Notes from the Far Beyond

World Work

I’ve been involved for a long time now in world healing work – or world work.

That’s to say, using the psycho-spiritual practices that I, and others, have learned over the years, and applying them in the context of world events as they are actually happening. The idea is simple enough: when something is happening in the world which causes fear, suffering, conflict or upheaval, we can work with it inwardly.

We fell upon this whole saga almost accidentally. A series of ‘coincidences’ happened, through which we discovered that this kind of thing does actually work.

For me, and for quite a few other people involved, the big breakthrough came in 1986, during the Chernobyl crisis. I was running an Earth Mysteries camp near Glastonbury for Beltane. People were arriving at the camp having just heard on their car radios that Chernobyl had gone up.

This of course brought up deep nightmarish feelings of dread in many people. Is this it?

There were about 150 earth-loving people at the camp, and we used a technique we called powwow. It was a talking-stick process. We sat in a circle, the stick went round, and people were invited to speak from the heart – their feelings, observations, intuitions and whatever they knew about what was happening. The purpose wasn’t simply to talk about Chernobyl. It was to do some healing and clarification around it.

So that’s where it really began.

In the mid-1990s this developed further when I started the Hundredth Monkey Project, which ran for three years. The story of that is on my website at https://www.palden.co.uk/m100.html.

After that came the Flying Squad, which continued for about twenty years, started by a caucus of ‘Monkeys’. That was a smaller group, but totally committed. The commitment was actually quite manageable: one meditation every week, and then three or four gatherings during the year – either weekends or week-long camps – both of these without fail.

Each week we would take a theme – conflicts, forest fires, nukes, apartheid… Sometimes a theme would stay with us for several weeks.

Once a month we would have an open session, where people could simply go where they were drawn to go. It was a way of fishing, really – fishing for the issues that needed attention, and for possible solutions, answers and ways through.

I’ve written and talked about these methods elsewhere, so I won’t go into all that here but you can find out more at https://www.flyingsquad.org.uk and at https://www.palden.co.uk/psychic-work.html .

But there was something we discovered that surprised me. When you do this kind of work, you can actually go through more personal growth than when you deliberately set out to do personal growth work.

That was quite an eye-opener.

It gave us an indication that perhaps we are programmed with quite a lot of ideas about our individuality and ‘sovereignty’ that aren’t necessarily correct. Because the world’s issues are our issues. Refugees. Hunger. War. Earthquakes. Climate extremes. Racial tensions. Economic problems. All of it.

And in some way, the world outside reflects the world inside of us. The Buddhists have a word for this: non-duality. The world within and the world without are one and the same.

Afghanistan and the shadow of the world

More recently I’ve continued this work on my own, although there are still people doing it in various ways. Recently I’ve been focusing on Afghanistan – on the shadow of Afghanistan, what it reflects about the world today, and what it might be trying to teach us.

We have to get out of the good guys and bad guys mentality. We have to get out of judging people from other cultures as though our way of seeing the world is automatically the right one. We have as much to learn from them as they have to learn from us.

This is particularly important for those of us in the West. We’re rather proud of ourselves and we’re rather stuck on the idea that we know best – and that needs to end. Many of the problems on Planet Earth come from precisely that sense of superiority.

So, what does it mean, to work with Afghanistan? Well, first of all, I try to find out what’s going on. I read up on the matter. I watch videos. I look at all sorts of things. I’ve watched material about the Taliban, about ordinary people in Bamiyan Provence, about the British forces in Qandahar, about the Panjshir valley, and the ins and outs surrounding the whole thing.

I get into it. I get to learn what the issues are for people, and the variety of those issues. That creates what I think of as a kind of psychic anchor point.

You can visualise people as psychic beacons – people who, simply by being who they are and living through what they are living through, can bring something into the collective field. Perhaps some blessing can come through them that we couldn’t bring ourselves. And that’s an important thing.

It’s important to know something about the actual situation. Not just the statements politicians make. Not just what Trump does. Not just what the newspapers say. Forget the politicians. Forget the propaganda. Bone up on the stuff and find out what is actually happening. Nowadays we’re blessed with enormous sources of information. But we also have to be discerning.

The discipline of doing it

Then I meditate. Once a week. That’s my world-work meditation.

What I’ve discovered is that perhaps one meditation in ten is blitzingly amazing. One of those experiences where something opens up and you think, woo, something just happened. The rest vary enormously. Some bring insights. Some bring subtle changes. Some seem to do very little.

And sometimes I just fall asleep. The Tibetan lamas taught me something useful about that. They said not to feel guilty about falling asleep during meditation. The Buddhas might simply want to work with you on another level. Well, may it be so.

So one meditation a week becomes fifty-something meditations a year. Do that for ten years and you’ve done about five hundred. That’s quite a lot of work. It’s amazing what can happen when you simply keep doing something regularly, for years.

I visualise some of the people I’ve encountered. Sometimes I’ve actually met people who become part of the work. Here’s an example.

I remember one evening at Bosigran Castle, a cliff sanctuary here in Cornwall. It was beautifully still and a friend and I heard bagpipes. The sound carried a long way. We walked towards the car park and found a man there who had recently come back from Afghanistan.

He was playing his bagpipes to the wind – for his dead comrades and for all the people he had known there.

It was a moving thing to witness. He was relieved to talk to us.

Having worked in war zones myself, I could understand something of the weight he was carrying. That’s one of the problems for soldiers and humanitarian workers. They come home and nobody understands. Nobody really knows what it was like. And yet, in another sense, it’s not as bad as all that either. It’s human life. Full-on human life.

What the comfortable West has forgotten

We live such switched-down, comfortable lives here in countries like Britain. And I’m afraid we may be in for a bit of a shock. Because the reality experienced by the majority of people on Planet Earth is very different from the reality experienced by relatively wealthy, comfortable Westerners.

We are not the bees-knees any more. Increasingly we exist by the good grace of people who are not Euro-American, not white-skinned – people who make up the majority of humanity. There’s something we need to learn here.

One of the ways to do this is through the Tibetan practice of Tonglen. The basic idea is that you start with something you know yourself. For me, I have cancer. My body is fucked. Life is difficult. These are things I understand from the inside. That becomes the anchorage. Then I reach outward.

I might think about people in Gaza who have cancer. There will be thousands of them. And unlike me, many of them may not have access to the medication I have been fortunate to receive.

But there is something else. They may have something I don’t have. Depth of care. A humanity, an empathy which is far greater than we sensible Westerners care to show. And this raises a fundamental issue. Forget the Judaeo-Christian idea that has motivated the humanitarian and the charitable sector, for so long. This isn’t really about helping other people.

This is about energy exchange.

If I went back to Palestine as a cancer patient, the care I would get from other people would be better than what I receive in Britain because they have large families and a different attitude and priorities. It works easily in a family of forty. So the funny thing is, they have no medication and we have little care – we need to swap some of each. Our society is geared towards material things and that is both our strength and our problem.

Even in the last few years since the whole Gaza thing and the West Bank has kicked off again, Palestinians can actually be happier than people in countries like Britain, Europe and North America. They are strangely socially wealthier.

This might sound strange but it’s because they have faced stuff which we still fear. We fear loss. We fear danger. We fear pain, violence, rainstorms, droughts, having no chocolate. All sorts of stuff. Using our fear, we conform to the requirements of the machine we live in, and as a result of this we have lost quite substantial degrees of our humanity.

This is what people in Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Pakistan, South East Asia, Latin America and Asia can show us. Ubuntu. This is about caring for our fellow humans. It’s one of the key things which people like Palestinians can teach people like us.

So really this is an energy exchange.

I can visualise somebody receiving medication or help, or comfort for their soul, or light in their darkness, and in doing so I too become healed – and this is how it works. It’s not about us helping others, it’s about us swapping what we are strong in, with what they are strong in.

We, in countries like Britain, are a bunch of softies nowadays. We are incapable of dealing with a lot of basic things – finding food after an earthquake or sharing our last loaf of bread with our friends and neighbours. We’re going to have to relearn this because things are going to go down in the West. When I say down, I don’t mean necessarily mean ‘bad’.

I remember a professor at the London School of Economics once saying something. He said that when the economy goes up, society goes down, and when the economy goes down, society goes up.

And this is what we have ahead of us.

We’re coming into a time where society will go up, even if the economy goes down. And this is going to be a very fundamental thing. This is going to change the whole sociology of our nation.

Energy exchange

Look at me. I’m old. I’m disabled. I need some care and attention. But I’m not helpless. There are things I can still do, up to a point, that are good for me to do – and for others too. I can contribute. I could cook a meal once a week for ten people (though not more). And because I have the time, I can do something that somebody else doesn’t have the time to do. I’m not just a recipient of care. And that matters.

People can go through extraordinary loss and still have something remarkable to offer. I know of a woman in Gaza, a journalist, whose family was bombed out while she was away working. She came home to find her house levelled and her family gone. And yet, somehow, it made her more committed to a life of peace-building.

You get the arrival of amazing peacemakers, fully qualified to bring about social healing because they’ve been into the depths of suffering and have come out the other side. They don’t want revenge, they want peace – and there’s something here which is important.

To get back the world work, we’ve got to change our philosophy. It’s natural that a person like you or me should want peace and that would be our social-political preference. But the thing is, you can’t wish peace on people, you can’t oblige it. People have to come to peace in their own way, and that often involves a lot of forgiveness.

It often involves a lot of exhaustion, actually. It means that people have to come to a point within themselves where they have had enough. They just want to go home, lie in bed and twiddle their toes. They want to do some shopping, just like everyone else does. They want to have a holiday.

That’s what brings peace. But people have to come to it in themselves.

So don’t wish peace upon people – it doesn’t necessarily help. These people are hurt, and they’ve got to work things out for themselves but you can wish forwardness and progress on them.

Take Ukraine.

At the moment, no matter what we might wish about peace and ceasefires and all the rest of it, it’s not going to happen anytime soon – unless of course, there is a miracle. So it’s not worth it really. It’s more to do with encouraging people to have good attitude, fortitude, perseverance, looking after each other and looking after themselves. Wish that upon people because, that way, they will get to peace quicker.

Getting underneath the story

This kind of work has got to be realistic, and that’s important. Not just idealistic. There’s enough idealistic meditation. There are enough people praying for peace, transformation and ascension and all the rest of it and that’s good. But this is about digging around in the dungeons. Digging around in the undergrowth and looking at the deeper causes of what’s really going on.

Take the situation in Iran at the moment. The fascinating thing is that it’s not going to resolve itself anytime soon, or very easily, and yet the aspirations of the Gulf states are getting ruined and Iran itself, a country with such a history, is getting ruined. Its people are paying a high price for the intervention that’s going on. What right have we or the Americans to do this, really?

I say ‘we’ because we British have been involved in Iran’s history. Back in the 1950s we brought about a coup d’etat there to work in our favour. What was it about? Oil and money. No wonder Iranians have difficulty trusting British people, even though we’re not involved in this war.

Technically speaking, it’s Mr Trump’s own war, such a desperate soul that he is. But he himself is channelling a force which is alive in the collective psyche of humanity. He wouldn’t have any power if there were no people who implicitly support him and are persuaded by him. And so the story goes on.

Our own shadow

We’ve got to get out of these judgements. Donald Trump is shaking things up. He is showing us plenty of things that we don’t want to do or to see in future.

We humans and our societies are a key issue, now and over the next decade or two. Because humanity has a leadership problem. We have a big crop of pretty bad leaders at the moment. We also have a good crop of pretty good leaders whom many think are bad leaders. And we have a crop of bad leaders who many people think are good leaders.

There is something we need to straighten out here. This has to do with social power and healing the past, healing history and the pain that we have had.

We might pride ourselves of living in a democratic country such as Britain but we’ve had our riots, violence and oppression. Just because the system now uses carrots rather than sticks, it doesn’t necessarily mean everything is better.

Part of world work is therefore to do with working with the shadow of our own country. Britain has an imperial past. We have hidden guilt about it, inherited from our ancestors. It’s not our responsibility to correct everything they did because it was something of a past generation, but nevertheless we can use our privileged position as British people, Americans and Europeans, to bring about good.

Palestine, personally

One reason I became so involved with Palestine is because it is a former British colony. My grandfather was involved in General Allenby’s British invasion of Palestine during the First World War. It’s personal, and in order to heal my own personal shadow stuff and that of my nation it has been good to go to Palestine and work with people there.

I’m so happy that I’ve done that and it’s brought me such joy – even though it has been tragic and we’ve made no progress, really. I’ve been involved in this whole thing for twenty-fivish years and it’s been backwards progress. Well that’s what it appears to be, but underneath there’s something really, really important going on, and so we can’t judge events too superficially. Don’t just tut tut at Israeli settlers – they are teaching us something. What is it? And what are we going to do about it?

This isn’t about feeling guilty about antisemitism either. This is about humans and human needs. All of us.

A friend once said something which stayed with me. She said that nowadays we talk about human rights, whereas in former times we talked about natural justice. There’s something in that.

So what now?

Do you believe in world healing? Do you want to heal this planet? Do you believe in a positive future?

If you’re going to be one of the people that join the Great Ascension, do you really feel ready? Really? Have you done the homework? And, if you haven’t started, what then?

It only really needs to take an evening every week or perhaps a month or two every year. You can get involved in things like this and it has a way of gladdening the soul on a very deep level. Even though there is plenty of blood, sweat and tears that goes on, this is the stuff of life. This is Planet Earth. This is what we’re working with.

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Recorded by Palden, and transcribed by Emma Cass – thank you, Emma.

Standing on the Edge

Two limited-edition evening talks
with Palden Jenkins
a decrepit old new age Penwithian from another millennium!

at The Hive in Penzance, Cornwall, TR18 4TP. Fridays 25th Sept and 23rd Oct, 7.00pm.

A 1960s veteran with a life-story to tell, and now in the end period of my life, I’ve come into a few insights along the way. I invite you to come and partake of whatever comes up or comes down on the day.

Teetering on the edge of the unknown, this is about our personal lives, our community belonging and our national and global futures.

Back in 2020 I described the late 2020s as an ‘avalanche of events’. Well, here we are. We and the world are being squeezed, stretched, shaken and squirted into a new, changeful, insecure reality in which it’s really difficult to see what is to come next.

But it’s coming anyway and it’s getting bigger and deeper.

It is this that will bring the changes that are needed.

Just as, in our own lives, we’re challenged to step into our true selves, so it is with Planet Earth. Earth seeks to realign with her purpose, her soul, and we, as itchy nits on her skin, are a part of that process.

In a sense, we’re losing control. But don’t fall for the idea that we’re doomed, that World War Three is just round the corner – it’s a trap of the mind and heart. It’s time to choose.

Here we stand on the surfboard of history, yet there’s another level of balance and control that comes up underneath. It’s all about riding that wave.

Seven years ago my life changed thanks to cancer. I was given a year or two to live and I’ve been hovering on the edge ever since. It yields insights. One of them is this: the more we work with change within ourselves, habituating ourselves to shedding skins and starting over, the more adept we become for the time when the big change really comes.

In the end, we’re all dead and forgotten. Everything that begins comes to an end. Yet we don’t die: we’re reborn into another world. These are not the End Times: this is just the beginning.

The rest we shall find out on the night.

With love, Palden

Here’s my online archive: www.palden.co.uk

Book tickets at Golden Thread:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100087774533364

Do come. If geography prevents that, an audio recording will follow in due course: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Pictures by Claudia Caolin and Faith Warn, modified using Painter Essentials 8 and a little human intelligence.

Eclipsing

A new podcast

I went up the hill to be with the solar eclipse, down’ere in Cornwall, and these were the thoughts that came up. Well, those which I could put into words.

All about the nature of reality and the way it is changing. And about miracles, reality-overrides, and random small matters like that.

With song and chirruping by the birds of Botrea.

It’s here on my site: https://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

or here on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0PWWCCzZ0klq9SSVAC8AB2?si=yyrdNB2GT9WPasFz3QLzjA

With love, Palden

Shining Land

Primeval Guardian, Pordenack Point, Cornwall

We’re starting a Kickstarter campaign to fund the production and printing of my book ‘Shining Land – the ancient sites of West Penwith and what they tell us about megalithic civilisation‘.

I’m really happy about this. Though I’m not bad at self-promotion, something in me dislikes it, and I’m doubly happy that some good friends have taken it on themselves to do this. To me, it suggests that the universe might be wanting this to happen.

You see, it’s not just because it’s my own book that’s getting published. Been there, done that. It’s the ideas inside. They are not generally accepted today – and this has been the story for me and for many, or all, other geomancers for too many decades.

In the book I propose an entirely different view about the meaning of ancient sites. I might not be correct in every detail, but the gist of what I am saying needs full and proper consideration. This will take time, and perhaps a new generation.

What am I saying? Well, previous postings give good tasters, and the book and an ample website are already available online, here…

www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/

It all starts from a simple observation. When you enter an ancient site you are entering a concentrated and consecrated energy-field. And you come out changed. This is not accidental.

I guess it’s a book of clues for a future time. A time when we address the matter of repairing the damaged energy-fields of our planet. It uses West Penwith (where I live) as an example of how this works.

I don’t have all the answers – this is the task of the coming decades, and I won’t be here to join in. But this book contains some fizzly keys and clues that might help. It moves things forward an inch. It’s all to do with energy-fields.

I’m glad it will come out in print. Thanks particularly to Rob, Rachel and Kai for what they are doing – and all other supporters too. It brings a big smile to my face!

Please permit me to invite you to contribute toward the print-publication of this book. It’s all here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shininglandbook/the-shining-land

With love, Palden

Populus Empatheticus

I was listening to a feature on the BBC World Service about the Afghan women’s football team, who have recently been reunited in New Zealand. My eyes flooded with tears. Now, I have no particular reason to feel this way about refugee Afghan sportswomen, but the tears came up anyway, from somewhere deep down. Not for the first time: this is happening quite often, prompted by the smallest of triggers.

Yesterday it was a little bat: it comes out at dusk, swooping around in our farmyard, catching insects attracted by the lights in my cabin. Up came the tears, set off by an upwelling feeling for the lonely struggle of the bat to find food, thanks to a serious decline in insect populations in Britain. Yes, that bat and its fellows could be doomed by the unthought-through ecological malpractices of the British people, blithely getting on with our lives, worrying about the prices of school uniforms, avocados and tankfuls of petrol.

Another was a story about computer programmers in Gaza, trying to find work internationally, on laptops retrieved and refurbished from the rubble – they just want to feed their families. Another was a story about seamen stuck on boats in the Persian Gulf – they just want to go home. Their kids haven’t seen them for ages. They’re victims of a geriatrically whimsical president in a faraway country who labours under the belief that his priorities are bigger and more important than everyone else’s.

These aren’t just narrowband tears restricted to feelings of pain and sadness. Sometimes I emerge from these soggy interludes with a smile and a feeling of relief – not because relief is imminent for these poor souls, but because of the tender humanity and emotional solidarity that lies within these feelings. This human vulnerability, so easy to bomb, mow down and bulldoze, is where the future of humanity lies.

Our desensitised world is so caught up in its dramas that we forget what we’re here for. Though we have a wide spectrum of feelings about the state of the world, collectively we have lost our emotional anchorage, our moral compass. We’re burdened with enough of our own problems, and distant people are another matter. It’s a sad dilemma, this.

Occasionally bursts of empathy come along when we see lines of refugees in a futile trek over the mountains, heading for refugee camps far from home, or a baby lying dead on a beach on the edge of the rich world. That child had lost its chance for a better life – a life of cars, refrigerators and the juggling of timetables and monthly bills.

But mostly, while we get empathic twinges as the media trot out yet another disaster in someone else’s backyard, we don’t have time. We have to get on with stuff. This is the way in which, on this planetary world, we’re unwittingly destroying ourselves, as well as all the other critters and species who nowadays find themselves dependent on our decisions and behaviour. I’d love things to be otherwise but, well, sorry, I’m too busy right now.

Nevertheless, we are all empaths underneath, true humans at heart, and herein lies a big solution. Not in arguments about net zero or GDP, but in a feeling of human togetherness and shared vulnerability. We’re all in this together, sharing as we do a rather small world. Yes, even billionaires are lonely and afraid.

Our current global trajectory pushes us in a direction where, to our horror and surprise, we might rediscover a big truth – that it is in our own best interests to prioritise everyone’s interest. To make sacrifices in our own lives, just as the world’s victims and underdogs today are doing for us.

It’s in our best interest to let those tears come up. To feel the pain of the world. And its tender joy, sprouting like springtime flowers in the nightmarish wastelands of today. To forgive ourselves for screwing up. To see things with another optic. To set the past behind us, entering the future facing forwards.

Whatever unfolds in the coming decades, our descendants shall one day live in a new world, whatever form that takes – we are creating it now. We’re getting closer to a showdown, a catharsis of global choice, and we’re all here for that. If you wish to escape it, that’s fine, but you’ll be missing something – missing the redemption of a planetary world. It’s the biggest game in town. And it’s happening in our own hearts.

That’s what came up for me this morning.

With love, Palden.

Siddhis

The Men an Tol (Stone of the Hole), Penwith, Cornwall

Siddhis is a Sanskrit word. It concerns magical, healing and psychic abilities. Oriental faiths look on these as a by-product of spiritual growth – not something to seek in themselves. They are natural abilities, and everyone has siddhis available to them – rather like musical and artistic abilities, which we might or might not take up.

We all have instinct and intuition. Some people are wired up to specialise and excel in them.

A lot hangs around whether and to what extent we open up to the siddhis available to us – this varies from person to person. This isn’t about seeking them out – it’s about letting them develop, if and when they do develop. Allowing them to surface as we grow psycho-spiritually. Taking the growth choice instead of the fear choice.

It’s all about taking note of what’s going on in our psyches, and trusting in our ability to perceive these inner movements instinctively or intuitively – going by our feelings. It’s about loosening up the control and censorship of our rational mind and being willing to go outside the realm of our normal thoughts and beliefs.

But remember… siddhis are a by-product of our inner growth. The siddhis within yourself will develop as you grow, and they are here as perceptual and healing tools.

One thing I have always done has been to act on my intuitions almost immediately. Sometimes I get up in the morning with an idea powered up with an urge, and I set about it there and then. The advantage of following these inspirations is that they tend to work well – somehow they are in tune with the universe.

In a sense it’s a matter of acting on behalf of the wider, deeper universe. The main problem with this is that I often forget my breakfast. Which is one reason I’ve always been physically rather slim. Intuitions have a way of working in paradoxically multiplex ways.

Love, Palden

www.palden.co.uk

Shorts

Recently I’ve been struggling to complete my customary long-form blogs. My brainz have been rather battered by cancer and the pharma-drugs I’ve been taking to deal with it. But they have kept me alive for seven years now (to my surprise). Typing on a keyboard is getting difficult too.

The consequence is that I’ve been losing track of my message after two-three paragraphs. This vexed me and I ground my stuff over it for a while. Then I remembered…

To quote I Ching: The Creative works through the easy and The Receptive works through the simple.

So, from now on, it looks like I’m going to be doing shorts. I think my soul-brother Alan will like that – he’s been elbowing me about writing shorter blogs for a good while now!

Love, Palden

Two thousand years ago, this was someone’s home. This is at Bosporthennis, Penwith, Cornwall.

Israel’s Situation

A while ago, a dear peacemaker friend of mine in Israel got triggered about some comments on one of my posts on Facebook, concerning Israel. It’s been bugging me ever since. His reaction was understandable. I’ve been wondering how to heal it. This new post might or might not help, but it’s a statement of where I stand.

One of the advantages of being a long-distance author is that I’ve often written stuff before – and there is little point writing it all out again. Especially when it’s a delicate subject that can evoke lots of reactions, many of them heading in very different directions. And if I am accused of anti-semitism, all I can say is “Yes, if that’s what you want me to be“. Please form your own judgements.

Below is a chapter from my 2011 book Pictures of Palestine – a humanitarian blogging from Bethlehem. What I wrote then still holds for me now.

Ma’ale Adumim, an Israeli settlement on the West Bank, east of Jerusalem. It splits the Palestinian West Bank into two halves, making the West Bank less viable as a nation.

One of my daughters wrote me an e-mail asking whether the blog I was writing, on which this book is based, would be biased. Well, yes, I was portraying a Palestinian perspective, if that’s what ‘biased’ means. Yet I care about the survival and future of Israel too, and Palestine’s success doesn’t have to mean Israel’s failure. Many people don’t get this.

‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us’. Crossing that gulf is a difficult aspect of working with both sides – you can get the splitz. The two sides aren’t just arguing about different aspects of the same debate – they’re not even in the same conflict. There aren’t just two sides, and it’s not a straight black-and-white issue – it involves lots of variegated nuances and complexities. To be for one lot doesn’t have to mean you’re against the other lot. The real battle lies between those who encourage polarisation and violence and those on the receiving end of them. Both sides can live together, and they shall. They do live together, even though they are strangely divided.

Palestinians aren’t angels and they’ve made mistakes but the power and the burden of error weighs heavily on the Israeli side. Israel has long had superiority in weapons, money, connections, PR, foreign backers, chutzpah and forcefulness. Israelis don’t see things this way, seeing themselves as endangered victims, thus explaining the hardship, punishment and violence they assert on others in self-defence. This is not unique amongst nations, but for Israel it’s extreme and the effects impact heavily on their victims and on the wider world.

The Israeli project – to provide a safe haven for Jews where they may live by their own norms – is a noble thing. Historically, Jews have suffered immensely, especially from the actions of Europeans. But this doesn’t justify their oppressing or punishing Arabs today or doing to others many of the things that once were done to them. Israelis don’t see themselves as oppressors – they are the oppressed, busy protecting themselves. They don’t see themselves as colonisers but as a people with an entitlement to what they feel is theirs.

Israelis have a lot to be proud of. They built a nation in six decades. From their perspective, Arabs have attacked and menaced them and Israelis have bravely held off such threats. This was the narrative I learned as a teenager in 1967 at the time of the Six Day War, during which the Israelis occupied the Palestinian territories as if by accident, pre-emptively defending themselves. In later life, I discovered that this invasion, like the previous one of 1948, involved severe ethnic cleansing and uprooting of Palestinians, razing and occupying villages and parts of towns and killing of thousands of largely defenceless people. The awful fate visited on Jews by Europeans was visited by Jews on Palestinians.

Only some Jews were perpetrators. Many were accomplices who shut their eyes, went along with things or obeyed orders, to an extent tricked by their leaders. Some protested but didn’t get far; others felt that the ills taking place were regrettable but unavoidable, believing Israel to be in mortal danger when Arab armies, somewhat incompetently, solely sought to protect Palestinians against overwhelming Israeli force.

The Israeli project was driven by a caucus of Zionists who branded Palestinians as barbarians. Zionists drove the occupation in ways which decisively defined Israel’s character and future as a state locked in a military vortex.

It could have been done differently. As they immigrated to Ottoman and then British Palestine in the first half of the 20th Century, Jews could have integrated much more with Palestinians – there would have been difficulties, certainly, though arguably fewer difficulties than actually arose.

The British administration of the 1920s-1940s could have exercised less of a divide-and-rule approach, driving people against one another.

When the UN partitioned Palestine, favouring Jews in the process, the Israelis could have made do with the territory they were allocated, without such rabid ethnic cleansing of the land.

They could have traded land for peace in the 1970s or 1990s.

None of these options would have been perfect, but some sort of peaceful and productive coexistence could have arisen, leading to a sounder long term future for Israelis. But the path Israel has chosen is, I believe, deeply flawed, and the results are coming back to haunt them.

Israeli feelings of existential threat arose from deep-seated and justified feelings of vulnerability following the Jews’ terrible history in Europe. But the threat from Palestinians and other Arabs has been less a conquering aggression, more an ineffective response to Israeli force and expansion. A sense of threat does not have to be the case now, even in these days of Arab revolutions [this was written in 2011]. When Israel upsets its neighbours, causing great loss and damage, or when during negotiations it refuses to budge on issues crucial to Palestinians and neighbouring Arabs, it naturally creates an unhappy response.

Thus, Israel becomes its own worst enemy: while intending to reinforce Israeli security, it generates ill-feeling and threats instead, undermining that security. The ethnic cleansing of 1948 would be consigned to history if such cleansing didn’t continue today. Hezbollah in Lebanon would be no threat if Israel hadn’t invaded and bombarded Lebanon so devastatingly on several occasions in the last 40 years. Hamas and other militias in Gaza would not fire rockets if Israel let up on its siege of Gaza. Action creates a reaction.

Zionism sees Israel’s own interests and expansion as paramount. Whatever means are used toward this end, and whatever costs are incurred or imposed, Israel’s growth must go on. Zionists like to reinforce the belief that the world stands against the Jewish people. The notion that Israelis’ needs and security could be helped by acknowledging the needs and security of others doesn’t enter the equation, except amongst a much-dwindled Israeli peace camp.

In the long term, if anything weakens Israel, it is Zionism, since it undermines the sympathy the world might have toward Jews. Only a proportion of Israelis actively subscribe to Zionist sentiments, though acquiescence to such sentiments increases when Israel feels threatened, and this happens regularly, and Zionism is a norm drummed into Israelis from an early age. Tragically, war has been used as a way of keeping Israelis united.

This strong-minded agenda doesn’t even really accord with Judaism’s core tenets: Judaism is one thing and Zionism another. The laws of Moses’ Ten Commandments – not to kill, not to steal – aren’t being followed, and the nobler, more tolerant aspects of the Jewish faith are sidestepped. It’s considered heretical to say this. The Zionist mentality builds concrete walls and fences around Israelis in self-protection, and in so doing they become separated from the world and increasingly fail to see the wider world’s viewpoint. Zionists accuse critics of anti-Semitism (though Arabs are Semites too) and it labels Jewish detractors as ‘self-hating Jews’.

But here comes a key proposition. If Israelis saw things another way, opening up to the notion that their fellow humans sit in the same boat as they, and if Israel ramped down its military expansionism and permitted some restitution of the ills which have occurred since 1948, then, over time, threats to Israel would subside, and the country and its population would become more safe and secure.

One Jewish extremist I know is so way-out that he’s right off the political map. Menachem Froman is an ‘ultra-orthodox’ (strictly observant) rabbi. [He is now dead.] He regards the state of Israel as scripturally premature and illegitimate, since the arising of such a state is prophesied to follow the coming of the Messiah. To him, the founding of Israel is supposed to make manifest a Holy Israel, a state of divine perfection and peace – what Christians call Heaven on Earth. To Jews the Messiah hasn’t yet come, and in Froman’s view Israel is thus manifestly unholy, both theologically and in everyday life. He’s the rabbi of an illegal West Bank settlement south-east of Bethlehem, and he’s also a member of Jerusalem Peacemakers [an organisation I was involved with founding].

But, get this. He hobnobs with sheikhs, imams, bishops, Tibetan lamas, Native Americans and oddbods like me. He also makes friends with ‘the enemy’. When Yasser Arafat was holed up under bombardment by the Israelis in Ramallah in 2002, during the second intifada, Froman walked through the lines, using his rabbinical authority to confound the Israeli troops seeking to stop him, and he visited Arafat repeatedly, becoming a close personal friend. Later, he walked into Gaza to make friends with Ismael Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister. Israeli troops can’t quite shoot a rabbi if he breaks the rules since rabbis are by definition ordained by Jewish tradition to define the rules.

Palestinians like him: he’s the kind of Jew they can talk with. He considers Jews no more nor less special than anyone else. He doesn’t mind living under an Israeli or a Palestinian administration as long as he can live in Eretz Yisrael, the holy realm of Israel, where he was born. His own proposed peace settlement states simply that if Arabs can live in Israel (which they do) then Jews can live in Palestine, so let’s just divide it up and get on with life, or live equally under one single government and shared land. But Froman, a memorable, charismatic character, does not represent mainstream Israel.

Most Palestinians and Arabs don’t want to fight. The idea that they want to destroy Israel is nowadays a myth, or voiced by Arabs only when tempers are hot. [This was the situation in 2011 and it will eventually return.] Arab extremists say they want to eliminate Israel and, equally, Israeli extremists want all Palestinians to be driven out of the land, but neither kind of extremist represents a majority, and such exclusion would charge a heavy price to the victorious who are left behind. Germany, for example, has paid heavily in compensation and guilt for its exclusion of Jews 60-80 years ago.

Most Palestinians and Arabs accept the existence of an Israel within the pre-1967 borders – an enormous concession that they signed up to in the 1993 Oslo Accords. Even Hamas, which Israelis perceive as the arch-enemy, has stated that it will recognise Israel within such boundaries. Palestinians just want a fair deal and a decent life. Peace will never be a perfect deal for everyone, but it will be better than the current situation.

Israel cannot afford to remain militarised forever: it has poor people and social problems of its own, enormous water-shortages, a risk of coastal flooding, toxicity, pollution and all the kinds of problems that pervade most modern countries. It also shares the West’s dwindling prestige and power. And it is isolated.

Even if Israel won every war it undertakes, this doesn’t make for a happy, healthy nation. Israel needs to make friends with its neighbours because it needs them, and they need Israel. Israelis can’t drive to Damascus, Beirut or Amman for the weekend – they are hemmed into their own country. Arabs can’t visit Tel Aviv for business or shopping or easily visit Jerusalem to pray in its holy places. It’s crazy. They all have a lot to offer each other. They share Middle Eastern space.

Looking down on Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean from up in the Palestinian West Bank, near Bir Zeit. Most West Bank Palestinians are not permitted to go there – they can see the Med but never bathe in it.

Israelis need a safe and peaceful future. Many are not fully aware of what’s going on in their name, or they shruggingly accept the ‘security reasons’ they are given when their army tramples on Palestinians. Many feel powerless, or they maintain an indifference by ‘living inside the bubble’. Others adopt extreme, partisan views, as if everyone is against them and deserves a strident response. Since the late 1990s, the centre of gravity of Israeli politics has headed toward the hard right, and a harsh minority nowadays dominates the public dialogue. Zionist minority interests place their priorities above those of the nation. The rule of dominant interests, while not unique to Israel, maintains a perpetual state of near-conflict.

I support a neighbourly Israel and its gradual integration into the Middle East. But I have difficulty going along with the way this nation behaves today. I know plenty of remarkable Israelis whose humanity and conduct of character are impressive, but these people’s voices do not prevail.

Sadly, Israel acts against its own longterm best interests and could come to regret many aspects of the last sixty years. It soils its nest by pushing its case uncompromisingly, thus creating enemies and the opposite longterm effects to what it genuinely seeks. Its reliance on force, bombing, assassinations, land-grabs, ill-treatment and dehumanisation of Arabs builds up new, avoidable problems, fostering new generations of opponents. We need a new habit of peaceful coexistence. This will take a generation and more, but it is important.

Israel’s great danger is the risk of truth breaking out amongst its own Jewish inhabitants, causing the Zionist world-view to be deconstructed. Disillusionment and uncertainty could one day cause many Israelis to decide that other countries offer greater peace and security. There’s even a risk of fighting breaking out between dissonant Israeli communities, or between ‘Israel proper’ (Israel) and ‘Israel of the settlements’ (Judaea).

Palestinians don’t have to fight Israelis – they just need to stand firm. Gradually, they will simply out-populate Israelis, and changing wider-world circumstances will redefine the situation in Palestine and Israel. Palestinians want dialogue and a fair deal. They’re remarkably patient but they still need a sense of progress. So do many Israelis, living in a small, walled-in country with an army that’s slowly losing its mojo and a government dominated by minority interests.

The Holy Land is a multi-ethnic, multifaith land and a fascinating place. Sanctity is elusive and faiths define it differently, but it’s safe to say that ongoing conflict is not one of its characteristics. Positive change matters for the whole world – Israel and Palestine form a bottleneck in the world’s process of change.

Security is developed by building up a nation’s internal feelings of alrightness, community and integrity. It is built by cultivating collective happiness and creativity, giving people a sense of a positive, mutually-beneficial future. This is the real national interest, the true guarantee of Israel’s future.

That was an excerpt from Pictures of Palestine. Its website is here. This book can be ordered online in print.
The sequel, Blogging in Bethlehem, is available as an audiobook, here. The other sequel, O Little Town of Bethlehem – Christmas in God’s Holy Land, is available in PDF text format, onscreen, here.

This was the view from my apartment in Al Khader, Bethlehem. Over the valley was an Israeli watchtower. They had their binoculars and listening devices, but I had psychic antennae. I knew what they were up to. Most of them were bored shitless. But I wasn’t.

Agonos

A natural or a placed rock? This one is probably natural. Zennor Hill, West Penwith.

I’m only as good as I am in my worst moments. This is what I have learned, or perhaps re-learned, recently. I’ve been going through a lot of physical pain, and pain has a way of reducing and diminishing me, bringing me down into a state of unclarity bordering on despair, so that my best efforts at staying conscious get to be a struggle.

This is affecting my writing. Already, peripheral neuropathy in my fingers has made typing difficult, and my fingers miss the buttons, and there is so much correction and re-editing to do that I lose track of what I’m trying to write.

Unfortunately, using speech-recognition software isn’t as simple as many people believe when they recommend it, and it doesn’t work well with me. That said, about one third of this blog was first-drafted this way, then re-edited.

It’s the pain that is really doing it. Pain demands complete attention – it is merciless, scooping up consciousness and attention and blurring my inner focus. It’s my left foot only, but the pain level is so high that it can keep me awake all night or, in the day, at times bring up tears of helplessness. I’ve also been weakened by tiredness – finding myself wondering whether it is day or night, what time it is, and what’s happening.

So I will not be writing as much as I have done in the past. Which I regret, because writing has been a major part of my life – I’ve spent mega-thousands of hours doing it. But that’s the way things are now and I must accept it. The pain I am currently dealing with soaks up so much of my attention and energy, and that’s that.

This brings up something of a fear. It is the fear that, if I say nothing and go quiet, I’ll be forgotten. It’s probably an early-life psychological issue or a past-life memory, or both. I can be forgotten for perfectly good reasons – people are busy, and so many things shout for our attention, and people assume that, if I’m quiet, I must be okay, or that perhaps they should not disturb me. Or relationships become digitalised and weakened, with a constant stream of how-are-yous with little or no face-to-face contact. But I do have people close to me who keep their eyes on me and I much appreciate their involvement in my life.

This is about neurological pain. It’s to do with the interaction of our neurological system (the information system), which is plugged into our body, and our conscious mind, which isn’t directly so. It has a lot to do with what we give attention to. However, it is easy to say this, but when in deep pain it’s difficult to summon enough focused attention to change the pain from the inside.

Pain has a way of forcing us to pay attention to it whether or not we wish to. It sucks up all clarity, positivity and perspective. It’s important not to panic and to avoid getting too caught up in it, though this in itself can be difficult when the pain gets mixed up with nightmares and dream-stuff in the quiet loneliness of the deep night.

Holding my focus has become more of an issue. I wrote a blog last week and ground to a halt with it. This is what I wrote…

I don’t know whether Agonos is a proper Greek word but, in the middle of the night a few nights ago, it gyrated around in my mind, aptly describing the state I was in. Things have been tough, and daily life is hard work. I’m doing quite well regarding the blood cancer, Multiple Myeloma, that I’ve had for seven years now – it is held at bay with cancer drugs. It’s the side-issues that cause the agony – especially peripheral neuropathy – and I have also acquired a secondary skin cancer, a carcinoma. Doctors’ visits, tests, pills and interventions are increasing.

I feel like I’m in my Nineties, shuffling around like an old crock. Things have been changing in recent months, and life and my medical condition have been getting more complex, as have relationships with the various different doctors I’m under. It’s a long uphill grind. The pain in my feet dredges and wrings me out. I have some fundamental life-questions to sort out too, the main one being this: is all this toil and trouble actually worth it?

Peripheral neuropathy is a side-effect of cancer drugs I’ve taken since 2019, which have killed off the nerve endings in my feet and fingertips. Initially it leads to an ungrounded loss of feeling – I learned to live with that though, since the cancer drugs have kept me alive and I’m glad about that. But recently it has developed into two kinds of acute pain: one is a feeling of burning in the feet and the other is a bony pain, like the excruciating pain you get when you stub your toe. Except it doesn’t go away.

These happen when I am sleeping, relaxing and not moving. With a vengeance. When I move around the pain usually subsides. But I cannot move around at all times of the day and night – I need to rest and sleep too! The sensors and signals in my neurological system have gone haywire, sending the wrong signals to the brain, which registers pain and exaggerates it, sending the wrong signals back. This is rather ironic, for one who has spent so long on computers! It becomes a psychological loop that is difficult to break out of, even with painkillers.

I was given a drug (Amitriptylene) to deal with the peripheral neuropathy, and it helped partially, but it had a big psychological effect. It drained my willpower, making small tasks seem big, and making me ask depressive questions like ‘What’s the point?’ and give up. In the blurb for the drug they do say ‘risk of sui*cidal thoughts’. I’m not desperate, lost or unstable enough to be thinking of that, but I can see how such thoughts can develop with that drug. So I’ve been switched to another drug (Nortriptylene) and I cannot yet tell whether it is helping or when it will start working (it takes 4-6 weeks, apparently). The question drags on.

I’m unhappy about the number of drugs I’m prescribed and the number of doctors who are tinkering with me – none of them know me and they tend to look at the computer more than at me. Tests and scans are amazing, but sometimes a look in my eyes or a feel of my feet would do better – cheaper and faster too. The doctors and nurses are all good people, doing their best, but they work in a medical system that is not really designed for humans – for the whole human.

There’s a good chance this is a human-placed or adjusted rock. Simply to enhance nature.

So that was what I wrote and didn’t finish. It’s the same with this one, where I need to report to friends and relations what is happening, so that you know, and I’m not sure how to finish it.

I’m making some sort of progress though, giving the pain less attention, taking more of an uncomplaining and accepting attitude – when I can – and receiving some insights into my father, mother and ancestors, and into the way of things.

My left foot hurts a lot right now. I wish this would end. I guess there must be a good reason why it doesn’t. I haven’t found it though.

Eitherwhichway, I wanted to give you a read-out on where things stand for me. I’ll probably be saying less and recycling more in the way of old material from now on (but it’s good stuff). But I have a new digital helper here in Cornwall, Lucy, who, all things being well, will handle my online affairs when I lose the ability to do so – we’re running in and working through details and questions, as time goes on.

Thanks to all of you who have been following my blogs, pods and other outpourings. After getting cancer it gave my life new meaning, and the creativity of it has itself had deep healing effects. Were that not so, I think I might well have died in winter 2022. I am so glad that good souls out there like you have been enjoying and benefiting from them, and so grateful to have touched the lives of so many people – as you have touched mine.

These are at Sperris Quoit, forming part of a kind of rock temple close to the quoit. I think these are placed rocks.

In life’s final chapter, as daily life gets more difficult, the multi-level, even multidimensional costs and benefits of staying alive can shift, and the costs can get to outweigh the benefits. Just getting up out of a chair or clipping toenails can be quite an operation! Sometimes cooking food wears me out so much that I can’t eat it (but often I cook for 2-3 days each time, so it’s not disastrous).

I’m active and functional for about six hours each day, usually doing catch-up things – phone calls, messaging, clearing up and self-care – and then I wear myself out even more! “Palden, why won’t you reply to me? Have I done something wrong?”. No. I can’t keep up, that’s all, and I lose track, and I can’t spend all day at my computer.

That’s the way things are. I’ve written here about problems and hard stuff, yet I’m still grateful for the experience. That might sound a bit schizoid but, for better or worse, throughout my life I’ve always tried to make the best out of apparently bad situations, and it doesn’t stop now – and they aren’t necessarily bad either, if handled well and turned around. I’m minded to dredge up a quote I quoted several times a few years ago in my blogs:

It’s okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

I was given that jewel of wisdom by a Berliner, while standing amidst the geological drama of the Sinai Desert in Egypt in 2012. We were like ships passing in the night, briefly meeting as soul-friends in the middle of the void. I wish I could remember his name.

Love, Palden

https://www.palden.co.uk

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The pics are from Zennor Hill and Sperris Croft in West Penwith, Cornwall. Some of these rocks are natural (it’s weird granitic geology round there) and some are placed or moved – back in the Neolithic, around 5,700 years ago. The question is, which are which? With some it is clear and with others it is a matter of debate.

Most people think this is natural, but I think there’s a good chance this was placed, or adjusted.

Ancestors

and taxiing toward the runway

Pics in this blog are of my father, Julian Jenkins – no longer on this Earth. Here he is, noble at his wife’s, my mother Ruth’s, funeral

I’m getting a feeling that, unless something changes or I’m getting things wrong, it might not be too long before I join the ancestors. That’s not a heavy feeling – there’s a dawning sense of relief to it. Of course, you never get to know when and how death will come, until it actually happens. So I’m faced with rather a strange choice: is it best to talk about this while I can, in case I keel over quite soon, or am I overdramatising something that is not actually imminent?

There is indeed a feeling of migration going on, a gradual shifting from here to there which, at some point, will mean that my heart stops pumping. The time will have come to go over to the otherworld – whatever that lands up truly meaning.

But the otherworld doesn’t start there. I want to return to a thought I shared a couple of years ago, about dying. Dying is a gradual psycho-spiritual process, and every one of us is dead to some extent, at this very moment. You might be only 10% dead, but part of you is over there. I’d estimate myself to be 80ish percent dead at present, up from the 70ish percent of a few months ago – though it’s a non-measurable perception.

Whether or not you’re aware of it, your psyche is much more bendy, pulsating, edgeless, multilevel, imaginal, transdimensional and empathic than you think. We’re addicted to the idea and the feeling of individuality, as if there is a clear boundary between what is me and what is not me, when actually there isn’t.

Julian at Castle Rigg stone circle, Cumbria, in his final years

Part of our deeper psyche oozes over to the other side, and on a more regular basis than we might think. This happens especially when a loved one, or a person who is important to us, dies. Part of us goes over with them, and it’s important to give time and space to experience that. It’s a blessed, spacious feeling, and a great gift. That feeling of inner connection with a deceased soul can be quite strong in the first few weeks. Over the course of a year, that emigrant soul will come back clearly at times. You get a flash of them – if only a glimpse – and you feel them and their vibe quite distinctly. So listen and talk back – this is important.

That’s how it works with ancestors. Early in human history, when we lived in genetically-defined tribes, souls would tend to recycle within the tribe’s psycho-spiritual field. We modern people have now burst out of our tribes, seeking experiential variety and following a multiplicity of possibilities. Both genetically and as souls we have become remarkably mixed and mongrelised. We’ve been at it for millennia.

But there are also specific threads that pertain to our own personal life-stories and interpersonal histories. People in our past have acted as beacons of light, rescuers, enemies, teachers, harmers, questioners and friends to us, and they live within us now, and it’s a personal thing. Or it might be a tribal or group-soul thing – a concatenation of souls with a shared identity and purpose.

Ancestors continue to live through us. They watch and witness from another place, sometimes lending a hand or dropping thoughts into our heads, or acting as an element of memory, as a model of how to do things, or how not to do things, that helps us shape the lives we live now.

One of my key guiding ancestors was a man who was alive in the mid-19th Century in South Wales, where he was well-known as a healer of last resort. Doctors would refer patients to him if they felt they could do no more. Apparently he was a curmudgeonly, difficult old git, with a big, white, Karl Marx beard, though he had a glint in his eye too. At times he would disappear up into the mountains on his horse, leaving the world behind, to collect herbs and spend time on his own. Yet he was gifted with a wondrous ability. He would reappear, back from the mountains, and people would come to him.

I first met him, inside myself, when I was young, during an inner journey on my third acid trip, in 1967. Over time he has returned, as if watching me, especially at critical points in life. It took some years of questioning relatives to find out who he was. He had been an embarrassment to the family, so he was not well remembered. But he was well-known and he did apparently save a lot of lives. He still turns up on the movie-screen of my psyche every now and then, and he’s both a genetic and a spirit-ancestor to me. And I am a bit like him too.

In this life I’ve been involved with large numbers of people, organising events, running groups, standing on stages, muttering down microphones, writing books and building websites, connecting deeply with many amazing souls. I’m aware that, having played a catalytic, key-turning role in many people’s lives, that makes me a kind of spirit-ancestor to at least some of them – once I’ve popped my clogs, that is.

So, after I’ve gone from this life, please do remember to check me out every now and then. Or if you find me checking you out, please do say hello. See whether there’s a message in it for you. I’ll pop up in your thoughts for a micro-second, and you’ll get a distinct feeling of me that comes with it.

But it’s not just that. This is a two-way thing. Being up in ‘heaven’, lacking an earthly body, it means that, if we ancestors want to get stuff done on Earth, we need to get people to do it on our behalf. This gets tricky. Modern humans suffer doubt, thinking that such thoughts are ‘just imagination’, and setting them aside. This can be frustrating for a soul on the other side: try talking to someone on Earth and they just ignore you and walk away! However, we can meet you in your dreams, and sometimes such interactions percolate through into waking-life – into what we call consciousness.

One of the things I am glad about is that, throughout life, I have often followed these promptings. I wake up with a feeling, an inspiration or a compulsion to do something, big or small (this blog about ancestors being one example), and I feel driven to do it. There’s a certain magic that comes with such downloads, a feeling that the prompting points towards something that is genuinely supposed to be. The outcomes from prompts like this can be much bigger than anticipated too.

Acting as an ancestor is rather a choice and a commitment. It’s a resolution to be available and of service to souls who remain in the land of the living, and service to the universe’s wider agendas. You don’t automatically become an ancestor just by dying: it’s a choice to be present, accessible and involved.

It also depends on how others see you, as a sort of role model or example. On some level, and whether or not people are conscious of it, you become a star in their inner firmament. You become a watcher. You cannot interfere, though you can lay seeds of possibility and simply be there for people.

Here’s the main reason I’m dwelling on this. From an earthly viewpoint, my health and condition have been deteriorating in recent months. I find I’m becoming less focused on, and interested in, the world around me. More often, I find myself floating off and disengaging, interiorised and seeing the world more like an outsider, once-removed.

I remember this when my Sagittarian father was in his nineties. I’d take him on adventures – he liked that. He would fall asleep during the journey but, when the engine stopped and he awoke, there before us would be a panorama over the mountains or the sea. We’d sit there sharing a flask of tea, sometimes going for a slow walk. Or I would go for a walk and he’d fall asleep. I was giving him a last look at the world, and we’d visit some of his favourite places. He died over a decade ago, but we still nod and wink to each other across the dimensions. Those were valuable moments.

We certainly are multidimensional intelligences, and this becomes more and more apparent as we approach death. Except, as intelligences, we don’t always use our full intelligence. Jean Piaget, a sociologist, once said, ‘Intelligence is not about what you know, it’s about what you do when you don’t know’.

Indeed. This is the story of life on Earth. It’s a life filled with paradox and improvisation, and we each have a different instruction manual and a unique experiential path to follow, just to complicate things.

I’ve just begun revising my cancer book, Blessings that Bones Bring – it needs to be shortened and sharpened. The book is a distillation of relevant material from my cancer-and-life blog, Notes from the Far Beyond. It’s in both digital and audiobook formats.

Next there is a question of how to end the book, since a cancer story, in my case at least, ends when I die. However, I’m not dead yet and, after death, I won’t be able to write the final chapter. That’s one of those paradoxes. I haven’t figured out what to do about ending the book, but something will work out.

So that’s my project for the next few weeks – apart from getting through each day. At this late-life stage, it’s a matter of completing what I can of the flapping threads of my life, while I still can, even though existence is twice as difficult as it used to be before cancer along.

I hope this rather rambling blog makes some sense. Perhaps I’ll return to this ancestor theme another time. I might be losing the plot, going off at tangents, but something else is dawning inside. In the land of the living it looks as if things are going wrong and I am deteriorating, but in the land of the soul something new is starting up. Or perhaps I’m getting a re-training in how to function in the rather rarefied consciousness-realm where ancestors spend much of their timeless time. I wonder if they serve good tea there?

This doesn’t really feel like a journey into the Great Unknown: instead, it feels like going home. It was this life that was all about the Great Unknown – a life in a world where we drive bulldozers through the laws of the universe. We flail around in the choppy seas of earthly experience, bumping up against things and people, struggling to make sense of a pervasive fiction that we call ‘reality’. However, at the end of it we are permitted to go home, and our bruises and wounds are attended to – if, that is, we allow it. If we don’t allow it, we start our next life carrying the baggage, hurt and aberrations of the life or the lives we had before.

Meanwhile, if you’re in the mood for some seriously moving rock’n’roll, here’s a remarkable musical rendering of the dying process, in a Christian cultural context: Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPI3E0Sxs0E

Love from me, Palden

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Interesting click-clacks:
+ Cancer book, Blessings that Bones Bring (original 2024 version): https://www.palden.co.uk/boneblessings.html
+ Blog, Notes from the Far Beyond: https://penwithbeyond.blog
+ From the AHA Class, a talk: Getting Dead, and What Happens Afterwards: https://www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-dying.html