myeloma – Notes from the Far Beyond

Dish brushes & worlds in apocalypse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bless you on your path.

With love. Palden.

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

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

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

Emergences

So what about dying, then? Living too.

Whatever lifts you up – bumble bee paradise, in this case.

Sometimes a comment spontaneously written in an online discussion can say it in ways it’s difficult to think up most of the time, and this morning I had one of those. I was commenting on a FB post by a fellow Myeloma patient who had just had shocking diagnosis news, and she was reeling from it – her fears were overwhelming her. So I wrote this to her, and it sums up a lot for me, as a cancer patient. Might be useful to a few of you….

You will pass away when your heart and soul feel the need to give up, or when your angels decide to take you out, or when it’s time and it is good and okay. You’ll have your own way of seeing and defining this.

But this kind of idea brings more control back to you, and it places an emphasis on keeping your heart and spirits up, as a primary focus. In this sense there is a perverse gift in cancer: it prompts us to monitor, be aware of and look after ourselves like never before, and to look at some of the more fundamental life questions that previously we avoided. It’s even arguable that some of those avoidances can be seen as a psycho-spiritual cause of cancer.

Without cancer we are nevertheless prompted by life to learn and grow, but with it the stakes and the issues are amplified. One of the big lessons that has come to me since diagnosis has been this: if it lifts me up, I need to do it, and if it weighs me down, I need either not to do it or I need to reassess. Psychological de-burdening.

Amongst other things it is an opportunity to redesign our lives to make them work better, for us and those around us, prompted by the tightened parameters, disabilities, fears and challenges myeloma brings.

It’s still not easy though.

Joe Biden Syndrome

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

Mayon Cliff Cairn

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘council space’ at Bosigran Castle

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carn Euny iron age fogou

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

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

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

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

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

Hella Point at Tol Pedn Penwith (Gwennap Head)

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

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

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

Thanks for being with. Love from me. Palden.

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

Dunnets and Dex

Perhaps I’m spending too much time talking to myself. It’s very quiet around here. People don’t visit because they don’t want to disturb me or kill me with a swarm of life-threatening viruses apparently swirling around them.

Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall, a cliff sanctuary (cliff castle) in West Penwith

I wasn’t aware until a few days ago that Easter was coming. There I was, sailing along through a chemotherapy tunnel, carrying on through thick and thin, and suddenly I was reminded of the relentlessly-rolling machinery of human society out there, happening beyond the bounds of this farm and upcountry from here. Easter was coming – oh yes. Down’ere in furthest Cornwall, all the madness happens in one direction, and we call it ‘upcountry’ or, with a sarky twist of intonation and a subtle roll of the eyes, ‘England’. Which means different things to us than it means to Englanders.

But then, England has just arrived here for its holidays. They’re all down in Tesco, shopping after the frantic journey down the A30, getting ready to stow away in cottages and splatter themselves in plastic tents all over the ancient pastures of West Penwith. Fresh-painted ‘campsite’ signs are sitting at roadside field gates, attempting to capture business, the machinery of the Cornish tourist industry grinds again into action, and the scenic single-track north coast road past Zennor will get suitably blocked up with queues of SUVs and campervans. The Cornish have mixed feelings about all that, and those feelings are growing bigger. Times are changing.

But it’s lovely too, hosting people for a break-out. Yes, there’s that sickening consumption aspect of holidaymaking – the kind that kills lovely places by extending urban tentacles over the land to trash the very landscape people come here to enjoy. But there’s also that aspect where people genuinely seek healing and release, the joy of waking up in a birdsong-soaked field, of paddling in the waves or stretching auras on the high cliffs, with the isles of Scilly shimmering in the distance…

Bosigran Castle – another cliff sanctuary

Back in the 1980s when I used to organise holistic camps, I tried hard to get black and Asian people to come and join us, but it just didn’t work. After all, why should these folks, most of whom come from a much better climate than ours, sit outside freezing their asses off in the rain, wind and dew, just because crazy pink-skinned Brits like to do it? But things change. Last year Lynne and I went to Porthcurno beach, crammed with people, and the majority were not ‘typical’ Brits at all – they were the new Brits, the second- and third-generation sprogs born of ‘rivers of blood’ immigrants, and Poles, French, Hong Kongers and Latinos, with no shortage of burkinis and saris, lapping it up and loving it, and I was so happy to be amongst them all. But then, I’ve always felt rather a stranger in my own country.

And this isn’t uniquely about Brits – it’s about humans and the way we create our collective realities, our nations, social tribes, cultures and identity-boundaries. Without sorting this out, we won’t progress with today’s big environmental, economic, political, immunological and military issues. The deeper aspect of international relations has been a core theme throughout my life, and I have a few things to say about this before I go.

When I was diagnosed with cancer and stared at death in late 2019, I became acutely aware of those things in my life that are unfinished but are still doable, in my newly disabled condition. What emerged were issues and possibilities I just hadn’t previously seen to be likely. One of those was to write a book about my understanding of prehistoric civilisation in the isles of Britain. So, when able, and whenever my brains were functioning sufficiently, I set about writing ‘Shining Land – megalithic civilisation and the ancient sites of West Penwith’. It’s now finished and seeking a publisher (no, I can’t self-publish it), but this is tricky because many publishers are cash-strapped and not in a risk-taking mood and, as usual for me, the book doesn’t sit neatly in a convenient marketing niche. Having myself worked two decades as an editor in book-publishing, and having myself rejected quite a number of good books for similar market-based reasons (we couldn’t publish anything and everything), this is rather ironic. What goes around comes around. But the book will come out somehow: it awaits a magic solution.

Pendeen Watch, also a cliff sanctuary – these go back at least 5,000 years

There’s another book or project starting to ferment, deep down – a re-work of my 2003 book about nations, cultures, beliefs and international relations. ‘Healing the Hurts of Nations – the human side of globalisation’ looked at the psycho-social and geopolitical issues that obstruct concerted planetary action to resolve its biggest global threats and challenges. Twenty years ago this was a little ahead of its time – and my spiritually-rooted approach was too far outside the box for many people, especially professionals and the commentariat. So I’m going to work over this subject again, either as a book or as a serialised online blog. Times come when ideas come into their time.

But first I must complete the prehistoric work – not far to go now. On chemotherapy, my constrained brain capacity cannot manage certain stretches of thinking. So I’ve been getting on with mind-numbing drudge – in this case, completing a detailed map of the ancient sites of Cornwall (there are thousands of them). I started it in 2015 and it’s nearly finished. Aaaah, relief. Then I can put it to bed and have done with it. Here’s the current version – and click on any site on the map to see what happens next.

The psycho-geopolitics project is fermenting underneath in the murky depths, taking shape at its own rate. I’m not really thinking it through, but the thoughts are brewing underneath and I can feel it. It involves an orientation and focusing of my thoughts and attention on the subject, and a ferreting out of pathways by which it best can be explored. These projects, these preoccupations, are like beings with a life of their own, and I sometimes there’s a discomfiting sense that I’m being used. There have even been times when I’ve been too busy with things like this to do things like earning an income! In another time of history I might have earned my income by doing it.

Gurnard’s Head – in former times called ‘the desolate one’.

It sounds like I’m ready to return to work and ‘get normal’ again – re-join the humanoid rat-race. I do need somehow to supplement my modestly adequate income, but I’m not ready for that – I’d make a mess of it. I might sound clear and resolute but actually I’m useless at making decisions, figuring things out and sorting through details. It’ll take me a day to get over the effort of writing this blog! But I’m making progress, as long as I can work when my energy and brains are cranked up. That’s difficult to predict, so arrangements and appointments are not doable, and fitting into the coffee-driven swirl of needs, complexities and timetables of the wider world doesn’t work well.

Or perhaps I’m spending too much time talking to myself. It’s very quiet around here. People don’t visit because they don’t want to disturb me or kill me with a swarm of life-threatening viruses apparently swirling around them. But I’m on Dexamethasone and probably better protected from Covid symptoms than most people. So Lynne’s fortnightly visits are so welcome – and I’m sure that if she chronicled the things we jibber about, it would land up quite encyclopaedic. Both of us being astrologers, we have a multidimensional language to yatter with that’s unavailable to most people – it ought to be taught to teenagers at school. It’s the same when Penny comes along on Wednesdays to clean up – she comes with issues and questions and leaves with a stack of lightbulb moments, sufficient to last until next week. But she doesn’t speak astrologese, so we’re limited to English. And Karen, who comes along with my shopping on Thursdays, tells me tales of events down in Penzance or at Treliske hospital (she’s a cancer patient too). That’s my main human contact with the outside world! Otherwise, my main company is the birds – there are a few dunnets that I really like. The swallows haven’t arrived yet though.

Meanwhile, the chemo process is working, and I’ve stabilised after the crisis I had a few weeks ago – was it just a few eeeks ago? My results are good, and I just have to keep on going until I reach a safe level that will last me for another period of time. I’m on a ‘management’ programme of periodic adjustments that keep my levels right and stop my bones from hollowing out – that’s what happens with myeloma if it isn’t managed. The haematologist is suitably surprised at my results, though I told her this would be so – having been a wholefood vegetarian meditator for half a century and subject to slightly different rules. But the medical profession has a strange kind of racial profiling that assumes that, if you’re white and you speak English, then you should be measured against a yardstick of ‘normal’, based on the way the ‘normal’ population operates. But then, a doctor once said that in Britain I’m underweight, while in India I’d be normal. Aged hippies like me should be treated more like an ethnic group because our psyche, metabolism and anatomy have changed quite radically as a result of the life-choices we’ve made, and the passage of time.

But there we go – this is a strange world, and none of us is here by accident. All will come well in the end. Because the sun keeps rising every day, and the Atlantic rollers keep ripping at the rocks and the cliffs, and time wanders unceasingly through the labyrinths of the present moment, and it’s time to put the kettle on.

Stay on the case, and do the best you can with what you have and what you are. I’ll do my best at my end too.

Love, Palden

Soul Honing

Hours after writing the previous blog I started going downhill, and last week I went through a nightmare. I was really unwell, out of it and going through it.

Hours after writing the previous blog I started going downhill, and between Tuesday and Friday last week I went through a nightmare. I was really unwell, out of it and going through it. I think the chemo has been pitched incorrectly (especially for a meditating vegetarian of fifty years), and I have a physical stomach complication arising from the shortening of my lower spine and squeezing of my stomach, which added to it all. By Friday I felt all beat up and half-dead, and during the weekend I’ve been reconstituting myself and coming back to balance – with a little help from the sunshine.

It makes me wary of the next step – I get another dose of chemo tomorrow. But I’ve had one item of medication removed, and another (Dex) halved, and I shall do my best with that.

All this has rather undermined my confidence, though this has been helped by two nurses and one GP who have been really good – mainly by being human and tuned in. The NHS system badly needs serious review, but it has so many good souls working within it.

So I’m going to take a calculated risk with the next stage and see whether I can tough out the coming week – whether or not this is battlefield bravado, I do want to get this chemo process over with. At best I shall have quite a lot of fatigue, so I’m unlikely to be able to answer messages or even perhaps read them. But, alive or dead (I suspect the former), I’ll be back.

Thanks and blessings to all of you who have sent prayers and healing: please keep it to general support without specific intervention since my inner doctors are best to cover that. They might even be whispering into the heads of the NHS doctors too – you never know.

I get the feeling a much deeper process kicked in last week – it went down, or up, a level – or both. For the astrologers amongst you, Neptune is doing an exact opposition to my Saturn in the coming weeks – it has a kind of ‘this is it’ feeling to it and, despite everything, I’m up for it. ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose‘.

And it’s a tad more engaging than bill-paying, driving along motorways, flattening aircraft seats or going through checkpoints…

The great blessing is that, amidst all this, it is clearer to me now than ever before that we come into this life to hone our souls. That’s the number one takeaway you get from taking on a life on Earth.

Love from me, Palden.

Chemo-daze

When this world was set up, they were creating something that hadn’t been done before. By a combination of intervention and natural evolution, they tried to make Earth into a suitable place for the cultivation of individualised free-will amongst a growing mass of volunteer souls coming from everywhere in the universe.

Fungiforms at St Loy, West Penwith, Cornwall

In the last few days, in my chemo-fatigued floaty reveries, I’ve thought of lots of things to write in this blog, and they all went thataway into the ethers – so if you picked up on any of them, just remember, our thoughts are less our own than we like to believe, and they might have come via me and not necessarily from me! This said, I’m reasonably good at elucidating things on the inner levels as well as in words, and throughout life I’ve often felt my psyche operates a bit like a telephone exchange, so you never really know…

A lot has changed in the last week or two. The new round of chemo treatment kicked in last week, and a rather nice, diligent nurse has visited me twice now to administer it. My perceived age went from 80ish to 95ish in a few days, and it has been at times difficult. But I learned a lot through last year’s chemo experiences and am much better prepared and adjusted than then. Much of the secret lies in reducing goals, simplifying, disengaging from former concerns and abilities, and keeping everything doable and within reach. I fall back on my methodical Virgo side and, that way, I can get through my daily routines quite well, and slowly, with rests in between.

I’ve stopped my creative writing (except this blog) because this draws on my bigger-brains, and they are taking a rest. Complexity, length, perseverance and big thinking aren’t available. Anyone who brings me complication or requests can wait or sort themselves out by other means. But I do manage smaller tasks when my energy is up – and I have to wait for it. I can write this blog today because I’m powered up on Dex, an anti-cancer steroid.

Cove at Morvah – Penwith is an arty place

To keep myself focused and kid myself I’m doing something useful with the remains of this incarnation, every few days, when I can, I’ve been working on the Meyn Mamvro online archive – a gradual process of scanning magazine pages, image-editing them, inserting them into a bookflip app and making PDF files of them, sorting out the web-page for each issue, and uploading. That takes 2-3 hours for each issue, and I’ve reached issue 35 out of 100. This sounds complex and long, but when you’re a natural archivist and editor with decades of drudge behind you, and if you’re a Saturnine Virgo like me, well, I can do it on autodrive – when I can.

Soon afterwards I engage in landing procedures (tea and munchies, music and, if I have the brains for it, something to read) and head for bed, flagged out. I’ve also been doing bits of work on the online ancient site maps of Cornwall that I’ve been developing since 2014. It’s good to do this, and it’s great when it ends too.

Well, we all develop our excuses for being alive. These are our chosen forms of self-punishment as the price we pay for a life on Earth – exciting and stimulus-rich as it is. If, for you, it isn’t, it might be take-off, not landing procedures, you need to develop further.

You see, when this world was set up, they were creating something that hadn’t been done before. By a combination of intervention and natural evolution, they tried to make Earth into a suitable place for the cultivation of individualised free-will amongst a growing mass of volunteer souls coming from everywhere in the universe. It is an advanced supertrooper training for those who are ready. What they didn’t then know was that strong gravitational fields of the kind that exist on this planet would have such a downward-pulling effect on consciousness, causing us to forget why we came, and to doubt that readiness. Also, they did not anticipate that we would build whole cultures and civilisations around this forgetting, such that we would lose track, locking ourselves into believing that our physical reality and our interpretation of it is the only reality that exists, that we are alone in the universe, that there is only one life we can live, and that ‘me’ is the most important thing in it.

Mysterious… (this is Gurnard’s Head, ‘the desolate one’)

What’s interesting with this is that they didn’t quite know how possible it was for beings like us to split and divide our psyches so thoroughly as we do, such that our two or our multiple sides would start operating semi-independently – our left and right sides, our conscious and unconscious. Westerners are particularly good at this, but every people has its own ways of defying its true nature. This has led to flights of possibility, genius and creativity that are utterly new (God would never have thought up the Beegees, condoms or nuclear bombs), and to a situation where we humans have developed a habit of working against our own best interests, causing ourselves and each other immense suffering in the process and even risking destroying this world, our playground, and thus even undermining our capacity to rectify the straits we’ve got into.

That’s pretty unique and very strange, and the problem is that no one else in the universe has had this kind of experience, so they’re not sure what to do. If I got my son Tulki to helicopter you over to Idlib province in Syria, or Yemen or Borno state in Nigeria, and drop you there, you wouldn’t know what to do either. Mercifully he’s in the air ambulance business, so if you’re nice to him he might fix for you to be saved! But The Management don’t interfere like that, because we came here to develop free will, and free will must develop freely. Humanity suffers a particulary psychological ailment called CSOCDS – compounded sense of consequence deficiency syndrome. This syndrome obstructs our free will, reducing us to the belief that one party or another in government, or VWs and Toyotas, or chattering on Facebook, or believing any belief you like, is what freedom means.

Anyway, as you can see, when I get into the right state, my crown chakra still can cough up a few gems. Please understand, you’re doing me as much a favour as I might be doing you, by being there for me to write to. I spend a lot of time alone, and there’s something special about this advanced ninetysomething age I’ve been thrust into and the perspectives it gives. It’s good to share it.

It has something to do with the loss of powers that comes with advancing age, and the question of whether we can make something positive and useful of it, for what it is. It’s part of the life-cycle, part of the completion that many souls omit to make as death approaches – the repair, the forgiveness, the releasing, the remembering, the forgetting. The dedication of one’s life to nothingness, to the fact that even we, in our self-preoccupation, will be forgotten, washed away in the ongoing tide of human history.

I feel strengthened by the prospect of reincarnation. This isn’t a belief – except inasmuch as the idea that tomorrow will come is a belief too. It’s a knowing, a deep knowing, a bit like knowing that you are the you that you are.

Our current incarnate lifespans are made up of quite different lives – the person I was in my teens, twenties and thirties is not who I am now. Though there’s a continuity too. In my observation, up to the age of about forty I was learning and developing new things, with a peak around ages 15-24, and after forty, in a way, it wasn’t about learning new things any more – the task was to uncover the further nuances, dimensions and intricacies of what I had already learned and developed. To really do them and work them out to a degree where, by the end of my life, I could own up to my successes and failings and come to some sort of completion, some sort of peace and balanced assessment of where I’ve really got to, and its genuine net worth.

I’m happy to say that, seen from this viewpoint, I think there’s a net positive result – but it’s not for me to mark my own homework. I’ll leave that to Yamantaka, St Peter, the Holder of the Scales and the Guardians of the Gateways. I have regrets too, and in the 16 months since I was diagnosed with cancer, starting on a different journey, there has been a lot of letting go, forgiving and self-forgiveness to do. Letting go of capacities and vitality, of my driving licence and freedom to travel, even to walk, and letting go of making plans for the future.

After all, in this last week I’ve already entered spaces inside myself where I’ve wondered how much it’s worth carrying on much further. Carrying my body around and being in this world has become so much more difficult. My bones are creaky and sometimes I have to push them to move. Making a cup of tea requires energy-saving procedural strategies.

But I’m a survivor too, and I’ve been granted a tenth life, alhamdulillah, and I shall be here until I am better somewhere else. I’m also blessed with such good support from Lynne and others, and it makes me happy that they seem to enjoy and benefit from doing it, as far as I can tell. Even the nurse this week – who had grown up in South Africa – was questioning me about my humanitarian work, and I felt I was saying more to her when answering than was apparent.

My commitment is that I shall recognise the moment to disengage from life when it comes and I shall make it a conscious choice made in peace and made totally, with all of my being behind it. I’ll die because I did it. If anyone starts fussing about wanting me to stay alive, or to save or heal me, just to avoid addressing their own fears or regrets, well, take the lesson, because it will knock on your door too one day, and it’s best working this one out in advance.

The good thing is the inner states I get into. I started meditating in 1975 and got serious about psychic innerwork by 1985, and somehow, years later, I didn’t expect to receive such a remarkable spiritual boost as cancer has brought me now, at physical age 70, currently leapfrogged to 95. Opening up to pharmaceutical medicine – I’ve been clear of all that for decades – has been a mixed experience of violation and revelation, trial and blessing.

When I go into these chemo-induced, fatigued, dulled-out reveries, I’ve been going a long way away. I’m so grateful that Lynne has what it takes to witness me floating off and for that to be alright – and perhaps she’s getting a ‘contact high’ which might be useful to her one day. It certainly gives her space to get through the compelling four-volume novel she’s reading! When I return I sometimes have an innocent, wide-eyed, childlike look, rather like an ET getting a first glimpse of this world through the sensual peripherals of eyes, ears and body, and I think she knows that’s also true, and that it’s not wholly the Palden she knows that she is seeing for that infinite moment of timeless seeing. Which she allows herself to see, because she can.

But then, as the Council of Nine would say: ‘No one is here by accident’. Did you really believe that your journey begins and ends on Planet Earth? If so, why honestly do you believe that, and is it worth re-examining?

But now I’m losing energy and I must end here. Thank you for letting me share a few tasters of the strange life I am living now, here at the end of a long peninsula on an isolated farm in Cornwall that even trusty satnavs take people the wrong way to. When I tell people about this, they still follow their satnav and not my directions. The irony is that it’s so easy: just turn right at Penzance and left onto our farm road. But no, the satnav must be obeyed, and doubt rules okay.

I must get a drink, take my pills, sort out a few things… and if I have enough energy I’ll get out a seat and go and sit in the sun for a while, before bed. If these tasks empty my batteries, it’s straight to bed. That’s what life is like right now.

Oh, and here’s a last throw-in – another of those insights I’m getting. It just popped up from behind. The future is not going to be as difficult as many people anticipate, and amazing solutions are coming in the 2020s-30s, and everything balances out in time. This is not a message of complacency since we do not yet have a sense of the scale of the mobilisation humanity is going to enter into in the coming decades – and it is this mobilisation that will make things easier by quite magical means, particularly by generating increased social and global resonance and the incremental overriding of dissonance – cognitive dissonance, well known by teenagers as hypocrisy and doublethink.

The cork popped when Covid came, and the fizzing is building up wave by wave, in just-more-than-digestible doses. It’s the people who find themselves at the frontline – today in Belarus and Myanmar, and just round the corner from you, and particularly in the developing world – who are pushing things forward. The main message came through ten years ago in the Arab Revolutions: it’s all about losing our fear. This is the project for the coming years: losing our fear.

Love from me. Thanks for being you and being with.

Palden.

My complete cancer blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Meyn Mamvro Archive: www.meynmamvro.co.uk/archive/
Ancient Sites and Alignments in Cornwall Maps: www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/maps.html

Drug and therapy list, if it interests you:
Pharma: DVD (Daratumamab, Velcade, Dexamethasone), Aciclovir, Co-trimoxazole, Zolodronic Acid.
Holistic: Quality natural-source multivits, Magnesium Citrate, Astaxanthin, blueberry powder, probiotics, cold-milled oils – mixed into breakfast. CBD oil, colloidal silver, shilajit, kombucha, Vit D+K2, lysine, unchlorinated springwater from up the hill, an E-Lybra machine, periodic homoeopathics and radionics, and a Schauberger Harmoniser. I keep a time-gap between taking holistic and pharma meds to avoid conflicts.
Spiritual: Lynne’s presence and dedication; prayers, support and healing from family, soul-family and people close and distant; adventures at the cliffs and ancient sites of West Penwith; life-lessons learned and being learned; positive thinking; and People Back Home (I open myself to their inspection and consciously let them in).

Freedom Costs

In our rich, safe countries where too much, not too little, is the problem, we live with life’s settings at three or four, but outside it the settings are pretty full-volume and tonally rich. Relationships are deeper, life is more intense, risky, edgy, uncertain and alive.

In this blog I seek to share some of the things that come up for me, as a cancer patient. This one was written while I was on the amphetamine cancer drug Dexamethasone, and perhaps it demonstrates the scatty mindset it generates – though hopefully not as disastrously as what happened with Donald Trump when he was on it. So here we go…

I was thinking back to a time thirtyish years ago when a number of us were cooking up an idea and designs for a complex in an old, deserted industrial estate outside Glastonbury, including a holistic hospital, conference centre and university. I also worked on a campaign to change Glastonbury into a county borough with special planning status – one idea was to initiate a ten-year programme to make Glastonbury into Britain’s first totally traffic-free town.

All this didn’t happen. It couldn’t. It was far too big a stretch for British people to encompass, and it grated with the politics, media-manias and vested interests of the 1990s. But I need that holistic hospital now. It doesn’t exist. I cannot resort to holistic healthcare because there is no all-round system for supporting a cancer patient – not something I can afford, that is within my limited travel range, including availability of an ambulance, paramedic or nurse if I had a need.

The best chance for this was killed off thirtyish years ago when the Bristol Cancer Help Centre was discredited, defunded and closed, for entirely political reasons. There are a few options further away (such as the Care Oncology Clinic), but these are just not doable, for me, in the state I’m in. Besides, these options didn’t appear quickly enough at the moment I needed them, when I had to make urgent life-or-death, next-day choices.

As I wrote this I was sitting once again in the cancer unit at Treliske hospital. The tea lady came round. The guy sitting next to me, with his arm hooked up to a chemo drip, requested strong coffee with three sugars in. It’s amazing that this is permitted in a cancer unit. I was sitting there surrounded by cancer patients getting pumped up with drugs, some at £1,000 per shot, and most were sitting with their mobile phone radiation-generators held just one foot from their prostate, stomach or breast, irradiating themselves.

Somehow, they don’t feel it. Somehow, the medical profession studiously ignores this, even though the figures for epilepsy, headaches, anxiety, depression, alcoholism and domestic violence have risen sharply in the last year, thanks partially to all the wi-fi radiation generated by the video-streaming so many people are doing, for hours on end.

A nurse came round who was there last week. We had had a conversation about humanitarian work – she had a wish to do something like that. Good on her. Many believe they would have to be taken on by a big NGO, and I encouraged her to think and act independently, to go as a freelance volunteer humanitarian to a country she felt drawn to in her heart. I think she was rather stirred by that conversation. As has happened so many times, I found myself appearing in a person’s life to act as a magical prompt, a timely whisper from the soul, giving a jog from The Fates.

I also mentioned to her that you don’t have to completely change your life for this: do three months every year or two and you will serve optimally as a humanitarian. Keep part of your life anchored and normal so that you can handle stirring, chaotic and emotionally challenging stuff more easily, and so that you can bring a certain calm and openness to the people you’re mixing with. Above all, follow your heart: you will fall in love with these people and they with you.

So this week I brought her a copy of Pictures of Palestine – a humanitarian blogging from Bethelehem that I wrote ten years ago. It reads like a travel book, telling of a three-month stay in 2009, talking of ordinary life in Palestine’s West Bank and the daily life of an activist humanitarian. (You can get a free online copy here.).

Such a life is not as excitingly romantic as you might imagine: there’s a lot of waiting, drudge, complexity, chaos, broken plans, roadblocks, funding problems, form-filling and plenty of assholes to deal with. You land up wondering whether you’re actually helping, whether you’re making just minuscule ripples in a vast, turbulent ocean of need, or even whether you’re part of their problem. After all, we Brits have given the world loads of problems: my own maternal grandfather was in General Allenby’s army invading Iraq and Palestine in WW1.

Working in conflict and disaster zones is deeply rewarding: life is lived more fully and intensively. In our rich, safe countries where too much, not too little, is the problem, we live with life’s settings at three or four, but outside it the settings are pretty full-volume and tonally rich. Relationships are deeper, life is more intense, risky, edgy, uncertain and alive. This said, an old friend from Devon, Gillian, was killed not in Bosnia or Palestine but in a taxi-crash in Luton, near London, on the way home from the airport – life takes strange twists.

Here am I, stuck in Britain, homesick for Bethlehem. Missing old friends there, and missing its amplified humanity. In Palestine I would not have access to the cancer medicat‭ion I’m receiving here but I would be under all-embracing human care because Bethlehem has pretty fully-functioning clans, communities and families – a family of forty can take in a cancer patient without great difficulty. The warm, dry climate of the Judaean Desert would be better for the aching arthritis I’ve acquired through my cancer treatment – a side-effect of violent pharmaceuticals I might not have needed if that holistic hospital had come into being in the 1990s.

This is why I like living at the far end of Cornwall: the people here understand the frailness of life – sometimes the storms here can be frightening, and Cornwall has long traditions of marine rescue, mining accidents and self-sufficiency. Living here is more edgy, a bit more alive, and we’re all in it together. Except we live under English colonial governance – Boris and his cronies.

Out here in the ‘Celtic Fringe’, during 2020 we left the UK in our hearts: we have better governance and more social solidarity, and Covid and Brexit have accentuated it. When Covid came along, we looked after each other. My shopping lady, Karen, who has breast cancer and osteoporosis, and who knows nothing about meditation or all the cosmic stuff I’m into, is nevertheless an amazing walking angel: she knows what it’s like being human and she’ll do anything she can to save souls while she’s still alive. She’s a good example. If she went to Palestine she’d quickly be taken in and made an ‘honorary Palestinian’.

The gift of cancer is that you start valuing life in a new way. If you so choose. You have to get straight with people too. It’s amazing how many people think they know what’s right for you. The people who don’t do that become your true friends and helpers. The English do have a habit of marking their own homework, assuming they’re right and telling everyone else what they ought to think – and this is why they are losing the Celtic Fringe.

I have this right now with a dear old English friend and brother who wanted to come and visit for some time and space in Cornwall. But while I’m on chemo, taking immuno-suppressant drugs, I can be seriously affected by the slightest infection of any kind, even a common cold. I’ve had to tell him straight that he has more likelihood of killing me than I have of killing him, and that’s not equal or true friendship, so please modify his behaviour when he comes. He’s welcome though: we’re soul-brothers.

I don’t take the same stand on Covid as many people do. I can relate to anti-maskers and anti-vaxx types. People are free to follow their conscience. But there’s something far greater here than individual freedom: you are not free to impose your values on others. You may not harm others because of your beliefs. Social and transnational solidarity is a key issue for the whole 21st Century: we will not survive the future unless we all work together.

So it is imcumbent on people who are unhappy about masks and vaccinations to take extra measures to protect their fellow humans, to avoid imposing on the vulnerable and to recognise that freedom applies to all of us. This means behavioural change, such as social distancing and emphasised thoughtful behaviour.

“Who wants change?” – and everyone shouts Yes! “Who wants to change?” – silence. This attitude undermines humanity.

This pandemic is the beginning of a big, long, total, global process of social change, and every pandemic in history has lasted 30-40 years. There are more crises and crunches coming – Covid has uncorked a formerly stoppered bottle and the genie is now out. We have an intelligent virus in our midst that has come to change us because we’re reluctant to change ourselves. It’s faster than us – nature’s answer to artificial intelligence. And it raises many other questions, such as that of social control – and Covid dissenters are at least partially right on this point.

The 1920s pursuit of individual freedom, understandably born out of a legitimate breakout-reaction to the Spanish flu pandemic and WW1, brought about a political disunity that allowed Nazism to gain power by 1930 in Germany. Take a lesson from this. Today, overblown individualism is helping the rise of a privatised form of totalitarian control called Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon, now becoming embedded in governments too – the Stalinists’ dream come true – and few people really notice.

For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing. That’s a quote from 18th C philosopher Edmund Burke.

As a lifelong dissenter I have exercised my personal freedom, and this has brought blessings and it has also charged a price to me and to others. I had to learn to stop being a male crusader and to wait for people to come, of their own choice, toward my way of seeing things – and only a few actually did. Who wants to learn astrology when there’s a mortgage to pay? That’s a big lesson in itself. Visiting cultures outside the rich world changed me: I saw societies that were economically deprived yet socially richer than in the materially rich world, with communities that work better, in real terms of mutual support.

This was blatantly obvious in Israel and Palestine: Israelis are by nature individualists while, as one Palestinian put it, “We have each other, but they just have themselves“. Though the Palestinians have repeatedly lost the battle, when you cross through the checkpoints from Israel to Palestine you’re entering a society that, despite everything, is strangely happier, more secure and more free. Despite everything. By social consensus.

In Israel, many people would say to me, “Why do you come here to interfere when your own country has plenty of problems?“. In Palestine people would say, “Willcome in Falastin, and why you not bring your children too?“.

Now the Celtic countries are pulling away from England, our former colonial master. We have each other, relatively speaking, while the English have themselves, and many prefer things that way. Seen from here, England seems to care more about money than people, yet in so doing they lose economically in the longterm. Brexit, born of an eruption of English exceptionalism and media-owning offshore tycoons’ profit margins, is now demonstrating the point.

I’m half-English and half-Welsh, but I have become one of the ‘new Cornish’. This isn’t just a matter of moving here and bringing English ways with you: it’s necessary to change, to become Cornish. Besides, the Cornish winter gets rid of people who think it’s a holiday paradise that’s here for their leisure. Celtic nationalism welcomes anyone who is truly here, in body and in heart – your bloodline is secondary. The Cornish are a European minority respected more by Brussels than by London.

So these issues are personal to me, as an English-Welsh new-Cornishman living closer to Dublin than to London. When I visit others’ countries I sit on the floor with them and pray with them in their mosques and temples – when invited. I’m not a big-booted Englishman, and one of my underlying purposes has been to help redeem the shadow of the British Empire.

There’s still an Englishman in me though, and here I wish to honour the human side of the English, that decent, fair-minded, broader-thinking aspect of Englishness that the rest of the world loves and respects. You find a lot of these amongst humanitarians abroad, and the carers, nurses and charitably-driven people here in Britain. The people who, when all is said and done, hold this world up. My partner Lynne is one.

She sobbed deep tears last weekend because of a new wave of realisation that, when I die, she’ll have a yawning gap in her life. She was feeling it in her heart, in advance of the event. This wasn’t self-pity – it was far deeper. After passing away I shall be with her in spirit but that will just not be the same, whatever anyone says. It has something to do with that special quality of love we humans can generate, here in this benighted world, stuck between a rock and a hard place – a kind of love that doesn’t exist up in heaven, where love and soul-melding come more naturally and easily.

We have a tremendous power to love despite everything. Paradoxically, those who have gone through it, feeling the full power of the pain and the joy of earthly life, tackling life’s questions instead of avoiding them, seem to love in a profoundly real way. It’s rather like the wise maturity that some ex-criminals, terrorists, druggies and alcoholics can gain when they pull back from the brink – a benefit gained from having visited hell and returned, much the wiser. Some of these people are the most principled, human, courageous people around. By their actions, not their words and beliefs, you will know them. And there are lots of words and beliefs flying round nowadays, including mine.

Bless you all. Be yourself. Have your beliefs. Be willing to review them and consider everyone else too, for none of us is free until we all are free. From now on, personal freedom has to balance with collective needs, worldwide, and Westerners are not the only people with big ideas on this front. We’re just 15% of the world’s population.

With love from me. Palden.

Eclipse of the Soul

I grew up into a teenager who looked at my dad, who had fought in Egypt for our freedom and lost a leg in the process, telling him we weren’t free. We were living in a totalitarian society where, at least for us but not for the Commies over there or for the starving children in Africa, our chains had been coated with carrots and cream.

Eclipse of the Moon in Bethlehem, Palestine, during the 2011 Arab revolutions of 2011

It’s strange. Everyone is busy angsting about Covid and here am I, as usual focused on something else entirely – in this case, right now, cancer. Or, more precisely, chemotherapy. I feel like I’ve aged ten years in the last week. Dragging myself around, feeling the gravitational weight of living on a dense-gravitational planet, holding up my weak back and gasping at shooting pains in my bones, feeling a deep tiredness with life, a tiredness with its daily routines, with yet another breakfast, yet another day. OMG, not again.

Throughout life I’ve always sought to light up the lives of others around me, with varying degrees of success, sometimes getting confused with the dark shadows in my heart, always picking myself up for another round, another try, another angle… and sometimes, burned out, drooping and flopping into life’s mudbath, the slough of despond, to go down, down into the murky depths of human struggle, the jihad, the holy war of inner conflict, the war with the axis of evil in the human heart… and for what?

Lying in bed in the semi-delerium of chemotherapeutic drudgery, with the BBC World Service bringing the heroic crowds of Yangon, Minsk, Santiago and all stops to Hong Kong to my bedside, ringing around in my night-bedarkened cranium… lying there hearing the complaints of my fellow countrypeople over the time spent queueing to get inoculated against a virus that is too intelligent, too agile to tamp down so that we can all return to normal, return to a comfortable purgatory, a purgatory that all makes perfect sense, expressed in dollars and cents, pounds, shillings and pence…

The normality of democratic freedom, a freedom to choose our own washing powder to dissolve the persistent criminal stains of omission, commission and perpetration that permit us our apparent freedom. A freedom to supply munitions for the bombing of faraway Yemenis so that we can pump up the employment statistics, share values and the great god GDP, just because those Yemenis are less than us, somehow less deserving of the certified serving of chocolate and tax bills that make up our cherished freedom.

I had an extended moment of revelation. One of those moments when you see something you’ve long been perfectly aware of but didn’t really dare to look at. I saw how lonely I’d been throughout my life. I was born in 1950 in a baby-boom maternity home that was about to close – the last baby to be born there. All the staff was there, watching. I wasn’t too sure I wanted to be born, to start that long trajectory of landing procedures leading into the tangly web of life and its involvements.

Up in heaven I had known I could do it, but now I was not so sure. There were all these people waiting to celebrate my birth, not because it was me but because I was the last, the last before they all got transferred somewhere else or had to find new jobs. It was the back end of a tragic baby boom when our parents tried so hard to replace the devastation of war with new hope and a constant stream of dirty nappies (diapers). Someone probably had some postwar rationing-busting plonk and munchies for that moment and they celebrated the last baby while I lay there wondering what was to happen next.

Yet I grew up into a teenager who looked at my dad, who had fought in Egypt for our freedom and lost a leg in the process, telling him we weren’t free. We were living in a totalitarian society where, at least for us but not for the Commies over there or for the starving children in Africa, our chains had been coated with carrots and cream. My parents thought something was wrong with me – after all, if I listened to that raucous, long-haired noise of 1960s pop music there must be something wrong. No, Commies weren’t like us, and any sympathy felt for them just showed what betrayal and subversion these youngsters were capable of – perhaps they were enemies in our midst, traitors to the cause, undermining freedom when, really, they ought to be grateful and get a proper job.

Like many in my time and like so many right now, I was struggling for truth. Now, half a century later, here am I, churning in bed with a war in my heart, struggling to plumb the depths of truth. Oh why, oh why do we fail to see? We’d prefer to destroy our planetary nest than to do without the security of chocolate, tax-bills and easy answers – it’s safer, it’s normal. If some dictator, some oligarchy, turns down the screws on another few million people, well, that’s life, and it all makes perfect sense, expressed in dollars and cents, pounds, shillings and pence.

Yes, struggling in a war against cancer that is being fought in the muddy battlefield of my being, in midst of that soup of fears, doubts and shadows that make me human. In that moment of seeing it became so clear how I had created this aloneness pattern myself: my pattern, my incrementally-repeated choice. In the pursuit of my percieved calling, my struggle to help humanity and shift society’s tiller in a new direction, I had walked away from so many. I had shrugged shoulders, let go and moved on. They had paid their price and I had paid mine. I’d shared so much redemptive love, care and awakening with so many people yet, in another way, I’d engaged in a life of struggle to reach across the light-years of distance, to try to reach to another human star-soul in the vastness.

Here I was, an ageing man churning in bed, wading through his demons, missing loved ones near and far, blessed with a seeing, a revelation of fact-sodden truth, a statement of futility, an audit of the enormity of the task of generating light in the muddy morass of earthly life. It’s a light that struggles even now to illuminate the stone walls of that prison of the soul that is me.

Before you rush to assure me it’s alright, send me reiki and pray for me to ‘get better’ – whatever that really is – and before you lapse into the belief that I’m indulging in negativity, please stop. Please sit and look at the phantasmagorical disaster-zone of your heart: sit with it. It’s there, it’s uncomfortable, yet here lies a key, a lost chord, a lump of gold sitting between the dragon’s paws. It invites you take a deep breath, let go of fear and pick up your birthright. It’s lonely and dark down there, but here lies the key.

Today I go into Treliske hospital for another round of pumping up with drugs. As a denizen of a rich country I am privileged to receive this, as if it’s a birthright. The Dara is already giving me the shits and the Dex is dragging me into a place where nightmares transmogrify into explosions of light and back again with bewildering rapidity. This treatment feels foreign to me, but these are times where my own vision of reality fails to accord with that which apparently is believed by the majority. What’s important to me in my own manner of perceiving is not what’s important to the medical system I have resorted – it doesn’t understand it. But this is the dilemma of being on Earth – no, of being in this civilisation at this time on Earth. We all share it. Stuck between a rock and a hard place – all of us. Serving our time. Doing what we feel is best yet making a pig’s ear of it, drowning in the disappointing pointlessness of constructed belief.

But this grinding action, this grating and milling, it generates light. Awakening before dawn, before the crows did their morningtime auditory armada of swoopy crawing in the dawny gloaming out over the farm where I live, and my demons were irking me. But now dawn has come and the sun is up, shining through the big windows of my hovelly palace – it’s called The Lookout because that’s what you do here, look out. The demons are scarpering in the dawning light. Vacating space until they can come again on another haunting mission. Perhaps it all was a nightmare. Or perhaps it’s the truth of my being. At this moment I cannot judge.

But when I was sitting there shivering, having just lit the woodstove, listening to a robin on the dog-rose outside, perkily tweeting hello, I realised, well, better to grind this stuff now than to leave it until the moment of my deathly transitioning. Better to grow while I can, to see clearly without the grey-tinted glasses of daily routine – the one that looks at the clock, telling me to get ready to be picked up for the journey to the cancer unit at Treliske. Yes, it’s now time to get normalised, to keep to the timetable no matter what. Get plugged back in to the matrix. Get ready. Take your pills. Do the business. Be responsible.

For those of you who are familiar with that quackish charlatanry called astrology, you’ve just read an unpremeditated description of a transit called Neptune opposition Saturn. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, well, that was your choice, and that’s okay too – we all have to live with the consequences of our choices, with the particular way we arrange the furniture and wall-hangings in the prison-cell of our souls. We all share this dilemma.

Paradoxically, nearly eight billion people are alive today yet we all face an aloneness that has never in human history been achieved before. We all have our demons, believing they’re unique to us without realising that they are but minuscule variants of the demons we all share – demons to which we give power, with which we’re fully capable of polluting and destroying our planetary home. For the demons out there are demons within us and the redemption of both go hand in hand.

It’s okay, really. Everything is okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end. Some people tell me they’re so sorry I have cancer, but I find myself wondering why truly they feel this, or whether I should be sorry for them instead. It doesn’t matter. In the end it’s all an enormous phantasmagorical Youtube video, an epic production of illusions showing in five dimensions on the custom-made cinema-screen of our psyches. Who needs a subsription to Netflix when we have this? It’s free and it’s right here, with no need for shipping in from China.

Ee, there’s now’t so strange as folk. God must be amazed at us, at the imaginings that we in our billions can cook up. It must be distressing for him to see how we blame the Chinese for what they’re doing to the Uighurs when it is we ourselves who are doing it whenever we buy yet another packaged product in our supermarkets. Or perhaps he laughs when he sees us languishing in our beliefs, including those that construct him into a God that, as John Lennon in one of his own moments of despair, identified as a concept by which we measure our pain.

Now it’s time to put the kettle on, shower my creaky body, dress up in my togs and get my ass to Treliske, for another round of the never-ending Youtube movie that is life. Chemotherapy, sometimes a high, sometimes a low, provided for free on ‘our NHS’ so that we can spend a little more time on Earth struggling with that darkness and light. Is this the life we came for?

Don’t fall for the idea that I’m suffering more than you. This is the life. This is the playground in which we are playing it out. Here’s the ketchup to squirt over it. And there’s the kettle, ready to disgorge its contents into my teapot. Here we are. The oldies amongst us will remember this, from the back of the Whole Earth Catalog: we can’t get it together – it is together. Perfectly together. This is where we stand. All will be well. But to reach that point of calm certainty in your heart, it’s necessary to dig down in the deeps, make love with those demons and live to see another day.

Now for the next bit. Peace, sisters and brothers. Palden.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUSaO07ThmY

The picture above is of a lunar eclipse over Bethlehem, Palestine, in 2011 at the time of the Arab revolutions. The Youtube video is a song by Roger Waters called Perfect Sense, from his 1990s album Amused to Death.

Out of Place – Right Place, Right Time

I went really deep and I was totally ‘gone’ for perhaps twenty minutes. I was consciously yielding to the drugs and my healing angels, who presumably needed me to hand over control so that they could manage the process. It was one of the deepest inner journeys I’ve had for a few weeks.

I knew everything was going to be okay when I reached reception at the haematology department, gave my details and received a ticket. On it was the number nine. Those of you who know me well will guess what this signals.

Have you ever observed day signs? I’ve been an intel gatherer for yonks and over the years many people have asked me where I get my information. Apart from being a knowledgeable geopolitical and historical big-head with an Aspie’s feel for hidden agendas, one answer is observing day-signs (omens), a magical way of information-gathering. Another is intuition/instinct, another is use of the pendulum and another is horary astrology (doing a chart for the moment when a matter arises or a question is asked). Of course, if I said this to many people I’d lose credibility or get accused of superstition, blasphemy, devil-worship or any other handily available accusation. But attentiveness to day-signs answers otherwise unanswerable questions. I was given a sign and it said ‘Nine’. I knew all would be well.

So there was I, later sitting in the Headland Unit at Treliske hospital. I’d had blood samples taken twice, I’d been ECG’d, weighed, measured, interviewed and briefed, I’d signed the assent form, taken four different pills plus ten of Dex (Dexamethasone), and then I had to wait an hour before they were to shoot me up with Dara (Daratumamab) and Velcade.

Well, at least these drugs are legal – that’s a change. It might sound strange, but I’ve had an issue coming up over this last year and, for me, it’s quite profound. It’s a tiredness with things not changing, even after a long time. One example is the ‘war on drugs’ which, to me as an aged hippy, has meant 55 long years of enforced criminality. Yes, me.

For half a century I’ve been living a very different life to the average Westerner but, despite all the talk nowadays about minority rights, things have not changed fundamentally, after all these years.

When I was 21 I stood on top of a mountain and made a vow to contribute significantly to world change, and while I knew it would take a long time, I so much wanted to see the world tip irreversibly into positive change before I was to die. But it looks like I’ll have to commute that joy and sense of relief to my next life. That’s quite a big let-go, but I made it last year. As I often say, history takes a long time. And we teach best what we ourselves are learning.

Anyway, back to the cancer unit: the journey had begun. It was a bit like the feeling I’d get on one of my humanitarian tours of duty, when the plane would take off from Heathrow on the way to the Middle East – I’d have gone through all the anticipations I could dredge up in the preceding days and weeks, and now it was business and I was dead calm and collected.

Some people think I’m brave, facing cancer treatment in the way I do, but there’s a simple answer to that: I’m not getting bombed or shot at, so cancer treatment is relatively easy when you see things from that viewpoint. Yes, I was getting nuked with EM radiation at Treliske (I’m electrosensitive) and bombarded with pharma-chemicals. And, amazingly, they didn’t even have any gluten-free biscuits or soya milk for my tea in the cancer unit, but this is peanuts.

Get upset with things like that and you’ll be useless getting shot at. This was a real problem in Syria, in the earlier days of the conflict in 2014. You couldn’t tell who was shooting at you or for what reason, because there were then about seven sides to the battle. They could shoot at you from any direction. At least in most wars it’s ‘the other side’ doing it, and you know roughly why and from which direction.

Anyway, that’s not the case here. My life is being saved, and for this I am grateful – without chemo treatment last year I would already be dead. Here I was, installed in an armchair, well out of it on drugs, and it felt okay. The main problem was not the chemo, it was my neurological system and brains squealing with EM radiation. Few people realise how discriminatory, insensitive and oppressive it is when they spray radiation from their mobile phone over an electrosensitive person like me, commonly regarded as an awkward person making an unnecessary fuss over nothing in particular. Yet radiation exposure is a direct cause of the particular cancer I have (myeloma). It’s a bit like being vegan 20-50 years ago – looked on as bloody awkward and deluded, and these people need to get a grip and get a proper job.

The nurses were keeping me in to observe how I reacted to the Dara. Fair enough. But there was just one problem: the doctors and nurses have little experience of people like me and they use ‘normal’ as their standard for judging everything. But I’m not normal. I have the benefit of having had a good diet, a growthful and meaningful life and, as a result, a more robust immune system and attitudes than the majority of people, and I can inwardly supercharge any therapies applied to me with consciousness work. Last year, my chemo treatment was cut from eight to six to five cycles of treatment – I did really well.

Inshallah, perhaps I’ll bring them a few surprises this time round. I had done a lot of inner preparation in the preceding days and, once the Chinese-Filipino male nurse, a nice chap, had shot me up with chemo drugs, I went straight into meditation, cross-legged in my chair, breathing myself down, modulating my energy-field to accommodate to the drugs and calm my heart which, in response to the Dex, an amphetamine, and the radiation, was pumping quite hard.

After doing this I went really deep and I was totally ‘gone’ for perhaps twenty minutes. I was consciously yielding to the drugs and my healing angels, who presumably needed me to hand over control so that they could manage the process. It was one of the deepest inner journeys I’ve had for a few weeks. When eventually I came to, I looked at the other cancer patients sat in their armchairs and hooked up to their drips, and the nurses going around doing their duties… experiencing all this with the perspective of an ET getting a look into this strange world through my eyes.

God bless these cancer patients, busy ingesting chemicals and most of them sitting fiddling with their phones, communicating with anxious daughters and neighbours to fix pickups. They’re all nice people, all facing cancer and reduced life-chances. They must wonder who this old guy dressed in his copper-coloured Arabic jalabiya was – a foreigner or a weirdo? But then, in Cornwall, it’s not like England, and this isn’t so strange, and when they hear I come from West Penwith, stacked full of oddbods and veterans of the revolution, they just nod, aha, okay.

God bless my nurse, who had been so worried about hurting me because I had so little subcutanous fat on my stomach to shove his needles into. No fat – not normal. But then, I’m not getting shot at, only shot up, so it was no worry – he was just being a bit over-conscientious. Later he came by and said, “Have you met the Dalai Lama?”. Yes, I had, though I’d mainly been involved with the Sixteenth Karmapa and his own amazing squad of lamas back in the 1970s. The nurse wanted to talk about the Tibetans, Uighurs, Hong Kong and Taiwan – he’d figured I understood these issues. He was deeply concerned about China – like so many emigrant Chinese, many of whom have lived outside the Middle Kingdom for generations, he still cared deeply about his country and people.

He said that, when I’d gone into meditation I had gone deeply quiet and the whole room had changed. I became aware that, although most of these people will have read and heard about meditation, few will actually have felt the darshan, the vibrational radiation, that can arise. There they were, stuck in their armchairs with nothing to do, while this guy at one side of the room was going somewhere that, on some level deep in their psyches, they knew they needed themselves to visit – faced as they too were the with threat of death.

The nurses were being overcautious with me though. I was supposed to leave by 4pm but someone had come in insisting I be kept there till 6.30, just in case. I told them this would not be necessary. But they could not go against authority. I showed them the places where I had been injected, which weren’t bruised or swelling, and reminded them that I had just hobbled all the way to the surprisingly well-stocked W H Smith’s at the main entrance and back, to get some gluten-free snacks which, astoundingly, they did not have available even in a cancer ward when they dished out refreshments. Eventually they ran out of excuses and I left at 6pm.

When I got to the main corridor, the guard, who had seen me go past on the way to the shop, now decided I couldn’t go that way to the main entrance. “But I’ve just walked 90% of the way there and you allowed me to do that”. “It’s the Covid regs – sorry it’s a pain in the ass”. He was a nice chap. “Well, I understand that, but it’s not a pain in the ass I’ll get but a wet bum, because I’ll need to sit down on the way and, as you can see, it’s raining…”. Nevertheless, old peg-leg had to walk round the hospital to get to the car park to find Lynne, who was going to take me home.

We got home, lit the woodstove, had a cuppa and detoxed from the day’s encounter with modern civilisation and its rules, timetables, regs and electrosmog. I was buzzing on Dex, and Lynne had to tolerate my rattling away for hours with my mind on overdrive until eventually we went to bed. She said she could smell the chemicals in my body. I lay there churning until I drifted off.

But I was alright. I seem to be tolerating the Dara (Daratumamab) well – that’s the new drug I’m on. The Velcade my body recognises, and I had had no problems with it last time. The Dex, meanwhile, though it charges its price in side-effects, does work well, and last winter I could feel that it was one of the most effective drugs I was taking. But it’s a bit like a cross between speed and cocaine in its psychoactive effects, and it heightens my Asperger’s symptoms a lot.

I’m on two other drugs too – an antiviral called Aciclovir and a kidney protector called Allopurinol – but I’m on a lot fewer drugs than last year, and that’s a relief. My body-psyche is more familiar and less shocked by the process than it was last year, and I don’t have the excruciating back pain I had then – so in this second round it is different.

So the anticipations I had had were just that: anticipations. Thus far, it is unfolding well. It’s difficult being on chemo, and writing this blog has been hard work, but it’s not as difficult as I thought it might be, and the Dara is easier on me than the Cyclophosphamide I was taking last year, which felt like being hit by an armoured bulldozer.

For the first time I’ve met my doctor and cancer nurses in person. Last year I had been treated at Torbay hospital in Devon, so the people at Treliske didn’t know me. During Covid lockdown I’ve had only phone and video consultations with one person, Liz, my doctor. So I felt quite on my own through much of 2020, as if held at a rather impersonal arm’s length during the Covid crisis. But now we were up close and personal.

I liked John, a fortysomething CNS (clinical nurse specialist). I think he figured me out quite well and had met people like me before. I get the feeling he’d done his fair share of raves and festivals before he had kids and got a ‘responsible’ job, so I was within his range of experience. This was true also for another nurse who, at a slack moment, came to say she too was a vegetarian – but I could tell she kept it quiet amongst her colleagues, rather like it was the 1980s – and to ask me a few questions about meditation.

And if you’re wondering why the number nine was significant to me as a day-sign, well, The Nine, some high beings for whom I wrote a book in the early 1990s, who jokingly used to call me Paladin Saladin, are at the root of my ‘spiritual genetics’. They’re like meta-grandparents who had placed the order for the weaving and construction of my soul. So, to me, they were signalling that they were with me and it would be alright. And they were, and it was. And so it goes.

With love, Palden.

Tears and Fears

Sometimes, early at dawn when it’s too dark to photograph it like the other birds shown here, a little wren flits to my window. It surveys the scene, sees a few crumbs on the breadboard, flutters down, feeds and looks around, then flutters back up and out. What a gift. It doesn’t know that it has become a healer of the highest order – or that news of this would stretch across the world. So wren and I are doing a good business in crumbs – and this morning, guess what, it had crumbs from the last of Lynne’s Christmas Cake! Bonus.

Slightly soppy Jupiter in Pisces that I am, I’ve been leaking tears recently, and it’s fascinating to discover what it’s all about. Several things seem to connect up to get it going – some are very positive, such as the little wren. One is about me, one is about people I know and have a connection with, and one is about the wider world.

I’m starting chemo on Monday 1st February and this will last 5-6 months, probably followed by a few months of fatigue and other side-effects. If I don’t do chemo, then the blood cancer I have will gradually hollow out my bones, I will get more collapses of vertebrae in my back and bones going brittle, I’ll become seriously disabled and eventually I’ll die, quicker than otherwise. I don’t have great expectations, but the chemo might give me a few more years with which to complete things, inshallah.

To holistic crusaders who think there’s a better path to follow: I’m on the same side as you, and if something had come up that was sufficiently convincing, based on real experience with my particular cancer and who and where I am, and if there had been a sufficient support system that I could afford, I would have done it. So thanks, and I know you mean well, and I have chosen this path, and here we go…

But it scares the hell out of me too. Mercifully, I’m not unused to that: before working in conflict zones or entering risky situations I’d grind through my stuff in the days and weeks preceding, though increasingly I found that, on the day, I was fine, balanced and fully present. It worked, mostly, in those things I could affect. In those things I could not affect, which are many in chaotic situations, I just had to take my chances. And here I still am.

So at times I’ve been feeling vulnerable and shaky, digging around in my fears. One big thing to overcome is lingering resentments over the way things have been in my life, that have not changed for the better, despite all that I and so many others have done over the years. This is coming up now with the doctors I’m working with. As a longterm vegetarian, meditator and consciousness-explorer, also very underweight, I believe I should be dosed with medications about 30% below the norm. In the last few days I haven’t taken a single pill or shot of chemo yet, yet my body and psyche are already going there, as if autonomically inducing it. My medical results have been pretty good: last year my chemo treatment, standardly eight cycles, was cut to six, then five. These results the medical profession just calls ‘good luck’. In this they are incorrect. I’m lucky, yes, but these outcomes arise from choices I have made and positive inputs that are way outside their zone.

Back to the fear. It is activating pain from the past, about being, or feeling, misunderstood and treated inappropriately, being judged and penalised for being who I am – and I’ve had a good load of that! But it’s still going on now to some extent, and I’m unhappy about that. On the other side, I do trust my doctors, and while they do want the best for me and to get things right, they can also make my life more difficult than it needs to be. Owing to institutionalised taboos against alternatives in medicine, and because doctors lack experience of holistic solutions and odd people like me, they don’t take seriously those things that are serious for me – particularly concerning pharmacological side-effects.

To be honest, this is also the case with some holistic practitioners too, who might be qualified, and who might think they know, and they mean well, but some of them also try teaching their grandmother to suck eggs, or they err a little too far on ideology, or they lack specific experience, incorrectly applying knowledge about tumorous cancers to my much rarer leukaemia-like blood cancer. With a rare disease and an unusual person, this can be problematic, being misjudged from both directions! Though I don’t want to seem entirely critical either, since doctors and healers are genuinely helping me too. However I am yet to find someone who is competent, experienced and unbiased in complementary and conventional medical fields together – integrated medicine.

One other thing I’ve had anticipation about is the task of training friends and people how to behave with me, as a cancer patient. Most people don’t know how, so they leave me alone, and this isn’t a solution – especially with people I’d like to see. Others get awkward, or try too much to help, or they’re so sorry or anxious for me – and I just need people to slow down, make us both a cup of tea, be a friend and act naturally!

Here’s a tip for dealing with someone with brain-fog: instead of asking me what I want, tell me what you’re proposing and let me say yes or no. Or just do it anyway – keep it simple. This gets around chemo-brain and the frontal-lobe issues it brings – making decisions, finding words, remembering details and following long explanations.

Here’s another one: please don’t ask me ‘How are you?’! I am asked this multiple times per day, and you’re requiring me to do a systems check and report this to you verbally and then to deal with your responses and concerns – and, believe me, it’s tiring and repetitive. I write these blogs to report what’s happening. If we do meet or talk, please just treat me like a ninetysomething, have a good conversation or communion with me and you’ll then find out how I am. My state can change on an hourly basis anyway.

Anyway, I was feeling vulnerable over all sorts of things. It’s good to bring it up, stir it round and get some of it out of the way – because many of the experiences we have in life are there to teach us. If we learn quickly and willingly, on or ahead of time, we unmanifest certain kinds of difficult learning experiences. Or they become testing experiences instead, where the Universe checks whether you really mean it, emotionally and in your cells and bones. Again, progress in tests depends on our capacity and willingness to go make something good out of a bad situation – and working through fear, guilt and shame in advance really helps us deal with such situations when we’re actually in them. And what we fear and what actually happens are two very different things.

So I am working on welcoming and befriending the process I’m about to go through and doing the best I can with it, on all levels of my being. Really, it’s the only option.

I get emotional over other people too. There’s a woman I know in Ghana whose child died on Friday night – Kwame was perhaps three or four years old and he died of pneumonia. I paid for some medicines but it was too little, too late. God bless Kwame, little soul – he had only a short life. His mum doesn’t even have enough money to bury him, so she’s stuck and rather overwrought. This is the case for many people in countries where health and social support systems are weak, or where paying for healthcare makes the difference between life and death. I cried not so much for Kwame, who returns to his Maker, but for his mother Grace, and for people like her (Lynne is one), who are left with a gap and a shadow of loss or regret when such things happen.

Then I get emotional about the overall world situation. Problem is, I’ve been dedicated to world transformation for fifty years and the new age hasn’t started. I could perhaps have done more, though I’ve done my best, but I’m now deeply sad for the world. The price it has paid for not getting the message fifty years ago is enormous – and there’s more to go. If necessary change leading toward ecological rebalancing, social and economic justice, peace and appropriate development had started back then, the situation we face today would be very different.

I’m a philosophical guy with a longterm sense of history, and I deeply believe things will work out better than many people fear – eventually. But I feel such grief over the way things have gone, and the pain and damage involved. Yes, there have been advances, but the fundamentals have not yet been addressed. This grief is what Germans call *weltschmerz* – the pain of the world. In my meditations I work to reduce the heat and increase the light in world situations and I’m very much a believer in the maxim ‘Don’t complain about the darkness – light a candle’.

When I go to my Maker, then to see things from that perspective, I have a feeling this innerwork, of all the things I’ve done, might be what I’m most satisfied with – even though, here on Earth, it is difficult to see what benefit it has brought, and even though, especially in the now-defunct Hundredth Monkey Project and Flying Squad, we did have definite instances where miracles happened.

Sometimes my tears come up from nowhere. I think of someone, or I hear something on the radio and, whatever I’m doing, I start wobbling, so I stop and give space to that precious and revelatory emotion that’s surfacing. Personally, this is important: I learned to cry only when I was about 30 – and it was an enormous loss that did it. Back then, it wasn’t just my own self-pity, but I felt so much regret for the others who also had lost in that situation. It cracked me up and cracked me open, affecting them a lot too. This experience was important for me as an Aspie: it taught me to look people in the eyes. Aspies are often regarded as feelingless and emotionally neutral, but actually we’re flooded with feeling, often confused where to put it and how to deal with it – so we go blank and get short-circuited.

This loss set me on a path of commitment to pursuing my purpose. It’s the case for many altruists and server-souls: intense pain and dilemma can unleash one’s superpowers, if one so chooses. One supporter of Alexei Navalny in Russia recently said, when asked why she was risking so much by demonstrating in the streets, “I could not bear the thought of not being there” – and this is what changes history. There comes a point where you lose your fear – or, at least, a crucial chunk of it.

Fear is natural. In the animal part of ourselves it warns us of danger, alerting us. But the deadening, sleep-inducing, inculcated and inherited fear we all have challenges us to use it to move forward, to do what we fear, to do it anyway. Though intelligently.

So I start on Monday, getting shot up with Dara, Velcade and Dex, and a load of other stuff to compensate. It involves three visits to Treliske hospital and multiple home visits from a nurse. I reduce my holistic treatments during this period, to minimise complication and avoid conflicts between holistics and pharma. Certain things, like CBD, Vit C, colloidal silver, basic nutrients and other things, I continue because they help the process (Lynne’s flapjacks too). There are other helpers, including an eLybra machine (radionics-like) and homoeopathy. There’s a mighty inner influence from Upstairs, from healers, meditators and well-wishers round the world, from Lynne and close-by supporters, from my adopted homeland of West Penwith and the landscape of the farm where I live. And my tears are part of my arsenal as a warrior-soul. And, fuckit, the past is past and this is today, the next stage on the path. All is forgiven that I’ve uncovered so far, and I’ll try to deal with the rest when I get to it.

I hope to report the whole process, as and when I can. If possible to the end. This said, I must be self-focused in the next few months, and I won’t be very interested in or respond to many people’s questions, concerns, worries and neuroses. Or endless Youtube videos. But personal, briefly-put, interesting thoughts are welcome – I’ll probably see it but you might or might not get a reply. My day will gradually go down to about six hours, probably.

I’ve said this before and it’s worth repeating…

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

This is one of those that’s worth writing on your toilet wall for further contemplation.

Now for the next bit.

Love, and thanks for being alive,

Palden

The pics are of birds who have visited my home in earlier years – including one wren who seemed to like hanging by a Tibetan thangka on my wall.