Robert Earl Burton and The Fellowship of Friends: September 1973

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 1, 1973

Body Types

Robert Earl Burton Fellowship of Friends cult enneagram

The enneagram

[ed. - The following is an excerpt from The Fellowship of Friends Body Types Journal published in 1973. It is posted on the Internet Archive. The tone of being "the chosen ones" is already apparent in this early publication.]

General Information

As students penetrate the inner circle of a conscious teaching they will arrive at the emotional verification that they are in a machine, and are surrounded by machines of a body type. As one observes body types objectively, he will find humans are as readily categorized into species as any other form of organic life on Earth. The primary function of these machines is to serve as an organic receptacle for the Earth for celestial influences emitted primarily from the moon and planets within our solar system, and to a lesser extent, influences from the sun and our mammoth galaxy.

Besides serving as a receptacle for celestial influences, body types also in some manner are part of the transmitting mechanism of organic life on Earth to the other heavenly bodies of the solar system. These types, or machines, have one staggering weak spot, which is esoterically known as the "Achilles Heel." The hidden meaning of the Achilles Heel myth is that the machine can stop being a machine by creating a soul, and a soul can be created only by the art of self-remembering.