by Mike Scott
There weren’t many people I could talk to about these interests apart from a couple of intrigued Waterboys like Steve Wickham and Karl Wallinger, a few old friends and my mother. Others, like Nigel Grainge who spotted me reading Dion Fortune’s The Esoteric Philosophy Of Love And Marriage in the Ensign offices one day, thought I’d lost a few screws. The only people I came across during the eighties who revealed a knowledge of The Perennial Wisdom happened to be three of the most intense characters I’d ever met, Steve Cooney, Kate Lovecraft and Robbie The Pict.
Cooney had been initiated by Aborigines in his native Australia and had the chest scars to prove it, and he understood those central pillars of the Aboriginal mysteries, the dreamtime and the songlines. But trying to talk to him about it through the swirl of his passions and paranoia was like trying to free a songbird from a thicket. Kate Lovecraft had knowledge of many kinds of spirituality and had been to India where she claimed to be on first-name terms with gurus like the godman Sai Baba, of whom she cooed, ‘he’s my friend!’ She showed me yoga exercises as well as techniques to change my attitude before going into a room, and how to attract spiritual experiences to myself by repeating ‘I want God’ over and over again like a mantra. I’m grateful to her for those, however ill-starred our relationship was. Robbie The Pict had owned a new age bookshop in Edinburgh and this involvement ran parallel with his campaign for Scottish independence and his fondness for blowing harmonica with grungy blues bands. We discovered our mutual interest in The Mysteries after a Waterboys show when Robbie, holding forth in a hotel bar about the condition of the world, exclaimed, ‘The problem is everyone’s afraid of three little words …’ and looked at me to see if I knew what he was going to say. Suddenly I did. We locked eyes and said in stereo, ‘I am God.’
When I moved to Ireland The Mysteries continued to inspire the writing of songs, including ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ and ‘Strange Boat’, until I headed west and became absorbed in the Celtic world. Here my absorption in spiritual literature receded; there was too much else to learn. But when I came out the other side of the Celtic mists at the end of 1990 I found my interest in The Perennial Wisdom awaiting me like an old friend. This time I was determined to go beyond learning on my own, which meant joining a group and receiving instruction in a specific system. And I figured that when I moved to New York, with all the different kinds of spirituality available in that most culturally liberated of cities, I’d at last find my teacher or school.
So between recording sessions for the Dream Harder album I kick-started the process by taking meditation classes. Meditation was something I’d been meaning to do for years. Being unable to meditate, despite all I’d figured out for myself, meant I felt like a spiritual virgin. If I could meditate, I imagined, I’d be able to access another mode of consciousness, and experience or perceive things that now I couldn’t. So I signed up for a Raja Yoga course at a New York bookshop and spent my evenings sitting in painful folded-leg positions, while inwardly repeating a mantra with twenty other beginners under the gimlet eye of an ascetic lady instructor called Lois. Lois was an initiate of the Hindu mysteries with a sharp but distant air about her, who’d never make eye contact with anyone in the class yet appeared to always know what we were all thinking and feeling. After a few weeks I discovered my preconceptions about meditation were absolutely right; it was like opening a new wing in the house of my mind from which I could observe myself and understand with more clarity why I did things. I could watch my thoughts and emotions without being them; a delightful liberation. But though meditation was a great tool, and one that I continued to practise, the path of the East itself didn’t appeal to me. I was still searching.
In the summer of 1992 Irene and I rented a house near Woodstock, a couple of hours north of New York, to which we’d retreat when the Manhattan heat got too crazy. My mother came over for a holiday, and one day she and I were browsing in one of Woodstock’s many cute new age bookstores when she spotted a video about a community in Scotland called Findhorn, which she’d recently visited. I dimly remembered reading an article about this place in the eighties and seeing a photograph of its founders, three respectable-looking elderly people with white hair. There had been something special about them, I remembered, but at the time I wasn’t drawn to explore further. My mother bought the video (its rather obscure title was Opening Doors Within) and that evening we watched it together, me doing so not because I was particularly interested but to keep my mother company. But as the film began, I found myself being pulled in. After five minutes I was gripped. After ten I was turning into the guy in Dylan’s song ‘Tangled Up In Blue’, who on reading a book of poems says, ‘Every one of those words ran true and glowed like burning coal, pourin’ off of every page like it was written in my soul.’
The agent of my electrification was one of the elderly people I’d seen in the photograph years before, a perm-haired lady called Eileen, and what she said in her down-to-earth way about the power of gratitude and love hit me like a thunderbolt. I’d come across such teachings before – the importance of loving oneself, the nature of unconditional love, and how a sense of gratitude is what keeps love flowing – but something about Eileen’s delivery made me hear these things as if for the first time. For in her voice was a profound yet gentle power, a mix of compassion, experience and grace, I came to realise later, that spoke directly to my heart. And a crucial thing: she wasn’t trying to make the viewer follow or believe her. She was showing them the way to their own wisdom, and because of this I instinctively felt right about her. Without knowing it I was responding to the hallmark of the true spiritual teacher, one who shows you how to access your power rather than taking it from you.
Yet Eileen was the most unlikely teacher I could imagine – a thousand miles from my ‘spiritual master’ preconceptions of beetle-browed men with cloaks and hats, or sylph-like women carrying old books down city streets on their way to secret meetings. No, my teacher had manifested after all these years as a cosy white-haired granny, and coming from her was everything I most needed to hear. When the film finished fifty-five minutes later I knew I would visit this Findhorn place. I’d found my school.
For several months I read everything on the Findhorn community I could find. It had begun in 1962 with a few mystics living in a caravan on some waste ground, then grew into a community based on The Perennial Wisdom premise that ‘God’ – or whatever name you want to give to the organising principle of the universe – is inside everything and everyone. The Findhorn people claimed to have found ways of contacting this inner spiritual source, and Eileen apparently could hear its guidance as a ‘still, small voice’ inside her. But what sealed it for me was that there was no pomp or fanfare. If these people were fakes they’d be hyping it to high heaven. Findhorn seemed to be a combination of the deeply spiritual and the deeply normal, and that felt authentic. But reserving judgment, I decided to go and see for myself.
The community was in Northeast Scotland and I flew from New York to Glasgow and thence, on a dark October night, to Inverness. From there a taxi drove me through a windblown landscape past dark pine forests and through small depressed towns with boarded-up churches and bright fish and chip shops. The driver chatted to me, ‘So you’re going to the community, eh? Oh aye, they’re very impressive people there, very impressive people,’ without giving more details. Nor did I ask for any; I was deep in my thoughts, wondering what this place I’d read and thought so much about would be really like. And who would I find myself to be when I was there? After half an hour we veered onto a narrow road and drove several miles along the side of a moonlit bay. We took a sharp left down a switchback lane and a grand house hove into view. I recognised it from photographs: Minton House, a decaying stately pile run as a B&B by community members. We pulled up, I paid the driver, walked up a flight of stone steps to the door and rang the bell. I heard a creaking of floorboards and the approach of heavy footsteps, then a tall bearded man opened the door and scrutinised me, register
ing in one sweep of his eyes my long hair, leather jacket and guitar case. I told him my name and said I’d booked a room. ‘Oh?’ he replied, surprised, ‘You’re not what we expected.’
This was an unnerving start and it didn’t get any better when he brought me into the lounge and introduced me to the inmates, a ragtag crew sitting around with dodgy jumpers and sharp eyes. My host, whose name was Ian, seemed just as spooked by me as I was by him. He gave me an awkward tour of the tea-making facilities then showed me to my room. I unpacked, strummed a few chords on my guitar and went back downstairs where an elderly English fellow called Reg, one of the lurkers in the lounge, offered to take me across the road to the community for ‘Sacred Dance’, whatever that was. It sounded awful but figuring I should enter into the spirit of things I agreed.
Reg threw on a jerkin and we walked out of the house back into the wild night, across the main road then down a dark country lane lined by high trees that roared in the wind. Suddenly on our left a fantastical structure appeared through a gap in the trees like a hallucination. Forty feet high with a roof like a giant, cocked wizard’s hat, its front a stained-glass riot of psychedelic patterns, the thing looked like an Atlantean fire temple or something out of a futuristic episode of The Flintstones. It was absolutely, loopily, magnificent.
‘This is our Universal Hall,’ said Reg, as deadpan as if he was pointing out the British Legion, and led me up a crunchy gravel path through the building’s huge wooden doors and into an odd, shabby interior. There was a beautiful smell of timber but the carpet was worn and the walls were peeling. From somewhere came the muffled sound of burbling folk music. I was thinking that Universal Hall wasn’t much to look at on the inside when Reg tapped me lightly on the shoulder and indicated I should follow him up a curved wooden staircase. At the top was a felt-covered door. Reg led me through and I realised what I’d seen downstairs had been only the lobby. For below us was an august five-sided performance space like a Greek forum, with high vaulted ceiling and rows of purple and gold seats on three sides, descending to a polished wooden floor. On this, dwarfed by their surroundings, a dozen people were dancing in a circle, hands linked, to Balkan music coming from a slightly distorted boom box. Reg and I sat down in a back row and watched them, a motley bunch: several middle-aged ladies, some shy-looking men, a gangly chap in a fair isle sweater who stood a foot taller than anyone else, and three or four cheerful girls. When the tune ended Reg nudged me and to my terror indicated we should join them.
Holding hands with strangers while performing Eastern European folk dances in a new age theatre-temple was a novel experience. A lady instructor with a German accent showed us the steps and we whirled round and round to the warbling of clarinets and balalaikas. It was good fun in a gusty kind of way, though I had no idea where the sacred part came in. When we finished, four or five dances later, the instructor told us to hug at least three other people before saying goodnight. Another terrifying prospect. I managed two. That night I rested well in my little room, the wind in the trees lulling me to deep sleep, and next day, after breakfast with the other inmates, I explored Findhorn. The community turned out to be a rambling settlement of old caravans, fantastical trees (someone had done a lot of planting twenty years earlier) and pristine Scandinavian-style wooden houses, several of them round, like something out of a nursery rhyme or a Dr Seuss book. There was a Royal Air Force base immediately south of the site, with shockingly loud jets taking off and landing, while to the north stood a deep forest of pine trees. The place confounded all my ideas about what a spiritual community should be: there was no monkish music drifting out of the buildings, nobody wore robes. The people I saw on the paths or through windows were absorbed in their own business and no one paid any attention to me. Nor did anyone recognise me as Mike Scott of The Waterboys, or if they did they weren’t letting on.
I hung around all that day and some of the next and even once caught sight of Eileen, the lady in the video, distinctive at a distance with her white permed hair. But though I liked the place I didn’t experience anything like the spiritual charge I’d felt watching the film. Then shortly before I left for the airport on my third day I went to a lunchtime meditation at one of the community’s sanctuaries, a plain wooden building unassumingly placed between some sheds and a garden. I walked in and twenty or thirty people, most with eyes closed, were sitting on a circle of chairs centred round a candle on a low wooden plinth. I sat down in an empty seat, closed my eyes too and waited for whatever was to happen. A woman began to speak in a clear English voice and asked us to imagine a golden light, like a pillar of energy, in the centre of the sanctuary. I did this, enjoying the novelty of knowing that everyone else in the room was doing it too. Then she asked us to visualise this light filling the whole sanctuary. I did this too, finding it easy enough, with an extra little thrill at the knowledge that all our mental images had just expanded together. Next she instructed us to see the light radiating out into the local area, blessing and loving all it came into contact with. And as I did this there came a change. I felt my emotions engage, and as I pictured the light ‘blessing and loving’ whatever it touched, a jet of compassion begin to flow in me. Then her voice continued, asking us to imagine the light spreading to Scotland’s holy isle of Iona and to England’s sacred centre, Glastonbury, then expanding to cover all of the British Isles. After each place name she allowed a short space of silence, and in one of these something very powerful happened. My sense of this ‘light’ shifted from being something imagined to something experienced. By some alchemy, by the working of some process or law beyond my ken, the light became real. I could feel it buzzing like a pressure, flowing through me as if I was some kind of battery. It was like taking a potent drug, except with a feeling of immense natural wellbeing.
The woman’s voice broke in on my awareness again as she directed us to imagine the light spreading beyond Britain, across Europe, then America and Africa and finally round the whole world. And as I consciously directed the light to do this (for it was a question of directing now, rather than imagining) I felt waves of inspiration flow through me as if I was part of a mighty system. I was awed in the presence of something far bigger than myself. And as I sat in silence for the last ten minutes of the meditation, the power radiating around and through me, I felt like I’d come home after wandering all the days of my life, and realised I was living the vision in the Eliphas Levi passage that had begun my journey all those years before. I’d found it! And when a small gong sounded to signal the meditation’s end and everyone silently stood up, I walked out of the sanctuary, stunned, into the cold Northern Scottish air, ready to proclaim to the skies that love was alive and everything was going to be all right forever. Though I could tell that wasn’t the done thing here; I didn’t know what the other meditators had experienced but when I looked at them emerging from the building they were quiet and relaxed, already strolling off to their afternoon duties. They inhabited a culture where this kind of work was simply part of daily life.
In transports of inspiration I went back to my B&B to collect my bags and bumped into Reg. ‘Come into the office with me, Mike, would you?’ he asked. Figuring it must be obvious to an old hand like Reg that I’d just had a serious spiritual experience I followed him, ready for something very meaningful to happen in the office. Perhaps Reg was going to welcome me to the inner group of super meditators or impart to me some final key of wisdom, a seal on the experience I’d just had. He lifted a slip of paper from the top of a cluttered desk and silently handed it to me. I looked. It was my bill for two nights’ bed and breakfast. This was a good reminder to keep my feet on the ground after spiritual experiences. Nevertheless, what had happened was immense. As I flew back to New York I felt I was returning from another civilisation. It was like when I’d gone to the West of Ireland, only that was an older world, and this was a new one. I wanted to explore this culture, to absorb it, become it, and receive whatever lessons and experiences it had to offer. And something els
e: what would happen if I could connect the machinery of my songs, lyrics and band to the flow of inspiration I’d felt in the Findhorn sanctuary?
Chapter 16: Some Kind Of Pop Star Living Up At Cluny
January 1994. Evening in the Northeast of Scotland. The waters of the Moray Firth are dark and restless. A harsh wind barrels down from the Arctic. A few lights glow in little hamlets and isolated cottages. Occasionally a car whizzes down a coastal road, its headlights making elliptical patterns in the night.
But from a long wooden building by the edge of a bay comes cheerful music. The Findhorn community is celebrating Burns Night with a ceilidh, and inside the community centre a veritable league of nations is gathered: boisterous German women, fine-boned Spanish men, visitors from Capetown, Rome and Buenos Aires, a troop of teenage American students, a muster of Antipodeans and even a few native Scots in kilts. Around the sides of the hall sit mothers with babies, middle-aged men out of puff, and a gaggle of wise-eyed old ladies. Supper was served an hour ago, the address to the haggis has been given, and a ragged eightsome reel is in full flow, ninety-six feet clumping on the wooden floor.
I’m watching this merry scene from my vantage point as guitarist in the ceilidh band. And man, we’re the weirdest ceilidh band ever: a bagpiper, a classical violinist, a bongo-playing Dutch girl … and me. Our music hurtles along with a kind of one-legged lope as the multitude parades in front of us. When the dance ends I strum a loud rally on the guitar, Margo’s bongos slip slightly out of time, and Rory’s pipes wrap up the tune with an ear-blistering squeal The next number is announced, ‘The Gay Gordons’, a Scottish country jig with a ho-ho rhythm. I turn to Rory and ask what the accompanying music will be. He replies, ‘The March’. Ah yes, ‘The March’, properly named ‘The Liberty Bell’, but most famous (though my three exotic bandmates don’t seem to be aware of this) as the theme music to Monty Python’s Flying Circus.