During 1977, my second year in what was now officially known as the Findhorn Foundation University of Light, I had several strong existential experiences. The first was an outing for the kitchen crews – Findhorn and Cluny Hill – to the Falls of Rogie, a beauty spot beyond Inverness where people go to watch the salmon leaping up a water fall on their way to spawning grounds. After a predictably sumptuous picnic – prepared by around twelve cooks – I took a walk across the river and up a steep path. Quite suddenly I slipped and found myself sliding down a steep grassy slope towards a drop of, maybe, twenty five feet over the edge of a cliff. Below, I could see nothing but craggy boulders. On the other side of the river, a group of tourists were marvelling at the leaping salmon.

I knew that I couldn’t stop myself from falling. At some point I said to myself: “I am going to fall . . . . . . . I am going to die.”
A voice came back, more like a felt sense within, as clear as a bell, like this:
“No you are not. . . . You are quite safe . . . . You are not ready to die . . . . you have hardly started this life. . . . There is far more ahead yet.”

As I was leaving the ground, I went into an altogether different reality – one that I had never consciously experienced before, and yet paradoxically it was totally familiar and as real as normal consciousness. I was falling down a kind of tunnel of light and entering a space where I could see every moment of my twenty-nine years of living at once, evaluate them, ask questions and receive answers – all within myself. [I knew almost nothing about near-death experiences at that time.] I can remember that there were happy moments and moments of disappointment, facing the truth of my life in one go, without judgement. All of this was held within an atmosphere of indescribable peace and acceptance in the time that it takes to fall thirty feet, at the most. My awareness of time had disappeared. It was as if I was suspended in a pool of shameless, timeless self-acceptance and beauty.

Then splash! A very different kind of pool!!
I had landed in a deep well of freezing cold water. I was wearing a thick Mexican poncho blanket, lent to me by a friend, Shirley Goldstein. It suddenly felt very heavy, and was dragging me down. I scrambled out on to the rocks with difficulty, dripping wet, disappointed, yet relieved, to be back in normal time and reality – aware that the tourists on the opposite bank had shifted their attention from the salmon to me.

Back at Rosie – the gardeners’ blue truck parked on the road – my fellow cooks were waiting for me, ready to leave. I arrived – probably looking like a drowned rat – in a Mexican Poncho.
“What happened to you?”
“Oh . . . . . . I think I just had a near-death experience.”

I thought little of this afterwards. When I encountered major obstacles and existential crises ten years, or more, the memory of this experience was a vital source of hope and strength.

Dominic Stuart