Customer Reviews

In Perfect Timing

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Peter Caddy was a man of many talents, a natural-born leader whose adventures during the war, climbing the Himilayas, running a Scottish hotel, then founding and leading an alternative spiritual community and becoming a world traveler and teacher make for fascinating reading. As they used to say, this is an exciting, "ripping good yarn" about a man who dedicated his whole life to God and to the emergence of a better world for humanity. This book is extremely fun to read and comes highly recommended for anyone interested in modern alternative spiritual and esoteric movements, the New Age, Rosicrucians,spiritual communities, or just a good biography. The last chapter was written by Peter's new wife after he was killed in an automobile accident and contains more of her perspective and philosophy than his, even going so far as to turn his life into an object lesson on the greatness of her particular Indian guru and making Caddy seem like an Eastern devotee rather than the initiate of the Western Mystery Tradition that he was, but if you ignore all that, you will be treated to a wonderful story about a remarkable human being.

Peter Caddy (1917-1994) was a British caterer, hotelier, and co-founder of the Findhorn Foundation community.

Here are some quotations from this 1996 book (which was published by his third wife Renata, after his death in a car accident):

"Since I was still without a job, I decided to begin a small garden... It was here that the Findhorn garden was started... Not only would this make what little money we had stretch further, it would also (and more importantly) return the 'vibrations' we were putting into the land, in the form of nourishing food to help refine our bodies." (Pg. 194)

"Two weeks later, after a lot of badgering from me, Dorothy directly contacted a spirit of the plant kingdom, the angel or 'deva' of the garden pea. She was a much surprised by the suddenness of the contact as she was by its message." (Pg. 197)

"I seized this opportunity to ask the devas, through Dorothy ... for practical advice to solve many of the problems I had encountered in the garden. Before coming to Findhorn I had very little gardening experience... While my chief interest in the devas lay in the practical advice they could give me, Dorothy was more attracted to their ethereal, philosophic communications and resented my pestering her for down-to-earth information... These beings did not speak to Dorothy in an audible 'voice.' She contacted them (or they her) telepathically... I would only consider the messages received if they were written down... Without Dorothy's stoical service to the garden I was creating, I doubt whether many people outside Scotland would have heard of the name Findhorn today." (Pg. 197-200)

"We had been told to expect an attempted landing by our space brothers, so we all assembled on the beach at the landing site that we had prepared and built up in our meditations over the years. Those with inner sight actually described a spacecraft as it came in and hovered overhead; I saw nothing as usual..." (Pg. 261)

"I am often asked why the garden at Findhorn stopped producing the extraordinary specimens (like 42-pound cabbages) that had first secured its fame. Some people ... suggest that as I withdrew my primary attention from the garden to concentrate on organizing and running the community, those who succeeded me in the garden lacked the same relationship with it. Both suggestions are wrong... I feel that the devas and nature spirits have proven their point about the need for cooperation, and it was no longer necessary to produce outsize advertisements for it." (Pg. 301)

"Findhorn could be seen as a community, as a spiritual community, as a University of Light, as a Mystery School. It was often a mystery how it worked! but it did. I feel that above all it was a graveyard of egos." (Pg. 331)