• Invocation the Gita – “Dharma/k/shé/tre, kuruk/k/shé/tre … Sanjaya”.
• 2 May 1976, lead an Aberdeen University group to Findhorn, saw the Universal Hall starting to be built and our guide, John Hilton a London ex banker, said “One day people will come here from all over the world …” (see pictures at the end).
• What is New Age? Paul Heelas 1996 on William Bloom’s “excellent formulation”, p. 226.
• Findhorn Fellows 17 Aug – 20 year fall off due to change – 6 factors – 1) Mission completed; 2) Internet); 3) Carbon; 4) Brexit and regulation; 5) Covid; 6) Fire.
• Michel Lindfield, 14 years gardner and Director of Education at Findhorn, email 11 Aug:
  Yes, our God is “an all-consuming Fire”. In the lineage here at Meditation Mount (Assagioli inspired, CA), transformation is described as a shift in consciousness from one state to a new level of awareness and being-ness “through the agency of Fire”…. I believe that the original forms of communal living created at Findhorn have to be recycled and out of this natural state of temporary chaos, a ‘new order’ will be called into being by the note of fiery purpose as it is intentionally sounded. This compelling call of Purpose is a magnetic appeal that attracts the random elements (like iron filings) and brings them into a new pattern of relationship with other. Findhorn has gone through the outer fire and now needs to go through the ‘inner fire’ for deep transformation to take place.
• Terry Gilbey, Fellows’ presentation: “I want to start with collective consultation…. How does the Foundation serve the world today, and into the future? And that may be different from how we have done it and are doing it.”
• Fellows’ Chat – The Foundation was originally set up to support the impulse manifesting through the community…. We must let go of the organisational ego and listen to the Angel of Findhorn, as it is manifesting within the community locally and globally.”
• Terry: “What is it that we are being called to create and how do we support that in terms of assets?” (£4m assets; £1m liabilities, beautiful places not worth much).
• So, to what Michael said about Purpose – Jung – “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious” (C.G. Jung Foundation, Twitter, 8-9-23 [CW 13:335]).
• Jung, Visions – Notes of the Seminar given in 1930-1934, Vol. 1:
  “[W]hen you get into a disagreeable situation where you see no opening, no direct path, you assume that you are quite alone with yourself. In a way it is a very good thing that you think so; otherwise you would never make up your mind, you would remain merely a child. You must believe that you are practically alone. But you may find yourself in a really tight place where you can’t get out, where you are helpless. Then you recognise that you are not alone, because such an absolute impasse is an archetypal situation, and an archetypal figure becomes constellated, a fact in your psychology, a potential, and so you are up to the situation.
  “This has repeated itself innumerable times in history, man has again and again passed through such situations and has a psychological method of adapting, the thing to do in such a case…. So it is the totality of the psyche produces a double, it brings up another figure; that is a psychological fact. The psychopompos (Gk. a spiritual guide that appears in dreams or to the land of the dead) is this second figure; you can call it the daimon [divine manifestation], or the shadow, or a god, or an ancestor spirit; it does not matter what name you give it, it is simply a figure; it might even be an animal. For in such a predicament we are dispossessed, we lose the power of our ego, we lose our self-confidence. Until that moment, we were willful or arbitrary, we had made our own choice, we had found out a way, we had proceeded as far as this particular place. Then suddenly we are in an impasse, we lose faith in ourselves, and it is just as if all of our energy became regressive. And then our psyche reacts by constellating that double, which has the effect of leading us out of the situation.”
• Winifred Rushforth (98) – Something is Happening (1981) – to Laurens van der Post on the secret of her energy, “I never go against my unconscious.” On Jung and loss of “your religion”, p. 13 of Something is Happening: she met Jung in Oxford 1939, just before WW2. He insisted to the assembled psychiatrists: “This is your insanity, that you have lost your religion.”
• Similarly, in 1914 Jung had addressed the BMA in Aberdeen on, The importance of the unconscious in psychopathology. He argued, says Shamdasani the Red Book’s editor, that “the corrective impulses that present themselves in the language of the unconscious should be the beginnings of a healing process, but the form in which they break through makes them unacceptable to consciousness.”
• I sent Michael Lindfield, a passage from T.S. Eliot, to which he replied it’s framed on his bookshelf, “Little Gidding”, Four Quartets, p. 57 (200-213). “The only hope, or else despair/ Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre – / To be redeemed from fire by fire.”
• What does that entail? If our insanity, whether individual, or organisational, or of our times and all of these, is our loss of “religion” in Jung’s sense, and if God is our “all consuming fire”, how do we sit in it? How do we sit in that fire of love, of “hell” that (as in Orthodox theology) burns off only that which is not authentic to us?
• Quote Yeats – “Into the Twilight” in The Celtic Twilight, p. 121 – “Out worn heart, in a time out worn … and God stands winding his lonely horn.”
• And so, Tao Te Ching (XVI, D.C. Lau): “The myriad creatures all rise together / And I watch their return. / … / Returning to one’s roots is known as stillness. / This is what is meant by returning to one’s destiny.”
• And so, destiny, or as Terry Gilbey put it, “How does the Foundation serve the world today, and into the future?” And the Fellows’ chat: “We must let go of the organisational ego and listen to the Angel of Findhorn, as it is manifesting within the community locally and globally.”
• There are practical questions: Is Findhorn serving youth? Is it serving pilgrim calling in our time? Is it able still to hold “spaces hospitable to the soul”? What kind of legal structures? I can’t go there, I’m not closely enough a part of it. However, the dream of Iain and the flower bed. Reconnect with what is indigenous to what I found here? Reconnect to Findhorn’s primal purpose, “the Angel of Findhorn” as a part of universal calling. A space and spaces “hospitable to the soul”. Sacred spaces where “prayer has been valid” (Eliot, 4Qs). Consider radical simplicity, and reconstitute the flower bed. That return to destiny
• Jung’s rainmaker story. And recognising the drought that has hit our flower bed, its arguable drift of original purpose, how do we bring rain for a re-flourishing?
• Therefore, the discernment of vision in and for these times and in ways that seeks spiritual unity, not the same as consensus, ergo Sheeran’s Beyond Majority Rule: Voteless decision making in the Religious Society of Friends. Discernment = “to sift through”, processes such as Meetings for Clearness.
• This work is both individual and collective, but it must be God-centred or it loses touch with destiny. It begins in each of us. Corbin on Ibn Arabi in Alone with the Alone, p. 184 on the alone sadness of God (our sadness), and on prayer, p. 248.
• George Fox of the Quakers (QFP 19:03): “I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. And in that also I saw the infinite love of God; and I had great openings.”

And so, we are all pilgrims on the path; as Ram Dass put it, “All walking each other home”, and sacred places (such as Findhorn?) stations along the way. And finally, or in Q&A perhaps, to R.S. Thomas’ poem, “The Moon in Llyen (ch/lay/n), p. 82 Everyman. “But a voice sounds in my ears…. people are becoming pilgrims again…. The parish has a saints name time cannot unfrock.”

Pictures of Findhorn, 2 May 1976

At that time, I was in my 3rd year at university and was the founder-president of the Aberdeen University Parapsychological Society. We came to investigate claims of giant strawberries and cabbages. John Hilton (top left) our host took us to the site where foundations were being laid in the sand for the Universal Hall and said “we’re trying to play that down these days, but one day people will come from all over the world to be inspired/educated/enlightened/whatever here…”, In the shop I bought a copy of Charles T. Tart’s Altered States of Consciousness, pioneering of transpersonal psychology which has greatly influenced my thought and work.

Visit to Findhorn 1976 photo Alastair McIntosh

Visit to Findhorn 1976 photo Alastair McIntosh