cancer – Notes from the Far Beyond

Agonos

A natural or a placed rock? This one is probably natural. Zennor Hill, West Penwith.

I’m only as good as I am in my worst moments. This is what I have learned, or perhaps re-learned, recently. I’ve been going through a lot of physical pain, and pain has a way of reducing and diminishing me, bringing me down into a state of unclarity bordering on despair, so that my best efforts at staying conscious get to be a struggle.

This is affecting my writing. Already, peripheral neuropathy in my fingers has made typing difficult, and my fingers miss the buttons, and there is so much correction and re-editing to do that I lose track of what I’m trying to write.

Unfortunately, using speech-recognition software isn’t as simple as many people believe when they recommend it, and it doesn’t work well with me. That said, about one third of this blog was first-drafted this way, then re-edited.

It’s the pain that is really doing it. Pain demands complete attention – it is merciless, scooping up consciousness and attention and blurring my inner focus. It’s my left foot only, but the pain level is so high that it can keep me awake all night or, in the day, at times bring up tears of helplessness. I’ve also been weakened by tiredness – finding myself wondering whether it is day or night, what time it is, and what’s happening.

So I will not be writing as much as I have done in the past. Which I regret, because writing has been a major part of my life – I’ve spent mega-thousands of hours doing it. But that’s the way things are now and I must accept it. The pain I am currently dealing with soaks up so much of my attention and energy, and that’s that.

This brings up something of a fear. It is the fear that, if I say nothing and go quiet, I’ll be forgotten. It’s probably an early-life psychological issue or a past-life memory, or both. I can be forgotten for perfectly good reasons – people are busy, and so many things shout for our attention, and people assume that, if I’m quiet, I must be okay, or that perhaps they should not disturb me. Or relationships become digitalised and weakened, with a constant stream of how-are-yous with little or no face-to-face contact. But I do have people close to me who keep their eyes on me and I much appreciate their involvement in my life.

This is about neurological pain. It’s to do with the interaction of our neurological system (the information system), which is plugged into our body, and our conscious mind, which isn’t directly so. It has a lot to do with what we give attention to. However, it is easy to say this, but when in deep pain it’s difficult to summon enough focused attention to change the pain from the inside.

Pain has a way of forcing us to pay attention to it whether or not we wish to. It sucks up all clarity, positivity and perspective. It’s important not to panic and to avoid getting too caught up in it, though this in itself can be difficult when the pain gets mixed up with nightmares and dream-stuff in the quiet loneliness of the deep night.

Holding my focus has become more of an issue. I wrote a blog last week and ground to a halt with it. This is what I wrote…

I don’t know whether Agonos is a proper Greek word but, in the middle of the night a few nights ago, it gyrated around in my mind, aptly describing the state I was in. Things have been tough, and daily life is hard work. I’m doing quite well regarding the blood cancer, Multiple Myeloma, that I’ve had for seven years now – it is held at bay with cancer drugs. It’s the side-issues that cause the agony – especially peripheral neuropathy – and I have also acquired a secondary skin cancer, a carcinoma. Doctors’ visits, tests, pills and interventions are increasing.

I feel like I’m in my Nineties, shuffling around like an old crock. Things have been changing in recent months, and life and my medical condition have been getting more complex, as have relationships with the various different doctors I’m under. It’s a long uphill grind. The pain in my feet dredges and wrings me out. I have some fundamental life-questions to sort out too, the main one being this: is all this toil and trouble actually worth it?

Peripheral neuropathy is a side-effect of cancer drugs I’ve taken since 2019, which have killed off the nerve endings in my feet and fingertips. Initially it leads to an ungrounded loss of feeling – I learned to live with that though, since the cancer drugs have kept me alive and I’m glad about that. But recently it has developed into two kinds of acute pain: one is a feeling of burning in the feet and the other is a bony pain, like the excruciating pain you get when you stub your toe. Except it doesn’t go away.

These happen when I am sleeping, relaxing and not moving. With a vengeance. When I move around the pain usually subsides. But I cannot move around at all times of the day and night – I need to rest and sleep too! The sensors and signals in my neurological system have gone haywire, sending the wrong signals to the brain, which registers pain and exaggerates it, sending the wrong signals back. This is rather ironic, for one who has spent so long on computers! It becomes a psychological loop that is difficult to break out of, even with painkillers.

I was given a drug (Amitriptylene) to deal with the peripheral neuropathy, and it helped partially, but it had a big psychological effect. It drained my willpower, making small tasks seem big, and making me ask depressive questions like ‘What’s the point?’ and give up. In the blurb for the drug they do say ‘risk of sui*cidal thoughts’. I’m not desperate, lost or unstable enough to be thinking of that, but I can see how such thoughts can develop with that drug. So I’ve been switched to another drug (Nortriptylene) and I cannot yet tell whether it is helping or when it will start working (it takes 4-6 weeks, apparently). The question drags on.

I’m unhappy about the number of drugs I’m prescribed and the number of doctors who are tinkering with me – none of them know me and they tend to look at the computer more than at me. Tests and scans are amazing, but sometimes a look in my eyes or a feel of my feet would do better – cheaper and faster too. The doctors and nurses are all good people, doing their best, but they work in a medical system that is not really designed for humans – for the whole human.

There’s a good chance this is a human-placed or adjusted rock. Simply to enhance nature.

So that was what I wrote and didn’t finish. It’s the same with this one, where I need to report to friends and relations what is happening, so that you know, and I’m not sure how to finish it.

I’m making some sort of progress though, giving the pain less attention, taking more of an uncomplaining and accepting attitude – when I can – and receiving some insights into my father, mother and ancestors, and into the way of things.

My left foot hurts a lot right now. I wish this would end. I guess there must be a good reason why it doesn’t. I haven’t found it though.

Eitherwhichway, I wanted to give you a read-out on where things stand for me. I’ll probably be saying less and recycling more in the way of old material from now on (but it’s good stuff). But I have a new digital helper here in Cornwall, Lucy, who, all things being well, will handle my online affairs when I lose the ability to do so – we’re running in and working through details and questions, as time goes on.

Thanks to all of you who have been following my blogs, pods and other outpourings. After getting cancer it gave my life new meaning, and the creativity of it has itself had deep healing effects. Were that not so, I think I might well have died in winter 2022. I am so glad that good souls out there like you have been enjoying and benefiting from them, and so grateful to have touched the lives of so many people – as you have touched mine.

These are at Sperris Quoit, forming part of a kind of rock temple close to the quoit. I think these are placed rocks.

In life’s final chapter, as daily life gets more difficult, the multi-level, even multidimensional costs and benefits of staying alive can shift, and the costs can get to outweigh the benefits. Just getting up out of a chair or clipping toenails can be quite an operation! Sometimes cooking food wears me out so much that I can’t eat it (but often I cook for 2-3 days each time, so it’s not disastrous).

I’m active and functional for about six hours each day, usually doing catch-up things – phone calls, messaging, clearing up and self-care – and then I wear myself out even more! “Palden, why won’t you reply to me? Have I done something wrong?”. No. I can’t keep up, that’s all, and I lose track, and I can’t spend all day at my computer.

That’s the way things are. I’ve written here about problems and hard stuff, yet I’m still grateful for the experience. That might sound a bit schizoid but, for better or worse, throughout my life I’ve always tried to make the best out of apparently bad situations, and it doesn’t stop now – and they aren’t necessarily bad either, if handled well and turned around. I’m minded to dredge up a quote I quoted several times a few years ago in my blogs:

It’s okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

I was given that jewel of wisdom by a Berliner, while standing amidst the geological drama of the Sinai Desert in Egypt in 2012. We were like ships passing in the night, briefly meeting as soul-friends in the middle of the void. I wish I could remember his name.

Love, Palden

https://www.palden.co.uk

——————-

The pics are from Zennor Hill and Sperris Croft in West Penwith, Cornwall. Some of these rocks are natural (it’s weird granitic geology round there) and some are placed or moved – back in the Neolithic, around 5,700 years ago. The question is, which are which? With some it is clear and with others it is a matter of debate.

Most people think this is natural, but I think there’s a good chance this was placed, or adjusted.

Acceptance

A new podcast

Acceptance is quite difficult for Westerners. We tend to want life to go the way we want it to go – and it doesn’t. Life has its own agendas and game-plan.

This becomes very apparent in late life, or when we contract debilitating, life-threatening illnesses like cancer, or when we acquire disabilities. Especially when we face death, over which we have little or no control. Death makes its own decisions.

But in the 2020s, a bigger agenda is taking over, and we have many unknowns and normality-disruptions ahead. Our grip on reality is loosening, and even billionaires and other sundry titans cannot buy themselves out of it.

It’s all about acceptance. Reality-street. That’s what this is all about.

It’s here, on my site:
https://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Or here on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0JI66zYybtb6ImqF1dcUbQ?si=lbDiQHWGRWmvo3QjAmpviw

Love, Palden

The Rigours and Gifts of Cancer

Ancient guardian at Pordenack Point, Cornwall. Busy watching.

Quite a few people have followed my outpourings because I’m a cancer patient with some deep and wide perspectives on it. I’m one of those who was told I had perhaps a year to live (and it felt like it), and here I still am, six years later.

I haven’t said much about cancer recently. Partially because I’ve said a lot already and tend not to repeat myself. However, there are recent friends and followers out there who haven’t had the full story.

I’m mulling it all over… and that’s part of the reason for relative silence on it. My cancer book ‘Blessings that Bones Bring’, available on my site, is undergoing a revision, and a new version will come out sometime – here in Cornwall we say ‘dreckly’. It needs to be shorter and more focused on what matters most to cancer patients and their helpers. Some new reflections are brewing, but my psyche moves slowly nowadays…

If you need something now, then go to my podcast page and look for the ‘Cancer and Dying’ section. To get a sense of the progression from earlier to later days, start from the bottom and work upwards. It’s here:

https://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

There’s a lot about cancer here on my blog, but it’s all jumbled up. Here is one blog giving an overview of what happened for me and how I handled it: https://penwithbeyond.blog/2024/05/11/blessings-that-bones-bring/

I have an incurable blood cancer called Multiple Myeloma – it can only be managed and held at bay, medically. It affects the bones: the first sign, in my case, was that the four bottom vertebrae in my back collapsed and, from that day on, my life changed. Rather painfully at first.

I became a partially-disabled old crock. It was a soul-shift. I’m not sure whether I went down with cancer or went up with it. But it confirmed and tested a life-lesson I had already learned, that everything in life is a gift.

Repeat: everything in life is a gift. Especially at those times when it doesn’t feel like it.

Time spent in Palestine taught me that, though cancer took it to a new level. As a peacemaker, I distinctly disbelieve in the notion of ‘fighting cancer’ – and as it happens, I’m still alive, so there might be something in it.

Cancer is not a failure or an aberration – it is a gift. It is an awakener. It presents hard facts and profound choices. This is about free will at its deepest level. Surrender. Acceptance like you’ve never accepted before.

Living with cancer is very difficult, and that’s the point. It confronts us on why we’re here and what it’s all about.

I’m in a different life now, drawing on the mixed outcomes of the life I’ve had, but it feels like a different life. Funny, that.

Anyway, I woke up with this morning with the thought to reconnect with fellow cancer-experiencers, and something is brewing, and I just wanted to say that.

If you’re struggling through the darkness, just keep going. On a soul level, during times like that we make a lot of progress.

Love, Palden

Pain

This and the pics below were taken in Bethlehem, Palestine, in Dec 2012

I was talking to a friend about our different illnesses and she said, “You must be suffering more than I”. This made me think, because suffering cannot be quantified and I can’t really say ‘I am suffering more than you’. Or at least, if I do, I’m making judgements about that person and about me that don’t really hold up. With pain, it’s really difficult being objective – it all hangs around our capacity to accept, tolerate and handle it.

Pain is partially to do with what is happening and partially to do with how we’re perceiving and experiencing it. I knew this before cancer came my way, but I’ve found since then that it is more true than I thought. I don’t instantly reach for the painkillers – avoidance of pain charges its price too. I use them only when I’m worn down, needing a break, to stop myself going into a self-fulfilling pain loop.

It’s not easy. But we do make things more difficult than they need to be. We create more friction inside ourselves than we need to have. We take difficulty and pain as negative experiences, something bad, something wrong – often according to beliefs and predispositions that aren’t very good for us.

Yet pain isn’t wrong – there’s something strangely right about it, if we can but change our perspective and suspend judgement enough to see how this might be so. Too often we compare our pain with how we feel things ought to be, how they used to be or how they could be, and this has a way of increasing the pain. Because it turns us away from facing it.

It comes down to attitude. Attitude might or might not change our circumstances or their causes, but certainly it can change how we experience and handle it all.

I’ve learned a lot from people in conflict zones, especially Palestinians, who have developed such attitude over the generations, in both the personal and the social spheres. They’ve got tragically used to dealing with hardship and they’ve developed ways and means of surviving in situations where levels of hardship and suffering are high – such as sharing what they have and looking after each other. They aren’t angels and they make mistakes, but they’re better than we at protecting and helping each other, and making the best out of a bad set of circumstances.

Many people in the comfortable countries can get really upset over issues that are relatively small, such as a power blackout, a shortage, a traffic jam, or someone not doing what they said they would do. Tolerance levels are low, tight and sharp-edged. We have an unhelpful sense of entitlement to a problem-free life. So when the shit hits the fan we catastrophise it, mishandling it and often creating more problems than were needed.

In all of life’s situations there is a degree of choice, either to make a big deal over something or to square with it, accept it and do the best we can. The choice lies around the friction we put up. It’s an honesty process, and with pain we’re forced to face stuff we don’t like facing.

Spiritually, a key issue is this: we come to Earth to learn, get experience, go through it, learn from it and hone the soul. Because at the end of life, all you take with you is what you have become as a result of having lived a life. Pain is an intense kind of experience that has a way of grinding at us, drilling holes in us, attempting a takeover of our psyche and giving us a truth-and-reality experience.

It’s the price we pay for the pleasure of being in a body and the experiential access that it gives us to the wonders of the world. Without a body we cannot stuff chocolate, have orgasms, go on holiday or bliss out in a field of bluebells. Pleasure and pain, whether emotional or physical, are two ends of the same experiential spectrum, and you don’t get one without the other.

I had a remarkable experience six years ago when first stricken with cancer – a blood cancer called Multiple Myeloma, which erodes the bones and creates all sorts of trouble and pain. Since then I’ve had treatment, though there is no remission from Myeloma, and am now on a maintenance regime of medication, supplements and working on myself. I’m surprised to be alive, actually, though clearly there are reasons to be here.

The cancer came on quickly over a few months and I deteriorated rapidly. At times I was in extreme, 150% pain, immobilised, helpless, rendered into a wreck of a man, at death’s door. One day the pain was so intense that I couldn’t even raise my head from the pillow to drink – moving a millimetre made my bones grind and grate. But I had to drink anyway and tried moving.

The pain was so overwhelming that something in me popped out of my body and I saw myself from above – as a soul having an experience on Earth, lying there, all crippled and useless. There was something strangely comical about this. Something in me could see the poignant humour in it – here I was, suffering, more than I had ever experienced, and it was bizarre. I started chuckling. It really hurt to laugh. My then partner, looking on, thought I was losing my marbles.

The funny thing was that my experience of pain suddenly changed. It seemed to become more distant. I became more at peace with it. I was able to face it and accept it, from more of a distance – it was simply a fact, a situation. Something profound had shifted in the space of several minutes.

Over the next few weeks it decreased further and within a couple of months my pain levels were around 30%. Also, my boundaries had shifted. Previously, I could handle 20% pain without it getting to me too much, but afterwards I could handle 40-50% – my pain threshold had moved and it has stayed there since.

Over the last six years I’ve hovered around 10%, with a permanent, steady and stiff ache. I hardly notice it, having become used to it. Most of the time I accept it – except perhaps in the late afternoon when Sir Isaac Newton seems to switch up the Law of Gravity. But there are times when I do notice the pain and it gets to me, deep down – especially in winter. Usually these are times when my spirits are low and I’m feeling worn out with life.

So there’s something here about being spirit-propped. The pain, disability and precarity of a cancer patient have somehow thinned the membrane between me and spirit – a membrane that I used to try so hard to cross, while now it comes more naturally. There’s something to this about the perspective of experiencing life as a soul in a body, visiting Earth.

Pain hits us all, in all sorts of ways and degrees, and at various times. It can go deep, and we each have our crosses to bear.

For example, throughout my adult life I’ve experienced ‘political pain’ – the pain of being misunderstood and misjudged in public, and paying a high price for it (as a dissident and an Aspie-Autistic). It has impacted me immensely. It’s the pain of being wronged in the social and political sphere – sometimes by evolving facts and sometimes by the wrongdoings and micro-harms of others, or by the madnesses of crowds. Even so, this pain forced me to come to terms with the reality of it, to understand what was going on underneath and to forgive the people involved, and to understand and forgive myself too – and in late life, forgiveness has been a gift to the soul and a lightening of a burden.

The world’s pain levels are escalating in the 2020s, partially because so many souls are alive today having a human experience, and partially because life is getting tougher for everyone, everywhere. Outrageously tough situations such as we have seen recently in Gaza are just the tip of a very big iceberg.

And here’s the rub: no one is exempt. Hence, a generous and charitable attitude toward others in need is wise since the tables can turn. We might one day be glad to receive others’ help.

It’s our choice as to whether or not the future is going to bring hard times. We can make a big deal about things ‘going wrong’, or we can accept things and get on with it. In the end, many problems are not as big as we think they are. What might to one person be a disastrous crisis, to another person is just another boring night of bombing.

We create sufferings simply by complaining, being angry, feeling hurt, self-victimisation, or by doing things which are not the wisest. So the level of actual hardship and difficulty we face is a different matter to the way we handle it, and in the latter lies our choice.

Even so, for some on our planet, life is really hard and, in the short term, they don’t have many options – if, that is, they survive. This is not ‘their karma’: this is the world’s collective karma spilling over onto them.

One of the things I’ve noticed in my peacemaking work is that many of the peoples most beset by longterm war – Bosnia, Ireland, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Lebanon, Sudan, Palestine – can be the nicest people around, and it does not seem fair that such ‘karma’ should fall on them. The people most affected by climate change are mostly not the ones who created it, and the world’s poor are losers in a system steered by others. But even they are faced with occasions when choice becomes available.

If we follow a deeper path through life, over time it changes our emotional responses, perspective and priorities. We don’t need to consume as much, we don’t need to ricochet through life, we don’t need to deny ourselves tender moments with loved ones, and we don’t need to create as much waste and damage as we do.

Because something changes inside. It’s a slowly-distilling sense of basic trust, a simple knowing that, somehow, things are going to work out. Especially if we allow it. The issue isn’t about being perfect – it’s about learning from life’s lessons and making good outcomes out of difficult situations.

So this matter of hardship and suffering depends so much on where we’re looking from. While I have a blood cancer, I’m partially disabled and life is difficult, it doesn’t mean I’m sitting here suffering all the time. Though I must admit there are times when I do.

Sometimes, in down times my spirits seem lost in a fog of fatigue, but even then it’s a matter of being patient and letting it be. I can struggle against it, feeling as if I ought to be doing this or I wish I could do that, when in fact it’s okay to take it as it comes, to flop down in a dull state and let it be. I tend then to revive more easily next day. It’s just that I’ve have been given yet another cameo experience of being on planet Earth.

With love, Palden

Blessings that Bones Bring

An audiobook

If you have cancer or any longterm, life-changing ‘condition’, this might interest you. Or if you’re a friend, family member or helper. It’s an audiobook about my cancer process and what I’ve experienced and learned through it. There’s also a text version if you prefer reading.

I have a blood cancer called Multiple Myeloma – typically for me, it’s not one of the common cancers. It has particularly affected my bones, leading to a clutch of other issues too, partially disabling me. Hence ‘multiple’.

This book is for you who might seek a different, deeper, wider approach toward cancer, not so much medically as attitudinally. Here I simply share my experiences, which have worked for me, and it might well give you a few lightbulb moments.

Medically, I have done both chemotherapy and holistic remedies and helpers – a middle path – and my results are good thus far. But the main focus of this account is psycho-spiritual. Yet very real too.

It starts in September 2019, before diagnosis, shortly after my back cracked and my life changed. It covers four years. I guess the story ends whenever I leave my body and life behind. If I am able, I’ll keep writing until I no longer can, and a later edition might take the story to its end. We shall see.

Distilled from a blog, this book more or less retains its blog format, with adaptations and improvements. In a blog of this kind you write whatever comes up on the day, and it doesn’t have to follow from what you wrote before or lead on to what you write next. So that’s how this book unfolds – a bit diary-like, with thoughts and observations that came up as life went on.

As an avid, lifelong communicator, I have always sought to stimulate people’s own thinking, not simply to persuade them to adopt what I say or write. Some readers might find some of the ideas expressed here difficult to accept. If that is so, I hope these writings help you clarify your own way of seeing things. These are my perceptions and experiences, submitted to you for your consideration.

In a way I went down with cancer. In another way I went up with it. It is very much a matter of how we see things. This profound issue affects our experience of being alive with cancer or any other serious terminal illness. It affects the way we create our future, even if we’re seriously ill. Yes, you and I might be dying, but there still is a future, and not just in this body. At least, that’s what I’ve found.

So this is the story of my cancer journey. It’s free, with an option to donate. Gratitude to all of you who have been part of it and helped it along.

With love, Palden.

www.palden.co.uk/boneblessings.html

Time is Endless and the World is Wide

“This is one of the virtues of meditating…“, said I to the three student doctors. We had just started reviewing my cancer readings. I was at the Royal Cornwall Hospital. The specialist had just told me that my ECG readings (heartbeat) were good and steady. “That’s rather a surprise“, I said, looking at the students, “Because I’m electrosensitive and I’ve just been sitting in the company of thirty mobile phones, with humans attached, for forty-five minutes. But once you get used to meditating and you build it into your life, it works wonders“. The specialist continued studying her papers.

“You’ve responded well to the new treatment. Your paraproteins have gone right down quite quickly, from 21 to 5. I’m beginning to expect that of you now…“

Again, as an aside to the students. “I’ve been a wholefood vegetarian since 1971 and done supplements and complementary therapies since the early eighties. For your consideration… there might be a connection.“

Then I turned to the specialist. “With your help, I’m alive now and I wasn’t expecting that. So bless you for that. Five years ago I thought I had up to three years. Yet here I am. I’m on extra time. I’ve been given a bonus. It has changed my perspective and since I’ve been given extra time, I won’t be complaining when I get to dying.” Aside to the students: “Attitude makes a big difference“.

And, to be honest, there’s a positive kind of disorientation that has come with that bonus, since I seem to have found a new mission in life, as a decrepit, vibrant old codger of a rainbow warrior and a slightly reluctant elder – with a little literary and audio output on the side.

I’ve been with this specialist for four years now, and she’s got used to me. She’s one of several remarkable goddesses looking after me nowadays. Though I’m an oddbod in their eyes, I’m congenial, good at elucidating symptoms and feelings, discerning but I don’t moan or make things difficult, and I’m not rigidly ideological, and my medical results are good – and the results are the clincher for the doctors. They think it’s good luck, of course – a very scientific conclusion, to be sure. I still regret that, five years ago, when I suggested that they set a student on me to monitor me, they didn’t do that. After all, in these straitened times of cost-cutting, ageing populations and expensive medical advances, they badly need to study people like me to find out how we do it.

To which, the main thing I’d say is this: if you’ve been looking after yourself for a few decades, both in a bodily and a psycho-spiritual sense, then that will build a basic resilience which, if or when you get plunged into the rigours of old age, will help you a lot. The moral of this wee story is this: if you haven’t started, start now.

Cloudscape from Carn Gloose, near St Just

Today’s the day when I pop my cancer pills – mainly Len, Ix and Dex.[1] I’m on a four-week cycle, with three weeks on drugs and one week off – during which time my bodily balances can restore themselves. Pharmaceutical drugs do charge their price, though I’m okay with that – I use holistics and innerwork to ease that out and improve the results.

However, when dying is on the agenda anyway, it’s good not to be precious about life. I feel I’m not quite finished here on Earth, though if the gods want to take me out beforehand, it’s okay. I’ve been and done enough. It doesn’t worry me. Paradoxically, such an attitude can be life-prolonging.

The other side of the deal is that, if I use this extra time to serve a purpose that the gods like, then the chances are they’ll help me stay alive to do it until it’s done. Though it’s also true that this might be a glib belief that doesn’t really hold up – it depends so much on one’s life-story – and that’s something that reveals itself as life goes on. Or perhaps having a mission becomes a healing device in its own right – which I’ve found to be true.

When I first contracted cancer five years ago, the immensity of it all, and what it meant, caused me to do a big let-go. I was lying in bed in hospital, helpless and in pain anyway, and that was the best response to an overwhelming situation. I let go of expectations and of those beliefs I’d adopted because I wanted them to be true. I decided to be patient and open, to allow myself to live or to die – whichever was most on the cards – and to see what happened.

Within two months this ‘good results’ thing started showing itself. It’s not that I’m in remission – this is not an option with Myeloma – but I’m doing alright, as it goes. It’s the consequent peripheral issues arising from cancer that bug me more than the cancer itself. I have stomach issues, back issues, peripheral neuropathy, osteonecrosis and a few other weird things. This means that I hover on the edge quite a bit – six weeks ago I was paralysed with pain, and movement was excruciating. I’ve had a few bouts of illness beforehand. It’s a matter of making use of these strange borderline states for the evolution of heart and the soul. For gifts come with them. Pain, for example, has a way of wringing out of us truths we don’t want to face but we need to.

The Longships Rocks and the Isles of Scilly, from Chapel Carn Brea, the last hill in Britain

Many people have to go on courses or retreats to learn things I’ve been given for free. Illness is a fascinating gift, if we choose to take it that way: it’s an opportunity for inner journeying, cogitation, letting be, and the resolution of deep life-issues. One of the key life-issues is the big Saturnine question that hits us particularly around ages 14, 29ish, 45ish, 58ish, 72ish and 86ish: what am I here for? Am I doing it? Where have I got to? What comes next? – all rolled up into one. And the answer lies deep, beyond a threshold of fear and self-doubt.

There’s one thing, our dream, and there’s another thing, our life as it presents itself. It is the grating of these two that characterise our lives and learning processes while in incarnation on Earth. It involves squeezing through the cog-wheels and roller-mills of Time, which stretches things out into threads, sequences, causes and effects. What you seek is also seeking you, but the process stretches out over time.

I had a big lesson in this: in 2000, during a life-crisis (Pluto square Sun and Chiron Return), I dreamed of the perfect place to live – and, as my life then was, it was distinctly out of reach, a fantasy. I forgot about it, got on with life, went through big changes, and then one day in 2012, I was lying flopped on my mattress, having just then got it into place, while in process of moving into the cabin where I now still live, and… gosh… I suddenly realised that this was exactly what I had prayed for, twelve years earlier.

Not only this, but it was the perfect place in which to go through a cancer process and a complete life-change, seven years later. Something in me knew this and fixed it. Yes, our souls know things that we do not. And sometimes there’s a guiding hand that pushes us that way.

Regarding missions, I’m really happy doing the monthly Aha Classes in Penzance – and for those of you who can’t attend, there are recordings on my site and on Spotify.[2] I’m seeking to share some esoteric general knowledge – stuff it’s good for people to think about and know a bit about, even if they’re not specifically interested. Things they already half-know, but hadn’t quite figured them out.

I’m rather an autodidact and, though educated in university (LSE), the knowledge I’m known for was not gained there. My self-education began as I was leaving university, and much of it didn’t exactly involve learning – it involved remembering. And observing. And watching. And gaining insights from within. This means that I don’t quote the usual old stuff, the derivative, fashionable or easy stuff you get in many of the books, videos and courses – you get original thinking.

The gift in this for me is that, no longer very interested in self-promotion (which self-employed people usually have to do), I can just express myself creatively – whether or not anyone publishes it or even reads it. It’s all going into my online archive on my site, and hopefully my rather techy son can keep it there in future times. In the front of my book Shining Land, about ancient sites in Cornwall,[3] is a quotation from Bhavabhuti, a mathematician in India in the middle ages, who said:

‘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.‘

Gods bless you, everyone. Look after yourselves. Eat your greens and do your inner growth, okay?!

With love, Paldywan.

www.palden.co.uk

NOTES:

Lenalidomide, Ixazomib and Dexamethasone, with Co-Trimoxazole (against pheumonia), Apixaban (stops blood clots) and Aciclovir (antiviral).
The Aha Class: www.palden.co.uk/aha.html and on Spotify search for ‘Pods from the Far Beyond’.
Shining Land: the ancient sites of West Penwith and what they say about megalithic civilisation. 2023, available online. www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/

Mighty hulkers over the Carn Galva mine, and abandoned tin mine

Time

The Mên an Tol – once a stone circle, though rearranged by a zealous Victorian antiquarian

GNASHERS AND MAGIC CARPETS

We’re all stuck in an experiential grindstone called Time. Well, at least, while we’re here in a body on Earth. Actually, after we leave our bodies there are also forms of time too, but that’s different. One can be called ticktock time and the other can be called cosmo-time or psycho-time. But it’s a little more complex and variable than that too – as are all organic, natural processes.

When I was running consciousness-raising camps in the 1980s and 1990s, one of the most pleasing things was watching the children develop and grow. At the camps they would experience the magic of life, and they were allowed to be themselves and explore their possibilities in a community of souls – and they flowered. There were a lot of family healings at the camps. Experientially and evolutionarily, these kids were evolving as much in a one-week camp as they did during the whole of the rest of the year. I’ve met a number of people, now in their 30s and 40s, who have described this and the part it played in their lives. In the OakDragon, with which I’m still involved, at present the reins of power are passing to precisely this generation of former children – and they know exactly what to do because they grew up receiving the kind of treatment they now are giving to and organising for others.

So here we have a situation where, in ticktock time, a week passed, while in psycho-time a year passed. Now look back at your own life and your own formative experiences – whether they were blessed and uplifting, or boring, or hard, or traumatic. To appreciate these moments and periods of time, we have to slip into a similar psycho-time mindset. If we assess and judge them from the viewpoint of ticktock time they are meaningless and lose their power and influence – in ticktock mode we are judgemental about efficiency, compliance or time-wasting unless we label it ‘holiday’ or ‘day off’ or ‘ill’.

Illnesses are a very good way of experiencing cosmo-time/psycho-time – in fact, one of the positive purposes of illness is to slow us down and immobilise us, to switch us into inner time – often, whether or not we like it. It helps us process stuff through that’s lying underneath, that we don’t ‘have time for’ in everyday life. So occasionally our souls need to impose an override, send us to bed, give us some pain and difficulty, forcing us to doze and dream, to give space for deeper things to come through. It’s advisable, once it hits you, to give permission for this to happen – heling and resolution will come quicker that way, usually.

These times can be important, evolutionarily speaking. This is also a clue about the source of illnesses: it lies in our unconscious, in areas that are suppressed, deep and secret or only now emerging into consciousness – perhaps because we have become ready for them. Thus the secret in self-healing is to go down into those hidden recesses to work on the stuff going on in there, to open it up and let it out.

Here the Mên an Tol, the Stone of the Hole, looks more like the stone circle it once was

Time is what stops everything happening all at once. This is a key ingredient in the Earth experience. Everything takes time. Everything that begins also comes to an end, sooner or later. Impermanence is the only constant – everything else changes. We go through a life cycle, and when you’re a kid it’s very different from when you’re an old crock – not only physically but also in terms of understanding, perspective and viewpoint. And both states of being have their blessings, joys, trials, wisdom, perceptions, scrangly issues and special moments.

In my mid-seventies, I am now time-rich – mainly by dint of being strangely blessed with cancer and partial disability – but, like most readers, I was time poor through most of my adult life. I did a lot of rushing around doing important things. I had objectives, timetables, obligations, ambitions and appointments, and often I over-committed myself, always trying to keep up with a never-ending list of things to do. I achieved quite a lot too but, looking back, I could have achieved similar or better results had I known certain things I now know. But of course, now it’s too late. If I were young again I’d start a Wrong Planet Liberation Front for people with Aspergers ‘Syndrome’. Or I’d work more in Lebanon, or spend time with my Tuareg friends in Mali. Or I’d spend more time with my own children.

The Nine Maidens as seen from Mulfra Quoit (telephoto shot)

It’s different now – I’m in a rather timeless, dateless zone that is disturbed only when there are appointments to attend, or when someone tries to book a future date with me. The issue here is that I really don’t know what state I’ll be in on the appointed day, and I can’t drink coffee, get into gear and override it in ways I used to – so I just have to warn people to take me as I come, that day. Even so, time grinds at me as much as before, though differently – mainly because getting through each day is far more difficult than it once was. Nowadays, if I cook a meal, I get worn out and I have to have a rest before I can find the energy to eat it! Crazy. That’s aged decrepitude for you. That’s what happens. I’ve been losing my Virgoid competences, getting more useless. It opens up a very different perspective on life.

This relationship with time and our temporal conditions involves choice. We can make a big deal of it, fighting every inch of the way, or we can make it easier. This involves getting more comfortable working intuitively with the fluxings of psycho-time. It involves getting in touch with our inner senses, giving them more attention, and believing more in our subjective perceptions, without letting the censoring, constraining, explaining rational mind pass off or invalidate these perceptions. For there are things we can know about the way things will go – there are feelings, instincts and intuitions that can save us a lot of trouble if only we give them attention and act more in accord with them.

There are ways of understanding the inner secrets of time too. For me, astrology has been a major tool and influence, and I’ve done a lot of research work and written books about time and the way it moves.[1] Astrology deals with the interface between ticktock time and psycho/cosmo-time. That is, it embraces the regular cycles that give us ticktock time – the rotation of the Earth (giving us day/night) and its orbital motions around the Sun (giving us the year and the seasons) – and also the flexing-fluxing, organic changes in the nature of time, which are affected by the motions of the planets of our solar system.

How does this work? We live on a thrumming, vibrating planet – it rumbles and rings like an enormous bell, in terms of subtle energy. We live within the energy-field of the Earth and are completely affected by it, and it is continually changing in all sorts of subtle ways. The Earth is also part of our solar system, which itself is a thrumming, reverberating energy-system in which all planets and the Sun affect each other, influencing their energy-fields. Therefore, by observing the motions and interrelations of the planets we can understand the fluxings of subtle energy here on Earth – the ‘energy-weather’.

We can forecast rain or sunshine, but we cannot determine in advance how humans and other beings will respond to them. This is where free-will comes in. In other words, you can let fullmoons drive you nuts and keep you awake at night, or you can ride the energies more calmly, utilising such peak periods to achieve or resolve or accept or deal with whatever life throws at us.

At present, we’re in a period where Mars is hovering around in opposition to Pluto, and one option is war and devastation, and another is negotiation and forethought – these are our choices, not just for Israelis, American presidents or Sudanese generals, but for everyone. Mars is just as much a god of peace as it is a god of war – the peace that arises when both sides realise that the costs of conflict outweigh its perceived benefits.

Sometimes, to get to peace, you have to have a showdown, a crisis that forces everyone to put their cards on the table. These sub-acute crises arise simply because wisdom has failed, so we have to go through painful processes to get to the same place more slowly. As William Blake once wrote, ‘The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom‘. Well, yes, as long as you don’t blow up the world in the process.

This process of grinding through issues, procedures, processes, crunches, slack periods and the stuff of life, both in our personal spheres and in the wider world, is precisely what we came here for. We wanted a slice of the physicalness, the passion, the pain and pleasure, and we have a way of getting lost in it, foretting why we came and what we’re here for. This is the big challenge: maintaining consciousness and perspective amidst the fray and bother of daily life. You don’t get this in other worlds – not in the way we have it here.

Here’s a quote from Tom, the spokesbeing for the Council of Nine (some cosmic beings I’ve worked with):

“Your Planet Earth is the most beautiful that exists in the Universe. It has a physical variety that no other planet has. It has a varied climate that no other planet has. In all the universe there is no planet in existence that has the physical characteristics of Planet Earth. It is the rarest of beauties, and it does attract souls which, once they have come, would like to come back again. It is of a different nature from any other planet. It has aspects of all planets: it is like a composite of the universe, with all the positive and all the negative aspects, and all in between, and this is what attracts souls.

“It has with it a gravitational pull that is different from other planets, and because of this a soul begins to feel a physicalness. Souls become adapted to their physical bodies, and they forget the freedom and pleasures they have without them. The Earth was created to be a paradise. When souls achieve harmony it will become a paradise again. This is your planet of balance, for you to learn to balance between the physical and spiritual worlds.

“Planet Earth is the only one of its kind, the only planet of free [individualised] choice in the entire universe, the planet created for the balancing of the spiritual with the physical; in other words, the creating of paradise.” [2]

No one is here by accident. We chose to come here. It is also our choice to learn from it, to accelerate our inner evolution, with a view to graduating from this particular kind of education and moving on to other realms – or perhaps to come back to help the rest of us do similar. People who’ve graduated from Earth, having gone through so much, are like super-troopers in the wider universe. We’ve seen and experienced stuff others have not. It was gritty, painful, relentless and difficult.

But you don’t get chocolate on other worlds. When it works well, the sex is amazing too. Money can be a blessing or a burden – whatever our financial status. It’s all about how we deal with this stuff. Power is remarkable when well done and disastrous when abused. The qualities of love, understanding and forgiveness on our planet are remarkable too, when they break through. As they now must, on a planetary level, if we and our descendants are to continue to have the privilege of incarnating here in a world that’s fit to live in.

It all takes time. Not just ticktock time measured in days, months and years, but also in evolutionary time. Peace will not come until there is a world consensus for it – unless humanity has reached a stage where it realises conflict is not the best way forward, and when it acts firmly in that belief. That can take time, but it can be accelerated too, especially during power-points in time when the possibilities for fundamental change are amplified. One way to change the world, therefore, is to work more closely with the fluxings of time so that we can surf its periodic waves and not burn up too much energy when the waves aren’t coming.

It’s all a matter of time.

Now it’s time to put the kettle on. You can’t do that on Alpha Centauri, so enjoy it while you can, because one day that opportunity will no longer be present. Though other things will happen instead, and they might even be quite a relief after going through the grinding and polishing action of a life on Earth.

With love, Palden

If you’re in Cornwall, in the Aha class in Penzance on Wednesday evening 23rd October (this week) I shall be covering this topic. Info: www.palden.co.uk/aha.html

FOOTNOTES!

Three books: Living in Time, 1987, www.palden.co.uk/living/, which is out of print and available as an online archive version,
Power Points in Time, 2014, www.palden.co.uk/time/ published by Penwith Press, and
The Historical Ephemeris www.palden.co.uk/ephem/ which is available online only.
About the Council of Nine: www.palden.co.uk/nine.html

This blog is written using human intelligence – nothing artificial added, however intelligent people might believe it to be.

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