Peter found that few numbers escaped this accusation at one time or another. The number ten clung to a certain steely practicality, gleaming like a Swiss army knife among the smoky relics of numerology, although there was no doubt some ‘system’ in which it too bowed down before the tyranny of the esoteric. As a banker, his relationship with numbers was at once corrupt, since numbers were always figures, standing for a sum of money, and at the same time serene because, even in the debased form of a bottom line or a grand total, they spoke of a separate reality, infused with a meaning less slippery than language and less ephemeral than emotion. To see this Platonic realm press-ganged into the tricky service of symbolism was strangely disturbing to him. He felt a similar flicker of indignation at the thought of astrology. Why should the other planets, which spun out their lives beyond the reach of palpitating human concerns, be dragged into that unfortunate melee?
As the sharing went round, Peter became anxious about giving an account of his motives for coming to Findhorn. His heartbeat quickened and his mouth grew dry. He was far too preoccupied to notice what the others said, except that each one seemed to be ‘going through a transition’ and won appreciative nods from Krishna, Lolita and the others for using this phrase.
‘I’m going through a transition too,’ said Peter defensively. ‘It’s difficult to talk about because, well, I’m sort of right in the middle of it at the moment. I work in a bank and the thing is it suddenly seemed completely pointless and I had a bit of a nervous breakdown … that’s all I can say just now.’
He blushed at the thought that he might be believed as much as at the thought that he might not be. What disturbed him even more was that he started to believe what he had ‘shared’. On his way through the dark woods that led down to the village of Forres and his hotel, he began to feel that he really was having a bit of a nervous breakdown, that banking did seem completely pointless, and that he was in fact going through a period of transition.
Back in the hotel, he was told there was a function in the Sunderland Room, but that residents were of course welcome to avail themselves of the bar facilities. He drank whisky in the bar and wondered what kind of mirror the group was setting up. Why should he start to worry about the things he said in front of the group? Why did it seem to act on him like some magnified and collective conscience? Why could he not wear some adequate disguise, and when the office opened the day after next ask if they could remember a German woman called Sabine, and when he had an address for her, leave Findhorn and its silly rituals? That’s what he would do, that was definitely what he would do.
The next morning on his way to breakfast, Peter saw the man with the grey ponytail he had overheard on the first day. He was again in earnest conversation.
‘He was saying that when you bring things together with love, either pieces of yourself or people in a group, that the sum is greater than the parts, and that in that context one and one equals three…’
Here, perhaps, was the sacred arithmetic that explained the strange power of the group to impress him more than its constituent members.
The fact that the first thing he heard in the morning seemed to address the very question he had been asking himself in the bar the night before was one of those funny little coincidences of which the people around him made such a cult.
‘Here at Findhorn,’ said Krishna before that morning’s attunement, ‘we suggest you make “I” statements. Out there —’ he thrust his chin towards the uncomprehending world that lay beyond the window — ‘you often say “you” when you really mean “I”, but here we like to own our feelings.’
Jill, a crushingly shy nineteen-year-old from Glastonbury, wanted to leave the group. Lolita was with her now, Krishna explained, trying to persuade her to stick it out at least for the sacred dancing they were going to do after the attunement. Krishna asked everyone to hold hands by crossing their arms over each other as if they were weaving them into a rope.
‘Feel the energy going round the circle,’ he said. ‘Receive it, take what you need and pass it on.’
Peter felt the flow come through one hand and pass out through the other. Was his neighbour sending the flow the same way? Did it matter?
‘Let’s focus on Jill and hope that through our love we can persuade her to remain part of this circle of new friends.’
Peter, who despite himself was enjoying being roped to his neighbours, was jolted into rebellion by this promiscuous use of the word ‘friends’ to describe the bunch of nervous strangers who had met for the first time the evening before.
The sacred dance was focalized by Ulrike, a German woman who had been ‘heavily into the lesbian and biking scene in Berlin’ before she got into sacred dance; now it was her life.
They stood shoeless in the former ballroom of the hotel, no doubt the site of many functions in its day, a painting of a unicorn, as pleased as Punch beside a woodland stream, now defacing its principal wall. Outside, ribs of dark grey cloud were packed tightly overhead. Peter looked longingly at the cars parked at the back of the building. He hated dancing. They were trying to brainwash him into some collective trance in which community, communism and communion formed a noose around the beautiful neck of capitalist individualism, the sole route to cultural achievement and personal happiness. He was going to scream.
The circle was the sun, Ulrike explained, and each person was a sunbeam. ‘We will dance the sun meditation and maybe the sun will come out,’ she smiled.
Fat chance, thought Peter.
Ulrike asked everyone to look at each other while they danced.
The music from the St Matthew Passion swelled from a ghetto-blaster in the corner. They started to move in a simple step, looking by turns into each other’s eyes, trying to move harmoniously round the room.
Peter looked at Lolita and she seemed to be serious and kind. Krishna, too, had a serious expression in his eyes. He looked around the room and saw candour, yearning and woundedness. Only Jill looked resolutely at her feet. She was young, excruciated, lost. Her skin was bad and her clothes defiantly ugly, but instead of dismissing her as he would have in the predatory streets of London, Peter found himself longing to reassure her and put her at her ease. They moved around, ceremonious and slow. If only she would look up, he would rain kindness into her eyes.
There were further dances, including a vegetarian allegory in which a hunter, startled by the beauty of his prey, spared its life. Peter continued to note the ideological pressure he was under, but it no longer bothered him as much. He was more intrigued by the strange sense of goodwill that was welling up in him. Why not approach people with trust instead of suspicion? Why not be helpful instead of opportunistic? Why not be heartfelt instead of calculating?
The clouds had thinned, melted and fragmented, and the sun poured down on to the lawn and through the tall windows onto the blond floorboards of the ballroom. What was going on?
‘You see, we’ve brought out the sun!’ Ulrike laughed.
Over the next few days, he kept rediscovering this sense of goodwill, even when the experiences it accompanied seemed to take place on moonless nights of rhetoric and credulity. His concern for the rest of the group gradually rose to a pitch at which his happiness seemed inseparable from the happiness of the others. Everyone developed a sense of each other’s vulnerability by telling their ‘stories’. Instead of having to lower the portcullis of a false self in order to avoid being hurt, they pre-empted the pain by showing that they were all hurt already. There was a great liberation in feeling that the worst had already happened. This mutual concern was how family life should be, but of course never was, and that was its seductiveness.