A Time For Us

An old friend from early in my spiritual community days has died.  The information has brought back a flood of memories.

Bruce Davidson was, as far as I knew, part of the flood of Americans to the Findhorn Foundation spiritual community in the north of Scotland occasioned originally by the presence there (for three years) of a young spiritual-teacher Yank by the name of David Spangler, and then by the publication in the early ‘70s (and then a reissue by a more normal book format in the mid-‘70s) of his book ‘Revelation: The Birth OF A New Age’.!  A very nice-looking guy, probably in his late twenties, Bruce was in a relationship with another American; much to the chagrin of many of the gals there, I can well imagine.2  But his main feature was meditation.  He would - could - spend hours, seemingly, in the Sanctuary.  An inspiration to many of us.  He and his to-become wife ended up shortly thereafter returning to the States, to the East Coast, in Massachusetts, where they, along with some like-minded friends from the community, started a community of their own, called Sirius.3  For income, besides guests visiting their ‘little Findhorn’ - complete with a garden grown on the same holistic principles as at the home base community of their inspiration - they give, to this day still, holistic building workshops.  Bruce had been a builder in his background, and had carried on with his inclinations along that line while still at the FF by building the first of what became many loft beds in the Cluny Hill College ‘campus’ of the Findhorn Community, where I met him.  A former hotel - which the founders of the community, an English couple by the name of Peter and Eileen Caddy, along with their spiritual partner, a Canadian named Dorothy Maclean, had been managing before they moved to the Findhorn Bay Caravan Park, which is the home base of the community, with ‘Cluny’ coming back into the picture, after 15 years, in 1972, by way of its purchase by the then-thriving community4 - it had small rooms but with high ceilings, and Bruce saw the possibilities of converting his room to allow for more living space.  

As to this business, of a spiritual community and holistic building principles (in the use of materials, etc.), a brief aside: I visited their community some years later, specifically in the late summer of 1982, with an eye to perhaps joining them in their admirable initiative  I had left our mutual parent community the year before, to come back to the States to work with an NGO connected with the UN called Planetary Citizens, which was the secretariat for a global educational project called The Planetary Initiative for the World We Choose, and, feeling that my time there was up, I was looking for my next steps, and thought to visit Sirius.  The community, that is.  (We may have had our heads in the stars, but we never thought to take our whole bodies there.)5  And so off I went, from NYC, for a weekend visit.  Was warmly welcomed - as is the custom of Findhorners the world over.  And liked what I saw.  But, in tuning into it, I knew that it was not for me.6  And so back to PC I went, for a short while longer. (Those of us running the office, across the street from the UN building on the Lower East Side of NYC,  lived in community in a large home upstate a short ways, in leafy New Rochelle.)  And ended up going back to the Community proper.  Where I walked back into Cluny only to be greeted at the front door with a member saying, casually, almost as if it had all been planned that way, ‘Hi, Stan.  Nice to see you back.  Care to take over the focus for the cleanup from the fire?’

What fire?  It turned out that only the weekend before, late on a Friday night, somebody had set fires going (via Molotov cocktails) in three places in the building; which fortunately were caught in time before occasioning any loss of life or doing any major structural damage, but there was a huge amount of smoke damage done - in our large dining room, a corner of the main hallway, and in our Sanctuary.  So I walked right back into my old unofficial job of being a particularly guardian spirit to Dear Olde Cluny.  Another story.  

Let me finish this note of homage to Bruce and the Findhorn Community, and their common spirit, with an anecdote about what all we were up to in those heady days, and building on Bruce’s main spiritual practice of meditation to do it by.

To set the scene: Eileen Caddy was the Channel of the couple, and Peter was the Activator.  She was Love, he was Will.  (Dorothy was Wisdom; she ended up channelling messages from the realm of Devas, and nature spirits.  A story in its own right.  But just to say, and clarify, here: the community is best known for its connection with Nature.  And thus, a penchant for its membership to believe in the Global Warming-oops-Climate Change fraud.  But to continue! )  Eileen got messages - of spiritual inspiration, and specific instructions on what to do - from a source that she called, and considered, God, and Peter carried out the activating part of them.  He was a former officer in the British Army, and executed ‘orders’ just like that.  No questions.  Whatever Eileen got, he acted on.  That teamwork had carried them, first, to being very successful managers of a Three-Star hotel, raising it to Four-Star status during their five years there,7 and then, after a short fallow time, to the founding of a highly successful international spiritual community.  Of which, along the way, Eileen got ’guidance’ that it was now time that Peter needed to develop his own intuition more, and not rely so much on her guidance.8  To that end, he tried to meditate more; a practice that he was not very versed in, being the man of action - as I said, the Will aspect of their team - that he was.  (He told a group of us once that he could “meditate until I am blue in the face and not get anything.”)  With that said: I was in our main Sanctuary for a morning meditation once when the light outside the door was turned on to start the session by lo, Peter himself, who proceeded to lead it; a rare occasion.  (It may have been the only such occasion.)  I remember it well.  The leader says a few words of inspiration, and then leaves us to our meditations, and then wraps it up with a couple of closing words.  Peter started us off on a ‘normal’ footing.  And then all of a sudden, he was ‘inviting’ us to see, as part of a “City of Light” in that area, some of the buildings in the area, including a long-empty stately countryside mansion (that Peter had obviously had his eye on for some time, for our presumed next stage of development), and another mansion that had been turned into medical premises for the likes of ‘intellectually disadvantaged’ individuals.9  

Two things here.  One: None of us ‘normal’ members had any idea that Peter had such grandiose ideas of the development of the community.  Or that Eileen specifically shared in with (although her guidance had ‘talked’ about the community becoming part of “a vast City of Light”).  In the event, nothing ever came of that vision.  (On the physical, at least.  A City of consciousnesses?  Connected energetically??  Perhaps.)  And for whatever the information may have to do with this subject, Peter - whose physical relationship with Eileen was put under severe tension when she changed the dynamics of their ‘spiritual’ relationship - left the community not long after, and also because of having been asked by a woman to help bring ‘the New Age’ to Hawaii.10

Two.  The idea of “a City of Light” is not something specific to Eileen and Peter.  It was, in fact, part of the impulse for me to go join that community, of obviously likeminded souls, in the first place.  I had had my own ‘intuition’ about such a thing, such an idea, many years before, when I was living in Hollywood and writing a film script I was dreaming up about an American in Mexico who, towards the end of a series of metaphorical events, is leaving the space he had been in for some time and, when asked by a Darkside-turned Lightside companion what he wanted to do, replies, thoughtfully “I want to be in on the building of - “ at which point the writer intervenes, and leaves the rest of the sentence hanging, for some plot development to take place.  And the specific term is never mentioned in the denouement of the film.  But in said writer’s mind, what I had come up with - all, to my mind, out of nowhere; I had never heard the term before - was, - you guessed it.

And since that time, and since my time in that spiritual community in the north of Scotland, I have come across the term from a number of other sources.  Including a woman who has shared online that she is taken to visit such a City sometimes - on whatever level that she experiences it.  And who says that such Cities of Light will ‘descend’.  

In perfect timing. 

And perhaps - just perhaps - Peter was acting on a vision that he had interpreted - in his first attempts to ‘get his own guidance’ - as a real, literal, third-dimensional thing.11  When all the time, it was -

is -

of a different level than our current level of awareness.

That we are in the process - the Process - of moving into.

In an Ascension process.  

That Bruce Davidson has just beat us to, is all.

Be well, Bruce.

And wish us well, too.

On the same sort of journey.

Different in degree, perhaps.

But not in kind.                                                   

—

footnotes:

1 “This book deals with the emergence of a new consciousness within humanity, which will be the foundation fora New Age and a planetary culture.  Written around a modern revelation from transcendental sources, it shows the lower resent in each person to transform his or her world and bring a New Age into being.  It is a vision calling each of us to understand and embody that power now, to live the life of ‘Limitless Love and Truth.’  - from the Foreword       

2  An interesting footnote here: That gal, with her young daughter from a previous relationship, had come to the community with a gal friend who, the friend smilingly reported later to a group of us, had come to the community looking for a relationship while Bruce’s to-become partner had come strictly for the spiritual nature of the place, and who, as these things sometimes have a habit of working out,       ended up in relationship with Bruce, while the other gal ended up getting very involved in the spiritual aspects of the place. (To the point of ending up writing a holistic cookbook - ‘The Findhorn Family Cook Book’ - before returning to the States.  Where for a while she earned a living giving special meals to small groups.  And ended up earning a Ph.D. in life, no less.)   

   Many a relationship started, and ended, in the community.  It got a reputation for being ‘death on relationships’.  Mostly a twenty-something group of members, many of them were always looking for their ‘soul mates’ there.  Sometimes they found them.  I see, by the report on Bruce, that he was still with his wife of those days of yore.  This is the mid- to late-’70s time period I am talking about.   

  

3 I never knew precisely what the connection was.  He and his old brother, Gordon - also a member of the community during the same time period - were into esoterics, and felt an affinity with the star Sirius.  As have other people, in the New Age ‘field.’  As have others in the field with other of the stars or constellations - the Pleiades, Andromeda, etc.  It’s a Stare Being thing.

4 All ‘in perfect timing’ - one of the sayings of the community.  In this case, the Caddy’s and Dorothy had to get a thriving community off the ground and running well, and the hotel had to start losing money ever since the Caddys and Dorothy had left its management, for a ‘marriage made in heaven’ to take place  - for the community’s next stage of development.  Which was when I came tooth scene.

   But to continue.

5  Speaking of ‘headiness’: You have to understand the spirit of the times.  These were the heady days of The New Age - the ernest, very sincere desire on the part of many people, not just of the younger generation, to help create a new world.  

   And our time seems, finally, to have come.

   But to continue.

6 A footnote about the ‘humanness’ of all this:

   Bruce’s wife’s daughter from her previous relationship - marriage or not, I don’t know; these are changing times even back then - was a very spoiled young brat, to tell it like it was, or at least seemed to be, to many of us.  And when I visited their community in Massachusetts those some years later (four or five), there she was, still, now in the guise of a spoiled young woman.  I remember trying not to judge.  After all, I hadn’t walked even a short distance in her moccasins.  Maybe there were deep issues regarding her birth dad and her mom in her early years.  And maybe her mother had tried to overcompensate, in some way, from the stress on her daughter, of the extent of, and ending of, that relationship.  All I knew was that a) I didn’t want to be in that sort of environment; and b) I made a judgment about how far along her spiritual path another human being should be, by that time in her life, and with that environment to grow up in.  Of two separate, but similar, ‘spiritual communities’.

   We certainly carry it all with us, wherever we go.  Don’t we.

   Oops…

7 From 1957 to 1962.  Running it strictly on ‘spiritual’ principles; which Peter defined, and carried out to the letter, as a) ‘Work is Love in Action,’ and b) ‘Perfection In All Things’ - ‘Give of your best in all that you do, because if you don’t, you are letting yourself down, you are letting the realm of Spirit down [which seeks to contribute its energy to our realm through us incarnates], and you are letting down all those other incarnate souls who could have been inspired by your example to give of their best’.

   Very worthy stuff.  It was the sort of thing - attitude - that attracted me there.

8 That was a message for the fledgling community members as well.  Which occasioned much mirth amongst the members, when they would start getting ‘competing’ guidance.

   I’m not sure about that bit, from Eileen.  I think that that sort of thing requires considerable past-life experience.  (As its founders were all reputed to have had.)  But you have to start somewhere.   And a spiritual community is not a bad place in which to start.

   Practice making perfect; and a supportive environment to do your practicing in, and by.

9 Yes yes: Perfect setting for us; right??  And the business about mansions: Was Peter - or whomsoever - trying to emulate the Christian idea of ‘Many Mansions’???…   

10 Where he had a hard time getting anybody to start anything like a New Age community, because the ex-members living there just wanted him to hang out like they were, enjoying the laid-back life there, especially surfing.  Peter got involved there pushing the Pritikin Diet, as I understand; and then with a community of people at Mt. Shasta in California; and got remarried along the way, and had a boy with that woman.  (Whom they thought was ‘special’.  We at Findhorn met him once, when he was about 5 or 6.  The only thing special about him, to the mind of many of us, was that he seemed a very spoilt brat.  (What is it in these pages, along New Age lines, with spoiled children???)  And came back and visited the Community once in awhile.  And then got remarried again, with a woman whom he followed to Switzerland to live with.  Where he died in a car accident.  Driving too fast.   

   Trying to make up for lost time, I suspect.  

11 As, incidentally, I did, in thinking into the inspiration.  And had my character be involved in the building of a city in the south of North America revolving around a step pyramid - as exists in that area to this day.  And during which time he makes connection with a being from a spaceship, that lands at that site.  

   Because it has such a place - and with that degree of dedication - to land.

   And remake contact. 

   Two pars of a whole.  Coming back together.

   To complete a circuit.  And turn on the Light.  More forcefully.