Due to having the same second name as Sir George I frequently get asked “Are you related to Sir George Trevelyan?” To this I reply that he was a second cousin of my father, John Trevelyan, who became publicly well known when he became secretary to the British Board of film censors in the 1960s and his signature would appear at the front of all films when they were screened. Despite the coincidence in our family name, unfortunately I never met Sir George Trevelyan during his long and prolifically active life.

The Trevelyans are a large family with different branches and an aristocratic sounding name which originated from Cornwall, where the early ancestors were farmers. The fact that they became historians, liberal politicians, diplomats, authors, a film censor and a New Age prophet is what makes them profoundly interesting as a family.

One Trevelyan characteristic though was that they didn’t communicate very much between themselves and having such divergent interests they could be quite opinionated about each other!

Sir George had a reputation for being a bit eccentric amongst my family – but apparently he knew about me. It seems that he had read in the press about my controversial marriage to the life sentence prisoner Jimmy Boyle while he was still in prison, and wanted to meet me, but our paths never crossed.

Meanwhile, before my marriage, thanks to reading about Findhorn in The Findhorn Garden Story, which was originally published in 1975 (Sir George wrote the Foreword to this) my interest in visiting this legendary community in the far north of Scotland had been sparked. As a newly qualified medical doctor working in London at that time, I was intrigued to learn more and applied for a house officer job in the Royal Northern Infirmary in Inverness which was geographically close by.

Just as it did for Sir George, the energies and magic of the Findhorn community led to it playing a significant and influential part in my life. My visits have continued over the years up to the present day and I have a home here which I share with others from the community. This didn’t happen all at once though. I first visited the community towards the end of the seventies but it wasn’t until several years later when I paid a return visit that I was sufficiently open and sensitive to perceive and be affected by these subtle energies. The way that I understand this now is that through my unlikely marriage to Jimmy Boyle, and all the challenges which this brought, my outer shell had been well and truly ‘cracked open’. Becoming a psychotherapist contributed to this deepening, as did a profound spiritual experience which took place after I had started meditating and which finally opened the doorway to the next phase of my spiritual unfolding. Through all of this tumult and intensity, life brought me to a place of conscious seeking and following my inner calling. I have described how this came about in my memoir “Freedom Found” ( Scotland Street Press – published in 2017).

It was at this point in my life when I became an active seeker and was consciously following a spiritual path that I had a strong feeling of wanting to meet Sir George. I wrote a letter to Diana Whitmore (who established the Psychosynthesis and Education Trust) to ask how I might get in touch with him. She wrote back saying that she was extremely sorry to have to tell me that Sir George, who she had known personally and who had been an important mentor to her, had sadly died two months previously.

This upsetting news might have brought my late in the day attempts to get to know Sir George to an end, but in fact this was just the beginning. As I sat taking in the news contained in Diana’s letter I had a clear and definite ‘knowing’ – a sense that if what Sir George had lectured and written about was true, then I would get to know him in other ways. He might have shed the overcoat of his physical body, but if his essence, the droplet of divinity which animated him throughout his life, was still around, I would have experiences which would confirm this and I would ‘meet’ him in other ways.

This has proven to be the case – over and over again, in encounters which have surprised and delighted me. The first of these was when I made my return visit to Findhorn sometime after I received Diana’s letter, and felt drawn to the visitor’s centre in the Universal Hall. The first photograph which I found myself standing in front of in the visual display was of the smiling face of Sir George!

This moment of contact made me decide to embark on a process of learning more about him through speaking to others who had known him over the years of his regular visits to this community. The first person I thought of reaching out to was Eileen Caddy. Sir George had been a close personal friend of both her and Peter. The first visit to see Eileen, which took place after participating in the early morning meditation in the sanctuary, brought forward a wonderful stream of memories from her and we forged a deep bond of friendship which continued up until the time when she died in 2006.

Sir George Trevelyan and Eileen Caddy

My encounters with other friends of Sir George have continued over the years and each time as he is remembered, as his presence and words are recalled, the same spark awakens. His animated spirit seems to enter the conversation. There is often an element of synchronicity, of wonder and of ecstatic surprise. There are too many to describe them all, but I continue to be amazed at the number of people I have encountered who knew Sir George when he was alive and ALL of them, without exception, have been deeply touched and inspired by him. The daughter of a delightful and wise Irish friend who rents the flat which is part of my home in Edinburgh, turned out to have known him as a young woman in Northern Ireland. This was a completely unexpected discovery! Another friend gifted me a book of poems often recited by Sir George as he shared with his unforgettable oratory the imaginative vision some of our most well known and deeply loved poets had of our deep interconnectedness with other realities. Keith Armstrong gifted me a copy of his collection of lectures which Sir George gave over the course of his life. All of these gifts came freely and spontaneously towards me.

To return to the question of what we can do to bring Sir George’s vision into reality, I would say that the experiences above, which continue to this day, have taught me that his VISION is very much ALIVE. This is because what he wrote about wasn’t an abstract concept or idea. He believed profoundly through his own passionately lived experience in these timeless truths. He taught them with great power and eloquence, and inspired a whole generation to awaken to these subtle realities. He sounded a clarion call to AWAKEN to our TRUE NATURE as droplets of divinity in an ocean of divine consciousness. This understanding is urgently needed to help us know where we can find UNITY, and HARMONY at a time when we are daily assaulted by so many discordant and polarised realities.

It took me quite a journey to become open to perceiving these deeper truths. How do we awaken and how does this transformation happen? This is where Findhorn comes in, as a centre of LIGHT, where life is based on communicating with and being open to these other realities, and through this magic and miracles happen. The words of Eileen Caddy come to mind. When she spoke about LOVE which is at the core of each one of us, and at the heart of life itself, she would say “LIVE IT, BE IT, EMBODY IT, BECOME IT.” It’s not an easy task to penetrate the denser layers of our being, so that we can become more open to these deeper truths. It’s sometimes a life long quest which demands everything we can bring to it.

I believe that our greatest ally in this is the divine mystery which we are all part of, and which is silently guiding us towards this place all the time, longing for us to awaken and participate in the greatest adventure of our times. We are in such a precarious place in our history as a species living on this earth, that our FUTURE depends on us having the courage to AWAKEN AND EMBODY the vision that Sir George dedicated his life to sharing. His legacy lives on through each one of us who share this vision and are, as he was, willing to devote our lives to this deeper truth.

Dr Sara Trevelyan – January 2019