Robert Earl Burton and The Fellowship of Friends: September 1971

Introduction

Robert Earl Burton founded The Fellowship of Friends in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1970. Burton modeled his own group after that of Alex Horn, loosely borrowing from the Fourth Way teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. In recent years, the Fellowship has cast its net more broadly, embracing any spiritual tradition that includes (or can be interpreted to include) the notion of "presence."

The Fellowship of Friends exhibits the hallmarks of a "doomsday religious cult," wherein Burton exercises absolute authority, and demands loyalty and obedience. He warns that his is the only path to consciousness and eternal life. Invoking his gift of prophecy, he has over the years prepared his flock for great calamities (e.g. a depression in 1984, the fall of California in 1998, nuclear holocaust in 2006, and most recently the October 2018 "Fall of California Redux.")

According to Burton, Armageddon still looms in our future and when it finally arrives, non-believers shall perish while, through the direct intervention and guidance from 44 angels (recently expanded to 81 angels, including himself and his divine father, Leonardo da Vinci), Burton and his followers shall be spared, founding a new and more perfect civilization. Read more about the blog.

Presented in a reverse chronology, the Fellowship's history may be navigated via the "Blog Archive" located in the sidebar below.

Saturday, September 4, 1971

Silence and "feminine dominance"

[ed. - On September 4, 1971, Robert Burton entered a 16-month period of silence, concluding in December 1972. During this time, he visited his mother in the hospital and refused to speak. Later, he was fond of citing that occasion as an example of his work against the human weakness he called "feminine dominance." (Always prone to exaggeration, on November 11, 2009, Burton would later recount, "When I was a young teacher, I worked with an exercise of being in silence for two years.")

In April of 1981, Burton even told a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle the familiar story.]

“My mother was in a hospital and she was dying. They had to do open-heart surgery and I was in the 15th month of a 16-month period of silence. I was denying myself speech. I saw her in the hospital and I did not speak. It was my aim not to speak.”

[ed. - His work against feminine dominance did not however prevent him from assigning many members, including myself, to provide various services for his mother, who lived in Sacramento, CA at least into the late 1970s. See also "Notes from the period of silence, 1971-1972" at the Internet Archive.]