Directly or indirectly, David [Spangler] drew to us many young people, who brought with them guitars, long hair and a lifestyle with a definite Californian flavour of casual manners and sun shorts. They drank in the wine of early Findhorn Community esoterics and began to build. The majority did not stay very long. In the early seventies the average length of membership seems to have been only about six months. But others took their place, and many were practically minded. The flavour of the Community began to change—cramped living conditions, sing-songs, artistic groups, collective projects and a gentle resistance to authority are characteristic of this ‘middle-period’ Findhorn Community.

In this period an area called Pineridge in the north-east of the Caravan Park was ‘colonised’ and transformed, the Community Centre was extended to accommodate the many new members and guests, the craft studios went up[1] and the present publications building was completed. The Community started to produce audio tapes, and there was a strong emphasis on the performing arts. The mood was one of dynamism and expansion. By 1974 the physical layout of the Park was much as it is today. There were 180 members, and an education programme was in place.

Over a seven-year period, Peter and Eileen released their control over the Community. In 1972[2] Eileen was directed to cease sharing her guidance with everyone else:
Let go, stand back and allow all those in the Community to live a life guided and directed by Me. Let them learn from experience to live positively, demonstrating the laws of manifestation in their own lives. If this means that the work is held up for the time being, let it be held up. Until life is lived, lessons are not learned, and these lessons are far more important than expanding without learning, living on what others have learned.

In Eileen’s view, Peter had become rather dependent on her guidance; its withdrawal was a challenge for him. But without sharing her guidance, Eileen herself became unsure of her role in the Community. An examination of copies of Findhorn News, circulated to supporters of the Community in this period, shows how important the guidance was. Up to 1971 practically every item of information is backed by a piece of guidance. By August 1971 David Spangler’s work begins to fill the magazine, which Peter edited at this period. The withdrawal of guidance increased the strain in Peter’s relationship with Eileen, for her guidance-receiving ability was, for him, one of the ties between them. He began to turn to others for support, and also formed a ‘core’ group of seven, the nucleus of a management group, which soon grew to 12 members[3]. But often the delegation of responsibility did not provide results that met his standards.
To prepare for my leaving the Community for short periods of time, we have decided to form a Core Group of seven members who would be responsible for the Community while I was away . . . . During the past few months I have been sharing all that has been happening with the Core Group, and am now gradually withdrawing to enable them to take on the running of the Community.
(From ‘View from the Centre’, by Peter Caddy, Findhorn News, April, 1974.)

Peter also set up a ‘focalisers’ group of those responsible for departments in the diversifying Community (March, 1974)[4]. Key decisions were discussed in Community meetings. In addition, in 1973, not only David Spangler but also Dorothy Maclean[5] left the Community—soon to organise the Lorian Association in the United States.

Peter’s heart opened to a young Swedish woman to whom he had given responsibility in the Community. Although there was no sexual relationship, Eileen reacted sharply. The Community was thrown into a period of uncertainty but there was no challenge to Peter’s overall authority. An editorial in the February 1975 Open Letter—which replaced the Findhorn News—reports:
We at [the] Findhorn [Community] are embarking on the first lap of a new cycle in our development; the phase of building the foundation of the Community is reaching completion and now we are involving ourselves in a deeper and more conscious commitment to the New Age through training and education. Individual wholeness comes first, and the changes that Peter and Eileen Caddy are experiencing within their own relationship are reflected in the changes in the whole Community.

Early in this transition period, in 1973, the decision to build our ‘Universal Hall’ (originally the ‘University Hall’) was made. Eileen’s guidance for the Hall was clear. A functional hall was to be put up fast, with the emphasis then turning to proper housing for members, who had to live in very cramped conditions in caravans. But although this guidance was shared, the Core Group were now receiving advice and ideas from many sources. The divine inspiration of the Findhorn Community required the development of inner attunement by the membership, so that each could individually harmonise with higher truth. But the Community had in the past relied on others for its decision-making process, and was not experienced at this level of inner work. It was much more exciting to embark on the building of a major monument, a project which kindled the collective enthusiasm of the young members, rather than on the construction of a utilitarian hall. The more superficially attractive view prevailed.

Ten years later we had the monument, a superb building in stone, beautifully furnished and decorated, with magnificent mural paintings. It also contributed greatly, however, to a very large debt, and the collective energy of the Community for construction was exhausted.

In the period up to 1979, when he left, Peter delegated more authority to the Core Group. This group still used meditation and attunement as a basis for its decision-making, but without Eileen’s guidance a current of more ordinary, administrative decision-making became stronger. The Core Group was self-selective; as someone dropped out, so someone else would be attuned to by the group.

In an article in the Open Letter of December 1975 Nick Rose commented:
Like the rest of [the] Findhorn [Community] the Core Group is divinely ordinary. It is prey to the lures of glamour and illusion like any other group. It is striving to improve its communication with the Community. It is trying not to impose a vision in such a wilful and purposeful manner that it inhibits the growth of personal vision.

In the Findhorn Community, Divine will unfolds itself unhurriedly, without the stress and impatience which our cultures regard as the norm. We have to relearn patience and right timing. The Core Group provided stability during a time when membership turnover was high and individuals had a shorter period in the Community for spiritual development. Only in the later part of the 1980s did a new trend in management emerge.

Expansion and Glamour
Throughout the seventies thousands of guests visited the Findhorn Foundation, were inspired and returned to spread their inspiration in changed lives. This is the true and simple history of the Findhorn Foundation, and it continues today. The more detailed events and dramas are the stage settings within which this process of transformation and development of love occurs.

Peter and Eileen were not exempt from change. Peter’s relationship with Eileen became steadily more distanced. His priorities were changing, and he left the Community in 1979 to develop himself by means of a new series of relationships. He remarried in 1982, and his new wife demanded from him a large share in the physical upbringing of their child. Peter was, in his seventies, required to learn the more mundane aspects of fatherhood. Through a further marriage he has been experiencing the more devotional aspects of religion so familiar to Eileen in her moments of inner surrender.

Eileen, on the other hand, has gradually conquered her shyness to become a lecturer and spiritual guide, unafraid before mass audiences of thousands. In this respect Peter and Eileen’s example, which has demanded great readjustment relatively late in life when others are thinking of ‘taking it easy’, has been inspirational to us.

While they were still together, Eileen and Peter were given the gift of returning to Cluny Hill, as promised in Eileen’s guidance many years earlier. In the intervening period the hotel had become very run down, and the Community purchased it for the ridiculously small sum of £60,000[6]. At the time, though, it was a huge step to take. It was a relatively collective Community decision[7], although the then Community treasurer[8] resigned over it. So Cluny Hill Hotel became Cluny Hill College.

The purchase of Cluny set loose an impulse for property acquisition which turned out to be a double-edged sword for the Community. Eileen’s guidance spoke of the development of a ‘Village’, eventually growing into a ‘City of Light’. Members began to feel that God was guiding the process, so all we had to do was acquire, and He would make sure of the funds[9]. The key year was 1978. We were given Drumduan House, and its gardens were lovingly renovated at great expense. It was finally occupied by the Moray Steiner School in 1987. Station House was bought as members’ accommodation and refurbished. In a more controversial decision Core Group decided to buy Cullerne House and grounds.

A group of members borrowed money to purchase another old house, Newbold. We accepted the custodianship of an island called Erraid, on the west coast of Scotland, off the island of Mull. Erraid is owned by two Dutch families, but we were offered its use for a small community for ten months of the year.

We were getting big and over-extended and the debts were mounting up. At the end of the 1970s we were far out-spending our income, and owed more than £300,000 to private individuals and to the bank.

With hindsight it is clear that a superficial interpretation of divine protection led to irresponsibility and carelessness, a kind of collective materialism similar to that evident in the Soviet Union, where no one has felt responsible for property that belongs to the abstract ‘State’. Even in 1985 after a new, strict financial policy had long been in place, I arrived in Drumduan garden, which had not been properly worked for two years, to find four lawn mowers in the garden shed, none of them functional. With a little attention we managed to get three in working order!

* * *

The attraction and glamour of esoterica also reached their peak in the late 1970s. David Spangler had warned the Community about glamour in an open letter written from America in 1975:
Glamour is the greatest challenge facing us today. It causes us to step off the balanced track and wander in culs de sac. It is a form of entrancement, bewitchment, hypnotism. It generates illusion (and is a product of it, as well) and it hinders communication. In fact, that is its greatest danger and characteristic. Glamour distorts communication and communion by altering the perspective of a single quality so that other qualities can no longer relate to it. It is like loud music playing when you are trying to quietly think or to converse with others; it is like over-inflating a tyre on your automobile so that the vehicle tilts and cannot run on a level. It fosters the creation of private worlds in which our attention is trapped and others cannot truly communicate with us.
. . The Christ is found in life’s processes, high and low, and not just in special events or people who may satisfy certain needs for stimulation and glamour. Building for the New Age is not tripping from charismatic happening to charismatic happening, like a junkie looking for his daily ‘fix’. The Christ, the New Age, planetary transformation are not meant to be addictions; our work is not really expressed in terms of visions, lights, sounds, seizures of energy, and hallelujahs. . . . Being the Christ is an everyday commitment to life as it is and as it is unfolding to become in revelation of its Divine Essence, a life seen beyond frills or glamour, lived in recognition of the uniqueness of each day and of the Divinity that is the fabric from which that uniqueness is woven.
(Reflections on the Christ, p. 102, 113)

In spite of David’s warnings, the Community had to learn its lesson about glamour. The problem came to a head with the ‘crystal incident’ in 1978. A small group of people began visiting the Community, and some became members, who felt that only with certain kinds of decoration and design, and particularly through the use of crystals, could the appropriate energy be properly channelled here. Indeed, it was not so much divine energy, but the energy of the fabled past civilisation of Atlantis which was to be incorporated into our almost completed Universal Hall through a special configuration of crystals and wires. The whole conception was not properly communicated to the membership, and Peter’s authority was still such that there was considerable acceptance of the new idea.

A specially cut quartz crystal, about the size of a grapefruit, was prepared and suspended on gold wires[10] in the centre of the Hall. The gold wires led to the supporting pillars, from which silver wires led down into the foundations. In the basement, a smaller crystal was embedded in the floor, and a piece of meteoritic iron sat above it. A third crystal was fixed to a light in the centre of the ceiling. The Hall was closed for some time before this occult arrangement was finished and then, around Christmas 1978, a special ceremony of invocation was held to inaugurate the energy transfer. Craig Gibsone remembers walking out of the ceremony and leaving the Community[11], so great was his disgust. He returned only in 1983.

A year and a half later, during a presentation by a visitor from the Edgar Cayce Foundation, the wires snapped and the crystal fell, smashing a two-inch-thick glass panel in the floor and narrowly missing the speaker, who had ‘providentially’ not chosen to stand in the centre of the Hall. The crystal shattered into many pieces, to almost everyone’s great relief. Eileen was not present at the talk, but her comment when informed of the event was: “Thank God[12].” She collected the crystal fragments and, following her guidance, they were returned to the earth from which they came. This curious incident ended a period which taught the Community some hard lessons.

‘Psychic glamour’ is widespread in the ‘new age’ movement nowadays. It caters for people who are dissatisfied with the cruder aspects of materialism, but who still retain a desire to purchase personal transformation quickly for a fee. Such demands are fulfilled by a large coterie of ‘psychic entrepreneurs’ who advertise their wares in the host of ‘new age’ magazines. Many people still visit us expounding their ‘visions’ or new techniques, trying to set us to rights. We enjoy them and thank them, and they pass on elsewhere. We are becoming more and more conscious of the simplicity and directness of the divine message—that our purpose is to find the divine within, the criterion for which is the practice and experience of unconditional love. Our work is too important to be side-tracked.

———

Extracts from The Findhorn Community: Creating A Human Identity for the 21st Century, Carol Riddell, FPress, 1991/1997

[1]In 1971.
[2] Other sources e.g. ‘Flight Into Freedom’ state this occurred in 1971.
[3] Histories can perhaps only ever be a metaphor for truth rather than a description of some absolute. It may already be obvious that the various personal recollections of our past on offer are not always in complete accord. It has been suggested that this sentence does not take into account the fact that Eileen continued to share her guidance with Peter for some time after she ceased to do so for the community. Such guidance supported the formation of Core Group.
[4] or Spring 1973, in response to the departure of the Lorians.
[5]And several other prominent community members including Roger and Katherine Collis, Kathi and Milenko Matanovic. Some students of community history perceive in this exodus of talent the beginnings of the financial and management problems of the later seventies.
[6]On 17th November 1975.
[7]Meaning that Peter brought community members to Cluny Hill for tours of the premises, and that the community at large was informed of the process rather than in the decision as such. In fact there was a serious division of opinion on this issue. From this point on Peter was often on tour. On his return, Core Group resolutions would sometimes be overturned. It would be some time before the community as a whole would actively participate in major decisions.
[8]John Hilton, an ex-bank manager who had been at loggerheads with Peter for some time over the deficits the Foundation had been running up. His resignation was not immediate but came some months later.
[9]Several individuals have pointed out that this was by no means a unanimous feeling. The influence of David Spangler’s work on the ‘New Laws of Manifestation’ was of crucial importance at this time, and of course in the absence of the author a variety of interpretations were extant.
[10]Or wire.
[11]These events did not happen simultaneously. Several months passed before Craig’s departure.
[12]Although she had supported the original idea. Eileen was on Core Group for much of the 1970s.