"I was born in Kassel, Germany. I never got to know my father, because my parents split up when I was two years old. I only saw him once, when I was six. My mother played a central role in my life, as did my grandfather, a truly grand old man with long, white hair and a big heart. I still feel a strong tie to them. My mother remarried a politician, and I was expected to become one as well. I could soon keep up adult conversation, which made them laugh. I have fond memories of grandfather's big garden with its ancient trees, and of old-fashioned aunts and uncles in cigar-smoke-filled, oak-furnished living rooms. My great-grandfather was a master tailor, and his mirror-lined workrooms had a great working table on which apprentices sat cross-legged, working with multicoloured cloth. It transported me into a world of fairy tales.
"As a teenager, my childhood world collapsed and I went into a crisis. I felt a sense of uselessness in me and all around me that I couldn't bear, so I started drinking heavily. I was short and I made up for it by being tough — and drinking. My parents wanted to put me into a rehabilitation centre for alcoholics. Somehow I knew I had to help myself battle my depression and find meaning in life. I started hanging around groups of equally desperate people, but also the Hare Krishna movement and other religious cults and sects. I became fascinated by a group of Jesus people, who were concerned with living and applying love. They had a drop-in cafe for people like me. I went along and argued with them, at the same time feeling suicidal, drinking and getting into fights outside.
"Finally one of them said, 'We've talked for six months and nothing's changed. Now I'm going to pray for you. Come with me, if you're not afraid.' I couldn't back down on that challenge. Several of us went into their prayer room. Among them was a huge black American GI who started crying during the prayers. I realised he was crying about me. I ran out through the night and the rain, a 16-year-old totally frightened that a stranger could cry because of me. The next day I went back, desperate. I tried to speak to God, and said, 'If you exist, take charge of my life.' Then for the first time I consciously experienced unconditional love; every object and living being around me was directly communicating love to me. At that time I called it Jesus saving me.
"I stopped drinking and smoking and joined the movement. I trained to be a forester during the day, and in the rehabilitation centre in the evening I worked with junkies and child prostitutes. I learned the basic spiritual truths of the Bible. It's still my sounding board; when I read other teachings, they resonate on the basis of what Christ said and did.
"A group of us split off from the others because we felt they were getting too establishment-oriented. Four of us opened our flat as a halfway house for ex-prisoners and ex-junkies. I had endless energy. I worked as a forester all day and then till two in the morning with the street people. Money we earned we gave away. Once we spent all we had on flowers and went through the streets giving them to people and saying, 'God loves you.' Another time we made a huge Christmas dinner in a church basement and picked up taxi-loads of junkies and prostitutes to eat it. Four of my friends whom we were trying to help died from an overdose of heroin. At that time 'born again' Christians in Europe weren't a bad thing.
"But the established churches and the police were ambivalent, although we were totally clean of drugs. The police searched the flat. The churches refused us premises, but sent us their 'impossible' cases. Gradually we ran ourselves dry.
"While I was doing alternative military service in a kindergarten with Turkish kids, I met a 'wise being'— a very kind spiritual friend and teacher who took me deeper into spirituality and introduced me to Eastern religions and practices. Then I began learning from a Hindu monk. An old German lady taught me Vipassana meditation and for three years we met in her shrine room for Buddhist studies and group meditations.
"After five years in forestry and one and a half years in the kindergarten I gave up everything, put on a backpack and started on a three-year journey visiting monasteries and spiritual communities in Europe and Asia. I studied Zazen and T'ai Chi, and lived with Franciscans, Benedictines and Tibetan Buddhists.
"A very important experience for me was becoming a Buddhist in Nepal — taking refuge, it's called. The ceremony involved having my hair cut off and chanting with my teacher/Lama in front of a beautiful statue of the compassionate Buddha. During the ceremony I had a clear vision of Christ next to the Buddha, winking and smiling at me and giving the thumbs up sign. I had a sense of living in harmony between the Buddha and the Christ. Later, during a tantric meditation, I became very ill. I had a near-death experience and would have died if it hadn't been for the monks, who looked after me. But during the experience I had a sense of pure consciousness, of God as Oneness, with no dualism.
"In my travels I had already visited the Findhorn Community. I had a resistance to the different type of spirituality here, but after three or four visits, during which I fell in love with Newbold garden, the sense came to me that I should stay. I couldn't resist for long. In a few weeks I was focalising the garden; after three years, Newbold itself. When Cally proposed I should focalise, I refused. It didn't square with my hippie self-image. But I knew that the underlying reason was fear. I stayed open and asked God. In the end I had to say, 'Yes. The answer is, "Not my will, but mine".'
"I'm glad I did. It has been beautiful to watch Newbold grow. To live in harmony, you have to acknowledge the gifts you are given and not try to be someone else. It's taken me eight years to understand these gifts which make Newbold unique within the Findhorn Community and that they have a lot to do with 'root space', the dark, the feminine, the Earth as a living being. To grow our own fruit of spirit in this community we have to nurture our roots as well as stretching up towards the light, to care equally for yin and yang qualities.
"You must understand that we are an aspect of and inseparable from the larger Findhorn Community I see the whole symbolised in the yin/yang symbol, with Newbold, Erraid and Iona being a focus for the earth and inward energies, while the Park, the Hall and Outreach are the outward, yang energies. For some things the intrinsic energies are in the Foundation, for others they are here. Our land and trees give a womb-like energy, whereas the Park is light, open. The Park is the residential and commercial area, Cluny is the university and Newbold might be a new model for an educational monastic setting. A Foundation Trustee once called it the ashram of the community. I spend 12 to 15 weeks a year in silence, focusing on our spiritual practices through the various workshops and retreats I facilitate. For many people silence is very scary. We make it safe here to deal with the undefined, feminine, not-yet-born, silent space.
"For the British authorities, we were comfortable to register ourselves as a religious institution rather than as a business, and that's what we are. This spring, we made a commitment to put spirit first in everything we do — to put being before doing, so that any activity can become prayer and worship. There are no great changes on the form level, although we have already had two four-week retreats this year, but the general energy and atmosphere in the house are becoming much more spiritually based, and there is a greater dedication of the members to spiritual practice. For us, the future is to grow in spirit; what form that takes is secondary.
"Our lifestyle here is one of sharing. More people are coming to live here for a longer time and 'common unity' is a strong theme in our programmes, as a form of spiritual teaching and message. At present more people want to share this than we can accommodate. We have started to invite spiritual leaders here. A Catholic priest shared a Eucharist with us in our sanctuary, and Native American teachers lead earth-sky ceremonies. Through these events a particular atmosphere is generated and we become a meeting point for many spiritual traditions.
"My vision for Newbold is that it may become more and more a place of refuge and learning, a place built on our love of God, shared with each other."
In the interview I have not emphasised François's artistic side. He is a wonderful mime artist and actor. He says of mime:
"One is given permission to be totally open and vulnerable, to reveal oneself without making a commitment, without saying, This is me, here.' It may be me, but the white-painted face raises a question mark. It is liberating to express oneself without cumbersome words; a kind of therapy for me.
"I was born in Paris. After studying law my father, who had been a graphic designer for the press, built, together with my mother, their own real estate business. I don't have many childhood memories. I was a keen, hardworking scholar. I specialised in maths, physics and languages at school.
"My parents were spiritual, and at around 16 I began to read their library of the Eastern and Western mystery traditions. I loved particularly to study the spiritual practices of the East. But I resisted my father's views, and for a while argued everything in opposition to him. Finally I read a spiritual book that really spoke to me: Lobsang Rampa's The Third Eye.
"After baccalaureate I went to business school, and part of the course involved a study visit. I chose India, with the ostensible purpose of examining the effects of the green revolution. But my real purpose was to visit ashrams. I was exploring all the levels of Indian society and culture when I received a telegram from my girlfriend. She was pregnant! I returned to marry her, and then my son Philippe was born. My marriage closed the avenue to the East!
"Soon afterwards I read a pamphlet about the Findhorn Community. We came for a visit at Christmas 1971. It all seemed to be happening here — the Hierarchy had come down to earth! I completed business school and returned to the community in 1972. Roc, Spangler, Dorothy, everyone was here; it was buzzing and aglow with light — a tiny community, but very impressive. I immediately decided to stay and moved into the Accounts Department. But my wife wasn't so happy. We had tried to make the best out of the marriage, but love wasn't there. After three years she moved back to France with Philippe.
"I became concerned with accounts, administration and management groups. After Spangler left, I continued to develop the embryonic 'college' for members that he had started. Michael Lindfield, who later wrote the book The Dance of Change, and I gave all sorts of courses on 'The Grand Order of the Universe'. It was great fun. I also went touring for the Foundation.
"By 1978 relations between Peter and Eileen were very uneasy. Peter was being drawn to other women and their marriage gradually fell apart. He decided to leave Eileen and go to Hawaii. When Peter said he was off, I'd just come back from a lecture tour in the United States and I was planning to leave the community myself. Peter said, in effect, 'I'm going. Here's the baby!' I was 28. It was a challenge for me. I thought, 'I'll do it!'
"I inherited a situation in which the community was in crisis on three levels. Firstly, there was a spiritual crisis — of faith and of vision. The question was being put: Is the Findhorn Foundation past its heyday? Is it now going downhill? Secondly, there was a crisis of leadership. Peter's at times very autocratic style of leadership had created a general distrust of authority. Also people had idealised images of Peter and Eileen, and their separation turned those images to dust. The third crisis was financial. We were on the verge of bankruptcy. We couldn't even pay basic things like telephone bills; the phones were cut off at one point. People would start a project, spend money and leave. There was no budgeting, no strict accounting.
"We had to work on all three levels in parallel. To nurture a sense of faith required placing a new emphasis on meditation, meeting together as a community and developing the next phase of the vision, that of the 'planetary village'. It was essential to move away from the distortion of a glamorous new age hippie movement and recapture the sense of a high destiny in what we were doing. We started meditation groups and organised community meetings about our vision and purpose, and in 1982 Roger Doudna and I focalised a conference on the theme of the planetary village.
"In regard to leadership, we started to put democracy in place, but the community membership halved in a period of two years and the 'village council' that we set up became superfluous. We placed much more emphasis on the focalisers and started the staff programme, for which we negotiated new visa arrangements with the Home Office. We tried to create structures of some permanence with a foot in the real world.
"Financially, it was essential to put controls in place. We started with an annual telephone bill of £12,000. After 16 months of locking phones and closing lines we were making a profit! We completed a new accounting system and made all the focalisers do their own budgets. On the one hand we had to stop the leaks, so our resources wouldn't flow out. On the other, it was necessary to put the Foundation on a solid long-term capital base. It could not rely purely on donations and guest fees. That could never provide the capital to finance expansion.
"All these themes came together with the chance to buy our land and remove a major symbol of impermanence. My expectation was that the Caravan Park would provide one third of our income. To raise the purchase money, we had a team of staff focalisers in place to pull the community together. We raised two thirds of the cost by donations and paid off the other third in two years, giving us a £400,000 asset.
"For me, this felt like a completion of my time as community focaliser. Now the Findhorn Foundation had a vision, was evolving its own method of self-governance and had the .means to pay its debts. I felt complete. I was tired of interminable meetings — I was longing to do something. I wanted to leave, but I met Hannah, who was just coming into the community. It was clearly right for her to be here, so I stayed. My soul, however, was calling me to move out of the Foundation. I had eight bouts of bronchitis that year. Later I felt that I'd have lost my life if I'd remained a member any longer.
"I had talked so much about the planetary village, however, that I did want to be part of building it from the ground up.
"I spent a year in NFD putting a time-share scheme together in response to a request to finance a million-pound community centre complex, but the scheme was several times undermined (cf. the account in Chapter 11 — CR). Then I met Stephan. I thought, 'I'm not going to waste my time in the Foundation — this time I'll build a business where I can be more in control of my own destiny!' So I became an entrepreneur.
"We started by working together on a new accounting package for the Foundation. Out of that grew Alternative Data. The challenge was to reconcile spirituality and business. I hadn't felt able or inclined to do that before.
"Business is the dominant institution of our culture. It needs people with consciousness, or nothing will work. I wanted to build a successful cooperation with spirit in business from the ground up, making a contribution by demonstration. There were so many workshops on new age economics. There are plenty of consultants. But could we transform the institution of business from the inside? I wanted to try it.
"The actual experience has been difficult, although the project itself has been exhilarating. Our business colleagues and partners are great people. The company is in God's hands — we've many times been on the brink of collapse and have been picked up. It's the human relations aspect that's been a shock. I have come to realise to what extent violence can be legitimised through business. Not physical violence, but psychic violence through the exercise of power. Generally, only one part of a person's identity can function in business. The whole system is based on status hierarchies. I'm suddenly in the middle of it and I think, 'No wonder the world doesn't work.' Power is the most difficult human transaction, and it's constantly battled over in our office.
"I thought meditations on Monday mornings and being nice to customers would do it; instead, I had to deal with intense personality conflicts in a system where power is also equated with money. Yet there is great excitement. All the problems have had to do with perceptions of power. Power to stifle and manipulate, or to create, enliven and challenge. There's no other way of dealing with power issues except by bringing them out and working them through till there's some result.
"I'm going ahead in faith, trusting that this path also has a heart."
"I was born in Edinburgh, but my father was in the Colonial Service, so we left Scotland when I was one and I grew up in Africa, a couple of years in Nigeria and then in Lesotho. We used to live in what were called 'camps', administrative centres for the colonial government, with about ten white families and a varying number of black families. It was a very safe environment. I was out of doors a lot. I loved it. Later I was sent to boarding school in South Africa, and it was always a relief to come home for the holidays, take off my shoes and roam barefoot again. My brothers and sister and I all developed very tough soles!
"I was sent to an all-girls' school in Pietermaritzburg. I didn't enjoy it much until my last two years, but I liked learning and I did very well there. My father was well liked in Lesotho. He considered himself to be preparing people to take over the running of the country, and respected them, irrespective of colour. Segregation there had more connotations of class than race. It was in South Africa that segregation and apartheid really struck me. Partly it was the contrast between Lesotho, where segregation was breaking down, and South Africa, where it was tightening up and becoming increasingly enforced by law. I began writing about what I saw, thought and experienced, discovered the writings of Alan Paton and decided to be a journalist.
"At university I began working for the weekly student newspaper and became involved in student union politics through the National Union of South African Students. I wrote articles about student affairs for a liberal newspaper (which I joined a few years later) and when I left university I spent a year running the South African National Student Press Association, a news service for the student press, as well as working for the South African Institute of Race Relations. In the meantime Lesotho became independent, my father died, and my family moved to South Africa. The kinds of activities I was involved in obviously didn't endear me to the South African authorities, because my request for residency was turned down and I was asked to leave the country. I appealed, and after a lengthy process which included being asked to leave three more times, I received a permanent residence permit. By that time I had been working as a newspaper journalist for three years.
"In Lesotho my family had known a healer and she had an ongoing influence on me. When my arm was broken in a car accident and then had to be reset in a bone graft operation, she sent me healing and I recovered remarkably quickly. A group of us in Cape Town began to have ouija-board-type seances, in which we received spiritual teachings for about a year. One thing that was emphasised was that the motivation for political action was very important. If it was spurred by hatred, violence and judgement, it wouldn't help. At the end of the year we had a final message, telling us in effect that the seeds had been sown and that it was time for this phase of the teaching to end. The experience led me back into contact with the churches and, through them, to the movement for Christian Education and Leadership Training, which used group dynamics, human relations training and encounter techniques within a spiritual framework. I was excited by this work and by the transformative effect it had on the people in the multiracial and ecumenical groups which CELT organised, and finally I gave up my job and came to Britain to explore it further.
"Over the next two years I explored a variety of approaches to individual and group work — Gestalt, re-evaluation co-counselling, massage, meditation, and T-group and group dynamics training. I spent a summer in Northern Ireland on a project bringing young Catholic and Protestant teenagers together both in work and recreational activities. A key time for me was spending six months with the St Mungo community in London, a group which worked with destitute men. All the tried-and-tested beliefs and ways of being I had developed over the previous few years were challenged there, and I found myself plunged into a devastating sense of hopelessness and despair, in which it seemed to me that we were all, at core, destitute. The only way I could deal with it was to stop thinking, to give up judgements and evaluations and to live in the present.. . and through this, amazingly and wonderfully, came a new sense of God's immanent presence, and an incredible joy. I began to feel I was receiving teaching, even
through what by chance I picked up to read, or what I saw on the few occasions I watched TV. It was a pivotal time in my life.
"My mother had heard about the Findhorn Foundation and when she spent time in Britain in 1972 we visited the community together. The person showing us around was talking about angels and I felt someone lay their hands on my shoulders, but when I looked there was no one there. Elfreda said, "You'll be back. You belong here."
"I went back to South Africa, but had no wish to stay. Then I spent a few weeks at the Foundation; I was very drawn to the place but wasn't sure about joining. I wanted to be socially active; also I was uneasy that people in the community weren't working much with their emotions. I went back to London and a couple of months later was offered a good job in youth education with the Church of England. It was time to make a choice. After some indecision, I knew I was to come to the Findhorn Community. I arrived back to stay in August 1973. I remember there were chickens where the Hall is now!
"On the night I arrived, I had a dream. I was in my own, loved house, and I was going to die at four o'clock. I put everything in order in the house, then sat in a window seat in the sun, ready to die. Next morning when I woke up, I had a new sense of myself.
"I came as one of a number of slightly older people, after the 'youth wave' of the early seventies. We had a lot to say about how we thought things should be. It was disconcerting to the longer-established people. We started a choir and wrote a Mass in D, for angels and humans — our understanding was that D was the note of the new age. There was no Orientation programme for new members in those days, but the experience in the choir provided the space and opportunity for us to work through many of the issues that are part of the integration process here. It was an intense group process which helped to insulate us from the rest of the community and also them from us! When we eventually proudly performed the mass, half the community went home feeling ill. Roc took us aside and told us that D was actually the note of purification!
"I began working in Publications and got interested in David Spangler's writings as I typeset some of his books. I have spent much of my time here involved with that department, editing, writing, publishing. I have also worked a lot with education. When I came there was little place in the Foundation for people's distress and there was a mistrust of support techniques. There was a sense in which the spiritual level was seen as 'good' and the personality level as 'not good'. A group of us — mostly women — with experience in emotional and group work became quite vocal and active, but we were seen as a threat and some of us were called up before the all-male Management Group to explain ourselves. It was clear we would have to find new ways of doing things or leave, so we started to develop experiential components for the programmes here, seeking to add them to the esoterics then being taught. We also began the 'group discovery' programme which is now part of the Experience week. Gradually these aspects became incorporated into the education and 'techniques' became respectable.
"After 18 months I became part of the Management Group myself. It met every morning. There would be a meditation, and then a theoretical discussion between Peter, François and Dick Barton. Other people didn't speak much and when they did, were not really listened to. My idea of circle sharing so we could really hear each other was resisted for months. When we finally did it, it was such a breakthrough that it quickly became standard practice. I was learning the spiritual context, but for years I was the spokesperson for the human context — giving space to all of ourselves. Nowadays, though, I sometimes feel we have to be careful not to get so caught up in the pull of personal process that we forget the spiritual context.
"For years I was involved in community administration; I was on and off the Management Group, and spent three years in the Personnel Department. But gradually my ongoing association with the Game of Transformation, which dates back to 1978, became dominant, and I began to focalise the Game in 1987.
"In 1988 the community supported me to join the spiritual Core Group. I was ambivalent about it at first, because I am no longer much involved with the specifics of the Foundation's work; most of my time and attention goes into the Game. But the community is very close to my heart, and I feel I have perspectives to offer. I also feel a very strong connection with the energy running through this centre, which I relate to as a friend and teacher. The Core Group is a holding and amplifying group for this energy, and we have had some very powerful meditations.