excerpts from
Delicate Mission
A Journey Home
Conrad O'Brien-ffrench
It was early summer [1939]. The country grew wilder and yet more beautiful. I drove through a thickly wooded and rolling land which was, nevertheless, well provided with open grassy tracts called, locally, “parkland”. The road climbed to about 4000 feet and as it dropped toward 100 Mile House a panorama of distant hills covered with snow opened up towards the north. On reaching the floor of the valley where the road crossed a stream I found a lodge, a barn and some corrals. Tired and hungry, I wondered what sort of a welcome I would receive. Close to where I stopped I could see a muskrat swimming in the stream and not far from him a cinnamon duck rested on the bank. For a while there was no other sign of life. I watched a kingbird making sallies from a fence post.
Then an opening screen door arrested my attention and I saw Lord Martin Cecil coming out to meet me. What seemed to be an unimportant encounter was to prove the crucial step into a period of my life which brought to light new and greater purpose in living. Martin stood before me; in his regard was depth of sincerity, perhaps a little shy, for he was neither cold nor effusive, neither was he talkative nor taciturn, gushing nor indifferent, but there was a quality which touched me immediately, something mysterious. At first I was a little on my guard, but instinctively I knew that he had stimulated a responsive chord in me. Had I evaluated him socially as a Cecil, of noble parentage, I would have lost him wholly. As a rancher, too, he was well thought of throughout the West, yet ranching pure and simple gave me no focus on this man. An Englishman, a gentleman, a rancher? These were useless measures which did not scan nor fit his true proportions, although he answered to those descriptions. But none of these did him justice.
He gave me a sincere handshake and the friendliest of smiles which evaporated any doubts I might have had about my welcome, and introduced me to his wife. Thus, in a few moments, was a new beginning made. Some Austrians, who were old friends of my family, now turned up, having travelled north from Vancouver by car to investigate the purchase of some property in the Cariboo-Chillicotin country. Their estates in Austria were on territory occupied by the Nazis so they had abandoned them to seek a new life in Canada. We met in the Lodge which had been built by Martin with some local help. It consisted of an entrance and lounge with kitchen and dining room behind it and a number of bedrooms upstairs for guests. On either side of the lounge were other apartments used privately by the Cecils. When later Martin reappeared it was to invite me to join them for dinner. This, our second meeting, confirmed my first impression of a quality in him which was greater than his inherited state, a positive authority emanating from some intense inner source. I was at a loss to encompass something for the first time in my life. It was not what he said or did, for outwardly he was quiet and unassuming. I judged Martin and his wife Edith to be in their late twenties.
After breakfast the next morning, as I sat with the Austrians, we were joined by our host who suggested a drive to show us the surrounding country. It proved to be as beautiful as could be hoped for; flatter than that of Douglas Lake and yet varied with surprising physical features—creeks, lakes, hills, ravines, open grassland, dense forest, all mingled in harmony. From the top of a rise we saw Lac la Hache in the distance, lying in a beautiful vale of mixed scenery. Some ponies, having been brought in from grass for our benefit, were offered to us as mounts and I was asked to act as guide. On the whole the ride went off pretty well, my horse making only one attempt to buck which I frustrated by tying his halter shank to the horn of the saddle. Clouds gathered and thunder rolled and we decided to return and, as is usually the case when heading towards home, the horses became more amenable. Next morning the Austrians continued on their journey to the north while I decided to stay on and, asking for sandwiches, took a trip to Lord Egerton’s ranch at 105 Mile where a deserted house stood two miles back from the read. I passed groves of poplars, their silvery stems contrasting with the deep blue of the lakes. On the lakes were wild duck of many varieties. Plover flew around me menacingly as I walked along the fringe of the lake. I sat on the verandah rail and gazed across the lake. A snipe was drumming, a fleeting speck amid the clouds. Somewhere below him, among the reeds, his mate sat on her nest completing her small creative cycle.
The next day I was invited by Martin, Romayne his sister and her friend Dianne, to accompany them on a ride through magnificent country to Buffalo Lake. It was wild land, inhabited by bear, moose and deer. Being overtaken by a sudden violent thunderstorm we rode under a large Douglas fir to keep dry, but the lightning played around too closely and it seemed increasingly dangerous. Soon the sun shone again, casting a rainbow broad and low across the murky sky and illuminating the bright green foliage and silver stems of the poplars. We were all very wet but had enjoyed it immensely, especially the thrill of emerging from a forest to find ourselves in a beautifully open space fringed by aspen, a lake or a creek. Such surprises await one at every turn in that district, still permeated deeply with the pioneering spirit and an exquisite living vitality. I took my leave of Martin reluctantly and, a few days later back at the coast, sat in the home of my friends at Maple Bay. On the radio King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were making their parting speeches before leaving Canadian shores.
Martin came to visit me and as we sat one morning among the daffodils on the bank watching the ebb and flow of the sea, together we discussed such matters which we called the “things of reality”. He had brought with him some papers written by one called Uranda. Uranda, he told me, represented the spirit of truth. My immediate reaction was “And so do thousands of other self-appointed prophets, especially in the western United States.” They all claim to expound the truth. “But,” added Martin, “this man is different. He manifests it in his living.” Martin then changed the subject, “Are you going to get involved in this war?”
“Yes, they don’t need me here. Besides I like the idea of helping in the war effort. I suppose it is just an idea of mine, probably wishful thinking. But Britain is really up against it this time.” I sincerely believed in the right of the British cause, mostly because it was British and when I had served England as a soldier or later in British Intelligence I had done so in all good faith. But now, having resigned, things were not quite the same and I could see Britain’s cause objectively and how it had frequently followed policies of self-aggrandisement rather than self-defence, and all too often moral issues had been secondary; and here my Irish heritage asserted itself. Insofar as justice is concerned, if indeed it existed at all in the world of man, I, as a soldier or as a secret agent, merely acted upon an idea that the Allied cause was just and I was therefore prepared to risk my life and the lives of others in that belief. I enjoyed excitement and, above all, the idea that in this romanticized game I was frustrating the international policies of a maniac.
Martin listened to me gravely. He threw a pebble into the amethyst depth of the bay. It landed with a plonk in a pool just below us. Finally he said: “Right and wrong, according to Uranda, are degrees of judgement on a human scale. In the state of order or perfection there is neither good nor evil.”
“Who then does he say is responsible for the state of order?” Martin was silent. He threw another pebble into the water. It caused a bigger splash this time from which concentric rings spread outwards. “There is always a cause to all effects, you know.”
“As for causes, what is good and what is bad?” I questioned. “In the First World War each side was asking God to bless their arms for them against the other. The only thing that is real is that which is part of the state of order and the state of order is the nature of that which functions in and controls the universe, including man. Beyond that I can see no truth in anything.” “I understand.” I said. Martin fixed his eyes on me steadily as if to say, “That’s right, but do you really know that?”
“I feel it, I feel that it is right,” and as I said it I felt we were sharing something so basic that it would be a bond between us forever. Then I thought to myself regarding Uranda: Why should there not be on earth such a clear expression of truth? It would not be the first time nor, I felt, the last. Martin had apparently been awaiting such a revelation for a long while. He hungered and thirsted for the truth unlike anyone I had ever seen before and although he had not yet seen the whole of it, he felt he had here touched the central evidence of it in the writings of a living human being. Suddenly I caught a glimpse of a new dimension which put nationalisms and human family quite out of focus. And from then in my heart I became a citizen of the world more than a citizen of a single country or federation of states. And even as I did so I got a vague idea that this was but a step towards becoming a harmonious part of a universal order.
The best piece of news, as far as I was concerned, was that Uranda was coming to Vancouver and would speak there, Martin and I attending. It was our first meeting with him. Uranda’s talk took place in Vancouver on 15 April 1940, and my first impression of him was as a truly remarkable and compelling man. Exercising a genius for analogy, he approached the subject of the human condition from many angles, seeking to engender in our understanding a sense of his vision of human being. He told us that man’s mind had become like a window pane through which the sunlight of the spirit was scarcely able to penetrate, so thick was the coating of self-centeredness that clouded it. “Man,” he said, “is accordingly in darkness, with his vision so obscured that it has left him with a desolate sense of abandonment and insecurity.” Continuing with his theme he indicated that it was not a hopeless condition, but that if man were to cease using his mind as a means of polarizing himself in the outer form of things, lusting after his material environment, the state could clear, his consciousness could again become translucent and allow the sunlight of love, the most potent of all creative forces, to radiate into the world.
Man, he taught, has the power of free choice allowing him to transfer his response from his outer involvements toward a true polarization in the Sun-source within him, the light of his Being. To me this was plain speaking. I saw in it the true meaning of the first great commandment that one should love the Lord with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind. From the solar system and the universe through the infinitesimal entities of the worlds beyond the atom, the same principle of radiation and response prevails. It could be observed between planets and sun, between the moon and the earth, between electrons and their proton and between male and female.
He spoke of fear and hate and their influence upon the human organism, creating chemical changes in the blood stream. “Hate,” said Uranda, “is a slow form of suicide.” The human mind is a good instrument but a bad master—like a car which starts off before you have touched the controls. The threat of planetary spasm is by no means new and is in common coin with the soapbox reformers as a means of proselytizing; the idea being that when there is a threat of danger from outside, the herd bunches together for security. Hitler used the threat of Jewish and Communist domination to rally the Germans to the Nazi standard. Russia uses capitalism, and others have used imperialism to stir up their people’s animosity, the idea being that there is something about to destroy you unless you hearken to my philosophy. Clearly that approach had been overdone. And yet here was I compelled to listen to this simple prophet’s offering. I told myself not to be a skeptic but to allow the matter to prove itself. If the pattern of order was within me, as he indicated, then the truth of the matter would be made clear once I allowed it to be experienced.
I sat next to Martin during these talks, and wondered a little at the contrast in backgrounds these two men represented; yet they were united by this magnetic power. Later on I brought this point up. “Backgrounds, social levels, or race, have nothing to do at all with the One Law,” he said. “If at this time the spirit of truth finds a clearer passage in Uranda than it does through me, I accept him as my leader.” This was stupendous and if followed out might carry one to the point of no return wherein one might be obliged to move on into a state wherein the values, conventions and ethics with which one had been saturated throughout one’s life became no longer valid. The image of a Daddy God up in the sky was gone and replaced by a principle, a primary cause, an aspect of which was in all creation—that was far more like it. It was within me too, not far away but very close. So close indeed that I, we all, could become one with it. Now we could work together, now I could live God all day long and all night too for that matter, and step in line with Him in every detail and be part of the universal order.
Martin and I parted as I boarded the boat for Vancouver Island. The passengers were all lining up outside the dining saloon and I treated myself to a hearty meal. I thought a great deal on these things as I watched the deep blue waves sweep past us, in brilliant sunshine, while we shortened the distance to Victoria. After my meal I went on deck gazing, as I walked, at the snow peaks of the Olympics across the straits. It seemed incredible to me that we had been created with the capacity to reject our creator in this fashion, and yet it is written that we were created in His own image and likeness with a capacity for free choice which we can exercise to our own destruction. My meeting with Uranda was the turning point in my life.
I received word that Lord Martin had been called down to California by Uranda on some important business, and that he wished me to accompany him. We drove down in his Studebaker taking turns at the wheel. We reached our destination amid the California hills south-east of Los Angeles in the early spring and Uranda came out of the small ranch house to greet us. We were, of course, a bit travel-worn after a journey of two thousand miles. There were others there as well as those we had brought with us: Uranda’s wife, Kathy, and her baby Nancy, his secretary Grace and her little son, and one or two of Uranda’s faithful followers. We entered the house. A meal was on the table ready for us, consisting of fruit salad, cottage cheese, rye bread and good fresh butter. Uranda blessed the food and afterwards, in the tiny living room, invited us all to sit and hear him speak of the spirit of truth. As we listened, material barriers seemed to recede and we found ourselves joined together as if separation had never been and we were united as a whole. When Uranda finally finished what he had to say it was almost two in the morning. There were six women in all, with two children, and accommodation being limited, Martin and I took blankets and retired to an open shed where we lay down to sleep among the farm machinery. But a wind got up and the thorny branches of the pepper trees surrounding the shed scraped the metal of the corrugated iron walls and emitted the weirdest noises. In the early dawn I distinctly felt hot breath on my forehead and, looking up, found myself gazing into the liquid brown eyes of a stray cow.
I could not compare the following few days with any others for they seemed to be unique. I felt buoyed up by a strange and holy atmosphere so formidable as to be almost frightening. The tension upon me while in the presence of Uranda was sometimes so unbearable as to cause me to seek release in trivialities. Perhaps, too, I was afraid of coming under a hypnotic influence and kept a tight hold on my thinking. But I soon came to see that I was resisting a totally benign power, foreign to me, but into which the others could relax and allow themselves to be enfolded and become part of, so that it flowed strongly through them, unifying on all levels. They clearly felt at one with themselves and each other. This touched me as the perfect state. It had to be on a voluntary basis, of course, and the voluntary part was all-important.
The ranch house stood in the midst of a field surrounded by eucalyptus trees. Odd pieces of disused farm machinery, an out-door privy and a wood pile had been woven together into a rustic pattern by the overgrowth of tall grass and sage brush. After breakfast Uranda seemed to wish to be alone with Martin, so I went for a walk on a neighboring steep hill. The wind was strong and from the north. It blew up a sand storm and from the valley a brownish cloud rose towards the sky. Beyond this, and contrasting with the sub-tropical foreground, I could see distant snow peaks beckoning. I sheltered for a while from the wind behind some rocks and sat on a sand patch where I could enjoy the solitude and think. There was a quiet murmer of nearby water. A small lizard came out to watch me and a swallow-tailed butterfly settled on a rock opening out his wings. As I gradually became conscious of an inner state, I thought, “The desert shall blossom as the rose.” In that little white ranch house down in the valley was a man imbued with the spirit of truth, and I knew that I had come to the crucial turning point of my life. I laughed so loud that the lizard almost jumped out of his skin.
Uranda was first, last and always interested in establishing the One Christ Body on earth, a temple of human form expressing the spirit of the living God, a body of many members all united by an irresistibly cohesive force inherent in each. Of course, of course, that was the meaning of the second coming. How ridiculous, I had been in thinking of a Christ descending on a cloud from above. This was a moment of birth, a sort of Christmas Day, not the return of the old, but the birth of the new in this day and age. The idea was, perhaps, by no means new for it suggests the basis of true Christianity and, for that matter, the basis of true Hebraic worship. But the fact of the matter was that no one so far had proclaimed it in such a manner and I was beginning to awaken to the dormant giant who was now emerging in awareness—showing the true stature of the dwarf-like human personality for what it was.
The meals at the ranch were a happy experience, the food simple and organically harmonious, blessed lovingly by Uranda before being served by the ladies. The rest of the day was spent listening to Uranda until the evening sun, streaming into the little sitting room of the ranch house, would remind him that it was time again for a break and, perhaps, another meal and some exercise. Once again, after we had eaten, we would gather together for Uranda’s evening session. Strenuous as it might have seemed it achieved its purpose in releasing our minds and hearts from a domination by the material world consciousness into an indescribable freedom of swift beauty. Nevertheless, after the prolonged intensity of his presence I found that, though my mind was seething with new vistas, it had reached saturation and now recoiled. The next day when he asked me if I wanted to hear more, I admitted for the present I had had enough.
That evening he read us a paper—his lesson material seemed endless—and as soon as he had finished we discussed or elaborated and expanded the subject presented and, as we had no tape-recorder, our remarks were all taken down in shorthand by two of the ladies. Of course it was mostly Uranda who spoke. He sat in a wicker rocking chair rocking himself gently with half-closed eyes, a hand passing over his forehead from time to time as he deliberated in slow measured terms. My powers of concentration were never good and often during his talks I would find my mind wandering and I would hark back to my conventional Christian upbringing with a shock and be amazed to find myself sitting there among that strange assortment of people—so racially and socially mixed, yet now united. Uranda, for instance, of German and Welsh descent, was ten years my junior, born in Ferguson, Marshall County, Iowa, but brought up among the Grand Mesa Mountains of Colorado. Lord Martin Cecil, an Englishman of noble birth on both sides of his family, was unquestionably accepting Uranda’s leadership.
At times I was swept on by the utter logic of the words which poured forth from Uranda’s lips, while at other times I found myself rationalizing and being subject to doubts. I had always expected a prophet to look like the pictures I had seen of them—men with upturned eyes and meekness in their faces suggesting weakness rather than strength. In my imagination they led conventional, blameless, almost inhuman lives; they had, in fact, no existence except as artists of the Renaissance visualized them. But the people with whom I now found myself led normal human lives. They had strong but gentle faces and determined mouths. They loved, ate and did all the things that others do, except sleep! Compared to my habits they seemed never to go to bed. Otherwise their lives were dedicated to one ultimate purpose only, and for this they were ready to give up everything. Indeed, they would gladly yield home, comforts, riches, all in fact that stood in the way of expressing the perfect state of order which was already within them. Nothing could be more natural since order exists everywhere except in the lives of men and women. The state of order, being cohesive by nature, draws together its responsive elements and thus produces an organic whole—which Uranda called the One Christ Body.
From the Zadokite papers of Egypt, and now from the Dead Sea Scrolls, history was coming to light which gave us some inkling of the life led by the Essenes, and I was inclined to draw the parallel and see Uranda as the “Teacher of Righteousness”, in a sect that was to Christianity as the Essenes had been to the Jewish religion of those times. But it was a hasty comparison and rapidly forgotten. I was in the habit of comparing previous events as if I could relate them to the present in some fashion, oblivious to the fact that the time and place, as well as all the vibratory factors (both infinitely minute as well as immensely vast) throughout the universe combined to make each instant absolutely unique. And I saw how the character of life in form was that of perpetual animation and change in perfect balance. More and more I could see it clearly and become part of it, part indeed of the order which is eternally at hand. This was the truth. Those who spent their time delving into chronicles of the past for evidence of the truth in bygone days, had, I thought, failed to realize that it is available today in a practical form.
I was beginning to see that if I were to come, with all my failings and impurities, into the burning light of truth, I would find the difference unbearable. I would have to choose between letting the process of purification take its course or relapse into the world of compromise from which I had come. The others at the ranch, though slightly eclipsed by Uranda and Martin, also had fascinating backgrounds. Some had salvaged their lives from marital discord, others from sickness or, like myself, had come “out of a hunch” that every atom of my body was the evidence of order and that I did not belong to myself and never had, but was the living expression of God—that is the truth of the matter.
I did not doubt that Uranda’s interpretation of certain phrases in the Bible was correct. I am not gullible by nature, but I saw danger in a drastic acceptance of his statements on their face value. By the process of putting an unorthodox interpretation on basic beliefs whether in regard to religion, history or physics, a state of such confusion could be produced in my mind that I would, no longer, know or understand anything. And my mind, being in this state of confusion, would become extremely vulnerable and easily controlled by an outside source. Likewise the process of dividing, setting one idea against another, or one person against another, or an individual against the rest, renders them prone to suggestion. I was suspicious of the techniques I had met within Europe which debunk concepts, break up petrified beliefs, or disperse groups, reforming them into patterns and formulae more easily manipulated. This, though it involves hypnosis, makes ordinary hypnotic methods look like child’s play. When previously accepted standards are removed or discredited and we are left without a yardstick by which to gauge our reasoning, we are thrown into a state of perplexity and become dependent upon a leader.
I was familiar with this process in advertising, and in political propaganda, and the fact that it is becoming more prevalent does not make it right. In my view, iconoclasm is justified only where the indoctrination is for the benefit of the whole—and who is to know this? The state of order, or perfection, the heavenly state which is the full expression of Being in the universe, has to appear through man; what other possible medium is there? And this is man’s service to God which he must perform to justify his existence, to fulfil his purpose as a cosmic entity. No amount of struggling or trying to accomplish it will help, it must be allowed to occur. It cannot be done in our own or another’s strength, because it is already there, this ultimate state which only man can reveal. What disturbed me most was the belief that I was being indoctrinated. Yet as I looked at it more closely I saw that the fixed beliefs which I clung to, were fixed only because I had been imbued with them during a defenseless childhood and the fact that I had already been so indoctrinated struck me as wrong. The findings of a council (which become dogma) can only apply in the moment of their emergence and are anathema to unfolding life.
Day after day, from his rocking chair, Uranda spoke to us. A bridge table before him was covered with his papers. Sometimes he read to us, sometimes he would speak without notes or else discuss the points that had been brought out. Sometimes he would kick off his shoes and smoke a cigarette. During one of these sessions I did a drawing of his head.
Uranda’s car was like an elongated shooting-brake. In fact, it had been an airport limousine. It was his means of getting about and it suited him well, for he always travelled with an entourage of many others including children. It was parked under the thorn trees beside the little white ranch house and served as a sort of Counsel office in which those of us who felt like discussing problems with him could speak freely on personal matters without fear of interruption. Uranda’s eagerness to heal wherever he found an opening came from a passionate desire to re-establish wholesomeness on earth. Having himself come to know that divine point of integration within himself, his purpose was to express it on all levels. His personal approach was always one of openness and of evident eagerness to heal, to bless and to comfort by exercising that universal and formidable cosmic power—“God’s love”, as he called it, with which he was overflowing.
It was Sunday and we were approaching the end of our visit to Riverside. Uranda suggested a drive to Los Angeles and its surroundings which included Hollywood and other places with familiar names. The world seemed strangely unreal after the depth of communion we had experienced. I was a stranger in a strange land but with the beginnings of home flowering in my heart. I had anticipated my early return to Canada so had brought with me my travelling bag. I managed to get a seat on a night plane and, bidding farewell to the others, settled down to wait in a Los Angeles cafe for it was yet early afternoon. The cafe had been given the appearance of a grotto with vaulted ceilings from which stalactites glittered. Bird cages, containing canaries, hung among the stalactites. The birds sung to the accompaniment of an orchestra. I thought of them as perpetual captives sentenced, like man’s imagination of angels on pink clouds eternally twanging harps, to a grotesque, humanly conceived heaven, longing for the fresh air and freedom of the wind, the spirit that blows withersoever it listeth according to its natural laws of life.
I had been a secret agent working for a cause I believed in, a human cause, now I would serve a universal cause, neither human nor limited in scope, the cause of all causes. My intention would be not to discover details of a political or ideological formation, but to be an agent relaying cosmic power, revealing the state of order in every aspect of life. I would reveal the cause of all causes in the form of a perpetual harmony of effects. And I would love the author of all in secret with every aspect of my being. I thought of all the things in my life that had passed away and was grateful for their contribution to the present. I was aware of the worth of these events in terms of thankfulness and in the absence of resentfulness.
It was 1954 and Rosie and I were at Fairholme. We were keenly interested in the activities of our friends in what we called the Third Sacred School, which we closely followed. There were regular mailings too which kept us in touch with what was current in the ministry’s spiritual development. A derelict ranch in the Colorado foothills had been bought and renamed Sunrise Ranch and it was hoped that before long it would flourish as the headquarters of the movement. It was little more than a dustbowl when it fell under the control of Uranda. But he predicted that there were seven springs beneath the property and followed up with this statement, “I carry the spirit of truth and when sufficient awareness of the truth is evident among you [his followers] water, which is the symbol of truth, will appear.” Perhaps some of them found this hard to accept, but in fact water in such abundance did become available that the valley, with proper management, could only flourish. Classes on the teachings of Uranda now took place regularly at Sunrise Ranch and the right instructors seemed to appear. Accommodation was scarce but with the frequent arrival of new members to the community housing increased. At first it was a bit primitive but, with the acquisition of a machine for making cement blocks, things began to improve.
At the conclusion of the 1954 Class period, which was six months in those days, the young ministry received its first great blow. Rosie and I and the children were at our home in the Canadian Rockies, and I recall we were halfway through lunch when the telephone rang. It was a long-distance call and I recognized the voice of Uranda’s secretary Grace Van Duzen speaking from Colorado. There had been a plane crash in which Uranda, his wife Kathy, Alan Ackerley (a personal friend), and two small children, had all been killed. The children had been of Grace Van Duzen and Lillian Call, Uranda’s two secretaries. The impact of the crash on the system of the Third Sacred School was no less than that upon the Cessna plane as it hit the shallow waters of the bay at Oakland, California.
Shattering as it was there were those who continued to accept their responsibilities in upholding Uranda’s teachings and it was at the head of this band of faithful ones that Martin now placed himself and he invited Rosie and I to attend the next Class starting in Spring 1955. Finding a caretaker for Fairholme for six months was miraculously achieved, and we with the children and baggage piled into our Ford and drove down through Montana and Wyoming to Colorado. I shall never forget it. The snow still hung in the hollows of those endless plains. The antelope and the distant hills were reminiscent of my early days in the Mounties on the Canadian prairies. And then on arrival at Sunrise, the pang of disillusionment as we gazed upon our new environment. The Ranch was still scattered with debris of broken farm machinery. Goats inhabited a pen next to the one-room cabin allotted to us. There was no indoor plumbing or sanitation yet a powerful feeling of victory dominated the scene which buoyed up our spirits and kept at bay any sense of depression.
A ranch house under a cluster of large cottonwood trees served as the kitchen and dining room, a barn was being converted into an apartment block, while to the west the foothills rose sharply to a summit called Green Ridge. Ever since the days when I first met Uranda I remember vividly the salient points of his message, “All wisdom, direction and power for living your life comes from within.” It needed no human explanation nor analysis, it only needed to be lived moment by moment, for this ground of our Being is the wellspring of life. I miss that man who first brought me to see that truth, albeit as old as time itself, I miss his friendly spirit, his Western mode of speech and the way he sat and handled his horse. His sunny personality was most infectious, one couldn’t help loving him. He lived what he preached and nothing on earth could persuade him to violate his integrity; above all he had a keen sense of humour. Our curriculum was plain enough: the theory of his teachings in the forenoon and the practice of same in the afternoon. In August when Class ended I returned to Fairholme alone, my marriage to Rosie, seen in the stark light of reality, disintegrated.
I set to work finding lodgings or an apartment in Vancouver where the boys and I could have a home. I finally made up my mind to buy a house of my own and went to a reputable house agency in West Vancouver. It being lunch time the office was deserted except for an elderly lady who said she had the very thing I was looking for, a two-bedroom house with a southern aspect overlooking the sea in its own grounds. She locked up the office and drove me to see it. It turned out to be her own home. The house had charm and possibilities and I bought it on the spot. I had been travelling around ever since the sale of Fairholme and now wanted to settle down. Now with a place of my own my children could come and visit me. I added a studio by building on top of the garage and extended the bedroom area and the result was very pleasing. I lived for fifteen years at my West Vancouver house during which time I wrote and painted a great deal.
Meantime the seeds of reality which Uranda had planted were sprouting. In my street alone four or five persons had got the message and opened their eyes to the fact that the truth of Being was not to be found in books, not in any institution, church or philosophy, nor in nature, nor in the abstract distances of space, nor in another human being, but was already within each person from the beginning and from which point its rule of harmony, balance and creativity was fully capable of functioning and controlling that person’s life. It is a simple matter of cause and effect, or radiation and response. No use manipulating the billions of effects in the hope of achieving harmony, for the harmonious and creative Tone emanates only from primary cause and cause is at the centre of all being. Therefore there was obvious truth in the saying, “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and Him only shalt thou worship.” In most cases it seems that people worship anything and everything other than God, which is, of course, an invocation of effect and a denial of cause. People are beginning to see this and marvel at their blindness in not having seen it before. We are told that human beings are only using a minute part of the actual capacity of their brains. Those parts which are capable of spiritual perception have for the most part fallen into disuse, probably since man expanded his capacities for rationalization on physical or animal levels—even here he has lost much of his intuitiveness. Uranda tells us to call to remembrance these latent capacities.
During this period I did some of my finest work in painting, including an oil called St John; and another, The Twenty-Third Psalm, which now hangs in the Lodge at 100 Mile House. It became my deep desire to stimulate the art expression of our ministry which was spreading all over the United States and Canada, South Africa and Europe, Israel and many other points including Australia and New Zealand, for it seemed to me that words alone were no longer able to reveal the subtle wholeness of spiritual awareness. I was invited to take up permanent residence on Sunrise Ranch which is the international headquarters of our movement, and I accordingly sold my house in West Vancouver and moved down to Colorado in the United States. I was still agile and full of life but in spite of all that I was in my eighties. I picked a site on Green Ridge about 300 feet above the Ranch, near enough to be able to participate in the general activities of the unit yet far enough off on my own with exquisite views from a broad balcony.
With Uranda no longer at the helm no one could have been better fitted to lead us than Lord Martin. He is deeply spiritual and accordingly wise and, in his wisdom, single-minded without being narrow in his vision. He is able to accommodate and enfold all circumstances knowing that everything in existence can be used to the glory of God. There is no fear, hatred, or judgement in him—which makes him a true leader. Like an accurate compass, he points only to a total response to his Maker. When I say that I have grown to love him I mean that I can respond to him in absolute reliability, for he is one with the universal order. How do I express this love? By following his example? No, not by imitation nor by following instruction but by doing as he has done, namely, obeying the first great commandment, which means total response on all levels to the cause of all causes. That is the golden rule.
There were, of course, others whom I admired and who were true brothers and sisters, as you might say, along the way. One of these was Richard Thompson, born in 1902 in the Isle of Man, a Cambridge M.A. who had adopted the teaching profession. Richard had been a disillusioned idealist who had thrown in his lot with Social Credit but who was quick to awaken from his pipedream when he met Uranda in 1937. He was a jewel and his wife Dorothy the setting. They founded a centre for what he then called “Ontology” in Vancouver, but the name fell short of doing justice to our programme and was discarded. When Richard died in 1965 I took over the co-ordination of the Vancouver group but soon found that most of my time was spent on the road plying between my home and the “Ontological” centre, a distance of ten miles each way. My relief came in the form of William Bahan who with his family came from the New England states where he was well known as a successful doctor of chiropractic. Bill Bahan who was then about forty years of age was of American-Irish stock and possessed a keen sense of humour and a clarity of vision which never failed to amaze me, and this, added to his extraordinary charm, quickly brought the Vancouver centre to a new level of vibrancy. But it became evident in due course that he was of too great a calibre to waste on a city of only 365,000 inhabitants and he was given the co-ordination of the whole of the Eastern United States and Canada.
It is now nearly forty years since together we went to hear Uranda speak in Vancouver and our understanding of the realm of cause, each in our different ways, has deepened and matured and clarified accordingly. There is a resonance or tonal chord which binds those who turn their faces in absolute response to God, and that has always been my relationship with Martin, a mutual understanding and respect one for the other so that words are hardly necessary. Martin enjoys a good story and has a hearty laugh but small talk is not in his line.
The reference point of beauty is within each one of us and it is our awareness of the presence of this order, harmony, balance and wholeness which is revealed through agreement. It is as simple as connecting the lamp to the main source of power and light. Beauty, in other words, comes from within. Our consciousness begins to clarify as to the true purposes of all our activities during our lifetime just as cells in our brain awaken from their deep sleep, and awakening discover that there is nothing new in existence. All is there in reality from the beginning, harmonious in detail and in true balance. We are not talking science or logic according to human ideas of logic, or of anything the human mind has concocted, but we are looking at something real and stable and everlasting, which was, is and ever will be but which can only be experienced, and can never be explained in human terms.
© Conrad O’Brien-ffrench 1979
