Mike Scott: Origins of Our Weekly Inspiration Emails
Written by Mike Scott
Intro from Britta Schmitz
Britta and global community member Mike Scott from TheWaterboys
In mid-September Mike Scott – global community member and lead singer of the band The Waterboys – gave two glorious, sold out concerts for the benefit of the Universal Hall at Ecovillage Findhorn. Together with his band members and friends, he came for a visit and it was wonderful to hear their stories and share more with them about the spiritual heritage of our community.
At some point we came to speak about our Weekly Inspiration email we send out and I asked them if they knew about it. To my surprise and excitement Mike said: ‘I used to choose the inspiration pieces to share with others when I lived here and Eileen did it before me.’ After the passing of our beloved community member, Dürten Lau, I and my and Eileen’s good friend Rosie Turnbull, have been working together to discover the source Dürten used to select the weekly guidance that is featured in our local community magazine, Rainbow Bridge, and shared with our global community through the Weekly Inspiration email.
An example of our Weekly Inspiration emails
So what a joy when Mike shared his story with me! I asked him to write it down for you and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did. Thank you so much, Mike! He even added some more information about the many people who visited and received and recorded their guidance in the early days and he gave me a copy of God's Word Through Elixir, from where he used to choose the Weekly Inspiration. (At that time, Eileen wrote under her spiritual name Elixir). So this is the source I will be attuning to to choose guidance for the October Weekly Inspiration and hopefully I will find some more volumes for the months to come. According to Mike and Rosie, there is a vast supply of guidance already transcribed. Maybe at some point some of us within our global community will step forward and share more about our personal guidance too?
If you would also like us to send you our Weekly Inspiration emails with guidance received by Eileen Caddy, please join our mailing list here.
Mike’s story about the Weekly Inspiration received by Eileen
In 2003 I noticed that Eileen's guidance, reproduced in each week's edition of the community's magazine Rainbow Bridge, often had typing mistakes. In those days I was in the habit of dropping in to visit Eileen in the afternoons, so I asked her about it. She explained that her eyesight was bad and she made mistakes typing the guidance.
Wow! I hadn't realised that she typed the Bridge guidance herself! She explained to me that she picked selections from her published books of guidance, all of which of course she had in her house, and typed these each week on small pieces of paper, signed them by hand, and popped them in the ‘for publication’ Rainbow Bridge folder in the General Office.
Mike Scott with Eileen Caddy
Thinking, in my zeal, that Eileen's guidance should be perfectly presented unbesmirched by typos, I offered to do the typing for her weekly, imagining me sitting by her, hands poised while she dictated. She said yes to this offer but went further, instructing me to also select the pieces from her guidance myself. ‘Just choose lovely ones,’ she said.
This was an honour indeed, and I enthusiastically embraced the task laid upon me. From then until Eileen's death, I would select a passage of guidance at the start of each week, print it out, and take it round to Eileen for her signature then, as she had done herself, pop it into the RB (Rainbow Bridge community magazine) folder in the Office.
God's Word Through Elixir (Eileen Caddy's spiritual name in the early days)
At first I selected from her published books but, because the guidance in those was already very familiar to Bridge readers, I sought out more obscure sources. At that time there were still copies in Park Library of God's Word Through Elixir, beautiful community-printed collections of her guidance, collected monthly for distribution in the early 1970s to the community's network of friends and supporters. Those were the days when Eileen would receive guidance each day for the community, which Peter Caddy would read out to the assembled members at morning Sanctuary. Little of this guidance had found its way into the published books, so it was less familiar and had a fresh charge. I knew myself how easy it is to take even Eileen's guidance for granted, and in the best Eileen style, just as she so often did with the patterns of her own life, I wanted to shake things up. She was delighted for me to select extracts from these obscure collections, expressing amazement that I had found them—though, in truth, it wasn’t difficult. With 21 editions of God's Word Through Elixir, each containing a full month of daily guidance, with each day filling an entire A4 page of typescript, there was a substantial wealth of material to choose from.
This system continued for the next four years. In spring 2007, three months after Eileen's passing, I went on a concert tour with my band, which took me away from Findhorn for most of the year. The responsibility of selecting and printing the guidance for Rainbow Bridge then passed to Dürten Lau, who continued the practice (using old copies of God's Word Through Elixir and other sources she discovered) until her passing earlier this year. The responsibility was thentaken up by Britta Schmitz, who asked me to share this brief history.
About guidance received by community members in the early days
The early Findhorn books of the late 1960s didn't emerge from a vacuum. They were the first public evidence of a culture of recording inner guidance and visions that had been developed and sustained by the Findhorn founders from the mid-1950s onwards, long before the famous caravan came to rest at Findhorn Bay in 1962.
The Original Caravan that came to Findhorn in 1962
A vast amount of material was inwardly received and committed to paper by Eileen Caddy (Elixir, from 1953), Dorothy Maclean (Divina, from 1954), Anne Edwards (Naomi/Miriam, who lived with the group for a brief period in 1962 and again from 1965 to 1967), and Lena Lamont (from 1957 when she joined Peter, Eileen and Dorothy at Cluny Hill Hotel).
Much of this body of material, plus further material received through Naomi before she joined the group, is held in the Foundation's archive at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Eileen, Dorothy and Lena had been trained by Peter's former wife Sheena Govan to sit in regular disciplined meditation to faithfully write down the guidance they received, and never to break their ‘appointment with God’.
Eileen Caddy
Sheena Govan
The messages or 'transmissions' received were recorded by hand, typed, filed, read within the group (and later the Community), distributed by mail to friends (and later to the Community's mailing list), and from 1966 distributed round the world; first in pamphlets, then in booklets, then in books, all the way to Opening Doors Within, the best-selling volume of Eileen Caddy's guidance, published in 1987 and so far translated into over 20 languages. Guidance received by Eileen was also distributed on audio tape.
Eileen Caddy, Peter Caddy, Dorothy Maclean, Lena Lamont and friends in 1967
Guidance and visions received by other members and visitors to the Community including R. Ogilvie Crombie, Kathleen Fleming, Kathy Sparks, and many others, were also faithfully recorded.
If you would like to see a couple of short video clips in which Eileen Caddy talks about the importance of learning to be still and receiving inner guidance please click here:
