CONSCIENCE AND WORLD CHANGE – a podtalk from 2007. It came out then on Glastonbury Radio.
Many people have been vexed over Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and the parlous state of the world. It can give a really discouraging, hand-tied feeling of not being able to do anything about it.
This podtalk addresses the matters of conscience and moral sensitivity – personal and also across society and the world. It was broadcast during the Iraq war, when similar feelings were afoot for many people. It’s taken from a book of mine, Healing the Hurts of Nations.
It might hold some answers and put things in perspective, concerning these rather vexatious issues.
Originally it was a radio programme with a really good choice of music woven into it, but for copyright reasons I can’t publish the full version – and that was a two-hour listen, while the talk alone is one hour long.
Leave it for a time when you have some space for something thought-provoking. Because it is. It has some real gems in it.
A bronze age chambered cairn at Treen, near Morvah, in Penwith. I think these were used for, amongst other things, conscious dying.
Dying consciously isn’t something to leave for the future. It starts now. Yes, even when we’re young. It’s about our lives now. Let me explain.
Dying is a process, a continuum. All of us are part-dead already, at least psychologically, even if we’re in good health. Most people are only 10-20% dead, and most are unconscious of it, except when we schmooze into the otherworld in our dreams or when we’re ill or facing overwhelming circumstances in which we are obliged to ‘die into the moment’, to let go of all of all that went before, as if this is our last moment or it is soon to be so.
It’s all to do with our relationship with the otherworld and how comfortably we function in it. This depends on the extent to which we trust our ‘subjective’ perceptions. When a close loved one pops their clogs, part of us goes with them as if by osmosis, and we can be in quite an altered state thereafter (for at least a month though also up to a year).
This is a form of privileged access to the otherworld, empathically piggybacking the loved one who has died. It’s a gift from them to you. If we indulge in loss, buying into the mindframe that causes people to say, for want of something better, “Sorry for your loss“, we’re missing the point. Is it a loss or a gain? Here lies a choice.
If it’s a loss, then you’re afraid of dying. Go on, be honest. You’re afraid, and you see it to be a negative thing. But wait, when it’s 150 Palestinians who pop their clogs in one night, in some respects I’m happier for the people who died than for those who survive. Bloody hellsbells, that’s a version of earthly life that it’s quite good to get out of, if that is the fate that befalls you.
If it’s a gain, something in you is open to dying. And, as it happens, you’ll tend to be more open to living too. Living fully, and switching up the risk factor to a healthier level. It means you are likely to die more easily, when your time comes, because this isn’t just a goodbye. It’s a hello. It’s an entry into a new world. You’re going home.
Some people will relax into it and float off when they come to the point of passing over – when they come to the medically critical point of taking a last breath. But even then, this is but a stage on an intensely transitional dying path. Death starts long before and continues afterwards. Even with a sudden or unexpected death there are often signs, which can be seen in retrospect, of foreknowledge of death – something was fixed in preparation, on some level.
Sometimes I’m told of someone’s death and I’m not surprised at all – I didn’t expect it, but once it came, it made sense in some way. Then there are some deaths where it doesn’t feel right. I’ve felt that about quite a few of the deaths that have occurred around me in the last year or more – not only were they avoidable, but also, in my judgement, it was not right that they happened. I felt that about a family, the Gaza branch of the Issa family in Bethlehem, who died en masse, over thirty of them, in October. My first response was, no, that shouldn’t have happened. There was something bad about that. But then, ‘the hand of God moves in strange ways’.
How you feel at the bucket-kicking critical point is greatly affected by your readiness for it. Some people experience it a bit like falling off a cliff – scary at first, but then you discover that you can fly. Some people can’t handle it at all, going off at a tangent, or to sleep, or they fight like hell. Some people relax into it, floating over the threshold with a gentle, sighing smile of recognition, release and relief. Then of course, there’s the question of what you choose to do next.
Well, the general rule is, if you’ve done reasonably well thus far, you’ll manage with the next bit. It depends a lot on how you’ve set this up, how ready you are. This might not take a vastness of preparation: it’s mainly about forgiveness and releasing, and how easily we do it. Letting things be.
Summer sunset over the Isles of Scilly, as seen from Tregeseal stone circle
Recently I’ve been finding out about things in my own life that I haven’t found easy to let go of. So it isn’t easy, even for one who is quite used to it.
One gift I’ve had from cancer has been the advance notice I’ve been given. I’ve been given time to pre-process dying. I’m willing to do so – and that makes a difference. Becoming disabled and debilitated started me on a change-process, and I’m grateful for having been given a time of debriefing and unwinding from life. At times it has been lonely and bleak, but that’s a necessary part of the process, part of the full spectrum of life-experience. Especially for someone who has had quite a public life.
One aspect of this is that, as an author and broadcaster, a communicator, I’ve been very productive since getting cancer. Being given notice of death gave me impetus to write and record things I haven’t said, to finalise and bring to completion many of the different threads I’ve followed in my work. It’s all going up on my growing online archive.
Completion is important because, to die consciously, we need to be reasonably at peace with things. Successful dying involves letting letting ourselves float off, and that requires that we feel okay doing so. We need to feel finished and done, with no major regrets that divert our energy and attention at death, making us struggle when it’s already too late. There will be regrets, but they need to have been dug over and sifted through, to uncover the abiding truth of them. Often these regrets come from judgements, tropes and memes of the time we’ve lived in and, ‘in the eyes of God’, they tend to look a bit different.
In recent years, as part of a self-forgiveness process, I’ve become aware of guilt and shame I have carried for things that quite often were other people’s projections – projections I had taken on – and they were not quite as big and real and bad as they had been made out to be. In some cases, though I was deemed to be wrong, I was right, or at least more right than I was judged to be – though sometimes it takes decades. I realised that my own responsibility for what happened was different from the responsibility people had laid on me – often to cover their own asses. Even so, I am responsible inasmuch as I manifested these experiences, and they’re my responsibility and creation. And it always, always, always takes two to tango.
When you die, you can’t do anything more about life – you’ve had it, and that was it. You can’t fix anything, correct anything, re-run the movie or click the ‘undo’ button. Not that you could do so earlier in life, but at least you could delude yourself you could. You can do so to some extent while you have some life left, since there are things you can correct, reconcile, heal or re-work. But as you approach death, especially if disablement and disability are involved, your capacity to do things reduces, your world grows smaller and it becomes too late to do anything. You just have to accept that that is that. Bombs that were thrown cannot be unthrown, even when the craters are covered over.
It’s still possible to come to peace about things inwardly, without reconciliation having to come from outside. We have to accept what we did and what we omitted to do – especially the latter – and own up, examine our regrets, say sorry at least within ourselves, accept that we could have done things differently, understand what it was like being affected by the things we did or omitted to do, look at the true, enduring outcomes, engage in self-forgiveness and forgiving others, and then let things be. It was as it was, and that’s that.
My old friend Charley Barley, roaming around Carn Kenidjack. We dropped out of university together, fifty years ago.
There are wider and greater significances to things, and it helps to start seeing them. A friend, Mike, died of despair, drugs and alcohol and, of course, everyone deemed that this was not good. Well, from the viewpoint of the living and the default judgements of society, this might be so. But I followed him over to the other side to check him out, and he was happy, radiant, relieved to have died and actually having a lot of fun – and I was happy for him when I found out. Those who prefer to stay with the default judgement of his seemingly regrettable death see his death as a sad thing, and I do not. I’m glad for him. It’s all in how we see and judge things.
I’m sure we’ll meet again, upstairs, Mike and I. As is the case with a good soul-brother, Terry, who unexpectedly blipped out during a hernia operation – he was the caterer at the Hundredth Monkey Camps in the mid-1990s. At the very first of the Glastonbury Camps in the mid-1980s, the camp cafe was called ‘Pie in the Sky’ and, guess what, we’ll revive it on the other side, and you’re welcome to come along when your time comes. It’s free. For the good souls who ran it back then – people like Diana and Bron – the good news is that no washing up will be needed and the food will be self-cooking!
I’ve come to the end of my ‘second line’ cancer treatment (of five). I’m receiving no more treatment of Dara, the immunotherapy drug that has kept me alive for three years. It has worked well and now it’s losing efficacy and my readings are rising. Right now, I’m on nothing – this is an eight-week ‘wait and watch’ phase, to see what happens, before I start a new treatment called Lenidalomide, or Len. This is probably what will happen, though it depends on further blood samples and observations. I’m in rather a limbo.
I can feel the cancer right now. My bones are beginning to twinge with stripes of pain. My spirits are sagging. I feel the dying process accelerate.
However, I’m better off than before because I’ve learned a lot in the last four years about living with a blood cancer. (It’s Myeloma, a form of radiation sickness). In the six-ish months before my first clear symptoms appeared (my lower back collapsed), technically I was in good health, but something was not right. A dark cloud was settling on me. I was feeling constrained, tied and weighed down. My hope and light were fading. Something in me felt desperate, despairing, as if something was wrong, though I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
Well, right now I’m getting those feelings again. Except the difference is that, this time, I can recognise the feeling and I know more about what to do, and not to do. I’m not pushing against it or trying to ‘get better’, or trying to prove that everything is alright and normal when it isn’t. I’m not anxiously looking for remedies and escape routes (though actually I’m on some new holistics), because I’ll die at the right time, in the right way, if I have anything to do with it, and that’s the way it’s going to be. The angels will take me out at the right time. It’s necessary to entrust myself to this process. It’s an act of will.
So yesterday I went to bed with my hot water bottle, a mug of tea and some munchies and I lay there, out of my head, unable to marshall myself, feeling wan and weepy, missing company and watching the jackdaws sitting on the wind.
I was stuck in a loop. Problem is, people say to me, “Just give me a ring if there’s a need”. But then, when I ring, I have to explain how I’m feeling, discussing the matter at some length, then to have to make more calls when I find out that they’re not available right now, though please feel free to ring me if ever there’s a need – which I just did.
I’ve instituted a new rule of dropping it when I’ve made three attempts. Sometimes I just have to look after myself. Problem is, nowadays, everyone is so busy, and since they’re volunteering to help out of the goodness of their hearts, I cannot complain about the quality of service! I tend to get lots of advice, and sometimes I have to say, “But I need actual help!“. “Oh, perhaps you ought to ring social services…”. The tricky bit here is that I’m often in a state of mind where due diplomacy and tact are not easy, and I cannot talk at length or discuss grand philosophisms, miracle cures or lists of things I should do.
“Would it work if I came next Thursday?“. Well, the way I’m going, I have no idea what next Thursday will be like, and life doesn’t go according to plan when your body-mind are shutting down and you’re heading for a big, yawning chasm of unwellness. The best remedy is a hot water bottle, a bit of ‘there there’ and someone to sit with you. Just the sound of those knitting needles clacking away can be very comforting when you’re in a highly altered state and hovering on the edge.
Anyway, the feeling I have right now is a bit like that point in an airplane flight where, 200 miles from landing, the pilot powers down the engines and you go into a long glide. It feels like that. There’s something rather relaxing about it. It’s a bit more effortless. Internally, it has caused me to lapse into greater levels of forgiveness and acceptance, to accelerate the flow of letting-go.
Yet something else in me wants to do a few things before I go. I want to share a few outstanding issues, to complete the story. One of these is local to me: I’ve proposed a series of three workshops on the ancient sites of West Penwith. We shall see whether the venue I’ve approached is interested. But something is different now: if someone says to me, ‘not this year, but perhaps next year’ they’re not getting it. I’m unsure I shall be on good form, or even alive, next year. People say, “Oh, don’t be pessimistic – of course you’ll be around, and besides, we need you!“. Well, perhaps, but if you need me, please get me while I’m here – and that could well mean this year.
Alternatively, please do not express regret and loss when I pop my clogs, because I was indeed here and then the angels took me out. I think I’ll manage one more Oak Dragon camp, this year, and one reason I’m inviting friends to come to the camp is not just because I want to bring the Oak Dragon tribe (a lovely bunch) a few new members. It’s because we can be together for a week in the same magic space, and it could well be the last time this is possible. This is why I invite you to consider coming.
If you can’t, then a second option is that I’ll be speaking at the Glastonbury Symposium (in Glastonbury Town Hall) on Sunday 28th July. With luck I’ll be doing a few, but not many, gigs in Glastonbury and elsewhere – this year, while I still can, and if there are organisers for it. Next year, 2025 – that’s in the lap of the gods and I don’t get the feeling my head, heart and soul will be good for it. We’ll have to wait and see. But it’s not so cool if I forget my lines half way through a talk, staring blankly at you, as if to ask, “Where am I? And why am I standing here?“.
The Pathless Path to the Gateless Gate. Near Zennor, Penwith.
This kind of stuff is important. When I ‘went up’ with cancer, I made a prayer. At the time it looked like I might have one year to live. I was a ragged pile of bones. I prayed that I might be able to bring as many things to completion as I could. In my last blog I told of how one issue – my unfinished humanitarian work – bugged me at the time, and I made a prayer for resolution. Well, BAM, it came to me in Sept-Oct 2022 and afterwards – the Ghana mission I wrote about last time, the Tuareg, about whom I’ve also written, and then in October 2023, the Palestine disaster. I can’t say I’ve resolved those issues, and none are looking good for the future. But something has been happening inside. A cleansing and releasing.
For it’s not the specific worldly issues that need completing – they can’t, and each of these three missions will resolve themselves after, not before, my death. But it’s the inner stuff. It’s not just about the worldly outcomes of the work I’ve done – much of which has on the surface been undone in recent months – but it’s the inner process of engagement with these issues, and the pain and the satisfaction, the dilemmas and truths and the intensity and pathos of it all, which is the important stuff. How to forgive myself and release it when someone in my care dies.
Just before she died, a year ago, Felicia Otoo thanked me deeply for all I had done for her and for her child Phyllis. We cried together, thousands of miles apart. She was dead the next day. Two months earlier I had adopted Phyllis, to give Felicia a sense that at least someone cared. Phyllis was renamed Phyllis Kenobi Otoo. I had saved their lives at least four times in the preceding months. I told her that I shall be joining them soon. And I shall.
There are two former students in Gaza from whom I have not heard for over two months. They’re now in the ‘missing, presumed dead’ category. I’ve been talking to them inwardly. There’s a great gift here that wasn’t there before. I can assure these dying people that I shall be joining them soon – and this gives them some comfort. Yes, a dead (psychic) humanitarian worker can still be useful, even after death!
Life always has its compensations. To be honest, though I can feel death creeping closer – I’d estimate myself to be 75% dead and rising – there’s some relief that comes with it. I’ve found the last few years difficult, facing much of it alone, and while this has had worthy rewards and I’m not complaining, I shall also be relieved when it ends, when I can drop it all, consign these matters to history and go home.
Cloud beings at Praa Sands
I’m finding life in the 2020s to be more complex than I can handle. I got scammed by an Indian guy online in December. He was part of a really neat scamming operation, pretending to be a BT engineer. Usually I’m really astute with things like this and rumble them quickly, but this time I was tired and not thinking clearly. I found my PayPal account quickly being raided for £300, sent to some address in China – but I got there just in time to stop another £1,200 following after it. Though I managed to save the day, it was costly and I can’t handle this kind of stuff any more. I was a tech pioneer thirty years ago, and look at me now.
Even so, this spacing-out process has its virtues. It causes me to pull back, excluding increasing swathes of things from my life – things that are too much to handle. Such as train journeys where I can’t trust whether the train will actually come. Or shopping trips in busy supermarkets where I have to stand in a queue with ten mobile phones around me, killing me slowly. Or long conversations where I can’t keep up with long-winded diversions, footnotes and appendices when I just need to get to the punchline while I still remember what the story was all about.
This pulling back is part of the conscious dying process. It starts now. It’s a winding-down process, and I feel I’m somewhere around the age of seven, growing down. I can still stand though!
It involves setting up circumstances, if I can, where I won’t be plagued with people asking favours of me when I just need to go to bed and be left in peace. It involves setting up head-spaces where I’m feeling reconciled even with people who don’t want to reconcile (or they don’t have time, or they’re afraid, or they’re leaving it till a ‘later’ that never comes).
It involves laying things to rest, applying the ‘Fuck-it‘ mantra, putting stuff down and letting things be. Dropping the burdens. Forgetting my fucking pills. Making a mandala of the life that I have had. Enjoying the semi-weightlessness of lying on my back in bed, listening to the Desert Dwellers and the raindrops on the skylight.
Usually, today I’d be buzzing on steroids and cancer drugs, and quite often I would write a blog or record a podcast on that day – it channels the buzzing into something productive. But I’m not buzzing on steroids any more. Instead, two friends over in Botallack took me to the Dog and Rabbit in St Just and I had coffee and pear cake, and that set me buzzing instead. That, and what we talked about there, is what produced this sudden, unpremeditated blog.
Penwith is bathed in sea fog. The woodstove is burning aromatic silver birch. Dinner is warming up on the stove. And the Atlantic winds are whooshing through the bare tree branches to the occasional hooting of owls.
Thanks for reading. With love, Palden.
PS. For those of you who listened to my audiobook, remember the allegations of corruption that were used to discredit the school where I worked, leading to the withdrawal of foreign funding at exactly the wrong moment? And remember what I wrote some blogs back about hasbarah – the telling of stories that are the opposite to what is actually happening? Well, in the recent accusations against UNRWA, which has 30,000 employees, exactly the same tactic is being used again, twelve years later. This is classic dirty hasbarah. The nations that have withdrawn funding should be ashamed of themselves – and my own nation, Britain, is one of them.
An eclipse over Penwith. The Earth and Moon are a co-orbiting double planet. The only other one in our solar system is Pluto-Charon.
Not all of the time, but at times it rained quite a bit. Nevertheless, Oak Dragon has been doing camps for 35 years, and British weather doesn’t stop it, even in force nine gales. Under the shelters, into our tents and vans, or into the domes we went, and sat it out, chattering. When I came home my joints and muscles ached, and it took three days for that to go.
But the compensating factors, the payoffs, far outweighed all that living in a planetary-body decrepitude I now live with. It was great. There’s a deep, magical spiritual uplift that dawns on everyone, and a family feeling, and there’s something special about disconnecting from the world for a week, as if going to another planet (which it is) – something captivating and engaging, moving and clarifying to the spirit. It’s like a multilevel recharge, and people’s souls start shining through.
In a way it’s a taste of future society. Conditions while camping are quite simple (we’ve got all the kit for it though), yet there’s somethinghere about a potential society where people have reunited and re-entrusted themselves to each other, and where the energy-saving effect of living in a community lifts off, opening out the possibilities for everyone.
One of the biggest things is the profound everyday sharings between people. Exchanges and connections, with an openness that allows us to experience more of the soul more and less of the adopted, conditioned behaviours in each of us. But group events – simple yet moving ceremonies, mystery-journeys, shared meals and the amateurishly uproarious show on the last night – create a kind of experiential sharing that is memorable to have been a part of.
One day, a wicker coffin was built in the middle of the camp. We all thought about ancestors of ours with whom we sought to reconnect, and wrote messages to them, during the day. Meanwhile an enormous pyre was built, with a flower-bedecked coffin containing our messages. With due aplomb, up in flames it went, and our thoughts and prayers went with them, and we could feel the ancestors close, and all of us were entranced by the enormous blaze.
Special moments. The theme of this year’s camp was ‘the Triple Goddess’ – the maiden, the mother and crone (though I think ‘the biddy’ is better). The camp was divided in three parts and we explored each aspect of the Goddess sequentially through the week. That was great. On the first night we were taken in small groups on a journey in the dusk to meet the goddesses, one by one (enacted by members of the camp), and we were given teachings and face-paintings and oracular moments.
Photo by Chrissie Ferngrove
As the founder of Oak Dragon (our first season was 1987), I was deeply moved by all this – I was shedding tears daily! In sharing circles I’ve even learned how to talk lucidly while crying buckets! They’re still here and at it, the Dragons, and many of them thought this was the best camp for many years. It’s particularly touching on a deep level to realise how, had I and we not started this, hardly any of these people, this family, would even have met. Many children would not have been born. Many lives would not have been reset and restarted. Many other miracles would not have happened. There’s something deeply moving about this and I felt privileged to witness it and play a part in it, as the Dragons’ kinda grandfather.
Also, I was so happy and relieved to see twenty- and thirty-somethings taking the reins, leading the circles, making the rules and teaching us wisdoms afresh. Many Millennials give me a feeling of confidence that the world will be alright in future times – they’ve got hearts and brains, good hands and broad shoulders. There was a good spread of ages at the camp, and there are signs that Oak Dragon might still be around in 35 years’ time.
You missed it. But there are coming years (it happens in late July and early August at Lughnasa). If I can, I’m going back. You can do that: you can come and go each year, and return years later, and the family, the tribe, rolls on, and you become part of it – your presence is your membership. You can come for the first weekend of the camp if you wish – though everyone who does so tends to regret leaving just as the camp is gaining momentum, so I don’t recommend it!
Now it’s true, I’m good at writing PR blurbs for things I like supporting, but actually, though clearly I am thoroughly biased, what I’ve written here isn’t too biased, actually. So it might sound like a sales pitch, but actually it’s pretty close to the mark. I had a great time, and it has changed my perspective, and I’m looking at life in a different way from just three weeks ago. Personally, I was honoured to be there, and I seem to be under strict instructions to come back next year. I’ll try. For me, it’s a bit like taking medication for the soul. I’ll leave it at that.
I even had the sneaky thought that it might be really good dying at a camp! What a way to go.
Meanwhile, I’m back in West Cornwall, and there’s more to come. And I have a pile of campfire smoke-infested clothing awaiting a sunny day for washing and drying them. Blimey, living on Earth ain’t half complex sometimes.
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.
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.
I’ve been visiting Glastonbury for Easter weekend, and I’ve done two speaking gigs, one podcast interview and a lot of hobnobbing. And cake.
and other tales…
Glastonbury Tor, as seen from Pilton
Tuesday morning, 11th April, Butleigh, near Glastonbury… Today my friend Claudia from Cornwall is taking me home, bless her – she’s driven up here to pick me up. Typically for one with a Moon in Gemini, I’m looking forward to going home and also I am not. I’m looking forward to it because, as a partially-disabled cancer patient, my lovely little home is, well, my refuge. Also I can detox from the generously donated phone radiation I’ve taken in over the last few days – almost everyone I pass or sit near to has a toxic radiation generator on them, and it gets sprayed all over me. It’s weird.
I’m not really looking forward to going home because, in the last year or two, since losing my partner and my capacity to drive, I’ve been isolated in a way I’ve never experienced before. This winter I crossed that strange boundary between aloneness and loneliness, and while I manage quite well with loneliness, compared to many, I don’t like it – it’s an inward-turning vortex, and it’s easy to get sidelined and forgotten by other people, busy as they are with other things.
This said, being alone has its value, and many of us don’t get enough of it. But over winter I’ve been drying up inside and talking to myself too much. If my health condition deteriorates, there is no one to watch over me. It says something about our society when, as was recently mentioned in the UK news, a person’s death is discovered because of the smell. If that’s the case with me, then so be it – after all, my creaky body will already have been abandoned and I’ll be somewhere else. Our society has big issues around death.
Glastonbury Abbey
But then, I’m a strange mixture of a hermit and public figure – it’s the bit in between, personal relationships, where in the end I don’t do so well. That’s classic for an Aspie: I don’t sit easily in the expectation-fields many people quite reasonably have, as a friend, neighbour, partner or parent, and I’ve never sat easily in the boxes society seems to need each of us to sit inside.
This said, as soon as I was diagnosed with cancer in 2019 I found myself sitting inside a neat, simple ‘cancer’ box, unexpectedly eligible for levels of social, financial and medical support that previously were outside my reach – and without that support I would now be dead. It’s a bit strange, being valued by officialdom and mainstream society, at a time of life when my productive value has declined dramatically. I’m now costing society around £200,000 per year. Just my cancer medication costs £4,000 per month. In contrast, twenty years ago I was Glastonbury’s online PR man (running www.isleofavalon.co.uk) and Somerset County Council reckoned I’d raised the town’s local GDP by at least 5-7%, but I still made nothing from it – so this late-life support is rather bizarre, even though welcome.
Yet, when I was lying there in December 2019, newly diagnosed with cancer, hovering just outside death’s door and gulping down large dollops of acceptance together with large numbers of pills and infusions, I decided to make the best of my new situation, come what may, and certainly it is true that I’ve started a new chapter of life. A while ago I revisited an experience I had around age six, in which I feared growing up and going through the full human life-process. I wanted somehow to skip straight from childhood to old age. Now, prematurely aged and reduced by cancer, being an old crock does strangely suit me, and I’ve found a new expression and creativity in this situation, blogging, podcasting and now writing a second post-cancer book (the first was about ancient sites and the second is about world healing).
In the early months of dealing with cancer, I started assessing my condition on a basis of perceived age. After a life in which I had only rarely had illnesses, suddenly I was flattened and floored by cancer. I shot twenty years forward into my nineties, in terms of physical ability and inner perspective, doddering around like the Ancient of Days. As time went on and I started reviving, I grew a bit younger and settled around my mid-eighties. Nowadays I’d put myself around age 80, varying between better and worse days, though physically I’m 72. So I’ve been fast-tracked into a new phase. Yet my spirit has brightened, as if to compensate for a loss of physical strength, ability and vitality – spirit kinda holds me up, now that life is twice as weighty.
Glastonbury High Street
My cancer story started very suddenly one day in late August 2019 in my former partner’s back garden (she was out somewhere): life fundamentally changed that day. I was pulling on a tussock, clearing space for a log-pile, and my back suddenly cracked, very loudly. It was both an external and an internal sound. I was stunned, standing stock still, swaying giddily, and the pain gradually came on over a few minutes until I could do nothing except stagger inside and slowly sit down, seriously excruciated with searing pain.
Four of the bottom vertebrae of my back had collapsed and I was in agony for months. It took ten weeks to find out that I didn’t have just a back problem – I had cancer, and it had me. In the NHS they often ask you to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, and it was seven on a good day and nine on a bad day – though nowadays I just get one to three, more of a perpetual stiffened inertia and achiness.
With Myeloma or bone-marrow cancer, permanent changes to the blood cause bone-formation to stop, leading to a softening and hollowing out of the bones. It’s a toxicity-related cancer caused in most cases by electromagnetic and nuclear radiation or by certain specific neurotoxic chemicals – in my case it’s quite safely the radiation, looking back on my past history. I’ve known myself to be electrosensitive since the mid-1970s, when I was 25, though it only became a problem around the Millennium when mobile phones and wi-fi started coming into common use.
Chalice Well
But there’s a deeper dimension to this. It’s a disease of sensitivity in an insensitive world, and there’s something good and right about that. I’m more concerned about people who don’t or can’t feel radiation than about those who do. Myeloma concerns blood – life-force and will-to-live – and bones – the structure that holds us up, enabling us to experience living inside a physically constrained body. These are quite fundamental planetary issues, and I’ve dug around in myself to understand how my own planetary-incarnational challenges have served as a basis for cancer.
In a strange way it has been a gift, giving a new perspective and something to work with – every day is an uphill climb, forcing me to focus my wits on doing life as well as I can, making the best of what I have, and accepting what I don’t and can’t have and do – the sex, thrills and rock’n’roll parts of life (though I’m doing alright with drugs, both prescribed and alternative). Having had a rather full life, cancer has added a new dimension that, strangely, fits my story. It’s the current stage on my path. The whole look-and-feel of life has changed.
I’ve been visiting Glastonbury for Easter weekend (it was my home from 1980 to 2008), and I’ve done two speaking gigs, one podcast interview and a lot of hobnobbing. And cake. It has been wonderful, medicinal to the spirit, and I really appreciate the welcome I’ve been given and the interesting conversations we’ve had. It lights me up.
Chalice Well
It has been a radiation nightmare too. At times my nervous system has been juddering, the amygdala in the back of my head has been screaming a high-pitched whine, and after two days I was bordering into the next stages, flu symptoms and heart palpitations – though I’m learning how to hold them off sufficiently while under fire. As I get more irradiated, symptoms gradually escalate: despite all the miracle cures, crystals and gizmos people advocate and offer to counteract radiation, the only option is to get out, find a low-radiation refuge and spend 48 hours detoxing. So if I walk out on you, please don’t take offence – I just need to get out, and it’s that simple.
It’s a strange, new cause of loneliness – I cannot hobnob easily with people since they literally shoot me (and each other) with a rain of EM jangle and noise. Worse, people are, or seem, mostly unaware of it, even if they’re Greens or members of Extinction Rebellion. Hardly anyone thinks of the disastrous effect mobile phones have on plants, animals, the ecosystem and the world’s climate.
Anyway, that is as it is, and I can do little except partially tolerate it and partially keep my distance. It means I can’t hang out with friends unless I’m okay about being poisoned that day, and unless I have two clear days afterwards to recombobulate my energy-bodies before anything else can happen.
Chalice Hill
Many old friends came to the ‘Evening with Palden’ on Friday, and it was so good to see them and share some insights I’ve been coming up with. This is where being alone has its virtues, since it enables me to step outside current social groupthink, to see things from a more reflective viewpoint, less affected by others’ perceptions and the current preoccupations, social judgements and projections of the time. As a writer and podcaster it has allowed me time and space to invest in conceiving, writing and recording material. I’m really happy that it seems to be saying something to readers and listeners. It gives new meaning to a rather time-wealthy life like mine, and a way of contributing something to time-poor people’s lives like many of yours.
I’m not one who is happy sitting round entertaining myself as pensioners are supposed to, or sitting there like a block of wood. I see no point hanging around on Earth without having a meaningful life and making a contribution. A long life is not the main point. I’ve had a whole lot of life and feel quite happy with what I’ve been given. Well, sort of. Of course things could have been better, but it’s life’s imperfections that are a key element in the Planet Earth experience. In the end, that’s what we’re here for.
Frankly, I’ll be relieved when the time comes to go. Life has been one long saga of feeling as if I’m on the wrong planet. I’ll be happy to go home and be myself again. Well, for a recharge, at least. But before I go, there’s more to do and be. I’ve been much blessed, living in a time when so many ideas have been conceived, and the seeds and roots of a new civilisation have been laid. So I’m leaving traces of what life has given me, in print, sound and online, for folks younger than me to imbibe, if it’s useful to them.
The Tor from Maesbury Castle in the Mendips
When I give talks, I’m usually quite unaware of what I have said. I just hope for the best and try to avoid making big bloopers – us Aspies, sometimes we make what we believe to be a bland statement of fact, when for others it can be thoroughly upsetting, confronting and offensive. But I seem to get through each talk without major mishap. It comes to an end, and everyone seems to be happy and glowing, though I come out of it feeling as if I’ve missed something, slightly bereft, but relieved that people are smiling. I’m used to it now. I made some notes of talking points before leaving for Glastonbury but, typically, by the time I got there, I couldn’t find them. Lo behold, they turned up again after I got home. Magic.
At the Legends Conference on Sunday I delivered an entirely new talk. After what seemed like fifteen minutes, Tor came along to say my hour was nearly up, and I was really surprised. I think I managed to make my main point, squeezed in at the end, but I could have made it better. The talk started with an overview of the geomancy of ancient sites, using my home area of West Penwith in Cornwall as a working example, moving on to climate and environmental control and geopolitical healing through consciousness work. This is the gist of my new book, ‘Shining Land’, about the megalithic engineering of consciousness. I’m having difficulty getting it published, but it’ll come out sometime.
Thank you to Lillah Lotus and Rose Temple Morris for putting me up, and to Samia and Dave, Tor and Matthew Fellows for staging things. And to people I met, for being present in this world and sharing a wee slice of their lives. And to Briony, who comes from a similar world to my own, and who had me sussed in minutes. Also to Cho Hopking for teleporting me to Glastonbury, and Claudia Caolin for returning me to Cornwall.
During 2023 I have two objectives, over and above enjoying life: first, to develop more ways of spending time upcountry, with one or two bolt-holes where I can stay – the trick is to find somewhere I fit easily and am no hassle to have around, as a person with special needs; and, second, to see whether the world healing project I am proposing is actually likely to fly – that’s interesting because, with only a few years to live, I cannot lead it. So that’s my agenda for this year, and enough to be getting on with.
Today, Saturday, is spring-like and, having done my clothes-washing duties, I’m summoning my energies to get up the hill behind the farm, to the bronze age platform barrows up on top, 4,000 years old and still doing their geomantic thing. The badgers have dug a new sett on one of the barrows – I’m sure the archaeologists will love that! You can see for fifty miles up there, with a 360° panorama, eastwards to Carn Brea, Mount’s Bay and St Michael’s Mount, and westwards to the Isles of Scilly. I’ll mosey past the main badger sett (apparently it has been there for centuries) and the iron age courtyard house (a mere 2,000 years old). That’s my adventure for today. Well, apart from the blueberry muesli I had for breakfast.
Thanks and well done for reading this! And, guess what, this blog was written using full-on, genuine, certified Human Intelligence. For better or worse.
Love from Pennwydh, the Far Beyond, Paldywan
All of the photos of Glastonbury I took around 2004-7
I’m doing a series about cliff sanctuaries in West Penwith, Cornwall, where I live. I forgot to post the first one here when I did it, so you’re getting a bonus blog this time, about two cliff sanctuaries. The first is about Cape Cornwall and the second about Bosigran Castle. Also, at the bottom is mention of my forthcoming visit to Glastonbury at Easter – if you happen to live in or around it.
Cape Cornwall as seen from Nancherrow valley
Cape Cornwall
Down’ere in West Penwith, Cornwall (right at the end) we have an important coastal feature called cliff castles – though I call them cliff sanctuaries, a far better descriptor. Archaeologically they are customarily dated back to the iron age (from 500 BCE on), though actually they go back to the neolithic 3000s BCE.
Cape Cornwall and the Brisons rocks from near Cape Kenidjack
That is, when this area was mostly forested, the main places you could get out of it, ‘get some space’, were on the neolithic tors and hills and the cliff sanctuaries. So these formed the first major ancient sites in the area.
This is one cliff sanctuary, Kilgooth Ust (pr: ‘east’), the Gooseback of St Just, or Cape Cornwall, and it’s near St Just. It was severely affected by the tin trade 150ish years ago – hence the remnant chimney and the houses. But it is a classic, and it’s one of the major alignment centres of Penwith. Originally it had four barrows on its neck. Here’s an alignments map: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/d/viewer…
Cape Cornwall as seen from Carn Gloose
Around Cape Cornwall were some of the richest deposits of metals in ancient times, with arsenic-rich tin, gold and other rare metals used in metal smelting to create different qualities and finishes, from around 1800 BCE. On either side of Kilgooth Ust was a landing bay where metal ingots were exported.
The rocks offshore are called The Brisons. It’s the left-hand, southern one that is the energy-centre there. In neolithic and bronze age times they were probably not islands.
Cape Cornwall as seen from Sennen
I’ll post a few more cliff sanctuaries as time goes on. See the map to see the other cliff sanctuaries in the area, forming a necklace around Penwith, the ancient Belerion, or ‘radiant land’. These were sanctified spaces, and you can feel it.
Until someone did a proper theodolite job in late Victorian times, this was regarded as the Land’s End. But actually, what’s now called Land’s End is a matter of yards further west. But this, in a way, is the energetic Land’s End.
Bosigran Castle
Bos chy carn, ‘home house [under the] crag’, often translated as ‘Ygraine’s home’ (Map ref: SW 4169 3688)
This is one of my favourite cliff sanctuaries, mainly because of its friendly atmosphere. There’s a story that it was the home of a queen – Ygraine, after King Arthur’s mythic mother, but it has other possible meanings too. It has a hospitable, sociable feeling. So, this queen, whoever she was, might well have been a great lady, leaving a strong imprint.
Today, it attracts lots of rock climbers – avid Bristolians in VW vans. You can be sitting there listening to the waves, looking wistfully over the sea toward Ireland, when a clinking starts up and, sooner or later, a helmeted climber appears over the parapet, trailing ropes and looking pleased. On one occasion a school of minke whales cruised past and the climbers were spellbound, frozen to the spot, hanging in weird positions on their ropes. I was moved too, preoccupied as I had been with my prehistoric ponderings and customary flask of anthropocene tea.
The top of Bosigran Castle is rocky and divided into a number of different natural spaces. Carn Galva is behind
Bosigran has a pleasantly healing and relieving feeling. Good for spending time when the weather is pleasant, it’s a great place for picnics, in both Neolithic and modern times. It could easily accommodate around 200 people for a summer weekend shindig, though there is no evidence and little likelihood of permanent occupation (too exposed in winter). Summer nights spent around a campfire would have been wonderful. It lies below Carn Galva, the magic mountain of Penwith, and perhaps the tribe that had Bosigran Castle lived around Carn Galva, coming down to the cliff sanctuary for special occasions. Summer sunsets there can be special.
The ‘throne’
A rocky Iron Age rampart sections it off from the surrounding land, though defence is only one possible reason it is there. More likely it was simply an energy-threshold, since when you cross it you get the feeling you’re entering special space. There are several distinct areas on top of Bosigran, each with rock platforms that could serve as outdoor ‘rooms’ – so it’s a place where a number of things could happen at the same time. At one of these areas is a throne-like rock where one can imagine a chief, wise-woman or druid sitting, with their flock arrayed around them.
The logan rock
The top of Bosigran is littered with earthfast rocks and, apart from the boundary rampart, there are few signs of rock-moving or the placing of stone, except in two instances. There is a logan or rocking stone on the top, near the ‘throne’. These are flattish granite boulders balanced in such a way that they could be rocked. It’s possible they were natural, or placed there or adjusted slightly to make them rock. What the purpose of logan stones was, we do not know, but the ancients clearly thought them special. These were the bass drums of the Neolithic era. Perhaps people drummed along to the deep rocking sound, building up a stirring, thumping beat.
The ‘council circle’
Further along the left side of the headland and down a bit, there is a sunken, west-facing area with an array of rocks which suggest a ‘council circle’, as if it were a place for undisturbed discussions.
Nearby is a line of three rocks with their lined-up edges aligned toward Pendeen Watch, a neighbouring cliff sanctuary. These are (I think) deliberately oriented stones intended to highlight the relationship between the two cliff sanctuaries.
The zawn (inlet)
Bosigran is a good example of a cliff sanctuary potentially serving as a coastal beacon site – the prehistoric equivalent of a lighthouse. A few of the cliff sanctuaries will have been connected with trade, but this is unlikely at Bosigran. This was a place for gatherings and events. It’s a pleasant half-mile walk down from the road, and it’s worth going down into the zawn (inlet) on the western side too, to watch the seabirds, waves and climbers. There are some interesting tin-mining remains in the valley, with signs of tin-streaming methods having been used in centuries past.
I shall be in Glastonbury over Easter and doing two gigs while there.
One is at the Legend Conference in the Assembly Rooms on Sunday 9th April at 10am on Sunday morning, and here’s the blurb…
———–
Consciousness work and the way it can affect our reality
My talk will be focusing on consciousness work and the way it can affect our reality. I’ll be going back to our roots, in the neolithic and beyond, to the early inner imaginal work that gave root to the core stuff of our culture, to our beliefs and ways of perceiving things. Using my home area, West Penwith in Cornwall, as an example, I’ll show how ancient sites were built for consciousness work in order to penetrate and engineer the heart of reality – amongst other things affecting the climate, the ecosystem and human society. Which happen to be issues that are a wee bit important today.
Forty years ago, the Assembly Rooms hosted some very early experiments in ‘working the circle’ – something that is now accepted and common – and Glastonbury is a place with deep historic and esoteric roots too. So the heart of my talk is about consciousness work in the imaginal sphere, how this might be used in jogging the prevailing reality-field of our world, and how it all started several millennia ago.
I shall also be doing ‘An Evening with Palden Jenkins’ on Friday evening, 7th April, hosted by the Inner Light Community, and that will be announced on their site and on my Facebook page soon.
On Saturday I’ll be around if anyone wishes to meet up. However, I’ll need you not to wear me out, and to have your phone switched off! I’m a bit of an old crock and I’m electrosensitive (my cancer is caused by EM radiation). Still here though!
It was deeply moving to walk into the Assembly Rooms in Glastonbury to a hall full of amazing people. I had been there so many times over the years, organising things or performing, and now, here we were in 2022, and these people were all waiting to hear whatever I was to come up with.
Whatever, indeed. I had a rough idea of talking points, but my talk didn’t follow that track. It went deeper and further than I thought it might. It’s funny when that happens: something in me suddenly decides to change course or to go deeper or faster, and off we go, plunging into the unknown.
While I’m speaking, I see the faces of people in the audience but my normal way of assessing their responses, watching body-language, is kinda switched off. Something else is doing it. I’m strangely unaware of what I’m saying. At the end of my talk, when I stopped and saw people lit up and clapping, I got a funny feeling of relief, as if it was a surprise. Which, in a way, it was.
There came a moment when my mind interjected on the side, wondering whether the talk was dragging and drooping, but that thought evaporated as fast as it came. Next day, Caroline, whose perceptions I find worth listening to, reported that my talk kept lifting, building and covering a lot of ground. I was glad to hear that, since it’s a bit strange being the person who missed much of what went on.
I didn’t miss everything. I’m aware of the gist of what I’m saying but I’m not following it – it goes past me. This isn’t verbatim channelling – I don’t get words or word-based concepts, and it’s me who does the translation and interpretation of what they’re trying to bring forth. A sub-verbal part of my psyche is busy meta-processing. My brains process the concepts and verbiage. And I need to slip into a rather altered, hyperintuitive state to do it.
Bundles of material are dropped in and it’s for me to unravel and unpack them. There’s also plenty of stuff lodged in my psyche from years of doing this. I’ve got used to the feeling of a dropped-in bundle and what to do with it. I wouldn’t call myself an advanced psychic – it’s just that I’ve chosen to listen, take note, hear and accept what comes up inside as real and valid. Not indiscriminately, since it still goes through my filters, to make sure it makes sense.
St Michael’s Mount, from Botrea Hill
Over time, things have evolved. I went through a critical breakthrough at age 42. Up to then, something in my busy intellect was interfering. Something doubted what I was getting, trying to detach from it, check the facts or worry over the improbably crazy yet ultimately quite useful insights I sometimes came up with. Then, one day, I had a deep inner experience. I found myself walking backwards toward an abyss – and walking backwards is something we humans are built to avoid at all costs. I had a moment of panic, followed by a critical moment in which I made an act of trust.
I went over, falling backwards over the edge. Falling, falling, this was an Alice in Wonderland moment, and I didn’t know what would happen. Would I just go splat? Suddenly, in mid-fall, something inside me snapped together, I turned, spread my wings and found myself flying, and a tremendous sense of uplift and a feeling of agency followed. I was flying over a wide landscape, safe on my wings. It became clear that, in the innerworlds, I had to trust my perceptions, natural capacities and ‘inner friends’ like never before. From then on, it all worked better and clearer.
I’ve been public speaking since age 15 – and, before that, would you believe, I was quiet and shy. I became good at notes-free speaking. Up to age 35ish, I did it on thought and preparation, but then something started happening. Two weeks before an event I’d have a clear idea what to speak about and how to do it, but as the time came closer the idea would melt away. This worried me. I was suffering fear of embarassment and of screwing up in public, and I knew it. One day I was nervous and decided, for want of anything better, to entrust myself to it, let go of fear and simply get on stage, take three deep breaths and start with the first thing that entered my head. This worked brilliantly. It became my new approach. But the trade-off was that, after that time, I was no longer fully aware of what I’d said while speaking.
Palden at Avebury. Photo by Rebecca Brain.
In the last three years cancer has changed my psyche. A combination of the cancer, the chemo drugs, the deep states I entered while ill, the fatigue and long hours alone… these moved the circuitry around, changing my perspective and perceptions. My capacity to deal with facts, names, information, decisions and left-brained issues declined, and my right-brained, creative, insightful, intuitive side grew stronger. I became less concerned about life and its intricacies and more like the Fool on the Hill. Out came my blogs and podcasts, surprising me at what was coming out and the way it was doing so. Something new was starting up.
The fluent side of me is what you see in my talks. But ask me whether I want tea or coffee and I’ll probably look blankly at you. On Glastonbury High St an old friend stopped me. Joseph had changed, and it was at least fifteen years since I’d seen him. I looked blankly at him – a very Aspie response. To him it might look like nothing’s happening but, inside, I’m searching memory banks, piecing together gallons of feeling-tones and associations, often too slowly to give a decent response right then. He must have thought I didn’t recognise him – I did, but I needed five minutes to piece a hundred bits together. Sorry, Joseph.
In spring 2022, something in me started wanting to come out of hiding. I was tired of hanging around at home ‘shielding’ and getting bogged down in risk-aversion. Something new had emerged in my blogs and podcasts and people were appreciating them. I thought of doing events and ‘magic circles’, moved by a sense that I might be popping my clogs before long. I wanted to find a way of seeing many friends in a way I could manage, and pass on some gems before I went. I thought it would do me good. Besides, I had run out of interest in my own company.
It’s funny how life can trick us into things. My late aunt Hilary Bedford was closely involved with Alan Turing at Bletchley Park in 1942-3 and, at the time, they thought they were breaking Hitler’s codes. Well, yes, they were, but the significant thing for which history will more enduringly remember them is that they made big steps in inventing the computer and laying the foundations for artificial intelligence. Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans – and that’s what happened to John Lennon too, after he wrote those words in a song for his son. In turn, when I was planning the magic circles, as a way of meeting people and sharing some insights, I wasn’t aware that something else was going to start happening. But it did.
On my trip upcountry in August 2022, I did two magic circles and attended an Oak Dragon camp. All sorts of things happened in those two weeks. The experience lit me up and a profound healing and breakthrough came with it. Something started emerging that I hadn’t been aware of. Back in May I’d got the message that “There’s something more for you to do…”, but only in August did it start revealing itself.
Photo by Rebecca Brain
When you come close to death, as I did last winter, you become acutely aware of what you haven’t done in life. Then, when you die, you have to live with that. Mashallah, it’s done and gone. In my life I’ve made some progress in the matter of consciousness, deep geopolitics, history-redemption and world healing, and I felt a kind of duty to leave some of this knowhow behind – it was a task not done. It took my illness of last winter to wring this realisation out of me, and by summer an initial vision had emerged.
The whole picture came quickly: suddenly one evening I saw how it could work. Well, theoretically. That was the 1% inspiration bit, and now we get to the 99% perspiration bit. It’s time now to mull it over and map it out a bit more. Also I must figure out my capacity to do things, how much active service I have left, what I would need, and how all this fits. Do I have what it takes? Do I need simply to suggest ideas and set a tone, or do I need to put in a few years of active engagement?
How small or big, and how discreet or how public should this be? It would need setting up so that it works well when I’m gone. There’s an extra personal twist: it’s my last chance, and getting things wrong is not really an option. Currently I might have three, five or, at a push, seven years to play with. And the best way to make the gods laugh is to tell them your plans.
On Thursday I was so unwell that I found myself wondering whether the gods indeed were laughing… I was weak, wan, clogged and weighed down, spending much of the day in bed. I wasn’t dealing as well as normal with my cancer drugs, administered on Wednesday. I think it was also a ‘healing crisis’ of sorts. Sometimes an illness comes to help us meta-process big changes in one fell swoop – some downtime and a re-boot are needed. A lot gets sorted out at once, in a kind of controlled burn or a induced churn. It was all about opening up to the future and dealing with the past and the full facts of my situation. But I was on my way back up by Friday.
I’ve gone quickly from a quiet to an active life. Something rather magical seems to be happening. It’s a possible coming together of a new constellation of people, happening rather naturally without deliberate action from me – except that people coming forward all know me or are tweaked by what I’m flagging up. This kind of thing has happened before and I recognise the symptoms.
Caroline urged me to write down my ideas, but I’m not so sure. The prospect of sitting at a computer for hours on end, writing yet another book (my thirteenth), doesn’t really light me up – though something will need recording somehow, and it might be better in audio. I feel more of a need to focus on people-foundations and processes for evolving things since, if this project is to work, it will rest on these. Perhaps I’ll assist energetically from upstairs once I’m gone, but it will be up to the living to do with it what they can and will. That’s fascinating: my obsolescence is built in. I feel rather good about that.
A member of the herd on our farm
I’m fermenting these questions, waiting for clarity. And giving other people thinking time. It’s important also to do a devil’s advocate job on myself. Why not just hang out in Cornwall and take it easy, walking the cliffs, tinkering around and writing the occasional blog? Or I could go to Sweden or Palestine – even Mali or Kirgyzstan. Or I could be a guest speaker at lots of gigs and supplement my pension talking about cancer and clog-popping. I could even join the grumbling classes and become a pain in the ass for the younger generation.
What will be will be, and it’s not really the goal but the journey that matters. And the next step. In Buckfastleigh in Devon on Saturday (24th Sept 2020) there is my last planned magic circle for a while – until something else happens. These magic circles are evolving each time, and this one will have some live music and perhaps more energy-working than before. We shall see what emerges. You’re welcome to come, though do book in advance. It’s all about soul-networks, channelling our root-source, world healing, remembering the reasons we came, and sharing something rather special.
I cannot organise future events myself, but something will unfold in future, inshallah. In future I’m likely to spend more time visiting places, but I shall stay based in Cornwall because my spiritual roots and inspiration lie here, and without them I am lost. Which wouldn’t be helpful at all. Something is happening, times are changing and all is well.
I’ve been away on Dartmoor and in Glastonbury, where I delivered a talk on Friday evening. It was really moving to see everyone who came, to feel their good vibes and interest and the atmosphere that evening in the Assembly Rooms. Hostess Samia Gelfling’s intro and outro to my talk were remarkable.
I wish it were possible to get round everyone in the audience personally, but nowadays three meaningful conversations a day are all I can do, and it would take ages to do justice to everyone.
Doing these talks, it’s my way of connecting with as many people as I can, within my energy-range. There’s a deep smile lurking in my heart. I’m now enjoying being back in Cornwall for a necessary reflection pause and for my cancer treatment (and its after-effects).
Magic Circle in Devon
Next up comes a ‘Magic Circle’ in Buckfast (near Totnes) on 24th September 2022. This will be a 5-6 hour session in three segments. It’s all about our origins, the soul tribes we come from, passing over to the otherworlds, bringing otherworlds into our lives, world healing and the way the world is going.
Stuff like that. You’re really welcome. We’ll also have a dash of chi gung with Jeanne Hampshire, garnished with some live music from two friends visiting from Oregon in Turtle Island, Jahnavi and Galen. And me, rabbiting on at you and lifting the cork off your crown chakra, with a little help from my friends.
Are we visitors from far away having a human experience or humans blessed with periodic uplifts? Soul-food for folks who’ve been at it for some time and are looking for new angles on this strange experience called life on Earth.
A new PodTalk
Following my talk in Glastonbury, I’ve now uploaded a recording of it (you can stream it or download it as an MP3). It’s 1hr 47mins long. The last quarter of it was taken up with some really interesting questions and contributions from the floor. Find it here:
It was great visiting Glastonbury. It is, after all, a pilgrimage place, and that’s what it is and does well. On Saturday I braved the town, had a maca smoothie, a few of those deeply meaningful conversations, some path-crossings with old friends in the street, and retreated twice to the calmness of the Abbey to ‘just sit’ and to defrag from the buzzy atmosphere and dense electromagnetics.
Glastonbury is a vortical place of contrasts, a karma-exchange and somewhere between an experiential kaleidoscope and a transdimensional roundabout. In vibe, it’s rather like Jerusalem, actually – though much less extreme – while both equally share a similar craziness, intensity and bizarre sanctity.
Thanks to Lily Lionheart for her hospitality, to Jonathan and Penny for trans-Dumnonian teleportation and to Rebecca Brain for her magical companionship and for being a superb minder and a really interesting person.
Carn Les Boel, Land’s End, Cornwall. Click for info about my evening talk in Glastonbury
Paldywan Kenobi beams down in Glastonbury, next week, on Friday evening, 9th September. If you live in or around Avalon, whether or not you know me, it’d be great to see you! I’m really looking forward to this.
I’ll share some tales from my time there, rattling the bars through the eighties, nineties and naughties. Also I wish to share with you a parapolitical panorama of where we stand in the long planetary revolution we’re all variously a part of.
A lovely quote popped up on Radio Four a week or so ago (from an American evangelical, no less) and it’s really pertinent now in the 2020s:
Don’t give up on the brink of a miracle.
I’m an old LSE student protester who didn’t quite give up, an old acid head who’s now tripped out on bone marrow cancer, staggering around on his sticks like a cripple on the wrong planet. Recently I’ve had to align to spirit like never before, to stay alive – death is my personal trainer and the therapy comes for free.
I’ve always been a strange combination of an esoteric extremist and a socio-political activist. The last three years squaring with cancer have been like ten – it was dark down there but there’s gold there too, and I brought some up.
Then suddenly a voice inside said, ‘Ah, we’ve got one more job for you…’. Oh shit, not again. I wasn’t expecting that – I thought I was on my way out. But then, when you enter an edge-treading miracle zone where it feels like your life is at stake three times a week, anything can happen, and it does. So I’m under new instructions, and this gig at the Assembly Rooms is a small part of that.
So this might be ninety minutes of utter crap (though it’s usually interesting), or a special sharing that you might remember longer than the next day. We shall see. That’s why I’d really like you to come – if, that is, you hear a little tinkling in your heart when you read this.
The pic here is of Carn Les Boel, a cliff sanctuary near where I live, and it’s a really strong place at the southwestern end of the Michael Line – next stop, the Mayalands of Yucatan, Mexico.
Greetings from the Far Beyond, West Penwith, Cornwall, with love from me. Palden.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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