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The Intraterrestrials

A Foretaste of the New World

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BOOK 4

"Dark and Light Flowers"

Dialogue 1

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.

******

Dialogue 2

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.

*****

Dialogue 3

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!

*****

Dialogue 4

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’d rather wait and see what our Richard says. Are you all right, Fiona?

F    Yes, I’m fine dear. It’s awfully difficult in this sort of place to get much sense of what’s going on. One really needs to come right out of season and walk among the stones on one’s own.

M    Trouble is there are no crop circles then. But you’re quite right. We need to be strong enough to be quite still inside and pick up the energies on a different level. How are you doing, Lu my love?

L    Holding onto Joe’s hand like a limpet, thank you. There’s Paul, lets go and be friendly.

P    Hello, everyone. Nice to see you all. Glad you could come.

M    This is Fiona, Paul. We told you about her, didn’t we?

P    Hello, Fiona. I’m glad to meet you at last. Hello, Melanie. This is Andrew and Maggie. And this is Lucia, who I told you about, and Joe I think, isn’t it? Look, our tables are right over there. There’s quite a queue building up for the café. Shall we have coffee and so on now and eat later? Or would you rather all bring chairs round our tables and meet the others?

R    I suggest our group joins the queue for a snack. Andrew, would you and Maggie like to join us?

P    Andrew knows as much as I do about what’s going on. Should we get together round our tables about eleven-thirty and decide what we’re going to do?

R    That sounds fine. Look if you lot sit round the table and tell us what you want, Mel and I could fetch it. We don’t all need to queue.

F    Here’s a couple of pounds, Richard. We can sort it out later.

M    So far I’m bid three teas a coffee and an orange juice. Maggie? Another orange juice. And a coffee. Shall I get an assortment of sandwiches and cakes and let us just pick? Come on Richard, then.

J    It’s a real scrum, isn’t it? How long have you been down here, Andrew?

A    About an hour. We came up in four cars.

J    Are you all from Plymouth?

A    There and other parts of the Devon-Cornwall border. We all got on the road between six and seven this morning. Maggie and I live in Plymouth itself.

L    Have you know Paul long?

A    We work for the same company. Paul has only been in Plymouth since two offices combined a few months ago. So we’ve seen a lot more of him recently. But we’ve been meeting over crop circles longer than that.

MG    It was actually Paul who introduced us. I worked in the Dorchester office and moved the same time he did. It was Paul who got me the job. But we’d been in a crop circle group before that.

F    You have some idea, have you Andrew, what’s been going on here in the last few days?

A    Well, it’s quite a confused situation apparently. Paul and I had a brief word just now with Richard Andrews.

J    Oh, he’s the dowser, isn’t he?

A    Yes, he’s been studying these paranormal things for many years, and knows as much as anyone about dowsing. I’ll wait till Richard comes back with the drinks to go into detail. But briefly, the first of Busty’s photographs started circulating yesterday. They were taken the day before. The first visits on the ground didn’t happen till this morning, or at the earliest late yesterday afternoon. There’s still doubt as to whether the first rumours started on Tuesday or Monday.

L    It’s Thursday today, so you had the first photographs on Wednesday.

A    That’s it, though none of us have seen them. All Paul has is some rough sketches he made of a photograph Richard Andrews showed him earlier.

J    He talked to Richard twice?

A    Simply a few minutes before we all joined him. By then Andrews had returned the photograph to someone else.

L    It’s like working in a fog, isn’t it?

A    That’s the name of the game in crop circle work. Too little information circulates among too many people, and too many factors get distributed among them in bits. You end with a mass of apparent contradictions.

J    And no doubt that precisely suits the people who are only too keen to spread disinformation wherever possible.

A    That’s exactly it.

L    Here come Richard and Melanie. Darlings, you were quick.

R    No problem. We just got a couple of trays and grabbed.

F    I hope you didn’t jump the queue.

M    No need. It was all very orderly, and plenty of people serving.

R    Have we missed anything? Has Andrew leaked all the secrets?

A    Only background stuff which they can fill you up on later. There’s really very little concrete information. Apparently either on Monday or Tuesday someone spotted an unusual formation in a field the other side of the main road towards West Kennet. You’ll need a map if you’re not familiar with the area.

R    I’ve got the Landranger 1:50,000 the old inch-to-the-mile, one and a quarter inch nowadays.

A    That’s it. Here, look. We’re here. The first formation must have been about there.

J    So there were others? We heard over the phone from Paul something about fifteen or sixteen formations surrounding the whole area.

A    Well that seems still to be a matter of a few observations followed by a lot of rough mathematics and guesswork. I doubt if more than eight or nine of those have either been seen on the ground or photographed from the air.

R    What actually made them speculate that it might be a complete circle of formations surrounding the area?

A    Busty’s first photograph showed two apparently similar formations a mile or so apart. He flew high enough to see a third, but not to include it in one picture.

MG    What were they like?

A    Paul’s sketch shows a figure like a child’s representation of a lightning flash. A zig-zag shape about thirty yards long, he thought. Three strokes connected by angles of about a hundred and twenty degrees. The paths are about six feed wide. The long axis of each figure points towards here. The inner and outer strokes have pointed ends.

R    That still doesn’t suggest a circle of figures.

A    No. The real bombshell didn’t occur till Busty took a second lot of photographs showing two or three more figures right the other side of Avebury beyond Avebury Truslow. People have been trudging round there all morning apparently. A number of forms have been spotted on the ground and sketched in on peoples maps. Since the forms are all about a mile apart from each other, and seem to be on the circumference of an enormous circle, or at this stage rather, on separated arcs of a circle, there’ve been wild speculations all day that we’re dealing with a giant formation several miles across...something on a much larger scale than anything seen hitherto.

R    So the idea of fifteen or sixteen forms is pure speculation, or rather, extrapolation from what has been confirmed already.

A    You could say that, yes. That’s where we pass into wild rumour, and probably why there are so many people here today. The local press got hold of it this morning, and all the usual polemical nonsense has started up again.

R    Look there’s John Martineau. I wonder what he thinks is happening.

A    Try and get him to come over and talk to us.

R    I don’t know him at all well. He’s probably up to his eyes with people asking questions already. But I’ll try. (He goes off).

M    I still don’t understand how the idea first arose that forms a couple of miles apart might be linked in some way as part of a single giant pattern.

A    Well certainly nothing of that sort has happened up to now. I’m really simply going on what Paul sad. It really did seem a unique event when three or four similar forms appeared miles apart, and all on the same morning, all apparently pointing towards Avebury.

M    You say the forms were similar. Did you say that before? Were they exactly alike, or what?

A    I don’t know, Melanie. I thought he said similar. I think we’d better go over to Paul’s table and see if he’s any clearer. This is the trouble, as I said, whenever new forms appear. Too little information and too much chatter among too many excited people. With one formation at least everybody can concentrate on looking at the same thing. But with this affair...

J    Paul will be in his element. He loves organising.

L    He seems to have got a large piece of paper from somewhere and he’s drawing something. Let’s go and see.

F    I’ll put the rest of the cakes in my bag. Have you all finished your drinks? You’re Maggie, aren’t you? I walk a bit slowly.

MG    I’ll stay with you. I’m sure there’s plenty of time. Richard seems to have gone off with John Martineau. Andrew’s dead keen on all this, but he’s also very cautious. I’m always miles ahead of myself. I’ve had a total image of this whole affair swimming round in my head ever since Tuesday when Andrew first heard about it from Paul.

F    Look, let’s sit down again. There’s no need for everybody to crowd round what Paul’s doing. We’ll hear about it soon enough when they’ve all finished arguing.

MG    I like you, Fiona. I think you’re like me; take things slowly. It’ll all emerge in its own time.

F    You’re a north country lass aren’t you? I like your accent.

MG    Yes. I was born and grew up in Bradford. But I’ve been in the south a long time. You don’t lose the accent you were brought up to.

F    What did you mean by a total image?

MG    Well you know when your friend, (Melanie is it?) said she didn’t see how they’d all jumped to the conclusion so soon that this was something different from anything that’s happened before in this crop circle affair? Well I’ve known it all along, I often get pictures like that.

F    What sort of picture is this one?

MG    Well, it’s like a sort of flower if you see what I mean. We’re right in the middle of it here.

F    Did you see it already when you were in Plymouth?

MG    Yes, but it wasn’t so bright, and it seemed smaller. Here it’s enormous. You do believe me, don’t you?

F    Oh yes. I believe you all right. I see things myself. But you know, we people who ‘see’ things are all different, and it’s easy to spoil each other’s pictures by adding our own too soon.

MG    Are you seeing this flower formation then?

F    No. My pictures are more to do with people, but we’ll talk about me another time. You don’t mind me asking questions about what you’re seeing. Maggie, do you?

MG    No, it helps me to get clearer if you ask the right questions. Some people ask the wrong things, and then the picture fades and I lose it. I’m sorry you don’t see this too. I hoped you did. It would be easier to share and believe in it sometimes if someone else knew what I was talking about.

F    Once you start meeting people who take what you see seriously, and know it’s real from their own experience, it doesn’t matter so much if their actual impressions are different from yours. They can still learn from what you see, and they can confirm it and add to it from their own point of view. After all, you don’t know whether everybody sees a red rose exactly as you do, but you do at least all agree it’s a red rose, and that they’re seeing one too!

MG    Yes that does make it clearer. Thank you Fiona.

F    What I wanted to ask you was, when you were coming up in the car did you know you were going toward it, that the car was going in the right direction?

MG    No, not exactly. It’s a different sort of space, if you see what I mean. I only knew because the flower shape was getting bigger, and also brighter.

F    Could you see where its middle was, the heart of it, as it were?

MG    I can now, as you ask. We’re not very far away from it actually, but I don’t think we’re quite on it. As I said, I can’t feel the direction, like on a map, I can only feel it as it gets brighter or fades. It isn’t still, you know. It sort of pulsates, very slowly, like a heart beating, but slow. And I have an idea the whole flower slowly turns on its centre, like a wheel.

F    It’s wonderful, isn’t it? I can’t see it as you do, but I can feel the presence of it as a kind of glowing warmth. I think it might be important for us to find the actual heart of it. I think we’d understand more. And we might be able to help the ‘croppies’ too, help them sort out their arguments!

MG    I tell you what! I see the whole thing more clearly with my eyes shut. Why don’t I get you to lead me along like a blind person, and we’ll see if we can find the brightest spot.

F    Is it a constant picture, or does it come and go?

MG    It changes all the time. It depends how strong peoples’ physical thoughts are. When I think about physical objects and all that it fades altogether. It has a lot to do with breathing and with feelings of love, and of how wonderful it is.

F    Let’s sit quiet for a bit.

*****

MG    It’s very powerful you know! We can’t be far away from the heart of the whole thing.

F    I feel it’s a lot to do with Avebury itself, the stones and the original temple here. I think the crop-circles are an event in the life of something much older, and that this new formation, whatever it is, is also a major event in the life of this temple.

MG    I’ll take your arm, and I suggest we walk back the way we came and try to find the way to the inner circle of stones. I saw a plan of the place, and it seemed likely as I looked that that was the place to be.

F    Shall we go quite slowly?

MG    We’re doing fine. It’s getting brighter already. And the colours are changing. You know, I think there may be two centres, not one. It feels rather like a pair of whirlpools.

F    You know the word vortices? A lot of living energy takes a spiral form, like the twin helices in the molecules of DNA in living cells.

MG    I don’t know anything about that, but it seems to be like what I’m feeling. I think we’re going a little off the track, it seems to be fading a bit.

F    It’s the path itself. Here, we can turn left now out of the village and up towards the stones.

MG    That’s better. We could walk a bit faster.

F    Is there any limit to how much of this sort of energy you can stand?

MG    I don’t know. I’ve never tried. I think I’m a pretty solid sort of person. What they call phlegmatic temperament, so I’m told.

F    You’ve never had what they call an out-of-body experience?

MG    Lord no! I think I absorb things like a sponge. Too solid in some ways. But I’m not dull. I’m a bit overweight, aren’t I? I do enjoy my food!

*****

MG    What’s happening?

F    Are you all right?

MG    I’m fine as long as I hold on to you.

F    We’re just crossing into the first of the inner circle of stones, the southern one.

MG    It feels just as if I’d stepped into a whirlpool. T think if I let go of you I’d be swept right off my feet and down into it.

F    Do you think we dare go any nearer the middle?

MG    I think you’ll need to concentrate harder than that to hold on to me.

F    I’m forming a strong vivid picture of you standing in the middle of the ring with the whirlpool trying to such you down, and the rushing forces sweeping past you into the centre of the Earth.

MG    That’s a picture I can hang on to. Don’t let it go. I feel there’s a kind of rock or platform in the middle I can stand on. Now, Fiona, edge us a few steps closer. Steady now. This is incredible! I feel if I let go now I’d shoot straight into the earth and out into another whirlpool over there somewhere. Hang on, for heaven’s sake! I can see from here what the new crop-circle is doing.

F    I can’t hold the image much longer. Are you O.K? I’m taking you out of here. Walk slowly backwards.

MG    Just a second. I want to turn and look the other way, not in my body, I mean in the flower. Heavens, I can see Andrew! He’s right out on the edge somewhere. Oh damn, I’ve lost him. He looked up.

F    We’re out of the circle. I couldn’t hold on any more. I’m not as good at concentrating as I thought I was.

MG    The whirling was already getting weaker. I felt as if the energies might go into reverse. I’ve lost the crop formation. I can still see the flower. It’s certainly based on this whole ancient stone structure. I think it must have been built to prevent the energy form from letting go, to hold it into the physical Earth.

F    But what did you mean when you said you could see what the crop formation was doing?

MG    Well, not so much the crop formations themselves. They’re just a side effect of a huge energy change. I think there’s a whole new energy grid in formation round Avebury.

F    What for?

MG    I think the energies have been at rest, or even asleep, for ages, and they’re waking up.

F    But you did see the crop formation for a moment?

MG    I was inside it looking out. It’s like a huge geometry diagram like I remember from school, but it’s made of energy. I want to see some of the drawings they’ve been making, to see what it looks like from outside, as it were.

F    What about Andrew?

MG    I think he must have gone out to one of the crop formations. He seemed to be outside the space we were in, looking in. (Laughs) I think he caught me looking at him!

F    We’d better get back. They’ll wonder where we are.

MG    I could do with a cup of tea.

F    Do you often go through things like this?

MG    Well, not so much since I gave up spiritualism.

F    You used to be a medium, then?

MG    Yes, for years. I gave it up. It began to feel wrong, somehow, unhealthy. Too much fear and selfishness.

F    Yes, I understand that. We must talk more about it sometime.

MG    Isn’t that one of your friends coming along?

F    Oh yes, here’s Joe. He’s probably looking fur us. (Calls) Joe! He’s seen us.

J    Where have you been?

F    Exploring the stones, among other things. You didn’t go with the others. You should have. We’ve been all right.

J    I’m not so interested in the field-work. It seems more on the surface of things than the stones. I like to see the forms afterwards. I’d love to talk to John Martineau about the geometry.

F    I think you’ll be very interested in what we’ve just been doing. We were just going back to the restaurant for some tea. I’d love to hear you tell Maggie about your time in Brittany.

J    I said I’d find you and we’d al wait at the tea place for the others. I want to hear what you and Maggie have been up to. I feel a pricking in my thumbs! You’ve had some sort of breakthrough, haven’t you?

F    We surely have! Come on then.

*****

Dialogue 5

P    Here we are, then. This is the fifth one that we visited on the ground late last evening. John Martineau had managed a fairly accurate drawing of Number Three by midday yesterday, and he let me take a carbon-paper tracing of it when Richard and I managed to nobble him before lunch. Before we go into this one let me point out the features John showed me. We’ll lay it on the bonnet of the car where we can all see it. There’s the compass bearing, which on Number Three made the middle of Avebury about five degrees west of north. John Martineau’s a pretty accurate cartographer and he showed us where he’d drawn in the form on his two and a half inch map of Avebury, which is this map. Now! We’re over here at the outer end of Number Five, and I’d say the form is extremely similar to the other one, if not identical, wouldn’t you? But it’s aligned more or less south east.

A    I can see what you mean by lightning flashes. That’s how I drew them as a kid. But I’d say this one’s longer and thinner, wouldn’t you?

P    Difficult to tell from this perspective. He suggested we try to do some measurements and compare them. I brought a measuring tape, but I only have one.

M    How do we do the angles?

P    There are a couple of metre rules and a protractor and some drums of string in the boot. Rough and ready, but not too inaccurate if we’re careful.

L    I’ll measure off some string into five metre lengths with knots. Anybody would think we were setting up as hoaxers, beg pardon, ‘agroglyphic craftsmen’. Eh Richard?

P    Good idea. Make the knots at every half-metre, Lucia, if you will. Before you cut the string lets see if we can measure the overall length and get a compass bearing on it.

A    What’s the nearest marked point on the map?

P    That road junction. Only about two hundred yards, isn’t it?

A    How long’s your tape, a hundred feet?

P    Let’s stick to metres. The tape has both and it’s thirty metres.

A    I’ll measure the road from the signpost while you start on some of the shorter measurements.

M    Lucky the string’s on a drum or we’d be tripping over ourselves. Say what you like, Paul’s quite efficient.

L    I didn’t say he wasn’t. He’s too damned efficient.

M    Oh come on, Lu love, it’s over.

L    Yes, I know. Oh, I’m sorry. I’m an idiot. It still hurts. You hold the drum at this end and I’ll go down the other end with the peg. How long’s the string?

M    Thirty metres.

P    Well, there’s the first solid fact, look. The paths are exactly the same width as on Number Three, one point three metres the whole way. I took six measurements, two on each limb of the zig-zag.

R    Come and check this angle Paul. I’m a bit surprised. Busty seemed to think there were either fifteen or sixteen forms, just over a mile apart on a circle about two and a half miles across. John says he flew right round the circle.

M    Did he spot them all?

R    No. Apparently some of the expected positions weren’t on crop fields at all. Some were in grass fields or bare soil. One was even in a wood.

M    How many did he see altogether?

P    Eight or nine, John thought. I wonder if these apical angles are intended to point towards other formations on the circle? Then the centre of the circle might be found by dividing the apical angles in half.

R    Only if the formations mark the positions of regular figures like pentagrams or hexagrams. A regular pentagram has apical angles of thirty-six degrees, however big it is. This is certainly not thirty-six, it’s more like thirty three.

P    Let’s look. Yes, thirty-three’s about right.

L    (Shouts) String’s not long enough!

M    (Shouts) Peg it. Don’t stretch it. Let it lie loose. I’ll start reeling in.

R    Paul, look. If you divide the angle on John’s Number Three by two, it points nowhere near the centre of the Avebury ring.

A    One hundred and eighty three metres and seventy centimetres.

R    What is?

A    Distance from the sign-post to a point on the line opposite here, and this is eighteen and a half metres from the road.

P    Work all that out on a scale of one in sixteen thousand and we’ll mark it on this map. Is the road straight?

A    Straight as a die!

P    It’s very tempting, isn’t it, to think that, if there are fifteen forms, we’re dealing with three giant pentagrams. If there are sixteen it’s all much more problematic.

L    Thirty-four point four three metres, mister foreman.

P    Thank you, miss surveyor’s assistant. And how long is that on a scale of one in sixteen thousand?

L    My arithmetic is hopeless.

P    And I didn’t bring a calculator.

R    I did. Just a sec. Thirty-four point four three? That’s two point one five, plus a bit. Near enough two centimetres, one and a half millimetres.

P    Well, we can now mark the apex on the map, but nothing else until we get some accurate compass bearings.

M    I’ve noticed something very interesting on John’s plan. Do you see that the apical angle of the figure is in exact alignment with the points where the second and third limbs begin, and also with the apex at the inner end?

P    So they are.

M    I wouldn’t have noticed it except for the fact that when we laid the string out it ran exactly along the edge of the first limb. If we tied another four or five metre string to the peg and took it to the inner apex I bet it would still line up.

P    Do the same thing on the other side, from the apex to the elbow where the third limb starts. Put the peg in at the apex Melanie, and unroll it down to the second elbow. Yes, it seems to be pretty accurate.

L    Why do you suppose its done like that?

R    It’s almost as if someone was drawing attention to the fact that the apical angle and the two arms from it needed to be very accurately figured.

A    We need to do a second rough drawing to the same scale as Martineau’s Number Three.

R    What’s the matter? You look peculiar. Are you all right?

A    I saw Maggie. I do sometimes.

R    What brought it on?

A    I held Paul’s sketch below my eye level and tried to align it to where the middle of Avebury lies. I felt a sort of jolt in my solar plexus, and there was Maggie looking at me with her mouth open.

R    You’re quite pale.

A    I’m all right.

P    Where’s John’s sketch. What’s the matter? Oh, you’ve got it. I’ve got a couple more measurements to do with the metre rule and then that’s about all we can do here. The compass bearings are more problematic. Somebody needs to bring a theodolite.

R    Who’s co-ordinating all this?

P    There’s a meeting at the so-called croppie pub, The Barge, at eleven tomorrow. We shall have something to contribute, and I’m sure a lot of others will too. There, that’s about it. We’d better get back. Where are you people staying?

M    The five of us are going down to Herefordshrie, but only for one night, as far as we know. Then back to London.

P    Will you be coming back this way?

R    I’d certainly like to. We’re meeting now at the restaurant again, aren’t we? We can discuss it there. I don’t know if we can get back in time for the meeting. I’d certainly hope to be there, if only to meet the experts.

P    It could be quite stormy. There’ll be a lot of controversial opinions. Croppies are not noted for peace and harmony.

L    I’d rather keep out of all that.

M    So would I. Let’s wait and see. See you down there.

*****

J    Here they come, Fiona. Hi, darling, what have you been up to?

L    We’ve had a gorgeous time. Melanie and I are now apprentice land-surveyors. Paul’s our foreman.

P    Martineau gave me a copy of a form he surveyed yesterday and suggested I do a sketch on the same scale of a figure right the other side of Avebury on the north west side.

A    Hello Maggie. I saw you from up there, like the time in Dorchester.

MG    I thought you might. I saw you too, but only a flash.

A    You had your mouth wide open like a fish.

MG    I’m not surprised. I was in a whirlpool.

A    A whirlpool? There isn’t any water in Avebury is there?

MG    Not a water one, silly. An energy vortex, isn’t it Fiona?

F    There seems to be a double helix here, similar to the one in DNA, Richard.

R    Good heavens, that opens up an enormous field for speculation. What if...

A    Don’t let’s theorise too soon. For heaven’s sake let’s wait till we know more facts. We’ll only muddle things.

P    We’ve got something quite solid from our work up there. It needs some proper triangulation to put the figure we were looking at firmly on the map. But I did pencil it lightly in.

J    Are yours and Martineau’s exactly alike?

P    No they’re not. They’re like different versions of the same general plan. Here are the two plans roughly drawn. Mine is longer and thinner than his.

L    Ours.

P    O.K. Ours.

J    What do you think that’s supposed to indicate? If anything. By which I mean it’s all too easy to impute purpose to these things in an anthropomorphic way.

R    Quite valid if human craftsmen have been involved again.

J    Not if they haven’t?

P    I would have thought not.

J    I don’t agree. I would impute a form of consciousness to the plant world itself, but not a purposive one.

M    I think that’s a valid comment. Just look at those shapes. If these had been single triangular wedges in the corn, the two sides would have been joined by a transverse edge at right angles to the Avebury direction. That would have taken the attention off the directional character of the two sides. It’s almost as if there had been a deliberate attempt to emphasise that it is the apical angle, both its dimension and its orientation towards Avebury, that is being emphasised.

R    That looks like human craftsmen again.

J    Not necessarily. How would a non-human intelligence express an angle and an orientation in space with the minimum expenditure of energy and design, and the least number of confusing inessentials? Like this I would have thought.

R    That’s purposive, isn’t it?

J    Not in our terms. There’s no separation in nature between the idea and the phenomenon which expresses it. "Conformity of thought to thing". I think that was a neo-platonist expression. At that level there are no errors in nature. There’s no gap where they can creep in. An intelligent phenomenon just exists.

M    And com is itself an intelligent phenomenon. That’s why you always emphasise that crop-circles are primarily a biological manifestation, isn’t it, Richard?

R    Whenever people ask for an external cause for a phenomenon in nature, without first looking to see whether they have underestimated the breadth of nature’s own capacities, I feel uneasy. Superstition arises when people suspect divine intervention whenever anything unusual happens. ‘Croppies’ who invent circlemakers to explain agriglyphs are really saying the gods made a poor job of inventing nature in the first place.

J    Well, that’s our materialistic view of the world, isn’t it? An automatic machine abandoned by its inventors.

R    More commonly, a self-explanatory machine which needed no inventors. However, Mother Nature is apparently alive and kicking. The old bag has more tricks up her sleeve than mechanistic theory allows for.

P    O.K. But when you’ve done philosophising there’s still the interesting question of why these two apical angles are different. For instance, if this turns out to be a perfect circle with fifteen points of the circumference emphasised by these zig-zag forms, it’s tempting to speculate that we may be dealing with three interlocking pentagrams.

R    Whose apices are marked by these forms.

P    Right.

R    They can’t be regular pentagrams related to the centre of a circle, or all the apical angles would be thirty-six degrees.

P    And we know they’re not. Of the two we know about, one’s thirty eight degrees, and the other, the one we measured, is thirty three. So where does that leave us?

R    Either the outer perimeter is not a circle, or they don’t all relate to one centre.

P    Or both.

R    Or, as you say, both. In either case, if they’re pentagrams at all, all four of the lines subtending the two angles we know about will hit the apices of other formations, four of them.

P    Or two, if they both belong to the same pentagram.

R    Fair enough. And that’s about as far as we can get.

F    Except for us.

R    What does that mean?

F    It means that as far as Maggie’s and my very different experience is concerned, what you’ve only experienced as a possibility is an actual fact, namely that these energies are centred on two different foci. Moreover we know where they are.

MG    More than that, we know which of the two centres has to do with your formation.

A    Yes, we do Paul. Maggie and I were aware of each other while we were standing at our apex, working.

P    And you were standing at a point you regard as a focus for the centred energies?

MG    That’s it. I wasn’t exactly on the spot, because the pressure was more than I could bear, even with Fiona’s help.

P    Is the experience repeatable? I mean, could you find the spot again?

F    Actually, it was fairly obvious where the point was going to be once I guided her into one of the inner rings of stone.

P    How do you mean, guided her?

F    She kept her eyes shut. She evidently finds it easier to sense the direction in which the energy is more intense if there is no visual interference.

P    Can you replicate an experience like that? I mean, could you bracket it, as it were, from the other side? If you could approach each focus from a number of different directions we might get a pretty accurate fix to work from.

F    I’m not at all sure the focal points are stable, Paul.

MG    That’s right. I was already having a feeling, when Fiona had to let go of her concentrating, and we had to leave the circle, that the whirling was getting weaker.

P    You say ‘whirling’. You were in a sort of whirlwind, were you? It reminds me of the sort of things Terence Meaden used to say about crop circle formation. He was sure it was all meteorological.

MG    This isn’t a physical thing Paul. It’s difficult to put into words, because it isn’t the same as when something happens in the direction of the senses and you describe it. It happens in a different direction and you turn and face it. Difficult to...

P    You mean half way between inside and outside you?

MG    I don’t understand this inside-outside business. I get this feeling of a huge whirlpool going round, and it’s also very bright, bright colours like, and the nearer the brighter. I feel it inside my stomach. But it must be in the other direction as well, towards what you can see, because although I don’t know which way to move to make it brighter, I can experiment with it, try different directions.

P    What makes you feel there’s another centre apart from the one you had found?

F    She told me before we went in there she’d had a feeling there were two whirlpools side by side.

MG    When it started getting so bright I lost the other centre. But when we moved away I could feel it again. Oh, I’ve remembered something Fiona. When we were fighting to hang on in the middle there, I was afraid I’d be sucked into the Earth and then be shot out into the other whirlpool. I’d forgotten that.

F    She’d been describing how during the journey up here she’d pictured a huge flower-like formation which got more vivid as you came nearer to Avebury.

MG    You know, I once read about these blowers they have in hot springs in some places, like in Australia. They have sort of rhythm. One dies down and another starts up somewhere else. It felt like that, almost as if the energies were breathing and I was getting caught up in it.

P    It’s all very interesting, but whether it has anything to do with what we were looking at remains to be seen.

A    All the same, it’s a bit odd that I seemed to get a momentary line on what she was doing from where we were working. It happened when I stood at the apex and tried to line up the middle of the drawing on Avebury.

R    I don’t think the drawing had anything to do with it. It was the crop-formation itself.

P    Maybe. By the way, I wonder what’s happened to the rest of my group. They went off in the other car, following Richard Andrews, apparently looking for other formations. They were supposed to meet us back here at four.

R    What time is it now?

M    It’s about four-thirty.

F    You know, if we’re going to get down to Garway in reasonable time we ought to get moving. I’m tired already.

P    Your not going back to London then?

M    No, we’re spending the night at a house Fiona has in the country.

MG    I’m really glad we met, Fiona. I’d love to talk to you more.

F    We live so far away, don’t we? What are you and Andrew doing tonight?

A    We’re supposed to be spending another night at this pub in Devizes, and then we wanted to listen in at this meeting at Alton Priors, at ‘The Barge’ pub where the croppies meet, in the morning when the experts get together.

F    I was wondering whether you would like to join up with us for the night, only you probably haven’t brought sleeping bags with you.

A    Maggie has; I didn’t think I would need mine. In any case, what about cars? We’ve got two others of our party in mine. Are you in two cars?

R    I’m afraid not. And there are five of us.

M    It doesn’t look as if it’s going to work this time, does it? Do you think we’ll manage to make it back to this meeting in the morning, Richard?

R    I can imagine getting back here by midday. I doubt if we’ll be earlier. But meetings like that go on forever. We’ll certainly learn a lot more whatever time we turn up.

F    Well, let’s look out for each other tomorrow then.

A    We’ll wait for you at the Barge at least until one. I’m sure we’ll know more by then.

R    What’s happened to Lucia and Joe?

F    They drifted off somewhere. Oh, there they are look. Somebody seems to be holding forth at that far table. I’ll try and detach them.

R    Paul, thanks very much for letting us know about this. And that was really interesting working on the mapping.

M    Yes, thank you Paul, that was really fun. And we want to hear a lot more about your I.T. doings. You’ve got a group going, have you?

P    Yes, I hoped to have a chance to compare notes and hear how you were doing.

M    Well, maybe we’ll get a chance to make an arrangement when we meet tomorrow. What was going on over there, Lu?

L    Very interesting indeed. I should go and join that group, Paul. There’s a chap there who went out with Richard Andrews this afternoon. But it seems we have to get moving. We’ll hope to link up again tomorrow then?

P    Yes, I hope so Nice to see you again Lucia. I hope you enjoyed the field-work.

L    Very much. The whole thing’s quite fascinating.

J    On our way, then. Bye Paul. Bye everyone.

A    I think Maggie and I will walk with you to your car. I wanted just to ask you about your I.T. work in London. Paul’s told us a little about it, but I get the feeling he doesn’t altogether agree with the way you’re going about it.

M    What does he say, then?

A    He thinks it’s all rather vague. He has a great sense of urgency, has Paul. He’s full of ideas about the breakdown of civilisation and the need for everyone to get their act together and prepare for Earth changes. And I will say for him that he’s an excellent organiser and quite a good speaker. The only thing is he doesn’t leave much room for other people’s ideas. The one person he does seem to listen to is Maggie, doesn’t he love? There’s something about her approach that intrigues him, something he can’t quite make out. It irritates him and fascinates him at the same time.

R    He only spent a short time with us in London, not enough really for him to hear in depth what we were doing. He was obviously intrigued, and we rather thought he would try to get something moving of his own. Meanwhile a lot more has happened in our group which he doesn’t know about. How many of you are there?

A    About twenty altogether. We meet regularly every week and most people come every time. He runs the meetings and talks most of the time. And I must say it’s all very interesting stuff. He must have been putting quite a lot of cash into it too. There are always quite a lot of books on display. I think he gets quite a lot on sale or return, but not all booksellers will do that. But what Maggie

and I really wanted to know was why he thought you were all too laid back about it all. You don’t seem at all like that to me.

M    My impression is that Paul doesn’t have much idea about the way in which spiritual processes develop. I think it’s because he’s so active in himself he hasn’t learned to listen to what goes on in other people.

A    So what does go on with you people?

J    Well, we’re beginning to be able to take account of other conscious entities besides ourselves.

A    Telepathy?

J    Not exactly. No, I’m not talking about communication with other human beings in bodies. I’m talking about conscious entities which put their oar in while we are communicating with each other.

A    Channelling?

M    No, not channelling either. Though, if we don’t watch it, the process does tend to drift into channelling. That’s to say some of us may begin to be pushed aside by such entities because they don’t have speech organs. They don’t even have language. Their thinking is non-verbal, or at least trans-verbal. So they are very dependent on us meeting them half-way, as it were.

L    Some people seem to be more mediumistic than others, more easily pushed aside, and therefore tending to be attractive to bodiless entities who are over-eager for embodiment in human terms, not too respectful of our freedom and independence. I’m a bit like that, but I seem to be getting over it, asserting myself more.

MG    Sounds like me too. I used to go in for spiritualism, got caught up in it. In fact I began to get ill.

R    I think once we begin to see the issues, experience what’s involved, we get a lot of protection and help from beings who are concerned with humanity’s next stage. Indeed, their own further development is bound up with ours.

MG    I believe we could learn an awful lot from you people. Fiona and I got on like a house on fire, didn’t we, Fiona? At least I thought so. It helped me no end to be with someone who took what I was going through seriously. You seemed to know exactly what I needed, and you had a very steadying effect altogether. I sometimes panic a bit, but I felt quite safe with you, safe to let go and allow things to happen.

F    I’m really glad, Maggie, and thank you for being so open after knowing us for so short a time. But it’s far from being all one way you know. We’ve been feeling that our group isn’t complete yet. There are things no-one in our group can do, and direct telepathic communication, in the very circumstantial way you and Andrew seem to be able to achieve, is certainly one of them. Gifts of that sort aren’t acquired easily. If you have them naturally, and then meet people you love, a lot starts to rub off.

A    So these beings you communicate with are pretty independent, are they? They don’t just come when called, like genies out of a bottle?

L    Far from it. They sometimes appear quite spontaneously in the middle of a conversation. One of us is just suddenly speaking as one of them. It’s almost like speaking a part as an actor.

R    I used the analogy the other day of suddenly finding a horse between my legs and riding it at a gallop. That’s why we don’t feel we are channelling. It’s a partnership.

A    It sounds as though they’re higher aspects of yourselves.

F    To some extent I think they are that. But as we become aware of the situation we project identities onto them. We even name them.

M    And discover in doing so that they are doing the same to us.

L    And that’s where the process takes off. A new level of being starts to be born.

F    Intraterrestrial, we call it.

MG    It’s a beautiful word. Paul uses it. But he isn’t anywhere near what you’re talking about. It seems more like just an idea when he uses it.

A    But be fair, Maggie. It’s a very interesting idea. And he’s very inspiring when he’s talking about it. He talks well. I’d even say more. Paul’s the kind of person to whom things happen. He only has to walk into a room and things begin to buzz.

L    Yes, we know all about it, Andrew. It’s called glamour. You either love it or you hate it. I think it’s awfully difficult to be fair to a person like Paul. People think glamour gives people an unfair advantage. Often it’s just the opposite. Glamorous people actually take advantage, override people, cut corners, cover up their own insecurities, and end by missing out.

A    How do you make that out? I would have thought just the opposite. Things happen round them. They get things going.

L    I didn’t say begin by missing out. But the initial success glamorous people have is usually too heady a wine for people to take. The temptation to ride the wave and by-pass problems is too great, both for themselves and for those round them. Help me Joe. I don’t want to overstate this, but you know how I feel.

J    Paul had a powerful effect on this group during the very short time he was with us. In a way he threw things out of balance. We couldn’t stop talking about him.

L    I frankly fell for him. I was all over the place.

M    It was as if he was still here. We were all affected, in different ways of course. My own chief impression was that he needed a lot of help. He didn’t really seem to know what was going on in other people.

R    Having a person like Paul around is like having a baby elephant in your living room. You want to help, but it keeps smashing the furniture and trumpeting. Most people give up and just follow the lead.

M    And if you cut them down to size, very often they’re lost. I think the problem of leadership is a very difficult one in our society. Consciousness is waking up in people. We want to decide on fundamentals for ourselves, take our own line. We put natural leaders out of a job.

F    This is the most extraordinary conversation to have standing round a parked car. I’m getting very uncomfortable.

R    Fiona, love, I’m so sorry. Here, I’ll unlock it. You get in.

F    Maggie, you and Andrew would be very welcome to stay with me in London any time. Give them our addresses and phone numbers, Richard. We need to talk a lot more. Give me a hug, Maggie, before my legs collapse.

MG    Oh, bless you Fiona, it’s been lovely meeting you. Have a good journey. We’ll be in touch. And perhaps we’ll see you tomorrow.

R    Bye Andrew. We’ll try and make it. In case we don’t here’s a contact list for us in London. Bye all. (General good-byes).

*****

Dialogue 6

A    You know, Paul, I don’t know if I even want to go to this damned meeting.

P    Why the hell not? Everybody else’ll be there. It’ll be the one chance we’ll get to listen to the impressions of some people with experience, and at a time when a major breakthrough is fresh in their minds.

A    Paul, it’s all so damned predictable. I mean people are so transparent. Just picture it. There’ll be George Wingfield trying to believe in the reality of the phenomenon, and at the same time helpless to disbelieve any idiot who claims to have made the things. Then Colin Andrews will bustle in looking harassed, with his briefcase bulging with secret documents hot off the press. And Michael Glickman almost in tears over the dawning wonders of a cosmic breakthrough.

P    Yes I know, and Erik Beckfjord in despair that everyone doesn’t see that every new form confirms what he has always said about language. And don’t forget Stanley Messenger, eyes aglow with his latest insight into the creative vitality of nature, and John Martineau with sheet after sheet of geometric transcripts, and Barbara Davies bubbling with statistics. But that’s the name of the game, Andrew. That’s the seething cauldron out of which new insights come! To my mind it’s the stuff of life. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

A    I sometimes wonder whether you’ve ever had a genuine inspiration in your life, Paul. For you it’s all nothing but an intriguing game, and the more intrigue the better. You’re intrigued by Maggie, for example. I watch you trying to make up your mind whether she’s genuine or not. Sometimes you think she’s just another hysteric who’s found a line she can sell. Don’t’ you?

P    I give Maggie the benefit of the doubt, Andrew. I like Maggie. But honestly, I simply don’t know. I’ve never had any reason to believe there’s anything to life other than what there appears to be on the surface. I find everything endlessly interesting and exciting as it is. Why do people have to have explanations all the time?

A    Good question. Let’s see what they’ve got for breakfast this time. Seems we help ourselves unless we want something cooked. Coffee’s what I need.

P    Morning Maggie. Did you sleep well?

MG    I never sleep too well away from my own bed. Did you?

P    I hardly notice where I go to bed. Out like a light the moment my head touches the pillow.

A    We were talking till all hours, weren’t we, Mag?

MG    Aye, we were natterin’ away till after midnight. Very interesting too.

P    So you heard what the rest of the party had been up to. I gather they tagged on to Richard Andrews and some others and went dowsing. Did they find anything?

A    Not at first, apparently. Somebody had been into Swindon with Busty’s negatives and got some big blow-ups, and Richard Andrews and others had been trying to see whether they could dowse on the photos the way the surrounding circle was going at the two ends.

P    Ends of what?

A    Well, the ends of the line through the forms they’d already mapped. One of our group, I think it was Peter, was with a party working on the two figures on those photos which hadn’t yet been mapped. Peter said...

P    Yes I talked to him. I even saw a copy of their plans. Not very clear, but they seem to have got the same sort of results as we did. Figures the same general shape, and angles at the apex of between thirty and forty degrees. But what about the dowsing?

A    They said Richard was a bit uncertain about the outer circle on the photos. The angles of some of the shots made it difficult. But it was enough to get them started on the ground, and then it seems it went very well. There was a strong dowsing trace which they all agreed on, both connecting the three figures and going on beyond them.

P    Were they still in wheat fields?

A    Don’t know. I think they followed it clockwise at first, and then a couple of them left and tried to follow it the other way. It’s obviously an enormous job, and I don’t know how well organised they were.

P    Do they really think they’re going to dowse a whole circle fifteen miles round? Even a dozen competent dowsers could take a week. And what about all the places where there’s no crop growing? Morning Peter? Sleep all right? I thought you were going off early with the people you were with yesterday.

Peter    I was. I overslept.

P    Did you arrange to meet them somewhere?

Peter    They were going to pick me up here about nine. What time is it?

A    It’s about a quarter past. They’ve probably overslept as well.

Peter    I’d better eat something. That porridge was good yesterday.

P    Peter, can I look at those diagrams you had yesterday?

Peter    Here they are. One got a bit torn.

Simon    Morning everyone. Girls not up yet?

MG    I am. Mandy and Brenda are sharing a room. I’ll go and see if they’re awake.

A    Finish your breakfast first love. There’s no hurry. Meeting’s not till eleven.

P    Peter, are you sure you’ve got these angles right? I thought you said they were all between thirty and forty degrees. You didn’t show me this third one. It must be damned near sixty degrees.

Peter    They’d already done that one before I got there. I simply traced all three with some carbon paper they had. Didn’t really look at that third one.

P    If you have got it right it throws my idea of three pentagrams right out of the window.

A    I think you’ll find that by the time we get to the meeting someone will have put together a composite picture of all the findings to date. I suggest we stop all further speculation till we get there.

MG    The girls have got as far as the bathroom.

Peter    Here’s my lift I think. See you later.

P    Can I hang on to these? I’ll take good care of them.

Peter    O.K. Bring them with you to the meeting.

MG    What are they Paul? May I have a look? This one gives me a real funny feeling.

P    Which one? Oh yes. That’s the one Peter didn’t show us yesterday.

MG    It’s quite a different shape, isn’t it? Sort of broad and squat, like a frog.

P    It’s the same general pattern though. I want to measure that angle. The protractor’s in the car. Morning girls, you almost missed breakfast. Simon’s eaten all the porridge.

Brenda    Can’t stand the stuff. Cornflakes’ll do me. And lots of lovely coffee.

Mandy    I want a cup of tea. I feel awful.

MG    Nobody’s really heard how you got on yesterday. You were with Richard Andrews, weren’t you? Was it interesting?

Brenda    It was really pretty amazing. You know I’ve done a bit of dowsing myself. Did I tell you I met those two chaps who did all that Michael and Mary Line stuff in Cornwall four years ago?

MG    That’s right. They did a book, what was it called? "The Sun and the Serpent".

Brenda    That’s it. Hamish Miller and Paul Broadhurst. Well, that’s what started me off dowsing. I got really into it yesterday following this Richard Andrews. He was striding away with his rods and every time he got off the line he was following they would collapse and he’d walk back and edge sideways like a crab, and suddenly the rods would flick into position again and on he’d go. It was crazy. We went across the rest f the cornfield like that and...

A    What do you mean, which cornfield?

Brenda    The one where the zig-zag shape was, the one we’d been measuring.

A    So there was no laid corn where you were dowsing?

Brenda    No, it was just energy. Real powerful.

A    The farmer can’t have been best pleased.

Brenda    We’d already talked to him earlier, and Richard Andrews told him exactly what we’d be doing. He seemed all right about it. I think Richard gave him some money.

A    So what happened when you got to the edge of the field?

Brenda    Well, we climbed up a bank and onto the road, still dowsing…

A    You were dowsing too, were you?

Brenda    Yes, I was following him with my pendulum. I tried to keep a little to the left of his line and hold the pendulum a little to the right of me. It went wild every time I touched the edge of the energy. Well we crossed the road and there was a hedge the other side, so we had to find a gate. Richard made me stay by the hedge while he and the others found their way round to the other side. Soon he called to me to mark the spot where the line went through the hedge so that he could pick it up again on the other side.

A    Did you have any idea how wide a band of energy it was?

Brenda    As long as we were in the cornfield he didn’t want to do any more damage to the crop than he could help. But when we got into the next field it was just grassy meadow, and that’s what he and the others were doing when I got back to them. Richard was dowsing at right-angles to the line, then Mandy and the others marked the spot with a stick...

Mandy    Usually a dry cow-pat. (giggles)

Brenda    ...and then he’d go on a few yards and do it again. We went right across the field like that.

Mandy    Soon there was a double line of cow pats and sticks all across the field. It looked great.

A    How wide?

Simon    He got me to measure it as we went along. It varied between ten and twelve yards. It seemed to me the outer edge was straight and the inner one wavy

A    So then what?

Brenda    Well, we crossed two more fields like that, still grassy. The land was sloping up a bit, so we could see back to the cornfield where some more people had arrived. There were cars parked along the lane.

MG    You know, it’s funny as you talk I’m getting the most odd sensation of two worlds meeting.

A    You mean this flower thing of yours?

MG    I wish I hadn’t used the word flower to describe it. There isn’t really a word. It’s a huge coloured pulsating thing like an enormous wheel. Sometimes it seems as if it’s made of clouds or coloured cotton-wool. Then the picture sharpens, and it’s like peacock feathers or butterfly wings, those big blue ones. And it slowly turns round. When Simon said the inner edge was wavy I felt that next time they measured the width of that band it would be quite different.

Brenda    Anyway, on we went, and the next field was clover and that other stuff...alfalfa. There was no hedge so we climbed through the wire and went on round. Richard was worried about trampling and sent us round the edge of the field, so we didn’t measure the band till we got to a strip of rough ground at the edge of a wood the other side.

A    How far were you from the others by then?

Brenda    We were out of sight of them, but they were all pretty big fields. I reckon the best part of a mile. Richard said we ought to be expecting another formation soon, so we all trooped round the edge of the wood to the left to see what was on the other side. It turned out to be about, say, three hundred yards wide, and the other side was sloping down-land going into a broad valley. Not a cornfield in sight till you get down onto the flat land below.

MG    What did you do?

Brenda    We were all a bit flummoxed. Then Richard started picking up the perimeter again further down the edge of the wood. Simon was still marking the edge of the inner edge of the band, and it was roughly the same width. The two of them went on down the hill quite a long way. There was nothing for the rest of us to do, so we just stood and watched.

Mandy    It was hilarious, wasn’t it Brenda? We suddenly found ourselves all looking at each other, and we knew we had all picked up the same thought. And that was just the moment when Richard and Simon stopped what they were doing and started trudging back up the hill.

A    Yes, I’m picking it up too. The next form simply had to be inside the wood! But how on earth would...

Brenda    Well this was obviously what had been in Richard’s mind for some time. If the forms were anywhere near equally spread round the circle, and we were now getting on for a mile and a quarter away from the last one, we had at least to try in the wood before we went any further.

A    So?

Simon    Well, we all had a confab by the edge of the wood. Richard wasn’t at all certain what to do next. We were all pretty tired by then. We sat on the ground, and Richard started reminiscing a bit. He’s a pretty old hand at the dowsing game, and I get the feeling that this whole crop-circle business has been a tremendous strain on him. Well it has on all of them really.

A    How do you mean that?

Simon    Well, it’s become a bit of an obsession with some of them. It’s altered their lives. You can’t just isolate it from the rest of your life, turn it into a sort of hobby, like. It gets hold of you.

MG    That’s what I was trying to say. We all have different ways of adjusting when we start to feel we’re living in two worlds at once.

Brenda    How do you mean?

MG    Well I mean look at us! On one level we’re all practical people. You’re young, but a lot of us have jobs and families and so on. What do we think we’re doing wandering about the countryside with pendulums and bits of wire?

Simon    I think that’s what we began to feel sitting out on that hillside yesterday. At least with crop-circles there’s a shape in the cornfields you can actually see. As Richard talked we began to feel that those shapes are only the tip of the iceberg. Where there happens to be wheat or barley growing you can see something. But we were going where the shapes were just as real, but there was nothing to see!

MG    I’m living in a world like that a lot of the time. It’s difficult to keep your feet on the ground when half the world you’re aware of is apparently invisible to the people round you. You feel a bit crazy sometimes.

A    But at least you’ve got something visible to refer to in your parallel reality.

Brenda    Yes, whereas when you’re dowsing you can only feel it in your hands and feet. It must be a bit like what blind people feel.

A    So what did you do next?

Brenda    Well for me, and I think for the rest of us, it all got a bit chaotic. Richard seemed to know more or less what he was doing. He had a bit of board with a paper on it and started plunging about in the wood with a pendulum. There wasn’t much room to work with his dowsing rods. I stayed with him, holding bits of string and pegs and putting them where he told me to. Mandy and Simon went back the way we’d come, and I think you joined the others, didn’t you?

A    But did you find the form?

Brenda    Yes we did, after a fashion. There was a lot of thorn scrub between the trees, so some of the lines were incomplete. But he’d drawn on his plan something we recognised as a zig-zag shape like the others. Whether he could measure actual angles and lengths like yours I’m not sure.

A    Well, thank you very much, Brenda. That was a very clear description. No doubt we’ll hear all about it at the meeting. By the way, what time is it? Whatever happened to Paul?

MG    He went off to get something from the car.

A    It must be getting on for ten o’clock. We ought to get going, otherwise we won’t have a chance to talk to anybody before the meeting starts. Oh, here’s Paul. Where have you been?

P    I found Richard Andrews. He’s staying across the road. We’ve been comparing the different figures. Apparently the one in the wood was another broad angled one. I hope someone has managed by now to do a general map of the whole area, and on a big enough scale to mark all the forms that have been found so far, with the apical angles accurately measured. More and more I’m beginning to feel we’ll end up with sixteen points, not fifteen. I think there must be a hexagonal form with six of the sixty-degree apices. In both the forms I’ve seen drawings of so far the sixty-degree angles were dead accurate. That not only means it would be a regular hexagon. It also means that the perimeter line is a perfect circle.

A    But it also means that the two pentagons are irregular, or all the angles would be the same.

P    Exactly. We ought to get going.

MG    None of you seem to have grasped that this means something else as well.

A    What, Maggie?

MG    It means there should be three vortices at the centre, not two. So far I’m not at all aware of a third vortex to this thing.

P    I don’t know what that means. We can’t stop now. Where’s Mandy? We’ll be late.

Brenda    Making up her face I expect. Mandy! We’re going.

Mandy    (off) Coming! I can’t find my camera. Oh here it is.

A    Roll on the day when we can all live in one reality.

*****

Dialogue 7

M    Well, I must say, I’m glad to be out of that. It may sound complacent, but thank God for I.T.

L    I thought it was all jolly interesting, but I know what you mean, Mel. As a group they have no common ground. It’s amazing they work together as well as they do.

J    Which way are we going, Richard?

R    I thought through Marlborough and straight up the A4 I don’t feel like motorways today. Let’s find somewhere nice for lunch.

F    Drive slowly, Richard. I want to get home, but I don’t want to hurry either. We don’t have to stay on the A4 all the way, do we? We might stop at one of those nice pubs on the river, Moulsworth or Shillingford or somewhere.

J    I wonder how long they’ll go on talking.

R    Most of the day I imagine. But there’s still a hell of a lot more fieldwork to do.

L    What a nice man that Michael Glickman is. He’s really quite inspired when he talks, isn’t he? He’s really enthralled by the sheer beauty of the whole crop-circle event, isn’t he?

J    The one who really struck me was John Martineau. I do love accurate observation. There’s no speculative nonsense about him. He observes and measures, and when he’s measured it opens up more observations for him. It was he who drew out the big map they had on the wall, wasn’t it?

R    He got into a bit of an argument with Richard Andrews at one point. I don’t think he’s done much dowsing. I think he thought it ought to be possible to trace out the whole of those giant geometrical figures across the landscape by straight dowsing Richard said it was impossible. The thing about dowsing everything in sight for years on end is that you begin to know its limits.

J    The trouble is, dowsers doesn’t always agree. What is dowsable to one person may be simply a blank to the next person who comes along.

R    Nobody knows precisely what dowsing is. Only that it works.

J    For some people.

R    Probably for everybody if they let it work. It seems to be more dependent than, say, sight or hearing on whether you believe dowsing works or not.

J    Then there’s a second level, which is whether you believe what you’re dowsing for exists or not. If you believe there’s an underground stream across your garden you can trace it. That is, some people can trace it. There are better discussions than this.

M    Well, I should think there jolly well ought to be. Talk about a blind man looking for a black cat in a room with the light out.

J    Dowsing lore would probably claim that a dowser would be more likely to find the cat than most people. And namers like you, Mel, would probably have the most difficulty.

L    Wait a minute, wait a minute! I don’t believe it’s all that different in a way from sight or hearing. Isn’t hearing enormously dependent on what people think they can hear?

F    And on training. Whole worlds can be opened up, even to people with relatively little constitutional sight or hearing by people who have taught themselves to extend the range of their own senses, and can teach others to do the same.

J    I think there is a difference, you know, Lu.

L    In what?

J    Between dowsing and other senses. Even the word itself conveys it. By that I mean we describe dowsing as an activity, but it is equally a sensitivity. With other senses we distinguish looking from seeing, listening from hearing. With dowsing...

R    If we weren’t so materialistic we wouldn’t make that distinction. If I don’t concentrate on driving we’ll bump into something. This is Marlborough. Why don’t we stop here for lunch? It’ll be hours before we get to the Thames valley.

M    Look there’s someone just backing out. Right here on the left!

F    Well done, Richard. There’s a nice place called Polly’s something or other.

L    We’re right by it Fiona.

*****

R    I wish the world of journeys and cars and meals wasn’t always cutting our discussions in half.

J    You’re very fortunate it does, Richard. Otherwise you’d be in an intellectual dream half the time.

M    What’s so special about Richard is precisely that he can live on both levels at once.

R    Sometimes I hardly know which is which.

F    It’s synchronising them that’s the problem, realising that they’re actually the same world, that there’s only one reality.

R    Well that’s exactly what I was trying to say in the car. We make a false distinction between looking and seeing, listening and hearing, dowsing and...well, dowsing!

L    What do we really mean when we say that an object is there?

M    Elaborate, Lu.

L    You look at a tree and there it is. You lie in bed in the morning with your eyes shut, and a bird sings. Where is it? There’s quite a palaver of picturing goes on before you locate it as on the tree outside, or down the road somewhere. With hearing there’s more of a gap between sensing and locating.

J    Reminds me of the Welsh riddle! What’s the difference between a collision and an explosion? Answer: with a collision there’s a bang, and there you are. With an explosion there’s a bang, and where are you?

M    But with hearing, there is an actual bird in a particular place, singing away. A singing bird is a collision as well as an explosion!

L    Yes, but that’s a bit of information you get by seeing it, not hearing it.

R    I’m lost.

L    Well, I repeat, what does there really mean in regard to things?

J    Are things any more than conventions we have about actions, processes, about something going on, not necessarily located in space or time.

R    Materialism would say you’re talking nonsense. The real world doesn’t allow for such distinctions. ¤ "The fact is, Richard, you are a materialist by constitution. That is why I have a special connection with you, and why it was in the crop-circle dimension we first met."

L    Hello, Ophromine! How are you today?

R    ¤ "Today for me is all the time. Very well, thank you, Lucia, my candle-flame. Stop flickering. Burn steadily. You are needed now."

L    Why now especially?

R    ¤ "Because the crop-circle world is changing. Didn’t you see what was going on at that meeting?

L    Well, yes, indeed I did. There was a moment when everyone was riveted on that enormous map on the wall. Richard Andrews was describing vividly how he had struggled to identify a figure in a piece of woodland, and his astonished realisation that it had the same general form as half a dozen or more already visible in the crops. Somebody shouted out that it was only because he expected it to be there. Then John Martineau asked, in that case why was the angle in his diagram accurately measurable, and exactly what one would expect as the sixth apex in a hexagram, five of whose angles were already identified in cornfields? Then bedlam broke out, and I lost touch with the argument.

M    Michael Glickman was in tears. Stanley Messenger was trying to take the stand, but I couldn’t hear what he said.

F    I was sitting with Maggie. She was in tears too. She said she was hopeless in meetings, but somebody needed to point out that it was the six-sided figure they should be looking at. The pentagrams were simply indicating the closing of what she called the Avebury age, the historical period of mankind’s history. The hexagram held the clue to the realignment of the Earth Grid, I think she said.

J    What do you think, Ophromine?

R    ¤ "I’ve told you before, I don’t think. You do the thinking yourselves. There is one thing, though. You need to pick out the essential from the non-essential in this crop-circle situation. That’s your job, Lucia."

L    Oh, Ophromine, let up will you? I don’t know anything about crop-circles.

R    ¤ "What you know about is the level from which they are coming. I have a suggestion. You’ve been meeting people over this, two in particular. Your group is incomplete. Work with these two. They will link you with others. Darkness is rendered visible by light. Light attracts darkness towards itself. The dark and light flowers need to bloom together, but do not confuse them. The time of harvest is not yet, but it is coming. It is very near".

*****

L    I’ve hardly eaten anything again. It’s time we stopped having major spiritual encounters in restaurants. He meant Maggie and Andrew, didn’t he?

F    I’ve no doubt of it. I invited them back with us, but they were too involved. Garway’s the answer, isn’t it?

M    Just that brief glimpse again convinced me. We’ve simply got to commit ourselves and get on with it. I don’t know how we’ll manage it, but we will.

R    I was recommended an extremely good trust-forming solicitor in the Strand. I hope you don’t mind. I simply instructed him to get on with it. He’s drawing up the deed as soon as he can. He seems a very nice man, knows the ropes. He says ‘new-age’ trusts are becoming second nature to him.

J    Have we got Maggie’s and Andrew’s address?

R    Yes, I got it yesterday.

J    Let’s go back to town, wind up our affairs, and detach ourselves. It can’t be too soon for me.

F    Let’s at least spend the summer down there and see how it goes. I know Maggie will be dead keen. I have no idea whether Andrew will be able to move.

M    It’s a long way from Plymouth to Garway. Maybe they’ll come at weekends, or he will.

J    Speculation is the thief of time.

L    That’s procrastination.

J    Speculation is a sort of procrastination.

L    You’re a metaphor mixer Joe.

J    What about your fairies on birthday cakes riding round on carousels?

L    You started that one.

J    I… DID… NOT !!!

R    I don’t know what you two idiots are talking about, but somebody’s got to pay this bill. I’m cleaned out with all the petrol.

F    Here, give it to me.

J    Not all of it, Fiona. Here’s some for Lu and me.

M    And me.

R    Off we go then. Intraterrestrials on the march. Garway via London next stop.

*****

END OF BOOK FOUR

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