Category: humanitarians

I’ve been involved for a long time now in world healing work – or world work.

That’s to say, using the psycho-spiritual practices that I, and others, have learned over the years, and applying them in the context of world events as they are actually happening. The idea is simple enough: when something is happening in the world which causes fear, suffering, conflict or upheaval, we can work with it inwardly.

We fell upon this whole saga almost accidentally. A series of ‘coincidences’ happened, through which we discovered that this kind of thing does actually work.

For me, and for quite a few other people involved, the big breakthrough came in 1986, during the Chernobyl crisis. I was running an Earth Mysteries camp near Glastonbury for Beltane. People were arriving at the camp having just heard on their car radios that Chernobyl had gone up.

This of course brought up deep nightmarish feelings of dread in many people. Is this it?

There were about 150 earth-loving people at the camp, and we used a technique we called powwow. It was a talking-stick process. We sat in a circle, the stick went round, and people were invited to speak from the heart – their feelings, observations, intuitions and whatever they knew about what was happening. The purpose wasn’t simply to talk about Chernobyl. It was to do some healing and clarification around it.

So that’s where it really began.

In the mid-1990s this developed further when I started the Hundredth Monkey Project, which ran for three years. The story of that is on my website at https://www.palden.co.uk/m100.html.

After that came the Flying Squad, which continued for about twenty years, started by a caucus of ‘Monkeys’. That was a smaller group, but totally committed. The commitment was actually quite manageable: one meditation every week, and then three or four gatherings during the year – either weekends or week-long camps – both of these without fail.

Each week we would take a theme – conflicts, forest fires, nukes, apartheid… Sometimes a theme would stay with us for several weeks.

Once a month we would have an open session, where people could simply go where they were drawn to go. It was a way of fishing, really – fishing for the issues that needed attention, and for possible solutions, answers and ways through.

I’ve written and talked about these methods elsewhere, so I won’t go into all that here but you can find out more at https://www.flyingsquad.org.uk and at https://www.palden.co.uk/psychic-work.html  .

But there was something we discovered that surprised me. When you do this kind of work, you can actually go through more personal growth than when you deliberately set out to do personal growth work.

That was quite an eye-opener.

It gave us an indication that perhaps we are programmed with quite a lot of ideas about our individuality and ‘sovereignty’ that aren’t necessarily correct. Because the world’s issues are our issues. Refugees. Hunger. War. Earthquakes. Climate extremes. Racial tensions. Economic problems. All of it.

And in some way, the world outside reflects the world inside of us. The Buddhists have a word for this: non-duality. The world within and the world without are one and the same.

Afghanistan and the shadow of the world

More recently I’ve continued this work on my own, although there are still people doing it in various ways. Recently I’ve been focusing on Afghanistan – on the shadow of Afghanistan, what it reflects about the world today, and what it might be trying to teach us.

We have to get out of the good guys and bad guys mentality. We have to get out of judging people from other cultures as though our way of seeing the world is automatically the right one. We have as much to learn from them as they have to learn from us.

This is particularly important for those of us in the West. We’re rather proud of ourselves and we’re rather stuck on the idea that we know best – and that needs to end. Many of the problems on Planet Earth come from precisely that sense of superiority.

So, what does it mean, to work with Afghanistan? Well, first of all, I try to find out what’s going on. I read up on the matter. I watch videos. I look at all sorts of things. I’ve watched material about the Taliban, about ordinary people in Bamiyan Provence, about the British forces in Qandahar, about the Panjshir valley, and the ins and outs surrounding the whole thing.

I get into it. I get to learn what the issues are for people, and the variety of those issues. That creates what I think of as a kind of psychic anchor point.

You can visualise people as psychic beacons – people who, simply by being who they are and living through what they are living through, can bring something into the collective field. Perhaps some blessing can come through them that we couldn’t bring ourselves. And that’s an important thing.

It’s important to know something about the actual situation. Not just the statements politicians make. Not just what Trump does. Not just what the newspapers say. Forget the politicians. Forget the propaganda. Bone up on the stuff and find out what is actually happening. Nowadays we’re blessed with enormous sources of information. But we also have to be discerning.

The discipline of doing it

Then I meditate. Once a week. That’s my world-work meditation.

What I’ve discovered is that perhaps one meditation in ten is blitzingly amazing. One of those experiences where something opens up and you think, woo, something just happened. The rest vary enormously. Some bring insights. Some bring subtle changes. Some seem to do very little.

And sometimes I just fall asleep. The Tibetan lamas taught me something useful about that. They said not to feel guilty about falling asleep during meditation. The Buddhas might simply want to work with you on another level. Well, may it be so.

So one meditation a week becomes fifty-something meditations a year. Do that for ten years and you’ve done about five hundred. That’s quite a lot of work. It’s amazing what can happen when you simply keep doing something regularly, for years.

I visualise some of the people I’ve encountered. Sometimes I’ve actually met people who become part of the work. Here’s an example.

I remember one evening at Bosigran Castle, a cliff sanctuary here in Cornwall. It was beautifully still and a friend and I heard bagpipes. The sound carried a long way. We walked towards the car park and found a man there who had recently come back from Afghanistan.

He was playing his bagpipes to the wind – for his dead comrades and for all the people he had known there.

It was a moving thing to witness. He was relieved to talk to us.

Having worked in war zones myself, I could understand something of the weight he was carrying. That’s one of the problems for soldiers and humanitarian workers. They come home and nobody understands. Nobody really knows what it was like. And yet, in another sense, it’s not as bad as all that either. It’s human life. Full-on human life.

What the comfortable West has forgotten

We live such switched-down, comfortable lives here in countries like Britain. And I’m afraid we may be in for a bit of a shock. Because the reality experienced by the majority of people on Planet Earth is very different from the reality experienced by relatively wealthy, comfortable Westerners.

We are not the bees-knees any more. Increasingly we exist by the good grace of people who are not Euro-American, not white-skinned – people who make up the majority of humanity. There’s something we need to learn here.

One of the ways to do this is through the Tibetan practice of Tonglen. The basic idea is that you start with something you know yourself. For me, I have cancer. My body is fucked. Life is difficult. These are things I understand from the inside. That becomes the anchorage. Then I reach outward.

I might think about people in Gaza who have cancer. There will be thousands of them. And unlike me, many of them may not have access to the medication I have been fortunate to receive.

But there is something else. They may have something I don’t have. Depth of care. A humanity, an empathy which is far greater than we sensible Westerners care to show. And this raises a fundamental issue. Forget the Judaeo-Christian idea that has motivated the humanitarian and the charitable sector, for so long. This isn’t really about helping other people.

This is about energy exchange.

If I went back to Palestine as a cancer patient, the care I would get from other people would be better than what I receive in Britain because they have large families and a different attitude and priorities. It works easily in a family of forty. So the funny thing is, they have no medication and we have little care – we need to swap some of each. Our society is geared towards material things and that is both our strength and our problem.

Even in the last few years since the whole Gaza thing and the West Bank has kicked off again, Palestinians can actually be happier than people in countries like Britain, Europe and North America. They are strangely socially wealthier.

This might sound strange but it’s because they have faced stuff which we still fear. We fear loss. We fear danger. We fear pain, violence, rainstorms, droughts, having no chocolate. All sorts of stuff. Using our fear, we conform to the requirements of the machine we live in, and as a result of this we have lost quite substantial degrees of our humanity.

This is what people in Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Pakistan, South East Asia, Latin America and Asia can show us. Ubuntu. This is about caring for our fellow humans. It’s one of the key things which people like Palestinians can teach people like us.

So really this is an energy exchange.

I can visualise somebody receiving medication or help, or comfort for their soul, or light in their darkness, and in doing so I too become healed – and this is how it works. It’s not about us helping others, it’s about us swapping what we are strong in, with what they are strong in.

We, in countries like Britain, are a bunch of softies nowadays. We are incapable of dealing with a lot of basic things – finding food after an earthquake or sharing our last loaf of bread with our friends and neighbours. We’re going to have to relearn this because things are going to go down in the West. When I say down, I don’t mean necessarily mean ‘bad’.

I remember a professor at the London School of Economics once saying something. He said that when the economy goes up, society goes down, and when the economy goes down, society goes up.

And this is what we have ahead of us.

We’re coming into a time where society will go up, even if the economy goes down. And this is going to be a very fundamental thing. This is going to change the whole sociology of our nation.

Energy exchange

Look at me. I’m old. I’m disabled. I need some care and attention. But I’m not helpless. There are things I can still do, up to a point, that are good for me to do – and for others too. I can contribute. I could cook a meal once a week for ten people (though not more). And because I have the time, I can do something that somebody else doesn’t have the time to do. I’m not just a recipient of care. And that matters.

People can go through extraordinary loss and still have something remarkable to offer. I know of a woman in Gaza, a journalist, whose family was bombed out while she was away working. She came home to find her house levelled and her family gone. And yet, somehow, it made her more committed to a life of peace-building.

You get the arrival of amazing peacemakers, fully qualified to bring about social healing because they’ve been into the depths of suffering and have come out the other side. They don’t want revenge, they want peace – and there’s something here which is important.

To get back the world work, we’ve got to change our philosophy. It’s natural that a person like you or me should want peace and that would be our social-political preference. But the thing is, you can’t wish peace on people, you can’t oblige it. People have to come to peace in their own way, and that often involves a lot of forgiveness.

It often involves a lot of exhaustion, actually. It means that people have to come to a point within themselves where they have had enough. They just want to go home, lie in bed and twiddle their toes. They want to do some shopping, just like everyone else does. They want to have a holiday.

That’s what brings peace. But people have to come to it in themselves.

So don’t wish peace upon people – it doesn’t necessarily help. These people are hurt, and they’ve got to work things out for themselves but you can wish forwardness and progress on them.

Take Ukraine.

At the moment, no matter what we might wish about peace and ceasefires and all the rest of it, it’s not going to happen anytime soon – unless of course, there is a miracle. So it’s not worth it really. It’s more to do with encouraging people to have good attitude, fortitude, perseverance, looking after each other and looking after themselves. Wish that upon people because, that way, they will get to peace quicker.

Getting underneath the story

This kind of work has got to be realistic, and that’s important. Not just idealistic. There’s enough idealistic meditation. There are enough people praying for peace, transformation and ascension and all the rest of it and that’s good. But this is about digging around in the dungeons. Digging around in the undergrowth and looking at the deeper causes of what’s really going on.

Take the situation in Iran at the moment. The fascinating thing is that it’s not going to resolve itself anytime soon, or very easily, and yet the aspirations of the Gulf states are getting ruined and Iran itself, a country with such a history, is getting ruined. Its people are paying a high price for the intervention that’s going on. What right have we or the Americans to do this, really?

I say ‘we’ because we British have been involved in Iran’s history. Back in the 1950s we brought about a coup d’etat there to work in our favour. What was it about? Oil and money. No wonder Iranians have difficulty trusting British people, even though we’re not involved in this war.

Technically speaking, it’s Mr Trump’s own war, such a desperate soul that he is. But he himself is channelling a force which is alive in the collective psyche of humanity. He wouldn’t have any power if there were no people who implicitly support him and are persuaded by him. And so the story goes on.

Our own shadow

We’ve got to get out of these judgements. Donald Trump is shaking things up. He is showing us plenty of things that we don’t want to do or to see in future.

We humans and our societies are a key issue, now and over the next decade or two. Because humanity has a leadership problem. We have a big crop of pretty bad leaders at the moment. We also have a good crop of pretty good leaders whom many think are bad leaders. And we have a crop of bad leaders who many people think are good leaders.

There is something we need to straighten out here. This has to do with social power and healing the past, healing history and the pain that we have had.

We might pride ourselves of living in a democratic country such as Britain but we’ve had our riots, violence and oppression. Just because the system now uses carrots rather than sticks, it doesn’t necessarily mean everything is better.

Part of world work is therefore to do with working with the shadow of our own country. Britain has an imperial past. We have hidden guilt about it, inherited from our ancestors. It’s not our responsibility to correct everything they did because it was something of a past generation, but nevertheless we can use our privileged position as British people, Americans and Europeans, to bring about good.

Palestine, personally

One reason I became so involved with Palestine is because it is a former British colony. My grandfather was involved in General Allenby’s British invasion of Palestine during the First World War. It’s personal, and in order to heal my own personal shadow stuff and that of my nation it has been good to go to Palestine and work with people there.

I’m so happy that I’ve done that and it’s brought me such joy – even though it has been tragic and we’ve made no progress, really. I’ve been involved in this whole thing for twenty-fivish years and it’s been backwards progress. Well that’s what it appears to be, but underneath there’s something really, really important going on, and so we can’t judge events too superficially. Don’t just tut tut at Israeli settlers – they are teaching us something. What is it? And what are we going to do about it?

This isn’t about feeling guilty about antisemitism either. This is about humans and human needs. All of us.

A friend once said something which stayed with me. She said that nowadays we talk about human rights, whereas in former times we talked about natural justice. There’s something in that.

So what now?

Do you believe in world healing? Do you want to heal this planet? Do you believe in a positive future?

If you’re going to be one of the people that join the Great Ascension, do you really feel ready? Really? Have you done the homework? And, if you haven’t started, what then?

It only really needs to take an evening every week or perhaps a month or two every year. You can get involved in things like this and it has a way of gladdening the soul on a very deep level. Even though there is plenty of blood, sweat and tears that goes on, this is the stuff of life. This is Planet Earth. This is what we’re working with.

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Recorded by Palden, and transcribed by Emma Cass – thank you, Emma.