The world’s longest-running crop circle gathering took place once again in Glastonbury this summer, and covered not only crop circles, but also other crucial contemporary subjects, as “individually perceived” here by BARBARA WADDELL…


Why have people flocked to the Glastonbury Symposium for fifteen consecutive summers? To be willing (and able!) to spend a long weekend attending some twenty meaty presentations, we have to have a pretty strong individual commitment. That combined commitment over the years bears witness not only to the crop circle phenomenon as a fact, but also to the variety of possible individual beliefs about that fact – and this was the underlying theme in July 2005.

An event occurs. Everyone who is aware of that event has their own perception of it. So the fact of that event exists in as many versions as there are individual opinions. Our mistake lies in thinking that our version is the only true one. So, in his keynote address, Andy Thomas – less colourfully dramatic than usual but with his constant passion for moderation – asked us to consider “What is truth?” Sometimes, we’re so sure we know the truth that we don’t stop to look at the facts, or our belief about them. For instance, asked if the London bombing events of 7/7 were the work of Al Qaeda, a reporter said “We have no evidence of that, but it is a certainty.”

On the way to that extremity of unconscious bias is the tendency of some croppies to leap from the particular to the general, claiming as true for all something observed in just a few examples: that a crop circle must, for instance, be man-made if any of the stems are broken, or that the geometry of “genuine” circles is always perfect. Is “truth” served when we just seize upon a tiny fragment of evidence, for or against, that fits in with our beliefs? The sceptics seem to have the upper hand because the TV image of a man with a plank is far more convincing than a group of people saying “It may be this, or it may be that.” But in the long run we destroy our own credibility if we defensively “spice it up.”

The new Pope has said words to the effect of “There are people who like to believe there are many truths: there are not, there is only one truth, our truth.” As Cardinal Ratzinger, he investigated the Fatima phenomenon, so he knows what prophecies were made. As one of these is said to be that the Church is going to fall apart, does he not realize he is on dangerous ground?

Andy concluded by quoting from Satish Kumar’s autobiography, ‘No Destination’:

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“Truth means seeing reality as it is. Although we can never be sure of the nature of ultimate reality, it is right and proper to seek it. There is no one truth which can be described, explained and defined in language. Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammed and Socrates have all been seekers of truth. Poets, saints and mystics experience the divine and the sacred in all things. For them that was the truth.”

“But we cannot live on the wealth of our ancestors. We must seek our own treasure and take up the quest to find our own truth. Truth is multifaceted and pluralistic. Seeing existence in all its mysterious diversity yet realizing its wholeness prevents us from imposing a monolithic belief system on it. The quest for truth is a liberating journey. It liberates us from dogmas, both religious and political… The moment the truth is imprisoned in a belief system, the truth is lost.”

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It is worth noting that Satish was once a Jain monk and Andy once intended to enter the priesthood. So it is possible to move on from a sincerely held rigid belief, not just (as so often the case) to an opposite rigid belief, but to the liberation that can come in the honest quest for truth.

What Ian Crane had drawn our attention to the day before is the degree to which some people are prepared, in the interests of maintaining their own political power, to manipulate the truth in order to persuade the world to a particular belief. He revealed some hard facts (some publicly available, if you look) that point to the deliberate creation of the events of 9/11 in order to spread a belief in the threat of terrorism, against which people could be intimidated into taking up arms.

On 9/11 there were five war games going on, so that all US Fighter Command forces were elsewhere, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency arrived in New York the day before, allegedly to participate in a war game. Looking at the film clip (camera conveniently present) of President Bush apparently being told that America was under attack, it is easy to think he had prior knowledge. Ian is now sure that at that moment Bush thought he was being told of something that was part of a game. He had to be taken to one side to be told it was for real.

The American people are gradually realizing that the wool has been pulled over their eyes –gradually, because, as Ian says, they have to take in all the implications of what is going on – for themselves, for their nation and for the world. He quoted Hitler as saying that the greater the crime perpetrated by the leadership, the less the people would believe the leadership capable of such a crime.

Just as 9/11 was a construct established to achieve an agenda, so there is evidence, Ian said – evidence some of which he had not yet had time to fully research – that 7/7 in London followed a similar pattern. For instance, a consultancy firm was – by the statement on record of its Managing Director, author of the recent DTI advice booklet ‘Preventing Panic in a Crisis’ – running an exercise that very day involving 1000 people to deal with a series of bombs going off in London at precisely the three railway stations that happened that morning. Could he have been unwittingly influenced in his timing of this exercise? And, while over the years the only Irish terrorists who went to jail for planting bombs in the UK have been released because they were framed, it is worth noting that four people were identified within 24hrs as being responsible in connection with 7/7. Ian is sure they thought they were part of a game.

He posed the primary question in any criminal investigation: “Cui bono?” – who stood to gain by the suppression and/or manipulation of facts in connection with 9/11 and 7/7? Who, in other words, are the conspiratorial “powers that be”? Not the American people. “America is certainly waking up to the situation.” Ian told us that he has for three and a half years been saying it is perhaps the role of the UK to help the US regain control of their own country, to regain their constitution. Now, he said, it’s our turn in the UK to regain our (unwritten!) constitution.

Turning to this year’s crop circles, he commented that as a medium of communication they are multidimensional – they mean different things to different individuals, but they do seem to him to be depicting ideas associated with the transformation of consciousness – a transformation that will enable us to deal with attempts to manipulate the truth. Those of us who have been through an individual transpersonal experience know, he said, that it is extremely traumatic: but when we get through it we are indeed a new person. That is what this year’s circles are telling us the Earth is going through.

And just as we need to be very aware of the desired outcome of an individual experience, so do we need that focus on a planetary basis. But it is as individuals that we make the consciousness choice – we should not become an organisation. He quoted Rudolf Steiner as predicting that “spiritual science will be integrated into the karma of humanity and then the possibility will be created for individuals themselves to have an effect upon the karma of humanity as a whole.”

Using the communications software of Microsoft Powerpoint to good effect, Robin Heath told us something new about ‘Powerpoints’ (the title of his talk and his latest book). John Michell had recognised that the ancients chose the omphalos, or geometric centre, as the seat of power. Working with John, Robin has confirmed an additional geometric distribution of power points: they occur at the ends as well as at the centre of alignments to be found on the map of the British Isles. They are marked by the location not only of seats of government, but also by installations of power in the modern sense of industrial complexes and nuclear plants – and, strangely, acts of indiscriminate violence like the massacre at Dunblane.

Does man control the landscape, Robin asks, or does the landscape control us? Well, neither. My personal feeling is that we subconsciously recognise the location of energy centres, but will continue to use them in a haphazard way until we have entered into the level of consciousness that enables us to use power constructively – as the circlemakers, human or otherwise, do. Incidentally, the longest W/E axis of Britain taken from the northernmost tip of Wales intersects with that from its southernmost tip at Shakespeare’s birthplace of Stratford. It is interesting that Cardiff, recently adopted as the Welsh seat of government, is at the right-angle of a triangle, the sides of which extend due North to Edinburgh and East to London.

Julius Caesar was told that the island of Britain was a triangle. By analysing his description, which includes specific measurements, Adrian Gilbert has realized a “geometrical figure of extraordinary properties”. Not only is it a right-angled triangle that is half of an equilateral one, but Adrian has been able to use this figurative map of Britain to solve the age-old problem of squaring the circle – see his book, ‘The New Jerusalem’, also the title of his presentation at the Symposium.

He showed us how a knowledge of geomancy (how to use power points) has covertly been maintained during the long architectural history of London, which the one-time British-Israel Movement thought of as the new Jerusalem – representing ancient Jewish values, I feel, rather than the rigid beliefs of modern Zionism.

An earlier name for London was New Troy (Trinovantum). Adrian subscribes to the orthodox belief that this name, brought here by wandering Trojans, was like all advanced ideas imported from the Middle East. But Iman Wilkens has, in his book ‘Where Troy Once Stood’ (regrettably out of print), demonstrated – at any rate to my personal satisfaction – that those wandering Trojans were returning home after the fall of Troy, which had been a fort near Ely (Ilium). Since they lost the war, I guess the Trojans didn’t use their local power point constructively! Are the crop circles, so concentrated in the South of England, helping us to find a way back to knowledge we once had so as to move forward with a better use of power?

That knowledge is being fed back into our school curriculum by Nick Kollerstrom, who got a round of applause when he told us how he now has a contact who teaches crop circle maths to mixed-ability classes who can share the joy of colouring in the diagrams if they don’t understand the theorems of this triune geometry.

Appreciation of the crop circles from a variety of aspects has completely altered the context of some people’s lives. Bearing witness to this were Francine Blake (Canada), Bert Janssen and Janet Ossebaard (Holland), Barbara Lamb (US), and Allan Brown (UK).

We are looking at a mystery, says Geoff Freed. He told us (not without humour) how, as a scientist working in a Zen monastery, he received spontaneous writing that contained prophecies, some of which are coming true – and one of which is that many of us will in the future be androgynous and procreation by conscious pre-life agreement means children will come through with a conscious design purpose. A crop circle is a cosmological event: if we find ourselves in one that may even be man-made, we can change it. We can use energy to bless everything we see: visualize terrorists blessing us and we bless them in return.

Chet Snow told us that people’s experiences, when they were hypnotically progressed into the future, fell into four different scenarios – so not only is there a future, but it is diverse, not one size fits all!

Rod Bearcloud, whose native American tradition takes a relationship with the circles for granted, showed us a video of his inspiring animations; and Bunny Barnett (originally from Jamaica) talked of the importance of Africa’s appreciation of the spiritual dimension.

That spiritual dimension has become the context of life for our Sunday night guest speaker, Andrew Collins. Even after three tightly packed days, we were held by the fascinating detail of his masterly lecture – which he dedicated to Laurence Gardner, who (if he were not in hospital) would have been giving this talk – on the holy grail.

Withdrawing years ago from the distracting internal politics of the crop-circle fraternity, Andrew was happy to come back and share ideas he has developed along with his own successful Questing Conference. Having supplied his credentials for being taken seriously – viz his earlier work with scientists to relate the human mind, the landscape, crop circles and the UFO phenomenon – Andrew told us that his thinking has come “full-circle”. He now sees those concepts fitting into a much bigger picture,

As part of the theory of parallel universes, we can change the past – an ability he has personally put to the scientific test. This he sees us as doing with guidance in dreams and visions by compassionate beings of light for whom he has been given the name of ‘Morphians’, noting that Morpheus was the Greek god of dreams, said to appear in a form the dreamer can believe in – the name implying “teacher” as well as “shape-changer”. Perhaps it is unconsciously under such guidance that human crop artists (including hoaxers) have played a bigger role than we or they realise in the overall creation of crop formations whose effect on human consciousness may ripple out for the next few thousand years.

As a Morphian download, Andrew received a message about the grail in a style very unlike his own beginning: “The grail is but a superficial image created in the modern age. The true grail is a multidimensional crystalline complex that forms the blueprint of cosmic order and form from the centre of the universe… setting a standard of life for a cycle of time.”

In conclusion, then, Andrew no longer thinks of the grail as an object – such as a cup containing a mind-influencing substance, or the head of a god – rather as our search for the truth of the mystery of godhead. And crop circles are part of our “communication with the divine.”

Andy Thomas paid tribute to Karen Douglas, Steve Alexander and Michael Glickman, familiar faces at Glastonbury in the past, who have helped to make the Symposium what it is – but they are now off (like the Symposium’s creator, Roland Pargeter, some years ago) to do their own thing. Which is as it should be. We don’t need top-heavy organisations, we need small gatherings of like-minded individuals. There is then an easy mix and match of people who move freely from one group to another for a change of air. Or from one job to another: In her role this year as co-presenter with Andy, co-organiser Sheila Martin’s delightful sense of mischief kept popping through to remind us that we, like the circles, are many-sided. Long live the multidimensional diversity of the Glastonbury Symposium!