July 2022 – Notes from the Far Beyond

Off to Pow Sows

The Land of the Sowsnek

Scenes from the OakDragon Camp in Wales in 1987

Pow Sows is the Cornish name for England, where the Sowsnek live.

When you have cancer, everything becomes a much bigger challenge. It could be easy to lapse into staying inside a comfort zone to keep difficulties down, but I don’t feel like that. It’s time for a change.

So on Friday I sally forth upcountry into the great wide and wonderful, feeling a bit like the little boy I was when I made my first trip to London, around age eight – my Mum put me on the train hauled by an impressive steam loco and I was met by my aunt at Paddington. But this time, this seventysomething little boy is under the Amazonic protection of Penny and Ruby and we’re off on an adventure to meet a dragon and work a circle or two. Erk, fasten your safety belts.

We’re going to an OakDragon camp. I’ve been invited back, and this is rather an honour. I was OakDragon’s originator. It’s a long story. It started in 1983, when a friend asked me to help organise a gathering in Glastonbury for earth mysteries enthusiasts. We did one at Samhain 1983 in the Assembly Rooms, seventyish people came and it was dynamite. In 1984 I did two gatherings in May, on earth mysteries and astrology. Again, dynamite. A weekend wasn’t long enough. How could we cheaply bring people together for a week? Ah, a camp. Hm, that’s much more to sort out. I was reluctant. But I knew it had to happen, and that year too. As an astrologer I pulled on my contacts, and Glastonbury friends appeared to help run it and, in late August 1984 the first Living Astrology Camp took place. A hundred people came. The Glastonbury Camps were born.

In 1985 we did three memorable camps, in earth mysteries, astrology and music and dance, and three or four more in 1986. One, an earth mysteries camp that turned into a Chernobyl camp, was a life-changer for everyone. But the volunteer crews were burning out and much was changing. The idea for a new start, the OakDragon Camps, dawned. The camps formula had worked and started proliferating – others started camps organisations in the following years too.

The OakDragon Camps’ first season was in 1987, running seven week-long camps in four locations. It was big, intense, amazing, memorable and tumultuous. But things also started going awry. There was a rebellion out of which, the following year, were born the Rainbow Circle camps – it weakened us but we kept on going. There were internal issues too, and by the end of 1988 I was leaving, rather burned out, undermined and unpopular.

I left them to it and OakDragon carried on. Within three years I was working for the Council of Nine and, in 1995, I started the Hundredth Monkey Camps. Here I managed to demonstrate more clearly what I had been seeking to bring about – the Nine had clarified my understanding of it all. Looking back, in the 1980s so many new ideas had been taking shape, we improvised as we went along, the challenges were big, and complex dynamics tugged in different directions. Yet it was a flowering, an awakening, an eruption of possibilities, a collective peak experience, and it was great to be part of it – and I think everyone involved would agree.

In late life, I’m moved to do more circle-working, with a little help from my friends, to share new ways of doing this work that have dawned on me during my cancer process. It’s not cool to build up expectations, but what’s available is quantum group transformation, if and when it works right. It’s the principle of ‘more than the sum of its parts’: when a group of individuals synergises into one being, something can happen beyond anything anyone imagined.

I believe that, later this century, this is how things will change. It’s all to do with the hearts and minds of humanity. It’s about mass focus of consciousness. When multiple minds give attention to one objective with a certain intensity for a certain amount of time, things can change, particularly in terms of human values, viewpoints and mindsets. It is these that determine so much else. Unless at least a majority of humanity joins together to pull in roughly the same direction, I don’t think we’ll get to where we need to go, this century. Humanity is in disarray, and this is no way to run a planetary home. We need to go through a kind of mass synchronisation of basic human intent, a re-resonance of human dissonance. This isn’t as airyfairy as it sounds: we have seen something like this happen in Ukraine this year, with the mobilisation of a nation.

How such a situation can be engineered globally is anyone’s guess, but a fortuitous combination of pressures could do it, if felt worldwide pretty simultaneously and if they evoke a similar response from everyone. Today’s major crises are quite unexpected, deeply stirring and breaking new ground, so this is in the hands of the Great Unknown. But there is something in the nature of these crises that is pushing us ultimately in a good direction. They are accelerating things. I’d even suggest there’s a guiding hand behind it, forcing us to face a plethora of important issues, for our own good. I’m not referring to Big Brother but to the group soul of humanity, or the heart of Gaia (or however you prefer to see it). A crunch-point could come where multiple simultaneous crises force us over a hump of social mobilisation and a collective melding of intent. That’s when the magic starts.

What is needed is an intense global situation activating sufficient shared feeling, fear, awe or goodwill, or all of them, so that billions of people find themselves spontaneously focusing on one basic thought – probably to do with survival or breakthrough. It needs to be sufficient to create a reality-wave that tilts the scales, making life look and feel quite fundamentally different, shifting people’s values and core aims over a critical hump. If we are to succeed in solving our problem here on Earth, some variant of this is what is likely to be needed.

Small groups can’t do it on their own, but they can lay tracks, train people, gather experience, evolve networks and embed and propagate the principles involved. It becomes a body of knowhow available to others to adopt when the need arises. It is a quality, not just a numbers issue, and a matter of time. For global-scale miracles to take place, a combination of factors must be dead right.

This has been a preoccupation for me since the LSE ‘troubles’. Fifty years later, I wasn’t expecting to be doing what I’m now setting out to do, but cancer has prised me open and I’ve seen something new. This winter I nearly kicked the bucket but my rebirth instincts eventually fired up and suddenly, to my surprise, by springtime I found myself with an ‘instruction’. It’s a bit like falling into hell and finding a lump of gold there, in the murk. I get these now and then.

It was strange because I had honestly felt I was heading for the final fall. But suddenly Life was saying, ‘No, there’s more’. I work on the basis that, if it is meant to happen and if I can pull it off, I’ll be helped and kept alive for it. Or the right thing will happen, whatever that needs to be. We shall see. But it does fire me up, this. And, as a cancer patient, having a good reason to stay alive is, well, a good reason to stay alive.

Meanwhile, OakDragon still exists decades later – and well done to them for doing that. No doubt it has changed a lot. I haven’t been part of it. I go now to the OakDragon as a guest, though it’s a bit like going home. It’s a healing. Everything comes round in the end, especially if we let it – and this is what’s happening. I’ll be interested to find out how I manage with camping – it’s one of those addictions I have difficulty letting go of, despite bone cancer.

On Tuesday 2nd August, during the camp, it’s the first ‘magic circle’ in Glastonbury and, whatever state I’m in, I’m going. Just as well, really. As a cancer patient I don’t know how I shall be on the day, so I can’t necessarily put on the competent airs of a normal person and get away with it. I’ll have to fall back on my root-resources, and there’s something rather special about that. It puts me on the line. Something in me loves that because it pulls out a second strength, or ‘superpowers’ that normal life doesn’t demand. So it doesn’t worry me, whether I’m weak or strong – the right thing will happen. It does. And, believe me, it’s a wee bit easier than operating in a war zone.

I have no idea when I shall next write a blog or do a podcast. They will come when they do. I’m peripatetic for two weeks, and around 15th August I return to Cornwall for my next shot of cancer immunotherapy, and to take a break before September adventures start. For you who cannot come on August 2nd, we’ll be in session from shortly before 14.00 to about 18.00 UK time so, if you wish, take a few pauses during that time to see if you can get us and pick anything up. Get a sense of the invisible presence that, I hope, will be with us. The next magic circle is in Avebury on Saturday 13th August (info below).

Hey, I really love you – whether I know you or not. I really appreciate your eyeballs and the goodwill you seem to feel, and it really does me good. Thank you so much for that – it makes a big difference to me. Thanks to Bruce, Ivan, Jackie and Jeanne for organising magic circles, and to Penny, Ruby and Lily for holding my hand. There’s an enormous smile on my face.

Muslims give God ninety-nine names, and they leave the hundredth entirely open. That’s pretty nifty. The Nine used to refer to ‘what you call God’ – they had their way of putting things. When Parkinson the talkshow host asked the Dalai Lama whether he believed in God, the Dalai Lama simply said, ‘No’. Spot on, Tenzin. Lao Tzu said, ‘The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao’. So when I say ‘God bless you’, you know what I really mean.

God bless you.

Paldywan Kenobi

The photos are by Tara Dancer, taken in Wales and Cornwall. Ironically, the campsite for the first OakDragon camp, held at Sancreed in Cornwall, is but a mile from where I now live, and I have the same landlord!

Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Magic Circles: www.palden.co.uk/magic-circles.html

Here’s a rather historic amateur video record of the second camp ever, Beltane 1985, at Butleigh, Glastonbury, made by the late Mark Walters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZaNwHo9wrM

Circles and Circles

and things changing

Mount’s Bay, Cudden Point and St Michael’s Mount, as seen from Halzephron Cliff on the Lizard

A deep rumble shook my cabin. Six in the morning. Tuesday. Heavy atmosphere. The rumbling came from the south, over the sea. I got up, made tea.

One of those expectant, crackly intensities was in the air, where the clouds take on an ethereal, colourful irridescence. Suddenly, an enormous crash close-by. A flash crackles out of the phone socket and the lights go off.

Hm, just as well I had made tea first. The power was restored in an hour or so but, while the landline worked, the internet didn’t – an engineer’s visit would be necessary, according to the friendly Yorkshirewoman on the helpline. Ah, I was to get an unforeseen break from being online. Actually, that was a bit of a relief. Even so, in the afternoon I wrote this blog, ready for uploading when I could. But the engineer came on Thursday and found that the fault would take longer. So I’m over at Penny’s, doing my online stuff.

In recent weeks I’ve had a lot of solitude. A big question has been this: if I need to hit the red button, who do I turn to? Who will check me out and do something? At present I can rely on only one person – my helper Penny, a real trooper, though she can’t cover everything, always. She’s often busy with other clients or the rigours of life, though she does down tools and come if it’s an emergency. A person in my situation needs to be able to rely on that. Suddenly offline, I decided to see who would ring up that day. In the end it was just Penny and my son Tulki – he’s good like that.

St Michael’s Mount from Penzance harbour

Unconsciously, I create this situation myself. I give off a positive vibe, my tolerance levels are high, I seem to take things in my stride, and everyone therefore assumes I’m alright. Often I am, and sometimes I’m not, and that’s the tricky bit. Forty years ago in a men’s group we did an exercise: we were stuck in a boat in the middle of the ocean, and one of us had to jump out to save the others. Reckoning I could handle it better than any of them, they chose me. That’s the pattern. I vowed then to release and change it, but life doesn’t quite work out like that. Our patterns remain and they are what we are. What can change is the way we handle them. Sometimes life takes us back to square one, to get us down to the pattern’s roots. And one problem with addressing shadows is that we can convince ourselves we’re worse persons than we actually are.

When I’m not alright I naturally go quiet and often no one checks me out. There’s a societal issue here: everyone is so busy. NHS staff are run off their feet. People tell me to ring if I need help but most times it hasn’t actually worked. Back in December I was really ill and it took five days and twentyish phone calls to get nowhere. So I have a problem, I haven’t cracked it, and it’s also bigger than me.

In a week’s time I’m sallying forth from furthest Cornwall. But first, on Wednesday this week a nurse came along to shoot me up with Dara and Dex, my cancer drugs. That gives me time to get over the ensuing problems and go through the most immuno-suppressed part of my monthly maintenance cycle of cancer treatment. Well, at least the drugs are free, legal and prescribed!

St Michael’s Mount and Penzance from Cudden Point

I’m really looking forward to meeting some people, at last! Loads of you! Penny, her delightful daughter Ruby and I are first going to the Oak Dragon camp near Glastonbury. It’s a case of ‘the old founder returns, thirty years on’, and rather a heart-gladdening honour, actually. Though my bones will probably ache and it could wear me out, camping is a blessing I’m reluctant to let go of. But, you never know, this might be the last time.

On Tuesday 2nd August I’ll dip out of the camp for a day to do the first, now fully booked ‘magic circle’ in Glastonbury. I’ve spoken publicly, broadcast, written and taught for decades but, after some years’ break, and acquiring cancer along the way, a lot has changed. A new approach has emerged, consistent with everything I’ve done before but now coming from a different, deeper place. Cancer and hard truths such as the grief of loss do hone your soul, yielding gifts of light. I might be experiencing battlefield-madness but, somehow, in my current weakness, a certain cards-on-the-table openness has come about, prompted by having reduced options and a limited time left. So, while I can, it’s time to share a few of the insights and secrets that have grown out of this – and spend some time with those of you who are able to come.

When the camp ends at the weekend, I’ll either find someone to spend time with or go back home to Cornwall for the week (I’m kidnappable).

Then comes the magic circle in Avebury on Saturday 13th August – right next to the stone circle. If you couldn’t join the Glastonbury event, try this. Of all three magic circles I’m doing this summer, this could be the most ET-related. I have a feeling the Devon magic circle on Saturday 24th September could be more ancient-oriented and soul-familyish. The Glastonbury one, well, that’s Glastonbury, and what comes up is what comes up, and that’s the wonder of the place. For local Glastonbury friends old and new, later on I’m doing a talk in the Assembly Rooms on Friday 9th September called ‘The Tipping of the Scales’, and that’s for you.

What will happen at the magic circles? A mixture of me doing my thing with some inner processes and group sharing, but there’s a hidden Factor X here. What I call my ‘friends upstairs’ will also be quietly beavering away – well, that’s the way I see things, though you don’t have to. If we get things right, a background override can set in and something deep arises. You see, I don’t work to a script. We get what comes up. I don’t do standard old channelling either – I stay myself and speak for myself, though prompted and jogged by something more. I hope to cover three main themes, with breaks in between. That’s all I really know in advance. Sorry about that. This is why we ask you to come at the beginning and leave only at the end.

If you can’t come and you wish to ‘be there’ with us, send your name to me before 28th July. It will be written down and placed under a motherly rose quartz crystal at the centre of the circle. With her mate, a big hunky quartz, she has sat at the centre of countless such gatherings since 1983. Please keep this simple: I can’t handle complexity – just send in your name. After 28th July you’ll be included in the next circle.

Here’s the first theme. Astronomers want us to believe intelligent life in the universe, if indeed it exists, is yet to be found. I humbly disagree – we already have contact. So you’ll get a taste of the dimensional vastness of the universe and the diversity of its inhabitants, as I understand it. Us lot, we’re one variant, living on, or in, a very unique world. A world is a greater thing than a planet, since it includes the sumtotal of all of the experience happening on a planet, and there are eight billion incarnate humanoids here, all having human experiences, and some really intensely so. A world is an experiential process, and we all came here for a dose of it.

So we’ll look at our place in this rather bizarre world and what we’re here for – from the outside. It concerns not only our personal paths through life, but also helping to fulfil the aims and objectives of the soul-families and the worlds we each originate from and unconsciously work with. Gurdjieff called this partkolg duty (a Russian term), meaning our duty to the universe.

Note that dread word, duty. We, exercising our dubious freedoms, often forget duty. One of the end-of-life hard facts I’ve had to own up to is the multifarious ways in which I have avoided and erred in rising to my own duty – and screwed up and regretted some of it, caused pain and also paid a price. The funny thing is that the ultimate act of free will is to rise to our partkolg duty. If we humans did so, this planet’s problems would get fixed much quicker.

Here’s the second theme: planet-fixing and ‘world work’. My preceding blog on ‘world work’ was a taster. The idea here isn’t to get you to change path and do it the way I do it – it’s to work with the tools you have and the path you follow, perhaps giving them a shift of context and new application. Some of the tricks and experiences I’ll share will be useful and, for some, it might be the start of something new. I take both an activist and a spiritual approach to world work, and I believe combining the two is important.

The third theme is about dying. It’s something imminent for me, but it’s coming to a heart like yours, sooner or later. There’s the small matter of having a ‘good death’, whatever that really means, and there’s also the matter of the life-issues that come into sharp relief toward the end of your life. There’s something of a karmic crescendo to it. What have you been and done, and what have you not been and done? Death is potentially a great resolution of life’s story. Or it can be a crunchy confrontation with all those things we didn’t want to look at. It throws new light on everything and pulls the plug on delusions and lapsed possibilities. We’re powerless to do anything more – life’s deeds are done. The choice available is how we deal with it. We can build a habit of dealing with it in life, or we can do a crash course when dying, and each path has its ins and outs. Inevitably it’s a bit of both.

Predannack Head on the Lizard, looking into Mount’s Bay toward Tregonning Hill

These magic circles, quite simply, are something I’m moved to do before I go. When you’re in decline there are things you have to accept you can no longer do, and there are certain things you still can do and, for me, this is one. Well, I hope so, but if I die in the process, I died doing things I wanted to do, didn’t I? I don’t get the feeling that’ll happen though. For all of us, the prospect of dying brings up the question of why am I truly here and what am I doing about it? Our society is geared to setting such questions aside in favour of paying bills and staying out of trouble, and yet this is important, and many people have an itching in their hearts over precisely this question. Perhaps it’s not a question of what we want to do, but more one of what we must do. It’s that relentlessly choiceless choice – it keeps coming up at certain times of life.

For the two or more weeks I’m away, new blogs or podcasts will depend on time and circumstance. I won’t be available on mobile phone. If you need to contact me then I might occasionally pick up messages online. For enquiries about magic circles, please contact the respective organisers – all great people I’m really happy working with. By September I might know whether I can do further magic circles in autumn or winter, if wanted – it depends mainly on my cancer, energy, infection avoidance and the viability of travelling. And an organiser or two.

This is my sixtieth blog. That’s rather amazing. Someone suggested I make a book out of it, but four big issues come up: 1. I can’t do the last bit of the story about my passing away and what happens afterwards (I’ll be otherwise occupied); 2. I don’t know what is most enduringly valuable to my readers (someone else will know better); 3. when I’m dying, I can’t do all the publishing business, and, 4. gimme a break – I might be rather a workaholic, but this is ridiculous! So I’ll just carry on writing blogs until I can’t.

So much rests on how we see things. That is a matter for each of us and now it’s going global.

Love you lots. Speaktya soon. Paldywan.

Magic circles info: www.palden.co.uk/magic-circles.html
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Looking over Mount’s Bay toward the Lizard and Predannack Head, from Lamorna in Penwith

World Work

Inner work to aid humanity’s evolution

The Isles of Scilly from the West Penwith mainland, Cornwall

I’m not a lightworker or a conventional prayer-circle type. But I believe we need to take a multi-pronged approach to ‘world work’ – meditative, religious, psychic and process work to assist the world. I’m esoterically more activist and gutsy – it’s born out of a political background, humanitarian experience and an aged-hippy approach to life.

If you do psychic work over a period of time, in conjunction with inner friends or ‘guides’, then you’ll tend to develop an operating style between you – and that’s what happened to me. It’s not that I’m an advanced psychic. It’s more that I’ve been at it for a long time, with formative and defining inner experiences along the way.

An example: when I was 41, in an inner process I found myself walking backwards toward the abyss – a vulnerability we humans just aren’t happy with. I had tremors of fear but just had to go over the edge anyway. Tipping backwards, I fell into the void, falling, falling… until an instinct made me turn, spread my arms like wings and fly… Since that moment, I’ve been able to set my mind more free, and my busy brains don’t interfere so much.

One bizarre benefit of cancer has been the inner experiences that have come with it. Forced to spend time in bed, I went on adventures. It gave me a sense of usefulness at a time when I was wondering whether it was all worth it. But no, the management clearly said “Don’t ring us – we’ll ring you“. Well, you do get some comedy sometimes!

I’m of the opinion that, if you give a flower to an asshole or shower them with light, it will likely be a turn-off and inappropriate, with the opposite effect to what was intended. Billionaires and terrorists don’t change just because you want them to, and you wouldn’t either. You have to get in there, make friends, gain trust and work it out, as if there, relating to a real person – albeit perhaps to their wiser, more feelingful self.

Sometimes I’ll give a backrub to a mountain jihadi, or sympathise with the rigours of a politician’s life, or make an etheric cup of tea for an old lady – ‘confidence building measures’. It goes on from there. Dialogue with them as a guest in their space. When someone can see it’s in their own best interests to change, they’ll change (though not always). Typically for stroppy humans, if you push them around, they’ll resist.

If you want to penetrate a computer, work with climate issues, deal with a natural disaster, do longterm work with ‘megatrends’ (like population growth or deforestation), it’s a question of getting right inside the matter, stepping into people’s shoes, seeing what life looks like to them, getting into the back office, ferreting through the datachips or feeding helpful ideas to people in need.

One key thing is social attitudes and particularly the freeing up of groupthink, cover-ups and polarised positions. These can involve societal resistance or oligarchies who like to believe they’re in control. Changes in attitudes form the basis of world change. A valid notion here is unconcealment, the exposure of things people should know of and think about – whether withheld, or people don’t want to know, or it is simply thitherto not known.

This is not about steering things in ways we want to see things go: it’s about helping humanity accelerate its evolution. Humanity’s group soul knows what it’s doing even if we humans don’t. Sometimes the ‘wrong’ thing seems to have to happen in order to catalyse a wholesome and fundamental change. This concerns defining moments – events embodying big issues and forcing critical shifts or decisions. By this means the collective unconscious and force majeure leak into real life.

In 1995 a circle of eighty or so of us worked with Bosnia – a powerful and moving session lasting some six hours. We heard later that, while in session, some drunken Serbs had bombed a marketplace in Sarajevo, killing 60. This was sobering, shocking – definitely not our intention. What had gone wrong? Yet, a week or so later, this defining event made NATO go in, ending the war within a short time. Something ‘bad’ led to something ‘good’ – though we couldn’t and wouldn’t have designed it that way. We can’t say we made NATO go in, and that wasn’t our thought, but the synchronicities, considering the war had gone on for three years, were too close. We must assume some involvement, even if but to oil the works or connect some dots.

One of the big lessons here is: carefully consider what you pray for. Also, only take on doable challenges, and be willing to follow them through later on.

The main idea is to help foster forwardness and a sense of progress – it’s like midwifery. We cannot force progress but we can do our best to facilitate it. Deep change doesn’t happen overnight, and sometimes we must work at it over time. Humanity’s problem is that it feels blocked, jaded and discouraged, as if nothing will make any difference. So the key issue is to help people gain a sense of relief and momentum – get a taste of the benefits of accelerating evolution.

It’s a matter of getting our politics, cultural judgements, ideologies, values and comfort-zones out of the way. This isn’t easy. It helps to have travelled outside the rich world to see things from another angle. Be aware of the way the media and your education shape your thinking, and listen more closely to events than to what people say. Study a little history, background and smallprint. Step over your beliefs and conditioning, using sensitivity, imagination and intuition to experience things from the inside, to see the dynamics going on underneath. It’s a challenge to set ourselves aside – though just for half an hour or so.

There are many ways to do world work, and if you resonate with what’s written here, then give attention to feeling your way forward, developing your own path. Use the inner tricks, tools and background you already have.

Here’s a crucial, human bit: we need to connect our own issues, pain and challenges into this, to power it up emotionally. We know what our own pain is like, and plenty of people round the world are in similar or worse situations. So they can act as a psychic entry-point. You can see life through their eyes. In recent months I’ve experienced heartbreak, and plenty of people in Ukraine, or Palestine and Yemen (the two main places I regularly focus on), have heartbreak too, and we all need a bit of there-there, and thus we can serve each other well.

With cancer, I tune into cancer patients, because it means something personal to me and I know what it’s like. The feeling-tones around this gives the work more grace, astuteness and firepower. If you’re a nurse, a truck-driver, a gardener or a pensioner, tune in through your own situation and its problems and joys and use this empathically to connect with others.

There are holistic and surgical/pharma treatments for disease. In this context, disease can encompass riots, volcanoes, storms, wars, famines, insecurity, collapses and ‘black swans’ – events no one expected. Holistic treatment works best for building conditions for good health and immunity, while surgery and pharma are best when it’s too late or too serious. This kind of meditation is more surgical, applicable when deep matters of principle are at stake.

But it depends really on whether this is your thing. Or perhaps you might be best continuing with what you already do, with a new slant to it.

There are all sorts of methods and procedures, such as mopping up dead souls after disasters, working to raise the level of the collective mood, inwardly supporting threatened species, love-bombing and truth-mining a conflict zone, or working with whatever comes up in the news that really gets to you. If it’s Ukraine, work with Ukraine because you will also assist other places and situations where similar issues apply. One longterm aim is to remove enough problems from the overall system so that its inherent, homoeostatic self-healing capacity can revive.

Sometimes it’s an A&E and intensive care job, and cutting out a tumour or infected organ can save the whole body, if that is the only option left. That’s how focusing on specific acute issues and crises can help the world as a whole. Don’t forget to support the helpers too: the on-the-ground activists, good-hearted people, dedicated public servants, people who hold society up and do the donkey-work, and people who take brave initiatives. I’ve even found myself sitting with an abandoned dying person in an apartment block in Sian, China, and it was good for both of us. He found a comforting welcome on the other side.

If you do this once a week for a year, out of fifty meditations, ten will be really worth it. When done in a group (three upwards), even if remotely at a chosen time, it powers it up. Stick with it. Don’t seek results – just do it. Give it time. This is a life-long work. It can empower other stuff you’re doing or give meaning to what you might believe to be a meaningless, insignificant life.

Based on earlier experiences in the 1970s-80s, in the 1990s I started a large-group project doing ‘inner aid’, the Hundredth Monkey Project, which pioneered much of this approach, and later a smaller group, the Flying Squad, continued in this work for twenty years. They’re both closed now, but the meditation time-slot, agreed with the Council of Nine thirty years ago, is still open every week on Sundays at 7-7.30 GMT (8-8.30 BST). I’m there, every week, wherever I am, dead or alive, and with a number of others (I know not how many). Tune in on that channel if you wish. If you continue over time the management will give you a direct line.

In my experience there is more personal growth in ‘world work’ than in personal growthwork. You find that out by doing it. The more you do it, the better you get. So just work at it, don’t make a big deal, keep motivation simple and intelligent and, remember, it is for the highest good, for the wide, longterm benefit of humanity, our planet home and all who live in her.

Thanks for reading. We’ll be covering this in my forthcoming ‘magic circles‘.

Love from me, Palden

If this subject interests you, here is an article and a report I wrote in the 1990s. My thoughts have developed and changed in some respects but it all still holds. I’ll revise them sometime. Or not, as the case may be.
www.palden.co.uk/consciousness-work.html
www.palden.co.uk/psychic-work.html

The Flying Squad site is worth a look:
www.flyingsquad.org.uk

My podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Carn Les Boel and its seal caves. This cliff sanctuary sits at the western end of the Michael Line

Aloneness

Latest podcast

When I was doing the design work for these podcasts, this one came close but didn’t quite make it.

This podcast is all about… Aloneness.

I had rather a debate and struggle about what to blog or podcast about next. So I decided to drop it and go up the hill on our farm to sit on the bronze age barrows up there and have a good think. Or a non-think. Those barrows have energy and I go there for an energy-bath.

On the way up I had an encounter with our big thumping bull. He’s great – he’s not a threat, but he’s definitely worthy of respect.

The whole of his herd of wives and children was spread across the field. Often they’re mainly to one side, so I go up the other side. But today it wasn’t possible, and the bull was right in the middle, staring at me.

We eyeballed each other. I let him hear the sound of my voice. Since we both have low voices we can read each other quite well. He grunted. We both wondered what to do. It took a while but we weren’t in a hurry. This was contemplation of the scene rather than anxious concern, for both of us. I decided to take an initiative, slowly heading uphill toward the left and, fascinatingly, as soon as I started moving he lumbered off to the right. We had both had the same thought.

As soon as he starts moving the whole herd starts moving. Belted Galloways, they’re a real herd, this lot, socially as well as genetically. So they shambled over into the next field. They have a big ranging ground all over Botrea Hill, with organic pasture and wild moor. I staggered uphill on my sticks toward the badger sett – a big, old and mature sett that apparently has been there for centuries.

On top of Botrea Hill. One of the barrows is in the background – low, wide and rather rain-eroded now. It’s not exactly exciting up there, but 4,000 years ago this would have been pleasant grassland, with a fantastic all-round view.

Further on, up on the barrows, I lay there absorbing the sun, connecting my heart and solar plexus into the earth and letting my psyche float free. Then I turned over and opened up my aura to the heavens, drifting off somewhere. Came to, had a drink, fired up my sound recorder (a Japanese Zoom H4N Pro) and suddenly realised I was going to talk about aloneness and loneliness. Out it came. This is it.

I have a feeling some Far Beyond listeners will relate to this podcast quite personally. Loneliness falls on all of us at times in life, but it falls heavily nowadays on certain people – it’s a hole you can fall into and get stuck in, getting so accustomed to your own company that you start losing interest in normal social interactions. It’s insidious.

That’s weird, considering the world’s population is at its highest ever. That’s about social isolation, even alienation.

But we have a new issue today: you can be physically alone for much of the time but well-connected remotely over internet with loads of people. Online home-workers can get isolated – not just grannies and the disabled. As a book editor, I would take 2-3-4 weeks over each book, with little need to talk to anyone for that time – I specialised in tricky, intricate books that demanded a lot of editorial thought. This online connectivity is both a blessing and a sad symptom of the way we moderns have adopted a surrogate digital life.

I too use this medium as a way of overcoming isolation, and this podcast is an example. Though this highlights one of the points I make in the podcast: it’s possible to turn even loneliness to good use.

You can listen on Spotify
or on my website at www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
and it’s also on Apple and Google Podcasts.

This is an old part of the badger sett. Top-left you can see the runway into a new hole they’ve dug out. Badgers are very clean, and they keep their property spruce and tidy.

Far Beyond yet Amazingly Close

and round in circles

In August and September I’m going to be doing three ‘magic circles’ – An Afternoon in the Far Beyond with Palden Jenkins.

I’m really happy about the way these are working out. They’ll be in Glastonbury, Avebury and Buckfast, near Totnes, in Devon.

If you’re able to come, it would be really good to see you and share this with you.

Since getting cancer in late 2019, and with only some time left, I’ve been reflecting on what I need to pass on before I go. Over the decades I’ve had privileged exposure to profound experiences and played my part in the movement for change, and there’s something from all this that I want to share, while I still can.

I’ve always worked on creating energy-spaces, tastes of the world we’re heading towards, taking people deep and high, though keeping it simple. You get a taste of this in my blogs and podcasts. I can be quite metaphysical and political too, with a way of connecting wide-apart dots and helping people see and feel things they half-knew but hadn’t quite got.

I have a few friends Upstairs who will be in on this, so everyone present will get some personal treatment! You see, in this ‘last chapter’ phase of my life, though I’ve done all this kind of thing many times before, it feels like it’s going to a new level. It feels right to do this. We’ll do three ‘magic circles’ to see how it goes, and how I hold up, and then see what’s next.

All of the information is here: www.palden.co.uk/magic-circles.html

So I shall be venturing upcountry from the far beyond (I live right at the far end of Cornwall), and if you’re able to make it I’d love seeing you.

I’m doing an evening talk in Glastonbury too (date not fixed yet) called The Tipping of the Scales. If you live in or around Glastonbury or are visiting at the time, you might find it rather interesting!