December 2019 – Notes from the Far Beyond

Mild Despond

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I’d love to be there – at the place in the picture. It’s Pordenack Point. I thrive on walking the cliffs, feeling the wide-ocean sense of space you get at Land’s End in Cornwall, with Mexico over the horizon.

But I can’t. Most of the time I’m stuck in bed, though sometimes I clatter around the house with my walking frame.

Bone marrow cancer or myeloma has two elements. There’s the cancer of the blood and bone marrow, with a weakening, ultimately death-dealing effect if untreated, and there are skeletal issues typifying this kind of cancer, arising from weakening of the bones. In my case, two lower-back vertebrae (L1 and L5) have fractured and partially collapsed. This means I can’t stand without holding myself up.

And I get a lot of pain. It hurts, and hurting has become normal. I’ve got used to assessing pain levels. As I write I’m on 3-4 (out of 10) – manageable, but it’s wearing. It niggles, grates and aches. It goes up and down, and part of it is an issue of perception. It’s in my pelvis and lower back. When things are good, I’m down to 1. Nine is a killer – mercifully I get only moments of that, when heaving my creaky bones around.

My spirits are sagging – otherwise they have a way of holding me up. There’s a relationship between spirits and the law of gravity: when your thoughts are light and rising, gravity morphs toward levity, and when your mood is flagging and drooping, this bodily contraption we all wear gets bedraggledly heavier.

Well, I’m weighed down today. If I weren’t a compulsive optimist, I’d be depressed. Probably like Boris feels on a bad day, wondering how on earth to pull off the Brexit promises he’s made. Well, at least I’m not fat like him.

Overweight is normal in our country. I’ve been reflecting on ‘normal’, the yardstick in conventional healthcare and medicine. Last week I got some good blood test results. My para-protein count is down from 40 to 13 in the first of four cycles of medical treatment – the aim is zero. The registrar at hospital thought that was good. It was a nice surprise to me, but in another way it made sense.

It’s because I’m not ‘normal’. It isn’t that difficult being better than normal, because normal means unhealthy, rushed, out of balance – a normal state for many people. In the cancer ward I was in a few weeks ago, the guy in the bed opposite me – a nice chap – had a cup of coffee with three sugars in before bed, and that was situation normal for him.

For decades I’ve been a wholefood vegetarian and vegan, camping out, walking the hills, working with spiritual uplift and holding beliefs that, for many people, are way off their map. As part of my treatment now, I’m imbibing oils, vitamins, nutrients, homoeopathics and other helpers that most ordinary people would never touch or even know about.

I’m even connected radionically to an intelligent E-Lybra computer that’s vibing me with healing radiations from 25 miles away. In my meditation yesterday I let my ‘friends upstairs’ – spiritual guides, if you will – look into and through me. They see me from the inside out.

They examined my pelvis, ribs and blood, my energy-system and psyche, and I was glad to let them in. I let them see my guilt, shame and fears, for their interest, and offered up my life and efforts. To some this will simply be a sign of eccentricity or madness but, to me, it’s part of my spiritual toolkit and a source of relief, insight and sanity.

So when the doctors look at my better than normal results, an eyebrow rises but it goes no further. Perhaps it’s just an exception or good luck. Of course, according to the official line, there’s only scanty evidence that a holistic approach works and they assert repeatedly that there are horrendous risks and dangers to it.

Well, I’m doing it anyway, in the hope and belief that it will help. And faith matters. And the prayers, goodwill and reiki that you good friends out there have been sending me, for which I am genuinely grateful.

I don’t know what my life is going to be like in future. It’s grinding at me. Will I be able to stand on my own two feet? Will I be able to walk to Pordenack Point again? Will I be dependent and struggling or reborn? As yet unknown, these questions depend greatly on how these pharmaceuticals, these holistics and my life-force and spirits progress.

It involves a deep decision. An act of will. A resolve that infuses my bones. A re-irradiation of spirit. Today, that feels a remote possibility. But on other days, especially when I’m bubbling on steroids, it feels more doable. We shall see.

Life gets like this. My first Tibetan teacher in 1974, Akong Rinpoche, told me that when you’re lost and wading through treacle, that’s when the real work is happening, and when you’re inspired by clarity and vision, that’s like a holiday – good for you and nourishing, but not what really makes the difference. He was a Capricorn realist, yet the truth he served me is valuable now.

So, Happy New Decade, everyone. We deserve it. I conclude with a few observations.

When you think you’ve had enough and can’t handle any more, that’s when you’re being stretched into a new capacity to deal with what’s evolving here on Earth.
Second, there’s more, and it’s coming.
Third, it’s all going to be alright, even when it isn’t. This is a tricky truth to live with, and I’ve really learned this one by sharing time with people living in conflict zones.
Finally, to quote a sign at old rural railway crossings in Britain: STOP, LOOK AND LISTEN.

A new decade is a human, post-Christian construct but it makes us think longer term, and this we need to do more of. But remember: listen more closely to things than to people. Stop, look and listen.

And I’ll try to do that too.

With love, Palden

Forgiveness

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Staggering around with a zimmer frame at the age of 69 wasn’t part of my plan. But then, I’m being taught a new level of acceptance: what is, is, and that’s that. Simple. It’s fascinating, because this process brings up issues, issues about the acceptance I’ve faced in life.

I’ve been searching inside myself for the causes of my bone marrow cancer. There are the obvious causes such as radiation exposure, environmental toxins, vaccines, fillings… though I’ve had a reasonably good diet and lifestyle for fifty years, for what it’s worth. But there are deeper causes too.

I’ve been going through a deep forgiveness process with my late mother. I don’t think she really wanted me or felt ready to have me when I came along. During pregnancy my father went far away to start a new job and she was, in effect, a single mother at my birth and for the first 4-5 months until she, my elder brother and I moved to join my father in our new home. Things had not been at all easy after WW2, but my parents made sacrifices, worked hard and did their best in a hard situation, and bless them for that.

I was reluctant to be born. I knew I had to do it, but it was a teeth-gritting thing. I didn’t come for the chocolate and rewards: I came because my soul knew there was a job to be done. In my birth chart the Moon squares Saturn and the Sun conjuncts it – a lot of rock-and-hard-place stuff. So my mother and I matched each other, and we did what we had to do. Don’t complain. Don’t make a fuss. Think how lucky you are. So we did. We made do. Throughout my life I’ve accepted many things that weren’t easy. Not least having loads of shit dumped on me and terrible dishonesties, and dealing with it.

This has made me good at working in war zones and other challenging situations, and without this gritty attitude a lot of things wouldn’t have happened and a lot of people wouldn’t have been inspired to break through in their lives. So it has paid off and I’m happy about that. I’m grateful too for a heart and a conscience that is relatively clean – as they go. This cancer experience allows me to drop stuff, forgive the past and draw a line on it, starting a new life. It has been my story – starting over again and again.

So cancer, for me, is a gift in disguise. Right now, I’m filled up with chemicals, my hands shake, I’m behaving weirdly on steroids, yet I’m growing stronger. I can now get out of bed to fetch something or go to the toilet! This is a big achievement. Sounds funny. But it gives me more freedom and relieves Lynne of some of her carer’s duties. So the chemicals are beginning to work. They’re doing so partly because of the compensatory holistic remedies I’m taking and also, I believe, because of attitude.

This is a core issue around healing: spirit, belief and will-to-live. Without these, the healing juncture I’m in becomes more empty. What am I doing this for? What is there to live for? What will I do differently with a possible five, ten or fifteen years? If my spirits are infused with hope and a reason to keep going, I shall stay alive as long as I need – this I believe, and I’m betting on it. I’m also starting to write a book – my eleventh.

I’m writing down all that I understand about the prehistory of West Cornwall, dense as it is with ancient sites. To me, these ancient sites represent a neolithic and bronze age geoengineering project working with the very issues of climate, biodiversity and human society that we face today. There’s even a chance that the bronze age megalith-building project was a response to an earlier climate catastrophe or a plague that severely reduced the people of neolithic Cornwall around 3000 BCE.

For fifty years I’ve been confronting sceptics, in the form of archaeologists, academics and people who believe they’re being rational when actually they’re being emotionally subjective, hanging on to a worldview that lacks imagination and doesn’t really work when it comes to understanding the megalithic culture.

This came to a head in September when I published some research in a Facebook group, asking for people’s insights. What I got was a put-down, with ideological scepticism from two characters who closed down the conversation from its start. These are what astrologer Rob Hand calls ‘Saturnine brain-police types’, or people who consider it their duty to protect others’ thoughts from subversion and self-questioning.

These two shut down all debate amongst the other people in the group. So much for peer review. Then came the cancer diagnosis. After that I made a deep-seated decision: to come out with it, speaking my truth and ideas more clearly, in a well-put way, to give these quasi-rationalists a counterswipe and lay out a completely different picture. Because beliefs such as theirs are destroying the world.

It’s already part-written on the Ancient Penwith website, but I’m sharpening it and no longer hedging. This is stage one of my revival process. With other interests – parapolitics, society, humanitarian work, extraterrestrials, the world’s future – there’s more to do before I pop my clogs. If, that is, life gives me the time and grace.

Problem with mission-driven people is that we don’t let up until the job is done. It’s relentless. Meanwhile, the vision of love and peace with which I emerged into adulthood in the 1960s hasn’t happened. That’s been hard to live with, but it’s what happened anyway.

There’s a choice here to shrug shoulders and give up – resignedly getting stuffed and drunk at Christmas instead – or to beaver away endlessly toward a historic-scale goal that won’t be fulfilled quickly, though in the next life or the one after that there’s a greater chance. This motivates me now. In between cups of tea.

This is the core of our healing process, whether or not it’s cancer egging us on. What are we here for and what are we doing? Right now, a Saturn-Pluto conjunction is happening, with its peak on 6th-14th January. Last time this happened it was the Falklands War and the Polish Solidarinosz uprising in 1982. It’s about ruthlessly hard facts – not what you want, but what you get. What actually works? What’s really true? How hard are we willing to work for it? When actually will we lose our fear?

Solstice and Christmas are a time for reflection and there are things worth contemplating instead of getting blotto. Do we really want to go along with a mass-murder of turkeys or do we truly support ecological sustainability? I’m one of the awkward squad on such matters, an Aspie like Greta, who keeps bloody well stirring things up. Cancer is sharpening my wits and undermining my hypocrisies. Yet this honesty process brings a feeling of relief, an unburdening of complicity. It’s literally enlightening my weak hips, making them more able to support me.

To the extent that I can now stand up, leaning precariously on my ‘walker’ (zimmer frame), tottering into the kitchen to cheer up Lynne, who is valiantly working away at all hours to earn a living because our wondrous system of social care in Britain doesn’t actually support cancer carers like her. Saturn and Pluto are doing their business here with cringeing efficiency.

So, Happy Everythings, everybody. This is what we get! Choose your devils to blame (good old Boris), but don’t forget the devil within. We can turn this round. Everything is a gift. A clock is ticking. Now it’s time to make good. That’s what’s happening for me, at least – that itchy feeling inside that winkles out a further turning in the deepest seat of consciousness.

Forgiving first involves remembering, and not forgetting. It’s worth remembering awkward things, and things that need repeated re-forgiveness. Forgive the world. Yes, it’s hard. But forgive the world. Because it’s an uncanny kind of mirror.

With love, Paldywan

Great Fart in the Void

landsend-29107 — At Pordenack Point, West Penwith, Cornwall

All my adult life I have been an astrologer. People make the mistake in believing that it’s about predicting the future. Not so. It’s about understanding the present and the inner-outer situation we’re in.

Lo behold, my situation seems to be evolving in tune with new and full moons. At these points, key decisions are made (such as to come to Devon for treatment on one fullmoon, and receiving the diagnosis around the next fullmoon), or health developments evolve in stages.

So, it seems to be that, around the recent fullmoon on Thursday, I seem to have been getting a bit stronger, a bit more capable, a bit less spaced out with medications and the shock of it all, and a bit clearer about the coming time. It’s a process.

Nothing miraculous is happening, and this isn’t ‘recovery’ or ‘getting better’ (people seem so anxious about that!). But, provisionally, I can report that something is moving forward. We shall see what happens as time passes.

I’ve been on chemo and steroids. The medications for bone marrow cancer are not as intensive and gut-ripping as for other cancers. It concerns life-blood and bones though, and it can disable and kill, so it isn’t less serious.

The chemo is not thus far affecting me badly – I’m not losing hair, getting nausea or suffering over it. The steroids are weird: they deal with aspects of the cancer, yet they also have a psychoactive effect that I would rate as close to cocaine. It makes me mentally buzzy, a bit heartless, assertive and more confident, and it gives me shaky fingers and a busy head.

I have to be careful with my behaviour, avoiding saying things too abruptly, bossily or directly, inconsiderately. I imagine that, for mainstreamer muggles who encounter this drug, there can be difficulties. But, as you might guess, I have plenty of experience with psychoactive substances, and these symptoms are not strange to me.

Some people press me to go along a holistic healing route, and this I am doing, partially. I’m following an integrated path, trying to exploit the best of both tracks. Many holistic methods are under-proven, and when people advocate them I ask them for actual experience and real information, not just advocacy and sales-talk. The same is true for conventional medicine – it assumes it is the only way, and it is not. We have to form our judgements on these things and get the consequences.

I am on colloidal silver, vitamins, homeopathics, CBD, am considering Essiac, and I’m also being helped by an intelligent, biofield-balancing E-Lybra machine which reads me off and sends me corrective subtle energy-fields in response. I feel that all of these are having a strengthening and transforming effect.

They might mean that I can modify my copious consumption of medications as time goes on. Because, frankly, I seem to be popping pills endlessly, rendered into a peeing, pooing, farting wreck of a man!

This brokenness seems to be a key question. I’m a broken man and I know it. Life has gone ‘wrong’ on me. I’m incapable of standing up and bearing a man’s load – like Atlas who dropped the world and went “Oh no, I’ve totally screwed up”. I’m dependent on the love and care of Lynne, the support of the taxpayer and the help of nurses and doctors. But that’s okay: this is the 21st Century, and we men need to get broken.

There’s another side to this. At age 69, I’m glad to say I’ve done some stuff, seen a lot of things, saved and changed many people’s lives, been places, written some good books, given loads of speeches, started a load of initatives, done some secret manoeuvrings… and, with some regrets, I am happy enough with what I’ve done.

It will be different for people who set aside their true life-path for security, fear, guilt, status or circumstances – they will have regrets.

So, if necessary, I can feel sufficiently satisfied that I did what I could – to an extent. It involves letting go of hopes and aspirations – after all, at age twenty, I did want to change the world, and fifty years have passed and progress has been slow, especially in my chosen areas of war and peace and community transformation.

But that’s life. We didn’t actually come here to fulfill our dreams, though we try. We came here to stand willingly between a rock and a hard place and to do our best with that – to learn from it and to contribute toward making things a wee bit better while we have the chance.

Because that chance evaporates. We do not live forever. We taste the chocolate and the blood, sweat and tears, and sooner or later find out that nothing is quite as we were told.

The most wonderful moments of our lives come and then they go. As you grow older more appears behind you than in front of you, yet there are opportunities for rebirth and transformation at every age – at some ages more than others. The Saturn Returns at age 29ish, 58ish and 86ish are critical junctures, for example.

So it’s okay. Being broken is not such a crisis – it’s an opportunity and a healing. If we take it that way. Live or die, it will be alright. But having this attitude arises from having made life-choices earlier in life that have at times cost me high – I’m ageing and broke, with no medals or gongs, a threat to some and a bringer of blessings to others, and that’s okay.

I’ve made mistakes, I’m an imperfect Virgo, I’ve been accused of murder and treachery, I’ve failed to make a million, I haven’t been the father, taxpayer or employee I should have been and, while in some people’s eyes I’m just a pile of crap and a burden, there’s a deep smile in my heart.

There’s more to do and, if I live, I feel this cancer crisis is bringing things into focus. If I pass away, transitioning to another world, I’m sure there will be plenty to do there too. Even the best of astrologers cannot foresee what happens next. This is the way of things. As my Tibeten lama guru in the 1970s, the Karmapa, said at the time, the final truth is simply like a fart in the void. Not long afterwards, he passed away too.

Bless you for being you, and thank you for being with me on this trip.

Love, Paldywan Kenobi

Knowing

Bethlehem, Palestine — That ‘little town of Bethlehem’, today. There is room at the inn for you to go visit it.

It’s funny how we know things.

A few people have remarked how Lynne and I have been comparatively unfazed by the discovery, just one month ago, that I have bone marrow cancer. Well, both of us indeed were fazed and deeply shocked – this was not on our roadmap – but, in another way, neither was it a total surprise.

The first concrete symptoms came up in late August when I cracked my back while gardening. I went to an osteopath and this helped, but soon I deteriorated. A soul-sister, Miriam, a psychic surgeon, successfully sorted me out, and this lasted some days and then I got even worse. Then Simon, a cranial osteopath, helped a lot, but there came a point where, perceptively, he said that something more was wrong than he could fix. I went to hospital for tests and that’s when the diagnosis eventually came.

But we knew. The first signs were back in January 2019. I was labouring, struggling, melancholic and lost. Nothing specific was wrong except my money situation, but my spirits and inner resilience were losing ground. With an ominous feeling of dread, I felt unable to lift myself out of a mud-bound feeling of stuckness – sandbanked though not quite on the rocks. I was going nowhere except down.

By May 2019 things got worse: I had an increasingly sinking feeling – one of those where, the more you try to raise yourself up, the more you seem to sink back into a hole. I live on hope and have considerable resilience, but this was getting at me in a deep place.

There’s more. With my prehistoric research, I knew I had to assemble more evidence. This detailed, meticulous work just had to be done before I could progress with drawing conclusions from the research. From May to August I slogged away on mapping the ancient sites of West Cornwall. I was driven, doing long hours. I did get it finished – just one week before I damaged my back. Something in me had known that, if I didn’t get the work done, it wouldn’t get done. I didn’t know why – I just knew. It was a relief to complete it.

When the cancer diagnosis eventually came in November, I was deeply shocked and yet, in another way, relieved. Relieved because, suddenly, I knew at last what the problem was. The cancer had been developing for some time, unbeknownst to me – and yet somehow I knew this.

There’s a lesson to draw from this. We modern, socialised, educated Westerners have had the knowingness drilled out of us. We override our instincts and intuitions with reasons, rationales, analyses, plans, excuses and science. We do what we’re told, for the reasons we’re given, even when we know it’s better to do otherwise. We do this even when giving birth to our chidren, even when it hurts, even when it harms others or ruins our world. The over-consumptive institution of Christmas provides a very good example of this kind of willful self-destruction.

It took until I was 42 to give myself permission to open up to the knowingness within me. That’s a long time: over-educated, it took twenty years of painful experiences, crises and inner work before I got it. I can’t call myself proficient even now but, since then, I have followed a simple rule, and I commend it to you for your consideration. Here it comes. It’s dead simple.

If it lifts you up, do it. If it weighs you down, reconsider. Reconsider really seriously. This is no joke. It’s not a spare-time activity. It isn’t actually even an option. It concerns our life-purpose and whether or how much we will fulfil it. It concerns our and others’ happiness and the success of any venture we undertake. It’s a methodology, not an ideal.

We do know things. Events or the words or actions of people put it in front of us, full square – but we often know the truth before this happens. So it’s helpful to pay attention, because it helps us get the message life is telling us. I knew I was going downhill nearly a year ago. And the bizarre thing is, when I was given the truth, the diagnosis, it was a relief.

Which goes to show that, for growing souls like you and me, with a glimmer of awareness, the buildup to a crisis is bigger, worse and more threatening than the crisis itself. When crisis really comes, we can pull out the stops and go for broke – 100% commitment to facing the facts.

This gives hope for the future. Because we humans, here on Earth, have a big one coming. When crisis really hits us, miracles become possible. We can break the rules and change the game. Live or die, this is what I am now setting out to do. Somehow I knew I was approaching point like this. And now the chips are down.

Your friend, Palden.

More to Life

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Pills. I’ve been taken over by an incessant stream of pills. Not just cancer drugs but painkillers, semi-psychedelic steroids, vitamins and homoeopathics, with squirts of CBD and colloidal silver, all meticulously ticked off on the list by Lynne, Virgo that she be.

Today we’ve been to hospital for a bone survey, a blood test and a chemo jab – and we managed to get a cuppa and some glutton-free cake… and the hospital cafe was free of sickeningly culturally-insensitive Christmas music too!

This cultural sensitivity thing is an issue that has been coming up today. As a pedigree aged hippy and an Aspergery type (with ‘wrong planet syndrome’), believe me, I’ve had sixty years of prejudice, projection and, worst, actions taken and decisions made, that have been outrightly discriminatory and definitely a multiple breach of human rights. The pain of this is the current phase of my clearance and reconciliation process.

I’m glad to say it’s working through alright. It’s the past, and the past concerns memory and ingrained patterns. Here I have a message for friends in their 20s, 30s and 40s. It’s this. Whatever psycho-spiritual path you follow (this will change and develop over time), do follow your path and keep on following it. Why? Because I can report that I’m really benefiting from having 50ish years of shit-shifting, magical and transformative experience. It works and it’s worth it.

If, when you’re younger, you build a default pattern of inner growth, it will serve you well when you come to the tests of late life. I started on psychedelics, nature and prehistoric sites at age 16, meditation at 25, therapy at 30 and all sorts more after that, and these act as a spiritual bedrock on which I now stand. I’m really glad that this is so. I’m struggling with my situation so much less than otherwise would be the case.

In particular this concerns death. Life is precarious and a preparation for dying. When your time comes, you need to be reasonably at peace with yourself, with people and with life. This makes dying a very different thing, in comparison to people who pass on with lots of unfinished business. I could die in a month or in 15 years’ time, but I’m doing the business of it now, releasing, re-examining, forgiving, asking forgiveness, and incrementally laying the past behind me. This frees things up and opens doors. It also makes me a better and more interesting person for Lynne to look after. She actually enjoys witnessing my process.

It helps in her own process. This cancer issue has been a rocking side-swipe from life for both of us. She is dedicatedly setting aside much of her life for me. This is enormous and not easy. To add to it, benefits agencies are really mean (they should at least throw £150 per week her way for three months, to help with real financial needs now). Our country is so heartless in this regard.

But it’s not just this. It’s a big psycho-emotional challenge, bringing up deep stuff for her. I really admire her for that and am so blessed by being looked after by Lynne. Tulki, my son, has also helped enormously – not just ‘call of duty’ but in a heartfelt act of solidarity with his dad, even though he lives some way away.

I’m not exactly getting better, but I am in process. In this three-ish month period we’ll discover whether or not this bone marrow cancer is going to subside and what my future life-chances are. Myeloma cannot be got rid of, but it can be managed. My intention is to shift toward increasingly holistic treatments after this deep-shit phase is done – immunity-building.

In the end it all hangs around matters of spirit. Happy spirits mean happy cells and bones. Life is an act of will, and spirit drives our will – and it’s blocked by our won’t. Inner conflict leads to inevitable, inescapable challenges from which no one is exempt. However, relative inner peace leads to challenges too: our soul, given space and attention, has ways of stretching us and moving us forward into new initiations, and this does not stop in late life. At times this stretching can feel to be too much, but it isn’t – you’re simply being taken further.

This is what we came into life for, to learn and to make a contribution. Planet Earth and its people need a lot of contributing right now. Even as an older person, if I am to stick around some years more, I seek still to be a net contributor. There is no such thing as retirement: the work is not done. Earth is not safe, neither is it a secure home for all of its beings. Too many people, animals and environments are having a hard time and are under threat. I don’t like the idea of passing on from a world where this is so. But it’s going to happen anyway.

This is one of life’s final secrets. We think we are so significant but, actually, we get munched up by the passage of history and, in time, we are totally forgotten. Even those who are remembered are not necessarily remembered for reasons they’d prefer. We are important only in the small domain and timeframe we have existed in, and then we evaporate and are gone.

One day you’ll become a memory, and then even this will disappear. So, get a life while you’re here. Try not to hang on too much to things and situations that have a beginning and an end: there’s something more in the silence within your soul – an alignment to the unborn and the undying. The rest is a kind of multidimensional movie. And for me, right now, the current episode involves guzzling a load of pills!

Bless us all. Your friend, Paldywan Kenobi.

Magnetic Resonance

I’ve just had an MRI scan at Torbay hospital. The two guys doing it were great. One of them knew of me. The scan involved lying down flat on a wheeled thing that was moved to the scanner, and I was mechanically drawn into a tube-like chamber.

The scan involved lying there dead still while the machine made all sorts of loud mechanical noises, vibrationally penetrating me. I could feel it slowly going up and down my body. Heat built up underneath.

Inside the tube I felt entirely enclosed. I went inside myself and stayed there while the process went on, for a long 20-30 minutes. When I was ejected I was cemented to my position and spaced out. The two men had to pull me up to sitting position and I sat there like a blinking owl before detachedly swivelling into my wheelchair, to be propelled along the corridors by Tulki.

On the journey home I felt once-removed. Tulki and Lynne were chatting and I felt far away. At home I settled into an armchair for my weekly meditation (7pm GMT on Sundays for 30 mins, every week). My aura was shattered, gone, yet I felt deeply interiorised in a void space.

I could feel my friends upstairs looking intently at, or through, me, as if analysing my state and seeking to understand what had happened and the technology that had been used. They’re strangers to this Earth, and they watch me closely – when I let them in. Yet I was protected, held and safe, enclosed in a calm cocoon of energy.

I had a strong feeling of empathy for people experiencing illness, injury and incapacity in places like Kiva, Congo, Yemen, Gaza, Afghanistan and Syria. I thought also of friends in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Palestine – all fine people doing their best with what they have, yet they don’t have what we have.

The great paradox is that they hold the keys of the future in their hands: we Westerners have created an enormous planetary problem and they are the the ones who will eventually fix it. Their way.

I’m so fortunate to have the medical facilities, knowledge and technology of modern medicine – invasive and violent as it is – and the complementary care and knowhow available here in Britain. No wonder people from benighted and crisis-ridden countries want to live here. There’s little or no sane reason for them to stay where they grew up when we have all this. And our health service depends on them as staff.

People in tough, insecure countries just have to suffer the pain, feel the illness or injury and slowly die. Cancer? Just die. Unless you’re very lucky. I’m so medically privileged. I sobbed deeply over this. It’s not right.

I thought of my Tuareg friends in Tinzibitane, Mali. They are holding together, rebuilding the integrity and heart of their village after a crisis of war and drought in 2012. They now have a new school so that their children can stay in the village and receive an education that both strengthens Tuareg culture and enables them to face the encroaching 21st Century world. It’s so heartening to see them rebuilding their lives, and to be of help in doing so. Together they stand, and they will survive.

I must pull back my aura and re-centre it. It has been exploded, dissipated, shattered. Yet it allows the doctors to see inside me. This is amazing. And I am still here. All will be well. This feels like the beginning of the serious phase of my cancer treatment.

Isn’t it so strange – the life-experiences we manifest in our lives on Earth?