Cancer blogs – Notes from the Far Beyond

Blessings that Bones Bring

A spirited cancer patient tells his cancer story.

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.

You’ll find it here: www.palden.co.uk/boneblessings.html

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.

It’s funny how things go.

Energy Lines and Power Points

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’:

palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

With love, Palden

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.

A Trip to the Iron Age

One of Palden’s prehistory podcasts

This 30 minute podcast is recorded while sitting in the remains of an Iron Age Courtyard House, up the hill on the farm where I live.

It doesn’t look very exciting nowadays, though it’s a nice place – but then, if you were 2,000 years old, you might be a bit worse for wear too!

This podcast is all about what life was like in the Iron Age in Cornwall, two millennia ago, and the way people saw things then.

Looking into the yard of the courtyard house. Behind are Sancreed Beacon (left) and Caer Brân (centre right), and far behind them is the hill on which the Merry Maidens stone circle sits.

This was the Celtic period – though the Celts shared a culture, and they were not one people. In West Cornwall many were descendants of the indigenals of the Bronze Age.

It’s about life and reality systems in our time, and in the Iron Age, and also in the Bronze Age and the Neolithic – how people saw life and the world in each of these periods, and how their technologies reflected that.

With some insights into what we can learn from them now. This is important. As elder dowser Sig Lonegren often used to say, quoting his Seneca teacher Twylah Nitsch, ‘We seek not to emulate the ancient ones – we seek what they sought‘.

Listen on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/5sRfUDrjLuJq1S8gHSogtt

Or you’ll find it on my podcast page:
www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

(On the podcast page, check out ‘Ancient Civilisation‘ for more prehistory podcasts.)

With love from down’ere in Cornwall. Palden.

You can see Mount’s Bay and St Michael’s Mount from the courtyard house

Relief

A cancer update.

Wind-strafed heather on Bartinney Castle, West Penwith, Cornwall

I’ve just had my three-monthly phone conversation with the haematologist – she’s at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro. One good thing about my particular cancer, Myeloma, is that it is easily tested and monitored with a blood sample (I had it two weeks ago). So we can do it over the phone. She’s always rather brisk – the poor woman probably gets fed up of the list of calls to make through the day, and with us cancer patients and our anxieties.

Anyway, I had been anticipating bad news. Well, not exactly bad, but not good either. I was hovering between optimism and pessimism.

This winter I’ve begun experiencing a kind of stress – partially due to circumstances but also because part of me feels vulnerable and undefended. No one has my back. It takes me back to experiences I had around the age of six-seven-eight. I remember the feeling of it. I was turning short-sighted, and as an unrecognised Aspie I felt like a stranger in a strange land and a fish out of water. My poor old Mum was always busy with other things, without paying much attention, and the world seemed so big and incomprehensible, and somehow I was expected to manage with all this.

Nowadays they might call that ‘learning difficulties’ but it isn’t really. It’s not a lack of intelligence but a bit too much of it. It’s a complex Aspie perception of the world that takes longer to compute – for me, it took until around age fourteen, when suddenly the other boys started calling me ‘Professor’ instead of ‘Speccy-Foureyes’.

Part of me feels like a seven year old – feeling a need to have someone holding my hand and shielding me from that big world out there. This is quite a change from earlier times in life when I had more confidence and a relative invincibility that was calm under duress and pretty competent – I’m a Virgo, after all, and us Virgos tend to be quite calm and serene, or we tend to be neurotic. Or perhaps both at different times.

So I was somewhere between nervous and calm over this phone call. It could decide many things. One thing in particular is that the next line of treatment – I’ve exhausted two out of five now – is Thalidomide. It’s a good cancer drug, the doctors say, but what makes me nervous is this: my mother took Thalidomide for morning sickness while pregnant with me, and I was very lucky to emerge into life with all my limbs and body-parts intact. Apparently, deformed bodies arise only if the drug is taken during a certain early week of pregnancy, and it wasn’t that week for me. However…

Prayer clooties at St Euny’s Well, near Carn Euny.
But if you ever wish to tie a cloutie at a well, make sure it is natural and biodegradable, since the problems you weave into it will disappear as the cloutie rots away. And it doesn’t throttle the tree.

I have Asperger’s Syndrome, and I have wondered whether it’s related to the Thalidomide I took, second-hand, during gestation. The chemotherapy I had four years ago made me wonder about this – particularly the steroid Dexamethasone. The drugs seemed to amplify my Aspie symptoms. The behavioural transition prompted by these drugs helped lose me a partner and some friends. It has become more difficult to manage some of life’s tricky social situations, or deal with bureaucracy, or insensitive people, or hackers, or modern-times complexities.

But, on the plus side, this Aspie-amplification has led to a wave of creativity, perspective and original thinking. As you might perhaps have noticed, I’ve been churning out loads of stuff – mainly in the form of blogs, podcasts and books. That’s the other side of Aspergers – the Aspie genius, with an ability to excel in certain specific interests and gifts (though not necessarily in the full range of abilities that modern humans are supposed to cover). Also, there’s a certain blindness to human guile and manipulation, making us emotionally rather susceptible to getting caught in other people’s webs without realising it.

Many ‘neurotypicals’ judge Aspies to be emotionally neutral or feelingless. Truth is, we get so flooded and drowned in feelingful impressions that we short-circuit or melt down, showing little or no responsive expression except perhaps the look of a rabbit frozen in the headlights. Or a bit like Commander Data. The picture comes clear within hours, days or longer, but by then people have formed their conclusions and stomped off, often making big, inappropriate decisions on our behalf.

Over two years after we separated, I have only recently lightbulbed a bundle of key insights into my relationship with my former partner that I had just not seen before. I had sensed it unconsciously but I still didn’t see it. While talking to a friend I suddenly saw it – the whole pattern and network of connections, events, clues, mistakes and junction-points. It’s funny when that happens – everything suddenly becomes very different. Nothing changes, but everything changes, and a healing can occur.

Yet the paradox is that empathically I understand the workings of the human psyche and human emotions more clearly than many people, though not necessarily in my own personal sphere of life. Many would interpret this as a growth blockage, a refusal to open up to my emotions, but that’s not the case. It’s just that I operate with a different operating system that computes things in a different way, and neurotypicals have some advantages and Aspies have others.

The main problem is that neurotypicals are in the majority and neurotypical culture is dominant, even though today we’re presented with a rather chaotic and multidimensional spectrum of psychodiversity. NTs tend to define the rules and, being more rule-bound than Aspies, they tend to insist that everyone should behave like them, according to their criteria.

Victorian architecture, at Porthmoina Cove, Penwith

Anyway, the haematologist quite likes me – I’m an easy customer. She was pleased (yet again) with my results. I’ve had no cancer medication now for four months and, lo behold, there is no significant change in my readings.

So suddenly I’m feeling relieved. My wobbles were just that – wobbles. It means I won’t have to go on Thalidomide for the next few months at least – and I won’t have to do the rather long journey to the hospital either, once a month.

That’s good, because it comes back to that vulnerable, undefended feeling. My fear is that my Aspie tendencies will get switched up by Thalidomide. The bit that concerns me most is that I have no one to speak for me or cover my back. There are times when I blank out and (this might surprise you) have nothing to say, at precisely the moment when I need to fend for myself. Or I simply forget about something important, remembering it afterwards, and too late. Again, it’s that eight-year old feeling where there are quite a few things you can handle, but some things are too much. You need Mummy or Daddy, or someone, to come to the rescue.

But there’s a lesson here too, in trust. Things always work out alright. My anticipations were based upon the fear that my readings would deteriorate and they’d put me on the new drugs quite quickly. I have a few public speaking engagements coming up, and some anticipation about how well I’ll do on stage if I’m on new drugs. Or whether Thalidomide would lead to regrettable behavioural changes, just as the steroid Dex did. But there was no need to worry, and everything is alright. My readings are fine.

So is Paldywan the oratorical bard. Lacking anyone to talk to, a few days ago I went up the hill to the 2,000 year old ruin of a courtyard house and recorded two podcasts on the trot. And one of them, Ascension, comes out with this blog.

There’s a funny twist I discovered recently. In 2021 I contracted Osteonecrosis of the Jaw (ONJ), as a side-effect of some pharma drugs I had been on earlier. It caused pus to drip from my chin – urgh, yuk! It made me feel horrible and disgusting and, naturally, no one wanted to come near me. I asked myself about the inner meaning of this, digging up an image or a memory of having had leprosy sometime back in history, and being rejected by society. Rejection and exile are two karmic patterns of mine. When I twigged this, it made some sort of sense – deep memory was involved in the ONJ.

As time went on the ONJ subsided, becoming manageable. Then, a few days ago I was looking up the various uses of Thalidomide and the two specific ailments mentioned were leprosy and multiple myeloma (my kind of cancer). Ah, there’s a connection. I’ve been given a clue. Clues like this can act as keys to healing. It’s fascinating how intuition can know things long before the brains catch up.

I’ve started on some new holistic remedies – the main one is Resveratrol, a specific treatment for Myeloma. I’m back on Shitake Mushrooms as well. I have started some new supplements and remedies too, including one by Detox Trading in Devon called Happy Mix – it really does lift the spirits and, with the late spring we’re having, it has helped me emerge from wintertime blues and cabin-fever.

The Watcher. A simulacrum at Porthmoina Cove

I didn’t need to be worried about the haematologist’s verdict. Perhaps I am a neurotic Virgo after all. Though there’s something else here too… cancer has stripped away many of my defences, sensitising me to vibes, energies, situations and scrangles. There’s more emotional lava erupting as well. This makes me both more open and more vulnerable. Small things demand more processing than before, yet I’m less dulled by the very defences, built with the cement of trauma, that are designed to protect us from a rather tough and violating world. Life has become more colourful, textured and meaningful.

So a key cancer benefit – or a possibility, at least – is that cancer is a big jolt to become more human, to live more fully – even if physically constrained like me. In some respects it might be worth looking on cancer as an upgrade – and other terminal, serious and painful ailments too. From a soul viewpoint, at least.

It’s not a matter of primary importance how long we live – dying ‘before one’s time’ isn’t necessarily a failure or a shame. What matters is how we filled the time and space we were given, how we chose to experience the life we had and what contribution we made. In terms of soul evolution, three years with cancer can sometimes be equivalent to fifty years of normality.

But then, you don’t have to contract cancer for that to happen. It’s the way cancer hits you that matters, and what doors it opens – and whether we choose to go through them. This is regardless of how well or badly the cancer goes from a medical viewpoint. It’s the psycho-spiritual impact and the jolt that matters. It induces a cards-on-the-table focus of energy and of will-to-live.

It obliges us to face our shit, stuff, fears, failings and foibles. And regrets. On a deep level, that’s one reason why cancer is increasing in incidence: it’s one way in which the soul of humanity is serving us notice that we need to wake up. Or, at least, wake up more. Or you die. It’s a simple formula. It’s a bit like being in a war or crisis zone – the situation is terrible, but a crazy enspiritedness can take over, making you put your life on the line and getting you through to where you truly need to go.

My cousin Faith calls it a state of super-concentrated uncertainty. Or I’m reminded of the title of Alan Watts’ book of fiftyish years ago, called ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity‘.

Even so, I’m rather relieved to know that I’m cruising along on a cancer plateau and my results are okay. I felt it was so, but the confirmation is much appreciated. After all, it does help to know at least a little about what’s going to happen next. Should I buy a new computer or put some money down for my funeral? Um, I don’t know, but it might be the computer. Sometimes you just have to choose. And that’s what life on Earth is about.

With love, Palden.

[Written using human intelligence. Such as it is.]

PS: my cancer book is progressing, and recently I decided to release it as an audiobook too – better for people with fatigue and chemo-brain. I still haven’t found a really good title for it though. That’s most strange. I guess it’ll come in its own time.

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

Looking toward Ding Dong mine (in the far distance) from Carn Eanes, near Pendeen

Hello, You

Welcome to a rather deep, wide and spirited cancer blog

This blog covers something I never thought I would land up writing about: my experiences as a person with cancer. Bone marrow cancer or myeloma.

It started in November 2019 (here), butthe latest blog is below.

It’s my cancer story and about the wider and deeper life-issues I come upon. Matters of spirit and matters of being alive.

You’re welcome to sign up as a follower (on the top-right of this page). No strings.
I also do podcasts – they’re here.

I’m glad you’ve come. Please inform anyone who might like this blog – thanks.

Best wishes, Palden.

I live in West Penwith, Cornwall, in southwest Britain.

The red marker down on the left shows where I live, on an organic farm. Far beyond. Surrounded by the high seas.

For pics of Penwith and its cliffscapes and stone circles, click here.

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.

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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.

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.

Carolingian Carcinogenix

A quick preen at Porthmoina Cove, Penwith, Cornwall

Greetings, King Charles, from that far-off Duchy down’ere at the other end of the A30, out past Windsor. Welcome to the Honourable Company of Cancer Patients. By appointment with Divinity.

Some people want to be astronauts, yet there’s another way of visiting other worlds, and it’s called ‘cancer’. From what I’ve heard thus far on the news, you’re taking the right approach to it. Good on you. Your life has just become a whole lot more difficult, yet moments like this open the curtains – something gets released and empowered too.

You’ve started a new life and, as a king and public figure, and with your background, you’ve had a training in public fortitude. So (pls don’t read this wrongly), when I heard you’d got cancer and cancer has got you, it felt that it fits. In some way it fits with the story of your life. There’s something good and right about it. As was the case with me – speaking as one with bone marrow cancer, and two years younger than you.

This is not a punishment but a challenge, and many of us are getting it. The reasons why we get cancer are many and intricate – it’s not just about ‘bad lifestyle’. The main reason is simple: we humans are living longer and this is the pricetag. But there’s something bigger and deeper too: it’s about facing the core reason why we are alive.

Cancer prompts a major review of the story of our lives, giving us an opportunity to realign, to do a course-correction. Even if not a lot can be done about our lives after cancer hits us, it is at minimum a time of understanding, re-computing, acceptance, reconciliation and choice. A choice between making something of it or being a victim of it. You can go down in glory or you can go down in sorrow.

Though, as I have discovered, you can also go up, not just down, with cancer, and it outclasses all of the workshops, trainings and pilgrimages you could possibly imagine.

Our civilisation has based itself on setting aside life-purpose in order to conform to the demands and requirements of keeping the show on the road, earning its rewards and avoiding its punishments. We get jobs, get debts and tread the mill, only some of us following something akin to our true vocation. This kind of life has its stresses and strains, causing many people to lose their way. They get stuck in it. Then they need an earthquake like cancer to change everything.

I have done a lot throughout my life to follow my vocation, though after I got cancer I realised I’d been missing something important. Cancer gave me a gift. It partially disabled me, making life, even just dressing and cooking, far more difficult. Yet it caused me to review my life, to do the best I could with it. It re-focused me. In a strange kind of way I stepped into a truer version of myself. Actually, I didn’t have a lot of option.

Yet this was a choice. It happened in the first few hours and days following diagnosis. There I was in hospital, immobilised, in pain, dependent on others, helpless to do much except fully accept the situation. The shock of it all actually gave me rocket-fuel: it was too big to handle, so I did the only thing I could do – handing myself over to ‘HP Source’. Surrender to ‘The Management’.

I had suddenly entered a test of all my beliefs and all that I stood for. The chop had come down and I was helpless, except to make that choice. It was a choice to trust that, whatever happened, everything would be alright.

Quickly I got to a point where I realised that, if there was a purpose in my staying alive, my angels, or the powers of regeneration inside me, would keep me alive. If it was time to go, that would be alright too. This is an important moment. This is where the big choice is made. It’s a choiceless choice, deep and multidimensional. It’s all to do with reconnecting with the true reason why we came to Earth.

Before entering this life we made an agreement.

To be given the gift of life we had to have a reason, a purpose, a task and a storyline, a particular bundle of joys and sorrows that we wished or needed to go through. Vacancies on Earth are in short supply, and no one is here by accident. Perhaps the choice had been made earlier, implicitly, as a result of things done or not done before this life, and it’s a matter of committing to a crash course in dealing with the karmic consequences. Some consequences can be testing and others can be a gift.

How we see things is critical here. Is cancer a gift or a burden, a life-giver or a killer? What matters more – longevity or meaning in life?

We made an agreement before coming and, the way that life is nowadays, the world has discouraged most of us from fulfilling it – for each of us in different ways, depending on our story as a soul. We went through growing-up and we lost our way. Some go through an awakening in youth (I did), some have a life-crisis in middle age or around age 60, and some awaken toward the end of their lives.

Gorse-perching demonstration, Carn Gloose

Life on Earth is challenging and thorough in the way it grinds and sieves us, to the extent that, even if we don’t lose our way, we still lose our way. For me, as an author, I was doing okay before cancer, yet cancer has propelled me into the most creative period of my life. I didn’t anticipate this, though now it has happened, I’m glad it happened. I had to lose some of my mind – to get ‘chemo-brain’ – to gain this benefit. Well, you win some and you lose some.

I was also given a gift of time, literally and psychospiritually. For the first time in my life I fitted safely inside a category – suddenly I was ‘a cancer patient’ with eligibilities – and this entitled me to benefits. This is a relief because, although I’ve brought benefit to the world worth millions, possibly billions, I haven’t done well financially, doing what I have done. So for the first time in my life I’ve had a regular income – a lean one, but if I’m broke now I don’t have to worry about next month. I’ve always been self-employed and public-service oriented, bumping along the bottom, so this is a big and welcome change.

This time business has led to a new issue. Most people around me lack time and, although I have great friends, our times together are short – or, worse, they’re mainly digital. That gives me even more time.

This time-wealth means that, as an author, I can ruminate on things more than ever before. Often this is semi-conscious, a fermentation going on underneath. Then suddenly, I wake up one morning, up it comes and, armed with a mug of tea, my fingers start up on the keyboard. This morning’s blog was prompted by the news of Charles and his cancer – and particularly of the approach he seems to be taking. You’re doing it right, Charles – carry on, and good luck. I’m with you on this.

And lay off him! Everyone’s suddenly worried about constitutional issues and how and when he’ll get better. The answer is: it’s a process, it takes time, and nothing definite can be said about anything because, with cancer, you can easily choke on your food and blip out in three minutes flat. So give it a break. Poor chap, let him be ill.

The one thing that does concern me about Charles is this. Cancer strips away our defences, making us more vulnerable and sensitive than before. This is a core part of the course-correction mentioned above, because insensitivity, fear and defence mechanisms are how we lost our way. So to get back on track we have to lose our defences. We have to feel vulnerable, stare death in the face, quake before The Abyss, and get real inside ourselves.

Cancer patients become more highly impacted by the prejudices and micro-aggressions that others unconsciously lay on us. We find ourselves crying tears and taking emotional impacts that, to normal people, would just mean ‘a bad day’ or ‘a tiff’, or ‘joshing’. This gets difficult at times because insensitive people can trample, act dishonestly, manipulate, harm and offend without being aware of it. When you have cancer and you’re in the public eye, subject to people’s hopes, fears and expectations, it gets complex and the best thing to do is to hobble away and leave them to it.

Charles will get fed up of being asked ‘How are you?’, and the worried looks, the repeated declarations of ‘Sorry‘, as if something wrong has happened, and of the people avoiding him, and of other people coming too close, and people being neurotic. He’ll be obliged by coffee-driven people to think clearly when he has brain-fog and he’s out of his head on fatigue and chemo side-effects.

Though the funny thing is, this is a gift. Charles has lived with an image problem all his life, and cancer is ending all that. In a strange kind of way, cancer brings him forgiveness in the eyes of many – though what he is to be forgiven for, over and above the normal foibles of being human, is an open question. Perhaps society needs to forgive itself for being so unforgiving and judgemental toward him for too long.

Charles now has an excuse to be himself. He can create his own image as a vulnerable, human, thoughtful and life-experienced people’s king. He can open up an important role for a constitutional monarch with limited powers: the possibility of teaching and tone-setting, exercising moral sway. If he wants to retreat to Highgrove or Balmoral to potter in the garden, he may – that’s a good way of being a king, in our day. If he wants only to do rare public appearances, that’s fine. If he needs to die, that’s okay too – but I suspect he has a few years left for redeeming something and giving the nation a gift. He’ll be more on purpose, with an enhanced moral right to speak his beliefs and suggest ideas to the wider public. We need a Carolingian Renaissance, mark two.

In a funny kind of way he’ll give new leadership to a country, Britain, that is rudderless, thrashing around bombing people instead of searching its conscience, or reviewing its history and revising its currently over-inflated, arrogant self-image. It’s called being human. We’ve failed to do it in Gaza and we Brits, as a nation, do need to do it, to prove that we are true, decent humans.

We need to do something about undoing the mess we’ve played a big part in creating – my own grandfather was in General Allenby’s invading force in Iraq and Palestine in WW1, and that’s where the trouble started. That’s one reason I’ve been involved with Palestine – my grandfather inserted it into my DNA.

We Brits have a certain standing in the world – it’s our covenant as a nation – and we’re failing to rise to our full stature, to fulfil that role. It isn’t about banking, manufacturing, property or wealth-generation. It concerns creativity, content of character, ideas, music, literature, principles, decency and moral integrity. Not religion, but spirituality.

Also, the future is too big for nations like Britain (or Germany, Israel, China, Russia or USA) to puff themselves up, acting as if they own the place, possessing some supposedly God-given right to impose on others and determine their sorry fates. Sorry folks, that was the Twentieth Century.

This gets interesting. What I have learned from cancer is this. When I was diagnosed and flat on my back in pain, I gave up. I realised that the game was up and I just had to accept reality. I realised that I’d had a pretty good life, all in all, and though I have regrets I also have joys, and it’s okay if it all comes to an end, if it must.

After about two years I went through a rebirth. I had got over the shock, learned some tricks, thought things through, screwed up several times and found some new benefits from a cancer patient’s life. Even though nowadays I have no professional aspirations, the fulfilment of my life-purpose has been going surprisingly well, without my really trying. All I’m doing is keeping my spirits up, filling time being creative, and people seem to appreciate what I churn out, getting something useful from it.

Deeper down, I guess I’ve stepped into a new archetype – the archetype of a rather beat-up old hierophant. Being an elder is not just about getting old and creaky. It’s about harvesting the value you’ve gained from life-experience, from what you’ve truly learned. It manifests in your behaviour, your manner and your vibe – what Maoris call Mana, your spiritual heft.

I’ve spent much of my life as an astrologer and speaker, volubly sharing my insights into the nature of life but, since having cancer, something has deepened. Life: it’s about what you become by living it. You take nothing with you when you die, except for what you have become. That’s what matters.

In 2022 I asked myself what I would be doing if I didn’t have cancer. The answer came straight: I’d be carrying on as before. Cancer wiped the slate pretty clean. Yet I’ve been gifted a new set of rules and parameters – I can’t drive a car, climb trees, make love, use a mobile phone, go to far-off places, earn money or do what I want. It’s almost like living on a different planet. Someone changed the rules of engagement.

And actually, I’m glad. It’s hard, and I’m unsure whether or not to recommend it, and I don’t think I’m just rationalising, but actually I’m glad.

From this viewpoint, I can safely say I’m glad for King Charles. Poor sod, he’s had to face a lot in life, including more than his fair share of antipathy from the public and a posse of judgemental hypocrites, though these experiences have prepared him for this, and it gives him a redemptive opportunity. This is the story of his life. This wasn’t part of the plan, and cancer is distinctly inconvenient for him as a king, but it authorises him to be himself and to take command of his position.

I’m not a royalist, by the way. However, I look at the different political systems we have around the world and I’m not excited by most presidents, dictators and other figureheads either – they do not convince me that another system would be better.

It comes back to something I realised after my time at the London School of Economics, where I had the opportunity to sample every kind of radical and academic political thinking that was available at the time. I realised that it’s not the type of system that matters, or laws or constitutions. It all hangs around the soul and content of character of the people who occupy the seats of power. In this, Charles is doing well. Meanwhile, most of our politicians are lightweights facing a heavyweight situation.

The problem with royalty is the matter of succession – it depends on who inherits the post. In Britain we’re doing quite well with our monarchs, at present. If you get a difficult monarch, you’re stuck with them unless you wish to engage in regicide or revolution. However, in our time, we can get stuck with apparent democrats too, and with oligarchies. So it returns to the question of the quality of people in power, not the system we live in.

If a dictator wishes to stay in power she or he still needs to keep their nose close to the wind, doing the right thing for the people and treating them well. If they fail in this then eventually they come to a sorry end. Revolutions and coups, and electoral landslides too, happen only when people feel things aren’t right.

But it’s not just about them. It’s about us. If we buy sensationalist newspapers or give clicks to online deceivers, if we pressurise leaders by expecting too much of them, or by criticising and blaming unfairly, or we fail to look at things in the round, then we’ll get leaders who ring-fence themselves for protection, distancing from and increasingly deluding the public with statements more than actions.

To quote President Georges Pompidou (in old sexist 1970s language), ‘A statesman is a politician who places himself at the nation’s service, and a politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service‘. Meanwhile, the good-hearted, well-motivated, listening, sensitive leaders – the ones who should be in the seats of power – wisely seek other jobs, or they land up in places like Cornwall.

We, the public, need to be more intelligent, aware, constructive and mature in our practice of democracy if we are to retain it. If politicians need security guards and spin-doctors they become inaccessible and democracy will not work. If the media and interest-groups engage in propaganda, manipulation and twisting the social discourse, democracy dies.

If electorates continue accepting this, we might as well also accept that we live in a ‘managed democracy’ – something we accuse Russia of having. That is, an opinion-manipulated democracy where there is no actual choice available and, even if the incumbent loses the election, nothing much really changes with the new lot, and the same oligarchy stands behind the scenes pulling strings.

To quote a 1970s bumper-sticker, ‘If democracy really changed things they’d make it illegal‘. And strangely, democracies are the most warlike nations of all. On behalf of whom?

So, Charles, hang in there. You aren’t involved in politics, and your job is to introduce some non-partisan wisdom, perspective and continuity to the equation. You’ve taken on a new mission.

Follow your intuitions, and when advice you’re given doesn’t ring true, follow your wisdom and preference. You’re in uncharted territory, but that’s not for the first time, and it’s likely that the public will think well of you if you handle this well.

Take time, don’t be pushed and don’t push yourself. Tell people that you’ll decide by tomorrow or next week. Enjoy the gardening. Be spontaneous.

When you feel up, be up, and when you’re down, be down, and teach people a new way of treating their king – more free of expectation and protocol and more happy with a happily human king. It’s okay if that crown is heavy – just take it off. We don’t mind. We don’t need the regalia and protocol – we need you.

That’s why your cancer is a gift, and I think you have the capacity to make it so.

With love, Palden.

This blog is guaranteed AI-free, crafted with Earthling-humanoid brainz and fingerz.

Site: www.palden.co.uk
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Conscious Dying

Dying consciously isn’t something to leave for the future. It starts now. Yes, even when we’re young. It’s about our lives now. Let me explain.

Dying is a process, a continuum. All of us are part-dead already, at least psychologically, even if we’re in good health. Most people are only 10-20% dead, and most are unconscious of it, except when we schmooze into the otherworld in our dreams or when we’re ill or facing overwhelming circumstances in which we are obliged to ‘die into the moment’, to let go of all of all that went before, as if this is our last moment or it is soon to be so.

It’s all to do with our relationship with the otherworld and how comfortably we function in it. This depends on the extent to which we trust our ‘subjective’ perceptions. When a close loved one pops their clogs, part of us goes with them as if by osmosis, and we can be in quite an altered state thereafter (for at least a month though also up to a year).

This is a form of privileged access to the otherworld, empathically piggybacking the loved one who has died. It’s a gift from them to you. If we indulge in loss, buying into the mindframe that causes people to say, for want of something better, “Sorry for your loss“, we’re missing the point. Is it a loss or a gain? Here lies a choice.

If it’s a loss, then you’re afraid of dying. Go on, be honest. You’re afraid, and you see it to be a negative thing. But wait, when it’s 150 Palestinians who pop their clogs in one night, in some respects I’m happier for the people who died than for those who survive. Bloody hellsbells, that’s a version of earthly life that it’s quite good to get out of, if that is the fate that befalls you.

If it’s a gain, something in you is open to dying. And, as it happens, you’ll tend to be more open to living too. Living fully, and switching up the risk factor to a healthier level. It means you are likely to die more easily, when your time comes, because this isn’t just a goodbye. It’s a hello. It’s an entry into a new world. You’re going home.

Some people will relax into it and float off when they come to the point of passing over – when they come to the medically critical point of taking a last breath. But even then, this is but a stage on an intensely transitional dying path. Death starts long before and continues afterwards. Even with a sudden or unexpected death there are often signs, which can be seen in retrospect, of foreknowledge of death – something was fixed in preparation, on some level.

Sometimes I’m told of someone’s death and I’m not surprised at all – I didn’t expect it, but once it came, it made sense in some way. Then there are some deaths where it doesn’t feel right. I’ve felt that about quite a few of the deaths that have occurred around me in the last year or more – not only were they avoidable, but also, in my judgement, it was not right that they happened. I felt that about a family, the Gaza branch of the Issa family in Bethlehem, who died en masse, over thirty of them, in October. My first response was, no, that shouldn’t have happened. There was something bad about that. But then, ‘the hand of God moves in strange ways’.

How you feel at the bucket-kicking critical point is greatly affected by your readiness for it. Some people experience it a bit like falling off a cliff – scary at first, but then you discover that you can fly. Some people can’t handle it at all, going off at a tangent, or to sleep, or they fight like hell. Some people relax into it, floating over the threshold with a gentle, sighing smile of recognition, release and relief. Then of course, there’s the question of what you choose to do next.

Well, the general rule is, if you’ve done reasonably well thus far, you’ll manage with the next bit. It depends a lot on how you’ve set this up, how ready you are. This might not take a vastness of preparation: it’s mainly about forgiveness and releasing, and how easily we do it. Letting things be.

Summer sunset over Tregeseal stone circle — Summer sunset over the Isles of Scilly, as seen from Tregeseal stone circle

Recently I’ve been finding out about things in my own life that I haven’t found easy to let go of. So it isn’t easy, even for one who is quite used to it.

One gift I’ve had from cancer has been the advance notice I’ve been given. I’ve been given time to pre-process dying. I’m willing to do so – and that makes a difference. Becoming disabled and debilitated started me on a change-process, and I’m grateful for having been given a time of debriefing and unwinding from life. At times it has been lonely and bleak, but that’s a necessary part of the process, part of the full spectrum of life-experience. Especially for someone who has had quite a public life.

One aspect of this is that, as an author and broadcaster, a communicator, I’ve been very productive since getting cancer. Being given notice of death gave me impetus to write and record things I haven’t said, to finalise and bring to completion many of the different threads I’ve followed in my work. It’s all going up on my growing online archive.

Completion is important because, to die consciously, we need to be reasonably at peace with things. Successful dying involves letting letting ourselves float off, and that requires that we feel okay doing so. We need to feel finished and done, with no major regrets that divert our energy and attention at death, making us struggle when it’s already too late. There will be regrets, but they need to have been dug over and sifted through, to uncover the abiding truth of them. Often these regrets come from judgements, tropes and memes of the time we’ve lived in and, ‘in the eyes of God’, they tend to look a bit different.

In recent years, as part of a self-forgiveness process, I’ve become aware of guilt and shame I have carried for things that quite often were other people’s projections – projections I had taken on – and they were not quite as big and real and bad as they had been made out to be. In some cases, though I was deemed to be wrong, I was right, or at least more right than I was judged to be – though sometimes it takes decades. I realised that my own responsibility for what happened was different from the responsibility people had laid on me – often to cover their own asses. Even so, I am responsible inasmuch as I manifested these experiences, and they’re my responsibility and creation. And it always, always, always takes two to tango.

When you die, you can’t do anything more about life – you’ve had it, and that was it. You can’t fix anything, correct anything, re-run the movie or click the ‘undo’ button. Not that you could do so earlier in life, but at least you could delude yourself you could. You can do so to some extent while you have some life left, since there are things you can correct, reconcile, heal or re-work. But as you approach death, especially if disablement and disability are involved, your capacity to do things reduces, your world grows smaller and it becomes too late to do anything. You just have to accept that that is that. Bombs that were thrown cannot be unthrown, even when the craters are covered over.

It’s still possible to come to peace about things inwardly, without reconciliation having to come from outside. We have to accept what we did and what we omitted to do – especially the latter – and own up, examine our regrets, say sorry at least within ourselves, accept that we could have done things differently, understand what it was like being affected by the things we did or omitted to do, look at the true, enduring outcomes, engage in self-forgiveness and forgiving others, and then let things be. It was as it was, and that’s that.

Charely Barley prowling around Carn Kenidjack — My old friend Charley Barley, roaming around Carn Kenidjack. We dropped out of university together, fifty years ago.

There are wider and greater significances to things, and it helps to start seeing them. A friend, Mike, died of despair, drugs and alcohol and, of course, everyone deemed that this was not good. Well, from the viewpoint of the living and the default judgements of society, this might be so. But I followed him over to the other side to check him out, and he was happy, radiant, relieved to have died and actually having a lot of fun – and I was happy for him when I found out. Those who prefer to stay with the default judgement of his seemingly regrettable death see his death as a sad thing, and I do not. I’m glad for him. It’s all in how we see and judge things.

I’m sure we’ll meet again, upstairs, Mike and I. As is the case with a good soul-brother, Terry, who unexpectedly blipped out during a hernia operation – he was the caterer at the Hundredth Monkey Camps in the mid-1990s. At the very first of the Glastonbury Camps in the mid-1980s, the camp cafe was called ‘Pie in the Sky’ and, guess what, we’ll revive it on the other side, and you’re welcome to come along when your time comes. It’s free. For the good souls who ran it back then – people like Diana and Bron – the good news is that no washing up will be needed and the food will be self-cooking!

I’ve come to the end of my ‘second line’ cancer treatment (of five). I’m receiving no more treatment of Dara, the immunotherapy drug that has kept me alive for three years. It has worked well and now it’s losing efficacy and my readings are rising. Right now, I’m on nothing – this is an eight-week ‘wait and watch’ phase, to see what happens, before I start a new treatment called Lenidalomide, or Len. This is probably what will happen, though it depends on further blood samples and observations. I’m in rather a limbo.

I can feel the cancer right now. My bones are beginning to twinge with stripes of pain. My spirits are sagging. I feel the dying process accelerate.

However, I’m better off than before because I’ve learned a lot in the last four years about living with a blood cancer. (It’s Myeloma, a form of radiation sickness). In the six-ish months before my first clear symptoms appeared (my lower back collapsed), technically I was in good health, but something was not right. A dark cloud was settling on me. I was feeling constrained, tied and weighed down. My hope and light were fading. Something in me felt desperate, despairing, as if something was wrong, though I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

Well, right now I’m getting those feelings again. Except the difference is that, this time, I can recognise the feeling and I know more about what to do, and not to do. I’m not pushing against it or trying to ‘get better’, or trying to prove that everything is alright and normal when it isn’t. I’m not anxiously looking for remedies and escape routes (though actually I’m on some new holistics), because I’ll die at the right time, in the right way, if I have anything to do with it, and that’s the way it’s going to be. The angels will take me out at the right time. It’s necessary to entrust myself to this process. It’s an act of will.

So yesterday I went to bed with my hot water bottle, a mug of tea and some munchies and I lay there, out of my head, unable to marshall myself, feeling wan and weepy, missing company and watching the jackdaws sitting on the wind.

I was stuck in a loop. Problem is, people say to me, “Just give me a ring if there’s a need”. But then, when I ring, I have to explain how I’m feeling, discussing the matter at some length, then to have to make more calls when I find out that they’re not available right now, though please feel free to ring me if ever there’s a need – which I just did.

I’ve instituted a new rule of dropping it when I’ve made three attempts. Sometimes I just have to look after myself. Problem is, nowadays, everyone is so busy, and since they’re volunteering to help out of the goodness of their hearts, I cannot complain about the quality of service! I tend to get lots of advice, and sometimes I have to say, “But I need actual help!“. “Oh, perhaps you ought to ring social services…”. The tricky bit here is that I’m often in a state of mind where due diplomacy and tact are not easy, and I cannot talk at length or discuss grand philosophisms, miracle cures or lists of things I should do.

“Would it work if I came next Thursday?“. Well, the way I’m going, I have no idea what next Thursday will be like, and life doesn’t go according to plan when your body-mind are shutting down and you’re heading for a big, yawning chasm of unwellness. The best remedy is a hot water bottle, a bit of ‘there there’ and someone to sit with you. Just the sound of those knitting needles clacking away can be very comforting when you’re in a highly altered state and hovering on the edge.

Anyway, the feeling I have right now is a bit like that point in an airplane flight where, 200 miles from landing, the pilot powers down the engines and you go into a long glide. It feels like that. There’s something rather relaxing about it. It’s a bit more effortless. Internally, it has caused me to lapse into greater levels of forgiveness and acceptance, to accelerate the flow of letting-go.

Yet something else in me wants to do a few things before I go. I want to share a few outstanding issues, to complete the story. One of these is local to me: I’ve proposed a series of three workshops on the ancient sites of West Penwith. We shall see whether the venue I’ve approached is interested. But something is different now: if someone says to me, ‘not this year, but perhaps next year’ they’re not getting it. I’m unsure I shall be on good form, or even alive, next year. People say, “Oh, don’t be pessimistic – of course you’ll be around, and besides, we need you!“. Well, perhaps, but if you need me, please get me while I’m here – and that could well mean this year.

Alternatively, please do not express regret and loss when I pop my clogs, because I was indeed here and then the angels took me out. I think I’ll manage one more Oak Dragon camp, this year, and one reason I’m inviting friends to come to the camp is not just because I want to bring the Oak Dragon tribe (a lovely bunch) a few new members. It’s because we can be together for a week in the same magic space, and it could well be the last time this is possible. This is why I invite you to consider coming.

If you can’t, then a second option is that I’ll be speaking at the Glastonbury Symposium (in Glastonbury Town Hall) on Sunday 28th July. With luck I’ll be doing a few, but not many, gigs in Glastonbury and elsewhere – this year, while I still can, and if there are organisers for it. Next year, 2025 – that’s in the lap of the gods and I don’t get the feeling my head, heart and soul will be good for it. We’ll have to wait and see. But it’s not so cool if I forget my lines half way through a talk, staring blankly at you, as if to ask, “Where am I? And why am I standing here?“.

The Pathless Path to the Gateless Gate. Near Zennor, Penwith.

This kind of stuff is important. When I ‘went up’ with cancer, I made a prayer. At the time it looked like I might have one year to live. I was a ragged pile of bones. I prayed that I might be able to bring as many things to completion as I could. In my last blog I told of how one issue – my unfinished humanitarian work – bugged me at the time, and I made a prayer for resolution. Well, BAM, it came to me in Sept-Oct 2022 and afterwards – the Ghana mission I wrote about last time, the Tuareg, about whom I’ve also written, and then in October 2023, the Palestine disaster. I can’t say I’ve resolved those issues, and none are looking good for the future. But something has been happening inside. A cleansing and releasing.

For it’s not the specific worldly issues that need completing – they can’t, and each of these three missions will resolve themselves after, not before, my death. But it’s the inner stuff. It’s not just about the worldly outcomes of the work I’ve done – much of which has on the surface been undone in recent months – but it’s the inner process of engagement with these issues, and the pain and the satisfaction, the dilemmas and truths and the intensity and pathos of it all, which is the important stuff. How to forgive myself and release it when someone in my care dies.

Just before she died, a year ago, Felicia Otoo thanked me deeply for all I had done for her and for her child Phyllis. We cried together, thousands of miles apart. She was dead the next day. Two months earlier I had adopted Phyllis, to give Felicia a sense that at least someone cared. Phyllis was renamed Phyllis Kenobi Otoo. I had saved their lives at least four times in the preceding months. I told her that I shall be joining them soon. And I shall.

There are two former students in Gaza from whom I have not heard for over two months. They’re now in the ‘missing, presumed dead’ category. I’ve been talking to them inwardly. There’s a great gift here that wasn’t there before. I can assure these dying people that I shall be joining them soon – and this gives them some comfort. Yes, a dead (psychic) humanitarian worker can still be useful, even after death!

Life always has its compensations. To be honest, though I can feel death creeping closer – I’d estimate myself to be 75% dead and rising – there’s some relief that comes with it. I’ve found the last few years difficult, facing much of it alone, and while this has had worthy rewards and I’m not complaining, I shall also be relieved when it ends, when I can drop it all, consign these matters to history and go home.

I’m finding life in the 2020s to be more complex than I can handle. I got scammed by an Indian guy online in December. He was part of a really neat scamming operation, pretending to be a BT engineer. Usually I’m really astute with things like this and rumble them quickly, but this time I was tired and not thinking clearly. I found my PayPal account quickly being raided for £300, sent to some address in China – but I got there just in time to stop another £1,200 following after it. Though I managed to save the day, it was costly and I can’t handle this kind of stuff any more. I was a tech pioneer thirty years ago, and look at me now.

Even so, this spacing-out process has its virtues. It causes me to pull back, excluding increasing swathes of things from my life – things that are too much to handle. Such as train journeys where I can’t trust whether the train will actually come. Or shopping trips in busy supermarkets where I have to stand in a queue with ten mobile phones around me, killing me slowly. Or long conversations where I can’t keep up with long-winded diversions, footnotes and appendices when I just need to get to the punchline while I still remember what the story was all about.

This pulling back is part of the conscious dying process. It starts now. It’s a winding-down process, and I feel I’m somewhere around the age of seven, growing down. I can still stand though!

It involves setting up circumstances, if I can, where I won’t be plagued with people asking favours of me when I just need to go to bed and be left in peace. It involves setting up head-spaces where I’m feeling reconciled even with people who don’t want to reconcile (or they don’t have time, or they’re afraid, or they’re leaving it till a ‘later’ that never comes).

It involves laying things to rest, applying the ‘Fuck-it‘ mantra, putting stuff down and letting things be. Dropping the burdens. Forgetting my fucking pills. Making a mandala of the life that I have had. Enjoying the semi-weightlessness of lying on my back in bed, listening to the Desert Dwellers and the raindrops on the skylight.

Usually, today I’d be buzzing on steroids and cancer drugs, and quite often I would write a blog or record a podcast on that day – it channels the buzzing into something productive. But I’m not buzzing on steroids any more. Instead, two friends over in Botallack took me to the Dog and Rabbit in St Just and I had coffee and pear cake, and that set me buzzing instead. That, and what we talked about there, is what produced this sudden, unpremeditated blog.

Penwith is bathed in sea fog. The woodstove is burning aromatic silver birch. Dinner is warming up on the stove. And the Atlantic winds are whooshing through the bare tree branches to the occasional hooting of owls.

Thanks for reading. With love, Palden.

PS. For those of you who listened to my audiobook, remember the allegations of corruption that were used to discredit the school where I worked, leading to the withdrawal of foreign funding at exactly the wrong moment? And remember what I wrote some blogs back about hasbarah – the telling of stories that are the opposite to what is actually happening? Well, in the recent accusations against UNRWA, which has 30,000 employees, exactly the same tactic is being used again, twelve years later. This is classic dirty hasbarah. The nations that have withdrawn funding should be ashamed of themselves – and my own nation, Britain, is one of them.

Lunar eclipse over West Penwith — An eclipse over Penwith. The Earth and Moon are a co-orbiting double planet. The only other one in our solar system is Pluto-Charon.

Site: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Audiobook: www.palden.c o.uk/audiobook.html
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Oak Dragon Camps: www.oakdragon .org

Bridging Gaps

Chapel Carn Brea, the last hill in Britain, topped by bronze age and neolithic cairns

I’ve just started a job that I’ve been putting off for six months. I wasn’t clear about what I needed to do, and it’s a lot of work. And I’m supposed to be retired. But it came clear a few days ago, amidst a down-time when I was sitting here alone, feeling rather rudderless and wondering what to do. I decided to do a complete revision of a rather big website I wrote and created 6-9 years ago, Ancient Penwith. It’s about the ancient sites of West Penwith, here in Cornwall.

In some respects it’s more difficult to revise a website than to create a new one, because you have to take the existing material and re-shape it along completely new lines. But there’s a tendency to simply recycle the old stuff and stay in the same mind-frame as before. So each page is taking time for me to revise – one a day, and forty to go. I’m going to make the site briefer, more to-the-point, with more maps, pics and straight statements about the geomantic issues my research of the last ten years has aroused.

The detailed stuff has gone into a book, written and not yet published, called Shining Land. I can’t self-publish it – brain issues, and I want it to stay available after I die. So I’ll try finding a publisher when I get brain-space to focus on it.

That’s what it’s like. My psyche doesn’t process stuff like it once did. I can’t multitask and hop from thing to thing any more. When faced with memory issues I have to give myself full permission to utilise and trust my intuitive brain – intuition works by faster, more direct neural pathways than logic does, and that matters in ageing brains.

In this sense, being an educated Westerner is one of the causes of many old peoples’ brain-processing issues: we have been trained to disable and constrain a significant part of our brains, in order to fit into the requirements of the system we live in. Though, frankly, many people with dementia and Alzheimer’s are simply brain-tired, worn out, and we ought to recognise this instead of deluding ourselves that we can extend our busy lives forever.

It’s not just about slow brainz. It’s about a slowing psyche – the whole lot. It’s part of the life-cycle and a wonderful way of rounding out a life. Instead of facts and figures, you get understanding and you see things in a different light.

Here’s the summit cairn on the top of Chapel Carn Brea, a chambered cairn about 4,000 years old, for retreat, conscious dying and the energy-treatment of seeds and other items (many archaeologists would probably disagree)

Right now I am celebrating the second anniversary of the sudden separation of my partner and me, after six years together. I’ve been surprised how slowly I’ve moved through the stages of coming back to myself. It has been a struggle. On the other hand, since in a late-life context I’m in the last-chance zone, there has been far more stuff to get through, for this concerns all my relationships. My very first girlfriend, Jane, is dying too, in Northumberland. It’s all about finalising a life in which I’ve been involved with some amazing women and we’ve shared remarkable experiences. But I’m happy to say that, though I regret what happened two years ago, I made it through and I live to see another day.

I’m rather surprised I got through that. But then, that’s another gift of a lapsing memory: life and its experiences become more of a surprise. Well, I’ve got through 90% of releasing my partner and seem to have crossed a critical threshold in the last month or so. When a person refuses to talk and to debrief openly after a major life-crunch together, it opens up a new level of soul-searching, understanding, guesswork and forgiveness. It’s necessary to understand and release, regardless of whether the other person responds, helps or cares – otherwise it’s a weight around your own neck and emotionally a killer. It has been painful getting through this stuff but, in the end, something has cleared and a weight of bereavement has lifted. I’m happy about that, and I hope it’s happening for her too.

When a single issue such as relationship breakdown comes up, it widens out into other areas of life – those areas that remain unreconciled and which perhaps cannot be reconciled. One recent example, for me, has been watching much of my work in Palestine come to pretty much nothing. There’s something of it still there, but really it’s a matter of writing off this chunk of life and its efforts – letting it be. It’s in the ‘life’s a bitch, then you die’ department of reality.

In a way, all our big ideas, our plans, ambitions and efforts, come to nothing. It’s a fart in the void. This is not entirely true, but it’s an aspect of life that we do need to face. We’re locked in a groove of exaggerated, self-generated meaningfulness, desperate to explain our lives and justify our existences, when often the true meaning of our lives is completely different from what we believe. Quite often our track record is better than we ourselves tend to judge. After all, we’re all useless, error-prone shits, really, and it has taken us thousands of years to get to this point – and look where we’ve got to! We humans are the kinds of people our parents warned us about – or they should have done.

Fifty years ago I might have become a professor, but I became an independent polymath instead, covering quite a wide range of seemingly disparate subjects. I mean, what’s the connection between humanitarian work in Palestine and the geomancy of stone circles? What’s the connection between astrology and geopolitics, between ETs and the history of the Crusades, or between group circle-working and leylines?

For me, it’s all about reaching across rather large gaps and seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. I guess that’s one thing that drew me toward Israelis and Palestinians – if your aim is to bring peace to these poor people, that’s noble, but it’s highly unlikely to happen in your lifetime, so get used to it and soldier on anyway. That’s what I needed to learn. It took a few years, and my work out there lifted off as soon as I learned it.

Boscawen-ûn stone circl e, around 4,300ish years old

Even so, things haven’t been working out well for me in recent years. Life has been an uphill struggle and I’ve had some rather earth-shaking experiences. In the last year, quite a few people under my care have died and I’ve faced some ridiculous challenges. Some think I ought to avoid such things but, in a way, for better or worse, this is my chosen life-path. It all hangs around the question of how deep into the water you’re prepared to go, and whether you trust that you can swim. Once you go deeper, you find out that you survive, so you go a bit deeper next time, and on it goes. Having someone shoot at you for the third time is not the same as the first.

Since October 2022 I’ve been involved in another irreconcilable problem that has weighed heavily. Recent news about the Post Office scandal here in UK has been heartening because I’ve been caught in a smaller but similar scandal. It’s a bank in Australia which, through corporate negligence, has caused the deaths of at least twelve people under my care. It is in denial of its responsibilities and has broken its promises. Like the PO scandal, the story sounds improbable and incredible. Even the consultant the bank brought in to help them with this problem recommended in our favour.

The short story is that, in October 2022, I got involved in a rescue operation in Ghana to save one of the company’s men, a Scotsman whom I knew. At the time I agreed to do it, it should have lasted 2-3 weeks. The anti-fraud security arm of the bank he worked for promised to pay all expenses if I acted as handler for this part of a larger operation – for them it was a confrontation with a large multinational crime gang. I have the right skills and experience, so I did it, in good faith.

In a crisis, there’s no time for written agreements: you either trust or you don’t trust the person, make a handshake deal and get on with it, since minutes matter. Despite repeated assurances of payment over twelve months up to September 2023, the bank has not paid. Twelve people have died as a result – some of you will remember Felicia and her child Phyllis, who died a year ago. And I am financially down. They owe Maa Ayensuwaa, me and a number of others £40,000 to help compensate all the damage done – not a vast amount.

During this time I met up with Maa Ayensuwaa, a native healer in Ghana with whom I’ve been working for the last year. Since December 2022 she and I have been alone on this, working to rescue people and both of us paying a high price for it. But we’re topping out now – the company has not managed to kill us, and neither has the crime gang.

The bank might not have intended to kill anyone, but its lack of integrity and its corporate dishonesty have killed people, and they’re continuing to err in this way even now, when a simple settle-up would not be difficult. Had they paid up as agreed at an early stage, many bad things would not have needed to happen – including Felicia’s and Phyllis’ deaths and the circumstances leading up to them.

Maa Ayensuwaa is now in Kumasi, Ghana, slowly reviving from a series of hospital operations for fibroids. Papa Nkum, her former student, and I are at present trying to find funds to get her home to her shrine at Nzema, to recuperate (£150). I’ve grown tired of fundraising. We need to get her home. It has been a long grind, keeping her alive, but we’ve done it. Gods bless her, she’s a tough cookie who seems to be able to hover around in the near-death state quite well without dying, and she’s made it through. If you feel any kind of connection with her, please send her supportive, healing vibes.

We’ve got through a crisis that neither Papa Nkum nor I reckoned we’d get through. He’s a good man. He has stood by her when others didn’t care – West Africans can be hard toward one another. But we’re quite a team, she, him and I, grossly underfunded yet resourceful and enduring. It’s quite an interaction too, between two native healers and one aged hippy – an esoteric bridge across cultures. We’ve learned a lot from each other.

The issue here is about crossing gaps, reaching across cultural chasms and bridgebuilding between disparate realities that talk different languages and see things in fundamentally different ways.

The connection between humanitarian work in Palestine and the geomancy of stone circles is this. It’s about bridging gulfs. When you’re in a stone circle, you are communicating with an intelligence, genius loci, the spirit of the place. It has a very different viewpoint from you, and it’s a whole lot bigger and older than you. It’s a stretch, but the interaction is really helpful in both directions. Meanwhile, in Palestine: when in quick succession you find yourself in the company of a right-wing Israeli settler and a Muslim radical, you’re straddling a gap where the two live in very different worlds, even if living only a mile apart. It’s the same thing. It’s the vulnerability of doing the splitz.

What’s the connection between astrology and geopolitics? Well, astrology provides a way of seeing things that sheds light on the course of events, and it’s a source of hidden intelligence on the trends, tracks and timings that such events are likely to follow. It helps us understand the threads that move through history and the way they move and evolve. If astrology were used in international relations and intel gathering, diplomacy would work far better.

What’s the connection between ETs and the history of the Crusades? Well, the Crusades, for Europe, were a pattern-setting colonial adventure that have defined the history of the last thousand years, and we’re watching the latest round in Gaza and the West Bank right now. At the time of the Crusades, there was a choice between cultural interchange or cultural rivalry between the Muslim and Christian worlds, and rivalry and misunderstanding were chosen. If one person were responsible for that, it was Richard the Lionheart.

It created a gap not only between Muslims and Christians but a separatist mindset in Europeans. That is, we choose to call Hamas terrorists rather than freedom fighters. We call ETs ‘aliens’, with the expectation that they are hostile. We again say the word ‘Russia’ with an intonation and undertone that portrays Russians as ‘them’ – it’s a return to the safe hostile territory of the Cold War. Having an enemy helps us feel better about ourselves.

There’s another connection too, observed by none other than Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik nearly 40 years ago: if ETs suddenly presented themselves to us, our differences here on Earth would quickly dissolve. We’d have to change our mindset overnight. If we put up a fight, we’d lose, instantaneously – they wouldn’t even allow us to get to that point. Because it’s not about a winning-and-losing, threat-based mindset or expectation. At that very moment we as Earthlings would be challenged to do what we’ve long needed to do – cooperate and stand together. Standing against things is not the way to go.

I’ll say that again. Standing against things is not the way to go.

What’s the connection between group circle-working and leylines? Well, leylines constitute a subtle energy-system spanning the world, concentrated in certain areas (Britain and Palestine being two) and they act as network channels that pump up energy-centres dotted around the world. Group circle-working involves people sitting in a circle, using a talking stick and other methods of entering into a synergistic group-mind state. It is ancient, archetypal and very modern, the basis of deep, para-political democracy. In such a situation, a group can generate an amplified energy-field which can at times have pattern-changing effects around the world, somehow aiding or influencing events to turn in certain directions.

This is a shamanic principle that is a key principle today in the resolution of the world’s multiplex ills. ‘When three or more people are gathered in my name, there shall I be‘ – that’s ‘God’ talking in the Bible, and it’s true, and every single reader of this blog will have experienced this in some way, however you perceive divinity. This is what people did at power-centres, and that’s why they were built – to enter into advanced mass-consciousness states, to go into deep thought and to engage with the core intelligence of nature and the universe.

Spirit operates beyond the framework of time, space and dimension. We all have sisters and brothers of the soul, dotted around the world and the universe, with whom we are in regular communication on an inner level. We’re part of networks, lineages and soul-families and, consciously or not, energy passes through these connections. That’s one reason I like to run the Sunday Meditations – it’s not necessary even to do anything in the meditation. It’s more a matter of making ourselves meditatively available for whatever need there is, and much of it operates on a very deep level, of which sometimes we only get glimmers.

On Earth, we’re at a critical time where we need to understand that we really are all one. Sounds easy, but it involves a painful, drawn-out transition. We’re one human family living on one small world. We face a big emotional transition in which we shall have to learn to trust and agree more than ever before. Or, at least, we need to find ways of disagreeing and cooperating at the same time, and feeling good about each other. This concerns identities, nations, cultures and also species.

The iron age fogou at Carn Euny – a women’s space inside the heart of the village

It’s the bridging of gaps. Not only seeing and understanding those gaps, but stepping over them. We people in the rich world hold back more than is wise for us. We stay in our comfort zone, where we won’t be confronted with big moral issues that actually we need to confront, for the good of our souls. That’s why people are sailing to our shores on flimsy boats, sacrificing their lives to bring us this question.

I’ve repeatedly been faced with a question like this: “Is it better to give my last money to save a person’s life, or should I play safe and side-step the issue (and let them suffer or die)?”. The fear that causes us to turn away from facing such a question turns out to be unjustified, in my experience. It’s a question of undertaken risk and commitment – and such heat-of-the-moment choices introduce a new magic that is otherwise unavailable. I’ve found that, having faced this edgy question quite a few times over the years, I’ve managed intuitively to make good decisions, with but a few mistakes, and while it has involved making personal sacrifices, I survived – and so did they. And that’s the main thing.

It’s not what we get for doing things. It’s what we become by doing them.

Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall, a neolithic cliff sanctuary

Wednesday was a bad-news day. I cried myself to sleep afterwards. I’m crossing a threshold. My cancer readings are beginning to rise. My medication is going to be changed. There are five options available, and this is the third. Part of me wants my Mummy to hold my hand while I go through the next stage. I shall lose my four-weekly nurses’ visits – the next phase involves pills, Lenidalomide (a form of Thalidomide). I lasted well for three years on the last form of medication, Dara, but it’s now losing efficacy.

I’ll have to go to hospital in Truro once a month. There will be medical side-effects, apparently. I’m feeling similar warning signs to those I had ten months before I was diagnosed with cancer – a feeling of being up against it, drizzled with feelings of hopelessness and garnished with a creeping tiredness – and a strange manic drivenness to work on creative projects. I’m doing Reishi, Astragalus, Vits C, D3, multivits, blueberries, cider vinegar, grapefruit seed extract, beansprouts and my friend Kellie’s multicoloured carrots, and took a break from blogging for some sun-medicine too.

This is the life of an eccentric cancer patient. Who knows how the next stage will develop? This year I would certainly love resolution of the bank issue and the ex-partner issue. It’s time, and life doesn’t have to be so difficult. I would love to help Maa Ayensuwaa to get back on her feet and do something for the Tuareg too (I need to find people to replace me). The Tuareg have had to send their young and their old people to a refugee camp over the border, since they are under threat from government troops, Wagner Group mercenaries and Jihadis. This isn’t the World War Three that some people seem to want, but things are escalating. Need is rising.

And here’s my quote of the day. It cropped up on a new friend’s FB page (shukran, Selina). It’s by Austrian psychologist Carl Jung. It applies to the whole of humanity as well as to individuals or nation peoples.

“Nobody can fall so low unless they have a great depth. If such a thing can happen to a person, it challenges their best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.”

With love, Palden

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

Written using Human Intelligence (what’s left of it)