Cancer blogs – Page 4 – Notes from the Far Beyond

Acquiescence

“Where is the world?“, cried a desperate woman in Omdurman, Sudan – in ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ on BBC World Service today. Lebanese will be feeling this feeling right now, though the Sudenese perhaps have it worst. Well, the world is busy with other things. That’s where the world is.

One of the stange paradoxes of our time is that, as world population has grown – exploding to over eight billion – individuals and communities have become more isolated, alienated and dehumanised. In recent years, wars, witnessed onscreen like disturbingly realistic video games, have been stumbled into as if people, cities and landscapes were expendable and there were few consequences to worry about.

We wring our hands, feel smidgeons of the sorrow and pain, grumble and get on with our lives. Others blank it out, as a survival mechanism that allows them to keep going with a daily round of never-ending pressures. And yet others love it, as if feeding on the tensions, the bangs and flashes, and the numbers, and the power of it all.

For the triumph of evil it is necessary that good people do nothing. I keep banging away about this quote from the philosopher Edmund Burke because it sums up the world today and the tenor and background of what is to come.

When wars take place, we easily latch onto the proposition that it’s about Israelis and Palestinians, Russians and Ukrainians, rival generals, or government and rebels – and thus has it ever been. Well, yes, but here we blind ourselves. This is the way it looks, but there’s something else here.

At root it is about the battle for the hearts and minds of humanity – a well-worn phrase which describes what we have been in for a very long time. It seems now to be coming toward a crescendo. This goes right back into prehistory. There are two fundamental mindsets here.

One perceives strangers as a threat, territory and resources as possessions, people as individualised objects, power and wealth as advantages, competition as the sole mechanism by which everything operates, Earth as the universe’s only inhabited world and physicality as our baseline reality.

The other generally likes, loves and trusts fellow humans, tends to treat others as it would like to be treated, identifies with nature, thinks mutually and cooperatively, understands that there is something greater than what we know, and it tends to prefer living relatively simply, sharing resources and staying within its means.

Something like that. These mindsets are more easily felt than defined in words.

All of us hover around various places on the spectrum between these two poles of perspective and experience. We all have to establish a balance between self-interest/sovereignty, and mutuality/shared sovereignty. They both bevel into one another. They can shift quickly in crisis situations. Often the values that position us on this spectrum are formed in teenage and early adult years, though they can shift if life jogs us into it, or through periodic epiphanies.

Seen this way, many of today’s wars aren’t between the commonly-agreed sides. They are wars by people with a competitive mindset against two kinds of people: those with a cooperative mindset, and those who aren’t sure, who acquiesce in whatever situation prevails at the time.

The competitive side is also made up of two main kinds: the oligarchy that drives the mindset and cracks the whip, and those who lock step, join in, to become the executors, officers, influencers, reinforcers and beneficiaries of the oligarchy (to gain advantage or for fear of not joining in).

But it’s not simple and clear-cut. It’s not a goodguys/badguys scenario where one side can blame the other side for the world’s problems, striving then to dominate or eliminate them in order to solve those problems. It’s far deeper and it’s not fully conscious. It’s the frequencies we tune into. Even if we cleave the world into ‘woke’, ‘anti-woke’ and ‘don’t know’, within those divisions are heartless wokes, good-hearted anti-wokes, and a large number of people unwilling to takes sides when the options are presented in such a binary, with-us-or-against-us way.

This last lot is a broad majority – except perhaps temporarily at times such as the outbreaks of wars, when polarisation waxes strong. And this is one reason, deep down, why wars are fomented – to keep polarisation and dehumanisation on top of the world agenda, and to dull people’s sensibilities with scenes of tragedy and destruction.

There are different kinds of ‘don’t knows’ too, and the matter is kept confused because few people have time to think and reflect clearly on what’s happening and what they can do about it. The acquiescent are constrained in what we can do – despite all the hoohah about democracy. We have delicately-balanced, busy lives, and the cost of disruption can be high. Bills must be paid. Some people don’t want to know. Some feel helpless and frustrated. Some try hard to make a difference and don’t get far. Others simply pursue their careers or their lives as best they can.

The key thing here is that acquiescence is the source of the world’s problems. Some like to rail against the perpetrators, the oligarchies and power-structures, and there’s some relevance in this, but really this concerns a deeply-embedded tendency in humanity to shrug shoulders and go along with things it has instinctive reservations about.

This gives oligarchies operational space by which to determine the agenda and co-opt majorities into buying or accepting it. Throughout history it has allowed them to drag humanity through mass experiences they otherwise wouldn’t have chosen. The devastation going on today in Lebanon is but the latest example, and there will be more next year and the year after that.

I’ve spent my life exhorting, encouraging and facilitating people in their change processes, and by no means have I been the only one doing it. In the stretch of history in which I and my generation have participated, some progress has been made, though the fundamental issue has not been resolved. That is yet to come.

It’s the battle for the hearts and minds of humanity. In recent years we’ve had distressing instances presenting us with deep choices. Do we actually want this devastation to continue? If not, to what lengths are we willing to go to end it? If, as it seems, the future is intensifying, the disasters are getting bigger, the pain and costs are rising and we’re heading for a precipice, when will the world’s majority consensus shift sufficiently to tilt the balances and head another way?

This is the bottom-line agenda for the coming decades. Events and collective feelings are moving that way – something is fermenting underneath and, one day, it will come out. We’re approaching an historic choice-point, or a series of them, and we all know what it’s about. Evidential statistics are hardly necessary.

This question lies within all of us. It’s tempting to give a nice, easy answer that looks like a solution, so that everyone can go home and feel okay, but so many of us have done this before so many times, and it doesn’t necessarily help.

It’s the process. We have to go through the process. Globally. Everyone. And it’s a cliffhanger.

I’ve been reflecting on all this as I’ve gone through what has felt like a long-dark tunnel of illness in recent weeks, as detailed in three recent blogs. I’m gradually reviving, and the muscular pain I’ve had, at 90% two weeks ago, is now around 30% and within my manageable zone. Though I haven’t been close to death medically, at times it has felt like dying, as if the pain might squeeze and pop me out of my body, leaving a curled-up pile of bones behind. Since getting cancer five years ago, I’ve visited that close-but-not-there point a number of times, and perhaps my body-soul connections are a bit loose.

It’s feelings like pain that make us more human. Times when we’re overwhelmed with our own feelings, our phantasmagorical inner dramas, locked inside our personal reality-bubble and struggling through the nettles and brambles overgrowing the path toward finding out who we are. Those bouts of suffering we impose on ourselves or which come at us, just when we were busy making other plans – they can have a humanising effect.

I guess I’m feeling a microcosmic version of what Gazans will feel when the firing at last stops. What then? Will I revive, to return to something resembling the life I had before? Or have I dropped to a new level where my possibilities have shrunk and my dependencies have grown, and that’s what I must accept? We shall see. It’s that post-devastation phase that happens after an enormous struggle. Actually, it’s the mindset that those of my age-group were born into, just after WW2 – a ‘whither the future?’ phase, experienced amongst the rubble of what used to be.

My life has reduced to the size of my cabin – and when the fog is down, as it does here in Penwith, the shrouding is complete. Even so, I’ll still be there every Sunday at the meditation, because that’s something I can do that breaks free from the physical confinement my body has given me. You’re welcome to join our little group and enter the energy-zone of the meditation. It can help greatly in the uncovering of answers. (There’s a link below, explaining more.)

The view from the hill on our farm – that’s St Michael’s Mount

Over the last few weeks, lying there in bed, dead still, propped up on pillows, at times I’ve travelled far and wide, visiting many of you, and visiting people I’ve known through my life (not least friends in the Middle East) to be with you. And to be in the world’s crisis zones, with people who are there. And to swim around in the tangly firmament of the world’s heart-mind, planting love-mines and stockpiles of psychosocial aid for people to draw on, in places I’m drawn to.

I’m not doing it all the time. Often I’ve been just lying there in an opioid-painkiller daze, wondering dreamily whether I have the energy to arise from bed to take a pee. But on occasions I’ve gone deep, through and out, visiting Darfur, Dneipro, Sidon, Bethlehem… or far further out, beyond this world, into the realms of light, timelessness and beatitude, and laying connections between the two.

Which goes to show, even in your darkest days it’s still possible to do something. A candle lit in darkness sheds far more light than a candle in sunshine. And this is what we’re here for. The first Tibetan Lama I met, Akong Rinpoche, taught me that times of enlightenment, freedom and joy are like a holiday, which heals us because it is brief and different, but the times when the real progress is being made are the times when we’re wading through the swamp, struggling to find our way. And it seems to go on and on.

In writing this, I’ve just realised that Lama Akong taught me this in November 1974, almost exactly fifty years ago. Half a century later, I’ve had a reminder of it, and I’m still learning that lesson. But it also says something also about the tribulation humanity is in. We do actually know what is needed on Planet Earth, more or less, and we now have to wade through the mud, the crossfire and the floods to get there. Hearts and minds. For the triumph of humanness, it is necessary that good people do something.

With love, Palden

PS: The next Aha Class in Penzance is re-timed to Wednesday 16th October – I’m not ready to do it on 9th. Ironically, the class is all about time.

The Aha Class: www.palden.co.uk/aha.html
Sunday Meditations: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
My website and archive: www.palden.co.uk
Recent public talks: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

Young swallows in the barn next to my house. But, worryingly, the swallows didn’t breed young this year – probably insufficient food around (insects)

Impermanence

I was physically unable to post my previous blog, so it sits below this one, for your interest. But first, here’s the latest…

Tregeseal stone circle, Cornwall — Tregeseal stone circle – a prehistoric time machine

My next Aha Class in Penzance, if I am able to do it, is all about time. On Earth we are locked into time of two kinds – ticktock time and ‘cosmo-time’ – and they interweave in ever-fascinating ways. Whether or not I can do the class is, I hope, mainly a matter of dates. A matter of time. Stay tuned.

I’ve been learning a new level of being with time, and facing the deep and simple Buddhist truth of impermanence. Everything that begins also ends. With no exceptions. The only constant is change. At times recently, sitting or lying in overwhelming pain, I’ve been tested on this. Because pain often feels like it will go on forever. Cosmo-time, subjective time, stretches out as if striving for permanence. Though it never quite gets there.

All things must pass. Not necessarily in ways we might prefer, but they do pass. The experience of life on Earth is about this. It takes time for things to happen, and for us to learn how to make them happen, and for us to digest the consequences. It’s a pilgrimage, and it’s the travelling thereof that matters most. Besides, in the end, we die anyway. Our empires crumble and, however much we seek to immortalise ourselves, we are forgotten. We disappear into the dustbin of time.

I knew this long ago. But life has a way of bring back old lessons and taking them a level deeper. I’ve been an astrologer for decades and I’m still learning about time. And at those times when coughing or crying sets off muscle spasms lasting minutes, I’m being tested on it – bigtime!

I am still not well – it’s mainly muscle spasms in my torso, that are painful and debilitating. It’s a by-product of cancer, a kind of neurological overreaction to weaknesses in my bones, though I seem to be doing quite well with the cancer itself and the new medication I’m on – according to my guardian haematologist angel at the hospital. But the spasms are a killer. It has been two weeks of at times extreme pain, with extra added opioid-induced haze and sluggishness.

I seem also to have fallen into an NHS black hole, trying and failing to get a muscle-relaxing drug I was given five years ago (they’ve lost the records, no one is taking charge, I’m being bounced back and forth too much and, after ten days, I’ve got nowhere). Since getting tense induces more muscle-spasms, I’ve had to drop it. All things shall pass.

I’m spending too much time on my own, and that’s difficult. Endless digital messaging, questions and advice are no substitute for human contact. I do understand how everyone is busy, I dislike being a burden and it’s not nice asking so many favours, so this presents a dilemma, and I’m chipping away at resolving it.

So I’ve been missing company. I appreciate offers to help, heal or do shopping, though it’s actually company that tops the needs list. I don’t need company all the time, but some of it. So if you have time, you’re welcome to hang out with Paldywan (though you might have to make the tea).

After nearly three years since she left, I still miss my former partner and her family – I’ve found that hard, and hopefully her life has improved without me. In our day, our friends, family and people we’ve bonded with over time are so widely spread. Salam, peace, to all of you with whom I have bonded, whether closely through time or in just a deep twenty-minute connection. Time and space separate us, though somewhere deep down we are together still.

Writing is physically difficult and one-fingered for me at present – I have to hold myself up with the other arm. It raises a question about how I shall continue with my blogs and podcasts as my abilities decline. One day I guess I’ll just go silent and, from then on, I might need someone to pass messages or upload soundfiles. But we’ll face that when we get there – my illness of the last fortnight has flagged this up.

I had a past-life memory that came up, possibly from several lives, of being a scribe, of writing things down for others. Pain squeezes interesting jewels of insight from our psyche when we yield to it.

This illness has also flagged up a need to get a support system better organised, so that it works well both for me and for those who choose to do supportive things. I’m really grateful to those of you who have helped. And life is a busy thing, squeezed inside a vice of time. I’ve been like that too – I do understand.

The recording of my last Aha class about Activism will be ready soon. Sorry, the production team is on a go-slow, haha. The next class is about time, conjunctures of time and the way ticktock and cosmo-time intersect and interact through such things as fullmoons, solstices and planetary line-ups – power points in time. I’ve written a book about it too (see below). The date will either be confirmed or changed before long.

The Sunday meditations continue, whether or not I announce them. I’ll return to writing reminders sometime but, until then, I shall still be there on Sundays, and you’re welcome to join when you can, wherever you are. Come and join us in the zone – it’s like plugging into a wormhole leading to the shining realm of the timeless.

Now it’s time to make breakfast. I was awake at 4.30 this morning, got up, made a drink (quite an operation), and propped myself up in bed to watch the dawn. After I’ve uploaded this I’ll go back to bed. Bed gets boring, but it’s what life is like at present – an exercise in horizontality.

With love from me. Palden

The Aha Class: www.palden.co.uk/aha.html
Sunday Meditations: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
Power Points in Time: https://penwithpress.co.uk/product/power-points-in-time/
My website and archive: www.palden.co.uk

HAMMERED

21st September 2024

I’m still alive. Made it through another long night. I’m still in pain, from muscle-spasms clamping my torso – it fluctuates and moves around my torso throughout the day – but while it was 90% pain a week ago it’s now 60-70%. Better, but still rather crippling at times. Though being muscle spasms driven by a deep underlying tension arising from the recent weakness of my bones, it’s a really good mindfulness exercise too. I have to monitor my mindset to provide no worry-hooks for the spasms to latch onto. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

They gave me opioids to deal with it. I’m not happy on opioids – and I’m speaking as an aged hippy with good first-hand experience of drugs. They weigh down my psyche, drain willpower and fog my brainz – though they do deal with the pain. I wanted a muscle-relaxant that I was given five years ago but for some reason I’m getting no action on that. I’m being well treated by the doctors, but too many doctors and nurses are involved, all of them working from my NHS computer records while only one or two have actually met me.

This went wrong last week. A doctor who knows me would prescribe dosages at around 70% of normal strength. A meditating, vegetarian psychic non-muggle who’s wired up rather differently from ‘normal’ people, I don’t need sledgehammering with medications – my system and my ‘inner doctors’ process them pretty well, thank you.

So there I was, on my first day on opioids – it brought relief from the searing pain – and the recommended dose knocked me out. My temperature suddenly rose, I broke out in a sweat and suddenly felt faint. Next thing, I woke up on the floor. But I fell well, semiconsciously, because I was lying quite comfortably (as it goes) and I had no bruises or headache when I awoke. I lay there, weak and drugged. Eventually I managed to get vertical – quite an operation taking at least an hour – and later a friend dropped by and saved me.

I’ve been given notice. I must sort out my support system – it’s not really working. It’s too complex – I land up with lots of visitors quizzing me and looking worried, while only some are useful or know what to do. I need one person to ring when I have a crisis, on whom I can rely to fix something amongst the wider circle of helpers. At one point, one visitor simply held my hand, and that was so good – such a small act of humanity can be really touching at wobbly, pained moments like that. A few days later she came and cleaned my house – and that, to a Virgo, is a great relief. Shukran jazilan, Selina.

The doctors are being good with me – once I was escalated up the list, that is. And people are being good too, though they have no time and such busy lives or other issues to deal with, especially on the recent fullmoon. But something is not quite right – I’m on my own too much. Just as well I’m a good survivor, even if a seized-up cripple of a crock. Clearly, Allah doesn’t want to take me away quite yet, even though he had a good chance to do so – so that’s a reality-check worth having. But I’ve been given notice that something needs to change if I’m going to get through the next chapter in reasonable fettle.

Today I have my weekly mega-blast of cancer drugs, Lenalidomide, Ixazomib, Dexamethasone, Allopurinol, Apixaban and Aciclovir. Sounds exotic. I’m a bit concerned about taking a steroid (Dex) and opioids together, but I’ll play it by ear and tough it out. The accelerating deterioration I was going through has stopped – I can feel it – and the cancer drugs are gaining the upper hand. But the drugs have shocked my system – and that’s part of the cause of the muscle spasms.

We have dramatic thunderstorms here this morning. It’s quite energising to my poppy-suppressed old body and its shattered nervous system. Recently a young Gazan welcomed the thunderstorms they were having there because they drove the drones away and there was some peace. We must remember how lucky we are.

And whenever anyone asks me ‘How are you?‘ – like, fifteen times every day – my best answer is, “Well, I’m like this, really‘.

May spirit bless you and keep you, and cause its light to pervade you, and guide your way home.

For all of us, a time comes when it’s our turn to go home.

Love from me. Palden.

Wipe-out

I’ve been very ill since Friday – it’s cancer-related. Muscle spasms up my back and all round my torso. It feels like cramp but it’s also different and it doesn’t end, and movement is a killer, painwise. Paradoxically it came on when I went to Penzance hospital for an infusion of Zoledronate, to strengthen my weakening bones. By the time I got home I was dying on my feet – well, it felt like that.

I think my body is reacting to bone-weakness, and starting new cancer meds nine days ago, plus the infusion – and I’ve been pushing it a bit recently too. But there are always deeper dimensions: at one point I felt as if I’d been stabbed in the back. I think that was a prompt from deep memory. It’s amazing, the insights that can squeeze out of the psyche when in deep pain.

Recently I wrote about how illness and pain can concentrate and focus the psyche and soul. Staying alive and performing such normally trivial things as getting to the toilet can be major operations. It’s an exercise in mindfulness and staying steady within, even when your body is yelling at you, oppressing and constraining you. For pain is partially a perceptial thing. And I’m being tested on this now.

How far have I actually come on dealing with pain? After the excruciatingly similar experience I had in October-November 2019, around the time I was diagnosed with cancer, I’m dealing with pain quite differently. But it still really hurts, affects my breathing and stiffens me. I feel like I’m in my late nineties.

A nice Indian doctor came round this afternoon, to do a medical assessment on behalf of the haematology dept at Treliske in Truro (35ish miles away). He was good, new to West Penwith and day by day discovering the fascinating and rather isolated place he has landed up in. He took bloods etc, and I’m quite normal in temp and blood pressure – though a bit on the low side. It’s the crippling muscle-spasms, really – that’s the min problem. He thought to prescribe morphine, after he’d consulted Treliske. This is not the first time I’ve been saved by an Indian doctor. Bless them all.

So, if I’m on morphine for a while, it will knock me out. Today I’ve been working at alerting my local friendship network – that’s complex, and the system isn’t working right yet for situations like this. But I’m making progress and hope one or two (virus-free) people will be able-willing to come round in the coming days.

This is clearly a classic fullmoon crisis, and I reckon it will take at least a few days. Saturn is bearing down on me – time. Serving time. But then, I’m a saturnine person – perhaps even a textbook case. And one consequence of Saturn’s pressures is that this blog is (for me) remarkably short.

I cannot sit at the computer very long, so staying in touch is not easy. Just send positive thoughts – I can pick them up in bed! Thanks.

This is what can happen in a human life on Earth – it’s part of the deal. Not to punish us but to teach us – and it’s fast-track evolutionary learning at that. Especially if it hurts.

Well, if you choose to take it that way.

Bless you all. Beeee goooood. Palden

www.palden.co.uk

The Isles of Scilly in the sunset, as seen from Chapel Carn Brea, the last hill on mainland Britain.

Suffering Cancer

The long and winding road. Chapel Carn Brea, Penwith, Cornwall

“Suffer the little children to come unto me“, said That Man, the prophet Issa (Jesus). But the children didn’t suffer. They were suffered, or allowed, to visit Jesus, and it might have been a high-point in their lives, or even his.

For cancer ‘sufferers’ of today, it’s all a matter of how we define suffering and how we deal with it. I’ve harped on about this in my audiobook Blessings that Bones Bring, and in my blogs.

Permitting or even welcoming cancer isn’t easy. It involves a lot of inner struggle. You don’t have much option about what’s happening, yet there’s a big, yawning option about how to deal with it in your mind, heart and soul. For me, squaring with cancer has been a boundary-stretching exercise. I’ve also had to learn how to stretch myself manageably, neither overstretching nor understretching.

Though I’m rather frail and unable to handle life in the way I once did, there have been compensatory advantages. One was mentioned in my last blog – a tenuous strength that can come from weakness and from dealing with rapid successions of truths, crises and scrapes. Fragility has a way of focusing heart and mind. It’s a matter of keeping my head above water as the water gets deeper and more swirly. I’ve kinda succeeded thus far, since I’m still here, though at times I’ve felt out of my depth and overwhelmed.

Now, five years in, I’m at a turning point and rather surprised to be alive. A new line of cancer treatment starts on Friday 30th August. I decided to bring it forward and start, regardless of my fears and reservations. It’s time to get started and get it over with, instead of prevaricating, biting nails and suffering over it.

If I suffer and grind myself up too much, I just wear myself down, and it doesn’t help. I just can’t burn up energy resisting things. I do go through resistances – especially when it all feels too much and something in me wants to dig in my heels – but I seem to come out the other side. It’s all a process.

The prehistoric cairns atop Chapel Carn Brea

Since January 2024 I’ve taken no cancer medication. However, I’ve been on homoeopathic treatment and also Resveratrol, an extract of Japanese Knotweed (of all things). It’s an antioxidant that is specifically good for my kind of cancer, Multiple Myeloma, and it’s taken with Quercetin. Before that, the previous pharmaceutical treatment, an immunotherapy called Daratumamab (Dara), succeeded for three years (longer than for most patients, apparently) but its efficacy started declining.

The haematologist overseeing my case reckoned I’d done well with Dara and, six months ago, we chose to pause treatment to wait and see. She knew my results had been consistently good and that I have strange ways of handling things – even if she and her colleagues are singularly uninterested in what those strange ways are. So we waited until my blood tests started showing deterioration. This took a bit longer than expected.

But recently, my readings started rising. A key reading, paraproteins, stood at three a year ago and now it’s at 25. I was already feeling a downward droop in my condition, and these readings confirmed that feeling. It’s exactly five years since cancer suddenly changed my life, and I recognise the subtle buildup-symptoms that I experienced then.

The main, though rather indistinct buildup-symptom was low life-energy. I’m feeling that again now. Six months ago I would have three up-energy days and one down-energy day, and now it’s more like three down days to one up. I feel my bones getting weaker – they start hollowing out. Following a recent PET scan, the haematologist told me that this is happening in both ribs, in vertebrum T5 in my lower back, and in my pelvis and my thighbones.

A bronze age chambered cairn, Brane cairn. I think these were used for dying in, consciously, in ancient times (amongst other things).

Many people tell me how well I look, but my smile and shining eyes don’t necessarily mean I’m in the best of conditions. They simply show that soul is propping me up with light, focusing my energy, and adversity is brightening me. That luminosity says little about the downward direction my body is heading in – even if my soul is heading the other way.

Down-energy days are wearing. On these days I wish I didn’t live alone. I get low life-energy and lack of motivation, dull brains and droopy heart – and the best place to be is in bed or a comfortable chair, where I’ll read or drift off. I can stay slowly active during such a day if I have a mid-afternoon rest, though I have to give myself permission to do it and also I need to fend off external pressures to perform, socialise and answer messages. I have to stay abreast of chores, cooking and daily-life demands too. Taking rests means I fall behind on those demands. Sometimes I catch up on up-energy days and sometimes I don’t.

Up-energy days can be challenging because on those days there’s so much to do to catch up. I need to wash clothes, clean the house, do shopping, think things through, fire off requests for help, answer copious messages and, with luck, take a walk. The problem with that is that these days are when I’m in my best state for writing blogs and making podcasts, and it all gets a bit much.

This increase of down-energy days, plus a feeling of weakness in my bones, forced me to address my fears. I had anticipations about the next combination of cancer drugs I shall be taking, Lenalidomide (Len), Ixazomib and Dexamethasone (Dex). Len is a variant of Thalidomide. [If interested, details here.] My mother took Thalidomide for morning sickness when she was pregnant with me in 1950, and I was lucky to avoid serious deformity – thus I have an instinctive wariness over this drug. I have wondered whether Thalidomide activated the Asperger’s Syndrome I’ve lived with throughout life.

That’s okay, and that’s how life has been for me, but I noticed that, during initial cancer treatment 4-5 years ago, my Aspergers tendencies seemed to be amplified, particularly by Dex. This leads to difficulties managing my life and communicating my needs, without someone to speak for me or to talk to. No one covers my back and I have no reliable, close-by fallbacks. My son, who is good toward me, lives four hours away and is a busy man – and this kind of sociological issue affects many seniors.

Our communities and families have broken down. People like me are supposed to be given independence as a remedy for this. Well, yes, in a way that is good, but in another way it means loneliness and isolation.

There’s another side to Aspergers though – ‘Aspie genius’. It’s a heightened capacity to think outside the box, apply intense intelligence, to be amazingly creative and innovative and to find solutions in quirky ways. I’ve been very creative and a new spirit has settled upon me since getting cancer. Which goes to show that, to every apparent problem, there’s another side.

I have plenty of lovely friends who do small, occasional helpful things, and that’s great, but there’s no proper backup and it’s all rather haphazard and unreliable. That’s where my fear lay around the next line of cancer treatment. I felt unprotected.

After grinding through my stuff about it for some time, I came to a conclusion. It was simple. Palden, get over it, give thanks, take the plunge and all will be well, somehow. And if it isn’t, make that okay too.

It’s a choice of consciousness: to follow the fear path or the growth path.

The entrance to Treen chambered cairn, Penwith, for the outside

The alternative to taking the new cancer drugs I’ve been prescribed is to continue declining slowly, with increasing down-energy days, foggying brains and a likelihood that my bones start collapsing or breaking. There’s no alternative really – and I risk attracting multiple volleys of suggested miracle cures by saying so – yet I was hesitant to make the choice. It wasn’t exactly the treatment that bugged me. It was my background worry about vulnerability and facing the future alone. So, I decided to get over it. The issue isn’t resolved, but my fear around it has changed.

The haematologist said two more things. A new treatment is coming online in a year or so, which she thinks will be good for me. That sounded interesting, and a welcome glimmer of light for the future. The other was a big surprise. She reckoned that, unless something else happened, it looks as if I have five to seven years left. Gosh, it doesn’t feel like that – I’d have estimated three. But then, I estimated three years about four years ago, and here I still am!

‘Suffering’ cancer has involved floating in a kind of plan-less, timeless void, taking each day as it comes – and chemo-brain has put me in that space too. But now, having survived five years, and with a growing sense of having at least a few years left, I feel an unexpected need to make some plans.

I have to adopt a new balance-point. I stand between being locked in the here and now, never knowing how much time I have left, and the need to make plans and arrangements, because that’s the way the world works. After all, I really don’t know what I’ll be like in a month’s time, or even next Tuesday. But then, there’s more to do before I go, so some planning is necessary.

I’m going to do more public talks – these are what’s within my scope right now. I’m in Glastonbury on Wednesday 4th September, doing a talk called Sludging through the Void with Muddy Boots (and why ETs have spindly legs). [Info and tickets here.] It’s all about the ins and outs of being a conscious soul living in a dense-physical world like ours. And a few other mildly interesting things, hehe – I range wide. Let me take you on a journey.

In addition I’m starting a monthly series of talks in Penzance called the Aha Class – a kind of master-class from an old veteran, for those who need something more than the usual stuff. The first, on Wednesday September 11th, is about Changing the World, Life-purpose and Activism. [Info and tickets here.] It concerns the personal and wider issues around making a difference in the world, the things we need to get straight about in ourselves, and the soul-honing, magical and deep-political dimensions behind it. Later Aha Classes will go into the workings of time, extraterrestrial life, the ancient sites of West Penwith, and in 2025, world healing, the movements of history, talking-stick processes, the Shining Land of Belerion, and close encounters.

Nowadays I often wonder what state I’ll be in on the night, but it always works out somehow. That’s what comes of years of training myself to stand in front of people, inspirationally holding forth, whatever state I’m personally in. It lights me up and it heals me. I realised this in the 1990s when I was booked to do a speech and I was really quite ill and ‘out of it’. Guess what, I did one of the most brilliant talks I’ve done in my life and, not only that, but I started quickly getting better in the days that followed.

Doing what I’m here to do helps Spirit keep me alive, regardless of medical conditions and diagnoses. If there’s good reason to be alive, I’ll stay alive, and if those reasons dwindle or I’ve reached the end, then it’s time to go.

So I’m starting a new cancer treatment and a new series of talks at roughly the same time. Well, life is for the living, and that’s the way things panned out, and there is presumably something right about it – we shall see. Thus far, some of the altered states that cancer drugs have taken me into have been quite interesting and, since I’m a stream-of-consciousness kind of speaker, you might get some good streaming!

Also, having stood on stages and clutched microphones for more times than I can remember, I’ve trained myself to be alright on the night. But it’s still an energy-management thing. I might be on stage for 60-90 minutes, but the buildup and unwinding process takes about four days in energy-management terms.

Sludging through the Void. Our lives on Earth feel quite long but actually they’re rather short interludes on a much longer and rather winding path through many lives. The Tibetans have an interesting understanding of this. Our waking lives constitute one of six bardos or states of experience. Others are the dream state (when we’re asleep), meditative and altered states, the transitional period of death, pregnancy and the moment of birth, and the after-death state. The nature of the after-death state varies greatly in shape and form, depending on where each person is at. Each of these states is, from the viewpoint of the experience of the soul, equal in magnitude.

Yes, the process of getting born, or the process of dying, is as big in impact as the whole of the process of living life in the world (waking life). The duration of a birth process is measured in hours while a lifetime is measured in years and decades, but the scale and intensity of each of these experiences is pretty much the same. Also our inner dream states and our altered states are as great in magnitude as our waking lives. It’s the same soul experiencing them all.

If you’re on a magical ceremony or meditative retreat, or you’re tripped out on psychedelics, or you’re ill to the extent that you’re right out of it, such an experience might objectively last hours or days but in the psyche it can last an aeon, stretching to infinite proportions. The more you have such experiences, the longer your life will be in evolutionary terms, as measured not in years but in volume and meaning of experience. In this sense, although my 74th birthday soon approaches, I feel like 120 years old.

So even though our waking lives are locked in time, and for many of us our lives seem to last a long time, the magnitude of experience gained in waking life is only equal to that which happens in the roughly nine months that it takes to get born, from conception to birth. Anyone who has been present at a child’s birth will know how time and experience take on a different dimension during the birth process. The same is true at death.

We cherish and hang on to our lives so much. Yet, for every one of us, the story of our lives inevitably comes to an end and we return to another realm – a place where we’ve been before many times. Whether it feels like home, and how well we do with it, depends a lot on the extent to which we’re attached to the narrative and the mindset of the lives we’ve just left. If, during life, we have tended toward being open or being shut off, it makes a big difference.

Whatever prevails in our psyche during life tends to replicate itself after death – though there are possibilities during the dying process to shift tracks, forgive the past and move to a different level. It all hangs around the way we habituate ourselves to respond to momentous situations in daily waking life: do we follow the growth choice or the fear choice? Because that sets the patterns.

When you die, you lose control. Your available choices are minimal. It really does hang around the question of what you’ve done with your life and what you have become since you were born. What have you habituated yourself to do, regarding the growth or the fear choice? Did you predominantly open up or close down? That’s what you’ll face when you’re dying. Dying is a test of where you’re really at – not where you would like to be at. But also, what we fear about death generally doesn’t actually happen.

Dying is not something to attend to later. We’re all setting the tracks and patterns for the manner of our passing right now, today, in our waking lives, in dreams and altered states, and our death from this life is a rebirth into another world. The process is not fixed and immovable, and there are redemption opportunities at every stage, and that’s the way it works.

In our culture we do little to attend to these matters, and we tend to believe unthinkingly that everything just goes dark when you die, and that’s it, and it all just shuts down. If this is our belief, then dying can be a bit like being pushed over a scary precipice with no knowing what happens next. But if we have developed a strong sense of knowing and trust that there is something that follows after dying, then it’s more like a relieving float, following the current through a portal of light. Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream – it is not dying, it is not dying… Good old John Lennon – he came up with some good ones.

Love from me, Palden.

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

The liminal boundary between worlds. Carn Bean and Carn Kenidjack, Penwith.

Sunday Meditation

Sunday has crept up and, here I am, reminding you of the Sunday meditation. (Usually I do it weekly on Facebook, but I don’t have the capacity to post it on multiple platforms – sorry).

It’s the same as before. You’re welcome to join. Times in different countries are below, and further details are here: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

I woke up early this morning, remembering a series of four dreams I had around age 27 on my Saturn Return in the late 1970s. It might or might not be apposite to mention them here, but I’m moved to do so anyway. You see, quite a few people think I’m brave. But that’s not my perception – actually, I get shit scared over things, like anyone, and currently I’m biting nails over the next stage of my cancer treatment or, more specifically, about facing it alone. So I’m needing to be brave anyway, whether I like it or not, since there isn’t much option. That’s the way the cookie sometimes crumbles.

In the first dream I was standing on a hill with some others, looking over a grand panorama. Yet down there, there were enormous nuclear explosions going on, with amazing mushroom clouds (this was in the time of the Cold War). What was bizarre was that this was a beautiful scene, and the explosions were crystal-clear and radiant – really, like wow, amazing. Then came the fizzing, and I could feel a wind coming from the direction of the explosions, and my body was beginning to fry. I could feel it sizzling, though it wasn’t actually painful. Gradually I was dissolving and dying. The scene went blank, and then suddenly I was in a kind of loft or attic, on my knees on the floor, reaching down through a trapdoor and hauling people up. The feeling was beatific, almost blessed, and peaceful, and the people coming up were relieved, awakening from a nightmare as they emerged through the trapdoor.

That was that. In the next dream, I was at home and They came for me, to take me away (a kind of forced conscription). I was really scared. Somehow I managed to evade them, and they went away. I awoke in the morning feeling really stirred and upset. In the next dream, they came, saying that if I didn’t come with them they would take my children. This really got me. Again, I awoke feeling disturbed, anxious, traumatised.

In the fourth dream I was being chased down a street by some gun-toting thugs from the security forces. I managed to get into a big building and into an apartment where there were people I knew. I shut and locked the door behind me and we hid. There was battering on the door and eventually they got in. It was really scary. Suddenly, there was a machine gun, right there. Now, at this time I was going through my training with Tibetan Lamas, and taking hold of a machine gun was totally incongruous and out of keeping for me. But I levelled it at them and killed them all! The others looked at me with a sense of both shock and relief. I woke up next morning feeling wonderful, on top of things and irradiated with light and a can-do attitude.

My soul was clearly teaching me something. Within five years I was to take on a strong leadership role, and one thing you must get over, to take on such a role, is your self-doubt over your worth as a leader, and your fear of standing alone against what can sometimes be seemingly overwhelming opposition (this is an issue for dear Donald and Kamala right now!). Within a few decades I was to stand amidst gunfire, and with no machine gun (or blue helmet), and a surprising calm-headedness.

On occasional hot moments in Palestine I used to say out loud, and totally neutrally, “Ah, we have a situation“. This at first was regarded by Palestinian friends as a strange yet forgiveable thing, yet after a while they started cracking up with it because it would completely dissolve their panic and insert them solidly into the present moment, so that they would be less reactive and more aware of what they were doing and what their options were. Some years later, I heard that this had become something of a meme that had gone around, and even Abu Mazen had used it in a speech.

But I think the main teaching was this. When you receive the call you need to swallow hard, muster your energies, stand up and do it. Because there are also big and frightening consequences to not doing it. Most of the world’s ills arise from what has not been done, at the time when it was necessary. And it’s probably what you’re here for yourself – to stand up, within the sphere of your own reality-bubble. Most people don’t get seemingly dramatic callings like the ones I’ve recounted – it’s just the story of my karma unfolding – but we all get called in some direction or other, even if it is ‘just’ growing cabbages, planting trees, or ‘just’ raising kids, or caring for the old lady down the road. It’s often quite specific, even designed for us – or we were designed for it.

In 2015 I supported a young Gazan male nurse in escaping Gaza. He was one of the boat people crossing from Turkiye to Greece at that time. He managed to get to Belgium and, discovering a Gazan nurse, they snapped him up quickly. Fast-forward to 2022 and he died, working in a Covid ICU ward in Brussels, far from home. Yet, tragic as this was, he was doing what he was here to do, and he was good at it. He had followed his calling. I think Allah will have looked after him and he’ll have done well in heaven. He might well have achieved far more for the progress of his soul than staying in Gaza or having a comfortable life of freedom in Belgium. We cannot know, but it’s likely. I hope we’ll meet again.

So that’s what came up for me today. See you at the meditation.

Love from me. Palden.

The photos are from Bannau Brycheiniog or the Brecon Beacons in Wales.

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

Crickets and Carcinogenicals

It’s funny. Having cancer has been a bit like a fast-track course in spiritual transformation. Well, on good days, and if I choose to see it that way. Perhaps it’s the down-payment for this course that makes a big difference: it’s not about paying money, it’s about giving up your life to a fate you have little control over. If you’re going to gain anything from the cancer process, you have to offer up your life because something greater is making the critical decisions and you are to an extent helpless. Higher powers are taking over. HP Source is placing a call.

Yet a gift can come with it: a certain strength underneath, arising from the fact that you could pop your clogs tomorrow. Or the next day. Or anytime. There’s little way of knowing. Which makes planning tricky: you have to have fallback strategies in case the preferred option – regularity and a longer life – doesn’t work. Every day plans B and C have to be treated as equally likely probabilities. Some good soul takes me out and, half-way through, I can’t handle it and need to lie down or go home, flaked out, batteries emptied. Plan B strikes again.

Recently we’ve had a lot of sea fog. West Penwith, right at the end of Cornwall, is where three sea-masses meet, from the English Channel, the Atlantic and the Celtic Sea, and their swirly interactions, plus humid air from the tropics, at times make for lots of fog. So we’ve had white-outs. The world disappears – recently, for days on end. It has been rather a struggle: I’ve been ‘under the weather’, literally. Stuck in my reality-bubble, rattling the bars of my cage. I’m obliged to deal with myself, and my shadow keeps following me around.

Yet where there’s fog, clarity can come. I found this a few years ago when I had two years of fatigue and brain-fog. Behind it was a gift, an imperceptible, emergent seepage of clarity. Things came back into focus after what seemed like a long time lost in space. Something similar happened this morning. I had a realisation, waking up at dawn to find that the fog had cleared and it was going to become a golden morning.

Neptune seems to be at work (I’m emerging from six years of Neptune transits), surreptitiously peeling off multiple layers to reveal things underneath that seem new and revelatory, yet they’ve been there all the time. It’s all a matter of seeing – and of curtains and the opening thereof. What’s behind the curtains was always there, yet it’s not there until we see it.

This is a key element in the building of the Great Illusion. We fail to see what’s actually there. Yet one of the strange gifts of life is that things such as serious or terminal illness, or other earth-shattering shocks, losses, disruptions and hard truths, reveal to us things that were always there – or perhaps visible if only we had looked ahead. We manifest them unconsciously.

Major illnesses and life’s hammer-blows derive from the unconscious, from the places we don’t see or want to see, and from the stuff we’ve tamped down or avoided. A lot of this is to do with memory – not just conscious memory of events and experiences, but emotional scars, body-armouring, touchy spots and no-go areas impressed on us through earlier-life traumas or repetitive experiences that we don’t want to remember, or we have needed to forget. But sooner or later they come up anyway.

This is what the Israelis fail to see, in their war with Gaza. By devastating the lives of Gazans they’re feeding gallons of trauma to over two million people, many of them young. This will produce a predictable crowd of new ‘terrorists’ (freedom fighters) in about 10-15 years’ time, though it will also yield a crowd of new saints – true peacemakers who have seen through the destruction game, even though they were on the losing side. Those saints could be more deeply confronting to future Israelis than fighters, because fighters are the same old thing while peacemakers in large numbers will not be easy for Israelis to deny or gainsay.

It’s exactly five years since my back cracked and my life changed in my former partner’s back garden, while clearing some tussocks and piling up logs. Three months later I was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer and, since then, life has been very different, in all sorts of ways. I used to be a night-owl and now I’m an earlybird. I used to have a really good stomach and now it’s a problem (Saturn in Virgo). I used to be a really good driver and now I cannot drive a car (Sagittarius rising and Moon in Gemini). I used to be fit and now I’m an old crock. The details are many. A lot has changed.

Something has been troubling me, and this morning I understood it, thanks partially to the clearing of the fog. I understood a contradiction in myself, and where its roots lie. It’s this: although my attitude to life has strengthened as I’ve got to grips with cancer, and it’s quite strong, and it protects me, I’m also much more vulnerable and affected by things, physically and emotionally, than I once was, and this weakens me, making me a bit like a leaf in the wind.

Many of my defences, insensitivities and fallbacks have disintegrated, and small things make a bigger impact than before. Several times a month, especially when out on walks or expeditions in the wider world, I have to go into ‘survival mode’ – a gritty ex-mountaineer’s approach to getting back home, regardless of how I feel or however worn out I am. I stagger on, running on two cylinders, totally focused on hanging in there, keeping my energy moving and getting home.

It’s an act of faith and against-the-odds, Mars-in-Scorpio determination – though in other contexts, some see this resoluteness as stubbornness. But it keeps me going and gets me home – or, at least, to the welcome car seat of whoever has taken me out adventuring.

It gets tricky, though. Quite a few people say I look really well when, underneath, I’m feeling like a turdy morass of aching, creaky detritus. I guess it’s one of the side-effects of handing my life over, to be propped up by spirit more than ever before. It can create a funny kind of deception since dealing with adversity can sharpen and brighten my spirits, even if adversity is grinding away and slowly eroding my sometimes tenuous grasp on life. Yet that vulnerability can cause a marshalling of energy that helps me through. It’s mind-control really.

The secret lies in activating levitational forces through staying focused and subscribing to positive thinking. Not the self-delusion or self-persuading wishful-thinking that denies pain and hardship, desperate to see things through rose-tinted glasses, but a deep conviction that all is well and it really is okay – even when you don’t know whether it is okay or when you don’t feel at all positive. This is not a conviction of the brain but a calm certainty of the cells and bones.

Psychologist Jean Piaget once said that intelligence is not about about what you know, it’s about what you do when you don’t know. So, when I’m faced with difficulty – I’m cold and wet, people are talking too long and my back is killing me – I’m faced with a choice. I can either have a hard time, grinding away through my pains and difficulties, or I can allow it to be as it is, accepting that the right thing is happening and it’s okay and I’ll get through it somehow. That’s the difference between gravitational and levitational thoughts and beliefs.

There are times when even this doesn’t work and I just need to lie down and give up, realising that I’ve lost the battle that day. But it’ll be okay in the long run, somehow. Inshallah, ‘if it is the will of the God’.

And if it isn’t, that’s okay too. Because everything comes for a reason. Seeing that reason can sometimes take time, but it’s quite safe to assume that it is something to do with the education of our souls. Now this is quite a belief-transformer. It changes good and bad, success and failure, ease and difficulty into something else. All experiences are fodder and vitamins for the soul, if we see them to be so.

Including dying – which all of us are irrevocably destined to do anyway, somehow, sometime. ‘Life’s a bitch, then you die‘. They didn’t quite tell you that when they called for volunteers for the Planet Earth experiment. However, they needed volunteers since, having gone along the path of overpopulation, we need to experience its consequences quickly so that we learn that lesson and get it over with. And the extra hands on deck might even persuade us to realise we are one planetary race, all stuck on the same boat and desperately needing not to rock it too much.

I realised this, about fodder for the soul, three years ago. I asked myself what I would be doing if I didn’t have cancer. The straight answer that came up was, “Just carrying on…“. I would be ticking over, continuing with everything I had been doing beforehand, and letting the clockwork of my life slowly run down. I would not be having the cancer experience which, despite the cost, the loss and the pain, had given me a new and completely changed chapter of life and a bizarre kind of spiritual boost that I hadn’t quite anticipated.

We all have to square with death sometime, and a cancer diagnosis (or similar) certainly brings that on. Many cancer patients avoid it, leaning on the medical profession to save them from facing death’s hungry jaws, and thereby delaying doing the spiritual spadework that will stay on their bucket list, whether or not they like it.

Our culture, believing we have only one life, regards death as a failure and an ending, repeatedly saying “Sorry for your loss” to the bereaved as a regret-laden default response. But actually such an attitude protects people from contemplating death, and it’s detrimental, and it costs our medical systems billions. As a culture, we’re shit scared of something that’s perfectly natural. We do this with birth too.

From clinical death onwards, a person is regarded to exist only as a memory, a reputation or a legacy, not as a person or a soul. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust – hmm, what a materialistic statement. In truth, home is what we on Earth, at a stretch, would call the Otherworld. Here on Earth we’re in foreign territory – we’re colonist occupiers, believing we own the place. Well, no, it’s not dust to dust but Heaven to Heaven, with a dusty, earthly interlude in between. During our waking hours, at least.

Earth is a dangerous place because it kills us eventually. Yet we can make the best of it. We live in parlous, vexing times, and the world coin is spinning in the air. We’re in a battle for the hearts and minds of humanity – or for what’s left of them, after all that people’s hearts and minds have gone through in recent times. We’re entering a phase that I wouldn’t exactly call decisive – that comes later, in the late 2040s – but I would call it informative, revelatory, creative and critically developmental. Laying the tracks for the next bit, up to 2050.

Informative in the sense that we’re entering a period of seeing, re-framing and discovery in the late 2020s, amidst a torrent of events that are placing many big questions on the line for us to confront and sort out. Critical developmentally because a lot of new stuff is likely to emerge, and many old realities will fade into obsolescence. We’re moving fast down some intensifying rapids, and it’s risky and dodgy. Yet by 2030 we’ll have moved a long way, probably without really realising it.

Astrologically this is something that doesn’t happen very often. The three major outer planets, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto will be co-thrumming for a few years, and the formation is shaping up now. When a thrum starts up, dead matter gets shaken out and new patterns take shape amongst the strengthened resonance fields. In the next few years Uranus in Gemini (shifts, flips and reversals of ideas) will sextile (60degs) Neptune in Aries (strong individuals and either inspired or mad initiatives), which is sextiling Pluto in Aquarius (crowds, masses, majorities, tribes and matters of belonging). A trine (120degs) links Uranus with Pluto, making a triangle.

This thrum and resonance, this signal-resolution, will shake many things through and sound the bell. It could be called ‘cultural florescence under distress’. It’s in its pre-rumbles now, and a lot is likely to happen in the next 5-6 years. Not so much dramatic events, though we’ll still get these because we do need shaking up, but a strong torrent of developments. Developments where we wake up one day to realise that a lot has suddenly changed, while we were busy doing other things.

As in ‘Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans‘. I’m reminded of my aunt Hilary, who was closely involved with Alan Turing at Bletchley Park: they thought they were deciphering Hitler’s codes, and they were, but they’ll be remembered by history for playing a key part in the invention of the computer and the early conceptualisation of artificial intelligence. What we believe is happening and what is actually happening can be quite different things.

The last time we had something similar to this triangle was around 1771. A lot was happening in terms of new inventions (steam engines), social change (urbanisation and industrialisation), ideas (technology and the Rights of Man), empire-building (the taking of India) and the emergence of the modern world, but it hadn’t quite gone critical – it was progressing fast and heading toward a series of critical junctures that went from the American Revolution of the 1780s through to full-on industrial revolution by the 1820s. The modern world was emerging fast – with its dark satanic mills, globalising tendencies and humanity’s departure from its agricultural past.

So, unfasten your safety belts: they are attached to past knowns. Keep the anchors down and you won’t go with the tides.

I had a cricket for a teacher yesterday. It had hopped into my house the day before and I’d heard it rustling around all evening. I was unable to find it – they hide in corners and move only when you aren’t there. It went quiet next day and I thought it had died – I’d probably find its shrivelled corpse sometime. But, half way through the morning, it hopped staight onto my left shoulder! Having the sudden arrival of such a primeval critter, bright green, weird and three inches long, rather surprised me, making me jump. It hopped onto the head and shoulders of a nearby metal Healing Buddha who looks after my kitchen. And it looked at me, intently. And I looked at it.

The cricket was asking me to liberate it. It didn’t know how to get out. It addressed me personally, knowing I was probably its last resort. Now that’s intelligence. I have a jar for such occasions, since I get a number of insect and bird incursions. I managed to place the jar over the cricket and a card underneath, taking it out and depositing on a young oak tree I’m growing in a pot. Ah, freedom. Try not to do it again, Cricket!

It rather touched me that it had demonstrably asked for help. This had happened once before, a few years ago, but I didn’t quite believe it then. The cricket communicated well and got the help it needed, from an alien species – me. Thank you, Cricket, for your visit. You taught me about inter-species communication across language barriers, and ways to ask for help.

Weakness can lead to a new kind of strength. It’s the strength of despair, of dread, susceptibility and weariness. Some of the greatest of guiding intuitions can arise at such points. It’s a cards-on-the-table thing. There’s something to learn here from the people of Gaza. The poignant, painful paradox they present to the world is shifting global attitudes, deep down. They’re making a sacrifice for humanity. This kind of devastation – worst in Gaza but happening elsewhere too – is up on our screens presenting an important issue that needs sorting out. What lies beneath and behind this is an incremental shift of power from the rich minority to the world’s vast majority in Asia, Africa and South America.

It isn’t announcing itself as such, but this is what’s happening, and we’ll realise it after it has already happened. There’s further to go on this question but, before long, inshallah, it will no longer be possible for oligarchies and their armies to impose such destruction on the world and its people. That involves an historic change, affecting lots of things. And it’s the kind of surreptitious shift that’s happening in the next few years, methinks. And God bless the people of Gaza, for what they are doing for the world.

The cricket made a leap of faith onto my shoulder, and it found salvation. I’m learning more about leaps of faith. It seems to me that gifts of grace are the one of the fruits of leaps of faith.

And guess what. As I finish this blog there’s some rustling amongst the muesli packets on the shelf in my kitchen – it’s another cricket!

With love, Palden

Site hub: http://www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Cancer audiobook: http://www.palden.co.uk/boneblessings.html
Palestine audiobook: http://www.palden.co.uk/bethlehemblog.html
Audio Archive: http://www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

The photos are from Chapel Porth, Cornwall.

Here Be Dragons

It’s funny how, even though I, with a small group of people, started the Oak Dragon family back in 1986-7, I find it really moving now, approaching forty years later and in my current rather decrepit state, to be part of this family.

It had started with the Glastonbury Camps that friends and I ran between 1984 and 1986, which were the prototype for the then-new camps model, which was to launch itself more properly in 1987, the year of the Harmonic Convergence, as the Oak Dragon Camps (Ddraig Dderw in Welsh).

I’d started Glastonbury Camps quite spontaneously, and many Glastafarians joined in, but by 1986 the whole team was burning out – the camps had been so momentous, moving and transformative that they couldn’t continue as they were. Some of the team came to me saying ‘We can’t continue – we have lives to live‘ and this was true. This was the Thatcher period in Britain, when there were pressures to be economically viable and to get organised. Charitable, good-hearted voluntarism was seen to be a mug’s game and there was ‘no such thing as society’ – thus spake Margaret, the handbagging thunderbolt witch.

So, wondering what to do next, I went to my hideaway of the time in Snowdonia, North Wales, to contemplate things and pray for an answer. One wet day I went up alone into the mountains, stripped naked and prayed from the bottom of my soul for an answer. Was it all over? Or was there a next step to make? I stood there, sopping wet and shivering by a rushing mountain stream, with the rain washing my tears down. I waited. And it came.

“Oak Dragon“. That’s what came up. Oak Dragon what? Oak Dragon Camps… Within a long-seeming hour I had it, a complete vision. I went back down to dry out by the fire, digest all this and write down the details that had erupted. Thus began the Oak Dragon, with our first season of seven camps in 1987. It was somehow wanted and needed. The very first camp was a Beltane Camp in West Penwith, Cornwall. Ironically, it was just one mile from where I now live, and hosted by the same farmer landlord that I have now – and he and I didn’t twig that until a few months after I’d moved onto the farm in 2012! Well, magic happens. Out of these early camps many other camps organisations started, some of which are dead and gone and some of which are nowadays quite big, taking different formats and serving different interest-groups.

I left Oak Dragon around 1990, myself rather burned out, returning to camps only in 1993 and 1999. I was getting on with other things (such as writing the book The Only Planet of Choice and starting the Hundredth Monkey Project). The Oak Dragon carried on, going through its highs and lows and a deeper bonding and group identity-forming process. A family is something that is bonded on a deeper level than an ordinary group or community of interest – it’s something you don’t leave.

Rite of Passage – emergence after a long night

Three years ago they invited me back. I’ve attended camps as a grateful recipient, not as an organiser. It’s great leaving all that to others and leaving the plans and decisions to their wisdom! But there’s something new about the camps that wasn’t present in the 1980s: there’s a core to this family of people that knows how to do it and what needs to be done, and it doesn’t need an organisational team as before. Not only this, but the younger ones are taking it on, giving it new life and pushing it forward – and the oldies are not foot-dragging either because this is regeneration.

At the camp we (mainly the women) did an overnight a Rite of Passage for two sixteen-year old women who had been formerly toddlers and children in earlier camps. These are people who will take things on into future times, as the Millennials grow older. The women took them through initiations and teachings in the evening, the two slept out alone in a neighbouring field, and they were welcomed back as women next day – dressed replendently in red and blessed by the whole family, young and old. Would that more youngsters could have such initiatory treatment.

A camp isn’t just a camp – it’s a process and a journey. Short-term guests are allowed in on the first weekend and then the gates close. We are off-planet, out in space, switched off for the following six days, building the patterns for another world and being a family in its own space. You join the family by coming to a camp, and you may return whenever you wish. One couple, former regulars, hadn’t been to camp for eight years, and it was like coming home for them.

There was a forging workshop and a wood-bodging workshop throughout the camp, and other things too – workshops, ceremonies, group processes and campfire circles – evolved over the years and forming the particular character of the Oak Dragon. There’s no entertainment except what we create – even so, the cabaret at the end, put together by participants, is spontaneously comical.

Something really interesting happened. As the camp progressed, we were oblivious to what was going on around us in Britain – riots, dismay and dissension. I wrote the following observations to the Dragons after the camp…

I remember saying to a couple of people early on in the camp how harmonious and calm the camp was – and when would the trouble start? Often there’s something big that comes up – weather, a group issue, one or a few people going into a big process… but this camp just glided through, and we even had good weather in the take-down day!

I said to someone how the camp had started with the Sun in Leo and the Moon in Aries (both fire signs, not easygoing), and a few other potentially wobbly issues were hovering around (such as the buildup of a Mars-Jupiter conjunction in Gemini – good for arguments and polarisation). So I was half-expecting something erupting. Yet it didn’t hit us – in terms of friction, disruption or mega-wobbles.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country was catching fire. At the camp, I had no idea such a thing could be happening, and no one else seemed to either, to my knowledge.

There’s something interesting about this. Ages ago I picked up an interesting observation from somewhere. Speaking in terms of personal growth, it said that first you get problems to face within yourself. Then, when you’ve progressed with that you manifest people around you presenting problems for you to work through and resolve. Then, when you’ve harmonised your relationships to some degree, you manifest issues in the wider world (society, the environment, the state of the world).

I found myself wondering whether this is a commentary on Oak Dragon, as a beingness, a family and stream of consciousness in its own right, with a reality-bubble of its own that has some continuity and character to it. The growth levels at the camp were, in my observation, pretty good, and we weren’t particularly in denial about or blocking off the darker ways of the world around us.

Yet our nation had caught fire, while we seemed to be a pool of relative calm – and quite oblivious to what was happening around us. We had few quakey internal rumblings, few problems with the surrounding world, yet we manifested trouble around us in the wider world – and we were distinctly not part of it.

It says something about creating our reality. Also about reality-bubbles that all of us live in – we humans live on one planet yet in very different worlds. When those worlds fail to interact healthily, there’s trouble.

I also wondered whether, unwittingly, we were balancing out the collective psyche of Britain and the British. We were probably not the only ones who were unconsciously or semi-consciously doing this. Anger, oppo and polarisation were happening on the streets of the ‘United’ Kingdom while also calm, creative and harmonious realities were being experienced in the Oak Dragon world, on the same islands, at the same time. Perhaps the island reality-bubble of Britain as a whole fixed things so that such a balancing could occur.

Perhaps the collective psyche of the Brits was fixing a few things.

I was digging around in some old writings about the camps and found this description from thirty years ago. It described of one of the magical initiations we’ve done at Oak Dragon:

In 1994, at the Myth and Magic Camp, we planned a magical heist for the climax day of the camp. The idea was that the nine teachers at the camp would dress up and station themselves at different points along a pathway through a limestone gorge some miles away, presenting to unsuspecting campers on a magic journey a series of choices and situations representing stages along the spiritual path.

Luckily, we worked out a ‘plan B’, in case of inclement weather. Inclement weather indeed came, so we staged it at the camp site. Each teacher occupied a geodesic dome, dressed up. Campers were released in ones and twos at five-minute intervals, to follow a trail from dome to dome, meeting an archetypal encounter at each stage.

So there I was, acting as the last stage in the line. By the time they reached me, people had already met a fairy, a sky-god, a druid, a goddess, an oracle or two, and I was a wizard – Merlin to some, a Mongolian or a space-being to others. I was dressed in my Hungarian pointed hat and Chinese dragon robes, meditatively transmogrified into an archetype-rich, altered state of being.

On announcing themselves at the door and being invited in, they encountered me in my arcane state, addressing them. I said: ‘The road is long, and you have already travelled far. The journey through your many lives has seemed like an infinity. There have been many turns of the way, and there are many more turns yet to come. I am going to ask you a question, and the question is this: when you have completed your life, you are preparing to pass on and you are looking back over your life at all you have seen and all you have done, what is it that you most would like to have done before your days are over?‘. For youngsters, I asked them what they would like to do when they were adults.

The pauses were sometimes long. One boy wanted to be a sky-diver, and another a good father. A girl wished to be a famous film-star and another wished to plant lots of trees. One grown-up wanted to resolve things with his father, and another wished to travel the world. Some wished to prove that they could truly be a good person, and others sought peace of mind. Another wished for a child.

They then, to their surprise, received a florid and fullsome blessing through me, giving them full permission to entertain and achieve their wish. ‘And when you are there and you have attained what you seek, just remember that you asked for it. And you received.‘ Already bowled over by their previous encounters, this one finished them off!

This kind of special fairytale occasion, a journey into dreamtime, changes the patterning of people’s lives. Even if, back in Manchester, Massachusetts or Milton Keynes, they bury the occasion in busy amnesia, the experience stays there, lodged beneficently in deeper consciousness, acting as a seed of future growth and awakening. It makes a difference. It doesn’t go away.

Nowadays we are rarely genuinely blessed or initiated into new realities. We often make do with the lives we get. We struggle on without encouragement, seeking to rise to our true greatness. Through experiences such as these people are deeply healed of woe, fear and self-limitation. And a splendid time is had by all – kids and adults, women and men, under the sun and moon, watched by trees.

Lord and Lady of the Dance, having a go, hehe.

I’m so happy to have been part of all this. I’m so grateful to return to Oak Dragon in the closing chapter of my life.

Whether physically I have what it takes to do another camp next year, I really do not know – it was hard on my bony body this year, though the spiritual compensations lifted me up. At the back end of life a growing number of ‘last occasions’ comes your way and there’s something poignant and beautiful about that – including the more sad and regretful last occasions. But it comes to the best of us, sooner or later.

And that, my good friends, is life. And we shall see. Life also gets compressed into an evolving nowness in the closing chapter, and everything becomes contingent on all sorts of other things – such as dropping off your perch. With a smile. Or living to see another day – sometimes with a pleasant sense of surprise.

With love, Palden

Hub site: http://www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Cancer audiobook: http://www.palden.co.uk/boneblessings.html
Palestine Audiobook: http://www.palden.co.uk/bethlehemblog.html
Audio Archive: http://www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html
Oak Dragon Camps: https://oakdragon.org
The story of the camps (my rendering): http://www.palden.co.uk/camps.html

PS: on Facebook, instead of sending a friend request, please ‘follow’ me. I’m at my friends maximum, needing to reserve the rest for people I know or am likely to meet, or unless you write to me to introduce yourself, or you live locally to me. Thanks.

Compassion

I quite recommend not being a retired humanitarian. Or, for that matter, trying to retire from many other helping and caring roles and professions. Because people come back for more, often for very good reasons, even if they’d prefer not to, and levels of genuine need in the world are rising sharply. So pulling out isn’t as easy as in a normal job. And when it comes to helping a person find food or pay an emergency hospital bill, it’s not a matter that can wait. “Is there a doctor on board?“, “Granny’s had a fall…” and “Could you just…?“.

This presents a dilemma, because the world needs people who help. Not advisers but actual helpers – people who do things. While some people are called to do it since they are by nature server-souls, it’s often foisted and dumped on them by a society that lacks time for being human, and server souls are not remembered and honoured very often.

Capitalism is not geared to accommodate compassion and empathy: you’re supposed to look after your own interests and, if you don’t, that’s your responsibility, and tough luck. The tragedy of this is that genocides happen and we as a society regret it yet we implicitly permit them, always busy with other things. That’s one of the great tragedies of our day, and we tend to worry more about Donald Trump than people in Gaza.

It’s not that enormous sacrifices are necessary, since £10 from a thousand people does make £10,000. Theoretically, many hands make light work. But it’s easier raising money for pussycats than for humans who live far away. Part of our problem is that our societies are so privatised – everyone’s supposed to look after themselves, and that’s the way the world is supposed to work.

But it doesn’t – there are too many things such an approach fails to cover. We have delegated caring to professionals, leaving it to them, yet there aren’t enough professionals, and many are under-supported. Also it’s personal closeness and family and community involvement that often are most needed, not regulated care administered according to official guidelines, done by stressed-out, underpaid people in uniforms.

We all get genuinely overloaded with issues and concerns… another war, another famine, another hurricane, another vexatious issue, another person needing concern. Compassion and empathy grate with the heartless pressures of staying alive in a capitalist system.

One of the frustrating issues I’ve faced in my humanitarian work is that I was always pressured to raise money, and that’s not my strong point. Philanthropists are regarded as rich gits who are there to disburse money, but my wealth is rooted in healing, reconciliation, communication and concocting occasional bursts of sheer magic. Even so, money needs are critical for many people, and often these needs are urgent. So it often defaults to money.

On Monday night I attended an all-night spiritual ceremony, processing this kind of thing in my heart through the night. It was a chance to step outside such concerns and look at them from a soul level, getting focused on inner healing. At present I have a friend in Gaza, with baby, who needs rescuing, plus a village of Tuareg people who need help (they’re under attack), plus a spirit-granddaughter, Phyllis, aged about six, whom I thought was dead. She has recently been found, rescued from Niamey in Niger and has now contracted malaria while in transit. So she’s in hospital in Ghana, in a country where, if you don’t have funds to pay, they dump you outside and leave you to your fate. That’s because of privatisations that rich countries imposed on developing countries in the 1990s, as a requirement for lending them money.

But we have achieved one thing: she’s safe in Ghana with Maa Ayensuwaa, who will look after her. I always suspected Phyllis was one of those rather special kids – her dead mother Felicia was a special soul too. Eighteen months ago, Phyllis had the fingers of one hand chopped off by a drug-crazed, murderous criminal, all because her mother refused to hand over a memory-stick that his gang wanted. I hard-talked with him just before he did it but I could not dissuade him. Perhaps Maa Ayensuwaa will train her as an Okomfo, a traditional healer – she needs to pass her remarkable knowledge and gifts on to someone, and perhaps that’s why Phyllis is still alive today, to inherit the secrets of Maa Ayensuwaa’s line of healers and bring their heritage of knowledge into the future.

Lo behold, as soon as I returned from the ceremony, tired yet in good spirits, in comes an urgent request from a hospital doctor for £100 for medication for Phyllis. Which, of course, I do not have, since I’ve already paid for her rescue and that emptied me out. The doctor cares about Phyllis but, if he breaks the rules, he loses his job. Telling them to seek support elsewhere is no help at all since they have already done so (and it’s rather callous and discouraging a response too).

So I’m back in the loop, begging people for money, yet again. I used to be much better in a team, when working with my old soul-sister Pam Perry – she could get on the phone and rustle up funds and action much better than me. With only one lung, she’d sit in bed with her oxygen tank, phone and laptop, raising money for Jerusalem Peacemakers and the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem, Palestine. We were a dynamite pair because I gave her brains, backing, online outreach and magical input, and she was great at what she did.

In magical operations I work best as a battery-backup, a reserve warrior for heavyweight situations, a standard-holder and a protector and minder for those at the frontline. Or, at least, that used to be the case – but cancer went for my lower back and bones, and I cannot carry the same weight I used to bear.

Still, as one with a conscience and a heart that some regard as too soft, and with the involvements I’ve had over the years, I’m still at it, scrabbling for money to save someone yet again. In one sense it brings gladness to my heart and meaning to what remains of my life, and in another sense it’s a weighty bane. It’s difficult finding people to replace me. I have personal relationships with the people I work with in Palestine, Mali and Ghana – I’m unhappy about just dropping them during a time when it’s getting harder for them.

So that’s the story for today: raising money for a rather special child who’s struggling to stay alive.

In September I’ll be doing an AHA workshop on this issue, in Penzance, called ‘Changing the World’. It’s for helpers, activists, meditators and change-agents of any kind, and it will cover real-life questions concerning personal risk, life-purpose, commitment, psycho-emotional issues, burn-out, energy-management, holding true to your core beliefs, staying with it despite everything, and tricks for getting through. And planetary healing too.

Not that I’m the world’s greatest expert on this (is anyone?), but I do have some real-life experience. I’m still accumulating it, even as an old crock, and today it concerns one of those small yet big hurdles you come upon: how to create a miracle and raise £100 out of thin air when you don’t feel like it and you’re already worn out.

If you’d like to contribute even just a fiver to help Phyllis get better, that’d be really welcome. Drop me a message and I’ll give details about a bank transfer in UK or PayPal from elsewhere. Alternatively, please send her and Maa Ayensuwaa a healing, supportive prayer. Thank you, and bless you.

From a personal growth viewpoint it’s common to talk about boundaries. Well, yes, that’s true, but that’s not really the goal: after all, most wars and disagreements concern boundaries and we can go on forever being anxious about what separates us. It’s really about sharing and how to do it well, for sharing is a healing thing – personal, societal and global.

We too can become refugees, fall through the net and need help – too often we forget that. Giving is a concept with problems around it – it’s sharing that is really the big issue. It’s always an energy-exchange. It’s in our mutual interests to share what we have. Recipients share too, what they have – if it’s only their humanity and efforts.

However, even then, sometimes we’re tested, especially when we seek to treat others as we would have them treat us and they don’t return it. In such a situation I just try to keep going forward in faith without giving up.

There’s a level deeper too. To survive in this game I’ve really had to learn it in my cells. As a mantra of perseverance it gets me through the difficult stuff, and I’ve quoted it before…

It’s alright in the end, and if it’s not alright, it’s not the end.

With love, Palden

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

Blessings that Book-Writing Brought

Silent Blessings on Dartmoor. Photo: Lynne Speight

I’ve just finished working on the audiobook version of my latest book, Blessings that Bones Bring. It’s done and uploaded to my site, in thirteen instalments of 40ish minutes each. Each audio instalment took around six hours to make. It’s culled from my blog over a four-year period. It’s not a how-to book but the story of a journey.

I cried at the end of it today, after doing a final listen to the last instalment – tears of relief, of discharge, of handing something over. It’s an emotional experience finishing a book, with some parallels to giving birth.

Every second of speech I listened to 4-5 times over, during the editing process – it’s strange listening to myself, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles nowadays, if you want to get something out into the public domain. The theme music is great – from a Ukrainian group called Orangery.

Whether or not ‘Blessings’ is widely read or heard, I’m happy to have done it. I’ve always had such an attitude. At the front of my book Shining Land I quote the 7th Century Indian philosopher-mathematician Bhavabhuti – the guy who conceived the number Zero – and it means a lot to me. It’s the story of my life as an author. “If learned critics publicly deride my work, then let them. Not for them I wrought. One day a soul shall live to share my thought, for time is endless and the world is wide.“

This isn’t a book for everyone, or for any or every cancer patient. But for those with whom it chimes, who are willing to dive into deeper water, it could be significant. It makes me happy to be able to say that. It’s about the psycho-spiritual side of cancer, and the stuff we can grind through not only in a cancer crisis but in life too, during any experience of earth-shaking intensity. It looks at adversity, illness and dying in a different way, and without shame or reservation. I’m not quoting current groupthink but speaking from my own observations.

With those books that have been significant to us, it’s not just the book itself but the timing of its arrival in our life that makes the big difference. This will be the case here. For some people it could be a life-changer if they’re at a critical point in their lives, seeking answers, cracks in the wall and glimmers of light. While this is a cancer patient’s recounting, it’s relevant to anyone experiencing crisis – and cancer is a crisis that is falling upon ever-increasing numbers of people.

That’s partly because we’re living longer and something has to fell us, and partly because of pollution, radiation and the crazy, screwed-up nature of the civilisation we live in, and partly because of things we’ve done to ourselves and choices we’ve made (or failed to make), and partly because the world is in the midst of a spiritual crisis where cancer has become a catalyst for a great awakening.

We don’t stop for rain at Oak Dragon! Pic by Chrissie Ferngrove.

There’s more to this. In my own case, the particular cancer I received, and the effect it has had on me, was tailor-made for me, karmically. It was somehow designed to hit me on all the right buttons, to force me to get to grips with issues that I, as a soul, need to grapple with. Stuff that stretches beyond the present, beyond lives. Including issues I didn’t know I had.

It has brought a wide swathe of things into new focus. But you have to choose to do the course – and it’s not a punishment but a strange kind of gift. You have to have some big honesty sessions with yourself, with your watching soul, and with ‘God’ (however you see her).

It’s not difficult when it comes down to it – when in the middle of a crater, it’s the easiest option available. What’s difficult is our resistances – our fears, guilt, shame, denial, avoidances, inhibitions and ghosts. The more willing we are to turn around and face these, when they present themselves, the easier it gets. Cancer is a crash course in this – if you choose to treat it that way.

Self-forgiveness is deep and difficult in one sense and dead easy and straightforward in another sense. It needs to be wholehearted, final and without reservation, and we need to be happy to live with the consequences.

For there is a consequence to everything. In the end this is neither good nor bad: it just is as it is. Everything creates consequences. Not doing things is no escape route because that creates consequences too. Many of the ills of our world boil down to things that were not done that needed to be done.

In my case, one of the gifts cancer has given has been an increased mindfulness of the effects of anything I do – because my energy-batteries are weak, my body is fucked, my defences are permeable and, theoretically, you could push me over quite easily.

Some talk, and others get the kettle on – that’s called ‘community’.

But there’s something funny about this too. Another strength has come up underneath, and it’s spirit-fired. I might be vulnerable but I’m not defenceless. Right now I am (still) involved with Maa Ayensuwaa in a serious altercation with a big Australian bank and, alive or dead, we’re not going to let them get away with it – and they know it. It’s about justice, and recognition by the bank that they have caused and been party to terrible consequences to which they need to own up.

Maa now has cancer too, so the bank is up against two cancer patients. Maa is a bit like Kali and I’m a bit like Obi-Wan Kenobi, and we’ve become rather a team.

The worst thing that can happen is that she or I could die. But we’re going to die before long anyway, so not a lot is lost. That gives a kind of relentless strength – something Palestinians are pretty good at.

The bottom line is that, in any show-down, winning or losing is not the primary issue. In the end things bounce back on victors and turn around for losers, and ever thus shall it be. So the objective is to make a battle yield a bigger outcome: truth, resolution and healing. That can involve taking a coolly fierce Zelensky approach, but the price might be higher if we don’t.

That is to say, it will not do the Russians good to take over Ukraine, and it will not help the Israelis to take over Palestine – there’s no victory available and chickens will sooner or later come home to roost. History doesn’t allow it, nowadays, and things have changed – though the world is yet to catch up with this small fact.

Maa Ayensuwaa and I seek justice and resolution. We want rightness to prevail. It’s two rather magical cancer patients up against an Austalian bank. Hehe, a bit like the Taliban and NATO, really.

When I started writing this blog I intended to go on about my new book. What I’ve written above is not included in the book, but it’s not a diversion either (even if I do have the Moon in Gemini). It’s part of my cancer process and the resolution of threads in my life. Other issues crop up in the book though – both blessings and challenges.

The great thing with cancer is that vulnerability makes me experience things far more fully. Life is more impactful – both the pains and the pleasures – and I feel the underlying feelings within and behind things much more than before. In a half-dead kinda way, I’m more alive.

There are quite a few cancer books around at present, and the majority of people and cancer organisations will prefer more mainstream accounts that don’t mention the virtues of inner travelling, stone circles, ETs, astrology, cannabis or colloidal silver – career-killers for most writers. However, since I don’t have a career to kill, and killing me off would probably raise my profile, it’s okay. It’s a learning experience for the soul – and not only for my soul. So all is well.

It’s the most personal book I’ve ever written. I’ve always had rather an allergy to writing an autobiography – not least because I can’t remember much about my life unless I recorded it at the time. This said, I have written a short autobiography on my site. Blogs have been useful ways of accumulating creative iterations of whatever has been going on, and this has yielded books and audiobooks on cancer and on Palestine (called Blogging in Bethlehem).

Re-editing a blog into a book does me good, since it helps me review my life. This might sound strange or perhaps narcissistic, but I have little memory of my life except what I have deliberately logged and imprinted as ‘personal history’ – and blogging has helped this. I went through big brain-changes when I had a near-death experience in 1974, when in my mid-twenties – one change involved loss of capacity to remember many but not all events in my life, and another was a rebalancing of my left and right brains to amplify the intuitive, emotional, imaginal right-brained side.

It’s nearly five years since my back cracked and my life changed – this was the first sign of cancer, though it took thee months to be diagnosed with it. It has been a very long and full five years. Not full of events – much of the time I’ve been completely alone, and I live on a farm at one of the far corners of Britain – but my life is full of life, even though I’d estimate myself to be around 70% dead.

Early morning at Oak Dragon. Pic by Chrissie Ferngrove.

So it has been cathartic to produce this book, and now I’m turning it over – for free, though donations are welcome.

It’s specifically of interest to people encountering cancer who choose an integrated medical route – conventional and complentary medicines together – and who have a spirited approach to life. Or people for whom cancer has taken away the blinkers, who want to try out new ideas. Or for people facing death and wondering what to do about it.

I’m not into giving answers, I’m no cancer expert, and I speak for myself alone, yet there’s a load of food for thought there, with a few golden nuggets hidden in and between the lines.

Phew. That’s over. Now I’ll have a few days pacing around, feeling redundant, wondering what to do next. Well, I’m off camping with a load of dragons before long, and perhaps I need to give my dear readers and listeners a break! Now that’s a thought…

With love, Palden

Blessings that Bones Bring: http://www.palden.co.uk/boneblessings.html

Palestine Audiobook: http://www.palden.co.uk/bethlehemblog.html
Short autobiography: http://www.palden.co.uk/autobiography.html
Oak Dragon Camps: https://oakdragon.org

With Brian Oliver at Oak Dragon – sorting out the ways of the universe, of course. It’s another Chrissie Ferngrove pic.

ET, go home

Getting real about switching realities

[Recycled – written in June 2022]

Pendeen Watch as seen from Bosigran Castle, Penwith, Cornwall

The amazing thing with dying is that it really is about setting sail into the Great Unknown. In aviation terms, it feels more like a landing procedure than a take-off procedure. Over the last twentyish years I’ve psychically tracked and handheld perhaps forty souls through the life-death transition – very interesting, rewarding and also wearing – and what has been striking has been the sheer variety of experiences people seem to have had while transitioning through death. For myself, the closer I come to dying, the more I find I’m needing to loosen up my preconceptions.

And my preconditions. Ultimately futile, they’re all about clinging on to the known. But it’s loss of control that is the key issue here, and it has already started. Dying is a challenge to go with the flow, to let be, to have done with it, to trust in the process and feel a way forward. Suddenly perspectives I harboured about life are changing and revealing themselves very differently. I have to ‘make a deal with God’ (as Kate Bush once sang).

It’s not binary. We aren’t either alive or dead. We’re all a mixture of both in varying proportions, all through life, and it changes slowly, sometimes in phases and sometimes suddenly. Medical thinking has it that death means clinical death, when your life-signs hit zero, but no, that’s a stage of dying. You still exist afterwards and you exist before, though you might be half-dead. When you’re on the other side, for a while you’ll see and hear people back in the land of the living whom you knew in life, though unless they are receptive to listening, they won’t see or hear you – and that can be tricky.

We’re all part-dead. I’m more dead than many of my readers, though there might be one or two who are more dead than me – hello! In February I think I went up to 95% dead – close – but by spring equinox I was down to 80%, and now I’d put myself at 70%. But only last week I had a lurch and drooped, getting older again for two days. This happens with cancer – you go up and down. Small things can have big effects.

In the near-death experience I had at age 24 – I was unconscious for nine days – it permanently changed me. I was very different afterwards, having gone through substantial memory-loss and brain-changes. Some would call it a ‘walk-in’. When I first came to, I didn’t even recognise my parents, with no sense of where I was or the time we were in.

As I revived, the experience made me mission-driven, pushing me to do whatever it was that I had come here to do. It took about seven years after the NDE to ‘come back’ sufficiently, to be fully functional. After three more years, by 1983, my mission presented itself – I started the camps movement. Or it started through me.

The near brush I had with dying in February this year shook, squeezed and wrung me out. By April, to my surprise I was served new instructions. An astoundingly clear voice in my head said, “Ah, there’s something more we’d like you to do…” – and I both perked up and groaned at the same time. I crawled from the slough of despond in February to the beginnings of a new vision by May.

I have been presented with serving an emergent grandfather-type role in the lives of many people. Additionally, there’s something incomplete about the ‘world work’ – world healing-oriented group consciousness-work – I’ve been involved with since the 1980s. And my writing and podcasting are appreciated. So there are things to do. A few years ago I wouldn’t have anticipated this.

There’s something here about sinking into the deep dark and then reviving with an armful of light. Shaky as I am, I’m being given something new to do, even though time is not really on my side. Yet this fact is a motivator: it is urging me to do what I can do while I still can and to enjoy doing it.

It might be a swansong or the beginning of something – I cannot tell. I have osteonecrosis (a dying jawbone), peripheral neuropathy (feelingless feet), a deteriorating back, a troubled stomach, a low-level permanent ache, I’m sensitive to radiation and, even with my thin body, gravity weighs heavily. Oh, and I have a cancer of the blood and bones.

Life is hard in a way I’ve never encountered before, and sometimes it gets me down – this last six months I’ve had a bit too much of it. I nearly buckled. So, if this gets much worse, it could be a relief for me to go. Can you see how this might be a positive thing? Though it does look as if there are positive reasons to stay alive too.

If you want to meet me before I go, then I am still alive in a body and here I am – alone much of the time. I serve good tea. Leaving it to another time, another year, might not be the best thing. Yes, when I go a gap will be created by my absence, but another kind of presence is possible which, in the end, might be valuable too. After all, here on Earth time and geography keep us separate anyway. There comes a point where a soul has done enough for this lifetime. We need to be released. But we haven’t gone away.

I had a good friend, Mike Blackwood, who died a seemingly sad death on booze, drugs and despair. Uncomfortable in this world, he was a spirited man, a solid part of our team in the camps of the 1980s – the site manager for many of them. When I heard of his death, I tracked him over to the other side and he was in the ‘holding bay’ – a buffer zone you go to initially, to process the life you’ve just left and make yourself ready to go further. In terms of Earth time, this often takes weeks, though it varies greatly. The funeral can be a key moment. But not always.

Well, in the holding bay, Mike was tripped out of his skull on acid and having a great time – he had loved happenings, festivals and raves during his life. He was blissfully happy, flowering, glowing, almost Buddha-like. This was a surprise, but that’s what you get in this game. I returned a day or two later and, unusually, he had completely gone beyond. He didn’t wait around for his funeral.

I guess he was relieved to end his life. I felt happy for him. It just goes to show how the judgements made of our behaviours and our lives on Earth don’t necessarily match who and how we actually, truly are, deep down. Sometimes, in the education of our souls, we need to plumb the depths and go where others fear to tread. Our judgements about the rightness or wrongness of others’ lives can clatter badly on the cobblestones of reality. Mike’s death was characteristic of him, and probably a relief for him. The manner of people’s deaths always seems to be true to character.

Ruth, my mother, couldn’t really handle death, even at age 92. Born during WW1, her generation trained themselves to survive, but it could not go on forever. Around death, she had that confusion many people have – an ill-considered mixture of Christian heaven-and-hell stuff and secular it-all-goes-blank stuff. Neither is very useful. She died and, not knowing how to handle it, went straight to sleep, curled up and unresponsive.

This felt okay at first because of what she’d been through, though after a while I got a feeling she wasn’t facing the fact of being dead. Her funeral was approaching and, since she was a popular figure, I wondered what to do. I wanted her to witness people’s love and regard for her. On the day of the funeral I tried waking her up but she wouldn’t surface. I made a prayer, feeling a bit clueless.

Then came a solution. Her little terrier Pepper, who had died some years earlier, came along, yapping at her. She woke up and my mother was able to witness her funeral, with Pepper on her lap. I think she was surprised at the gratitude and recognition that came her way from the crowd. Bless her, she hadn’t appreciated the value of the contribution she had made during life. “It’s only me”, she would say when she rang up or came through the door. Only you?

She and I had some leftover issues at the time she died, but the changes she went through after death allowed her to encompass her strange son and the person he was. All was forgiven between us. It happened one day when I was in Palestine. I experienced her strongly while at an ancient church at Burqin, near Jenin in the West Bank – the place where Jesus healed the lepers – and found myself deeply wishing I could have brought her there.

In her life she would never have entertained the idea of coming to Palestine, but she loved old churches. She came in spirit and I felt her there with me. I shed tears of release, and I think she did too. All that lay between us was made good and each of us came to fully understand why we had entered each other’s lives. Thank you, Jesus, for that. Ironically, it was a Muslim friend, Wael, who had brought me there to meet the Prophet Jesus – and my Mum.

What’s interesting here is that, today, I’m going through a lot of early-life patterns of vulnerability, unsupportedness and loss, and feeling like a five year old – mother stuff – while being completely at peace with my Mum. We smile to each other occasionally.

Going home. On the slopes above Bosigran Castle.

When my old philosopher friend Stanley Messenger died, he wasn’t interested in witnessing his funeral – as a mystic Christian, psychic and Anthroposophist, he didn’t like the conventional church funeral his family organised.

I sat there in a pew with Stanley gruffly urging me to take over the service, while the vicar was up there trotting out the usual stuff. I told Stanley to stay and watch, because the people present did care about him. Actually, when we were all sitting in the pub afterwards, he was happier because it was informal, and I sensed him around, communing with us.

In the weeks that followed he loitered in the ‘holding bay’, sitting enjoying a pleasant landscape and a blissful absence of worldly hassles, still looking frail. In the last few years of life he had dementia, which can dissipate a person’s selfhood, so I guess he lacked momentum to go further in the dying process. After a while I came along, took his hand and pulled him up what seemed like a lot of steps until we reached the ‘pearly gates’ – the full transition point into the after-death state. He was met by people who welcomed him and took him in – I think one was Rudolf Steiner himself, whom Stanley had known when he was a young man. Goodbye, Stanley, and thanks for being you – see you again.

My cousin Faith’s husband Albert was a good-hearted man, rather secular and empirical in viewpoint though gentlemanly and worldly-wise with it, and I think at first he thought me weird and extreme. Then he got prostate cancer and started changing, slowly becoming more open, doing tai chi and becoming more attuned to matters of spirit. Just before he died, he was clearly edging into the otherworld, far away and in a state of grace. I had been working with him remotely but came to visit in his last days.

At one point his eyes opened slightly, he saw me, and he gave me the thought, “You’re here?!” Then after a pause he thought, “But you were there”. I could sense him computing that. “Yes”, I thought back, “I went there to pull you over”.

He had seen me on the other side, and here was I on this side, with him at the hospice. That’s not supposed to happen, or is it? He had a peaceful death. My cousin Faith really did well with him – he expired with her hugging him. She felt his last breath. After a while she got up, went out into the hospice garden, and a heron flew in, did two loops round the garden and sailed off past the trees – heaven was signalling.

I had helped sort out his connection with the otherworld, making sure there was someone to meet him, and myself going over to give him a hand. Since his death we have nodded and smiled whenever he has popped up – he’s even done me a few favours that only someone on his side of reality can do.

Often I’ve been able to say who will be there waiting. It melts the last doubts and resistances people might have. When I told my Dad that his brother Laurie, who died in WW2, would be there, he went quiet and a tear came to his eye. Something in him knew this was true. From that moment I sensed that he felt alright about going – his long lost brother would be there.

On the day before he died he was unconscious. I held his hand, telling him all I knew about what would next happen to him, and what to do. I knew he could hear me and took it in. A while after his death he and I had a psychic chat and he thought to me, “You’ve done your duty to your father by becoming my father”.

In my twenties he had felt I had let him down by making the dissident life-choices I made at the time. My parents had done their level best but they could never quite encompass me – their strange boy who became a hippy revolutionary, a disappointment and embarrassment. In my mother’s eyes the only sins I had failed to commit were running off with a black woman and being gay – such was the moral atmosphere of the late 1960s. Poor them, they must look down on me now and think, “OMG, is he still at it, getting himself into trouble, even at his age?”. But I think they now understand why I’m like that and why I had been their son.

What happens in death has a lot to do with how we deal with life. If during life we are willing to own up when necessary, then owning up in death gets a lot easier. Life on Earth is such a screwed-up and tacky thing that we’re all damaged, up to our eyeballs in karmic cobwebs. Living in a body on Earth isn’t and cannot be about being perfect – it’s about getting through. It’s about leaving the world a slightly better place than when we started – not only because it’s good and right to do so but also in case we need to come back. Or in case other members of our soul-tribe need to come here. Or for the sake of our grandchildren and everyone else who shares our world.

At death you can’t do anything more about anything. Life was as it was, and that’s that. The task is to come to peace, to hand in your resignation without reservation – well, as much as possible. There’s a good chance an emergent feeling of relief will help with this. It involves releasing and forgiving, letting be. It’s too late to do anything. So working on at least some of the issues we’re likely to meet at death is well worth doing before we get there.

There’s more. The better we’re able to get through our life-crises and make them good during life, the more we establish a pattern of dealing well with crisis. When death comes, it makes dying easier because the ‘growth choice’ has become a habit we can latch onto at the moment of death – instead of the ‘fear choice’. The more we are centred, flexible and okay about handling life, the more we will handle death and ride the wave.

At death it matters who we truly are and what we have become – no glosses or pretences are available any more. It’s an honesty process, yet also a relieving and healing process in which a weight is lifted off us – the weight of being who we were, with our character traits, habits, stuck bits and karmic patterns. A lot of forgiveness and understanding comes. But look at this another way…

When we die we’re entering a new world. As with this world, the way we are born into that world greatly affects what happens afterwards. When we sally forth to the other world, if we die well and do our best with it, we’ll start well on the next bit. By ‘dying well’ I don’t mean the right circumstances – it could even be a car crash – but the right approach when we encounter it. Even if it is a car-crash, or you get shot, time stretches immensely in that moment, and there can even be a surprising calmness about it. In such a circumstance, your soul pops out of your body before the impact hits you and you will feel no pain. People who die in wars, shocks or tragedies get scooped up by soul-paramedics and helped quickly.

Dying is like an examination to test what we’ve truly learned and worked out in life. It affects subsequent decisions about what we’ll take on next – our next incarnate life on Earth, if that is our path, or whatever happens instead, if that is our path.

Our soul-family, soul-tribe and angels help us get things sorted out. It’s a process, and it involves referencing all of our existences and their overall storyline and purpose. It concerns the role we play in our soul-tribe and the agenda, priorities and evolution of our tribe. We aren’t solely individuals but part of something much larger. There’s bliss, relief, healing, love, rest, fellowship, education and soul-melding to be had too, in the after-death state.

A deep choice is presented. The choice lies between opening up to such a path or walling ourselves into an imaginal reality that carries us off somewhere else – if perhaps we believe that we don’t deserve better, or if we can’t let go of the identity, feelings and attachments we had in life. Then we might well get another round of life, with a bleed-through of elements from the past that can be both helpful and difficult, until a turning in the deepest seat of consciousness redirects us to our true, core path.

Above Porthmoina Cove – rock climbers love it

Part of our reason for being here on Earth is to evolve and train ourselves as super-trooper souls – souls who’ve been through the mill, shed blood, sweat and tears and learned lessons from it – experiences that aren’t available elsewhere. It’s one helluva training – a ton of both difficult and joyous stuff is to be found here on Earth, and we have a profound option to become greater souls through wrestling with it.

There’s something many ancient peoples instinctively knew: the souls of the living and the souls of the dead walk alongside each other in parallel worlds, helping each other out. We’re in the same tribes and networks, all still here. You can talk to your Mum (not anytime, but sometimes). They knock on our heads every now and then. It’s important to take note, to listen within and to answer when the souls of the dead call.

After I’ve gone, if any of you feel me twiggling the top of your head, please acknowledge it and signal back. It depends on whether you pick me up sufficiently, giving it full credence, and whether it is in your scope and growth to respond.

It’s not uncommon for anyone with a dash of intuition and receptivity to pick up on the dead – go on, own up, you’ve experienced this yourself, actually. Search back in your memory and you’ll find it. So if you get a buzz from me after I’ve gone, please work on the basis that I am actually there.

In life, it’s not primarily what we do that matters – it’s how we do it, and how much we make it good in the end. As an astrologer, there’s one prediction I can safely make, for no charge: you are all going to die. The choice lies in how we do it. That involves the full and proper exercising of free will. Whatever your faults, you’re a fine person. Don’t you forget it. I’ll try not to either. As a Virgo, I’m so bloody self-critical that I have to remind myself.

With love, Palden

I have reposted this blog from two years ago, and it’s also part of my cancer book Blessings that Bones Bring. While reading out out loud for the audiobook version of the book, it struck me as a really good piece. So here it is again.