Category: life-purpose

Pearls and Gold

Despite everything, here I stand, weak, strong, wobbly and firm

Chapel Carn Brea, the first and last hill in Britain, where the national beacon light-ups start from. That’s a bronze age chambered cairn on top.

One of the best books I ever wrote, ten years ago now, I couldn’t publish. It concerned a plot I helped uncover, involving American financiers funding settlement building in the West Bank, a well-known international meditation organisation making a big error and rogue elements in the Israeli and Palestinian intelligence services. I had to get out of the country pretty quick after dishing up that lot!

The story was quite sensational, though I didn’t publish it because it could endanger people’s lives, many issues would be twisted and misinterpreted in the West, American lawyers would have had a field day, some people would seek revenge, and my friends back home would ask me why I bother risking my life for a few darned Palestinians. Well, it has happened again, except it’s Africans this time. If I told you the story that’s happening now, you’d have difficulty believing it’s for real.

That’s one reason I’ve been rather quiet. It has been difficult knowing what to say. Telling the story can endanger lives, sabotage others, and much of it would, again, be misinterpreted. The number of seriously incorrect diagnoses of the situation that I have received recently has been disturbing, particularly because of their implied racist undertones. Many friends believe I’ve been scammed by West Africans, but the problem comes from a whiteskin company in the rich world, not from Africans. We have been stuck between Western corporate negligence and a crime gang’s violence. Meanwhile, people were getting murdered by the gang, whose market for cocaine, crack, people-smuggling and prostitution is in Britain and Europe. If we want to change the world, we need to end this turning away.

In the last few months I have gained an adopted granddaughter, Phyllis, whose life I have now saved several times. Looks like we might lose her now. She is on the edge of dying, due to a drug overdose and having had two fingers on her left hand cut off by the crime gang. Her mother, Felicia, was gang-raped. The bastards. Felicia is Liberian in origin: when she was young, civil war broke out around her and she was forced to watch her parents and three sisters being shot. When Phyllis’ fingers were being cut off Felicia cried out to me, online, “Why, dear God, is this happening to me AGAIN?”. Phyllis is all she has left.

So while I have a cracker of a story, I cannot tell it. I feel bottled up, but it is safest for those involved that I do not say more. Some good book sales would have been really useful though. This nightmare has cost me a lot and, until the company honours its multiple promises to pay me, I’m seriously in debt. They promised to compensate Felicia for all she has been through, and Felicia is now destitute. This has set me back a lot, affecting my plans for the coming year. But my conscience is as clear as it can be in such a gruesome situation, and I am glad I have not obeyed the advice of many friends to look after my own interests and, in effect, abandon these people to let them die. If I lose friends over this, then so be it.

Bridging gaps. Porthmoina Cove, West Penwith, Cornwall

Last year was a testy year. It wasn’t just the hair-raising story I’ve been involved with. It started a year ago. I was unwell and down, in a mess. My partner suddenly left me – she had her reasons – and I lost another adopted grandchild in the process. Gaining and losing grandchildren is a theme for me at present. Looking back, I was unconsciously picking up forewarnings for nine months beforehand, feeling insecure but unable to figure out why. Something needed to change between us, but I wasn’t ready for total, enforced relationship destruction. I got the blame, though whatever crime I truly committed, in the final analysis, has been far outclassed by the response. I miss her still, and her family. Giving myself a year to get over it, I’ve partially succeeded and also I haven’t. I believed we would go through to the end of my life. But no, I had a big lesson to learn there.

So, I wish her good fortune and many blessings for all that we had together. She is free, and I sincerely hope she finds rebirth and flowering in her new life. She deserves it – she saved my life in my worst cancer days. I am so grateful for our time together. Now a free man with mixed feelings, I’m not managing very well alone. But that’s my problem. It has its plus side though: I’ve used the pain of loss to fire up my creativity, rebirth myself and give the rest of my life, if I can, to starting something new. Or it’s starting me. It concerns a world-healing project. There’s a feeling of rightness to it, like a little seed currently hiding under the snow, awaiting its moment.

In the last year my cancer process has changed. Medically I am more or less stable, and the focus has turned to relationships and the psycho-emotional side of living with cancer. Cancer strips a layer off you and the shields come down. Issues get amplified. A last-chance-saloon feeling takes over. You suddenly find friends and loved ones committing micro-aggressions they didn’t know they were doing. Life becomes raw and unprotected. You get hurt. It has changed my capacity to relate and slowed my capacity to process things through, emotionally. While I’m kinda managing, being on my own means that, if I deteriorate, I have little or no fallback. Sometimes I just need someone to hold me. Sometimes I just want someone around.

One or two friends have suggested that I move upcountry to England, to be closer to people. But I’m electrosensitive and I can’t hobnob in parties and groups or walk down the street without getting zapped and needing to retreat back home – it can take 48 hours to get over it. In effect, to be with friends and loved ones I have to permit them to harm me with radiation. So I could be just as isolated there as I am here. Folks up in England are all very wired-up, busy keeping timetables and treading mills, and that is the central cause of the care crisis we have today – we don’t have time and space to be human, and people in situations like mine demand too much of it. Meanwhile, Cornwall feeds my soul, and the movements of my soul and its expressions seem to be valued nowadays, by you lot. So this seems to be the right place for me. I’m happy doing forays into England, or even elsewhere, but I’d need a lot of persuading to move because I would lose my taproot.

I haven’t been doing well on the family front either. That’s a complex story – another I won’t tell. What with my disability and their busy family lives, it’s difficult for us to meet up, and online relationships don’t really work for me. Mercifully though, all of my offspring get on really well, though they have three different mothers and live in two Brexit-sundered countries. They’re a lovely bunch, and their husbands and children too. In many people’s judgement I’ve been a useless father, and I guess I’m supposed to feel bad about it. Or perhaps I have had Mandela’s dilemma: a conflict between ‘my people’ and ‘my family’, which I have not been able to integrate – and neither did he. However, as an Aspie and weirdo in late life, I’m tired of apologising for being who I am, and I’m not as wrong as I’m often judged to be. It’s time for a change.

In the distance, Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall, as seen from the Boscregan Cairns, one of my favourite haunts

My health is kinda okay, though my back is slowly deteriorating, as if gravitation were increasing. My cancer, Multiple Myeloma, affects blood and bones – will-to-live (blood) and capacity to be active in the world (bones). That’s a wee bit fundamental. Even so, my haematologist is surprised I’ve lasted so long on my current cancer drug, Daratumamab. But, to me, it makes sense that I would do well with it. Dara isn’t a form of ‘chemo’ designed to kill cancer cells. It works by flagging up cancer cells as they emerge so that my immune system can deal with them itself – that’s a brilliant approach, and it’s just right for me. So I’m doing well with Dara. My immune system is in pretty good nick too.

Here’s an observation. I think there are two kinds of immunity: one is to do with the nutrients we take in on a daily basis, which can provide fight-back if our immune system is under pressure or feeling low. Whenever I get the slightest sign of an infection, such as a sneeze, I take a gram of Vit C straight away – and it works. But there’s a deeper immunity level I’d call resilience. If you’ve done immunity-boosting things for a decade or more – good vits, good oils, good everything, though not too fanatical about it – then you’re in a different league. If you’re dabbling with veganism or health-awareness, take note: it truly works if you stay with it for decades, allowing your body-psyche to go through deeper structural changes. Combine this with inner growth, and your cells and genes become transformed. I can verify this from experience.

Longterm resilience has been a life-saver for me, now I have cancer. At root, it lies in attitude. When I’m having a hard time, I look for the gift that’s available. Sometimes I’m forced to lie in bed, watching the buzzards wheeling around over the fields. Sometimes I’m being given a gift of pain to teach me how to move through it and out the other side. Recently I’ve been given a loneliness that has allowed me to spend a lot of time reflecting on life, writing and recording things from my eyrie out here in West Penwith, the Far Beyond.

Immunity is intimately connected with psychic protection too, and right now I’m working on that. Whenever we feel down and got at by life, we have both a protection and an immunity issue. If you want to work positively with cancer or any other adversity, work positively with your protection. This isn’t about throwing up barriers around you – it’s about working on the fears, shame and guilt that grind away underneath, undermining the integrity of your being and giving an opening that outside interference can hook into, draining your power. Sometimes it’s like having fleas, getting nibbled at by lots of small things, and sometimes it’s like a big thump in the stomach. Protection is about the light within us and the degree to which we withhold ourselves behind our shame, guilt and fear.

When I first went into cancer treatment, I hadn’t had pharmaceutical drugs for many years. Suddenly I was getting pumped with chemicals. I called on my inner doctors. “Let it be. We’ll fix it, and follow your instincts on what else will help“. I don’t get it in words like that, but that’s what the message was. I decided to trust, deeply. I started on things like CBD, carefully selected supplements, received healing from many wonderful people, and worked on generating an attitude of yielding and acceptance. On the whole it worked. I’ve balked at a few of the drugs given me, but not many, and in some cases I’ve dosed myself more sensitively to my own actual needs. But I’ve had fewer side-effects than many other people seem to get. That’s resilience: it’s all about strengthening our capacity to handle whatever life throws at us.

Pendeeen Watch, a neolithic cliff sanctuary looking out toward Ireland over the Celtic Sea

At some point, when I can restore my finances, I’ll start doing some events. A monthly online ‘magic circle’ is shaping up, and I’ll be doing some live Magic Circles or talks sometime, though I don’t have it in me to organise them myself. The capacity to handle life’s details and intricacies is one thing that chemo and cancer have taken away – though I’ve gained a widened and deepened understanding of life instead. The only booking I have at present is the Legends Conference in Glastonbury on 8th-10th April, and I shall announce other events when they get fixed.

When I die I shall have no money or property to leave, but I do hope to leave a legacy. We shall see if it works in real life, if I can keep going long enough. When I was young I was heading for a career in diplomacy or government, but then around age 21 I went through an awakening and changed course. I began treading a spiritual-political alternative path. In starting the camps movement in the 1980s I attempted working with the heart and soul of Britain, to transform it from within – with limited success (it was the Thatcher period, after all). In the Hundredth Monkey Project in the 1990s, we attempted direct spiritual work with world events, with some success. With the Flying Squad that followed, we developed the techniques, ethics and practices of such work, forging a synergistic unity and a group bonding that compensated for our lower numbers. This built up a body of experience. There’s further to go, and the world has a need for it.

When cancer came along in 2019, I thought that was it with the world-healing work but, no, reviving last spring from the enormous emotional hit I had a year ago, I got the message, “Ah, there’s one more thing, before you can come home…“. I realised that no one else really had the experience and capacity to take the world-healing work one stage further. In a way it was incumbent on me to do it. I now have a plan, and it’s now a matter of finding out whether and how it will work in real life. It has already started with the Sunday evening meditations, and we’ll let things develop from there.

It involves a group process for which I can prepare the ground, plant seeds and help them germinate, but that’s all. I don’t have much time left, and the events of the last year have shown me how beat up and worn out I am. You see, what decides things for me is not medical prognoses but how long I can keep going, in heart and soul, pushing the limits and remotivating myself to face another day. My current aloneness has tested me profoundly and, while I’m holding up, it has been a big systems check on what I can and cannot do. Overloaded with issues, I’ve been trying hard not to fuck up but only just managing. But then, this is my life, I’ve created it this way, that’s my karmic pattern, and it is as it is. Mashallah – thus has it been ordained. This next chapter is my last dance, and I’m going to give it what I can.

Wolf Rock lighthouse, 11 miles or 17km out to sea, as seen from St Levan, Penwith

But first, there’s business. I want the company to right some wrongs, financially, and I want to get Felicia and Isaac and their remaining children safe and stabilised in a new life. True heroes, they have paid a high price for being good people. Even as a tottering old man, I choose to stand by them, whatever anyone says. Then there’s that gang, who have deprived at least seven people of their lives. This included an Akan native healer, Okomfo Ayensuwaa, with whom I had close miracle-working dealings for a week or so just before Christmas. Killed for protecting Felicia and Isaac and their families, she has decided to work with us on the world healing project, from the other side. She is with us now, in our meditations. A strong, big and good-hearted lady she was, and the river spirits she worked with miss her.

I have shed so many tears over these unjust tragedies, and several times I have been faced with a painful moral choice I would not wish upon any of my readers: the choice between playing safe, prioritising my own interests and security, and standing by my principles in order to keep some good people alive and to stand up for what is good and right. I’ve made that choice, I’m paying that price and, despite everything, I am glad to have done so. The bravery of these people has been a big lesson for me, and my standing by them has been a big lesson for them. Whitemen have a way of walking off. The fates have now separated Felicia and Isaac, and they struggle on alone. I’m still with them, supporting them even though I can’t send money.

Please pray for them, for their safety, healing and relief from their trauma and misfortune – they, and Phyllis, and Isaac’s one remaining child, Adjoa, aged about 6-7, truly need it. They are struggling, materially, emotionally and spiritually. Please be with them in spirit.

One of my missions in life has been to do with righting some of the wrongs committed by the British empire. One grandfather was in Allenby’s invasion of Iraq and Palestine in WW1 and the other was in the Battle of the Somme. My father fought in Egypt in WW2. Northern Ireland started me off on this path, fifty years ago, and I seem to be at it still. Interestingly, it was the Akan, the Ashanti, who, together with the Maoris of New Zealand, were the only peoples who successfully stood up against the empire – at least until the amoral Brits tricked both of them into losing. The empire had its merits and demerits and, while we should forget neither, we do need to own up to the demerits we forced on so many millions of people. For the world cannot progress while unredeemed shadows such as these hang over us all. Every country has its shadow to face.

This has been a difficult time. I’m still here though! As I write, Felicia is watching her only child Phyllis die slowly, in a coma, in hospital, unable to afford treatment. They’re stranded with nothing in a foreign country. That’s the score today. That’s life, as it presents itself. This has been a difficult and risky blog to write – I hope to goodness that I’ve done it right. Meanwhile, I’ll be there as usual at the meditation on Sunday evenings. Bless you all for being my friends, especially the ones closer to me. We all need each other.

Helen, my peerless homoeopath, gave me Pearl last year (beauty out of pain) and Gold this year (lighting up darkness) – spot on. She’s brilliant. If you happen to need an inspired homoeopath who can do it remotely from Cornwall, try her.

Lots of love from me, Palden.

Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Meditations: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

The path goes ever on and on… Zennor Head, West Penwith, Cornwall

Far Beyond

Paldywan Kenobi goes on tour

Paldywan’s ‘magic tour’ is starting in Glastonbury on Tuesday 2nd August – details below.

It will continue to Avebury (right next to the stone circle) in August (date not finalised yet), and then it goes to Totnes area on Saturday 24th September (by Buckfast Abbey). Full details about these two are to follow soon.

The Glastonbury details given here will be common to all of them, but these circles will be different in each place and at each time. You see, these aren’t rehearsed. I have some basic themes to work around, but it arrives on the spot and it’s a process.

Some people might say it’s channelled, but I don’t really use that notion much – it has been corrupted and romanticised. Let’s just say it arrives on the spot. If you’ve seen me on stage, you’ll notice I stand in front of you silently, fumbling with my ear and I look at everyone in the audience. It gets a bit weird, just for a second or two. Then I just come up with the first thing that arrives, and we’re off.

If you’ve heard my podcasts, they’re unrehearsed too, and that’s how I work. When you’ve done this kind of thing countless times for many years, it kinda sinks into your bones. Since I have a bone cancer (myeloma), it looks like it’s coming out!

That was one of my wry jokes – please excuse me. After all, life is rather a joke – when we’re in a position to see it that way. Which does happen sometimes, amidst the treacle-journey of earthly existence, during partings of the fog. It’s all about getting lost in our stuff and then getting found again. The regularity of this as life goes on obliges us to ride it a wee bit better as we go along.

It never ends, and this is paradoxical. The more accumstomed you get to riding life’s waves, and the more tools you gather, the deeper the challenges that Life presents us with. You clear the last lot and become eligible for the next lot. You become ready to handle stuff a level deeper. So, really, it never ends. It’s relentless.

When I was a young Buddhist I used to think that, once you attained enlightnment, you’d be at peace and everything would be alright. But, watching my Lama teachers, HH Gyalwa Karmapa XVI and various other remarkable rinpoches, it became clear that, the more they resolved things inside themselves, becoming more enlightened, the more deeply they were involved with the woes of the world.

This process of inner growth really doesn’t end. Dead or alive, it goes on, and at any age of life. Cancer and other recent experiences have rather put me through the mill, and the grinding action really has helped me become a better version of myself.

Well, I hope. It’s not really for me to judge. Cancer is an amazing crash course in navigating a much altered reality, and it goes on for the length of time you survive in this life. And then you’re free.

So, people who wish me a long life, and I appreciate the thought, but it’s not necessarily as easy and welcome as it sounds! My approach instead is to be straight-up with myself and others about my real prospects and to do the max with the time I have left – hence this tour. Because cancer is wearing, and it depends how much I really want to struggle, hurt, worry and endure. And for what? How much more willpower do I have left in my account?

Well, I’m doing alright at present, and excited about the tour, and enjoying the summertime, but I cannot rely on holding up longterm. In a way the tour is an experiment to see how much I can take. But it feels really good to be doing it. If I get through these three, then I might be able to do another three – it depends on organisers, on being pulled there and on whether it feels right.

If your antennae twitch over this, please consider coming. With the Glastonbury event, don’t leave enquiring about it until late, if you want a place. Otherwise you might have to head over to Avebury – which has its virtues too. The organiser in Glastonbury is my old friend Bruce Garrard, a well-known character around town.

Three themes: 1. transitioning (about incarnation and excarnation); 2. world work (inner aid and disaster response) and, 3. our personal origins, roots and purpose as souls. And the way these knit together. They have knitted together for me, and some of you might get some vital clues for yourselves.

Here’s the leaflet for the Glastonbury event. Download it as a PDF here or as a JPG here.

If you cannot come (perhaps you live too far away or just can’t break out) but you’d like to play a small part, then this is what to do. Put your name on some paper, or send a small photo, or a very small item like a bead or a very small stone or piece of wood – anything, but pls keep it small and keep it simple! These will be put at the centre of the circle in each of the circles we do, and they will be dealt with mindfully afterwards (they can’t be returned).

Send it by post before 25th July to: Palden Jenkins, Botrea Farm, Penzance, Cornwall TR20 8PP, UK.

I shall be at the OakDragon camp in early August (the founder returns on his sticks!) and I’ll do an evening talk in Glastonbury (the Inner Light Group) – to be announced. Then in September I’m really looking forward to the Devon circle. News about Avebury and Devon soon.

With love, Palden.

Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Website: www.palden.co.uk

Continuation of the Soul

Yes, you and yours too

For those of you who are interested in the kinds of things I gibber on about, you might find this video really interesting. It’s down below.

Jeffrey Mishlove comes at matters of the soul and psyche from a completely different angle from me, yet I completely agree with what he says. He’s a psychologist with a really open mind, while my qualifications in this subject are zilch, haha, yet I draw on my own experiences. Which, over the years, have become a bit of a list…

These have included a near-death experience, talking to a soul (my son) before he was born, talking to souls after they’re gone and even handholding them over the threshold, re-experiencing a good number of ‘past’ lives and a couple of ‘future’ ones, and all sorts of other out-of-time experiences of many kinds. These qualify me as a madman or rather sane, depending on your viewpoint. (Actually, for all of us it’s somewhere in between – Gurdjieff used to call people of the muggle variety ‘mad machines’.)

I don’t actually consider myself very good at this stuff. Believe me, when meditating, I get booming brains and endless diversions at least as much as anyone reading this. But the issue here is giving it attention and going into it, giving it time and space and doing it over a period of time – such as the rest of your life. Simply do this, and you do pick up experience. Keep doing it. Occasionally, you’re lit up with grace, wonder, healing, resolution and light.

So, I am not a good meditator. I’ve been with people who go far deeper than I do. But the issue here is to sit with it and do it – at your own pace, with no shoulds or oughts, as a part of your life like breakfast and lunch. Give space for the world within to speak.

I’ve been doing a weekly meditation without fail on Sundays at 7pm GMT (8pm BST) for half an hour, since 1994. This is the Nine slot when the channels are open, run by Altea. If you wish to join, just do it – though pls take your boots off before entering and spend the first few sessions just listening and, if necessary, waiting. It works like that.

Otherwise I meditate randomly when it’s right to do so. Sometimes I’m just sitting there churning over my stuff and nothing much seems to be happening – as far as what a meditative state ought to be (ahem). But then I draw out, up and back from myself and see it differently. ‘Removing self from self’. I see myself churning around and it looks very different. It changes instantaneously.

One day I had a breakthrough. It was when I was with the Nine in the early 1990s. I found myself letting my watchers upstairs enter right into my psyche, allowing them to see parts of me I didn’t want them to see. I didn’t want to see them either, and I’m still discovering new hidden shadows down there in the depths. It goes on and on – there’s no retirement in this game.

Letting them in was like an enormous burst of self-forgiveness. They didn’t do anything except take a look inside an interestingly fucked-up humanoid on Earth, but for me it was a release and relief, an opening up and a step forward. I saw myself as I was, not as I told myself I wanted to be, or feared I was, or believed others saw me to be.

My birth chart. Jupiter, down the bottom (like a 4), holds the key to my chart – it’s called a bucket-handle. My chart is a bit like a foolproof instruction manual on how not to be a billionaire.

For a Jupiter in Pisces type like me, this kind of thing is an undoubted peak experience.

Whenever I am troubled, I open myself up for them to take a look. After a while it becomes more of a habit. That opens out a load of things. It shifts the context, I see things more as they are, and this helps me do an update on myself. It’s not as easy as it sounds, because guilt, shame and fear are so deeply embedded and sometimes demand some wrestling, but it helps me move forward.

It’s like mindfulness practice: whether it’s you or your ‘inner guides’ being aware of what’s happening in your psyche, it’s essentially the same awareness being aware of it.

We are not the separate individuals we believe ourselves to be. Here on Earth we’re swimming in an enormous and rather busy psychic collectivity, and it’s like a swirling, whirling, jangly cacophony. We’re all members of tribes and groups that go way beyond this life.

At this time of history we’re being asked to recognise something further: that we’re all of the same tribe, the same people. We’re all so different yet we’re part of one planetary tapestry, one species. We all breathe the same air and see the same Moon in the sky.

Without recognising this in our hearts and in our bones, we will give ourselves a very hard time in coming times, and we’re already well advanced in this. It’s that simple.

Tibetans have a philosophy of doing good and of practicing loving kindness not only because they’re good things to do, but also because they set up conditions for our forthcoming incarnations. It means that, in future, there will be less of a pile of difficult issues to deal with if we make progress on them now. It helps us stop causing problems we don’t really need. Perfection isn’t required: all we need is forward motion. Whether or not you subscribe to such a perspective, it’s worth contemplating. It’s ecological, sustainable and just. It involves what Buddhists call non-duality…

…recognising that the inner and the outer worlds are two sides of the same coin, of equal reality, and they’re thoroughly interactive and mutually-responsive in detail and down to the subtlest of nuances. The toxicity, injustice and tragedy out there in our world are totally connected with those that lurk within our own psyches. Oh shit.

If humanity gets this equation, sometime, somehow, we will make it through the crisis we have here in our world – and we’ll make good use of it. Miracles will happen because we will be creating reality differently. For some (not all) of us here, this concerns our future lives as well as those of our grandchildren, who could become our parents. What we’re doing now creates conditions in which, in coming times, we and everyone may thrive and fulfil our purpose.

Everyone has specific instructions programmed into our psyches and genes, but the two main purposes we all share are… to learn and to make a contribution. No one is here by accident.

This video is by an old friend, Tim Walter, a film-maker and dowser who’s interesting in his own right – check out his videos on YouTube, such as this…

With love, Paldywan

Emergence

and scraping myself off the floor of life

Bluebells in the woods down below the farm

My Mum taught me not to be a problem. As a quiet Virgo, I wasn’t much of a problem – it didn’t take a lot of doing. But her and my concepts of ‘problem’ were different – mine didn’t encompass spotlessly white collars on my school shirt or holding my knife and fork properly. This pattern has at times itself been in itself a problem – not putting myself forward when I should, or accepting loss more than was right. But it’s also an asset which has helped me in my peacemaking work and generally makes people believe I’m a good guy, and this has got me through some mighty scrapes.

It’s an important thing for the 21st Century. We all have to scale things down that we reduce the extent to which we are other people’s problem or can become one. This is tricky. For me, I’ve often been a problem for others in terms of the way they see things, but not necessarily a problem in an ultimately real way. This is common in all sorts of social and intercultural interactions – we project stuff on each other. I’ve been in many situations where the worse option, not the one I present, has been chosen, just to cover people’s asses or allow them to avoid facing something that is important. I’ve sat in clink, been an exile and lost my kids over this. There have been times when I’ve been plain wrong too – and it’s important to own up to these.

It’s all about attentiveness to others. I’m very attentive in certain ways, though sometimes I seem deficient too, on the personal front. My attention is taken up quite a lot with the world and at times with things not of this world. Perhaps as a psychic type I tend to forget some of the more outward niceties and considerations others need, and they don’t necessarily register the support I might be giving them inwardly. Generous in certain ways, though spontaneously, I forget birthdays and little behaviours that matter to others but I don’t really register in my lexicon. I guess this is an Aspie issue.

Since my life encompasses a large number of people, those close to me can sometimes wonder how much I care specifically for them. This can be reinforced by my at times dispassionate and inscrutable demeanour, or an absentmindedness when I’m focusing on work or innerwork that looks like I don’t care. Or perhaps I’m lost in space, processing situational intricacies, or keeping a presence in the Donbas, or monitoring someone who is ill or dying. Or just floating off. Mad professor stuff. I do change, but I’m slow, sure and thorough in it, especially when on a major Saturn transit like recently, and sometimes people can’t wait. Sometimes I change further than others were expecting.

I’ve had a time of scrangly challenges for the last year – the duration of a Neptune opposition Saturn transit, starting in May 2021 and completing in February this year. It has taken 3-4 months since then to surface and survey the new landscape. In February I felt I had perhaps one year left, and now I feel I have longer – it’s important not to try to pin down how much. For me there’s an extra calculation of two things: the time I can stay in active service and the time to drop it and focus on staying alive, or departing well. I don’t want to drag things out though, because I’m also rather tired in my soul and I want to go home for a while.

One of the transformative gifts here is that everything is so much more provisional than it was before, or than it is for most people. We usually have a sense of a roadmap, plans, expectations and logical steps to our lives, whether it’s framed in terms of things feared or things loved and hoped for. But now, in every arrangement I make I must calculate whether and how much I’ll be able to actually do it when the time comes. It helps to be an astrologer, though much of the decision-making I do intuitively. For important arrangements I tend to take a rather military, or a performer’s attitude, managing my energy to make sure I’m alright on the night whatever state I’m in. It’s the before and after that matter more – and nowadays it’s during those times I need a minder.

I always used to say to astrological clients that, when they had a major Saturn transit, they would get a download and a re-purposing of their life and mission, a new chapter in their work. Or (I’d tell them this carefully) they would get consequences from not doing so. On the approach to the transit two years ago I was going through my cancer struggle and reckoned, well, there’s not a lot more for me to do, so I can’t see how it could work that I’d get a new mission. But on the other hand, before cancer came along, something in me had been saying ‘There’s one more major mission to do’. But I could not see what that might be. When cancer came along I packed away that idea.

But cancer gave it back to me. It changed my life. It aged me, putting me up against the wall. It forced me to look at hard truths. It is now yielding fruits I did not expect – yet, the way it feels now, in a funny sort of way, all my life I’ve been unwittingly preparing for this. It shows how taking a hard path can sometimes shift things much more than following a seemingly easier or safer path. I peeped into hell during the depths of last winter, struggling with demons in the desolate places of my soul. But it shifted a pile of crap too. It’s strange to say, in my condition, that I’ve been given a new life, but there’s some truth to it, even if it lasts only a few years.

On the cliffs with the sheikh and friend Julia Aisha

This week I was visited by the Green Sheikh Saad Iddeen AlMaghrebi AlQudsi. He came with a dear Palestine soul-sister, Julia Aisha, with whom I worked in Bethlehem, and by his minder Said Julia Adams. Both Julias are very English, yet Muslims and well versed in Middle Eastern ways, and the Green Sheikh lives in London and goes regularly to Jerusalem, where he was born. He’s involved with many of the spiritual peacemakers I’ve worked with out there, on both sides of the conflict, nowadays calling themselves the Abrahamic Reunion (though formerly they were Jerusalem Peacemakers – it was founded in Glastonbury).

Julia Aisha played the oudh and sang some lovely Palestinian songs, and we formed a little bubble of Palestine here under the cloudy skies of Cornwall. Transfixed, we were. Then I took them to Carn Gloose, a dramatic clifftop nearby, and they made prayer there, facing Makkah. Cornwall weaved its oceanic magic on them and they were shining. We came back and the sheikh said prayers for me, giving me the healing of Allah. He lit up as he was chanting. I was being blessed and felt it. Allah was giving permission to move forward. Alhamdulillah – thanks be to That Which Cannot be Named.

So I want to create some magic spaces and invite you in. I’ll be doing some talks too, captivating in their own way, but this is different – this is circle-working. I’ve always been a good teacher, threading things together and causing a lot of lightbulb moments, but this isn’t primarily about teaching. It’s more about what Tibetans call transmission. Not from me but through me, and through the rather amazing people working with me and through those who are present. This will take some input and focus by everyone for the duration of each event (lasting perhaps 5-6 hours altogether). Something special becomes possible when it’s all well engineered and everyone’s in there with it. I cannot tell you exactly what this will be, but you’ll know it when it comes. I feel I’m in a position now to bring such a thing through, with your help.

At present, there are three areas where I feel I can contribute something. The first is about life and death and our lives and paths, the second is about ‘inner aid’ work to help the world, and the third concerns connecting with the source of our souls and the places and soul-tribes we come from.

I’m not interested in converting anyone or starting a following – I’m not around for long, and that kind of stuff really doesn’t matter any more. This is a series of one-offs – they are not going to get routine. I’m interested in drawing together people who feel a resonance with me and the signal I put out, because in some way that makes us soul-relatives or soul-friends, and we thus have a resonance between us. The coming together of a group of souls with such a connection means that energy-levels can be upstepped to a higher voltage. It means that everyone present needs to be a bit stretchy, willing to overcome reservations and swim in deeper water, but if we hold the circle well, everyone will be safe and the outcomes can be memorable. I and many of you have experience in this and we can do it.

The overall aim of this is to help everyone get connected up better, within yourself and with some good people and beings. I hope it will encourage you to follow your path and pursue your mission, whatever it is. My personal aim here is to fulfil one of the major threads of my life and hopefully to do something of assistance to The Management and to you. Those that I work for don’t seek believers and followers and they are not important in themselves: they want us as souls to rise to our full stature and to do what we’re here for and what we need to do. They’ll support anyone who does, and I want to strengthen in you ways in which this may be done.

Get this. One of the greatest crimes against humanity of today is withholding. We all do it – me too. It’s embedded in our cultures and it’s quite a heave to pull out of its clutches. With it go self-doubt, not-good-enough little-me syndrome, fear of risk or shame and that creepy feeling that the holy spirit somehow left us behind, or that we’re not up to it. Withholding involves setting aside and even forgetting the reason we came, and the true gifts and purpose we have. We get on with other things that seem important at the time, but when we approach the end of life, the money, property and success we’ve had and the chocolate we’ve eaten matter little, while the enduring truths of what we have been and what we have become stare us in the face.

Withholding lies at the root of our planetary problem today. If everyone increasingly got on with their true calling, things on Earth would start resolving quite rapidly. It’s amazing what comes out when the channels start getting unblocked. And yes, the toilets would get cleaned, because there’s a way of making even cleaning toilets a divine act of soul-enriching service.

Climate change, war, systems disintegration, injustice, poverty, toxicity – all these we can resolve. It’s going to take more effort, time, energy, sacrifice and change than we currently believe, but we’re going to do it and we can’t not. There will be payoffs, good news and miracles amidst the crises and crunches. What’s interesting here is that the drift of events in the world is forcing us to face big questions and do something about them for our own survival. There’s an urgency to it. It’s becoming clear that it is in our self-interest to work together and prioritise collective interest. We have to devise a way of coexisting on Earth in a way that fosters diversity and cultural variegation while becoming one planetary people, consensually cooperating in maintaining our world, rendering it safe and decent, and building a new world out of the structures and rubble of the old.

Here’s a question worth addressing, regarding death and what happens afterwards. Do you choose to return to live out one or more further lives on Earth, to contribute toward that planetary resolution, and perhaps to be here when the breakthrough happens or afterwards? It’s hard and risky work though it has its rewards, as you probably know. Or would you opt for heading off to other realms and leaving the Earth issue to those of us who remain? This has its validity too, and this life might be designed to be your last. Consider this carefully because you will face it sometime. Sorting out this question can help you refocus your current life so that, whatever your choice, you do it well while you’re alive.

Because once death comes, there’s no going back. There’s no delete or undo button. That’s when you set sail for other horizons and, if indeed you are to come back or move on, that will be finalised later on, once you’ve gone through the full post-death process. You’ll have a conference with your angels and members of your soul tribe.

I awoke at six this morning with a cacophony of thoughts that permitted me only to make a round of tea before getting on with them. That’s what I’m like. But also I’ve been on Dexamethasone for the last two days, a once-monthly part of my cancer treatment, and as a steroid it gets my mind buzzing. Something usually comes out of it – I’ve trained myself to make use of it. That’s perhaps why you got another blog thrown at you quite quickly after the last one.

I’m on antibiotics too for an osteo-necrosis infection, which I’m not happy about, but I do not see any alternative to them at present, so I’ll continue till I find one that actually works – since this is potentially a killer issue and I can’t mess around. My back is getting weaker, and exercise doesn’t necessarily help it. Cancer caused four of my lowest vertebrae to soften and collapse and my bones shrank marginally – you ought to hear my back clicking when, several times a day, I click myself back into place…

Myeloma is a blood and bones issue, and that’s pretty fundamental. It’s not tumorous, but it permanently changes your constitution. Blood is about life-force and will-to-live, and my bones hold me up, allowing my body to hang itself onto them for the purpose of functioning on a densely-gravitational planet. Myeloma is not very common but it’s one of the fastest growing cancers today – because of increasing EM radiation and use of certain neurotoxic chemicals. My functionalities are much reduced, but I manage, with a little help from my friends. Sometimes, by late afternoon, I can’t hold myself up any more, it hits my life-force tremendously and my brains conk out. I have to hit the horizontal, allowing myself to relax and float off for a regeneration session – it takes about half an hour. That’s when visitors need to get out their knitting.

A number of Paldywan events are taking shape in Glastonbury, Avebury and Totnes in the coming months and, when things are firmed up, I’ll let you know. This will be networked, not greatly advertised. For those of you who cannot come, it will be possible to devise a way of tuning in – news about that later. Other places are possible in due course, though I must pace myself and my helpers. These events will perforce be ‘limited edition’, even if I manage to continue with them for two or three years. Electrosensitivity means I cannot work in cities. Besides, everyone will be far more in contact with things with their phones switched off.

It’s time for breakfast. The sun is shining and I’m going to potter in the garden. I might or might not be alone this weekend, depending on whether anyone chooses to come visit. One other gift cancer has given me has been loss of agency – control over my circumstances. I’m in Neptune’s capable hands, and have gone through another lesson in acceptance. In life, we get what we get, and that’s the way it is, and we’re here to do the best with that. But the amazing thing is that other things happen instead, even if we don’t get what we want, and the universe does indeed look after us.

Love from me, Paldywan

Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Website: www.palden.co.uk
Facebook: www.facebook.com/palden.jenkins

Photos by me (in the woods), Miriam Naccache and, on the cliffs, Julia Aisha

The view from my window one early morning

Costs and Benefits

A new Paldypodcast

Here’s a new podcast. My creative mojo seems to be returning and I’m churning it out at present… erk. This is what it’s about:

In our time we’re going through an intensification of events and pressures, globally, socially and individually. We’re heading into harder times, and it’s not going to go back to normal. But there are things we can do about this. It doesn’t have to be as bad as currently it looks.

The costs and difficulties we have in life can be made a bit easier by not grinding on about it quite so much, by making things less difficult inside ourselves. Sounds easy, but it takes some work.

There are also gifts in any situation that become visible if we shift our focus, take a deep breath, own what we’re responsible for and focus on what’s really most important.

I’ve faced some stuff in recent times and seem to be gaining something from it, deep down, underneath. It’s a lot to do with finding what’s available in any situation – anything that can cheer us, lift us up and open up pathways – and going on from there. Following a path.

If your spirits have some sparkle, you’ll be alright. Though often, ‘alright’ isn’t what we originally thought.

17 minutes, with love from Palden.

Listen on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5W7HTEsIrryRSqs0syUK0w?si=36bw0NqbS1CFS_NnDo1Yyg

If you don’t want to use Spotify (or Apple or Google Podcasts – it’s there too), then go here: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Being in the World

And out of it too

Carn Gloose and, behind, Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall

I’m lucky to be a writer. With my cancer-derived disabilities I can still more or less carry on with my work. If I were a farmer, work would be mostly impossible and my life would fall apart. There’s another side to this though: I get fed up with sitting at the computer – being nerdy and scholastic, I’ve done a lot of that over the last fifty years! My major hurdle at present is fatigue, though even that has its compensations because the rest and the floating-off that fatigue induces gives me space to cogitate things more than I’ve ever done before.

So my current book is taking time, but I’m now on the finishing touches – checking footnotes, indexing and sorting out pictures and maps – ready to send to a printer and publisher I do not yet have. That’s the next hurdle. Fatigue means I have to take things one thing at a time – handling complexity, arrangements and details is distinctly difficult. But I’m really pleased with the book.

The ‘council circle’ at Bosigran cliff sanctuary

In some respects it’s rather obscure – about the ancient sites of West Penwith, here in Cornwall, and what they show us about ‘megalithic geoengineering’ – but in other respects I’ve never been able to give a book so much thought and consideration. It might be one of my best (it’s my eleventh). There has always been a rush to meet a deadline or before other things start happening. But I don’t have a lot happening, and I’m no longer striving to be a successful author – I’m seeking simply to pass on my knowledge to whomever will benefit from it, before I go.

A dear soul-sister, Sophia, suddenly went recently. She was about to stage a big exhibition of her remarkable art and ceramics when she died quietly in her sleep, in her early seventies. It’s one of those deaths that was a surprise – she was in good enough health and spirits, with good prospects. Yet there’s a feeling it was not actually wrong that she passed away there and then. Sophia is a deep and sensitive lady who has done consistent spiritual practice (Subud Latihan) for a long time. We worked together on local and world healing in the 1980s, with an occultist called Gareth Knight and others. Her angels clearly, cleanly and calmly took her out at what they consider exactly the right time.

It’s stirring, when someone suddenly blips out like that. But we’ll probably meet in heaven when I blip out too. It doesn’t bother me the way it seems to bother a lot of people who, in their confusion over death, seem to experience such loss and regret when a person dies. Some people judge that I don’t care when I say this, but they misunderstand me. Yes, there’s an enormous gap, a silence, and it raises big questions about life, bringing up mysterious feelings, and the person is no longer physically present, but why do people stop talking to a person when they die, as if they no longer exist? I’ve sat at funerals where the departed soul says to me, “But can’t anyone see I’m here?“, so I talk to them. Then they, and the attendant angels and beings, seem to wonder why I am not running the funeral myself.

At times in the past I have done so, encouraging the living, standing around the grave, to address the person directly in their thoughts and words. We’d do a talking-stick circle where everyone could say their bit and recount their chunk of the life-story of the walked-out person and their abiding impressions. I’d encourage everyone, silently to themselves, to say all they needed to say to the person, to round out their relationship, and to hear the departed person’s truth, and thank them for their presence and for whatever, knowingly or not, they taught us while they were alive.

Anyway, Sophia is now very much at peace and in good hands, and she is going home, and the quiet manner of her departing was true to form, for her. A death like hers leaves the rest of us in an altered state because part of us goes with her, drawing attention to the wider and deeper meaning of life and what we are doing about it. This leads me to my latest podcast about Soul Education – recorded in early September. It’s not about death but about life. My starting premise is that we as souls did not begin our evolutionary journeys here on Earth, and that we come here for two primary reasons: to learn and to make a contribution.

Carn Euny iron age village, 2,000 years old

Cancer has been something of a gift because it gave me an indefinite though possibly imminent death sentence, which has brought forward this question of the contribution I have made and still make. It sharpens me up, in my constrained and slightly helpless state. Soon after getting diagnosed, in mid-November two years ago, on my back fighting for my life and amidst my pain, I was moved to write down all I knew about prehistoric culture – something I had not properly done before. This knowledge would be lost and wasted if I didn’t get it down. It gave me a focus through the next two years, and now it is virtually complete and ready to ‘put to bed’.

I now face a new question. My life might (or might not) be longer than the few years I expected. But I do not know what will happen, especially since, just two weeks ago, I was again not far from death’s door. I need to face the world and to supplement my income, since my pension and allowances no longer cover all my needs and costs and I have nothing to fall back on. But I cannot make arrangements, keep timetables, remember details and deal with the intricacies and obligations of conducting business – I don’t even know what state I’ll be in next Thursday, next month or next year, so making promises and agreements is just not realistic.

Working for a living (such as editing books or doing astrological sessions) is not easy now, even though I’m a solid workaholic. You see, when I fall ill, I cannot sit at the computer renegotiating arrangements with multiple people and giving them a reliable answer when they ask when I’ll be better and back to normal! If I died suddenly, lots of threads could be left untied. My recent health encounter took three weeks and I’m worn out, running on three cylinders. I’m destined to fail in dealing with the details of working for a living, and I know it, and I’ve had instances already where I have let people down or forgotten something, because I’m in an altered state with chemo-brain and fatigue. Or they’re in more of a hurry than I can keep up with.

I’m just not ‘up to speed’ or ‘in the loop’, and neither should I be. I’m still shielding. But I’m a Virgo with an inbuilt need to do my bit. I need to focus on what actually I can do, such as writing this cancer blog until I no longer can, or churning out podcasts and my forthcoming book, or doing psychic work and playing a part in the lives of people close by and far away. I do these not just for self-entertainment, though they do keep me occupied, but because I believe they bring some value.

Neolithic Chun Quoit as seen from bronze age Boswens menhir

Last week Lynne picked me up and I went to stay in Devon with her. That worked well, and the change and being with her after a too-long pause was good. But while I was there I encountered another issue: electrosensitivity. It has increased since I got cancer. It’s a blood cancer, and iron-rich blood is electronic and magnetic. Lynne is herself electrosensitive, so this is not what otherwise could be a difficult issue between us. But it affects my and our social life a lot.

Most people don’t understand radiation, and many think they are exempt from its effects when this is incorrect. Problem is, it takes me just three seconds of close exposure to mobile phone or wi-fi radiation to set me off for 36 hours. I go through a sequence of cumulative symptoms, depending on the amount of exposure. It starts with an agitated, embattled, uncentred, inarticulate, locked-in kind of feeling, progressing to a high-pitched whine in the centre of my skull, then some sharp, pulsing, show-stopping headaches, then a thumping, irregular heartbeat, then distinct feelings of flu-like illness lasting about 24 hours after exposure has stopped. This is upsetting, especially when it’s friends, loved ones and interesting people killing you. No one understands what they’re doing because it is not recognised as a problem.

From my own perspective, I think that EM and nuclear radiation probably account for at least 20% of the environmental damage, climate change, social stresses and health problems happening right now, globally. The world doesn’t want to know. Many people groan when I come up with things like this, and I have been criticised many times for awkward utterances, only to watch them come true in the longterm. I’m not right every time, but I’m correct enough times for it to matter. It’s the price of being a seer and choosing to live ahead of our time – I’m sure a lot of you know that one.

I turned vegetarian-vegan in 1971, but now is it no longer regarded as a deficiency or weakness, but that took 40-50 years. Twenty years ago I was involved with ‘talking to terrorists’ (Hamas) at a time when it was risky and taboo. But now, British soldiers tell us we should have talked more to the Taliban in Afghanistan – ahem, yes, precisely. It’s painful, living with this wilful blindness and watching the wider costs and hardships rise so high. This is the case now with the question of EM radiation – it is nicely invisible and deniable, and mobiles and wi-fi are so useful, but it’s harming us and our world. Even Extinction Rebellion and the Green Party have a blockage over this issue, and I do wonder why.

Caer Bran, the possible bronze age parliament site for Penwith, as seen from Grumbla in the valley below

It’s past lunchtime and time to go to bed. Fatigue is funny: when it comes, it’s like pushing through treacle. The law of gravity gets switched up, my mind dulls out and it’s like being muffled in wool. It can arrive quite suddenly, often in the afternoon or following a lot of activity. The secret is to accept it and not grind myself up feeling guilty or inadequate. I’ve pushed energy writing this blog, and now I need to put my body-mind system into freewheel for a recharge. Besides, it’s a grotty, rainy, grey, blustery day, and bed is the best place to be. With a cuppa, a few munchies, music by Brian Eno, and a good case of metaversal megaflop.

Thanks for being with. This time you get a podcast too, introduced by a nightingale.

With love from me, Palden.

www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html – for the latest podcast from the far beyond
www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/ – about my book Shining Land
www.facebook.com/palden.jenkins – my Facebook page

And the pics here are made for but not included in my book.

Truth Time

A personal podcast about seeing and struggling through the bogs and brambles

We choose what we want to see

Here’s my latest podcast, recorded on Saturday 28th August.

Truth time.

It’s a personal one, this, and it concerns revelation. Uncovering. Curtains opening. Seeing things as they actually are and show themselves to be.

And pain, the pain of the soul, and of being a growing soul struggling through the bogs and brambles of evolving truth.

That’s me. That’s you. It’s here:

palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

With love.

Palden

Dish brushes & worlds in apocalypse

Everything is okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

Looking out from a 4,000 year old chambered cairn at Treen, in West Penwith, toward the position of the summer solstice sunrise

This is my 41st blog entry since I gained cancer, would you believe – or it gained me. It is now almost two years since the first sign of cancer revealed itself: I was gardening at Lynne’s place and cracked my back. For the first two months it seemed I had a bad back issue, but by mid-November I was diagnosed with myeloma – bone marrow cancer. My life changed. I was given a new chapter of life. Now it has been nearly two years. I’m still here, still alive. Amazingly.

Myeloma is a blood cancer and, unlike tumorous cancers, it cannot be cut out or eliminated – it can only be managed. I’ve been on a course of chemo since February (DVD – Dara, Velcade and Dex) which is now cut down to one treatment per month of Dara (injection) and Dex (pills) – a nurse comes round to visit, do blood tests, give me the drugs and occasionally to pump me up with Zolodronic acid, by drip, which helps reconstruct my hollowing bones. This is because myeloma dissolves the bones – and that’s what, in the end, might well kill me. Collapsing bones that land me up in bed, or where I get breakages and complications from them.

Well, that’s the standard prognosis, but I’m rather different, and we shall see.

All this is because of a susceptibility and exposure to electromagnetic and nuclear radiation – yes, mobile phones and wi-fi. Which I no longer use, and anyone entering my house must switch off. Even so, some people forget, and some are even dishonest. What people don’t understand is that it takes three seconds to be irradiated and two days to get rid of it. That’s what it’s like being electrosensitive.

In what way am I different? Well, I’ve discovered a lot about this in the last two years, under test and in real terms. I’ve been an acid tripper since 1966, a health-conscious wholefood vegetarian since 1971 and a meditator since 1975. This has made a big difference, and it’s deeply embedded over half a century. When diagnosed with cancer I went through a few days of anger and feelings of letdown because I had honestly believed that my lifestyle would protect me from such ailments as cancer. But then a specialist came along to say, no, my cancer wasn’t a ‘lifestyle cancer’ arising from life-habits or other causes such as stress – it was from specific toxic poisoning from radiation exposure.

Though it is also true that there are deeper reasons, and psychiatrist Gabor Mate has something interesting to say about that: people who get cancer tend to be more tuned into others’ feelings, needs and thoughts than to their own. So cancer draws our attention back to ourselves. And staying attuned to your energy-state becomes very important.

Myeloma concerns blood, the life-blood that keeps me alive, and bones, the framework that holds me up and allows me to live. It’s core stuff – not just a stressed organ going wrong – and it concerns being alive and will to live. Being someone who has helped thousands of people change their lives and who has saved many lives, this is significant to me. I’m also one of those who has felt reluctant to be alive, though this has been a motivator too – giving me a desperate need to give meaning to my life, to justify being here.

A gull sitting on an ancient aligned stone, aligned toward the northermost of the Isles of Scilly, on Cape Kenidjack, West Penwith

There’s more. I’ve discovered that there are two levels of immunity. One is what people standardly regard as immunity, for which immune boosters such as Vit C, zinc or selenium and a wholesome diet with fresh foods and exercise help a lot. The other is an underlying resilience that arises from decades of care for oneself, in terms of diet, lifestyle, basic happiness and psychospiritual condition. This resilience has shone through during my struggle with cancer. It shows up in my medical results: the doctors sometimes say I’m lucky, but no, it is because of choices I made when I was young and have held to ever since.

There’s even more. I knew this theoretically beforehand, but I’ve now learned it in my cells and bones. My survival now depends not mainly on medication – which did indeed save me when I was at death’s door in late 2019 – but on the state of my spirits. Earlier this year I took life in my hands and deeply decided that I shall die when I have run out of energy and the will to hold myself up and maintain my spirits – no sooner, and no later. I’m a former mountaineer – I know this stuff. The state of my spirits keeps me alive. I do get deeply tired, and on some days I drag myself around like a lead weight, as if gravitation has been switched up and Sir Isaac Newton is working overtime. My batteries run down and my life-signs are measured in mega-flops.

But the key thing is this. As things have progressed I have gone for help to my ‘inner guides’ and ‘inner doctors’, and every week I do a deep meditation where I open myself up and yield to them, let them inspect me internally and do some fixing. And they do. And it works. It really works. But it requires deep surrender, trust and, dare I say it, belief. Were it not for this, I wouldn’t be alive now.

I’ve asked myself what life would be like if I didn’t have cancer. I realised that I had reached the end of my path. I’m a purpose-driven kinda guy, and I had run out of purpose without realising it. I was carrying on with my customary life-strategies but I wasn’t really fired up. Cancer has given me a new life by giving me new challenges: core challenges. I’ve been tasked with befriending death and completing my life. This wasn’t what I thought the plan was, but it is indeed a great gift.

The long and winding path – this one up Chapel Carn Brea, Britain’s last hill, to the 4,500ish year old cairns at the top

My old friend Bryony, a radiant lady and a devoted Buddhist, was my PA when we were organising the Hundredth Monkey Camps in the 1990s. She died of cancer at age 50 and she said, just before she went, that her life divided in two halves. One lasted 48 years, BC, before cancer, and the other lasted two years – and they were equal half-lives.

That’s what’s happened to me. Rob Hand, a well-known astrologer in Cape Cod, USA, once told me, when I was 40, that I would reach my peak in late life. Well, Rob, you were right. It made sense, because I have Saturn prominent in my birth chart. But I never anticipated cancer. It has prematurely aged me. Physically I am coming up 71, but I’ve been catapulted into my eighties, and on a ‘bad’ day in my nineties.

It reminds me of something the Tibetan lama Akong Rinpoche taught me in 1975: the real work happens when life is hard and you’re climbing uphill, and the times when you feel free, light and joyous are like holidays, to help you keep going. But then, he was a Capricorn.

In recent years some people of my generation have been thinking of themselves as elders. I’ve always balked at this. I’m a veteran, yes – a veteran of the revolution and a load of other things that would frighten many people. My life has been 120 years long, experientially. But I’ve now discovered what an elder really is.

To be an elder you need to lose your powers and abilities to a sufficient degree that you can no longer participate in life’s busy issues – you have to become incapable, dependent on others. This makes you see beyond normal ways of seeing things. A certain wisdom becomes available, yet it comes only when you can no longer act on life in the way you used to. We humans only really appreciate things when we lose them, and having Death staring at you, straight in the eyes, sure does change your perspective on life. You have to accept that you’re no longer in control. That brings forward the relative wisdom of elderhood – if, that is, you’re prepared to assume it, and if people around you actually want and need it.

I can’t do stuff any more. People want me to self-publish my book (which is still not out) but I don’t have what it takes to handle that. I am dependent on others for this. That’s just one example. And today, as I write, my valiant helper Penny, who deserves ten medals, comes round to clean up. I keep my house tidy on a day-to-day level (after all, I’m a Virgo) but I haven’t got what it takes to do deeper cleaning, recycling and sorting. I can no longer drive a car (a big thing for me), and she’s my daily-life fixer out there in the world. This week she’s going to get me a new dishwashing brush.

Treryn Dinas, a cliff sanctuary, and Pedn Vounder, a lovely and rather inaccessible beach

On Monday, Lynne left after one of our weekends, to go back home to Devon, and I depend enormously on her too: she’s my chief watcher, and she supports my heart and soul in thoroughly irreplaceable ways, and she helps me stay human. She loves me in ways I never thought anyone could. Circumstances meant that we hadn’t seen each other for two months. I’m a tough old boot and a survivor, but as soon as she walked in the door, everything was alright again for both of us. As she said last weekend, there’s something deeply magic between us – it’s almost as if we’d been fixed for each other. And remarkably, given my situation, I seem also to be supporting her heart and soul too, since she has a busy, engaged life of the kind I have now withdrawn from – and life hasn’t been at all easy for her recently. She’s had months of intensity and treading the edge.

I depend also on my truly dedicated and heroic shopper, Karen, who keeps me stocked with food each week. I depend on my landlords, the Tobins, for their hospitality, protection and goodwill. I rely on the wildlife outside my window – the swallows, tits, robins, buzzards, gulls and crows – who feed my spirits. And on you lot, who read my stuff and hear my podcasts, who give me a feeling there’s reason to stick around. And on my family, who still need me as a father and grandfather, however distant, hermity and weird I might be.

And on creativity: I’ve been limited to about 3-5 hours per day in my working capacities, but I’ve been very creative with it. That feeds me – and hopefully it feeds others too. But the biggest thing is my inner helpers. In the end, they’re keeping me alive, and this must be because they perceive a reason to do so.

Now here comes a plonker that will turn off some of you and twiggle the antennae of a few others: half of them are ETs. And, if I have it in me to write a further book, it might be about ETs. And MDIs – multidimensional intelligences. And what this means for the world. Most people think this is a peripheral, fanciful or deluded issue for cranks only, and of no relevance to them. Well, I have news for you.

If you think that climate change and resolving all of the world’s other endless problems is the most important question for the 21st century, think again. The biggest issue for humanity is meeting the neighbours. For which we are not ready.

However… resolving our world problems will make us ready. It will enable us to meet them as equals. Which is why they currently hold back. They’re waiting. To save us from our planetary plight they would currently have to stage a takeover, rendering us as subjects and victims, and this is not what is needed. They would need to suppress our strange human tendency to fight against them, defending our supposed freedom to do what we want – and a conflict would constitute a massive mission-failure for planet Earth. They would win, but they don’t want things that way. They are waiting for us to rise to our full stature as humans and take responsibility for our part in the universal story. Making progress in this is crucial not just for us but also for them.

Waves at Kilgooth Ust (Cape Cornwall)

What I am saying is not new. It was in a 1993 book I was commissioned to write for some beings called the Council of Nine, The Only Planet of Choice (now out of print and with collectors’ value). Gene Roddenbery was involved, and Startrek and the idea of the Prime Directive were based on his chats with the Nine. Thirty years after writing that book, my experience has led me to understand that the Nine were right. Planet Earth’s progress is important for the universe.

It is not really for me to choose whether to write this book, since I cannot control how long I live or whether my brains will handle writing another book (it’s hard work). I’ll do it if I can, and if the right flow starts up to allow me to write what is truly needed. But first, I must complete what I’m currently doing. On my ‘up’ days, I can see the possibility of doing such a book, though on my ‘down’ days, when I’m dragging myself around and making a cup of tea is a big deal, it seems a ridiculous proposition – and who would be interested anyway? And am I bothered?

We shall see. That’s what life is like now – it goes on a daily basis. I might live seven years, or I might fall over, break my bones and pop my clogs in a month. We shall see. That vulnerability, that rather big open question, now determines my life. Over time I’ve been describing to you how gaining cancer has been an amazingly strange gift – it has given me a new life, even if shortened in terms of ticktock time. Now let me deliver you another plonker. Some of you won’t like this or agree, but I’ve always been like this: I don’t always deliver notions people would prefer to hear.

The environmental problem and the world’s vast stock of problems are a great gift. They are the beginning of a new life for humanity. We are at last growing up. It’s happening now. The solutions lie within the problems we face, in all their details. And, despite the underlying fear, anxiety, loathing and resistance we humans are infected with nowadays, all eight billion of us, each in our ways, we’re going to make it.

The only question is how much pain and damage has to happen first – and that’s our choice. In making it we shall rise to a more full stature as a planetary race. We will become ready to meet the neighbours. Because we as souls come from them. No one started their journey here, and nobody is here by accident.

Brothers and sisters: be in peace in your hearts, and get on with whatever you know in your blood and bones to be good and true. Get on with it please. For that’s what we are here for. There was a nuclear scientist who asked the Nine whether there was one thing that would really change everything, that humanity could do. The Nine were good at one-liners. They said, simply, everything will change when everyone on Earth gets on with their life-purpose. It is already programmed inside us. If everyone does that, everything will get covered. We don’t need to find or get it: it’s with us now and we need to do it.

Bless you on your path.

With love. Palden.


www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html | Pods from the Far Beyond

www.possibilities2050.org | my report on the world in 2050

For you who are interested, here’s a transcript of a regression I did to re-live the life-changing near-death experience I had in 1974. www.palden.co.uk/nde.html

Joe Biden Syndrome

It’s all about the ins and outs of coming out into the world again.

Mayon Cliff Cairn

I haven’t written a blog recently. Some of you might be wondering what’s happening. Well, it’s classic for a cancer patient, and also it’s happening for some in connection with Covid. It’s all about the ins and outs of coming out into the world again.

I’ve been getting busy. Sometimes a bit too busy, and then I collapse. My brains are less befogged than last year and I’m less fatigued, and also there comes a point where I get fed up with resting and intense self-care. One problem is, people start thinking I’m ‘better’ – no, I’m more good and less bad.

Also I have lifelong hyper-proactive patterns and a dose of Joe Biden Syndrome – the knowledge that this is your last chance and you need to dance your last dance before you go. That’s quite a motivator. I can understand the struggles teenagers and young adults go through when they look at the world and think, OMG, what kind of a mess is this that I’m walking into?. Well, at the other end it goes, What kind of a mess am I leaving behind?

So my book is being edited and produced (hopefully for publication in September), and I’ve started doing podcasts, and I’m doing some online talks on astrology, prehistorics and geopolitics, and I’m getting a few more visitors… and thus far I’m managing to keep it together, but I have to work hard on training people to understand I’m not ‘up to speed’ and cannot match their timetables, lists, agendas, complexities and demands, and helping people solve their problems is not as easy as before. Though sometimes magic happens anyway. My memory is poor, my capacity to multitask is near-zero. After 4pm my energy droops a lot – and that’s when many people come online and want to talk.

On the plus side, the effect of a death sentence, chemo treatment and longterm isolation have given certain advantages. I’m seeing things differently, a level deeper. This can be uncomfortable for some, and I’m getting some crit for it. That’s a bit off-putting but it’s part of the game if you stick your head over the parapet.

It sounds terrible to say this but, in a way, I don’t care any more. This is a part of Joe Biden Syndrome. I don’t care so much about what people think or whether my output earns me brownie-points, fame or money, and this frees up loads of things. Though bizarrely, I’m more sensitive and permeable than ever before, and this part of me really cares.

The ‘council space’ at Bosigran Castle

I really appreciate insightful feedback, though when it is reactive, prejudicial and poorly thought through, it sometimes hurts. Often it’s powered by projected frustration. That’s difficult, because I’ve spent my life working to raise the level of people’s understanding, and this small matter seems to have gone backwards in recent years.

Some people might feel my writings can be harsh or scathing. They might be right. This might perhaps be an issue about understanding Aspies though (Greta Thunberg, Elon Musk and Bill Gates can be seen this way too – kinda suspect). But there’s one thing that’s important to me: I never insist on readers believing me or doing what I say. Or if I do, I don’t mean to. I add things to the pool for your consideration and I might be right or wrong, and seeing this and my own process might perhaps help you in your own process. That’s my approach.

So, in the end, I get over crit and am committed to avoiding the censorship of public judgement. Which might even be a worse censorship than the one people usually moan about.

I did write a blog a week ago about ‘weltschmerz‘ – the pain of the world. I got a bit stuck on it though, precisely over this crit. But I’ve kept it and might work it over again. I’ve moved on for now, giving more attention to the G7 summit that’s happening this weekend a few miles away from me, here in Cornwall.

This represents an interesting twist to the geopolitical consciousness work I’ve been doing over the years (with my friends – see below), usually from quite isolated and insulated places. Well, although distance is no object in the innerworlds, this time they’re coming to me, haha!

Actually, I think the real big guy who’s coming to the G7 is Mutti Merkel. One can disagree with things she’s done, but she has done really well – an examplary politician in a difficult political arena, and a sensible and well-informed hand on the tiller. Now she’s retiring, and that’s right too – times move on, and she knows it. Good luck to her. As Mikhael Gorbachev found, politicians and public figures are dispensible, and history eats them for breakfast.

Carn Euny iron age fogou

I’ve been facing some stuff. I found out that my back problem is likely to become a slow physical degeneration – an increasing incapacity to hold myself up. Myeloma slowly eats away at my bones and they’re already rather thinned out. I click my back into place about once every hour or two, and if a stranger hears it they find it a bit frightening! This degeneration issue has been a big thing to confront and accept. It confronts my get-over-it kind of character.

It’s a test of a key philosophy of mine: to look for the gift in all things. That’s what cancer and similar ailments are: a soul-driven test of our psycho-spiritual resilience and openness, a test of our capacity to actually do it, and not just to believe it, or to hope unproductively.

I’m still on chemo but it’s getting milder. The nurse came yesterday to take my bloods and shoot me up with Velcade and Dara, and I took Dex and two other things too, as pills. It’s weird, and Dex gives me stomach issues and a difficult steroid-driven feeling for two days, but the myeloma itself is in retreat and I’m ‘coming back’. The killer will either be toxicity from the stomach problems or bone degeneration – side-effects of myeloma (they vary for different people).

This brings up a further issue and challenge. I have decided to die by decision and when the time is right – or perhaps when my ‘angels’ choose to take me out. They have helped me so much through the cancer process and, in a way, I’m dependent on them, as well as on doctors and other humans, near and far.

I’ve recently made a re-commitment to a certain kind of work I’ve done in the past. It came to me a few weeks ago and gave a new sense of purpose I didn’t know was there. It’s a renewed contract with those ‘angels’ and I guess that, if I get things right, whatever that means, they’ll keep me going until it’s complete. A contract is a two-way agreement, and each party needs to know they have a reasonable chance of fulfilling it.

Hella Point at Tol Pedn Penwith (Gwennap Head)

This re-commitment feels right, but we’re feeling it out before starting. Besides, I need to get Shining Land published and a few other things done and clarified first. That’s my reality, and they have theirs too.

People sometimes ask me whether I believe in God. I say, “No”. Then I say, “In another way, Yes”. Muslims give Allah 99 names and they leave the last one open – good idea. Belief is simply a guideline, a choice of a way to construct our reality, a direction to head in. It’s more a matter of knowing, not believing in, ‘God’. Or, as my old soul-friend Sig Lonegren might say, gnowing. We’re challenged to really gnow. In order to grow, we need to gnow. This is what brings a turning in the deepest seat of consciousness. Believing takes you only a certain distance. And Goddess bless you Sig, because you’re facing these same end-of-life questions.

So that’s where things stand right now, and the story unfolds. I got up at 6am with a sudden urge to write a blog, and now it’s time for breakfast and to take my second dose of Dex. Was I hearing someone out there, in my circle of soul-relatives, wondering what was happening with old Paldywan? I’m still here. And there you are too. Gratitude for that.

Thanks for being with. Love from me. Palden.

Geopolitical innerwork: www.flyingsquad.org.uk
An article about consciousness work, 27 years old and even more relevan today: www.palden.co.uk/consciousness-work.html
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Still Kicking

Nowadays I’m rather frail, yet there’s a deep resilience in me too. I’m not unused to crisis and tend to fight back and rebirth myself through it. The more you allow crisis, the more you can use it as a launchpad for revival.

Rocks and hard places – Porthmoina Cove, Cornwall

I’m still alive. Crisis over. I spent last week coming back fully, also working with taking chemo. I seem to be taking it quite well, though it affects my brains and energy – my perceived age is now that of a perky 90 year old and I have to simplify my life and activities to match.

Since starting chemo a month ago I’ve gone into a pharma-induced weekly cycle where I’m ‘up’ on Dex (a steroid) on Mondays and Tuesdays and then I subside into what could be a ‘down’ time by Friday – except I relax into it and let it be, and I don’t get depressed as some people do. The challenge is to hang in there and go through the long tunnel.

The signs are good. Liz, the haematologist, reported last week that my results were ‘surprisingly good’. She forgets that I had said this was likely, but now at least she has some evidence.

When my cancer journey started in autumn 2019, I really didn’t know how well I would do: the shock of getting cancer obliged me to abandon previous ideas and beliefs and really get to grips with the facts of my situation. I was dying and the cancer was quite advanced – I was caught in the nick of time.

My treatment in the last month has worked well – again, to their surprise, and despite the crisis I had. I had encouraged them to set a student on me to observe and monitor me for their research, because I’ve been a meditating vegetarian for decades. But no, such knowledge wasn’t deemed necessary.

Though when the visiting nurse came on Monday this week to administer my drugs, she was fascinated with my story. She’s clearly quite interested in alternative pathways, but most people she talks to about this will tend to be relatively new to the game, and perhaps they won’t have changed and evolved as far.

She nodded, agreeing, when I said that five decades of a good diet and lifestyle and 45 years of meditation must have a significant effect, especially since I started this while young: I (and people like me) have evolved differently from many people, psychospiritually and physically, and decades of it makes a difference.

Nowadays I’m rather frail, yet there’s a deep resilience in me too. I’m not unused to crisis and tend to fight back and rebirth myself through it. The more you allow crisis, the more you can use it as a launchpad for revival. Part of me needs it since it activates my systems, and that’s one reason why I’ve tended to live quite an edgy life, involved with risky, frontline, limit-pushing activities.

If you’re part of a revolution when you’re young, even if it fails, there’s no going back – and many are the people around the world who have crossed this line in the last decade or two, yesterday in Belarus and Hong Kong, today in Myanmar.

Though I have contracted a blood cancer, this seems to arise from specific toxicities – electromagnetism and nuclear radiation – rather than from the patterns of my lifestyle. But I’ve had to face a raw fact: I have opened myself to energy and energy-fields. This has been a thirty-year theme in my talks and writings on astrology, cereology, ancient sites and the state of the world.

Perhaps I opened myself to these energy-fields a bit enthusiastically and unwisely earlier in life, or perhaps this openness made for a problem with mobile phones and wi-fi, making me undefended and increasing the effect of radiation exposure. Even so, although I have cancer, my overall body-mind system is in quite good nick, and this gives me good medical results, also helping me avoid some of the side-effects other people get during treatment.

Chapel Carn Brea, Cornwall

There’s a deep truth here: everything in life is a gift. Everything. Including those things we do not count as gifts.

Here we come to crises. Since diagnosis I’ve had three crises and it seems that, when these happen, more gets resolved than was immediately apparent at the time. Last October I contracted shingles (a side-effect of chemo drugs). But, as a result of that crisis my arthritis reduced, my fatigue disappeared and I went through quite a lift and breakthrough afterwards. The crisis mobilised a greater healing process than just dealing with the shingles.

The advantage of a crisis is that you can resolve lots of issues at once, rather than dragging them out over time and through much complexity. It raises the stakes, accelerating change.

Last week’s crisis – a total stomach explosion lasting 4-5 days – rendered me helpless and weak. I did the necessaries and dealt with it. Put me in a crisis and I am calm and collected – well, at least, in the heat of the moment. Astrologers amongst you will understand that, for a person with Sun and Saturn in Virgo, an exploding stomach is a big issue – a symptom of the transiting Neptune that is currently opposing my Saturn.

In my meditation at the time I opened myself up to my ‘inner doctors’ more than ever before. I went a level deeper than I knew I could. Most of them seem never to have had earthly bodies, but I think they’ve taken on a couple of former humans to help them get closer in – otherwise they can work only with my energy-fields without actually knowing how my body anatomy works. This sense of being closely examined was profound particularly because, for the healing to really work, you have to let these beings into your darker corners – the bits of your life you don’t want others, or even yourself, to see, and the stuff you feel guilty and ashamed about. For here is where the causes of illness lie.

Over the next day or two I felt myself getting sorted out from top down, starting at the highest level and working down through energy-body stuff to the physical issues. It’s difficult to convey how this felt, but I felt myself being pulled up and flooded with light from the centre and working outwards, while also being pulled down and re-grounded after a rather nightmarish experience, from outwards in. The crisis was resolved as the week progressed, and I feel I’ve been realigned, rewired and recharged, and that my soul is now more in the driving seat.

Here there’s a lesson in letting go. Before you ‘let go and let God’, it’s difficult knowing what that newly-opened space will be like and the way the game-plan rules will change when you step into it – and we have this cringeing habit of entering the future facing backwards. Letting go is, in a way, more about adopting the future than releasing the past. It can be hard work, sometimes, especially when you’re digging into deep patterns. But we also make it harder than it needs to be.

This is true for individuals but also, in the 2020s, this is very much the condition of the world, and it’s manifesting as a sense of urgency for change in the young: they don’t want to face the crap they’re faced with in the world as it stands, because they want to get on with the real stuff, not with the embedded illusions and attachments of former generations. But they’re faced with presented reality and legacy situations, and this is hard. Harry and Meghan have been demonstrating this in full public view.

One blessing arising from hovering close to death has been that I’m looking not only at the patterns of this life and of my life story. I find myself looking at patterns beyond this life, noticing the abiding threads, relationships and connections I have with people, and with karmic themes that go further than this life. Such a viewpoint shifts our perspective greatly – which is one reason why most people avoid it like the plague.

My son has signed up for the Army Reserves (Royal Signals), and he’s really motivated, and I know he’ll do it well. This is challenging for a wizzened old peace-freak like me, but I support him in following his path. When you’re a parent of a child joining the armed forces, you have to get used to the idea that they might get killed. In his case, I don’t think my son will, but you never know. I’ve had plenty of death-opportunities myself and I’m still here, now on my tenth life. But my response to this risk of death is, ‘Well, he and I have a contract lasting many lives, so if he dies I’ll be there to meet him on the other side, and we’ll have more to do with each other anyway, another time – this life is a chapter in a long story’.

I feel this with my three daughters too: we arrived in each other’s lives because we all have an interlocking karmic story, and we are here to enact those threads and experiences that we give each other – both intentionally and not. It has had its painful times. Here I have some regret, but in retrospect not as much as some people have judged I ought to have. This is important because, with children, though we generally want to do the best for them, we as parents are also here to give our children problems, issues and patterns. We have to give them a pile of shite to deal with. What they do with that is ultimately their choice, and it takes time to make it good and turn things around. They are new people, not just products of their heritage, and a proportion of souls alive today are new to earthly life too – some youngsters experiencing gender dysphoria are like that.

These new souls are programmed with the memories of other souls who have had earthly lives, to make them fit to face the challenges and details of life in a body on a high-gravity, spinning planet. These are not their own memories, and they don’t have the same emotional connection to them as souls would who draw on personal experience. So many of these souls seek to achieve their goals without really knowing fully how to deal with the dilemmas and screw-ups that happen on the way, or without fully developing the necessary skills. Developing patience and perseverance is a key issue.

My son is drawing on trans-life military memory – he’s inherently experienced in it, and the same has been true for me as a humanitarian and social activist. In the 1980s-90s, when I was organising gatherings and camps, I had an inherent gift of pulling people together – calling up armies – and many of them were former souls who knew me from other lives. When you’ve been a chief, a khan, a sheikh and a general, for better or worse you can be known by many thousands of souls.

This insight has helped me understand how and why, throughout life, some people have loved and been noticeably loyal while others have hated me and even taken revenge. One of life’s big lessons has been to forgive yet not to forget. Though the funny thing is that, since a near-death experience I had at age 24, I’ve had significant memory problems and I don’t actually remember my past very well, and this has helped immensely with forgiving. Our hang-ups are rooted in memory and the emotional armouring we develop as a result of pain and hardship, and I’ve had less of this than many people, owing to memory-loss.

One of life’s big lessons, for all of us, is how to make something good out of a bad situation. The Palestinians are masters at this, and they’ve taught me a lot. Life’s a pile of shit, and why do we delude ourselves otherwise and suffer so much over that delusion? Even eating chocolate causes suffering. But it’s delightful too, and you just do not get tomato ketchup up in heaven, so enjoy it while you can. But the big issue now is that enjoying life’s ketchup can no longer be done at the expense of others, and everyone deserves their fair share of ketchup, though not at the expense of our home planet.

Boscregan, looking toward Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall

Another big lesson is staying true to our calling and purpose – not letting the world’s diversions get in the way too much. Sure, there are bills to pay, but this is not what we’re here for. We have to face these diversions because they’re part of life and they do lead us into places and situations we otherwise wouldn’t experience. They force us to develop life-skills. I’m a good writer but it is a developed skill, honed through mega-thousands of hours sitting at desks and computers, and it has been both a gift, a bane and at times a burden.

In my life I’ve made choices to prioritise my calling more than my security, and there has been a price to that, not only for me. I’ve made mistakes too, but I don’t fundamentally regret it. I’ve often been accused of being an unrealistic idealist, but actually I’m very much a Virgo realist, more preoccupied with working with human wrongs than with human rights, and looking further into the future than many people care to do. What in the 1960s were visionary ideals are now pragmatic policy imperatives.

One day at a time. With chemo-brain this approach is necessary. My capacity to handle complexity is much reduced. But it has its virtues. One thing in life we cannot control is the time and manner of our passing away. Paradoxically, the more we accept that lack of control, the more control we gain within that context. Life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans.

Thanks and blessings to all guardian angels. Thank you too for letting me share these thoughts. Salam alekum: peace in your soul. And what next? Time is what stops everything happening all at once.

Palden


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My book Pictures of Palestine | http://www.palden.co.uk/pop/order.html (free PDF download)

Human wrongs, and the future: Possibilities 2050 | www.possibilities2050.org (website and free PDF download). A visionary realist report on the world in 2050.