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
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’.
Http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22GkBTAC7QQ
________________________________________
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…”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/iloveyou2/sets/72157600241409949/show
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 o