The Findhorn Community is a unique, growing, evolving place. The Findhorn of today is not the same as when it began in the sixties or even as it was twenty years ago, any more than I am the same person I was twenty or forty years ago.

And yet, there is continuity. It is a different place but it’s the same place, too. Just as my own physical genetic pattern provides a foundation for my own sense of continuity, so the “genetics” of Findhorn give it a persistent identity as well.

Woven into this organisational genetics is the idea of the new age. This is an idea that has fallen into some disfavour and ridicule in recent years. It is probably more likely that these days a place like Findhorn would be called a “transformational” community than a “new age” community, or just simply a spiritual community.

But when I arrived at Findhorn in 1970, the idea of the new age was very different. It was a powerfully inspirational and paradigmatic idea, one that summarised a sense of civilizational change and being on the edge of new opportunities and creative possibilities. It was a call to service as much as, if not more than, a call to personal psychic and spiritual development. While the image of the new age had roots in psychic prophecy, esotericism, and Christian millenarianism, in the seventies it was moving towards being a search for a new vision for society. It drew on ideas of new science, sustainability, community, ecology, and systems and complexity theories. It was a visionary image, which included a vision of new forms of spirituality.

In a very general way there was a period between the late ’60s and the early to middle ’80s when the idea of the new age shifted from the mainly psychic and prophetic idea it had been been (with a large dash of UFO speculation thrown in) to a vision of science, knowledge, culture, civilization, and service, before it turned back towards psychism and personal development (at which time it earned the unhappy label of being a “religion”).

Of course, few things are ever that exact. What I think of as the civilizational visionary aspect of the New Age continues to this day (though often under other terms), and even through the ’70s the glamour of esoteric, psychic, and prophetic material remained strong.

Here my story must become personal. When I arrived at Findhorn, it was right at the cusp of that shift of vision that I feel took place in the late ’60s and early ’70s from psychic prophecy to paradigmatic transformation. As you may remember from the history of Findhorn, Peter, Eileen and Dorothy and others were part of that prophetic stream in the late fifties and early sixties that saw an apocalyptic event coming to humanity which would usher in a new age.

This is not a new image in Western history. The Christian millenarian tradition (by which I mean the teachings and expectations around the Second Coming of Christ and the birth of the new Millennium or Thousand-Year reign of Christ on earth as foretold in the book of Revelation) had seen it all before. The one major difference was that the transformation of one world into another would this time be assisted by beings from other worlds, visiting us in UFOs, rather than by angels – a change in keeping with an increasingly secular and technological society.

So while still running Cluny Hill Hotel, Peter, Eileen, Dorothy and Eileen, and others would gather on the Findhorn Bay beach to prepare a “landing site” for the UFOs that would come to evacuate them if and when apocalypse broke out.

Interestingly, I was involved in much the same thing at that time. I was finishing high school and entering college at the time the Caddys and Dorothy were at Cluny (1957-62) and during their first two years on the caravan park (1962-4). My parents and I were part of a metaphysical group led by an ex-spiritualist minister who also channeled messages from “space beings” about forthcoming destruction and the need to find an “evacuation spot” to be taken to safety by flying saucers. Ours were out in the desert around Phoenix, Arizona, where I lived at that time.

When you think about it, it is amazing how wide-spread this particular myth was, and I use the word “myth” here not to suggest something unreal or made-up, but in its deeper meaning of an intuitive apprehension of a truth too complex or too deep to put into words except through imagery and story. It’s easy to look back on those days and become cynical or metaphysically snobbish (as in, “who could believe such stuff ?”), but in fact, these prophecies, which peaked around 1962 and 1963, were not far off. A reading of the history of the Cuban Missile crisis shows just how whisker-close we came to a nuclear Armageddon. Those psychics just weren’t picking up smoke and air!

I left home in 1965 to begin my career as a spiritual lecturer and teacher. It was at that time that I began working regularly with my own inner plane mentor, whom I named John. (If you’ve read my book A Pilgrim in Aquarius, you’ll have heard me mention him before.) John hardly ever offered anything like a prophecy, the one major exception being when he foretold the arising of Gorbachev and the fall of the Soviet Union five years before it happened. Indeed, his take on all the prophecies of apocalypse and Armageddon was that they were human interpretations, for the most arising from experiencing the leading edge of a wave of planetary change. John absolutely perceived the coming of a new age, but for him it was a civilizational shift that humanity would participate in, rather than a new millennium brought about by disaster and calamity. In effect, we had to co-create our new age; what was entering the world were energies and presences that would greatly enhance our capacities to do so.

Prior to coming to Findhorn, I actually lectured very little about the new age; almost all my work was on the integration of personality and soul – as well as on my own inner training. In an environment in which psychic apocalyptic prophecy was the norm for new age thinking, I was trying to arrive at and present a different vision, one more in keeping with what later became known as the “paradigm shift.” Apocalypse, for John, was a possibility but not a major one (“You won’t get off so easy,” he used to say!). His vision was that we would have to work for the new world we wanted and not have it handed to us through “planetary cleansing” and subsequent rescue and “planet-building efforts” by space beings. (By the way, if you recognize any similarities between this version of the New Age and the idea of invading Iraq to remove all the bad guys and evil influences so we can rescue and rebuild the country in a new and better way…well, it’s an old myth in human culture!)

When Findhorn and I intersected in the summer of 1970, I found that Peter, Eileen, Dorothy and the others were ready to move past the apocalyptic vision of the new age – and were already doing so to some extent – while I came with a different vision, one of co-creating that new age. In a simplistic way, I might say that I had a vision of the new age that Findhorn needed and wanted in order to move ahead, but Findhorn had an expertise and attunement to the co-creative, grounding work in the world through its cooperation with the Devas and Nature Spirits that I was looking for and needed. We came together at just the right moment in our respective lives to be able to help each other.

The turning point was a meeting I had with Peter in which he showed me a letter he had received (written in magenta ink on violet paper, no less !) from a group in Australia that was urging all new age groups to spread the word of a forthcoming apocalypse. Several British groups had jumped on this particular prophetic bandwagon, and Peter was being urged to do so on behalf of Findhorn. He asked me what I thought of the letter.

I told him I felt it was rubbish and that Findhorn should have nothing to do with it. Instead, Findhorn should proclaim that the new age was already here, which, from my point of view, it was; a particular stream of new, spirit-sourced civilizational energy having grounded itself into the etheric body of the earth in 1967.

My suggestion to Peter and to Findhorn was that we pretend the new age had already arrived and ask ourselves the question, “Now what?” Now what do we do? What kind of community do we build? What kind of lives do we live? How do we go about our ordinary affairs to anchor sacredness into them and into our world, instead of waiting for some disaster or another ?

From John’s point of view, the new age was less a historical event and more a state of consciousness: a state of attunement to our co-creative capacities to participate in the unfoldment of the life of the world. The new age was a symbol of a consciousness open to newness, emergence and change, and free from any assumptions that the past must necessarily shape the future.

Peter loved this approach and took to it with his amazing enthusiasm and will. At that point Findhorn truly adopted as its vision being a demonstration centre for the possibilities of living in a new age. And the idea of new age began to shift from prophecy to paradigm-shift, as Peter and the small community around us then began to re-envision the centre as a node or focal point where the seeds and forms of a new civilizational model could emerge and be nourished.

Well, that’s a bit of history. What I remember most is that after we adopted the policy that the new age was already here, there was a true explosion of creativity and membership in the Community. When I arrived in August 1970, there were about 15 permanent residents and a number of guests. A little over a year later there were 150 residents, plus guests; a ten-fold increase. And I should add, most of these residents were living in the same amount of space as the 15 had had! Talk about “cheek by jowl”!

I believe this rapid increase was due not only to the influence and attraction of the garden and the idea of community, but also to the positive vision that Findhorn then began to put out about the future. There was an exciting sense of actually contributing to the emergence of a new cultural vision, not just talking about it or speculating but actually doing it. The new age seemed palpable because we felt we were creating it, adding our bit to the cause of planetary emergence.

Of course, this has been part of the power and attraction of Findhorn ever since.

So, let’s explore this a bit more. Like it or not, everyone living at Findhorn today continues to have this new age idea woven into the spiritual genetics of the place. At times this may seem embarrassing, particularly given some of the modern definitions or images attached to “new age.” At times it may seem confusing or presumptuous or glamorous, or may even seem old-fashioned, a cliche without a lot of meaning. It may seem an idea that motivated the founders back in the sixties, but which at the beginning of the 21st century merely seems quaint.

Labels are not really important, but it is important to understand what lies behind that label. The challenge with the term “new age” is that it has acquired an incredible amount of baggage in a short period of time, so much so as to render the term almost unusable in many circumstances. But because there is a lot of baggage does not mean that the original destination is not a good one!

The “genetic chemistry” of a new age community to me is deeper than the idea of the new age. It really is a feeling of calling within the Community. A new age community is essentially a “community of Calling.” It is a place of people who feel called and a place that calls to people.

The important thing here is that most communities are not communities of Calling. My neighbourhood certainly isn’t. My town certainly isn’t. Individuals within my neighbourhood and town may feel called in different ways, but we do not share the same calling. A Calling is not the raison d’etre for the existence of my town and neighbourhood.

But Findhorn is a community of Calling. It is not simply a town or suburb where people come to live and go about their separate ways, pursuing their own ends. Findhorn is not the product of geography, as say the Findhorn Village is (built to take advantage of fishing in the Moray Firth), nor is it a product of economics (such as a town that is a centre of trade). It is the product of an idea.

The reasons for Findhorn’s existence arise from realms of spirit and imagination, qualities and ideas, visions and service. It arises from a sense of calling.

First was the calling to God, to the still small voice within, to the sacredness within ourselves and within the world.

Then came the calling to the garden, to nature, to the earth, and to cooperation with non-human, non-physical orders of life.

Then came the calling to the new age, to a vision of the future, and to service to humanity and the planet.

Then came the calling to community.

Findhorn did not come into existence in response to a calling to a particular social need (like The Red Cross) or to a particular religion or philosophy (it’s not primarily a Buddhist center, a Christian center or a Moslem center, though these traditions are represented). It arose from a calling to service. It arose from a calling to the potentials of emergence and new life within each of us and within society and the world. It arose from a calling to the sacred within all things.

When my wife Julie and I and our kids were at Findhorn this past April, I noticed that for the first few days I could not attune to the Angel of Findhorn. I couldn’t find it, which doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, only that I couldn’t see it, though I certainly felt its good presence. Of course, a great deal of my attention and energy was taken up by the conference, which surrounded me and the other presenters in a bubble all our own.

Towards the end of the conference I finally found time to go up to one of my favorite spots, the Nature Sanctuary, and have a quiet time. It was there that I finally made contact with the Angel. Only this time, the way I see it had dramatically changed. In the past, whenever I’ve come to visit Findhorn, I’ve seen the Angel as a shaft of Light rising above the caravan park, a very vertical presentation. But this time, I saw it as a pulsing series of concentric circles radiating out from the caravan park into the surrounding countryside, which suggested to me a very much broader, more grounded, more spread out condition. Rather than a “pole”, it seemed like a blanket covering the ground for miles around.

I find this image reflected in what is Findhorn today, how spread out it is, how many activities and smaller groupings are gathered into its field, how diverse it is becoming, and so on. By no means is it all concentrated just in the Foundation or in the original location clustered around the Community Centre. It is a rich gathering of people expressing their callings in a variety of ways.

One effect of this is that there are activities at Findhorn that are important to it, and part of its spiritual work, that are most likely never seen by visitors, never shown in its “public” face. There is a life to Findhorn that is rich and powerful but not necessarily seen if one only looks through the lenses of the Foundation or the caravan park or Cluny.

I want to affirm the Community of Calling is more than just the parts of it that are obviously out there for the public to see and experience.

During the whole time I lived in the Community from ’70 to ’73, there was a tension between “community as demonstration” and “community as living place,” a tension that revolved around the role and importance of guests and visitors, privacy boundaries, service, and so on. Some of this tension emerged from the way we were conceiving a “community of calling.”

Inherent in the vision of Findhorn as a “city of light” is the idea of at least three tiers. There is the part of that city that is the teaching/demonstration part, whose primary function is to host and to provide a means for visitors to have a concentrated experience. Then there is the tier that deals with the relationship of the city to the rest of the world in the usual forms of commerce and neighbourliness that towns, villages and cities normally have with each other. Finally, there is the tier that is the private side, the residential areas where individuals and families can live out their lives as people do anywhere, albeit with a different and perhaps unique set of values.

But in the beginning, all we had was the first tier, the hosting, public, demonstration tier, and this meant that the calling of the place was very obvious and very oriented to serving the guests who came. Indeed, that is how the nature of calling at Findhorn came to be perceived. It wasn’t for nothing that the Community evolved from people who had run a hotel !

This ties in with the genetic presence of the idea of the new age within Findhorn’s make-up. As I’ve said, when I lived there, the idea of the new age still meant something very hopeful and visionary. It was a calling for humanity itself to rise above the habits and tendencies and inertia of its past and forge something new and abundant for the world. The call to be part of a new age, certainly as it was understood and embodied at Findhorn in those days, was a call to set aside purely personal goals to serve the larger wellbeing of humanity – or perhaps more precisely, to integrate one’s personal goals with the larger good of the planet.

So Findhorn saw itself and defined itself within a context of planetary service, and that image of service was a major part of the “calling” for the community of calling. But inherent in the idea of a city of light was a larger and more integrated vision. This idea was usually expressed as an image of growth and power: Peter would speak enthusiastically about growing from a group to a community to a village to a town to a city and so on. It’s a very human vision in one way, as that is what communities and villages do: they grow, if the environment and economics permit. It also has elements of imperialism about it, the sense that “size DOES matter”, and that Findhorn would be more effective in the large dose of being a city than in the homeopathic dose of being a small but potent community.

But the idea of “city” can also be taken as meaning the integrated complexity of a rich and diverse human ecology. In such an ecology, there can be many kinds of callings, all united by the common identity of the city itself. So in an average city, you might find schools, medical facilities, sports arenas, areas of commerce, museums, theatres and places for the arts, residential areas, and so on.

I live near a major city (Seattle) in a small town (Issaquah), which once upon a time was a rural town. When I first moved here in September of 1984, it was still a relatively small place, though even then it was beginning to show signs of being a bedroom community for Seattle.

The Issaquah Creek is a major salmon run, and in the fall, the salmon, returning from the sea to spawn, are so thick in the river that it looks like you could walk across on their backs and not get wet. There is a large salmon hatchery in the town. Salmon are the animal totem of this place, and every October they have a celebration called Salmon Days to honor the returning fish.

So the first year we’re here, we go to this celebration which begins with a parade. I’m sitting on the sidewalk in this little town with Julie and a year-old John-Michael, not expecting much. I mean, how big could a parade be for such a small place? Three hours later, the parade is still going on! There were bands from all over the state parading by, clowns on little cars, a tank and various other military vehicles plus marching soldiers, a squad of colorfully dressed grandmothers doing precision motorcycle formations, horses, lots of floats, the list went on and on…I was flabbergasted! Who would have expected such a display?

I later learned just how diverse and rich Issaquah is. We have two theatres for live stage productions, one of which is nationally famous as one of the few theaters where brand-new playwrights and composers can stage totally new, untested plays and musicals; we have numerous ethnic restaurants (Indian, Thai, Afghani, Chinese, Greek, Italian, and Eastern European, to name a few), a large zoo, and so on. We’re a long way from being a city, but we have a very diverse and rich community ecology. We are a city in spirit, if not in name or physical size.

In the early years of Findhorn – certainly while I was there – the Community was something of a monoculture. It was a new age centre comprised of two main demonstrations, the garden and the Community, and a hundred and fifty people whose calling was defined in part by being hosts to visitors, as well as in embodying spiritual values such as love, attunement to the God within, and so on.

Now Findhorn is much more diverse. It’s more like Issaquah. There is space for a variety of expressions of calling, some very evident and public, others tucked away here and there in different parts of the countryside.

And now the calling of Findhorn has room to be something more than just “serving the guests”. It can be a calling to diversify within a shared context of vision. It can be a calling to create a rich local ecology of incarnational and spiritual expression within a shared context of values.

Yet, as this diversity evolves, there is still a commonality, a “Findhorn-ness,” to be considered and nourished. Part of this commonality still, to me, resonates with the fundamental energy and promise of the idea of a new age: the possibility of giving emergence to a new expression of personal and collective promise and wellbeing for all upon the world. It is the potential of a new society. And one way this can be experienced is to realise that in my everyday life, in my home life with family and job, I can be a point of openness to possibility, to vision, to change, to emergence. A new society has to start somewhere. Why not with me? After all, a society is really just a collection of individuals expressing themselves in a particular way.

The Findhorn Community was created or emerged to be a public place. That it now has non-public spaces and activities, as befitting any village or community, does not take away from this. It simply says that this public aspect needs to be taken into account in any consideration of the energy, the field, the spirit, and the nature of the place, particularly as it impacts those of you who live and work there. Being public is part of your community of calling, though now not all of it as it was when I lived there.

Now, at the risk of overloading you with lots of words, text, and ideas, I want to take this idea of Findhorn and the New Age in yet another direction.

I’ve talked about Findhorn as a community of calling. Now I’d like to refer to it as a community of emergence.

By this I mean a community that is open to the future and to change and growth. It does not mean that you don’t have traditions, habits, routine ways of doing things, or that you don’t learn from experience and are reinventing the paper clip every day. It means that while standing on the foundation of what has gone before, you are able to keep open your visionary and co-creative capacities. You are able to embrace change, let new ideas arise, be imaginative. You are welcoming to the spirit of the future and can attune to its essence without fearing the change it might bring.

You are a growing tip.

In my definition, you are “new age.”

I’d like to cast this discussion of being a community of emergence within a particular context: Findhorn’s teachings.

What are the unique teachings and practices of Findhorn? What legacy or offering do you make to the ongoing spiritual richness of humanity? What might a person come to Findhorn to find that it cannot find any place else?

My assumption is that you are a place of unique spiritual dispensation and emergence. This was the vision we had in the early seventies and it is consonant with the type of energies and inner contacts I felt then at Findhorn and always feel with Findhorn.

It is quite possible that this unique spiritual contribution will not take the form of a teaching or practice of some nature. Being a teacher myself, I tend to think in those terms. But your contribution may be to be a presence in the world, a source of inspiration and energy. Or it may be to also be a source of teaching in a more traditional way.

Being a workshop centre is a way to bring in money and make a wide variety of ideas available, but it’s not the same thing as being a unique generative source of spiritual teaching in your own right. Are you a conference or retreat center, or could you be a collective Rumi, for example, afire in your unique way with the love of God, of the world, and of humanity?

When you see yourself as a community of Calling, you may tend to see yourselves in terms of service or services you may render.

As a community of Emergence, you want to look at yourselves as portals through which something inspirational, empowering, enlivening, and fresh enters the world. You want to see yourselves as generative sources, like stars that generate all the heavy atoms that go to build up the rest of the universe. These heavier atoms make planets possible; they make us possible. So what ideas, thoughts, visions, imaginations, feelings, emotions, energies, vibes, and so on do you generate, and what will they make possible? What can be built in the world based on what emerges from you?

It is easy for each of us to see others as portals, especially when they are labeled as “spiritual teachers”, “philosophers”, “prophets”, “channels”, and the like. Not that those labels don’t have meanings, but they are not intended to be bricks to block up the portals that each of us can be.

Findhorn is more than just a means to transmit past teachings into the future. Whatever wonderful, fantastic, excellent, outstanding, mind- and heart-expanding teachings such folks as Peter, Eileen, Dorothy, ROC, and (ahem…) I may have given, your task is to do more than just pass them on. And whatever fabulous, enlightened, skillful, marvellous teachers come to Findhorn to your programmes and conferences, your task is more than just to provide them with a platform for their talents and gifts.

Your task is to be a point of emergence for ongoing revelation, if I may be so bold as to call it that. Your task is to ensure that spirit speaks freshly and relevantly within and from you in response to today’s needs and tomorrow’s potentials.

Every teacher who has been privileged to be part of your field – and whom you have been privileged to hear – should add to your powers of insight, imagination and emergence, not obstruct or detract from them. How wonderful to host their voices as they speak to the world.

AND….

What is your voice?

What emerges uniquely from you, not just as individuals (though that is important, too) but as a community, as Findhorn?

I promised I would talk about the idea of Findhorn as a demonstration centre. This was an important part of our identity back when I lived there, and I gather it still is, at least in some parts of that complex Foundation/Community/Village blend that is now Findhorn.

The question in the early Seventies was always just what were we demonstrating and how were we demonstrating it? What does it mean to be a centre of demonstration?

Well, some of the obvious answers were: we’re demonstrating community life, or we’re demonstrating cooperation with the nature kingdoms. Both the Community and the gardens were something visitors could see and experience first hand, which is important since one expects and wants a demonstration to be invisible. (After all, it does no good for me to say I’m demonstrating sending out love if no one can feel or see these loving energies or their effects and if my behaviour doesn’t show much lovingness!)

But as I implied in the last section, we also saw Findhorn as demonstrating “the new age” or a “new age” way of being; we were (allegedly) a centre for demonstrating a new culture.

Now this is something very nebulous indeed, especially as there was very little about the physical nature of the Findhorn Foundation Community that seemed particularly “new” or innovative. After all, there were lots of trailer or caravan parks around, and other people lived in mobile bungalows, and there were religious centres where people went to sanctuary or meditated together. Even the ideas of community and cooperation with nature spirits were not new. Indeed, my lawyer in California in those days worked quite consciously with his inner contact with devas and nature spirits in creating a lavish garden, and he’d been doing that long before Findhorn was established.

The idea of being a demonstration centre for a new age or new culture led to some humorous and at times embarrassing situations, as once when Peter took a collection of the fruits of our art studios (some pottery cups and bowls and some weavings, as I remember) to an international art festival in Ireland (if I remember correctly) to display them. Peter touted them as examples of new age crafts, which suggested they were somehow at the evolutionary edge of pottery and weaving, much to the consternation of the actual artists who accompanied him. They were, as I remember, good solid pieces of art but not at the same level as some of the exhibits that were on display at that festival.

So in the end what it seemed to come down to was that if something were new age, it had a special kind of energy and spirit attached to it, even though its form might be quite ordinary, that differentiated it from anything else in its class.

The interesting thing is that this described Findhorn itself. I remember well that a common reaction from visitors who came expecting to see a new age centre was how ordinary and common Findhorn turned out to be, with its flower gardens and bungalows. They often had an initial reaction of disappointment, or at least surprise and bemusement.

I remember going to a new age centre in the high desert country of southern California in the early Sixties and it really looked very different from anything you could find in your local neighbourhood. Whoever had designed it had done so with remarkable grace and beauty, blending spiral circular designs with pyramidal shapes. It looked like it had manifested directly from ancient Atlantis or some future civilisation. That place looked new age!

Not Findhorn!

But on the other hand, there was no denying the special quality of spirit and energy that surrounded the Community. It was (and is) a place of vision and hope. And for those of us living there, it really felt like a place on the borderland of the future (and I think it still does). Whatever made it “new age” was definitely in the atmosphere and spirit of the place, if not in its form.

But how to demonstrate that? Or, more precisely, since that spirit was there and visitors felt it, just what were we doing to demonstrate it?

One reason I’m interested in this topic is to explore how the idea of being a demonstration centre affects you. In my neighbourhood where I live, there is no expectation upon me to demonstrate anything except a tidy lawn and good neighbourliness. But the idea of being a demonstration centre does carry expectations. It carries the implication and realisation that you are being witnessed.

So to our Community of Calling and Community of Emergence, we can add being a Community of Witness. You are witnessing to the reality of something (spiritual life, cooperation with nature spirits, community, or whatever) AND you are being witnessed.

To give a demonstration or to be a demonstration is to be a focus of attention.

What does this mean ? What does this feel like ? How does it shape your lives, if at all ? What implications are there for you personally and for all of you collectively in living in a Community of Witness?

These, I think, are important questions.

I happen to feel the idea that Findhorn is a community of witness is an important one. It incorporates the idea of service, which I feel is a key element of Findhorn’s character. The Community never did come into being just for the sake of Peter, Eileen, Dorothy, ROC, myself, or any of the wonderful people who formed the initial group in the late sixties and early seventies. It was always a place where others could come and see or experience something that, at the most fundamental level, would be a demonstration of God’s presence, grace and power, as Dorothy has often said.

Initially, people came to see the garden and learn of the nature spirits. Then they came to see and experience and become part of the Community. Then they came to learn about a vision for the future – a potential new age – and a vision of personal possibilities. At each stage, as the Community has grown, it has demonstrated something else, something new for visitors to see and experience. And in a larger context, there were always the stories of Eileen and Dorothy, God’s guidance and presence, the co-operation with spiritual worlds, Peter’s intuition and obedience to God’s will, manifestation, ROC’s meetings with Pan . . . the basic stories of Findhorn’s origins.

These are powerful stories and over the years others have added their own stories to them. It is these stories, and the obvious presence of a community that works, that I have seen inspire guests and visitors. Yes, there is a powerful energy at Findhorn, generated in no small part by the love (or the willingness to be loving) that everyone exhibits, but it is the stories as much as anything, I believe, that made up the core of the “demonstration”. The almost archetypal tales of going from waste dump to garden, from soil to soul, from an old age to a new age – the stories of transformation and promise that are as old as humanity – remain among Findhorn’s greatest gifts to the world.

In the days that I lived in the Community, telling these stories – showing visitors what Peter called “the proof of the pudding”, which was faith and spirit made real in the actual substance of the gardens, the buildings, the lives of the Community members and so on – was the primary act of witnessing. People came to Findhorn to see the gardens, experience the Community, and to hear the stories. This really was the sum total of “demonstration” in my opinion in these early days.

But the idea of being a centre of demonstration grew more complex and ambitious, it seems to me. We certainly, like you, had a powerful vision, but the link between vision and demonstration began to get a bit tenuous. This is one of the factors that made the idea of demonstrating so vexing.

I can illustrate what I mean by using the example of my youngest daughter’s soccer team. Of course they have a vision of being a great team, having an undefeated season, and so on, and when I went to see them play last Saturday, they were good for a beginning team. They demonstrated a degree of competence appropriate for their level of play (almost all the girls on this team are just learning soccer). But what we spectators didn’t see was all the work they’ve been putting in during the practice sessions twice a week in learning the fundamentals of soccer. At the games we see the fruits of their labours, but we don’t see the training and the labours themselves (well, unless we attend the practice sessions, of course!).

But the fact is that there ARE practice sessions. We do not see a group of 9 and 10 year old girls put straight onto a soccer field and expected to play a game and demonstrate what soccer is all about.

Yet in some ways, that is what happened at Findhorn. The majority of members were being asked to demonstrate a spiritual life, cooperation with nature spirits, a sense of the new age, community spirit, and all the rest without any real training. We were learning, practicing, and demonstrating all at the same time, as if a group of strangers, few of whom had any real soccer training, had been brought together and thrown into a World Cup arena to compete for the championship and had to immediately begin playing together.

The result was pressure.

So, back to demonstration.

The point I was making was that in the early days of Findhorn we often felt that we were asked to demonstrate something that we actually didn’t wholly understand ourselves. There were no “practice sessions” for what we were doing, other than just doing it. And we needed to do it under the eye of witnesses.

For those who felt a call to service anyway, this was doable; for those who simply wanted to live in a community and live their private lives, it was more stressful. Hence the controversy.

It was in an attempt to help this situation that I started the College in 1972. I thought that if we had an internal education program, it could provide some training – some “soccer practice” – in the things we wanted to demonstrate.

But I faced two problems which frankly I never did solve by the time I left.

The first was that I didn’t know what the training should be! In many ways, I was in training myself from the inner worlds. There were some things I could pass on, such as a new perspective on manifestation and a re-imagining of the nature of personality, but on the whole, I felt that much of what I might offer actually wasn’t all that relevant unless Findhorn was going to become an esoteric, occult center. And that, I knew quite clearly, was not its destiny. It was not Findhorn’s place to be a recreation of, say, the Order of the Golden Dawn or Dion Fortune’s Society of the Inner Light or some other magical order – and even if it had been, my own path was taking me away from that way of working into something new.

When I was a teenager, I had a series of inner contacts and communications that convinced me a new form of spirituality and spiritual teaching or training was starting to emerge upon the earth. That is why I was open to the idea of a new age in the first place, because I felt this new spiritual energy and unfoldment would be at the heart of it.

When I came to Findhorn, what really attracted and held me was a very clear inner perception that Findhorn was one of the places where this new energy of spirituality would emerge. I felt it my job to create and hold a space for that to happen. But that didn’t mean I actually knew just what that spirituality would look like or how it would be practiced. It’s only in the past five years or so that I have begun to have an understanding of that. In the early Seventies, all I could do was affirm that such a thing was possible or that a new spirituality was emerging. I couldn’t offer anything concrete as a training. (And it’s in the nature of this emergent spirituality that no one person or group can claim to wholly represent it anyway.)

So my first problem was that I knew something was needed, but I couldn’t offer it, certainly not in the way that I wished. I couldn’t really be the “soccer coach” or new spiritual teacher I wanted to be back then. It was partly Peter’s tendency to turn me into a soccer coach prematurely that contributed to my decision to leave when I did.

My second problem was that I realised that while I felt Findhorn needed some kind of training to support its “demonstration”. to some extent that training had to evolve and emerge from the Community itself as it grew over the years. This meant to me that it would not be good for Findhorn to adopt some other existing form of spiritual or psychological practice or training. What Findhorn had to do was to keep an open space within which something could emerge; it had to be improvisational, not scripted. This is not an easy place to be, and frankly, I think you all over the years have done a pretty good job of keeping that space open, even though I know there have been temptations and powerful personalities that have arisen to fill it with one religious, philosophical, esoteric, or psychological tradition or practice or another.

In that sense, part of Findhorn’s demonstration was to use the best of what came its way from the traditions of the past but to keep an open space for something unique to it to evolve and emerge.

I also felt in the early Seventies that it wasn’t quite time for what I sensed as a new spirituality to emerge, though the foundations could be laid. Making community itself a central practice was part of laying that foundation, I believe.

Is it now time? I guess that’s up to you.

In this process, I know it may has been challenging to be called to demonstrate something and not have specific training, teaching, tradition, etc., to demonstrate. You have had to demonstrate qualities like love and respect, community life, personal responsibility, and so on. In this sense, I think you have had to demonstrate being at the edge of experimentation and mystery where the new and the unknown actually begin to manifest before they have comfortably settled into new forms.

Going back to the idea of the new age, it’s relatively easy to speculate about and demonstrate new forms that a new age might take in various areas of human life. It’s harder to abide in and demonstrate that open space in which imagination, vision, spirit, and wonder come together to actually give birth to those new forms.

Yet in the end, that is what a person can take home from Findhorn, and it may be the most important thing. We all struggle with our pasts and with the inertia of what has gone before, what I call the ‘tyranny of the familiar’. We all can feel trapped in our histories, unable to change, lacking vision, lacking the energy to be an agent of transformation in our own lives, let alone in the life of society.

Yet, this is what Findhorn really demonstrates above everything else. It is truly a beacon of the future – not of a specific future with specific forms, but of our capacity to co-create futures.

In the garden, Findhorn demonstrates cooperation with the kingdoms of nature, but in its life, it demonstrates cooperation with that which births the future. “Behold,” says the sacred, “I make all things new!” This is cooperation with the sacred, both within ourselves and within our world. This is cooperation with the mighty forces of imagination and vision, love and potential, wisdom and possibility, emergence and manifestation.

It is this power of cooperation with sacredness, with creativeness, that is the hallmark of human consciousness to me; we are world shapers, future makers. We have in ourselves that living edge between the unmanifest and the manifest. Findhorn holds out this vision of who we are, sometimes clearly, sometimes not so clearly. But it is to me one of Findhorn’s unique gifts.

In thinking of yourselves as a Community of Witness, you are witnessing to the presence of the future in our midst, the presence of possibility, vision, courage, willingness, change, transformation, emergence, love, support, co-creativity . . the list goes on. It is a powerful witness.

So what if other centres, other communities do specific things better than you can? All honor to them! But you synthesise; you hold a co-creative space. You witness the power of the imagination when held in a place of love. You are a community of sacred imagination! From Eileen and Dorothy right down to yourselves.

What a gift! What a demonstration!

A final thought on this topic. Demonstration occurs at various levels, and all levels are important. When I see a play in a theatre, I see the actors and the stage setting and I experience the story they present. But they would not be there if it weren’t for the stage hands, the set designers, the producers, the directors, the writers, the script checkers,all the people who make the play possible. Each of them is demonstrating “theatre”. Theatre is not only actors, not only the story. It is all of it together.

At Findhorn the primary role of Demonstrator has been the Foundation and its membership. I know that the Foundation is now just one of many “nodes of light” within the overall field of the Findhorn Community. Many of the important centres within Findhorn may never be seen or recognised by guests or visitors to the Foundation, but you are all part of the demonstration. You are all part of what generates the light that others may witness.

And as the city of light grows, either as a physical reality or as a virtual, imaginal one, this itself becomes a powerful demonstration of the reality of who we are in the world. For all of us, each of us, in our sovereignty, our light, our individuated sacredness, helps to co-create the field that surrounds our world. We are all generating the inner “stuff” from which our world is forming itself as an energetic and spiritual manifestation.

When we look out at world affairs, we concentrate on the world leaders, the “movers and shakers”. But often they are only responding to the deeper currents that have been set into motion by millions of individuals. Did Bush start a war in the Middle East or was there a longing for a war somewhere in the hearts of men and women, or at least a failure to generate a sufficient longing for peace, for which he and others were only the portals into manifestation ?

We are all, each of us, demonstrating in our lives the kind of world we want, or believe in, or think possible, or accept, or can imagine. We are all demonstrators. Findhorn can demonstrate this. Findhorn can remind us of this. It can teach us of the power we each have to shape what is around us from what is within us. And with the power of its vision of hope and transformation, as each of you in your own lives – and in your collective life as a community – experience this power and demonstrate it, Findhorn can truly inspire the rest of us to rise up in demonstration of a new world, a better world, a transformed world.

I’d like us to reflect on your experience of community. Community has been, ever since I lived there, one of the identities of Findhorn. I still find myself by habit speaking collectively of Findhorn as “the Community”, even though I know that the Community is quite different from what it was when I lived there, especially in its distinction from the Foundation. But when people come to Findhorn, community is one of the elements they are likely looking to experience. It is one of the things you demonstrate.

But I would like us to reflect on community as more than just a social arrangement. I would also like us to think about it as a spiritual practice in its own right, and by extension to think about spiritual practice itself.

Here’s some background.

In the beginning, what attracted people was the garden. They were not attracted by a specific teaching or a spiritual practice, since Findhorn offered none, at least not in the same way or to the same depth that a religious centre might have done. There was no specific meditation practice, for instance, that Peter and Eileen or Dorothy taught in those days, other than to encourage people to follow their example and tune in to the God within. Many people who came already had their own personal practice, which they privately continued.

However, there were three practices that became central. The first was morning Sanctuary when the whole Community came together for shared meditation, hearing messages from Eileen, Dorothy, and others, and having Peter share special letters that had come or other bits of news important to the Community. While attendance was not mandatory, it became apparent over the years I lived there that the first signs that someone was withdrawing from the Community, or was having difficulties, was that they stopped coming to Sanctuary.

Of course, we were small then and everyone could fit into the building. As we grew, this became more difficult, and gradually other sanctuaries began to develop around the Community to handle some of the overflow. But the practice was one of a shared morning meditation and communal gathering of some nature each day.

The second practice was group attunement before undertaking a task or job. This primarily took the form of having everyone involved stand in a circle holding hands and tune into each other and to the task at hand. It could take other forms as well, but the basic idea was to create an attuned group focus for mutual blessing and the blessing of the work to be done.

The third practice was the Community itself, or more precisely, living in the Community. Given the wide variety of people who came to the Community and the very close living conditions that existed then (Peter’s famous “cheek by jowl”), this was no small undertaking.

It can readily be seen that morning Sanctuary and the process of group attunement both bolstered and were important elements in establishing and maintaining coherency in the Community. They gave us a sense of wholeness together. But the actual practice of community was very individual and primarily consisted of bringing love (or at least tolerance and respect) into all our daily encounters with each other as much as we could.

I could identify a couple of other “practices”, such as following Peter’s injunction that “work is love in action” or his other statement to “love where one is, whom one is with, and what one is doing”. But I choose to see these as elements in the practice of community itself, which basically boiled down to finding in oneself, however one went about it, a source and flow of love that could be brought to bear on all one’s relationships, collaborations, and tasks in the Community. And this need to love was reinforced again and again through Eileen’s messages.

Creating and manifesting this loving attitude and environment was (and still is) in many ways Findhorn’s most powerful and transforming demonstration. And I think on the whole the Community over the years has been fairly successful at doing this.

Now, we certainly had people come (and perhaps you still do – it wouldn’t surprise me) who felt this was a pretty lame practice for a spiritual centre. Where were the meditation techniques ? Where was the spiritual discipline ? Where were the magical and esoteric teachings for working with other levels ? Where were the mystical and spiritual practices ?

Of course, if they stayed, they quickly discovered how challenging living in community is and how profound it can be as a spiritual practice. And one has only to see the news these days to realize how many of the world’s problems could be solved if we just knew how to live together and bring love to each other. But I agree it’s not a particularly dramatic or glamorous practice.

And because of this, there were always people who came who were practitioners of this or that tradition, technique, psychospiritual methodology, and the like who felt they had come in answer to what they saw as Findhorn’s need for some specific spiritual practice. It became clear very early on that there would be those who would want the Community to become a Christian centre or a Buddhist centre, to align with some guru or master, to offer this training or that technique and who would make some effort to bring this about. Indeed, one of the first attempts in this direction was from a small group of Alice Bailey students who wanted Findhorn to become an offshoot of the Arcane School. Peter basically invited them to leave or to stop proselytising.

As I said in the first section, we (Peter and I, Eileen and Dorothy, and ROC) felt that Findhorn should be open to all traditions and practices of merit and worth but should align with no one of them. Findhorn’s identity was to be a centre of light and a new age centre, a place where something new could emerge. If someone really wanted to learn a Buddhist practice or wanted training in esoteric methodologies from the Western Magical tradition, there were other places where they could learn these things. We felt that the spirit of Findhorn was oriented to something different, specifically to supporting the generic spirituality innate in every human being, to the relationship between ourselves and the sacred, and to the practice of community between ourselves and between the human and the non-human, the physical and the non-physical areas of life.

In one way, the emphasis of Findhorn was less on a teaching or a technique and more on the person, particularly the person in relationship.

As I said earlier, we all felt Findhorn should be an incubation center – a womb – within which a new kind of spirituality could develop and emerge, even though we didn’t know just what that spirituality might look like or what kind of practices might evolve from it.

In this regard, Findhorn took on a fourth spiritual practice which was the practice of openness: keeping an open space for discovery, experimentation, and emergence.

Everyone was encouraged to have a spiritual practice and to share the fruits of their practice but no one was encouraged to make their practice a requirement for everyone in the Community.

In the two-year program Lorian is offering at the moment, quite a bit of time is spent on working with the participants defining just what a spiritual practice is and helping them develop a practice unique to each of them. This comes from our philosophy that a spiritual practice is not something imposed from the outside but something that organically develops from who we are as unique incarnated spiritual beings in relationship with the world and with the sacred.

Looking back, I wish I had had that vision when I lived at Findhorn and had been able to teach then something like what I am teaching now. I had intimations of it thirty years ago, but it was not within my skill or insight then to teach a kind of open, emergent spiritual practice. It’s the difference that thirty years of life experience and learning can offer! The best I could offer was to keep reiterating that Findhorn should remain open and not configure itself around any particular spiritual practice.

One of the important areas of spiritual work, I believe, is the relationship between the individual and the group. I think of it as the development of “co-creative sovereignty”. Certainly this has been one of the dimensions Findhorn, as a community, has been exploring over the years.

I remember well the challenges that arose back in the early seventies between the needs of the individual and the needs of the group. It was not uncommon for people to become overworked and burnt out because they felt pressure within themselves or at times from the Community for them to “give their all” to the whole. Finding a balance between meeting one’s own needs and doing group work was not always easy.

Here is a classic story. Some of you may remember Gillian Lubach who had played cello in a symphony orchestra when she came to Findhorn in 1969 and who eventually organised a string quartet. Peter was delighted to have her and her children in the Community because he loved classical music and had dreams of Findhorn one day having its own orchestra.

In those days everyone worked in the garden and/or the kitchen. One day Peter was making his rounds and heard music coming from Gillian’s bungalow up in Pineridge. Upon investigating he found her playing her cello instead of doing her stint in the garden. When he asked what she was doing, she said she was practicing. She had to practice every day to maintain her skill and level of proficiency. Well, Peter said, that was alright but not during working hours. She could practice at night. Gillian informed him that at night she had to be with her kids and that in any event practicing *was* her work. No, Peter insisted, playing music was fun but the garden needed her. That was where her work was. At which point Gillian told Peter in no uncertain terms that either he gave her time to practice during the day, or she would leave the Community, taking with her any dreams he might have of a classical music group. Peter gave in. (I should add here that Gillian also contributed a lot of energy to helping the Community with its needs too.)

Of course, this could be a story about what constitutes “work” in the Community, but it is also a story about finding the balance between the individual’s pattern and that of the group. This is a constantly dynamic balance. When I visited during the early nineties, I found the balance had swung in the other direction. Community work was not being done if individuals felt doing their own thing had priority in the moment.

Finding the synergic balance, in which the individual and the group work for each other’s advantage and neither tries to disadvantage the other for its own benefit, is a spiritual practice in its own right.

In my own sense of things in the world and the spiritual tasks before humanity, one of them is to work out in new ways the relationship between individuals and groups. Synergy is a buzz word here: the state in which neither individual or group advances at the expense of the other but both are benefitted by each other.

This is not always an easy balance. It’s certainly dynamic in its nature in that, as in any good relationship, it oscillates around an axis which represents that balance. At times more energy goes to the individual than to the group and at times the reverse, but overall the mutual balance and mutual benefit are maintained.

Anyway, I see Findhorn as one of the places that is exploring this synergy and that that is part of its demonstration through community.

The other thought has to do with layers of community as part of that demonstration. This is partly in response to some comments I heard about the role of the sanctuary in the “old days” as a force of community coherency; about a desire that the whole Community, whatever that now means to you, meet at some time in the Hall, either regularly or on special occasions, so everyone can see everyone else.

With that context, I want to affirm that gathering together now and then as completely as possible would undoubtedly be a good thing – you could call it a “Day of Seeing”, in that an objective would be to actually physically see each other and yourselves as a whole group.

However, you are a different beastie now than you were thirty years ago. You are more layered than we were, and this, I believe, is a good thing.

What do I mean by layers ? I have in mind a similar image as when you call yourselves a community of communities, indicating there are a number of smaller groupings, each with their own identity, that now make up the greater Findhorn Community.

So, for instance, I’m thinking that one layer is the most public layer, the one I understand is represented primarily by the Foundation. This is the layer that runs the programs, the education, gives tours, shows off the various aspects of Findhorn, meets the public, and so on.

Then there is a layer of folks who have jobs in the surrounding communities of Elgin, Forres, Inverness, Findhorn, Kinloss and so on, and who own homes or rent flats in the area, whose kids go to local schools etc., and who feel connected to Findhorn. They attend meetings and events when they can, they may contribute financially; they may volunteer services from time to time. In effect, Findhorn is a part of their lives – but it is not the focus or centre of their lives.

In between these two are other layers of association, commitment, and involvement within the Community.

Now, if the Community insists that only people who are full-time participants are full “members” and part of Findhorn, then that whole layer is cut off and probably some of the in-between layers as well.

The fact is there are now different layers of responsibility and involvement, which you know very well. I’m not saying anything new here. But the point I want to make is that this multi-layered format – or see it as an ecology with various niches if you wish – is itself a powerful demonstration, for it more nearly describes the larger society of which Findhorn is a part.

From the beginning, we wanted Findhorn’s message that you could embody the spirit of the place wherever you were, that entering into a new age or demonstrating spirit or being part of what Findhorn represented was not dependent on living in a community or moving to Findhorn. The whole idea of Findhorn’s role as a demonstration centre was that the essence, the spirit of Findhorn, could be replicated wherever you were, for the core spirit was the expression of one’s attunement to sacredness in the ordinary facets of one’s life. This is the point that Dorothy Maclean has been making for years: that the core of Findhorn was not working with nature spirits or communicating with angels but with the relationship with the sacred, the “God Within”. Everything else emerges from that, and the relationship is not bound to any specific place.

To continue this thought, every layer has its own type of responsibility to be part of the whole of Findhorn. The “living in town” layer has to be mindful of attending to the spiritual core: the sacred in the ordinary. These folks may not come to sanctuaries because their sanctuaries are their homes or flats or in their hearts; they may not help in the kitchen or tend the garden or meet visitors because they are working in their own kitchens, tending their own gardens, and they are meeting people every day in their work and commerce. And in this process, they can draw people into the “field” of Findhorn as much as someone doing an Experience Week.

After all, what you really offer guests and visitors at the Foundation layer is an energy. It is love basically, and it is the energy of inclusiveness, of affirming that we are all part of a great visible and invisible circle of Life. If someone working with visitors can’t embody and offer that energy, then he or she is just sharing ideas and showing off physical structures. They are essentially not doing anything different from a car salesman or a clerk in a store showing off his or her wares. It is the field, the energy, the presence – call it what you will – that is the key.

A person in the “living in town” layer and a person in the Foundation layer (and everyone in between, of course) can both live in and embody this field, this energy of Findhorn. Indeed, the living in town person may be making the more powerful and important demonstration. If they can hold the energy of love and co-creativity in the midst of their work, town, associations, etc., that are not Findhorn, they are doing what Findhorn is asking all its guests to do when they return to their homes.

So when a Foundationer meets a guest and shows him or her around or leads an Experience Week or draws a visitor into a work circle, a large part of their job is to draw that guest into the Findhorn field, which is also the field of love generated by that Foundationer individually. But this is no different in essence than when a “Towner” meets people in the course of doing his or her work or shopping or neighboring and can also draw those people into that same field of love, honour, blessing, and so forth.

And for that matter, what is the Foundation or the Community but a bunch of “Foundation Towners” or “Community Towners” – ordinary people – working to extend from their own sacredness a field of love and blessing to those whom they meet and with whom they must work ?

In our day, and I imagine this may be true now too, we often got complaints or excuses from guests that it was easy to be loving and to work with invisible allies and to do the things we were doing when we lived in an isolated community; it was much harder to do it back in the “real world” (a term I came to loathe – what, after all, were we, an unreal world ?). Well, they were right. Not that Findhorn was ever easy; it could be and often was far more intense and challenging than living on your own in a flat in London or a suburb in Chicago. But we were in a supportive community, which does make a difference.

But now, just as you have the Living Machine and the eco-houses and the windmill to show off practical examples of sustainability, you also have individuals and families living in the “real world” who are demonstrating that Findhorn can be as much a part of that world through the lives of ordinary individuals as it is part of an intentional community. This is a great gift, a great demonstration. These “living-in-towners” need to be celebrated and honoured for what they’re offering! You should have a “Thank You Living In Towners Day” to celebrate them!

You may already have volunteers from this “outer” layer come to speak to guests and visitors; if not, it might be helpful. They represent an important part of your community and demonstration, even if they are not as visible or involved on a daily basis as the Foundationers or the various Findhorn-associated businesses – the other layers. They could come and speak to what it is like living in the “real world” and how they bring Findhorn values and energy into play where they are. Frankly, I wish we had had folks like that to speak to guests when I lived there thirty years ago.

Our next topic is the relationship of Findhorn to the “inner worlds”, spiritual worlds, supersensible worlds, Otherworld, or whatever you wish to call those invisible dimensions that are home to nature spirits, devas, angels, guides and so on.

Contact and communication with the inner worlds is one of the rocks on which Findhorn was built. By this I mean particularly communication with the devas and nature spirits, the provinces of Dorothy and ROC, since I don’t consider the sacred as part of an “inner world”. I personally view the sacred as the mysterious, generative ground of all being, wholly accessible at any time to any consciousness that turns towards its own deepest roots. Communing and communicating with sacredness is a different skill set than that of contacting and communicating with non-physical entities.

Yet for all its importance in the creation of the Community, communication with the inner worlds is not something that has been officially taught by the Foundation as a key part of Findhorn’s “teaching” for the world. There are probably several reasons why an actual Findhorn training in inner world communication never developed as an official programme. Three that I’m aware of from my own experience follow.

The first was a distrust of purely psychic phenomena. Peter, Eileen, Dorothy, ROC and I had all had experiences of the difficulty that one could get into by putting too much faith into connections that came primarily through an individual’s emotional or mental natures. Discernment needed to be exercised. So there was a not so subtle discouraging of psychic development.

There was a steady influx of individuals who claimed to have received psychic guidance for Peter about how the Community should be run; it was not difficult to tell that most of them were more interested in control than in actually dedicating themselves to the Community. Ego is not a problem limited to psychics by any means – mystics and gurus can get swelled heads too – but when ego and psychic sensitivity are combined in a non-discriminating way, messages tend to get distorted.

The irony here is that after Eileen stopped getting guidance for the Community (1971) – and for Peter, too, in the same way – Peter was more open and hospitable to folks who came with psychic abilities, sometimes to his and the Community’s detriment.

The second reason was related to the first: the emphasis was on attuning to the sacred – the God within. While communication with the devas and nature spirits had certainly been helpful and was seen as part of Findhorn’s work and demonstration, the relationship to the sacred was seen as the core. That was most important.

The third reason was that there was no one in the Community at the time to hold training in contact with inner realms. Various ones of us had experience in that area, but experiencing and being able to teach it are two different things. In my own case, my capability in this area was something I had had all my life. I had never learned it, so I didn’t know how to teach it.

Looking back, do I think there should have been some kind of official training in “inter-realm communication”, assuming someone had been there to offer such a thing ? Frankly, I’m not sure. Communication with inner worlds can be such a glamorous subject that I think it might have shifted the message and meaning of Findhorn away from more important issues.

Part of the problem are the assumptions many people bring to the matter of inner world communication. Over all the years of my work, I have seen these assumptions arise many times. They include:

1. That inner plane beings are smarter, more spiritual, closer to reality and truth, wiser, and generally superior to incarnate folks like us.

2. That all good things humanity has – all the good ideas, all the good inventions, all the good energies – have come from inner plane beings.

3. That we all can use and benefit from guidance with inner plane beings.

4. That the purpose of these beings is to give us guidance, since, as #1 states, they are wiser and better than we are.

5. That communication with inner beings is basically the same as communicating with one another.

6. That people who have communication with inner plane beings are more spiritual because of it and have an inside track, so to speak, to the Truth. They should be listened to. Only special people have this ability.

7. That people who have communication with inner plane beings are stupid, delusional or crooked. They should not be listened to. Only crazy people think they have this ability.

Over the years I have run into every one of these assumptions. They are all incorrect. What is more, they all undermine the basic premises and ideals of Findhorn.

The topic of communicating with inner worlds is a huge one, more complex than I can get into here. The discussion I wish to encourage is about the relationship of such a process or phenomenon with Findhorn. Some contextual comments may be helpful, at least in outlining where I’m coming from.

Here is my basic bottom line: the incarnate individual and his or her connection to the ground of all being (ie the sacred, by whatever name or image) is sacrosanct. Nothing should be allowed to diminish, disrupt or distort the sovereignty, will and integrity of the individual, his or her capacity to access his or her unique connection with All Being, and his or her capacity to form healthy, functional, co-creative relationships with others.

This is because the individual person is the locus for responsibility, accountability, will and action. When responsibility is denied or accountability is disrupted, obstructions arise and things start to break down or become too diffused. Flow is interrupted.

Responsibility and accountability are not issues of blame; they are capacities to respond and to take actions to correct what may be going amiss, if necessary. To say that I am responsible is simply to say that actions and energies appropriate and responsive to a specific situation can and will begin with me. I am the anchor point, the portal, the means from which, and through which, something will be done that needs doing.

The American President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk that said, “The buck stops here”, an old American expression from the days of the pioneers. The buck has to stop somewhere, or energy and action have nowhere to anchor and ground themselves.

The ability, capacity or willingness to let the buck stop with us is a powerful one. Responsibility is not a burden. It is at the heart of incarnation. It is part of what gives me substance and power. It locates me in the world and says “if you need to reach me, O great Cosmos, here I am!” It grounds me. It anchors me in an axis of integrity and alignment. It helps to give me identity.

If you want a common metaphoric example of what I’m talking about, imagine a group of friends trying to decide what to do and where to go for an evening. They may have lots of good ideas, but ultimately it will take someone saying, “OK, let’s do this specific thing” for anything to happen. We’ve all been in groups where the energy just dissipates and nothing gets done because no one can or will take responsibility to set something into motion. The energy simply never grounds itself; it remains suspended and diffuse.

I’m harping on about responsibility here because it is an important part of who we are. All phenomena of inner world communication and contact need to respect and honour who we are; if they diminish us in any way or make us less capable than we were, then what’s the point? They become toxic. We have all read or been told that inner plane beings – at least the “good” ones – will not interfere with our free will, and in all my fifty-plus years of experience I have found this to be absolutely true, with no exceptions. But it is equally and perhaps more importantly true that no “good” inner plane being will ever compromise or interfere with my capacity to be responsible, to do and choose for myself as much as I am able, to be open and accepting of the consequences of my choices and actions.

By “good” inner plane beings here, I’m not using “good” as a polarity with “evil”, I mean inner beings whose sense of responsibility to my wellbeing and integrity and to the good of the larger Whole is highly developed. There can be irresponsible non-physical beings as well, and my best protection against them is not to walk down the path of irresponsibility myself.

Having said that, here is the “Spangler Scale of Inner Plane Communication.”

1. First, in any life situation, I should try to understand and deal with it as fully as I can with the best of my own knowledge, intellect, heart, feelings, wisdom and love as an incarnate person. In other words, my first choice of action, I suggest, should not be “what do my inner guides have to say about this ? What do they think I should do ?” It should be: “What do I think of feel about this?” From my experience and wisdom, what do I think I should do? What can I do?” As my own inner mentor John used to say (often!), “This is an issue on your level. You handle it.”

2. Seek a level of attunement to something larger than myself that gives me an inner sense of spaciousness and opens up the capacities and possibilities of my own thinking and feeling. I think of this as stepping into the larger spaces of my own being and out of the constrictedness of thought and feeling which a specific situation may seek to impose on me.

3. Seek connectedness to a larger wholeness that embraces and empowers more than just myself. This opens me to consider and gain insights about how my choices and actions may affect others and what consequences there may be to their wellbeing as well as my own. It is entering into a larger relational space, a larger community of Being. This also enhances a larger sense of internal spaciousness and capability. I find love a most powerful way to enter into this space.

4. Seek a larger perspective, or help in achieving a larger perspective, which allows me to see and respond to a situation from the broader or simply the different context that an inner being may have. I still make the choices, but I have more information or insight to work with.

5. Seek an energetic communion and co-creative cooperation with an inner ally, a relationship in which we share responsibility and see each other as equal partners. The object here is to enlarge the field of perception, energy and possibility with which to respond to a specific situation.

6. Seek specific help, insight, advice or guidance from an inner ally about an issue that seems genuinely beyond my capacity to deal with, and which seems to require more than just a sharing of our energy fields to accomplish a desired end.

These are general suggestions, but note that getting guidance is at the end of the scale. It’s what I would do last, after exhausting other options, rather than what I would do first.

Let’s apply this scale to the Findhorn garden and the work with the devas and elementals that Dorothy and ROC began:

Here we are on the caravan park and we want to start a garden to supplement our food supply, since we are currently on welfare.

1. What do we already know about gardening ? What knowledge, skills, experience etc. can we bring to bear on growing plants in sand, making compost etc. The fact is that Peter and co. already had some practical gardening knowledge; they were not complete novices or ignoramuses when it came to gardening.

2. The task may seem a bit daunting! Our knowledge is scanty and incomplete or at least insufficient for the task, the soil is…well…non-existent, and we may be feeling a bit panicky about it all. But we can enter into meditation and allow our minds and heart to expand into a larger place within ourselves. We can move into centredness, peace, inner calm, a sense of attunement and oneness within ourselves. We relax. We are open to inspiration and intuition. More ideas begin to come. We are free from the fear or anxiety, our thinking and feeling are less constricted. New ideas begin to come.

Remember in Dorothy’s story, when she was told to contact the Devas, she said no, she couldn’t do that, but then one day she put herself into her expanded state, into an inner sense of power and connection, and then she believed and knew she could do it. She could make that contact. And she did. But the expanded state came first. She stepped into a larger, more open place within herself.

3. Dorothy made contact initially by using the garden pea, a plant she loved and with which she felt a relationship. She also had a love for nature, and felt a sense of comm-union with nature as a whole. And Dorothy, as well as Eileen and Peter, had a practice of communion with God, the largest Wholeness of all. She and ROC went beyond their own personal concerns and shared a concern for the wellbeing of the plants and for nature for their own sake as fellow beings. This further enhanced their capacities for interaction and communication.

Many gardeners do this. Their love for their plants is their source of inspiration and insight into how to garden. They don’t need to talk to a Deva or an Elemental. They are guided and inspired by their love and relationship to the natural world around them.

4. When Dorothy made contact with the Devas, they didn’t immediately begin to tell her how to garden; they told her about their world, about how they saw things, about their perspective on nature, humanity, gardens, and so on. Having this larger perspective was itself a great help to Peter and others in working in and with the garden.

5. The Devas often told Dorothy the biggest help a person could make in working in the garden was to come in a good energy state. Human energies had an influence on the plants around them. The Devas requested that people work in the garden from a joyous, positive, loving, enthusiastic frame of mind. The positive human energy would then blend with their own positive devic energies to nourish the growth of the plants. This was the essence of cooperation. It wasn’t that humans would obey and carry out the will of the devas of vice versa; it was that each would bring their respective energies into play and offer them to each other for the benefit of the garden. This is not a sharing of guidance or instructions but a sharing of being, and the Devas always said this was the most powerful way of working cooperatively with them.

6. Finally, specific guidance was given through Dorothy and later through ROC. It could be argued (at least, I would suggest so) that the efficacy of the guidance was based on the existence and practice of the previous five levels. The guidance was important in specific situations, but was not the be-all and end-all of the cooperation with the nature spirits.

If you examine all of Dorothy’s messages over the years, you will see that comparatively few of them have actual guidance in them, in the sense of specific instructions on things to do. Most convey what I think of as “devic perspectives”; ways of thinking and feeling, being and acting that can generate positive, life-affirming, generative energy. Indeed, the thrust of much of Dorothy’s work seemed to be that of the devas wishing to help us be like them, to be embodied human devas, shining ones in our own right. They were, in effect, passing the buck back to us.

Which is an excellent example of what “good” inner contacts do!

In the whole Findhorn experiment and experience with the garden, the key word is cooperation, not guidance. The difference to me is one of not simply being obedient but rising to a level of heightened and shared co-creativity that honours everyone’s sovereignty and cooperation. Peter was always very clear that as gardener, his job was not just to obey the Devas and nature spirits, but to bring his human perspective, needs and talents into the mix. It was cooperation, not obedience that was the power behind the garden.

The difference between cooperation and guidance is between, one the one hand, sharing a task and benefiting from each other’s point of view and, on the other, just being told what to do. There are times, I quite admit, when the latter may be entirely appropriate, but the universe develops out of, and functions through, relationship and cooperation, not out of instruction and obedience. In the latter case, information is restricted or lost and new information, new learning is often not gained. It is not an emergent situation, and the cosmos is definitely an emergent and emerging phenomenon.

As I say, there are situations when being given instructions and simply following them is the appropriate and responsible thing to do, but this works best in relationships we have with each other, not with the inner worlds in my own estimation (and this is just one person’s opinion). This is largely because of the responsibility issue. How do I hold an inner being responsible for its instructions ? The excuse “I was just following orders” has been used throughout history to justify mistakes, terrors, abuse and evil, and it always represents a passing on of the buck, a refusal to take responsibility and consequences. But how does the buck pass the threshold from this realm to another ?

However, if I say right from the start, “I am responsible. The buck stops here with me for my choices and actions, including those I make using information, insights or perspectives gained from non-physical sources,” then I can open to receive perspective, insights, energy, blessing, love, holding, support, information and so on from the inner realms to my heart’s content, since I will use none of it to shield myself from consequences. Then what I call alliances can take form, with beings who support me in my responsibility, in my sovereignty, in my identity and co-creative power. Which is exactly what the Devas sought to do with Dorothy, Peter and all who came to work in the garden.

So in the relationship of Findhorn to the inner worlds there has often historically, it seems to me, been an emphasis placed on the phenomenon of guidance, which is very misleading in my opinion, and not as much on the implications of cooperation and partnership. But in fact it is the reverse that is most true and which represents what contributes most powerfully in this context of working with inner worlds.

Of course, there is Eileen’s guidance from God. But consider what most of this guidance is: most of it is what I think of as perspective – the world as seen from God’s point of view, so to speak. It is not so much instruction as it is inspiration to help us to embody a very uplifting, positive, holistic, loving perspective in our lives, thus cooperating with the flow and blessing of sacredness within all things. Much of the time, I remember, when Peter asked for guidance, what came was not so much instruction, as suggestion or exhortation for Peter to see, think and feel in a certain way that would open him to his own intuition and inspiration.

The thing that has always impressed me with Eileen’s “guidance” has been that it empowers sovereignty. It doesn’t transgress it, as often can happen in situations where one person gets guidance for others. There is no insistence upon obedience for its own sake (as in: “I’m God, you’re not, so do what I say”). Had there been, I frankly would never have stayed and could never have worked with Findhorn as I did. Mine has always been a spiritual path of individual sovereignty and co-creative cooperation.

In effect, through Eileen, we are called into cooperation with the highest within us; we are called into alliance with our best possibilities and potentials in personal development and relationships with others. We are called to cooperation and to love. We become allies with the sacred, not its puppets.

I began my public work forty years ago this year. Over that time I have been guided by what I think of as an incarnational perspective. Some of this perspective developed from my work with my own non-physical mentor, colleague, friend and partner, whom I named “John”, and his way of seeing the world. Some of it I have developed out of my own experiences.

In this perspective incarnation is itself a sacred act, one that generates a unique spiritual energy that accompanies each person into physical life. In part because of this our individual incarnate everyday selves – our personal beings – are themselves resources of spiritual power; not everything has to come from transpersonal sources.

This leads me to honour our individual personhood and our personal sovereignty and to see these as important components of our overall spiritual existence.

At the same time, we are beings who are co-created by our relationships with others and with the world, and who in turn are co-creators in return. None of us exists in a vacuum but in relationship. So our sovereignty is not something that separates us; it is a co-creative sovereignty.

Incarnational Spirituality seeks to redress the balance between the personal and the transpersonal and to change the perception that privileges the latter at the expense of the former. It sees the physical world, and our incarnations within it, as sources of spirit and sacredness as much as any transpersonal or transcendent realm may be.

Incarnational Spirituality honours the act of incarnation itself as a sacred act, one that generates a unique spiritual energy which we may tap through our personhood. I call this our “empersonal spirit”.

Incarnational Spirituality honours the particular and the specific, boundaries and limits, as forms of sacredness, and honours Self and personhood as spiritual states of being, rather than being obstacles or illusions in the way of achieving spirituality. It does not claim that our incarnational expression of personhood and Self is perfect and without flaw, needing no improvement. We are evolving beings and far from skilled in the full manifestation of the love and wholeness at the heart of Selfhood. It does claim, though, that being an individual, embodied person is not itself innately a fallen or flawed state.

Incarnational Spirituality honours the sovereignty of each person as a unique individuation of sacredness. At the same time, it also honours the sacredness that uniquely emerges when individuals gather and co-creatively manifest a collective endeavour.

Incarnational Spirituality sees each person as more than just a “planet” reflecting light from some other source. It sees each person as essentially a “star”, a generative, co-creative source of light and love. We may lack the knowledge and skill in any given situation or moment to express these qualities ably (or at all) or to express our generative capacities to the fullest, but that doesn’t mean they are not there. We can be obstructed and obstructing, but that doesn’t change the essence of who we are nor the capacities we carry as incarnate persons.

In Incarnational Spirituality, the physical world is not an innately obstructing or obstructed place. It is a place of limits, boundaries, and differentiation, embodying that aspect of the sacred which manifests as particularity and specificity. It is a radiant and spiritual realm, the same as any other in creation, a place where the sacred is as much as the sacred is anywhere else. It is a rich, wondrous and highly creative place. The fact that we can build walls and prisons for ourselves from the materials and processes this realm provides is not an indication that this realm is itself flawed or at fault.

In matters of spiritual education and practice, Incarnational Spirituality rejects a “sun-satellite” model – in which one person or one source is seen as special or uniquely holding truth, wisdom, love, and light around whom others must revolve and receive – in favor of a “star-galaxy” model, in which each person brings his or her capacities as a unique source of spirituality into a co-creative relationship. There are differences between each of us. Some persons may contribute and bring more to a situation than others and in that moment embody more skilfully the wisdom or love that is needed, but this is in a context in which all are acknowledged and honoured as being equally part of sacredness and having something to offer.

In Incarnational Spirituality, the sacred is seen as universally present and accessible. One does not “evolve” or “journey” towards the sacred as a goal or as a measure of worthiness and specialness. No one on any realm is closer or has a more privileged access to the sacred than anyone else. There are different “energy states” that validly can be thought of as “higher” or “lower” or as being more or less powerful and effective, but the sacred is not an energy state.

Incarnational Spirituality does not view the spiritual realms of life and consciousness as necessarily being in a hierarchical relationship to the physical and personal worlds we inhabit. Instead it sees us as existing in an ecological relationship with a variety of other dimensions and spiritual beings, each of which has a unique contribution to make to an evolving Whole.

You will note that I hold the Self as a vital manifestation of Spirit, seeing it as neither an illusion nor an obstruction. To me, non-dual consciousness (or the experience of oceanic, unconditional, undivided oneness) is not the highest form of spiritual awareness; it is merely one of several possible states of experience. If I look to any state to be an “ultimate” or “highest” form of consciousness (and normally I don’t, finding that concept to be too hierarchical and without a lot of meaning), it is a state in between all the possible perspectives of consciousness which holds them all as possible expressions of the generative Mystery that is the origin and ground of all being.

Put another way, I feel God (and we as individuations of sacredness) can manifest perfectly well through Unity and through Diversity, through Non-Duality and through Duality, through Oneness and through Multiplicity, through the Non-Self and through the Self, through the Universal and through the Particular, through the Cosmos as a whole and through you or me as personal selves.

Please note as well that while this is my perception, I don’t expect anyone else to hold it with me. I share it simply as my perspective and as the ground I stand on when I teach and do my work. Reality is far too wondrous, miraculous, diverse and expansive for anyone except a fool to say, “This, and only this, is the way it is; this is the Truth.” In this, at least, I’m no fool! The best I can do is to say, “Here is a slice of truth as I experience it.”

I share this as well to explain why Findhorn made such an impact upon me when I first arrived in 1970. It wasn’t that Peter, Eileen, or Dorothy shared all the perspectives I have mentioned above. They didn’t. But the thrust of their work was incarnational in nature. As Peter used to say, “Our job is to bring Heaven down to Earth”. And that was a very important idea to me. Whatever else Findhorn had, for me it held an incarnational energy that was more powerful than any other place I had been up to that time.

And I still feel that when I visit.

I want to celebrate this quality in your lives and the life of the Community. You are a Community of Embodiment. How important this is in our world.

After all, the power and importance of Christ in the Christian tradition is that he incarnated. He was the “Word made flesh”, uniting heaven and earth, divinity and humanity, in his own person. The power of early Christianity, as I see it, is that it was not a philosophical movement, discussing the abstractions of theology and cosmology; it was an embodied movement. It sought to bless the earth. Until later generations of Church leaders managed to give it a different twist, Christianity was, as Matthew Fox puts it so eloquently, a movement celebrating the “original blessing” of the earth, nature, and of human life and love. And at the heart of that Christian tradition was the Incarnation.

Now I happen to believe we are all manifestations of a sacred impulse. We are all Incarnations, and in each of us, divinity and humanity, heaven and earth, the universal and the particular are united and blessed. And I happen to believe that each of us is an “original” or unique blessing as well, without whom the world would be very much poorer.

And when such individual blessings gather in the name of world service and of what is possible, then the most amazing collective blessing is released – the name of which is Findhorn.

In the course of this forum, I have named you in several ways. I have said you are:

A Community of Calling
A Community of Emergence
A Community of Witness
A Community of Co-Creation
A Community of Embodiment

To these I might add:

A Community of Givers
A Community of Vision
A Community of Play
A Community of Commitment

Just taking on one of these would be a lot. You are taking on all of them in one way or another.

Does that live in your awareness? Is it a pressure? Is it a joy?

In a deeper way, it is what all of us can take on, wherever we are, for it is no more than what being human is all about.

Thank you for giving us an example.

One of the themes I’ve had in the back of my mind is to explore with you what it means as an individual to be part of a place like Findhorn. We’ve looked at a selection of elements that contribute to the place – the new age, being a demonstration centre, being a community, engaging with non-physical worlds, and so on – and there are other elements we probably could have picked. Each of these introduces something that is not found in most communities in the world.

What does it mean to be in a Community of Witness or Calling or Embodiment or Co-creativity? What particular pressures and upliftments come to you as an individual? What do you give to it ? What do you take from it?

In short, how do you incarnate in such a place? How do you participate in its incarnation? I don’t mean this in terms of your job or work. I mean this in thinking how your life configures to the energies and character of a place like Findhorn. How are you shaped, and how do you shape in return?

The challenge of Findhorn from my point of view is how to be extraordinary and ordinary, how to preserve and enhance its special magic and also how to foster awareness of the magic that is inherent in human activity and life anyway, the magic any of us has anywhere.

The world, in my estimation, needs places that are unique, inspirational, charismatic, uplifting, and the like, but it needs such places not to be requirements (that is, acting as examples which the world has to follow in order “to be saved” or “to make it” or some such thing) but as liberators, enabling people to find how they can express the same quality of magic and spirit, life and abundance in their own lives in their own unique ways without having to be tied to or dependent upon a particular place. In a paradoxical way, you need to attract and give away at the same time, drawing a person’s attention to the possibilities you embody, then enabling them to lead their own lives of discovering and embodying those possibilities separate from you (though hopefully in a collegial, co-creative, partnering relationship as well).

So a theme of this Forum has been to encourage your reflection, both self-reflection and community reflection.

Another theme, which I hope has come across, has been to celebrate you and to encourage you to celebrate yourselves. Whether you’re a 24/7 Foundationer or a “Townie” with occasional interaction with the Community – though with a spiritual link – or somewhere in between, you are incarnating something very special, both in yourselves and collectively.

You are much more than just a community or a programmatic centre or a college or a demonstration of ecological living.

You are a Gift.

I am honoured to celebrate you.

Further reference:

David Spangler: The Significance Of Findhorn
An Evening With David Spangler
David Spangler: Open Letter To The Community
David Spangler: The Angel Of Findhorn
Myrtle Glines: Findhorn: Garden Or Jungle ?
Eileen Caddy: Guidance On The Function Of Findhorn
Peter Caddy: New Age Living
Dorothy Maclean: The Deva Consciousness

David was co-director of the Findhorn Foundation, 1970-73, and was substantially responsible for the creation of our education programme, giving over 100 lectures, and initiating Findhorn College in 1971. During 1970-80 we published 60-plus audio tapes of David’s lectures and over two dozen books and booklets of his writings. David was also lyricist/singer/founder of the Community’s first band, The New Troubadours, who made two albums in Findhorn: Homeland and Love Is.

After returning to his native USA in 1973, David founded the Lorian Association with Dorothy Maclean, Myrtle Glines and others. David has always maintained a deep connection with Findhorn. He calls his current work Incarnational Spirituality, and like all his teaching, it fosters an understanding of the sacredness of both individual and cosmos. For further information visit the Lorian website: www.lorian.org