The fourth way to nowhere

Link to part 1: The arousing of thought 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

“Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!” said Alice … One day it became clear to me that I no longer believed in the cult of which I had been a member for twenty-seven years. In some respects this parting of the ways had been coming for a long time. In other ways it was almost a surprise to me. I had joined with the belief that here was a teaching, perhaps ancient, which could lead to higher states of consciousness, which could lead one back to one’s own birthright as a human being. I came disillusioned from the peace movement, with the strong feeling that no amount of political protest was going to save humanity from itself, and with the conviction that the only way forward was inner transformation—to start with myself, perhaps to help others to do the same. Thus began my journey from what still seem to me reasonable grounds, into a cult in which the ideas of Ouspensky’s and Gurdjieff’s fourth way were transformed into something different, and in which there was a smell of corrupti