Fellowship of Friends

The Fellowship of Friends is a group founded in California in 1970 by Robert Earl Burton, teaching a version of the Fourth Way, the esoteric system derived from the early twentieth-century teachers G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky. Its central aim, in Fourth Way terms, is the awakening of a higher consciousness through "self-remembering" and the overcoming of mechanical, sleeping habit; the Fellowship has placed particular emphasis on the cultivation of fine art, classical music, and refined taste as aids to this awakening, and its northern-California property became known for its collections and vineyards.

The group has drawn outside attention and criticism chiefly through the accounts of former members and litigation, some of which alleged that Burton exercised improper control and made sexual demands of male followers, allegations he and the Fellowship have contested, and which have been aired largely through civil disputes and journalism rather than resulting in criminal findings. The Fellowship continues as an organization. It is frequently cited in discussions of the Fourth Way's many offshoots and of the general difficulty of evaluating a living group when the principal critical evidence comes from former members and unproven civil claims; readers should weigh those accounts accordingly.

The Fellowship of Friends built its life around a place. On oak hills near Oregon House, California, the group planted a celebrated vineyard and winery, called Renaissance, raised a lodge filled with European art and opera performances, and named the settlement Apollo, all in service of founder Robert Earl Burton's teaching that a conscious community should surround itself with beauty against a coming collapse.

Burton, a former schoolteacher who adapted the Fourth Way vocabulary of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, made specific predictions, a California earthquake for 1998 and a global catastrophe for 2006, which members marked and which passed unfulfilled, the group absorbing the failures as tests of understanding. The community's legal history has been dominated by its founder. Civil suits filed in 1984 and 1996 by former members alleged that Burton sexually exploited young men in the group under the cover of spiritual authority; both were settled out of court, and further accounts by former members, collected by journalists and by ex member networks online, describe the same pattern across decades. The Fellowship denies wrongdoing and continues, smaller than at its peak, with centres in many countries feeding members and money toward Apollo. For scholars of the Fourth Way's many descendants, the group stands as the movement's most opulent and most litigated branch, a test case of what happens when the teaching of self remembering is fused to one man's unaccountable authority.