In a way Fiona was right, the Findhorn Foundation had started him on what she would no doubt have called ‘the slippery slope’. He had been nervous enough himself when the taxi driver from Inverness airport, at first sycophantically mistaking him for some kind of sportsman, spat him out disgustedly at the doors of the rambling former hotel which housed the educational aspect of the Foundation. On the way in, he briefly overheard the conversation of two men with grey ponytails.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Inner Child.’
‘That’s with me!’
‘Oh, I didn’t realize it was with you!’
They rubbed each other’s backs appreciatively.
Inside, after ignoring some notices from the Housekeeping Department, signed with hearts, he found himself in the hall with three groups of people. In front of him stood a couple in a long, charged hug. Over on the stairs an earth mother massaged the shoulders of a ragged-haired girl with a nose-ring. And in the corner an earnest trio consoled a crying woman.
He soon realized that the notices he’d ignored had been about removing muddy shoes before entering the house. During the months he subsequently spent in the winding souk of spiritual growth, nothing turned out to be so certain as the obligation to remove and replace his shoes dozens of times a day. Laces were as helpful as handcuffs to a juggler.
Sweaters, on the other hand, played a part analagous to armour in the lives of those medieval French knights who drowned in the mud of Agincourt, so weighed down by the armigerous language of swans and shields and falcons that they could no longer move without crane or horse. Peter felt bald in his dark-blue knitwear, when the sweaters of the initiated were bristling with rainbows, twinkling with stars, threaded with silver and gold, pulsing with hearts, populated with endangered species, embossed with purple burial mounds, and swirling with nameless mandalas. Homemade, these sweaters were also expressive of a love of creativity that scorned the judgement of the world. Everywhere, he found an art measured by its sincerity, not its results. Art itself seemed to take on a blurred but pretentious existence on the borders of therapy and craft, where it was deliriously liberated from difficulty as well as talent.
For his first few days, Peter endured the fulfilment of his prejudices in the hope of getting an address for Sabine. The New Age seemed to be a bomb shelter for people burdened with unusual names. Even those with ordinary names made subtle changes, putting a K in Eric or dropping an N from Anne. If all else failed, they simply changed their names to Shiva or Krishna, defying their birth certificates for the higher truth of their longing for deification.
He also encountered the first hints of a new vocabulary in which rules were called ‘suggestions’. This was one of the promises of the Aquarian Age, a coercion not exercised from above, but enforced from every side by the asphyxiating pressure of collective beliefs. The net would replace the pyramid as the model of human relations, but consensus could be as oppressive as authority, and the cult of group activities, while it seemed to point forward to a democratic future, also led backwards to the mentality of the schoolyard, where popularity and the ability to exploit a special slang were the currency of power. The shadow of the pyramid in any case prevailed, crumbling, compromised, questioned, but still present. He found at Findhorn, and again elsewhere, a slave population of long-term students who paid reduced rates to work for nothing, a priesthood of teachers who passed on the open secrets of the New Age, an aristocracy of administrators, and a merchant class of consumers like himself, paying for the teachings of the priests.
Peter was at first annoyed by the ‘focalizers’ – a clumsy term used to sidestep the hierarchical implications that ‘leaders’ or ‘teachers’ would have conveyed. Everyone in his group would learn from everyone else, but they ‘held the focus’ by the simple device of deciding what everyone would do for the ‘Experience Week’. Krishna and Lolita suggested that Peter move out of the local hotel he had mistakenly thought he was allowed to stay in, but Peter, who had come to pursue an amorous obsession, not to return to the primitive conditions of a hostel dormitory, suggested that he would rather leave the group than the hotel. Krishna and Lolita climbed down, but only after Peter had assured them that his separate accommodation would not prevent him from ‘fully participating’ in the Experience Week.
He had hardly tasted the thrill of out-suggesting the focalizers than he found himself in a strange crisis, wondering if he was addicted to telephones and hotel rooms, and feeling guilty about the conflict between his promise of full participation and his undisclosed reasons for coming to the Foundation. Somehow, the atmosphere of self-enquiry had already encroached on his private schemes.
On the first evening there was an ‘attunement’, a preliminary to all activities in which the help of ‘unseen presences’ and the ‘Angel of Findhorn’ was invoked, and the members of the group, sitting in a circle around a candle and some scattered leaves, ‘shared’ their feelings.
‘Oh, we are nine!’ exclaimed Oriane, a nervous and melancholy French woman whose face seemed to have been polished by too many tears. ‘It’s a sacred number.’
Peter found that few numbers escaped this accusation at one time or another. The number ten clung to a certain steely practicality, gleaming like a Swiss army knife among the smoky relics of numerology, although there was no doubt some ‘system’ in which it too bowed down before the tyranny of the esoteric. As a banker, his relationship with numbers was at once corrupt, since numbers were always figures, standing for a sum of money, and at the same time serene because, even in the debased form of a bottom line or a grand total, they spoke of a separate reality, infused with a meaning less slippery than language and less ephemeral than emotion. To see this Platonic realm press-ganged into the tricky service of symbolism was strangely disturbing to him. He felt a similar flicker of indignation at the thought of astrology. Why should the other planets, which spun out their lives beyond the reach of palpitating human concerns, be dragged into that unfortunate melee?
As the sharing went round, Peter became anxious about giving an account of his motives for coming to Findhorn. His heartbeat quickened and his mouth grew dry. He was far too preoccupied to notice what the others said, except that each one seemed to be ‘going through a transition’ and won appreciative nods from Krishna, Lolita and the others for using this phrase.
‘I’m going through a transition too,’ said Peter defensively. ‘It’s difficult to talk about because, well, I’m sort of right in the middle of it at the moment. I work in a bank and the thing is it suddenly seemed completely pointless and I had a bit of a nervous breakdown … that’s all I can say just now.’
He blushed at the thought that he might be believed as much as at the thought that he might not be. What disturbed him even more was that he started to believe what he had ‘shared’. On his way through the dark woods that led down to the village of Forres and his hotel, he began to feel that he really was having a bit of a nervous breakdown, that banking did seem completely pointless, and that he was in fact going through a period of transition.
Back in the hotel, he was told there was a function in the Sunderland Room, but that residents were of course welcome to avail themselves of the bar facilities. He drank whisky in the bar and wondered what kind of mirror the group was setting up. Why should he start to worry about the things he said in front of the group? Why did it seem to act on him like some magnified and collective conscience? Why could he not wear some adequate disguise, and when the office opened the day after next ask if they could remember a German woman called Sabine, and when he had an address for her, leave Findhorn and its silly rituals? That’s what he would do, that was definitely what he would do.
The next morning on his way to breakfast, Peter saw the man with the grey ponytail he had overheard on the first day. He was again in earnest conversation.
‘He was saying that when you bring things together with love, either pieces of yourself or people in a group, that the sum i
s greater than the parts, and that in that context one and one equals three…’
Here, perhaps, was the sacred arithmetic that explained the strange power of the group to impress him more than its constituent members.
The fact that the first thing he heard in the morning seemed to address the very question he had been asking himself in the bar the night before was one of those funny little coincidences of which the people around him made such a cult.
‘Here at Findhorn,’ said Krishna before that morning’s attunement, ‘we suggest you make “I” statements. Out there –’ he thrust his chin towards the uncomprehending world that lay beyond the window – ‘you often say “you” when you really mean “I”, but here we like to own our feelings.’
Jill, a crushingly shy nineteen-year-old from Glastonbury, wanted to leave the group. Lolita was with her now, Krishna explained, trying to persuade her to stick it out at least for the sacred dancing they were going to do after the attunement. Krishna asked everyone to hold hands by crossing their arms over each other as if they were weaving them into a rope.
‘Feel the energy going round the circle,’ he said. ‘Receive it, take what you need and pass it on.’
Peter felt the flow come through one hand and pass out through the other. Was his neighbour sending the flow the same way? Did it matter?
‘Let’s focus on Jill and hope that through our love we can persuade her to remain part of this circle of new friends.’
Peter, who despite himself was enjoying being roped to his neighbours, was jolted into rebellion by this promiscuous use of the word ‘friends’ to describe the bunch of nervous strangers who had met for the first time the evening before.
The sacred dance was focalized by Ulrike, a German woman who had been ‘heavily into the lesbian and biking scene in Berlin’ before she got into sacred dance; now it was her life.
They stood shoeless in the former ballroom of the hotel, no doubt the site of many functions in its day, a painting of a unicorn, as pleased as Punch beside a woodland stream, now defacing its principal wall. Outside, ribs of dark grey cloud were packed tightly overhead. Peter looked longingly at the cars parked at the back of the building. He hated dancing. They were trying to brainwash him into some collective trance in which community, communism and communion formed a noose around the beautiful neck of capitalist individualism, the sole route to cultural achievement and personal happiness. He was going to scream.
The circle was the sun, Ulrike explained, and each person was a sunbeam. ‘We will dance the sun meditation and maybe the sun will come out,’ she smiled.
Fat chance, thought Peter.
Ulrike asked everyone to look at each other while they danced.
The music from the St Matthew Passion swelled from a ghetto-blaster in the corner. They started to move in a simple step, looking by turns into each other’s eyes, trying to move harmoniously round the room.
Peter looked at Lolita and she seemed to be serious and kind. Krishna, too, had a serious expression in his eyes. He looked around the room and saw candour, yearning and woundedness. Only Jill looked resolutely at her feet. She was young, excruciated, lost. Her skin was bad and her clothes defiantly ugly, but instead of dismissing her as he would have in the predatory streets of London, Peter found himself longing to reassure her and put her at her ease. They moved around, ceremonious and slow. If only she would look up, he would rain kindness into her eyes.
There were further dances, including a vegetarian allegory in which a hunter, startled by the beauty of his prey, spared its life. Peter continued to note the ideological pressure he was under, but it no longer bothered him as much. He was more intrigued by the strange sense of goodwill that was welling up in him. Why not approach people with trust instead of suspicion? Why not be helpful instead of opportunistic? Why not be heartfelt instead of calculating?
The clouds had thinned, melted and fragmented, and the sun poured down on to the lawn and through the tall windows onto the blond floorboards of the ballroom. What was going on?
‘You see, we’ve brought out the sun!’ Ulrike laughed.
Over the next few days, he kept rediscovering this sense of goodwill, even when the experiences it accompanied seemed to take place on moonless nights of rhetoric and credulity. His concern for the rest of the group gradually rose to a pitch at which his happiness seemed inseparable from the happiness of the others. Everyone developed a sense of each other’s vulnerability by telling their ‘stories’. Instead of having to lower the portcullis of a false self in order to avoid being hurt, they pre-empted the pain by showing that they were all hurt already. There was a great liberation in feeling that the worst had already happened. This mutual concern was how family life should be, but of course never was, and that was its seductiveness.
There was a hint of a primordial scene as everybody told their stories, if not around a campfire, at least around the fat candle that always burnt at the centre of the circle.
Peter had not devoted much time to what Gavin called ‘navel-gazing’, although Gavin himself once admitted to a ‘bout of the blow-your-brains-out’ on an otherwise meticulously rowdy skiing holiday in Klosters. Peter had no very clear idea of what he felt about the big issues, except a general sense that God was bad taste in some forms, boring in others and mad in the rest. Nevertheless, he started to reflect that even if we were just dying animals, burdened with self-consciousness and the certainty of death, telling ourselves stories about the world in order to pass the time and relieve our troubled minds, then they might as well be good stories and they might as well be true. And so he told the group his real reasons for being there and about Sabine and how he’d been happy for the three days they’d spent together, happier than he’d ever been.
Everyone was touched by what he’d said and nobody seemed to worry that he’d not said it before.
‘Oh, it’s so romantic,’ said Oriane, ‘it make me want to cry.’ And cry she did.
‘I want you to think of room ten as your room, Peter,’ said Evan, a buck-toothed and awkward Australian, aching to do good for the world in ways it was hard for him to put his finger on. Room ten had been assigned to Peter before it became known that he was staying in a hotel.
‘It’s actually rather a special room, because it was Eileen and Peter Caddy’s family room,’ Evan went on, unaware that this would not represent an additional temptation to Peter, who found the mythology of Findhorn and the lives of its founders, often recounted with the portentous detail of a biblical parable, one of the most tiresome aspects of his Experience Week.
‘When you were telling your story, I was thinking what a pain in the ass God is,’ guffawed Xana, an American woman who became friends with Peter, despite her initially disconcerting habit of bringing God into every sentence. She helped to persuade someone in the office to look for traces of Sabine, and miraculously, as they all agreed, one of the names that emerged was indeed ‘Peter’s Sabine’, as he could tell from the address in Frankfurt she had unfortunately been leaving at the time he met her. At least he was now fortified with her second name, Wald.
A morning’s work was part of the Experience Week and both Peter and Xana ended up working in the kitchen.
‘I’m Gawain, I’ll be focalizing the soups today,’ said the friendly man who greeted them in the kitchen. ‘And this is Bettina, who’ll be focalizing the salads.’
‘Hi,’ said Bettina.
There was an attunement and everyone shared what was ‘going on’ for them that morning. The sharing went around in what Peter was coming to think of as the usual way, until it reached Lisa, a young Argentinian woman who was part of the established kitchen team. Lisa’s English was immediately exhausted by the enormity of her mood.
‘I feel,’ she began, and then broke into gesture, wriggling her palms towards each other on different planes, like tadpoles hurrying towards a doomed rendezvous. ‘I have to be careful, because I may not really be here…’
You what? thought Peter.
‘When I was a healer in Brazil,’ continued Lisa, ‘I couldn’t work at night, because I would leave my body and go off on the astral plane. Sometimes it was very hard to come back and I think maybe last night,’ her right hand shot up into the air, ‘I spoke to my angel, and I have to share one thing: my angel tell me no work this morning.’
This was what Gavin would have called ‘skiving off work without a chit from Matron’. You didn’t need a chit from Matron here, just a chat with an angel.
Gawain, whose name sounded so like Gavin’s but whose tone was so different, asked the Angel of Findhorn to help them work as a team, to open their hearts and to clear their minds. He invited everyone to be conscious of the noises in the kitchen and of the spirit helpers, as if this enjambement of whirring blenders and fluttering wings were the most natural thing in the world.
The strange thing was that they did work as a team, the atmosphere was wonderfully collaborative and charming, people glided round the kitchen, anticipating their fellow workers’ needs, sliding saucepans and knives to each other, handle first, with a silent smile, moving out of the way without stopping work, preparing food for hundreds without apparent effort, and enjoying themselves as well. What had happened? Again, there seemed to be something precious hidden among the rustling tissue of ritual and rhetoric. Gawain’s prayers had been answered, and even if prayers were just the setting up of a fervent expectation, they had worked.
Elated over lunch, Peter and Xana discussed what had happened while eating the food they had helped to prepare, which tasted to them supremely good. Perhaps the attunements were not just an amiable waste of time. Peter had always assumed it was best to bully his way through his feelings. When he set off for the bank feeling sad, or hung-over, or bored, or desperate, or in some other way unfit for work, he found that these moods usually evaporated as they hit the hot plate of action. There was of course a price to pay, a vague general depression, the lost habit of reflection, sudden bursts of frustration that seemed inexplicable because the trail that led to them had been obscured by a thousand urgencies, and by the trick of calling unhappiness ‘a lousy day’, and by the agreement of everyone around him that nothing surpassed the thrill of selling expensive loans and securing cheap ones, in order to enter a nirvana of ownership and hobbies.
On the Edge Page 5