For those of you who are interested in the kinds of things I gibber on about, you might find this video really interesting. It’s down below.
Jeffrey Mishlove comes at matters of the soul and psyche from a completely different angle from me, yet I completely agree with what he says. He’s a psychologist with a really open mind, while my qualifications in this subject are zilch, haha, yet I draw on my own experiences. Which, over the years, have become a bit of a list…
These have included a near-death experience, talking to a soul (my son) before he was born, talking to souls after they’re gone and even handholding them over the threshold, re-experiencing a good number of ‘past’ lives and a couple of ‘future’ ones, and all sorts of other out-of-time experiences of many kinds. These qualify me as a madman or rather sane, depending on your viewpoint. (Actually, for all of us it’s somewhere in between – Gurdjieff used to call people of the muggle variety ‘mad machines’.)
I don’t actually consider myself very good at this stuff. Believe me, when meditating, I get booming brains and endless diversions at least as much as anyone reading this. But the issue here is giving it attention and going into it, giving it time and space and doing it over a period of time – such as the rest of your life. Simply do this, and you do pick up experience. Keep doing it. Occasionally, you’re lit up with grace, wonder, healing, resolution and light.
So, I am not a good meditator. I’ve been with people who go far deeper than I do. But the issue here is to sit with it and do it – at your own pace, with no shoulds or oughts, as a part of your life like breakfast and lunch. Give space for the world within to speak.
I’ve been doing a weekly meditation without fail on Sundays at 7pm GMT (8pm BST) for half an hour, since 1994. This is the Nine slot when the channels are open, run by Altea. If you wish to join, just do it – though pls take your boots off before entering and spend the first few sessions just listening and, if necessary, waiting. It works like that.
Otherwise I meditate randomly when it’s right to do so. Sometimes I’m just sitting there churning over my stuff and nothing much seems to be happening – as far as what a meditative state ought to be (ahem). But then I draw out, up and back from myself and see it differently. ‘Removing self from self’. I see myself churning around and it looks very different. It changes instantaneously.
One day I had a breakthrough. It was when I was with the Nine in the early 1990s. I found myself letting my watchers upstairs enter right into my psyche, allowing them to see parts of me I didn’t want them to see. I didn’t want to see them either, and I’m still discovering new hidden shadows down there in the depths. It goes on and on – there’s no retirement in this game.
Letting them in was like an enormous burst of self-forgiveness. They didn’t do anything except take a look inside an interestingly fucked-up humanoid on Earth, but for me it was a release and relief, an opening up and a step forward. I saw myself as I was, not as I told myself I wanted to be, or feared I was, or believed others saw me to be.
My birth chart. Jupiter, down the bottom (like a 4), holds the key to my chart – it’s called a bucket-handle. My chart is a bit like a foolproof instruction manual on how not to be a billionaire.
For a Jupiter in Pisces type like me, this kind of thing is an undoubted peak experience.
Whenever I am troubled, I open myself up for them to take a look. After a while it becomes more of a habit. That opens out a load of things. It shifts the context, I see things more as they are, and this helps me do an update on myself. It’s not as easy as it sounds, because guilt, shame and fear are so deeply embedded and sometimes demand some wrestling, but it helps me move forward.
It’s like mindfulness practice: whether it’s you or your ‘inner guides’ being aware of what’s happening in your psyche, it’s essentially the same awareness being aware of it.
We are not the separate individuals we believe ourselves to be. Here on Earth we’re swimming in an enormous and rather busy psychic collectivity, and it’s like a swirling, whirling, jangly cacophony. We’re all members of tribes and groups that go way beyond this life.
At this time of history we’re being asked to recognise something further: that we’re all of the same tribe, the same people. We’re all so different yet we’re part of one planetary tapestry, one species. We all breathe the same air and see the same Moon in the sky.
Without recognising this in our hearts and in our bones, we will give ourselves a very hard time in coming times, and we’re already well advanced in this. It’s that simple.
Tibetans have a philosophy of doing good and of practicing loving kindness not only because they’re good things to do, but also because they set up conditions for our forthcoming incarnations. It means that, in future, there will be less of a pile of difficult issues to deal with if we make progress on them now. It helps us stop causing problems we don’t really need. Perfection isn’t required: all we need is forward motion. Whether or not you subscribe to such a perspective, it’s worth contemplating. It’s ecological, sustainable and just. It involves what Buddhists call non-duality…
…recognising that the inner and the outer worlds are two sides of the same coin, of equal reality, and they’re thoroughly interactive and mutually-responsive in detail and down to the subtlest of nuances. The toxicity, injustice and tragedy out there in our world are totally connected with those that lurk within our own psyches. Oh shit.
If humanity gets this equation, sometime, somehow, we will make it through the crisis we have here in our world – and we’ll make good use of it. Miracles will happen because we will be creating reality differently. For some (not all) of us here, this concerns our future lives as well as those of our grandchildren, who could become our parents. What we’re doing now creates conditions in which, in coming times, we and everyone may thrive and fulfil our purpose.
Everyone has specific instructions programmed into our psyches and genes, but the two main purposes we all share are… to learn and to make a contribution. No one is here by accident.
This video is by an old friend, Tim Walter, a film-maker and dowser who’s interesting in his own right – check out his videos on YouTube, such as this…
My Mum taught me not to be a problem. As a quiet Virgo, I wasn’t much of a problem – it didn’t take a lot of doing. But her and my concepts of ‘problem’ were different – mine didn’t encompass spotlessly white collars on my school shirt or holding my knife and fork properly. This pattern has at times itself been in itself a problem – not putting myself forward when I should, or accepting loss more than was right. But it’s also an asset which has helped me in my peacemaking work and generally makes people believe I’m a good guy, and this has got me through some mighty scrapes.
It’s an important thing for the 21st Century. We all have to scale things down that we reduce the extent to which we are other people’s problem or can become one. This is tricky. For me, I’ve often been a problem for others in terms of the way they see things, but not necessarily a problem in an ultimately real way. This is common in all sorts of social and intercultural interactions – we project stuff on each other. I’ve been in many situations where the worse option, not the one I present, has been chosen, just to cover people’s asses or allow them to avoid facing something that is important. I’ve sat in clink, been an exile and lost my kids over this. There have been times when I’ve been plain wrong too – and it’s important to own up to these.
It’s all about attentiveness to others. I’m very attentive in certain ways, though sometimes I seem deficient too, on the personal front. My attention is taken up quite a lot with the world and at times with things not of this world. Perhaps as a psychic type I tend to forget some of the more outward niceties and considerations others need, and they don’t necessarily register the support I might be giving them inwardly. Generous in certain ways, though spontaneously, I forget birthdays and little behaviours that matter to others but I don’t really register in my lexicon. I guess this is an Aspie issue.
Since my life encompasses a large number of people, those close to me can sometimes wonder how much I care specifically for them. This can be reinforced by my at times dispassionate and inscrutable demeanour, or an absentmindedness when I’m focusing on work or innerwork that looks like I don’t care. Or perhaps I’m lost in space, processing situational intricacies, or keeping a presence in the Donbas, or monitoring someone who is ill or dying. Or just floating off. Mad professor stuff. I do change, but I’m slow, sure and thorough in it, especially when on a major Saturn transit like recently, and sometimes people can’t wait. Sometimes I change further than others were expecting.
I’ve had a time of scrangly challenges for the last year – the duration of a Neptune opposition Saturn transit, starting in May 2021 and completing in February this year. It has taken 3-4 months since then to surface and survey the new landscape. In February I felt I had perhaps one year left, and now I feel I have longer – it’s important not to try to pin down how much. For me there’s an extra calculation of two things: the time I can stay in active service and the time to drop it and focus on staying alive, or departing well. I don’t want to drag things out though, because I’m also rather tired in my soul and I want to go home for a while.
One of the transformative gifts here is that everything is so much more provisional than it was before, or than it is for most people. We usually have a sense of a roadmap, plans, expectations and logical steps to our lives, whether it’s framed in terms of things feared or things loved and hoped for. But now, in every arrangement I make I must calculate whether and how much I’ll be able to actually do it when the time comes. It helps to be an astrologer, though much of the decision-making I do intuitively. For important arrangements I tend to take a rather military, or a performer’s attitude, managing my energy to make sure I’m alright on the night whatever state I’m in. It’s the before and after that matter more – and nowadays it’s during those times I need a minder.
I always used to say to astrological clients that, when they had a major Saturn transit, they would get a download and a re-purposing of their life and mission, a new chapter in their work. Or (I’d tell them this carefully) they would get consequences from not doing so. On the approach to the transit two years ago I was going through my cancer struggle and reckoned, well, there’s not a lot more for me to do, so I can’t see how it could work that I’d get a new mission. But on the other hand, before cancer came along, something in me had been saying ‘There’s one more major mission to do’. But I could not see what that might be. When cancer came along I packed away that idea.
But cancer gave it back to me. It changed my life. It aged me, putting me up against the wall. It forced me to look at hard truths. It is now yielding fruits I did not expect – yet, the way it feels now, in a funny sort of way, all my life I’ve been unwittingly preparing for this. It shows how taking a hard path can sometimes shift things much more than following a seemingly easier or safer path. I peeped into hell during the depths of last winter, struggling with demons in the desolate places of my soul. But it shifted a pile of crap too. It’s strange to say, in my condition, that I’ve been given a new life, but there’s some truth to it, even if it lasts only a few years.
On the cliffs with the sheikh and friend Julia Aisha
This week I was visited by the Green Sheikh Saad Iddeen AlMaghrebi AlQudsi. He came with a dear Palestine soul-sister, Julia Aisha, with whom I worked in Bethlehem, and by his minder Said Julia Adams. Both Julias are very English, yet Muslims and well versed in Middle Eastern ways, and the Green Sheikh lives in London and goes regularly to Jerusalem, where he was born. He’s involved with many of the spiritual peacemakers I’ve worked with out there, on both sides of the conflict, nowadays calling themselves the Abrahamic Reunion (though formerly they were Jerusalem Peacemakers – it was founded in Glastonbury).
Julia Aisha played the oudh and sang some lovely Palestinian songs, and we formed a little bubble of Palestine here under the cloudy skies of Cornwall. Transfixed, we were. Then I took them to Carn Gloose, a dramatic clifftop nearby, and they made prayer there, facing Makkah. Cornwall weaved its oceanic magic on them and they were shining. We came back and the sheikh said prayers for me, giving me the healing of Allah. He lit up as he was chanting. I was being blessed and felt it. Allah was giving permission to move forward. Alhamdulillah – thanks be to That Which Cannot be Named.
So I want to create some magic spaces and invite you in. I’ll be doing some talks too, captivating in their own way, but this is different – this is circle-working. I’ve always been a good teacher, threading things together and causing a lot of lightbulb moments, but this isn’t primarily about teaching. It’s more about what Tibetans call transmission. Not from me but through me, and through the rather amazing people working with me and through those who are present. This will take some input and focus by everyone for the duration of each event (lasting perhaps 5-6 hours altogether). Something special becomes possible when it’s all well engineered and everyone’s in there with it. I cannot tell you exactly what this will be, but you’ll know it when it comes. I feel I’m in a position now to bring such a thing through, with your help.
At present, there are three areas where I feel I can contribute something. The first is about life and death and our lives and paths, the second is about ‘inner aid’ work to help the world, and the third concerns connecting with the source of our souls and the places and soul-tribes we come from.
I’m not interested in converting anyone or starting a following – I’m not around for long, and that kind of stuff really doesn’t matter any more. This is a series of one-offs – they are not going to get routine. I’m interested in drawing together people who feel a resonance with me and the signal I put out, because in some way that makes us soul-relatives or soul-friends, and we thus have a resonance between us. The coming together of a group of souls with such a connection means that energy-levels can be upstepped to a higher voltage. It means that everyone present needs to be a bit stretchy, willing to overcome reservations and swim in deeper water, but if we hold the circle well, everyone will be safe and the outcomes can be memorable. I and many of you have experience in this and we can do it.
The overall aim of this is to help everyone get connected up better, within yourself and with some good people and beings. I hope it will encourage you to follow your path and pursue your mission, whatever it is. My personal aim here is to fulfil one of the major threads of my life and hopefully to do something of assistance to The Management and to you. Those that I work for don’t seek believers and followers and they are not important in themselves: they want us as souls to rise to our full stature and to do what we’re here for and what we need to do. They’ll support anyone who does, and I want to strengthen in you ways in which this may be done.
Get this. One of the greatest crimes against humanity of today is withholding. We all do it – me too. It’s embedded in our cultures and it’s quite a heave to pull out of its clutches. With it go self-doubt, not-good-enough little-me syndrome, fear of risk or shame and that creepy feeling that the holy spirit somehow left us behind, or that we’re not up to it. Withholding involves setting aside and even forgetting the reason we came, and the true gifts and purpose we have. We get on with other things that seem important at the time, but when we approach the end of life, the money, property and success we’ve had and the chocolate we’ve eaten matter little, while the enduring truths of what we have been and what we have become stare us in the face.
Withholding lies at the root of our planetary problem today. If everyone increasingly got on with their true calling, things on Earth would start resolving quite rapidly. It’s amazing what comes out when the channels start getting unblocked. And yes, the toilets would get cleaned, because there’s a way of making even cleaning toilets a divine act of soul-enriching service.
Climate change, war, systems disintegration, injustice, poverty, toxicity – all these we can resolve. It’s going to take more effort, time, energy, sacrifice and change than we currently believe, but we’re going to do it and we can’t not. There will be payoffs, good news and miracles amidst the crises and crunches. What’s interesting here is that the drift of events in the world is forcing us to face big questions and do something about them for our own survival. There’s an urgency to it. It’s becoming clear that it is in our self-interest to work together and prioritise collective interest. We have to devise a way of coexisting on Earth in a way that fosters diversity and cultural variegation while becoming one planetary people, consensually cooperating in maintaining our world, rendering it safe and decent, and building a new world out of the structures and rubble of the old.
Here’s a question worth addressing, regarding death and what happens afterwards. Do you choose to return to live out one or more further lives on Earth, to contribute toward that planetary resolution, and perhaps to be here when the breakthrough happens or afterwards? It’s hard and risky work though it has its rewards, as you probably know. Or would you opt for heading off to other realms and leaving the Earth issue to those of us who remain? This has its validity too, and this life might be designed to be your last. Consider this carefully because you will face it sometime. Sorting out this question can help you refocus your current life so that, whatever your choice, you do it well while you’re alive.
Because once death comes, there’s no going back. There’s no delete or undo button. That’s when you set sail for other horizons and, if indeed you are to come back or move on, that will be finalised later on, once you’ve gone through the full post-death process. You’ll have a conference with your angels and members of your soul tribe.
I awoke at six this morning with a cacophony of thoughts that permitted me only to make a round of tea before getting on with them. That’s what I’m like. But also I’ve been on Dexamethasone for the last two days, a once-monthly part of my cancer treatment, and as a steroid it gets my mind buzzing. Something usually comes out of it – I’ve trained myself to make use of it. That’s perhaps why you got another blog thrown at you quite quickly after the last one.
I’m on antibiotics too for an osteo-necrosis infection, which I’m not happy about, but I do not see any alternative to them at present, so I’ll continue till I find one that actually works – since this is potentially a killer issue and I can’t mess around. My back is getting weaker, and exercise doesn’t necessarily help it. Cancer caused four of my lowest vertebrae to soften and collapse and my bones shrank marginally – you ought to hear my back clicking when, several times a day, I click myself back into place…
Myeloma is a blood and bones issue, and that’s pretty fundamental. It’s not tumorous, but it permanently changes your constitution. Blood is about life-force and will-to-live, and my bones hold me up, allowing my body to hang itself onto them for the purpose of functioning on a densely-gravitational planet. Myeloma is not very common but it’s one of the fastest growing cancers today – because of increasing EM radiation and use of certain neurotoxic chemicals. My functionalities are much reduced, but I manage, with a little help from my friends. Sometimes, by late afternoon, I can’t hold myself up any more, it hits my life-force tremendously and my brains conk out. I have to hit the horizontal, allowing myself to relax and float off for a regeneration session – it takes about half an hour. That’s when visitors need to get out their knitting.
A number of Paldywan events are taking shape in Glastonbury, Avebury and Totnes in the coming months and, when things are firmed up, I’ll let you know. This will be networked, not greatly advertised. For those of you who cannot come, it will be possible to devise a way of tuning in – news about that later. Other places are possible in due course, though I must pace myself and my helpers. These events will perforce be ‘limited edition’, even if I manage to continue with them for two or three years. Electrosensitivity means I cannot work in cities. Besides, everyone will be far more in contact with things with their phones switched off.
It’s time for breakfast. The sun is shining and I’m going to potter in the garden. I might or might not be alone this weekend, depending on whether anyone chooses to come visit. One other gift cancer has given me has been loss of agency – control over my circumstances. I’m in Neptune’s capable hands, and have gone through another lesson in acceptance. In life, we get what we get, and that’s the way it is, and we’re here to do the best with that. But the amazing thing is that other things happen instead, even if we don’t get what we want, and the universe does indeed look after us.
Bluebells at Treviscoe, West Penwith, the home of a dear friend, Ba Miller
I felt a bit like a nine-year old boy, swallowing hard, facing the Great Wide and Wonderful and wondering whether he’ll make it.
I made my first trip away from home for a long time, travelling to East Cornwall to stay with an old friend – we’ve known each other for four decades. I caught the train back – it’s necessary to take a punt on its not getting too crowded. The last two miles as the train comes into Penzance must be one of the better stretches of train journey in this country, as the mythic St Michael’s Mount appears and the train cruises above the Long Rock shoreline. A very fresh air and seagull welcome greets you when you get out at the last town in Britain.
Penny, my trusty helper, picked me up, taking me home to the farm. She had spring-cleaned my cabin while I was away, bless her. I spent the evening detoxing from the mobile-phone radiation I had picked up in transit, letting the brain-screeching, embattled agitation and sharply-piercing headaches of electrosensitivity die down slowly – it takes about 36 hours. Still alive, still here.
Going away changes my perspective, and I had a lot to mull over. In a way I’m starting again. The traveller in me, locked down for the last few years, managed to get an airing – and in making the trip I was testing out my capacity to handle it. Because, all things being well, and when I can afford the ruinous post-Brexit health insurance for a cancer patient and the expense of taking a minder with me, I might one day even find myself once again sitting in an aircraft seat and heading off somewhere.
Guess who’s the chief
The four likely destinations, in order of doability, are Sweden (where I once lived and have family and friends), the ancient Minoan island of Kalymnos in Greece and the even more ancient town of Bethlehem in Palestine, where bits of my heart still reside, and, least likely, Tinzibitane in Mali, the village of the Tuareg tribe I’ve been helping for some years. It would be great to meet the village chief, who is my age and a brother of the soul, before either of us passes on. Though perhaps we might meet over on the other side instead – you never know. I wonder if the Tuareg version of heaven is similar to that of a European like me? I might find out before long.
Making plans – a very Western preoccupation. I’m making some provisional plans. They must be provisional because I could have a choking fit or a sudden downturn and keel over tomorrow – I had a downturn and lucky scrape only in February. But I could also live for five years more. For a person like me, held up by strength of spirit more than by medical probability, there’s a mysterious factor too, because I have an uncanny tendency to bounce back from the deepest of crises, and this makes things a bit less predictable.
This stone circle was built in the 1990s by the late dowser Hamish Miller, and it does indeed thrum.
So I’ve decided to do something I’m good at: put myself on the parapet, push the river in a direction cancer patients like me usually shouldn’t take, and create a few miracles before I go. My two strong points lie in pulling together groups to do some magic pressure-cooking and close encounters, and humanitarian work in embattled places. These are more connected than it appears, actually.
I’m going to try to pull off a few things, using my weakness and despair as strengths and the insight that wizzened mortality and beat-up experience have brought. I’d like to create some magic moments for people I’ll soon be leaving behind. Or perhaps I want to reaffirm a heartlink with sisters and brothers far and wide, to strengthen our network of light so that it comes back to life in other realms and other times. Because the work is not yet done.
When I was twenty, standing atop a mountain in Snowdonia, north Wales, I had a life-changing vision of the coming battle for the hearts and minds of humanity. I saw the beauty of nature and the dark clouds on the horizon. I discovered what Weltschmerz felt like – German for the pain of the world. Fresh from a failed student revolution at the LSE in London, burned out and trying to process it, I had a soul-shaking revelation of the kind you sometimes get at the tops of mountains. I made a deep commitment to doing what I could to transform the world into a safe and friendly place.
Well, in the ensuing decades I did what I could, and now, as curtains time approaches, I feel the job is distinctly incomplete. This is deep because I feel I came into this life not to help bring about that change, but to attend to what needs to happen after it when, having crossed the hump, humanity is faced with the big question of what to do next. This mission is as yet unfulfilled – it must be commuted to my next life. Inshallah, if that is what it is to be. So if sometime in the future you see some kid in a baby buggy staring right at you and twiggling your sonars, it might be me.
Many ancient stone circles are sanitised and also robbed of their setting by farms and more recent developments, but this stone circle sits in a fine and beautiful setting. It draws the spirits to it.
But there’s still stuff to do. In my latest book about prehistoric sites in West Penwith, Shining Land, I suggest that the esoteric technology of the people of the neolithic and bronze ages in Britain is pertinent to us now because, once we’ve sorted out basic sustainability, social and ecological issues, by the end of the century we will come to the matter of working with the subtler energy-fields of nature and the planet, to bring about the next level of planetary restoration and repair. This is what I mean by ‘after the change’. It concerns not only ecological-climatic repair but social, psycho-spiritual and civilisational repair, deep and on a global scale. The book will come out sometime but, currently, there’s a technical problem: its typesetter, Jonathan, who has done two of my previous books, happens also to be the Green mayor of Penzance, and he’s a tad busy!
This is what being on Planet Earth is all about: there’s an excruciating gap between vision and actuality, and it often takes longer than we’d like. This is a key part of the learning and soul-honing that coming to this planet involves – it’s what we chose when we volunteered for the mission. It’s so easy to forget that. I do. Some things take a lifetime, and changing the course of history takes longer. For those of us in the business of planetary repair, we need to remember this. True and full change takes seven generations. So look after your grandchildren.
I can’t visit my grandchildren, but each of them I regularly hold in light, giving each of them deep attention and being there as a kind of guardian angel. I have an ancestor, a well-known healer in Pontypridd, South Wales, in the mid-1800s, who seems to have been watching over me. Apparently he was a stroppy, difficult man, but a brilliant herbalist and healer to whom doctors would send patients when they had given up on them. Sometimes he’d disappear off into the mountains, forsaking people and collecting herbs, and people responded with a mixture of relief and hope that, being a community protector, he’d return. Perhaps we’re a bit similar.
I’ve been learning a big lesson for a man, yet again: the taproot of our strength as men lies in our weakness, vulnerability and apparent lack of agency. In weakness we can either become its victim or we can use it to pull out all the stops, to break rules and probabilities. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. During this winter I’ve been alone, going into deep, desolate places in my heart, and realising that, though I’m immuno-compromised on cancer drugs, I don’t want to sit around at home waiting for the chop. I’m a Mars in Scorpio sort of guy who dies in action and rarely surrenders. Well, metaphorically speaking.
This said, I’ve had quite a few chances to die and I’m still here, so God only knows how this saga will actually end. I guess my friends upstairs will hold me up and keep me here until they transfer me to another department. Fuckit, these are the facts of life for a pathological rainbow warrior leaning heavily on his sticks, trying desperately to pull off a few earthly thrills before he deposits his clogs into the recycling bin of forgotten time. Us Virgos, we do tend to want to make ourselves useful.
So, I propose doing a few events, with a little (actually quite a lot of) help from my friends. To some groups it will be armchair talks or afternoon workshops, and in some it will be special group phenomena and close encounters of a ninth kind – inspiring, empowering and memorable, I hope. With the latter, perhaps they’re not for people who prefer to paddle rather than swim. They’ll be one-offs only, because there will come a time when I can’t do it any more.
So if you’re good at organising and you feel drawn to the prospect of doing an event in your area with old Paldywan, please contact me and we can work something out. I can’t do many of these, a minder will be bringing me, it must be phones off and not in a city, and please treat me as if I were ninety. Energy-management: if it all works, it could be a memorable event and a blessing. Cornwall and Glastonbury area are likely locations, but if there’s a caucus of interested people in your area or your network, let’s discuss it.
If you can’t make it, then I’ll be blogging and podding till I no longer can, possibly longer, so all is not lost. Then there are the psychic airwaves: it’s not specifically me that you’re tuning into, but the network I’m a part of, and those of you who get a buzz of recognition with me are getting a buzz from the network, and you’re getting it because you’re already part of it and perhaps need reminding or help with reconnecting. You see, I’m a strange one from a faraway place, and some of you pick up the frequency because you know it. I’m interested in reconnecting with those souls while I still can, and sharing a shot in the arm with you from the folks back home, if you’d like that. It’s pretty much all I can do with my life now. So do come and have a cup of tea with friends old and new, wherever I turn up.
Two dear friends, Ba Miller, 90, left, and Miriam Naccache, 61, right, at Ba’s home.
Concerning psychic airwaves… there’s plenty of spam, phishing and malware out there in the ethers, and keep your commonsense filters up. If in doubt, give it time and form judgements slowly. It all depends on the frequencies you tune into and anchor to. If you are as clear as you can be in motivation and perspective, that is your protection – a whole person has fewer weak-points and we’re challenging as entities to level with. Be cautious with anyone who in some way, often well concealed, advocates division or prejudice, since it is the unified resonance of humanity that will ultimately carry us through – just as the solidarity of Ukrainians is carrying them through today. Remember to know and judge people by their works more than their words – and that includes enchanters like me. In the psychic world the actual content and value of information is far more important than the claimed status of the source. The most valuable sources are not so loud and they don’t make big claims – they tend not to come from our local area in our galaxy or from neighbouring dimensions either. With exceptions. As you do with humans, treat each one individually and follow your intuitions as to how to interact with them.
But now, it’s back to mundanities. It’s another hospital outpatient visit concerning the osteo-necrosis in my chin, followed by a visit from the nurse to shoot me up with my monthly hit of cancer drugs. And team-building after the destruction I went through a few months ago, completing building the Meyn Mamvro Archive (it has taken two years), getting my book out, staggering over clifftops and through woods, and carrying out that strange activity called staying alive. For someone in my situation, that takes more effort than for most.
Walking angels, these two (though they’d no doubt shrug shoulders and deny it)
The 18th Century philosopher Edmund Burke once said something that has always guided me: For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing. This is the story of our time: in this world we don’t have a problem of evil, but we do have a problem with playing safe and keeping our heads down so that evil can prevail. This is why psycho-spiritual transformation is a necessary and central part of repairing all else.
I met a young Berliner in the Sinai Desert one hot, shimmering day. We were specks on each other’s horizon until eventually we met, there in the resounding desert silence, hiding in the shade under a rock, and he taught me something I seem to have repeated quite a few times on this blog: It’s always okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end. The implications of this expand in every direction, the more you consider it.
Hm, while finishing this blog, I kept saying to myself ‘Eat your breakfast, Palden’ – it was ready. Or so I thought. I looked at it and discovered I’d already eaten it. Ah, that’s presumably why I forgot. I might sound lucid in a blog or do a video interview, but actually I’m pretty useless in many functional things nowadays. Chemo-brain. I don’t have brain-fog, I have brain-lag. Which is why I sometimes need a minder, and I can’t organise events any more (that was 30-40 years ago). Nowadays I must studiously avoid getting sucked into complexity because I get lost and screw up. And sometimes, once we get to the car, it’s great to be driven home again, to my little cabin in the far beyond.
Here’s a big hug to all of you who’ve read thus far! Bless you – and thanks for being with.
Some music I’m enjoying right now, Eric Mouquet (Deep Forest) and friends in Brazil: https://youtu.be/-nAwQoM3eS8
Here’s my granddaughter Idun in Lappland, singing in two languages, demonstrating the magic of the coming generation and busy discovering her starborn side (get a tissue): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Dv_6IiHWLw
The Jokkmokk Market in February, in northern Sweden, goes back generations – formerly the Sami and the Swedes met up to trade, though now it is mainly a kind of ethnic festival lasting a few days.
Something is beginning to come together, and that’s a relief. I went through a big loss and crisis nearly three months ago, with my world disintegrating and hope plummeting, but I plugged on through it, taking it day by day. A blessing arose in that darkness that I didn’t see at the time. As my health and spirits sank it felt as if I was coming close to dying. As I mentioned in my last blog, we’re all partially dead, and at that time I went from (perhaps) 50% to (perhaps) 80% and started feeling pre-death shutting-down feelings. (Today I’m back around 50% again.)
There comes a point where you have to accept that you could be going. However, what I find is that, when I reach that place, everything changes. I go further toward dying, or my homoeostatic, self-healing capacities kick in, and a revival of some kind follows. You might have experienced this yourself in a breakdown or overwhelming crisis with death-like characteristics, even if it was mainly a psychospiritual wrenching out of the past and a squaring with the present.
Pordenack Point, with Wolf Rock lighthouse behind
The great thing about dying or near-death is that it clarifies and simplifies a lot. You see things more as they actually are, not what we tell ourselves they are. You’re less caught up in life’s ins and outs and see more clearly the underlying threads, meanings, connections and inevitabilities of things. And life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.
So the rather deep and murky experience I had in February seems to have started me on a new chapter of exploration. I’ve decided to probe the inner experiences leading toward disincarnation, to see what I can do about sensing or perhaps experiencing some of the post-death stages – at least as they might apply to me. It strikes me that, if I am willing and give it attention, it’s possible to disentangle many of the processes that occur around death, and to work with them in a different order or a different way.
I’m finding hints of this already. It has something to do with making good use of the end-of-life phase, when much of the stuff and processing that comes up around death can be done. This phase can last from days to years, and everyone’s story is different. I realised that, with issues currently emerging in my life, if I don’t process them now, I’ll need to do so at death. There’s a kind of quiet urgency to it. So from this came the idea of taking some of the pressure off the moment of death – removing some of the unnecessary confusion from it.
Pordenack Point, Lands End, Cornwall
Several people have been contacting me as a result of things I’ve written and podcasted, and this is where something is coming together. The beginnings of a team is perhaps forming. I do wish to share as much as I can of the process with anyone who is interested. On the other hand, when I’m on my way out, I’ll probably need a small, tight team, with relatively little to-ing and fro-ing of people in the last stages.
It’s like childbirth: in the births I’ve been involved in, there is usually a need for about 5-6 people, no more, each of whom take different roles, either close-in and personal or managing the phone, the food or the people, with one person sitting quietly in the corner holding the energy, and I think the same applies in the case of dying. Besides, if anyone wants to see me, please do so while I’m alive, since there’s no point feeling sadness and loss once I go. And if you seek a true sharing, it’s best to come alone.
But there’s more to this. I’m finding that visitors can find it challenging stepping their energy down to where I’m at. They’re living with busy timetables and agendas while I am not, and their minds are racing compared to mine. My energies do quicken when people visit me, and I can come half-way, but I do need people to sensitise themselves and come half-way too, to connect on the level that we need, and which most people visiting me actually seek. It’s not just to do with talking, it’s do do with what Hindus would call ‘darshan’ – inner connection and communion. I don’t have a lot of time and energy to mess around, and there might not be a ‘next time’.
This vibrational issue will probably intensify around the time of my passing, and the people who will be welcome will be those who are sensitive and empathic enough to step themselves down sufficiently, vibrationally speaking. There’s a profound quietness involved. Without this, the ‘angelic connection’, the vortex, the wormhole we need to go through when we pass over, doesn’t function so well.
The ancient sage at Pordenack Point
But then, all of this might be the stuff of imagination. How and when we pop our clogs is not something that is controllable. It can happen to any of us tomorrow. Some of us have this truism facing us more hauntingly than others. We shall see how this all pans out when we get there. However, the experiences of the last few months, having shoved me through the grindstone, seem now to be yielding some fruits. And it’s springtime. And I’m still alive.
This end-of-life perspective has led to other things too. In my teens and twenties I chose a path of change, seeking, with so many yet so few others, to change the world. Well, it has taken a far longer and far more than I, or people like me, first thought. Even when being realistic, we still thought it would happen by the time of the Millennium. The purposes for which many of us were born have not been able fully to come about.
In my own case, I feel I was born not exactly to help bring about the big change in the world, but to lay tracks for what needs to happen after it. Much of my life purpose has been predicated on that, and I feel I haven’t done all that I might have done, though what I have done is good enough in the rather adverse circumstances of recent decades. With this in mind, I’m leaving quite a big archive of material on my website, just in case folks in my grandchildren’s generation, or even one or two of my own grandchildren, find it useful.
Pordenack Point
This issue, for me, has involved quite an internal struggle. And I’ve come to this…
Change takes seven generations. Several ancient cultures say this. That’s rather thought-provoking and difficult to face if you’re a change-making activist, but it’s true. Starting out in adult life as a revolutionary, this is what I’ve had to learn in order to make sense of the way my life and the world unfolded thereafter. Because it isn’t what I and we dreamt of. The world didn’t give peace a chance. However, there’s progress, even if, to us with our limited life-spans, it’s really slow. A lot of groundlaying has been done, and a lot of possibilities have been explored and trialled. Free energy is available, though it awaits its time.
If you count the enormous global change we’re a part of to have started moving in the 1960s, with my generation being the one that started shifting things, then our children’s generation, now mostly in their 30s and 40s, and their kids, now young or up to 25ish, make three generations. Those two younger generations have already shown signs of pushing the process further along than my generation could.
There are four generations to go. That takes us into the 22nd Century. If you come back once you’ve popped your clogs, you might perhaps see this completion in your next life or the one after that. Depending of course on how things go. We earthlings have, after all, chosen to go for a cliffhanger. Not even God Almighty knows what we humans are going to do next. It rests in our hands.
My feeling is that my grandchildren’s generation, the children of today, will shift things sufficiently to swing the overall tide of change in the world – especially in the so-called ‘developing’ or majority world, where young people currently form majorities. I sense that the crunch will come around the 2050s, when they are in mid-life and in power. (For more on this, see here.) That is, the world could well tilt from a net-damaging to a net-fixing mode around then, in de facto terms, but it will still take time.
Mayan star-watcher, Porthcurno
Yet each generation stands on the shoulders of those who came before, expressing its missed or repressed possibilities. My generation brought us the Summer of Love in 1967 but Britain’s unmentioned, more secret history tells a story of widespread free love, free-thinking and spiritual growth during WW2, amidst the pain and disaster of war. The biggest orgies of recent centuries took place in Hyde Park and similar places on VE day on 8th May 1945, not in 1967. This upwelling of energy got shut down and bottled up when the war ended, and my generation therefore needed to bring it out of hiding (and The Pill helped).
Similarly, the gender-loosening going on in Gen-X today stands on the shoulders of the gays and lesbians of former decades, and the abuses and deaths they went through, and the more communitaire values of many young people today are moving things toward a more human, just and caring kind of society that some in my generation dreamt of and strove to build, even if our rampant individualism rather got in the way.
In terms of longterm change, two things are going on here: one is long and slow, the stuff of centuries, and one is more intense, the stuff of decades. They’re confusingly intermixed. The long, slow one is all about becoming a planetary people, a sustainable and genuinely civilised global culture capable of taking its due place in the universe. That’ll take a while, since it involves healing the damage and trauma of millennia.
The shorter one is the crash-response period we must go through to stop the damage we’re causing and deal with its immediate effects, during this century and in the coming decades. This period of instability and change started in the 1960s and, after a delayed-action start, it’s beginning to gain momentum. Kind of. Hopefully. I think that, by the late 2020s, things could be moving much faster – we could actually be in for an avalanche of events and developments, for which Covid and Ukraine were but the foothills.
If we had started with necessary changes in the 1960s-70s, many of the problems we have now would be very different – we’d be further along the road toward sustainability, justice and peace, though it’s likely that we would not have progressed sufficiently to be ‘out of the woods’ by now. It takes time to fix planets and planetary races, and ultimately it has to be done at every level of reality and in all of the micro-worlds that make up this highly variegated planet we call Earth.
It’s the Chief, at Pordenack Point
A planet is a mass experience with a particular flavour. Our planet has quite strong gravity-fields, and we therefore have to have quite robust bodies to handle it. Like some kinds of beings of other worlds, we can operate both in the physical and the metaphysical realms, except here, rather psychotically, we separate it into ‘waking life’ and ‘sleep and dreams’, while on other worlds the process is more integrated and conscious. Problem is that the intricacy and immersive quality of life here, together with the strong gravitational fields, pull our thoughts and beliefs downwards and we lose the plot, forgetting the real reasons why we came, the main agenda of life. We’ve made cultural institutions of this and we build our belief systems around quite alienated, separative, distrusting, competitive, threatened assumptions. That’s really weird.
This getting lost business is a big one. We all do it. It is a key part of the planet Earth process. The big question is whether we are able and willing to return to balance, to centre, to sanity, to proportion and to peace, when we do get lost. If we’re willing, the challenge is then to make a habit of returning – however we do that – so that it becomes an inbuilt, default pattern. This becomes important when we face death because marshalling all our forces at that time can be quite an operation. In death, you tend to go the way you habituated yourself to during life. Though it’s also important when we confront a moment of truth or a reality-crunch at any time of life: if habituated to centring and collecting ourselves, we resort to it as a default behaviour. This is important because, when we have a crisis, our control over things drops dramatically. So if you’re able to surf with it, drawing on experience, you’re more likely to make progress in life and in dying – and afterwards. You become psychospiritually more flexible.
So really, the way we deal with our crises and crunch-points in life sets the patterns for the way we die. If avoidance or denial are our default patterns, this makes for a more difficult death, since there can often be far more ‘stuff’ to deal with when death comes. So acceptance, non-resistance, becomes important. You can neither block nor push the river. Even if we feel we can’t handle it, it’s happening anyway, so acceptance is vital.
Even in the new age movement, many people, so anxious to heal and make things better, and somehow thinking that death is some sort of failure, something wrong or perpetually avoidable, suffer big acceptance problems – and this syndrome, not unique to them, stretches across society.
Near Tol Pedn Penwith
So what are the fears that we each have, that cause us to turn away from dwelling on something that is going to come to every single one of us anyway? Dying is inevitable and unavoidable. The best preparation for death is a full life, lived as well as possible, and there is no standard recipe for it since the answers for each of us are innately programmed within us. So near, yet, sometimes, so far.
So if I seem to be harping on about death and dying, it’s because I feel our society doesn’t talk enough about it, and it’s part of my exploration. Being a pathological communicator, and long ago having tied my growth path to that of the world by taking a spiritual-and-political stand on things, I feel it’s worth going on a bit about it. Or perhaps I don’t have a lot else to do. Even so, I’m grateful for your reading this: it gives me a reason to be here!
Here’s a re-tweet that I keep re-learning over and over: it’s all okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
And… so involved in writing was I that I forgot my breakfast, and now it’s past lunchtime. That’s the kind of thing that happens on Earth, especially with me. Time to put the kettle on.
Life never stops throwing stuff at us. Well, until it does.
Paldywan drifting off in his seat
Here you can see photos of a man who is 60-70% dead. Though in another way, I’m very much alive. Let me explain.
In our society we’re addicted to defining death as clinical death, when the heart stops. But actually, dying is a gradual process where the psyche, you or me, leave the body we used for becoming incarnate on Earth and we move into another existence. Most people are only 10-20% dead – that is, mostly on an unconscious level, only a small part of them is in touch with the otherworld. This sense of connection might increase at special moments such as being present at a childbirth or at the death of another person – part of your psyche goes over to the other side with them. Especially if you let it. But when near the end of life, you edge gradually closer into dying, often in stages and down-steps. Social attitudes tend to make this a secret process for many people at the end of their lives – no one wants to talk about it.
The black patch on my beard is a staphilococcal infection – neither hospital nor holistic treatments have worked thus far
You can see it in my eyes – there’s more of a once-removed look in them than there used to be, if you knew me some years ago. It’s because part of me has already gone over. This is partially because I came close to dying two years ago and then came back, and partially because I’m more or less okay about dying, so I’m not blocking myself from slipping into that kind of space and awareness. I had a near-death experience at age 24, which made me more easygoing about dying – and having a Buddhist background helps too.
Since I contracted cancer in late 2019, life has been very much a day-to-day, uphill grind, an effort, where I have had to apply myself to the art of living much more decidedly and in a much more focused and mindful way. It can be wearing at times. In that context, when you’re growing tired of staying alive and you’re dying, whenever and however it comes, it is likely to be a relief. After all, for me I shall be going home, where there will be no more gravitation and bodily constraint to deal with.
For now I’m okay about being alive, for there is something quite remarkable about this end-of-life phase. There’s a certain clarity to it that comes from a simplification process in the psyche – my capacity to handle complexity, or even my interest in it, is reducing, and this simplifies things. Complexity, human guile, head-trips, hidden agendas and evasions become rather irrelevant. There’s a deep realism to it. For me, it’s a time of honesty with myself, in the knowledge that if I don’t process truths now, I’ll have to process them at death. I’ve been thrust into this state by cancer and relative disability, with a fair dose of isolation thrown in, and having had quite a life over the last seven decades, starting my life in a completely different and distant time of history, I have plenty to reflect on. There’s quite a lot of past and not a lot of future left for me, at least in a bodily sense.
Even now I’m having deep, earth-shaking learning experiences, and I talked about what’s been going on for me in a recent podcast, ‘When it all gets too much’. Growth never ends – it isn’t the domain only of the young and able. One tricky issue I’m facing at present is that I’ve been fucking up. Life is proving too complex, I get out of my depth and I’m not functioning with the same intensity as most people – life’s intricacies get to be a bit too much. So I fuck up. This complicates things and I find it difficult to deal with.
I seem to be managing though. I don’t have enough life left to get really tangled up with things as I used to, and complexity boggles me. One of the drugs I’ve been given, the steriod Dexamethasone, seems to have exaggerated my Aspergers tendencies – in one sense an incapacity to deal with human headtrips and manipulations, with complexity, and in another sense a rather inspired genius, creativity and deep seeing – the Aspie blessing that brought us the Theory of Relativity, the computer, the iPhone and the Tesla. Though in my case it concerns ancient sites, geopolitics, astrology and other weird subjects I’ve given my life to. I don’t have time to hang around resisting life as it presents itself and feeding my fears and neuroses. This isn’t an avoidance: it’s more to do with zeroing in on the really important, fundamental, underlying stuff, the tough, abiding truths, and leaving the complexities to sort themselves out by themselves.
The next bit I’ve thought about long and hard. I’m not seeking to make a public discussion about this because it concerns two real people who are fine souls and deserve good treatment. Also because, in writing this blog, I undertook to tell you my cancer-and-life story, and I cannot genuinely omit this development. This isn’t about taking sides or making judgements. It concerns something that can and indeed does sometimes happen for some cancer patients and for those involved closely with us.
The biggest challenge I’ve recently had to face was a big shock when it came – the sudden ending of my relationship with Lynne. She had good reasons – it had been really difficult for her when I tipped into cancer and went through big changes, including in my personality – and then I fucked up in January, really upsetting her, and suddenly it was all over. It all became too much for her, and suddenly it was over. For me, I could both empathise with her situation and pain and also feel my own loss and inner bleakness. The next month or so was a deep and dark struggle, with emotional and health issues merging into a churning journey that seemed to last a thousand years. Later blood tests revealed that a key cancer indicator (paraproteins in my blood) had gone up – not a good sign since they’d gone down over the last year and more. When I mentioned this emotional storm to the haematology specialist she said, “Oh, that won’t affect anything”. No, she’s wrong there. I’m amazed how a doctor can say such a thing and believe it.
Leaving a cancer patient is difficult. It can lead to public judgement and that’s not fair. So I honour Lynne for being brave at this time. It is not right for a person to feel tied to another, by force of circumstance. She has a life to live too, and perhaps she’s done her bit.
Around spring equinox I started rallying and reviving – the warrior in me kicked in. Falling helplessly into the great cosmic plughole isn’t really my style – well, not for long. I’m going to try to make my cancer readings go back down again by working on reintegrating myself and getting my life-energies pulsing better. This might or might not work. If it doesn’t work, the haematologist wants to change my cancer drugs to Lenalidomide (a new word for Thalidomide) which my mother happened to take for ‘morning sickness’ when I was inside her before birth – I was lucky not to be born severely disabled, and I’m nervous about taking this drug now since I anticipate that it could worsen my Aspergers symptoms yet more or it could affect my spirits, my core medicine-source.
I go up and down on different days, getting to grips with this strangely new chapter of life and letting myself feel and experience everything that comes up, so that these experiences may evaporate into the vastness of things that never were and things that are best forgotten. But it’s hard work. As always, I look for the gift I’m being given in life, and undoubtedly, through Lynne and her absence I’m being given a gift of truth and reality. My homoeopath prescribed me Pearl 1M – pearls are created as an outcome of irritation and ‘things going wrong’. Thanks, Helen.
I wish to thank Lynne from deeper than the bottom of my heart for all she has been and done with me. She looked after me and saved my life two years ago, and her kindness and love were exceptional, a life-changer. Not many people would be able to do that, nowadays. We’ve been such good companions, lovers and soulmates. I sincerely hope she too has benefited deeply from what I have offered her. My going down with cancer wasn’t part of our plan and we’d been together only three years by then – she didn’t really get enough of the me that I once was. I wish her well, bless her. She’s been such a shining soul in my life. Also she’s a very gifted astrologer, and I miss our discussions. I’ve been difficult for her and she has been really good to me, in the last two years. It’s funny and also tragic how life goes, and what we humans do to each other, even when we don’t really mean to. So now we are both ‘free’. I sincerely hope life works well for her and miss her enormously.
Now it is time to move on and make good use of the life that I have. It will take time to repair, yet I need to keep moving forward. It’s time to do the best with life as it presents itself, to uncover the TLC within my own heart and to let myself receive what support life will provide, as if being carried in the open palms of the Goddess. After all, our existence is all about two things that aren’t entirely connected: life as it factually presents itself and life as we choose to see, experience and respond to it – and in the latter lies our power. But it’s true also that it’s really strange encountering an experience such as this at my current stage of life.
One thing I’ve learned is that separation and aloneness do not mean I have to close my heart and block off, just because I find myself on my own or in an emotionally barren state. Love is something that resides in our hearts, in the core of our being – it generates its own warmth and inclusion without having to be dependent on the closeness or the absence of another soul. Though, this said, I must admit that I have to really work on that, and it really is nice being enwrapped in love! Talking to and caring just for myself isn’t quite the same. After all, even as a crippled cancer patient I still love looking after others to the extent I can.
And I still welcome hassle-free, relaxed visitors, and bring your knitting – I serve really good springwater tea.
Life is all about change. All that starts comes to an end. It really does. This is the nature of life on Earth. The Talking Heads once sang that heaven is a place where nothing ever happens, and there’s some truth in it but not a lot, since life goes on everywhere and the progress of the soul on its long evolutionary journey continues wherever we are. Different forms of existence offer different openings and opportunities. One difference between ‘heaven’ and Earth is that, in ‘heaven’, as in your dreams, you experience what your psyche is capable of tuning into, and it often manifests pretty quickly, while on Earth it’s a lot more complex (and we humans make it even more so) and there’s a much bigger gap between possibility and fulfilment. In heaven you can rebuild the bombed cities of Ukraine in an instant, but on Earth it will take decades and it will involve lots of complications and the future just won’t be the same as the past.
I’ve been thinking about my blogs and podcasts. There will come a point where I can’t continue, so the whole series might not conclude in the same neat way as a fiction story. So in the next few weeks I’m going to write and record a final blog and podcast in advance, for my son Tulki to release when the time comes. The funny thing for him is that I’ll be leaving next to nothing in terms of property and money, but he and his sisters will inherit a load of digital assets instead! The list of passwords and digital details I’m leaving is far longer than my will.
But there’s another question too, that I haven’t resolved. I hope and intend to communicate after I’m gone, at least with folks in my family and inner soul-circle, and I’m wondering who will actually have their receptors open and their antennae up when the time actually comes?
Lots of love from me. Paldywan Kenobi.
You’ll find my podcasts here and my website is here and my forthcoming book is here.
I wasn’t ready for it. The crows in the woods below the farm were on form. Each morning they wake up just before dawn and chatter in hundreds, working themselves up and suddenly taking to the air together, swooping around over the fields, doing crazy tribal manoeuvres, crarking and grating, settling and then swooping again as a mass before landing on the rooftops and trees of the farm and the big house next door, to sit there awhile and begin their day as individual crows, each with a life to live.
It shows the power of synergy, when they interlock minds to fly as one being, with no visible leadership, making a deep rumbling as hundreds of wings thrash the air in harmony. Meanwhile, waking up in pain and feeling unwell, I had missed an opportunity to sound-record one of the best dawn crow displays of late (for my next podcast). Oh well. That’s what happens when your life is humiliatingly falling apart and all your well-learned human capabilities start failing you.
Plus some dilemmas. On Thursday afternoon I landed up sitting there crying my eyes out, unable to get help after four days of trying, following a stream of unreturned calls, answering machines, referrals to other numbers, and promises unkept. Yet again I was landing up at the end of the day having got nowhere. I was in pain and going down. The dilemma is that, when I do get someone at the other end, they’re really good – but somehow, the system just isn’t working, and a clock was ticking on me.
Come Saturday morning, I got through to an emergency number and the nurse was really helpful and attentive, assuring me she would ring back within an hour – and she did. “I hate to do this to you, Palden, but I must refer you to yet another service”. OMG. Eventually, by afternoon I was down in the Urgent Care Unit at West Cornwall Hospital in Penzance. By evening I was at last fixed with the medication I had been promised five days before. Penny, busy helping another of her care clients move house, came to pick me up in an enormous van and dropped me home. Staggering around on autodrive, I lit the woodstove, made tea and then had what my mother in her later years used to call ‘a good sit down’. Thus ended a nightmare week during which I had squared with a few rather hard things.
Medically, my prospects are not good – I’m doing alright with the cancer but not with its side-effects, and the prospects are ‘risky’. I’m at a choice-point. It all boils down to a matter of will-to-live. A decision in my soul, in my bones, not my head. Will this crisis be followed by an upswing or a downward slide? This isn’t just about health conditions. Getting through each day has become more difficult and I’ve started getting tired of it, wondering how much it’s worth struggling on.
It’s a bit like climate change: a question of mitigation (trying to solve the problem) or adaptation (getting used to the idea that you can’t). Do I have what it takes to break medical expectations? Or shall I let myself decline in peace, perhaps during the coming year? If I revive, for what and for whom? I am on my own almost all of the time and, recently with diminished creative inspiration, there isn’t a lot to do except talk to myself and deal with a succession of difficulties in a muddle-through kind of way.
Yes, that’s honing to the soul, and there’s always something to learn. But fighting to stay alive is not all there is to life, and there comes a point where it gets a bit stupid resisting a tide that currently seems to want to carry me back home. I’m leaving the question open for now, but it’s sitting with me.
‘Heaven…’, sang Talking Heads a few decades ago, ‘Heaven is a place, where nothing, nothing ever happens…’. I don’t agree. That’s an earthbound perspective arising from the forgetting process we went through around birth and in early life. Forgetting who we are and why we came. So going back to where we came from becomes a scary issue that few wish to face, because it involves remembering who we are, or were, or could be, and why we came. But the rub is, everyone will face it. And things do happen after death, and there’s more to life than what we’ve experienced thus far.
Astrologers amongst you will probably recognise the symptoms: I’m on a Neptune opposition Saturn. I’ve been given cancer to give my life a new focus. The last two years have been like ten. Struggles have changed me a lot, for better and worse, but there comes a point where a new hurdle hoves into view: letting be, letting go and ‘letting God’.
We get these let-gos throughout life, and the more experience of them that we gain, the more we position ourselves well for the final one. But there are some biggies to get to grips with – particularly regrets. Things we did, or didn’t do, that we could have done differently.
If we’ve done something with our lives, if we have at least tried, other things come around too, to show us where we got things more or less right. For me, as I slowly pull out of my temporal life-slot, things are coming to pass that I got used to accepting as unchangeable. World transformation is not an easy thing, and we’re in a painful period, but things are starting to wrench themselves out of their stuckness – also known as ‘normality’. The mechanism by which change is happening is not one that anyone could have forecast. It’s getting us from behind and underneath.
It started with Covid and its cascading consequences, and we’re heading for the next big wave. Again, it will be something that few visualised or expected. It’s a raking-out of all and everything, very thorough, corroding and eroding many things, all separately, and building up into an enormous slow, drawn-out quake, an avalanche of issues that will come to a scrunch-point – and then something else starts happening.
We’re not used to insecurity and uncertainty but we’re being forced to get used to it. Covid, with its consequential effects, was just the start. There’s more (see here). In the end, all will be well, but it’s really difficult now – my 25ish futile telephone calls of the last week were a minuscule example of the cumulative systems breakdown that is coagulating at present. The exception has become the rule, and relative chaos is becoming the new order.
After a life of going against the grain, I’ll be leaving a world where the logjams are at last beginning to free up. In a way, it’s a time of tribulation, but in another way it’s a time of solutions and breakthroughs, goaded by crisis and necessity. But if we truly want a new world, we must truly let go of the old one – and that’s what the coming decades are about.
Hence we see such daunting attempts at social control today. Humanity has started sliding down a ski-slope and it’s shit scared of losing control. Stamp out the virus, rescue the economy, maintain normality, control the future, blame it all on others. Change whatever you like as long as it doesn’t affect me.
This is not all that there is to life. Even fighting against it is not all there is to life. There’s more. Humanity is struggling to figure out why we are here, and what exactly for. It’s an endless process. It’s the Universe trying to find out who it is, by scraping the accumulated experience of billions of struggling humans into an enormous databank of universal experience, fiddling with models and algorithms to find out what it’s here for. And whether the telling of the story really was worth it. Or whether, as my Tibetan teacher HH Gyalwa Karmapa XVI once put it, it was all simply a fart in the void.
Meanwhile, now on medication, I’m beginning to feel ‘better’ and out of danger, but I’ve been knocked down a rung, and this is a different place. Another fullmoon has passed. Here’s sending a hug to those who will be alone at Christmas, and best wishes to all of you, whatever you are or aren’t celebrating, with a reminder and a smile: it’s all okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
Love, Palden.
A new podcast is coming soon when my production team (me) gets its act together. Meanwhile, an optional extra: some music, Pink Floyd’s On the Turning Away
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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