This article by Carola Splettstoesser was first published in Network News Issue 23, Summer 2000.

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Some feel it in a waft of wind; some serenade to the lettuce deva; some journey between the worlds; some encounter Archangel Michael astride a unicorn. Some get the message like an electric current through the crown chakra. To some it feels like an ice cube, and some like it hot. Angels, guides, spirits, power animals, devas and archetypes were the fragrance, feel and flavour of the Foundation’s Easter Conference Angels@Findhorn 2000, and their overlighting message was: Surrender!

HERE AND NOW: DIRECT AND FOR ALL

“Surrender to the grace of this ‘holding force’ which holds together that which would otherwise be fragmented,” said angel expert William Bloom, who co-focalised the conference together with the Foundation’s very own Michael Hawkins. “Surrender the tension and struggle. This is a brave act. Move into the Tao, stay in the pause.” And Michael Hawkins did just that. Surrendering, he gave his first-ever public speech and did it with a giggle: “When I first came to Findhorn I didn’t know the difference between Sai Baba and Ali Baba!”

Good. Because, “we don’t need no education,” it’s all within. William Bloom said: “We’ve reached an experiential stage of finding out directly.” And part of this experience was such far-out things as the Internet. Angels@Findhorn 2000 wasn’t just a clever title; the Internet, with its modern feel of omnipresence and instant connection was claimed as a truly democratic device, and part of the “holographic universe” we are finding ourselves in. Even as we all travelled down the aisles of the Universal Hall towards a beautiful paper-cutting of a red and golden Tree of Life, we also blessed the Internet tiptoeing up the former’s slender trunk.

SURRENDER TO THE INNER KNOWING

“The Tree of Life is a garden of delight: you drank your wine and you smelt the roses and then you just surrendered to its presence.” Serene simplicity by impresario François Monnet, who had cut out the paper tree and choreographed the sweet and funny bits of magic into the tapestry of the conference from behind the scenes: a dancing unicorn, Pan emerging from a compost heap, an angel offering water and pillows to the listening crowd.

Really, it did not matter what the tools or the language of the individual speakers were – they all seemed to say the same in the end; we are in this middle world, distracted by a limited and thus scary awareness of what seems to be a strictly physical reality only. We need the connection to the other realities which hold all the bits and pieces together, and we need to let go of our human reasoning and the hidden agendas of body, mind and emotions to reach out to our true being. In our wholeness we connect with the limitless conscious intelligence in all and everything; we can thus communicate and cooperate with the blueprints or archetypes of all that is and bring about heaven on earth. Love is what unlocks the door to our wholeness.

THE JOURNEY INTO TIMELESSNESS

American intuitive healer Caroline Myss is not one for mincing words: “Your angel is a taskmaster,” she claims, whose voice you hear through “pinhole realisations”. You had better follow that guidance and not quibble with it, otherwise the same message will be delivered ever more forcefully in situations you simply cannot ignore. Prior to our incarnating we made agreements and our invisible guides are with us to maximise our spiritual growth. Partly, we are drawn to awakening, and partly, we are repelled by it. Guidance will melt the ego.

“When I hear guidance which makes me lose control – that’s true guidance, but when I hear something which makes me keep or gain control, that’s manufactured,” says Myss. “Devotion and courage start the meltdown of our psyche.” When the archetypal pattern we are dealing with meets with the angelic force, we are at a crossroads, at a choice point. Now we can decide to resist and stay in the seeming safety of our old habits, or we can open up to the larger perspective on our lives as archetypal journeys. We encounter the challenges of archetypal patterns in our physical life, reflected in the three lower chakras. This is the place of seeming time and space, but in order to resolve the issue and find the larger picture we need to connect with the consciousness in the fourth, fifth and sixth chakras. Linking up with the timeless realisation of the highest chakras we are transformed; we switch into high voltage light, letting go of human reasoning. Myss talks of an archetypical cluster of 12 patterns that accompany us all on our journey through life. One of the archetypes is, for example, the saboteur: triggered by a fear of failure we keep sabotaging ourselves until we accept that our self-esteem isn’t controlled by the verdict of other people.

God In His Elfen Mind photo Adriana Sjan Bijman

photo Adriana Sjan Bijman

THE BIG, THE TINY AND THE UGLY

England’s angel promoter, Diana Cooper, of TV fame, was taken for a flight by her personal guardian angel. The frequency of angels, she told us, is high – too high for us to see them. They’re guides and helpers, and they change our DNA as we now move from the Piscean era into the Golden Age. Diana’s vision, which she feels it is her task to report from the higher realms, is no less than the Ascension of Earth, and spiritual communities are vital in spreading a new awareness and preparing humanity for the big take-off by creating portals of light, where love touches everyone. Angels are, says Diana Cooper, ever so willing to help, and we can send whole armies of them into troubled areas of the world. In a private conflict she suggests we let our angels talk to each other first, and we should also create “peace corners” in our houses.

Ana Pogacnik, who came to the conference with her father, Marco, proposed the notion of an ocean of angelic energies rather than individual angels. She first channelled the presence of this ocean through finger movements, then received messages as drawings, and now as words directly into her computer. “We are one with the cosmos through our limitless soul,” Ana claimed, “whereas we are also part of a limited earth experience through our bodies.” We create reality by adding our sense of space and time to the limitless and formless experience of angelic vastness. The angelic realm is ever-present, but only accessible to us when we focus our attention on it. “When we open our hearts,” added Marco Pogacnik, “and see the world differently, the world changes accordingly.” Marco Pogacnik, artist and earth healer from Slovenia, began in the 1980s to heal the earth by setting stones on acupuncture points. Later on he began to alter the vibration of places that needed healing through having groups of people dancing, singing, humming, or meditating there. Landscape angels for Marco are vast beings, archetypes high above; whereas underfoot there is always an elemental being holding the focus for a particular place or person. “Our task is to free what was frozen into matter back into free spirit,” says Marco.

Sabrina Dearborn stated clearly that communion, albeit a very wondrous and desirable place to be, is only the first step on our way to being with the angelic realm. The second step is to communicate, and then, the third step, to cooperate with a more subtle consciousness. An old Findhorn alumni, Sabrina’s advice was to make friends with an angel by being loving, playful and tender. It’s all in us, she says. We link the overlighting awareness of the great archangels to the specific one of, let’s say, a fairy, which may only relate to a toadstool. We are here to redeem the middle world and with the power of thought bring new awareness even to the minds of politicians.

THE DAFFODIL CONNECTION

Dorothy Maclean first connected with the “Goddess within” a long time before she came to create the Findhorn Foundation together with Eileen and Peter Caddy. God’s message to her was: “Put love first in your life,” a message told in a never-ending variety of ways and using what He called His elfen mind. The task is to “harmonise with the essence of intelligence in all things.” Dorothy began to talk to the energy fields in charge of the different species. These energies she called devas because the old Sanskrit word seemed far enough removed from our idea of angels. Dorothy spoke to the garden pea, to the caterpillars munching away at the gooseberry bushes, to the worms, the moles and the rats under her caravan. She found the moles “true gentlemen” who very obligingly manufactured their molehills at the edges of the garden only, as requested. (From here the turned-up soil was then used for potting.)

But the great guardian entities are not confined to the nature kingdoms. Dorothy met the angels overlighting cities and even countries. Alighting in China, she sensed the country embraced by the angel of compassion, a feeling that stayed with her for days. This was a fortnight before the massacre of Tiananmen Square.

Carola's Angel

Carola’s Angel

Some of us met again with Dorothy Maclean in the Universal Hall in a workshop. More meditations and visualisations, and I was about to doze off. We were trying to connect with the daffodil deva, and there were lots of daffs in the Hall. I remembered a few situations in my life where daffodils had played a part, then stopped myself. This isn’t going to work. Then suddenly an “I” spoke in my head. It said: “I am yellow. When I say yellow, I mean it. No mucking about. No shades of yellow, no other colours. I am what I am. Resilient, bringing colour into rainy days. And that is just fine.” I thought it was a very personal message!

THE JOURNEY OF THE SHAMAN

Sandra Ingerman, Caitlin Matthews, RJ and Josie Stewart were representatives of those who see in the dark, the shamans. The age-old traditions of shamanism are still taught in many parts of the world and are seeing a great resurgence today. Some aspects may differ, said Ingerman, but all have in common that the shaman takes a journey into what Carlos Castaneda calls non-ordinary reality, where he has access to helping spirits. When we are healthy, says Ingerman, we have two or three power animals who act like guardian angels. A person might become ill when a power animal leaves and a new one has not yet taken its place. Such loss of power can show as chronic illness, depression or misfortune. The shaman will then travel into the lower world of dreams and the unconscious to find a power animal willing to re-empower that person. Soul-loss can also happen through trauma. In shamanistic terms, dissociation is the soul’s healthy device, partly removing itself from the scene of trauma. The shaman will then journey through the middle world to find the missing part.

MERGING INTO ONE

Connections, be it with a power animal, spirit guide or the deva of the daffodil, are made through merging with the other’s essence. Marco Pogacnik told us how, as he attuned to nymphs weaving about in water and he merged with the observation, he understood that they potentised the water through polarisation. Sabrina Dearborn suggested contacting a lettuce by singing to it: attunement can happen, literally, with a tune. Ingerman lists the key elements of successful contact as intention, union, love, concentration, harmony and imagination, which will then lead to transmutation. In his talk on the Tree of Life and its hermetic system, RJ Stewart showed how a sense of separateness can be overcome by realising that everything outside of us is also on the inside. Human beings relate to the world under their feet and above their heads while standing on the earth, held by gravity. As above, so below, also puts into perspective that beyond our limited sense of physical self there is no above or below. In Tree of Life traditions, be it Jewish, Norse, Egyptian or Sufi, the solar system is seen as an entire being, reflected in all living beings on earth, and all the different spheres having archangels connected to them.

VISION IS FILTERED BY OUR CULTURAL EXPECTATION

The artist, potter, ex-Benedictine monk and Steiner school teacher, Brian Nobbs, joined the Findhorn Foundation some 30 years ago. He was one of the artists who, in the early days, found their way to the fledgling community almost despite himself and ignorant of Peter Caddy’s expressed desire to gather artists in his spiritual caravan park. Gentle, humorous, Brian told us about some wondrous aspects of this very own “life of Brian”; for instance about when, to his great surprise, gentle fingers began caressing his face in the enchanted Findhorn garden and when, with a sense of ecstasy, it dawned on him that there was more to a garden than meets the eye! Dorothy Maclean had asked him to draw devas, and for over a year the pictures just rolled in. Then he met ROC (Robert Ogilvie Crombie), another cornerstone of the early Foundation. Brian’s initiation happened when he saw the huge figure of Pan himself during a weekend in Edinburgh in the company of ROC. On another occasion while wandering through a valley he heard the sound of a high-pitched flute and found himself in the company of “the most beautiful androgynous beings in little mediaeval jerkins in russet and gold,” pointing at him and laughing; high elves. One of them accompanied him to Findhorn, riding next to Brian on public transport. As Marco Pogacnik had pointed out, we tend to see – if we see at all – the beings as taken from the picture books of our own cultural background. In Europe we may see elves, gnomes and fairies, unicorns and fauns, whereas in South America similar beings may appear in the shapes of reliefs on Aztec pyramids. Forms are, so it seems, co-creations between formless energy and a manifesting human mind. They are symbols enabling us to map a presence that is ultimately limitless and formless. A connection can also be made by sounding; it is not mainly the meaning of ancient texts, says Josie Stewart, but their sound that holds the power. And often the messages in themselves are works of art, beauty in form, poetry.

RESTORE OUR STORIES

Caitlin Matthews, shamanic midwife and writer, powerful singer and musician, sounded the last note in the round of evening presentations. The animistic, shamanistic aspect, she said, can be found in all spiritual traditions and even in the revealed religions. It is only nowadays that we succumb to the belief that there are no spirits. A scary place to stand, as life is like a weaving; it can only exist with two sides to it, two realities. Just as an unborn baby gets all its nutrients through the umbilical cord, people are fed through the thread of life by their spiritual kin. We all sound our individual note, but we can only sound a clear note when the string, the connection to our spiritual kin, is taut. Finding one’s vocational thread is one of the main aspects of shamanic midwifery, Caitlin explained. Often people come to the threshold of opportunity and recoil; “I’m not properly trained!” But our spirits, says Caitlin, want us to use our gifts! Thresholds are places of great opportunity, but also of great fear. Coming towards power is coming to manifest yourself, here and now. “Where the greatest fear is, there is the greatest power. Fear is locking up power. If we flick it over, then power will be locking up fear.” Shamans’ work, said Matthews, is about restoring what is lost, restoring our story. We can walk away from our vocation but it will be at a price. The story will come after us, and not always as a playful reminder. At the closing celebration, Lesley Quilty, from the Findhorn Foundation Community and wonderfully funny, turned up in leather outfit, clown’s nose and on her (imaginary, though very real) Harley Davidson: “You make it up, you make it up!” This Hell’s Angel brought comic relief by demonstrating how the guardian angel loses it, when it comes to showing us mortals the way to one of those famous thresholds. Pulling her hair out, cajoling, purring, bribing and finally kicking the customer’s butt… we’ll all get there in the end.