I can’t remember who gave me this pic, but thanks anyway! It is taken on the coast path from Land’s End to Pordenack Point – one of my favourite haunts.
Recently I’ve been feeling rather uninspired. Saturn and Neptune are in opposition to my natal Mercury, and I’m feeling it. Mercury is a key planet in my chart and, since the age of fourteen, for better and for worse, I’ve been a big communicator, and the struggle to clarify my ideas and make myself understood has been a key part of my growth. When I was a boy I was quiet and shy – would you believe? – and it took until my teenage years to find my voice and until age 36 to become good enough as a writer.
It’s kind of like drying up, this uninspiration. It’s a feeling that I’ve said all that I can say – and I’m not one for repeating myself. I’ve also been wondering how much people are interested – though this is often solved by spending time with someone to find out what’s going on for them.
And so I took another tack – after all I’m rather a workaholic, continually looking for new things to do to keep myself occupied. Nowadays, although I’m reasonably noisy online, I spend most of my life alone and quiet. In another world.
This is the farm where I live, in the far west of Cornwall
Over the last few years I’ve been turning my website into an archive. After all, it’s thirty years old now (started in 1994), and I’ve been adding bits to it every few years which, with a bit of tweaking has been gradually turned into an archive over the last two years. I don’t have money or property to leave to my descendants but, for what it’s worth, they are getting a digital estate, and I’ve often had the feeling that a few of my seven grandchildren might find some treasure there.
A while ago, I was tooling through some old radio programmes which I made twenty years ago, when I lived in Glastonbury, and they were surprisingly good. Especially since, in comparison to many of the talking-heads podcasts which are pouring out now online, the content was really rich, good, original and quite unique. This is partially because Glastonbury is a place which is a source of new ideas and initiatives, and some of the people living there are true originators in their fields.
It was not difficult to bring in old friends to provide interesting material for this programme. I called it This is the Light Programme. That’s a bit of an older generation joke: it refers to a time before about 1970 when BBC Radio had just three channels – the Home Service, the World Service and the Light Programme.
So I have been reviving many of the interviews in those programmes and creating a new section of my archive called Recycling Light – this was the Light Programme. The first few programmes will be coming out soon on the new moon, and I shall continue reworking more of them, making them ready to add to the list of Recycled Light programmes.
This is my kitchen
And yes, on the whole, when I post a blog or a podcast, I do it at astrologically auspicious moments – this matter of timing is more important than most people think. So this blog was uploaded with Jupiter rising, Mercury on the Midheaven and lots of planets in the tenth house. That’ll do.
I’m recycling these programmes because of the quality of the ideas coming through them. The first is the story of two Glastonbury characters who had been involved in the Middle East – one, Colette Barnard, was in Tehran at the time of the ayatollahs’ revolution in the late 1970s, and the other, Tom Clark, has been involved with funding and supporting progressive projects in the Middle East, particularly women’s and backchannel diplomacy projects. So the first programme is a really interesting interview with these two characters.
The second programme is an interview with Peter Taylor, a critical scientist, ecologist and shaman. He and I have been dialoguing for decades, cousins of the soul, sharing a political-spiritual activist approach to our respective areas of work. He used to be a scientific adviser to Greenpeace in the 1980s and also to government and United Nations bodies on ecological matters, and he is a detractor in the climate question and also one of the inventors and early advocates of the concept of rewilding, a concept which is now accepted but, thirty years ago, it was an entirely new idea and quite radical. What? Wolves? Beavers? Weeds and scrub? Well, yes.
The third programme involves two old friends who, like me, have been involved in researching alternative archaeology and prehistory. One, Sig Lonegren, is a dowser, who can find information about ancient sites which the majority of us have no access to at all. Now in his eighties, he has been a major contributor to the field of earth mysteries. The second, Bruce Garrard, has been doing a lot of thinking about the early origins of human society – particularly of the question of gender and the historic formation of gender roles. So they have interesting things to say.
That’s where I rest and sleep. When resting I can watch the swallows, buzzards and jackdaws outside.
It was a great privilege to make that programme. It was weekly, and we did it for a year. Each programme was three hours long. Unfortunately I have had to take the music out, for rights reasons, and to rework it into a new format, but it turned out that this was a good thing to do. My son Tulki, who was then eleven years old, was the studio manager – he used to run the controls. He and I work well together. Now he’s turning thirty. Time moves on.
So in a few days time, I’m coming out with something new on my website. It’s become a really big site over the years, as I have added bits and chunks to it every couple of years. Partially it’s a manifestation of the story of my life, of being one who has advocated ideas which, in general, are right for the world, but which the world is not ready for or interested in accepting.
This has been the story of my life and that of many other people of my generation – particularly the drop-outs. We’ve had to live and work as ‘alternative types’, playing our part in society from the periphery, not from the centre.
When I was lying in a hospital bed with cancer six years ago, being eyeballed by Death and reviewing my life, I realised that I needed to leave as much as I could online, just in case it becomes relevant and useful in the future. Because the need can arise to refer back to the original people who first thought up the ideas which have become commonplace as time has gone on.
Many of the things that I’ve believed in and advocated have been roughly twenty to thirty years ahead of their mainstream adoption – or at least the beginning of it. So I’m leaving this archive in the hope that it becomes useful to someone in the future.
So when the new moon comes along I’ll be launching this new segment of my website called Recycling Light, and I hope you find it useful and interesting.
That’s the view from my bed. On that hill is an ancient site called Caer Bran – around 3,500 years ago it was the parliament site for the clans of Belerion, or West Penwith.
Now it’s time to have breakfast – before it’s lunchtime. And I have to work out what pills to take this morning. As a cancer patient I am given lots of pills, but if you adopt a holistic approach to cancer treatment, then it’s double trouble because there are loads of supplements and other therapies to take pills for too! Groan.
(Though if you follow this route, I recommend keeping the pharma drugs and the holistics separate – taking them at different times of day, with food between them – since they operate according to different principles and in some cases can conflict.)
There’s a gift in everything. A state of uninspiration has led to a state of audio-recycling.
Bombs are falling, strongmen are flouncing their stuff and the Megamachine happily strafes another family. It looks as if everything is going wrong.
In a way, it is, though not quite. These are the growing pains of the global community. We are learning how not to do it. And there’s more going on underneath.
Perhaps you could call this psycho-spiritual geopolitics. Or parapolitics.
I wrote this piece in 2003 on the buildup to the Iraq War and it’s pertinent to give it another spin as the Iran War unfolds. It’s an extract from my 2003 book ‘Healing the Hurts of Nations‘.
That’s what this is about. The unconscious pain, guilt and shadows in the psyches of nations, which cause them to act as they do. And what we need to do to deal with our divisiveness and wars.
With sound collected from the birds of Grumbla in Cornwall, on an early February morning this year, 2026.
Today I was interviewed online about the time thirty-plus years ago when I worked with the Council of Nine, compiling a book for them called The Only Planet of Choice – essential briefings from deep space. This is the story of what happened in the making of the book.
The interviewer, Greg Mallozzi in USA, asked interesting questions, about how the channelling sessions worked, and what I thought about the genuineness of the Nine, and what I think about the communications thirty years later.
I also spoke about the remarkable force-field around my house at the time I was working on the book, and about the process of editing it into its final form. And about the transformative effect it had on me.
So if you have read ‘Only Planet’ this will probably interest you. And if you haven’t, some clues about the Nine are here:
A short audio history of the Isles of Britain – in one hour flat.
We Brits, we’re proud of our history but most of us just know snippets about the Romans, 1066, Henry VIII and World War Two.
Let me take you on a 6,000 year journey to see the forming of a nation.
It’s the story of an island people and their gifts and tribulations, and a succession of periods, phases, invasions, migrations, ups and downs.
It’s not just about kings, battles and acts of parliament – the usual stuff dished up as history. It’s about the collective experience of the British, the effect we’ve had on the world and the way this story affects us now.
It’s a chapter from my 2003 book Healing the Hurts of Nations. Whether or not you’re British, you might find this interesting.
For people of my generation this can be a shock – we weren’t prepared for this. You get creaky. You can’t handle things you used to be able to do.
Gravity gets heavier, bodily frailties set in, people forget you and doctors start taking over your life.
But there’s something special about this last stage of life – it’s a chance to complete the story of our lives and bring things to some sort of conclusion. If we ignore this, there can be quite a lot of baggage to carry into the afterlife.
This is about the deepest and potentially the richest time of our life-cycle, when we can advance psycho-spiritually in ways that, earlier in life, we used to pay large amounts for, going on courses and retreats and doing snazzy practices.
I can’t chop logs and climb hills like I used to, but another mobility has arisen instead, deep down inside.
Getting old is about growing wiser, not getting stiff, conservative and grumpy.
I rather love Sundays. It’s a bit strange, that, since I live and spend most of my time alone, so there’s not much difference between Sundays and other days. But there is a difference, on two counts. The first is that this is the day of the week that I take my cancer drugs – Ixazomib, Lanalidomide and Dexamethasone. I have a small breakfast, fast for two hours, take the drugs and then fast for another hour or so. Then I spend much of the rest of the day rather out of my head. But at least it’s legal.
The second is the Sunday meditation. By evening, the drug effects have worn off a bit, helped by a herb I take called Resveratrol (Japanese Knotweed, no less), which helps balance me out, and with absorption of the drugs.
I’ve been doing the meditation since the 1990s, almost without fail, around 1,500 times now. Yes, if committedly you do a meditation once a week, it adds up.
The numbers don’t matter but, during that time, some of those meditations will in some way be extra special, even life-shifting. Looking back over my life, though I’ve done a few things with it, my feeling is that these meditations have been one of the most significant things I have done, ever.
No one and nothing have been able to stop me, because it can be done at a bus stop, in the corner of a cafe or even when in distinctly unsupportive company. You just have to go quiet and lock on to the beam. I’ve even delivered a few public talks during the meditation, letting my friends upstairs drop ideas into me for conveying to the audience. I even did it once in Israeli detention at Checkpoint 500 outside Bethlehem, but it wasn’t serious and they let me out thanks to good behaviour. The tofu I was carrying, which I’d bought in Tel Aviv, looked to them like Semtex, but the officer in charge rather liked me, letting me go. I didn’t have the profile, vibe or age of a terrorist, he reckoned.
But, most weeks, it’s a day of return. Return to a certain perspective that comes with the meditation, even before it starts. It’s a bit like going home. Regardless of what has happened in the previous week, and regardless of my state of mind and heart, which at times are not at peace, I can lock back into the energy-space, the continuity, the flow of the meditation.
Yet it’s different every time too – it’s a parallel thread of sanity, of re-anchoring and of bathing in the blessing-field of the inner, deep-space overlighters who preside over the occasion. They do things to me, or sometimes they set tasks, or sometimes I’m just floating in their energy-world.
Sometimes I section up the meditation. It starts with a self-healing routine with my ‘inner doctors’, who scan me, flood me with light and sometimes perform operations. For this to work I have to clear my psyche, empty myself out, let them in and allow them to draw me up to their level.
Then we progress to ‘any other business’ – and this varies a lot from week to week. Often it involves seeing things going on at the time in a different light, or blessing and thanking those who have troubled me, or changing my position in an energy-constellation of relationships and situations, to unlock them, and to own up, at least to myself, about the ways I have contributed to creating or maintaining the situation. Even if it involves Donald Trump – poor man.
Then comes the work. If I don’t already know where to go, I ask my inner friends to send me to a world situation where I might be able to bring some release, healing and forwardness, or do some spiritual mop-up, or, a bit like a surveillance drone, connect them into the details of a situation so that they can do what they need to do with it. Recently this has concerned Iran, though I’ve done a lot with the two Palestines too.
Then it comes to an end and, amazingly, the blessing-field shuts off. This can be quite distinct, and always exactly at 7.30 GMT. If I’m sleepy I sometimes doze off at that time. Sometimes I go into a different kind of meditation, and sometimes I get up.
Then I spend the rest of the evening in a reflective state and, if I have thought ahead, by then a meal will have simmered its way to readiness in my slow-cooker. Or perhaps Claire or Selena, two members of Friends of Palden, bless them, have left some food in the fridge.
I’m so fortunate to have a small group of helpers who look after me, and I’m so grateful to them for that. It means so much to me, and I am so happy that they feel it is worth it. I’m also at present super-grateful to my former partner, who left four years ago, for the love and care she gave during my first two years of my cancer journey. I became too much for her. Sometimes we truly appreciate things and people when we no longer have them – and this emptiness can also be a gift if we make it so.
If you don’t know about the meditation, try here: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html – and, if you wish, do join in. It’s your choice and your move. You might be meditating alone, physically, wherever you are, but you are in good company. Just do whatever meditation you normally do, except with us – this is about spiritual diversity.
Meditation times for different countries are below.
And now it is time for breakfast and pills! And for another day, feeding the birds, going for a staggery walk and delighting in the silence of my own company. Yesterday I felt unhappy being alone but today it is different: loneliness is a feeling while aloneness is a simple fact, and that feeling can be changed.
Because everything is a gift. As many of my Arabic friends would say, everything comes from and returns to Allah. We bathe in the wide-open field of the Vastness. And ever shall it thus be so.
Love from me. Palden.
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Current meditation times, on Sundays: GMT: UK, Iceland, Ireland & Portugal: 7-7.30pm W Europe: 8-8.30pm E Europe, Turkiye, Israel, Palestine, Egypt: 9-9.30pm Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, UAE: 10-10.30pm Pakistan: midnight-00.30 Monday India: 00.30-01.00 Monday Oz: AEST 5-5.30am Monday NZ: 8-8.30am Monday Greenland: 5-5.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile 3-3.30pm EST, Cuba 2-2.30pm CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia 1-1.30pm PST, West Coast North America 11am-11.30am
Once I encountered a paper bag, and on the side was printed, ‘Recycled materials – do come again’. Yes indeed, if that is your path. There’s also the option of going beyond.
But that depends a lot on what we do with the life we have, and the way we played our hand of cards.
This is one of the best blogs I’ve written and it’s time to give it another spin. It’s all about dying, and prepping for it while we’re alive.
Ancient guardian at Pordenack Point, Cornwall. Busy watching.
Quite a few people have followed my outpourings because I’m a cancer patient with some deep and wide perspectives on it. I’m one of those who was told I had perhaps a year to live (and it felt like it), and here I still am, six years later.
I haven’t said much about cancer recently. Partially because I’ve said a lot already and tend not to repeat myself. However, there are recent friends and followers out there who haven’t had the full story.
I’m mulling it all over… and that’s part of the reason for relative silence on it. My cancer book ‘Blessings that Bones Bring’, available on my site, is undergoing a revision, and a new version will come out sometime – here in Cornwall we say ‘dreckly’. It needs to be shorter and more focused on what matters most to cancer patients and their helpers. Some new reflections are brewing, but my psyche moves slowly nowadays…
If you need something now, then go to my podcast page and look for the ‘Cancer and Dying’ section. To get a sense of the progression from earlier to later days, start from the bottom and work upwards. It’s here:
I have an incurable blood cancer called Multiple Myeloma – it can only be managed and held at bay, medically. It affects the bones: the first sign, in my case, was that the four bottom vertebrae in my back collapsed and, from that day on, my life changed. Rather painfully at first.
I became a partially-disabled old crock. It was a soul-shift. I’m not sure whether I went down with cancer or went up with it. But it confirmed and tested a life-lesson I had already learned, that everything in life is a gift.
Repeat: everything in life is a gift. Especially at those times when it doesn’t feel like it.
Time spent in Palestine taught me that, though cancer took it to a new level. As a peacemaker, I distinctly disbelieve in the notion of ‘fighting cancer’ – and as it happens, I’m still alive, so there might be something in it.
Cancer is not a failure or an aberration – it is a gift. It is an awakener. It presents hard facts and profound choices. This is about free will at its deepest level. Surrender. Acceptance like you’ve never accepted before.
Living with cancer is very difficult, and that’s the point. It confronts us on why we’re here and what it’s all about.
I’m in a different life now, drawing on the mixed outcomes of the life I’ve had, but it feels like a different life. Funny, that.
Anyway, I woke up with this morning with the thought to reconnect with fellow cancer-experiencers, and something is brewing, and I just wanted to say that.
If you’re struggling through the darkness, just keep going. On a soul level, during times like that we make a lot of progress.
Amidst all the noise, bother and confusion pervading our world today, we need to zoom out, for there are far bigger questions to give attention to.
These are not just the enormous challenges in our ecosystem and with the human condition that we see before us. There’s more.
We’re heading for a time when as a planetary race we must face the fact that we are not alone. This has enormous implications.
This pod is all about the way our world will change when we start facing this. Our petty squabbles, the ways we oppress each other and the ways we wreck our world will take on a very different complexion.
One day, this small matter will trump everything.
A contactee in several senses, I’m happy to share some insights that might be worth considering!
This is a short talk I gave recently in Penzance, Cornwall, during a Palestine-support event.
Many of us get caught up in the big issues around Palestine, often paying a lot of attention to our own countries’ or international politics and inadvertently forgetting actual Palestinians in places like Gaza. Anyway, the politics is a nightmare that’s going nowhere anytime soon.
This is about making friends with an actual Gazan, taking a person-to-person approach. It can have a bigger effect that you might at first imagine. And the friendship and benefit goes both ways.
In the talk I recommend a website run by Gazan young people: www.wearenotnumbers.org – check it out.
Thanks to Gershon Baskin of Jerusalem – a good-hearted Israeli – for a quote from his recent writing. Well done Adam Stout and Alison Dhuanna for organising the event – and thereby raising 600 GBP to help a few Gazans.
A correction: to get out of Gaza costs $5,000, and it is paid to the Egyptians at Rafah Crossing, who pay the Israelis, and both take their cut. It’s just as bad, whatever the excuse and whoever does it – exploiting people in need.
With love, Palden
By the seaside. Photo by Refaat Ibrahim of wearenotnumbers.org
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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