The Caddys credited the garden's exceptional vegetables - cabbages the size of footballs, leeks that astonished visitors - to Maclean's communication with plant devas and to Peter's positive-thinking techniques drawn from theosophy and the Rosicrucian Order. Outsiders suggested more conventional explanations: the unique microclimate of the Moray Firth, where the Gulf Stream produces relatively mild winters at fifty-seven degrees north, and the substantial quantities of horse manure donated by a sympathetic local farmer. Both explanations probably contain truth. What mattered was that the garden attracted attention. Sir George Trevelyan, who founded the Wrekin Trust, visited and brought others. Eileen's writings, distributed in a 1967 booklet called God Spoke to Me, drew people who came to stay. The caravan park slowly became something else.

Before the move to Findhorn, the Caddys had managed the Cluny Hill Hotel near Forres. Peter, working with others who called themselves channellers, became convinced he was in contact with extraterrestrials through telepathy. He prepared a landing strip for flying saucers near the hotel. This detail tends to embarrass the Foundation's later, more sober history, but it was part of the New Age intellectual climate of the early 1960s in which the boundaries between psychic experience, alien contact, and religious vision had not yet hardened. When the hotel chain fired Peter in late 1962 - the saucer business was not specifically the reason, but it cannot have helped - the move to the caravan was a forced one. They had nowhere else to go. The Findhorn community was born from a kind of professional collapse that turned, slowly, into a vocation.

From 1969 onward Peter Caddy gradually devolved his day-to-day leadership, following Eileen's guidance. David Spangler arrived in 1970 and became co-director of Education almost immediately, and the community transformed into a residential spiritual education centre with a permanent staff of over one hundred. The Findhorn Foundation was established as a charitable trust in 1972. The Universal Hall, a theatre and concert hall, was built at The Park between 1974 and 1984. The musical group The Waterboys performed there and named their 2003 album Universal Hall after the structure. Eileen Caddy was awarded an OBE in 2004. Peter died in a car crash in Germany in 1994. Eileen died at home in 2006. Dorothy Maclean continued giving talks and workshops around the world, returning to Findhorn to live in 2009 and retiring from public life in 2010. An ethnographic study in the 1990s found that over 5,000 people attended Findhorn's courses each year - the Experience Week that the study called the main entry point into the community's ethos.

On 12 April 2021 a fire destroyed the community centre and main sanctuary. The community centre manager, who had lived and worked at Findhorn for sixteen years, was made redundant in a restructuring affecting fifty staff and set the fire in despair. Inverness Sheriff Court later sentenced him to 300 hours of unpaid community work. The Sunday Post reported widespread "hurt and anger" in the community over the restructuring, only partly attributable to COVID-19. The Foundation sold properties to stabilize its finances. In July 2023 it warned that more of its remaining fifty staff might be let go. In September 2023 the Findhorn Foundation stopped offering courses, conferences, and educational programmes - ending a sixty-one-year run of residential teaching. The ecovillage continues under a community-owned successor organization, Ecovillage Findhorn Community Benefit Society, which raised 400,000 pounds in a November 2024 bond issue. The community at Findhorn now includes around forty businesses ranging from Findhorn Press to an alternative medicine centre. The era of the Foundation as the village's central institution is over, but the village itself remains.