Robert Earl Burton and The Fellowship of Friends: October 2006

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.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Where has the Fellowship gone?

[ed. - Showing concern that his article "Fellowship of Friends - a school for intellectuals" has gone unnoticed, Pavel, the Esoteric Sheik of Inner Confusion, posts the following on Animam Recro.]

Where has the Fellowship gone?

Posted by Pavel under Random

The first article I ever posted on this blog was a report of my visit to the Fellowship of Friends in London. I still find this entry very meaningful and both the writing of the report and its consequences fill me full of joy to this day.

The reason is simple – Fellowship of Friends is a cult. It has destroyed people’s lives, taken their money, alienated people from their friends and family. All of this for the vague promise of spiritual fulfillment and the possibility of ‘awakening’, not to mention the terror technique of scaring people by informing them that the only after-life that exists is achievable through joining the cult. Read the report and see for yourself how it all went.

Now, since writing that report months ago I have had a lot of comments and discussions about it. I believe that by writing this report I have helped some people become less naive and watch their backs where no one else can do it for them. I have also been a target of a fair amount of verbal and digital attacks from the defenders of the Fellowship, which was interesting.

What I don’t understand is this: my article was 10th or 11th on google after searching for the Fellowship of Friends (hence a lot of people got to read it) but now it is nowhere to be found – I searched for a while but it was as if my article vanished from the google database. Luckily enough the first entry in google is still an anti-cult informative website and not the Fellowship website (as it has been before) there is some fairness in the world. But what has happened to the animamrecro report? I offer sweets and soft hugs to anyone who can offer me an answer.