Welcome to the 30th part of 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 (and above else), enjoy and have fun.
Oh…. its like walking on untrodden snow…….
If you have a gripe you can back up with fact then please consider sending Susan a letter.
Just click on Wikispace above then petition and see whats required.
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Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you.
– Aldous Huxley
J x
Rumour has it there’ll be an article about the FOF in the Sac Bee on Monday.
A little Coleman Barks RUMI :
THE SUNRISE RUBY
In the early morning hour,
just before dawn, lover and beloved wake
and take a drink of water.
She asks, “Do you love me or yourself more?
Really, tell the absolute truth.”
He says, “There’s nothing left of me.
I’m like a ruby held up to the sunrise.
Is it still a stone, or a world
made of redness? It has no resistance
to sunlight.”
This is how Hallaj said, “I am God”,
and told the truth!
The ruby and the sunrise are one.
Be courageous and discipline yourself.
Completely become hearing and ear
and wear this sun-ruby as an earring.
Work. Keep digging your well.
Don’t think about getting off from work.
Water is there somewhere.
Submit to a daily practice.
Your loyalty to that
is a ring on the door.
Keep knocking, and the joy inside
will eventually open a window
and look out to see who’s there.
“Submit to a daily practice.
Your loyalty to that
is a ring on the door.”
Or perhaps a ring in the nose?
2. Nuthead
Rumors abound about the Sacramento Bee article.
Suppose to print anyday now.
Keep us posted will you?
….as the apostles argued amongst themselves as to which of them were the greatest one thing became (painfully) obvious…
During the projections at the Cosmodemonic-MysteryScience Multi-Plex 6,000,000,000 (6 billion theaters and only one screen, how DID they do it?) a few of the movie goers had somehow managed to get elephant dick wedged inextricably up their tight little flea pussies.
Yesri 5
This salvia does seem to have interesting effects.
Abigail-
Well, you know what they say.. If you don’t like the effects stop licking the spittle.
I didn’t see anything in the Sacramento Bee today. Does anyone have any more information about this?
5 is newly moderated.
9 Vena
When I did a search I happened to come across their previous article which contained these interesting quotes (Lindalies):
Lawsuits accusing the group’s founder and spiritual leader, Robert Burton, of sexual improprieties scared off distributors, says Beinstock; one suit was dismissed and two others were settled by the Fellowship’s insurance companies to save the costs of litigation, says Tulisso.
here it is…
“The Fellowship itself never paid a penny in settlement,” notes Tulisso, who added that the suits were filed by former members who failed to produce evidence to support their accusations.”
What a slimy grease ball.
9 Vena
My informant was wrong, though there’s an article about Salvia. Maybe two articles about people addicted to states would be too much for one issue.
Thing about salvia is, it’s sentient.
12 veronicapoe
I would tend to agree.
I spent close to an hour yesterday writing an extremely long post about my fairly extensive experiences with salvia. When I hit “submit,” I got a message that the blog had switched to a new page, and my post was lost in the ether. I didn’t have the time to re-write it, but maybe I’ll be able to soon.
12 veronicapoe
13 Innernaut
Veronicapoe – Other than the info at Erowid, I don’t know much about salvia. Could you elaborate on the idea that it is ’sentient’, and did you mean that any external substance would be so?
Innernaut – Not sure if salvia is anything I might experiment with, but I would like to hear of your experiences.
13 Innernaut
Sounds like the vegetable version of Inflence C.
Daily Card,
The rabid bloggers are comparing saliva stories.
‘Life lacks the idea of looking for truly legitimate esoteric sources. Influence B does not count-only Influence C does.’
Based on this above line of thinking, I ask this rather important question of any current members of the Fellowship of Friends: The
Fellowship of Friends, for more years than can be counted, has perused the world for ‘esoteric sources’ that supposedly confirm the prior existence of school on the planet (presuming Influence C operating) and the material that is found can be no better than Influence B, by definition, to be delivered to you for your time, efforts and money. And, especially now/recently, when/where there are tens, if not hundreds, of members worldwide doing research scouring for sources of this material, or making it up as you go along, in order to have the equivalent of dogmatic, highly scripted, content for the meetings that is likely to be NO BETTER THAN Influence B? I would postulate that it is being done for Influence A purposes: 1) Gives reason to have meetings. 2) Enables there to be money charged. 3) Supports your identification with the Fellowship of Friends being a school, a religion, and/or a source of Influence C, 4) Puts on a good show, 5) Keeps people busy – while most spontaneity and real issues that people need to work on are glossed over and ignored. 6) Feeds the false personality of the Fellowship of Friends. Influence C does not need Influence B; Influence B needs Influence C. Influence C creates Influence B. Influence C does not need to go find Influences B. Maybe, just maybe, the Fellowship of Friends does not have any connexion to Influence C?
So here is some support for this above logic from Ouspensky (Oh, I almost forgot, the Fellowship of Friends has rejected Ouspensky and is no longer a fourth way school.):
Ouspensky defining Influence B in The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution:
‘The second kind [Influences B] consists of interests of a different order aroused by ideas which are not created in life but come originally from schools. These influences do not reach man directly. They are thrown into the general turnover of life, pass through many different minds and reach a man through philosophy, science, religion and art, always mixed with influences of the first kind [Influences A] and generally very little resembling what they were in their beginning. In most cases men do not realise the different origin of the influences of the second kind and often explain them as having the same origin as the first kind.’
Influence B exists for the purpose of feeding magnetic centre. Why is the Fellowship of Friends still dieting on Influences B?
Ouspensky/Gurdjieff defining Influence B in In Search of the Miraculous:
‘So far I have spoken of the right magnetic center, of the right guide, and of the right way. But a situation is possible in which the magnetic center has been wrongly formed. It may be divided in itself, that is, it may include contradictions. In it, moreover, may enter influences of the first kind [Influences A], that is, those created in life, under the guise of influences of the second kind [Influences B], or the traces of influences of the second kind but distorted to such an extent that they have become their own opposite. Such a wrongly formed magnetic center cannot give a right orientation. A man with a wrong magnetic center of this kind may also look for the way and he may meet another man who will call himself a teacher and will say that he knows the way and that he is connected
with a center standing outside the law of accident. But in reality he may not know the way and may not be connected with such a center. Moreover here again there are many possibilities:
1. He may be genuinely mistaken and think that he knows something, when in reality he knows nothing. 2. He may believe another man, who in his turn may be mistaken. 3. He may deceive consciously. Then if the man who is seeking the way believes him, he may lead him in a quite different direction and not where he promises; he may lead him very far from the right way and bring him to results directly opposite to the results of the right way. But fortunately this happens very rarely, that is, wrong ways are very numerous but in the majority of cases they do not lead anywhere. And a man simply turns circles on the same spot and thinks that he is going somewhere.
‘How can a wrong way be recognized?’ asked somebody. ‘How can it be recognized?’ said G. ‘It is. impossible to recognize a wrong way without knowing the right way. This means that it is no use troubling oneself how to recognize a wrong way. One must think of how to find the right way. This is what we are speaking about all the time. It cannot be said in two words. But from what I have said you can draw many useful conclusions if you remember everything that has been said and everything which follows from it. For example, you can see that the teacher always corresponds to the level of the pupil. The higher the pupil, the higher can be the teacher. But a pupil of a level which is not particularly high cannot count on a teacher of a very high level. Actually a pupil can never
see the level of the teacher. This is a law. [As soon as you can see the level of the teacher, they are no longer your teacher.] No one can see higher than his own level. But usually people not only do not know this, but, on the contrary, the lower they are
themselves, the higher the teacher they demand. The right understanding of this point is already a very considerable understanding. But it occurs very seldom. Usually the man himself is not worth a brass farthing but he must have as teacher no other than Jesus
Christ. [Or, conversely: The higher the level, self-proclaimed by the teacher, the more likely they are not worth a brass farthing.] To less he will not agree. And it never enters his head that even if he were to meet such a teacher as Jesus Christ, taking him as he is described in the Gospels, he would never be able to follow him because it would be necessary to be on the level of an apostle in order to be a pupil of Jesus Christ. Here is a definite law. The higher the teacher, the more difficult for the pupil. And if the difference in the levels of the teacher and pupil go beyond a certain limit, then the difficulties in the path of the pupil become insuperable. It is
exactly in connection with this law that there occurs one of the fundamental rules of the fourth way. On the fourth way there is not one teacher. Whoever is the elder, he is the teacher. And as the teacher is indispensable to the pupil, so also is the pupil
indispensable to the teacher. The pupil cannot go on without the teacher, and the teacher cannot go on without the pupil or pupils. And this is not a general consideration but an indispensable and quite concrete rule on which is based the law of a man’s ascending.
As has been said before, no one can ascend onto a higher step until he places another man in his own place. What a man has received he must immediately give back; only then can he receive more. Otherwise from him will be taken even what he has already been given.” [Who has Robert placed on a higher step so that he could ascend? Where is the continuum from man 4 to his man 7.4? No wonder REB and FoF are going nowhere except turning endlessly in a small circle of friends.]
More on this later.
Ya’ll probably know this already, nevertheless…
“…who joins a cult? The easy and most popular belief is that cult disciples are inadequates of low intelligence. But in her extensive study of cults, sociologist Eileen Barker has found the opposite. The normal cult member is of above average intelligence and comes from a well-balanced, middleclass background. What appears to be happening is that, as modern life becomes more secular and materialist, an increasing number of intelligent people are finding life unfulfilling and meaningless… and if established religions fail to appeal to this increasing minority, then spiritual values are found in fringe cults – of which there are well over a thousand in Britain alone. And once hooked, the follower’s search for meaning, combined with the guru’s charisma, leads to a psychological process that guarantees obedience… once a cult has been formed by a guru, individuals who feel a lacking in life are sucked into the madness of cultism through psychological coercion, brainwashing or mind control. People joining cults usually argue such techniques would not work on them, but the favoured methods of meditation used by cults, combined with forms of sleep deprivation and bombarding the initiate with information, inevitably lead to, first, sensory overload, and second, obedience to the whim of a guru. Clearly cult membership also leads to a rejection of family ties as the cult becomes the new family….” etc.
http://beyondtheblog.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/the-cult-disciple/
James, thanks for the Sunrise Ruby, it’s a true gem and a wonderful thing to wake up to this morning.
11 is newly moderated.
Sentient. As in, a thinking, feeling, living being.
Okay, I’ll try this again. It’s incredibly long, so feel free to skip.
I first heard about salvia about 10 years ago, probably on erowid and sagewisdom. I read about it and was intrigued, but not enough to order any (it’s legal, or at least at the time it was). However, I was definitely curious. I read about how the plant was cultivated by native peoples in a small village in Mexico, and about how they used the plant in religious and healing ceremonies. They always seemed to use them in so-called “sacred pairs,” which struck me as interesting, though I wasn’t sure of its significance.
Not long after learning about salvia, I went with my family to the local arboretum. I went off by myself and found myself in a “medicinal garden.” I started looking around, and what should I find but a nice healthy salvia divinorum plant. I bent down and examined it, and noticed what looked like dried up old leaves underneath it. Just as I was doing that, a fresh leaf just fell right off onto the ground. That kind of blew my mind, because I was just thinking I’d like to get a leaf, but I wasn’t going to pick one and mess up the arboretum’s plant. As I was crouching there looking at the leaf on the ground, I remembered the idea of the “sacred pairs” – at that point something possessed me to reach out and touch the plant, incredibly lightly and gently, and another leaf fell right off and landed by the other one. Naturally, I pocketed the two leaves, with the feeling that the plant had offered itself to me (call me crazy, but that’s exactly what it seemed like).
I let the leaves dry out, and one night when my family was asleep, I set myself up to try it. I arranged a bunch of cushions such that I could do it sitting down, and not harm myself if I fell over unconscious, which is what I’d heard would happen when you smoked it (it did, BTW). I also arranged a safe area for the pipe so I wouldn’t set the house on fire if (when) it slipped from my unfeeling fingers. With the preparations made, I took a big puff.
It seemed like nothing happened at first, because my awareness told me that I was still sitting on the cushions in this room. The transition to an altered state happens instantaneously, IME, and while your body falls unconscious, your awareness seems unchanged at first. Then it changed. I was still sitting in my room, but suddenly I was sitting on what appeared to be a little island, with flames and sparks shooting up all around it. I looked around the room, and there were a number of women – old women in what looked like Mexican native dress – and they were each sitting on their own island, with the flames and sparks shooting up. Then I noticed that they were all holding on to each other’s islands, trying to keep them together. The old woman nearest me indicated that I needed to grab on to her island, to keep us all together. I had the sensation that this was urgent, like we were each sitting on a tectonic plate, and unless we held these things together, the world would come apart. So I grabbed hold.
The thing about smoking salvia (IME), is that the state is so real, it seems like it’s really happening. During the experience, I knew that I had smoked it, but I thought the results of that were physically happening. At that point I remembered my wife sleeping on the other side of the house, and became aware of all the noise we were making, what with the flames and lava shooting up, and the women telling me to hold on. I started thinking, oh great, this is going to wake her up, she’s going to come in and how will I explain all the old women, not to mention the flames? I worried about that for a bit, then suddenly I was waking up, reclining on the pillows, the pipe no longer in my hand but in the big ashtray thing I had made. Thus ended my first experience.
I’ve done it a fair number of times, but for me it’s not the kind of thing you want to repeat any time soon. So all my experiences were pretty far apart, time-wise.
The next time I smoked it, I made the same set-up, waited till very late at night, then took a big puff. Once again, it seemed as if nothing had happened. I was wondering if this experience was going to be a dud, when I started hearing a sound off in the distance. It sounded like some kind of giant being, and I could definitely sense some kind of presence — it got louder and louder as it seemed to approach my house. Suddenly I had the experience (which is somewhat common, I hear) of being rolled around and around. It turns out this giant being was clomping along, rolling up all 3-dimensional matter like a carpet (don’t ask how I know, it was obvious at the time).
I could hear it approaching the house, and I knew what it was doing, then here I go, rolling over and over, along with everything else in the room. I ended up in what I can only describe as an undifferentiated mass of matter – everything had lost its individual shape, like an elaborate clay sculpture that someone smooshed back into one big blob. And here I am, stuck in the middle of it. Once again, I thought this had really happened. I thought, great, I smoked salvia and now our house, yard, town, are all rolled up in one giant mess of nothing – what will my wife think of this? I was worried because there was no way she could not notice this. At some point I started feeling claustrophobic, and started struggling and pushing at this mass. It then occurred to me that I could push myself back into my own form, along with all the other contents of my room. So I felt I essentially had the responsibility of re-forming all the matter around me back into its 3-dimensional shape – tables, lamps, computer, etc. So, I pushed the stuff back into its familiar form, and woke up, once again reclining on the pillows.
Those are two representative experiences of smoking it. I was intrigued enough to want to try it some more, so I ordered a bag from sagewisdom. I ended up having the majority of my experiences by chewing the leaves, as the active chemical is readily absorbed in the mouth tissue. You take some dried leaves, soak them in water so you won’t have a mouthful of dust, then form a “quid” and chew it until you reach the level you want. It takes effect after about 20 minutes of slow chewing, and I didn’t find the taste that unpleasant. Once it kicks in, you can keep chewing to go higher, so you have more control over the intensity, unlike smoking, which is pretty much all or nothing. I’m not positive how long the smoking experience lasts, but I think it’s about 5 minutes. Chewing results in a peak of about a half hour or 40 minutes. It definitely affects your motor skills, so you have to settle in on the couch or bed so you don’t stumble around and hurt yourself.
Chewing it is very slightly like other kinds of tripping, but it really is completely unique and can’t be compared to anything else. At this point I should say that whichever way you do it, it is not a “fun” drug, definitely not a party substance. It should be approached with total respect and used for self-exploration or with a spiritual intent. IMO.
I will just relate a couple of experiences chewing salvia, because it is so different from smoking it, though there are definite “themes” or similarities.
One of the times I chewed it, for example, I experienced the native woman theme again – though in a completely different way. I had chewed the leaves and gotten to the level I wanted, and went to the kitchen sink to spit out the leaves and rinse my mouth out. As I bent over the sink, I was no longer in my kitchen. I was in a brightly sunlit, dusty Mexican village, leaning over to drink from water flowing from a pipe set in an adobe wall. Also, I was no longer myself, but an older, somewhat heavy-set native woman. I had zero awareness of my “normal” life, but WAS this person, in this place. It was one of the most amazing drug experiences I have ever had. It only lasted a few moments, but during that time I was experiencing a completely different life. Weird. I stood up and I was back in my kitchen, and went and sat down and had the rest of the experience.
That was the only time that I can remember that I lost awareness of my ordinary setting. Normally chewing the leaves doesn’t transport you the way smoking does.
Another time the experience began with hearing my thoughts as though they were completely external. You know the thoughts that are constantly generated by the mind – they sounded absolutely as if someone was in the room speaking them to me. And the weird thing is, they had a British accent. It was a little freaky, because I had the thought that this must be what schizophrenics hear when they hear voices. That same experience, as I was hearing my thoughts, I heard that giant being off in the distance – the one that was rolling everything up. It was clomping around, but it never came close to my house. The repetition of that thing was intriguing, as was the native woman theme.
I’ll just relate one more experience, because it was probably the most important for me. First, let me say that in my youth I had a LOT of various experiences. Toward the end of this period, I started having some very negative, bad trips. Filled with panic and fear. It’s the main reason I stopped doing that stuff.
The last time I did salvia, I chewed it and lay down. It was a very intense experience, and for the first time on this plant I started having that familiar panic rising up, which if you’ve ever experienced it is pretty miserable – it builds on itself getting more and more panicky. Internally, I start turning this way and that, trying to hide from it or make it stop, but that just makes it worse.
This time something different happened. As I was fighting the fear, it suddenly occurred to me that what I was feeling was okay – that if I was afraid, then that was exactly right, and what I was supposed to be feeling – there was nothing “wrong” with it. I realized that all those times in the past I had fought the fear because I thought I shouldn’t be feeling it. The moment I accepted what was happening, the fear vanished and I felt this kind of ecstatic happiness, like I had had a major healing breakthrough. That happiness was the only time I felt like that on salvia – it’s not generally an ecstatic drug, IME. That experience was several years ago, and I haven’t had the desire to do it again. Maybe someday.
So, that’s my tale of salvia. I’m not sure I can recommend it, but neither would I try and dissuade you. But if you do it, it would be much smarter to have someone with you, especially if you smoke it. Otherwise you could really hurt yourself or set the house on fire. Even chewing it will make your legs pretty wobbly.
Be careful out there, and happy trails.
ton:
You continue to refer to yourself as made of rubber. Buffers are made of rubber, my friend.
My intention is not to have the last word at all, (that’s your projection) but is and always has been to dialogue with you, yet you would like to silence me with your condescending attitude about gamesmanship, which speaks to your defensiveness, not my pain. So I am unclear if you do indeed wish me well. There will be no last word here, there will only be cessation of communication between two people with the same features, dominance. So be it.
My references to your style of railing against “people are weird” etc., (as you wrote) were to alcoholic behavior, which, in my professional experience, often extends long beyond the use of the drug. It is not slander, nor a personal attack. Slander would be calling you something you are not. And being an alcoholic is nothing to be ashamed of.
Just so we are clear, ignorance is our mutual enemy, not each other.
“a thinking, feeling living being” and according to what I’ve read so far, a female energy.
Somehow, all the reasons people had for chasing after Robert Burton can be explained by this “entity”.
Remember the “I” exercise? “I” to (it). Under the auspices of the plant “I” is taken away. Of course, this is my understanding so far.
Innernaut (22),
Thanks!!
Hi Whalerider,
Even if it were true that Ton drinks I don’t understand what is the point of saying it here. I do not wish to know these things about people because they do attack something one privately knows that will predispose others in relation to that person. Perhaps I made mistakes like that in relation to Girard and have the justification that Girard chose to be a public figure, one who has been determining people’s lives for twenty years in the Fellowship of Friends with deep indoctrination and as such I am questioning his integrity but indeed I might have, in my “wounded ness” gone way too far. I do not regret exposing Girard but I regret offending people in my exposure and I am hoping you don’t fall in the same pattern. Is that the situation with you? The feeling of having lost your stability is putting you on a defensive state so tough that you are attacking Ton with extremely pointed arms? Is it worth it? So you know each other and here is where you’re going to tell us about it? What is your aim? The fact that one was rejected does not mean that one has to make up reasons to be rejected consistently. You are much loved here on this blog Whalerider. Can you take that?
I know I have absolutely no authority on this matter but please stop.
Hopefully Ton will not buy on the bait but the fishing’s gone too far over a trifle. Might you be in a less vulnerable place Ton? Hopefully…
#3 James Mclemore
#19 ton
Ditto for me James. That is a gem. A gem is a stone, right ton?
yesri 27
yeseree, that’s right, a precious stone, much valued… thanks again James. Speaking of stone(d), thanks Innernaut for the salvia tales, your experiences sound generally and somewhat similar to my own with the “mint” — definitely not for “recreational” purposes.
Elena, thank you truly for your response to our friend the Whalerider… I had hoped that we really did turn the page.
Pray for peace, it starts “at home” it starts within and it does require a certain type of strength.
All the best to y’all.
22 innernaut
Thanks for the tales.
‘Life lacks the idea of looking for truly legitimate esoteric sources. Influence B does not count-only Influence C does.’
A revealing angle from RB who obviously looks for legitimate esoteric sources then counts everything in them, e.g. number of toes, number of fingers, number of sides in a square, (good to double check the last one occasionally). Now perhaps I understand his rationale – only influence C counts!
Good Lord, the fine ladies at the Oregon House store can also sometimes count, I shall show them more respect tomorrow and slyly observe the workings of their esoteric arithmetic.
Why is it though that great c influence seems only to be able to count up to ten? As the school evolves will it move towards triple digits, the 94 wordless breaths perhaps? These and other puzzling questions must presumably remain unanswered until my higher emotional centre turns terracotta color and combusts.
p.s. Shouldn’t we all be wearing asbestos hats?
For those interested in the plant conversation and in the subject of plants as sentient beings, poking around on this site might be interesting:
http://www.greenearthfound.org/index.html
It’s Ralph Metzner’s web site and contains links to books, full text of some of his writing, workshops he teaches, etc.
Ralph was one of the infamous three who did psychedelic research at Harvard in the 1960’s. The other two were Timothy Leary and Ram Dass (Richard Alpert). He went a less flashy, more academic route, attracting less attention.
waskathleenw(31),
I am interested thanks for the link. It’s appreciated.
Deleted on request of the author. — ES
Thanks for the link waskathleen 31… I tend to think that reconnecting with our biosphere as indicated by the “plant teachers” may show humanity a way out of the current morass we’ve created for ourselves and other living creatures. Somewhat related but taking a slightly different, perhaps less typically “shamanic” approach — here’s a site with an interesting philosophy… though you may already be familiar with bltc.
http://www.bltc.com/
On the darker side, here’s an article called Sex, Drugs, and Cults… Although the article does talk about other types of drugs (alcohol for example) an interesting take is that the “drugs” referred to here can are endogenous (i.e. dopamine and endorphins) which are produced under certain ‘cult conditions.’
“Two major evolved psychological mechanisms emerge from the past to make us susceptible to cults. Capture-bonding exemplified by Patty Hearst and the Stockholm Syndrome is one. Attention-reward is the other. Attention is the way social primates measure status. Attention indicates status and is highly rewarding because it causes the release of brain chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins. Actions lead to Attention that releases Rewarding brain chemicals. Drugs shortcut attention in the Action-Attention-Reward (AAR) brain system and lead to the repeated behaviour we call addiction. Gambling also causes misfiring of the AAR pathway. Memes that manifest as cults hijack this brain reward system by inducing high levels of attention behaviour between cult members. People may become irresponsible on either cults or drugs sometimes resulting in severe damage… Cult gatherings or human-potential trainings are an ideal environment to observe first-hand what is technically called the ‘Stockholm Syndrome… This is a situation in which those who are intimidated, controlled, or made to suffer, begin to love, admire, and even sometimes sexually desire their controllers or captors.”
ETC…
http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/cults.html
I was pondering overnight over the loss of structures in one’s life and how suicide is basically an expression of such a loss. I would even go as far as saying that most forms of crime are an expression of that loss.
It’s six in the morning and this’ll be just an outline of what I’d like to explore (together if possible) before I have to run out.
Some of the ideas are:
What people in cults are desperate to find is: COMMUNITY
They are willing to sacrifice their personal integrity and the integrity of their family in search for the integrity of the community. Deep down what they are really in love with or in desperate need of, is COMMUNITY.
The fact that they are willing to sacrifice themselves or first line, their families and friends or second line to the imaginary “community” in their hearts, makes it a Cult and not a community. It inverses the ideal of community and turns it into a hierarchic structure for the benefit of those in the inner circle. The COMMUNITY in the ideal sense of the word, that is, in the most “conscious” sense of the term, would on the contrary serve to protect the individual and the family.
In Latin countries where the female has still been in many layers of society subservient to the male, it is not uncommon to find women committing suicide after the marriage breaks apart. The connection to the community comes through the male and the structure of the family. When these dissolve the sense of loss is overwhelming.
I wonder if in very developed countries such as Sweden in which the individual is much protected by the state the strength of the instinctive well being in the social order does not run parallel to an emotional well being of the community and we get a high percentage of suicides because the individual becomes stagnant, the family and the community? As if “all were well” but in fact, the individual cannot affirm himself, he simply has to play along definite set of economic structures without struggle or possibility for inner or social development? I am guessing; a lot of research would need to be done to confirm this hypothesis.
The understanding of the fundamental connections between individual, family and society or rather, community or first, second and third line of work must necessarily lead us to an ample understanding of innumerable social and individual phenomena. The fact that these “realms” of existence are in traditional sociology not closely connected accounts for our own blindness to what we are really dealing with. Our social life is but the expression of our inner life. Our political structures are the expression of our level of being as human beings just as the coherence with which an individual “acts” in relation to himself, his entourage and his community are “ALL” an expression of his level of being.
A human being is an instrument with three strings: the individual, the family, and the community. Externally tuning these strings must necessarily tune his inner consciousness exactly proportionately to internally balancing his instinctive, emotional and intellectual centre. Any work on whichever sphere, helps tune the corresponding sphere.
A man cannot come to terms with his instinctive centre without coming to terms with the world of nature, at least in principle. S/he cannot come to terms with his/her emotional centre without coming to terms with his friends and family or the inner circle of his community and a wo/man cannot come to terms with her/his intellectual centre without coming to terms with her/his community. The intellectual centre is there for the sole purpose of understanding the laws that govern the life of human development through love or social responsibility. Objective social responsibility, or the balanced practice, the dialogue between the individual and the community are an expression of what mankind has achieved through its struggles from the Priest-King to the Individual through actual life on Earth. From one angle, all mankind has been learning is to “share the cake” like a child growing up: to share Earth. The consciousness or unconsciousness with which we share the cake is the reflection of our level of being. The same struggles that the ‘I’ has to go through to acquire integrity in an individual through work on balancing the various realms of his being are socially fought in the struggles mankind as a whole has to experience to develop a balanced community. The imbalance in mankind’s treatment of nature, the development of cities and concentration of industries at the service of a few men’s economic benefit and the detriment of a huge majority of people’s well being and the loss of human, (emotional) communities; the political organization that protects these state of things or the use of the intellectual centre at the service of the instinctive centre of those in power are all expressions of mankind’s level of being.
Tuning the strings of our inner as well as our outer lives is the aim of the Fourth Way: The Way of Life and it is alive and well! The Fellowship of Friends did not manage to kill it!
I must run, please allow me to correct later.
It is very strange. I went to the erowid website and found a picture and short bio of Gurdjieff. I went to the Greenearthfoundation website and found a whole bunch about Gurdjieff.
My “magnetic center” took me to the Fellowship Of friends and Robert Burton and I found no Gurdjieff. I guess that says alot about the formation of my “magnetic center”.
ton (35),
That link was interesting too, thanks!
Elena, a COMMUNITY college is awaiting your ‘presence’ to teach a class in humanities.
I trying to connect dots: The websites I’ve visited including this one say this to me.
The Monochromatic Knight a friend of Mr. Shiek wrote an article which included quotes from a book written by John Perkins (The Confessions of an Economic Hitman). Mr. Perkins if I remember worked for the United States Government as an economic manipulator in various countries. At the present time he interacts with Ecuadorian Shamans. The Shamans of South America have a notion called “the prophecy of the Condor and Eagle.
The Condor represents the Heart, Intution and the Mystical. The Eagle represents the Brain, Rational and Material.
The Greenearth foundation website has articles about the cycles of human activity. Including passages from Gurdjieffs Beelzebub. Everything so far is pointing to a major cycle of Change.
Robert Earl Burton is pointing to 2011 as his major departure date. At the 2011 website it too talks about a human activity shift.
The “plant eaters” have been looking to the “other side” for hundreds of years and have been taught. The “art” of expectation.
And the dots? Gurdjieffs arrival for the West. Shaman’s use of Salvia, 2011, the Union of the Condor and Eagle and Robert Burton’s unfolding of self.
This blog has brought patronizing to the level of Art.
It is quite interesting to see that there are some simple facts that most of those who express their opinions here fail to understand.
It is your free choice to leave the school and it is your free right to have whatever opinion about it and express it in anyway you want and in fact you are doing it quite diligently.
Yet, what seems to be quite odd is your complete & total lack of understanding that there are many students who sincerely and deeply follow the teaching based on their deepest understanding of how important striving for presence is for them and how important it is for them to be in the best environment for practicing presence i.e. the school under the guidance of the teacher.
This is a fact. No matter how many times you will be rewinding your tapes and spill your words here, you cannot ignore the fact that students stay or join the school out of their own free will. You are all eager to totally ignore this side of the equation.
Your claim that whoever left the school is “free” and those who stay or join are in “captivity” is pathetic.
35 ton
My first 2-3 weeks in the Fellowship of Friends was one of the most intense and pleasurable experiences in my life. I was literally high as a kite, and felt flooded with a kind of pure joy. I had so much energy I could barely sleep during that time. I thought it was some kind of proof that I had found the real thing. What you say about endorphins sounds exactly right. As with all drugs, no matter how good, there is always the other shoe to drop. I spent the remaining years in the FOF becoming more and more miserable, trying and utterly failing to recapture that initial bliss.
36 elena
I’ve spent a lot of time in Sweden. You may be at least partially right about the breakdown of family and community. The institution of marriage has become less important, and many couples co-habit and have children without ever becoming married — not a judgment, just an observation. Also, religion is almost non-existent, having nearly completely died out. It may be like what Fellowship members used to say about Marin County — when I moved there from the East Coast, I was warned by more than one person that that is where people go to leave the school. They said that it was so perfect there, you got to where you no longer felt you needed the Fellowship. The Marin Center at that time had about 30 or more official members, but only like 3 ever came to meetings regularly. After a couple of years, I left the school. But I think I was on my way out anyway. After years and years of people saying how “wonderful” it was at Renaissance, when I finally got there I found the place utterly depressing and kind of bleak. I guess in the end I wasn’t “good student” material.
But in terms of suicide in Sweden, I think it may have more to do with the incredibly dark winters, and the depression that many people experience from the lack of sunlight. But those other things may well be factors.
41 psychic
“This blog has brought patronizing to the level of Art.”
“Your claim that whoever left the school is “free” and those who stay or join are in “captivity” is pathetic.”
You are expressing negative emotions, Psychic. Sounds like your lower self speaking.
“It is quite interesting to see that there are some simple facts that most of those who express their opinions here fail to understand.”
It’s all so clear once you fall under the spell of the cult. Sadly, you life people will never get it.
“Yet, what seems to be quite odd is your complete & total lack of understanding that there are many students who sincerely and deeply follow the teaching based on their deepest understanding of how important striving for presence is for them and how important it is for them to be in the best environment for practicing presence i.e. the school under the guidance of the teacher.”
The main thing this “Teacher” has to offer can be found much cheaper on countless yucky male porno websites.
“This is a fact. No matter how many times you will be rewinding your tapes and spill your words here, you cannot ignore the fact that students stay or join the school out of their own free will.”
Free will? I thought “man cannot do”?
Please keep your messages coming Psychic. I thought the blog was about to die out a few weeks ago, then your “invitation” got people actively posting again. Thanks!
41 Psychic
You’re a loser.
41/Psychic
You state that many FOF members remain so “out of their own free will.” I gather that you find odious the suggestion that FOF members’ ability to choose is compromised or impaired in some way.
I ask you, is your will “free”? Assuming you say “yes,” what process did you go through to come to that conclusion? Did you examine only your subjective sense that you were freely choosing? Do you believe that such subjective sense is the only thing you need to examine to conclude that you are choosing freely? Do you concede the possibility that something outside of your conscious awareness may influence your choices?
In confidence schemes the mark seems to be “choosing freely.” Only later does he discover his choice to have been manipulated, his vulnerabilities discovered and exploited.
40 Arthur: “And the dots? Gurdjieffs arrival for the West. Shaman’s use of Salvia, 2011, the Union of the Condor and Eagle and Robert Burton’s unfolding of self.”
You’re joking, right?
40 Arthur: “And the dots? Gurdjieffs arrival for the West. Shaman’s use of Salvia, 2011, the Union of the Condor and Eagle and Robert Burton’s unfolding of self.”
You’re joking ( I hope)?
Psychic says: ‘you cannot ignore the fact that students stay or join the school out of their own free will.’
I believe students join the school out of idealism, hope and naivete.
Students leave after regaining a part of their ‘free will’; after they have realize that they do have a choice. And then sometimes they don’t realize it and stay, which I would consider a lack of free will, or a lack of understanding they have a choice.
There seem to be many layers and ‘personal stuff’ that one has to go through in ones life. The idea that free will is taking place upon joining or staying seems kind of ludicrous to me as it takes time to develop and is a process that usually leads to leaving the Fellowship
ton,
Somehow I missed your 480 on page 29. I’m late but thanks.
Wow, good news. Psychsick almost had a thought, retarded as it was.
Nuthead (46),
My dots. When I pretend that each dot is an LSD dot carrying with it all the information related to it they add up. I believe the current consensual reality states that everything is inner-connected. Some are aware of the connectedness, some suspect and some take the dogs for a walk.
The discussion on this page has taken some odd directions.
Salvia:
Many of us took loads of drugs in our earlier years – I certainly did – partly in a spirit of experimentation, partly from a feeling of “there must be more to life than this”. Innernaut’s descriptions are quite familiar. The enthusiasm for altered states fed right in to the decision to join the FOF.
Now, decades later, my experience is that states produced by drugs, self-remembering, meditation and the like, are only temporary. They can be fun, interesting, intense but they don’t have any connection with what is known as awakening or enlightenment. Ultimately they just substitute one illusion for another.
Predictions (2011, 2012, whatever):
No one is capable of predicting the future. These theories are nothing but mind candy, fun but insubstantial. How can we possibly give them creedence after our experiences with Mr. Burton? Surely we learnt something from our years of delusion?
Rumi poetry:
It’s not Rumi, it’s not poetry. It’s the Hallmark card version of spirituality: bland, reassuring, soporific.
Eg: “Keep knocking, and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look out to see who’s there”
That “eventually” is exactly what enables pseudo-teachers like RB to continue shearing the sheep.
Reality is right here, right now – there’s nothing else, nowhere to go.
The discussion on this page has taken some odd directions.
Salvia:
Many of us took loads of drugs in our earlier years – I certainly did – partly in a spirit of experimentation, partly from a feeling of “there must be more to life than this”. Innernaut’s descriptions are quite familiar. The enthusiasm for altered states fed right in to the decision to join the FOF.
Now, decades later, my experience is that states produced by drugs, self-remembering, meditation and the like, are only temporary. They can be fun, interesting, intense but they don’t have any connection with what is known as awakening or enlightenment. Ultimately they just substitute one illusion for another.
Predictions (2011, 2012, whatever):
No one is capable of predicting the future. These theories are nothing but mind candy, fun but insubstantial. How can we possibly give them creedence after our experiences with Mr. Burton? Surely we learnt something from our years of delusion?
Rumi poetry:
It’s not Rumi, it’s not poetry. It’s the Hallmark card version of spirituality: bland, reassuring, soporific.
Eg: “Keep knocking, and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look out to see who’s there”
That “eventually” is exactly what enables pseudo-teachers like RB to continue shearing the sheep.
Reality is right here, right now – there’s nothing else, nowhere to go. Except maybe to take the dog for a walk.
Psychic (41),
I’ve been reading this blog since the beginning and only missed one or two pages.
I submit to you that what Whalerider, Bruce, Elena and others have said about the evilness of the Fellowship of Friends is even partially true then it is not a school for enlightenment, religious instruction or spirituality.
I’m not an intellectual by any stretch of my imagination, but if you want to touch swords with the “regulars” on this blog bring sanitary napkins. These former Fellowship people know how to poke they learned well from Robert Burton.
Psychic 30/41: Nice. It sounds like Psychic is speaking with his own voice for the first time, rather than spewing out predigested soundbites of a propaganda machine. I would call that progress, which doesn’t immediately need to be stampeded down as “retarded loser”. Simply insulting him terminates thought just as much as any RB cliché about the dangers of the lower self. Maybe he is at the point where he (or his comrades) can start investigating his mind, even if most people here would disagree with his opinions.
Psychic says: “[t]here are many students who sincerely and deeply follow the teaching based on their deepest understanding of how important striving for presence is for them and how important it is for them to be in the best environment for practicing presence i.e. the school under the guidance of the teacher.”
He is completely right. Weren’t we all “sincerely and deeply” at one point? I, for one, do not count myself among people who have a “complete and total lack of understanding” of that fact.
If there is anything to argue about in his post, it is the definition of “free will”. (“Students stay or join the school out of their own free will.”) Perhaps that could lead to an interesting discussion.
I would speculate that in his post, Psychic is (perhaps unconsciously) attempting to simplify the situation down to the point where he can say “Your claim that whoever left the school is “free” and those who stay or join are in “captivity” is pathetic.” In saying that, he is again right. I think that such a claim would indeed be pathetic. The question is, is anyone making that claim? Maybe that is another point for discussion.
In my opinion, it is not about officially ceasing membership in the FoF. It is about an internal shift in attitude, which often happens to coincide with formally ending membership. But not all people who leave, leave for the same reasons, and some who leave may continue to be psychologically dependent on the FoF for many years (“not free”). On the other hand, there may be people who are formally members but have a high level of autonomy and would be considered extreme “outer circle”, who are much more free than others who leave but remain psychologically dependent. And on the third hand, there are people (such as Psychic) who actually enjoy and sincerely believe Robert Burton’s teaching, and resent attempts from the outside to “rescue” them, as insulting and patronizing intolerance. In my opinion, they are right. It is patronizing and personally disrespectful to try to rescue someone who believes differently than you, no matter how deluded you feel they are.
Thank you Nuthead.
JUST A THOUGHT
This has nothing to do with effort.
This has nothing to do with understanding.
Nothing to do with process, nothing to do with praxis.
Nothing to do with lack of process or praxis.
This is not about seeing anything new, or getting rid of anything old.
This is not something the mind could ever grasp. Nor does the mind need to give up its grasping.
This is nothing personal, nor does it have anything to do with the “impersonal”.
This is not about choiceless awareness, or seeing through the ego, or self-enquiry.
This cannot be expressed using concepts. Nor will it ever be expressed in the absence of concepts.
This is not about words. Not even these words.
This is not about getting anywhere.
This has nothing to do with any kind of future achievement.
This is not about following a path: there is no path, although there may be the idea of “a path”.
This is not about reaching a higher state: there are no higher states, although there may be concepts about “higher states”.
This is not about becoming anything, although beliefs about that may arise too.
This is certainly not about “putting an end to the I”. Only an “I” would want that.
This is most definitely not about “becoming more present” – the present was never lost in the first place.
This is not about waiting for an event called liberation – that would require time, and a “me” who would eventually become liberated.
This has nothing to do with going “beyond” anything – there is nothing to go beyond, and nobody who could go beyond even if they wanted to.
This is not about enlightenment. There is no such thing as enlightenment.
This is not about awakening. There is no such thing as awakening.
This is not about enlightened individuals passing on their understanding. That’s a good story, and a compelling one, but it’s just a story, and has no deeper reality.
This is not something that could be of any use to anyone.
This is not something that anyone would ever want.
But no matter – the “me” who would want this is just a thought anyway.
Just a thought.
See? Psychic really does do good things for this blog. Almost like an ex-student posing as a blind follower to stir the pot. But either way it works.
Thanks Arthur but they’ll probably need a super title in paper or someone in high places that can override all the demands before they can recognize the value of the presentation and not make fun of it.
Innernaut 42, that is very valuable, thank you for reading and appearing to understand the connections which have taken me a year to grasp.
This evening is the only lunar eclpse this year and will not repeat for ten years,….if I understood it right on the news.
Yes Traveller and Yesri Baba, Psychic is thinking. Congratulations Psychic! It is good to see you getting a little more desperate with the lack of arguments to present even to your own self. Yes, students are in the Fellowship of Friends by their own will but what the Fellowship of Friends is actually giving them has nothing to do with what they are looking for just like when one goes to a University and realizes they don’t teach wisdom there, just fact.
In the Fellowship they don’t even teach facts, they indoctrinate you to accept blindly. Open your eyes before you really go blind!
41 Psychic
“It is your free choice to leave the school and it is your free right to have whatever opinion about it and express it in anyway you want and in fact you are doing it quite diligently.”
Attention all current FOF members reading the Blog!!!!
Here you have the truth, directly from the voice of the Fellowship, the great Oz. YOU ARE NOW FREE TO LEAVE. Yes! You can go now, class is dismissed. Time to find out if you can fly on you own power.
Nuthead (53): Now, decades later, my experience is that states produced by drugs, self-remembering, meditation and the like, are only temporary. They can be fun, interesting, intense but they don’t have any connection with what is known as awakening or enlightenment. Ultimately they just substitute one illusion for another.
I don’t know, the states themselves seem to be temporary but the lessons you can take from these states can be long lasting/permanent (if only by realizing that a different state produces different thoughts which produce different emotions, different reactions…). Also, any and all states can be used as tools to some goal, anything from MDMA to salvia, DMT or ayahuasca has found uses in psychotherapy, shamanism and general search for well-being among some sub-cultures. People like Leary, Wilson, McKenna and many others would (have) argue(d) that drugs serve a purpose in awakening/enlightenment (a short-cut if you will), Alan Watts would have said that they show you where to go (‘once you get the message, hang up the phone’). From personal experience states make some realizations easier to obtain (the work comes after the state, including the ‘realizing’), they can also strengthen personal (true) will which seems to be at the very bottom (top) of it all.
I would not disregard them, at the very least they are a kick in the butt that can turn people in a different direction. Surely, they are not a proof of anything other than that we (the modern we who want to know how everything operates) do not understand how, on what basis and why we function the way we do.
# Psychic
“One must patiently allow for time to align one’s being with one’s knowledge”.
R.Burton 18.04.77
Good luck.
60 Sheik
The principal lasting lesson for me is that “normal reality” is a construction of the mind.
But unlike Leary, McKenna and friends, I don’t see drug states as a short cut to awakening. It was extraordinary merging with the universe while on LSD, but there was no long term result other than the wish to attain that kind of state without drugs, which led to joining the FOF. After two decades of struggling to achieve this aim, I realised that the efforts espoused by the FOF/4th Way lead nowhere.
Now there’s a deep awareness that “higher states” are in fact not any more real or profound than the state I’m in now.
60 the Esoteric Sheik of Inner Confusion
Nuthead (53): Now, decades later, my experience is that states produced by drugs, self-remembering, meditation and the like, are only temporary. They can be fun, interesting, intense but they don’t have any connection with what is known as awakening or enlightenment. Ultimately they just substitute one illusion for another.
I don’t know, the states themselves seem to be temporary but the lessons you can take from these states can be long lasting/permanent (if only by realizing that a different state produces different thoughts which produce different emotions, different reactions…).
—————–
I wonder what we all/any of us mean by awakening and enlightenment. It may be different for each person, and what we believe it to be is encased in the layers of mesh and filters that we experience and interpret everything through, so I don’t see how the “truth” about enlightenment can be anything but subjective.
Having said that . . .
I would agree with Nuthead that altered states substitute one illusion for another — IF the exploration stops there.
As Sheik says, the lessons learned can be long-lasting. Changes can be set in motion that sometimes have a profound and lasting impact. If we just go back to beer and the shopping network (or Gucci and the Met), then the state was probably no more than interesting entertainment.
It’s all in what is done with it.
Does it lead to “enlightenment”? I don’t know. What’s enlightenment?
When I wake up early in the morning,
Lift my head, I’m still yawning
When I’m in the middle of a dream
Stay in bed, float up stream
Please don’t wake me, no
don’t shake me
Leave me where I am
I’m only sleeping
Everybody seems to think I’m lazy
I don’t mind, I think they’re crazy
Running everywhere at such a speed
Till they find, there’s no need
Please don’t spoil my day
I’m miles away
And after all
I’m only sleeping
Keeping an eye on the world going by my window
Taking my time
Lying there and staring at the ceiling
Waiting for a sleepy feeling
Please don’t spoil my day
I’m miles away
And after all
I’m only sleeping
Keeping an eye on the world going by my window
Taking my time
When I wake up early in the morning,
Lift my head, I’m still yawning
When I’m in the middle of a dream
Stay in bed, float up stream
Please don’t wake me, no
don’t shake me
Leave me where I am
I’m only sleeping
Lennon/McCartney
Psychic, what’s your take on the fact that Robert Burton is hang up in the past because he cannot place his vision into the future after failing for thirty five years to even experience a decent intuition? If he were truly present he would not be trying to justify himself with the past.
He’s digging dinosaurs because he has to make something up to keep students busy and believing but his level of fantasy is not nearly as amusing as the Fellowship pretends. He’s actually trying to find his own essence in that digging but at this point, he’s lost complete trace of it. It’s painfully pathetic.
Appreciated your post Sheik. If everything you said could be connected to levels of being then each experience could increase or decrease the level of being of the subject. Too many drugs or mushrooms and the I gets lost in a limbo of incomprehensible realms of the instinctive centre. They, sacred mushrooms or plants, do seem to open up realms that are already within one, the physical DNA of the world of the spirit is codified in the instinctive centre or each human being’s body. They seem to do it though at the cost of depressing the sense of self when they are as widely abused as they are in modern times.
The practice of sacred plants with the guidance of a guru today can be replaced by the practice of self remembering or presence and the acquisition of a higher state or the accessing of a higher realm through the concentration of one’s own energy or trust. The emotion of trust has its own magic. The ‘I’ penetrating its different realms both inside and outside the individual (for consciousness encompasses them both). Both the outside and the inside meet in the individual.
There’s a great difference between the realms perceived in drugs of any kind and the realms perceived by allowing the I to surface. Realms perceived by external means, no matter how sacred, will give the individual a view of natural realms, which are not for that reason less sacred. But realms perceived through the appearance of the ‘I’ give the individual a view of spiritual realities connected to human evolution. The capacity to actualize those visions reveals the level of understanding that the individual reached with the experience. A whole lifetime can take to actualize the integrity of such experiences. They finally become “the flower”, the outer expression of that individual’s inner experience.
I wonder what the karmic consequences are these days for sincerely aiding and abetting a delusional deviant?
As always, I got nothing.
Hey My Sheik
Don’t know how you found me where you did, but so glad you did, you saved me from myself. Thank you. Thank you.
Probably, no one in the world would have picked up on the implication from those three or four words, all that implication, subtle, but wrong, with all my heart I knew it was wrong. Feeling vindictive, and put upon, lashing out in the most cruel way.
Vous m’avez sauvé
Clean slate
Cake
41 Psychic
Uh, yeah, about that “log that’s in your own eye” thingie…
Obviously, M. Psychic has missed the most important fact that separates those who are in from those who are out.
Bloggers are almost all people who once said they
sincerely and deeply follow the teaching based on their deepest understanding of how important striving for presence is
However, we now have information, knowledge, experience that is denied to M. Psychic; what you understand when you leave the insane asylum of the FoF. Since Psychic still resides there, he cannot know what it is like outside but persists in trying to “correct” us. Unsurprising arrogance, that.
. . .
Interesting discussion on NPR today in which author Susan Jacoby was making a point of the difference between anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism, that is, the belief in something that is contradicted by observable facts. For instance, it is anti-rational to suggest that 2 + 2 = 5. Sounded strangely familiar to me, I wonder why…. ?
JoelF
I’m with you Joel. I don’t believe Sidekick is “starting to think” at all. I think he’s the same fucking moron that he’s been all along. I’ll leave it to others to be magnanimous to this putz. We all gave the Flying Faerie the benefit of the doubt once too often, I’m not going to waste it on a mindless drone. If anyone here thinks Sidekick is starting to use his noodle for a change I have a very nice bridge to sell, and it’s been blessed by 44 invisible lunatics.
66 Mick Danger
At the very least, considerable psychological damage occurs – loss of the ability to think for oneself or to distinguish right from wrong, or to function normally in “life”, a general weakening of one’s being and life force, an increasing tendency to negate the reality of anything that disagrees with FOF dogma (even when excruciatingly obvious), deferral to a future lifetime of the possibility of spiritual awakening, schizoid separation from one’s true nature (“lower self”), increased tension and anxiety caused by suppression of negative emotions, acquisition of phony “good student” act, decreased ability to recognise or feel genuine emotions (both positive and negative), etc., etc.
That’s just for the average dupe. I suspect the effects are considerably more severe for those who know about RB’s corruption and try to cover it up, especially if they’re involved in recruiting new members, and even more so if they’re actively pimping.
70 Nuthead
Now, don’t hold back.
63 waskathleenw
“I would agree with Nuthead that altered states substitute one illusion for another — IF the exploration stops there.
As Sheik says, the lessons learned can be long-lasting. Changes can be set in motion that sometimes have a profound and lasting impact.”
* * *
It has been that way for me. There are things that were seen and experienced some 35 years ago that still serve as a guide. You could say they did lead me also to fof, but for me personally, they also led me back out of it. The most powerful thing in several of those experiences was precisely what Pensate un attimo said, “Just a thought”.
And thank you Pensate un attimo for that post at 56.
Psychic:
The choice to stay in the Fellowship of Friends is not free. It is very expensive. Payment is required. Robert uses fear for your soul as leverage and collateral. But the oldest trick in marketing is to make the consumer feel inadequate so they are motivated to buy your product in order to compensate. Most consumers are brand loyal.
And the choice to leave will save you more than just money.
To Psychic:
Would you explain how you justify and understand Robert’s sexual and financial improprieties? I would appreciate a rational and thoughtful answer, not just a repetion of the current dogma. I am not challenging you. I would sincerely like to hear how you explain these things to yourself.
You must have thought about this and come up with some answer for yourself. I don’t think anyone who is “in” has yet offered an explanation that makes sense.
73 whalerider
“Robert uses fear for your soul as leverage and collateral.”
* * *
I think that is one of the main answers to a question I have often asked myself and here on the blog in relation to what keeps the students ‘locked in’ to the fellowship of friends, even after perhaps being exposed to the information this blog produces.
It is fear. I remember some part inside of me cringing the first time I heard Robert say (paraphrased),
“For those who find a real school and lose it, it would have been better had they never been born.”
Boy O Boy!! That can be a pretty deep hook.
Talking about ’states’ in flatland. I would guess we would have a mighty laugh reading some of this hogwash with who we are in the foreground.
That’s one way I look at ’states’- me moving in and out of me, from background to foreground. Sure they’re all temporary in passing except for the me part.
Funny we say it is just exchanging one illusion for another. This is because we focus on and remember the illusory part of the experience and not the qualities of the experiencer.
I don’t advocate the use of drugs particularly. I kind of like what the Sheik said and the Alan Watts quote. I do think it is an experience some people should have to get an look at different ‘dimensions’.
Some of this distorted flatland pseudo neo-advaidist clap trap really frosts me.
Definitly like what Nisgaradatta had to say when asked about drugs:
“What drug did you take to get in the state you are in now?”
Thanks again James for ‘Sunrise Ruby”. I have never read Rumi. That poem is the most beautiful, concise depiction of realization I have ever read.
Nuthead 62 “It was extraordinary merging with the universe while on LSD…”
The night of my 21st birthday I went to a party some friends were throwing in the country, by a lake. I dropped a hit of “windowpane” and spent much of the evening perched up in a tree. I had the experience of “merging with the tree” and later that night I “saw god.” With the ruby sunrise I came down from the trip and the tree and I made a decision that would determine the course for the rest of my life — I reasoned that this state I had experienced is within me and as such I should be able to live in a state of “god-realization” without the use of a drug. So my quest to find “a way” to live in higher states began in earnest, I became a sort of “zealot.” Initially the search involved reading about descriptions of higher states and “methods” of attainment… I soon found a copy of “The 4th Way” which happened to have a FOF bookmark in it and the rest is, as they say, “history” — part of which has been related in the pages of this site.
You wrote: “…but there was no long term result other than the wish to attain that kind of state without drugs, which led to joining the FOF.”
I would say for me, that there is indeed a long term result and joining the FOF was part of it but as it turned out it was “somewhat” of a deviation… “states” may be transitory but that original experience still informs who and what I am, for “better” and for “worse.”
I would echo the question asked by waskathleenw (63) because it seems central to what motivated many of us here to get involved with the FOF in the first place… “What’s enlightenment?” (neti neti).
Elena 65 thanks for your insights here: You wrote in part: “The practice of sacred plants with the guidance of a guru…”
IMO the “plant teachers” are in and of themselves the “guru”– they can be seen as individual entities with their own unique character and lessons to impart… encountering these teachers is in certain ways identical to encountering another being… in other words, the experiences are not of the “I” but can be transmuted to become part of who and what one is. I would agree with you that the experiences gained from encounters of the sort under discussion are not to be substituted for development of the “I” through what we know as “working on oneself” — and this is not intended as an endorsement of using the “plant teachers” as a short cut to “enlightenment” — but I thought I might do a bit of reflecting here since I have had certain experiences with them… for what it’s worth.
76 baba: “What drug did you take to get in the state you are in now?”
endogenous considerations…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyltryptamine
“How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with say, my knowledge of my room…”
Kafka
Ton: As regards BLTC, the only worry I have is this:
We are on the brink of a revolution in reproductive medicine. Decoding the human genome allows us to choose the genetic make-up of our offspring. The ethical choices we make – and the ethical choices made by our children and grandchildren – will determine how much or how little suffering exists in the world. Participating in the imminent post-Darwinian transition just means making – and persuading other prospective parents to make – informed reproductive decisions about just what kinds of (post-)human beings we want to exist. On the one hand, we can opt to retain the legacy wetware of our hominid ancestors. This choice entails condemning our children and grandchildren to a genetic predisposition to suffering and malaise. Or alternatively, we may decide that our descendants should enjoy lifelong mental health. Gradients of intelligent bliss can be the genetically preprogrammed backdrop to everyday life.
This part and some others on the website painfully remind me of the Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. The only things needed in order to arrive at Huxley’s vision of society (ie. the only ones that do not operate already) are genetic programming (of the kind that BLTC seems to be thinking of) and soma (the notion of which is also touched upon on the website).
Scary scary scary. Or am I the only one who (almost without alternative) sees it from that angle?
Reading further, I found a response to my reaction – the last point on the website is an essay on why the Brave New World is a tragic piece of literature that has slowed down research in the area of genetic engineering and the search for ’soma’ (an insane notion).
Sadly, all I could find on the website was a proposition for global happiness and the ways through which that could be achieved, I think that the term they used was ‘abolition of suffering’. It seems that they missed the point – suffering is usually a reaction to something, it is not an irrational (uncaused) phenomenon. Like pain, it is an indicator. Like pain, sometimes it breaks down and over-indicates (in my opinion, there is no reason why we should feel constant pain, such as with arthritis, or polio), equally some depression is so over-bearing that it prevents any action to resolve it. So there is space for drugs, genetic engineering (and what have you) to reduce suffering and re-balance our brains and nervous systems, but to ‘abolish it’ frankly seems insane.
Happiness is as much (in its strength) of a behaviour-influencer as sadness, anxiety, or depression. It’s more pleasurable to behave according to the feeling of happiness, it is more pleasurable to feel happy, but somehow (extreme or ceaseless) happiness doesn’t seem to be the right state for introspection, self-change, or anything else really but hedonism (the search for pleasure). Contentment perhaps, happiness no, not for life.
Having said all that, the website is a brilliant resource on legal and illegal drugs and their uses and effects.
‘pyschic’ 41:
“It is quite interesting to see that…”
About 30 years ago someone in the fof decided this phrase would somehow get everyone to drop everything and listen.
The phrase caught on and never went away.
But no one ever closes the interesting stuff by saying, “Now, the REST of what I am about to say is not interesting at all, and I have nothing particularly enlightening to impart to the conversation, so you can all relax now as I ramble on indefinitely.”
Vena (74),
You ask a fair question:
“To Psychic: Would you explain how you justify and understand Robert’s sexual and financial improprieties?”
And I really like your follow-up comments:
“I would appreciate a rational and thoughtful answer, not just a repetition of the current dogma. I am not challenging you. I would sincerely like to hear how you explain these things to yourself.
“You must have thought about this and come up with some answer for yourself. I don’t think anyone who is “in” has yet offered an explanation that makes sense.”
I agree. Because then we’d truly have to think about it, and ask ourselves what it means FOR US that Burton is living his life the way he is living it.
70 Nuthead
So, other than the loss of a few bucks and a false sense of self-importance, there’s really no downside. Small price to pay for soul insurance.
“We all need someone we can dream on….” Jagger/Richards
Tea & Sympathy will be served elsewhere.
Psychic,
I check in on the blog every now and then to see if there is a different take on things and read your comment and some of the reactions.
I wrote on this blog in the past because I wanted to understand how ex students felt and also wanted to express my own opinions and experiences.
I have intervals with the FOF, and the Teacher, and do question things at times. But Psychic, at the end of the day we understand why we are here in the FOF; and trying to make others understand this is impossible; just like it is generally pointless for former students to convince current students that we are better off without the FOF.
I would not waste your time on this blog for there are very few bloggers here that have relativity and few who can debate the issues in civil way. The norm here is to be sarcastic, ridicule, judge and attack students who wish to express themselves. This blog is the playground for former students or students getting ready to leave the school, and it is better to just let them have it totally to themselves so they can heal; for when students enter it becomes a battlerground.
I love this show. It is, in many ways, the absolute opposite of everything Fellowship.
http://www.mtv.com/ontv/dyn/viva_la_bam/videos.jhtml
“I have intervals with the FOF, and the Teacher, and do question things at times. But Psychic, at the end of the day we understand why we are here in the FOF.”
Fat Boy, this is a great example of a thought terminating concept and spiritual bypassing. You’re saying that your doubts and questioning are characteristic of an interval, which when bridged brings you again to the realization of why you are in the FOF?
No need to feel any troublesome dissonance then right? It was a pesky interval but you made efforts and it passed and now you’re back on track, intoning your sequence and listening to no “I’s” unrelated to presence.
This is what people in cults do Fat Boy, and at the end of the day that’s how they are able to stay in spite of the obvious absurdities. If you can see this tendency to bypass for what it is, you might also see how and why you are still in the FOF.
Good Luck,
Leonhardon.
If you are a student in the Fellowship of Friends and are reading this blog, even if you skip or dismiss every other post on this page, please read ‘post’ #85 by Leonhardon. Down in the middle of those doubts and the ‘intervals’ is a voice that does belong to you. That voice is trying to bring you something that is outside of the context you have been schooled in.
New Obamaphilia cult threatens to sweep the United States and turn it into a liberal zombie zone. It isn’t yet futile to resist.
Vote for the Clinton’s, reality’s razor edge.
77 ton
My experiences sound very similar to yours, even down to perching in a tree.
“I would say for me, that there is indeed a long term result and joining the FOF was part of it but as it turned out it was “somewhat” of a deviation… “states” may be transitory but that original experience still informs who and what I am, for “better” and for “worse.”
Yes, I agree. What I was getting at is:
The drug experience produced a desire for higher states, which led to the 4th Way. G. indicates it’s possible to move from being a man # 1-3, a “sleeping machine”, to becoming a man # 5-7, a “conscious being”, which I interpreted to mean a person continually in a higher state similar to an LSD high.
I joined the FOF because the students I met were actively practicing the 4th Way, or so it seemed. RB was presented as a conscious being, and to my horror now, I came to believe that was true.
Neither the drugs nor the FOF produced the desired result, and so could indeed be described as deviations. But in both cases, the experiences still inform who and what I am, just as you say.
Sheik
Just visited your site animam recro and listened to the u-tube “The Mindscape of Alan Moore”.
Thanks for that – he is great.
87 nuthead
wasn’t there something Gurdjief purportedly said about a pill, “swallowing moon” and the “wise man”?
Sheik 78 & 79
Thanks for the thought provoking posts. One take I have on what you write is — in order to appreciate and recognize pleasure and happiness there needs to be contrasting experiences and I agree, such is life as we know it. There is a wide range of inner experience and emotions, including sadness, anxiety, depression, etc, and you say that a life of extreme or ceaseless happiness would not be conducive to self-change or introspection. I don’t know about that, in the past when I used some of the entheogens, I had the extreme experience of the “pleasures of the mind” and with that experience came deep introspective insights resulting in impetus for self-change. There are many types of pleasure and happiness and although it is a fact that sadness, despair, anxiety, depression, etc, are a part of life (as we know it), if I had my druthers I’d opt for experiences on the pleasure side of the spectrum rather than the blue alternatives. I am all for “responsible hedonism” I don’t have a problem with the enjoyment of pleasure.
On the other hand, ya I agree, I have similar sorts of concerns regarding some of the thought processes and implications of the BLTC “mission.” It seems like many expressions of Utopian thought include conundrums, contradictions and the message is often delivered with the conviction and myopia of religious zealotry… that is of concern in itself. Utopian thought usually deals with radical change– that can be a “scary” prospect, it may not be so threatening for a small group to go to some remote backwater and form an “intentional community” based on their shared ideals, but when the proposed changes involve large scale social and genetic restructuring, that gets into the “scary” zone. I think that the implications of what the BLTC site is talking about regarding tinkering with the genome and human biology is just that, re-engineering life as we know it, playing god on a large scale contains “scary, scary, scary” prospects. But it is a fact that genetic manipulation and things of this sort are happening now, it is the future and the future is upon us — (that is assuming the human race can survive it’s own self-destructive inclinations).
As for the knotty practical and moral questions that naturally arise out of the subject of genetic engineering, such as — to what end and purpose? and especially who makes the decisions and controls the outcome? this is obviously hugely problematic. I don’t know how seriously the BLTC people take their proposed Utopian vision but it does appear that quite a bit of thought and research has gone into the project and they at least make an attempt to show several sides of an argument, pro and contra… although their bias and agenda is clear throughout. I read Brave New World many years ago, the dystopian world controlled via a combination of genetic engineering and drugs portrayed by Huxley would indeed be a “scary” place to live and in this respect the BLTC site balances on a razor’s edge in advocating their vision for “trans-humanity.” In the section called “BRAVE NEW WORLD ? A Defence…etc.” there is an interesting take on some of the arguments against “paradise-engineering” many of the arguments against, were raised by Huxley’s original dystopia… I think reading Brave New World back in high school colors my own feelings of trepidation regarding ideas promoted by BLTC and it’s interesting to read their critique and analysis of Huxley. I’m not advocating for the BLTC point of view, but I do think it raises some serious moral questions concerning genetic engineering and manipulation of body chemistry through the use of drugs — as far as that goes “the genie is out of the bottle” there is no turning back and IMO we will be better off with an informed examination of the difficult issues, prospects and dangers inherent to the subject.
etc.
Psychic,
Awakening as taught in the Fellowship of Friends is a self centred issue in which people have the attitude that more than an honour, it is a right and in practice a right conceded by Robert Burton only. You Poor folks. What matters is not whether you are a decent, coherent and non-pretentious human being but if Robert Burton said you have become worthy of his trust. Then you can fuck people around by ignoring them because deep down even the highest in the inner circle know that they better not fuck around with Robert who is the “one and only” in the Fellowship of Friends and who holds his grip precisely turning people against each other and leaving no one with anything but superfluous power. Or do you call power buying the balloons for the fourth of July, or the clickers? Maybe travelling like a lunatic for three days in each centre? Or counting the millions you’ll watch go down the toilet in Roberts plain tickets for the new boys? But then they all justify him thinking that they should not be wanting more power! and continue to endorse their presence to him not quite understanding exactly how they sold their soul.
To have lost the connection with one’s self and allowed a so-called teacher to interfere is not the Fourth Way but you guys might get a copper medal when you get to hell for having bared for so long in the way of the non existent fakir. In the Fourth Way all the paths might lead to Rome but you have to be willing to walk with your own feet no matter their length, because the road opens every time you trust your self enough and closes each time you deposit your being in somebody else’s ass.
Vena asks Psychic how he explains Robert’s sexual and economic improprieties and Girard would explain it by stating that consciousness is not functions and that Robert’s, Girard’s or any body else’s functions in the Fellowship can be actually very damaged but that that has nothing to do with their degree of consciousness: they are not trying to perfect the machine is a favourite indoctrinating stereotyped sentence. It closes the door to argument because if the student then says that correcting the machine would matter he would be looked at as if he were under the spell of Influence A and not Robert’s magical influence C. They then use the inverse theory against students with the attitude that they are not conscious enough considering they don’t even make enough money to go to dinner with Robert every week and should therefore avoid their desire to participate on an equal basis with Robert, Girard, the Asafs and the rest of the paid pimps, the psychics. It works perfectly on people who cannot see beyond their nose and have mortgaged their soul to Robert Burton; Too many of us for too long.
Another absurdity in the Fellowship of Friends was the eagerness men like Girard and then Asaf would claim to be looking for a permanent state of awakening with an edge that the realm of simple life was ‘not good enough’. Robert was never awake enough to give meaning to ordinary life no matter how many times he washed his teeth upside down or fucked the boys downside up. He had to separate from the body and influence A and if you screamed “the king is naked” they’d throw you out for looking at influence A instead of influence C. They still haven’t realized that in the hierarchy of real beings you can’t just present a credential from Robert Burton.
The aspect of having any form of rejection for life in its precise terms is an issue because undermining it is already a problem. People in the Fellowship have to adorn life with hierarchic robes to feel it is worth struggling to be in a high place although the things that really matter about being alive, like the company of other people, water, air and some bread, are readily accessible. One of the dramas of our times is that the instinctive struggle is not the main issue and no one knows what to do with the overdose but they definitely will not share any, definitely not rationalize where the surplus energy is going into, building useless things that one can throw away after the first use, or eat compulsively the third pizza not knowing how to rest their bowels and keep screaming because there’ll never be enough for the compulsion to find something more worthy outside of one’s self than one’s simple presence.
The quality of one’s performance in any job is one’s own struggle and the contentment for doing one’s best is more than enough but not to people who have to make OF living a complicated issue like being served by a legion of students in black, in gold plated dishes, fillet mignon’s that have to be thrown to the dogs because the teacher gets a kick out of pretending that it is work on the instinctive centre although it is only meant to aggrandize his ego. Perfectly programmed Hans H’s. and Michael M’s, beautiful adult men dedicated to stating that Robert Burton is worth serving dinner to every thirty first of December, because idolatry must live on.
And yet people wonder what and how we were indoctrinated if not by the “statement of being” (not of presence but of commitment to idolatry) of a legion of idiots who were themselves indoctrinated by the other legion of people without identity before them. Poor Robert has never been present enough to project himself into the future but has had to dig into the past to justify himself, presenting his subjects with scatological pieces, like a tree growing backwards down to Earth instead of looking high towards the sun. Who’s ever known of a conscious being that turned out to be an anthropologist interpreter, and a bad one at that too?
Ton:
“…I would echo the question asked by waskathleenw (63) because it seems central to what motivated many of us here to get involved with the FOF in the first place… “What’s enlightenment?””
Not love that clings to it self.
Maybe the understanding of the Inner Hierarchy of Beings when understanding is the irrevocable experience of having witnessed beyond doubt or the need to prove?
Maybe standing on the same spot second after second
observing the things one would so readily have gotten lost in,
only to perceive them more fully after a while as if the more one let go of them, the deeper one coloured them, the more vital and beautiful they became?
Maybe the endless trust, the unconditional humility, the unmovable pride of knowing one self to be within the hierarchy of beings even if in the lowest echelon, knowing there is no low in that dimension in which we all are?
Maybe the all encompassing gratitude which permeates
all of Air, all of Water, all of Earth and each human being?
Is it in the game of Sunset and Sunrise?
In the food we eat?
In this life that spills rapidly out of one’s naked hands and still is?
Maybe in the suffering that walks us by the hand to the unadorned entrance of sanity?
The unnecessary suffering that spills like burnt oil from one’s fading lamp?
Maybe in this consonants married to vowels with which we affirm that we wish to connect?
Maybe in this plea that does not beg; in the myriad mistakes; in the acceptance without judgement and the revolution without truce.
Maybe in this willingness to let go and go on.
_____________________________________________
I believe it was Arthur’s Post #435 on February 15, 2008, that began the Salvia divinorum thread… I am amazed, because it was on that very same day that a similar thread was caught hold of by myself concerning Ayahuasca…
_____________________________________________
Hello ‘leonhardon’ ~
You wrote ~
“…and at the end of the day that’s how they are able to stay in spite of the obvious absurdities. If you can see this tendency to bypass for what it is, you might also see how and why you are still in the FOF.”
_________________________
Something I have recently arrived at understanding a little bit about is that this “bypass” is due to a kind of painful, insatiable appetite to doubt and construct psychologically ‘no way out’, which, in my experience, is directly synonymous with deep, unresolved emotional traumas, i.e., the feeding of their condition of ‘unresolved-ness’ (for something must keep them maintained as thus, yes?) and these traumas are very likely totally unrelated to one’s history in the Fellowship of Friends…
IMO, the ’school’ resonated and resonates with the void (emotional traumas needing a place to stay, to exist and feel secure, yet IMO, ironically unresolved and unmet) within all ‘magnetic centers’, it also resonated with the void within all ‘not-so-magnetic centers’, or people who still had voids to fill with certain mental atmospheres, though kept a distance from the other side of the coin (after all, they were on the other side) ~
In other words, IMO, there are usually two sides of the coin when considering this ‘void’ or ’seeking thirst for more sand to create more thirst’; to me, it is ~
Those that are hopeful it will come to an end with the application of more wanting, more effort towards finding more things to call mechanical and difficult, more trying to dig new grave plots for new ideas and body’s of Life’s knowledge that become ‘dead’ once compared to the type of ‘food’ the ‘conscious-hope-lifeline’ eats, belonging to those faiths and fears that feed the void and keep the yearning yearned for and the painful self balled up.
It’s interesting to me, this, because such an inner process does not seem static to the mind of a ‘certain kind’ of student, yet when looked at from another point of view, IMO, it can be seen as a pinwheel stuck on top of a fencepost: the pinwheel is moving, yet, innerly it is taking itself one type of way while the person may ‘think’ it’s another and do not understand that they are in a certain kind of ‘Evolution Circle Gesture’ within themselves concerning the resolution of the void or emotional trauma: one question to perhaps ask oneself is ~ What am I doing that maintains that I cannot do? Which to me refers to the pinwheel process, which it seems all must pass through in some way or another.
The second are those who are resolved to not hope it will come to an end: those that are considering where the news is the most fantastic and most irreconcilable, as to gain more news, etc.
IMO, until a ‘certain time’, which no amount of blogging can precisely ‘trigger’ in of itself to occur spontaneously, although it can be an inspiration to move towards its discovery, the “in spite” and “obvious absurdities” will remain not so much the property of those ’still in’, that sort of ownership, IMO, will always be premature to a certain degree because it’s not indigenous to a specific point on a mysterious time line we’re all somehow sharing together…
How this ‘mystery’ works can be honored, IMO…
The “obvious absurdities” are as important to the unresolved emotional traumas within oneself as the “obvious facts” are to those who are equally moving through their soul’s journey with a sort of mist hiding the clarity to resolve those same type or category of emotional traumas, only they’re being covered or preoccupied by the nature of the ‘other side of the coin’, i.e., more good news or bad news, so long as it’s news (The Sacramento Bee).
IMO, I am not saying that the coin cannot be simply tossed into the river and one can move on without its ‘good luck/bad luck’ reputation in one’s pocket; only that getting rid of the coin is an enormous journey and regardless, IMO, as to who has which side of the coin staring at them, it may not assist ‘the blog’s ability’ to let go of the coin for it’s own purposes and emotional healing by staring too hard at its flipping through the air prior to landing, which, it often simply will not do if either side of the fence always dedicates it’s toss to be given to that inner wishing well called ‘I am not enough’, ‘why can’t you complete me?’ or ‘the void’.
There are ways to heal: ‘Grandmother’ is one of them.
_______________
L.t.y.a.
Students,
Waiting for the Fellowship’s collapse or for Burton to kick the bucket, you loose the opportunity to make your own decision and leave the cult by choice.
You will regret and never will forgive your self this weakness.
94
Hence, the creation of another emotional trauma: you will forgive yourself for this weakness and move on, beyond “regret and weakness”.
:.)
43 innernaut to psychic psychotic enabler:
(p): “Your claim that whoever left the school is “free” and those who stay or join are in “captivity” is pathetic.”
(i): “You are expressing negative emotions, Psychic. Sounds like your lower self speaking.”
Innernaut, you are my friend, and you know I stand up for friends like you. (You too, spoonful, and many others.) Please understand that I am in no way attacking you here. Your comment to psychic psychotic enabler way back when stuck with me, and I have been mulling it over for a few days. You bring up an important point. Let’s show fatboy how we “outies” debate in a civil way.
(BTW, fatboy, we display much more relativity out here living independently on our own than you will ever have…as long as you continue being dependent upon Robert and the FOF. You see, (or maybe you don’t) it takes years being out of the FOF to have that relativity. Get it?)
The non-expression of negative emotions…. Hmmm…. We all bought into it at one point in our careers. We now know that this concept has been hijacked and twisted by Robert Burton to use to silence his followers from expressing any criticism of him and depravity deemed ‘negative’, right?
Originally, the Fourth Way or whatever you want to call it, espoused the idea of not burning up ‘hydrogen 12′ from expressing negative emotions and accumulating the substance to coat the astral body. And to express negative emotions, meant that one was identified with something or someone as the case may be. So we all labored to be good student followers in a higher state of non-identification to the point where nobody cares who does what to whom, you know, like when I was fucking the teacher up the ass. If I was in a higher state, it shouldn’t have mattered to me.
Now, to you, for the sake of debate only, and for those current FOF followers who still believe in that shit, does that only include expressing negative emotions out of your mouth?…or does writing out negative emotions count as burning hydrogen 12, too? Was psychic really expressing negative emotions or just being critical? Are they one in the same hydrogen? Can one be divinely present and critical? Or is divine presence only a positive, goo goo ga ga state of infantile womb bliss sought by any means possible, including drugs?
What do you think…does writing something negative allow one to express negative emotions without identification while retaining one’s soul? What about acting out negative emotions such as in a stage play? Even though the actor may portray negative emotions through their character without necessarily being identified themselves, is he or she still burning up ‘hydrogen 12′?
What about negative thoughts? Do they count? Can one have a negative thought (as in criticism) without a corresponding negative emotion? What about giving someone a “dirty look”…can you burn hydrogen 12 through your eyes?
Personally, I feel better when I write out my negative feelings, purging them from my psyche. I feel cleansed afterward. Lighter. Relieved. Like right now.
How about you, my friend?
I think that all that ‘negative emotion’, ‘hydrogen’, ’soul’ stuff is a bunch of hooey.
Dear Whalerider,
I appreciate parts of your post for bringing light to this area of non expression of negativity.
I agree with you that somtimes situations have to turn negative to get something off our chest. Everyone expresses negative emotions. The Students and the Teacher for me are beacons or a third force to aim, remember and to strive to be better in the area of non expression of negativity. Robert’s Teaching for me has brought attention of how to work with both internal and external negativity. For me personally, I don’t feel he judges us when we are negative, nor do I think he controls it for the sake of his self preservation as a Teacher.
It is obvious for me that I need to transform negativity when I can and when this is done I go beyond the machine to trully higher realms. But most of the time I live in this negativity, whether it is expressed or not. Battling negativity, like other things will be a lifetime challenge for me because I am mechanical.
You are right I am somewhat dependent on My School and friends to help me, and they are dependent on me too, but it is not connected to the concept or having relativity IMO as you declared. I know what it is like to be out in the Real world alone. I have been in the school for twenty years but I still have drifted away from the School internally for years at a time so I know what it feels like not to have a School. I choose to be in the FOF now because it does give me inspiration, knowledge and hope to produce more consciouness. I will grant you things get absurd and contradictory in here, but at the end of the day, like I said to Psychic (paraphrasing), we know why we are here and we know what we are getting. When one is not getting what one wants then they leave. It may be a struggle either way, to stay in the school or to leave the School. Thats the way life is. For you know this, and have gone through some difficult challenges in your personal life recently.
41 Psychic
Your right in some things you say, really, like when you say that ‘it is not easy to stay in a place like the fellowship of friends’, that it takes will..
For me it never was easy to stay in the fof, i never liked most of the people, really – always found them somewhat pretentious, silly and also just plain dumb.
But sometimes i was in a state of more awareness – and for this i gave credit to the fof and robert burton and forced myself to paying him for this.
In the beginning i thought it was ‘cool’ that robert burton looked like someone from the mafia. But over time i felt that i could no longer trust the people in the fof and i send them away out of my life. (thank you God)
And you know what, the moments of more awareness just became more deep, and oneness more apparent and less a response of something or determined by something.
But for you i don’t know, 30 years in the fof is a long time – may it is a good place for you maybe not, you will never know because you will probably be in there for the rest of your life.
Let’s never forget that you and me are a piece of the some one god.
*
**
*
When I was a member of the Fellowship of Friends my teacher Robert Earl Burton passed the word along that 7 of his students would reach a state beyond my understanding.
And, that if I were not one of the blessed 7 then I would be sent upon physical death to that place in time to await a rebirth in a cycle of rebirths.
And, that the blessed 7 would only be the ones who were capable of free-willing themselves into any part of historical time to do whatever they willed.
Whereas I would be back on earth following like a sheep some intellectual judas goat more lost in language than I.
So, after 37/38 years the Robert Earl Burton school of creating 7 evolved souls should have evidence of some kind pointing to at least some of the 7 chicks cracking the egg shell of whatever it is they are cracking out of. Right?
Name one. If one can not be named then notion of cracking out is a criminal fraud and I wants my money back plus interest.
83 Fat Boy,
Thank you, I agree.
I wanted to highlight a simple fact that one can choose whether to be a member in the school or not. And that this blog is soaked with ridiculous patronizing.
That post(41) is not for those who write here on a regular basis, but for those who surf the web and come across this place.
Whalerider #96,
I know for a fact that Innernaut was being facetious with that negative emotions remark to psychic.
I, personally, have been shellacing my Astral Body with Hooey for years now and you should see the sheen.
(Hooey is now a registered trademark of The Shelleen School of Higher Whatzis, so please: don’t make me call out the lawyers.)
“From day to day
just letting it ride
you get so far away
from how it feels inside
You can’t let go
cause you’re afraid to fall
till the day may come
when you can’t feel at all
Comes a time
when the blind man
takes your hand
says: don’t you see?
got to make it somehow
on the things you still believe
Don’t give it up
you’ve got an empty cup
only love can fill
only love can fill”
–Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter
Elena 92 Thank you for your heartfelt poetry. Poetry at the highest level is not mere rhyming and wordplay, it’s an effort to describe the ineffable.
My own take on the notion of “enlightenment” is connected to the state of “god-realization” and the fact that we can in no way completely define “God” with words… It (god) isn’t this, but also, it isn’t that either. To realize “god,” it is necessary to transcend words and descriptions of “The Divine”… though that’s not going to keep us from trying to describe the indescribable. This is not a denial, whatever “god” is, to capture “it” is an impossibility. The reality that “god” is and even the human state of “god-realization” defies containment by words… reminds me of a story about blind men and an elephant…
Whalerider 96 your post to “fatboy” etc, with all the jargon about numbers and hydrogens and negative emotions and “soul creation” etc, reminds me of something —
“…the system can be seen… as a very intricate and cleverly devised trap… I would strongly encourage anyone who has come under the influence to make every effort to think outside of that particular box…”
I’ll echo Yesri 97 “all that ‘negative emotion’, ‘hydrogen’, ’soul’ stuff is a bunch of hooey.”
HORSE-PUCKY !!!
I’ve wondered why the likes of a “fat boy” and a “psychic” occasionally pop up to post here — is it an attempt to validate and defend their life-style choices ? (Are fatboy and psychic really the same person using different “names”?). They must realize the futility of their efforts to sway or convince the folks who frequent this site… They also must know one thing for certain, there’s going to be a huge “bulls-eye” on whatever they write here in their defense of their “teacher” and “school” etc. IMO their “presence” and continued return here must have something to do with the attention they’re able to generate; they know they’re going to be a target:
“Attention is the way social primates measure status. Attention indicates status and is highly rewarding because it causes the release of brain chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins. Actions lead to Attention that releases rewarding brain chemicals.” (Quote from the previous page — you can go back if you need sources/footnotes).
Otherwise and in general, for what it’s worth, here’s one more for the “psychic fatboy” connection:
“And once hooked, the follower’s search for meaning, combined with the guru’s charisma, leads to a psychological process that guarantees obedience… once a cult has been formed by a guru, individuals who feel a lacking in life are sucked into the madness of cultism through psychological coercion, brainwashing or mind control.”
87 is newly moderated.
Ton: Thank you for your reply. I re-read Brave New World very recently so the message is still very strong with me. While reading it I remembered the first time I read it (when I was about 14) and was surprised how well I remembered it, it almost felt like the book had a very silent but very real impact on my life since the point of reading it, an impact I was pretty much oblivious of until re-reading it. But be that as it may, I still find the message of that book more believable from my personal perspective, than the view of BLTC (ie. Huxley sounds about right, BLTC scares me).
Psychic and Fatboy: I think that it is very much possible to produce tangible results in the search for enlightenment and awakening, if you don’t receive any indication of getting closer to your goals (and you can and should be very specific to yourself about your goals), of achieving something (and, no, a feeling is not enough, tangible results are the only true indication) in the next year then I would search elsewhere, you only have a set amount of time and it is up to you to use it as you wish, don’t waste it. You are in control.
For an interesting look at someone who has spent the last 10 years searching for tangible results and moving through various different systems, look at this blog: Alchemically Braindamaged. In my opinion this is one of the few people who are a living representation of ‘tangible results’ through their writing and speech.
Unoanimo: Funny you should say that, I took part in an ayahuasca ceremony yesterday. It was disappointing in a lot of ways, perhaps it was too much of a Western event (with a very technical and modern approach to it), not quite of the same kind it seems to the kind of ceremony that would be accessible through traditional sources in the Amazon. Not quite what I wished for or expected of it.
James: Yeah, Alan Moore is great, keep on a lookout for the entire interview (we only managed to find 10 minutes of it on the Internet), it’s very much worth it (more of the same lucidity and clear thought).
325 Crouching Tiger
Fuckin Hugh J…s. Robert’s ass licker.The supreme indoctrinator.
Watching the modafacar always gave me the impression that if he was to fall from his chair on the floor he would’ ve done without loosing his composture.
Do you think he is evil?Yeah HJ the canadian guy from the london centre…
103 Kid
The Shelleen sheen. I like that.
Thanks for the laugh this morning.
(You will be hearing from my lawyers presently. No one is stealing my Hooey without a fight.)
snorer/107
Have you seen HJ’s essay, published in the Fellowship Forum (I think that’s what it was called) about recognizing “outer circle” I’s? According to HJ, if one considers the Teacher to be “bizarre,” that is an “outer-circle ‘I’.” No shit, Sherlock.
#87 Hardtruth,
Now there’s a non-sequitar!
Psychic 41, 101
Dear psychic, if your post was indeed only intended for those who randomly “surf the web and come across this place”, it would have been better to directly address it to them, as you have done in the past. Otherwise we can get the wrong impression that you may be interested in some sort of dialogue with us word spilling, tape rewinding machines.
Anyway, you seem to hope that people who stumble upon these pages might somehow be persuaded, by finding your posts among all the information detailing the fallacies, falsity, degeneration and abuse in Robert Burton’s teaching and organization, to think that after all, the Fellowship of Friends may be a good place to go looking for Divine Presence.
I think you fail to take into account that all around the world, and even in Northern California, there is an abundance of teachers and spiritual groups, with better credentials and often true lineage, that offer more empowering, sound and effective techniques and ideas. They are not surrounded by controversy, and they are cheaper, too.
I can understand fatboy’s and your sentimental attachment to an organization of which you have been members for a good part of your life, but where lies the appeal for a healthy contemporary spiritual seeker? And how can he/she be drawn in by your dogmatic and rather lifeless presentations?
I personally feel repulsed by your words and attitude, but I can honestly sympathize with your predicament. It is very hard to correctly assess the value of a closed society when you are one of its subjects. For example, one can say about the good people of North Korea that they sincerely and deeply follow their leader based on their deepest understanding of how important striving for communism is for them. But of course, the rest of the world has a very different opinion of North Korea and its Beloved Leader.
Only after crossing the imaginary line back into life the utter nonsense of the perverted values one has been subjected to slowly becomes plain to the mind’s eye. Then maybe it’s time to have another talk about free will.
Kid Shelleen:
I believe there are those still mired in the FOF who would not take innernaut’s comment to psychic so facetiously. That’s actually who I was addressing, along with the other poor souls who might be surfing the web and find this miraculous place (thank you sheik!), and I’m going to go out on a limb here and bet innernaut can tell that by how much I went off on the topic. But don’t worry, you shine!
ton:
We are simpatico about the trap thing. It made Robert Burton a millionaire. I think of mircosoft in the same way. There is no way out, they gotcha, unless you choose to live off the grid.
fatboy:
You impress me, more so than psychic’s self-patronizing remarks. It may not matter to you; I am just an old, lonely geezer here, but I can tell you are sincere. I can feel you reaching out to me, and I appreciate you, too.
My highest wish is to convey this to you in a way that will set you free of your mental bondage: WE ARE NOT ALONE.
You contain a universe within you, including your own teacher who doesn’t need to suck your dick to coat his astral body in semen. You have just externalized him and given him carte blanc, because you lack the self-confidence to accept your own magnificence. It’s easier to dwell on your shortcomings and belly up to the FOF breast, if that is indeed a choice at all. Robert knows at the end of the day most people go with what is easier, just as shit flows downhill.
BTW, your “negativity” is what gets your sorry ass out of the burning house before your balls get cooked.
(yeah, I admit I am graphic, but when you think of me, think of Pulp Fiction, “…widely considered the most influential American movie of the 1990s” see: http://www.starpulse.com/Movies/Pulp_Fiction/, you know, getting fucked up the ass in one scene by some creep from Arkansas named Bob, then getting a needle rammed in your heart to save your frickin’ life because you’re overdosing on endorphin…what you took up the nose was not what you thought. Sure, we all want to be dancing forever with Uma, but life is just not like that. It’s often one long overdue earthquake after another. I know from experience. Life is change.)
So you say: “When one is not getting what one wants then they leave.” That may or may not be true. The relativity that I speak of says that one leaves the school when one wakes up to the fact that you already have everything you need. Remember, you will never get what you want, only what you need. If you need to be dependent, so be it.
c-influence wants you to suck my dick now. (just kidding)
And I predict one day there will be an earthquake in California. (not kidding)
Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the salvia – plant teachers thread!
I have been reading the personal stories and followed the links, and I’d love to contribute my own 2 cents as soon as I find the time. For now, I just want to point out a very interesting french documentary on ayuhasca called Other Worlds.
Ayuhasca is one of the things that keep popping up on my radar these days. It looks like this may be a general trend…
http://www.altertube.tv/view_video.php?viewkey=7183b2e40bc464231c96
lauralupa:
Thanks to you, too. It’s an honor to be wedged in here with you. Your post to psychic was brilliantly written. It is brimming with many salient points.
“It is obvious for me that I need to transform negativity when I can and when this is done I go beyond the machine to trully higher realms. But most of the time I live in this negativity, whether it is expressed or not. Battling negativity, like other things will be a lifetime challenge for me because I am mechanical.”
Fat Boy; That’s right, it will be a lifetime challenge and relentless battle for you and you must continue to struggle until you die because you are mechanical and cannot reach the higher realms without the outside help of C-Influence who love you and guide you and are monitoring your evolution in a precise and mathematical way in return for your sincerity, efforts for the school and money.
You’re indoctrinated Sonny Jim and it’s a truly sad thing to see.
Best,
Leonhardon.
Lauralupa,
This is so well said. It is worth reading again. Too bad it couldn’t be sent out to every current member. Thanks. Vena
_______________________________________________
“I think you fail to take into account that all around the world, and even in Northern California, there is an abundance of teachers and spiritual groups, with better credentials and often true lineage, that offer more empowering, sound and effective techniques and ideas. They are not surrounded by controversy, and they are cheaper, too.
I can understand fatboy’s and your sentimental attachment to an organization of which you have been members for a good part of your life, but where lies the appeal for a healthy contemporary spiritual seeker? And how can he/she be drawn in by your dogmatic and rather lifeless presentations?
I personally feel repulsed by your words and attitude, but I can honestly sympathize with your predicament. It is very hard to correctly assess the value of a closed society when you are one of its subjects. For example, one can say about the good people of North Korea that they sincerely and deeply follow their leader based on their deepest understanding of how important striving for communism is for them. But of course, the rest of the world has a very different opinion of North Korea and its Beloved Leader.
Only after crossing the imaginary line back into life the utter nonsense of the perverted values one has been subjected to slowly becomes plain to the mind’s eye. Then maybe it’s time to have another talk about free will.
99 Fat Boy: “It is obvious for me that I need to transform negativity when I can and when this is done I go beyond the machine to truly higher realms.”
In reality, how often do you “transform negativity”? And what actually happens when you do? My experience was that occasionally I would perform the inner psychological movement known as transformation and this would very very occasionally be followed by a “higher state”. Was there a connection between the effort and the state? Maybe, maybe not. And even if there was, so what? The state was quickly gone.
You live in an imaginary world where doing sequences and transforming negative emotions leads to spiritual awakening. They don’t – you’re wasting your time.
101 Arthur: “So, after 37/38 years the Robert Earl Burton school of creating 7 evolved souls should have evidence of some kind pointing to at least some of the 7 chicks cracking the egg shell of whatever it is they are cracking out of.”
Spot on! The only FOF student who RB claims to be “conscious” is Girard. Spend half an hour talking to Girard and you’ll quickly be disabused of that notion – he hasn’t got a clue. On the other hand, I know of several people who had what might be called “awakening experiences” in the FOF and immediately left. The increased clarity of perception revealed the FOF for the fraud it is.
THE SACRAMENTO BEE ARTICLE
will be published soon.
The delay is due to various Oregon House
students who had been interviewed,
submitted statements, but then
requested to stay anonymous.
The BEE can’t use anonymous statement
(illegal/legal trouble) and is now revising the article.
They now will use the signed statements of those
who are not living on OH
Sheik 106… I think the message of Brave New World is believable because it is in many ways happening as we “speak.” The drug of choice for controlling (pacifying) the masses in the book was “soma” — control today is through visual and audio media, especially the t.v. — the effects are comparable to a drug, it tends to make one a passive “participant” (consumer) and it’s a means of mind-control to boot. One might hope the introduction of the computer and internet on a mass scale changes things in this area… but there’s a whole generation of kids growing up inhabiting these artificial cyber-worlds and “gaming” sites etc. — I sound like an old fart — but this trend seems even more ominous in certain ways than t.v. watching.
The technology of control described in Brave New World (genetic engineering) has not been applied to humans to any significant extent yet — as far as we know — but we’re on the threshold of that inevitability. Genetic manipulation of the food source is of course in full operation, global powers such as the likes of a Monsanto, and etc, are creating certain “profitable” conditions on the planet, having no uncertain negative influence over the choices and lives of people on a mass scale.
http://www.zmag.org/bios/homepage.cfm?authorID=90
This might be stretching the comparison of Brave New World to existing conditions but the various types of technology being used today for control and manipulation of the populace are related to “the ways and means” of “asset stripping” the planet; i.e. creation of a system of dependence on the manufacture and consumption of the products of technology — and they call it “progress.” An obvious example is the whole situation with “big oil” — the collusion of corporations with government leads to control and exploitation of resources and the massive accumulation of wealth by a fraction of the populace — the controllers — at the expense of the masses and the biosphere.
I agree that bringing the element of genetic manipulation into the area of human reproduction has serious and scary ethical implications, but it appears that there is no stopping it. The question is how will it be used? Since it is a question more for future generations, do we ignore it? I think most of us alive today probably don’t give the subject much thought — apparently those over at the BLTC site have, as scary as that may be. But then again this might all be moot… maybe our collective greed and hijinks will trigger a mass die-off and the humans will be forced to start from scratch and return to a kinder, gentler “leaver” culture envisioned and described by someone like a Daniel Quinn.
This sounds like the notes of a Luddite… I’ll get off the soapbox. Please excuse my excess, it’s a “snow day” — no school in Philly so I have a bit of free time here at home. Thanks again for your thought-provoking comments… the “alchemically braindamaged” site is interesting, I’m going back for a closer look. Thanks for the Alan Moore link, his insight and sense of humor is refreshing.
this is from today:
We reach Paradise one by one, by helping each other.
Love, Robert
TON
I have my suspicions about you.
For one: How you tried to expose Whalerider’ s identity
LOW LOW LOW
A lot of intellectual copy and pasting
with intent to control the discussion
Pretending to be in Philly?
…most likely in OH or in that neighbor hood
121 Dream Catcher
Not that ton needs any help in addressing your post if he should wish to, but what are your motives? I suspect you are either a bit paranoid or this is just maliciousness.
I see nothing about ton’s posts that attempt to control the discussion.
I feel pretty certain you have no idea what you are talking about, so what is it you are attempting?
Dream Catcher 121
What are you?
You’re suspicious.
Bear with me, here comes some more copy and pasting, in your own words:
“For one: How you tried to expose Whalerider’ s identity
LOW LOW LOW”
Would you mind telling me how you came to that conclusion?
What are you, an instigator? Trying to stir things up between myself and Whalerider? I have no idea who Whalerider is beyond what he’s posted on the blog and I have no interest in exposing anyone’s identity here.
(Whalerider, I hope you agree that I did not try to “expose your identity” as this person is claiming).
I have no “intent to control the discussion” as you put it… I’ve been treating the blog as more of a forum for an exchange of ideas rather than a “discussion.” Maybe that’s my mistake, but since this is not occurring in “real-time” it’s really not very conversational IMO. Sounds like my style disagrees with you… I don’t read all of the posts here, if my style rubs you the wrong way, feel free to scroll over it.
Maybe this will reassure you Dream Catcher; since I’ve had more free time than usual as of late, I’ve been spending more time blogging than is usual for me… but don’t fret, that will change soon enough.
BTW,
Why would I be “pretending to be in Philly” of all places?!!
What was it that W.C. Fields had engraved on his tombstone…
“At least it’s not Philly…”
All the best.
James,
Ya I just posted and then read yours… you got there first and I see you had a similar take on the Dream Catcher…
Dreamcatcher,
I know ton. I know whalerider too. They know me and they know each other. I think you are thinking of someone else.
ton
Yeah, I just got home from work a short time ago and was catching up. I read all these great posts from you and Lauralupa, and Whalerider and Kidshelleen and the Sheik etc., and then there at the bottom of the page was this sort of weird crappy sounding thing.
121 Dream Catcher
When I read your post I thought I must be missing something. It gave me a really creepy feeling. Now I know, it IS creepy.
Are you an agent provocateur, or just a bitter person?
veronicapoe I do know you, but if I know who Whalerider is then it’s news to me. Maybe since you know both of us, you know something I don’t in this regard? Like, whether my time in the FOF and his overlapped? As it stands and as far as I know now, based on his postings here I have no clue who Whalerider is. This is all kind of silly, seems to be the result of someone in a crappy mood looking for a target.
Laura/Sheik etc
I took Ayuhasca a couple of times in Mexico. It was quite fun once the puking stopped. There were some beautiful, very real-seeming hallucinations, and some internal psychological blockages of an instinctive nature got shifted around. For a few weeks after the second time I felt like I was being followed by a large wooden woman-like being (not LT), but this wore off, fortunately.
To summarise, it was fun and interesting but not particularly profound, rather like a jungle version of psilocybin.
“Let him who is wealthy become king; let him who has power abdicate.” Rumi
Okay, okay, we up
After a day of trying to explain the most elemental, the most rudimentary, the most basic, the most visceral, the just wanting to grab hold and never let go.
Come on, feel it, just feel it I say. Feel for the real.
All I get back is talk. Talk of reflection, introspection, explanation, evaluation, condemnation, retribution, reparation.
Hey, hey,
Instead, instead, let’s leave it all behind, let’s just jump in
right now, right now.
Whatever grooves you, whatever moves you.
Leonard Cohen, okay, well fine, love ya just the same, but really.
Funk it up a bit, know you can do it.
How old were you when you first heard it?
That song that made you believe in, well, more than geometry.
Still in us, my friend, don’t need to be a dancer, just a breathing in and outer.
Come on , come on.
We can do it, oh yes we can.
Let go. Let go.
If just for this moment, oh this moment.
Friday Night
Cake
dream catcher:
I’m with ton. I don’t feel he was trying to expose me…if anything I am guilty of trying to expose him from one of the links he provided. That was low of me, I’ll admit it. Bad lower self! (Sorry about that, ton. I think we’ve made our peace thanks to Elena.)
I really enjoyed the movie about the ayuhasca shamans that laurualupa provided from the thread ton is pursuing.
Personally, I went to a western person practicing shamanism myself for a period of time as part of my healing process, although we didn’t have to use DMT to “journey to the upper or lower worlds” as it is called. All we used was drumming and an eye mask for darkness. It was quite a trip!
Holotropic breathing, ala Stan Grof who was interview in the film next to the Golden Gate Bridge, does the trick as well, only you can stop the tripping process at any time, unlike with drugs. Interesting that the ayuhasca ritual is done at night in lieu of sleeping, the time when the subconscious is closer to consciousness anyway.
I don’t think any one person can control this discussion as you suggest. Every dog has his day here. In fact, I enjoy the anarchy. Anyone, even you, can pop in and say anything they want straight from the heart at any time. (See #87, that’s gem! I suspect that hardtruth is one of those people surfing the web that psychic is trying to recruit who found our little discussion.) But hey, there is room for all of us here, just keep putting those quarters in the Sheik’s paypal slot.
Anyway, it’s good to get your feelings and thoughts out here in the open for some reality testing. Keep posting no matter what anyone says about you. I won’t take what you say about me personally, I promise.
pensate un attimo:
Thanks for that! Welcome back.
“We reach Paradise one by one, by helping each other. Love, Robert”
Actually, Robert thinks he can reach paradise one on top of the other.
Look at the words he chooses! One doesn’t just reach paradise, hopefully one enters it. One reaches orgasm.
Also, it reads: “… by helping each other love Robert.” You have to help others love Robert. In other words, as we have been saying all along, you have to pimp for him in order to ‘reach’ paradise.
A fool’s paradise.
130 Cake please
Thank you. Great timing for me. I just took a break from having a really fun time playing my guitar, and then read your words. What a nice reminder and a nice treat.
cake please:
I am so glad you are here. Is this what you mean?
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=pSIbfzK2spg&NR=1
133 whalerider
Wow! Thank you. I am now an Imogen Heap fan.
A Heap Peep.
A Few Creep.
The Rest Just Don’t See At All.
Love, Wally
Where is Love in all of this?
Today, you and me, me confessing all.
You, usually so flowing,
suddenly, measured and cautious.
Not feeling it was a good sign,
what were you trying to tell me.
Words, oh how, I distrust them.
Whether they come from your lips or mine.
We go from left to right, back and forth, up and down.
And in the end you ask me,
what do you want, hope or truth?
On my knees and gasping,
whisper
hope
What truth. Whose truth
more human, than perceived esoteric
Cake
Follow on to earlier post:
Page 30 #18:
on February 19, 2008
at 11:08 am:
On the subject:
‘Life lacks the idea of looking for truly legitimate esoteric sources. Influence B does not count-only Influence C does.’
Ouspensky defining Influence B in The Fourth Way:
‘[T]hese influences B. They reach man in the form of religion, literature or philosophy. These influences of the second kind are conscious in their origin. Influences A are mechanical from the beginning. Man can meet these B influences or he can pass them by without noticing them, or he can hear them and think that he understands them, use the words and at the same time have no real understanding at all. These two influences really determine the further development of man. If man accumulates influences B, the results of these influences crystallize in him (I use the word crystallize in the ordinary sense) and form in him a certain kind of centre of attraction which we call magnetic centre.
The compact mass of memory of these influences attracts him in a certain direction, or makes him turn in a certain direction. When magnetic centre is formed in man it will be easier for him to attract to himself more influences B, and not to be distracted by influences A. With ordinary people influences A can take so much of their time that nothing is left for other influences and they are hardly affected at all by influences B. But if this magnetic centre in man grows, then after some time he meets another man, or a group of people, from whom he can learn something different, something that is not included in influences B, and which we call influence C. This influence is conscious in origin and action and can only be transmitted by direct instruction. Influences B can come through books and works of art and things like that, but influence C can only come by direct contact. If a man in whom magnetic centre has grown meets with a man or a group through whom he comes into contact with influence C, that means that he has made the first step. Then there is a possibility of development for him.
But at the same time man also lives under influences originally created in schools but thrown into the general turnover of life. These influences B are as it were a life apart. They are arranged for a certain purpose, to serve as ‘lights on the way’ The rest depends on man himself. All his interests may concentrate only on influences of the first kind, or part of him may remain interested in influences created in life, while another part may be interested in this other kind of influences. If a man notices and studies them, they may accumulate in him. The memory of these interests may begin to collect in him from a very early age and form a certain group of ‘I’s out of the many ‘I’s in him. After some time this group of ‘I’s or magnetic centre begins to control and determine his general direction in life and the trend of his interests, or of a part of his interests. Magnetic centre means looking for definite things and being on the level of certain things.
But if a man does not notice these influences, they will produce no effect. This is why people are so different. One person may be very intellectual, may have studied philosophy, art and so on and at the same time he has no chance if he has no magnetic centre. If he comes in contact with a school, he will not recognize it. And another man may be insufficiently educated, may not have read so much, may not know so many words, yet if he meets a school he may become interested at once.
[So, again, why is FoF preoccupied with (re)searching out 'truly legitimate esoteric sources' (Influences B) rather than generating Influences C? Could it be that there is no conscious, or celestial, influences passing through the Fellowship Of Friends? Hasn't Robert Burton said that when one meets a real school, magnetic centre has served its purpose and must be left behind? If so, then why is there still this dining on Influences B? Influences B serving the primary purpose of creating and feeding magnetic centre. Could it be that it serves an Influences A purpose?]
Q. What makes us different in this sense?
A. It is a combination of what we are born with and outside circumstances that makes us what we are, it is all mechanical, all under the law of accident. It is useless to deny that people are born different; but that we cannot change, in any case in the beginning. We have to take it for granted that people have different capacities, but not for awakening, this is where people make a mistake. Awakening does not depend on what is born, it depends on the magnetic centre, and magnetic centre depends on what one is interested in. One person is interested in one thing and another in another thing, but on what that depends we do not know and it will not help us to investigate this question, because it will only be theories. In our state of consciousness we can only know some things and we must concentrate on the things we can know without wasting time on the things we cannot know.
Q. Does not our magnetic centre depend very largely on mechanical causes?
A. Not quite. As I said, it is a certain combination of interests, and not only interests but also of ideas a man has acquired, a certain knowledge, a certain understanding. It all enters into the magnetic centre. It is mechanical like everything else, but influences B are different in their nature, although in the beginning they come mechanically. This is not important. The important point is whether there is interest in B influences or not. This is how out of mechanicalness comes struggle with mechanicalness. Magnetic centre helps a man to see, understand and distinguish certain things.
A man cannot appreciate the difference between ideas, he cannot say which is better and which worse, which suits him, which does not suit him, without the help of magnetic centre. Accumulation of knowledge does not help to create a magnetic centre; magnetic centre is good taste with the help of which a man can have a new evaluation of the ideas that come his way. The question is, in this stream of life, to distinguish the two kinds of influences, to feel the difference between them. If a man does not feel it, if he takes influences B in the same way as influences A, then they produce the same effect and magnetic centre is not formed. Then, there are many dangers, because some of these ideas which make up the second kind of influences are so distorted that they can form a wrong magnetic centre. Magnetic centre must be very uniform and very sane to lead somewhere, otherwise it is only an embarrassment and nothing else.
[Embarrassment is about the gist of it. Nowhere man leading to nowhere land.]
Q. How does one know whether one is under influences B?
A. Influences B are always there. They come originally from the inner circle of life, from that part of life which has become free from the law of mechanicalness, but they may pass through many stages before they reach man and may be so distorted and so disguised that it is difficult to recognize them, just as it is difficult to recognize ideas of an esoteric origin which come to us in the form of legends and myths, or even superstitions and things like that. Sometimes they have an esoteric origin and then they are influences B.
Q. Suppose one only imagines that one is working under influences B?
A. One does not know about it and one does not ‘work’ under influences B. One can be interested in influences B just for one’s own personal advantage, profession, fame or something like that; then one loses all the profit one can get from them. But if a man values them for themselves, not selfishly, not only for his own gain, if he is interested in their meaning, then he may get something from them. Definitions are very difficult and mostly wrong, for our ordinary language has so many different associations that sometimes a more precise definition spoils the possibility of understanding. For instance, you can say, though I do not guarantee that it will always be right, that the chief characteristic of influence A is that it is always selfish, whereas influence B is unselfish. But people understand these words so differently that it does not convey much. You can also say that influences A need identification and influences B can exist without identification and that if there is identification with influences B it spoils them. In fact, the more identification there is with influences B, the more they become influences A. But all this is not sufficient to explain the difference between them.
Q. Is total immersion in influences B and complete rejection of influences A a correct attitude to life? Can we altogether dispense with influences A?
A. Why should we? Influences A may be quite legitimate interests in life. If you do not disappear in them they are quite harmless. One has to accept everything that comes, only not identify. Influences A are not dangerous in themselves, only identification is dangerous. So there is no question of dispensing, there is only the question of having some interest in influences B, of not being entirely under the power of influences A. If people have an interest in these influences B, they have a magnetic centre; if not, they have no magnetic centre. After some time, with the help of magnetic centre, a man may find a school, or if he comes near one he may recognize it. But if he has no magnetic centre, he will not notice it, or will not be interested. And if he meets a school or a man who transmits another kind of influence, influence C, magnetic centre helps him to recognize this new influence and absorb it. If he has not first absorbed enough influences B, and so has no magnetic centre, or if his magnetic centre is wrong or too weak, a man will not recognize influence C. Or he may meet a wrong school and have wrong instruction and instead of becoming better become worse; instead of acquiring, lose. Influence C differs from influences B in that it is conscious, instead of being accidental, both in its origin and its action, whereas influences B are conscious in their origin but accidental or mechanical in their action. Influence C is school influence.
[You've got to ask yourself if you are 'becoming better' or 'become worse' and 'instead of acquiring' you 'lose.' Seems like a very simple and direct way to determine if Influence C is present and feeding you.]
Q. Must one be adult to recognize C influence?
A. There is no general rule about age. But one must have enough experience, enough temptations from influences A and enough time to accumulate influences B. Otherwise influence C will serve as influence B; in other words, it will do the work of a more simple instrument and will not have its full value. When people have tried and have realized that ordinary means do not satisfy them, do not give them what they want, they value influences C. But if they come before that, they take influences C on the same level as the other influences and influences C lose their power. It is very important to understand that.
Q. When you recognize influence C, is it bound to be the right one for you?
A. No, not at all, you may be right or wrong, it depends on your magnetic centre. If the magnetic centre is right, you are bound to recognize the right things; if it is wrong, you may find quite a wrong school. This happens every day. Why do so many quite unfounded and wrong schools exist, with no material whatever? Because people have a wrong magnetic centre. The case is possible, for instance, when a man with a wrongly formed magnetic centre may come upon a school which pretends to be connected with esotericism, while in actual fact no such connection exists. In this case influences which should have been influences of the third kind become influences of the first kind, that is, leading nowhere.
Q. Isn’t there a way in which one can find out?
A. Only by results. But even if people have wrong results, if they have a wrong magnetic centre they persuade themselves that the results are good. One can deceive oneself about anything. Generally speaking, there is very little chance of finding a right school and many possibilities of wrong schools, because a school must have influences C, that is, ideas that come direct from higher mind. What does ‘direct’ mean? It means coming not through books, not through ordinary learning accessible to everybody. These ideas must come from another school, and to that school again from another school, and so on, until one comes to the original source. If there are no ideas of that kind, it is only an imitation school. This does not mean that a school must be directly connected with the source, but it must at a certain time have received this kind of ideas, and then people can work on them. But if it has no ideas different from ordinary ideas, it is not a school; then, at best, it is a school on the level of B influences, that is, a philosophical or scientific school. It can be called a school only if, through it, one may be able to find the direction towards becoming man No. 4 (although there is no guarantee of attaining it). So, through the school you can find the right direction only if you have a right kind of school. If you come to a wrong kind of school you lose what you can learn by yourself.
[So, where is the Fellowship Of Friends/Robert Burton connexion to Influence C or a lineage? Supposedly there was a connexion to Rodney Collin. But, if Alex Horn is the conduit, better rethink that and go back to the drawing board.]
Q. If schools are so important, why do they not have more influence in the world?
A. Schools can only act through people who are interested in them. They can do nothing if they are surrounded by people who are indifferent. The possibility of schools influencing life is conditioned by the general attitude to schools. In order to have influence, schools must have people who are interested and who would obey. But this must come from below, it cannot be produced by schools. Schools can throw B influences into the world, but if people are not interested in them, they can do nothing. They cannot use violence.
[Much social violence has been used by Fellowship Of Friends, than one would meet with in the common scope of life, in an attempt to bring people to 'obey' and make them remember themselves. Is this the right triad? You cannot make people remember themselves with machine guns.]
In the beginning, when we spoke of A, B and C influences we did not specify what they were, we merely took them as influences. Now we must try to divide these influences into classes, and the practical side of this study will be how to control these influences, how to be receptive to certain influences and not be receptive to the influences we do not want. In other words, we must study life. Our study of ourselves will continue, but it is necessary to begin to study external things as well, try to understand them and form a right opinion about them. We will not be able to go far if we do not learn to discriminate between external events, events on a big scale, and find what is good and what is bad from the point of view of possible evolution. If we find in external events something that helps evolution, that will bring us to the question: how can individual evolution, that is, evolution of a small number of people, affect the general state of people? If we look at external life now and ask ourselves how we can regard it from the point of view of the existence of esoteric circles of humanity, we will see that the state of humanity is far from favourable, because, although we know that everybody cannot be in esoteric circles, there can exist in life definite influences coming from these circles. But we can say positively that we cannot see any signs of a control of things by the esoteric circles—life goes on by itself. Roughly speaking, man’s situation can be described like this: he is a machine governed by various currents coming from the big machines that surround him. What are these big machines? All big events, wars, revolutions, civilizations, religions, science, art, inventions of the last century— all these things produce different influences that act on man. Then in connection with schools it was explained that the possibility of escape is only in schools, that is, with the help of C influences. But what is the situation of people who do not know any school, for the possibility of school-work is very small and very rare? Does it mean that it is absolutely impossible to attain anything without school, or is there such a possibility? You remember I spoke of the three traditional ways and the Fourth Way. These four ways are called subjective ways. These ways are supposed to produce certain effects. But some people, maybe very few, may develop to a certain extent even without school-work. This is called the objective way; but it is a slow way. Subjective ways are short-cuts, they are for people impatient of ordinary slow work, even if there is a certain progress. So theoretically you can get possibilities of development living quite an ordinary life, without C influence, using only the material provided by B influences. You remember about B influences: religion, philosophy, art, science? On the whole, if people can absorb enough of this material, it should be sufficient for development, but even at best it is slow and uncertain development. All schools, all ways are for impatient people; that is why they are called subjective ways. So the answer to this question is both yes and no; some people can develop without schools and some cannot, because it is a question of different types of people. Besides, the objective way also needs conditions; it does not mean that all people who are not in the work can develop. In a sense the objective way is even more difficult than school-work, because there one has no possibility of verifying whether what one decides to do or not to do is right or wrong. In school one can verify; but
verifying is one thing and doing is another.
[Is there verification going on in Fellowship Of Friends? Or, is sequence rammed down your throat? There is, evidently, more being rammed down throats than the sequence.]
Analysis of events in life can be based on the idea of influences A, B and C. We can ask ourselves, how many influences of the third kind, that is, influences conscious both in their origin and action, do we see? We must admit that we never see them. If we are looking for something, we meet only with certain manifestations of influence B, and every influence B is surrounded by all possible dangers and all kinds of forces trying to destroy it. Many influences B are disappearing under our eyes; things that could be found not so long ago cannot be found any more. How many influences B of the past reach us? They do not live long, they have a short life, with the exception of two or three which are surrounded by such a tangle of mechanical adaptations that they almost become influences A— they survive only in this form. All mechanical forces tend to destroy them because in their origin they are opposed to mechanical forces.
[I guess that is what has become of FoF. If there was any Influences C, they have become Influences A; a selfish desire for money, sex, power, a form, an ark, a legacy, a new civilisation, my states, my presence, etc.]
Supposing that what you or someone else calls civilization destroys influences B and you find yourself surrounded by influences A, you will have no chance. And, indeed, what we ordinarily call civilization does destroy influences B. Revolutions destroy, wars destroy, civilizations destroy—everything destroys esoteric influences. For instance, schools have always been destroyed by wars; that is a well-known fact. Schools cannot be established permanently. It is not exactly that wars intended to destroy schools, they did it by the way. War is one of these institutions in the life of humanity which make work impossible and destroy schools. School-work needs a certain amount of normality in life; if life becomes too abnormal, school-work becomes impossible, and a school disappears.
[Where is the 'normality in life' that permits 'school-work' in the Fellowship Of Friends? No wonder then that the school has disappeared.]
Q. Have the people in the inner circle any control over people in the outer circle?
A. Yes, but with many reservations. The conscious circle cannot act directly, but only through B influences. Influences C can appear only if influences B are accepted and if people look for them. Men in the inner circle cannot have control over people who do not wish to know them. They cannot use violence, because it would mean a wrong triad, a wrong activity. For every kind of result there is a special triad. For instance, if people wish to acquire control, they can achieve it only in one way. If they act in another way they will get the opposite result. Wars, revolutions and so on never give the desired results, but always the opposite results, because wrong triads are used. If people of the inner circles wish to influence other people, they can produce good results only if there is understanding, and only with people who wish it. This is a useful question. Try to think about it.
[Makes you wonder what Robert Burton's inner circle thinks it is doing, no/know?]
Q. Do you mean that after coming in contact with C influences the number of chances diminishes?
A. Yes, because C influence cannot be wasted. B influences are practically unlimited; this means they are thrown into life and one can take or not take them; they do not diminish. But C influence is limited. Try to answer this question for yourselves and you will understand why the possibility of receiving C influence must be limited, because if one does not make use of it, what is the good of wasting it?
Q. How can dead people influence sleeping people?
A. In comparison with sleeping people they are very strong, because they have no conscience and no shame. What makes ordinary people weak? Conscience and shame. Besides, if people are asleep, anything can happen to them, they can be stolen out of their beds. All people in life are asleep, but not all are dead—yet. At the same time, if one cannot accept and use B influence at all, there is nothing to keep one from dying sooner or later. B influences are sent to keep men from dying, even though they are asleep. But if they reject them, there is nothing to prevent their dying. People are not equal in relation to evolution. Some can evolve, others cannot. Either they lost the possibility of evolution or they have done nothing to deserve it.
[If I read this correctly, O. is saying that dead people 'are very strong, because they have no conscience and no shame.' That certainly sounds like a description of what has been going on with FoF/REB, as presented on these 30 pages and 14444+ postings. So, who are the dead people and who are the ones with possibilities? Looks like having a conscience is a key factor in the psychology of man's possible evolution. Don't leave home without it. And, trust no one who does not have one.
Using B Influences for A Influence purposes while calling it C Influence is unconscionable.]
Wouldnt You Like To Know 137
dead people ‘are very strong, because they have no conscience and no shame.’
Absolutely. And we poor common folks are duped by the superior strenght and self confidence of these walking zombies into believing that they are actually superior to us.
We mistake dead conscience for superior consciousness!
Amazing but true.
on a different note, here is another nice Imogen Heap video…
I really like the images in this one
You’ve been walking,
You’ve been hiding,
And you look half dead half the time.
Monitoring you, like machines do,
You’ve still got it I’m just keeping an eye.
You know you’re better than this
Can’t make a start, got your heart in a headlock,
but I don’t believe any of it.
You say too late to start, with your heart in a headlock,
You know you’re better than this.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=eKZsZkH_MJc&feature=related
Ton, sorry, I apologize
This is for you
IF by Rudyard Kipling
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 impostors 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!
Cake Please:
Seems like only yesterday
I left my mind behind
Down in the Gypsy Café
With a friend of a friend of mine
Who sat with a baby heavy on her knee
Spoke of life most free from slavery
With eyes that showed no trace of misery
A phrase in connection first with she occurred
That love is just a four-letter word
Outside a rambling store-front window
Cats meowed ’til the break of day
Me, I kept my mouth shut,
To you I had no words to say
My experience was limited and underfed
You were rapping while I hid
To the one who was the father of your kid
You probably didn’t think I did, but I heard
You say that love is just a four-letter word
I went on my way unnoticed
Slipped forth into my own games
In and out of lifetimes
Unmentionable by name
Searching for my double, looking for
Complete evaporation to the core
Though I tried and failed at finding any door
I must have thought that there was nothing more absurd
Than that love is just a four-letter word
Though I never knew just what you meant
When you were speaking to your man
I could only think in terms of me
And now I understand
After waking enough times to think I see
The Holy Kiss that’s supposed to last eternity
Blow up in smoke, its destiny
Falls on strangers, travels free
Yes, I know now, traps are only set by me
And I do not really need to be assured
That love is just a four-letter word
Strange it is to be beside you, many years the tables turned
You’d probably not believe me if told you all I’ve learned
And it is very very weird, indeed
To hear words like “forever” fleet
so ships run through my mind I cannot cheat
it’s like looking in a teacher’s face complete
I can say nothing to you but repeat what I heard
That love is just a four-letter word.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=jEE67H9ozbA
Dream Catcher thank you for the poem, it’s one I’m familiar with and appreciate… I get the message.
Wouldn’t U Like 2 Know 137
Thanks for reminding me of what I’m missing (said with a sense of relief mixed with sarcasm). I’ll repeat myself here (again) but preface the repetition by recognizing that Ouspensky was obviously a very bright individual… nevertheless… “the system” is an intricate and cleverly devised trap…
I’ve sifted through your post and pulled out bits that I think reflect some of the control mechanisms used in any standard religion or run-of-the-mill cult. One mechanism suggests that an individual needs a mediator in order to contact something higher (“god-realization” for lack of a better term). Mediation by a select group or individual guru, IMO contradicts the idea of direct contact for the individual.
I think the idea of “lineage” is just another line of horseshit designed to create a sense of validity while attempting to impress the dupes. With the right attitude an individual can learn something from any given situation… and if an organization claims to have a monopoly on, or some special claim to “the truth”– be it based on “lineage” or charismatic leadership or whatever the sales pitch might be — I personally would turn and run in the other direction as fast as possible.
The following is taken from your post and indicates some of the control mechanisms I refer to — the implication here is dependence or reliance on a “priesthood” for individual contact with “divinity.” It also implies that membership in a select and “elite” group is the only means of “evolution” or “salvation” or “redemption” — call it what you will.
“….after some time he meets another man, or a group of people, from whom he can learn something different, something that is not included in influences B, and which we call influence C. This influence is conscious in origin and action and can only be transmitted by direct instruction…. influence C can only come by direct contact. If a man in whom magnetic centre has grown meets with a man or a group through whom he comes into contact with influence C, that means that he has made the first step. Then there is a possibility of development for him…. What does ‘direct’ mean? It means coming not through books, not through ordinary learning accessible to everybody. These ideas must come from another school, and to that school again from another school, and so on, until one comes to the original source… One can deceive oneself about anything… schools must have people who are interested and who would obey.”
Ya I do agree that “higher forces” can only come by direct contact, in my mind that means cutting out the “middle man” the priesthood, guru, group — not that there’s anything wrong with assembling in groups or social organizations per se, it gets damaging when the mindset becomes that we are the “chosen few” or “us against the world” and only through association with the group will you get “the truth,” achieve enlightenment, salvation, etc.
Alan Moore makes a very clear and cogent remark in this connection, he says words to this effect: “I believe that every single individual human being, should probably make their own peace with the Universe… we’re all different emotionally, physically, intellectually, so it would be really odd if we’re all the same spiritually… religion means bound together in one belief, that’s a bit creepy and a bit unnatural…”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cam2kK7J_8k
Cake,
thanks for keeping it light in here,
thanks for reminding us of the lightness of being…
we all need that.
All the best to all
141 ton
I love it.
all praise Sweetie.
Yes, it’s salutary reading that Ouspensky guff again. I find it helpful to recall how O’s writings prepared me for being drawn into the FOF. What strikes me now about it is how he’s so obviously lying, but he does it with such conviction that a young, gullible person can easily believe it.
“C influence is limited” “Schools must have people who….would obey.” There it is, a recipe for a cult.
The one good thing that can be said about O. is that towards the end of his life he admitted he was making it all up. Let’s hope RB gets to that point too.
In defence of Hugh J.
Tall and composed so consistently to reveal the inconsistency and yet no less than those consistently un-composed convinced that there was an advantage in keeping the shoe laces lose. A shy smile that revealed more humour than none and a friend, even if he never called.
A true believer; but weren’t we all?
A competition of souls trying to win at who can idolize the Teacher more fervently and each angle, each gesture presents the rest with one’s purest impulse to expose one’s unquestioned dedication. “This is how I love the “ideal”” each student says and begs: “Could you please take it without ridiculing me? This is sacred to me” We did… too bad.
Not the Teacher: He cannot take it.
Gratitude should certainly come from his denial because the account of karma is freed from the heart if not from the pocket, which fortunately dies and no body cares how much they paid. But he allows the commitment to flow and forbids the grace of ridiculing what is not.
The gestures of love that never reached a port look at one like a hanged man from a tree but what is blind love if not a hanged man? Ten, seventeen, twenty-seven years look at you with dismay and the System confirms the fact that you were once more, simply identified; this time with the Teacher. Love is a dangerous thing. Most lifetimes are spent loving to love without knowing the loved one. If one really knew him, one would not touch him with one’s weaknesses: the statements of fear, the doubts. “I am not good enough but I love you; that should make me good enough.” And marriages grow on what the couple is not. But Robert smiles, “come, let me fuck you” How many relationships grow from the weeds of each other’s fears, the condescendence to each other’s weaknesses? And once we feel comfortable with the degree to which we’ve managed to hold the other’s suffering between our thighs, never let each other out. “Where do you think you’re going? Your freedom offends me. You must need to be loved if you want my appreciation.”
How often can we trap the whole of life in the sex of love
convinced that the flesh will redeem our absent acts
as if one could thread knots on invisible tapestries
or colour the tapestry without a thread?
The woman rests home while he goes out to third line, the “work” or any odd job equally serves and what could have been love becomes idolatry, what could have been manhood, becomes servitude, what could have been life, is not.
How can we weave in each other’s tapestry without making a mess of the threads?
Second, cease (trying) to knit into others and unwind yours first; break the needles and give the threads to invisible children to fly the kites they’ve always dreamed of being in control of, concerning the birth of. (?)
ton 141, thanks for yet another great link. and sheik too, for the one to the alchemically braindamaged blog.
I keep discovering new cool things thanks to you people!
I watched the Alan Moore video without knowing who he was, and finding out afterwards that he is the guy who wrote V for vendetta was a big blow to my “formatory” mind.
Fantastic! I love Sweetie (and Cake, and Bruce, and Whalerider, and really, all you people…)
I have just watched the Glastonbury movie, and that may be partially the reason for this loving vibe I’m feeling.
The movie also made me feel soooo sorry for our poor little brothers and sisters stuck in the stifling environment of the “School” never having any real fun together! I pray Sweetie that all you innocent souls will soon be delivered from this evil.
I know there’s been an onslaught of videos recently, but just in case you can bear one more… make sure to pump up the volume!
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=TkvAFYDgYlY
Uno, why do you smile?
Four letters perhaps but they stretch out in a morning that never ends
and an afternoon that never begins.
Maybe the night’ll wash over them and rest.
The dream gets opened in any page like a dried velvet flower
Why are you impregnated by the colour when it is already dry?
Better aborted than limping but pregnant even so.
Dam!
Dumb!
Keep running!
Light, lucid, lips
Open, orgasm, Om
Velvet VIDA, “VITA” “VIITAA”
Eternal, eastern Eden, Eyes.
Excerpts from a meeting Robert Burton led on February 10th:
- – -
Robert: Before we begin our meeting (…) we will discuss Alex Horne [sic, actual spelling is ‘Horn’] who recently completed his task. [Picture is shown] This is a photograph of Alex, the only one we have in our files. In fact, he is with us now; he is in the room with us. He was born in 1929, just before the stock market crash that began the Great Depression. He completed his task in Montana, which is not far away. In fact, you could have breakfast here and have dinner there, it is that close. He looks a little like Walt Whitman, does he not? He was seventy-eight. We learned of it last night during the margarita dinner. He completed his task last year on September 30th, but we just found out about it out last night — a hundred and one nights after it occurred — like the One Thousand and One Nights — meaning a fairytale ending for Alex.
There were only two or three people with him at the end. This shows us the great divide between a group and a school. He left New York and went to a remote place in Montana, where he owned some property, and completed his task “far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife.” It really shows how important presence is, does it not? I happened to be watching a video yesterday about the Russian dancer, Moiseyev. He died at 101 and he danced from the heart. Alex Horne danced from the third eye — the cosmic dance.
Alex went into an orphanage in Chicago in his twelfth year, and was adopted by Influence C to make him an immortal conscious being. Gurdjieff said, “We are all equally beggars.”
When I left the dinner last night, I went into the vestibule, where Sarah was washing dishes by herself, like Cinderella. I said to her, “Alex Horne died September 30th last year.” She said, “That is my birthday!” I brought Sarah back into the room and mentioned to the others that Alex was “governing himself” [a pun on Sarah’s last name]. The reason I mention this is that Sarah returned from Egypt — where we were together — on Monday, and on Tuesday her car was totaled on Rice’s Crossing Road.
[Another picture is shown] This painting by William Blake shows God Creating the Universe. [A third picture is shown] This photograph of a lightning storm over San Francisco was on my desk this week. From one angle you could say it was great Influence C sending down this lightning. It could be a discreet message from Influence C: Alex Horne completing his task in Montana (Joe Montana was a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers), Sarah, with the same birthday as the day on which Alex Horne’s completed his task, totaling her car, perhaps signifying a total disaster.
The way we received the school from Influence C was through Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Collin, and Horne. I remember that when Alex crystallized I was a young man, around twenty-seven, but I was able to recognize that he had crystallized and had the starry world in his eyes. And I said to him, “Congratulations!” I was so grateful that I was evolved enough to see it. Last night after the dinner I went to the library and he was there with me. All I said was, “Congratulations!” — the great cycle of forty years complete! When I was told that he completed his task I just blew him a kiss. It was so spontaneous and it came so sincerely from the heart. “He is out! He is out!” — the great truth in front and the great lie behind. Sylvia completed her role on January 4th — the “mark” [a pun on her last name] meaning the four wordless breaths.
Alex Horne passed totally unrecognized, and that is fine with him. It is like Rilke, who died isolated in Switzerland. The woman attending Alex said that he knew as much as Gurdjieff. Well, he knew a lot! Did you have anything to add to that, Patricia?
Patricia: I was briefly with Alex Horne before I met Robert. When I advised him that I was leaving his group to study with a teacher in Berkeley, he asked me who it was. I said that I did not know the teacher’s name, but somehow later I understood what he meant, because he kissed me on the forehead and said, “If ever I produced a conscious being, my role as a teacher is complete.” And that was a message for Robert.
Robert: Alex brought us the sacred flame. It was he who introduced us to self-remembering. (…)
Don’t try this at Oregon House on dialup:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=hI6sBdA99c8
2012 – Mayan Cataclysm – the 44th President of the U.S. has put the country under a voodoo trance. It’s already too late.
149 Ollie
Hey you members, this is the horse shit you’re paying for.
Even his little verbal idiosyncrasies haven’t changed in 23 years: “is it not”, “In fact, he is with us now; he is in the room with us”. ( and I’m sure right after his demise he zipped right over to ROBERT- unfucking believable, narcissistic, deaf dumb and blind, and doesn’t have a fucking clue), “completed his task”, “We are all equally beggars.” (isn’t that attributed to Christ?), ”
All your hard earned money and time…..goes to this clown. Think about that for more than 30 fucking seconds.
Thank you Ollie. “One has to be reminded” (another Burtonism) what the rantings of a psychopath sounds like.
From having seen several of Alex’s plays, and having met him once, and all the surrounding information available, I would venture a guess that if Alex could here RB spouting this horse shit he’s beat the shit out of him, or have it done.
Finally found it in myself today to forgive Robert Burton for his misdeeds and myself for being duped by him, so I’ll say goodbye to you all. Thanks for everything!
153 Nuthead
I, for one, will miss your voice. I admired the intensity and the insight that you often brought in your posts. I wish you well.
149 Ollie
Yes, this is classic Burton name-dropping. If you cannot speak anything of substance, drop a few names and point out some far-fetched coincidences. Of course, you really have to be there to see the pinched expressions on his face while he spouts this trite nonsense.
For those who have not heard, Robert Burton studied with Alex Horn less than 2 years and was reportedly expelled from Horn’s group for not working with Horn’s task to refrain from engaging in homosexual affairs.
I thought about leaving tonight too. But, instead I went across the road and bought A influences.
I’m drinking my A influences (on my driveway) when a neighbor shows up. A little later a motorcyclist pulls into the driveway ranting and raving about who knows what?
That’s when B influences appear. I try to talk him out of his motorcycle but he wouldnt part with it even in his drunken state.
They both leave under the influence and here I am with Influence C. Simple!
amazing – you are still all here. good for you. what’s the latest on the “article” anybody know?
Ollie
“Excerpts from a meeting Robert Burton led on February 10th:”
Very good intelligence, one question:
The Teacher: can a fruit from California really be kosher?
Void for Oregon House dialup:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=6kID5W9k-Zw&
Elena:
“How can we weave in each other’s tapestry without making a mess of the threads?”
My love, only epitaphs are set in stone. Life is a tapestry that is a work in progress. Yours, mine, and everyone else’s. The pattern is not complete until your life is over…for most, the finished tapestry is buried in a box and is eventually forgotten by the living, unless you have children and pass the threads on to them. Then it hangs on the wall of the beloved to be admired in its exquisite complexity.
Trust your feelings and dive in. You will create a new beautiful pattern that never would have existed if you had let fear stop you. Life as we know it now is messy, but so is giving birth to a new life.
Ollie 149 Thanks — I think. He, or It, really is ill. Reading this slice-of-life from the absurd world created by this thing reminds me of HPD (histrionic personality disorder):
Males with HPD usually present with identity diffusion, disturbed relationships, and lack of impulse control. They have antisocial tendencies and are inclined to exploit physical symptoms. These men are emotionally immature, dramatic, and shallow. Both men and women with HPD engage in disinhibited behavior.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histrionic_personality_disorder
Does this make any sense? Maybe to the hypnotized…
“…a hundred and one nights after it occurred — like the One Thousand and One Nights —”
“It could be a discreet message from Influence C: Alex Horne completing his task in Montana (Joe Montana was a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers)”
And of course to top it off, the gay innuendo… (I don’t intend to insult the gays):
“I just blew him a kiss. It was so spontaneous and it came so sincerely from the heart. “He is out! He is out!”
155 Richard M.
“…and point out some far- fetched coincidences.”
Far-fetched coincidences? How about manufactured absurdities.
It boggles my mind reading ‘daily cards’ and other such stuff as this ‘meeting’
This ”thing” as ton calls it has been running this pitiful superstition con for 38 yrs. It has not changed one jot in all this time. There are just new ‘marks’ and some poor old fools.
It is so fucking sad.
Hardtruth — what are you about? Are you a simple reactionary? A political operative? To quote the song: “Paranoia may destroy ya…” (on the other hand, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean someone’s not following you, right?). I don’t know you so I need help to understand your posts 87 & 150:
“New Obamaphilia cult threatens to sweep the United States and turn it into a liberal zombie zone. It isn’t yet futile to resist. Vote for the Clinton’s, reality’s razor edge.” and “2012 – Mayan Cataclysm – the 44th President of the U.S. has put the country under a voodoo trance. It’s already too late.”
Let me know if this helps:
http://science-community.sciam.com/blog-entry/Mind-Matters/Harvard-Students-Perceive-Rednecks-Neural/300008563
It is so sad.
That’s why it seems worth while protesting about it. What kind of friend would one be if one just let them be?
Snorer 107.
I don’t think HJ was/is evil, but he was certainly one of the more bizarre examples of Fellowship behaviour. When I first joined in London there was quite a stellar cast there… Collin and Catherine, Gideon and Karen and HJ just to name a few.
All the new students tended to get ‘looked after’ by one of the more senior people and Hugh had such a role in relation to me. He was a little like a Fellowship spiderman, swinging from building to building via huge shooting webs of esoteric ‘theory’! But he never seemed to enjoy his advantures nearly as much!
If you went to the National Gallery with him, he had to be the lecturer- going to the same paintings and giving the same lecture every time…. Just as he’d always eat the same turkey escalope and salad every night. He needed repetition to be comfortable.
From time to time you’d see some little green shoots of shyness and a sly, engaging sense of humour peeping out from behind the esoteric Mack truck.
But this was an early difficulty with the Fellowship that I never really shook off: Everybody talked AS IF THEY KNEW nearly all the time, and Hugh was certainly no exception. Very little sense of humility, of being in a position to receive something modestly… When I became too much like them, I had to leave to preserve my own sanity!
I remember a lady joined a few months after me and took a shine to HJ. I really began to like him THEN, when he had no idea how to handle her amorous advances. She was very persistent, and kept on asking Hugh how he felt about her… which usually provoked an uncomfortable pause followed by another esoteric lecture! It was quite hilarious.
But it’s hard to keep liking, or develop a friendship with someone who refuses to function like an ordinary human being… who refuses to give their ‘lower self’ any constructive role to play — not even the one it was designed for.
The effect on the Teaching House was tangible, it just created an atmosphere of emotional frigidity. Reading that monologue of RB’s on Alex Horne just now, it’s almost like he’s frozen in this crazy web of associations (Montana and SF for example) and the conviction that ‘They’ are there with him, right now. It’s like an angel somehow got trapped up in the attic, and is too afraid to come back down again… so he has to invent all sorts of incredible excuses to convince everyone else that it’s really his proper habitat. “Really it is, my dears, Leonardo’s just jogged my elbow this instant…”
Thanks ollie ollie oxen free:
(It’s OK now to bring little Bobby’s mental illness out of hiding.)
DELUSIONS OF REFERENCE involve people having a belief or perception that irrelevant, unrelated or innocuous things in the world are referring to them directly or have special personal significance. In their strongest form, they are considered to be a sign of mental illness and form part of a delusional, paranoid or psychotic illness.
They may include experiences such as:
•feeling that people on television or radio are talking about, or talking directly to them
•believing that headlines or stories in newspapers are written especially for them
•having the experience that people (often strangers) drop hints or say things about them behind their back
•believing that events (even world events) have been deliberately contrived for them, or have special personal significance
•seeing objects or events as being deliberately set up to convey a special or particular meaning
According to psychologist JAMES Alcock ‘MAGICAL THINKING’ is the interpreting of two closely occurring events as though one caused the other, without any concern for the causal link. Magical thinking invests special powers and forces in many things that are seen as symbols. Alcock notes that because of our neurobiological makeup we are prone to magical thinking and that therefore critical thinking is often at a disadvantage. This type of thinking also manifests itself strongly in people suffering from some mental illnesses.
Any comment, psychic psychotic enabler?
whalerider
U-tube!!!
Me, in Dial-up Land. Off in search of a T1 line. Then, back at ya.
mornin’ all
Cake
157 is newly moderated.
Ton: Once again thank you for the discussion.
Elena,
For me, smiles arrive and leave, similar I guess to leaves falling and tree branches budding: so much is happening these days and when I ‘think’ of ‘why’ and ‘how’, I really have to lay down and just be there, blank… I simply cannot take the questions, I am full and also not… Somewhere we simply are and our emotions occur so much more deep than the face so confusingly oftentimes ‘assuredly’ shows… I suppose when I trust that my intent really matches the feeling I have from my core, I sorta smile from within because I know that I have not killed myself, nor am I totally ‘dead’ beyond consciousness: we walk out onto our porches and stare out into starring out and there we are, there you are… Yet we’re surrounded by others doing the same thing, because we can and there’s some obscure meaning in simply being, in saying ‘I’ or lying motionless and blank… It’s ‘obscure’ because it’s not for our human mind we have in our pocket to figure out in total, it simply ‘is’ and that’s got to be enough tonight.
Ollie 149
“Stalin, Tito, Dimitrov, three stars who shine forever, three hearts to beat together ” .
Bulgarian socialist party slogan. Each time when the Party changed its relations to one of these leaders his name and his ’star in the sky’ had to be replaced by another one in the respective party.
“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed.”
Robert Jay Lifton, “Thought Reform and Psychology of Totalism”
“Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one’s sleep, under so
many lids.”
Rainer Maria Rilke’s epitaph
“Language is a virus from outer space.”
William S. Burroughs
So, I can’t resist adding my six bits to the thread of comments on the “Horn” monologue…
It is quite interesting to see that Robert, like many of his students, these days apparently gets his info from this blog: the news of Horn’s death was given here by Spoonful on february 7, two days before the margarita dinner.
Fascinating to “hear” our little Lord Voldemort casting his spell once again; it reminds me of my last dinner at the Academy, some fourteen years ago, when for the first time the following conscious mentation occurred in my brain while listening to my teacher talk:
“WTF?”
This latest speech is a wonderful example of dysfunctional communication. I love the way Robert uses the catchphrase “completed his task” instead of “passed away”, or “shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibile” to create a vague area of meaning around Alex’s death; he actually likes it so much that uses it three times in the first paragraph (eight times total, perhaps there is an esoteric meaning to this). I personally remain a little puzzled about what the task to be completed was, since apparently his task as a teacher was completed many years ago when he produced the conscious being Robert Burton (notice here the peculiar Fellowship idea that conscious beings “produce” one another).
And apparently Horn has indeed joined the bleedin’ choir of invisible celestial beings, so the two great men can meet again, one in the flesh and the other out. Noble and wise words are then uttered by these conscious beings:
“Congratulations!”
“He is out! He is out!”
Now this is a really poignant moment and a powerful image, for sure it shall be recorded in history… I can already envision the Galleria fresco, with Robert blowing a kiss to the Whitmanesque Alex and the goat patiently waiting by their side…
I just wonder why Horn didn’t pay his visit to Robert a little earlier; for sure it would have given the conscious teacher an edge if he had been aware of his death before the rest of us. A perfectly plausible explanation would be that Alex himself only found out that he was dead upon reading the news in his ex-students’ blog. It may sound strange, but bizarre are the ways of the celestial realms.
I found all the little meaningfully meaningless non-sequiturs so “typically Robert”: Montana is so close that “you could have breakfast here and have dinner there” (?), Alex “was born in 1929, just before the stock market crash that began the Great Depression” (??) “the Russian dancer, Moiseyev. He died at 101 and he danced from the heart” (???), “Congratulations!” — the great cycle of forty years complete!” (???? a latest addition to the numerology craze?)…
But the true madding masterpiece, IMO, is this associative thought sequence:
“This photograph of a lightning storm over San Francisco was on my desk this week. From one angle you could say it was great Influence C sending down this lightning. It could be a discreet message from Influence C: Alex Horne completing his task in Montana (Joe Montana was a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers), Sarah, with the same birthday as the day on which Alex Horne’s completed his task, totaling her car, perhaps signifying a total disaster.”
If I was Sarah I’d be really relieved to know that the totaling of my car was charged with cosmic significance. It makes the lonely washing of dishes more bearable, too. This Cinderella has truly found her Fairy Godmother. Too bad that all these portentous omens occurred only months after Horn’s death. Are they a new kind of retroactive prophesy? I am unconvinced, and thus stuck with the pressing dilemma: what is the real esoteric significance of Sarah totaling her car? Total disaster, yes, but for whom? From one angle you could say that when great Influence C sends down his lightning, SOMEONE is going to get hurt, and that’s all that really matters, am I right or am I right?
BTW, for someone who counts so much, Robert is fairly inaccurate: from September 30th to February 9th there are actually 132 days (I counted).
But we don’t need to be so picky now, do we?
“Alexander, our older brother
Set out for a great adventure
He tore our images out of his pictures
He scratched our names out of all his letters…”
http://www.cnettv.com/9742-1_53-5988.html
Just to dispell some of the ‘magical thinking’…
If the date of numbnuts death was Sept. 30th then the meeting in question would have to have taken place on Jan. 10 to be 101 days after that insignificant occasion (maybe significant in that there is one less scumbag roaming the planet).
Therefore ’shit for brains’ couldn’t have found out about it from the Feb. 7 post to weave his delusional little spell for his little zombies in training.
Somebody shoot me for counting those days.
ton:
“Hardtruth — what are you about?”
Dear Tom,
I want to recognize the fact that you quoted me nearly perfectly and commend your photogenic memory. I can hear your shutter swishing away. I opted not to explore your web contribution due to boredom on my part, sorry.
I do want to point out that as of today Ralph Nader (I’m not sure how the Teacher will interpret this momentous turn of events) is now in the race to keep the first “liberal political televangelist” from stealing the White House through the use of just the sort of platitudes that seduce our citizenry into well-meaning but ultimately destructive cults. Good luck to Ralph, again. He once took 90,000 votes from the sky hugging Gore allowing Bush to steal the election. Ralph’s a civil genius. At this point the general election will likely not be just a cake-walk, it will likely not be just another party:
(this link is useless in Oregon House)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=xzORu1dqEE0
I’ll shoot you Yesri, but only if you shoot me in return!
Man, the things we do for love these days…
hardtruth 171
Your version of past political outcomes is debatable. Many argue that Bush’s first theft of the presidency was the result of the shenanigans in Florida, you know, with little brother Jeb the governor and secretary of state Kathleen Harris, etc, and then a hurried and unconstitutional decision by the supreme court. The Ralph Nader angle was a diversion, a smokescreen to take attention away from the facts — seemed to work on you. Many say the second Bush theft of the White House was orchestrated through more low-down tricks using Diebold… the point here is: a thief is a thief, I think we can agree?
As for “how the teacher will interpret events” who gives a flying fuck?! You exhibit a general air of disdain in your posts (BTW it’s not “Tom”), so I’m curious as to why you still refer to that thing in Oregon House as “the Teacher”?
170 Yesri baba
“shit for brains” aka Princess Twinkle Toes
hardtruth:
You may enjoy this if you haven’t seen it already:
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=1122532358497501036
(Bernays BBC series part #4of 4)
Regarding:
Ollie #149
on February 24, 2008 at 12:21 am
Excerpts from a meeting
Robert Burton led on February 10th:
Thank you for that intel.
WOW! What no license plate shock/interpretation/creations to further bolster the delusional meaning of things? Somebody must be slipping up. Or, maybe, that has become a thing of the past. (Perhaps, if you get too good at manufacturing license plates, imaginarily, you might actually be on your way to really BE making license plates like at Folsom Prison. Or, could it be the plate in Robert’s head that is speaking the dribble? Or, maybe it’s the dribble in Robert’s head that is speaking the plate? Oh, I am sooooo confused. Let’s wait and see what the intel in Sacramento Bee will BE.)
Here’s a riddle:
What do Bill Clinton and Robert Burton have in common, besides being from Arkansas? They both will have maniacal sex with anything that moves, or does not move. See any satyrs or centaurs around Oregon House?
This link good in O.H. by dialup:
ArkansasBob · THE BURTON ASSRAM:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ArkansasBob/message/5
But don’t try this at home, kiddies, especially without parental supervision.
Thank you Uno for your reply, so glad that you are well.
Hi Whalerider,
It may be worth noticing that Robert’s “magical thinking” is closely connected with the “causal link” of how he has set up his personal interpretation of the Work and how he experiences it. I agree with you that Robert is mentally ill. At the same time I would suggest that he is being as sincere as he can be. That is what is so dramatic about the situation inside the Fellowship; That they are all extremely sincere. They’ve been deviating their inconsistencies for so long that they no longer have the capacity to recognize them as such, hence; the mental illness. The hasnamuss or the individual who clearly separated into two different personalities: One doing the work and the other one abusing other people. I don’t think we are going to understand what happened to Robert unless we start conceiving of this division as a reality. It is very interesting to observe clinically because all the ‘symptoms’ that you mention are verifiable.
That is one aspect of what you present but there is still another aspect in what traditional medicine may consider madness and what we can understand as higher states. Since what matters is not only the Fellowship and what they are willing to do with themselves but us, who do not want to distort the whole of the work because Robert failed at it, then I would challenge the statement that interpreting everything as connected to one, is just madness.
In the few high states that I experienced, specially at the beginning, it was clear that what gives meaning to the external world in which we happen to find our selves in is one’s level of being. I connect with this blog in my level of being like the rest of us. I eat what I eat with my level of being and the fact that I can barely understand the effort that innumerable people have had to make, directly or indirectly for me to taste that food, and not only the people but natural forces like where the vegetables were planted, by whom, how did the people live, the supermarket, who transported it… it could be an infinite list for the mind but for a higher state it is a fact, an instant realization without words and the fact that I cannot perceive these things in a low state does not mean that when I do, it does not connect me to the unity of the whole world and its lack of boundaries. It’s wholeness.
There is a dialogue of the world towards an architect, a painter or a beggar and each with his own being interprets it accordingly. It is not that “Delilah” was written for me but that no matter where I find it, it’ll belong to me. If one transposes the same example to the other centres then it is clear that in high states the instinctive centre would interpret the language of nature, the intellectual centre, the language of laws and the emotional centre the language of spiritual value. What we lack today, what we really don’t understand much about is the spiritual or emotional value of everything that happens to us, so we walk the streets like zombies getting wet under a rain that does not clean us and thinking there is nothing worth looking at out there. The streets and the woods, the parks and the rivers, have each their own language and they could always tell us something if we were there to hear it. They are each the living manifestation of laws.
It is not that one’s ego flatters itself thinking or feeling that the angels are sending one messages, as Robert interprets it; it is that in tuning into the different realms of existence, one perceives reality from one’s being and not just from one’s mind, from one’s wholeness and not just from what might be convenient to keep the idiots before one paying another thousand dollars. What they are paying now instinctively might one day allow them to make the effort from their being: trusting themselves and not having to pay somebody else to interpret reality for them.
May the weaving in each other’s life be clearer each day…
Trully enjoyed: “My love”. Thank you.
Thanks Ollie (page 30/149), for that chilling glimpse of “divine wisdom”.
Like many perhaps, my initial reaction was one of grimly amused horror at how batshit crazy Burton has become.
Then I had to ask myself if it was really much different from the “signifyin” he done be doin’ since day one.
From an old blog entry:
“In 1971, Teacher and a student were riding in a relatively new Dodge Dart along Highway 1 near Carmel. Teacher was 32 years old at the time. They were listening to a baseball game on the car radio. As the odometer of the car hit the mileage number “1954, they passed a mailbox which had the name Thompson on it. Teacher indicated that this was a shock, as in 1954, Bobby Thompson of the New York Giants had hit a famous home run in a playoff game (which Teacher had apparently heard on the radio). 44 miles later as the odometer hit 1998, the mailbox on the side of the road showed the number 41211. Teacher indicated that THIS was also a shock which meant that California was going to fall into the Pacific Ocean in 1998 on April 12th at 11 am. Burton believed that the oil company that used the advertising logo “UNION ‘76″ was a sign from C Influence that he, Burton, would “crystallize into a man number six” in 1976″
For me, the primary difference is only that I had erected a multi-layered wall of rationalizations which allowed me to live with the old-school psychotic ramblings with only an occasional embarrassed groan and shake of the head: by the time the new-school schlock hit the stage, the ball bearings on my rationalization machine were worn out, and I was forced to actually hear the words.
“Second verse, same as the first” – Herman’s Hermits
In my post Page 30 #137:
on February 23, 2008 at 9:08 am
I quoted Ouspensky extensively from the Fourth Way. I did not post that material because I believed in all of it, but rather because it seemed relevant to the quotation from a daily card and also because this discussion could possibly benefit from some material from the Fourth Way past.
In particular: It may very well be possible that Influence C can be found without a teacher or a school. However, it is likely very difficult, especially when the dominance of false personality rules the awareness. Lineage and connexion, therefore, is not an absolute necessity. Magnetic centre, and other higher parts in a person, rightly formed, should be able to recognise Influence C, IMHO.
I do not completely agree with this sentence: ‘In order to have influence, schools must have people who are interested and who would obey.’ In specific, the ‘who would obey’ part. Might be a wrong triad. Better they should ‘agree’ because they have an understanding of what would be right action, IMHO.
I do not completely agree with this sentence: ‘But C influence is limited.’ Access to finding C influence maybe limited but C influence being limited, no. C influence is as unlimited as the universe. (However, even the universe is limited. It is said to be curved and therefore enclosed and even light bends traveling through it so that the light eventually returns to its origin – vast though it be.) And, one person having it does not prevent others from having it. Gurdjieff at one point alluded to C influence being like other materiality, like gold or other valuables. I do not go for that. The more one person can have of it, the more it is possible that others can partake of it. C influence in one’s life is only limited by one’s being to absorb it; and the more one absorbs it the more being one has to absorb it. C influence defies the parameters of materiality, like: supply/demand; law of diminishing returns – the more you have of it, the less there is to be had; it cannot be horded – the idea that, if I have it, you cannot have it; or, someone, somewhere, somewhen, is the only source of it – as if it were franchised or patented; and/or other idiotic concepts of selfishness. IMHO.
C influence is simply the influence of a teacher who knows. It is not some kind of cosmic ray or ethereal substance. Everything about The Society of Friends makes me nauseaus.
Wouldn’t You Like To Know 180 — I would tend to agree with your clarifications and interpretations (within the context of the material) although it seems a bit like counting the number of angels on the head of a pin… splitting hairs as it were. My own personal inclination as far as “the system” is concerned; just let it go… throw-out the baby with the bath water — but that’s just me and I may be an ignorant fool… whatever floats yer boat.
Whalerider, I posted links to the Century of the Self material a while back — I think it’s important and worth repeating over and again. Thanks for that.
Re: “magical thinking” IMO, in a sense ALL thinking is a sort of “magic.”
Sheik, here’s one that reminded me of a previous thread….
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18885211
All the best
What You Mean to Me
A little way back, there was talk about, maybe, diluting the intent, the message with the emotional, with the way too personal, the definitely less than esoteric, the less than purpose driven.
But, this place, this place is totally emotional, totally personal to me.
Sometimes we say too much, sometimes not enough.
But often, more than enough to make those closest to us gasp.
Even in our most guarded attempts,we reveal ourselves to each other word by word, well turned phrase by well turned phrase.
Becoming transparent.
But here, no need for fear, trusting,
that there is so much reading between the lines
that exposing pain and frailty, will fall on just the place it should.
So much confusion, so many collapsing worlds,
and suffering, too much suffering.
And with all that, “What possibly could you have been thinking?”
Solace, connection, compassion.
Thanks to all
just a curbsider
Cake
p.s. thanks whalerider
Test
#180: Regarding C influence; ‘the idea that, if I have it, you cannot have it; or, someone, somewhere, somewhen, is the only source of it – as if it were franchised or patented; and/or other idiotic concepts of selfishness. IMHO.’
Hallelujah! Right on! How dumb could one get to think otherwise? Alright, we were all pretty dumb, including myself, depending on how hard we fell for it. The Specialness Clubs. Yes, there are many, and the FOF is one of them.
Manchurian Candidate:
http://i.l.cnn.net/cnn/2008/images/02/25/art.obamasom.ap.jpg
“Alex brought us the sacred flame.”
Indeed, mr Burton, indeed he did.
All the following is excerpted from A History and analysis of the Sharon Gans group, also known as “The Work”, at
http://www.rickross.com/reference/theater/theater13.html
Reading the materials on the Rick Ross page I have come to realize that Horn and Gans and company were/are more sophisticated than Robert, with some extra brainwashing techniques in their bag of tricks. I am only posting the bits that seem to me more equivalent to brainwashing “Fellowship style”. Sorry, this is going to be long.
“A cult is a group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control (e.g. isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heighten suggestibility and subservience, powerful group pressures, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgement, promotion of total dependency on the group and fear of leaving it, etc) designed to advance the goals of the group’s leaders to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community.” (West & Langone, 1986).
In the Gans group it would not be possible for someone in the group to bring up such a working definition in class and then use it as the starting point for a rational, open inquiry into the difference between the “school” and a cult.
Similarly, it would be impossible to have an open dialogue about manipulative techniques, which might take into account the following three “Ds” of cultic manipulation as identified by Margaret Singer, Ph.D. noted author, cult expert and Professor Emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley.
Deception
Recruits brought into the Gans group are essentially duped to believe that the group is benevolent and will enrich their lives. For example, by somehow advancing their spirituality or increasing their self-esteem and/or sense of security. As a result of this deception and the systematic use of highly manipulative techniques of influence, recruits come to commit themselves to the group’s proscribed ways of thinking, feeling and acting; in other words, they become members or converts. There is also deception in the recruitment process, which will be described later.
Dependency
By gradually isolating members from outside influences, establishing unrealistically high and guilt-inducing expectations, punishing any expressions of “negativity” and denigrating independent, critical thinking, the group causes members to become extremely dependent upon the group’s compliance-oriented expressions of love and support.
Dread
Once a state of dependency is firmly established, the group’s control over a member’s thoughts, feelings and behavior is strengthened by a growing dread of losing the group’s psychological support, regardless of how much the member must comply with the leader’s increasingly debilitating demands.
Milieu Control
Lifton states, “The most basic feature of the thought reform environment, the psychological current upon which all else depends, is the control of human communication. Through this milieu control the totalist environment seeks to establish dominion over not only the individual’s communication with the outside (all that he sees and hears, reads or writes, experiences and expresses), but also – in its penetration of his inner life – over what we may speak of as his communication with himself&In order to be the engineers of the human soul, they must first bring it under full observational control.”
The Gans group seems to exercise “Milieu Control” as follows:
Typically, no member of the group may speak to anyone outside of the group regarding the content of the ideas, the classes, or any personal interactions that have taken place within the group. Members are in particular asked not to discuss any of the group ideas with family members who are not members of the “school,” unless they are somehow involved in a recruitment effort with that person. Books used in the classes are most often covered and/or hidden when not in use.
Group members themselves are not allowed to speak with each other about the ideas or about each someone’s life, outside of their weekly meetings or without a “teacher” present, unless they are give permission.
Persons outside the group are often described as “asleep in life” and therefore unable to hear and/or comprehend the ideas and lives of group members. This characterization tends to isolate members through their lack of meaningful personal associations and communication with all those who are “asleep.”
Vacations are discouraged, except around the rare occasions when classes do not meet. That is, one week around Christmas, and one week in the summer. Unexplained absences are frowned upon.
Members that break these rules and speak of the group to outsiders are often disciplined and/or expelled.
According to the rules once a member leaves the group he or she is shunned and virtually any meaningful communication or contact is usually cut off. Members are typically not allowed to speak and/or associate with former members.
The Demand for Purity
Lifton states, “The Philosophical assumption underlying this demand is that absolute purity is attainable, and that anything done to anyone in the name of the purity is ultimately moral. In actual practice, however, no one is really expected to achieve such perfection. Nor can this paradox be dismissed as merely a means of establishing a high standard to which all can aspire. Thought reform bears witness to its more malignant consequences: for by defining and manipulating the criteria of purity, and then by conducting an all-out war upon impurity, the ideological totalists create a narrow world of guilt and shame. This is perpetuated by an ethos of continuous reform, a demand that one strive permanently and painfully for something which not only does not exist but is in fact alien to the human condition.”
The Gans group seems to exercise the “Demand for Purity” as follows:
The world is divided into those who are “asleep,” which is most of humanity and those who are awake or striving to awaken, which are essentially the members of the “school.” The asleep are not awake and fully realized and therefore when they die they will be dissolved. Only the elect, the members of the group, have the possibility of immortality.
Students and even teachers are continually berated with the idea that they are “asleep,” “in life” and/or “filled with negativity.” Such assessments often occur when people question the desires or statements of Sharon Gans. Group members may be denigrated or humiliated at almost any time and told they are not pure enough to reach the next rung on the ladder of consciousness.
The group espouses a ladder of mankind, which denotes higher levels of purity. This includes Man Numbers One Two and Three, who are all “asleep” and not really human, to Man Number Four , Five, Six, Seven, and Eight, who show varying degrees of consciousness and superiority. Jesus is said to have been a Man Number Eight. Sharon Gans suggests that she herself is a Number Six and that Gurdjieff and Ouspensky were likewise people of much higher consciousness.
The chief technique of intimidation is for the group leader to reveal some intimate detail of weakness or guilt that a member has revealed in confidence to a sustainer or some other special friend. This is evidence of a personal failure regarding purity and may be anything from a childhood betrayal, an act of bullying to an unsavory personal habit like picking one’s nose. No item of behavior is exempt from criticism.
Sacred Science
Lifton states, “The totalist milieu maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic dogma, holding it out as an ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence. This sacredness is evident in the prohibition (whether or not explicit) against the questioning of basic assumptions, and in the reverence which is demanded for the originators of the Word, the present bearers of the Word, and the Word itself. While thus transcending ordinary concerns of logic, however, the milieu at the same time makes an exaggerated claim of airtight logic, of absolute ’scientific’ precision. Thus the ultimate moral vision becomes an ultimate science; and the man who dares to criticize it, or to harbor even unspoken alternative ideas, becomes not only immoral and irreverent, but also ‘unscientific.’”
The Gans group seems to exercise a “Sacred Science” as follows:
“Modern science” itself is frequently chastised and ridiculed for failing to see what the group sees. It is frequently referred to as “pseudo-science.” That is, the group’s belief system is instead a more precise and absolute body of knowledge, which people should follow rather than this “pseudo-science.”
Interestingly, a respected teacher in the past also wrote an entire book showing that modern science in fact supports the teachings of the group, which ultimately proved that the group’s views somehow possessed “absolute ’scientific’ precision.”
The group’s teachings are said to be truly “objective,” while all other ways of thinking, including democracy, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, are described as “subjective and flawed.”
The group favors esoteric diagrams that require sacred geometry to unpack. The enneagram, a figure of linear geometrical figures inserted in a circle, is said to contain all possible knowledge. Of course, only the group’s historic leaders and current leaders are said to be capable of interpreting this diagram properly.
Loading the Language
Lifton states, “The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed.”
The Gans group seems to be “Loading the Language” as follows:
Phrases like “inner evolution,” “balanced man,” “man asleep.” “self-remembering,” “self-observation,” “negativity,” “higher centers.” and the like are supposed to encompass virtually all the possibilities of human thought. About fifty phrases seem to be used to describe almost any human situation.
Refusal to use this phraseology is referred to as an example of “negativity” or “being asleep.”
The oldest members often scarcely seem to speak any other phrases, and may lapse into silence if addressed in other terms.
Doctrine over Person
Lifton States, “This sterile language reflects the characteristic feature of ideological totalism: the subordination of human experience to the claims of doctrine. This primacy of doctrine over experience is evident in the continual shift between experience itself and the highly abstract interpretation of such experience – between genuine feelings and spurious cataloguing of feelings.”
The Gans group seems to exercise “Doctrine over Person” as follows:
Anyone who rejects the group’s loaded language is said to be suffering from personal difficulties and to have “fallen asleep.” Such a person is often expelled from the group and people are admonished never again to speak to him or her, because to do so might somehow jeopardize that person’s chance of ever awakening again.
From time to time, members develop serious illnesses, some of them appear to be induced by the stresses of group membership and/or simply getting sick. If a member were in ill favor with the leader, it might be suggested that the illness was a result of their negativity. If a member were in good favor, it may be suggested that the illness was a test, both for the individual and for the will of the group, all of whose members would be instructed to pray for that person.
People who reported bad things in their life, such as loss of a boyfriend or girlfriend, loss of a job, sickness of a parent, conflict with friends, may be told that they should expect nothing else “in life,” because everyone there “is asleep.” People who report good things in their life, getting a good job, getting engaged, resolving a conflict with friends, are expected to credit the group’s advice and guidance regarding achieving these ends.
The Dispensing of Existence
Lifton states, “The totalist environment draws a sharp line between those whose right to existence can be recognized, and those who possess no such right…The totalist environment – even when it does not resort to physical abuse – thus stimulates in everyone a fear of extinction or annihilation. A person can overcome this fear and find ‘confirmation,’ not in his individual relationships, but only from the fount of all existence, the totalist Organization.”
The Gans group seems to exercise “Dispensing of Existence” as follows:
When a member leaves the group, all members are instructed never to speak to him or her again.
A person “asleep in life” is not worth much more consideration than a domestic animal. Such a person, according to the group, is incapable of authentic thought or feeling.
A person leaving the group is told that they essentially now have ceased to exist. The mild form of this is that they have “given up the struggle and are content to be asleep.” A more extreme expression would be that they have abandoned the true way and will “die like a dog in the gutter.”
The greatest fear of the majority of longtime members and the greatest weapon in the hands of Sharon Gans, seems to be that at some point she may tell them to leave. And then all their privileges and friends, they are told, would be lost.
How much does the Gans group cost?
The Gans group has between 150 and 200 members, between its two main locations in New York and Boston. Each member is charged a monthly tuition of $200-400 dollars a month, which amounts to $2,400-4,800 annually. New recruits often pay $400 a month. Tuition alone comes to more than $700,000 collected by the group annually.
This income is apparently controlled by Sharon Gans. Little if any of this money seems to cover any expenses associated with the functioning of the group, as other fees are assessed separately to cover such costs.
Each New York member pays an additional $85 a month “maintenance” fee to cover the cost of renting the space where classes meet. That amounts to an additional $1,020 collected from each member annually. The maintenance fee collected from the members easily yields more than $125,000. But the annual rental fee for the meeting space is about $70,000.
Members who participate in the retreats (and that comprises the majority of members) pay additional fees. Those who go to monthly retreats at the recently purchased complex at Pawling, New York pay about $200 a month for that privilege. Individually, this is an additional $2,400 a year, plus an additional $20 a weekend for a “transportation fee,” that curiously doesn’t seem to go to actual vehicle owners and/or drivers.
Those who go to the annual summer retreats at the complex in Montana pay $60-80 a month during the year to cover its property taxes, plus about $800 per person to participate in the ten-day long retreat. Of course that does not include roundtrip airfare (about $650 coach), plus about $75 each from many members to cover the First Class roundtrip airfare for Sharon Gans. Individually, that is an additional $2,245 a year.
In recent years, every group member “contributes” $5 a month to a “retirement” fund for Sharon Gans, and another $60 a year fee for a storage space used to hold theatrical sets and props.
Many of the group members are “strongly encouraged” to take acting classes from a friend of Sharon Gans in Manhattan. This costs $200 a month.
A writing class taught by yet another friend of Sharon Gans costs $100 a month.
A yoga retreat, once again given by someone with connections to the group’s teachers, cost $400 to $900.
There are also required contributions for special classes such as the Christmas class and occasionally “classes outside of class” such as square dances organized in Croton Falls, New York.
It is unknown if Sharon Gans or her “teachers” receive any financial consideration for such referrals. And the group has no published independently audited financial statement, which is distributed to all its members showing how the money is used and what payments are made to Sharon Gans and/or her family members, associates and friends through salaries and expenses.
Add this all up and you can see that a single student could easily be paying out $6,000 to $10,000 a year in disposable income. This does not include other expenses such as taxis, babysitters, money spent recruiting, and all kinds of incidental donations made in response to frequent requests.
Furthermore, students who work on special projects called “lines of work” are rarely reimbursed for their expenses, whether it is photocopying something for teachers or other students, or entertaining potential recruits by buying meals at coffee shops for special motivational meetings.
For many students, this represents the limit of their financial capability. Because the bulk of a member’s free time is also consumed by the demands of special lines of work, retreats, sustaining, and recruiting efforts. The group can potentially consume a member’s life.
In a short while, a new recruit becomes a valuable asset, providing not only a steady source of income, but also a source of free labor, available at virtually any time for any purpose for their supposed spiritual development.
In addition, Sharon Gans receives very significant contributions of cash and stocks from wealthy individuals who have become part of the group. Their wealth is often derived from large family inheritances and trust funds. These wealthy individuals often acquire special status. They may be given special attention and praise. Such treatment can be seen as a tool used to cement their loyalty.
Sounds familiar, bobby?
169 lauralupa
“I just wonder why Horn didn’t pay his visit to Robert a little earlier; for sure it would have given the conscious teacher an edge if he had been aware of his death before the rest of us…”
LOL — Brilliant! Where was Alex during those “101″ days that were really 132 that somehow relates to 1001 nights??? Must be that esoteric math they use — too hard for a simple life person like me. And since when is Montana close to California? You could also have breakfast in California and dinner in New York, for that matter. BFD.
185 lauralupa
That was edifying, and painfully familiar. This in particular:
“Thought reform bears witness to its more malignant consequences: for by defining and manipulating the criteria of purity, and then by conducting an all-out war upon impurity, the ideological totalists create a narrow world of guilt and shame. This is perpetuated by an ethos of continuous reform, a demand that one strive permanently and painfully for something which not only does not exist but is in fact alien to the human condition.”
Effort, effort, more effort! Or…maybe not. Ouspensky admitted late in life that it was all a scam, but he was too comfortable duping rich devotees to stop himself. In the end I think he bet it all on “eternal recurrence,” a far-fetched theory that has become fact for suckers everywhere. Man number 7 come 11 — everyone’s a loser!
“If a woman gets in the way of your evolution, kick her in the teeth and move on” – Alex Horn
http://forum.rickross.com/read.php?12,6379,page=3
Ouspensky might have admitted whatever you like but the System is not Ouspensky, nor is one’s work the work of losers.
One taste of reality is worth a lifetime of suffering and there is really not that much suffering but the one one is able to carry. There’s no point in giving one more than one can carry and there is much pride in getting used to one’s load.
There are no losers but a work in progress. Life as we conceive it is but a glimpse of it. It is all there just as it is, heaven and hell at the same time, the difference is in one’s conception. In one’s state of being.
Hope opens in one’s own will
and becomes gratitude
pride
and humility
as one stand’s on it.
Pride is in mankind’s sense of self.
How can one ever be small again?
How can anyone be confused by sizes?
How can one stop affirming?
Gratitude is in the Air.
It breaths in one’s soul.
I lie;
Air is an attribute of gratitude,
it breath’s from man’s being.
Earth is the means,
everything must be planted on Earth.
One must make sure love grows
in each of one’s gestures.
In one’s ‘No’ as much as in one’s ‘yes’.
Love grows sideways!
Only from man to man.
It is the love between men
that makes everything else grow.
But we don’t know the beauty
that makes the trees so tall
and the butterflies fly.
We take it for granted and love without pride.
Life does not touch us,
it rapes us.
We do not love it,
we ignore it.
It’s the misery what wakes us,
the shame. But one must hold the whole world with compassion to be able to see one’s own misery without shame.
It’s that vision what brings the humbleness. Every Saint carries the devil within. They carry it so gently that it makes them look like saints. It is the carefulness with which they carry it that their compassion develops.
There is only the evil that one is willing to allow. A simple ‘no’ is enough to displace it but one spends a lifetime saying ‘no’ saying ‘yes’.
And when one has stood long enough in those borders then they are one simple rope between life and death, the seen and the unseen, and the seen rests like a bird in the nest of the unseen, always protected, always embraced, always, always held with infinite compassion as it runs wildly against its own death-birth.
Love is nowhere more infinite than in your hand.
psychic:
Mental illness or conscious being?
I am reminded of something from the awesome Ayuhasca Shaman documentary I saw…
(hope you saw it, too, here is the link again if you didn’t: http://www.altertube.tv/view_video.php?viewkey=7183b2e40bc464231c96 THANKS again lauralupa! And yes, THANKS ‘ton for “Century of Self” that whole series was awesome too!)
…of one the PhD talking heads describing the difference between an insane person with psychosis and a mystic with spiritual visions.
He said the difference is that an insane person keeps to himself and doesn’t go around sharing stories about his psychosis with others and the mystic does.
If I were to play the devil’s advocate here (literally), you could argue that Bobby is therefore not insane. He is quite content to share his delusional system to anyone who will pay him and doesn’t hold back for the sake of decorum.
But in fact I have to disagree with the talking head. In my six years experience of working in mental health facilities, I found that insane people were just as willing to share their delusional system with you as anyone else, quite sincerely I might add, if you care to listen to them and for free.
Is that the real difference then, you have to pay the mystic?
Oh well, so much for being an advocate for the devil, eh psychic?
Hello Whalerider ~
Yes, it was a great video Laura found… thank you Laura.
_______________
For me, it’s not so much that there’s a system inside either a labeled ‘insane person’ or a ‘teacher/mystic’: actually it’s pretty rare that all the stuff whirling through people’s minds, whether they’re ‘here or there’ can be sorted into a system at all…
So, once it is shared, IMO, the system is one thing, its heart-connectivity ability is another, belonging to its innate intent and its intender…
Do you remember the Shaman in the video saying ~ “I have met people who are not in Time or Space, but only in the Present.” ? (He was speaking of human-angels, BTW, not untouchable, un-medium-ed-angels.)
Similarly, another shaman stated that he must be careful of his diet, what he says, does and that he and his people are connected to a whole sense of their history and purpose…
The ’system’ Robert Burton molded pretty much contradicts everything shamans and spiritual healers are about, which, IMO, is no small thing since that’s at the core of all of the four ways, i.e., awakening to becoming The Healer and not a more precise ‘Starving Baby’:
it shows where ‘his version’ of the Fourth Way is headed, away from the heart, healing and being careful and straight back to referring to himself and those referring only to themselves; this people do billions of times a day as well, either by purchasing this year’s model of new car (each year) or by marrying a symbolic solution to the last marriages real problem, yet, this too is necessary, just as it’s necessary for a tree to grow so to produce another tree before ‘it’ dies, before or after its ‘last’ harvest:
so, Robert Burton is not to be singled out of the human ‘race’ by any means: only it would be good of someone to some day allow him to notice that, although there’s a race, there’s no finish line and the checkered flag, is the flag and it never flies at half mast.
There’s something in everyone that’s disappointed or vacant in some unfinished, round and round way;
it is the environment which surrounds the sensation of having a void within us that most often leads us to such places as The Fellowship of Friends, so to build more skyscrapers to keep filling the horizon, to make the reality of the rising and setting sun a little later in showing itself each day and evening…
Robert Burton ‘belongs’ to every human being on the planet, just as George Bush ‘is’… IMO. It’s not to say that we are not responsible for ‘exorcising’ certain intents, yet, with the same power of ‘exorcising’ I hope we can also learn our lessons and become more and more less desperate when such pythons slide across our sweaty bellies as we find ourselves laying face up and frozen on a jungle floor, seeming indefinite; because it’s that panic which rises up in us that points to an unresolved distrust, an unresolved anguish, fear and pain, of whom the python is only a ’symbol’ of… it belongs to the same realm where affirmations exist and work within, only it’s from the other side of that ‘moon’.
Perhaps we’ve stood in front of the mirror image long enough and can stop working on it and step through the looking glass (?)
There’s a little desperation in everyone and each of us have and have had our own ways to make this desperation the driving force in our lives, as if, just because the fact that it knows how to drive somehow convinces something within us that it too, knows the best and ‘right’ places to take us, to deliver us…
Yet, it’s been my experience that it owns all the gasoline stations, hotels, beach resorts and planet: too, it knows nothing, other than the intent belonging to the fact that it is a mechanism which ‘drives’, like a merry-go-round, similarly perhaps to the one that spun the earth its first time.
We orbit a sort of ‘void’ within ourselves and rarely go into it purely, without referencing the satellites and other crutches: it’s ok though, Time and Space have a reason and seem to also have an Emotional, tactile context connected to the growth of the soul and its ‘touching’ of others in a healing and loving way.
The Fellowship of Friends and Robert Burton in so many ways, ‘is’ that atmosphere surrounding that ‘void’, keeping it ’safe’ and impregnate-able:
IMO, die to the atmosphere and one can perhaps get into that void, the vacant soul-placenta and stand up, learn how to walk without the affirmative ‘legs’, ‘ground’ and ‘destination’.
And when the python does slide across one’s belly, try to smile, it may actually be there protecting you from the lion in the bush, who’s been contemplating the having to go through its 700 pound detour sign, to get to you for some time now…
Pythons are not the trouble, it’s the trouble-maker that’s the trouble: it’s one of the phenomenon ‘who’ surround and ‘protect’ the void, our ‘birth-place’… It keeps oneself whirling in the external world space kicking, screaming, laughing and joking, all the while these two emotions play mysteriously as ‘hinges’ to the door called ‘I’…
We turn the doorknob and the hinges move, there’s an opening, yet, the person now in the room has not ever touched the door, it’s always been so easy for it to get out of the way, so long as it’s not locked…
And when the day comes that we do find it locked, we figure its someone else’s house and we’ve forgotten where we built ours, so we become ‘homeless’ and begin searching for a foster home (The Fellowship of Friends)… Such places serve their part, indeed, too, so do so many atmospheric institutions we identify ourselves with… even the Blog.
IMO
__________________
l.t.y.a.
Lauralupa, 185 — I don’t know about “bobby” but it sounds all too familiar to me. I’m reminded of the saying about “hindsight being 20/20″…
I suppose the one “positive” I carry with me from the experience is a healthy cynicism and a radar that steers me clear of involvement with anything resembling a “cult.” It’s an understatement to say the FOF experience was the most difficult of life-lessons, many did not come through it… but those of us who did survive, probably feel that something precious was taken. Speaking from my own perspective, money and labor are the least of it, the time I’ll never get back, friends, spouse, a child, innocence, dreams… these pieces of a shattered soul were scattered behind me when I left.
I’ve wondered about why I continue surfing and posting here — picking up the “shamanic” theme again, this quote comes to mind:
“Shamans say that the soul has such a longing for wholeness that it will recreate the conditions that caused the soul loss, because it hopes that another opportunity for healing will result in our integrating these fragmented aspects of the self.”
The bit above about “20/20 hindsight” has to do with awareness of the soul wound… revisiting this site has helped deepen that awareness for me. Consequences of being unaware might look like this:
“Unaware of their soul’s wounding, the person will change jobs but end up with a similar boss, move to another city and wonder at how she ended up with neighbors who are just like those she left behind, or divorce the abusive spouse and end up in an identical marriage. If the shaman can discover the source of the original wounding, he can heal it, and break the self-destructive patterns.”
181, 186 and 189 are newly moderated.
Dear All,
Saw two videos with Robert, one of Nov 2007. The subject was the square, and an Italian dinner from Oct 2005. I recommend seeing them with open eyes and ears. BE PRESENT to them.
Nov 2007. Robert sees al kinds of esoteric meaning in a square, illustrates this with pictures on a screen and does very many hand gestures. He sees 4 fingers all over ( even if there are 5 or 3), and knits this info all together. 50 people follow him, without much enthusiasm and try to grasp this “esoteric” knowledge. There is hardly anybody with a smile on their face…..
He mentions a person who recently dies and confuses his name with another J-m-s.
Next par: the video of 1995. This was when the fellowship was still flourishing and having an aim and something was going on. Robert babbles away, is the center of the attention, makes strange facial expression that seem not very congruent with what he is saying.
To make a long story short, I lost several illusions.
3 times nothing, is still nothing.
I invite everybody to see it for themselves. It might be a rude awakening, especially when you are in the fellowship.
Love to all of us, we need it.
195 Another Name
Where can a person view these videos if they’re not a member?
Another Name 195
Yes, IMO at this point all we need is love and we can beat this collective monster together.
Namaste
I can feel a difference,
today, a difference.
All of us in a our towns
fearing God like a mistress.
We lay on our box, in the sun,
watching you and your women.
Sat up and blinked when you appeared
So pale you were nearly clear.
Later I stumbled to my bed
all alone in the branches.
I laid in the dark
thinking about all of my friends and their changes
And I do not know if you know just what you have done.
You were the sweetest one I have ever laid my eyes upon.
It’s a beautiful town with the rain coming down,
Blackberry, Rosemary, Jimmy Crack Corn.
You’ve got the run of the place now that you’re running around.
And may kindness, kindness, kindness abound.
In this hour of our lives,
our effortless plenty.
How do we know which parts of our hearts
want what with such base generosity?
Taking so many photographs,
so amazed, we’ve never seen a baby so newly born.
And the bulbs do flash as bright as morning;
this crowd keeps on gathering like an electric storm.
The phantom of love moves among us at will,
each phantom in us has got an angel.
So confused, like the wagging ghost tail of a bulldog,
kindness, kindness prevails!
Kindness prevails!
Ties and rails, ties and rails,
fall into lines bearing kindness.
Where will you go if not here;
What will you say when you write to us?
And this is a world of terrible hardship
everywhere on our search for words to set you at ease.
But there in the looking glass a kite is soaring
still in my roaring heart and my trembling knees.
Clean as a breeze, bright as a day,
all of the people gather to say,
Sweet Esame, sweet Esame.
Oh, oh, oh…
I believe love will always surround you,
brave as a bear, with a heart rare and true.
But If you are scared, if you are blue,
I’ve prepared a small song for you
Sweet Esame, sweet Esame.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=bS1cNK94tUw
I had a somewhat sad experience yesterday. I approached a current and long time member in a restaurant and asked if I might join her with my coffee, which I did. I had the aim to connect as human to human in a simple way. I had no plan to challenge or confront. I had known this person for many years. She could barely look up from the table and seemed to be full of shame and confusion. I felt kindly but not willing to pretend that there had never been a connection. There was some banal small talk. I tried asking about things that this person had enjoyed and been involved in but the responses were artificial and awkward. I finally asked how the school was for her now. She replied that things were better with people no longer sitting on the fence. I said that I was not referring to the people leaving but wondered if the information being given out made sense to her. She said that she didn’t think about it, that what was happening was just the next step. I gently asked how she could know if it was the next step if she didn’t think about it. She replied that if you are walking along you just continue to take the next step in the direction that you happen to be facing. She added as a further explanation that it was hard and that she always learned something from the direction of the school. I felt so sorry for her that I declined to ask how it was “hard” and for an example of waht she thought she had learned. These answers were rather pitiful and I could see in her eyes that she was lying to herself and to me but I felt that she had lost the possibility to let go of these illusions and I did not want to hurt her by leaving her with nothing. I felt sad that there was nothing accessible behind the fear and lying to connect with and I wish I might have helped her somehow.
186 hardtruth
We have our own resident moron.
brucelevy:
“We have our own resident moron.”
Apologies to Oregon House:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Vn6sE0kcPaI&
There is talk about the Lewis Carroll School becoming a charter school which would be open to the community at large. Some people think this would be a good thing. I have some serious doubts. Not because a charter school would not benefit the area but because this one will carry the legacy of it’s origin in the Fellowship. The influence from Robert Burton on the existing administration and faculty has a long and perverse history and I can’t see how something new and healthy can arise from this sordid past.
186 Hard truth
I do not know what your “agenda” is, but in the interest of fairness and as a tribute to “external consideration”, I have gathered a few other apparent reasons to dislike Obama from the great World Wacko Web.
#1 – He will nominate Osama as head of national security.
#2 – He took cocaine with Saddam in Chicago
#3 – His wife does not like our country, or any country.
#4 – Never been in the military.
#5 – He does have an unusual name, does he not (?), and does have an exotic background (through a Manchurian Candidate prism), does’nt he?.
#6 – He lacks the experience and brilliant insights of our current president.
#7 – He supports meeting with – (as opposed to, sever-) the heads of terrorist states.
#8 – He wants to get rid of your right to own a handgun (or 2, or a big one).
#9 – He is calling for the repeal of the law preventing gay marriage at the Galleria.
#10 – He is for a trillion-dollar tax increase and a 125% hike on teaching payments.
#11 – He says he is not a republican.
#12 – He rode camels (unconfirmed)
#13 – He eats with chopsticks
#14 – He plans to grow an afro once in the white house
#15 – All federal employees will be made to wear dashikis.
#16 – He’s going to take 123% of your earnings and tax the rush limbaugh freedom channel.
#17 – Once shot a man in Reno…just to watch him die!
#18 – Ate the liver of a census taker once tried to test him, with some fava beans and a nice chianti.
#19 – Turned to the Dark Side to try to save Padme’ and killed Mace Windu.
#20 – He likes to dissect girls. Did you know he’s utterly insane?
#21 – He’s going to enjoy watching you die, Mr. Anderson.
#22 – He will tell you “what’s the matter!” He goes out of his way for you! He does everything to try and make you happy. He feeds you, he cleans you, he dresses you, and what thanks does he get? “Oh, you bought the wrong paper, Barack, I can’t write on this paper, Barack!” Well, he’ll get your stupid paper but you just better start showing him a little appreciation around here, Mr. MAN!
#23 – He’ll get you, my pretty…and your little dog too!
#24 – He’s done far worse than kill you. He’s hurt you. And he wishes to go on… hurting you. He shall leave you as you left him, as you left her. Marooned for all eternity, in the center of a dead planet. Buried alive… buried alive.
#25 – He does know or has not even heard of Robert Burton, although he is probably gay
#26 – His chief weapon is surprise. Surprise and fear, fear and surprise…his two weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency…his three weapons are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the pope…amongst his weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the pope, and these nice red uniforms…
#25 – He’s not circumcised
#26 – He watches washington week in review
#27 – He’s dead, jim
#28 – He’s a pork-eating muslim
#29 – He’s a christian-eating muslim
#30 – He didn’t vote for bush
#31 – He’s a HIP-HOPER
#32 – He has not read the Fourth way
#33 – He wears ruby slippers to bed.
#34 – He was born on february 30th
#35 – He always sided with colonel klink
#36 – He always sided with muttley et al.
#37 – He won’t annex Canada.
#38 – He blew his mind out in a car
#39 – He was the Walrus
#40 – On the night he was born, Lord, I swear the moon turned a fire red.
#41 – He’s off to see the wizard
#42 – He does not dislike the French.
#43 – He does not read this blog
and of course # 44 – He’ll be baaaaack!
Re# 201 (Lewis Carroll School)
That sordid past includes the fact that Robert Burton asked women to have abortions and to give away their children. And this man is revered as a spiritual guide by the current administration and faculty.
CVB #198
What a touching story. I am sure you helped her just by asking the questions and being open to her. Ultimately each person’s decision to stay or leave depends on their own understanding at the time. I remember a time when I was unsure about staying or leaving, and as long as I stayed I had to justify it to myself, just as I now justify why I left. It reminds me of the cognitive dissonance discussions here on the blog some time ago, which is a good explanation of how we justify our actions. Just seeing we are all poor bastards in pretty much the same boat helps give perspective.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=HhFrZ4-nxa4
202 Opus111
#45 – He come on flattop, he come groovin’ up slowly.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=OvTZAg0H17w
Yes, Lennon ripped it off from Chuck.
unoanimo:
“The ’system’ Robert Burton molded pretty much contradicts everything shamans and spiritual healers are about, which, IMO, is no small thing since that’s at the core of all of the four ways, i.e., awakening to becoming The Healer and not a more precise ‘Starving Baby’.”
Precisely, my friend. Well said. I agree wholeheartedly.
Anyone up for the healing task? If so, one successful, yet time consuming therapy used to extinguish and heal a delusional system in a person suffering from mental illness is to:
1) Join with them in the system
2) Encourage the system
3) Intervene by means of gentle confrontation of delusions of reference and magical thinking with reality testing
4) Support and reinforce new insights and healthy reality perceptions with the patient among a group of his peers
IMO, one healthy reality perception for bobby would be that his students are in fact not his sexual playthings and the school is not legally a vehicle for satisfying his personal lust and greed. (Good luck there.)
Of course, then bobby would have to become aware that there is a wider world out there and a community of humankind of which he is a part as an equal. It’s getting the peer group together that we would have trouble, finding his equals. Hmmm…all the people bobby thinks of as his peers are dead conscious beings, his good buddy Alex recently joining the bunch. (How convenient for him.)
Oh dear, oh my, what do we do? People continue to be harmed by this sexual predator whom you and I once supported. Our time, energy and money got him to where he is today.
Who can save bobby’s followers if they won’t save themselves from being trapped and slowly indoctrinated into his little delusional system of no return?
THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES! (And he is crazy as shit.)
This predicament of sincerity that his followers succumb to is only a recipe for more pain and suffering. At the end of the day, it makes me more sad than angry.
CVB
In relation to LCS:
I hear your concerns but do not fully agree with them. There are many youngsters who have been through that school and seem to have done well for themselves (gone on to college and away from OH). One may be horrified by the belief system and allegiance of Faculty and Administration, but I do not think those permeate very far into actual teaching, from what I could see. It is not like pupils were taught or asked to endorse 4th way ideas or count angels in the room (unlike creationism or fear of Shakespeare in other areas of deep America).
In general, teachers care very much for the kids and provide a safe environment for them to learn. Kids learn tolerance through an unusual ethnic diversity, and go through a curriculum which, although far from perfect, seems to prepare them more than adequately for High School and higher education elsewhere.
So, while not perfect and yes, endorsed/supported by FOF, LCS has provided a true service to the OH (FOF) community.
Hardtruth
Thanks for joining in the political dialog with the other 80% of the population with the cognitive development of a yak (my apologies to yaks). I am not particularly happy with the whole set-up but it would be nice to watch someone speaking as president who can put three sentences together without looking like they were mustering all their will to keep from picking their nose and eating the booger.
Yesri baba:
“…with the cognitive development of a yak (my apologies to yaks).”
Note that nearly everyone posting here on a regular basis entertains a certain sense of rational superiority, isn’t there something suspect about that?
http://youtube.com/watch?v=VlnVxcqSSfs
207 Opus111
I’d have to agree. I can’t speak about the faculty and administration per se, but my ex-wife is a teacher there. While I have several issues around our years together, and the fact that she “re-joined” I have absolutely no misgivings about her capacity to be an excellent teacher, and I’m confident that she doesn’t inject the ideas that we all fear may be fucking up the children of FOF members. She’s not a dummy, and I’d trust her judgment as to what’s appropriate within a school environment (that’s “school” and not “School”). Actually, in my opinion, they’re fucking lucky to have her.
209 hardtruth
There’s far more that’s suspect about you.
hardtruth
to add to your paranoia:
http://static.crooksandliars.com/2008/02/2009-rwball.jpg
Our beloved teacher has decided that Isis shall be renamed, “Camealot” because after all that’s what most of you did. Plans are currently underway to dig a giant moat around the property, “The moat of abundance” and fill it with desert wine to keep life people out. However given the dearth of cheap foreign labor currently being experienced, all students are asked to pitch in, bring a shovel and gather at the jousting ring, (formerly Grand Bazaar) this coming Saturday at 9am for a chalice of mead and the inaugural breaking of the holy ground.
Saturday evening’s fundraiser will be a Holy Grail banquet in the Gawain room where Robert will be talking absolute nonsense again on a mediaeval theme and counting fingers and toes in some nice pictures. Ladies are asked to greet the gentlemen by saying, “Good morrow brave Sir Knight” whilst gentlemen are asked to address the ladies as “Wench” e.g., “Here wench get me more mead”.
About the changes Robert has said, In the Bible Jesus admonished, “Why do you see the moat in your brother’s eye and don’t know you have a beam in your own eye?” The beam in your own eye is world 12 gazing wordlessly upon our beautiful moat. We shall be known to posterity as Camealot because when the moving finger hath writ and having writ moved on, it will be clear that’s really pretty much all we did here.
209 Hardtruth
Definitely, That is why I posted the response to the one who is so obviously ‘rationally superior’ to those in favor of Mr. Obama.
You Idiot.
Yesri baba:
“You Idiot.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DDaX4r–kI
(click on the “name-link” for this post and then click on “McCain supporter rips Obama” to the right on the video feed when over-mousing near the bottom of the clip window) (except in Oregon House, of course)
Re: the hypnotized, the influence of religion and mind control on a planetary scale — here are some staggering numbers…
http://timesonline.typepad.com/faith/2008/02/the-worlds-most.html
Hardtruth, sorry if you are bored by the facts…
Girls just want to have fun, eh?
214 hardtruth
My oh my, where ARE my manners?
Welcome back Greggy.
Love that song.
“Why I hate Pachelbel’s Canon”:
http://tinyurl.com/2f4zu2
hardtruth:
I have to agree with Yesri baba, I love that song, too, those are some awesome lyrics in that little ditty that bobby wrote:
“It was gravity which pulled us down
And destiny which broke us apart
You tamed the lion in my cage
But it just wasn’t enough to change my heart.
Now everything’s a little upside down, as a matter of fact The wheels have stopped,
What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good,
You’ll find out when you reach the top,
You’re on the bottom.
I noticed at the ceremony,
Your corrupt ways had finally made you blind
I can’t remember your face anymore,
Your mouth has changed,
Your eyes don’t look into mine.
The priest wore black on the seventh day
And sat stone-faced while the building burned.”
The part that hits me in the gut is about reaching the top only to find you are on the bottom. Ouch!
I may only speak for myself, but that is EXACTLY how I felt being intimate with the teacher. I was on top of him, but actually I was on the bottom. I felt like scum. I knew what kind of FOF track was in store for those who say, “no thanks”. I wised up fairly quickly after that.
See ya, hate to be ya.
Yesri baba:
“Welcome back Greggy.”
“Love that song.”
Love Song? You flatter me with your suspicions:
Opus 207 and CVB.
Presently, it seems even the children in the Lewis Carroll somehow know they better get their asses away from that place because they leave by the tons whenever they are old enough. They run!
I think they begin to perceive the cardboard make up of a place in which everything is supposed to be beautiful and in order, but the people are lifeless. The “King of Hearts” alchemy of the dead cannot fool children. They run for their lives, thank god!
There are difficult children in the community of Oregon House who have been ending up in jail, mixed with drugs, hardly speak with their parents after they leave. Like many teenagers in regular society but unthinkable in the “only conscious school on the planet.”
The teachers pardon me, are also like any other and give preferences to the children from parents in power in the Fellowship and other abominable things like that. The teachers, even those I much appreciate, express so much negativity to the children that they didn’t know what the hell to do with them to not have to sack them and live them without any money after being founders of the School.
They are needing to make it a Charter School because daddy Robert is not willing to share his income for the boys with the teachers and the children. No wonder the Teachers get sick; one way or another. The most frustrated students in the Fellowship of Friends are by far those who ever tried to work in the Lewis Carroll School for a better generation of children. Their dreams died in time, burnt by Roberts greed.
Dear Internaut,
I do not know at this point…..
What Fellowship life
is imagined to be:
http://www.youtube.com/v/LD8HDta7Z_4
Must be the Mickey Mouse outfit.
(Sorry, likely not so good by dailup in Oregon House.)
What Fellowship life
is becoming like
in Oregon House:
http://www.youtube.com/v/V8Ca_edg6RE
Note the six bell rings sounding
signifying the sequence –
must make it of esoteric origin.
(Sorry, likely not so good by dailup in Oregon House.)
hornyalex 212
LOL
Speaking of “Camealot”, Robert’s sperm donors should be reminded that all spiritual traditions point out that coming a lot is not good for one (and one’s possible evolution). Here is just one of many takes on the subject:
http://www.reuniting.info/wisdom/rainbow_serpent_of_the_toltecs
And here is a little excerpt in case you don’t want to read the whole thing:
Thoughts on gurus – Her teacher also warns her that it is possible for those who have learned to control their sexual energy to misuse their power. Unsolicited sex with an apprentice builds the abuser’s power while draining the apprentice. The more powerful the abuser looks in the eyes of his apprentice, the more the apprentice is likely to give away further power in hopes of gaining power and importance. However, one reason the abuser looks so charismatic to the apprentice is that he is “wearing” some of the apprentice’s “stolen” energy. This may account for the many abuses by gurus through the years. Another way that masters can abuse their power is by using a dream body (energy body) to engage in energetic intercourse while an apprentice is asleep in order to bind the apprentice’s sexual energy to the master’s service.
“How do I rip thee off? Let me count the ways…”
Is the Aire of Superiority a fragrance or an odor?
“He who smelt it, dealt it” Confucius
(Sorry, I had to quote somebody)
Lauralupe, that is powerful information that you’ve brought up. Thank you. Interesting that it uses all those words and does not mention that all that happens because there is an initial impulse of love for the Teacher. In the lower emotional centre, people love what they feel they don’t have and it makes emotional slaves of them. That is idolatry.
“However, one reason the abuser looks so charismatic to the apprentice is that he is “wearing” some of the apprentice’s “stolen” energy.”
He is wearing the student’s own love projected. This is essentially the phenomenon in meetings at the Galleria in which student’s look like hypnotised fanatics and Robert throws them out if they are not looking at him like that.
In relation to the dream body or body of energy, Girard did mention a few times that Robert would often absorb Girard’s physical energy when he was in need of it. Not sexually. They never had sex he claimed, but physically. I did not understand him at the time but that description explains it clearly.
Elena:
You have my deepest respect for all that you have been through with Dorothy’s passing and for the sacrifices that you have personally made for the truth. We have made similar sacrifices at the altar of love.
Your insights about Girard are invaluable. Did Girard ever actually spend much time around Robert?
One story I heard from his time in the London Center was that there were complaints about his teaching style. Some student followers were claiming that he couldn’t possibly be conscious. While he sat there with you in private consultation, he would loudly fart and carry on without excusing himself.
Maybe that was to dispel any air of superiority?
Hi Whalerider,
Before I answer you I wished to make a correction from my post where I say Girard claimed they had not had sex. I would rather say, Girard stated that they had not had sex and I still believe him. Their relationship was more Edipic in my opinion. They did not spend any time together in the four years I lived with Girard. They were not friends but accomplices.
The story you mention about Girard may well be true, he is not a refined man in those aspects. His true refinement is in the fact that no matter how misleading, he is the most honest man I’ve ever met. We are in a very delicate situation because if we really wish to understand what happened to us we cannot simply look at one aspect of the human beings involved, we have to see them in their integrity. “Honesty” is a difficult word for a man who divided into two clear personalities and duped thousands of people into believing in Robert Burton’s integrity. The sad thing is he himself believed it and needed to believe it. He himself convinced himself and used the whole of his presence, the whole of his authority, the whole of his sacrificed being into making others believe it was true. You can’t just watch a human being sacrifice everything in his life for another man and not be inspired by his devotion. The misery in each one of us admired that he could throw away children, wives, friends, his own body, and all of his time to state throughout the whole of his life that Robert Burton was a legitimate conscious being. We overlooked the slight issue that if Robert was not authentic his own promise to consciousness was no more real, that is the problem. He did not believe in himself, he had to believe in Robert and he had the will, the structure, the being to have led us all and himself to an awakening of some kind without having to mortgage his soul to Robert’s corruption but he was himself corrupted enough to not be able to do it.
The most honest man and the most corrupted at the same time but if we can understand the scale of both honesty and corruption when used in this man’s life as much as in the rest of the Fellowship then we’ll be way ahead in understanding our play. All the corruption in the Fellowship of Friends is much accepted as “normal” in American standards and most western societies are quickly catching up to it. It is good in a way because judging each other for the corruption that we’ve inherited from our peers is not going to help us work with it. We inherited the capacity to live as schizophrenics from our childhood with parents whose jobs had nothing to do with their family, whose sexuality had nothing to do with love, whose children had nothing to do with who they were but subjects of another authoritarian institution in which the parents could practice both their features and their suffering; Their honesty and their corruption. The separation of the different spheres of individual, family and community account for most tragedies of our time.
From that point of view, both Robert and Girard are perfectly coherent people in the standards of our societies. They do not make more money than others, they do not rape more people than others, they do not love any less than others and the robe of a spiritual school is no less corrupt than the robe of a “University.” People think they can get away with everything but in the end we are all caught up by the whole.
Our real tragedy lies in the fact that this is what we made of our lives with the best intention. This is what our being has produced this far. Girard stood like a monument on behalf of Robert Burton’s enlightenment. He used all his beauty as a human being, all his power as a martial, all his capacity for sacrifice in the only possible way that he understood it legitimate, with total honesty. He is still doing that. The break-point is in the fact that he deployed all that not really for the students, the work or his own development but at the cost of the students, the work and his own development. Robert Burton and Girard Haven are the only two people that seem to have benefited from the Fellowship of Friends: They took student’s love to empower themselves and rule over them; They claimed the right to decide, to speak, to love, to spend, to not share, to think, to not hear, to do, to not let it be done, to be, to not let us be, to fuck and be fucked. The Fellowship of Friends has not harmed anyone as much as them; we are all victims of our own invention but they are the worst victims.
Thank you for your acknowledgement Whalerider! Where did you find Dorothy? I think of her with much joy. She smiles at me from the other side where she is much more relaxed than with me pushing her around to go for an ice cream in Yuba City! But she did think Food for less was at her age about as exciting as Walt Disney for a child! We really had so much fun in our predicament!
New Fellowship theme song:
I just got a new job as a translator for Indian music videos. This is my first shot:
I just got a call, for some reason they fired me.
230 brucelevy
OMG — hysterical.
I laughed so hard I cried.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA1NoOOoaNw&feature=related
“Who put that goat in here?”
That’s it folks, my new screen name: Benny Lava.
234 Kid Shelleen
And to think, Fellowship students can’t enjoy these videos because of the “no wit” exercise. How depressing.
“I’d love to see you pee on us tonight.”
“I’d love to see you pee on us tonight.”
Actually, Robert may want to re-think that exercise.
“Now poop on them Oliver.”
…even more so.
From The Egyptian Book of the Dead (or The Book of Going Forth By Day):
“The third gate: the name of its gatekeeper is ‘One who eats the Putrefaction of his Posterior’; the name of its guardian is ‘Alert of Face’; the name of the announcer in it is ‘Gateway’.”
Discuss.
229 / 230 brucelevy
234-5-6-7 Innernaut
I don’t know why you got fired, Bruce, you’ve got a future there!
Which leads me to ask, just how is your loony bun today?
Really Bruce, they made me want to off blast!
Thx.
JF
“The World According to Benny Lava”
OMG, I think I almost died watching this, I couldn’t breath.
I see the nuns are gay!
Benny Lava, anybody need this sign?
Who put the goat in there? The yellow goat I ate?
I put papaya in there!
The ninja made a movement!
Have you been high today?
Oh, man, this is epic, thanks for the laughs guys.
JF
. . . and just to prove the weirdness goes on and on, it just sometimes gets a better soundtrack, I submit:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4776181634656145640
JF
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eGvmB8Phk8&
Unless you’re in Oregon House always check the “name-link” for something weird.
Disjointed
Well, how are you today? It was an innocent question.
Jumping in boots first. “Disjointed”. Continuing on with the example of the the four horses, four limbs torture.
Stop! Stop! That is a horrible image.
Just figurative, my friend. But realizing the only way out is to change the subject , move on. So sorry to have left you with an image of galloping horses and flying body parts. Just figurative.
Sometimes, these days, don’t you just feel like that? Head to the left, heart to the right, and what the heck is going on with the body. Hey, stop that.
Keep hearing myself saying, keep it together, left foot, right foot, this moment, this moment. But there isn’t a word in the world that is going to help.
Hold on, hold on. But how can I? My right arm is half way to Argentina. Finding myself and losing myself in rapid succession. Doing far too much of some things and definitely not enough of others.
We haven’t we been encased in concrete far too long? Shake it off. You and your friend. Telling them, I see things in you, wonderful things, things you can’t see in yourself. Just look in my eyes. Deep. See.
Then you catch your reflection in their gaze. Whole.
My left arm, you ask. Paraguay.
disarmed
Cake
More disarming:
“Ever wanted to talk to God? Well, now you can…”
http://www.eso-garden.com/index.php?/weblog/godsbot_the_christian_robot/
Cake ~
If you’re in South America or anywhere where you can access it, find a Shaman: try and embrace both arms around ‘Grandmother’… ’she’ will show you the way towards healing.
There comes a time when one must bypass ‘C-Influence’ and go straight to their parents for help: a place where conscience rules over prayer and zero is the most ancient age.
:.)
Uno
Thank you.
Me, in Oregon House. And you and me talking about flora and fauna, when was it, mid August, at somebody’s party. Maybe you remember.
Healing, Shaman, strange enough, it looks like I have one at my fingertips. Whenever. Whenever.
But in my worst, up against the wall, out of control, what the hell are you doing moments, here it comes, that voice that says aren’t you glad to be alive and feeling again.
Really, meant that post to be something about joy. Years of feeling, not enough, never enough. Years of trying to making efforts and more efforts, knowing there was not an effort left to make.
Finding out. Then finding out after all, that you are enough. You were always enough. Perfect. Complete.
Flawed, of course, filled with frailties and vanities, of course, but still perfect. Do you know what joy that brings. Bet you do.
Healers. Oh these friends, magical friends. Guess, I am still glowing in the first rush. Alive again. Alive again.
with respect and gratitude
Cake
Cake
You’re welcome.
The only party I recall attending was that ‘Half & Half’ party where the Fellowship of Friends ‘Ins’ and ‘Outs’ mingled and drank beer from the bottle (well, at least I did).
Hummmm; I am glad to hear that you have a Shaman at your fingertips, then again, all airports do… IMO, efforts are one thing, revelations another…
Oftentimes an experience can be an ‘effort’; often in American esoteric circles (based on American ethics and other misc. hoopla) an effort is usually packed filled with physical and mental gymnastics and battles with contradictory goods and evils, whereas an experience with ‘Grandmother’ can reset the standards, IMO, where they possibly began, i.e., not having experiences defined as ‘effort’ or ‘trying’ occurring outside ourselves, but, rather, from the inside
and if it’s truly a genuine ‘occult’ experience, it will not leak out, like those which hinge on external results and when the flowing of circumstances ‘happen’ as the third dimension does not turn fourth when Could, Should and Would ‘would’ have it so or based on some ‘Sunday to Sunday’ schedule of report-card sharing.
Whoever you are Cake, I wish you well and try and walk somewhere out here called ‘Beside You’…
___________________
L.t.y.a.
Dear All,
When Elena mentioned that Girard told her that he was not involved in Robert’s sex life, it might be true. Maybe not. Many men deny the fact that they were involved in Robert’s sex life. For many reasons. Like:
Shame
Denial
Disgust
Hurt
The secrecy that was ask of the involved, to not to talk about it.
The believe system that it was and/or is something very special.
There are a few men that I know (intentional maybe) who say they were not involved in Robert’s sex life and it seems so obviously they were? Who knows?
Girard is the intellectual type and does not seem to fit the bill. Maybe he had sex once or twice with Robert? He fits the bill of the broken type category.
It is hard to know and from one angle not my business?
I am still pondering about this. What is my business in this matter?
241 Skeptical Optimist
That was good (and odd), but this is, well, check it out.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6283096511750618839
More history needed,
I believe Girard and Robert have not had sex simply because when he would have been eligible to Robert’s taste Robert was still trying to work with it, control it, hide it and between himself and Girard there was a code of honour. The code from which Girard has been able to stand and hold Robert with. They have an edipic relationship I believe. The image of a man that was enough of a man is in each other’s programming. The great man, the macho giving up his machoness for the conscious queen, The conscious queen giving up his kingdom to the conscious macho. Yuk! Deep down they need to believe in each other’s integrity. Girard needs to think that Robert has integrity and Robert has to use that conviction from Girard to have the rest of the School believe in him. Hundreds of students could have given a dam about Girard but no one ever challenged him or told the rest of us that he was challengeable. They kept quiet and played along with how Robert used Girard’s apparent integrity, apparent willingness to sacrifice, apparent stature and will and love to get another generation of students to support their little act in the Fellowship of Friends. Everyone profited from the money one way or another and everyone loved the little act they were meagrely allowed to display in the last conscious School on the planet.
We live in the most decadent time of our civilization and people in cults will pass on as the most decadent people it harboured.
What is your business in this matter? This is our life not anybody else’s.
244 Cake please
“Sometimes, these days, don’t you just feel like that? Head to the left, heart to the right, and what the heck is going on with the body. Hey, stop that.”
“But there isn’t a word in the world that is going to help.”
* * *
Yes. Sometimes these days I do feel just like that. And yes, there do not seem to be any words that will help. Attempting to live with no reference points seems to be so frightening to some sections of my little cosmos.
Some inside try to be a little like those jugglers, except the balls keep landing all over the fucking place.
251 Elena
I believe Girard and Robert have not had sex simply because when he would have been eligible to Robert’s taste Robert was still trying to work with it, control it, hide it and between himself and Girard there was a code of honour.
Elena, I respect and appreciate much of what you write here (at least the bits I’m able to get myself to read) and your passionate efforts. However, statements like the one above are complete and utter rubbish, bullshit fabrications of your own imagining. You are talking about 1973-1974, and I’m pretty sure you have no direct idea of what was happening then, who Girard and Barbara actually were when they joined, and even less idea (if that’s possible) of what “Robert was … trying to work with.” Much more effective when you stick to what you know.
250 Innernaut
Fantastic, thanks. Much better skill, yeah, but it was the whole performance/audience aspect of the original that pushed it way over the weird barrier for me. And how’s your loony bun today?
Thanks.
JF
Threading, tying loose ends, half knots, weaving, tapestry forming, breaking needles, frayed ends, and grandmother is flying above on the magical carpet.
253 Skeptical Optimist
Yeah, I agree the original had the bizarre quality going for it. Everybody wants to be a rock star. Even jugglers, apparently. I loved how the guy doing the parody even sung along with the lyrics at precisely the same time as the original guy. I admire the original guy’s skill, but I think his weirdness has something to do with delusions of grandeur. To bring it back on-topic, I guess there’s a little bit of Robert in everyone. Uh, let me re-phrase that…
And my loony bun is fine today, thanks.
252 James McLemore
“Some inside try to be a little like those jugglers, except the balls keep landing all over the fucking place.”
Well said.
241 Skeptical Optimist
No matter how many times I watch this I’m blown away. Thanks.
243 hardtruth
Ok, I get it all now….your posts, this clip. You’re like 16, 17? All is forgiven. Youthful folly.
249 More history needed?
Having been around Princess Twinkle Toes I can tell you that Gerard was definitely NOT RB’s type. I remember thinking about the fact that RB never really liked to spend time around Gerard other than what was needed. It was pretty clear that G didn’t fit the usual bill of fare. He wasn’t pretty in a boyish/girlish way, he wasn’t solar and/or stupid. I remember thinking (this was the 80’s) what a dick RB was for treating G the way he did. RB obviously needed him and used him for certain aspects of the gig, and that was it… period. If Gerard died in the school you’d have RB talking fondly about him like they were soul mates, like he did with Alex, but in truth, other than efficacy, RB really doesn’t give two shits, except to create new myths.
I just can’t get past Girard thinking that the relationship between a student and his teacher is like that of a master and his dog. That blows me away everytime I think if it! What drugs was he on? If he told me that, I would turn my back and start running for the hills.
Now a dog has no real loyality or conscience. It will follow you or anyone else if you feed it, as long as you don’t feed it too much to completely satisfy its hunger, otherwise it runs off. You have to keep it slightly hungry so it will obey you and feed it only once a day. More often than not, you have to keep it indoors, chained up, or behind a tall fence. With time, you can train a dog to jump through hoops, dance, wear funny clothes, and even fuck you up the ass.
That’s the difference between a student and a follower. A student has and retains a conscience and the self-esteem that would empower them to get themselves out of a “school” that is in reality a rape factory. A student has the aim and ability to learn to feed himself. At some point, FOF students are taught to eat their own consciences and become followers in order to stay a member for so many years. I can hear the master’s voice now…
Stay! Sit! Speak! Now roll over that conscience! Good boy! Here’s your doggie treat!
I agree with Bruce, Girard wasn’t Robert’s type but even if he had been Joel, I think Robert had better plans on how to use him. All that mass of apparent integrity must’ve had some use if it wasn’t to fuck it. Or fuck it anyway in the long run like Bruce says for he, nor does anybody else in the Fellowship, give a fuck about Girard. Only Girard’s role as long as he can continue to travel around the third class countries in the world making the few dimes that less sophisticated, more in essence people willing to travel for two days to listen to him, can come up with and get some money for the Lewis Carroll and the Arts from the few adepts that still go to his dinners to see if they ever have a chance to say anything that is not a pre-established quotation. Anything as long as the Arts and the Lewis Carroll and anyone in need doesn’t have to put his dirty hands in Robert’s pocket who once in a while will also add to the multiple donations another dinner for the Arts and the Lewis Carroll.
As long as I can continue to hear your voice Joel saying anything positive to me I’ll do my best to add a few of those absurdities that move you enough. Thank you for the compliment. The ink does tend to dry a little in monologues.
——……
In relation to Girard’s honesty I was looking at it from his own point of view and it is with that relativity that I think it needs to be taken. No one fucks other people thinking they are harming them, they make up myriad excuses within themselves to make it look legitimate for themselves and no one will prove them the contrary without suffering. That is how honest Girard thinks he is. Miles might have had less addictions to have to bend his being and if he didn’t just leave with the ambition of opening his own school, which would not detract much from him either, who cares, why not, but it was the presentation they gave to students who joined later to make him look like an ambitious fart and take weight away from the real facts. Still, why did neither Miles, nor you nor a thousand other people ever come to tell us what you knew so clearly? What shame, what horror, and what honesty did you carry in your being to stay silent for over twenty years while thousands like I continued to get fucked?
You are lucky that I do not regret it either, that fire bends to transform. There was no Internet but the gates were always there. Any slight gesture would have moved thousands in the right direction.
Of course I love Girard, not that I expect him to appreciate this kind of love, or anyone else for that matter, but you think I would be screaming if it weren’t because I can see so clearly how they all damage each other? Anyone can speak the truth about him, that would help, but if I were just going to detract from him because he farts, who doesn’t?
The issue is in the fact that big macho man; big male institution was willing to sacrifice himself for a cheap queer but not for a woman, not for any woman. As long as it was for another man, he’d break his balls into four and burn them in glycerine but not for any woman. Not a fucking chance, from Girard or any of the thousands of men in the Fellowship of Friends who support and supported the institution. And the women too, they love to play second and third and fourth place in the brothel as long as they get a chance to play any role, God Fuck, after centuries of playing whores, who would expect them to play women.
It’s too bad I no longer find any interest in women but if I have to play the second or third or fourth in the game of being with men, I’ll happily stay celibate for another lifetime. We align ourselves like human beings in marriage and community or we stay out of marriage and community until it dies out on its own. If no sex is the price of dignity, it’s a cheap price.
innernaut #250
Nice video…the guy was obviously in a high state of ‘flow’.
Cake 247 that was beautiful.
Different cult, similar issues:
warning this video is not for the squeamish.
http://www.cracked.com/article_15973_scientology-nice.html
Elena #260 (and 12s of others)
You keep referring to Girard as the embodiment of honesty. I just don’t quite get it. May be you could think of the difference between “honesty”, “delusion” (mistaken honesty) and “deceit” (intended delusion or the famous intentional insincerity). I think Girard’s honesty often falls short of being honest. Just because one can argue a point does not mean one is being “honest” about it. I am not suggesting a long debate about the issue.
I also disagree that nobody cared or cares (in or out of FOF) about Girard or the pleas of those still mesmerized by the whole show. Many did, many do today. Lambasting Joel and others for having waiting for so long to tell us how bad it was, how bad it is, miss the obvious point that only those willing to learn and ponder come to read and/or wrote on the blog. How many of those still attending “events” today would be willing to read your posts, or those of Joel, Whalerider, Simon, Anna and others?
‘You can bring the horses to the water (by and large, those in the FOF know the blog exists) but you cannot make them drink’ (read and weep).
brucelevy:
“Ok, I get it all now….your posts, this clip. You’re like 16, 17? All is forgiven. Youthful folly.”
The Indian-English interpretation clip was lame, juvenile, but I had the good taste not to say so. In my opinion the clip I posted was a great rendition of a tune by the Smiths, even if performed by two teenaged lesbians. In the future always refer back to my previous suggestion you check your own mirror before projecting your version of quality control or “adult supervision” on others. In that regard, you might also consider what you were susceptible to in your career as a human being that others resisted and maybe drop the attitude that you have the common sense to offer criticism to anyone about anything. I hope this reply doesn’t interfere with your implacable, self-satisfied smirk. Have a nice day.
You won’t like this either:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=CDqnq_Qb-kE&
260 Elena
Still, why did neither Miles, nor you nor a thousand other people ever come to tell us what you knew so clearly? What shame, what horror, and what honesty did you carry in your being to stay silent for over twenty years while thousands like I continued to get fucked?
You are lucky that I do not regret it either, that fire bends to transform. There was no Internet but the gates were always there.
Just more self-righteousness, Elena, and inaccurate at that. Why didn’t you read the LA Times article that spelled it all out? Why didn’t you come to the many former student gatherings where you could have found out what people thought who had left? Are you going to beat yourself up over that? How futile and what a waste of energy.
The fact is that most of us knew nothing of the extent of Burton’s sexual crimes. It came out with the Buzbee case, I believe in 1994. And the real story I only learned from this blog. Did you seek out the Buzbees to find out their story? No, of course you didn’t because no “good student” or well-functioning robotic follower would do so, and that is why it is equally insane to think that
Any slight gesture would have moved thousands in the right direction.
Utter bullshit. I mailed out over 100 letters to people when I left, and I never declined to tell people why. I didn’t notice any thousands leaving. As has been stated many times here, people really have to be ready, and that’s the compassionate truth.
My sense is that you have much to offer and many subjects on which you are a valuable contributor and a passionate spokesman. Continuing to blame other people does nothing for you or for them. Life isn’t fair. I lost an enormous amount through my captivity in the FoF, but looking for someone to blame simply retards my own healing. Why not just drop it?
JF
I have been waiting for ages to post this video, I love it, but after all this is not a music blog…
time to go with the flow?
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=7NVfuSFREmU&feature=related
260 Elena
“anyone in need doesn’t have to put his dirty hands in Robert’s pocket”.
RB likes to refer to that as “having to go into his private coffer”.
264 Hardtruth
I hope this reply doesn’t interfere with your implacable, self-satisfied smirk.
Thanks for the concern, but no, it didn’t.
264 Hardtruth
…You supercilious little shit.
Opus 111, Joel,
I clearly put a line where I ended the part for Joel after thanking him but should have been clearer that I wasn’t directing the rest to him but to the blog in general and answering private mail that I get that seems equally valuable for the rest of us. You never mentioned Girard’s honesty, why would anyone think I was talking to you?
Opus, I don’t know how many times I have to repeat that the honesty I speak about in Girard has nothing to do with real honesty but that he himself never thought of himself as anything but honest and thousands of students relied on that. At least I did and know for sure that hundreds other did. Hundreds in centres and at Isis.
If you had been told by Robert that you were to become the next conscious being in the last Conscious School on the planet, what would you’ve done for Robert?
A little sex?
A little sex with a few boys? What the hell, homosexuality is legal in the United States and most of the world? Specially Ancient Greece?
Some brilliant men after all?
Build the lodge?
Build the Academy?
Build the Gardens?
Develop the winery?
So much building, we can’t just be fooling around here?
And if they gave you some money to travel around meeting loving devotees with their tongue out, cherished you like a jewel, how comfortable would you be?
And if you had a little tendency for young pure beautiful girls, so pure and young what on earth could be wrong with that? Isn’t porn legal too?
And besides your little tendency you were willing to give up every comfort for yourself and your family until you extirpated it out of your life forever and required of your wives the same stoicism multiplied by the fact that women and feminine dominance had to be put in the first row after they had bowed to find young men for Robert, then wouldn’t you think you had after all been as honest as you could have possibly been, given the conditions?
The fact that you run your luck against your destiny and got a stroke from the dissonance, married four times and finally succeeded to try one decent time to fail again, lost all your bets in the machinery that needed to swallow younger more credible men and forgot to care convinced that if you just continued to make daily plans for everyday of the rest of your life you could wind yourself enough to last, did not really make a difference.
Honesty, you think I call that honesty or do you just wish to hear that and not read the rest of a thousand posts?
Still every measure of compassion would have stood for the man if he’d been willing to take a step out because when you understand fully how easily we all make a misery of our lives with a thousand fewer temptations to do so, you don’t doubt about what your role is in a situation like that. But we are too miserable even to take a step out when nothing but more crime is left inside.
What’s the difference Opus 111? He does that while we shout on the blog displaying our talents in the hope that there exists something different to what one just left but when the time comes to state the obvious, people hide the pen, the hand, the balls and the head and to hell with a petition, a newspaper, a lawsuit and keep playing the music.
It is different nevertheless. There was nothing in seventeen years in the Fellowship Joel. Every tiny claim was minutiously covered up by the establishment and besides the five that got thrown out for backing my question in a meeting on How do we deal with abuse of Friendship, I NEVER HEARD ANYONE COMPLAIN OR SAY THEY HAD SUFFERED IN THE FELLOWSHIP OF FRIENDS. Never; not one. We can kill each other out here with atomic bombs but as long as we don’t find a way of interrupting the life inside with real objections, hundreds of people will continue to spend five, ten, fifteen, twenty and more years paying money they don’t owe and karma they don’t deserve.
If no one else had seriously suffered why should I question what was making me suffer so deeply? Shouldn’t I just transform it? If it had not been for the fact that if I had stayed there for another two years I too would have died of exhaustion, illness and sadness. Hopelessness. It was not my bright mind what got me out of there it was one scream from the blog and my exhausted body what could not take it for a second longer. After a few years one stays in the Fellowship solely out of soul. No mind, no heart, no will but the inertia of having to go on because that is all you know and nobody gives a fuck.
I do not blame you Joel or anybody else; today I call you responsible. If anyone around here does not feel responsible for what is still happening inside, I blame you. We know too much to let it continue no matter the money, the newspapers or whatever else is necessary to stop it. I cannot do it on my own and if you just want to play with it, allow me to stand out of the game. I already played.
I too will stop screaming. Maybe I’ll come up and stand at the pyle every time I am in the United States, but you’re right Joel, I’ll go to hell with my righteousness because in the end there are more beautiful things to talk about than how a bunch of people destroyed their lives and those of others.
I too am getting tired of hearing myself, don’t worry, I’ll let you play with your selves without bugging you much more. In fact I will not leave without deeply thanking you for getting me out of the Fellowship and putting up with me for a year. I’ve learnt more from you in a year than from seventeen years in the Fellowship of Friends, especially about what I really want for myself.
270 Elena
” I’ve learnt more from you in a year than from seventeen years in the Fellowship of Friends, especially about what I really want for myself.”
That sounds like healing to me.
***
“If anyone around here does not feel responsible for what is still happening inside, I blame you.”
Not sure about that one.
Remember that responsibility simply means the ability to have a response. And the ability to respond works much better without weight or guilt.
Hello Elena and All ~
I want to address some of Elena’s points, though not to her entirely: I hope, in the nature of the blog and what it has meant to me over the last year, that what we still write is still (in spirit) for all to take in and ponder, sense and be with.
_____________________________________________
Hello Elena,
You wrote ~
“But we are too miserable even to take a step out when nothing but more crime is left inside.”
________________
IMO, this is a very deep Catch 22 situation in all cults and organized religions alike, it is an Earth-human-situation, ‘installed’ in front of our souls like a movie screen and is magnified more so when it’s modeled in a small setting, i.e., when it is condensed and not spread out over a State or Country. This movie ‘entertains’ our ‘Daily Mind’ and for whatever reason, it cloaks our core, our soul’s conscience.
IMO, there are two conscience’s:
1) The one belonging to our ‘Daily Mind’s’ response to reports from the External World and its reaction to these events and definitions: it belongs to the part of us that believes ‘I am me, because you are you.’ It also believes, it experiences itself through ‘concepts’ and not deep ‘percepts’: it believes and acts on belief, experience is still a confusing thing, because experience still, for the most part, leads most into Hypocrisy and Contradictions.
2) The second is much more quiet; it shape shifts behind loud conversations in Coffee Shops and such places as Apollo D’Oro:
it is what pauses, then a scratch to the chin opens Pandora’s Box and covers it up with a quick speculative response. To me, Pandora’s Box is the makeup kit that the Painful Self (Daily Mind) uses to keep it’s inner ‘actor’ looking like an actor and not a movie goer, while the farm boy and gasoline attendant sleep by the diesel generator in case it begins to sputter, that is, the simpler sides of ourselves stare out in wonderment as to what we just said
and oftentimes does actually produce real “conscious remorse” and apologizes, saying, “I did not mean what I said.”
I could say this about allot of what I have written on this blog, yet, it had to happen the way it did and that’s that:
I could say that, ‘I did not mean what I said because it meant me.’ There’s a huge crossover here…
Again, you wrote ~
“But we are too miserable even to take a step out when nothing but more crime is left inside.”
________________
Further into it, the ‘Catch 22′ is that the “too miserable” is exactly, IMO, what protects the evolution of the soul and the reconciliation of certain traumas, sometimes contemporary, sometimes ancient and beyond your wildest imaginations.
IMO, the ‘Painbody’ is a spirit-phenomenon and one will only get further from ‘touching its nature with understanding and healing intent’ if one applies human-being-characteristics to it: just because ‘its’ emotions and atmospheres unfold in human form means little when Conscience hits the fan…
______________________________
IMO, Magnetic Center is the result of untransformed traumas from one’s soul’s core issuing out some sort of ‘cry’, a type of ‘beacon’:
to me, this is something everyone has to some degree, it’s some function that simply ‘is’ and it gets covered up with layers and layers of blankets:
I picture a person worried that a suffering child is too cold so they keep putting blankets on the child till the weight of the blankets ceases the child’s breathing:
the child remains warm, safe, though in a coma and extremely disturbed because it cannot open its eyes, mouth, ears, hands or heart to itself, it’s conscious will.
__________________
The “nothing but more crime is left inside”:
IMO, this is a mirror image of what is inside us (at times); the trauma is the ‘first crime’, anything that resembles or triggers the trauma to use the ‘Daily Mind’ to express itself abstractly, is simply a sort of ‘collectors piece’, something to occupy Time and Space and the Daily Mind, not oneself or fundamental healing processes:
the Painful Self keeps a ‘photo album’ for sure and rarely does it exchange its photo album for that of another’s for good… It keeps these ‘photo albums’ as an atmospheric opiate, IMO, keeping the core traumas under wrap…
It is a mystery to me how it is that we have to grow up twice: first we just simply grow up by default and secondly we are offered the chance to die to all that ‘atmosphere’ and begin from the point of view as a self standing up from the inside out,
quiet and fearful of not a ‘god’ in the worshipful sense (worshiping the antidote (the wish) to the atmosphere), but rather, fear of our own condition of Conscience, what it really feels and how the trauma itself can be revealed as a sort of soul-tumor, stretching out its fibrous influences all throughout our bodies, spirits and Daily Minds, what this does and creates if left unchecked, (that is, once you know it’s there and have felt the tumor with the Hell that’s intertwined with ones innocence, free will and embattled feelings ‘the push and pull of conscience’.)
_____________
IMO, perhaps (in the final stages of Reconciling certain deep Traumas) it’s not about taking a step outside or fearing the taking of such steps based on being in a state of desperation concerning the external world’s mirror, because, going out (for some) would only mean more of the same that’s driving the inner trauma crazy, that’s making it want to get out:
though here’s the odd thing ~
The stepping out takes place inside and the atmosphere that’s surrounding the unresolved traumas, keeping them alive, is the ‘External World’, i.e., the external world belonging to the Trauma, the external world that one’s ego and Daily Mind has created around the unconscious penmanship of the Trauma itself: IMO.
Traumas ‘attract or magnetize’ to themselves mirror images of their creators and romanticized relief or wish-button;
sometimes at the ‘end’ of whatever circumstance created the trauma, there’s a ‘wish’ sent up into one’s soul; this wish most likely goes against accepting the circumstance as a lesson or one simply cannot accept it and it burrows itself into one’s heart, feeling like an immortal gopher:
(hence, the condition of needing to be a student that does not graduate and gain conscious autonomy, till the permission of another allows it: who is this ‘other’?
Perhaps it’s that part of us that feeds off resentment and regret…
Perhaps it’s the part of us that wants ‘wish’ more that ‘It’s coming true’ (?)
___________________
In one of my experiences I saw that all of my marriages and relationships ‘ended’ just as my original trauma ended and that they began with ‘rescue missions’, that is ~
When ‘the wish’ was concerning the aftermath of the ‘original trauma’ or exactly what I had wished I could have done in order so that the circumstances that ‘did’ happen would not have:
so I lay down at some point in my existence, curled up and breathed heavy from exhaustion, fear, doubt and extreme rage at not having been able to say goodbye to ‘the other’ caught up in the circumstance of the trauma’s creation, so too, perhaps there was even residue within my soul from it’s unfinished yearnings as well… (?)
The wish was ~
To have been able to rescue or BE RESCUED… Which is actually not at all about the Trauma itself and the fact that it did happen to the soul via its incarnation in the physical world: no, it (the wish) was simply ‘atmospheric’, a mood, a drug of sorts, a coma-hope…
______________________________________
So many times, when the Knight meets the Dragon, he in secret says ~
‘I’ll tell you what, I will call with my special whistle and my horse will gallop here; she’s 6 times my weight in tasty flesh, eat her, not me.’
And lo and behold the Dragon agrees with the Knight and to this day lets out a whistling noise each time it hiccups.
___________________________________
Elena, you wrote ~
“as long as we don’t find a way of interrupting the life inside with real objections, hundreds of people will continue to spend five, ten, fifteen, twenty and more years paying money they don’t owe and karma they don’t deserve.”
____________
Perhaps the ‘inside’ is not altogether about Oregon House’s mirroring of our ‘inside’ or what’s ‘inside’ once one gets beyond the guard house at Isis…
What within all of us ‘resembles’ Robert Burton’s bedroom on a Sunday night?
If there’s a student whose supporting such a mirror image, then, IMO, I can only suppose that there’s something within themselves that’s creating a ’supportive reflection’:
___________________
Narcissus likes seeing his reflection the the surface of the water likes giving it, showing it; while it safely flows as itself underneath the reflection… So long as Narcissus stays ‘put’, the water itself will not meet with drought…
It’s no mistake that a famous ‘teacher’ was said to have spent his time in a desert and not a plush oasis. The traumas we have stored in us are Black Seas needing drought, IMO.
___________________
The atmosphere surrounding traumas is gigantic: trillions are spent each year in building up an atmosphere of Military Defense on Earth, defense of what? Whose the enemy? Perhaps the ‘enemy’ is one’s own unresolved anger and rage and the ‘mind’ within that attaches itself to keeping it that way… (?)
Getting to the heart of the trauma is not necessarily ‘winning the war’, yet, at least it’s a war where the sacrifices cannot add to the trauma, if it’s warred well and the lessons one learns actually live daily and are applied, rather than talked about and polished more high as philosophical possibilities.
Sometimes I wonder how far people in The Fellowship of Friends took the word-phrase ~ “Man’s Possible Evolution”?
To me, this is not a static condition, yet it could be if coupled with a teacher or a student whose concerning themselves with the application of ‘environment and atmosphere’ surrounding the Trauma or Magnetic Center and not getting to the heart of the students or teachers contradictions and hypocrisies, which so often are awesome tell-tale symptoms of where to work and learn into, not necessarily out of.
Yet, I am not judging or doubting here, because it’s a necessary stage, it arrives in one form or another along the spirit’s way… It’s mysterious and I have no words.
______________________
I am not sure, Elena, whether I could support (in blog-friendship), after my experiences, that of ~
“paying money they don’t owe and karma they don’t deserve.”
The Atmosphere around the Trauma is insatiable till a breakthrough is initiated; while, IMO, the “money” and “karma” are one.
What we owe and ‘deserve’ is proportionate to the atmosphere the Daily Mind has built up around the Untouched Trauma: it’s linked to conscience: for does not Conscience nearly always ‘imply’ some sort of payment to be made and ‘how’ do we pay it and then later regain a debt by contradicting what we thought we learned by the initial payment?
If we do not ‘really pay’ then a debit is naturally created and the atmosphere becomes denser, thicker and more ‘I am not that Trauma, because I am busy looking up at the Atmosphere (the external world), while, curiously enough the ‘looking up’ is resting under the graveyard-trees of the trauma itself.’ (?)
So, perhaps there is an inner ‘right-ness’ that’s connected to the sense of oneself, that is indeed partly about keeping a spirit record of exactly where one is in relation to one’s conscience: and perhaps we do owe ourselves money and WILL pay (as Rodney Collins said ~ “Eventually you will have to pay for everything.”) For me, I have verified that he was ’spot on’ concerning this one, at least for me, he was.
Maybe there is a sort of ‘karma’ that we do deserve, after all, if we did not ‘deserve’ anything from our actions and reactions ‘within ourselves’, how would we grow and exist?
________
Perhaps “deserve” has a personal meaning for you Elena, in regards to the subject of ‘punishment’: the Fellowship of Friends ‘leader’ (punished) you for speaking and gave you a ‘No talking exercise’ for a long time: is there anything within you that may mirror that ‘happening’? I fathom there is, for by some mysterious contraption we attract similar ‘plays’ as to those that created the Trauma itself and this ‘tumor’ lives based on ‘Repetition’ or ‘The Law of Re-occurence’:
IMO, ‘deserve’ is either the red or white blood cells of Conscience, I am not sure which; yet, underneath all that ‘thinks for us’ there’s a feeling and this feeling is connected in the most delicate way to ‘deserve’ and ‘free-will’…
In my experience, free will costs allot and what I deserve is to stand up within, in the midst of the tumor and begin tending to its veracious appetite for breathing polluted air and not to kill it or remove it and toss it into a trash can: rather, to attempt to return it to where it once was, i.e., an actual beating heart and not a war-drum-beating.
________________________
Lastly, you wrote ~
“I’ll go to hell with my righteousness because in the end there are more beautiful things to talk about than how a bunch of people destroyed their lives and those of others.”
_________________
IMO, whoever is ‘righteous’ does not have to go too far to call it ‘going to hell’, actually, a step in any direction from that point of ‘righteous view’ will suffice for ‘being’ in Hell.
And there’s no end, my friend; please do not let the mind fool you into ‘thinking’ that the body’s death is an cessation of the trauma or atmosphere that’s been built up around its playing outward ‘a life’ over top the presence of your soul…
Hell (is) Righteousness; in so many respects we’re all already there, so there’s no traveling to do, but to stand up inside it and let the ice burn: melt yourself and try and allow the external world to Love you a bit: maybe Grandmother too.
________________
I walked a friend’s dog last night: the fact that the dog ‘paid’ me no mind helped me allot; it allowed us to be together while not under the opiate of ‘the we’, i.e., The Needy and The rescuer.
________________
Love to you all
270 …And if you had a little tendency for young pure beautiful girls, so pure and young what on earth could be wrong with that? Isn’t porn legal too?…………………………
Yes and your teachers tells you or other men with similar tendencies that it is illegal now to pursue these tendencies and you can get into prison but after 2006 there will be no rules after 2006? (Here Robert is referring to the “fall of humanity and the world”, which never happened).
Truth? Who knows……
Only Robert and those men who were close to Robert and who spoke with him about these matters knows and could come formward.
Who dares to come forward?
“If anyone around here does not feel responsible for what is still happening inside, I blame you.” (Elena)
Not sure about that one.
Remember that responsibility simply means the ability to have a response. And the ability to respond works much better without weight or guilt. (James).
If you witness crime and you do not act/speak up crime continues. Is not that correct? When we do not speak up do we give permission and allow crimes to continue?
Food for thought.
Elena:
Never mind “admiring” your husband for his fanatical devotion, I do love your passion, girl!
But hey, if Girard recanted the dog thing in public, I might be willing to give him the benefit of doubt and accept that maybe his farts were conscious ones and intentionally “placed” in the air to display his mastery over inner considering and feminine dominance (whatever that means). But I think that’s his dog story and he’s sticking to it, or stuck in it, or stepped in it as the case may be. Arf! Arf! Chomp, Chomp. Wag. Wag. Squat. Squat.
“If you had been told by Robert that you were to become the next conscious being in the last Conscious School on the planet, what would you’ve done for Robert?”
Girlfriend, I am SO glad you said that! That thought process needs to be taken out and aired! What the fuck do you mean by that? What would I do if he just “told” me that? And I didn’t really feel or think he was actually showing me how to do it…he was really just trying to get into my pants? To yank my chain…my leash?
I’d leave him, as soon as I was able. End of story, beginning of new story.
The ‘School” paradox, IMO…the way it is set up…is that if you acutally do become conscious, presumably by your own efforts and with the help of the other fish in in the school, you don’t need anyone to tell you that are conscious, you just know it. You are conscious of it. It is self-evident. You don’t glow in the dark or something. You don’t need to be tapped on the head by someone’s magic wand. That’s just a game. And if the teacher tries to fuck with you, you leave. You jump out of the water and you breathe on your own. Simple as that. Mission accomplished, moving on, good bye. I am taking my marbles and I am leaving the game now, with my balls intact, and not in four pieces fried in glycerin, thank you very much.
Did it ever occur to you, what if the fucker is lying? Then how would you feel? Believe me, it’s your worst nightmare! I just don’t buy the “last conscious school” thing for one nano. Is the sky really falling?
If there has always been “schools” as the fucker claims and sees in yak poop on a cave wall, then why would one think that there would not be schools moving forward into the future? You know, directed by good ole’ c-influence and all, remember? …whose supposed to have humnaity’s best interests at heart? Duh. It’s a con game.
“…there are more beautiful things to talk about than how a bunch of people destroyed their lives and those of others.”
Personally, I am quite content to talk about how to stop a certain man and his followers from further continuing to recruit and destroy the lives of other unsuspecting, sincere, and soon to be bankrupt, souls. That’s a beautiful thing, too. Think of it as soul retrieval. If I were a dog, I’d be a Labrador. (Thanks, Girard.) How it was done is immaterial to me now, but might mean something to certain fish starting to wise up by reading how.
So just in case there are some fish out there who want to know about the nature of water and air…how does the indoctrination happen?…for me it was done with a combination of sleep deprivation, hard physical labor, manipulation, peer pressure, thought reform, and sexual abuse from the leader.
I wouldn’t say my life is destroyed, however I can say the FOF has left its mark on my psyche. Actually it’s more like a smudge, and without going into any more lurid detail than I already have, it’s something I am ashamed of. I would not want anyone to have to go through what I did, and am still dealing with two decades later, and luckily, no two plays are exactly the same. That shit has a delayed response for good reason, as nature intended.
I want you to know that I have forgiven myself and part of my healing is follow through with an aim to speak out in my community in whatever fashion or guise in which I feel comfortable against what is happening to this day in the Galleria or whatever pain palace you want to call it. I couldn’t speak then, and I am now. So I may not appear as chatty to you as you like, don’t take it personally. It’s not about you.
“In fact I will not leave without deeply thanking you for getting me out of the Fellowship and putting up with me for a year.”
Was there a “Thank You” in there? So you are not leaving, then? Because I didn’t actually hear you say, “thank you”, I just heard you talk about it.
I’d rather you stay and could never tire of hearing you, despite the fact that you don’t like hearing yourself. Unoanimo sent you a lovely response; you left a deep impression on him. Nobody is asking or telling you to leave. We are all free here. You’ve already paid enough so it will cost you nothing to stay.
There is plenty of room in here for all of us…in cyberspace. Think of it as infinity. You or I or anyone else can come in here on this blog, the doors always open, and rant and rave and safely release an enormous amount of pain or pleasure or poetry or flame or music or information and links or whatever your big heart desires. Others can choose to read about it and respond or scroll on by. Nobody’s holding a gun to your head, (sorry Shelley).
The deal is: you don’t get to control how people respond to you! We responders can take time, reflect, and respond later, or not, or we get to “shoot from the hip” so to speak, and tell it like it is, if we want to, depending on our style. Btw…THANK YOU, BRUCE, FOR TELLING IT LIKE IT IS! YOU ARE AWESOME, DUDE! And ARTHUR, CHEERS TO YOU ON YOUR DRIVEWAY! (Hey dude, if you enjoy kicking it with a couple of beers, watching the parade go by…dude, I recommend you go to Burning Man. You will have a blast watching that parade, complete with dancing naked ladies. But I digress, I am a guy.)
Me, I enjoy reflecting and digesting what I hear in people on this blog. I let the images and thoughts and cool music and video links and all work on my inner mind, and I watch what bubbles up, usually the next morning. I learn a little something in the process, too. Then I write about it. Freely. So don’t you be trashin’ the blog, girlfriend!
I gotta hand it to you, sheik, you are right, free speech is a dirty business. Here everyone gets to air their dirty linen, if they need to. Then they get to rest on clean sheets. What a great service! I hope it’s a good business for you.
Posts 272, 273 and 274,
I mean I can’t top those, I’m the hillbilly with dogs that look like wolves, sitting in the driveway listening to the sputtering of a diesel engine, signaling as a look out to passing humanity and watching the wind blow.
So, I raise a bottle of beer in salute from the curbside.
Thanks whaleridder for what you are.
Thanks for you post(s).
Still I am listening
to Imogen
Just for now
Get me out of here
Aaaaaah
There is just no out or in
It is just a dream
Maybe the sun is a dream and the sky too….
Hug for all of us.
272 unoanimo
unoanimo -
I started to copy and paste some of what you wrote, but there was so much of it I wanted to do that with it seemed rather silly. I guess I just want to thank you for what you give out.
James, thank you for what you give back.
278 WhaleRider
I will tell you something Whalerider. I have learned a lot from you and unoanimo. You have both influenced me not so much as to ‘what’ I write, but as to the place I try to uncover and find inside, to write ‘from’.
275 arthur
“signaling as a look out to passing humanity and watching the wind blow.”
* * *
It’s a dirty job Arthur, but somebody has to do it!
Uno wrote,
IMO, Magnetic Center is the result of untransformed traumas from one’s soul’s core issuing out some sort of ‘cry’, a type of ‘beacon’:
to me, this is something everyone has to some degree, it’s some function that simply ‘is’ and it gets covered up with layers and layers of blankets:
I picture a person worried that a suffering child is too cold so they keep putting blankets on the child till the weight of the blankets ceases the child’s breathing:
the child remains warm, safe, though in a coma and extremely disturbed because it cannot open its eyes, mouth, ears, hands or heart to itself, it’s conscious will.
I think that ideologies and cult involvement can provide a “deep freeze,” a distancing from unresolved pain of human relationship. Leaving a cult, later growing out of or repudiating its ideology, the old pain, the old identity, re-emerges, out of time, out of context, as from suspended animation. Anaesthetizing that pain served a temporary purpose–it enabled us to get up and around and walking–but it could not properly heal under the ideological bandage. Which is why it has to come off and we have to actually feel the roots of what happened.
quite the group therapy session going on here. i don’t read most of this, especially the long and incoherent posts, but glad this is happening.
stating the obvious: it’s not easy to heal from an unhealthy situation, and move on to a healthy and productive life, if i don’t at least acknowledge the unhealthy situation.
i liken it to a union, where nothing improves unless people join together. want to leave but don’t want to lose your friends?
then lead.
you, that’s right you…
if you’re sitting there — still in — you’re not doing enough. time for you to lead? show some courage. i wish i had.
Maybe in some unfathomable, mysterious and peculiar way it is what we become that is the cause and all that we have experienced the effect.
Fellow Ship of Fools
Statement from Former Member of Fellowship of Friends
8-25-02
Beginning in 1974, I spent 8 years as a member of “Fellowship of Friends” cult in California. Supposedly, we were studying “4th way” ideas, but the “teacher” had his own agenda. Like myself, many members were sincere in seeking a”higher state of being” or what others might call “enlightenment”.
We, of course, were encouraged to shun and have no further contact with former members. However, one day a chance encounter with a “former student” led to the revelation that the “teacher”, Robert Burton, was a homosexual – and quite active at that. At first this information was difficult to believe, since there was a rule against homosexual behavior within the “school” and, further, Burton had indicated that he was celibate! My acquaintance suggested contacting another ex-member who had been in a relationship with the “teacher”, from whom I learned many sordid details regarding Robert Earl Burton.
Robert’s modus operandi was to select the young men who appealed and quickly move them to the “inner circle”; these young men(many were under the age of legal consent) were invited to travel w R.(in grand style) and to live with him at his private residence as a virtual harem. My acquaintance had been married when he entered FOF, however a la King David, Robert quickly dispatched the inconvenient wife to a distant “teaching center” so as to indulge his lust. He informed me that Robert’s appetite for young men was voracious.
My disenchantment was replete when Robert didn’t deny this information. Also others in high positions tried (weakly) to justify his behavior, saying “it was food for his higher centers!!!!!”. Now the young men who disappeared in the night to never be heard from again, the odd sleeping arangements, the endless change of residents at his house, the arranged marriages for former paramours all made sense.
I believe that Robert Burton has harmed and damaged many sincere young men. Those around him who know of this and protect him share in his guilt. He has used his position of power and trust to satisfy his lusts, without regard for the consequences to others. He has invoked higher powers to overcome the objections of unwilling partners, telling them that “higher forces” were thus pleased.
Finally, Robert Burton relished destroying anyone who had the temerity to leave FOF. He had his assistant call me after I had left to inform me that, in his words “I had died”.
“BY THEIR FRUITS YOU SHALL KNOW THEM”. Amen.
Close Encounters of a Third Kind:
The above was third citation on Google when searching on ‘Fellowship of Friends’:
http://www.freedomofmind.com/resourcecenter/groups/f/fellowship/fmrmbr_statement.htm
How does this above statement fit with this one, below, copied from the beingpresent.org website; last paragraph under the section: The Work of Our Spiritual Teacher???:
‘Developing a personal relationship to the Teacher does not depend upon proximity to him. His influence permeates through all aspects and dimensions of the organization he created, and the moment a person connects to this organization through any channel, he or she will experience the Teacher’s loving influence directly.’
Duplicate post.
Fat Boy 99
Robert’s Teaching for me has brought attention of how to work with both internal and external negativity.
Associated Press 284
He had his assistant call me after I had left to inform me that, in his words “I had died”.
Fat Boy, according to the laws of logic, one of the above statements is not correct. You pick.
Also, if any of you are anywhere near the area, please don’t miss these free shows!
Arcade Fire live are totally amazing (yes, I know I sound like a frikking teenager, because that’s exactly the effect this band has on me)
“Arcade Fire will be playing a free concert on Sunday, March 2nd at Stuart’s Opera House in Nelsonville, Ohio in support of Barack Obama’s bid for the Democratic nomination. The show is at 7 p.m., first come first serve.They will also be playing a free show at the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland on Monday, March 3rd. Doors are at 7 p.m., and the show is 18 and over, first come first serve.”
282 is newly moderated.
(LONG PAUSE)
OK little fishy. Breathe.
It’s fine to breathe now.
Breathe.
Breathe!
It’s only air.
Time to breathe now.
C’mon, I know you can do this.
Breathe, god damn it!
I said, breathe!
BREATHE!!!!
That empty space you feel inside, those are your new lungs!
Yes!!!!
There you go!
That’s right.
GOOD!
You did it!
Keep breathing, now.
That’s right, in and out, in and out, just like that!
Good, you got it! Good job!
In with the good air, out with the bad air.
Just like that.
Keep going, now.
Change is good.
That wasn’t too hard, now was it?
Yeah, I know, it’s warmer out here, and the light is brighter, too, but you’ll see…you will get used to it….yes, this air stuff seems pretty thin at first…very soon you will adjust. And you will be amazed at the difference. You don’t realize it yet, but you have been swimming in a polluted cesspool and it was starting to make you sick. And those other fishies that left your school…remember that one day when they just up and disappeared?…no, they didn’t die! They’re here, too, and they are doing great! I am one of them! I was once a fish. The big fat blowfish was lying to you. Don’t worry, I’m a vegetarian, I don’t eat fish, or anything else with a face. You’ll be OK.
Now, let’s get you cleaned up. Let’s have a look at you.
Hmmm….Those hardened scales all over you, you don’t need them any more! Those can come off now. And that tail of yours there, in a little while that is going to turn into your own two legs for you to walk on…anywhere your heart desires. And those fins, those are your hands. You’re going to use them to feed yourself.
And that thing you have been repeating over and over in your head? Stop that! You don’t need it anymore, either. That’s what keeps you thinking you’re a fish! In time you will grow to enjoy the silence of a quiet mind. It will be quite a relief, you’ll see.
Yes, you can see further in the air. No, the moon isn’t out to get you either. It’s just the moon, silly, and it’s very, very far away. And no, the sky is not falling, either, those are the stars. Aren’t they beautiful? You couldn’t see the stars very well in that cloudy cesspool, could you? You were so busy being a fish and following the other fish around in your school, that you couldn’t stop and think for yourself. There’s a whole new universe out here, you’ll see. And we are here to help you.
Just keep breathing.
Whalerider 289
“Somehow, with all of this change, we are going to have to learn how to change our minds a little more easily….”
From Pinchbeck who’s managed to capitalize on and contribute to the “2012″ buzz and hype… to the liberation of friends yet trapped by the web of “The Fellowship”– I still hold the hope that this place can make a difference to an individual who’s trying to escape.
“Whether someone does a flawless series of asanas, drinks ayahuasca with 20 different shamans or visits hidden monasteries in Bhutan has no value as a sign of spiritual attainment. How they live day by day, what they do with the psychic energy and time available to them and how their work helps to liberate others is what matters.”
http://commongroundmag.com/2008/03/pinchbeck0803.html
I wonder though; into this night as I lay down and close my eyes to feel what I have experienced today,
how my sense of ‘self’ stays
with this or that event, action, opinion expressed and satisfaction gotten so to alleviate some spirit-tension or to re-justify a kind of self-preservation-ego that’s altogether simply not what my yearning encompasses or wishes.
These ‘wishes’ or true-nature-pangs of bewilderment and dry, greasy coughing on myself, till, too, a sense of slow, heavy raindrops of remorse throb onto me and ‘knock’ like tiny, one-beat-per-lifetime-hearts hitting, sliding down gently to the window seal, where the rest of me, having been the whole window installed, resides, not upside down or right side up;
I am just ‘here’ so to catch-basin them, to give them something to feel after their free-falling eternity, now, here, all being as one quivering, watery flute held, balanced and see-sawing along my wide rectangular shoulders.
Me, to later rise with the assistance of a small child’s reflection and muscles; she lifts me up so to let Space in; myself superimposed on myself, glass page to glass page:
the breeze flows through her hair and a hawk glides, almost from nowhere and lands upon her dresser top…
She wants it to be a ‘male’, yet, it’s not, it’s neither; soon enough it will depart for the first of two last times and return, when she’s not looking, into her shadow-keep, that thin blanket that we all drag around during the day wherever we go and whose frayed ends direct ones attention not to something worn and neglected, rather, accepting of additional patchwork,
a total hem of outstretched fingers belonging to a ‘one hand’ who, when her soul wants it to be ‘right’ will, like one can do with a thin glove, turn it inside out to make it ‘left’ and visa versa.
Yes, the ‘left right’ and the ‘right left’ and the power of Time to make the most superficial contradictions and traumatic projections into some sort of wisdom-poetry…
Little do we know, yet all we can be; while, as Two Inches hears it, ‘it’ sounds like a psychotic raging howl, Eleven Thousand Inches hears ‘it’ as a nearly sensual whisper whose nuances (do) travel through the forest-edge’s leaves, laying restless fledglings lids deeper to sleep.
The ‘We’ ponders, argues, resists and restrains: while the two shadow-keeps intertwine amongst their human drama kin, like strangers whose kites suddenly third-party-swerve to hit and not miss one another’s pulling down of some
awe-on-a-string sense of flight, pressure, control, freedom while looking up and good fortune in the midst of the tempest’s beginning…
And down, straight towards the beach ‘The Caught Up’ dive for, right where you stood that evening, not knowing it, yet, waiting for the hawk to return from having exited to visit ‘another’ you,
the reflection ‘you’ outlined on me while waiting for the storm to end, for the beach to settle its tempestuous mini-whirlpools and once there,
not landing anywhere, I reflect it to myself, the hawk flapping in mid air and looking down:
it’s watching the flute drip and disappear into the grass, where its splashing stirs something, a mouse whose too far from the forest’s edge to have been lulled deep enough to sleep not to be awakened by such small, humid visitors…
And as the hawk lands to welcome the mouse, so do the kites land to greet your footprints and upon those spots all the love in the world stops to stare transparent with me into Space, into Time and into Right Now.
291 unoanimo
It feels like you are getting bigger and better, whatever the hell that means. The last three lines are especially beautifully written.
The mention you made of ‘wishes’ in the earlier part reminded me of this, perhaps because I watched it again recently.
It is something a little different.
These are excerpts from a part of the libretto of “Into the Woods”, a musical by Stephen Sondheim; sung at the end of Act I and Act II. (For those not familiar with the work, it is a collage of several different fairy tales rolled into one.
When you know your wish,
If you want your wish,
You can have your wish,
But you cant’ just wish –
No, to get your wish….
You go into the woods,
Where nothing’s clear,
Where witches, ghosts
And wolves appear.
Into the woods
And through the fear,
You have to take the journey.
Into the woods
And down the dell,
In vain perhaps,
But who can tell.
Into the woods,
Into the woods,
Then out of the woods,
And happy ever after.
Into the woods, you have to grope,
But that’s the way you learn to cope.
Into the woods to find there’s hope
Of getting through the journey.
Into the woods, each time you go,
There’s more to learn of what you know.
Into the woods,
Into the woods,
Then out of the woods,
And happy ever after.
292
______________________
Thank you for sharing what is beautiful for you with me and all, it balances things out a bit in here. In some places within all of us, often times the only newspapers one gets to read is on the bottom of the cage. A cage; it’s the only place where leaving the door open does not let in the breeze.
Incredible James, again, thank you: your quote answers a question that’s been on my spirit for the past several days: and it answers it so to the ‘T’ that it’s a little spooky… The question was actually concerning a ‘wish’, a ‘woods’, a place where ‘nothings clear’, a place where ‘witches, ghosts and wolves’ actually do appear, a ‘the fear’, a ‘journey’, a ‘to learn’, etc, etc.
Amazing! Thank you for the answer-telegram; beautifully given; I truly got my answer and way beyond a doubt.
____________________
:.)
The Public Square is filled with silent souls that don’t need to say anything to know that they are there. In time, they don’t even need Public Squares to know how close they are to each other after touching and not touching each other’s soul so deeply.
Either way the sculpture gets sculpted and gratitude remains the figure.
Thank you Sheik for hosting us in your site. How long will it remain open for us to explore the park and pub, the shops and the homes? It is clear that the Fellowship of Friends is not really our aim but our excuse, we might eventually find other excuses, how long will you let us in?
Every bit of information is still pertinent. I would much appreciate anyone who’ll tell us when the article comes out in the Bee and other madnesses from my friends in voluntary captivity. It must be their way of working with voluntary suffering!
And where’s the music? I’m about to go dancing to say goobye to this country where war is knocking at the door. I take it in me for we’ve always been in a silent and corrupt war. When I was young we’d find the dead men, tied up and with a shot in the head on the road to nowhere early in the morning and one could never walk as a teenager without being terrified of finding the police. Misery does things to people. Any kind of misery. It is a fortunate thing that we can look at misery without judgement, live with it and continue trying to find more human solutions.
There once was a monastery that was very strict. Following a vow of silence, no one was allowed to speak at all. But there was one exception to this rule. Every ten years, the monks were permitted to speak just two words. After spending his first ten years at the monastery, one monk went to the head monk. “It has been ten years,” said the head monk. “What are the two words you would like to speak?”
“Bed… hard…” said the monk.
“I see,” replied the head monk.
Ten years later, the monk returned to the head monk’s office. “It has been ten more years,” said the head monk. “What are the two words you would like to speak?”
“Food… stinks…” said the monk.
“I see,” replied the head monk.
Yet another ten years passed and the monk once again met with the head monk who asked, “What are your two words now, after these ten years?”
“I… quit!” said the monk.
“Well, I can see why,” replied the head monk. “All you ever do is complain.”
Courtesy John Suler, Ph.D.
Enjoy.
JF
Wake up Neo
The Matrix has you
Follow the white rabbit
Knock, Knock, Neo
+++++++++++++++
As you have probably guessed
I am Morpheus
I imagine that right now
You are feeling a bit like Alice
Tumbling down the rabbit hole
I can see it in your eyes
You have the look of a man
Who accepts what he sees
Because he is expecting to wake up
Ironically, this is not far from the truth
Do you believe in fate?
Let me tell you why you are here
You’re here because you know something
What you know you can’t explain
But you feel it
You’ve felt it your entire life
That there is something wrong with the world
You don’t know what it is, but it’s there
Like a splinter in your mind, diving you mad
It is this feeling that brought you to me
Do you know what I am talking about?
The Matrix
Do you want to know what it is?
The Matrix is everywhere
It is all around us, even now in this very room
You see it when you look out your window
Or when you turn on your television
You can feel it when you go to work
When you go to church
When you pay your taxes
It is the world
That has been pulled over your eyes
To blind you from the truth
What truth?
That you are a slave, Neo
Like everyone else you were born into bondage
Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch
A prison for your mind
Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is
You have to see it for yourself
This is your last chance
After this there is no turning back
You take the blue pill
The story ends
You wake up in your bed
And you can believe whatever you want
You take the red pill
You stay in wonderland
And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes
Remember
All I am offering is the truth
Nothing more
++++++++++++++++
Neo:
I know you’re out there
I can feel you now
I know that you are afraid
You are afraid of us
You are afraid of change
I don’t know the future
I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end
I came here
To tell you how it’s going to begin
I going to hang up this phone
And then I am going to show these people
Want you don’t want them to see
And I am going to show them a world
Without you
A world without rules and controls
Without borders or boundaries
A world
Where anything is possible
Where we go from there
Is a choice
I leave to you
++++++++++++++
From “The Matrix”
A song for you, Elena, and for all you beautiful women, from the beautiful Fiona Apple
“Paper Bag”
I was staring at the sky, just looking for a star
To pray on, or wish on, or something like that
I was having a sweet fix of a daydream of a boy
Whose reality I knew, was a hopeless to be had
But then the dove of hope began its downward slope
And I believed for a moment that my chances
Were approaching to be grabbed
But as it came down near, so did a weary tear
I thought it was a bird, but it was just a paper bag
Hunger hurts, and I want him so bad, oh it kills
‘Cause I know I’m a mess he don’t wanna clean up
I got to fold ’cause these hands are too shaky to hold
Hunger hurts, but starving works, when it costs too much to love
And I went crazy again today, looking for a strand to climb
Looking for a little hope
Baby said he couldn’t stay, wouldn’t put his lips to mine,
And a fail to kiss is a fail to cope
I said, ‘Honey, I don’t feel so good, don’t feel justified
Come on put a little love here in my void,’ he said
‘It’s all in your head,’ and I said, ‘So’s everything’
But he didn’t get it I thought he was a man
But he was just a little boy
Hunger hurts, and I want him so bad, oh it kills
‘Cause I know I’m a mess he don’t wanna clean up
I got to fold ’cause these hands are too shaky to hold
Hunger hurts, but starving works, when it costs too much to love
Hunger hurts, and I want him so bad, oh it kills
‘Cause I know I’m a mess he don’t wanna clean up
I got to fold ’cause these hands are too shaky to hold
Hunger hurts, but starving works, when it costs too much to love
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=JB4Al0l6Cuo
A Core ’something’ ~
_______________________________
“Fiona Apple, famous singer/songwriter, was raped outside of her mother’s apartment at the age of twelve. For years after her rape she would check her closets to make sure no one was hiding in the house and would be nervous around older men. And she still continues to have bad, violent dreams. During her teens and the months she spent making her album, Tidal, she suffered with an eating disorder. Frustrated at the misunderstanding by the media of her eating disorder she attempted to explain it in a 1998 Rolling Stone interview, “I definitely had an eating disorder. What was really frustrating for me was that everyone though I was anorexic, and I wasn’t. I was really depressed and self-loathing. For me, it wasn’t about being thin, it was about getting rid of the bait attached to my body. A lot of it came from the self-loathing that came from being raped at the point of developing my voluptuousness. I just thought that if you had a body and if you had anything on you that would be grabbed, it would be grabbed. So I did purposely get rid of it.” As a result of her eating disorder Fiona became extremely thin. But the media wrote off her thinness as an attempt to “fit in.” After her “Criminal” video from her album, “Tidal,” came out she began gaining weight on purpose. She wanted to show the world that she doesn’t care about being thin. In 1998 she said, “I mean, my plan is to gain enough weight that I can really be considered voluptuous, and do my ‘First Taste’ video. And I am preparing myself for what is going to happen. Because soon they will be saying that I’m fat. And it will hurt me.”
When Fiona read her first bad review for Tidal she began scratching her left wrist with the fingernails of her right hand. She scratched all the way up her arm, there are still some dark patches on her wrists, where she dug the deepest. Fiona said, “I have a little bit of a problem with that. It’s a common thing.” When asked if it made her feel better she simply replied, “It just makes you feel.” Fiona also sometimes bites her lips as hard as she can, sometimes until they bleed. “And it’ll be bleeding, and I can’t stop, because it almost feels so good when I bite my lip.” Trying to explain her actions she said, “It was never, like, ‘I am going to hurt myself and put myself in the hospital.’ …It is that I am going to give myself the pain that I need to feel to put the punctuation on this shit that’s going inside.”
Fiona would get frustrated and sad when she feel that people think she’s “crazy.” She says, “The most annoying thing for me to hear about myself is that I’m trying to make people have a pity party for me. Everything that I’ve gone through has been dramatized by the people who’ve written about it, not by me. I’m just saying, ‘This happened to me, this happened to a lot of people.’ Why should I hide shit? Why does that give people a bad opinion of me? It’s a reality. A lot of people do it. Courtney Love pulled me aside at a party and showed me her marks.”
Fiona Apple has become a happier and more confident individual since she talked so frankly about her past self-injury and eating disorder to Rolling Stone. Articles in several magazines and newspapers, including The Washington Post and USA Today, mention different new aspects of Fiona, such as her new take on life, a healthy weight gain and a new-found confidence in herself and her music. In a USA Today interview she said still gets upset when she reads a particularly bad article about herself or review of her music but does not mention any further self-injurious behavior as a result.”
Web Article Quote
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Thank you Laura; I used to listen to Fiona Apple allot along with all the other female soloists like Sheryl Crow, Kate Bush, etc. Singing can be the atmosphere surrounding that core ’something’: I would say that something was transferred to her via the rape incident and if that was not enough, perhaps she’s also having to deal with having a part of her soul stolen and ‘it’ being still ‘in the hands’ of the rapist.
If you follow her story at twelve years old and then settle into her songs, the songs themselves begin to seem to me like footsteps around a blazing, blinding ancient fire, wherein one’s essence dances and curls up to hide from the cold world… Yet, perhaps part of the journey is to return to the fire, to cease a certain ‘type’ of dancing and stand up in it and burn for the sake of being able to do it for oneself and not the campfire-concert goers (?)
Too, her songs are magical and I am grateful that they exist to allow others carrying similar ‘trauma cores’ around a chance to rest and expand a bit into the space of themselves, to listen and gain more time to unfold and look.
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:.)
This is today’s card from Burton.
Now I understand why so many ‘martial’ body types love these kind of BS…….
Plato said that war is a permanent state for
humanity – every work ‘I’ is opposed by mechanical
‘I’s.
Love, Robert
Pensate un attimo:
Plato said that war is a permanent state for humanity-every Fellowship work ‘I’ opposed by conscience and common sense.
Love, Grampa Joe