The Beginning of Findhorn
In 1952, while posted at RAF Habbaniya, in Iraq, Combe on reading an article written by Squadron Leader Peter Caddy who was also posted, met him, and got interested in bringing him into MRA folds, subsequently Eileen was introduced to Peter and his wife, Sheena Govan, daughter of the founders of the Faith Mission. Due to their shared interests in the occult and spirituality, they immediately took a liking to each other. Soon Eileen was in the circle that formed around Sheena Govan.
Peter Caddy's marriage was already in trouble. Their friend Dorothy Maclean later recalled, in one of the meetings Sheena herself earlier declared that she was no longer her husband's 'other half', and soon Peter would meet his 'true partner'.
Eileen and Peter fell in love and in 1953 after returning to England, she asked Combe for a divorce in a letter to Iraq, where he was still posted. Combe immediately forbade her from seeing her five children. It was then that a traumatized Eileen, visited a private sanctuary at Glastonbury with Peter, where she first claimed to have heard while meditating, the ‘voice of God’, which said: “Be still and know that I am God.” Initially she took it as a sign of her nervous breakdown but in time she began to “love the voice as an instrument from the God within us all” . Her subsequent instructions from the “voice” directed her to take on Sheena has her spiritual teacher. Sheena moved away to Isle of Mull, near Iona, Scotland, having divorced Peter Caddy. By autumn of 1956, Peter and Eileen came over to join her nascent group of followers there, along with the two children they already had together. Following a divorce, Eileen married Peter Caddy in 1957, and had one more son in 1968.
Meanwhile Sheena’s group was fast gaining popularity, and was dubbed the ‘Nameless Ones’ by the local media, which also called her "the woman Messiah". Starting in 1957, Peter and Eileen Caddy first co-managed a run-down hotel in Scotland, the Cluny Hill Hotel near Forres, Moray, which they reportedly resurrected and turned it into a four star hotel following the practical guidance given by the 'voice'. Early in 1962, the couple along with most of the staff were sent by the management to resurrect another of their properties, the Trossachs Hotel, at Perthshire, and when they rallied to be shifted back to Forres closer to their 'mission', they were fired.
Following this period of unemployment, on November 17, 1962, Eileen Caddy, her husband Peter, the children and their colleague Dorothy Maclean, shifted to a holiday caravan in a trailer park, a few miles from Forres and a mile from the village of Findhorn. There they began practicing organic gardening as a means of supplementing their family's food supply. The garden flourished to such a remarkable extent with the help of what she claimed as plant spirit and devas that it eventually attracted national attention, and was featured in a 1965 BBC radio program. Its supporters included Sir George Trevelyan and Lady Eve Balfour of the Soil Association.
Beginning in 1965 a community, eventually known as the Findhorn Foundation community, began to form around the work and spiritual practices of Eileen and Peter Caddy and Dorothy Maclean. The community was featured in several television documentaries by the BBC, starting in 1969, when BBC TV programme Man Alive came to Findhorn, and there was no turning back since then. Soon the place began a favorite haunt for thousands of new agers from around the world and the community bought the Cluny Hill Hotel in 1975 and turned it into a college, which stand seven miles from the Findhorn Bay Area caravan park, which was bought in 1983 Most recently it was profiled by the Channel 4 documentary series, The Haven, in 2004.
In 1971, Eileen as ‘guided’ herself by her inner voice, stopped receiving guidance for the community and from then on remained as an inspiring figure within the community. Dorothy Maclean moved to the United States in 1973, while Peter left Findhorn in 1978 after falling for a young female community member, he married twice in the following years, even started a Findhorn-style community in California and eventually died in a car crash in 1994. Meanwhile all through the 1980s, Eileen travelled across the world speaking at spiritual gathers, and also writing several books, including her "compendium of daily guidance", 'Opening Doors Within', which went on to be translated in 30 languages. Her works include God Spoke to Me, a volume of inspirational messages published in various formats from 1966 onwards, and an autobiography titled Flight into Freedom and Beyond. Finally in 1996 at the age of 76, Eileen stopped giving workshops, as her inner voice ‘suggested’.
Read more about this topic: Eileen Caddy
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