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(Extracts from ‘Findhorn: Garden or Jungle?’, Foundation Early Study Paper, also printed in New Age Journal and United Focus Journal.)

Recently, my partner, David Spangler, received a letter from a person who had just returned from the Findhorn Foundation, the spiritual community in northern Scotland that is currently the subject of much publicity. This letter was asking for his assistance for the Community, which, the writer assured him, was moving steadily into states of psychological and spiritual imbalance.

This was not the first such letter we have received. Over the past two years, we have been contacted by several persons who have felt that the Community was losing its direction or was becoming imbalanced in some way. We have also heard from people who had gone to the Community in response to something they had read or heard about it, only to discover that its reality was not what they had expected. While some of these reports have been angry or bitter, most have simply indicated a disappointment that, in the minds of these people, the Community was not living up to the beautiful ideals which it proclaimed.

This concerns me, for I have a deep personal interest in its well-being and a love for the people who are trying to make it a success. For three years David and I lived in the Community. His work there is well-known through his writings and lectures; my own contribution was as a human relations counsellor, which has been my profession for twenty years. Though less publicised, my work put me in touch with every facet of the Community life and gave me opportunity to witness and experience first hand the challenges in building and running a place like the Foundation. These were not only the normal human relationship problems brought about by the presence of many strong and different personalities or by the Community’s small living area and limited accommodations which caused everyone to live in constant, close contact; there were also problems arising from the subtle but highly stimulating and transformative spiritual and psychological forces at work there.

This experience gave me a perspective on the Community’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as an appreciation of the immense amount of energy, commitment and care it takes just to make it work at all. It is important to remember that the Foundation does work, although not always to everyone’s expectations or satisfaction. As it becomes more publicised and gains an aura of glamour and success, I believe it is important to keep a balanced perspective. Nothing attracts detractors like success, and I am not concerned with those criticisms which arise when someone’s personal ideas of what a ‘New Age’ centre should be like (and we all have such personal preferences and desires) are confronted by the reality of Findhorn. Many critical analyses of this Community have come as much from bruised egos as from a clear perception of truth.

Still, many criticisms I have heard have a valid reason behind them and touch upon some area of imbalance that does exist within the Community, often an area that I had to deal with myself while I was there. What I am interested in writing, therefore, is neither a defence nor an expose but a statement of my observations of the Community and its growth processes which may provide a balanced perspective. The experiences of the Foundation are not unique to that centre, either; I have found similar mixtures of positive and negative elements in every group or enterprise I have ever encountered. As a counsellor I know only too well our human challenge of confronting that mixture in our lives, but I also know that the truth of a human being does not lie in his extremes. Likewise, the truth of this centre lies neither in the glamorous image of a heaven on earth, as some recent publicity might suggest, nor in a picture of some psychologically imbalanced authoritarian hell. We need to find that truth not only for the Community’s sake but for our own, for it is a truth throwing light on the processes of growth and change which we are all facing in our quest for a new world. The Community is on a path of transformation, and we need to understand that path more clearly, for it is ours as well.

The Foundation is no stranger to criticism. After it had released the transmissions David had received there from the consciousness of Limitless Love and Truth (published in his book, Revelation: The Birth of a New Age), irate letters were received from some people on their mailing list accusing the Community of being led astray by this ‘false prophet’ from America. This was because these transmissions claimed that the New Age was already here now as a living spirit within humanity, something these critics did not believe. Peter and Eileen Caddy, two of the founders, received guidance that the Community should begin charging for its materials and services, rather than giving them away for nothing, this generated a lot of protest and claims that the Foundation had abandoned its spiritual direction; it also drew support from many other people and placed the Community on a more stable financial footing so that it could increase its work and services.

The most intense criticisms, however, came from the people most involved with the Community, as one would expect. I remember one young man who had come from London to live in the Community. The change in his life style was a drastic one, and he had challenges of adjustment. Most of all, he discovered, as does everyone who joins the Community, that the Foundation is no refuge or haven from the problems of society. To the extent that those problems are inner created through our own personal imbalances, we bring them with us wherever we go, and at the Foundation, our inner contradictions are brought to the surface with uncomfortable intensity. This particular young man kept alternating between staying in London and living at the Foundation. Finally, despairing of his ability to adapt to the Foundation, he told me that emotionally it was a worse jungle than London.

Why should a spiritual centre, based on ideas of love, communion, service and wholeness, create such problems? Why should the Community be a jungle a well as a garden? One answer comes from the process of growth itself, another from the nature of the Community and of the people who have built it and who come to it.

As a counsellor involved with helping people make positive changes in their lives, I have found that the meaning of growth itself is frequently misunderstood. Many people seem to see it as a process of addition: the acquiring of new talents, new skills new knowledge and images of self, and so forth. Growth is like a tonic to them, the stimulation of novelty to fill some void in their lives. Implicit in this is the sense that there is a core of being—some aspect of ego or self— that remains detached and untouched by growth; it is the collector of new experiences, the acquirer, remaining aloof like some central sun of consistency around which swirl satellites of changing experience.

To me, growth is a more profound activity than just acquisition. It is a deepening into the wholeness of life, like the spreading of roots to nourish and support the visible structures of stem, leaves and blossoms. It is a greater openness to life and its dynamic qualities, an increase in aliveness, responsiveness and responsibility. It represents an expansion of that inner self that knows and can create wholeness, not of some isolated self separate and apart from life. It is a relationship with the most fundamental part of ourselves, a relationship with a force transcending our simple mortal identity and taking us beyond into unexplored territories of being where the human psyche blends with the universe in oneness.

Growth can be joyous and exhilarating, a fulfilment of all that is most human within us. However, if we are unwilling to release our desires about how we should grow, if we cannot release our separateness, if we shrink from confronting the deeper truths of our nature and from surrendering through self-knowing to the rhythms of death and rebirth which carry life forward, then growth can be a challenging, frightening and even a negative experience.

Within us each is a mixture of characteristics some of which we are happy with and some of which we aren’t. These characteristics are the seeds we have sown over the years—our karma, if you like, or the tendencies we have built into our way of being through our habits and motives of thought, feeling and action. When we open ourselves to the forces of growth, it is like exposing a garden to the sun and the rain. Whatever seeds are there will sprout and reveal their nature, whether we want them to or not. This means we may find ourselves confronting unpleasant and undesirable elements within our nature. Also, for plants to emerge, the soil must be broken up and the seeds themselves must disintegrate to give birth to new forms. Creativity often involves prior destruction, and growth involves a giving up or a ‘de-structuring’ of familiar and comfortable patterns to make room for new ones to appear. This can produce imbalance in our lives. During growth periods, therefore, we are more vulnerable than usual and more likely to experience negativity in our relationships with life.

The young man from London called the Community a jungle, and that is what it is for many persons. A jungle, however, is a place where the growth forces are strong and life is abundant. This is the nature of the Community: a place where the forces generated by the pioneering dynamics of life in its deepest aspects are exceptionally strong and concentrated, a tropical zone of the spirit. Peter Caddy often calls the Community a hothouse. Everything about the Foundation contributes to this effect, from the close living conditions to the many activities intended to invoke highly stimulating energies of spiritual transformation and unfoldment.

Although its climate does not suit everyone, a jungle cannot be blamed for being what it is. If one is going to live in the tropics, one goes prepared with proper clothing and equipment. Unfortunately, this is not always the case with the people who come to the Community. Even those who come fully aware and accepting of what they are getting into may be surprised by the intensity and swiftness with which inner pressures of change begin to manifest. While I was there, though, I observed that there were those who came expecting a Garden of Eden, a community of loving souls where the problems of life would somehow resolve themselves. They came with definite preconceptions of what a spiritual centre should be like, how it should be run, what they wished to receive from it and the manner in which they felt their growth should proceed.

It was painful to watch the crises that these people went through as their dreams ran up against the reality not only of the Foundation but of their own natures as well. Of course everyone tried to help, and many of these people were able to re-adjust their expectations, but there were still those who refused to change or to give of themselves except in the manner and degree that they wanted. These were the ones who eventually left the Community with bitterness at what they saw as the Foundation’s failure to adapt to their needs and desires.

* * *

The Foundation’s spiritual focus had two effects. First, it concentrated highly stimulating spiritual and psychological energies of transformation through which the normal growth processes were accelerated. I have already mentioned that imbalance and negative states of thought and emotion can be temporary by-products of growth efforts. At the Foundation, the appearance of these states was intensified: whatever seeds of karma might be there, they were quickly brought to the surface for the individual to deal with. People would have inspiring and illuminating experiences and become very high for a period and then would swing just as far in the opposite direction, suffering a period of depression. All of this generated negative states which individuals would have to cope with in addition to the positive states of being which also resulted.

The second effect of the Foundation’s spiritual nature was to make it difficult to deal with negativity because it clashed with the Community’s high ideals and its emphasis on positive thinking and living. To give vent to negative pressures was to risk being seen as a ‘negative thinker’ and as a disruptive element in the community life. To experience negativity at all was for many, a guilt-producing situation as they felt they were letting the Foundation down; this was particularly true with respect to the Community’s general understanding of the laws of manifestation, through which the Foundation could attract to itself what it needed to grow and survive. Positive thought and emotion were seen as the fuel that made these laws work, whereas negativity was a neutralising force that could block manifestation and thus directly threaten the Community.

Dealing with this problem of how to cope positively and therapeutically with negativity was my primary work, and I was given every co-operation. I was sometimes hampered, however, by two interesting side effects of the Foundation’s spiritual orientation, other than those I have mentioned. These were a tendency to ignore the personality level and concentrate on higher, more esoteric levels, and a tendency to seek esoteric or occult explanations for everything that might happen.

I view the personality as part of our wholeness, neither more nor less spiritual or vital than any other part. I see it as an expression of what we are in relationship to life, a reflection of the skill and quality with which we focus our universality in the here and now. To me, the personality is not a thing but a dynamic process; it is like a river, always flowing, which can be clear or polluted depending on what we put into it in the way of emotional and mental energy, motive, balance, wisdom, love and self understanding. Parts of the river can be calm and smooth, other parts can be swift and treacherous, passing over rough terrain, but the river remains the link between its source and the ocean. The personality is a process of linking between divinity and the world of experience and manifestation, and the laws of its functioning are reflections of universal laws of creation. As a counsellor, I am interested in the whole being- rather than say that I work with personality levels or with higher levels, I prefer to say that I work with those factors that manifest wholeness and with those that fragment and inhibit it.

Many people in the esoteric field of study and approach, however, see the personality as a ‘lower’ self, a source of distortion and error, the sign of humanity’s fall from grace. Certainly, the personality level generally represents for most people a level of fragmented and limited vision which can lead to mis-communication and conflict. As I mentioned, the ‘river’ has its rapids. For many within esoteric disciplines, however, the solution is not to understand the personality but variously to overcome it, go beyond it or transmute it. Because the methods are often not well understood in themselves, the practical effect of this approach, I have found in working with many esoteric groups, is to simply ignore the personality, hoping that by concentrating on a spiritual vision, it will just go away somehow. Like the Victorians who kept pregnant women confined out of sight, it is as if they are embarrassed to have a personality and ashamed of its effects. Of course, it doesn’t go away; it remains, untended and unintegrated, to be a source of continuing problems of relationship and communication on all levels.

This way of thinking was not extreme at the Foundation, but it was present and tended to prevent some people from seeking my help or someone else’s and from dealing creatively with personality problems when they arose. Added to this was a tendency to find esoteric or spiritual explanations for most everything that happened. Thus, a negative upset was due to ‘dark forces’ rather than to a lack of skill and wisdom in dealing with human relations. This attitude, when it was present in a person or situation; diverted the attention from inner causes of the problem at hand and turned it outward, dispersing the area of responsibility. Of course, one solution for psychic attacks – which can be a reality, I know from experience – is to increase the pressure for being positive, when negativity is seen as a point of entry or of contact for dark forces. Needless to say, this also increases the repression of negative emotion and the tendency for people to feel guilty when these emotions surface.

Thus at the Foundation we faced a problem where the very nature of the place stimulated the appearance of negative emotional states as part of a natural growth process and a throwing off of older, personality patterns through the process of transformation; however, the nature of the place also tended to deny an acceptable outlet to these feelings because they conflicted with spiritual ideals or with teachings concerning the importance of positive thinking for the well-being of the Foundation and the working of the laws of manifestation. To avoid guilt, one outlet was to blame negativity on ‘dark forces’ rather than to accept and deal responsibly with one’s own personality patterns and challenges. When problems developed at the Foundation, it was often due to these causes.

I have written of this at length because in the work David and I have done over the years, which is to demonstrate the synthesis between personality and spirit, we have discovered that this problem is widespread throughout the entire spiritual movement. In fact, although I have pointed out this problem at the Foundation, it was really less evident there than in several other groups I have known. In the Community, the tendency to be negative about negativity was offset by a generally good community perspective and a high level of humour, as well as a great deal of love and caring. Also, Peter and Eileen, whose personal training was in learning how to overcome the personality and concentrate on higher levels, supported me a hundred percent in my work and began to take a fresh look at their own personality challenges. They have my highest respect for the way in which they proved their openness to growth and to new ideas, qualities that make them good leaders.

* * *

Two [other] factors, experimentation and the high activity level, also contributed to the problems the Foundation and individual members have faced. Growth is a process of deepening, not just activity in the direction of newness and change. Because it can create temporary experiences of instability, it is good if growth can be nourished by a stable environment. Traditionally, this stability is provided by family structures and by those in one’s peer group who can provide a sense of caring and of support. A rhythm of growth – a cycle of inbreath and outbreath – is also very important.

When I was at the Foundation, such a rhythm was often spoken about but was not always evident. Instead, there was a constant sense of activity and growth without adequate periods of assimilation and consolidation. The winter period, when visitors were few, was considered the time of consolidation, but it was often as busy in its way as the summer. Over a period of time, however, such a rhythm did begin to emerge, but the overall feeling remained one of constant activity and energy in motion. While this need not be a bad thing, it can work against the deepening process of growth, substituting instead a sense of motion and change that masks as growth.

This was heightened by the frequent turnover of personnel and the amount of work that needed doing. There were always more jobs than people, and sometimes a person would be allowed to stay simply because he had a needed skill, irrespective of whether he understood or supported the deeper objectives of the Community. Such people rarely worked out and often created more challenges than they solved; in fact, it was these people who usually had the most personality problems, since they did not have the spiritual dedication or motive of unselfish service which can give a person a perspective beyond their own feelings. Often, people would be trained for a skill, such as running a printing machine or working a loom, and then would leave the Community. Also, the bulk of the Community’s population were foreigners to Britain, mostly Americans, whose stay was limited by their visas. The youth of many of the members, their lack of previous experience or of skills and sometimes their inability to carry through with responsibilities also increased the work pressures.

All of these factors detracted from the overall stability of the Community, and also created a situation that demanded full time commitment from the members in order to deal with the many tasks that arose. This demand of the Community for the greater part of an individual’s energy had a dispersing effect on families that came to live at the Foundation, as well, bringing into conflict the allegiance of husband and wife to each other and to their children with their new allegiance to the Community.

Many intentional communities are designed to pull families apart in order that the community itself can emerge as the family. Such programmes develop in reaction to the limitations and separation that family life can produce: the possessiveness of families that can ruin a person’s life. However, the family remains an important link in the processes of growth and stability and needs greater understanding not destruction. In fact, a recent report indicates that in the Israeli kibbutzim, where the family was broken up, it is reforming in the third generation, with the support of the original pioneers! They recognise its importance after all and are seeking creative ways of incorporating its advantages into community life.

Families have never had an easy time of it at the Foundation, and some have broken up, as recent criticisms have suggested. However, as a marriage counsellor, I observed that in every case where families broke up in the Community and husband and wife separated, the seeds of that separation were already there before the couple came to the Community. The Foundation simply intensified and speeded up their confrontation with the realities of their relationship (or lack of it). This can be a good thing, but sometimes the process became glamorised, that is, seen as evidence of a spiritual process, and others were encouraged to split as well.

A combination of factors – the new morality, the love flow in the Community, a certain lack of responsibility – all combined to make it easier to seek another partner than to work out the problems with one’s mate. Some marriages were borderline; they were in that phase, which all new marriages go through, when the problems of adjusting to another being seemed all encompassing. Normally, couples work through this period and come out stronger but when there are opportunities to form other, more attractive partnerships where possible personality challenges are obscured by the flush of romance, when the demands of the Community are asking for as much as one can give, and when the seeking of a new mate is interpreted as a spiritual experience (such as the finding of a soul mate), then everything is working towards pushing that marriage over the line.

All of these matters could be subjects for articles in themselves. All I want to show now is that conditions exist at the Foundation to create instability, and while the Community is filled with loving people, love alone without a wise structure to support it is insufficient to restore that stability. The fact that the Foundation has few rules places a premium on self discipline, but self discipline is also a matter of training and can be difficult to develop in the vulnerability of an intense growth process. As a consequence, the Foundation can appear as an emotional jungle where people are left exposed to the heat of the sun and unprotected from the ravages of their own contradictions and those of the Community.

* * *

It is important to remember that Peter and Eileen did not set out to build a community; it developed out of the work they were guided to do. The Foundation was built out of faith, not out of ambition. Neither Peter nor Eileen nor Dorothy were trained or prepared to deal with the problems of running a community; they have learned through trial and error, supported by their guidance and their faith.

The Foundation has not been easy for them, either. They, too, have been subject to the same growth forces as everyone else. I have seen them change tremendously over the past six years, until now they are simply not the same people we met in 1970. They have grown in wisdom and in love, but they have paid their own price for their growth. They have gone through periods of profound inner change and instability, and this has been reflected into the Community as well, creating further problems.

The fact remains that The Foundation has been meeting its problems and continuing to grow. I have described what I observed during my three years there; they are challenges which I believe the entire New Age movement or community is facing in one form or another. Perhaps new sets of problems have developed at the Foundation since I left. The point is that the Community does have its jungle aspect, but it is learning to deal with it in creative ways. When I think of the problems we faced while I was there, the wonder to me is not that emotional conflicts arise but that the Foundation has survived at all. That it has is a testimony to the people who have lived there and given much to help the Community develop.

Now the Community and all concerned are facing what will be their greatest challenge: success and glamour that surrounds it. How will this affect the Community? Peter and Eileen, after years of being considered crazy for their beliefs and their work, are now making triumphal world tours and being met with wide acceptance and acclaim. They are human beings and share our human vulnerability to praise and acceptance. How will this affect them? Time will tell. I have witnessed in Peter both an attraction towards publicity and a sensitivity to the dangers of glamour. His one-pointedness on the Foundation and its success may be a liability as he moves in a wider arena of contact and tries to create a planetary community of co-operating individuals, for he can give the impression that The Foundation and the New Age are synonymous. He also concentrates on the positive aspects of the Foundation and may fail to give a balanced presentation. However, this is not wholly his fault, for how many audiences want to hear about another jungle when they came to hear about a garden? Most people feel they already live in a jungle in modern society and long for inspiration and for a piece of heaven on earth. Peter’s training is to project positive images, so that positive realities will manifest; he will meet this desire within people if he can. His challenge is to do so in a way that promotes a balanced understanding and perspective along with inspiration and new vision. Because the Foundation is a physical place, its concreteness can obscure its vision. People hear of it and rather than see its reality within their own lives and environments, want to travel to Scotland. Peter and the Community must find ways of dealing with this, but it is as much our problem as it is theirs.

We see and hear what we wish. We create our dream worlds and try to project them into reality. We desire a heaven on earth. We can have such a heaven if we are willing to create it in our own lives and where we are, which means confronting the challenges of growth. This is all they are doing at the Foundation. The problems that arise there are human problems; the triumphs are born out of the spiritual potentials and realities within all human beings. the essence of the Community is everywhere; the challenge of the Community and of Peter as its primary representative is to communicate this and help us all to realise it. I believe they will meet this challenge and succeed, but we will probably observe the process of their lesson learning as they do. We need a balanced perspective that can tolerate imperfection in those people and places that we select as our guiding images even while demanding and reaching for the perfection we know is there; in short, we need wisdom.

What the Foundation needs is help to meet its vision. It needs people who can accept its promise and make it work in their own lives where they are. It needs people who can go to the Community with the right motives of service and commitment to growth and responsibility, people who understand the growth process, can work creatively with negativity, can strengthen family patterns; people who are balanced and who are not looking for a personal utopia as much as for a place to serve according to the service that is needed, not according to their own glamorous ideas of the kind of service worthy of them. The Community is both garden and jungle, but so are we – so is the world. What we all need is a consciousness that can work with both in order to touch the greater life that is the Source.

COIF editor note: when this paper was written the Findhorn Foundation and the Community were one and the same.