Fellowship of Friends Discussion, part 55 November 13, 2008
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Welcome to the newest addition to the Fellowship of Friends Discussion.
For previous parts of the discussion please click on home and scroll down, or move to the Fellowship of Friends Discussion blog, or to AnimamRecro for the very beginning. For a more organized reading check out The Fellowship of Friends WikiSpace.
The largest meeting point for former and current members of the Fellowship of Friends is the Greater Fellowship, you can sign up to the Greater Fellowship community and connect with mostly former members of the Fellowship of Friends, as well as: some current members, family members of former/current members, and others interested in the Fourth Way here.
For sites in Russian and Italian, click http://fofway.narod.ru/ and http://laliberastrada.blogspot.com/respectively.
To access the Online Petition: http://www.PetitionOnline.com/djindjin/petition.html
For more information check Rick Ross and Steven Hassan.
This is where you can find the website of the Fellowship of Friends.
If you decide to interact as well as digest, this is where you can start.
And as always (and above else), enjoy and have fun.
At the Moderator’s discretion, excessive abuse, personal attacks, as well as deliberate attempts to unmask people taking part in the discussion will result in a warning followed by a ban from the discussion.
Participants require 1 moderated comment before they can start communicating in real-time. (ie. if you are new to the discussion, your comment will appear about 1 day after it has been posted, any subsequent comments will appear instantaneously).
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/djindjin/petition.html
To visit the site created by Unoanimo:http://fellowshipoffriends.wordpress.com/2008/01/20/res-ipsa-loquitur/
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Fellowship of Friends - Living Presence Discussion 
Fat boy 54-293
“I think trusting yourself should be the main focus rather than relying on others to “convince” you.”
I couldn’t agree more. That’s why the word “finally” was used there. Initially, it only took a split second–a moment of grace, if you will– to see the truth of what was really going on in the fellowship. After that, it was only a matter of time for the “final” decision to leave; that’s when the blog helped out.
Best wishes to you.
Josiane:
In reality we are first convinced then we look for reasons that support our decisions. In all likelihood when you were ready to leave you went looking for reinforcement and found the blog.
Ouspensky concluded we dream in reverse and that’s closer to the truth for our “waking” dreams also.
First there is a stimulus, then a response. But people are notorious for not noticing the stimulus, only the response. Then they have no choice but to find a reason to legitimize their reaction. I step on someone’s toe, they scream and slap me. I “wake up” at the slap and think “What’s with them are they crazy?” Later I concoct a reason why they did what they did.
As I speak someone is calculating how to join the FoF and another is calculating how to leave.
You had probably left by the time the dinner for Peter ended and the last 8 years were spent waiting for the blog.
DC 2
In reality, there is no reason, there is no counting, no sequential words, no tricks. In reality, one knows that is not healthy to keep on supporting a sick organism. I do not think it is an accident you ask and receive so much attention in this forum. Ask yourself why you are doing this. Your posts are very bitter and you sound as if you are looking at a mirror trying to convince yourself.
If the school feeds you and supports you as you claim, why don’t go to the events arranged at your center or at Apollo? Why bother writing here, breaking an exercise (Robert has asked the members of the FOF to not read this forum or be associated to the GF), being contaminated by sleepy machines?
Peter B. was one of the only persons who had any control on Robert’s extreme behavior. He would restrict him in his financial extravaganzas. When he passed away and the Romanian armies entered, Robert’s sick side was protected and grew like a huge cancer that is eating up any small inconspicuous efforts of kindness and love you and other members are making. It is a question of time. You are associated with a very unhealthy energy that expands.
Wishing you the best.
DC 2
Josiane:
In reality we are first convinced then we look for reasons that support our decisions. In all likelihood when you were ready to leave you went looking for reinforcement and found the blog.
——————-
DC, how do you know what it may be someone else’s process in leaving if you have no personal experience?
It’s not a black and white thing. It’s a reverse awakening.
“A lot of comedians end up tragically self destructing”
Just like me to get it all ass backwards.
Punchline for Death:
“Is that a banana in your pants or have you been writing DC’s posts?”
Elena – 293/274
First of all, thank you for the cordiality of 293; it is appreciated.
Regarding this comment from 274:
“You are already addicted to the blog because you love participating.”
I can only say you are 180 degrees off the mark. I can say this for certain because you are commenting on my innermost motivations, which I am eminently more qualified to know than you are. And if you are that wrong about me, it’s possible you are also that wrong about FoF, Robert, Girard, anyone.
It’s one thing to have your feelings, beliefs, opinions, but you do not serve yourself well to be so sure that you know the whole story of the FoF.
My motives for being on the blog are very different than you conclude. The blog is a big imposition on my life. Almost always when I am writing here some other facet of my life is calling me to it.
I’m not free of all my addictions but the blog in not one of them.
I had an aim, and that aim was to present to anyone reading the blog the side of the FoF that ex members cannot speak about. I don’t have to go into why I think they cannot or will not address this other side. I observed the patterns of the blog before writing and I knew that the regular posters, for the most part, would disavow what ever I said here, and it has transpired as such. I don’t really know who I’m writing to. Most current students who may be reading
already think the same as I do about most of the topics on the blog, so it’s not to them I write either.
The other side of this complex coin, the side ex members can’t write about, is my life, my reality. It contains much truth, much falsehood, much struggle, much suffering and more than anything, much joy.
When I write about the FoF or RB, it is not based on delusion or lying. It is the unadorned reality I live each day. It is different from your time in the FoF apparently (at least part of that time). I cannot speak for your life experiences and I don’t try to.
We all see the world around us in our own hue, while being color blind to many other hues. But whoever is aware that these other hues exist is already much less color blind. Only they can begin to imagine other colors. Only they can work towards seeing the whole because they know much more exists outside of their own vision.
They simply need to train their eyes on it. And how do we start to comprehend the other hues that exist? We do that by listening to others. Especially others who we may strongly disagree with. I listen to your truth, I don’t deny you your truth. I answer you from my truth. When you deny me my truth I have no other choice than to see your falsehood in that instance.
I will not change my mind about the FoF being a real school because I have lived the truth that it is a real school. No words you can write will cancel the truths I have lived. I also know it is not perfect. If I could wave a magic wand over it much would change, but neither I nor anyone, including Robert, can wave that wand.
The wand is being waved by those who invented magic. And their choices are good enough for me; even if a petty part of me doesn’t think so.
There are real victims in the world; they’re simply not in the FoF.
Victims are under lock and key. There are no locks in the FoF (there are keys however!)
The doors are wide open. You left when you wanted to; you simply walked away, and its the same for everyone.
I hope one day you can end your inner conflict and turn your attention to some of the world’s real victims. You have much to give to them.
Daily Cardiac 7
“If I could wave a magic wand over it much would change, but neither I nor anyone, including Robert, can wave that wand.”
Dear DC, I do enjoy metaphors, but I have to say that the wand waving reference is a poor choice on your part. In my brain (and I don’t think I am particularly dirty minded) it was immediately associated with the perverted activities that daily take place behind the locked doors of your teacher. You know, Robert still freely waving his “magic” wand inside his young student’s bodies, now that’s a disturbing image to most of us…
“The wand is being waved by those who invented magic. And their choices are good enough for me; even if a petty part of me doesn’t think so.”
Not to be a pain in the rear, but that reminds me… how have you verified that the current situation in the FoF is due to “magic inventing” entities and not to more mundane cause-and-effect causes ?
“And how do we start to comprehend the other hues that exist? We do that by listening to others. Especially others who we may strongly disagree with. I listen to your truth, I don’t deny you your truth.
…
There are real victims in the world; they’re simply not in the FoF.”
Whew, it’s good to be reassured that you are listening !
You know, since we are at blog page number 55, your last statement might give one the wrong idea that you ears are sealed with wax.
P.S BTW, you and Burton are not the only ones to love magic and wands
http://www.katiehalper.com/bush-obsessed-waving-his-magic-wand
“The demonic appears most terrible when it assumes dominance in some one person. They are not always the most admirable persons, either in mind or in gifts. But a tremendous force goes out from them, and they exercise an unbelievable power over all creatures. It is in vain that the brighter part of mankind tries to throw suspicion on them as betrayers or betrayed; the masses are attracted by them.” ~~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
j x
Is God in our genes?
A review on Dean Hamer’s book: The God Gene
Hamer claims to have discovered a gene known as VMAT2, which CONTROLS the flow of MONOAMINES within the brain. Monoamines are chemicals in the brain that can make us feel pleasurable, ecstatic, or depressed. Monoamines include dopamine and serotonin, and are customarily released by psychotropic drugs and hallucinogenics.
Thus, Hamer argues that evolution explains why many individuals possess the VMAT2 gene, and are thus more likely to have their monoamines regulated in a way that leads to self-transcendence. Following so far?
Once self-transcendence is defined as the goal of this evolutionary process, and once VMAT2 is identified as the gene responsible for creating the feelings associated with self-transcendence, Hamer is well on his way to arguing that self-transcendence plays a role in evolution by fostering optimism in individuals possessing the trait. Such optimism leads to better health, to a more positive outlook toward the future, and increased likelihood that these individuals will have children and hand down their genes through the biological process.
This physicalist explanation, limiting something like faith in God to purely chemical factors, is necessary because Hamer and his colleagues are committed materialists. He provides an explicit admission of this fact in The God Gene. Insisting that a scientific explanation for belief in God must be expressed in terms of chemistry and physics, Hamer explains: “Proponents of this view often are called ‘materialists’ because they believe that all mental processes can ultimately be accounted for by a few basic physical laws. MOST scientists, including myself, are MATERIALISTS.”
In other words, as a committed materialist, Dean Hamer is looking for an explanation of belief in God that will fit his evolutionary worldview. In order to do this, he has to jettison all that is customarily associated with theism, avoid everything that has to do with the content of belief, and redefine his entire concern in terms of self-transcendence–an experience he admits can be purely secular. In other words, Dean Hamer tells us absolutely nothing about belief in God and very little about modern genetics.
This point was made devastatingly clear in a review of The God Gene published in the current issue of Scientific American. Carl Zimmer, another major evolutionary theorist, blasts The God Gene as bad science and reckless argument.
As Zimmer notes, “The field of behavioral genetics is littered with failed links between particular genes and personality traits. Those alleged associations at first seemed very strong. But as other researchers tried to replicate them, they faded away into statistical noise. In 1993, for example, a scientist reported a genetic link to male homosexuality in a region of the X chromosome. The report brought a huge media fanfare, but other scientists who tried to replicate the study failed. The scientist’s name was Dean Hamer.”
___________________________________________________________________
Good Gene, Bad Gene: It Depends:
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/labnotes/archive/2008/06/10/good-gene-bad-gene-it-depends.aspx
By the way: Gurdjieff
When questioned,’In what way does your system differ from the philosophy of the yogis?” Gurdjieff replied:
Yogis are idealists; we are materialists. I am sceptic………….I believe only if I have obtained the same results over and over again. I study, I work for guidance, not for belief.
You may decide if you would have chosen his quote or the quote:
I believe only if I have obtained the same results over and over again. I study, I work…..
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4774395836545955595
Be aware: Shunryu Suzuki Roshi: sound and noise, objective and/or subjective:
PS Thank you Daily Cardiac for your information that there are no victims in the FOF!
But what is your understanding concerning victims? They are under lock and key? Unworldly, I presume.
To refer to other victims in the world could be a diversionary tactic.
Thank you for staying with your former friends and for your efforts to lay bare the truth.
Credo the blog is a great imposition for you!
Daily Cardiac,
I was going to go through your most recent message and take your various statements to pieces. But I’ve done that before, so I’ll try a different approach.
Why don’t I simply acknowledge that the Fellowship provides an environment in which one can be present to beauty, receive divine help, be part of a community of like-minded seekers, etc.? Why can’t I recommend the Fellowship to someone who is searching for a school?
Because if that person is a young man he could easily find himself coerced into having sex with Robert. If that person is a young woman she could find herself in a relationship with someone who is coerced into having sex with Robert .
Because he or she will be squeezed for money to such an extent that independence is weakened..
Because that person will be encouraged to sever or lessen ties with friends and family.
Because the psychological techniques and social culture of the Fellowship encourage the member to become dependent on the Fellowship.
Because he or she will gradually be persuaded that leaving the FOF is the ultimate tragedy, that ex-students just become “negative” and that their souls will go to the moon.
Because the Fellowship view of C Influence weakens critical thinking and self-esteem and justifies Robert’s practice of indulging himself no matter what the consequences are for those who are involved with him.
And on and on.
As for the door being wide open: it isn’t so. As members continue in the Fellowship, door after door is closed behind them. It takes a considerable amount of courage, self-examination and disillusionment to reopen those doors one by one and to go out into the fresh air. You wouldn’t know because you haven’t done it. We have.
As for helping the world’s real victims, well, Fellowship members are noted for their lack of interest in suffering outside of their own small community, so once again you are hardly the person to tell us what we should be doing.
As for joy in the Fellowship: why does Robert have to take antidepressants six times a day?
Daily Cardiac,
I do love where you’re speaking from now. It’s so much more you than at the beginning. I don’t agree with you on the idea that we don’t see each other clearly. The fact that we’re not in each other’s skin allows us to see the other much better than we can see our own self. The blind areas in relation to others are areas we ourselves haven’t come to. In relation to the first, we are experts at seeing each other’s weaknesses, to the second, we’re mostly blind to each other’s grandeur, self, divinity. On a physical plane it makes sense because it is easier what is down from where you are than up, where you haven’t stepped on.
You’re as addicted as the rest of us because everything you’re doing here you simply cannot do in the Fellowship. Your voice does not matter, nobody cares for it, all you’re allowed to talk about it the dogma and you’re moving away from the dogma just by being here as Josiane well points out, why aren’t you obeying your teacher?
Please don’t. Obey yourself. You’ve proven a respectful character with a great deal of control of areas under dogma supervision. Once the dogma wears out, you can see if you can hold that discipline from your own being.
We imposed on ourselves a tremendous amount of discipline in the Fellowship Cult but it was all geared towards baring with the Fellowship itself. It was the straight jacket to hold our selves in place within its conditions. You talk about joy but there is no joy in your expression but a man who’s been doing his duty for a long, long time. Duty is only just an aspect of will.
You center the whole of your arguments on your right to be yourself, on the wholeness of your boundaries and that is where one of the weaknesses is. The whole of your boundaries are what stop you from perceiving the connections with others and the universe at large.
In this last post you are finally beginning to acknowledge that the Fellowship is not perfect. Soon you’ll be realizing where and how exactly it is not only not perfect but criminal. When you move out of that idea than no one can know where other’s are at, it’ll begin to matter to you where others are at. What you are defending now is you impossibility to consider anyone else: Robert’s satiarisis and the suffering that comes with it; the young men’s submission to it and its consequences; the member’s oblivion to that endlessly paying for it while Robert treat’s them like retarded sheep with money. I could go on for 55 pages of internet but they are already there whenever you are ready to consider them.
You arrived here like a new born baby thinking you could make the world up with your own rules totally disregarding anything anyone of us has said and now you’re at least dialoguing. It is beautiful to see it.
False personality is as perfect as true personality, just upside down and backwards in terms of the direction it is going. An individual totally immersed in his own false personality can look as coherent and strong as the one in true personality but the dissonance in the different lines reveal the lack of harmony, the lack of principles, the lowlessness of his or her pursuit.
The Fellowship weakened our essence by separating us from ourselves from the way we dressed to the culture we came from and once essence is weakened it is easy to implant the new doctrined behavior even if one feels totally awkward about one’s self. That feeling of awkwardness mines one’s self assuredness, disempowers one and becomes the seat of self immolation or denial while fanatically supporting the Cult.
Once the process of reducing essence to its minimum expression is complete, the individual who has incorporated him or herself into the life of the Cult feels secure within those boundaries and no other which is why he or she will defend it to death. Cancer works just like that and yes, probably many will never ever understand that they are killing not just their own essence but the human spirit within themselves and the society they’ve created. The human spirit cannot serially rape young men, ban children and old people and make adults work, work and work without ever giving them a chance to express themselves, their joys and sorrows.
Do you remember when Peter Bishop and anyone who was dying were made to lead a meeting on how they were not at all identified with the suffering they were going through and playing the act of heroes that were indiferent to their own death? That pantomime they were made to carry out to make us believe that working all their lives for Robert was worth it?
Do you remeber the other friend whose voice had almost left him already almost crying and being shouted at because he got identified?
While Robert sits like a king licking his own balls at us telling us that his age doesn’t seem to have weakened his sexual appetite, rubbing on our faces the fact that he is having a swell time while we are made to feel guilty because we laugh.
Tell me D.C., how much of this post are you going to ignore? How much of it will you remaine blind to?
I’ve got to go to my father’s. No time to correct even. I promise I’ll take a course on punctuation and grammar one of this days.
Glob, it would be a pleasure to hear you tell us why you’ve left if you care to. You were like D.C. a strong defender of the Fellowship initially here, what’s changed? No imposition, just an invitation.
Ex-cult member, what a great post!
Thank you all.
11 Elena
I’ve got to go to my father’s. No time to correct even. I promise I’ll take a course on punctuation and grammar one of this days.
—–
Elena, no need to correct anything, your post is most eloquent.
It’s easy to become numbed by abuse, that’s what happens in the fof and what I need to remind myself of, over and over.
The huge elephant in the room becomes a usual guest that no one sees anymore.
=============================
Thoughts From An Ex-Cult Member
Thank you for your posts; you are like a fresh breath of truth.
Thank you everyone here, including DC and Fatboy.
“ re DC 07
I can only say you are 180 degrees off the mark. I can say this for certain because you are commenting on my innermost motivations, which I am eminently more qualified to know than you are.“
Really now! Then what would possibly be the purpose of “photographing“ or has that been eliminated during the sequence era?
180 degrees indeed! Oh, that only applies to the others, the lesser ones, oh, I understand now, you are one of the ever so many men number fives or 5.1`s or even better on the sociopathetic scale.
Cheers!
Sweet Joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while;
Sweet joy befall thee!
Joy is seeing how happy my friends are when they leave.
Joy is not having to worry about my lower self.
Joy is not being photographed for laughing, the jack of hearts, or doing what I want.
Joy is not having to worry about whether I can make my teaching payments.
Joy is not having to worry about becoming biological.
Joy is appreciating the instinctive center.
Joy is not having to worry about whether I am present enough for my friends, C-influence, or myself.
Joy is not having to worry about whether C Influence is working with me.
Joy is not having to please C influence, Robert or other imaginary things.
Joy is not having to worry about whether I have a hanky in my lapel.
Joy is not having to carry around the shame of supporting Robert. (it was very unpleasant worrying that my bosses and family would be introduced to his lifestyle ). I saw part of me was ashamed of it all. I saw it was impossible to explain even to myself. I saw I carried that shame deep within – the shame of a secret sleazy life.
DC: Joy is not having to support that which goes beyond reason and common sense.
Joy is not knowing and being ok with that.
Joy is being with people without giving a damn whether either of us is working – the doorway to love.
Joy is not interpreting everything through the eyes of a crazy man that sees messages in license plates, and repeatedly makes predictions for the future which are wasteful and which never come true.
Joy is not feeling the pressure to emulate a man with a sordid lifestyle backed by an irrational and greedy mind.
Joy is not having to pay to sit at the theatron or stand body to body in the galleria.
Joy is feeling my money and efforts go to good causes.
Joy is the merging of my rational mind and my intuitions into a worldview that makes sense to both.
Joy is not having to understand how smoke came out of his ears when his higher centers fused.
Joy is not hearing again that Leonardo is in the room and causes pain.
Joy is not fearing the king of clubs.
Joy is not worrying about brutal shocks.
Joy is not being told that I better spend more time at the Galleria before I get cancer.
Joy is not being ignored.
Joy is having time to take drawing lessons.
Joy is about having time to go to the river or hiking every day if I want.
Joy is rebuilding my health by taking time for it by running every day.
Joy is having time to ENJOY my son’s soccer games without feeling guilty.
Joy is having time and my best energy for my son, daughter, wife and other loved ones.
Joy is reestablishing my relationship with my greater family.
Joy is having time to donate to teaching kids.
Joy is reconciling my past.
Joy is recognizing that there were joys while in.
Joy is recognizing I learned some things while in.
Joy is recognizing that what I am (and I like what I am) is partially attributable to having been in.
Joy is love for those that are in and for the many beautiful experiences I had while in.
Joy is giving credit where it is due and feeling free to call a worm a worm.
Joy is taking responsibility for how I see the world.
Joy is being simple and feeling OK about that.
Joy is finding that life can be so fun.
Joy is learning that tee-shirts and shorts are ok.
Joy is trying new paths. New spiritual paths, new ways to be with people, new people.
Joy is working to build a good life and a good future.
Joy replaces shame.
Joy replaces fear.
Joy replaces vanity.
Joy replaces illusion.
Joy replaces being busy.
Joy replaces being tired.
Joy brings love.
Joy brings simple presence.
Joy is getting up at 5:30 just because I want to get up.
Joy is being present because I want to be present to a joyful life, not because I feel I should.
Joy is about watching my friends leave, so joyfully sure after just a few weeks that they made the right decision.
Sweet Joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while;
Sweet joy befall thee!
Sweet joy befall thee!
DC
“In reality we are first convinced then we look for reasons that support our decisions. In all likelihood when you were ready to leave you went looking for reinforcement and found the blog.”
and later
“I can say this for certain because you are commenting on my innermost motivations, which I am eminently more qualified to know than you are.”
Is this a double-standard? You know our motivations and we can’t know yours?
“There are real victims in the world; they’re simply not in the FoF.”
Last night I talked to a friend who’s husband is having sex with Robert. She is being pressured to accept this by her friends – both those who are having sex with Robert and those who’s husbands are having sex with Robert. Her unwillingness to accept it is called “queen of hearts” and her self-esteem and overall perception of life is very low now. She has nobody to help her in the FOF and nowhere else to go. And because she loves her husband she is still hoping to somehow open his eyes and save him and their marriage. He treats her very unfair, tells her that she is not present enough, that her lower self is taking over etc. And that Robert told him that he is very special and now he began to realize it himself. He is special for the Gods and the “Most Loving Conscious Being.”
When I hear stories like this my blood begins to boil.
Very good,Old Fish. It reminds me of another song:
Tomorrow Never Knows
Turn off your mind, relax
and float down stream
It is not dying
It is not dying
Lay down all thought
Surrender to the void
It is shining
It is shining
That you may see
The meaning of within
It is being
It is being
That love is all
And love is everyone
It is knowing
It is knowing
But listen to the
color of your dreams
It is not living
It is not living
Or play the game
existence to the end
Of the beginning
Of the beginning
Of the beginning
Of the beginning
Of the beginning
Of the beginning
Lennon/McCartney (But mostly John)
Tatyana when I hear stories like this I want to throw up. That part about her husband being so special, and yet he uses the “work” against his wife. Blaaugh!
Maybe you can tell your friend that she can find other friends – there are plenty of loving people in OH who would actually care about her and counsel her more productively. I so very much wish that women like her had talked to me when I was there, I think that I would have responded differently from her current “friends”. And if women like her had talked to me, I would have left a whole lot sooner. Thank God for her that she could talk to you. This awful community of not speaking the truths of our lives to each other….
Altering Serotonin Levels Changes Monkey Behavior and Status.
Who takes the Prozac in the FOF headquarter?
Tatayana:
Thank you for your post.
Joy is not having to support a man that interferes with marriages in the name of teaching by playing with peoples vanity in order to get sex.
Joy is understanding that disgust has a place. Illegal? Maybe not, but perhaps it should be. Perhaps it is not illegal only because it has not come up enough to get any legal consideration. And perhaps it has not come up more because it is so sick.
Joy is not having to hear that life outside of the Fellowship has no value and that life in is so beautiful.
Joy is being able to call a sick dog a sick dog without having to fear being ostracized for not respecting unrespectable actions.
So sick.
To those that support what Tatyana has described:
But Listen to the color of your dreams – It is not living.
Thanks to Mick Danger.
… O Rose, thou art sick.
W Blake
2. Daily Cardiac
“In reality we are first convinced then we look for reasons that support our decisions. In all likelihood when you were ready to leave you went looking for reinforcement and found the blog.”
I assume, before uttering that first sentence that you write so easily as if it was some definite aspect of objective truth that should be obvious to all, and being the long time student that you appear to be, I do assume that you are speaking from personal experiences and observations. And that also this same bit of truth, since it is ‘in realilty’, works on you also.
So are you saying that you were first somehow ‘convinced’ that Burton would be a great fellow to give up your will to, and follow faithfully, and then you looked for ‘reasons’ to support the ‘decision’ that you made because of being ‘convinced’? And then (to quote you with one substituted word and phrase), “In all likelihood when you were ready to” STAY (in your case) “you went looking for reinforcement and found” what YOU were looking for?
Or is the above quoted statement only ‘reality’ for the unfortunates who are acting from their ‘lower self’?
Or maybe you will agree with what I wrote, in that the process is the same for you too, and your answer will be ‘yes’. If that is the case could you tell me what was it personally that ‘convinced’ you, and somehow continues to convince you, and then afterward (as you say), caused/causes you to look for the reasons to support it.
You know, someone said a while back that conversing with you was like talking with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I had a loved one who became involved with the JW’s, and I can tell you that reading your responses is almost exactly like listening to the elders of their organization/cult. The content is different of course, but the dynamics are very much the same. They use the same key phrases over and over and over, and it has that robotic quality to it.
DC – I think you have tied yourself in a very tight knot. I only hope that something or someone comes along that will aid in loosening it just enough that you can see it from a different perspective. It is going to be a shock, but it could be the beginning of a healing process.
I would like to point out one analogy which came to my mind recently :
Once, we were having trouble with one client complaining about the fact that we did not explain her enough the whole project we were planning to do before the construction.
Then someonelse told us : you must involve people in the decisions you take if you don’t want them to complain after.
This seems quite reasonable but I was just making the parallel with RB and how he avoids people complaining because he pushed them to be involved in the decisions, and the craziest ones, then they did not feel the right to oppose or to sign a petition ….
How clever!
#15 Tatyana
What you wrote was my story word by word 16 years ago.
Things don’t change fast.
This time of my life was probably one of my biggest moment of solitude and at the same time the best crossroad that happened in my life.
My ex husband is still in, devoted to RB : he even said once that the worse mistake he had done, was to choose me instead of staying with RB.
But no matter, I am more alive than ever.
Lacuna Piñata has written correctly and persuasively about the process of rationalization and “dissonance reduction,” though he hasn’t used that term. The fact is that often we do decide something, and then rationalizes why we did so.
I may be wrong, but I don’t think he has gone the extra step to apply it to himself. He has decided to stay, and so he looks for reasons why he stays.
What I am fairly sure about is that Lacuna Piñata doesn’t understand that his decision to stay, having already been made and not being open to re-examination, controls the reasoning processes he is able to employ. In other words, having decided to stay, Lacuna Piñata necessarily agrees to shut down a part of his mind, the part that could examine critically the decision to stay.
Of course, he might say (he hasn’t said this, but he might) that this is a victory over his “lower self.” But if he said that, he would just be wrong.
tatyana 15
“When I hear stories like this my blood begins to boil.”
And rightly so! That’s a very healthy sign, Tatyana, meaning you are warm and com-passionate and alive, out of reach for the snow queen’s icy hypnotic grip.
… Empty, vast, and frigid were the Snow Queen’s halls. The Northern Lights flared with such regularity that you could time exactly when they would be at the highest and lowest. In the middle of the vast, empty hall of snow was a frozen lake. It was cracked into a thousand pieces, but each piece was shaped so exactly like the others that it seemed a work of wonderful craftsmanship. The Snow Queen sat in the exact center of it when she was at home, and she spoke of this as sitting on her “Mirror of Reason.” She said this mirror was the only one of its kind, and the best thing in all the world.
Little Kay was blue, yes, almost black, with the cold. But he did not feel it, because the Snow Queen had kissed away his icy tremblings, and his heart itself had almost turned to ice.
He was shifting some sharp, flat pieces of ice to and fro, trying to fit them into every possible pattern, for he wanted to make something with them. It was like the Chinese puzzle game that we play at home, juggling little flat pieces of wood about into special designs. Kay was cleverly arranging his pieces in the game of ice-cold reason. To him the patterns were highly remarkable and of the utmost importance, for the chip of glass in his eye made him see them that way. He arranged his pieces to spell out many words; but he could never find the way to make the one word he was so eager to form. The word was “Eternity.” The Snow Queen had said to him, “If you can puzzle that out you shall be your own master, and I’ll give you the whole world and a new pair of skates.” But he could not puzzle it out.
“Now I am going to make a flying trip to the warm countries,” the Snow Queen told him. “I want to go and take a look into the black caldrons.” She meant the volcanos of Etna and Vesuvius. “I must whiten them up a bit. They need it, and it will be such a relief after all those yellow lemons and purple grapes.”
And away she flew. Kay sat all alone in that endless, empty, frigid hall, and puzzled over the pieces of ice until he almost cracked his skull. He sat so stiff and still that one might have thought he was frozen to death.
All of a sudden, little Gerda walked up to the palace through the great gate which was a knife-edged wind. But Gerda said her evening prayer. The wind was lulled to rest, and the little girl came on into the vast, cold, empty hall. Then she saw Kay. She recognized him at once, and ran to throw her arms around him. She held him close and cried, “Kay, dearest little Kay! I’ve found you at last!”
But he sat still, and stiff, and cold. Gerda shed hot tears, and when they fell upon him they went straight to his heart. They melted the lump of ice and burned away the splinter of glass in it. He looked up at her, and she sang:
“Where roses bloom so sweetly in the vale,
There shall you find the Christ Child, without fail.”
Kay burst into tears. He cried so freely that the little piece of glass in his eye was washed right out. “Gerda!” He knew her, and cried out in his happiness, “My sweet little Gerda, where have you been so long? And where have I been?” He looked around him and said, “How cold it is here! How enormous and empty!” He held fast to Gerda, who laughed until happy tears rolled down her cheeks. Their bliss was so heavenly that even the bits of glass danced about them and shared in their happiness. When the pieces grew tired, they dropped into a pattern which made the very word that the Snow Queen had told Kay he must find before he became his own master and received the whole world and a new pair of skates.
Gerda kissed his cheeks, and they turned pink again. She kissed his eyes, and they sparkled like hers. She kissed his hands and feet, and he became strong and well. The Snow Queen might come home now whenever she pleased, for there stood the order for Kay’s release, written in letters of shining ice.
DC
2″In reality we are first convinced then we look for reasons that support our decisions. In all likelihood when you were ready to leave you went looking for reinforcement and found the blog. ”
“You had probably left by the time the dinner for Peter ended and the last 8 years were spent waiting for the blog.”
7″I cannot speak for your life experiences and I don’t try to.”
Hmmm, really?
14 Old Friend
Stop it – you are making me all joyful.
Joy is being out of a cult.
From an Interview with Authur Deikman”
How can one tell if a group is a cult?
Deikman says every cult fosters four notable behaviors: 1) dependence on a leader; 2) compliance with the group; 3) avoidance of dissent, and 4) devaluation of the outsider.
“One definition everyone agrees on,” he laughs, “is that a cult is something I don’t belong to.”
“It’s a very human impulse,” he says. “The problem with cult behavior is you pay the price of diminished realism because you allow fantasy to take hold.”
One fantasy he finds particularly dangerous is that of them and us, good guys and bad guys, good versus evil.
“Once you have the good and the damned, you’re stuck,” he says. “That’s why religion causes so many problems – because it ends up with these categories.”
This black-and-white, them- and-us approach so common in cults is also common in political institutions and corporations, Deikman says, citing recent media coverage of America’s war in Iraq. Networks frequently list the number of Americans killed and often profile the fallen heroes, but they rarely mention how many insurgent fathers, husbands and brothers have died. The “enemy” always remains “faceless.”
“I was very startled,” he says, “to hear some reference made on NPR to Saddam Hussein’s sons being killed. Sons are what WE lose.”
Dissent, which is also discouraged by cults, is vital to a free society, says Deikman, because it enhances realism and multiple perspectives.
“No one person has an absolute grip on something as complex as life,” he says.
Someone who Deikman thinks does have a good grip on life is the Peanuts character Charlie Brown, from whom Deikman borrowed a central metaphor for “Them and Us.”
In the cartoon Deikman reproduces in his book, Charlie Brown tells Marcia that security is sleeping in the back of the car when you’re a little kid, and you’re riding home in the car at night with your parents, and you don’t have to worry about anything.
“Cults fan the dependency fantasy that there is someone out there who’ll drive the car for you,” Deikman says. “If I allow some person to drive the car to the point where he can tell me I have to violate my principles because that’s what God wants me to do, and I comply, then I’m in big trouble.”
Situations like the one Tatyana 15 describes have been going on for years and years in the FOF.
What kind of human being can accept this distorted sight and put their lives and spiritual growth in the hands of such a disturbed man? – A brainwashed human being. – A divided human being. _ A human being who is so desperate that lives under the illusion that love and consciousness and compassion and full daylight can co-exist with that corruption.
The agony and the ecstasy? Do you remember that one? When something becomes more of an agony, it is time to run and run and run….
There was a Young Lady whose nose
Was so long that it reached to her toes;
So she hired an Old lady,
Whose conduct was steady,
To carry that wonderful nose.
E.Lear
Oh yes, just to clarify: I fit perfectly the above-mentioned description. The only difference between you and me (also remember this one?) is that I am still running….
Catch me if you can… Also a good film to watch by the way…
I know the following post is longer than anyone can take after the many good posts that have been offered today. Allow me to give it anyway for it is yours now and who knows if I’ll be able to do so tomorrow. There is no pressure or expectation that you’ll have time for such long dissertations but thank you anyway for your precious time in this River of Possibilities
There’s an area we haven’t much explored which surfaced with the recent conversations, which is that of having to agree with the Cult because one is paying for it. One is in fact paying for all the abuses, which are not called abuses but lessons from the Teacher. The Fellowship Cult took the ideas of the System and “Instinctivized” them making everything more obvious to the naked eye than it occurs in regular society, which is the benefit of studying extremes. Like in medicine, the study of cult cancers can give us a greater understanding of our social or communal life.
The idea that everything must be paid for, which apparently Gurdjieff also promoted with high economic payments from the members, is what I find worth exploring here.
To what extent does paying for something make one justify that it is valuable? And would that not be an “instinctivization” of the process when you’re paying for “consciousness”? How can you pay for love? For consciousness, like love, is priceless. It breathes out of our integrity when we sit together by the river and share our selves with each other. It is, like the air we breathe, a sine qua non condition of our existence. It is the expression of unity between one’s self and the world: the consciousness of it in one and each of our movements. In language of the System it is the connection between the third and the fourth state of Consciousness. It expresses itself in the physical dimension through love, in the spiritual dimension by unifying different dimensions. Each of those dimensions has an expression in the physical world we inhabit. The way we move through this world reveals our consciousness of its dimensions.
The “objectivation” of consciousness that occurs in the Fellowship Cult in which it is measured, rated and paid for had a lot to do with the materialistic Western mentality but it took it to its pinnacle and showed the extent to which it can become thoroughly inhuman. But as the popular saying goes: “there is no evil that does not bring something good,” and in doing so, it was able to show why being so dutiful and bound to the physical dimension puts people in such extreme conditions of slavery to their identification: Robert’s slavery for sex, Girard’s slavery for the Fellowship’s ideal world, the member’s slavery for Robert (idolatry) and everyone’s slavery for a world of fixed, crystallized beauty in which they could leave themselves, their families and humanity outside. (Sounds so much like hell! Where else would non of those be?) And hence, depression, alcoholism and other forms of self-destructiveness easily develop.
Contrary to developing a more conscious world, the Fellowship Cult developed a world in which people paid to suffer for the same things the people in the lowest classes of regular societies have to suffer: work in infrahuman conditions for insignificant payment without recognition and acknowledgement, participation in the benefits or payment. Even the world outside the Fellowship is working against that since the abolition of slavery (although we still see serious expressions of it like those Afghan women who dared to show their face and were burnt with acid. It’s rather significant isn’t it? The face which defines the individual and the “I am”. The fact that in the Fellowship you could not speak for yourself or you were thrown out for trying to replace the one and only Teacher man number seven, and in Afghanistan women’s faces are burnt with acid for exposing them! The apparition of the “I am” in humanity seems to bring all this opposition but the struggle is the only way out. I wanted to express my respect for these women who much impressed me today in the news. Forgive me if it looks like a deviation.)
It is interesting because it is as if the upper middle and upper classes of the Fellowship Cult members which were its majority, were paying to be or to live and no matter what anyone else says, I am convinced that we, they, you, were paying for a community. “To be in a community” even if the interpretation of that was to become conscious. The idea that it wasn’t a community but a School does not fit Girard love, no matter how much you hammer it into those poor souls who love your authority and reasoning. The Fellowship was above all a community and a very dysfunctional one at that. Everything had to be paid for and nothing was free. This is what is important here because life is free, it’s the body what we are paying for. The understanding that life as we know it is still “free” or at least a gift of Nature (and what is Nature?), might give us a glimpse into the sources of joy and gratitude, dignity and other positive emotions. Nature, they say, is like mother’s milk to humanity, or our forefather’s gift in the Hierarchy. “Life” is the provider of Gratitude and gratitude is the source of all positive emotions.
The idea that everything has to be paid for was strictly connected in the Fellowship with the idea that time is money and neither Robert, Girard or anybody else had time to be with us. They were always too busy to take care of individual members because they were taking care of their evolution!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It’s funny isn’t it? Doesn’t the irony make you want to cry Daily Cardiac love? Maybe that is why it is so pretty that you’ve at least given us some time although you already started mentioning how little of it you have for this enterprise! How much do you get paid for being here? If you don’t and do it out of love, that alone will set you free.
When we, human beings, tie our “being” to time, we are “instinctivating” our soul and therefore instead of bringing the physical dimension into the spiritual dimension through Art, we pull the spiritual dimension down through “work holism” and become slaves of our talents.
All human work ought to be connected to Art for Art is the means of expressing the Spiritual in the physical. Probably the whole human crisis we have today is connected to the fact that work without Art for the benefit of a few, proper of our economy, is finally showing its toll. The “vehicle” was, is, going downwards against humanity, not only against the natural balance of the Earth that embraces us. The whole oil industry and car manufacturing crises is probably the external expression of the fact that spiritually, we weren’t going anywhere with those policies. The Parking Lot is Not the Public Square. We need space and time for ourselves, not for the cars.
Work holism is probably the chief feature of all Cults but very clearly of the Fellowship too. People had to work to justify that they were valued because they were worth nothing onto themselves or Robert. For Robert you only matter in relation to what use he can make of you. “Use” and “discard” like Dorothy, Girard, Guinever and how many more of you? For I know almost everyone who tried to help in some area was discarded as soon as that area stopped producing income for the brothel.
Work holism is the expression of work without art and millions of people around the world today are suffering from it but if we limit ourselves to the Fellowship it is clear that there it got in-twined with a spiritual yearning in which money was replaced by recognition from the guru developing the very sick forms of idolatry that so many people in there suffer from.
“Why are people doing this”, “what motivates them”, that is the question that matters. We were not working for money, we were working for love, for community, for consciousness, for participation but we left those at the door from the moment we left our right to be, to decide, to participate. The moment we lost sight of the money we were paying for to belong, we became slaves of the machinery. The “letting go of the money” was used by the Cult to make us believe that if we didn’t we were identified with it, with our selves, with life, with Influence A, but in letting go of it, it dis-empowered us from the possibility of developing a community and channeled the privileges towards Robert’s personal agenda.
In regular life people go to work, get their salary and drink it all at the bar talking and laughing with friends if they want. That “talking and laughing with friends” justifies and rewards a great deal of the toil but in the Fellowship nothing rewarded the effort. You could not enjoy the sunset without having to pay Robert for it. Robert replaces and replaced the reason to be, the divine grace of life, the air we breathe. He would charge for air and water if he could.
What makes people in the Fellowship so depressed is that they are desperately trying to pay for what they already have but have lost the ability to recognize. They have the money, the means, the talent but have given it all away and made to feel useless pimp providers of one man’s well being. It is interesting because it seems to be an illness of well to do people. They’ve lost their “raison d’etre” (reason to be) and have to replace it by a Monarch who justifies their existence. I bet the truly working class people of the Fellowship did not suffer as many losses as the upper class members. And what is interesting about it, is that what the upper class people have lost at least in our Western world is a “community” which the lower classes haven’t: They need each other too much, to afford losing it.
It looks like what we were paying for in the Fellowship was the community that we had lost or never had in regular society but instead we developed a dictatorship. How sick!
I would like to clarify that I present these ideas without judgment for upper or lower class people. This is not an attempt to belittle people with money, class or talents, for we gave everything we had. It is on the contrary an attempt to understand how our social conditioning took us where we went. What were we lacking and what did we have too much of. I have in the past expressed my horror in relation to all this, which we suffered. Now, more healed, it is easier to look at it without judgment. Where we come from is not the issue, where we are going is what matters and if we understand the deep lesson at hand, I am hoping no one amongst us, not a single one of us, will ever again fall into the fangs of another Cult or give his or her self away so cheaply. It may also help other Cult members when we take the lessons of these 55 pages of exploration and decant them into a readable piece of work.
Arthur, where are you? Please get a computer. I miss you. I miss you too Bruce, immensely!
10 is newly moderated
I’ve had a very long day, preparing for our week-long Winter Student Exhibition at my Academy of Precious Metal Arts. But my students are all ‘chipping in’ of THEIR OWN VOLITION – dried flower arrangements, manning the gallery and stocking the cabinets – made of acrylic with fibre-optic back-lighting (by the most accomodating, moving-centred, Mercury I have ever met – I even feel he has gone very far in overcoming any ‘negativity that we as opposing part-negative types encounter). I am reminded of a passage from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer……..
“To give and not to count the cost; to labour and not to ask for any reward, save that of knowing that what we do is in the name of thee, oh God Most High”.
…..Nigel.
In this last post, when I talk about infra-human conditions I don’t mean physically infrahuman but emotionally and psychologically. It was not that members were treated physically violent, it was that their work was not valued in a human way, it was simply “used” and “abused” by not allowing to create from their own being but simply to repeat what Robert chose for them.
There was a great deal of physical abuse but surprisingly enough it was self imposed by members who thought that abusing their instinctive center or physical body they would reach higher states and many developed chronic fatigue.
Daily Cardiac 2
I wish you well from the bottom of my heart. I wish for you to experience the split second/moment of grace when the veil is lifted and truth/reality is revealed without a single doubt. Doubt may return later but it will not have such a strong grip on you anymore.
Renald 13:
Speaking of 180% – you are only addressing half the sphere.
Of course one can profit from a photograph; that is a very important aspect of schools. It’s also possible to see clearly into one’s own psychology (after accepting many photographs).
Seeing clearly after all is the whole point of being in a school.
Jomo Piñata – 24:
“What I am fairly sure about is that Lacuna Piñata doesn’t understand that his decision to stay, having already been made and not being open to re-examination, controls the reasoning processes he is able to employ.”
What do you think of the man who marries the right woman and every day that he looks on her he is reminded anew that he made the correct choice?
Staying with her does not mean he has not undergone a periodic re-examination. It may equally mean the re-examination on a periodic basis only confirms his original realization.
DC 37
I think that’s a question for your teacher.
31. elena
∞♪♫♥♪♫♪∞
Old Fish 28
In the cartoon Deikman reproduces in his book, Charlie Brown tells Marcia that security is sleeping in the back of the car when you’re a little kid, and you’re riding home in the car at night with your parents, and you don’t have to worry about anything.
“Cults fan the dependency fantasy that there is someone out there who’ll drive the car for you,” Deikman says. “If I allow some person to drive the car to the point where he can tell me I have to violate my principles because that’s what God wants me to do, and I comply, then I’m in big trouble.”
thanks, great quote. don’t we all love travel metaphors ?
Serenely let us move to distant places
And let no sentiments of home detain us
The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.
H. Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
We don’t have to worry
Life goes where it does
Faster than a bullet
From an empty gun
Turn yourself over
Loose change we could spend
Grinding down diamonds
Round, round, round the bend
People pushing harder
Up against themselves
Make their daggers sharper
Than their faces tell
Babe, its your time now
Loose change we could spend
Where we are going
Round, round, round the bend
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qw_CAXzGFU
Daily Cardiac,
Funny, I was thinking about you yesterday, wondering if it would ever be possible for you to admit who your true Teacher really was.
I mean, if you approach every single post here as gunfire coming from the enemy camp, we can’t talk, even though we may exchange digital text bites. Likewise, if “we” (this rag-tag bunch of digital malcontents) approach everything you say as coming from the other side, we can’t communicate with you, either.
I feel/sense a need to find some common ground – which I propose to be presence. To me, it’s unthinkable to suppose that your valuation for Robert Burton doesn’t have a few grains of presence in it. There may be a structure that you have built around that valuation which then segues into belief, but we can leave that to the side just for the moment, can’t we? Conversely, we bloggers may appear to have built a structure around our lack of valuation for the Fellowship as a vehicle for presence which then segues into anti-cult “dogma”, but we can leave that to the side for the moment, too, can’t we?
Because if it’s true that presence is what you really “get” from your association with the Fellowship (which is what I really “got” from the Fellowship), then isn’t that your real and true Teacher, besides which all other Teachers pale? These external existences functioning as mere signposts, fingers pointing to the moon, guides but not the final destination, etc…? So, isn’t the true Teacher within? Or am I off base here?
I only ask because this conversation with you keeps going round and round in circles with only some of the listeners breaking through but never you or us (in terms of your perhaps wished for objective of getting someone to reconsider their position and rejoin the Fellowship).
Give yourself a break and admit that your real and true Teacher is within. Or am I wrong about that?
I came across a passage the other day that summarises more succinctly than anything else I’ve found the problematic nature of the fellowship to ‘the Way’, including the 4th Way, and even its own notion of presence:
“The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.” Hsin-hsin Ming.
The distinctions practised in the school and reinforced here by such as DC – higher versus lower self, steward versus the ten thousand idiots etc.. – have no place in any real path, they only help you construct some imaginary spiritual ego and then go further and pretend it is actually protecting your own real interests as a human being! Steward indeed…!
Dis-ease of mind, finally disease of mind. Then the meds…
Yeah,
and now back to earthy sounds:
Lizz Whright
Wright!
Daily Cardiac,
As I thought about us this morning I came to the realization that some of what is happening here has to do with the fact that what you are saying is: “I am what I am and believe what I want and I too have that freedom” and you are perfectly right. No one can force you to change your choice.
If we can agree on that, we can agree that there is nothing here to discuss about your freedom to believe which is what you’ve consistently based your arguments around, neglecting to look at the arguments against the Fellowship. But you’re not the Fellowship no matter how identified you are with it. While I and I think the blog, that is, “we”, are not attacking your right to be what you are or make your personal choices, we are attacking the Fellowship’s fraudulent abuse of innocent people to exploit them economically, emotionally, intellectually and sexually presenting itself as a Conscious School of Awakening. We cannot stop you from believing that that is what it is for you, especially if you have no regard for the facts, the suffering or the consequences of The Fellowship’s damages in people’s lives, but we can continue to expose them even if you cannot see it or feel it or wish to be numb to it.
You can burn yourself for your cause and we cannot stop you, you have that right but that doesn’t mean we won’t question your cause with equal vehemence. We’ll simply acknowledge that the human spirit in you was willing to die for a Cult that institutionalized pimping as the Way of Life for its members. I will respect your position with the same respect I would have for the Nazi officers who, before they were shot for their crimes, raised their arm and shouted, “Hail Hitler”.
What is fascinating about our situation is that you’ve proved to us that at some point we are simply separate. We neither agree nor walk the same path, we are each on our own and that must be accepted no matter how much we might long for harmony. That was precisely the understanding when I left the Fellowship and my husband: we each must choose, no matter the losses which is why, at some point, it is clear that dialogue is not going to stop the Fellowship from continuing to do what it has always done and legal action is necessary no matter how much all of us would rather it didn’t get there.
So while I respect your right to stand in your ground, I do not respect the ground you stand on and will continue to fight it because just like you are convinced that it is not hurting anyone, I know how much it hurt us: my daughter and all the children of the Fellowship who had to put up with parents who allowed them to be put aside while they “awoke”, parents, brothers and sisters, friends and one’s most inner life as well. The rest of the list is long but why write it again when it is clear you will not see it?
If you were Girard it would be just as easy to understand why you cannot see it. Too many loses to count in your personal life to wish to acknowledge that you were in fact so addicted to your position in the Fellowship that you were willing to sacrifice children, wives, family and members alike as long as you could remain in your post. Enough power to believe that you could get away with it endlessly. I very much doubt that you, Girard or Robert as much as any other of the enablers will be able to hold it indefinitely. Life is a circle and turns us all upside down before we complete it. I hope that when it turns for you, you can remain as vertical as you are pretending to stand today and survive without being profoundly damaged by your blindness.
On Nature, which was reduced to mechanicality in the Fellowship Cult.
“Water accounts for most of the wholenesses, forms and shapes in nature’s realm, and most especially in all living organisms in the plant, animal, and human kingdoms. Indeed, water makes the earth organism one single whole, functionally at least. The earth organism has distinct functional organs, which, though they are not yet recognized as organs, show themselves to be such as soon as they are studied in a larger context. Since all of earth’s life depends for its existence on an interplay between earth and the cosmos, we are justified in looking for such an interplay where its organs are concerned. We need not raise the question here as to whether gravitational forces are the only ones that play a decisive role in the relationship of earth and cosmos; it is enough to know that the cosmos is symptomatically “at home” in the water element.
…
Water is the primary organ of rythm, the heart of nature, the element in which we can discern natures’s heartbeat. As such it is the polar opposite of a mechanical pumping device: its alternating swing is free. And this eccentricity, this subtle freedom it retains, makes it the element that keeps nature from becoming mechanical, that is, from dying. Indeed, water is the overcomer of the mechincal, and that is why it is so important to imbue thinking with qualities of water.
As an entity, it is all-embracing, the repository of cosmic wisdom, which is found in its highest manifestation in the human organism.
Theodor Schwenk “Water, The Element of Life”
Daily Cardiac and all,
The one thing that I am most grateful with the Fellowship for is that it hasn’t, as far as I know, actively killed anyone but I am convinced it was not far from getting there and know with absolute clarity that it had it already in its womb to let people die mercilessly. Joseph Monteleone died mercilessly and Dorothy was brought to me dying because the concerted attitude amongst the members was that her life was of no value. They were drugging her, feeding her and treating her in a way that could only lead to her death. I thank Janet C. for having stopped it before it happened because she well knew I knew what was happening. I had warned her of it three months before she brought her to my house.
I will keep reminding you of these things so that they weigh in your consciences until you do something about it.
Thank you Tatyana for the continued exposure of the Fellowship madness.
So sad, when good students go bad:
“I was born at a very young age with an incredibly stiff neck and have never looked back.
Childhood was a blur but luckily when I reached the age of twelve my uncle Hermione died and bequeathed his spectacles to me along with some nice dresses.
Around this time I began to see clearly into the nature of reality and wrote my first spiritual classic, “Am I That ?”. The rest will be history.
At the age of 28 I joined a cult, at the age of 53 I got out.
In between I gave most of my spare change to a Goddess in a man’s body who was convinced by Leonardo da Vinci that the world was about to end.
It all made perfect sense at the time!”
– from Ivan P. (GF Site)
DC “What do you think of the man who marries the right woman and every day that he looks on her he is reminded anew that he made the correct choice? ”
What do you think of a woman who marries the man and every day she looks at him reminded anew she made the correct choice… until one day her 9 years old daughter calls her in the middle of the night and tells that she was sexually abused by him? And when a woman asks her beloved husband what happened he answers that he does not know anything because he was sleeping in bed.
If you were that woman you would tell the 9 year old girl to stop lying and dramatizing, that she just had a bad dram, because nothing in your world would make you see the reality as it is.
Some illusions die hard. But one must accept the reality no matter how painful it is.
Jomo Piñata – 24:
“What I am fairly sure about is that Lacuna Piñata doesn’t understand that his decision to stay, having already been made and not being open to re-examination, controls the reasoning processes he is able to employ.”
Lacuna Piñata – 37:
What do you think of the man who marries the right woman and every day that he looks on her he is reminded anew that he made the correct choice?
Staying with her does not mean he has not undergone a periodic re-examination. It may equally mean the re-examination on a periodic basis only confirms his original realization.
I’m glad that you responded, even if in metaphor. You liken your participation in the Fellowship to a marriage to a woman. A polyandrous marriage, clearly, because she is married to many. Many divorce her. But not you! You re-examine your marriage to her periodically, but are convinced you are making the correct choice to stay. True?
I’m willing to bet you don’t feel free to leave. And if you do not feel free to leave, there’s only so much re-examination of your commitment that you can do.
If you’re not free to leave, examining your commitment is basically superfluous, idle mental activity, right? Because you don’t feel free to act on your perceptions. I mean, if you’re not free to leave, why pursue the issue at all mentally? It’s not going to affect what you do, right?
The purpose of your intellect–I am putting words in your mouth, please spit them out if you disagree–is to affirm, to rationalize, what you have already decided to do, or what you feel you should do, or what the Teacher tells you you should do in respect of the Fellowship. Right? It’s to supply a stream of work ‘I’s to your steward. That’s its function. It’s not supposed to examine your commitment to the School. The part that examines your commitment to the School, that’s the lower self. Because it might take you out of the school. It is the lower self that takes you out of the school, by definition. Right? If not, tell me what’s wrong with this thinking.
Last couple of days I could not get read of the strong anger towards Robert, after talking to my friend who is stuck there and suffers that her husband sleeps with Robert. She told me in details how russians are trying to talk her into accepting “the play”.
Knowing all those russians and coming from the same background, the same center even, being the same age, it makes me very sad to see what they have become. It is like if they became sick. And Robert uses it and increases his own sickness.
Russians have problems with boundaries. It is perfectly fine for a friend to come to your house without a call, or eat from your refrigerator. We were told that everything is “common” and therefore nothing belongs to anybody. It sits so deep in our psychology and it takes professional help and a desire – to learn what the boundaries are.
When it comes to the area of relationship, sex and children things get more complicated. Ex-wives come into the new wife’s life as if she has a right. Ex husband comes to visit a child using his own key and makes himself a cup of tea. People accept to share a lot of things, which in western mind are not for sharing. It gives one an excitement and a feeling of never ending Burning Man festival. They enjoy suffering – so they have a reason to drink a bottle of vodka and sing sad songs.
All this ex-lovers-wives-husbands are bonded like shishkibobs. It is not king of hearts and being above the instinctive center, it is immaturity and luck of responsibility. And so called conscious love is untamed sex energy circulating between people with no principals more like extended group sex.
Also russians do not have a democracy in their veins. They don’t want it. They inherited love for the strong tsar, and the more terrible, the better.
Olga, Denis, Sahsa, Swetlana, Sergei, Nicholai, Natasha, Kirill, Vlad, Genya, Misha, Leonid, Maxim, Vasily, Igor, Marina… My heart aches for you! You have so much more options in life than this mad house.
Daily Challenge:
“As I speak someone is calculating how to join the FoF and another is calculating how to leave.”
There may even be a third possibility…if you actually think about it.
53 whalerider
Yeah! Not calculating because they are living their life to the full and do not need a cult…..Nigel.
52 Tatyana
Wow. Nice psychological snapshot.
Dear Tatayna,
Thank you for sharing yourself with us.
It is easy for all those things to happen when people are young enough and in bad enough company and the Fellowship promoted all of that without any of the adults helping them or interfering, on the contrary actively promoting those things or giving a blind eye to them.
It’s like a wild lion in a rabbit party.
Your culture does not sound too different to mine when people are young but from the little I’ve seen you are all wonderfully prepared people in many areas.
Thank you for expressing your sadness. It is sad because no matter how much “fun” many think they might be having now that they are young enough to fool around, the price get’s high as one gets older aand the cold facts hit one hard in the face. Why didn’t the adults help us? Why didn’t they help when we were children, I would ask myself and why didn’t they help when we were teenagers? Why don’t they help these teenagers now? A few of them are no longer teenagers, but some of them were when they got to the Fellowship in the past ten years.
Perhaps because most people still haven’t come to terms with their own hurt that they can help others avoid it?
The sex trip amongst teenagers or young adults is not that surprising nor is it of that much concern, at least to me even though group sex isn’t something I’ve practiced. Where it gets very delicate is where there’s imposition, conditionioning and the result of an outlet for the pressure of the Fellowship lifestyle in which not a feather moves without Robert’s approval. He of course knows all that is happening directly and indirectly and probably thinks it is actually alright so that his own practices look more acceptable especially to the men he abuses.
Would you consider the possibility that it is an outlet to the rigidity and the pressure? In this sense it is very good to observe that energy cannot be stopped, it is simply channeled into other areas.
Young people in the Fellowship do the same things a lot of young people do outside of it but instead of hiding from their parents they hide from Robert and the rest of “authorities”. They seem to have decided long ago that they were simply taking advantage of that situation while it lasted while in reality it is Robert who is taking advantage of them, while they last.
Would you say that this is another example of people who have gotten trapped into instinctive comfort and have overruled their own judgment so consistently that they don’t have enough of a self to let go of it?
What help do you think is needed? Have you thought about possible solutions? Would the Russians accept help? Do they not want to return to Russia? Do most of them have permanent residence?
It’s 12:30 am on the east coast of North America. I just returned from a talk by Jacob Needleman at the Philadelphia Ethical Society. After the discussion his wife performed several songs composed by Gurdjieff & Thomas DeHartmann (sp?) on a grand, grand piano. The event was hosted/sponsored by the “Gurdjieff Foundation” the talk was titled “Toward a Community of Conscience.” Needleman has written a book or two about Gurdjieff but he really didn’t focus much on G in his talk… as for ‘personalities’ or characters, he talked just as much or more about Emerson, George Washington, and his high school and college students. This was a non-dogmatic discussion filled with the quiet wisdom of age and experience. Something that he said comes to mind relative to dogma and ‘system’ — he was asked about the work of Ken Wilber, and whether he (Jacob) was ‘more organic than Ken’ — he said he personally knows Ken but wasn’t willing to comment on his ‘organicity’ — that got a chuckle… he said he has great respect for Ken’s intellectual gifts while at the same time he thought there was too much ‘systemization’ there for his own liking.
The gist, or ‘a’ gist (at least what I came away from the discussion with), is the importance of asking the right question and especially the importance of LISTENING and having enough self-awareness to recognize how difficult it is to be open to receive what another is trying to communicate. And then there is the whole issue of interpretation of the message…
I guess my point in posting this here is; during the evening I didn’t get even an inkling that there was a hidden agenda, there was no attempt to persuade or recruit. I came and participated in a meaningful discussion, followed by ‘interesting’ and at times even moving music and then refreshments and conversation. When I left, I walked into the balmy night streets of center city with no strings attached. I hate to bring things down to the basest level here but (imo) one reason for the existence of the blog has to do with one’s experience of the FOF so… the point of mentioning my experience this evening is to ‘say’ there was more intelligence, insight, hope and inspiration in this two hour talk than in all of the years I spent “sitting at the feet” of that blood-sucking hasnamas robert burton.
“I am not making this up……. there is a cult (The Fellowship of Friends) in Northern California existing at a location called Oregon House where the heterosexual male members submit to sex with the 60-some-odd year old homosexual cult leader and even convince their wives that it is for their own spiritual good. They do this — now get this part — because they believe they are psychologically asleep (unaware of themselves) and they want to do anything they can to wake up (become aware of themselves). So they give their money, all their time and even their penises to Robert Earl Burton, the self-proclaimed “awakened” cult leader. Before you laugh and shake your head, these people seriously believe that they are already so advanced in “awakening” that you as an ordinary citizen can’t understand how they are not being exploited by the cult leader, but rather are receiving incredible gifts of teaching. How’s that for some convenient doublethink brainwashing?”
GG
veramente – 4:
“DC, how do you know what it may be someone else’s process in leaving if you have no personal experience?”
It’s entirely possible to observe tendencies in others as well as oneself. It’s entirely possible to ignore tendencies in others as well as oneself. People are more alike than different. If that were not true no one would be able to emphasize with anyone else.
As far as not yet leaving, don’t count people out of the process who have not left. Some go through the same process as those who leave, but simply do not follow that impulse.
The good thing is that one day we will all know the whole story of the FoF.
the music I referred to earlier sounded something like this, and etc.
Crouching Tiger – 43:
“The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.”
Nothing could be more true than the statements above.
This is the reality of one who has overcome, subdued the lower self.
This is the reality of a spiritual warrior.
Because the lower self is all about preferences, denials, love (lust/obsession/identification), hate, opinions; etc.
To someone ruled by the lower self the above quote is a pipe dream.
the shill is gone…
“bait and switch is a form of fraud in which the party putting forth the fraud lures in…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Persuasion_techniques
Ton 57
“…. he said he has great respect for Ken’s intellectual gifts while at the same time he thought there was too much ’systemization’ there for his own liking.”
I agree, there is too much ‘systemization’ there for my liking too. However, I think Ken’s work is well worth digging into, really ‘listening’ to what he is trying to say, which requires more than reading his books but also listening to conversations and talks he gives. It is remarkable how he is bringing people together from diverse disciplines.
For me, some understanding of his views have blown so many ‘Sacred Cows’ to smithereens there is still hamburger falling from the sky.
I went to the first biennial Integral Institute Conference. It was very interesting. A lot of the presentations were quite academic but there were many that were more ‘organic’ from a transpersonal psychology perspective. I talked with one presenter, a lady who confided to me that she didn’t much care for Ken Wilbers work. I guess the point is it is called Integral for that reason- it is trying to bring ideas and disciplines together. There was a culty feel to some of it (unavoidable I imagine) and there was a luxury auto in the parking lot with a vanity plate AQAL (all quadrants -all levels- all lines) which made me want to puke.
But that cult thing doesn’t bother me too much. The only flag I am going to be flying is my own.
“This is the reality of one who has overcome, subdued the lower self.
This is the reality of a spiritual warrior.
Because the lower self is all about preferences, denials, love (lust/obsession/identification), hate, opinions; etc.
To someone ruled by the lower self the above quote is a pipe dream.”
It’s the reality of someone who is still growing. It exists on the living pathway, it doesn’t exist in some impossible future.
Until you accept the existence of everything you understand as the ‘lower self’, completely and without even the smallest reservation, your ‘work’ will be a pipedream.
DC “Because the lower self is all about preferences, denials, love (lust/obsession/identification), hate, opinions; etc.”
What a great definition of Robert and the Fellowship, DC, you got it better than all of us together, for what else is there to Robert than all those? You seem to know him better than us.
If you don’t agree with that, why don’t you tell us what the higher self is then? According to you, Robert or the Fellowship?
Another question you’ll avoid and people will continue to play along with you in the limited frame that you present?
If you’d left the word love out of it, you might have had something but in including it, it is clear that you don’t know the difference between higher and lower in or outside yourself. You are a faithful follower of Robert who above anything taught that love is the lower self while rape, denials, love (lust/obsession/identification), hate and other of his opinions are the higher self.
Who the hell are you working for you members in the Fellowship?
Ton,
Thank you for your notes and the lovely music.
Crouching Tiger,
How is that about accepting the existence of everything as the lower self?
Can what is lower be encompassed without being above it? Can it be embraced without being aside of it? What law would make that possible, even in the physical dimension?
How would you see the lower if you could not look at it without judgment? Wouldn’t the fact that it is without judgment mean that everything is the lower self? Or simply that there is enough of one’s self to include it?
Would not the same “lower”and “higher” presentation of words tend to reinforce the Fellowship’s and Daily’s separations?
Would not lower and higher be two aspects of the opposite and if we’re trying to understand unity, would it not be wiser to approach the interpenetration of those instead of continuing to reinforce the extremes?
Thank you Tiger, for your continued participation here.
I’d like to offer the following notes on Water as a physical expression of so many of our “social-psychosomatic realities”
In the chemical realm, water lies exactly at the meutral point between acid and alkaline, and is therefore able to serve as the mediator of change in either direction. In fact, water is the instrument of chemical change whereveer it occurs in life and nature.
In the light -realm, too, water occupies the middle ground between light and darkness. The rainbow, that primal phenomenon of color, makes its shining appearance in and through the agency of water.
In the realm of gravity, water counters heaviness with levity; thus, objects immersed in wqqter take on buoyancy.
In the heat-realm water takes a middle possition between radiation and conductiooon. It is the treatest heat conveyer in the earth’s organism, transsporting inconceivable amounts of warmth from hot regions to cooler ones by means of the process known as heat-convection.
In the morphological realm, water favors the spherical; we see this in the drop form. Pitting the round against the radial, it calls forth that primal form of life, the spiral.
In every area water assumes the role of mediator. Encompassing both life and death, it constantly wrests the former from the latter.
Water does not constitute a linear divider in the sense of a bar separating one part of nature from another. It alternates between right and left with a living pendulum swing, not only in the sense of creating meandering patterns but in a functional sense as well, thus serving to relate extremes.
Which is to say that water is the primary organ of rhythm, the heart of nature, the element in which we can discern nature’s heartbeat…
Not who the hell are you working for, you members of the Fellowship but Who in hell are you working for, Fellowship members?
Elena.
Me: “Until you accept the existence of everything you understand as the ‘lower self’, completely and without even the smallest reservation, your ‘work’ will be a pipedream.”………..
You: “How is that about accepting the existence of everything as the lower self?”
I think you got the wrong end of the stick in my statement!!!!!!!!
It’s addressed to DC. Let me rephrase it:
Until you accept the existence, unconditionally, of everything YOU CHOOSE to call the ‘lower self’ without even the smallest reservation, your work will be a pipedream.
Sorry to make the rest of your message unnecessary, but thanks for effort anyway!
Ton 57.
You clearly had a very nice experience with Jacob Needleman, thanks for your description. Funnily enough, I gave his contact details to one of our fellow-bloggers only a day or two ago!
It’s very pleasant to know that Gurdjieff’s teaching can produce such sensible men. It was certainly a great relief to me to realize after a while that his teaching can be disentangled from its ludicrous Fellowship context…
Crouching Tiger,
Thanks, that makes sense!
Rereading mine there’s a mistake there though.
How would you see the lower if you could not look at it without judgment? Wouldn’t the fact that it is without judgment mean that everything is the lower self? Or simply that there is enough of one’s self to include it?
Wouldn’t the fact that is is without judgment mean that everything is the lower self?
should say:
Would the fact that it is without judment mean that everything is the lower self?
For all who love beauty that goes soooo deeeep
Israel Kamawiwo’olo……
Have a great day
If you know why it goes so deep…..let me know…..
Jomo Piñata – 51:
“You liken your participation in the Fellowship to a marriage to a woman. A polyandrous marriage, clearly, because she is married to many. Many divorce her. But not you! You re-examine your marriage to her periodically, but you are convinced you are making the correct choice to stay. True?”
Yes, that’s true.
All analogies will breakdown if taken too far and I think yours starts to. Analogies are meant to be mental snap shots, sketches. When you try to polish them they crumble.
Most of the time when I offer an analogy some will intentionally play off of what’s written and come up with a sarcastic “opposite” of what was intended. You didn’t go that far. You used my analogy to compose a variation of it; which is fine, as long as you take mine at face value before you move on to your own.
That said, you being so learned it seems like it took a long time to comprehend what I’ve been saying all along. But at least you did formulate a correct conclusion above. I think you are the second to go that far.
Here’s my story: I heard about self-remembering. I tried it. It was what I had always been looking for. I heard about schools. I felt I needed a school in order to be in an environment that promoted SR. So I looked for one. I found one. I joined. It turned out that it delivered everything it claimed to deliver regarding an environment conducive to presence.
I can’t think of a more meaningful life than one spent in an esoteric school.
There are no locks on any FoF doors. You walked out, so did 15,000 others. It’s never been easier to leave than in 2008. I join anew each day. My last day in the FoF will be my last day, in all likelihood. I personally don’t think it is going anywhere. Maybe I’ll screw up and get the boot but it’s unlikely. I’ve already dodged a few bullets in that regard. That’s my story. O, one other thing,
Old Fish, Real Joy is presence.
Daily Card,
“It has never been so easy to leave as now.”
Remember Robert saying call no man happy until he dies….
Your last day….how do you know?
Saying I will stay in the fellowship till my last day is… imagination remember….? As you nor I or anybody else will know.
Daily Card you seem to willing support a cult…and a man who uses young men for his sexual lust and you call him a concious being?
He uses money and advises people with issues to take pills or wait till after 2006 when there are no laws anymore.
Now that you have iso much nformation on the fellowship of friends and robert burton you can not say later:
“I did not know therefore I am not to blamed?”
To refresh your memory, presence is also world 6…and as you could know by now that is not only joy, far from joy. I am starting to wonder if you are really well informed in the fourth way?
Hope you read this entree and will be able to write me back, so far you have ignored me completely, wonder why?
Daily Cardiac, this is especially dedicated to you after your last post (70) you sick puppy. Your rethoric makes me puke. Fortunately it was already written before you presented us once again with the coolness of your capacity to enjoy self remembering and disregard everything else that happens around you or it would be another long puking exhibition of impotence and frustration before your blindness. Your position hurts as much as Girard’s. Your unwillingness to see, that you glorify so repugnantly, mocking people’s suffering with your numbness, hurts, not because I am dependent on your acknowledgement to be myself but because realizing that people like you who are indefinitely willing to hurt others with you blindness to the facts, is not something I can celebrate or glorify.
Ton,
Thank you for offering these tools. I often don’t have you tube and for those that don’t I would like to bring a lot of what you offered here.
I’ve actually been trying to decipher what is happening in Daily Card’s inner life that keeps him from perceiving the damages the Fellowship imposes on its members. It matters tremendously because Girard and so many others suffer from this same limitation and it is very interesting that it also manifests in how he approaches the discussion by simply avoiding to answer what he is presented with or deviating from it.
Daily Card, Do you know why you consistently fail in the second condition presented here which states:
2. Burden of proof rule. A party that advances a standpoint is obliged to defend it if asked by the other party to do so.
Could you explain what happens in your inner life when you simply avoid the questions or arguments being presented?
I also wonder if you’re using a particular technique similar to the Nazi repetition in which by simply repeting your dogma, you think it’ll sink in or not totally get washed away from the mind of those members still reading.
Since I actually find that very delicate in your right to express yourself in this forum, I would like to explore and question it. This does not mean that I think you should be banned, it means that I wish us all to be clear about your technique, how you use it, why and with what aim.
It is clear that you give a dam about what writers on this side of the fence say for you either openly avoid them or address them only in particular stands that have little to do with Fellowship practices. You consistently avoid THE FACTS, which, interestingly enough is what Fellowship Members are avoiding to justify their indoctrinated motives to remain inside. Interesting also that this behavior shows the degree in which the Fellowship has succeeded in dividing the inner life of the members into people who no longer have enough common sense to understand things by considering the facts but are willing to continue supporting the abuses based on their emotional and intellectual adherence already disconnected from the reality of the facts.
If this is the case, the differences between most members and ex-members lies in our interpretation of the facts. The seduction of young men brought in from other countries in social conditions of disadvantage through Robert Burton’s economic rewards in exchange for the sexual services and the unconditional followers inculcation of the ideas and feelings that sexually submitting to this “Conscious Being” will not only help the young man’s evolution but provide a great service to the Fellowship of Friends by helping this “great being” “who we adore, serve and respect” deal with the tremendous energy that comes from being in such a high state, is looked at by some ex-members as a fraud meant to provide sexual services to Robert Burton.
Would you Daily Cardiac and you, the Fellowship of Friends who will sooner or later be in Court trying to deal with these same things, explain how this is not a fraud?
You have consistently mentioned the benefits of the Fellowship of Friends as a School of Conscious development, would you please give us some examples of this benefits?
You have stated that the Fellowship of Friends is a School of Consciousness, would you tell us what you mean by this and how does it practically express itself in the life of the School?
Could you, Mr. Robert Burton, or any of his followers, explain how separating mothers from their children is an expression of Consciousness?
Mothers from their children,
Members from their families,
Member’s from their cultures,
Members from their previous friends,
Members from their functions,
Members from their bodies, their minds, their emotions and their sexuality?
How does consciousness work in the Fellowship of Friends if it dismembers its members and forgets to remember?
You will have to respond to these questions sooner than you think in a Court of Law. The corruption you bring to the society is an expression of each of your member’s inner corruption. The lack of integrity of your souls, not only in relation to social matters but in relation to your inner lives, is appalling. You all need help, desperate help to recover your selves from so many years of numbing your selves to your and other people’s suffering. You are the most crude expression of spiritual frigidity and not far from actually killing someone in an environment in which every form of abuse is looked at as the expression of divinity on Earth.
During those three months between my asking Janet to let me take Dorothy to my house and her actually taking her, Dorothy changed from an old woman to an old wreck. A drugged piece of meat that was left at my doorstep with the sentence, “Call me when she dies” by an extremely respected member of the Fellowship of Friends who’s been inside for over thirty years. Meredith, Rosemary and all the other “wonderful” ladies taking care of Dorothy during this period, all of whom have been in there longer than anyone can remember have developed such values as to allow for this woman to be treated in the way she was treated being fed on bread, five loafs of bread a week, Sharon told me because twenty five dollars a week did not allow her to buy more decent food.
If these so very respected women of the Fellowship of Friends School of Consciousness were willing to let this 87 year old woman with alzheimers die like a pig, what is so surprising about the fact that the rest of the members are willing to let twenty five year old men be systematically raped by Robert Burton until they’ve aged enough that he has no use to them, just like all those who, like Peter and all the Peters of the Fellowship have been taking anti-depressants for the whole of their adult life?
If all this is true and it is, what is so surprising then about the fact that parents are willing to leave their children out of the only community they recognize as their own?
Their children, their families and themselves to support the practices of this group of people whose souls have been rotting in hell since the moment they arrived with the exception of the Daily Cardiac’s who thoroughly enjoy the show and call it presence: “Old Fish, Real Joy is presence” and underlying note: you idiots who left the Fellowship and cannot enjoy the grandeur of my state that as long as I can remain blind to the facts I will continue to enjoy the show for only self remembering matters in this world, no matter how many people are dismembered. You all left, why don’t you get the hell out, we’ve a whole new generation on whom to practice the same things we practiced on you. Losers! You cheap, whinning blog losers, you cannot touch us, too bad for you if you’re right. I’ll continue blogging for ever about the wonders of presence no matter how many Tatayna’s or Whaleriders, mothers or children tell their story of abuses. As long as you allow me to talk about my pleasures without ever confronting the facts I will stand untouched by your suffering. I am the omnipotent, omnipresent member of the Untouchable Fellowship of Friends. Love, Daily Cardiac and all the enablers of the Fellowship Cult.
All the following seems pertinent to this discussion and particularly to the effort of exploring Daily Cardiac’s approach. I know how much space I am taking. If you think I am taking your space, that is an illusion of the instinctive center. No one can take your space here, please help yourself to it. Time and Space are on our side, they are no longer anyone’s private property or at least, those who own this site, seem to have invited us all to use it.
Pragma-dialectics
One rigorous modern version of dialectic has been pioneered by scholars at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, under the name of pragma-dialectics. The intuitive idea is to formulate clearcut rules that, if followed, will yield rational discussion and sound conclusions. Frans van Eemeren, the late Rob Grootendorst, and many of their students have produced a large body of work expounding this idea.
The dialectical conception of reasonableness is given by ten rules for critical discussion, all being instrumental for achieving a resolution of the difference of opinion (from Van Eemeren, Grootendorst, & Snoeck Henkemans, 2002, p. 182-183):
· 1. Freedom rule. Parties must not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or from casting doubt on standpoints.
· 2. Burden of proof rule. A party that advances a standpoint is obliged to defend it if asked by the other party to do so.
· 3. Standpoint rule. A party’s attack on a standpoint must relate to the standpoint that has indeed been advanced by the other party.
· 4. Relevance rule. A party may defend a standpoint only by advancing argumentation relating to that standpoint.
· 5. Unexpressed premise rule. A party may not disown a premise that has been left implicit by that party, or falsely present something as a premise that has been left unexpressed by the other party.
· 6. Starting point rule. A party may not falsely present a premise as an accepted starting point nor deny a premise representing an accepted starting point.
· 7. Argument scheme rule. A party may not regard a standpoint as conclusively defended if the defense does not take place by means of an appropriate argumentation scheme that is correctly applied.
· 8. Validity rule. A party may only use arguments in its argumentation that are logically valid or capable of being validated by making explicit one or more unexpressed premises
· 9. Closure rule. A failed defense of a standpoint must result in the party that put forward the standpoint retracting it and a conclusive defense of the standpoint must result in the other party retracting its doubt about the standpoint.
· 10. Usage rule. A party must not use formulations that are insufficiently clear or confusingly ambiguous and a party must interpret the other party’s formulations as carefully and accurately as possible.
The theory postulates this as an ideal model, and not something one expects to find as an empirical fact. It can however serve as an important heuristic and critical tool for testing how reality approximates this ideal and point to where discourse goes wrong, that is, when the rules are violated. Any such violation will constitute a fallacy. Albeit not primarily focused on fallacies, pragma-dialectics provides a systematic approach to deal with them in a coherent way.
Psychology has long studied the non-logical aspects of argumentation. For example, studies have shown that simple repetition of an idea is often a more effective method of argumentation than appeals to reason. Propaganda often utilizes repetition. [12] Nazi rhetoric has been studied extensively as, inter alia, a repetition campaign.
Empirical studies of communicator credibility and attractiveness, sometimes labeled charisma, have also been tied closely to empirically-occurring arguments. Such studies bring argumentation within the ambit of persuasion theory and practice.
Political argumentation
Main article: Political argument
Political arguments are used by academics, media pundits, candidates for political office and government officials. Political arguments are also used by citizens in ordinary interactions to comment about and understand political events. [14]. The rationality of the public is a major question in this line of research. A robust political science research tradition seems to prove that the American public is largely irrational and ignorant of even the most basic knowledge of national or world affairs. Political scientist S. Popkin coined the expression “low information voters” to describe most voters who know very little about politics or the world in general.
Some theorists have inferred from this that only comprehensively trained elites can debate public issues. They point as additional proof to the practice of academic debate in the United States, an activity almost exclusively involving children of the upper middle classes, future lawyers and graduate students, and not ordinary citizens.
Debate (American English) or debating (British English) is a formal method of interactive and position representational argument. Debate is a broader form of argument than logical argument, which only examine the consistency from axiom, and factual argument, which only examine what is or isn’t the case or rhetoric which is technique of persuasion. Though logical consistency, factual accuracy as well as some emotional appeal to audience are important elements of the art of persuasion, in debating, one side often prevails over the other side by presenting superior “context” and/or framework of the issue, which is far more subtle and strategic.
In formal debating contest, there are rules enabling people to discuss and decide on differences, within a framework defining how they will interact. Informal debate is a common occurrence, but the quality and depth of a debate improves with knowledge and skill of its participants as debaters. Deliberative bodies such as parliaments, legislative assemblies, and meetings of all sorts engage in debates.
The major goal of the study of debate as a method or art is to develop one’s ability to play from either position with equal ease. To inexperienced debaters, some propositions appear easier to defend or to destroy; to experienced debaters, any proposition can be defended or destroyed after the same amount of preparation time, usually quite short. Lawyers argue forcefully on behalf of their client, even if the facts appear against them. However one large misconception about debate is that it is all about argument; it is not.
[edit] Rhetoric as Epistemology
The relationship between rhetoric and knowledge is one of its oldest and most interesting problems. The contemporary stereotype of rhetoric as “empty speech” or “empty words” reflects a radicial division of rhetoric from knowledge, a division that has had influential adherents within the rhetorical tradition, most notably Plato in ancient Athens, and Peter Ramus in 16C Renaissance Europe.[7] It is a division that has been strongly associated with Enlightenment thinking about language.
Most rhetoricians, however, see a closer relationship between rhetoric and knowledge. Researchers in the rhetoric of science, for instance, have shown how the two are difficult to separate, and how discourse helps to create knowledge.[8] This perspective is often called “epistemic rhetoric,” where communication among interlocutors is fundamental to the creation of knowledge in communities.
Emphasizing this close relationship between discourse and knowledge, contemporary rhetoricians have been associated with a number of philosophical and social scientific theories that see language and discourse as central to, rather than in conflict with knowledge-making.
CT – 64:
“Until you accept the existence of everything you understand as the ‘lower self’, completely and without even the smallest reservation, your ‘work’ will be a pipedream.”
This is also true. I think this is a given. One cannot know the lower self, confront the lower self, neutralize the lower self until one accepts its existence.
Another Name – 71:
“Saying I will stay in the fellowship till my last day is… imagination remember….? As you nor I or anybody else will know.”
No one has ever known the future until it came to pass, prophet or otherwise. I did qualify the quote from above, but you did not include the qualifying point.
A. N. – “To refresh your memory, presence is also world 6…and as you could know by now that is not only joy, far from joy. I am starting to wonder if you are really well informed in the fourth way?”
“Man was made for Joy and Woe, and when this he rightly knows thru the world he safely goes.” W. B., posted last week by me.
Real joy is presence, that means real suffering is a form of joy.
It’s far more joyful to be awake and suffering than “having fun” while asleep.
Girard Haven’s innumerable fragments of dogma have fortunately being published by his followers.
From Creating a Soul.
“Working with failure: the Uses of Scale”
“It is only possible to speak of success or failure relative to an aim….
…viewing ‘failure’ from the appropriate scale enables one to deal with the ‘I’s that are evoked by it. When the events in our lives are seen as an expression of Influnece C, it makes no sense to think of them as failures. As Epictetus put it, his own will could not be defeated becasue his will was that the will of higher forces be done.
…One cannot say that one has failed in the aim to awaken if one has not committed all of oneself to it -perhaps for more than one lifetime. In these cases, the sense of failure is a photograph that one did not understand the aim, that it represented a larger undertaking than one thought and may involve a greater payment than one is prepared to make.
Perceptions such as these are characteristic of intervals. Identification with an aim can be the third force to bridge such intervals mechanically, while will can be used to bridge them consciously. a man number four, however, occasionally finds that neither of these means is available to him – he is not identified enough to proceed solely on that basis and he is not sufficiently awake to exercise his will consistently. Thus, he is brought fact-to-face with his own helplessness, with his inability to do. His only recourse is to his verification of his Teacher and of Higher Forces, and his understanding that in trying to carry out their will and follow their directions his real needs will be taken care of. In this way ‘failure’, taken rightly, not only leads to a review of the scale of one’s aim, it also leads to a right relationship to influence C, which is perhaps the most important application of scale a man number four can make.”
With this kind of reasoning, Mr. Haven disconnects the member and members from their own aims and puts them in the context of accepting their failure as not being in line with Influence C or the Teacher, (the Gods, the divine) making of it a double failure. The only way members are not failing is if they are completely submissive to everything that is going on in the Fellowship Cult.
In this way anyone who tried to pursue an Art or Project of his own was first not given Mr. Burton’s support or allowance within the Fellowship and then justified by Mr. Haven with rationalizations similar to this one. Fifteen thousand people have gone through such grinder. Fortunate those who left soon enough but the lives of those who stayed for decades was deeply hindered.
The Fellowship Cult will continue to hurt it’s members if it is allowed to continue. Please help stop it.
….
Daily Cardiac,
Do you know why you consistently fail in the second condition presented here which states:
2. Burden of proof rule. A party that advances a standpoint is obliged to defend it if asked by the other party to do so.
Could you explain what happens in your inner life when you simply avoid the questions or arguments being presented?
67 CT
Until you accept the existence, unconditionally, of everything YOU CHOOSE to call the ‘lower self’ without even the smallest reservation, your work will be a pipedream.
—————–
Why not just cut out the middle man?
I post this mainly for those making a decision about whether to go or stay and also for those newly out.
I left the FoF in 1984, and my spiritual life did not end there. In some ways, that’s when it began. The idea that there is nothing of value outside of the FoF is just false. Also, presence is not confined to FoF. Presence is a big part of many spiritual traditions, and while the emphasis placed on it and the tools for working with it may vary, it’s there for anyone who looks.
I didn’t find another “school” after leaving. I found places to learn, experience and grow. I stayed with each one long enough to take what was there and give what I could, then I moved on, bringing more lasting friendships in the process. This movement is growth. It’s not my “failure” or a “failure” on the part of the group/teaching that I didn’t stay with any of them for life.
Something I’ve learned about consciousness is that it needs to include connection. It needs to include connection with other people (not just those in our chosen group), other life forms and the other forms of consciousness we share this universe/cosmos with, including Divinity.
There is a great Mystery out there and in here. I don’t claim to be able to explain it or describe it. I can only experience it through my own human nature, when I’m (ta-da) present enough to experience it at all. It’s grand and glorious though, and for me dancing and engaging with that Mystery is what life is about. The Mystery is both immanent and transcendent, and recognizing our relationship with it isn’t dependent on membership or association with a “chosen” few.
One of the challenges of being newly out can be coming to terms with having accepted false information as truth. I felt betrayed and lied to and stupid and gullible for awhile. Then I got over it. It really hurts, then you get over it and get on with life. It’s also humbling, and that may not be a bad thing.
79. Clear post and this is what I feel/ experience more or less.
The pain of being lied to, is still there and I wish for people who join that they have the whole information before they join.
It seems more honest and truthful and supports my need for honesty and information.
How you DC can keep on believing your own words is unbelievable and pains my heart. How can you be so disconnected and defend a sick cause? Are you sick, yourself, I wonder?
Daily Cardiac,
Why do you ignore the facts?
Daily Cardiac:
“Real joy is presence, that means real suffering is a form of joy.”
Bulllshit, no suffering of any kind is a form of joy. I dare you explain that one if you are willing to rationalize it with anything but the dogma that says that everyone inside is having joy because they are suffering. That’s what you mentally retarded people have been believing Girard say for the last thirty five years. Keep up your depression dears, it is a form of joy.
Your crooked mind is so corrupted that it should scare people to know that such highly educated people as you are nothing but corrupt.
Conscience and Decisions by Girard Haven )Creating a Soul, pg 292.
“As we are all aware, for men numbers one, two and three ‘conscience’ is an aspect of feminine dominance which uses the negative emotion of guilt to keep men’s actions within acceptable bounds. On the other hand, apparently speaking about men number five or higher, Mr. Ouspensky says that conscience is the same thing as consciousness, only it looks different to us.
Conscience can be defined as an emotional feeling of truth on a given subject.”
Since all members except Girard and Robert are men number five and above, the conscience of all other members is Feminine Dominance.
Daily Cardiac:
You have stated that the Fellowship of Friends is a School of Consciousness, would you tell us what you mean by this and how does it practically express itself in the life of the School?
Why do you avoid the question?
52. tatyana
Marvelous post! Thank you for your observations.
I always wondered about the Russian mentality, how
it seems sometimes that they sold their soul to the devil.
It is no judgement though, I have not been subject
to a communist regime, and can only imagine how they welcomed
FOF as an escape.
And how easy it the was to be corrupted by the decadence,
the bait of a possible green card that RB offered.
Prostitution seemed part of their new way of life.
I feel like you do, a deep deep sadness for Olga, Denis, Sahsa, Swetlana, Sergei, Nicholai, Natasha, Kirill, Vlad, Genya, Misha, Leonid, Maxim, Vasily, Igor, Marina… My heart aches for you! You have so much more options in life than this mad house.
Could you explain what happens in your inner life when you simply avoid the questions or arguments being presented?
Could you explain what happens in your inner life when you simply avoid the questions or arguments being presented?
Could you explain what happens in your inner life when you simply avoid the questions or arguments being presented?
Could you explain what happens in your inner life when you simply avoid the questions or arguments being presented?
Could you explain what happens in your inner life when you simply avoid the questions or arguments being presented?
Could you explain what happens in your inner life when you simply avoid the questions or arguments being presented?
Could you explain what happens in your inner life when you simply avoid the questions or arguments being presented?
Could you explain what happens in your inner life when you simply avoid the questions or arguments being presented?
Could you explain what happens in your inner life when you simply avoid the questions or arguments being presented?
ad nauseam.
Lacuna Piñata/70
Jomo Piñata – 51:
“You liken your participation in the Fellowship to a marriage to a woman. A polyandrous marriage, clearly, because she is married to many. Many divorce her. But not you! You re-examine your marriage to her periodically, but you are convinced you are making the correct choice to stay. True?”
Lacuna Piñata:
Yes, that’s true.
All analogies will breakdown if taken too far and I think yours starts to. Analogies are meant to be mental snap shots, sketches. When you try to polish them they crumble.
So, if I understand you, participation in the Fellowship is something like being married to a beautiful woman. But just a little. One mustn’t push the analogy. It’s not like, ’til death do us part. Or is it?
Most of the time when I offer an analogy some will intentionally play off of what’s written and come up with a sarcastic “opposite” of what was intended. You didn’t go that far. You used my analogy to compose a variation of it; which is fine, as long as you take mine at face value before you move on to your own.
Truthfully, I just continued yours. I didn’t make up my own.
Lacuna Piñata: That said, you being so learned it seems like it took a long time to comprehend what I’ve been saying all along. But at least you did formulate a correct conclusion above. I think you are the second to go that far.
Jomo Piñata: Which conclusion did you mean? That you reconsider every day whether to leave the Fellowship? That you don’t feel free to leave the Fellowship?
Lacuna Piñata: Here’s my story: I heard about self-remembering. I tried it. It was what I had always been looking for. I heard about schools. I felt I needed a school in order to be in an environment that promoted SR. So I looked for one. I found one. I joined. It turned out that it delivered everything it claimed to deliver regarding an environment conducive to presence.
I understand your story. Every one of us concocted a story that sounded like that and you are no exception. We have learned how to construct that syllogism: I heard about self remembering. I tried it. I recognized it as what I had been looking for. I realized I needed a school. I found a school. I am grateful that I found a school. I do not want to lose the school. That’s the template, word for word.
So you told us your (boilerplate) story. That said, don’t be afraid to change your story to include MORE. I am sure there is much, much more in your story than what you have written above. Right now, the template contains the elements of your story that you want to emphasize as meaningful. But the reality is that the story can CHANGE to emphasize other things that you discount as sources of meaning now, but that you may find meaningful later.
Lacuna Piñata:
I can’t think of a more meaningful life than one spent in an esoteric school.
The life we imagine is seldom as rich, both in joy and in pain, as the life we actually lead.
There are no locks on any FoF doors. You walked out, so did 15,000 others. It’s never been easier to leave than in 2008.
Amen, hallelujah. The Yezidi circle is not made of bulletproof glass. It has a very real existence is in the mind of the Yezidi individual.
I join anew each day. My last day in the FoF will be my last day, in all likelihood.
Very poetic. But as to the “I join anew each day,” you are bullshitting me, buddy. Or rather, deceiving yourself. Your life has its own momentums and goes of its own accord just like everyone’s. Or maybe you think you are speaking in metaphor, but I don’t think it’s an apt one. Even taking you on your own terms, joining an “esoteric school” is an unusual life event. You may comply with requirements anew each day, but that is hardly the same thing. By the way, you have not addressed my questions about whether you feel free to leave or whether you actually engage in the mental evaluation of your commitment. It’s one thing to declare yourself a life member. Again, even interpreting you charitably, it’s an “aspirational goal.” What I want to hear about is whether your commitment to that goal has ever wavered, and if it has, why.
I personally don’t think it is going anywhere. Maybe I’ll screw up and get the boot but it’s unlikely. I’ve already dodged a few bullets in that regard. That’s my story.
For once, you have me genuinely interested. If you can tell about those bullets without “outing” yourself, I’m all ears. Like you, Lacuna Piñata! 😉
“… Joy is presence”
————
“true dat”
Saul Wredinown
79 waskathleenw
“It’s also humbling…”
———————
It was very humbling for me but I got over it.;)
>>>Once upon a time, in a Jungle village, a man appeared and announced to the
>>>villagers that he would buy all the monkeys they could catch for $10 each.
>>>
>>>The villagers, knowing that there were many monkeys around, went into the
>>>bush and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and, as
>>>supply started to dwindle, the villagers began to lose interest as
>>>catching the
>>>few left, took greater effort.
>>>
>>>He then announced that he would now pay $20 for a monkey.
>>>
>>>This renewed the interest of the villagers and again, they started catching
>>>monkeys. Soon the supply diminished even further and people once again
>>>felt the effort in catching the monkeys was worth more than the
>>>price and started
>>>going back to their farms.
>>>
>>>The offer was then increased to $25 each, and eventually the supply of
>>>monkeys became so small that it was nearly impossible to even find a
>>>monkey, let alone catch it!
>>>
>>>The man now announced that he would pay $50 for a monkey! However,
>>>since he had to go to the city on some business, he would leave it to his
>>>assistant to buy the monkeys on his behalf.
>>>
>>>In the absence of his boss, the assistant told the villagers. “Look at all
>>>these monkeys in that big cage that the boss had collected. Tell you what,
>>>I will sell them to you for $35 a monkey and when the boss returns you can
>>>sell them back to him for $50!
>>>
>>>The natives thought that was a great idea and collectively rounded up all
>>>their savings and bought all the monkeys.
>>>
>>>The assistant disappeared with the money and the villagers never saw
>>>either the boss or his assistant again.
>>>
>>>And that, my Friends, will give you a better understanding of what just
>>>happened on Wall Street.
and in FoF
Some more jewels from Daily Cardiac’s Cult:
“The Ray of Creation is a descending octave, and all the ordinary processes of growth are part of it…
The process of growth produces more people, more buidings, more theories and ideas. It moves away from unity to create a profusion of forms.”
G.Haven. Bridging Intervals. Creating a Soul.
So dears, don’t indulge in creation, keep repeating the same old form day after day feeding baby boys to mummy Robert.
There’s a technique and an agenda being followed by Daily Cardiac.
He’s targetting certain kind of aspects of the blog.
1. Wanting to make people feel bad for not moving on
2. Suggesting people are not forgiving.
3. Debating on philosophical positions were he finds theoretical weaknesses.
4. This person seems to have been trained. The agenda is pretty clear.
Just keep talking a little more, you go round and round in circles and your pattern will be obvious.
Your presentation of prince charming with the joy of suffering was lousy though, keep trying other strategies. We’re naive, loving and caring people but not as naive as when we joined the Fellowship.
NO, it is not easy to leave the Cult; especially if you have been a member for many years. NO, it is not easy to take the step.
Leaving is a statement.
DC’s posts need to appear. They are the best examples of Cult brainwashing. There is no voice in them and there is no person behind them.
The veil of imagination is only removed after one has left the Cult.
Try to imagine what it would mean to leave. Now, put the fear that your life will end aside. Now, put the fear that your spiritual life will end aside. Now, say to yourself that you can always re-join (even here there is a huge lock with a key only this key is a huge amount of money…). Nevertheless, visualize yourself re-joining. Give your mind some freedom.
Oh yes, there is another way: Do not sit back and only pray and behave in the expected way. Get yourself involved. Find a way to look behind the scenes. Go ahead and work for Robert and the Council. Get your chance to see Robert when he is not “teaching”. It is really the best way to form a picture of the drama. When you just listen to others and their stories you only buffer reality. You want to have the dream continue. It is a nightmare.
The veil of imagination is only removed after one has left the FOF.
There is a way out.
Ouspensky’s notes on “What is a school”; page 159 of the book Conscience:
13. Independent work outside the school is possible in contact with the instructor or without contact.
Hope you have not thrown away all your Fourth Way books…
79. waskathleenw – November 15, 2008
Thank you for this lovely and sincere message.
DC-
“This is also true. I think this is a given. One cannot know the lower self, confront the lower self, neutralize the lower self until one accepts its existence.”
I still feel we are talking at cross-purposes. The whole point is that this acceptance isn’t a ‘given’ at all – particularly in the fellowship, and it explains why there are such hugely differing perceptions of the school, inside and out…
It isn’t given to “me” (whoever that is) to either neuter or neutralize whatever I believe to be my ‘lower self’. Again, we have this feature of yours, where you begin to think in categories almost immediately.
For example, in regard to RB’s sexual behaviour, you nearly always attribute it to a higher purpose beyond the ken of ‘ordinary morality’…. Why do that? Why not just try to accept the evidence without categories. This is called letting the impression fall on you rightly, so that it becomes a real experience. The evidence we have is that some seem to benefit from his behaviour, many have been injured by it and feel abused, and probably the majority (inside and outside the fellowship) are very confused by it – and especially how the injection of sex can be reconciled with the student-teacher relationship. These are the facts before they have been processed by your internal commentary.
DC, you don’t have to stampede your perceptions so that you see this behaviour as an expression of either RB’s higher or lower selves, or add ‘Ahhh, but he’s outside ordinary morality’…. Just witness the contradiction, and contradictory feelings it inspires among the people who have actually experienced it.
When ‘it’ happened, there wasn’t a single person who has spoken here who didn’t look on RB with love and trust. That is the simple, unadorned truth. Nobody wanted to experience the terrible contradictions they had to endure as a result of his ‘proposal’.
Somewhere near the beginning of your contribution to this Blog, you said you wanted people to allow for other possibilities, that someone else could also be right. Now you do the same. Let this contradiction settle in you as deeply as possible and do its work without ‘your’ interference.
The situation is the same internally. There is a popular mis-conception, oft repeated, in the school that “Everything is a just a collection of I’s.” The school sees it this way because that is the level on which it operates. It’s a very eloquent testimony.
When you are invited to comb out ‘work I’s’ from the 10,000 idiots (passing thoughts), you are performing an action in your mind which has a definite result. However it is not necessarily one that is connected to your body – how it feels, how it experiences ‘imagination’ or ‘identification’ or a negative emotion. The mind cannot order you to ‘leave’ an identification unless it knows the rules of the body. How it works, how it understands, what it needs in order to co-operate….
There has been a lot of talk intermittently here about students taking pills, particularly anti-depressants, both inside and outside the school. Lately, I think it was Draco who mentioned that RB himself takes AD’s about 5/6 times a day. Again, take a moment to see why this might be so. If the sequence and the 30 imperishable Work I’s work so well in telling your ‘lower self’ what to do, then why use the pills? The obvious answer is that your ‘commands’ are causing an adverse reaction somewhere in the body which then need to be dealt with chemicals that communicate with it directly, and on its own terms.
So there are adverse reactions, both externally and internally. What you are saying is simply not getting through to the ‘whole body’ of current and ex-fellowship members without causing further damage. Just as RB causes damage with his behaviour and (presumably) can’t understand why? Or students use the work I’s and can’t understand why they have to take medication, or have sex/drugs parties after meetings?
You can go on arguing til you are blue in the face theoretically, but at some point you have to return to actual, physical results unmediated by all the explanations. The explanations will eventually crumble in your hands, the physical results won’t.
Yesri.
I happen to like the middle man.
95 Crouching Tiger
Funny you should mention this ‘drug alteration’ thing. At present, I am taking a whole ‘cocktail of downers’ – Haloperidol, Lithium and Olanzapine as well as a mood stabilizer – to stop me becoming too excited about the First Exhibition of my Academy of Precious Metal Arts and preventing me from acting practically. My whole brain feels like a Whirling Dervish. I am taking a day off from manning the gallery and leaving it to my ‘married couple’ students – a little Jack of Hearts bundle of fun. I will get back to you guys this evening…..Nigel
Thanks for 93. ex member
Well said….so clear and precise. Exactly how I perceive Dc.
Thanks for your clear and informative post.
O, Is this called synchronicity?
Wooh synchronicity feels gooood.
Martha Beck states in her book: Finding your North Star. “When you are in touch with your essential self, synchronicity appears…..”
Ceeeeelebration now, come on
du, du, du ….du…. du du du
Doubting you are in a Cult? Talking about mind control methods and fear to be exposed? Go to wikipedia.org, check Fellowship of Friends and Robert Burton, click on “edit this page” and then click on “history: to receive all revision entries. They are many…
Too many lies.
112 signatures on the petition.
http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?djindjin&1
What is holding you back?
Fear?…..?
Lets talk about it.
I have been thinking about some of the ideas discussed recently, our tendency to weave our life experiences into stories and narrations, the importance of using all input for reaching an inclusive understanding, the difference about the map and the territory, the frightening tendency of the human mind to be impenetrable to new uncomfortable or contradictory data… here’s a few random thoughts and personal observations, with more to follow (excuse the royal we, it came out that way and I don’t feel like rewriting):
Practicall psychological work on oneself, in the Fourth Way sense, is nearly impossible in the Fellowship because from the start members are sold a “new and improved” image of themselves as special people with a special destiny. Burton has a famous line that says “we are not special, only lucky”, but as long as one is a member the very idea of being lucky makes one feel special. As DC gently reminds us, the storyline we swallowed (I think we all did at some point, to some extent), is a powerful one: being told that one is now part of a real esoteric school, that one is working with (or better worked upon by) higher forces, that one’s teacher is the best the earth has to offer etc… offers such an attractive restructuring of one’s life narrative that most if not all are tempted, at least temporarily, to withold serious scrutiny, defer verification and play along with the dream.
Up until that moment we were simple, struggling, aimless human beings; all of a sudden, a magical realm has opened, and one is invited to be part of a special club, an esoteric elite. And it was so easy, really: since there were no exams, no initiatory rites, no selective process whatever. With the mundane act of making the first teaching payment, we were miraculously introduced into a world where our lives made sense, everything we experienced was part of a divine play, shocks were arranged for our benefit, we were raised one step above humanity, we didn’t have to play by the rules, we could feel superior to even our coolest friends, we were chosen to build a new civilization etcetera etcetera. I can see why to some it still looks like the best deal they ever made.
But there’s a catch to being so smoothly admitted into this very special club (the most special club, as Burton never tires to reiterate): one’s vanity and one’s fear are immediately evoked, diminishing our ability to see and discern. We so much want to believe we are worthy of such incredible honour, that we start to resent the part in us that doesn’t buy into the story, which is actually a manifestation of our conscience.
So right from the start one is torn between the very contradictory imperatives promoted by the cult environment: know yourself, and ALSO buy into this new self image we are offering you. The new identity is not up for personal verification: the only way to confirm if we are real students is by following whatever Burton says and staying in the cult.
Since we are excited by the prospect of defining ourselves esoteric students, we start looking at our old “life” identity with detachment, judgment and even disdain. After all, it’s a dying shell that we need to get rid of in order to become the new self, the higher and improved being who is not going to feel out of place in the context of the new narration: the disciplined student og higher knowledge, the waking paragon to the sleeping masses, the grateful child of celestial influence.
Now I ask you: how can one even begin to honestly know oneself, let alone perform any meaningful psychological work, when one is at the same time busily constructing a new fairy-tale image of oneself, gradually substituting ones’s ordinary personality with the wishful-fearful imaginary picture of “me as a worthy member of a conscious school” – an idea we never stopped to seriously verify to begin with?
Instead of stripping down preexisting illusions, we built illusions on top of illusions, actively feeding our egoic vanity and fears, until the whole idea of work on oneself became all topsy-turvy and we found ourselves devolving instead of evolving; substituting detachment with numbness, awareness with tunnel vision, love with indifference, compassion with idolatry, conscience with moral relativism, spirituality with spiritual materialism, verification with dogma.
The trap was set, we were tempted, we fell right into it, we slowly and painfully crawled out. And now here we are calling those still in, trying to show them what we have learned from our mistakes, to make them see, to set them free. But they think they know better, they believe we are the ones deluded and in need of help. It’s strange and ironic, but still better than when we didn’t have a voice and the possibility for communication at all !
59 DC
veramente – 4:
“DC, how do you know what it may be someone else’s process in leaving if you have no personal experience?”
It’s entirely possible to observe tendencies in others as well as oneself. It’s entirely possible to ignore tendencies in others as well as oneself. People are more alike than different. If that were not true no one would be able to emphasize with anyone else.
As far as not yet leaving, don’t count people out of the process who have not left. Some go through the same process as those who leave, but simply do not follow that impulse.
The good thing is that one day we will all know the whole story of the FoF
—————————–
DC, I bet you could make a teaching out of following or not the impulse of leaving the “school”.
It could become a trendy subject for using the work I’s , the sequence and whatever else can numb the conscience.
98 lauralupa
Not wishing to be ‘queeny’, but it was, for me, the being told that the ‘school’ was the only vehicle to everlasting life that led me to make the desperate suicide attempt in June 1989, when I was running out of money to ‘chuck at the FOF’…..Nigel.
Lauralupa 98
…”Since we are excited by the prospect of defining ourselves esoteric students, we start looking at our old “life” identity with detachment, judgment and even disdain. After all, it’s a dying shell that we need to get rid of in order to become the new self, the higher and improved being who is not going to feel out of place in the context of the new narration: the disciplined student og higher knowledge, the waking paragon to the sleeping masses, the grateful child of celestial influence.”..
—————————-
This reminds me when I joined the Fellowship of Friends Cult very quickly I found myself in vigourous training to get rid of my “False Personality”. Since I was considered to be in my FP 80% of the time there was no much left for me to believe about myself.
Fortunately I could take a breather every once in a while communing with other “students” who were much more light hearted and did not live at the Center.
It’s funny to think about this now, since in “life” I was a rebel of some sort, I got myself to become part of an authoritarian institution much more damaging and dangerous.
This desire for this self imposed “control” must have been at the roots of my profound anxiety and lack of self esteem.
I happened to remember the other day that while I was living in a cult house with other followers my center director encouraged me to work “under the table” and illegally collect unemployment at the same time. The money that I accumulated became my “ranch donation” when I moved to Renaissance which at the time was $1000.
This is the most balanced piece of river that has yet come out of our possibilities. Thank you all for your posts.
Here is a letter from a student to Mr. Haven on inner considering. Pg 266. Creating a Soul. (Interesting to note that most of the indoctrination “brainwashing,” was done through personal letters that most students who asked a question, cherished like jewels, because they were coming from the “next to be” conscious being.)
“I wish to understand inner considering better…
At the start, it was as if one was working simply to be less concerned about what people might be thinking, but it developed to a stage of being indifferent to people generally and eventually reached the stage of not caring much about anyone else”
In the Fellowship Cult self remembering NEVER developed positive emotions which is the outcome of sincere work on one’s self.
Daily Cardiac and Company: “Why did the Fellowship never develop positive emotions?”
Why don’t you answer the question. What happens to you when you disconnect from the question?
Why have you come to deny love?
Do you realize what you are doing when you deny love?
This pitiful letter from a student shows clearly the process that took place instead of leading to external consideration and love.
Inner considering, if I remember correctly, is defined as identification with other people’s valuation. In the Fellowship the fact that no one was valued onto her or himself but their talents were immediately put to use for the machinery, developed people who returned the same lack of valuation for others and strengthened the same social pattern that stratifies people because of what they have. People mattered only if Robert liked them, approved them, gave them his “blessed” look. Idolatry developed while the second line or love and solidarity between the members dried up like a plant without water.
The natural, spiritual inclination of any healthy human being to connect with others was and is seriously damaged in the Fellowship Cult. This is the main cause of depression amongst members. Depression, in as much as I’ve been able to verify, is a descent of the “ego” or “real I” or simply the depression of one’s self, into oblivion. The disconnectedness from other human beings is its cause: the lack of fresh, open, unadulterated references.
I’ve seen this process take place in myself as much as in people who take drugs. The drugs open up the inner world at the cost of alienating people from the outside when taken obsessively. I’ve also seen it in Dorothy who was never healthier than when we went to restaurants or food shopping. Just being with people in a normal environment cheered her soul even in the clouded laberinth of her Alzheimer. But she screamed and made us leave when I twice took her to Apollo D’Oro after she’d been with me for some time.
The connectedness with other people references one’s self. What matters about it is not necessarily being “loved” in the hippie sense of love, but being respected as a human being within the boundaries of a community with each and all the rights proper to that status. To be a citizen in the full sense of the word. To express one’s self freely and know that one can without getting hurt even if deeply questioned. To allow one’s self to sprout and grow like the flower in any tree, not like a bonsai in a human experiment in which the size and form of one’s gift has to be tied with wires to the Cults conditions. The Fourth Way is not a dictatorship. It happens in life because it is life.
Bonsai’s are beautiful but they are an aberration to their nature. If you do that to a human being you destroy the soul. The perfection emulated in a bonsai can only be acquired by an individual by the taming of his own soul through his own grace and will, not by external imposition into rigid forms.
The conditions that the community sets to allow for freedom of the individual is in itself, consciousness and love and within that “womb”, all and any individual can flourish. No one can flourish when only one individual has the reigns of power “to be” at the cost of others. “At the cost of others” there is no consciousness in our economic, political or spiritual-cultural lives, and the whole of the Fellowship functions at the cost of its members.
The model of the Fellowship Cult is the attempt of a time in human development to acquire consciousness under the same materialistic ideology in which the individual lives for himself and only for himself, proper of the capitalist process with complete surrender of the members to the enlightened man who had “achieved” it. It is an extremely decadent experiment in the soul life of humanity.
In System language what we’re really talking about here, is the insertion of first line of work, with second and third lines. The Fellowship and probably all cults, trap the member in his first line by violenty prunning his emotional life or second line in relation to other people who she/he might be connected to:
family, friends, nation. The whole of the member’s references are made vulnerable and minimized allowing for the new conditioning to become implanted. (Laura’s last post is talking about this process, thank you!). The motto: “work to death for the salvation of your soul” is what is really going on in the Fellowship Cult, like in any other Catholic Christian Institution that supports the Capitalist Ideology and probably the Communist Ideal too. Both Capitalism and Communism developed dictatorships with the same motto.
The question of consciousness in the relationship between the individual and the community, expresses itself practically in our external life as much as in our inner perception of ourselves as individuals. How we relate to others and the things around us is an expression of our consciousness as much as how our societies relate to the goods “we don’t share”, reflects the state of our consciousness as human beings. Overcoming the fear that “there will not be enough for me” so I have to grab as much as I can away from others and keep it in my little safe box reflects the limited consciousness of individuals who have not perceived their own limitlessness or the grace of being. It would not matter if there were little, if we knew that others would keep our share. That trust in each other is what we’ve lost. That is what depresses individual souls and the society at large.
Our times are brutal for the lower classes who go to war (for it is they who go to war), but equally brutal for the upper classes who live at war in their spiritual lives. The soldiers die as friends and heroes to each other, the high executives die on their own. Even their families have been broken apart with the lack of a community to embrace them. The stereotype millionaire stands as the icon of masculine authority diminishing his subordinates, wive(s) and children with his power and whole generations and layers of society, try to emulate that model.
As the letter expresses, the process of becoming a Fellowship member, alienates him/her from other people. It is less powerful if the member can “fit” into the hierarchy within the Cult because he/she continues to reference him/herself within the Cult’s Community but it is extremely destructive if the member is “left out”. There are variants and advantages to being left out. Many leave before it hurts them too badly but many become blind supporters trying to work on themselves in distant centers. Their inner life may not be as damaged which is one of the reasons why members in outside centers who never got involved with the inner life of the Cult, are that much bothered by its abuses. But that is just another form of blindness in their development. Consciousness knows that it is responsible for everything one is connected to.
Daily Cardiac and Fellowship members, what makes you think that you are not responsible for the abuses to people’s lives that Robert systematically interferes with? How many layers of conscience and consciousness do you have to slice to cut it out of your lives?
Families: mothers and their children, couples, children of the Fellowship and their community life being left out of it and allowed only to Sunday brunch to decorate the setting with their angelic faces so that Robert can take a good look at his future meal?
Why don’t you answer the question. What happens in your inner life when you avoid to look at reality?
Thank you for sharing your self with us. It is an honor to be here amongst you.
Oh dear, don’t know how that repetition happened. Very sorry for the unnecessary use of space.
I deleted the repeated text… fofblogmoderator
Whalerider/102
I happened to remember the other day that while I was living in a cult house with other followers my center director encouraged me to work “under the table” and illegally collect unemployment at the same time. The money that I accumulated became my “ranch donation” when I moved to Renaissance which at the time was $1000.
Good and evil do not exist in themselves, but only in relation to aim. Integrity means doing what helps the cult. Right? 😉
Elena around 92: “There’s a technique and an agenda being followed by Daily Cardiac….”
to all, and to whom it may concern;
regarding the tactics used by the person (or more likely the persons) posting and posing as DC, I’ll reiterate something implied in a previous post (around 62 on this page) when the shill again inserted itself — this is to all with good intentions — please consider how you are being ‘played’ here and remember what ‘they’ say about the pavement on the road to hell…. I’ll just add one more comment: ’round and ’round we go…
“bait and switch is a form of fraud in which the party putting forth the fraud lures in…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Persuasion_techniques
106 ton
the wiki link you provided has lots of options, do you have the article you are referring to? thank you.
vera 107
take your pick… and while you’re at it don’t limit yourself to the ‘options’ from that particular link… the study of fraud, manipulation and deception certainly doesn’t end there, but it might be a place to begin. the specific method used in manipulation and subterfuge was not necessarily the point of my post, the point was rather more generally to recognize the games that are being played, perpetrated and perpetuated here by the shill.
For an example of the ‘study’ referred to above, I’ll ‘take a pick’ somewhat randomly — it’s a link from the wiki link previously posted– you may (or may not) get the connection in relation to the activities of the shill and the victims of cult brainwash, whatever the case, by all means and in ALL cases ‘draw your own conclusions’ — enjoy (~:
“Puddle Thinking is a satirical analogy coined by Douglas Adams to illustrate the folly of an egocentric view…. imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise.”
and so on, etc.
Intelligence seems to grow through constant exercise. Absorbing new information, concepts and ways of looking at the world is how understanding grows, how we grow. Being trapped in a cult is most of all a trap of the mental kind. True, there are no visible locks. There are other locks, though, otherwise there would be no need for keys. And these are big deep dark locks, just as the keys members carry in their mind are rusty and old and heavy. Useless clutter in the form of sophisticated superstitions, abstruse concepts and outrageously self serving rationalizations takes all the space of conversation and official dialoge instead of the free flow of information that takes place in a healthy and free community, like this blog is after all. I don’t care if they are devoted members or shills, to me engaging with these people on this venue is a morbidly fascinating past time, and an excruciating verification of the limits of mind when confined in a narrow thoughtcage fraught with discrepancies and self serving lies. It beats watching tv and is almost up there with YouTube.
And one thing for sure, these guys are not ready for the floor
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=AW94AEmzFhQ
laura 109 “….engaging with these people… is a morbidly fascinating past time…”
hopefully not too morbid :~)
on the positive side, one way to treat ‘these people’ is as a ‘foil’ —
it is a way to make a point through expression of alternative views. (with the caveat that illusions about changing the view of a shill is most likely self-deception… imo)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foil_(literature)
for those who can’t access the previous wiki link:
“A foil is a character that contrasts with another character, usually the protagonist, and so highlights various facets of the main character’s personality. A foil usually has some important characteristics in common with the other character, such as, frequently, superficial traits or personal history. The author may use the foil to throw the character of the protagonist into sharper relief…. In some cases, a subplot can be used as a foil to the main plot. The “straight man” in a comedy duo is a comic foil. While the straight man portrays a reasonable and serious character, the other portrays a funny, dumb, or simply unorthodox one. The humor in these partnerships derives from the interactions between these drastically different personalities.”
Thanks Steve for moderating. Hope you’re doing well.
Ton, that makes a lot of sense and in my opinion that is cheating but they made cheating their mode of life why should it surprise one?
He takes so many days responding that they probably have to meet to find the right way to answer but the prettiest one was prince charming and the joy of suffering! They’re losing track of their own steps!
The Fellowship turned life upside down and backwards and when you do that to the word you get evil, as someone pointed out in the GF:live-evil. How do you explain that one Bobby dear?
Another jewel:
Things and Reasons
Pg 256 Creating a Soul by G. Haven
…students who perform manual labor at Apollo, such as workers int eh vineyar, find themselves feeling tha they are being ‘used’ to satisfy the instinctive-moving needs of the School with little return for themselves. From this point of view, the next step in their evolution would seem to be to take control of their lives and to do what they feel is right for themselves rather than simply doing what they are told to do.
To some extent, such attitudes are, of course, right. However, they also pose some serious dangers in that it si frequently the case that the part of one which feels used and feels it needs to take control and act on its own is as much a part of the machine as the part which was unthinkingly working in the vineyard.
….To begin with, men numbers one, two and three do the wrong things for the wrong reasons. They serve Influence A and promote false personality out of feminine dominance, inner considering, negative emotions, and so on. When a man joins a school, he begins to do the right things, but he continues to do them for the wrong reasons.
…If he is serious aboutevolution, he will begin to see that by noy doing the things the School ask of him int eh way they are asked, he isolates himself from his Teacher and from the help which he needs.
…With this he is finally ready to do the right things for the right reasons. The first and second forces for his evolution are no longer external; he begins truly to work on himself. AND HE DOES THIS BY SERVING AND OBEYING THE SCHOOL, THE TEACHER AND HIGHER FORCES, not because he is asked to, but because he wishes to, because he understands the necessity of it for himself. THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS TO THINK FOR ONESELF. It does not mean that one does different things. Instead, it means that one finds one’s own reasons for doing what NEEDS TO BE DONE; that rather than feeling obliged to obey, one chooses to obey.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There are a number of ideas which must be verified to reach this stage. In particular, it is necessary not only to verify the existence of Higher Forces, but also to begin to understand our position in relation to them. A true understanding of what angels are relative to men leaves one no choice but to trust them and serve them.”
The whole trip to anihilate personal initiative and accept Robert, the divine man number eight at the level of Jesus unconditionally, is set in place.
So strange to have read all these things and believed they were pure. That we were trully working for the will of the Gods. That Robert was a Conscious being and that things just couldn’t move differently because we, the members, were obstacles to each other. Wishing to participate and having doors closed time after time…
It makes me feel shame to read this things but it does not shame me to have loved you, Girard. I truly believed in you and it’s been a huge trip to understand how you got where you got. So many people were modelled by those thoughts.
Modelled into non beings but good money makers for the brothel.
Hello. I just found this site. I was a child exposed to the FOF by my parents, one of which I have read about here. I no longer talk to them, and am starting a search into healing this past. Is anyone was in the FOF from the years of about 1980-1991, can you please email me because I have questions about some things I am trying to piece together. Thank you.
yogaflower08@yahoo.com
97 & 99 are newly moderated
yogaflower, feel free to contact me at veronicapoe@gmail.com.
Howdy All,
Just dropping back in after a year+ hiatus.
98 thoughts
I first heard about the wikipedia entries for the FOF here on the blog.
Reading about the crazy editing, I decided to sign on and try an experiment. I only added things that I had heard directly about the aims/ideas of the school, and provided quotes and excerpts from both Robert’s and Girard’s books. Nothing inflammatory, just filling in the ‘gaps’ in what was being presented.
Everything was removed.
What kind of student{s} (a name was used in the editing page that I recognise) are so ashamed of their teachers own words, and those of his ‘pre-eminent’ student?
Lies take many forms. Lying by omission implies that there is something to hide……
People who are in the FOF have lost any connection to themselves and to basic human values. We are (were) brainwashed. So, there is somewhere, someone on guard, waiting to see a new entry on wikipedia and their job is to erase it.
I had someone erasing me from their lives the other day. Someone I have known for 16-17 years and have gone through so many experiences together. They sent me a card to tell me what an example I had been in their lives, how they appreciated my warmth, depth and compassion and what a very bad shock my departure was, both for them and for the center. But as far as contact is concerned, they do not feel comfortable in staying in touch.
It is so sad and disgusting. They just remove you from their lives. And it hurts and the only thing I can do is to feel the pain. So many years wasted in a way.
The FOF is a Cult; a Cult for the average human being, disguised in beauty and classical music (or shall I say Muzak). It is so ironic; one double checks the type of insurance they take, their new refrigerator, the new car but one never questions their “spiritual” leader.
There are so many lies.
100. lauralupa – November 16, 2008
In general, a feeling of repulse overtakes me when using quotations (after having done superficial “research” for meetings – undermining my university degree, intelligence and integrity…) but here what Ralph Waldo Emerson mentioned about luck:
“Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”
Thank you for your thoughtful post!
Elena – 65/72:
The FoF offers one product, and that is presence/self-remembering. So it’s a question of priorties. If someone values presence over the form that contains presence then esoteric schools make sense and are even vital for those individuals. If someone does not value presence above everything else then schools make no sense. Being in a school of presence and not putting presence first is the worst case scenario, as the higher in one will not be fed nor will the lower.
Based on my own experiences those who value presence first thrive in the school. That does not mean they agree with everything or understand everything that goes on; it just means their priorities are in order for them to succeed spiritually.
I’ve been listening to people’s thoughts on the blog and answering from my heart, that the main disconnect with ex members is that they do not consider or respect the needs and laws of the spirit world. They do not get the scale correct, they do not distinguish between the different scales/levels.They do not remember that spirit supersedes matter and thought, is greater than matter and thought; and must be given priority over matter and thought.
Elena – “Could you, Mr. Robert Burton, or any of his followers, explain how separating mothers from their children is an expression of Consciousness?”
This can be an expression of consciousness when it is determined to be what’s best for the mother’s spiritual evolution, or for the school’s evolution.
Generally children have not formed a magnetic center and are not ready to engage in a life dedicated to self remembering. These same issues probably came up in other schools and will again in future schools.
Actually the fact that Robert did not allow children in the school is one proof the FoF is not a cult. Cults are quite happy to absorb children into the fold as it’s a good age to be indoctrinated.
In most of the cases of mothers relinquishing care of their children to family or spouses it has not been determined if anyone, mothers or children, were really harmed by this exercise.
For one thing this exercise was part of the school’s early years, and has not happened, that I know of, for close to 30 years.
Now what really did happen in most cases? It’s not like people left their babies on a stranger’s doorstep. Possibly in all cases the children went to live with grandparents or the father.
Do you know how much this happens in today’s world, how many mothers willingly give their children to a spouse or family? Do you know how many young couples give their children to their parents to raise while they pursue a career. Sometimes both parents have to work and they have no choice. Where is the brutality in this?
What was Apollo like then? It was a thicket of brush with two dilapidated buildings. People lived in tents exclusively on FoF property, worked 12 + hours, 7 days a week. Is this an environment for children? On one level Robert was being humane for not allowing children on the property back then.
As far as separating:
“Members from their families,
Member’s from their cultures,
Members from their previous friends,
Members from their functions,Members from their bodies, their minds, their emotions and their sexuality?”
People made personal choices. All of the above happens in life on a routine basis to tens of millions of people.
How many students were helped out of a third world country by the FoF? How many were overjoyed for the opportunity. Many of them are ex students today, still enjoying the freedoms they gained as a result of them being in the FoF. How many foreigners married Americans through the FoF and made a new life for themselves here?
You have spoken of abortions in the past, supposedly prompted by Robert. It’s easy to make claims but how are the claims substantiated? I’ve never heard anyone’s name mentioned in that regard? And if names are mentioned what does it prove? Abortion is legal. It is legal by society’s law. Morally/spiritually we don’t know for sure when the soul comes into the fetus. But I would think an all knowing and compassionate deity would monitor and consider well the needs of unborn infants, and not leave the fate of a soul in the hands of men.
It can however be proven how many lives the FoF is directly responsible for helping to bring into the world. How many children were conceived by students who would never have met each other without joining the FoF?
Is it fair to say these individuals, and their parents, owe a debt of gratitude to the FoF? How many of these children of students/ex students are there? Hundreds, and each one verifiable; their existence not a question of debate.
How many viable careers were formed through training received in the FoF? Do any or all of these things count as good fortune arising from participation in the Fellowship of Friends?
As far as separating from previous friends, I wonder what percentage of previous friends remain in the average person’s life?
People in life constantly turn their backs on previous friends by changing schools, growing up, changing jobs, cities, spouses.
How many millions of people disown their parents and siblings, entirely without the help of the FoF? Gurjieff said about our world
that it’s a pain factory.
Suffering exists in every corner of the world; independent of the FoF.
Why focus your complaints on a measly 1700 people? And who precisely are you complaining to? A deity? Do you think they haven’t heard you by now? Do you think they have somehow lost track of this notorious organization run by a sociopath impersonating themselves for the last 40 years? And if not to a Deity then to whom? A government? Robert Burton has not broken any laws.
The FoF is a rape factory? One of the many ironies of the blog is that ex members fail to consider the spiritual realm and point to Robert’s failings based on ordinary man’s moral code, but when it comes to rape, they disregard what constitutes rape in the eyes of most governments, and more importantly, in the eyes of reasonable men using common sense, and invent their own laws when judging Robert Burton.
Abuse of power? This is indeed a mighty joke. What individual with even modest power has not abused it at one time or another? In sexual matters has there ever been a rich, or famous man who has not tried to use his wealth or status for his own enjoyment?
Has there ever been a beautiful woman who has not used her beauty to manipulate men? I’m sure there have been exceptions to the rule. But as a rule people use their status to get what they want.
In terms of conscious teachers and sex, it’s a much more complex issue. No one knows Robert Burton’s motives in that regard. To be conscious implies having will, and if one has will one can apply that will when and where necessary. Conscious teachers can also use their status for any reason they deem appropriate to higher aims (Conscious beings live for themselves, but they also are in service to higher schools first and foremost.)
There is one thing I have understood in this area and that is the majority of reasoning I read on the blog by ex members would not fit into today’s FoF. So if Robert’s lifestyle is being used as a tool by higher forces to force people’s hand on whether to stay or go, I can see it’s an effective tool.
Those who manage to keep presence as the top priority have stayed, while those who have placed something above being present (I think of Old Fish’s list of joyful things) have departed.
Elena, I am also certain of another fact. You have already condemned Robert Burton and the FoF. Nothing anyone says will change that. And any information you hear, no matter how factual and / or positive will have to be turned around in your mind and made into whatever fits your extreme position.
That being the case can anyone believe the things you say about Girard, or Dorothy? With all of the hate you have displayed on the blog can you be impartial about what you experienced, or have you molded those experiences into whatever fits your preexisting position.
Regarding Dorothy I have visited homes where she lived after she was in an advanced stage of her disease and I saw her to be well cared for. I know the the people who cared for her and they certainly don’t fit your profile of Dorothy’s caregivers.
One of Dorothy’s last requests when she was still in control of her thought processes was to live the remainder of her days at Apollo. The school made good on her request.
Dorothy was not the FoF’s responsibility to care for. If the school is as heartless as you characterize, it could have easily put her into a car and drove her to her son’s house in L.A., knocked on his door and said here she is, she’s your responsibility, not ours. But that did not happen.
On more that one occasion you said when you received Dorothy into your care she had not taken a bath for over a year and her fingernails were inches long and packed with dirt.
This statement is highly suspect. It does not fit human behavior. Even if those people neglected Dorothy, they would not jeopardize their reputation by giving her to you in that condition. Most people would, if nothing else, inner consider too much or would be in too much vanity to allow someone to know the degree of their irresponsibility.
If a friend calls me unexpectedly on the phone and says he or she is on the way to see me, I will probably do a little tidying up, wash a dish or two, pick up my socks off the floor, because I want not to be thought a slob. This is human nature. What you say makes no sense at all. Almost anyone would cover up that kind of neglect.
Also knowing how you felt at the time from your own writings, I can’t believe you would not have documented Dorothy’s condition by taking photographs of her in the condition you described. That would have been the most intelligent and reasonable thing to do.
For someone who put so much into the mistreatment of Dorothy, I can’t seriously believe that it would not occur to you to show the world what really goes on in the FoF. You had all the proof in the world delivered to your doorstep. And if your statements were true you would have shared that proof with everyone.
Dear Elena,
You said back in post 31 that “where we come from is not the issue, where we are going is what matters…..” I feel that isn’t completely true for myself and I’ve been thinking about it.
One of the deepest experiences for me since leaving the Fellowship has been to find that all emotional memories replay from where we were at that moment. To feel these emotions rather than to think about or judge them brings compassion for the human condition, the capacity to love, the respect for others. By finally finding compassion for ourself we become fully vested in the exploration of what it means to be human. The experience expands awareness and the context of our stories becomes more complete.
We share our stories and we heal what lead each of us to agree to isolate for all those years, content to be assigned a place in Robert’s cosmos (or devastated when banished).
I think “where we come from” can be one of our most unconscious myths.
Remember the idea of memory created through “higher states” as our bridge to somewhere over the rainbow?
many thanks Elena for your recent posts and the quotes from Girard.
I never saw these before and I wonder how I would have reacted reading them while in the FoF. As you said time and again, Girard is the perfect foil (thanks Ton) to Burton. Robert is a master of the extremely short forms: the dissing epigram, the self serving wordplay, the supercilious remark, the delusional haiku, the reassuring slogan, the elitist valentine, the inspirational cliché (please indulge me, I too love playing with words – but if you dare me I will find examples for all of the above). But whenever he tries (or more likely, one of his slave intellectual laborers tries) to combine these isolated utterances into a string, the result is dismally fragmentary, as anyone who has read his book can witness (yes, I have done that – well I gave it my best shot). Not to mention his recent ramblings, where he jumps from from one obscure subject to another without any trace of rhyme or reason.
But Girard, he is rational and methodic, and he likes to arrange his little thought bricks all in a row and build neat little impenetrable walls with them. His mind moves with discipline, from to A to B to C, patiently following the dogmatic line of reasoning to its extreme consequences (one has to acknowledge the fact that he really seems to believe the theories he sets forth, although I am not sure if that’s an advantage).
And with his soft spoken, methodic, pseudo-Ouspenskian style, he does well his job of sounding objective in convincing people that obeying is better than taking control of their OWN lives, which is the exact opposite of what the contributors to this blog have been forever trying to say.
(Ton, this is where it becomes a bit morbid for me – on one hand the former cult victim reacts emotionally to these quotes with sadness, repulsion and anger; meanwhile the wannabe psychologist who also inhabits my body is coolly taking notes in her notepad and finding them quite interesting and often unintentionally enlightening).
It’s amazing to follow this man’s rationale as it justifies going from A:
“the next step in their evolution would seem to be to take control of their lives and to do what they feel is right for themselves rather than simply doing what they are told to do.” (duh!)
to B:
“THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS TO THINK FOR ONESELF. It does not mean that one does different things. Instead, it means that one finds one’s own reasons for doing what NEEDS TO BE DONE; that rather than feeling obliged to obey, one chooses to obey.”
Since people are seen as robots ruled by their own machinery, how can they hope to escape their mechanical condition without giving up their unreliable thought processes (the many I’s) and desires (the lower self speaking) and coming to totally rely on the sacred triad school-teacher-higher forces (this part sounds like a nazi version of the Buddhist taking refuge in the Buddha-Dharma-Sangha)?
It makes perfect sense once you buy into the paradigm !
THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS TO THINK FOR ONESELF: IT ACTUALLY MEANS GIVING UP THINKING FOR ONESELF AND CHOOSING TO OBEY
I wish Orwell could give us his comments on that …
IMO it’s the the perfect addition to every cult leader’s make-your-own-slave toolkit.
BTW, just in case you missed it the first time, please enjoy the new unofficial FoF anthem:
pa pa parapa parara parara papara papa
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=1g__9JwFYWo
DC-
“Those who manage to keep presence as the top priority have stayed, while those who have placed something above being present (I think of Old Fish’s list of joyful things) have departed.”
This is really sad. Sustaining the presence you say you want will never be possible for you in the environment you’ve chosen… There’s a big hole in the fellowship teaching (and teacher) but you seem unable or unwilling to realize it. Presence your top priority? Try spiritual vanity. Too bad for you.
DC, you stupid child, how I wish I could slap you silly like only a good Italian mamma can !
72 recurrences on posts, references and quotes of “DC” Daily Cardiac out of 125 posts… and, yes, the usual 25 folks discussing here.
Just statistics,
26
Golb 126
Good, now this blog also has its own unofficial stats-keeper.
And, pray tell, this information goes to show ….?
Daily Cardiac, 55/121
Gosh, you really outdid yourself here. Seeing all of those terrible justifications about such serious matters all at once has really moved me profoundly (and I’m not being sarcastic). I really do wish for you and other current members to be able to look at the dark side of what you are involved with and feel remorse.
Golb 126.
Yes we’re such a tiny minority, the 25 (sorry 26) of us. We can’t possibly be right about the fellowship. Maybe we should just curl up and die, especially as we are only mouthing the idiocies of the lower self.
Yes, why not just surrender now this limited lower mind and enjoy, as the eternal spirit that We really are, the clear light of the unborn wordless eternal present which contain in its Oneness all forms, and yet is beyond the illusory separated forms that are born and change continuously and die anyway by themselves?
Greetings from the other Side,
Gold
On this Blog might be visitors from Germany or visitors who are able to read the editing discussions on Wikipedia in the German language and those links below might be of interest.
I expose only those three links (concerning also the FOF or rather the Forth Way, German:”Vierter Weg”, Gurdjieff and the Enneagram)
They represent not only the efforts of persons associated with the FOF but also the efforts of persons associated with different groups ( “Forth Way” in a wider sense) competing with each other and claiming “reputation”. But keep in mind the single persons might also be mirror images or mirages, who is to know?
Afterwards this lecture and the lecture of the various books/authors or text fragments concerning the Forth Way you will be prepared to face a discussion with different groups/members/teachers or there’s possibly been a misunderstanding.
The German (and the Russian, French, Japanese etc.) language/s is/are [a] nice sphere/s of activity beyond the orchard in California.
I can’t change any body’s mind on this Blog or in this world. All human beings and I have only the small possibility to listen to others (and our cats, dogs… and not to my “self”) without any rejection.
That’s a lifelong exercise and a Blog represents a very complicated place for this attempt.
Have a profound and sunny day.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diskussion:Vierter_Weg
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diskussion:Georges_I._Gurdjieff
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diskussion:Enneagramm
golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb
golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb
golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb
golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb
golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb
golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb
golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb
golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb,golb!!
Does that make you feel better?
121. Daily Cardiac
Collector’s Item!!!!
Copy and Paste on every page. Print it out, enlarge it, frame it, place it next to your bed and read it every morning as you open your eyes. Then pray to any possible Deity you can recall. Three times every day. Thank you Universe for spitting us out of that dark hole! Amen!
I don’t manage to read the bullshit posted under the moniker DC…. but I really don’t have to read it, I know what’s there by the smell. You know you don’t need to waste your time with this DC bullshit, you don’t need to read past the first line when the post begins with THE false premise which THE WHOLE FOF mindfuck is based on: I glanced at the top line of that last pile of shit left by DC wherein the shill writes: “The FoF offers one product…”
The false assumption upon which the FOF ‘system’ (i.e. brainwash) is based is that consciousness is a commodity to be bought and sold. Just another glaring example of ‘spiritual materialism’ in this overtly and overly materialistic age… the notion of consciousness as a ‘product’ is ABSOLUTE FUCKING UNBELIEVABLE BULLSHIT! belief in this falsehood is where the brainwashing begins, realizing that IT IS A FALSEHOOD is where the brainwash ends. the false thinking here is that you are not conscious… this falsehood is repeated and reinforced ad nauseum in the FOF and the stooge ‘buys’ the bullshit, he believes that he is not conscious and so he is not… it’s a bit like a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’… this is the brainwash and self-hypnotic trance the FOF sheep exist in…. the only ‘product’ the FOF offers is brainwashing and deep sleep. If you are reading this and still ‘buy into’ the FOF mindfucking bullshit, good luck with ‘the system’ it is indeed a tangled web you are in.
I tend to agree with you Ton, I don’t see any further point in trying to have a conversation with this person(s).
CT
conversation is not what DC is about (imo)…
I meant to add this to my last post…. regarding the scam that turns consciousness into a ‘commodity’ — it would be laughable if not for the suffering inflicted by taking advantage of the gullible and the guileless…
“I am not making this up……. there is a cult (The Fellowship of Friends) in Northern California existing at a location called Oregon House where the heterosexual male members submit to sex with the 60-some-odd year old homosexual cult leader and even convince their wives that it is for their own spiritual good. They do this — now get this part — because they believe they are psychologically asleep (unaware of themselves) and they want to do anything they can to wake up (become aware of themselves). So they give their money, all their time and even their penises to Robert Earl Burton, the self-proclaimed “awakened” cult leader. Before you laugh and shake your head, these people seriously believe that they are already so advanced in “awakening” that you as an ordinary citizen can’t understand how they are not being exploited by the cult leader, but rather are receiving incredible gifts of teaching. How’s that for some convenient doublethink brainwashing?”
GG
I hope Ryan McCarty from the Appeal Democrat is reading. Printing Daily Cardiac’s post #121 would be enlightening to the public.
Daily Challenge:
“Why focus your complaints on a measly 1700 people?”
The sinking of the Titanic resulted in the deaths of 1,517 people, making it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history.
Lacuna Piñata/121
The FoF offers one product, and that is presence/self-remembering. So it’s a question of priorties. If someone values presence over the form that contains presence then esoteric schools make sense and are even vital for those individuals. If someone does not value presence above everything else then schools make no sense. Being in a school of presence and not putting presence first is the worst case scenario, as the higher in one will not be fed nor will the lower.
Based on my own experiences those who value presence first thrive in the school. That does not mean they agree with everything or understand everything that goes on; it just means their priorities are in order for them to succeed spiritually.
The term “fundamentalist” has been used (by Richard Dawkins, among others) to characterize religious advocates as clinging to a stubborn, entrenched position that defies reasoned argument or contradictory evidence. The arguments you present here, Lacuna Piñata, are “fundamentalist” by this measure. You assert that “valuing presence” is the top consideration and that everything takes a back seat to that. Presumably you could be asked to do something criminal, or overlook something criminal, on the proposition that it was an esoteric exercise to assist you to develop presence, and you would do it. By your logic it wouldn’t matter that it was “wrong” to do it; what would matter is that, right or wrong, you did it with presence. And that would build your soul, n’est pas vrai?
But assume that what you say is true. Would the soul you built be worth having?
130, Hey, looks like golbpaste…. now read it backward! enjoy!
121 DC
Did you write this during the day or by candle light ?
Jomo, you da man.
130 Allan S.
LOL !!
golb:
“…and, yes, the usual 25 folks discussing here.”
Don’t drink the wine flavored kool-aid. We’re the 25 brave enough to talk about our little cult experiences.
read my lips:
The whole world is watching.
The whole world is watching.
The whole world is watching.
What I tell you three times is true.
118, 131, 132 & 141 are newly moderated
“Does that make you feel better?”
For who didn’t get it (who????) that meant that DC is keeping up 3/4 of the blog this pages.
gold
Hello Cardiacs,
I’ll answer you sentence by sentence since that’ll make it precise enough even if the post looks outrageously long. I’ll just write my entries with a line ————–
DC: The FoF offers one product, and that is presence/self-remembering. So it’s a question of priorties. If someone values presence over the form that contains presence then esoteric schools make sense and are even vital for those individuals. If someone does not value presence above everything else then schools make no sense. Being in a school of presence and not putting presence first is the worst case scenario, as the higher in one will not be fed nor will the lower.
Based on my own experiences those who value presence first thrive in the school. That does not mean they agree with everything or understand everything that goes on; it just means their priorities are in order for them to succeed spiritually.
————–I wonder what the judge will say when you tell him that! When a lawyer asks a hundred of you, “What were you present to while members sent photos of young men to Mr. Burton? While these men were given priority visas? While they were dresses like Barbies? While they battered their wives and said nothing would happen to them because they were in Mr. Burton’s inner circle?”
What will you say then?
If the priorities of the Fellowship of Friends act against the well being of its members and causes harm on hundreds of people economically, sexually, emotionally and intellectually, the priorities of the FOF are against everything that the Constitution of the United States stands for. You cannot take a group of people and take all their rights out and pretend that after years of submitting to mental and physical control they can respond for their acts. It is not the members who are responsible for their acts, it is principally the Cult leader and the Inner Circle of the Cult who is responsible.
DC: I’ve been listening to people’s thoughts on the blog and answering from my heart, that the main disconnect with ex members is that they do not consider or respect the needs and laws of the spirit world. They do not get the scale correct, they do not distinguish between the different scales/levels.They do not remember that spirit supersedes matter and thought, is greater than matter and thought; and must be given priority over matter and thought.
——————You can expand on that one, it is still very weak. I don’t think you’ll get by with it with anyone serious enough. I do not expect you to believe my beliefs either but just in case you wish to listen to them, the Spiritual World is based on the grace of its beings. No being who is above in the Hierarchy can hurt anyone who is above or below. We are all helping each other. We are all, even in this physical realm, helping each other. The different dimensions are interconnected. To serve is to help without doing harm. You cannot harm and help at the same time and the Fellowship Cult only harms.
DC: Elena – “Could you, Mr. Robert Burton, or any of his followers, explain how separating mothers from their children is an expression of Consciousness?”
This can be an expression of consciousness when it is determined to be what’s best for the mother’s spiritual evolution, or for the school’s evolution.
Generally children have not formed a magnetic center and are not ready to engage in a life dedicated to self remembering. These same issues probably came up in other schools and will again in future schools.
————————How cheap, tell the judges that. You better get more specific or you’re all going to end up in jail.
DC: Actually the fact that Robert did not allow children in the school is one proof the FoF is not a cult.
————-Robert Burton did allow children in the School but only under certain conditions and those conditions neglected the children’s and the parent’s well being. They neglected the integrity of the family.
He only just recently tried to invite a member’s son who I think is not even eighteen to work at the Galleria when he found him young enough and probably thinking that his father had been such a good treat, he would allow his divine Teacher to taste his son too, after all, he wasn’t even his son was he, he was adopted. Fortunately the member left the Cult in horror.
DC:Cults are quite happy to absorb children into the fold as it’s a good age to be indoctrinated.
In most of the cases of mothers relinquishing care of their children to family or spouses it has not been determined if anyone, mothers or children, were really harmed by this exercise.
—————- You probably weren’t there when K would scream up and down the corridors of the London center because of the situation with the children that she had abandoned. You probably weren’t there when the other lady cried for months because the child she’d given up for adoption twenty or more years before had cancer and it was the first time that she was going to see her. How would you be there when you are desperately trying to not be present to reality?
There are things that no spiritual path would ask of a human being unless it is one of black magic. I dare say that you are all too stupid to even be intentional black magicians (for which I am grateful and do not judge you harder) but the carelessness of your lives runs so close to darkness that it is just a line away from black. Your practices are dark as hell. There are members who sit quietly outside the blog, who sincerely claim that Mr. Burton’s intense swallowing of semen, between six and sixteen times a day, have been quoted, are directly connected with black magic practices. I personally do not think that Girard Haven or other members are consciously practicing such things even if the things they practice or allow Robert Burton to practice are so dark, that they could very well be black.
DC. For one thing this exercise was part of the school’s early years, and has not happened, that I know of, for close to 30 years.
—————— Your eyes are so closed you think abandoning children is just the act of giving them away but children were not allowed in the Fellowship until late nineteen ninety five or so. That is twenty five years after the Fellowship began to function. When I joined in 1990 and moved to Renaissance in 1992, my children were not allowed which gradually implanted in my psychology a permissiveness to separate from them. I left my eldest daughter in a boarding school and my youngest I eventually left her with her father when she was eleven. This is the worst mistake I have ever made in my life prompted by the attitude the Fellowship of Friends Cult had on the biological connection of families. My children were all the family I had and I gave them up for years. The rest of my family had broken apart badly since my mother’s death. The FOF took the System’s ideas and distorted them until it ruined our lives. RUINED OUR LIVES. The fact that we will heal and learn and overcome the damages one day, does not mean that having participated in The Fellowship of Friends Cult did not ruin too huge a portion of my life to let it continue ruining other people’s. I beg forgiveness to my children and my family for the damages I brought to their lives in my blindness to belong to the Fellowship. It made me look at the sacred connection between us as something I could relax and let go of and we are, my younger daughter and I, still years away from healing from it. I am responsible for having left her, but the Fellowship is responsible for having induced me into leaving her. I swear to God, you will not continue to do these things to people with the same freedom you’ve been doing it for years.
I could write a book about this, why don’t I since you can’t see it.
Children are still banned from the Fellowship life and the Fellowship is NOT A SCHOOL, IT IS A COMMUNITY OF SLAVES WORKING FOR ROBERT BURTON’S BROTHEL. Children are banned “psychologically”. They are made to feel that they do not belong there, that they are biological accidents in their parent’s lives, that they are in fact a burden rather than a joy. Oh Daily Cardiac and company, how many times do you want me to write Heather’s story? Eileen’s story? Why were these children abandoned until they committed suicide? Why did Heather’s mother never take her into her house even after she tried to commit suicide three times? At least I knew enough about suicide to know that she had to be thoroughly and totally embraced. Why did Eileen come begging for help after being an alcoholic and did not get it from her father’s community and was so lost, so fucking lost that she opted to drive herself into a light post because there was no light at the other end of life?
Please help, please help these people get out of their madness, please help yourselves to a more dignified life.
You could say that Dorothy, Eileen and Heather are just a few people, the exception to the rule but they are not: They are the physical expression of the extreme to which the attitude of a community can bring their members to. Each one of these people is the result of the Fellowship credo, the Fellowship ideology, the Fellowship Way of life and in every one of these cases the results are simply put, PERFECTLY INHUMAN: they are the acts of people in a mind control environment that distorts their inner being so badly that they are willing to hurt children and old people.
DC: Now what really did happen in most cases? It’s not like people left their babies on a stranger’s doorstep. Possibly in all cases the children went to live with grandparents or the father.
Do you know how much this happens in today’s world, how many mothers willingly give their children to a spouse or family? Do you know how many young couples give their children to their parents to raise while they pursue a career. Sometimes both parents have to work and they have no choice. Where is the brutality in this?
—————-Life might be brutal but the Fellowship is criminal.
DC: What was Apollo like then? It was a thicket of brush with two dilapidated buildings. People lived in tents exclusively on FoF property, worked 12 + hours, 7 days a week. Is this an environment for children? On one level Robert was being humane for not allowing children on the property back then.
——————-For how long do you want me to laugh at your reasoning, you sick pimp. IT WAS ROBERT BURTON’S CHOICE TO TAKE THE MEMBERS OF THE FELLOWSHIP INTO AN ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH CHILDREN NEEDED TO BE BANNED FOR THEIR APPARENT WELL BEING. IT WAS HIS CHOICE TO PUT THEM UNDER THOSE CONDITIONS. IT IS HE WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR MAKING THE MEMBERS COMMIT SUCH ACTS THAT gradually made them into the pitiful human beings that all those poor women in the high ranks of the Fellowship Cult have become who, having abandoned their children, now think it is rather amusing to have other people’s children get systematically raped by the same man who asked them to abandon their own. Tell me if most of the “survivors” of the oldest generation today are not precisely those who made such drastic sacrifices in their lives? What makes it so difficult for you to put one and one together? What makes you think that these women who abandoned their children are not those who are in fact in power in the Fellowship and promote the seduction and brainwashing of those young men into THE LEGITIMACY OF Robert’s abuses, they have to do it because it justifies their own sacrifices. If Robert is wrong, who will forgive them for what they did to themselves? And their children? Every single member of the Fellowship of Friends who remained inside after those things happened was no longer a normal human being. They had each tresspassed the boundaries of human sanity. Even at war, no human society has ever sacrificed its own children or old people. The Fellowship Cult is not only not a Conscious School, it is the most retrograde expression of Consciousness of all times. The dysfunctionality of the Fellowship of Friends is so corrosive that the traces of humaneness has disappeared.
Daily Cardiac:
As far as separating:
“Members from their families,
Member’s from their cultures,
Members from their previous friends,
Members from their functions,Members from their bodies, their minds, their emotions and their sexuality?”
People made personal choices.
—————-People do not make personal choices under situations of mind control. Girard Haven’s books are systematic mind control bibles. Those holy scriptures of the Fellowship of Friends will prove in any court of law, how the Fellowship of Friends indoctrinated its members. I can open any page and find the dogma separating people from their own consciousness.
DC. All of the above happens in life on a routine basis to tens of millions of people.
How many students were helped out of a third world country by the FoF?
——————-Tell us how many if you know. Tell us how many young men under twenty five were helped and not other people. I dare you give us the numbers. Tell us how it used the musicians and exploited them so that they could not get proper jobs. Tell us everything or you will eventually tell the court. We will know sooner or later, because we need to know.
DC: How many were overjoyed for the opportunity. Many of them are ex students today, still enjoying the freedoms they gained as a result of them being in the FoF. How many foreigners married Americans through the FoF and made a new life for themselves here?
————Life?, Is that what you call life? Have you in fact forgotten that for the Fellowship of Friends LIFE is influence A, something a member should never touch so that he can be at the disposition of Influence C every time Robert wishes to have sex or have enough money to take his whores on a trip where he can bribe them more easily?
DC: You have spoken of abortions in the past, supposedly prompted by Robert. It’s easy to make claims but how are the claims substantiated? I’ve never heard anyone’s name mentioned in that regard? And if names are mentioned what does it prove? Abortion is legal. It is legal by society’s law. Morally/spiritually we don’t know for sure when the soul comes into the fetus. But I would think an all knowing and compassionate deity would monitor and consider well the needs of unborn infants, and not leave the fate of a soul in the hands of men.
—————There will be names, you can be sure of that. For the past eighteen years people have been helping many of the women who were in a relationship with one of Robert’s boys, abort. Many, many women and one of them will come forward and speak against you and tell us how it worked. Hell is black enough that you can’t hide it in daylight. I won’t give you their names but I know who I am talking about.
DC: It can however be proven how many lives the FoF is directly responsible for helping to bring into the world. How many children were conceived by students who would never have met each other without joining the FoF? Is it fair to say these individuals, and their parents, owe a debt of gratitude to the FoF? How many of these children of students/ex students are there? Hundreds, and each one verifiable; their existence not a question of debate.
—————-The irony of your statement makes it even more repulsive.
DC: How many viable careers were formed through training received in the FoF? Do any or all of these things count as good fortune arising from participation in the Fellowship of Friends?
—————–Tell us how many and who profitted from these careers? How many of Robert’s boys in proportion to others? How and why were those people who were helped, helped?. Why don’t you explain why the rest of us weren’t even given a chance to speak.
DC: As far as separating from previous friends, I wonder what percentage of previous friends remain in the average person’s life?
People in life constantly turn their backs on previous friends by changing schools, growing up, changing jobs, cities, spouses.
How many millions of people disown their parents and siblings, entirely without the help of the FoF? Gurjieff said about our world
that it’s a pain factory.
——–As I said, life might be brutal but the Fellowship is criminal and it will have to respond for its crimes. Lucky you that I am persecuting you before you actually kill someone, although for me you actually killed Dorothy, I simply saved her. In fact, for me, you killed Heather and Eileen, and I helped Heather enough and unfortunately was not able to help Eileen because I was myself too weak. And you certainly killed Joseph Monteleone with your repulsive neglect of Fellowship members in any kind of suffering. Yes, there are exceptions like Tamara who after making a film showing the wonders of Divine Robert was sent to Springs….. to suffer less, but tell me how this exceptions do not prove our points, not yours.
DC: Suffering exists in every corner of the world; independent of the FoF.
Why focus your complaints on a measly 1700 people?
————–Because you are the people I loved and trusted and invested my intellectual, emotional and economic resources in for seventeen years. Because you are responsible for ruining a beautiful portion of my life and because knowing what I know I will not let you continue doing what you do, just like I would take a rapist to the police if I was able to catch him. And I have caught you. I know you better than I know the palm of my hands.
DC: And who precisely are you complaining to? A deity? Do you think they haven’t heard you by now? Do you think they have somehow lost track of this notorious organization run by a sociopath impersonating themselves for the last 40 years? And if not to a Deity then to whom? A government? Robert Burton has not broken any laws.
—————Robert Burton has broken every human law of decency, integrity and respect for each and all the members of the Fellowship Cult. He has broken innumerable Constitutional Laws with the Fraudulent presentation of the Fellowship of Friends Cult as a School of Consciousness. If the Fellowship of Friends were not a fraud you would have sued me from the moment I began speaking and you have not sued me only because you know you cannot prove me wrong. If the laws today protect Cults like you, the laws must be changed so I am appealing to the people who can see what is right beyond the law. The laws are written to protect people from abuse and when criminals like you make up new forms of abuse, protected by the laws, the laws must be changed to protect the people, from people like you.
DC: The FoF is a rape factory? One of the many ironies of the blog is that ex members fail to consider the spiritual realm and point to Robert’s failings based on ordinary man’s moral code, but when it comes to rape, they disregard what constitutes rape in the eyes of most governments, and more importantly, in the eyes of reasonable men using common sense, and invent their own laws when judging Robert Burton.
——————- Under mind control environments, inducing young men in socio-economic disadvantages to sexually submit to the authority of the institution is RAPE. These men are not in an ordinary environment.
DC: Abuse of power? This is indeed a mighty joke. What individual with even modest power has not abused it at one time or another? In sexual matters has there ever been a rich, or famous man who has not tried to use his wealth or status for his own enjoyment?
Has there ever been a beautiful woman who has not used her beauty to manipulate men? I’m sure there have been exceptions to the rule. But as a rule people use their status to get what they want.
In terms of conscious teachers and sex, it’s a much more complex issue. No one knows Robert Burton’s motives in that regard.
—————-Abuse of power not only with the men who had to submit sexually but to every single member who had to pay for it convinced that she/he was supporting a School of Consciousness and not a sophisticated brothel.
Good! Why don’t we let Robert tell the judges what his motives were? Maybe they’ll like it sweet!
DC: To be conscious implies having will, and if one has will one can apply that will when and where necessary. Conscious teachers can also use their status for any reason they deem appropriate to higher aims (Conscious beings live for themselves, but they also are in service to higher schools first and foremost.)
——————Yes, being conscious implies having the will to not hurt people who have been rendered defenseless in a mind control environment. “DEFENSELESS” IN A MIND CONTROL ENVIRONMENT PROPER OF A CULT LIKE THE FELLOWSHIP OF FRIENDS. IF THE ARMS OF YOUR INTEGRITY ARE MADE TO BE SURRENDERED WHEN YOU ENTER THE CULT, YOU ARE MADE DEFENSELESS AND THAT IS WHY EACH AND EVERY ONE OF US SACRIFICED MORE THAN WE CAN EVER RECOVER. We were made “defenseless” because we were stripped of our psychological make up in disconnecting us from our references and submitting us to the Fellowship references that we had to adopt to survive within that environment just like any person who is kidnapped willingly submits to the kidnappers. We were not kidnapped but we were indoctrinated to believe that salvation was only possible in the Fellowship, that war was imminent, that leaving meant the death of our possibilities.
PLEASE DON’T LET OTHER PEOPLE GO THROUGH THIS SAME GRINDER.
DC: There is one thing I have understood in this area and that is the majority of reasoning I read on the blog by ex members would not fit into today’s FoF.
—————–Today’s FOF is not the FOF of the past thirty five years or the FOF of the future. Today’s FOF is a Cult trying to save a few members under desperate conditions. All the “good” changes you’ve made today will succumb as soon as you are left without pressure and you will return to your favorite bad habits or priorities which are making money for the brothel and pimpimg for mummy Bobby.
DC So if Robert’s lifestyle is being used as a tool by higher forces to force people’s hand on whether to stay or go, I can see it’s an effective tool.
Those who manage to keep presence as the top priority have stayed, while those who have placed something above being present (I think of Old Fish’s list of joyful things) have departed.
——————-Try giving the judges that answer dear and they’ll wonder if they are in a Court room or in a Latin soap opera!
DC: Elena, I am also certain of another fact. You have already condemned Robert Burton and the FoF. Nothing anyone says will change that. And any information you hear, no matter how factual and / or positive will have to be turned around in your mind and made into whatever fits your extreme position.
————-You’re right, you cannot change the facts now. Everything that has been presented here by members and exmembers has deeply supported my claims against the Fellowship of Friends Cult. It is not I who will change my position, it is you who will disappear as a legal institution to defraud innocent people from every corner of the world.
DC: That being the case can anyone believe the things you say about Girard, or Dorothy? With all of the hate you have displayed on the blog can you be impartial about what you experienced, or have you molded those experiences into whatever fits your preexisting position.
————Anyone in their right mind can easily recognize that what you call “hate” in me is suffering and that I am in fact the one who has opted for non violent actions against the Fellowship. Legal and moral or ethical action but non violent, inspired by the same Ghandi your “beloved conscious teacher” despises so badly.
DC: Regarding Dorothy I have visited homes where she lived after she was in an advanced stage of her disease and I saw her to be well cared for. I know the the people who cared for her and they certainly don’t fit your profile of Dorothy’s caregivers.
————–Do you want me to give more names and details? I will in court. Dorothy had not been bathed for a year when I volunteered to look after her for the second time thoughout various years. She had not been given a bath and she stunk. Her nails were like a fakirs nails they were so long and black in dirt. She walked around with a doll who no one else could touch because she screamed and ate five loafs of bread a weak because her caretaker said she did not have enough money for more decent food. How many times do you wish me to tell you this story.
DC: One of Dorothy’s last requests when she was still in control of her thought processes was to live the remainder of her days at Apollo. The school made good on her request.
————–All those are lies. Janet asked Robert what to do with Dorothy when her alzheimer was in its early development and Robert told her to send Dorothy to a home. Janet who was Dorothy’s best friend was not able to do so and carried on her back the load of taking care of Dorothy on her own for years. When the situation got bad enough volunteers without payment were required. When it got worse, paid caretakers were required and when it got even worse she was dumped at my door with a “call me when she dies” and not one of the six high rank women of the Fellowship who had been carefully feeding her mostly bread for the past year, offered to look after her for even one hour a month. One of them personally told me, it was not right to have Dorothy in the Fellowship any more, she had to go to a home and therefore she would no longer help.
DC: Dorothy was not the FoF’s responsibility to care for.
—————-Tell me you sick criminals, if the FOF induces members and actually induced Dorothy into leaving her son with her mother and disconnect her from her family, who is responsible for the old people of the Fellowship if not the Fellowship itself? Tell me, what kind of School is this that simply uses people until they are helpless and then discards them because they are no longer its responsibility? Who if not the Fellowship of Friends is responsible for an 84 year old woman with Alzheimer’s who has been a member for over thirty years? What in your sick mind, makes you think that a human being who has worked to support her community for thirty years does not have the right to be cared for by that community, when that same community induced her into disconnecting from her family and people outside of the community? If the Fellowship Cult thinks that people outside of the Cult are sleep, dead, unconscious beings, why is it so willing to throw its members out into the hands of those people, when the members become helpless? If it were as conscious as it claims to be, would it not be coherent enough to protect at least its most disabled members from the people outside of it, who, it claims, are the six billion dead or sleep people on the planet?
DC: If the school is as heartless as you characterize, it could have easily put her into a car and drove her to her son’s house in L.A., knocked on his door and said here she is, she’s your responsibility, not ours. But that did not happen.
———–The irony of your response makes me puke for the second time in this post. After separating Dorothy and her son, with what face would you show up to his house and tell him that she was his responsibility? But you’re lying, he had stopped seeing her for ten years before she died, their relationship had not been good ever and no one knew where he was. But the saddest thing about this story is that in the deep mist of her alzheimer the only person who Dorothy still held dear to her consciousness was her son who she would ask about minute after minute forgetting she had asked about him the minute before and we would tell her that he worked in San Francisco and that he was alright. Then she’d ask again.
DC: On more that one occasion you said when you received Dorothy into your care she had not taken a bath for over a year and her fingernails were inches long and packed with dirt.
This statement is highly suspect. It does not fit human behavior. Even if those people neglected Dorothy, they would not jeopardize their reputation by giving her to you in that condition. Most people would, if nothing else, inner consider too much or would be in too much vanity to allow someone to know the degree of their irresponsibility.
If a friend calls me unexpectedly on the phone and says he or she is on the way to see me, I will probably do a little tidying up, wash a dish or two, pick up my socks off the floor, because I want not to be thought a slob. This is human nature. What you say makes no sense at all. Almost anyone would cover up that kind of neglect.
—————–Yes, any normal human being would have done those things but we’re talking about Fellowship of Friends members who got used to abandoning children and raping men in their twenties who couldn’t be “touched” by an old woman slowly dying in the most heartbraking isolation. They went to look after her and sat doing their work on the computer, or reading their book because the attitude that they expressed, including Mr. Haven’s in a letter to me, was that Dorothy was a useless, mindless “shell”. They thought she was worth looking after only as long as she didn’t actually require attention!!!! Only as long as she didn’t need to be touched, helped, made to move, do a little exercise so that the body would not pain her to death in a bed and the skin would not rot in the sheets. All these things were needed for a member of the Fellowship of Friends who had paid for thirty five years and instead they drugged her and starved her until she began having seizures so bad that they justified giving her hal dol and other extreme drugs that would kill that body over the weekend and Janet did not allow it because she knew and she knew that I knew and that I was extremely afraid something like that could happen. She could not bare her own conscience, THANK GOD.
DC: Also knowing how you felt at the time from your own writings, I can’t believe you would not have documented Dorothy’s condition by taking photographs of her in the condition you described. That would have been the most intelligent and reasonable thing to do.
—————I have photographs of Dorothy in each of those periods, in fact I have videos of her. The most difficult picture of her is with her doll. The only connection to love that she had during that period.
DC: For someone who put so much into the mistreatment of Dorothy, I can’t seriously believe that it would not occur to you to show the world what really goes on in the FoF. You had all the proof in the world delivered to your doorstep. And if your statements were true you would have shared that proof with everyone.
I did not put so much into the mistreatment of Dorothy, only you put that into the octave. I was no saint though. I did my best, but Dorothy and I fought like dogs every once in a while and everyday I would have to force her to get her into bed because she wanted to sleep in the chair where she’d been resting at the end of the day. Nothing was easy during those three years for either one of us, but we bonded with each other for eternity. May she forgive me for every time I was too tired or too weak to be more patient. Taming a mad dog is not a far off analogy to the condition in which Dorothy was brought to me. From an old woman with alzheimer’s in strong physical condition, in three months she was rendered a crazy, violent, drugged piece of meat that could not even stand when she was left at my door. I had to carry her in because Janet just walked away as she said, “call me when she dies”. Indeed, she came only a few times during those three years but I will defend Janet in any court because in the end she too knew that the Fellowship was humanless as she states in a letter after a confrontation with Linda.
————— I was much tempted to go to the police but at that point I still believed in Robert Burton and had not connected all the threads that I was able to connect after three years of looking after her and directly experiencing the attitudes of the Fellowship and Robert towards its members. At the time I held the caretakers responsible, not the Fellowship and since the Fellowship was to me still the School of Consciousness, I was called upon to assume responsibility for what I thought consciousness was and therefore, assumed the job of taking care of a Fellowship member, not because it was my job or because I had been trained as a nurse or because I did not have enough in my hands serving my disabled husband, but because as a member of a Conscious School I felt that it was OUR responsibility to take care of OUR members and if no one else was able to do the job, I was willing to do it. As the wife of the Second in Command of the Fellowship I felt it was my responsibility to assume the problem. I did it for three years, twenty four hours a day and every time I went on a teaching trip with Girard, Dorothy regressed terribly, except when Elizabeth took care of her: a trained nurse with a lifetime of experience. Agnes was also good.
WHY WAS THERE NOT ENOUGH MONEY IN “THE FELLOWSHIP OF FRIENDS CONSCIOUS SCHOOL OF AWAKENING” TO HIRE A TRAINED NURSE AND THERAPISTS TO RENDER A THIRTY THREE YEAR OLD MEMBER A LOVING DESCENT INTO THE HANDS OF THE BEYOND.
TELL ME YOU SICK CRIMINALS, IN THE NAME OF WHAT GOD DO YOU SPEND FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS ON EACH OF ROBERT’S UNDERWEAR AND ARE NOT WILLING TO PAY FOR A NURSE FOR YOUR HELPLESS MEMBERS?
Tell me, where is the dignity or the consciousness in having one of your members die like a pig on bread and drugs while hords of dandys walk up and down the corridors of the Galleria exposing the outrageous expense of their clothing?
Your arguments Daily Cardiac defy common sense and while you and the rest of the members might have lost it completely, you still belong to a world that will demand it of you. When you confront Robert Burton’s expenses in a court of law with these outrageous human offenses, you will not find one judge in your favour. I long for the day in which you no longer exist for your own well being and humanity’s.
…or much more with Elena’s posts….
The whole world is watching.
The whole world is watching.
The whole world is watching.
yes, on this you may remain 25 or so….I’ve lost this illusion. (Also because the world ‘is’ an illusion).
26
golb:
“…the world ‘is’ an illusion”
I repeat, don’t drink the kool-aid.
Golb.
Your wisdom is just staggering. What an idiot.
DC, now 122.
———
Brilliant, DC! Reposting this one frequently could be as effective a deterrent to joining the FoF as anything else being said here.
Dear Across the River,
I thouroughly agree with you and am glad you’ve tapped into the treasure of those practices.
If you take something like that sentence out of context you will get to a different understanding. If you take the whole of my work into context you’ll know that the Fellowship past is a great issue of each of my posts but in that particular post I was trying to accentuate the possible future.
Thanks for your attention to details.
Thank you all for your posts, it is a pleasure to be amongst you.
148. elena
Thank you very much for posting that.
You’ll get most likely no reply admissible in court.
And the good old DC shill will go on.
But for the Blog more “Pictures at an Exhibition”:
Since “disembodied spirits” & “prophecies of doom” are kind of tired & over used, I think the big selling point for FOF should be
“Goddess-in-man’s body”.
I’m sure this will help with recruitment & retention.
It seems to me that Elena may have struck a cord in DC’s broken instrument. I have not heard him so defensive before, he even talked about washing dishes and picking up socks off the floor when a visitor is announced. What is the matter with him? Did he forget about completing octaves?
Elena is persistent, and more. Her answers to DC diatribe, were fun to read. I have to say that DC’s contribution was impressively bereft of decency, compassion and simple emotion (I understand those “things” are not part of the FOF product). Somebody long ago on this blog wrote that consciousness without context is just another form of sleep (I paraphrase). Well, in FOF you can see it: sheep and wolves trying to promote presence. Anyone inspired to join this vibrant community and get acquainted to its many seminal contributions to humanity, can reach DC or Golb for more details.
“I will defend Janet in any court because in the end she too knew that the Fellowship was humanless as she states in a letter after a confrontation with Linda.”
Please be careful with that statement which does not mean that Janet literally said that the Fellowship was humanless in any letter, she simply questioned Linda for the absurdities in the way our situation with Dorothy was handled. Although Janet is still a member of the Fellowship I believe, she has my respect and gratitude for that gesture and the many in which she tried to support me but couldn’t even if I might still question some of her actions.
She was, in the end, more solid than my husband and for that I’ll be forever grateful. It made me realize that I was better off on my own than married.
opus 157
“…many seminal contributions…”
you must be referring to all the seminal fluid consumed by the hasnamas Robot Burton.
If you are thinking of joining the cult known as the Fellowship Of Friends, consider this; Robert Burton, the founder and ruling power of the Fellowship of “Friends” enjoys sucking cocks of heterosexual men. If you’re gay he’s not into it. You’ve got to be straight. It’s a big challenge for him and a huge ego rush. Robert Burton LOVES to suck on men’s cocks (heterosexual men) more than anything else in the world. Please consider this before you go to any prospective student meetings.
157. Opus 111
Actually it was …being present without context is sleep, but certainly close enough.
Robert consistently set up an Us/Them view of the world. None of us wanted to become a ‘Them’. I believe our herding instincts are such a deep part of our human nature that it allowed Robert to do the unthinkable. In the animal kingdom to be ostracized by the herd is death. In the Fellowship, being ostracized was often described as equivlent to spiritual death, a fate that we thought was worse than death. Those that did not support Robert and expressed public concern were put into the ‘soon to be them’ category. Essentially they were ostracized. Those that left were put into the ‘Them’ category. The exercise to not speak with former members reinforced this ‘Them’ concept. When I told a best friend that I was leaving, she said she would “never forgive me” for it. The Us/Them attitudes in the Fellowship are undeniably a factor behind the blindness to some of the hurtful activities.
Elena, I find your consistent courage and energy to stand against the wrongs in the Fellowship to be admirable. There were some ‘rights’ in the Fellowship but these do not make the ‘wrongs’ ok. I believe we still have a part of us that struggles against becoming a ‘Them’ and once we leave there may still be a part that wants to be a ‘Good Them’ – there is still a force that wants to be seen as supportive even after leaving. You have shown the strength to remain consistent in your views about the wrongs that we all saw, experienced and buffered (maybe even supported) while in.
Presence that ignores reality and common sense is not presence. When the effort to hold presence blocks out the needs of the moment, it is not presence but in fact is an obstale to real presence. It is a buffer. It is a kind of imagination. When valuing presence excludes other values and prevents one from seeing the obvious what we called presence is not presence but a focus towards oneself, a shutting out of a part of reality, that becomes a buffer and interferes with becoming a better and more unified person.
The Fellowship has the opportunity to show that it understands this concept by cleaning up Robert’s harmful ways. DC claims that Robert’s sexual activities are not illegal, although from the stories I have heard I believe they would be considered sexual harassment if anyone complained. It would seem from stories that proximity to Robert (essentially having a favored position) was often taken away when sex was refused. I believe this fits a classic definition of sexual harrassment., The Fellowship board continues to take the risk that there will be no formal complaints. With hundreds of men having passed through Robert’s bedroom this is a huge risk That an intelligent board would continue to take this personal risk, indicates to me just how strong the fear of Robert is. The Us/Them instinct is so strong that everyone is afraid to even speak negatively about Robert.’s harmful activities that have jeapardized the well being of the Fellowshiop for decades.
I would be willing to bet that the harmful nature of Robert’s sex life has never even come up at a board meeting, even though it could easily be argued that this is the single most harmful thing with respect to the well being of the Fellowship.
No body wants to become a ‘Them’. Is this a sign of personal evolution?
Sorry, it was “being in the moment without context is sleep”
162. Old Fish in the Sea
Years ago when “it” still wasn’t talked about, but gathering undercurrent buzz, it was brought up in at least one board meeting. But the board is just a relatively impotent and redundant appendage needed way more for legality than utility and direction.
Let us not forget this post. It is so much related to the role of children and the lack of a healthy emotional life in the Cult:
115 YOGAFLOWER
Hello. I just found this site. I was a child exposed to the FOF by my parents, one of which I have read about here. I no longer talk to them, and am starting a search into healing this past. Is anyone was in the FOF from the years of about 1980-1991, can you please email me because I have questions about some things I am trying to piece together. Thank you.
yogaflower08@yahoo.com
164: Bruce Yes, and I think that one board meeting was over 20 years ago and the person that ‘went against’ Robert was asked to leave. I expect that it has not come up since but would love to hear otherwise. He went in one day from a respected member to a ‘Them’ and was even referred to on some occasions as being part of a’play of crime’. I believe this further emphasizes my point about how strong the Us/Them mentality is and how it interferes with honest appraisal of the facts. I believe the board does have the legal power in a Non-profit organization, but in this case is too afraid of Robert, and the imaginary death of spiritual possibility to use their power to carry out their responsibilities. It is a difficult place to be and I sympathize with the board memebers. They have to be ‘really present’ to buffer that one.
DC:
You have company within; I truly hope, that you will some time soon, see, that your voice may not be entirely your own ~
Phone call from Robert Burton to James Battaglia, October 23, 1994
______________________________________________
Robert Burton. Hello James, how’s your liver? Are you
feeling well?
J. I’m fine, Robert, and it was a kidney transplant that I had.
Robert Burton. Yes, that’s right. Are you disturbed by this Richard Buzbee incident? I understand you left the meeting in protest.
J. Let me explain the scenario. I had been standing for an hour and you know my physical condition. It was two minutes to eight o’clock and there were about a hundred cars at the Town Hall. Why do you think I left?
Robert Burton. To beat the traffic!
J. That’s right. If I was protesting this meeting, I’d do it verbally.
Robert Burton. I don’t want the meeting to be an arena to discuss my sexual life and I allowed it to happen. C Influence wants me to be a homosexual and have sex with my students so that I may have humility. It’s a beautiful experience for myself and my students. I’m very loving and careful with them. The morality of the ark will not be based on Judeo-Christian principles.
J. What will it be based on?
Robert Burton. I don’t know yet.
J. I’d like to ask you some questions concerning this matter about Richard. Are you open to that?
Robert Burton. Yes.
J. Did Richard consent to having sex with you?
Robert Burton. I’m over fifty and not a strong man. Richard lifted his buttocks up so that I could remove his pants. After we were through, he said that it was beautiful.
J. Had you had sex with him previously?
Robert Burton. We had laid naked together in the other (Ethan’s) house and I fondled him. My students willingly have sex with me, I don’t force anyone.
J. I’ve talked with Richard myself and I feel that I have a good understanding of his experience.
Robert Burton. Just remember I am a conscious being and Richard is an unconscious being. Richard is lying through his teeth, and he set me up. Richard is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and I fell for the setup.
J. I’m not conscious and I can’t verify if you are conscious. The system tells me that the lower cannot see the higher.
Robert Burton. I am the brightest light in two thousand years.
J. I can’t verify that.
Robert Burton. Have you verified C Influence?
J. Yes.
Robert Burton. Well, the reason you’re able to do that is because I am a conscious being. Do you remember when I sent the car for you?
J. What do you mean?
Robert Burton. I have to make about five hundred decisions a week. That I was able to send a car for you to pick you up at the hospital was an act of a conscious being. It’s the little things that matter.
J. Robert, I don’t see how that allows me to verify that you are conscious. Are acts of kindness an indicator of consciousness?
Robert Burton. You don’t sound like you are coming from the king of hearts, more from your king of clubs.
J. I’m glad you brought up the king of clubs. It seems like you have a big identification with things pertaining to the king of clubs. What do you think is the right work of the king of clubs?
Robert Burton. Gurdjieff says the king of clubs is the beast of the jungle, it protects the machine from harm. It lives in the jungle.
J. Then it seems to me a necessary part to recognize and understand. Yet you have an aversion to king of clubs things like holistic healing, hands-on healing, etcetera.
Robert Burton. (vague response)
J. Robert, the only thing important to me is to keep my ears and eyes open and try to be in the moment. This moment. Talking to you is the most important thing happening. It helps me see the truth. That’s why I came to this school; I felt it was a bastion of truth. In time, though, I’ve found that most students don’t want to face the truth. Whenever I make an observation, the general response is that I’m being negative or that I’m losing the school. I see fear and feminine dominance as tools to keep students in control, I don’t have any fear of losing the school. I just need to be in the moment and if C Influence takes me out, so be it. Being in the moment is all that’s important to me.
Robert Burton. That’s not enough.
J. What do you mean, not enough? That’s what you’ve been preaching all these years, self-remembering. What more is there?
Robert Burton. You have to be concerned with your future.
J. What?!
Robert Burton. You have to be concerned with YOUR future.
J. I’m concerned with the moment.
Robert Burton. Remember when you were thrown out of the raft?
J. Yes.
Robert Burton. C Influence can shake you out of the school just the same.
J. Robert, again let me say all I can do is keep my eyes and ears open and stay in the moment. That’s all that’s important to me. I don’t fear losing the school if I’m bounced out of it.
Robert Burton. You have to be concerned about your future.
J. I’m only concerned with my present.
Robert Burton. You have to be concerned about YOUR future (very strong emotional energy coming from Robert). Well, I’m glad that you’re o.k. about this incident. It’s fine to share this conversation with other students.
J. I won’t do that, Robert, because it would influence their thinking on this matter. I would encourage them to speak with Richard and you to form their own opinions. Are you open to them calling you?
Robert Burton. Yes. Well, there’s a wedding here today and I have things to do.
J. Let’s keep the channels of communication open, Robert, and thanks for calling.
Robert Burton. Goodbye, dear.
__________________________________
James followed up this conversation with a letter a few days later…
Dear Robert Burton,
I appreciate you calling me and have taken time to digest the experience, and I’d like to offer you my perceptions.
My emotional center registered from your tone that you were very concerned with how I was dealing with what I’ll call the Richard Laurel incident. My action at the meeting of questioning Wayne’s angle and then leaving soon after was the catalyst for your call. I find it interesting that this was reported to you and that you acted so quickly on it. It verifies to me that you are quite active in the process of damage control over this incident with Richard and it makes me question why.
I made thorough notes of our conversation and thought about the emotional content of your voice during it. I feel that you put a lot of energy out to convince me that you are a conscious being, bordering on divinity. “The brightest light in two thousand years”, as you put it. The examples you gave to me for verification, such as my having verified C Influence because you are a conscious being and your sending me to a car to pick me up at the hospital did not penetrate as valid verifications of consciousness.
I had verified C Influence before and after being in the Fellowship of Friends and I don’t see any connection with your theoretical consciousness. As to you sending a car for me and supplying rides to my doctor’s appointments at my request, I appreciate it greatly and that shows me that you were very considerate of my situation, yet I don’t know they constitute acts of consciousness. Yet I have a pretty good idea of what is not consciousness through self-observation and observing others.
As to our discussion of your sexual preferences and that C Influence wants you to be a homosexual and have sex with your students, this in unverifiable to me. Your sexuality is your business and is not a real issue with me. The issue with me and other students I’ve confided in is the possibility of you using your position as a means to gratify what appears to be a large sexual appetite. I’ve talked with students who have been your partner and their experiences have been as diverse as the individual.
Some have said they were pursued quite vigorously until they succumbed, others felt it was a beautiful experience from which they gained tremendously, and others felt they were treated as an instinctive object for pleasure, then discarded. You said that your students willingly are with you and you do not influence them and t his my be true. You do hold a very influential position over many and I’m sure that you realize this does affect a person’s process in responding to you. Years of observation about the type of men you have in your entourage have shown me that they are predominantly very similar in their psychologies and appear to be particularly malleable.
My final concern is that over the years it appears you have many sexual partners and that precautions for sexually transmitted diseases are not taken. I feel this is not responsible action by all parties involved and can lead to dire consequences for you and many others. Have you ever had an AIDS test and have any of your consistent partners been tested? What do you feel is your responsibility and how do you deal with this issue?
My responses and statements to you appeared to make you more defensive of your position until you photographed my as being in the king of clubs rather than the king of hearts. This appears to be a standard response by you that one is becoming instinctive if your authority is questioned. The Fourth Way, as I understand it, is a process of questioning, observing, and verification. One that does not question is asleep, in my opinion. My questioning is a step in the process to find the truth, it does not come from disrespect or judgment.
At the start of our conversation you mentioned that you had just returned from staying at a hotel, I believe it was named after Muir, and that the address was 1998 and you made a reference to the numerical significance. At the teaching dinner I attended in September, you spent a considerable amount of time talking about interpreting license plate, place names and the like.
Robert Burton, what relevance does that have towards evolution and why is it such a common topic by you to students? I searched books by Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, Collins and Bennet and have not found any references to predictions. What does this information have to do with the Fourth Way and awakening? To me it appears to feed imagination. I may be wrong, so could you clarify your intent on speaking of these matters? I’d appreciate some relativity.
Robert Burton, I feel the intention of your call was to assure me that everything is fine and as you put it, Richard was lying through his teeth, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as you stated and you fell for his setup. I don’t know why you made a particularly strong effort to convince me. I’ve been told that one of your roles is to keep students asleep as well as awaken. If this was said by you I feel that you were trying to assure me that all is well and that it’s business as usual.
And you (Robert Burton) realized that I wasn’t buying it. Thus your example of being knocked out of the school felt like a strong warning to me. As I said to you, I’ve never felt as committed to my work and to supporting students as I do now. All I can do is to try to be present to the moment, keep my eyes looking and my ears listening. Trust my conscience and I’ll be shown the truth. The future will unfold as it will and I will accept it as it happens, without fear.
Robert Burton, I appreciate all the opportunities I’ve been given to self observe and try to develop will. For our efforts and all the efforts of all students who have built and are building Renaissance/Apollo I am forever grateful. I know of no other community where I have 1901 teachers and it is something I value highly. My observations to you come from a place of caring, support and concern for what we are building and I know that you can understand and appreciate that. Let’s keep the communications open.
Thank you.
With love and friendship,
(signed) James Battaglia
“I think the big selling point for FOF should be
“Goddess-in-man’s body”.”
This little item should be on the wikipedia site.
Regarding the board, I was told that they were advised to get liability insurance (and to pay for it themselves).
154
Elena, I appreciate that you address the larger picture and no one can answer DC like you can!
My attention to detail was on the point that without reconciliation with our own internal cosmos, assumptions and mental attitudes can continue to bias our ability to see the larger matters clearly, just as it was in the Fellowship. DC can continue to tell us how we should be viewing the FoF and we can continue to tell him why he should be sick to be part of it. Something different is needed in the end, though, and IMO that’s where “where we’re going” gets interesting.
Thanks for the flowers Across the River, I share them with all here. What I’ve written on that post is a synthesis of what the whole blog has exposed in its different moments.
The joy of being out that Old Fish shared, promises to bring a much lighter side of us that we’ve or at least I’ve never been relaxed enough to share. I do hope we can have some fun one of these days even while we continue to fight hard!
In relation to joy I wanted to point out Daily Cardiac’s ill intentioned reference to Old Fish’s post on Joy:
“Those who manage to keep presence as the top priority have stayed, while those who have placed something above being present (I think of Old Fish’s list of joyful things) have departed.”
reinserting here the well known Fellowship dogma that those who leave are superficial people who want nothing but trivial aspects of life: influence A and wanting to make people feel guilty because well being is an issue in their lives.
Next to “goddes in man’s body” could go, “ideal for Catholic Christian Masochists who did not get to feel guilty enough in regular Church.”
Daily Cardiac, how considerate of you. What happens in your inner life when you undermine someone’s presentation of joy by ridiculing his emotion?
You present yourself as an almost conscious being without negative emotions, would you call this one another aspect of your consciousness? Or just a slip in your ass?
Thanks Old Fish for your post on the Fellowship’s dark side. Too bad for them that they can’t even appreciate when someone like you speaks well for them. At some point it is clear that one cannot have any mercy with tarantulas.
“Join the Fellowship Cult and become the top voyeurist of how a sick old man dressed in pink, systematically rapes the most handsome dandy’s of the world with the support of the whole congregation who selects them, gives them visas, tucks them into bed with a good dose of viagra and discards them when they are no longer young enough to perform, with a handful of depressants!”
131 Golb
Yes, why not just surrender now this limited lower mind and enjoy, as the eternal spirit that We really are, the clear light of the unborn wordless eternal present which contain in its Oneness all forms, and yet is beyond the illusory separated forms that are born and change continuously and die anyway by themselves?
Greetings from the other Side,
Gold
———————————
you must be kidding….
BTW : 124,344 hits on the blog right now.
OMG. I think I remember who Dorothy was. Was she a heavy set blond lady who walked with a cane?
If that was her I remember a time on the patio in front of the “Linocln Lodge” when that motherfucker RB was making fun of what ‘lifetime’ she was on and giggling like a psychopathic little schoolgirl.
ARRRRRGHHHH
Oh, I forgot…
DC- Fuck you, you fucking asshole!
Now that I think about it that lady’s name was Doris.
Burton treated everybody like shit.
Daily Card Trick:
‘Actually the fact that Robert did not allow children in the school is one proof the FoF is not a cult. Cults are quite happy to absorb children into the fold as it’s a good age to be indoctrinated.’
That must explain the ‘Battle of Troy’ (also know as: Trojan War*) then. That is the battle where Robert Earl Burton makes an underage (less than 18 years old) child, of a Fellowship of Friends member, a member of the Fellowship of Friends in order to seduce the poor young man into violating his marriage vow. The euphemisms of: ‘ruse of the Trojan Horse’ and sneaking hidden warriors in ‘behind’ defenses and goddesses in quarrel, would seem obvious necessities. After the successful conquest, Renaissance becomes named Apollo. The retrograde progress of Fellowship of Friends cult ure moves backward in time from Italian Renaissance to Greek civilisation (and later to Egyptian and then back to Greek Apollo again). But conquest was not over. Later, there is a court battle.
Read about it here (1st mentioned on the blog on page1/79):
ArkansasBob · THE BURTON ASSRAM
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ArkansasBob/message/5
where the strength of the case, brought on behalf of the plaintiff by Mr. Greene, Esq., was so overwhelming (or embarrassing (’em bare assing), or both) that the Fellowship of Friends caved to a, reported, $5 million settlement and sealed the material from the prying eyes of public and Fellowship members, as a condition of the deal. (Gee! Where do my teaching payments (charitable donations) go? To lawyer’s fees and sex slaves it seems.)
Then there is the little known fact that the Troy conquest was facilitated by placing that person on salary, along with many other sexual conquests, so that they could be readily available to respond to the voracious appetite of the goddess in a man’s body conscious being. The person(s) is(are) then given special duty (octaves of proximity) so that they might be all the more convenient to the predator. How diabolical and with the full knowledge of the enablers – and smacks of organized crime where people have no-show jobs, collect checks, perform ‘special’ criminal duties and answer to no one except the godfather, all in the name of religion and/or spiritual progress for the individual and all. This Battle of Troy was no single isolated incident. It was only the tip of an iceberg where 90% of what was going on was invisible below the water line to the casual observer.
The intricate arrangements of these ‘behind the scenes’ activities in the Fellowship of Friends would boggle the lower minds. Makes you wonder how the facade was managed for so long and so well without people noticing. Hypnotized I tell you, hypnotized – like sheep to the slaughter – narcissistic supply.
I guess this describes the proof that the Fellowship of Friends is not a cult (but a real school) – the children were spared (as in spare sex partners that wait in the wings for the golden opportunity of filling some orifice).
It is all Greek to me. D_m_s and K_ll__p_, is your child ready for this?
* Trojan War (According to Wikipedia): The war originated from a quarrel between the goddesses Athena, Hera and Aphrodite [All whom reside inside the body of Robert Burton], after Eris, the goddess of strife and discord, gave them a golden apple, sometimes known as the Apple of Discord, marked ‘for the fairest.’ Zeus sent the goddesses to Paris, who judged that Aphrodite, as the ‘fairest,’ should receive the apple. In exchange, Aphrodite made Helen, the most beautiful of all women, fall in love with Paris, who took her to Troy. Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and the brother of Helen’s husband Menelaus, led an expedition of Achaean troops to Troy and besieged the city for ten years. After the deaths of many heroes, including the Achaeans Achilles and Ajax, and the Trojans Hector and Paris, the city fell to the ruse of the Trojan Horse.
Haven’t been here for over a year now.
What the fucking shit are you still doing here? I see here almost the same poor Ex-FOF addicted rewriting themselves to death.
Get out of here, have a life. Why spending the rest of your lives on this shit you left & hate. Don’t give me that bull that you care about those who stayed. Give me a break, you are here because you are addicted. Nothing will pule you out of this shit hole but yourselves.
I see a student who’s daily shitting on your heads and like good communist party members you all say that it’s raining.
Yeh, Yeh, your tender souls are hurt by Robert’s prick…poor souls…
A bunch of moron losers, that’s what you are.
Ashes to Snow
Feather to Fire
yesri
doris elizabeth
I recently wrote in a post that the love we need is not the “hippie love” but the status of citizens in the trues sense of the word and what I really meant is that we not only need the “hippie love” but also the the status of citizens in the full dimension of the term. In other words, we need the emotional life of our society to go hand in hand with the intellectual life of the laws that govern it.
elena
have you ever considered running for ‘public office’ ?
Ton,
If I knew myself prepared enough for such an honor, that is, the honor to represent other human beings, to protect and defend them fully from each other and myself, I would consider it. Today I can only hope I have enough being to at least represent myself where I’ve been this much abused.
So, the question to the FOF Board is:
Robert Burton, good cocksucker or great cocksucker?
Remember, silence is an answer.
Golb 141 & 147
Geez, read it backwards, I never thought of that…it’s like the love/evolve thing right? Yeh, groovy!
Allan.
Ps, I enjoyed!
Old Fish – 162:
“Presence that ignores reality and common sense is not presence. When the effort to hold presence blocks out the needs of the moment, it is not presence but in fact is an obstale to real presence. It is a buffer. It is a kind of imagination. When valuing presence excludes other values and prevents one from seeing the obvious what we called presence is not presence but a focus towards oneself, a shutting out of a part of reality, that becomes a buffer and interferes with becoming a better and more unified person.”
No one will find truer words than your own on this subject; on the blog or in any book. Judging by what you wrote we don’t disagree with what presence is, we just disagree with how to get there.
You probably don’t believe any more in an entity known as the machine/ego/lower self, that can’t be present, ever. And this entity is not passive, but will oppose presence circulating in the part of us that can receive it.
This entity is like a donkey dragging it’s heels when the owner wants to turn right or left and it wants to go the opposite way. Or it’s like a child at an opera who cannot take in the proceedings, but can’t be still for the adults to take it in either.
But this entity can morph into anything it want’s to morph into in any moment. It can become a learned professor, a saint, a beautiful man or woman, a “nobel cause”, anything it wants to become to lure us away from the moment and the duty of the moment.
Nothing I’ve ever written on the blog has contradicted any of your words. Your problem is not with what I say but with who I support.
I say the FoF is the perfect arena for presence and since you left you probably don’t think that is true, or you don’t really value presence above all else. And you are free to say anything, but only you know the answer to that. Was “joy is presence”, “presence is joy” on your list?
What I have experienced is that all good things come to one through presence; they simply come on the terms dictated by gods, not ourselves or other men and women. And they come when they come, not on our time table. Patience is a virtue, and not one that comes naturally for most of us.
I still don’t understand the animosity displayed by ex members. If the FoF is as evil as people make it out to be everyone should be elated to be free of it.
But elation of being out of an evil organization is not being transmitted on the blog. Just loathing, anger, irritation, judgment, mean spirited words, etc. If you found a way to harvest presence ouside of the FoF I am happy for you. Why do you take exception to me harvesting it in the FoF. Is part of your free will deciding what is best for me and hundreds of others who agree with me?
You are a product of the FoF (25 years or so) whether you admit it or not. You ultimately rejected it but it has molded your life nonetheless. If you like the person you are it is in part due to you being a member of the FoF all those years. If anything it is because of the FoF rather than in spite of it.
The easiest thing in the world to do is to support an organization, have a change of heart, leave it, and then trash it after you have gone. In life this is called sour grapes. It is only possible because vanity is entrenched in the human psyche. We are the center of the universe and when we withdraw our light from anything it simply withers in our eyes.
There is no consensus on what the FoF is or is not. Any open minded individual will come to that conclusion. And people who vainly try to present a consensus are abiding in self delusion.
Yesri Baba – 174:
“Oh, I forgot…
DC- Fuck you, you fucking asshole!”
Yesri Baba – 175:
“Burton treated everybody like shit.”
Lacuna Piñata/183
The easiest thing in the world to do is to support an organization, have a change of heart, leave it, and then trash it after you have gone. In life this is called sour grapes. It is only possible because vanity is entrenched in the human psyche. We are the center of the universe and when we withdraw our light from anything it simply withers in our eyes.
I’ll let Old Fish respond for himself, but I wanted to speak to what you wrote here. You describe the above as “the easiest thing in the world.” But, so far as I can tell, it’s something outside your experience. You have never left an organization after devoting twenty-five years of your life to it. So you are lecturing Old Fish that something outside your experience is “the easiest thing in the world.” In reality you don’t know anything about it. Right?
Instead, you express that trashing an organization after leaving is on account of the “vanity” “entrenched in the human psyche.”
Let me suggest to you that you have adopted a “convenient” explanation and have never really thought about it deeply.
(My discerning eye suggests to me that you have never really thought about anything very deeply, but have enthusiastically adopted norms of thought and behavior without thinking very much about them. I may be wrong, but I read your posts carefully and I do not see in them evidence of thinking things through.)
It is very convenient to label people who leave and give voice to their criticisms as “disgruntled former students” expressing “sour grapes” on account of wounded “vanity.” You didn’t use the term “disgruntled former students,” but I think you would endorse it. By giving these people this label, you can dismiss them and avoid taking what they say seriously.
In other words, there’s a strategy going on there to avoid taking in material that might cause you to question your own values. I don’t say it’s a conscious strategy on your part. It’s a community norm that you have adopted that has effects that you haven’t examined. If you took ex-members’ criticisms seriously, you might have to question your own values, and there’s an ideology that prevents you from doing that. Your values are defined by someone else, not by you. That’s why you can make pronouncements about “valuing presence above all else” — it’s someone else’s aspirational standard that you mistake for your own values. Whereas if you were honest with yourself, you’d have to admit that the values you actually hold are at odds with the aspirational standard someone else has articulated and told you you must embrace.
In honesty, Lacuna my brother, I do not think you can say you lead an examined life. Staying in the Fellowship depends upon avoiding leading an examined life. Do you think, Brother Lacuna, that the unexamined life is worth living?
%&!!#@&*&^%!!%*%!!!!
DC- “Judging by what you wrote we don’t disagree with what presence is, we just disagree with how to get there.”
You seem more approachable when you’re in a softer mood like this, so I’ll give it another shot…
Yes, this is one of the things we disagree on. As someone who has explored a more traditional version of Gurdjieff’s teaching since I left the fellowship, I feel the gist of my own contribution here is to point out places at which RB’s teaching deviates from that of Gurdjieff as it’s been transmitted by those to whom it was entrusted.
It is well-known that RB never completed a course of instruction under his own guide, and that guide – Alex Horn – was never more than an ephemeral fringe member of a Gurdjieff group led by J.G Bennett. All RB ever possessed was a very partial and fragmentary understanding of the 4th Way, and how the ideas fit together practically.
While any desire for presence, or added feeling for your own life is entirely laudable, Old Fish, like myself and others here, have tried to indicate that there are flaws in the process as it is communicated in the fellowship. The reason I raised the issue of the use of anti-depressants in the fellowship is because it fingers that fundamental flaw. ‘I desire presence, but it arouses a type of resistance that leads to a certain unwanted and unforeseen result – I take a drug in order to restore some lost chemical balance…’
In your current post you are relatively compliant and agreeable. In your previous one you were militant, claiming that those who left had lost their sense of priorities in relation to presence. All myself, OF, Laura and Ellen (to name just a few) have been trying to tell you is that there is a reason for the drug-taking and the anomaly of RB’s sexual mores. Something is not right in the state of Denmark, and if we can at least alert others who might enter the fellowship to the dangers as we see them, that is a perfectly legitimate action. Even the angriest posts (like Yesri’s recently) are perfectly viable because they are at least asking prospective members to ask WHY? They can then make their own minds up by weighing the evidence.
I feel prospective students should be alerted to the obvious realities of the fellowship before they cross the threshhold. The sexual behaviour, the possible side-effects like depression, the actual monetary demands, the lack of any meaningful relationship to the 4th Way – all these can be presented up front… Then people can make an informed choice.
When I joined I wanted to find a real 4th Way school. Instead I found something that had elements of both reality and illusion, and certainly nothing I could call 4th Way now.
I have no objection to you ‘harvesting’ whatever you feel you’re harvesting in this organisation. It is no concern of mine. But the school uses a lot of advertising, and that advertising needs to be more complete – hence the Blog… If there’s nothing to hide, you need to be confident enough to display all your wares (not just some) to public view before individuals have learned to rely on the fellowship as their support-system, and feel that the range of their choices has diminished drastically.
Daily Challenge:
“There is no consensus on what the FoF is or is not. Any open minded individual will come to that conclusion. And people who vainly try to present a consensus are abiding in self delusion.”
OMG, it is uncanny the ability of some people to delude themselves, is it not? I guess we can both agree on that.
“Any open minded individual will come to that conclusion.”
Is that open minded individual of whom you speak well informed…or did they just fall off the turnip truck??? What are your informed neighbors saying about you these days?
Enough is enough.
The FOF, Inc. is a cult and a rape factory….soon to be closed down and put out of business, Allah willing.
DC 183:
I am not trying to trash the FOF organization. I have mentioned on the blog that part of what I am is the result of the FOF and that for the most part, I like what I am. I learned many things in the Fellowship, had many wonderful moments and experiences and I am very thankful for my many friends, most of which are or were part of the group. Would I be further without the FOF – I cannot say.
But I do believe that the Fellowship has some issues that need addressing and that some of these issues make it difficult for those that are in, to see the Fellowship with any objectivity. I still have many friends (at least I think of them that way) that are in, but I believe, based on my experience, that the organization as a whole has some major problems that if not corrected will continue to cause harm and probably will eventually bring about the downfall of the organization. To point out these issues is not “trashing the organization”. My posts as I read them do not have animosity, but are aimed at helping me and others to understand and to become more free from the cult-like attitudes that can arise from being a member. This requires understanding that the Fellowship either intentionally or unintentionally promotes some attitudes which end up hurting people and limit personal expression in our society as a whole.
Here are the primary faults that I see:
1) Robert continues to harm the organization with his sexual exploits. I believe this hurts individuals who are unfairly influenced by his position and their own desire to be respected and learn from the teacher. For Robert to use his position in this way does not reflect well on the organization. I also believe that this isolates the Fellowship and limits opportunities for students. No one is proud to talk about Robert and his entourage of young me and it puts students “in the closet” because deep down they are ashamed – afraid for family, bosses and others on the outside to know the whole story. Also, because students must find ways to internally justify what Robert does, it desensitizes them to other signals from their conscience, causing them to find elaborate justifications for many issues that are not quite right. It also brings major risk to the Fellowship. So far the Fellowship has been able to settle out of court and had the money to keep going despite major set backs. This may not always be the case.
2) The Us/Them attitude is encouraged. This makes members afraid to leave, afraid to lose their possibilities and cuts off communication with the outside world. In short, it generates a cult-like atmosphere. It also separates students from their families which I think is not healthy on the whole and causes a great deal of unnecessary hurt. It means that students are afraid – afraid of losing the school which permeates the way they live. I think so many (with notable exceptions) are afraid to do anything that is not clearly sanctioned by the FOF. This limits the growth of essence and the variety of ways that students may contribute to society, to the Fellowship and to themselves. As has been mentioned, this can lead to depression and a lack of self worth. The Us/Them attitude is so strong in the FOF and it is perpetuated by much of what Robert says, by the restrictions on speaking with former students, the exercises that make students obvious in public, the predictions, and the general picture that life outside of the FOF is a wasteland.
3) Members tend to support Robert NO MATTER WHAT HE DOES and this causes them to become like children, not in the good sense, but in the sense of not taking responsibility. I believe that personal growth is largely about taking responsibility and that taking responsibility means being able to see when something is harmful to the whole. I believe that self Remembering is unfortunately sometimes misused so as to avoid dealing with legitimate signals from conscience.
4) The financial payments are steep. High payments limit the possibility of being in good householder with retirement, health plans and essentially puts burden on the society as a whole. High payemts are partially the result of Robert’s extravagances.
5) Responsibility for society outside of the FOF is discouraged. Essentially, rather than developing attitudes of helping society, students are sometimes influenced to not value society and to take advantage of it when they can. I feel this attitude lacks maturity, interferes with self respect, and continually comes back to haunt the Fellowship (think Theatron). The glee of taking advantage of society starts with Robert.
Do I have a complete picture? Certainly not. I am sure that there are other faults that I have not mentioned. Some would not call them faults but would go further. I also acknowledge that I could be mistaken about some of these issues. Still, when I put all the information together that I have, based on my experience, I have to see that the FOF has a dark side and that it is being largely ignored from within.
Yes DC, I do acknowledge the lower self but not in the same way as Robert. I believe his lower self has gained too much control which is overrunning his talents, aims, and the success of the Fellowship. I believe that he uses the idea sometimes in a way that limits self respect and the ability to act.
And Yes DC, I do value presence but I think the idea can be misused and that a trance-;like, meditation-like state, though pleasant, can be confused with presence, which is not so self centered. A little more looking out and a little less looking in.
Once again, my aims are not to trash the Fellowship but speak about how I see things now (for better or worse) in an effort to shed light on some of the points mentioned above. If these points cannot be adequately addressed I believe that the FOF will fail on it own. Justifying them is not the same as addressing them. Also, by formulating my attitudes I have the opportunity to learn from the formulation and from the comments in response.
I did not feel comfortable when I was In speaking publicly about these issues that I think many of us saw and ignored. I think we were afraid that we would be asked to leave. When I did touch on these subjects it created discomfort. I speak of them now, as an outsider, because I think they need to be said. I also speak about them to help formulate for myself and for others that have left, or are considering leaving, some of the FOF ways of thinking that are in my mind ‘life limiting’ – that separate one from conscience, self respect, happiness, and integration into society – that keep one from thriving. I believe coming to terms with these cult-like attitudes, and being set free from them opens the door to joy and a self-expression of each person’s individual talents.
I also feel that some of these things need to be said so that new students that enter have more information to evaluate what they are considering joining or what they have joined. So much information was kept from us.
Finally, I think many of us are very happy to leave, and very happy to be out. The Greater Fellowship is better evidence of that, than the blog. My friends that have left, including my wife, seem happier than I ever saw them while in, but there is also a feeling among many of us that we were hurt and deceived, that we gave too much and that we have not come away with a balanced compensation for what we gave. Is it best to leave that behind and move on? – probably. But acknowledging and understanding the hurt is part of leaving it, and helping others to avoid finding themselves in that place after spending the bulk of their adult income and years in the Fellowship seems worthwhile.
But to be fair, as I have said before, each person’s experience is different but in general we did get something. We are left with what we have, our being, our friends and our observations on it all. It is nice to have a place where we can formulate and express those observations.
Oops. My message seems to have doubled up like Elena’s. I seemed to accidentally hit some hot key in my final reading which made a mess and I did not catch it. My last version starts with the 2nd DC 183.
Perhaps you can fix this when you get a chance Steve. Thank you for moderating.
Hey Old Fish, I believe I cleaned up any repeated text- fofblogmoderator
176 & 177 are newly moderated
WhaleRider – 188:
“Enough is enough.
The FOF, Inc. is a cult and a rape factory….soon to be closed down and put out of business, Allah willing.”
Any one can call anything a rape factory, but laws are laws and if laws were broken Ford Greene would be calling you on the phone saying let’s go get these guys, I’ll waive my fee until we convict.
It’s encouraging that you said “Allah willing” It shows some sense of scale, which is rare on the blog. But ultimately Allah owns all the factories, he starts them, he closes them when he sees fit.
I’ve said several times everyone on the blog will know all there is to know about the FoF in due time. If it does’t come in this existence it will surely come in the one to follow.
DC ~
Your “sour grapes” analogy (A ‘right’ metaphor bubbling up from your conscience?) I wonder if, during an outdoor reception at the Galleria, whether you’ve looked over your back and up upon those slopes of browning and vacant grape terraces recently?
“Why do you take exception to me harvesting it in the FoF.”
Is another bubble?
—-
To me, DC, no one is talking about you ‘personally’ on this blog (Though, no doubt, our concern for our friends, including you, is breathing deep and ‘well’); what I feel many are doing (And maybe I am wrong) is taking exception with themselves via the past (bringing something to the past that was not there before) and attempting to heal and give outwards that ‘medicine’ of understanding and redemption (like a sun and not the incubating moon) to others.
In a school that allows no other form of graduation from its classrooms than for the student to drop out or be ‘officially’ suspended, you could ask yourself, ‘Is this a school or the very sort of brick building father Gurdjieff and Pink Floyd spoke about, over and over again?’
I still do not believe you are a member of the F.O.F., btw; not that it really matters; what you say applies to those still in and even ‘us’ who are out, because we’ve all wrestled with the net you call “entity” (plus its semantics and left brain infectiousness) and still do:
the oddity of your “harvest” is that your ‘school” relies on that entity for its daily bread, which turns any such ‘school’ into a circle and not a graduating ‘line’…
To me, there are wineries that may make wine relying upon the love of the wine-ritual, appreciation, moderation and ‘One glass a day health’; while others may knowingly produce products relying on alcoholism, conflict and the general addictions to aphrodisiacs that the painbody is famous for:
alcohol pushes conscience far to the background, revealing the true landscape of how it was so easy to do that in the first place with such a world famous athlete as Conscience… So, the Path is the path and such phenomenon is ours to glue wings to and wrestle with; that’s pretty moot as it stands in the right now…
The FOF doesn’t promote graduation, nor does it harvest those who have graduated, without the personal tastes of a person whose actions do not indicate that indeed he does know the student better than they know themselves, otherwise the heart would be involved, empathy, tolerance, humanity, care, etc.,
Instead, the ‘knowing’ is just that, (the student knowing that the teacher is knowing, who does not demonstrate this knowing of individual students through heart-actions): it’s a mental position that cannot crawl down the tree that it has been chased up and rightly so, it had no business messing around with the Love dog inside our heart in the first place, which, when read backwards from the outside looking in, pretty much says the rest.
Don’t leave the FOF then DC; though at least REALLY join it and ask someone about the Indefinite Thirteenth Grade clause…
Jomo Piñata – 187:
“You describe the above as “the easiest thing in the world.” But, so far as I can tell, it’s something outside your experience. You have never left an organization after devoting twenty-five years of your life to it. So you are lecturing Old Fish that something outside your experience is “the easiest thing in the world.” In reality you don’t know anything about it. Right?”
I don’t think your theory of not being able to understand something unless one has experienced it first hand, holds much water. I could give countless examples, but you can probably also conjure up many yourself.
But if there was any truth to what you propose, it would only confirm that ex members know nothing about the reality of one who overcomes the I’s to leave and ultimately stays.
191 Old Fish in the Sea
I hardly knew REB much, nor his ‘exploits’. So why do I still post 19 years after ‘ejection’ from the FOF? Because I firmly believe that I have – and others are near or on the way to – gained something that REB threatened to sell me for the rest of the time, had I stayed in the FOF – ENLIGHTENMENT. I don’t just mean being present to fine impressions or one’s ‘friends’, but to the ‘whole of one’s life’ (as Whitman said). I believe that crises (crunching of experience) can be both negative and positive and that “In a crisis, Christ [the Light of the Universe] IS!” I have a jacket, manically decorated, which has the emblem of my elementary school ‘St. Michael and All the Angels’. The emblem reads “IN TENEBRIS LUX” – an extract from the first few lines of St. John’s Gospel – “The Light was in Darkness, and the Darkness comprehended it not”. Hence back to my first lines in this post. I never asked Robert for advice or what career/vocation I should follow, but ran out of money and into debt to the tune of $30,000 (I still owe federal taxes, as far as I know) before ‘ejection’ in June 1989. The thing is REB, the non-knowing Anti-Christ, never knew my efforts in precious metal craftsmanship, so really – HIS FALSE PERSONALITY NEVER KNEW NOR EVEN NOW KNOWS ESSENCE – it’s all show (EGO). The Christmas Lights came on in our City of Exeter tonight; the Half Moon is Cradled in its Tiltiness and Cloud Streaks. We are one day away from the end of the Winter Exhibition of the Academy of Precious Metal Arts. The students have made £400, I have 5 new students to begin soon and there are some wondeful commissions on the way. MY STUDENTS ARE BRILLIANT. I facilitate – I do not boss (dominate), threaten or seduce them. Real (tangible/tactile) things are being made by real people. If only it were possible for you bloggers to be with me in person?! Oh, well! When we get to the lawcourts in San Francisco (I hope REB gets this Wake-Up call)…..Nigel.
Lacuna Piñata/196
I don’t think your theory of not being able to understand something unless one has experienced it first hand, holds much water. I could give countless examples, but you can probably also conjure up many yourself.
You misunderstand my position if you think this is what my position is. My position is, you made a criticism of Old Fish and ex-members generally, but your criticism is not informed by your experience. You reduce them to straw men of wounded vanity expressing sour grapes. This is an expedient for dismissing their points of view. Really, it is very rigid, black-and-white thinking.
But if there was any truth to what you propose, it would only confirm that ex members know nothing about the reality of one who overcomes the I’s to leave and ultimately stays.
Again, on scrutiny this proves untrue. I invite you to dialogue out of your own experience on this subject, talking about your specific experiences. You dangle your feet in the water of conversation, but you never jump in and have a real conversation, a real exchange out of your own experience. If I knew you better, I’d swear you were actually afraid of yourself.
Daily Challenge:
“Any one can call anything a rape factory.”
…especially by those ex-cult followers whom have been raped, emotionally, financially, and spiritually by Burton and the Fellowship of Friends, Inc.
“…but laws are laws and if laws were broken Ford Greene would be calling you on the phone saying let’s go get these guys, I’ll waive my fee until we convict.”
Interesting logic… Most lawyers I know don’t work that way.
BTW, regarding broken laws, Ford Greene is not the District Attorney for Yuba County, however, Patrick McGrath is.
I am glad you mentioned scale because we are not just talking here about the rape of a few “measly men” by a sexual predator posing as a spiritual leader (and 1,700 would be a very conservative estimate.) We are talking about the institutional rape of several thousands of ex-cult followers, many like me who are too ashamed to talk about the pain and suffering your corrupt organization and cult leader caused them…that is the scale of this blog, the first public document detailing the decades of abuse and fraud.
If I were to build a case against the FOF, it would start with a psychologist trained in cult behavior as my first expert witness.
In due time, my friend, in due time.
The Sword of Allah grows longer each day.
Thank you Jomo and Old Fish for your posts. What a treat to breathe respect for this medium in this river of possibilities.
Daily Cardiac: Why are you avoiding all the questions I asked you in my last posts?
Members reading, please note all the questions that were avoided.
Why does the Fellowship of Friends Cult does not have money to help its members while Robert Burton wastes it in throwing food away at the Galleria because the members can’t even eat without him telling them that they have a leave of absence because they were supposed to be looking at him instead of eating? How do you equate such narcissim with consciousness?
Did you join the Fellowship because you wanted to work with the System?
Have you verified where, how, when and why the Fellowship has deviated from the System?
What do you really think about that deviation?
Daily Cardiac: “You probably don’t believe any more in an entity known as the machine/ego/lower self, that can’t be present, ever. And this entity is not passive, but will oppose presence circulating in the part of us that can receive it.
This entity is like a donkey dragging it’s heels when the owner wants to turn right or left and it wants to go the opposite way”
That’s bullshit Daily Cardiac, the donkeys here are all the members who turn left and right when Robert says so. This is just more fellowship dogma reinforcing a separation of the human being, totally misunderstanding the System and establishing a credo of good and evil that is no different to Catholic Christian dogma.
There is no entity known as the lower self within any human being in the Fourth Way. There is one human being who posesses different parts many of which are not totally developed without work on one’s self. That is what the System states. I challenge you to present here where in the System it says that there are a good and a bad entity within every human being. “ENTITY”.
Nothing that is negative within a human being is REAL is what the System states. It is, so to speak, an armor that is developed from contact with the world. It is no entity. Negative emotions and other obstacles that stop us from developing aspects of ourselves are not entities nor they have a REAL source. THAT is what the System presents. What you mention is Robert Burton’s and Girard Haven’s constructions to justify their own impediment to work with their weaknesses. To be able to justify them they had to make up a doctrine in which they established that it was alright to coexist with the lower self or the machine while the “upper self”, for theirs never went “high”, could fly in the imagination of presence without context. Life, influence A, the world, love, sex, functions, the centers, all belong to the machine, their machine, which they do not need to perfect or work on because they are already men number five and eight and have reached a level in which they are no longer identified with what the machine does, nor hang up in its limitations. A few extra anti-depressants are enough to get them up and out of bed and lecturing the world with the horrors of everyone but themselves who are the only none machines on planet earth in the only conscious school equal to Christ’s. Everyone else in the Fellowship must continue to struggle for a few lifetimes to reach higher levels like Robert posseses. When too difficult questions are asked from Girard, then he’ll just say, he hasn’t a clue but that since he knows Robert is a conscious being he trusts him unconditionally and so must you if you don’t want to be asked to leave.
Joy and suffering in the Fellowship are both just aspects and expressions of the machine so they are to be discarded like the machine. Few more pills will do the job.
This post by Daily Cardiac is the greatest piece of dogma that has been presented on the blog. Please watch it with a ten foot magnifying glass so that you never forget it.
DC: “What I have experienced is that all good things come to one through presence;”
———presence only comes (according to the Fellowship) through tremendous shocks from the Gods.
———–This has nothing to do with the System which affirms that all human beings have experienced higher states in different moments of their lives, which can be more easily recognized in extremely positive or painful shocks but do not necessarily happen only with extreme shocks.
(In the cult people end up longing for suffering to see if they can ever experience a higher state)
DC: “ they simply come on the terms dictated by gods”
Which means, through Robert and with shocks, so keep bearing with your bad luck which is a shock that you need because you are the machine and the lower self and Robert hasn’t said you are not.
DC “not ourselves or other men and women.”
——–Can you see how he discards all human beings from having the possibility of offering the members joy or suffering? If people give you joy or good things, it is because they are keeping you sleep, trapped in influence A and the lower self. If they are giving you suffering it is because you are identified and must bear with it. But if the Fellowship gives you anything and the only thing it gives you is demand of you that you pay for everything, then it is giving you consciousness. In this way this “enabler” is not trying to justify your experiences in life, he is trying to indoctrinate members on how they must react to what the Fellowship offers them. He has to justify what the Fellowship does to you so that you can justify it for yourself and continue supporting it. He is, like Girard, standing on the authority you have given him to help you stand in the same position that he holds in relation to yourself and the Fellowship. Because you trust him, you adopt his points of view, even though your whole being might scream that that is not what you thought life was about. Because members have committed to “change” and “work on themselves”, they accept the dogma without fuss! Most particularly because if there is any fuss, they are asked to leave
Interesting to observe how ideas like: Nothing is easier to lose than a School, make huge payments because you are not wanted here unless you value it, submit to all the difficulties if you wish to become conscious and many others, made many of us believe that the Fellowship was indeed a real School.
DC: And they come when they come, not on our time table.
———What is being said here is: You cannot demand, ask or beg for good things, you have to let Robert give them to you when he so desires. Robert or the bunch of Gods on salary that work with him.
DC “Patience is a virtue, and not one that comes naturally for most of us.t of us.”
———Here he introduces a positive emotion: “patience” so that you think he is coming from a good place within himself and especially “the truth”. Patience does not come naturally, you have to wait many lifetimes before you awaken because all of you with the exception of seven men are not going to become conscious in this lifetime. Of those seven men, Girard fluked by letting people find out that he watches porno and marrying Elena so he’s out of my divine grace but you can now trust Asaf and Dorian who promise to be as corrupt as Girard: Dorian pays his personal whores with vouchers and Asaf tells on him so that he raises in position of trust but why? Because they left him out? Because he was envious that in that brothel, Mihai and Dorian were having as much “fun” as Robert?
Why did you tell on Dorian and Mihai, Asaf, when you know they were doing exactly what Robert does? Why were they criminal and not Robert? And did not Robert absolve them all because they are in fact all alike?
——–There is a tremendous amount of psychological manipulation in this post by Cardiac and it is directed to the members reading the blog and not to the bloggers who no longer matter. It is meant to reassure the members in their belief system. Just the fact that another member, be it Girard or whoever is stating this things, expresses them, is meant to reassure them that it is alright for them to continue believing them, that they are not on their own, that someone is responding for the accusations.
The tactics of the Fellowship have obviously changed in relation to the blog. It has realized that members read it anyway and what it is trying to accomplish with Daily Cardiac is to have someone present its position to the members. For those members reading, it is worth noting that it is not the Fellowship itself presenting these ideas which are obviously mainstream Fellowship dogma, but an “accidental” member who just happened to come by.
This tactic shows how the Fellowship is not willing to assume responsibility for its position. It could very well state, yes, this is the Fellowship point of view which would be more ethical and responsible but instead it chooses to put out an unknown somebody to give out its credo, to see how it works. That alone shows how little “being” there is in the Fellowship. The fact that Robert Burton has not stood up for himself after two years of questioning, shows the kind of man behind the mask.
A lot of fat for such weak marrow. You are all cushioning yourselves in a fantasy. If the fantasy were not as harmful as it is it would be easy to leave you all alone but dogma like this is meant to keep you enslaved for the rest of your lives. It has nothing to do with the System or the Fourth Way. You can look for yourselves at any of the books and you will not find anywhere the idea that there is an entity known as the lower self or the machine separate from higher centers. The most real part of a human being is beautiful and joyful. That is its essence. It is there in all of us as children and it is from there that the Spirit can develop. If you crush it to pieces by following Robert in his ill human practices, you will never develop consciousness.
The idea that False Personality actually dies when a man’s consciousness appears is not connected to this idea that the machine is separate from Real I, which Cardiac, Girard and Robert present. The machine, as presented by the Fellowship is a complete distortion of the System.
The Fellowship has abused the System as much as the members, which is why, after being consistently confronted by members on how much he deviated from the System, he had to state that the Fellowship was no longer connected to Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Apparently he’s moved back on that because the medicine was worse than the illness but he’d made his point which was essentially, to get the old ranks of the Fellowship off his back and replace them with the young generation of much more efficient pimps.
The System used metaphors which are in many cases being used “literally” by Robert and Girard to justify their own limitations. They are as distant from the System as the bible to its literal interpretation.
We could talk about this for years but this post is already very long although every time I begin one, I have the aim to keep it short. Please forgive my inability to do so with the issues at hand.
From the ACLU organization for those who might care for the pleasure of participating!
After eight years of a Bush administration that thumbed its nose at the Constitution and the rule of law, it was incredibly gratifying to see President-elect Obama in his “60 Minutes” interview affirm his intentions to reject torture and put an end to the Guantánamo prison camp and its sham military commission system which have been a stain on America’s name at home and abroad.
And a letter to be signed for those who care to.
Dear President-Elect Obama,
I was deeply moved by your recent affirmation that you will close the Guantánamo detention facilities and shut down the military commissions, which have been a stain on America here, at home and abroad.
Nothing would make me prouder than to see you act on your first day in office to restore America’s moral leadership in the world.
With one stroke of your pen, you can close Guantánamo Bay prison, shut down military commissions, and ban torture.
The Bush administration created a prison camp at Guantánamo – a place where they claimed the law didn’t apply. They detained hundreds of men without charge or trial, authorized torture, and prosecuted some prisoners in military commissions that violate our Constitution and international law.
We can’t let the system of injustice George W. Bush put in place stand – not for a single day. I want you to know that I will support your leadership on this vitally important issue in every possible way. And I will stand by you every step of the way to resist those calling for you to “go slow” or “wait for the right time” to act in defense of American freedom.
Please act on day one to make clear that the government you lead will be faithful to the Constitution.
The restoration of American freedom is in your hands. Give us back the America we believe in.
Signed,
[Your Name]
Obama is the 44th president of the United States. Do you think the 44 conscious beings will finally let Robert know what they think about him during this presidency?
177. Samson –
Haven’t been here for over a year now.
What the fucking shit are you still doing here? I see here almost the same poor Ex-FOF addicted rewriting themselves to death.
Get out of here, have a life. Why spending the rest of your lives on this shit you left & hate. Don’t give me that bull that you care about those who stayed. Give me a break, you are here because you are addicted. Nothing will pule you out of this shit hole but yourselves.
I see a student who’s daily shitting on your heads and like good communist party members you all say that it’s raining.
Yeh, Yeh, your tender souls are hurt by Robert’s prick…poor souls…
A bunch of moron losers, that’s what you are.
————————-
you are pretty funny Samson and full of assumptions in why people write here.
What’s your accent?
Unoanimo – 195:
“In a school that allows no other form of graduation from its classrooms than for the student to drop out or be ‘officially’ suspended, you could ask yourself, ‘Is this a school or the very sort of brick building father Gurdjieff and Pink Floyd spoke about, over and over again?’”
In a spiritual school graduation comes when one drops the body.
Uno – “I still do not believe you are a member of the F.O.F., btw;”
I would think you are in the minority. But it’s interesting in the sense that I don’t think you have left the FoF.
Your observations on FoF goings on are often in “real time.” So the three conclusions I can come up with is that you are a member
“in good standing”, or you are in a relationship with a current student so you can catch up at will, and even log on to propylia, etc. Or you have a good friend who is a “mole.”
Maybe you are a recent departee. There’s probably other possibilities but that’s my take on it.
As far as the barren slopes facing East, people felt the same way about the Court of the Caravans, the Galleria parking lot, the first LCS, the old barn. Something better comes.
Schools are in the business of Change.
201 elena
My mum had the maiden name of Wallace, whose Latin motto is ‘Pro Libertate’ (for freedom). It would be the greatest way in which I could pay back the United States for helping me with my Essence Growth (precious metal skils and small business experience) to testify against REB and the ‘inner circle’ (read – ‘black hole’) of the FOF in court with the aim of freeing the minds and hearts of all spiritual aspirants…..Nigel.
I love my country
By which I mean
I am indebted joyfully
To all the people throughout its history
Who have fought the government to make right
Where so many cunning sons and daughters
Our foremothers and forefathers
Came singing through slaughter
Came through hell and high water
So that we could stand here
And behold breathlessly the sight
How a raging river of tears
Cut a grand canyon of light
Yes, I’ve bin so many places
Flown through vast empty spaces
With stewardesses whose hands
Look much older than their faces
I’ve tossed so many napkins
Into that big hole in the sky
Bin at the bottom of the Atlantic
Seething in a two-ply
Looking up through all that water
And the fishes swimming by
And I don’t always feel lucky
But I’m smart enough to try
Cuz humility has buoyancy
And above us only sky
So I lean in
Breathe deeper that brutal burning smell
That surrounds the smoldering wreckage
That I’ve come to love so well
Yes, color me stunned and dazzled
By all the red white and blue flashing lights
In the American intersection
Where black crashed head on with white
Comes a melody
Comes a rhythm
A particular resonance
That is us and only us
Comes a screaming ambulance
A hand that you can trust
Laid steady on your chest
Working for the better good
(Which is good at its best)
And too, bearing witness
Like a woman bears a child…
With all her might
Born of the greatest pain
Into a grand canyon of light
I mean, no song has gone unsung here
And this joint is strung crazy tight
And people bin raising up their voices
Since it just ain’t bin right
With all the righteous rage
And all the bitter spite
That will accompany us out
Of this long night
That will grab us by the hand
When we are ready to take flight
Seatback and traytable
In the upright and locked position
Shocked to tears by each new vision
Of all that my ancestors have done
Like, say, the women who gave their lives
So that I could have one
People, we are standing at ground zero
Of the feminist revolution
Yeah, it was an inside job
Stoic and sly
One we’re supposed to forget
And downplay and deny
But I think the time is nothing
If not nigh
To let the truth out
Coolest f-word ever deserves a fucking shout!
I mean
Why can’t all decent men and women
Call themselves feminists?
Out of respect
For those who fought for this
I mean, look around
We have this
Yes
I love my country
By which I mean
I am indebted joyfully
To all the people throughout its history
Who have fought the government to make right
Where so many cunning sons and daughters
Our foremothers and forefathers
Came singing through slaughter
Came through hell and high water
So that we could stand here
And behold breathlessly the sight
How a raging river of tears
Is cutting a grand canyon of light
Ani DiFranco
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=DpuJujIu9gM
the choice of language the shill uses is telling… it reflects a deeply imbedded materialistic view, for example the previous referrences to consciousness as a ‘product’ being sold by this so-called ‘school’ and now presenting us here with the ‘business’ model of this so-called ‘school’ — change has nothing to do with what the FOF organization is about, but it is about control and manipulation….
” Coercive persuasion or thought reform as it is sometimes known, is best understood as a coordinated system of graduated coercive influence and behavior control designed to deceptively and surreptitiously manipulate and influence individuals, usually in a group setting, in order for the originators of the program to profit in some way, normally financially…..
The essential strategy used by those operating such programs is to systematically select, sequence and coordinate numerous coercive persuasion tactics over CONTINUOUS PERIODS OF TIME. There are seven main tactic types found in various combinations in a coercive persuasion program. A coercive persuasion program can still be quite effective without the presence of ALL seven of these tactic types.
TACTIC 1. The individual is prepared for thought reform through increased suggestibility and/or “softening up,” specifically through hypnotic or other suggestibility-increasing techniques such as: A. Extended audio, visual, verbal, or tactile fixation drills; B. Excessive exact repetition of routine activities; C. Decreased sleep; D. Nutritional restriction.
TACTIC 2. Using rewards and punishments, efforts are made to establish considerable control over a person’s social environment, time, and sources of social support. Social isolation is promoted. Contact with family and friends is abridged, as is contact with persons who do not share group-approved attitudes. Economic and other dependence on the group is fostered. (In the forerunner to coercive persuasion, brainwashing, this was rather easy to achieve through simple imprisonment.)
TACTIC 3. Disconfirming information and nonsupporting opinions are prohibited in group communication. Rules exist about permissible topics to discuss with outsiders. Communication is highly controlled. An “in-group” language is usually constructed.
TACTIC 4. Frequent and intense attempts are made to cause a person to re-evaluate the most central aspects of his or her experience of self and prior conduct in negative ways. Efforts are designed to destabilize and undermine the subject’s basic consciousness, reality awareness, world view, emotional control, and defense mechanisms as well as getting them to reinterpret their life’s history, and adopt a new version of causality.
TACTIC 5. Intense and frequent attempts are made to undermine a person’s confidence in himself and his judgment, creating a sense of powerlessness.
TACTIC 6. Nonphysical punishments are used such as intense humiliation, loss of privilege, social isolation, social status changes, intense guilt, anxiety, manipulation and other techniques for creating strong aversive emotional arousals, etc.
TACTIC 7. Certain secular psychological threats [force] are used or are present: That failure to adopt the approved attitude, belief, or consequent behavior will lead to severe punishment or dire consequence, (e.g. physical or mental illness, the reappearance of a prior physical illness, drug dependence, economic collapse, social failure, divorce, disintegration, failure to find a mate, etc.).
Another set of criteria has to do with defining other common elements of mind control systems. If most of Robert Jay Lifton’s eight point model of thought reform is being used in a cultic organization, it is most likely a dangerous and destructive cult. These eight points follow:
Robert Jay Lifton’s Eight Point Model of Thought Reform
1. ENVIRONMENT CONTROL. Limitation of many/all forms of communication with those outside the group. Books, magazines, letters and visits with friends and family are taboo. “Come out and be separate!”
2. MYSTICAL MANIPULATION. The potential convert to the group becomes convinced of the higher purpose and special calling of the group through a profound encounter / experience, for example, through an alleged miracle or prophetic word of those in the group.
3. DEMAND FOR PURITY. An explicit goal of the group is to bring about some kind of change, whether it be on a global, social, or
personal level. “Perfection is possible if one stays with the group and is committed.”
4. CULT OF CONFESSION. The unhealthy practice of self disclosure to members in the group. Often in the context of a public gathering in the group, admitting past sins and imperfections, even doubts about the group and critical thoughts about the integrity of the leaders.
5. SACRED SCIENCE. The group’s perspective is absolutely true and completely adequate to explain EVERYTHING. The doctrine is not subject to amendments or question. ABSOLUTE conformity to the doctrine is required.
6. LOADED LANGUAGE. A new vocabulary emerges within the context of the group. Group members “think” within the very abstract and narrow parameters of the group’s doctrine. The terminology sufficiently stops members from thinking critically by reinforcing a “black and white” mentality. Loaded terms and clichés prejudice thinking.
7. DOCTRINE OVER PERSON. Pre-group experience and group experience are narrowly and decisively interpreted through the absolute doctrine, even when experience contradicts the doctrine.
8. DISPENSING OF EXISTENCE. Salvation is possible only in the group. Those who leave the group are doomed.
COERCIVE PERSUASION IS NOT PEACEFUL PERSUASION
Programs identified with the above-listed seven tactics have in common the elements of attempting to greatly modify a person’s self-concept, perceptions of reality, and interpersonal relations. When successful in inducing these changes, coercive thought reform programs also, among other things, create the potential forces necessary for exercising undue influence over a person’s independent decision-making ability, and even for turning the individual into a deployable agent for the organization’s benefit without the individual’s meaningful knowledge or consent.
Coercive persuasion programs are effective because individuals experiencing the deliberately planned severe stresses they generate can only reduce the pressures by accepting the system or adopting the behaviors being promulgated by the purveyors of the coercion program. The relationship between the person and the coercive persuasion tactics are DYNAMIC in that while the force of the pressures, rewards, and punishments brought to bear on the person are considerable, they do not lead to a stable, meaningfully SELF-CHOSEN reorganization of beliefs or attitudes. Rather, they lead to a sort of coerced compliance and a situationally required elaborate rationalization, for the new conduct.
Once again, in order to maintain the new attitudes or “decisions,” sustain the rationalization, and continue to unduly influence a person’s behavior over time, coercive tactics must be more or less CONTINUOUSLY applied. A fiery, “hell and damnation” guilt-ridden sermon from the pulpit or several hours with a high-pressure salesman or other single instances of the so-called peaceful persuasions do not constitute the “necessary chords and orchestration” of a SEQUENCED, continuous, COORDINATED, and carefully selected PROGRAM of surreptitious coercion, as found in a comprehensive program of “coercive persuasion.”
Truly peaceful religious persuasion practices would never attempt to force, compel and dominate the free wills or minds of its members through coercive behavioral techniques or covert hypnotism. They would have no difficulty coexisting peacefully with U.S. laws meant to protect the public from such practices.
Looking like peaceful persuasion is precisely what makes coercive persuasion less likely to attract attention or to mobilize opposition. It is also part of what makes it such a devastating control technology. Victims of coercive persuasion have: no signs of physical abuse, convincing rationalizations for the radical or abrupt changes in their behavior, a convincing “sincerity, and they have been changed so gradually that they don’t oppose it because they usually aren’t even aware of it.
Deciding if coercive persuasion was used requires case-by-case careful analysis of all the influence techniques used and how they were applied. By focusing on the medium of delivery and process used, not the message, and on the critical differences, not the coincidental similarities, which system was used becomes clear. The Influence Continuum helps make the difference between peaceful persuasion and coercive persuasion easier to distinguish.
VARIABLES
Not all tactics used in a coercive persuasion type environment will always be coercive. Some tactics of an innocuous or cloaking nature will be mixed in.
Not all individuals exposed to coercive persuasion or thought reform programs are effectively coerced into becoming participants.
How individual suggestibility, psychological and physiological strengths, weakness, and differences react with the degree of severity, continuity, and comprehensiveness in which the various tactics and content of a coercive persuasion program are applied, determine the program’s effectiveness and/or the degree of severity of damage caused to its victims.
For example, in United States v. Lee 455 U.S. 252, 257-258 (1982), the California Supreme Court found that
“when a person is subjected to coercive persuasion without his knowledge or consent… [he may] develop serious and sometimes irreversible physical and psychiatric disorders, up to and including schizophrenia, self-mutilation, and suicide.”
WHAT ARE THE CRITERIA OF A COERCIVE PERSUASION PROGRAM?
A). Determine if the subject individual held enough knowledge and volitional capacity to make the decision to change his or her ideas or beliefs.
B). Determine whether that individual did, in fact, adopt, affirm, or reject those ideas or beliefs on his own.
C). Then, if necessary, all that should be examined is the behavioral processes used, not ideological content. One needs to examine only the behavioral processes used in their “conversion.” Each alleged coercive persuasion situation should be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. The characteristics of coercive persuasion programs are severe, well-understood, and they are not accidental.
COERCIVE PERSUASION IS NOT VOLUNTARY, PEACEFUL, RELIGIOUS PRACTICE OR CENTRAL TO ANY BONA FIDE RELIGION.
Coercive persuasion is not a religious practice, it is a control technology. It is not a belief or ideology, it is a technological process.
As a PROCESS, it can be examined by experts on its technology COMPLETELY SEPARATE from any idea or belief content, similar to examining the technical process of hypnotic induction distinct from the meaning or value of the post-hypnotic suggestions.
Examining PROCESSES in this manner can not violate First Amendment religious protections.
Coercive persuasion is antithetical to the First Amendment. It is the unfair manipulation of other’s biological and psychological weaknesses and susceptibilities. It is a psychological FORCE technology, not of a free society, but of a criminal or totalitarian society. It is certainly not a spiritual or religious technology.
Any organization using coercive persuasion on its members as a CENTRAL practice that also claims to be a religion is turning the SANCTUARY of the First Amendment into a fortress for psychological assault. It is a contradiction of terms and should be “disestablished.”
Coercive persuasion is a subtle, compelling psychological force which attacks an even more fundamental and important freedom than our “freedom of religion.” ITS REPREHENSIBILITY AND DANGER IS THAT IT ATTACKS OUR SELF-DETERMINISM AND FREE WILL, OUR MOST FUNDAMENTAL CONSTITUTIONAL FREEDOMS.”
Want more? Google “cult coercion manipulation”
“Give me a break, you are here because you are addicted”
——————
“Never tell a man his boots smell bad with your head up the cow’s ass”
Heywood Jablome
DC – “In a spiritual school graduation comes when one drops the body.”
I am very glad that you have defined your own position – and that of the fellowship as a whole – in one easy sentence. Now at least others can see your ‘advertising’ for what it is! Now we can all see that your claim to be ‘beyond the opposites’ (at least in your thinking, if not in your practice) is a chimaera. You are indeed identified with the notion of a ‘higher self’. Thank you.
The only possible graduation in a school of this sort is a kind of spiritual mutation. You may even turn out to have some of the ‘special powers’ of your leader, but you will certainly pay a price for it… and not at all the one you think. You will create a demon within, that is well beyond your control. Just look at the example you have in front of you. Angelic and ‘pure’ at meetings, very much otherwise even just before or after them…
One of the very best comments I’ve read recently was from Elena, when she says that “The idea that False Personality actually dies when a man’s consciousness appears is not connected to this idea that the machine is separate from Real I, which Cardiac, Girard and Robert present. The machine, as presented by the Fellowship is a complete distortion of the System.” In my experience this is a very accurate observation.
What you are experiencing is a mutation, albeit a powerful one, of a real teaching, and the mutations will only get more and more bizarre as time progrgesses – unless of course the ‘body’ in which the experiment is taking place is lucky enough to break down (GH) or leave the school first.
DC- “This entity [the lower self] is like a donkey dragging it’s heels when the owner wants to turn right or left and it wants to go the opposite way”
Jesus rode into town on a donkey. It was the most humble creature he could find. People laid palm leaves under its feet.
The state of warfare you always seem to describe in your posts only belies your own condition and that of the school, nothing more. Yes, you’re in a war, but one which is ultimately self-perpetuating and Self-defeating at the same time.
Good luck to you. I hope you do ‘graduate’, at least when graduation starts to take on a new meaning for you.
.. and like good communist party members you all say that it’s raining.
….
————————-
you are pretty funny Samson and full of assumptions in why people write here.
What’s your accent?
Hey All,
I have been down and out for a few days. Fun to catch up now. Thanks for all the fine posts. I really appreciate the new voices that keep this dialogue alive. I really appreciate the old voices that don’t give up – because they know what is at stake. See, Daily Cardiac mistakenly thinks he knows what’s at stake, too (“until death do us part”). And Fat Boy in his ignorance scoffs at the old timers, drinking in their own sour grapes.
See, I know both of them, I know Fat Boy’s wife, too. These are good people, just people whose hearts got turned around too soon. So here’s a suggestion for – anyone but especially – them.
*******************************************************************
DAILY CARDIAC and FAT BOY:
#1 Take a half hour out before your next visit or meeting with “students”. Sit quietly and with your eyes open or closed direct your attention down to the heart area. Sit with that, keep your attention there, just there. No “I’s”. After a period of time feel your heart begin to warm up. It cannot help but do so with so much loving attention directed towards it. Feel the warmth. Imagine yourself sitting before a cosy fire and toasting in it’s glow. Mentally stretch out your hands and feet to partake of it’s fullness. Feels good. Stay with that for as long as you can. Just enjoy the warmth….
Slowly open your eyes and go to your meeting. Observe the meditation’s effect on your relationship towards other people. Stay clear and just observe (don’t think about it!). Observe and directly feel.
#2 Take a half hour out before your next shopping experience in Marysville (or NYC, as the case may be). Drive down and sit in the parking lot for a half hour just before going into a store. Do the exact same heart attention exercise as described above.
Slowly open your eyes and go shopping. Observe the meditation’s effect on your relationship towards other people (people you don’t even know!). Stay clear and just observe (don’t think about it). Avoid all mind categories of “life” and “school”, etc… Just feel.
You both will probably have good success with the first situation and moderate with the second. Habits of affection run deep and are certainly not counter productive to consciousness. Yet, if you earnestly apply yourself you will find that all divisions and separations lie within and are a product of the mind and not the heart.
Good luck to you….
BTW: You are welcome to report back here with your findings if you wish to do so.
Escaping from Robot Burton’s flying saucer cult and…
“A Note on Spiritual Healing (if Needed)
For those of you that have been in… cults, you have been betrayed at a most primal level. The mere mention of resuming your spiritual search may create unimaginable duress. Yet the paradox is, that if you are a spiritual seeker by nature, you will need to resume your spiritual development to complete and speed your cult healing…. by studying the Spiritual Safeguards collection link contents below, you should be able to avoid any repeat of the deception or trap…. cults set for you utilizing your legitimate search for spiritual meaning and connection. This level of healing not only helps to make you whole again, it has the potential to make you stronger than you were before because you are able to transform the effects of the experience into far more good than harm over time.
http://www.factnet.org/Healing.html
Warning Signs of a Destructive Cult
(The following Warning Signs of a destructive cult is found at http://www.factnet.org/headlines/destructive_cult_warning_signs.html .)
Anyone could attack a group they disagree with by unfairly labeling it a destructive cult. How would you know whether it really were such a cult or not? Isn’t there an objective method to evaluate groups for cultic tendencies? Yes. The following early warning signs can help you reasonably determine whether or not a group is likely to be a destructive cult, and if you should be concerned about a friend, coworker, or loved one being involved with it.
The main reason that the following destructive cult tactics are so damaging to both the individual and society is because they debilitate rationality and reduce empathy. Rationality and empathy are indispensable in making good personal and social decisions. History is littered with personal and social catastrophes where a lack of rationality and lack of empathy were its core causes.
Ask yourself if the following criteria apply to the group you are concerned about.
1 A destructive cult tends to be totalitarian in its control of its members’ behavior. Cults are likely to dictate in great detail not only what members believe, but also what members wear and eat, when and where members work, sleep, and bathe, and how members think, speak, and conduct familial, marital, or sexual relationships.
2 A destructive cult tends to have an ethical double standard. Members are urged to be obedient to the cult, to carefully follow cult rules. They are also encouraged to be revealing and open in the group, confessing all to the leaders. On the other hand, outside the group they are encouraged to act unethically, manipulating outsiders or nonmembers, and either deceiving them or simply revealing very little about themselves or the group. In contrast to destructive cults, honorable groups teach members to abide by one set of ethics and act ethically and truthfully to all people in all situations.
3 A destructive cult has only two basic purposes: recruiting new members and fund-raising. Altruistic movements, established religions, and other honorable groups also recruit and raise funds. However, these actions are incidental to an honorable group’s main purpose of improving the lives of its members and of humankind in general. Destructive cults may claim to make social contributions, but in actuality such claims are superficial and only serve as gestures or fronts for recruiting and fund-raising. A cult’s real goal is to increase the prestige and often the wealth of the leader.
4 A destructive cult appears to be innovative and exclusive. The leader claims to be breaking with tradition, offering something novel, and instituting the ONLY viable system for change that will solve life’s problems or the world’s ills. But these claims are empty and only used to recruit members who are then surreptitiously subjected to mind control to inhibit their ability to examine the actual validity of the claims of the leader and the cult.
5 A destructive cult is authoritarian in its power structure. The leader is regarded as the supreme authority. He or she may delegate certain power to a few subordinates for the purpose of seeing that members adhere to the leader’s wishes. There is no appeal outside his or her system to a greater system of justice. For example, if a schoolteacher feels unjustly treated by a principal, an appeal can be made to the superintendent. In a destructive cult, the leader claims to have the only and final ruling on all matters.
6 A destructive cult’s leader is a self-appointed messianic person claiming to have a special mission in life. For example, leaders of flying saucer cults claim that beings from outer space have commissioned them to lead people away from Earth, so that only the leaders can save them from impending doom.
7 A destructive cult’s leader centers the veneration of members upon himself or herself. Priests, rabbis, ministers, democratic leaders, and other leaders of genuinely altruistic movements focus the veneration of adherents on God or a set of ethical principles. Cult leaders, in contrast, keep the focus of love, devotion, and allegiance on themselves.
8 A destructive cult’s leader tends to be determined, domineering, and charismatic. Such a leader effectively persuades followers to abandon or alter their families, friends, and careers to follow the cult. The leader then takes control over followers’ possessions, money, time, and lives.
If you know someone who belongs to a group that demonstrates a significant number of these warning signs and you would like more information on how to deal with destructive cults or mind control, go to http://www.factnet.org.
Also see MIND CONTROL AND RELIGION”
Just a soldier in the Moronic Loser Brigade.
What’s it to ya, big guy?
We got some beautiful people here,
and they’ll really make a mess out of you.
Why did Vena post this (see above):
Regarding the board, I was told that they were advised to get liability insurance (and to pay for it themselves).
Are we at risk posting thoughts on the FOF?
212. yogaflower
The reference was to the FOF Board of Directors. Not a problem for you.
Thank you all for your post. Ton, this was inspired by Tactics 1.
Daily Cardiac and all other members of the Fellowship,
Do you, as a member of the Fellowship, sincerely believe that dressing like everybody else, that is, using a “uniform” allows you to express yourself freely? How many dresses, “uniforms” do you keep in your wardrobe to be able to attend Fellowship events? How does being coerced to dress in a particular way to be able to participate in events affirm your freedom to choose? Do you think that having to wear a uniform makes the Fellowship of Friends a School of Consciousness? Do you think the money that you’ve spent on clothing has been well used for the evolution of your soul and the Arc for humanity?
How can you build an Arc for humanity by separating from humanity?
Would you say that you are building up your inner self by finding more and more extravagant and expensive ways to dress for Fellowship events in the hope that Robert and others will admire and accept you lovingly?
How much effort is worth spending on getting dressed to be able to be accepted in the Community you support?
Is the way you dress an expression of your inner self? What other aspects of your inner self are you able to share in the Fellowship?
How much time do you spend on your clothing? How much money?
Did you come to a Conscious School to learn to dress up externally or to learn to appear internally? How does the Fellowship teach you to trust your own self? How does it teach you to appear not only physically but spiritually?
Would dressing beautifully be an expression of the presence of the body? What would be an expression of the presence of your Spirit?
How are the expressions of your spirit allowed to participate in the Fellowship?
Are you allowed to sing the songs you’d choose, the theater you’d create or are you given a particular repertoire?
Does the Teacher give you this repertoire because it is the best humanity has produced or because refraining you from self expression is necessary to keep your spirit at bay?
If, according to the Teacher, the whole of humanity is, was and will be the six billion sleeping people on Earth, why does the Teacher promote the use of humanity’s Art, humanity’s cultures, humanity’s creations and at the same time keep you separated from what is human and humanity?
What Jesus or what Buddha promoted separation from the rest of mankind?
About creating will. Somehow this one reminds me of the fof.
An elderly gentleman…
Had serious hearing problems for a number of years. He went to the doctor and the doctor was able to have him fitted for a set of hearing aids that allowed the gentleman to hear 100%
The elderly gentleman went back in a month to the doctor and the doctor said, ‘Your hearing is perfect. Your family must be really pleased that you can hear again.’
The gentleman replied, ‘Oh, I haven’t told my family yet.
I just sit around and listen to the conversations. I’ve changed my will three times!’
What the heck, I could be on a roll.
An elderly couple had dinner at another couple’s house, and after eating, the wives left the table and went into the kitchen.
The two gentlemen were talking, and one said, ‘Last night we went out to a new restaurant and it was really great. I would recommend it very highly.’
The other man said, ‘What is the name of the restaurant?’
The first man thought and thought and finally said, ‘What is the name of that flower you give to someone you love?
You know… The one that’s red and has thorns.’
‘Do you mean a rose?’
‘Yes, that’s the one,’ replied the man. He then turned towards the kitchen and yelled, ‘Rose, what’s the name of that restaurant we went to last night?’
Daily Cardiac,
If the machine, ego, lower self, body is the worthless aspect of Influence A, why do Robert and all the members spend most of their money dressing it up as if it were a conscious king?
If the body and sex are aspects of the lower self that are not connected to consicousness, why does Robert indulge so lavishly in both?
If the body, eating, enjoying, sex, dressing, looking pretty are all aspects of Influence A and the lower self, would that not lead to a life of ascetism instead of the indulgence in them?
Then why is the Fellowship anything but ascetic?
Somebody and those of you still inside. It would be very helpful if you stimulated the members to read at least Daily Cardiac’s posts on the blog.
Then why is the Fellowship anything but ascetic?
Only that while the members are meant to practice ascetism because it is the expression of the lower self, the Teacher is suppose to be able to indulge in it because he is not trapped in it. How long did it take you after joining to accept such reasoning as “logic”.
Do you think defying all logic and common sense is making you a more conscious being? or the delusional fanatic proper of any cult?
Given circumstancs any man can find himself cheating on a spouse or loved one. However, when that is extended through time and not stopped, it becomes irreversible no matter what the circumstances were. When such a mishap is repeated, it is accepted. After an occurence of eleven times, as G.I.Gurdjieff would say, it is a habit and imo an addiction. To deny that there was any choice is to deny that there was any intelligence of any kind, or is that being too cold?
There is an expression in America which goes like this, ”Goodbye to to bad rubbish”, or is that too cold?
I would like to offer these two questions but before going any further let’s look again at this offering from a friend and a noble lady.
“re52. tatyana – November 14, 2008
Last couple of days I could not get read(rid) of the strong anger towards Robert, after talking to my friend who is stuck there and suffers that her husband sleeps with Robert. She told me in details how russians are trying to talk her into accepting “the play”.
Knowing all those russians and coming from the same background, the same center even, being the same age, it makes me very sad to see what they have become. It is like if they became sick. And Robert uses it and increases his own sickness.
Russians have problems with boundaries. It is perfectly fine for a friend to come to your house without a call, or eat from your refrigerator. We were told that everything is “common” and therefore nothing belongs to anybody. It sits so deep in our psychology and it takes professional help and a desire – to learn what the boundaries are.
When it comes to the area of relationship, sex and children things get more complicated. Ex-wives come into the new wife’s life as if she has a right. Ex husband comes to visit a child using his own key and makes himself a cup of tea. People accept to share a lot of things, which in western mind are not for sharing. It gives one an excitement and a feeling of never ending Burning Man festival. They enjoy suffering – so they have a reason to drink a bottle of vodka and sing sad songs.
All this ex-lovers-wives-husbands are bonded like shishkibobs. It is not king of hearts and being above the instinctive center, it is immaturity and luck of responsibility. And so called conscious love is untamed sex energy circulating between people with no principals more like extended group sex.
Also russians do not have a democracy in their veins. They don’t want it. They inherited love for the strong tsar, and the more terrible, the better.
Olga, Denis, Sahsa, Swetlana, Sergei, Nicholai, Natasha, Kirill, Vlad, Genya, Misha, Leonid, Maxim, Vasily, Igor, Marina… My heart aches for you! You have so much more options in life than this mad house.”
Here comes the contraversial part of my understanding. Every single one of us who ever joined the Fellowship of Friends did so due to an attraction. We were all attracted because we were focused either on something or some things that we either wanted strongly or something or some things that we were resisting or not wanting. There was not one exception.
Robert Earl Burton also was not an exception. He did his thing and thereby created his life just like I did and we all do. To blame him for whatever followed is to deny ourselves. It has been often said and I agree that WE created the Fellowship of Friends, at least our little part of the script with all the little parts becoming part of the play of plays.
Where some are failing in a sense, actually we cannot get it wrong in the long run, but where some still suffer unnecessarily in this moment, is that we do not like to mind our (their) own business. Somehow some think that it is their responsibilty to protect others from great harm from Robert Earl Burton and his “accomplices”.
This is focusing on what we or they do not want and the absolutely certain conclusion to all that resistance simply is ‘more of the very same’. Whether this very same happens in Oregon House or in Dobbins, or in Nevada City/Grass Valley, or some other locale is irrelevant, it WILL happen. Not only that but the worst will get even worst and of course the other side of the coin also will happen and that is that the better will get better. Whether Robert Earl Burton will get thrown in jail for the rest of his natural life has only to do with one person and that is Robert Earl Burton and HIS focus. Sorry but that is how it must be by law. I mean he has dodged the sword of Allah as someone said for 35 years. That should tell you something.
We are all in this together and we all will make choices whether from impulse or not or we could also make as few as possible. That is neither here nor there. I cannot in true conscience jump on anyone in judgement. I can walk away from a situation if it is not to my liking. That is all. I have a hug for anyone who wants one, physical or otherwise. Cheers!
Oh dear, my writing runs faster than my thoughts!!
Only that while the members are meant to practice ascetism because it is the expression of the lower self, the Teacher is suppose to be able to indulge in it because he is not trapped in it. How long did it take you after joining to accept such reasoning as “logic”.
Should say,
Only that while the members are meant to practice ascetism becasue indulging in the pleasures of life are expressions of the lower self, the Teacher is suppose to be able to indulge in them because he is not trapped in them.
Robert uses the ideas of an ascetic life but only to justify why the members must work without retribution while he gets all the priviledges.
How do you explain that Daily Cardiac? To your self or others?
I much enjoy your posts Renald but unfortunately I don’t agree with you. You are totally disacknowledging the fact this is what characterizes the Fellowship of Friends:
COERCIVE PERSUASION IS NOT VOLUNTARY, PEACEFUL, RELIGIOUS PRACTICE OR CENTRAL TO ANY BONA FIDE RELIGION.
Coercive persuasion is not a religious practice, it is a control technology. It is not a belief or ideology, it is a technological process.
If I the Fellowship were not a cult but a car factory in which you had been working and you had found out that it was making cars that were dangerous for its users would you keep quiet about it and not expose it?
Why are you willing to let it be when it is about human beings?
Hey Mick, you just reminded me of one of my favorite Decemberists songs. Since one of my self-inflicted tasks as a proud member of the Loser Brigade is bringing the ex-Pachelbel crowd up to speed with the latest trends in popular music (well actually, only the ones I like), here it goes. It does remind me a bit of my Renaissance years when I listen to it, with all its references to California wine, castaways and of course the youth and beauty brigade…
Take a long drive with me
On California one, California one
Take a long drive with me
On California one, California one
And the road a-winding goes
From Golden Gate to roaring cliff-side
And the light is softly low as our hearts
Become sweetly untied
Beneath the sun of California one
Take a long dram with me of California wine
And the wine, it tastes so sweet
As we lay our eyes to wander
And the sky, it stretches deep
Will we rest our heads to slumber
Beneath the vines of California wine?
Beneath the sun of California one?
Annabelle lies, sleeps with quiet eyes
On this sea-drift sun
What can you do?
And if I said, “Oh, it’s in your head
On this sea-drift sun”
What can you do?
We’re calling all bedwetters and ambulance chasers
Poor picker-pockets, bring them in
Come join the Youth and Beauty Brigade
We’re lining up the light-loafere’d
And the bored bench warmers
Castaways and cutouts, fill it up
Come join the Youth and Beauty Brigade
Nothing will stand in our way
I figured I had paid my debt to society
By paying my overdue fines
At the Multnoma County Library
At the library they said, “Son, go join up
Go join the Youth and Beauty Brigade”
Nothing will stand in our way
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=77d1peD7YwQ&feature=related
BTW, do you know who the original decemberists were?
“On December 14, 1824, a group of leaders marched with armed troops to Senate Square in St. Petersburg, Russia, trying to force the Senate to do away with the autocracy, abolish serfdom, and institute a democracy in the motherland. They were quickly and utterly disposed of, with the leaders executed, and several other high ranking officials exiled in Siberia. This group became known as “The Decemberists,” a group that would later be regarded as the start of the Russian revolution.”
just another bunch of beautiful losers…
actually this video is a lot less shaky
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ixe3-SDcZX0&feature=related
There was an article in the Appeal-Democrat yesterday “30 years after cult massacre” about Jonestown.
“Late on the afternoon of Nov. 18, a coded radio message from Jones was transmitted to the temple’s house in Georgetown: Some Jonestown residents had betrayed them, and he wanted the faithful to kill temple enemies. Then members in the Guyanese capital and San Francisco – a couple of hundred people – should commit suicide.
Bay Area businessman Shervin Harris had sat down for supper at the house with his daughter Liane and his ex-wife Sharon Amos’ two other children. Obvious to Jones’ dire orders, Harris felt hopeful. He had traveled to Guyana with Ryan party to check on his daughter’s welfare and, after several days of trying, was finally able to see her.
Harris and his daughter discussed plans to spend the next day together. That night, after Harris took a cab back to his hotel, police informed him that his daughter, Amos and her two other children were dead.
“It felt like the swing of a sledge hammer full on to my chest, ” he said.
Amos killed her two youngest children with a butcher knife; then she and Liane dies the same way. Harris clings to the belief that his daughter was killed, and did not commit suicide.
Since that night, Harris’s two surviving children have made him a grandfather four times over. He has become friends with his daughter’s closest temple confidante.
“As I’ve met members over the years, I would hate to bet a cup of coffee on the difference between them and us, ” he said. “They were normal folks, mostly wanting to make a contribution to society.”
220 Oh dear, my writing runs faster than my thoughts!!
—-
you meant ‘rolls’, yes?
Thank you, Ton.
Your research into coercive persuasion made me cry. That’s exactly the kind of expert testimony that would inform DC’s “open minded individuals” about the nature of the FOF cult.
Allah’s Sword became mightier with your post.
renald:
“WE created the FOF”
…by coercive persuasion. Objectively speaking, it was not voluntary. That’s what makes it fraud. (Half the people in a large scale fraud don’t even realize that they’ve been had.)
There was a moment when I asked my center director during a consultation about moving to Renaissance where he neglected to tell me the facts of Burton’s lifestyle. Now why do you suppose he was motivated to do that? He wanted to score brownie points with uncle bobby and at my expense! I could still have been in the FOF had I not met ever Burton.
But remember, all roads in the FOF cult lead to Burton and his lifestyle.
elena:
Brilliant. (Women make such great Muhajadeen!) You are right. The FOF’s product “divine presence” is defective. It harms people. It should be taken off the market.
Regarding creating memory. I am sure there was some important point I wanted to make. Oh well!
Hospital regulations require a wheel chair for patients being discharged. However, while working as a student nurse, I found one elderly gentleman already dressed and sitting on the bed with a suitcase at his feet, who insisted he! Didn’t need my help to leave the hospital.
After a chat about rules being rules, he reluctantly let me wheel him to the elevator.
On the way down I asked him if his wife was meeting him.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘She’s still upstairs in the bathroom changing out of her hospital gown.’
Couple in their nineties are both having problems remembering things. During a check-up, the doctor tells them that they’re physically okay, but they might want to start writing things down to help them remember
Later that night, while watching TV, the old man gets up from his chair. ‘Want anything while I’m in the kitchen?’ he asks.
‘Will you get me a bowl of ice cream?’
‘Sure.’
‘Don’t you think you should write it down so you can remember it?’ she asks.
‘No, I can remember it.’
‘Well, I’d like some strawberries on top, too. Maybe you should write it down, so as not to forget it?’
He says, ‘I can remember that. You want a bowl of ice cream with strawberries.’
‘I’d also like whipped cream. I’m certain you’ll forget that, write it down?’ she asks.
Irritated, he says, ‘I don’t need to write it down, I can remember it! Ice cream with strawberries and whipped cream – I got it, for goodness sake!’
Then he toddles into the kitchen. After about 20 minutes,
The old man returns from the kitchen and hands his wife a plate of bacon and eggs. She stares at the plate for a moment.
‘Where’s my toast ?’
To Crouching Tiger, Old Fish, Lauralupa, Elena, Jomo Piñata, Ellen, WhaleRider, Draco, others.
All of you at one time or another have said that I’ve evaded the most pertinent questions put to me. It will probably come as no surprise to you that I don’t see it that way. What I see is more of a dissatisfaction with my answers, an unwillingness on the part of ex members to take what I’ve said at face value.
It is true that I don’t address certain questions, and there are several reasons for that silence. Contrary to what Elena wrote, I am not addicted to the Blog. I’ll say it again: Writing on the blog is an extreme imposition on my time, especially considering that I know in advance that 99.9% of what I write will be disputed, disavowed, mocked, ridiculed, and the like. Given that I don’t feel a tremendous obligation to answer anyone. But of course I do answer several in earnest.
The other reason is this; according to Glob 72 of the first 125 posts on this page contained references to my comments. It would be simply impossible to address them all (obviously none of those were Kudos, but all refutations)
The last reason is that in many cases I feel I have already answered the latest questions in some form in the past. My position is fairly streamlined and singular and hasn’t changed.
In a nut shell I have said that the FoF, according to my experiences, my reality, is a conscious school, and Robert Burton an enlightened spiritual teacher.
I have acknowledged the reasoning, the logic, the information used by ex members that contend that FoF/RB is a fraud, charlatan, power abuser, etc.
My main contention is that the disqualifying activities pointed out by ex members fall on a more material level which is the realm of what I call “ordinary morality”, and that on a higher, purely spiritual, plane these activities do not in any way contradict a conscious teaching, but actually create and upport a conscious teaching.
Secondly, if I wasn’t clear in the past I will use this moment to say that I also feel that the stories and accounts formulated on the blog contain a combination of facts, subjective interpretations, distortions, and wholesale fabrications of the truth.
And no one is in the position to sort out truth from falsehood; in particular no one who already has an agenda to bring the FoF down in any way they can. No one who has already invested years of their lives with a deep resentment for how their experience unfolded.
Now I understand that ex members can say the same for me; that my comments are based on trying to defend or protect the FoF. I can’t deny that I speak as someone who highly values this organization and its leader. I can only say that what I relate about my personal experiences are given with as much honesty as I can muster, and I would consider that degree of honesty to be at least equal to the honesty of any ex member posting.
Here is just one example of what I would call a major disconnect based on what to me is nothing more than a distortion of truth.
Many have have said the FoF and RB have themselves distorted or moved on from the “Fourth Way System.” For me nothing could be further from the truth.
“The Fourth Way” is a term coined by Gurjieff a century ago. Before that time the term did not exist. Gurjieff himself collected and collated this information form ancient eastern knowledge, and millennium old Sufi knowledge.
The Fellowship used the Gurjieff/Ouspensky terminology to build a 35 year foundation for processing and understanding this ancient knowledge. In the last few years the school has digested enough to now go back to the direct source of the knowledge, which was impossible to do, even ten years ago, before the internet age took hold. Of course people will disagree with this version of the facts and persist the FoF is no longer teaching the “Fourth Way.” Technically, I guess they are correct. But esoteric truths are the same no matter how they are labeled.
For Elena, what she points about the Machine/lower self is mostly accurate. The present information, evaluation of the lower self, to be much more of an obstacle to presence than previously indicated, even by Gurjieff, is a result of going back to the source information.
This is only one major area on misunderstanding; out of maybe 8 or 10 such areas.
Misinterpretations of what constitutes rape, sexual harassment, abuse of power, even by life’s standards, all abound on the blog. And all the misinformation goes into the big pool of discontent.
But behind it all is a concerted effort by many on this blog to keep this misinformation flourishing, so long as it paints the FoF in a negative light.
And that is because they are not in any position to change their views no matter how much reason exposes the flaws in their logic. Anyone can turn the tables on me and say the same thing; that I am not able to see the FoF’s real flaws, change my thinking in spite of what they say are real facts to the contrary of my beliefs. All I can say to that reasoning is – yes, I will not change my beliefs about RB and the FoF because they are based on verifications which do not change.
Real schools don’t become false schools one day. If they are discovered to be false it only means the verification was not valid, but contrived, imagined. Anyone is perfectly free to say what I call verification is flawed and what they have verified is real. I am fine with that. I am fine with that because I know the day will come when we will all know the whole truth.
I don’t feel or believe I’ll be on the wrong side of the truth about the FoF, but if I am you won’t find me complaining. I’ve taken this path entirely of my own free will.
Maybe someday you too will have a beautiful cocksucking experience with your teacher. Until that time…
Lacuna Piñata/227
I appreciate your addressing the subject of ignoring or failing to answer particular questions. First, the notion that the blog is an “extreme imposition on [your] time” is disingenuous. The fact is, the Fellowship’s money sources are dwindling. People are leaving and fewer people are joining. Surely the blog has something to do with this. Just ask Linda Tulisso who stated that the blog was the worst thing ever to happen to the Fellowship. You are here to try to counter what you regard as anti-Fellowship propaganda. It is not an “imposition” on your time. You have an agenda to try and help keep the money coming in.
Secondly, although I understand what you are saying when you say you have previously addressed certain subjects, and I think what you are saying is generally true, I also think your mind goes blurry when you are asked to stay with a subject for any length of time, or to engage in independent thinking. You retreat into blithe ideology-based assurances about “conscious schools.” I keep asking you to set those aside and do a little thinking as you dialogue. You have it in you to do this! Do it and it will change you!
Third, you say:
“I’ve taken this path entirely of my own free will.”
The truth is, if you had not taken this path of your own free will, you wouldn’t even know it! Check out this article from the July 2008 issue of Scientific American about decisionmaking and the brain:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=unconscious-decisions
Quoted material begins here:
What are you going to do after you read this story? You may not know that yet, but your brain probably does. A new study shows that patterns of brain activity can reveal which choice a person is going to make long before he or she is aware of it. A team led by John-Dylan Haynes of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin scanned the brains of volunteers who held a button in each hand and were told to push one of the buttons whenever they wanted to. The scientists could tell from the scans which hand participants were going to use as early as 10 seconds before the volunteers were aware that they made up their mind.
Previous research has shown motor-related brain activity preceding conscious intent by a fraction of a second, but this study is the first to show unconscious predictive activity in a region associated with decision making—the prefrontal cortex—according to Haynes. The results support the notion that unconscious brain activity comes first and conscious experience follows as a result, says Patrick Haggard of University College London, who was not involved with the study. “We all think that we have a conscious free will,” he says. “However, this study shows that actions come from preconscious brain activity patterns and not from the person consciously thinking about what they are going to do.”
CT – 208:
“Jesus rode into town on a donkey. It was the most humble creature he could find. People laid palm leaves under its feet.”
It is a symbol of the steward subduing the lower self.
re 221. elena – November 19, 2008
“ I much enjoy your posts Renald but unfortunately I don’t agree with you. You are totally disacknowledging the fact this is what characterizes the Fellowship of Friends:
COERCIVE PERSUASION IS NOT VOLUNTARY, PEACEFUL, RELIGIOUS PRACTICE OR CENTRAL TO ANY BONA FIDE RELIGION.
Coercive persuasion is not a religious practice, it is a control technology. It is not a belief or ideology, it is a technological process.
If I the Fellowship were not a cult but a car factory in which you had been working and you had found out that it was making cars that were dangerous for its users would you keep quiet about it and not expose it?
Why are you willing to let it be when it is about human beings?“
You may have missed in 219 where I said I was sorry, so here it is pasted for you:
R. “ Whether Robert Earl Burton will get thrown in jail for the rest of his natural life has only to do with one person and that is Robert Earl Burton and HIS focus. Sorry but that is how it must be by law.“
I certainly did not expect you, Elena, to be ready to accept my point of view, at least not until the day when you give it more thought, and frankly that is okay. I did not mention anything about religions or car manufacturers. I did not mention anything about coercive persuasion or any other type of persuasion. What I did mention was the effect of pushing against stuff whatever it may be.
Now where the heck is my toast? Come to think of it where`s the bloody toaster?
So nice to chat with you Elena. Keep up the good work. Hugs!
Mick Danger – Maybe you would be agreeable to being questioned tacked on to a lie detector as regards any fantasies you may have had regarding blow jobs. This is my point. Anyone who focused on getting a blow job where the wish was not in such detail as to be concerned who the giver of it would have to be got what he wished for with tons of energy. As well, anyone who harbored fears of being put upon by a pervert or any other man for that matter, also gave a large amount of energy to that thought and thereby attracted it to come into his reality. That is how life works, like it or not. I am not a proficient writer, but I think my point is clear enough. I know a lady who had such a phobia about getting raped that she attracted men who were focused on raping a woman FOUR times in ONE year. At that point most everyone was beginning to think that she must have had a secret desire for it, even her husband. What she did have was a strong focusing power. I wish to have such a power.
That has nothing to do with the subject of my desire and what that is is my business. (no pun intended “is is“)
Have a great day! Cheers!
So the clear implication is, you don’t “join anew each day,” at least, not consciously. In fact, the brain research demonstrates that you unconsciously decide–” ‘it’ decides,” and then you manufacture justifications (I accidentally typed “justifictions”!) or rationalizations about why you decided what you decided.
So the clear import is, your decisionmaking is not conscious, even though it seems to you that it is.
Elena – 221:
“If I the Fellowship were not a cult but a car factory in which you had been working and you had found out that it was making cars that were dangerous for its users would you keep quiet about it and not expose it?”
Any big car maker is responsible for 10s of thousands of unsafe vehicles on the road. Some of those unsafe cars cause the injuries or deaths of countless people. Try to shut down GM for safety reasons and see how far you get. Probably the relatives of some of those people who died in an unsafe car from GM own and drive the same car.
You forget about the other side of the ledger. How many People benefit from GM. There are thousands of people who have benefited in some real sense from the existence of the FoF.
Lacuna Piñata/233
There are thousands of people who have benefited in some real sense from the existence of the FoF
Agreed. Many of us met people we love there. But we have to not let the fact that we had many good experiences in FoF obscure the fact that we were misled, lied to, manipulated and exploited by this organization which is corrupt at its very core.
Jomo Piñata – 232:
“So the clear import is, your decisionmaking is not conscious, even though it seems to you that it is.”
Is this the case for me only or ex members also?
Hello DC ~
“obviously none of those were Kudos, but all refutations”
—
Yes, DC, we all loved our “Kudos” in the FOF House of Mirrors (Affirmations of a tomorrow that tastes like coco-raspberry-liquor-heaven and delivers cirrhosis to the Now.)
BTW, there are 2 schools in the FOF (One made up of those who desperately need each other more than a teacher and those who need the teacher and not those who need each other.) Are you a new student DC or an old one who has forgotten how things work in Oregon House, California?
—
“It is a symbol of the steward subduing the lower self.”
Who is the steward though, the donkey or the Prophet? I’d like to step it up into Rumi territory (No ‘Us and Them’ Kudos for the Painbody) and suggest that they’ve subdued one another simultaneously; a lazy prophet needing a better view and a bored donkey wanting to go to town for the chance to find some stray vegetable Kudos.
—
So far as dropping the body in order to graduate; well, that’s a pretty foolproof ‘Kudos’ for a cult/school of affirmations to have (sorta). No more words for that one my friend, no more words…
—
Yes, we are all ‘still’ in the school, we’re the blades of grass under your feet, who, when you step away by thinking round and round your heart like a lonely Love-dog about how to get into the master’s card house without knocking it over, give to Space, time and imprint, so to say ~
‘Please wait Kali, please do not tie him so tight round your waist and please, please, leave a bow and not a trimmed knot, because he was here for a moment; see these imprints we’ve surrendered to, proof that you’ll not need to hire Anubis to weigh this heart’s one aching, speechless, staggering beat…
See, see, we’ve been tricked again, serendipitously commissioned to get an approximated kilo-numeral for your breathing scroll rite.’
Oh, and that card house; the way that the Love-dog ‘gets in’ without knocking it down?
Stand parallel to it, as close as you can (And do not wag your tail in expectation or by the nerves belonging to Uncertainty’s surrender!) to the Master’s open doorway and let the sun and your shadow do the rest.
“Is this the case for me only or ex members also?”
—
This is the case for everyone DC, when our moviestar-self-aggrandizement gets ahead of conscience, that little voice who steers the pearl to be round so that it can move on its own someday: conscious autonomy with an omnipresent 2×4 on the side.
If we didn’t give you the benefit of the doubt we’d not be reading your letters and replying.
B. of the D. ~ “The principal employed by umpires in cases of uncertainty concerning a batsman possibly being out, in which the decision must be in the batsman’s favor.”
—
If you feel that we want you to loose the game, you’re mistaken; I’d even like to see Robert win his conscience, though when you already ‘think’ you’re a winner just because the egg has been laid, you’ve yet to be introduced to foxes, gopher snakes and Sunday morning breakfast…
From inside the shell the world looks ‘all luminous’ and I sometimes wonder if the fledgling inside really ‘get’s it’ that the warmth is from two suns, its parents trading places from time to time and via that orb who doesn’t have a dark side?
Piling the trigger for consciousness with conscience and reconciliation of contradictions on Death’s living and breathing backache again… Whew! It’s getting to be religious in the FOF… To me, whenever a teaching relies on the body’s inevitable, inescapable path of love and woe to be its ‘originality-promise’ of heaven and hell, you can be sure that the mirror you’re hearing speak those words is a mirror and not a soul…
Renald – 219/231
I hope you don’t take too much flack for it but I must commend you on posts 219 and 231. They are two of the most intelligent and responsible entries I’ve encountered in this forum.
If some of the more bitter ex members would embrace this approach it could be the beginning of true healing for them.
Renald and Daily Cardiac,
The sickness of your reasonings clearly reveals why people like you happily condone the Fellowship practices and similar practices in any society but your time is up. Get ready to go.
Daily Cardiac,
Your answers are still far from answering the questions. Oblivion is not a sign of consciousness but of fanatism.
You haven’t answered: Why do you and your teacher deny love? How do you explain that in thirty five years the Fellowship has attracted this much horror and never developed positive emotions?
Jomo Piñata,
Bravo!
In another dimension:
As the light that kisses the morning,
born in a night without stars
I come to your always without batting my wings
to offer you to fly with them.
No more do I offer you
because the impossible
died in silence
when I know how to look at you
and there is nothing
with what to compare you
even if the nothingness
makes itself available.
An Argentinian Folk Song for the fun of love!
211 & 226 are newly moderated
I believe this is from Elena:
COERCIVE PERSUASION IS NOT VOLUNTARY, PEACEFUL, RELIGIOUS PRACTICE OR CENTRAL TO ANY BONA FIDE RELIGION.
Story: After getting the pink slip from Robert Burton, I started attending Quaker meetings in New York. I don’t think I need to tell everyone about Quakers, right? Pacifists, non-hierarchical, compassionate, quiet, etc., etc. But after a few months I noticed that there was a definitive dress code (silver alchemy tramp in Robert-speak), people used regular rhetorical tropes and figures of speech to talk about spiritual experience, and there was a subtle, even coercive, persuasion to conform. There were also taboos that were coercively enforced using the Quakers’ own insider-speak.
Quakers don’t have a hierarchy, no ministers, so there can never be the kind of abuses one see in the Fellowship. But the inner psychological conflict to conform is absolutely the same — its just that what the Quakers ask you to conform to is relatively innocent, in the Fellowship its perverse.
So what I’m trying to say is that ALL religious discourse is coercively persuasive, and from their point of view (that they have salvation, eternal life, enlightenment for the betterment of humanity) its fully justified. I happen to find Elena’s writings coercively persuasive, but that’s just saying she’s a persuasive writer. She gets my heart pounding, that’s coercive, I didn’t give her permission to get my heart pounding.
walter.tanner@gmail.com
“A remarkable thing about cult mind control is that it’s so ordinary in the tactics and strategies of social influence employed. They are variants of well-known social psychological principles of compliance, conformity, persuasion, dissonance, reactance, framing, emotional manipulation, and others that are used on all of us daily to entice us: to buy, to try, to donate, to vote, to join, to change, to believe, to love, to hate the enemy.
Cult mind control is not different in kind from these everyday varieties, but in its greater intensity, persistence, duration, and scope. One difference is in its greater efforts to block quitting the group, by imposing high exit costs, replete with induced phobias of harm, failure, and personal isolation.”
Does any of this sound familiar? The sad thing is this; those too brainwashed to recognize the sorry state they’re trapped in, just don’t get it… what can you say in that case except “sweet dreams.” something else one could say in this case is: “how would you survive if you were alive, shitty little person?”
enjoy :~)
RE 225 Whalerider
“ renald:
“WE created the FOF”
…by coercive persuasion. Objectively speaking, it was not voluntary. That’s what makes it fraud. (Half the people in a large scale fraud don’t even realize that they’ve been had.)
I agree fully. There are plenty a large scale frauds that people participate in and if only half did so without realizing it, the frauds would no longer exist at the time they did. That is what revolutions are all about. Yet, my friend, that is not the point, not at all.
Even people who had nothing to do with joining also created the Fellowship of Friends. The residents of Oregon House helped create it. The parents of joiners helped to create it. Society at large helped to create it. The laws helped to create it or whoever had anything to do with creating those laws and also those whose job was to uphold those laws. You cannot even begin to number everyone who participated in one way or another. There are even those who will get on this blog and tell you that God created the Fellowship of Friends. What do you think is the sense of trying to straighten them all out? Are you going to straighten out all the Bushes in this world? And every bit of energy that you fire off in their direction gets richocheted back to you and you are the one who does not get to enjoy your life unless,…..unless you want to count how good it feels to blow off steam, to give a momentary dose to the addiction which is running your life. I am aware that I have used “you“ for effect and I am aware that I could just as well have used “I“ or “they“. Like I said before we are all in this together, “this“ being our realities, our play.
Yes there is such a thing as being completely aware and voluntary in our lives. What percentage of our lives would that encompass? That was one of my wants that I hoped to improve upon when I joined the Group. I knew there was a big risk and because I felt that I had nothing to lose at that time, I went whole hog including the tu`penny stamp.
Life is a continuum, it is ever-changing, it is evolving. It is okay to have a change of priorities, and as long as we desire freedom we will be free. I did not set out here today to do rhetoric or philosophy.
I set out to express myself because I was moved to do so by impulse. I have a sense that it can be useful to drop a seed or two and at this time I am enjoying being here.
There is such a thing as “buyer beware“. Nobody likes to hear that when they discover that they have been ripped off. I suppose a lawyer could even say, “well show me your contract!“ and I had none, not even a verbal one. My contract if it can be called that lay in my imagination and in my mind. I cannot say what was in the minds of others exactly but what I can know is that we all got and/or are getting what during our prior lives we focused on unless that focus was updated, just like our computer software.
I am only interested in sharing my point of view so that maybe someone will gain something from it. If not, so be it. Maybe I have helped myself with the re-hash- That is okay too. If I happen to spot a question directed at me personally, I will probably answer it to the best of my capability unless it is obviously negative in nature and I do prefer a positive conversation. Cheers!
Dear Members of the Fellowship Cult and Daily Cardiac in particular,
Why does each single condition of a Cult presented by Ton in posts 206, 211 and 243 faithfully describe the coercion and abuses of the Fellowship of Friends?
I challenge you to a single one that does not happen in the Fellowship cult.
Ton, thank you immensely for your work and everyone for your posts.
Renald,
You’re no friend and WE are not in this together. People like you abused other people and will have to give account for it. The Fellowship will be closed and you’ll all lose your little business.
It is a pleasure to fight for a different world. You and everyone like you belongs to a past that no one wishes to remember. Even America has voted for change with the election of Mr. Obama and that is the greatest news against people like you and the Fellowship.
I do not know enough of politics to burn my hand for Mr. Obama yet, but the little I know is enough to know that the Spirit of the Times is not your spirit or of all the abusers you are applauding at.
Life is not the life of losers that you present. We will die struggling against attitudes like yours but our grand-children will live in a better world.
Who wants to die without giving a worthwhile fight? That is one of the best aspects of being alive!
I was just watching the news in which a low income family is rescued after five days of running away from the fluds in an area of Colombia. The 68 year old grandmother is put into the helicopter and interviewed when she arrives and although she’s injured her voice is joyful and strong. Before they finish she tells people: riding a helicopter is so much fun! its great fun! and laughs.
Elena 245:
“Why does each single condition of a Cult presented by Ton in posts 206, 211 and 243 faithfully describe the coercion and abuses of the Fellowship of Friends?
I challenge you to a single one that does not happen in the Fellowship cult.”
ton – 243- “Cult mind control is not different in kind from these everyday varieties, but in its greater intensity, persistence, duration, and scope. One difference is in its greater efforts to block quitting the group, by imposing high exit costs, replete with induced phobias of harm, failure, and personal isolation.”
There are no “high exit costs” associated with leaving the FoF. There are high ENTRANCE costs to rejoin however; very uncult like if you ask me.
Renald:
“…anyone who harbored fears of being put upon by a pervert or any other man for that matter, also gave a large amount of energy to that thought and thereby attracted it to come into his reality.”
So a victim of fraud is at fault?
Where’s your compassion and humanity, my unenlightened friend? The unhealthy idea that I somehow brought this suffering upon myself is the very reason why many victims of rape keep silent about the crime. You seem to be young in the study of human nature.
No wonder Daily Cardiac praised you.
Speaking for myself, I certainly never harbored any fear of being raped nor even the slightest idea that Burton was a sexual predator of young straight men before I met him. As I stated before, both my center directors and the other older followers with whom I had contact never took the time to inform me of Burton’s lifestyle. Some of the older followers, like Charles R. have since apologized to me on this blog earlier on, which I greatly appreciate.
I like the idea about the power of visualization, though. What do you think will come to pass when enough of us collectively give a large amount of energy to closing down the FOF, Inc.? That’s the kind of reality many here would like to see.
Daily Cardiac:
“There are thousands of people who have benefited in some real sense from the existence of the FoF.”
Gee, that’s odd…out of the thousands of ex-members whom have supposedly benefited in some real sense (monetarily?)…they don’t seem to be posting here singing Burton’s praises very much…
From what you post, it sounds like you have been assigned to the blog and would rather practice your pseudo-religion in a less than public sphere. I don’t blame you.
BTW, the closing down of the FOF, Inc. and the draining of the victim pool happens to be part of my healing process, despite your suggestion otherwise to walk away silently into the night as your cult leader wishes his ex-followers to do. It is only our embarrassment, shame, and disgust that keep us from speaking out.
Once the FOF is closed down, that’s when your healing process can begin. I believe you have a long road ahead of you.
“Try to shut down GM for safety reasons and see how far you get.”
I think you have greatly overestimated the scale importance of the FOF, Inc. in relation to your GM metaphor, a multi-billion dollar corporation. Yet, all it took was one paralyzed young boy who survived a gunshot wound by bullets bought at a Kmart Store who went public with his protest to get Kmart, a multi-billion dollar corporation to remove all ammunition from its shelves nationwide in a matter of days. Oh, and you probably didn’t know either that after the hit movie, “Supersize Me” aired McDonald’s stopped selling “supersized” anything.
Change happens.
As you say, the FOF, Inc. is only made up of “a measly 1700 people”. No worries. We, the ‘spaniel underdog’ will prevail. The whole world is watching.
A friend of mine came out with something very strange last time I spoke to him on the phone. This friend is still in the FOF, and he is of a curious and agile intellectual nature. He said in passing that he had seen a picture of Obama photoshopped to look like Franklin Roosevelt in a 1930’s car. He added that it was of note that Roosevelt was the president at the time of WW2, and that a parrallel could be drawn ( I suppose he meant that Obama’s term would coincide with WW3). I point this out as a symptom of cult thinking. “Lets wait for doom and see how THEY screw it up___ the world is a mess__-etc”.
I am sure that this friend did not even notice where this came from in himself so I pointed out to him that thinking that way was useless since many such parrallels/premonitions/predictions don’t even happen in the end (as was so aptly demonstrated by RB).
It is also very warped because it is a disclaimer to any pro-active individual effort to mend any aspect of society, however smalll it may be. And importantly, how the can you preach about the ‘moment’ or say that you live for that, when you spend all your time thinking about completely imaginary possiblities (and paranoid ones at that). Isn’t that completely mad ?!
It’s giving vent to completely negative ‘imagination’ and suppositions and calling them right and feeling indignation at how messed-up the world is and how bad people are and that they are evil. But apart from that it is fine to ‘be present’ (and proud of) that sort of selfish psychology within oneself.
It is shifting responsibility and inventing the dellusive precept that makes it fine not to take part.
How can you then also think that you are going to heaven whilst living like that? or developping your ‘true nature’ with such unbased thinking. Who wants to die anyway, no-one____ so common sense has to be applicable somewhere; and not to mix up the fate of terrorists and psychopaths with that of the common weald.
How sad to infer that everyone is just sleeping and not caring when all you can do is predict doom and failure of a society you have isolated yourself from in order to live out your own/ someone else’s lies and inventions . Anyway, quite an eye opener.
This experience pointed-out to me why intellectually something was really bothering me about FOF. You might say that I should have been warned a long time ago.
Well, honestly, even though the sequence and its illustrations by RB were definately lacking in intellectual underpinning, I thought it was quite funny when I was in the FOF. I even had an out-of -body experience using the sequence that showed me what would survive of me after death.
ALso, having been RB’s lover for 12 years (and being of a bisexual persuasion myself), I did not see the sexual rigmarole entirely as abuse. At the start of it I thought it was discovering, then, afer a while it got a bit boring. After the sex exercise was lifted he started to introduce more partners so it renewed the sense of excitement for the first few times; then it became like work, and like not wanting to disappoint a lover and teacher.
Anyway, I never felt forced into anything because I also had some male lovers and this was just another scenario.
However, I do understand that a straight young man being co-erced into it at the detriment of his emotional/professional life is wrong.
I am saying that those arguments on the blog did not cut it with me personally because my experience had been different, and one of the many tripped-out eccentric things that have happened to me or that I have done in this lifetime___ though I do empathise very much with any that feel victimized.
What HAS cut it with me is the lack of intellectual freedom that my friend demonstrated, and that I think is as a result of Cult thinking.
Obama is a figure of Worldwide hope. When I saw his acceptance speech I had a few fears about how naive it sounded. Afterwards I reasoned with myself and deduced that it is an opportunity for a nation/ nations to come together and work on it together and sort it out.
The Bush regime has oppressed us with fears and ridiculous policies that we denigrated and did not take seriously, and this pushed us back onto ourselves. We could not really think about society in a positive and constructive way anymore but just negatively about the current govt.
The opportunity for change is at hand and it seems ludicrous to hamper that with superstitious thoughts and doomsday predictions. The fact that my friend still supports that sort of thinking is perhaps a testimony to how powerful Cult mentality can be. People can barricade themselves from the POSITIVE CONSTRUCTIVE world and support it with fabricated theories.
Anyway, there is room to help___ and wether WW3 is at hand or not, it is probably the right thing to support life on earth in whichever way we can by being helpful citizens
THanks to all who have helped me come out of this by being such great support.
Julien
Dear Renald,
Your focus and attraction law is theory. Theory, I have seen 2 year old being raped……, baby’s being killed explain this…..in your Law of atraction Theory. I have seen so many things, children dying at the age like your child……unexplainable…. I have asked God to give me an explanation…..he/she has been silent.
The law of atraction and Byron Katie have wonderful theories on this matter and if you have tried the law of attraction you must have observed some flaws.
Many Russian have allowed SEX to get out of Russia…..were they visualizing to have SEX with Robert. No …they wanted to get out of Russia…..
Please be careful with what you say…if you have verified your own observations that is yours, Please do not talk for others…..
This spiderweb of Robert Burton is very tricky and somebody who got web IMO needs support and help to get out and become sane and healthy again. IMO that is our task and that is one big reason we are here.
And if you feel you were responsible for some part of a crime ….it would be healthy to admit it and take the congruent actions.
1700 people…..less and less each day and some people stand next to the road and allow it and say…you attracted this play?
Aahh and yes DC calls this intelligence……we are all different and my advise (unasked) is: mind your own pot that your cooking food might not get burnt.
In other words…talk is cheap….
My dear Daily Cardiac,
You really do need help.
The fact that people must pay so much money to come back is a very high exit cost no matter how formatory you want to be about it and get stuck on the details. It weighs on the members a great deal because we kept trying to hold on to the dream that all those like you were decent human beings trying to evolve and all your limitations were due to the pressures you were under by having to work so hard with Robert’s demands on you. At least it was like that for me, and I kept forgiving the fact that you were too busy to care for anyone but yourselves and apparently the School.
The idea that if one leaves the Cult one will lose one’s possibility to evolve is a very high exit cost for anyone who was working seriously with the ideas but not for those like Renald who was just trying to use the opportunity to see what else he could get away with in this lifetime, also like you and the rest of enablers.
The idea that life is sleep and that one is doomed as soon as one steps out of the Cult is a high exit cost.
Also the one that Robert likes to repeat often that if you lose the School you also lose Influence C.
What’s truly interesting about it all is that all these things which constitute the essence of the Fellowship of Friends were never talked about or digested in detail, but were taken as if they were not really serious. Most members are in there obeying to such commands pretending that they are there doing what they want or simply using from the Cult what they can get away with but amongst those are people who try to listen and work with the Teacher’s exercises and suggestions and abandon their children, give their money away, drop their families until they are nothing but an old piece of furniture that needs to be removed from the Fellowship because it is beginning to cost more than Robert is willing to pay.
Such ridiculous idea like that the Fellowship is the only Conscious School is actually meant to keep members inside and it is connected with the high exit cost that we’re discussing here.
There are many more but I won’t tire you further.
You can have another chance since you lost in this one. Maybe one by one, you’ll open your eyes and cry like the rest of us until you get all that horror off your back.
It is beautiful to be out here, life without all those constraints is ample like each one of you. Your being does not deserve to be reduced to that many constraints, your spirits are beautiful, let them free.
I and I hope we, will help anyone of you with no matter what problem if you need it when you come out. It has taken me a year and a half to be this well but I assure you, it is worth every second of real suffering to be able to let go of all the unnecessary suffering that the Fellowship imposes on you.
All that doctrine is nothing but unnecessary suffering to keep you working for them, not only to feed their pocket but their lust for power over you.
248: DC
The high exit cost is the fear of returing to life, to a biologicial and instinctive existence – an existence where supposedly there are no possibilities for evolution, an existence where supposedly you will be cut-off from higher states and c-influence. For many, and myself included while I was in, this fear of losing my soul and all the possibilities I had worked so hard for was far greater than any financial payment required to leave. I personally believe the Fellowship fits the criteria for a cult in this regard. There were certainly induced phobias of harm (described above) , a sense of failure (good students stay – bad students leave) and personal isolation was a certainty up until this last year. Still some of my best friends will not speak to me. Of course it is easier now and as a result many are leaving. Please read the statement again.
ton – 243- “Cult mind control is not different in kind from these everyday varieties, but in its greater intensity, persistence, duration, and scope. One difference is in its greater efforts to block quitting the group, by imposing high exit costs, replete with induced phobias of harm, failure, and personal isolation.”
249. whalerider – November 20, 2008
Renald:
“…anyone who harbored fears of being put upon by a pervert or any other man for that matter, also gave a large amount of energy to that thought and thereby attracted it to come into his reality.”
So a victim of fraud is at fault?“
R. A victim is a victim is a victim until the time that he gets so sick of being a victim that he allows something else to enter his being. “Fault“ here implies justice, it implies revenge and punishment. Is the victim one of the two it takes to tango? Yes. Is it a conscious choice? No, clearly not. Does everyone who joined the Fof feel defrauded? No. Some certainly feel that they were let down either by someone else (like the teacher) or even themselves. Going back and trying to analyze the entire psychological and chronological happenings mental or physical might work. The drugs might work or control. I would not advise anyone to go that route, it is too long. The Work is to get happy and stay that way as much of the time as possible. The Work is to limit the time spent in No No Land. Only then can the door be opened and our desires manifested. And if I am wrong? Well at least you would have had some happy time and as a result your body and mind would have gotten a reprieve which has got to be good for you.
“Where’s your compassion and humanity, my unenlightened friend? “
R. That is none of your business. Just be happy. You are right, I am unenlightened and I am a friend and I plan to stay that way. If you feel that I am in any way not a friend because of what I say, then consider that I do not know any better and this too will pass. I usually do not hang around very long. I will make more efforts to not be so blunt at the risk of hurting essence. I know how that feels and I would not wish it on my worst enemy if I have one.
“The unhealthy idea that I somehow brought this suffering upon myself“
R. Could you handle that if you could actually see that you did play a part in it even though it might be a small part?
“ is the very reason why many victims of rape keep silent about the crime.“
Could that maybe differ slightly from case to case and how much does it matter to you right now.
“ You seem to be young in the study of human nature.“
R. Maybe so.
“No wonder Daily Cardiac praised you.“
R. I promise I will not let his compliments get to me.
“Speaking for myself, I certainly never harbored any fear of being raped“`
R. It would not have to be rape exactly but something which causes a similar vibration. Any form of the state of vulnerability when the subject of abuse had been brought up would be enough. It calls up an attitude or thought habit or emotional habit which may be quite invisible and may have been acquired in childhood even. So one would not have to have the thought of rape in mind but just a negative state to do with this subject.
“ nor even the slightest idea that Burton was a sexual predator of young straight men before I met him. As I stated before, both my center directors and the other older followers with whom I had contact never took the time to inform me of Burton’s lifestyle.“
R. You know, I was at Apollo for ten years, washed more pots at the Academy than I care to remember, had one conversation with Mr. Burton in the back garden of an emotional nature about my Work, went to 99% of the meetings and receptions, and still did not know much about the extracurricular goings on told about by yourself and others in this blog. I had heard he was gay and I knew he preferred them young. That was basically it. I knew he was a bit of an outlaw when it came to getting licenses and such but that was a small trait in my mind much akin to exceeding the speed limit while driving.
“ Some of the older followers, like Charles R. have since apologized to me on this blog earlier on, which I greatly appreciate.“
R. After I left due to finding out that I was illegal in the USA (another story for another time maybe), my wife became a center director and because I had been so long at Apollo, I was in the position to warn young students and would have if I had known more, but in my mind I figured that the gay ones would be happy and the heterosexual ones would be fine too. I didn`t know it was the reverse, yet I still feel a little responsible. I hope none of them felt abused. On an other level I know enough to not let it concern me too much and I let it go.
“I like the idea about the power of visualization, though. What do you think will come to pass when enough of us collectively give a large amount of energy to closing down the FOF, Inc.? That’s the kind of reality many here would like to see.“
R. Indeed if enough give a large amount of “ positive“ energy to seeing the Fellowship of Friends, Inc. closed down, it could be done by morning. What do I mean by “positive energy“ here? In this case, the asking process has certainly been done. The closure is just around the corner or just outside the gate. The only reason it has not happened, imo, is that the energy coming forth from the wanters of the closure is “negative“. There is anger, there is frustration, there is indignation, there is revenge, worst of all there is depression or a feeling of powerlessness. Of course that is perfectly normal. It is also suffering. Yes, after many years of studying this subject I can see it as mostly unnecessary, but not in the sense of sociopathic numbing of conscience but in the acceptance and releasing which is far quicker with my new understanding.
Some at times maybe with the help of the blog manage to work their way up the scale from total powerlessness into anger and revenge and that provides much relief. That feeling of relief is the feeling of healing which is so essential. The problem there is that they tend to set up camp in that neighborhood, mainly because they are not really aware that they are camping there due to justification. Of course the anger is justified, so what? The victim who gets stuck there continues to suffer, less all right but it can still become chronic. One must continue up the scale of emotions consciously in order to make it to hope and onward.
The other hiccup is that there are other people who want the FOF, Inc. to remain as it is. I and I would say that most at one time thought that way and felt that way. Now one person connected to Source, one person who is in a state of joy, is more powerful than a million who are not. You can see the disadvantage caused by the suffering and the reaction to it. Had this not existed, he would not have gone anywhere after Alex Horn or even after the teaching job. Maybe it IS time for the change. I sincerely hope so, but if not I have no intention of carrying the nun across the stream and down the road.
The experience of pain that many suffer is a gift. It provides us with the conclusion that we want something other than what is. At that moment the subject and all the connections required to manifest it are immediately put in place. They exist. They are ready to appear in ways that we as a community cannot even begin to imagine. The resistance caused by the negative emotions re. the subject is what keeps the door locked. That is what is meant when it is said that we are often our own worst enemy. The way out is simple, yet it is the miraculous much sought for by so many and rarely found.
Do you think there is a chance that the number of the desirers of a beautiful loving community able to cleanly fulfill our dreams can ever surpass that of those inners who are still emotionally positive as regards to what they have?
But all is not lost because those inners are not diametrically opposed to what we want. Actually except for those who support the free for all sex experience, most of the inners and the outers want more of less the same situation or at least there would be little opposition emotionally speaking. The financial sins are only a tool to achieve the goal and can hardly be called an issue in my mind. For those reasons “ hope eternally springs in the hearts of men“, namely us.
I guess that about covers it. I trust that this lets in a little light and sign off. Cheers!
Renald ~
Thank you for that letter; it’s rare to clarify something for yourself while needing to read and write by fog-light (I ought to know). Yes, there’s some extra screaming going on, though, as you stated so strongly and surely to Whalerider, “That is none of your business.”
I am nearly certain that there was a time when I cosmically bawled, weeping from my gut to my seventh chakra and without any intention to make it into a story or even a memory that I could refer to the next day (In case that day wasn’t exciting enough for people’s inquiries.)
There are those incredibly private rituals where you meet your maker face to face (You) and share this meeting when you notice that another is in this dance too (Though not caught in it, no, simply a soul born into it and sometimes expected to make it look like ‘second nature’, while being a human being is actually very far from even ‘first’…)
Yes, overall, it’s advantageous to keep dancing through a stampede then to stop and ask someone to flip the record over, though this doesn’t mean you cannot speak while running; interpretation is in the ear of the beholder.
Grow ears on your heart.
248. Daily Cardiac
“There are no “high exit costs” associated with leaving the FoF.”
What about loosing your friends with the exercise of ‘not speaking with ex students’?
WhaleRider – 249:
“Where’s your compassion and humanity, my unenlightened friend? The unhealthy idea that I somehow brought this suffering upon myself is the very reason why many victims of rape keep silent about the crime. You seem to be young in the study of human nature.”
What I liked about Renald’s comments is that it speaks to people’s need to take responsibility for their own actions.
First of all you did not get raped, not by any definition of rape I’m familiar with. You had consensual sex by your own account. It happens to all of us at some point in time that we are persuaded by another to engage in some activity or agreement that we later regret.
This happens constantly in daily life regarding people agreeing to have sex, or being talked into buying something they can’t afford, or didn’t need. People get persuaded to get married, quit their jobs and start businesses with friends, rob a bank, you name it.
It’s understandable to blame/detest the individual who talked us into something we later regret doing, but we cannot relinquish our own responsibility and complicity in those instances. The bottom line is we agreed to something. We gave up our right to say no. We signed on the dotted line. When that happens the sooner we stop blaming outside sources the sooner we can learn from our mistakes and move on with our lives.
DC- “The Fellowship used the Gurjieff/Ouspensky terminology to build a 35 year foundation for processing and understanding this ancient knowledge. In the last few years the school has digested enough to now go back to the direct source of the knowledge, which was impossible to do, even ten years ago, before the internet age took hold. Of course people will disagree with this version of the facts and persist the FoF is no longer teaching the “Fourth Way.” Technically, I guess they are correct. But esoteric truths are the same no matter how they are labeled.”
Well at least you acknowledged there was a question, which I guess ought to be counted as progress! However, the question remains unanswered.
As I’m sure you’re aware, most of the ‘ancient knowledge’ you talk about was orally transmitted, so that the secrets behind the words could be revealed to the hearer. I’m simply pointing out that Horn never received the teaching except through hearsay, and RB never completed whatever task he may have had as Horn’s pupil. So the whole transmission was doubly incomplete.
The fellowship has spent 35 years building a huge edifice on top of an incomplete foundation, and of course it has become such a huge investment that it would be entirely too much now to go back and admit that there were a few simple omissions and misunderstandings right at the start…
The fellowship enthusiatically took possession of 4th Way terminology without knowing many of its real secrets. And of course you have only been exposed to the fellowship version of the 4th Way, so you don’t have any outside point of reference, unfortunately. Of course you will substitute your own ‘verifications’ for that comparison in order to block it out…. However, I do believe it would shock you if the comparison were somehow made available. At present that doesn’t look likely.
243 & 251 are newly moderated (nice to see you both here)
Sorry, I got no fantasies of that sort and the lie detector is attached,
I just like to call Robert Burton a cocksucker, so that this blog can maintain an X-rating.
(With apologies to *ADVERTISEMENT*)
Appearing Now: Princess Bobby,
self proclaimed Goddess-in-a-man’s-body!
Admission Free, Pay at the door.
The meeting will consist of no questions, no answers and best of all no humor.
As always, Not intended to disparage fellatio, or any other kinky ideas you might fantasize about.
Dear Walter J. Tanner,
“COERCIVE PERSUASION IS NOT VOLUNTARY, PEACEFUL, RELIGIOUS PRACTICE OR CENTRAL TO ANY BONA FIDE RELIGION.”
Is not a line by me but by a professional writer and expert on cults presented by Ton, J. Lifton (I think). I wish I were half that professional! I am sorry I did not remind us of that in my post, too fast to realize that some would think it mine. I will nevertheless take your heartfelt rose and adorn my house with it. Thank you.
Julien, it brings great joy to listen to you and you’ve certainly put a finger in an area in which more “presence” was needed. Thank you.
Renald,
Renald: “Fault“ here implies justice, it implies revenge and punishment”
Justice does not imply revenge and punishment, where on earth did you get that? Your premise is set in place to avoid the responsibility that comes from knowing the myriad injustices that are going on in the Fellowship. Your premise is meant to justify the fact that you will not take action to follow through with your experience. You will stay in the perimeters of the ego in your first line without connecting what you know with the second line, disavowing consciousness in your third line.
Renald:
“Where’s your compassion and humanity, my unenlightened friend? “
If you think compassion and humanity is to sit in your little shell not bothering to move a finger so that other people don’t get abused like you or others did in the Cult you supported for decades, you better review the idea of compassion and humanity in the dictionary of your consciousness before you continue to decay into greater selfishness.
What keeps you from crossing the line from your first line to the second? In what crossroad of your life were you told you could not use the public square to express your self and protest for the hidden abuses of unconsciousness? Protest loud enough that unconscious nesses like that will be wiped out forever, like slavery.
When you drive a car, do you not use the public space to move about it? What is stopping you from making a definite move to stop people from continuing to move into a dead end road because at the end of it is a precipice in which 900 of them might still fall in for the rest of their lives? (For the 1700 figure is to boost their credibility but they are much less than that today)
Where is the compassion or the responsibility in that? You just fell in the precipice and happened to walk out not completely disabled and think, well, now I’ll go home and have a cup of tea while the rest of passers by keep falling down the precipice. Too bad for them, shouldn’t they look where they are going?
It is attitudes like yours what allows abusers like Robert to stay in place for enough years to do irreparable damage.
The many good points of your post are rendered useless when confronted with the fact that all those good people in the Fellowship who want a community as much as the rest of us, have a community of abuse and are willing to close their eyes to the abuses… like you. We are very different and I am glad that you know in advance that you cannot count on me to support your weakness.
You’re the kind of person that would not be seen picketing in front of any gate because you are ashamed of making your self “present” in the public spaces of the world. You think the public space is meant for you to drive behind the wheel of an ironed mask and go to the park like a good little boy as if the world where a good little school but while you can remain being the little good boy that does not question the bad little cult to its foundations, people continue to get raped, exploited and made to feel worthless of themselves allowing Robert and the rest of enablers to humiliate their integrity at every event. They are conditioned, like you, to quietly and uniformly go to the little good concert and the little good dinner and pay their worth five hundred times in economic retribution but disenable themselves in their human worth, because like you, they think they are not worthy of speaking their word in public and have accepted to have their tongue mutilated.
Like you, they are ashamed to stand on the side road of any institution and protest for its practices because you have not yet crossed the boundaries of your personal limitations and use the public space to hide in your little car with a thick enough armor to protect you from the rest of the world who you still think is an enemy. Too strong an enemy for you to stand up for others and stop them from being abused like you and the rest of us were, perpetuating a status quo in which abusers have nothing to be afraid of because most people, like you, have already been paralyzed. Jesus made people walk with miracles. You too will walk like a full human being in the Public Square of every city, when you trust yourself enough to be one.
Daily Cardiac:
What I liked about Renald’s comments is that it speaks to people’s need to take responsibility for their own actions.
I take responsibility for having joined the Fellowship with the conviction that it was what it claimed to be. A Fourth Way School with a conscious being at its head working for the well being of humanity.
I do not take responsibility for all the members in the inner circle who hid and twisted the truth of what was actually happening to Robert and other members for thirty five years. The concerted action of not one but many, many people who hid the truth when many, many members asked for help in a situation in which they were getting hurt is a crime. You asked those members to leave when you were not willing to confront Robert with the injustice. It is fraud and all of you who are involved will have to respond for it. I do not wish any of you any harm, I demand that you to stop hurting more people. You will continue to hurt each person that joins for as long as the Fellowship is open, because you no longer know the difference between not hurting and hurting, you’ve lost the human reference in your actions and think you can justify all the harm with your imaginary high states. You are, simply put, “out of your mind!” and must be restrained like any criminal who plans a crime and carries out for years and years on its innocent victims.
CT around 259
re: Robot Burton’s ‘apprenticeship’ with Alex Horn and this notion of ‘direct transmission’ of knowledge…. (imo) the lessons that were taught and learned in that association involved coercive manipulation and brainwashing techniques which were later put to such ‘good’ use by the FOF organizing principal (a ‘teacher’ he is not although he is indeed a ‘principal’ since the whole organization revolves around the satisfaction of his desire-body).
Around 249 DC writes “There are no “high exit costs” associated with leaving the FoF.” Thus proving once again, the delusional twilight state this shill exists in… knowing not of which ‘it’ speaks… (fyi) here is some indication of the ‘high exit costs’– the question is: how ‘open minded’ can a shill be?
“Clinical research has identified specific cult-related emotional problems with which ex-members must cope during their reentry into society. Among them: indecisiveness, uncritical passivity–and fear of the cult itself.
The recent upsurge of cults in the United States began in the late 60s and became a highly visible social phenomenon by the mid-70s. Many thousands of young adults — some say two to three million — have had varying contacts with such groups, frequently leaving home, school, job, and spouses and children to follow one or another of the most variegated array of gurus, messiahs, and Pied Pipers to appear in a single generation.
By now, a number of adherents have left such groups, for a variety of reasons, and as they try to reestablish their lives in the mainstream of society, they are having a number of special — and I believe cult-related — psychological problems that say a good deal about what experience in some of these groups can be like.
The term “cult” is always one of individual judgment. It has been variously applied to groups involved in beliefs and practices just off the beat of traditional religions; to groups making exploratory excursions into non-Western philosophical practices; and to groups involving intense relationships between followers and a powerful idea or leader.
Over the past two years, about 100 persons have taken part in discussion groups that I have organized with my fellow psychologist, Jesse Miller of the University of California, Berkeley.
Our sessions are devoted to discussion and education: we neither engage in the intense badgering reportedly carried on by some much-publicized “deprogrammers,” nor do we provide group psychotherapy. We expected to learn from the participants in the groups, and to relieve some of their distress by offering a setting for mutual support.
We also hoped to help by explaining something of what we know about the processes the members had been exposed to, and particularly what is known of the mechanisms for behavior change that seem to have affected the capacity of ex-cultists to adjust to life after cultism. My own background includes the study of coercive persuasion, the techniques of so-called “brain-washing;” Dr. Miller is interested in trance-induction methods.
It might be argued that the various cult groups bear resemblances to certain fervent sectors of long-established and respected religious traditions, as well as to utopian communities of the past. Clearly, the groups are far from uniform, and what goes on in one may or may not go on in another.
Still, when in the course of research on young adults and their families over the last four years, I interviewed nearly 300 people who were in or who had come out of such cults, I was struck by similarities in their accounts. For example, the groups’ recruitment and indoctrination procedures seemed to involve highly sophisticated techniques for inducing behavioral change.
I also came to understand the need of many ex-cult members for help in adjusting to life on the outside.
According to their own reports, many participants joined these religious cults during periods of depression and confusion, when they had a sense that life was meaningless. The cult had promised — and for many had provided — a solution to the distress of the developmental crises that are frequent at this age. Cults supply ready-made friendships and ready made decisions about careers, dating, sex, and marriage, and they outline a clear “meaning of life.” In return, they may demand total obedience to cult commands.
The cults these people belonged to maintain intense allegiance through the arguments of their ideology, and through social and psychological pressures and practices that, intentionally or not, amount to conditioning techniques that constrict attention, limit personal relationships, and devalue reasoning. Adherents and ex-members describe constant exhortation and training to arrive at exalted spiritual states, altered consciousness, and automatic submission to directives….
The exclusion of family and other outside contacts, rigid moral judgments of the unconverted outside world, and restriction of sexual behavior are all geared to increasing followers’ commitment to the goals of the group and in some cases to its powerful leader.
Some former cult members were happy during their membership, gratified to submerge their troubled selves into a selfless whole. Converted to the ideals of the group, they welcomed the indoctrination procedures that bound them closer to it and gradually eliminated any conflicting ties or information.
Gradually, however, some of the members of our groups grew disillusioned with cult life, found themselves incapable of submitting to the cult’s demands, or grew bitter about discrepancies they perceived between cult words and practices.
Several of these people had left on their own or with the help of family or friends who had gotten word of their restlessness and picked them up at their request from locations outside cult headquarters.
Some 75 percent of the people attending our discussion groups, however, had left the cults not entirely on their own volition but through legal conservatorships, a temporary power of supervision that courts in California and several other states grant to the family of an adult. The grounds for granting such power are in flux, but under such orders, a person can be temporarily removed from a cult. Some cults resist strenuously, sometimes moving members out of state; others acquiesce.
Many members of our groups tell us they were grateful for the intervention and had been hoping for rescue. These people say that they had felt themselves powerless to carry out their desire to leave because of psychological and social pressures from companions and officials inside. They often speak of a combination of guilt over defecting and fear of the cult’s retaliation — excommunication — if they tried.
In addition, they were uncertain over how they would manage in the outside world that they had for so long held in contempt.
Most of our group members had seen deprogrammers as they left their sects, as part of their families’ effort to reorient them. But none in our groups cited experiences of the counter brainwashing sort that some accounts of deprogramming have de scribed and that the cults had warned them to be ready for. (Several ex members of one group reported they had been instructed in a method for slashing their wrists safely, to evade pressure by “satanic” deprogrammers — an instruction that alerted them to the possibility that the cult’s declarations of love might have some not-so-loving aspects.)
Instead, our group members said they met ex-cultists like them selves, who described their own disaffection, provided political and economic information they had been unaware of about cult activities, and described the behavioral effects to be expected from the practices they had undergone.
Meanwhile, elective or not, the days away from the cult atmosphere gave the former members a chance to think, rest, and see friends — and to collect perspective on their feelings. Some persons return to cult life after the period at home, but many more elect to try to remake life on the outside.
Leaving any restricted community can pose problems — leaving the Army for civilian life is hard, too, of course. In addition, it is often argued that people who join cults are troubled to begin with, and that the problems we see in postcult treatment are only those they postponed by conversion and adherence….
But some residues that some of these cults leave in many ex-members seem special: slippage into dissociated states, severe incapacity to make decisions, and related extreme suggestibility derive, I believe, from the effects of specific behavior-conditioning practices on some especially susceptible persons.
Most ex-cultists we have seen struggle at one time or another with some or all of the following difficulties and problems. Not all the former cultists have all of these problems, nor do most have them in severe and extended form.
Depression. With their regime of ritual, work, worship, and community, the cults provide members with tasks and purpose. When members leave, a sense of meaninglessness often reappears. They must also deal with family and personal issues left unresolved at the time of conversion.
But former members have a variety of new losses to contend with. Ex-cultists in our groups often speak of their regret for the lost years during which they wandered off the main paths of everyday life; they regret being out of step and behind their peers in career and life pursuits.
They feel a loss of innocence and self esteem if they come to believe that they were used, or that they wrongly surrendered their autonomy.
Loneliness. Leaving a cult also means leaving many friends, a brotherhood with common interests, and the intimacy of sharing a very significant experience. It means having to look for new friends in an uncomprehending or suspicious world.
Many of our informants had been struggling with issues of sexuality, dating, and marriage before they joined the cult, and most cults reduce such struggles by restricting sexual contacts and pairings, ostensibly to keep the members targeted on doing the “work of the master.”
On leaving the cult, some people respond by trying to make up for lost time in binges of dating, drinking, and sexual adventures. These often produce overwhelming guilt and shame when former members contrast the cult’s prohibitions to their new freedom. Said Valerie, a 26-year-old former teacher, “When I first came out, I went with any guy that seemed interested in me — bikers, bums — I was even dating a drug-dealer until I crashed his car on the freeway. I was never like that before.”
Others simply panic and avoid dating altogether. One man remarked, “I had been pretty active sexually before I joined. Now it’s as if I’d never had those experiences, because I’m more inhibited than I was in junior high. I feel sexually guilty if I even think of asking a girl out. They really impressed me that sex was wrong.”
In at least one case, the rules restricting sexuality seem to have contributed to highly charged interpersonal manipulations. Ruth said she was often chastised by Mary, a prestigious cult member, for “showing lustful thoughts toward the brothers.” Mary would have me lie on my face on the floor. She would lie on top of me and massage me to drive Satan out. Soon, she’d begin accusing ME of being a lesbian.” Needless to say, anyone who had been through experiences of the sort described would be likely to have sexual conflicts to work out.
A very few who were in orgiastic cults had undergone enforced sexuality rather than celibacy. Describing the cult leader, one woman said, “He used orgies to break down our inhibitions. If a person didn’t feel comfortable in group sex, he said it indicated a psychological hang-up that had to be stripped away because it prevented us all from melding and unifying.”
Indecisiveness. Some groups pre scribed virtually every activity: what and when to eat, wear, and do during the day and night, showering, defecating procedures, and sleep positions. The loss of a way of life in which everything is planned often creates what some of our group members call a “future void” in which they must plan and execute all their tomorrows on their own.
Said one, “Freedom is great, but it takes a lot of work.” Certain individuals cannot put together any organized plan for taking care of themselves, whether problems involve a job, school, or social life. Some have to be urged to buy alarm clocks and notebooks in order to get up, get going, and plan their days…
Slipping into Altered States. From the time prospective recruits are invited to the cult’s domicile — “the ashram,””the retreat,” they are caught up in a round of long, repetitive lectures couched in hypnotic metaphors and exalted ideas… These are all practices that tend to produce states of altered consciousness, exaltation, and suggestibility.
When they leave the cult, many members find that a variety of conditions — stress and conflict, a depressive low, certain significant words or ideas — can trigger a return to the trance-like state they knew in cult days. They report that they fall into the familiar, unshakable lethargy, and seem to hear bits of exhortations from cult speakers. These episodes of “floating” — like the flashbacks of drug-users — are most frequent immediately after leaving the group, but in certain persons they still occur weeks or months later….
During our group discussions, unless we keep some focus, we often see members float off; they have difficulty concentrating and expressing practical needs concretely. Prolonged recitals using abstract cult jargon can set off a kind of contagion in this detached, “spacey” condition among certain participants. They say these episodes duplicate the conditions they fell into at meditations or lectures during cult days, and disturb them terribly when they occur now.
They worry that they are going mad, and that they may never be able to control the floating. But it can be controlled by avoiding the vague, cosmic terms encouraged in cult talk and sticking to concrete topics and precise language spoken directly to a listener. In one session, Rosemary was describing a floating incident from the day before. “In the office yesterday, I couldn’t keep centered . . . . I couldn’t keep a positive belief system going,” she said.
“Now, look, Rosemary,” I said. “Tell us concretely exactly what it was that happened, and what you were feeling.” With effort, she told us she had been using the Xerox machine when the paper jammed; she didn’t know how to fix it, felt inadequate, was ashamed to go and ask. Instead, she stood silent and dissociated before the machine. Under pressure now, she found ways to tell the story. In cult days, she had been encouraged to generalize to vague categories of feeling, to be imprecise, to translate personal responses into code.
People affected by floating are immensely relieved to learn that others have experienced these same flashbacks, that they can be controlled, and that the condition eventually diminishes. Those who still float for a long time — it can go on for two years — are generally the same ones to have reported severe depression, extreme indecisiveness, and other signs of pathology before entering the cult.
Blurring of Mental Acuity. Most cult veterans are neither grossly incompetent nor blatantly disturbed. Nevertheless, they report — and their families confirm — subtle cognitive inefficiencies and changes that take some time to pass. Ex-cultists often have trouble putting into words the inefficiencies they want to describe.
Jack, the physiology graduate, said, “It’s more that after a while outside, something comes back. One day I realized my thinking had gradually expanded. I could see everything in more complex ways. The group had slowly, a step at a time, cut me off from anything but the simplest right-wrong notions. They keep you from thinking and reasoning about all the contingencies by always telling you, ‘Don’t doubt, don’t be negative.’ And after a while you hardly think about anything except in yes-no, right-wrong, simpleminded ways.”
Uncritical Passivity. Many ex-cultists report they accept almost every thing they hear, as if their pre-cult skills for evaluating and criticizing were in relative abeyance. They cannot listen and judge: they listen, believe, and obey. Simple remarks of friends, dates, co-workers, and roommates are taken as commands, even though the person does not feel like doing the bidding, or even abhors it.
One woman had gotten up in the middle of the night to respond to the telephoned command of a near stranger: “I borrowed my dad’s car to drive about 65 miles out into the country and help this guy I had just met once in a coffeehouse to transport some stolen merchandise, because he spoke in such a strong and authoritative way to me on the phone. I can’t believe how much I still obey people.”
When this behavior comes up in our group sessions, we discuss the various cults’ injunction’s against questioning doctrine or directives, and the effects of living for months or years in situations that encourage acquiescence.
Ex-members of some of the more authoritarian cults describe constant urging to “surrender your mind .. accept … melt … flow with it . . Don’t question now, later you will understand.” Reluctance or objections are reprimanded: “Don’t be negative, don’t be resistant, surrender.”
Joan had been the nemesis of many college teachers before she joined a cult. “I was into the radical feminist group at school; I was a political radical; I was trying to overthrow the system. In three months, they recycled me and I was obeying everybody. I still have that tendency to obey anybody who says ‘Gimme, fetch me, go for . . . . ‘” Ginny was described by her family as having been “strong-willed. It was impossible to make her do any thing she didn’t want to do.” Now, she complains, “Any guy who asks me anything, I feel compelled to say yes; I feel I should sacrifice for them; that’s how I did for four years in the group.”
Fear of the Cult. Most of the groups work hard to prevent defections: some ex-members cite warnings of heavenly damnation for themselves, their ancestors, and their children. Since many cult veterans retain some residual belief in the cult doctrines, this alone can be a horrifying burden….
It appears that most cult groups soon turn their energies to recruiting new members rather than prolonging efforts to reattract defectors. Still, even after the initial fear of retaliation has passed, ex-members worry about how to handle the inevitable chance street meetings with old colleagues, expecting them to try to stir up feeling of guilt over leaving and condemn their present life.
Fear may be most acute for former members who have left a spouse or children behind in the cults that recruited couples and families. Any effort to make contact risks breaking the link completely. Often painful legal actions ensue over child custody or conservatorship between ex- and continuing adherents….
The Fishbowl Effect. A special problem for cult veterans is the constant watchfulness of family and friends, who are on the alert for any signs that the difficulties of real life will send the person back. Mild dissociation, deep preoccupations, temporary altered states of consciousness, and any positive talk about cult days can cause alarm in a former member’s family. Often the ex-member senses it, but neither side knows how to open up discussion.
New acquaintances and old friends can also trigger an ex-cultist’s feelings that people are staring, wondering why he joined such a group. In our discussion, ex-members share ways they have managed to deal with these situations. The best advice seems to be to try focusing on the current conversation until the sense of living under scrutiny gradually fades.
As I suggested above, returnees often want to talk to people about positive aspects of the cult experience. Yet they commonly feel that others refuse to hear anything but the negative aspects, even in our groups. Apart from the pleasure of commitment and the simplicity of life in the old regime, they generally want to discuss a few warm friendships, or even romances, and the sense that group living taught them to connect more openly and warmly to other people than they could before their cult days….
Conditioned by the cults’ condemnation of the beliefs and conduct of outsiders, ex-members tend to remain hypercritical of much of the ordinary behavior of humans. This makes reentry still harder. When parents, friends, or therapists try to convince them to be less rigid in their attitudes, they tend to see such as evidence of casual moral relativism.
The Agonies of Explaining. Why one joined is difficult to tell anyone who is unfamiliar with cults. One has to describe the subtleties and power of the recruitment procedures, and how one was persuaded and indoctrinated. Most difficult of all is to try to explain why a person is unable simply to walk away from a cult, for that entails being able to give a long and sophisticated explanation of social and psychological coercion, influence, and control procedures.
“People just can’t understand what the group puts into your mind,” one ex-cultist said. “How they play on your guilts and needs. Psychological pressure is much heavier than a locked door. You can bust a locked door down in terror or anger, but chains that are mental are real hard to break. The heaviest thing I’ve ever done is leaving the group, breaking those real heavy bonds on my mind.”
Guilt. According to our informants, significant parts of cult activity are based on deception, particularly fund-raising and recruitment. The dishonesty is rationalized as being for the greater good of the cult or the person recruited.
One girl said… “There is something inside me that wants to survive more than anything, that wants to live, wants to give, wants to be honest,” she noted. “And I wasn’t honest when I was in the group. How could they have gotten me to believe it was right to do that? I never really thought it was right, but they kept saying it was okay because there was so little time left to save the world.”
As they take up their personal consciences again, many ex-members feel great remorse over the lies they have told, and they frequently worry over how to right the wrongs they did.
Perplexities about Altruism. Many of these people want to find ways to put their altruism and energy back to work without becoming a pawn in another manipulative group. Some fear they have become “groupies” who are defenseless against getting entangled in a controlling organization. Yet, they also feel a need for affiliations. They wonder how they can properly select among the myriad contending organizations — social, religious, philanthropic, service-oriented, psychological – -and remain their own boss. The group consensus on this tends to advise caution about joining any new “uplift” group, and to suggest instead purely social, work, or school-related activities.
Money. An additional issue is the cult members’ curious experience with money….
Elite No More. “They get you to believing that they alone know how to save the world,” recalled one member. “You think you are in the vanguard of history . . . . You have been called out of the anonymous masses to assist the messiah . . . . As the chosen, you are above the law . . . . They have arrived at the humbling and exalting conclusion that they are more valuable to God, to history, and to the future than other people are.” Clearly one of the more poignant comedowns of post-group life is the end of feeling a chosen person, a member of an elite.
It appears from our work that if they hope to help, therapists — and friends and family–need to have at least some knowledge of the content of a particular cult’s program in order to grasp what the ex-member is trying to describe. A capacity to explain certain behavioral reconstruction techniques is also important. One ex-member saw a therapist for two sessions but left because the therapist “reacted as if I were making it up, or crazy, he couldn’t tell which. But I was just telling it like it was….”
Many therapists try to bypass the content of the experience in order to focus on long-term personality attributes. But unless he or she knows something of the events of the experience that prey on the former cultist’s mind, we believe, the therapist is unable to open up discussion or even understand what is happening. Looking at the experience in general ways, he may think the young person has undergone a spontaneous religious conversion and may fail to be aware of the sophisticated, high-pressure recruitment tactics and intense influence procedures the cults use to attract and keep members. He may mistakenly see all the ex-cultist’s behavior as manifestations of long-standing psychopathology.
Many ex-cult members fear they will never recover their full functioning. Learning from the group that most of those affected eventually come to feel fully competent and independent is most encouraging for them. Their experiences might well be taken into account by people considering allying themselves with such groups in the future.”
M.T. Singer
DC –
Oh, and about that donkey…! Jesus CHOSE the donkey as his preferred mode of transport, over the many ancient forms of the ‘Lexus’ he was offered. He chose what you call the ‘lower self’ as his vehicle, even if it did not fit the religiose (fellowship) view of the times, as being appropriate for a higher being.
In relation to the idea of Christ humbly riding a donkey…… it is the animal which Davidic Kings rode.
“The Significance of the Donkey
The word translated “colt” is Greek polos, the young of any animal — from an elephant to a locust. Here the “colt” or “foal” of a donkey is the reference.[5] The specific Greek word for “donkey, ass,” hupozugion, is not used in Luke, but found in Matthew 21:5.[6]
Luke and Mark don’t discuss the significance of the young donkey, but Matthew and John quote from Zechariah 9:9, a passage that comprises one of the great soprano arias of Handel’s Messiah:
“Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion!
Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem!
See, your king comes to you,
righteous and having salvation,
gentle and riding on a donkey (LXX hupozugion),
on a colt (LXX polon), the foal of a donkey.
I will take away the chariots from Ephraim
and the war-horses from Jerusalem,
and the battle bow will be broken.
He will proclaim peace to the nations.
His rule will extend from sea to sea
and from the River to the ends of the earth.” (Zechariah 9:9-10)
The donkey was domesticated in Mesopotamia by the Third Millennium BC and was used as a beast of burden from the patriarchal period. It was renowned for its strength and was the animal normally ridden by nonmilitary personnel (Numbers 22:21; Judges 10:4; 1 Samuel 25:20).[7] The scripture indicates that riding a donkey is not at all beneath the dignity of Israel’s noblemen and kings (2 Samuel 18:9; 19:26). Indeed, David indicates his choice of Solomon to be king by decreeing that the young man should ride on the king’s own mule (1 Kings 1:32-40).
Jesus’ instructions are clear that the donkey must be one that has never been ridden (see Numbers 19:2; Deuteronomy 21:3; 1 Samuel 6:7; 2 Samuel 6:3). It is set apart, consecrated for a specific use — for the Master’s use. There is a rabbinical tradition that no one should use the animal on which a king rides.[8]
It is fascinating to me that in Zechariah’s prophecy the gentle king that comes into Jerusalem riding a young donkey is the same one who will defeat chariots and war-horses and bring peace to the nations. One of the final scenes of Revelation is a picture of the conquering Christ riding a white war-horse (Revelation 19:11-16), but today he rides a donkey in hope of peace.
When Jesus indicates to his disciples that he should ride on a donkey that no one had ever ridden before, he is initiating a public, kingly act. He is revealing openly that he is the Messiah.”
not really that humble.
jx
# 251 Julien
Thanks for your sincerity about your life and for pointing out :
“People can barricade themselves from the POSITIVE CONSTRUCTIVE world and support it with fabricated theories.
Anyway, there is room to help___ and wether WW3 is at hand or not, it is probably the right thing to support life on earth in whichever way we can by being helpful citizens”
….the school now asks for mental gymnastics, which excludes verification, rigour and integrity.
Who can affirm to have verified the last conclusions and deductions of the teaching (prehistoric tradition, and so on..,)?
Who among us can re-explain these elements, from the depths of themselves, without taking again the pre-established, formatted and repetitive formulations that they have recorded?
These endless research (cathedrals, prehistoric tradition…), which would amuse any scrupulous researcher, trap students in making them believe in the necessity of acquiring always more material in order to be able to be present and awake.
This approach only constitutes a deviation of our attention regarding the essential…
This was a excerpt of my letter of departure one year and half ago.
The essential is what you pointed out : to support life on earth in whichever way we can by being helpful citizens
In relation to this attracting things to oneself idea…..
“The court heard details of horrific abuse inflicted on the three-year old:
• She had been kicked, beaten, slapped, jumped on and held over a burning fire
• She had been put into a clothes dryer spinning at top heat
• Wrestling moves copied from a computer game had been practised on her
• She had been folded into a sofa and sat on, shoved into piles of rubbish, dragged through a sandpit half naked, flung against a wall and dropped from a height onto the floor
• And she had been whirled rapidly on an outdoor rotary clothes line until she was thrown off.
At one point, she was left lying unconscious for 36 hours without medical attention.”
So you are telling me this little girl ( wanted all of this ) ?
That her being attracted it?
I believe in karma but also that there are instances where injustices occur.
jx
Lacuna Piñata:
There are no “high exit costs” associated with leaving the FoF.
Um, how about being ostracized by all your friends and family?
We don’ call you “Lacuna Piñata” for nothing. It’s that collection of blind spots inside that paper-mache sheep we keep swinging at, in order to liberate you.
Walter Tanner:
The discourse on “coercive persuasion” changed over time, as did the term itself. I think it was originally Schein’s term from his book in about 1961. It went through various iterations. “Thought reform,” “exploitative persuasion,” etc. The general principle is that there is a continuum of methods of persuasion, and that it is unethical to utilize methods of persuasion that influence people without their knowledge and consent. Is all religious discourse based on persuasion? Certainly. Is all religious discourse based on coercive persuasion? Absolutely not.
I don’t have a divinity degree, as you apparently do, but I take issue with your proposition to the contrary. In my experience, those who seek to persuade me on religious grounds are generally absolutely up front about what they are doing. (Indeed, as you know, converts to Judaism must approach a rabbi wishing to convert, and are refused three times before the dialogue that may lead to conversion even begins.)
Such “up front” motivation is not the case in the circumstances that brought “coercive persuasion” to the forefront in recent years. In the Molko and Leal case, which established liability for deceptive recruitment into a thought reform environment, for example, Molko was lied to when he asked whether a religious group was involved in the community in Boonville that he was bused out to. He was told “no.” In fact it was the Unification Church.
In fact, the “prospective student meetings,” as they are called, are the Fellowship’s primary recruitment device. They are tightly scripted. Indeed, they are registered with the United States Library of Congress as a dramatic work. Prospective students are not told they are attending the performance of a dramatic work.
During my tenure in the Fellowship Burton had instructed that prospective students be given a “shock to their false personality.” In my own case I had traveled to the location of the meeting and extended my hand to one of the people giving the meeting. He looked me in the eye and refused my hand. He did this to implement Burton’s instruction. I found it very disturbing. It made me want to be accepted by these people. In other words, it was an example of “iatrogenic illness” — i.e., induced by the group which offers itself as the cure.
This was a mind game played on a young kid. It was conducted as part of the methodology of “hooking” people into the Fellowship. It was unethical. It was effective. If nothing else, it was manipulative persuasion or exploitative persuasion. It bears no relation to above-the-board religious discourse.
266 Jack.
Thanks for adding so much depth, of which I was unaware!
# 251 Julien
Thank you Julien for your post, it balances the impressions that many people are coming here to write feeling “victims” all the time.
No doubt the FOF experience was and is different for everyone and I am still digesting, but not ruminating!!! : )
———————————————————
# 256 Unoanimo
“….interpretation is in the ear of the beholder.
Grow ears on your heart.”
Thank you Uno for this beautiful image. It reminds me that in the FOF cult we were discouraged to listen to the heart and in fact we made it numb in favor of our heads and easily deceived intellects.
DC explains abuse as something above the level of ordinary morality. This is an example of a partially functioning heart which ideally and in its integrity would connect with the function of intelligence and even wisdom if we care to look inside deep enough and listen carefully.
Elena 263 You already asked me to leave your little club meaning the chat between you and I. I respect your wish and am letting you stew in your own juices. I hope you get well.
Jack 268. You have not read what I have posted these last couple days and have taken things out of context. If you cannot be bothered to investigate then why should I be bothered to respond to you? Do your homework first, then we could have a meaningful discussion.
Mick Danger 261
Like I said before if it makes you feel good to call anyone a cocksucker, that is fine with me. If I come back to visit a year from now and I see you in the same mood saying the same things, then from my point of view the message that I will get is that you are stuck on the same rung of the ladder of emotions. What can I say or do? Pray? Maybe. I am sorry if I triggered a further and looping descent. If you are here for humor only, well I did post a couple jokes and you are free to skip the rest. Where does it say you must police the blog and with a few others attempt to keep excluding those who are not part of the 25 club? Sorry, you need not get upset because I got turned off from joining clubs years ago.
Daily Cardiac..I gave up reading your posts a long time ago. I am in GF and anyone can email me there if you/they so wish.
It is less likely that I would miss a connection there.
Elena..By the way, just to show you how off base you can get when you get upset, I went to jail five times for picketting/protesting against what I perceived as injustice. I did this on my own and it was not connected to my workplace except that I was warned by my employers that taking time off work to protest against one of their customers was not going to be accepted. They had seen my picture on the front page of the local newspaper questioning a local politician. Had the Fellowship of Friends not screwed up my visa status, I would have been alongside of your picketting efforts at the main gate and maybe even been there before you even thought of it. So much for your intuition. Okay, okay, I forgot that I had decided to leave you be. Sorry, Rose. Have a great day!
Thank you Ton, Jomo, Aline, Crouching Tiger, Unoanimo, Veramente. It is such a joy to hear you speak. Veramente, your voice recently is so much clearer.
Ton, those professional views of the phenomenon help so much to understand what’s been happening throughout this year. The recurrent depressions and feelings of worthlessness, thank God I get angry enough to fight back because it puts me back on the ground from those limbos.
Jomo, thanks for the clarification. Was it not a rose but a thorn and was I so naive to confuse them? I still doubt. It still looks like a rose! No need to explain though, rose or thorn, they both move me.
Renald, Just got your post sending in the last one.
What a great change of attitude, I must have totally misunderstood you in the posts before.
Please don’t let me be, be with me. The playground is big enough for both of us and I like the way you pull my hair!
Rose, thorn, huh?
Forget about it Jomo, Walter I think will understand!
272 Renald.
( Jack 268. You have not read what I have posted these last couple days and have taken things out of context. If you cannot be bothered to investigate then why should I be bothered to respond to you? Do your homework first, then we could have a meaningful discussion.)
wow! You are not only psychic ie, you jump to the conclusion I have not read your previous posts.
But you assume things too! ie that I was addressing you.
Did you see your name or post reference number on my post.
Didn’t your mum tell you that ” assumption is the mother of all fuckups.”
Not only that you are defensive and rude invoking the “do your homework” put down.
Ps I thoroughly enjoyed the pre-senile dementia jokes.
jx
#211 #264 ton,
long post but quite instructive.
thanks
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BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — Attention all culture-craving couch potatoes: Cultural riches from over 2,000 years of European civilization are going digital.
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“You can see all aspects of (Mozart’s) life in the works and material that comes from our museums, libraries, audio visual collections and archives across Europe,” said Jill Cousins, director of the Europeana project.
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The project, which started two years ago, seems to be Europe’s answer to Google’s efforts to build a private digital library and is to be launched amid much fanfare by the EU’s ministers on Thursday.
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EU officials say Europeana offers a better product than Google’s Book Search feature. Google has been scanning millions of books stored in dozens of libraries around the world over the past four years to lure more traffic to its popular search engine.
“The Google Book Search project is a great project, but it’s about books, it’s not like Europeana; you see the difference,” said Horst Forster, an EU official who helped coordinate the project. “What we have here does not have any commercial aims.”
Santiago de la Mora from Google’s European office welcomed the launch, saying Google hoped to collaborate with Europeana “taking part in what could become the biggest technological leap in disseminating knowledge since Gutenberg invented the printing press.”
Most of the items on the site so far are from France, the Netherlands and Britain. Other countries in the 27-nation EU — such as Germany, Spain and Poland — were expected to submit more artifacts in the coming weeks and months.
“We were offered an embarrassment of riches, an enormous amount of material,” said John Purday, who works on the project.
Europe’s famous museums have little to fear, however.
“Actually, it encourages use of museums, because you give people a taste of what’s there,” Purday said.
DC:”We signed on the dotted line. When that happens the sooner we stop blaming outside sources the sooner we can learn from our mistakes and move on with our lives.”
I think this is a good point, and to further your point, what we called magnetic center was ripe for being abused by someone. To that extent, we do have responsibility, and if we have outgrown that, we cannot blame Robert or the Fellowship for the fact that we had it when we joined.
Yet most of us did not fully realize what we were agreeing to when we “signed on the dotted line”. We did not realize the extent to which we were offering our selves up for the psychological manipulations involved.
Is the Fellowship a “real school” as it claims or is it a scam – another cult masquerading as God’s gift to planet earth? If the Fellowship does have a bright side, I personally think that side is greatly exaggerated, and in this sense, I think it is deceptive. It is another organization with some good people and with some good ideas mixed in with ideas designed to make members afraid to leave and to keep paying. The implied promises of an ideal state, life after death, the celestial city of paradise, uninterrupted presence, the true meaning of life, a direct connection to the angels, a connection to original school and hidden knowledge etc. are ( from my experience observing myself and others) not being delivered .
I think that the FOF does offer something for some for a while. It also burns people. There comes a time when we are ready to experience life on its own terms – when staying another month will make it more difficult to reestablish ourselves in life, and gain from life, and make living a positive experience both materially and spiritually. I believe that sitting in the back seat instead of driving can be useful only for a while. There comes a time when supporting the life-style of Robert and others within the Fellowship, interferes with personal growth, and leaves us in a damaging cycle.
Yes, we need to move on from our obsession with the Fellowship, but be helpful to others along the way by expressing what we have learned. Walter Tanner has a good point, persuasion is everywhere, and even in this and other posts on the blog. But the intent here is to support the capacity for each person to make their own decisions. This requires understanding the tools of manipulation and cult thinking, and admitting that these tools are used within the Fellowship. We are all subject to those manipulations. We need to understand them so we can take responsibility for our decision to leave or stay.
So yes DC, you are right we need to take responsibility, but coming from you, this strikes me as disingenuous. It strikes me as manipulation because I don’t get the feeling that you really care about us but rather you wish to undermine our thoughts that cause Fellowship members to question the dark side of the Fellowship. So what I feel you have done, perhaps unintentionally, is photograph us to undermine the points we are making. You turn the attention from the points of discussion to the faults of those that are bringing up the points. This proves to be an excellent example of the kind of manipulation that is prevalent within the Fellowship. This is precisely what Robert did with James Battaglia when Robert photographed James for being in the king of clubs. Photographs are a great way to change the subject and induce self questioning passivity.
Bravo, Fish.
ton:
Thanks for another awesome post.
renald:
“A victim is a victim is a victim until the time that he gets so sick of being a victim that he allows something else to enter his being.”
Thanks for you posts. Before you leave, (and I do hope you come back), I’d like to educate you on the difference between being a victim and feeling stuck in victimization.
There are perpetrators and there are victims. When a person is involved in a crime, they are either one or the other.
A person mired in feelings of victimization remains silent and depressed for a long time, taking on an inappropriate amount of guilt and self blame. That’s not me any longer.
Once the fear and confusion abates, that “something else to enter his being” begins with negative halves of centers. Remember those?
A person emerging from feelings of victimization gets angry before they get happy. It’s part of a healthy process. If the anger is turned inward, then over time the feelings become depression. If the anger is appropriately channeled outward, then the person takes action to confront the perpetrator by speaking out.
To outsiders like you, the victims appear to be “blaming” the perpetrator when they call for the perp to take responsibility for the perp’s share, who until now has not assumed any blame and always settled out of court. Our vocal written and vocal protests are an effort to shift an appropriate amount of responsibility from our shoulders to his…on the road to happiness and bliss…or more psychic equilibrium.
That’s justice and that’s a higher moral standard than any Burton can ever claim to have.
“It would not have to be rape exactly but something which causes a similar vibration. Any form of the state of vulnerability when the subject of abuse had been brought up would be enough. It calls up an attitude or thought habit or emotional habit which may be quite invisible and may have been acquired in childhood even. So one would not have to have the thought of rape in mind but just a negative state to do with this subject.”
Thanks for that. It will help me clarify an issue for you. When Burton lead me into his room, I was scared shitless. I was shocked. I said nothing to Burton during the intimate encounter; he did all the talking…kinda like when you get mugged. If you know what’s good for you, give them what they want and let them do all the talking.
I don’t know that I’d call fear an emotional habit in me, but more like a hardwired conditioned response.
There was no love there, Burton took advantage of my fear.
That’s what predators do; they take advantage. They are patient opportunists. They keep the herd running and then circle around and pick off the vulnerable. That’s kinda like a dance too, only not the tango. When I was in Africa last year and witnessed three lionesses take down a water buffalo in an exquisitely choreographed display of prowess, I was even more amazed at how passive the water buffalo became as it died. Once it was on the ground, it hardly fought back at all, it just succumbed. Soon the buffalo herd started peacefully grazing nearby again.
“Could you handle that if you could actually see that you did play a part in it even though it might be a small part?”
Yes, I accept that I played the part of the vulnerable victim who has no small part, in fact, the victim plays a necessary role in the crime.
If the crime continues, eventually enough victims band together and confront the perp., an empowering experience for the victims. For me, having sex with Burton was not such an empowering experience. It was degrading.
“I knew he was a bit of an outlaw when it came to getting licenses…”
Would you care to elaborate?
Daily Challenge:
Thanks for your opinion on whether or not I was raped and whether or not my encounters with Burton where consensual. I think I am going to go with my licensed, PhD Clinical Psychologist’s opinion, who happens to be a gay man. We both disagree with you.
“…not by any definition of rape I’m familiar with.”
You are either lying or ignorant of all the awesome definitions of rape Bruce posted to you earlier in the blog last time you started spouting the FOF’s “consensual sex” party line and Burton’s numerous “liaisons” with his young male followers.
So maybe you might want to page back and familiarize yourself with a more informed and broader definition of rape by an expert if you want your opinion to have any creditability.
“In fact, the “prospective student meetings,” as they are called, are the Fellowship’s primary recruitment device. They are tightly scripted. Indeed, they are registered with the United States Library of Congress as a dramatic work. Prospective students are not told they are attending the performance of a dramatic work.”
Wow, does this mean I can apply for an Actor’s Equity card? I hope so, because I want to land one of the leads in a local children’s theatre musical adaptation of “My Dinner with Andre” called “Po Po and Boo Boo Share A Snack.” I up for Po Po. Wish me luck.
“I’m ready for my close up Mr. DeMille.”
On the one hand, DC reminds us that Burton is breaking no law in his relentless pursuit of young heterosexuals males. On the other hand, Whalerider tells us that there was no love in his sexual encounter with Burton. He felt scared then, and to this day, he feels victimized. And so did many others, even if only a few have actually written about it on these pages.
There was no love. I wonder if Burton sees sex with the same hunter/hunted mentality that he uses in his higherself/lowerself internal wartime exhortation to presence.
Love has left the Fellowship, which has been reduced to a battleground of the strong versus the weak, us vs them, the chosen ones vs those destined to organically feed the moon dust. Presence is not love any more, it is conquest and victory.
Love is no longer part of the teaching. Instead you find this weird intellectual revolution. You may need (if asked) to learn by heart – I mean by head – the new obscure way of informing prospective students (instead of the now obsolete and apostate way of speaking of your own experiences using the 4th way system and other school teachings). At events, you simply need to listen with your left eye or perhaps recite a recently abused, ancient quote. You do not need to appreciate and love literature, you need to use it. Time is limited.
Love is no longer the answer. It is still mentioned here and there, but presence in sequence is the higher right, the eternal answer from the Gods to your quest. It trumps all other concerns and aspirations, and negates need for decency. The sequence is the six-step answer to all of your questions about life one earth.
Love is gone. Lust for the body, for the money, remains, shelled in repeated vows to friendship.
Managed to recover my name finally…But I still feel like an ex-cult member. Did you know that there are teams of psychologists dedicated to helping current and ex-cult members? Try talking with someone outside the FOF please.
It is important to realize that a person who is trapped in the Fellowship of Friends mind control spiral and has doubts will not sign up with the Greater Fellowship (even though there are some chaps there who manage to remain anonymous…). If one has been indoctrinated for years and is as afraid to even think out loud their own thoughts and feelings, they will not go public (The Greater Fellowship counts 861 members as of today). But they WILL sneak in here, because no one can see them.
I do not see this forum as a place to connect. It is a rough game as the whole Fellowship affair has been. But it is necessary you keep on writing what is “written” here because you never know whom you are actually helping out!
A Visitor
My father, for example,
who was young once
and blue-eyed,
returns
on the darkest of nights
to the porch and knocks
wildly at the door,
and if I answer
I must be prepared
for his waxy face,
for his lower lip
swollen with bitterness.
And so, for a long time,
I did not answer,
but slept fitfully
between his hours of rapping.
But finally there came the night
when I rose out of my sheets
and stumbled down the hall.
The door fell open
and I knew I was saved
and could bear him,
pathetic and hollow,
with even the least of his dreams
frozen inside him,
and the meanness gone.
And I greeted him and asked him
into the house,
and lit the lamp,
and looked into his blank eyes
in which at last
I saw what a child must love,
I saw what love might have done
had we loved in time.
Mary Oliver
268. jack – November 20, 2008
In relation to this attracting things to oneself idea…
You are quite right. There was no name or reference number. You could have been answering anyone who had previously been chatting about the law of attraction. I forgive myself since I had also been chatting about the law of attraction which I have studied deeply since 1998 and verified for myself beyond any reasonable doubt.
278. jack – November 20, 2008
“ 272 Renald.
( Jack 268. You have not read what I have posted these last couple days and have taken things out of context. If you cannot be bothered to investigate then why should I be bothered to respond to you? Do your homework first, then we could have a meaningful discussion.)“
wow! You are not only psychic ie, you jump to the conclusion I have not read your previous posts.
But you assume things too! ie that I was addressing you.
Did you see your name or post reference number on my post.
Didn’t your mum tell you that ” assumption is the mother of all fuckups.”
Not only that you are defensive and rude invoking the “do your homework” put down.
It was not a put down and I certainly did not mean to sound rude, far from it. It was a suggestion and I stand by it. You see from where I stand you could not have given much attention to what I have been in general saying and you certainly know little about the Abraham material about the law of attraction.
It is easily available on the web and much of it is free of charge.
My life started to change for the better the day that Virginia Jenkins introduced me to it. I am eternally grateful to her and it is the reason why I every once in a while make efforts to pass it on down the line.
The rest of yr. 268 is a common idea which is often put forth by those who really have little idea what this law of attraction stuff is about and do not want to hear anything about. That is what I referred to as homework. It is like if someone picked up a “Beelzebub`s Tales“, opened it in the middle and read any paragraph, dismissing the entire series and the author saying that it is all gobblygook.
“ Ps I thoroughly enjoyed the pre-senile dementia jokes…“
R. So did I. I sure wish I could remember them when I try to pass them on to my wife.
Cheers!
P.S. I am getting the sense that all these reference numbers can just as easily confuse the issues. How many peole would actually go back to them? That is why I try to include the posts in my replies.
Are you the Jack who had an accident just after I arrived at Renaissance in 1990? If so, I missed you after you were gone.
286 & 287 are newly moderated
Hi Renald.
Where exactly do you stand?
“You see from where I stand you could not have given much attention to what I have been in general saying and you certainly know little about the Abraham material about the law of attraction.”
Seems to me like another assumption.
Its nothing new, its said in another way in the Vedas!
Are you saying that my way of interacting suggests this to be the case?
How would you know?
Have you attracted this discussion?
Anyway I did have an accident before deciding to leave and many people at the time told me I chose to attract it….. hmmn.
I always wanted to break my back in three places its just what I was missing in life!
Is Renald your real name? you sound in your discussions very like someone I do know.
Anyway there are many ideas which I cant take too seriously any more.
All the best I must retire for the evening.
“The rain it raineth every day
Upon the just and unjust fella,
But more upon the just because
The unjust hath the just’s umbrella.”
Guess which one Burton would be?
jx.
whalerider 283
“I’d like to educate you on the difference between being a victim and feeling stuck in victimization. “
I read your post twice and I still do not know what you mean by the difference between a victim and someone who feels stuck in victimization. Is the latter a victimizer or someone who continuously goes around playing the part of a woe is me victim? My thought on the subject is that there are people who either from time to time or even often or even always feel vulnerable. They then sing the song, in this case of the ready to be abused and when they meet up with the one who is going around singing the song of the perpetrator, an event which is highly predictable happens. Going back to the past I found two times when I was picked up by homosexuals and I followed then like a lonely sheep. Fortunately they were not sociopaths and in both cases I was able to run out the door before anything could happen. In these cases I was obviously not so far down the scale of victims (it could only happen that way) and the picker-upper was not so far down the scale of maniacs. One can think of it as quantum mechanics of psychology.
“To outsiders like you,“ Now I am an outsider. What is the secret message there, I am an outsider because I did not get abused? Because I did not and am not suffering? Well the odd time I remember that I lost a big fat company pension because I could not wait even six months to have the plan paid up and hightail it to the Fellowship of Friends who nearest center was some 2,000 miles away from my home and job. Sure that is small potatoes compared to others like yourself. At least I have it ingrained in my mind that it is small potatoes.
“A person emerging from feelings of victimization gets angry before they get happy. It’s part of a healthy process.“
I agree wholeheartedly. Getting stuck there however is as much of a curse and over time is unhealthy. Lack of health can just as much develop into the lower emotional states of depression and powerlessness, a terrible loop.
“I don’t know that I’d call fear an emotional habit in me, but more like a hardwired conditioned response. “
My take on that is this: Initially it is a conditioned response. After a while, eleven times according to George Ivanovitch, of repeating the scenario it becomes habitual and an addiction. Why? Because our brains don`t know the difference between the thought and the what we call “real“ event. It starts to build connections which then trigger hormonal responses, which then cause an addictive response much the same as nicotine or heroin does and it is just as dangerous. In my point of view the way out is in building different habits which use up our energy until the unwanted ones get starved out. Yes it can hurt for a while but it can be done. Why get hung up on whether Reb can heal himself. Charity begins at home. Why get hung up on revenge, which is also on the path of healing oneself, when getting stuck in that still relatively low vibration risks falling back down again to the previous abyss like a recovering alcoholic who falls off the wagon? It is a step by step rebirth, a reclaiming of power which can bring the victim and his victimness out into the light and fresh air of perpetual joy and love. This is what I envision.
Screw the perp as you call him. Let him rot for all you care. He will attract his just rewards. They tell me he cries when his friends abandon him. Good for him! Seriously! I want to see you smile a happy smile. It would put an even bigger smile on my kisser and for sure my teeth would show. What else?
“I knew he was a bit of an outlaw when it came to getting licenses…”
Would you care to elaborate?“
That was only referring to the trouble he would get into over not getting building permits or maybe even not using bequeathed money for what it was meant to be and such sins that I could more easily ignore. I was listing my memories of what I knew and did not know about what was going on behind closed doors.
There is one more thing I would like to point out and you probably will not like it. Shake it off!
When a person focuses on a negative long enough, that negative is attracted. It may or may not appear physically and I am thinking about the feeling here of the sexual abuses which are quite prevalent in this era. One of the things I noticed at Apollo before I left was the preponderance and increasing numbers of young people coming down with cancer and with tumors of various types. Even her highness was never completely healthy and this I knew to be the result of negativity in mind or in body or both. Anyways that is not the point I am attempting to highlight. I mentioned two so far.
Why do you suppose there are so many perverts among the ranks of priests, ministers, police chiefs, law makers and so on? Availability? It may be a factor but it is not the real biggie. It is what I have been speaking about all along. It is focus, attention. Like I said the brain does not know the difference between fact or fiction. One is just as addictive as the other. I have seen social workers burn out physically and probably mentally as well though that does not show up as easily and in a relatively short time. Add to that what people are watching on television these days. Not exactly “Leave it to Beaver“ is it? Everyone is addicted to what crosses the mind enough times. Then what? I will leave it at that or as they say I don`t want to go there. Cheers!
Jomo Pinata,
Thanks for the thinking/writing on “coercive persuasion.” You could see from my post that I wasn’t on firm ground there and needed some help. I like your clarification re: Molko and Leal of “above board” or “up front” persuasion vs. lying to get what you want.
But this is where I am still hazy: do any REB or FoF actions rise to the standard of lying in order to get someone into the cult? I was a Regional Coordinator in 1999, and admittedly Robert put me in that position to get my ass out of Apollo, so maybe I never saw the top secret memos, but I never heard about the Library of Congress registered dramatic work thing. Even if true, so what? Unlike the Molko case, if a prospective student asks you tell them (at least you did in 1999, and I was told myself in 1992) that the FoF is a California registered 501(c)(4) religious organization.
And you can only lie about facts. When REB says he’s a goddess-in-a-man’s body, or that letting him fellate you will be good for your soul, how exactly does one go about proving whether that is a “lie” or not? I happen to think its what he really believes.
Now I’d been at prospective meetings where fucks like Benny Youdin and Mark Laksen would fib, especially if the prospective was young and fine. I’d photograph them after the meeting in private and set the prospective student straight. Look, assholes are everywhere. I have this creepy memory of my first center director, Ms. Grace, who with that wicked gleam in her eye told me that “Robert would like me.” She wasn’t lying, right? But I don’t hold her responsible for Robert’s actions, she was just an enabler. In the same Fellowship (the same center, actually) were incredible friends who sat me down when they heard I was to “go travelling” with Robert and made sure I knew the whole truth, and knew that I could say “no.”
That was the whole thing with the Fellowship. In a way, REB was just the crazy attractor, and he attracted people from all ages, backgrounds and persuasions, to get together and do this “work.” Sure REB doesn’t have a genuine lineage to Gurdjieff or Ouspensky, but there were (are) people in the Fellowship who did, and those were my teachers: Mark S., Brunella, that old Egyptian guy, Parks, more I can’t remember.
walter.tanner@gmail.com
A rose AND a thorn, Elena, I embrace opposites.
Walter, I hear you and really agree with the bulk of what you wrote. (Except that stuff about the “work” — I believe “the work” is bullshit. No question but that I am an apostate.) By and large the enablers are at a whole different level of culpability than the big rotting stinky cheese. It is not unique to the Fellowship that a whole lot of sincere people are to be found throughout the pyramid, with a conscienceless psychopath, who has lied to them and manipulated them and exploited them, occupying the pyramid’s tippy top. But you’ve gotta figure, even the sincere have had to do some pretty extreme psychological contortions to justify away stinky cheese’s statements and actions. At a certain point every adult must come to a point where he says, crazy wisdom, fuck it. This shit’s just mental illness.
By the way, center director told me at my first meeting that the Fellowship was incorporated as a church “for tax reasons.” I’m sure that’s true, but the metamessage was, it may be a church technically, but ignore its bona fides. It’s not a church. It’s a school.
I was also required to sign a release of liability, because I was over 18 but under 21. I have a distinct memory of this. I was never given a copy.
Walter Tanner:
But this is where I am still hazy: do any REB or FoF actions rise to the standard of lying in order to get someone into the cult?
This is a great question. How much fakery is necessary before one can call something a lie?
I don’t have the answer to this question. I can discuss the bookmark, though. The one I found was in a copy of The Fourth Way. It had little naked cherubs on it and it said “Gurdjieff-Ouspensky Centres TM.” It was printed on glossy paper in color at a time when this was expensive to do.
1. It was placed in a book without permission of the publisher or the person who owned the literary rights.
2. It was placed in a book in order to harvest the very powerful thing that is human engagement with a book. Illicitly.
3. It did not lead to an organization called “Gurdjieff-Ouspensky Centres.” Instead, it led to an organization called The Fellowship of Friends, Inc.
4. A corporation is supposed to use its real name. An organization gets limited liability when it incorporates and part of the deal is, it has to use its real name when it deals with the public. This organization did not use its real name.
5. There was a trademark indicator next to the name “Gurdjieff Ouspensky Centres” I.e., “TM.” But trademarks are for products, and Gurdjieff-Ouspensky Centers was not a product. So this was misleading.
6. The bookmark itself created the impression that it was linked to the author of the book and the lineage of the book. This was a false impression.
7. The bookmark misrepresented the name of the organization that put it there and concealed the real name.
8. Even the real name of the organization, the Fellowship of Friends, creates a misleading impression by suggesting not only the Quakers but also the name given one of Gurdjieff’s groups as described in In Search of the Miraculous.
9. Prospective students attending prospective student meetings were told the school was led by a man #6 but were not permitted to be told Robert Burton’s name until they had made their first teaching payment. So there was active concealment.
Would anyone like to add to this list?
Panorea, It is very good to have you with us. We’re learning but I believe everyone here writes with love. In fact, I believe love is the Ocean on which we swim, it’s just that we’re not such great swimmers! Something like Meher Baba’s idea that killers kill with love because they don’t know any other way to connect. I also think that love is not necessarily letting us be but pushing each other towards greater horizons. A lot of moulding is necessary to help us connect and where there’s been so much individualism, is it surprising that there are so many difficulties?
————
Renald, O.K. I’ll play with you. I completely agree with you, there is a dimension in which we attract everything that happens to us but with the same stick, the Fellowship, that is, every member inside, is now attracting everything that is happening to them.
If I misunderstood you before, it was because the idea is brought in a moment in which it reinforces Daily Cardiac’s position. If that was your aim, there you have the questioning, if it wasn’t, would you consider the possibility that the way and the moment in which it was presented seemed to express it? And the tone does seem to be undermining the impulse to “stop the Fellowship?” It is not easy for me to understand people who are perfectly clear that Cults harm people but think it is quite alright to let them be. Am I understanding you correctly now?
The way I’ve perceived the law of attraction is not necessarily that one is attracting something because one must pay for something that happened in the past but because one can carry it in the present and take into the future. Both ends meet. The difference is that the gloomy view of having to pay for something we attracted from the past is rather “catholic”, so to speak, while being able to carry what happened to one connects with one’s present and future, one’s being, one’s ability to carry one’s destiny. In fact it connects beautifully to the “donkey”.
Would you also consider that it connects with pride and humility?
As when pride carries without humility.
When humility will not carry what pride thinks it doesn’t deserve
when humility carries what pride thinks it doesn’t deserve
when humility carries what pride doesn’t deserve and
when one carries with pride what one accepted with humility.
In that vein and connected to our discussion, it may not be that we did not deserve to experience the Fellowship, on the contrary, we were meant to experience it so that we could take care of it in this lifetime.
There is a human pride that cannot accept abuse because it takes dignity away from itself. Dignity then would be an aspect of pride. Real pride. In accepting abuse one is accepting for dignity to be tampered with, attacked, reduced. It is not my dignity what is abused when you abuse me, it is the dignity that lives within us and vice-versa. When this happens between two people, it can be resolved by “absorbing” the negativity and humbly allowing for the offence, which allows the offender to take a look at dignity but when it happens socially, as we are dealing with the Fellowship, it seems dignity must express itself in actions. In both situations, firmness, or a strong enough I to respond, is necessary.
We are not used to think of positive emotions as if they were entities of their own and that we simply “experience” them or “live them out”, but if we could think of them in that way, then, what we accept, when we accept abuse, is for positive emotions to lose ground in the Universe. In that sense we are actors of objective entities that live within our struggles. Our lives are the struggle between them, like the cells in our body suffer our emotions. Consistent sadness has it’s toll just as consistent well being expresses itself in the tone of the body.
In the Fellowship it is taught that only false personality is offended and that to learn humility one has to accept every humiliation. Pride is consistently attacked as “false pride”. But just as false pride is a quality of false personality, true pride is a quality of true personality. When true personality or essence accepts to be humiliated indefinitely, Real I is weakened and depression, worthlessness and self deprecation appear. It was the most practiced “lesson”, for Robert never stops humiliating the members with his “forever above the rest” behaviour but humility cannot be learnt without pride. If you cannot stand there and look at yourself when there is nothing to see, you cannot be there to see what is standing there. First one Is, then one is nothing. If one cannot acknowledge one’s self with pride, one cannot accept anything with humility and therefore there is no gratitude.
Positive emotions have their own triads. Gratitude is for the Spirit like Oxygen for the Earth. All that Is, is within Gratitude.
The attempt to write this things down is simply an attempt. To put those experiences into words is like finding out what one actually experienced. But the experience itself is as many have said before, as far from words as the Earth to the Sun. Forgive me if the presentation is not only long. I am finding out as we share. I thank you for letting me offer them here.
This last post was written after having read up to 289.
Walter, I thought it was too good to be true, but will make sure to be less naive next time!
NEW DISCUSSION