Upcoming Events
Regular Community Events
- Monthly Movements Classes
See the Calendar for details. - Work Weekends
See the Calendar for details. -
Thursday Night Inner Work – 8:00pm.
Currenty being held on Zoom.
Join us to explore the spiritual side of Gurdjieff’s work. We work collaboratively to share our experiences, our personal journeys, and to reflect on the readings and practical exercises. All are welcome, but please, contact us for details. -
Morning Meditations & Sittings 6:30am – 7:30pm.
Mondays – Fridays, Barn Community Room.
Sit with the community and be a part of our daily practice. Some mornings are guided meditations or sittings, others are on your own. Interested? Contact us!
Full Calendar
Annual Movements Retreat 2024
Annual International Movements Retreat to be held at Claymont Court.
For more information and to register, please visit the website: https://movements-retreat.org/
Higher Energies Workshop at the Barn led by Joe Naft
DOWNLOAD FLYER for more info
The workshop will be led by Joseph Naft. He is the author of www.innerfrontier.org and of seven books, most recently Light on the Way. He studied with J.G. Bennett at Sherborne, England in 1974 and has led Fourth Way groups since 1976. Deborah Rose Longo will teach movements, along with Joe.
The workshop will begin with dinner at 6:30 pm on Wednesday July 10 and end with lunch on Sunday July 14.
All activities will be at the Great Barn. You are cordially invited to join us in our work and exploration. Participants must have experience in Fourth Way groups or courses.
Suggested donation for the workshop is $400 if you are staying overnight at Claymont and $220 if you are not staying overnight at Claymont. However, do not let the cost prevent you from attending, as financial assistance is available.
For more information and to register please contact Amy Silver at Claymontgathering@hotmail.com.
“If a man desires sincerely and seriously, and out of no mere curiosity, to attain to the knowledge of the way leading to Real Being, and if he fulfills to this end all that is requested of him and begins, in fact, among other things to aid indirectly, and from his very first step, the attainment of this by others, he will, by this act alone, become as it were the forming ground for the real data contributing to the manifestation of objective and actual Good.”
Appropriately, from The Herald of the Coming Good.
Mr. Gurdjieff, in some of his early writing indicated that people working together in the sense of being could become sources of good in this world. The obstacles faced by Mr. G in establishing his work are well-known and well-documented.
Through the work and sacrifice of countless people over the years we have been able to participate and benefit from the above-mentioned good. It is with deep gratitude that we look to acknowledge and celebrate several significant milestones that are rapidly approaching us this year.
Our founder and teacher, J.G. Bennett, in the midst of his Sherborne residential project, looked to the future. With great cost to himself and with the help of numerous others, he managed to find and acquire the Claymont property in 1974 for the establishment of a community firmly centered on the work that Mr. G transmitted to him and many others. Mr Bennett’s vision, profound and far-reaching, was left in the hands of others, as 1974 would also mark the end of Bennett’s ‘planetary existence.’
This year, 2024, marks fifty years since the founding of the Claymont Society as well as fifty years since the passing of its founder. There have been countless challenges along the way, and no one claims to have fulfilled The Call for a New Society. We are now fifty years into the project and it is up to us how it is to unfold for the years during and beyond our lifetimes.
This, therefore, is a great time to come together, acknowledge the events that have occurred along the way, celebrate the greater present moment in which we find ourselves, and consider the possibilities for Claymont’s future.
We are calling out to all who have taken part in the past as well as all those connected inwardly and outwardly with our core practices and aspirations to come together from October 16th to 2oth 2024 for an event marking the 50 years of the society.
Please take an active part. We are interested in your input and ideas. We have volunteers locally who are working with the details of preparation and planning. However, we view and sense this event in a larger context and hope that others will be active toward it in a positive way and will contribute time, care and thought into bringing about an event worthy of the Occasion.
The event will begin with dinner on Wednesday October 16 and end after lunch on October 20.
Lodging and activities will be at the Great Barn at the Claymont Society in Charles Town, WV.
The cost for the event is $495 including meals and lodging. However, do not let the cost prevent you from participating, financial assistance is available.
For more information and to register please contact Amy Silver at claymontgathering@hotmail.com.
Click Here to Register
Free and open to the public. All ages are welcome, though youth must be accompanied by an adult. Registration is required.
PVMN Continuing Education and Volunteer Credit Eligible
What is biochar? In this hands-on demonstration, you’ll learn how to create biochar from unwanted organic matter (we’ll be using recently removed Autumn Olive shrubs as feedstock), how to safely operate a biochar kiln, and learn about new methods for managing non-native species and enhancing forest resiliency.
(Rain date: March 7)
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March 27 – 30, Work Weekend at the Barn with a theme of Educating Essence.
Seminar by Hardy Mason. The weekend starts with dinner at 6:30pm Thursday, March 27th.
For more information and to register please contact, the registrar, Amy Silver at Claymontgathering@hotmail.com.
Aging as a Spiritual Practice webinar series
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Spiritual Practices While Aging From a Fourth Way and Multi-Dimensional Perspective.
with Jerry Toporvsky
Saturday talks on Zoom 2-5pm ET | $50 / session or three for $120
Contact registrar.ics4way@gmail.com for registration
May 10
May 31
June14
Balancing the Three Centers through Meditation, Movements, and the Enneagram
Lead by Deborah Rose Longo and Rob Creekmore
June 4 – 8, 2025
Download the flyer
Work Weekend with Lee van Laer
July 10-13, 2025
A Cosmological Sensation
Join us for a work weekend led by Lee van Laer. When Gurdjieff wrote Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, he mentioned the words cosmos and cosmic 750 times, give or take, in the 1140 pages of the book. Mr. Gurdjieff was, it’s clear enough, bent on reminding us that we live in a cosmos; and that we’ve lost touch with our cosmological nature. He speaks of a lost world where mankind was able to see more colors than we do now; to hear more tones than we do; to sense the emanations of the sun, moon, and planets—and even the sorrow of God Himself.
How do I live within this cosmology which Gurdjieff presents? It’s in the book, but not of the book.
Here are some of the questions we’ll explore from a practical point of view through guided meditation, discussions, and community activity.
- What are Spiritual molecules? Can one re-align one’s molecular Being? If so, how?
- How can I form an inner relationship that has enough strength to maintain a right attitude regardless of external conditions?
- I live in the disordinary: a wrongly ordered state. Yet somewhere in me is an inner voice that speaks softly, perhaps even wordlessly, through my sensation of Being. It tells me the cosmos has a right order. And I’m thirsty for that. I’m searching for it. In the midst of all this confusion, how do I say yes, and bring the good? Where is my center of gravity?
Attendees are also encouraged to bring their own questions for all of us to explore.
The weekend will be led by Lee van Laer. Lee is a long-time member of the New York Gurdjieff Foundation, a group leader, an editor at Parabola Magazine, an author, a podcaster, a musician and an artist. His website is https://zenyogagurdjieff.substack.com
Movements will also be offered as part of the weekend. The weekend will begin with dinner at 6:30 pm on Thursday July 10 and end after lunch on Sunday July 13. All activities will be at the Great Barn.
Suggested donation for the weekend is $350 if you are staying overnight at Claymont, and $210 if you are not staying overnight at Claymont. However, do not let the cost prevent you from participating, financial assistance is available.
For more information and to register please contact, the registrar, Amy Silver at Claymontgathering@hotmail.com.
Click for: APPLICATION | PROSPECTUS
The Claymont Society is offering a 15 week Course of Study in The Fourth Way tradition. This is open to anyone who feels a need and wish to go deeper in their spiritual search and practice.
The Course will be conducted both in person and online. It will focus on the teachings and practices of G. I. Gurdjieff and J.G. Bennett, offered by people who studied with Bennett at Sherborne, with Pierre Elliot at Claymont, as well as other prominent spiritual teachers.
This will begin with an on-site program August 2nd-10th and conclude with a second on-site program November 9th-16th with regular on-line group activities in between.
We are pleased to host this opportunity to work together with Roger Lipsey. In addition to inner exercises and practices in the rural atmosphere of Claymont, there will be an opportunity to work along with others of long experience in the practical application of ideas and values brought to the West by G. I. Gurdjieff.
Roger invites us to “create a study circle on Saturday, September 20th, to explore together the values of the teaching. The form is simple, potentially demanding: form teams of three or four study partners in August if not earlier, choose a focus for study and exchange, and bring your findings and questions to the whole gathering for shared discussion. As Mr. Gurdjieff said about meeting at his apartment in Paris, ‘Here there are no spectators.’In that spirit, be sure to find teammates and engage.”
Where to look in the Gurdjieff literature? In Beelzebub: the Sphinx, Belcultassi and those he drew close to him, Ashiata Shiemash and so much in those four chapters, the passages on the hasnamuss in the Greek and Roman chapter—and so very much else, scattered like peradams throughout the book. Elsewhere, especially in Views from the Real World, a team could choose aphorisms to explore and offer to the rest of us. There is also a wealth of material in that book about values. Look also in the reflections of Mr. Bennett, in In Search, in the Paris meetings
1943 and ‘44–and naturally look also at your own experience. Can we make this a research project through which we educate ourselves about the values of the teaching? Roger’s talk at the Harvard Gurdjieff conference last December shows some of the topics with which you might engage. You’ll find the text at https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/publications/gurdjieff/eighteenth-commandment-lipsey
Roger Lipsey is a trustee of the New York Gurdjieff Foundation. He served for many years on the board of Parabola, and his many books include Gurdjieff Reconsidered: The Life, the Teachings, the Legacy; Make Peace Before the Sun Goes Down: The Long Encounter of Thomas Merton and His Abbot, James Fox; and others. For more information about his books, visit https://www.rogerlipsey.net.
“What has long been needed is a good translator, someone who can bridge these gaps with more patience than Gurdjieff himself and more subtlety than those who meet his teaching only from the usual intellectual and cultural reference points. In both of these respects, Roger Lipsey is supremely the man for the job… Tremendously literate, with a sweeping breadth of knowledge of the Western intellectual tradition , he is also a longtime student of the Work – now one of its respected elders – and his long years of laboring in this vineyard will be immediately apparent, to those who know the Work, through the signature fragrance of his presentation.”Cynthia Bourgeault, in her introduction to Gurdjieff Reconsidered. The weekend will begin with dinner at 6:30 pm on Friday September 19 and end after lunch on Sunday September 21. All activities will be at the Great Barn.
Suggested donation for the weekend is $250 if you are staying overnight at Claymont, and $170 if you are not staying overnight at Claymont. However, do not let the cost prevent you from participating, financial assistance is available.
For more information and to register please email, the registrar, Amy Silver at Claymontgathering@hotmail.com Further information and Updates will be posted on society.claymont.org