You’re welcome to join the Sunday meditation – it’s good medicine. Take a break – life can do without you for half an hour.
Do your meditation, astral travelling, mindfulness, mantras or whatever, as you normally do it, together with everyone else doing the same, wherever we are. Enter the zone, an enhanced energy-field, and the wind will inflate your spiritual sails.
My current feeling is that we’re in a chickens-coming-home-to-roost phase, after the events of the last 6-9 months and more. A tide is turning. Nothing is ever permanent. This cuts all sorts of ways: both the benefits and the harms we have brought come back at us, and the overall trajectory is all to do with learning. The learning of the soul.
We’re now in a phase of collective learning (Pluto in Aquarius), of learning together as a mass of people. Our challenge is to mature as a human race, at a time when we truly need to do so. For our social subgroups, our social tribes, nations and the world are themselves beings with their own karmas, behaviours, choices and lessons to learn.
Sometimes it feels as if everything is going backwards. Gaza, Sudan, Yeman, Ukraine, Myanmar, they all seem like retrogressions, and certainly for the people in the thick of these maelstroms, they are.
But look underneath. What has been achieved in recent times has been a maturing of human values worldwide. It’s underneath, beyond the politics, the opinions, the propaganda, the polarisation. It’s historic.
It’s happening particularly in the majority world where 80% of the world’s population lives. Sadly, the Global North, including Europe, America, Russia and Japan – our time was back in the 19th-20th Centuries – are in a rather self-deluding, hubristic phase at present. We’re quite good at alienating that global majority. But people of conscience in the West are deeply unhappy with what has been happening too. It’s people of conscience who need to be the ones in power.
It concerns the matter of conflict itself and of man-made devastation and suffering. Forget this side or that side, who is right and who is wrong – conflict, polarisation and dehumanisation are themselves the problem. Humanity is growing tired of this stuff. And, strangely, exhaustion is one of the greatest of history’s peacemakers.
The sacrifices made by people oppressed by war are fuelling up the collective psyche toward an historic shift. It’s taking place deeper down. That’s where the learning is happening, and in coming times it will be tested. Humanity needs to come out of hiding, and we’re moving inch by inch toward such a time.
Do join us in the meditation. Help the world rise an inch higher. Help humanity see things from another viewpoint.
Current meditation times, every Sunday: Iceland 7-7.30pm UK & Portugal 8-8.30pm W Europe 9-9.30pm E Europe and the Levant 10-10.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 3-3.30pm PST North America 12-12.30am
I don’t always post here about the Sunday Meditation, but they continue regularly every Sunday, and here’s a reminder (should you need one).
You’re welcome to join the meditation this week – or any week – on Sunday. Times are below. We’re a loose group spread across various countries, who meditate together simultaneously. Meditate, contemplate, pray or inner-journey in the way you normally do it.
No sign-up, fees or strings – it’s a group of us sitting together, simply sharing a wish to contribute to raising the vibe of our world and helping it break through to a new level of being.
Since the eclipse the tide has changed direction. However, the powers that be, plus general habit and intertia, fail to recognise this and seek to carry on as before. This will come apart and derail at some point and the current frenzy of wars, arguments and dissonances will start unravelling. But right now it’s tentative, not a foregone conclusion.
It’s good right now to reaffirm the direction the tide is now starting to head in. It hasn’t yet picked up momentum, though events are likely to push things that way as time goes on. It’s a flow moving toward resolution and sanity, following a paroxysm of madnesses and injustices that, through their excesses, have shifted public consciousness deep down.
Gandhi-ji called it satyagraha – truth force. The power of reality to overcome delusional beliefs. Getting real. ‘Smelling the coffee’.
Current times, on Sundays: Iceland 7-7.30pm UK & Portugal 8-8.30pm W Europe 9-9.30pm E Europe and the Levant 10-10.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 3-3.30pm PST North America 12-12.30am
St Michael’s Mount as seen from Botrea Hill, the hill on our farm
I don’t post on a weekly basis here, about the Sunday meditations, but whether or not I do, we continue meditating together every week, wherever we are, and at the same time. There’s no mantra or prscription: just do the meditation, prayer, inner journeying or just sitting as you usually do, together with us.
If this interests you, you’re welcome to join us. For more details, there’s a link below. I do make weekly announcements on Facebook though.
In UK and Europe the clocks change this weekend, so the meditation is now between 8 and 8.30pm. My apologies: in USA and most of Canada the clocks changed on 10th March! Add one hour to the time you previously meditated. In other parts of the world, please check online.
But the real time stays the same, and that’s why we do this – it’s only clocks, not life, that have changed. Nature and the planet carry on as before. Also, during summertime, the later time works well in terms of the patterns of our daily lives, as the days grow longer.
In the meditation, feel free to ‘fly’ where you’re needed. But if you want something to give some focus to, I’d suggest humanitarian organisations and their work – not only what they do, but also the awkward and sometimes dangerous position they are in, in places like Sudan, Gaza, Haiti, Yemen and Congo. And the way that the world signs up to noble goals while failing to fund and support them fully and properly.
You’re welcome to join us in the zone, to meditate together wherever you are, and however you do it. For details:
What unites us is meditating together at the same time, and a shared basic intent to raise up the world and assist in its, and our, positive evolution. A once-a-week, simple, undemanding meditation can be a really good habit to fall into.
The Mount as seen from Caer Bran, an ancient hilltop gathering place
And…
For you who are a regular or semi-regular, I have two questions. You’re welcome to give feedback below or write to me about it. 1. Do you think there would be benefit in starting a dedicated page on Facebook for the meditations, together with a discussion group? 2. If a discussion group, do you think it would be better to have it password-protected (closed), or open, or both?
The background thought to this is: there will come a time, sometime, when I am no longer here or active. So I seek to find out whether there is momentum for the meditation to continue when I’m out of the game. This process can start small, slowly and organically, so that something has consolidated by the time it’s needed. If or whenever it will be needed.
With love. Palden.
St Michael’s Mount from the other direction, with Penzance behind, on the left
Every Sunday at 7-7.30pm GMT I and a morphing collection of people meditate together at the same time, wherever we live. The different times in different countries are below.
You’re welcome to join us. There’s no prescribed method or mantra: just do the kind of meditation, innerwork, prayer or mindfulness you usually do.
What connects us us that we’re doing it together and we’re all motivated to contribute to raising the energy and awareness level of our world, to aid in resolution of its compound issues.
Should it interest you, I’ve recently done a 30-min podcast sharing some thoughts on meditation, and that’s found here.
Come and join us, from a sitting place in your world, to be together in the zone. It happens once a week without fail, same time, same space. Join us whenever you can, and if you’re able to do it regularly you’ll find that something starts lifting off…
Saturn is currently in Pisces for two years – it returns here once every 28 years. The last times were 1965-66 and 1994-5. At these times terrible wars were going on (Vietnam and Bosnia) yet these were also times for the seeding of new things. Similar is the case today. These wars show humanity how not to do things, and they oblige deep-level decisions of principle.
In the Mid-1960s, today’s modern ‘global village’ period started, and in the Mid-90s was born the digital era and mass travel. Now we stand on the edge of another cycle taking us to 2053-54, when the Millennials will be old and today’s teenagers will be running around being busily middle-aged.
Pisces concerns the vision and the principles by which future developments will unfold. Saturn in Pisces is about doing the prep work before the action starts. It’s about seeds and their pre-germination arousing. It’s also about the matter of war and peace.
It’s a time for firming up the possibilities and groundrules for the next phase.
Perhaps the international figure who at present gives the most valuable running commentary on the state of the world and its prospects is Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General. His pleas frequently fall on closed ears, but he’s the one who is spelling it out globally, speaking for Saturn in Pisces.
With love, Palden.
Current meditation times, on Sundays: UK 7-7.30pm GMT W Europe 8-8.30pm E Europe and the Levant 9-9.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm PST North America 11-11.30am
Pictures: looking out into the void from safe territory. Porthgwarra, West Penwith, Cornwall, looking out into the Atlantic. Look closely in the top picture, and you’ll see a seal there, and here it is, below.
SUNDAY MEDITATION 7pm GMT every Sunday and… a new podcast
The meditation gives a chance to pay some attention to matters way beyond ourselves, to do a little volunteering at the spiritual frontline, a little world-maintenance. You can do it wherever you are. All you need is a decent place to park your body while you go within.
There’s a zone, a field, that’s open from 7-7.30pm GMT every Sunday (see below for different times in different lands). After a while you’ll probably feel it, as you tune in to it and it tunes in to you.
It’s a benign encouragement-beam or carrier wave, amplifying the meditations and prayers of all who enter and sit within it, like an uplift-field. It helps us in the underlying resolution of issues in our lives, yet the emphasis is on the world.
There’s no sign-up, no method, no mantra, no fee, and people of all paths are welcome: do your own meditation-prayer-journeying as you usually do it. We are connected by doing it at the same time and by a simple shared intent to raise the world’s level an inch, to help it progress on its evolutionary path. And by being friends in spirit.
On the fullmoon on Saturday it came upon me to do a podcast about meditation, and I recorded it down in the woods, sitting by the stream, editing it together back home this evening. It’s 34 mins long. It’s available online…
The fullmoon has brought a shift of perspective (Virgo-Pisces). Nothing much has changed, but suddenly and rather surreptitiously we’re seeing things differently. Looking back, so what was all that really about? And where does it leave us now? The world is settling into a more resonant, steady thrum for a short while. Even so, there’s an underlying acceleration going on over the next three-four years – the waves are progressively getting bigger and coming in clumps.
So we’re in an in-between-waves period. The bad news is that we have more crunches and crises coming, and the good news is that solutions are growing too, shared consensuses are forming and whatever is standing in the way is likely to come under pressure.
The sign of this is the crazy acts of resistance to change that are going on right now – it always happens as a change approaches. It’s a digging in of heels. Except such as strategy doesn’t work in tsunamis – you just gotta run. Metaphorically speaking. It’s not here yet, but we’re getting advance waves.
With love from me Palden
Current meditation times, on Sundays: UK 7-7.30pm GMT W Europe 8-8.30pm E Europe and the Levant 9-9.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm PST North America 11-11.30am
Chapel Carn Brea, the last hill in Britain, topped by bronze age and neolithic cairns
I’ve just started a job that I’ve been putting off for six months. I wasn’t clear about what I needed to do, and it’s a lot of work. And I’m supposed to be retired. But it came clear a few days ago, amidst a down-time when I was sitting here alone, feeling rather rudderless and wondering what to do. I decided to do a complete revision of a rather big website I wrote and created 6-9 years ago, Ancient Penwith. It’s about the ancient sites of West Penwith, here in Cornwall.
In some respects it’s more difficult to revise a website than to create a new one, because you have to take the existing material and re-shape it along completely new lines. But there’s a tendency to simply recycle the old stuff and stay in the same mind-frame as before. So each page is taking time for me to revise – one a day, and forty to go. I’m going to make the site briefer, more to-the-point, with more maps, pics and straight statements about the geomantic issues my research of the last ten years has aroused.
The detailed stuff has gone into a book, written and not yet published, called Shining Land. I can’t self-publish it – brain issues, and I want it to stay available after I die. So I’ll try finding a publisher when I get brain-space to focus on it.
That’s what it’s like. My psyche doesn’t process stuff like it once did. I can’t multitask and hop from thing to thing any more. When faced with memory issues I have to give myself full permission to utilise and trust my intuitive brain – intuition works by faster, more direct neural pathways than logic does, and that matters in ageing brains.
In this sense, being an educated Westerner is one of the causes of many old peoples’ brain-processing issues: we have been trained to disable and constrain a significant part of our brains, in order to fit into the requirements of the system we live in. Though, frankly, many people with dementia and Alzheimer’s are simply brain-tired, worn out, and we ought to recognise this instead of deluding ourselves that we can extend our busy lives forever.
It’s not just about slow brainz. It’s about a slowing psyche – the whole lot. It’s part of the life-cycle and a wonderful way of rounding out a life. Instead of facts and figures, you get understanding and you see things in a different light.
Here’s the summit cairn on the top of Chapel Carn Brea, a chambered cairn about 4,000 years old, for retreat, conscious dying and the energy-treatment of seeds and other items (many archaeologists would probably disagree)
Right now I am celebrating the second anniversary of the sudden separation of my partner and me, after six years together. I’ve been surprised how slowly I’ve moved through the stages of coming back to myself. It has been a struggle. On the other hand, since in a late-life context I’m in the last-chance zone, there has been far more stuff to get through, for this concerns all my relationships. My very first girlfriend, Jane, is dying too, in Northumberland. It’s all about finalising a life in which I’ve been involved with some amazing women and we’ve shared remarkable experiences. But I’m happy to say that, though I regret what happened two years ago, I made it through and I live to see another day.
I’m rather surprised I got through that. But then, that’s another gift of a lapsing memory: life and its experiences become more of a surprise. Well, I’ve got through 90% of releasing my partner and seem to have crossed a critical threshold in the last month or so. When a person refuses to talk and to debrief openly after a major life-crunch together, it opens up a new level of soul-searching, understanding, guesswork and forgiveness. It’s necessary to understand and release, regardless of whether the other person responds, helps or cares – otherwise it’s a weight around your own neck and emotionally a killer. It has been painful getting through this stuff but, in the end, something has cleared and a weight of bereavement has lifted. I’m happy about that, and I hope it’s happening for her too.
When a single issue such as relationship breakdown comes up, it widens out into other areas of life – those areas that remain unreconciled and which perhaps cannot be reconciled. One recent example, for me, has been watching much of my work in Palestine come to pretty much nothing. There’s something of it still there, but really it’s a matter of writing off this chunk of life and its efforts – letting it be. It’s in the ‘life’s a bitch, then you die’ department of reality.
In a way, all our big ideas, our plans, ambitions and efforts, come to nothing. It’s a fart in the void. This is not entirely true, but it’s an aspect of life that we do need to face. We’re locked in a groove of exaggerated, self-generated meaningfulness, desperate to explain our lives and justify our existences, when often the true meaning of our lives is completely different from what we believe. Quite often our track record is better than we ourselves tend to judge. After all, we’re all useless, error-prone shits, really, and it has taken us thousands of years to get to this point – and look where we’ve got to! We humans are the kinds of people our parents warned us about – or they should have done.
Fifty years ago I might have become a professor, but I became an independent polymath instead, covering quite a wide range of seemingly disparate subjects. I mean, what’s the connection between humanitarian work in Palestine and the geomancy of stone circles? What’s the connection between astrology and geopolitics, between ETs and the history of the Crusades, or between group circle-working and leylines?
For me, it’s all about reaching across rather large gaps and seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. I guess that’s one thing that drew me toward Israelis and Palestinians – if your aim is to bring peace to these poor people, that’s noble, but it’s highly unlikely to happen in your lifetime, so get used to it and soldier on anyway. That’s what I needed to learn. It took a few years, and my work out there lifted off as soon as I learned it.
Even so, things haven’t been working out well for me in recent years. Life has been an uphill struggle and I’ve had some rather earth-shaking experiences. In the last year, quite a few people under my care have died and I’ve faced some ridiculous challenges. Some think I ought to avoid such things but, in a way, for better or worse, this is my chosen life-path. It all hangs around the question of how deep into the water you’re prepared to go, and whether you trust that you can swim. Once you go deeper, you find out that you survive, so you go a bit deeper next time, and on it goes. Having someone shoot at you for the third time is not the same as the first.
Since October 2022 I’ve been involved in another irreconcilable problem that has weighed heavily. Recent news about the Post Office scandal here in UK has been heartening because I’ve been caught in a smaller but similar scandal. It’s a bank in Australia which, through corporate negligence, has caused the deaths of at least twelve people under my care. It is in denial of its responsibilities and has broken its promises. Like the PO scandal, the story sounds improbable and incredible. Even the consultant the bank brought in to help them with this problem recommended in our favour.
The short story is that, in October 2022, I got involved in a rescue operation in Ghana to save one of the company’s men, a Scotsman whom I knew. At the time I agreed to do it, it should have lasted 2-3 weeks. The anti-fraud security arm of the bank he worked for promised to pay all expenses if I acted as handler for this part of a larger operation – for them it was a confrontation with a large multinational crime gang. I have the right skills and experience, so I did it, in good faith.
In a crisis, there’s no time for written agreements: you either trust or you don’t trust the person, make a handshake deal and get on with it, since minutes matter. Despite repeated assurances of payment over twelve months up to September 2023, the bank has not paid. Twelve people have died as a result – some of you will remember Felicia and her child Phyllis, who died a year ago. And I am financially down. They owe Maa Ayensuwaa, me and a number of others £40,000 to help compensate all the damage done – not a vast amount.
During this time I met up with Maa Ayensuwaa, a native healer in Ghana with whom I’ve been working for the last year. Since December 2022 she and I have been alone on this, working to rescue people and both of us paying a high price for it. But we’re topping out now – the company has not managed to kill us, and neither has the crime gang.
The bank might not have intended to kill anyone, but its lack of integrity and its corporate dishonesty have killed people, and they’re continuing to err in this way even now, when a simple settle-up would not be difficult. Had they paid up as agreed at an early stage, many bad things would not have needed to happen – including Felicia’s and Phyllis’ deaths and the circumstances leading up to them.
Maa Ayensuwaa is now in Kumasi, Ghana, slowly reviving from a series of hospital operations for fibroids. Papa Nkum, her former student, and I are at present trying to find funds to get her home to her shrine at Nzema, to recuperate (£150). I’ve grown tired of fundraising. We need to get her home. It has been a long grind, keeping her alive, but we’ve done it. Gods bless her, she’s a tough cookie who seems to be able to hover around in the near-death state quite well without dying, and she’s made it through. If you feel any kind of connection with her, please send her supportive, healing vibes.
We’ve got through a crisis that neither Papa Nkum nor I reckoned we’d get through. He’s a good man. He has stood by her when others didn’t care – West Africans can be hard toward one another. But we’re quite a team, she, him and I, grossly underfunded yet resourceful and enduring. It’s quite an interaction too, between two native healers and one aged hippy – an esoteric bridge across cultures. We’ve learned a lot from each other.
The Mên an Tol, the Stone with the Hole
The issue here is about crossing gaps, reaching across cultural chasms and bridgebuilding between disparate realities that talk different languages and see things in fundamentally different ways.
The connection between humanitarian work in Palestine and the geomancy of stone circles is this. It’s about bridging gulfs. When you’re in a stone circle, you are communicating with an intelligence, genius loci, the spirit of the place. It has a very different viewpoint from you, and it’s a whole lot bigger and older than you. It’s a stretch, but the interaction is really helpful in both directions. Meanwhile, in Palestine: when in quick succession you find yourself in the company of a right-wing Israeli settler and a Muslim radical, you’re straddling a gap where the two live in very different worlds, even if living only a mile apart. It’s the same thing. It’s the vulnerability of doing the splitz.
What’s the connection between astrology and geopolitics? Well, astrology provides a way of seeing things that sheds light on the course of events, and it’s a source of hidden intelligence on the trends, tracks and timings that such events are likely to follow. It helps us understand the threads that move through history and the way they move and evolve. If astrology were used in international relations and intel gathering, diplomacy would work far better.
What’s the connection between ETs and the history of the Crusades? Well, the Crusades, for Europe, were a pattern-setting colonial adventure that have defined the history of the last thousand years, and we’re watching the latest round in Gaza and the West Bank right now. At the time of the Crusades, there was a choice between cultural interchange or cultural rivalry between the Muslim and Christian worlds, and rivalry and misunderstanding were chosen. If one person were responsible for that, it was Richard the Lionheart.
It created a gap not only between Muslims and Christians but a separatist mindset in Europeans. That is, we choose to call Hamas terrorists rather than freedom fighters. We call ETs ‘aliens’, with the expectation that they are hostile. We again say the word ‘Russia’ with an intonation and undertone that portrays Russians as ‘them’ – it’s a return to the safe hostile territory of the Cold War. Having an enemy helps us feel better about ourselves.
There’s another connection too, observed by none other than Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik nearly 40 years ago: if ETs suddenly presented themselves to us, our differences here on Earth would quickly dissolve. We’d have to change our mindset overnight. If we put up a fight, we’d lose, instantaneously – they wouldn’t even allow us to get to that point. Because it’s not about a winning-and-losing, threat-based mindset or expectation. At that very moment we as Earthlings would be challenged to do what we’ve long needed to do – cooperate and stand together. Standing against things is not the way to go.
I’ll say that again. Standing against things is not the way to go.
What’s the connection between group circle-working and leylines? Well, leylines constitute a subtle energy-system spanning the world, concentrated in certain areas (Britain and Palestine being two) and they act as network channels that pump up energy-centres dotted around the world. Group circle-working involves people sitting in a circle, using a talking stick and other methods of entering into a synergistic group-mind state. It is ancient, archetypal and very modern, the basis of deep, para-political democracy. In such a situation, a group can generate an amplified energy-field which can at times have pattern-changing effects around the world, somehow aiding or influencing events to turn in certain directions.
This is a shamanic principle that is a key principle today in the resolution of the world’s multiplex ills. ‘When three or more people are gathered in my name, there shall I be‘ – that’s ‘God’ talking in the Bible, and it’s true, and every single reader of this blog will have experienced this in some way, however you perceive divinity. This is what people did at power-centres, and that’s why they were built – to enter into advanced mass-consciousness states, to go into deep thought and to engage with the core intelligence of nature and the universe.
Spirit operates beyond the framework of time, space and dimension. We all have sisters and brothers of the soul, dotted around the world and the universe, with whom we are in regular communication on an inner level. We’re part of networks, lineages and soul-families and, consciously or not, energy passes through these connections. That’s one reason I like to run the Sunday Meditations – it’s not necessary even to do anything in the meditation. It’s more a matter of making ourselves meditatively available for whatever need there is, and much of it operates on a very deep level, of which sometimes we only get glimmers.
On Earth, we’re at a critical time where we need to understand that we really are all one. Sounds easy, but it involves a painful, drawn-out transition. We’re one human family living on one small world. We face a big emotional transition in which we shall have to learn to trust and agree more than ever before. Or, at least, we need to find ways of disagreeing and cooperating at the same time, and feeling good about each other. This concerns identities, nations, cultures and also species.
The iron age fogou at Carn Euny – a women’s space inside the heart of the village
It’s the bridging of gaps. Not only seeing and understanding those gaps, but stepping over them. We people in the rich world hold back more than is wise for us. We stay in our comfort zone, where we won’t be confronted with big moral issues that actually we need to confront, for the good of our souls. That’s why people are sailing to our shores on flimsy boats, sacrificing their lives to bring us this question.
I’ve repeatedly been faced with a question like this: “Is it better to give my last money to save a person’s life, or should I play safe and side-step the issue (and let them suffer or die)?”. The fear that causes us to turn away from facing such a question turns out to be unjustified, in my experience. It’s a question of undertaken risk and commitment – and such heat-of-the-moment choices introduce a new magic that is otherwise unavailable. I’ve found that, having faced this edgy question quite a few times over the years, I’ve managed intuitively to make good decisions, with but a few mistakes, and while it has involved making personal sacrifices, I survived – and so did they. And that’s the main thing.
It’s not what we get for doing things. It’s what we become by doing them.
Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall, a neolithic cliff sanctuary
Wednesday was a bad-news day. I cried myself to sleep afterwards. I’m crossing a threshold. My cancer readings are beginning to rise. My medication is going to be changed. There are five options available, and this is the third. Part of me wants my Mummy to hold my hand while I go through the next stage. I shall lose my four-weekly nurses’ visits – the next phase involves pills, Lenidalomide (a form of Thalidomide). I lasted well for three years on the last form of medication, Dara, but it’s now losing efficacy.
I’ll have to go to hospital in Truro once a month. There will be medical side-effects, apparently. I’m feeling similar warning signs to those I had ten months before I was diagnosed with cancer – a feeling of being up against it, drizzled with feelings of hopelessness and garnished with a creeping tiredness – and a strange manic drivenness to work on creative projects. I’m doing Reishi, Astragalus, Vits C, D3, multivits, blueberries, cider vinegar, grapefruit seed extract, beansprouts and my friend Kellie’s multicoloured carrots, and took a break from blogging for some sun-medicine too.
This is the life of an eccentric cancer patient. Who knows how the next stage will develop? This year I would certainly love resolution of the bank issue and the ex-partner issue. It’s time, and life doesn’t have to be so difficult. I would love to help Maa Ayensuwaa to get back on her feet and do something for the Tuareg too (I need to find people to replace me). The Tuareg have had to send their young and their old people to a refugee camp over the border, since they are under threat from government troops, Wagner Group mercenaries and Jihadis. This isn’t the World War Three that some people seem to want, but things are escalating. Need is rising.
And here’s my quote of the day. It cropped up on a new friend’s FB page (shukran, Selina). It’s by Austrian psychologist Carl Jung. It applies to the whole of humanity as well as to individuals or nation peoples.
“Nobody can fall so low unless they have a great depth. If such a thing can happen to a person, it challenges their best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.”
Pedn Vounder and Porth Curno, Penwith, Cornwall, from Treryn Dinas
SUNDAY MEDITATION
7-7.30PM GMT every Sunday (different times in different time zones – see below). You’re welcome to join. Do the meditation however you normally do it – mindfulness, prayer, visualisation or your own way, or simply being present with us.
Our purpose is to uplift our world an inch, to relieve the shadows of the past and to encourage decency and sanity in humanity’s thoughts, words and deeds.
Carn Du, Lamorna, and The Lizard in the background
This weekend we’re all at a rather historic juncture, astrologically speaking: Pluto moves into Aquarius for 15 years and, obligingly, the Sun conjuncted it today (Saturday), to give it an extra kick. It’s a change of chapter in the longer world story.
Last time Pluto changed sign (into Capricorn) we had the financial crisis of 2008 and the near-collapse of world currencies. But largely these sign-changes (ingresses) signify a change of theme, viewpoint, context and setting. Such shifts become big events when there are unexploded bombs lying around – unresolved matters from the past and trigger issues everyone hoped would go away.
In recent decades things have been steered top-down, but now it’s shifting to bottom-up – to some extent whether we like it or not. It’s less about economics and megastructures and more about people, societies, crowds and values.
Sunset at St Levan, Penwith, Cornwall
It’s a time of truth and transition. There’s a surreptitious tilting of balances, a crossing of a threshold. Warmakers currently feel trigger-happy and exempt from liability, yet something else is creeping up behind. A change of values.
A key issue now is ‘the people’ expressing their consensual view. Also it’s a question of whether ‘the people’ will be captured by propaganda and populism, waylaid by ‘bread and circuses’, or whether we express a new kind of moral-setting collective wisdom.
So it’s good at this time to put in a prayer for the people of planet Earth. We need some sanity and sensible behaviour.
Current times, on Sundays: UK 7-7.30pm GMT W Europe 8-8.30pm E Europe and the Levant 9-9.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm PST North America 11-11.30am
If at this time you’re working inwardly with Gaza (or Ukraine, or Sudan, or…), there’s not a lot we can do right now except care for people, to ease their hearts, mop up the dead and help people make the best of a hellish situation.
It’s tragic, but the bit we can do is to etch these events in the collective psyche of humanity and to help the world come to a very necessary conclusion, that this kind of thing is not part of our future.
This needs the building or reinforcing of a world consensus, deep in the heart of humanity. This isn’t as impossible as it seems since so many people are now tilting that way, many of them quietly and surreptitiously within themselves, and the real problem we face concerns what I keep quoting over and over, from the 18th C philosopher Edmund Burke…
“For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing.“
It’s arguable that, on Earth, the goodguys actually outnumber the badguys (though that’s over-simplistic and reality is more like shades of grey). Yet the energy-balances are tilted the ‘wrong’ way, giving much more apparent power to the Netanyahus and the conflict-stirrers of this world than they deserve.
Yet in the final analysis, the energy-balances actually tilt the other way.
As humans, we are mixed – there is darkness and light within each one of us. We’re challenged to examine those balances within ourselves, since the state of the world and the state of our selves are intimately connected. Buddhists call this ‘non-duality’. Christians call it ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’. I am he as you are she as you are me, and we are all together.
One of the best ways the losses and pain can be redeemed is to shine a psychic spotlight on these events, to help build up a tidal wave of awareness in the world psyche which simply says ‘May this be the defining event that makes this the last time it happens‘.
Perhaps we cannot right now save people like Gazans from their plight, but we can turn their sufferings and deaths into meaningful sacrifices for wider change.
We don’t want to set up a new conflict – this isn’t about a battle between light and darkness since both are part of reality. It’s about bringing the light and the dark into stronger relationship so that they interact properly and come to a new balance.
In personal growth this is called ‘owning our stuff’. The world needs to own its stuff.
With love, Palden
Both pictures come from Beit Lahem or Bethlehem in the West Bank, Palestine in 2011. The boy below is now a young man: I wonder what he’s thinking nowadays?
Castle Rigg stone circle, Cumbria. 4,200 year old sustainable architecture
You’re welcome to join our circle of souls doing a meditation together on Sunday, all at the same time, wherever we are. It’s rather special.
It’s all to bring relief, healing and forwardness to ourselves, people around us and the great wide world. Or perhaps to imitate a mountain for half an hour. Or just to sit there and give ourselves some time and space (go on, pamper yourself!).
In UK we do it at 8-8.30pm, in W Europe 21-21.30, in E Europe, Turkey and the Levant it’s 22-22.30, in Brazil and Argentina it’s 5-5.30pm, in EST USA and Canada, Cuba and Jamaica it’s 3-3.30pm and in West Coast USA and Canada it’s 12 noon-12.30pm.
Makes me feel a bit like Chronos himself when writing all that down!
No sign-up, no recipe, no strings – just turn up in inner space.
Summer solstice sunset, as seen from Trencrom Hill, Cornwall
One thing I like about doing a regular, weekly, ‘booked’ meditation is that I do it regardless of whatever is happening or how I am feeling. I just do it – no question, no struggle. Over time this has created a parallel space in my life with a life of its own, and it has a tremendously steadying effect. It pulls me back on track, helping me step outside the ‘wheel of life’ a bit, to remind me of the main issue or the heart of the matter.
So, whatever’s happening, and however I’m doing, I just do it anyway. That’s a bit different from doing meditation by choice, or doing it daily. Doing it daily is a distinct choice and, certainly at some stages of life, it can be really good, if life allows it. And sometimes it can be made to fit in with life: I often used to go into meditation while sitting with my kids as they went to sleep – and we’d all mutually benefit from the vibe-change. It was a moment of special closeness.
The weekly meditation is very doable. It’s not a relentless habit and it doesn’t require a disciplined or diligent attitude. At minimum it’s a half-hour deeper-relaxation space, once a week, and at best it can sometimes be a game-changing shift, or a blast of insight, or a healing, or an inner journey.
At times I get into some really remarkable inner experiences – for example, when visiting a disaster zone or a world situation, or when communing with people dealing with life. Other times, I just have a quiet meditation. Or I have two or three parts to it, one of which might involve letting my inner doctors scan and work on me, or inwardly being with a friend who needs standing alongside, or simply working over the events of the time, to release them or lift the clamps they’ve put on me.
It varies a lot. It’s a kind of extra dimension in life that goes on anyway, whatever else is happening.
It has certainly been valuable to me as a cancer patient – especially getting involved with ‘inner doctors’. When I had a lot of fatigue a few years ago I found I progressed a long way in meditation. I didn’t have a lot of available focus, but I had time, allowing myself to float and glide, to let be. If you have Longcovid or disability or something similar, I suggest taking a positive approach inwardly and looking for the gift that is available in fatigue or immobilisation.
It’s currently at 8-8.30pm UK time (other times elsewhere – see link below), and quite a few of us are doing it, including people who aren’t aware of these postings – they started doing this ages ago, or because they read the Nine book, or through other connections.
It’s especially good for folks who are doing it on their own, perhaps because of geographical or social isolation, or just because they can and do do it that way. It’s not complex, you don’t have to go anywhere or do anything for it, it’s free and it’s a gift of the present and The Presence.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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