II · Of the Work
Five disciplines, undertaken across a lifetime.
The work of the Society is divided, by custom, into five disciplines. They are not stages to be completed; they are practices to be sustained. A member returns to each, in some form, every week.
Study, here, means the careful and repeated reading of a small canon of Western contemplative thought. It is not the consumption of information. It is sustained engagement with a finite number of texts over many years, with the aim of allowing their structures of thought to become part of one's own.
The member reads deeply, slowly, and again. The Library lists the principal works.
Contemplation is the disciplined exercise of sustained attention upon an object — a passage of text, a question, a virtue, or the conditions of one's own life. It is not meditation in the modern, therapeutic sense, and it has no occult purpose.
It is the philosophical exercise by which what has been studied is brought, slowly, into understanding. The early Stoics called this prosoche: the close attention paid to one's own mind.
Discipline is the daily and weekly ordering of life: of sleep, of work, of speech, of company, of attention. It is treated as a craft, refined throughout life rather than mastered at a moment.
Without it, study and contemplation produce only fragments. With it, they accumulate.
Counsel is the practice of bringing one's deliberations before a senior member of the Society, and of offering counsel in return. It is not therapy, and it is not direction. It is the slow, mutual sharpening of judgement that occurs between two serious persons who share a vocabulary.
Each member of the Society is in counsel with at least one other. The correspondence may continue for decades.
Service is the practical obligation of the member: to the Society and the preservation of its canon, to those with whom one works in the world, and to the world itself, which must live among the consequences of one's cultivation or one's neglect.
It is not philanthropy as performance. It is the recognition that a private discipline incurs a public debt.
The disciplines are not five paths. They are five sides of a single labour.
The path through these disciplines is marked, traditionally, in three degrees.
Read The Path