Robert Earl Burton and The Fellowship of Friends: January 2001

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.

Monday, January 1, 2001

Robert Burton resumes teaching at meetings in the United States

On this date, according to a former Fellowship of Friends archivist, Robert Burton led a Fellowship of Friends meeting at Apollo. The subject, "The Most Important Questions a Man Can Ask Himself." It was the first time he led a meeting in the U.S. since October 1978, when he ceased leading then-weekly "Bay Area" meetings.

This was preceded by two meetings he had also led, in Moscow on December 5th and in St. Petersburg on December 7th.

[ed. - In 1981, The Bay Area Meetings were moved to Renaissance (later known as Apollo) and relabeled Northern California Meetings.]