death and dying – Page 3 – Notes from the Far Beyond

Bridging Gaps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall, a neolithic cliff sanctuary

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

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

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

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

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

With love, Palden

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

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

The Pipers menhirs at the Merry Maidens stone circle complex

Arrive without Travelling

The long and winding road (near Falmouth, Cornwall)

I’ve been rather quiet recently. My energy has been under par. Nowadays I’m not good at doing winter. I’m often told that I look well, and part of me indeed is well, though this is more a matter of a grin-and-bear-it attitude than a medical reality. Since getting cancer I’ve found I give off an unintentionally deceptive appearance, looking better than I actually am, or feel. Sagittarius rising with Venus trine to it (the grin bit) and Saturn square it (the bear it bit). I’m not sure what to do about this.

Oh yes, I forgot… a health warning: beware of smatterings of astrology.

Though I’ve been relatively quiet, I’ve been at it, extracting parts of my blog from the last four years that tell my cancer story, turning them into a book for patients with cancer and other serious conditions, and their helpers – at least, for those interested in my approach. It will come out dreckly (sometime) as a free online PDF book, and possibly as an audiobook later on. I’m pleased with the way it’s developing.

In my birth chart I have Jupiter in Pisces – a dreamer perhaps, but for me the challenge has been to make dreams manifest. There’s fantasy and there’s vision, and there are doable and impossible dreams. The difference is a matter of discernment and not always clear, even if, like me, you have a forensic Saturn in Virgo, a dreadfully factual place for it. I’ve had successes and failures in this manifestation business, though a lot of things wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t tried. Jupiter, in my case, is the handle to a bucket formation of planets – so it’s an energy-focus in my being. A bucket is a pattern where all but one of the planets in a chart are located in half of the zodiac, with a singleton on the other side acting as a handle.

In my chart the bucket tips so that it pours or perhaps spills out – all of my planets except one, Jupiter, are above the horizon (the horizontal line across the chart), in the social and public domain. But the key to that array is Jupiter, down below, in the personal, local-neighbourhood sphere. In my case it allows a certain privileged access to inner wealth – though I had to make a progression of big, sometimes difficult choices to unlock it. The Tibetans gave me the name ‘radiant merit’ and the Bedouin called me ‘always giving’, and these have been a challenge to live up to and live with. Had I oriented my life another way, I might have been a senior civil servant or an ambassador serving Tony Blair’s government. But I didn’t.

Life as it stands today is rather peculiar: I’m out there with my writings and podcasts, with a public presence, while in real life I’m very much on my own. That’s Jupiter in Pisces and Saturn in Virgo again. I live in an uplifting, ancient landscape, peppered with geomantic technology from millennia ago, surrounded by high granite cliffs and the wide ocean. Here lies the taproot of my being – the sense of space here nourishes my soul. Jupiter in Pisces needs a spiritual anchorage. Before this, I’ve lived under Glastonbury Tor, in Bethlehem, in the Swedish forests and the mountains of Eryri, Snowdonia.

Yet ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main‘, wrote John Donne in 1624. For me, solitude is a way of sourcing original experiences and perceptions which then I can bring to the wider world. I’m not one of those authors who can write a book for three hours a day while doing other things – instead I go into a hyperfocused voluntary lockdown for months, totally immersing myself in it.

I’ve even manifested electrosensitivity in my life, which is very isolating. I live in furthest Cornwall to be as far away as possible from the dense cloud of radiation that England emits. I’m close to other emitters instead – humpback and minke whales, dolphins, basking sharks and seals. And buzzards, geese and owls. The construction of our realities, both intentional and unconscious, has so much to do with what we tune into.

The funny thing is that, although West Penwith is relatively isolated, in my psychic work I find it’s easy here to reach around the whole globe. It’s geographically peripheral and psychically quite central, relatively free of etheric noise. I have Neptune in the ninth house (an eclectic spiritualist) and Chiron in Sag in the twelfth (a penchant for behind-the-scenes stuff). As George Harrison, lifting words from Lao Tzu, once sang: “Without going out of my door I can know all things on earth; without looking out of my window I can see the ways of heaven; the farther one travels, the less one knows… Arrive without travelling, see all without looking, do all without doing…” [1] This is certainly true for me now, though I’ve travelled and done plenty of things before, and this makes it easier to accept my current confinement. If cancer had come in my thirties or forties it would have been a very different story.

Currently, transiting Saturn has been sitting on my Jupiter. Normally I’d interpret this as a crisis of faith. Well, my faith is more or less intact but circumstances are having a good go at eroding it, with many disappointments, big and small. Singlehanded, I’m not keeping up with everything that’s involved in staying alive – at times the ‘to do’ list overwhelms me, and I need help with critical things like transport, shopping, laundry, lifting, specific tasks and particularly companionship. And a PA for online assistance and organising things, and a minder for travels. Ideally.

But reality is something else. No one covers my back or keeps their eye on me, and that’s the lesson of my life. Or perhaps I deserve it, or perhaps it’s a gift in disguise. One of the gifts you get when you die is that you see all these facts and nuances from an entirely objective viewpoint, and the end-chapter in life is, if we so choose, a time of revelation and release as insights like this trickle up. Life is, after all, not only about what we tell ourselves is happening.

On the other hand, I’m kinda managing, keeping many things together, as long as it doesn’t get too complex and demanding. My task pile is increasing though, not shrinking. Even so, a strange kind of peace and acceptance has settled on me. Last year I was lonely while this year I’m alone – circumstances haven’t changed though my feelings about them have.

Ironically, one issue that’s stretching me a lot is that, although I need help, quite a few people nowadays seek help from me. I even need help explaining to many of them why I can’t help them – this requires careful diplomacy. The world’s needs are rising and people from the past naturally come back hoping I can wave a magic wand once again. Mostly not, in concrete terms, though occasionally I can given them a magic key. But the human contact between us is important – it helps them plug into some sanity, perspective and encouragement, with a feeling that someone is bearing witness and feeling their pain.

It’s heart-wrenching too. I’m talking to Bashar, a young doctor in Gaza, when he can get messages through to me. I haven’t heard from him for over a week now – might have lost him. Some years ago I helped him write articles about life in Gaza, under the auspices of We Are Not Numbers.[2] It’s an NGO that trains young Gazans in writing, photography, video and social media outreach, to help them speak for themselves. One of its founders, Prof Refaat al Areer, has recently been killed in bombing.[3]

Bashar graduated as a doctor in August this year after six years study at the Islamic University in Gaza City and was plunged straight into working at Al Shifa hospital – the big one recently in the news. I asked if he could write something about it but I haven’t heard from him. He wished he could come and work in Britain, where a doctor can have the resources, drugs and equipment they need for their work – well, much more than they have in Gaza. He doesn’t want money or to immigrate here permanently – he wants to get experience and raise his game so that he can return home, where people like him are much needed.

Another friend, Aminha, had a baby a few weeks ago. I’m relieved that she and her child are still alive – well, they were, last time I heard. What a life to be born into, stuck in a devastated concentration camp with little food or security and no escape.[4] Her brother had been a nurse in Gaza – he managed to escape in 2016, got to Europe, was talent-spotted by the Belgian health service and later died of Covid while working in a frontline intensive care unit. Poor chap. Some years ago I asked him what was the most difficult job he had had to do as a nurse in Gaza. He said, “Holding down patients during surgery without anaesthetics“.

One of the reasons I’ve had a strange peoccupation with conflict zones is this. Kahlil Gibran puts it well: “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars“. In conflict zones I’ve met some of the most impressive people I’ve ever met.

Sakyamuni Buddha put it another way: “The path to enlightenment begins with the experience of suffering“. That is, if shit happens, it might be a gift in disguise. It’s not fair to say that to a person in Gaza right now, but there’s truth in it – a truth better confronted in retrospect for the deepening of our understanding, at a time when we’re not actually being bombed.

I’ve been facing facts recently, regarding my health. I’m doing alright with cancer, though my current treatment, Daratumamab, is slowly losing its efficacy. So in the coming year I might have to change to Lenidalomide, which intuitively I feel nervous about. My anticipation is that I might not get on so well with it as I have with Dara. I’ll lose the visits by the nurses too, since it involves a daily pill rather than a four-weekly injection.

But my real concern is the peripheral side-effects of cancer. I have two critical issues – osteonecrosis of the jaw (my jaw is dying) and a compressed stomach (leading to difficulties digesting and eliminating food). The stomach is Virgo’s place in the body, while the jaw is critical for scrunching up the stuff of life. Experience is food too, so there’s symbolism in this. The stomach is where we assimilate the nutritional experiences that life gives us.

The osteonecrosis gives me anticipations. A specialist at the Royal Cornwall Hospital was concerned about it recently. We like each other, and he can see I’m very much alive, but the disintegration of my jaw, possibly in a year or two, could be a critical issue heralding my end – not a very happy ending either. Either this or the stomach issue are more likely to kill me than the cancer itself.

I’m not one who will struggle and fight to stay alive just for the sake of it. If I can, I’ll stick around until living becomes too difficult, but no longer. I’m okay about passing on, and I’ve had a full life. Over the last four years with cancer I’ve done my best to release regrets, accept facts, forgive and be forgiven, and to stay happy. However, without adequate support and with no one close to me in daily life, I’m concerned about what happens when I start deteriorating. I need someone who’s tuned in, an alternative type with some health knowledge and a good heart, with time available and willingness stand by me to the end – funnily, rather like my former partner, with qualities akin to hers.

She was into David Bowie and I was into John Lennon (having grown up in 1960s Liverpool). Lennon’s recent song, ‘Now and Then’, says it for me exactly.[5] Now and then I really do miss her. Nearly two years have passed and I’m moving on, gradually opening to other options. Not that options are here, but I’m opening up to them.

However, if I get close to someone or move house or join a new situation – a family or group, perhaps – this will be the last time, baby the last time, and I won’t be able to do another big change. If this can’t be the case, then it might be better to stay alone and handle things myself. This involves a promise to myself to pull out of life quickly and go home when the time comes to do so, and no later. I’ve spent my life pushing against the wind, and there’s no point doing it in death.

Life always has its compensations and our prayers are always answered – not necessarily when or how we might want them, but they’re certainly answered. When I was in the depths of cancer four years ago I was concerned about my humanitarian work. I could continue as an author and thinker, and my post-cancer blogs, podcasts and webwork are some of the best output I’ve done, but the humanitarian work died right then – I couldn’t travel and I’d be more of a liability than an asset at the frontline. Or so I thought.

But in the last two years I’ve worked with the Akan priestess Maa Ayensuwaa to disable a violent, Nigerian-led, drug-addled criminal gang, I’ve had involvement with the Tuareg in Mali, and recently I’ve been back with the Palestinians. It all happens from my desk here in Cornwall – online stuff – and in bed, or sometimes up on the bronze age barrows behind our farm – psychic stuff.

Something in me has been strangely calm about getting involved in human wrongs, death and devastation once again, even though at times it has been grief-filled and rather a strain. I’ve been given grace-time and opportunity to do it – a prayer answered. Which goes to show, there’s a gift in everything, even in disability, and even when it seems that all the wrong things possible are happening. But then, to quote a peacemaking Ulster vicar from some time back, ‘Better to fail in something that eventually succeeds than to succeed in something that ultimately fails’.

When it comes to popping clogs, I think I might be able to fold myself up and pop out voluntarily, if necessary – though I’ll find out only when I get there. It’s a matter of shifting away from the apparent difficulty of letting go of life, toward being reborn into a new world with a sense of relief and homecoming. We don’t stop being ourselves when we die, but the location changes, you wave goodbye to your old, damaged, tired, physical self and body, and you say hello to welcoming souls who await your arrival. You get processed through a decompression, a debriefing and a healing of wounds, a few truth sessions, some re-education and recuperation, and then other options come before you.

So, I’m getting used to the possibility that my time might be shorter than otherwise it might be. My current state isn’t going to last forever. However, the conundrum is that, when you’re kept alive by spirit, anything can happen.

But I do need friends to quit trying to oblige me to stay alive for their own convenience. I’m here now, alive in incarnation, in physical form. If you wish, you may invite me places, get me to do a holy gig or two, join us at the Oak Dragon Camp in summer [6] or visit me here in Cornwall. But please don’t leave it too late. When it’s time to go, I’ll need to go, whatever anyone thinks and whether or not I fit their timetable.

After that, I’m in the hands of two Geminis – Tulki, my son, looking after my remaining affairs, bless him, and a dear soul sister, Rebecca, looking after my funeral. I’m pretty Mercurial (Sun in Virgo and Moon in Gemini) and, as you may have discovered, rather effusive with words – miles and gallons of the effing things – so being sent off by two Geminis somehow fits, and thank you, you two.

My Mum, also with a Moon in Gemini, was a prizewinning shorthand typist in the 1940s-70s and she got arthritic fingers in the end. I’ve managed to bypass that, thankfully. Instead, my fingers are losing their keyboard-accuracy and I have to go over and over everything multiple times until it’s right! We each have served the bane of being a compulsive scribe.

I’m Saturnine – it’s central in the array of my planets – and my cancer, Myeloma, is about bones (Saturn). Without treatment my bones would hollow out, crumble and break. Bones hold us up, enabling us to live in a functional planetary body with a humanoid architecture. They give us a frame to hang our body on, counteracting gravitation and the heaviness of physicality. When my energy is up, I’m more or less upright, looking bright, and when it’s down I’m stooped, dragging myself around like a corpse on double gravity, and I need putting to bed with a cuppa, some music, a hot water bottle and a cuddle – therapy for a saturnine old crock with a limited shelf life.

So it feels a bit like I’m poised at the top of a slalom slope and it could be downhill from here. We shall see – I don’t have a sense of the future right now, the gods like keeping me on tenterhooks and it’s a scary-ish seat-of-the-pants matter. Goes to show, I do get fear, in case anyone wondered. But I’m usually alright on the night – fear is more about anticipation than factual realities. One of the great things about being a senior is that, having got through many scrapes over the previous seven decades, I know that, live or die, I’ll get through the next lot too, somehow. It all lies in attitude, really. Only in certain respects can we genuinely control the circumstances of our lives, but we have much more influence over the way we respond to the circumstances we face. That’s what free will is all about.

Love from me, Happy New Moon and Happy Everythings. Palden

The next blog is half-written, and it’s a ‘Paldywan’s top tips for cancer patients’ blog. It’ll also form the final chapter of the book ‘Bones’.

NOTES:
[1]. The Inner Light, by the Beatles: https://open.spotify.com/track/379hxtlY5LvbPQa5LL6dPo
[2]. We Are Not Numbers: http://www.wearenotnumbers.org
[3]. Refaat Al Areer: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2023/12/8/poet-professor-and-writer-refaat-alareer-killed-in-israeli-strike
[4]. An article about Aminha by an old friend, Mike Scialom: https://mike-scialom.medium.com/just-a-miracle-from-god-would-end-this-insane-war-gaza-city-resident-s-plea-under-attack-from-082af6b32586
[5]. Now and Then, the Beatles: https://youtu.be/AW55J2zE3N4
[6]. Oak Dragon Camps: http://www.oakdragon.org – if news of their 2024 camp is not online when you look, it’s coming soon.

Maa Ayensuwaa

Okomfo Akua Ayensuwaa, Queen Priestess of the Ayensu River, West Africa

Those of you who know me well and have been following my story for the last year will have heard me mention the Okomfo Akua Ayensuwaa (Maa Ayensuwaa). An Okomfo is a priestess or priest. This is her.

She is a native healer in Ghana who has been working with me to save lives of people in Ghana, Togo and Niger who have been under attack from an international crime gang, since October 2022. The gang do drugs and people-smuggling over the Sahara, for the British-European market – hard, ruthless men who care little about rape, violence and crime.

She has been in hospital with fibroids, which are spreading. This arises from the privations she’s put herself through during this year – she tends to put others first and is a real heroine. I have not been able to finance her hospital treatment and aftercare (£500). So it looks as if she will die before long.

I am really sad about this. Our meeting last December was very special and, between us, we’ve pulled off some amazing miracles. The problem we have had is that the security/anti-fraud wing of the ANZ Bank in Australia, promising to pay all the expenses for this operation, have failed to fulfil their promise and pay up. Perversely, the bank has turned out to be a bigger problem than the crime gang, whom we have disabled considerably.

This debt from the bank now amounts to some £40k, for the repaying of debts incurred (£15k) and for compensation (£25k) to those ‘good samaritans’ who have sought to help and who have paid a high price as a result. This whole story started when I saved one of their men, Andrew, a Scotsman, whom I knew, from attack by the gang – and the crime gang was uncovered in the pursuit of the bank’s anti-fraud business in West Africa.

As a result of this failure to pay, I cannot pay the fees to save Maa Ayensuwaa now. In circumstances like that, hospitals simply dump people outside, since they do not want liability for them. The bank is in a state of corporate denial, yet they are indirectly responsible for the deaths of at least ten people. They owe the Okomfo and me a lot of money.

I am not appealing to you for money, and I do not like to. The best I can do is to fix for some good-hearted person in Ghana to take care of the Okomfo, so that she can at least have a noble and peaceful death, which she deserves. She is currently semi-conscious and about to be dumped. (The doctor I have been dealing with is a good man, and regrets this himself, but he is bound by the rules.)

I do however ask for prayers and inner support for her. May she manifest the support she needs and deserves, and may her likely end be filled with light and with grace. May she be blessed by the angels, gods and spirits. If she is to live, may she find healing and revival – whichever way the Universe chooses. Please surround her in love. She has given so much to so many people, risking her life for them, and she is a true heroine – rather saintly, actually.

I am working on writing the full story, for the time is now coming to tell it in public and expose the bank. Sometimes the pen is mightier than the sword.

For now, may I ask you to put in a prayer for Maa Ayensuwaa? She is 53 years old, a Gemini, and she is Queen Priestess of the Ayensu River in western Ghana. Her magic and her considerable healing powers are rare. She is is one of the most remarkable psychics I have ever met – and I’ve met a good few. She is a sincere woman who gives freely of herself and her abilities, and she is deeply committed to truth and justice. The photo of her here is the only one I have – our contact has been psychic and online only.

I am really sad that it comes to this and I shall miss her. But we shall continue communicating whether she is alive or dead, and we shall meet again. I was aware that she and I could have done so much together in the area of world healing. Whether this is to be or not to be, may the Universe make the best choice, and may Maa Ayensuwaa go well on her journey and be truly blessed. She is one of the most remarkable women I have ever known.

Thank you. Love, Palden

A World of Appearances

Finally I’ve written an autobiography. It’s online and shortish, the equivalent of ten pages. I was reluctant to write an autobiography, partially because I feel it’s not greatly important and partially because my memory of past events is foggy. In it I explain why this is so. Lots of people have said I ought to write one. I dragged my feet. Standing on stages in front of people comes naturally to me, but I’m also a quietish, Saturnine Virgo who’s happy beavering away behind the scenes and not making a big deal about it.

Yet writing it has been therapeutic. I did it in two rounds. In the first, a year or so ago, I wrote down all I could remember. Letting time pass and recently reading it again, I remembered more events, details and issues. Though really, it’s not life’s events that matter: it’s what goes on inside, prompted partially by those events and partially by stuff coming up from within.

There are general, lifelong issues and patterns too, which are difficult to weave into a short autobiography without making it lengthy. Even so, while working on it I’ve been reminded of something that has been important throughout my life. I’m not sure what to call it. It’s all to do with working with contradiction and paradox. In a way I’m a radical extremist in my spiritual-political views and, to some people, I’m right off the map, not even a decently normal left-winger, conspiracy buff, new age glitteratum or a proper anything. But in another way I have always been measured, considered, anchored in lived experience and seeking balance in my thinking.

My politics – particularly in international relations – comes from my heart. Being with Tibetan Lamas in the 1970s clarified this. They showed me how everyone suffers, rich or poor, privileged or deprived, and that we need to practice compassion and loving kindness toward each and every person and living being. The secret here is to put ourselves in others’ shoes, to see what life looks like from where they stand. You don’t have to agree, just to bear witness and comprehend their situation. I firmly disagree over a lot of things, though I’m not into pointing fingers or demonising people. Such a non-polarised approach isn’t complacency but a way of seeing life that can unlock doors to effective activism or concrete action.

Revolution, to me, involves building the future while letting the past dwindle of its own accord and in its own time, perhaps with an occasional strategic shove. I’ve always been focused not so much with rousing people to rise up as with looking beyond the next perceived horizon and laying the ground for what happens afterwards.

Of course, everyone needs to do whatever they’re moved to do, and to do the best they can with it, preferably without harming others. In the end we all learn from what life has taught us. It’s all part of a bigger, wider movie with a cast encompassing the whole of humanity. If people die in war or by starvation, it is indeed tragic and wrong – one young friend in Gaza has just been killed – yet it is also a sad part of humanity’s learning process, its aversion therapy. It happens because we humans have not remembered the main agenda and what the endgame is.

It’s both a personal and a collective process and, today, the pendulum is swinging toward collective priorities. Our attention is being drawn to the collective dynamics involved in facing the future, which are incrementally overriding the personal preferences and envisionings we all variously might have. In the Global North there’s a lot of braying about personal rights and sovereignty, but much of this is the sad complaining of affluent Westerners, scared of losing the power, advantages and comforts we have had. The future no longer lies with us whiteskins, though we do have a place in it. Around 15% of the world’s population, having banged on about democracy and human rights for decades, to our surprise we’re faced with being but a minority, with equal, not superior, rights to everyone else.

For better or worse, I’m seriously moderate. I regard Bilderbergers as humans. They do things that are beneficial and things that aren’t. They’re like you and me, really – thoroughly imperfect beings. Yes, they have a certain power to swing things their way, though not as much as some of their critics believe. We need to help them change their thinking, their hearts and their behaviour, since no system of social-political organisation will work well without people’s hearts being in the right place.

If we see those at the top of society as Them, by implication making Us into their underdogs, we tend to reinforce the masters-and-slaves mentality. Even so, we apparent slaves far outnumber them, and we aren’t always stupid sheeple who obey our masters, so ‘the Cabal’ doesn’t control everything. We are co-responsible.

It’s all to do with how we choose to see things. Personally, I see a transformation of the current system to be inevitable and unavoidable. It’s taking longer than many of us first thought, but it is happening. It’s up to us to do what we can to nurture and channel that inevitability, in order not to prolong the agony, since what’s really at stake is the amount, the depth and intensity of suffering and damage that people and the world must go through before we reach a breakthrough point.

Seen in this light, the latest outbreak of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, or between rival factions in Sudan, is a tragic saga of the thrashing of the tail of a slowly dying dragon. In WW2 we had an example of dying dragons: the greatest destruction in the war took place after 1942, when its course had already pretty much been decided at Stalingrad, Alamein and Midway – yet it took a lot of further destruction to confirm that inevitability. Mainly because of masculine bull-headedness. But the matter was eventually harrowingly resolved amongst the ruins of Berlin and Hiroshima.

In the last thirty years, on top of other projects and activities, I’ve worked with meditation and psychic work. Many political types and rationalists think this is woo-woo, a joke, or peripheral or impractical, and they may hold that view if they wish. The way I see things, a tide is turning, nothing is permanent and we’re working with the historic trends of centuries and millennia. We’re working with the underlying thoughts, feelings and beliefs of people, and that’s what shapes the future.

Those of us who elevate our individual freedoms as benchmarks upon which everything else should be judged are having to swim against a growing tide moving the other way. Individualised self-interest, though indeed relevant and part of life’s equation, is not actually in everyone’s best interest – and the endangered state of our world demonstrates that. Our world problem derives from self-interest. We’re at a stage in history where the survival and benefit of humanity and of the natural environment as a whole have become the top priority. Global circumstances push things this way, and the big question is how fast and fully we respond and adapt. The future is nowadays having a greater causative influence on the present than the past has. We’re being sucked toward the future.

So I don’t rail against the banksters, the billionaires and the secretive manipulators, though I do twiddle their knobs while they aren’t looking, when I can. I do my bit. In my innerwork I sometimes penetrate the backrooms of Davos, or tweak the energy-fields around certain cloud computers, or drop thoughts into prominent people from afar. This probably sounds like fantasy or even megalomania, and there’s truth in that observation too, but feeding and seeding the collective psyche with such perspectives is the beginning of change. All man-made change begins in the psyches of people.

I tend not to see things in black-and-white, good/bad, right/wrong terms – that, to me, is a prejudicial, blinkered comfort-zone allowing us to avoid seeing clearly. When working in Palestine I was not really like many of the other activists. I believed in staying in Palestine for long periods and participating personally in people’s lives, rather than visiting in an activist group for an exhausting and short week picking olives, doing conflict tours and leaning on the copious hospitality of Palestinians.

I wasn’t anti-Israeli either, even though I found some Israelis difficult to relate to, especially if politics came up. Also I don’t agree with the agendas of the state of Israel. But I don’t agree either with the minority of Palestinians who wish, at least in heated moments, to eliminate Israel or drive the Israelis out. To me, it’s not about Palestinians and Israelis – it’s about people, and I worked with those who sought my kind of input.

So when I went through Israeli checkpoints, I regarded the soldiers scrutinising me as real humans, and my behaviour and body-language reflected that – and I got through, often by simply brightening up their day and being a nice guy. I wasn’t there to do battle with the poor grunts on whose shoulders it fell to protect a screwed-up system.

It is easy, popular and sexy to bang on about the badguys at the top of the pile and to dish out neatly packaged certainties about the solution to the problems we face. It gets the hits, royalties and votes, but those who do it then become part of the psychosis of the divisive system that they oppose. Yes, it’s easy to regard Them as the reptilians, the child-molesters, the evil ones, the exploiters, and this neatly places Us in a position of being the pure, the innocent and deserving – and anyone who disagrees with this is clearly on the side of The Cabal.

For me it all started at the London School of Economics in 1969, when I was a student. A situation was brewing where quite a few students were getting confrontative, hurt by the treatment the police and authorities were meting out to us. But I did not believe in confrontation or violence – this would not get the people of Britain on our side. Even if we, the goodguys, won, violence wouldn’t simply subside since it would already be baked into the character of the revolution itself, leading to new atrocities and the subsequent rise of Napoleons and Stalins. So I advocated working toward creating a new future rather than fighting the agents and symbols of the past – a fight we would not win, given the circumstances we were in. I and people like me lost that argument, and eventually the revolution sadly exhausted itself, mainly by tilting at windmills.

I’ve always held a gap-straddling line. Only as I grew older did I come to understand why. I came to see the situation on Earth as part of a larger, deeper, wider scenario. Here comes the button-pressing extremist in me: I fundamentally believe we are not alone and isolated here on Earth – though we are to an extent quarantined. Many people who are into ETs focus on galactic locals such as Pleiadians, Arcturians or Zetas, but it gets bigger, wider and deeper than that. [Here’s an audio talk of mine about this: Life on Earth, Life off Earth.] This has big implications for us on Earth. Bizarrely, the only public figure of recent times to mention this was Ronald Reagan, who once said, “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world“.

Beings from other worlds are mostly not ‘aliens’, and our origins as human-type souls lie amongst them. But we earthlings do like to see things in polarised terms, and we need to understand that we also are rather daunting to ETs since we’re fitful, unpredictable, inconsistent and we even have divided selves.

It’s a matter of how we choose to see things, and how much fear we weave into it. If you want to see lizard beings and regard them as dangerous, that’s what you’ll tend to see. The same goes for our relationships with all ‘others’, including foreigners, criminals or simply people who share our planet while living in different worlds. It applies also to creepy-crawlies and sharks, or cancer cells, Covid viruses, refugees or lightning strikes.

It’s time to step beyond the judgemental constraints of good and bad, right and wrong. There’s more to life than this. We need also to look carefully at the notion of ‘evil’, which is so easily bandied around – again, to make ourselves look like goodguys. I’ve been accused of being a criminal, traitor, toxic male, dictator and asshole myself, but that doesn’t make me so unless I buy into it. However, it’s still my duty as a human to work on those aspects of myself where I do fuck up.

The way I see things, evil doesn’t exist in itself – it is simply poisoned, blocked, polluted, diverted life and naturalness. The Tibetan story of Padmasambhava is instructive. When he took the Buddha-dharma to Tibet, he did not cast out the old gods and render them into evil entities, as Christians did over in Europe. He made friends and, as a teacher, he raised their perspective so that they could see beyond their situation. He co-opted them to become wrathful protectors of truth – scary, yes, but embodying the fears and defilements that we must face in the process of progressing spiritually. They were given a bigger, broader and deeper job.

This is similar to the legend of Lucifer, the angelic bringer of light, who sheds light on our darker sides, obliging us to learn through hard but necessary lessons. Except the notion of Lucifer got twisted, he was made into a badguy, the light and awareness bit was removed and his badness was made permanent. Poor chap, he’s misunderstood.

Yet there is always redemption, and we can do things to further it. I’m not at all perfect in this, and there are issues I need to sort out before I’m gone. But the main thing is to work at it. The Council of Nine were emphatic about this. [The Nine was a group of cosmic beings I compiled a book for thirty years ago and continue to work with.] They didn’t prescribe an ideal world or state of enlightenment that we should strive to attain – because there’s always further to go, and this is what evolution is all about. They spoke instead of simply creating forwardness and a feeling of progress, because the more it happens, the more it grows in momentum.

That in itself, in any situation big or small, is all that is needed. Whether it’s gardening your allotment, bringing up your kids, doing your work, being socially active or weighing in on large-scale issues, creating forwardness is what we’re here for, as souls. It all adds magnitude to a growing current. It’s about making Earth a good, safe and happy place to live.

In our time, our big advantage is this. Amidst darkness, one candle makes a big difference. In the sunshine, a candle is hardly noticed. We’re in a time when small things matter more than we tend to believe, even though it sometimes feels like the darkness is overwhelming. Yet keeping our eyes on an aged neighbour, changing nappies (diapers), fishing plastic from a river, cooking a nourishing meal for hungry people, or even joining a meditation once a week can make a difference in a beshadowed world.

On Pordenack Point, looking toward Carn Boel and, behind, Tol Pedn Penwith

I have not done well in terms of money or status, though toward the end of my life I’m happy about what I’ve done in other spheres. I’m aware also of times I’ve failed or omitted to step up, but the net balance is, I hope, positive. It feels that way, and in recent years this feeling has helped me deal with cancer: I chose to treat cancer as a crash course in being alive and making the best of what I’m given. Over many years I had gathered a quiverful of growth-tools that have served me well in my cancer journey, and I’m glad I did that. Because cancer and, later, dying, involve a loss of control, and our success in handling them rests on where we’re really at, not in what we’re trying to be. It’s our actual spiritual fitness and muscle-tone that matter here.

This gives us access to a miracle zone where it’s possible to bend, break or bypass the constraints of normality and expectation. Life is a strange dance and, if the one we are dancing with doesn’t dance to the same tune, or seems to oppress or constrain us, then the secret is to step out of the way, out of the set patterns and moulds in ourselves that render us into being victims. The degree to which we feel oppressed, and what we do about it, is something we can change. It can take time and it can be a struggle, but that’s the direction to go in.

A good friend wrote to me as I was writing this. She was concerned about the new outbreak of violence between Palestinians and Israelis. It’s happening yet again. It’s terrible, and it’s easy to get locked into hand-tied consternation about it. Peace will indeed come to the Holy Land, and many people there already subscribe to it. But the dragon’s tail is still thrashing, and it’s tragic and painful for those who are personally affected and involved. Sadly for Israelis, it’s also shutting down an enormous domestic dialogue about the future of their divided nation – predictably, that suppression will charge a high price later on. Yet step back from this conflict and look at it another way, and this is not a war between Israelis and Palestinians so much as a war between the dehumanising drivers of conflict on both sides and ordinary people of both sides.

We can do things about this. We can visit Palestine or Israel to add our bit, or we can make friends with an Israeli or a Palestinian online, or we can donate money, or in meditation we can work at creating a vibe where the people involved are raised up to see things another way, to see the futility of their situation and get a clearer sense of what is genuinely best for the future. It’s not for us to prescribe what that might be, but it is for us to help create a psychic field in which they might progress with what’s genuinely right for them.

Once a conflict starts, it’s not helpful simply to oppose it – it’s too late and, as is often the case, the opportunity for preventing conflict came earlier and we missed it. The trick is to take the situation as it stands, working to twist and weave it another way, to introduce new, unlocking factors, to help those who are suffering, to work with wider public awareness, and even to conduct direct dialogues with generals and fighters in our inner universe.

It’s not a matter of taking sides: we need to step beyond our preferences and biases. No matter how much we believe that past history is important in this or any conflict, it’s the future that really matters.

A young friend in Gaza, Basma, is going to have a baby any day now. What a way for a child to be born. Her brother Moh, a male nurse, escaped Gaza in 2015 and was one of the boat people crossing from Turkey to Greece. He landed up in Belgium, working as a nurse, and died of Covid in 2022. What a life these people have. He had been the hope of the family.

In this week’s medit ation, if you join it, I encourage paying some attention to this issue. However, this world is full of worrying problems, and good-hearted people can get overwhelmed with it all. To deal with this, it’s advisable to do small things well rather than big things badly – that is, to focus on the particular issues that mean a lot to you, and to stay with them and proactively do something with them. If we all do that, we’ll cover things better.

It’s also true that everything is interrelated. What’s happening in the Holy Land affects other people and places. Each time something like this breaks out, the collective psyche of the world becomes more disappointed, dismayed and depressed. Explosions and bloodbaths make sensitive, delicate, human issues seem irrelevant, and the problem with this is that empathic sensitivity is a key ingredient in making the world a better place. Wars, meanwhile, are useful to the status quo – they suppress not only the people in war zones, but also the spirits and hopes of humanity as a whole. They make the public jaded, accepting conflict as a given, shrugging shoulders and turning away.

We’re faced with many paradoxes and knife-edge choices in our day. It isn’t simple. This has been the saga of my own life, and many of you might share a similar story. Yet it’s what we’re faced with, and we can fret and worry about it or we can do something, within the scope of our lives and possibilities, and at times beyond it. That is our choice.

Back in 2011 I gave a speech at a conference called ‘Will they still serve tea in 2023?‘. This was the moderate in me, speaking. Some people thought the world might end, or at least radically change, in 2012. Well, life went on after 2012 passed. So, apparently nothing happened. The catastrophists were proven wrong and the normality-freaks seemed to win. But this was a lot to do with the dramatic utterings of advocates who desperately wished to be the one who got a big prediction right. Things did happen. Discreetly, the tide turned. Before 2012 we had a future global problem and, after 2012, we had an actual problem, and as the decades roll on, we’re going deeper into it.

In Britain there’s a legend that King Knut (Canute) tried to demonstrate his power by turning back the tide – and he got wet feet. No, historians are now seeing this differently. He sought to demonstrate that even he, with all his worldly power, could not turn back the tide. He didn’t write an autobiography either.

With love, Palden

Autobiography: www.palden.co.uk/autobiography.ht ml

Website: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Audio Archive: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

Ancient Protector of the Isles of Britain. Pordenack Point, near Land’s End, Cornwall.

The Turning of Wheels

It’s raining. Unwittingly, we were teleported into October. Well, that’s the case down’ere in Cornwall. I’ve even lit up my woodstove to cheer things up.

Then I started working on a half-finished website – a shortened version of my 2003 book ‘Healing the Hurts of Nations’. I wrote that in Glastonbury as the Iraq War was building up. It’ll be ready dreckly – a Cornish word meaning ‘whenever’.

One of the funny things that has happened in my life has been that I’ve given focus to quite a wide variety of different subjects and areas of activity. I give each of them total attention, lots of time and energy, sometimes to the annoyance of people close to me.

Something comes out of it that lands up as a book or a project of some sort. And then, once it’s complete and wrapped up, I have a tendency to move on to something different. Sag rising and Gemini Moon. Four planets in the Ninth. Or manic Aspie obsession, perhaps.

Which means that, over my lifetime, I’ve accumulated a range of bits of work. This one here, ‘Silk Roads’, represents the para-political and geopolitical side of me, fed by the historian and feeding the stuff I’ve done in humanitarian activities and world healing.

The other side of this is that I’ve made contributions to many fields – astrology, geomancy and cereology are other ones – though I haven’t stuck around long enough to really milk any of them fully. Other people got better known than I. By the time the ideas I’ve put forward start gaining traction, I’m off somewhere else.

This traction process seems to take around 30 years – a Saturn cycle. It’s frustratingly slow when you’re younger, but it starts making more sense when your bones start creaking. It’s necessary to let go of the urge for fame and success, let others get the accolades and royalties, and instead enjoy feeding the collective psyche with ideas and impulses that take on a life of their own. After all, ideas don’t come from us – they come through us. It’s all to do with feeding future history with ideational fertiliser. Planting seeds.

At the end of life, that process seems to be turning around, for me. I’m leaving an online archive of much of my stuff on my now rather labyrinthine 600-page website, and it’s all there for anyone who wishes to trawl through it. Or for anyone who find the parts that are waiting for them. It has become a kind of wholeness – at least to me. But for most of you, bits of it will be valuable.

I’m now approaching what might be a crisis. I’m running out of stuff that needs revising and entering into the archive, and also my capacity to cook up new stuff is diminishing. Blogs and podcasts work quite well, because I can get them done in a matter of hours, but books, no, I can’t do books any more.

I can do single intense workshops like the Magic Circles I did last year, but these are in-the-moment one-offs, never to be repeated. I can’t do longer courses or series any more. For both better and for worse, chemo-brain and ageing have put me more into my right, intuitive-imaginal brain. It kinda trundles along like an old steam engine, but the livery is a tad smart.

I’m able to do a few more five-hour Magic Circles, if you’re an organiser who’d like to host one. I can’t organise them myself, but on the night you’ll get something really memorable, special for that moment and for the needs of those present. I’m contemplating doing some online… er… I’m looking for a term like ‘master class’ but better… one a month for 4-5 months. But really, I prefer now to work amongst people, not online. People power me up.

In my last life-chapter, I find myself looking for something new – there’s something that needs to come right. I need to find a situation where, as a partially-disabled but rather interesting old crock with cancer, I can play my part and make the contribution that I can make, and not be difficult to have around – and have someone cover my back or even consider hosting a good decline and death.

Investigating an iron age settlement in Penwith

I want to fix this sometime before long, in the coming year. Before it’s too late for me to make a change. I’m not sure whether it involves moving – I do love it where I live, but I’m too alone here now. It’s circumstances rather than location that matter most. Perhaps my world is gradually shrinking.

Anyway, here’s a re-posting of an interesting chunk from Healing the Hurts of Nations, in case your eyeballs needed something to get down on, to feed your synapses with some interesting stuff. It’s all about humanity’s largely unconscious attempts at becoming a planetary race.

That’s rather important, a key ingredient in the next stage of human evolution. All of the issues before us, including local and personal ones, are now planetary in context and thoroughly affected by global-scale influences. Like it or not, we’re becoming one humanity. It’s an at times painful process, and at times it’s amazing.

It’s a kind of destiny. It was not foreordained how we would get here, and the process has been in many ways cruel, but it’s what humanity is heading toward. It’s a bit like an acorn that is programmed to become a mighty oak – it’ll get there somehow.

The uniting of humanity is necessary because we can then join the wider, greater universal order, but only as a unified race of beings. At present we can’t handle that idea, but it’s coming. Also, the only way we can fix our own problems on Earth is by becoming a unified race of beings. It all boils down to simple questions: who decides and who gains? Well, now, by necessity, we’re a team, currently with 8 billion players.

We’re in the critical part of that process now. I’d suggest the process properly started in the 1960s and will, at least in principle, be worked out by the 2060s-70s. That is, by then, I think we will know the state of play on Earth, what we have to work with, and we will have started doing it. Whatever that entails at the time. (For more on this, click ‘The 2020s’ above.)

So, Silk Roads and Ocean Winds…

With love, Palden

Me in 1988 at one of the OakDragon Camps. Photo and knitted sweater by the illustrious Chrissie Ferngrove.

Quacking Fakery

It rained. It’s strange for this to be important in a customarily wet country like Britain. But it rained down’ere in Cornwall.

We’ve had the best sunny weather in Britain in recent weeks, and we got the first rain – it came north from Brittany. I had been away for a few days in East Cornwall and, as the train home neared Penwith, the landscape changed colour and smell. It had rained.

The last two miles of the trip, pulling into Penzance station, is the best bit – cruising alongside the waves of Mount’s Bay, with St Michael’s Mount standing there majestically like a mythic castle transplanted from Gondor… When you return on the train from London (takes 5-6 hours), it’s like the real world opens up before you, bathed in the light of Penwith.

It was good to get away from home, to see things from another viewpoint. I seem to have been facing a variety of adversities for a really long time, and feeling rather locked into a loop where seemingly I had to accept a lot and couldn’t do a lot to change it. So going away was good, to spend time with an old friend I’ve known for forty years. It really helps to be in the company of someone who’s seen me through various chapters of life – there’s a mutual understanding there that I appreciate. Being a rather incomprehensible and inscrutable one-off oddball, it can mean a lot.

Regarding adversities, one thing I give thanks for is that it has really pushed me. With reduced capacities to handle things in the way I used to, instead I can draw on a tankfull of experience. That’s a blessing of old age – you’ve done it all before. Well, kind of.

Each day, spending a lot of time alone, I have rather a lot of available time, so I can go gradually though things to get them right. Takes ages. On the whole I think I’ve dealt with it all quite well – with a few errors and misjudgements thrown in. Could have done a lot worse.

The tide might even be turning, you never know, and the various nightmares I’ve been through might turn around. Perhaps I was being tested. After all, it is always the case that there is more to life than this, even in late life. Or perhaps life just gets like that sometimes, and it needs no reasons for doing so. Now that’s a thought.

Going down with cancer in late 2019 (or up, depending on your viewpoint), I decided to try to resolve as many as possible of the patterns of my life before I died. Actually, some of them have moved much further from resolution since then, becoming more complex and irresolvable. This has been disconcerting. Part of the reason for this is my own reduced capacity to remember, manage and handle things. They call it ‘chemo-brain’ but I find it’s ‘chemo-psyche’, since my capacity to process emotional and profounder things has changed too – it’s not just about brains.

But I’m being taught something here as well. Life’s been throwing googlies. I had a strange one recently. The cancer drugs I’ve been on produce funny neurological symptoms – funny feelings around my body. Well, some weeks ago I thought I had nits. But a few examinations and treatments have shown nothing at all there. It’s another of those funny neurological things. But the interesting thing is what this phenomenon put me through, in terms of self-esteem, feelings of failure and no-goodness, and all the stuff I’ve been carrying all my life that, only in late life, is coming clearer and visible. And I didn’t have nits!

I’ve written earlier (somewhere in this blog) that, as we come close to dying, we go through a progressive loss of control. When we are actually at the point of dying, there is absolutely nothing more we can do. It’s over. It’s all about what we truly have become – not what we aim, try, aspire or pretend to be, or avoid being, but what we have actually become. Not where your eyes are looking, but where your ass truly is at. I’ve wondered whether this escalating disarray is a kind of overload-lesson, to teach me to disengage further from at least some of life’s complexities.

For I am slowly deteriorating. My back is weakening, and I have a physical stomach issue and osteo-necrosis, and these are consequences of my cancer but having a worse effect on me than the cancer itself (I’m doing well with that). As I get worse I shall need real support (not just advice, which I get lots of), and I’m not currently managing to manifest it. So this might cause me to cut out earlier than otherwise I might. For me, the point of death is not exactly a medical thing – it’s more to do with willpower and how much I’m motivated to carry on.

You see, if you see your death as a home-going, it’s rather different. Most people see death as a loss or a departure, with little sense of what they’re heading towards. I’m rather looking forward to it, to be honest. So I’m not gnashing my teeth over dying – it’s living that’s more troubling. It isn’t about being on planet Earth – I quite like it here – but it’s more about living in the particular kind of civilisation we find ourselves living in at this moment in time. I’ve always felt a misfit. This might be the case for you too.

But there’s a job to do first. I’m not quite finished. After all, it’s a bit of a waste of time leaving before you’ve done what you came for. Earth is important for the progress of the rest of the universe, and many of us came because of that. Most people don’t realise Earth’s importance. This problem arises from the strange belief that we’re the only intelligent beings in this universe, and that Earth is a godawful provincial planet that we somehow got stuck on… and look at the mess we made of it. Well, there’s a larger story than that. I can’t relate it here, but I’ve done so in a few of my podcasts and podtalks (see notes below).

So these adversities have faced me with some quite big questions. One that I was facing during the winter was this (regarding the Africa mission I’ve been on): do I prioritise my own financial position and security, or do I let a person that I know and like die? That’s been quite a sharp question, often with only minutes to answer it. I had to face it several times, and it was difficult. But I’ve made my choices and stand by them, for better or worse.

Sometimes I find it really demanding to turn a problem into an asset and advantage, but that’s what I try to do. At this point in time it feels as if a coin is spinning in the air, in slow-mo, regarding all the various show-stopper questions coming up in life right now.

In a way, we all came here to get ground down, between rocks and hard places. We’re here to get burnished by struggling through impossible conditions. We enter life naked and helpless, and that’s how we leave it, and everything that happened in between is quickly blown away in the winds of time, well and truly forgotten and gone. We all have multi-generations of ancestors, hardly any of whom we know or remember – and, like them, you’ll be forgotten too. Even those who go down in history are often remembered for things they themselves might not want remembering for.

I became aware of this once on the Isle of Iona in Scotland. I ‘met’ Saint Columba, and he was troubled. In his view, everyone remembered him for the wrong reasons. He’s fondly regarded as a saint, but in his view he was a murderer, doing penance for his sins. This is what can happen for people who make a mark on history: what they’re seen as and remembered for doesn’t necessarily correspond with their own experiences and their own assessments of life.

I write this for the person who not long ago accused me of being a complete fake. Well, there’s truth in everything, dear sister, and you’re right. And also, as it happens, you’re incorrect. Fakes tend not to stake their lives on the kinds of things I’ve been foolish enough to stake mine on. Though you’re entitled to your opinion. It’s all in how we see things, really.

Talking of how we see things, it’s meditation time again on Sunday (and every Sunday). 8pm UK time, 7pm GMT. All the details are here. You are welcome to use up a precious half hour ‘doing nothing’ with us, if you so wish!

The photos from a lovely place in East Cornwall that I forget the name of, in the Lynher valley on the side of Bodmin Moor, near Rilla Mill.

Oh, and I’ve made a new soul-friend. The funny thing is, I’ve never seen a picture of her, and we might never meet in person, but we have done a lot of psychic and rescue work together since December, and it has been remarkable for us both. Maa Ayensuwaa, queen priestess of the Ayensu River in Ghana, wishes to send her greetings to you. She is a healer and priestess of the Akan or Ashanti people, who have deep roots stretching back to the same roots as ancient Egypt, and their cosmology resembles the Jewish Tree of Life.

Greetings to all of you from me too, across the void. Paldywan loves you. Don’t go away… because, inshallah, there’s more to come.

Palden

A podtalk about the significance of Earth (1h 17mins):
www.palden.co.uk/podcasts/PPArchive-Millnm3-LifeOnEarth.mp3

Further podtalks are here:
www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

Website and archive:
www.palden.co.uk

Conundratisms

One who Speaks does not Know.
One who Knows does not Speak.

Discuss. This issue has been rather a preoccupation for me throughout life. Not least because I’m articulate and reasonably persuasive. It took until my mid-thirties though for that articulateness to really come out.

Over the decades I’ve created yardages of verbiage in writing and sound, onstage, radio and video and in groups, so does this make me someone who does not know? Well, it could be true. I could, after all, be twisting your brains in a very nifty way, so that you don’t notice. I might be manipulating you, deluding you.

And there would be truth in it. Not the whole truth, mercifully.

Besides, I find I can’t just rattle off stuff just to fill column inches, sell something or meet a deadline. So I didn’t become a journalist or copywriter, even though I could – I can’t just write stuff to fill space. I find I have to wait until something meaningful and creative comes up, something to really write about. It has to come up and out.

One gift cancer gave me is reduced concern about my career path – a release from the ties of what I believe other people believe about me. Or, as a blogger, a compulsion to write stuff just to retain eyeballs, for fear of losing readers if I don’t. There are times when I go silent. My feeling is that, without originality, my work is second rate – and I’m a Saturnine Virgo and relentlessly self-critical in these things.

But the funny thing is, the more I’ve got used to this, the fewer the quiet times have become – what some call ‘writer’s block’.

There’s an advantage to self-criticism, in the long term – as long as you relax about it as you mature. Since self-critical people set high standards for themselves, they do actually rise to some pretty high standards. Even if, when they get there, they’re still digging away at themselves and running themselves down.

With some of my writing, I go over and over it again and again. And again. Neurotic. What often shocks me, positively, is that I post stuff online that I think is, well, good enough, when readers enjoy and appreciate it in no uncertain terms and it seems to be far better than I’d have guessed! Phew.

I have a retrograde Mercury in Libra that mulls things over a lot, attempting to reach a balanced view. So I go though periods of quietness, mulling and cogitating. Sometimes I might be having an Aspie meltdown, where everything gets terrible tangled, to the point where I’m short-circuited and go into a space of aghast inner blankitude, like a rabbit caught in headlights, a sort of void space out of which, at some point, there suddenly springs a guiding light of an idea and… ping, I’m back – I got it.

Then I’m off again. One of the little gladnesses I’ve had is that I’m a good reserve speaker – someone who can be called in last minute because another speaker dropped out. Give me ten minutes, a mug of tea, and tell me how much time I have, and I’m off. Mercifully, as rather a polymath, I have a number of subjects up my sleeve that I can rattle on about in quite a fired-up way.

I had to learn how to do that, and it broke through when I was about 32. I discovered that, no matter how much I planned my talks, the best were those where, at the beginning, I found I had no idea at all about what to say, even if I’d prepared something. I just had to set aside my fear, take three deep breaths, take in the audience, and start with the first thing that came into my head. Nowadays, it just comes naturally.

St Michael’s Mount from Penzance harbour

I wouldn’t call that channelling. It draws on my own knowledge, experience and character. But there’s something where, if Friends Upstairs want to drop something in, it’s easy for them to do so. Sometimes I get nudged, occasionally jolted. Sometimes they pull the plug on what I thought I was about to talk about, and I launch in deep, straight away, into something that feels like it’s coming out specially for the particular people in the audience. I’m always amazed that, when people tell me the clincher for them, it’s a really wide variety of my utterances that they mention. It’s fascinating.

But at the end of a talk I can feel a bit bereft because I can’t remember what happened – I’m the one that missed it.

So I’m fine about being filmed or recorded, because it helps me know what I’m actually saying to people! Not only this but, sometimes, when I’ve heard a recording afterwards, it’s as if some of the stuff I said was precisely for me – me teaching myself out loud, in public. Other people seem to like it too, which is a relief. So it balances out – Mercury in Libra.

I’m not one who repeats myself too much, and working from notes doesn’t work for me. I often have three or four talking points in reserve, and I cycle around those, but that process is still spontaneous, a wandering, a looping and a returning back to base. These anchor points kinda keep me on track amidst a wide ocean – a Gemini Mooner like me can go off sideways and add too many footnotes, so that people can’t remember what on earth I was talking about.

Part of the reason for this is that it wasn’t on earth. But I have had to learn how to anchor to a few key points, to give my poor audiences a few memorable nuggets to lodge in their brains. Judging by the ramblingness of this piece, I still need to learn it, even at my age.

As a Gemini Mooner, one of the issues I had to learn was this. People remember three things. Repeat: people remember three things. In any talk, book or radio programme, I always try to look for three core points that need bringing through. I might not know how I’ll do it, but I kinda flag them up in my back-brain for covering. If I don’t do this, I go into too much intricacy and people can lose track. It was an interesting talk but they can’t remember what it was about.

What’s changed, since I had cancer 3-4 years ago, is that, more and more, I find myself anchoring back spontaneously to a wellspring inside. I clear my psyche, the process starts up, something comes up and off we go.

This very blog is an example. I was sitting there drinking rose congou tea, contemplating Lao Tzu’s saying: One who Speaks does not Know, and One who Knows does not Speak.

Well, that’s true. But there’s a way round it. The resolution of this dilemma comes spontaneously. Part of the deal is that, when it comes, it’s necessary to get down on it and write it there and then. Because that creative streak doesn’t stay. It’s a momentary thing, and part of the creative process of the universe. It speaks for that moment. If you don’t catch it, like a sailor with the wind, it comes and it’s gone.

So Lao Tzu’s statement is true. I as a voluble person need to take note, repeatedly. Yet it has something to do with the message and the vibe that’s concealed between the lines. It’s that direct mind-to-mind and heart-to-heart communication that hides behind the clattering of expressed words. Something that AI will have difficulty falsifying since AI is imitative, not originative. It doesn’t come from that wellspring.

Up to the 18th-19th Century, it was part of an author’s remit even to use flexible spellings, even on the same page – and that was part of the poesy of prose.

True authors are here to authorise authoritative authenticity. I didn’t go on a creative writing class – I just did the however-many thousand hours and years needed to gain a certain mastery in the craft of wordsmithery. That where those aspects of life that we habitually consider to be problems can become assets in disguise. I’ve been complaining of aloneness in the last two years and, well, it has given me space to create. To do so, it’s necessary to be alone and ‘antisocial’. Life has its strange compensations.

That’s a realisation that particularly comes toward the end of life. Everything has its compensations, its reason for being as it is, or was. Often it’s not at all easy to see how this is, when we’re busy struggling through life’s relentlessly tangled web of attention-seeking demands that present themselves for free on a daily basis. Until, that is, you die.

Then other stuff starts happening and, with luck, you begin to see the real, full, all-round reasons why life needed to be the way it was. Going through this process allows us then to pass through the gate and move on.

Not going through that process tends to make us take a left turn, a quick road back to incarnate familiarity – the hope for chocolate and the fact of blizzards and droughts. We have a strange addiction to being stuck between rocks and hard places. The Council of Nine called this ‘bottlenecking’. It’s the primary reason why Earth’s population has swelled so quickly to, now, over eight billion.

Many of us have repeatedly been forgetting why we came, recycling back into life again without fully working things out. We’ve forgotten that this is a training, an initiation into dense physicality, for the deepening and broadening of the scope of our souls.

But there is the option to go on to other realms and worlds – some familiar, a few of them ‘home territory’, and a lot more that we become ready to encounter by dint of what we have already become.

The Road goes ever on and on. Out from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone. Let others follow, if they can.

There was a cuckoo on the farmhouse roof just now, making quite a cuckoo racket. But the swallows have gone to bed – busy day tomorrow. The crows and jackdaws have mostly dispersed around Penwith for the summer. And a nightjar sometimes haunts my roof late in the night, after the bats have disappeared into the dark.

Paldywan sends love from The Lookout – especially to YOU. Yes, you.

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https://penwithbeyond.blog

– if you sign up as a ‘follower’, my blog posts will be sent to you by e-mail, whenever they come out

www.palden.co.uk

———————

If you wish to find out more about bottlenecking, here’s a podcast: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts/PFB13-210906-SoulEducation.mp3

Tol Pedn Penwith – the hole at the end of Penwith

Punch Cards and Power Points

A website goes archaeological

My website has just gone through its Saturn Return – 28 years old. Erk.

Born in the antediluvian days of the ‘information superhighway’, when John Major was prime minister…

Every coupla years I’ve added an extra bit to it, and it’s like a new age minefield now. Tread carefully.

Unless I suddenly earn a million between now and the time I pop my clogs (with Jupiter in Pisces, such things can sometimes happen, as a kinda cosmic joke!), this is the legacy I’m leaving.

Wurdz. Bl**dy loadsa them.

Perhaps you might now understand why, in late life, I’ve developed a slight allergy to sitting at my computer to chat with people… (‘cos computer keyboard=work, for me).

It started with pink and green punchcards on tea trolleys in 1971. I was on the world’s fourth largest computer at the time (London Univ), and it had a memory of 56k – hot shit! We had the latest tech too – dot-matrix printers! But no keyboards or screens – they came later.

It was my dear old friend Sig Lonegren who nudged me to get on internet in 1994. Initially I had reservations. Perhaps part of me knew this would be a life-changer. I’d been in printing and publishing for some time, but this… well, I had to get ready for it.

Actually, I was on my Saturn opposition, at age 44. This was a step-change. And then… whoosh… egged on my whizz Avalonian programmer friend Barry Hoon, before long, with him, I was creating www.isleofavalon.co.uk which, by 2002, was getting a million visitors per year. (Apart from the content, people liked it because it had zero advertising – no estate agents or shop adverts in sight, and it worked, for the town as a whole.)

One thing I’m looking forward to when I die is the possibility of returning to direct mind-to-mind and heart-to-heart communication. Paper, print, messages and web-pages, well, they have their virtues, but when we’re talking about ‘sharing’, internet just doesn’t measure up.

As an early adopter of internet, one thing that disappoints me about the way things have gone is that too many people, imho, quote and re-post other people’s stuff and media stuff, and too few actually speak for themselves and create from themselves.

I get five-ish friend requests every day, and I look at everyone’s FB page. If you speak for yourself, you interest me more, and you’re more likely to become my friend. People who hide behind re-posted material or blankish pages… well, please come out and give us a sign of who you actually are!

I do have a way of making uncomfortable statements (a bit like Martin Amis, wordsmith, my age, who’s just died)…

One of them is that withholding is a crime against humanity.

I submit this for your consideration.

Having lived through a remarkable slice of time (1950 to now), I’ve been privileged to be surrounded by and adding to a pool of emergent knowledge that lays foundations for the future. My website’s Saturn Return is significant (at least to me) because it marks a transition from a website to an archive.

An archive of an old codger who saw some stuff and did some things to add to what’s changing in this world. This, on the offchance that, like William Blake, my stuff might be valued more after my passing than during my life!

But then, a Saturnine soul like me has to accept that time makes its own decisions, and his Jupiter in Pisces speaks from the Void, and it can take time for time to catch up with Voidness.

www.palden.co.uk

If you wish, join me and us in meditation this evening (Sunday) at 8-8.30pm UK time (7-7.30pm GMT). Let’s give this world a push to get through the rather dangerous Mars-Jupiter-Pluto triangle that’s been firing off for the last few days. Angry stuff – facing the music – grasping the nettle – time to be brave.

Love, Paldywan

Grace

Ishmael. As it happens, this photo was taken in Hawara, Palestine, recently in the news

Ishmael, my trusty taxi driver and fixer in Bethlehem, Palestine, twelve years ago, rang me up a few days ago. “Balden, when you come visit us in Beit Lahem?“. OMG, yes indeed. If only I could… I know why he was ringing. Things are edgy and intense there right now, and my friends used to feel a bit safer when I was around. I had to explain to him that getting to Palestine is no longer on the cards for me. Besides, I’ve been dealing with another, rather different battle.

I’ve been pulling back from the West African mission I’ve been involved with in recent months. It has worn me out, got me into financial difficulty and lost me some friends, and I can no longer help. I don’t actually regret what I have done. These are choices I have made. I trusted in a series of promises by an Australian security company to reimburse me for money I put forward on their behalf from the beginning of this saga in October, having saved one of their men, though I misjudged them.

They have not followed up on their promises and this has led to a series of deaths and difficulties. One day I shall tell the whole story, but there are dangers to doing so and I must think it through carefully. Felicia did her best to deal with my withdrawal from supporting her, but things were getting worse for her. She was in Niamey, in Niger – a French-speaking country, and different from Nigeria.

I found out on Thursday that Phyllis had died of septic infection. I debated what to do with this news, and how best to tell it. So I’ve decided to relay the last conversation I had with Felicia, on Friday 3rd March. It is filled with the pathos of a mother who has just lost her child.

[I have edited Felicia’s words to make them more readable.]

Felicia
I don’t want to leave Phyllis’ dead body here in Niamey. She has been through so much. I will miss her, but I get that she needs rest. No matter what, I shall not leave her here like this. But I have no other option than to get her to be buried here at the Infants’ Hospital Morgue [in Niamey]. I have no money. I am so sad it has come to this.
Palden
God bless Phyllis. If she is buried at the children’s hospital, at least she will be with other children. Her soul is in good care – I know that, since I am watching her.
Felicia
I have to pay for the land at the cemetery. I have no other option than to bury her in a foreign land without family. I love her. Can’t help crying. I must pay for a cremation. Thanks for your love and help towards her. She loved you and I wish she had the chance to meet you in person. Thanks for all you have done.
Palden
I’d have loved to have met her too. But I shall watch over her now [psychically]. This must be such a moving time for you. This has all been far too difficult, with complications and tragedies at every stage.
Felicia
Yes. Phyllis has suffered a lot of drug overdosing, physical and psychological trauma, defilement, beating, threats, hunger, homelessness.
Palden
There was a stage a few weeks ago when I wondered whether she would have a good life if she survived. Especially with no hands [they had been medically amputated], and possibly with her mind affected permanently. When she died I had a feeling of relief for her. Poor child – she was such a little angel. But perhaps that is part of the story behind her short life. God bless her.
Felicia
She’s been without anyone. And I have been raped, starved, homeless and running for months. It’s by God’s grace that I had you to support us. We would have died long ago. The money you invested to saving Phyllis is gone to waste, gone and lost, like Phil, never to return. I am sorry. I feel so bad. I don’t know where to go with this pregnancy [Felicia was multiple-raped in January]. I don’t know how to take care of myself. I am beaten. Life has not been fair to me. Why does this happen to me?
Palden
One thing at a time. Try to get home to Ghana next. Then meet some friends, talk it through and cry your tears.
Felicia
I can’t forgive the company for not coming to my child’s aid. To help us.
Palden
I still want justice from them, and I am telling them clearly that they have an obligation to compensate and support you, as they promised. Not just me.
Felicia
I am burying her alone. Money has been the problem, and had the company helped, I would still have Phyllis now. I can’t make my way home now. I can’t find money for an abortion. I don’t want this child and shall not bring it forth to the world.
Palden
Wait and see. I really understand how you feel. Try not to make decisions now. Do what’s in front of you.
Felicia
Alright. Thanks for your advice and love and help. You have been of immense help to me, even though I can’t repay you for the money lost.
Palden
It is the company who should repay me, not you. You have done your best. It will make me happy to see you getting your life back and being able to make a new start. But that will take time. I hope it can start soon.
Felicia
Am so sorry for depending too much on you, am so sorry for having caused you so much financial difficulties, kindly forgive me, pls
Palden
You do not need forgiving. No blame upon you – you have been a heroine. Forgive me too for not being able to help at critical moments which could have made such a big difference. I was just not rich enough and the company undermined us. I regret that.
Felicia
I feel so bad all has been lost after all the care, love and support I have had. I have been thru so much, and I have lost all, and now where do I start from? Your help has been more than enough. You have helped too much. Thanks.
Phil will be burnt and her ashes will be given to me. I miss her already and have been crying for days. If only I had gotten her home, maybe I could have got her to a good hospital, where she could have had the best treatment she would have needed. But it’s too late. Such a tragedy she died so far away from home.
Palden
Maybe. But maybe also the pain and difficulty for her might have been too great. Two weeks ago I felt her soul was tired, tired of trying to stay alive. It is important now not to think too much about “What would have happened if…?”. Unfortunately we must be dead real. We must get you home and safe, so that you can be more protected and release your tears and fears.
Felicia
Yes. This is the time for the whole story to be told to the world. I don’t fear the dangers any more. Got nothing to lose now. And when you write about it, pls do seek help for me. Maybe a good soul may pity me and help me get home and help with some money to start a new life and abort my worse pain in my life. For if I carry the child, I will never forget it. I don’t have any life here, and I don’t want to keep the memories of these past months with me. Got to abort it. I can’t keep a baby of bandits.
I have lost my entire family. I have nothing to call my own. I have lost hope, and my dreams are dead. I know I am not safe from the gang, but am not worried about dying any more. I have nothing to live for, no family and hope lost, alone.
Palden
Bless you, Felicia.

That was the last I heard from her. In the evening I heard from a doctor at the Niamey Roundabout Hospital in Niger. Felicia had been found unconscious. He said she was short of blood, looking starved and had a fever. Well, as she said, she has nothing to live for. So on Friday evening I held her and committed her to her angels. She was at a point of soul-choice. On Saturday morning the doctor informed me Felicia had lost a lot of blood and remains unconscious.

And me, I’m tired, had enough. Throughout, I’ve been faced with a choice, whether or not to ‘be sensible’ and walk off, leaving them to die. This would have been sensible from a commonly-held British viewpoint, but to do so I would have had to block off a part of myself. Rightly or wrongly I chose to remain true to something deep inside that is very fundamental, at least to me. Some may not agree, and they might have good reason, but I feel that, on the whole, I’ve done the best thing. Now I pay a price. In life, you don’t win every battle.

In my humanitarian work I have always felt unhappy getting pushed by circumstances into raising money. It is not my speciality – I work as a healer, counsellor and adviser, not a fundraiser. I am reluctant to start raising money now, for a number of reasons. I think the best thing to do is this: if anyone wishes to support Felicia financially (medical needs and getting home) then I shall assist them, but I can no longer take on funding responsibilities myself. Some have cast doubts too, judging that Africans are scamming me, and questioning my integrity and judgement. I’m sad about that, and life is not quite that simple. But this is life. In a way, this has been a three-way battle, with a drug gang, an errant company and people’s considered opinions.

If on the other hand you wish to send healing and spiritual uplift to Felicia, currently lying in hospital in Niamey, Niger, then it has definitely helped before and I believe it would help now. This is what I and many of my readers are good at. This is very welcome, and you are welcome to join me in ‘holding’ Felicia and bathing her in light.

In my life I have met some remarkable, courageous women. I’m reminded of an old friend Gillian, from Devon, whom I last met in Bethlehem twelve years ago. She’d been involved in Bosnia, Kosovo and Palestine, and suddenly she died in a car accident ten years ago in, of all places, Luton, England, when arriving back from a conflict zone. Life moves in strange ways. Felicia has a bravery like Gillian’s. When people pass away they are gradually forgotten, buried in the rubble-heaps of subsequent events. I’m reminded of Gillian now.

Some suspect I had a romantic involvement with Felicia: no, it was her courage and fortitude that I supported. Only some people in this world are willing to stake their lives on what they believe in. She was a bystander, suddenly swept up with her child, Phyllis, into a drama of violence and horror, and she did her level best at all stages of that drama. The Australian company, having promised to compensate and support her for what she did, should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

Dear readers, I’m sorry to ply you with this stuff. I seek simply to share it. When I went down with cancer three years ago I resolved to share my story openly. This is a strange part of it and I take the risk of sharing it now. It’s the story of a man who, in late life, seeks to round out his life’s threads, and I’m yet again being taught one of life’s more ultimate riddles: some things just don’t make sense and should not happen, but they do, and that’s life. Planet Earth is a very weird world, where the depth and intensity of life-experience definitely burnishes the soul.

It’s funny how, as life goes on, we get small prompts that say it like it is. A few days ago I fell upon one by the child psychologist Jean Piaget, who said: ‘Intelligence is not what we know, but what we do when we don’t know‘. Life presents us with challenges we don’t know what to do with, and it doesn’t always tell us which path to follow. But then, Rico Rose, a Berliner I once met in the Sinai Desert, once gave me a really fizzly truth, there under the hot desert sun: ‘Everything is okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end‘.

With love, Palden

Syria and Turkiye

Turkiye and Syria. Some thoughts.

If you find yourself inwardly involved with the earthquake zone in the Middle East – an ancient, historic area at the centre of Eurasia where so much history has happened – then it is possible to do some innerwork to assist from wherever you are. It is possible to transform concern into activity, wherever you are.

I suggest that, as a group, we keep to our Sunday evening meditation slot – it’s important not to rush at things, and we don’t have a system worked out yet for activities like this. Unless something else arises between now and Sunday to change this, we can focus together on the region then.

As individuals, if you wish to do some work with this crisis over the coming days, please do. Use it as a way of self-training – there will be plenty more crises like these in coming years.

Note how they often come in twos (currently Chile and Syria/Turkiye), but just wait, because they’ll come in threes and fours before long. All that’s needed is a loaded situation and a whacky fullmoon line-up, and here they come.

If you’re not in a position to focus much on it, practice holding it in the back of your mind as you live your life, and give it focus as and when you can, when you have a quiet moment. I sometimes use a small rosary or mala as a way of keeping partial focus while living my life.

As you know, I prefer not to prescribe methods and strategies since a diversity of approaches is important. But if you need some ideas and a basic structure, here are two recordings made last year, when we visited Pakistan at one of my Magic Circles to help with mop-up and after-care there. One is a talk and meditation, and the other is the meditation only (20ish mins long).

The talk and meditation | Just the meditation

Here are a few thoughts to contemplate.

1. Since this is a really big crisis we can really only tinker round the edges but, remember, there will be many people worldwide adding their thoughts and prayers. So find the gaps;

2. Look around for people who are forgotten, unnoticed and undiscovered, going through it on their own;

3. one approach is to help the helpers – the first-responders, doctors, social leaders, activists and ‘community mothers’;

4. you can work with the living and/or the dead. With the living, help them find solutions to their needs, solace to their hearts, warmth, food and contact with relatives and neighbours. With the dead and dying, help them deal with their situation and get over properly to the other side and to a ‘reception squad’ who can receive and care for them as souls;

5. use your imagination and inner instincts. Experiment, follow your feelings and do whatever you’re best at doing;

6. this is an energy-exchange. What are these people and this situation bringing to us, giving us and teaching us? No country, including our own, is exempt from disaster.

7. healing energy comes *through* us, not from us, so bring in any deeper influences that you customarily work with, however you see things, and act as a vehicle for such influences – a bit like a healing drone;

8. it’s better to do small things well than big things badly, and make sure you complete and wrap up everything you start.

Unless you’re that way inclined, you don’t have to ‘do meditation’. Just hold it in your heart-mind, stay calm and bring calm, keep with it, note your thoughts and experiences and, if at a loss to know what to do, imagine yourself actually there, doing what you would do if you were there. If that just involves making tea for people or holding their hands, do it. This matter of consistent and well-paced energy-holding is important. Keep it simple.

The tensions released in an earthquake are not just geological. Human tensions affect things too. This is an area where the world’s first settlements and towns arose, many armies have marched across it and, in recent times, much oil has been pumped out of it. Consider.

Disasters are one of the mechanisms by which world change comes about. It’s tragic, but they shake us out of our customary busy indifference, exposing the human underneath. So one thought or prayer to make is for these tragedies to lead ultimately to real improvements and breakthroughs. May those deaths and hardships become more meaningful in the way they catalyse progress and redemption.

The Indonesia earthquake-tsunami of 2004 led to enormous strides in large-scale disaster-response, and to all sorts of changes big and small. Also it became really clear that the key first responses to disasters come within local communities, often through churches, mosques, temples and brave individuals who, in that moment, suddenly find they have a calling. Big organisations often take a week or two to get activated and deal with logistics and supplies, but it’s the people on the ground and in local communities, in that first week, who make a critical difference.

Resilience is all about the capacity of any society to handle whatever is thrown at it. At moments like this, the togetherness of a society makes an enormous difference. As Pluto enters Aquarius this and next year, until 2043-44, the togetherness of humanity is the central question. Here we have it. This is a soulquake, a prompt from Gaia.

With love, Palden.

Website: www.palden.co.ukBlog: https://penwithbeyond.blogPodcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.htmlAudio Archive: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

Website: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Audio Archive: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html