This is particularly for people affected by cancer or any other serious or terminal illness.
I’ve been a member of the Honourable Company of Cancer Patients for over five years now and, amazingly, I’m still alive, and against the odds. I have a blood cancer, Multiple Myeloma, and I didn’t expect to live this long.
I waded through the tough grind of chemotherapy and dealing with physical disablement. I went down, nearly fell through the cracks, and found myself emerging from a dark tunnel around three years ago.
I found myself starting a new life – well, kind of. I have no idea how long I am to live – it could be next month or five years. But I found a reason to be alive.
This podcast is not about the medical stuff: it’s about the experience of cancer and what it can do to us. Deep in our soul.
This is my fiftieth podcast from the far beyond. The birds in the intro and outro were recorded here on the farm early in the morning on 19th February 2025. To me, they’re medicine birds – especially the geese, who overwinter here.
Yes, you’ve probably done it before -getting dead, that is. While this involves falling into the Great Unknown, swimming in the Vastness, it’s in your personal bundle of knowhow, somewhere deep down.
This February 2025 Aha Class was about the process of dying and what happens afterwards. The talk comes in two parts. They’re here:
I’m drawing on personal experience. This is what it’s like from the inside – at least, as I have experienced it, and the way I see it.
The range of possible dying experiences is vast, actually, and tailor-made for every soul according to our karmic dispositions and where we have got to in the lifetime we’ve just had.
The audio recordings of this two-part talk are ready and out now. Save them for a good moment – this is a special one.
Next month’s Aha Class is about geopolitical healing – working inwardly with wars, disasters and the deeper levels of the issues at stake on our planet at present.
Without uncertainty there would be no faith. I heard that on the radio this morning. It’s true.
Faith is not just about religion – it’s about beliefs of all kinds. Even belief (or disbelief) in that voracious phantasm called Donald Trump. Uncertainty makes us build a body of interconnected, multi-level beliefs, a world-view, by which we attempt to navigate the mizmaze of reality we’re presented with when we get born on earth and attempt to live out our lives.
This is where change starts, in our beliefs. Occasionally they need shaking up because they can coagulate into set ways and conventions that are not ultimately helpful. This applies to us as individuals and to human collectivities.
If we wish to contribute to changing things and making the world good, we can do so on many different fronts, whether working with overarching principles or with the building of buildings. This is where meditation comes in, because its realm is that of spirit, beliefs and the roots of human thought, feelings and actions.
We can have revolutions or other radical changes, but where revolutions fail is that basic beliefs don’t automatically change with them – though things can indeed get shaken up, stimulating uncertainty and thus a potential reformulation of collective belief and faith. Change needs to start both from above and below.
In meditation, by generating positive vibes and working within the vibrational field of collective human awareness, we’re working with change from the bottom up. We might not see things that way – we might simply be wishing to calm down, or do our practice, or pray for healing or peace – but that’s what happens anyway.
Whatever we seek in meditation, it’s worth adding a prayer that we help humanity raise its level, to look again at its realities, to see things in new ways and to become more conscious. Just this creates world change.
That’s my thought for the day (or the week).
Last week I lost my internet for three days, so no message was possible. So much for uncertainty! But as always I was there in meditation at the appointed time and I felt others of you there too.
You’re welcome to join us in the Sunday meditation. Just join us at the appointed time (see below) and do your meditation in your own usual way, together with us. If you’d like more information, click here:
On Wednesday 12th February I’ll be doing another Aha Class here in Penzance, Cornwall, and it’s called ‘Getting Dead, and what happens afterwards‘. Since many of you don’t live in Cornwall, audio recordings of the class will be online within a week afterwards. If the thoughts I wrote above are of interest to you, the next Aha Class in March will be about inner aid and geopolitical and planetary healing, consciousness work to help the world progress and to participate spiritually in specific world crises and issues. It will include an inner journey to do some work on that front.
With love from me, Palden
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Current meditation times, on Sundays: UK, Ireland & Portugal 7-7.30pm GMT W Europe 8-8.30pm E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 9-9.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm PST North America 11-11.30am
This is about the ancient sites of West Penwith in Cornwall, where I live. It runs through the prehistory of this area from the Mesolithic, through the Neolithic and the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, featuring particularly the megalithic periods of the Neolithic and Bronze Age – the time of the quoits, menhirs and stone circles.
It will be of interest to locals in Cornwall, or people from elsewhere who visit our ancient sites, or people with a general interest in prehistory and megalithic times.
It’s in four episodes – and for binge-listeners there’s a three-hour omnibus edition. If you prefer reading, there’s a PDF version of this short book that can be read on-screen or printed out.
Originally it was part of my book Shining Land, about the ancient sites of West Penwith, but I took it out because it made Shining Land too long. It works well on its own.
Britain has had two periods of national greatness. One was the 250-year empire-building period in relatively recent times, and the other was the Bronze Age and a megalithic civilisation that lasted a thousand years. This is its story, as it happened in West Cornwall, one of the hubs of megalithic activity in NW Europe 4,000 years ago.
If this interests you, I hope you enjoy the book! It’s free to stream or download.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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