Jennifer Clowes is a good buddy of mine, the only one outside Findhorn, in fact, who has made the trip up here to visit me (and get involved in various hippy shenanigans while she was at it of course). You can catch her blog here:
www.opticalparadox.co.uk/wordpress
OK, well the Trustees have decided that when October comes, and Newbold has honoured all of its commitments to hosting workshops, the house will be sold or leased to a new project. In April they will look at all of the proposals and in May they will attune to the one that is most in alignment with them and the Findhorn way.
At the meeting in which this decision was revealed I received it quite philosophically. The prospect of living in community until October, enjoying the summer here, was an enticing prospect, and who knows, maybe the new project will be something inspired.
My equanimity was short lived, however. It evaporated a few minutes later when we were also informed that from April to October the community decision-making structure would be replaced by a management structure. If I wished to stay at Newbold it must be as a worker under a manager. My heart sank. I had quit my job in Swansea, as a worker under a manager, in order to travel North to live in community and a different way of life.
Now, for a little while at least, Newbold will be a place where I can work in order to have a roof over my head and my cost of living bills paid. And I’ll get some pocket money too.
When I voiced my discontent at my unwilling transition from an equal member of a community to an employee several voices urged me to understand that I could still have an experience of community if I maintained the right attitude. This is, of course, absolutely true. But to say it then was, in my opinion, simultaneously obtuse. But it was obtuseness born of not wanting me to feel hurt, disillusioned, disaffected, etc.
“Have the right attitude, Ianto, and you’ll be okay.”
Yep. I nod my head without irony, because it’s true. It’s true.
The Trustees have done the best they could in good faith and they are tired. It is as it is and I have had time to reflect.
During all of this mini adventure on the temporal plane I’ve also been engaging in a mini spiritual crisis. It’s always interesting to see how the inner and outer worlds reflect and affect each other …
I’ve read two books in the last month that have each inspired and dismayed me in equal measure. These were THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE UNIVERSE: two ascended masters appearing to the author and discussing the merits of A COURSE IN MIRACLES, and STAR MAKER, by Olaf Stapledon: a classic science fiction in which one man journeys through the cosmos as a disembodied mind in order to witness its birth, development and death and to ultimately meet its creator, before returning to his humble existence back on Earth.
What dismayed me in THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE UNIVERSE was the conviction that everything perceived by the senses is a ‘miscreation’ that does not come from God but from the insanity of the ego. This dismays me because it scares me and it scares me because it’s so compellingly believable.
STAR MAKER dismayed me because in his conclusion, Stapledon portrays the cosmos as a place in which the most terrible of torments can and are inflicted on the helpless creations of the Divine. This Divinity is described as something that is so beyond the comprehension of the limited perceptions of the human mind, that it can only be worshipped and adored for its ineffable ‘moreness’, despite what horrors may seem to be born from it.
Summarised like that it sounds quite heavy and depressing (which is fair enough, cos it is) but it’s also finely reasoned and compelling.
So two very different yet strangely similar views there of the human condition for me to appraise and wrestle with. I also found during this time that I became worn out with some of the online discussions I was taking part in, or reading. The pessimism of the people I was talking to with regards to the ‘imperfections’ of the human creature became too much for me to subject myself to anymore.
The message I have been bringing to myself, through these books, through these message boards, is this:
‘You are small. You are imperfect. You are incapable of knowing truth. You are incapable of apprehending the Absolute. Truth and beauty and divinity does exist but it is bigger than you, beyond you, better than you. Absolute perfection exists, but it is not you. You are doomed to be less than that which is truly good, and then to die.’
And the people bringing me this message are amazing, intelligent, eloquent, inspiring people. I admire them in many ways, I really do.
But this message has been brought to me in all of these different ways because I have been asking in my prayers for the Truth. This message has been brought to me so that I can appraise it and measure it against my own experience. This message has been brought to me so that I can respectfully decline it.
Yes, it is true that the cosmos around me seems to be so big and magnificent and ineffable that by comparison I am an insignificant spec. But the truth of my experience is that I am the very centre, the pivot on which two universes turn: the outer and the inner. What I see in the vastness surrounding me, spreading out to the stars and beyond, is balanced pound for pound by what is inside me. I know this to be true. I know it. It is blindingly obvious.
Size and relativity are illusions. The smallest grain of sand is absolutely equal to the entirety of God. The most depraved and devastated wreck of a psychotic human is equal to the highest of angels.
There is no hierarchy of worth.
There is no hierarchy of worth.
It does not exist.
There is no one thing that is not supremely miraculous nor patently inevitable. That the grain of sand exists at all is the most sublime of miracles to me. Why should the evidence of the existence of God seem bigger and better to me than the evidence of the existence of a grain of sand? How could one be more or less miraculous than the other? They are one and the same thing.
In THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE UNIVERSE the ascended masters say that the Absolute Truth can be spoken in just two words …
God is.
That sounds fair enough to me. Yet I have my own two-word sentence, an antidote to every belief that we are insignificant or somehow unworthy, and I say that it is the equal of ‘God is’ …
I am.
That is the truth of my experience. I am all that I know. I am all that I have ever known. There is no part of me that is less me than any other part. Anything that I experience is a part of me. So I am all that I will ever know. Nothing is excluded from what I am, not grains of sand nor God.
There lies the equality I was looking for in community. There lies the community I was looking for, and it will be there with me wherever I go.
