March 2024 – Notes from the Far Beyond

Nine Principles

...and the weirdness of living on Earth

I wrote this as a comment to a posting on Facebook about the Sunday meditations, and part way through I realised it was worth making a full post out of it… I seem to be churning out a lot of stuff right now but, don’t worry, I’ll calm down!

Groupwork at the OakDragon Camp. Are you coming this year?

There’s a definite reason why the timing of the weekly meditation changes in terms of clock-time, though not in natural time. When I was with the Council of Nine thirty years ago (I compiled a book for them), they asked the human group involved with them to start meditating regularly in coordination with them, and they gave us a choice about when it should happen.

We decided on Sunday at 7pm GMT – the most available time that could work for everyone living between the Middle East and North America. But when we wondered about time-changes on the clock, they asked us to keep the time constant (that is, in Britain, 7pm in winter and 8pm in summer).

When asked why, they explained that, since they are beings that do not live in a world or on a planet, they have a technical challenge creating a connection between the timeless zone they’re in and the time-full zone we’re in. We live on (or in) a spinning, solar-orbiting planet where the changes involved with time (day/night and seasons) are a major part of the Earth experience.

Actually, the technicalities of fixing this up are sorted out by a hyper-civilisation called Ultima or Altea. They are one of twenty-four hyper-civilisations that work with and for The Nine, covering different aspects of the universe’s management and in a manner of speaking acting as creation and maintenance crews. The Alteans live in a timeless realm too, but they’re closer to us than the Nine, metaphysically speaking, so they have a capacity to reach into our world to set up the energy-field, the zone, around this meditation.

This allows the energy-field around this meditation to be established and ‘held’ for that half-hour time-period, as we experience it here on/in Earth.

This matter of The Nine and the Twenty-Four is not a universal hierarchy – more a bundle of reality-bubbles of enormous proportions, with some toward the centre and others toward the periphery yet all of them interlocking and interlinked on a multidimensional basis.

What I’ve found fascinating over the years is the accuracy of timing of the meditation – it’s as if the field noticeably switches on at the beginning, dead on time, and it shuts off and closes exactly at the end.

I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this. There’s something about this half-hour time-slot which, when it ends, makes one’s meditation change back to a more ‘normal’ kind that we would experience when meditating at other times. There’s no problem with that since both kinds of meditation have their value and function.

You don’t have to ‘believe’ in The Nine to experience, benefit from and participate in this energy-field – they are not interested in picking up a throng of followers. They have spoken their truth in the book I compiled – The Only Planet of Choice – and that’s all they wish to say, because they prefer us not to follow a scripture or set of instructions – they want us to use our inner experience and inner senses to feel our way into a spirit-field that connects with the essence of what all faiths are addressing – minus the cultural claptrap that they can be encumbered with. They just want to help the people of Earth wake up and get on with the business we came here for.

Personally, I like and respect people who have their own beliefs and ways of seeing things, who can stretch beyond them to see the spirit and soul in anyone, or any culture or faith, and somehow embody their beliefs in their lives, especially in their actions – even if they’re labelled as terrorists, infidels or unworthy souls. As the Dalai Lama would say, we’re all trying to achieve happiness, each in our own ways. Though each culture and time of history has its own misconceptions of what happiness truly implies.

If you wish to read more about The Nine, start here: www.palden.co.uk/nine.html – but even this is not necessary.

A Palestinian lady at the Sulha, a gathering of peacemakers in Israel, in 2005

I recommend you simply go by your inner sensitivities. If you resonate with the energy-field around this meditation, then that’s all that is necessary. That’s why I encourage all participants to do their meditation as they normally do it – and let it develop. What bridges us is that we all do it at the same time, with a similar basic motivation to help raise the level of the world and bring healing. It’s the motivation, not the method, that really matters – though methods can help, as long as we don’t get too stuck in them. If we get stuck in them, we narrow the vibrational frequency-range of our humanness and spirituality.

One thing we found in the Flying Squad (www.flyingsquad.org.uk) is that, if you step up to do the meditation every single week – 100% attendance – it does get easier, stronger and more fruitful. Though obviously this can only be done if it’s right for you at this stage of your life, and joining the meditation when you can, or even sporadically, is fine too. There’s no rulebook here.

For a short answer on who or what The Nine are, they’re part of what you could call the management structure of the universe, and they’re in charge of regulating the balances between polarities (light-dark, male-female, yin/yang). They refer to themselves as nine principles. But these principles each have beingness and individuality too, in a wordless kind of way. When I have experienced their presence in my inner journeys, I experience them as bodies of light and presence, without form, though they do have character and vibe-differences.

When asked about their relationship with ‘God’ they said something interesting (and this appealed to me, as someone with a Tibetan Buddhist background). They said that, when all of the consciousnesses of the universe attune to each other they become, in their words, ‘what you call God’. So when the Nine co-attune as nine beings, they are ‘God’, and when we co-attune with each other as humans, we also become ‘what you call God’. I am sure there are people reading this who have experienced that.

What I liked about them was that, in their communications in the 1970s-90s, they were uninterested in creating a cult or persuading people to align with their way of seeing things. They saw such a thing as part of our problem on Earth. We make a cult or religion out of our beliefs. This applies even to scientific rationalists, even to people with progressive political beliefs, the believers of which can act like a cult with a priesthood and a doctrine.

I distilled a 400-page book out of thousands of pages of channelled transcripts, working full-time for eighteen months, often for ten hours a day, six days a week – and only occasionally did it deplete me. So I’d take a break, but then I’d quiickly get fired up again. I was uplifted and much challenged by it.

Seemingly, they chose me because I have a universalist psycho-spiritual attitude. This is partially because I started on my inner path very experientially, as a hippy on psychedelics, rather than as a believer in a traditional faith. Though I am aligned somewhat with Buddhism, neo-paganism, Islam, megalthic shamanism and at least some of the whole panoply of teachings and blessing-streams available today, I’m not aligned with any of them, anchoring instead to my soul-origins and roots.

This was an advantage when working in Palestine – I could be in a mosque, church or synagogue and enter into the spirit that was present. I’ve become a kind of modern Western freebooting Imam, oscillating between being a saint and a sinner and, like everyone, struggling to reconcile the two in the way I conduct my life, fuckups’n’all.

Anyway, this is a rather long explanation for why the meditation time changes when the clocks change – we’re simply keeping to the same time-slot, as do the birds, the winds and the worms.

An ex-Islamic Jihad fighter and an ex-IDF soldier speaking peace at the Sulha

It was an immense privilege working with them. I found out later that they chose me for this work because, as a soul, they had actually placed the order for the seeding of my soul in the first place. As rather an individualist, a one-off case, I didn’t even properly fulfil what they had constructed me for – I worked as a kind of planet-fixer and morphological thought-energy engineer. For better or worse, I followed my own path.

But they found that what I became, through doing what I did, enabled me to take on certain kinds of assignment that they hadn’t anticipated. As a soul in service, I was on the edge of (in a manner of speaking) retiring, but they asked me to do one more job, please. So I came to Earth as a consultant to the sages of the time, around 5760 BCE, during a troubled period and a serious downturn in human development. And I kinda got stuck.

This karmic pattern, I guess, is repeating itself now – I was given cancer in 2019 and it has tipped me into the same pattern, of discovering a new mission just when I need to retire! In my involvement with seriously-bifurcated Israel-Palestine, I took a rather un-zealous approach, which can come when you’ve been at this kind of thing for a long time.

And there’s an important truth here: if you go to ‘the holy land’ expecting to bring peace, you will fail. It’s guaranteed. Just like Planet Earth! You have to go into the maelstrom with the simple motivation of adding your bit in whatever way you can to help people be as happy as possible in a shite bunch of circumstances. Then it works much better.

All that I have said doesn’t make me special – it’s just that I have gone into all this metaphysical claptrap more than most (I’ve got Jupiter in Pisces), so I’ve dug it up. Or bits of it, at least. Like an archaeologist, you can stand on an ancient site but you won’t learn a lot from it unless you do some digging, or at least some subtle way of seeing under the surface to find out more about what’s buried there. For me, doing past-life regression helped a lot.

But it also involved saying Yes when offered the opportunity to discover something new in the inner realms and in life’s experiences. Too often, we say No, or we block it with fear or distraction. Actually, it took me until age 42 to give myself full permission to do it – just before I worked for the Nine, as it happened.

As an inner experience, I had to allow myself to tip backwards over the edge of a cliff, the Abyss, in trust. I went over, not without trepidation, spinning and falling through infinity, only to find suddenly that I could fly! Whoooeee!!! From then on I was much more proficient in space travel.

Doing the Nine book happened like this. I was sitting working as an editor for a small publisher in 1991, Gateway Books. The phone rang, and the publisher, Alick Batholomew (bless him) answered, chatting some time with what seemed to be an old friend. Then he turned to me and asked, “Fancy editing a book of kind of ET channellings?“. No, I wasn’t interested – at that stage I’d rather had enough of a lot of the psychic claptrap that was flying around at the time. I shook my head. I returned to my work and he to the call. But suddenly there was a knocking or ringing on the top of my head. “OMG”, thought I. I told Alick to put the guy on once he’d finished.

It was Sir John Whitmore. We clicked immediately, a bit like we already knew each other. He invited me to an interview. I went to meet him and Phyllis Schlemmer in Kent, and we had the interview, and they seemed happy with me. We had lunch. Then John said, “Now for the interview“. Oh! I honestly thought we’d done it already, but no – I was to speak directly with The Nine. They were in charge.

It got all set up, and Phyllis worked herself down into a trance. It took about 20 minutes and a lot of focus – she went really deep in ways that most psychics cannot. I talked to the Nine. I can’t remember much of it, but I was concerned that I might not be the right person for the job. In the previous year my life had been an utter mess, and I didn’t feel good about myself. But the Nine simply said words to the effect of: “We know you, you know us, you need no preparation, and there is no one else“. I fell off the floor. This was a form of validation that, at the time, was a deep shock. Isn’t it funny how things go?

So I spent the next eighteen months under voluntary lockdown, out of this world, with a force-field around my house in Glastonbury (Chilkwell Street). I had just three visitors during that time. The phone stopped ringing, and people in Glastonbury thought I’d gone away. The amazing thing was that, on the very day I delivered the manuscript to the publisher, the phone started ringing and people started coming to the door saying “Where have you been?“. All I could do was smile. Yes, where had I been?

I trawled through mountains of transcripts on computer, picking out good chunks, saving them as files – using a very Virgoid filing system – and, after a year of this, I had 700 files saved and edited to make them more readable.

I had to edit the text a lot, thoughtfully and sensitively. The Nine, never having lived in a realm where words are necessary, had to raid the brains of Phyllis and all of us to find words. So it was a slow process, with a lot of seeking of terminology and phraseology, and their wordage was cumbersome… ‘that of the essence of that which you are…‘, and ‘that of what you call God‘, and things like that. A lot of searching and debating went on, both with the other eight members of The Nine and amongst us. Quite often Tom, the spokesbeing, consulted back with the Nine. We wanted to get this right, and they made sure there were no misunderstandings.

So there I was, faced with 700ish files. OMG, what do I do now? I decided to climb the Tor (I went to Brean Down too – a special place), and I slept on it. One morning I woke up with the idea, ‘Just start‘. Perfectly obvious, really, but as a brainy, educated Brit, something that simple was difficult to get to!

I sat there looking at all these files, got my mouse and just clicked the cursor on one of them. This is the edited version of what came out:

“GUEST: Tom, it’s nice to meet you. Could you define who you are, please?
TOM: I am Tom, I am the spokesman for the Council of Nine. We are the Council of Nine, we oversee what you term the universe. We are of nine principles of the universe.
GUEST: Whom do you represent – a higher authority above you that commands you and directs your ways?
TOM: This is difficult to explain to you, for the world has no similar situation, but we would say to you, yes, we are in connection with one that is higher, but in totality together we are one, as that of all the universe is one.
GUEST: Do you have any purpose in our world, any major purpose or message?
TOM: We wish you to know first that we are not physical beings. Your world is the manifestation of Creation, and of the Creator manifest in your world, in the form of humankind. You ask if we have a message to humankind?
GUEST: Yes I do.
TOM: We say to you: you have been created in the image of the Creator. This world has lost identity with Creation. What is of necessity is to understand the importance of going forth and creating action and deed that bring you to completion in who you are. It is not enough to pray, it is not enough to gather groups of humankind for meditation. What is of importance is to act.“

[‘Guest’ was, if I remember rightly, someone who came for a session with the Nine with Gene Roddenbery. The ethics behind Startrek were based on Gene’s discussions with them. Tom was actually Atum, an Egyptian god. The Nine never manifested on Earth, but their existence was known in various ancient cultures. Understanding the human propensity to create glittery stars and daunting gods, Tom deliberately and wisely demystified himself by using the name Tom, to reduce the perceptual distance between him and humans.]

Wow, I’d picked a good way to start – randomly, but obviously it was not random at all. That’s how the book unfolded. If I came to a blockage, I’d sleep on it, take a walk and wait, and the answer would come, just like that. I guess you could call that ‘psychic editing’.

Note the teaching here: such things as prayer and meditation can help us and the wider world greatly, though they are not a substitute for action and stepping over the line.

I had the same ‘psychic editing’ thing some years later when building an online archive for Sir George Trevelyan (who died in 1996, age 96 or so). He was one of the founders of the new age movement in Britain in the 1940s-1970s, a spiritual grandfather to many people and projects. I was one of his minders in his final years. The archive is still there: https://sirgeorgetrevelyan.uk

If I couldn’t figure out a detail – where to put a photo or what colour to use – I’d just deep-think about him and say, “George, whaddya want here?“, and he’d answer – not usually in words, but I got to know what to do. He got the website he wanted by supervising me, even after death. Amazing. It was a great privilege, believe me. In fact, right now, tears have come up and they’re dribbling down my smiling face.

I wrote this in year 2000: “Sir George has been fondly referred to as ‘the Grandfather of the New Age Movement’, a title somewhat misunderstood by those who did not know him. His ‘New Age’ did not involve cult, fad and woolly notions. It involved a non-sectarian, holistic outlook, scientific and practical as well as mystical. It involved a compassionate, global humanitarianism very pertinent to our day.“

Anyway, back the The Nine. If it interests you, there’s a PDF copy of the original manuscript of the Nine book here: www.palden.co.uk/nine.html – and download the second PDF offered there, the pre-publication version.

The other version is a pruned version that was prepared for translation into other languages. I submitted the pre-pub version to the publisher in November 1992, just before the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1993, during which year the book was published. Some bits were by necessity edited out of the first edition by John and Phyllis, partially because they might have put members of the human Nine group in danger (concerning mainly ET and geopolitical issues).

But since they are all now dead, I feel there’s no harm now in including those bits – and I get the feeling The Nine are nodding Yes. John, Andrija, Phyllis and the others are safe in another world now. I miss them, but we shall meet again.

There were a few different editions of the book, and I did the first, the 1993 edition. The first edition now has collector’s value and it can be ridiculously expensive. The second was by Mary Bennett, with her take on it. You can get a newer printed edition (with my commentaries removed, but they’ve retained much of the work I did) from USA: www.theonlyplanetofchoice.com – or try Amazon and other sources.

Making a wicker coffin at the Oak Dragon – later we put it on a pyre with all our thoughts and prayers, and up it went

Those of you who recognise the vibe, somewhere in the recesses of your soul, like a little bell tinkling, will inherently know The Nine, and they will know you. But even if you don’t recognise them, it doesn’t matter – they’re friendly, and it’s okay, diverse and inclusive.

You see, the Universe has a staff shortage on Earth – we Earthlings are so distracted with our earthly joys and woes, and we argue so endlessly about things like ceasefires or politicians’ bloopers instead of really getting in there and helping sort things out. It drives Gazans crazy, giving them the impression no one cares.

But there are things we can do within the sphere of our own lives. The main one is: be a good person and do your best with the life you have and the situation you’re in. There are gifts and specialisms we can develop too – anything from knitting to driving buses to running a business well to attending COP conferences in Baku. Wherever you’re called to go, whatever you’re called to do, the issue is to do it and not to hang back, delaying to another day. And it’s just not good enough to believe you’re not good enough!

The Universe has a staff shortage of willing and active volunteers, so any help at all is welcome, and small things make a bigger difference than we tend to believe – especially when millions do it. Such as staying human and treating each other as we would like to be treated ourselves. If there is one single formula for our future world, it’s that. I’m good at churning out yardages of verbiage, and a few other things, and that’s what I do. And the meditations are one way of tuning into a taproot within yourself, whence your inspiration and inner promptings come.

Being a good human doesn’t involve being perfect. Get real – this is Planet Earth and it’s bloody difficult. But it does involve working on ourselves and with others so that we get better at being human and at doing what we’re here for. A nuclear physicist once asked this of the Nine: if there were one thing we could do that would really change the world, what would it be? Tom answered simply, and in a unique way that I cannot imitate: “If everyone pursued their life-purpose“. It’s that simple. Do what you’re programmed up to do. It’s there in you.

Ibrahim Abu el-Hawa, a spiritual grandfather from the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem, talking with a Native American and an Israeli hippy at the Jerusalem Hug in 2011

Oh, and there’s something else. A number of people claim to speak on behalf of or channel The Nine. Sorry, not true – though they might nevertheless be communicating with a civilisation that has connections with The Nine. Consider this: if you lived in Sudan or Palestine, if a UN representative showed up, you’d consider them to be the UN and to have a direct line into UN HQ (whether or not they do). It’s similar here. The Nine are involved with an enormous network of civilisations and beings, working with and through them, and during the meditation you’re plugging into that network.

Claims to authority are not what validates the content of channelled material: what matters is the quality of the content itself. It doesn’t matter whether the source claims to be Jesus or Lord Sananda if what is being conveyed is dazzling, weak, meaningless and it’s all been said before.

The Nine do not live on a world, or a moon of Saturn, or anywhere else. They are not at present speaking out, no matter what anyone says. There is no need: they have said all they need to say for this period of history, and things haven’t fundamentally changed since the late twentieth century, so there’s little more to say until we progress to the next stage.

In the Nine book, it’s not the words and details that are the main thing, it’s what comes between the lines, and the connection and re-wiring that we get when we read it. It jiggles our cells and reminds us of things we know, deep in our hearts. So while many of the contents of the book pertain to the 1970s-90s, with a little intelligence it’s easy to apply such insights to current events of our time. They don’t want followers – they seek simply to encourage us to get on with what we know we need to do.

One thing I like about the book is that it does not try to change our way of seeing things, and we don’t even have to believe what they say. But it’s full of winking lightbulbs. It can add to the way we see things, articulating things that many of us half-know but hadn’t quite realised yet. It has a way of extending our field of vision – but you can still continue along the path you were already on. The issue is, whatever you do, do it as well as you can, and the rest will follow.

So that’s the story of the book, and also some background to the reason why I’ve started these meditations. I continue with them whether or not anyone else is there, but it sure does make a difference when people are there. Because when we meld in consciousness, even at a distance, ‘what you call God’ is there and present. Because ‘God’ (however you wish to see it) is us. We are the creators of the universe, and the job isn’t finished yet.

Sometimes people ask me, “Do you believe in UFOs?“. To which the only good answer I can think up is: “Do you believe in cars?“.

With love, Palden.

If this stuff interests you, then there are talks I’ve done in past years about it in my audio archive.
This one in particular: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts/PPArchive-ETViewOfTerrestrials.mp3
and the whole lot is here: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

Site: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Palestine Audiobook: www.palden.co.uk/audiobook.html
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Social Healing

One of the themes of my life has been social healing – stimulating social and community psycho-spiritual growth. This took shape through the camps of the 1980s and 1990s, community events and early online social networking in Glastonbury and working at the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem – it was, and still is, focused on trauma recovery and social reconstruction in the militarily occupied West Bank of Palestine.

Modernity has brought individualism with it – the development of an urban-industrial society required the breakdown of community bonds and social sharing. Nowadays so individuated, each responsible for our own lives whether or not we like it, we tend to over-personalise our hurts, complexes and issues. Some of us take more personal responsibility than is due too, out of compassion, guilt or charitable activism.

But this individualism arises from a social-cultural pressure, like an endemic viral infection that is well embedded in the rich world, though in some societies it has only recently hit them, not least through the medium of the mobile phone. Such societies start breaking down when the brainiest and most enterprising of their members start leaving, heading for cities, jobs and universities.

Many of our difficulties arise from being part of a society, a culture, and their institutions, values and customs – and their webs of power. So if, for example, you grow spiritually or in terms of human potential, people and situations can frequently obstruct or resist these changes in you, or cause you disadvantage, and it gets difficult, and profound choices arise.

One of them is: should I pursue my own path or should I stay in this situation to try to improve things over time? This is not easily answered – it’s not just a matter of selfishness, and it goes much deeper. Nowadays many people leave their communities in order to work in cities or abroad, and to send remittances back home to help the family, and they perceive it as their only option. Many people in Gaza would like to leave, but also they don’t want to leave their families (and the Egyptians charge $5,000 per person to get out of Gaza).

This is a dilemma that all of us variously face at times – a conflict between fitting in or doing your own thing that is a big factor in social churn, divorce, family and community breakup – and it has very mixed outcomes. This inner struggle is a side-effect of intense change.

Nelson Mandela, who took a big destiny on his shoulders, once wrote that he felt he had failed to resolve key dimension of this question: for him it was a conflict between duty to his family and duty to his people. I’ve faced this question quite a few times and, looking back, I still have mixed feelings about it.

But in recent decades, those of us who are more awake than most people have been faced with a barrage of cultural, social and institutional opposition to or rejection of the kind of beliefs we hold. These beliefs have a lot of variety, colour, contradiction and value to them, but in the end they all boil down to a key issue: whether or how much to prioritise either personal or collective benefit.

Another issue lurks behind this, summed up in Jesus’ words, ‘by their works shall you know them‘. Not ideas, advocacy, explanations, disinformation or ideology but actual actions and the way we walk our talk.

The future is not just about economics, resources, AI, ecosystems, carbon sequestering or even space travel. At the heart of all these issues lies the small matter of social healing. For me, it started off during ‘the Troubles’, a student uprising at the London School of Economics, where I was a student. [For a 15-min video about it, try this.] We got squelched. As I experienced this, feeling the impact of suppression of our movement for change, I saw also how we ourselves had screwed up our own cause. People had slipped into endless argument, disagreement and a confrontative approach to protest, and there were regrettable scenes mixed in amongst the brilliance, excitement and flowering that went on at the heart of our attempted revolution.

It wasn’t at the time clear to me exactly why and how this had happened, but it set me on a path. During the 1970s, in my twenties, I went through a lot of inner growth, learning more about awareness, psychotherapy and social dynamics. I went through my own process, where I found myself screwing up even when I didn’t mean to, and faced with a mountain of young person’s acute dilemmas that sometimes felt too big to handle.

At one stage, during my Saturn Return around age 29, I contemplated suicide. Actually it was a ruthless truth process and soul-searching, and it led me to committing to my calling. That calling wasn’t clear and distinct, but I had to make myself available and willing to be given a task. The shape and expression of it surfaced within a few years.

I had accumulated a bundle of experiences during my teens and twenties that made me feel like a jack of all trades and a master of none, but the fascinating thing was that when my mission did take shape, all of those skills and abilities gelled together, suddenly making sense. I had the full range of skills needed. It was as if life had been preparing me for it without my knowing.

Looking across St Ives Bay toward Godrevy lighthouse

Fast-forward to the 1980s, and something drove me to start the camps movement, as well as a stream of conferences and gatherings in Glastonbury that developed thereafter. I didn’t know this was going to happen – I was just driven, or shoe-horned, even to some extent tricked into it. The Great Cosmic Trickster has greater designs than we can see, and sometimes we must be thrown into things and presented with a choiceless choice.

It was an old friend, Jamie George, who did it. He asked me to help him organise a gathering in the Assembly Rooms in 1983. At the time they were threatened with demolition, and several of us set about creating events there, to bring energy into it and stop the demolition. One late-summer’s evening Jamie and I sat in his garden brainstorming it and coming up with an innovative formula for running the gathering. It’s what came to be called circle-working. Though it’s as old as the hills, ancient and archetypal, circle-working was not at that time practiced in our society, whether alternative or ‘straight’.

Time went on, Jamie beetled off, leaving me to it and, before long, I and a squad of Glastonbury friends I brought together were organising week-long holistic educational camps, usually for 100-500 people. Each had a theme (Astrology, Earth Mysteries, Music and Dance and, later, Arts and Crafts, Healing, Ceremony), with transformative intent, group process and a foundation of circle-working – mainly use of the talking stick.[3] We were improvising and innovating in a seat-of-the-pants kind of way, but it was dynamite.

In the 1990s I took this further with the Hundredth Monkey Project – consciousness-work camps specifically addressing world problems of the time, where we applied to world issues methods and ways drawn from the personal-growth sphere. Again, it was based on circle-working.

One of the big unexpected discoveries we made was this: by focusing on ‘world work’, personal growth was vastly accelerated as a by-product. The idea was to set aside our personal growth, to serve a greater sphere – the wider world. But for participants the personal growth implications were enormous. In fact, this led to an unforeseen problem, because each summer camp had such a transformative effect on participants that they tended not to return in later years – it had had such big consequences for them that they were already ‘cooked’ and busy getting on with what had started for them as a result of the camp.

But there was more. Here we come to the social healing bit. For me, it was a big learning. The idea with camps was to create an accelerated growth environment in which people could truly step back into themselves and flower as souls. In this we were very successful. It wasn’t just some people who experienced breakthroughs: it was everyone, without exception. Together, through social bonding and working at it together, we had lifted each other up – we had risen together.

Some of the best camps were those that were the most challenged. We had no shortage of weather events hitting us, and also, in 1986, we had the Chernobyl meltdown, which started on the very day that one of the camps began. Yet these experiences pulled us together by shoving us through the grinder. They forced everyone to become really sure why they were there. It generated commitment and group focus, hundred-percentness.

There was a classic moment in 1987, the morning after a Force Eight gale had ripped through on the very first night of a camp in Wales. We had downed all marquees and tents and crammed into the geodesic domes we had, since these were the only safe structures in a gale and monsoon. For some people this was a nightmarish experience – one of those dark, threatening nights with lashing rain and furious winds that can go on forever, bringing up loads of fear and desolation.

Next morning, the storm had gone. All was still, the sun was breaking through and everything was dripping and remarkably colourful, in a sopping, late-summer way. I was standing there outside, blinking and assessing the scene, having hosted fourteen people in my two-person dome. A new camper was standing with me, looking wan and pale, telling me she couldn’t handle this and she was going to go home.

I was quiet, wondering how to respond when, suddenly, from upfield, came a shout, “Tea, anyone?“, and one of the site crew processed down the field like a butler, with a big tray of mugs of tea. It was a poignant moment. The lady just broke down, crying her eyes out. And she loved her tea, and she stayed with us. And her life changed. She made a growth choice there and then – the atmosphere of the camp had prised her open. That’s just one story of many such epiphanies. Another camper once said, “This is what I have always dreamed of, but never thought it could actually happen“.

Though the success of the camps was very much teamwork, resting on the qualities and experience of our camp crews and the innate wisdom of participants, as the key instigator of all this I was going through big epiphanies too. Not just personal, but concerning this matter of social healing.

At every camp there would be a crunch-and-breakthrough point. At the early camps it often took about five days but later on it came after three or so, as the group atmosphere of the camps evolved. There was a point where people had settled into camping, been through a few days of it, and they were lighting up, feeling part of each other’s lives and gaining momentum. There was a rising feeling of this is it, that we were in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing. As if this was meant to be happening. As if this was a model for a future society, where everyone got on, worked together, served each other and enjoyed each other’s presence. The guards came down, shared trust rose, and a brightness started shining in people’s eyes.

And then, something would happen. Often it would come out of nowhere.

It could have been someone snoring through the night and disturbing others (a tolerance issue). One year, a person slept around and spread a sexual disease – a big controversy bringing up loads of stuff. Or it could be someone suffering withdrawal symptoms from meat – the food was vegetarian only. Or tents leaked in the night. Or kids got into a scrap. Or, one year, the Hippy Convoy arrived at the gate, pursued from Savernake Forest by police, demanding that we rescue them and give them a place to camp.

Of course, this fell on me and key members of the crew and facilitators to sort out – to deal with people placing blame or getting upset, and quite often it involved complex, reverberating community situations. But there was enough love and care around for these societal explosions to work through. We turned it into a group process to turn problems into assets. It wasn’t one person’s problem – it was our problem, and all of us were stakeholders, together.

I’m glad to say that, on the whole, we succeeded in this – especially by the 1990s at the M100 camps. This arose from a buildup of collective skill and experience that could contain and channel social energy in all sorts of ways. Also most participants were willing to go that way, contributing their own gifts and inputs, while the rest gave it a try, going along with it and soon realising that this was something amazing to be part of. It became a cauldron of mutualised contribution – powerful sharings and dynamics during talking-stick sessions, or in afternoon workshops, or around campfires.

This is how social healing works. It works particularly through the medium of crisis and shock, precipitated particularly by unforeseen things against which we have few defences. A recent example, in the news recently, was a ship that destroyed a bridge, killed people and blocked a major port in Baltimore, USA – something no one was prepared for. It’s the kind of event that says something. No doubt people will apportion blame for this disaster but, if we’re honest, if we want to have the fruits and luxuries of a developed civilisation, this is what will happen, no matter who actually does it.

It’s not them – it’s us. This truth lies at the nub of social healing. This is a key issue today in the collective psyche (with Pluto in Aquarius for two decades from 2023 to 2043): there are those who opt toward collective, mutually-empathetic solutions and those who resort to self-interest or sectoral interest. Both options have their costs and benefits. But the costs of self-interest are nowadays outweighing their benefits – so historically we’re heading toward more collective awareness.

Human society as a whole has an endemic case of PTSD. History has been traumatic, pretty much everywhere. The pain and behavioural aberrations that arise from this are rooted not just in past events that we know and remember, but also in collective experiences that are long forgotten.

I have written before about a time in Britain around 1200 BCE, over three millennia ago, when the people of Britain underwent a mass trauma which then played a large part in all that happened afterwards, including four invasions of our country over a thousand year period. This trauma happened at the end of the megalithic period around 1200. The megalithic period had stretched back 2,500 years up to that point. A spell was broken, a mainly-sustainable, cooperative, enspirited society fell, and it was replaced by insecurity, social decline, warlords, weaponry, territorialism and grief (also climate change). That’s big.

Today, many young people today won’t remember or care a lot about what happened in WW1 and WW2 – they’re consigned to history – but these two traumas are programmed deeply in their own genes, contributing to their current preoccupations and anxieties – they are descendants of survivors who went through a very hard time. In my own case, my mother spent two years under the Blitz in London and Swansea, my father lost a leg in Egypt, and my grandfathers were in the Battle of the Somme and the British invasion of Iraq and Palestine.

Yet the addictive consumerism that many young activists point out today was induced by trauma, horror and shortage, and the consequent urge, emerging in the 1950s-60s, to cover it all over with food, security, holidays and overconsumption.

So solving a major component of the ecological-climatic crisis involves deep social healing – the healing of trauma and its effects. Not just trauma, but cultural beliefs, intolerances and insecurities, identity and diversity issues and many more.

This healing process won’t happen overnight – it’s multi-generational. But we need to start it, and somehow keep it manageable by building up social processing mechanisms and a body of experience in all sectors of society which can ‘hold the energy’ and help it work through in ways that don’t turn destructive.

St Ives Head, a Neolithic and Iron Age cliff sanctuary

War is a critical issue, as part of this. I read recently that a study had shown that over 90% of Hamas fighters had experienced their fathers being killed. Little explanation is needed – it’s all about pain and how we respond to it. And, take note: if that had been you, you’d probably land up being such a fighter too. Either that, or you might become an exceptionally brave and driven peacemaker if you so chose – one of those who are rarely mentioned in the news.

The world teeters on an edge where a very big collective decision is needed, regarding war. While explosions and horrors go on, other big world issues cannot progress. The world’s sensitivities are dulled. Resources are misdirected into ‘defence’ and wasted in both destruction and reconstruction. Our moral compunction is overlaid with anger and dismay. Our capacity to see that we all sail in the same boat is obscured. We fall for the belief that other people and nations are against us and a danger to us. This is a mass-psychological complex.

There are elements in this world who wish to crank up this belief too – not heal it. Such a belief does have substance, but there are other ways of dealing with it. It’s not just a matter of diplomacy but one of deep social change. Some people deliberately stoke up division and conflict – our good friend Benjamin Natanyahu is a classic case, but he’s by no means unique. Such people have a vengeance to carry out on a world that has mistreated them. Or they’re on a power trip, though this often arises from past pain too. Or they and their oligarch-team are struggling to stay on top. Or they can’t drop the addiction to conflict (or the money).

The majority of people have grudgingly fallen for the habit of accepting division, conflict and war – they regret seeing their children die, but they still fall into this pattern of belief, even financing their own children’s deaths through their work and taxes. Some nations rely on a psychology of fear and division to justify their existence. Some oligarchies cannot exist without it.

In Britain, divide and rule, a power-imposition pattern taught to us a long time ago by our conquerors the Romans and the Normans and nowadays embodied in the ethics of the Conservative party, is a pattern arising from trauma. It’s not uncommon that imperialistic nations – Britain, Russia, China, Turkey, USA, Netherlands, France, Israel and others – generated the historic urge to conquer as a result of being conquered or oppressed themselves, further back in time.

But this is not the only option: Canada, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Costa Rica, and to some extent Germany and Japan, tend the other way. None of these nations are angels, but they see things differently. Peacebuilding is not an impossible task.

We don’t commit acts of warfare only militarily – nowadays economic and psychological warfare are big things.

On the economic front, we smug Brits, we run a neat string of offshore banking centres for the sequestering of wealth and the unaccounted processing of enormous transactions. That’s one of our specialisms – clean, kinda legal and smart corruption. Around one third of all the world’s money goes there. We have straight-laced, official, smart, seemingly law-abiding banks in the City of London, though those same banks have shadow subsidiaries in the Caymans, Belize, Virgin Islands, Singapore, Isle of Man or Jersey to handle the unaccounted stuff (everything from Apple profits to drug barons’ billions to Nigerian oligarchs’ money-stashes to corporate mega-transactions). Good business. However, not good for people and planet (or national government tax-takes).

These kinds of obstructions are not insurmountable: it requires people to hang together, clarify and state our collective wisdom and preference, and vote with our feet (or even fingers). It requires electoral swings, mass consumer choices, campaigns and also – this is the critical one that leads to real action and change – the right kind of response to events and defining moments.

We’ve had one recently with Gaza. All of the demos and campaigns of recent months have not really paid off in terms of ceasefires. But in terms of historic swings and consensual tiltings, Gaza represents a turning-point. The failure of popular will, globally, has consolidated a deeper shift underneath which is far more firm and solid. It’s not specifically about Gaza, though Gaza, following on from Mariupol and Aleppo, has triggered it. It’s about large-scale destruction itself, and people as victims of it. It comes at the same time as the film Oppenheimer and a range of other events that make this a defining moment or period. Doing blanket devastation of this kind will not be so easy in future.

A tide is turning, even if it takes a generation to do so. When tides are turning, nothing much happens except for powerful undercurrents and a buildup of potential for a full-flux tidal flow to follow. That’s what could be happening here. It depends on the world public to carry this through without sitting back, believing the job is done, or forgetting because of the pressure of other concerns.

Hence, in the Sunday meditations, I’ve sometimes suggested building and consolidating a certain thought or image, since strengthening such thoughts in collective consciousness – such as reconciliation or justice – is a key part of this process. It’s all a matter of where the centre of gravity, where the tilting point in the collective psyche, stands. Gaza has shifted it. The sacrifice Gazans are making is not entirely fruitless.

Forty years ago the Greenham Women surrounded the USAF cruise missile base at Greenham Common. They made a really strong point that hit home in the hearts and minds of many people. The base didn’t close right then because something larger was happening – the end of the Cold War, an historic process that came pretty quickly once it came. The base closed during the 1990s. The women’s action worked, even though most scepto-pundits continue to believe there was no relationship between the women’s protests and the geopolitical change that followed around seven years later. Or perhaps it was just chance. Yeah, sure. But there was a connection: the women put in the work on a psycho-spiritual level which gave a big shove of momentum, alongside the efforts of Solidarinosz in Poland and other movements bringing about the Velvet Revolutions. The Iron Curtain just so happened to come down – and in history, seven years is a blink of an eye.

This is how it works. It’s in the psyche of humanity, the collective unconscious. That’s how change comes. A strange twist might also be this: when the moment comes, the actual ignition-event that catalyses such a shift could be quite small and unexpected, in a place and from a source that most people don’t anticipate until it pops. Then suddenly a widlfire starts.

Remember the young Tunisian street seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself alight and sparked the Arab Revolutions? Martyrdom worked for him and he set alight a tidal surge across the Muslim world that has been tamped down for now but it has not gone out. It’s an historic process, and many threads and factors are involved.

Newton’s third law applies to the course of history: to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Yet, while the wheel turns round and round there is a net movement in a prevailing direction. This is one reason why we need to give thanks for the assholes and badguys of this world: they prompt us to pull our fingers out. Because if we don’t, they’ll carry on. They exist because we allow them to exist. They embody the ghouls and devils within the collective psyches of nations and the world, and it is here that, at root, change and immunity need to develop.

Historic processes can be accelerated, and one day in the coming decades (my astrologer’s guess is around 2048-65), we’re heading for a time of intensity, of going through the mangle. We’re already going through it, but there’s more to come, and it’ll get bigger. We can make this easier or more difficult – that’s the main option available. It depends how much we Earth humanoids decide to agree. Or at least to agree to disagree while cooperating over the essentials.

The big historic change we’re going through this century involves addressing issues that go back centuries and millennia. In essence, it’s a transformation from a competitive to a cooperative collective mindset, society and civilisation. Because we’re all in the same boat, and the boat is now rather crowded and unstable.

With love, Palden

Site: http ://www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Audiobook: http://www.palden.co.uk/audiobook.html
Podcasts: http://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Sunday Meditation

St Michael’s Mount as seen from Botrea Hill, the hill on our farm

I don’t post on a weekly basis here, about the Sunday meditations, but whether or not I do, we continue meditating together every week, wherever we are, and at the same time. There’s no mantra or prscription: just do the meditation, prayer, inner journeying or just sitting as you usually do, together with us.

If this interests you, you’re welcome to join us. For more details, there’s a link below. I do make weekly announcements on Facebook though.

In UK and Europe the clocks change this weekend, so the meditation is now between 8 and 8.30pm. My apologies: in USA and most of Canada the clocks changed on 10th March! Add one hour to the time you previously meditated. In other parts of the world, please check online.

But the real time stays the same, and that’s why we do this – it’s only clocks, not life, that have changed. Nature and the planet carry on as before. Also, during summertime, the later time works well in terms of the patterns of our daily lives, as the days grow longer.

In the meditation, feel free to ‘fly’ where you’re needed. But if you want something to give some focus to, I’d suggest humanitarian organisations and their work – not only what they do, but also the awkward and sometimes dangerous position they are in, in places like Sudan, Gaza, Haiti, Yemen and Congo. And the way that the world signs up to noble goals while failing to fund and support them fully and properly.

You’re welcome to join us in the zone, to meditate together wherever you are, and however you do it. For details:

www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

What unites us is meditating together at the same time, and a shared basic intent to raise up the world and assist in its, and our, positive evolution. A once-a-week, simple, undemanding meditation can be a really good habit to fall into.

The Mount as seen from Caer Bran, an ancient hilltop gathering place

And…

For you who are a regular or semi-regular, I have two questions. You’re welcome to give feedback below or write to me about it. 1. Do you think there would be benefit in starting a dedicated page on Facebook for the meditations, together with a discussion group? 2. If a discussion group, do you think it would be better to have it password-protected (closed), or open, or both?

The background thought to this is: there will come a time, sometime, when I am no longer here or active. So I seek to find out whether there is momentum for the meditation to continue when I’m out of the game. This process can start small, slowly and organically, so that something has consolidated by the time it’s needed. If or whenever it will be needed.

With love. Palden.

St Michael’s Mount from the other direction, with Penzance behind, on the left

The Greatly Unknowable

Zarathrustra spake thus, all over the Isles of Scilly

The world was on tenterhooks. After the assassination of Trump’s vice-president by a white South African, America could no longer play off different groups of nations against each other. Netanyahu’s threat to drop nukes on Turkey had put NATO in an acutely difficult position, exposing its double standards. Trump was raging at Israel’s intransigence and Putin, looking haggard in his hospital bed, uttered boisterous words in support of him when everyone knew that, in his tenuous position, and now being undermined by the Moscow oligarchy, he could promise nothing.

The Israeli civil disturbances were brutal, with neither side willing to step back – the media were under strict instructions not to call it a civil war. The mowing down by the Judaean Settler Army of Palestinians trying to escape over the Jordan valley had variously dismayed the world, exposing the inevitable consequences of their inaction. Even Israelis were not allowed out of Israel – at Ben Gurion airport and the two remaining land crossing points, only approved Israelis could leave. There had been a full-scale call-up of reservists but they were taking different sides, taking their weaponry with them. India had at last withdrawn its support for Israel. China had remained silent, concerned as usual about its markets, oil sources and leverage in the newly denominated West Asia.

After the establishment of the Sahelian Dirham, the currency of the new Sahelian Alliance, other small countries flooded to join it, abandoning the Dollar and distancing also from the newly-minted Renminbi-Rouble bloc – after all, the Russians and Chinese were resource-gulping imperialists too. The resignation of the UN Secretary General, saying he had done his best but it had led only to this, was rejected by a uniquely united Security Council. Then Netanyahu, looking taut-faced and cornered, put the cat amongst the pigeons. He boldly declared in Hebrew that, if threats against Israel continued, he would detonate his country’s nukes and incinerate the country – by implication, a second, self-imposed holocaust, as if to prove his version of history to be correct. Chaos broke out not only in Israel but also in the steets of Damascus, Beirut, Amman and Cairo as crowds panicked.

Trump’s speech from Mar a Lago (since Washington DC had become too dangerous) had been surprisingly firm and calming – the invasion would be paused for now. Secretary Blinken, drafted from his thinktank job by Trump to deal with a situation he had played a large role in creating, was to be given a last chance to pacify the Israelis. Gaza, left with only stragglers and people unable to escape, already looked as if it had been nuked, though it hadn’t. Saudi Arabia had reluctantly opened its borders to Palestinians to relieve refugee pressure on UAE and Egypt – well, it swelled the numbers moving into Neom, the new desert city not too far from Sinai and Gaza. Meanwhile, UNHCR, backed by the first Polish and Swedish battallions in the new European army, had taken over refugee operations in Greece. Refugees were coming in big numbers. Now there was a new crowd from the Tashkent earthquake and nuclear disaster.

In the English Channel, disaster came when a container freighter and an oil tanker collided. An oil and chemical slick was spreading and most shipping through the busy Channel was blocked. Both ships had been trying to avoid refugee boats. The UK authorities were now running ferries to Calais to pick up refugees who were endangering shipping in yet another of the world’s maritime choke-points. This caused further supply-line disruptions in crisis-ridden Europe as shipping was diverted north of Scotland, exposing it to both Russian and American naval attentions. Europe was on its own, suddenly sandwiched between two big powers.

A wee visitor at my home, aspiring to do the washing up

Possible realities… Improbable, yet all the same possible.

A big problem we face is that the world approaches the future facing backwards. We see the future on the past’s terms, afraid to make a leap, afraid to acknowledge that we’re lost at sea, afraid that everything could go wrong – and in so doing, we’re making things even worse. Consequence-delivering chickens are coming home to roost, in waves. This might go on for a number of decades, because the world seems so determined to drag its feet through every single learning experience that comes to face it. Such global brinkmanship arises from a collective failure to own up to the full consequences of what we have done. A multipolar deadlock has unfolded. The powers that be are all busily making sure nothing really changes – not fundamentally.

But there is another kind of brink we’re slipping over. It started around 2012 or, further back, perhaps 1989. Or perhaps 1967-68. It’s this: even if the world decided tomorrow to mobilise humanity, wholeheartedly embracing fundamental change, we would tip into a new, anxious period of at least a few decades. Whatever we do, we would not know for some time whether and how much the solutions we attempt will actually bear fruit.

It takes time for a forest to grow, for an invention to be trialled, for society to change its values and for the fruits of systems-redesign to show themselves. Not all solutions will work, some might backfire, and the world is hamstrung, riddled with complexity, interdependence and conflicting interests. We’ve sidled into a minefield. This creates an underlyingly edgy and anxious atmosphere, stoking up an already insecure and volatile situation.

I’m happy to report that my little visitor did not lay a plonker on my bed while hopping around on it

I was reflecting on all this a few nights ago while lying in bed, listening to the owls hooting and screeching outside. It reminded me of my own cancer story. We all face an underlying, nagging issue, and cancer patients get it in a big, pressing dose, thrust in our faces.

When and how am I going to die?

And here’s the rub: you get no answer.

It could be anytime, anyhow.

Making plans gets difficult when you know there’s a good chance that anything can come along to scupper them. Whether or not you’re going to die soon, this still comes up, variously for everyone, when we’re scared enough to look at it. With cancer, I’ve found I’ve become much more sensitive to anything charged with any feeling at all. It’s not fear, exactly – it’s an insecure, creeping anticipation that hovers in the background. Worse, no one wants to talk about it.

In my own case, I’m rather surprised to be alive. I’m unsure what plans to make, and with what time-perspective. So I tend to keep my perspective open, but with the headlights shining on only the next three months, and anything beyond that is unanswerable. This has a remarkable effect on everything. It’s tenterhooky, no matter how philosophical or optimistic I might be, and no matter how much others encourage me to ‘get better’, not to dwell on morbid things – as if dying were a failure and living a success.

Sorry, dear Kate, Princess of Wales, while I understand your wish to assure everyone by saying you’re getting better, this is unwise. You do not know. It’s unwise to yield to that implicit social pressure to make everything look alright, because it isn’t alright.

When I lie in bed, drifting with fatigue, this is the view. On top of the hill in the left-hand window is an ancient site called Caer Brân (mentioned a couple of blogs back)

This is our world situation. We’ve stumbled into a mire of uncertainty and complexity. We have squads of scientists, super-forecasters and expert-texperts, and mega-millions of people with armchairs and opinions, yet we’ve become unable to accept the obvious – that the future is not as clear and fixable as we would like it to be. It’s left mostly to the young to point this out, while they’re still at an age where they are uncompromised by fear of loss and chaos.

Cancer patients, in my observation, divide into roughly three camps. Some are in denial – they take the pills, do the chemo, get the op, and do their best to appear and return to normal – it was just a bad dream and it’s over now. Some are heroic, fighting, striving to overcome and conquer cancer, and some of these will succeed while they have the willpower to do so, but it’s experienced as a fight, not a gift. And some come through to a level of acceptance and forgiveness that allows them to live and die in greater peace, whatever is to happen. To some extent all cancer patients hover between these three in different ways and proportions because cancer does indeed have a convincing way of putting the fear of God up you.

I have my struggles with this. I get fed up with all the pills, disciplines, diets and doctors’ appointments a valiant cancer patient is supposed to appreciate, to save their life and relieve others of the pain of loss, and sometimes I just want to say ‘fuckit’, to be normal, get my life, or even my ex-partner, back (fat chance). Other times I work on rising up within myself, trying to be a good human, in case God notices and gives me a reprieve – which won’t really happen since it’s a pointless, guilt-ridden belief.

Anyway, I’m doing quite well with my cancer, and I think it has something to do with full-on acceptance, yielding to The Force. I’ve lost control – yet, like a slalom skier, or when you first learn to ride a bike, or even like sex, by losing control you find a new balance.

In times of despair, hope sometimes stretches far further than it realistically should – like the vain hope that many Gazans entertain, that the decent people across the world will step in to save them. But just because something should happen, it doesn’t mean that it will.

At times I’m given deep truth-moments and gifts of spirit. I go down into the depths and up to the heaven-worlds, handing myself over in a humbled acceptance of my powerlessness and the overwhelming force of my circumstances, dependency and weakness – and the paradox is that, every time I drag myself through such a crunch-period, something in me is healed and reborn.

Here I still find myself, alive in a body and wondering what exactly for. Am I just here because I’m here? Or is there more to life? Yet my inner growth process has been ramped up to three times the speed, with a lot more depth, breath and height, and with a vulnerability that has amplified the emotional impacts, the feelingful fullness of being alive. That’s what I’ve been given.

My little house. It’s called The Lookout. That’s what you do there.

So it is with the world. The world has cancer, depression, anxiety, diabetes, fentanyl addiction, ME and a strange mixture of obesity and hunger. Part of us wants everything to return to normal, if only we could just buy an electric car, and part teeters on the edge of an abyss, flummoxed and hovering between lightbulb moments and flounderous resignation.

A nightmare is unfolding. However, while plenty of horror, injustice and destruction are going on, World War Three is now mainly a hearts-and-minds matter, not one of nuclear bombs or evil terrorists.

This is what we have been given. Or, collectively and unconsciously, it’s what we gave ourselves, to teach us something. We’ve created a situation where, kicking and screaming, we’re being arm-twisted into change. This is the great value of the Trumps, Putins, massacres, disasters and tragedies we face: they’re putting options before us. The stakes are rising until, sometime, we get it – we get the fundamental lesson, the lesson that will save us and redeem the damage and pain. So it is with cancer.

What none of the pundits in the commentariat mention is the spiritual crisis the world is in. Mental illness is not limited to those who are diagnosed with it, as if a certification of our woes would contain the crisis: it’s a disease of a psychotic world society, taking different forms in different places. All of it points to one core issue.

We have lost our way, lost our humanity. We’re deeply worried about what’s going on. We don’t know how to make it go away. Even the wisdom teachers, psychologists and solution-bringers are lost. As an astrologer I can often see when a wave is coming, but what will actually happen is at best qualified guesswork.

We’re faced with the Great Yawning Gap, like a black hole sucking us into some sort of final battle for the hearts and minds of humanity. Well, that’s what it feels like, sometimes. This presents heightened choices. These choices have been around for quite a time – I was one of those harping on about it when a Sixties teenager – but the stakes are rising with each year and decade.

It’s highly symbolic of the state of humanity, particularly for the global minority, for the one billion of us privileged to live in the rich world, that cancer has become a big issue. Because cancer hits you like a battering ram, with immediate life-changing consequences and a threat of imminent termination. Loss of control. Loss of everything. When you die you take nothing with you except what you have become.

The biggest, deepest choice we are faced with is this. Just because life doesn’t go the way we want, does this mean it’s going wrong? If we get faced with cancer or similar terminal or disabling ailments, or earth-shaking experiences such as war, disaster, loss, hardship or death, is this something going wrong or something going right?

But when I’m alive and kicking, this is where I spend a lot of my time. It’s the bane of being a pathological wordsmith.

This is a very deep question. But in it lies a solution that lies at the foundation of our situation, from personal to global.

With cancer, in my experience, the secret is to embrace it and make friends with it. I manifested it and, whether or not I understand why, it came for a reason, not by chance or bad luck, and it gives me a deep learning for the soul. It’s a life-changer of a high order. Something is going right. Similarly, it might be difficult to see this at present, what with all that’s going on around us, but something is going right in the world.

To see this, it is necessary to step out of life somewhat, out of the mill and the grindstone, to see things from another viewpoint – the viewpoint of a soul visiting Earth. We came into life to do something with it – not only to learn but also to make a contribution. Society doesn’t think that way – it encourages us to snap out of it – but in the cultural, institutional and societal mass-avoidance of our time we miss something crucial about life.

Have we each made our contribution?

In Western culture we even believe that we get only one life, and that when we die we cease existing. This belief is unthought through, ideological and deeply problematic. It’s a key part of the world’s problem today – a way of blanking out the longterm and avoiding taking responsibility for anything much more than ourselves, those close to us, our properties, concerns and beliefs, and only for the next three years.

We’ve become hyper-privatised, socially atomised. The world is crowded but we don’t even know our neighbours. It’s crowded, yet loneliness is at its historic zenith.

The world we omit to save now is the same world that many of us will wish to return to in another life – after all, we have the best chocolate in the universe, and in most worlds getting rich, being a star or a tall poppy is distasteful and antisocial – that’s best done here, if you want it. Even if we don’t come back here, it still matters – after all, once we’ve ascended to the fifth dimension, Andromeda, heaven or wherever, it’ll still be necessary to account for ourselves, to explain the incomprehensible to the souls we meet there.

Why did you lot screw up your planetary home? After all, being a distinctly desirable residence, billions of souls want to live there. And, (you might have to take my word for this) most worlds in this universe don’t host souls in billions. If I remember rightly, the Nine once said that the optimum population of planet Earth is around two hundred million.

It is a planet of amplified choice – we are each and all given a capacity to create our lives as we feel best. This isn’t just a choice between Toyotas and Mitsubishis, or between Copenhagen and Buenos Aires. It’s deeper, and when we are confronted with earth-shaking crises, we’re given the gift of amplified choice. We’re dragged into fundamentals.

Disaster – which means ‘out of sync with the stars’ – is a gift. This is what we need to get straight about. We need to meet the future facing forwards.

Me too, with my cancer, which will inevitably kill me sometime. It’s alright. My bones could disintegrate, my stomach could block up, an infection could floor me. I could die alone with nobody noticing, nobody here to hold my hand. I could be floored by a blast of phone radiation given to me by someone who loves me and didn’t mean to be so generous. If such is the case, so be it – it’s all for the learning. Soul-learning, about the true and full nature of existence as a human.

I’ll be going home. Done. Cooked. But even then, it doesn’t stop there.

I’m tempted to quote the lyrics of a song, ‘I just wanna be there’, by a late, great soul-friend, John Cartwright, and it went:

“I just wanna be there / When we all start to re-pair / All the damage to our Mother / And our sisters and our brothers / All deserving to be fed / In the spirit and the body… / It is doing in my head / There is nothing to be said / Time is running out…
“Seeds bursting to grow / Dying of hunger, under the snow / My need, bursting my heart… / Where do we wander? Where do we start? /
“My soul… silently smiles / Laughs as the water falls from my eyes. / Each tear, spelling it out… / Rise or go under… Rise here and now!“

[Glastonbury friends will know John and Jaki’s band, Court of Miracles – ‘the best band you never heard of’, to quote the late Justin Credible. I couldn’t find an online version of this song, but here’s one of their uplifting albums from the 1980s, called International Times.]

Peace, brothers and sisters. Despite everything, it’s okay – just remember that.

With love, Paldywan Kenobi.

————————
Site: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Audiobook: www.palden.co.uk/audiobook.html
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

The Islands of the Dead. Sometimes the islands seem to hover *above* the ocean.

Megalithic Penwith

Geomantic secrets. This is a telephoto shot of Carn Kenidjack, a Neolithic tor, seen from atop a barrow five miles away at Carn Les Boel, a cliff sanctuary. Here’s the rub: step off that barrow and you can no longer see Carn Kenidjack. That sightline is important.

Over the last month I’ve been doing a complete revision and rewrite of the Ancient Penwith website and, with relief, this morning, on the Piscean new moon, I uploaded it all.

www.ancientpenwith.org

This is the key map that illustrates my main point in this work: that Penwith was an integrated ancient site and cliff sanctuary covering the whole landscape. That integrated system was pegged out between the cliff sanctuaries and Neolithic tors of the peninsula.

I built the site in 2015-19 in connection with my researches into Penwith’s ancient sites and geomancy, leading out of the ancient sites and alignments maps I was also making at the time. Initially the maps covered West Penwith though, by 2019, I had extended it across the whole of Cornwall. The maps, together with fieldwork, were the basis of the research.

It’s a resource site focused on the alternative archaeology and geomancy of West Penwith, as I understand it. In a way it’s a bit like the course on that subject that I never taught. It’s now around 100 pages in size and quite comprehensive.

There will be tweaks and amendments in coming weeks. If you find glitches, errors or dead links, please tell me their page and location! Thanks.

I’m not sure how much longer I have to live (being a cancer patient) and God usually doesn’t tell you when your bucket-kicking initiation will come – so this rendering of the site might be a parting shot. Whatever is the case, do enjoy trawling through it. It’s for you.

Whether or not you agree with this kind of stuff, there are gems there for the finding, and archaeologists will definitely miss something if they omit to give it a trawl and a good think – and a feel too. It’s all a matter of what we consider to be viable and useful evidence, and what conclusions we draw from it.

Near-parallel alignments across West Cornwall

This work is probably incorrect in some details, but the overall points made suggest that this peninsular landscape was built over many centuries into a single large, integrated ancient site and cliff sanctuary. One symptomatic outcome of this is that it has never been forcibly invaded. Well, except perhaps by tourists during summertime.

Have fun! With love, Palden

Archaeoastronomy. The summer solstice sun setting between Trink Hill, left, and Rosewall Hill, right, as seen from the top of Trencrom Hill, a Neolithic tor. This isn’t man-made – this is natural. Think about it…

Landscape Temples

St Michael’s Mount from Botrea Barrows (telephoto shot)

One of the strange gifts that cancer gives is the prospect of dying soon. It’s is a motivator. You can’t leave things till later or leave them incomplete. So I’ve been moved to bring things to completion as much as I can – with success in some areas and less in others. One area I’m focusing on wrapping up now is my study of the Megalithic period of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.

For the last ten years I’ve been researching ancient sites in West Penwith, where I live, drawing on fifty years of study and experiences in Britain, Scandinavia, Greece, Jordan and Palestine. Having done an alignments map of Glastonbury twenty years ago,[1] in 2014 I started making a map of the ancient sites and alignments in Penwith.[2]

West Penwith, the shining land of Belerion, has more ancient sites per square mile than anywhere in Europe. It’s the far promontory at the very end of the long southwestern peninsula of Britain. Surrounded by cliffs on three sides, it has a distinct energy-boundary on the landward, eastern side, made up of three hills lying in a straight line – St Michael’s Mount, Trencrom Hill and St Ives’ Head. On the A30 to Penzance it crosses the road by the shop in the village of Crowlas.

Alignments in Penwith have been studied over the decades by John Michell and a number of other researchers. John wrote the 1974 book ‘The Old Stones of Land’s End’, identifying around ninety alignments involving mainly Bronze Age and early Christian sites. Checking these alignments with online satellite mapping, not available in John’s day, I found that only two of the ninety were inaccurate and questionable.

Cape Cornwall or Kilgooth Ust, with the Brisons Rocks behind

Then late one night came a Eureka moment, after an evening working on the Penwith map. I was tired yet unready to go to bed. I sat there musing about St Michael’s Mount, a roughly conical hill in a marine setting, and then about Cape Cornwall, a prominent headland near me, with a similar character. Both were prominent ancient sites on either side of the peninsula.

Spontaneously I got out a ruler, placing it between the two sites to see if an alignment was there. Lo behold, indeed there was. It passed through a set a four barrows up on the top of the hill on our farm, not far from my house. Gosh, that was a surprise.

I spend a lot of time up at Botrea Barrows and, though they don’t look impressive, they have a remarkable panorama and they certainly have that distinct feeling you get at an ancient site that is still energy-alive. It’s a feeling of being changed in mood and perspective, energy-bathed, both calmed and energised.[3]

A lightbulb lit up. I started checking to see whether there were further alignments like this. The Mount and Cape Cornwall are both cliff sanctuaries. They form a necklace of magic headlands around Penwith, and also much of Cornwall and parts of Devon (there’s a big one in Somerset called Brean Down). So I started checking other cliff sanctuaries and suddenly a lot of new alignments appeared. Normally called cliff castles, they aren’t defensive, and they’re not just beautiful places but also they have a special feeling of being consecrated, so I call them cliff sanctuaries.

I found about eight alignments in twenty minutes – a record never again repeated, since usually they don’t come easily. Not only this, but many of the alignments connected with Neolithic tors, the very first dedicated ancient sites in Penwith, Cornwall and Dartmoor. There are five in this area: Carn Brea, the Mount, Trencrom Hill, Carn Kenidjack and Carn Galva.

Something interesting emerged. Three of these newfound alignments crossed exactly at Lanyon Quoit. One came from Carn Brea near Redruth (a Neolithic tor), through Trencrom Hill (a Neolithic tor), Mulfra Quoit and Lanyon Quoit (Neolithic quoits or cromlechs). It continues to the Tregeseal stone circle complex and eventually to the Brisons Rocks off Cape Cornwall. This implies that, when it was built in the Bronze Age, Tregeseal was deliberately placed on this alignment, or that the site was known in the Neolithic even if it took a millennium to build a stone circle on it.

Another alignment went from St Michael’s Mount (a Neolithic tor) through Lanyon Quoit to Pendeen Watch (a cliff sanctuary). A third alignment went from Treryn Dinas (a cliff sanctuary) through Boscawen-ûn stone circle and Lanyon Quoit to Bosiliack Barrow and a proxy menhir at the Nine Maidens stone circle. Thus, the location of stone circles is significantly determined by these alignments (though multiple interlocking factors are usually involved).

Lanyon Quoit, with Carn Galva behind. Lanyon Quoit is not in its original shape – it fell down in Victorian times and was incorrectly re-erected.

That sounds straightforward, but the implications are quite big.

Lanyon Quoit was built around 3700-3500 BCE, as were the enclosures built to encircle the Neolithic tors. Since the quoit’s precise position is fixed by these three alignments, each aligning with tors or cliff sanctuaries, it means that cliff sanctuaries date back in their first us to at least that time. In one fell swoop, the number of Neolithic sites in Penwith doubled.

Cliff sanctuaries are not usually regarded as major ancient sites.[4] This discovery changes that. Archaeologists ascribe them to the Iron Age around 2,500-2,000 years ago. But we now have geomantic evidence that they were far older in first use and far more important. They were consecrated – you can feel this when you visit them, since they don’t have the same feeling as other headlands. To test this, visit Zennor Head, an ordinary headland, and then neighbouring Bosigran Castle and Gurnard’s Head, both cliff sanctuaries. They’re special. The discovery of Neolithic archaeological remains at some of them hasn’t caused archaeologists to drop their attachment to Iron Age fortresses though.

These new alignments I call ‘backbone alignments’. They are different from the alignments John Michell and most ley-hunters studied, involving Bronze Age sites such as stone circles, cairns and menhirs. In Penwith, what’s special about the backbones is that they represent a more coherent order than the Bronze Age alignments. I’m surprised no one has discovered them before.

More implications… The backbones reveal a coherent structure to the 600 ancient sites of West Penwith. They hint at a master plan – a plan to make Penwith into one big landscape temple, one big cliff sanctuary. This idea hasn’t caught on down here, except with one archaeologist (David Giddings) who struck upon it independently, using a different logic and terminology from me.

We aren’t looking at a random collection of ancient sites splattered across Penwith wherever anyone fancied. We’re looking at a planned, integrated network and system of ancient sites.

It evolved according to basic protocols but not a rigid plan. Here’s an analogy. The Internet was not planned, and what has emerged in recent decades is not what was foreseen and intended early on. However, it evolved according to consistent protocols – a bundle of coding that operates internet networks in a coherent, expandable, adaptable way. Although it grew organically, there was system to it.

Similar applies to the principles established in the Neolithic 3000s – principles first developed in Iberia and brought to Britain around 3700 BCE with a wave of incoming migrants at that time. (They spoke a language related to Basque.) Later, in the Early-to-Mid Bronze Age (2500ish to 1200ish) the Brits took these principles further than anyone, to high degrees of astronomical, mathematical, geomantic and cosmological sophistication.

According to Knight and Lomas [1] even the Egyptians are likely to have learned some mathematical tricks from the Brits concerning the curvature and size of the Earth and the precession of the equinoxes. The Bronzies were doing Pythagorean and Euclidean mathematics two millennia before Pythagoras and Euclid, and they understood the astronomical Metonic cycle two millennia before Meton, another Greek philosopher, wrote it down and got the kudos for it.

This gets bigger when we look at the reasons why the megalith-builders went to so much trouble building megaliths. Here we go right outside the scope and beliefs of archaeologists into the wilder territory of geomancers. When the Neolithics and Bronzies built ancient sites, they plugged them into astronomical variables, underground water, networks of energy-lines, networks of alignments (those are two different things), and they built them using advanced mathematical and astronomical systems. They locked time into space through the designs, orientations, proportions and alignments of ancient sites, particularly stone circles, the ‘cathedrals of the Bronze Age’. Why?

Well, go to an ancient site and spend time there. You’re entering a multidimensional energy field. The evidence lies in observing our feelings, registering those feelings and taking them seriously. The depth and significance of experience is magnified at ancient sites. When you leave, it’s worth noting what’s different in your state, mood and optic. It’s far more than the uplift you might gain from a walk in the countryside. Test it out.

The character and feeling of this experience depends on several factors, contingent on the time you visit, your motivation and respect, how openly you and the place interact with one another, how the place itself is feeling at the time, what you do, what you don’t do, and also there’s a mysterious ‘factor X’, a magical concatenation of conditions that makes some visits extra memorable, even transformative. These variables influence the character of our experience of ancient sites when we visit them – and their experience of us.

This is a consciousness effect. We don’t understand how it works, but it does, and there are hints of proof in neuroscience and parapsychological research. You don’t have to take my word for it: simply visit ancient sites and try it for yourself. The principle here is that containing, fixing and enhancing energy fields seems to be the key reason why ancient sites were built, and why they were placed and designed as they were. This was a technology of consciousness.

It isn’t difficult to feel or sense subtle energy, at least instinctually or semi-consciously. If you’re capable of feeling love, you’re capable of feeling energy, and this is a capability we are born with. But it is more difficult to square this with our overlaid, educated rationality which, together with fears, conditioning, insecurities and emotional armouring, tends to edit, dull, obstruct, corrupt or suppress our sensitivities.

To many people, what I’ve written about consciousness effects makes little or no sense – it’s imagination, woo-woo and hocus-pocus. ‘No evidence’ – though actually, there is. Academics and archaeologists are missing something really big here.

The consciousness effect was valued because these people worked magically – shamanically. This matter lay at the heart of their culture. They worked with the inner components of reality, knowing that what happens within us is entirely connected with what happens around us (called non-dualism). Ancient sites of different kinds were built to exploit various opportunities of consciousness.

Some sites train our awareness upwards, some out to the landscape, some to the earth-sky relationship, some downwards (such as wells) and some inwards (such as chambered cairns and fogous). Stone circles, the reactors, telescopes and laboratories of megalithic times, create a palpable and measurable energy-intensity within their enclosed space.

This would be used at auspicious times for high-pressure magical-ceremonial workings. A few hundred people would surround the circle, fasting, chanting, dancing and visualising, probably with the help of mind medicines, while inside it ‘proto-Druids’ would perform the specifics of the work. They did this to create an intensified energy-field to perform healings, balance the etheric bioelectronics of land and sky (affecting fertility and climate), carry out ceremonial consciousness work in connection with the environment and the welfare of the people, make decisions through an oracle, communicate over long distances, protect the land and keep the spirits of land and sky happy.

But this is not all, since West Penwith is one big ancient site made up of hills, tors and headlands, stone circles, menhirs, cairns and barrows, quoits, enclosures, holy wells and other sacred spaces. These represent a significant buildup of geomantic infrastructure designed around the landscape itself, using subtle energy technologies. It took until the peak of the Bronze Age around 2000-1800 BCE for the infrastructure to take full shape.

However there are signs of a trial run in the Neolithic 3000s in the northern highlands of the peninsula, where most people then lived: the quoits were arranged in a structure involving astronomical and parallel alignments, suggesting that the quoits were built to a coordinated plan. They might all have been built around the same time.[5]

Recently I’ve been studying landscape temples in Penwith. These are areas that hang together in terms of the psycho-geographical, perceptual and magical lie of the land and its features. It is likely that these roughly coincided with the social subgroups or tribes of Penwith. Everyone was related somehow, but social subgroups occupied certain areas, calling them ‘home’. These were not days of territorial frictions, and what mattered most was heartlands more than boundaries.

Based on my knowledge of the area, I’ve drawn a map of what I think those landscape temples and tribal areas might be, as they might have been seen in the Bronze Age, around its zenith. It is hypothetical with little backup, but it’s an interesting thought-experiment and it makes some sense in terms of the lie of the land and the way ancient sites are arrayed.

Here’s an example. On the west coast of Penwith, between Mayon Cliff near Sennen in the south and Cape Kenidjack in the north, a landscape temple is marked out by a series of clifftop cairns.[6] They all face the sea, toward the setting sun and the Isles of Scilly, with the Longships Rocks and Chapel Carn Brea acting as focal points of attention. From every one of these cairns you can see Chapel Carn Brea, the first and last hill in Britain – it has a Neolithic longbarrow and Bronze Age cairns on top. Sennen was the main landing beach for Scilly boats, and the people of this area will have been involved with Scillonians and probably related to them.

I live in another landscape temple made of four hill sites and a valley between them, at the centre of the peninsula. Bartinney Castle is a high, convex, rounded hill with a circular enclosure, eight cairns and a well on top, probably used for quite high-level magical purposes. Caer Brân is a circular enclosure on a hillbrow with a remarkable panorama – I think it was the parliament site for the whole of Penwith and, within its magic circle, a neutral space. Sancreed Beacon feels to me as if it was a ceremonial centre and seat of power for the local tribe. Botrea Hill has four large platform barrows on it, likely to have been used for ceremonial-magical purposes. All four hills are within view of each other, part of the same perceptual landscape and complementing each other in character.[7]

Caer Brân (pronounced ‘care brain’) as seen from Botrea Hill

Penwith was one large landscape temple with a variety of localised areas within it, each with its own character and geomantic facility.

Gradually I’ve been building a picture of life in Penwith in the Neolithic 3000s and the Bronze Age. These periods were quite different, not least in population numbers, which were much bigger in the Bronze Age. But what many people miss is the esoteric depth of the culture of the megalithic period. The bottom-line issue is that megalithic sites cannot be understood without appreciating the crucial role of subtle earth energy in their construction, location and reason for being.

It’s also important to acknowledge the role of shamanic consciousness work in the way the people of the time managed their affairs. This was a theocratic, magical civilisation and, while it didn’t build cities, roads and empires, its thinking was advanced.

This is not just a captivating fascination with the past: it has something to do with our future and the healing of our world. My work in West Penwith has led me to this.

Mulfra Quoit, with St Michael’s Mount behind. I think Mulfra Quoit and Zennor Quoit were both intentionally decommissioned.

This year I wish to bring this work to completion so that I can drop it and pass it on, while I can. It’s not just about completing a body of work. It’s about resolving something inside myself. With others like me, I’ve lived in a time where people like us are not believed – the tide of convention and groupthink has gone the other way. When I was young I knew it would take time but I believed that, by the end of my life, the tide would have turned. Astrology would be accepted, geomancers respected, healers would be accepted as a mainstream medical option, war would be going or gone, the world would be changing and oddbods like me would be seen and heard. This hasn’t happened, so completion now involves leaving clues for others to pick up in future.

For me, it’s also about resolving and healing personal pain. The pain of having ideas rejected because they don’t fit with the prevailing ideology of our time. Things aren’t properly discussed or peer-reviewed, people like me get rubbished, discredited, sidelined, we don’t get the grants and we’re kept off the BBC. Being a vegetarian, meditatator, aged hippy, astrologer, crop circle researcher, social healer and Palestine activist has not been popular with the mainstream. Some things I’ve done have even been illegal – talking to terrorists, delivering babies or using mind medicines – and it is disgraceful that these are still considered crimes.

The pain of being misjudged and discriminated against is a big learning experience for a sensitive soul, and since getting cancer I’ve become more aware of how it has affected me throughout life. I’m working on it by rattling away on my computer, creating an online archive of material which I hope people will find and make use of after I’ve gone.

But it’s a forgiveness process too, because ultimately the weight of unforgiveness rests most heavily on our own shoulders. Time is a healer, and what goes around, comes around. To quote Bhavabhuti, an Indian mathematician and philosopher of the 700s CE: “If learned critics do deride my work, then let them. Not for them I wrought. One day a soul shall live to share my thought, for time is endless and the world is wide.” Until he came along, in mathematics the number Zero did not exist.

With love, Palden

–

FOOTNOTES

For a key to symbols used on the online maps: www.ancientpenwith.org/key.html

Map of the Ancient Landscape around Glastonbury, Gothic Image, 1983 and 2005. www.palden.co.uk/leymap
Map of the Ancient Sites and Alignments of West Penwith: www.google.co.uk/maps/d/viewer?mid=1rZQT0gYvH9uD_nxg9f4sNByaHQbbBqTw&ll=50.122514747105356%2C-5.6038752366332645&z=12
Podcasts from Botrea Barrows: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts/PFB03-210613-BotreaBarrows.mp3 and www.palden.co.uk/podcasts/PFB40-BotreaBarrows-230909.mp3
About cliff sanctuaries: www.ancientpenwith.org/cliffcastles.html
Online map of quoits: www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=115Hwb1BI-_lmNyQ4bz-gF0dhciU&ll=50.16159288655412%2C-5.593891490692237&z=13
The Boscregan landscape temple: www.google.co.uk/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=10TKtQKR4aFSymGj23xUiYmCBQ1Frnfz5&ll=50.09990259589591%2C-5.670959956329282&z=13
About sacred enclosures: www.ancientpenwith.org/hillforts.html#SacredEnclosures

Chapel Carn Brea, the first and last hill in Britain

Saturn in Pisces

Sunday Meditation

Every Sunday at 7-7.30pm GMT I and a morphing collection of people meditate together at the same time, wherever we live. The different times in different countries are below.

You’re welcome to join us. There’s no prescribed method or mantra: just do the kind of meditation, innerwork, prayer or mindfulness you usually do.

What connects us us that we’re doing it together and we’re all motivated to contribute to raising the energy and awareness level of our world, to aid in resolution of its compound issues.

More details are here.

Should it interest you, I’ve recently done a 30-min podcast sharing some thoughts on meditation, and that’s found here.

Come and join us, from a sitting place in your world, to be together in the zone. It happens once a week without fail, same time, same space. Join us whenever you can, and if you’re able to do it regularly you’ll find that something starts lifting off…

Saturn is currently in Pisces for two years – it returns here once every 28 years. The last times were 1965-66 and 1994-5. At these times terrible wars were going on (Vietnam and Bosnia) yet these were also times for the seeding of new things. Similar is the case today. These wars show humanity how not to do things, and they oblige deep-level decisions of principle.

In the Mid-1960s, today’s modern ‘global village’ period started, and in the Mid-90s was born the digital era and mass travel. Now we stand on the edge of another cycle taking us to 2053-54, when the Millennials will be old and today’s teenagers will be running around being busily middle-aged.

Pisces concerns the vision and the principles by which future developments will unfold. Saturn in Pisces is about doing the prep work before the action starts. It’s about seeds and their pre-germination arousing. It’s also about the matter of war and peace.

It’s a time for firming up the possibilities and groundrules for the next phase.

Perhaps the international figure who at present gives the most valuable running commentary on the state of the world and its prospects is Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General. His pleas frequently fall on closed ears, but he’s the one who is spelling it out globally, speaking for Saturn in Pisces.

With love, Palden.

Current meditation times, on Sundays:
UK 7-7.30pm GMT
W Europe 8-8.30pm
E Europe and the Levant 9-9.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm
PST North America 11-11.30am

Pictures: looking out into the void from safe territory. Porthgwarra, West Penwith, Cornwall, looking out into the Atlantic. Look closely in the top picture, and you’ll see a seal there, and here it is, below.