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Although I was relatively prosperous as an economist before coming to Findhorn, my relationship to the world was fundamentally based on ideas of scarcity. What changed my whole life was the experience of living in Indonesia for three years as an economic advisor. I came to see that the Western ideal of economic development is not only condescending but false. I could see that the culture I encountered in this so-called “underdeveloped” part of the world was far more developed than my own in spiritual terms.

In Java there are over ninety million people living on an island the size of England. The Javanese live almost exclusively on a staple of rice, which they either have to grow or import at world market prices. They treat the rice with great respect, growing it in a process of attunement to the nature spirits, and harvesting it by hand with apologies to the goddess of rice and an explanation of their need. Everything the Javanese do is based on spiritual principles, although they don’t think of them as such; they think of them as life-ideas. I could see that the social and economic implications of these ideas were healthier than anything I had to offer. For instance, if you don’t use machines to cut the rice, you need the whole village to cut it, and everybody in the village is given a share of the crop for doing that, so there is equal distribution immediately; whereas if you have combine harvesting, the man who owns the machines controls the crop. I was also impressed with the way that villages are run essentially by attunement, through village councils that don’t debate issues but speak about them from many perspectives, as we do at Findhorn in community meetings, and come to a consensus in which everybody has participated.
I left Indonesia feeling profoundly changed in my attitudes, and when I came home to England I wasn’t at all clear as to what I was going to do, so I went back to an old love of mine, which was building boats. Eventually I came to Scotland looking for a boat-building job, but discovered Findhorn, and ended up staying.

I spent my first six months here as a plumber, then I was asked if I’d like to focalise the small grocery shop that the community runs for the caravan park. The experience of working in the shop was a real course in the principles of manifestation. I arrived on the scene at the beginning of the summer peak period when suddenly the number of, say bottles of milk that are sold per day goes from 20 to nearly 400. The shop was short-staffed and the group was putting out the message to the whole community: “Help, the summer crunch is coming and we need people.” There was a feeling of panic about the plea, and the community was being told, “lt’s your duty to help run the shop.” Needless to say, the appeal drew no one. So when I arrived, we decided as a crew that we would stop putting out appeals and just get on with the work and enjoy ourselves. Within a week or two the work seemed effortless, and we were fully staffed. At the end of the year the profit for the shop reflected our positive energy flow. For the previous two years the shop had been running between break-even and a thousand pounds profit. That year there was a profit of over ten thousand pounds. I was quite staggered! It made no sense financially. I couldn’t understand where the extra money came from – the turnover wasn’t that much greater and it had not been a particularly spectacular summer. In the end the lesson for me was, first and foremost, to do what’s right in front of you as perfectly as you can and enjoy it. That, for me, has been the key to manifestation.

As a community, we seem recently to have lost sight of that simple truth. We’ve expanded all over the place into houses and programs and projects while spreading our consciousness too thinly. We’ve always said it’s our principle to finish thoroughly and perfectly what we start before moving on to anything else. As far as I can see, we haven’t lived up to that very often in the last three years. I’m sure this is why we’ve precipitated a financial crisis for ourselves, and we’re having to sell at least one house; not just to pay off our debts, but to draw our spiritual energy into a clearer focus and infuse it in the other forms whose custodianship we’ve neglected.

In the year or more since I left the shop and have been working with the community’s finances, I’ve discovered that growth has to come from a balance of two kinds of impulse. One is a strong vision, held clearly in our consciousness, which we move towards purposefully, and the other one is that the growth and movement towards that vision come out of love and care for whatever we are having to deal with right now. You need to nurture and love and care for a garden for it to thrive. It helps to have a vision for the garden, but vision alone is useless unless you’re prepared to put love and care into each spadeful of soil you dig.

I feel that, at worst, what we’ve done as a community in Peter’s era is to hold a spiritual vision very strongly and in very specific material form and make it happen. That kind of energy flow is a reflection of management patterns in the larger society around us. However, I think that an important difference between Findhorn and the larger society is that we are committed to being flexible in relation to our plans, and we know that there is a divine pattern unfolding throughout the universe which we can sometimes glimpse clearly in part and sometimes not clearly at all. We’ve learned that we always need to be careful about laying down our own blueprint and then sticking to it just because it’s there. It’s so easy to become attached to one particular interpretation of a vision, and it’s a dangerous thing if we can’t release our interpretation as new guidance, or new attunement, or new intuitive feelings come up about the right thing to do now. And guidance isn’t always justifiable or completely “reasonable”. If Peter and Eileen had always acted reasonably, the community would never have been founded.

Ideally in the New Age, “No management is good management” , because we should all be co-creating through universal attunement to the will of God. We’re not there yet, but I think we’re creating a culture that’s cohesive enough and open enough to accept and synthesize what we need to learn without selling out to manipulative solutions. In that respect I feel we’re like the villagers in Bali in whose traditional dances there are now Tango steps. They got these from Dutch tourists in the 1930s, but they weren’t seduced into switching to the Tango; they took what spoke to their hearts and incorporated it into some of their own dance forms.

written in 1980s for Faces of Findhorn