This interview was previously published in One Earth magazine, Volume 4 Issue 5, in Aug/Sept 1984.

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Our world is more than we can see, hear, touch, or manipulate. Other realities converge with our human reality. We knew this in the far past, when as a society we were still in harmony with the rhythms and cycles of nature, and we are beginning to know it again now that the materialistic world view we have set up for ourselves over the past few hundred years is proving itself so inadequate and even destructive. The ‘mysterious’ side of life is regaining its credibility.

One of the way-showers in this reawakening is Dorothy Maclean, a founder of the Findhorn Community and perhaps best known for her contact with the devas, or angels, in the Findhorn garden and elsewhere. She found that the devas hold the archetypal patterns for all the forms around us and direct the energy for those forms to materialise.

Despite her feelings of inadequacy about contacting these beings, Dorothy found that the devas were positively eager for communication. They proceeded to teach her, often with extremely practical help, about the treatment certain plants needed and how humans could cooperate with the world of nature for the good of all. Dorothy’s inner guidance told her: “There is no such thing as dead matter. Everything is living and everything has a place in my one life; and that life force is more than what you call magnetism. It is an influence consciously wielded on the higher levels. You are simply surrounded by life; you are a life force moving among other life forces . . . .”

In her book, To Hear the Angels Sing, Dorothy gives a fascinating account of her relationship with the angelic worlds. After leaving Findhorn in the early 1970s and returning to North America, she continued to develop her understanding of this realm. She returned to Findhorn last year for the World Wilderness Congress and, in addition to her presentation in the Hall, answered questions at an informal session. We reproduce some of this here, as it sheds light on where her understanding has led, including the presence of angels in more unlikely places than the garden …

Q: Do you continue to communicate in the same way with the angels and other dimensions?

Dorothy: In my latter years at Findhorn I was still meditating each morning—putting myself apart in a special place for attunement and writing. I had a time for meditation and a separate time for the rest of my life. By the end of my stay I realised that I would know beforehand what I was going to write, that my personality self was becoming more merged with my higher self. To me the whole point of being human is to have a soul-attuned personality, to get the two really working together. So when I left Findhorn I stopped segmenting my life into a meditation period and a non-meditation period, and tried to be open all the time—and that’s still my aim. You can say either that I don’t meditate or that I meditate all the time, or try to. I want to experience the oneness of life. I feel wonderful in that state and have learned to trust my thoughts without having to go and check them. What’s the point of attunement unless you can relate it to your everyday living? I could never understand the way the flower people floated around. It took me a long time to realise that many people thought that spirituality meant floating around. It never meant that to any of us at Findhorn—just the opposite.

Q: How does one cultivate a ‘vertical attunement’?

Dorothy: We’ve all had peak experiences. That’s our vertical attunement. I think we can recall those and bring them back to ourselves through imagination, through seeking. That’s the way I do it. People can also go into nature or listen to music or do whatever it is that brings them to their highest feelings. We can cultivate it.

Silence is another important thing. We in the West don’t give ourselves an opportunity to hear the still small voice within, because we’re so outward-focused all the time. We should give ourselves the blessing of silence every now and then. I think there have been a lot of mistaken ideas about meditation, too, such as that the mind is the slayer of the real. The mind can be that, but it can also be the bridge to the real. If we can get the consciousness into the real, the mind reflects it and brings it down to earth. That’s why in the beginning I was told to write down what I got in meditation, to bring it into everyday living. Eileen used to get wonderful visions and didn’t want to tell anybody about them, but she got guidance that she was always to write them down, even if she didn’t understand them, so they wouldn’t be floating somewhere up there.

Q: What was your own process of developing attunement?

Dorothy: I first had an experience of knowing that God was within. That was reality to me, and I always tried to return to it. Then I was told to listen, to be open for whatever was meant to come. I was told in the process to throw the old mind merrily out the window, especially the left-brain mind.

During times of attunement, I learned to distinguish between thoughts from the personality and those from higher levels, mainly by the ‘feel’ of my state of consciousness. When in a state of clarity and love, I could trust and write down my inspiration. Maybe then my mind would wander, and then I would choose to return to that state of clarity and beauty. It was an in-and-out process, not suppressing the mind but directing the energy to where I wanted it, i.e., on the thoughts that came at that particular inspirational moment. I also learned from mistakes. I think if we are absolutely honest with ourselves, we know when thoughts come from a broader perspective and when they come from our own limited thinking.

However, all that is only one aspect of it. The other aspect is trying to live it and dedicating your life to it. It was only through trying to live it, through my personal experiences, that I got that first inner opening about God being within. So it’s hard to separate the living of it from the sitting down and meditating and being attuned. Only your own soul can tell you what you have to do. That’s why it’s so difficult to answer these questions, because we’re each absolutely unique. Peter (Caddy) used to sit for hours trying to meditate. He never got anywhere. That wasn’t his way. But Peter is far more intuitive than he ever let on.

image Talking of AngelsQ: Do you have a sanctuary in your home?

Dorothy: No.

Q: One of the abiding concerns of the Findhorn Community is the question of how important is it that time be set aside for Sanctuary in the normal round of activity. What are your thoughts on this?

Dorothy: To me, attunement with the God within—your ‘private’ sanctuary—is basic and most important. The sanctuary time that we share is a group attunement and that’s important also, not as a time for our own inward exploring but as a time for the energies of the group to get together. If I lived here, I don’t know how much I would go, but that’s up to the individual. A sanctuary is one measure of the togetherness of a group, but there are many other measures.

Q: What can you say about attuning to angels specifically?

Dorothy: The whole angelic kingdom is open to every one of us all the time. Through the development of the mind we have cut ourselves off from direct contact with nature—and rightly, so that we could have the instrument of the mind. It’s up to us to renew that contact. They are always open. The angels of all the kingdoms meet us more than half way and are very eager for contact.

Everyone has a completely different contact with nature, because we’re each unique. But for all of us the stairway to the soul level of nature is love. In the past, much love of nature has been love of the form—the beautiful flowers and so on. But real love recognises the essence and purity of nature in all its stages. It means loving even the ugly ducklings and linking with the inner divinity that’s right there. I myself first had to get into a state of attunement with my own inner essence. At the beginning I would ask for cleansing and protection, because I was terrified I would write down nonsense. If we make contact from our personality level, we’re going to get personality responses; we’re not going to get the high purity of the soul. It’s not a process of sitting back, but of focusing into the highest we know and choosing it.

I read later in Alice Bailey’s A Treatise on Cosmic Fire that one should never contact the devic kingdom, because it’s dangerous. And I realise that it can be, if we do it on the lower levels, because then we open up to anything in the astral realm and may experience things like embodiments of fear.

Q: Are you maintaining your contacts with the nature kingdoms?

Dorothy: I am not in contact as much with the angels of the nature kingdoms as with those of other areas. Recently, I have been more concerned with human groupings. My first experience of that was with the Angel of Findhorn. When I first became aware of this angel, it was a fully formed but unalive being, like a Sleeping Beauty needing a kiss to bring it to life. Gradually it became more enlivened.

God within kept asking me to keep exploring the angelic kingdoms all around. Initially, I wasn’t at all open to the angels of cities, because I had never liked living in cities. I’ve always had a great desire to live close to nature, as the North American Indians did. Then when I travelled across America I went to stay in Indian places in order to feel into those energies and be close to the lovely harmony of their lives. I went to Mesa Verde, which I have always admired, but I found that those beautiful cliff dwellings weren’t built out of harmony with nature; they were built out of fear. Little finger and toe holds had been the entrances and exits, although now stairs have been built. All my romantic ideas of the culture living in harmony with nature got shattered. I had to have that concept broken up so that I’d be open to our present culture.

After that, the next time I went to a city, I thought, “I suppose it has an angel.” I attuned to it and in response received, “Well, it’s about time!” and the sense that the angels of cities or of any human group are always trying to wield the energies for the greatest good of the whole. Previously when I went to cities, I would take what I liked from the shops, the arts, museums, whatever, and then get out as quickly as possible. I wasn’t really being grateful. I was calling the city a concrete jungle and giving it my dislike, whereas these angels, more than any others, need love.

That experience completely changed my attitude. Now I live happily in Toronto—and I try to stay open to the next area of the angelic world to attune to. I hope to write a book on the angels of countries, a very relevant subject at the moment. It is when we recognise and accept our cultural background that we can be clear enough to attune to the energy necessary for our country or whatever country we are in.

The first time I contacted the angel of America was when I was trying to discover what was relevant or irrelevant in nationality, thinking that perhaps Canada should join the States. I asked the Angel of America if this was a good idea. The Angel said no, and implied that the North American continent had been kept for an experiment in freedom. In the USA it is freedom at all costs—freedom to buy and shoot a gun as the negative extremity. Canada, on the other hand, was opened up by thousands of United Empire Loyalists who didn’t believe in revolution. They believed in freedom changing slowly through precedence, a different, more law-abiding, standard. Canada and the United States are like two sides of one coin. Their different purposes are meant to balance one another. From the angelic level, of course, there’s no sense of competition but rather of working for the whole planet.

In his book on folk souls, Steiner says that the theme for the last age, as written in the initiation temples in Delphi, was ‘Man, know thyself’; and that the keynote for this coming age is ‘Man, know thy national self.’ He says that the Spirit of the Age, the planetary being, works through the archangels—which I call the angels—of the countries. From these, countries get their purpose. This is especially interesting at the moment when nationalism is a dirty word. The importance of contacting the national angels is to help us fulfil the purpose of the Spirit of the Age. Each angel contributes its own facet. It’s not uniformity we want; it’s a richness of diversity, working together. When we reach that stage we can really have a world government. We need a planetary viewpoint before we can attune to our national angel. If we don’t, we are still biased, still in our cultural limitations.

Q: Do guardian angels really exist?

Dorothy: It’s an idea we’re all brought up with. When I started to tune in to the angels, I wasn’t aware of guardian angels. But I was aware that we are all angels—angels walking on Earth, functioning through the personality. Edgar Cayce says, “Your sense of responsibility is your guardian angel.” As I understand it, at this time of initiation of the planet we’re all learning to contact our higher selves and function from our angelic area. Our guardian angel—the angelic part of ourselves—has been separate, but when soul and personality begin to function together, we become linked up to that angelic self.

Q: Do you think the true purpose of the Findhorn Community and this area of land is to do with direct attunement with nature?

Dorothy: The true purpose, for me, has always been working with vertical attunement, our inner divinity. The job I had with nature was only a sideline of that inner attunement. But because attunement with nature was a striking difference between us and other groups, it became seen as the sole purpose of Findhorn. It is vitally important, though, as an outgrowth of that other attunement. It’s an area that has been neglected in spiritual groups in the past—especially in the Christian Western world—so there has to be an emphasis on it. I feel the world is going through a planetary initiation. We’re growing into our God-hood and working together for the planet. This is one way to do it.

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To Hear the Angels Sing by Dorothy Maclean published by Lorian Press