une/July 2008
My Mother’s Garden
Muktha Jost
Getting A Grip
Frances Moore Lappé
The Documented Health Risk of
Genetically Engineered Foods
Dr. Jeffrey Bland Interviews Jeffrey Smith
The Emerging Significance of Urban Agriculture
Jody Woodruff
Our Food Future
Scott McGuire
We Need A New Generation of Farmers
Zoë Bradbury
Soft Intentions, Hard Results
Peter Moore
Fitness Training For The Brain
Jim Brown and Molly Brown
Improved Health Through Detoxification
Daniel Smith, ND
Awakening and Embodiment
An Interview with Judith Blackstone
Randall Keller
Reclaiming Our Attention
Guy Finley
Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain
The Findhorn Garden Story
One radiant energy pervades and gives rise to all life. While it may speak to us through plants, nature spirits or the human beings with whom we share life on this planet, all are reflections of the deeper reality behind and within them. Myth has become reality in the Findhorn garden, not to present us with a new form of spiritualism, but to offer us a new vision of life, a vision of unity. The story of the garden is the celebration of this life in its myriad forms. May the joy we experience in participating in this celebration deepen our commitment to revealing the total beauty of ourselves and all life around us.
A miracle occurred over 40 years in windswept and barren sand dunes in the far north of Scotland. On a small plot of poor soil the most wonderful flowers, vegetables and fruit grew to enormous size. This remarkable event occurred with very little assistance from external sources—or so it seemed. With an absolute faith in the guidance they received Eileen and Peter Caddy, together with three sons and their friend Dorothy Maclean, discovered how to contact and cooperate with nature and made the seemingly impossible possible.
The updated and revised edition of The Findhorn Garden Story, in addition to chronicling these early days of discovery, explores the wider work of the Findhorn Community and the huge effect it has on all who visit. Today, at the original site of these humble beginnings, there is a thriving village housing hundreds of people from all over the world. The Findhorn Foundation, an internationally recognized center for spiritual learning at the heart of the village, is surrounded by innovative and ecological businesses. The garden has expanded into an organic farming initiative which feeds over 200 people while providing students with an experience of how to grow organically and in tune with nature.
The story of uniting with nature and others across the planet—creating an existence based on sustainable social, spiritual and ecological values—continues at Findhorn, and in the lives of many of us in communities across the planet. We’re pleased to be able to share the foreword from The Findhorn Garden Story written by Sir George Trevelyan in 1976, as well as the afterword (“The Organic Center”) by David Spangler, with hope that our readers will be as excited as we are about the possibilities which present themselves when we co-create with nature and each other.
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This is an age of wonder and of mystery, of horror and of hope. We realize that we are in very truth living out a great saga in our lives, in which we all have a part to play. The world seems to be a violent and dramatic place. Yet at the same time an awakening is happening, a surge of new thinking and vision and an explosion of new understanding. This is accompanied by the re-emergence of the timeless wisdom which in each age, in the idiom of the time, has told the great truth that humans are spiritual beings in a universe spiritual in its nature. The material world is seen as a reflection of this realm of higher consciousness from which it is derived. Life is a unity, poured out into infinite diversity and playing into myriads of beautiful forms. We humans are an integral part of this complex pattern and indeed in a real sense we are so placed in the hierarchy of life that we can be aware of higher forms of consciousness as well as the lower. Humanity is that point where evolution becomes conscious of itself.
The coming of the new age is a breakthrough of energies which are imbued with creative intelligence and love. It is sweeping like a rising tide which may wash away those who seek to go on working in accordance with the old law of every man for himself.
To use another analogy, it is like the bursting of the first green shoots after the “death” of winter. You may trample on the tender snowdrop, but you know that the force behind spring is something absolutely irresistible. So it is with the new age energies. Hence we see the energy and enthusiasm which characterize so many of the new groups, enterprises and centers devoted to the new values, new ways of living, new survival techniques, new community experience.
Now to the phenomenon of the Findhorn Garden. On windswept and barren sand dunes in the north of Scotland the most wonderful plants, flowers, trees and vegetables have been grown. The Findhorn Garden Story tells how it came about—how Peter Caddy and his colleagues discovered how to contact and cooperate with nature.
No cynic is able to explain away the fact of these flowers. Whatever anyone says, they go on burgeoning. Leading soil experts have declared that, in the initial years, compost and good organic husbandry alone could not have achieved these sensational results. No artificial fertilizers were ever used and the ground was as dead and profitless as imaginable. There must be some other factor.
The garden is a challenge and a source of immense hope. If one group can achieve this, others can follow. In days of threatened famine, here is an indication of a new way in which the earth may be made more fruitful. But it gives us much more than a practical means of growing bigger and better vegetables. Here is vision, and without vision, we know, the people perish.
The existence of the elemental and devic worlds has of course been known and acknowledged by many mystics and clairvoyants. Findhorn’s achievement in direct con-scious contact has, however, profound significance. It demonstrates quite practically that plant growth is not only a mechanical process. It appears that myriads of living and intelligent beings are at work within the flowers, leaves and roots. We are now called upon to recognize and work with these artisans and artists of living nature, servants of the Most High. We realize with horror what the human race in its greed, ignorance and arrogance is doing to the earth, to the plant world and to the animal kingdom.
Our ignorance of the reality of the nature spirits working in the plant world leads us to follow all sorts of practices which hurt and alienate those who should be our colleagues. It is very true that only a limited number of people have as yet developed faculties enabling them to see and communicate with them. This need not discourage us if our rational understanding can accept it. Indeed we are not being asked to believe so much as to allow room for a new idea to come in and see where this leads us. We grasp how the communing with other beings is telepathic in nature. Therefore we are called on to love our plants in a new way, to cherish and talk to them, to speak in thought to the beings of the trees and give them thanks for all their work for us. The splendid book The Secret Life of Plants, by Peter Tompkins, reveals the astonishing sensitivity of plants and gives understanding of humanity’s true relation to the plant world. What is happening is that all along the line barriers are breaking down within our minds, and resistance to the new vision is dissolving. We may now go forth openly with a new and loving attitude to the Life within nature.
Merely to read about Findhorn is not enough. We need the Findhorn experience each in our own degree, and no one ought to make judgment without going there. Remember that this is not somebody’s thought out plan. It is a phenomenon and a facet of expression of those living energies for renewal which are sweeping through our society now. Hence its creativity in all directions, of which the garden is but one. When I went there for the first time in 1968 I knew from the first moment that here was something very much alive, very healthy and ringing true. This doesn’t mean it is everyone’s cup of tea. Anything really dynamic through which the energies of change are pouring is bound to call down upon itself both praise and criticism. By no means would all find themselves at home in community living. But here was a community expression thoroughly sane, full of enthusiasm, striving for quality, dedicated avowedly to God and the service of the Divine Will. At the same time it had, to my mind, no false sentiment and none of the aberrations which to more conventional minds have brought discredit on some of the pioneer ventures. The garden is an image of the kind of creative action which the new age is demonstrating, but it is important to see it in the wider context of a community filled with energy, enthusiasm and love for all life.
Findhorn is not only a garden. From its small begin-nings it has grown into a large community. It demonstrates a down-to-earth philosophy and practice of living and working towards the unity of all life.
Thus though this book deals with the garden story, this is but part of the bigger enterprise in which a community develops for the growing not only of cabbage, but of souls. From one caravan and the first row of beans, it has grown into a village/university with a flexible organizational structure. Findhorn is beginning to demonstrate a new way of life. We are called on to form a new society truly dedicated to God and to survival through humanity’s conscious cooperation with the beings of higher worlds. This is not just airy froth. Nothing is in the end more practical than to allow the power of the spirit to influence activities of daily life. Findhorn is a striking demonstration of what can be achieved and how lives can be changed. The lead given there is likely to inspire many other communities and centers throughout the world. It gives us a faith to move forward into an unknown future, learning to live in the “now,” taking the next step with an inner certainty that, if the work is dedicated to the glory of God, the real needs (His needs through and in us) will be met to perfection. And then we remember to give thanks.
Thus this book will be an encouragement to many at a time when it is sorely needed. It will stretch thought and imagination and lead us out into the beauties of nature with a renewed sense of the vibrant kinship of all life.
The Organic Center
The theme of the Findhorn garden—the cooperation of humanity with the kingdom of nature—has great significance in reorienting our consciousness towards the more holistic and transmaterial outlook which planetary survival would seem to require of us. The importance of the garden, as indeed of all areas of the community, lies in demonstrating the processes of the organic nature of consciousness attuned to the center and oneness of all life. Such an attunement can invoke and use in balance the formative, creative energies of the universe for the transformation of matter and the rebuilding of the Earth.
At a time when much is being written about the pos-sibilities of communication with extraterrestrial beings, it is instructive to realize that we are surrounded by a world of intelligent lives who wield the most potent forces on Earth and who are eagerly waiting to enter into renewing a meaningful dialogue with us. As has been eloquently pointed out in this book, these lives have much to teach us and, in turn, they look to humanity for help and instruction in furthering the causes of evolution. They offer us a true partnership, as well as affirming humanity’s essential divinity. Humanity has been playing with the fringes of true power, and has come close to destroying its world in the process. Findhorn demonstrates the entry into a shared realm of real power, consecrated by a partnership of love, wisdom and understanding.
Deeper than that lies another message, as well, which the cooperation demonstrated in the Findhorn garden and its community has to offer—we all participate in and reflect the same universal processes of growth. Our planet is informed with a life and a spirit which is gradually unfolding itself, realizing its latent potentials. This process repeats itself on every level of being. It can be symbolized by the unfolding seed that reveals through the various life stages of a tree, a flower or a vegetable the wholeness of what it is. The esoteric traditions of all cultures speak of the “withinness” of things that seeks to externalize and to fulfill itself. If we think of our planet as an organic, growing system—a living being—then it, too, has an image of fulfillment buried within its seed center, an image that is using all of nature as its means of emergence.
Within such a concept, humanity occupies a unique position. We share in the biosystem, the ecology, the psychic energies of the natural world of Earth, yet we participate in a world of thought and intuition and of spirit that extends beyond this world. Unlike the patterns that encompass the evolution of plants and animals, our evolution is open-ended, open to creative repatterning by our own consciousness. (This potential, which is basically spiritual, is dimly reflected in modern attempts at genetic engineering and bio-molecular manipulation to change hereditary programming.) We can become true Lords of Evolution, taking over our own development from the forces of planetary nature which have brought us this far and extending that awareness and ability to assist the entire field of Earth’s evolution.
Thus, humanity represents the stage of Earth’s unfoldment at which the planetary soul be-comes not only self-aware but functionally and creatively con-scious of the processes through which growth, awareness and the externalization of spirit through form take place. Such a consciousness can say not only, “I am,” but it can also say, “I know how I am what I am. I know and can work with the processes of identity through which I am becoming what I am.” The devas are personifications and embodiments of these processes. They represent to humanity the consciousness which it must manifest in order to take its next evolutionary step.
To me, the New Age consciousness is essentially self-aware and rooted in its organic center of identity, that point where consciousness emerges from pure being into dynamic becoming. Such a consciousness participates knowingly in the growth process by understanding that process and thus wielding its energies. The essence of all growth processes is, in fact, divinity. Therefore, this consciousness is aware of divinity, but not as a thing, a possession, nor as some external agency that directs it. Rather, divinity is the very core and source and identity of the process of its being. Living that process with awareness, the New Age consciousness is capable of becoming one with its source. Revealing the secret of the creative power of organic, integrated growth is Findhorn’s contribution to this unfolding consciousness within humanity.
The affirmation of the organic center of identity and the process of emergence pervades Findhorn. Whether perceived through the devic or elemental influences of the garden, through attunement to God and to divine guidance, or simply as the creative spirit working through individuals who are given freedom to fulfill themselves in relation to a creative community, this process is the true phenomenon of this center by the North Sea. They are not just growing vegetables and flowers on barren sand. They are working with the processes of emergence and drawing out of Earth its potential. This actualization of the living Self of the planet is what has transformed the barren sand into a garden. The same is true for the members of the community. These people are not unfolding because they are working in a garden, a pottery, a college, or any of the other activities in which Findhorn is now engaged. They are being transformed into new people because they are learning to identify with the process of themselves, rather than with their forms. They are learning to understand and to be the growth energies that are stored within the depths of their organic psyche, their seed center of individuality.
Findhorn sounds a note of return to nature, but this can be deceptive, for it is not just the nature of woodlands and forests, of meadowlands and gardens, of shaded glens and still lochs and ice-crowned peaks. The return is to the dynamics of nature, the “nature” of nature. It is a return to the soul and intelligence and divinity of nature of which humanity is an integral part and through which the spirit of man is revealed. This is the world that Findhorn demonstrates. This is the Findhorn garden story, the story of the processes by which the world was born and by which it evolves; the processes by which the world now reaches, with the help of humanity, for a new unity of spirit and release of energy in evolution.
In this demonstration, Findhorn and the garden straddle the past and the future. By drawing us back into myth and legend and into cooperation with the spirits of the Earth, Findhorn invites us to a more ancient time when man was young and shared his world knowingly with these beings. This priceless gift of wonderment invites us to become as little children, dancing in an elven ring of quicksilver delight. We are offered the renewal of links only recently forgotten in the rush to industrialize the Earth. Yet at the same time, Findhorn proclaims the image for humanity of a new maturity, the birth of the consciousness of participatory divinity, of co-creation with God.
The Findhorn Garden Story is the story of these people and of Findhorn’s remarkable garden. Behind all of this, you are reading of yourself and the nature of the life you share. Whether you tend a garden or not, you are the gardener of your own being, the seed of your destiny. As demonstrated at Findhorn, the principles involved go far beyond gardening and embrace all activities of life. Perhaps in these pages you will discover ways to make your own sandy places bloom with new life and to enter more fully into the cosmic adventure of living.
The Findhorn Garden Story is available from Findhorn Press (www.findhornpress.com), one of the world’s leading publishers in the fields of spirituality, healing, and self development.
