Welcome to the Fellowship of Friends Discussion.
For previous parts of the discussion please visit AnimamRecro or the Main page of this blog.
For more organized reading check out The Fellowship of Friends WikiSpace.
For sites in Russian and Italian, click http://fofway.narod.ru/ and http://laliberastrada.blogspot.com/ respectively.
For more information check Rick Ross and Steven Hassan.
This is where you can find the website of the Fellowship of Friends.
If you decide to interact as well as digest, feel free to start here.
And as always, enjoy and have fun.
more flogging of the horse… it’s not dead yet.
“The psychopath does not merely repress feelings of anxiety and guilt or fail to experience them appropriately; instead, he or she lacks a fundamental understanding of what these things are. When asked a question such as “What does remorse feel like?” for instance, the typical psychopath will become irritated, deflect the question, or attempt to change the subject. The following response from a psychopathic rapist, asked why he didn’t empathize with his victims, shows just how distanced such a person can be from normal human emotion…”
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=936#more-936
“Anne Simpkinson writes in an article named Soul Betrayal – Sexual abuse by spiritual leaders from 1996:
Sometimes what psychologists call a personality disorder compels a person to exploit, manipulate, and hurt those in their spiritual care. While publicly charming, ebullient, devoted, hard-working, and inspiring, this leader proves himself cunning, slick, seductive, and cruel in private. Involved in multiple, simultaneous relationships, he can sweet-talk his victims into compliance — “Our love is special and holy” — or bully them into submission.
Sounds very much like the description of the common psychopath. Robert Hare is the foremost expert today on psychopathy and the author of several books on the subject. He defines psychopathy as follows:
Psychopathy is a personality disorder described by the personality traits and behaviors that form the basis of this book [Snakes in Suit]. Psychopaths are without conscience and incapable of empathy, guilt, or loyalty to anyone but themselves.
These are some of the common traits of psychopathy:
lack of remorse or empathy
shallow emotions
manipulativeness
lying
egocentricity
glibness
low frustration tolerance
episodic relationships
parasitic lifestyle
persistent violation of social norms”
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/147919-Sexual-predators-in-the-religious-scene
“In the group there was a spy, a famous conductor. The spy informed his teacher.”
You must mean that weasley little shit. It’s funny, whatever someone did in “life”, when they join the fellowship, they are suddenly “world famous” at what they do.
What they lack in talent RB makes up for with his world famous bull shit.
The Russian boys must be “world famous” blow job artistes and fisters. The current “teachers” are world famous manipulators and psychopaths and all around assholes without peer..
2 ton
One can’t call RB “glib”, but he’s certainly all the others.
1 ton & 2 ton
I certainly understand that Robert Burton is not going to read about psycopaths and be able to recognize himself or admit to it if he did.
However, there is still a part of me, that even though there have been numerous posts explaining the ‘hows’ of what keeps/kept people(us included) under the influence of Robert Burton, that is still somewhat baffled that more current members cannot take that one small step back and see the man they call their teacher described here. I mean, he seems to fit every single item on the list of personality traits.
I understand that the circle of apolgists and enablers that Bruce calls the ‘flying monkeys’ may not be able to see it, as their investment might be to extensive at this stage.
But the rank and file; the good and honest and innocent people that just wanted to find a school, a place to try to learn about themselves; it is these people that I am surprised about. If they have visited this blog, and still, after 28 pages have not been able to take that step back and honestly appraise the fellowship of friends and Robert Burton and see that there is something drastically wrong, well, like I said, I continue to be a bit baffled.
Perhaps dignity is not the first quality of human consciousness, but trust. How was it for others? The practice of self remembering seemed to be essentially an exercise on trust, trust in one’s presence rather than faith. Trust in one’s ability to be there to what was before one.
What the Phalluship of Fiends imposes is trust in Robert Burton, which leads to the development of idolatry and cult, rather than Consciousness and School. It does so through the imposition of external hierarchical preconceptions of Robert Burton’s level of being: man number six, seven and the closed doors of tight behavior within Renaissance, Apollo and Isis or the main center in Oregon House which had to change names every time life questioned it, giving the impression of permanent change to the insiders but actually crystallizing with different labels to trap uninformed potential students.
The trust to be there for what is before me is already a vicious trust. That is how we would say it in the Fellowship of Friends but it would be closer to dignity to say, “to be there to who was before one”. One of the difficulties that we face today is that we’ve come to interpret the world through the physical impression of objects rather than our direct relationship with each other. We are losing the human dialogue. What matters today is not the dignity of your humanity but the power of your economy which determines your position and the imaginary picture of how you expect and impose others to treat you. In ancient cultures, the monarch carried the spiritual authority that the individual is meant to carry in our times.
In as much as we accepted and promoted the gradual development of a status of monarch to Robert Burton and adopted the position of inferior beings, economically as well as spiritually or “humanly”, we gave increasing power to the development of uncontrolled idolatry, authoritarianism, or abuse of power.
If we make a parallel of this phenomenon to the context of the individual, we can observe that it is the same process which allows false personality to develop and the accompanying unnecessary suffering in which most of our lives develop.
What is interesting is that the ingredients were there for a conscious School to develop, but what we actually developed was a much more corrupt brothel than any in regular society. Why? How?
The answer is an evolving one as we ourselves deepen our understanding but a first attempt to answer these questions may lie in the fact that we turned our back against life and allowed for our own imaginary picture and self centered illusion of individual consciousness without external consideration to reach the uncontrolled dementia of Robert Burton’s decadence.
Nothing was missing. We were beautifully ignorant people willing to give our energy, work, love, faith, trust and money to the development of the Arc or a bubble of protected culture separated from “life” or regular society rather than a mature group of people willing to face the suffering of life and put our energy into finding solutions within it in whatever our area of work was. We became a sewage instead of a fountain.
In terms of individual development, the work is no different. One is either willing to dissolve the obstacles within one’s own being, (essentially the programming received by one’s peers through imitation) to consciously perceive other people and their needs or one is unwilling to work on one’s self and continues to crystallize the process without stating one’s presence, or renewed spiritual energy.
As others may have verified, life runs over one until one is willing to take the wheel.
Is that not essentially what the Fellowship of Friends did to us? Run over us until we were willing to state our presence? What was the difference between getting spiritually exploited and being physically exploited by the current form of life in standard society? If we are unable to face the fact that we are physically exploited by current society, that we allow other men to take advantage of their position to state that they have better rights over the overall goods, how could we avoid having given the same privileges to Robert Burton but on a spiritual level?
If we look into the idea that what happens on one level, turns upside down and backwards in another, we can almost confirm that what we made of the Fellowship of Friends was the inverse projection of what “life” had made of us. What we conceded Robert to become was what we had never been granted by “life”. Making a “monarch” of him was our way of resolving our imaginary “peasantry”.
As a community we cannot resolve the form of our spiritual development unless we are willing to resolve the form of our physical development which is totally contrary to what the Fellowship of Friends attempted: to resolve human consciousness avoiding life. Both spiritual and physical or instinctive development need to run parallel to each other through will. In as much as human relationships are determined by greed, pure animal greed, the “goods”, which have always been enough for every one, will continue to be stolen by a few in detriment of the many. As soon as we understand that the problem is not the lack of goods but how we are willing to distribute them, we will be functioning from another more generous part of our being, more human, more conscious.
One of the problems today is not that there is not enough food for everyone in the world to eat, it is that the lack of human consciousness allows a few of us to take more than we have a right to. The laws that establish our right to take more than we need or have a right to, are the expression of the lack of human consciousness and the confirmation of animal determination in the social laws that govern our lives. Laws are crystallized social attitudes. As the individual has to work against his own attitudes or obstacles to develop, society must work on its laws to change its human relationships from animal determination to human consciousness. In work on attitudes, the individual processes the crystallized laws that he inherited in his time and in changing his level of being by continually renewing his connection with the spiritual, the individual challenges the laws in society that limit the evolution of Mankind and by so doing, renews culture. Culture is the transformed suffering of the individual’s struggle between the life that he inherited and the spiritual that he himself, brought forth. Consciousness is consistently renewed through the individual. Culture is the living expression of his consciousness.
I doubt that we ever lived in a time in which the individual and society can move towards consciousness separately as the Fellowship of Friends wishes to convince its followers. The Fellowship of Friends is the pathetic expression of a materialistic age in which the individual thinks all goods are for himself and a group of people who think that they can amass spiritual freedom because they are willing to overfeed a depraved sex maniac. The excess with which they overfeed Robert Burton is the greed turned upside down, with which they deprave the whole of humanity from their acknowledgement. While in relation to Robert, they show their enslaved presence, in relation to the rest of the world, they show their suffering absence. These are the hallmarks of unnecessary suffering or a wasted life condemned to disappear from the current of evolution. Spiritual death, like physical death, does exist but it is not through fear that one can find the road to consciousness as it is imposed in the Fellowship of Friends, but through trust in one’s own self.
Bruce, I looked up “glib” and that shoe seems to fit too… Definitions of glib:
• marked by lack of intellectual depth; “glib generalizations”; “a glib response to a complex question”
• having only superficial plausibility; “glib promises”; “a slick commercial”
• artfully persuasive in speech; “a glib tongue”; “a smooth-tongued hypocrite”
James, I hear ya. My own reasons for continuing to flog the horse is the hope that someone of those who are still “hypnotized” might visit here, recognize the truth and wake up to the scam. As for the rapist Robert Burton, I would agree that any hope for him is wasted.
7 ton
“My own reasons for continuing to flog the horse is the hope that someone of those who are still “hypnotized” might visit here, recognize the truth and wake up to the scam.”
*******
Ditto!!! — And #1 and #2 was a great post!
7
Thanks for the additional definitions.
I was thinking of “artfully persuasive in speech”. Personally, having spent substantial time with him years ago, I find him pretty much a simpleton who depends on others’ minds to make it appear that he has any depth.
So, ok, he’s all of them.
9
…all of the above and a snake in a canary colored suit.
9 brucelevy
I never spent any significant time around Robert, so I was surprised when I finally saw him “teach.” It was on those video clips they had for a while on the Fellowship of Friends website. I watched them and was kind of dumbfounded at how utterly simplistic he sounded. He spoke in shallow cliches, but acted as though he was saying something very profound. He had the act of profundity down — pausing to emphasize certain words, while tilting his head with a knowing look — yet he wasn’t really saying anything of value.
Then it occurred to me that someone considered these clips to be the highlights of his teaching, or they wouldn’t have put them on the site. In other words, it wasn’t going to get any better than that. Yikes.
BTW, it’s a new page and no Stepford-bot advertisement from Psychic. You’re slipping.
Why are the chief lieutenants/understudies of the leader of the Fellowship of Friends mostly Romanian? They are familiar with the territory of psychopathy; Nicolae Ceaucescu:
Ceausescu could have been a hero but instead went down the killing road. His commitment to Romanian independence was poisoned by paternalism and his belief in his own infallibility – hubris, that age-old companion to despots. Not content with ruining the country it is alleged that he also tried to rob it, establishing Swiss bank accounts to hide his stash. His most appalling legacy is the thousands of filthy, neglected children rescued from the orphanages and institutions Ceausescu claimed did not exist.
http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/ceausescu.html
Veronicapoe 28/511
Spot on; especially the analogy of joining FOF to being thrown into the “magic circle”. The magic circle is one of the vivid images I keep from my first reading of Gurdjeff’s “Meetings with remarkable men”. When I joined FOF, I did not have any thoughts of black magic (more like pink magic as it turns out), but the spell it cast on me, on many of us, lasted for years. When I broke the circle/spell, I felt a bit dizzy but could not really explain why I stayed for so long, more like Alice at a “FOF auction” tea party.
I also loved the last quote (“The beatings will continue until morale improve”). Where did it originate (I read somewhere it might be in WWII Japan)?
11 innernaut
“He had the act of profundity down — pausing to emphasize certain words, while tilting his head with a knowing look — yet he wasn’t really saying anything of value.”
That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. It creeps the shit outta me. A thing to remember on one’s path…apparently the more one wants something, the more easily one can be shucked and jived.
In our quest, we projected, on that waste of flesh, just what we wanted to see…until we didn’t anymore.
580 Peckingpah
The night that Robert Burton escaped.
One night, a group of students were chatting, joking, about things of their teacher:
¿What is worse to see Robert with a yellow suit or to see nake Robert?
Bla,bla,bla and ja,ja,ja.
¿ Why Robert, with golden alchemy, leaves the rooms of hotels as a pork?
Bla,bla,bla and ja,ja,ja.
¿Is Robert a conscious being?
Bla,bla,bla and ja,ja,ja.And: One of the students said:
“If Robert was not a conscious being I will kill him.”
More bla,bla,bla and ja,ja,ja.
In the group there was a spy, a famous conductor. The spy informed his teacher.
Robert Burton and some students left Apollo rapidly, on the same night.
From the city Robert ordered that the Killer student should leave the school, should leave Apolo immediately(for the salvation of his soul,of course).
The student left and Robert returned to Apolo.
I like to think that Robert spent something of fear that night.
Peckingpah’s story rings a bell!
I remember a guard talking about a lot of mayhem in the middle of the night
with a Russian student screaming and yelling loudly outside the galleria.
Next day he was gone.
Peck, tell us more.
Your story helps to understand the inner workings
of this now deplorable place called the Galleria
“I remember a guard talking about a lot of mayhem in the middle of the night with a Russian student screaming and yelling loudly outside the galleria. Next day he was gone.”
_______________________________________________
Yes; though that was only one of the ‘cries’ on the ‘outside’, don’t forget the pillow screams downstairs and into Robert Burton’s bed pillow as he defiles yet another beautiful woman’s husband while in his honeymoon period with her.
________________________________________________
Speaking of ‘Death’ : Death barely moves a fallen, fireproof eyelash on Karma’s blazing shirt collar… physical death is but a hiccup, it means nothing and the spirit stands starring, starring, starring into a mirror who has no glass and what Robert Burton’s conscience cannot un-touch this time around, the mirror will visit and not only from his.
A quote from the link on ton’s #2 post:
The writer is speaking about church leaders who become predators and take advantage of the people who are supposedly in their care.
“I am amazed at the creativity that perpetrators have, the manipulation of theology and scripture and ritual, the moral rationalization they bring to bear:
‘No there is nothing wrong with this because God’s love for you is flowing through me, and this is a holy kiss.’ ”
* * *
There have been so many posts that describe Robert Burton using almost these exact words with students.
I recall Robert Burton telling me ~
“It is unfortunate that you are missing this divine opportunity to have a relationship with a conscious being.”
____________
WTF! As if 44 of them was not enough already?
Opus111 (13), Veronicapoe (28/511)
“Spot on; especially the analogy of joining FOF to being thrown into the “magic circle”. The magic circle is one of the vivid images I keep from my first reading of Gurdjeff’s Meetings With Remarkable Men.”
Thanks, that’s a helpful image. There was a collection of irrational beliefs that exerted the great force necessary to prevent us from crossing the line and leaving the FOF. I couldn’t really conceive of the possibility of leaving, just like the trapped Yesidi tribesman. In fact I didn’t even realise I was imprisoned until I escaped.
Had dinner recently in the local Oregon House restaurant, surrounded by FOF students. The tables are close together so it’s easy to eavesdrop. The students’ conversations were hilarious – utter nonsense spoken as if it were deep and meaningful, with the hushed voice tones that imply “aren’t we privileged to be part of this special group”. They even still say “Robert says….” as if his every utterance is undeniable truth by which all else is to be measured. There’s your magic circle!
19 Nuthead: ‘Had dinner recently in the local Oregon House restaurant, surrounded by FOF students. The tables are close together so it’s easy to eavesdrop. The students’ conversations were hilarious – utter nonsense spoken as if it were deep and meaningful, with the hushed voice tones that imply “aren’t we privileged to be part of this special group”. They even still say “Robert says….” as if his every utterance is undeniable truth by which all else is to be measured. There’s your magic circle!’
Sounds like a lot of judgment about a world that we all were a part of. I don’t think think it’s hilarious at all.
Dunno the origin of “the beatings will continue until morale improves.”
I always liked the saying because it illustrates tyranny holding an obvious inescapable false preconception.
“I will keep the stone in my shoe until I achieve immortality within the limits of the solar system.”
12 Associated Press
I have long pondered the fact that Robert’s chief sycophants and stallwart supporters are relatively young Romanians. They would have spent their formative years in Ceaucescu’s corrupt regime’s final and most appallingly brutal years. Their families were part of the ruling elite sharing the spoils from the rape of their country, the sufferings of their countrymen (Fellowship students almost never come from the ranks of the downtrodden–they tend to be members of the third world wealthy, than which few are wealthier). In short, for D—-N and M—I the Fellowship is just business as usual, all they’ve ever known. How could anyone from such a background come to have any understanding of honor or decency?
Through the years, due to my relationship with someone still in the fof, I went to numerous dinners and houses in the Oregon House area with ’students’. Most often there was a palpable dream of self-satisfaction engulfing them. It was almost as if I could reach out and stroke it with them.
Mostly I wanted to slap it off them.
Hello. I have been very busy the last few weeks but I did check in to see how the petition was going and to catch up on some of the postings. I am pleased to see that you all are moving ahead on the petition and that, from the postings, you are analyzing and synthesizing your various experiences.
I did see the digressions about what was happening around Scientology this past month. I think the more responsible people involved in that work are starting to catch their respective breaths and start thinking and evaluating what has happened and what the future may hold.
And some of this reflection may be appropriate for you all. Please remember that while “flash” can be perceived as fun (pickets that are rowdy, non-responsible and non-thoughtful media coverage for events, uproar in general around the Internet; many newish people showing up to get ex’es to be more public in ways that could be dangerous, in a legal manner, for the ex’es) that these actions are seldom as useful as quiet, supportive, hard work around communications, responsible media interviews and other work with assisting ex’es and soon-to-be ex’es. That is where the real inner and outer change takes place, IMHO.
I will keep dropping by, if that is OK with you all.
For those who may not have used the link in the earlier post, here is background on Nicolae Andruta Ceausescu, excerpts:
1965: Shortly after taking power Ceausescu prohibits direct contacts between Soviet and Romanian officials. All Romanian military officers with Soviet wives are ordered to either divorce, send their wives back to the Soviet Union, or resign from their posts.
Ceausescu’s stance towards the Soviet Union wins him considerable support from the West, with then United States President Richard M. Nixon visiting Romania in August 1969. In 1975 the US grants Romania most-favoured-nation trading status.
At the same time, Ceausescu builds closer ties between Romania and the communist states of China and North Korea.
At home Ceausescu initially adopts a relatively liberal approach to freedom of speech. But this period of relaxation is short-lived as he begins to cash in on his promotion of Romanian nationalism to fuel a Ceausescu personality cult.
1966: New laws are introduced to engineer an increase in the size of Romania’s population. “The foetus is the property of the entire society,” Ceausescu states, “Anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity.”
Abortion and contraception are outlawed, childless couples face higher taxes, divorce is discouraged, and sex education prohibited. The birth-rate almost doubles, but is accompanied by a leap in infant mortality and unwanted pregnancies, with the rising numbers of handicapped, orphaned and abandoned children being placed in decrepit institutions under state care. After the fall of Ceausescu in 1989 over 100,000 handicapped and orphaned children are discovered living in horrific conditions.
During the 1960s the regime also begins planning for urban and rural “systematisation”. To provide a labour pool for new industries while increasing the amount of land available for farming and the state’s capacity for social control, over 11 million people are to be resettled from private houses in about 7,000 villages to apartment buildings in 550 standardised “agro-industrial centres”. Ethnic minorities will be forced to assimilate.
1967: In June Ceausescu purges the Ministry of Internal Affairs of pro-Soviet officers and creates a new Department of State Security (Securitate). With its sweeping powers and extensive resources, the Securitate becomes the arbiter and the enforcer of Ceausescu’s will, growing to become the largest agency of its type in Europe, relative to the size of Romania’s population.
Securitate agents will be allowed to conduct surveillance on private citizens with impunity. Contacts with foreigners are monitored, mail is screened, telephones tapped, and homes and offices broken into. Those suspected of disloyalty to the regime are arrested and interrogated. Prominent dissidents suffer more severe forms of harassment, including physical violence and imprisonment.
Meanwhile, further manoeuvring by Ceausescu sees him elected president of the State Council in December. By the end of the year he has emerged as the undisputed leader of both the party and the state.
1968: In April Ceausescu cautions intellectuals and artists not to overstep the mark of permissible free expression. By 1971 he has completely reasserted neo-Stalinist policies on economic and social control. Freedom of speech is limited and the media is controlled. It is even illegal to own a typewriter without an official licence. The Securitate suppress all political opposition.
1970s: Ceausescu continues to concentrate power at the top of the party structure. The military and security forces are overhauled, thousands of managers and officials are removed and replaced with his protégés, party and state structures are blended, and the media is manipulated with “patriotic commercials” to promote his personality cult.
1974: Voters “elect” Ceausescu president of the republic in March. He further tightens his control of government by placing trusted allies and members of his immediate family, including his wife, three brothers, a son, and a brother-in-law, in strategic party and government posts – a policy that comes to be known in the West as “dynastic socialism”.
Meanwhile, Ceausescu’s personality cult is increasingly boosted by the state-controlled media, which lionises him as the greatest genius of the age, the ‘Genius of the Carpathians’, the ‘Danube of Thought’, the “guarantor of the nation’s progress and independence”, the “visionary architect of the nation’s future”. His presidency is described as the “golden era of Ceausescu”.
1982: The standard of living plunges. But while most Romanians are needlessly starving, cold and living in the dark, Ceausescu and his family continue to be surrounded by comfort and privilege. One dissident estimates that at least 15,000 Romanians die per year as a result of the austerity program.
U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz claims that Romania has “possibly the worst” human rights record in Eastern Europe.
1987: In May students stage a large demonstration in Iasi, in the northeast of Romania, near the border with Moldova. Massive antigovernment protests and riots break out in Brasov, 150 km north of Bucharest, on 15 November. Ceausescu uses force to suppress the uprisings. Thousands of children are also recruited to spy on their families, friends and teachers and report to the Securitate.
1989: Ceausescu is now the head of state, the head of the Communist Party, the head of the armed forces, chairman of the Supreme Council for Economic and Social Development, president of the National Council of Working People, and chairman of the Socialist Democracy and Unity Front.
In March six prominent members of the Communist Party write an open letter to Ceausescu that criticises his abuses of power and his economic policies. The so-called “letter of the six” is circulated in the Western media and read on Radio Free Europe, where it is described as the manifesto of an underground organisation called the National Salvation Front.
Nevertheless, Ceausescu is reelected for another five-year term as head of the Romanian Communist Party in November, only weeks before his downfall.
On 16 December antigovernment demonstrations begin to break out in Timisoara in the west of Romania. The next day, as large numbers of protesters march on the Communist Party headquarters in the city, Ceausescu orders his security forces to fire on the crowd. Up to 4,000 die during the days of conflict that follow. The ‘Revolution of Timisoara’ ends on 20 December when the demonstrators take control of the city, aided by army defectors.
The demonstrations spread to Bucharest. On 21 December 80,000 to 100,000 people gather outside the headquarters of the Communist Party in Republican Square in a mass rally organised by the party in support of Ceausescu and broadcast on national television.
However, as Ceausescu speaks to the crowd from the balcony of the building, he is shouted down by chants such as “Timisoara”, “Down with the murderers”, “Down with the dictatorship”, “Romanians awake”, and “We are ready to die”. The television broadcast is stopped, but not before images of a visibly shaken Ceausescu are aired.
Ceausescu retreats inside the party headquarters. Outside the number of demonstrators converging on the square grows throughout the night. It is reported that the minister for defence, General Vasile Milea, is summarily executed after he refuses to obey Ceausescu’s directive and order his troops to fire on the crowd.
The army sides with the demonstrators on 22 December. Ceausescu makes a final attempt to address the crowd, but seeing that situation is now out of his control he flees the capital with his wife, boarding his personal helicopter from the roof of the party headquarters building.
Several hours later the Ceausescus are captured at Cîmpulung, about 100 km northwest of Bucharest, and returned to a secret location in Bucharest.
On 25 December the Ceausescus are tried by a special military tribunal and convicted on charges of mass murder and other crimes. The sentence is death. Ceausescu and his wife are executed by firing squad shortly after the sentence is handed down. They are buried at an undisclosed location. After footage of their dead bodies is broadcast on national television the remaining resistance to the regime change quickly falls away.
——
Is it any wonder, then, that certain Romanians are readily molded into an advancement, and/or survival, at any cost type of society? And, are on board with ‘personality cult’ scenarios? Also, have a perverted sense of trust and loyalty? Fellowship of Friends members: Think of the type of society you are creating, in microcosm! Not surprisingly that many FoF members could write to Robert over the last several years and none of the material ever gets to him? He is ensconced in the posh political palace protected from prying protestations while planning perpetual pauperism for the population – watch for the ‘personal helicopter from the roof of the party headquarters building.’ And, the Swiss bank accounts. Does Robert Burton deserve an equally glorious ending?
IMO, The Romanian Spin is ~
______________________________________
Pretty silly…
Sure, you can make metaphorical/cultural-mannerism- connections via the Romanians and The Fellowship of Friends all day long and I could write another equally ‘reasonable’ comparison and ‘what about this spin’ article on the Germans that have awesomely supported the ‘esoteric holocaust’ and ‘positive eagerness of being even more special people once California was dumped into the sea via the 1998 predictions by Heirophant Robert Burton:
and on a symbolic level it’s all sorta coffee-table-exciting till the next CNN or BBC article is published… so what? These sorts of connections are just lounge-candy and IMO, removes oneself deeper into negative justifications, conspiracy theories and further from the simple truth that every human being has had these selfish potentials, large and small, privately and publicly at some point in their ’story’, all playing them out in various (and mysterious at that BTW) depths, widths and degrees of circumstance and effect…
Not that the ‘fact’ makes the destructive practices lesser or neutralized/indifferent; simply it’s just pointing to another direction of investing ones energies into looking at people, not as programmable mutants of a dead regime, rather as confused ’spirits’ (even if they say they are firmly convinced that they are soundly not confused), the ‘firm’ intonation in the voice proves otherwise …
The Governments of this world have been no less numerous than the movie directors of those ’safe’ horror films or action films people rent from the Oregon House Video Store: the effects are certainly different and of a different order, though IMO, the fundamental content of what a movie director imagines is ‘important’ and ‘exciting’ is not different than a Government and the people who come to see their movies…
Dorian and Mehai are simply two young men who were best friends long before Robert Burton polished their egos and made them Oregon House Movie Stars, both were torn asunder from their ‘individualism’, just like thousands before them and just because they are leading meetings means nothing as to the relative picture of their internal worlds,
if given the role, Linda, Benjamin, Colin or Steven would do the same, albeit they are of the First generation AI’s, the general hoopla would spin:
the older generation Fellowship of Friends sees M & D as ‘rising stars’, the affirmative ’sons’ they never had or better yet, mini-Burton’s to carry on the Affirmative Utensil of Hope, Smiling and Pretty Esoteric-like Behavior…
minus the placing of a pillow on Robert Burton’s chair during Sunday meetings; Dorian seemed to be the best one for that ‘discreet’ slide into fifth base (that’s when you forget you’ve touched home base and slide into first).
Not all Romanians were lollipops in Robert Burton’s mouth, though certainly he tried to mold them thusly… though nearly all of them did dutifully sing their hearts right out onto the galleria lawn every other morning when called for and like all spirits caught up in the glamorous distance Robert Burton kept from their sparkling, hopeful eyes and the higher ignoring of their curiosities by Robert Burton, teasing their Magnetic Centers further into the future and bigger donations,
they fell for it and like all falling, no matter the nationality, it is meant to be, otherwise it has not happened (yet): regret is a buffer to allowing transformation to breath on its own in the moment, the ‘little self’ wants ‘bad guys and good guys’, yet, it’s the TV, that’s where they live anyways…
Giving Robert Burton’s Romanians such a historical umbilical cord is undeserving IMO;
I would vote closer to the fact that neither of the two have any fundamental foothold in peoples hearts without referencing Robert Burton’s approval of them (literally or subliminally) and their non- emotional being of the words can be ‘felt’ if only the students would get off the tread mill and stand still awhile with the deeds this organization, The Fellowship of Friends, perpetuates and have not redeemed /reconciled themselves from…
When abuse is justified by only one man and only his seeing and believing, only his communications and visions of ‘higher forces’, one can be sure that this is the Way of The Selfish Man, a super-star struggling spirit for super-star struggling spirit worshipers:
no different than that of the Yuba City or California Governments who create just enough red tape to keep milking the Fellowship of Friends for more money… hey, Robert Burton’s Fellowship of Friends has raised the property value of Yuba County in Oregon House three fold and his ‘behavior’ fixes potholes…
Too, one could even write an article on how the American, Yuba County politicians allow such a ‘meat farm’ to exist in their midsts, perhaps it additionally has something to do with the fact that the Fellowship of Friends is the third largest tax revenue source in Yuba County(?)
The American Dream is alive and sponsored by Hope-Monetary-Supplements and just as the Early Americans tolerated the justifications to eradicate hundreds of thousands of ’savage Indians’, so do the religious and capitalists support ‘moderation of conscience’ when it comes to turning off the ‘donation faucet’ via the Fellowship of Friends pipeline to their tax-chests and long term land values…
____________________
There was once a Theatrical performance directed by a Romanian, who Robert Burton kept on a short leech, due to their innate ability to be an individual with no room for Robert Burton’s fist (when he cannot put it in the regular-end, he tries smoothing it into ones mouth)…
This performance was not supported by Robert Burton and the inner circle was predicting it as a failure or at best a small performance (Hey, it did have Girard in it)… but that was not surprising since he was Robert Burton’s disgruntled ‘Ouspensky’ at the time and playing Humpty Dumpty…
And what was the turn out? The house was packed to the seams for all three performances because people loved the symbolic, affirmative ‘Her’ who had no room for Robert Burton’s fist
and for a brief moment at ISIS, the doomsday clouds parted and people paid to express their conscience, their independence from the Declaration of Independence and partied hard, drunk on love and the conscious expression of essence and its essentials;
because if you keep declaring while you’re enslaving, then what is that piece of paper, what is Robert Burton sitting on his double-cushion, but a thin, gold-leaf- promise of forgetting that you have a self that has no room for Robert Burton’s fist?
There are conscious, legitimate and fundamentally soul expanding phenomenon on this planet:
take the little pictures you have on your mantles of yourselves, your family’s, you and your octave members with Robert Burton in your hands,
cut out Robert Burton and you’ll see the first phenomenon that will deliver you forwards, out of the static of Hope and Celestial Coma;
the key, the only key your spirit has ever held, its physical body and its manifestation/incarnation into this physical life and DO something with it that makes no one else smile before you do or have.
_______________________
l.t.y.a.
P.S.
And don’t forget about those silly American mannerisms that Robert Burton played upon and in, i.e.,
Plymouth Rock Part 2 and Robert Burton dressed as the ‘May Flower’ (or other rhyming synonyms),
where Apollo was destined to be the new founding civilization of the Earth after nuclear world war 3 took care of the ‘denying force’, leaving Marysville and Yuba City under water; they’d have a coast line for auction sailing-trip-bidding and deep sea diving for Gottschalks jewelery and that big private wine locker belonging to the owner of ‘The Kitchen Store’.
______________
The American psychologies took Robert Burton’s ‘May-Flower’ and wore it on their lapels and blouses for years, causing one another bankruptcies, foreclosures, job loses, divorces and other various domestic dark chucklings.
The Fellowship of Friends: yep, they could not take care of their compromised citizens, but, hey, at least the affirmative city will still be standing for some poet to spawn another Declaration of Independence about, until of course a bomber from Beale Air Force Base accidentally drops a few hundred ‘expired’ 3 ton bombs on that deserted Ghost Town called ‘Paradise: The West Coast Had a Plymouth Rock Too’.
_____________
:.}
Abigail, 22:
“..Their families were part of the ruling elite sharing the spoils from the rape of their country, the sufferings of their countrymen (Fellowship students almost never come from the ranks of the downtrodden–they tend to be members of the third world wealthy, than which few are wealthier). In short, for D—-N and M—I the Fellowship is just business as usual, all they’ve ever known. How could anyone from such a background come to have any understanding of honor or decency?”
While Unoanimo has already BEAUTIFULLY said it, it may still be worth confirming that we all fitted in from a background of nationalities BUT into the structure of the American Way of Consciousness, “a la Rober”. When things were questioned did Mr. Haven not affirm emphatically that the Fellowship of Friends was indeed American because its teacher was so? Did he not finally “manage’ it with the same fist that his military family had brought him up with? Not one of us was free from our background and in severing our ties with it, the Fellowship Inner Circle condemned itself to suffering it instead of understanding or transforming it. The crux of the matter is that suffering one’s karma is as difficult as transforming it but while suffering it without understanding or working with it leads to unnecessary suffering, transforming it leads to human progress or evolution. While the former conditions one to feel a victim all throughout one’s life, the latter makes a player of one, an actor, and brings forth one’s destiny.
It is interesting to look at those differences and understand the background from which each one of us came so that we can better understand the labyrinth that we put together and run out of it because it no longer matters what nationality we came from, we are mostly Westerners enmeshed in the patriarchal mentality in which sex, power and economy run parallel with each other and more than Westerners “we”, I hope, are human beings trying to stand above the limitations to consciousness with which Nationalities and other “elites” separate us. Was that not the reason for which we allowed Robert Burton to rip our nationalities off so badly that he almost managed to disfigure the scent of our essence? Too bad that he took his own essence to the horrifying extreme of individualism without boundaries: the “Fallen Monarch” without moral or spiritual authority.
As for Dorian and Mihai, they were puppets in the play, like the rest of us. What most mattered to Robert was that with their presence he pulled any authority away from his own decadent American children in the inner circle: Girard, Collin, Steven …, who he had already replaced with equally decadent but ambitious women and gave a blood-shot of youth to the credibility of the Fellowship of Friends, at least in the eyes of a new generation. That generation is what is at stake because from it, a hundred Robert Burtons can fill the sewage of many nations. The Fellowship of Friends teaches mastery in corruption, “run over your peers and make the “Star Pimp” of yourself, next to mummy Edith and the other mummy Isis’s. We could not have eaten more shit if they’d served it to us in diamond plates!
I don’t know about bad romanians. There were certainly plenty of ‘good germans’. Musta run out of stupid americans.
Scientology
Fair game
Jan 31st 2008
From The Economist print edition
An online onslaught against Scientology
A VICIOUS cult run by cynical fraudsters, or a sincerely held religious belief persecuted by zealots? That is the long-standing row about Scientology, founded by the late science-fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard. In some countries, such as Germany, the group is watched by the security services. In others, such as America and Australia, it has won charitable status as a religion.
Until now the fight could mostly be seen as one-sided. Scientology’s lawyers are vigorous litigants. The group argues that its internal materials (which claim, among other things, that expensive courses of treatment can help rid people of infestation by alien souls from an extinct civilisation) are commercially confidential and protected by copyright. They react sharply to any perceived libel.
As a result, public critics of what they derisively term “$cientology” risk expensive legal battles. For example, a new unauthorised biography of Tom Cruise by a British author, Andrew Morton, contains detailed and highly critical material about the film star’s involvement in Scientology. It is a bestseller in America but has not been published in Britain. The publisher, St Martin’s Press, has even asked internet booksellers not to ship it to foreign customers. Though Scientology representatives vehemently deny breaking any laws, critics have claimed that they experience intensive harassment and intimidation.
Now Scientology is under attack from a group of internet activists known only as Anonymous. Organised from a Wikipedia-style website (editable by anyone) and through anonymous internet chat rooms, “Project Chanology”, as the initiative is known, presents no easy target for Scientology’s lawyers. It is promoting cyberwarfare techniques normally associated with extortionists, spies and terrorists. Called “distributed denial of service attacks”, these typically involve using networks of infected computers to bombard the target’s websites and servers with bogus requests for data, causing them to crash. Even governments find this troublesome.
Anonymous is also hoping to galvanise public opinion with a mass “real-world” protest outside every Scientology office worldwide on February 10th. But its best weapon may be ridicule. The group got going in reaction to efforts to ban an internal Scientology video of Mr Cruise that leaked onto the internet. The star appears to discuss his beliefs with a degree of incoherence and exaggeration that might lead some to question Scientology’s effects on its adherents’ sanity. A Scientology spokesman says it has been selectively edited. Several internet sites have taken it down after threats of lawsuits. But it keeps popping up.
20 WULS: “Sounds like a lot of judgment about a world that we all were a part of. I don’t think think it’s hilarious at all.”
For me the fact that we were all part of it makes it even funnier, or sadder, depending on my mood at the time. In any case, “judging” people still in the FOF seems like an appropriate response – they ARE ridiculous, after all. You should’ve been there…..
I have noticed one improvement however: where current students used to act superior around ex-students (“hope I’m not going to pick up some life germs from these sleeping machines), now they mostly appear to be embarrassed and exaggeratedly friendly (“I realise that the fact you left the FOF doesn’t mean you’re spiritually dead and I’m “unformatory” so I’d still like to be your friend”).
Hilarious/ridiculous/sad/scary? Your choice.
Nuthead observed:
“I have noticed one improvement however: where current students used to act superior around ex-students (”hope I’m not going to pick up some life germs from these sleeping machines), now they mostly appear to be embarrassed and exaggeratedly friendly (”I realise that the fact you left the FOF doesn’t mean you’re spiritually dead and I’m “unformatory” so I’d still like to be your friend”).”
______________________________________________
Yeah. I feel embarassed for them. When I see them at the store or post office they seem sheepish and ashamed and sometimes just awkward and tense.
I observe that the devision between ex-students and students is very traumatic for both sides.
Students feel that ex-students only gossiping and expressing negativity against them and the school. Ex-students feel that they are being rejected by friends and let down.
Some students believe that by not communicating with the “ex” they are helping them to come back and at the same time avoid brainwashing and lying. “Ex” believe that they are helping the victims of a cult to get out by telling them the truth about “how things really are in the FOF” which freaks out the students…
There are still a lot of students who are fence-sitters because of this (and other reasons). There are many friends on the both sides of the fence (and on the fence).
Associated press
Thanks for the Romanian history
The birth-rate almost doubles, but is accompanied by a leap in infant mortality and unwanted pregnancies, with the rising numbers of handicapped, orphaned and abandoned children being placed in decrepit institutions under state care. After the fall of Ceausescu in 1989 over 100,000 handicapped and orphaned children are discovered living in horrific conditions.
23 years ago when I studied Psychology and child rearing, there was this incredible, INCREDIBLE research regarding Romanian children who were living in an orphanage in Romania. The conclusion of this study was that children who were only fed their nutrition and not being emotionally cared for by expressing love and physical contact, died.
Sad and shocking: this was observed in a Romanian orphanage….
Which nationality is so hurt, HURT, that they do not play with their children and only feed it and not touch the children and give the children love……????
Makes me nauseated…and I do not seem to have an allergy.
Maybe I am developing an allergy for the fellowship of friends and the hurt it is still causing…..out of passed hurt and ignorance?
There was a programme on tv here in the uk recently on a romanian orphanage. The children were given no stimulus at all. They were just fed and washed there was no talking to these children. No good morning not even the most basic of human interchange seemed to take place. I couldn’t fathom it out. I couldn’t work it out. Even a moron would say, “Ah, goodjy wouldjee dibbledee woops” to a 3 year old kid.Maybe the workers for this place just looked at their daily job as looking after the braindead kids on the hill. Lets face it , there isn’t much going on between some peoples ears. Look at how many people are still in fof. Maybe we’re talking some sort of sub-moronic level of existence. Totally weird. The ones however in another orphanage that did have a radio and a tv to react to were a little more alive. The manager in the other orphanage said they didn’t have the money for a radio or tv. Oddly enough however they could find the money for the sun lounge chairs on the veranda. (*?*)
It is not uncommon to find people willing to not talk to others, play indifference and dead silence. But the pain is for both sides, Now.
It is not uncommon to find people willing to not talk to others, be it children or adults, play indifference and dead silence. But the pain is for Both Sides Now. It was the habitual play in the Fellowship of Friends and it continues to go on outside of it no matter the excuse. It’s a good thing some of us have seventeen years of practice enduring it.
……
The new Act that Fellowship of Friend’s students have developed is “act innocently positive”. It is a buffer meant to keep the crystal in place that convinces them that they are innocent. Innocent, beautiful and have never killed a fly. Too bad some people think it is worth eating shit because it is served in gold plated dishes. In the end it proves that what really mattered to the people of our age who succumbed to the Fellowship of Friends, was money or the smell of it in silk clothes and semen stained roses. Robert certainly knew what our level of being really was and had no shame in milking everyone five times a year in the Auction of our souls.
31 Nuthead: Other than me not spellchecking (think think, should have been think that) my passage to you I find it interesting how many of us express ourselves very differently regarding this issue. I certainly would have no way of knowing whether you were judging the situation or feeling empathic to it, or both. I reacted to your words. You list a whole host of emotions that one could experience in viewing the situation.
Nuthead says: ‘In any case, “judging” people still in the FOF seems like an appropriate response.’ I would disagree with this statement. I don’t think judging people in any situation is an appropriate response. And knowing what I know now about the Fellowship I find myself in a place of empathy rather than judgment. I find that when I experience judgment it’s usually an issue with myself rather than what I am observing. However, I when you say judgment is an appropriate response you may mean something else.
Mercury continues its retrograde movement and it could be we’re just misunderstanding each other.
Ceausescu and the revolution 4:42:
http://uk.youtube.com/v/ckiXKWKBbC8
Gazing through the window at the world outside
Wondering will mother earth survive
Hoping that mankind will stop abusing her sometime
After all there’s only just the two of us
And here we are still fighting for our lives
Watching all of history repeat itself
Time after time
I’m just a dreamer
I dream my life away
I’m just a dreamer
Who dreams of better days
I watch the sun go down like everyone of us
I’m hoping that the dawn will bring a sign
A better place for those Who will come after us …
This time
I’m just a dreamer
I dream my life away oh yeah
I’m just a dreamer
Who dreams of better days
Your higher power may be God or Jesus Christ
It doesn’t really matter much to me
Without each others help there ain’t no hope for us
I’m living in a dream of fantasy
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah
If only we could all just find serenity
It would be nice if we could live as one
When will all this anger, hate and bigotry …
Be gone?
I’m just a dreamer
I dream my life away
Today
I’m just a dreamer
Who dreams of better days
Okay
I’m just a dreamer
Who’s searching for the way
Today
I’m just a dreamer
Dreaming my life away
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah
Ozzy Osbourne –
Dreamer . . . . . .
[click my name above for music video]
It went in one of these Robert’s typical trips to Los Angeles by car. The new student of Robert’s court was conscious of the sexual intentions of his teacher. The student had been looking for Robert all the time in Apollo, looking for a father, looking for a teacher, looking for a God…and Robert the typical: invitations to have dinner, invitations to travel,etc. After a time :”I like to be close to you this night, dear”. The student said not this night. Two cars full of students seeing the new student nervous, fearful and sad. ¿Did someone it help? Nooo.¿ Did someone speak with him of the matter? Noooo. Smiles,smiles and more smiles. Enjoying ourselves in his suffering, the same suffering that we spend. When I was looking at the new student I could meet to myself time ago. The sensation of that something not me let to say “No” , of that come the moment would be impossible to say “No”. The apparent normality as all living the sexual submission to an old man Not let to say “No”. The power of the group and not the power of Robert is what submits one to one to the students. I was submitting the new student, me and the others. Like in the hunt for the fox we were the dogs and Robert the hunter. We also had been hunted for other dogs and the same hunter. That night, after the dinner in a Mexican restaurant, finally the fox was hunted. I remember in the parking of the hotel, as Robert spoke to the new student with violence, with negativite, furiously in front of all his dogs, he said ” ¿Are you going to want or not this night?”. The new student said “Yes”.
Thank you for talking Peckinpah. That will help so many of the boys and the rest of us.
Thank you Suzy for the reminder that it is not about judging, which also separates us.
Nuthead, True, we were and still are ridiculous but more than ridiculous, indoctrinated. It is surprising that even people like the Sheik showed in his last long post, still have barely grasped the extent to which we were indoctrinated and what that implies in the actual practice of how we lived. The power of the experience is that it then allows us to see what it means to be programmed in no matter what area. The nationality programming, class, race, status, etc, all of which separate us from each other if we are unable to use their side of light.
39 Peckinpah
….That night, after the dinner in a Mexican restaurant, finally the fox was hunted. I remember in the parking of the hotel, as Robert spoke to the new student with violence, with negativite, furiously in front of all his dogs, he said ” ¿Are you going to want or not this night?”. The new student said “Yes”.
——————————————————————–
Thank you Peckingpah for telling your stories.
It was not until I found this blog I started realizing the magnitude of ROBERT BURTON’S POWER AND SEXUAL ABUSE.
(I am not yelling, just making sure it stands out).
In the past I thought he was just a poor fuck with a weakness for sucking you know what.
I even thought a guy like him was also impotent and had a kind of undeveloped homosexuality.
It turns out he was and is an insatiable man and extremely negative, craving hungry hellish ghost.
What bothers me now is the most of us students HAD NO IDEA he was the opposite of what he was teaching.
I thought he would just get coldly irritated from time to time, but not much more than that.
Remembering the guys returning from trips with RB with a strange energy, I was not sure if they were hating it or loving it traveling to Europe or China, as you say Pekingpah: “Smiles, smiles and more smiles.”
Boys not men, boys do not cry?
Thanks Peckinpah for the insightful and chilling account of the dog pack mentality that enables the abuse to be perpetrated. I think you are right about the importance of power of the group in bringing about the submission of the individual.
I also agree with veramente that it’s very hard for people outside the inner circle of abuse to get a grasp of the magnitude of what is really going on. It’s easy for other students to minimize and misapprehend the situation, since there’s an invisible wall between the boys of the harem and the rest of the community. They are trained to keep amongst themselves and shut up, not letting even their wives and close friends enter the door into their secret life. So they can’t get any help from the people who most love them, which is terrible, really. I too remember the chosen guys’ weird energy, and some of them were my friends, what a shame that our relationship was tainted by silence, shame and our common allegiance to a demented and perverted man.
They say that in war there is so much personal guilt when you lose a friend and find yourself thinking “thank god it wasn’t me”. There’s similar guilt when you find yourself thinking “thank god RB didn’t pick me tonight”.
I mentioned this before, I remember feigning sleep on the floor of the Blake Cottage (boy cottage) when RB would come out in the morning to the living room where there would be 4 – 10 sleeping boys in their early 20’s, where he would make his “choice” by tapping you awake with his foot and indicating he wanted you in his room. I remember thinking “not me, not me” and being relieved when it was someone else. Exchanging one kind of guilt for another. Not very dissimilar, I’m sure, to what people felt in concentration camps when being “chosen” for execution or some other ungodly purpose completely out of their own hands. These were, for the most part, completely naive kids being fattened for the kill.
And anyone who can come back and say “Well, they weren’t miners, they could have said no” should have their balls cut off and shoved up their asses. And I’ll volunteer for the task.
39 Peckinpah
What a pig is that teacher of you
I remember one of the entourage in Paris, many years ago, who was deeply depressed. i asked him what was wrong and he replied, “Robert told me if I don’t start behaving he is going to send me home.” There was a painful and heavy silence. I was afraid to ask what he meant but I think I knew. Years later he committed suicide.
46 Vena
Yup, when RB paid your way you were expected to “put out” and shut up.
Today’s daily card:
Conscious beings in Paradise have no interest in
fame. They are devoted to serving the Absolute.
Love, Robert
I post this as a contrast to the real life stories from Peckinpah, Bruce and Vena. The disconnect between what RB says and what RB does is so huge it’s almost too much to grasp. Similarly, the imaginary FOF is utterly different from the real FOF. Students mostly live in the imaginary FOF, a world of illusions, and buffer the real FOF.
PS WULS Sorry if I was being a bit contrary, that’s in my nature, but I do feel that I can both empathise with students and at the same time see their ridiculousness.
Nuthead: Like I said previously it’s probably only in the words. Judgment to me denotes a negative feeling of someone else and seeing their ridiculousness does not necessarily contain that negative feeling. Just in our discussion it is easy to see how we usually don’t understand one another. xx00
Nuthead: Another note on me and my stuff: When I was growing up my mother used to always tell me how I felt. It used to really bug me and I’d get mad at her. I’d say ‘don’t tell me how I feel. How could you know how I feel?’ This is so true. Words or even facial expressions do not tell us how another person ‘feels’. That is personal. And judging you or judging another is simply hogwash because there is no way to tell and most of the times it’s a projection of how we feel.
Smiles, smiles and more smiles.
Smile and Frown
There is a smile of Love,
And there is a smile of Deceit,
And there is a smile of smiles
In which these two smiles meet.
And there is a frown of Hate,
And there is a frown of Disdain,
And there is a frown of Frowns
Which you strive to forget in vain;
For it sticks in the heart’s deep core
And it sticks in the deep backbone,
And no smile ever was smiled
But only one smile alone.
(And betwixt the cradle and grave
It only once smiled can be)
That when it once is smiled
There’s an end to all misery.
William Blake
Nuthead: to be a little clearer on my #50 blog: My last sentence should read: And judging you or judging another is simply hogwash because there is no way to tell and most of the times it’s a projection of how we feel when we say those words or we make that facial expression. As St. Paul said in 1 Corinthians: “We see through a glass darkly”. So true.
Yesri baba #51: Thanks for that. I am smiling.
“I remember in the parking of the hotel, as Robert spoke to the new student with violence, with negative, furiously in front of all his dogs, he said ” ¿Are you going to want or not this night?”. The new student said “Yes”.”
_________________________________
Yes, it’s an odd world is it not, that there is something automatically in people that ‘thinks’ that a so called ‘god’ who can be an angry god is more of what they need, i.e., fear and desire…
Desire to escape the fear, fear to loose the desire that it takes to identify with the circular journey to escape from the fear and the self that has been willy nilly built throughout this haphazard seesaw of extremes…
Round and round the Painbody goes, not unlike the planets (or meteorites), it has its ’solar-system’, i.e., the human body.
___________________
Pekinpah,
Was your story recent or ‘long-ago-historical’?
Just curious as to what its effect had on your remaining an educated supporter of Robert Burton’s funded campaigns of date-rape (?)
________________
l.t.y.a.
Indifferent? No Smiling? No I am just sad with no answers.
Hello everyone.
Im back..and am currently working on my letter detailing an event which I can personally attest to and which can be used for helping to remove one of the allegedly’s in the petition, in order to send it to Susan.
Rack your brains…do you remember anything which can help to do likewise with any of them.
Check it out on our wiki-blog.
I enclose a thing of great beauty on you tube, its payback time Lauralupa…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A2Jt4WOxN8
best of luck to all.
Jack
“The moment you have a system or method you become mechanical…to have clarity the most essential thing is to have freedom from authority…”
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=s1J_qPa72S0
It would be interesting to be able to define exactly the difference between the Fellowship of Friend’s Cult and a concentration camp.
Probably the main difference is that in the Cult people participate willingly.
In concentration camps the Jews were sexually abused by some of those in positions of authority. In the cult, it became accepted behavior to help the Teacher sexually abuse young men. In the former, Jews were exterminated, in the latter; anyone who dissented was asked to leave. There is a huge gap between actually killing people and simply asking them to leave but what is worth understanding is that the psycho-emotional-physical phenomenon is in fact, the same. Jews were exterminated from this world; students were banned from the world they had chosen to belong to.
What I am after is trying to understand the fact that although they are such different phenomenon, they end up having similar results.
Another aspect is the one related to the deep necessity to belong to a community that people in Cults share and the horrifying result that we end up serving a dictator.
What really matters in the exploration of failed causes, is to find the initial will that triggered the phenomenon. The initial will is too often covered by a layer of mud, of failed aims, facts that deviated so badly from the objective that drive people to judgment and disillusion without being able to protect themselves from the failure. But if we can go deeper into our selves and touch upon the initial impulse, we can recognize its sincere beauty and better understand how it failed. Once we understand how we deviated, it is very difficult to make the same mistake; it requires malice and intentionality to deviate so many times from the initial purpose of a cause.
All real healing happens not in the realm of the illness but in the realm of the initial condition or healthy state. The remembrance of one’s initial vision, one’s initial desire for a community of more conscious human beings, one’s inner drive, legitimate need and birthright to belong to a human community, is the healthiest, most powerful vision that any man will ever have. The fact that we failed so drastically in the Fellowship of Friends, does not mean that there is anything wrong with the vision, simply that we were not ready, just like so many people go into marriage without ever reaching the state in which marriage can be actualizes between them.
The naivete of our time lies in the fact that adults behave like children and think they can “do” things, but things like Marriages, Schools and Laws, happen only when the people involved are mature enough for them to happen. One can get married but not have a marriage, pay to belong to a community but not have a community, institutionalize a law but not have an order to live by. It is the “syndrome of self centeredness” that the man of our times is so characterized by: an individual without the understanding of ritual, humanity or social order; The “understanding” or the “consciousness”. Consciousness is action with understanding. In our state of unconsciousness we suffer the things we try to accomplish instead of accomplishing the things we suffer for.
No one should ever feel ashamed for wanting, needing, knowing that it is his/her birthright to be loved by the rest of the people s/he lives with, works with, dies with. No one should ever feel afraid of assuming the task of sharing even when others are not willing to. Every act of every individual is an act of love, of longing for participation and the hierarchical structures of nationality, class and status consistently deny every individual to recognize his humanity without labels. Those who have to look at labels before they can greet another human being are the loneliest people on the planet. We are all orphans. The old people in the United States, that is, in the richest nation on the planet, die drugged and lonely. Professional people who learn to caress should be hired to caress their heads, their hands, their feet. Latins, Blacks and people from the third world should be hired by the most advanced nations of the world to love their old people while the young people of those nations learn to love them themselves. The people in those nations are in so much need of being touched that they will soon forget their prejudices against the darker Latins, Blacks and all those from the third world. It does not matter who you love as long as love matters, as long as it happens. Love should fall on people, like rain, without discriminating.
The family is dead, the institutions are dead but man, man and woman, totally naked, are alive. One on one, without labels.
With love to you all who suffered with me, in the Fellowship without friends.
Post 56 should have startes as follows. It was a mistake in my copying to add the initial paragraphs in which I was exploring my own thoughts. So sorry.
What really matters in the exploration of failed causes, is to find the initial will that triggered the phenomenon. The initial will is too often covered by a layer of mud, of failed aims, facts that deviated so badly from the objective that drive people to judgment and disillusion without being able to protect themselves from the failure. But if we can go deeper into our selves and touch upon the initial impulse, we can recognize its sincere beauty and better understand how it failed. Once we understand how we deviated, it is very difficult to make the same mistake; it requires malice and intentionality to deviate so many times from the initial purpose of a cause.
All real healing happens not in the realm of the illness but in the realm of the initial condition or healthy state. The remembrance of one’s initial vision, one’s initial desire for a community of more conscious human beings, one’s inner drive, legitimate need and birthright to belong to a human community, is the healthiest, most powerful vision that any man will ever have. The fact that we failed so drastically in the Fellowship of Friends, does not mean that there is anything wrong with the vision, simply that we were not ready, just like so many people go into marriage without ever reaching the state in which marriage can be actualizes between them.
The naivete of our time lies in the fact that adults behave like children and think they can “do” things, but things like Marriages, Schools and Laws, happen only when the people involved are mature enough for them to happen. One can get married but not have a marriage, pay to belong to a community but not have a community, institutionalize a law but not have an order to live by. It is the “syndrome of self centeredness” that the man of our times is so characterized by: an individual without the understanding of ritual, humanity or social order; The “understanding” or the “consciousness”. Consciousness is action with understanding. In our state of unconsciousness we suffer the things we try to accomplish instead of accomplishing the things we suffer for.
No one should ever feel ashamed for wanting, needing, knowing that it is his/her birthright to be loved by the rest of the people s/he lives with, works with, dies with. No one should ever feel afraid of assuming the task of sharing even when others are not willing to. Every act of every individual is an act of love, of longing for participation and the hierarchical structures of nationality, class and status consistently deny every individual to recognize his humanity without labels. Those who have to look at labels before they can greet another human being are the loneliest people on the planet. We are all orphans. The old people in the United States, that is, in the richest nation on the planet, die drugged and lonely. Professional people who learn to caress should be hired to caress their heads, their hands, their feet. Latins, Blacks and people from the third world should be hired by the most advanced nations of the world to love their old people while the young people of those nations learn to love them themselves. The people in those nations are in so much need of being touched that they will soon forget their prejudices against the darker Latins, Blacks and all those from the third world. It does not matter who you love as long as love matters, as long as it happens. Love should fall on people, like rain, without discriminating.
The family is dead, the institutions are dead but man, man and woman, totally naked, are alive. One on one, without labels.
Elena (#52) You said…”All real healing happens not in the realm of the illness but in the realm of the initial condition or healthy state.”
I beg to differ…the dictionary definition is “heal – make or become healthy after injury” – we were not all injured by being in the FoF, some of us were just fooled for a while….perhaps thanks to our own need to look to someone else for the ‘answers’. I have also been reflecting on the Sheik’s assumption that we all hate RB, and I cannot say I do…not being personally adversly affected or touched by the goings on. However, I am sorry for the injury he did to my fellow students, and yet somehow cannot find it in myself to regret anything…in the ‘greater scheme of things’ I learned a lot about myself and humanity. This may be my way of justifying my actions and avoiding cognitive dissonance in myself, but that is the way I see it currently. The following Krishnamurti clip stresses the need to rely only on ourselves and to avoid looking for an authority figure to guide us…I especially hope Psychic watches it, and if I would wish one thing to be different, it would have been to realize this sooner.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=s1J_qPa72S0
good wishes, and may you be lusty in life!
Elena, do your busyness, forgot the fof, freedom your mind from that identification, free yourself, and avoid criticism.
clean your mind.
remember GOD,
GOD is important
robert is not important,
why do you give your thoughts, time and energy to something in the pass?
live the now, live the reality,
avoid negative imagination, that is a very deep sleep.
Be Present, and remember GOD.
Elena,
Were you there?
with the Jews?
Did you saw that?
do you think that you know everything?
calm down.
you dont must hear to your mind because is getting dangerous, is takingyou far away from GOD.
Enjoy the trees
enjoy your family
enjoy yourself, enjoy the life, all is a blessing, but we are negatives, and we can not see the beautiful creation, the most of the time we are living in God´s blessing, but we talk about others for to avoid our own responsability, that is be aware of God in everything.
59 Hans
Isn’t this the phony Hans that so readily slips in and out of dialect, and idiocy?
Hey Hans, take your loving “God”, wrap tightly in your unsolicited advice, and shove it, firmly and deeply, up your officious, ignorant ass.
Dear Hans,
It is a joy to hear you talking. Don’t stop!
Didn’t mean to contradict you Bruce but they went in at the same time. Glad to know you are there! Hans is not offensive and it is fine to hear him. When we ask to be loved and to love without shame, it is dangerous.
Hans, Robert Burton and all the people in the inner circle of the Fellowship of Friends are sick. Get them real healers. Help them before they go to jail.
62 Elena
I think we’re talking about two different Hans’. But whatever blows your skirt up.
For those still “in”
59 Hans
GOD is important
———————————————————–
Your god is not important to me.
Fuck him.
Does anyone have current FoF membership stats? Incoming, outgoing, total?
Here’s a trippy little youtube I just stumbled across.
#60 brucelevy
Ouchie!!! That’s going to stretch a bit.
The very people who probably have the greatest need to be reading this blog probably are not. They can’t afford to own a computer in the first place ? Maybe they’re prevented from even using one. Now that is a dictatorship.Does anyone know the current suggested behaviour “traits” expected of fof members ? I’ve got a feeling it includes restricted computer use.Wall of silence ?
It’ll all come out in the wash eventually.I’m ducking for cover behind my computer screen.See ya.Just hope its garden peas that are being fired at me in the event of an attack.
So how many members are there in the Fellowship of Friends? Here are some numbers:
February 3, 2008: 1,789
January 15, 2008: 1,818
November 24, 2007: 1,848
August 20, 2007: 1,949
These numbers simply show how many members are listed in the database at a given day. There is no doubt that the actual membership count is lower but I don’t know by what percentage. Here are several reasons why the numbers don’t give a realistic picture:
* Records of people who leave are not immediately removed from the database. Today, I saw the name of one friend who has recently left but is still listed. And there are probably others I am just not aware of.
* There is a percentage of members with special deals, mostly at Isis, who make minimal or no donations (and attend events for free). They help to keep the numbers up but don’t produce any revenue.
* Finally, there are many members worldwide who are disillusioned and unhappy with what is happening but they can’t quite let go yet, for whatever reason. Month by month, they are asking themselves why they are still hanging on. For now, they keep making their payments and show up as numbers but sooner or later, they will leave. I know there are many of them. In fact, I am one of them myself.
69 Ollie
Thanks for your post.
Could you share what you think it is that keeps you from not quite letting go yet?
70/James
Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. I can see that the loss of friendships would be a big deterrent. But l’ll let Ollie answer for him or herself.
James (70), good question for Ollie (69) about letting go.
Just a couple of thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head recently (thought I would warn everyone first):
Leaving the fof is very similar to two experiences that all of us have had:
1) Breaking up with the person who we believed was the love of our life.
2) Grieving for a loved one who has recently died.
In both cases, it’s hard to let go. But in both cases, we have to let go.
The sooner the better.
Unfortunately, it’s ingrained in us to believe that we’re heartless if we don’t prolong the grieving process indefinitely. About #1, we’re sometimes hesitant to find someone new right away.
But the healthy thing is to find someone new. The heathy thing and the spiritual path is live your life feeling good, and to let go of the grieving for someone close to us who has died. Feeling good is spiritual. It’s good to feel good. Seems obvious right? But we are “programmed” to not believe this, and we are particularly programmed in the fof to not believe this.
The “idea” of the Fellowship of Friends is very different for all of us. But one thing we all have in common is that “idea” has died. It’s in the past. And it died a long time ago for thousands of people who entered the group years ago with same sincerity and hope that all of us have had.
———–
Ok, here’s the other thought:
In the spirit of election year politics, members of the Kennedy family have been mentioned several times in the news, partly for who they’re endorsing for president.
One Kennedy who died several years ago was asked about his father, JFK, whether he believed he could be (or if he wanted to be) a “great man” like his father.
JFK Jr. dismissed the question and replied. “I want to be a good man.”
This idea of the “greatness” and the “importance” and the “significance” of individuals to society is brought up often by Burton. He’s obsessed with it. Many of us are and were obsessed with it. It’s partly related to the infatuation with separating ourselves from the rest of humanity by becoming a “man no. 5″ or whatever.
I know the Kennedys evoke a huge spectrum of reactions from people in this country, but when I read the quote from John F. Kennedy Jr years ago, it got me to thinking — as much as anything else — that I had joined the wrong group, and that I had definitely followed the wrong man.
All he said was, “I want to be a good man.”
Bruce (43): thanks for sharing this story:
“I mentioned this before, I remember feigning sleep on the floor of the Blake Cottage (boy cottage) when RB would come out in the morning to the living room where there would be 4 – 10 sleeping boys in their early 20’s, where he would make his “choice” by tapping you awake with his foot and indicating he wanted you in his room. I remember thinking “not me, not me” and being relieved when it was someone else. Exchanging one kind of guilt for another. Not very dissimilar, I’m sure, to what people felt in concentration camps when being “chosen” for execution or some other ungodly purpose completely out of their own hands. These were, for the most part, completely naive kids being fattened for the kill.”
Bruce: “I think we’re talking about two different Hans’. But whatever blows your skirt up”
I wish I knew better the meaning of that idiom but the little I understand it, Hans not only does not blow my skirt up, he doesn’t even pull my socks down!
At this point though I do believe the value of any dialogue is in allowing each other to talk without violently trying to stop each other. It is not what we say what will change our understanding as much as the tolerance with which we are willing to listen to each other. Not that there is no space for argument but if you cannot convey what you wish to say with words, you will not do it any better biting people. I too am learning.
Is it not true that in the end, we live in a time in which it is possible to err without anyone minding? If you wish to commit a slow suicide of the spirit participating in the corruption of the Fellowship of Friends, no one can stop you even if they can stop the Fellowship of Friends and friends hold their hand out for a while but if you’re not willing to stretch yours out and grab it, they move on.
Back to Hans, is it not fascinating for you to understand the mind-frame of students still in the Fellowship of Friends? Hans had not “materialized” ten months ago when I left and he is incarnating a dogmatism that had not been vocalized but it was there in potential. It is very, very important to listen to his tone, his outlook, his pragmatism and specially, his blindness. It is a pleasure to hear him talk because anyone willing to talk tells us something that we did not know before. He incarnates everything we feared the cult would take its students to: extremism with justification. “God is presence” Robert Burton, “We have the authority of God to be doing what we are doing” “We rape young men with the authority of God and Absolute Presence” “We belittle both men and women with the authority of a man number seven” “We, the Fellowship of Friends, are the only conscious School on the planet” “You, ex-students are now part of the six billion dead people on the planet” Love, Hans, Girard, Linda, Steven, Robert, Edith, Dorian, Mihai, Carlos, Jorge, every single director in every center, every single student in any center and Robert Burton at the top. Half of the students in centers don’t even know yet what it is they are standing for.
Hans: …”remember GOD, GOD is important
robert is not important,
why do you give your thoughts,
time and energy to something in the pass?
live the now, live the reality, avoid negative imagination, that is a very deep sleep.
Be Present, and remember GOD.”
It is a pleasure to hear Hans because he is vocalizing the extreme current thought in the Fellowship of Friends, the justifications they give themselves to continue being and doing what they are doing, and they are struggling to make any sense of it.
“Robert is not important”
That is important! In trying to protect Robert they are diminishing his importance but we all know that the only one who matters in the Fellowship of Friends is Robert Burton. FALSE! Robert Burton became the puppet of the inner circle which converted the Fellowship of Friends in their only income and indoctrinated thousands of people to feed the insatiable bank accounts on his authority financing themselves while offering him an unconditional provision of young sex. Robert is as much a victim of the Fellowship of Friends as the Fellowship of Friends a victim of Robert Burton.
The inner circle is not riding on Robert Burton’s back. It has been riding on the “indoctrinated potential students” (who are condemned to remain “potential” students for ever, because the economy of the Fellowship is too tight for anyone else to participate in it; Robert’s lust is insatiable and the inner circle’s needs are insurmountable) for over a decade, probably two. It has to keep enough distance from Robert whose power it cannot overtake and limits itself to withdrawing the cents he allows them to survive with. The drama of the Fellowship Inner Circle is that they are survivors in the economy as much as in the emotional dependency. They are a concentration camp in which the chances of anyone to survive are minimal. It is a self-consuming society of perverts; A cancer that will disappear with or without anyone’s help. The impulse to “help” is no other than the one any sane person would have if s/he knew a group of people were unnecessarily destroying themselves without the slightest justifiable aim.
The question is, how can a dictatorship, not a Cult, like the Fellowship of Friends develop within the State of California without the State doing anything about it?
How is it that the psychotic group of pimp directors in every center around the globe and particularly the center in California, can import people into the United States, legally or illegally to serve as whores for Robert Burton or pimps of the Fellowship of Friends with the protection of the Constitution? It may be true that Cults are protected to allow for freedom of religion but when a Cult over abuses its conditions to act against its participant’s human integrity, it becomes a menace to society, an outlaw.
Any director in any center in every city in the world where they exist, can be sued for having participated in presenting a perverted nest of pimps for a Psychotic sex maniac, as a School of Consciousness with a man number seven at its head. Any director and The Fellowship of Friends as a whole, can be sued for fraud for having lied about the reality of the Fellowship of Friends. The fact that the lie was based on good will and faith on the director himself does not alter the consequences, the fact that the directors were as indoctrinated and corrupted as the Teacher himself, does not reduce their responsibility in their participation. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse in Court.
A sex maniac’s brothel and a School of Consciousness, both, have precise definitions and any court of law will recognize that the actual practices of the Fellowship of Friend are much closer to the brothel than to the School of Consciousness with a Jesus at its head.
Ex-students in any center around the World may consider the possibility of helping centers close down by having a lawyer call their directors and tell them where their little spiritual enterprise, is actually going to take them: Jail. I will myself consider this and let the students who joined in Colombia while I was a director know that if they continue to look for students I myself will sue them for fraud. Strange ways in which life turns things around but so be it. Cults in Colombia do not have the Constitutional protection that they do in America. They are in fact generally looked at as what they are: Spiritual rapists of people’s good will.
PS. Can you imagine the Fellowship of Friends having to hire lawyers in every city around the world to defend itself from the millionary demands of fifteen thousand ex-students?
Someone will have to respond sooner than later.
74 Elena
Hi Elena,
I urge you to go back one or two pages to the last absurd and dishonest set of exchanges from our phony “Hans”, with and without the amazing sudden grasp of the english language.
I have no problem with people “honestly” having their “say” regardless of view point. But I remember the exchange from before, and on top of this exchange (and they have been pretty seamlessly horse shit), for me, he hasn’t said a fucking thing.
Bruce, you’re the finest bullshit meter around here and I’m grateful I haven’t fallen below it as often as I could have. I’m certainly not trying to defend Hans but I am grateful to him for confirming the madness of the Fellowship of Friend’s indoctrination, which I am consistently hoping is not nearly as dangerous as it is proving to be. As the Fellowship gets squeezed you get to see the cheap led of its being. You might have already seen it all but I need to be reminded of what it is actually like to remember why I am fighting against it. The tendency to just love them and forgive them is not weak at all.
On another subject, it takes me about twenty minutes to download youtubes, but I loved your Queen. Thanks.
78 Elena
Love you’re queen too.
Ollie,
Thanks for your email.
Keep the numbers coming. I saw a list with more then 200 people who have left around November 2006 till now.
Breaking up with the fellowship is a hard process…one of the most difficult things in my life.
I believed the good things and it turned out so nasty with Robert’s desires for money and sex. How can we keep supporting this nonsense…how can we?
Somebody quoted:
Betrayal begins with trust…..
_________,
I have done nothing to you, your brother, or your mother. Why are you fucking with me?
This message is for those of you who are looking for information about sincere esoteric school work and happened to come across this blog.
It is quite evident from reading the posts here that this blog is definitely not the best place to find a conscious school.
Real schools never bothered arguing with the lower side of humans called the Lower Self. What conscious schools always did and still do is separating from the Lower Self and thus create space for engaging presence and prolonging it. If one argues with ones own Lower Self or with others’ one will not be able to work on developing consciousness, because the Lower Self is imaginary and therefore contains nothing that can become conscious. That is also why you will hardly find here any posts written by Fellowship of Friends students, though they largely outnumber those who post in this blog.
As for myself, I write here seldom just in case a true seeker for conscious work enters and might get a chance of reading this post.
The Lower Self expressions are very common and constantly appear in oneself and in others, whereas presence and prolonged presence are not common at all. Engaging presence and prolonging it is Divine and it is school work. It is what crates a conscious being.
The Fellowship of Friends is a conscious school lead by a conscious Teacher. What make it conscious are the Teacher and the influence under which the school works.
If you keep on reading the next posts you will probably encounter a ‘flare-up’ of negative reactions to this post. This is how the Lower Self acts and one cannot expect it to be otherwise.
If you are interested in conscious work on your self you are invited to visit the Fellowship of Friends website:
http://www.beingpresent.org
Hey Psychic,
You wrote;
“It is what crates a conscious being.”
How much is it these days to crate a conscious being?
And if I wanted to add shipping to Baghdad how much?
Love,
Leonhardon.
Hey psychic,
Nice story, but I like the one about the 3 bears a lot better.
Zoe 55
I had not seen that post. What’s up?
Who’s Jordi? What’s going on?
Would you care to write me at Tablut@une.net.co or let me know your e-mail?
Bruce,
Queen? Me? Without doubt! Isn’t it fun? We no longer have to be the King of Hearts until we die! That’s as you would say, a great fucking relief!
Hey Bruce, You mad at me? You’ve forgiven me? If you haven’t, will you? The only good thing about good fights is that the people end up loving each other and I at least continue to be grateful for having people to share with. In March it’ll be a year since I left. Time does fly, its the only thing one’s really got to offer anyone else. Time is not money; it’s love.
………………
I need a room and a job to be able to get back to California hopefully in the area of San Francisco and not in Oregon House. I’m afraid of going there. If anyone can give me any suggestions I’d be grateful. (To the above e-mail.) I use to direct a magazine before going to the states, researching and writing would be good but any fair job would be fine. My health is much better, I’ve began sleeping all night. I think I can work again.
85 Elena
Not mad at you for even a moment.
THe name of GOD is _____________________?
My “GOD” is your “GOD” too, is the “ONE” “THE UNITY” “powerful” “Almighty all”, “merciful one” “the only one, there is no other, “ALLAH” “THE CREATOR” “YAVE” “THE ABSOLUTE” you can put any name that you like, but there is only “ONE” and everything in the UNIVERSE is a part of “GOD”
And This Planet is the PARADISE but we are destroying it, with many negative things.
I do not belong to any religion,
I do not belong to any school, i`m was in the fof but not any more, Now I`m learning by myself,
even here in this blog i`m learning some things.
that every one speaks by itself and nothing else,
because you are not the the chosen one for to save the world.
Do not speak for others.
were you hurt directly?
or are you talking for others?
the people who has resentment is because they did not know to say “no”
The LORD our God is one LORD:
And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
Thou shalt have none other gods before me.
Thou shalt not kill.
Neither shalt thou commit adultery.
Neither shalt thou steal.
Neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbour.
Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbour’s wife, neither shalt thou covet thy neighbour’s house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or any thing that is thy neighbour’s.
X`s Ray you must first to think before to speak. insult to who gives you r is not a good idea.
: Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God, and serve him, and shalt swear by his name.
Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you;
(For the LORD thy God is a jealous God among you) lest the anger of the LORD thy God be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth.
X Ray- you are insulting to that the life gave you.
Hey Psychic,
How much to crate Hans?
And how much with shipping to Kandahar?
Love,
Leonhardon
87 Hans: Have you become Born Again? There are a lot of religious undertones in your statements?
When I hear the phrase “Fear the Lord thy God”, it saddens me. God Is Love.
It should say, “Fear the lack of God in your life”.
David Dickinson
yes you`re right wakeuplittlesuzywakeup, it sounds like that but, GOD do not belong to any Religion.
“Islamism” “Christianism” “Sufis” “Budism” etc.
in the lower is the separation (many I`s) and in the higher is the “Unity” (put here the name that you want) for the only GOD.
try with not connecting this with no religion.
brucelevy the absolute perfection. and the Judge of all of us.
you distract your atention to insignificant things like my writing,
instead to try understand the message.
the message is the important no the letters, sorry about my writtings. but you must not deviateyour atention in things that are not important.
Focus your mind in the message, and you do not criticize my form to write.
who are you to Judge.
you do not have errors? you are not mistaken? you are so perfect one that you are never mistaken?
89 wakeuplittlesuzywakeup
Undertones? UNDERTONES? Suzy, come in from under the sun, stay away from that poi.
Well, I think we’ve finally arrived at the outer borders between Completelybizarreland and HowfuckedupcanIpossiblyappearville.
Hans sort of reminds me of my Dr. Bronner’s soap bottle.
After Belechik, Patriots coach, walked off the field with one second left he was critizised on Yahoo for being a sore looser. Although the clock said zero but I guess they put one second on clock as he was walking on field to congradulate the Giants. He probably did not know.
Within three hours there was 6000 posts from Giant fans critizing Belechik in the most profane way. Their also angry because he broke the rules by videoing a play book of another team, so they really let him have it on this blog, no compassion that he had just had his worst defeat in his carreer.
Blogs, like that one and THIS ONE are mainly based off peoples imagination, bias, subjectiveness and need to express the lower parts of their Being; just like the Belechik blog. Hey Steve, since your from NJ and probably a Giants fan what do you think of Belechik?
By the way, Bruce, is like Nomad, from the orginal Star Trek,c whose mission was to exterminate all imperfect life forms. Mistakenly, Nomad thinks Kirk is his creator. As Nomad is getting ready to destroy the Enterprise because of the imperfect lifeforms, Kirk tells Nomad he made a mistake in thinking he was his creator, and Nomad starts to malfunction and Kirk convines Nomad that since he made mistake that he should also destroy him self – which he Nomad does. Something to think about Bruce.
Oh, by the way I am a Giants fan. Great game.
With regard to Psychic’s latest message (82), I would like to make two comments particularly for non members:-
1. Psychic is trying to use this board to recruit members.
2. If you join the Fellowship, there is no way to graduate or to leave honorably in the eyes of the Fellowship. If you leave you are considered to have fallen victim to the ‘lower self’ mentioned in Psychic’s post.
and remember not to covet your manservants ass!
j x
A REPLY TO psychic #82
___________________________
Hello Psychic,
You wrote ~
“This message is for those of you who are looking for information about sincere esoteric school work and happened to come across this blog.
It is quite evident from reading the posts here that this blog is definitely not the best place to find a conscious school.
Real schools never bothered arguing with the lower side of humans called the Lower Self. What conscious schools always did and still do is separating from the Lower Self and thus create space for engaging presence and prolonging it. If one argues with ones own Lower Self or with others’ one will not be able to work on developing consciousness, because the Lower Self is imaginary and therefore contains nothing that can become conscious. That is also why you will hardly find here any posts written by Fellowship of Friends students, though they largely outnumber those who post in this blog.
As for myself, I write here seldom just in case a true seeker for conscious work enters and might get a chance of reading this post.”
_______________________________
Actually Psychic, the readers of this blog, which includes the total of the membership of The Fellowship of Friends, outnumber the actual population of the ‘City of Good Angles’…
Not that numbers count, so long as you’re not one of the center directors asking a new student how long his penis is, because BTW, our one and only conscious being wants to know…
Try to go deeper Psychic and see the hypocrisies in your ‘doctrine of affirmations’… your whole paragraph is hinging on the Lower Self in order to be written by a Supposed Higher Self who simply came from nowhere, no context, no work, no reference point or journey;
now is that not a Catch 22 or what? Whose to say that the Lower Self is not simply along for the ride, learning and experiencing at its own speed, for its own reasons and resolutions (and hell bent for the prison cell as well)…
It’s when the angel and the devil merge as one; that’s when the party really gets started!
A ‘Higher Self’ whose disgruntled and preaching about the Lower Self is exactly borrowing from whose habits of mind?
I’ll let you take two aspirins (or Darvon) and lay horizontal on that one…
_______________________________________
You continue to say ~
“The Lower Self expressions are very common and constantly appear in oneself and in others, whereas presence and prolonged presence are not common at all. Engaging presence and prolonging it is Divine and it is school work. It is what crates a conscious being.”
______________________________
Presence and Prolonging presence can also create ~
“The Gurdjieffian term for psychopath is hasnamuss. Gurdjieff also uses the word psychopath but this in the more generic sense of mental aberration. We note that the term did not get its current meaning until Gurdjieff completed his books. The hasnamuss is capable of crystallization and can accede to a state of eternal condemnation and exile. The hasnamuss has a certain lasting being, yet is opposite to ‘being,’ as Gurdjieff uses the word.”
_____________________
So, please, current Fellowship of Friends members, if you are true to your craft, then include in your conscience both sides of the power of Sustained Presence,
i.e., that it is a creative force which has no ‘Divine’ label just because it’s being produced by the ‘being’ cranking it out in the moment and using its hydrogens for manipulation and self serving or healing and revelation…
You of The Fellowship of Friends have chosen to ‘label’ presence as ‘Divine’ based on the nature of the Affirmation Buffer, your make believe living rooms contest to it;
the nature of presence does not label you so to label it… What? Have you never seen a ‘present’ psychotic? Get thee to Youtube then…
(In case you have not noticed Robert Burton has not produced one paragraph of New Wisdom and his ‘Divine Keys’ hinge on doors with broken locks;
anyone can ‘key’ anything who knows the formula/form and believe me the formulas are not hard to find, start with Dream Interpretation for instance…
And as Robert Burton stands at the door rattling those ‘keys’ in the broken lock for all to hear like church bells; someday you may see the plain truth of the matter when a small, radiant child of five years old walks (like the one in Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’ painting) along and opens the door with the awesome pressure of its little finger…)
(BTW, that would be the ‘little girl’ that did not have room for Robert Burton’s abortive fist…)
If there’s ever been a ‘Formatory’ definition of ‘presence’ or ‘prolonged presence’, which hides the ‘other side of the coin’ which is Robert Burton’s use and self-creation through its neutral radiations, then it’s the Fellowship of Friends, whose ’school’ is unto itself a ‘proof’ of the underlying result of Robert Burton’s sustained presence,
i.e., an eternally struggling self to self contract, gratifying itself with the ‘prolonged struggle to be present’, redeem and repent, repent and redeem…
A mirror to a mirror sees nothing ~
The treacherous dance of the Painbody and its developing-in-consciousness Host …
It is in the ‘Only a Man #4 Struggle’ and the ‘Theory of Divine Hibernation and Lifetimes’ that the Hasnamuss Robert Burton can be found scripting his influence (and in his bedroom coerced rapes as well)
~ as if the cruel inhumanity of your ‘teacher’ is not enough ‘proof’ as to which side Robert Burton’s ‘being’ has taken the power of presence to and for (?)
Robert Burton, whether he knows it or not, IMO, is one of the Deputy Wardens of the Prison called Earth and his escape keys are made of wax, the kind that melt as soon as your conscience touches them…
It is only in your Christian (religiousnesses) programming and hope that your sustained support of such a teacher will redeem him; that since you are dying for his sins, he will be resurrected through your love and suffering of conscience;
this is the same psychic-trap that is detailed in ‘Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson’ by Gurdjieff
and the sort of nonsense that most of us smelt during our budding Magnetic Center days, though forgot that a dead carcass is a dead carcass, even if a Gardener calls it ‘good fertilizer’…
our desire for family overruled our desires for finishing ourselves…
_____________________
Psychic,
You continue ~
“The Fellowship of Friends is a conscious school lead by a conscious Teacher. What make it conscious are the Teacher and the influence under which the school works.”
____________________________
There are many different ‘kinds’ of ’students’, there are even teachers who are students and again, Psychic, you’re limiting yourself to very formal, non-peripheral points of view…
Your statement sounds very logical (to logical mind) which is often the seat where ‘Hope’ and ‘Faith’ sit as a self-ordained obese Siamese twin feeding on the regrets of yesterday (Just a Man#4) or the excitement of being the chosen ones tomorrow (BTW, for another times redemption that is)…
Psychic,
Your last sentence statement in the above quoted paragraph is simply not true; its not the influence under which the school works that makes it conscious, after all, the “influence” you’re speaking of does not belong to the collective deeds and consciousness of the members of The Fellowship of Friends, it belongs exclusively to Robert Burton’s ‘one way phone line to the divine’, i.e., his idiosyncratic notions, not your input and unlocked essences and beings…
Control and exile of innocent awakenings are not hallmarks of a conscious school of the Ascending Clan, it is the hallmark of such formats as the Inquisition, The Holocaust, the Spanish in South America and the ‘New Americans’ upon the Native American…
Robert Burton’s school is simply two things ~
His School of Hasnamuss, that you do not know about or will not ask or read with conscience, so to educate and build your ‘conscious will to do’ towards a fully functioning conscience and graduate from to go to the next stage, which cannot be guided by a teacher in the flesh, IMO…
And two, it is your own self-ordained ‘family’, which feeds on your weaknesses and talkative dreams, a family that is loving and understanding, though does not understand you with love intact and un-suspicious/superstitious due to the limitations that such a Hasnamuss must place upon his or her ’sources of expressions and food’… (a book could be written on this)
_____________________________________
You continue to state ~
“If you keep on reading the next posts you will probably encounter a ‘flare-up’ of negative reactions to this post. This is how the Lower Self acts and one cannot expect it to be otherwise.
If you are interested in conscious work on your self you are invited to visit the Fellowship of Friends website…”
___________________________
Moot Predictability is not the way of the Ascending Guild of The Work: warning the reader of what will inevitably happen is simply a cheap trick to easily justify your argument: I too could say that after this post of mine, since the Fellowship of Friends school is one of a Hasnamuss~
that a soft religiousness in words will follow, couched in intellectual affirmations and lower & higher self contradictory comparative couch potato talk: that someone of a calm and collected anal demeanor will appear and pour a soothing balm of hope and earnestness in your cracked cup of suffering and need to apologize for something that can only be redeemed through keying yourself and not pages pressed from wood pulp and written upon so to inspire and exhaust the ’students’ mind as to such a degree as to create a suspicion that there’s really nothing to say or ask anyways, on to the next book written by someone not themselves and whose dead, like the collective conscience of The Fellowship of Friends…
never mind that ‘the soothing balm’ is a concoction of blood from Robert Burton’s rapes, clear epoxy from the tears of the ‘Only a Man #4’s’ and Renaissance wine…
___________________________
It’s is surely interesting to see your writings here Psychic,
it reminds me of the sort of semantics that Robert Burton used on me when he wanted to sodomize me before my second marriage commenced: he knew I was seeing someone else and that I did not feel right about having sex with anyone due to my commitment to her…
Yet, of course Robert Burton is not just anyone right? Wrong, he is just anyone and nearly nothing as well…
I recall him saying ~ “It’s a woman isn’t it?”
I also recall how he said it, as though he had two tongues in his mouth, a human tongue and one belonging to a 210 pound python… I am sure that a little spittle issued forth after his pronunciation of
“It’sssss…” similar to “Keyssss”;
but you guys are usually too far away from ‘The Teacher’ to smell his “Sperm on the Breath”, the conscious venom that keeps your hearts beating just a few rounds faster than most ‘life people’ so that what is ‘normal material for building your astral bodies’ can be hidden from your conscience and being,
while the promise of Celestial Reverse Insomnia can be yours for only the cost of this lifetime and maybe the next;
after all,
in your next lifetime, you’ll only be a Man#5 and they’ll be another Hasnamuss there to tell you he or she’s a Man #10.
____________________________
Love to You All
Hans,
My God says “Do not judge, all what you see in the other is in you ”
Good luck, I feel sorry for you and wait for your compassion to arise.
I wonder what your real need is…what is your purpose on this blog?
Newly moderated comments: 39, 58, 61, 93
99 fat boy
Thank you for revealing more of your reality: football and Star Trek. Why aren’t I surprised?
61 Lust for Life
“I have also been reflecting on the Sheik’s assumption that we all hate RB”
Where did this little factoid come from? I’ve been here for awhile and I don’t recall this particular gem.
Hello David Dickinson ~
If you are who you say you are; please spread the word amongst the Fellowship of Friends unchosen (the rest of the world) that this blog site exists and if you’re ever fixing the heating duct of any Yuba County Officials, slip a few flyer’s about this blog site in their mail boxes as you’re reversing out… Behind the windshield wiper will do too.
:.)
Hello Bruce ~
It’s found in Post #487, Part 28 ~
Hence, thereof the quote ~
“I never fully understood the level to which ex-members hate Robert Burton. Not knowing him personally, I could only see him as a clown (which is how he seems on youtube or through the daily cards), or as the son of Satan (which is how he is mostly portrayed here). The least horrifying way of seeing Robert Burton would then be to see him as a trickster, playing pranks on unsuspecting people, meaning no good, meaning no harm.”
The Sheik
______________________
:.}
98 Xeena: Good one!
Bruce: Poi? Oi!!
Another Name,
Hans and Psychic’s real need is to share because they are not allowed to do that in the Fellowship of Friends. The fact that they participate mines their own objective without anyone even questioning them. They are trapped in the higher and lower, the realm of opposites without being able to stand on the law of three and experience the octave or law of seven. That also happened to the whole of the Fellowship of Friends. They are trapped in the realm of opposites: Good and bad, Teacher and student, high and low, mind and genitals, soul and body, Fellowship of Friends and the six billion dead people outside. Their minds crystallize in one layer of formatoriness after another without being able to free themselves from the chain of contradictions. Anyone who writes here is freer than all the rest even if he is presenting the opposites with total conviction. It is their fervent soul that really matters, they are still believers, they can still cry, unlike those who are no longer believers of anything, have nothing to defend or struggle against but continue mentally masturbating with the already indoctrinated convicts and support it anyway because they can’t imagine what to do with themselves without the chains. They love the closed doors of the Fellowship of Friends because it gives them the greatest advantage over the followers who cannot oppose them in those unending one way meetings in which only the “chosen one” has the feminine dominance to talk. I have a great deal of respect for Hans or Psychic or anyone who participates here because they are more alive than the fifteen hundred students inside. They need to talk, they need to affirm their convictions and that firmness will have a better chance of driving them out of the Fellowship than killing their essence inside.
Hans you are a liar, you, Fat Boy and Psychic are still members of the Fellowship of Friends and your creed is Burtonianism: The higher and lower severed from each other. It is not a religion but the practice of schizophrenics; it never even got close to being able to be credited with spirituality. It is an asylum of potential schizophrenics who don’t know whether their genitals are in their mouth or between their legs. Their sexuality has turned upside down and backwards and instead of having an orgasm, which is the greatest cosmic experience that a human being can have from his body, they throw up.
Look for healing love and don’t be afraid of your self. Life is beautiful! Stop wasting it! God or the godlike state, like marriage, can be actualized through the sexually and consciously mature human being, not through sucking the teacher’s dick or paying for him to get it sucked.
Have a great day!
109 unoanimo
Thanks for the text and context.
Correction: Not “between their legs” but between their hips or in their “vientre”, a beautiful Spanish word that means both womb and the lower abdomen.
I also have a clinical question for those who know. It sounds as though Robert always sucked dicks but seldom had his sucked, as if he were “sacrificing” his own pleasure so that he can justify his act. Could someone explain what really happens? It matters in the understanding of oral sex.
Dopamine
Here you are,
once again in a puddle, wet eyes, futile
trying to breathe life into something
that does not want to be.
Maybe time to change those locks
on the doors to your heart?
Better still, what about no locks?
Better still, just get rid of those doors!
This fortress you are building, what is it for?
To keep you in or keep you out?
And all that time on the sharp edge
clinging to a frayed rope that no longer exists.
Heading high speed down that rough road
Cracking the windshield. Spitting gravel everywhere.
Yet, so afraid of a superficial flesh wound,
that really won’t hurt at all.
Those that you love,
you think they will desert you,
if you lay your cards, face up, on the table,
if you become liquid and start to flow?
Open your eyes. Look around you.
There is no hiding. They already know.
You are not going anywhere. It’s really all a done deal.
No more locks, no more keys. Let go. Let go. Let go.
H and H
Cake
“There is a hugh gap between actually killing people and simply asking them to leave but what is worth understanding is that the PSYCHO-EMOTIONAL-PHYSICAL phenomena is in fact, the same. Jews were exterminated from this world; students were banned from the world they had chosen to belong to”. From Elena #57.
“Leaving the fof is very similar to two experiences that all of us have had”.
1). Breaking up of a relationship.
2). Grieving (for the death of another).
From Rear View Mirror #73.
Grief of another kind is that experienced by those heterosexuals who were seductively raped by a monster in the form of Robert Earl Burton in the prison of the FELLOWSHIP OF FRIENDS located near Oregon House, California.
It’s not the same but all this GRIEF reminds me of what Rodney Colin said about dying violently. One’s soul is wrenched from the body. And, Robert Earl Burton is somehow guilty of that too.
114 Elena
Clinically speaking, of course, he’s a cocksucker AND cocksuckee. And loves to use such euphemisms as “drinking from your cup”.
If you ever ingest poison just recall that image, you won’t have to run out for ipicac.
85 Psychic
This message is for those of you who are looking for information about sincere esoteric school work and happened to come across this blog.
It is quite evident from reading the posts here that this blog is definitely not the best place to find a conscious school.
Real schools never bothered arguing with the lower side of humans called the Lower Self. What conscious schools always did and still do is separating from the Lower Self and thus create space for engaging presence and prolonging it. If one argues with ones own Lower Self or with others’ one will not be able to work on developing consciousness, because the Lower Self is imaginary and therefore contains nothing that can become conscious. That is also why you will hardly find here any posts written by Fellowship of Friends students, though they largely outnumber those who post in this blog.
As for myself, I write here seldom just in case a true seeker for conscious work enters and might get a chance of reading this post.
The Lower Self expressions are very common and constantly appear in oneself and in others, whereas presence and prolonged presence are not common at all. Engaging presence and prolonging it is Divine and it is school work. It is what crates a conscious being.
The Fellowship of Friends is a conscious school lead by a conscious Teacher. What make it conscious are the Teacher who love’s to secretly suck my dick and the homosexual influence under which the school works.
If you keep on reading the next posts you will probably encounter a ‘flare-up’ of negative reactions to this post. This is how the Lower Self acts and one cannot expect it to be otherwise.
If you are interested in conscious work on your self you are invited to visit the Fellowship of Friends website:
I happened to run across, at the GF in the Lust discussion, a detail of one of the ceiling paintings of the nude student with the hard dick as viewed from below.
I’m dumbfounded on several levels:
1 This is art?
2 This is not laughingly and horrifyingly sick?
3 That the “teacher”, the artist, the model and anyone else who views this shit calmly are not losers on a cosmic scale.
and lastly, as this must be an example of the high art of the next civilization, I certainly hope the FOF has invited curators from all the world’s prestigious museums to come and feast their eyes on art as it evolves to a whole ‘nuther level.
Really, while I have empathy for many of you that I’ve known and loved, it’s plain that you’ve become pathetic shadows of who you were. You are some sick motherfuckers.
119 brucelevy
I’m referring to present “members”, or should they be called “numb”ers.
Hi folks
I have just finished my letter to Susan which will be going in the post tomorrow.
It details a specific financial impropriety which I was instructed to carry out on behalf of the “school”.
The other point in my letter is my confirmation of the predatory nature of Its “teacher” in regards to sexual molestation.
So my letter addresses two of the “allegedly’s” in the petition.
……………………………………………………………………………………..
I encourage those of you who feel you might have something to contribute in terms of a factual statement, to click on the Wikispace at the top of the page and look at the petition.
As soon as we are covered in relation to these points we can install the petition with impunity and not worry about its being removed or any of us being harassed in any way.
It would also just look nicer without all of these “allegedly’s”.
good luck
jack.
Bruce,
You are so right about the pathetic nature of what is considered art in the Fellowship. I’m certain the clip you saw could have in no way fully revealed how gawdy and tasteless it all is. Worse than what I imagine a fifth rate Las Vegas Hotel might be. All those years and the vast sums of student’s hard earned money that he spent in musems and great European cities did nothing to really educate him or give him a mature understanding of art or culture. When I heard many years ago after joining that the school was in California I almost didn’t join. I had some stuck up idea that nothing of substance could be found in California and in this case it turned out to be true.
Today’s daily quote:
Wherever we travel, good ‘I’ and evil ‘I’
struggle for power.
Love, Robert
Just a tiny bit dualistic?
Worth bearing in mind too that “evil” is defined in the FOF as “things Robert doesn’t like”, such as thinking for oneself, common sense, not wanting to give money to FOF, refusing Teacher’s sexual advances, etc.
Even more eccentric: a friend of mine had what was obviously to himself and those close to him an awakening experience. When RB found out about it he hold him it was a manifestation of his Lower Self. So in RB’s view awakening is “evil”.
122 Vena: “Worse than what I imagine a fifth rate Las Vegas Hotel might be.”
More like a fifth rate Las Vegas brothel?
123 Nuthead
It had gone SO FAR into the realm of the absurd that trying to talk logically about it is almost as absurd.
I hope the student depicted in the hardon painting sent a color postcard of it to his parents and family so they can see how he has entered history and immortality. And I hope they are helping him financially so he can continue his “education”.
Unfuckingbelivable.
123 Nuthead
“Today’s daily quote:
Wherever we travel, good ‘I’ and evil ‘I’
struggle for power.
Love, Robert
Just a tiny bit dualistic?”
At this point he doesn’t even make the effort to appear awake, or out of duality, or in relativity. He doesn’t give a shit. It’s his playpen.
He sees that he’s successfully dumbed down everyone already. Why play to the sheep, they’ll already do whatever the fuck he wants them too. They’re too invested to wake up. There is no shame, only blind stupidity. They deserve each other. Personally I’m done with the altruistic approach. Fuck em.
Hello, Bloggers.
A simple request: will someone please post instructions on how to e-mail the Sheik privately. Or, could he e-mail me?
Thank you in advance…
…and my best wishes to everyone as always.
I am,
No Kid
Xeena 98,
Excellent!
Here you are folks, “art” of man number asshole:
http://greaterfellowship.ning.com/forum/attachment/download?id=799715%3AUploadedFi58%3A84832
No Kid–You can contact the sheik at:
recroanima@gmail.com
129 brucelevy
If that doesn’t creep you out, you might be dead. I’d check.
Thank you, Xeeena.
N.K.
Quoting Peckinpah #40
“It went in one of these Robert’s typical trips to Los Angeles by car. The new student of Robert’s court was conscious of the sexual intentions of his teacher…. After a time :”I like to be close to you this night, dear”. The student said not this night. …………That night, after the dinner in a Mexican restaurant, finally the fox was hunted. I remember in the parking of the hotel, as Robert spoke to the new student with violence, with negativite, furiously in front of all his dogs, he said ” ¿Are you going to want or not this night?”. The new student said “Yes”.”
and today’s daily card is:
Wherever we travel, good ‘I’ and evil ‘I’
struggle for power.
Nice one Bobby, truly enlightening!
129 Bruce: That artwork looks like something you’d see in the Tenderloin district in San Francisco.
134 wakeuplittlesuzywakeup
Or one of Saddam’s palaces. Loser art.
Wherever you find it, at the very least, the erect penis is in very poor taste.
Psychic (#85)
This is my attempt to analyze what Psychic wrote; I have little knowledge of writing styles, but have spotted a few psychological tricks that lead the reader to think in a certain way and come to certain conclusions. Partly through experience; I joined the FoF and for years believed it was what it said it was; a conscious school, only to discover that it was an organization set up to feed the insatiable appetite of Robert Burton for material objects, the unquestioning obedience of his followers, first class travel, the best food and wine, and the abuse of power over the heterosexual young men who he persuaded to have sex with him. A very clever man, and his followers are hypnotized into becoming carbon copies. Thank heavens for true enlightenment, and realizing that being present is very simple, accessible, attainable and possible only through NOT following an authority figure, but learning through everyday experiences what is really of value.
Psychic’s paragraphs are numbered; my interpretation in brackets.
1. This message is for those of you who are looking for information about sincere esoteric school work and happened to come across this blog.
(This is a special message to sincere seekers – thus creating a sense of elitism and secret esoteric knowledge, also the concept of luck and being blessed by finding a ‘real’ school.)
2. It is quite evident from reading the posts here that this blog is definitely not the best place to find a conscious school.
(Information found on this blog – apart from this special message of course – is not as spiritually esoteric as the knowledge Psychic is about to hint that the FoF has.)
3. Real schools never bothered arguing with the lower side of humans called the Lower Self. What conscious schools always did and still do is separating from the Lower Self and thus create space for engaging presence and prolonging it. If one argues with ones own Lower Self or with others’ one will not be able to work on developing consciousness, because the Lower Self is imaginary and therefore contains nothing that can become conscious. That is also why you will hardly find here any posts written by Fellowship of Friends students, though they largely outnumber those who post in this blog.
(Insinuating that the FoF is a ‘real’ school, that information bloggers are providing is inferior, and that it should be ignored as it is beneath the implied ‘higher’ level of FoF’ers, and that FoF members are great in number. Also introducing the idea of splitting one’s being into different parts, some more ‘desirable’ than others, thus establishing the concept of duality, as opposed to the concept of unity as seen to be factual.)
4. As for myself, I write here seldom just in case a true seeker for conscious work enters and might get a chance of reading this post.
(Introducing the idea of suffering, selfless effort on behalf of other people who, unlike the ‘masses’ are one of the ‘few’ supposedly lucky enough to be introduced to the FoF.)
5. The Lower Self expressions are very common and constantly appear in oneself and in others, whereas presence and prolonged presence are not common at all. Engaging presence and prolonging it is Divine and it is school work. It is what crates a conscious being.
(Most of what everyone experiences is mundane and cheap in comparison to a much more valuable state of presence, which is on the level of divinity – with a capital D to emphasize how supposedly difficult it is to attain. This is coupled with the phrase ‘school work’, implying the connection between the two, and introducing the idea of work and effort. This paragraph culminates with the proffered goal; to create – or maybe the ‘crate’ mistype is a Freudian slip (!), a conscious being – the dream of spiritual enlightenment. Note that the last sentence is short, for emphasis.)
6. The Fellowship of Friends is a conscious school lead by a conscious Teacher. What make it conscious are the Teacher and the influence under which the school works.
(Repetition of the work ‘conscious’, again implying higher levels, linking these with the leader – teacher with a capital T, and hinting at some other secret influence. Repetition is a typical hypnotic technique.)
7. If you keep on reading the next posts you will probably encounter a ‘flare-up’ of negative reactions to this post. This is how the Lower Self acts and one cannot expect it to be otherwise.
(Implies that the writer has special powers to predict the future. Indicates the reader is making a mistake by reading on, and introduces the judgmental attitude to ‘negativity’, which causes conflict, and aligns this to the already defined ‘lower self’ – capitals so that now it is labeled and presumably understood as being a separate entity – finishing with the tolerant attitude indicating understanding and acceptance, yet also a patronizing and deprecation of ‘lower self’.)
8. If you are interested in conscious work on your self you are invited to visit the Fellowship of Friends website:….
(Implies that you have a choice of remaining with ‘lower self’ or opting to join an organization which promises a method of spiritual enlightenment, indicating that this will involve ‘work on yourself’ – sacrifice may be necessary.)
Subtle psychology which works on the naive unsuspecting seeker and continues to work it’s magic once they have joined and invested effort and money into the organization through self justification of one’s actions. This is one reason why people stay so long.
Let me fix that duality thingy.
Wherever we travel, good ‘I’, evil ‘I’ and brown ‘I’ struggle for power.
138 Yesri baba
Ahhh, Third Farce.
Bruce 129
Oh My God! (picture Janice saying that)
Thanks Bruce, I had been curious to see the infamous frescoes.
Awesome, indeed.
In viewing the fresco again, it looks like the right hand of our fellow who has a hard on is doing something with the buns of the fellow above. I can hardly believe this is serious!
Zoecan (84): Could you please use e-mail instead.
http://greaterfellowship.ning.com/forum/attachment/download?id=799715%3AUploadedFi58%3A84832
Think this is shockingly Kitts?
You should have seen the ceiling of the lobby in the Galeria.
Russian naked boys posed for the talented Russian In-House painter
Boys were selected for size and shape by RB
Absolutely tasteless, like a gay brothel in the Castro
Yet, goody goody students for years have been entering that lobby
dreading to look up, or if they did, blushing, giggling
or stone faced accepting the insulting in-your-face-bravura-
decadence.
This truly saddens me.
I appropriately changed my avatar
I am now hula girl
~ 85 psychic
“It is quite evident from reading the posts here that this blog is definitely not the best place to find a conscious school.”
A true seeker won’t find a conscious school at “dubdubdub.beingpresent.org” either. It’s just a propaganda tool to recruit naïve new penises for the insatiable sexual appetite of a self-proclaimed teacher who is also a sexual predator of males. I don’t know if that came from your higher self, psychic, but mine says, “Let the seeker judge for himself”…or are you on a mission?
(Dear seeker, you will only find a conscious school from the trail of conscious beings or quality B-influence it produces. To date, the Fellowship of Friends has produced none of either.)
“Engaging presence and prolonging it is Divine and it is school work.”
The work of the Fellowship of Friends is to rape your sex energy and pillage your bank account while you buffer it all practicing the ‘sequence’.
“…whereas presence and prolonged presence are not common at all.”
…especially in the Fellowship of Friends. Pity the seeker who makes his or her higher state dependent upon a specific environment, circumstance, or person. Evolution is based upon ones’ ability to adapt prolonged consciousness to constant change and not measured by having to adapt to and stomach the increasing immoral and insane behavior of the teacher to remain a follower. The only thing Robert Burton is interested in prolonging is his erection and those of his many male concubines. “Ignore the lower self”…he can’t be serious! Could he follow his own advice and teach by example?
“What make it conscious are the Teacher and the influence under which the school works.”
A reasonable argument could be made that this school ‘works’ for its followers only under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
on 131 brucelevy
129 brucelevy
If that doesn’t creep you out, you might be dead. I’d check.
——————————————————————————
I am alive and safe from the nut house!
Knowing Bob Burton, that’s pornography, not art.
unoanimo
I am the genuine thing. I did not post to join a battle for either side.
I am about truth, forgiveness, and most of all Love.
As I say on Davids Godblog Love is the answer.
For those having problem viewing the the naked ceiling painting detail from the Galleria foyer, please try this link:
http://api.ning.com/files/zBuXAPjY2N4H2N1gc50GYDSfDjrzOLW8CAwY3n7OtX8_/lust2.jpg
This image is supposed to represent a specific person. The name and identity is withheld to protect the innocent, or not so innocent.
Also, this may not be fresco, per se, but a painting on canvas installed to look like fresco.
It is the latest image that FoF/REB would have accompany these words: ‘An endless fountain of immortal drink, pouring unto us/me from heaven’s brink.’
Suckers all!
147 veramente
“Knowing Bob Burton, that’s pornography, not art.”
While that’s true, one doesn’t need to know RB to know pure shit when one sees it.
149 Associated Press
Shall we guess how the model held the pose?
Never mind.
148 David Dickinson
“As I say on Davids Godblog Love is the answer.”
Yeah Elton said that too, before you.
So what’s the fucking question smart guy?
We’re attracting mini-gurus like flies on shit.
150 brucelevy
147 veramente
“Knowing Bob Burton, that’s pornography, not art.”
While that’s true, one doesn’t need to know RB to know pure shit when one sees it.
————————————————————–
True!shit is shit.
You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve been down with the flu, so I have more time to read this bull shit and get more pissed off than usual.
Hello David Dickinson ~ 148 ~
Not that I was trying to recruit you, (I did say “please”) just a passing inspiration to ask you to consider it, not ‘do it’: yes, Love asks; thank you for you reply; nonetheless, it’s good to know that ‘you’ are walking these corridors and for that, more love is in here too.
May you never run out of Freon.
:.)
About the foyer ceiling–I used to mainly worry about the goat that Vladimir appeared to be sodomizing.
“Wherever we travel, good I and evil I struggle for power”. Robert Burton
“If I try to wake up in thoughts, they will turn in circles. They are not concrete like my body is, my life… We will never start by altering our thoughts.”
Henriette Lannes (student of Gurdjieff’s)
I have not come across a more eloquent testimony to the real difference between the Fellowship and real Fourth Way work.
My experience in the FofF was definitely of the former, this nightmare of trying constantly to alter one’s thoughts: ‘Do another sequence’…. ‘Pick one of the thirty work I’s– your choice’. You are asked to be present using these highly unsuitable tools. Over the last couple of years, these tools have been endlessly elaborated through the Keying process and the additional use of images from older cultures… All playthings of the mind! It’s what keeps us in the nursery, spiritually-speaking. But toys are just what seem to please Mr.Burton the most.
What enables the Fellowship to get away with it is the overwhelming amount of emotional stimuli operating in a closed environment. You can’t help but be impressed by the attention devoted to setting up a dinner or teaching event, for instance. When the emotional part is in a constant state of arousal, there are bound to be times when purely by chance it connects with other, finer emotional energies…. Hence, ‘the experience of higher states with Robert’ etc.
But it is still all happening under the Law of Accident. I always wondered why I used to come crashing back down to earth some time after such events– never a gentle return… After a while I began to realize that a craving for emotional stimuli was trying to replace the wish to be a balanced man. I guess this is a typical experience.
One of the biggest illusions propagated by the Fellowship is that everyone entering the organisation is automatically a Man #4, a balanced man. In fact this is nowhere near the truth. Looking back on it, I can’t remember meeting anyone who could be properly described as balanced. Girard may be many things, but balanced is certainly not one of them.
Robert’s loathing of the instinctive/moving centre seems to permeate everything, and his association of the instinctive centre with all the ‘evil’ powers of Imagination can only lead to wrong results in the work his students do. Because the foundation is wrong, all the emotional experiences fall out randomly on the personality, like a set of cards that have fallen out of the hand of a dozing man. How can that be right? To repeat the experience can only repeat the disorder…
It is a marvel that many people seem to come out relatively unharmed, and still with the sincere wish to allow more presence into their lives intact!
Hello Bloggers,
I have been silent for a long while here. My post FoF departure process has not really included this Blog. I’ve even felt shy to post here since my story isn’t negative or destructive of Robert. My experience in the Fellowship of Friends was quite good. My relationship towards Robert was usually on the positive side of neutral. He never raped me sexually (but then I am a woman) and though financially I may have paid more than was necessary for spiritual instruction, I still don’t regret it. It was one hell of a ride, and the School was/is an amazing collection of fine, sincere people.
I am still grateful for the Consciousness part of the experience: I learned many profound things. Since leaving I have sometimes felt stupid for buying the belief-cult-package for so long. And also been regretful for silently judging old Friends who (figured it out and) left earlier than I did. Since most of us were not directly exposed to the sex and power plays, it was possible to think that the good of Self-Remembering simply outweighed the bad, and no one (except my first husband) was shoving it in my face. Most of my Friends who remain still think that the Good still outweighs the Bad, and good luck to them!
But as James McLemore keeps asking, “Why. Why after knowing all the dirt do people remain”? Why, indeed. Having experienced some part of the profundity that is available within the spiritual experience of the Fellowship of Friends, who wouldn’t wish to continue on that journey? But we are taught that the good that one gains, is threatened to spoil upon departure. Like a drop of acid in a pitcher of good, fresh milk, any negativity upon our departure will cause all our goodness to turn to buttermilk, sour and full of little, fat yellow chunks. Losing our Self(!). Losing our Friendships. Losing our Investments. This is what we are taught not only by Robert Burton but even the Fourth Way.
So, I can report a bit on my post departure proccess. After spending many, many years viewing Robert as a simply unfathomable Conscious Teacher, I’ve recently tried on viewing him as a Psychopath. It is a little bit like flipping a switch in the brain, with the attendant flip of the emotions. I spent perhaps a few months or so looking at him that way, fearful of my own emotions. I must say that from what I now know of fully enlightened beings (from research but also personal experience), I’d have to say that Robert Burton is bit closer to a Psychopath than an Enlightened Master, yet I’d still hesitate to simply place that label on him and say, “Basta”.
To digress, there seems to be too much evidence out there of spiritual people who deviate from the path somewhere between normality and enlightenment, and I tend to think Robert is one of those Are they all Psychopaths? Is that the best label we can find for it? Is False Guru or Charismatic Teacher any better? I’ve recently read some books, “Saints and Psychopaths” by William Hamilton, and “Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism” by Chogyam Trungpa. And also found this interesting link about Rajneesh. http://home.att.net/~meditation/Osho.html In addition, there is a new book about to be published by Andre Van Der Braak about his time with Andrew Cohen, called “Gurus & Charisma”, it even contains a chapter on Gurdjieff(!). Actually, there is a lot of information out there now – on the internet – information that was not so easily available in 1970 when the Fellowship began or in 1980 when I entered it’s gates.
But to return to my time in the Fellowship, I hesitate to label it and here is why: my story or any story, my label or any label, is a fabrication of the mind, already divorced from the moment in which it occurred – and wasn’t it that – the moment –which is what the Teaching was all about in the first place?
A few weeks ago I listened to a very powerful satsang from Adyashanti called “No Story, No Suffering” from November 11th. It is about his recent experience of becoming diagnosed with Bell’s Palsy. The satsang helped to put my own experience of the Fellowship into perspective. It may be useful to others too? http://www.adyashanti.org/cafedharma/index.php?file=library_audio, and scroll down to find the title.
But the point from Adya’s satsang is simply this: “Our freedom lies in the realization that the truth of any situation, any moment, does not come from our thinking mind. Without the interpretation, all we are left with is, what is. What is, has no future, and has no past: both past and future are mental constructs. The moment in and of itself is totally free of problems and conflicts, conflicts and problems are created in the mind. And the mind’s primary interpretation of the moment is called “me”. One illusion interpreteting another illusion. The content of the moment is constantly changing, but there is something that is not changing and that is conscious awareness. All that is happening is happening within conscious awareness. Thus, a mind is a very powerful tool, but a rotten indicator of reality. The best it can do is to translate the moment, and translate is an intelligent way of saying distort.”
I don’t post Adya’s talk here in an effort to belittle the misuse of trust that has occurred within the Fellowship of Friends. It is huge and it is reprehensible. Reading these blog pages is enough to shatter my heart and certainly my illusions. But it is what it is, and each of us have gained what we have gained. Sublime knowledge like that contained within Adya’s satsang, should never be used to justify the criminal behaviour of a spiritual Teacher. So I don’t justify it now, and I do regret, if in my ignorance, I ever did. That there are spiritual teachers out there who are cleaner, purer, and finer than Robert Burton can easily be verified for anyone who wishes to look. Adyashanti is one. John Wheeler another. Genpo Roshi, and Dowe Tiemersma are a few of my own recent experience, but there are many for those who wish not just to seek but also to find.
Robert’s personal disowned shadow keeps his own teaching polluted and severely dualistic, thus he can only teach transcendence through separation and not inclusion, hence all the voodoo teaching about the Lower Self. We then accept a kind of spiritual bypassing as essential for evolution. The Fourth Way lends itself to such a formatory, dualistic interpretation. So, ultimately, who are we to blame? George Gurdjieff? Peter Ouspensky? Our own egos who were attracted to the Fourth Way as a spiritual teaching? However, Zen, Advaita Vedanta (and possibly other teachings that I am unaware of) are more about integration through non-duality. This passage from Chogyam Trungpa, in “Cutting through Spiritual Materialsim” helps to illuminate the core of the spiritual issue at stake:
“Q: Is self-remembering or observing oneself incongruent with giving in and being here?
A: Self-remembering is quite a dangerous technique, actually. It could involve watching yourself and your actions like a hungry cat watching mice, or else it could be an intelligent gesture of being where you are. The whole point is that, if you have any idea of relaitonship-I am experienceing this, I am doing this-then “I” and “this” are very strong personalities, equally. Somehow thre will be a conflict between “I” and “this”. It is rather like saying that “this” is the mother and “I” the father. With two such polar extremmes involved you are bound to give birth to something. So the whole idea is to let “this” not be there, and then “I” will not be there. It is not a matter of telling it to yourself, but of feeling it, a real experience. You must take away the watcher, the observer of the two extremes. Once the watcher is removed, then the whole structure falls apart. The dichotomy remains in existence only so long as there is an observer to keep the whole picture together. You must remove the watcher and the very complicated bureaucracy he creates to insure that nothing is missed by central headquarters. Once we take away the watcher, there is a tremendous amount of space, because he and his bureaucracy take up so much room. If we eliminate the filter of “I” and “Other” then the space becomes sharp and precise and intelligent. Space contains the tremendous precision of being able to work with the situation in it. One does not really need the “watcher” or “observer” at all.”
Cheers and good luck to us all,
Bass Ackwards, aka, Ellen T.
Today’s daily…..
When one does not possess presence or know about
it, what choice does one have but to be preoccupied
with the functions?
wow, ‘possess presence’!!
He must ‘possess’ very little ‘presence’ since he looks very preoccupied with ‘the functions’
money…..
sex……
Gucci…..
I would say that he is ‘obsessed’ with ‘the functions’
but you poor little student you just have to pay (with your functions)…and all the rest is not important….do your sequence, pay…..and let your brain be brainwashed!
158 Crouching Tiger
“If I try to wake up in thoughts, they will turn in circles. They are not concrete like my body is, my life… We will never start by altering our thoughts.”
Henriette Lannes (student of Gurdjieff’s)
I am so pleased you quoted this passage, as it is from a text I often read. You have eloquently stated in this post what I have struggled to put into words.
Thanks
Allan.
Psychic 85
Crouching Tiger 158
My father in law died on Saturday, and yesterday we had the funeral and a very moving memorial service. I decided to post one of the excerpts that were read during the ceremony, since I think it is also another eloquent testimony of the disconnect between what is sold as conscious teaching in the Fellowship of Friends and real spiritual work.
“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one
from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’
Matthew 25:31-40
Hans 90
“: Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God, and serve him, and shalt swear by his name.
Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you;
(For the LORD thy God is a jealous God among you) lest the anger of the LORD thy God be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth.”
This morning, out of my curiosity to discover who David Dickinson is, I went and read his blog, where I found this writing of his that seems to suit really well as an answer to your quote:
“When I hear the phrase “Fear the Lord thy God”, it saddens me. God Is Love.
It should say, “Fear the lack of God in your life”.
Namaste everyone, and may you all get your heads out your asses one day, it gets stuffy in there!
162 Lauralupa
The Sufi Ibn Arabi once said that the best kind of king is the one who is generous to both himself and his subjects, equally.
If there is a better way of proceeding in life, internally and externally, I don’t know of it.
Thank you for your quotations, I am sorry for your loss.
For those inside the wall, whose Conscience is still alive and there’s some revolutionary blood still flowing in their veins, enjoy this video from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2bzWoQPSGc
“We don’t need no education
We dont need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher leave the kids alone
Hey! Teacher! Leave the kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall”
(Elena, ten paciencia cargándolo, vale la pena.)
(Para mis amigos latinos, el video viene con traducción en español. Un besito a todos…)
Things are simple and beautiful outside the wall.
55 unoanimo
- Was ‘long-ago-historical’ story.
The man who does not cry.
The first time that I saw Robert Burton to cry was like the first time that I saw him to express negative emotions. He was crying not as a mad queer, he was crying with class, with alchemy.
A student said to me ” He is an emotional very sensitive center and the rejection of the students damages him very much”.
With time I saw Robert to cry less and less. Now he never cries.
((The first time that I saw him to express negative emotions: In a restaurant he got dirty with sauce and I strike the table with the handle and the dinner ended in this moment)).
“Psychic is trying to use this board to recruit members.”
Don’t take Psychic so seriously. I am pretty sure he is Ro…do Al……no. He is mad. You can never proof anything to him. In fact he most likely is not reading any of your replies. He just likes to take space by irritating people. Recently he published the book with a very similar style of writing. Costs $20 and is on sale in the gift shop.
Did anyone see this episode of Law & Order? About a bicycle theft ring composed of kids and headed up by a Marcus-Aurelius-quoting recording-studio owner? It gave me the deja-vu shivers:
https://umdrive.memphis.edu/mhooker/lawandorder.html
165 Peckinpah
WTF?
165 Peckinpah
Similarly, a friend who used to spend a lot of time with RB told me that until a few years ago he could tell when RB was lying because his right eye would blink very fast, but more recently the blinking stopped, replaced by a glazed look. My friend thinks that this indicates that now his conscience is completely dead.
There is no point in undermining the efficiency of Robert Burton’s technique. He is a master at it and that is what is so profoundly dangerous about the Fellowship of Friends. He and his inner circle are very clear about what they are doing even if they are doing.
The System works and Robert uses it. It is not the tools which are malfunctioning, it is what they are used for what is wrong. The exercises work. People make super human efforts only it is at the cost of their physical and emotional, economical and intellectual integrity.
The sequence is a marvelous tool. It aims at training the intellectual center for the soul just as the body would train the muscles to send a disc further away. The mind is the wild child of the soul and it needs to be tamed if one ever hopes to ride it. The problem is not the sequence no matter how much he has distorted the tool, the problem is that he is using a great tool to train students like dogs to behave in a very particular way so that he can guarantee an endless provision of sex and funds mostly for himself and a few crumbs for the inner circle that supports him; crumbs of power, of vanity, of a place in the hierarchy of the brothel.
Students of the Fellowship of Friends have forgotten what they joined a School for and have lost themselves in blind efforts. In their personal work, they are the character in the story that goes around in circles without knowing where he is heading convinced he is going somewhere because he keeps walking. They have given Robert Burton absolute power over where he is taking them and are now too numbed to acknowledge the fact that he has missed the mark for thirty five years; The Arc never actualized, the Fourth Way died in its fingers, and the serene look of a human being was replaced by the psychotic demands of an old man dressed in pink, throwing students out of the School because they are not looking at him as if Venus herself had appeared.
Students think that the fact that Robert Burton is willing to make them faint at the crowded meetings in which only the wealthiest can sit for $175 dollars in the front row and only fifty if you’re old or crippled, means that they are making tremendous efforts to evolve.
It is NOT the emotional center what Robert Burton has ever, (NOT EVER IN ANY OF THE CHEAP SECONDS OF HIS MISERABLE LIFE), EVOKED OR WORKED WITH. HE HAS PRESSED ON STUDENT’S INSTINCTIVE CENTER WITHOUT MERCY AND CONVINCED THEM THAT THEY DESERVE IT BECAUSE THE MORE MONEY THEY GIVE UP, THE MORE OF THEIR BODIES THEY ALLOW HIM TO RAPE, THE MORE OF THEIR INTEGRITY HE HUMILIATES, THE FASTER THEY’LL WAKE UP. He uses the idea of their being attached to influence A to rip them off their money, their body, their aims. Miserable spiritual orphans who still think about good and evil like Crusaders from the dark ages and walk sadly chained to Robert Burton’s silk whip. Some of them are, much to their misfortune, decadent upper class people convinced that if they can spend their money dining like kings (who can’t eat because food gets thrown away, because he calls their attention if they eat instead of look at him, because they serve smaller and smaller portions because no one can eat them anyway), they’ll become conscious by the mere fact that they allow Robert to humiliate them like criminal beggars. It is not the food they care about, they’ll eat when they get home, “we’re in America”, it is the pretense that they belong to The Monarchy of a Conscious Being what they are addicted to, because they do not have enough dignity left within themselves to know the difference between throwing food out to please a lunatic or being grateful for sharing or even just eating a meal.
The so called higher states they proclaim they experience from these events do not come from the materialization of divine wisdom, they come from the hydrogens their being has to crystallize into, to buffer the humiliation that they are being submitted to, en mass and with the allowance of each other’s already decadent integrity that was programmed in a society of “differences”. They deserve what they are getting, they pay for it, because they were programmed to humiliate other people with their money and status to the same extent that they allow Robert Burton to instill in them the concept that they are only in their seventh lifetime, only men number four, only beggars, beginners, beasts of the lower self in the quest for enlightenment without mercy: third class spiritual beings. They relish in the fact that they can treat other students and the six billion dead people on the planet with the same despondency with which Robert Burton treats them.
Other students are middle class people who think that anyone who stimulates them to dress like princess and princesses, walk around rose gardens and “d…i…n….e” at the Galleria, must be a conscious being. After all, they are the middle class, who would ever think they deserved so much? A bit of lush and crumbs of power and they’ll take the king to the end of the planet even if they have to rape young men and empty the pockets of a job they never enjoyed. Ignorants without taste or respectability, programmed robots to be exploited in the chain factory of capitalism or the decorated slums of Robert Burton’s Cult.
Upper class, middle class or third class foreigners, flattered like nouveau rich peasants by the sound of crystallized wine.
Flattery IS the key to the Fellowship of Friends. Naked flattery pressed upon the instinctive center of decadent television addicts who are convinced that they are accessing Heaven because they have replaced television for fifth class art and the news for Robert Burton’s indoctrinated cards. Cards that they make so much effort to learn to read so that they can include in the life of the Conscious School, the meager morsels of their no longer recognizable being.
So what about the artists and the scholars, the hard working vineyard workers, the builders and servants of the Fellowship of Friends? Why did they bargain their soul so cheaply? Because what people really wanted was to belong to a community and they were willing to file their soul to its roots as long as they could find someone able to appreciate their effort, an effort which Robert Burton profited from and corresponded to as long as the student was willing to humiliate himself and submit others to the ankles of his insatiable corruption; Because people allowed Robert to set the mark of beauty, coherence and worthiness way beyond their own common sense; Because people were willing “not to be” to let the Fellowship of Friends “become” even at the cost of their evolution; because upper and middle class ignorants are still naïve human beings willing to give the whole of their being for a noble cause; because we do not remember our selves enough to know that we are already too human to allow any one to rape our integrity with an external set of imaginary structures of class, status or being. We are, it is the structures what are imaginary.
There has NEVER been room for the Emotional center in the Fellowship of Friends. The emotional life of its students is methodically exterminated. Their talent is put at the service of the money making auctions to build more camp sites where they can be further exploited.
There is nothing emotional about the flowers or the alchemy or the innumerable students who serve dinners, sing in them or dress to assist them. It is all the instinctive center of a group of people trying to survive in a community that raped their soul.
How many times did we not run out of Renaissance with our guts flamed in tears solidified in our throat so that no one else witnessed the extent of our pain and photographed us for allowing our Queen of Hearts to be repelled by the meticulous severity with which we were consistently repressed to not participate in what was going on with anything but the dollars we carried in our concealed pockets? How often did we pay to justify our presence? What can it do on people’s soul to know that they simply cannot be unless they pay? And only “be quiet” once they pay?
Payment is a principle, was never the principle of the Fourth Way, as used by Robert Burton. Robert uses every one of its tools and concepts against his devoted followers and it is such a great system that it works even for criminals. That is why they were so afraid of putting it out in the market of life, but this is, The Way of Life: You learn or you become the victim of what others know. Being a good householder is knowing what you are paying for and students don’t. We will yet experience hunger and remember the Cult in which we paid for the food to be thrown away, young men to be raped and both men and women to be humiliated like pigs in a Church. We will suffer what we promoted one way or another, sooner or later. It must help if one can rewind one’s doings and undo them in the same lifetime: Close the Fellowship of Friends down.
Long-term membership in the Fellowship of Friends seems to result in loss of ability to discern right from wrong — in some, not all.
It seems that in the Fellowship of Friends the ability to discern right from wrong is considered feminine dominance, subjective, the work of the lower self and is something to be suppressed and ignored.
I haven’t come up with a better explanation for why people stay now that so much is out in the open. Community, fear of losing friends, position, livelihood and a spiritual path and all those other reasons that have been discussed would seem to take a back seat to “wrongness” if the ability to see it were still intact.
Kinda scary stuff.
Elena, I have to disagree…. The sequence is not ‘a marvellous tool’ in my experience, and it does not train the mind effectively. Remember that Robert and co. invented the sequence, it has nothing whatever to do with Gurdjieff or Ouspensky. It’s a bit like an intellectual golden calf. Sounds pretty and looks worth worshipping, but it excites the mind into effort without leading to the Promised Land (Presence). Sorry, bit it manifestly doesn’t work.
172 Elena: “The sequence is a marvelous tool. It aims at training the intellectual center for the soul just as the body would train the muscles to send a disc further away.”
What a load of rubbish! The sequence is complete waste of time. “Training the intellectual center for the soul”??? The mind can be a distraction from reality, true, but any attempt to “train” it strengthens it. Forget all this intellectual crap and just look around you, experience life in all is glory.
its glory
147 and 160 are newly moderated.
172 Elena
I have to agree with the above comments. The sequence seems to clearly and obviously be to keep the sheep asleep while being sheared. To keep one from questioning something that has progressed so far into infamy that “criminal” is a gross understatement. It’s an esoteric version of “nahh nahh nahh I can’t hear you”. Unfortunately what one is tuning out is truth and reality and one’s own real possibilities.
It’s fucking INSANE.
I just had this flash of the future, prophesy is upon me:
The FOF has folded. The assets revert to the State (as they would as a non-profit). Somehow the property becomes a tourist attraction It’s seen in the public eye as a flaming fairy’s “Winchester Mystery House” (you know, the house with stairways and doors leading nowhere). People pay $5.00…now I’m not completely clear on this part of the vision- it could be people are PAID $5.00 to go visit the Galleria, where the most oft overheard comment from twittering covered mouths is “Holy fuck, this guy had followers”? And it eventually enters the hallowed hall of fame of parody, right next to the Madonna Inn.
160 Bass Ackwards.
Thanks for the update. Enjoyed the Chogyam Trungpa passage. Reminds me a bit of:
“You want me to go from A to B I cannot” (Samuel Beckett)
157 Abigail
“About the foyer ceiling–I used to mainly worry about the goat that Vladimir appeared to be sodomizing.”
It’s Michail sodomizing the goat. His son now lives in the Galleria – the one who was looking for a car…
c. Tiger, Nuthead and Bruce, the sequence works like any mantram and it works. What they use it for, as Bruce and my whole post implies is what is dangerous about it: the fact that all the exercises Robert uses work to make students believe that the Fellowship of Friends is a legitimate school of consciousness. Thank you nevertheless for bothering to read such a long post. It is not for the speaker to prove what s/he is saying but for the reader to verify it. All is well.
Nuthead, The sequence in fact works so well that students no longer bother to think. They just do sequences and keep the mind like a tamed lunatic. Unfortunately they think it is the mind what they are keeping like a tamed lunatic and not their own freedom to think.
C. Tiger, I don’t think the sequence comes from Robert but from ancient practices. With a hundred students researching and giving him ideas of what might work, he is not at a loss for exercises. And he is not dumb. As long as he can use the exercises to keep making people believe that they are fighting their lower center, their king of clubs and influence A, he doesn’t have to worry about introducing the emotional center into play to convince them that they have a conscious teacher. Why do you think that he has never in thirty five years dealt with “positive emotions”? Simply because he doesn’t know anything about them.
brucelevy:
“I just had this flash of the future, prophesy is upon me:
The FOF has folded. The assets revert to the State (as they would as a non-profit). Somehow the property becomes a tourist attraction…”
Holy shit, bruce! When I read your post that same thing flashed in my mind, too!
…popular ex-fofers will be hired as well dressed tour guides and lesser figures will be hired to drive the shuttle bus in a tux and run the motel and restaurant. It will help the local economy blossom and the story will have a happy ending! (Although someone might need to post a disclaimer that no goats were harmed modeling for the galleria paintings or PETA and the SPCA will be up in arms.)
Maybe some disgruntled ex-fofer’s would be allowed to do their own burning man once a year on the property, too…as a healing ceremony…we could float it out on one of the lakes and torch it. We could attract a new following…maybe even evolve the event into a music festival held over at the unfinished stage. The possibilities are endless! Why not convert the whole vineyard to organic table grapes…run as a non-profit and grown especially for select tables of key ex-fofers in the state prison system…
Somebody 181
Thanks for the correction–I got the name wrong but was more concerned about the goat.
Elena 182
Hi Elena, I think we’ll have to agree to disagree about the sequence! I tried it for quite a while and didn’t get the desired results…. Like the 30 great Work I’s, these mind-correction techniques seem attractive only when…. you’re hung up on mind-correction techniques!!! Anna T’s description of running along the riverbank without ever getting the chance to dive in is a pretty good summary of the sequence in relation to Presence, I reckon.
I don’t think the Fellowship could possibly function without the constant attempts to evoke the emotional part. That’s what all the cultural events are about, all the visits to Art galleries and concerts and the ballet. Just basic salesmanship really… When people feel expansive, when they ‘feel good’, they’re more likely to part with their money, and who knows maybe even with their sex??
I got caught a few times by the ‘photo with Robert’ scenario. Sunny day, standing in a rose garden high above the Bosphorus in Istanbul, 60 or 70 quid suddenly didn’t seem so much!! The worst one was buying one of those awful little ‘30 Work I’s’ booklets – not even hardbound – for £50! People have to feel that they’re getting what they came for in order to keep shelling out, so emotional stimuli oil the wheels of the whole operation. The Fellowship can’t function without it.
In your long post, I got the feeling that somehow you feel the teaching would be fine if Robert could just restrain his lust for money and young boys? I don’t see how that can possibly be true. His personality has infected the his version of the 4th Way more deeply than that. If you say that the basis of his ’system’ is the Sequence and the 30 Work I’s, you have a teaching that can’t deliver what his students really want, regardless of his personal behaviour.
Can someone please be so kind to repost here the sequence and 30 work I’s?
I’d like to contribute to the current thread, but first I want to get them right.
The Sequence ~
IMO, the sequence cannot be linked to ancient practices or anything else ‘original’ for these reasons ~ First, its source (spiritual crime) and what it supports, at the end of the day, that is, (if) it connects with conscious conscience and secondly its method of supporting the ‘what goes around comes around-lies and the buffering it takes students to keep up the Good Work’…
So much of the students ’sex-energy’ goes right back to Robert Burton’s white grip upon their conscience and his multi-application of the fear of moon-damnation and 44 moody gods upon their desires to express themselves and make their own mistakes before Robert Burton makes his upon them, calling theirs ‘mechanical’ and his ‘divine’ or ‘humiliation sent from c-influence…
The sequence is connected upon too much drama to be objective and that’s pretty much it; IMO.
Sure, you can compare the pyramid in Los Vegas to the one in Giza, but hey, its simply not the same…
The only thing exercises ‘work’ for is sometimes to create space over mind-activity, yet, whose creating the space, whose allowing the exercise to ‘work’, what is enabling it to go through the mind and deeper? It’s YOU, it’s not the sequence; yet, too, it’s a Catch 22 that ‘you’ use your mind to pronounce the sequence, etc. (perhaps one could say that ones presence moves the mind upon the board of its will and heart to assist)
I have yet to meet any spiritual teachers who are doing well with having successfully severed their brain stems…
Many spiritual teachers talk about the no-need for exercises and various mind-techniques, yet, they are often soft-hypocrites, because I have also been unable to find one sincere spiritual being on this planet that has not developed in some way due to those very exercises or through people who themselves did so…
BTW, observing one’s life in a constructive and creative way as it flows is, IMO, conscious work and an exercise: IMO, there’s a big difference between slouching to the Day and sitting up straight.
Be careful; one man’s state is another man’s rubber ducky.
________________________
l.t.y.a.
Hi Laura,
The sequence is… “BE-Hold-[theme]-Back-[theme]-BE”. The theme is the action of the moment, one of the thirty Work I’s, although some were favoured more than others.
The idea was to initiate the desire for presence with the first two steps, pin it down to an activity (like ‘read’) with the third, deflect Imagination or any distracting thoughts with the fourth, and return reinvigorated to the quest at steps 5 and 6.
In practice, it’s almost impossible to superimpose this grid on the flow of thoughts. There’s the perennial problem of trying to correct the mind by travelling at the speed of the mind, and I didn’t find my sense of awareness very responsive to that, or enriched by it.
The most useful result I found was that it enables you to be more aware of the flow of your thoughts at step 4. At least you have two forces together there.
I don’t have the 30 I’s to hand, but will post them if I find them.
Dear Hearts, Gentle People, True Friends & all the rest:
History gets made, one way or another.
Sports Update: Eli Manning & the Giants defeat Goliath.
(Ref. “When the Ship Comes In” words & music by Bob Dylan.)
As Always, Bless the boys & girls who make the noise.
The sequence was invented by Asaf and Robert. Before the emphasis on Keys, Robert and company came up with a list of 14 ways to presence that students were supposed to use. That was a damp squib. Then there were the keys,
Robert and Asaf decided that a statement in the Conference of the Birds, “Out of thousands of birds that set out on the journey, only thirty birds of the outer world contemplated the face of God in the inner world. ”
Robert has a very literal mind and he took this to mean that there must be exactly 30 specific work ‘I’s and he and Asaf produced a list of them which then were taken to be the esoteric meaning of the number 30 in any religious or spiritual tradition. Then they set to work on the number 6. Initially, the number 6 represented the first 6 of the thirty work ‘I’s. But this was soon forgotten once Asaf got his hands on some wooden cubes on which a student had inscribed the work ‘I’s. Asaf started arranging the cubes in sequences and he and Robert decided that the number 6 in all traditions referred to this sequence. The sequence was announced to the ’school’ then changed a few times. Then Asaf and Robert decided that just about any symbol in religious tradition must refer to the sequence. Any reference to a beginning’ was to the beginning of the sequence, ‘end’ the end of the sequence, ‘middle’ the middle, etc. It only takes a tiny bit of research to realize that these religious texts are NEVER referring to anything like Robert/Asaf’s sequence in the quotations that are used in the Galleria.
Robert Burton and Asaf playing with wooden cubes; well that’s a cute picture… back to the basics I suppose.
160 Bass Ackwards
…….This passage from Chogyam Trungpa, in “Cutting through Spiritual Materialsim” helps to illuminate the core of the spiritual issue at stake:
“Q: Is self-remembering or observing oneself incongruent with giving in and being here?
A: Self-remembering is quite a dangerous technique, actually. It could involve watching yourself and your actions like a hungry cat watching mice, or else it could be an intelligent gesture of being where you are. The whole point is that, if you have any idea of relaitonship-I am experienceing this, I am doing this-then “I” and “this” are very strong personalities, equally. Somehow thre will be a conflict between “I” and “this”. It is rather like saying that “this” is the mother and “I” the father. With two such polar extremmes involved you are bound to give birth to something. So the whole idea is to let “this” not be there, and then “I” will not be there. It is not a matter of telling it to yourself, but of feeling it, a real experience. You must take away the watcher, the observer of the two extremes. Once the watcher is removed, then the whole structure falls apart. The dichotomy remains in existence only so long as there is an observer to keep the whole picture together. You must remove the watcher and the very complicated bureaucracy he creates to insure that nothing is missed by central headquarters. Once we take away the watcher, there is a tremendous amount of space, because he and his bureaucracy take up so much room. If we eliminate the filter of “I” and “Other” then the space becomes sharp and precise and intelligent. Space contains the tremendous precision of being able to work with the situation in it. One does not really need the “watcher” or “observer” at all.”
——————————————————–
Thank you Bass A or Ellen for posting this.
Your whole post is actually worth reading and thinking over.
I like this from Chogyam Trungpa, I used to think self-remembering was everything!
I later understood it could become a buffer and a useless way to try stop the huge leaks from my whole being screaming pain and plain truth.
Instantes (Instants)
If I were able to live my life anew,
In the next I would try to commit more errors.
I would not try to be so perfect, I would relax more.
I would be more foolish than I’ve been,
In fact, I would take few things seriously.
I would be less hygienic.
I would run more risks,
take more vacations,
contemplate more sunsets,
climb more mountains, swim more rivers.
I would go to more places where I’ve never been,
I would eat more ice cream and fewer beans,
I would have more real problems and less imaginary ones.
I was one of those people that lived sensibly
and prolifically each minute of his life;
Of course I had moments of happiness.
If I could go back I would try
to have only good moments.
Because if you didn’t know, of that is life made:
only of moments; Don’t lose the now.
I was one of those that never
went anywhere without a thermometer,
a hot-water bottle,
an umbrella, and a parachute;
If I could live again, I would travel lighter.
If I could live again,
I would begin to walk barefoot from the beginning of spring
and I would continue barefoot until autumn ends.
I would take more cart rides,
contemplate more dawns,
and play with more children,
If I had another life ahead of me.
But already you see, I am 85,
and I know that I am dying.
Jorge Luis Borges
186 Uno: “I have also been unable to find one sincere spiritual being on this planet that has not developed in some way due to those very exercises or through people who themselves did.”
Maybe development “in some way” occurs, but so what? My experience has been: I have been unable to find one sincere being on this planet that has achieved spiritual awakening due to exercises of any kind.
The emphasis of the current RB’s teaching is based on the idea that one has to be present as much as possible. Since thinking is usually called “imagination”, students are advised not to think, but to be present “to what is in front of you” or indulge in the activities conducive to the promoting presence. Sequence, keys, esoteric traditions, images are the new “tools” which are promising to help one to be present more often, longer and deeper. People for whom the idea of being present is valuable tend to get together and support each other in the effort to “promote or prolong presence”.
And since “what is present” is not the machine, anything which one ascribes to the machine (which is everything except the effort to be present) labeled “a lower self” and has no value. When a common sense would tell one what is important ( loved ones, responsibilities, pains, interests, problems, ideas, privacy, sex, money, energy, etc) it means nothing if looked at as a lower self and therefore – denied. If people are aiming for immortality, why invest into something temporary as one’s mortal body? Machine will die and the Higher Centers will go to Paradise (together with Robert Burton) The role of Robert therefore is looked at as a helper for the higher self who puts pressure on the lower self and makes it easier to separate from it.
Recently I researched Ouspensky’s books in order to find what he had to say about “presence”. Ouspensky does not talk much about “being present”. The System described by Ouspensky can not be simplified to the word “be” or even a sequence. It has something to do with seeing one’s mechanicality, developing unity, will, struggling with false personality, buffers etc. It’s far from simply “shut up and be present”
What are your thoughts on the subject of “presence” or “prolonging presence”? Is that a way to a conscious awakening and immortality?
I once read where a lawyer or judge say that he could not define pornography but if he saw it he would recognize it.
Wouldnt it be weird if a large billboard size photograph of a cherub with exposed penis appeared in Oregon House with a caption that said, “this is art”.
While another billboard size photograph across from the cherub with an erect adult penis appeared with a caption that read, “according to Robert Earl Burton and staff of the Fellowship of Friends this is not pornography but a object d’art
that promotes Higher Centers, conscience and presence.
#193 Nuthead: 186 Uno said: “I have also been unable to find one sincere spiritual being on this planet that has not developed in some way due to those very exercises or through people who themselves did.”
Nuthead said: Maybe development “in some way” occurs, but so what? My experience has been: I have been unable to find one sincere being on this planet that has achieved spiritual awakening due to exercises of any kind.’
Being present to ourselves and the world around us doesn’t require an exercise and is not a development. It’s a way of being and everyone’s right. When Nuthead says ’sincere’ spiritual being’ that is through his eyes.
I believe one achieves presence when one is ready to see what already IS and depending on what we ourselves have put in the way of this it can take some time. It’s already there!!! No need to develop anything. And the idea that something has to be done, developed, achieved, keeps people in the school ‘working’ for what they already have.
WAKE UP!!! Get a hula hoop instead! Maybe a couple. They’re a lot cheaper.
Here it is – the thirty work I’s;
Be (Be Present)
Hold (Hold the sequence with Presence)
Pray (Choose the theme of the sequence; i.e. Look, Hear)
Back (Watch the lower self)
Turn (Return to the theme of the sequence; i.e. Look, Hear)
Long Be (Prolong Presence)
Act (Engage Presence)
Peace [Pax] (Avoid the entire spectrum of negative emotions)
Leave (Avoid identification)
Kneel (Do not resent friction)
Drop (Do not judge or keep accounts)
Use (Use voluntary suffering)
Wit (Avoid wit)
Now (Think neither of the past nor of the future)
Look (Look with Presence)
Move (Move with Presence)
Taste (Taste with Presence)
Hear (Listen with Presence)
Feel (Feel with Presence)
Smell (Smell with Presence)
Talk (Speak with Presence)
Think (Think with Presence)
Read (Read with Presence)
Write (Write with Presence)
Child (Remain in essence; avoid false personality revolving around chief feature)
Serve (Do not inner consider, externally consider)
Scale (Use scale and relativity)
Aim (Keep aim and complete octaves; be aware of third forces)
Time (Remember the brevity of life)
Gods (Remember the gods)
194 Somebody: “What are your thoughts on the subject of “presence” or “prolonging presence”?”
The mind tries to persuade us we need to make efforts to achieve and prolong presence. But actually if we ignore the mind we see that we are always present, without effort. Even “imagination” takes place in the present. It’s actually impossible for us to exist even one second in the past or future.
Exercises to attain and prolong presence are con tricks designed by pseudo-teachers to gain adulation, money, sex, etc.
A perfect example of exercises as con tricks would be the Thirty Work ‘I’s (197).
In so far as anything can be said about spiritual awakening it can be said very quickly and simply. A pseudo-teacher is compelled to invent increasingly novel and complex spiritual-sounding garbage to retain the interest (and donations) of his followers. Hence the frequent changes in RB’s teaching and the current insanely detailed pseudo-interpretations of irrelevant quotations.
Hello Nuthead 193 ~
You wrote ~
“Maybe development “in some way” occurs, but so what? My experience has been: I have been unable to find one sincere being on this planet that has achieved spiritual awakening due to exercises of any kind.”
_________________________________
LIVING your incarnation is an ‘exercise’; perhaps it’s time to consider yourself as that ‘one sincere being’ (?)
:.)
197 steve lang
Or for the sake of brevity:
Can be reduced to long wank and short wank.
199 Nuthead
Yup, exactly.
http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/29/babiessh2.jpg
184 Crouching Tiger:
“The Fellowship can’t function without it. (the emotional center)
In your long post, I got the feeling that somehow you feel the teaching would be fine if Robert could just restrain his lust for money and young boys? I don’t see how that can possibly be true. His personality has infected the his version of the 4th Way more deeply than that. If you say that the basis of his ’system’ is the Sequence and the 30 Work I’s, you have a teaching that can’t deliver what his students really want, regardless of his personal behaviour”.
Good lord Tiger, if you got those feelings from my post I should cut my fingers and never write again or you better get some eyeglasses!
“If you say that the basis of his ’system’ is the Sequence and the 30 Work I’s, you have a teaching that can’t deliver what his students really want, regardless of his personal behaviour”
Where on earth have I ever said such thing?
I do have the problem that I am understanding what I know as I write and only after saying the same thing a few times I can actually say it in less words. (After having finished this long post it doesn’t look like I am understanding it any better!!!)
What I am actually trying to say is that the exercises practiced in the Fellowship of Friends are in principle useful exercises, they work not because Robert invented them but because they are legitimate practices of a legitimate system. What I am specially trying to emphasize is that they are the main reason for people to continue believing that Robert is a conscious teacher because he still challenges their impulse to work. The fact that they end up doing sequences like idiots and clicking a clicker like retarded automatons is another problem. It IS the problem.
These people have accepted to become retarded idiots willing to leave unchallenged anything Robert Burton says, Mr. Haven supports and Linda and the rest pretend to practice while the real innocent students or just stupid students like me, end up making a religion of it for seventeen years and more. It is one of the reasons why students in centers thrive some what, because if one limits one’s self to using the exercises without ever bothering about what Robert is doing, who he is and what the Fellowship of Friends is actually about, one can not necessarily get very far in one’s evolution but one can at least pretend one is moving through one’s sincere effort.
Dear Tiger, you’re right, everything in the Fellowship is handled through the lower emotional center, specially idolatry for Robert Burton and specially Robert Burton’s imposition of “love me, the divine conscious being who you have to pay more than you own, to be close to me for the rest of your life if you want to evolve”. You’re right, the lower emotional center is blackmailed to belong to the club by paying ludicrous amounts of money. The lower emotional center is the slave of one’s karma and it must be in our miserable karma to spend a considerable period of our life loving a psychopath addicted to manipulating men, women and young people to serially abuse young men and empty people’s pockets. You might have found something emotional about the Fellowship of Friends but if you can judge by my bitter expression in which I didn’t know whether to scream or cry or bite my ears, you can verify that I never found the Fellowship of Friends emotional. I swallowed it all, worked for it, played my Girard’s wife role but I fought it every second and have witnesses. I believed in Robert and the practice of self remembering and the non expression of negative emotions which taught me practically everything I know but life in the Fellowship of Friends stunk from the first to the last day. I promised I would leave the day after I met Robert Burton and I didn’t because of my own practice, but I should have. Breaking my promise had me paying for sixteen more years. Do you not remember how uncomfortable I made you all feel in meetings, dinners and breakfast? Do you not remember that I always presented a different point of view that was never welcomed? I did finally give up after living six years at Isis. In fact, I once asked “How are we going to work with abuse of Friendship” and five students were thrown out the next day.
I’m sorry, that too is beside the point. The issue that matters is that Robert Burton is dangerously exterminating the emotional life of his students. Idolatry is not an emotional life, it is the imposition of the mind or brainwashing over the I. What he is demanding from students is that they give up their emotional, intellectual and physical life to replace it for his indoctrination. The sequence tops the use of the mind with the whole process that has come before. Why can’t those students that were there with me, not see it clearly? We had already been ripped apart from our emotional life, and the forms of our interactions were already precisely determined by conditioned “king of hearts” behavior. We could only use certain language and only talk about certain things. Of course, I am talking about the main stream of the main stream or what Girard Haven allowed for students to handle, what, how and when was perfectly pre-determined by Fellowship of Friends dogma. Even students that never went to Girard’s meetings ended up behaving as Girard imposed through his own example. He translated and specially reformulated the attitude that was allowed for students to have before Robert Burton’s “divine madness” (and even this term became regular), which we could not understand or judge because after all, we were men 1,2,3, functioning through the lower self, the instinctive center and finally if you don’t like it, you’re welcome to leave without dialogue. The Fellowship of Friends imposed a no dialogue status quo, like fascism, totalitarism and any other criminal behavior in which a man or a few men impose their will on the rest of the community.
Once a community accepts this as the normal behavior that they are willing to practice every single day for the rest of their lives, you can get anyone to experience the deaths in Jamestown or the rapes in the Fellowship of Friends.
Continued…
Everything that we’ve spoken about on this blog has happened because student’s emotional life has been cut to pieces. In fact their emotional, intellectual and physical lives have all been cut to pieces.
Their false personality was superimposed by another more cruel personality that lost all sight of their I, and sat Robert Burton in its place. They are becoming a legion of Hasnamusses. They lost contact with themselves when they accepted to separate themselves from their origins:Their families, their nations their biography, without having processed the separation. They did not transform their lives, they annihilated them. Their lives were treated as “biological connections of the instinctive center and influence A” and discarded as unnecessary garbage in the process of awakening.” This sole fact reduced them to people who had to hide their origin from public life, or rather the private life of the club, people who had to hide their shameful origins and never, ever again talk about their parents, sisters, friends or any of the six billion dead people on the planet.
Their childhood and youth were to burn in hell if they wanted to awaken.
Their childhood and their youth is to burn in hell if they want to awaken. This is the present of the Fellowship of Friends even if it is in the past of ex-students.
The use of SHAME as the main ingredient to indoctrination is tremendously effective because it lowers the self-esteem of the individual enough to allow for the process of idolatry to take place. He undermines himself but the surplus energy of his integrity must go somewhere and it gradually lands in the Teacher, who replaces the student’s capacity to discriminate or exercise his will and the process of idolatry develops rampantly.
This is indeed an emotional process of the lower emotional center. It could never happen in the higher emotional center in which a mature I would respond for himself without ever allowing for idolatry.
NO one should ever again give his will to another man no matter how wrong he himself thinks he is. Trust yourself and look for answers of your own while listening to others. Then we will all grow parallel to each other. Not only in our centers but specially in our being. The being of humanity is much depressed. Our general depression runs parallel to it. We will continue to be orphans falling in idolatry for as long as we neglect to assume responsibility for our own lives. Each individual must respond for the whole, not one for the many.
Everything Robert Burton uses is upside down and backwards to the system but it is still the system. The car works no matter who drives it, that is what is so dangerous. The Fellowship of Friends is not going to Heaven, it is already in hell.
I would like to separate this subject which is what matters in that post and the subject of the sequence itself which is a completely different discussion.
I have already overrun my lines considerably, my eyes sting and I’ll have a headache soon. The subject of knowledge of the sequence or work in the intellectual center can wait. Thanks Draco for the information, it doesn’t alter anything but thank you very much.
203 somebody
Thank you goodness.
#192 lauralupa
Hello Laura,
Nice exerpt.
Thanks.
Aline
Crouching Tiger, Draco and steve lang, thanks of your clarifying posts.
To begin with, the sequence and 30 work I’s remind me of another of my favorite writings from Jorge Luis Borges, “in which phenomena are cataloged in a completely ersatz fashion”.
“In “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” Borges describes ‘a certain Chinese Encyclopedia,’ the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which it is written that animals are divided into:
those that belong to the Emperor,
embalmed ones,
those that are trained,
suckling pigs,
mermaids,
fabulous ones,
stray dogs,
those included in the present classification,
those that tremble as if they were mad,
innumerable ones,
those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
others,
those that have just broken a flower vase,
those that from a long way off look like flies.
This classification has been used by many writers. It “shattered all the familiar landmarks of his thought” for Michel Foucault. Anthropologists and ethnographers, German teachers, postmodern feminists, Australian museum curators, and artists quote it. The list of people influenced by the list has the same heterogeneous character as the list itself.”
(from http://www.multicians.org/thvv/borges-animals.html)
Does anyone think that possibly Roberts’ delusional meanderings and their peculiar effect on his followers’ psyches could one day be the source for some interesting psychoanalytic, sexual studies, postmodernist and anthropological essays? They are at the very least worthy of a chapter in the “California Odd Phenomenas of the Seventies Book of Weirdness”.
# 203 Somebody
It’s worth a hundred words.
Aline
#197: Gosh! How does anyone have any time to do anything else?
Don’t miss #203!!!
208 lauralupa
I loved Borges long before I stumbled into the Fellowship of Friends. That’s a brilliant quote, thanks. It somehow reminds me of the fact that I’ve been thinking about the idea of parallel universes recently. One of the big new theories of existence is String Theory, which states, among other things, that there are 11 dimensions.
For reasons I don’t understand, for string theory to be a true description of the universe, parallel universes must exist. These would or could be universes exactly like our own, but each with a minute difference. There may be an infinite number of them, playing out every possible variation of our own universe. Therefore, right now in these parallel universes, the Fellowship may resemble these alternate realities:
1. Robert Burton is heterosexual and rapes lesbian women.
2. Instead of addressing students as “goodness,” he calls them “yucca.”
3. The same as 2, only the word is “bristle.”
4. Etc.
5. Everything is exactly the same as our world, only a single carbon atom in a grape in the 1982 Renaissance harvest is oxygen instead.
6. The same as 5, only 2 carbon atoms are replaced by 1 oxygen and 1 hydrogen.
7. Every possible variation of atoms and years for 5 and 6.
8. In 1986, a woman sits in the Academy library with a book of art prints open to page 236. Instead of looking at the book, she stares into the middle distance.
9. The book is open to page 238.
10. Etc.
11. Bonita (the FOF’s first student) decides not to go to the party where she meets Robert.
12. Bonita goes to the party, but Robert is just leaving and they never meet.
13. Bonita meets Robert, but she starts the school, and Robert is her first student. She sleeps with him, then claims to be celibate. He leaves the school in disgust.
14. Smoking is mandatory. Students sniff each other to ensure they are complying.
15. Robert despises art, but loves comedy. He claims to commune with 44 conscious comedians. Groucho Marx is his Leonardo.
16. The Fellowship grows marijuana instead of grapes and palm trees.
17. Robert has a Meissen bong.
18. The world is covered in water. Robert starts a school called the Fellowship of Fish.
19. Robert hunts humans for sport.
20. Tom Cruise joins the Fellowship.
21. Robert is not a psychopath.
22. Etc.
For light relief – this is one from a selection of brokeback parodies:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=FtRi42DEdTE
212 innernaut
Even in the realm of the Multiverse I don’t accept #21 as a possibility.
Call me crazy, call me stubborn, just don’t call me late for dinner.
And I love #14.
Here it is – the thirty work I’s;
Boo (Scare people with inane prophecies) Hold (Try really hard to hold it all together) Prey (Pressure others until they agree to have sex with you) Back (Keep backing a loser) Turn (Turn on people when they find the courage to leave).
Long Boo (Really scare people with the level of your indoctrination) Act (Act like a zealot but organize your departure) Peace (ignore conscience)
Leave (Get out) Neil (Buy new copies of the Neil Young records you sold) Drop (Your trousers for Leonardo) Use (Use people and tell yourself that it’s work on feminine dominance) Wit (Avoid people with a good sense of humor) Now (It really is time to go)
Look (Watch a recent Galleria video and ask yourself who’s bonkers) Move (move on to something good) Taste (Look at the ceiling in the Galleria) Hear (Listen to more and more crap in the hope it will all eventually make sense, put fingers in each ear and intone a sequence) Feel (pinch yourself often) Smell (Smell a rat) Talk (Talk to people who’ve been abused) Think (Think for yourself) Read (Read first hand accounts on the blog) Write (Write a scathing goodbye note) Child (Don’t allow your kids to get sucked in)
Serve (Play tennis while the money rolls in) Scale (Consider the scale of abuse.) Aim (Aim to leave) Time (Time to leave) Gods (Where did the 44 conscious beings go?)
Example: Boo, Hold, Prey, Back, Prey, Long Boo
So many posts, so little time…
But here goes
160 Bass
Congratulations to you and bravo on having the “courage to just say no.” However (and I may be all wrong here) much of your post seems like an elegant rationalization of the lifetime that you gave to the FoF. I just don’t buy it. Leaving certainly is a process, is individual for each of us, and takes (in my experience anyway) years to come to terms with and begin to understand. You speak often of what was gained—have you tried to address what was lost? Irretrievably?
189 Draco
Thanks for putting the insane idea of the “ancient” sequence to rest. Well put.
192 laura
An astonishing poem, thanks for that, and for the mind-blowing list in #208. And sorry for your recent loss. I look forward to all your posts.
212 Innernaut
Thought provoking and hilarious at the same time. Nice trick! Immediately brought other “parallels” springing to mind, a wonderful mind expansion.
215 Leonhardon
Spot on! You must have a very high level of bean!
Wakeuplittlesuzywakeup
I love hula girl!
194 Somebody
What are your thoughts on the subject of “presence” or “prolonging presence”? Is that a way to a conscious awakening and immortality?
Being present to yourself and what is going on around you is not a secret idea, not a complex practice, it is not hidden from the world, it is not unknown to millions of people, it is not even very unusual. People who misuse ideas like presence try to mystify and confuse you into thinking you need something more. Like “conscious awakening” or “immortality.”
As many on this blog have said, the great “mystery” of life is that there is no mystery—everything is here right now, in the moment my fingers fly over the keyboard trying to communicate to you that if you continue to try to acquire “conscious awakening” or “immortality” you may be manipulated once again, or may miss what is so compelling in life that needs no “search.”
Be well, and thanks to all.
JoelF
213 bruce
Okay, you’re right, even an infinite multiverse could not contain #21.
215 leonhardon
Very funny. I particularly liked “Neil.” I just wish I could get my Stratocaster back that I sold in 1982 to make a “special” donation. That one still hurts.
216 Skeptical Optimist
“…if you continue to try to acquire “conscious awakening” or “immortality” you may be manipulated once again, or may miss what is so compelling in life that needs no “search.””
Nicely put. It reminded me of a meeting long ago where the center director, a very level-headed, successful professional, said “what we’re ultimately doing is creating a soul.” I remember even then being stunned, and thinking, “We are? How could we possibly know that, even if it’s true?” One in a long line of shocking realizations that something had gone seriously awry.
Thanks
Draco,
You say Asaf and Robert invented the sequence but I don’t believe Asaf and Robert have the talent to invent anything. They took the idea from other ideas they were reading about and Robert polished it to give students something to do with their mind instead of think about what the Fellowship of Friends was doing while they repeated words like robots.
Were you actually there to know how they invented it? I do think Asaf came up with it before Robert though. Asaf was coming up with everything for a long time ago while Robert mumbled things out and looked for Asaf when he got lost or forgot what the hell he was talking about.
China’s last emperor at least was very young to justify being his inner circle’s puppet but Robert has no other excuse than his own decadence.
correction: for a long time while………
Another problem in the Fellowship of Friends was that very few people actually did exercises. They settled for modelling and finding friends with whom to undermine others and play Roberts favorites of the moment. Then when he discarded them they didn’t know what to do with themselves but pretend they were working on something important like fold the napkin in a triangle.
Hi Innernaut,
Coincidentally, retrieved my surf green Strat from my Ma’s garage a few weeks back. It had languished there neglected for many years. A little the worse for wear now, having weathered the damp and cold of a few too many winters, but jeeez does that thing sound goooooood!
Okay, now remind me, how does Pachelbels Canon go?
Love,
Leonhardon.
Just saw in the news that there are half a million cases of rapists in L.A. that go unchecked although they would usually match someone already in the system. What chances for the Fellowship of Friends?
I contributed to this blog in its earlier stages, but have been absent for many pages, so I apologise if I am repeating something that has already been said.
I was recently doing a little research on Robert Burton’s influences – namely Alex Horn and Sharon Gans and stumbled across this very revealing Web site which discusses their group, as well as other Gurdjieff / 4th Way related material. It’s called Esoteric Freedom and can be found at this address:
http://www.esotericfreedom.com/
The site also has a blog attached on which is posted a very formal letter by a lawyer (with Gold in his name), threatening to take action against any person who states anything false on the blog about the three main protagonists – Sharon and Robert (Klein) being two of them. Though strangely no mention of Alex Horn. However, in spite of all the rhetoric and legal sounding jargon, it amounts to little more than idle threats and is an example of something I actually half expected to appear on the Fellowship blog.
Anyway, if you’re interested, you can read it here:
http://www.esotericfreedom.blogspot.com/
Finally, I was reading the Esoteric Freedom blog, where many of the contributors are obviously going through a healing process of their own – mainly trying to make sense of the Horn / Gans / Klein methods to which they fell victim.
The experience was made even more strange by the constant references made to Robert by the bloggers. For a time I thought there were referring to Robert Burton, who was part of this group. Many of the comments, which I soon realised they were referring to Robert Klein, had a disturbingly similar ring about them, describing a person created very much in the same mould – with many of the characteristics that have previously been touched upon in this blog.
Here is an example of a comment from one of the bloggers:
“When you start to hear the stories and see the human wreckage that Sharon and Robert and Alex have left in their wake all for their monetary gain, power, manipulation and control – none of it can be justified. I think that many of us are so overcome with shame that we really can’t look at what happened and see it for what it was. I was overcome by such shame for a long time – it prevented me from speaking or listening to others. It kept me locked in silence and lies and hate. It enhanced my mechanicality. I am not totally free yet but that is the path I am now choosing to travel.”
You can read more for yourself here:
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=3279117262052869671&postID=5664220362580688408&pli=1
We are not alone!
Back to the Fellowship blog. Though we will not be able to reach those who are currently under Robert Burton’s spell, there will come a time when most of these students will begin to question what they are doing there and look toward other possibilities i.e. a FREEDOM outside the Fellowship Of Friends – as we did.
That is why what each of us are doing here is so valuable, especially when we are writing with the intention of helping those who are at such a point of transition; by providing encouragement and support, while at the same time revealing the lies and subterfuge behind which Robert Burton and his lackeys feather their nests. Such were the motives that made me contribute to this blog at its outset and now once again.
I find it worth remembering that inside his little world, Robert Burton appears a very big fish, but outside one would hardly give him a second glance, but throw him straight back. Unfortunately, for many of us, at a time when we were starving, he was what we were given. For a period of time – rather like the fish – we too got hooked.
Daily Emetic (slim down the Sequence way!)
“Dear friends, To honor the great gifts the Gods have bestowed upon us throughout the year, Robert has asked that our Christmas gift to him be a monetary donation to the Fellowship that will help us purchase a remarkable Italian Marble Tabletop with inlaid designs of significant esoteric meanings. You are welcome to include a check of any amount, made out to the FOF, in your Christmas card to Robert or simply give your contribution online using the link below. As part of the intricate inlaid design, the table displays three vases behind a black marble background. The three vases, which each represents the nine of hearts, also represent the three Be’s. The first vase, Short Be, is a Greek drinking vessel with 16 pearls draped around it (the number 16 represents control of the passions) and 12 lines on the side (the number of the Amduat or the inhalation/exhalation of the sequence). The middle vase is heavenly blue and the tallest of the three, indicating Middle Be must be strong and active to complete the sequence. On the third vase, or Long Be, the steward and nine of hearts figures face each other with hands raised; he is standing and she is sitting on a square throne. At the top of this vase appear eight discreet squares that represent the inhalation and exhalation of the four wordless breaths. There are many more keys to discover in this exceptional piece of art. Robert recently said that when one understands the inner meaning of a quotation, it has the magical ability to evoke presence. Fine art, when images are understood esoterically, can elicit Divine Presence as well. We wish to thank you, in advance, for your generous gift to our School.”
=============
“Gag me with a spoon” – Moon Unit Zappa
are my hula’s showing? I keep forgetting to log in correctly. this is a test.
223 Joey Average.
Absolutely fabulous! Thanks for posting – announcements like this are beyond hilarious.
220 Elena: “Another problem in the Fellowship of Friends was that very few people actually did exercises.”
Maybe true among people you knew. Not true among people I knew. Most of us were doing the exercises earnestly and sincerely, making major efforts. Which is why I started to become puzzled when I realised they didn’t work. But I always enjoyed the modelling.
http://img176.imageshack.us/img176/5843/prizonuk8.jpg
Somebody:
You are my hero.
226 Somebody
http://img176.imageshack.us/img176/5843/prizonuk8.jpg
Woooooooooooooooooooow
Dream come true!!!!!
http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/9656/greenscreenjailli3.jpg
Nuthead, Too bad we never met, must’ve been we were too busy doing the sequence! Or modelling our latest outfit in our respective clubs.
227, 228: Made me laugh today. Thanks!
160/Bass, and re: Skeptical Optimist’s comments
I honor your process. I also think Joel is right. Don’t be surprised by a major paradigm shift ten years on, though, accompanied by unexpected anger which encourages you to reclaim yourself through its power.
Re: sorting out this set of experiences called Fellowship of Friends membership, considered as a whole: I like to think of an audio mixing console running 200 audio tracks on two-inch tape. Good stuff going on on some of those channels. Bad shit going on on other channels. Your mission is to find out what’s on the tape, because it’s your life. There’s still undiscovered stuff going on (IN THE PAST OF YOUR LIFE), undiscovered because it has been drowned out by the compulsory playing of some tracks and the compulsory muting of other tracks. Stuff going on on the angry track. Stuff going on on the boundary violation track. Stuff going on on the why was I so willing to relinquish power to others track. The self preoccupation track. The blindness to others’ pain track. The precursors to dysfunctional patterns in my family of origin track. You get the picture.
As long as we are occupied with dissonance reduction, i.e., trying to make it ok that we spent years of our lives deceived, exploited and controlled, there will be pain in our lives which we can’t fully experience. Our wholeness begs us to experience that pain so that we can heal. So don’t, and I am speaking to COLLECTIVE you, and not to any individual you, even though Bass Ackward’s post led to this one, don’t be so determined to make it ok, to display the attitude, to others or yourself that, well, it was 20 years, or 30 years, that’s true, but that’s ok, it has been a good life. That may be true on some of those 200 channels, but it is definitely not true on other channels. You can’t even know about some channels because it has not ever been permissible to play them aloud.
Ambivalence: THAT’s reality, not spin.
Laura,
Sorry for your loss. Thanks for the Borges.
somebody:
That image at 228 puts me in mind of the Jarmusch movie “Down By Law”. Robert as Tom Waits and Asaf as Roberto B – “Do you know Walt Whitman?” Or, perhaps, “You scream, I scream, we all scream for ice cream” is more up their alley. (Clips on the GF site)
veronicapoe:
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. Sometimes everything seems fine in regard to my fellowship of friends past. Maybe it’s more correct to say that I want it to seem fine. Then, out of nowhere, I fall into a gaping hole of regret, or become entagled in a web of what-ifs. I’m nine years gone, but have only recently started grieving the artistic, musical life I chose to forfeit to become a fof member. I can’t get those years or that energy back and there are times when I will employ any rationalization possible to dull the pain of that blunt realization.
Leonhardon:
Surf green is the coolest of Fender’s colors.
So many good posts and photoenhancements going on…
Joel, Kid Shelleen, Crouching Tiger
Thank you!
Innernaut 212
Lovely list. For some unknown reason my favorite universes are # 5 and 17.
Draco 189
Thanks again for this post, I find your account very believable and explanatory. Robert Burton and Asaf playing with wooden cubes seems to make a lot of sense in this sea of nonsense. Just more of the same old BS sold as esoteric knowledge.
I can clearly recall the shock I received when Robert explained at a dinner that the whole 44 angels business started because, as he was asking himself the number of conscious beings working with the school, he suddenly turned around and saw a 44 motel sign.
I thought: how simple, even I could do that! Only, it would not enter my mind to build a belief system around such a mundane coincidence. That moment opened my eyes to the terrifying likelihood that these were the words of a madman, that someone so deeply buried into his own head to consider a non-event such as the above to be a good basis for a new spin on religion was more probably looney than conscious.
So the Sacred Sequence, like everything else in Burtonville, was birthed from another casual occurrence, a phrase haphazardoulsy chosen from a book, taken totally out of context and turned into something completely unrecognizable. The only thing that remains of the original meaning is the number 30, because that’s how the Psycho-teacher works: ciphers are the key to everything. And that in itself is an incredibly dangerous mind game. (BTW, the following link contains some interesting thoughts on numbers and coincidences:
http://www.shekharkapur.com/blog/archives/2006/03/looking_for_pro.htm )
I bet RB has not read the whole Conference of the Birds, and he and Asaf were just looking for random sentences containing “esoteric” numbers. In case you haven’t read it either, I am posting an excerpt from the final pages of the book for your enjoyment, and as a refreshing reminder that when one gets tired of contestless quotes, all-powerful numbers, superstitions and weird categorizations, there’s a lot of real meaning and beauty to rediscover in literature and art.
“In Attar’s ‘Conference of birds’ all the birds gather to begin a quest for the fabulous bird Simurgh, the King of Birds. The bird hoopoe symbolising inspiration tells all the birds of existence of Simurgh, who lives far away, beyond seven valleys. Many of the birds make their excuses and decide not to make the journey, eventually a group of birds makes their way across the seven valleys which are: search, love , mystic apprehension, detachment, unity, bewilderment, and fulfilment in annihilation. After many trials and tribulation across the seven valleys only thirty birds finally reach the court, at first they are turned back, but finally admitted. The crucial moment depends on a pun: ’si’ means thirty, ‘murgh’ means birds, and hence si-murgh literally means thirty birds. Once in the presence of Simurgh :
. . .
“A new life flow towards them from that bright
Celestial and ever living light.
Their souls rose free of all they had been before;
The past and all its actions were no more.
Their life came from that close, insistent sun.
And in its vivid rays they shone as one.
There in the Simurgh’s radiant face they saw themselves,
the Simurgh of the world with awe.
They gazed, and dared at last to comprehend.
They were the Simurgh and at the journey’s end.
They see the Simurgh at themselves they stare,
and see a second Simurgh standing there;
They look at both and see the two are one.
That this is that, that this, the goal won.
They ask (but inwardly; they make no sound).
The meaning of these mysteries that confound.
Their puzzled ignorance-how is it true
That ‘we’ is not distinguished here from ‘you’?
And silently their shining lord replies:
I am a mirror set before your eyes,
And all who come before my splendour see,
Themselves, their own unique reality;
You came as thirty birds, not less nor more;
If you had come as forty, fifty- here,
An answering forty, fifty would appear,
Though you have struggled, wandered, travelled far,
It is yourselves you see and what you are
‘Who see the divine? It is himself each sees;
What ant’s sight could discern the Pleiades?
What anvil could be lifted by an ant?
Or could a fly subdue an elephant?
How much you thought you knew and saw; but you
Now know that all you trusted was untrue.
Through you traversed the Valley’s depths and fought
With all the dangers that the journey brought,
The Journey was in Me, the deeds were Mine-
You slept secure in Being’s inmost shrine.
And since you came as thirty birds, you see
These thirty birds when you discover Me,
The Simurgh, Truth’s last flawless jewel, the light
In which you will be lost to mortal sight,
Dispersed to nothingness until once more
You find in Me the selves you were before.’
Then, as they listened to the Simurgh ’s words,
A trembling dissolution filled the birds-
the substance of their being was undone,
And they were lost like shades before the sun;
Neither the pilgrims nor their guide remained.
The Simurgh ceased to speak, and silence reigned”.
221 leonhardon
I believe this is the way to play Pachelbel’s Canon.
212/innernaut
The Meissen bong. I love it!
Of course, the wooden building blocks (or a duplicate set) were auctioned off for a few hundred dollars.
234 lauralupa
Thanks for that excerpt, I have never read the book, and that was wonderful.
Thanks also for that earlier “list” of the division of animals.
232 Veronicapoe: “don’t be so determined to make it ok, to display the attitude, to others or yourself that, well, it was 20 years, or 30 years, that’s true, but that’s ok, it has been a good life. That may be true on some of those 200 channels, but it is definitely not true on other channels.”
After 15 months out of the FOF and an initial period of “no regrets – it was all OK” I’m starting to see the “it was not all OK” aspects emerge. Seems like a healthy process: more “buffers” falling away, energy flowing more freely. The awareness that I and probably everyone else was psychologically messed up by being in the FOF doesn’t necessarily lead to regret, however. It’s still true to say that everything’s fine right now. But I’m very happy I got out when I did and can now start to reclaim my life.
233 Kid Shelleen
My favorite Fender finish is the one from the 50’s that came to be called “Mother of Toilet Seat”.
http://acapella.harmony-central.com/showthread.php?t=1882734
221 leonhardon
Of course, this is also an acceptable way to play the Canon. The Beaux Arts Trio never could do the face melting thing the way this guy can.
Hey Bruce,
That’s more an expression of contempt than a color! I could see Elvis making James Burton play one of those during his Vegas period. Don’t know if Roy Buchannon would have picked one up, though.
Deleted on request of the author. — ES
Thanks Laura for confirming that Robert and Asaf came up with the seaquence of nonsense after finding the idea somewhere in a book and for offering us a purer version of the Conference of the Birds without keyed interpretations.
Your interpretation of Robert is so accurate and yet, unless we are able to grant him what truly belongs to him we’ll be undermining our selves and deforming the initial vision that we granted him to seduce us with.
Two thousand people believing in a man for thirty five years are not easy to dismiss. If you allow me to continue playing the devil’s advocate to which the posts have been maliciously reduced to, Robert was and still is, capable of dismissing anything for his awareness. Was that not what we found so attractive? And was he really that lost in interpreting car plates for his own sake? Did Goethe himself not state that it rained for him? Is there anything wrong in living life as if one were connected to everything that happens? Or if not, was Robert’s deviation not in his form or process but in the marrow of his direction? And ours, in becoming fascinated by the form and process forgetting the direction he was taking, too comfortable to ride without committing our own self, in another man’s fantasy?
Too bad he expects people to dismiss everything for his presence but that is the destiny of non-existent students who have given up their own life for his, and a role in the fantasy. At the head of the line the self mutilated prime minister stumbles, giving the example to other students of the sacrifices that are necessary to belong to the monarchy of conscious beings, the road of fame in which his ascendants and descendants lie deadly in the sidewalk and the four mirrors he chose to look at himself with, broke into smaller pieces than Snow White’s.
I offer you these pieces that we may again be able to see our selves.
Deleted on request of the author. — ES
Please ignore my posts 243 ans 245. I’m getting names wrong and don’t want wrong attribution.
This is the guy I meant to refer to. I’m all fogged up.
http://luthiersaccessgroup.com/lawrence2.html
IN MEMORIUM
ALEXANDER FRANCIS HORN
August 14, 1929 – September 30, 2007
Part of an obituary – including a reference to the “Renaissance guy.”
“Alex was very talented, energetic, and had the psychological condition where HE COULD NOT BE AFRAID OF ANYTHING. I am not bragging. Almost everything Alex learned about the real Gurdjeff Work I told him at his request. But please try to understand that almost everything Alex and Ann and Sharon and the Rennaisance guy taught was nothing like what was taught by Gurdjieff or Mme de Salzman. I don’t want to hurt your feelings any more than you have been hurt. You people were truly led down a sad path and I hope you recover. What happened to Alex in the 60’s was what happens to many poor orphans: He discovered he loved money.”
Read the rest at:
http://www.thealexhornpages.blogspot.com/
Actually I don’t think it’s an Alex Horn obituary – unless by “I hope he is OK” at the end of the entire linked article, he is referring to Alex Horn in his after life.
I do wonder sometimes what happens to people like Horn and Burton after they die – given the extent to which they have severed themselves so comprehensively from their human (humane) parts.
Of course, I never knew Alex Horn, but Robert Burton is certainly a case of psychotic individual who has lost touch with reality and the ability to experience any kind of normal relationships with the people around him.
There was a long period when I felt great anger against Robert Burton. Then at some point it turned to immense pity.
246 brucelevy
Thanks, even if you did get names wrong. I have played guitar for a long time but I had never heard of a chapman stick. That was cool. I would like to see one of those up close.
Whalerider ~
“… enduring is everything.”
Hang in there, beyond promises, beyond projects and what Life nor Death can deliver, I am with you… you can be sure of this.
RB behind bars?
http://img176.imageshack.us/img176/5843/prizonuk8.jpg
That’s a good one Somebody!!!
250 God Laughing
What a great set of fine prints they’d make. I’d love to hang them. The gift that keeps on giving. I hope there will be more.
Maybe we can get Carl to run a series and offer them as an impulse item for the Oregon House General Store.
252 veronicapoe
That could potentially rend the fabric of the universe (or multiverse).
Innernaut,
Yep, that’s how I remember it. Tacobell’s Canon played 12 times a day with secret Four Season seasoning. Yum!
Thanks,
Leonhardon.
At the head of the line the self mutilated prime minister stumbles, giving the example to other students of the sacrifices that are necessary to belong to the monarchy of conscious beings, the road of fame in which his ascendants and descendants lie deadly on the sidewalk and the four mirrors he chose to look at himself with, have broken into smaller pieces than Snow White’s.
For thirty-five years they watch him break mirror after mirror without ever giving him a chance or a choice but they never tell the newcomers so that they continue to finance and support the show. Never tell; never tell. The code of silence holds the Fellowship of Friends together for thirty-four years. They love to watch how people walk themselves to hell. They suck their worn knuckles at the sight of someone more miserable than themselves and when the minister decides to look at himself in the last mirror that chose him, they themselves take it into their hands to tear it to pieces and remind him that it is not like he is now going to aspire to joy, not after thirty five years of denying everybody else any. True, he is crippled, but so what, “separate, don’t identify and keep walking you sick addict, who said joy ever made part of this game”. They don’t know who they envy more; the prime minister with his broken back and mutilated heart but the Teacher’s promise, or the new students with their youth, their money or their sex; The prime minister with his disguise of self-sacrifice but profiting from all the credits or the blank mirrors that get to travel for free. They finally manage to bring his crippled highness down five stores from the Teacher’s promise only to find that they now have to compete with six m-orally crippled teenagers.
Envy runs up and down the corridors of the Galleria where young men compete for the credentials of being the chosen one for an evening, a mourning, a moon at the noon of day to have the extension of their blooded I inflamed by a conscious mouse.
It runs up and down the road to the lodge, the winery and the dry lips of people who drained their soul competing to dis-appear; a lust for being that makes them dress and undress compulsively five times a day until they no longer know whether they are the silk dress or the Gucci shoes or what they ever looked like when they were naked.
Paranoiac envy assaults the Teacher who takes twenty-eight years to finally silence them all. He cannot bear to hear any body else talking. After he’s trained his dogs he lets them lose to bite each other’s ankles and rewards them with silk cookies. Thank you my darlings! And sends a random kiss to his trained poodles. The meeting is over and they walk out of the Galleria wagging their conscious tails.
THE ILLUSIONS OF THE EGO
[personality]:
Right Teaching and
Right Learning:
A good teacher clarifies his own ideas and strengthens them by teaching them. Teacher and pupil are alike in the learning process. They are in the same order of learning, and unless they share their lessons, conviction will be lacking. A good teacher must believe in the ideas he teaches, but he must meet another condition; he must believe in the students to whom he offers the ideas.
Many stand guard over their ideas because they want to protect their thought systems as they are, and learning means change. Change is always fearful to the separated, because they cannot conceive of it as a move towards healing the separation. They always perceive it as a move toward further separation, because the separation was their first experience of change. You believe that if you allow no change to enter into your ego you will find peace. This profound confusion is possible only if you maintain that the same thought system can stand on two foundations. Nothing can reach spirit from the ego, and nothing can reach the ego from spirit. Spirit can neither strengthen the ego nor reduce the conflict within it. The ego is a contradiction. Your self and God’s Self are in opposition. They are opposed in source, in direction and in outcome. They are fundamentally irreconcilable, because spirit cannot perceive and the ego cannot know. They are therefore not in communication and can never be in communication. Nevertheless, the ego can learn, even though its maker can be misguided. He cannot, however, make the totally
lifeless out of the life-given.
Spirit need not be taught, but the ego must be. Learning is ultimately perceived as frightening because it leads to the relinquishment, not the destruction, of the ego to the light of spirit. This is the change the ego must fear, because it does not share My charity. My lesson was like yours, and because I learned it I can teach it. I will never attack your ego, but I am trying to teach you how its thought system arose. When I remind you of your true creation, your ego cannot but respond with fear.
Teaching and learning are your greatest strengths now, because they enable you to change your mind and help others to change theirs. Refusing to change your mind will not prove that the separation has not occurred. The dreamer who doubts the reality of his dream while he is still dreaming is not really healing his split mind. You dream of a separated ego and believe in a world that rests upon it. This is very real to you. You cannot undo it by not changing your mind about it. If you are willing to renounce the role of guardian of your thought system and open it to Me, I will correct it very gently and lead you back to God.
Every good teacher hopes to give his students so much of his own learning that they will one day no longer need him. This is the one true goal of the teacher. It is impossible to convince the ego of this, because it goes against all of its own laws. But remember that laws are set up to protect the continuity of the system in which the lawmaker believes. It is natural for the ego to try to protect itself once you have made it, but it is not natural for you to want to obey its laws unless you believe them. The ego cannot make this choice because of the nature of its origin. You can, because of the nature of your origin.
Egos can clash in any situation, but spirit cannot clash at all. If you perceive a teacher as merely “a larger ego” you will be afraid, because to enlarge an ego would be to increase anxiety about separation. I will teach with you and live with you if you will think with Me, but My goal will always be to absolve you finally from the need for a teacher. This is the opposite of the ego-oriented teacher’s goal. He is concerned with the effect of his ego on other egos, and therefore interprets their interaction as a means of ego preservation. I would not be able to devote Myself to teaching if I believed this, and you will not be a devoted teacher as long as you believe it. I am constantly being perceived as a teacher either to be exalted or rejected, but I do not accept either perception for Myself.
Your worth is not established by teaching or learning. Your worth is established by God. As long as you dispute this everything you do will be fearful, particularly any situation that lends itself to the belief in superiority and inferiority. Teachers must be patient and repeat their lessons until they are learned. I am willing to do this, because I have no right to set your learning limits for you. Again, –
nothing you do or think or wish or make is necessary to establish your worth. This point is not debatable except in delusions. Your ego is never at stake because God did not create it. Your spirit is never at stake because He did. Any confusion on this point is delusional, and no form of devotion is possible as long as this delusion lasts.
The ego tries to exploit all situations into forms of praise for itself in order to overcome its doubts. It will remain doubtful as long as you believe in its existence. You who made it cannot trust it, because in your right mind you realize it is not real. The only sane solution is not to try to change reality, which is indeed a fearful attempt, but to accept it as it is. You are part of reality, which stands unchanged beyond the reach of your ego but within easy reach of spirit. When you are afraid, be still and know that God is real, and you are His beloved Son in whom He is well pleased. Do not let your ego dispute this, because the ego cannot know what is as far beyond its reach as you are.
God is not the author of fear. You are. You have chosen to create unlike Him, and have therefore made fear for yourself. You are not at peace because you are not fulfilling your function. God gave you a very lofty function that you are not meeting. Your ego has chosen to be afraid instead of meeting it. When you awaken you will not be able to understand this, because it is literally incredible. Do not believe the incredible now. Any attempt to increase its believableness is merely to postpone the inevitable. The word “inevitable” is fearful to the ego, but joyous to the spirit. God is inevitable, and you cannot avoid Him any more than He can avoid you.
The ego is afraid of the spirit’s joy, because once you have experienced it you will withdraw all protection from the ego, and become totally without investment in fear. Your investment is great now because fear is a witness to the separation, and your ego rejoices when you witness to it. Leave it behind! Do not listen to it and do not preserve it. Listen only to God, Who is as
incapable of deception as is the spirit He created. Release yourself and release others. Do not present a false and unworthy picture of yourself to others, and do not accept such a picture of them yourself.
The ego has built a shabby and unsheltering home for you, because it cannot build otherwise. Do not try to make this impoverished house stand. Its weakness is your strength. Only God could make a home that is worthy of His creations, who have chosen to leave it empty by their own dispossession. Yet His home will stand forever, and is ready for you when you choose to enter it. Of this you can be wholly certain. God is as incapable of creating the perishable as the ego is of making the eternal.
Of your ego you can do nothing to save yourself or others, but of your spirit you can do everything for the salvation of both. Humility is a lesson for the ego, not for the spirit. Spirit is beyond humility, because it recognizes its radiance and gladly sheds its light everywhere. The meek shall inherit the earth because their egos are humble, and this gives them truer perception. The Kingdom of Heaven is the spirit’s right, whose beauty and dignity are far beyond doubt, beyond perception, and stand forever as the mark of the Love of God for His creations, who are wholly worthy of Him and only of Him. Nothing else is sufficiently worthy to be a gift for a creation of God Himself.
I will substitute for your ego if you wish, but never for your spirit. A father can safely leave a child with an elder brother who has shown himself responsible, but this involves no confusion about the child’s origin. The brother can protect the child’s body and his ego, but he does not confuse himself with the father because he does this. I can be entrusted with your body and your ego only because this enables you not to be concerned with them, and lets Me teach you their unimportance. I could not understand their importance to you if I had not once been tempted to believe in them Myself. Let us undertake to learn this lesson together so we can be free of them together. I need devoted teachers who share My aim of healing the mind. Spirit is far beyond the need of your protection or Mine. Remember this:
In this world you need not have tribulation because I have overcome the world. That is why you should be of good
cheer.
[Excerpted from: A Course In Miracles. Does any of this make sense to you?]
In a ‘IMO Nutshell’ ~
First points (sorta) are ~
“Nothing can reach spirit from the ego, and nothing can reach the ego from spirit.
They are fundamentally irreconcilable, because spirit cannot perceive and the ego cannot know.”
________________________________
Second point(s) (sorta #2) are ~
“Spirit need not be taught, but the ego must be. Learning is ultimately perceived as frightening because it leads to the relinquishment, not the destruction, of the ego to the light of spirit.”
_________________________________
If nothing can reach the ‘ego’ from the ’spirit’ then how then the line “the ego must be.” (?)
If the ‘ego’ cannot be reached by the ’spirit’ then how then the “relinquishment… of ego” via the “light of the spirit”(?)
_______________________________________________
It’s this sort of Barney Rubble nonsense that keeps many ‘things’ spinning in retrograde… good grief.
This sort of writing is made out of a deep wish to understand contradictions (wishing for the sake of the state of wishing; too much reading and not enough being the words, IMO…) by means of contradicting ones need for redemption from desire by embedding irreconcilable points of view so to keep the desiring circular, not linear…
Yet, whoever is doing the wishing is not looking to the stars of Reason and Conscience, rather, is seemingly looking towards contradictory, intellectual-sex-energy- draining profundities; one side belonging to their ‘essential self’ (the source of the yearning) and (ironically enough) the other side, their ‘ego’, that thinking apparatus that cranks out this sort of intellectual self-copulation, giving birth to nothing more than the desire to be pregnant with one half of the seed and not the other, i.e., (IMO) reconciliation and honoring the present without ones making extra-trouble of it through prayers to a ‘Dead God’, i.e., the brain on brain.
_______________________________________________
A Course in The Hall of Mirrors; we’ve all been there I believe and or are headed in that direction so to see ourselves through the wild form it is.
Good luck and never go into a Hall of Mirrors without a BB gun or sling shot if you’re in the 17th century.
_____________________________________
l.t.y.a.
Bruce,
Very cool vid, very musical player. Oh, and Coral Pink is the other very cool Fender color, but one must be very secure in one’s masculinity to strap on a pink guitar or bass at the Dew Drop Inn.
James,
The Chapman Sick has been around quite awhile. Tony Levin was one of the first big name musicians I saw use one and that was with King Crimson in the early eighties. I’m sure a search of youtube will reveal more.
Uno,
I hear what you’re saying, but some folks may need to think their way through this paradigm and come out the other side just as we trudged through the fellowship of friends model. It seems to take a certain kind of person to live without these myths and stories at all. Probably not me.
Hello Kid Shelleen ~
You wrote ~
“…but some folks may need to think their way through this paradigm and come out the other side just as we trudged through the fellowship of friends model.”
__________________________
Yes, I mentioned this ~
“A Course in The Hall of Mirrors; we’ve all been there I believe and or are headed in that direction so to see ourselves through the wild form it is.”
______________________________
“… so to see ourselves through…”
______________________________
Kid Shelleen,
We’re in the same book, perhaps just on different flip sides of the same page; it’s when one cannot step back from the profound, simultaneous front-ness and back-ness of the mirrors ‘power’ of showing yesterday, wish (mirror, mirror on the wall…etc.) and tomorrow… that one gets stuck in the card catalog and never gets to hold the actual book its referencing… that is what I wish to support, ’simple’ movement away from the card catalog…
__________________________________
l.t.y.a.
Newly moderated comments: 183, 214, 225, 230, 252 and 253.
From a Social Security Death Index search:
Name
ALEXANDER HORN
Birth
14 Aug 1929
Death
30 Sep 2007
Last Residence
10011 (New York, New York, NY)
SSN
565-36-0399
Birthplace
California
And the Rest of The Story ~ A QUOTE ~
___________________________________
Saturday, December 22, 2007
I knew Alex Horn in College at the U of Chicago from 1949 when I was 16 to 1952 and then until 1969. I was never in a group of Alex and/or Ann’s. I was in a group at the Gurdjieff foundation in NYC from 1956 until 1963. I could say many things about the absurd cruelty of some of the teachers there. Lord Pentland only knew Gurdjieff for one week. Jeanne de Salzman answered questions of mine at meetings and she was VERY kind and helpful to me. She was the real thing. Alex was almost always friendly to me. In the 50’s we would go to ball games at the polo grounds. We once saw Stan Musial hit a 505 foot line drive to center field. We would have long discussions about Alex’s favorite books, Paidea: Ideals of Greek Culture, and Stanislavsky and Tolstoy’s What do men live for. He would ask me to attend his play rehearsals and comment. Alex was put in an orphanage in Chicago when his father died when Alex was 11. He loved his father very much. I believe much of his human kindness to me was an attempt to treat me like his father had treated him. Alex was very talented, energetic, and had the psychological condition where HE COULD NOT BE AFRAID OF ANYTHING. I am not bragging. Almost everything Alex learned about the real Gurdjeff Work I told him at his request. But please try to understand that almost everything Alex and Ann and Sharon and the Rennaisance guy taught was nothing like what was taught by Gurdjieff or Mme de Salzman. I don’t want to hurt your feelings any more than you have been hurt. You people were truly led down a sad path and I hope you recover. What happened to Alex in the 60’s was what happens to many poor orphans: He discovered he loved money. We argued sometimes about this. Me – Money is nothing. Alex – Money is everything. I have not seen Alex since 1969-70. As we were jolly friends in our younger days I hope he is OK. **
_________________________
** See Post #252 for the website location
Interesting…he doesn’t say if the Musial line drive was a homerun or not. What esoteric meaning might this omission portend?
Somebody 229,232
bruce and veronicapoe 257, 258
Actually, if Somebody (or anyone who has images to contribute) so wishes, he could easily upload high resolutions of his images on a print-on-demand website like
http://www.cafepress.com/
and choose a number of ways to print them (posters and prints, but also t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, notecards, etcetera). Then anyone who wants to, could buy the prints or objects directly from the site, which also takes care of shipping. Setting up shop on these kinds of websites is free, since they make money on the base price of what you sell.
This could also be a fun idea to use for fundraising.
Interesting page:
http://www.esotericfreedom.com/Lineage.html
262 Wouldn’t you like to know: “Does any of this make sense to you?”
Not really.
“I need devoted teachers who share My aim of healing the mind.”
Hmmm……
253 Spoonful: “I do wonder sometimes what happens to people like Horn and Burton after they die.”
A friend of mine who sees things in Christian terms these days is of the opinion that Burton will burn in hell for hundreds of thousands of years.
I think Peckipah should do the screenplay (Elena can flesh out the dialogue) & Levy should produce.
5th Verse “My Back Pages” Words & Music by Bob Dylan:
“In a soldiers stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My existence led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I’m younger that that now.”
Yes Nuthead, I had conjured up that though myself. Though taking a Dante’s “Inferno” approach, he might equally be forced to his knees, surrounded by a circle of naughty boys and made to perform non stop fellatio for hundreds of thousands of years.
Though maybe he wouldn’t need to be forced! He must have several thousand under his belt already. One hell of a start!
273
I think having his ‘Holy prison, behind bars blues portrait’ being embossed on 15,000,000 Oregon House ceramic coffee cups, with a morale of the story quote from one of Bruce’s posts and reinforced with titanium edges, would be of greater use.
“I do wonder sometimes what happens to people like Horn and Burton after they die”
My guess is Robert will go to Robert hell;
He will live alone in a small mud hut,
have dreadlocks and wash his own spandex underwear for eternity.
His impressions will be a Green Peace calendar and a Lava Lamp.
He will wear a beige nylon suit and sports shoes with red lights in the heels that flash as he walks. The trousers will have bell bottoms, be too short in the leg, too wide at the waist and be held up with a piece of string. The jacket will have lapels that extend to his armpits and underneath he will wear a Garth Brooks t-shirt with barbecue sauce stains. His socks will have holes in them and will not match.
He will be coerced into performing cunilingus six times a day
upon a God in a housewifes body who never bathes.
She will interupt him constantly and remind him frequently that none of his predictions were accurate. She will live next door in palatial splendor. On Saturdays he will wear a boilersuit and Galoshes and be forced to knit scarves for orphans in the baking sun. On Sunday he will play tuba in the Salvation army band
Everyone he meets will think he’s a total bore and ignore him.
He will drive every Friday evening to Grocery Outlet in a beige colored Pinto with an eight track player and a single tape of Yanni’s first album. He will catch himself whistling the tunes. He will be expected to shop frugally.
He will work by day as a feminist rights advocate.
He will cook his own food and it will be tofu.
And that’s just the first week!
Love,
Leonhardon.
Spoonful 225
Yes, we’ve got some more soul brothers and sisters out there…
Thanks for the very interesting link, I have just read this page and found it a perfect match for our little situation here.
http://www.esotericfreedom.com/Shadow.html
lauralupa.
Did you get round to reading the esotericfreedom blog? That’s kind of insightful. Horn, Gans, Burton – a really dysfunctional line.
The question is, who will carry the flameless torch after Burton?
Especially given that the Fellowship Of Friends is the greatest School after Christ’s. Did Christ have a school incidentally?
Here’s the blog address:
http://esotericfreedom.blogspot.com/2007/08/greetings-and-salutations.html
Hi Kid Shelleen,
Yep, Shell Pink is coooool! Have you seen the Candy Tangerine Tele.?
http://www.fender.com/resources/colors/
By the way was trying to find a post of yours from way back when, (I think it was you). You wrote about RB in connection with a baseball strike and a wrong date and the subsequent prediction. Can’t find it any longer, do you have it saved somewhere or would you tell the tale again?
Thanks,
Leonhardon.
leonhardon 277:
Your vivid description matches some of those folk who used to – and most likely still do – (co)inhabit those trailers you would often spot passing through Dobbins. With yards full of junk, dogs that look like wolves and often a beige colored Pinto parked in the drive.
So maybe he doesn’t have to go all the way to hell… if it’s on his doorstep.
279 Spoonful: “The question is, who will carry the flameless torch after Burton?”
He is now predicting that the human race, other than FOF members who are current with their donations, will be expunged in 2012. Then a new civilisation will arise, with the FOF as the Ark. All the wonderful art that has been collected, including the Galleria ceiling, will set the style for generations to come. There will be no music other than Pacherbel’s Canon, Bach’s Air On A G String, and the 2nd movement of Rodrigo’s Concerto De Aranjuez. The Sequence will be the new religion. Everyone will be a true believer. The flameless torch will be ignited at last!
Since he predicted his own death at age 72 (it is in the Mt. Carmel Journals somewhere between 1976 and 1978, a death “which is but a moment from now,” it appears he will not be around in 2012 to verify the accuracy of his prediction.
Please forgive the non sequitur — dedicated to those still trapped by circumstance and “systems” — my hope is that you may experience freedom.
“The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done –that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.”
R. Buckminster Fuller
“Run from anything that may not strengthen your precious wings. Run like hell from anyone likely to put a knife into the sacred vision of your heart. You have a duty to befriend those
aspects of obedience that stand outside your house and shout to reason ‘O please, Come out and play.’ You have not come here to take prisoners or to confine your wondrous spirit,
but to expereince ever and ever more deeply, courage, freedom, and light!”
Paraphrased from Rumi
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
(And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;)
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same:)
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
(If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,)
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son
Thanks ton. Here’s another non sequitur:
It’s an espn column about a young man who was able to dupe a large number of people with a clever set of lies. Reminds me of someone we know.
College “recruit’s” lie a tale gone horribly wrong
The small-town football player involved in the most bizarre recruiting story, well, ever, answered the phone on the third ring.
“I’m not going to make any comment on it,” said Kevin Hart, his voice subdued, almost sad. “I don’t mean to be impolite. I’m just going to hang up the phone.”
A moment later, click.
Thursday was not a good day for Hart. How could it be? The sheriff’s department wanted to talk to him again.
But Wednesday was worse. Wednesday is when the pride of Fernley High School admitted that he had lied to the police, to his family, his friends, his teachers, his coaches, his teammates, his classmates, and anyone else in a small Nevada town who thought Hart was going to be the first Vaqueros player to receive a Division I football scholarship.
“I’ve been with the Lyon County Sheriff’s office for 18 years,” said Lt. Rob Hall, “and I’ve never seen anything like this.”
A week ago, in front of television cameras and a packed high school gymnasium, the 6-5, 290-pound offensive guard placed two baseball caps on a table — a Cal Bears cap on his right, an Oregon Ducks cap on his left — and then, after a dramatic pause, put the blue-and-gold Cal hat on his head.
“They really won me over,” Hart told reporters. “Coach [Jeff] Tedford and I talked a lot, and the fact that the head coach did most of the recruiting of me kind of gave me the real personal experience.”
Actually, the Cal head coach barely knew he existed. That’s because there was no scholarship offer. Not from Cal. Not from Oregon. Not from anywhere. Hart made it up. He made everything up.
What began six months ago as a small, ego-driven lie, somehow gained weight and strength and grew into an uncontrollable hoax. It enveloped a school, a town, a family and maybe a future.
Chin strap-deep in his own confused dishonesty, Hart issued a statement Wednesday through the county school district saying that he fabricated it all.
“I wanted to play D-I ball more than anything,” he said in the statement. “When I realized that wasn’t going to happen, I made up what I wanted to be reality.”
——————–
Anyway, Happy Friday everyone.
#277
Priceless!
284 ton
Thanks ton. Those were both great. I had not read any quotes from ol’ Bucky Fuller in a long time. He was truly an amazing guy.
#283 Veronicapoe
I heard or read that prediction also, along with the prediction that his death would be at the hands of his own students.
Maybe he will get one right, but I doubt it.
Opus 111- I was thinking the same thing. Perhaps “Somebody” could photoshop that image behind bars. Priceless.
Mr.(?) Hardon, you so funny.
Thank you ‘ton’ for the Rumi paraphrase; I needed that…
_____________
It’s interesting how the mind works, then there’s a “certain something else” that Grand Dad G. used to write about so well…
I was thinking yesterday that after Robert Burton is ‘gone’, it will not be so much the fingerprints on the inside of his glass jar we will be busy with, but rather the fingerprints on the outside of the jar, i.e., our own… some have ‘the jar’ in their basements, others in their glove compartments, pockets, mantles and even buried in the neighbors back yard…
If one looks at the enormous buffers it takes for Robert Burton to life with the pangs of his conscience, and if not, then those of others, IMO, the Christian (or Buddhist) idea of Hell would pale in relation to the friction he would benefit from if he was delivered to Heaven, after all, it is only mankind who can keep the meanings of Heaven and Hell then switch the titles and smile while chewing on a peanut butter cup.
It’s odd that one would wish upon anyone punishment without the possibility of some sort of redemption or transformation: is it not punishment that simply makes demons deeper and more expert at evading next time?
At least that’s how it works out down here on earth and I am not sure if Hell has any surprises that humanity has not already copy written (?)
I suppose it’s normal to have that “Eye for an Eye” knee jerk reaction when it comes to being hurt, etc., by another and believe me, I know a bit about that one… Yet (not that I do not support Robert Burton and clan going to get some rehabilitative solitary kudos from a blank wall), perhaps it’s just the talk about the ‘after death stuff’ that bugs me a little, the area of a being’s jurisdiction that most will not be able to verify (yet) what’s going on anyways…
Wishing is one thing, intent another… I understand that most of Leonhardon’s post was ‘tongue in cheek’, yet, I would support some deeper ‘informational prayers’ directed towards Robert Burton’s being and those enabling his reign of Sleeping Beauty Sleeping Pills… Bad intentions cause a sort of ‘cancer’, IMO, because one’s own level of being cannot actualize the mind activity’s steps to any sort of reconciled destination, so, laughing in circles it goes, off into Robert Frost’s Forest to ‘fence sit’ another day…
Then there’s ‘personal ceremony’, a time where a person can sit down with themselves (and memories) and concentrate some intention outwards (into the Past and Present) and really feel it radiating, like a sun and know that you’ve done your utmost with the part of you, perhaps in one’s magnetic center days, that felt was not going to take this lifetime laying down ’six feet under’…
In Egypt there’s two forms of ‘justice’, the Police (Christian Religiousnesses) and an Arabian Sitting…
I once used the idea of having a Arabian Sitting instead of going to the bureaucracy of the Police and got my investments back before sunrise: an Arabian Sitting is what Robert Burton would get in Heaven, IMO… the Police Department (unbeknown to the wisdom of The Fellowship of Friends) knows nothing of spirit, conscience and how to ‘fix’ (adhere) upon the ‘one in the middle’ of the sitting circle just the right creation of memory to send that being into the throws of their own inner sense (or nonsense)… either way, they’ve directed justice towards the hub (the being-cause) and not the tire (altogether, the being’s effects upon others)…
You might ask, how much revenge could a person enact upon another till it begins to double back unknowingly upon themselves? How does one really know when the bill has been paid… Many families effected by Death row inmates actions swear that ‘death’ is not punishment enough (?) Do these ‘people’ in the throes of their incredibly painful and soul wrenching losses sense some truth that the “Eye for an Eye” simply is ignorant of or is it that a system of illusory punishment has been put in place by man’s subliminal desire to keep the drama (?)
Pain, anguish, frustration and extreme embarrassment are not always ‘teachers’ or ‘redeemers’ for the criminally possessed; actually, at times, it’s ‘mother’s milk’ to them… go figure and be careful with your thoughts, instead of righting Robert Burton’s wrongs with visions of Hell’s Punishments, you may be creating a Frankenstein with his many ‘dead parts’.
________________________
L.t.y.a.
P.S.
“…either way, they’ve directed justice towards the hub (the being-cause) and not the tire (altogether, the being’s effects upon others)…
________________
“they’ve directed” refers to the participants of the Arabian Sitting.
Today from Mister Burton, that is to say THE TEACHING OF IGNORANCE
Position in a real church is determined by presence,
and the amount of presence PRODUCED by one’s sequence
is what counts.
288 unoanimo
Thank you unoanimo. You wrote:
“It’s odd that one would wish upon anyone punishment without the possibility of some sort of redemption or transformation: is it not punishment that simply makes demons deeper and more expert at evading next time?”
When I look inside and at my own journey, it certainly does seem that what we judge and what we try to punish in ourselves, does have the effect of driving those ‘demons’ deeper’ and more difficult to uncover.
Listened to one of those utube thingies of Eckhart Tolle a while back. He said (paraphrased), that when we see unconsciousness in ourselves or outside of ourselves, that it is all the same. He suggested not to judge it, because really, No One is there, it is just unconsciousness.
Perhaps our job, whether internal or external is just to try and bring or allow light to enter, and maybe we cannot even ‘bring’ it, but just need to sort of ‘get the hell out of the way’(whatever that might mean), so it can enter. The Light apparently does its own work and has its own effects.
Further thoughts on Justice:
I have always abhorred that old testament revenge style of retribution – though I shall be the first to confess on certain occasions I’ve often felt the desire for it. When it grips, it has the tenacity of a limpet! I don’t wish that kind of justice on Robert Burton or anyone else.
The form of justice I advocate (and it’s something I wish on myself on a daily basis for actions I have undertaken while unconscious i.e. asleep), is that there comes a time when you are made conscious of what you are doing / have done. For a person who is emotionally, psychologically alive, I believe this is an on-going process. We observe the times we were asleep to another’s needs, for example and then try to be more awake for them.
Unfortunately, with regard to Robert Burton I sense this process has completely atrophied. He has no “alive” place from which such a self critical observation can function – (call it soul if one likes). Either it has been constantly ignored, run over rough shod by identifications with worldly matters, or extinguished by other means. Any reference he does make to it, is often no more than a mechanical gesture – such as the – Jesus style – finger to the forehead.
So what would entail justice for Robert Burton? That one day someone or something would re-ignite this spark within those ashes – in a word, for him to be able to see himself. To be able to look into a crystal clear mirror and recognise the pain / torment he has inflicted on others by his ignorance – from being asleep to those genuine values – which by setting himself up as a self proclaimed teacher, have been his responsibility to pass on to his students. His failure to do so is because a selfless teaching can only be realised and passed on by a person who is truly conscious – not masquerading as such.
I know this may be wishful thinking on my part, but such a realisation could be a kind of hell in itself. Yet I still to discover an alternative explanation for what was a very unsatisfactory phase of my life when it came to the work and putting my trust in a “teacher”, who for so many years was able to convince me that he (his school) was the sole access point to… call it what you will! Yes, I learnt a lot, but one can spend a life time learning “what it is not” – examples abound!
I sense that such enlightened masters are very rare. Neither am I suggesting that evolving consciousness does not entail pain or suffering on the way, but at some point it must embrace “love”.
291Pensate un attimo
“Position in a real church is determined by presence, and the amount of presence PRODUCED by one’s sequence is what counts.” Love, Robert?
Thank you Pensate un attimo for such a jewel. Robert may not be a conscious being but he can say in two lines what I’ve been trying to say in five hundred. Pity his diplomatic talent has raped and continues to ex
That was a mistake but if it goes through it doesn’t matter! It’s up to you Sheik and thank you for hosting.
291
Pensate un attimo
“Position in a real church is determined by presence, and the amount of presence PRODUCED by one’s sequence is what counts.” Love, Robert?
Thank you Pensate un attimo for such a jewel. Robert may not be a conscious being but he can say in two lines what I’ve been trying to say in five hundred. Pity his diplomatic talent has raped and continues to exploit fifteen thousand people and they love it. Many don’t even consider themselves victims but people who are blessed by his presence and get a “high” from just looking at him.
“Position”= a role in the hierarchy of the Fellowship of Friends,
“In a real church” = that’s new! So now they are finally a dogmatic church that can do anything with its students and not a school? Of course, even in Schools the Teacher has to listen to its students. Mr. Haven, you must be having a hell of a hard time fitting that one into a rational statement but I guess now that you fitted the statement that he’s not human but divine, it is not that difficult to make sense of it.
“determined by presence” = or the student’s ability to condone everything the teacher rapes.
“and the amount of presence PRODUCED by one’s sequence is what counts” = or how much you’re willing to disintegrate in words repeated automatically so that he can rape the rest of you without obstacles.
“Position” is the same as “be” and it is what everyone in this world is struggling for. “Participation” and the only thing instinctive hierarchies can deny others from through imaginary status that limits the participation. You can’t eat because you don’t have money, you can’t talk because you are not educated, you can’t be loved because we don’t like you, you are invading the privacy of our imaginary boundaries.
The sequence works because it has given students the illusion that they are alive, that they can be, think and feel, move, talk and pray but they can only do any of these things as long as they accept the Fellowship of Friends as “the way of life”. It is a systematically perfectioned tool to keep the brainwashing in active development and completely fulfill the formatory apparatus. It is the program in the raw disc that replaces student’s actual lives.
It is nevertheless a great thing to hear him giving out such quotes because he is trying to explain and command and is therefore under pressure to do so. Students are gaining space and he is having to try to put them back into the status quo in which HE, the magnificent, is the one who decides who has enough presence to deserve a position in the Fellowship of Friends, a role. As I’ve been trying to convey for a year, regular society allows for people to acquire “position” or a role through economic power, academic prestige or overrated talent of deformed human beings that spend a lifetime hitting a ball, in tennis, soccer or the other massive television shows but the Fellowship of Friends has replaced all of people’s qualifications by the capacity students have to tolerate and finance Robert Burton’s lifestyle. The boys, the trips, the clothes, the extravaganzas, the painted ceilings with naked students, the Louis XVI clock, the compulsive auctions, the private house for the serial whores. He has destroyed student’s imaginary picture and replaced it for The Picture in which what is of value is their talent to see in Robert Burton and the Fellowship of Friends the last conscious school on the planet. The Arc that will save mankind’s culture and human values, sorry, divine values, because they had to give away with the human to sanctify the satanic practices of exploiting people economically, emotionally, physically and sexually. “Satanic” or just “mechanical” as The System would call them.
“You can’t eat because you don’t have money, you can’t talk because you are not educated, you can’t be loved because we don’t like you, you are invading the privacy of our imaginary boundaries.” They’ve been raped for so long that they don’t know the difference between being raped and being made love to. They condemn lovers to the cross and sanctify rapists.
“Friends, Romans, countrymen lend me your ears!
I come to bury Caesar not to praise him!”
Anyone with any factual evidence of unlawful practice, please “get up stand up, stand up for your rights”.
And send a letter to Susan!
You can click on the Wiki link at the top of this page and look at whats required.
It is probably helpful that we endlessly complain here on the Sheiks blog and I believe that it does have an effect on those would be or actual students who stumble in here, but from my pov we could do more.
Susan should have my letter now and perhaps this is one of those instances where one thinks ah someone else will do it I neednt bother….
Well not this time …. We need YOU !
lt isnt just going to happen at least thats my opinion although there are it seems many who believe that the fof is in its death throes, and will not last much longer.
Robert Burton seems to be the kind of bear whose fur shit doesnt stick to.
Or he uses rabbits to remove it.
Or at least he can afford lawyers who specialize in fur cleansing.
I can picture him jet setting around from a new base in Switzerland if we don’t collectively and individually make some effort to make it otherwise.
WARNING !!! please do not watch the video below if you are of an overly sensitive nature or squeamish in any way.
But I think for those of you who do you will get the symbolism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di5jiNQ3ZMo
dont say I didn’t warn you.
Jack
Ps good luck to all.
292 Spoonful: “So what would entail justice for Robert Burton? That one day someone or something would re-ignite this spark within those ashes – in a word, for him to be able to see himself. To be able to look into a crystal clear mirror and recognise the pain / torment he has inflicted on others by his ignorance”
Don’t hold your breath.
291 James McLemore
Perhaps our job, whether internal or external is just to try and bring or allow light to enter, and maybe we cannot even ‘bring’ it, but just need to sort of ‘get the hell out of the way’(whatever that might mean), so it can enter. The Light apparently does its own work and has its own effects.
———————————-
James, thank you for this.
Frankenstein, precisely. A ’spiritual’ monster cobbled together from old dead parts giving his creators what they want. A church with a position in it.
Just as in the great science fiction movie ‘Forbidden Planet’ It is a monster created within utopia, out from their own unconscious fear and darkness which turns on them and destroys them.
Here’s a point of view that might apply to parts of the current discussion concerning “justice”, retribution, karma etc. This is not intended as an endorsement of theosophical philosophy, when it comes to answering questions about life after life, it is for me speculation — as the blind man said “we shall see” (or not). So I included a “caveat” as counterbalance, it concerns belief systems and pitfalls thereof — the latter quote is intended as counterbalance to the former. Enjoy.
“Death and Beyond…The departed, consisting of the astral body and Ego (known as the Jiva in Hindu philosophy), now journeys into a condition known as Kamaloca (Purgatory, Place of Burning desires, Moon sphere). This is not yet the pure spiritual world. Here the departed experiences his life sequentially but in a backward manner. The last day of his life is experienced, then the day before and so on. Now he does not experience what he had experienced himself but what his companions and the environment experienced through him and his deeds. Hence if he had been cruel to his wife and children and inflicted physical or mental pain then he will feel the pain that they had experienced except to a much heightened degree. Yes, the departed can have a painful and an unpleasant time if his actions on earth had caused pain and suffering but he now objectively sees how imperfect he has become and now resolves to make amends for his past misdeeds. This is the first step in the shaping of karma for the future life on earth. There are many earthly habits and cravings, which we can acquire which do not progress spiritual growth, in fact these can actually hamper spiritual development. Even though we lose our physical and life bodies after death we still retain all our acquired earthly habits, desires, likes and dislikes as these reside within the soul body. Hunger is a spiritual aspect of the physical body, and hence its satisfaction is quite right and proper as it assists man in evolving further in the physical body but taking the matter one step further the satisfaction of gourmet taste buds where one pursues food for the taste experience or being a wine connoisseur, over obsession with :- money, sexual desires, power and material goods are purely earthly acquired pleasures which are not of a spiritual origin and do not have a place in the pure spiritual world into which the departed will journey further. In Kamaloca the departed experience an immense desire for these acquired earthly pleasures but with no physical organs to satisfy these desires the departed experience a burning thirst and immeasurable pain for these pleasures.”
“Caveat”
Belief, by definition, depends on suspension of critical judgement. The power of beliefs inheres mainly in the fact that they cannot be judged, rationally refuted, or critically disproven—or proven. They are ‘unfalsifiable.’ Beliefs may be patently absurd and ridiculous on face value, but those who adopt them are empowered because beliefs are unfalsifiable—no one can prove that the world was created by a giant gnome who lived on the dark side of the moon, but no one can disprove it, either—they seem to have a power that defies and surpasses reason. This is one aspect of their appeal. The other is that beliefs provide answers to questions such as ‘Where does life begin?, that cannot be answered easily, if at all. People frequently say that such answers (most notably about life after death) console and encourage us and life would be intolerable without them—but this statement is also just a belief. Not having tried to live without these consoling beliefs, we do not know how life would be, stripped of such beliefs. We believe that it would be intolerable to live without unsupported and unverifiable beliefs to answer the unanswered questions that life puts before us. The strength of this belief, rather than the unverifiable answers we settle for, is what deters us even trying to live without dependence on beliefs. So, the specious power that excels reason, and the consolation of unverifiable answers are the two primary appeals of belief; and there is a third. What we believe is usually an unexamined idea or conviction uncritically received from others and shared with many others, hence, it is basic to our identity. In most cases, children believe what they are told to believe, period. (The truth is, children can resist with determination what they are told to believe, but with no one to confirm their resistence and support their dissent, they gradually comply and come to forget their objections, stifling the feelings that came with them.) In adopting beliefs, children naturally identify with those who share those beliefs, and who insistently impart them. The transmission of belief, hugely celebrated in high-toned rhetoric about spiritual and cultural tradition, is actually one of the great, unadmitted tragedies of the human condition.”
http://www.metahistory.org/index.php
Nuthead 296
I’m not! I would have expired long ago! I’m mortal.
Incidentally the world record for holding one’s breath is 9 minutes and 8 seconds (free dive) and 15 minutes and 2 seconds after inhaling 20 minutes of pure oxygen.
Though Robert might be able to hold it longer!
Thanks spoonful,
Do you live in the P and are a diver yourself?
I love mortals.
Thanks for your contributions.
I too wish that Robert could see what is happening and the hurt he is causing. I saw a session of Marshall Rosenberg when he works with rapists who had raped their daughters.
This is real conciousness/ bringing issues in the light.
I wish we could get Rosenberg to Robert and several of his boys. I would pay for that, if possible.
I see a whole healing in that aspect. A healing on a grand scale…….
Wish it would happen.
Another Name,
It’s a pandemic! Robert Burton is one of many nodes where such a disease erupts. Like the stress points on the earth’s crust out of which lava spumes forth. A quick look in the papers tells that we can’t have too much healing in the way you describe. Burton is an issue for us because we’ve had his cold – which many of us are still trying to shake off, with varying degrees of success.
But then are all diseases bad? Or do they serve a function? Well, I guess – providing it’s not fatal!
As for our contribution to the healing process, we must start small – with ourselves – and hope it becomes infectious.
“Infectious healing” – I like the sound of that.
We’re all in need of healing if we work with assumption we have become separated.
Isn’t healing becoming whole? As in “Self” or “No Self” – it doesn’t matter! When one is healed, it no longer becomes a issue!
~~~~~
I’m not a diver. I only like sea water if it’s warm and I can see my toes.
300 Spoonful: “Though Robert might be able to hold it longer!”
Hold what longer?
302 Spoonful (of what, pray tell?)
Robert Burton is one of many nodes where such a disease erupts. Like the stress points on the earth’s crust out of which lava spumes forth.
Uh, sounds a lot like acne, yes?
JoelF
279 Spoonful: “The question is, who will carry the flameless torch after Burton?”
A student said me ” Might be worse, ¿Can you imagine if instead of men Robert was interested in women?”
And I imagined “Yes, would be worse, worse for Robert of course.”
¿Asaf? ¿Dorian? ¿Mihai? ¿Can you imagine?
“Yes, would be worse, worse for them.”
Connecting with this and 274 Mick Danger “…..I think Peckipah should do the screenplay…..”
I see entering Isis a Wild Bunch, sounding Bob Dylan’s music for “Pat Garret and Billy the kid”, walking little by little to the gallery and……..
Nuthead 303
Yes, I agree that could be open to interpretation. I can think of few areas where Robert might be required to hold something. “The Sequence” comes to mind and he being the most practised at it, I can only assume he can “hold” it the longer than anyone else.
That said, the phrase “gagging for it” springs to mind. This might involve some form of breath control. I’ll have to check into it.
~~~~~~~~
Skeptical Optimist
Reflecting over a cappuccino, I realise my “fire and brimstone” analogy was probably a little OTT. But I sense you got the gist.
As for Spoonful:
I’m going to have to disappoint all you fans our there when I say it has nothing to with “Lovin’ Spoonful” the group which brought us hits such as “Summer in the City” or “I Believe in Magic?”
However it does have a musical reference.
A song written by the Bluesman Willie Dixon and recorded by Howlin’ Wolf, which was based on “Spoonful Blues” by Delta Bluesman Charley Patton.
The band Cream and a whole lot of other artists have since recorded it.
I find the combination of melody and lyrics most gratifying – especially delivered with Howlin’ Wolf’s growl.
It could be a spoonful of coffee
It could be a spoonful of tea
But one little spoon of your precious love
Is good enough for me
Men lie about that spoonful
Some cry about that spoonful
Some die about that spoonful
Everybody fight about a spoonful
That spoon, that spoon, that spoonful
Hello Spoonful ~ 302 ~
“But then are all diseases bad? Or do they serve a function? Well, I guess – providing it’s not fatal!”
______________________________
There’s an old saying in America you hear allot around good ole fashioned country funerals (and sometimes even weddings) where there’s no group-idea of ‘pretense’ and worry that if one gossips about another, then oneself and all those closet-hypocrisies will be next and in the Sunday paper; because usually, by the time everyone is age fifty in a small town, everybody pretty much has done everything everyone else has already done anyways…
______
So, the saying is ~ “Well, he’s better off dead…”
I suspect that they are not always referring to the physical suffering connected to ‘his’ deathbed throes; rather, perhaps his lifestyle and those who were tied to it like cans on strings on a car bumper driving 95 MPH, nervously awaiting for the Nitrous Oxide bottle to be punctured and the Supercharger to start its massive air induction;
honeymoons are indeed more subjective than the weddings they are born from…
_______________
Who knows, Spoonful, perhaps “fatal” also teaches, i.e., serves a “function” just as ‘well’ as birth or health (?)
You often hear Esoteric Teachers going on about how Life and Death are one of the same thing, yet there’s not much down here to show how that equation works out ‘visibly’ (or isn’t there?)
I sense the balance is here, yet, for whatever reason Death is not as readily available for comment than Life is to the vast majority who’s often just as curious about the neutralities of the ‘Dark’ as they are the ‘Light’ (minus the religious pretenses and hoopla);
then again, is it not most often than ‘just a few’ that when ‘Light’ starts teaching about itself, it becomes ‘Dark’ by contrasting itself against it’s ‘enemy’… LOL… an ‘enemy of the enemy’, then what?
‘Light’ loses its original function and becomes a war machine, some sort of ‘Blinding Light’ so to stun the ‘deer in the meadow’ (or salon).
Rumi speaks of a middle ground: I suspect it’s ‘all ground’ and the poet Rumi was simply standing somewhere near the middle of its proximity to him when to spoke that one to the transcriber following him around…
______________
You wrote ~
“Isn’t healing becoming whole? As in “Self” or “No Self” – it doesn’t matter! When one is healed, it no longer becomes a issue!”
______________
To me, I suppose it depends on what you mean by “healing” and “whole”: was Rumi or Rilke or Emily Dickinson ever ‘healed’ of The Yearning, by the default processes of Death? I doubt it, the music of the heart doesn’t stop ringing in the ears of the ‘memory fairies’ just because the drums have stopped… Good grief! Where has the poetic gone?
And which one of those (or anyone) would not choose to live longer (minus the un-livability of certain forms of pain, i.e., Rilke’s rare form of leukemia) if asked, that is, if that person could be ‘clear’ of certain forms of regret and depression? Lot’s of prerequisites; they can arrive at any time though… IMO.
__________
What you wrote, IMO, can be actualized in the moment; perhaps when applied to a conversation, deed or thought process or it can be recrystallized in your psyche as another piece of steel (epoxy-coated for ~ By the sea-salt-air ~ House Building) ‘re-bar’ for the scaffolding of the ‘Hopeful Self’,
the same self that Robert Burton feeds upon with his “Not this Lifetime Dear” theorems and ‘You’re not REAL yet, though are supposed to ‘act’ like you can tell you’re in a Real School Dear’ 44-multiplied-by-himself-complacencies and sexual predator-mini-dictatorship.
________________
So, it could be an interesting thread, Spoonful, to investigate alongside the ‘quilts of deeper verifications’ concerning “healing” and the idea of continuance… Take a look at the histories and dealings of Shaman’s and their ‘collective’ ‘world’ view…
IMO, the Earth is not ‘earth’, it’s Space too…
BTW, I’ve noticed that when people say “It doesn’t matter!” at the end of a sentence or conversation, that it’s usually the most important thing on their hearts and the area of their curiosity which possesses the greatest amount of fear of being hurt or rejected by ‘Life’, so a symbolic ‘Death’ often accompanies one’s ‘End of Conversation’ in such phrases as “Well, anyways…”, “I do not really know what I am saying anyways…”, “Well, who cares?”, “That’s just my opinion.”, “I am probably just being mechanical”, “I am an emotional type By the way.”, “Robert said I should ‘BE’ more and say less.” and so forth.
__________________
One question is too, to which ‘I’ is “healing” an issue and “healing what?” and once the healing is done, what did the healing and if something ‘else’ did the healing, who then massages the massager? We are not alone down here, we borrow and purchase one another’s sufferings daily and take little pieces of one another’s puzzles all the time into our hearts and mental-realms, to sometimes say a prayer-wish there or send out a smile in the dark towards some other who we fancy is still awake and struggling with insomnia;
perhaps it’s a shimmering Atmosphere of Us: if we could see on the microscopic level simultaneously as the normal physical, it would be a hoot, yes?
Onwards…
_________________
l.t.y.a.
A general question:
I’ve been pondering this for a time now and I think this is a good time to ask and is primarily directed at those who have since left the Fellowship of Friends.
What ideas, concepts, tools etc., which you acquired during you time in the Fellowship of Friends (Robert’s system) do you still find useful to incorporate into your day to day lives? I am not including those ideas you took with you upon joining the group i.e. which didn’t have Robert Burton’s spin on it.
Just interested…
307 Spoonful
When this topic came up I used to say that a couple of FOF ideas were still useful: “the ‘I’s are not real”, and “life is a play”. Then a friend pointed out that these ideas were so embedded in all the other FOF/4th Way crap that they couldn’t really be separated. In other words, though these two ideas in isolation contain some truth, as used in the FOF context they are totally untrue. For example, “the ‘I’s are not real” becomes a tool for mind control, not liberation from the ego. Potentially useful ideas became irredeemably twisted and distorted.
So my answer is that there are no ideas, concepts, tools etc., which I acquired during my time in the Fellowship of Friends that I still find useful to incorporate into my day to day life. IMO it’s best to drop the whole thing, leave every single one of those FOF/4th Way concepts behind, and start again with a clean slate.
Spoonful (307): “What ideas, concepts, tools etc., which you acquired during you time in the Fellowship of Friends (Robert’s system) do you still find useful to incorporate into your day to day lives? I am not including those ideas you took with you upon joining the group i.e. which didn’t have Robert Burton’s spin on it. Just interested… ”
———————-
The premise of your question is that we did actually “acquire” some “ideas, concepts, and tools”. And that the man we call “Robert” actually had a “system.” The longer I’m away from the brainwashing of the group, the more I doubt that I acquired anything at all in the Fellowship other than a lot of psychological baggage — self doubt, fear, imaginary superiority over those outside the group, hyper-critical attitudes that sometimes prevent the experience of simple joy, close-mindedness to outside ideas, fatalistic attitudes about the future, and more.
For me, the most “useful” ideas from the group probably had to do with being present to simple moments and appreciating beauty (although “sanctioned beauty” might be a better term to use). But we didn’t need the fof to learn that.
I know there are people out there who will think, “Hey, I learned a LOT in the Fellowship. It made me the person I am.” And yes, that’s true. But I’m gradually letting go of the notion that we learned anything there that we couldn’t have learned elsewhere.
—
By the way, on another topic, sort of… What we definitely DID learn in the Fellowship were a lot of tired old terms and phrases. We take them with us when we leave the group. I see it in my speech and writing, too. In your post, Spoonful, I noticed the following:
“primarily directed at”
“I have been pondering”
“ideas, concepts, and tools”
“which you acquired”
“during your time (in the school)”
“do you still find useful”
“to incorporate”
“Robert’s”
“useful”
What I’m noticing from the blog is that you can almost tell how long a person has been out of the group by calculating how often they use the typical fof phrases. Anyone can do the same with me. (Any takers? I’d be curious to see how close anyone came.) We’re all doing it here.
Spoonful, what I liked about your post was the expression… “Didn’t have Robert Burton’s spin on it.” Not something you’d hear at a meeting.
Here’s Howlin’ Wolf’s Spoonful:
Hello All,
It’s been a while…what’s happening behind the gilt-gate? Will the FoF survive the exodus? In the meantime, I thought some of you might enjoy a window on another real cult with a whack sexual twist: Hookers for Jesus!
The following is an excerpt from this link:
http://www.xfamily.org/index.php/Flirty_Fishing
“Flirty Fishing (FFing) was a form of religious prostitution practiced by the Children of God/The Family cult from 1974 until it was officially discontinued in 1987 (due, in part, to the AIDS scare). Its etymology can be traced to Matthew 4:19 where Jesus says “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
Flirty Fishing was a subset of The Family’s love bombing activities and involved the use of sexual attraction and intercourse to win converts and favors. Female members were told to be “God’s whores” and “hookers for Jesus”, and soon after its launch as a method of witnessing, sex was given to complete strangers in combination with a request for a “donation”, or for a required fee in line with Escort Servicing (ESing) or freelance ESing. FFing and prostitution was widely used as a way to raise money for the cult and resulted in many of the second generation births (known as “Jesus Babies”). Internal Family records from 1988 indicate that over 223,000 “fish” were loved sexually between 1978 and 1988.”
As a child of a longterm FoFer, I guess I can be grateful that I’m not a Robert Baby!
peace out,
Jules
Hello Spoonful ~ 302 ~
“But then are all diseases bad? Or do they serve a function? Well, I guess – providing it’s not fatal!”
______________________________
There’s an old saying in America you hear allot around good ole fashioned country funerals (and sometimes even weddings) where there’s no group-idea of ‘pretense’ and worry that if one gossips about another, then oneself and all those closet-hypocrisies will be next and in the Sunday paper; because usually, by the time everyone is age fifty in a small town, everybody pretty much has done everything everyone else has already done anyways…
______
So, the saying is ~ “Well, he’s better off dead…”
I suspect that they are not always referring to the physical suffering connected to ‘his’ deathbed throes; rather, perhaps his lifestyle and those who were tied to it like cans on strings on a car bumper driving 95 MPH, nervously awaiting for the Nitrous Oxide bottle to be punctured and the Supercharger to start its massive air induction;
honeymoons are indeed more subjective than the weddings they are born from…
_______________
Who knows, Spoonful, perhaps “fatal” also teaches, i.e., serves a “function” just as ‘well’ as birth or health (?)
You often hear Esoteric Teachers going on about how Life and Death are one of the same thing, yet there’s not much down here to show how that equation works out ‘visibly’ (or isn’t there?)
I sense the balance is here, yet, for whatever reason Death is not as readily available for comment than Life is to the vast majority who’s often just as curious about the neutralities of the ‘Dark’ as they are the ‘Light’ (minus the religious pretenses and hoopla);
then again, is it not most often than ‘just a few’ that when ‘Light’ starts teaching about itself, it becomes ‘Dark’ by contrasting itself against it’s ‘enemy’… LOL… an ‘enemy of the enemy’, then what?
‘Light’ loses its original function and becomes a war machine, some sort of ‘Blinding Light’ so to stun the ‘deer in the meadow’ (or salon).
Rumi speaks of a middle ground: I suspect it’s ‘all ground’ and the poet Rumi was simply standing somewhere near the middle of its proximity to him when to spoke that one to the transcriber following him around…
______________
You wrote ~
“Isn’t healing becoming whole? As in “Self” or “No Self” – it doesn’t matter! When one is healed, it no longer becomes a issue!”
______________
To me, I suppose it depends on what you mean by “healing” and “whole”: was Rumi or Rilke or E. Dickinson ever ‘healed’ of The Yearning, by the default processes of Death? I doubt it, the music of the heart doesn’t stop ringing in the ears of the ‘memory fairies’ just because the drums have stopped… Good grief! Where has the poetic gone?
And which one of those (or anyone) would not choose to live longer (minus the un-livability of certain forms of pain, i.e., Rilke’s rare form of leukemia) if asked, that is, if that person could be ‘clear’ of certain forms of regret and depression? Lot’s of prerequisites; they can arrive at any time though… IMO.
__________
What you wrote, IMO, can be actualized in the moment; perhaps when applied to a conversation, deed or thought process or it can be recrystallized in your psyche as another piece of steel (epoxy-coated for ~ By the sea-salt-air ~ House Building) ‘re-bar’ for the scaffolding of the ‘Hopeful Self’,
the same self that Robert Burton feeds upon with his “Not this Lifetime Dear” theorems and ‘You’re not REAL yet, though are supposed to ‘act’ like you can tell you’re in a Real School Dear’ 44-multiplied-by-himself-complacencies and sexual predator-mini-dictatorship.
________________
So, it could be an interesting thread, Spoonful, to investigate alongside the ‘quilts of deeper verifications’ concerning “healing” and the idea of continuance… Take a look at the histories and dealings of Shaman’s and their ‘collective’ ‘world’ view…
IMO, the Earth is not ‘earth’, it’s Space too…
BTW, I’ve noticed that when people say “It doesn’t matter!” at the end of a sentence or conversation, that it’s usually the most important thing on their hearts and the area of their curiosity which possesses the greatest amount of fear of being hurt or rejected by ‘Life’, so a symbolic ‘Death’ often accompanies one’s ‘End of Conversation’ in such phrases as “Well, anyways…”, “I do not really know what I am saying anyways…”, “Well, who cares?”, “That’s just my opinion.”, “I am probably just being mechanical”, “I am an emotional type By the way.”, “Robert said I should ‘BE’ more and say less.” and so forth.
__________________
One question is too, to which ‘I’ is “healing” an issue and “healing what?” and once the healing is done, what did the healing and if something ‘else’ did the healing, who then massages the massager? We are not alone down here, we borrow and purchase one another’s sufferings daily and take little pieces of one another’s puzzles all the time into our hearts and mental-realms, to sometimes say a prayer-wish there or send out a smile in the dark towards some other who we fancy is still awake and struggling with insomnia;
perhaps it’s a shimmering Atmosphere of Us: if we could see on the microscopic level simultaneously as the normal physical, it would be a hoot, yes?
Onwards…
_________________
l.t.y.a.
Nuthead 308
Apologies for covering old ground, but without some form of index, repetition will be inevitable. However, as a large part of my reason for posting here is to involve those who are having questions regarding their own involvement with in the Fellowship of Friends, I figure it is worth coming back to such issues.
So back to your response, I am exactly of that opinion. It’s just after so many years in the Fellowship of Friends, I would like to think I got something more substantial out of it (though I do have my life back, I suppose).
With a similar investment of time – well I could probably be a Doctor in Nuclear Physics by now, with several initials after my name and NASA calling me on the phone. As it stands, I’m usually on hand to prune my neighbours rose bushes for a cup of tea and a biscuit.
On top of that, it has taken me so many years to separate the real gold from the crap that has smothered it for so long, that only in the last year or so have any efforts at being “Present” been possible without an accompanying malaise, or hangover due to it’s strong association with Robert Burton and his devious knack of manipulating what are beautiful tools for his own ego satisfying ends.
Hey! Perhaps I learnt about self pity in the Fellowship of Friends…
Spoonful, you wrote:
It’s just after so many years in the Fellowship of Friends, I would like to think I got something more substantial out of it.
I think the attitude of attempting to do an early profit/loss assessment concluding with an articulable “bottom line” should itself be abandoned.
You said, “I would like to think that…” That’s the dissonance reduction effort. That’s a species of the “I got what I came for” mindgame which tends to shut out whole channels of experiences you have already had and now need time to process.
Allow yourself not to know whether it was wasted time or not. Alternatively, allow yourself to feel that it was wasted time, if it turns out that you feel that way on one of the many channels of your experience. Feel it, feel it, OWN it. THEN see if somehow you can repurpose that feeling of wasted experience into something valuable. Maybe that feeling of waste is a valuable motivator to propel the future course of your learning or your actions.
Do not be a prisoner!
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=29JewlGsYxs&feature=related
“Uh-oh”
“What?”
“Yesri’s about to go off on a rant.”
“OH SHIT ! …. RUN AWAY , RUN AWAY ! …..”
“But…… it’s just a bunny…. AAAAHHHHhhhhhhhh….”
Spoonful- Love the origin of the moniker.
“…. idea’s, concepts, tools etc. ….” Hmmmm……
It seems there is place for that kind of stuff. Different stuff for different places at different times. But I tend to agree with Nuthead ( like that moniker too, should be apparent why) all that stuff is often used for mind control and manipulation.
Underlying that stuff though, there seems to be a barely perceived assumption and expectation. The assuption is that something is fundamentally wrong with life and the expectation is that through ideas, concepts and tools this will be resolved ‘once and for all’.
The idea that we can use conceptual technologies to reach ‘presence’ once and for all contains a fatal flaw.
‘Once and for all’ has always been here. (It) Is so big and so once that we lost sight of (it). (It) is a strangely familiar mysterious skin that keeps itching and scratching at us sending us seeking for secret ideas, concepts and tools and hundreds of other things to float our boat.
All technologies fail, all ideas, concepts and tools fail to get us to ‘once and for all’.
Why? Because we already are once and for all.
In regards to having done this or that or becoming this or that…
IMO, despite rumors it is all a 0 sum game.
But that is just me and that is just fine and sometimes it is down right fucking sublime.
312 Yesri baba and others
“…. idea’s, concepts, tools etc. ….” Hmmmm……”
———————————-
These days I’m thinkin’ that ideas, concepts, tools, myths, stories, gods and goddesses, traditions, teachings, schools . . . and on and on . . . are there for us to use as frameworks that can help us make sense of things. Even if something isn’t literal truth (whatever that is), if it helps us make sense of what we encounter when we wake up every day, then it has value. The tricky part is that we usually forget to think of it as a framework. Or we never knew it was framework because we take it as reality.
I don’t mean to diminish the power of gods and goddesses when I include them in this. I see them as matrices that bring through a specific bandwidth of consciousness, in a way that we can more readily relate to – a suit of clothes that represents a quality of consciousness, if you will.
Most ordinary folks making their way through an ordinary life need some degree of framework to make sense of things. I know I do. They do lend themselves to control and manipulation when everyone involved takes them as real . . . the only right and true way. Like any other tool – it’s how you use it.
Spoonful 307
I have slowly dropped them all throughout the years. What I have retained of the Fourth Way teachings is mostly some Gurdjieff ideas, which were never much used in the Fellowship anyway.
off-topic… last night I listened to this again after a while and was reminded of what an amazing song it is, for me… maybe some of you will enjoy it too.
You change all the lead
sleepin’ in my head to gold,
as the day grows dim,
I hear you sing a golden hymn,
the song I’ve been trying to sing.
Purify the colours, purify my mind.
Purify the colours, purify my mind,
and spread the ashes of the colours
Over this heart of mine!
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=3Hh45-yBMXY&feature=related
313 waskathleenw
“The tricky part is that we usually forget to think of it as a framework. Or we never knew it was framework because we take it as reality.”
“Like any other tool – it’s how you use it.”
*********
Yes. It seems like there are many ideas, concepts and tools that can enrich and help us to understand the unfolding of our lives. Our lives, which in and of themselves, are already what Yesri called the ‘Once and for All’. The mistake we sometimes make is as you say, and I think it was Alan Watts who once said that it is like going to a restaurant and eating the menu.
Hi jack,
Sorry I’ve delayed concentrating on the petition not knowing exactly how to pinpoint the areas in which I could state something without a doubt. I would appreciate your general outlooks on the subject and any comment you wish to make to improve it. I would also like to know what the next step is, if it is edited by anyone or not. If you care to address it privately please write to tablut@une.net.co. It’s been a year since I left the Fellowship of Friends, it’s time for me to start wrapping things up. I thank you all for sharing your experiences to give the rest of us a clearer understanding of what happened to us.
I also hope this outline allows other people to concentrate in the areas in which we all witnessed the same things and equally denounce the Fellowship of Friends where you can. The number of us doing so will create a necessary pressure on the person we are addressing to look at the matter, hopefully more than pressure; s/he will experience an innate human desire to help.
To Whom it May Concern,
If I need to beg for your help, I beg for your help.
I joined the Fellowship of Friends on the 3rd of March 1990, because it presented itself as a School of Spiritual Development with a Conscious Being, man number seven or the equivalent to a man close to the stature of Jesus according to the Fourth Way System with which the Cult stated to work with. Four years ago, I married the second man in hierarchy of the Fellowship of Friends, Girard Haven. I left the Fellowship of Friends on March of 2007 and have been actively trying to expose the human disfunctionalities of the Fellowship of Friends since then.
It took me seventeen years to understand the tremendous corruption that the Fellowship of Friends had consistently sustained for over three decades and it happened when I was treated as if I were a little less than a criminal for asking for help in the care of an 86 year old woman with Alzheimer’s who had been a student of the Fellowship of Friends for thirty years. After asking for help, Robert Burton, the Teacher, Linda Tulisso, the President, Karen B. and Susan S. ordered me through Elizabeth B. to never again address them about Dorothy Beaulieu’s situation and labelled me for being under “feminine dominance” for caring about an old woman who should have long gone to an old people’s home. I had assumed the care of this old student because I had seen the carelessness with which she was being treated by her previous caretakers, other students who had not given her a bath for a year, fed her mostly on bread and abandoned her on a chair with very little human interchange. She walked around with a doll in her arms and yelled at everybody when they came close to her. This happened although there were actually six students volunteering to help with her care but the general attitude was that this woman was a worthless “shell” who should go to an institution. Because of Dorothy’s developed Alzheimer I did not consider it beneficial for her to go to a regular old people’s home and considering the Fellowship of Friends had indoctrinated students to abandon their families, it should at least take care of students without any other support. I felt it a moral obligation with the older students of the community I had chosen to belong to, to look after them and provide them with a decent human situation before they died. I had been looking after this old lady for two and half years and was in a severe state of fatigue when I asked for help, only to be treated as if I were a little less than a criminal of some kind who had broken the laws of this psychotic community, in reality, dedicated to providing funds for Robert Burton’s lifestyle and pathological predation of young male students for sex.
The Fellowship of Friends will prove to be one of the most corrupt cults in the history of America and the spiritual and physical damages incurred on its participants, the saddest and most degrading of people’s integrity. It will probably also prove one of the most efficient money makers on its scale.
Some of the areas on which this document hopes to shed light are:
1. The sexual trade of young male students for Robert Burton’ private harem.
2. Extravagant privileges of these selected male students sexually at the service of the Teacher: International trips, clothes and housing, religious visas and money.
3. The idiosyncrasy of the Fellowship of Friends that has led a whole community to act against its participants, particularly the young males, to serve as sexual providers of Robert Burton’s sexual predation.
4. The suffering these men have endured after growing up and realizing that The Teacher and a community who condoned and supported his practices systematically sexually abused them.
5. The discriminatory practices against women as third class citizens.
1. “Feminine Dominance” is one of the main tools of indoctrination and control of behaviour in the Fellowship of Friends and it aims to reprogram people’s behaviour to accept Robert Burton’s lifestyle and abuses. It implies that following any code of social behaviour that stands against his imposed individual or social norms, is Feminine Dominance. To be under Feminine Dominance is unacceptable in the Fellowship of Friends and with this condition every individual understanding of decent social behaviour is sent to the garbage and replaced by Robert Burton’s understanding of what decent social behaviour is in the Fellowship of Friends. A behaviour that condones the sexual traffic of young males, the discrimination of women, the lack of care over older students in need and the overall humiliation of every student’s integrity.
2. The submission to acceptance of Robert Burton’s sexual partner’s wives, who had no choice but to accept their husband’s sex with The Teacher, through the social pressure that they were under “feminine dominance” it they did not accept it. The pressure came from the Teacher as much as from their own husbands, and the community they lived in as a whole that judged them negatively if they made any fuss about it. Many marriages were broken apart through this practice.
6. The indoctrination and practices that have allowed for this idiosyncrasy to develop to ever increasingly dangerous social and individual behaviour are:
1. Robert Burton is a God on Earth. A divine being man number seven. He is unquestionable. He is a perfect divine being. A teacher three or four realms above the realm in which the rest of students live.
2. Students are not to question the Teacher. If they cannot “work” with his teaching or “form” they are to leave the Fellowship of Friends without a chance of dialogue even if they have been in the Fellowship of Friends for over fifteen years.
3. No discussion or freedom of speech is allowed within the Fellowship of Friends. The code of silence condones every abuse without the majority of students getting to know what is really happening. Many of us understood the dimensions of the corruption through sharing our experiences on the Internet in the Fellowship of Friends Discussion at: http://fellowshipoffriends.wordpress.com/2008/01/31/the-fellowship-of-friends-disussion-part-29/ for the first time after three decades.
4. Students have systematically been separated from themselves or their integrity through specific practices. Ideas from the System have been corrupted to benefit the Fellowship at the cost of the student such as:
1. “Separate from your identifications” has been corrupted into: “do not trust yourself and your understandings.”
2. “Don’t express negative emotions” has been corrupted into: “Do not contradict or question Robert Burton’s doctrine or his inner circle’s interpretation and practice.
3. “Remember yourself” has been corrupted into: “Mind your own business in the FOF and do not consider other people’s well being; Only the Teacher’s.
4. “Stay out of Imagination” has been corrupted into labelling “imagination” everything a student talks or thinks about that is not one of the Teacher’s exercises or interpretations of life, the System or the World.
5. “Don’t lie” has been corrupted into keeping students from exploring their own understanding and practice of the work as if they were talking about things they were lying about. They must accept Robert Burton’s and only Robert Burton’s interpretation.
6. “Avoid unnecessary talk” has been corrupted into students having conversations only about Robert Burton’s interpretation of the System and avoiding any conversation about anything related to them selves, their families, their jobs, their fears or their joys.
After only a few years of practicing these inner and social practices, idolatry for Robert Burton has rampantly developed and students have given him such a tremendous power of authority over their existence that they no longer know how to function without relating to how he allows and expects them to act. It is frightening to observe the level of conditioned behaviour that the participants of the Fellowship of Friends have fallen into. They do not think or feel or talk about anything that is not predisposed by Robert Burton.
I have witnessed this systematic brain washing for all the years that I have been in the Fellowship of Friends. I did not realize that this brainwashing was so pervasive to student’s integrity until I personally experienced the degree to which Robert Burton, Girard Haven and other people in the administration and direction of the Fellowship of Friends were willing to protect Robert Burton’s dogma and lifestyle against a totally vulnerable 86 year old student with Alzheimer, who was to be sent to an old people’s home because her situation threatened to demand some funds from the Fellowship of Friends. The unacceptable lack of human values surpassed all the trust and confidence I had in the Fellowship of Friends.
5. The Fellowship of Friend’s indoctrination systematically separates students from their families, who are reduced to being “biological accidents” in their lives and the Fellowship much profits from deviating student’s income towards itself rather than have students financially help their family. In this regard, children have been given up for adoption or aborted and many families seldom contacted by students. Highly influenced by these theories I personally left my daughter with her father when she was eleven years old. Nothing has ever caused more suffering in our lives; it is the greatest mistake I have ever made. These practices and mentality are common in the Fellowship of Friends, young mothers are prompted to leave their children and go to Oregon House. I personally witnessed this in two occasions of leisure conversation between students.
6. Students develop an anti-social attitude towards the rest of mankind who is reduced to “the six billion dead people on the planet” without chances or possibilities for development. This mentality allowed for the Fellowship to stimulate huge loans from financial and other institutions that students would never have to pay if California suffered a disastrous earthquake predicted by Robert Burton for 1998. (Luckily, all the predictions from Robert Burton’s fantasies, failed). Even more than deter the relationship with regular society that the Fellowship of Friends needs to receive income from, this mentality is meant to indoctrinate students in the belief that they are in the only conscious School on the planet, that they are in an extremely privileged situation and that they should never leave or will lose every opportunity to evolve. With these patterns, it guarantees a stable community of fearful individuals without options. The Fellowship of Friends is the saddest place I’ve ever been in.
7. Many students in centres around the world do not know the extent of corruption and suffering that they are financing. They are of course not informed and have been given the task to not communicate with ex-students.
8. The “Cultural” activities in the Fellowship of Friends are a cover up to the main aim of the Cult, which is to provide Robert Burton with money and young men for sex.
Talented student artists are manipulated to legitimize the Status Quo of the Fellowship of Friends. Their egos extensively lend themselves to feed their vanity without caring about the abuses that take place in other areas of the Fellowship of Friends. Artists hired outside of the Fellowship do not know the real facts about the Fellowship of Friends.
The psychological conditions that allow for the Fellowship of Friends to function without regular checks are due to a great extent to the fact that many of its main directors and administrators are themselves badly corrupted and damaged human beings.
Girard Haven who is the Prime Minister of the Fellowship of Friends or The Fellowship of Friend’s second man and a predicted Conscious Being by Robert Burton, is a man who has given up so many aspects of his integrity in the course of thirty five years that he finds it perfectly normal to promote situations in which other people are also submitted to extremely humiliating and painful situations. He has handled innumerable difficult situations through asking students to leave immediately, accept the condition that they are being submitted to or pay ludicrous amounts of money for having misbehaved. He is a confessed porn addict and his ex-wife told me he was severely addicted to child pornography. I do love this man but consider that he suffers from severe split personality and is dangerous to both himself and the people around him. He needs professional help and not the freedom to indoctrinate more people to accept the abhorrent status quo of the Fellowship of Friends.
Most of the people in positions of power in the Fellowship of Friends are severely dependent economically on their reduced salary. This too is a major issue in their attachment to the Fellowship of Friends and Robert Burton.
The psychology of many of these people in power is that if they have personally suffered and given up so much of their own integrity and well being; their children, their families and themselves, it is justified for any other student to also be required to do so. The suffering of young men systematically used sexually, the suffering of wives systematically pressured to accept the situation, the suffering of innumerable students who cannot legitimately participate in the life of the community are simply not taken into account. The level of cruelty exercised by the people in power increases proportionately to the extent to which their cruelty goes consistently unchecked. When you get situations like this one you will have a major tragedy sooner than later. Suicides, denounced rapes of minors and other abuses have been silenced and modified to make students believe the victims involved were crazy and the Teacher continues to carry the credential of his impeccable and conscious behaviour.
The participants of the Fellowship of Friends are sick and damaged individuals in great need of help. A generation of young people has been speedily trained to replace the old students to perform the same roles that they performed and prolong the status quo of life in the Fellowship of Friends. Do not allow for another generation to repeat the same mistake.
As many other people will inform you, money is the condition number one to belong to the Fellowship of Friends. Participation in any activity requires great amounts of money.
Breakfast with the Teacher: $100 to $150
Dinner with the Teacher: $150 to $350
Meetings: $60 to $175
Monthly donations: 10% of your income or minimum of $250
Three seasonal donations a year: $250 each
Participation in Auctions five times a year that must generally collect over $80.000 dollars.
Trips to other centres around the world that must equally collect huge amounts of money to finance the travelling Teachers, the sex aggregates and other company involved.
One of the most instructive and enjoyable TV programmes on at the moment is ‘The Dog Whisperer’. The aforesaid DW, a bloke called Cesar Millan, traveles up and down the length of the US “rehabilitating dogs and training people”….
It’s fascinating stuff from an esoteric standpoint. Whether they spoil and pamper their pooches or live in fear or anxiety about them, it is always the human attitudes and energies being fed into the dog that DW is at pains to correct. When the penny drops, the humans begin to realize that the the faithful mutt can only play back to their owner everything they’re being given…
DW asks them to speak to the dog in its own language, not in the ordinary range of their human emotions and thinking.
My experience of the Fellowship was that Robert Burton refuses to speak to the ‘dog’ — the instinctive centre — in its own language. He just can’t make himself understood and therefore gets some ‘insane’ reactions from it.
For one of the more bizarre years in my life I lived in a Teaching House run by Hugh J—s. The experience was a strange alternation between instinctive ‘lows’ and emotional ‘highs’. Instinctive misery seemed to be part of the deal. A lady called Isabelle insisted on living in a room that was no larger than a shoebox, with space only for her bed, two candles and a picture of RB! That was pretty typical of the prevalent desire to punish, rather than discipline the ‘dog’.
Over weekends, the house would be flooded by poetry readings, music and flower arrangements as students came together for events. By Sunday night the linen tablecloths, silver cutlery and crystal glasses would be put away, and we’d be back to bare wooden tables and Hugh’s endless repeated diet of Turkey escalope and salad… the same every day.
The more emotional the weekends, the greater the instinctive ‘hit’… Within a couple of months, certain tenants wouldn’t speak to each other. This could go on for weeks or even months. Food, drink and even cash teaching payments that were left in the TH were thieved. A rash of stickit notes started appearing all over the house, with the ‘owner’s’ name on food and drink: “This is mine”. Bills weren’t paid and everyday chores frequently weren’t done. The atmosphere for five days a week was as cold as a cemetery.
For the most part I spent as little time in the TH as possible. Through the cloud of mixed messages RB used to give out, it became clear that the ‘dog’ was there to be punished rather than disciplined, so that his behaviour became more and more crazy, even rabid. No wonder one of RB’s favourite images of the Instinctive Centre is the mouth from Chartres Cathedral, ready to devour its victims. That’s the way he sees it, the monster he created. The dog has no role to play in the ‘weekend’ emotionalism, after all.
Six months out of the Fellowship, this is feels like just one sad example of how wrong work leads to wrong results. Work without common sense or ordinary civility, and certainly without any notion of external considering. The only time anyone mentioned that phrase was to indicate that you weren’t not giving THEM enough of it!
The themes of emotional arousal and the instinctive punishment go together hand-in-hand in the FOF, they’re inseparable. It’s why the brutishness of Elena’s experience with Girard, or Anna T’s experience with one of RB’s boys, will repeat….. For myself, I felt I had to free myself from BOTH to truly cut the cord with the School.
P.S. Elena. The para beginning “If you say…” in one of my previous posts is NOT addressed to you personally, it’s just rhetoriacl, as in “If One says…”. Okay?
Dear, dear Elena,
Here is a suggested title for your book:
Harem Scare’m:
A Spy from the Seraglio
(It describes the FoF, and your, experience in the simplest terms.)
And here, Elena (and All), is a Saint Valentine’s Day greeting:
Oh love,
I place my trust in you!
May your strength be mine!
Through the power of love . . .
. . . I have come thus far.
When the world
fills with despair . . .
. . . through love,
one finds the way!
Oh love,
I place my trust in you!
May your strength be mine!
Through the power of love,
I have come thus far.
When the world
fills with despair,
through love,
one finds the way!
http://www.youtube.com/v/VfSoBWlOeaM
Deon van der Walt singing
‘Ich baue ganz’ from
Mozart’s
Abduction from the Seraglio
5 minutes, 8 seconds.
leonhardon wrote:
“By the way was trying to find a post of yours from way back when, (I think it was you). You wrote about RB in connection with a baseball strike and a wrong date and the subsequent prediction. Can’t find it any longer, do you have it saved somewhere or would you tell the tale again?”
Someone was recounting the story of riding with Robert as he was seeing the signs and making his mathmatical/mystical C-influence inspired predictions and one of Bob’s comments related to the famous “Giants win the pennant” homerun by Bobby Thomson. If the person recalled the incident correctly, Robert based all of his math and predictions on the fact that Thomson’s homerun was hit in 1954. It was, in fact, hit in 1951. But, as many teachers of the esoteric have said before: the facts shouldn’t stand in the way of the truth.
I highly recommend the movie “Into Great Silence.” It depicts the day to day life of monks in a monastary, I think, in the French Alps. After watching it I had the thought that I had spent fifteen years playing a game of pretend enlightenment with a bunch of well-meaning, but totally naive friends.
And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing…
318 ~ Kid Shelleen ~
Right, I, towards the end of my Fellowship of Friends reverse enlightenment wiring instruction, found it ironically amusing that Robert Burton was so stuck on the number 44 and himself BTW, yet never said “45 conscius beings are working with the school”…
Freudian slip I suppose, that he discounted himself in that ‘conscious total’… never mind though, later he started tacking on ‘additional soft ruffians’ and the number 44 got so blurry, you’d think something was slipped into your overly tannic glass of ‘98 Cabernet.
:.)
Hi elena.
and everyone else.
What we are looking for at the moment are specific statements of personally witnessed illegality’s.
I would suggest taking a look at the petition by clicking on the link Wiki space at the top of the page and see if there is an area of alleged mal practice that you can comment on first hand.
We cant use hear-say it must be something personal that you have either witnessed or taken part in under the direction of the “church”.
These letters which Susan is collecting will be sent to the lawyer when there are corresponding ones for all of the points raised in the petition and he will determine if we are legally covered.
When we are advised by him that this is the case, I will post the petition, (which is in its finished form now having been reviewed by the lawyer), on the relevant website and inform everyone of its location so they can sign it if they wish without any fear of repercussions.
One suggestion in relation to any letters to address these allegedly’s is to use Occams razor or in other words to try to keep them as short as possible just the bare facts.
In the event of there not being enough support for these allegations to be stated as fact I will post the petition as it stands.
Im considering how long to wait ……perhaps a month, before just going ahead.
My letter is already in it addresses unregistered funds and sexual molestation.
all the best to all.
ps elena I will drop you a line on your e-mail address.
302 Spoonful
Thanks for your postings.
Healing in the moment
starting with your self, the SELF
forgiving yourself and others
from the heart
so joy can come in
and becoming what we are
Rosenberg can give you some practical tools in the moment.
This method is just what the fellowship of friends could use and what could heal the gap in practical moment to moment awareness.
ENJOY Marshall.
BTW he grows on you, give him a little time.
The links below are three parts of Rosenberg compassionate communication.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dpk5Z7GIFs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbgxFgAN7_w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8fbxPAXBPE&feature=related
Ps Crouching tiger. Marshal Rosenberg recites a book in part one regarding 8000 ago an “elite” group introduced the punishing method and violence become “fashionable.
Marshall can instruct you better then me.
Enjoy the day and a big hug.