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
Having done battle with the Furies of Storm/Hurricane Goretti, and by the grace of hard-working local tree surgeons and power engineers, I’m back online and able, yet again, to elbow you about the Sunday Meditation!
Usually I do it weekly on Facebook and occasionally here on my blog. From now on I shall do this more occasionally, since I’m slowly losing my capacity to sit easily at a keyboard and activate it in a manageable way.
That is, though I sound lucid and coherent, as a meticulous Virgo and retired editor I go over and over it at least five times, and that’s getting laborious. A life of service to keyboards is slowly grinding down as finger-coordination declines and brains slowly decouple from this World of Ten Thousand Things.
But meditation is another thing, and I’ll be there, regardless, at the appointed time, whatever the weather or circumstances, at least until my passing and possibly for a while afterwards. The times are below, and if you are so moved, you are welcome to find a place to park yourself and join a holy party! And if not this week, then another week.
It’s also a good, doable and undemanding life-habit to establish, since the blessing-channel will be open and operative at 7-7.30pm GMT whatever happens. Times in other timezones are below. For me, over the last thirty years, and having had a life with little regularity to it, it has been like a cosmic timecheck – one thing that has been constant and unchanging over time, whatever is going on and wherever I have been – even in car parks, trains, deserts and cow fields. Funny, that.
It’s easy. Meditate, contemplate, be mindful, go quiet, make prayer, go inner-journeying, drop out for half an hour, and do it in your customary way. There’s no prescribed method or mantra, no sign-up and no need to be online. Just be present. I sometimes call it ‘cosmic availability’. We’re just a bunch of bright souls sitting together in inner space, at an appointed time. It amplifies the outcomes.
It is overlighted by a collective of cosmic beings I’ve worked with for decades, the Council of Nine, and if you resonate with me, then you’ll probably resonate with them. But they don’t meddle with us. They put it this way: if you meddle too much with your children you’ll drive them against you, and that is what free will is all about. So they don’t meddle – they subscribe to the Prime Directive (and that Startrek concept came from them). But they do like to support us in exercising our free will – our true and deep free will. More about them here: www.palden.co.uk/nine.html
As for times of passing, it’s funny how things go. If you’re spiritually oriented then other forces tend to take over, and the timing of death is not just a medical matter involving normal probabilities. It’s now six and also four years since I should have died, medically speaking, but here I am, and though I experience deterioration and decline of capacities and fascinating changes of viewpoint, I have no idea at all whether I have weeks, months or years ahead. This weekend my ‘perceptual age’ is in my mid-90s, though on a good day it’s 80-85ish, and my physical age is 75.
Thanks to all of you who have flown alongside over recent times, and may it continue, and may it bring benefit to you and to our benightedly shining planet. This isn’t a resignation letter but it’s always good to say things that need saying while we still can – or perhaps, when in the mood! Perhaps the Furies shook me up.
Love from me, Palden.
Current meditation times, on Sundays:
GMT: UK, Iceland, Ireland & Portugal 7-7.30pm W Europe 8-8.30pm E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 9-9.30pm Iran: 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, East Coast North America, Cuba: 2-2.30pm CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia: 1-1.30pm PST, West Coast North America: 11am-11.30am
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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