When writing the story entitled ROC Music, my reflections took me further to look at the cultural, political and evolutionary context of the 1960s.

Setting the scene

The Office of the Historian states “The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and was the moment when the two superpowers came closest to nuclear conflict.”

The Findhorn Community and its extraordinary experiment is generally considered to have begun when the Caddy’s caravan was moved to its site on the Findhorn Bay Caravan Park in November 1962. It was in the shadow of the events outlined above. Something had to be done, but what to do? Peter and Eileen Caddy and Dorothy Maclean began their series of meditations to create a Network of Light around the planet.

Having no money they began to build a garden to supply themselves with some basic sustenance, and so the experiment was launched. It wasn’t until 6 months later in May 1963 that Dorothy received the following guidance:
“Yes, My child, you are to co-operate in the garden. Begin this by thinking about the nature spirits, the higher nature spirits who overlight, and by tuning into them. That will be so unusual as to draw their interest here. They will be overjoyed to help and to find some members of the human race eager for that help. That is the first step. The smaller individual nature spirits are under their jurisdiction.”

Realisation

In 1987 I found myself teaching Sacred Dance in southern Germany close to the Swiss border, listening to a Swiss radio station that played song after song from the 1960s. I had not heard this music for years and was struck by how powerful many of the songs were. There was a quality in them that seemed to be absent from so much of the more recent music. Was it simply my memories of earlier days that made it so? Or was it something more? I decided it had to have been overlighted by one spiritual master or another. I began to listen more analytically.

I recalled the summer of ‘65 when I was at a cadet camp in Dorset, England, and how the opening notes of the Byrds ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ had captured and held my mind.

‘I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade,
unto my own parade,
Cast your dancing spell my way, I promise to go under it.’

Standing in line for a breakfast of lukewarm fried egg, or walking to the parade ground, just hearing those few notes was spellbinding.

I found myself wondering, in 87, what was so important about San Francisco and California?

‘if you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair’

Clearly California was an Aquarian state but then it struck me. How could I have been so blind. San Francisco – Saint Francis. The Byrds. The birds. The House of the Rising Sun, the Animals. The Beatles, All you need is Love. What did I know about Saint Francis? He had always been the greatest light in the Christian World for me, even next to Jesus. His disciples were known as the little Flowers of St. Francis, he talked to the birds… and so it began.

The Incredible String Band album ‘The 5000 Spirits of the Layers of the Onion’

Sunshine and showers

Flower Power and the sense of light and colour came pouring through the music.

‘I can hear the grass grow.’

‘I’m just sitting watching flowers in the rain.’

‘Yellow is the colour of my true love’s hair in the morning.’

Love and sunshine seemed to infuse the lyrics.

‘Tomorrow may rain so I’ll follow the sun.’

‘Sunshine came softly through my window today.’

On and on the mystery seemed to unravel itself before me. Who were the Knights in White Satin?

Published in 1961 the Phantom Tolbooth, a kids book by Norton Juster, was made into a movie in 1970. It tells of a young boy who finds a toy car and a tolbooth in his bedroom through which he travels to a country lost in the doldrums and all monochrome and miserable. He discovers that the Princesses of Rhyme and Reason have been stolen and restores them. As he does so the land changes from grey-scale to full colour.

For me the 1960s were like that from the drab 1950s suddenly there was sunshine and Summer Holiday. A bit like the Yellow Submarine when the band comes back playing music that even enchants the Blue Meanies.

Esoteric science teaches that there are seven Sacred planets, home to the Schools of seven spiritual Masters, where our souls serve and learn. Suddenly a whole new meaning came to the Yellow Submarine, another classic Beatles song, and later a cartoon of their adventures.

‘We all live in a Yellow Submarine, and our friends are all aboard, everyone of us has all we need.’

The submarine was the Solar System, wallowing under the ocean of the Galaxy, held beneath the waters by the Fall and the ‘stone that fell from Lucifer’s crown’.

Little did I know then that I would soon witness the exchange of that stone between the planetary Devas, Earth who held it, and the planet which was to take on that role for future generations, and a different cycle of Time. But that’s another story.

While it is widely recorded that St Germain is the Master of Ceremonies for the coming New Age, and an overlighting presence of the Findhorn Community, here was St Francis heralding a new era for mankind. Here too, in the Findhorn Garden was living proof of what the world could become through cooperation with all the intelligences of Nature, reliant upon alignment with God, and not fixated by our own ideas and self-importance.