meditation – Page 4 – Notes from the Far Beyond

Bridging Gaps

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.

Boscawen-ûn stone circl e, around 4,300ish years old

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 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.”

With love, Palden

Site: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Audiobook: www.palden.co.uk/audiobook.html
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Written using Human Intelligence (what’s left of it)

The Pipers menhirs at the Merry Maidens stone circle complex

Tilting

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.

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.

That’s my suggestive thought for this week!

With love, Palden.

More details are here: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

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

Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall, from Nanjulian

Tragedies

In case reminders are needed, it’s meditation on Sunday and you’re welcome to join us.

It’s at 7pm GMT every Sunday, without fail. Times vary in different countries, and these and other necessary details are here:

www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

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?

Vegetation

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.

Any quandaries, try here: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

With love, Palden

Cumbria – the Lake District (NW England)

Gifts of Presence

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.

Love from me. Palden.

www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

Chun Quoit. Still there after around 5,700 years

Perestroika in the West

Tregeseal stone circle here in Cornwall sometimes has a knockout effect!

It’s meditation time again on Sunday evening at 8-8.30pm UK time. Do it wherever you are, using methods you’re used to. No sign-up, no strings – it’s a sharing of inner space, with a view to raising the energy of the world. For full details, including the meditation times in different timezones, go here:

www.palden.co.uk/meditations.htm l

On a slightly different matter, I am creating an archive of my work and last week sorted out an astrologically-based talk I did in 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Tienanmen Square and a massive shift in all and everything worldwide. This was a time when many new ideas born in the 1960s – environmental, gender, racial, human rights – came into mainstream awareness.

Neolithic longbarrow on Chapel Carn Brea, Cornwall – the last hill in Britain

Interestingly, I predicted several things at the time – that Gorbachev would not last long, that trouble would ensue from Western encroachment on Russia and that online networking would become a big thing. But there was one thing I got wrong: I reckoned the world would make the big and necessary decisions very soon, during the 1990s, and it took another 30 years and we’re only now entering a time, the late 2020s, when such decisions are really likely to be made. Well, better late than never.

This PodTalk is not required listening but some of you might find it interesting. It outlines the astrology and the underlying meaning of of those times, a major junction point of modern history that was only really equalled by the banking crisis of 2008 (when Western world hegemony lapsed) and the Covid crisis (the seeding and beginning of a major social change that is likely to unfold further during the coming 15ish years as Pluto chugs through Aquarius.

Perestroika in the West: http://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts/PPArchive-PerestroikaInTheWest-1990.mp3

Here’s my audio archive, with a wide range of interesting recordings available free: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.htm l

With love, Palden

Sunday Meditation

You’re welcome to join the weekly Sunday meditation this week.

It’s at 8pm UK time, 7pm GMT, 8pm in Western Europe, and for other places, plus more details, check out times lower down this page: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

This week I’m going to pay attention to Israel-Palestine and also to Sudan – in both places the virus of violence is running rampage. It’s as if, as Syria and Yemen die down as conflicts, the virus has shifted. The earthquake in Syria tapped and released the conflicted feelings of people in the Syrian civil wars, taking the fire out of the conflict. Yemen, meanwhile, has demonstrated one of the most regular causes of peace – sheer exhaustion.

It’s important not just to try to impose peace – this doesn’t necessarily heal the causes of conflict. What’s important is to seek to transform the sheer expression of violence and resentment into something that does something – something to address the fundamental causes of the problem. This requires some imagination and exploration.

Palestinians in Manger Square, Bethlehem

It means that people might suffer or die, which is tragic. But if hardship and death lead us toward a realisation that resolution must happen, this is more valuable suffering – a soul-sacrifice, in a way, which might save lives and hardship further on in the future. What is most important is the collective learning experiences that build a basis for resolution.

The Elders, Mary Robinson and Ban Ki Moon, have made a strong statement about this which is worth a read (link below). What they say about the demise of the two-state solution between Palestine and Israel isn’t new – it was visible 15 years ago at least. But at least they are acknowledging that the two-state framework is now obsolete, and a more fundamental rethink is necessary – this is back now as an international issue (itself an important development).

In Sudan, the eruption of wild violence is such a sorry thing. Sudan has so many unhealed wounds, from recent decades but also it goes way back. It is by nature a mature nation which could have a steadying effect on the Middle East, where an experiment in people power had been thriving until this dual coup d’etat fomented by two fighting generals and their men, overriding the people’s movement – and this, globally, is a worrying sign of our times.

So, if you’d like to join in, please consider the thoughts above. Praying for peace can work before a conflict erupts but, once it has started, it’s necessary to make use of what is happening, seeking to turn it to a more positive direction, to create situations and openings where positive developments may emerge. Sometimes a showdown or even a tragedy is necessary in order to turn around the local and the global consensus. Sometimes a ray of light needs to come into the situation in an unexpected way.

With love, Palden.

Here’s the Elders link: https://theelders.org/news/elders-warn-consequences-one-state-reality-israel-and-palestine

Some Austrian musicians who once came to Palestine to entertain and uplift the locals in Bethlehem – and the locals loved it.

Healing the World 2

Here’s a new podcast from me…

Second in a series of thoughts and observations about world healing. For people interested in helping the world evolve and break through, by using meditation and innerwork.

When I was organising gatherings and camps in the 1980s, some quite remarkable things took place that demonstrated the capacity of innerwork to change things. Here’s a quote, about something that happened in 1983:

“The high point of the weekend came when we spent twenty minutes sending meditative support to forty or so Glastonbury women who, that weekend, were at Greenham Common USAF base near Newbury on a major protest action against cruise missiles. The meditation seemed profound – we all were quite stirred by it. Later that day, Lydia, one of the women at Greenham, returned to report that the Glastonbury women had instigated a tearing down of the perimeter fence of the base. “We did it!”, she exclaimed. It turned out they had started doing this spontaneously at the very same time that we had sent our meditative support, earlier in the day.“

I’ll always remember that look on Lydia Lyte‘s face….

In the early 1990s I was asked to write a book on behalf of the Council of Nine, some cosmic beings, not of this Earth, who had a lot to say about world healing, and this set me off on a path.

This later developed into two innerwork projects – the Hundredth Monkey Project and the Flying Squad. In these we developed a bundle of techniques and a body of experience, building up a momentum over a twenty year period and working with all sorts of issues during that time.

Now, in late life, and while I can, I’m bringing together my thoughts on world healing in writing and podcasts, to leave to posterity. This is part two (there might be five-ish).

32 minutes long, with bumbly evensong from our farm, and music by my friend Galen in Oregon.

With love from me, Paldywan Kenobi.

Get it on Spotify or on my website:

http://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

A seal at Porthgwarra, West Penwith, Cornwall

The Viral Infection of War

It’s Sunday evening meditation again. 8pm UK time, 7pm GMT, 9pm in W Europe and 2pm EST. For half an hour.

Wherever you are, you’re welcome to join us.

All the details are here: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

And here’s a thought. I’m not certain about this, but it’s worth contemplating. In the world’s collective psyche, there’s a certain amount of infection with the psychological thought-virus of war. On the whole, it cannot spread and grow any more than the host body, humanity, will allow – the extent to which it is susceptible. But this thought-virus does not decrease unless humanity as a whole shifts its values to build increased immunity to it.

I’m not talking about conscious thoughts or thought-through policies or actions. It’s on an unconscious level. But I’ve sometimes noticed how, when a conflict subsides in one area, another conflict will come up elsewhere, as if the virus hops from an arena where people have developed immunity (often exhaustion and a desire for normality), to an area where the population is susceptible. It will be vulnerable because of divisive politics, ethnic tensions, oligarchic manipulation, outside intervention and proxy-warring, and sometimes outright madness.

I first noticed this in 1990, when the long Lebanese civil war ended and the multiple wars that broke out as the former Yugoslavia disintegrated.

This dynamic happens in other ways too, and we’ve recently had an example. It’s as if the outbreak of war in Sudan has vacuumed up some of the available violence energy, draining some of it away from Ukraine, where a much talked-about escalation of conflict isn’t really happening – some of its motivating energy has been siphoned off by Sudan.

Sometimes the grief that is experienced in conflicts can be overridden by other forms of grief. This we see in eastern Congo at pesent, where recent flooding has sucked much of the energy out of the complex conflict there. it has shifted the emotional focus.

The recent earthquake in Syria came at a time when the Syrian civil war was subsiding, converting the sump of conflict-grief in Syria into another kind of tragedy. On the other hand, in 1999, earthquakes in both Turkiye and Greece brought a simmering longterm conflict between them to an end.

So if we look at humanity’s collective psyche as an enormous, seething ball of blobs, representing mindsets, and interweaving threads, representing themes and issues, all in perpetual motion, then on the whole there will be a fluctuating balance over time between different forces at work.

This includes positive and multifaceted beliefs too – at times there can be outbursts of negativity or positivity which, over time, balance out. Though despite this, there will also be a slow net shift of values happening underneath. In the last century or so, deaths and injuries from conflict, seen in proportion to the size of population, have actually been decreasing significantly.

It’s useful looking at things this way. This isn’t about Russians and Ukrainians, Democrats or Republicans or the people and the regime: it’s about conflict and polarisation, whoever the current puppets and victims are, and whatever they’re in conflict over – which, to confuse things, might not even be the same issue for each side. It affects all of us variously.

So when we look at current events, it’s important to step back, looking behind and underneath those reported events at the underlying dynamics prompting them. One interesting polarity which I have been personally experiencing is this: strangely, as world population has risen (and dramatically so in recent decades) so too has social isolation and loneliness. That is, with much of the world feeling crowded out with other people, a compensating grouping of isolated people has been growing too.

Even so, those with busy lives and lots of people to relate to will often have a shallowness of relationship leading to an underlying loneliness, even if well-distracted, while those with lots of time tend to be factually isolated, left behind in distant villages or shut in unknown rooms, and they feel it in a different way.

We live also in a world where there are hunger and obesity, and extremes of wealth and poverty, advantage and disadvantage. The issue here is that these polarities have become more extreme, and the natural relationship between them has dwindled – and they live in different worlds.

Same planet, different worlds. Yet even though New York City and the Tian Shan mountains are like different worlds, and though our current obsession with identity obscures our common ground, we are all unwitting participants in one planetary group psyche.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

Thought for the day.

Love, Paldywan.

Time

It’s multidimensional

One of the big themes of my life has been time – dealing with the present, understanding the past and envisioning the future.

The future has preoccupied me since I was a late teenager – sitting around with friends, discussing things, trying to see which way the world will go. That’s still an open and evolving question, though for me the issues are clearer now [see: The World in 2050] and my perceptions of fifty years ago, honed by experience and the passing of time, in essence remain quite consistent.

Looking at the future led me to the past. As a student at the London School of Economics during the ‘troubles’ of 1969-71, I’d experienced what it’s like being in a revolution that is suppressed and fails – a devastating transition from inspired ferment to cruel disillusionment. Many are the peoples round the world who have experienced similar since then.

Trying to deal with my ‘political pain’, I studied the movements of change of the past, seeking clues. Then I was given a gift.

Ragged and burned out, one summer’s day I hitched out of London, landing up two days later in the Orkney islands. I found the Ring of Brogar, a big stone circle, and innocently I decided to sleep in the middle of it. I wasn’t expecting a major soul-intervention that night. But it came.

I had a profound lucid dream in which hundreds of people danced around the circle. Chanting and stamping rhythmically as they moved round it, they made the earth resound like a deeply donging bell, generating a charged magical atmosphere.

Loving my favourite stone at Carn Lês Boel

One of them came, reached down and said, “Come and join us“. Which I duly did. From then on I was a smitten megalithomaniac. A deep memory of ancient times was reawakened. Back then too I was involved with time, responsible for organising longterm observances and rites to work with Metonic, Jupiter, Saturn and other longer cycles of time.

Guess what, in this life, by the mid-1980s I was initiating consciousness-raising camps, doing a modern version of the same thing. And they were astrologically timed. After one of the camps I had a moving inner experience where the modern I and the ancient me were dialoguing, sharing our perspectives from our contrasting points in time.

So, I’ve been an astrologer, historian, antiquarian and futurologist. I didn’t particularly plan this but that’s the way it unfolded, in paragraphs and chapters through life. While studying astrology in the 1970s it felt more like remembering than learning afresh. By 1990 I had compiled The Historical Ephemeris of historical cycles with a timeline of events, showing how major-scale changes in human ideas and activities can be identified by observing such cycles. A labour of love, much ignored by historians, it needed doing and I did it.

For the last decade I’ve been studying and mapping West Penwith’s prehistoric sites. We have lots of them. One day I realised why the ancient Penwithians had gone to all the trouble of building these things. Experiences gathered in world healing [see: The Flying Squad] over the previous 35ish years led to a lightbulb moment that came up at Bosiliack Barrow, where I go whenever I seek insights. It’s funny how a revelation often simply uncovers something obvious and already there, though until then it is unseen.

I’m not particularly into earth healing, lightworking or healing and prayer circles, though it’s important that people do these. I’m more into working surgically with specific issues that obstruct progress, in an inner journeying and energy-working sense. It involves addressing fundamental social and cultural patternings, tendencies and institutions that become spotlighted by current events, digging down to get closer to the heart of things, unconcealing and helping to heal the layered pain and damage that humanity has brought upon itself over time. In our own time, these issues are getting in the way of necessary change.

CASPN members, after doing maintenance work at Boscawen-ûn

Consciousness work is upstepped immensely when groups of people work together. Over time, in activities with others that I’ve been involved with, remarkable outcomes have occasionally arisen from it. The Council of Nine (I wrote a book for them in the early 1990s) had emphasised this too: “If there are thirty-six with one mind, focused together, then the entire world, even the universe, may be changed“.

However, an undistracted, unwavering, one-minded focus is needed for that, and it’s not easy. If a group or network knits itself together over time, melding as a group, it can build up a momentum and focus that can take us at least part way along that track.

Sometimes it even happens unintentionally in the public sphere – moving moments experienced at a captivating music concert, a funeral, an uprising or even in a football crowd. Notable in particular are those moments that shake the awareness and feelings of mainstream people in their millions – poignant events, situations and crises that can sometimes evoke a one-mindedness in millions of people at the same time.

When the numbers rise, the intention and energy-holding are good, and there is real feeling behind it, the work people do in this field does have a positive effect, incrementally raising the world’s vibrational level. I encourage you to include this kind of work as a slice of attention in your life, in whatever way is best for you.

Back to ancient sites. The key sites are those that enclose space – stone circles, enclosures, chambered cairns, caves, wells and dolmens. Here intense vibrational fields can be built up within that space. That’s what the people in my dream fifty years ago were doing.

In many ancient sites we can still feel vestiges of those energy-fields, built up over the centuries during the megalithic era. A presence is in residence. At Boscawen-ûn stone circle, a couple of miles from me, it’s quite common that, when you arrive, someone else is leaving, and when you leave, someone else arrives. There’s something bigger going on here.

Being a peninsula at the end of a bigger peninsula (Cornwall and Devon), West Penwith has definite edges, bounded by the sea. Even the landward side in the east is guarded by three hills in a dead straight line (St Michael’s Mount, Trencrom Hill and St Ives’ Head), creating a threshold and energy-shield. (Interestingly, the G7 conference held in Cornwall in 2021 was located exactly on this line.)

As I did my research, it came clear that this was not just a fascinating collection of ancient sites – they constituted one big, integrated system, roughly 10×15 miles in size, and purposefully built. It was rooted in the landscape, anchored to key hills (neolithic tor enclosures) and promontories (cliff sanctuaries). The location of major sites such as stone circles is largely determined by these.

These sites are also variously plugged into underground water-energy systems beneath them. Stone circles and dolmens are sited on top of ‘blind springs’, energy-springs emerging as a vortex on the surface, which the ancients then entrained and focused by building an ancient site on top.

They’re also plugged into the wider cosmos by alignments to the rising and setting points of the sun and moon at key times of year, as well as, in some cases, certain key stars – marked out by alignments to menhirs, cairns or natural features. The designs, geometry and mathematics of many sites also embodied principles such as the Metonic cycle, a 19-year cycle of relationship between the solar and lunar calendars, both of which were used at the time.

Stone circles and other sites are placed in remarkable locations, with a visible relationship with the lay of the land. Tregeseal stone circle, near me, lies in the apex of a U-shaped bowl of hills which meld together to highlight a gap in the west, toward the sea and the distant Isles of Scilly, which float on the ocean like a mystic realm on the edge of the world.

Stone circles, enclosures and certain hills and features were amped up by cairns, menhirs and other markers that were aligned to them, acting as feeders, relays and batteries. These integrated the system as a whole into a network. In some cairns, bodies were buried not for the memorialisation purposes we now practice with our dead, but to bless and light up the land and the network by burying the relics of revered people at carefully-chosen places – rather like the medieval reverence for saints’ relics.

It was all for the engineering of conditions in which advanced consciousness levels could be achieved – though there were other purposes too. Enclosed energy-spaces such as stone circles and chambers are insulated, charged-up spaces. In Penwith, background radiation in a stone circle is much lower inside than outside it, and this applies also to background psychic noise. A protected, charged space like this allows clearer and stronger psychic, shamanic and healing work – and many of you will have experienced this yourselves.

At the Hundredth Monkey camps of the mid-1990s we built up an energy-field in the circle that resembled those that they built up at ancient sites. An energy-field morphs into a reality-field, where the framework of reality changes gear and things become possible that are not available under normal circumstances.

This was noticeable at the end of a camp when we closed the circle – the mood would subside like a slow puncture, ‘normality’ would restore its grip and the background noise and clamour of the busy world around began intruding again. We had been in a magic space with very different character, norms and rules.

Inside chambered cairns there’s a profound quietness providing ideal conditions for solitary meditation, vision-questing, innerwork and conscious dying, and also for the treatment of seeds, tools, elixirs and magical objects. Insulated from outside by stone and earth, such cairns sit on energy-vortices generated by the intersection of two or more underground water streams underneath. This makes the chamber into an energy-bath or orgone accumulator, valuable for entering into altered states.

Apart from ‘getting high’, why did they bother with all this? It had a direct bearing on the fortunes of people and tribes, as an investment that paid good dividends. Although their civilisation was materially simple, it was culturally and spiritually sophisticated. They had an advanced technology that worked esoterically with the essence of life, the core dynamics within all things, with which they could carry out forms of genetic modification, long-distance communication, medical procedures, ecological and climatic regulation and societal problem-solving.

They weren’t manipulating genetics the way we do today: instead they created energised conditions within which organisms could modify and enhance themselves, and this has been demonstrated to be possible in modern-time experiments too. They needed no telegraph wires or radio waves for communication: trained psychics, often some of society’s neurodiverse people, trained up, would enter a state in which time and distance ceased being an issue.

As for weather-modification, by siting menhirs, mounds and stones on top of energy-conductive water and metal veins and magnetic anomalies, they could neutralise the excesses of bioelectric charge between land and sky, reducing climatic extremes and damaging weather events. Conducting sometimes long and complex rites they focused on keeping Gaia and the spirits of land, sea and sky happy.

Different kinds of sites evoke different responses – this concerns consciousness-engineering. Just over the valley from me is Caer Brân, a circular hillbrow enclosure surrounded by earth banks, which could hold a gathering of at least 300 people – I believe it was the parliament site for Penwith in the bronze and iron ages. Parliament-moots were probably held annually at a fullmoon around summer solstice, exploiting the virtues of the time and the site, which is exactly aligned with two other circular enclosures (Castle an Dinas and Pordenack Point), with a summer solstice orientation. Though it has a remarkable panorama encompassing Mount’s Bay and the Isles of Scilly, you can’t really see the view from inside because the surrounding banks obscure it. This entrains consciousness upwards and inwards.

Meanwhile, on a neolithic tor hill or a hill camp, awareness opens out over a wide vista, invoking an upward-and-outward feeling. Or at some sites our attention might be entrained in certain directions – at Boscawen-ûn we are drawn toward Chapel Carn Brea, the very last hill in Britain, a beacon hill topped with a neolithic longbarrow and bronze age cairns. In contrast, in a chamber or holy well a deep interiority arises. Ancient sites had added properties engineered into them.

People did ongoing magical work over many generations, well-trained, focused and serious in intent. To crank it up further, they chose power points in time – an eclipse, solstice or planetary configuration – amplifying and pushing their energy-work over a critical potency hump.

There are things to learn from all this. I’m not suggesting building new stone circles everywhichwhere, but there are ways we can amp up world healing work by learning from the shamanic methodology and philosophy that megalithic peoples used. One key element is groupwork and another is the focus such a group can build up. In some respects this was easier for the ancients since they were mostly related, well accustomed to it and also much less psychologically scatterbrained than we. But we moderns have our virtues, such as psychospiritual diversity, a lot of creativity and a good measure of despair regarding the state of the world.

My feeling is that, in the coming decades, events on planet Earth will reach moments of intensity where everyone worldwide gets a deep and clear sense of the full extent of what’s at stake. Events have a way of manifesting scenarios before us that stir us up, press our collective buttons and present sharp dilemmas – whether they’re big events such as the recent earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria, or small, highly poignant events such as a refugee baby washed up dead on Greek shores. These experiences focus minds and hearts, invoking archetypal imagery, stirring sentiments and moral choices. This global process will intensify in coming times and there’s an inevitable crunchpoint approaching, or a few of them, where we’re faced with events of a ‘this really is it‘ kind.

It all hangs around whether we pull together globally or atomise into a tangled mess of narrow interests. It’s not just a matter of practical cooperation, effort and peacemaking, but also one of one-minded and one-hearted inner consensus. We’re faced with a mountain of global issues that require a miracle, or a stream of them, and normal means of fixing our problem are too slow and clunky. Only a quantum shift of approach and priorities is likely to prevent disastrous levels of hardship and disruption in coming decades.

A miracle requires the focusing and intensification of an energy field to the extent that our former understanding of reality flips. Nothing much might immediately change, but everything looks and feels very different. A new reality-field supersedes the previous one. The rules change and remarkable things happen. This depends greatly on how, collectively, we see and judge things – a disaster can be made good if if leads to fundamental changes.

This involves going to the heart of things, dealing with them in a psychospiritual way. Not to the exclusion of practical solutions, but complementing them. Making a big step in the collective heart of humanity. Creating a resonance that overrides the psychic disarray and disturbance of today – a central cause of today’s global problems.

‘Disaster’ means out of tune with or loss of the stars. Out of sync with nature, human nature and the cosmos. Out of sync with the guiding light within. The ancients did their shamanic energy-work to keep things resonating well, knowing that everything is interconnected and interdependent. Fixing the world today involves a big cooperation in every possible sense, between humans and with nature and the cosmos.

We have this in our collective memory – it’s a taproot memory in humanity’s collective soul. If we read the underlying meaning of current events to be a manifestation of all that we semi-consciously fear, dread, need and hope for, it is possible to see how events are leading us toward a crunch point, a truth point. A point of focus where everyone’s awareness potentially comes together to think a new and deep thought.

So something in our deep memory from former millennia holds a key here. And it concerns the future.

Time is a strange thing, and dimensional. When I went down with cancer, my life expectancy was shortened yet strangely I was given a gift of expanded time. In a time-poor world I became time-rich. Not long ago I asked myself whether I’d like my old life back, and I realised I didn’t really. Though life is more difficult now, and serving time as a cancer patient, 70% dead and hovering there, mostly alone, has tested me to the limit, time has morphed toward a more timeless zone where other things start happening. Loss of physical capability has led to something of a gain in inner ability. Life on Earth always has its compensations!

Perhaps that’s where the world is heading. Global loss of traction caused by increasing crises and disruptions could well lead to a similar compensating factor, experienced by growing numbers of people. I’ve discovered this in the crisis zones I’ve been in – such intensity can pull out the true human in us. When your life is at risk you play for high stakes, and there’s no alternative. You’re drawn into the immediacy of now, and time changes in power and potency. That’s where root-questions are met. From a world healing viewpoint, that’s where the crunchpoint lies, and from it will be born the next world, whatever shape that takes.

Oh, and by the way, if you like bathing in the timeless, you’re welcome to join our circle of souls meditating together every Sunday!

Time to go. Thanks for reading this (it was a bit long). Written using human intelligence (what’s left of it).

Love, Paldywan Kenobi