David Spangler

David Spangler (born January 7, 1945) is an American spiritual philosopher and self-described "practical mystic." He helped transform the Findhorn Foundation in northern Scotland into a center of residential spiritual education and is a friend of William Irwin Thompson. Spangler is considered one of the founding figures of the modern New Age movement, although he is highly critical of what much of the movement has since become, especially its commercial and sensationalist elements.

Spangler was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1945. At the age of six, he moved to Morocco in North Africa where his father was assigned as a counterintelligence agent for U.S. Army Intelligence. He lived there for six years, returning to the United States when he was twelve in 1957. He attended Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, though his time there was interrupted when his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where he graduated from high school. He attended Arizona State University where he was working for a Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry but continued to pursue other subjects of interest.

From his earliest years, Spangler has argued he was clairvoyantly aware of non-physical entities. While in Morocco at age seven, he said he had a classical mystical experience of merging with a timeless presence of oneness within the cosmos and then remembering his existence prior to this life as well as the process by which he chose to become David Spangler and entered into his present incarnation. Following that experience, he claims his awareness of and contact with various inner worlds of spirit was heightened, though he believed throughout his childhood that everyone shared the kind of perception and experience that he had. This changed when he moved to Phoenix where he met other individuals who were clairvoyant or were acting as "channels" for non-physical entities and realized that his own inner experiences were not common. In his late teens he was asked by members of metaphysical study groups to give talks on his own inner contacts, leading up to 1964 when he gave the keynote address at a national spiritual conference on "Youth and the New Age." This led to his receiving a number of invitations from around the United States to come and give lectures to various spiritual and metaphysical organizations. At the time he refused these invitations to concentrate on his scientific studies, but the following year, in 1965, he felt called by his own inner spirit to leave college and begin sharing his own particular insights and inner perceptions.

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