This article originally appeared in the 19th edition of the “Alternative Technology” magazine Undercurrents, December 1976-January 1977. It has been lightly edited to minimise external references.

Ecological pioneer John Seymour (1914-2004), in [an earlier Undercurrents] article, strongly criticised a number of attitudes to organic husbandry, especially the practice employed at the Findhorn Community, Scotland, of communicating directly with the nature forces (or ‘fairies’ as John Seymour calls them). On a recent visit to the Findhorn Community, Richard Elen asked Dick Barton, a member of the community ‘core group’ or governing collective, how he felt about the methods used at Findhorn, and criticisms of them.

I talked to Dick one sunny August morning, in the living room of his bungalow among the sand dunes that surround the Findhorn Bay Caravan Park, near Forres, home of the Findhorn Community since 1962. I asked him if he’d seen a nature spirit himself. Yes, he had seen what, in his terms, he understood to be the body of an elemental. At the time he was the controller of an RAF computer training centre, and he saw the entity through the window. He interpreted it in terms of his science – he is an electronics engineer – as a system of electromagnetic waveforms. He regarded it as physical energy, with a structure not normally encountered, but still within the normal physical laws for such radiations. “If I’d seen this thing without my scientific background”, he commented, “I might have thought I’d seen a classical fairy. It had incredible shimmering colours, and as it changed its shape, it could easily have been imagined to be fluttering multicoloured wings. It was a living control mechanism, controlling energy in and out of a growing plant, varying its shape with this control.”

“Talking to other people who’ve had this kind of experience, I believe that there are vortices of energy, which are reported as elementals, fairies, or whatever, depending on what space the observers are in themselves”, he said. “There is an interface between the energy system which is there and their own mental system, imagination, and so on.” The interface modifies the thought patterns, and you see partially what you want to see – you interpret the reality in terms of your own preconceptions. But there was something there in the first place to interact with your imagination. In the same way two reliable witnesses can give totally different accounts of an accident. “And because of the great ‘thought form’ of fairies set up in the West over thousands of years, when people get this type of experience, they say, ‘I have seen a fairy’.” But it may ‘only’ be an energy field, seen with imagination. It is not a ‘spiritual’ or ‘mystical’ thing – “just a straightforward account of a physical observation”, says Dick.

Someone like John Seymour may be screening these experiences off because he does not accept the traditional idea of ‘fairies’. Or his mind may be working in another pattern altogether and he just doesn’t require the idea – he’s got too many other things to think about. “Many electronic devices have some kind of limiting action – a squelch circuit – that restricts the level, or the frequency, of the input signal, and the human brain is no exception.”

This is a useful, if inaccurate, analogy. If we tried to deal with even 10% of the data which assails our senses every instant, we would go mad. We individually draw the line, tune the circuit to accept some things and reject others. John Seymour is “a man of great focus, who doesn’t need to be drawn away from that focus at this time. He is doing it his way – he doesn’t need to see fairies. Humanity is a wholeness – if we add together what we experience instead of trying to divide it up, then we start getting a synthesis; John Seymour’s view is his way of seeing it – his reality, and the reality of many, many people. There is another reality. Now the exciting thing is when we bring these two realities together, not in conflict, but in synthesis – they are complementary. You have the bedrock, the bricks and the mortar, with which to build the foundations of something new.”

So how do these two worldviews live together? “It’s not new, it’s been going on for a great deal of time; it’s almost the challenge of the two opposites – between them there must be a space.”

Beyond duality, jumping between the horns of the dilemma. The only problem arises when one side or the other claims to have ‘absolute truth’ on their side, that as they are right, then you must be wrong; although in reality there are only personal truths. The space between the horns is the place where people can live and experience. There must be a balance, a synthesis between inner and outer. Neither is sufficient on its own. “The people who are totally hung up about elementals, nature spirits, elves, fairies, and so on can do nothing. Every time they put a spade in the ground to plant something, they disturb the worlds of millions of tiny lives. If you become sensitised to that, you can’t move, walk, or anything. You can’t breathe for fear of killing insects. You can become sensitive, sensitised, and then allergic. That happens here sometimes. It’s freaky: people become so sensitive. In a ‘New Age’ type community, I suppose the problem is one of sensitivity to personal aggression – you can become allergic to aggression and finally not be able to communicate with anyone at all. At the other end of the scale, people can become so insensitive that they blunder around, bumping into things, though that would be very unlikely here.”

In the outer world, many people are unaware of the consequences of their actions. “You can see the two extremes as full-stops at the ends of experience, and you move along the line between.”

“I can live happily with both sides. I like to see someone looking very deep into the metaphysical, having contact with the things people know as devas, as I have, but I find there has to be a sort of ‘telephone exchange’ between the two extremes. You can call it many things: the ‘Higher Self’, the ‘Soul’, the ‘Christ Consciousness’… it has many names. It’s like a translator between the incredibly broad spectrum of the level of existence of the devas, and the evolving mind of humanity. Again, the ‘Soul’ is a balance point. The devas can attune to that, and so can a human being. Then the link happens, and there’s work to do. Both are needed to hold the world together, so to speak.”

“One of these contacts happened within the last three weeks. I usually feel a tension building up over a period of days: when I realise what it is, it’s a matter of finding a quiet place and attuning to the contact. This is what I did on this occasion, and a being came through to me, from a higher plane. My scientific mind said, ‘how can I on this level communicate with this being on such a higher level?’ And the answer came back that the contact ‘trickles’ down through the planes, and you can pick it up wherever you like, like harmonics of a radio transmission. This was at the mental level. It merely said that the deva was the substance of a given level, and that its substance was now available for use on the lower planes, including the plant kingdom. Plants are important, it said, at the moment, and this was where humanity’s work was to be done. Humans are involved because there is a certain will-aspect that is involved, and humanity is the vehicle for that. The devas are not: it has to be through co-operation between us. There had to be a group of human beings who understood this relationship, who could tune in to their higher selves and realise that there was a new form of energy available, through which they, devas and plants, could work together. This would tend to stabilise the plants genetically, in terms of keeping breeding true, and would stabilise growth by helping the plants to grow in harmony rather than competing with each other. It would also make them more resistant to pests. New plants and new types would appear as they were needed.”

“That doesn’t deny good husbandry – all of this is beyond that. You must have good husbandry. You must use compost, you must keep the soil right, you must be wise, and have knowledge of all the systems involved in plant growth. All of that is taken for granted. This is a little job to be carried on, on the higher levels while you’re doing the rest. They’re complementary.”

I asked Dick whether someone like John Seymour would get as good results as Findhorn did.

“I see no reason why not: this source said it had already worked through many people, consciously or not. A good, attuned gardener has always done this, whether believing in devas or not. A good gardener believes in his plants, loves his plants, cares for them; he doesn’t have to talk to them – that’s a very single-level thing!”

“It’s interesting that the people who get the most balanced view out of this ‘spiritual understanding’ are those who approach the subject sceptically, saying ‘I don’t believe all this rubbish’. It’s very glamorous, having energies flowing through you and this sort of thing, and too easy for some people just to imagine it. But the sceptic doesn’t believe anything will happen, so when it does, their scepticism helps them know that it’s real and not just a product of their imagination. That’s how I started. I was just sitting quietly one day, trying to find out what this ‘meditation’ was, when I became aware of sitting on the bed, and being somewhere else, flying high up, and that I was being watched by someone or something I didn’t believe in! Communication was established, and that opened the flood-gates; things kept pouring in for about three weeks. Gradually different things came together, I found books that described and explained some of the things I’d been told…”

“I find no problem relating the spiritual world and the normal physical life. In truth, there is no barrier there. One enhances the other. And people who get deeply into the spiritual life and find themselves inhibited in their physical activity must be deluding themselves, I think. They get totally abstract and just drift off with totally unrealistic schemes; that’s not the reality of it at all – it’s an intensely practical life.”

I asked Dick if there were any guidelines that could be written down to enable people to experiment in the co-operation between the kingdoms.

“It all stems from being centered within yourself. It must come from being a balanced human being. In my understanding, the only way you ever contact the other levels is through the Higher Self, becoming aware of the relation between yourself and the environment, the situation where your activity carries out a higher purpose without damaging the environment. Until you find that point of centering, there’s no way you’ll ever contact the other kingdoms. When you’re in that space, your higher self decides whether contact will be made, not your lower self: though it can produce fine illusions! This is perhaps what John Seymour is talking about. There is so much rubbish around this thing. Sometimes it’s safer to throw the whole lot out, because it can cloud what you do, and can be so complicated that for some people it’s just not worth dabbling with. When a person is ready to contact this type of thing, it will happen. If you feel that’s the way you want to go, you begin to take your own quiet time, learning your identity, finding out who you are, what you’re about, then contact is possible. You start physically. You start looking at your plants, and see that they are living things, and part of the creation. The soil is alive, everything right down to the smallest atom is ‘alive’ in a sense. That’s where it starts. Not reach reaching out to grab some extraterrestrial contact – the horrifying thing you realise when contacting the devas is that you’ve been in one all the time! Everything you touch is an expression of a deva. They are so close you can’t see them. I’ve even ‘talked to’ the ‘Deva of Oxygen’!”

“Not everyone can cope with this sort of information. That’s where people like John Seymour are really helpful. By putting this sort of thing down, they turn off the people who aren’t sure. Those that are dead sure – they’ll support him, because having John say the things aren’t there, that they don’t happen, and so on, is no threat to what they know to be true. It’s just where he comes from. A different reality. We all create our own realities. Better we live in them than try and live in someone else’s.”

“So many people forget that this is an additional reality – it doesn’t replace anything. They think that by making a deva contact they become gardeners. But they’ve got another 20 years of learning to do yet! You don’t come by two decades of experience by sitting in a dark room and meditating. You’ve got to go out into the world and learn it. When you’ve become an expert in the field, then you can do it with that plus… then you’ve got something.”

“You can’t talk someone who takes a materialistic line into spiritual understanding. And even if you could, you shouldn’t. That’s a good definition of black magic – manipulating the form to let the spirit out. It’s no good breaking down a person’s beliefs if they still can’t accept your alternative – that leaves them with nothing. The sceptic, besides, is so useful; the true scientist is wide open to everything that comes along – though we must be careful to separate the science and the technology – always pushing back their own boundaries. That is, unless they allow their own thought forms, their theories and hypotheses, to control their search. That way they find what they expect to find. Things are discovered at the rate society can cope with them. If they exceed that rate, the society risks collapse.”

 

This postcard from the “Fairies’ Lib” was received by Undercurrents magazine after the publication of John Seymour’s article in which he criticised the idea of working with nature spirits