Robert Earl Burton and The Fellowship of Friends: April 2020

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, April 28, 2020

Russian documentary critical of Robert Burton

[ed. - I'm assuming references to "GIG" below are to George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.]

"Insider" wrote on the Fellowship of Friends Discussion blog, July 13, 2020:

There is a documentary [below] made a couple months ago. It’s over 5 hours long, and all in Russian.

Here is a Google-translated description of the documentary:

“In the last two broadcasts, Alexander Grinin told a stunned Spectator an amazing, amazing, incredible story about:

– a bunch of GIG-Lenin-Stalin-Hitler, and those who joined them Bokiya with Barchenko, about the Order of Lucifer, Shambhala tapes, and all that;

– the disgusting details of the unbridled, fraudulent life of the GIG top starter Gurdjieff;

– the senselessness of the faith of the conditional “man” in all gurus and happy recipes from them;

“In this, the third and the last, the author will end up feeling your hero of the GIG: he will gaze with his gaze at the strange life of the “black magician”, will show and tell by personal example whether the dancing sects named after Gurdjieff are useful, and will marvel at the goodness of his theory …”

At about 3:51:00, Grinin begins to discuss Robert Burton and the Fellowship of Friends. I asked a friend to summarize the key points made regarding Burton. Here is what my friend said:

“Mostly about brainwashing in FOF, predictions and teacher’s depravity with big amount of young boys and men with examples from Russian blog.

“3 castes in RB harem 1. Privileged loved wifes ) 2.Ordinary sex slaves with little privileges 3. Lower cast with no privileges that used for sex only, totally dependent from FOF.”

I believe for the second caste he meant to say, “Ordinary sex slaves with some privileges.”