Tenets For Community
These Six Tenets have been chosen as the focus for our Inner and Outer work. By holding these Tenets in mind and approaching the task at hand with initiative and creativity, always refining our efforts, and keeping in mind knowledge of the whole we are better able to understand ourselves and the world around us.
Operational Excellence
-Each of us will contribute to the optimal running of the property, systems and infrastructure with understanding of the current operational needs.
Financial Sustainability
-We will commit to keeping The Society financially stable by contributing to the Claymont Court Seminars, educational programs, agriculture, cottage industries, publishing, and other business as defined by the Claymont charter.
Spiritual Focus
-We are committed to a spiritual life and to a spiritual direction for the community. This includes participation in group practice, maintaining our personal spiritual practice & honoring and supporting the practice of others.
Healthy Community
-Each person is committed to building strong and healthy community. Each will participate in community building activities, take responsibility for our own emotional and psychological health, and learn to use technologies available for transforming conflict. At all times we strive to hold one another in the highest personal regard.
Environmental Stewardship
-We practice environmental stewardship through applying the permaculture principles of land-use, reducing personal consumption and waste, and holding a sense of responsibility towards the land that Claymont occupies specifically and value of the earth generally.
Service
-We all endeavor to serve and share with the Community, the Society, and our greater local community and neighbors.
Community
We are here at Claymont among other things in order to learn to see reality. Reality includes the fact that we are each small parts of a larger whole, both at the micro and macro levels. Yet, we are here, both on earth and at Claymont, for a reason and have a part to play and a purpose to fulfill in being incarnate. In order to fully serve our purpose, we have to see ourselves in the context of the whole. Living in community is the perfect training ground for this if we choose to make use of the opportunity. On the one hand, we each have something to contribute, and on the other hand, none of us is important at the expense of the whole. Our highest contributions must come from our higher selves, not from our egos, which generally get in the way of this process, although they serve survival functions for us.
Our egos represent a necessary animal part of ourselves, especially in terms of our ability to have evolved as a species, but they include aspects such as blind competitiveness, fighting for dominance, and all lower emotions, that do not serve our spiritual growth individually or collectively. They also support the illusion of our own wants and needs being more important than those of others, and of ourselves as totally separate from others and from the larger whole. Gurdjieff talks at great length about the illusions of egoism and the problems they create. Unbridled egos are extremely destructive in any community context, and at odds with the basic purposes of a spiritual community of any sort. Egoism is in direct opposition to developing the lovingness that helps bind a community together and that is an important part of our spiritual development.
Therefore, central to our spiritual lives, either individually or as a school for spiritual growth is an understanding of how ego operates, problems it can cause, and the collective understanding of it. To be part of this community there needs to be a commitment to working to transcend it, not by trying to kill it, but by getting it to serve only its proper functions (actual physical survival, acquiring and using knowledge of the world, interpersonal communication in the context of society), not the maintenance of our illusions about ourselves and our importance as personalities.
Find out about current Community Projects at Claymont.
Find out about our Programs at Claymont.