meditation – Page 2 – Notes from the Far Beyond

Meditations

And a meditation on leadership

I’m not sure how many people join the Sunday meditations. In a way it doesn’t matter. I know and feel some people are there and joining in, including people doing it because of their own relationship with the same spiritual source as mine, the Nine.

Eitherwhichway, I’m always there, every single Sunday, whether or not I say so. Those of you who like to join in, whether often or occasionally, are welcome to continue. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, it’s all explained here:

www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

and the meditation times for different countries are below.

As a cancer patient with my ups and downs, there are times when I cannot do my customary pep talk. However, even if I’m really unwell, I’ll still be there at the meditation. Even when I kick off my earthly clogs, you might even sense me there on the other side. It’s an inner commitment I made to the Council of Nine thirty years ago, and I just keep beavering away at it.

Whatever path you follow, it makes a difference if you stick with it for a long time, since nowadays there’s a spiritual commitment problem that itself is rather problematic for world transformation. We all need to step up, each in our own way, to contribute proactively to something much larger than ourselves – personal growth and fulfilment is only the start of the great pathless path through the gateless gate.

An ancient pathway on our farm, here in Cornwall

But that’s not what I wanted to write about. I want to give an astrologer’s insight. It’s all about Neptune in Aries, which started at the beginning of April 2025. It has been in Pisces since 2011 – a time of reality-slippage, geopolitical confusion, underlying transition, flailing beliefs, mental ill-health, tech dreams and military and climatic nightmares.

We have Neptune in Aries for 14-15 years until 2039. So this is a chapter, a phase, in which the world lives out Aries-type experiences, hopefully to progress them forward. On a 165 year cycle, Neptune last did this between 1861 and 1874 – the time of Abraham Lincoln, Gladstone and Disraeli, Bismarck, Queen Victoria, Karl Marx, and of roaring, steam-powered industrialisation, warfare, power battles, nationalism, early popular movements and Euro-American colonial expansion.

As Neptune trawls its way round the zodiac, chapter by chapter, it pushes us through periods of preoccupation with certain themes – the rise and fall of beliefs and perspectives which themselves influence the way the world sees things, acting out its anticipations, beliefs, fears and its light and its darkness. There’s a visionary side, a place where dreams and big ideas are born, of revelatory situations and realisations, and there’s an illusory and delusory side, mingled with fantasy, fakeness, projection, hypocrisy, glamour and horror. It’s all dreamstuff, yet it percolates into our reality, both helping and harming us and the wider world.

When Neptune is in Aries restlessness, impatience and frustration come up. Though there’s a lot of noise about freedom and identity, there’s a seeking for social-political-cultural examples to follow, align and identify with – it becomes a parade of leaders, public figures, accidental heroes/heroines (Florence Nightingale was one, last time round), who manifest the best and the worst of human possibility.

Some prominent people represent what is hoped for and dreamt of, or perhaps they represent integrity, genius or a human touch, with their finger on the pulse. Some represent what we most fear and dread, or they capture the hearts and minds of followers to promote or impose their own agenda. Either way, they have a lot of push, even of force – or also they reveal or portray themselves and their flock as victims, as the weak. This often gives rise to strong resistance and counter-measures – last time we had the rise of socialism and workers’ movements. It’s then a matter of how intelligent the wider public is in choosing what ideas and initiatives to subscribe to, and how clear their sight is to exert an influence on the strong.

I think you’ll be gtting the gist of this by now, and seeing how this is playing out round the world today. We’re seeing reformed terrorists gaining power as reformers, Popes calling out the status quo, dictators and billionaires acting out their fantasies, a massive generational change and an ongoing movie in which the best and the worst of human power-plays and moral choices process before us. This action-packed movie demands that we get off the fence to exert a moderating influence on those who lead the public discourse or precipitate evolving facts, whether helpful or harmful.

We’re getting an array of leaders and prominent figures who variously represent different aspects of these issues – and different people will see different facets of them, judging them differently. We’re getting a diversity of realities and viewpoints that partially clarifies things and partially adds confusion. It’s all a matter of perceptions and viewpoints, inspired sometimes with vision and purpose and sometimes with false hope or coloured by predisposition or prejudice. It’s a question of whether big ideas and beliefs attempt to override reality or whether reality clips them back to workable proportions.

There’s a conquering undertone to this – ranging from taking territory or power to overcoming obstacles and pioneering new possibilities. The bottom line is that, in the final analysis, there are no winners, and the idea of winning is inherently flawed. Victory is transitory, and everything turns to its opposite in the fullness of time.

Aries is ruled by Mars which, customarily seen as the God of War, in our time is showing itself also to be a God of Peace – a peace arising from stalemate and from the calculus that further conflict means that even the winner becomes a loser. There are limits to the extent to which the strong can push their agenda.

Each sign unconsciously faces its opposite – in this case, Libra, the sign of agreement-disagreement, values, fair-dinkum and relationship. Neptune was last in Libra in 1942-1956, leading to the formation of the United Nations and the ‘rules based’ order that is now disintegrating as the Global North loses its primacy and the Majority World accrues its true power in world affairs.

This has best been symbolised in Gaza, which in the end is a war between the People and the Megamachine, acting as a tipping point where the power of the Global North betrays itself and the Global South is challenged to find a unified position and agenda of its own, sufficient to replace the old order.

Thus spake Zarathrustra, looking over St Just toward Scilly

Underneath this lies a necessary historic tilting of all and everything, a slow and fundamental shifting from a competitive to a cooperative model in the very nature of society and civilisation. Multiplex issues are bound up with this, and we’re sliding into an avalanche of events that push those issues forward. This multiplicity of issues is pushing us out of our habits, avoidances and complacencies, demanding attention, backed up by the threat of unwanted consequences that will surely arise from inaction.

Historically, we’re surreptitiously entering a new chapter. Last year Pluto shifted into Aquarius and next year Uranus shifts into Gemini. Such shifts or ingresses create a change of themes, realities and atmospheres, which themselves indirectly prompt and colour events and developments. History moves slowly most of the time, though sometimes it moves really fast, and we’re entering such a period.

But it’s all in the way we see things and do things. We can make it easier or more difficult. Our problem is that we have a habit of entering the future facing backwards, of obeying fear, thereby complicating, undermining or blocking the very developments we deeply seek. Our own freedoms, benefits and rights can no longer impose themselves on the freedoms, benefits and rights of others or of nature, reality and the collective good. Change does not have to be as difficult as many people visualise. Its reward is eventual relief from the oppressions we already carry on our shoulders.

With love, Palden

PS. Here’s an example of a new leader who is taking on a big agenda and putting himself on the line. This man, part of the Megamachine and Old Order, is seriously acknowledging the agenda of a younger-generation military dictator who is playing a strong hand of cards. We’ll see more of these agenda-changers in coming years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=navBX2A37ls

———————

Current meditation times, on Sundays:
UK, Ireland & Portugal 8-8.30pm GMT
W Europe 9-9.30pm
E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 10-10.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm
EST, Cuba 3-3.30pm
PST North America 12-12.30am

Geopolitical Healing

The seventh Aha Class, in Penzance, Cornwall
Weds 12th March, 6.30pm, at The Hive

A settler incursion and tricky situation in the historic souk in Hebron, Palestine

Inner journeying, meditation, remote healing and peace-building. Doing our bit toward tackling the world’s problems – instead of wringing hands and feeling helpless.

In recent times many of us have been moved to join meditations, prayers and link-ups when major crises break out. Waves of mass empathy and concern over such crises can have a wide and deep psycho-spiritual influence – it goes deeper than mere ‘public opinion’.

Praying for peace or showering light over a benighted area are good, though often they are of a generalised nature. They can affect the collective psyche and sometimes help swing things.

But it’s possible to get closer in. It’s possible to penetrate actual situations and play a more targeted part in them – literally rescuing people or souls, or participating in situations, meetings and crux-points at the frontline of human experience.

That’s what this evening is about. This might be a valuable inner tool to add to your repertory. This is not ‘lightworking’ but spiritual humanitarian work – bringing in truckloads of spirit, rescue and healing.

This is not simple. It carries responsibilities, and it’s not a matter of imposing our wishes – benign or biased – on world situations. The key issue is to help humanity learn, to become more aware in making the choices it makes, for the longterm resolution of what are often deep-seated problems.

In the first half of this evening, I’ll outline considerations and issues involved in such work, how we choose issues and crises and work with them, and the blessings, delusions and dangers involved and what it’s all for.

In the second half we’ll go on an inner journey to work with a particular area of focus that is currently afoot in the world. (And, first time round, we won’t be working with polarised Trump-related issues!)

You might or might not wish to go into this kind of work but, even if you don’t, world situations do come up at times, touching our hearts, to which we respond, and inner journeying (conscious dreaming) is one way we can play a part in world affairs as situations arise. Once you get the gist of it, it can be applied in areas that interest you – socio-cultural, ecological, geopolitical or simply encouraging forward-moving change.

If you’ve done this kind of thing before, this class might help you clarify a few things and take it a step further. If it’s new territory, it’s a good place to start.

Since most of you will not be able to come, audio recordings will be posted online within days after the class (no charge) – just follow the link below. Recordings of all of the Aha Classes can be found here. If geopolitical healing interests you, you might find this site useful: The Flying Squad.

https://www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-geo.html

With love, Palden

Site: http://www.palden.co.uk
Podcasts: http://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Books: https://www.palden.co.uk/books-by-palden.html

Gandhi-ji, in residence at the UN in Geneva. His life was his message.

Sunday Meditation

Without uncertainty there would be no faith. I heard that on the radio this morning. It’s true.

Faith is not just about religion – it’s about beliefs of all kinds. Even belief (or disbelief) in that voracious phantasm called Donald Trump. Uncertainty makes us build a body of interconnected, multi-level beliefs, a world-view, by which we attempt to navigate the mizmaze of reality we’re presented with when we get born on earth and attempt to live out our lives.

This is where change starts, in our beliefs. Occasionally they need shaking up because they can coagulate into set ways and conventions that are not ultimately helpful. This applies to us as individuals and to human collectivities.

If we wish to contribute to changing things and making the world good, we can do so on many different fronts, whether working with overarching principles or with the building of buildings. This is where meditation comes in, because its realm is that of spirit, beliefs and the roots of human thought, feelings and actions.

We can have revolutions or other radical changes, but where revolutions fail is that basic beliefs don’t automatically change with them – though things can indeed get shaken up, stimulating uncertainty and thus a potential reformulation of collective belief and faith. Change needs to start both from above and below.

In meditation, by generating positive vibes and working within the vibrational field of collective human awareness, we’re working with change from the bottom up. We might not see things that way – we might simply be wishing to calm down, or do our practice, or pray for healing or peace – but that’s what happens anyway.

Whatever we seek in meditation, it’s worth adding a prayer that we help humanity raise its level, to look again at its realities, to see things in new ways and to become more conscious. Just this creates world change.

That’s my thought for the day (or the week).

Last week I lost my internet for three days, so no message was possible. So much for uncertainty! But as always I was there in meditation at the appointed time and I felt others of you there too.

You’re welcome to join us in the Sunday meditation. Just join us at the appointed time (see below) and do your meditation in your own usual way, together with us. If you’d like more information, click here:

www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

On Wednesday 12th February I’ll be doing another Aha Class here in Penzance, Cornwall, and it’s called ‘Getting Dead, and what happens afterwards‘. Since many of you don’t live in Cornwall, audio recordings of the class will be online within a week afterwards. If the thoughts I wrote above are of interest to you, the next Aha Class in March will be about inner aid and geopolitical and planetary healing, consciousness work to help the world progress and to participate spiritually in specific world crises and issues. It will include an inner journey to do some work on that front.

With love from me, Palden

—————-

Current meditation times, on Sundays:
UK, Ireland & Portugal 7-7.30pm GMT
W Europe 8-8.30pm
E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 9-9.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm
PST North America 11-11.30am

——————

Ixazomib

Yes, that’s the drug I’m on today, together with Lenidalomide, Dexamethasone, Apixaban and Aciclovir – it’s enough to make pharma-paranoiacs run a mile. Many have been the messages I’ve had which recommend all sorts of alternative means of staying alive. No doubt well intentioned, I nevertheless find myself writing back to ask whether they have actual experience of what they recommend – which has mostly not been the case. Most seem to think I have a ‘normal’ cancer, without actually knowing I have Multiple Myeloma, an incurable blood cancer and definitely not normal.

I’ve listed all the holistic supplements, remedies and methods that I use in my cancer treatment in my book and audiobook ‘Blessings that Bones Bring‘. With a philosophy of counting my blessings, I’m doing both pharma and holistics, and it works, and the ideological contradiction between them that many people set up for themselves is something I gladly omit to subscribe to.

Just as well really – I’m alive against the odds. But the biggest medicine of all is this. If you are practicing your life-purpose, the reason why you came here to Earth, as a priority, then you’re likely to stay alive until it’s reasonably complete – whatever that means. However, here’s the rub: for some people, dying and the manner of their death can also be part of that life-purpose. Princess Di was an example.

It’s an initiation. You might be a smart-arse with a masters or a doctorate, but they will not qualify you for this. What’s needed is every single cubic inch of humanity you have in you. It comes at you, takes away your control and takes you off, out of your body to another place.

Or perhaps you believe it all goes dark and the you that is you somehow suddenly stops being you – you’ve become a useless pile of dust returning to the dust. Well, good luck with that, though you might be heading for a few surprises. In my experience, the journey doesn’t stop there. Just as well really.

I do have a strange tendency to believe that there’s more to existence than that. The last five years, since cancer gave itself to me, have reinforced that belief. If indeed it is a belief. After all, do I believe in breakfast? Do I believe in trees, rain and sunshine? I’ve been really close to dying, several times. Actually, I shouldn’t be alive – and that’s not a medical opinion but my own observation. I’ve made it through thanks to a series of miracles, a few acts of faith and a strange capacity to rebirth myself. Plus the prayers and goodwill of friends, the blessings of guardian angels, and… work. Yes, work. Working at the reason why I came, and whether I’ve done enough of it to feel satsified with a job well enough done.

Much to my surprise. I wasn’t expecting to be alive after five years, and it leaves me in rather an open space. I thought that at most I had three years, and now I’m on extra time. It’s a matter of figuring out how to make plans while knowing that I’m vulnerable enough, and my grip on life is tenuous enough, to pop my clogs tomorrow or the next day.

For me, it’s a matter of taking charge of my death. It’s my decision – not anyone else’s. Except perhaps for those angels. A year ago, my haematological specialist at the Royal Cornwall hospital said to me, “Well, Mr Jenkins, I don’t know what you do, and I don’t want to know but, whatever you’re doing, keep on doing it“. Indeed, I did, and I’m still here. I’m an easy customer for her – I get few complications, I’m uncomplaining though I’m also calm and clear about certain issues, and she leaves me to my own devices. No, not toxic digital devices, but devices such as intuition… and inner doctors.

Yes, I’ve got some inner doctors. I called them in at an early stage. My angels shunted a few in, too. Once a week, I have a session with them (and at no charge). I go into myself, breathing myself down into a deep state, and I open myself up to them, and there they are. They examine and scan me – using psychospiritual technologies that make Startrek look primitive. I feel them umming and aaahing over things, and consulting, and sometimes I’m flooded with light, or they insert a light-tube into me, or they focus on an organ, and often I’m not at all sure what they’re doing but I can feel them doing it.

At times they raise me up to their level and it feels so friendly, inclusive and welcoming there. I kinda hover there, on my back, held in the middle of their energy-field and jiggled, poked, massaged and blessed by invisible forces. After a while they drop me back down again.

It’s funny how it works. The doctors at Treliske have been worrying about the fact that I’ve been a lifelong smoker – it helps my brains and, as a psychic, also helps me stay on Earth – since I am not a foodie, which is the other way many psychics stay on Earth. So I was to go in for a lung scan. But during my last session with the inner doctors, I did two things. One was to ask for their help in cleaning out my lungs and removing anything that’s unhelpful, and the second was to offer myself up and release all hopes, fears and expectations, to get to a state of full acceptance that, whatever is to happen will happen, and it will be good.

So they flooded my lungs with light and I felt them doing something there. I continued with this in the days that followed but, the day before the scan, the thought came, “Hmmm, this needs more time…“. Claire, a trusty helper from over the hill, took me for the scan. I walked into chaos – the power had gone off – but eventually, on the second interview, the nurse said, “Ah, Mr Jenkins, I’m sorry to say that we can’t scan you because you had a PET scan last August and we cannot scan you more than once a year“. I quietly chuckled. Yes indeed, this needs more time, and I’d just been given it. The nurse didn’t notice me looking upwards and smiling. This is how it sometimes works.

I thanked her for her consideration, saying I am electrosensitive and it matters to me. “Ah, that’s interesting“, said she, proceeding to ask questions as if she knew about it. This was refreshing: in the last five years only one doctor has indicated interest. He showed me a paper in The Lancet which correlated incidences of Multiple Myeloma with proximity to nuke stations. Since then I’ve met other Myeloma patients who have worked operating radar systems, driving nuclear-waste trains from Sellafield, working as high-tension power cable or mobile phone engineers, or as programmers who’ve used a lot of wi-fi…

Once information about EM-radiation is finally made public, everyone will no doubt bleat, “But why weren’t we told?”. To which the answer is: “Why didn’t you feel it and use your commonsense? Did you think it would be alright to irradiate yourself all day and every day without consequence?”.

Well, we humans… we find quite intricate ways of limiting our possibilities and making life difficult. The same applies to me. However, while I have my own self-immolating patterns, I’ve also looked after myself and now find myself still alive as a result – if proof be needed. I’m definitely glad that, at an early age (21) I went vegetarian and changed my life – it has paid off. Yes, I got cancer, but my capacity to deal with it is far greater than most people’s, because on the whole I’ve had a good diet and lifestyle, having built up a good reserve stock of resilience.

But here’s what in the end is the key bit: I’ve been following a growth path, with fewer diversions and denials than most ‘average’ people. If you live on purpose and in purpose, it gives you distinct reasons for staying alive.

But even then, the stories of our lives are multiplex and not limited to being alive in a body. Many of us aren’t even fully installed in our bodies, even when emotionally attached and afraid of losing them. The Council of Nine put it quite well…

“Your Planet Earth is the most beautiful that exists in the universe. It has a physical variety that no other planet has. It has a varied climate that no other planet has. In all the universe there is no planet in existence that has the physical characteristics of Planet Earth. It is the rarest of beauties, and it does attract souls which, once they have come, would like to come back again. This has created a bottleneck of souls recycling on Earth.

“It is of a different nature from any other planet. It has aspects of all planets: it is like a composite of the Universe, with all the positive and all the negative aspects, and all in between, and this is what attracts souls.

“It has with it a gravitational pull that is different from other planets, and because of this a soul begins to feel a physicalness. Souls become adapted to their physical bodies, and they forget the freedom and pleasures they have without it.

“The Earth was created to be a paradise. When souls achieve harmony it will become a paradise again. Planet Earth is the only one of its kind, the only planet of free [individualised] choice in the entire universe, the planet created for the balancing of the spiritual with the physical – in other words, the creating of paradise.“

To some extent this ‘paradise’ business is an attitude of mind. In a funny sort of way, since getting cancer and becoming partially disabled I’ve been happier than before. It’s all to do with how we deal with the life we’ve been given. Nowadays, a lot of people do a lot of complaining about life, as if it’s all someone or something else’s fault. But my best recommendation is, just go to Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, Belarus, Syria, Ukraine, Xinjiang or Myanmar – there are plenty of options – and do a full-spectrum re-assessment. You might find that you come to feel differently about things. That’s what happened to me.

Yeah, life’s a bitch, then you die. However, here’s another gem from the Nine: no one is here by accident.

So, you see, even on pharmaceutical cancer drugs, you can do something with it to make it good. That’s where that free, individualised choice truly lies. It’s on us, not anyone or anything else.

Love from me, Paldywan

http://www.palden.co.uk
and if you live in Cornwall, check out the Aha Class:
http://www.palden.co.uk/aha.html

And look, no footnotes!

Eyes and Ears, Hands and Feet

Treen and Gwella, a gull couple in Falmouth

On Facebook, I seem to be settling into a new habit of announcing Sunday Meditations once a fortnight, not weekly. But the meditations continue weekly, whether or not they are announced. So if you’ve been meditating with this group thus far, keep going, and if you’re hovering around wishing or meaning to do it but not quite doing it, well, that’s up to you.

It concerns intention and what we give our time and attention to – and here lies the root of freedom of choice. It’s all about what we do with our psyches – our hearts, minds and behaviour. Nowadays there are tremendous diversionary, distracting pulls and pushes that we encounter every day – pressures, needs, imperatives, concerns – and this is the way of our lives in our time. Here we’re offered a choice to ricochet our way through life – as victims of our distractedness – or to anchor back to the roots of our being, to remember why we came into life and to do something toward giving that some priority.

The meditations are designed to be entirely doable. You can participate every week, or dip in and out when you can. It’s important to keep it simple and just do it. But there’s a funny paradox too: if you do it 100% every week, it gets easier. If we’re clear about it, life rearranges itself around it so that distractions start unmanifesting. Besides, meditation is simply a state of mind, and sometimes doing meditation on a bus can actually work really well because the stimuli and noises around us can help us focus within.

We can get so serious about things like this, and it’s not like that at all. Last night, before the meditation, I lost track of time and I was a few minutes late. Typical me, I had been trying to finish something I was doing, and my friends upstairs were tapping on the top of my head, as they usually do just before the meditation… and there I was, standing there at the toilet having a pee and feeling the meditation starting.

Here’s a footnote. Since becoming a cancer patient, when I get the need to pee, I do have to pee quickly – some of you will know this problem! But also, as a creaky old man, I pee really slowly, and it can take ages.

So there I was, sensing ‘them’ chuckling at me and the comedy of my earthly situation, and my psyche was already sinking into meditation-mode while I was standing there peeing… and this is what happens when you take on a regular date with ‘higher powers’. I’ve meditated in airports, motorway service area car parks, in fields surrounded with heavy-breathing cattle, in side-rooms at parties, on buses I have to disembark from in the middle of the meditation… and that’s the deal. And at times it can be really funny.

In situations like that I’m aware that my ‘friends’, being non-earthly types, quite appreciate getting a look into our world through my senses. I remember, a few years ago, some hooting geese flying over my house during the meditation, and I got a distinct sense of “What’s that?” coming from ‘upstairs’. So I visualised geese, explaining that they are birds in our world and they make that rather haunting sound that geese can do. And they got it. So, in instances such as that, I’m acting a bit like a drone or a remote sensor for them – and that’s fine.

It has led me to quite an inner breakthrough, actually. If these guys can see inside me, they need to see the whole lot. They are interested in us humans and our amazing complexities – our sub-personalities and sectioned-off, often conflicting parts of our psyches – and they do seek to understand us. This has meant letting them into those guilty, fearful parts of myself that I even hide from myself. That has been amazingly cleansing. When I first did it, it was an immense relief. I was letting these beings see the whole of me. In doing so, I started seeing myself more clearly too.

For they do not judge. We judge ourselves a lot, but they don’t judge. That’s something we do here on Earth, and it has its roots in our religious traditions, and also it feeds off our hidden guilt for things we have done, as individuals, as societies and as a planetary race. Bad shit. So we tend to feel judged by others and by ‘God’, and we judge ourselves in ways that really clip our wings.

There have been times when I’ve done meditative double-tracking – that is, I’ve been in a situation I can’t get out of, while also being in meditation mode. This can work if the situation is not too demanding – perhaps kids are present but they don’t need much attention, or perhaps other people are doing most of the talking – and at times it’s necessary to focus on the situation at hand and then return back to centre, to the meditation, when it’s possible to do so. Building that habit of returning is important and really valuable, as a general life-practice.

Once upon a time I was quite deep in meditation and gunfire broke out outside – this was in Bethlehem, Palestine. Something in me decided instinctively not to stir, and I stayed where I was, in meditation. I did some energy-working to spread calm to the situation outside and carried on – and, lo, the firing soon stopped. One of my neighbours down the road – a nice chap, and now disabled – had been a fighter in an armed showdown in the Church of the Nativity in 2002, during the second intifada, and the Israelis often used to come for him. I have no idea whether my input had had any effect, but the important thing was to hold steady. And trust. Trust like hellsbells.

Back in the 1990s, in the Hundredth Monkey camping retreats, participants signed an agreement to stay for the whole camp – there were good reasons for this since there can be dangers sallying forth into the world in an altered state. There was also a mobile phone and outside-contact ban – it was like a week out of this world, as if on a spaceship. One year, one participant broke this rule, only to find out that her father was dying. She was immediately upset and wished to leave. We could not and would not stop her leaving, but it didn’t feel right. It took a long process, but eventually she realised that she could better serve her father by staying with us in a more spiritual and empathic state, rather than going home, to be amongst anxious family members who would be acting out all sorts of strange behaviours around her father’s death. So she stayed. After the camp she reported back that she was really glad she did what she did because, with us, she had been able to mind her father’s soul and stand by him inwardly as he died – instead of panicking, obeying her guilt and rushing off in a car to go back home, probably arriving too late for her father’s death anyway.

Anyway, I finished my pee and settled down for the meditation, all the while dialoguing with those ‘friends upstairs’ in quite a jocular fashion. They sympathise with our situation and they feel lucky not to have to face such things. And they do not judge.

As usual I tuned in to others meditating in the group. Now this is fascinating because, while I know some of the people who are there and can feel them – in Wales, Nova Scotia, Iceland and Sweden – there are others flying along with us that I do not know of. I sense them there sometimes, and other times I really don’t know. It depends on the state I’m in, quite a bit – how much I feel others.

Recently, in my last Aha Class, I was recounting the story of the close encounter I had, in 1972. It seemed that the ETs were making use of me to solve a problem they were working with – it was a problem with nuclear technologies in use at the time. It’s not that I had specific knowledge of nuclear issues. So why did they want me? Well, I figured out that they needed access to an Earth-human’s brain and psyche in order to help them figure out the strange logic by which this errant piece of nuclear technology was put together, so that they could fix it. That’s what they needed.

This means a lot to me. Throughout life I’ve often felt myself getting used – as if part of a larger chess game in which I’m a pawn or a rook, getting moved around the board for the execution of agendas beyond my perception – or perhaps I just get faint glimmers of it. There’s something in me that’s willing to do that. I call it ‘actional channelling’. It’s not just about ‘being the eyes and ears of God’, but also the hands and feet too – doing things the universe needs to have done.

Sometimes I’ve even felt requisitioned. I felt that some years ago. I had found myself doing research into the ancient sites of West Penwith, here in Cornwall, and coming up with results that were quite astounding. It felt almost as if I had been moved to Cornwall because I was eligible, with my background and experience, to do a job on behalf of the spirits and ancient places of Penwith. It was as if they wanted to speak, and I’d been shunted in to give them a voice. I felt that earlier in life when I founded the camps – as if I’d been called up and given that job because the job needed doing and I was the only one in a position to do it. It was an idea whose time had come, and it needed someone to make it come into manifestation.

That’s one thing that lies behind this meditation – for me, at least. It’s about ‘meditative availability’ – making myself available to ‘higher powers’ so that they can carry out their actions and manoeuvres through me – if they so wish, or have a need, that is. And it just so happens also that other things happen during the meditation too – it has been important to me in the cancer process I’ve been through in the last five years. And it acts as a half-hour island of sanity each week – a bit like locking the door, shutting out the world for half an hour and taking a warm bath. I’ve been doing it for thirtyish years now.

Having had a rather irregular life for decades as a ‘new age professional’ – with lots of late nights, weekend working and hyper-flexible timetables – the funny thing is that the regularity of this once-a-week meditation allowed me to set my inner clocks. In the very few weeks in recent decades that I’ve missed the meditation, my life lapsed into foggy chaos. It’s funny how an appointment with The Timeless has become the way by which I’ve set my inner clocks – re-setting my psyche’s gyroscope.

By now you might be aware that I work with some beings called the Council of Nine. It was an arrangement with them, thirty years ago, that prompted this weekly meditation – and various streams of people over time have done it, and still do. This is my own personal commitment, and I don’t evangelise about it. But I am aware that there are some souls out there who also, in some part of their being, resonate with me and with The Nine, who are drawn to join this meditation, as a way of making themselves available to that energy-stream.

For we all have quiet agendas we’re acting out – partially consciously. I had an old friend, Gabrielle, who was one of the Oak Dragon family. She was a quiet soul and a committed meditator. She lived at Alton Barnes in Wiltshire, which happened to be ground zero of the crop circle phenomenon. Gabrielle never rated herself very highly. Well, humility is good, but sometimes it can distort our perceptions of ourselves too. What she did during her life (she died a couple of years ago) was much bigger than she was aware of. Through her meditation, she was ‘holding the energy’ in Alton Barnes. In an esoteric sense she was carrying out a really big job. In the world of humans she gained no medals for that (and didn’t seek them either), but in the greater universe she was performing an important act as a kind of energy-moderator in a major transdimensional diplomatic mission that was being conducted between worlds.

She made herself available and, in her quiet way, carried out a duty that no one else was doing, or possibly even capable of doing – as if she was requisitioned or drafted for the job. And she did it, right through to the end of her life.

This stuff might sound weird to some readers, but others will, I think, know what I’m talking about here. There’s something deep to this. Something about quiet service to a greater cause, to a deeper dynamic. Something about making ourselves available to participation in a larger chess-game. It’s a rather big act of trust too.

So, apart from the fact that it’s a good practice to invest half an hour a week to such a thing as this meditation – though it’s an entirely free choice – and I’m happy to encourage friends to do so, there’s something a bit bigger than this going on. In my recent Aha Class, about extraterrestrials, I talked about the need we each have to penetrate back to our roots as souls. We all come from somewhere, as souls, and we all come from soul-tribes, soul-nations and soul-worlds to which we still belong. There’s something in deep memory that remembers this. Following from this, it is possible to anchor back to those roots, to our family and soul-clan. For, here on Earth, whether or not we are aware of it, we are acting on behalf of our people. Our soul-clans have their own agendas.

So if the energy-stream that I am on resonates with yours – that on a soul level you and I might be relatives, friends or associates in some way – then you might find that, by doing the Sunday meditation, it helps you anchor back to your own roots. Or perhaps you have an inherent connection with The Nine. Or perhaps it’s simply a case of resonance. It doesn’t matter. The main thing is that there’s a channel open once a week at the specified time and, if you sit within it in meditation, then you’ll be bathed by it, and you might well find that interesting inner experiences follow!

If you don’t resonate with it, that’s fine too. The main thing is, whatever your path, follow it and pursue it. That’s what will, in the end, change the world. Some years ago a nuclear scientist asked The Nine whether there was one single thing which might change the world, and the Nine simply said, “Yes, the world will change if the people of planet Earth all pursue their life purposes”.

What am I here for? A lot of us are on that quest. Well, you find out by doing it, by doing what you’re drawn to doing. And by flapping your wings and getting on with it. Here’s a good guideline for finding out what it is: if it lifts you up, do it, and if it weighs you down, don’t.

It’s entirely our own choice. This is the bottom-line issue with free will: we are free to do whatever we feel is best. Making choices and dealing with the consequences is our learning path here on Earth. And we’re here not just to learn and to grow as souls, but also to make a contribution.

With love, Palden.

Website: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Extraterrestrials: www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-ets.html

Time is Endless and the World is Wide

“This is one of the virtues of meditating…“, said I to the three student doctors. We had just started reviewing my cancer readings. I was at the Royal Cornwall Hospital. The specialist had just told me that my ECG readings (heartbeat) were good and steady. “That’s rather a surprise“, I said, looking at the students, “Because I’m electrosensitive and I’ve just been sitting in the company of thirty mobile phones, with humans attached, for forty-five minutes. But once you get used to meditating and you build it into your life, it works wonders“. The specialist continued studying her papers.

“You’ve responded well to the new treatment. Your paraproteins have gone right down quite quickly, from 21 to 5. I’m beginning to expect that of you now…“

Again, as an aside to the students. “I’ve been a wholefood vegetarian since 1971 and done supplements and complementary therapies since the early eighties. For your consideration… there might be a connection.“

Then I turned to the specialist. “With your help, I’m alive now and I wasn’t expecting that. So bless you for that. Five years ago I thought I had up to three years. Yet here I am. I’m on extra time. I’ve been given a bonus. It has changed my perspective and since I’ve been given extra time, I won’t be complaining when I get to dying.” Aside to the students: “Attitude makes a big difference“.

And, to be honest, there’s a positive kind of disorientation that has come with that bonus, since I seem to have found a new mission in life, as a decrepit, vibrant old codger of a rainbow warrior and a slightly reluctant elder – with a little literary and audio output on the side.

I’ve been with this specialist for four years now, and she’s got used to me. She’s one of several remarkable goddesses looking after me nowadays. Though I’m an oddbod in their eyes, I’m congenial, good at elucidating symptoms and feelings, discerning but I don’t moan or make things difficult, and I’m not rigidly ideological, and my medical results are good – and the results are the clincher for the doctors. They think it’s good luck, of course – a very scientific conclusion, to be sure. I still regret that, five years ago, when I suggested that they set a student on me to monitor me, they didn’t do that. After all, in these straitened times of cost-cutting, ageing populations and expensive medical advances, they badly need to study people like me to find out how we do it.

To which, the main thing I’d say is this: if you’ve been looking after yourself for a few decades, both in a bodily and a psycho-spiritual sense, then that will build a basic resilience which, if or when you get plunged into the rigours of old age, will help you a lot. The moral of this wee story is this: if you haven’t started, start now.

Cloudscape from Carn Gloose, near St Just

Today’s the day when I pop my cancer pills – mainly Len, Ix and Dex.[1] I’m on a four-week cycle, with three weeks on drugs and one week off – during which time my bodily balances can restore themselves. Pharmaceutical drugs do charge their price, though I’m okay with that – I use holistics and innerwork to ease that out and improve the results.

However, when dying is on the agenda anyway, it’s good not to be precious about life. I feel I’m not quite finished here on Earth, though if the gods want to take me out beforehand, it’s okay. I’ve been and done enough. It doesn’t worry me. Paradoxically, such an attitude can be life-prolonging.

The other side of the deal is that, if I use this extra time to serve a purpose that the gods like, then the chances are they’ll help me stay alive to do it until it’s done. Though it’s also true that this might be a glib belief that doesn’t really hold up – it depends so much on one’s life-story – and that’s something that reveals itself as life goes on. Or perhaps having a mission becomes a healing device in its own right – which I’ve found to be true.

When I first contracted cancer five years ago, the immensity of it all, and what it meant, caused me to do a big let-go. I was lying in bed in hospital, helpless and in pain anyway, and that was the best response to an overwhelming situation. I let go of expectations and of those beliefs I’d adopted because I wanted them to be true. I decided to be patient and open, to allow myself to live or to die – whichever was most on the cards – and to see what happened.

Within two months this ‘good results’ thing started showing itself. It’s not that I’m in remission – this is not an option with Myeloma – but I’m doing alright, as it goes. It’s the consequent peripheral issues arising from cancer that bug me more than the cancer itself. I have stomach issues, back issues, peripheral neuropathy, osteonecrosis and a few other weird things. This means that I hover on the edge quite a bit – six weeks ago I was paralysed with pain, and movement was excruciating. I’ve had a few bouts of illness beforehand. It’s a matter of making use of these strange borderline states for the evolution of heart and the soul. For gifts come with them. Pain, for example, has a way of wringing out of us truths we don’t want to face but we need to.

The Longships Rocks and the Isles of Scilly, from Chapel Carn Brea, the last hill in Britain

Many people have to go on courses or retreats to learn things I’ve been given for free. Illness is a fascinating gift, if we choose to take it that way: it’s an opportunity for inner journeying, cogitation, letting be, and the resolution of deep life-issues. One of the key life-issues is the big Saturnine question that hits us particularly around ages 14, 29ish, 45ish, 58ish, 72ish and 86ish: what am I here for? Am I doing it? Where have I got to? What comes next? – all rolled up into one. And the answer lies deep, beyond a threshold of fear and self-doubt.

There’s one thing, our dream, and there’s another thing, our life as it presents itself. It is the grating of these two that characterise our lives and learning processes while in incarnation on Earth. It involves squeezing through the cog-wheels and roller-mills of Time, which stretches things out into threads, sequences, causes and effects. What you seek is also seeking you, but the process stretches out over time.

I had a big lesson in this: in 2000, during a life-crisis (Pluto square Sun and Chiron Return), I dreamed of the perfect place to live – and, as my life then was, it was distinctly out of reach, a fantasy. I forgot about it, got on with life, went through big changes, and then one day in 2012, I was lying flopped on my mattress, having just then got it into place, while in process of moving into the cabin where I now still live, and… gosh… I suddenly realised that this was exactly what I had prayed for, twelve years earlier.

Not only this, but it was the perfect place in which to go through a cancer process and a complete life-change, seven years later. Something in me knew this and fixed it. Yes, our souls know things that we do not. And sometimes there’s a guiding hand that pushes us that way.

Regarding missions, I’m really happy doing the monthly Aha Classes in Penzance – and for those of you who can’t attend, there are recordings on my site and on Spotify.[2] I’m seeking to share some esoteric general knowledge – stuff it’s good for people to think about and know a bit about, even if they’re not specifically interested. Things they already half-know, but hadn’t quite figured them out.

I’m rather an autodidact and, though educated in university (LSE), the knowledge I’m known for was not gained there. My self-education began as I was leaving university, and much of it didn’t exactly involve learning – it involved remembering. And observing. And watching. And gaining insights from within. This means that I don’t quote the usual old stuff, the derivative, fashionable or easy stuff you get in many of the books, videos and courses – you get original thinking.

The gift in this for me is that, no longer very interested in self-promotion (which self-employed people usually have to do), I can just express myself creatively – whether or not anyone publishes it or even reads it. It’s all going into my online archive on my site, and hopefully my rather techy son can keep it there in future times. In the front of my book Shining Land, about ancient sites in Cornwall,[3] is a quotation from Bhavabhuti, a mathematician in India in the middle ages, who said:

‘If learned critics publicly deride my work, then let them. Not for them I wrought. One day a soul shall live to share my thought, for time is endless and the world is wide.‘

Gods bless you, everyone. Look after yourselves. Eat your greens and do your inner growth, okay?!

With love, Paldywan.

www.palden.co.uk

NOTES:

Lenalidomide, Ixazomib and Dexamethasone, with Co-Trimoxazole (against pheumonia), Apixaban (stops blood clots) and Aciclovir (antiviral).
The Aha Class: www.palden.co.uk/aha.html and on Spotify search for ‘Pods from the Far Beyond’.
Shining Land: the ancient sites of West Penwith and what they say about megalithic civilisation. 2023, available online. www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/

Mighty hulkers over the Carn Galva mine, and abandoned tin mine

Us Together

Here’s a little medicine to help deal with all the hot air on the airwaves today – about, amongst other things, where the power really lies.

It’s a podcast I did in 2021, about the collective psyche. Yes, us lot.

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/palden-jenkins/episodes/Us-Together—the-collective-psyche-e19hajc

or you can also get it on the top right of this page:
https://palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

With love, Palden

Pictures were taken at the Oakdragon Camps | http://www.oakdragon.org

Contemplation

Sunday meditation… yes, it continues… it doesn’t pause or stop!

In North America it is as from now an hour earlier than during summertime.

We’re at a parting of the ways. My feeling is that those around the world who have been pushing and asserting their agenda will not necessarily achieve their goals but slide into a soupy funk. We shall see.

There are hopes, plans and intentions, and then there is evolving reality. Sometimes they converge and sometimes not. Things are not as they seem.

There’s a gentle tipping going on. It’s all about an outer-planet astrological triangle that has been forming this year, and it will be with us for a few years. A few years back I wrote about it here: https://penwithbeyond.blog/2020s/ and it’s shown in the ‘Florescence under Duress’ image here.

Something is opening up. And remember (this is particularly important at this time): listen more closely to things than to people.

Speaking as a regular prognosticator in past times, I currently feel it’s best not to prognosticate – or at least not rigidly so. Possible realities, speculations and prognoses are worth bearing in mind but they should not obscure our seeing of what actually is emerging. Not just the surface stuff squirted at us through the news channels but the stuff underneath. And underneath that too.

We’re in a strangely tender time when possibilities are being incubated. There are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and lots of them.

So in your meditation, get a feeling (repeat, feeling) of the energy-dynamics of what’s under the surface. The future is pulling us toward it. Though stay in the now, and let’s lift it up a notch.

I’ve written this rather late… been inner-journeying and detached from the world for two days over newmoon. Meta-processing. All is well.

Love from me. Palden.

The pictures are all from Gurnard’s Head, West Penwith, Cornwall

Reviving

The outer-planet thrum that’s in operation now

I realised on Friday that I must be reviving. I started back to work. Well, in a slow, step-by-step way. It was relatively easy work – checking and updating maps. Throughout life I’ve tended to run two tracks in parallel (being a Gemini mooner): harder work that takes a lot of thinking and creativity, and routine work that, while it’s necessary to do, it demands less focus and intensity.

I’ve been doing the latter, updating a series of online maps I made between 2014 and 2020, showing the ancient sites and alignments of West Penwith, and also of Scilly and Cornwall as a whole. They contain every known and identified site in Cornwall, precisely positioned. The alignments are most properly researched in West Penwith, the bit at the very end where I live, though the rest of Cornwall is covered too. If you click on any site or alignment on the map, you’ll get a popup providing further information and links concerning that site or alignment.

The maps are here: www.ancientpenwith.org/maps.html

So that’s what I’ve been doing, as a way of getting my brains back into gear, after two weeks of energy-suppressing opioid painkillers. They blanket you in an insulated fog of unwittitude and swimmy drowse – or at least, that’s what they do for me. Opioids are not good for the brains – I can testify to that.

But they kept the pain at bay until the problem I had started subsiding – a painful spasmic tightening of the muscles in my back and torso. For two weeks my muscles had pulled tight and rigid, as if a neurological overreaction to the deterioration of my bones. My psyche was fearing disintegration of my bony frame, and it was overreacting though seeking to protect me. This deterioration was stemmed last month by the first round of my new cancer treatment and, today/Saturday, I’m starting the second cycle of this treatment. It’s a maintenance treatment that I’ll be taking for a while, until it becomes clear it’s no longer working, or there’s a better alternative. Myeloma, a blood cancer that erodes the bones, cannot be cut out or irradiated surgically, like tumorous cancers, so it has to be regulated and held in check.

I still have residual pain and difficulty, but it’s at a 30%, not a 90% pain-level, and it’s in my manageable zone. Yesterday I visited John Tillyard, a gifted chiropractor in Hayle, who worked his magic on me, balancing up my bony frame. Claire, who took me to the appointment, reported that I walked back to the car in a very different way.

So I’m re-entering ‘normal’ life, such as it is. I re-start cancer treatment today. It’s pills, taken in a four-week cycle for three weeks, with one week off. On the first day I take a big dose of cancer drugs, then for the rest of the week I’m on a tick-over regime until, next week, the routine starts again. But on the fourth week I get a week off.

Recently, during the Sunday meditation, I’ve had a funny twist in the experience while I’ve been on opioids. During the meditation itself I find I’m very present, quite centred and ‘in the zone’, despite the opioids. Over the years I’ve found that the ‘channel’ distinctly switches off dead on time (currently at 8.30pm UK time) – I get a definite feeling of it – and this has been happening clearly in recent weeks. After the shut-off I sit there for a while and then the opioids take over, seeping into my psyche, and I drop off for an hour. It’s funny, that.

I find the ‘switch on’ of the channel is less distinct – it’s as if a space opens up, though it takes me a while to grow into it, or perhaps to slow my churning psyche – sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes. But when the ‘switch off’ comes, it’s quite noticeable. Fascinating. Over the last thirty years since I started doing this Sunday meditation, on the few occasions when I’ve lost track of time and forgotten the meditation (often because of jetlag after travelling), I’ve even experienced an altered state coming on of its own accord – only then to realise that it’s meditation time.

You’re welcome to join the meditation on Sunday (or any Sunday).

The clocks are changing soon. In UK and EU it’s Sunday 27th October, and in USA/Canada it’s on Sunday November 3rd. The meditation will be one hour earlier from those dates onward and through winter. (In UK it goes from 8pm to 7pm.) Remember: the ‘real’ time of the meditation doesn’t change – it’s just that our clocks change. Nature doesn’t change its clocks either. Changing our human clocks is connected with our modern human preoccupation with diaries, lists and appointments – it started particularly with industrialisation and urbanisation, particularly when trains arrived, running to strict timetables.

This has led to an exaggerated dissonance between ‘objective’ ticktock time and natural, inner, ‘subjective’, intuitive cosmo-time – the time-waves by which the Earth and cosmos resonate and reverberate. One of the core problems of our civilisation is that we impose ticktock time, with its plans and timetables, on natural time. This produces a disharmonic grating and grinding within nature and our own psyches. This friction lies at the heart of our psychological issues, our ecological and climatic situation and in the self-destructive nature of our civilisation. Put another way, we need to re-attune to our natural timings.

That’s what the next Aha Class is all about: time. Since getting cancer five years ago I’ve become curiously time-rich, while most people around me are time-poor, so this could be interesting. This matter of time, and our experience of it as we live our lives, is a key ingredient of the Earth experience – this is what we chose to engage with by getting born in this world. Everything on Earth is a matter of time – and also timing. That’s at times frustrating and yet it’s what we came here to evolve through, psycho-spiritually. Time is what stops everything happening all at once.

The talk is astrologically-based, but if you don’t understand astrologese, a multidimensional language, you’ll still get pings and lightbulb moments. One intention behind the Aha Class is to help broaden your general knowledge – concerning things it’s useful to know about even if we focus mainly on other things. Most of you will have a smattering of astrologese though and, since we’ll be talking about fullmoons, solstices, planetary line-ups and energy-configurations, all of you will have lived experience of these, and the talk will help you make more sense of them. I’ll explain how they work. Each talk is audio-recorded and, where relevant, maps and diagrams are put online afterwards, and they’re all found on the Aha page on my site.

On the day of the talk there’s what I’d call a ‘magnitude three’ planetary configuration or thrum-pattern, involving outer and inner planets, and the atmosphere of the evening will thus serve as an example of how it works. This rather fleeting configuration is an illustration of something that has recently started happening, a Uranus-Neptune-Pluto triangle for a few years, which is a door-opener for the world (see ‘2020s’ below). Whenever the faster planets swing round to activate that triangle, energy-changes are triggered, and the chart for the day and time of the class will be an example. The full astrological details of all this are laid out in my book ‘Power Points in Time – ancient festivals, lunar phases, planetary line-ups and historic moments’.

Classically, for an evening talk about time, Maria and I got mixed up with the dates. It’s now on Wednesday 23rd October at The Hive in Penzance, inshallah. After my illness I needed more time to get my body-psyche systems up’n’running properly, so the class has now been set to the new date. Which just goes to show, it’s all a matter of time. Even though I’m time-rich, I needed more time.

And now it’s time for breakfast. Love from me. Palden.

The Aha Class: www.palden.co.uk/aha.html
The Astrology of the 2020s: https://penwithbeyond.blog/2020s/
Power Points in Time: https://penwithpress.co.uk/product/power-points-in-time/
Meditations: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
Site and Archive: www.palden.co.uk

Chart of the 1999 solar eclipse in Cornwall – not just an eclipse but also a major configuration of planets and energy-thrum.

Acquiescence

“Where is the world?“, cried a desperate woman in Omdurman, Sudan – in ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ on BBC World Service today. Lebanese will be feeling this feeling right now, though the Sudenese perhaps have it worst. Well, the world is busy with other things. That’s where the world is.

One of the stange paradoxes of our time is that, as world population has grown – exploding to over eight billion – individuals and communities have become more isolated, alienated and dehumanised. In recent years, wars, witnessed onscreen like disturbingly realistic video games, have been stumbled into as if people, cities and landscapes were expendable and there were few consequences to worry about.

We wring our hands, feel smidgeons of the sorrow and pain, grumble and get on with our lives. Others blank it out, as a survival mechanism that allows them to keep going with a daily round of never-ending pressures. And yet others love it, as if feeding on the tensions, the bangs and flashes, and the numbers, and the power of it all.

For the triumph of evil it is necessary that good people do nothing. I keep banging away about this quote from the philosopher Edmund Burke because it sums up the world today and the tenor and background of what is to come.

When wars take place, we easily latch onto the proposition that it’s about Israelis and Palestinians, Russians and Ukrainians, rival generals, or government and rebels – and thus has it ever been. Well, yes, but here we blind ourselves. This is the way it looks, but there’s something else here.

At root it is about the battle for the hearts and minds of humanity – a well-worn phrase which describes what we have been in for a very long time. It seems now to be coming toward a crescendo. This goes right back into prehistory. There are two fundamental mindsets here.

One perceives strangers as a threat, territory and resources as possessions, people as individualised objects, power and wealth as advantages, competition as the sole mechanism by which everything operates, Earth as the universe’s only inhabited world and physicality as our baseline reality.

The other generally likes, loves and trusts fellow humans, tends to treat others as it would like to be treated, identifies with nature, thinks mutually and cooperatively, understands that there is something greater than what we know, and it tends to prefer living relatively simply, sharing resources and staying within its means.

Something like that. These mindsets are more easily felt than defined in words.

All of us hover around various places on the spectrum between these two poles of perspective and experience. We all have to establish a balance between self-interest/sovereignty, and mutuality/shared sovereignty. They both bevel into one another. They can shift quickly in crisis situations. Often the values that position us on this spectrum are formed in teenage and early adult years, though they can shift if life jogs us into it, or through periodic epiphanies.

Seen this way, many of today’s wars aren’t between the commonly-agreed sides. They are wars by people with a competitive mindset against two kinds of people: those with a cooperative mindset, and those who aren’t sure, who acquiesce in whatever situation prevails at the time.

The competitive side is also made up of two main kinds: the oligarchy that drives the mindset and cracks the whip, and those who lock step, join in, to become the executors, officers, influencers, reinforcers and beneficiaries of the oligarchy (to gain advantage or for fear of not joining in).

But it’s not simple and clear-cut. It’s not a goodguys/badguys scenario where one side can blame the other side for the world’s problems, striving then to dominate or eliminate them in order to solve those problems. It’s far deeper and it’s not fully conscious. It’s the frequencies we tune into. Even if we cleave the world into ‘woke’, ‘anti-woke’ and ‘don’t know’, within those divisions are heartless wokes, good-hearted anti-wokes, and a large number of people unwilling to takes sides when the options are presented in such a binary, with-us-or-against-us way.

This last lot is a broad majority – except perhaps temporarily at times such as the outbreaks of wars, when polarisation waxes strong. And this is one reason, deep down, why wars are fomented – to keep polarisation and dehumanisation on top of the world agenda, and to dull people’s sensibilities with scenes of tragedy and destruction.

There are different kinds of ‘don’t knows’ too, and the matter is kept confused because few people have time to think and reflect clearly on what’s happening and what they can do about it. The acquiescent are constrained in what we can do – despite all the hoohah about democracy. We have delicately-balanced, busy lives, and the cost of disruption can be high. Bills must be paid. Some people don’t want to know. Some feel helpless and frustrated. Some try hard to make a difference and don’t get far. Others simply pursue their careers or their lives as best they can.

The key thing here is that acquiescence is the source of the world’s problems. Some like to rail against the perpetrators, the oligarchies and power-structures, and there’s some relevance in this, but really this concerns a deeply-embedded tendency in humanity to shrug shoulders and go along with things it has instinctive reservations about.

This gives oligarchies operational space by which to determine the agenda and co-opt majorities into buying or accepting it. Throughout history it has allowed them to drag humanity through mass experiences they otherwise wouldn’t have chosen. The devastation going on today in Lebanon is but the latest example, and there will be more next year and the year after that.

I’ve spent my life exhorting, encouraging and facilitating people in their change processes, and by no means have I been the only one doing it. In the stretch of history in which I and my generation have participated, some progress has been made, though the fundamental issue has not been resolved. That is yet to come.

It’s the battle for the hearts and minds of humanity. In recent years we’ve had distressing instances presenting us with deep choices. Do we actually want this devastation to continue? If not, to what lengths are we willing to go to end it? If, as it seems, the future is intensifying, the disasters are getting bigger, the pain and costs are rising and we’re heading for a precipice, when will the world’s majority consensus shift sufficiently to tilt the balances and head another way?

This is the bottom-line agenda for the coming decades. Events and collective feelings are moving that way – something is fermenting underneath and, one day, it will come out. We’re approaching an historic choice-point, or a series of them, and we all know what it’s about. Evidential statistics are hardly necessary.

This question lies within all of us. It’s tempting to give a nice, easy answer that looks like a solution, so that everyone can go home and feel okay, but so many of us have done this before so many times, and it doesn’t necessarily help.

It’s the process. We have to go through the process. Globally. Everyone. And it’s a cliffhanger.

I’ve been reflecting on all this as I’ve gone through what has felt like a long-dark tunnel of illness in recent weeks, as detailed in three recent blogs. I’m gradually reviving, and the muscular pain I’ve had, at 90% two weeks ago, is now around 30% and within my manageable zone. Though I haven’t been close to death medically, at times it has felt like dying, as if the pain might squeeze and pop me out of my body, leaving a curled-up pile of bones behind. Since getting cancer five years ago, I’ve visited that close-but-not-there point a number of times, and perhaps my body-soul connections are a bit loose.

It’s feelings like pain that make us more human. Times when we’re overwhelmed with our own feelings, our phantasmagorical inner dramas, locked inside our personal reality-bubble and struggling through the nettles and brambles overgrowing the path toward finding out who we are. Those bouts of suffering we impose on ourselves or which come at us, just when we were busy making other plans – they can have a humanising effect.

I guess I’m feeling a microcosmic version of what Gazans will feel when the firing at last stops. What then? Will I revive, to return to something resembling the life I had before? Or have I dropped to a new level where my possibilities have shrunk and my dependencies have grown, and that’s what I must accept? We shall see. It’s that post-devastation phase that happens after an enormous struggle. Actually, it’s the mindset that those of my age-group were born into, just after WW2 – a ‘whither the future?’ phase, experienced amongst the rubble of what used to be.

My life has reduced to the size of my cabin – and when the fog is down, as it does here in Penwith, the shrouding is complete. Even so, I’ll still be there every Sunday at the meditation, because that’s something I can do that breaks free from the physical confinement my body has given me. You’re welcome to join our little group and enter the energy-zone of the meditation. It can help greatly in the uncovering of answers. (There’s a link below, explaining more.)

The view from the hill on our farm – that’s St Michael’s Mount

Over the last few weeks, lying there in bed, dead still, propped up on pillows, at times I’ve travelled far and wide, visiting many of you, and visiting people I’ve known through my life (not least friends in the Middle East) to be with you. And to be in the world’s crisis zones, with people who are there. And to swim around in the tangly firmament of the world’s heart-mind, planting love-mines and stockpiles of psychosocial aid for people to draw on, in places I’m drawn to.

I’m not doing it all the time. Often I’ve been just lying there in an opioid-painkiller daze, wondering dreamily whether I have the energy to arise from bed to take a pee. But on occasions I’ve gone deep, through and out, visiting Darfur, Dneipro, Sidon, Bethlehem… or far further out, beyond this world, into the realms of light, timelessness and beatitude, and laying connections between the two.

Which goes to show, even in your darkest days it’s still possible to do something. A candle lit in darkness sheds far more light than a candle in sunshine. And this is what we’re here for. The first Tibetan Lama I met, Akong Rinpoche, taught me that times of enlightenment, freedom and joy are like a holiday, which heals us because it is brief and different, but the times when the real progress is being made are the times when we’re wading through the swamp, struggling to find our way. And it seems to go on and on.

In writing this, I’ve just realised that Lama Akong taught me this in November 1974, almost exactly fifty years ago. Half a century later, I’ve had a reminder of it, and I’m still learning that lesson. But it also says something also about the tribulation humanity is in. We do actually know what is needed on Planet Earth, more or less, and we now have to wade through the mud, the crossfire and the floods to get there. Hearts and minds. For the triumph of humanness, it is necessary that good people do something.

With love, Palden

PS: The next Aha Class in Penzance is re-timed to Wednesday 16th October – I’m not ready to do it on 9th. Ironically, the class is all about time.

The Aha Class: www.palden.co.uk/aha.html
Sunday Meditations: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
My website and archive: www.palden.co.uk
Recent public talks: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html