Editor's Desk - April, 2005:
Communication, attunement and resonance
Dear Readers,
Have you ever watched a flock of birds flying overhead suddenly change direction and all the birds instantly move in unison? They do not move in succession but all at once without bumping into each other. How do they know to turn so precisely? Once they land and move about, they seem independent and random in their movements. What principles are at work that we are observing?

In our last letter, we discussed the evolution of consciousness from nescience to sentience and beyond. When the birds are a “flock”, they are of one accord and are of one mind. When the birds mill about, they have the beginning of sentience. Ultimately their genetic programming will dictate the majority of their actions. Some birds, when building a nest, will not stop until it is completed. Rascal scientists have removed branches that had been set to observe birds work unto exhaustion. The scientists learned something whereas the birds apparently did not.

During the 1970’s, some magazine articles and books began reporting strange tales of a spiritual community in northern Scotland where enormous vegetables were growing on near-barren land. Botanists and horticulturists from the British “Royal Societies of” came to see what the brouhaha was all about. When the scientists arrived at Findhorn, what they found were some pleasant elderly English and Scottish folks living in caravans, scraping what appeared to be arid beach soil and producing county-fair prize-winning vegetables. Their soil analysis showed mostly sand and a little manure and seaweed compost but no nutrients significant enough to produce these kinds of crops. The scientists were gobsmacked. During interviews with the community members, it became evident that a great experiment had begun. Nature beings had come forward and revealed themselves to this group of humans with the desire and intent to begin a program of reintegration and rehabilitation between the different kingdoms of life. It was because these people held an attitude of receptivity and were truly dependent on the land in this wind-swept and isolated landscape that they were thus approached. Years of silent meditative practice had made them sensitive to the more subtle side of life. Spirits of the plants and soil and wind began communicating messages to the group about how to grow crops, not just with physical inputs but also with mental, emotional, and spiritual inputs.

If you were reading this account in an ethnobotany treatise or anthropology course, all the elements would fit right in until you get to the 20th century white-folks part; then you might halt abruptly. As I myself read their stories, I sensed the sincerity of their words and I felt it was right to go. What I found there was profound; it became part of my herbal practice and of my whole life. The Findhorn community had grown large and modeled itself as an open, co-ed monastic/spiritual intentional community. The days were structured into periods of meditation/work/meal/meditation/study/meal/meditation…etc. Learning to communicate with the various nature beings might occur spontaneously while working, or during a meditation or attunement exercise. There was a jargon at Findhorn and three words were very important: communication, attunement, and resonance. The Latin roots of the first two are indicative. Communication means, “to come together to impart knowledge.” Attunement means, “to be at one” with. Resonance is the term from harmonics describing how two vibrations can be reflecting or “re-sounding” a similarity by induction. In practical terms we were being shown scientifically how vibrations could resonate somewhere inside our consciousness just as a piano can resonate with a tuning fork on a certain keynote.Through attunement exercises, we learned to harmonize ourselves with known, positive vibrations (for example, a virtue like cooperation) and so have a set of standards and a vocabulary to work with. Alternately we might attune to a plant and feel how or where it resonated within ourselves. Subtle communication was understood to be the process of using attunement and resonance within a two-way flow of energy or consciousness between oneself and another being.
Sincerely,


John Redden

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