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(First published in One Earth Magazine, Spring 1978.
Click here for an overview of posts in the series The Art of Living in Community.)
I am convinced that my entire life this time has been spent in very, very careful planning for the job that I have to do in this experience. But that doesn’t mean that I consciously participated in all the careful guidance and development of my consciousness. My conscious participating probably began about five years ago with what for me was a very spectacular experience in discovering that something that I always thought as I was growing up, was actually true. That is, that as the son of a Southern Baptist minister, who by the way is the son of a Southern Baptist minister, and on and on and on, I grew up hearing the idea that one could talk to God and get answers.
So, I literally believed that God was part of our family and that we could talk with him, that he could talk with us, that there was a two way communication possible. As I grew up and went through high school, I carried with me this idea that God was always present and knew every single thing that I did. I adopted these Baptist views of morality but when I discovered all sorts of delicious things when I became a teenager and assumed that God was watching all that, I developed a gigantic guilt complex. It is great knowing that God is always there, that you can communicate with him, but there are some things that you don’t want him to notice. Unfortunately, the Baptist view of God doesn’t deal with that concept, and so in order to right the wrongs that I was still doing, I felt like I had to serve God to make up for it. The next thing I knew I was in a Baptist seminary becoming a Southern Baptist minister.
Then, about five years ago, I found out that God can literally speak to us and through us in terms so precise and so understandable that there is no mistaking the message. And that was the beginning of a new dimension of my spiritual experience that had nothing to do with religion as I had known it. In fact, it didn’t have anything to do with that God that I had known. This was a new God. A greater God. Someone far beyond any concept I had had before. And the thing happened with that new birth that I think probably always happens to each of us when we are born spiritually.
When you are born spiritually it is like a physical birth. You become a spiritual baby, and there are some things that are characteristic of spiritual babies. Babies like to be handled and cuddled, and they cry a lot. That is what spiritual babies are all about. The other thing most characteristic of spiritual babies that is also characteristic of babies in the flesh, is that anything they can get their hands on, especially anything shiny and attractive, they stick in their mouths. When you are born spiritually you go to every conference you can go to, every teacher you can find and buy every book that deals vaguely on a spiritual subject. And without a lot of discrimination—you just stick it all in your mouth and digest it all which very soon results in spiritual indigestion. And just like a baby, you need to be burped. It all comes back up — spiritual regurgitation.
But the interesting thing is that after that spiritual regurgitation is a time when you don’t want to hear anything about anything spiritual. ‘Don’t talk to me about God, don’t talk to me about metaphysics, I don’t want to hear it. I just want to rest.’ And during that rest period an interesting thing happens. Things digest, and then you go back a little more cautiously, a little more discriminately, and still take things in, but you select what you take in and you grow a little more slowly.
As I went through that period looking and discovering and reading and trying to inform myself, the most exciting concept that I came across was the concept of the mystery schools. Nothing was ever more intriguing to me than the idea that somewhere, hidden back in a forest in the mountains somewhere where nobody could find it unless he was enlightened, was a mystery school. A very, very special school where masters—those who had actually mastered all of the arts and sciences and spiritual cultures and had evolved beyond anybody else on this plane—were in residence. The concept of the mystery school says nobody can even make application to such a place. The only thing that you can do is handle your lessons so well that one of these masters will discover you. He will find you. Through his influence you will be accepted into this mystery school where your consciousness will be moulded through a series of initiations until you have the opportunity to grow as fast as a human can grow because the lessons are presented very carefully by real master teachers. How exciting that was to me! If there was anything I wanted, it was to purify myself, get my act together and get to a mystery school. I was absolutely determined that I was going to do it.
The only problem was that everything in the literature of mystery schools referred to schools way back, centuries ago, around Pythagoras and in ancient Egypt even before Pythagoras when Hermes and Ra were teaching there. Everything about mystery- schools was ancient, and yet there was always a phrase that said, ‘There are still mystery schools operating today. Nobody can find them, but they are there, and if you are ready the teacher will appear and will take you there.’ So, I did everything I could do to get myself ready, but how do you know when you are ready? And how can you be sure that the talent scout is going to find you? It is not easy to leave all of those things to blind faith.
And as I was studying and working and meditating and trying to prepare myself, I discovered a law of telepathic communication that said, ‘If you can focus on anybody, anywhere, whether in the flesh or not in the flesh, if you know what they look like and you know their name, then you can hold their image in your mind for an extended period of time, and repeat their name over and over and over it would attract their consciousness to you.’ And, I thought why shouldn’t that work for a mystery school? At least they would find me and know I exist. Maybe I could convince them if I ever made contact. So I started my meditation, holding the traditional models in my mind, and repeating a mantram, calling them to me. What followed was the most frightening experience of my life. I suddenly was in another dimension, a separate reality from this one. And I saw a procession of hooded beings, in long robes, in a great circle around me and it became obvious that I was the object of their procession. They were chanting. Suddenly I realised that I didn’t know how to get back, nor how to disengage myself from this scene.
I prayed like I never prayed before, with all the prayers I had learned as a child in Sunday school. And it occurred to me that if I had made contact with them by calling their name, I could make contact with myself by calling my own name. I did this, and suddenly I was awake, dizzy, uncomfortable but thankful it was all over. I read further and discovered that Dion Fortune said that all of these mystery schools have occult and psychic protection, and that you can’t invade their space on a psychic level. So I assumed that I had encountered the ‘cops’ of the mystery school. After that I left it all alone. I wasn’t about to try to enter a mystery school again, and I figured I had made my presence known and they would discover me soon enough, and that I had probably flunked the entry exam already.
Some time later I had given a woman a reading about a lost child and she had located her daughter through the information in the readings, so she was very happy with what we were doing and saw the purpose of it. She told me about a Zen master who teaches Bonsai in Atlanta. She said, ‘I have a feeling that what he is really teaching has little to do with these trees that he is bending into shape, but I don’t know really what it is and he won’t say, so why don’t you go to see him.’ So I went to see him.
At the school of Bonsai I saw all these miniature trees. Some of them that looked like a little tree you would see on a mountain beside the ocean where they were bent in a windswept direction, one side bare from the salt spray and the branches were moving out to the other side. They were done so perfectly that they didn’t look as if they were shaped by the hand of man. They were actually modelled that way and yet they were living things. It was exceptionally fascinating. There were little forests with hundreds of trees in a little block. Hundreds of trees and a perfect forest. In fact, the forest might include a mountain, a lake and a cliff and so on in this little miniature world.
As I walked through the garden with this man, I noticed some peculiar things about him. First of all, he was never in a hurry. I was so excited with everything that was going on around me that I would ask three questions before he would answer the first one. And I couldn’t get him to move any faster. And the slower he got, the more impatient I got. But he didn’t even seem to notice that. In fact, he was so much in communication with the nature around him that I was there as an observer, and finally before we got through the garden I felt very distinctly that he was apologising to the garden for my presence.
I began to realise this man was teaching me something but not by pointing it out to me, not by telling me what the lesson was and I had the option of not even noticing the lesson. We went to sit down and chat about what he was doing. I heard him working with some students, in forming a tree, and I heard him say that in wiring branches in a particular direction, ‘You must realise that this is a living being. Don’t think of it as a plant. Think of it as a soul, and this soul needs to be moulded in a particular direction, and these training wires are like the karmic experiences that you have that bend your nature in a particular direction so that you are made more beautiful by the pressure of these that mould your being.’ I was listening to him give these people fantastic spiritual truths, and all of a sudden it occurred to me — he’s not really teaching horticulture or botany or even Bonsai, he is teaching them spiritual growth and the laws of the universe. What a brilliant mind, so slow and so understated, acting as if he were not brilliant.
As I sat down with him I said, ‘I know that the ancient masters had a rule that if the student couldn’t notice a lesson that the teacher couldn’t give it to him. You had to be ready for a lesson to be able to receive it. You had to be able to ask the question in order to get the answer. I know that you are not going to sit here and tell me you are a teacher of spiritual growth, but I can see that you are. And I want to learn from you.’ And he looked at me with a look that could melt steel. He looked hurt that I had made an accusation.
And in his very slow, soft way that still twisted the knife, he said, ‘I am not a spiritual teacher. I do not teach spiritual lessons, I do not believe in teaching spiritual lessons.’
I thought, ‘How peculiar. I wonder what he does believe in?’ but I didn’t quite know how to ask, and the best I could say was, ‘What do you mean? I know that you are teaching more than how to torture these plants. It is a bigger lesson. I can hear that in what you are saying to these people. What you mean you are not a spiritual teacher?’
He said, ‘What you are accusing me of suggests that I would separate life from its essence. What I teach is life. The relationship to the universe, but not this on a spiritual level and this on a practical level, and this on a physical level. I don’t rip these things apart. It is all one law. Spiritual growth is growth—that’s all. I don’t believe there is any such thing as a spiritual teacher. If a person separated that part of their life and tried to teach that, they would be teaching an error in the first place. There is no such thing.’ Well, I was duly impressed, and I asked him if he would teach me. ‘Let’s work with a plant for a few moments and then I will come back and we will talk about it.’
He gave me a pine tree that was sort of rag-tag. It didn’t look like a Bonsai at all, it looked like something he had picked out of somebody’s garbage can and put there. It had literally tens of thousands of little brown pine needles in it, tiny little needles because the tree had been miniaturised by clamping its roots and cutting them back. He gave me a little pair of tweezers and told me to pick out those little brown needles. Well, I am not so dense that I can’t recognise a lesson in patience, and I took those tweezers and said, ‘If it kills me I am going to do it.’ I sat at that table picking all these little brown needles one by one and wondering if I really had to do this, or if he thought it up just for me. I kept plucking and plucking. For hours I was plucking pine needles from just one side of the tree before I turned it around, and I kept thinking about all sorts of things I needed to do back at the Fellowship, and the more I plucked I kept thinking, ‘He should be over talking to me. He could be teaching me fantastic lessons while I am plucking these damn little needles.’
He let it go on and on and on for hours, and I didn’t think he would ever get back. He went off to the store, he went here and there. He just left me plucking those little needles. By the time he got back that tree and I had quite a relationship going. I was beginning to see it in a whole different way. Then he began to talk with me about the tree.
He said, ‘If you were going to shape that into a more beautiful shape what would you do?’
And I looked around at some of the others that he had shaped, and looked at this one and I thought, ‘I don’t see any way that this thing can get into that shape. If I bent all of these branches that way it still wouldn’t do it, and if I cut this I couldn’t imagine anything beautiful in that tree.’ I just didn’t see anything beautiful about it. It was like a rag-tag, dirty little girl without her hair combed.
I said, ‘Well, maybe windswept, because most of the branches go in this direction anyway.’
He said, ‘Why don’t we just work on it and see if anything comes out of it for you.’
I had watched him take the pruning shears and cut and wire them and push them around. It really didn’t look all that gentle, the way that he did it. I didn’t see how the tree survived it. So I took this little thing, and I took the shears and I started to cut a branch. I thought he would go through the ceiling.
‘Don’t do that to that plant! You didn’t ask permission first.’
I said, ‘What do you mean?’
He said, ‘You have to talk to the life in the plant so that it understands what you are going to do to it so that it will co-operate with you. That’s how you are going to find out what direction it wants to go in.’
I thought, ‘Oh you are going to tell me how to talk to devas.’ I was really excited about this idea of getting in touch with the spirit of that plant although he didn’t use the term spirit. So, I said, ‘All right, how do I do it?’
He said, ‘Talk to it.’ Well, I am sitting there looking at this ridiculous little scruffy pine tree, and I haven’t any idea how that pine tree is going to talk back to me. There is nothing harder than to try to talk out loud to a tree feeling that it is just a tree. But I tried. And I asked it what direction it wanted to go and it was so ridiculous that I almost giggled. I just didn’t feel that I was communicating with that plant. So he watched me and he didn’t smile. But I could see little fleeting glimpses of a sense of humour at my discomfort in trying to communicate with the tree.
Finally he said, ‘If you could see that tree as a human being what would that being look like?’
I began to describe this dirty, skinny little girl with combat boots, and hair uncombed, and all of that was the image this tree gave me. He said, ‘Close your eyes and see that little girl standing before you.’ Well, that was easy enough, I closed my eyes and I could see the little girl. He said, ‘Now talk to her. Don’t talk to this plant, talk to her, the spirit of the plant and ask what she would like.’
Well, the image began to come. ‘First of all, you’ve already washed my face,’ and I saw her face differently after she said that, ‘and my hair is ready for the combing and shaping.’ And these things began to come and I opened my eyes and looked at the plant again, and it was a whole different thing. It was a different plant, and the plant was excited as I was about to cut it. It no longer felt that I was going to cut a branch and it was going to bleed. It was more like a girl who is going to get a haircut and when she has finished she knows she is going to look beautiful. There was the spirit coming from the plant, and we began to communicate with it, and before we finished that afternoon, there was an absolutely beautiful, exquisitely beautiful little tree that was wind-swept and had the bark missing on one side, and we painted that with lime so that it looked as if it had been bleached with salt spray, and you could almost smell the ocean by looking at that little plant. And I was thrilled. I really felt as if I had seen a transformation of a soul from something uncontrolled to something beautified by nature itself. It didn’t look shaped by human hand.
All these things relate to mystery schools. As I was talking to him after this experience I said to him, ‘I’ve always wanted to be a student in a mystery school, and I have an idea that you can cause me to learn more than I can learn by accident with my spiritual group from now on. You can take me in a short time and teach me more in one year than I can learn in five years on my own. Will you take me as a project and shape my consciousness like yours and mould me as they did in the ancient mystery schools?’
He looked at me and said, ‘Paul, could you leave the Fellowship, close its doors and come here as my servant, wash my teacups in my kitchen and make my bed, sweep my floors and pick the pine needles off the dirty, scruffy pines and do all of these things if I never say anything wise to you or entertain you?’ It hit like a ton of bricks. The Fellowship to me was like a child, a living being, something that was a part of me and to close it would be like closing a part of my life. But at the same time there was this other thing. These two highly valuable things were being weighed in the balance for me, and it seemed to me that the life of the Fellowship would continue even if the doors were closed.
I said, ‘Yes, I will. I will come here as your servant.’
He said, ‘That being true, I cannot teach you.’ That really hurt! I just wasn’t expecting that sort of reply. I thought I had sorted it out and done exactly the right thing. These things can be so painful for a moment.
And I said, with tears running down my face, ‘Why?’
He gave two reasons. ‘For one thing you are too emotional about it, and secondly, if you could close that Fellowship and come here then I have need of learning from you because I couldn’t close this school and come to stay in your Fellowship.’ Well, I felt that I had learned more in that short exchange in those few seconds than I could learn in a lifetime out there looking for it. I had found my mystery school, and it had affected me profoundly. I asked him if I could meet his teacher someday. He answered, ‘The teacher only makes that decision. If he wants to meet you.’
I asked, ‘But how will he know?’ He looked at me as if that was the most absurd question that I had ever asked. And I realised it was, so I dropped the subject and went on about my business.
It wasn’t long after that, that we moved the Fellowship to Virginia Beach. One day I got a call from a man at the Norfolk Botanical Gardens, who said he knew the Bonsai teacher from Atlanta. He said, ‘I’ve studied with him for quite some time and I have a tree here that I would like to bring you, and perhaps let you work with it and see if you would like to continue the thing you started with him some time ago.’ I asked him to come out, and he brought a beautiful little tree that was still in training wires. He sat down and we looked at it for a bit. I noticed that the man was Oriental. After only a few moments of conversation, he left the tree with me, giving me the impression that it was a gift from the Bonsai teacher in Atlanta.
Later in the day I thought I’d call Atlanta to thank the teacher for the plant. When I spoke to him, he said, ‘I didn’t give that plant to you.’ So I asked who did. ‘He did.’
‘Why should one of your students want to give me a tree?’ I asked.
He replied, ‘That wasn’t one of my students, that was my teacher.’ My God, I spent ten minutes with that man and hadn’t asked him a single question! All these years I waited to meet this teacher and the teacher comes and goes and I don’t even have sense enough to recognise the vibration of a teacher! How could I have missed it?
I immediately got on the phone to Norfolk Botanical Gardens and I asked if he was still around, and I told him I was not quite sure how to take care of the plant he left, and asked him to come and see me again. I didn’t tell him that I had found out that he was the teacher. Very graciously he consented to come back out and talk to me about the care and feeding of the little plant that he had left. Then one of the most spectacular things happened: as he was sitting talking to this plant, he began to make reference to things. He said, ‘As I was training this branch here it was stiff, as if it would break instead of bending in that direction. Now that was during that period of time when you should have been publishing this material and felt that you wanted to be out there teaching instead.’ And all of a sudden I began to make a connection.
I asked, ‘How did you know about those incidents in my life?
He said, ‘This tree was put in training wires at the time that I was first told about you, and ever since then I have watched you by the branches of this tree. Everything that you did was reflected in this image of you. And if I had resistance from a branch I knew that you were having resistance in what you were doing in your life.’
Looking at that tree I realised that whole tree had been a point of communication between him and me, and he had been teaching me for three years. I had never even met him, but for part of my life he was participating in every incident of my life and he never forced me to learn anything. He never manipulated me through the branches of that tree but he did very gently suggest to the tree and to me through the tree that we shape ourselves in more beautiful directions.
Then I began to realise, looking back on these things, that somehow I had touched the periphery of the mystery school. I asked him directly about mystery schools. ‘Is there really a place in China or Japan where priests come together and learn a discipline through which they become very spectacular individuals that know how to respond to every situation of life?’
He said to me, ‘There may be such a thing as a mystery school, but you don’t want that because you already are enrolled in the highest of the mystery schools on this plane. The teachers put lessons before you.’
And he told the story of a young man going to a school, finding himself enrolled in the Pythagorean school of the mysteries and waiting for the classes to start. As he left his room and went down the hallway to go to the dining room, he noticed a broom sitting against the wall and some dust in the hallway, and thought, ‘This is ridiculous, they don’t take care of this school. There is trash and somebody hasn’t finished a job and they have gone off. This is no way to run a mystery school.’ He had his meal, he came back and noticed that the dirt and the broom were still there. He went back to his room and meditated while still waiting for the classes to start. Finally after his meditation of the afternoon, he came out and started to go to the dining room for dinner. He noticed that the broom was still there and the dirt was still there and now there was a mop and a bucket. And he thought, ‘How careless. How could they do this? They aren’t taking care of this thing,’ and he went on to the dining room. When he came back and it was still there, he thought, “I am going to tell somebody about this. As a matter of fact, I am not sure I want to stay in this mystery school. If they don’t have it together any better than that, they can’t teach me very much.’ And he was still waiting for the lessons to start….
Now, the whole thing that the man got across to me was it is not possible for you or me to need a lesson to shape our lives in a more beautiful way, without that lesson appearing. The next lesson that you need in your life is already right in front of you, and you don’t need any more teachers than you already have, although teachers can very well help you to see the lessons. That’s all they can do. That’s all teachers are. No one can teach you any more of God than is already written in your own heart, but others can point it out to you and bring it to the surface of your realisation, can cause you to notice where it is.
But the best way to precipitate a teacher is to learn the lesson that is before you and then you become companions along the way with the teachers who are themselves being stimulated and are learning. Their lessons come from your stubbornness. They are taught patience by wanting to point out that mop and bucket. How much a teacher wants to say to a student, ‘Can’t you see the lesson that is in front of you?’ His lesson is not to say that. His lesson is to put the mop and bucket there and see if you will stumble over it and move it a little closer to the middle of your path each time.
You know, I think some of you are waiting for the Foundation to become a great mystery school. Some of you are waiting for Pythagorean masters to come and teach you the formulae. Some of us are thinking, ‘Someday the Foundation will get its act together, and then I want to become a student.’
The mop and the bucket are before you. The greatest lessons that can be taught in the planetary school of the mysteries are right here already before you, carefully designed, carefully laid out by the master teacher, and they are exactly what you need to learn on this plane.
As the community progresses and as other lessons come that are the greater, deeper, more intricate lessons, those students who are ready for that lesson will be attracted. By then you will have learned the lessons that you need at this stage of your development. Teachers never teach by their words. We are taught by the masters’ lives. We are taught by being in their presence and watching their response to their surroundings, not by their words but by their actions, by the opportunities that are put in front of us by their presence. We are taught by the evolution of the school of which we are a part. And we are taught as much by the school’s mistakes as by its examples and successes. And we learn most from a mystery school when we build it.
You could not be in a better place at a better time than now for your particular needs. You have a lesson where you are. Don’t feel that a mystery school is at Findhorn for only those who remain there. Your participation in whatever way in this mystery school has been a part of your life and will continue to be. Wherever the lesson is, it is in the middle of your path, and you have one of two choices—pick up the broom and start sweeping or push it out of the way and say, ‘Isn’t that ridiculous that somebody left that here.’ Learn to recognise the next step along the path, and don’t say, ‘If I didn’t have that to do, I could get about my spiritual growth.’ Do that and know that is your spiritual growth and grow through the experience of having dealt with it, whatever it is, and give thanks for it and keep your eyes open. No waitress was ever unkind to you in a restaurant without reason. No shop girl ever was impatient or short with you without purpose. No husband or wife or child ever put you through their selfish trip when you didn’t need it. You have the perfect teacher if you will just listen, will give him credit for his successes and notice your failures. The difference in people on this plane enrolled in this mystery school is that some are enrolled and asleep, and some wake up. We don’t have the option of leaving the mystery school. We don’t have the option of resigning the lessons. The only option is to learn the lessons on purpose or not. We are all already in the greatest of the planetary schools of the mysteries, and the Foundation, the Fellowship of the Inner Light, Lindisfarne and other such centres are places where those who have awakened come together to share their lessons and make the lessons available quite deliberately to others. The lessons are not greater or lesser. Just more conscious. Know that and grow to be what you are: a child God growing to be what his father is.
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