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The Archive of Stanley MessengerThe IntraterrestrialsA Foretaste of the New World |
M Guess who phoned?
L Who? No, I know who it was. It was Paul, wasn’t it?
M It was Paul, yes. He wanted to speak to you.
L I don’t want to see him. Where’s he been? What’s he been doing?
M He seems to have left Dorset. He says his firm’s moved to Plymouth and he’s living down there.
L Did he say anything about I.T.?
M Yes. He says he’s started a group, which is going like a bomb. He wants to discuss progress with us up here.
L The man’s a menace. I hope you put him off.
M Look, Lucia, I don’t think we can avoid him, nor do I think we should. I know exactly how you’re feeling. You feel vulnerable, because a part of you is drawn to him and you don’t feel strong enough to cope. But that is precisely why he too feels drawn to our scenario. He doesn’t trust our reliance on the right things happening through a process of synchronicity, a guidance which goes at its own pace, which knows that a process like this needs to grow, and growth has its own times and seasons like a plant. He doesn’t trust that. It scares him. He not only wants to organise things, he believes it is right to organise them. Organisation, believes Paul, is how things root themselves into reality. For the same reason he wants to organise you. He recognises something in you, a quality which he lacks, and he wants it.
L He’s not going to get it, not from me.
M Well, maybe he is. But not from your vulnerability, the thing which arouses his maleness, his desire to conquer. On the contrary it may be precisely what you need to turn a weakness into a strength. You are extremely strong, Lucia, but you don’t believe it yet. You need to discover a new dimension in that Light-being of yours. A little less Aphrodite, my girl, and a little more Pallas Athene is the recipe for young master Paul. Keep Aphrodite for Joe who can appreciate her without wanting to enslave her.
L You’re very good for me, Melanie my love. You remind me of Cassius talking to Brutus. We did ‘Julius Ceasar’ for A-levels. How did it go? "I, your glass, will modestly discover to yourself that of yourself that you yet know not of" Well, well! Pallas Athene, eh? Tell me about her. Greek myths, isn’t she?
M A Greek miss in a Greek myth. It was she who was said to have sprung fully armed from the head of Zeus. Steiner said she was the female counterpart of Michael. So, she is the female aspect of cosmic intelligence. I have a feeling about her which reminds me of the U.S. Statue of Liberty. She loves men, but she doesn’t take any shit from male dominance. She brings out the hidden strength in men whose gentleness makes certain men appear weak.
L Joe.
M Yes, Joe. You’re the ideal sort of woman for Joe. You can reflect his gentleness back to him so that he experiences your Aphrodite sexuality and radiance. But with a man like Joe too much of that would emphasise his weakness and passivity. He also needs the other aspect, the Palladian quality, the lightning flashes which shock him into a more assertive masculinity. You won’t turn Joe into a macho brute, he hasn’t got it in him, but you should be able subtly to bring out in him a courage which he would otherwise be too perceptive to risk.
L As you talk, I’m recognising both sides of this in myself. When I was younger I may have been a bit of a soft touch sexually, but I don’t think I am now. I may have played the field a bit, in fact I know I did, but I can look after myself when I have to.
M Yes, but how?
L Well, I suppose more by avoidance than aggression.
M Why do you feel vulnerable to Paul, then?
L I suppose you’re right. There’s a side of me that knows I can’t altogether avoid him.
M So long as you go on wanting to avoid him the vulnerability will remain. It seems to me you need to find the strength of the Light-power in you which is the equal of Paul’s desire to dominate and control. For that you have to believe in it, and to find an adequate reason for doing so.
L My love for Joe is a more than adequate reason for finding that strength. But I don’t want to make Joe feel I am defending him from something.
M I don’t think you need fear any such thing. Joe has a quiet strength all his own which comes from his deep belief in all we are doing. When you discover you have an equal belief in that to Joe’s you will no longer feel vulnerable to Paul. You have to stop being afraid Paul may be right. But you don’t have to confront him alone. We will all be strengthened by the very fact that he exists, and is likely to challenge what we are doing.
L That’s just the point! What are we doing? It’s tempting at times to think we’re not doing very much.
M And that’s precisely the effect people like Paul have on others, making them feel ineffective. There’s a certain kind of initiative and enterprise which takes no account of the actual way in which processes evolve. Things have their own times and seasons. They’re like plants. They don’t take kindly to being forced into the mould of peoples’ short term intentions and desires, which is why so many nursery-forced pot plants die off quickly and don’t stand being planted out.
L Don’t you think you may be projecting onto Paul more insensitivity than he really has?
M Now who’s defending him? You were the one whose hackles rose when he was questioning what we were doing.
L At the same time I was initially very attracted. What was that? Just pheromones?
M You know, my reaction to Paul is not really very different from yours. I was quite aware of his attractions, though probably not as strongly as you were. But I was also aware of his insecurity, and of how he tackles it by taking control of situations.
L How did you leave it with him? Where did he ring from?
M Plymouth. He proposed coming up this weekend. I said I’d ring back when I’d talked to the others to see if we’d be able to get together. I said I was sure Fiona would like to meet him. I was friendly without being all over him. I didn’t refer to you again.
L You’ve made me feel much stronger about the whole affair. If he rings again, I’m not here. I don’t think he’s got my number at Chalk Farm. I want it to be obvious Joe and I are together, and the best way to do that is if he sees me first at the meeting.
M What shall I say if he asks for your number?
L Give it him. I’ll keep the answer-phone switched on. Let’s forget Paul for the moment. I’ve got something more interesting to show you.
*****
M Oh Lu, that’s beautiful. Oh, that’s really lovely. Bring it to the light. I can almost smell the flowers. Oh, and Joe’s menhir in the middle ground. I love the way the people are walking towards it from the town. I suppose you’ll reduce it to about A5 size won’t you for the leaflets themselves?
L Or even smaller. It depends on the wording really. It depends whether we just have the wording on the back, or whether we make it into a folder. What do you think?
M It would be nice really if the wording was in a separate space from the personal stuff, addresses and phone numbers, in which case we could have the reading matter inside the folder and the hand written stuff on the back. What about cost?
L I haven’t been into it yet. I imagine the initial cost will be quite steep. The print run will depend on numbers.
M Oh, Lucia, I really think that is a very beautiful painting. You know, it would make a beautiful greetings card. Would it enlarge to poster size? We could defray some of the cost by selling cards and posters?
L Let’s discuss it tonight. We’re meeting at Fiona’s aren’t we?
M They’re going to love it, darling. I’m sure it strikes just the right note. The flowers and greenery are alive and familiar. The town in the background is what people want to redeem, and the menhir in the middle is mysterious and challenging without being menacing. The light on that man’s upturned face looks as if it’s coming from the menhir itself.
L You don’t think it’s too sentimental?
M No. I think he looks intrigued and awestruck, but certainly not over-eager or slavish. I like all the faces. You know, I don’t think the leaflet should be too small. The menhir is very impressive. You don’t want to lose that. I think A5 would be about the minimum.
L So we would print it on A4 and fold it.
M Right! Let’s get Richard to make some enquiries.
L What about the wording?
M I think the painting will stimulate people to come up with the right words. Let’s wait till the meeting.
L I felt Ophromine very much present while I was painting it.
M In the foreground?
L No, I felt I was doing the flowers myself. It was more when I was doing the menhir and the space round it. I was trying for a sort of vortical movement there in the middle. Ophromine was inducing that in the last meeting at Fiona’s.
M I’ve just noticed the butterfly. It looks as if it had emerged from the green-blue-grey swirling round the menhir itself.
L It had. And look, I tried for an indication of others in the vortical swirling mist.
M I didn’t recognise the butterfly. Is it any particular species?
L I think it must be, though it’s not one I know. Joe bought me a butterfly-book for Garway. Those green, blue and silver colours are not very common in a tiny butterfly like that, certainly not in Europe. I wonder if new species will emerge in the new time?
M What does Ophromine think?
L Let’s ask him! Shall we? What do you think Ophromine?
M ¤ " I don’t think. It’s you who do the thinking".
L Don’t quibble, Ophromine. Form pictures and Melanie will try to put the pictures into thinking.
M ¤ "Butterflies are pictures".
L I thought butterfies were insects.
M ¤ "They’re somewhat reluctant insects. The butterfly energy kills the insect, burns it up."
L Doesn’t the insect resent that?
M ¤ "Insects don’t feel resentment, they just eat and grow. Metamorphosis overcomes their eating and growing, which they resist by skin-changes for as long as they can. Finally the process overcomes them and they pupate. The light and heat form a sensitive surface into which the butterfly picture can imprint itself. Then, with a final burst of life the insect gives itself over entirely to a kind of flowering fruiting process, which kills it. It starts to die the moment it emerges from the chrysalis. Your friend Steiner says that the light-form carries the dying insect round beneath it like a sort of suspended suitcase, which it burns up and dessicates into dust."
L What a sacrifice. Poor caterpillars. There was a cartoon once of two caterpillars sitting on a leaf and a butterfly goes by. One says to the other:- "They’ll never get me up in one of those things".
M ¤ "If caterpillars could think instead of just eat themselves to death, they might feel resentment. Merciful life gives them the ecstasy of self-immolation instead".
L So butterflies are pictures. I just painted a butterfly Ophromine.
M ¤ "You are a creative girl, Lucia. But you have no access to the insect kingdom".
L So my picture will never become a new species.
M ¤ "Who said so? There’s more than one way to skin a cat".
L "What vulgar analogies you use, Melanie! I never said that".
M What did you say then?
L ¤ "I don’t say things. I simply..."
M Oh, come off it, Ophromine! What picture did you form, then?
¤ "I formed a pcture of a changing world situation in which creative impulses in humanity will find new ways to embody themselves in incarnate reality".
L Ponderous, Ophromine, but I get the picture. I’ll go on painting and hope for the best. Meanwhile, the object of this picture is to stimulate people to ask questions about the I.T. school. We needn’t raise the question of Paul till tonight, need we?
M No. Meanwhile I’m feeling sleepy. It must be all this communicating. I wonder if I’m channelling Ophromine, or if I’ve reached the point when we are side by side communicating in a free and independent way.
L I think you are probably still allowing him a bit too much space in your own aura. That’s maybe what’s making you sleepy. But you don’t slip out of your body like I sometimes do. Have a bit of a sleep now and I’ll make a cup of tea in half an hour. I’m really glad you like the picture.
M (Yawns) I think it’s a masterpiece. I feel drunk. G’night. Wake me up soon.
******
M Hello Fiona. Boys not here yet?
F No. Richard rang. Usual story of having to meet a deadline for a prompt-payment client. They should be here soon.
M We have news.
F Good or bad?
M Good! Two things, one beautiful and wonderful, the other challenging.
L I would have said scary rather than challenging. But I’m coming round to Melanie’s idea.
M Lucia, I do love you. I don’t push you too hard, do I?
F Come off it, you two. You’re both doing wonders for each other. Let’s have the scary or challenging bit first. I know what it must be. You’ve heard from this Paul chap again.
L He’s moved down to Plymouth with his job and started a group there. He says its going like a bomb. To put it mildly, I have misgivings.
F Why?
L Well, simply he’ll be telling them all what to do. He’ll be describing a personal version of I.T. picking a group with similar ideas of organising things to his own, and getting them into high-powered movement. And I bet they all adore him.
F Just as you very nearly do.
L Oh, Fiona, for heaven’s sake! All right, I’m conditioned to respond to charisma wherever I find it. I’m not free of that yet, you’re right. But I do begin to get the point. I’ve never been exactly naïve, but I’ve self-indulged in the glamorous side of things and I’m paying for that. I’m enormously privileged to have met you people. I feel I’m on my own path at last. And that path certainly doesn’t include Paul and what he stands for.
F I think you may be over simplifying. I think he may well be on your path in a certain sense. We don’t fall in love with people for nothing.
L Fiona, I am not in love with Paul! I was very attracted, but there’s a lot about him I really hate and distrust. And then I met Joe, for whom I feel a great tenderness and a sense of partnership, and a real feeling that there is something important in life we have to do together.
F Are you in love with him?
L (Cries) Fiona, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to make things more difficult for me? I need to have the strength to meet this encounter with Paul, and I feel you’re undermining my efforts by...
F By what?
L Well...
F Darling, I want you to be strong in this every bit as much as you do. You have a formidable strength which I need, which everybody in the group needs. But we dare not watch you try to build that strength on a falsehood, on a position of patched up insecurity. This is not simply a matter of you and your path. Let’s look at how this actually came about. I haven’t even met Paul yet, but he’s approaching me, just as his path has approached the rest of you. I would very much like him to meet me if possible in a clear situation. We have to consider Paul’s real needs in this, just as we consider our own. You see, in a fundamental sense, Paul is absolutely no threat whatever to any of us. The fact of Paul falling in love with you is just as much on his path as it is on yours, and, by extension therefore, on ours as well. Paul needs to discover his real relationship to I.T. As it appears at the moment, you are his most likely clue to this. As you’ve described it, he is at present bulldozing away on a misconceived project, which may well draw others into similar misconceptions. In the long term these can do no harm to the reality of I.T. which we are beginning to understand, which Meruel supports and embodies, and so on. Certainly Paul may cause others to go a longer way round than seems necessary to us, just as Paul himself does. But maybe they need this. Paul himself certainly seems to need this path.
M Another thing is, some of his group, whatever it is, may come to meet us as well. Paul can’t immunise people to other life experiences. Nobody can, unless they choose to be isolated in circumstances others suggest.
F Meruel seems to be wanting to suggest something.
L What’s he saying?
F "It seems a great part of the answer lies in your other bit of news".
M Oh, how silly of us! Show her, Lu.
*****
F Oh, Lucia, how wonderful! I feel the whole of what we’ve been talking about has risen onto an altogether different level. That is really absolutely beautiful. Don’t you see? I feel we’ve been implying that something confrontational, on the level of arguments, polemics, divisions among the people who meet us, including Paul, was about to dominate our lives. And it isn’t like that at all. You, my darling, have produced something which will make a direct impression on people without a word of discussion being involved.
M There you are, Lu. On one level you already have inside you the answer to what, on another level, throws you into confusion.
L Not the whole answer, Em. It needs words as well. I need words myself. The picture itself is a kind of prayer for the right words to challenge people.
F I see much more than the right words emerging from this. There will be other pictures and other words. This is the sort of thing that will stimulate people to produce their own pictures, and others to offer quite different words. Some people will want to make contact with each other through initiatives of which we know nothing, people with whom, on a karmic level, we have virtually nothing in common except our humanity.
M We can only start from where we are, and others from where they are.
F I was trying to say something of the sort to my two ‘Friday ladies’ last week. There was a moment when I felt reluctant to let them go. I think there is every possibility I won’t meet them again, at least, not until they have found themselves on another level than what I have been able to introduce to them. Somehow we have to convey to people that they are absolutely free, and that what happens to them is exactly what needs to happen.
M "May the events that seek us..."
F Exactly! Here come the lads I think.
M I’ll let them in.
*****
L Hello darling. You look all gloomy. What’s up?
J We’re in a bit of trouble.
R The neighbours in the flat below have complained about our running a business in the block. We’ve had a notice to quit.
M Oh, Richard! How long have you got?
R The notice says twenty-four hours but our lease gives us a month. They’ll take us to court, which gives us a bit of time.
L Oh you poor dears. What a business. Melanie had just started to quote Adam Bittleston’s prayer when you rang the doorbell. "May the events that seek us come unto us".
J Yes. A quiet mind seems to be the appropriate response. I think we had this coming to us all right.
F I have the feeling we five are no longer separate individuals in the way we were a few months ago. Anything that happens to us individually happens to us all.
R If that means Joe and I are now going to depend on you three for our fish and chips I don’t agree at all.
M Male defensiveness doesn’t feel like a quiet mind to me, Richard. The people who seek you are coming unto you as well. Your understanding heart should tell you that. Our need for each other is mutual. We are just as dependent on you as you are on us.
L In any case I feel this will be quite a temporary crisis. Why should a particular door slam shut unless it is to draw attention to another one opening?
F I suggest that for the time being we simply pool our resources. It may turn out that we want to make that a permanent arrangement. In any case none of us is exactly on the street.
J I suppose I’m the one with most need to think about accommodation. Lu and I spend a lot of time in her big room, don’t we love? But there isn’t really room for us both. I haven’t moved much of my stuff in there. I’m a bit of a jackdaw when it comes to personal bits and pieces. I shall need another room.
L We’ll start looking straight away, won’t we dear? For all I know there may be an empty room in my building. I don’t know what goes on upstairs. I’ve seen a couple come and go once or twice, but not recently.
F The third verse about spirits and a clear soul seems to offer the next clue. What is this event saying about where we are on the I.T. path?
J It’s saying something about commitment, isn’t it? It seems to be suggesting that at a certain stage I.T either becomes a full-time job, or it is likely to fall apart.
R Joe and I have been getting uncomfortable about this business of ours for some time. It’s not really what we feel we should be doing. If we stopped tomorrow no one in the trade would miss us There are plenty of other people our clients could call on. Apart from a minor inconvenience for a few people we would disappear without trace.
F Are there any debts?
R Nothing our savings wouldn’t cover, and nothing immediate. We should still have two thousand or so in the bank.
J We’ve got a bit of breathing space. I think the beings are challenging us to take another step in I.T., almost calling our bluff. "How serious are you about this?" Meruel is saying. "Are you going to go on relying on conventional sources of income, or are you prepared to put your entire weight on us, which means on your own higher selves?"
R Is that what you are, Meruel? Are you simply a synthesis of our own joint spiritual beings, projected into a common space and given a name?
J "I am that, and also more than that. Just as you are also mineral, plant and animal, as well as human, so I am also all those things and also human angelic and archangelic. I rest on your higher and angelic selves just as you rest on the nature kingdoms. In the same way as much of your behaviour is purely animal, so much of mine is purely angelic and human. Without you I wouldn’t be properly earthed. I am an Earth being just as you are. I am an Intraterrestrial like you. I don’t have an individualised physical body, but I do have an individualised angelic body, made up of a number of angels, and higher human selves.
M What does that mean? Is our body made up of our five higher selves and our angels?
J "You five are the main part of my incarnated self at the moment, but there are others you don’t know about yet. The big difference between you and me is that my component organs are self-aware, that is to say, you, and your higher angelic selves. Your component parts are aware in an animal sense and a plant sense and a mineral sense, but not yet aware of themselves as components of something higher".
F What has this got to do with the next stage in what we are calling the I.T. work?
J "This awareness is crucial to it. You will soon be meeting many other people who your activities are nudging into self-awareness and group-awareness, people who are not linked to me at all, but to other entities like me. Now, some of these entities are more self-aware than others, just as some humans are. Some humans, indeed many, live almost entirely on the animal level. So you have to understand that some archangels live an almost entirely human existence. Some archangels rise to an angelic level of life, where they animate humans who live lives of isolated power, controlling themselves and others. But some are like me, finding their way to groups of people who are intuitive enough to become self-aware as a group. I long for a time when your lives are so integrated that you start to recognise other groups like your own. This will enable me to meet other archangels like myself who are awakening into the Earth in a self-aware way".
L What happens to archangels who don’t rise above a purely human existence?
F "They are the animating spirits of all the people who organise themselves into groups and live in a group awareness. Nations, political parties, groupies of every kind, all the people who only sense their identity in what they belong to."
L So there are no human beings without an archangel of some sort?
J ""Here again the analogies apply all the way up the ladder of existence. There are no animals without some sort of dependence on plants, though some are separated by millions of years from active involvement with them. There are plants whose involvement with animal processes are extremely tenuous, but which could become extinct if all animal life disappeared. Other plants are symbiotic in a direct way with animals throughout their existence, as food, as environment, or even closer. Animals relate to humans as food, as clothing, as zodiacal categories, as expressions of unresolved passions and emotions, as companions in the expression of tribal identity, as intimates in magical practice. And so to humans, who relate to angels on the path to self-awareness and awakening into conscious identity. That identity attained, your angelic selves reach archangelic levels in karmic association on group paths to spiritual awareness and initiation. But if that awareness is not yet reached, you become subject to archangels on the level of corporate, tribal identity as members of subject groups. You literally become the food of such dominant archangels, represented as eagles lions bulls or man-angels, controlled by them as hordes, mobs, armies, churches, sects, cloned on a sub-individual level as part of your training and testing in self-development. In these cases it is not just you humans who fail to reach your full spiritual potential. The archangel too is on a lower rung of its developmental ladder. It too is struggling in partial darkness, its karma only partially resolved, just as you struggle when you dominate and exploit and abuse the lower kingdoms."
R Returning to your own existence, Meruel, I understand from this that you are not just the result of our naming you, you are already in existence before that.
J "Already in existence, but not fully aware. When you form thoughts about me I awake in you, just as the animal activities of your own brain and blood and liver are vehicles for your human awareness, and ultimately for your self-awareness. Your thoughts are the expression of my awareness. The thoughts of your higher being raises this awareness to self-awareness in me, and the capacity to communicate with others of my kind as an embodied Intraterrestrial being."
F And this is how you teach us to follow this path?
J "Indeed. This is the further development of what induced you to arrive at the concept of an Intraterrestrial school. I sense that Joe is getting sleepy. Let him off the hook for a bit. You need to learn a better balance, so that all aspects of my being, represented in you five human beings, get an even chance of expression. I’ll leave you now for a bit." I’m cold.
F Here, sit by the fire, Joe. We need to become rather rapidly more aware of each other on a practical level. Melanie, there’s a rug over my chair in the bedroom; do you mind fetching it darling? Room on the left at the top of the stairs.
R I’m getting a feeling that we simply don’t know enough to handle these energies. We’re like kids playing about with a sophisticated machine. They press buttons on a trial and error basis without knowing the risks they run.
F On that level children are unprotected because the adults who invented the machine and are in charge of the children are irresponsible. We are not at the same kind of risk., because the beings awakening through us are doing so directly through our own activity. We are consciously present at each stage, and so are they.
R How do we know that? If that were so Joe wouldn’t have lost touch with his body just now.
L The same thing happened to Melanie this morning when we were talking to Ophromine. She slept for nearly an hour.
F Protection doesn’t mean that the beings need to swaddle us in cotton-wool all the time. There’s a dangerous side to all activities which stretch us beyond the habitual. We need to take sensible precautions, that’s all.
R I think we’re getting into areas where we no longer know what sensible precautions are.
M Here’s the rug, Joe. Let me sit by you. I want to put the palm of my right hand at the back of your neck. And here, let me hold you left hand.
J I’ve got quite a headache and that’s making it worse.
M I think it will get a little worse at first. Relax and let it flow out of your head and down my arm. Breathe more deeply and allow the pain to flow.
J Your hand feels extremely hot. It’s almost burning me.
M It’s not my hand itself. To me it feels cold, because your head’s cold. There, now it’s warming up a bit.
J And the headache’s going.
F Let him lie on the floor.
R Do we really have to go through all this palaver every time the beings want to speak to us?
F No, of course we don’t once we learn the lessons which the palaver, as you call it, is teaching us. Here’s Melanie, for instance, beginning to realise why she had to go through the Reiki experience.
R But don’t you feel we must be going about this process of making contact with the Intraterrestrial beings the wrong way? Each time we hve one of these episodes one or other of us seems to go into an altered state, loses touch with their normal consciousness. First it was Lucia going partly out of her body. Then Melanie, and now Joe.
F Richard, there isn’t a single human activity in which extension beyond the habitual isn’t accompanied by tension and strain. If you want to take another one-tenth of a second off a hundred metre sprint you have to accustom your muscles to a painful degree of effort. Our organisms are entirely unaccustomed to the kind of activity we have been involving them in, in I.T. We’re out on the frontier of human development, into entirely new experiences, some of which humanity has literally never encountered before, certainly not at this level of awareness. You have a special function in this group to do with the clarification of knowledge in the quietness of pure thought. But the route we are following towards that goal is bound at first to be a confused one. We need you to clarify these things. But meanwhile others need to take risks.
R I’m scared of the loss of control.
F Yes, I know you are. It seems to me that exact thinking usually carries an element of fear. Exactitude exacts a price, if you’ll excuse the pun! The results is often dogmatism, rigidity. Fanatics are afraid of being wrong.
R How do I get beyond that?
F I can remember moments when I was aware of you finding release from that sort of rigidity in a very characteristic way. An idea took hold of you, and it was as if you were riding a wild horse. You felt the beast between your knees, and the horse had the bit between its teeth, and you were away! That’s the other face, both of fanaticism, and also of scientific genius.
R I don’t think that happens very often.
J Oh yes it does, Richard. In minor ways it happens quite often at work, in fact whenever you have an awkward problem in a drawing, for example, and suddenly you see how to get it right.
R What occasion were you thinking of, Fiona?
F I was thinking of the glint in your eye when you suddenly realised Joe was an alchemist.
M Yes! And do you realise that was just before we first became aware of the entity we afterwards knew as Ophromine. I had a sense of danger, if you remember.
F Intellectuality always seems to have a link with the elemental world, both the rigidity and the wild release from it. Steiner calls it the realm of the Ahrimanic. It both arouses fear and the desire to control. Left to itself it grows into a closed system where chaos and power are linked in a rigid embrace into which no warmth penetrates.
R And yet it has its own dark light which fascinates people like me. It’s the realm of inventive mechanical genius, the world where television and computers were born.
M And because it’s all on the surface it has a deceptive innocence. It appears to be free of emotional problems, a nuts-and-bolts world where simple male souls can get away from the wiles of us women.
R It’s not the wiles of women men want to get away from it’s their sleek complacency.
M Oh come on, Richard!
R Yes it is! Men love the wiles of sophisticated women. What they can’t stand is the domesticated pussy-cats who think all they have to do is to smile and purr and smooth the warrior’s furrowed brow and solve all the stupid male problems.
J I think this conversation’s falling apart. Not up to our usual standard at all.
R You’re very silent, Lucia.
L Well actually I’m bored rigid if you want to know.
R What’s going on?
L ¤ "I’m what’s going on."
F I think it’s our friend Ophromine again.
L ¤ "You people have got a hell of a long way to go yet in what you call the I.T. school. You’re still at the stage when I can usually twist the lot of you round my little finger. So long as you stay on the heights where you can open doors for Meruel and beings of his sort of class, you’re doing fine. But down here in the shitty world you’re all over the place. And I’m telling you straight, beings like me don’t thank you for it either. There are thousands of us down here who’ve been hanging about for millennia, literally imprisoned in matter, waiting for you lot to get your act together. And you still faff about most of the time like dreamy wambly kids not knowing your tit from your ass, as if you’d got all the time in the world. Your whole Earth existence is coming apart at the seams, and a lot of the time you’re still playing intellectual games with it all. It may not seem like it when I talk like this, but beings like me love you humans very much. You’re like gods to us. We rejoice with your joys and weep with your sorrows. But a lot of the time you drive us bloody mad. You’re so bloody feeble."
R Well! What a carry-on! What set him off?
L I wish you wouldn’t call Ophromine ‘him’. It was my energy it was using.
R All right then, ‘it’. Seems a bit impersonal still.
L ¤ "Well, we’re not personal. It’s you humans who introduced the personality factor, and that’s half the problem. Sexual polarisation is a wonderful instrument for you, but you have to transcend it. Failure to do so leads to fiascos like you got into just now. The level on which you are beginning to achieve a common identity in Meruel is actually beyond personality. What you now have to do is achieve a comparable lucidity down here in the elemental world, the actual Earth. That’s a much more difficult problem for you, because you’re working in the dark, especially the men. That’s why we tend to favour women to work through. A streetwise dame like Lucia is a sort of natural element for us. Still more so when she melds with a quiet underground worker like Joe to feed her with new perceptions. Incidentally, I apologise for blowing my top just now and I’ve a suggestion you might like to consider."
F I think we’re in the sort of chastened mood, thanks to you, when we could do with a bit of help for our next step.
L ¤ "Why don’t you have a sort of formal session in which Richard talks to you about crop-circles and Joe supports him with his knowledge of the stones? I’ll put in a word or two now and then and boost what Richard comes up with. Al this has a lot more to do with your work than you think, and it’s been hanging fire for some weeks now. You couldn’t have done it earlier, but I think you’ll find your latest insights through Meruel have given you a new ability to work together. Why don’t you try that?"
J What did you mean just now, Ophromine, when you said something about being imprisoned in matter for thousands of years? You implied that this was somehow our fault did you? Something we’d done, or failed to do?
L ¤ "You’ve no idea, Joe, what an extraordinary event this conversation is. Roc in Edinburgh and others at Findhorn achieved a tremendous breakthrough in communicating with us, but communication between your kingdom and ours on this sort of level is actually still a matter of extraordinary difficulty. Look, Joe, would you mind swapping places for a bit? This is not very good for Lucia. I have to translate everything into a sort of foreign language. It puts Lucia under a lot of strain. We don’t want her losing consciousness again."
F I can see what the paradox is, Joe. Lucia’s a natural medium at a time of spiritual awakening when mediumism is becoming less and less appropriate. By letting Lucia take the strain of Ophromine we’re taking too easy an option.
R But how can we control what happens? These beings just suddenly appear in our minds, and away we go. It’s like water breaking through a dyke. It takes the path of least resistance.
F Ophromine itself pointed the way.
R How?
F Meruel. By opening our understanding to our actual relationship with beings of a higher, that is, more comprehensive awareness we are becoming a conscious bridge between their world and the world of the elements of which we stand.
J "That’s better. Now you’re forming thoughts with which I can link. We have been waiting for thousands of years for you to realise that your abstract intellectual thinking has nothing to do with reality as such. It is an essential exercise by which you have acquired freedom of operation in the natural world, but you have acquired it at our expense."
R How is that?
J "Because it is we who hold the natural world together as an ongoing spiritual process. When you form abstract thoughts about it, it is as though you suck the living juice out of it for your own purposes, so freeing your own action in it. What is left is a sort of dry husk of reality in which we are imprisoned like caricatures of ourselves. You hand us over to mighty dark beings, what Steiner called Ahrimanic entities, who set us in a kind of spiritual concrete. We can do nothing but wait, until you use the freedom you have acquired to think live thoughts in this concrete world and so restore its blood-flow. You are beginning to do this with your realisation of what you call Gaia, the Earth as a living organism, because you are a part of that. But it’s a painfully slow process, and it isn’t made easier by all the half-baked idiots who want to repudiate the freedom you have so painfully acquired for yourselves and us, and sink back into a sort of soupy nirvana dream. It’s as if they deny that Kali-Yuga ever existed or needed to happen.
R What’s Kali-Yuga?
J "Go on, tell him, Fiona. I’m worn out. But thank you everyone. We’re making progress. Thank you especially, Lucia. You opened the channel for the others. But we have to get beyond channels."
F You see? Ophromine’s right. None of us can do this work alone. We have to work as a team, a common consciousness. We have to be a cell, an organism in which Meruel can also find himself. Herself. Damn these pronouns. I think it’s time we stopped this session. We need to breathe out a bit. It’s been quite a struggle, hasn’t it? Would it be a good idea if we centred ourselves round Joe’s pillar, lit a candle, and let Richard see Lucia’s picture. You haven’t seen it, have you dear? And somebody put some music on. Something nourishing like Mozart or Bach. I can’t stand that featureless discarnating new-age stuff.
M It isn’t meant for you love. They write it for people who’ve worked in factories and offices all day, breathing petrol fumes and tapping computers.
F O.K. I’m an old-fashioned square. But I do appreciate you people. You’ve brought new life into my old one.
M And you’re a wonderful healer, Fiona. You bring everything back into a peaceful centre, like Gray’s Elegy. You have a closing day quality like late afternoon sunlight!
F I don’t propose to draw the curtains on my life yet, Melanie. But I appreciate what you’re telling me. Oh, listen! The slow movement of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto. Just what I needed! Thanks Richard.
*****
L I ‘d been wondering whether we’d ever get to use this room for I.T. work after all. And now here we all are, and we’ve turned it into a kind of lecture-room. I don’t know whether I like it.
J Well, it is a bit of a barn now that you and I have gone all domestic. I think we’ll find ourselves mainly living upstairs, don’t you love?
L We haven’t told you have we? It turned out there’s a whole empty flat on the first floor, two rooms and a bathroom-cum-toilet.
M And it was empty?
L Seems the couple living there moved out a few weeks ago. I thought I hadn’t seen them recently. The owner’s been away and hadn’t got round to advertising it.
F Can you afford to have both?
J Well, it’ll be a bit tight. We shall have to see.
F Maybe this is where the pooled resources come in.
R I wonder whether this is the right moment to launch out into a new project in London when we’re still thinking about Garway.
M What’s in your mind Richard?
R I was thinking that we’re right in the middle of the summer. Everybody’s out of town. It’s certainly not the right time to draw people together for indoor activities. But it might be the right time to think about being in the country for a bit if we decide to go ahead with Garway.
L What are you suggesting?
R Well, have you actually taken the flat upstairs?
L Not yet.
R Why don’t you move in there? I’ll help Joe move all his clobber from the office. Would you consider risking giving this room up till the autumn when we see how things are going at Garway? It might still be empty.
F We’re somewhat at the parting of the ways, aren’t we?
R More than somewhat. As I see it we have to make a definite decision.
J I wonder if there’s really room for all my stuff up there.
L I was thinking we’d still cook down here, and meet here. We could use one of the rooms upstairs as a bedroom and the other for Joe’s stuff. Then my painting and clay and so on could be down here.
J Let’s ask the landlord if he’d treat the three rooms as a single let….see what the rent is before we decide.
R Meanwhile the timing of Garway is really up to Fiona.
F The old lady’s taken all her things now. The place is empty. Nominally as you know it’s a furnished let. But it’s pretty sparse. We’d be camping out really till we’ve decorated and refurnished it. They’re aren’t even enough beds for us all.
M I can’t help feeling there’s a missing factor somewhere. You know what Meruel said about the group being somehow incomplete. I believe we’re waiting for some people we don’t even know about yet.
R I think we should drop the subject for the time being. Why don’t I show you some of these crop-circle slides, and let you ask me and Joe questions? That may introduce some more factors into our thoughts. We’re like people doing a jigsaw puzzle with too few pieces on the board.
L Shall I draw the curtains? Actually it’s almost dark enough to see the screen without them.
M It would make it cosier, Lu. Is everybody warm enough?
F Plenty warm enough I think. It’s been such a hot day.
R Don’t trip over the lead, Fiona. Could you switch on, Joe? We got this fixed up earlier.
L Did you take these photographs, Richard?
R Lord no. These are aerial photographs, copies of some of Busty’s slides. Busty Taylor’s been one of our principal aerial photographers. At first he was the only one. He’s done some wonderful work. This is a selection of some of the most spectacular forms, spanning several seasons. I won’t give you details of dates, just show you the pictures. This is a good one to start with, Barbury Castle, one of the most spectacular we’ve ever seen.
*****
M Richard, are you telling us in all seriousness that that is a natural phenomenon?
R I am, Melanie, yes.
M I simply don’t know how to react to it.
R What do you mean?
M Well, here we are sitting round in Lucia’s room as if this was an ordinary slide-show, and you calmly show us something which in ordinary human terms is totally unbelievable...why aren’t we all madly rushing round the room in screaming excitement? Or are we all just sitting here stunned like me?
R Well, first of all, are you telling me you haven’t ever seen a picture of this Barbury Castle form before?
M I am, yes. And I don’t know how to live with it in my world. It has a total impact on what I am sensitised to, on what I am geared to respond to. I am a namer, Richard, and there is no name for this thing.
F I think we have to accept, Melanie, that human beings have very nearly lost their capacity to react to the phenomena of the world with wonder and astonishment. We have turned the entire experience of our daily lives into science-fiction, a story somebody made up. The easiest thing to do with a thing like this is to say it must be a television spectacular by Stephen Spielberg or somebody like him, and dismiss it.
R What rather surprises me is that you haven’t already seen pictures of it somewhere. Actually it’s been all over the place in the last year or two, magazine covers, T-shirts, posters. I’ve even seen Barbury Castle earrings. It’s much better known than the earthwork on the hill above which gave it its name.
L And did you actually see it yourself, Richard? I feel rather as if I were ‘one of three’ asking the Ancient Mariner if he really saw the albatross, or if he made it all up to gain attention and the price of a beer.
R Yes, I saw it. I walked round it with a few dozen others within a week of its formation. How about the rest of you? Have you seen it before, Lucia?
L I’ve seen it with others in passing, mainly in bookshops. But Fiona’s right. There are no miracles anymore. If they happen they’re quickly drowned in a sea of minor technical wonders in department stores, so that they look like all the other things we’ve become immune to.
R What about you, Joe?
J I’ve heard you talk a bit, and picked up one or two of the books, Colin Andrews and others, and looked through them. I know I ought to be reacting. But there’s too much going on, isn’t there? One’s almost bound to put up a wall of resistance. Our world’s falling apart but we tell ourselves we’ll deal with it later.
M But wait a minute, wait a minute, Richard! Are we really going to damp down our sense of urgency over a thing like this that fast? Are we I.T. promoters just as bloody dull and stupid as the rest of zombie humanity? Can’t we keep an edge of wonder sharpened for just five minutes, or are we condemned just to rationalise it away with all the other ersatz rubbish our minds are filled with? You actually saw the thing, Richard, you walked in it, smelt the wheatfield, looked at…
M ...other people’s faces. What was it like, for God’s sake?
R Well, you’ve made the point yourself. People were stunned. They didn’t quite believe it. But they didn’t quite reject it either. There was already by then a good deal of polarisation into sceptics and believers. People were stumbling around nailing anybody who was prepared to hold forth and do their thinking for them. "What do you think’s behind it all?" was the commonest question you heard. Very few people were really allowing themselves to experience anything direct. People always drug themselves against actual experience by demanding immediate potted explanations. It was a great temptation to react to this and to air one’s theories in a rather unconsidered way. I did it myself, even to journalists sometimes on the spot. Very unwise! Not that they ever printed anything which didn’t conform to editorial policy, most of it sceptical. But it doesn’t help the process of refining one’s own understanding if one yields to people’s demands for explanation, and to realise too late that they are really after a handle to facilitate their own desire to rubbish it all. I gradually learned to keep my mouth shut.
M I’m still stunned. And just by that one picture. I don’t really want to see any more slides, Richard, at least not yet. I can’t really believe that you have had all that in your mind all the time we’ve known each other and never said anything about it. After all, we’re not exactly strangers.
R Be fair, love. You didn’t want to know, did you?
M I suppose I wasn’t ready. Joe, you’re not saying much, love. What do you think?
J I also think we weren’t ready for this before. I think it’s a very wonderful and miraculous thing that we have come so close together before we allowed this particular sharing to happen. We’re going to need the perspective of what we call "the beings" if we are to take this crop-circle experience on board without being thrown off course by it. I’ve already begun to suspect something in this formation I hadn’t at all expected to see. In fact I couldn’t have seen it if Lucia and I hadn’t already done some work on the menhirs. Do you see what I’m referring to, Lucia?
L I think I do. I’m not sure. I’m so overwhelmed by this form I want to start painting it, sculpting it, dancing in it, anything! I need to lose myself in the experience to stop the pain of being separate from it. It has a quality of instantaneous, overwhelming meaningfulness that is too strong, so violent it’s almost like an insult to one’s capacity for experiencing it. It’s beyond words, isn’t it? No wonder so many people believe they’re nothing but a kind of trick, a hoax.
R One of the books refers to a cartoon in an early issue of the magazine "Punch", in which an old farmer surrounded by kids is paying a first visit to the Zoo. They take him into the giraffe enclosure, and there he stands with his mouth open. Finally he blurts out:- "There ain’t no such animal!"
J It doesn’t appear at first as if we could make any connection between this and any of our other experience. That’s why so many people feel obliged to lump it in with S.F. Science fiction is the only mythology into which it seems to fit. It’s like the solitary flower blossoming in the giant spaceship in Arthur. C. Clarke’s "Rendezvous with Rama". It bursts into your reality and touches your direct soul experience, but out of a completely alien world.
F Imagine what it would be like if we ourselves were S.F. aliens landing on the Earth, and we saw a flower for the first time, or a butterfly, or a sunset. We’ve lost the childhood immediacy of experience. Perhaps that’s all these crop-circles are, projections of our unconscious minds into nature, in an attempt to reawaken our dying consciousness.
L What did you mean Joe darling when you said just now there was something you hadn’t expected to see?
J I hadn’t expected to see cosmic intelligence, as I’ve learned to experience it in anthroposophy, directly represented in the form in such an obvious way.
R Explain.
J Well, it’s those three vortical forms at the points of the main triangle. They’re all completely different versions of a circular vortex. None of them could have been inferred from the others. Think of the Trinity, or the three monkeys, blind, deaf and dumb! Symmetrical figures like simple circles or rings are immaculate, transcendental. Even pairs of things simply confront each other, cancel each other out. But trinities raise our awareness. Three is the first number that demands description and analysis. Its three members do not mutually imply each other. Pairs of opposites can remain irrevocably alien, like Lucifer and Ahriman, or they can relate. A third element which harmonises, reconciles, or holds the ring, is not inevitable. It raises the question of freedom, alternative possibilities.
R Good grief! Now stop waffling Joe and say what you mean.
J Just look at those three figures, Richard, all of you. I’m really looking at them for the first time. You’re familiar with them. Look at that first one, a simple circle. It’s like a spinning disc on top of a needle. I feel it is spinning there at infinite speed, and at the same time totally still. It’s like thought.
L "The still point of the turning world".
J That’s it. And then the second one, with its six double curved spokes. It’s like the governor on an old-fashioned reaping machine. The spokes have bit of spring in them, so that on a hot day they won’t expand and split the iron rim. It’s a circle that can breathe and control the rhythm of the system which it monitors. It’s like feeling, like our own rhythmic system. But it’s the third one which really astonishes me. Look at it, Richard, homing in on its centre in a series of six distinct steps. It’s like a gimlet or a corkscrew. It screws its way into the centre like an act of rhythmic will. You’ve got a vivid picture there of our threefold soul system, mind heart and will. Too fanciful? I don’t think so. And what does that third one remind you of, Lucia?
L Well it’s obvious what you mean, now you point it out. It’s the path of initiation at your menhir spiral in Brittany, or the paired thorn-trees on Dartmoor. It’s the relation of the will to the initiatory path. One step at a time. Is the blemish in the Goh Menhir represented?
J I don’t think it’s necessary. When you have mind initiation, feeling initiation and will initiation all represented in one form they heal each other, keep each other in balance. You can represent a virtual reality, a reality in the making, without pre-empting and threatening the whole course of creation. I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I’m not exactly waffling, but I’m improvising on an intuitive level. I’ll stop.
R What about you, Fiona?
F I didn’t want to have to comment, At least not so soon. You know, the whole way in which we have learned to use our senses when we are awake is like a continuous steady blasphemy. I’m not getting at you, Richard. We five are close enough not to violate each other’s sense of wonder when we share experiences. But we still feel embarrassed when we have to confess that we are totally overwhelmed by something. We don’t know any longer how to allow each other the privacy of worship, or private prayer.
M Isn’t that what we are in process of transcending., Fiona, when we allow ourselves to accept that Meruel is real, when we let ourselves feel a common identity, a shared privacy?
F Does anyone remember their first communion?
L I had a Catholic childhood,. I knew other kids, some of them were experiencing something. But my parents had stopped believing, so I couldn’t really either.
R This is the real problem about crop-circles. A lot of people feel they ought to be taking their shoes off, falling on their knees, or contacting what they call "circle makers". But the thing confronts them in a wholly secular setting, which is quite disorienting. You become aware of a temple atmosphere, but most people don’t know how to behave in a temple. So they either behave like tourists in a cathedral, or they try to respond with some acquired ‘new age’ ritual, beating drums or intoning ‘oms’, embarrassing themselves or each other, and exciting the hilarity of sceptics.
M I’m still a bit shattered Richard, that you managed to keep all this to yourself while we were all going through the I.T experience together, and while you and I were coming together in a new way.
R I actually refused to think about it Melanie. For me it was a step too far. I felt I needed more time, coming into a common experience with you all, to assimilate the changes in myself. You know, this knowledge path of mine is probably more separative than the very different paths of experience you others are on. I have more potential for scepticism than any of you. But I have just as much longing for integration, and for belief in my own experiences.
J Would you say Ophromine was more confrontational for you than Meruel?
R I would, yes.
L Catholics would say all this is the work of the devil.
J So would fundamentalists; in fact they would be more violent about it.
L Fiona, you and I have a clue to all this. When we first met, you remember? I was fighting off what I called the C-word. I had a feeling that the very pronouncing of the name was blasphemous in our time. Somehow our capacity for wonder and reverence has to be restored before we can allow ourselves to approach the C-reality, to pronounce the name of our own true being.
J That’s why reality is approaching us from these two diametrically opposite directions. Steiner called them Luciferic and Ahrimanic. It’s not that Meruel and Ophromine are the work of the devil. It’s rather that we, having lost our capacity for wonder and reverence, being unable, we think, to identify with the CHRIST, push Meruel towards Lucifer, and Ophromine towards Ahriman. Do you remember Ophromine declaring he was morally helpless, unable to choose allegiance to CHRIST, or to Pan, without our initiative?
F By the same token, our common identity expressed in Meruel would be a Luciferic blind-alley unless we achieve the common ground between our inner and our outer experiences.
R This is why Christians of all complexions tell us to leave all this stuff alone. It’s true that if it doesn’t reach the reality of the CHRIST, new-age spirituality becomes "the work of the devil". And what is the work of the devil? It is to keep Meruel and Ophromine from meeting!
J To keep all polarities from meeting. To keep the future and the past from meeting. To keep crop-circles from meeting stone-age temples. To keep feminists from meeting the Sun-god.
F To keep Lucia from meeting Paul.
L Joe, I love you. But I do need to meet my alter-ego.
J Yes I know.
M But, central to it all, the work of the devil is to prevent Christians from recognising the CHRIST. As humanity awakens, it is Christians more than anyone else who fight tooth and nail to remain asleep in their Christian dream while the CHRIST batters at their door.
F He warned them. "As a thief in the night", he said he would come. While they were asleep. Asleep in their preconceptions.
*****
L Let’s stop Christian-bashing and put the kettle on. There’s the phone. Could you answer it someone?
R Hello. Who? Oh, Paul. Hello! How did you find me? That must have been the caretaker. Yes, this is Lucia’s flat, we’re in the middle of a meeting. When was that? Only yesterday. Centred where? How absolutely incredible. Yes of course we must see it. Where are you ringing from? So you’re all staying in Devizes? No, I don’t think I can come today. I shall have to discuss it with the others. Hang on. Can I ring you back? O.K. I’ll ring in about five minutes. Don’t go away. Yes, I’ve written that down. (Repeats the number) Yes, O.K. as soon as I can. Bye. Well that was Paul, as I suppose you gathered. He’s got his whole group at Devizes in the middle of crop-circle territory. There’s been an unbelievably enormous crop formation completely surrounding the whole area, miles across apparently. He was a bit incoherent. Virtually the whole croppie community seems to be there. He wanted me to go straight down. I said I’d ring back.
M Why don’t we all go?
F I’m not sure I’m up to it. Unless we go on from there to Garway. It’s a bit late in the day. We might go tomorrow.
M That would give us time to get some sleeping bags and provisions together if we go on to Garway.
F There are three beds in the house. I could stay at the guest-house. I’d offer to entertain you all again, but I’m a bit short at the end of the month.
M We’d manage perfectly well. How do you feel you two?
L Shocked. But actually fine, don’t we, Joe?
J Yes. I think the beings are looking after the situation in beautiful style. It’s an objective cosmic scenario to lift us out of the personal a little way. Couldn’t be better.
R I’ll ring him back, then, shall I? If we start early we could get down there by about eleven tomorrow. All right, Fiona?
F Yes, I can manage that.
R I’ll tell him.
L Come and get your tea. I’ve made some flap-jacks and a cake.
J Are you feeling nervous, love?
L Yes very. We’ve built up this Paul business into quite an unreality I think. It will all turn out quite differently from what we expect, I’m sure. Not very fair on him really.
J Or on ourselves. He’ll be far too involved with this event and his group to bother about us, at least at first. What did he say, Richard?
R We’re to meet him and the group at eleven. I know the café he means.
M That’s fine. Now we can relax. Have a flap-jack, darling. They’re delicious.
J Did he say any more about this crop-circle breakthrough?
R If I got it straight it appears there are fifteen or sixteen formations completely surrounding the Avebury area, formations which themselves form a circle. It must be several miles across, at least two or even three miles apparently. It’s too soon for anyone to have done a map. I asked where the centre was, but they don’t even know that yet, or whether it’s an accurate circle. They’re all a bit stunned, obviously.
M I’m not surprised! It must be quite a boost to the sceptics who say people are doing it all. Would that be a possible explanation?
R Whenever a spectacular new formation appears the whole polemic between believers and sceptics surfaces again. This is clearly a completely new departure. But so was Barbury Castle, and before that the Alton Barnes series. Every step has been a breakthrough.
M But would it be physically possible for human beings to carry out such an undertaking?
R It would be a colossal logistic exercise, an impossible one for untrained amateurs. There seems to be some evidence that a group of people, perhaps more than one group, have trained themselves very intensively to do just that, for several years now. The difficulty is not so much the organisation, it’s the secrecy. The more complex and extended the form the more the likelihood of someone spotting something. Nearly all the forms have been demonstrably overnight operations during the early hours of the morning.
L But what on earth would the motives of such people be?
R Well, that isn’t a simple question either, Lucia. A lot of illusionism starts as a kind of student prank. There is a huge fascination for some people in doing something everybody says is impossible. And of course the whole path of technology partly depends on that. And there is the other side of the coin too. In a world where science claims there is a mechanical explanation for everything, even life itself, people develop a lust for being mystified, a longing for the nouminous. Some psychologists claim that all spiritual belief is based on that simple reaction, even belief in God. If he hadn’t existed, someone said, somebody would have had to invent him.
L Yes of course. The huge popularity of conjurers. Now all the classical conjuring tricks can be bought in sets for children’s parties, you have practitioners of the impossible on T.V., like the American David Copperfield.
R The object, at least some people’s motive, is to perform the impossible and then to demonstrate that it is not impossible after all, but actually quite simple if you learn the rules. You ensure their continued fascination by doing ever more impossible things, but in circumstances which make people believe you know how to do them. The final secrets are never revealed.
L Then it’s all a game!
R They would like you to think that. But there is a serious motive behind the game. There are people who seriously want to undermine peoples’ belief that there is an actual supersensible reality.
L Why?
R First of all because they want to exercise ultimate control of the world. They couldn’t hope to do that if they believed there were mysterious supersensible realities, and they don’t. On the other hand they don’t want to destroy all peoples’ hope for better things, because they need to control that too. They don’t want a world of zombies to master. What they do is, they inculcate a belief that the system always wins. They portray heroic souls standing alone against the system, and then show them defeated, but without ever finally destroying hope. Whole T.V. series are devoted to these themes.
M They would want to convince us, for example, that we invented Meruel and Ophromine, literally ‘to keep our spirits up’!
R You’ve said it!
J What they leave out is that Meruel and Ophromine also invented us, though they didn’t create our higher being. It’s a two-way process. Rationalists and humanists say nothing exists which we haven’t invented or which we can’t explain. They say we project our ‘reified’ objective apparent world into a particle-filled vacuum. What we say is that we are ourselves the product of a more comprehensive reality which invents us, so that we may in turn give it the experience of its own existence. What did Meruel Say? It was I who was speaking, wasn’t it? Something like:- "You form thoughts about me which arouse my awareness. These thoughts are not me, but if you didn’t think I wouldn’t be aware. At your level your brain and liver and blood are animal activities. Without them you wouldn’t be aware. Your thinking is the next step up. Without it I wouldn’t be aware." The lower doesn’t create the higher. But without the lower the higher wouldn’t be aware.
R There are people who constitute so-called ‘’dark brotherhoods’. Thoughts like these keep open doors which they wish to keep closed, because out of fear of the unknown they are determined to attain and retain control of the whole human situation. They are familiar with fear. Their own fear makes them masters of fear in others. They use it to keep us secure in a common-sense material world, and at the same time they keep us scared to enter into the unknown which fascinates us.
F Keeping these doors open for ourselves, finding new ways of stimulating others to find their own way to do the same, this is our Intraterrestrial School.
L And beings like Meruel and Ophromine are just as much members of it as we are.
R Yes.
L And just as little.
R What do you mean?
L There’s something which really bothers me about the whole picture Meruel was building up as Joe was speaking. It was a tremendously heady and exciting picture. They invent us so that we can think. We think, and as a result we invent them. Back the process shoots to us, where our thinking becomes their awareness. We’re in a hall of mirrors, aren’t we? No cause and effect, just resonance. But what resonates to what? Where does the process start? Where is the base line? Where is the reality? Is there such a thing as reality in this scenario? It is all a game, isn’t it? Is reality simply a reference point we decide upon arbitrarily so that we are not completely disoriented?
J I met a man at a conference who spent his life studying the play of animals, and thence the play of people. He wrote books and took endless photographs and videos. He was convinced that play holds the secret of the birth of conscious evolution into awareness, and ultimately of self-awareness. I don’t think reality is an arbitrarily chosen reference point, but I do think it is intuitively chosen rather than logically derived from experience. And that intuition may well be born out of experiences which emerge in play. It’s not so much that life is a game. It’s rather that the secret of insight starts in what comes to conscious attention during play. Watch a kitten chasing its tail. Stillness of concentration, titivated and intrigued by unanticipated movement, unconsciously self-produced. ‘At the still point of the turning world.’ Says Eliot, ‘there the dance is, and there is only the dance’. Reality sense comes from the endless fascination of irreconcilables, not from the dogmatic assertion of eternal verities. There, my little chicks! Joe’s thought for the day.
R I doubt if it’s original.
J Who said it was? But it was I who thought it.
R But is it the whole story?
F No it isn’t. Wisdom comes into form through movement. But the secret doesn’t lie either in wisdom or in form. As Eliot says, it lies in the movement itself, and in the stillness implicit in the movement. Reality sense only starts with fascination, Joe. Wonder has to progress beyond itself into reverence, and there the animal process of play reaches a boundary. Perhaps only the dog in the animal world ventures beyond that boundary, in its devotion to the human beings. It can’t formulate them itself. Mankind consciously recognises divine law in nature.
J And is that the limit for mankind: obedience to divine law?
F No. Steiner points to a fourth stage in which the will is released from divine law in recognition of the ongoing course of evolving reality, which becomes the sphere of human freedom.
J So freedom is not disobedience to law, since law itself evolves. Each of these four stages is quite unique isn’t it? Wonder, reverence, obedience to law, release into evolution. No one of them could be derived from the previous one.
L It’s an in-going spiral towards a still centre, like the thorn-trees, or the stepped spiral in the Barbury Castle form.
F Steiner showed a way of reconciling the differences between the four stages, or rather experiencing the transformation of one into another, by releasing them into the body in movement and sound. Otherwise we get stuck at each stage and experience them as irreconcilable with each other. Wonder and astonishment for example. If we never get beyond this reaction to the unknown we remain outside the phenomenal world altogether, just as Immunuel Kant said we eternally were, trapped where the conjurer-illusionist wishes to hold us.
R I can see that, at that stage, it really doesn’t matter whether a crop-circle is a hoax or not. Astonishment still operates through the form itself. It’s only at the next stage...
F That’s it. Reverence sets wonder....
M ….which is static! Wow! Gosh! Look at that, eh?
F ...sets it into movement. Reverence internalises wonder, personalises it in the heart. Astonishment still has an element of fear. Reverence diverts your attention from fear to love. From open-mouthed astonishment you go on to round-mouthed mystification. From Ah you move to Oh. You can experience this in the body by making the sound ‘Ah’ with your arms open to the starry sky, and then changing the sound to ‘Oh’ or ‘Aw’ and enclosing something with your arms, as in holding a baby, or protecting a candle flame. Steiner gave a name to this recognition that the body can directly express a development of meaning. He called it eurhythmy.
L What happens in the body when we go beyond reverence and start formulating laws?
F The internalising movement goes external again. The arms become parallel as if setting limits, defining parameters. You put the baby in a cradle with parallel sides, preparing it for life’s limitations in the world. You put the candle in a box, an lamp holder. You make rules. The world withdraws a little. The sound changes from ‘Aw’ to ‘Ooh’. There’s a slight frisson of fear again. Reverence moves towards respect.
L And the fourth stage?
F None of these stages is experienced as separate from the one before or after it. Although none of them can be derived from the one before it...there is a divine inevitability about the change from one movement to the next. However, there is a more fundamental change when divine law is transcended and freedom declares itself. The eyes close and the mouth also and there is a humming sound as the soul reasserts itself within. We have moved from Ah, via Aw and Ooh, to Mmm. I remember the bodily thrill. I remember the bodily thrill I experienced when I first realised that the combined sound ‘Aoum’ was rooted in cosmic and human reality!
M Fiona, thank you! That’s a wonderful lesson in the exact science of the spiritual world.
F You can thank Steiner for it. It expresses the essence of his spiritual-scientific method.
L When some new-agers insist on intoning three ‘oooms’ to close their group meditations, are they expressing a reality, then?
F Yes, but as it were, only half the story. ‘Oom’ comes from the east, where karmic law is transcended and the soul enters nirvana. ‘Oom’ needs to be healed by ‘Ah-aw’, which is a western sound, based on the wonder of the cosmic world outside, and the growth of reverence for it within. ‘Ah-aw’ changes the whole mood of Oom’ from denial of the world in nirvana to recognition of the evolution of reality in fulfilment of divine law in the ongoing course of the world, as Steiner calls it. CHRIST said:- "I come not to destroy the law but to fulfil it".
M Fiona, would you say that the I.T school in general is a valid continuation of what Steiner initiated in his spiritual science, so-called anthroposophy?
F These are big questions. It’s easy to oversimplify them. The I.T. impulse will certainly need to face fundamental issues involving the course taken by the spiritual evolution of mankind. There are issues raised by the whole way in which Steiner initiated anthroposophy as a step beyond the nineteenth century theosophical awakening, issues which have by no means been resolved in our time.
M Are you able to indicate what these issues are?
F Only the general direction of them. They all relate in some way to the question of human freedom. From the first, Steiner insisted that the path of spiritual evolution is, ipso facto, a path to freedom. In contrast to that, for example is the view of the catholic church, which places prior emphasis on the path of ‘holy obedience’, obedience to divine law, and the discipline of will in conformity with that. The path of religion is a binding back, a matter of service, within which the mysterious secret of freedom lies. The authority to administer and direct this service, the service which is perfect freedom, is claimed to be invested by divine authority in the church, whose walls define the limits within which it is safe to play.
J That refers back to ‘Joe’s thought for the day’ doesn’t’ it. The church claims that dogmatic parameters make it safe to play, safe to seek insight through the fascination of irreconcilables. Since the true path to freedom lies within that structure there is no point in looking over the wall to see what’s going on outside. And then we find ourselves looking once more at the whole bitter struggle over the centuries between orthodoxy and heresy. The attempt to do good on these conditional terms carries the responsibility for the greatest evils of western history.
F You see, Steiner was brought up against the background of all this. His early schooldays were in the care of Cistercian monks. It took him decades to realise that there was any truth at al in what was taught him as a child about the CHRIST, so distorted a version was it of the truths emerging in his understanding from a diametrically opposite direction.
L To be fair to the church, most Catholics would say that matters would have been far worse if they hadn’t imposed their rule. Walls protect children at play as well as restricting them.
J Yes, but Catholics are also human. Theoretically there may be a moment when it is safe to dismantle the scaffolding and let the structure grow on its own. But that moment is always being deferred, perhaps indefinitely. As an example, an ex-student with the Jesuits once told me that as early as the twenties of this century there were discussions in their hierarchy, not as to whether reincarnation was a fact, but as to how soon it would be politic to admit that it was. Our differences with the church often centre on this question of what an adult is. But people need to grow up.
R Steiner was a very great man, perhaps the greatest of our time. But he was also human, and he was once young and inexperienced like the rest of us. It is characteristic of people who turn out to be geniuses that, like the child in the story of the emperor’s new clothes, they see through the confusions which throw a misty veil over other people’s perceptions. The child in the story saw that the emperor was naked, and said so. Steiner, as a church-nurtured child entering the free-thinking world of the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, saw through the nub of the matter in straight philosophical terms. When most of his contemporaries were still floundering around trying to solve the problem of human freedom, but still accepting the conditional nature of all human conclusions, Steiner went straight to the heart of the philosophical matter. He saw that it was useless to go on hedging about the precise balance in particular cases between freedom and necessity until you have stated, and solved the fundamental question of whether freedom was possible in principle. And this meant going further still, and finding out whether human thinking was capable of arriving at the truth of a matter, and if so, under what conditions.
M Did he reach a conclusion?
R He certainly did. He demonstrated and proved philosophically that freedom was possible on first principles. He showed that the thinking which could reach such a conclusion was valid. And finally he showed that thinking unaided could not arrive at truth, and under what conditions the truth could be attained.
M If that were generally accepted it would change the whole basis of scientific thought, and even of civilisation itself. Why isn’t it?
R That’s one of the big questions Fiona was referring to just now. Steiner was working near to the heart of the philosophical movement of the late nineteenth century, which was mainly a German movement. These things may seem dry and academic now, but at the time those philosophical questions were a seething cauldron of thinking in which what we now largely take for granted as ‘the philosophy of science’ was being shaped. We easily forget that, at certain points in the struggle for certainty, there are conclusions which come to be generally accepted as a basis for further exploration, not because anybody at the time regards them as proved, but because they couldn’t go further without deciding on a workable basis. When subsequent results in science tend to confirm these conclusions, ordinary undiscriminating mortals tend to accept these quite provisional assessments as Truths, laws of science, or whatever. But this doesn’t alter their provisional nature. Anthroposophists (and, for this purpose that includes me!) believe that Steiner transcended that whole provisional scenario in his early fundamental book, "The Philosophy of Freedom", and in other philosophical treatises. His subsequent destiny, and the spiritual needs of the time, then took over and he began to teach an occult science, at first in association with the Theosophists. At that point, inevitably, the entire middle-European, sceptical , rationalist, non-spiritual, academic world of philosophers dropped him like a hot cake. If that sort of occultist nonsense, said they, was to be the outcome of this early philosophical work, which up to that time had seriously interested them, then there must have been something seriously wrong with it. Quite simply, the academic world ceased to take Steiner seriously. In fact no serious students of philosophy nowadays read "The Philosophy of Freedom", or they would discover for themselves that it stands on its own, and would have done so even if no world of spiritual teaching had ever followed it. The whole course of twentieth century philosophical thought would have been very different if they had. Much modern philosophy, much of existentialism for instance, rests on foundations which, did students but know it, Steiner had already dismantled a century ago. In detail these are matters for philosophical specialists. For most of us it is enough to expose earlier flaws in the foundations of philosophy at the time of Kant, Hegel, von Hartmann and others.
L Do we all need to do that?
R I think we do, more especially if we want to go more deeply into the practical consequences of Steiner’s later teaching. It’s shocking how few people who think of themselves as anthroposophists are self-confident enough to solidify for themselves that fundamental groundwork. The consequence is that a great deal of the rich new wine of spiritual teaching in our time is poured into old bottles, in other words into thinking about freedom and reality which is still vague and untransformed. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since Steiner’s day.
L I would need all that gone through again and again before I’d grasped the essentials of what you’ve all been saying. I can sense that somewhere in the middle of all that lies the answer to my fundamental unease about a hall of mirrors. It seems to me that what you’re saying is….There’s no possibility of arriving at the truth about reality if all you do is think. Somehow people themselves have to break through the cycle of mutually supportive ideas and perceptions. They have to intervene. We actually have to do something about it. But what is it we have to do?
J We have to say Aoum!
L Oh come off it, Joe! I don’t want Zen. I want to think it out. I mean it’s obvious, isn’t it? If we are free beings, and the thinking process is valid, but is incapable of reaching truth, then what the hell is thinking for?
J I heard a very practical agriculturist put that very point in a lecture last year. He said if practical agriculture depended on thinking we’d all starve. I’ve heard evangelical fundamentalists say God never meant us to think.
L Come on then Joe, give!
J Aoum! (Lucia leaps on him with a large cushion) Get off, you idiot! (Muffled Aoums and giggles emerge from the cushion).
R This ridiculous group has a childish predilection for pillow fights. You and I, Fiona, seem to be the only serious Intraterrestrials in the room. (A pillow strikes him amidships and spills his tea).
F Our elderly dignity doesn’t seem to be immune, however. Let us restore order. (Order is restored).
L I’m terribly sorry, Richard. Let me dry you and get you some more tea.
R I assure you my natural serenity remains unruffled. I’m just wet.
M Are you all right, Fiona?
F My maternal feathers are as smooth and dry as usual, thank you Melanie.
R I wonder what Meruel and Ophromine think of all this.
J Ophromine says:- ¤ "In the groves of Arcadia, nymphs and shepherds, not to mention satyrs and centaurs, were larking about all the time. It usually ended in sex"
L We’re good pupils, aren’t we Ophromine?
J ¤ "Well, you say we invented you. You should be. Speaking for myself, I find you a bit sober for my taste. You’re all terribly English, you know. They managed things better in Ancient Greece."
F As for Meruel, he’s saying nothing. He maintains an Olympian dignity. I fancy there’s a glint in his eye, though.
R Where were we?
F Lucia’s question. What the hell is thinking for? You’re very like Steiner, Lucia. You go for the throat. You’re very good at basic thinking. But I think Richard’s right. You’ll have to read Steiner’s "Philosophy of Freedom".
R It’s time somebody rewrote that book. I don’t mean simplify it for "bears of little brain" like Winnie the Pooh. But it needs re-expressing in twentieth century English, with references to writers as familiar to modern readers as those old philosophers were to Steiner’s public. I think we’d find that every one of the philosophical clangers dropped by those old boys and sorted out by Steiner are still being dropped today by some well known author or other.
M Why don’t you do it?
R Me? I’m simply not widely enough read. It needs to be done by a trained scholar, or at least by someone who thinks in that way.
J The trouble is they’re mostly hamstrung by their own disciplines. Their very training disqualifies them for the original thinking the task would require.
R It would need to be done by someone deeply versed in anthroposophy, but not afraid to shock the anthroposophical purists. There aren’t many trained scholars among such people.
F There’s a man called Richard Leverton. He could do it. In some ways he’s more anthroposophical than the anthroposophists themselves. But he could do it all right.
R Perhaps he already has.
L All this is very interesting I’m sure to you people who know what you’re talking about. It’s not much use to me, or probably to you, Melanie, is it? And if Joe says Aoum once more I’m giving up.
F The problem is, Lucia, that the concepts behind Aoum are the answer to your question about what thinking is for. The path towards the knowledge of Truth is not itself a thinking path, and yet thinking is required at every step of it. Steiner said no step can be taken in the direction of Truth unless wonder has first been aroused in the seeker. Unless we are astonished there is no motivation other than to accept matters as they appear to be on the surface. But an astounded spirit of enquiry doesn’t in itself take us very far. On the contrary, it only starts the process off. It makes us think like mad, but most of those thoughts tend in the direction of reinforcing a sense of impenetrable mystery. It’s only when wonder arouses in us a sense of the nouminous, when we feel ourselves out of our heart’s warmth turning inwards towards a reverent preoccupation with inner mysteries, mysteries which are more than just intriguing, but penetrate below the surface of what is apparent, that our thinking is released from the block created by our own astonishment and wonder. We are still thinking, but suddenly our thoughts have a whole new world of intuitive perceptions to go to work on. However, we soon find ourselves up against further limitations, this time imposed by the chaotic nature of our own heart processes. We lose ourselves in the depth of our own insights. The nature of thinking itself demands of us that we organise these formless insights, set them in order. We discover this third stage, natural law, out of a need to limit the extent to which we otherwise sink into the uncontrolled depths of heart insights.
And that perception of law at the same time imposes a sense of loss, and even fear. Once again it is not thinking itself which has led to this further step of knowledge. There is nothing implicit in intuitive insights which would lead by thinking to the idea of laws in nature. It is our own human need to seek order out of chaos that brings us back into an outer world. But without further thinking we couldn’t take this step.
Then once more we reach a limit. Nothing blocks our perception of Truth more completely than the belief that the whole of reality is containable in dogmatic formulation. This is where fear takes the dark brotherhoods to, the idea that the system always wins. These are the dark flowers which blossom from the greenery of living processes, the greenery which took us to Garway. Once more thinking demonstrably fails to take us beyond a certain point. The light flowers only appear when intuition takes us beyond law to the notion that the whole nature of reality evolves. It is constantly breaking through the barriers we impose on it by rational comprehension.
M No wonder the ecstatic mystics don’t want us to think.
F The only religions which can bear us to think pre-empt the thinking in dogma and bind it with interdicts and fatwas. The very word religion means binding back. In their eagerness to reveal the source of existence they forgot that existence also evolves.
M You don’t like religion, do you, Fiona?
F I don’t like the assumption that worship and love is only safe and right if it is hemmed in by the fear of error. I don’t think the fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom, I think it is the end of spirituality. I have a taste for the headlong, but I believe that thinking has to accelerate to keep pace with it, or we lose the ground of our existence.
L Fiona, you never finished your account of how the body experiences the progression from Ooh to Mmmm! Melanie and I both sent you off on another track. We were too interested in the question of whether I.T. was a straight continuation of anthroposophy to let you finish.
F Which was totally relevant. We needed to talk about the ongoing course of the world, and we did. If we want to allow our arms to express this we need to release them from the parallel lines of Ooh and set them into a smoothing motion, like stroking a cat or raking soil over seeds you have planted, one hand pushing and the other pulling, and then reversing direction. Wonder, reverence and law are all returned to a peaceful uniformity in preparation for the next cycle of wonder.
L ‘Ah’ again.
F And have you noticed that the first word of a baby goes from Mmmm to Aaaah in a most appropriate way? The beginning of a new cycle of Truth.
L MAH-MAH!
R Sheer coincidence!
F If you say so. I find serendipity more convincing. If we’re going to meet Paul at eleven in the morning we’d better get to bed.
J You say there are three beds at Garway? We’ll need another. I’ve got a camp bed which I’ll bring.
R And we’d all better bring sleeping bags.
M I’ll do the food again.
R Don’t bother with lunch. They do an excellent meal at Avebury.
J Good night all. Leave the screen and stuff. We’ll clear up.
L Night Mel! I feel we’ve really christened the room at last. I can’t believe we’ve got to give it up. I’ll talk to the landlord in the morning.
M Bless you both! Sleep well! What’s that? What are you muttering about?
L BOOB! BOOB! I wonder what Eurhythmy makes of that?
M Ask a baby. Good night!
*****
R We’re a bit early.
M The place is seething. We’ll be lucky to find a place to park.
R There’s George Wingfield. Hi, George! What’s doing? He’s pointing round to the other side of the car park.
M Drive on round. Who’s George Wingfield? You never talk about any of these people.
R I’ve kept away from the croppie gossip, and in any case I don’t know any of these people well. That looks like the last place gone. We’ll have to park along the road. We’d better be quick before the police start moving people on.
M Go on into the village. There you are, look. There’s a few places on the right.
R Don’t leave anything of value in the car anyone.
L I’m the only one with a camera. Is the boot locked?
R I’ve done it. We can go back into the car park and down the footpath. It’s shorter. We pass some of the stones of the main peripheral circle. Take my arm, Fiona. I can’t believe all these people are simply here to see crop-circles. This is the usual crowd of Avebury tourists.
F Well it’s a lovely day, Richard. I’d expect a crowd on a day like this. Joe, you’re the expert. Is it always like this?
J I don’t come very often nowadays, Fiona. There are more people than I would have expected on a June morning in the week. Look, there’s a placard. "Giant crop formation at Avebury" Shall I get a paper?
R I wouldn’t bother. Paul will know everything by now. The paper will only have the usual disinformation stuff. Here’s where you begin to see the stones.
L Heavens! They’re absolutely gigantic. How on earth did they get here?
J That’s what everybody’s been asking for centuries. I’ll tell you all about it sometime, but an enormous amount’s been written about it all, where the nearest sources of such stone are, how long they’re estimated to have been here, and so on. It’s all very relevant to what we’re doing, but I’d rather concentrate on crop-circles today.
F Richard, you go ahead and find Paul. I’ll take my time. Melanie, you go with him.
L We’ll stay with you, Fiona. I want to take in these incredible stones. I’d no idea the whole thing was on such a gigantic scale. It looks as if they go on for miles.
J They do very nearly. There’s an enormous outer circle which we’ve just passed through, and two smaller circles side by side enclosed in it. You can see the first one over there, look. As well as that there are two avenues of parallel stones leading out of, or into, the outer circle from different directions: a short one, now largely dismantled, and a much longer one leading straight to Silbury Hill.
F Those must have been the ones we passed in the car.
J That’s it. Richard says several of the crop formations seem to have been associated with that avenue and with Silbury Hill for a number of years now.
F There’s some sort of connection then?
J I’m beginning to think there must be. What interests me is whether there turns out to b any mathematical connection. We need to ask Richard about that. A man called John Martineau has done a lot of detailed mathematical analysis of the crop formations. He has established that, however they are actually created, whether biologically, by some sort of intervention or resonance with extra-terrestrial space, or simply by human beings, a lot of them demonstrate a quite extraordinary degree of mathematical accuracy.
L More than could be achieved by people working in the dark at night, do you think?
J Richard says there’s still a lot of argument about that. The accuracy is less of a problem than the complexity. We know, according to Richard, that the so-called hoaxers have become more and more skilled in the mechanics of producing the forms. But Martineau claims, if I understand it, that some of the forms are constructed on the basis of two or even three different geometrical grids. There is an intricacy about that which would challenge even a computer to come up with such a complex formation. As for replicating it in the dark at night, even with highly sophisticated equipment, and at the same time keeping the operation secret, I really don’t know if that is humanly possible.
F On the other hand, as you, Lucia, pointed out the other day, there are illusionists like the American David Copperfield, who appear to be achieving feats which defy accepted limits of what is possible.
J Yes, but usually under highly controlled conditions.
F We seem to have come into the village. I’ve only been here once before. I’m not sure which way we go now. I think we cross over and down a path the other side. Richard did explain...oh, here comes Melanie.
J She’s telling us to cross.
L Did you find them, Mel?
M Yes, Richard’s got us a table, big enough for us five and a couple of others. We’ve seen Paul. He’s got a whole crowd with him. They have a couple of tables outside the café further over. It’s bedlam down there.
J Did you get any sense out of anybody?
M Not really. Richard talked for a moment to one of Paul’s party. He, Paul and some others had been sitting with one of the dowsing experts, another Richard, but it was all quite confused and second hand. I’