Two limited-edition evening talks with Palden Jenkins
at The Hive in Penzance, Cornwall, TR18 4TP. Fridays 25th Sept and 30th Oct, 7.00pm.
We stand on a threshold, peering over the edge.
These two talks are about our personal lives, our circles and communities and our national and global futures. Limited-edition because these might be the last public talks I give – I’m on my way out, standing on my own edge and peering over it.
The funny thing is that, soon after deciding to do these talks and announcing them, I plummeted into a deep and rather nightmarish illness. Already a cancer patient living on extra time, I wondered whether I’d make it through. It looks like I did. So I come to you having recently wobbled on that edge.
Back in 2020 I described the late 2020s as an ‘avalanche of events’. Well, here we are. Personally and globally we are being squeezed, stretched, shaken and squirted into a new, change-rich, insecure reality in which it’s difficult to see what is to come next. But it’s coming anyway and it’s getting bigger and deeper.
Here’s the nub of it: this grinding, fear-inducing process is the very mechanism by which the changes that are needed will come. In our own lives, we’re challenged to step into our true selves, and so it is with Planet Earth. Earth seeks to realign with her purpose, her soul, and we, as itchy nits on her skin, are a part of that process.
Avebury. Photo by Rebecca Brain.
In a sense, we humans are losing control. But don’t fall for the fearsome idea that we’re doomed, that World War Three is coming – that’s a trap of the mind and heart. It’s time to choose.
Losing control, there’s another level of balance and magic that comes up underneath. It’s all about riding that wave. Overcoming fear.
Seven years ago my life changed thanks to cancer. I was given a year or two to live and I’ve been hovering on the edge ever since. It yields insights. One insight is this: the more we work with change within ourselves, habituating ourselves to shedding skins and starting over, the more adept we become for the time when the big change really comes.
It might not look like it, but another world is birthing itself and it’s already in labour. The big squeeze is happening and, by being alive today, you’ve chosen to be part of it.
Everything that begins comes to an end. Yet we don’t die: we’re reborn into another world. This is what I’m facing at the end of my life, and eventually it comes to each and every one of us.
I’m a former astrologer, geomancer, original thinker, consciousness-worker, project-founder and humanitarian, a veteran of the 1960s and the late 20th Century alternative society. I have a few perspectives to share, and that’s what these two evenings are about.
Two limited-edition evening talks with Palden Jenkins a decrepit old new age Penwithian from another millennium!
at The Hive in Penzance, Cornwall, TR18 4TP. Fridays 25th Sept and 23rd Oct, 7.00pm.
A 1960s veteran with a life-story to tell, and now in the end period of my life, I’ve come into a few insights along the way. I invite you to come and partake of whatever comes up or comes down on the day.
Teetering on the edge of the unknown, this is about our personal lives, our community belonging and our national and global futures.
Back in 2020 I described the late 2020s as an ‘avalanche of events’. Well, here we are. We and the world are being squeezed, stretched, shaken and squirted into a new, changeful, insecure reality in which it’s really difficult to see what is to come next.
But it’s coming anyway and it’s getting bigger and deeper.
It is this that will bring the changes that are needed.
Just as, in our own lives, we’re challenged to step into our true selves, so it is with Planet Earth. Earth seeks to realign with her purpose, her soul, and we, as itchy nits on her skin, are a part of that process.
In a sense, we’re losing control. But don’t fall for the idea that we’re doomed, that World War Three is just round the corner – it’s a trap of the mind and heart. It’s time to choose.
Here we stand on the surfboard of history, yet there’s another level of balance and control that comes up underneath. It’s all about riding that wave.
Seven years ago my life changed thanks to cancer. I was given a year or two to live and I’ve been hovering on the edge ever since. It yields insights. One of them is this: the more we work with change within ourselves, habituating ourselves to shedding skins and starting over, the more adept we become for the time when the big change really comes.
In the end, we’re all dead and forgotten. Everything that begins comes to an end. Yet we don’t die: we’re reborn into another world. These are not the End Times: this is just the beginning.
Pics in this blog are of my father, Julian Jenkins – no longer on this Earth. Here he is, noble at his wife’s, my mother Ruth’s, funeral
I’m getting a feeling that, unless something changes or I’m getting things wrong, it might not be too long before I join the ancestors. That’s not a heavy feeling – there’s a dawning sense of relief to it. Of course, you never get to know when and how death will come, until it actually happens. So I’m faced with rather a strange choice: is it best to talk about this while I can, in case I keel over quite soon, or am I overdramatising something that is not actually imminent?
There is indeed a feeling of migration going on, a gradual shifting from here to there which, at some point, will mean that my heart stops pumping. The time will have come to go over to the otherworld – whatever that lands up truly meaning.
But the otherworld doesn’t start there. I want to return to a thought I shared a couple of years ago, about dying. Dying is a gradual psycho-spiritual process, and every one of us is dead to some extent, at this very moment. You might be only 10% dead, but part of you is over there. I’d estimate myself to be 80ish percent dead at present, up from the 70ish percent of a few months ago – though it’s a non-measurable perception.
Whether or not you’re aware of it, your psyche is much more bendy, pulsating, edgeless, multilevel, imaginal, transdimensional and empathic than you think. We’re addicted to the idea and the feeling of individuality, as if there is a clear boundary between what is me and what is not me, when actually there isn’t.
Julian at Castle Rigg stone circle, Cumbria, in his final years
Part of our deeper psyche oozes over to the other side, and on a more regular basis than we might think. This happens especially when a loved one, or a person who is important to us, dies. Part of us goes over with them, and it’s important to give time and space to experience that. It’s a blessed, spacious feeling, and a great gift. That feeling of inner connection with a deceased soul can be quite strong in the first few weeks. Over the course of a year, that emigrant soul will come back clearly at times. You get a flash of them – if only a glimpse – and you feel them and their vibe quite distinctly. So listen and talk back – this is important.
That’s how it works with ancestors. Early in human history, when we lived in genetically-defined tribes, souls would tend to recycle within the tribe’s psycho-spiritual field. We modern people have now burst out of our tribes, seeking experiential variety and following a multiplicity of possibilities. Both genetically and as souls we have become remarkably mixed and mongrelised. We’ve been at it for millennia.
But there are also specific threads that pertain to our own personal life-stories and interpersonal histories. People in our past have acted as beacons of light, rescuers, enemies, teachers, harmers, questioners and friends to us, and they live within us now, and it’s a personal thing. Or it might be a tribal or group-soul thing – a concatenation of souls with a shared identity and purpose.
Ancestors continue to live through us. They watch and witness from another place, sometimes lending a hand or dropping thoughts into our heads, or acting as an element of memory, as a model of how to do things, or how not to do things, that helps us shape the lives we live now.
One of my key guiding ancestors was a man who was alive in the mid-19th Century in South Wales, where he was well-known as a healer of last resort. Doctors would refer patients to him if they felt they could do no more. Apparently he was a curmudgeonly, difficult old git, with a big, white, Karl Marx beard, though he had a glint in his eye too. At times he would disappear up into the mountains on his horse, leaving the world behind, to collect herbs and spend time on his own. Yet he was gifted with a wondrous ability. He would reappear, back from the mountains, and people would come to him.
I first met him, inside myself, when I was young, during an inner journey on my third acid trip, in 1967. Over time he has returned, as if watching me, especially at critical points in life. It took some years of questioning relatives to find out who he was. He had been an embarrassment to the family, so he was not well remembered. But he was well-known and he did apparently save a lot of lives. He still turns up on the movie-screen of my psyche every now and then, and he’s both a genetic and a spirit-ancestor to me. And I am a bit like him too.
In this life I’ve been involved with large numbers of people, organising events, running groups, standing on stages, muttering down microphones, writing books and building websites, connecting deeply with many amazing souls. I’m aware that, having played a catalytic, key-turning role in many people’s lives, that makes me a kind of spirit-ancestor to at least some of them – once I’ve popped my clogs, that is.
So, after I’ve gone from this life, please do remember to check me out every now and then. Or if you find me checking you out, please do say hello. See whether there’s a message in it for you. I’ll pop up in your thoughts for a micro-second, and you’ll get a distinct feeling of me that comes with it.
Adventuring
But it’s not just that. This is a two-way thing. Being up in ‘heaven’, lacking an earthly body, it means that, if we ancestors want to get stuff done on Earth, we need to get people to do it on our behalf. This gets tricky. Modern humans suffer doubt, thinking that such thoughts are ‘just imagination’, and setting them aside. This can be frustrating for a soul on the other side: try talking to someone on Earth and they just ignore you and walk away! However, we can meet you in your dreams, and sometimes such interactions percolate through into waking-life – into what we call consciousness.
One of the things I am glad about is that, throughout life, I have often followed these promptings. I wake up with a feeling, an inspiration or a compulsion to do something, big or small (this blog about ancestors being one example), and I feel driven to do it. There’s a certain magic that comes with such downloads, a feeling that the prompting points towards something that is genuinely supposed to be. The outcomes from prompts like this can be much bigger than anticipated too.
Acting as an ancestor is rather a choice and a commitment. It’s a resolution to be available and of service to souls who remain in the land of the living, and service to the universe’s wider agendas. You don’t automatically become an ancestor just by dying: it’s a choice to be present, accessible and involved.
It also depends on how others see you, as a sort of role model or example. On some level, and whether or not people are conscious of it, you become a star in their inner firmament. You become a watcher. You cannot interfere, though you can lay seeds of possibility and simply be there for people.
Here’s the main reason I’m dwelling on this. From an earthly viewpoint, my health and condition have been deteriorating in recent months. I find I’m becoming less focused on, and interested in, the world around me. More often, I find myself floating off and disengaging, interiorised and seeing the world more like an outsider, once-removed.
I remember this when my Sagittarian father was in his nineties. I’d take him on adventures – he liked that. He would fall asleep during the journey but, when the engine stopped and he awoke, there before us would be a panorama over the mountains or the sea. We’d sit there sharing a flask of tea, sometimes going for a slow walk. Or I would go for a walk and he’d fall asleep. I was giving him a last look at the world, and we’d visit some of his favourite places. He died over a decade ago, but we still nod and wink to each other across the dimensions. Those were valuable moments.
We certainly are multidimensional intelligences, and this becomes more and more apparent as we approach death. Except, as intelligences, we don’t always use our full intelligence. Jean Piaget, a sociologist, once said, ‘Intelligence is not about what you know, it’s about what you do when you don’t know’.
Indeed. This is the story of life on Earth. It’s a life filled with paradox and improvisation, and we each have a different instruction manual and a unique experiential path to follow, just to complicate things.
I’ve just begun revising my cancer book, Blessings that Bones Bring – it needs to be shortened and sharpened. The book is a distillation of relevant material from my cancer-and-life blog, Notes from the Far Beyond. It’s in both digital and audiobook formats.
Next there is a question of how to end the book, since a cancer story, in my case at least, ends when I die. However, I’m not dead yet and, after death, I won’t be able to write the final chapter. That’s one of those paradoxes. I haven’t figured out what to do about ending the book, but something will work out.
So that’s my project for the next few weeks – apart from getting through each day. At this late-life stage, it’s a matter of completing what I can of the flapping threads of my life, while I still can, even though existence is twice as difficult as it used to be before cancer along.
I hope this rather rambling blog makes some sense. Perhaps I’ll return to this ancestor theme another time. I might be losing the plot, going off at tangents, but something else is dawning inside. In the land of the living it looks as if things are going wrong and I am deteriorating, but in the land of the soul something new is starting up. Or perhaps I’m getting a re-training in how to function in the rather rarefied consciousness-realm where ancestors spend much of their timeless time. I wonder if they serve good tea there?
This doesn’t really feel like a journey into the Great Unknown: instead, it feels like going home. It was this life that was all about the Great Unknown – a life in a world where we drive bulldozers through the laws of the universe. We flail around in the choppy seas of earthly experience, bumping up against things and people, struggling to make sense of a pervasive fiction that we call ‘reality’. However, at the end of it we are permitted to go home, and our bruises and wounds are attended to – if, that is, we allow it. If we don’t allow it, we start our next life carrying the baggage, hurt and aberrations of the life or the lives we had before.
Meanwhile, if you’re in the mood for some seriously moving rock’n’roll, here’s a remarkable musical rendering of the dying process, in a Christian cultural context: Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPI3E0Sxs0E
For people of my generation this can be a shock – we weren’t prepared for this. You get creaky. You can’t handle things you used to be able to do.
Gravity gets heavier, bodily frailties set in, people forget you and doctors start taking over your life.
But there’s something special about this last stage of life – it’s a chance to complete the story of our lives and bring things to some sort of conclusion. If we ignore this, there can be quite a lot of baggage to carry into the afterlife.
This is about the deepest and potentially the richest time of our life-cycle, when we can advance psycho-spiritually in ways that, earlier in life, we used to pay large amounts for, going on courses and retreats and doing snazzy practices.
I can’t chop logs and climb hills like I used to, but another mobility has arisen instead, deep down inside.
Getting old is about growing wiser, not getting stiff, conservative and grumpy.
Once I encountered a paper bag, and on the side was printed, ‘Recycled materials – do come again’. Yes indeed, if that is your path. There’s also the option of going beyond.
But that depends a lot on what we do with the life we have, and the way we played our hand of cards.
This is one of the best blogs I’ve written and it’s time to give it another spin. It’s all about dying, and prepping for it while we’re alive.
Having done battle with the Furies of Storm/Hurricane Goretti, and by the grace of hard-working local tree surgeons and power engineers, I’m back online and able, yet again, to elbow you about the Sunday Meditation!
Usually I do it weekly on Facebook and occasionally here on my blog. From now on I shall do this more occasionally, since I’m slowly losing my capacity to sit easily at a keyboard and activate it in a manageable way.
That is, though I sound lucid and coherent, as a meticulous Virgo and retired editor I go over and over it at least five times, and that’s getting laborious. A life of service to keyboards is slowly grinding down as finger-coordination declines and brains slowly decouple from this World of Ten Thousand Things.
But meditation is another thing, and I’ll be there, regardless, at the appointed time, whatever the weather or circumstances, at least until my passing and possibly for a while afterwards. The times are below, and if you are so moved, you are welcome to find a place to park yourself and join a holy party! And if not this week, then another week.
It’s also a good, doable and undemanding life-habit to establish, since the blessing-channel will be open and operative at 7-7.30pm GMT whatever happens. Times in other timezones are below. For me, over the last thirty years, and having had a life with little regularity to it, it has been like a cosmic timecheck – one thing that has been constant and unchanging over time, whatever is going on and wherever I have been – even in car parks, trains, deserts and cow fields. Funny, that.
It’s easy. Meditate, contemplate, be mindful, go quiet, make prayer, go inner-journeying, drop out for half an hour, and do it in your customary way. There’s no prescribed method or mantra, no sign-up and no need to be online. Just be present. I sometimes call it ‘cosmic availability’. We’re just a bunch of bright souls sitting together in inner space, at an appointed time. It amplifies the outcomes.
It is overlighted by a collective of cosmic beings I’ve worked with for decades, the Council of Nine, and if you resonate with me, then you’ll probably resonate with them. But they don’t meddle with us. They put it this way: if you meddle too much with your children you’ll drive them against you, and that is what free will is all about. So they don’t meddle – they subscribe to the Prime Directive (and that Startrek concept came from them). But they do like to support us in exercising our free will – our true and deep free will. More about them here: www.palden.co.uk/nine.html
As for times of passing, it’s funny how things go. If you’re spiritually oriented then other forces tend to take over, and the timing of death is not just a medical matter involving normal probabilities. It’s now six and also four years since I should have died, medically speaking, but here I am, and though I experience deterioration and decline of capacities and fascinating changes of viewpoint, I have no idea at all whether I have weeks, months or years ahead. This weekend my ‘perceptual age’ is in my mid-90s, though on a good day it’s 80-85ish, and my physical age is 75.
Thanks to all of you who have flown alongside over recent times, and may it continue, and may it bring benefit to you and to our benightedly shining planet. This isn’t a resignation letter but it’s always good to say things that need saying while we still can – or perhaps, when in the mood! Perhaps the Furies shook me up.
Love from me, Palden.
Current meditation times, on Sundays:
GMT: UK, Iceland, Ireland & Portugal 7-7.30pm W Europe 8-8.30pm E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 9-9.30pm Iran: 10-10.30pm Pakistan: midnight-00.30 Monday India: 00.30-01.00 Monday Oz: AEST 5-5.30am Monday NZ: 8-8.30am Monday Greenland: 5-5.30pm Brazil-Argentina: 4-4.30pm Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile: 3-3.30pm EST, East Coast North America, Cuba: 2-2.30pm CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia: 1-1.30pm PST, West Coast North America: 11am-11.30am
When cancer came into my life nearly six years ago, I found myself adapting some inner visualisation techniques I had learned earlier in life to my new situation. It was a spontaneous thing and a way of dealing with my situation.
I met a group of ‘inner doctors’, engaging in dialogue with them and allowing them to examine me and work on me. The amazing thing is that, in my experience, it has really worked.
So this podcast is about the inner doctors. It’s for people with life-changing or terminal ailments or disabilities, or their helpers, friends or families. But it could be useful to anyone, if only for future reference – after all, especially as you grow older, all sorts of things can happen. They did to me.
I’ve been greatly helped by the inner doctors. They even seem to have helped my outer doctors in hospital, as they treat me. So this might interest you and prove useful.
Though you do need to believe.
Note: in the podcast, at times I did not distinguish sufficiently between inner and outer doctors! Sorry for the confusion.
This is mainly for my generational peers – if you’re in your 70s, 80s or 90s, your bones are getting creaky and your mind is getting sluggish.
In the life-cycle we’re given, we grow up and later we grow down. In steps.
It’s also about karma-clearance. Sorting out our stuff at the end of life, so that we don’t carry all of it with us when we go over to the other side – to the realm of the Ancestors.
I’ve been involved in humanitarian work, and recently I’ve needed to work on my patterns around givingness and compassion fatigue. Commitment. Success and failure in helping people. Deep heart stuff.
And it’s about acceptance. That’s one of the biggest learning experiences life ever gives us.
47 mins long. Introduced and outroduced by the birds of Grumbla in the Far Beyond, down’ere in Cornwall.
It’s the Sunday meditation again, and I have revived sufficiently from an illness that floored me last week to be able to elbow you about it! That is, you’re welcome to join us in the zone – times for different countries are below. It’s an open meditation space lasting half an hour. To quote Van Morrison: no guru, no teacher, no method – just you and me in the garden… Follow your own path, together with us following ours. We shall be blessed.
The illness was a fluey thing. My energy was low, and I’d been pushing hard and under pressure in my remote humanitarian work. So when I got cold and wet during a trip to Falmouth, my soul pulled the plug and I went down through it. Next day I was semi-conscious, stiff and hurting, with sluggish brains, wobbly balance, burning feet (peripheral neuropathy) and I was right out of it, gone, hardly here.
A pertinent sign at Gurnard’s Head, in West Penwith
My predominant emotion was grief, over things that have happened, and particularly over moral dilemmas and painful moments in my humanitarian work over the years. I’ve seen people face hardship, suffer and die who, in my estimation, should not have died, and at times I’ve been unable to help – often quite simply I did not have the funds needed for medical treatment for an amputation or to save a life.
This is a deep dilemma being faced by many humanitarians now, as governments blithely withdraw funding and the public shrugs its shoulders. For me, in late life, it has left traces of regret, even though I know that the net value of my work was positive overall, and there’s a lot I’m glad about.
But the illness enabled me to go deep, deep down to a place where the hidden roots of life’s experiences and events ferment and bubble. This is one of the big virtues of illness that many people try their best to avoid – the consciousness changes it can bring about. Sometimes our soul needs to cut us down and render us helpless, to help us work through something – burn through something. Whether or not we actually do this is a life-choice and an exercise of profound free will.
Seals asleep at Godrevy
It is an act of free will to choose to go through a turning in the deepest seat of consciousness. You have to go over the edge and take the plunge. Getting into the habit of doing this throughout our lives sets us up for one of life’s greatest and most moving of experiences – dying.
As you approach death, life tends to take you down in stages – a series of crunch moments or crises where your worldly powers and agency are reduced, your world shrinks, and you bodily functions deteriorate. This incremental withdrawal yields the possibility of a new seeing, a new understanding, if we so choose it. Though it involves perceiving truths that can at first be uncomfortable. Yet facing and accepting these revealings becomes a relief too, an understanding, a forgiveness. For this life had simply been a short visit on an ongoing pathway. It begins and it ends.
Sir George, looking straight at you
Back in the 1990s I was privileged to help and spend quality time with Sir George Trevelyan, who was in effect the grandfather of the New Age movement in Britain. Very much a man of the Twentieth Century, born in 1906 and dying in 1996, he was an aristocratic philanthropist, thinker and educator, planting the seeds of the new age and the green movement in the 1940s-70s. He was a four-planet Scorpio. At the very end, he died by decision, announcing that he should not be disturbed or given any food or drinks. He was gone in 4-5 days.
Here’s a video of him talking in 1988, in his eighties. Thank you, Sir George, for being you, for what you did with and for so many people, and for pointing the way in my life too.
Meanwhile, if you care to join today’s meditation… see you there!
Love, Palden
Current meditation times, on Sundays: UK, Ireland & Portugal 8-8.30pm GMT W Europe 9-9.30pm E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 10-10.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm EST, Cuba 3-3.30pm PST North America 12-12.30am
You must be logged in to post a comment.