First Contact
The day after America’s Thanksgiving Day holiday in November 1955, my maternal grandfather developed an aortic aneurysm which he was not expected to survive longer than a few hours. My parents rushed us to his home in Portland, Maine where we arrived around midnight. I, four years old, was put to bed while they hurried to the hospital. I closed my eyes and immediately found myself wide awake in a very strange place.

It was circular—at least 200 and perhaps as much as 300 meters in diameter—with a tightly packed sandy ground that was covered by an invisible dome through which the starry night sky was dimly visible. I knew it was a dome because at its center a fountain of liquid light erupted out of thin air about 12-18 inches (30-45cm) above the ground. It was like a steady geyser, splashing on the dome’s underside, making a slithering sound as it slid down in all directions. What amazed me was that the light filled the interior without any shadows being cast anywhere. And, when you looked at it up close, it consisted of gazillions of tiny drops of polychromatic colors that combined to fill that large volume with a warm bright light.

I was not alone. There were quite a few ‘clouds’ ranging in size from VW Beetles to school buses floating around. I found that fascinating because there was no wind to move them. Eventually one of the ‘clouds’ drifted over me. Instantly, I was no longer focused on events within the dome. Instead, I was watching what I would later learn was a spiral galaxy from a distance tens of thousands of light years away. I intuitively understood the clouds were alive and conscious like me. I also knew that somehow my mind had merged with another mind much vaster than my own and that we were both simultaneously under the dome and way out in outer space. I wasn’t frightened by that span of perspectives because it seemed perfectly normal for the cloud mind and, anyway, I knew somehow that my home was located on one of that galaxy’s spiral arms. Then I was back and the cloud being was floating away.

I had no sense of time and continued to explore. There were other encounters with other cloud beings that were so far out that I retained only a foggy knowing that lots of things had happened.

Then two glowing ‘spikey’ lights floated toward me. They were shaped like a dialogue balloon in a DC or Marvel comic book that contains the word Pow! or Bam!, except they were in 3D. They told me it was time to leave. As would any four year-old who was having a great time doing whatever he wanted whenever he wanted without any adult interference, I was having none of that. They insisted and I resisted. The experiences with those extraordinary cloud beings who could be in many places and times at the same moment—giving them, in my eyes, an authority way beyond that of my parents and grandparents—had shown me that in this place I wasn’t just a little kid who had to do whatever the grownups wanted. Politely standing my ground, a stalemate developed. None of the cloud beings had been bothered enough to come over to tell me it was time to go home which made standing my ground even easier. Finally, one of the spikey light beings said, “One day you’ll be able to return.”

Those were the magic words. I knew they had been honestly spoken and so I headed for the dome perimeter with the two glowing shapes floating along on either side of me. Stepping through the dome wall with no sense of transition, I found myself in the middle of a flat road under a glittering night sky with the thick belt of the Milky Way shining so brightly overhead that you’d think there was a full moon. We set off down the road. I had never done such a long walk before. It was a rural area. Straight at first, the road turned to the right, then a while later to the left, gradually inclining higher and higher.

Something was happening to my companions as our distance from the dome increased. Bit by bit, the spikes shrank and then vanished from their glowing forms. Then those roughly spherical forms began to narrow and lengthen. Mostly I marched along the road looking straight ahead, but each time I stole glances to either side, they had become just a little more human-shaped. By the time the road had taken us high enough so that more of the surrounding countryside of fields and woods was visible in the bright starlight, I was walking between two men in coveralls, both looking straight ahead and not paying me any attention except that they were holding my hands. One had a mustache similar to my grandfather’s.

Finally, we arrived at a viewpoint that I knew was close to where I would depart for my grandparents’ house. I wanted one last look at where I had been. Letting go of their hands, I walked into the field on our right and beheld for the first time a clear view of the area. About three miles away, the dome was highlighted by the fountain of polychromatic light splashing on its underside. Somehow I could still hear the slithering sound it made. Its beauty was mirrored by its reflection in a wide bay whose nearest shore was about a mile from where we stood. The dome stood on a peninsula that formed most of the bay’s righthand shore. To the left were more fields and a forest that grew right up to where the bay emptied into an unknown ocean beyond.

Then my physical eyes opened to a grey morning moping outside the bedroom windows.

Attunement I
Standing in the Community Centre lounge waiting for lunch on the last Monday in October 1973. Aside from a pleasant, informative tour with Alisdair McKay two days before, I’d been in the community for just over ninety minutes. My 10:30 appointment with John Hilton had been postponed due to a surprise meeting he’d been called to. Taken to the Park Library where, after thirty minutes with the weirdest assortment of books I’d ever seen, I’d been cross-examined for nearly an hour by Alice who knew nothing of John’s communications with me. When she’d finally decided that although suspicious, I wasn’t an immediate danger, I was turned over to a young fellow who led me to the CC.

Head spinning from that bath of skepticism and distrust—which had felt like a verbal version of a Medieval ducking stool—and was such a contrast to the other members I’d talked to, I warily chatted with a couple of gray-haired women as the Lounge gradually filled with members ranging in age from toddlers to elderly with most being on the sunny side of forty.

Soon the cooks opened the hatch to reveal a large pot of soup with containers of brown rice and vegetables set into a self-serve catering unit next to it. Immediately the conversations died down as everyone began to join hands until all present in the kitchen and the lounge were part of an irregular circle standing silently with eyes closed. No one spoke a word, there was no ceremony, just silence.

Silence.

After about a minute, the persons on either side of me squeezed my hands at exactly the same time. The paused conversations resumed while the folks at the front of the queue began ladling soup into bowls and piling food on plates. What had just happened? I had no idea what they had been doing let alone what I was supposed to have been doing. I certainly hadn’t closed my eyes. But something had been going on in that thick quiet, something beyond my perception that had not been beyond that of the people around me. How had the people on either side of me been able to squeeze my hand in the same moment? What had they been doing that had somehow included my foreign, unaware presence?

Forty-nine years and twenty days later, as I sit here in North Carolina typing, that attunement is still the first thought that comes to mind when someone asks me how I came to “spend so much time in that community” in Scotland.

Attunement II
The first Saturday night of November 1973. Sharing night. It was not always open to non-members, but that night it was. I had been in the community for six days. With Alice deciding the mornings’ priorities, I’d either been assigned to the Garden (with Matthew, Holger, Maggie, Michael Lindfield, Eve Godfrey, John Rook, and maybe another person or two whose names I’ve forgotten) or to the Kitchen (with Carol Campbell, Robin Gormley, Liz Rook, June Hurley, and several others) where I washed the biggest, dirtiest carrots of my life with Mary Coulman and heard of the romantic nights she spent in her husband’s arms overlooking the Nile with the Great Pyramid reaching up into the heavens behind them. Although my afternoons had been free to do what I wanted, I volunteered wherever a hand was needed. Alice did not approve of my doing two shifts in the Kitchen in a single day, so I had also helped Victor with collating in the Publications building that a year later will become Reception and the General Office.

After the Saturday night kitchen cleanup crew had finished with the Dining Room, the early arrivals began rearranging the tables and benches in a semicircle that faced the door to the Lounge. One bench was placed in front of each table, the other on top of it. That explained why they had been so heavily constructed by Craig Gibsone and why he had insisted that they receive several coats of polyurethane. The set up was completed with the blue chairs from the Lounge being arranged as the front row.

Like many other activities I had observed that first week, it had not been organized. No one had been in charge. The members arriving first knew how the dining room would have to be set up so they began making it happen. As more members arrived, they pitched in so that what may have begun with just one or two souls always ended with as many as a dozen completing the arrangements.

Ten minutes later, almost the entire membership had arrived. Peter, Eileen, ROC, and the older members—who in a year or two will christen themselves the Odd Bods—occupied the blue chairs while the rest of the community sat, sprawled, or snuggled on the bank of tables and benches. Happy chatter filled the room until Craig stepped to the center and, smiling, looked silently around. The conversation died away.

Silence.

I had participated in several attunements since Monday, but that was the first one where we did not hold hands. I’d learned to close my eyes and did my best to get out of the way of whatever it was that was happening.

Silence.

Silence that deepened, united, harmonized, bonded… Silence that not only connected those of us in the room but also connected us to something else. I didn’t know what that was but I could sense its presence. It listened. And somehow we were all a part of it.

Silence.

Craig softly said, “Thank you”, and the rest of the evening got underway.

The attunement at the start of that Sharing is the second thing I think of when explaining how I came to spend those years in Scotland. It gave me the first glimmers of an understanding of what the community was about, how turning within, following your intuition, and attuning had led to big veggies, manifestation, an ‘awareness of the Whole’, group consciousness, and what John Hilton had meant when he’d told me the previous Monday afternoon, that its members practiced attunement not meditation.

Forty-nine years later, attunement—expanding my awareness of ‘the Wholes’ in which I play parts, improving my cooperation with the physical and non-physical species of consciousness without whom the natural world cannot exist, refining my intuition, and above all, joyfully embracing everything that Life sends my way—constitutes the major vector of my life as I continue exploring and creating.

Sueno’s Stone
A weekday afternoon in early July 1975. I had caught a ride into Forres for an errand and had decided to walk back to the community. For one thing, I’d never done that before and for another, I’d driven past Sueno’s Stone many times in the previous two years and had never once stopped to check it out. With my business finished on the Forres High Street just as the shops began closing at one o’clock, I strolled east along Victoria Road, past Grant Park, then past the Witches Stone in front of the Police station, and the Ramnee Hotel before taking the Findhorn Road at the left hand fork. There were not nearly as many houses at the east end of town in those days as there are now.

I did not get much from the weathered carvings on Sueno’s Stone. Nor did I detect any of the ley lines it supposedly sat on or any nearby power points. I had taken a course on the Neolithic archaeology of the British Isles during my final term at university, one lecture of which the professor had devoted to the Clava Cairns near Nairn. But they had been built during the Bronze Age, about three thousand years before Sueno kicked up enough of a fuss to have a carved standing stone erected in his name. Mildly disappointed, I turned my attention to the view and started walking across the field in the direction of the bay which spread out before me beneath a mostly cloudy sky.

Another reason for walking back to The Park was that I wanted to see what the Hall looked like from up on the escarpment where Forres sits. For several days in June, I had helped the Construction group raise the beams for the auditorium roof. We hadn’t finished before we began hearing how the roof already dominated the skyline on the drive from Kinloss.

The Hall was clearly visible as I walked parallel to the road. Then suddenly the last image of the dome I had seen in November 1955 dropped over the panorama. The bays and landscapes matched. The peninsula to the east matched, the Culbin forest on the bay’s western shore also matched what I had seen as did the Moray Firth beyond. But it was the image of the dome centered on the Hall that seized my attention. For a moment, I was four years-old again watching the polychromatic light erupting against the dome’s underside. Only this time it was shooting up through the opening in the Hall’s roof where a cupola would eventually be built. Then I was back to being twenty-four years-old, thoroughly gobsmacked, and feeling indescribably stupid.

As a new member in the autumn and winter of 1973-74, I’d heard Peter, ROC, and others refer often to the community’s “dome of protection.” It was an image that was not merely symbolic but reflected a tenaciously held understanding of how non-physical realities functioned and how easily unaware humans could become dysfunctional in the course of interacting with them. It utilized the archaic language of Light and Dark forces battling each other that touches and distorts most if not all of Western Culture’s many spiritual creeds and beliefs. All the warnings and verbiage about Dark Forces, witchcraft, astral entities, psychic attacks, etc., etc. had not matched my experience of the consciousnesses within that dome. They were beings with awarenesses approaching supra-galactic scales. There was no war going on, there were no dark beings swarming the exterior looking for a way in. Thus, I’d never made the connection.

I had always known that I had had that experience in 1955 for a reason and had kept looking for explanations. Eighteen months earlier, I had talked with Sally Walton about it. Auroville, where she had also been a member, was in the early stages of building the spherical Matrimandir for silent meditation. That intrigued me and the vocabulary of Aurobindo and The Mother described my experiences much more accurately than ROC’s and Peter’s. Since the chat with Sally, I had been keeping Auroville at the back of my mind as a possible location to hunt for answers.

It was stunning to discover that the answer had been in front of me for nearly two years, that I hadn’t recognized it until I stood in the same location where my four year-old self had nearly twenty years before. Somehow as a toddler I had connected with the energies and beings responsible for the psychic ‘field’ in which Peter, Eileen, and Dorothy would take root seven years later. How? Why? Why me? To what end?

I’ve been chuckling as I typed that last paragraph. In the decades since, I have assembled quite a collection of hypotheses, lessons, and even some possible answers. Many have prompted even more questions. Life in the physical universe, in that regard, is a target rich environment. I eventually met and shared an adventure (that made a mockery of linear time and space) with the two men who had been energy forms inside the dome in 1955—when both had been young boys a bit older than me in physical reality. And, yes, when we met as adults in the Park Maintenance department they had been wearing coveralls and one had a mustache.

Of the many things I learned in my community years, two are always front and center. The first is a paraphrase of something Odin tells Thor and Loki before his death in Thor: Ragnarok: The community is not a place, it’s a consciousness. The second was the invisible warp and weft of our daily life in 1973: Wherever it is and in all of its forms, Life is the spiritual practice.

Gordon Cutler