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2: Cult versus belief



Do not build a Dervish convent or live in one.
—Abdulhalik Gudjduvani

How does a cult differ from any guiding belief? Having been in a cult and come out, I am re-examining what it is I know and what I merely believed. 

I was looking for meaning in life, and for twenty-seven years I was a member of what some would call a cult, others a fourth way School—the Fellowship of Friends led by its teacher Robert Earl Burton (‘the Teacher’). Over the years many have left. Many students remain, for the most part beautiful and sincere people. (How people who are beautiful and sincere also appeared to receive with equanimity the Teacher’s prediction that California would fall into the sea and millions of non-cult members drown is an important question. I also wonder about those at the centre of the school who must have known exactly what was going on.)

Now I have dropped out. I have read the testimonies of other ex-students, testimonies I had not read before. Some, according to their accounts, were sexually abused and damaged. Some have merely spent a large part of their incomes and others wasted years when they might have been happier doing something else. I cannot speak for them. 

For myself, I have mixed feelings: I have given twelve percent of my after-tax income, yet I have done well enough. I did not live at Apollo on a below-minimum wage while the world passed me by. I did not abandon my ‘life’ family. I did not entirely abandon my skepticism, but I did compartmentalise it (perhaps that is the most interesting part of coming to believe unverifiable things—how a scientifically-educated person can be fooled—or fool themselves). By applying some of the methods of the fourth way, I have learned things that still seem to me of value that perhaps I might not have learned any other way. Yet even that is a difficult claim to verify. How much might I have learned simply by looking after my family and doing my job with persistence and sincerity?

Like it or not we all need a world view to live by. That world view may be as narrow as a self-centred self-interest which ricochets like a pin-ball from one event to the next, or as wide as Jesus’s philosophy of love or Buddha’s middle way. But it is impossible to live without some guiding principles, even if they are just money, sex and beer. Whatever I arrive at will undoubtedly be simpler and humbler than what I had before.

There is a quotation I came across to the effect that young men come to Athens to learn wisdom, but when they get there they learn to be ordinary. I have learned at any rate that there is nothing wrong with being ordinary, as long as you do it properly.

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