This is a short talk I gave recently in Penzance, Cornwall, during a Palestine-support event.
Many of us get caught up in the big issues around Palestine, often paying a lot of attention to our own countries’ or international politics and inadvertently forgetting actual Palestinians in places like Gaza. Anyway, the politics is a nightmare that’s going nowhere anytime soon.
This is about making friends with an actual Gazan, taking a person-to-person approach. It can have a bigger effect that you might at first imagine. And the friendship and benefit goes both ways.
In the talk I recommend a website run by Gazan young people: www.wearenotnumbers.org – check it out.
Thanks to Gershon Baskin of Jerusalem – a good-hearted Israeli – for a quote from his recent writing. Well done Adam Stout and Alison Dhuanna for organising the event – and thereby raising 600 GBP to help a few Gazans.
A correction: to get out of Gaza costs $5,000, and it is paid to the Egyptians at Rafah Crossing, who pay the Israelis, and both take their cut. It’s just as bad, whatever the excuse and whoever does it – exploiting people in need.
With love, Palden
By the seaside. Photo by Refaat Ibrahim of wearenotnumbers.org
These are kids at the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem, West Bank, Palestine, and these pics were taken in the last few days.
They are orphans from Gaza, and refugee and special needs kids from the West Bank. Apart from giving a good education under difficult circumstances, the school gives kids the tools to process their anger, loss, fear and trauma, so that they grow up knowing there is another way. Another way from what has happened over the last hundred years in Palestine and Israel.
Note the performers. These look like visiting Europeans. They are independent humanitarians: they set about brightening up the lives of people in places like Palestine and they make a big difference. They often fund themselves to do so, and travel cheap and crash on sofas. Some are performers, some hairdressers, some are welders and some are law graduates, artists and retired professionals. Have you ever considered doing something like this?
Forget Trump and Natanyahu: this is the human frontline, where the real work of peacemaking happens. These children are, I hope, the generation who will see a big change across the Middle East. The times of war need to end now: we must do things another way. And these are the people who will do it. That is my prayer for them.
Here’s the translation of the text that came with the pics:
In an atmosphere filled with fun and positive energy, the professor of physical education, Mr. Mustafa, organized a special recreational day for the students of the school, in cooperation with the refugee center, where play, art, and laughter came together in an unforgettable day ✨
⭕ A variety of events between animated games that enhanced activity and interaction, face painting added colors of joy to the faces of children, alongside a theatrical circus that presented pleasant performances that brought joy to the hearts🎪😊
Our students also participated in playing with parschute and other group activities that contributed to promoting a spirit of cooperation, active discharge, and building self-confidence in a fun and safe way 🌟
⛔ This day was an open space for joy and expression, and an integrated recreational educational experience that emphasizes the importance of play in supporting our children’s physical and psychological development 💚
ـــــــــ🍂ــــــ We learn for human well-being ــــــ🍂ــــــــ
To make a donation to Hope Flowers, go to this page for links to Hope Flowers’ supporting organisations in different countries: https://hopeflowers.org/wp/support/
Here’s a readable story about the history and philosophy of the school. It’s from my book Pictures of Palestine, and it’s called ‘Korea meets Palestine’. (Korea and Palestine were both divided in the same year, 1948.) https://www.palden.co.uk/pop/korea-meets-palestine.html
I’ve been working with a village of Tuareg for ten years, in a small people-sized support operation. They live in the Sahara desert, a day away from the historic city of Timbuktu in Mali.
We restocked their goats and camels after a terrible drought, helped them dig a new well and build a small village school.
But now I need to pull out – I can’t continue with things I used to be able to do. But I don’t want to abandon them.
So this pod tells the story, and about the dilemma of a humanitarian with a need to pass this on.
With love, Palden
Thanks to Constanze Küppers in Germany for prompting me to make this pod
A few days ago I thought out loud that I had little to say. Well, this turned out to be incorrect. Forgive me for that! Goes to show, I too have my illusions. Here’s a new Pod from the Far Beyond.
I went on a slow stagger down to the pleasantly unkempt woods below the farm where I live. I sat next to a big hazel tree that’s far older than me, where I usually go. It leans over and there’s a sitting place amidst its roots which is just right for me. It’s my outside broadcast studio, where quite a few podcasts have been made.
This one is all about the battle for the hearts and minds of humanity. This is something that is unfolding behind and beneath the torrent of worrying events that we experience today.
‘The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’. Thus said William Blake over two centuries ago. Well, true. But do we really need to pursue excess in order to achieve wisdom? It causes a lot of damage to our world and to hearts and minds. There is another way.
As a peacemaker (more correctly, a peacebuilder) there hasn’t been a lot of progress since the days of Vietnam and Northern Ireland – the issues I and many others of my postwar generation started out with. The warmakers are still very much at it.
But the matter is still open. We’re coming to the time. And this podcast is about that. It’s here on Spotify:
or on my podcast page, where you’ll also find 60-odd Paldy-podcasts on a range of subjects:
In the weeks and months to follow, I might well come up with further insights about the future. Despite everything, I’m still an optimist. Though we’re in a strange, perverse time of history where humanity is bring taught how not to do things, and it can seem as if everything is going wrong.
This is mainly for my generational peers – if you’re in your 70s, 80s or 90s, your bones are getting creaky and your mind is getting sluggish.
In the life-cycle we’re given, we grow up and later we grow down. In steps.
It’s also about karma-clearance. Sorting out our stuff at the end of life, so that we don’t carry all of it with us when we go over to the other side – to the realm of the Ancestors.
I’ve been involved in humanitarian work, and recently I’ve needed to work on my patterns around givingness and compassion fatigue. Commitment. Success and failure in helping people. Deep heart stuff.
And it’s about acceptance. That’s one of the biggest learning experiences life ever gives us.
47 mins long. Introduced and outroduced by the birds of Grumbla in the Far Beyond, down’ere in Cornwall.
It’s the Sunday meditation again, and I have revived sufficiently from an illness that floored me last week to be able to elbow you about it! That is, you’re welcome to join us in the zone – times for different countries are below. It’s an open meditation space lasting half an hour. To quote Van Morrison: no guru, no teacher, no method – just you and me in the garden… Follow your own path, together with us following ours. We shall be blessed.
The illness was a fluey thing. My energy was low, and I’d been pushing hard and under pressure in my remote humanitarian work. So when I got cold and wet during a trip to Falmouth, my soul pulled the plug and I went down through it. Next day I was semi-conscious, stiff and hurting, with sluggish brains, wobbly balance, burning feet (peripheral neuropathy) and I was right out of it, gone, hardly here.
A pertinent sign at Gurnard’s Head, in West Penwith
My predominant emotion was grief, over things that have happened, and particularly over moral dilemmas and painful moments in my humanitarian work over the years. I’ve seen people face hardship, suffer and die who, in my estimation, should not have died, and at times I’ve been unable to help – often quite simply I did not have the funds needed for medical treatment for an amputation or to save a life.
This is a deep dilemma being faced by many humanitarians now, as governments blithely withdraw funding and the public shrugs its shoulders. For me, in late life, it has left traces of regret, even though I know that the net value of my work was positive overall, and there’s a lot I’m glad about.
But the illness enabled me to go deep, deep down to a place where the hidden roots of life’s experiences and events ferment and bubble. This is one of the big virtues of illness that many people try their best to avoid – the consciousness changes it can bring about. Sometimes our soul needs to cut us down and render us helpless, to help us work through something – burn through something. Whether or not we actually do this is a life-choice and an exercise of profound free will.
Seals asleep at Godrevy
It is an act of free will to choose to go through a turning in the deepest seat of consciousness. You have to go over the edge and take the plunge. Getting into the habit of doing this throughout our lives sets us up for one of life’s greatest and most moving of experiences – dying.
As you approach death, life tends to take you down in stages – a series of crunch moments or crises where your worldly powers and agency are reduced, your world shrinks, and you bodily functions deteriorate. This incremental withdrawal yields the possibility of a new seeing, a new understanding, if we so choose it. Though it involves perceiving truths that can at first be uncomfortable. Yet facing and accepting these revealings becomes a relief too, an understanding, a forgiveness. For this life had simply been a short visit on an ongoing pathway. It begins and it ends.
Sir George, looking straight at you
Back in the 1990s I was privileged to help and spend quality time with Sir George Trevelyan, who was in effect the grandfather of the New Age movement in Britain. Very much a man of the Twentieth Century, born in 1906 and dying in 1996, he was an aristocratic philanthropist, thinker and educator, planting the seeds of the new age and the green movement in the 1940s-70s. He was a four-planet Scorpio. At the very end, he died by decision, announcing that he should not be disturbed or given any food or drinks. He was gone in 4-5 days.
Here’s a video of him talking in 1988, in his eighties. Thank you, Sir George, for being you, for what you did with and for so many people, and for pointing the way in my life too.
Meanwhile, if you care to join today’s meditation… see you there!
Love, Palden
Current meditation times, on Sundays: UK, Ireland & Portugal 8-8.30pm GMT W Europe 9-9.30pm E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 10-10.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm EST, Cuba 3-3.30pm PST North America 12-12.30am
Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall, with The Brisons behind
First things first…The Sunday Meditation continues, whether or not I announce it. Sometimes I can’t, and there’s no one to cover for me. Yet I’m always there meditating at the appointed time, and so are quite a few other people.
You’re welcome to join us. It’s a recipe-free open meditation, especially for independent souls who follow their own path or live relatively isolated from others. All you need is half an hour, a cushion and your inner presence. Join us in the zone. No need to be online.
I might not be able to do regular meditation calls from now on. A lot of things are happening and I’m rather overwhelmed! Much of it is good stuff, and some is difficult – mainly my humanitarian work.
I three-quarters wrote a blog about this, about compassion fatigue, but I’m not fully clear how to write about a few delicate issues, so that’s gone into in the ‘later or never’ pile. For me, as a lifelong author and editor, getting stuck on some writing is unusual and strangely frustrating!
Even so, things are happening.
– I’m doing a talk on Tuesday 15th April, 7.30 at Gwithti an Pystri, the Museum of Folklore and Magic in Falmouth (book ahead);
– then there’s a visit to Gloucester to see my old friend Ibrahim Issa from Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem, Palestine, on 2-4 May (I’m still looking for a driver-minder for that, or a workable way to get there and back);
– and a talk at the Pathways to the Past conference in St Just, Cornwall, on Saturday 24th May (I’m really happy about that);
– and another at the Just Live Camp near Morvah in Penwith a day or two after, on 25th or 26th May.
Then there’s the Belerion Project, about which I’m really happy too. It’s a research project into the subtle energy and psychoactive effects of the system of ancient sites in Penwith. We did our first field trip to Portheras Common Barrow recently and, despite weather challenges, it went really well. Thanks to everyone who came. The next is on Wednesday 7th May.
Carn Les Boel and Carn Barra
I’ve always been rather workaholicky but, age 75 and doing a cancer trip, recently I’ve been running at capacity. Just getting ready to go out can wear me out, requiring a rest, and everything requires twice the effort it took in pre-cancer days. My brains aren’t handling all the messages, chats and enquiries involved – apologies to people I fail to answer.
I’m a hyperfocused Aspie, you see – good at concentrating for hours in a right-brained way but bad at hopping from thing to thing in a left-brained way. Aged brains do get creaky and slow! This is a mixed gift that has come with cancer: I’ve done some of the best creativity of my life, though I have a decreased capacity for admin, lists, names, timetables and even time itself. Or remembering to have dinner.
That’s the way it goes. Ideally I need an assistant (who lives close by and knows me well – not online). But I cannot pay such a person. That’s been one of the issues of my life that I was trying to write about in the latest, as yet unpublished blog: I’ve never had an expense account to finance projects and missions. It’s mostly come out of my own pocket.
A plus with this is that I’ve pulled off some mighty stunts on a slim budget, and I’ve been a free agent, but it is wearing too, and many good things could have happened if I’d had better funding.
For those who suggest I should ‘just’ do some crowd-sourcing (takes ten minutes, it’s easy and the money floods in, haha), I ask, do you require soldiers to fund their service at the frontline? Soldiers are paid salaries and pensions while peacemakers are told it’s our choice, our risk and why don’t we get a proper job?
You might hear a thread of resentment there. That’s why I didn’t complete the blog. I’ve got stuff around it. It’s still happening now: I and others I’m working with in Ghana, Mali and Palestine are all being seriously obstructed by, would you believe, the actions, errors, denials and avoidances of two banks, one in USA and one in Australia.
It’s not simple, this game. Paldywan Kenobi stares down the banksters! Who’d have thought I’d get sucked into teaching banks how to be human, at my age? Oh, and dealing with a few crime gangs, Wagners and drug-addled murderers along the way, remotely from my eyrie here in Cornwall. Well, I’m quite good at it, actually, and many people give up on such things when things get big or dangerous. I tend to hang in there.
When you step into what used to be called The Great Work, the rules of normal life seem to levitate out of the window and disappear. Retirement is something other people do.
For astrologers, I’ve just gone through Saturn opposing my natal Saturn (and square Moon and Ascendant). So I’m doing Saturn, yet again. When I started my cancer trip five years ago, I thought I had 1-3 years left, so I put my rather mission-driven, saturnine sense of life-purpose to the side. But it has started up again!
Well, my dear old late Mum used to say, “There’s no rest for the wicked!”. Well, yes, perhaps so, or perhaps not. She was a do-gooder too, handing me down that pattern, bless her. In our self-centred times, it’s not a sensible strategy, doing good, but some of us choose it or get sucked into it anyway.
Compassion fatigue, versus ‘To give and not to count the cost’. Non-attachment to the fruits of our labours, versus ‘Give me the compensation you owe for your frigging corporate errors’. Yes, these things have been rattling around in my heart during those Saturn transits. Well, life is for the learning.
I’ve been reminding myself of something a young Berliner taught me while standing (as you do) in the Sinai Desert. I repeat this here, particularly for people infected with the Trump virus:
It’s okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
Love from me – as you might sense, in a rather saturnine mood on this fullmoon!
The seventh Aha Class, in Penzance, Cornwall Weds 12th March, 6.30pm, at The Hive
A settler incursion and tricky situation in the historic souk in Hebron, Palestine
Inner journeying, meditation, remote healing and peace-building. Doing our bit toward tackling the world’s problems – instead of wringing hands and feeling helpless.
In recent times many of us have been moved to join meditations, prayers and link-ups when major crises break out. Waves of mass empathy and concern over such crises can have a wide and deep psycho-spiritual influence – it goes deeper than mere ‘public opinion’.
Praying for peace or showering light over a benighted area are good, though often they are of a generalised nature. They can affect the collective psyche and sometimes help swing things.
But it’s possible to get closer in. It’s possible to penetrate actual situations and play a more targeted part in them – literally rescuing people or souls, or participating in situations, meetings and crux-points at the frontline of human experience.
That’s what this evening is about. This might be a valuable inner tool to add to your repertory. This is not ‘lightworking’ but spiritual humanitarian work – bringing in truckloads of spirit, rescue and healing.
This is not simple. It carries responsibilities, and it’s not a matter of imposing our wishes – benign or biased – on world situations. The key issue is to help humanity learn, to become more aware in making the choices it makes, for the longterm resolution of what are often deep-seated problems.
In the first half of this evening, I’ll outline considerations and issues involved in such work, how we choose issues and crises and work with them, and the blessings, delusions and dangers involved and what it’s all for.
In the second half we’ll go on an inner journey to work with a particular area of focus that is currently afoot in the world. (And, first time round, we won’t be working with polarised Trump-related issues!)
You might or might not wish to go into this kind of work but, even if you don’t, world situations do come up at times, touching our hearts, to which we respond, and inner journeying (conscious dreaming) is one way we can play a part in world affairs as situations arise. Once you get the gist of it, it can be applied in areas that interest you – socio-cultural, ecological, geopolitical or simply encouraging forward-moving change.
If you’ve done this kind of thing before, this class might help you clarify a few things and take it a step further. If it’s new territory, it’s a good place to start.
Since most of you will not be able to come, audio recordings will be posted online within days after the class (no charge) – just follow the link below. Recordings of all of the Aha Classes can be found here.If geopolitical healing interests you, you might find this site useful: The Flying Squad.
This is another of my Palestine tales from 12-15 years ago, from a book called O Little Town of Bethlehem, which recorded a five-month stay in 2011-12. In my writings and photos at the time my aim was to humanise Palestinians. Because, like you and me, they’re real humans with real human lives to live.
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As the sun went down, a wonderful atmosphere settled upon Bethlehem. The town was in a genial mood – people chatting and hanging out in the streets. At Cinema, a busy intersection with taxis and taxi-vans, I saw a six year old girl standing on some steps simply singing out loud to the street. This was not only touching but also rather refreshing because, for some reason, Palestinians tend not to sing.
Aisha, an English friend who teaches English at the Hope Flowers Centre and stays at my place one night a week, uses the large, empty, echoey conference room in the school for practising opera – she’s an accomplished singer but, living in Ramallah and surrounded with people who would find opera rather strange, doing her scales and practicing her arias doesn’t quite work easily. So she loves practising at the school, where she won’t be heard – and the conference room echoes quite nicely too.
Nevertheless, a neighbour discretely enquired of me what was happening. I explained and he smiled. He’d seen opera on TV, and was interested when I said that operas were like plays sung out loud, with stories to them. I asked him why Palestinians tend not to sing, and he said back, “Since the Nakba we haven’t had much to sing about”. Well, true, but I know that’s not the real answer, which I am yet to find out.
The Nakba, by the way, was ‘The Disaster’, the 1948 war during which the Israelis staked out their nation militarily, by ethnically cleansing and killing the Arabic inhabitants of hundreds of villages and towns in what became Israel. In the space of a few months, the population of Bethlehem quadrupled with refugees and they have never gone home – there’s no home to go back to. As a symbolic act, refugee families keep the keys to their old, lost houses, like a family totem, proof of having torn-up roots in their own land.
This afternoon was one of those times when people set their cares aside and enjoy the moment. That’s one thing I like in Palestine: people do their best to keep their spirits up and enjoy life. There is no alternative. Or at least, the alternative, dwelling on your problems, is far worse.
As my friend Ghada once put it, at a time when she was feeling pessimistic a few years ago, “In Palestine we don’t have up days and down days, we have down days and worse days”. She was at that moment manifesting symptoms of the strange collective bipolarity Palestinians live by, thanks to their circumstances: generally they keep their mood positive in spite of everything, but when they lose their strength and fortitude, they plummet into deep despond. That was where she was when she said this.
Palestinians wear their emotions inside out: love and sadness, friendship and disgust, humour and anger, they share them openly, men perhaps more than women. Their feelings spill out liberally. Mercifully it’s their positive emotions they show most. I have never seen a sign of violence except on a couple of occasions when Israeli soldiers are around, acting provocatively, but even then Palestinians suppress it because they usually don’t feel like getting shot, beaten up, arrested or hounded. They got tired of that ten years ago, and it doesn’t achieve much.
But on a lovely, tranquil afternoon like today, there was still a problem. On the way home, passing through Deheisheh and Duha, there was smoke everywhere. People were setting fire to the skips in which they put their rubbish. They do this because civic rubbish disposal is patchy at the best of times, and the skips were full. It’s not only smoky but dangerous, since so much of their rubbish contains plastics and other toxic materials, and the slow smoulder of the rubbish means that it doesn’t even burn properly. They have a blind spot around this issue. When Westerners like me raise the matter, they shrug it off as if it is no problem. But it is a problem and a big one.
Before you disapprove of these apparently backward people, let me remind you that we in the West started seriously addressing issues such as this only 20-30 years ago, when it was already too late for us. Before that, we trusted in modernity and slavishly paid the price in smog, toxicity, fumes and ugliness. Even today, when I speak to Westerners of the dangers of mobile phones, microwave ovens, wireless internet and electro-smog, people smirk or frown, as if to say “Oh no, he’s one of them”, since this is a current blind spot. One day an enormous scandal will erupt about it and people will yell “Why weren’t we told? Who is responsible for all this?”. We are responsible. We know. But we don’t want to face it.
So blind-spots – areas of life that people deliberately ignore, ultimately to our own cost – are not unique to Arabs. In fact, Arabs look on Westerners as backward because we turn our backs on God – Europeans by becoming increasingly secular and Americans by turning God into a heavily-armed, consumptive patriot with conservative politics.
Every race and nationality covers its insecurities by looking on others as inherently deficient. The less contact they have with other kinds of people, the stronger the negative projection on outsiders – this is one reason for the separation wall, so that each side can project its fantasies about the other onto a concrete screen untainted by reality. This is why Iran is currently a bogeyman – no one goes there to meet the people, so it’s easy to dehumanise them.
This said, Palestinians must still address the issue of rubbish – creating less of it and disposing of it properly. Battery recycling, vegetable waste composting and plastics disposal? Forget it, it doesn’t exist here. But probably it will exist in 10-20 years’ time – Palestine is at a similar stage to the West in the early 1970s. Yet regarding social values, sharing and human warmth, Palestinians are advanced, at a stage that I hope the West will reach in a few decades’ time.
I went into town to do my shopping. I’ve been sitting slogging away at the computer for the last week, so I don’t have many events to report. The trouble with computers is that people hardly see the results of your work because it’s digitally concealed, distinctly not in your face. Much of the work is for people far and wide, so that people around you see little significance in what you’re doing – you’re just sitting at a computer, twiddling fingers and looking serious. I’ve been building a website, dealing with issues for Hope Flowers, doing bits of work and answering questions online – many questions, from many people.
When shopping I went to an old lady I visit regularly. She has a small stall on the streetside in the Old Town. By stall, I mean a stool and a few boxes and bags. She sells herbs and figs. She’s a lovely old lady, clad in her embroidered traditional dress. She walks into town daily with her husband, who leads their donkey, which carries the herbs – then he returns home to work on the land, and he comes back to pick her up later.
Palestinians are big on herbs – they have mint or thyme in their tea and they eat parsley, sage, coriander, spinach and chillies copiously. I buy my herbs from her – big bunches of them, far too big to use on my own, for 1-2 shekels per bunch (20-40p in British money). She likes her pet Englishman. She eyes me closely when she thinks I’m not looking. I think she knows intuitively that I’m roughly the same age as she is, except she’s an old woman and I look younger – apart from a rather wrinkly face which has clearly seen some things. She hasn’t figured me out yet. Life wears out Palestinians.
Then I went down to the market to get vegetables. Two stallholders were trying to steal me off the stallholder I usually go to, but he has the best vegetables. One thing many Palestinians don’t quite understand is this. They tend to think one is obliged to shop with them out of a duty to support them – after all, fair’s fair, isn’t it? Well no, I’m a Westerner, and I go for the best stuff and the best deal. Sorry about that. Also, annoyingly, I buy things only when I need them.
The souvenir shopkeepers down in town think similarly. I’m a Westerner, therefore I have money, therefore I ought to buy from them. Not so. I buy presents only because there are people I know and love to whom I wish to give things, and I buy specifically for them. There’s also the question of how to get it back to England, so I cannot buy much. I’m not a buying machine – well, at least, not in my own head.
Dear reader, this might seem elementary, but it’s not so for Palestinians. This is a walled-off cooperation and mutual-support economy, an economy where everyone depends on everyone else for keeping each other alive, so the emphasis here is on supporting your fellow citizens by trading with them, to some extent whether or not you need what they’re selling.
Nevertheless, when one of the traders, a young chap of seventeen who helps his elder brother run a shop, moaned to me today about having no money to buy schoolbooks, I took pity on him. He had said there had been no business today, and he needed 50 Jordanian Dinars (250 shekels or £50) for the books tomorrow. He was worried and depressed. So I wandered off to do other chores, including raiding a bank machine, and slipped him 50 JDs on the way back. He lit up and hugged me, shedding a tear. Now he could get his books.
I told him that this is a life-lesson we all need to learn: solutions often come when you’ve given up. When you give up, it means you’re opening up to Allah, handing over your problems since you couldn’t solve them yourself. This money is a gift from Allah, through a random Englishman. So give thanks to Allah.
“You are a good man, Mr Balden. I pray that Allah, he will pick you up when you have a need.” Well thanks, I might need your prayer to come true one day. This young Palestinian, poor yet intelligent, has better English than some of the 17-year old Brits I know. Good luck to you, mate – I sincerely hope you get a future.
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My three Palestine books are: – Pictures of Palestine (in print and as a downloadable PDF) – Blogging in Bethlehem (an audiobook and PDF) – O Little Town of Bethlehem (PDF only) Available here: http://www.palden.co.uk/pop/order.html
It’s amazing to be part of a revolution – even if it’s temporary. The relief of getting rid of an oppressive regime creates an expanded nowness, a special moment of intensified significance, before the serious stuff that follows inevitably sets in. There’s a shedding of a deep sense of social burden and self-suppression, of unwilling, shoulder-shrugging complicity with something that few were happy with. In Syria, those who took the regime’s side did so because they saw it as the lesser of two evils, or they made a living or gained advantage through it.
But when the cork pops, a deep collective-emotional eruption bursts out, spreading like wildfire around the country, even spreading around the world. It reminds people everywhere, on a deep, hardly-conscious level, that it is possible to change things from the bottom up, that society has power.
It’s also emotionally tragic to be part of a failed revolution – a dashing of hope and faith, a reimposition of fear and oppression, a paroxysm of despair. It can crush spirits. It nearly did so with me – I was part of flower power and a student uprising at the LSE in London – but after a lot of pain and process the experience ended up making me more resilient.
Forty years later in 2011 in Amman, Jordan, I met some Egyptians and Syrians, fresh from their uprisings, proud and uplifted to have been part of them, yet fearful. They were in Amman because they had been chased out of their own countries, regarded as dangerous. The repression of both uprisings had polluted the joy and impetus of revolution, and these guys were vexed about what to do.
I told them that, in the case of the uprising I had been a part of, though we were beaten and broken, the flowering of issues and dynamics that emerged during that short yet long time had withered but not died. It re-emerged slowly over the years, filtering in through society’s back door. Those of us committed to change had continued quietly, developing our green ideas, healing methods, lifestyle changes, music, feminism, back-to-nature instincts and our psycho-spiritual transformations, and it was a all matter of time before these infiltrated wider society – and it still is. Here I was, four decades later, still here, still working for the change I believed in.
I reminded them that change is deep and it is not truly fulfilled by a revolution, which merely clears the way for whatever happens next. It would take time and it would be difficult, but the lava-streams of change would work under the surface, seeping out or erupting over time and over the generations. What makes the spirit of revolution survive, like a dormant seed buried in the soil? Well, whatever its faults, it was essentially right, and it constituted the direction that humanity needs to follow. History takes time to unfold, but time is on the side of change. The issues that bubble up in such change-moments are bigger and more historically-transformative than we often see at the time, and this process takes time. For me, in late life I’ve come to accept that it can take longer than a lifetime.
Now, in Syria, here we have it – the consequences of 2011. The Syrians of the Arab Spring are 12 years older and a new generation has grown into adulthood. Media outlets round the world are wrong to harp on about terrorism and Al Qaeda – they don’t see where the true roots of this lie. They suspect Islamism of malign, threatening things, when Islamism itself is simply a philosophy and social reform movement, the behaviour of which depends very much on the people doing it.
The Taliban in Afghanistan, while dominated by old Muhajedin fighters from former decades, is also stocked with thoughtful, pragmatic, younger and more travelled people who will inherit the reins. Hamas in Gaza was far more (as it goes) progressive, liberal and socially competent than outside commentators and their paymasters wish to see, and the Israeli killing of Ishmael Haniyeh a few months ago, Hamas’ leader, meant the loss of one of the world’s better political leaders. In my humble opinion.
When so-called terrorists have a constituency of local support, and when they are fighting on their own turf for the liberation of their land and people, they are freedom fighters. Terrorists lack empathy, caring little for the people they live amongst, their agenda is geopolitical and ideological and their method is to use violently dramatic actions to create fear and terror, to scoop up media attention. One well-executed bombing can set the world on edge.
HTS is not a terrorist organisation and neither are most of the other militias in Syria (though one or two might be). Other countries would be wise not to oppose or obstruct the new regime – though perhaps it will need moderating with sweeteners. The uprising in Syria is locally-driven, in distinction to the ongoing conflict in Syria since 2011, which has been a viper’s nest of external intervening powers, influencers and financiers. Now their influence is weakened, withdrawn or undermined.
When I went there in 2014 there were about seven sides to the conflict and it was terribly confusing. I went briefly to Deraa and Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp outside Damascus. Since it was likely that I’d be thrown out of Palestine by the Israelis, under suspicion, and banned for at least ten years, I felt a need to do something else. When asked to visit Yarmouk by a Palestinian tribe with refugee relatives in Syria, I decided to help them, as a kind of courier and emissary.
But it finished me off. Things happened that deeply affected me. Perhaps also I was in denial,lready feeling burned out, with elements of PTSD accumulated over previous years. But this finished me off. I lost my hope and patience in Syria, afterward feeling lost in a smothering cloud of dismay and disappointment. It was the last humanitarian mission I did. I wasn’t happy about that. But life had other designs.
I spent the following years on a self-healing path in Cornwall, doing remote humanitarian work (such as with the Tuareg in Mali), prehistoric research and walking the cliffs and moors. A loving relationship from 2016 to 2022 brought me back to life. Only when I went down with cancer in 2019 was I healed of the clamping shadows I had been struggling with – they were subsumed by the prospect of death, which prompted an enormous inner let-go of all and everything, bringing something of a spiritual breakthrough and a rapid process of forgiveness of myself, others and life.[1]
This is deep stuff. When, as an individual, you ‘lose your fear’ and come out into the streets in an uprising, you align with a collective tidal surge of vision, emotion, ideas and spirit that feels truly like a springtime, a release. All sorts of amazing things happen. People come alive, emerging out of the woodwork, progressing a long way and finding a new mission in life. People’s lives change in bulk, and a rising tide of hope lifts up even those people who normally are sunk in a life of drudge, stuck in a state of reluctant complicity. The splintered social dissonance that allows oppressive regimes to gain and hold power melts away, and there’s an eruption of resonance, mass concurrence and shared wishes. This resonance-field fizzes and sparkles, motivating people to do quite remarkable things.
But it all depends on what happens next. It depends on the new leaderships that take power and, even more, on the wisdom, patience and fortitude of crowds. Once the change happens, eveyone wants normality to be restored – the economy, public services, reconstruction, and freedom from excessive and unnecessary obstructions in daily life – though this is not simple and fast. After the joy of change, there’s a lot of hard work to be done.
The wisdom of crowds… this is a delicate matter. After regime change in Sudan, the democratic movement did quite well for a time. There was a maturity to the way that people dealt with their tender democratising situation after a long period of dictatorship. But it was delicate, involving a lot of mutual trust, and there are people who manipulate unstable, transitional situations to their own advantage – they can act quicker and more decisively than collectivities of people. They have a contrarian need to break the magic ring of mutualised social power, aiming to restore public dissonance at any cost. In Sudan, it became a slugging match between two oligrchies, each headed by generals, each supported by different outside powers and financing. The democratic movement was killed off, tragedy ensued, and it continues today. Most of the world isn’t interested. Hope is not currently available in Sudan.
Ten years ago I was involved with a small group called the Flying Squad.[2] We did geopolitical healing work and, by 2014, the group had been working together for sixteen years – so we had some experience. It involved a weekly group meditation, wherever we were, and three or four weekend meetings each year – and membership involved committing to 100% presence and involvement in all meditations and meetings, to take group synergy to a higher level.
We did a lot of work with Syria and its uprising and civil war, even travelling to Greece to get closer. There were times when we felt we were getting somewhere in our efforts, but each time a new set of events would re-ignite the situation and make things worse – often prompted by outside intervention by state and non-state actors. Were we getting things wrong? Or was this simply an intractable situation?
This was a big learning. As a planetary healer, you have to learn and accept that sometimes it doesn’t work. There was a point where, in our inner investigations, we discovered an enormous ancient telluric ‘worm’ or dragon in the Euphrates valley in Syria and Iraq, and it was deeply upset. We tried to ease its concerns and help it clarify its aims – it was deeply unhappy about the fighting, oppression and oil extraction in its patch. After we did this work there was indeed a brief pause in events, providing a glimmer of hope, but it soon was dashed by new developments.
We had to learn that there are some things you cannot help. The reasons often emerge later, even years later. Sometimes we can be too restless, short-termist and attached to immediate outcomes. It’s unwise and even egocentric to expect results, just because you feel you’ve put your heart and soul into it and, by rights, it should work. But there can be reasons why it doesn’t work. The idea of creating a ceasefire in Gaza, for example, while desirable, doesn’t actually resolve the problem and its causes, and it might not bring a fundamental healing of a bad situation.
Deep down, countries like Syria and its neighbours are developing a social immunity to conflict and oppression. This is at street-and-village level, and it’s a semi-conscious thing fermenting underneath. The key mechanism is that a society must reach a level of exhaustion with war and oppression, to the extent that it firmly and behaviourally no longer permits it. Society stops responding to the methods that oppressors and warring factions use to divide people and set them in fear. This is pretty much the case in Lebanon nowadays – they’ve had enough of strife, havig been through many decades of it.
The seat of such social power rests a lot with women: if women collectively no longer accept a bad situation and are tired of going along with what men are doing, the violence ends, sooner or later. It’s a buildup of firm and settled emotional consensus. This was one of the key dynamics of the peace that came to Northern Ireland in the 1990s – women put pressure on men to make a change. They just stopped making sandwiches for them and washing their underpants.
There’s another force at work that generates this immunity. After a while, everyone just wants to go home, sleep in their own bed, be with their family and feel safe. This is another rather feminine feeling. When fighters get tired, conflict ends, somehow. It’s a deep tiredness with the privations and dangers of war and oppression. It’s what made the Syrian soldiers recently melt away as the militias advanced – they were fed up. They’d lost the sense of purpose that soldiers need to have if they are to put themselves in the way of danger.
So we now have a full-on situation in Syria. A lot hangs around the international community and the way it responds. A lot hangs on leaderships and their behaviour. A lot hangs on social solidarity, forgiveness of the past, de-corruption and a buildup of trust and integrity in society.
We’ve had a lot of failed uprisings in recent times – in Myanmar, Belarus, Hong Kong, Iran, Venezuela and Sudan – but something has recently changed. Astrologically, Pluto has moved from spending 16 years in Capricorn – a sign that generally hangs on to stability and convention and doesn’t like change – to spending 20 years in Aquarius. The emphasis has shifted from the prevalence of governments and institutions to the prevalence of crowds and public attitudes.
There is a possibility here of a real turning of the page. Not just the replacement of a Captagon-driven, oppressive narco-regime with an Islamist one, but also a change in Islamism itself, and a change in the behaviour of the public. All over the world, the style of governance of countries has come into focus – both democratic systems and authoritarian regimes are in trouble, and people at the top no longer sit securely in their seats. We shall see.
I’m wondering how the Palestinians in Syria (around 450,000 of them) feel about all this. Assad had treated them well, in comparison to many other countries, so they were grateful for that, but the Palestinians could not accept his violent response to the 2011 uprising, and this put them in a difficult situation. Palestinians do not like Muslim extremists either – Al Qaeda or the Islamic State – and in the last twelve years of instability they have come under attack from various directions. I hope they’re feeling some relief today.
This has stirred me quite deeply and personally – helped by the winds and storms raging here in Cornwall in the last two days. It’s a glimmer of hope. It reminds me of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. At that time I was contemplating suicide – the only time I’ve ever felt that feeling. I felt blocked by life from every direction. Everything seemed to be going wrong. But, on the weekend when I might have done it, the Iranian Revolution happened, and this suddenly gave me a spark of hope. It went bad soon after, but on that weekend it looked as if something quite big was changing. I forgot suicide. For me, amidst a dark night of the soul, it was a turning-point: my soul was asking me to make a big and deep commitment to my life’s work. It involved the end of a marriage, the loss of my children and a return to Britain after a time of exile in Sweden.
It was the beginning of a new path in life that brought me to where I am now, affecting thousands of people along the way. For better or worse, that is, since there are times when I’ve screwed up too. However, the posterity-perspective of late life seems to be telling me that it was, on balance, positive. Just above my desk is a Healing Buddha with a little sign at its feet which says ‘Time is a Healer’. Well, yes, though it’s also a decider, an accounting, a process of judgement by posterity. We ourselves can only make an accounting, but time, the wider world and other people judge the balance of benefit our lives have brought.
The same goes for revolutions and regime changes. The Assad and Makhlouf families and the deposed Syrian oligarchy have a lot of accounting to do, and history is unlikely to be sympathetic – as with Saddam Hussein, Ghaddafi and possibly, in future, Netanyahu. Together with many others, too many to name. But, in our own smaller lives, we face an accounting too since many of us are guilty of a shared crime that also needs to end: to quote 18th Century philosopher Edmund Burke, ‘For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing‘. That is a crime we all variously have a stake in.
However, here’s something. We need to be careful about the way we label some people as goodguys and others as badguys. We get dictators because we didn’t stop them coming. So, instead of focusing all the blame on them – or all the Trumps and Al Fayyads of the world – we ned to remember to look at our own part in the equation. As old Jesus once said: ‘Let the one who is without guilt cast the first stone‘.
The building of social capital and the amassing of power to the people involves a lot of deep forgiveness.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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