(Editor’s note: Stan wrote the following as a result of conversations/correspondence with two long-term guests staying at Cluny 2010/11.)

Cluny Today: What do you most cherish about Cluny Hill College nowadays? What concerns you?

I cherish most of all my appreciation for its simply being here, (a) that I can have such a compatible place to be – home for now – and (b) for its doing such good work, in helping the guests have a real, hands-on experience of Work as Love in Action. An experience that they can take out with them and apply in their own lives, and thus ‘spread the word’, the attitude, of bringing spirit into matter in everything we do; and thereby helping to fulfil our individual selves, and bringing humanity as a whole in closer touch with its highest potential. Cherishing the fact that it’s not a game we’re playing here, or that it is just ‘a nice place to be’; but that it’s a deadly serious business, this business of helping individuals and humanity in general reach for their best expression. That we have work to do, and are doing it.

What concerns me is that we don’t always rise to our highest and express the founding principles of the Foundation as best we can. But hey – we’re still human. Still on a journey. Still have a ways to go. But that would be my summation of this point: the hope that we keep awake to the fact that we are not there yet. Can still learn, and grow. And that includes me as well.

Cluny Tomorrow: How could Cluny ‘serve the world’ yet more? What would you like to see more of?

What occurs to me first on this question is that we could do more in the way of demonstrating sustainability. The value of being linked into local (organic) produce, and so forth. I’m not a purist in this regard, or a fanatic; I feel there is value in being linked into the world system of exchange of goods and services – in creating a One World mentality in spirit. But there is also a value in demonstrating good stewardship, and that sort of awareness. And we could do that more by continuing to explore the subject area of edible landscaping. (N.B. The Foundation currently has four students sponsored by the EU in a program called European Voluntary Scheme (EVS). They are spending a year here in the Foundation, each working on an individual project – seeing how we do things along these ‘sustainability’ lines, and bringing their subject areas further into being here. One of them is precisely this one – a project in developing edible landscaping.)

We could also be more conscious of not wasting energy. Turning radiators down when we’re not in the rooms; turning lights off when we finish using them; etc. etc. We live pretty ‘high on the hog’ here. It’s sleep-inducing, figuratively as well as literally.

It’s one thing to think abundance. Nothing wrong with that attitude. It leaves us open to the doors and stores of heaven – when living in harmony with the larger reality. But it’s another to look at the needs of the whole, and realize that there is sufficiency for everyone on the planet, if we are more conscious of our use of resources. And that will require humanity to stop living by economic ‘principles’ of planned obsolescence, and the necessity of consumption, and constant growth, and so forth. And that, in turn, will require humanity to stop thinking in terms of the western monetary system, and realize that there is a different way to live with one another, on this lovely planet we call Earth. And that is by way of cooperation, not competition. Realizing, that all we need, to give of our best to one another in the exchange of goods and services and our individual ingenuity and enterprise, is a motive – not ‘money’ per se. That is – has been – just one motive. Another: to do so out of gratitude to our Creator for life with meaning. And if we do, then ‘all else will be added unto us’. So Cluny, as the main educational arm of the Findhorn Foundation, could start running workshops to help people see outside of the current parameters, the current paradigm, the current mindset, the current matrix, and make the changes being asked of us as a race of beings now.

We – humanity – got into trouble when money became an end in itself, rather than simply the means to an end that it started out as: the end of exchanging goods and services. But – and especially with the creation of the concept of ‘interest’ – then money became the object, not the verb. (Somebody here was telling me the other day that one of our Trustees had pointed out once that ‘we’ got into trouble when we started paying money FOR money, rather than its being merely a medium of exchange. Just so.) And we have been separated from our potential ever since – our potential as One Planet – One Humanity – One Destiny (in the words of Planetary Citizens, that NGO that I worked with for a year in the early ’80s). We are close to experiencing the deadly potential of that estrangement from our better natures. We need to wake up out of our trance. Our self-induced trance. (That’s free will for you; and its potential…)

I would love to see the Findhorn Foundation take a lead in helping people to undo that trance state, and start being aware of the flip side to great Crisis. Which is great Opportunity. And move into a state of awareness of The Turning Point we are at. Some observers of the human scene also call this (with good reason, to my way of thinking) The Great Turning (see David C. Korten and Joanna Macy for more information).[1]

This also gets into the subject area of ‘2012’, and what all that meme, that idea – of an End of History – can do for the raising of consciousness.

But that’s beginning to get into another subject.

***

[1] David C. Korten, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. And Joanna Macy, of ‘Council of All Beings’/Deep Ecology workshop fame, has used and expounded on the term in her good work as well.

Korten has written nicely on this theme in the conclusion to his book Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth: (pp 186-7). I commend that book in general, and the closing statement in it in particular, to your attention. He concludes his book with the words:

“Now is the hour. We have the power to turn this world around for the sake of ourselves and our children. We are the ones we have been waiting for.”