’). Has she matured, learned anything? I doubt it.
The suffering of all living things is a sort of tragedy.
‘Tragic’ is also the need of many here to look for somebody to blame. It keeps us preoccupied with the outside rather than investing more in looking inside, at our own nature, innate & acquired attitudes & responses. Looking more inside, with the right ‘tools'(though as it is obvious by now there are many to whom decades of attempting to do just that didn’t seem to do much ‘good’: it amounted to Aline’s ‘learning how to sweep perfectly’ analogy), may lead to some reduction of suffering (of the ‘unnecessary’ sort) in ourselves & in the world.
Robert Burton & all the opportunists & enablers around him are far from being blameless but isn’t such a childish good looking devotee a delicious dish? While you’re at it blame her parents, the media, the overly uptight or the too lax culture & society as well. And where is personal responsibility?
May 28, 2007 at 6:00 am
Hello ARTHUR,
I posted on “About” (About Animam Recro) where you were discussing Politics and spirituality. Is that discussion still alive? J
May 28, 2007 at 6:19 am
ralph, steven dambeck, lloyd, joseph g, jonathon f, graylin, susan – you’re married to Abraham?, Rowena? from San Diego? Weren’t you with George and his 240z?, Gideon – don’t tell me you aren’t alive enough to read this, William Heinz? on boards? yøu used to drive a tractor, Where are you now?
Ames? Are you still in the area? Where is Unconcious Grant?
May 28, 2007 at 8:08 am
Let’s take some stock of what we have learned through the Blog to date:
Here is my top 10 List!
10. The first poster of being a victim of RB, the so-called Simon (a.k.a. Raptor Regalis, known by his former friends as S.A….) admitted that he was well warned beforehand, but enjoyed the “perks” of being an RB Boy–slept around with numerous ladies while married and while with RB (STD’s anyone?), unbeknownst to his wife, and admitted he needed someone to blame, who better than RB, and now is a “holier than thou” type fellow warning everyone!
9. The scandalous posting, copied to all the FOF members, from Inner Circle Facts, has NEVER been substantiated, and everyone when asked has confirmed that IT IS FINE TO SAY NO!
8. Kiran has lied about just everything that involves another person. It is true he was in a car wreck, was in a coma, lost his wife, and was generally trying a little too hard with the ladies…but hey, just ignore everything he writes, and look at his nice slideshows–stare in his dreamy eyes…
7. The 9-year old “rape” turns out to be another false report, and in no way connected to the FOF, RB or remotely related to any doctrine of the FOF.
6. There are a lot of former members, who for one reason or another, dislike or criticise RB, the FOF, etc. There are equally a number of supporters–they do not seem to care too much for each other, and so far, apart from some reasonable voices (such as Siddiq and Ames Gilbert, both pretty civilized) not likely to convince anyone too much.
5. There is no one from the FOF trying to “Hack” into computer systems. Just another nasty little rumour…
4. There is no one who has admitted he was brainwashed in any way, nor that any “sex” was not consensual–Despite Whalerider’s whaling! Good going old Ken!
3. Everyone seems to do just marvelous when they have left! It may take a little time, but overall, the FOF does not have a lasting damaging effect (hmm, so why is everyone so busy here??)
2. The aggressive flaming of the more interesting and sensitive postings seems to ensure that some will not come back! Examples, PHilip Rosseter, Zsu Zsa Veit, Cheryl Rosseter and presumably many others.
1. After every 3000 postings, there will be a picnic to which everyone is invited! Way to Go Ames Gilbert!!!!
AND HERE IS MY TOP 10 List of favorit BLOGGERS~!
10. Howard Carter–damn irritating but sure to get the reactions going better than anyone else on this blog! Share this prize with Kiran, equally irritating!
9. Unanimo–he would be higher on the list if we could follow it. Prize for most poetic postings.
8. Joel Friedlander–you never know what his next witty remark will be! He has to share the prize with Sandra, Bruce, and Richard Moore, Charles Randall–the special Old Fart Award!
7. Ames Gilbert–for being an unstoppable force! Share this prize with Elena Guiterrize De Haven, and Rabbi Burns–also totally dedicated!
6. Cry Baby–for the angriest raving rants. (See page 2 and 3)
5. Hava Nagilah–most insightful post (to Paola)
4. Whalerider–most passionate postings (too bad he has just one story to tell!)
3. Siddiq–the most reasonable voice on the blog–but irritating as hell! Share prize with Innernaut–two sides of the same coin!
2. Inner Jewels–hottest female vocals//share with No Person! Both from NY–makes it easier to celebrate victory!
1. The Sheik–Credit where credit is due, for having started this blog, and for keeping this party going!!! THANKS!
May 28, 2007 at 9:06 am
To Ames: 10/140,
“And to Howard Carter (#10-116)… “It helps to know it’s a play, every word of it written long ago”. There is no room for misunderstanding your beliefs, that’s for sure. Pure Burtonism. How desperately sad!”
Ames, you obviously have your own way of interpreting things that lead you to the conclusion that there is no external, active/controlling God, Higher Mind, C-influence.
To be honest I could not really follow the train of thought that allows you to arrive at that conclusion, neither the part directed to me nor to Kiran.
From what I could grasp I would offer that all the major spiritual traditions point to an active, controlling diety. Why does practically the exact creation myth show up in so many diverse cultures? What about fate, destiny, reincarnation, preordaination, the “word” of God, prophecy/prophets? Don’t these things point to the play being written? And you really believe this is a “Burtonism”?
One of the greatest truisms Gurjieff left to us is the law expressed thusly: “As below so above”. We can get a glimpse into higher laws by observing laws on the human level.
What can happen on our small scale without the planning, orchestration, intervention by a controlling entity? Only chaos, which I would say is the opposite of order.
Under your worldview it would be possible that one day, quite independent and unbeknownst to each other 60 musicians would arrive at the same concert hall by chance, along with the chance arrival of 2000 customers. They would all decide on the spot to buy a ticket from a clerk who for no reason just showed up to take everyone’s money.
Then the customers would all decide to take the correct seat at the exact time as the 60 musicians all decided to go on stage and warm up without any prompting. Without any rhyme or reason and at precisely the same instant all 60 musicians would begin, inexplicably, to play Beethoven’s 9th symphony, each one playing his or her instruments part to perfection.
Think what level of planing and intervention the universe requires.
God is within, but equally external to us in my worldview. We are created in part with a divine nature but also in part with an animal nature. And the spiritual struggle is the contest for control between those two natures.
You state that if you really thought that the play is written you might “end it all”. When I saw the reality of the “play” it was the most liberating moment of my life. I knew then that all I could really control is my inner state; the rest was indeed written. Play the part well, no need to invent the part, or other parts. No need to step out of the part. Everything is the way it has to be. If one individual steps out of his/her “role” its the equivalent of asteriods colliding into planets.
By all means learn from the part. We are here to learn. See a better way to act, have the will to carry it out and the part miraculously accepts the new course of action. Don’t see it and the part repeats.
You are not the first former student to turn away from this truth. I would call your disbelief of the “play” the result of the “collateral damage” connected with leaving. Most people who leave the FoF feel the need to discredit RB/FoF as they depart.
It justifies the act of leaving; I did not fail the School, the School/Teacher failed me.(it’s curious that there are so many bogus teachers in the world but no bogus students. That on top of the fact that pupils should out number teachers by quite allot. How many bogus students, ex or current on the blog? Will anyone admit to that designation?
But aside from discrediting RB/FoF several other truths must come down as well. The idea of the written play is a dangerous one indeed. It’s quite easy to discredit RB or the FoF to the satisfaction of the regular critics on the blog.
But if people start to sanction the reality of the “play being written”, for all that implies, we would soon end up with the conclusion that RB’s role was also written, sanctioned by the same higher powers who connected us with our spouses, or jobs or who bestowed us with any and all the things we like in our lives.
If we accept the notion of the play being written pretty soon we will come round to the conclusion that we must give up our small will to some entity above us in the celestial hierarchy in order to progress. One can see there’s no end to the problems we could cause ourselves.
May 28, 2007 at 11:32 am
Hi All,
I had another clip that might tickle some memories of Robert. Incidently, I got these two clips from the FOF website a while back, when I happened to look at it for what ever reason. I was so amazed that they would published clips like these that I saved them. Needless to say they were removed from the site a few days later. … I wonder why.
Any psychologists out there want to say some thing about this body language???? Does he even beleive this himself … no he doesn’t and he’s telling the whole world.
Best of luck.
May 28, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Truth Finally Prevails (Post 218)
I’d probably call that splitting hairs – pubic hairs!
Where’s the truth in that?
May 28, 2007 at 12:32 pm
Woah! Taking Stock (Post 228) – thanks for the biographical information. You know more about me than I do.
And your tone… were you one of my victims too?
Yes, I’m full of mental disease, but still alive…
Thanks for the concern.
Simon et al…
May 28, 2007 at 12:49 pm
THANK YOU Rabbi Burns for your post 214,
Dear All please read it, it points directly to the real issue:
“..So why is Robert Burton so controlling? Most likely because he’s afraid. He knows he’s a fraud and he’s terrified of being seen as he really is. So he surrounds himself with people who would not dream of questioning his behaviour in any way. Then, with all restraints removed, naturally enough he starts behaving more and more strangely.”
May 28, 2007 at 1:28 pm
To Traveler, to Paola, and All:
In response to Traveler (#211) who asks “ But could you please address the issue here, namely, how do you personally feel about Robert deciding who is to marry who? Do you see it as his prerogative of a conscious being?”
The short answer is “no”…but I do not think that this is the real issue.
As I tried to express before, while I try to think psychologically about the influences that are entering my play, I am practical and directly responsible for my own life, so I believe this type of personal decision has to be felt by one’s own heart, and not even the Teacher’s can or should substitute for it.
The trouble comes in when we make someone else, Robert or anyone else, responsible for our actions. Remember Gurdjieff wrote that you have to be present to the “I” that writes the check, because you can be paying off a debt for a life time?
So the question really involves our instinctive centers and false personality taking up space,—I wrote that the several plays referred to in Paola’s posts took up so much space that something in the players was literally asking for a shock.
Once you can see this, the question will then be a very different one than the one you are asking now.
Because in a state where you firmly know yourself without lying, and what you stand for—I am now talking about the real you—not some false idea–there is no phony part taking up all the space and then you will simply no longer attract the same shocks that your false personality would have.
Traveler, what part in us do you believe feels a need to please the teacher at all costs? Could this be feminine dominance?—the same shocks simply do not happen to all people—why is that?
Is that not the real question?
I relate all of this to the idea of “taking up space”—because if the actors in these particular plays had real courage (in the areas where they attracted the shock), there would not have been room for Robert to involve himself (because there would be no need).
As it was, their false personality’s indecision, lying, and wrong work, made firm interference necessary…because all these instinctive centers took up so much space!
This is the real key, that could be seen across the Galleria salon and can still be seen today–including in ourselves–but we are all learning our lessons…
So, not just acting different, BEING different, and another play is then possible.
As you write, I may well be naive, but will tell you that for the last years, I have been able to no longer attract such plays that were once all too common in my life too…so I am speaking from experience.
I hope this makes some sense…
Good Luck to All!
Siddiq
May 28, 2007 at 1:46 pm
A trip down memory lane:
weekends at ‘Hall Farm’, where Peter and Kristina B, (mum and dad) or John T (big brother) used to knock on people’s doors at some unearthly hour shouting “time to awake…arise and make efforts” – and we used to get up to spend the day gardening, shopping, cleaning, cooking, but definately not using the huge swimming pool or billiards table which were out of bounds…it was like being in the army, and I must admit did instill some discipline in my youth.
Later I had the ‘honour’ of being asked to lead one of the European centres and found myself leading a double life – most of the time being the upstanding ‘centre director’, but developing ‘life’ friends that I would sneak off to have fun and sometimes get drunk with! At the time I called it ‘false personality’ and a barrier to my work, but now I realize that it was a lighter part of me that wanted to get away from the oppressive, limiting atmosphere that permeated the FOF culture; having to act in a certain way otherwise risk being disapproved of and ‘photographed’ for ‘not working’. I suppose it was rebellion and I am just grateful that I was not one of those who remained sheeplike to the cause for too long.
Perhaps this reflects the need we have for authority figures to tell us what is what, and how to be, and the security of belonging to a group; it is ‘risky’ to rely only on oneself and question everything, and yet is much more real and enduring. Much of the time there is a ‘not-knowing’ but also an understanding that this does not matter – life is an adventure!
May 28, 2007 at 1:53 pm
Many replies to send out this morning; it is truly inspiring that we can stay consistent in this blog, even after 3500+ postings.
Hello Paola ~
I read your post (#141/10) this weekend while in a coffee house, that is, after an older guy who could have been Walt Whitman’s twin brother helped me get into ‘Control Panel’ settings and change my wireless reception details.
I am familiar with your story and Asaf Braverman, yet more from an intuitive point of view, for I saw you each, from a distance,
as so many, for oftentimes in the Fellowship of Friends, when students are caught in certain ‘self experimental nets’, their friends can visit them, even up close enough to touch, yet cannot pull the other out for one simply resists, thinking, seeing the other from the point of being inside the net, that ‘the puller’ is in that net instead of one’s self, that they are trying to get you into their predicament.
Predicaments are sand pits and possible gardens.
I recall many times that there was something in me throughout my life, that wore ‘the net’ as a kind of fashion statement, call it ‘vanity’, though I sense it’s deeper than that;
even wearing a tuxedo at the galleria can equate with ‘net and bow tie’.
Regardless of my particular connection within or without the Fellowship of Friends, it may help you to know that we know one another on a deep ‘recognition level’,
very little said, though understood by both of us as ‘the joy of being instantaneous friends’,
and that’s not of the ‘irridation/maximum attraction-friend category’ for the true personalities reading this, looking for glitches in the Matrix.
I send you my love.
I recall you in a profound way, you saw me once seeing you; it is interesting that the only ‘thing’ that separated our beings was the ‘form’ of this earthly ‘beer in the driveway, sit down, stand up, party for our solo jump into its atmosphere, i.e., a crowd.
One positive aspect of the Fellowship of Friends is graduation, the being-connections made with ‘people you hardly knew’ will last far beyond this time around;
we often sense this, though often loose its depth and profundity by allowing it to fall into the brain, into doubt and hope.
Yet, regardless of the contradictions, we ‘know’ nonetheless that opposites simply test our ‘thoughts of becoming ourselves’ into ‘being ourselves before thought’.
Most of all I liked your confidence in whatever you were doing, the personal attention, even if it was somewhat Shakespearian, so what,
I applaud your continuance, not your footprints.
Continue dancing, we’ll need able, personable instructors above this atmosphere someday, to reach out and see us as we are being seen, no more, no less, no mind.
Your being reminds me of an occurrence in my life that I sense you will take as ‘good medicine’, particularly since you have a very strong feminine aspect flowing thorough your ‘particular being-luggage’.
Nearly 3-4 years ago ~
Dedicated to Paola, a reminder of the eternal feminine, that which becomes pregnant in all of us who fear not the birth itself will be ‘complicated’, rather, giving life to our love is all.
~
One night I awoke, in a bit of a different ‘form’, I felt as though the whole house was breathing, that the air itself had ‘arrived’, all the parts that commonly made the whole ‘normal’ had a presence, each its own, yet not pronounced, for something was in the living room corner that took the ‘stage’ as ‘center’.
As I walked to the living room, I noticed that, although I was in the house, the ‘essence’ of the outside was also inside; formatory physical perceptions were ‘mixed’ inner mingling, though not confusing, simply ‘sharing’.
I looked to the left of the living room and saw a young girl standing there, between the age of 10 and 12. I had been somewhat ‘dragged’ from my ‘sleep’ by several ‘forces’, who were not this young girl, though seemed very interested in ‘prying me’ from my ‘floorboard’.
There she stood, all and everything, all that she was, needed to be, present, depth with no background, no end, like a vanishing point. She was profoundly ‘she’, not mysterious, not occult, simply a ‘she-titan’ in a little girl’s ‘form’, yet something beyond this ‘obvious profound ‘self’ proclamation.
There, right there. Me, right there.
I sensed that I was ‘summoned’, though not to some king’s court or some ‘event’; this was ‘personal’, though depth-personal, not about information or confirmation. Deeper.
I approached her a bit, stood in the middle of the room, she approached me a bit: little by little step, she and I were embracing one another, yes, a hug, though far beyond brother-sister,like and like or anything involving I wish or I am this or that for you are this or that for me, etc.
Vaguely I recall that I may have picked her up in my arms and stepped through the window into the night arm with her.
The only thing she wanted to share was to mingle in my ability to ‘accept’ her as she stood in the now, not that her now-existence was ‘on the edge’ without me, no, it was a profound and simple exchange of being, not trust, not ‘faith comes home’, as we were, straight from the depth, no commercials, no rest stops, no affirmations.
What did I get? Giving. Pure giving, a receiver who could absorb and radiate both from itself and acknowledge that it is the quiet ‘we’ that is the greater picture, yet not from a point of view of comparisons, simply ~
As Rumi said, “We are helping people we don’t even know.”
~
Know this Paola, no matter what happens to you down here, that, from the depths, not from having traveled there or all the ‘little details’ on having tried or succeeded in getting there for a short while, rather, from the depth of you as you are now, from that starting point, nothing can bring you down or up, you are, depth changes, though an ocean is still an ocean, no matter the ‘land forms’ it covers and allows to stay revealed.
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Hello Shelley M. (Post #136/10)
You would benefit, if you have not already, from reading the account of the ‘first formation of Theater’ as written by Gurdjieff in “Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson.”
Once the Fellowship of Friends (or any group who has decided to ‘play the game’ of spiritual family) has the patience to read this book, then, no one man or woman will ever again be tolerated to claim sole proprietorship of the fourth way or any way so far as teaching their ‘spin on it’,
fourth way disk jockeying.
The future of a ‘real school’ will be bound in its ‘nucleus’ or ‘originator’s’ first objective ruling rule, “Conscious collaboration, conscious participation of many, tactile, verifiable, ‘strike up a conversation’ beings.
The age of the oracle is dead, at least within this particular octave of civilization. There are too many ‘real oracles’ to call a one, a one: for truly, it is the most infinite number, who is untouched by a counting end that allows the single digit ‘1’ to exist, not to exclude the zero.
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To Innernaut (Post#138/10)
Yes. Everyone has a ‘life person’ attached to them, its called ‘the human body’, for does it not live without our conscious permission? Certainly it does and its posts like yours that show this explicitly.
That we can look through thick, broken, bent, oily, taped together glasses and still see that’s its daytime, we don’t need external clarity, makeup, chinupness to ‘see the light’.
As soon as we are asked by another to justify our mystical depths, we are scuba diving in a pot hole; your story is not an example of this, though it could have been.
There’s this great scene in I believe the movie “Analyze This” where a somewhat paranoid war veteran goes up to this guy, a much larger in size and bald fellow, sitting at a bar with his back to him and simply smacks him in the back of the head. Of course he gets his ‘karmic adjustment’ by the larger guy.
Later, his ‘shrink’ asks him, “Why did you hit that guy?” The veteran says something like “I don’t like people who put down Jews.” (this may not be the exact quote)
The ‘counselor’ says, “But he didn’t say anything about Jews!? And the veteran replies, “He could have.”
For me this is ‘Crazy Wisdom’, we do it each day when we make choices that provide us with a U-turn back into ourselves, instead of an Indy Nascar Race.
Thank you for the ‘peep’ into your life.
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To Gabriella F. (Post#142/10)
Yes, that seriousness is ‘trying’ which has entered the realm of showing, i.e., the vanity feature rattling the true personality rattler and mind activity coupled with the presence of the King of Clubs, rather than integration and acceptance of the ‘we’.
Your post is a great reminder that even ‘good students’ can unknowingly and knowingly cheat on the test, yet, that’s why we have choices, humanity can either be our audience or ours.
Try to forgive the one who is looking to be seen, then pretends he was not looking to get your attention when you give it.
Such an odd collection of dice we roll, yes?
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Reply to K. of C. (Post #153/10)
you wrote ~
“… conversation at coffees and never once witnessed her say or do anything that wasn’t elegantly appropriate. She seemed to enjoy an inherent sense of polished decorum. Based on this alone I am skeptical of your claim,…”
Although the Fellowship of Friends has no ‘true core’, one that produces seeds for objective trees to bear their own fruit, not bound by the allergies inherited by the ‘orchard keeper’ of ‘certain fruits’,
‘photographs’ as the Fellowship of Friends call them, i.e.,
clean cut participation by a stranger to another stranger so to impart some form of ‘possible objective assistance’ sensed needed, deep down, intuitively by that being’s unreconciled predicament, beyond their false personality’s response ~ “Yeah, I knew that, it’s just that I forgot, thanks anyway” comments, still lean outwards, wishing to love and let live, yet, participate.
So, K. of C., live, though please read the quote I posted from your Post #153/10, at least five times and try to sense the incredible irony you’ve precariously ‘slipped into’.
What you’ve described is actually the observation of a very slick vanity feature, a kind of vanity that only solars are capable of producing, while radiating pure hydrogen 12 sex energy as, let us say, to provide ‘the icing’ on the block of cow-lick-sugar.
It fascinates others, similar to second hand opium smoke.
The part that really ‘flipped my lawn chair ‘ was ~
“She seemed to enjoy an inherent sense of polished decorum. Based on this alone I am skeptical of your claim,”
If I were to read this to an ex con he would look at me and say ‘WTF?’ ~ peering at me as if I were trying to insult his ‘street intelligence’; such a ploy is rather ‘touchy’ out in the streets, particularly around 3AM, the original ‘witching hour’.
In this blog I consider it pretty much always 3AM and so you might also try this ‘slight adjustment’ to how you perceive the being of time and placement of ideas, visions and statements.
Now, the ex-con is simply a symbol for the most rudimentary level of conscience and common sense, a level that I rarely see people, who can actually write, maintain throughout, to then form a paragraph of legible communication.
You might think that this I am writing is a good example of ‘wit’ or ‘sarcasm’, yet, with some ‘being formations’ ‘there’s no hitting the treasure chest’ without a little smirk conjuring.
Let’s have some fun with our contradictions, shall we, for certainly it seems that you’re asking for it.
Can you imagine that a person that is so taken to ‘worshipful heights of boot licking and high heel smooching’ by another’s possession by ‘polished decorum’ can rightly, with the same state of mindful affairs be “skeptical” of another’s claim of any particular anything?
Jeepers Peepers guy, don’t let your H12 sex center’s activation by a solar type turn you into some ‘Knight of Rightfulness’…
Steeping back, the only thing that could have allowed you to write such a ‘stew of ice cubes and snowballs’ is the insatiable sport-belief in the arm wrestling match between The King of Hearts and The King of Clubs; it is clear to me that you are experiencing the effervescent effects of the drug called ‘envy’.
Do not worship solars, they are the only body type that can unconsciously be ‘used’ as affirmations for your potential essence under the guidance of your state of being.
Solars are not angels, angels are not solars. Someone who is naturally naive is
often mistaken as spiritual, whimsical, present and loving.
These are all projections, add-ons we’ve participated in downloading without the permission of our uploading deeper presence , yet there are levels, yes?
Are not some ‘rhyming stews’ called ‘poetic’ although its base-stock-foundation is based on war?
Romance is often a simple case of serious laziness.
Look deeper and re-read the section called ‘Solars’ in your ‘Body types’ book.
There’s a reason Rodney Collin warned of ‘irridations’.
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A reply to Siddiq & Traveler (Posts #173/10, #186/10)
Paola – Destiny – C-Influence and The question of Robert Burton’s consciousness.
I find it somewhat limiting to categorize every aspect of one’s experiencing of the now:
Robert Burton has trained his students to do this automatic self-calming dittle dattle butterfly swipe, which, although it ‘seems conscious’ to pay attention to every third dimensional event and happening then relate it to some higher justification or multitudinous fourth dimensional direction or cause & effect,
as I sense it,
particularly by the fruits of this school’s particular being at this present point in time,
it is simply a habit of his chief feature and second chief feature, in other words, consider this question ~
What would your mind activity automatically choose to ‘have its way to form’ if it were under the First Force of Dominance & Greed?
Perhaps an inclination to greedily dominate every detail of the moment, not allowing his students enough ‘space’ to simply be within the great mystery of their silent ‘half’.
Try this ~ While you’re eating (you have to do this American style, with fork in right hand and nothing in the left, unless you’re left handed) rub your thumb and forefinger together as you are putting food in your mouth with the right hand fork gesture, keep these two actions going simultaneously.
This may lead you to that space within yourself where no teacher can classify or
justify due to his or her proximity.
Certainly every ‘type’ of teacher can be thanked for his ‘role’ no matter his shoulder-deamons and shoulder-angels or simply a Duracell battery balancing there;
yet, do not fool yourself, you owe Robert Burton nothing, you owe the gods nothing,
we get what we get and give what we give and owe nothing for we have no ‘real impulse’ to bring debt upon any other than ourselves, or am I being poetic?
Who would rightly stand up in their death hammock and say “Life, you owe me more than Death, I will not accept this form of payment!”(?)
Payment happens, it cannot be planned. If I have to remind my friends to love me, then what, they are friends of my mind, not my soul, my being without their prior approval or credit seeking for having lead me in the direction of ‘ultimate friend’ or a Friend #4?
It’s not really a question of whether Robert Burton is conscious or not: I’ve never met a real Zombie, even the deepest psychologically deranged ‘different’ beings within human form are ‘now’, they are ‘here’, conscious on some level.
So we are not truly saying that RB is the world’s first undead,
he is conscious, he is also many people’s imaginary picture of their ‘consciousness affirmation’, a symbol, an icon, a pointer.
It is what Robert Burton does with his so called ‘conscious time’ through the medium of physical form and spirit circumstances, this is the ‘issue’ or ‘impression’ people are transforming, efforting into and out of.
There are paintings that one can look at for one’s entire lifetime and be with, they grow as one grows and die when one dies for they contain no ego, no tension, no finger pointing rules.
Then there are those paintings one likes for ‘a time’, then gives away or puts on Ebay.
All Schools are to be sold on Ebay eventually, the earth is the ultimate Ebay buyer, it gets everything by default, regardless of our personal endeavoring to maintain control, stability, predictability and last wills & testaments.
Gurdjieff advised to turn everything upside down,
so,
Robert Burton students,
remember
The Earth shall inherit the meek.
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Reply to Post #183/10
Thank you Steve Anderson for your post;
I wonder, what else can one expect from the King of Clubs than such a reply as it is destined to give you by it’s particular automatic nature point of view?
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Reply to H.N. Post #193/10
Your post reminded me that I have still not put enough time into locating WhaleRider’s toaster… Thank you.
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A question for you Siddiq (Post #189/10)
You say that events can be seen as having come from the gods.
Are you implying that there are events that can be seen as not coming from the gods?
And if not, what is it in you that self indulges in choosing the King of Hearts stuff as ‘holy’ over Iraq, George Bush stuff as perhaps ‘other’?
Again, you have the King of Hearts programming of Robert Burton.
Who really cares what card takes you into the relativity that you are not your mind activity? Only True Personality, which is, after all, just refined I’s that serve nothing in the aim resulting.
You can ‘harvest’ the King of Hearts all you want, yet, this is not transformation of suffering, nor is it doing anything within the state of the now with all the implications and profundities accompanying maintained presence,
its simply cranking the Model T that’s out of gas.
The King of Hearts might be one diving board, though, as Meher Baba proved, the King of Clubs is one too.
It is no small irony that a Fellowship of Friends student can be formatory about which card is most suited for diving into a higher center state… For it is the same ‘formatory’ opinion-apparatus that looks present, though falls at the bottom of the staircase from ‘thinking’ there’s one more step to go.
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Reply to Joseph g (Post #160/10)
Your question is everyone’s, so it seems, on some level, i.e.,
“What happened to the trust in RB we had?”
Though you may not read this, I give it to you just the same, you’ll find it…
Nothing happened to that trust, it simply traveled inwards, away from its affirmative-hope-investment.
Did Robert Burton betray you, no, you came to the school for yourself and left with yourself, only that which tends to betray can be betrayed, like makes like important.
You say that “Integrity inspires trust.”
or Trust = Integrity
For me, all this comes down to being with another’s being.
Picture this,
we’re sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon, you look at me, I look at you, I see you smile a little and smile with my eyes back, not wanting to imitate you, you recognize that I’ve made an effort to go deeper into presence, you accompany, I accompany, we crack open another beer, look at the canyon, you look at me, I see you out of my peripheral and point upwards in imitation of Christ’s Last Supper gesture, you say “You think he was smashed after that supper?” I reply, “Yep, most definitely.” We don’t laugh, its not meant to be sarcastic or demeaning, it’s simply a sign that we both share a non formatory space now and are maintaining it with a certain kind of fun profundity.
This is being, which has all those virtuous words like ‘trust’ and ‘integrity’ within its form, inseparable as one phenomenon experienced through its many qualities.
I believe, for you Joseph, that fooling around with perfecting the parts before having a context, is another Robert Burton King of Hearts hobby that you’d be better without.
Let the virtues come to you, like spoons to a giant magnet, its being who you are in this one and only now, this is the magnet, you’ll attract all those important virtues, after all you’re one of their children, don’t worry, they’ll find you.
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Hello WhaleRider (Post #156/10)
There was a quote that you quoted in your post reply ~
“..and bridge an interval in him that he likely could not bridge himself.”
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It is interesting what sort of situation Robert Burton has gotten you people into,
(the student that wrote the above quote)
the very same situation he’s in, yet, this is what happens in hierarchies, one lake, one reflection, one tree, one fish, one boat, one god, one beer in the refrigerator that no body better touch, it’s the last one 11th commandment,
“Thou shalt not chug my last beer.”
Hummm.
It’s curious that Robert Burton’s overly self important self calming hobby of promoting himself in multi faceted ways has actually crept into even the 44 conscious beings, who, don’t support the will of the students wish towards the teacher to reconcile his ‘dark side’, but rather, the teacher’s ‘dark side’ to reconcile the students ‘lower self’.
Now there’s some ‘takes one to know one’ logic! But wait, that’s not divine, that’s street wisdom!
How is it that one write this ~
“..and bridge an interval in him that he likely could not bridge himself.”
without considering the ‘holy implication’ of the student’s proximity and ‘holy yearning’ to cross over that bridge?
Do you truly ‘sense’ (or think) that another ‘force’ would mingle with the likes of us if it did not have the experience and conscious assurance that it was not ‘running on a treadmill to get from California to Maine’?
Rise up you guys and give yourselves a pat on the back ‘for gods sake’, it takes two to tango.
You’re under the influence of the spiritual virus infection of what I term ~
“Saturn-satellite-tis”.
It’s most noticeable when one feels the smugness of being connected to a bigger imaginary picture that’s larger than one’s little imaginary picture, which then feeds off the Catch 22 insatiable fact, that it takes many small ones to make one big one.
~
The wheel ‘thinks’ its seen everything till its axle breaks and it goes rolling off the cliff, leaving the driver and the carriage
behind.
Love the view, not the binoculars.
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Love to you all.
May 28, 2007 at 1:56 pm
ME
“The present moment is there all the time. It is a gift for me, I will accept that. I do not need to buy it. All I have to do is to be silent about it, I will not be vain about it and I will overcome the wish to make money or to spent money on it. Life is very simple. Be simple to myself, not special in any way. Let me just value presence for its own sake, let it warm my hart and let it bring me closer to the cosmos. “
YOU
“The present moment is there all the time. It is a gift for you, accept that. You do not need to buy it. You just have to be in silence about it, don’t be vain about it and overcome the wish to make money or to spent money on it. Life is very simple. Be simple yourself, not special in any way. Just value presence for its own sake, let it warm your hart and let it bring you closer to the cosmos. “
US
“The present moment is there all the time. It is a gift for us, let us accept that. We do not need to buy it. We just have to be in silence about it, and not be vain about it. Let us overcome the wish to make money or to spent money on it. Our life is very simple. We will be our own simple self, we don not what to be special in any way. We just value presence for its own sake, we let it warm our harts and let it bring us closer to the cosmos. “
May 28, 2007 at 4:07 pm
#229 HC….Your shallow cosmology (like the blood cell trying to describe the body) is no different than any other faith based fundamentalism. Entity, entity, entity…my God (and I use that loosely) WTF? The fact that you even consider your “apprehension” of the universe as even being a possibility shows your arrogance, self delusion and lack of sense and shame. You are the “perfect student”.
How sad that you are convinced that you can discern even the knowable part of the unknowable, with such a limited mind and lack of humanity and humility. You are the sheep and the fodder.
May 28, 2007 at 6:17 pm
#230 begorra
“Needless to say they were removed from the site a few days later. … I wonder why.”
Copyright infringement?
“Any psychologists out there want to say some thing about this body language???? Does he even beleive this himself … no he doesn’t and he’s telling the whole world.”
The clip is far from detrimental to Burton’s cause of portraying himself as a “teacher,” it had the opposite effect on me. The “angle” did not seem rehearsed but emerged naturally and his moving center seemed to be under the influence of his emotional center, which though not rigidly “intentional,” is nevertheless right work. One thing that I observed is how psychologically attractive the king of hearts is, regardless who it is that is projecting the king of hearts one’s being feels a natural ease of attraction and trust. It is clear how this emotionally centered Saturn has kept the loyalty of a large number of followers. Too bad they don’t present Burton using the same act to explain how this is the end of the world and after everyone is dead (billons of worthless life people) all the finest art in Europe will be brought to him for his own enjoyment.
I have to say at this point that those of us seriously opposing Burton’s cult and having even a mild desire to see it come to a justified end by losing its population need to produce a far better impression and speak with considerably more intelligence than the ineffective queen of hearts expressions that are typical on this blog. Even though most of us are immune to the devotional mentality expressed by Howard Carter about his teacher and his school he nevertheless projects a more elevated emotional/intellectual appeal than most of us speaking against the Fellowship of Friends. He seems to speak from a competently developed essence, even if for a wrong cause, while we speak more from personality. Also, unless they clearly chronicle credible wrongdoing by Burton or members of the Fellowship, these here-is-my-heartfelt-story and subjective view of my personal universe since being freed from the Fellowship prison narratives only show ex-students as self-absorbed and self-indulgent characters with no other aim in life than to experience “my ordinary life.” Remember, before we realized that the Fellowship was nothing more than an emotionally addictive madhouse populated by the identified pretending to be unidentified the last thing we wanted out of life was that it become ordinary. Is this really an accomplishment, escaping a cult in order to settle down into an ordinary, typical, comfortable biological existence? What is an alternative lifestyle that is on a higher level, with increased emotionality, that someone can create for himself as an alternative to being a hopefully desperate cult member begging for the attention of a Robert Burton? What do you get when you leave the school to replace the artificially charged emotionality produced by the illusion of being chosen to populate the village at the end of the world?
May 28, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Taking Stock:
It is your own deep insecurity and lack of passion in your own life that compels you to minimize others in a vain attempt to elevate yourself with your blog ‘critique’ to date.
Oh, I have many stories to tell, my ex-friend. What have you been up to lately? I have been quite busy since I left the Fellowship. I have had a chance to study first-hand a wide range of human behavior, more than you can imagine, including the pedophile I once had to escort to the police station to register as a sex offender.
Let me enlighten you about my intent in revealing my experience in the second of my many posts. It is a warning to others, just obviously not to you. You think my experience was atypical? This blog has only just begun…
Just to be clear, Robert Burton is a sexual predator. It is well documented how a predator operates; they prey on the weak and vulnerable, well-meaning people such as me, who for whatever reason do not readily say, ‘no thanks’. (Remember, students are taught to give up their will to the teacher, so consent between adult equals is a very big gray area here, which Robert plays to his advantage. My weaknesses were my vanity, my naivety, and my status as a student.) Often a predator’s advances can easily be repelled; they are at the core narcissistic and concerned only about themselves and their own self-preservation. They do not want to be injured or exposed in the process, so they display great patience; they stalk their prey. They place themselves in a large pool of potential victims. (Robert has high status and has accumulated a huge moat of money around him for both protection and attraction.) They test this one, then that one, until the victim is identified, cornered and exploited. The weak are often not in a strong position to defend themselves. The emotional damage to the victim is done when they resist or attempt to expose the perpetrator. The perp then defends himself by ‘shunning’, minimizing (such as what you are doing, making YOU complicit in his play of crime), demonizing, and mollifying the victim to discredit them. Others usually rally around the perp since his public behavior is in such stark contrast to his private actions.
Sound familiar?
WhaleRider
1979-1985
May 28, 2007 at 8:34 pm
To Unanimo,
I have a question for you, is your leaving related to not being able to express in the school, what you seem to be able to express in your posts on the blog? I have never seen, heard, or felt anyone with such poetry in the school.
Wild & Free
May 28, 2007 at 8:48 pm
In response to SIDDIQ, 10/234, in a continued discussion of PAOLA’s play, Siddiq asks: “What part in us do you believe feels a need to please the teacher at all costs? Could this be feminine dominance?—the same shocks simply do not happen to all people—why is that?”
Of course I agree that Paola is responsible for her choices, and she attracted the lesson she needed. I do think it is immature to want to please the teacher at all costs. That isn’t even under dispute.
The question I am asking is what kind of teacher is it who wants to be pleased at all costs? Who needs to make sure his students’ futures are controlled by him? Who gets angry when the particulars of his followers’ lives don’t go the way he wants them? What does that tell us about Robert?
Siddiq says: “As it was, their false personality’s indecision, lying, and wrong work, made firm interference necessary…because all these instinctive centers took up so much space!”
Remember that they started out by telling the truth, which led to an argument with Robert, who immediately interfered and forbade them to have any contact with each other. Please don’t buffer this part of the story. It was only after they learned this lesson, that the Teacher’s will must be obeyed, that they started to hide and tried to confine themselves to friendship, which led to a tragic romantic drama. Their behavior was messed up, but it was in direct response to Robert’s interference in the first place. His false personality is as much a part of it as Paola’s and Asaf’s.
In the FoF we keep observing ourselves and thinking psychologically about ourselves, which is fine and all true on its own level, but try putting things in a larger context and thinking psychologically about Robert Burton once in a while. Is he beyond and above the realm of observation and investigation? None of your business, as long as you have your own being-present-here-and-now? Nothing outside of this moment and your immediate environment exists, no, no, it doesn’t…?
My best wishes to you Siddiq.
The rest of this post was inspired by HOWARD CARTER in 10/229, but is not addressing him directly, as he already knows he is right. Howard, go ahead and skip this post, it is only many I’s and a distraction from your aim to be present and become immortal through repeatedly achieving 4 wordless breaths.
Howard argues that everything points to an external and controlling higher influence, for how could the world function if there was no one to organize it and keep it in check?
I will take a wild guess that Howard is a Saturn, like Robert, and thrives on control, like Robert. Control, suppress, fix it and make things right, is the supreme mantra of a Saturn.
Howard claims that all major spiritual traditions point to an active, controlling deity. It is amazing to hear him say that, as it illustrates how little some people are aware of any spirituality outside of what they may have grown up with, and the Fellowship’s particular take on life. The active, controlling deity is only featured in the popularized, non-mystical versions of Abrahamic religions, of which the Fellowship is an offshoot. External controlling deities also appear in various pagan cults, although there are always many of them and they are often in conflict, as they can’t seem to agree on how the world should be. Some segments of Hinduism believe in supreme deities which push the world through its endless cycles, while other schools of Hinduism acknowledge no supreme deity or see it as inseparable from all manifest world. Buddhism knows no external personal God whatsoever. And Taoism sees all personified deities as human constructs.
Howard further argues that “practically the same creation myths show up in so many different cultures”. Actually, “creation” is itself a concept limited to Western and polytheistic pagan or Neolithic belief systems. The idea of a creation of the universe is totally foreign to Taoism for example. In Buddhism, the world is seen as naturally growing and emerging out of itself, actually the question of a beginning is not even addressed. For creation by God, God has to be distinct from the universe, but in Hindu philosophy among others, God and the universe are essentially the same, and the world is seen as a process of repeated existence and non-existence. Have fun reading the diverse creation stories in cultures where they do exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_within_belief_systems
The point of all of this being, there is nothing universal about Fellowship beliefs. Here we can see how Howard invokes reasoning and appeals to a “majority opinion” to support his truth claims only when he hopes it will serve his purpose, while he does not employ reasoning or logic to back his other irrational beliefs, such as that this same majority of people on Earth are asleep and unconscious and have no idea what it’s all about, while the FoF is the only conscious school on Earth.
I would suggest that this need to project authority onto an external deity/Maker of All Things Right/conscious teacher is a valid – albeit somewhat childish – stage in everyone’s development, and is necessary at some point to maintain a civilized level of existence. It is a step above the lawless, selfish, egotistic it’s-mine I-want-it-now, stage, to go from there to belonging to a larger community, submitting your will to the will of a (hopefully benevolent) ruler/parent/priest/elder who knows better, and working for the good of the members of your in-group. It’s just that development does not have to stop there.
Howard says: “Most people who leave the FoF feel the need to discredit RB/FoF as they depart.” I would suggest that it’s the other way around: Most people who have found that RB/FoF are easy to discredit and burden one with a number of fundamentalist, unnecessary and unverifiable beliefs, feel the need to leave the FoF.
But here’s one thing that Howard gets absolutely right: “If we accept the notion of the play being written pretty soon we will come round to the conclusion that we must give up our small will to some entity above us in the celestial hierarchy in order to progress. One can see there’s no end to the problems we could cause ourselves.”
May 28, 2007 at 9:54 pm
Best wishes to all on the path. Make the most of our lives on Earth. Keep working, keep working…
May 28, 2007 at 10:02 pm
I dont know who said it, but I did read it.
When passing on the 4th Way use your own words and keep it simple.
I dont know who said it, but I did read it.
When you’re passing on the 4th way and it becomes argumentive then you did’nt understand it yourself.
I dont know who said it, but I did read it.
Robert Burton never read Gudjieff(?). Steve Anderson (Keith) said: “…the form of the 4th Way must always be changing but certain principles must always remain constant”.
Thanks, Keith.
And to the rest of you kundalini enthralled peacocks–Kiss
Or, should that be Hiss?
May 28, 2007 at 10:36 pm
After watching the sleep-inducing video of Robert on YouTube, I followed one of the links that was (coincidentally?) displayed after his video ended:
There seems to be a connection here.
May 28, 2007 at 10:42 pm
Reply to Rabbi Burns, #post 214:
“And why on earth is Robert Burton concerned about these things? Why does he get viciously upset when one of his boys chooses to be with one girl rather than another? ”
The common sense explanation for why Robert Burton is trying to arrange these marriages of certain of ‘his boys’, such as Asaf, to certain young ladies is so that they can acquire a ‘Green Card’. By marrying an American they become legitimate, long-time US residents, which suits RB’s purposes for them.
May 28, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Re RB making statements that students are on the way, etc.
“It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.”
John Steinbeck (1902 – 1968)
American writer
May 28, 2007 at 11:19 pm
Dear Taking Stock #10/228:
Thank you for the flattering inclusion in your top 10 list.I feel honored to be mentioned in the same paragraph as my fellow award winners. Very witty and observant post. Someone must be spending a lot of time reading this blog. It is a little cruel to not include Shelly in your pseudo/Letterman top 10 list.
I tried to guess who you are, since you seem to know me. But, again you are obviously no real person but the same group of FOF spin doctors appearing throughout this blog. Your post is very clever, somewhat well-written, and has a crip, factual legal tone throughout. Rather entertaining, actually, compared to some of the long-winded, but well intentioned, posts here, but so sad and desperate, as well.
So you must be a mutant mix of a quasi-professional writer/editor/PR person (Peter Ingle, Linda Kaplan/Rockwood/Levin/etc.?), a lawyer (Abe Goldman?), and then someone with even more wit and sarcasm than the prize winners (Ed Brode, Nick Spaulding?)
Hi to Ya’ll. Now I must get back to LIFE.
May 28, 2007 at 11:25 pm
To Traveler, and All,
Traveler, I appreciate you going deeper inside the questions–quite a good discussion so far!–this is perhaps an example of what I was asking about how we can make the school a better place–some of these questionable areas can and should be worked on…Can they? I sure think so! If people have more truth and character–these plays sure can develop it! And it is not just Robert’s features or subjectivity that keep the school where it is! We are all too willing to abdicate responsibility.
Yes, I do think even Robert has features, can be subjective and has a lower self–it is what he and we have to work with also. It does not lead me to disrespect him. His subjective tastes do not need to be copied by me. The life I need to live is mine, not my imaginary idea of what I imagine Robert imagines for me…
Take the hypothetical example related to what we have been talking about, and Robert is told, “Dear Robert, I cannot, no, I deeply disagree and do not feel that is true for me, I am in love with … and will marry her. Nothing will stop me.” not as an argument, but quietly and respectfully from a place where everything has been deeply felt in essence, will he not listen? Yes he will. I know several students where exactly this play has happened to. And Robert listened and took back his suggestions.
So, I think that the teacher reflects our attitudes to him, so if he is surrounded by mature human beings, there will not be room for the mechanical parts in him that do sometimes manifest–i.e., us treating him like our mother, or some bullying school teacher.
We all get what we want.
Siddiq
May 28, 2007 at 11:28 pm
Peter, (#237) thanks for a beautiful post.
There is no getting out of the present – it’s all happening only now. Just relax and enjoy the free gift, right? What’s with the struggle to get “into the present moment”? How can you possibly be “out” of it – may be only in our thoughts, and even these thoughts are still happening in the NOW.
It’s the (mental) struggle that is blocking the obvious… The more we struggle – the more entangled we get. Stop all struggle, and simply enjoy the gift of now. Presence doesn’t have to be earned, produced or purchased – it’s always here, and always been here. It’s our natural condition. We need to just notice it.
Best wishes to all.
malaec@yahoo.com
May 28, 2007 at 11:56 pm
King of Clubs says: (10/239) “Is this really an accomplishment, escaping a cult in order to settle down into an ordinary, typical, comfortable biological existence? What is an alternative lifestyle that is on a higher level…”
If you feel the need to persuade large numbers of people to leave the cult, to “replace the artificially charged emotionality produced by the illusion of being chosen” with something else, and to show these people alternative ways of being special out there, you are still in the grip of the same mentality that brought you to the Fellowship in the first place. Grok that.
Peace
May 28, 2007 at 11:57 pm
#239 You present your interpretation of the clip as if it’s how any sane person would see it. I have a completely different view of what it says. I am also a bit repulsed because I know (somewhat) it’s context in relation to RB-ness. It certainly wouldn’t help on a legal basis, but I don’t look at it from that point of view. One can also see that not much has changed. All the chairs up front apparently still have that stick affixed to them.
May 29, 2007 at 12:05 am
245…Cathie
You’re right…”they always pick the guy with the wires”.
May 29, 2007 at 12:07 am
#247
“There’s a sucker born every minute”.
PT Barnum
May 29, 2007 at 12:16 am
*** 10/224 from Moon Angel
“-1-
What is conciousness?”
Consciousness is the experience of fusion/oneness with whatever or whomever you are paying attention to, which experience brings with it the realization that whatever you do to another, or to anything around you, you unfailing do to yourself.
With this experience comes the understanding that most suffering in the world is due to the actions of sleeping people who do to others what they would never do if they were conscious i.e. awake, experiencing their one-ness, their self.
Hence the need to struggle to divide attention and transform negativity:
1) to help you to develop your being so eventually you experience self-consciousness/oneness,
2) so that in the meantime, you reduce the harm you unwittingly create for your one-self in your state of sleep.
Paradoxically, the practice of separating (dividing attention) leads eventually to the realization that we are not separate from anything at all.
formerfofer (1978-92)
May 29, 2007 at 12:49 am
IRONICALLY, these 10 pages of useless posts had become that they are criticizing from day one – “a cult for intellectuals”.
May 29, 2007 at 12:49 am
“Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids lack a degree of refinement, they lack a certain loveliness of emotionality.”
Hey, KofC, having visited both these sites and having been awe-struck by their sheer emotional power, I wonder if you have ever visited them or have just looked at the pictures?
“an ex-student, a “failed experiment””
Although there are a lot of ‘failed experiments’,just look at this forum, given the statistics of people passing through the FOF and out, chances are that there are many more successes than failures.
“…behind the scenes of the devotional emotionalism moves invisible schools of objective knowledge. Evidenced in such creations as Notre Dame and Chartres Cathedral… religious monuments that contain encoded esoteric truths”
Again, having myself, as probably many people on this forum have, visited these edifices of truth, what truths did you actually discover there? Would you share any of them??
“The center of gravity of art during this earlier Christian period declines from the level of objective monuments revealing the operation of higher centers found in the Egyptian civilization”
Really? How are you able to know this?? Let me guess…
“…the understanding of a man number seven”
Voila! I don’t have to guess: you are among the successes!
May 29, 2007 at 12:58 am
I dont know why but somewhere else Janet Marchant #226 asked me who Cake was #201. I told Marchant that I thought Cake was woman.
So, I went back to Cake’s #201 post and found this. “Such a solitary journey is this…The lonelest passage of my life….Past the point of no return”
Sorry I am Cake. Just hang on no matter what.
Rodney Collin said, “never give up hope even when there is nothing to hope for”
And, somebody else said, “whatever doesn’t kill me will make me stronger”
Come to my driveway and we’ll knock off a case of cold dark German beer. We’ll sit and watch without binoculers the various Bemmers, Mercedes and Jaguars buying their zig-zags and condoms.
And, we’ll laugh with them when their snooted looks come our way.
You are strong Cake, never doubt it.
May 29, 2007 at 1:27 am
#205 Paola
” I sincerely want to understand: What would have been a Nine of Hearts behavior- during and especially after the facts had already happened- as an alternative to the letter I wrote?”
Please read #212 WhaleRider’s post it may help you see something.
IMO you are under the spell of a poison apple and are looking for another bite.
Understand that you are under the spell of a poison apple and you are going back for another bite.
May 29, 2007 at 1:40 am
cake 201:
It is as easy to create a castle as a button.
And what a third state to watch it arriving!
May 29, 2007 at 1:45 am
To Howard Carter (#229)
Your post is so full of “ifs” and implied “let’s supposes”, I can’t help but smile ‘out loud’. There is the same flavor as when I used to tell my girl bed-time stories, but without the color and excitement.
Since your starting points are invariably points of faith, and you have turned the meaning of ‘personal verification’ on its head, not to mention inside out, let’s just call it quits. Actually, I concede the victory to you. The supposed unstoppable force (Hey, Taking Stock, # 10-228, hope you didn’t lay bets on me!) has not proved to be irresistible at all against the immovable object. It was ordained that I be fresh outta steam… chalk up one for the FOF!
(Reading from the script…) Look, a while ago, we both came to a similar ‘fork in the road’, an arrangement apparently made an eternity ago. The play was written that you ‘chose’ one way, I the other. You chose the path of ‘pawn’, I the path of ‘aspiring to become individual’, but I don’t really know, the signpost had fallen over. It is also written that I expect that ‘one day’, ‘in another field’, we will meet, have a beer or the cosmic equivalent, and have a good laugh (hopefully with Siddiq and Just Observing—the first round on me, by the way…). Again, it is written that I believe that the apparent tensions between our points of view are only apparent; the play demands contrast, and we are nobly playing our parts, providing entertainment for the audience (of which we are simultaneously members), each in the role of a lifetime.
With love and affection,
Ames
May 29, 2007 at 1:58 am
Beyond Says:
May 29th, 2007 at 12:49 am
“IRONICALLY, these 10 pages of useless posts had become that they are criticizing from day one – “a cult for intellectuals”.
Useless only to the useless.
Do you think there is the smallest chance that you are viewing life through your own personal filter, one that only allows a limited frequency? Surrounding yourself with people who wear similar lenses. After awhile, some see that they can no longer see clearly, their vision has changed…the available spectrum becomes to limiting.
Meanwhile you clutch your map with sweaty hands thinking it is “the place”, guarding it with your invested energy. Trust me, no one wants it. You’re more than welcome to it. Enjoy it until it deteriorates in your fingers.
Fortunately for you, it’s never too late (almost never).
May 29, 2007 at 2:31 am
Hello Lust For Life, you wrote ~
(Post #235/10)
“…friends that I would sneak off to have fun and sometimes get drunk with! At the time I called it ‘false personality’ and a barrier to my work, but now I realize that it was a lighter part of me that wanted to get away from the oppressive, limiting atmosphere that permeated the FOF culture,”
LOL … What do you think that pool and billiards table was for? Also Robert Burton’s little hide away condominiums,
previous sports car, 1000 + suits and matching glass ‘slippers’ and those notorious cuff links… whew! We gotta have those.
I remember once hearing that Robert Burton had a ‘certain pair of cuff links’ stolen from his luggage upon return from some European trip.
Later, before his arrival back to ‘the farm’ certain ‘inner redundant’ students rallied round others at the ‘Lincoln lodge, aka Apollo D’Oro’ and began furiously collecting $20,000 + dollars to replace them with another equally self-calming pair.
So, fear not Lust For Life people, you’re by no means even near the totem pole of self calming entities who are bouncing celestial checks at Disney Land.
________________________________
It’s curious that it has yet to be written about as to why Robert Burton became so ‘pathologically disturbed’ with Paola’s disclosure of her 2+ years of ‘hiding the truth from Robert concerning her romance with Asaf Braverman’.
Any guesses?
I recall during the time I was investigating the Jones Town massacre, looking for the ‘pivoting point’, i.e.,
where everything Jim Jones had ‘tried to build’ reached a ‘cross-roads’, a ‘peak’, then descended.
I found it through the assistance of certain YouTube video archives.
This ‘point’ came about when a government panel, along with NBC news reporters and a governor visited Jim Jones ‘little paradise’ and began interviewing his ‘flock’, finding 15 people who wished to go AWOL,
the ‘officials’ also interviewed J.J., who, strangely enough has the same precious way of talking with his hands as someone else we know.
Here’s the rub ~ As soon as the ‘officials’ left with the ‘defectors’, Jimmy ordered a band of his follows to hop in a big flatbed truck, rifles in tow, to go and execute the NBC reporters, governor, defectors & children, plus whoever else seemed to stand in front of their field of vision. So they did;
now, back in paradise Jimmy was freaking out, calmly though, he had lost his ‘symbolic, self justifying external world’, someone had succeeded in revealing his ‘beer belly’ beneath his tightly laced ‘paradisaical girdle’.
Now, without writing 15 pages on the phenomenon of Super ego, arch typical collective pain body role players such as Jim Jones, I will say simply this ~
That in the realm of spiritual phenomenon, there are still spirit identifications, crystallized ‘people’, role playing, leaders and followers, perhaps one could call it an ethereal mirror of the flesh-play, an echo of sorts.
So, here’s Jim Jones, talking over a loud speaker telling everyone that it is better to die a honorable death than to wait for the consequences (of his actions). See, he suddenly became the spoke in the wheel, as he always was, though a very ‘odd spoke’.
Group hysteria is a strange phenomenon, yet here was an ancient incarnated pain body who was an ‘unconscious expert’ at inducing a very powerful self pity wave, that eventually took out 900 + adults and 200+ children and babies.
Like a pebble throw into a pond, this ‘man’s’ loss of the super ego pain body link to a third dimensional ‘something’ was tremendously strong, strong enough to gather up and disperse a psychic force, like a nuclear explosion, taking out over 1200 people in less than two hours:
yet, they were also prepared, they’re pain bodies were ripe for his picking and their picking of others as well.
So, not that I am comparing RB to JJ: simply its an association as to what can occur when ‘the mirror’ is held up to such a being as JJ by another ‘stranger’, someone who was a ‘symbol’ on the opposite end of the pain body candle,
i.e., the joy body, that certain someone who exudes control and power through altruistic vibrations of offering amnesty, safe haven, free this and that.
It was simply too much for JJ, what he had done to 1200 + people, suddenly mirrored back, ironically, he was the only ‘being’ that was not his follower.
________
Dear Paola,
See? The reason Robert Burton became so verbose, saying that you were “worse than alcohol”. Is because you consciously held a mirror up to him, had revealed having done something very similar to what he continues to do today, for a time he lost his ‘grip’, his ‘paradise’, he was spun down to his true level of being, the yet to be reconciled, little boy (or girl) within.
(And i do not say ‘or girl’ to seem coy.)
There’s nothing worse for a participant of the pain body hierarchical apex than to be shown that it is not ‘special’, that it is not doing anything altogether ‘all powerful’ and ‘all celestially precious’.
In other words, Robert Burton has unconsciously perpetuated the craft of hiding one’s sexual adventures from the light of conversation, scale & relativity, joy and honesty.
So, it is no coincidence that your essence would be ‘inclined’ to do the same, so far as your particular triad was concerned. After all, if the teacher can do it, then how can’t his students?
This is not to say that your motives and nature is the same as Robert Burton’s, simply that he has supported and nurtured the form by which you and Asaf Braverman drew around yourselves,
imitating a teacher, personalizing his or her ways is the first chime of the clock, beginning the count down to the ‘Dark night of the Soul.’
I would advise you not to come back to Oregon House, this place will be a paleolithic museum in no less than 5 years.
There’s nothing in this school for your new level of graduate-being.
If you need a teacher, find one that does not ‘need’ you, who does not get spiritually ‘hot’ when he or she sees a chink in the mail or glitch in the main frame.
It is odd, I have witnessed some really profound stuff lately.
I watched a video where a so called ‘spiritual guru’ was sitting around asking his students or admirers questions that he himself already knew the answer to, the intonation in his voice was almost as if he was subliminally saying ~
“Look, idiots, I will always know everything you need to know before you know it, therefore, any wisdom self originating from the depths of your being and conscience coupled together to form any particular sense of ‘I am’, I already have done that for you, you owe me, because I saw the answer to my question put to your infantile jurisdictional curiosities before you did, so on and so forth…”
Wow and pain body loves these ‘under the carpet, blind acupuncture treatments’! Yet, somehow, this is the mud we grow our lotus from.
It was no surprise that Robert Burton treated you with such aggressive profundity; I figure that the four days that he gave you to leave is approximately the exact amount of time it took for his first lie to ‘sink in’ and take root as the ‘do’ of the Fellowship of Friends.
Take gentle care of yourself, it’s all you’ll have for an eternity, get used to the game of ‘dodge ball’.
_____________________________________
Reply to Post #241/10
Hello Wild & Free,
Who said I left the Fellowship of Friends or that I was ever ‘in’?
As far as I understand it though, Robert Burton does not support writers who are not already dead, i.e., those writers who are
‘Indisputably six feet under the possibility to contradict his self-important projections upon their conscious individualities as supporters of his self calming reference to their cause paralleling his’.
Yet, just for fun, let’s say that your question is ‘relative’, so to satisfy at least the question’s desire for reconciliation.
If a student was to leave the Fellowship of Friends because he or she was not being ‘looked at enough’, then, welp, they really have not left ‘school’, perhaps the external form, though this self patting still lives on, painting its portrait throughout the being’s experiences, a mortal portrait, Ebay art.
I have been writing for a very long time, at least fourteen years before I even heard of the Fourth Way; having never published anything, I have no personal problem with not seeing myself in the shiny reflective part of another’s eye.
I am looking for sharing, not showing.
______________________________________
Love to you all.
May 29, 2007 at 3:33 am
Paola,
There is no “Nine of Hearts behavior.”
The Nine of Hearts is the place in you that quietly and firmly promotes presence and stops imagination from interfering.
It is a subtle emotion that derives it’s emotionality from presence itself.
The Nine of Hearts is still part of the lower self, yet it is very essential for reaching a wordless higher state. There its role ends untill one is drwan back to inagination and needs to start engaging presence again. There the Sequence is a very powerful tool.
Once Rodney Colin came to Ouspensky with a complex theoretical question. Ouspensky replied “There are no stories in the world, just moments.”
You see, without a deep self relaziation that stories of any king (including yours) are nothing but imagination; it is not possible anymore to stay in this school.
Till about a year ago it was still possible to hang around and have lots “Seven of Heart’s fun”.
This era is over now and that is why quite a few students are leaving these days. Some want a community to thrive, some want psychology to still be part of the teaching (and not just be treated as ‘lower self’) and so on.
This school is teaching direct and practical work on consciousness. That means getting out of imagination into prolonged presence.
From your reactions here I can see that your Seven of Hearts is the active force eager to satisfy its imaginary picture.
May 29, 2007 at 3:44 am
Paola,
Please ignore my last two lines:
“From your reactions here I can see that your Seven of Hearts is the active force eager to satisfy its imaginary picture.”
They are not based on my verification and I am sorry for that.
May 29, 2007 at 5:06 am
Paola–
This seven/nine of hearts distinction is part of a false map of the human heart. It exists to undermine your trust in your own perceptions so you can be manipulated by someone else.
When you ask, sincerely, “what would have been a nine of hearts behavior,” you are telling others you trust the map over your own perceptions–you trust “doctrine” over “person.” The doctrine will always be right, and you will always be wrong.
I second Yesri Baba about your being under the spell of the poisoned apple. Trust yourself and spurn this false map.
May 29, 2007 at 5:12 am
Happy memorial day to all!
I am a former member, in for twelve years, and on the “property” most of that time.
They were heady days, and I was as close to Robert as anyone I knew, yet was never approached to donate my sexual energies physically. I attended symposiums and dinners, got drunk and argumentative, I even once called him a villain which, to my surprise, he did not deny, but said that he was “the biggest villain of them all!” In my experience, I’ve never met anyone quite like him. He exudes a very palpable energy, and uses it as part of his power of persuasion. I am a catholic now, and don’t really know what consciousness really means, yet he uses this as one of his bartering tools to get what he wants.
If you notice, it is not his orgasm that seems to be his primary concern, but for others to orgasm, since sexual energy is supposedly derived from higher hydrogens, I could only assume that he accumulates it this way. Unfortunately, sex and Love are not always mutually inclusive, eh? He was always gentle and kind to me though. Words are poor in regards to the rich experiences I’ve had, I only
hope and pray that somehow this discussion will bring us all to the objectivity of Love, for all our neighbors, and..Roberts is one of them.
Take care, and nice hearing some familiar voices! Alan l.
May 29, 2007 at 6:20 am
Sheik,
Thanks for inspiring a memorable gathering of friends this Memorial Day Weekend. And thanks to all who organized the event!
A particularly poignant feature of the gathering was a memorial erected to those friends who have passed away. (Far too many!) A reminder how precious is our brief time together.
I was reminded of Shakespeare’s Thirtieth Sonnet (which many here know well:)
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.
***
Reflecting upon my experience in the “school”, now twenty years removed, while we considered the importance of “intellectual parts of centers”, “consciousness” and “conscience”, I cannot say the Fellowship of Friends promoted a balanced development in each of these areas.
We were quick to focus on “mechanical parts of centers” and becoming expert processors of “observations”, pigeon-holing data within our “body-type” and “center-of-gravity” matrices, labeling phenomena, exchanging “angles of thought” that further cemented these observations, summoning the authority of a host of “conscious beings”, through conveniently short yet insightful quotations. Labels mistakenly passed for knowledge and understanding.
What a leap it is, from the recognition that we are “asleep” and commonly unaware of ourselves and our surroundings, what a presumptuous leap of faith it is, to an “acceptance and promotion” of other school concepts: Universal Laws, the Ray of Creation, Conscious Influence and a Conscious Teacher, Man Number 7, The Ark, The Plays of Crime, ladders, “the play is written”, “the lower cannot see the higher”, etc., etc. (Things that by their very definition, were beyond verification.)
What a tragic leap of faith, and abandonment of critical thinking, and one’s self.
We must return to evaluate what is known, what can be known and what may never be known. (Indeed, is anything “known” in these metaphysical matters? In contrast to what my mechanic might “know” about my vehicle.)
And, once you have asked these questions, ask yourself by what authority another PROFESSES to know the answers?
This is the time to fall back on personal experience, conscience, and all the honesty we can muster.
***
Early on, Robert discouraged us from using the term “love”. (“Sleeping machines cannot love.”) I don’t know if the “exercise” (or suggestion) continues. In retrospect, what an emotionally crippling device this appears.
In the same way, I suspect our proficiency at labeling phenomena became an intellectually crippling device. A cheap substitute for understanding. Perhaps it served the purpose, as some suggest, of producing a more compliant membership.
And so it is disturbing at this late date, to witness how easily (apparent) Fellowship of Friends members here fit their thoughts and perceptions into the same boxes we were taught to use so long ago. And those bits too complex to fit neatly are consigned to more general headings (“the play is written, the lower cannot see the higher, it is the will of C-influence”, proclamations so confident in their wisdom.)
The Fellowship of Friends, as presented here, recalls Western Civilization’s futile struggle using convoluted models to describe planetary motions at a time when the Earth was still considered the center of the universe. It took the critical thinking of Copernicus to demonstrate the fundamental flaw in contemporary cosmology.
The Fellowship seems to be ensnared in its own convoluted and self-centered cosmology, struggling to portray as rational and cohesive, an increasingly contradictory and dysfunctional system.
Adding to the challenge, it appears to be a community increasingly devoid of conscience, critical thinking, and perhaps by design, love.
May 29, 2007 at 7:00 am
The King of Clubs post 153
“Based on this alone I am skeptical of your claim, but when you add in the fact that if she did make it clear to a healthy heterosexual male that she was interested in him I don’t believe that there is anyone that would be ignorant enough to say no or brush the offer off.”
Another one of these emotionally degenerated beings for whom it is not sensible that Kiran 4 month after his wife was killed and 3 month after he came out of coma would reject the offer of RT to have sex with her. How much proof do they have to give us that this work is in a dead-end, for so many ?
May 29, 2007 at 8:32 am
Now is the time for all good seekers to come to the amazing conclusion:
It is all about you and you. This is your LIFE!
The original premise that shocked me and awed me so long ago about the FOF was :
Verify everything: Accept Nothing!
I worked, I watched, and left….eons ago
I searched, I learned, i grew – it never ends! Yippee! It is as fun in LIFE as you make it.
Some of us seek. Some don’t. It is all good. What it seems the FOF/RB can’t/won’t tell you – is that it is your grasp of goodness – the law of attraction – believe it to see it – that the world/love/god/creator/goddess – is ready and at your call. And a warm and loving and interesting (in EVERY WAY) community is out here in life on planet Earth – LIFE – ready to embrace you, love you, journey with you. Come on out of there!
May 29, 2007 at 8:37 am
Dear Arthur
Thanks for the encouragement and the invite. G and T for me, and my bud Janet – at least the G (she knows me well). And oh yes, I am Cake, hear me roar.
I wanted to leave with no regrets. Yet now, I find I still have a few.
Those that I have cared for and that have equally cared for me who will no longer consider me a friend.
Leaving a community that has been my heartbeat for more than half my life.
But my greatest regret, is that when someone so dear to me, someone who trusted me told me his story I could not hear him.
I did not doubt it. Not a word. There he was, a man transformed. Something terrible had happened. The pain flowed through his eyes and filled the room. And still, I was able to numb my heart and violate my conscience.
But not again, not again. I have been given another chance to hear that voice.
So tonight, somewhere ‘round two or three, when that fear shoots up my spine and plants itself on my chest, staring me right in the eyes, I may shake and I may tremble, but Arthur, I will not waiver.
Best to all
Cake
May 29, 2007 at 8:46 am
To traveler; 10/242
I’m afraid you did not really address my main point, that the idea of the play being written is, as Ames labeled it, a “Burtonism”. Neither did you address the mechanism/nuances of “the play is written”
Instead you chose to go after a few loop holes in the posting. And although you are rather good at it I suppose I could keep pace with you if my aim was solely one-upmanship.
The way you appropriated the last paragraph
of post 229 to serve your own end was particularly clever.
Here’s a few lines from the Buddhist I Ching, a merging of Buddhism and Taoism:
“How great is the creativity of Heaven, all things originate from it.”
“The action of Heaven is strong.”
From Confucious:
“He who offends against Heaven has none to
whom he can pray.”
“Wherein I have done improperly, may Heaven
reject me”.
This heaven, not unlike its “Abrahamic” counterpart, seems to me to be the abode of a higher, external power/intellegence. Or am I assuming too much?
May 29, 2007 at 9:11 am
There’s a ridiculous tone in Sidiq, Howard Carter, Hava Nagilah and the Fellowship representatives in which they’re reasoning goes something like: “If you are already a mature, conscious human being you wouldn’t get fckd up by Robert or the rest of the establishment at Isis”
Makes one wonder why they don’t put up a sign saying that they only take conscious beings and not regular people.
They were obviously not mature or conscious enough to not let their reasoning get as fckd up as their formatory thinking in which they wave out the banner that as long as I,I,I, take responsability for myself, who cares about what happens to the rest of the students.
They are the kind that condone the idea that students get burned by Robert and that that’s the expression of his consciousness.
I do not know why the king of clubs thinks their reasoning is not coming from personality when it is in fact coming from false personality or the inability to consider anything but their own very formatory justifications without having ever addressed the deeper questions posed on this blog. It is rare to think of the Kof Clubs being seduced by the condescendance of sick dick, who is as happy to pat Paola in the shoulder and then stab her in the back. Psychologically of course.
But they are one sweeter than the other, trapped in the issue of not being able to see beyond individualism, missing the real issues consistently and biting on dead meat like vultures.
May 29, 2007 at 9:32 am
Dear Paola,
Please do not excuse yourself or believe those who demeanor you for having loved.
Behind the sickness of all these happenings is the perfectly natural desire to love and be part of a community that was not possible in the Fellowship of Friends for younger or older women like you or me.
The one’s still inside condone the fact that only a few people have the grip to the life of the community and are happy to discard anyone who does not fit their conditions.
Asaf, like Girard, was as happy to hide with you and let Robert throw you out when you were unable to take the treatment just as Girard was willing to not stand up for me at any time on any issue, be it Dorothy or any other. They are not men that will grow in the struggle to become so with a woman, they are half men that will continue to support Robert as long as he guarantees their privileged position in the Fellowship. They have given up the possibility of growing with a woman, to play the role of leaders in a community in which they are willing to discard the women in their lives if they do not submit to the third class treatment, happy to follow the shortsightedness of a decadent homosexual teacher. This is what both men and women in the Fellowship are willing to support mindlessly, convinced that as long as they stay present only to themselves, they’ve accomplished the aim of a lifetime. It is part of the self serving egotism of our time in which people think that even consciousness, is a self serving acquisition.
Don’t be surprised by it and I hope you won’t be such a fool to return. After all, ninety percent of the surviving men today, if not more, were willing to sleep with Robert and wore with pride the medal of being chosen by the conscious being for no matter what competition. Those who were not chosen are still inner considering about it. And I now a few that rejected the offer that are now wondering wether they made a mistake, they’ve had to put up with so much friction from it. It is not they who should surprise one as much as the women who still put up with being used for a money making role and at the same time are treated by the men and the community they live in, like “feminine dominance” that they still have to put up with.
Perhaps we are simply victims of the liberality of our times that allowed us to play the game of being led by a homosexual and what we thought was openness on our part did not allow us to watch out for the implications of such conditioning.
Is it not interesting that lesbians are in as much of a slavery to look for the emotional support of other women as gay men are in their insatiable search for physical contact with other men? Having been a lesbian and considering it the worst period I have ever had to go through, do people realize the horror of being under such conditioning? What made us ever think that such a state is just another reasonable condition to act from? Have we not understood the amazing suffering and illness of such condition? Heterosexual relations may be as sick in many ways as homosexual ones but they are by far more balanced, the mind set is totally different. And I am not saying this from a judgemental position, the problem is not to judge but to consider the deep implications involved.
Is it not interesting that extreme gay men like Robert have an even more pronounced sense of impressions than the finest woman? I would not call Robert’s fine, but exaggerated. Does it not mean something to be educated in a culture with these accents? These over emphasis in so many areas that are not the conditioning of a conscious man but of a simply gay man, so extreme and crazy that the professional supporters have presented it as the conscious beings form? A form that he never gave any meaning to and got heavier and heavier as time passed?
Is it not interesting to observe that the classical male man is mechanically more interested in his role as a social being than in his role as a husband and the modern stereotype behavior of the macho implies that they can rarely deeply commit to the family and balance themselves both within the family and the community?
Is it not interesting that the classical female role in undeveloped countries shows a woman who is unable to go beyond the family into a community role or social role? And then to observe how in the modern society, both the man and the woman acquired a money making social role and discarded the family? The mind set willing to discard the family was already so prevalent at the beginning of the Fellowship of Friends, that giving up the children was accepted by many of the followers. Would it not be interesting to find out how many of these women are still in the fellowship? How many of precisely these women were unable to leave and had to continue supporting the man they had given up so much integrity for?
It has been mentioned that Robert more than just tapped into families and separated couples as well suggested other unions. It does not seem to matter that his suggestions in so many cases have been nothing but failures, one after another, and yet these more than failed adults are willing to allow Robert to continue such practice with the new generation of young people.
It does not matter that his suggestions to Girard to have children with Barbara did not help that relation any more than Girard’s marriage with Denise, Cynthia or myself, since it is clear that the problem is not the women these men marry but the fact that these men just cannot offer a decent enough marriage to stay by, too busy giving their lives away to the decadent homosexual they are so grateful to, for putting them up in the pedestal, next to him without it mattering in the least that they are making up the show as they go along and getting away with it because too many people have gotten used to watching the show without looking at it.
Is it not strange that Russians, Italians, french, Japanese, Chinese and people from all over the world are willing to come to Isis and believe that there is CULTURE in this made up show, that consciousness and culture can be picked up by a few pictures and the repetitive tape recorder of a machine that forgot to say anything besides remember yourself always and everywhere, so that he could lock students up in a little cage in which they could not consider anything else but themselves? But they are still willing to affirm that this IS CONSCIOUS CULTURE.
Does it not make one wonder how much more decadent life in Russia, Europe, China and Japan, together with all the other countries that students come from are, that students are willing to put up with the cheap autocracy of a decadent homosexual and his equally decadent homosexual old men, jumping on every young man that happens to join the fellowship getting him ready for Robert’s final assault and the equally decadent and deviated heterosexual men and women who dare to say that this is a conscious school?
There must be some generalized ignorance in the type of students who join the Fellowship of Friends if they think the CONSCIOUS CULTURE of this ridiculous club is above their own ancient cultures; if they think that culture is not what comes in through what you see and do everyday and not the little show that comes every Wednesday and Sunday and any other day without anything but the taste of a made up show, far from anything one could call genuine culture.
But would it not be the same if we happened to confront the Fellowship of Friends with Abraham Lincoln and the other Americans who pushed the freedom of the individual to the limit of its possibilities for the sake of these very questionable Americans to end up supporting a cheap cult, in which even the freedom of speech has disappeared, together with the freedom to marry, have sex, interact, work or create, and still pretend to stand for a conscious school teaching each individual to become conscious of his own life and possibilities while having to accept to have everything about his life, conditioned by a few, perfectly corrupt individuals?
We are no longer too young to question what it means to be in a homosexual machine and establish a certain kind of community. What the students of the Fellowship of Friends have had to suffer for allowing a man that was unable to establish a balance between himself and another man or woman, a stable relationship in which he could grow internally. Of all the men that have told us about Robert’s use of them, not one has mentioned any form of stability in the relationship. Nothing but the persistent use and discard pattern, which equally manifests in the use and discard pattern extended to students who are asked to leave or have to leave not agreeing with the form, and the equally use and discard pattern of the multiple marriages of Fellowship students. And yet, you continue to call it a conscious teaching neglecting to look at the horrifying failure of a community that it really is.
It would be interesting if any of the fellowship representatives were willing to address some of the real questions posed in so many postings on this blog and stopped hiding behind their little I to justify life in the fellowship.
Of course, after so many years of indoctrination their minds have stopped functioning to address any deeper issues than their inability to remember themselves and only themselves, always and everywhere. No wonder students are terrified of looking at the blog, when they have no being to respond to anything that questions their little bubbly club and prefer to close their eyes and hide under the carpet in the hope that the big bad wolf will eventually go away.
It will, much to their misfortune.
May 29, 2007 at 10:00 am
Often times the higher forgets its lower and unknowingly shares this forgetfulness with friends.
Love to you All.
May 29, 2007 at 10:08 am
What the Seeker seeks is consciousness.
The mistake for the Seeker seeking consciousness is to look for consciousness as something new or different.
Most people seek altered states or special states foolishly believing that a new or different state could be Reality.
But consciousness is not a new state, special state or different state, but paradoxically stateless.
Reality never changes, consciousness always remains the same. It is pure changeless being.
The ignorant Seeks consciousness far and away as something spiritual or special.
The wise understood or realized that to simply be conscious is this unchanging consciousness itself.
Who is not aware of himself, undeniably aware of being present or knowing that they are?
Consciousness is this knowing-ness. The ‘knower’ or awareness presentis called consciousness.
Not knowing this or knowing that, but simply the constant activity of knowing that you are.
To simply be present and aware of oneself. Awareness of being present as oneself is ‘I’ am.
No one can deny one’s own being and say ‘I’ am not. One’s own existence is certain and needs no proof.
Everybody knows that they are present and yet they do not know the Reality.
A strange paradox!
The Seeker has no clue that what he Seeks to find is never far away, but always present here and now.
Ever-present with himself as consciousness or the natural ‘knowing that you are’
or simply pure awareness of being present as oneself or ‘I’ am.
The Search is the only trap! Because the Seeker is the Sought.
‘You’ will find Reality when ‘you’ stop Seeking Reality.
Reality is simply one’s own being-ness or ‘I’ am-ness.
You already are, what you Seek to know.
Yourself!
lotus4411jpg.jpg (1018 bytes)
Freedom is Free like the air you breathe.
The honest person or pointer will never ask anything for Freedom, simply because he knows you need nothing at all.
But the self-appointed Guru is easily spotted as always requesting money in exchange for Freedom.
Obviously no one can pay any amount of money to acquire Truth,
simply because you cannot buy what you already are, but paradoxically only buy ignorance.
Get rid of ignorance and Freedom is self-revealed as simply being your very own self.
Only ignorance is the obstruction to Freedom, just this and nothing else.
All you have to do for Freedom is to wizen up!
Use some common sense and understand that Reality is simply being oneself.
That is all Freedom is truly all about.
Only the false Guru or self- appointed Teacher will try to convince you that you cannot understand.
But they are simply lying to you, these people keep Seekers in the dark and only bound to ignorance.
Beware of self-appointed Gurus because they are not your friend, but the greatest illusion.
Always remember that Freedom is not the acquisition of anything new nor is it a special faculty.
But simply the removal of ignorance about your very own familiar self or ‘I’.
Not knowing yourself or acquired ignorance about ‘you’ is the only ‘veil’ or camouflage.
There is no other obstruction for Freedom than falsely believing oneself to be bound.
Freedom is not a special event or some spiritual state.
Reality is what you always are.
The True Guru is ever-present naturally and unchanging within.
Always turn within toward your own being for Reality.
Turn toward your own self, toward ‘I’ am.
Get to know the real ‘you’.
Freedom is all about ‘I’ or knowing yourself.
Who am ‘I’.
May 29, 2007 at 10:10 am
Yesri Baba, what do you mean with the gloom and doom about “going back for another bite of a poison apple?” And how do you know what her experience is?
Paola now is a different person from a year ago, she is not seeking poison, nor does she appear to be under any spell, are you projecting your own assumptions?
Live and Let Live!
Enjoy Being
Wild & Free
May 29, 2007 at 10:57 am
To Bruce
The Sucker is you! The award for most pathetic postings should have gone to you!
Wishing you would lighten up a little–you have not changed a bit from your old negative self!
Sad to see your pathetic nature given so much free reign…
Sad that you have chosen to remain the tremendous a-hole you always were…
Sad you cannot see yourself Bruce
May 29, 2007 at 12:52 pm
#236 – Unoanimo … … … You sound like a dear friend of mine.
Thank you for the beauty of your gift.
pgallarato@hotmail.com
May 29, 2007 at 4:35 pm
To the esteem-able Yesi Baba: #223
Thank you for your post. You speak from your being, and I admire that. I thought long and hard about what you wrote. Actually, a person can be addicted to anything that gives their brain a buzz, with or without a chemical ‘substance’. That includes gambling, shopping, the stock market, sex, driving fast, the internet, rage (take exlax for example), running, etc. It is the relationship to whatever gives the person a buzz that is addictive.
I don’t understand why on earth would you think of yourself as retarded when your mind seeks the void in meditation? Isn’t that the serenity that replaces all the drama that goes into justifying escaping with alcohol abuse? (Euphoric recall happens between two parties share a common feeling that crescendos, like two waves in resonance make the pitch greater.) IMO the void you speak of is clarity. It allows you to see clearly, feel, clearly, and be clear, like the post of the person giving that street child a hug. That was a priceless moment! That touched me deeply. No filtering, no censoring, no qualifying, just one human reaching out to another in need. That is true compassion! It comes from the higher emotional center. You have to be quiet and listen for it, once all the chatter and layers and layers of false personality are peeled back. The Fellowship adds more layers!
So I heartily agree with you about being present and clear, even in the dull times. Goodness, even the Dali Lama has down time. (He occupies his spare time with the hobby of fixing watches.) Those ‘down’ moments are gifts that deepen our understanding of the human experience, as long as one doesn’t identify with them (Oh dear, I’m clinically depressed!), like all feelings, they pass, and one returns to clarity. You don’t have to always put on a happy face to be more awake! Happiness is the accumulation of pleasant experiences that one reflects back upon and feels good. Clarity is the absence of unresolved feelings which provides you more free attention to be present to your life as it unfolds, pleasant or unpleasant.
Robert does not model healthy enlightenment. He draws his emotional intensity from external stimulus, such as fine impressions, drugs, shopping, sexual conquests, travel, intrigue, etc. That leaves you in a state of need. IMO the intensity of enlightenment is generated within regardless of environment. That is why sages often lead distinctly unglamorous lives; they can be celibate, live in a cave, have no possessions and still generate the passionate intensity that we associated with being more awake. That’s how you tell they are truly free of the bonds of sleep and more awake. An enlightened person radiates love. Robert’s school is the way of lust.
Let me know how feel and what you think about that.
WhaleRider
1979-1985
May 29, 2007 at 6:20 pm
King of Clubs (post 213):
Your post in which you analyzed the history of art had some interesting parts; however I can’t say I agreed with all of it. The main thing I pick up is that your analysis is not your own — not that you lifted specific ideas from other sources, but that you view art through a lens that is colored by comments by Gurdjieff, Collin perhaps, and yes, Burton. There is also a tone of absolutism — much of what you are writing is your subjective opinion, yet it is presented as though it were unquestionable fact.
It reminds me of a time in college when I had just been exposed to the 4th Way ideas. I wrote a term paper on something or other, and as an example I mentioned something about the Sphinx, and how it represented a kind of art that has remained unequalled to this day. I was trying to refer to Gurdjieff’s statement about it being an example of “objective art” — a somewhat silly and unverifiable idea, looking back on it now. I was new in the Fellowship when I wrote this paper, and I was surprised when I got the paper back and the professor questioned the validity of this statement about the Sphinx. It was the first time I think that I realized that I had accepted an idea without question, without verifying, and made it part of my own psychology.
One specific comment: you elevate da Vinci above all others, and of course his greatness is hard to dispute. While I find his paintings to be technically admirable, I find that virtue to be something of a drawback as well — they are excessively technical, to the point of being cold and lacking in humanity. But that’s just me.
You also say, regarding modern art:
“Art is thoroughly subjective. … Art is driven by popularity, by its ability to make money.”
I would answer that art has always been subjective — this notion of “objective art” is a Gurdjieff-ism that is unverifiable, as I said above. Art’s relationship with money and popularity today is just as complex as it was in da Vinci’s day. Don’t think da Vinci was driven, at least in part, by the money and desires of his patrons?
May 29, 2007 at 7:24 pm
Beyond (10-256): “IRONICALLY, these 10 pages of useless posts had become that they are criticizing from day one – a cult for intellectuals”
Hmm. Actually the irony is that you seem to be alluding to someone’s supposed lack of intelligence, while your post lacks a coherent point. But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt… several typos? several missing words? you were in a hurry?
I can’t tell if you are current member or just someone surfing the web who happened to run into this blog. But one thing I can see from your post is that you find the systemic unveiling of the truth for the benefit of others to be “useless.” Ok, we’ll make a note of that.
May 29, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Great party! What great fun. At a certain point in the evening (just before sundown) I stopped in the middle of the group, looked all the way around, and didn’t see one person who wasn’t satiated, in one way or another. It was luminescent. Keep the parties coming. It’s the most colorful crowd I have ever seen. Breathtakingly gorgeous and slightly peculiar. Thanks to the Organizers.
Claude
May 29, 2007 at 9:12 pm
I’ve posted a few photos, taken at the Nevada City Greater Fellowship Reunion, at Kodak Gallery online:
http://www.kodakgallery.com/BrowsePhotos.jsp?&collid=80304708711.640251741111.1180465806625&page=1
Love – Kathryn (Hannah) Fitzgerald
May 29, 2007 at 10:35 pm
I bet most of you people are the ones who were most reverent and adoring, using words like ‘Beloved Teacher’,’wonderful’, ’emotional’, wearing a soft false smile and using refined words like ‘inexpensive’ instead of ‘cheap’.
If only you could have been yourselves and followed your own consciences, you might not be so suddenly screwed up now that you’ve left.
May 29, 2007 at 10:49 pm
Re:Beyond, 10/256,
“IRONICALLY, these 10 pages of useless posts had become that they are criticizing from day one – “a cult for intellectuals””.
I think what Beyond intended to say was:
“IRONICALLY, these 10 pages of useless posts have become what they have been criticizing from day one – “a cult for intellectuals””.
All together, one of the more remarkably accurate observations on the entire blog.
May 30, 2007 at 12:12 am
Moon Angel (224):
“Why aren’t there any prominent women who are conscious?”
I wasn’t sure if you were really asking, or just raising the absurdity of the absence of women from the hallowed 44. Of course, the reason there is only one woman among the 44 is that Elizabeth I was reputed to have been a virgin, and that is the only sort of woman that RB could bring himself to label “conscious”; the others are too threatening. (Personally, I admire Elizabeth I as an exceptional political leader, and am amazed at her strength as a women in such times, but I never was able to find much evidence of exceptional consciousness in the collection of her quotes in the Renaissance Journal back in the day.) But of course there have been countless women who apparently understood a great deal. Some of the women these days who make no claims of being anything remarkable (e.g., Pema Chodron, Tenzin Palmo) offer tremendous insight and wisdom. Not to mention some of the female mind-blowers like Anandamayi Ma. http://www.anandamayi.org/Ma.html
“Why are men always cult leaders?”
(Why are most cult leaders men.) They aren’t–just most of them, because men seem to enjoy power more than women. Aimee Semple McPherson was once one of the most famous people in America, and could have run rings around RB as a cult leader. (And she still revered by some evangelicals today.)
H.C. (229) Hermes Trismegistus’s “As above, so below” wasn’t any more Gurdjieff than it is Burton or “4th Way.” In any case, your view of the universe being manipulated by “gods” who move individuals around like chess pieces is not new, and can never be disproved, but is unnecessary to explain anything worth explaining. I am confident of the existence of a “higher consciousness” or whatever you choose to call it, and also believe “the play is written” is a good, though “formatory,” view of what life looks like in the “second state,” but find your perspective to be influenced more by the Christian fundamentalism that underlies Burtonism than verifiable personal experience. In fact, your metaphor about the concert hall sounds exactly like something one would hear in a Kansas schoolroom teaching creationism to credulous children. You mean well, Howard, but you would benefit by some broader knowledge and experience of non-Burtonist spiritual tradition.
Siddiq (234):
Yes, one’s being does attract one’s life. We all should take responsibility for our choices, internal and external, notwithstanding that “the play is written.” And these concepts can easily be exploited to excuse any form of harmful behavior, since the people affected by the behavior can always be admonished to focus on their own reactions, their own being. Indeed, not only excuse, but exalt–the person who acts badly can then claim to be providing valuable “shocks” to those who “need it.” This is exactly what RB does. (And Exlax, for that matter.) At what point does a person say “Thanks, but I prefer shocks that are intelligently designed by a compassionate, awake person for my benefit to fielding whatever crap is thrown at me by a manipulative charlatan”?
King of Clubs (239):
Having read through most of the posts on this blog, my impression is there is plenty of childish nonsense and plenty of wisdom to be found, and I trust that someone who is looking for truth will separate the wheat from the chaff.
May 30, 2007 at 12:25 am
YEAR 2198.
THE FELLOWSHIP SAGA IS IN IT’S HIGHEST POINT!
PEOPLE FROM ALL OVER THE SOLAR SYSTEM ARE GATHERING HERE TO DISCUSS THIS ONE QUESTION:
“DID OR DID NOT, ROBERT BURTON EVER EXIST?”
IN A PLACE CALLED OREGON HOUSE WERE FOUND SOME ARTIFACTS THAT LEAVE NO DOUBT,
SOMETHING WAS GOING ON THERE.
BUT, DOES THAT JUSTIFY THE DESIRE OF SOME PEOPLE TO BELIEVE IN THE EXISTENCE OF SO CALLED “CONSCIOUS BEINGS” ?
IT’S YEAR 2198 AFTER ALL, AND WE HAD NOT HEARD OF ANYBODY BECOMING CONSCIOUS FOR AT LEAST A 100 YEARS!
TO ME, IT ALL SEEMS LIKE SOME WEIRD FASHION OF OLD AGES (I.E. PRIOR 2012).
STAY IN TOUCH FOR MORE EXCITING NEWS!
May 30, 2007 at 2:25 am
Yo, Vinnie (285): The Fellowship term for “cheap” isn’t “inexpensive,” it’s “reasonable.” Next you’ll be forgetting that a cookie is properly called a “biscuit,” goodness.
May 30, 2007 at 2:39 am
KathrynF:
Thanks for posting the photos. As far as I can tell, your link no longer works.
May 30, 2007 at 2:39 am
dear KathrynF #284:
The link to your photos didn’t work for me. Apparently the creator of the album (you) has to “share” the album before others can access it.
May 30, 2007 at 2:48 am
#278 #@$%^&*()_+ Says:
That strong reaction indicates to me that I’m not that far off the mark. I’m even more sorry for you.
Claudlarson, I agree. It was a peak experience. Good people. Thanks Ames, Carl etc.
May 30, 2007 at 3:00 am
#284 KathrynF Do you need to do something to allow one to view the pictures. It indicates that you have to “share” them with recipients.
thanks,
It was good seeing you.
B
May 30, 2007 at 3:22 am
Hello.
Does anyone still have a list of the 44?
I’d love it if someone would post it here.
Thanks,
LL
May 30, 2007 at 3:34 am
A former student Duncan Shockley 1973-1980
Thank you again to the Sheik. I am certain they are as amazed as anyone at the continued activity on this blog. An interesting thought what if all angles given about the FOF are true? HUH?
I would also like to thank some of the poster’s that I find the most useful. JF, Shelley, Sandra, Charles, Bruce and particularly Ames Gilbert who I never met. I think some of his ideas come closest to the reality of the FOF. There are more but these individual’s come to mind as what I find in their posts is the simple expression of honesty and humanity which is the finest we can offer each other. I have no one opinion on the FOF rather a shifting Kaleidoscope of memories, thought’s and feeling’s changing in cycles , stirred up by these posting’s. I find it difficult to read all these post’s and keep up on the sheer volume of material posted. One observation is that the FOF has had a profound emotional impact on many lives. I left in 1980 so I have had a while to process much of what is discussed in this blog.
To those who claim to have been students and yet do not understand the nature of the 3rd state and self remembering for themselves I can only express profound sorrow. What a total waste of time and energy to be in the FOF for even a month let alone years without the reality of self remembering to center on. The system exists independently of the FOF as does each’s individual consciousness.
I chose to think in terms of the system because it for me it is the simplest way to describe my realities. The 4 functions are not theories they simply are as is the air or gravity, nor are the divisions into different parts by attention theories. Over the years of efforts I now have more control of intellectual parts of centers than when I was young. I am however still a jack of spades machine and almost any King of Spades type can do most anything better.
Many ideas that were new when Gurdjieff and Ouspensky introduced the system have penetrated into popular thought. Even the rather difficult concept of 6 dimensional space is beginning to penetrate into modern Physic’s. I.E. “The Multi verse”. It is certainly part of modern science fiction. There have even been Television shows using “multiple universes” as a beginning premise. Certainly transformational Psychology is a prevalent concept. 12 step groups have effected millions. In the Bay area John Bradshaw has had a major influence on modern psychology with his idea of “healing the child within” . A local newspaper called common ground features many workshops and approaches to transformation, growth and spirituality.
Another writer spoke of the attitude of superiority that was tolerated, even cultivated , in FOF students. This is an aspect of false personality. Magnetic center is superior to anything in life. False personality will take credit for this. Magnetic center does come with a price. As Ouspensky pointed out in “The Strange Life of Ivan Osokan” once one knows the secret time is counted. It is easy to be critical and judgmental of “life people”. Once magnetic center transforms into work “I’s” It is far more profitable to see the reflection of ones own weaknesses and try to experience the humility that should come with knowing that even with great knowledge and outside help one is still subject to all the mechanical weaknesses inherent in just being human.
I would not wish apon others the degree of suffering I needed to experience in order to give up my attitudes of intellectual superiority. Interesting that once I was able to do so what I learned was the same truth’s as expressed in the system. I believe whether one is in the school or in life personal work means experiencing at a deep level the reality of such words as identification and imagination. There is no way to become one without experiencing without buffers the varied aspects of ones being and there is no way to experience these deeply enough without intense pressure of some kind.
It seems true that the FOF incorporated lies even on the beginning. To me Ames comes closest in his thinking but I don’t think he clearly states that this may be a Law. That the FOF had to present a teaching in such a fashion as it was the best its students would accept. Gurdjieff, I believe, described the 4th way as a way for those unfit to enter the other three ways. It is interesting that so many poster’s seem to be upset that the reality of the FOF does not agree with their imagination.
Even RB’s sexuality is something I hesitate to have a strong opinion on. I don’t like how it appears and certainly feel the pain of those who experienced being victimized by him. The idea of sperm as a higher food has a remote theoretical appeal but even the idea that sucking many dick’s is good for your evolution is one I find myself unwilling to attempt to verify. However our culture offers no guidelines for what is a normal form of sexual expression. RB’s actions are actually historically characteristic of power possessing beings in many cultures. The dominant -subservient relationship is also a norm through out history. It is still a norm in most Moslem nation’s. China an ancient culture with totally different tradition from the West has an idea that to preserve the vital energy or Chi in old age men should have sex with young girl’s, virgin’s actually. In American culture this is a crime as is the most common of marriage relationships that of polygamy and the taking of young wives by older men. In fact the common age for marriages throughout history for woman was in their teens. This again is criminal in the U.S.
My point is that we have no basis for a sexual norm. I do agree that the lying is bad and can only create negative consequences.
On a larger scale we can observe the unfolding of the polarity developing between the “line of descent” of the tradition developing out of Ouspensky’s work and that of Gurdjieff’s. A group of Gurdjieff’s student jealous over Ouspensky’s “success” began spreading gossip even while Gurdjieff and Ouspensky lived.. Now in a new century the polarity grows stronger. The self styled Gurdjieff foundation, descendants of Gurdjieff’s unsuccessful students, are creating a school of the 2nd way around Gurdjieff’s teachings. I say 2nd way because like the Catholic Church it begins with the acceptance of the importance of a “line of succession” as the starting point. Yet the reality is that for better or worse the FOF represents the living tradition of the 4th way. It has affected the life of 1000’s. Is it a real school? I say yes because a real school must not only teach and nurture consciousness and conscience in its students but be able to change their fates. Gurdjieff said that being under the Law of fate may or may not be good for an individual. It is however a law that one can only develop through ones fate.
Thank you to anyone who takes the trouble to read this post.
Anyone interested in discussing the system ideas can go to
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StillPoint/
to see some personal photo’s and artwork
http://community.webshots.com/user/scottduncan
May 30, 2007 at 3:35 am
#281 Innernaut Says:
King of Clubs (post 213):
“Your post in which you analyzed the history of art had some interesting parts; however I can’t say I agreed with all of it. The main thing I pick up is that your analysis is not your own — not that you lifted specific ideas from other sources, but that you view art through a lens that is colored by comments by Gurdjieff, Collin perhaps, and yes, Burton. There is also a tone of absolutism — much of what you are writing is your subjective opinion, yet it is presented as though it were unquestionable fact.”
**********
I appreciate your comments. I’m replying mainly because you sound intelligent, calm and sane and I’m always on the lookout for those qualities in people. Here are some meager excuses for the over-active attitude prevalent in those paragraphs:
1. The essay was not the central point, I was hoping that someone would come to the conclusion that Burton had plagiarized “The Sequence” off the internet from the king of clubs. Of course I as yet have any real idea what the sequence is. Anyone care to explain it?
2. I wrote those words nine years ago, a few lifetimes have passed. To steal a phrase: I was so much older then, but I’m younger than that now.
May 30, 2007 at 4:32 am
Thank you whalerider and Tim Campion for your posts. (280 & 268) So good to hear you.
Alan Davis, In the 17 the years I’ve been in the Fellowship, not one man’s gone unapproached so it was probably a time way back when Robert was still in some contact with reality and had not given such a free reign from so many students. Things do happen gradually and we’ve seen them get worse and worse as time goes by.
Hava Nagillah, would you try to speak a little about your personal experience and not just theory? It is you who matter here, not the indoctrination, and that is also true for Howard Carter and the other few students that are trying to sound convincing but don’t get beyond the formatory apparatus.
You are all obviously as desperate to talk as we are, and since you can’t ever do it inside, you are trying yourselves out here because Robert would never listen to you and you don’t have any channels to do so within the Fellowship since only Asaf, Girard and Robert can officially talk, for the rest of your lives.
It is good you are getting a taste of your selves out here, eventually you’ll realize how good it feels to communicate and the sickness of the fellowship will penetrate more and more painfully until you resign. Then you’ll get a wonderful taste of slowly regaining the integrity you had consistently given away.
May 30, 2007 at 5:02 am
Hi Howard, you’re right (10/272); I went off on a tangent and made fun of you. That was self serving. I’ll try to address what you call the main point of your letter: the belief that “the play is written”, and what this is actually supposed to mean.
Your original post was a comment to various negative responses on the blog, you said: “It helps to know it’s a play, every word of it written long ago.”
Actually this is an idea that in my time in the FoF I felt as “emotional” and inspirational, and often produced a kind of lightness of being rather than the depression and hopelessness that Ames talks about (10/140). I guess it all depends on what these words mean to you. So it’s helpful to think about it again.
I guess the reason why I used to find it so inspiring to remind myself that “the play is written” was that because to me, this was a near equivalent of reminding myself of scale – it made what was going on less serious. If I saw myself getting frustrated locking myself out of my vacation rental on a Sunday night, for example, I would remember that “it’s a play” – and this would create a shift in worldview, lifting from the me-perspective to a more embracing spectator-perspective, to a point of calmness and slight curiosity about what is going on. I remembered that we were playing a bunch of humans doing our thing on planet Earth. With this sense that it’s a “play” never came a sense that it’s a tragedy. Rather it carried with it a sense of “playing” in the sense children play. In a way, “the play is written” meant that I can quit worrying about how to change it and just go along with participating in it. Nothing can go wrong. There was a sense that “everything is written” is the same as “nothing is written”, but I’m still not quite sure how to explain that intuition. Just that it created a sense of freedom.
I don’t suppose that this is how the idea is generally understood in the FoF though. The emphasis seems more on external higher forces actively scripting and directing individual events of the “play” and assigning important “roles” to people in pursuit of achieving certain aims that the Gods are said to have, some great task that needs to be accomplished. I think Robert Burton understands the “play” as “we are involved in a serious and momentous struggle to awaken”, and “we have been cast in the midst of tremendous events” (he used to enjoy predicting hydrogen warfare and survival of a handful of chosen people, he still likes to talk about the FoF being the last school on Earth in the cycle of this civilization), and that we must make every effort to fulfill the wishes of the Gods, which seem to have very concrete ideas about how we should behave and what our futures should be like. We must do all we can to make sure we preserve ourselves for eternity. For him, it seems that the “play” is in fulfilling desires of angels correctly, and this makes life more serious. He takes himself to be an active participant in the “play” written by higher forces, a participant who must not get his lines wrong.
“Every word of the play was written by higher forces a long time ago” – this is a statement I can’t even comment on, because it presupposes many beliefs which are neither universal nor self-evident, and I happen to not share them: it presupposes entities in a celestial hierarchy of beings, prescribing the “plays” of beings beneath them (including men #7 such as Robert, and angels passing messages down to him), external controlling deities that Howard talked about before, it presupposes a beginning of time/creation, when all future was set down “in stone” and at which point linear time started flowing and still keeps going until everything will have acted itself out at some point in the future, presumably the end of the world. It helps explain the world, of course, and works fine as a closed system, I just happen to think that it’s simplistic and antropomorphic, projecting that which is familiar onto a larger unknown in an attempt to make it graspable. (Here I would recommend reading a little book called ‘Flatland’ by John Abbot, I think someone else has mentioned it before.)
May 30, 2007 at 5:31 am
As I drove to the reunion on Memorial Day weekend, I listened to a radio station that presented a long program to honor the soldiers who have died in battle. I was reminded of this today as I was reading Tim Campion’s beautifully written post (10/268).
In one segment of the radio program, we hear the voice of a man named Joseph Robertson — an American soldier during World War II. Joseph describes an encounter he had with a German soldier during one of the battles. By chance, the two soldiers were suddenly in close proximity. Joseph had the upper hand, however. With his gun ready, he yelled at the German soldier to lay down his weapon and surrender. But instead of surrendering, the soldier turned and began to point his weapon. At that instant, Joseph felt he had no choice but to pull the trigger.
Joseph described the German soldier as being very young, very handsome, with light blond hair and blue eyes. He said the man “had the face of an angel.”
That night, Joseph said he was exhausted from the long battle, so he had no trouble sleeping. However, the next day, and for a long time thereafter, he could not stop thinking about the young German soldier who he had killed in battle. To this day, Joseph still thinks of him, he still has dreams about him, and he still cries whenever he thinks of him.
Another reminder, as Tim said, of “how precious is our brief time together.”
So…
Comrades, we are still comrades.
May 30, 2007 at 5:40 am
Hava Nagillah, may I ask you a thing or two? You tend to say things with so much persuasion as if you know it for sure… May I ask you to be sincere and to honestly think or observe before you answer? It’s cool if you don’t want to answer though…
“The Nine of Hearts is the place in you that quietly and firmly promotes presence and stops imagination from interfering.” –
How do you know this, Hava? How can you know this? Have you seen this “place” – Nine of Hearts, and if so – what is it exactly and how can you feel this “place” within yourself? Isn’t it a theoretical assumption, or, well, something may be … imagined? And have you ever actually STOPPED imagination from “this place” or any other “place”? For how long did you stop it if you did?
Please answer sincerely if you can. I hope you can sincerely look within and think before you answer.
Look, we do observe behaviors and traits in ourselves and others. These are just what they are – behaviors happening in the now for whatever reasons. When someone with authority gives us a LABEL we tend to just take it and use it and label this and that. Does the experience change because you labeled it? Why does it need to be intellectually labeled, what’s the benefit of labeling the actual experience?
Interestingly, me and you can argue what do we call “Nine of Hearts”. I think it’s this, and you think it’s that. We can argue to death about it, and it still is so subjective. So, who really knows what the heck is “Nine of Hearts”? Robert showed us some pretty graphic pictures of prehistoric women mating from behind, and called it Nine of Hearts… Is that what you observe in you – a woman on her fours? I saw many cool illustrations of Nine of Hearts but I have never found something in me that I can certainly call this. So what is it for you? You speak as if you know, please share your understanding.
What I see is what happens in reality – is some act, manifestation, some behavior. A thought, a gesture, a movement. It’s not “Nine of Hearts”. We are just using a second hand label to explain something that happens in the moment, like an additional verbal layer. Your mind gets the kick out of labeling, just as anyone’s else’s mind. “This is my label for it, as if I know!” But you don’t, you really don’t. There could be hundreds of possible verbal explanations for what occurred, depending on so many personal factors, and none is accurate or even needed. Whatever happened – doesn’t need your label to be expressed, it is just whatever it is. But our mind likes stories and labels. Here’s your quote: Ouspensky replied “There are no stories in the world, just moments.” In the moment something occurred, and your mind ads a story to it. Why don’t just leave it with no comment? Just take it as it is, presently, experience it and let it pass? Instead we comment, dissect, divide, reject, battle, discriminate or even “key”. Pretend as if we know when we really don’t.
Labels are not “deep self realization”, dear friend. They are just more mental clutter and illusion. It may feel really good to label things and events, and to tell others how to label them, but – do you know WHO YOU ARE because you learned your labels? Do you really know yourself? Are you “deeply self-realized” because you can repeat after RB the stuff he just came up with?
Once I asked at the meeting where everyone was talking with confidence about Steward: Guys, what are you talking about: My Steward, my Steward… Who is he?
Of course people looked at me in total judgment. Uncomfortable silence…
So who is this Steward, who is this Nine of Hearts? Who measured Lower Self? Where does the Higher Self starts? We all were playing this game – but what is exactly this division stuff? Mental labels, nothing else. Labels for various desirable/undesirable behaviors, inaccurate, subjective and totally unnecessary. Another layer of words. False map. Another candy for imaginary picture.
RB came up with this stuff just to give you something else to do in the school- label this and re-label that with new labels, feels great, doesn’t it? Oh yes, it’s connected to the ancients because I said so…
Anything has a label – it’s either 6 or 12, Steward or Nine of Hearts, or resembles a pyramid. It’s either a Sequence, or – the Devil!
Now, do you really feel like you get to “know thyself” with this “knowledge”?
You’re right about this one thing, Hava – FUN is definitely over in FOF. Fun is long gone. It’s SERIOUS BUSINESS. And getting more so, based on some posts here.
It’s fun to watch!
Good luck and be well.
May 30, 2007 at 6:24 am
141, Paola
Thank you for telling your story. It had me riveted. Will you try to get back into the FoF?
173, 234, Siddiq
193, 264 Hava Negila
199 Howard Carter
You know, I have nothing against the people who are behind these identities, typing away at their keyboards. After all, it’s not exactly their ideas that are objectionable. They are the speakers, but not the author.
I see no distinction among the three of them whatsoever. All are completely bound by the circular logic they have been taught, none stray in any significant way. They are three faces of the same dogma. Pick your style.
Throughout their posts I feel the mechanisms of thought control, the heavy hand of an authoritarian regime, the threats, the elegant (and self-serving) rationalizations.
They are peddling (as Veronicapoe, 266 says), “… a false map of the human heart. It exists to undermine your trust in your own perceptions so you can be manipulated by someone else … The doctrine will always be right, and you will always be wrong.”
Because I was equally trapped in the prison of the mind, could rationalize with the best, it seems so clear. No arguments will penetrate, as they haven’t so far. By definition, it’s impossible, everything will be refuted.
Hava Negila’s #193 stands out as the darkest expression of the FoF dogma I’ve seen in some time. The soul-deadening weight of disapproval, the attempt to completely crush another person into the dead form of a loyal follower is chilling.
286 Howard Carter
“I think what Beyond intended to say was:
“IRONICALLY, these 10 pages of useless posts have become what they have been criticizing from day one – “a cult for intellectuals””.
All together, one of the more remarkably accurate observations on the entire blog.”
Unbelievable. The fun never ends with these people. No wonder they don’t know they’re in a cult, they think it’s the same as a blog!
JoelF
May 30, 2007 at 7:02 am
“Is it not interesting…”
“Is it not interesting…”
“Is it not interesting…”
“Is it not interesting…”
“Is it nit interesting…”
“Is it not interesting…”
“Is it not interesting…”
My dear Clara. NO IT IS NOT INTERESTING.
May 30, 2007 at 7:19 am
“…rage (take exlax for example)…”
Dearest WhaleRider:
Do you really want to keep BASHING me because you keep buffering your own inability to accept that you had been had by R in many ways?????
What is most shocking to me is that you have used other peoples emotional centers, which we really know does not exist, to support your own inability to accept the fact that you F**KED UP a LONG TIME AGO.
Get over it and get on with the good life you say you have found.
May 30, 2007 at 7:44 am
“I’ll Give It a Try” Says:
We all should take responsibility for our choices, internal and external, notwithstanding that “the play is written.”
So which shall it be? Door #1, Door #2, Door #3 or the curtain that Carol Merrill is now showing us?
“I prefer shocks that are intelligently designed by a compassionate, awake person for my benefit to fielding whatever crap is thrown at me by a manipulative charlatan”
Do you really think you have a choice of influences thrown at you by existence itself? Whether its ‘crap’ from a ‘charlatan’ or divinely designed its all the same. Life itself provides you with what you need to awaken. If you want to say, “Cake, please” (no pun intended to this blogger) you are deluding yourself into thinking you have a ‘choice’, although you do have a choice to accept or reject the opportunity that presents itself.
May 30, 2007 at 8:27 am
Hi, …jumping right in —
Dear KofC re: your art post
I am very familiar with the written history of western civilization art and I would like to suggest that, if you open your mind and heart (meaning also ‘higher centers’) you will be surprised and delighted and inspired. I very much enjoyed reading your well written essay, but have to disagree with just about all of it. Maybe you are reading Jansen’s History of Art from the 1960’s, or Gardener’s. There, there were only three women in the entire book(s) and it all was laid out in neat little time-based periods. (btw, it was more probable that women were the artists of the cave paintings) Since then much has been written and discovered about our history. And, as several have commented, you really need to have direct experience with art to actually get it. Exlax put it very well.
But mostly I want to comment on your assessment of contemporary art.
It seems that you are particularly unfamiliar with modern and contemporary art. It is difficult to really see art, especially art of ‘today’, so, hey, no blame. Your essay (thank you for posting that!!! – the subject really interests me) is essentially an extremely conservative point of view – the “ain’t it awful” today, and the glowing yesterday – the golden years, all washed up and spick and span and shiny. And I think you have to question the rigid notions of ascending and descending as based on ‘good’ and ‘bad’. When I was in the Fellowship that was called formatory.
In the spirit of Exlax’s comments -that one benefits from direct experience- I will relate an experience of mine that happened in 1983 (two years before I left the FOF)
First off I should say I have always been an artist myself and have always loved – yes LOVED – art of other’s and other times. I had the chance to travel in Europe in 1984 as a 29 year old, but I was on a serious budget. No extra cash at all (actually lost weight in Italy since I just had to eat street vendor food and couldn’t afford a single restaurant- just not ‘right’) Thank goodness for teaching houses! Anyhow, I started in Paris, and as it was a museum exploration for me, the Louvre, in the basement, in ancient Greece. Then on to Italy and the Renaissance. Then on to England and 18th century on. (I’m simplifying a lot here) At last I ended at the Tate (the old Tate) and in the rooms of modernist, 20th century art. My being was filled with history, memories, and visual chronicles. Plus, I usually do psychological reads of visual art, so I was primed for 20th c. (you might like to do psychological reads and rely less on the “technical” aspects)
You wrote: “Like a child developing, civilization matures into a new function.”
And I agree completely. Visual art (and all art and all of human activity) reflects the maturing of humanity. The modern rooms of the Tate no longer carried the hopeful, great, amazing, yet immature and untempered images of times past. I walked into WWI and the great world depression and WWII and Vietnam and the civil rights movement as a result of pandemic injustice — the incredible suffering of the 20th c. Towards the end I was wrenched with sobs. And I hate to display like that in public – any public. So this was moving for me beyond superficial control. Like standing in Chartres – but this included the recognition of suffering.
Higher states can come from art because of a deeper understanding of visual language and a connection with compassion with other human beings. These states are more mature than those that are simply “elevated” –— k-of-hearts’… ‘uplifted’. Real life is much much much much much more interesting and complex.
Now it is up to us to transform without naiveté or denial.
If you, or anyone, is interested I can forward some links to the works of contemporary artists who’s work might just blow your mind off – or at least your socks. Really, open your eyes to this stuff. And remember as unoanimo and Innernaut says, not all art from every age is ‘good’ or free from complexities like making a living for the artist. It all gets sorted out by those in power. DaVinci was ‘made’ over the centuries by power brokers who stood to profit, so please take the whole picture (as much as possible) into consideration. That is one reason the contemporary scene is so vital – it still is in a raw stage – material for your higher self to directly address!!!
On another subject, I had a great time at the reunion picnic this past weekend and want to thank the organizers who put in so much effort and planning! The whole event meant a lot to me.
Kat A.
May 30, 2007 at 9:28 am
no.278 #@$%^&*()_+
As someone who knew Bruce well in FOF and have known him for many years since he got out, I have to say that you don’t know WTF you are talking about. When was the last time you spent time with Bruce? He is actually a very positive and caring person to be around.
If Bruce’s posts upset you so much, I would suggest you stop reading them.
It would be better to feed your 9 of hearts and steward instead.
May 30, 2007 at 9:54 am
#277 Wild @ Free
I do not know what her experience is. I am responding to the words she has written on the blog. By them, it appears to me she is perceiving from an entranced conceptual matrix, a fantasy.
I am still sweeping cobwebs out of corners 27 yrs. later. I think she needs to quit with the card tricks and play a game of solitaire for a while with those two jokers wrapped around/within her. They are lovers unlike any others.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the opinions of those opinions and do not reflect the opinions of other opinions I might have.
P.S. I know, at times, it seems I am antagonistic towards people. I am not. I am antagonistic toward what I perceive to be ignorance. I have only good wishes for all the “Jokers” in and out of fof.
May 30, 2007 at 2:00 pm
Dear Friends,
Yo I’m new to this, 10 pages with 20,000 posts, can someone gimme a quick 10 line summary?
Is this like the Foflist for ex-students, but all anti- instead of pretending lovey-dovey?
Did something change in the FOF in the last year or did you all lose some buffers?
in loving friendship…
🙂
May 30, 2007 at 4:46 pm
#239 King of Clubs:
Nobody ever said he wasn’t really good at what he does, i.e. Cult Leader. A very wise, older woman I met who was never in the FOF but had been meditating most of her life and who lived a very private existence until she passed said:
“Of course he’s very good at what he does. He’s been doing it for eons of time (many past lives) and has become an expert at it.”
Otherwise why would so many wonderful people have joined the Fellowship? And to this day many of us are still close friends. Naive yes but lots of really good people who had good intentions and joined for the right reasons. We can at least say that we were fooled but were fooled by an expert at what he does.
May 30, 2007 at 6:01 pm
Elena #297 you are completely believing your negative imagination and consequently lying all the time: who will be fooled besides the remains of your’self’ in the long run?
May 30, 2007 at 6:22 pm
A Reply to ‘Beyond’ Post #256/10
You wrote ~
“IRONICALLY, these 10 pages of useless posts had become that they are criticizing from day one – “a cult for intellectuals”.
_________________________________
Hello Beyond,
It’s amazing how profound we often find the most obvious ‘thing’ to be, yes?
For instance,
One day I was talking to a friend and he told me this story ~
I was driving along a bridge, between two cities and saw a man dragging a cross, I said to myself ‘Wow! That’s impressive, particularly since it was summer time in Northern California! Then a second thought said, Geez, another religious fanatic, yet, hey, giant cross, long distance, rather little guy, impressive! Then looking down I saw that on the end of the cross there was attached a little wheel, making it easier to ‘bear’.’
Amazing yes?
It’s a similar ‘reaction’ of awe that I received reading your post and the posts praising it as a ‘reasonable claim’,
yet, I see your ‘wheel’,
let me introduce it to our readers since it seems you’re rather too busy showing those who only look straight through a paper roll tube, your ‘obviously a similar cross’.
_________________________
The fourth way is an intellectual way, always has been, always will be, was never ruled by the Nine of Hearts, never had it, never will, similar to Sprite.
After all, what center would dare bring the other ways together to form a fourth or ‘one’, than Higher Mental? Are you confusing regular mental with higher mental, the nine of hearts with higher emotional?
Nonetheless, here’s the ‘wheel’.
This blog is not about transforming the “for intellectuals” part of your post-observation, rather, the “cult” assertion or comparison: can anyone see the formation of a ‘cult’ in this sort of ‘blog triad’? I do not believe ‘cults’ form within the forum of free flowing and unlimited forms of speech.
It’s easy to roll out the obvious, yet, I would ask you to look deeper into this Fellowship of Friends mess, for it will happen again and it is a mirror of the condition of ‘relative awakening’ that Robert Burton has produced by arriving at his wit’s end, yet, he will grow through this ‘shock’,
‘The Sheik of Inner Confusion’ is also RB and every one, including myself. We all have a Sheik of inner confusion within. Anyone working on theirs or simply parading the right to be schizophrenic?
Beyond, go beyond, use your name as a portal. What blog is not intellectual? I’ve never been able to write without the permission of my intellect, you? And reading all the material, there’s plenty of emotion here, as there is in the Fellowship of Friends, particularly when people go home or to a friend’s home after a meeting.
So, for me, again, it’s not a point of “intellectual”… Think CULT, do your research, be intelligent (for lack of a better word).
To me, its not that the Fellowship of Friends or this blog is too intellectual or emotional, its the choking hands of suppression, hypocrisy and dictatorship around the throats of these aspects that we are attempting to loosen here in this bloggish forum.
How is your breathing?
“Can you breath the open air?”
Metallica
_______________________________
Love to you all.
May 30, 2007 at 7:11 pm
“When one sees another with a real problem, such as paralysis, it neutralizes one’s imaginary problems.”
9/10/95 Love, Robert
Does anybody want more???
May 30, 2007 at 7:21 pm
The following is an excerpt from a letter I sent to a former member who contacted me by email. After writing it, I thought it might be worth sharing here:
Thank you for your note. My personal belief is that nothing good can be lost; and much of what you contributed to the Fellowship and your fellow students through the years was surely very good, since, if you are anything like most of my friends in the Fellowship, you acted your role with honesty, diligence and love. Whether or not we were members of a “conscious school acting out the script of C Influence”, we were at least for the most part dedicated people who sincerely wished to reach something higher in ourselves and help others in whatever ways we could. This does not sound so bad to me. I am honored to have been a Fellowship member and student alongside you.
About Robert’s bad habits, many who remain students even today are being freshly shocked to learn the full truth. Our responsibility and blame for what has been happening is directly proportionate to how much we actually knew. That said, it is in my view critical not to deprecate or destroy so much that was and is positive about our experience in the Fellowship because of Robert’s little problem. Should we have left? Absolutely. But that does not mean we accomplished nothing. To think this would be to truly give Robert the ultimate power over our lives by allowing him to dictate the validity of the being we achieved through our own efforts, and the loving moments we created with one another.
All that is needed is a slight shift of focus. This is not a funeral, it is a celebration. You passed the test. You learned what was to be learned and now are eligible for new, more exciting or meaningful experiences that your own unique fate has in store for you.
Through the blog you have also discovered a whole new universe of wonderful potential friends, many of whom left the Fellowship long ago for very good reasons. You lost these people when they left, even if you never met them or even knew of them. Now they have been magically restored to you. I can vouch for many of them. They were and are jewels…not dead life people.
We each have much to be grateful for, and the person above all whom you should thank for all these gifts is yourself. Not Robert, not C Influence. Yes there are higher forces and yes they are guiding your play. They will help you because your being attracts this. Nothing real has been lost.
These are my beliefs, and I am setting out to verify them more fully in whatever the next chapter brings.
With all the love I can give,
Joseph
joseph.granados@gmail.com
1976-2007
May 30, 2007 at 7:52 pm
HI there WHALERIDER!
Question for you, you said you had your “semen drained nightly”, did you mean to say every night for all the years you were a member? How did this first get started? How long were you a member. Did anyone warn you of RB and his methods?
Give us the real details if you would please, did you mean every once in a while, a total of how many times, etc. I think we deserve a bit of detail since your letters are so explosive and accusing.
Thanks KW
May 30, 2007 at 7:53 pm
“When one sees another with a real problem, such as paralysis, it neutralizes one’s imaginary problems”
September 10, 1995 Love Robert
Anybody want more??
May 30, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Just want to thank Ames, Cathie, Carl, Ramona and anyone else who helped organize the weekend gathering.
Jill and I had a great time, seeing old friends and reconnecting. I was surprised at the size and vitality of the community that has settled in the Nevada County area.
Perhaps those who have posted here about finding a way to “replace” the community of the fof should look into locating there. Just a thought.
We came home emotionally very full, and it was particularly fun to meet some of the bloggers behind the names here. It was also very satisfying to not have to encounter any of the old “student” attitudes in the participants. A great group.
Thanks again, and let’s not wait so long for such a good party!
JoelF
May 30, 2007 at 8:07 pm
Also a question to Elena, Elena now that you are determined to not return to the FOF, have ignored what your daughter has been trying to communicate to you, and in general keep spouting off your opinions all angry at the FOF, what are your aims? what would you want to achieve, and also, what are you going to do with your life?
Thanks, please tell us it is something constructive!
Finally a question to JoelF–what is circular about the reasoning of Hava, Siddiq or HC, they are actually addressing the questions asked.
You write (judge) that they are just mechanical but is that not what you feel in every post of former students, yourself included–have you somehow escaped mechanics? Has Ames, Charles, Sandra, all those you do like, only because they have left?
Do you really sincerely believe you are experiencing more truth and reality than the current students?
Is it just a benefit leaving and somehow all is given to one? Truth, understanding and intergrity, all those qualities lacking before? And no effort needs to be made? How can this be?
Thanks!
May 30, 2007 at 8:14 pm
Almost forgot–Question to Kiran, are you going to give us the truth now about what happened between your wonderful wife Cassandra and Benjamin? in that supposed (cuddling) orgy of yours?
Let us know if the world is ready for you to lie about beautiful Cassandra some more! Now we are left just imagining her with Old Benji!–hard to picture that–Do you want to leave us with that impression?
We already know nothing happened between you and Paola–you lied about that–so that leaves C and Benji doing the wild thing. Unless of course you and Benjamin got it going on, but you do not seem the type–too insecure around jewish folk!
So give us some more of your yarn, (and keep living that contradiction, because you will probably be contradicted again if you even dare to respond!).
ALso how many new members did you get for your little cult–you did try to recruit at the picnic?
Thanks!
May 30, 2007 at 8:15 pm
To KA post 10/305
on Art without “naiveté” or “denial”…
What would be Art-naiveté ?
What would be Art-denial ?
Those are not questions for me
(perhaps an invitation for you to say more?) since,
I do not need to “see” the struggle to know it exists.
The simplicity, the existence of a smile, contains its own tears…
Do I need to see the painting of a church offering no doors (Van Googh)?
Well, No!
When I enter whatever place, I hold with me all the previous closed doors I found on the way…
How can I not,
even,
resent the intention of the artist intending to keep anyone there ?
Show me a door and all doors will be in there!
Show me an open door and all closed door will be there!
Do I need to see to see a Giaccometti’s sculpture
to know it is an achievement to “breath the open air” ?
Well, again, No!
Show me a man with a torso able to contain an horizon and my caughing will be there!
———————–
On leaving the FOF.
I just left the FOF and a ‘life friend’ asked:
– Will there be a party?
– A party ?
– Yes, something like what you do when leaving a company because you found a better job!
Yes, Show me an open door and the closed doors will be there!
Gratitude.
May 30, 2007 at 8:22 pm
No Person,
Words are being used here, yet this matter exceeds words. If that cannot be perceived nothing could.
Yours: “How do you know this, Hava? How can you know this? Have you seen this “place” – Nine of Hearts, and if so – what is it exactly and how can you feel this “place” within yourself?”
The options are: “To Be or not to Be.”
The answer is: ‘Be’.
It requires firm discipline to stop thoughts – the Steward – and deep sincerity and longing to ‘Be’ – the Nine of Hearts.
Steward and Nine of He are just names representing an actual action of engaging presence.
‘Be’ is the first step that lasts about three seconds. It is too short to stay present and if one stops there one is drawn back into imagination.
This was the limitation of the 20th century 4th way.
One must strive for prolonged presence.
This is the great mistery of the teaching of all schools and it is identical in all of them.
The answer is yes, the Nine of Hearts is a familiar place.
How can it be felt? One needs deep sincerity and longing to be present and at the same time one needs silent and firm discipline to control imagination.
This is what the school is about.
These two parts are there in many of those who are reading these lines now. But they can be covered and even burried by the lower-self in so many ways.
Yes, it is very difficult to distinguish truth under such a heavy load of lower-self matter, yet as you know one Pea can be noticed under seven mattresses 🙂
May 30, 2007 at 8:44 pm
Dear King of Clubs (post 296):
Thanks for your reply and for your gracious response to my critique. If my criticism seemed heavy handed, I apologize. After being in the Fellowship, I have a bit of a sore spot about modern art. At some point, after I had discarded the attitudes about what I “should” like and dislike, I discovered that I was quite fond of modern art — that it even creates the same kind of elevated emotional response as our beloved Rembrandt’s, etc. Not all modern art of course, but there’s plenty of it out there that is worthy (I believe you acknowledged this in your essay). So, thanks again.
As for “The Sequence,” I can only tell you what I learned on this blog, as it is something new and I have been away from the FOF for many years. As I understand it, the sequence is a new “tool” from Robert that I believe he claims has been practiced since paleolithic times (apparently he interpreted cave drawings of a rhino pooping to determine this). It involves mentally intoning a series of syllables, which are held for varying lengths of time, and also involves some kind of breathing exercise, I think. It sounds to me like a mantra type device, though I think current students might object to lumping the sequence into more common items like this.
There was a post earlier on the blog in which a current or recently ex-student laid the sequence out probably more correctly, though I couldn’t tell you which page to search on. Hope this helps.
May 30, 2007 at 8:53 pm
I agree with your theoretical construct, Exlax(304). And, I also try to avoid oncoming trucks whenever I can. Whether my “choice” is “really” an illusion is of no concern to me. Nor is the possibility that being hit by the truck would have been just the shock I needed for my evolution.
May 30, 2007 at 9:10 pm
I have been reading this blog since almost the beginning, and I have finally ‘got it’.
I finally got why women and sterile men will never become englightened, conscious (cosmic or otherwise),or reach any kind of higher development.
I have pieced it together bits at a time from reading 4th way and yogi writings.
The women and sterile men do not produce the “creamy stuff”. Is the “creamy stuff” ‘Love Potion Number Nine”? I don’t know.
Does it ‘come’ from the testes or prostate? I dont know?
Is ‘it’ something that oozes out of the various tubes/ducts? I dont know?
I’ve been reading here on the blog the best way to ‘get it’ is to swallow/take every inch/gram.
But the best benefits go to the men only.
I guess the women and sterile men get some kind of ‘instinctive pleasure’. I dont know?
The Bible says to put your “creamy stuff” in the belly of a whore, so I guess I ‘got it right’.
Me? I just drink my beer and look out the windows.
May 30, 2007 at 10:04 pm
Laughing Love:
This is the best I can do from memory. Others will no doubt pitch in to complete the list.
Erasmus
Petrarch
Fra Angelico
Leonardo
Franklin
Socrates
Lincoln
Elizabeth I
Milton
Dante
Whitman
Jesus
Plato
Meher Baba
Solon
Aristotle
Bach
Vivaldi
Rilke
Moses
Shakespeare
Gurdjieff
Ouspensky
Collin
Montaigne
Cervantes
Epictetus
Marcus Aurelius
Blake
Horace
Homer
Lao-Tze
May 30, 2007 at 10:23 pm
#280 WhaleRider
What I meant to communicate was that meditation can become a form of addiction like anything else. Ther are a myriad of “states” and “energies” one will experience in meditation. One important mystic said: “If I had a nickle for every time I got a boner meditating I would buy everyone in the world a gumball”.
So, meditation, self-remembering, whatever can be used by the mind to chase experience. In my opinion that is retarded and I see myself doing it sometimes ergo I am being retarded. That does not mean that those disciplines are without value. As somebody said, enlightenment happens by accident and meditation makes one accident prone.
Clarity is always a good thing but there is a lot meditation doesn’t get at. It doesn’t get at much of the unconscious shadow or “pain-body” stuff which seems to hide pretty well. There are ghosts and spooks surfacing just when we don’t expect them.
May 30, 2007 at 10:54 pm
Fellow Travelers,
Walter Tanner here, FOF November 1992 to September 1999. Don’t regret my time there, the “charm school” aspects alone are worth the money spent. Robert Burton is a horny goat, but his sexual tastes are a bit white bread, like his teaching. No doubt people have been damaged by his dominating behavior, but who of us is without sin in relationship to our sexual drives? (I will not cast the first stone.)
As the Regional Coordinator for eastern North America just before leaving, I freely told new and prospective students that every time you write that monthly donation check, you should deeply consider if you’re getting what you’re paying for. And if not, leave. Same advice to current students. To the angry ex-students: let it go — RB’s got his kingdom and court and let’s just watch what happens.
After the FOF I went to Harvard Divinity School (M.T.S. 2002) and studied history and philosophy of religion, mysticism and new religious movements. I’m now in a Ph.D. program in philosophy and religion. The FOF is following, almost perfectly, the template of charismatic millennial cults – after 3 predictions fail, membership begins to wane. A smart guru will try and change things up, which I hear RB is doing. But even if the movement doesn’t die out from lack of money, I doubt it will survive the founder’s death. (Especially if Girard is still the official #2–is that right?)
But 4th Way is the sly man’s way — which means the very mendacity of your guru can shock you into realizations and true changes of Being.
I could go on and on, its so nice to hear the voices of people I loved and respected. Please email me at walter.tanner@gmail.com if you’d like to chat, and if you are in the Bay Area (I’m in San Francisco) I’d love to catch up over coffee, beer, wine or whatever.
Best to all and thanks Sheik for the effort,
Walter
P.S. I’d love to get into the meat of spiritual systems, the reality of enlightenment, free will vs. determinism, and other matters of the greatest importance. I’ve been lucky since the FOF to find communities where these discussions thrive, and my position has…evolved.
May 30, 2007 at 10:56 pm
To Dick “Richard Moore” Moron–You not only deserve your name, you deserve your company–good riddance–you were always a #$%^&*(jerk as well–with you vain arrogant, “I am closer to RB” than anyone else-shit eating grin on your face–makes me puke just to think of you! Funny that you still think this way, are so proud of yourself and give yourself a pat on the back “I was one of his closest friends”–exfoffers like you and bruce just make me sick!
May 30, 2007 at 11:43 pm
My Google home page presents me with three quotes every day. Because I no longer make teaching payments, Influence C no longer selects those quotes for me, but some are interesting anyway. Today:
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
– John Kenneth Galbraith
May 30, 2007 at 11:49 pm
Hava Cigarilla (264): “Till about a year ago it was still possible to hang around and have lots “Seven of Heart’s fun”. This era is over now and that is why quite a few students are leaving these days. Some want a community to thrive, some want psychology to still be part of the teaching (and not just be treated as ‘lower self’) and so on.”
The reason I left was none of the above. It was principally because I saw clearly that the Fellowship Of Friends’ brand of spirituality doesn’t work, unless all you’re after is a few moments of presence now and then. The teachings of Robert Burton become ever more obscure and absurd. There are spiritual teachings outside that are infinitely more effective.
I was also influenced by the fact that the “teacher” of the Fellowship of Friends is corrupt from head to toe, and this corruption spreads thoughout the organisation in the form of lack of conscience, feelings of superiority and a tendency to lie to oneself and others.
Apart from that everything was wonderful…
yrs, RB
May 30, 2007 at 11:59 pm
“There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.”
-Bertrand Russell
May 31, 2007 at 1:29 am
Ooopsie. One more try.
Photos of:
The Greater Fellowship Gathering
May 26-27, 2007
Nevada City, California
http://www.kodakgallery.com/Slideshow.jsp?mode=fromshare&Uc=10w3clt3.864lct6f&Uy=-lmd2hj&Ux=1
If this doesn’t work, send me your email address and I will officially “invite” you to view the 50 or so photos.
khfitzgerald@netscape.net
Love to you — Kathryn Hannah Fitzgerald
May 31, 2007 at 1:47 am
King of Clubs (post 213):
The essay on the history of Art is interesting. Gurdjieff did indicate that the study of the works of conscious beings of the past is a part of being partlong duty.
One point that the racist teachings of the FOF probably does not indicate is that higher school and art originated in Africa by African IE. Black people. Even in the early traditions of Egypt it was said that knowledge of rituals came from the small people of Nubia (modern Ethiopia) This is important because the rituals which existed in Egypt were transfered to Judaism and Christianity. Some of the ealiest Jews were black African’s ( who still exist today)Even today the modern Ethiopian orthodox Church claims to have the original Ark of the Covenant. One of the most prominent theories today suggests the Ark is within a church in Axum, Ethiopia. ( this cannot be verified by outsiders as only a single priest is allowed access and the Church has a dedicated unit of gurads who will kill anyone who tries to enter the sanctuary.)All Ethiopian Orthodox Churches have a copy of the Ark.
What is not indicated is that this octave of art is one of growth and that growth is a descending octave.
Discussing this process on the blog may be a deviation so if the auther is interested in reposting his essay or anyone wants to follow up you are invited to add it to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StillPoint/
as a topic.
Thank you
May 31, 2007 at 1:55 am
Or try this:
http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLandingSignin.jsp?Uc=10w3clt3.864lct6f&Uy=opdhrw&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=0
May 31, 2007 at 2:43 am
Dear all,
Again, thank you for your being and for your response: your posts and emails are an incredible source of inspiration.
Hava Nagillah – the reason why I asked your opinion on the seven versus nine of hearts photo-issue was not to receive a theory lesson: I am familiar with what the theory says. What I hoped to get from you was instead to ‘explain’ me the photograph so to help me understand how to see in myself what you saw, as I don’t seem able to. If you don’t have this intention in your comments, than there is no real purpose for your photograph other than re-sticking a label on me without any further use.
The function of second line is to offer a new point of view that can help another person; ‘pouring theory over’ goes only to feed one’s self importance: I can tell you I was a specialist at it.
Elena #297 and No Person #300: thanks for putting some of my thoughts into words.
To respond to some of the questions:
I would never exchange where I am now to return to where I was, because it was based on lies, which cannot be the foundation for anything valuable.
After my exile was sentenced, I was buzzed, shaken and confused, yet one thing was clear: my aim for the time to come was to try to be true to myself, to understand what that meant, in all its depth, and make that aim my God.
Therefore, if I cannot be myself, if I have to lie again, there is no room for me in the school. (The detonator – the letter I wrote to R – is the contradicting element: for me it was the flag of my transformation, for Robert the worse possible thing which had to be neutralized: the proof that Asaf had lied to him. So I had to bear the blame – as his plan for Asaf was and is what you are witnessing).
I had a lot of ‘house cleaning’ to do and had to process the events without any cross reference beside my own conscience – which was at times difficult to find… I am by no means done, and finding the blog was the necessary catalyst to continue this process. The confrontation which takes place in these pages is not only healthy and long due, it is making us grow.
My deepest gratitude to all of you for your consistency.
Rabbi, Elena, Wild & Free, Siddiq, Joel F., Joe Average, KA … Unoanimo…, Thank You!
And of course: Sheik!
May 31, 2007 at 2:44 am
2b #282
First, I am not a native English speaker.
Sorry for my typos.
2d, “…the systemic unveiling of the truth for the benefit of others to be “useless.”…”
I think, this is the main misunderstanding with this “publication”. Let me explain…
Through the use of the methods of logic, philosophy and psychology it is possible to unveil the truth, and not through the desire to express oneself, whether it has any deep understanding behind it or not.
And the sciences I had mentioned say that there is no Objective Truth that you can unveil here. And if you are unveiling something, it might be some personal thoughts, ideas, guesses. At the best, you will have some “facts from the personal life of RB”.
Maybe your aim is to write a script of life of FOF from its beginning till year 2198?
But that has nothing to do with the truth, either.
Maybe you want to open someones eyes to something. But, can you force it?
And what kind of authority are you that other people should believe you, or believe anything that is written on this blog?
Do you see what I am trying to say?
What we have here is The Holy Inquisition hunting for witches. And witches saying that maybe they should not be burned yet. Maybe it is all a misunderstanding.
Look around, go to India and see what cults they have, and maybe all of you will become more enlightened. People believe, do and experience so many “weird” things, but it does not mean they are wrong and you are right. Or does it? And we should destroy all who sing different songs, dress in a different way, and call “cheap” “inexpensive”???
Looking on something from a dogmatic point of view can cause a lot of suffering to you and others.
This what cult is. To take a form and make a God out if it. But then, if you dig deeper, you will see that all things have their cycles. Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, all the religions and believes had their CYCLES of being “formatory” and dogmatic (a Winter phase) and then suddenly flourish into something extraordinary (Spring phase).
So, the word CULT, is just a piece of modern b#llSh#T. It does not exist in reality.
You know, if you to ask my mother, anything that is not Christian is a cult and all its followers will go to HELL!
Well, what many people are saying here is : “If you are from FOF you will be f#kd, made use of and dumped. And no consciousness for you!!!”
Sounds like my mothers speech!
(I love my mother, but she is not an expert on personal development, I should say)
At the end, it is only up to the person to choose and see for themselves, what is right and what is wrong.
And as Tyler Winget said :
“When you mess up . . . big deal.
Just admit it, fix it, and move on.
Other than that, life’s a party!”
(From “Shut Up, Stop Whining, and Get a Life”
book by Larry Winget)
Or, you can be a VICTIM.
And live your life as a VICTIM.
AND die blaming others.
“Shut Up, Stop Whining, and Get a Life”
I am on neither side.
I am Beyond,
and I keep my place.
May 31, 2007 at 3:26 am
Here are some questions for Siddiq, Howar Carter and those still in the Fellowship who would wish to consider such things.
Robert Burton’s main activity is finding sattisfaction for his sexual identification. His secondary activity is keeping the Fellowship of Friends running so that he can support his first activity, or main identification. Here I would like to explore why students cannot see that for what it is, what sort of mental processes have been instilled in us to accept those facts and pretend that Robert is a conscious being that should not be questioned in any way and on the contrary be supported indefinitely.
One of the reasons students accept this situation without confronting it is the fact that many of us had taken homosexuality as an acceptable condition and Robert’s private life as something one did not have a right to interfere with. A friend once wanted to tell me how wild it was at the galleria and I told him not to do so, that Robert was my teacher and I accepted his privacy or right to his own individuality.
I did this because I was at the same time struggling with so much baggage of my own, including my own homosexuality, that I thought it was human enough to simply accept that we were all struggling towards a more conscious life including Robert.
I know I at least believed in Robert’s consciousness because I highly valued the consistent focusing on presence and working with the system as a whole gave worthwhile understandings and results. Having center meetings when abroad was an interesting confrontation with other students and while a director in Colombia the interchange of experiences in the work was so fruitful that most students haven’t even left. But once in Isis, the consistent contradictions between what I thought a healthy community should be and what actually happened was so powerful that it finally got me out. What I am interested in looking at is the type of ‘Is’ or indoctrination that held me inside for so long. I know hundreds of students have similar friction with what is happening at Isis today but the knowledge of all the different ‘I’s that continue to support it is not widespread enough.
One of the major influence on students is Girard’s indoctrination which has definitely been picked up over time by the spokesmen of the Fellowship. Many have picked and adapted it to their own weaknesses and necessary justifications.
In Girard’s and now Asaf’s exposition, the main emphasis is set on the idea that Robert is so far beyond any one of us that every word he says is law that cannot be questioned. (What is worth observing is that most of this indoctrination is not even something that is said, it is an attitude that is held. Attitudes, that is where the problems are). This is Indoctrination Number One in the Fellowship of Friends. So here are some questions that may be worth considering:
Is Robert really that different from any one else? Do his good clothes make him a better man than you? Are you attracted to the fact that he made it for himself? That he lives all his lust as everybody else should live it? Is this part of the American Dream?
Does he not seem as identified or worse than you with the way he pursues young men?
With the way he spends money?
With the way he avoids you personally? And yet demands that you look at him in the eyes so that you really think he is telling the truth?
With alchemy itself as almost a fixation to have everything look “beautiful” but more than beautiful, up to the standards of a gay man’s conditioning?
Have you ever thought about what it is like to be in a gay man’s conditioning? What is the difference between Robert or another gay man in terms of his behavior?
(It is not casual that many, many, older gay men with money, have this kind of alchemy, so it is worth paying attention to it and not confusing it for consciousness, for it is not.)
Is there not something to say for the fact that Robert in his alchemy, can have no contact with nature, simple organic nature and this has been justified as the ideal of consciousness by implication so that within Isis we have all accepted to live under this conditioning?
If Robert is so badly conditioned by his own mechanics, was not the idea of consciousness that individuals would free themselves from such mechanicality? At what point did you exchange that understanding for the acceptance that Robert could continue being as subject or subjective as you and still be a man number seven?
Do you really want to be under Robert’s all encompassing rules about everything that happens in the Fellowship for the rest of your life? Is that what you call developing your consciousness? If you answer yes to this question, can I ask, Where are you? Where did you leave your alchemy? Your own inclinations? The way you yourself understood things? What makes you think that you can give them up to someone else? Were there not four alchemys in the system and all equal? What made you adapt to somebody else’s alchemy as if it was the synonimous to consciousness? Do you really think dressing up two or three times a day to exchange from your personality to your fellowship personality is a great deal? Do you really think good clothes will do it for you? And if you don’t then why has your life being reduced to wearing good clothes to events that you cannot actively participate in, only accept somebody else’s thinking and ideas? Do you really feel that good about yourself when you go to these events? What do you like about them? Does it not matter to you that you don’t like so many things about them? What implications do you think it has on your being to give up many things that you like and accept many things that you don’t like.
You could answer, it separates me from the emotional centre and its mechanicality, therefore I can see myself more objectively. Good, then why do you think you have to be subject to Robert’s mechanicality if you are so willing to give up your own. Do you really think his mechanicality is better than yours?
If we look at the theories Robert is talking about, is it not a fact that we’ve seen him making them up as he goes along, changing, adding and removing as it suits him?
Have you ever thought that the worst indoctrination comes from simply not allowing yourself to think about anything but what Robert is saying? endlessly?
That most students feel they are not good students when they don’t do it more? That you’ve become used to accepting your self as a failure because you don’t do the sequence all the time and are not trying to remember yourself all the time? And that it is not a failure but actually the little of you that is left without indoctrination? The little of you that you keep trying to destroy so that you become a good student?
The justifications from the inner circle to swallow these very strange behavior of making things up as he goes along, in this, “last conscious being on the planet”, are: that he is exploring higher consciousness, that he is inviting us to explore with him, that he is not formatory, that it is very exiting to be a part of such a man’s exploration of his consciousness…..
and then when you really press the point that, this is supposed to be the last conscious being on the planet then you get the answer that “Oh, nobody believes that!” and, “suppose he is not the last conscious being on the planet but one of a hundred or even a thousand in six billion people, he is still a conscious being on the planet” So there you stand, you against Girard or Asaf or all the other great inner adepts that like to stand up to these reasoning and you settle for it for years adapting to the subtle indoctrination that just happened to you without your ever thinking that you were being indoctrinated. In fact when I confront Girard with these things, he says, “I have never indoctrinated students” but I was deeply indoctrinated by him and by the other many students of his generation, older and younger, who used him, loved him perhaps, accepted him and his role to pull it all together with this very questionable reasoning, one in which, in the end, one adapts to letting go of the disonance that initiated it and accepting the dogma at the cost of the development of one’s own self and the gradual development of two personalities to put up with the dissonances. It is not just a game, it is a very dangerous game in case you haven’t realized it yet.
Can you really not see two personalities in the private life Robert leads and his teacher role?
May 31, 2007 at 4:50 am
Once Again I Turn
Thank You for this gift of Life
And Companions, enemies, friends, strangers
Who honor me with their company.
I offer praise, with gratitude and thanks.
Flesh of my flesh, as myself a father, I know You.
Mother Father inexhaustible, ineffable Love,
With me, loving me every moment no matter
My sordid, sublime, oh so personal folly or scheme.
All for me (betrayal, rage, depravity, loneliness, tenderness, friendship)
Sometimes we watch together; I wondering, laughing at the latest.
Sometimes apart, I, believing distractions of desire.
Suffering anything to keep my delicious, painful, exhausting secrets.
Oh Father Mother, how could I not remember?
How could I not know you made me so beautiful?
Why would I have to be told this and that you love me?
Yes, there is Love enough. Yes, never for an instant abandoned.
I have been lonely, worried and afraid and horny too.
Open to advantage yes, in heartfelt generosity.
Distractions driving me mad, I ask once again, for your Love.
Again Father Mother, I prodigal, full of this world, return.
Please help me connect to my own Heart. I cannot do this alone.
Please love me. Will you carry my burden for awhile? It is so heavy.
Sometimes too I just want to be held and caressed and whispered.
How much longer? Please now let me see and be free.
Once again by the Grace of God I breathe
Ineffable Grace, and once again Love.
Once again all is possible.
Thank You for this gift of Life.
May 31, 2007 at 6:08 am
Howard Carter Said:
“The real point is this: before I met the school I could not remember myself; before reading the Fourth Way I did not know it existed. I can also say with some surity that no one I ever knew before the school knew about it. “
My question to you is this, now that you know how to Self Remember then why stay in the school?
How does “Cave drawings” images help you to Self Remember?
When was the last time the teacher gave you a personal observation to help you become more awake?
What are the aims of the school right now?
May 31, 2007 at 7:26 am
Re: Exlax #303
As I expected, you took the bait from my last post. I knew you couldn’t resist.
I welcome you treading on my toes, but as you’ve read prior, others are understandably not so welcoming. And I welcome the opportunity to work with your comments on this blog, no matter how negative. This blog format allows me to accept what you have to offer, reflect upon it, then transform the negativity with my response. That’s pretty cool, actually.
I am going to spare you or others from having to reread your post #303 to me and paraphrase thus:
You think that by ‘bashing’ you (confronting you on your pent up rage) I am buffering my inability to accept responsibility for my actions regarding my experiences with Robert Burton. You want me to accept the painful truth that I was foolish (which I was) and have been ‘had’ in many ways by Robert, who you regard as more clever than me. You are “shocked”(?) that I have “used other people’s emotional centers which we really know do not exist” (???) to support my ongoing whining about the stupid mistakes I made that happened 22 years ago, which for you seems too long a time to still be going on about. I should just ‘get over it’ and get on with the good life I have found, the actual goodness of which is questionable in your mind, otherwise why am I blogging about all this old emotional stuff that really doesn’t pertain to you anyway, but for some reason unbeknownst to us, you force yourself to read. You seem unable to ‘get over’ your negative reactions each time you read my or other silly, self-serving posts and want us all to know how much this irks you. Does that about sum it up?
Exlax, I get from your responses that you’d rather this blog was a forum for the exchange of ideas exclusively, rather than as an exchange of feelings as well. To you, lofty thoughts and ideas are somehow more real, valid, and important than base feelings, yet you seem to have all the ‘answers’ in your posts and pose no sincere questions to anyone or attempt to dialogue with anyone. You look for the flaws; that’s what is ‘interesting’ to you. And you are good at it, focusing on the hole and not the doughnut. You just want to set the record straight no matter what other people think or feel.
In one of my posts, you ‘missed’ taking the intellectual leap to correlate the idea of compassion with the work idea of external consideration. You reacted to the ‘word’ compassion in a formatory way as though Buddhism has the patent on the concept. You have also taken it upon yourself to confront in a hostile manner any post that doesn’t match with your strict ideas of the fourth way, because that’s just the way you feel, so deal with it.
Well, you are certainly entitled to your opinion, and the sheik continues to grant you that.
FYI you are coming across as a bitter person who feels they have not gotten the credit and recognition that you deserve for all your unseen super efforts, and you project all that negative, unresolved frustration back at the fellow bloggers who irk you, which are many. (You know, it is a proven fact that chronic negativity can cause heart disease, dude! Have you had an EKG lately?)
That’s what irks you about me. You see me getting emotional support from others when I share what I have been through, and you get pissed off about me ‘winning’ at this. You’d like to deprive me of any good feelings I receive from others, because I was just an undeserving fool. YOU are more deserving of recognition because YOU had the good sense to fend off Robert’s advances, didn’t you? Well good for you, then! You were smarter, more clever, and/or more experienced with gay men than I was. Good job! I would like to have known you way back then…when you might have warned me about Robert’s predatory sexual behavior! Well, so be it.
Just so we are clear, I did accept responsibility for myself after a relativity short amount of sexual and emotional manipulation. I left the Fellowship of Friends as soon as I was in a position to do so. I had to protect myself or implode. Yes, I had been ‘had’ for as long as I allowed myself to be ’had’ in order to learn what I needed to learn and move on. I picked up the splintered pieces of myself and then got the heck away fairly intact. Healing from the experience is yet another matter…
Let me ask you…if a person gets mugged because they knowingly walk down a dark alley late at night…is it all the person’s fault? What if they were lost? Does their confusion relieve the mugger of any moral responsibility because that’s just what muggers in dark alleys do to people, and confused, lost people who mistakenly take a wrong turn deserve to get mugged? And despite any pain or suffering they experience from what happens to them, they are not entitled to feel anything now or share any feelings about it later because it really was all their fault? That’s seems to be your logic and frankly, it’s unhealthy!
Let me remind you that all our centers, the intellect, the instinctive, the moving, the sex, and the emotional center ‘process’ or digest things at differing rates of time. You discern and digest a thought sometimes quickly, sometimes more slowly. You experience and digest feelings sometimes very quickly, sometimes over the course of many years. It takes eight hours to digest your food. It takes a few weeks to digest and master complicated movements like driving a car. Understand that difference? Ever heard of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? It kicks in many years later! What I went through has taken this long to process and digest just because it has, and if it makes you ‘feel’ uncomfortable, please just skip my posts and spare yourself the stress on your heart. What I am doing happens to BE how people ‘get over’ things. I would recommend you give it a try sometime.
Let me clue you in on how it works, here. In addition to being a forum to discuss ideas, like it or not, this is a blog COMMUNITY. Many posters are loving, caring, sensitive, insightful, and intelligent people who care about each other. Communities have the power to heal the damage done by individuals such as Robert Burton. Repressing negativity and suffering in silence can cause mental illness! By expressing sadness, an injustice, a tragedy, or a deeply held insecurity in a public way to a community of people who have shared these experiences…to a group of ‘friends’ who can truly understand and empathize with each other, that otherwise untenable feeling is then finally digested, and emotional closure is reached. The vicious vortex of negativity is broken. Clarity is then achieved, which equals more time to be present, unfettered by the past. Understand? I am thankful to this community for helping and supporting me to do just that. And I make myself available on this blog to be emotionally ‘used’ by others as an expression of that gratitude back to the community in an effort to heal other idiots like myself. I don’t mind sharing my life, and I don’t mind empathizing with others. It makes me feel more human and connected.
BTW, I have the life NOT that I “found”, but the life I went out and intentionally CREATED for myself, by using the right work of my sex center. I didn’t waste all my creativity pursuing someone else’s grandiose windmills.
Hey Exlax, mano a mano, what do you feel most vulnerable about in your work on yourself? I mean that sincerely. How ’bout sharing that with us? What have you got to lose? That’s a real chance to get to know yourself and evolve. There is a huge pool of pretty amazing (and struggling) people tuned in here from which to learn and grow.
Your pal,
WhaleRider
1979-1985
May 31, 2007 at 7:35 am
[…] Friends, a pseudo-Gurdjieffian cult which has spawned a very extensive on-going discussion over at Animam Recro. Among those thoughtful responses was one by a reader who goes by the handle […]
May 31, 2007 at 8:29 am
Dear Sheik:
A long time ago, you wrote ~
“my personal mystical experiences were unknown to him, he did not understand them when I tried to explain them to him; that in itself is strange since most people who dabble in this area usually know what I am talking about…”
___________________________________
Care to share with us?
May 31, 2007 at 11:20 am
Unoanimo (341): You picked my busiest day. I am not sure how relevant this is to the conversation, at the time I was regularly and spontaneously entering states that closely resemble states produced by psilocybin and MDMA (different states). I wouldn’t know how to begin describing them (childish glee, absolute beauty, inner calm and certainty, ecstasy). There were other things happening to me, some through my meditation and yoga practice, some synchronicities, etc.
It was a long time ago and there was a lot of it. Not all that important though. Why did you ask?
May 31, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Guys, you are making me laugh!
What an unbelievable slide show of pictures of a bunch of grey-haired, wornout, washed out, depleted, spent, sad, pathetic looking fools and dumb asses! you guys have gone old, fat and ugly well before your time, and only one of you is looking still a little alert (have to admit it is Joel!!!)
Tell me did you guys really have a good time? come on! serious? do you get your kicks out of looking at a bunch of old hippies?
what happened to Devin’s teeth? scary! and some of you gained a lot of weight! Richard Buzbee–what is his longbeard trip? he almost looks like a philosopher (did he bring the semen stained pants, or was that whalerider??–one and the same probably! where was the sheik? probably laughing his head off and glad he did not waste his time!
Merryweathers look almost dead, and why is Sebrans always playing his guitar? Charlie Randall has not changed a bit, but the saddest pic of all, Randall the Gatehouse keeper–man you got old and tired–what is going on and where is your dog? Sharon and Sandra, nice to put your ugly wrinkled faces with your ridiculous postings! Whew! Good laugh! Keep em coming!
and Inner Jewel–you ain’t looking so hot anymore! What is up? Lost your magic charm?
LOL
May 31, 2007 at 12:37 pm
Just saw the photos KathrynF was kind enough to make available. I was completely blown away! Thanks, Kathryn! I hadn’t seen most of your faces for at least twenty-five years. So much beauty! Wish I could have made it. Hopefully, there’ll be other opportunities.
May 31, 2007 at 1:44 pm
In Reply to Post #342/10
Hello Sheik:
Why? Rather ‘how’?
How not ask of the mediator of his or her curiosities sent out to us, your guests, you our host?
Yes, “a long time ago”, no longer relevant?
I sense that your initial wanderings of these experiences in your first post became ‘covered up’ by a plethora of ‘other concerns’; though I wonder, do these events stem from your intent or do they happen upon you, not invited by you?
Simply welcoming to perhaps share.
________________________
Reply to Post #331/10
Thank you KathrynF.
For the photo sharing, it is good to bring words to images, beautiful, beautiful…
__________________________
Love to you all.
May 31, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Watler says: P.S. I’d love to get into the meat of spiritual systems, the reality of enlightenment, free will vs. determinism, and other matters of the greatest importance. I’ve been lucky since the FOF to find communities where these discussions thrive, and my position has…evolved.
—
Well, why don’t you. Please share something with us. I am sure we would be interested. Thank you.
May 31, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Current cult cosmology:
—–
King of clubs, or lower self = the devil
Nine of hearts = steward = angels
Presence = heaven
States on non-presence hell
Sequence = a prayer to fight the king of clubs and allow you entrance to heaven.
The teacher = Christ Figure- Gods representation on the earth, salvation.
Students- sinners who need redemption
—————————————–
“If you are not using the sequence you are consumed by your king of clubs.”
Translates into:
If you are not constantly praying, you are possessed by the devil.
The cult thinking gives the followers a choice. Either to be in hell and possessed by the devil, or be in heaven with the help of you own personal angel the steward.
By practicing a sequence (prayer) you can redeem your sinful state and make it possible for an angel (your steward) to allow you into the gates of heaven (3 state).
The cult leader (teacher) is the Christ figure (actually considered higher than him) so followers hope he can lead them to salvation.
All the students are sinners and they need to do battle with the devil (King of Clubs) to achieve salvation.
Life people, ex students are all possessed by Satan. Students must avoid contact with them to avoid temptation and sin.
The last judgement will come (nuclear holocaust, earthquake) and all the sinners will die and the true believers (faithful students) will be saved.
How does all this relate to the Fourth Way?
Did I miss something…
It sounds more like the views American fundamentalist Chirstians rather than Ouspensky and G.
—
Sorry for double post Shiek
May 31, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Dear Kiran,
Thanks for your openness and clarity which I find astonishing in certain aspects of it. You have clarified some things, or rather, my argument on the ‘exercise of gossip’ in the FoF as baloney.
First of all, we come to the School to pay for information that could bring us to Balance. Before the exercise of gossip was introduced, students seem more open and innocent. With the curse of this exercise, some deep followers, which in turn affect everyone else, are closed up with more mind activity. This is going away from balance.
Information is power. We have that right. With the exercise of ‘not gossiping’, we are paying to have information taken away from us.
This is like Alice in Wonderland. Doing exactly the opposite of what is. It is NOT gossip when you pointed out that Renato died of aids. You are clarifying a situation. By pointing that out, you are protecting other people from the dangers of the disease. I have nothing against Renato dying of aids. If anything, I enjoyed him just as much, maybe more than when I heard he died of cancer. The picture somehow did not fit. That is his play. The same as Brian Sisler. This is why we are all unique.
Gossip is when someone deliberately track down your sex life in order to make your life miserable.
You had finally clarified it by openly speaking the truth. Deep followers (where the inbalance is) will find it negative. The truth is NOT negative – it is simply inconvenient for those that are affected.
A hug to you.
Hello Walter, I’ve been trying to track you down ever since I heard you left. You’re like the first part of Spring when the freshest leaves and buds coming into bloom. All the best
May 31, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Interesting, Confused Shiek, you describe what I often have during and after meetings. (But you left out ‘love’.)
That’s what keeps me going, the higher states.
Where else could I meet a group of ‘friends’ and sit around or have dinner with the sole aim of holding the attention within this infinitesimally-thin slice of time called The Present?
Some of you people seem to feel hard-done-by.
I don’t. My only slightly burdensome obligation is to make a minimum monthly payment, but hey what’s free these days?
I follow my own conscience ahead of anyone else’s advice, since I WILL DIE ALONE WITH MY CONSCIENCE.
I love my life, and being in the school is a great part of that. I hate gushing superlatives like ‘wonderful’, but it’s pretty f’in good I gotta tell ya! I’ve never recommended it to anyone else though, who knows what is good for others?
I do what pleases my conscience, so I do what I like and I like what I do or I wouldn’t do it in the first place. I never liked abstract art, but if I did I sure wouldn’t block that part of me off that I know is good and then blame someone else for stealing it!
‘Selling out’ that used to be called in the 60’s.
Like with rock music, I listen to it sometimes, and sometimes I feel it dragging me into nostalgia and I flick it to classical.
Discrimination is a serious requirement for spiritual growth.
If George Bush wanted to blow me I’d say ‘no thanks good buddy’, but I wouldn’t necessarily leave the USA if I lived there. He just happens to be in the role of President and I might happen to live there! (not).
May 31, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Paola,
Please read my response to No Person.
What you can ask yourself is what would it take for you to go in? meaning renouncing all sceneries and taking presence as your sole goal.
It requires deep sincerity. No one can know how much you really want it but you. If this is not your goal there is no point in going any further.
But, if that is what you really want you must start now, otherwise it is just words.
You must have a method – the Sequence, otherwise it is all imaginary.
The school is the place to study how to work and obviously this forum is the worst place for that. It is almost 100% sharp deviation from presence.
I am writing here to slightly balance slander because there are many surfers who are new to all this. I write nainly for them so that they are able notice higer possibilities amidst this noisy environment.
May 31, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Regarding “@#$%^&*” post 327 in which you trash Dick Moron:
I hope you haven’t spent too much time and money in the Fellowship learning about the non-expression of negative emotions. If you have, I’d say you haven’t gotten much of a return on your investment.
May 31, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Beyond wrote in 335: “I am on neither side… At the end, it is only up to the person to choose and see for themselves, what is right and what is wrong.”
I agree. So we do have some common ground, because we’re both in favor of open discussion — the sharing of ideas and viewpoints for the benefit of the whole. For a while there, I thought Beyond was actually opposed to open discussion (when he called the blog “useless” in 256), but maybe this was a misunderstanding.
Instead, I can see now that he was simply disagreeing with many of the comments within this blog — which is very different from wanting everyone to stop.
There was a time when the Fellowship of Friends included “angles” at the meetings. During this era of the fof, some people would talk for about five minutes, and many of us hoped their angles would stop. But for the most part, no one jumped up and stopped them — as long as the angles focused on Fourth Way and FOF-related philosophical ideas. Members raised their hands and presented facets of the truth (angles), which then helped us in our efforts to attain knowledge and develop understanding. If the angle didn’t make sense to us, we dismissed it (or “recorded it”) and listened to the next angle — analogous to the vertical scroll bar on your browser.
But as far as being on one “side” or another, here’s the most significant division I can think of… Do you want open discussion or not?
Most of the contributors and readers of this blog support an open discussion about the Fellowship of Friends, and they oppose not having that. There’s a wide variety of viewpoints here, and not everyone agrees with every criticism of the Fellowship and Robert Burton, and not everyone agrees with the positive viewpoints that some people have expressed. But the support of open discussion is the universal viewpoint here — or at least one would hope. Or did I miss someone’s post where they voiced opposition to this?
Oh, wait…
Well anyway, never mind. What has grown from the blog has already been something good. What grows from it in the future, only time will tell. But whatever happens, it will lead to a deeper understanding about the nature of the Fellowship of Friends and Robert Burton. And better yet, it will lead to a deeper understanding about ourselves.
And as Beyond wrote, it is up to each person to choose and see for themselves. How can anyone disagree with that? And hopefully, allowing information to flow freely will help each of us to make wise choices.
Which is what we want — right?
May 31, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Paola,
Tell me, have you heard that voice too ?
That comforting, whispering “I” that dismisses all strange feelings of awkwardness
when we allow something “wrong”(or stupid) to happen ,
with the good old “it’s only feminine dominance” perfect-universal-ultimate buffer.
I’ve made many mistakes listening to that voice too.
And I’ve never blinked.
It’s horrible to realize my own level of immaturity now,
as much as it must have being painful for you to face yours.
I have never blinked.
I knew from early on that some students were asked to “leave their children behind” and
I brought myself to even find their commitment somehow…“noble”.
I knew that those people who we call today “Friends” will have to be ignored tomorrow if they were to loose the School;
I found that only practical and righteous.
I knew about all of the young men being exploited by Robert, and if they wouldn’t recover from it I would say that they weren’t strong enough, that it was THEIR play.
And slept well with that.
I saw double standards everywhere, established by Robert and reproduced in our micro-cosmos on a daily basis, by everyone;
I’ve never recognized the hypocrisy in that.
Our lack of any tangible practice of external consideration , for me, IS the real tragedy in every story I’ve heard so far.
Robert cannot teach it because Robert never practiced it.
We have learnt how to justify and amplify our egocentrism in ourselves and in each other, together with our overly grown, pathetic illusion of superiority on the rest of the human race (“life people”, we call them).
No, today I don’t feel that I’ve been any better, nor any luckier for that matter, only “blinder”.
Robert has come to the point of justifying as “influence C’s Will” all of his many caprices, obsessions, perversions and “itches”
and we have learnt from that how to avoid taking responsibility for our mistakes by blaming the Play, the Gods, the Hormones, the Centre of Gravity etc.
He gave us permission to NOT CARE, because he doesn’t;
He keeps us blind, indifferent and ignorant, as much as HE IS.
Maybe is not too late to find the courage to be a better merely human simple life being.
M.
May 31, 2007 at 6:27 pm
To JoelF: 10/301
“Unbelievable. The fun never ends with these people. No wonder they don’t know they’re in a cult, they think it’s the same as a blog!”
Joel, I know a cult of intellectuals when I see one, be it virtual or otherwise.
It’s fine that the FoF is labeled a cult by people who share your sentiment about it, regardless that it fails any number of “litmus tests” for cults.
But this blog, which worships the written word in a cult-like manner (as long as it is anti-FoF) cannot be labled as such?
“The fun never ends with these people.”
Why don’t we agree to drop the “with these people” and leave it simply as: “the fun never ends”
May 31, 2007 at 7:16 pm
I wrote what I think about the terms like CULT or SECT in post #335.
Here I just want to add a few thoughts.
Since people insist on using this term soooo much.
1.Humans had not defined themselves as individuals. We are still group oriented. And it may never change, as we have broken our connections with the nature and need one another for survival.
2.Most humans, probably 99%, have a very low level of Self awareness. Therefor, their identity is in the group, society, religion, etc.
3.Consciousness of these people is completely controlled by the group they are identified with. And since they do not have enough Self awareness, they do not question their believes.
4.This is basically the same as what Gurgieff was saying about men being machines, and the Earth feeding the moon. Most people just don’t have a chance. Sad but true.
5.”Cults”, if you wish, are no worse then any other institution that replaces personal Self awareness with group awareness. Political parties, businesses, communities, groups you name it. They all abuse other people. Even the nicest ones. Because they replace your self identity with their own.
6.If you are fond of Gurgieff, you may as well know that many people consider him a cult founder too. And they say basically the same things about him a that is said here about FOF. Abusing people, manipulation, dictatorship…
Maybe we should dump the whole Forth Way idea and look somewhere else?
Well Christianity was considered to be a cult by Romans and Jews. And then a few hundred years later when it gained power everything that was not Christian became cult and pagan.
Is there a lesson here?
Only if you wish to see one.
——————————————–
“Shut Up, Stop Whining, and Get a Life”
I am on neither side.
I am Beyond,
and I keep my place.
May 31, 2007 at 7:25 pm
Part photos:
http://www.kodakgallery.com/Slideshow.jsp?&mode=fromsite&collid=485279096109.348419596109.1180632229901&conn_speed=1
May 31, 2007 at 7:31 pm
Hey KathrynF # 333.
Thanks so very much for posting the pictures for those of us who couldn’t be at the gathering.
Great to see some old friends and some faces that were only legend to us other suckers that stayed in tooooo long.
Everyone looks great! Older, but natural, themselves, all unique in their ‘aliveness’. Sparking eyes, smiles, LIFE! OH TO LIFE and LIVING!
Thanks again.
May 31, 2007 at 8:55 pm
Elena, Writes: “In fact when I confront Girard with these things, he says, “I have never indoctrinated students” but I was deeply indoctrinated by him…”
You were married to him for how many years? When did the indoctrination and brainwashing begin? How did he do it to you? Did he use his intellectual center and did he talk to you? Make some sense at the time, no?
Do you remember your beautiful wedding(were you already indoctrinated?), at FOF expense, garden reception, everything paid for (were you already indoctrinated?), you sitting side by side at his dinners(were you already indoctrinated?), living with Girard(were you already indoctrinated?), traveling with Girard(were you already indoctrinated?), visiting dozens of centers including here in South America(were you already indoctrinated?)
What are you really trying to tell us! And take a look at the pictures on the Greater Fellowship meeting party, you look like you are hanging on the lips of another guru–can you see that you are feeble minded, eager to become indoctrinated, whatever you mean by this?
You are a disgrace to your country!
May 31, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Dear Hava Tequillah,
You scary, wooooooooooo!
You wrote, “Yes, it is very difficult to distinguish truth under such a heavy load of lower-self matter, yet as you know one Pea can be noticed under seven mattresses”
Would that be short Pea or long Pea, I get confused ?
Also, regarding the heavy load of lower-self matter, I suggest you try a brown rice diet for four weeks with a little exercise and plenty of water and don’t be so hard on yourself.
“Tubby or not Tubby that is the question.”
Love,
Ryan.
May 31, 2007 at 9:53 pm
Dear Questioning KW #314:
C’mon now, let’s not get too formatory here with words. As it said, it takes a bit of time for a sexual predator to identify, corner, and exploit their prey. They are usually not violent rapists, they pick and choose. As with the others, I had to be groomed in an outlying center for a period of time. Back then, Robert was not ‘teaching’ or traveling to host meetings at US centers; he had enough in his pool of potential victims arriving daily at Renaissance.
No, I was certainly not informed or warned of Robert Burton’s predatory sexual behavior beforehand by neither my well-meaning center directors nor older students of the Fellowship of Friends; if you remember there was and still is a ‘gossip exercise’ in place. I was told he was celibate, and I believed it. I spent a period of time living at Renaissance, experiencing and witnessing the dichotomy of the somewhat Spartan lifestyle of a Renaissance employee and the lavish lifestyle of our illustrious leader. My aim was to find out whom this self proclaimed ‘conscious being’ was and how he could help my evolution. Remember, he was not leading meetings then, so being close to the ‘teacher’ was regarded by everyone I met as a good thing, and an honor. I was young, earnest, and not interested at the time in getting married right away, so apparently that made me fair game.
The personal ‘duties’ of the academy concubines was rotated, and I was greatly relieved when Mr. Moonshine traveled for 6-8 weeks at a stretch. Although given a choice between working my ass off in the hot sun six and sometimes seven days a week to prepare for the ark for the ‘great depression’, versus traveling all expenses paid to Europe to dine on some fine wine, food, and impressions for my developing soul (as the he dined on my precious bodily fluids), well what can I say…I went with the program. I didn’t realize as I do now the extent to which I was set up.
I could only take about a year of this crap before I reached my limit. If you have spent time living on ‘the property’, you will agree that time tends to distort when you are working such long hours on not much first state. Sometimes when a lot is happening to you all at once, you have to bury it and deal with it later. As far as the frequency of my ‘personal servitude’, that is immaterial. Let’s say numerous and quite enough in duration to incite such explosive and accusing letters so many years later, don’t you think? It’s just the raw and uncensored truth. I am not looking to start a school, civil lawsuit or anything here. I hope I can ‘poison’ Robert’s pool of future potential victims by exposing his spiritual crimes so he cannot do harm to other sincere seekers such as me.
When I first found out about this blog and began reading it, (and I started from page one which I recommend!) my body would sweat profusely, and later I would have bouts of spontaneous crying. I regurgitated what happened to me, unable to contain it any longer. My family has no idea; my wife knows only the tip of the iceberg. I seem to be a bit better now after baring my soul, and I am eternally thankful for this chance to do so within this community. I pray it will inspire others to do the same.
That will have to suffice your questioning mind.
WhaleRider
1979-1985
June 1, 2007 at 12:49 am
Dear @#$%^&* no. 327:
Yes I was quite pathetic back then, 10-30 years ago. Stupid me! I seem to have left some strong memories with you, 11 plus years later. I’m sorry the thought of me caused you such stomach discomfort. Are you sure it was not one of Alfred’s oysters or prawns?
You can post my name as many times as you like. I am no longer embarrassed to admit I spent so many years in the company of such a deluded manipulator. That was so long ago. I, like Bruce, am a different person than the one you supposedly knew over 10 years ago.
Do you, by the way, have a name or are you just a chicken-shit coward FOF member who likes to curse and yell. Actually, your posts sound way too psycho for you to still be a member. You’re probably one of the truly damaged ones who somehow escaped.
I am telling my stories on this blog, because I CAN and I have benefited personally from the process. I really have a lot more to my life than the memories and opinions recorded on the blog. So you can rant and demean others all you want.
When I experienced the type of anger and negativity you seem to be experiencing now, I knew it was time for me to get out. If you are still in FOF (yes you, little chicken-shit) I would advise you to run now.
Since you have such powerful memories of me, maybe we should get together for lunch sometime. I can bring Bruce and we will watch you puke at the sight of us. Call me at:
Deleted, don’t post phone numbers, people! –ES
Love & Peace
Richard M.
1955—
June 1, 2007 at 1:00 am
Vinnie the Fish: You rock. I wish I could access higher states with you and your mates.
Unoanimo: My interest in these things, and the experiences, never left me. I simply found more and more things and other states and skills as time went by. I also became interested in other things, to my great benefit. To this day my primary interest is human potential (skills, abilities, and self-change).
June 1, 2007 at 1:32 am
#352 2b.
That is all you got from my post?!
That I am on neither side…
Well, read my post #355.
I do think that what you call an open discussion is a waste of time.
To understand what I mean go read posts 335 and 355 again.
“There was a time when the Fellowship of Friends included “angles” at the meetings.”
O, so that what this thing is?
A virtual meeting?
Well, who’s leading?
Nobody?
So it’s a mass then, I mean a mess?
We all had an experience like that: on a busy street, on the market, subway. You are surrounded by noise of people trying to say something.
This blog is indeed very much like that.
——————————————–
“Shut Up, Stop Whining, and Get a Life”
I am on neither side.
I am Beyond,
and I keep my place.
June 1, 2007 at 1:37 am
The two raised middle fingers in the party pics are specifically for LOL and ChiiliPeppers
June 1, 2007 at 2:02 am
Try:
http://www.kodakgallery.com/Slideshow.jsp?Uc=10w3clt3.864lct6f&Uy=opdhrw&Ux=0&mode=fromsite&collid=485279096109.348419596109.1180656054607&conn_speed=1
or:
http://www.kodakgallery.com/BrowsePhotos.jsp?Uc=10w3clt3.864lct6f&Uy=opdhrw&Ux=0&collid=485279096109.348419596109.1180656054607&page=1
for other Party pictures.
June 1, 2007 at 2:02 am
Yeaaah man, with my mates Patrick, Squidward and Spongebob.
But seriously, since I first got stoned I saw that being in the present holds the secret to human potential. I don’t know if there’s any other ‘school’ that is so focussed on that single issue is there? (Regardless of how weird the leader is).
Did you know Sai Baba and Muktananda are (were) equally odd? Seems to go with the job – airline stewards have to be gay, and gurus have to be devos.
June 1, 2007 at 2:07 am
Hey LOL, my vanity is crushed! You didn’t single me out in your cruel and cynical post, probably (hopefully) because you never knew me. Yes, I am one of the sad, spent and sagging middle-aged hippies in the photos, my youthful vigor ebbing away with each passing year. Poor me!
But several others here expressed a rather different point of view. They saw beauty and the faces of dear old friends in those images.
In time you may understand that the world is a mirror, and what you see is your own reflection. If you see ugliness and decay, look within yourself for its source. If you see beauty, it’s only because there is beauty in you.
Thanks for sharing your perceptions with us. I hope you felt better after that toxic purge (but I’m guessing you didn’t).
June 1, 2007 at 2:15 am
Vinnie The Fish (349): “That’s what keeps me going, the higher states.”
Understandable in a way, but is the occasional higher state really all you want from life?
“I follow my own conscience ahead of anyone else’s advice, since I WILL DIE ALONE WITH MY CONSCIENCE….I do what pleases my conscience, so I do what I like and I like what I do or I wouldn’t do it in the first place.”
The obvious question is: who is this “I” that you’re so identified with? Could there be another “I” that is more real and perhaps not subject to death in the same way?
Just asking, RB
June 1, 2007 at 2:29 am
I loved seeing the photos. Thank you Kathryn for posting them. Wish I could have been there, it looked like a fun party.
June 1, 2007 at 2:59 am
#346 Moon Angel: To Walter, “well, why don’t you”. Very good idea.
#352 2b: about “angles” at old time meetings. That’s what “it” misses the most. And, I didnt hear one that wasnt ‘key’ with something already within.
#355 Beyond: It’s strange sounding to me how somebody “in” is explaning to those ‘long in the tooth’ “out”
#360 Whale Rider: “gossip exercise” “it” remembers that one too.
To Robert Burton, A-sap and G. Haven too: Shouldnt the primary law of the 4th Way be to do no harm?
“Poking” somebody on this blog is harmful, what say you?
June 1, 2007 at 3:10 am
In post # 278 a cowardly cur #@$%^&*()_+ perhaps experiencing a brief moment of shame critizes whaleriders posts. I have played online games with young people who can be very rude. In any one else such rudeness is inexcusable. I do not enjoy whale riders posts. His descriptions of RB’s activities make me very uncomfortable and cause me to question my own memories and beliefs. I know that honesty about sexuality is mandatory for healthy relationships. There is a great contradiction between some of my memories and facts. I find that I need to hear the facts about RB’s behavior over and over as I simply do not want to accept that my teacher who I venerated can be so base and corrupt. Ohell, it is not my first disappointment nor the greatest contradiction I live with.
June 1, 2007 at 3:14 am
To the ungracious LOL (10/343): Maybe you forgot the sensible request made by one of your cohorts, Siddiq, at 9/342. I’ll reprint it here for your convenience:
Dear fellow current members posting on this blog:
Please refrain from the unrestrained expression of anger, judgment and sarcasm. It does absolutely nothing positive for you as a person and greatly, in my view, diminishes the School—those who post, do represent the FOF whether you want to or not–so take responsibility.
We are all here by the grace of something we cannot fathom, and know not if we will be ever allowed to reach our aims, whatever they may be.
Taking an example of RB mentioned here, by James B., I too for many years questioned why RB allowed himself to express negativity about former members, but I am extremely grateful that this ended some years ago, and there is no longer that condemning judgment–when you think about it, there simply is no time for it if you want to truly awaken. Same for all former members, we are all pretty much alike, nobody would like to trade places with anyone else, clearly—so why not make this blogging something, if you were ever to look at it again, a meaningful expression.
Best to all…and thanks to all
Siddiq
June 1, 2007 at 4:01 am
Dear LOL (#343) – your post is incredibly mean and distatesful. Do you feel good now that you said all this? What’s the point of this meanness? You just made a complete ass of yourself by posting this.
I’ll bet that you are a current member – by the sheer amount of pointless negativity expressed at ex-students. Current memebrs seem to be great at this, for some strange reason. May be repressing or controlling negativity doesn’t actually work after all…
I wish we could see your own (hot) picture, you must be very well preserved and look quite sexy for your age…
Do you have guts to post your own mug shot, so we can LOL too?
June 1, 2007 at 4:05 am
Glad you start realizing a few things Richard Moore–it did not happen in the school for you but you are surely getting the truth now!
“Yes I was quite pathetic back then, 10-30 years ago”
Right!
and Flying Free–“sparkling eyes”? where? who?
a bunch of worn out hippies as my buddy LOL pointed out. Good grief you people are slow!
June 1, 2007 at 4:22 am
Cannot open Bruce’s photos of the Party and thank you Katryn for posting yours.
Post more please! Anyone who has pictures please let me/us see them!
Thank you in advance.
June 1, 2007 at 4:54 am
Dear Chile Pepper, (358)
You say:You were married to him for how many years?
Not as many as many as I would have hoped for. Our separation also happened to us.
“When did the indoctrination and brainwashing begin?”
Long before we were married. I looked up at him as the model of the student I wished to imitate, learn from. I thought he was a man full of integrity and love.
You must understand, Pepper, that brainwashing is not only something that happens through words, but through actions and forms. It is not what is said, which definitely counts and we will slowly unwind it all, but what is done. The show in the Fellowship shows a certain kind of Robert Burton, Girard Haven, Collin L., Guinever, Steven, Meredith, Frances, Robert and Rowena, there are so many, Linda Ts., Karens, and those that don’t even appear, that hide in their lives but still belong to the Fellowship of Friends for god knows what economic reason, but know all too well that the pie is rotten and still do not have enough integrity in themselves to come and say, “something smells bad around here, why don’t we take a look and throw it out so that we can continue to inhabit this place.”
That is how we indoctrinated each other, on each others being, on each other’s lack of integrity, on the dellusion that a sick man pretending to be a man number seven is authentic. We all held it, one way or another, with sincere conviction. I did too, as much as any one of them and from my black sheep position. I could still stand up for the beautiful efforts I made but not for Robert. He always behaved like a sick man who would not acknowledge anybody else except Girard, Asaf, people he sat up there once in an eon and the men that were tested. And they, in their infinite vanity, approved to sit up there and hold the myth of a man that has had the bad luck to divide into two different people, like the rest of us were having to do, to put up the show and neglect the reality behind the show.
I am trying to tell you, Chile Pepper, that the Fellowship of Friends which I once loved as much as you do, is a dangerous place for your deepest I. The contradictions that you have to adapt to, to be able to remain in it, go against any body’s integrity. It is no longer enough to say, “I don’t understand this, I don’t know why Robert does that” and justify with indoctrinating language that simply puts a cover over the observation to keep the show running.
I beg you to understand that if I did not seriously believe that the show is dangerous to your innermost integrity I would not be screaming like this. I am no better than anybody else and have a thousand things to resolve for myself, but the love I have for my husband is not a love that will silence the damage I have seen the Fellowship do on his being and he, do to other people.
The fact that there is no ill will on those of us who have supported the fellowship for so long, does not make it any less harmful. The fact that Bush is sleep and invading nations does not stop people from being killed just as the fact that Robert is sleep, abusing people sexually, emotionally and economically, does not mean that we will come out of this “set up”, without any consequences to our soul.
The money we loose, which is no small figure and certainly makes a hole after this many years, is nothing compared to the loss of integrity. Do not think that it is not terrifying to be out here with the dreams of a lifetime gone down the drain. The persistent questioning of what it is that I stand for and what not, the fear of not knowing what is the truth when the truth was the work, the fellowship, consciousness, the community, my husband…. but none of these dreams ever actualized themselves in the fellowship of friends. They on the contrary, disintegrated into the many contradictions of a consciousness without functions, a leader that would not extend himself out to anybody and who created separations where they should have never existed.
I have seen those separations invade so thoroughly a man, MY HUSBAND, in case you have not yet understood what I am talking about, that he can no longer distinguish between one and the other man that lives within himself. But the effects are there in his crippled body, in the fact that he has not tasted the lightness of joy with any woman, in the uniform that keeps everything in order so that nothing can get out of his hands because any thing out of place will have him hitting his head and swearing, at all the innate perversity of inanimate objects that chanllenge his being without compassion. You probably do not understand what it means when a man cannot even deal with innanimate objects to control the expression of negative emotions.
You have not yet seen the compassion with which I have invested myself into that marriage that you witnessed. One that I will take the opportunity to ask for your forgiveness for not having had a decent meal to treat you with, not one like any of the many friday receptions. I trusted the organizers would be up to the standards of at least a reception but the scale went down three or four degrees. Had I known, grateful as I was for the use of the Galleria, I would have put the necessary money to make it so, but they did not even tell me that it was missing to make it at least to that standard that we so regularly enjoy with Robert, just so that they could remind us and each other that no one is as good as the last conscious being on the planet. It is not that I am not grateful for those who helped, gave money, tried. It is that if they had at least counted me in for my own wedding, I would have at least treated you with a decent meal.
You say:……..” traveling with Girard(were you already indoctrinated?), visiting dozens of centers including here in South America(were you already indoctrinated?)”
But what you’re really trying to rub on me is the bit of money that was used for me to travel with my husband, thinking I should feel bad even for that.
I will tell you a story. On our trip to Kiev, a few students travelled for two days to meet Girard for an afternoon and return immediately so that they could be at their jobs by monday. Others travelled only one day. During the events that took place my husband continued to support the merciless lack of external consideration of the school amongst other things, by simply not allowing anyone else to talk. By simply not listening to others for one of the great damages that the fellowship has done on my husband is that he CANNOT listen to others. JUST LIKE ROBERT and the newly trained Asaf. After thirty years of being his most loving student, Robert now shifts him out and photographs him for this same behavior through Asaf. Tell me, what has Robert been doing for thirty years if he has not even had the time to protect and help his most convinced and loving student? One willing to split himself physically and spiritually just like him?
Do not think that saying that the blog was something that did not interest him because it was just people’s ‘I’s was an sporadic coincidence. IT was his crystallized attitude that others do not deserve to be heard, they should listen. LISTEN to him and Robert who are the first and second to be, conscious beings. Of course, in his role of “mother” of the Fellowship, he does not say these things, he simply acts them.
The lack of external consideration has invaded these men’s being so thoroughly that they cannot even see the misery in which they live.
This post is already too long to wine in detail about the fact that no matter how tired and sick I was after four years of working next to Girard supporting the Fellowship, he did not even notice it. He can only see himself just as the other students like you and I, identified with the illusion of CONSCIOUS BEINGS, can see nothing but the idealized role we are such great adepts at imagining.
You say: “You are a disgrace to your country!” forgive me for laughing. You reminded me of the second prospective meeting I led in Bogota. There were three prospective students. The center was just beginning. After the three days of exposition, they said, “Everything is wonderful but we will only join if the money goes to you, not to anyone in another country.” They did not join. But they were right. The money that is made in centers should remain in the centers and not come to support this prostitution. The money would then be used by those in the center who would be able to see their effort and work, manifested, and not disappear in the invisibility of an illusion. We need to assume responsibility for everything we do, especially the money we make, because how money is handled shows the being that is handling it.
I thank you for reading, questioning and confronting me with my self.
Dorothy died this morning. She has freed her self. She has freed me. Now I can leave. May her soul bring back the gratitude of sharing, to this God forsaken Fellowship of Friends.
June 1, 2007 at 5:03 am
At first the vituperative put-downs directed towards Whale Rider, Elena and others surprised me. But then it occurred to me that some people deal with information that triggers shame by attacking others. This is the “attack other” pole in the “compass of shame.”
When I remember this, the animus becomes comprehensible. The vituperation does not occur because the targets deserve it, but because the vituperators are grappling with shame or one of its relatives. They achieve shame reduction, temporarily, by attacking the people they identify as triggering the shame.
Kind regards to all.
June 1, 2007 at 5:04 am
To Teresa Dozzi (#348)– You should be a bit more honest and admit you do not have a clue if Kiran is speaking truth or just gossiping. If you got your eyes open just a bit and read this blog, you see he is a frequent flyer and a frequent liar! Nice of you to stand up for him though. Wake up Dozzi and smell the bullshit! Also you have no clue about Renato’s death–until you really know consider it gossip. And one more thing, what does this have to do with anything. Do you not think that people deserve a little respect? Him dying is one thing, but it is not his final disease that is the sum of his life, or is it? Some people want to bring everything down to their level–actually Kiran is really doing a lot of that. Look how badly he talks about his own wife. Sad, sad, sad.
June 1, 2007 at 5:06 am
Why, oh why are some of the most caustic, defamatory posts coming from current Fellowship students? Slings and arrows. If pain is truly behind all negativity, be whole, be well, be aware of how much you reveal. You are fueling the wrong fire.
Maybe it is a matter of choice or perhaps not (Exlax, something in what you said rings true). No matter.
It comes down the moment, this moment, something we all share. With each breathe, all embracing, all forgiving. No need to raise swords, bear arms against another. We are so much closer than all the words here.
Out playing in the fields of the Gods
Cake
June 1, 2007 at 5:07 am
The fish says: follow my own conscience ahead of anyone else’s advice, since I WILL DIE ALONE WITH MY CONSCIENCE.
—-
You must not be swimming with the school.
—
June 1, 2007 at 5:11 am
Hello.
To LOL (343)
Your cruelty in assualting the personal appearances of individuals is appalling and entirely unconscious.
How could you bear to actually write those petty words in a state of consciousness?
To I’ll Give It a Try (324)
Thanks for your list!
I guess what I was thinking was how these geniuses (the “44”) are somehow perceived as “owned” by the Fellowship.
I have explored so many of these beings’ accomplishments in an entirely different context and know that they speak to all.
Walter Tanner (326)
You sound extremely fun and well educated. I knew you when.
Elena (336)
It’s fascinating to analyze Robert by using his own methods. That is where part of the unassailable contradiction becomes clear.
Kathyrn: Thanks for the photos.
Best of everything to everyone,
LL
June 1, 2007 at 5:48 am
Here’s something written by John (8/350) about three weeks ago. Just found a link to it from the Italian blog:
John’s post is very succinct, thorough, and convincing. Here’s a short excerpt:
Looking at Robert Jay Lifton’s study on “brainwashing” I would like to make some parallels with the Fellowship that others might find useful. In his idea of milieu control, it says: “The basic feature of the thought reform environment, the psychological current upon which all else depends, is the control of human communication”.
In the Fellowship this is done by institutionalizing what one must think, read or talk about as much as with whom, where and when.
Worth a look in case you missed it. Worth a second look, too.
June 1, 2007 at 7:14 am
Dear Hava Nagillah, thanks for taking time to answer me.
“Steward and Nine of He are just names representing an actual action of engaging presence.”
Ok, I understand. I am glad we agree. My point was exactly that – these are just labels that are trying to explain something else. And this something else is different for different people. In a way various thoughts, or I’s, or actions HAPPEN to us. And under the present “Teaching” we like to call them these fancy names. I personally find them completely unnecessary and in fact cluttering the mind and creating more disagreement between people and confusion.
You talk about these new labels as some kind of revolutionary revelation from the teacher. And I say that all he did is changed the packaging for an old (and not even his own) product, just like any clever modern corporation would do to boost it’s sales… It happens all the time, not just in “schools” – just look around. “New name – same great flavor! This time -more cheese!!!”
All these Stewards, Nine of Hearts and Lower Selves – just new fancy packaging for something else, pure intellectual labels that have no meaning or independent existence of themselves. Too bad these labels are given such tremendous importance. Why? Are they real? Sadly, 4th way is big on intellectual labeling, and now School is acting like an odd re-labeling machine… “Look at THIS! We’ll call it THAT. And it means this and that”.
How about just taking things as they simply are, without labeling and de-coding.
You haven’t answer my other question – Have you ever actually STOPPED imagination from “this place” or any other “place”? For how long did you stop it if you did?
You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. I was hoping the question makes you look within…
If you’re honest, you’ll have to admit that it is simply NOT POSSIBLE to stop thoughts and imagination. Yes, you can have a quiet second or two, and then it’s all comes back. It doesn’t seem to stop even in our dreams!
It’s like holding your breath – yes, you can do it for a little while, and then you simply must resume breathing.
Imagination and thoughts seem to be just as NATURAL as your breathing and heartbeat. Producing thoughts is what a healthy human brain must do. Where this whole idea came from – to STOP thoughts and imagination in order to be present? Is it the ultimate goal for you to become brain-dead (or “vegetable”?)
You can see that any of this permanent “stopping imagination by Steward” don’t work, because it simply can’t be done.
If you disagree and insist that it works – then please tell us honestly, how long can you stay without thoughts and imagination, after all these YEARS of practice?
Now may I share something with you. I came to realize (by pure luck I guess) that prolonged presence and thoughts are OK together… Even imagination and prolonged presence is OK together… Funny right? How can it be? That defeats all this fight for prolonged presence. But in my immediate and honest experience one can live, talk, eat, do business, imagine, create, laugh, make love – and have a prolo-o-o-onged presence! Nothing but presence! Never ever ending presence! With no struggle at all… Just eternal now and nothing else. In fact there is nothing I can possibly do to escape presence… Because presence is ALL THERE IS and there is no separating from it.
No, no, it doesn’t last for 3 seconds! In fact it became obvious that it’s 3 seconds that don’t exist…
Dearest Hava, it’s right there, under your nose, under anyone’s nose. Open your mind, open your eyes. It’s not a “mystery” reserved for selected special people, it is so simple and requires an understanding of a 3-year old… There is a shocking simplicity about this.
Don’t “strive” for prolonged presence – you’re it!
Our mind is way too cluttered to notice, and now more intellectual clutter is added, new silly labels. Throw them in the trash, and enjoy the simplicity of being. You’re stuck in the cage made of mind ideas and seem to struggle to be free. But you ARE free! The prison and struggle is in the mind… You’re fighting with wind mills…
Truth is not hidden – no need to hide it, it’s right in your face. No one owns it. It’s not difficult to see, it’s right here, right now – embrace, enjoy and live it!
(I love the original Hava Nagillah song by the way! It’s such a joyful song, although I have no idea what are they singing about…)
June 1, 2007 at 7:29 am
#325 Yesri Baba
Thanks for your reply. Now I get where you are coming from. You are right-Americans especially like to overdo things in the extreme in a vain effort to be the ‘best’ at something. Marathon meditation sessions or back to back classical music concerts will certainly not make you more conscious or raise your level of being. And anything can be addictive when it is used to feed the insatiable or insecure ego.
My perspective on meditation is this: you are going to go into a trance state every day anyway. It is how your intellect releases its grip on your awareness to give your emotional center a chance to processes feelings. It’s the way our brains are wired. Music has long been a way to help humans do this. But most people (Americans, that is) outsource their trance states to television. And the majority of TV programs of course are designed to make you feel afraid and/or inadequate so you will go out and buy something to compensate for those unsettling feelings and feel better, temporarily at least.
IMO meditation is a way to intentionally have a trance state, without the commercialism in order to be more balanced and present the rest of my waking hours.
That is why members of the Fellowship of Friends are ‘chasing Amy’ when they attempt to stay out of trance or ‘imagination’ as we called it, which is impossible and unhealthy to do anyway. When they catch themselves in trance they get insecure, think they are asleep, and feel compelled by guilt to redouble their ‘efforts’ and continue making teaching payments. This is what I learned being around Robert Burton. Shit man, he goes into trance just like he farts you just don’t notice it as much to be polite because he is an authority figure.
Sometimes I cry in meditation to release the ‘pain-body’ stuff, sometimes I write it out. I don’t like carrying around that extra baggage because it clouds my vision. Just as the stars are still there in the sky during the day, you just cannot see them in the bright sunlight, so to the ‘ghosts and spooks’ are there in the unconscious mind when you are awake. You just don’t notice them until something triggers them. So when someone or some situation really sets you off and you emotionally overreact, it is likely due to an unresolved ‘ghost’ from your past. That is what Shakespeare really meant when he wrote, ‘all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players’. Not because of the ‘c-influence’ play is written, moving-us-around-as-chess-players fundamentalist bullshit, but because we don’t actually ‘see’ people in our lives for whom they really are. We see them for the roles they play. Their ‘character’ role for us has been set in our early childhood from the people we knew, learned from and experienced as we grew up. We just get identified by surface appearances with narrowed attention and often forget that we have a past.
So for me, just living my life, working at being the best version of myself, is my way to ‘get at’ the ‘pain-body’ stuff. I don’t going around stuffing my feelings anymore, I use them as a guide back to myself…to know myself better.
WhaleRider
1979-1985
June 1, 2007 at 7:42 am
If I was in charge of keeping the FOF going, I would be afraid of the blog and I would try to stop it.
First I might check to see if I had any legal rights. If not I might try to scare people away (e.g. Be careful).
Finally if all else failed, I would spread the word that the blog is merely a group of former students expressing negativity and that frankly, it is not worth my time.
And then, to prove it, I would start throwing out personal insults under assumed names to see if I could get people to take the bait and insult me back. If enough of this occured, enough mud slinging, then I could be sure everyone, especially current students, would see that the blog was, as stated, a forum for negativity and a waste of time. That’s how I would destroy the blog.
June 1, 2007 at 8:03 am
Sheik: Re: 343 from LOL,
You might want to consider deleting this post.
June 1, 2007 at 8:17 am
Thank you Moon Angel, Medusa, Whalerider 360 & 339 and seemwally for your poem.
Welcome back Chopsticks. Are you coming over to this other side of the river? You sound more free.
Thank you all others for this blog community, as Whalerider put it.
Medusa you put it so clearly and you too whalerider. You know what you’re talking about, you’ve seen. In your last post Whalerider, you describe things as they are happening today. I cannot believe you were in twenty years ago. It is exactly the same. I cannot believe the inner circle has allowed this to go on and on and kept delluding themselves and everyone who joined, a little more each day.
Thank you for your very clear description of how it works.
I’ve been wishing to ask Another Name and Medusa to come to tea or coffee. Would you give me a call since I don’t know who you are? I would enjoy some relativity.
If you were around Whalerider, I would bring you the Ocean and continue watching you swim in it.
You all have no idea for how long I’ve not had genuine conversations like this one. Even Howard Carter is beginning to sound familiar and friendly!
I take no credit for your talking to me, but for my hearing you, it is a pleasure.
Allow me to share with you Dorothy’s absence. Almost three years that we’ve been chained to each others foot. Such a strange, difficult and beautiful play.
Even while choking terribly, she only had kind words.
I called the ambulance at eleven last night and brought her back at four thirty but they said I could not bring her in the ambulance because the insurance would not pay for it. She seemed fairly well, wasn’t coughing so much, the doctor gave her strong antibiotics and let me bring her home.
Then when we got here she couldn’t walk at all and I couldn’t carry her in. I had to drag her in across the floor. I kept almost shouting at her to help me but she couldn’t. I Finally got her in bed and she said kind words, like she did often. She knew when to forgive me. I fell sleep but she coughed non stop for another three hours and died before Dinara (who arrived at nine), or I, could blink. She looked peaceful after the great distress.
Life, like death, just happens to us. Then a lifetime is spent trying to understand the facts.
June 1, 2007 at 9:20 am
This is my first look at this blog and postings. I have only skimmed a few so far.
It’s been more than 20 years since I left the school (the second time). Basically, I haven’t looked back. I was counting today. I have two close friends who are former students. Otherwise, students (current or former) are not part of my life.
There are a few people whom I remember with great affection, especially:
– Jan Allen
– Elizabeth Kent
– Daria Ricci
– Michael Sevick
– Richard and Ceri Wolf
– (others whom I’m blanking out for the moment)
It’s unlikely that all of them are still students after all this time, but some of them may be.
I’m of comparable vintage to Whale Rider (comment 360) so quite possibly we’re acquainted.
For myself, I think I ‘turned a profit’ on my experience in the Fellowship. Through the example of other students, I moved to San Francisco, which turned out to be a very congenial home and I learned a trade that has turned into a comfortably remunerative career.
Though I was the right age and sex, I never caught the teacher’s fancy (that bitch!).
A lot of what we accepted then is obviously preposterous in retrospect– especially about California falling into the ocean.
Verification will serve you in good stead.
Regards,
Demi Moaned
1977-1982, 1983-1986
(Anyone who knew me then will recognize who I am from the information contained here.)
June 1, 2007 at 9:22 am
Dear Whalerider, I want to thank you again for your continued contributions to the blog–being from the same “generation” has made your posting very emotional for me (and I wished we had the being at the time to be more open with one another), but I also to warn you to not fall into the trap to divulge too much personal information as you want to maintain your privacy–this is what you are being baited with–I hope you are aware of this. There really is no need to be “picked apart” and your identity divulged–Others and I have vouched for your honesty and I do so here again. Although my experience was not the same as yours, for many different reasons probably that are not important, if we gain through this forum by transforming our experiences, to any extent, the entire blog is worth it.
All my best to you, again, your once and virtual Roommate
June 1, 2007 at 10:11 am
To Chopsticks: 10/338
“My question to you is this, now that you know how to Self Remember then why stay in the school?”
It’s tempting to take what one gains and strike out for one’s self. Many do. My understanding is that the school gives us something (the ability to SR) but also wants something in return; They (Influence C) want our consciousness. They want our efforts to build their/our school.
For me, I had a realization at the first meeting I attended that I was now involved in something on the scale of a lifetime. No one told me that back then, no one has ever told me that in so many words. It was just a fact to me.
I also feel the school is the perfect environment to engage presence. I’m sure it can be done outside of a school invironment but I’m not sure if it can be done as well.
“What are the aims of the school right now?”
The same as always, to create consciousness in its participants. Other subservient aims go under the heading of creating the “form” and change from time to time.
“How does “Cave drawings” images help you to Self Remember?”
The theory is that all schools are the same school; they communicate with their future counterparts through the works they leave behind. Apparently the rust of sleep is so encrusted that we need to keep hearing the same thing said many ways to stir the emotions sufficiently to shake that rust away.
“When was the last time the teacher gave you a personal observation to help you become more awake?”
He gave me several personal observations 20 years ago that I am still working on.
June 1, 2007 at 10:24 am
Thou Art That. Tat Tvam Asi.
You are already what you seek to find. Seeking it, is only missing it.
It is all a paradox, what you seek to find for freedom is your very own self here and now.
The cosmic joke of ‘Enlightenment’ is that you already are and have always been ‘Realized’.
If you take a closer look at your own familiar everyday self and investigate yourself.
You will be surprised to discover that the Self or Reality you seek to know, is truly yourself.
Always closer than close. You will only laugh at yourself for seeking to discover the Real Self!
Simply because it is present here and now, it is you! Just as you are right here and now you are IT.
Gee!yoU aRe yoU, is the only Real-‘I’-zation, nothing else but simply being your own familiar self.
Only the feeling of being a separate entity is the only cause of all mischief. Nothing else.
Because of this false notion of being a separate self or entity from the whole,
there is a subtle search for Oneness and a deep desire to become whole.
To feel separate or apart is to feel insecure and vulnerable.
Not knowing that being oneself is also being the One Self is the only problem.
Therefore Seeking happiness and wholeness outside oneself, in a transient world Therefore Seeking happiness and wholeness outside oneself, in a transient world
which by very nature cannot remain permanent, but is always changing is suffering.
Know the Truth! Reality and Freedom is not a spiritual state or religious event.
Because of the false notion of separation and duality people turn to religion and spirituality.
Paradoxically, spirituality and religions point away from Reality and consciousness.
Some people turn to Eastern or Western religions lineage and pick up all sorts of dividing
and separating religious concepts from holy books and others disguised as holy beings,
that are keeping the earnest person in the dark, blind by ignorance and confusion.
You will never find the answer to who am ‘I’ in any holy, religious or spiritual books.
But only by turning within and getting to know your own self, get to know ‘I’ am.
“And all shall be well and all the manner of things shall be well.” TS Eliot
June 1, 2007 at 11:20 am
In post #229 Howard Carter makes a feeble attempt to
make an argument for all events being a play writes in regard to a post of Ames
“From what I could grasp I would offer that all the major spiritual traditions point to an active, controlling deity. Why does practically the exact creation myth show up in so many diverse cultures? What about fate, destiny, reincarnation, preordaination, the “word” of God, prophecy/prophets? Don’t these things point to the play being written? And you really believe this is a “Burtonism”?
This is a bit of slight of hand as while it is true that many diverse traditions indicate that there is a higher mind and many have similar creation myth’s not all indicate that predestination is the result. In fact this is not at all indicated by many traditions. It is a an open question. Free will vs. predestination. One on which there is a mass of views which have developed and existed for 1000’s of years. It is a typical FOF attitude of intellectual arrogance that an individual would present any opinion as objective truth in regards to a question on such a large scale. I.E.. Bullshit or as Gurdjieff so accurately described the intellectual process of such “learned beings of new formation” as “Howard Carter” “pouring from the emptiness into the void”. It is not the argument for “the play” but speaking about it as proven when it is obviously not which makes this argument false. This is clearly a habit of repeating what “THE TEACHER” says as true.
What is more true is that most traditions indicate that behind the play of life as we see it are both a higher mind and a higher play of Laws and forces that determine events. The system provides a simple idea-there is a higher mind, C influence and all is governed by the interplay of the Law of Three and Law of Seven. This is not the same as predestination. There is also the idea of the interplay of the Law of Fate, Law of Accident and the Law of Cause and effect. From my perspective and the result I most often experience as a result of applying “active being mentation” to this subject is reverence and awe for the mystery of creation.
Among many different forms of thought The ancient Chinese developed a complete system based on the study of the “I-Ching”. Inherent in the “I-Ching” is the idea of choice. The “I-Ching” recognizes the existence of a higher or non physical mind in the form of the spirits of the ancestors yet The I-Ching also attempts to indicate the possible path’s for development of right conduct. This assumes the possibility of choice. The “I-Ching” also includes the idea of right action being necessary for specific results that is the right process (Rodney Collin’s description of 6 processes)
Ouspensky entitled his description of his time with Gurdjieff “In Search of the Miraculous”. This indicates the possibility of the existence of the Miraculous. What could this be? One possibility is that the Miraculous is the possibility of changing ones fate. This means all is not preordained. We are actually given rather simple directions that indicate the proper direction for efforts to achieve this. Self Remembering changes ones fate.
As has been stated many times the use of the idea of a Play has been misused by the FOF to encourage individuals to give up will and justify failing to act on individual conscience. Ouspensky clearly discussed the idea that conscience is one aspect of consciousness. To those former students as well as current students this should provide a simple equation. If conscience and consciousness are and can only be an individual experience then it would seem to follow that one can only develop by following ones own inner compass. What ever goes counter to this cannot be right. No matter what clever games the FOF may have used to distort these ideas is does come back to the individual. It would seem to be a shallow substitute for real consciousness and conscience to await the anointing of RB as the next “Big Thing” I.E. “conscious being”. All theory aside inner development no matter what words one uses must began and end in oneself.
The Buddhist teaching of the 8 fold path also includes the idea of different possible actions. As why teach right action if there are no choices.
a quote.
“The way to liberation is to train yourself to live in the present without
waiting to become anything. Give up becoming this or that, live without
cravings, and experience this present moment with full attention.”
The Buddha
June 1, 2007 at 11:45 am
Dear Chile Pepper,
Thanks, I haven’t had such a good laugh at someone for years. The way you ripped into Elena was priceless, it shows anyone with half a brain what a complete waste of air you are.
Love,
Ryan.
June 1, 2007 at 12:06 pm
Vinnie the Fish,
You Stink!
Love,
Ryan.
June 1, 2007 at 3:04 pm
Howard Carter: I think that it’s necessary to keep posts like that undeleted.
Vinnie the Fish: There is more fun to be had, good fun finding it.
June 1, 2007 at 3:37 pm
Dear Lol,
Did not see you at the party…?
It is all in the eye of the beholder. Verified that one ready your letter.
You are looking through dirty pair of glasses, time to clean, your own mind. Maybe the 4 wordless breaths X 3000 would be helpful. Sit with it and listen to your inner self where your pain comes from.
I am sso sorry for you, you are part of my blog world and i love you.
June 1, 2007 at 4:25 pm
# 378 from NO Name
I am also NoName but I am not the author of post 378 signed by No Name, with slight difference in signing.
Sheik I want to officially change my name today as not to confuse anyone:
NoName-ONE
Thanks!
June 1, 2007 at 4:29 pm
To 2b (#352)
My observation is that the FOF is like any institution. An analogy: it has a body. It has it’s own independent form, energy, laws, body and cells. It is governed by its DNA, its belief system and concept about the world. The analogy even extends to the “leucocytes” which leap to defend the self-concept of the FOF; witness Daniel, sorry, Howard Carter, and Hava Nagillah. The self-concept (DNA/belief system) is reinforced at meetings, one of the main ways that members are shaped into recognizable commonality of form (the shaping therefore induces sleep and encourages self–delusion). Deviations from the DNA, in the form of new ideas or fresh intelligence, particularly from the outside, are seen the same way as our bodies see a virus, and evoke the antibody/antigen reaction so often seen on the blog. Such reactions confirm the mutual agreement to sleep. Poor old Girard, poor old Linda, poor old Hava, poor old LOL, poor old @#$%^&*, helplessly turning out to defend the indefensible…
My feeling is that far from supporting an open discussion, the “leucocytes” would much, much rather the blog somehow went away—which of course it will, but in its own good time. The FOF has already tried their version of a blog or discussion board. It was soon abandoned because the heady winds of freedom were too much for the management of the empire. They literally did not know what to do with the new information—so out went the order, “close it down”. They could not trust the members to faithfully regurgitate the party line (transmission of order), or to see or choose for themselves. Little did they know, that like this blog, it had the potential to give them everything they needed to know to ensure the health and longevity of the organization—if only they had ears to hear. So ironic.
Even in the ‘old days’ when there was a journal (a kind of record of meetings, beautifully printed on a letterpress and sent out to individuals in all the centers, for those who can’t remember), the ‘angles’ and viewpoints were heavily censored and often entirely re-written or invented by Burton and Linda T; control right down to the last period (“full stop”, in the rest of the English–speaking world). I’d guess the brief attempt to create a discussion board was an aberration by someone who didn’t understand the probable consequences, or who exceeded their authority.
One aspect of this blog may be that it is an expression of what Gurdjieff called, “aieioiuioa”, the sacred cry from below towards the unbecoming manifestations from above (see Ch. 17, “The Arch Absurd” of Beelzebub’s Tales). This infers that if one channel, like the blog, were somehow to be closed down before its time, another channel would appear using another form.
For another possible explanation more suitable to those in charge of the Fellowship of Friends, I’ll have to call on the experts. Hey, Siddiq or anyone else close to Burton, is it true that he is saying something approximating, “The blog and the recent meetings between ex-students constitute the Greatest Crime so far against the Greatest School the world has ever known”? If so, it would be pretty much in line with previous pronouncements I have personally heard from his lips, right down to the tone of grandiose self–pity. So, Siddiq, keep us updated on our level of criminality, would you?
Love to all,
Ames
June 1, 2007 at 4:41 pm
Dear Elena,
Dorothy was very dear to me in my early days at Oregon House.
I am surprised she lived this long.
She always looked very old.
She gave me a few gifts I still have.
Her gentleness touched me and I will always remember her.
I can only be happy she left her body and hope she is free now.
May her departure bring sweetness to your heart, for us left behind in this life death makes us more real….
Love.
June 1, 2007 at 4:51 pm
from 324/10
“I’ll Give It a Try Says:
This is the best I can do from memory. Others will no doubt pitch in to complete the list.”
Erasmus wasn’t on the list but Ezekiel was. Plus Hans Christian Andersen, Buddha, Lewis Carroll, Geoffrey Chaucer, Hafiz (Shams-ud-Din Mohammed), Joseph (son of Jacob), Omar Khayyam, Paul, Peter, Rembrandt, and Virgil.
formerfofer
(1978-92)
June 1, 2007 at 4:57 pm
“As I expected, you took the bait from my last post”
Ah, Whalerider, so you are admitting to being dishonest and manipulative? And I thought we were beginning to become friends!
“what do you feel most vulnerable about in your work on yourself?”
A)Lying to Juan’s self B)Lying to Juan’s friends C)Lying to the community.
Statistically it has been documented, after the wave of molestations to children, that the further away from the actual event the more likely the details of the event have become distorted in the minds of the victim.
I am not saying what you experienced was not real to you nor any less an emotional trauma but I am questioning what you can remember from an event that happenned so long ago.
_________________________________________
“…maybe we should get together for lunch sometime. I can bring Bruce and we will watch you puke at the sight of us.”
ROFLMAF!!! This is too much. Thanx!
__________________________________________
Cake, please says:
“(Exlax, something in what you said rings true).”
Ah, signs if intelligent life….
June 1, 2007 at 5:57 pm
“Ryan O’Poo Says: Vinnie the Fish, You Stink!
Love, Ryan.”
Good one Ryan, eloquently put.. but with a name like yours.. no comment. It might look more sincere if you sign off “Hatred, Ryan” though.
Hi MoonAngel, I swim quite freely in and out of the school thanks. It’s possible to swim in it and not drown I’ve found, if I stay true to myself, and don’t imitate others’ words, actions, expressions, habits, opinions, beliefs.
Rabbi Burns, you think too much. Following my conscience doesn’t make me identified, on the contrary, it saves me from a lot of the useless anguish people seem to suffer. It’s so very simple. Nobody makes me think or read or do anything I don’t want to. I don’t ‘believe’ anything either:
Say a used car salesmen tells me a car has a “genuine 10,000 on the clock”. If I ‘believe’ him, all I’m saying is “I hereby blind myself to the 60% doubt I have inside”. If I buy the car anyway, accepting my assessment that he’s probably lying, I am free, it was my choice.. no anger or blame. Isn’t all of life like that – we can become independent entities.
It would not make sense to my conscience to deny my own experience and judgement. What else have I got to navigate through the world with?
One of my early questions in the school was ‘is Robert permanently conscious?’ as he allegedly claimed. I asked a Cuban close to Robert, who said he ‘has no doubt’. But that was just HIS opinion. I didn’t see ANY evidence to support the claim… on the contrary!! So naturally my experience outweighs the hearsay.
Hi Sheik I hope this is not all too boring for you, not having been in the school.. Hopefully it can be more generally useful on our path of human potential actualization or evolution or whatever it’s called!
June 1, 2007 at 6:03 pm
#376 Elena Says:
“You must understand, Pepper, that brainwashing is not only something that happens through words, but through actions and forms.”
Brainwashing occurs when we make the mistake of believing the thoughts that happen to us without the intervention of our will. Our own minds brainwash our being into a state of sleep.
Channel all this energy into your Self and into a recognition of the world that is surrounding you now. Forgive and transform the past, release all resentment against the circumstances that were necessary to bring you up to this moment in your life. Remember yourself and transform into a positive emotion that cannot become negative the storage of energy supplied by the events of your existence. Use all the “something is/was wrong” ‘I’s to remind you that nothing is wrong now other than the machine’s identification. You are free if you can separate from the useless outrage generated when it finally becomes clear that life is not fair.
June 1, 2007 at 6:06 pm
We could argue about who believes what till the cows come home!
June 1, 2007 at 7:41 pm
To Elena (various posts):
You mentioned in several of your posts that you think/know that the FOF leads to illnesses and untimely deaths in its members.
Quantifying illnesses in and out of FOF, in a valid epidemiological way would be difficult, but quantifying death is easy (using a dualistic approach, dead or alive!). That is what one of my friends did to investigate the statement that RB often made in the past, that is: C-Influence is persecuting the FOF by taking the lives of its members at a seemingly high rate (I paraphrase). This friend inventoried all deaths that occurred in the FOF since 1977 (FOF did not keep very accurate statistics before, but few students, if any, died before then). Only deaths of members were quantified (Kevin K. would be tallied but not Brian S., for instance). It came to about 2.3 deaths per year, with 2 years when there were as many as 6 deaths and several when there were none. He then applied the age-adjusted US death statistics published by the CDC to the roster of students during that same period, to predict the expected yearly number of deaths. The results were not even close: predicted number of yearly deaths was 4-5 times that observed. In other words, one could say that being in the FOF keeps you from dying an untimely death, on the average. Obviously, these are only statistics (lies, damn lies and stat…), but at the very least, it does not support the statement that the FOF “makes people die early”. I would venture to say that one might find similar conclusions with somatic illnesses, and even psychological illnesses, but I have no evidence for it.
Elena, and others also call Robert and the FOF misogynistic. I don’t get it, and I have not seen it. I would accept that one would see Robert as misanthropic, perhaps, but not just misogynistic. After all, he does women a huge favor by not inviting them in his bedroom. You do not find women in his regular entourage, serving his events or house cleaning his quarters, hardly something to complain about. But women have equal access to events, they pay the same dues, and can leave whenever they wish, as do men. Historically, they have occupied positions of authority, in administration or teaching, to the same extent as did men. Currently, the FOF president is a woman, the CFO is a woman, the Isis Directors have 2/3 female representatives, the person organizing travels is a woman, etc, etc… My observation is that RB has been very good at sponsoring women with talent and leadership qualities, in a position of leadership, while allowing them to be themselves, not just token males. All know how much he learned from some amongst the early prominent women in the school, and no, they were not all rich. I simply do not see that Robert treats women more poorly, or better than he does men, again on average.
Elena also mentioned that half the males in the school have slept with Robert, and later states than at least 90% of men have been approached, while the remaining 10% regrets or inner considers having been left off. Would you, Elena, care to try and substantiate such claims (outlandish, in my view)? Do not get me wrong, my intention is not to invalidate everything you wrote (a daunting task), but simply to point out that you may get carried away with some of your statements. After all, one of your stated intentions was to collect facts and debunk lies about the FOF.
__________
To Tereza (10-348)
“It is NOT gossip when you pointed out that Renato died of aids. You are clarifying a situation. By pointing that out, you are protecting other people from the dangers of the disease.”
I do not agree with that statement on 2 counts. May be it is not gossip, but it certainly is lack of decency and invasion of privacy, and I am not talking about FOF privacy here, but Renato’s and his family.
I also do not see how revealing the possible (probable?) cause of Renato’s death, in any way protects people from the dangers of HIV. HIV is contagious. It does not present a danger to casual relationships however, only to intimate ones. Is it not the responsibility of those involved in intimate relationships to be open and truthful about themselves? Is it not the responsibility of those “old enough” to engage in intimate relationships to know its potential dangers? What does this have to do with throwing old friends’ reputation under the bus? That seems to me what Kiran is doing, not improving public health.
_____________
To Moon Angel (10-347), about the school cosmology.
Some statements are accurate, others not. Robert does not present himself as Christ equivalent any longer. In fact, he rather rarely mentions C-Influence nowadays. As to predictions, this subject has largely been off the table since 1998. I know those two points remain a big part of the demonized aspects of his personality, but they have largely gone by the way side. In addition, he does not say presence=heavens and imagination=hell. He did say heaven=presence and hell=imagination. The point is that he was trying (my word) to key passages of the bible and give them a practical significance for his students, by using work terms that students understand and have had the opportunity to verify. He was not trying (my assumption) to revive the guilt/morality that are linked to such terms as hell and heavens, which I find is implied in the way you present your post. While it is impossible for me to know whether such keys are true or not, it allows me to use a layer of reading of the Bible that I did not have before.
In general, unlike many here, I do not see RB as someone intrinsically nefarious, who carefully planned the whole thing for his greedy and personal benefits. Call him deluded if you want, that would make him rather ordinary, if that were all he is. I think he grew in his role, propelled forth by his students and held back by his own limitations. The result is there for all of us to witness and the subject of this ongoing chronicle.
June 1, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Student, behold, LOL is not the student but one of them: the many negative ‘I’s of the lower self.
June 1, 2007 at 8:08 pm
Fellow Travelers,
What a wonderful opportunity we have here, to try and reformulate the path that brought us to where we are. I’ve loved reading yours, I hope mine is helpful.
Note on method: I’m intellectually-centered, 5 or 6 of diamonds. I’m the Mercury in Susan Zannos’ Human Types, but believe there is also an admixture of Venus and Solar (BTW, I got interested in astrology and discovered I have an extremely tight–astrologers call it a ‘cazimi’–conjunction of the Sun and Venus in Aquarius. I’m also a Gemini rising, and that’s one of Mercury’s signs). So I like to talk and explain, but there will be a lot of references thrown in to flesh things out. You can always find the books I mention on Amazon, but by all means don’t buy from them–support your B influence bookshop!
As said before, one of the most important things to me about Gurdjieff was his willingness to “step on corns,” and right from the introductory meetings I figured this guy Burton could do that. The “Homosexuality Exercise” really rubbed me the wrong way, and when I discovered RB’s own sexuality it just seemed like a big joke, like Ouspensky calling off the voyage to America at the last minute. Within a few months a very high-class gay couple joined the New York center and the exercise was promptly revoked, reinforcing for me the nature of these “exercises.”
The folks in the New York Center were all awesome and I happily took on the mantle of “Man Number Four” after my first dinner with Robert. By 1995 I had moved to Apollo, did some continental criss-crossing and then landed a great job at a local business that was all students. Talk about the high-life: I was making “life” money, was a regular at the Apollo d’Oro, dabbled in the theater, attended great cultural events, etc.
Inside, the contradictions of Robert’s teaching were reaching a climax. It seems to me that the organism of the Fellowship takes on certain themes at certain times, and during my tenure a lot of focus was placed on suffering.
“Suffering” was considered very important to one’s evolution – but to me, and maybe I’m just too Buddhist, suffering is not important to enlightenment, its important to maintaining a sense of self and excluding enlightenment. Gurdjieff said the last thing people were willing to give up was their suffering, and I verified this observation with nearly everyone I met in the Fellowship.
Here was my question that never received an angle: “Tell me what the suffering is that cannot be shown to be identification, imagination, or negative emotions?” The closest I got to an answer was that I was young and naïve. Now that’s a dodge–I may be “blessed and highly-favored” (from my Harlem Grandma), but I wasn’t asking about me, I was asking you, “What is your suffering that is not identification, imagination or negative emotions?” And I never got an answer, so I went deeper inside.
I kept abandoning all suffering that wasn’t identification, imagination or negative emotions. This is a true alchemical process, god-bless G&O. But a lot needs to get dropped, including teacher, system, school…even presence. Its amazing to find at your core a transformation of suffering that delivers all the love and will the Creation needs. I first found that field atop a hill in the vineyard, and bear nothing but compassion for all those that traveled along the path with me.
But we all know how those states, those “verifications,” fall away with the first obstacle. I continued with the FOF (as “we must”) for a few more years, even became the first Regional Coordinator who had never led a center. But being a student was becoming a constriction, not an opening to the Creation (nice word, BTW, but I’m not sure there is a Creator). I remember the last question I put to my spirit, outside the teaching house on Riverside Drive: “Should I stay in the School?” (No, I couldn’t see the identification, imagination, or negative emotion of the question.) The answer was an unmediated guffaw, a tremendous numinous indifference that threw me to the ground and made me realize that the question has absolutely nothing to do with my awakening.
So you pick things up as you find ‘em and keep going. Be careful with the drugs and drinking, too many of us (G&O, Alan Watts, Chungyam Trungpa, the list goes on) use that for the easy exit out of here. I sure as hell tried it, even consider myself a priest of Dionysius. Trick is, each Bacchic priest or priestess is also a card-carrying Apollonian. Blessing/Curse of Being.
walter.tanner@gmail.com
June 1, 2007 at 9:06 pm
In Reply to request to delete LOL Post #343/10
Yes, this is exactly what the Fellowship of Friends has been deleting from their conscious conscience (buffering) in respects to the raw contradictions concerning Robert Earl Burton for 34+ years, from the very first day that the first student realized “He lied about being celibate!”
Conscience and consciousness do not grow at the same pace, nor simultaneously.
Yes, Sheik, keep it up (Post #343/10) as a reminder of where one goes drinking copious amounts of self-will-numbing wine, talking about the importance of second & third line and flying Robert Burton away on a paper airplane through one of the million pinholes of the mind ‘to do’ board.
I love you all, yet, stand up, do something outside this blog-box, write the California Governor’s Office, bring the Terminator in on this ‘official church’;
blogs are created by ‘certain forces’ to vent steam, keeping ‘real fires’ from disturbing ‘the sleep’: the nozzle of a flame-thrower and a water hose look amazingly similar.
_________________________________
Elena, you wrote ~
“May her soul bring back the gratitude of sharing, to this God forsaken Fellowship of Friends.”
Very wishful thinking Elena; physical deaths, particularly ones which happen outside the inner circle hardly stop anyone in their tracks, its too close to real Scale and Relativity, a reminder of the now-urgency of certain sorts of reconciliation, unless of course there’s a baby rattlesnake at one’s ankle while hearing of a student’s death, those little guys ‘do’ bring pause.
Can the “God forsaken” state of being truly
transform into ‘gratitude of sharing’… To me, it’s one or the other, no in between, unless of course you’re satisfied with relative awakening, living the contradiction by being identified as a good one yourself.
It is amazing how your ‘spirit style of writing changed between Post #376/10 & #387/10, it seems that Dorothy’s death has made an effect on you; perhaps it has fulfilled what you wished upon the Fellowship of Friends (gratitude) within you (?)
A long journey with her, thank you for taking care of her Elena, truly, I have been watching that situation for a very long time, seeing it as one of those top 5 list items showing how the Fellowship of Friends is a moon, not a sun.
The above is a personal ‘thank you’ for enduring, not a blog-thank you; it is difficult to share certain depths in written formats such as blogs.
_____________________________
Love to you all.
June 1, 2007 at 9:26 pm
To the walking wounded looking for some understanding…
To the wounded healers looking for their voice…
To the teachers and healers and artists looking for relevance in today’s world…
Another stunner about authority and spirituality from Caroline Casey.
http://kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=20507
Love to all-
Shelley
June 1, 2007 at 9:27 pm
…..no person is able to be present consistently and awake completely without constant right effort and outside help from eternal conscious school work…..
June 1, 2007 at 9:30 pm
#326
“But 4th Way is the sly man’s way — which means the very mendacity of your guru can shock you into realizations and true changes of Being.”
We are ALL beggars.
June 1, 2007 at 9:42 pm
KathrynF
Thanks for the photos. Did we share a house in SF sometime in 1978? It was a beautiful place up above the Aves I think it was called Forest Park. There was a flurry of people coming through SF at that time and I think you and your young solar husband (or boy friend I can’t remember which) were in that house with Barbara Sanders, myself and a few others for a while. Maybe it was a different Kathryn. I recognized about 10 or 15 of the folks in the photos and contrary to LOL found you all to be amazing and it was wonderful to see you again. Even if I don’t know some of you from the past the connection in the present draws us all together. My love to you all. Sandra C you look terrific.
Steve
June 1, 2007 at 9:46 pm
To all who were at the party, and in this blog!
It looks like it must have been fun and quite emotional to reconnect after all this time for some, I see lots of familiar faces–wished I could have been there to say hello to several good friends! Thanks Ames for doing this…you and many others DO have that sparkle! Great to see that.
Good luck to all of us ignoring some of the violent postings here!
Siddiq
June 1, 2007 at 10:12 pm
(just one of thousands)….in relation to the origin of the Three Traditional Ways to awakening:
HOW THE HUMAN BRAIN EVOLVED
We slowly ascended from lower life forms to what we are today, by a process of natural selection from randomly occurring changes. Each change had to prove its worth by surviving the continual battle for existence, being against being, species against species and this process has gone on for many millions of years.
As far as we know the human brain evolved in three main stages {3}. Its ancient and primitive part is the innermost core reptilian brain. Next evolved the mammalian brain by adding new functions and new ways of controlling the body. Then evolved the third part of the brain, the neocortex, the grey matter, the bulk of the brain in two symmetrical hemispheres, separate but communicating. To a considerable extent it is our neocortex which enables us to behave like human beings.
So the human brain consists of these three different but interconnected brains and the way in which these three brains interact with each other underlies human behaviour. {3}
How the brain evolved and functions is explored and described in the immediately following chapters which cover how the brain evolved, sleep and sleeping, dreaming and dreams, and how we learn, memorise and remember.
The final chapters contain conclusions which describe how the functioning of the human brain and of the human mind determine behaviour.
What we see in this report raises a number of pertinent questions which need answering. Questions such as why do we have to struggle for a better life and what motivates human beings.
Reptilian Brain
Innermost in our brain is what is called the reptilian brain, its oldest and most primitive part. The reptilian brain appears to be largely unchanged by evolution and we share it with all other animals which have a backbone.
This reptilian brain controls body functions required for sustaining life such as breathing and body temperature. Reptiles are cold-blooded animals which are warmed by the daylight sun and conserve energy by restricting activities when it is dark. The biological clock (controller) for their activity-rest cycle is located in the eye itself {10}.
At this level of evolution, behaviour relating to survival of the species, such as sexual behaviour, is instinctive and responses are automatic. Territory is acquired by force and defended. Might is right.
Mammalian Brain
Next to evolve from the reptilian brain was the mammalian brain. An enormous change took place as mammals evolved from reptiles, the mammalian brain containing organs {11, 12}:
For the automatic control of body functions such as digestion, the fluid balance, body temperature and blood pressure (autonomic nervous system, hypothalamus).
For filing new experiences as they happen and so creating a store of experience-based memories (hippocampus).
For experience-based recognition of danger and for responding to this according to past experience. And for some conscious feelings about events (amygdala).
To this extent the mammal is more consciously aware of itself in relation to the environment. Millions of neural pathways connect the hippocampal and amygdala structures to the reptilian brain and behaviour is less rigidly controlled by instincts. It seems that feelings such as attachment, anger and fear have emerged with associated behavioural response patterns of care, fight or flight. {4}
Human Brain
And the mammalian brain became the human brain by adding the massive grey matter (neocortex) which envelopes most of the earlier brain and amounts to about 85 per cent of the human brain mass.
This massive addition consists mostly of two hemispheres which are covered by an outer layer and interconnected by a string of nerve fibres. {13}
The brain is actually divided into its ‘hemispheres’ by a prominent groove. At the base of this groove lies the thick bundle of nerve fibres which enable these two halves of the brain to communicate with each other.
But the left hemisphere usually controls movement and sensation in the right side of the body, while the right hemisphere similarly controls the left side of the body.
We saw that with the mammalian brain emerged feelings such as attachment, fear and anger and associated behavioural response patterns.
And human emotional responses depend on neuronal pathways which link the right hemisphere to the mammalian brain {4} which in turn is linked to the even older reptilian brain.
Etc…
http://www.solbaram.org/articles/humind.html
_________________________
The lost ancient knowledge of the three divisions of the brain allowed choosen human beings to work through the preminent part of their human brains to attain consciousness following a certain precise path and directions.
The Fourth Way has been created after much experience on the three ways, which still exist, to work on the three parts simultaneously.
June 1, 2007 at 11:05 pm
You-me-us-they Says:
What would be Art-naiveté ?
What would be Art-denial ?
Hi You-me-us-they,
I just happen to be a person who looks at visual art – have been since I was a baby. I have friends who listen to music, dance, act, write, love math, and the experiences translate. But I will tell you what I mean about experiencing art beyond naiveté and denial. Looking at a work is like walking thru another person’s mind (being), but to get there you have to have an inner quiet. It is a process of slowly opening up which puts one in a vulnerable position – at least it feels that way. Particularly with something one doesn’t like or understand. We just want to judge and label (naïve in the hurry, and denial in the pushing away) and move on – pleasant nice feelings are much preferred. But with much contemporary art you don’t get pleasant or nice. The world is a complex place and there is so much more global recognition of suffering and also buffers to that. Much of that seeps into art. I suspend (or at least try to) judgment and discrimination for awhile. Discrimination is much more valuable then judgment, but they are related. Unfortunately judgment usually simply takes the place of discrimination. Discrimination, for me, flows in very slowly after being quiet with a work of art for a period of time. I experience it as a kind of emotion and a kind of revelation. A new understanding, concept, happens in a feeling way. I look closely and move around so that my whole body is involved too. Sometimes I move on to do a psychological read, and analyze the technique and other things. I learned this over many years, often because I really wanted to get into and understand the art of friends so I worked at it.
I was moved when Cathie said this: “In time you may understand that the world is a mirror, and what you see is your own reflection. If you see ugliness and decay, look within yourself for its source. If you see beauty, it’s only because there is beauty in you.” With so much contemporary art ugliness and beauty are all mixed together and often I really can see myself in that and the best experiences lead me to the experience of compassion.
Kat
June 1, 2007 at 11:27 pm
“No, no, It doesn’t last for 3 seconds! In fact it became obvious that it’s 3 seconds that don’t exist…”
Good one No Person! It is disconcerting to feel the subtle conceptualizations of the hours of the day, the “flavors” of the days of the weeks, months and years.It makes one wonder what else we are dreaming about?
#384 WhaleRider
Yeah, sometimes the tears flow hard. Sometimes one feels the depths of the alienation, the abandonment and lonliness of this life and “out of the corner of one’s eye” we see that it is I who have done this to myself. The eternal game of cat and mouse. For a moment we are home and we have always been home and we will always be home and there is no place like home.
Love to you.
June 1, 2007 at 11:49 pm
Thanks for posting the photos of the get-together! It looks like fun, and it was wonderful to see friends I haven’t seen in a long time. Wish I could have been there. I thought everyone looked great — much more lifelike (pun intended) than our typically stiff interactions in the Fellowship.
As to the post from LOL — you have provided us with your own photograph of yourself, much more revealing than any snapshot. I can see every bit of twisted, sneering, venomous hatred — self-hatred, mostly. It would suck to be you.
Post #392 from “A Former Student” had many interesting points. I found particular resonance with:
“the use of the idea of a Play has been misused by the FOF to encourage individuals to give up will and justify failing to act on individual conscience.”
This caused me a great deal of concern in the Fellowship from the beginning — I had understood that the idea of giving up self-will was something that had a definite, limited time period, and would be based on the leader’s assessment of the individual requirements of the individual. When I realized there was nothing but general tasks and exercises, red flags went up, but it took lots of time and increasing misery to act on them. A primary problem was that the exercises and suggestions seemed bent on molding individuals into people that shared Robert’s likes and dislikes, as though one could change one’s fundamental being in this area. It felt like working to change the size and shape of my ears.
Vinnie the Fish’s (post 349) approach may be a good way to remain sane in such an environment, but I would ask, what’s the point of being in a school if you’re just going to do whatever you want? He seems to imply that you’re a sucker for taking the requirements seriously and sincerely. When I was a member, I was under the impression that that’s what doing the work was all about.
June 2, 2007 at 12:03 am
(Sheik: sorry for the double post but the formatting got screwed up the first time, please delete the earlier post, and thanks.)
317 Questioning
Finally a question to JoelF–what is circular about the reasoning of Hava, Siddiq or HC…
Their reasoning is circular because both the frame of expression and the end results are fixed and preordained, without any deviation. Round and round they go, but always arrive at the same point.
Do you really sincerely believe you are experiencing more truth and reality than the current students?
I don’t know what current students are experiencing (but not much fun, from the reports here). I know that the apprehension of “truth” and “reality” were severely compromised and pre-packaged when I was in the FoF, and that I had to leave to have any chance of getting in touch with them.
343 LOL
What an unbelievable slide show of pictures of a bunch of …
Well, I was there, and what I saw were people who had not been pushed through a cookie cutter, who had an intrinsic integrity to them that allowed them to stand on their own two feet without myths to prop them up. Strong people who know something about themselves and who have a variety of interests, not a dictated agenda. And I found that beautiful, yes.
And thanks to Kathryn and Bruce for posting your photos, lovely.
349 Vinnie the fish
Oh great, another bubble boy.
354 Howard Carter
Joel, I know a cult of intellectuals when I see one, be it virtual or otherwise.
Apparently not, Howard.
It’s fine that the FoF is labeled a cult by people who share your sentiment about it, regardless that it fails any number of “litmus tests” for cults.
You sound like you’ve actually researched this, which I doubt. Please say how the FoF is not a cult, I’d love to hear it.
But this blog, which worships the written word in a cult-like manner (as long as it is anti-FoF) cannot be labled as such?
Howard, the blog cannot worship anything, and I see no particular evidence that the posters here “worship the written word.” Where is your evidence for that? From your comments it seems that you don’t actually have any idea what a cult is or how it works. Don’t you think it would be wise, and in your own best interests, to get educated on a matter which (whether you believe it or not) has had, and continues to have, the most profound effect on your life?
363 Beyond
I do think that what you call an open discussion is a waste of time.
I guess that about sums up this poster’s attitude. Fantastic what they’re teaching in the FoF these days.
Thanks for reading
JoelF
June 2, 2007 at 12:48 am
Wir möchten Sie informieren, daß wir haben nicht mehr jedes mögliches Verhältnis zum “Fellowship of Friends.” Wir beendeten unser Verhältnis, nachdem wir gesehen hatten, daß Robert Burton uns ausnutzte, um Männer sexuell zu mißbrauchen.
Johann von Goethe
Jacob Grimm
June 2, 2007 at 1:01 am
LOL: JD beam in eye… re: the photos — what we see is what we are.
About five years ago, my husband and I attended The Magic Flute opera presented by the Fellowship in Nevada City. At the intermission, we chatted with a very dear old friend for a few minutes, while he politely served us chilled water. Suddenly, he launched himself over the table, scattering a stack of champagne flutes, and grabbed us both while roughly exclaiming, “It’s You Guys! YOU HAVE AGED!”
We were amused.
As WS once said to me, “We are all in this ‘aging thing’ together, don’t forget.”
Our words and intentions continue to resonate long after being spoken or written, and anathema is a boomerang. I detested someone intensely several years ago for an insulting remark. I cursed him every day for weeks, until one night I dreamt of bombarding him with hate arrows. Instead of penetrating my target, the artillery of word missiles flew back at me, stabbing and piercing me with my own revulsion, shredding my energy while poking and hissing “I abhor you!”
What seeds do we sow, what will we harvest?
–Kathryn Hannah Fitzgerald
June 2, 2007 at 1:03 am
McFinn said, “What’s wrong with being a ‘life’ person – with being alive? Is the alternative being a ‘death’ person?”
June 2, 2007 at 1:58 am
Old Fish In The Sea (10/385): Nice insights into the thinking behind some of these extremely negative posts. (I say “extremely” negative because I’m not exactly the most “positive” contributor here either… Sorry about that, Beyond. Truce?)
By the way, Old Fish In The Sea, I know you weren’t suggesting that someone could in fact “destroy the blog”, but only that someone might be thinking of it. But if someone could destroy the blog, I have this image of a Hand emerging from our computer monitors and grabbing each of us by the neck, and then a voice booming from the speakers: “Step away from the keyboard, and no one gets hurt.”
I’m sure someone within the FOF has a strategy, because the blog is filled with unhappy news. And I’m sure someone likes the idea of stirring up polarity and opposition. But slowly and quietly, something very different is happening: Current members and former members are becoming part of the same family — part of the same group of friends. That’s always been the case, whether we realized it or not, but the idea is seeing the light of day now.
There’s no plan behind it, and there’s no timetable involved — it’s just happening. Everything is not good, but for the most part I’m liking this. I like the arguments as well as the comments that are more thoughtful and conciliatory. I don’t like all of it, and I especially don’t like the personal attacks against those who are using their real names. But if there is some sort of strategy behind that, I’m not seeing the effects of it.
Also, if in some strange scenario this blog were to go away, there is always Blog 2, and Blog 3, and so on, and then we have the dozens of people saving all of the content of this blog for posterity.
Either way, most of us have already gotten what we wanted from this… We’re connecting with old friends.
June 2, 2007 at 3:37 am
Hello to all friends past and present.
The heads of the sheiks hydra.
Thank you for your wonderfull contributions.
Are you sittng comfortably and deeply rooted in presence then lets begin.
Just finished after reading for days….Who is there who imagines that it is weak boys who leave after the beasts ass-aults?
Think about it, to leave a comfortable situation where one will be helped with money, accomodation, career moves etc.To leave a large community of people who talk the same language as you and have the same interests.To leave easy access to many forms of culture. To leave your”friends” your “new family.”
I was there while it was still ” The Fellowship of Friends” before it became.”The Friendliship of Fiends” it was my whole life and my plans were to stay for life, in fact i couldnt concieve of leaving.Those i”s just didnt occur.Even after the persecution began i tried to make it fit by making amazing leaps of faith and trying to understand how this could be happening in the last place on earth that it should and with the last person that should be doing it.
There is an expression that many english speaking friends and even some non english ones will have heard, “in vinho veritas” or in wine the truth so i suppose if you get drunk enough then anything goes and certainly many of us do things under alcohols influence that we have to then live with when sober. So we are introduced to Mr Hide or Hyde.
But in normal life if we heard the story of a man taking adventage of a woman when she was well under the influence what would we think of that man? I can allready hear some cogs in some heads turning thinking or rather re-acting “but its not normal life Robot isnt a normal man” well your telling me….and perhaps another time i”ll be telling you.. in more detail! just how un-normal he is. What it would be nice to say instead, is that the devil tempted Christ in the desert and offered him the world; thats the same situation that many of the men including me were put through and i say to you if you left as i did because of it then you graduated with flying colours!
The eightfold path begins with yama and ni-yama which are the observances or moral foundations, what one should and shouldnt do, oh oh there are those cogs again should, shouldn”t thats normal morality blah, blah, blah. Well it is simple, even a child can understand..whats that passage from that crappy book the bible “if he should offend one of these little ones it would be better for that man if he should be cast into the sea with a millstone around his neck” heavily paraphrased or reversed perhaps. Well “key” it anyway.
You are born again when you leave, in many cases quite naked, no friends no family no job no country its sink or swim. When the going gets tough…the…. higher centres sometimes emerge, especially if you have been not wasting time and have actually learned a bit about transformation.
To those of you who are trying to convince us that “its all there allready you dont have to do anything there is only presence, the illusion is that you arent it all of the time, just realise that its there, you cant leave presence if you wanted to. All i can say is WAKE UP !!! from this comforting illusion! But hey, poor me, what do i know im obviously deeply lost in the illusion that presence is something that must be loved and nurtured, G was just an old nutter trying to make a fast buck, well just have compassion for me. Talking of compassion it doesnt seem that the conscious cocksucker has any, i mean how much does an ambulance ride cost? Better make sure you have a good insurance plan.There is a story of a wealthy king asking the Bhudda what must i do to awaken and the Bhudda replying “do only good, do not do evil” to which the king said “is that all? but any four year old child knows this! ” “ah but which sixty four year old can practice it?” replied the Master.
Is Rub-butt Errol Hard-on a master? well as he might say himself “Get real”
He is someone however who has made great efforts to sustain presence. He”s one of the few people who when i have shocked them out of fascination or imagination, in his case one of the times with a gentle kick the immediate response each time was thank you That is exceptional. That is exactly the kind of person i would want to spend time around if only they didnt become fascinated at the sight of a hard on, in the same way as a child does with an ice cream.
Im not awake all of the time, but in those periods when am i can tell when another person isnt, it becomes obvious.
And i spent an awfull lot of time completely alone with this particular man. Who I still believe is a very gifted thinker, well before the senility set in anyway.
Has anyone considered the appeal to the King of clubs ( and by the way why drop a language that we all speak that enables us to share on a deeper level than strangers who have different concepts that dont match, you say chair with a wooden one in mind and i think of a comfy armchair) but the appeal to the king of clubs addressed in the idea, that if you leave, then all of your hard physical effort, and the money you invested, will be lost. It kind of makes you want to hang on for the big share out doesnt it?
Perhaps a form of control?
Girard Unfuck you! i came to you for help and received platitudes.
To sum up for now; im gratefull for the good things which the founder brought into all of our lives one of which is all of you but would have wished to stay longer. As it happens many friends left as the years went by and i managed to get in touch with some of them and now more. To all who have recently left dont give up transform, transform and
May the bird of paradise fly up your nose.
Cyclops. aka, joe blogs.
June 2, 2007 at 3:56 am
29 more photos of the Reunion party at
Thanks Ames!
June 2, 2007 at 4:35 am
10/410 Delphi’s Oracle says: “…..no person is able to be present consistently and awake completely without constant right effort and outside help from eternal conscious school work…..”
😀 This made me laugh because — “… No Person is able to be present consistently and awake completely without constant right effort and outside help from eternal conscious school work…..”
10/419 Johann von Goethe 😀 😀 😀 now go and alert the rest of the discorporate 44, maybe they’ll stand up for their integrity as well …
Have a fun weekend all!
June 2, 2007 at 5:03 am
Innernaut, I work with exercises – wear a tie, try not to express negativity, not talk with the hands… all useful stuff for me. but I use my own judgement. If someone ever told me to get divorced or give away my kids, my conscience might tell me otherwise – and it would win. Not the guy on the outside, he is only a temporary part of my life.
That’s the way it has to be or you’d go crazy.
Joel Friedlander, I got your book, you seemed a nice enough guy when you visited in the early 90s. 🙂 But you might have misread my mail, there was a ‘no’ in there.
A bubble boy – is that from Casteneda’s evocative quote, that we live inside a bubble all our lives, and all we see on its round walls is our own reflection? I swim in the big sea but not in any bubble. Actually you look more like a bubble than me with your hairstyle. 🙂
What happened to Miles Bart, are you around to tell your tale? And how about Slava in London? We had a great connection, what happened to you?
Elena/Clara, if you want people to read, clear and concise is a good aim. If u want purging/elimination on the other hand… fine.
In or out of the FOF, we are probably all fellow humans hurtling through space on this globe, who have stuck our heads out thru clouds, looking for something above the murk below.
well ok, humans plus fish..
(If you see a head, shoot it! might be some people’s philosophy.)
June 2, 2007 at 5:06 am
Beyond (#335)
Your comments about cults point out that the concept is not an objective one, that one person’s “cult” is another person’s revealed Truth, and that even if what a person expresses is the truth, no one else can be forced to see it as truth. Good points. I also agree that, among the thousands of posts in this blog, there are some in which the person seems to want to convince the other of some “truth.” It’s a good idea for all of us to keep your comments in mind.
I also think it would be a good idea to not go to the other extreme and assume that, because the term “cult” can be used in different ways, all of these issues that people have been discussing here are just a matter of perspective, that no person’s supposed “truth” ought to be taken any more seriously than any other person’s “truth,” and that there’s no basis for imagining that the Fellowship of Friends is any more or less worthwhile than any other spiritual endeavor. The problems with the Fellowship of Friends, and many other similar groups, cannot be so easily argued away into meaningless relativism.
The term “cult” as it is being used here does not mean “any group that I don’t agree with.” It has certain specific connotations, and a great deal of material has been posted here describing what a “cult” is, within the context of these discussions. Have you read some of those postings? They contain specific tests to help determine whether a particular group acts like a “cult.” Of course, a person is always free to decide that, even if the Fellowship of Friends meets those criteria, he or she likes it anyway (see Vinnie the Fish’s comments–“Who cares? It’s fun!”). In my own experience, being in a cult, as the term is used here, isn’t productive. Ultimately, it’s pointlessly painful and a waste of limited time and resources. Your results may vary.
June 2, 2007 at 5:07 am
Responding to 10/422, by 2b
The ‘Friends’ part of FoF was very real (no apologies for choice of word) for me. And losing the connection to many genuine friends– people whose company I enjoyed, whom I admired, who confided in and materially supported each other– was the hardest part about leaving for me.
I don’t know if I’ll meet any of the people I considered my close friends again. I don’t know if I did meet them whether we would experience a connection in present time rather than just a reminiscence of shared experience. But there are people I do think of occasionally.
But loss is a necessary, even constructive part of human life. And the value of what we shared then is not diminished by it.
June 2, 2007 at 5:42 am
‘LOL’ acts as the extreme right party when it goes to put ‘red’ bombs in public places to favor their own politics. Old trick doesn’t work anymore. Not here!
June 2, 2007 at 5:47 am
Dear Opus 111,
Thank you for your reply to my post.
I too got some nice images from the bible keys…e.g. the story of the damsel awakening, world twelve rising.
If the keys are helping you that is great. I don’t want to rain on your parade.
—-
I respectfully disagree, however, that the teacher does not mention the fall, or Armageddon, anymore. Attend any event and at least once he will make some ominous statement to that effect as a means to dampen and quiet everyone while creating some drama to add texture to the mood of the presentation. He is usually deadly serious…but maybe he is just kidding around.
While you are correct that you will not hear him talk about being Christ, many students make this comparison and they constantly say that he is either a man number seven or eight. The teacher is treated like a god and if you question anything it is blasphemy and will get you scolded, ostracized or kicked out the school.
—\
Most people on this blog are probably not familiar with the most recent teachings.
For those of you on the blog who haven’t been in the “school” for the last four years the teaching has completely abandoned the system. Ouspensky and G no longer serve as the foundation. Soon after a meeting on “know thyself” personal angles were not considered for Sunday meetings and the teacher started delving into the Sufis and the bible among others. Students were asked to stop reading forth way material and the teacher went in a new direction and insisted everyone follow.
During this period Girard became marginalized (a few Giradites- ardent followers of Girard still follow struggles to interpretation the new teaching with the desperate hope of making sense of it in forth way terminology.) and a new being Asaf was developed to replace Girard. Asaf has been pivotal in helping Robert establish the new teaching. He is a very nice young man, and charming and truly believes in what he is doing, as does the teacher. Rumor is he is conscious, but like Girard in days of old he denies it for now.
Anyway, the new teaching advocates that the idea that being present is ancient and goes back to prehistoric times. The teacher got a windfall of material from Egypt, and the “school” took several trips there to study Egyptian art and architecture. During this period the teaching became more arcane and dogmatic. Everything was related to presence, or the sequence. The teacher constantly is telling everyone we are present.
—
The main point of the current teaching is this idea called the sequence. The sequence is a series of six syllabus used to introduce and prolong presence. I it goes something like this (coordinate with your breathing)
1) Be
2) Hold
3)subject e.g. look, taste, feel, hear, etc.
4)back e.g. go back to presence
5)subject
6)long Be e.g. be present
You are supposed to repeat this until you are present. When you are present, you stop because it is the Sabbath. You no longer need to seek because you have found.
I stand by my interpretation that the teacher, in his recent teachings presents:
The sequence as a form of prayer to protect you from being possessed by the devil (King of Clubs).
The devil is the king of clubs (a direct key illustrated in numerous pictures and text by the teacher)
The steward as the nine of hearts, an angel that brings the keys to heaven by helping you to promote presence(world twelve).
Imagination is keyed as evil. Sin. To be in imagination is to be in a state of sin. To be possessed by the devil.
——-
Basically if you are not using the sequence…(prayer)…you are sinful..(in imagination)…and therefore possessed by your lowerself..(the devil)…if you do not become present…(in a redeemed state…heaven)…you will forever be asleep…(in hell).
—-
Basically, the “school” seems to be a version of fundamentalist Christian religion put into a more exotic package. Many devote students may stay in the school due to fear of sinning and going to hell. Basically the same fears that keep people in the pews are keeping people loyal to the school.
I would like others to comment on this interpretation. .
June 2, 2007 at 6:00 am
“Suffering” was considered very important to one’s evolution – but to me, and maybe I’m just too Buddhist, suffering is not important to enlightenment, its important to maintaining a sense of self and excluding enlightenment. Gurdjieff said the last thing people were willing to give up was their suffering, and I verified this observation with nearly everyone I met in the Fellowship.
You onest men missed the Key Word: TRANSFORMATION (one of the many). In the fof the two words go ALWAYS together as in the fourth way. That’s Work!
Does it click now?
June 2, 2007 at 6:43 am
Opus 111 405
It is somewhat of a strange moment for you to come up with this subject but maybe it’ll do me good to think about these things. Thank you for reading and exposing what you consider weaknesses, will you do the same with strengths or do you find none? Just too plenty?
You mention the deaths and I don’t think my emphasis was ever on the deaths as much as the illnesses. I definitely don’t have statistics and not being the most social what I get to hear about is little. Many of the deaths I’ve found out on the blog and yes, one death like Brian Sisler is enough for me to say that The Fellowship of Friends, Robert Burton in particular has the capacity to hurt people, that the environment of the Fellowship of Friends (I do like to repeat that since somebody mentioned that the blog will get high in the lists so forgive me the formality) is not a healthy one, leave alone a conscious one. Who knows where you live but I only needed to look at the people around me to see the repressed suffering. Your logic could lead us to the fact that for all we know Robert hasn’t done himself any damage and looks better each day but it seems to be a law that weeds thrive much more easily than flowers.
Still, I hold to my statement and guarantee that if you did a serious statistical study within the Fellowship, you would find too big a number of people on antidepressants, viagra, alchohol and prescribed drugs for multiple illnesses. This is not a healthy, thriving, conscious community, IT is far from that and people’s faces look bitter and uglier each day. The clothes cannot hide the unhappiness and incoherence of what we were trying to go through. The statistics may show that it is no different to what happens in life but the difference is that this is supposed to be the LAST CONSCIOUS SCHOOL ON THE PLANET AND ROBERT THE ONLY CONSCIOUS TEACHER ON EARTH. (And I am not shouting to you but trying to make the point clear because ridiculous as it may sound now, it has permeated the realm of the attitudes and conditions people to a certain behavior, SO much is controlled in the Fellowship by this absurd assumption that Robert is a man number seven and the only one on earth).
I personally do not believe that awakening is a process of suffering indefinitely about all and everything that happens around one. But that is the attitude within the Fellowship, that you put up with ever so much nonsense and say nothing about it so that you work on your own negative emotions and transform suffering. There is more to awakening than transforming the unnecessary suffering that Robert Burton wishes to impose on his victims. There is real suffering and it is the real suffering that people have to go through that is silenced and condemned in the Fellowship of Friends as if it were just imagination. There is no help for real suffering in stating that the I’s are not real, be present like the king of clubs is suggesting to me on his post 403, just like Robert.
The few of you who think that Isis is just great, like Vinie the Fish and similar, do so on the ground that they could not care less what happens around them as long as they are smart enough. It is true that we live in a time in which individualism thrives and people have the option to choose whether they wish to care or not and no one will chastise anyone else for that but do not tell me that that is the consciousness of the fourth way. Maybe the way of the yogi or the fakir but I’ll also tell you that students who stand by this position are not even close to making the payments a fakir or a yogi makes to acquire consciousness. They are just avoiding the demands of any true path like any common tramp. The Way of Life is not the way of individualism. It happens in Life because it is about community, human communities, conscious communities, external consideration, love, connections, human contact.
Your second issue is about Women in the Fellowship and you say they are treated like the men or better. You are obviously a man, probably don’t see women like so many men don’t. Or only for certain functions where you think they should stay. Forgive me for my assumptions on your personal self, but I say it without wishing to offend you. These things are a fact in our lives and they neither help the men, nor the women. I’ve known them in many men, but never as bad as in the Fellowship where the third class treatment becomes so accepted that even you think it is normal.
But it is subtle. You mention the women in power, yes, there are women in power in the Fellowship. Take a good look at them, with compassion and tell me what you see.
I am not here interested in defending myself for having being treated like a third or fourth class citizen in that miserable institution called Isis, for it is neither a group, nor a society or a community but an institution, more and more, for mentally ill people.
We had perhaps just one letter on the blog that I clearly remember from a female student who had been in the Fellowship of Friends for twenty years, and stated every angle I have said about the Fellowship, that all she counted for was to pay money, that she never had any other role, and that she had ill health. One woman, twenty years in the Fellowship is enough for the questioning down to the ground be necessary because THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE A CONSCIOUS SCHOOL.
Speak with Guinever, for I have heard her, speak with any woman who has worked her share of beauty and been displaced like a piece of cutlery that was done for. But you do not really need to do that because Robert is willing to displace both men and women at his pleasure, without the slightest consideration. He is a MASTER at seeing people’s weaknesses and using them against them through others having to state it so, with their message from the big guy. In this way, he makes witnesses of the weakness so that the victim feels guilty and accepts the humiliation as Robert’s consciousness and the need to continue working on him/herself. Here is a man that has lavished on thirty five years of our lives treating people like adorable peasants because we are human enough to not be conscious. NO, we came to the school to learn consciousness, not to be the victims of our lack of consciousness. Were this man a teacher, we would have learned something besides humiliate ourselves before him. And that goes as much for the women, as for the men. Feeble men and women, all of us who put up with it for so long.
Your third issue is the men. Yes, I have not known all the men in the Fellowship of Friends. But 100 percent of the men I’ve known have been approached by Robert and those that haven’t, wonder why and feel left out, and others who rejected him, are actually considering that it wasn’t such a great idea. I put 90% because not knowing all the men in the Fellowship, there must be a few that were too old and ugly or sick to be approached by his majesty.
I have seen enough Opus 111 and I am the one that has seen the least for I’ve only been at Isis for six years and always too busy caring for other people to spend much time gossiping. They are lucky that I have not seen more.
One day you too will spread the wings of your consciousness out and suffer the horror of so many absurdities done on the name of consciousness. You’ll feel much better after you scream at the top of your lungs and beg for things to change. Whether they do or not is not up to me, but I will leave knowing that I did what I could for Dorothy, Girard, The Fellowship and myself.
Thank you for confronting me with myself, and having a dialogue in which we can see ourselves better.
To The King of Clubs.
Your idea that life is not fair, that there is no justice, I believe, was misinterpreted by Robert to suit his means, misused as another great indoctrinating tool and it is one of the most despicable ideas that any community could be built up on.
Justice comes one way or another, always, everywhere, it is a law. No man lives in vain. It may not be the justice that thinks there’ll be more flowers than weeds but one in which whoever wishes to evolve will have to take the weeds out of himself or stay behind.
June 2, 2007 at 6:56 am
Hello Unoanimo, 408.
Do forgive me for looking at you closely for I have you between my eyebrows. I invite you to look at yourself with me.
Your first paragraph:
“May her soul bring back the gratitude of sharing, to this God forsaken Fellowship of Friends.”
Very wishful thinking Elena; physical deaths, particularly ones which happen outside the inner circle hardly stop anyone in their tracks, its too close to real Scale and Relativity, a reminder of the now-urgency of certain sorts of reconciliation, unless of course there’s a baby rattlesnake at one’s ankle while hearing of a student’s death, those little guys ‘do’ bring pause.
Your first paragraph undermines what I said in a context in which I did not give a dam what the inner circle thinks. You undermine us both but pretend to be on my side against them.
2nd: Can the “God forsaken” state of being truly
transform into ‘gratitude of sharing’… To me, it’s one or the other, no in between, unless of course you’re satisfied with relative awakening, living the contradiction by being identified as a good one yourself.
In your second paragraph you give me an opposite I then tell me I must be satisfied with relative awakening if I don’t agree with you. You undermine me again, or rather, your imaginary picture of me.
It is amazing how your ’spirit style of writing changed between Post #376/10 & #387/10, it seems that Dorothy’s death has made an effect on you; perhaps it has fulfilled what you wished upon the Fellowship of Friends (gratitude) within you (?)
You then “reduce” your imaginary picture of me saying that what it wanted from the Fellowship was gratitude and yet pretend to be saying something positive about the differences in my posts.
Then: A long journey with her, thank you for taking care of her Elena, truly, I have been watching that situation for a very long time, seeing it as one of those top 5 list items showing how the Fellowship of Friends is a moon, not a sun.
The above is a personal ‘thank you’ for enduring, not a blog-thank you; it is difficult to share certain depths in written formats such as blogs.
And then you give me full credit for taking the octave and show me how considerate you are thanking me although you cannot simply take anything I’ve said graciously.
Why don’t you call me up if you’re serious about thanking me, you know my phone number if you want, you don’t have to tell me you’re unoanimo.
It must be that you have not tasted the gratitude of sharing.
You have so much vanity unoanimo that you cannot even give a flower without thinking it is a reflection of your beauty. You undermine others just like Robert pretending you are helping them. I do not like your style no matter how much you pretend to flatter me.
And now let me answer the issues.
To your first paragraph, I do not agree with you, I think those in the inner circle, even Robert will one day, in this or another lifetime know who they are and will feel the gratitude of sharing. What we are most afraid of is of living up to the beauty within and without ourselves and live in misery to justify our unwillingness to recognize it.
To your second paragraph: Yes there is a no in between, that is called time. People change, willingly or unwillingly. A death is a great and beautiful force that puts things into the right perspective for some time. We fall sleep again but it always leaves some of the perspective.
You must have indeed looked from very far away at my play with Dorothy because I never heard from you, but then you didn’t have an audience to watch you, did you.
One day we’ll be friends, after much struggling with each other. Thank you for your willingness to friction yourself with me. It is another form of love. What I dislike most about your post is you’ve not even considered Dorothy. She was the only one that mattered in that sentence.
June 2, 2007 at 8:23 am
That people die more in the fellowship of friends or not? Thanks for the numbers.
I want to relay these stories that I heard:
VJ was suffering of cancer. The day she heard of Cassandra’s death, her illness detoriated and 3- 4 days later she died. This was a big shock for her and we know these kinds of shocks effects the immune system negatively. This has been researched…
People who move from other countries to the US, often suffer a decline in health due to the difference in quality of foods and their nutrition. Many students can testify this change of nutrition in the fellowship of friends.
A student suffering from Parkinson in the fellowship of friends will tell you if you ask him: Robert says that this is how he will create a permanent tendency to awaken.
All words…
May silence be your guide
Love to all of you and all your efforts.
June 2, 2007 at 8:46 am
Old Fish In The Sea (10/385)
2b #422
Nice conspiracy theory!
“Evil FOF members are trying to destroy the freedom of speech and the right to be wrong”.
Well. The point is completely missed.
As I can see, this is what this publication is.
We have former members of FOF and current ones.
The first one had bad experiences or just did not fit, and now are complaining a lot!!!
I know, some people will not like this word – complaining. They think they are expressing the TRUTH, the WHOLE Truth and NOTHING BUT TRUTH. Well, would you mind if I call it a SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE?
My advice:
“When you mess up . . . big deal.
Just admit it, fix it, and move on.
Other than that, life’s a party!”
Current members are trying to say that for them there is no bad experiences and that they do fit. And that they do not understand why the first ones are complaining. Sorry about this complaining word :-))
My advice:
“Leave them alone, if they have nobody to confront they will, eventually, find something more useful to do. And more IMPORTANT, start creating some content on the net that reflects the positive things that you had experienced as a member of FOF.
Then, if someone is searching the net for FOF they will find some good material too, not only this blog and other stuff like it. Do a search on google and see what comes up. Then ask yourself, is this what I want to be a face of FOF on the net?”
Advice for all.
“If you had high experiences, stick to that.
This is the only thing that matters.
We all will die eventually, and all these words written here will not have any value.”
Peace be with YOU.
—————————————
“Shut Up, Stop Whining, and Get a Life”
I am on neither side.
I am Beyond,
and I keep my place.
June 2, 2007 at 10:45 am
To Innernaut in Relation to post #417
Thank you for reading and commenting on my post. I’ve been trying to keep up on the blog. It is a lot of work. Often I read things and have so many thought’s I can’t write them all out or if I try I save them and don’t post it. Many individuals invest a good bit of time, attention and emotional energy in their post’s and I try and treat this with the respect it deserves.
June 2, 2007 at 11:09 am
I know Joel, bubble-boy is a term of offence isn’t it, like jew-boy or gay-boy?
Which reminds me, can anyone tell me why there are so many jews in the FOF? Every second Joe(l) is a jew. They’re not famous for throwing away their shekels for nothing, so it must be a bargain!
June 2, 2007 at 5:00 pm
sheik please delete first Veronicapoe comment beginning “This is a comment about the following >comment a person etc.
Corrected version follows:
This is a comment about the following *comment*, and not about the person who posted it:
> a person is always free to decide that,
> even if the Fellowship of Friends meets
> those criteria [i.e., the criteria of
> being a “cult,” which has a specific
> meaning], he or she likes it anyway
I think this turn of phrase misses an important point. The point is about “freedom to decide.”
A person induced to distrust her ability to think critically is not “free to decide.” Rather she is bound to decide in a way uninformed by the critical perceptions she was induced to mistrust. This point is central to the “circular reasoning” that JoelF so aptly described above.
Kind regards.
June 2, 2007 at 5:09 pm
Elena, my condolences to you on Dorothy’s death and my hopes that you and she each have found relief and peace. I remember her from many years ago, teaching dance during hot summer days at the Town Hall.
June 2, 2007 at 6:22 pm
Is it correct to conclude that all the people in the photos at the gathering are no longer in the FOF?
June 2, 2007 at 7:55 pm
Moon Angel, post 430:
“Basically, the “school” seems to be a version of fundamentalist Christian religion put into a more exotic package. Many devote students may stay in the school due to fear of sinning and going to hell. Basically the same fears that keep people in the pews are keeping people loyal to the school.”
Even in the ’80s when I was a member I felt this to be a strong element of the Fellowship of Friends. Alchemy, impressions, negativity — these things were not offered as ideas to be experimented with and their value verified in terms of one’s own personal requirements — you were expected to put on a suit and tie, clean up your act and conform. Failure to do so met with very heavy judgment and tsk-tsking (ie, morality). There was an air of the Puritanical, especially on the East Coast where I spent half my time. Also, there was always the threat of eternal damnation of one’s immortal soul — if one left the school, one’s soul was lost to the moon. So it sounds like the form has changed, but not the substance.
June 2, 2007 at 7:57 pm
In another color system similar to the Body Types here is a description of the Saturns like Robert.
They use colors.
Purple
Lycopodium-Moss- Explosive- Charming and Magnanimous. “Trust me, trust me” Very insecure about themselves, habitual lyers, they don’t realize they are lying. Bright minds. They know exactly how to answer power questions. They have a free mind but a fixed soul- They lock into something and that is what it is. Aversion to change and undermine equals. Purple people need to work in a sub-kitchen to balance themselves.
They have the attitude that “some people are made to have power and some are not. And it must be me”.
Royal Purple: Organisers of countries and people. Politicians. They are larger than life. They have a manifest destiny to pull the thing threw. Creative power. Conflict between the haves and have nots. They don’t want to connect to the have nots- They want to help the masses come to power until the masses come to power. They are oblivious to their inner circle but very loyal to the masses below. They have the safeguard that they believe in themselves totally to the point of denial. They totally believe themselves even if they are lying. Bill Clinton. Arkansa. They are meant to overcome the temptation of power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. They are not conflicted at all about their sexuality.
This were quick notes taken from the speaker. I hope they make sense. They couldn’t fit Robert more accurately.
June 2, 2007 at 8:05 pm
#440 I have, to my knowledge, eliminated photos of present members. I haven’t been a member for many years, so If I made a mistake please quickly let me know. levybooks@email.com. Thanks.
Vinnie, you are one sick puppy.
June 2, 2007 at 8:22 pm
426 Vinnie the fish
“Actually you look more like a bubble than me with your hairstyle. :-)”
ROTFL, I wish I had enough hair to have a hairstyle!
Vinnie, I just don’t buy your story of blithely doing exactly and only what you want and still paying your dues to the FoF, unless you’re a predator. You’re not a predator, are you Vinnie? A Fish?
Then again, it could just be me.
JoelF
June 2, 2007 at 8:34 pm
to Photo Question:
No. Most, but not all.
June 2, 2007 at 8:41 pm
RE: Photo Question, post 10/440:
It would be correct to conclude that all the people in the photos at the gathering each found their own personal reasons to be present there.
What is the point of your question?
June 2, 2007 at 9:10 pm
LOL #10/343
Now here is a prime example of the Fellowship of Friends’ chief feature. The greatest insult that vanity feature can sling is to assault another person’s vanity. My team is prettier than your team…your team is old and my team is young. Young and pretty is good, old and ugly is bad. Neener, neener, neeee-ner! How juvenile, really. Evolve is the other direction, folks.
The Little Prince: “It is only with the heart that one sees clearly, what is important is invisible to the eye.” That is the Sufi way.
exlax #10/401
C’mon, did my post #339 seem dishonest to you? I really reached out to you in that post! I was certainly not a child as you insinuate in your example, and I certainly remember in vivid detail other sexual experiences I had when I was younger than at the time in question. The intensity of the sexual experience tends to imprint in the memory, in case you hadn’t noticed. And do you summarily discount all the allegations of sexual abuse done by priests in the US Catholic church because it happened so long ago?
Roommate #10/389
Thank you for your post. I will heed your advice. How are you doing? Can you share your story? The reasons your experience was different than mine are important to me. Are you at liberty to speak?
Elena #10/387
Thank you for your kind words and thoughts. It is amazing how far the heart can expand to help or love another. It can even reach across time and space. If Dorothy was the sweet, white-haired dance teacher, I remember her. Your efforts assisting her in her passing are noble.
You make a valid point: the school has drifted sideways for the past 22 years. That’s how people make money in America. Once you have a winning KFC formula you franchise and move laterally and internationally. Now the CEO of FOF has rolled out the new Coca-cola… and minions have to pretend to like the taste or they get fired!
Paola:
I have been meaning to check in with you after all you’ve been through. Thank you for sharing your life with us. How is the progress going working on creating your new conscious role for yourself, your new ‘right livelihood’? It is said that sometimes understanding comes two years after experience. I can vouch for that. Hava Nagillah said, “You must have a method – the Sequence, otherwise it is all imaginary.” That is bullshit. He strikes me as young in the work. Your ‘FOF work personality’ is not your Steward. Discard it. You will be given your ‘daily bread’ by just attempting to be the best version of yourself, no matter what you choose to be. Help will come from where you least expect it. I think it bears repeating: it is only in the higher emotional and intellectual centers that a person is truly awake. A person can still be asleep in the 7, 8, 9, or 10 of hearts, spades, diamonds, or clubs….it doesn’t matter, all those cards are mechanical. It all depends upon your aim. Be prepared to play ALL of them in life, girlfriend. Sure, it is smart to ‘work’ on your weak cards. The two higher centers function on a different level and can be ‘at work’ behind the scenes no matter what card you are playing. And it is far better to play with a full deck, don’t you think?
I also want to share with you my love for your country, having recently traveled there. Argentina is immensely and diversely beautiful! Being there created so much awesome memory for my family and me. It is nature fully dressed in her best and most varied wardrobe! From the mammoth and powerful Iguaçu Falls, red soil, lush rainforest, vast pampas, Mendoza wine country, Patagonia mountains, the great peak Acongagua, that iridescent light blue glacier lake water and great calving glaciers of Perito Moreno, cosmopolitan Buenos Aires with its vibrant, colorful neighborhoods, huge city parks and big sprawling trees, we loved it all. I’d go back there in a heartbeat. There is so much to see there. I can think of worse Fascist countries with high gas prices to be in right now…
“The only ‘play’ which has been written for us that truly cannot be changed is you were born, you will grow older, and you will ultimately face death. The rest is up to you.”
WhaleRider
1979-85
June 2, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Hello, Beyond (435)
If you are Beyond, as you say (“I am beyond”),
what’s with all the advice?
“My advice…”
“My advice…”
“Advice for all…”
Is that what you call “keeping your place”?
And since you seem to imply that you are “beyond” all this, why should your advice matter to us poor bloggers?
June 2, 2007 at 9:31 pm
I have a question for those of you who have been close to RB and have spent time with him. Does he ever question his actions? Does he have doubts? Does he wonder if how he treats people might hurt them? Does he wonder if he is doing right action?
June 2, 2007 at 10:08 pm
#425
I am what I am
June 2, 2007 at 10:27 pm
About 2b (#422)–who so well said:
“But slowly and quietly, something very different is happening: Current members and former members are becoming part of the same family — part of the same group of friends. That’s always been the case, whether we realized it or not, but the idea is seeing the light of day now.”
I feel that to be very true, as I experience deep bonds of friendship and love with many now no longer in the Fellowship–and even if we do not spend any time. I am grateful to have seen the pictures of dear friends even though we do not see each other any more regularly.
It is the recognition of that part in all that wishes to be present, what can be more beautiful than that. Age, beauty, time cannot destroy this bond, only we can sever our ties to the present and each other.
My path is to seek this higher place “full time” and that is my reason to stay in the school–it is simple mathematics…
And I want to add something to this, there were some observations from Hava that caused quite some discussion, about the 9 of hearts and the 7 of hearts. These are what we know to be “photographs” (Whalerider referred to it very true as our “daily bread”)–the type you will get a lot of when you are participating in school work.
This “rubbing” is what makes the pearl in us, as Rumi wrote…
Best to All
Siddiq
June 2, 2007 at 11:25 pm
Joel, it’s true I do pretty much what I want, but of course I work with the exercises where possible. Yes I suppose I’m a predator for presence, and very practical, I want to get and give positive value, not set myself up to feel bad or robbed, it’s simple common sense.
June 2, 2007 at 11:36 pm
to Life Person #427
Yes, you are right. We can’t disregard what one side is saying for the benefit of the other. But, the situation if FAR more complex that any of us can imagine. Even the scholars have a hard time.
You can find some very interesting info on wikipidia –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult
Here are some excerpts I found interesting.
“Criticism by former members of purported cults.
The role of former members in the controversy surrounding cults has been widely studied by social scientists. Former members in some cases become public opponents against their former group. The former members’ motivations, the roles they play in the anti-cult movement, the validity of their testimony, and the kinds of narratives they construct, are controversial with some scholars who suspect that at least some of the narratives are colored by a need of self-justification, seeking to reconstruct their own past and to excuse their former affiliations, while blaming those who were formerly their closest associates, and that hostile ex-members would invariably shade the truth and blow out of proportion minor incidents, turning them into major incidents. Other scholars conclude that testimonies of former members are at least as accurate as testimonies of current members.”
and
“According to Lewis F. Carter, the reliability and validity of the testimonies of believers are influenced by the tendency to justify affiliation with the group, whereas the testimonies of former members and apostates are influenced by a variety of factors.”
So, we all have good excuses to justify our actions and believes. And it seems that nobody is capable to define OBJECTIVELY what a “cult” is, and what it is not.
You wrote: “…a great deal of material has been posted here describing what a “cult” is…They contain specific tests to help determine whether a particular group acts like a “cult.””
Sounds promising on the paper, but in practice you can’t separate the person taking the test from the results of the test. A nice movie to watch about this phenomena is “What the bleep do we know”. Somehow, one group of people gets positive on “cult test” and another gets negative. Mystery!?
From you: “In my own experience, being in a cult, as the term is used here, isn’t productive. Ultimately, it’s pointlessly painful and a waste of limited time and resources. Your results may vary.”
I agree. If one feels that the group or a religion does not work for them, they should leave and find something that works. What I think is a waste of time, is to write how bad it was in that cult (especially write as much as on this blog), instead of looking for something that really works.
The original post from Sheik coined the phrase “cult for intellectuals”. And for him it probably meant: smart (intellectuals) weird (cult) people that he met at that introductory meeting.
What I meant then I said that this blog became a “cult for intellectuals” was this:
People use their intellectual center in a wrong way ( judgment and negativity )and instead of looking for the solution (peace of their own minds), they try to find more of the problem.
Well, you know what is going to happen, don’t you? They will find more of the problem.
The world and life on this planet is a big problem in itself. Think of all our limitations and laws we are under.
Peace be with you.
—————————————
“Shut Up, Stop Whining, and Get a Life”
I am on neither side.
I am Beyond,
and I keep my place.
June 2, 2007 at 11:45 pm
-Truth is Where You Find It $448
Not sure what you are trying to say.
You don’t like that I am giving advice?
Or you think that I should repeat OM mantra all the time, since I call myself Beyond?
Get clear with yourself first.
—————————————
“Shut Up, Stop Whining, and Get a Life”
I am on neither side.
I am Beyond,
and I keep my place.
June 3, 2007 at 12:32 am
Alice in W #449: Joel Friedlander wrote a book titled “Body Types” and Rodney Collin referred to the Nine Types.
The information contained within these books i have partially verified generally. Not in detail or specifically.
Both books “sounded true” to me. Robert Burton a Saturn is a special case. However, with the information provided on this blog you can provide your own satisfactory answer about Saturn’s generally. And, wayward ones specifically.
June 3, 2007 at 12:46 am
To Elena (10-432)
“Yes, I have not known all the men in the Fellowship of Friends. But 100 percent of the men I’ve known have been approached by Robert and those that haven’t, wonder why and feel left out, and others who rejected him, are actually considering that it wasn’t such a great idea. I put 90% because not knowing all the men in the Fellowship, there must be a few that were too old and ugly or sick to be approached by his majesty.”
I will belabor the point a bit with a question. Was the subject of relationship with RB one that you introduced with ALL your male acquaintances (let’s say those at Isis, and South America, 2 parts of the world you know well), or did EVERYONE volunteer that information soon after they met you? It flies a bit in the face of the idea of most vicitms, here and elsewhere, saying that it is very difficult to speak of such events, and your very early statement on the blog that you had not become aware of RB’s activities (or extent of it=100% of men you know) until recently. By the way, we do know each other, we have never breeched the subject of my possible relations with RB although we have breeched the subject of RB’s sex activities together. I have not been approached by RB or his majesty, and I do not feel rejected or guilty. I will gladly concede that I may be too old or ugly. So let us make your number 99+%
Numbers are not the point, although they help place factual statements in more focus. I am interested in sincerity.
________________________
We seem to agree that RB is probably more of a misanthrope than simply misogynistic.
________________________
I apologize for inadvertantly bringing the subject of death before I was made aware of Dorothy’s death. Your story of her last hours touched me.
I do think that the sacrifices you made for her in the last years of her life are a gift to her but also to you. Nothing better would have come, in my opinion, if these last years had been more institutionalized within the FOF, as you indicated you wished had happen, except it would have been easier on you, physically and emotionally. Having participated in helping several friends in the last weeks/days of their life, I value these experiences amongst the most intense of my life, when words recede behind the experience and the mystery. I also know that my hope is that I will be able to spend my last hours amongst friends and family, because they wish to be there, not because they were asked or feel obligated, and not in the cold and sterilized hospital environment. Dorothy was “lucky” that you and before you, Amy, Janet and others were able and willing to help. It may be the responsibility of the community, but it is a fact that it remains the burden of friends/family. Tell me if anyone here (in or out of FOF) has volunteered to help you with that task in the month or two since you revealed on this blog that you were alone doing it.
_____________
To Moon Angel (10-430)
You may be right about RB still mentionning CA fall or general destruction. But it has to be rare, a far cry from the entire events on the subject we used to have. His approach of the subject is much more quizzical, along the lines: “I wonder what they might have in mind”
My point about the Bible keys was not to become warm and fuzzy, although I like to be. I appreciated the fact that it replaced the mythical and unverifiable ideas I may have of heaven and hell for example (having been raised as a christian) with the concrete, verifiable concepts of presence and imagination. Notwithstanding the fact that guilt may permeate many of the perceptions we have of RB’s teachings, understanding what is talked about helps place it in perspective, unlike many of the Bilical stories/sayings I was fed at a young age. I do not see identification or imagination as sinful. If I read hell, sin, I can try to fit imagination/sleep and see if it makes sense, it takes any experience of guilt away, that is all. In that perspective, I do not think RB has truly abandonned the system, he is just exploring other traditions and telling us what he sees of the system in them. Different words to illustrate the same concepts.
June 3, 2007 at 12:49 am
Across the River Says (446):
RE: Photo Question, post 10/440:
What is the point of your question?
Well I noticed that I used to know a few of the people in the pictures but they seemed unlikely to ever leave the FOF, so I was wondering if in fact they did leave. I don’t think it would be a good idea to single individuals out by name in a public location so I guess my wonder will have to continue.
June 3, 2007 at 12:54 am
For those interested, the following links to a document entitled “Guidelines for Circle of Angels, 1990-1991.”
Click to access GuidelinesForCircleOfAngels1990-1991.pdf
Additional scanned ephemera from thought reform environments utilizing a Gurdjieff/Ouspensky ideology are forthcoming. Your contributions of text and image files are welcome. Write to veronicapoe@gmail.com.
June 3, 2007 at 1:12 am
To Alice in W (10/449):
“I have a question for those of you who have been close to RB and have spent time with him. Does he ever question his actions? Does he have doubts? Does he wonder if how he treats people might hurt them? Does he wonder if he is doing right action?”
From what I could tell, no, no, no and no.
June 3, 2007 at 1:45 am
#423 cyclops
“if thine eye be single the house is full of light.”
“Doth a human form display to those who live in realms of day.”
Thanks for the post. Looking forward to the story.
A little advice. Your imagination about what someone elses imagination about “presence” may or may not be is irrelevant. We will deal with our own self deception on our own.
It makes me laugh when I hear conflicting stories. The ones I have heard about Lord Pentlands dinner with RB comes to mind. One story says “I saw clearly that Pentland was “awake” and Robert was “asleep” so I left the fof to join Pentland’s group. Or another, Robert was effortlessly in the “third state” while Pentland was attempting to remember himself. Complete B.S.. When we are “awake” we can clearly see others as being “asleep” – B.S..
Get out of yourself and get on with it.
A little advice from someone who needs to take his own.
June 3, 2007 at 2:52 am
SPIRAL OF FRIENDS
The following was posted on
Tuesday, 03-Aug-1999 17:37:27
by 206.168.68.39
—[QUOTED MATERIAL BEGINS HERE]—
Brings back memories of old days with James. There was a house in Grand Junction, Co. and one in Price, Ut. In between is a desert town called Green River, Ut. I had been wondering where he was coming up with this big idea that we should all be carrying weapons. Then I saw it. A large billboard on the freeway at Green River which said GUN CLUB, EXCLUSIVE MEMBERSHIP. It was easy to imagine him asking C influence for a shock and seeing this “shock in the moment”. The metanoya of a higher level of being, I’m sure.
One night he arose 3 Martial students late to go Elk hunting in a snow storm. Didn’t matter that it wasn’t Elk season or that they were hunting on anothers private property, or that he was using a utzi. So they go out, fire aimlessly into a herd, wounding several and then get caught by local farmers who heard the shooting, dragging an elk through a fence they had cut. James gets back to the ranch, into the Rolls Royce, takes off to the house in Grand Junction and leaves myself and the three students who accompanied him on the shoot to face the sheriff and irate farmers. Turns out only James did the shooting. I made a personal visit to the farmer to apologize since I had done the business of selling him hay in the summer. And we went out immediately and repaired the fence. I was running the farm at the time. James was doing a great amount of Cocaine. This was the last year I was there. It was said that the school went through 600,000 dollars worth of cocaine that year. Many were in debt. He built himself a small tower room on top of the farm house where he could go do crack at students expense. He was suffering from malnutrition and had running sores on his legs. Yet, Cocaine was not an addictive substance according to him. Only a stimulant.
I had made the down payment to buy the Molina farm. I was supposed to be getting paid back on a monthly basis. However, nothing was ever paid to me, And it seems my contract dissapeared. I was told that unless I could find the signed copies , nothing was owed. The farm became more and more in disrepair as funds were funneled up his nose. I looked around in sadness at the huge tramp scene, packed up and left. Seems not any too soon as it was about 6 mo. later that London Bridge came falling down. I had also been hearing rumors about the sexual abuse of Olehandra. He was the child of a student, one of four boys, age 14 at the time. Was standing at a campfire at the farm one night. A hot bottle cap flew out of the fire and hit him in the eye. He lost the sight of his eye and received an insurance settlement of 250,000, in installments of 18,000 dollars every 6 months. Suddenly Ole was James best friend. All that money was funneled up both of their noses. Sickening.
This idea that the lower cannot see the higher makes new and younger,lower students fair game for those who claim to be higher beings. Those who spoke their conscience and tried to be sincere were accused of being in “feature”
—[QUOTED MATERIAL ENDS HERE]—
June 3, 2007 at 3:30 am
This is the last portion of a letter I’ve written to Girard that I wish to share on the blog. Elena
I have to thank you for having had the good will for there was good will on your part as in mine. We tried and lost or tried and gained what was possible. No mean intention, just our beings couldn’t make it any better. You say I must be as sick as you because one day I loved you, another I was furious. Yes, I must have been sick or just naive in trying to love you when I knew everything I knew about you. Your porno addiction, the fact that you weren’t sexually able (and God knows how you managed to recover, never being better than when we separated), the fact that you were so sick and neurotic that you hit yourself and swore so often, the fact that year after year you were unwilling to do anything for us to have time or joy for ourselves, the fact that it took four years for you to finally be the first force to take us out and I was so shocked that four years had gone by for me to experience beauty and time and freedom again, that I cried all day while looking at the birds in Grail Lodge, but you wonder why I’d get so unhappy. But it would have taken another four years before you were willing to take us out again (Yes, we went once more, but it was as if you were doing me a favor, not something you really wanted for yourself, you thought you were wasting time when you spent time with me) and it’ll take another lifetime for you to understand that the fellowship of friends cannot be a club in which you work and keep your wife out, that you either make a conscious community and live a decent life in it with your family and friends or cannot call it a community and even less a conscious school.
Yes, I was always trying to push your limits so that you would understand that I was worth your time enough for you to push the community you supported into an understanding of love and respect between a man and a woman. But no, you were not willing to support me and allowed for Robert, Linda, Karen and Susan and another one whose name I forget to withdraw any recognition for my work with Dorothy and humiliate me for having taken what you considered a not good enough job for people like you. You are the Fellowship’s slave and expected me to be the same, although your slavery still has a pityful recognition.
You people who are in power in the Fellowship and are therefore recognized and acknowledged by the establishment, that is, Robert, think no one else should expect to be recognized or acknowledged. No, you think people should work their asses off to support the school, third line, without recognition and then you justify your attitude with some “conscious” idea that “people should not expect reward,” “people should not work for a result,” “people should do their job and work only on themselves,” or as you say in your letter:
“I could point out that if you let the Fellowship use you, that was your mechanics and therefore was something you needed to see and free yourself from in order to have the possibility of further spiritual growth. What is frightening, though perhaps unavoidable, is the payment we sometimes have to make to see ourselves.”
And with that you are willing to justify no matter how much suffering people have to go through for having put any good will into the Fellowship of Friends. With that you justify Robert’s use of men for his sexual pleasure, the Fellowship’s use of people for economic viability and your own use of women for really nothing more than your sexual satisfaction.
It is not really that surprising since indeed you are programmed by an American mentality which is as willing to do the same to other countries in a much bigger scale and think it is too bad if the people in the other country are too weak to protect themselves against you.
What Robert and you in the inner circle of the Fellowship of Friends have not understood is that everyone needs to be a part of a community and not just a servant. A part of a marriage and not just a pleasure object. That it is our spiritual right to belong in equal terms to both a marriage and a community. And it was realizing the extent to which Robert’s and your unconsciousness cannot embrace external consideration objectively that freed me from your grip.
You, as much as the Fellowship, were willing to take dignity away from me and when I got angry you labelled me for being crazy. But I am a lot less crazy than you people are, for I now know the limits of my dignity and the extent of your madness. The lack of dignity with which Robert treats people and the way the inner circle supports that lack of dignity on the students is just as appalling as the fact that you were unwilling to stand up for me on any issue. You all place yourselves above and think you have the right to decide where we can participate and at the same time allow Robert to treat you like dirt because you too have lost all dignity, as so many ex-students who have posted here have had the courage to admit in those or other terms, to be able to lie and have control on others.
People who feel no dignity as part of the community they belong to, cannot avoid becoming depressed, inner consider, or get angry or instead go into an opposite behavior and look like they are perfectly hypnotized with a smile from ear to ear like my friend Helen in the gardens and Abraham and even Thomas, recently. But most students of the older generation just look terribly bitter. The women more bitter than the men, the men, many, are acquiring this strange, feeble expression, this softness that is neither feminine nor masculine, just feeble. That is probably why Robert cannot stand their presence, because he sees what he has done to them and has to cover it up with young people who do not yet show the damage he is doing to them.
It is true that after four years of being a nobody next to you, someone who you did not even have time to talk to, I feel pretty insecure about myself, but I am not going to do myself any harm now that I understand. I have learned to “be” above the Fellowship of Friends and have nothing to thank you or the Fellowship for. It was my own effort and good will that allowed me to get there in spite of your ill treatment of me, it was my work with Dorothy that kept enough dignity within me to know that I was still human and you had fallen below anything one could call, human dignity. If I saved Dorothy from the inhumanity of the Fellowship, she equally saved me from you and the Fellowship and I think she did me a far greater service than I ever did her.
I have only loved you for four years and admired you since I joined the Fellowship but Robert I loved for seventeen years and dedicated my work to his support for that length of time. He was a hundred times more neglectful and inconsiderate than you were. Next to him, you are an angel. After hearing Shelley M.’s story, I realized how he was equally confused with me. He thought I had money when I joined and they sat me next to him always. Then he realized all my questions questioned him and he placed me as far as he could. Then stopped me from giving angles for two years and finally just stopped any angles anywhere. It is really absurd how unintelligent he is. He could have asked me to leave long ago and would not have to put up with this play. It just shows how things happen to us, we are all victims of our own invention, and must assume responsibility for our doings. Yes, I assume responsibility for my love, for being a student and a wife, and Robert must assume responsibility for pretending to be a conscious teacher and you for being his main supporter and my husband. We all have to assume responsibility and not just find scapegoats.
Those who cannot see, think it is blaming and complaining but taking responsibility is not a negative emotion.
I think I’ll post this letter on the blog because my play is many women’s play in different scales within the Fellowship and they may profit from reading it. You are not the only egotistic, self committed macho that supports the fellowship, you’re just one who deeply helped to indoctrinate the rest and they all behave like you in greater or lesser degree. Besides, what I am saying is as good for the Fellowship as for life, it is a phenomenon of our time and one person’s play is simply the expression of that huge phenomenon. I offer my self for others to look at because there is nothing in it to be ashamed of and I expose you and Robert not because you are my husband, who I would have preferred to protect but because you, like Robert, have dared to pretend that you are more conscious than the rest of us for thirty five years and you are not, you used, abused and deceived our good will.
Once women understand that they are as worth while human beings as men and recover the long lost dignity that the patriarchal authoritarian structure has stripped away from us, we will be able to help men recover their long lost dignity, as men and human beings, by simply not allowing them to treat us any less than we should be treated. True men that have understood this will not be offended by my words. Homosexuals like Robert are so sick that they even treat other men as the stereotype macho, treats women, and young men have so little dignity themselves, that they allow it to happen, unaware of the price they are paying in their being. What we are not willing to protect amongst these young men in the Fellowship is their human dignity with the excuse that they offered themselves. You are all so sick, placing a twenty five year old next to a sixty year old and say it is equal ground. That is what each person still in the Fellowship is still supporting and you are so sleep you think there are no spiritual consequences to your loss of dignity but dignity is something you can’t buy.
Infra sex is infra sex, no matter where. Was that not one of the main issues in the work? Don’t let anything black come to the sex center, but in the Fellowship, it couldn’t be darker.
Not once has the Fellowship of Friends ever addressed the subject of positive emotions. At least in that, it was sincere. They could not fake what they don’t have and that is in the long run how spiritually, people can be recognized.
A conscious school would be able to develop positive emotions to a much greater extent than standard life. Dignity is presence. True pride, transparency, compassion, humility and gratitude, were never developed within Robert Burton’s Fellowship of Friends. What his school developed was shame, fear, frustration, anger, desolation, separateness, infra sex, lack of friendship, lack of human solidarity, servicehood, humiliation.
June 3, 2007 at 3:52 am
Here are yet more photos from the Memorial Day 2007 celebration.
http://www.kodakgallery.com/MyGallery.jsp?Uc=10w3clt3.864lct6f&Uy=opdhrw&Ux=0
June 3, 2007 at 7:28 am
Vinnie the Fish,
Your earlier remarks were racist.
Racism is a characteristic of the spiritually challenged.
The aquatic stooge and his cohorts are becoming predicatable. Flaming the dear bloggers and now goading them with racism. How low will the lizards in the Collin office stoop?
The ill conceived plan is to try and turn this noble blog, successor to the vine, into a mud bath.
Dear FOFer’s
Every week your high command shoots the FOF in the foot. Are there no humane individuals left with a sincere wish to replace fear with compassion? -Time’s running out.
Thank you Vinnie, I appreciated your segue.
Love,
Ryan.
Love Ryan.
P.S. You’re fooling nobody here bubble boy
June 3, 2007 at 7:57 am
[QUOTED MATERIAL BEGINS HERE]
I was in a group called “The New American Wing” (NAW), a spinoff of James Randazzo’s “Spiral of Friends” (SOF), which in turn came from “The Fellowship of Friends” (FOF).
The NAW teachers (a married couple, Jim and Carolyn Kuziak, aka “J&C”) had the final word on who was “a five”, who had awakened. I knew two women who told me they “didn’t realize they had awakened” until a couple days later when the teachers told them so. This was an important clue that something was not quite right, because Man #5 is supposed to be objective in relation to himself. Also in my own personal experiences of non ordinary degrees of consciousness, it was obvious to me that my state had changed. These two women had actually believed they had awakened because the teachers told them so.
A few days after a friend of mine supposedly awakened, I asked him about what had happened. He didn’t say much except “it changes your life”, and “the teachers say I am a five when I am self-remembering.”
There was little doubt who the fives were, because during meetings the teachers would occasionally ask to the audience, “who here has awakened?” (As though they forgot, as though they didn’t know us each quite well.) Hands would rise into the air, like kids in a classroom. It was a public performance, resulting in a feeling of superiority in those who raised their hands, and a feeling of self-loathing in those who didn’t. On one occasion, a student raised her hand and the teachers scolded her, “you haven’t awakened, you’ve had experiences but you haven’t awakened.”
The NAW has two main “centers” — one in Ann Arbor and one in Lexington KY, overall about 25-40 students combined. Of these, I can recall eleven who claimed to be Men #5. Generally, these were the older students who had dedicated their lives to the school and had bought-in 100% to the game. People usually awakened during one of the major ceremonies we had during the year (Christmas, Easter, July 4, Thanksgiving). It also usually occurred during “obligatories” — the ritual movements.
These students had special privileges after their conversion experience. They could attend special private meetings, held only for those who had awakened. They were also given special exercises. At the time I left, I was just starting to be included in these “older student” activities, even though I had not awakened. They were giving me exercises that did not seem to be practical for me — imagining myself the size of the earth, imagining energy and directing it through my body, etc. There was a thrill in receiving these new exercises, because it gave me the illusion of being an advanced student, of being part of the inner circle, etc.
Fives also had a more prominent role during ceremonies and obligatories. They were also allowed to ask less practical questions at meetings — they could ask theoretical questions regarding higher energies, the ray of creation, symbols, etc., and the teachers would entertain those questions now. This was not an explicit privilege, but was a sort of unwritten understanding, as though now the students had enough being for these questions to be considered “practical”.
Strangely, once someone awakened, they were allowed to take much greater care of their instinctive functions. The teachers would not complain if an older student dropped out of some “work octave” because of physical discomfort. If a non-awakened student tried this, the older students and teachers would come down hard on them. “Do not let the instinctive function eat your work”, “learn how to dominate those queen-of-clubs ‘I’s”, “no half efforts”, “once you decide to do something, do it whole hog and twice the postage”, etc. But awakened students were allowed much more sleep, more breaks, less strenuous work, more desk jobs. The rationale seemed to be, “in a higher state, you are much more sensitive to the needs of the instinctive function.” Or, “if you don’t take care of your machine, it will become negative and eat you when in a higher state.” The teachers exemplified this behavior. They received massages and sexual favors from the innermost core of students, took considerable time each day in a hot tub, and spent hours each night laying in a bed with about 15 pillows watching a $3000 wide-screen TV. One particular student, the teachers’ pet, cooked their meals each night with utmost care: only the best organic foods, making handmade ice-cream, all sorts of special dietary requirements, etc. While preparing food for them, we were told that if we were in a negative state while cooking, they could tell from the food itself, as though our negativity had corrupted the food.
But being considered a Man #5 was not all positive… Awakened students were given additional duties and responsibilities, such as being sent out to start centers in new cities. They were also treated more harshly by the teachers, because they had “verified that this was a C influence school” and were now supposed to devote their entire lives to it. The teachers claimed to control the higher states in the fives, “when you awaken you swim in our higher being bodies.” They also used this as a threat, “I’ve got your nickel … once you’ve awakened, you belong to me — do you understand me?”
Outwardly, there were various signs that would indicate one of these students were supposedly in a higher state. Often they would shed tears, sometimes tears of horror and sometimes tears of joy. The state was usually onset by heavy controlled breathing on the part of the student — such as during obligatories, or during a meeting if a student wanted to be seen making a “super-effort”. They often had a far-away look in their eyes, as though they were not interested in the trivial events taking place around them.
They usually would not look directly in your eyes, and others generally didn’t “photograph their instinctive functions” (stare at them) either. If I looked them in the eyes, sometimes I felt waves of shame arise within me, fearing they could see into my horrible feature-ridden soul. This kind of self-hatred was glorified in various subtle ways throughout the school. A common expression was, “you cannot look in the face of something higher” (without becoming extremely identified). This grand suggestion actually encouraged us to become more identified in these situations.
Sometimes they would experience brief twitches, as though bolts of energy were shooting through their system. One student kept experiencing these jolts frequently a few days after he had “awakened”, until the teachers scolded him during obligatories, “you can’t go there every time, now it is time to get serious.”
The fives quickly became more self-confident, especially around non-awakened students. I can remember how quickly one particular student changed after going through this experience — within a couple weeks he changed from being a true wuss into an assertive person able to take what he felt he deserved. (In many ways it was an act and after a few months he gradually returned closer to his original state.) This new self-confidence came from a renewed certainty about their faith, and also seemed to justify their increased outbursts of negativity towards others. In other words, they were now peers with the other awakened students, and, lacking that fear to keep them on-guard, they were more likely to try to control situations with negative emotions. Their new strength, self-confidence, and perceived power gave them a kind of charisma.
The teachers probably liked the idea of having more awakened students too. They validated their credentials, “proof that this school works”. Awakened students were fully crystallized in their devotion to the school — it seemed that these were the students who would do ANYTHING for the teachers (get a divorce, move to a new town, make large payments, sexual favors, hold multiple jobs, etc…) It justified giving these core devotees extra privileges and extra duties. It maintained the hierarchical power system and justified it with a spiritual basis. It gave these students a feeling of increased being.
Older students also took over many of the public responsibilities previously performed by the teachers. By allowing them to hide in their bedroom, with all contact fully controlled and orchestrated, the teachers were able to generate a kind of mystique. In their absence, we had less chance to ‘catch them in the act’, less opportunity to discover if the teachers were truly higher beings. When we finally did interact with them, it was so formalized and so fear-laden that we were easy prey. And with mere fives running most of the show, any faults could be blamed on them, thus protecting the teachers’ facade of perfection. And although fives were supposedly conscious, they were not fully objective to the external world, so their eventual mechanical flubs and failures could still be forgiven without breaking our belief in the actual existence of something higher.
[QUOTED MATERIAL ENDS HERE]
June 3, 2007 at 8:17 am
KathrynF, I was unable to view the photos of the May 26th gathering; apparently the link has been removed? Was curious to see the assortment of geriatric cases/Dorian Grays described so gleefully by LOL.
Got some aging issues, Laugh? Perhaps too identified with the body (or machine, as it were)? If you have ever experienced the play of death up close, then you realize that we are not the body. What was that quote from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues? Something like “age is just heightened awareness on the cellular level.” (You probably haven’t read that old hippie novel from the ’60s, though.) If you find the notion of getting older before you die so repulsive, I suppose you could always die young and leave a pretty corpse. Don’t be formatory about the impressions/alchemy thing (putting form before life). Guess I’m being a bit patronizing, myself. 🙂
June 3, 2007 at 12:16 pm
Hi Life Person, it’s not JUST that it is ‘fun’ for me, but that helps to continue – if it was constant suffering the tendency would be to leave. Most important are the ‘spiritual’ gains, which are lifely serious. Ability to live life in this moment, not “believe the i’s”, freedom from the “machine”. 🙂
June 3, 2007 at 2:54 pm
hello all.
are you sitting comfortably and deeply engaged with presence ?
if you have the time look at the Jamie Kennedy Bliss experiment. Its direct address is below.
or you can search under Kennedy Bliss experiment in the you tube search line.
By the way for those at the Gathering nice to see your shining faces. Thanks for posting the photos, wish you all well, wish also to come there sometime. Insh Allah.
ah Micah how lovely to see you, thank you for the sketch many moons ago it is still in my possesion.
good luck friends . storm the Bastille!
cyclops, aka one eyed jake.
June 3, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Sorry about my photo post earlier. I can’t get the Kodak site to work. Here are the photos at the Google site. I hope it works.
http://picasaweb.google.com/crandall33/5262007FOFReunion
June 3, 2007 at 6:23 pm
To Anonymous (456)
Dear Friend,
What we seem to be discussing on the issue of the numbers which you yourself say at the end, is not the issue, is rather silly if not openly ridiculous and formatory and wishing to put a finger in one place where that has not been at all the issue in my posts. Still, here we go again.
100% of the men I know is meant about the men I have actually had a somewhat close relationship in which that kind of subject was talked about. I have divided that 100% in three kinds of men. You are not one of those, wonderful, you’ve never even thought about the fact that Robert hasn’t approached you, good for you.
I think these details are not what question my or your sincerity. I can neither show you a serious statistical study of how many men in the Fellowship of Friends today have had and are still having sex with Robert but if you really want me to tell at least twenty stories that I know, one more disturbing than the other, I will be happy to tell you about them. I was so surprised when I heard them, the men involved who I would have never guessed had actually indulged in having sex with Robert, that it has shocked me. I guess one of the significant issues for me is that it is a bit disturbing that so many heterosexual men would actually agree to have sex with Robert and that so many of them are in positions in the Fellowship, wether official or not. What interest did they have? Position? Yes, and did they get it? yes. Prostitution? Or just exchange of services? That is how a conscious school works?
Are you also Opus 111? I guess you are by your answer but it doesn’t matter.
Finally I would say that indeed the amounts count because I think they are rather significant. Of the twenty plays I know, suppose ten were an exception, and ten simply reflected a pattern of what happens to so many men I do not know personally, does that not make you wonder enough how much the corruption extends? For it is in the end, nothing but corruption, all of it. NOT one of Robert’s relationships with men is a love relationship between two human beings. Does that not tell you about the corruption involved? Or do you just not call it corruption because it is coming from his majesty, the conscious being whose functions are not to be questioned?
We will talk more about these stories, maybe I’ll start writing them on the blog one by one and we can really analyze them. I didn’t think they were needed when there are so many much worse. It is funny, this must be some kind of voyerism or “being frigidity” that people really need to have the truth rubbed into them a thousand times before they can even feel it.
On the question of women, I still think Robert is very clearly a misogynist. It surprises me that so many of you think that the fact that Robert USES women for power positions, is not misogyny. For the past four years, the only woman that seems to have been clearly out there with Robert is Allison, she even directed a meeting, wow, that must be some recognition, but then, you could not find more of that kind of money or idolatry in the “have not” women of the fellowship, could you?
Would you find out and present to the blog how many women have been helped by Robert to own their own business like some men at Isis?
On your question on Dorothy, I have had not more than five volunteers in the almost three years I’ve been working with Dorothy. Four of them did not come more than twice and one of them came many, many times during the worst five months that I was looking after her twenty four hours a day when she first arrived. She was Susan Willoughby to whom I am deeply grateful.
In the past two months, Dinara has still been working with Dorothy. The Fellowship pays for her four hundred dollars of the salary and I give her an extra hundred as I did to anyone on salary so that they would have more incentive. It was not an easy job, for even forty hours.
The day she died I received one phone call from students, at ten to twelve at night and one from my daughter. The next day, two students called.
I have received more, much more from the ex-students on the blog who expressed their condolences, Whalerider and Veronicapoe, who I thank deeply, and Ames Gilbert offered great help.
But should it surprise me that students who made the black sheep of me are now disliking me even more after the black sheep has turned real and is questioning them down to the ground? No, I have nothing personal against any one student even if there are accounts to clarify with some but in general, we were all victims of a situation that was caused by our different positions in relation to Robert and how we each grabbed on to that relationship is what caused our secondary connections. That is why he is the one who I question the most, because he is the one who is most sick, who I most loved and who most hurt me, used me, exploited me. I do not think I owe the Fellowship any of the money I ever payed it. I should have it back, ALL OF IT and that would only cover 10% of the damages the Fellowship has had me suffer. I have nothing but suffering to thank the Fellowship for, or did I ever look like I was having fun?
You have not understood so very much of what I am trying to say but it is as much that I may not be 100% clear as that you do not wish to hear 100%.
On the question of there being an institutionalized responsibility of the Fellowship with the health of students, these are the steps to conscious communities (objective institutions that offer the people some simple human guarantees) and the lack of that simply shows how the institution of the Fellowship, (to not call it the brothel) is organized so that 80? 70?% of the income goes to Robert and the support of his life-style. There is no consciousness in his life-styles and had I known clearly what was done with the money from the beginning I would not have joined.
What has not been understood is that a conscious community, a conscious man, would not be able to establish any unlawful relationships with any other human being. A conscious community would establish enough official channels to guarantee the safety and integrity of its participants. 90% (!) of the things that happen in the Fellowship in relation to money, sex, human interaction, could never occur in a conscious community.
Life is a much better model of consciousness in this sense because although life individuals may not perform their work consciously in many areas, life has acquired after great social struggle, institutions that offer some human guarantees to its participants. The fact that the Fellowship has fallen below life standards and that students don’t even question that, is what makes the generalized and accepted corruption so dangerous to each student’s integrity.
The excuse that in exchange of giving up so much of our integrity for a few guessed angles on how previous schools connect to the idea of presence is simply not enough to justify the corruption in all other areas.
I wish I could make my posts shorter than two pages but I also don’t inner consider about saying what I have to say.
June 3, 2007 at 6:38 pm
To the student who are still in the school, who wrote in this blog and who will recognized themselves immediately :
Why do you want to deliver your opinion here?
Some of you say to counterbalance the point of view of the reader.
But which positive outcome will have these posts on a reader, since they evoke only discrimination, contempt and racism?
Which positive outcome will they have since to defend the school, these students exceed the rules given by their teacher:
Not to communicate with former students
Not to read this blog
Not to gossip
Which positive outcome since the simplest rules of” honor are not respected there.
First rule of honesty when you attack someone is to advance with face discovered and to name yourself.
Second is to attack others on the ground on which one discusses and not personally.
The level of attack is so low that I am myself surprised, and I did not think that this was existing on this level in the school.
As Robert quoted Einstein: The solution is never on the level of the problem. I guess he was meaning that at least it can not be below. Am I wrong?
The circulation of ideas and information is certainly a new thing in the school and one can understand that it creates a wind of panic there.
Thank you Sheik for not having erased the posts, which actually have nothing to do on this blog, except to let each reader be able to make up his own judgement about the whole thing.
Aline C.
June 3, 2007 at 7:46 pm
Hey, I was merely trying to hold up a mirror to you idiots out there. Maybe this will give you a little glimpse of how it must feel to RB and dedicated students to have your teacher ripped apart with lies and half-truths, by a bunch of wolfs in sheep’s clothing… But I guess you old, fat and ugly farts have so deeply forgotten all verifications, you are unable to see that, so forget my flaming and go on dreaming all is well in your stupor.
As for me, I am LOL
June 3, 2007 at 9:01 pm
Elena, your last letter to Girard was just wonderful, caring, sensitive, well written and deeply meaningful. Really it came from your heart and soul.
Also it is so noble and sweet of you that you choose to share these wonderful insights in your private life with G with us on this blog-thank you so much for that. Thanks to you we can appreciate his struggle more.
Your lofty spirit and emotional maturity shines through every written word. You must have a truly awakened soul in your beautiful gorgeous body.
May you continue on your wonderful journey as no doubt someone who has already awakened and if not will do so shortly.
Also, our thanks goes out to you about all the wonderful acts of selfless kindness you have provided to our beloved Dorothy. Thanks to you she died a peaceful death surrounded by true friends (your self, for example) and we are eternally grateful to you.
LOL
June 3, 2007 at 9:04 pm
Arthur said in response to my question about blogger’s personal experience of RB expressing doubt or concern about his own right actions : “Both books “sounded true” to me. Robert Burton a Saturn is a special case. However, with the information provided on this blog you can provide your own satisfactory answer about Saturn’s generally. And, wayward ones specifically.”
Huh? I don’t understand your response. (thank you Don Juan for yours… was there ever any discussion with or around RB of conscience or right action in your experience?) Are you saying that right action or conscience is a function of type? Conscience is an aspect of consciousness, so is consciousness a function of type? Plus, if you are really into typing people you may want to expand your reading list to include the many and brilliant books on astrology. Erin Sullivan has a fantastic book on Saturn. And to who ever had the post about the types by color would you mind posting more about that or a link?
Why is it that conscience is not a subject for fofers? In Buddhism it is part of the foundation – right action. I’m serious about this question, really. How about it current members?
…….
Beyond says: “If one feels that the group or a religion does not work for them, they should leave and find something that works. What I think is a waste of time, is to write how bad it was in that cult (especially write as much as on this blog), instead of looking for something that really works.”
I have not had the impression that former fof members have not gone on to discover much better forms for themselves. Why do you assume it is an either/or situation? My experience is that as I mature my circles expand and include more and I don’t jettison any part of my life.
June 3, 2007 at 9:36 pm
OK Ryan, you’re not the ideal moral-guardian, but “I’m sorry” to Joel, my post could read kinda anti-sem.
However from my own (not FOF or anyone else’s) experience I know that when someone uses a 5-year-old’s name calling tactics (“you stink”, “Bubble-boy”), the best policy is to slap the other cheek hard (theirs). That usually inspires more intelligence in their approach, unless that key ingredient is totally absent.
Trust me I am as far from the FOF high command (if that exists) as YOU are!! 🙂 So don’t dream up any conspiracies around me, pulleease!
I am curious about the number of Jews in FOF though, is it because they’re generally more spiritual than religious, or more free-thinking.. what?
Life Person, what was your cult?
I like this forum, it’s like the Foflist without any pretences of ‘kinder than thou’. Not that I had any of those.
I really don’t understand how people can leave after 10 or 20 years and turn totally anti. What are they saying, that they were blind and stupid for the previous 20 years? Are their whole lives subjective opinion? One day “Arsenal is the greatest!”, next day “Manchester United!”
I’m no apologiser for the Fof, I only say it’s useful for me.. but are these people just side-takers, who have to align their whole “identity” with one “side” or the other?
June 3, 2007 at 10:20 pm
“If you have not by nature a critical mind your staying here is useless.” G. I. Gurdjieff
“If you have not by nature a critical mind your staying in the Fellowship of Friends cult is mandatory.”
The King of Clubs is the enemy of delusion. The Fellowship of Friends is what happens when the work ideas are mixed into a crowd of people that do not understand the need to develop all the lower centers. The intellectual story of the instinctive center is an entirely necessary part of the intellectual story as a whole because it can always hear a lie. The king of clubs is the machine’s lie detector, even when the intellectual center and the emotional center are in full agreement with the statements of another it is the king of clubs that ignores all the ideas and words and looks at the body language and the radiated energy of the speaker. The king of clubs is what hears the ulterior motive behind the disingenuous outward appearance of a generous and platonic attention from someone who is in fact simply seeking to sexually gratify an obsessive appetite. The king of clubs is what directly witnesses the apparent and hidden appetites of people. When a false prophet wants your money, wants to satisfy his sexual lusts and wants to control you it is the king of clubs that recognizes the real motivate in spite the elaborate spiritual con game. When a six foot four, 200 pound son of a butcher from Arkansas tells you that the all knowing gods want you to submit to him sexually it is the king of clubs that says no. This is one reason Burton hates the king of clubs, not to mention that the king of clubs is a threat to the security of his income from people with a wrong magnetic center. People easily manipulated with extreme ideas and the distortion of useful ideas have what in the Work is known as a wrong magnetic center, they lack the common sense that comes from developing all the centers. They lack the critical mind that requires the presence of the king of clubs. The main reason Burton hates the king of clubs is because his is broken. This is a quotation from the “teacher” in the first days of the Fellowship of Friends (once posted on the internet and substantiated as circulated notes from a Burton meeting):
Burton: This group will produce three angels, and they will be burned on the cross and will survive.
Q. The others are the chaff?
Burton: They move to another role, if we take Jesus’ words, “Every hair is counted.” Remember, those three I spoke of will be literally and worse burned on the cross.
This kind of statement is predictably the kinds of perceptions that come from the mentally ill, that is people with broken centers. The “angle” comes from a man with a broken, “paranoid” king of clubs and such broken machines and their delusions of grandeur are commonly registered in medical journals. Many of these psychologically crippled people even share the same delusions, so that professionals hear the same beliefs from various individuals. Broken brains are predictable. Burton hates the king of clubs because his broken king of clubs keeps telling him that bad things are going to happen, he even calls these distorted ‘I’s from the “adversary” prophesies. Burton was distorted and ruined right from the beginning of his career as a pawn of B influences. This is where your “teacher” received instructions on how to manipulate and misuse people for his own gain:
http://www.davearcher.com/alex.html
June 3, 2007 at 10:31 pm
Dear No Name,
I appreciate your patience with me, as I was not clear with what I really meant. I was trying to put years of observation into one sentence.
This is going to be my last note, as I find it very time consuming to read up on everyone’s good intentions.
I just want to say hello, this is where I’m at, and move on. You are right that I don’t know a lot, re Renato’s illness.
The point I’m really getting to is not about Renato. It’s more about how 99% of the exercises given in the FOF, held us back, rather than, teach us anything. This had left me very unclear for a long time, so that when I believed there was some clarity with regard to the above,(Kiran’s and others missives), I hastily posted to the blog without thinking it out with more definition.
The confusion is from the abusive use of the exercise of not gossiping, and for a long time things were not adding up. Perhaps I can add in the sex exercise just to clarify what I meant.
Renato is just an example simply because someone mentioned him with illness, and there again,supposedly, another lie: i.e. HE HAD CANCER SO IT WAS REPORTED. Kiran says he died of AIDS….. who to believe….. I side with K & alts.
Again, the point I’m getting at is NOT about him, but about the exercises given to work with.
Here is an example: Sex exercise is created, and out come the SEX DETECTIVES. Seemed like dirty old men and women getting their jollies by “checking out” other student’s relationships.Did it do anyone any good? No.
It is very difficult to point out the ABUSIVE use of the gossip exercise, so also is the so-called “work” with negative emotions. We misinterpret what positiveness really is, and call it ‘good’, and in turn misinterpret what negativity really is and call it ‘bad’.In reality, it was the opposite given the info that is on this blog.
Take Sharon’s blog 52 dated May 26th, 2007. She mentioned that “The exercise of gossip did not stop much of this – All the twisted manipulation of relationships as what Paola described is nauseating”.
What does that say about the exercise of “keeping things in low profile” The revelations on this blog sound more like reality and the deceit and abuse that was and still is prevalent in the FOF is coming to light and the dots are starting to be connected .
It didn’t help, and it created fear, such that, and in more than one case, “awake” parents saw their only alternative was to remove themselves and THEIR CHILDREN from this sordid and dysfunctional behavior.
I truly think people should start shouting out the true facts, and stop calling it “gossip”.
I’m not against anyone having sex all day long with 1000 partners,and they can have as many orgy parties as they want. This is the best soap opera around and if someone cared to arrange or produce this play, it could make top dollars BUT be FAIR about this game of non-gossip and non-sex exercise.It is not all one way.
Thanks for your time. Hello to everyone that I know, and who knows me.I have ‘travelled’ around the world without travelling meeting all of you.
Teresa
June 3, 2007 at 11:01 pm
I am here now, or how would you be able to read the screen?
The light that you all bloggers see at the end of this one way tunnel blog is nothing else than an over size truck coming full speed wrong way.
Don’t wait to recognize it by the horn.
Look, Hear.
June 3, 2007 at 11:39 pm
Science now, 10/#414 wow,
Do you mean you only relatively recently came slowly to verify all this? You must be a western science.
Esoterism realized this witout need of scientific analisys ages ago.
That’s why the three traditionals ways were used for men, which all have one of the three brains more developed than the other two.
And a Way of working with all the three aspects simoultaneously as to get out of there more rapidly had been also elaborated in earlies times.
That sounds schematically like Men number one, two, three, their ancient traditional ways to awakening in schools, and the Fourth Way.
Why to mention this well known, and now apparently verified also by you, matter here?
In my fof blog?
Do you mean that Mister B*rton is using all the three old ways to wash real pupils away from they own reptilian, mammalian or dual-human physical brains toward their real SELF? at once?
Is his center of gravity beyond the reptilian (1), mammalian (2) and dual-human formatory (3) physical brains to which the pupils are still so attached?
I see….
he wash them up from the reptilian brain by the contraddiction of finest senses impressions, hard moving labor and contradictory sexual experiences.
He wash them up from the mammalian brain by going against the mechanical natural mammalian love and affection while nurishing the mammalian part with symbolic impressions that go beyond the understanding of the mammalian brain by itself alone.
Is not his machine a mammalian brain centered one? may be with reptilian tendencies? That is anyway the machine fitting and playing the role.
At this point the formatory dual ‘human’ brain is easily washed clean by themselves if anything is alive beyond that grey matter.
Is this that you meant with your ‘scientific’ post?
I’ll consider it deeply – thank you anyway
GOlb
June 4, 2007 at 12:14 am
I’ll admit to being brainwashed.
I used to joke about it sometimes..
You can call it ‘putting yourself under the infuence of the school’ also.
Big deal..
I knew it and it was fine as long it lasted.
Now I need something else
June 4, 2007 at 1:09 am
veronicapoe says:
“This is the “attack other” pole in the “compass of shame.””
Imagination satisfies all centers.
***
Whalerider says:
“I really reached out to you in that post!”
OK, OK, you did make the effort, bit I still feel you were manipulative. Just a bit, maybe?
“I was certainly not a child as you insinuate in your example”
No, I did not insinuate you were a child. I was mentioning the children that were recently the wave of molestations of the Church. (Did you get identified? Queened out??)
“The intensity of the sexual experience tends to imprint in the memory, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
Actually, and this was evidenced in a court of law, that the further away from the incident, memory tends to become faded, regardless of the the intensity. This was proven under hypnosis.
“Do you summarily discount all the allegations of sexual abuse done by priests in the US Catholic church because it happened so long ago?”
Actually, the Church, which is extremely wealthy, chose to “pay off”, much as the FOF does (sound familiar?) rather than face more negative press and lose its members.
***
Community aka Elena says:
” I got angry you labelled me for being crazy.”
No, not crazy but extremely identified.
I suggest, quite seriously, since you are really on a roll with this stuff, that you try to get a publisher and get it published.
Seriously, you will make a lot of money. When I was with Rajneesh I was amazed by the number of journalists who wre constantly around. And publish they did. Did they actually publish an accurate account of what was going on? Hell no!!
Didn’t matter. Sensationalism sells!!!
What you write is subjective. What YOU understand, what YOU feel internally, it is NOT what is happenning in REALITY. GET IT?????
June 4, 2007 at 1:16 am
Elena,
Exposing publically personal intimate details of your husband’s private life puts you in the same place you so eagerly put others.
The delicacy of the excuse does not count.
Big Big buffer signora.
June 4, 2007 at 1:35 am
Language and the system
In post #300 no person writes
“These are just what they are – behaviors happening in the now for whatever reasons. When someone with authority gives us a LABEL we tend to just take it and use it and label this and that. Does the experience change because you labeled it? Why does it need to be intellectually labeled, what’s the benefit of labeling the actual experience?”
This is directed specifically towards a statement regarding the 9 of hearts.
This post is a good example of a failure to think through something. I let this statement circulate for a while, it just did not seem right. The author apparently has had enough exposure to the idea of using the deck of cards to understand in general what is meant by the labels but seems to assume that because they have not observed a specific part or function that the whole system of using the deck of cards as a model is incorrect. Since the deck of cards in this context is meant to be a model of the functions it is also denying the model itself.
This illustrates how we mix up the internal and external. It is possible to make a true observation of how I take a label and substitute it for real understanding. This does not make it a rule for others. I learned long ago that often what I thought was something outside of me was actually either a limitation or a change in my understanding. No one of us can speak for the understanding of others. When we believe we can we are in imagination.
There are three questions in this post. Taking them individually
One “what’s the benefit of labeling the actual experience?”
try and think this through as a pseudo intellectual bit of wisdom it sounds OK- but what is the actual argument, it is “what is the use of language?” Do I need to justify language? All language is labeling something. Yes it may be possible to argue that we want to reach a place of “beingness” not of theory. This does not negate that thinking and theory are part of how the intellectual center process’s information.
The second question is “Why does it need to be intellectually labeled,”
Shakespeare accurately stated a “rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. So, Yes amino acids, supernova, black holes and tectonic plates would exist whether or not we label them. Each center and each part of center has its own intelligence and ways of experiencing the internal and external world. Through out history all cultures have developed languages and cosmology. The system is presented as objective knowledge. If you personally accept the labels without verifying them they are less then meaningless. The intellectual center, emotional center, moving center and instinctive center are things. As much a thing as a rock or a tree. Our inner world is fully as rich and diverse as the external and as much of a mystery. Consider Shakespeares statement isn’t smell a different function than an intellectual label? Perhaps another way of interpretting his statement is to use the right function for the task.
Which brings me to three.
“Does the experience change because you labeled it?”
Yes, it does. Whether in the external world or internal labels describe something. My father in law is a retired professor of Botany from UCB. He has an immense library of books on this topic and knows the labels of 1000’s of plants. This is the external world. Do you not see that what he sees when he looks around is different than what I or you see. He sees a world of relationships that do not exist for me. The labels describe an underlying structure of Law. Physisist’s, Anthropologist’s, Lawyer’s, auto mechanics each has their own inner map of relationships.
So too for some one who actually uses the tools of self observation a world of relationships exists that is different than that of man #1, #2 or #3 . The words and labels of the system become part of an interconnected series of experiences that help to bring us to an understanding of ourselves as an individual.
If ideas like false personality, body type, imagination, and buffers are not connected to profound inner experience they carry little weight. My limitations, weaknesses, memories, thoughts and dreams are my reality and it matters little how I describe them. The value of the system is that it simplifies everything down to one point. What we experience is limited to our own consciousness which can and does exist only in this moment.
For me the system is a convenience. I was in school recently for a number of years. I had to learn to write an essay. One point was that it is necessary to chose an intellectual perspective. Each different division of modern study has its own theoretical framework and language. One common form of assignment in my Psychology class was to write about a topic from different theoretical perspectives such as Freudian theory, or Maslow’s ideas,( Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a theory in psychology that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation,)
Some classes I took were Logic, Ethics, Human Values, Speech, Early African Civilizations, Physic’s, Biology, Sociology, Anthropology, Abnormal psychology, writing for the Humanities, Group work, and Family dynamics. The point is that each discipline had a language and theoretical structure. I would need to refer to the text and copy the language of whatever discipline I was working with. One thing I found for my self -nothing contradicted the system. The system allowed me to simplify my thinking because it described relationships in terms of the Law of Three and the Law of Seven. I could think about the subject in these terms and use the vocabulary of each subject.
For example a point that modern psychology has not recognized that is implicit in both Freudian theory and Maslow’s theoretical structure is that man is not one-there are more than one intelligence inhabiting our bodies. Freud developed his theory through self observation ( with the help of an abundance of cocaine) His ideas like the Id, ego, super ego and libido indicate a number of different and at times contradictory intelligence’s. So too does Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs. The system’s idea of 4 functions with the ability to work with different qualities of attention is both simpler and more verifable. Another influential modern physcologist John Bradshaw has developed his own theoretical perspective and done excellent work using his own theory of “reparenting” with a process of healing the “Child within”. Yet isn’t what he is describing false personality and essence and the need to develop a true personality to heal and stimulate the growth of essence?
The point is that each of these can be understood in the context of the system. A theoretical perspective is not a substitute for individual understanding and never a substutute for individual experience. Denying the validity of the system because the FOF has a play of crime is poor thinking. Crime is just one of the six process’s the FOF also has a play of the other 5. Some former students have discussed this eloquently. Christ said “let him who is without sin cast the first stone” from that perspective let the ones who have no crime in their lives be the judges of the FOF. Do not confuse this with justifying that which cannot be justified. In the end all is as it must be.
This post is actually a good example of the limitations of the intellectual center. There is a difficulty expressing an individual understanding that is based on both a theoretical perspective and emotional realizations. My actual thoughts and feelings on this subject pass through me rapidly. Over a period of days they return and develop.Finally there is the emotional intensity to try a to record my thought’s. It requires the training and experience of working within a structure to write this. In the end however it is not my own internal experience that is transmitted it is simply the best I can do right now. What is a rather short thought and passing feeling requires a lenghty post just to make any sense and convey to some degree my own understanding of this.
I too regret the necessity of having to use this medium.
I prefer to work with Music, Poetry and Art.
Thank you to anyone who takes the trouble to read this post.
Anyone interested in discussing the system ideas can go to
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StillPoint/
to see some personal photo’s and artwork
http://community.webshots.com/user/scottduncan
June 4, 2007 at 3:28 am
Funny I saw this from Kiran:
“Also there were many comments on Clara’s beautiful and courageous posts for example “Why she did not show this side of her for so many years in the school?” Simply because she, as all of us were trying to play the game, which was only be created to make this incredible number of contradictions possible.”
Funny, when Kiran was called Ulrich he visited my centre in the early 90s and pointed out that people changed when they sat down for the meeting. He said there is no need to act any different. It stuck with me, so I for one have never “played the game”, but instead try hard to “be myself”.
Maybe that’s the ‘brainwashing’ people undergo, a semi-voluntary imitation of others’ posture, facial expression, words and phrases (‘in a way’, ‘for myself’, ‘a certain…’, ‘incredible’, ‘a taste of..’), and then probably extends into the emotional and intellectual centres too. I often hear students with a ‘standard’ voice, for men the softly stoned Colin Lambert drawl, and for women a crisper and more business-like tone.
Kiran I hear you didn’t pay Huib and Tracy who set up your very successful business and website, not good karma for a hopeful New Age guru! Does your Inergator product zap your conscience or did the Fof do that, or the coma? Or is that just ‘bearing contradictions’?
June 4, 2007 at 4:01 am
Photo Question post 10/457: OK, then! Thank you for clarifying. If not for the threat of having the FOF impose ultimatums, I wonder if there might be many current members interested in following their own compass to attend a reunion and embrace old friends.
June 4, 2007 at 4:27 am
Hello.
Some current members on this discussion board consistently resort to childish language as a mode of expression. They sound similar. They spew with a particular cruel sarcasm and are humorless.
Even though other current members, including Siddiq, have requested that they, as representatives of the School, resist crass urges to express negativity, they continue to write rude, puerile and vulgar comments.
Further, one current member (Howard Carter) requested that a particularly offensive comment by another current member (LOL) be deleted, (out of embarrassment?) nevertheless they continue to express with utter unconsciousness.
Are they Fellowship of Friends members? One might highly doubt it. It seems implausible. It is true that it is very common for random lunatics to join discussions and “flame” to attract strange attention. Perhaps there are imposters on board. That seems more likely.
Still, if they are really members, I have a thought. Anger is a tricky emotion. Under its influence, it is usually best to slow down and become present before hitting “submit post”.
LL
June 4, 2007 at 4:34 am
Go Vinnie the Fish!
A bit more anti sem. mixed with threats of violence,
You old charmer you.
You’ll be one of the inner circle charged with the task of regenerating humanity I suppose?
Love, Ryan.
p.s. I bet you’re one of the Blowfish.
June 4, 2007 at 4:54 am
To Hava Nagillah, (482)
“Exposing publically personal intimate details of your husband’s private life puts you in the same place you so eagerly put others”.
I am not afraid of exposing myself publicly. If once exposed we cannot account for our behavior and pretend it is conscious behavior then it needs to be looked at deeply. Girard’s as much as Robert’s and anyone in the Fellowship who has to take antidepressants and go to the meeting to feel they’re accomplishing a high state.
When men like Robert and Girard say they are conscious beings above everybody else in the Fellowship, for thirty five years, their lives must be able to show that consciousness in practice. If they cannot, what buffer or excuse is being used to justify it?
All three lines of work must be in harmony with conscience and consciousness. If they are not there is no consciousness. Most of us, including Robert and Girard are on different levels of that scale. Robert, in his misuse of power is way down the line.
It is not I who made them public figures, it is they who made themselves such and lied to everybody else about their level of awakening. Now they must respond like any one of us have to respond.
LOL, you were trying to sound sarcastic but it came out really good, thank you. Were you trying to put your foot out from your last posts?
Don’t be so afraid of the questioning of your teacher, question him yourself so that you stop getting ripped off for he is a man that thwarted his own evolution by dividing into a minor teacher and a sex addict. He uses his teaching to provide money for the sex addict. You really think that is consciousness? Integrity? Dignity? Love? Transparency?
June 4, 2007 at 5:08 am
Thank you Veronicapoe for your posts. It is good to see how the same patterns apply in different cults. In the Fellowship people still think it is so unique.
June 4, 2007 at 5:09 am
Hello, Beyond (454):
I was just shaking your pedestal a little, since you put yourself forth as “Beyond” and say, “I do think that what you call an open discussion is a waste of time.”
As for my question about all your advice, it is in response to your comment: “And what kind of authority are you that other people should believe you, or believe anything that is
written on this blog?”
But instead of answers to my questions I got more advice from you:
“Get clear with yourself first.”
The word DISCUSSION, according to The Concise Oxford Dictionary means:
Examination by argument; a debate; a conversation.
I see no mention of TRUTH in this definition.
Now that I have clarified my position, I will ask you again:
1. If you are Beyond, as you say, what’s with all the advice?
2. Is that what you call “keeping your place”? (since you use it so often in your signature)
3. And since you say you are “beyond” all this, why should your advice matter to us poor bloggers? Especially in light of your comment,(“And what kind of authority are you…”)
I do think that you believe “Shut Up, Stop Whining, and Get a Life” is good advice and has worked for you; and it probably works for those who are ready to do that. But I also think that the blog can be the PROCESS, the ROAD, the PATH for many of us, if we wish, to get to where you SAY you are:
“I am on neither side. I am Beyond, and I keep my place.”
June 4, 2007 at 6:14 am
Teresa, thanks for your clarification, I appreciate that you did not really intend to speak as if you had first hand knowledge. See, this is the problem on this blog, there is a work word for this: it is called GOSSIP.
Gossip can be quite a pathetic part of human nature. I think you and I can readily agree that it matters little what someone dies of (as long as there was no murder, but say one disease over another) but in a forum as here, these rumours take on an insidious quality, I am sure you did not intend.
Kiran, if you read this blog carefully, has deeply slandered quite a few people but when asked has not had the decency, as you do, to admit he had no clue what was really going on.
Thanks.
June 4, 2007 at 7:10 am
8 more photos from a great weekend:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Jfbookman/GreaterFoFGetTogether507
JoelF
June 4, 2007 at 7:28 am
#482 “Exposing publically personal intimate details of your husband’s private life puts you in the same place you so eagerly put others.”
Unless it is to serve a higher purpose, such as revealing pertinent truth to involved parties.
Elena, I have no doubt that you are past allowing this kind of BS to affect your choices. Let them rant on. The game of guilt and judgment is their’s, to be revealed here, apparently.
June 4, 2007 at 10:05 am
Am I the only one around here who find The Teacher a bore both as a topic and a person?
In more than nine years as a student (77 to 86) the only things I never heard him say (nor heard attributed to him) anything remotely memorable that did not pertain to the fantasy, fairy-tale side of The School– you know, the predictions of coming disasters, the immanence of conscious beings, the glorious future awaiting us individually and as a group.
During my time he was certainly an object of reverence in my own mind, but mainly based on the reverence that others I respected granted.
His carryings-on as recounted by many here and elsewhere seem rather run-of-the-mill addict, alcoholic behavior.
We all idealized him to various extents. That he failed our ideals of him is a matter of course. The interesting question is what our idealizations tell us about ourselves.
June 4, 2007 at 11:34 am
Elena,
Your:”I am not afraid of exposing myself publicly.”
What a buffer!!!
It is not yourself you were exposing, but you husband!
You did not write anything about your sexual desires or tendencies in that post (of course no one expects you to), but you did write all that about Girard’s.
You just ended marital relationship with a man whom you declared you loved and the next thing you do is telling millions of people intimate details about his personal and sexual life.
And you did all that in the name of your imaginary picture of how the personal life of a conscious being must look-like.
Your great humanistic valus worth nothing if you can be so malicious and buffer it so strongly.
June 4, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Reply to Post #478/10
You wrote ~
“The light that you all bloggers see at the end of this one way tunnel blog is nothing else than an over size truck coming full speed wrong way.”
__________________________
Whew! If only that were true, it would be allot easier to see the possible whereabout-trail of Whalerider’s toaster.
Love to you all
Including opossums, turtles, skunks, raccoons, dear, vultures, armadillos,
cats, dogs, squirrels and the rare person stooped over looking for signs of a dragging power cord belonging to ‘certain’ opportune and inopportune kitchen appliances.
June 4, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Ryan O’Stool: “You’ll be one of the inner circle charged with the task of regenerating humanity I suppose?”
It would be great to make such a contribution, I’d die happily then. I suspect we’re all ‘charged’ with that task deep inside, after we regenerate ourself (or during the process). Mr G maybe felt that call when he struggled for 8 years to write A&E, to ‘pay for his existence’.
To just lift one individual out of her mire feels priceless i think.
One thing I’ve learned in the Fof is that I can actually experience Love with even the most incompatible person whom I might normally avoid. We’re not just all connected at some deep level, but are really ‘one’ at a deep level.
June 4, 2007 at 5:06 pm
I have a question for the FOF members who have the responsibility of contributing to Wikipedia. I would sincerely like to know why there is an attempt to hide the failure of Robert’s predictions by suggesting that they were symbolic and not to be taken literally. As a long time member, I know, you yourself know and many, many others also know that these predictions were never presented as symbolic. Hundreds of quotes can probably be found to substantiate this.
What are you telling yourself when you write these things? It seems that you must have somehow found justification for complying with the notion that truth and honesty are much less important than new recruits. Is the continued existence of the FOF in its current form more important to you than the integrity and moral health of the organization and its members? My sense is that you are damaging yourself by taking on this role.
I would appreciate honest and personal explanations from Peter I., Mario F. and anyone else who is contributing to the information on Wikipedia. Maybe the attempt to think about and answer this question will help you see how you are being used in a way that is most likely inconsistent with your original impulse to live a decent and spiritual life.
I sincerely hope you will find your way to the truth. It is a tragedy to start out in one direction and find yourself later only going deeper into the darkness you had hoped to avoid. I am afraid this is happening to many members of the FOF. This may be the biggest pitfall on “the Way” and the longer you stay and support lies masquerading as truth the harder it will be to leave. If you really value your self you will find the courage to do the right thing and you will know what that is in your own heart if you listen.
Good luck, thanks for reading and for having the courage, I hope, of answering.
p.s. If you do find your way out there are people who will support you and help you through the process of understanding how something that once appeared so beautiful, that you gave so much to and trusted so completely, has now become so corrupt.
June 4, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Hi Steve Anderson 10/412
“Did we share a house in SF sometime in 1978?” —
Sorry, that would be another Kathryn. I lived at “Mount Carmel Monastery” in ’78 (later known as Renaissance, Apollo, Isis…)
“Sandra C you look terrific.”
Agreed!!
June 4, 2007 at 6:42 pm
To us all:
The perception, within, that questioning can even occur in one’s life is not to take for guaranted!
A very special set of circumstances have to come together… So called “Kairos time” ?.
The perception, within, that questioning is actually occuring, is not to take for guaranted!
A very special set of circumstances have to come together… So called “Kairos time”.
The “next”, happends according to the very same laws…
Things happend…
“Incipit Vita Nova”
(Dante Alighieri, Vitae Nova)
Translation: New life begins.
Gratitude.
June 4, 2007 at 6:42 pm
Hi Former Student, #483 – thanks for your thoughts. I wanted to say that labels in themselves are fine – this is exactly how our mind seems to work normally. But I am not sure if names and explanations actually bring us any closer to actual understanding of things.
Our mind tends to work kind of like scissors – dissect, dissect… And label the pieces. We look at a whole picture and pick out parts. Then our mind imagines relationships between these picked out parts. There is a certain fascination about this dissection into pieces and reconstruction, and certain pleasure and satisfaction. However, it seems to me that it is just a trick of the mind and no matter how crazy we go labeling – we still don’t really know what’s going on… Do we really know? Or we simply comfort ourselves with subjective explanations?
When I was a small girl I would walk in the forest and be amazed at the chorus of birds, and all the variety of plants and creatures. It was one magical picture, miraculous, unknown. Forest appeared as one big alive entity full of mystery.
Then I grew up and became a biologist/botanist, and passionately learned the names and “relationships” between creatures and plants, determined to understand what life was about. You know what I sincerely noticed after I’ve done that? That now when walking in the forest I inevitably see multitude, my brain goes clicking – this is A, this is B, this is C. I know the names of plants and single out each birds voice. My brain dissects the beautiful whole and labels it, and explains “relationships” and “reasons” for things. There is definitely a certain kick I get out of it.
But the feeling of miraculous is somehow gone. This was the most disappointing discovery after years of university education. I’ve got pieces with names, and even stories about relationships between pieces, but lost the sense of the miraculous Whole that I so clearly remember having as a child.
Do I actually KNOW more now with all the labels in my pocket? I don’t think so. I have labels, and I know names of things, that they taught me – that’s it.
Science changes it’s labels all the time, and then re-labeling and re-explanation starts. It’s like a mind game – fun to play, brings certain pleasure and satisfaction. In the school the same thing happens – labels and explanations change. Now King of Clubs and Lower Self are singled out as the devil, and Steward and Nine of Hearts are good guys. Interestingly, all participants sincerely observing all this in themselves, just like before they were sincerely observing some other stuff in themselves that is now went out of style. Similarly in middle ages people seem to agree that Earth was flat and stars were holes in dark fabric, little windows for angels. And now all agree that these are huge round celestial bodies… I am sure there will be other explanations, and we’ll agree to them.
I am not saying that labeling is bad, and intellectual knowledge and research is all wrong. I am definitely not against education and knowledge! No, it is what it is, it’s happening everywhere, it’s all seem to be a part of the human deal.
I was trying to point that although intellectual labeling a very satisfying process, it might not be the ultimate tool for self-knowledge, helpful in understanding a true picture of the world, of ourselves. A true picture may not be understandable or knowable, after all. We try, we end up with a bunch of names, and still may not have a clue what’s up and who we actually are. It’s humbling to see how little do we know, but it is also liberating in some strange way.
I still enjoy science and read new research articles with great pleasure. I totally loved the System – such a great tool for singling out behaviors and labeling them. But may O. was right when he supposedly said “abandon the system”? What do you think?
Please feel free to write me directly, I know it gets lengthy trying to talk about these things. Sorry folks for takind blog’s real estate, and thanks for reading.
malaec@yahoo.com
June 4, 2007 at 7:04 pm
Elena–no I am not joking, I sincerely thank you!
Please continue on your path!
LOL
June 4, 2007 at 7:09 pm
Hey Demi Moore, it took you only 9 years to figure out he is a bore? good for you taking such swift action!
you ex foffers are quite the brainy bunch! 9 years for Demi Moore, 17 for Elena, 10-15- 20+ years for randall, bruce, friedlander and others…even some recent additions that had been in for 30 years! you folks are really IMPRESSIVE!!!
June 4, 2007 at 7:12 pm
Exlax 101 #481
Me: “I really reached out to you in that post!”
You: “Ok, Ok, you did make the effort, bit I still feel you were manipulative. Just a bit, maybe?”
Me: Thank you for acknowledging my effort. Let’s say I encouraged you to react. Manipulating you would be making you do something you really don’t want to do.
Me: “I was certainly not a child as you insinuate in your example”
You: “No, I did not insinuate you were a child. I was mentioning the children that were recently the wave of molestations of the Church.
Me: “You used the child example to support your idea that in the case of childhood abuse that happened long ago, memory is unreliable. That’s true. I was not a child when my experience occurred. So in fact, my memory is likely to be more reliable that of a child’s.”
You: “Did you get identified? Queened out??”
Me: “It takes one to know one.”
Me: “The intensity of the sexual experience tends to imprint in the memory, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
You: “Actually, and this was evidenced in a court of law, that the further away from the incident, memory tends to become faded, regardless of the intensity. This was proven under hypnosis.”
Me: “Actually, Juan, you are lying. Cite the case, and I will pay you $100. Hypnosis is inadmissible evidence in a court of law.”
Me: “Do you summarily discount all the allegations of sexual abuse done by priests in the US Catholic church because it happened so long ago?”
You: “Actually, the Church, which is extremely wealthy, chose to “pay off”, much as the FOF does (sound familiar?) rather than face more negative press and lose its members.”
Me: “So what’s your point? Obviously the cases had merit as did the one against the FOF. It is not all about negative press.”
Vinnie the Fish #10/484
You said: “brainwashing…as a semi-voluntary imitation of others’ posture, facial expression, words and phrases”
In life we call this modeling behavior. We model our parents and friends growing up as a mechanism for receiving affection, attention, and group membership. Since it is a deeply ingrained socializing behavior, one of the psychological ‘laws’ we are under, the smart choice is to choose your role model(s) wisely.
Former Student #10/483
Thanks for your post.
You said, “Another influential modern psychologist John Bradshaw has developed his own theoretical perspective and done excellent work using his own theory of “reparenting” with a process of healing the “Child within”. Yet isn’t what he is describing false personality and essence and the need to develop a true personality to heal and stimulate the growth of essence?”
Interesting thought, ‘reparenting’ as true personality… So what you are saying here is that when essence is shackled with childhood ‘issues’, an adaptive, addictive-prone false personality is formed to protect essence. To heal or resolve the addictions, one must journey within to do a ‘reparenting’ process for essence. I agree that ‘reparenting’ is a trait of true personality, although the actual process of ‘reparenting’ is an inward, psychodynamic, intrapersonal manifestation of work on oneself. ‘Personality’ is what I would consider as an outward, interpersonal manifestation of work on oneself with others.
“…from that perspective let the ones who have no crime in their lives be the judges of the FOF.”
Remember Scott, one of our duties as US citizens is that we may be called upon to be on a jury and make a judgment call in a legal case. In fact, a judicial judge’s job, despite their human failings is in fact to judge people, which may include moral issues. The judges that I have met have been emotionally developed and highly intelligent people. So I don’t feel the need to accept the status quo and justify a play of crime just because it is the way it is on this plane. That’s using bad judgement. For many years in the US human slavery was the status quo…
WhaleRider
1979-85
June 4, 2007 at 8:15 pm
“Hey, I was merely trying to hold up a mirror to you idiots out there. Maybe this will give you a little glimpse of how it must feel to RB and dedicated students to have your teacher ripped apart with lies and half-truths, by a bunch of wolfs in sheep’s clothing… But I guess you old, fat and ugly farts have so deeply forgotten all verifications, you are unable to see that, so forget my flaming and go on dreaming all is well in your stupor.
As for me, I am LOL”
Well, at least you are honest.
Let me ask you why do you assume the personal observations here are untrue? And as far as bloggers being ‘wolfs’, WHY would anyone go to the bother to tell lies? – it is much more worthwhile to tell one’s truth. Who do you think owns truth?
And if the consensus truth among some people who have being in the fof is that RB is not a ‘conscious being’ and is actually a person with some serious problems, then why do you care? Just don’t read it. Let us continue in our stupor.
What do YOU think of conscience? Is it important to you? Do YOU experience your conscience? I’m not asking for a merely subjective point of view, but a deeply personal one. A core, essence, pursuer of enlightenment, point of view.
And finally, is LOL “lots of love” or “laughing out loud” or “lots of laughs” or what? Just curious…
Also – ‘a former student’ #483 … I enjoyed that post.
June 4, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Any pattern of “use and discard” is a pattern that undervalues and humiliates another person. In Girard Haven’s compilation of “Best Thoughts” we find:
“The pain that one feels when one is humiliated is that of false personality being diminished”.
So Girard and each one of you in the inner circle who have made of Girard’s indoctrination your greatest tool to support and justify Robert Burton’s behavior, does that mean that humiliating other people is the way of a conscious school?
And to regular students who are consistently humiliated, have you observed the I’s that make you think that you should not be feeling this humiliation and opt to buffer it or feel guilty about it because you think it is your own negative emotion?
Robert humiliates students by:
1. Not addressing them personally but en masse, unless he has some particular interest in them.
2. By separating them into groups of those with more and less money.
3. By using student’s money to sexually exploit young men.
4. By setting young men up so that he can exploit them sexually.
5. By using student’s intellectual, emotional and physical resources for his own idolization.
6. By not giving room for students to develop themselves, limiting their scope of participation.
7. By determining what students must talk about, read, and participate in.
8. By acting as if he is the only human being worth listening to on the planet.
9. By looking at people’s clothes up and down before he even greets them, if he greets them at all.
10. By having students pay 800 dollars each for a dinner of twelve people and not addressing them but holding a conversation between himself and Asaf.
11. By not LISTENING to students.
12. By reducing students to mere servants when work on one’s self should be able to bring out the beauty and the talents of each individual and not shame, fear and inner considering.
13. By neglecting students that love and support him.
“The pain that one feels when one is humiliated is that of false personality being diminished.”
According to Mr. Haven then, pain is not real, suffering is not real, humiliation is not real, only false personality is real and it makes those other emotions false. He is welcome to question my interpretation of his words and so are others.
True personality according to him, does not feel humiliated? Is he saying that if Jesus felt humiliated when he was made to walk the streets with a cross while being whipped by the soldiers, he was in false personality? Or is he saying that a man’s being cannot be reduced by humiliation? Does that mean that he does not feel the humiliation? Or that he doesn’t identify with it? And whether a man’s being is not reduced or identified with the humiliation does that make the humiliation any less humiliating?
Why do you think Robert Burton is such a professional humiliating his student’s? How many of the twelve thousand students that have had to leave the Fellowship were humiliated enough that they were not willing to put up with it anymore? The humiliation from Robert or from those in power postions in the inner circle who thought they were also better than the rest?
Here is another angle on humiliation.
Humility is the other side of the coin of pride. While pride is the being knowledge of one’s integrity, humility is the being knowledge of one’s position within the macrocosmic whole. The knowing that one is being served with love by those ahead of one and that one is to serve with love those arriving after one. Ahead and behind, not in the position of class or space, but in the being spirituality. There are no classes, or statuses in the spirit, just spirits evolving, all bounded by love.
Humility and pride are the positive emotions that come from the experience of the hierarchy. Humiliation cannot occur in spiritual hierarchy.
Humiliation is only possible in physical hierarchies. It is the state in which the instinctive center primes. It is done redundantly in life by the way people behave with each other, dress, move, talk to each other.
Indifference, disacknowledgement, pedestals, idolatry, are all forms of humiliation. Only people who have not experienced the greatness of their own being with pride and humility can allow others to humiliate them. In doing so, they diminish their own possibilities of experiencing themselves because they depress themselves into lower and lower states until they can no longer recognize themselves but the other. Their “love” for the one that humiliates them, totally replaces their recognition of the being within themselves.
Depression is the expression of an I without pride, without dignity. True dignity does not set itself up for others to humiliate it. It cannot humiliate others. Dignity, humility and pride are positive emotions or qualities of consciousness.
June 4, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Re: Feathered Serpent, The Dragon, Divine Chi, Inner Lightening, Kundalini Energy, Cosmic Consciousness, Higher States…
For all his faults, Robert could dominate his students into sublime awareness, while herding us away from state-trampling trances, arguably by replacing them with higher ones. From my perspective, every note in the crystalline continuum of the Now surrounding him resonated with celestial harmony. In his presence I often felt like a beggar, a scavenger, feeding on the crumbs dropped from the feast of his being by which he fed his gods, savoring the small ambrosial energy morsels molted by him: Robert, the feathered serpent.
Or was he just a snake?
A dear and beautiful friend, JW, could see auras, and remained in the school for many years despite her overwhelming moral dilemma, because RB’s energy field was magnificent.
Now we may see both sides of the mirror; the duality of illusion; “life” as a master teacher.
Meeting Grandmother Ocean
Why can’t life move smoothly and pleasantly all the time? We exist in a liquid universe. A molecule of water is in continuous a state of imbalance, with two hydrogen atoms teetering back and forth on either side of an oxygen atom. A similar imbalance in the cosmic ocean keeps the universe in motion.
A few years ago, I ambled along a shady Mendocino sidewalk, munching on a dark-chocolate truffle, looking for willows for a pagan ceremony with Martin Prechtel. Toward me walked the oldest woman I have ever met. She strode directly up to me in ecstasy with her hands out. “Oh”, she said, “You are so beautiful! So beautiful!” She waved her hands around me, tracing my outline.
Over a faded blue dress she wore a raggedy green shawl, bordered with discolored white lace, nearly as ancient as she was. Her eyes were clear, deep blue, without flecks or specks, and no pupils either: just a vast expanse of sky.
“You are a studious one!” she said gravely, looking deeply into me. “My goodness how much you’ve studied! They tell me”, she whispered, glancing over her right shoulder, “that you have been studying for many, many years!” She smiled. “It has made you beautiful, so beautiful.”
Looking into my hip, she advised: “Don’t exercise so hard, dear, no more jumping around. Be kinder to yourself.”
Peering into my heart she exclaimed with mild surprise, “Ah, you’re a writer!” She paused and cocked her head to the side while scanning me for a while, as if the message was somewhat obfuscated, then slowly nodded and soberly divined: “Write something that will make people laugh.”
We had been holding hands, with me nodding and saying very little, except: “you are also very beautiful”, which she was. The intricate textures and patterns on her grainy face inspired respect, lines which had been etched by the lengthy erosion of youth from her nevertheless vibrant face, time having drawn there sketch upon sketch of sorrows and joys; she was beautiful despite a patchy white beard of corn-silk hair below her chin. But most of all, she exuded magnificence, nobility, an exalted, other-worldly energy, a luster of heavenly light which shone through her eyes and happy heart.
Perhaps she was completely cracked; but in my old age — now — I hope to burst open like that, ripe with love, delight, warmth, good humor, taking counsel from the invisibles, being kind and attentive to my fellow humans, while immune to the pain of other peoples’ opinions, which so often bite the heart.
“You’re doing very well,” she urged, “Keep working, keep studying, you are very beautiful.” She withdrew her hand and glided away.
A tsunami of love washed over me. I stood there for a time, stunned, floating in new currents, reeling from implications. How did she know I injured my hip last year by jumping around like a teenager? that I aspired to write a book, with a cartoon on the cover?
Here we float, swaying between happiness & sorrow, enlightenment and piggishness, order and chaos… knowing that happiness cannot be attained by going anywhere, possessing objects, nor the esteem and admiration of others. It washes over us when we accept things as they are. This is not easy, yet possible and worthwhile: being in a very humble state, recognizing our personal poverty, having nothing to hide, a willingness to share (material, happiness, insights, space), listening intently to the shimmering messages in exquisite rifts of music… seeing old friends… Simple moments are sublime, when the heart’s engaged.
The canoe of time is paddled on one side by sorrow and on the other by happiness. We get ourselves stuck by furiously paddling in one direction, but we will only turn in endless circles; we need both suffering and happiness to get anywhere. Joy and sorrow are the wings on the butterfly of time: you need both to fly.
Is depression “frozen rage”? Freezing in our tracks — refusing to change — arrests those nagging fluctuations, but it’s just another trap.
Happy today – you are on the crest between two sorrows. Incessantly tossed by waves from all directions, remember that “The Now” is continuously-temporary. Caught in a trough of sadness, remember: you are merely between peaks of bliss, tomorrow you shall be rich in happiness and contentment. Enjoy them while they last. Or, like Martha, learn to surf and love the exertion as much as the exhilaration.
To Enlightenment — Kathryn Hannah Fitzgerald
June 4, 2007 at 10:48 pm
Ames (398): “My feeling is that far from supporting an open discussion, the ‘leucocytes’ would much, much rather the blog somehow went away—which of course it will, but in its own good time.”
I agree. I wrote in one of my posts that someone seemed to be in favor of open discussion because he wanted people to think for themselves. However, he also states that we are preventing people from deciding for themselves when we state our opinions, and provide information. But I’m sure he doesn’t actually believe that.
I like the comparison you make to leucocytes. Group think depends on the suppression of information. Any information coming from the outside is a threat to group think. If you genuinely want to encourage people to think for themselves, you give them more information, and you give them more information from diverse sources, and especially outside sources. For example, you would encourage news organizations to be owned by as many people as possible, and you would tap into news sources from other countries. Instead, the news is being consolidated into the hands of fewer and fewer people, and these people are naturally protecting their interests by deciding what news can be reported, as well as how the news is reported.
Some people think this is a “conspiracy theory”, but maybe a better way to express it is “business as usual”. It’s people attempting to control their money, their power, and their way of life. Not very different from what’s been occurring with some people in the Fellowship of Friends.
………………………………
Demi (428): “But loss is a necessary, even constructive part of human life. And the value of what we shared then is not diminished by it.”
Very true. I’m sure there are countless former members who have left the FOF far behind, and who have moved on to new lives, with new friends, new colleagues, and new activities. They’ve found new ways of thinking, and new and rewarding ways to experience their lives. Meanwhile, as time goes on, we all have fewer acquaintances within the FOF (as people either leave or pass away).
For others who have remained a little closer to the group, I like the idea of current members and former members becoming more a part of each other’s lives. I’m not sure Robert Burton likes that idea, because increased correspondence with former members would also allow a continued flow of criticism and ideas from outside the group.
………………………………
Light (478): “I am here now, or how would you be able to read the screen?”
Huh? 😉
“The light that you all bloggers see at the end of this one way tunnel blog is nothing else than an over size truck coming full speed wrong way.”
Oh. Got it. Sounds like a cool video game. 😐
June 4, 2007 at 10:56 pm
A good question is worth a thousand answers.
It’s a key to the memory banks of consciousness,
possessed by all, accessed by few.
How far down the rabbit hole does one want to go?
A good question awakens thousands more,
who wants to come for the ride?
Compassion, con passion?
Illuminated, illiminated!
Hide your hide, Hyde.
Let them heckle Jeckyll
If the light of day obfuscates their Way.
She sees very well indeed said He
As the cock crowed thrice.
Head for the hill and kill any and see
Just what emerges between the white rocks.
Does the sun really rise
and the moon really eat?
Lies to be sure,
from a clever
cheat?
Is the sly man’s pill red or blue?
Since all death is suicide,
Does it matter at all?
Are these mere magicians’ tricks
or angles from the ole matrix?
Cinder man, cinder man,
How goes the Ark?
Will it climb up the Niagara
with a little more viagara?
Sorry, sorry, that was just a choke!
Never stick new wine in an old skin.
You never know where it’s been.
Omen, oman, on the wall
whose the largest of them all.
7-6 is the posta, though he ran,
At whata costa?
Bang! Zoom! To the moon!
Slam Dunk! Back to St.P.
Can’t have your cake and eat it too,
Can you, can you?
Button up that lip, don’t let it slip.
Hafiz, half mine, oh love sublime.
Turn, skeedaddle and jump ship
While you can, while you still can.
There’s a million more inside this blog.
Memories are such fun to flog.
Expansion was the name of the game
Back in the good old days.
Now, it’s not the same.
Now, that’s the long or the short of it.
June 4, 2007 at 11:27 pm
Promiscuity in sexual gratification is bound toland the aspitrants in the most pitiful anddangerous chaos of ungovernable lust. As such diffused and undirected lust veils the higher values, it perpetuates entanglement and creates in the spiritual path insuperable difficulties to the internal and spontaneous renunciaion of craving.
In promiscuity the temptation to explore the possibilities of mere sexual contats is formidable. It is only by the maximum restriction of the scope of mere sex that aspirants can arrive at any real understanding of the values attainable through the gradual transfromation of sex into love. If the mind tries to understand sex throught increasing the scope of sex, there is no end to the delusions to which it is prey -for there is no end to the enlarging of its scope. In promiscuity the suggestions of lust are necessarily the first to present themselves to the mind, and the individuals are doomed to react to people within the limitation of this initial perversion and thus close the door to deeper experiences.
Truth cannot be grasped by skipping over the surface of life and multiplying superficial contacts.
Page 102 of the Meher Baba’s Discourses, 1995 edition of the Sheriar Foundation.
June 5, 2007 at 12:19 am
The true Guru (honest person or pointer) will not estrange you from yourself.
He knows you need nothing, not even him, and is never tired of reminding you.
But the self-appointed Guru
is more concerned with himself than with his disciples…
All blessings come from within. Turn within. To that ‘I’ am you know.
~ Nisargadatta Maharaj ~
There is no reaching the Self (consciousness). If the Self were to be reached,
it would mean that the Self is not here and now and that it is yet to be obtained.
What is got afresh will also be lost. So it will be impermanent.
What is not permanent is not worth striving for.
So I say the Self (consciousness) is not reached.
You are the Self, you are already that.
~ Ramana Maharshi ~
June 5, 2007 at 12:35 am
No Name 10/491:
“See, this is the problem on this blog, there is a work word for this: it is called GOSSIP….Gossip can be quite a pathetic part of human nature.”
Gossip is not all bad. That would be “formatory thinking.” Well-intentioned gossip, as long as discrimination and common sense are employed, can serve a useful and necessary function. It’s a method of transmitting information about what is going on in a community.
In the Fellowship of Friends, the prohibition against gossip effectively squelches the movement of certain kinds of information. A similar process occurs in dysfunctional families, in which family members agree not to talk about their problems, employing the psychological defense mechanism of DENIAL. Reams of material have been written about the harmful consequences of this.
“…it matters little what someone dies of (as long as there was no murder, but say one disease over another) but in a forum as here, these rumours take on an insidious quality”
I think it’s quite pertinent, and in the public interest, whether a person died of AIDS (a transmissible disease) or cancer (not contagious, as far as I know). I would most certainly want to have this information if I were sexually involved with the person or any of his/her sexual partners.
June 5, 2007 at 1:00 am
To Allan W.
Look up Catherine R. Coulter’s Nature and Human Personalities.
June 5, 2007 at 1:19 am
Truth is Where You Find It: #490
As someone said: “The solution to the problem is never to be found on the same level as the problem”.
So, I try to see the roots of the problem, or go beyond the problem all together. At the end it all comes to us. Life is never about other people doing things to us, but rather us taking responsibility for our response to events that happen to us. Just a different view, but a whole lot of difference for ourselves. We become the creators of our life, instead of being the victims.
Many people describe various events in their life and then they proceed to put responsibility for these events on somebody else, but not themselves. And this is a classical victim behavior. And, I said this in my other post, the fact is, if you are not trying to develop your consciousness and see the difference between yourself and the group, you will always end up a victim. ALWAYS.
This is WHY I consider this kind of discussion to be useless. People are only reaffirming their victim psychology, by posting tons of blame and judgment about other people. I don’t believe that this is the way to reach higher states of consciousness.
As you can see, I assume (and now I think, that my assumption is correct only for about 10-20%)that people who are gathered here, on this blog, are seeking higher states of consciousness. But instead, most of people seem to seek the “guilty one”.
The second scenario, is that most of the people here are not interested in developing and growing their consciousness. Well, in this case this ‘discussion’ has even less sense. And I think people who are like that should state this in their posts, to make this clear. Because I think that a person who is focused and committed to being in a higher state, will not spend a lot of time blaming others.
OK? So this is the Beyond staff.
Now, lets see what else you are saying:
“…I was just shaking your pedestal a little…”
Since it is a virtual pedestal, and it only exists on the mind of the person who is visualizing it, I think you would be better of not doing it anymore.
Below is the whole quote from my other post #335, and it should not be taken out of the context.
“Maybe you want to open someones eyes to something. But, can you force it?
And what kind of authority are you that other people should believe you, or believe anything that is written on this blog?”
Read the whole post again. I have nothing to add to what I already said.
From you: “The word DISCUSSION, …means:
Examination by argument; a debate; a conversation.
I see no mention of TRUTH in this definition.”
So, it does reaffirms my suspicion that most people here do not want to find the truth, but merely to discuss all the wrongs they had experienced in their life.
May I ask you, what do you want from your life? Sleep or awakening?
As to your questions, I have nothing to say.
What I was trying to achieve on this blog through my posts, was to raise the level of conversation. From “they did it to me, they are a cult and we are its victims”, to “I take full Responsibility for whatever happens to me. And if something wrong had happen, I am to find the way out and not to repeat this mistake.”
If it makes no sense, I won’t take it personally. If it had helped someone to get clear on that the hell is going on here, I won’t take the credit for it either.
You say: “But I also think that the blog can be the PROCESS, the ROAD, the PATH for many of us, if we wish, to get to where you SAY you are.”
Reaffirming ones victim psychology, by posting tons of blame and judgment about other people, is not the way to reach higher states of consciousness.
It is like fighting your thoughts, and the thought of other people, and their thoughts about the thoughts from other people….
It’s endless, you know.
But here is a way out.
As one master said:
“If you see a thought, let it go, and it will dissolve into open space of your mind.”
Peace be with you.
——————————————–
I am on neither side.
I am Beyond,
and I keep my place.
June 5, 2007 at 2:14 am
When Chopsticks asked, “How do ‘Cave drawings’ images help you to Self Remember?”
Howard Carter replied (390):
“The theory is that all schools are the same school; they communicate with their future counterparts through the works they leave behind. Apparently the rust of sleep is so encrusted that we need to keep hearing the same thing said many ways to stir the emotions sufficiently to shake that rust away.”
Howard:
Chopsticks did not ask you: “Why are there many different schools throughout history?”
Nowhere in your answer do you address the connection between Self Remembering and cave drawings. But I can understand why you’d evade that one. Very difficult question to answer, isn’t it?
You know, on the face of it, I have no inherent resistance to the idea that ancient cave drawings may have esoteric significance. I’ve spent much of my adult life being fascinated with archaeology, history, and ancient knowledge. This is one of the reasons that I was drawn to the Fellowship of Friends in the first place. However, when we state that we know the meaning behind cave drawings, and that we know something about the people who drew them, this is where you are losing me.
(Interesting idea, isn’t it? — the idea that the school can “lose us”, just as much as we can “lose the school.”)
Few of us are impressed when supposed esoteric connections with ancient works of art are pulled from thin air with no attempt to explain the significance of the art in a coherent, reasonable way…
… other than, “Robert Burton said it, so it must be true.”
We each recall experiencing certain emotions while viewing works of art, and this in turn made us receptive to the idea that a Rembrandt, Da Vinci, or other pieces of art may contain “higher hydrogens” that can help us awaken. But is this idea owned by the Fellowship of Friends? No, not at all. But at the same time, many of us appreciated that “higher” works of art may actually help our souls.
It made sense to our souls.
Howard and friends, tell us what touches your soul. Could it be that you have lost track of that? I don’t believe you have lost track of that, but when I see the continued certainty — and the lack of any sense of mystery about these things — I do wonder.
June 5, 2007 at 3:16 am
Hello.
The purpose of this post is to offer a kind perspective toward individuals who choose to express themselves sarcastically.
The use of sarcasm as a mode of communicating is questionable.
Here are some definitions. The main descriptive words are:
Mocking, scorning, sneering, caustic, bitter, disapproval, annoyance, wounding
1. Using praise to personally mock someone (verbal irony); the word comes from the Greek word sarkazein meaning “to tear flesh.”
2. Sarcasm is sneering, jesting, or mocking a person, a situation or thing. It can sometimes be the sincerest form of discourse for the emotionally fragile.
3. Heavy use of apparent praise for an actual dispraise: it is the common man’s usual form of irony; sarcasm is personal and intended to hurt.
4. A form of verbal irony in which, under guise of praise, a caustic and bitter expression of strong and personal disapproval is given.
5. Sarcasm expresses scorn, disapproval, or annoyance.
6. Harsh form of wit, aimed to wound, which often employs irony.
7. Caustic words used for the purpose of wounding another.
In other words, it is an extreme expression of negativity.
It is certainly not humorous.
Wince,
LL
June 5, 2007 at 3:22 am
I totally agree with Beyond that it is useless to leave the FoF and then play the victim and look for someone to blame for what was “done to you”. But, Beyond, the fact that you see only blame and judgment in the blog also tells us something about you. I would say that “victim” posts are in the minority actually. I find that people notice those parts of the blog that make the most sense to them, and to many current members, what makes sense is that former members would be resentful and negative, looking for a scapegoat for their misery or seeking to reveal Robert’s sex life to the public to “get back at him” and to indulge in scandal – and then they think that this blog is about sex, money and victimization.
It may be, for some. Personally, I have no grudge against Robert, and so I tend to notice a number of posts that seek to understand more deeply what it was in our own psychology that allowed us to stay in the Fellowship and play mind-control games, which of our own needs were being served by continuing to support it. It’s true what you said, many bloggers are not interested in the Fellowship-brand methods of “growing consciousness”, and that’s because they do not see them as the obvious ultimate truth, the way you may perceive them at the moment.
You see, to me this blog is like the second line we never had while in the school, because we could not share observations about our relationship to the school. Such conversations were always predictable: if you had any negative perceptions or doubts about Robert and his teaching, it was the Enemy that was tempting you from the true path. So, some of us are feeling the need to explore this neglected part of our “work”, hold it up to the light and allow doubt in the certainty of a “true path”.
If you want, you can do a little experiment: go back through the page, and rather than scanning for posts which confirm your assumption that people talk like victims, look for posts in which people admit that they had been stupid and naive in many ways while in the FoF. Posts in which they are trying to understand and come to terms with what they had allowed themselves to do or what they were complicit in, and finding ways to move forward. I predict you will find quite a few.
Peace be with you too.
June 5, 2007 at 3:32 am
Hello, Beyond (514):
Very well written.
You have answered my real queston and maybe your advice will start to sink in and raise the level of this blog.
P.S: Sorry for the “shaking”, but I had to see if you were wise enough not to take the bait. Sometimes playing Devil’s Advocate is also a way of getting closer to the truth.
June 5, 2007 at 3:40 am
Beyond,
Your post 519 is simply full of yes/no, either/or, black&white, us&them, thinking. What is with that? You are “beyond” and on “NEITHER side”?? are there only two?
You say, “As to your questions, I have nothing to say.
What I was trying to achieve on this blog through my posts, was to raise the level of conversation. From “they did it to me, they are a cult and we are its victims”, to “I take full Responsibility for whatever happens to me. And if something wrong had happen, I am to find the way out and not to repeat this mistake.””
You sound like you are saying “they did this to me, they are a blog and we are its victims!!” Take some responsibility and tell me – do you experience conscience? Do you consider conscience a component of consciousness? Is conscience a deeply personal state? If, you say, you are interested in “growing” your consciousness, are you also interested in deepening your conscience?
June 5, 2007 at 4:28 am
#498 Vena–As a current member I totally agree with you on this one! Whazzup folks — didn’t Walt Whitman say “include all the Hell’s and Damn’s” (in other words, do not prettify me!). Seems I heard RB say this as well on many an occasion or words to that effect.
June 5, 2007 at 4:36 am
Exposing the sex issue.
Dear Hava Nagillah,
You must have started reading the blog recently, I have much exposed my sexuality as much as myself, not because I think it is of any interest to you, but because if I am doing it about others I might as well do it about myself.
Please try to understand that the issue is not placing more shame on Robert or Girard for their sexuality, they are no different than millions of other men in life. Whether they want to work on themselves or not to be happier, healthier and more conscious human beings is up to them, the issue is that when men like that pose themselves as the last conscious beings on the planet who have the right to decide everything about what happens within the school-community that supports them, then, one needs to question them deeply. Integrity is an issue if you want to be a leader of men. Indeed, if I had understood this almost twenty years ago, I would no have not have joined the Fellowship and it was happening all along. I think people joining today need to know this things first and then decide whether they want to join. Once in, it gets more and more difficult to keep the focus with so much indoctrination going on.
So Hava, please try to judge me less with the sex issue. It is only a small aspect of the problem. It is the first line in each of us and how we deal with it, is indeed personal. It is when it affects others (second line)and pretends to be what it is not in a big community, (third line), that questioning must be faced up to.
I think I covered your question in an earlier post that didn’t get posted on this round but here is more clarification.
Be well, be loved.
Elena
Thank you No person for your insights on the intellectual labelling and Kathryn H. F. for your very inspiring blue eyed, wise lady. Dorothy also had deep blue eyes and was always telling everyone that came, how beautiful they were. What she lost in her mind, she expanded in her heart.
June 5, 2007 at 5:14 am
Over 500 posts. I think the Sheik has hit an interval or this blog is slowly coming to an end.
What else can be said that hasnt already been said? Different way maybe?
James B. What happened to Robin, Jose and Susan, Christopher and Amelia, William, Patrick, Luke, Richard and Margret, Sheila, both Stephens,the Nurse, Theresa and the female from Israel?
Margret was right. I did come back from where I started and became a liar. A big one. Robert Burton was also right, in my case, “those who leave the school go back to a lower state than where they started”
I think it was you and Margret that took me to dinner in Santa Monica or Malibu with the house managers in Pacific Palisades to warn me not to go to San Francisco. Right again.
I saw the first batch of pictures J. Bryant and spotted you right away with a white dog. I’m not going to be rude about age but we do.
I remember one time I was caught playing rock at the teaching house, and you said, “A. it doesnt raise your level of Being”.
You’re cool James Bryant gold alchemy, Venusian?
June 5, 2007 at 5:38 am
The family of emotions which includes shame and humiliation is innate and integral to the human affect system. Shame occurs naturally whenever something impedes the experience of positive affect. Humiliation is a species of shame, varying only in degree.
Understanding the experience of shame is necessary to understand narcissism. The most narcissistic persons are completely governed by the need to avoid the experience of shame. It leads them to invent grandiose delusions about themselves, to limit their social contacts to those who tend to reinforce their grandiosity and to devalue those who do not, and to rage when those delusions are threatened.
Elena quotes Girard as having written,
“The pain that one feels when one is humiliated is that of false personality being diminished.”
This really is a central tenet of Fellowship doctrine and it is fallacious. What makes it insidious, as with so much of Fellowship doctrine, is its grain of truth. It *does* take a certain strength to experience and acknowledge shame and humiliation. It represents an improvement over the degree of narcissistic impairment that refuses to acknowledge such emotions and flees the experience of them into grandiose delusions about oneself. The essence of the *innate* negative affect called “shame-humiliation” is a *physiological* response that occurs when something interferes with the experience or expression of positive affect. Being present to shame-humiliation is being present to what’s actually going on in one’s individual affect system at a given moment.
Where the idea goes wrong, as Girard has expressed it, is that it tends to make the experience of humiliation a means of eradicating the ineradicable.
The logic of the thing goes like this: Some event or experience is causing me to feel humiliated.
(Jim has shot randomly into the herd of elk with an Uzi and taken off, leaving the hunters humiliated to deal with the angry farmers and repair the broken fence.)
(Robert has deliberately dropped a glass onto the floor in the Coffee Tree and the waitstaff have to come clean it up.)
(The new student fails at the word exercise and is photographed for it so often that she finds herself unable to put together a coherent thought.)
(Joseph is glowered at for daring to eat while Asaf talks.)
Because the Fellowship ideology provides that when humiliation happens, “false personality” is being reduced, this humiliation experience is viewed as spiritually salutary. I am humiliated, therefore I must be evolving.
The logical conclusion of this position is to exalt the experience of shame and humiliation, to make it sought after and central, and to subject people to increasingly humiliating experiences for their own spiritual good. The notion seems to be, somehow, that through this trial of fire, one eradicates the part of oneself that is “less real,” the so-called “false personality.”
The problem is that the shame-humiliation family of emotions belong to us and are no more or less real than joy, excitement, interest, sadness, anger, and disgust. They are ineradicable and innate. We can no more rid ourselves of them than we can stand on our own shoulders, and all attempts to do so must end in humiliation.
June 5, 2007 at 6:11 am
To Hava Nagilla and those who judge my exposition of my husband’s private life.
If you multiply that feeling that you have about my exposing my husband’s private life, by a hundred or rather, a thousand, you will get a glimpse of what it felt like to me to have to observe Robert’s exposition of the men he submitted to having sex with him for seventeen years. His bringing them out to dinners and events to show us how he was not under feminine dominance and to show them how powerful he was that he could get away with it with the blessing of the whole bunch of us snoring people was the most enduring and humiliating thing I have had to experience in the course of my life.
Since Girard Haven, who also happens to be my husband is the main indoctrinator of the Fellowship of Friends I will continue to question him and Robert in every single area that I can find because they have had the misfortune of deceiving me for too long. You are offended by me, but were you ever offended by the way I was humiliated in the Fellowship with my husband’s condonement and support of the offenders?
No, Mr. Nagillah, your feminine dominance that works to condone the behavior of those inside the fellowship will not stop me from exposing them.
Was it not the lack of feminine dominance that they had no respect of to justify their behavior and was that not what they used so juicily to stop any one of us to question them?
This multiple double standards and double morality in which we are at the same time rubbed Robert’s sexuality on our faces and Girard’s unquestioned indoctrination supporting it so that he can justify his own addiction because his teacher’s is blessed, will no longer stop me from questioning them. I am OUT of the Fellowship and no longer under those laws that make you think that what is proper for me is not proper for your teachers.
And the difference between me and them is that I no longer believe that we can continue to play at the conscious school and support and support and continue supporting the third line of giving money, money, money to make the world go round, while the second line is inexistent and the first line is totally corrupt.
Corrupt: Men that have divided into two very definite personalities and have no measure of human values, who justify their behavior by each other’s support of their verified consciousness.
In Mr. Haven’s book on Best Thoughts we find:
Feminine dominance is inside each of us. It is not that other people use feminine dominance to control me; it is that feminine dominance in me makes me feel obligated to respond to situations and people in a certain way.
Tell me friends or if you prefer, exfriends, exhusband, exteacher, what in the Fellowship of Friends happens without the feminine dominance or control of Robert Burton and his multiple assistants? Since when have you given up the opportunity to think and decide for yourself how the life of the community you live in, pay for, support, love, should develop or are you really going to accept being a nobody for the rest of your life who is thrown out if you wish to participate in the game that you are paying for? Because it is Robert’s school? Is that really what you call the development of your self, your presence, your self determination, your integrity, your consciousness?
June 5, 2007 at 7:05 am
KathrynF Says:
Toward me walked the oldest woman I have ever met. She strode directly up to me in ecstasy with her hands out. “Oh”, she said, “You are so beautiful! So beautiful!” She waved her hands around me, tracing my outline.
Satan knew how to grab your attention didn’t he?
June 5, 2007 at 7:33 am
Some people regard this blog just as a discussion, sometimes even useless, sometimes even full of gossip, pissing matches, therapeutic, call it whatever you want…
By pure chance this place has become for the first time in the history of the FOF an opportunity to bring out the truth that is inconvenient for RB and Company. Publicly!!!
Let us keep talking.
June 5, 2007 at 7:49 am
Vena,
I know this matter is dripping prey for some people here…:).
Prophets are obliged to prophecy regardless of the actualization of their prophecies:
It is interesting that I was sitting with a fellow student the other day and she was reading from the Old Testament, the book of Jonah.
I can assume no one would say that the prophet Jonah was not a prophet just because his predictions were not fulfilled for whatever reason.
I looked it up and this is what I found:
“And Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey, and he proclaimed, and said: ‘Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”
…
“And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, which He said He would do unto them; and He did it not.”
…
“But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry.”
June 5, 2007 at 8:07 am
Hava Nagillah #495/10 Says:
Elena,
Your: “I am not afraid of exposing myself publicly.”
What a buffer!!!
It is not yourself you were exposing, but your husband!
________________________
Girard Haven, “Notes from a Conscious Teaching”
(AKA: Nuts from an Unconscious Preaching):
“A machine does not have a personal life; it has a mechanical life. As such, we can learn to discuss our own machine as we would any other machine. At the same time, as a way of being externally considerate, I would not discuss some areas in a meeting, because not everyone here fully understands that we are all machines. Men number four are still identified with their machines; they think they are real. So, for example, if I were to talk about my married life, my wife would have difficulty separating, and probably many of you would have ‘I’s that were embarrassed, or would produce some other buffer. There is no point in such a discussion – not because there is something special or hidden or secret about my mechanics, but simply because other people could not hear.”
Be very careful what you boast about when it comes to the advanced nature of your being, because you will inevitably get a chance to find out what it is like from more than a theoretical perspective.
June 5, 2007 at 8:39 am
Beyond #10/514
You said: “Reaffirming ones victim psychology, by posting tons of blame and judgment about other people, is not the way to reach higher states of consciousness.”
Beyond, you are not speaking from your being, but from your intellect when you state this. ‘Victim psychology’ is keeping silent, remaining depressed, identified, and stuck blaming oneself. Thus a person remains a victim because they never empower and energize themselves by rising up and confronting the perpetrator of the injustice done to them. Repressed feelings inevitably will lead to mental illness, the anathema of consciousness.
So, in fact, as a way to reach clarity, a higher state of consciousness, one sometimes has to express anger in an appropriate or creative way (such as writing or protesting publicly, instead of kicking the dog) to free oneself from it. Depression is anger inappropriately turned inward at oneself. IMO the best use of anger is as a fuel and motivator to take action for positive change. Remaining silent in the face of crime or injustice reinforces the status quo. Releasing and expressing negative feelings without identification is taking responsibility for oneself (and community) instead of letting them fester inside and turning into an ongoing negative, irritable emotional mood.
Warning others in a public way about potential spiritual pitfalls (such as sexual predators masquerading as conscious beings) is not only paying forward some good karma, but also a way to transcend victimization.
You quoted some ‘master’ (out of context) as such, “If you see a thought, let it go, and it will dissolve into open space of your mind.”
This statement applies to a meditation practice, not to the practice of chopping wood and carrying water!!!! You had better think about how to carry that water without spilling it or about cutting the wood and not your foot if you want to succeed in your work. That is another example of posting from your intellect instead of your being.
You said, “What I was trying to achieve on this blog through my posts, was to raise the level of conversation.”
If you want to raise the level of conversation on this blog, learn to respect another person’s process as different from you own. Stop ‘trying’ to be a man number 11 and just be yourself. ‘Beyond’ sounds fairly idealistic and narcissistic to me. Aren’t we hopeless in your mind anyway? Why bother with us mere mortals? I have a feeling you cannot handle the raw truth about anything, especially about what it takes to truly be more conscious and awake in your higher centers.
WhaleRider
1979-85
June 5, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Unoan 10/496
“Whew! If only that were true, it would be allot easier to see the possible whereabout-trail of Whalerider’s toaster.”
Yes, what then? Truck headlights includes the truck coming fast.
Every toaster wit sounds like a waste of time?
May be you want to try something from us sufis:
SEARCHING FOR THE KEY
Once, a man found Mulla Nasruddin searching for something on the ground outside his house. On being asked, Nasruddin replied that he was looking for his key. The man also joined in the search and in due course asked Mulla: ”Where exactly did you drop it?”
Mulla answered: ”In my house.”
”Then why are you looking here?” the man asked.
”There is more light here than in my house,” replied Mulla.
Light
June 5, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Elena #524/10 Says:
“Tell me friends or if you prefer, exfriends, exhusband, exteacher, what in the Fellowship of Friends happens without the feminine dominance or control of Robert Burton and his multiple assistants?”
The only thing more mechanical than feminine dominance is gay dominance, remember when J. Edgar Hoover controlled Washington politics by his covertly communicated threats to leak the dirt he had on various elected officials? Meanwhile he was controlled by the crime mobs because of his gambling debts and the pictures the mob had of him giving blowjobs. There is nothing more vainglorious than a man that has no use for women.
complete_attention@yahoo.com
June 5, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Laughing Love #516 and Veronicapoe #523:
Food for thought. Thanks for feeding me. I was really starving.
June 5, 2007 at 1:19 pm
Dear All,
and Dear Beyond,(post 10/514)
Perhaps you have never experienced the struggle to regain a sense of reality after the shock of betrayal, but I believe that is what’s happening in some of the posts you describe as ‘whining’. Any human being is subject to betrayal (even you).
I believe most all exfofers posting here have moved on to ‘get a life’ beyond the Fellowship of Friends experience. The blog simply came along and opened a venue not available before, and because of the space the experience takes in one’s life, many found they still have angles about it to share. Does that make sense to you?
I have a sincere question for you and hope you will offer your answer.
There are endless ways to pursue higher states. Around the world there are endless organizations that help facilitate this goal in one way or another. I’m interested in knowing if you consider yourself in a fixed position toward keeping your place ‘beyond’. If not, can you suggest a circumstance where you would take a side?
Just a thought for you and some others: Higher states and being ‘under’ the influences of the FOF would not buy complicity in corruption for many posting here who learned that it was their own self-directed act of taking a side and then ‘getting a life’ that started a true
process of ‘becoming beyond’.
I think there are fewer crybabies here than you perceive and a fair amount of insight if you can hear it. I hope you will answer my question and describe the limit at which you would feel the responsibility to take a side, because I’m interested to hear this from you and hope you’re interested by the question.
Now I’m recalling a similar question pages back…to Howard Carter? Not sure. I’d welcome a response from anyone currently wearing the mindset of Beyond, Above, Removed, Exempt, etc.
Beyond, help me understand. As you see, it’s my understanding that sometimes we must weigh-in.
Thank You Sheik
June 5, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Arthur was right, it’s time to move again. I believe that Animam Recro has played its part in this discussion well but it’s time for the blog to continue its prior purpose, which was almost forgotten due to the Fellowship of Friends focus which has been given to it over the past months. So the discussion will move to a different blog which I have prepared for it today. Nothing significant is going to change, I may play around with some of the settings and try to make things more sensible but as of now, there are very few surprises.
So warm up your internet browsers and surf to the new destination:
THE FELLOWSHIP OF FRIENDS DISCUSSION