You’re welcome to join the Sunday meditation – it’s good medicine. Take a break – life can do without you for half an hour.
Do your meditation, astral travelling, mindfulness, mantras or whatever, as you normally do it, together with everyone else doing the same, wherever we are. Enter the zone, an enhanced energy-field, and the wind will inflate your spiritual sails.
My current feeling is that we’re in a chickens-coming-home-to-roost phase, after the events of the last 6-9 months and more. A tide is turning. Nothing is ever permanent. This cuts all sorts of ways: both the benefits and the harms we have brought come back at us, and the overall trajectory is all to do with learning. The learning of the soul.
We’re now in a phase of collective learning (Pluto in Aquarius), of learning together as a mass of people. Our challenge is to mature as a human race, at a time when we truly need to do so. For our social subgroups, our social tribes, nations and the world are themselves beings with their own karmas, behaviours, choices and lessons to learn.
Sometimes it feels as if everything is going backwards. Gaza, Sudan, Yeman, Ukraine, Myanmar, they all seem like retrogressions, and certainly for the people in the thick of these maelstroms, they are.
But look underneath. What has been achieved in recent times has been a maturing of human values worldwide. It’s underneath, beyond the politics, the opinions, the propaganda, the polarisation. It’s historic.
It’s happening particularly in the majority world where 80% of the world’s population lives. Sadly, the Global North, including Europe, America, Russia and Japan – our time was back in the 19th-20th Centuries – are in a rather self-deluding, hubristic phase at present. We’re quite good at alienating that global majority. But people of conscience in the West are deeply unhappy with what has been happening too. It’s people of conscience who need to be the ones in power.
It concerns the matter of conflict itself and of man-made devastation and suffering. Forget this side or that side, who is right and who is wrong – conflict, polarisation and dehumanisation are themselves the problem. Humanity is growing tired of this stuff. And, strangely, exhaustion is one of the greatest of history’s peacemakers.
The sacrifices made by people oppressed by war are fuelling up the collective psyche toward an historic shift. It’s taking place deeper down. That’s where the learning is happening, and in coming times it will be tested. Humanity needs to come out of hiding, and we’re moving inch by inch toward such a time.
Do join us in the meditation. Help the world rise an inch higher. Help humanity see things from another viewpoint.
Current meditation times, every Sunday: Iceland 7-7.30pm UK & Portugal 8-8.30pm W Europe 9-9.30pm E Europe and the Levant 10-10.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 3-3.30pm PST North America 12-12.30am
Planet Earth – quite worth a visit (this is down in our woods).
Down here in Penwith we get a lot of wind – we’re stuck out in the ocean and it loves blowing us away with its power and glory. So it’s a breezy start and finish to this podcast.
It’s one of those things that happen in parts of Planet Earth. And that’s what this podcast is about. Conditions on Earth as seen from the outside.
In coming months I’ll tell you more about things I learned from the Council of Nine – this is the first of a few. What they taught was so multidimensional that it’s difficult to cover it all briefly. In this podcast I present one aspect of it, for your consideration.
It’s all about how our planet was set up and the larger picture on our current global situation. It is the consequence of the application throughout history of human free will. People might legitimately ask, ‘How can the Universe be benign, and how can God be Love when we see things like the disaster in Gaza happening?’, but there is a simple answer.
It is a product of human free will. And collectively as a planetary race we need to apply our free will to deconstruct such tragedies and make them obsolete.
Recorded in May 2024, down in the bluebell woods below our farm. The wind sounds like a powerful gale, but actually it was simply a brisk Cornish ocean breeze rattling in the leaves of the trees. 37 mins long.
This is interesting. It’s written by an old friend who is himself involved with helping out in a freelance-humanitarian sense with Gaza. But this is something that anyone involved in conflict resolution, or in any kind of change-bringing commitment, needs to ask themselves: what is it that drives me to do this?
It came up for me too. In my case, my maternal grandfather was in General Allenby’s British invasion force in Palestine in WW1, my father was in Egypt in WW2, and I have Roma and German (though not Jewish) ancestry – Holocaust stuff. That’s what I’ve identified in myself that hooked me into it.
But also, growing up in a polarised and violent city, Liverpool, in the 1960s, played its part – overcoming the effects in myself of being bullied in early life. We teach best what we ourselves have had to learn.
If you have a bee in your bonnet about particular issues, driving you into activism, it’s worth looking into your ancestral background and your history. It can help make it all more conscious.
Many Palestine and other activists would do well to look at the emotional source in themselves of their despair, anger and commitment, because this will help them become more effective, tactical and compassionate in pursuing their vision.
It’s important because issues like this will not be resolved overnight. Yes, a ceasefire has been needed and is still needed, but a ceasefire without resolution of fundamentals might not be the best thing. Sad to say, sometimes the horror has to get worse, until a point comes where peace and resolution are the only options left.
We need to own up to the perverse fact that many of us worry about Gaza and similar places only when blood and horror happen, impinging on our comfort-zones. But actually, the reason why blood and horror happen rests on causes that are brewed and fermented during quieter times. If we’re going to succeed in a mission such as peacemaking of conflicts that have deep roots, it has to be sustained in the longterm.
And here’s an awkward truth. If campaigning for our beliefs polarises society, then we shall fail. Because if others have different beliefs, thinking of them as nasty ‘them’ people itself lies at the root of conflict. People who are anti-anything, who wish to ban things or people, and who dehumanise people with different viewpoints, become part of the problem they’re sincerely trying to resolve.
We really are all in this together, if we wish to resolve the fundamental issues that the world faces today. Peace will not come, and ecological and societal issues will not be resolved, unless we all work together.
This is not idealistic thinking. It is a very real socio-political issue. If we don’t get through this in the coming decades – global consensus-forming – then we’re fucked, really. War arises from polarisation, and there is little value in trying to stop war or save our world by polarising society.
Working to overcome polarisation and build bridges makes things more difficult. It means we must work longer and harder on this. It means we are challenged to walk our talk more consistently and for longer.
When the shooting and dismay stop, if everyone just goes home, back to normality, then peace will not come, because the matter is not sorted. And in this century we really need to sort things out, changing and ending the patterns of centuries and millennia.
That’s my thought for the day. However, there’s something else too – a new podcast.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | HUMAN INTELLIGENCE
I recorded this in January and completely forgot about it! That was a memory question. And that’s why it’s coming out now. I remembered.
Jean Piaget once said that intelligence is not about what we know, but what we do when we don’t know. How we figure things out when we’re in new territory or out of our depth.
The problem with AI is that it works by drawing on data and on what is known, on memory, and on the way things have happened thus far.
That’s not true intelligence. Human intelligence is better at dealing with the unknown. That is, if we humans act intelligently – which we do only occasionally.
So AI is unlikely to be as wondrous in its problem-solving capacities as tech-bedazzled AI cultists would like us to believe.
And there’s a hidden twist here concerning human intelligence – it’s in the podcast! Recorded in January 2024, down by an old silted-up millpond in the stream below our farm. 27 mins long.
Yes, it’s my latest (fourteenth) book, now out. It recounts the story of my cancer process up to late 2023. Currently available as a PDF for on-screen reading (free or optional donation). Later it will come out as an audiobook.
It will be interesting to cancer patients, their helpers, families or friends who prefer to take a non-standard approach to cancer. Or to people with other serious conditions. Or to anyone who likes a good autobiographical read.
Blessings focuses particularly on the psycho-spiritual side of things. It outlines what I have chosen to do with my situation. It isn’t a how-to book, but there might be some secrets in there that are beneficial to you.
I have taken an integrated medicine approach, doing both chemotherapy and holistic treatments, following my intuitions. And, lo behold, my results are good and, to my surprise, I’m still alive, still at it.
For those of you who haven’t followed my cancer story since the beginning, here’s a summary of it, taken from the book…
The Wisdom of Insecurity
Fortuitously, five years ago I started a blog a few weeks before going down with cancer, with no idea that it would turn into a cancer blog. I just had a feeling to start blogging. That says something about intuition: it has ways of knowing things in advance that our conscious minds don’t.
Intuition knows or understands things in the back brain without needing to think about them in the front brain. But it’s a matter of giving it attention and credence, and learning to avoid overriding our feelings with obstructive and over-thought rationales, conditioned responses, fears or doubts – or science.
Cancer was a great surprise when diagnosed in November 2019. Signs were appearing nearly a year beforehand in January 2019, but they weren’t recognisable. Something wasn’t right. It was as if I was in a downward spiral, getting tired of life and losing my spark. Neither my partner nor I could figure out what it was.
In August 2019, while working in her garden, my back cracked – two of the lowest vertebrae in my back fractured and two collapsed. At the time it seemed I had an excruciating, immobilising back problem.
A cranial osteopath recommended I get scanned in hospital – he felt something more was going on here (thanks, Simon Perks). Getting to hospital was a long process. Eventually, in A&E, the junior doctor, in a quandary, called in a specialist, who entered, looked intently at me, then said, “Test him for Myeloma”, and walked out. Brilliant. This man nailed it at first try. Before long I was having treatment. I had Multiple Myeloma or bone marrow cancer.
When the news of cancer hits you it’s like a thunderbolt and soulquake. Yet it also brought me a strange element of relief, at last knowing what was actually happening after three months of spirit-wringing pain. For decades I had looked after my health quite well, with a view to avoiding such things as cancer. Had I got things wrong? Seriously ill, if I had arrived in hospital a month later I was unlikely to have survived. When cancer comes it can come fast and strong, even if its buildup is long and slow.
After a few days I asked one of the cancer specialists whether he had any clues about the causes of Myeloma. He looked at me straight, saying quite simply, “Radiation exposure”. The next day he brought a map in The Lancet, a medical journal, showing the clustering of Myeloma cases in UK around nuke stations. For 28 years I had lived 15 miles downwind of Hinckley Point nuke station, and I’d had two instances of nuclear radiation exposure in other contexts. His opinion just went ‘ping’. I had known since 1975 that I was electrosensitive. This was not a great problem until around year 2000 when mobile phones and wi-fi became commonplace. That’s what finished me off.
Certain chemical neurotoxins may also be a cause of Myeloma for some. Once, when in hospital, I met a man with Myeloma, asking him what his work had been. “A merchant seaman”, he said. “We have all sorts of strange chemicals on the ships”. I asked what his specific job had been. “Radar”. There you go: radiation exposure.
Another chap said he had been a freight train driver. “What kind of freight?”. “Oh, nuclear waste from Sellafield. It was good pay.”
Many doctors say the causes of Myeloma are unknown. This perhaps deliberate unclarity probably arises because of the court cases and compensation claims that would erupt if such electronic or chemical toxicity became public knowledge. There’s a lot of money in it, and everyone loves their mobile phone.
Back in 2000 I had a ‘dark night of the soul’ crisis and a long illness, going down into the deep dark, questioning all I had done over the previous three decades and wondering what value it had really brought. It was a profound honesty session, a struggle with Weltschmerz – the pain of the world. Then aged fifty, I think my susceptibility to cancer started brewing around that time.
As time went on the electrosensitivity got worse, especially after 4G smartphones emerged around 2008. By 2014 periodic overdoses of radiation (in a restaurant, meeting, supermarket or train) were giving me rapid-onset flu symptoms, and by 2017 I was getting heart palpitations. It took until 2019 for cancer to show itself.
That year I was working on my prehistory research and mapmaking in a rather urgent, driven way. I completed it in early August, just two weeks before my back suddenly went crack and my life changed. Well, the research was at least done – perhaps a hidden hand of fate had known what was going to happen next.
When diagnosed in November I was now very much in the hands of the doctors, my partner Grace, my son Tulki and a few others – and way out of my depth, flat on my back. It was an exercise in surrender and acceptance – there was no alternative.
Having been a health-conscious, vegetarian meditator for decades and rarely getting ill, I had always assumed I would be exempt from cancer. Well, life has a way of teaching us other things! In our culture, cancer is regarded as something going wrong, as if a failure, but it didn’t quite feel like that to me, once I accepted it was happening. There was something strangely fitting about it, even though life was being hard on me. I decided to suspend all my foregoing beliefs and to do my best to trust that, whatever was to happen, everything would be alright in the end. I held on to one belief though, and I have a suspicion you know what it is: whatever life presents, there is a gift in it.
Earlier in life, rigorous experiences as a mountaineer, camper and humanitarian taught me energy-management, attitude-maintenance and steadfastness. Having got through plenty of crises and survived, I felt it was possible to do so now, whether that meant living or dying. At one point I said to the haematologist that I felt I had gone past the allotted nine lives (of a cat) and was on my tenth. She laughed but, dealing every day with people with terminal aliments, she probably knew what I meant.
Trusting the doctors was my only option. Nearly all of them were really good people. My experience of NHS treatment has largely been positive, once I gained the right attention. As the Covid period went on, by 2022 Treliske hospital became much more efficient and better organised. That helped a lot.
I had done alternative medicine for decades, yet I did not have the knowhow, energy, facility, support, time or money to opt for a holistic approach while in the depths of cancer, and already it was too late, too urgent. Chemotherapy was the only doable alternative. Accepting it contravened beliefs I’d held until that moment, yet it felt right to do my best with it. If the angels wanted me alive, they’d keep me alive, and if they didn’t, they’d take me out.
I’m pretty good at handling crises and, here was I, going through a full-on crisis, a test of spirit. I had to grasp life’s reins. Healing means fully allowing healing to take place, handing ourselves over. This goes as far as dropping any expectation of what healing means – it doesn’t only mean ‘getting better’. Whether I am to live or die, may it be for the best, all round – this was my prayer.
Pharmaceuticals shocked my system, though clearly they could also save my life. I asked for inner help in handling whatever was to come. One profound message came through: use your feelings and intuitions. My brains were not working well – I couldn’t get my head around all the medical research and terminology – though my intuitive senses were easier to read off. Intuitions just say Yes or No – and then it’s up to us to figure out why, or to bear witness to the way it becomes true.
I went inside myself, connecting with the angels like never before. This might sound spurious to some readers but, believe me, when you’re in a situation like this, that’s what you tend to do, whatever your foregoing beliefs. I asked them to help me adapt to a changed life. But when you ask for help, you need also to offer something: I offered my life, however it was to be. May it happen well and may I make it easy – that was another key prayer. I think this approach really helped, not just psycho-spiritually but medically too.
I used holistic supplements, helpers and good nutrition judiciously, careful not to mix them or create conflicts with the pharmaceuticals. Over time, various healers and healing circles weighed in – thank you everyone. Some of these interventions made a big difference. And old Tomten, Grace’s cat, would lie on my pelvis, the most painful place, giving genuine pain-relief.
So, doctors saved my life and healers gave me a new life.
I feel immense gratitude to Grace, who gave balm to my heart and helped me through the process – she was a true healer and a great soul. Her love, care and protection made a critical difference in a bleak time. I was a heavy weight for her to carry. There was no financial help for a ‘family carer’ like her, she had a business to keep going and a life already filled with issues and concerns. And I’m a tricky and complex character at the best of times. My son Tulki was a constant companion and support, though he could be present only sometimes. These two good souls made a big difference in that dark time.
So I followed an intuitive route through the cancer tunnel. I worked at getting the doctors on my side, showing them that I was not a member of the awkward squad – ideologically rigid, argumentative health-freaks with antipathies to match – though I did have my own ways and preferences. Two things helped: the doctors and nurses found me interesting and, lo behold, as the months went by, my medical results were surprisingly good. This gave me leverage.
Still, I had to badger them about drug dosages. I didn’t need blasting with explosives. Eventually the doctors got the message. One or two drugs were withdrawn and one was reduced – Dexamethasone, which had had positive effects on my cancer and distressing behavioural side-effects. My dose was reduced and, lo behold, it worked better.
Initially I was supposed to have eight cycles of chemotherapy but they stopped treatment after five, saying I could go. Later on, one specialist said, “Mr Jenkins, I don’t know what you’re doing and I don’t want to know, but whatever you’re doing, keep doing it”.
Myeloma is a blood cancer that causes the bones to hollow out and weaken. It’s not as complex to treat as other cancers – there’s just chemo, with no radiation or surgery since no tumours are involved. I responded well and quickly. I think my use of holistic practices, supplements and remedies helped, together with, to me, an almost palpable influence from my inner doctors. They scanned and treated me on an energy-level, and it worked. I think they worked through the hospital doctors in mysterious ways too.
I’ll add a few more things: walks on the hills and clifftops; a lovely place to live on a wildlife-rich farm with low EM radiation; unchlorinated springwater from just up the hill; a positive attitude; and coming to peace with as many life-issues as possible.
And sunshine. And love. These aren’t available all the time, and they don’t just come when requested, but they work.
At the time I wrote this, I was on an immunotherapy maintenance treatment, Dara. I had a subcutaneous Dara injection every four weeks – a nurse came round, inserting a short needle into the flesh of my stomach. This made the Dara disperse slowly (in contrast to an injection in a vein or artery). She took my temperature, oxygen count and blood pressure.
Every twelve weeks she took a blood sample and sent it off, and it’s from this that my condition was judged. Later I was taken off Dara and currently I’m chugging along with no pharmaceutical cancer treatment – only holistics – but I’ll probably go on ‘third line’ medical treatment eventually.
With Myeloma, most people don’t get ‘remission’, just a delay in dying – some get a year of life and some get ten, even fifteen. In my fourth year, I’m still alive. Yes, just checked, I’m still here.
After decades of living a holistic life, your system evolves differently to that of ‘normal’ people. When you’re doing spiritual work and you have some pretty amazing healers as friends, normal medical rules get bent and broken. But still, there’s a deeper karmic story that goes on underneath cancer, with a trajectory of its own. I did well at first but after two years I was ailing, hit a crisis and got ready for the possibility of dying within the year.
Yet by summer 2022 I was reborn, even attending a week-long Oak Dragon camp. This itself was a healing boost, as much from the people and the ambience as from the campfires and outdoor life. As Oak Dragon’s founder (in the 1980s) I felt so welcomed, and this in itself was medicinal.
By now I was in a state of positive shock, realising I was still alive and that there was indeed a future. Perhaps I needed to get a new coat for winter.
I’m doing well with the cancer but the side-effects are problematic and these might fell me in the end. It’s all about bones. Four of the lowest vertebrae in my back subsided. Reducing my height by over an inch (4cm), this squeezed my stomach, leading to digestive and eliminative difficulties. It caused the outer gluteus muscles in my backside, which do the major pulling when walking, to lose their tension, making long walks strenuous and painful. Added to this I have osteonecrosis of the jaw – a dying jawbone – stopped by medication but still an area of susceptibility. If I break any bones, repair and revival could be difficult. These side-issues affect my life more than cancer does.
Then there is chemo-brain. Chemotherapy chemicals destroy brain-cells and nerve-endings. Chemo-brain has had mixed effects, reducing my left-brained ‘executive’ thinking and my memory for details, yet improving the right-brained intuitive-imaginative side. It has pushed me into the present moment. My sense of time, sequence and duration have dwindled. I’ll remember something that was said by someone, but not who it was or when. I screw up when things get complex.
Yet my creativity – through writing, podcasting and websites – has never been better. This can deceive other people because, if they read my writings or see a photo, they get the impression I’m in better shape than I am. “You’re looking well, Palden!” Gosh, do I? It doesn’t quite feel like that.
At one stage I asked myself what I would be doing if I didn’t have cancer. Just carrying on, was the answer. Instead I have been given a new relationship with life, an experience-rich chapter, however long or short it is to be – miraculously paid for by the government and the noble taxpayers of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Life is twice as difficult but, in compensation, it has changed in shape and content.
I’ve had some pretty amazing spiritual initiations in my life, and this has been one in a sequence, as if it was meant to be that way all along. Twice coming close to dying in the last four years, I’ve had some training for the inevitable journey that is yet to come.
So, did I go down with cancer, or did I go up?
In our time, we’re all faced with many unknowns. Most people can however safely assume they will be alive later in life. The removal of that assumption has a strangely spiritualising effect – and that’s another bizarre gift that cancer has given. It’s what the psychedelic guru Alan Watts used to call the wisdom of insecurity. Earlier in life I knew it was good to appreciate life and all that it gives us, but cancer has taught me what that means in far more real-life terms.
On Sunday, Ba Miller and I shared the floor in Penzance, speaking to a lovely crowd, on the occasion of the late Hamish Miller’s 97th birthday.
Ba herself is 91 – though, with me at 73, a mere stripling, we’re both beat-up and still going strong!
Ba told some anecdotes of what happened when they were following the Apollo and Athena lines from Ireland to Israel, and some really valuable dowsing tips (since it was also World Dowsing Day).
I talked about the energy-landscape of West Penwith, about building megalithic structures for consciousness-engineering and how Penwith is one big ancient site with hundreds of components.
A big thank you to Rachel, Lucy and Lyndz for initiating and organising it, and for their rousing spirit.
To hear our talk (1h 15m), go to my Audio Archive and look for ‘2024 PodTalks’:
Also: my latest book, Blessings that Bones Bring – a spirited Myeloma patient tells his cancer story, is coming out soon in digital PDF format, and before long as an audio book. Whether it gets published in print remains to be seen.I’ll let you know when it’s available.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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