It's a strange thing having free will.
   It gets us in all sorts of good and bad places.

Sometimes it seems it would be easier just to be told what to do and go along with it.
   Well, if I were God and wanted to create a wonderful universe that would only obey and love me because I said so, it wouldn't be very satisfying. Unless we're given free choice we're just robots-but we have the capacity to be more than robots. So, we've been given this wonderful opportunity of free will to learn. And we do learn because God is at the core of us. Each of us is God and that's always trying to surface and come out, so it's always there.

We're always having to come up with choices so we always have to be exercising our will, but presumably we're also exercising our intuition.
   To me intuition is our will. You might say we have our personality desires and then we have what we call our divine desires, which often are actually against each other. We have to make these choices to find out what we really want to connect with-our personality or our divine self.

Is there some exercise we can use to help in this capacity?
   Well, I think we can always choose to be in higher, more loving energies. We've all experienced them and, as I say in the exercises in the books, we can remember them and imagine we're in that same state of joy or ecstasy or whatever it is. We can choose to be in that state whenever we want to, unless we're in such a negative state that we don't even try. That's where free will comes in too, of course.

It seems often we forget to choose that.
   We get too caught up in whatever it is, the world's ways and so on. Each time we make a choice we learn something. We get a result and we learn from the result what satisfies us. We begin to choose things that satisfy us more. We want wealth, shall we say, and we get it and find we're still not happy. So we keep on choosing until we find what really makes us joyful and that's the connection with the divine in all things.

So what we're attempting to do is continually attune to the Beloved, as you call it.
   Yes. To me God is the life energy in everything.

Sometimes we look around the world and see all the environmental problems etc. and wonder how we're going to get through all this. Is there any doubt that we will get through it?
   Well, answering your last point first, I don't doubt it. The angels don't seem to doubt it. I think we can. As to how do we change the world? By changing our own consciousness. We can't change anything outside of ourselves basically. We can only change ourselves. We can always make these choices to be nearer to that core and work with our own divinity, which in itself changes everything around us.

It's such a simple thing and yet we forget it so easily.
   Our minds don't like simplicity. I know I had to sort of throw out the critical analyzing mind, which is a wonderful servant but not a good master.

You bring that out in your book quite well, that you've always had to work with your personality. It's like we come into this earth with this seeming dichotomy in ourselves that there's a personality and then our higher self.
   Yes, our higher self or inner core or the divine within. There's no doubt that the personality can be aligned with it, but generally we have a sense of separation and that's how we're evolving into wholeness. Through our free choice we find out the separation and we gradually choose wholeness.

It's a funny game that we've come into the world to play.
   Yes, it's a game. As I say in the book I think the Hindus call it Lila, the Game of Life.
   The game is to learn to love whatever we are, whatever we're doing. That was one of our oldest lessons, to love wherever you are and whoever you're with and so on. To love your own negativities is the thing, because we resist that. We don't want to do that, but we find that's the only answer in the end. We can't run away from them or deny them or push them back. They'll always surface, so the ideal is to learn to love them, which is what life is all about.

You said you had to stop resisting and condemning yourself and then the beloved was there.
   It's funny. If we do stop, something happens. If we stop the resistance or resentment or whatever it is, or accept it, there's a change. It's because our very resistance puts up a barrier. When we stop putting up that barrier love comes right in.

It's so easy to be down on ourselves or hard on ourselves, or saying we should have done this or been like this or whatever, which of course separates us from what we want to be.
   Yes, we're hardest on ourselves. At least, I am and I think most people are too. When we stop condemning ourselves we stop condemning others, and usually what we condemn in someone else is something we don't like in ourselves. So, if we see a fault in someone else it's telling us we have that fault in us, and the same with the good points.

The same with the good points?
   Yes, or else we couldn't recognize it. If we have no experience of something we wouldn't know it.

You've talked about the angels of countries, or the souls of countries. You've talked about Canada and that this whole idea of putting ourselves down is a sort of Canadian trait which may keep us from finding out who we are.
   Yes. I think that's one of the things Canadians do and that's why we're always trying to find out who we are. That's a positive side of that particular condemnation of ourselves. If we're not anything in particular then we don't threaten anyone and can get along with anyone and be mediators. I've found that out very much in my own life, because I used to work with the Brits and the Americans and I wasn't anything in particular as a Canadian and they'd both come to me and complain about the other one, because I wasn't anything threatening to them.

I suppose Canada can be looked on as always a project rather than something fully formed.
   Yes. Change is part of life anyway. No country, no body stays the same - or if they do they're stuck, they're missing life.

If we can have a sense of being attuned to the Beloved then we have a sense that change is okay.
   Then we can move with the life of the times. It's when we're stuck in rigidity, in any aspect, whether it's physical, mental or emotional or anything, we're in trouble. We're just stuck. Some people have said that evil is just stuck energy and I think there's a lot of truth in that.

You say we have a problem in western civilization in not seeing our own shadow. We think there's just good or evil.
   In the west we've been taught there are always two warring parts in life, the good and the bad, and they'll always be fighting and Satan represents the evil and will always be there to fight and so forth. That is not what they feel in, for instance, Buddhism. They don't talk of that. They speak of sin being ignorance. We fail to see that what we think is evil has also got good in it and has to be listened to; that every point of view is part of what life is and we have to take it all into account and find the balance.

Well, that forces us into God if nothing else does because we can't possibly take it all in without some sense of the higher...
   That's true. In fact life does force us into God, if we let it. The trouble is we've been so separated that we have our eyes on other visions, but it always does come back to that one point.

You talk in the book about the problems you have in attuning as well. It's not as if it's been given to you. It's something you've had to work at.
   I think that's one of the things about Findhorn that people don't realize-the work we had to go through. They think it's easy to start a community, just like that, but we had many years of preparation.

Your call in this book is also for each of us to become who we truly are. Have you got any words to say about some of the ways we might pursue that?
   Yes, just accept what we are in all parts of ourselves. To me it's a sense of beauty, when nature at the moment just brings out this awe at the incredible beauty of it-that's part of what we are. Those are our highest feelings, when we're really feeling in love with the universe and nature at that time. We can always go back to that sort of thing. In my early days I had to do it three times a day-to meditate on the highest part I had experienced, which is the God within me.
   We can all do that. We all need to give it time to blossom in our lives. We don't pay any attention to that aspect of ourselves. We have these highest feelings and then we just leave them at that. It's wonderful and we're grateful for them, but we can also choose to be in touch with them at any time.
   I had to have an outer discipline to do it. I didn't have the inner discipline. I didn't want to do it. Fortunately I had someone I respected to give me the outer discipline, so I did accept it. I think that's one of the things missing nowadays. The word discipline has got a bad name. From within I was told to stop, listen and write, but I had someone help me by saying that means you sit down and do it several times a day. It's a commitment and not many people are completely committed to doing those sorts of things. There's always an excuse.
   If we get past our excuses and have a self-discipline, we'll just love doing it. It will change us mightily, because the more we bathe ourselves in those wonderful vibrations, the more they're part of our lives and the more they change the world.

So many people fall into the pessimism over the over-population, the depletion of species and so forth.
   I often think of all these horrible things too, but I do know I can't change anything outside of myself. If I change myself, if I'm coming from a higher conscious and we all take on a higher consciousness we'll, for example, make different decisions about how many children we want to bring into the world and that sort of thing-from a higher consciousness level. If we get a consciousness of the whole, a consciousness of the planet, we'll not just make personal choices or just let things happen. We'll be part of creating the planet that we want.

So, it behooves us to find our wholeness and keep attuned to that because that's the saving grace.
   That's our only saving grace, to me. That's what life's all about.
   What can we do otherwise? If we feel impelled to go to Bosnia and work that's okay too. But, we don't have to do that. We do whatever seems best in our peculiar way. We may sit down and meditate about it for hours or whatever it is. We have that choice.

You said somewhere that you attuned and it and that was all very well, but you also realized that you had to do things in the world too. You had to ground it.
   It's no use just having it up in the air and talking about it. It's got to be lived in one's life. It's not just talk. A lot of teachers sound wonderful and then you find out they've had sexual peccadilloes or something and your respect for them goes. The idea is to live it in every moment.

Sometimes that feels daunting because we want to regress to our easy state of TV or whatever.
   Not only that, we don't think we're capable of doing it.
   It's another form of selfishness and separation from God, which I know I suffer from. It's thinking of oneself as unable to do anything. But that's a form of selfishness, not a form of being at one with wholeness.

We're so conditioned to accept that to think great things of ourselves is just hubris.
   We think it's ridiculous.
   That's a big barrier, which most of us have got, but if we just get into the state of love we don't even think about ourselves. We're just doing what we have to do regardless of results or what's going to happen.
   If we're at all aware we know that our personality and our higher selves have got different feelings. We don't have to be grandiose or personal about it, but just let go of what we're doing and let the energies, the divine within us, just work through us, which, in other words, is just following one's intuition.