Category: death and dying

The Squirty Squeeze

I didn’t expect to be alive today. Yet here I am and here we are, and this is it. We’re a quarter of the way through the 21st Century.

Born mid-century in 1950, it’s rather an age-marker for me. In my twenties in the 1970s, I didn’t really expect that the world would still exist in 2025 – it seemed an age away, and back then the world’s prospects seemed very much at risk. They still are.

It feels as if I’ve lived several lives since then. A new one started in 2019. As a cancer patient since then, I haven’t expected to be alive now either. Five years ago it felt like I’d reached the end, with just one year left. My body was on its last legs, wrung out with pain, I felt like a ninety-something and it seemed as if my angels were close, eyeing me and laying the tracks to receive me.

Or perhaps they were hovering there discussing what to do with me next. Two years later, reviving from a crisis, I woke up one morning with a voice in my head, saying, “Ah, there’s something more that we’d like you to do…”.

Here I am, wondering what’s next. Life is still very provisional. I have a form of blood cancer that can’t be holistically melted away, medically cut out or irradiated. It has permanently changed my body, giving me partial disablement and about 7-8 different side-issues. It’s called Multiple Myeloma because it shows itself in many diverse forms in different people, though it particularly affects the bones – it’s also called Bone Marrow Cancer.

Things indeed are provisional: recently I took on a booking to speak at a conference in May and I wondered what state I’d be in then. However, I’m accustomed to performing in whatever state I find myself in, and if I’m wobbly and unwell I’ve found that, onstage, I can nevertheless be right on form, with my thinking, planning mind already nudged to the side. So unless I’m actually dead, the conference talk should be alright.

But I still get anticipations and, over Christmas, I worked through a good few of them – one being a fear that my cancer might be spreading and becoming something else, something more. I’m having tests later in January.

To be honest, the fear comes from a creeping feeling that whatever happens next might be too big for me, that I can’t handle it. It’s precipice-fear, ‘little me’ stuff, and the kind of fear a little boy gets when looking up at the big, wide world, feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of getting to grips with it all. I spent a few days grinding through this stuff. Then I started emerging from the other side as the newmoon came.

In life, having been through quite a lot of grinding and scraping, I seem to have made it through. So there’s a good chance I’ll make it through the next lot, somehow. They call that resilience. Though, for me, it’s as if that resilience is rooted in a strange mixture of wobbly vulnerability and an accumulated knowing that I’ve done it before and I can do it again.

If I work through my fear in advance, I tend to unmanifest whatever I fear because I’ve already faced it – or at least I start facing it and showing willing. Or it becomes changed, turning out differently and easier than it looked. Or it becomes advantageous to feel the fear and do it anyway, since it then becomes a nexus of breakthrough. I learned this in conflict zones: I’d shit bricks before I went and often I’d be dead calm and on form when I was in the middle of crunchy situations. There were only some cases of bullets flying (I was quite good at not being in places where trouble happened), but there’s a lot of chaos, tension, mess, pathos, pain and complication in conflict situations, and the psycho-emotional aspect of war was very much there.

Right now, I’m not as close to dying as I have been at various times in the last five years. Cancer came during 2019 with no detectable warning, so I didn’t have to go through anticipatory tremors about cancer beforehand, like some people have to when they’re given a diagnosis. I hadn’t felt good in the preceding six months, though it had seemed like a classic down-time that I would hopefully pull out of. But then one day my back cracked while I was gardening. The four lowest back-vertebrae had softened, and in that moment they collapsed. From that moment my life was irreversibly changed. Even after that, for two months it seemed like I had a very bad back problem, though eventually a brilliant specialist in hospital identified Myeloma. Already half-dead, the news hit me really hard – also hitting my then-partner and son, who were involved too.

But when disasters strike, I tend to be quickish to adjust, crashing through the gears of my psyche and getting really real – I don’t waste time fighting it once I realise it’s a full-on crisis. There I was, in total pain, hardly able to move, feeling wretched, and the doctors were saying I had perhaps a year or, if I was lucky, I might survive – they couldn’t tell. I wasn’t expecting this.

There’s something rather special about coming close to death. Everything simplifies dramatically, and many of life’s normal details and concerns evaporate. You’re faced with the simple, straight question of surviving or dying – and the meaning of life. Is this it? Is this the end?

This simplification is a necessary part of the dying process. Many of life’s details that we believe to be important are not actually so. On the other hand, certain experiences and life-issues come to the fore – things we’re glad about, things we regret, things we missed, things we sidelined, things we got right and things we screwed up.

Many of the things that people and society judged to be wrong, bad or inadequate… well, these are the judgements, narrownesses and prejudices of the time and the social environment we’ve lived in. Things that conventional society considers good – money, success, status, property, fame – become diminished, or they flip, turning inside out so that the price we paid for them reveals itself. We might have had a million, but were we wealthy in spirit? We might have a doctorate, but did we really understand? We might have taught a thousand people, but where have they gone?

It depends on how we respond to the arrival of death, and a key part of this is forgiveness of others and of the world, for what they did and didn’t do. There’s also self-forgiveness for all, or at least most, of the ways we have let ourselves down, got our hands dirty or avoided the main issues and the bottom-line truths. Forgiveness lets new, non-judgemental perspectives come through – seeing how things actually were, from all sides, as seen in front of the backdrop of posterity. This deep simplification and clarification is a necessary part of the dying process, and the more we can accept it and make it our own, the better things tend to go.

The more we have faced the music during our lives and amidst our life-crises, the easier this gets at death. Dying is a gradual, cumulative process for many of us, unless we pass away suddenly – it’s not just about our last breath. There’s the matter of dying before we die – going through at least some of those squeezy, grindy processes that we’ll meet at death while we’re still alive. It shortens the queue of issues that can come up around the moment of death.

When I was younger I thought that my growth would slow down in old age – this is not so. It’s going like the clappers. My capacity to process emotions and profound issues has slowed, though it has also deepened to compensate. Nowadays, when faced with a crunchy issue, I need more time to process it through. But there’s a cathartic element to it that makes it easier – a bit like writing a resignation letter and having done with the whole thing. So the big let-go and the forgiveness process seem to accelerate inner growth in the final chapter of life.

Strangely, in late life, recent memory fades relatively and longterm memory comes forward. The recent and the more distant past rearrange themselves, taking on a different perspective. I’ve found myself working through issues deriving from decades ago, together with lifelong patterns that are exposed by things happening now, and sometimes by feelings or memories that blurt up from the hidden recesses of my psyche. In late life we’re strongly encased in our patterns, laid down, routinised and reinforced over the decades, like clothing we can’t quite peel off.

After all, if you are, say, 72 years old, you’ve eaten over 26,000 breakfasts. There’s not a lot we can change because it’s already done. The consequences are with us and there’s no Undo button. But that stuckness in our karmic patterns can be repaired too, if we let it.

We can change our feelings, our standpoint, by learning from the lessons that life has thrust at us – the deeper, more abiding, more all-round lessons. In the end, there is no right or wrong to what has happened in life, though there certainly are consequences – and that’s where our choice and options lay. But it was done, time has moved on and the page has turned.

It was as it was, and now there’s the future, and whether we actually change our behaviours, beliefs and befallings. We need to sort it out with ourselves and with others, if that’s necessary and possible, or accept it, or change the way we feel about it, or own it, or drop it – or do whatever brings some sort of forwardness. That’s a key aspect of life on Earth: living in a perpetually-changing dimension of time and creating forwardness out of the situations we encounter along the way.

If only it were that simple. It’s so easy to forget and lose our way. We get brought back to it when we get to the end of our lives. What was all that for – that life? Am I happy with what happened? Have I become something more than what I was when I started? Did I do what I came here to do?

I’ve been a good boy and a bad boy. I’ve done things I feel happy about and things I regret. I’ve helped a lot of people and hurt a good few. Some things I got right and some things I misjudged. My feelings around all sorts of things have changed as life has progressed. Mercifully, it seems to get lighter as I sift through the piles of detritus left over from a life that has been lived, committing it to posterity one spoon-load at a time.

Though I’ve had a few close runs with dying since getting cancer, a funny thing has happened. I’ve gone through an unexpected inner rebirth – not ‘getting better’ but, as Evangelicals would put it, being born again. The consequence is that, as my spirit-propped condition has improved, life has become more complicated. Part of me seeks that, because I’m not one who can easily sit around weighing down seats, acting like a passive old crock with his head plugged into a TV. Being a passive care-recipient doesn’t turn me on at all.

Partially the complexity comes at me from the world around, even though it’s me unconsciously manifesting it – recently I’ve been getting five friend requests a day on Facebook, presumably because an algorithm decided I’m a somebody. Oh, thanks. I do like friends, but keeping track of it all is beyond me now. To me, a friend is someone who mutually brightens up my life like I might theirs. (Please ‘follow’ me instead!).

I’ve even been setting a few things in motion. Whether they will work is another matter, since I cannot organise them myself as I used to. The three main ones concern the Tuareg, the Sunday Meditation and the ancient sites of West Penwith.[1] My likely short shelf-life, being unpredictable, and the dysfunctions of my brains, make me thoroughly unreliable in organising things.

Also, there’s not a lot of point starting something if it subsides when I pop my clogs. So I’m scattering some seeds of possibility for other people to take care of, if they will, to see whether or not they take root. Which they might, or they might not, and that’s okay. As a reserve option I’m leaving a biggish archive of work online in case someone picks it up, sometime in the vastness of the future. There’s a remarkable loss of control that accompanies dying, and this is one aspect of it.

So dealing with complexities has been quite a big one. I’m asked “How are you?” seven times a day. The answer is, “Well, I’m like THIS, really!” Do you yourself do a systems-check seven times a day to monitor your condition, and can you articulate it in words each time? Even so, I appreciate your concern and good wishes, and I write these periodic blogs to let you know how I am. When they stop, you’ll know I’ve gone, or I’m on my way.

I’ve written before about dying being a gradual process, and I’d call myself seventy-ish percent dead at present, and stable (as it goes) – I go up and down each day. Today (Wednesday 1st January) I’m working myself up for a hospital visit tomorrow for a three-monthly check-up, and a generally friendly but virologically-dangerous period of waiting for it in waiting rooms. Meanwhile, my stalwart friend Claire will sit outside in her car, reading books and twiddling thumbs in a shopping-mall car park – very exciting. I have to work myself up for events like this, and the day after I’m often rather wiped out.

It’s worth thinking about this continuum. Yes, part of you is already dead. That is, part of you is in the otherworld, where your soul, in the timeless zone, is closer to eternity than you currently feel yourself to be. This is of course an illusion – it’s more a matter of where we place our awareness and what we give attention to while we’re alive. That’s one reason I do the Sunday Meditations: to give busy people a manageable, uncomplicated, regular time-slot in which to give the soul a little attention. Do it for a year and you’ll have done it fifty times. It’s like a weekly shot of cozmickle multivitamins. Good for helping face life and its rigours.

Oh, and by the way… lots of people use funny ways of talking about dying, as if not wanting to mention or face it. Like, ‘passing’. Be honest: it’s called ‘dying’. It happens to all of us, inescapably, and you’ve done it before. Even Elon Musk won’t be able to buy himself out of it, on Earth or on Mars. It’s an integral part of our life-cycle, just like getting born. In the Tibetan way of seeing things, the whole of our waking lives are equal in experiential magnitude to the apparently much shorter processes of getting born or getting dead. It’s all about experiential intensity.

During life, moments of crisis that come up can be rather like dying. They’re moments when time stretches in duration while compressing in intensity, when everything comes to a head, crunching together – and these climactic experiences are our training for the expanded moment of death, when we transit, float or squeeze ourselves into another world, whether in peace or struggling with it. How we deal with our crises in life has a big effect on how we deal with our dying. We can make it easier or we can make it harder. The funny thing is that, though dying involves a complete loss of control, it involves possibly the biggest choice and free-will opportunity of our lives since we got born.

My Mum did that. At the end of her life, at age 92, she just could not handle more hospital stays, medications, discomforts and indignities. She made a big decision to stop taking her medication, and she was gone in a few days. Good on you, Mum: you made that choice. It was a big choice, and you did it. Believe me, my Mum wasn’t into meditation and cosmic stuff at all but, in the end, she exercised her choice, a soul-choice. I have a feeling she has flowered in the otherworld.

With love from me, Palden.

PS: a blog about the Tuareg will come soon.

JUST ONE FOOTNOTE, this time:

  1. The Tuareg: http://www.palden.co.uk/the-tuareg-of-mali.html
    The Sunday Meditation: http://www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
    Ancient Sites in Penwith, Cornwall: http://www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-penwith.html

Social Capital

Photos from trips I made to Geneva 12-14 years ago. These are The Dispossessed

If you’re in your forties or fifties this is for you. Oh, and by the way, this is what’s nowadays called a ‘long read’, and, guess what, no AI was involved.

It’s about the care crisis and what needs to happen before you yourself grow old. I’m not going to harp on about pensions and savings, or the rights or wrongs of privileged old people currently being relatively prosperous at the expense of younger people. Neither will I repeat the implicit message that says ‘Look after yourself because no one else will’. There’s much more to it than that.

Nowadays I’m a net recipient of care and support, as a creaky old cancer patient. Similar things will probably happen to you. For Millennials and today’s younger people, it looks like you have a problem building up for when you get old, and that’s daunting. But there’s time to prepare, and magic solutions are available.

We’ve got to get real about the future. My own postwar generation has avoided much of this, and our behaviour has not necessarily matched our beliefs and ideologies. There’s a lot of hot air about growing old gracefully, but my generation still hangs on to our independence, sovereignty and property, and we have difficulty letting go (Pluto in Leo, and the Pluto in Virgos of the Sixties can be pretty control-freaky too). When we were young we had big visions of community (we have Neptune in Libra), and it hasn’t happened – not in a way that works in our old age. We have omitted to pool our financial and social capital. Here’s a tip: try not to do the same as you lot grow older!

Many of my generation have landed up on our own, stowed away in our centrally-heated, often over-sized houses or isolated in some godforsaken room somewhere. Society, in a perpetual hurry, quietly elbows us and dependents like us to the side. People largely don’t mean to do this, but they just don’t have time to be human – and this creates a social crisis. It’s the human aspect that, to children, to the chronically ill, the disabled and the old, becomes critically important: we humans have a bizarre need to feel that somebody loves and cares about us, that we matter to someone.

Geneva

Palestinians used to ask me, ‘How can you talk about human rights when you stuff your grandparents away in front of a TV in a padded prison?‘ – and they have a point.

This is a Pluto in Aquarius question – a key issue for the next twenty years. In the West we’ve gone through a period of (arguably) excessive prosperity, enabling us to venture into possibilities that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. One of these is lengthened lives – it’s now reasonable to expect reaching our eighties while, when I was young, it was the sixties or seventies. If I had contracted cancer 30-40 years ago I’d soon have been decisively dead – but not now.

Along the way we have professionalised and medicalised social care, and this is unsustainable, clunky, expensive and without limits. There’s a shortage of carers, nurses, teachers, cleaners, cooks and midwives, and we neither pay them well nor honour them properly, even though they hold up society. It’s all costing more than we are able or willing to pay, and we’re going deeper into debt, trying to maintain a lifestyle that’s already past its time. We’ve reached the end of a period in which the West got rich off everyone else, and now that we’re in an historic downward-curve, we need to get focused on a soft landing.

We’ve lapsed into a rather decadent kind of denialism: “I’m all in favour of change as long as it doesn’t affect me“. Thus we’re heading toward a likely crash landing… shock, horror… only to realise that we can’t continue living as we have lived, and our precious lifestyle has become unserviceable. Why didn’t someone warn us? Well, they did, decades ago, and no one wanted to listen.

Well, we’ll get what we get, though there are options.

Geneva has never been an imperial capital or the capital of anything, but it has a certain style to it…

In the rich world we’ve become materially wealthy while becoming socially and spiritually poorer. We’ve set aside social and community matters, even our humanness, in favour of wealth-generation and consumption, as if happiness comes from material plenty and security. But it does so only up to a point, and above that we hit diminishing happiness-returns. Just enough is good for us, and too much is definitely not. Treats are not a substitute for happiness.

This dilemma revealed itself to us during the Covid lockdowns. We became a tad more human for a month or two before grudgingly restoring normality. Meanwhile, having lectured the world about democracy in recent decades, we whiteys (or pinkies?) now find we’re an ethnic minority in a big, wide world where we’re far outnumbered and outclassed. We British think we’re different from Hungarians, but to the rest of the world we’re all Europeans and pretty much similar. Over half of the world’s population is Asian. Things are moving on.

I learned a lot when working with Palestinians – they are socially wealthier while being materially and circumstantially poorer. Their families, clans and communities pretty much hold together, even under extreme duress – and that’s what social wealth looks like. From the late 1960s to the 1990s they lived virtually without government, organising themselves so that everybody was provided for and most essential social functions were catered for from the ground up. A simple consensual rule held sway: help, support and do no harm to fellow Palestinians. Or, for that matter, to anyone deemed a ‘good person’. This included ‘good’ Jews. It’s not about ethnicity or religion – it concerns content of character. Guess what? There was little crime, pretty good road safety and a woman could walk down the street alone at night and feel safe.

A ‘generosity economy’ survives through mutual support and collective adaptation. You need no qualifications to participate or to benefit richly – you just need to do your bit, whatever you can do. It’s not perfect, but in another way it is exemplary. Even in Gaza we have not seen the kind of destitution and social disarray that we sometimes see in other places that plunge into crisis. While Palestinians are always the losers, they are not beaten.

The world – the work of some famous artist whose name escapes me.

From this I learned a big lesson. It wasn’t a case of me, a well-meaning Westerner, a ‘humanitarian’, going out to Palestine to help these poor benighted folk in their dire circumstances. No, I had to get over that one. All I needed to do was to be amongst them, to add my bit when appropriate, to listen a lot and learn from these people. Being fully present was sufficient. Their generosity and sincerity was, at first, button-pressing to me as a European – we’re programmed with a neurotic need to pay for everything. But in Palestine you should never offer to pay if something is ofered or given, because you will deprive a good Muslim of giving you a gift of God – even if they’re poor, with nothing for tomorrow.

Instead, you learn to enter the cycle of mutually-circulatory social generosity and you play an active part in it – keep the benefits moving around. As a relatively rich outsider, you spend thoughtfully and you quietly drop people occasional monetary gifts of God, to help them on their way, simply because it’s good to do so.

However, I had further advantages I could offer. As a European, it was easier for me to level with an Israeli soldier than it was for a Palestinian. I could use my privileged position in the apartheid system to eyeball an Israeli, practice street-level diplomacy and improve the overall outcomes – you see, in a roughly nine-level apartheid system, foreign visitors come in third, just below Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, but above the Druze, four kinds of Palestinians and the Bedouin. It’s complex.

Often, the poor soldier was 30-40 years younger than me anyway, doing his or her conscription-slavery, and I pulled age on them. I used my influence as a Westerner to turn round the interaction and calmly hold the power, even though the soldier had the gun. Exploiting the hidden rules of apartheid, I projected an image of a politely self-confident, imperialistic Brit visiting one of his country’s former colonies.

After all, my grandfather was in General Allenby’s invasion force in WW1 when we took Palestine from the Ottomans, and my father fought in Egypt in WW2, and my aunt was a periodic Jew-rescuer – so it could be construed that Israel owes my family a favour, if truth be known. My ruse was that I was an historian interested in studying early Christian fonts. Yeah, me, a Christian – but it worked. Israeli border guards tend to regard Christians as rather stupid, sometimes awkward, but largely harmless.

Of course, to see many of the UN buildings, you have to go on a tour. But there are security issues they do need to stay on top of.

At times these interactions were rather comical. When searching my bags once, they found some plastic-wrapped tofu I’d bought in a healthfood store in Tel Aviv, suspecting it was Semtex… well, it took a few minutes to sort that out (such as reading the Hebrew labelling) and we all landed up chuckling… and, in a better mood, they let me through, waving a load more people through after me. Bingo.

It’s all about societal energy-exchange. In that instance I used my strengths as a Brit to give both the Israelis and the Palestinians what they needed. It works best when there’s some sort of balance of benefit that can equalise both parties – however that benefit is perceived. A change of mood and spirit can make the whole situation flip quite quickly, and the all-round benefit gained often grows greater than the sum of all the individual benefits.

After all, the soldiers at Checkpoint 500 were bored shitless, and the Palestinians standing in line were equally bored, and it just needed the right thing to happen. The magic catalyst was tofu – Romanian-style and marinated. But if I’d reacted to those soldiers as ‘the enemy’, tightening up my body-language and doing oppo, trouble would have ensued and I’d have given away my power – since they did have the guns – and the Palestinians would have got home from work even later than they did.

So, here am I, older and more decrepit, in need of a few hours of help a week, and also for times of company, love and tenderness. These three matter a lot in late life – you might get hugged but real cuddles can be rare. I’m quite self-sufficient, though there are times when I go downhill and I need more intensive help and attention. In recent months a lot has come together on the support front and I am really happy about it: a group of lovely people has come together, and it’s working. Friends of Palden (FoP) – thank you all and bless you. It was a health crisis I had in September that precipitated the change.

For my part, what needed to happen was an opening of my own heart – and the illness and physical pain cracked me open. I had been in a state of emotional recoil for two years, after the sudden and, for me, reluctant end of a loving relationship early in 2022. After that, I wasn’t interested in opening up to others. I’d lost my trust and felt stuck in my hermit-like Saturnine isolation pattern – the ‘anti-social’ thinker and writer with one foot in society and the other in the mountains.

There was something I needed to face – a big and rather final, late-life change – and it took two years to adjust to it emotionally. I’d realised that this was the last close one-to-one relationship I would have in this lifetime. That sounds a bit sad, or dramatic, but no, it isn’t. It’s quite a settled feeling. I’ve had some good relationships over the last half-century, and there’s more to life too. Things have changed. Actually, don’t tell anyone, but it was Ayahuasca wot did it. The focus of my love extends now to a wider circle of people, and I’m playing a new and different role in their lives, and they in mine, whether they’re near or far.

Geneva is in a rather idyllic setting.

Here we come to energy-exchange. Caring for an new age codger like me can at times be hard work. So I’m working at making it good for everyone, if and however I can. I can’t run around servicing relationships in the way I used to in pre-cancer days, but I can do certain things. I can give a listening ear and sometimes a few astute observations – as a wizzened old retired astrologer who’s figured a few things out. I can give them an hour’s break in a warm, calm, phone-free cabin on a farm in a magical place, with springwater tea and an oakwood fire, so that they can draw a line between the last thing and the next thing, departing a little clearer and more ‘sorted’ than when they came.

There’s something deep to this. It’s about being there for people – it’s the grandfather or patriarch archetype. I don’t have to do anything, and they don’t even need to be with me to benefit from it. It’s just that I’m here, and that in itself is perceived to add something to others’ lives. Spending a lot of time on my own, I range around in my mind, pastorally thinking of people as they pop into my attention, I monitor their souls and pick up on them when they’re unconsciously signalling. They themselves feel supported, deep down. This motivates them to do things that benefit me.

This sounds terribly transactional but, actually, if you keel over with cancer or something similar, or with misfortune, you do have to think transactionally and make sure you’re getting enough of what you need. Otherwise, you won’t get it. You have to be carefully selfish, yet also understanding of others since you’re relying on their goodwill and generosity.

For what it’s worth, ‘elderhood’ is where I now find myself. I’m something of a natural at it, though I’m also somewhat reluctant (I prefer thinking of myself as a veteran). Perhaps I’ve been here and done this before in other lives. It’s all about quietly standing behind people and being there for them. It gives them a certain security whereby, if they feel they’re out of their depth, or fucked off with life, or at their wits’ end, they can anchor back to someone like me, even just in their thoughts.

To which my response is, Yes, that happens, it’s life, it’s okay, hang in there, and the world isn’t ending… though I’d put it more subtly, and much of it lies in the vibe I give out. The fact that I’m standing there is living proof that you can and do survive life’s hard knocks. Or at least, I have, thus far, and perhaps you can too.

It’s not about having opinions and telling people what’s best. There’s a challenge to overcome the reactive, self-satisfied conservatism of age and, from a rather more transcendent, slightly dementia-liberated viewpoint, to think afresh, seeing things from a new place, contributing not opinions but perspectives. But even then, only when asked. Be pleasantly surprised if younger people actually do take heed. Besides, they’re the ones making the decisions now.

So, although I depend on the help, support and company of friends, there’s something I can offer, and this is important. This is ‘social capital’ and if, like me, you haven’t been focusing on building up financial capital, then you need to work on building up social capital, on cultivating your assets, your character and transferable skills. This means that, when you too become relatively useless, with luck you’ll be liked, valued and a little bit useful, even then.

It’s him.

In my life I’ve had phases of organising volunteers to help me run projects I’ve started. While they liked doing it and it brought them benefit, it was also hard work, with a fair measure of wind and rain thrown in. I tried to help them gain a growth-payoff, a soul-payoff, from it. That is, something in them would progress, and some started a new life from that time on. There’s a certain joy in being part of something that works well and is good to be part of.

My father taught me that. He had been in industrial relations in the 1960s-80s and his philosophy was that, if your workers are happy working with you, they’ll be motivated to work well and and everyone will benefit. He’d encourage the directors to eat lunch in the canteen rather than at the golf club, and to avoid driving their Jaguar to work. Sounds obvious, and it’s true, but it was not what was happening in British workplaces at the time, and it does so only for some workers now. It’s how a generosity economy works, in which everyone is a stakeholder and beneficiary, together.

It’s about ‘we‘, not ‘I‘. However, while the relationship of ‘I’ to ‘we’ is still important, in the end ‘we’ are the overriding priority, and each of us needs to learn to do the best we can with that, as individuals.

Pluto is now in Aquarius. We need now to focus on strengthening society. Not the economy, not technology, not government, not business, but society and the mechanisms by which it works.

Do people exist to serve the system, or does the system exist to serve the people?

Pluto likes to dig out the bottom-line hard truths of things, and this is the big question for at least the next twenty years.

There’s something substructural going on. In richer countries, our time is done, our economies are subsiding and we’ve got to get real about this. It is a necessary historic adjustment of economic levels. For Britain, Europe and America real wealth-generation is sinking, overall costs, complications and debts are rising, and things are approaching a crunchpoint.

We in rich countries are not enjoying treading the mill of work and consumption as we once did. We’re supposed to be excited about the latest gizmo, scientific discovery or tech advance, but many of them arouse mainly a yawn. We’ve reached a certain level of satiation. There’s now a deep-level exhaustion, a declining motivation to bust a gut for what might anyway prove to be dubious outcomes. There’s an element of laziness and decadence to this, yes, but it’s also genuine, deep down. We’re discovering a need to become more human and for society to become more humane.

This historic shift will affect Millennials and currently younger people as you grow old. Compared with my (Pluto in Leo) postwar generation, you have more inherent social wealth than we, with a greater sense of implicit togetherness, and this is driving a deep reconstitution of society that is only now gaining momentum.

There is a fundamental law of economics that few mention, yet it’s abidingly true: when the economy goes up, society goes down, and when the economy goes down, society goes up. We’re at an inflection point in this oscillatory equation.

When you yourselves are old, there might be care-bots to help you, and there will still be people who hold society together by acting as committed care-givers, but there’s unlikely to be the capacity to finance the full care and medical facilities that we have today. So this needs tackling another way, especially by building up social wealth.

Here we return to people like Palestininans with their family survival mechanisms – and most Mediterranean cultures are (or were) like this. They have families often of fortyish people, young and old, which are part of a larger clan that can number hundreds or thousands. The old people and the kids spend a lot of time together, often at the centre of the compound where everyone lives, freeing up middle-aged people to do their daily duties. The older kids look after the younger kids, both look after the old people, and the old people oversee the kids. People come and sit for a chat and a cup of tea, then to continue on their way. It’s an integrated system with the oldsters and the youngsters at the centre. Everyone does something toward the family, to the extent that they can, and someome is usually available to step in with a solution if there is a need.

Western researchers would come to Palestine, finding unemployment levels standing at 20-30%, yet no one was hanging around looking unemployed. This was simply the generosity economy at work – lots of people had no paid job, but they had a place in the family and community economy – and it doesn’t show up in the statistics. Everyone is catered for and everyone contributes. In Bethlehem, a little boy would help me with runaround tasks and occasionally I’d give him some loose change, and he’d run home to give it to his Mum because it was more important to him to contribute to his family than to sneak off to the sweetshop to feed his face.

This is the way to go. It lies in social values. So teach your children well. To get through the future, countries like Britain need to work on social wealth and resilience. Social love and solidarity. Hanging together. Making life easier for each other. Sharing lifts. Keeping an eye out for each other.

That’s not as easy as it sounds, because it involves dealing with disagreement – what’s politely called ‘diversity’. In the 2020s we’re pretty good at arguing, disagreeing and detracting, pretty unwilling to hear others’ viewpoints, or even to acknowledge that they’re actually real, valid people, just like us. We have issues about who’s in and who’s out. There’s a lot of shadow stuff lurking in the social psyche – trust issues, historic pain and resentment, unresolved questions, pending problems.

Migration is one of those issues we have to face because it is happening anyway, and we have to get sensible about it. It is changing our societies and we need to do this well. We can’t evade the facts, pretending that we can stop it or send people home – it’s happening, and we in rich countries have been a substantial part of the cause. We cannot supply munitions to Israel and expect Palestinians to stay at home without seeking refuge in Manchester – sorry, that’s two-faced, narrow, poor thinking, and if such thinking were applied to you, you’d hate it. Yet, on the other hand, we need to take in numbers that we can realistically absorb, so that there are enough housing, teachers, facilities and space to cater for them, to give them what they need and to get what we need too – and this is a very real issue without easy answers. It brings up quite primal emotions – it’s not solely socio-logical.

My generation failed, when it reached its sixties, to pool its capital and engage in creating mutual support systems for late life. We didn’t think we would actually get old. Those of us who have done well financially do what we can to enjoy our position, and the rest of us get by as best we can. Our sense of generational fairness and equality has been compromised by incentives and bonuses that have successfully splintered us. We might disapprove of businessmen getting stinking rich, though strangely we nevertheless believe it’s kinda okay for a rock musician to own five houses, a stack of glossy, carbon-belching sports cars and an art portfolio for which the insurance can cost a quarter million. [Even so, here’s a perceptive song from one of them, Roger Waters: Is this the Life We Really Want?]

This kind of thing is not really good for the future – unless of course we permit it, allowing an oligarchy to burn up resources while we dutifully catch the battery-bus to save energy. World circumstances are changing, and if the excesses of the past are to continue into the future, then you Millennials have a problem before you. And here’s an awkward question (sorry): do you want to leave this problem to your children, as my generation has done with you? Or will changing circumstances and shifting values perhaps force the issue before you reach that point?

Strengthening society – from the bottom up. To face the future we need to build social resilience. This means looking after each other and sharing what’s available and what we have. It means pitching in together when there are floods, pandemics, economic downturns, supply-line blockages, power-brownouts and gaps on the supermarket shelves. Governments and institutions can certainly facilitate the process, but it needs to come from ordinary people.

In 2025 Neptune enters Aries for 14 years. This is about Big Men and our neurotic need, during insecure times, for leaders who will fix things for us and keep control. This is why we have Putins, Trumps, Modis and Xis dominating the world and holding it to ransom. We need to overcome this illusion. However, the real issue here is not about getting rid of leaders – that’s something we’re generations away from, realistically.

It’s about right leadership and – more important – astute, intelligent, thoughtful citizens who think a bit further than our noses, and who don’t allow populists and pranksters to capture our support and run off with the agenda. Perhaps we also need to support and respect our leaders a bit more, holding them to account but with more empathy and understanding – it’s a lonely and shitty job, with plenty of holes to fall into and minefields to navigate. The worst bit is that, even if you’re a great reformer, someone, somewhere, gets hurt and loses out.

During this Neptune in Aries period we might also see some exemplary, Mandela-esque leaders. To quote Georges Pompidou, a French politician of the 1970s (in old sexist language): “A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation. A politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service“.

One such leader I’m watching at present is the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley – she’s lucid, justice-seeking, solid, with a good sense of proportion, likeable, and she’s the sort of person who, with luck, will leave a good track record behind her. [Click here to see her recent UN General Assembly speech.]

Leaders can catalyse helpful social processes – at least for their first ten years in office – but it is not for them to determine our future. Society needs to take control of itself. We need to train ourselves to form, develop and hold to social consensus, to make fair deals between competing interests, to stand back from sectoral disagreements and responsibly to keep hold of the power and influence that society itself should hold. Government is important as a coordinating influence, but placing responsibility for fixing society on government and institutions inevitably leads to a disjunction of values and aims between oligarchies and ordinary people.

Since the demographic pyramid currently favours the old, weighing quite heavily on the young, we oldies need to pull together to look after each other to lighten the load. We have resources. We don’t need a paid carer to come in to make a cup of tea and hold our hand when a friend, a neighbour or a grandchild is far better. We need professional help only in those things that we cannot do ourselves – I can keep my house in good shape on a daily basis, but I find vacuum-cleaning physically difficult. I can mostly cook for myself, but there are occasions when I’m worn out and really appreciate the application of someone else’s culinary gifts.

Being rendered into a passive recipient of care – especially in old people’s homes – is disempowering, dispiriting and it costs a bomb. It’s healthy to keep going with the daily tasks that we can do – and it’s far more healing to do it with and for others, not just for ourselves. And a single oldie doesn’t need a whole house to live in – I live in a one-room cabin where it’s just five steps from my bed to my kitchen, and it’s great! Let’s liberate our oversized homes for people who truly need them.

Social capital. The strongest social bonding force is crisis. When a society goes through a crisis, triumphing over the odds by sharing and cooperating, the social ring of power gains strength. It’s a transpersonal feeling, a feeling of being in it together and being mutually reliant and reinforcing. It is in the interests of oligarchies meanwhile to keep society splintered, dissonant and competitive. The social ring of power is activated when collective resonance and solidarity rise and hold firm – and this is why organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah are unbeatable, since you can bomb them out as much as you like but the need for such movements doesn’t go away. So they remain and revive, even when shot to pieces.

But solidarity can be dangerous if social blindness or denial is tangled up in it. When at war, Israelis have remarkable national solidarity, but the big question is, toward what ultimate end? Israelis need a safe homeland where they can pursue their lives in peace. Yet, feeling the world to be against them, they do tend to create conflict around themselves – and this is an example of the way a people can be captured by an oligarchy which harnesses and exploits their solidarity for narrow, ultimately unwise ends – in this case, it’s Zionism, but Israel is not the only place where such things happen. But for Israelis, subservience to Zionist aims and values leads to a situation where war is needed as a way of generating solidarity – national unity in an otherwise rather culturally-argumentative country. Here herd mentality fails to serve the true and lasting interests of the whole herd. Israelis will find peace when they become friends with their neighbours. Period. And so it is worldwide.

The initiative lies with people at ground level. It concerns cultivating the wisdom of crowds. Often this happens through encountering nexus-points of occasion and crisis where there are opportunities for social healing, for the airing and resolution of unprocessed social issues. In Britain we’ve just had a rumpus over ‘assisted dying’ – a rumpus because we have a cultural fear of death and an unwillingness to even think about it, so we start panicking when we’re forced to.

There’s also the possibility of a future characterised by the madness of crowds and a lack of societal connectedness, leading amongst other things to the marginalisation of the old and the unwell by the fit and the healthy. The solution to the ‘problem’ of the old and infirm is a fundamental reconstitution of society. And perhaps this escalating social crisis is a gift in disguise. The crunch will come when our economies can no longer support the standards we have become used to.

Good luck, you lot, in addressing a problem I don’t think my own generation has cracked. We need to look after each other a lot more, and to get into proportion what’s really abidingly important in life. Because, believe me, at the end of my life it’s not the pounds, shillings and pence that I earned and spent that I remember – it’s the closenesses I’ve had with fellow humans, the magic moments and the rustling of the leaves in the trees.

With love from me, Palden

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

The pictures are from trips I made to Geneva in Switzerland (an incredibly expensive place) 12-14 years ago – one of the UN capitals. As you might gather, I’m distinctly internationalist in my geopolitics!

AND… the Sunday Meditation continues every week… details are here: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

Dying Ahead

Chambered cairns in West Penwith. This is Bosiliack Barrow. It has been taken apart and reconstructed by archaeologists, but they did it well, and the cairn seems happy as it is. Many cairns are far more wrecked.

Just over a week ago, as reported in my last blog, I went to hospital, caught a virulent cold infection there, and I’ve spent the last week coughing, spluttering, wheezing and snotting as a result. I’m on immuno-suppressing cancer drugs, so my defences are down. I live rather a sheltered life on a farm, so my immune system doesn’t get much exercise, fighting off the kinds of infections most people encounter on a daily basis. An extra irony is that I couldn’t attend a further hospital visit yesterday (Friday, fullmoon day), because I was too unwell from the last visit to hospital! But we did a telephone consultation instead.

Being more vulnerable than otherwise I would be if I didn’t have cancer, small illnesses can get big. My snotty cold pushed me into quite an altered state. Fullmoon approached, I got fed up with it and I wanted to turn things around. I had been invited to attend a special healing ceremony, which would probably have helped, but the prospect of being with a large group of people overnight, most of them 20-30 years younger than I, was a bit too much – especially since I was due to take my weekly main dose of cancer drugs the next day. The illness I had had just over a month ago (muscle spasms) had warned me not to push it. So, reluctantly, I decided not to push it and I stayed at home. In parallel with the group, some miles away, I did my own inner journey instead.

One of the blessings of cancer is that, if you’re seeking truth and breakthrough in your heart and soul, you don’t need to look very far – truth comes to you, free of charge. Your life changes, and death stares you straight in the face. When I was healthy, I would do innerwork, or tramp the hills and clifftops, or join a group process, or somehow do a spiritual workout, but actually, with cancer, all I need to do is catch a cold and I’m pitched into a truth process at the deep end! When my energy is down or my health is poor, I find my perceived age, the psychological feeling of age, climbs upwards from my seventies into my eighties and sometimes into my nineties.

Brane chambered cairn near Carn Euny, with a neat hair-do

Besides, I’m not really seeking truth at this stage of my life – cancer gives me enough of that, and at times, I even get rather tired of it. No, it’s not truth I seek. It’s forgiveness and release. Which itself involves a truth process, but it’s different. It’s all to do with letting myself go through elements of the psycho-spiritual process of dying before I get there and actually pop my clogs – dying in advance. Doing the business before the business does me. The main part of this concerns processing issues accumulated during the life I’ve had – clearing the decks so that, when I get to death, I don’t have too large a deluge of issues to face. This enables me, theoretically, at least, to move more easily toward the next stage, rather than having to be preoccupied with untangling the past.

Except, the more I dig up, the more I find there’s stuff underneath I hadn’t really been aware of, or I’d forgotten it or buried it. This is helped by a strange rearrangement of memory. Toward the end of life I’ve found that the time-bound sequentiality of life’s events decreases in life’s inner chronicle of memory. I’ve started remembering things from earlier life that had been crowded out and overwritten by subsequent events. It’s not time-sequentiality but process-sequentiality that comes forward.

Our inner process rises and falls at different stages of life, accelerating and decelerating, and it doesn’t travel in a straight line – sometimes we even seem to go backwards, screwing up over issues we’d thought we’d resolved and repeating old errors and patterns. At other times we move forward more easily, the cork pops and the fizz and froth spill out all over the place. Such is the nature of inner time and of the threads of evolution within our psyches.

So here am I, staggering through late life and discovering how little I have learned. Last night, while inner-jouneying, I was particularly, and tearfully, aware of the way I’ve screwed up with the close women in my life – particularly my three daughters and my last partner. This is rather paradoxical because, ever since I was about 20, I’ve stood alongside feminists and been supportive to so many women carving out their lives and destinies, and I’ve done a lot of emotional processing, yet I still seem to be fucking up, even in late life. When I was younger I thought I’d be wiser in late life. Perhaps I’m not much wiser, but in less of a hurry instead.

Inside Brane cairn. Many archaeologists would disagree with me, believing they were for burial. No, I don’t think so. They were built for retreat, for actually dying in, for energy-bathing crops, seeds, medicines, mind-medicines and tools, and as an energy-bath for healing and initiation.

I asked within for forgiveness. For anything I have done or omitted to do, or failed in doing, which might have hurt or harmed them or set them back, I acknowledged it, asking their souls for forgiveness and release from past shadows. It hurts and harms me too. It always takes two to tango, and the bit that I can influence and change, even if only in retrospect, is my own part in that tango.

The funny thing is that, especially in late life, I’ve been popular with womankind. Many women seem to think I’m the kind of man they’d like to be with, or to have as a brother, father or son – since I have quite an open heart, as it goes, at least when I’m hyperfocused on matters of the heart, and I have sensitivities that are unusual for a man.

Perhaps this is one of those dilemmas that arise from being an Aspie (with high-function autism or Aspergers Syndrome). Haha, it’s not a syndrome at all. It’s a different operating system and a minority one which, in ‘normal’ people’s acquired beliefs, is called a syndrome – for which one is supposed to get fixed so that one can have a ‘normal’ life.

One facet of this ‘syndrome’ that applies to me is that I’m pretty adept at standing up in public and putting myself on the line, and pretty adept at being alone too, but in the space between – personal, close relationships – I’m not very good. I forget people’s birthdays, I don’t do Christmas, I get the wrong roses, or I cannonade off on my crazy, driven missions, forgetting those that I’m close to. This hurts them. Understandably. Problem is that, right or wrong, it’s me.

There’s a dilemma that the families of public people often face: their public and private personas can be quite different. Perhaps you’re a brilliant musician, author or leader but, as a person in private, you can appear quite dysfunctional, detached, seemingly hypocritical, or even regarded as a thorough asshole. It can be quite difficult in particular pandering to people’s wee foibles – those behaviours that demand conformity with seemingly strange requirements, such as coming home before 10pm or reminding them that you love them, or following proper recipes when cooking, saying “Sorry for your loss” at funerals, or ‘acting responsibly’ by feeding your kids at set times of day.

Here’s the chambered cairn on the summit of Chapel Carn Brea, the last hill in Britain. It’s around 4,000 years old.

So, last night, on the fullmoon, I was processing this stuff, and I sincerely hope it has brought some release and forgiveness to my daughters and ex-partner too – and anyone else who needs it. For forgiveness involves moving to a level where wrongs dissolve and the deeper patterns, causes and effects of life’s sorry events suddenly start fitting together into a more meaningful whole.

Here’s another paradox: those to whom we are closest are often those who uncover and expose in us the deepest of shadows and pain. And vice versa – we do it for them too. This is one of the strange tragedies of love and closeness. I’m sure every one of my readers knows that one from cruel experience!

It’s also a manifestation of the advanced soul-honing opportunities that are available here on Earth. That is to say, it fucking hurts. It gets you deep down, dredging the depths of heart, mind and soul, digging out the hidden ghosts and ghouls lurking in the darkness of buried ‘stuff’. You don’t get this in many worlds. Life might seem easier in the worlds of our dreams and aspirations, or on Arcturus, or the Pure Land, but actually, the grinding action of life on Earth is not only a gift, but also we chose it by coming here. We wanted to do some fast-track soul-evolution. We wanted to get arm-twisted and flogged into transformation. We sought to go for the heavier stakes and to find out what it’s like wading through the slough of despond.

This is not just a personal process but also an evolutionary process for every group and nation and for the whole population of Earth as a planetary race – especially when Pluto is entering Aquarius.

Not because all that shite is important, really, in itself. But it obstructs our process of lighting up as souls, of finding true freedom – the kind of freedom that can sit in a jail cell, accepting one’s lot and making good use of it. Like Nelson Mandela and his ANC friends on Robben Island, who decided to co-educate each other with everything they knew, since there was nothing else they could do. Or like King Wen in ancient China who wrote down the texts of the I Ching while sitting in jail. Like Malcolm X, who waded through the full Oxford Dictionary while banged up in a cell. Like so many less-known women who have carried a heavy weight of families and social mores through many years, even many lives, yet turning out to save the day when the chips were down, feeding the troops or ministering to the needs of people who hardly deserved it.

Here’s one at Pordenack Point. In some cases I think these served as geomantic spots where they’d bury someone they considered a great soul, for the blessing and protection of the land, and I think that was the case here. It was a bit like the preservation of the relics of medieval saints, as a blessing.

So, to the women in my life, bless you all. Thank you for being teachers to me. I sincerely hope there has been some sort of pay-off for you. It’s all in how we see things, really – whether and how much we can allow ourselves to forgive and be forgiven. I’m finding, in myself, that this goes deeper than I was aware it could.

Thank you Maria and the meadows of Penwith for your alchemical gift, helping me walk alongside your group in spirit as you did your fullmoon ceremony. It’s amazing how gifts of grace arrive at our door. Frankly, with my snot-filled porage-head, yesterday I was feeling like a pile of rotting compost as the fullmoon was rising, yet at night I emerged under sparkling starlight with a glint in my eye, a knowing that all is well and a deep appreciation for the wonderful souls, past and present, who play a part in my life. Forgiveness comes in its own time, sometimes when we aren’t looking.

Over and out. With love, Palden

Website: http://www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Podcasts: http://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Cancer audiobook: http://www.palden.co.uk/boneblessings.html

Here’s a cairn on Mayon Cliff near Sennen – another geomantic cairn, placed in a carefully-chosen spot. Yes, probably someone was buried there, but the bodies would be changed around and the cairn would have other uses too. It wasn’t a memorial to a person, like our graves today. It was a geomantically hallowed spot where they put the bodies of special people, to bless the land. Or where it was a good place to die consciously.

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.

Tregeseal stone circle

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.

Treen chambered cairn from the inside

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love from me, Palden.

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

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

Blessings that Book-Writing Brought

Silent Blessings on Dartmoor. Photo: Lynne Speight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But we do stuff too

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early morning at Oak Dragon. Pic by Chrissie Ferngrove.

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

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

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

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

With love, Palden

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


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

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

ET, go home

Getting real about switching realities

[Recycled – written in June 2022]

Pendeen Watch as seen from Bosigran Castle, Penwith, Cornwall

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

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

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

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

Above Porthmoina Cove, Penwith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bosigran Castle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going home. On the slopes above Bosigran Castle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jaggedy granite at Bosigran

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Above Porthmoina Cove – rock climbers love it

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

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

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

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

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

With love, Palden

Crossing the divide

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

Relief

A cancer update.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victorian architecture, at Porthmoina Cove, Penwith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Watcher. A simulacrum at Porthmoina Cove

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With love, Palden.

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

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

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

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

Carolingian Carcinogenix

A quick preen at Porthmoina Cove, Penwith, Cornwall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choughs and a gull at Kenidjack Castle

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

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

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

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

Before entering this life we made an agreement.

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

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

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

Gorse-perching demonstration, Carn Gloose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peregrine falcon at Carn Les Boel

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hawk at Carn Les Boel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A seal at Portheras Cove

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With love, Palden.

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

Site: www.palden.co.uk
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Sacred cattle at Bosigran Castle

Conscious Dying

A bronze age chambered cairn, used probably, amongst other things, for conscious dying
A bronze age chambered cairn at Treen, near Morvah, in Penwith. I think these were used for, amongst other things, conscious dying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cloud beings at Praa Sands
Cloud beings at Praa Sands

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading. With love, Palden.

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

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

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