On January 7th, 2025, I turn 80 years old. There’s no particular merit in this by itself. All one has to do is ride the Earth around the sun, and each time it does this, we can add another number to our chronology.
Easy Peasy!
On the other hand, having eighty of such revolutions under my belt does give me an appreciation of things based on a longer view than I had when I was twenty. And it’s from that appreciation and perspective that I can write a love letter to the collective, emerging entity that I know anachronistically as “Findhorn.”
In the office in The Park 1972
I was twenty-five in 1970 when I arrived at the Findhorn Bay Caravan Park on the shores of Findhorn Bay and the Moray Firth. I had no idea what to expect aside from things that people who had visited the community had shared with me, not all of it positive. Among several of my friends in London at the time, there was suspicion of Peter Caddy and what they felt amounted to his “colony” of people doing his bidding.
However, my own inner sources had told me that I was about to start a new cycle of work away from the United States, and while I had no reason to expect that this would involve the Findhorn community, I had a strong inner prompting that I should visit. When I did, I found a centre whose vibrancy and Light were exactly what I had been told to look for; I also found, to my surprise, that Peter, Eileen, and Dorothy had been expecting me to come prior to my arrival!
The reason lay in a booklet on the “Christ Experience” that I had written for one of my classes in California. One of the class participants had, unknown to me, mailed a copy to Findhorn where it was read by Dorothy. She in turn gave it to Eileen to read who subsequently had a vision that I would come to Findhorn and be part of the community. The problem was that, aside from my name, they had no idea who I was or where I lived or how to contact me.
So they waited.
Three years later, I showed up, essentially out-of-the-blue, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Peter Caddy, David Spangler and ROC
Becoming part of the (then) small Findhorn community was a turning point for me, for several reasons. For one thing, Findhorn in its garden was demonstrating the cooperation and collaboration between we incarnate humans and the intelligences active in the subtle side of Earth’s ecology. This was something I’d been lecturing on in the States. Findhorn provided the concrete proof that it could work.
Findhorn was where I met Julia, the love of my life and my wife for over forty years now. It was where I met the folks who later formed the Lorian Association with me; we are still friends—family, really—and co-workers.
It was a privilege, an honour, and a pleasure to have served as a co-director with Peter for the community.
I felt then—and still do—that Findhorn, whatever its outer configuration may be, is a major source of hope and inspiration in the world, the wellspring for one “incredible global family.” My own spiritual work is infinitely easier because of the spiritual and ecological centre at Findhorn and its example in the world, and I like to think the reverse may be true, as well.
However, the importance of what you are all doing
is that you truly are the seed of a new civilisation,
just as Eileen envisioned and as Peter Caddy strove to make real.
This can sound grandiose, so let’s say that you are the seed of an emerging civilisational vision, one that “re-enchants” the world with the demonstration of a community that links not only hearts but souls and not only the physical side of life but the vast non-physical side as well.
That is magical.
A little over a hundred years ago, the German sociologist Max Weber wrote about the “disenchantment of the world” which had been going on since the 17th century. This was the transition from a world vision that was animistic and panentheistic, seeing nature and the world itself as sacred and filled with life and soul to a world vision that saw nature—and humanity—as random accidents of cosmic dust, without true meaning and useful only in the way that humans could shape it to their will. From a magical, enchanted, alive world, we in the West shifted to a rational, materialistic, dead, and definitely disenchanted ball of rock, spinning through empty space along with other similarly dead rocks. As far as spirit or the subtle dimensions go, forget them! Superstitious nonsense beyond the scope of the measuring stick and thus unreal. We went from being collaborative co-creators in an emerging, joyous, living cosmos to being “meat sacks.”
We gained technological prowess but we lost our souls.
The project that is now the ecological and spiritual centre at Findhorn—that is to say, all of you—are giving us our souls back. You have been doing so since 1962.
I know that it’s a challenging thing to do, swimming upstream against so many social currents and ways of thinking and seeing the world, and it takes courage and perseverance to do so. But I have known you now for fifty-five years, and I have seen the courage, the perseverance, and the vision you all have had and continue to have, whatever obstacles arise.
Talk about one incredible family!
That’s why, as I quietly celebrate my 80th year on earth, I can look back, count my many blessings, and see Findhorn (whatever your ever-changing name may be!) as one of them. A major blessing! Not just for me but for our planet, for humanity, for the future.
It’s why I love you!
Blessings, my friends, and thank you for all that you do and give.
David
***
Photo credits: images are from the Lorian Association website, the archives of the Findhorn Foundation, and from Jonathan Caddy
I have been a teacher of subtle realities for sixty years. I am married with four children, all of whom live in the Pacific Northwest. I have a granddaughter and a grandson.
Fabulous. Thank you! Blessings to you David.