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Findhorn Friends

1969-70: For people in many if not all indigenous cultures, the spirits of Nature are expressions of the nature of Spirit just as we humans are, dynamic energies which are part of a more holistic ecology.

What I see and feel at the Findhorn Community in Morayshire, Scotland also opens my mind to the possibilities of working with such energies in beneficial ways. At this time in my life, I’m rather shy and often lonely. Peter and Eileen Caddy and Dorothy Maclean , the three co-founders of the community, are extremely kind to me during my stays there.

I cherish my memories of Peter and Eileen’s warmth, and of the afternoon I join Dorothy for tea in her snug little trailer home. An exquisite feeling of peace steals over me as I sit there with her. The center between and above my eyebrows stirs and gently pulsates with light. My Findhorn friends water my inner garden.

At one point, Peter spends the better part of a day taking me to a number of powerful places in the area. One of them, Randolph’s Leap, is said to be especially charged with the presence of elves, fairies, and other subtle beings of Nature. I wonder now whether Peter received guidance to take me there in order to help prepare me for later experiences with such intelligences in the United States.

Gratitude.

Crossing Paths with Chogyam Trungpa at Findhorn

1970: Two of the major threads in my spiritual life crisscross at Findhorn in the early spring. While working in the garden one day during a break from my studies at the University of Aberdeen, I see a small crowd of people gathered around a stocky Asian man and a young woman. Inquiring, I’m told this is Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, one of two presiding lamas at a Tibetan monastery south of Findhorn in a peaceful valley of the river Esk in Scotland. Kagyu Samye Ling was the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery established in the West. It is to this day a center for meditation in the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.

Trungpa Rinpoche has just eloped with the sixteen year old Diana Pybus, and they’ve come to Findhorn in search of some privacy from rapacious reporters eagerly trying to squeeze as much sensationalism from the event as possible.

Trungpa radiates silence and power. As I follow him around with the rest of an impromptu little entourage, he pauses to play a silver hand drum, something golden permeating him and all of us with him. In his book Warrior-King of Shambala: Remembering Chogyam Trungpa, Jeremy Hayward recounts similar impressions of a pervasive, golden quality noted by some of Chogyam Trungpa’s students. Later, I write a poem to honor this charismatic, very controversial, pioneering Buddhist teacher:

BODHISATTVA

Your being fits behind the sensitive masks the world wears.

So you are love–the wellspring that an open heart makes–
and you wear the heavens like a cowl.

So you are sheer transparency; pure water that enters
through dry mouths the parched hearts of each creature.

Trungpa Rinpoche’s appearance at Findhorn makes sense. He felt a kinship with the Community and its founders. Peter Caddy had some time earlier taken him to a spiritual healer in England after the car he was driving crashed into a “joke shop“ which injured him quite seriously. Trungpa later was to receive revelatory teachings which bear certain similarities to the Findhorn Community’s cosmology, with its Nature spirits and angelic beings.

The teaching lineage established by Trungpa includes texts and practices relating to “dralas”, or sentient patterns of energy that can enhance human and environmental well-being. The “drala principle” is an inherent aspect of most traditional cultures, involving beings variously envisioned as angels, devas, Nature spirits, elemental energies, and gods and goddesses.

Later I study with Trungpa at the first summer session of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado in 1974, and witness his body flash through extraordinary transformations as he manifests tantric energies. This begins my connection with Vajrayana Buddhism, particularly the Kagyu tradition, a spiritual strand which continues to run unbroken through my life to this day, along with my ongoing connection to the Findhorn Community and a number of its former members who do great work for the earth.