Category: myeloma

Conscious Dying

A bronze age chambered cairn, used probably, amongst other things, for conscious dying
A bronze age chambered cairn at Treen, near Morvah, in Penwith. I think these were used for, amongst other things, conscious dying.

Dying consciously isn’t something to leave for the future. It starts now. Yes, even when we’re young. It’s about our lives now. Let me explain.

Dying is a process, a continuum. All of us are part-dead already, at least psychologically, even if we’re in good health. Most people are only 10-20% dead, and most are unconscious of it, except when we schmooze into the otherworld in our dreams or when we’re ill or facing overwhelming circumstances in which we are obliged to ‘die into the moment’, to let go of all of all that went before, as if this is our last moment or it is soon to be so.

It’s all to do with our relationship with the otherworld and how comfortably we function in it. This depends on the extent to which we trust our ‘subjective’ perceptions. When a close loved one pops their clogs, part of us goes with them as if by osmosis, and we can be in quite an altered state thereafter (for at least a month though also up to a year).

This is a form of privileged access to the otherworld, empathically piggybacking the loved one who has died. It’s a gift from them to you. If we indulge in loss, buying into the mindframe that causes people to say, for want of something better, “Sorry for your loss“, we’re missing the point. Is it a loss or a gain? Here lies a choice.

If it’s a loss, then you’re afraid of dying. Go on, be honest. You’re afraid, and you see it to be a negative thing. But wait, when it’s 150 Palestinians who pop their clogs in one night, in some respects I’m happier for the people who died than for those who survive. Bloody hellsbells, that’s a version of earthly life that it’s quite good to get out of, if that is the fate that befalls you.

If it’s a gain, something in you is open to dying. And, as it happens, you’ll tend to be more open to living too. Living fully, and switching up the risk factor to a healthier level. It means you are likely to die more easily, when your time comes, because this isn’t just a goodbye. It’s a hello. It’s an entry into a new world. You’re going home.

Some people will relax into it and float off when they come to the point of passing over – when they come to the medically critical point of taking a last breath. But even then, this is but a stage on an intensely transitional dying path. Death starts long before and continues afterwards. Even with a sudden or unexpected death there are often signs, which can be seen in retrospect, of foreknowledge of death – something was fixed in preparation, on some level.

Sometimes I’m told of someone’s death and I’m not surprised at all – I didn’t expect it, but once it came, it made sense in some way. Then there are some deaths where it doesn’t feel right. I’ve felt that about quite a few of the deaths that have occurred around me in the last year or more – not only were they avoidable, but also, in my judgement, it was not right that they happened. I felt that about a family, the Gaza branch of the Issa family in Bethlehem, who died en masse, over thirty of them, in October. My first response was, no, that shouldn’t have happened. There was something bad about that. But then, ‘the hand of God moves in strange ways’.

How you feel at the bucket-kicking critical point is greatly affected by your readiness for it. Some people experience it a bit like falling off a cliff – scary at first, but then you discover that you can fly. Some people can’t handle it at all, going off at a tangent, or to sleep, or they fight like hell. Some people relax into it, floating over the threshold with a gentle, sighing smile of recognition, release and relief. Then of course, there’s the question of what you choose to do next.

Well, the general rule is, if you’ve done reasonably well thus far, you’ll manage with the next bit. It depends a lot on how you’ve set this up, how ready you are. This might not take a vastness of preparation: it’s mainly about forgiveness and releasing, and how easily we do it. Letting things be.

Summer sunset over Tregeseal stone circle
Summer sunset over the Isles of Scilly, as seen from Tregeseal stone circle

Recently I’ve been finding out about things in my own life that I haven’t found easy to let go of. So it isn’t easy, even for one who is quite used to it.

One gift I’ve had from cancer has been the advance notice I’ve been given. I’ve been given time to pre-process dying. I’m willing to do so – and that makes a difference. Becoming disabled and debilitated started me on a change-process, and I’m grateful for having been given a time of debriefing and unwinding from life. At times it has been lonely and bleak, but that’s a necessary part of the process, part of the full spectrum of life-experience. Especially for someone who has had quite a public life.

One aspect of this is that, as an author and broadcaster, a communicator, I’ve been very productive since getting cancer. Being given notice of death gave me impetus to write and record things I haven’t said, to finalise and bring to completion many of the different threads I’ve followed in my work. It’s all going up on my growing online archive.

Completion is important because, to die consciously, we need to be reasonably at peace with things. Successful dying involves letting letting ourselves float off, and that requires that we feel okay doing so. We need to feel finished and done, with no major regrets that divert our energy and attention at death, making us struggle when it’s already too late. There will be regrets, but they need to have been dug over and sifted through, to uncover the abiding truth of them. Often these regrets come from judgements, tropes and memes of the time we’ve lived in and, ‘in the eyes of God’, they tend to look a bit different.

In recent years, as part of a self-forgiveness process, I’ve become aware of guilt and shame I have carried for things that quite often were other people’s projections – projections I had taken on – and they were not quite as big and real and bad as they had been made out to be. In some cases, though I was deemed to be wrong, I was right, or at least more right than I was judged to be – though sometimes it takes decades. I realised that my own responsibility for what happened was different from the responsibility people had laid on me – often to cover their own asses. Even so, I am responsible inasmuch as I manifested these experiences, and they’re my responsibility and creation. And it always, always, always takes two to tango.

When you die, you can’t do anything more about life – you’ve had it, and that was it. You can’t fix anything, correct anything, re-run the movie or click the ‘undo’ button. Not that you could do so earlier in life, but at least you could delude yourself you could. You can do so to some extent while you have some life left, since there are things you can correct, reconcile, heal or re-work. But as you approach death, especially if disablement and disability are involved, your capacity to do things reduces, your world grows smaller and it becomes too late to do anything. You just have to accept that that is that. Bombs that were thrown cannot be unthrown, even when the craters are covered over.

It’s still possible to come to peace about things inwardly, without reconciliation having to come from outside. We have to accept what we did and what we omitted to do – especially the latter – and own up, examine our regrets, say sorry at least within ourselves, accept that we could have done things differently, understand what it was like being affected by the things we did or omitted to do, look at the true, enduring outcomes, engage in self-forgiveness and forgiving others, and then let things be. It was as it was, and that’s that.

Charely Barley prowling around Carn Kenidjack
My old friend Charley Barley, roaming around Carn Kenidjack. We dropped out of university together, fifty years ago.

There are wider and greater significances to things, and it helps to start seeing them. A friend, Mike, died of despair, drugs and alcohol and, of course, everyone deemed that this was not good. Well, from the viewpoint of the living and the default judgements of society, this might be so. But I followed him over to the other side to check him out, and he was happy, radiant, relieved to have died and actually having a lot of fun – and I was happy for him when I found out. Those who prefer to stay with the default judgement of his seemingly regrettable death see his death as a sad thing, and I do not. I’m glad for him. It’s all in how we see and judge things.

I’m sure we’ll meet again, upstairs, Mike and I. As is the case with a good soul-brother, Terry, who unexpectedly blipped out during a hernia operation – he was the caterer at the Hundredth Monkey Camps in the mid-1990s. At the very first of the Glastonbury Camps in the mid-1980s, the camp cafe was called ‘Pie in the Sky’ and, guess what, we’ll revive it on the other side, and you’re welcome to come along when your time comes. It’s free. For the good souls who ran it back then – people like Diana and Bron – the good news is that no washing up will be needed and the food will be self-cooking!

I’ve come to the end of my ‘second line’ cancer treatment (of five). I’m receiving no more treatment of Dara, the immunotherapy drug that has kept me alive for three years. It has worked well and now it’s losing efficacy and my readings are rising. Right now, I’m on nothing – this is an eight-week ‘wait and watch’ phase, to see what happens, before I start a new treatment called Lenidalomide, or Len. This is probably what will happen, though it depends on further blood samples and observations. I’m in rather a limbo.

I can feel the cancer right now. My bones are beginning to twinge with stripes of pain. My spirits are sagging. I feel the dying process accelerate.

However, I’m better off than before because I’ve learned a lot in the last four years about living with a blood cancer. (It’s Myeloma, a form of radiation sickness). In the six-ish months before my first clear symptoms appeared (my lower back collapsed), technically I was in good health, but something was not right. A dark cloud was settling on me. I was feeling constrained, tied and weighed down. My hope and light were fading. Something in me felt desperate, despairing, as if something was wrong, though I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

Well, right now I’m getting those feelings again. Except the difference is that, this time, I can recognise the feeling and I know more about what to do, and not to do. I’m not pushing against it or trying to ‘get better’, or trying to prove that everything is alright and normal when it isn’t. I’m not anxiously looking for remedies and escape routes (though actually I’m on some new holistics), because I’ll die at the right time, in the right way, if I have anything to do with it, and that’s the way it’s going to be. The angels will take me out at the right time. It’s necessary to entrust myself to this process. It’s an act of will.

So yesterday I went to bed with my hot water bottle, a mug of tea and some munchies and I lay there, out of my head, unable to marshall myself, feeling wan and weepy, missing company and watching the jackdaws sitting on the wind.

I was stuck in a loop. Problem is, people say to me, “Just give me a ring if there’s a need”. But then, when I ring, I have to explain how I’m feeling, discussing the matter at some length, then to have to make more calls when I find out that they’re not available right now, though please feel free to ring me if ever there’s a need – which I just did.

I’ve instituted a new rule of dropping it when I’ve made three attempts. Sometimes I just have to look after myself. Problem is, nowadays, everyone is so busy, and since they’re volunteering to help out of the goodness of their hearts, I cannot complain about the quality of service! I tend to get lots of advice, and sometimes I have to say, “But I need actual help!“. “Oh, perhaps you ought to ring social services…”. The tricky bit here is that I’m often in a state of mind where due diplomacy and tact are not easy, and I cannot talk at length or discuss grand philosophisms, miracle cures or lists of things I should do.

“Would it work if I came next Thursday?“. Well, the way I’m going, I have no idea what next Thursday will be like, and life doesn’t go according to plan when your body-mind are shutting down and you’re heading for a big, yawning chasm of unwellness. The best remedy is a hot water bottle, a bit of ‘there there’ and someone to sit with you. Just the sound of those knitting needles clacking away can be very comforting when you’re in a highly altered state and hovering on the edge.

Anyway, the feeling I have right now is a bit like that point in an airplane flight where, 200 miles from landing, the pilot powers down the engines and you go into a long glide. It feels like that. There’s something rather relaxing about it. It’s a bit more effortless. Internally, it has caused me to lapse into greater levels of forgiveness and acceptance, to accelerate the flow of letting-go.

Yet something else in me wants to do a few things before I go. I want to share a few outstanding issues, to complete the story. One of these is local to me: I’ve proposed a series of three workshops on the ancient sites of West Penwith. We shall see whether the venue I’ve approached is interested. But something is different now: if someone says to me, ‘not this year, but perhaps next year’ they’re not getting it. I’m unsure I shall be on good form, or even alive, next year. People say, “Oh, don’t be pessimistic – of course you’ll be around, and besides, we need you!“. Well, perhaps, but if you need me, please get me while I’m here – and that could well mean this year.

Alternatively, please do not express regret and loss when I pop my clogs, because I was indeed here and then the angels took me out. I think I’ll manage one more Oak Dragon camp, this year, and one reason I’m inviting friends to come to the camp is not just because I want to bring the Oak Dragon tribe (a lovely bunch) a few new members. It’s because we can be together for a week in the same magic space, and it could well be the last time this is possible. This is why I invite you to consider coming.

If you can’t, then a second option is that I’ll be speaking at the Glastonbury Symposium (in Glastonbury Town Hall) on Sunday 28th July. With luck I’ll be doing a few, but not many, gigs in Glastonbury and elsewhere – this year, while I still can, and if there are organisers for it. Next year, 2025 – that’s in the lap of the gods and I don’t get the feeling my head, heart and soul will be good for it. We’ll have to wait and see. But it’s not so cool if I forget my lines half way through a talk, staring blankly at you, as if to ask, “Where am I? And why am I standing here?“.

The Pathless Path to the Gateless Gate. Near Zennor, Penwith.

This kind of stuff is important. When I ‘went up’ with cancer, I made a prayer. At the time it looked like I might have one year to live. I was a ragged pile of bones. I prayed that I might be able to bring as many things to completion as I could. In my last blog I told of how one issue – my unfinished humanitarian work – bugged me at the time, and I made a prayer for resolution. Well, BAM, it came to me in Sept-Oct 2022 and afterwards – the Ghana mission I wrote about last time, the Tuareg, about whom I’ve also written, and then in October 2023, the Palestine disaster. I can’t say I’ve resolved those issues, and none are looking good for the future. But something has been happening inside. A cleansing and releasing.

For it’s not the specific worldly issues that need completing – they can’t, and each of these three missions will resolve themselves after, not before, my death. But it’s the inner stuff. It’s not just about the worldly outcomes of the work I’ve done – much of which has on the surface been undone in recent months – but it’s the inner process of engagement with these issues, and the pain and the satisfaction, the dilemmas and truths and the intensity and pathos of it all, which is the important stuff. How to forgive myself and release it when someone in my care dies.

Just before she died, a year ago, Felicia Otoo thanked me deeply for all I had done for her and for her child Phyllis. We cried together, thousands of miles apart. She was dead the next day. Two months earlier I had adopted Phyllis, to give Felicia a sense that at least someone cared. Phyllis was renamed Phyllis Kenobi Otoo. I had saved their lives at least four times in the preceding months. I told her that I shall be joining them soon. And I shall.

There are two former students in Gaza from whom I have not heard for over two months. They’re now in the ‘missing, presumed dead’ category. I’ve been talking to them inwardly. There’s a great gift here that wasn’t there before. I can assure these dying people that I shall be joining them soon – and this gives them some comfort. Yes, a dead (psychic) humanitarian worker can still be useful, even after death!

Life always has its compensations. To be honest, though I can feel death creeping closer – I’d estimate myself to be 75% dead and rising – there’s some relief that comes with it. I’ve found the last few years difficult, facing much of it alone, and while this has had worthy rewards and I’m not complaining, I shall also be relieved when it ends, when I can drop it all, consign these matters to history and go home.

Cloud beings at Praa Sands
Cloud beings at Praa Sands

I’m finding life in the 2020s to be more complex than I can handle. I got scammed by an Indian guy online in December. He was part of a really neat scamming operation, pretending to be a BT engineer. Usually I’m really astute with things like this and rumble them quickly, but this time I was tired and not thinking clearly. I found my PayPal account quickly being raided for £300, sent to some address in China – but I got there just in time to stop another £1,200 following after it. Though I managed to save the day, it was costly and I can’t handle this kind of stuff any more. I was a tech pioneer thirty years ago, and look at me now.

Even so, this spacing-out process has its virtues. It causes me to pull back, excluding increasing swathes of things from my life – things that are too much to handle. Such as train journeys where I can’t trust whether the train will actually come. Or shopping trips in busy supermarkets where I have to stand in a queue with ten mobile phones around me, killing me slowly. Or long conversations where I can’t keep up with long-winded diversions, footnotes and appendices when I just need to get to the punchline while I still remember what the story was all about.

This pulling back is part of the conscious dying process. It starts now. It’s a winding-down process, and I feel I’m somewhere around the age of seven, growing down. I can still stand though!

It involves setting up circumstances, if I can, where I won’t be plagued with people asking favours of me when I just need to go to bed and be left in peace. It involves setting up head-spaces where I’m feeling reconciled even with people who don’t want to reconcile (or they don’t have time, or they’re afraid, or they’re leaving it till a ‘later’ that never comes).

It involves laying things to rest, applying the ‘Fuck-it‘ mantra, putting stuff down and letting things be. Dropping the burdens. Forgetting my fucking pills. Making a mandala of the life that I have had. Enjoying the semi-weightlessness of lying on my back in bed, listening to the Desert Dwellers and the raindrops on the skylight.

Usually, today I’d be buzzing on steroids and cancer drugs, and quite often I would write a blog or record a podcast on that day – it channels the buzzing into something productive. But I’m not buzzing on steroids any more. Instead, two friends over in Botallack took me to the Dog and Rabbit in St Just and I had coffee and pear cake, and that set me buzzing instead. That, and what we talked about there, is what produced this sudden, unpremeditated blog.

Penwith is bathed in sea fog. The woodstove is burning aromatic silver birch. Dinner is warming up on the stove. And the Atlantic winds are whooshing through the bare tree branches to the occasional hooting of owls.

Thanks for reading. With love, Palden.

PS. For those of you who listened to my audiobook, remember the allegations of corruption that were used to discredit the school where I worked, leading to the withdrawal of foreign funding at exactly the wrong moment? And remember what I wrote some blogs back about hasbarah – the telling of stories that are the opposite to what is actually happening? Well, in the recent accusations against UNRWA, which has 30,000 employees, exactly the same tactic is being used again, twelve years later. This is classic dirty hasbarah. The nations that have withdrawn funding should be ashamed of themselves – and my own nation, Britain, is one of them.

Lunar eclipse over West Penwith
An eclipse over Penwith. The Earth and Moon are a co-orbiting double planet. The only other one in our solar system is Pluto-Charon.

Site: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Audiobook: www.palden.co.uk/audiobook.html
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Oak Dragon Camps: www.oakdragon.org

Arrive without Travelling

The long and winding road (near Falmouth, Cornwall)

I’ve been rather quiet recently. My energy has been under par. Nowadays I’m not good at doing winter. I’m often told that I look well, and part of me indeed is well, though this is more a matter of a grin-and-bear-it attitude than a medical reality. Since getting cancer I’ve found I give off an unintentionally deceptive appearance, looking better than I actually am, or feel. Sagittarius rising with Venus trine to it (the grin bit) and Saturn square it (the bear it bit). I’m not sure what to do about this.

Oh yes, I forgot… a health warning: beware of smatterings of astrology.

Though I’ve been relatively quiet, I’ve been at it, extracting parts of my blog from the last four years that tell my cancer story, turning them into a book for patients with cancer and other serious conditions, and their helpers – at least, for those interested in my approach. It will come out dreckly (sometime) as a free online PDF book, and possibly as an audiobook later on. I’m pleased with the way it’s developing.

In my birth chart I have Jupiter in Pisces – a dreamer perhaps, but for me the challenge has been to make dreams manifest. There’s fantasy and there’s vision, and there are doable and impossible dreams. The difference is a matter of discernment and not always clear, even if, like me, you have a forensic Saturn in Virgo, a dreadfully factual place for it. I’ve had successes and failures in this manifestation business, though a lot of things wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t tried. Jupiter, in my case, is the handle to a bucket formation of planets – so it’s an energy-focus in my being. A bucket is a pattern where all but one of the planets in a chart are located in half of the zodiac, with a singleton on the other side acting as a handle.

In my chart the bucket tips so that it pours or perhaps spills out – all of my planets except one, Jupiter, are above the horizon (the horizontal line across the chart), in the social and public domain. But the key to that array is Jupiter, down below, in the personal, local-neighbourhood sphere. In my case it allows a certain privileged access to inner wealth – though I had to make a progression of big, sometimes difficult choices to unlock it. The Tibetans gave me the name ‘radiant merit’ and the Bedouin called me ‘always giving’, and these have been a challenge to live up to and live with. Had I oriented my life another way, I might have been a senior civil servant or an ambassador serving Tony Blair’s government. But I didn’t.

Pendower Cove, Land’s End

Life as it stands today is rather peculiar: I’m out there with my writings and podcasts, with a public presence, while in real life I’m very much on my own. That’s Jupiter in Pisces and Saturn in Virgo again. I live in an uplifting, ancient landscape, peppered with geomantic technology from millennia ago, surrounded by high granite cliffs and the wide ocean. Here lies the taproot of my being – the sense of space here nourishes my soul. Jupiter in Pisces needs a spiritual anchorage. Before this, I’ve lived under Glastonbury Tor, in Bethlehem, in the Swedish forests and the mountains of Eryri, Snowdonia.

Yet ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main‘, wrote John Donne in 1624. For me, solitude is a way of sourcing original experiences and perceptions which then I can bring to the wider world. I’m not one of those authors who can write a book for three hours a day while doing other things – instead I go into a hyperfocused voluntary lockdown for months, totally immersing myself in it.

I’ve even manifested electrosensitivity in my life, which is very isolating. I live in furthest Cornwall to be as far away as possible from the dense cloud of radiation that England emits. I’m close to other emitters instead – humpback and minke whales, dolphins, basking sharks and seals. And buzzards, geese and owls. The construction of our realities, both intentional and unconscious, has so much to do with what we tune into.

Dolphins playing in Nanjizal Bay

The funny thing is that, although West Penwith is relatively isolated, in my psychic work I find it’s easy here to reach around the whole globe. It’s geographically peripheral and psychically quite central, relatively free of etheric noise. I have Neptune in the ninth house (an eclectic spiritualist) and Chiron in Sag in the twelfth (a penchant for behind-the-scenes stuff). As George Harrison, lifting words from Lao Tzu, once sang: “Without going out of my door I can know all things on earth; without looking out of my window I can see the ways of heaven; the farther one travels, the less one knows… Arrive without travelling, see all without looking, do all without doing…” [1] This is certainly true for me now, though I’ve travelled and done plenty of things before, and this makes it easier to accept my current confinement. If cancer had come in my thirties or forties it would have been a very different story.

Currently, transiting Saturn has been sitting on my Jupiter. Normally I’d interpret this as a crisis of faith. Well, my faith is more or less intact but circumstances are having a good go at eroding it, with many disappointments, big and small. Singlehanded, I’m not keeping up with everything that’s involved in staying alive – at times the ‘to do’ list overwhelms me, and I need help with critical things like transport, shopping, laundry, lifting, specific tasks and particularly companionship. And a PA for online assistance and organising things, and a minder for travels. Ideally.

But reality is something else. No one covers my back or keeps their eye on me, and that’s the lesson of my life. Or perhaps I deserve it, or perhaps it’s a gift in disguise. One of the gifts you get when you die is that you see all these facts and nuances from an entirely objective viewpoint, and the end-chapter in life is, if we so choose, a time of revelation and release as insights like this trickle up. Life is, after all, not only about what we tell ourselves is happening.

On the other hand, I’m kinda managing, keeping many things together, as long as it doesn’t get too complex and demanding. My task pile is increasing though, not shrinking. Even so, a strange kind of peace and acceptance has settled on me. Last year I was lonely while this year I’m alone – circumstances haven’t changed though my feelings about them have.

Godrevy Head, East Penwith, Cornwall

Ironically, one issue that’s stretching me a lot is that, although I need help, quite a few people nowadays seek help from me. I even need help explaining to many of them why I can’t help them – this requires careful diplomacy. The world’s needs are rising and people from the past naturally come back hoping I can wave a magic wand once again. Mostly not, in concrete terms, though occasionally I can given them a magic key. But the human contact between us is important – it helps them plug into some sanity, perspective and encouragement, with a feeling that someone is bearing witness and feeling their pain.

It’s heart-wrenching too. I’m talking to Bashar, a young doctor in Gaza, when he can get messages through to me. I haven’t heard from him for over a week now – might have lost him. Some years ago I helped him write articles about life in Gaza, under the auspices of We Are Not Numbers.[2] It’s an NGO that trains young Gazans in writing, photography, video and social media outreach, to help them speak for themselves. One of its founders, Prof Refaat al Areer, has recently been killed in bombing.[3]

Bashar graduated as a doctor in August this year after six years study at the Islamic University in Gaza City and was plunged straight into working at Al Shifa hospital – the big one recently in the news. I asked if he could write something about it but I haven’t heard from him. He wished he could come and work in Britain, where a doctor can have the resources, drugs and equipment they need for their work – well, much more than they have in Gaza. He doesn’t want money or to immigrate here permanently – he wants to get experience and raise his game so that he can return home, where people like him are much needed.

Another friend, Aminha, had a baby a few weeks ago. I’m relieved that she and her child are still alive – well, they were, last time I heard. What a life to be born into, stuck in a devastated concentration camp with little food or security and no escape.[4] Her brother had been a nurse in Gaza – he managed to escape in 2016, got to Europe, was talent-spotted by the Belgian health service and later died of Covid while working in a frontline intensive care unit. Poor chap. Some years ago I asked him what was the most difficult job he had had to do as a nurse in Gaza. He said, “Holding down patients during surgery without anaesthetics“.

One of the reasons I’ve had a strange peoccupation with conflict zones is this. Kahlil Gibran puts it well: “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars“. In conflict zones I’ve met some of the most impressive people I’ve ever met.

Sakyamuni Buddha put it another way: “The path to enlightenment begins with the experience of suffering“. That is, if shit happens, it might be a gift in disguise. It’s not fair to say that to a person in Gaza right now, but there’s truth in it – a truth better confronted in retrospect for the deepening of our understanding, at a time when we’re not actually being bombed.

Gurnard’s Head, West Penwith

I’ve been facing facts recently, regarding my health. I’m doing alright with cancer, though my current treatment, Daratumamab, is slowly losing its efficacy. So in the coming year I might have to change to Lenidalomide, which intuitively I feel nervous about. My anticipation is that I might not get on so well with it as I have with Dara. I’ll lose the visits by the nurses too, since it involves a daily pill rather than a four-weekly injection.

But my real concern is the peripheral side-effects of cancer. I have two critical issues – osteonecrosis of the jaw (my jaw is dying) and a compressed stomach (leading to difficulties digesting and eliminating food). The stomach is Virgo’s place in the body, while the jaw is critical for scrunching up the stuff of life. Experience is food too, so there’s symbolism in this. The stomach is where we assimilate the nutritional experiences that life gives us.

The osteonecrosis gives me anticipations. A specialist at the Royal Cornwall Hospital was concerned about it recently. We like each other, and he can see I’m very much alive, but the disintegration of my jaw, possibly in a year or two, could be a critical issue heralding my end – not a very happy ending either. Either this or the stomach issue are more likely to kill me than the cancer itself.

I’m not one who will struggle and fight to stay alive just for the sake of it. If I can, I’ll stick around until living becomes too difficult, but no longer. I’m okay about passing on, and I’ve had a full life. Over the last four years with cancer I’ve done my best to release regrets, accept facts, forgive and be forgiven, and to stay happy. However, without adequate support and with no one close to me in daily life, I’m concerned about what happens when I start deteriorating. I need someone who’s tuned in, an alternative type with some health knowledge and a good heart, with time available and willingness stand by me to the end – funnily, rather like my former partner, with qualities akin to hers.

She was into David Bowie and I was into John Lennon (having grown up in 1960s Liverpool). Lennon’s recent song, ‘Now and Then’, says it for me exactly.[5] Now and then I really do miss her. Nearly two years have passed and I’m moving on, gradually opening to other options. Not that options are here, but I’m opening up to them.

However, if I get close to someone or move house or join a new situation – a family or group, perhaps – this will be the last time, baby the last time, and I won’t be able to do another big change. If this can’t be the case, then it might be better to stay alone and handle things myself. This involves a promise to myself to pull out of life quickly and go home when the time comes to do so, and no later. I’ve spent my life pushing against the wind, and there’s no point doing it in death.

Life always has its compensations and our prayers are always answered – not necessarily when or how we might want them, but they’re certainly answered. When I was in the depths of cancer four years ago I was concerned about my humanitarian work. I could continue as an author and thinker, and my post-cancer blogs, podcasts and webwork are some of the best output I’ve done, but the humanitarian work died right then – I couldn’t travel and I’d be more of a liability than an asset at the frontline. Or so I thought.

But in the last two years I’ve worked with the Akan priestess Maa Ayensuwaa to disable a violent, Nigerian-led, drug-addled criminal gang, I’ve had involvement with the Tuareg in Mali, and recently I’ve been back with the Palestinians. It all happens from my desk here in Cornwall – online stuff – and in bed, or sometimes up on the bronze age barrows behind our farm – psychic stuff.

Something in me has been strangely calm about getting involved in human wrongs, death and devastation once again, even though at times it has been grief-filled and rather a strain. I’ve been given grace-time and opportunity to do it – a prayer answered. Which goes to show, there’s a gift in everything, even in disability, and even when it seems that all the wrong things possible are happening. But then, to quote a peacemaking Ulster vicar from some time back, ‘Better to fail in something that eventually succeeds than to succeed in something that ultimately fails’.

Treviscoe, West Penwith

When it comes to popping clogs, I think I might be able to fold myself up and pop out voluntarily, if necessary – though I’ll find out only when I get there. It’s a matter of shifting away from the apparent difficulty of letting go of life, toward being reborn into a new world with a sense of relief and homecoming. We don’t stop being ourselves when we die, but the location changes, you wave goodbye to your old, damaged, tired, physical self and body, and you say hello to welcoming souls who await your arrival. You get processed through a decompression, a debriefing and a healing of wounds, a few truth sessions, some re-education and recuperation, and then other options come before you.

So, I’m getting used to the possibility that my time might be shorter than otherwise it might be. My current state isn’t going to last forever. However, the conundrum is that, when you’re kept alive by spirit, anything can happen.

But I do need friends to quit trying to oblige me to stay alive for their own convenience. I’m here now, alive in incarnation, in physical form. If you wish, you may invite me places, get me to do a holy gig or two, join us at the Oak Dragon Camp in summer [6] or visit me here in Cornwall. But please don’t leave it too late. When it’s time to go, I’ll need to go, whatever anyone thinks and whether or not I fit their timetable.

After that, I’m in the hands of two Geminis – Tulki, my son, looking after my remaining affairs, bless him, and a dear soul sister, Rebecca, looking after my funeral. I’m pretty Mercurial (Sun in Virgo and Moon in Gemini) and, as you may have discovered, rather effusive with words – miles and gallons of the effing things – so being sent off by two Geminis somehow fits, and thank you, you two.

My Mum, also with a Moon in Gemini, was a prizewinning shorthand typist in the 1940s-70s and she got arthritic fingers in the end. I’ve managed to bypass that, thankfully. Instead, my fingers are losing their keyboard-accuracy and I have to go over and over everything multiple times until it’s right! We each have served the bane of being a compulsive scribe.

I’m Saturnine – it’s central in the array of my planets – and my cancer, Myeloma, is about bones (Saturn). Without treatment my bones would hollow out, crumble and break. Bones hold us up, enabling us to live in a functional planetary body with a humanoid architecture. They give us a frame to hang our body on, counteracting gravitation and the heaviness of physicality. When my energy is up, I’m more or less upright, looking bright, and when it’s down I’m stooped, dragging myself around like a corpse on double gravity, and I need putting to bed with a cuppa, some music, a hot water bottle and a cuddle – therapy for a saturnine old crock with a limited shelf life.

So it feels a bit like I’m poised at the top of a slalom slope and it could be downhill from here. We shall see – I don’t have a sense of the future right now, the gods like keeping me on tenterhooks and it’s a scary-ish seat-of-the-pants matter. Goes to show, I do get fear, in case anyone wondered. But I’m usually alright on the night – fear is more about anticipation than factual realities. One of the great things about being a senior is that, having got through many scrapes over the previous seven decades, I know that, live or die, I’ll get through the next lot too, somehow. It all lies in attitude, really. Only in certain respects can we genuinely control the circumstances of our lives, but we have much more influence over the way we respond to the circumstances we face. That’s what free will is all about.

Love from me, Happy New Moon and Happy Everythings. Palden

The next blog is half-written, and it’s a ‘Paldywan’s top tips for cancer patients’ blog. It’ll also form the final chapter of the book ‘Bones’.

NOTES:
[1]. The Inner Light, by the Beatles: https://open.spotify.com/track/379hxtlY5LvbPQa5LL6dPo
[2]. We Are Not Numbers: http://www.wearenotnumbers.org
[3]. Refaat Al Areer: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2023/12/8/poet-professor-and-writer-refaat-alareer-killed-in-israeli-strike
[4]. An article about Aminha by an old friend, Mike Scialom: https://mike-scialom.medium.com/just-a-miracle-from-god-would-end-this-insane-war-gaza-city-resident-s-plea-under-attack-from-082af6b32586
[5]. Now and Then, the Beatles: https://youtu.be/AW55J2zE3N4
[6]. Oak Dragon Camps: http://www.oakdragon.org – if news of their 2024 camp is not online when you look, it’s coming soon.

Rollers in Nanjizal Bay, Land’s End

Avalonian Adventures

I’ve been visiting Glastonbury for Easter weekend, and I’ve done two speaking gigs, one podcast interview and a lot of hobnobbing. And cake.

and other tales…

Glastonbury Tor from Pilton
Glastonbury Tor, as seen from Pilton

Tuesday morning, 11th April, Butleigh, near Glastonbury… Today my friend Claudia from Cornwall is taking me home, bless her – she’s driven up here to pick me up. Typically for one with a Moon in Gemini, I’m looking forward to going home and also I am not. I’m looking forward to it because, as a partially-disabled cancer patient, my lovely little home is, well, my refuge. Also I can detox from the generously donated phone radiation I’ve taken in over the last few days – almost everyone I pass or sit near to has a toxic radiation generator on them, and it gets sprayed all over me. It’s weird.

Glastonbury Tor

I’m not really looking forward to going home because, in the last year or two, since losing my partner and my capacity to drive, I’ve been isolated in a way I’ve never experienced before. This winter I crossed that strange boundary between aloneness and loneliness, and while I manage quite well with loneliness, compared to many, I don’t like it – it’s an inward-turning vortex, and it’s easy to get sidelined and forgotten by other people, busy as they are with other things.

This said, being alone has its value, and many of us don’t get enough of it. But over winter I’ve been drying up inside and talking to myself too much. If my health condition deteriorates, there is no one to watch over me. It says something about our society when, as was recently mentioned in the UK news, a person’s death is discovered because of the smell. If that’s the case with me, then so be it – after all, my creaky body will already have been abandoned and I’ll be somewhere else. Our society has big issues around death.

Glastonbury Abbey
Glastonbury Abbey

But then, I’m a strange mixture of a hermit and public figure – it’s the bit in between, personal relationships, where in the end I don’t do so well. That’s classic for an Aspie: I don’t sit easily in the expectation-fields many people quite reasonably have, as a friend, neighbour, partner or parent, and I’ve never sat easily in the boxes society seems to need each of us to sit inside.

This said, as soon as I was diagnosed with cancer in 2019 I found myself sitting inside a neat, simple ‘cancer’ box, unexpectedly eligible for levels of social, financial and medical support that previously were outside my reach – and without that support I would now be dead. It’s a bit strange, being valued by officialdom and mainstream society, at a time of life when my productive value has declined dramatically. I’m now costing society around £200,000 per year. Just my cancer medication costs £4,000 per month. In contrast, twenty years ago I was Glastonbury’s online PR man (running www.isleofavalon.co.uk) and Somerset County Council reckoned I’d raised the town’s local GDP by at least 5-7%, but I still made nothing from it – so this late-life support is rather bizarre, even though welcome.

Glastonbury Abbey

Yet, when I was lying there in December 2019, newly diagnosed with cancer, hovering just outside death’s door and gulping down large dollops of acceptance together with large numbers of pills and infusions, I decided to make the best of my new situation, come what may, and certainly it is true that I’ve started a new chapter of life. A while ago I revisited an experience I had around age six, in which I feared growing up and going through the full human life-process. I wanted somehow to skip straight from childhood to old age. Now, prematurely aged and reduced by cancer, being an old crock does strangely suit me, and I’ve found a new expression and creativity in this situation, blogging, podcasting and now writing a second post-cancer book (the first was about ancient sites and the second is about world healing).

In the early months of dealing with cancer, I started assessing my condition on a basis of perceived age. After a life in which I had only rarely had illnesses, suddenly I was flattened and floored by cancer. I shot twenty years forward into my nineties, in terms of physical ability and inner perspective, doddering around like the Ancient of Days. As time went on and I started reviving, I grew a bit younger and settled around my mid-eighties. Nowadays I’d put myself around age 80, varying between better and worse days, though physically I’m 72. So I’ve been fast-tracked into a new phase. Yet my spirit has brightened, as if to compensate for a loss of physical strength, ability and vitality – spirit kinda holds me up, now that life is twice as weighty.

Glastonbury High Street
Glastonbury High Street

My cancer story started very suddenly one day in late August 2019 in my former partner’s back garden (she was out somewhere): life fundamentally changed that day. I was pulling on a tussock, clearing space for a log-pile, and my back suddenly cracked, very loudly. It was both an external and an internal sound. I was stunned, standing stock still, swaying giddily, and the pain gradually came on over a few minutes until I could do nothing except stagger inside and slowly sit down, seriously excruciated with searing pain.

Four of the bottom vertebrae of my back had collapsed and I was in agony for months. It took ten weeks to find out that I didn’t have just a back problem – I had cancer, and it had me. In the NHS they often ask you to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, and it was seven on a good day and nine on a bad day – though nowadays I just get one to three, more of a perpetual stiffened inertia and achiness.

With Myeloma or bone-marrow cancer, permanent changes to the blood cause bone-formation to stop, leading to a softening and hollowing out of the bones. It’s a toxicity-related cancer caused in most cases by electromagnetic and nuclear radiation or by certain specific neurotoxic chemicals – in my case it’s quite safely the radiation, looking back on my past history. I’ve known myself to be electrosensitive since the mid-1970s, when I was 25, though it only became a problem around the Millennium when mobile phones and wi-fi started coming into common use.

Chalice Well
Chalice Well

But there’s a deeper dimension to this. It’s a disease of sensitivity in an insensitive world, and there’s something good and right about that. I’m more concerned about people who don’t or can’t feel radiation than about those who do. Myeloma concerns blood – life-force and will-to-live – and bones – the structure that holds us up, enabling us to experience living inside a physically constrained body. These are quite fundamental planetary issues, and I’ve dug around in myself to understand how my own planetary-incarnational challenges have served as a basis for cancer.

In a strange way it has been a gift, giving a new perspective and something to work with – every day is an uphill climb, forcing me to focus my wits on doing life as well as I can, making the best of what I have, and accepting what I don’t and can’t have and do – the sex, thrills and rock’n’roll parts of life (though I’m doing alright with drugs, both prescribed and alternative). Having had a rather full life, cancer has added a new dimension that, strangely, fits my story. It’s the current stage on my path. The whole look-and-feel of life has changed.

I’ve been visiting Glastonbury for Easter weekend (it was my home from 1980 to 2008), and I’ve done two speaking gigs, one podcast interview and a lot of hobnobbing. And cake. It has been wonderful, medicinal to the spirit, and I really appreciate the welcome I’ve been given and the interesting conversations we’ve had. It lights me up.

Chalice Well
Chalice Well

It has been a radiation nightmare too. At times my nervous system has been juddering, the amygdala in the back of my head has been screaming a high-pitched whine, and after two days I was bordering into the next stages, flu symptoms and heart palpitations – though I’m learning how to hold them off sufficiently while under fire. As I get more irradiated, symptoms gradually escalate: despite all the miracle cures, crystals and gizmos people advocate and offer to counteract radiation, the only option is to get out, find a low-radiation refuge and spend 48 hours detoxing. So if I walk out on you, please don’t take offence – I just need to get out, and it’s that simple.

It’s a strange, new cause of loneliness – I cannot hobnob easily with people since they literally shoot me (and each other) with a rain of EM jangle and noise. Worse, people are, or seem, mostly unaware of it, even if they’re Greens or members of Extinction Rebellion. Hardly anyone thinks of the disastrous effect mobile phones have on plants, animals, the ecosystem and the world’s climate.

Anyway, that is as it is, and I can do little except partially tolerate it and partially keep my distance. It means I can’t hang out with friends unless I’m okay about being poisoned that day, and unless I have two clear days afterwards to recombobulate my energy-bodies before anything else can happen.

Chalice Hill
Chalice Hill

Many old friends came to the ‘Evening with Palden’ on Friday, and it was so good to see them and share some insights I’ve been coming up with. This is where being alone has its virtues, since it enables me to step outside current social groupthink, to see things from a more reflective viewpoint, less affected by others’ perceptions and the current preoccupations, social judgements and projections of the time. As a writer and podcaster it has allowed me time and space to invest in conceiving, writing and recording material. I’m really happy that it seems to be saying something to readers and listeners. It gives new meaning to a rather time-wealthy life like mine, and a way of contributing something to time-poor people’s lives like many of yours.

I’m not one who is happy sitting round entertaining myself as pensioners are supposed to, or sitting there like a block of wood. I see no point hanging around on Earth without having a meaningful life and making a contribution. A long life is not the main point. I’ve had a whole lot of life and feel quite happy with what I’ve been given. Well, sort of. Of course things could have been better, but it’s life’s imperfections that are a key element in the Planet Earth experience. In the end, that’s what we’re here for.

Frankly, I’ll be relieved when the time comes to go. Life has been one long saga of feeling as if I’m on the wrong planet. I’ll be happy to go home and be myself again. Well, for a recharge, at least. But before I go, there’s more to do and be. I’ve been much blessed, living in a time when so many ideas have been conceived, and the seeds and roots of a new civilisation have been laid. So I’m leaving traces of what life has given me, in print, sound and online, for folks younger than me to imbibe, if it’s useful to them.

Glastonbury Tor from Maesbury Castle in the Mendip Hills
The Tor from Maesbury Castle in the Mendips

When I give talks, I’m usually quite unaware of what I have said. I just hope for the best and try to avoid making big bloopers – us Aspies, sometimes we make what we believe to be a bland statement of fact, when for others it can be thoroughly upsetting, confronting and offensive. But I seem to get through each talk without major mishap. It comes to an end, and everyone seems to be happy and glowing, though I come out of it feeling as if I’ve missed something, slightly bereft, but relieved that people are smiling. I’m used to it now. I made some notes of talking points before leaving for Glastonbury but, typically, by the time I got there, I couldn’t find them. Lo behold, they turned up again after I got home. Magic.

At the Legends Conference on Sunday I delivered an entirely new talk. After what seemed like fifteen minutes, Tor came along to say my hour was nearly up, and I was really surprised. I think I managed to make my main point, squeezed in at the end, but I could have made it better. The talk started with an overview of the geomancy of ancient sites, using my home area of West Penwith in Cornwall as a working example, moving on to climate and environmental control and geopolitical healing through consciousness work. This is the gist of my new book, ‘Shining Land’, about the megalithic engineering of consciousness. I’m having difficulty getting it published, but it’ll come out sometime.

Thank you to Lillah Lotus and Rose Temple Morris for putting me up, and to Samia and Dave, Tor and Matthew Fellows for staging things. And to people I met, for being present in this world and sharing a wee slice of their lives. And to Briony, who comes from a similar world to my own, and who had me sussed in minutes. Also to Cho Hopking for teleporting me to Glastonbury, and Claudia Caolin for returning me to Cornwall.

Glastonbury Tor

During 2023 I have two objectives, over and above enjoying life: first, to develop more ways of spending time upcountry, with one or two bolt-holes where I can stay – the trick is to find somewhere I fit easily and am no hassle to have around, as a person with special needs; and, second, to see whether the world healing project I am proposing is actually likely to fly – that’s interesting because, with only a few years to live, I cannot lead it. So that’s my agenda for this year, and enough to be getting on with.

Today, Saturday, is spring-like and, having done my clothes-washing duties, I’m summoning my energies to get up the hill behind the farm, to the bronze age platform barrows up on top, 4,000 years old and still doing their geomantic thing. The badgers have dug a new sett on one of the barrows – I’m sure the archaeologists will love that! You can see for fifty miles up there, with a 360° panorama, eastwards to Carn Brea, Mount’s Bay and St Michael’s Mount, and westwards to the Isles of Scilly. I’ll mosey past the main badger sett (apparently it has been there for centuries) and the iron age courtyard house (a mere 2,000 years old). That’s my adventure for today. Well, apart from the blueberry muesli I had for breakfast.

Thanks and well done for reading this! And, guess what, this blog was written using full-on, genuine, certified Human Intelligence. For better or worse.

Love from Pennwydh, the Far Beyond, Paldywan

All of the photos of Glastonbury I took around 2004-7

—————–

Collected Blogs: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Website (est’d 1995): www.palden.co.uk
Recording of Friday’s talk on Starlings and Resonance: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html
Podcast interview with Matthew: http://www.buzzsprout.com/…/12627936-5-palden-jenkins…
Starlings on the Somerset Levels: https://youtu.be/QxcFppxakHI (thanks to Rosemary and Samia for the link)

—————–

Glastonbury Tor

Dish brushes & worlds in apocalypse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waves at Kilgooth Ust (Cape Cornwall)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bless you on your path.

With love. Palden.


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

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

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

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.

St Michael’s Mount

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…

Steps on the path, St Loy.

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.

A rather magic place 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.

The view southwards from Carn Gloose

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.

Bumbling at Porth Ledden

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.

Grumbla

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?

Home

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.

Seal tribe at Godrevy

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.