This is about pitying the winners, social healing and walking our talk.
The core issue is this: ascension and the birth of a new world will take place only when we are truly ready for it.
We wish for peace, ecological restoration, socio-economic justice and change in every sector of life that we can think of.
But the big question is whether and how much we’re ready and willing to do what’s necessary to allow such things to happen.
Until we become ready and willing, we’re holding back progress on planet Earth. As philosopher Edmund Burke put it: ‘For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing‘.
37 mins. Recorded while sitting in the ruins of a 2,000 year old Iron Age courtyard house, down’ere on the farm.
Wind-strafed heather on Bartinney Castle, West Penwith, Cornwall
I’ve just had my three-monthly phone conversation with the haematologist – she’s at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro. One good thing about my particular cancer, Myeloma, is that it is easily tested and monitored with a blood sample (I had it two weeks ago). So we can do it over the phone. She’s always rather brisk – the poor woman probably gets fed up of the list of calls to make through the day, and with us cancer patients and our anxieties.
Anyway, I had been anticipating bad news. Well, not exactly bad, but not good either. I was hovering between optimism and pessimism.
This winter I’ve begun experiencing a kind of stress – partially due to circumstances but also because part of me feels vulnerable and undefended. No one has my back. It takes me back to experiences I had around the age of six-seven-eight. I remember the feeling of it. I was turning short-sighted, and as an unrecognised Aspie I felt like a stranger in a strange land and a fish out of water. My poor old Mum was always busy with other things, without paying much attention, and the world seemed so big and incomprehensible, and somehow I was expected to manage with all this.
Nowadays they might call that ‘learning difficulties’ but it isn’t really. It’s not a lack of intelligence but a bit too much of it. It’s a complex Aspie perception of the world that takes longer to compute – for me, it took until around age fourteen, when suddenly the other boys started calling me ‘Professor’ instead of ‘Speccy-Foureyes’.
Part of me feels like a seven year old – feeling a need to have someone holding my hand and shielding me from that big world out there. This is quite a change from earlier times in life when I had more confidence and a relative invincibility that was calm under duress and pretty competent – I’m a Virgo, after all, and us Virgos tend to be quite calm and serene, or we tend to be neurotic. Or perhaps both at different times.
So I was somewhere between nervous and calm over this phone call. It could decide many things. One thing in particular is that the next line of treatment – I’ve exhausted two out of five now – is Thalidomide. It’s a good cancer drug, the doctors say, but what makes me nervous is this: my mother took Thalidomide for morning sickness while pregnant with me, and I was very lucky to emerge into life with all my limbs and body-parts intact. Apparently, deformed bodies arise only if the drug is taken during a certain early week of pregnancy, and it wasn’t that week for me. However…
Prayer clooties at St Euny’s Well, near Carn Euny. But if you ever wish to tie a cloutie at a well, make sure it is natural and biodegradable, since the problems you weave into it will disappear as the cloutie rots away. And it doesn’t throttle the tree.
I have Asperger’s Syndrome, and I have wondered whether it’s related to the Thalidomide I took, second-hand, during gestation. The chemotherapy I had four years ago made me wonder about this – particularly the steroid Dexamethasone. The drugs seemed to amplify my Aspie symptoms. The behavioural transition prompted by these drugs helped lose me a partner and some friends. It has become more difficult to manage some of life’s tricky social situations, or deal with bureaucracy, or insensitive people, or hackers, or modern-times complexities.
But, on the plus side, this Aspie-amplification has led to a wave of creativity, perspective and original thinking. As you might perhaps have noticed, I’ve been churning out loads of stuff – mainly in the form of blogs, podcasts and books. That’s the other side of Aspergers – the Aspie genius, with an ability to excel in certain specific interests and gifts (though not necessarily in the full range of abilities that modern humans are supposed to cover). Also, there’s a certain blindness to human guile and manipulation, making us emotionally rather susceptible to getting caught in other people’s webs without realising it.
Many ‘neurotypicals’ judge Aspies to be emotionally neutral or feelingless. Truth is, we get so flooded and drowned in feelingful impressions that we short-circuit or melt down, showing little or no responsive expression except perhaps the look of a rabbit frozen in the headlights. Or a bit like Commander Data. The picture comes clear within hours, days or longer, but by then people have formed their conclusions and stomped off, often making big, inappropriate decisions on our behalf.
Over two years after we separated, I have only recently lightbulbed a bundle of key insights into my relationship with my former partner that I had just not seen before. I had sensed it unconsciously but I still didn’t see it. While talking to a friend I suddenly saw it – the whole pattern and network of connections, events, clues, mistakes and junction-points. It’s funny when that happens – everything suddenly becomes very different. Nothing changes, but everything changes, and a healing can occur.
Yet the paradox is that empathically I understand the workings of the human psyche and human emotions more clearly than many people, though not necessarily in my own personal sphere of life. Many would interpret this as a growth blockage, a refusal to open up to my emotions, but that’s not the case. It’s just that I operate with a different operating system that computes things in a different way, and neurotypicals have some advantages and Aspies have others.
The main problem is that neurotypicals are in the majority and neurotypical culture is dominant, even though today we’re presented with a rather chaotic and multidimensional spectrum of psychodiversity. NTs tend to define the rules and, being more rule-bound than Aspies, they tend to insist that everyone should behave like them, according to their criteria.
Victorian architecture, at Porthmoina Cove, Penwith
Anyway, the haematologist quite likes me – I’m an easy customer. She was pleased (yet again) with my results. I’ve had no cancer medication now for four months and, lo behold, there is no significant change in my readings.
So suddenly I’m feeling relieved. My wobbles were just that – wobbles. It means I won’t have to go on Thalidomide for the next few months at least – and I won’t have to do the rather long journey to the hospital either, once a month.
That’s good, because it comes back to that vulnerable, undefended feeling. My fear is that my Aspie tendencies will get switched up by Thalidomide. The bit that concerns me most is that I have no one to speak for me or cover my back. There are times when I blank out and (this might surprise you) have nothing to say, at precisely the moment when I need to fend for myself. Or I simply forget about something important, remembering it afterwards, and too late. Again, it’s that eight-year old feeling where there are quite a few things you can handle, but some things are too much. You need Mummy or Daddy, or someone, to come to the rescue.
But there’s a lesson here too, in trust. Things always work out alright. My anticipations were based upon the fear that my readings would deteriorate and they’d put me on the new drugs quite quickly. I have a few public speaking engagements coming up, and some anticipation about how well I’ll do on stage if I’m on new drugs. Or whether Thalidomide would lead to regrettable behavioural changes, just as the steroid Dex did. But there was no need to worry, and everything is alright. My readings are fine.
So is Paldywan the oratorical bard. Lacking anyone to talk to, a few days ago I went up the hill to the 2,000 year old ruin of a courtyard house and recorded two podcasts on the trot. And one of them, Ascension, comes out with this blog.
There’s a funny twist I discovered recently. In 2021 I contracted Osteonecrosis of the Jaw (ONJ), as a side-effect of some pharma drugs I had been on earlier. It caused pus to drip from my chin – urgh, yuk! It made me feel horrible and disgusting and, naturally, no one wanted to come near me. I asked myself about the inner meaning of this, digging up an image or a memory of having had leprosy sometime back in history, and being rejected by society. Rejection and exile are two karmic patterns of mine. When I twigged this, it made some sort of sense – deep memory was involved in the ONJ.
As time went on the ONJ subsided, becoming manageable. Then, a few days ago I was looking up the various uses of Thalidomide and the two specific ailments mentioned were leprosy and multiple myeloma (my kind of cancer). Ah, there’s a connection. I’ve been given a clue. Clues like this can act as keys to healing. It’s fascinating how intuition can know things long before the brains catch up.
I’ve started on some new holistic remedies – the main one is Resveratrol, a specific treatment for Myeloma. I’m back on Shitake Mushrooms as well. I have started some new supplements and remedies too, including one by Detox Trading in Devon called Happy Mix – it really does lift the spirits and, with the late spring we’re having, it has helped me emerge from wintertime blues and cabin-fever.
The Watcher. A simulacrum at Porthmoina Cove
I didn’t need to be worried about the haematologist’s verdict. Perhaps I am a neurotic Virgo after all. Though there’s something else here too… cancer has stripped away many of my defences, sensitising me to vibes, energies, situations and scrangles. There’s more emotional lava erupting as well. This makes me both more open and more vulnerable. Small things demand more processing than before, yet I’m less dulled by the very defences, built with the cement of trauma, that are designed to protect us from a rather tough and violating world. Life has become more colourful, textured and meaningful.
So a key cancer benefit – or a possibility, at least – is that cancer is a big jolt to become more human, to live more fully – even if physically constrained like me. In some respects it might be worth looking on cancer as an upgrade – and other terminal, serious and painful ailments too. From a soul viewpoint, at least.
It’s not a matter of primary importance how long we live – dying ‘before one’s time’ isn’t necessarily a failure or a shame. What matters is how we filled the time and space we were given, how we chose to experience the life we had and what contribution we made. In terms of soul evolution, three years with cancer can sometimes be equivalent to fifty years of normality.
But then, you don’t have to contract cancer for that to happen. It’s the way cancer hits you that matters, and what doors it opens – and whether we choose to go through them. This is regardless of how well or badly the cancer goes from a medical viewpoint. It’s the psycho-spiritual impact and the jolt that matters. It induces a cards-on-the-table focus of energy and of will-to-live.
It obliges us to face our shit, stuff, fears, failings and foibles. And regrets. On a deep level, that’s one reason why cancer is increasing in incidence: it’s one way in which the soul of humanity is serving us notice that we need to wake up. Or, at least, wake up more. Or you die. It’s a simple formula. It’s a bit like being in a war or crisis zone – the situation is terrible, but a crazy enspiritedness can take over, making you put your life on the line and getting you through to where you truly need to go.
My cousin Faith calls it a state of super-concentrated uncertainty. Or I’m reminded of the title of Alan Watts’ book of fiftyish years ago, called ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity‘.
Even so, I’m rather relieved to know that I’m cruising along on a cancer plateau and my results are okay. I felt it was so, but the confirmation is much appreciated. After all, it does help to know at least a little about what’s going to happen next. Should I buy a new computer or put some money down for my funeral? Um, I don’t know, but it might be the computer. Sometimes you just have to choose. And that’s what life on Earth is about.
With love, Palden.
[Written using human intelligence. Such as it is.]
PS: my cancer book is progressing, and recently I decided to release it as an audiobook too – better for people with fatigue and chemo-brain. I still haven’t found a really good title for it though. That’s most strange. I guess it’ll come in its own time.
CONSCIENCE AND WORLD CHANGE – a podtalk from 2007. It came out then on Glastonbury Radio.
Many people have been vexed over Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and the parlous state of the world. It can give a really discouraging, hand-tied feeling of not being able to do anything about it.
This podtalk addresses the matters of conscience and moral sensitivity – personal and also across society and the world. It was broadcast during the Iraq war, when similar feelings were afoot for many people. It’s taken from a book of mine, Healing the Hurts of Nations.
It might hold some answers and put things in perspective, concerning these rather vexatious issues.
Originally it was a radio programme with a really good choice of music woven into it, but for copyright reasons I can’t publish the full version – and that was a two-hour listen, while the talk alone is one hour long.
Leave it for a time when you have some space for something thought-provoking. Because it is. It has some real gems in it.
When an eclipse happens, it’s as if time and normality stop for a while. Our choice is to respond consciously and awarely, or to act out the energies unconsciously – sometimes leading to trouble.
If you aren’t acting consciously and with intent, then there can be confusion or disquiet in your psyche. It’s because the barriers or veils between the levels of awareness and reality are opening up, for a time-stretched short moment. If we are unwilling or unprepared to go deep, then psychological avoidance strategies can kick in, and all sorts of discombobulations can set in with them – things go off at a tangent and can get difficult.
That’s why Emergency Departments in hospitals are usually busy just after eclipses. People get the consequences of unconsciousness.
Things happen to change the agenda. This is an amplified newmoon and the beginning and end of many threads, narratives and trains of events. So it’s rather portentous.
It’s a moment of pattern-setting. That is, we’re given opportunities for re-setting patterns, possibilities and probabilities, just for a short time. Miss it, and it’s gone. It’s a special space of calm intensity. The thoughts-feelings that come up during that time are oracular. They say far more than is being said.
Think positive. What you choose to think and believe can get set at this point. If you’re just running on routine, for better or worse, routine is what you will get, and cringeingly so. If you’re open to possibilities, openings and even miracles, they become more possible.
A miracle is something everyone agreed was impossible until it happens.
It’s a time for forgiveness and releasing. The past is over, and that was that. If it clouds the present and future, you’ll just get repetitions of the past, until it is too late and force majeure takes over.
It’s a time of exaggerated, deep, eerie stillness. In that stillness, be still. Visualise positive, fruitful, helpful outcomes – not necessarily what you want but what is in alignment between you and what the universe seeks.
There’s an element of fate and destiny to this – things that the rational mind does not like to accept. Patterns get set. Whatever comes up in your awareness at the time of an eclipse is relevant and oracular. Your unconscious, your conscious and your superconscious are in temporary, fortuitous alignment – now’s your chance.
Nature goes silent. Birds and animals lie low. Energy-fields collapse and are rebooted. The psyche either goes quiet or it gets jittery, panicky or disquieted.
Modernists like to think the ancients had superstitious beliefs and were scared of eclipses. Not so. This is an ideological and rather arrogant judgement, using imprssions drawn from superstitious times in the Middle Ages, when the Church taught that the Devil was on the rise – which everyone naturally feared.
But the lesson here is that the light doesn’t go out. It’s just a matter of time. It returns, only temporarily obscured by the mechanics of time and planetary orbits. The light never dies, and darkness brings with it a deep and profound revelation of meaning.
An eclipse is an extended short moment of insight and revelation, a superconjunction of the Moon and Sun. So, instead of standing there with expectations of what you think might or should happen, open up and receive what is actually given. Remember, be here now.
In a way, it’s better to feel and eclipse than to see it – this can be something of a distaction, though also it can be deeply stirring to behold.
If doing ceremony, be mindful to avoid confusion and disarray amongst the people present. Don’t wait for the technical time of the eclipse – it is a buildup and aftermath process lasting at least two days on either side of it. Give it time, and settle down – quit chattering, whether to yourself or others. Be there fully.
One of the themes of my life has been social healing – stimulating social and community psycho-spiritual growth. This took shape through the camps of the 1980s and 1990s, community events and early online social networking in Glastonbury and working at the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem – it was, and still is, focused on trauma recovery and social reconstruction in the militarily occupied West Bank of Palestine.
Modernity has brought individualism with it – the development of an urban-industrial society required the breakdown of community bonds and social sharing. Nowadays so individuated, each responsible for our own lives whether or not we like it, we tend to over-personalise our hurts, complexes and issues. Some of us take more personal responsibility than is due too, out of compassion, guilt or charitable activism.
But this individualism arises from a social-cultural pressure, like an endemic viral infection that is well embedded in the rich world, though in some societies it has only recently hit them, not least through the medium of the mobile phone. Such societies start breaking down when the brainiest and most enterprising of their members start leaving, heading for cities, jobs and universities.
Many of our difficulties arise from being part of a society, a culture, and their institutions, values and customs – and their webs of power. So if, for example, you grow spiritually or in terms of human potential, people and situations can frequently obstruct or resist these changes in you, or cause you disadvantage, and it gets difficult, and profound choices arise.
One of them is: should I pursue my own path or should I stay in this situation to try to improve things over time? This is not easily answered – it’s not just a matter of selfishness, and it goes much deeper. Nowadays many people leave their communities in order to work in cities or abroad, and to send remittances back home to help the family, and they perceive it as their only option. Many people in Gaza would like to leave, but also they don’t want to leave their families (and the Egyptians charge $5,000 per person to get out of Gaza).
This is a dilemma that all of us variously face at times – a conflict between fitting in or doing your own thing that is a big factor in social churn, divorce, family and community breakup – and it has very mixed outcomes. This inner struggle is a side-effect of intense change.
Nelson Mandela, who took a big destiny on his shoulders, once wrote that he felt he had failed to resolve key dimension of this question: for him it was a conflict between duty to his family and duty to his people. I’ve faced this question quite a few times and, looking back, I still have mixed feelings about it.
But in recent decades, those of us who are more awake than most people have been faced with a barrage of cultural, social and institutional opposition to or rejection of the kind of beliefs we hold. These beliefs have a lot of variety, colour, contradiction and value to them, but in the end they all boil down to a key issue: whether or how much to prioritise either personal or collective benefit.
Another issue lurks behind this, summed up in Jesus’ words, ‘by their works shall you know them‘. Not ideas, advocacy, explanations, disinformation or ideology but actual actions and the way we walk our talk.
The future is not just about economics, resources, AI, ecosystems, carbon sequestering or even space travel. At the heart of all these issues lies the small matter of social healing. For me, it started off during ‘the Troubles’, a student uprising at the London School of Economics, where I was a student. [For a 15-min video about it, try this.] We got squelched. As I experienced this, feeling the impact of suppression of our movement for change, I saw also how we ourselves had screwed up our own cause. People had slipped into endless argument, disagreement and a confrontative approach to protest, and there were regrettable scenes mixed in amongst the brilliance, excitement and flowering that went on at the heart of our attempted revolution.
It wasn’t at the time clear to me exactly why and how this had happened, but it set me on a path. During the 1970s, in my twenties, I went through a lot of inner growth, learning more about awareness, psychotherapy and social dynamics. I went through my own process, where I found myself screwing up even when I didn’t mean to, and faced with a mountain of young person’s acute dilemmas that sometimes felt too big to handle.
At one stage, during my Saturn Return around age 29, I contemplated suicide. Actually it was a ruthless truth process and soul-searching, and it led me to committing to my calling. That calling wasn’t clear and distinct, but I had to make myself available and willing to be given a task. The shape and expression of it surfaced within a few years.
I had accumulated a bundle of experiences during my teens and twenties that made me feel like a jack of all trades and a master of none, but the fascinating thing was that when my mission did take shape, all of those skills and abilities gelled together, suddenly making sense. I had the full range of skills needed. It was as if life had been preparing me for it without my knowing.
Looking across St Ives Bay toward Godrevy lighthouse
Fast-forward to the 1980s, and something drove me to start the camps movement, as well as a stream of conferences and gatherings in Glastonbury that developed thereafter. I didn’t know this was going to happen – I was just driven, or shoe-horned, even to some extent tricked into it. The Great Cosmic Trickster has greater designs than we can see, and sometimes we must be thrown into things and presented with a choiceless choice.
It was an old friend, Jamie George, who did it. He asked me to help him organise a gathering in the Assembly Rooms in 1983. At the time they were threatened with demolition, and several of us set about creating events there, to bring energy into it and stop the demolition. One late-summer’s evening Jamie and I sat in his garden brainstorming it and coming up with an innovative formula for running the gathering. It’s what came to be called circle-working. Though it’s as old as the hills, ancient and archetypal, circle-working was not at that time practiced in our society, whether alternative or ‘straight’.
Time went on, Jamie beetled off, leaving me to it and, before long, I and a squad of Glastonbury friends I brought together were organising week-long holistic educational camps, usually for 100-500 people. Each had a theme (Astrology, Earth Mysteries, Music and Dance and, later, Arts and Crafts, Healing, Ceremony), with transformative intent, group process and a foundation of circle-working – mainly use of the talking stick.[3] We were improvising and innovating in a seat-of-the-pants kind of way, but it was dynamite.
In the 1990s I took this further with the Hundredth Monkey Project – consciousness-work camps specifically addressing world problems of the time, where we applied to world issues methods and ways drawn from the personal-growth sphere. Again, it was based on circle-working.
One of the big unexpected discoveries we made was this: by focusing on ‘world work’, personal growth was vastly accelerated as a by-product. The idea was to set aside our personal growth, to serve a greater sphere – the wider world. But for participants the personal growth implications were enormous. In fact, this led to an unforeseen problem, because each summer camp had such a transformative effect on participants that they tended not to return in later years – it had had such big consequences for them that they were already ‘cooked’ and busy getting on with what had started for them as a result of the camp.
But there was more. Here we come to the social healing bit. For me, it was a big learning. The idea with camps was to create an accelerated growth environment in which people could truly step back into themselves and flower as souls. In this we were very successful. It wasn’t just some people who experienced breakthroughs: it was everyone, without exception. Together, through social bonding and working at it together, we had lifted each other up – we had risen together.
Some of the best camps were those that were the most challenged. We had no shortage of weather events hitting us, and also, in 1986, we had the Chernobyl meltdown, which started on the very day that one of the camps began. Yet these experiences pulled us together by shoving us through the grinder. They forced everyone to become really sure why they were there. It generated commitment and group focus, hundred-percentness.
There was a classic moment in 1987, the morning after a Force Eight gale had ripped through on the very first night of a camp in Wales. We had downed all marquees and tents and crammed into the geodesic domes we had, since these were the only safe structures in a gale and monsoon. For some people this was a nightmarish experience – one of those dark, threatening nights with lashing rain and furious winds that can go on forever, bringing up loads of fear and desolation.
Next morning, the storm had gone. All was still, the sun was breaking through and everything was dripping and remarkably colourful, in a sopping, late-summer way. I was standing there outside, blinking and assessing the scene, having hosted fourteen people in my two-person dome. A new camper was standing with me, looking wan and pale, telling me she couldn’t handle this and she was going to go home.
I was quiet, wondering how to respond when, suddenly, from upfield, came a shout, “Tea, anyone?“, and one of the site crew processed down the field like a butler, with a big tray of mugs of tea. It was a poignant moment. The lady just broke down, crying her eyes out. And she loved her tea, and she stayed with us. And her life changed. She made a growth choice there and then – the atmosphere of the camp had prised her open. That’s just one story of many such epiphanies. Another camper once said, “This is what I have always dreamed of, but never thought it could actually happen“.
St Ives, from Hayle Towans
Though the success of the camps was very much teamwork, resting on the qualities and experience of our camp crews and the innate wisdom of participants, as the key instigator of all this I was going through big epiphanies too. Not just personal, but concerning this matter of social healing.
At every camp there would be a crunch-and-breakthrough point. At the early camps it often took about five days but later on it came after three or so, as the group atmosphere of the camps evolved. There was a point where people had settled into camping, been through a few days of it, and they were lighting up, feeling part of each other’s lives and gaining momentum. There was a rising feeling of this is it, that we were in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing. As if this was meant to be happening. As if this was a model for a future society, where everyone got on, worked together, served each other and enjoyed each other’s presence. The guards came down, shared trust rose, and a brightness started shining in people’s eyes.
And then, something would happen. Often it would come out of nowhere.
It could have been someone snoring through the night and disturbing others (a tolerance issue). One year, a person slept around and spread a sexual disease – a big controversy bringing up loads of stuff. Or it could be someone suffering withdrawal symptoms from meat – the food was vegetarian only. Or tents leaked in the night. Or kids got into a scrap. Or, one year, the Hippy Convoy arrived at the gate, pursued from Savernake Forest by police, demanding that we rescue them and give them a place to camp.
Of course, this fell on me and key members of the crew and facilitators to sort out – to deal with people placing blame or getting upset, and quite often it involved complex, reverberating community situations. But there was enough love and care around for these societal explosions to work through. We turned it into a group process to turn problems into assets. It wasn’t one person’s problem – it was our problem, and all of us were stakeholders, together.
I’m glad to say that, on the whole, we succeeded in this – especially by the 1990s at the M100 camps. This arose from a buildup of collective skill and experience that could contain and channel social energy in all sorts of ways. Also most participants were willing to go that way, contributing their own gifts and inputs, while the rest gave it a try, going along with it and soon realising that this was something amazing to be part of. It became a cauldron of mutualised contribution – powerful sharings and dynamics during talking-stick sessions, or in afternoon workshops, or around campfires.
This is how social healing works. It works particularly through the medium of crisis and shock, precipitated particularly by unforeseen things against which we have few defences. A recent example, in the news recently, was a ship that destroyed a bridge, killed people and blocked a major port in Baltimore, USA – something no one was prepared for. It’s the kind of event that says something. No doubt people will apportion blame for this disaster but, if we’re honest, if we want to have the fruits and luxuries of a developed civilisation, this is what will happen, no matter who actually does it.
It’s not them – it’s us. This truth lies at the nub of social healing. This is a key issue today in the collective psyche (with Pluto in Aquarius for two decades from 2023 to 2043): there are those who opt toward collective, mutually-empathetic solutions and those who resort to self-interest or sectoral interest. Both options have their costs and benefits. But the costs of self-interest are nowadays outweighing their benefits – so historically we’re heading toward more collective awareness.
Human society as a whole has an endemic case of PTSD. History has been traumatic, pretty much everywhere. The pain and behavioural aberrations that arise from this are rooted not just in past events that we know and remember, but also in collective experiences that are long forgotten.
I have written before about a time in Britain around 1200 BCE, over three millennia ago, when the people of Britain underwent a mass trauma which then played a large part in all that happened afterwards, including four invasions of our country over a thousand year period. This trauma happened at the end of the megalithic period around 1200. The megalithic period had stretched back 2,500 years up to that point. A spell was broken, a mainly-sustainable, cooperative, enspirited society fell, and it was replaced by insecurity, social decline, warlords, weaponry, territorialism and grief (also climate change). That’s big.
Today, many young people today won’t remember or care a lot about what happened in WW1 and WW2 – they’re consigned to history – but these two traumas are programmed deeply in their own genes, contributing to their current preoccupations and anxieties – they are descendants of survivors who went through a very hard time. In my own case, my mother spent two years under the Blitz in London and Swansea, my father lost a leg in Egypt, and my grandfathers were in the Battle of the Somme and the British invasion of Iraq and Palestine.
Yet the addictive consumerism that many young activists point out today was induced by trauma, horror and shortage, and the consequent urge, emerging in the 1950s-60s, to cover it all over with food, security, holidays and overconsumption.
So solving a major component of the ecological-climatic crisis involves deep social healing – the healing of trauma and its effects. Not just trauma, but cultural beliefs, intolerances and insecurities, identity and diversity issues and many more.
This healing process won’t happen overnight – it’s multi-generational. But we need to start it, and somehow keep it manageable by building up social processing mechanisms and a body of experience in all sectors of society which can ‘hold the energy’ and help it work through in ways that don’t turn destructive.
St Ives Head, a Neolithic and Iron Age cliff sanctuary
War is a critical issue, as part of this. I read recently that a study had shown that over 90% of Hamas fighters had experienced their fathers being killed. Little explanation is needed – it’s all about pain and how we respond to it. And, take note: if that had been you, you’d probably land up being such a fighter too. Either that, or you might become an exceptionally brave and driven peacemaker if you so chose – one of those who are rarely mentioned in the news.
The world teeters on an edge where a very big collective decision is needed, regarding war. While explosions and horrors go on, other big world issues cannot progress. The world’s sensitivities are dulled. Resources are misdirected into ‘defence’ and wasted in both destruction and reconstruction. Our moral compunction is overlaid with anger and dismay. Our capacity to see that we all sail in the same boat is obscured. We fall for the belief that other people and nations are against us and a danger to us. This is a mass-psychological complex.
There are elements in this world who wish to crank up this belief too – not heal it. Such a belief does have substance, but there are other ways of dealing with it. It’s not just a matter of diplomacy but one of deep social change. Some people deliberately stoke up division and conflict – our good friend Benjamin Natanyahu is a classic case, but he’s by no means unique. Such people have a vengeance to carry out on a world that has mistreated them. Or they’re on a power trip, though this often arises from past pain too. Or they and their oligarch-team are struggling to stay on top. Or they can’t drop the addiction to conflict (or the money).
The majority of people have grudgingly fallen for the habit of accepting division, conflict and war – they regret seeing their children die, but they still fall into this pattern of belief, even financing their own children’s deaths through their work and taxes. Some nations rely on a psychology of fear and division to justify their existence. Some oligarchies cannot exist without it.
In Britain, divide and rule, a power-imposition pattern taught to us a long time ago by our conquerors the Romans and the Normans and nowadays embodied in the ethics of the Conservative party, is a pattern arising from trauma. It’s not uncommon that imperialistic nations – Britain, Russia, China, Turkey, USA, Netherlands, France, Israel and others – generated the historic urge to conquer as a result of being conquered or oppressed themselves, further back in time.
But this is not the only option: Canada, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Costa Rica, and to some extent Germany and Japan, tend the other way. None of these nations are angels, but they see things differently. Peacebuilding is not an impossible task.
Godrevy lighthouse
We don’t commit acts of warfare only militarily – nowadays economic and psychological warfare are big things.
On the economic front, we smug Brits, we run a neat string of offshore banking centres for the sequestering of wealth and the unaccounted processing of enormous transactions. That’s one of our specialisms – clean, kinda legal and smart corruption. Around one third of all the world’s money goes there. We have straight-laced, official, smart, seemingly law-abiding banks in the City of London, though those same banks have shadow subsidiaries in the Caymans, Belize, Virgin Islands, Singapore, Isle of Man or Jersey to handle the unaccounted stuff (everything from Apple profits to drug barons’ billions to Nigerian oligarchs’ money-stashes to corporate mega-transactions). Good business. However, not good for people and planet (or national government tax-takes).
These kinds of obstructions are not insurmountable: it requires people to hang together, clarify and state our collective wisdom and preference, and vote with our feet (or even fingers). It requires electoral swings, mass consumer choices, campaigns and also – this is the critical one that leads to real action and change – the right kind of response to events and defining moments.
We’ve had one recently with Gaza. All of the demos and campaigns of recent months have not really paid off in terms of ceasefires. But in terms of historic swings and consensual tiltings, Gaza represents a turning-point. The failure of popular will, globally, has consolidated a deeper shift underneath which is far more firm and solid. It’s not specifically about Gaza, though Gaza, following on from Mariupol and Aleppo, has triggered it. It’s about large-scale destruction itself, and people as victims of it. It comes at the same time as the film Oppenheimer and a range of other events that make this a defining moment or period. Doing blanket devastation of this kind will not be so easy in future.
A tide is turning, even if it takes a generation to do so. When tides are turning, nothing much happens except for powerful undercurrents and a buildup of potential for a full-flux tidal flow to follow. That’s what could be happening here. It depends on the world public to carry this through without sitting back, believing the job is done, or forgetting because of the pressure of other concerns.
Hence, in the Sunday meditations, I’ve sometimes suggested building and consolidating a certain thought or image, since strengthening such thoughts in collective consciousness – such as reconciliation or justice – is a key part of this process. It’s all a matter of where the centre of gravity, where the tilting point in the collective psyche, stands. Gaza has shifted it. The sacrifice Gazans are making is not entirely fruitless.
Forty years ago the Greenham Women surrounded the USAF cruise missile base at Greenham Common. They made a really strong point that hit home in the hearts and minds of many people. The base didn’t close right then because something larger was happening – the end of the Cold War, an historic process that came pretty quickly once it came. The base closed during the 1990s. The women’s action worked, even though most scepto-pundits continue to believe there was no relationship between the women’s protests and the geopolitical change that followed around seven years later. Or perhaps it was just chance. Yeah, sure. But there was a connection: the women put in the work on a psycho-spiritual level which gave a big shove of momentum, alongside the efforts of Solidarinosz in Poland and other movements bringing about the Velvet Revolutions. The Iron Curtain just so happened to come down – and in history, seven years is a blink of an eye.
This is how it works. It’s in the psyche of humanity, the collective unconscious. That’s how change comes. A strange twist might also be this: when the moment comes, the actual ignition-event that catalyses such a shift could be quite small and unexpected, in a place and from a source that most people don’t anticipate until it pops. Then suddenly a widlfire starts.
Remember the young Tunisian street seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself alight and sparked the Arab Revolutions? Martyrdom worked for him and he set alight a tidal surge across the Muslim world that has been tamped down for now but it has not gone out. It’s an historic process, and many threads and factors are involved.
Newton’s third law applies to the course of history: to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Yet, while the wheel turns round and round there is a net movement in a prevailing direction. This is one reason why we need to give thanks for the assholes and badguys of this world: they prompt us to pull our fingers out. Because if we don’t, they’ll carry on. They exist because we allow them to exist. They embody the ghouls and devils within the collective psyches of nations and the world, and it is here that, at root, change and immunity need to develop.
Historic processes can be accelerated, and one day in the coming decades (my astrologer’s guess is around 2048-65), we’re heading for a time of intensity, of going through the mangle. We’re already going through it, but there’s more to come, and it’ll get bigger. We can make this easier or more difficult – that’s the main option available. It depends how much we Earth humanoids decide to agree. Or at least to agree to disagree while cooperating over the essentials.
The big historic change we’re going through this century involves addressing issues that go back centuries and millennia. In essence, it’s a transformation from a competitive to a cooperative collective mindset, society and civilisation. Because we’re all in the same boat, and the boat is now rather crowded and unstable.
Zarathrustra spake thus, all over the Isles of Scilly
The world was on tenterhooks. After the assassination of Trump’s vice-president by a white South African, America could no longer play off different groups of nations against each other. Netanyahu’s threat to drop nukes on Turkey had put NATO in an acutely difficult position, exposing its double standards. Trump was raging at Israel’s intransigence and Putin, looking haggard in his hospital bed, uttered boisterous words in support of him when everyone knew that, in his tenuous position, and now being undermined by the Moscow oligarchy, he could promise nothing.
The Israeli civil disturbances were brutal, with neither side willing to step back – the media were under strict instructions not to call it a civil war. The mowing down by the Judaean Settler Army of Palestinians trying to escape over the Jordan valley had variously dismayed the world, exposing the inevitable consequences of their inaction. Even Israelis were not allowed out of Israel – at Ben Gurion airport and the two remaining land crossing points, only approved Israelis could leave. There had been a full-scale call-up of reservists but they were taking different sides, taking their weaponry with them. India had at last withdrawn its support for Israel. China had remained silent, concerned as usual about its markets, oil sources and leverage in the newly denominated West Asia.
After the establishment of the Sahelian Dirham, the currency of the new Sahelian Alliance, other small countries flooded to join it, abandoning the Dollar and distancing also from the newly-minted Renminbi-Rouble bloc – after all, the Russians and Chinese were resource-gulping imperialists too. The resignation of the UN Secretary General, saying he had done his best but it had led only to this, was rejected by a uniquely united Security Council. Then Netanyahu, looking taut-faced and cornered, put the cat amongst the pigeons. He boldly declared in Hebrew that, if threats against Israel continued, he would detonate his country’s nukes and incinerate the country – by implication, a second, self-imposed holocaust, as if to prove his version of history to be correct. Chaos broke out not only in Israel but also in the steets of Damascus, Beirut, Amman and Cairo as crowds panicked.
Trump’s speech from Mar a Lago (since Washington DC had become too dangerous) had been surprisingly firm and calming – the invasion would be paused for now. Secretary Blinken, drafted from his thinktank job by Trump to deal with a situation he had played a large role in creating, was to be given a last chance to pacify the Israelis. Gaza, left with only stragglers and people unable to escape, already looked as if it had been nuked, though it hadn’t. Saudi Arabia had reluctantly opened its borders to Palestinians to relieve refugee pressure on UAE and Egypt – well, it swelled the numbers moving into Neom, the new desert city not too far from Sinai and Gaza. Meanwhile, UNHCR, backed by the first Polish and Swedish battallions in the new European army, had taken over refugee operations in Greece. Refugees were coming in big numbers. Now there was a new crowd from the Tashkent earthquake and nuclear disaster.
In the English Channel, disaster came when a container freighter and an oil tanker collided. An oil and chemical slick was spreading and most shipping through the busy Channel was blocked. Both ships had been trying to avoid refugee boats. The UK authorities were now running ferries to Calais to pick up refugees who were endangering shipping in yet another of the world’s maritime choke-points. This caused further supply-line disruptions in crisis-ridden Europe as shipping was diverted north of Scotland, exposing it to both Russian and American naval attentions. Europe was on its own, suddenly sandwiched between two big powers.
A wee visitor at my home, aspiring to do the washing up
Possible realities… Improbable, yet all the same possible.
A big problem we face is that the world approaches the future facing backwards. We see the future on the past’s terms, afraid to make a leap, afraid to acknowledge that we’re lost at sea, afraid that everything could go wrong – and in so doing, we’re making things even worse. Consequence-delivering chickens are coming home to roost, in waves. This might go on for a number of decades, because the world seems so determined to drag its feet through every single learning experience that comes to face it. Such global brinkmanship arises from a collective failure to own up to the full consequences of what we have done. A multipolar deadlock has unfolded. The powers that be are all busily making sure nothing really changes – not fundamentally.
But there is another kind of brink we’re slipping over. It started around 2012 or, further back, perhaps 1989. Or perhaps 1967-68. It’s this: even if the world decided tomorrow to mobilise humanity, wholeheartedly embracing fundamental change, we would tip into a new, anxious period of at least a few decades. Whatever we do, we would not know for some time whether and how much the solutions we attempt will actually bear fruit.
It takes time for a forest to grow, for an invention to be trialled, for society to change its values and for the fruits of systems-redesign to show themselves. Not all solutions will work, some might backfire, and the world is hamstrung, riddled with complexity, interdependence and conflicting interests. We’ve sidled into a minefield. This creates an underlyingly edgy and anxious atmosphere, stoking up an already insecure and volatile situation.
I’m happy to report that my little visitor did not lay a plonker on my bed while hopping around on it
I was reflecting on all this a few nights ago while lying in bed, listening to the owls hooting and screeching outside. It reminded me of my own cancer story. We all face an underlying, nagging issue, and cancer patients get it in a big, pressing dose, thrust in our faces.
When and how am I going to die?
And here’s the rub: you get no answer.
It could be anytime, anyhow.
Making plans gets difficult when you know there’s a good chance that anything can come along to scupper them. Whether or not you’re going to die soon, this still comes up, variously for everyone, when we’re scared enough to look at it. With cancer, I’ve found I’ve become much more sensitive to anything charged with any feeling at all. It’s not fear, exactly – it’s an insecure, creeping anticipation that hovers in the background. Worse, no one wants to talk about it.
In my own case, I’m rather surprised to be alive. I’m unsure what plans to make, and with what time-perspective. So I tend to keep my perspective open, but with the headlights shining on only the next three months, and anything beyond that is unanswerable. This has a remarkable effect on everything. It’s tenterhooky, no matter how philosophical or optimistic I might be, and no matter how much others encourage me to ‘get better’, not to dwell on morbid things – as if dying were a failure and living a success.
Sorry, dear Kate, Princess of Wales, while I understand your wish to assure everyone by saying you’re getting better, this is unwise. You do not know. It’s unwise to yield to that implicit social pressure to make everything look alright, because it isn’t alright.
When I lie in bed, drifting with fatigue, this is the view. On top of the hill in the left-hand window is an ancient site called Caer Brân (mentioned a couple of blogs back)
This is our world situation. We’ve stumbled into a mire of uncertainty and complexity. We have squads of scientists, super-forecasters and expert-texperts, and mega-millions of people with armchairs and opinions, yet we’ve become unable to accept the obvious – that the future is not as clear and fixable as we would like it to be. It’s left mostly to the young to point this out, while they’re still at an age where they are uncompromised by fear of loss and chaos.
Cancer patients, in my observation, divide into roughly three camps. Some are in denial – they take the pills, do the chemo, get the op, and do their best to appear and return to normal – it was just a bad dream and it’s over now. Some are heroic, fighting, striving to overcome and conquer cancer, and some of these will succeed while they have the willpower to do so, but it’s experienced as a fight, not a gift. And some come through to a level of acceptance and forgiveness that allows them to live and die in greater peace, whatever is to happen. To some extent all cancer patients hover between these three in different ways and proportions because cancer does indeed have a convincing way of putting the fear of God up you.
I have my struggles with this. I get fed up with all the pills, disciplines, diets and doctors’ appointments a valiant cancer patient is supposed to appreciate, to save their life and relieve others of the pain of loss, and sometimes I just want to say ‘fuckit’, to be normal, get my life, or even my ex-partner, back (fat chance). Other times I work on rising up within myself, trying to be a good human, in case God notices and gives me a reprieve – which won’t really happen since it’s a pointless, guilt-ridden belief.
Anyway, I’m doing quite well with my cancer, and I think it has something to do with full-on acceptance, yielding to The Force. I’ve lost control – yet, like a slalom skier, or when you first learn to ride a bike, or even like sex, by losing control you find a new balance.
In times of despair, hope sometimes stretches far further than it realistically should – like the vain hope that many Gazans entertain, that the decent people across the world will step in to save them. But just because something should happen, it doesn’t mean that it will.
At times I’m given deep truth-moments and gifts of spirit. I go down into the depths and up to the heaven-worlds, handing myself over in a humbled acceptance of my powerlessness and the overwhelming force of my circumstances, dependency and weakness – and the paradox is that, every time I drag myself through such a crunch-period, something in me is healed and reborn.
Here I still find myself, alive in a body and wondering what exactly for. Am I just here because I’m here? Or is there more to life? Yet my inner growth process has been ramped up to three times the speed, with a lot more depth, breath and height, and with a vulnerability that has amplified the emotional impacts, the feelingful fullness of being alive. That’s what I’ve been given.
My little house. It’s called The Lookout. That’s what you do there.
So it is with the world. The world has cancer, depression, anxiety, diabetes, fentanyl addiction, ME and a strange mixture of obesity and hunger. Part of us wants everything to return to normal, if only we could just buy an electric car, and part teeters on the edge of an abyss, flummoxed and hovering between lightbulb moments and flounderous resignation.
A nightmare is unfolding. However, while plenty of horror, injustice and destruction are going on, World War Three is now mainly a hearts-and-minds matter, not one of nuclear bombs or evil terrorists.
This is what we have been given. Or, collectively and unconsciously, it’s what we gave ourselves, to teach us something. We’ve created a situation where, kicking and screaming, we’re being arm-twisted into change. This is the great value of the Trumps, Putins, massacres, disasters and tragedies we face: they’re putting options before us. The stakes are rising until, sometime, we get it – we get the fundamental lesson, the lesson that will save us and redeem the damage and pain. So it is with cancer.
What none of the pundits in the commentariat mention is the spiritual crisis the world is in. Mental illness is not limited to those who are diagnosed with it, as if a certification of our woes would contain the crisis: it’s a disease of a psychotic world society, taking different forms in different places. All of it points to one core issue.
We have lost our way, lost our humanity. We’re deeply worried about what’s going on. We don’t know how to make it go away. Even the wisdom teachers, psychologists and solution-bringers are lost. As an astrologer I can often see when a wave is coming, but what will actually happen is at best qualified guesswork.
We’re faced with the Great Yawning Gap, like a black hole sucking us into some sort of final battle for the hearts and minds of humanity. Well, that’s what it feels like, sometimes. This presents heightened choices. These choices have been around for quite a time – I was one of those harping on about it when a Sixties teenager – but the stakes are rising with each year and decade.
It’s highly symbolic of the state of humanity, particularly for the global minority, for the one billion of us privileged to live in the rich world, that cancer has become a big issue. Because cancer hits you like a battering ram, with immediate life-changing consequences and a threat of imminent termination. Loss of control. Loss of everything. When you die you take nothing with you except what you have become.
The biggest, deepest choice we are faced with is this. Just because life doesn’t go the way we want, does this mean it’s going wrong? If we get faced with cancer or similar terminal or disabling ailments, or earth-shaking experiences such as war, disaster, loss, hardship or death, is this something going wrong or something going right?
But when I’m alive and kicking, this is where I spend a lot of my time. It’s the bane of being a pathological wordsmith.
This is a very deep question. But in it lies a solution that lies at the foundation of our situation, from personal to global.
With cancer, in my experience, the secret is to embrace it and make friends with it. I manifested it and, whether or not I understand why, it came for a reason, not by chance or bad luck, and it gives me a deep learning for the soul. It’s a life-changer of a high order. Something is going right. Similarly, it might be difficult to see this at present, what with all that’s going on around us, but something is going right in the world.
To see this, it is necessary to step out of life somewhat, out of the mill and the grindstone, to see things from another viewpoint – the viewpoint of a soul visiting Earth. We came into life to do something with it – not only to learn but also to make a contribution. Society doesn’t think that way – it encourages us to snap out of it – but in the cultural, institutional and societal mass-avoidance of our time we miss something crucial about life.
Have we each made our contribution?
In Western culture we even believe that we get only one life, and that when we die we cease existing. This belief is unthought through, ideological and deeply problematic. It’s a key part of the world’s problem today – a way of blanking out the longterm and avoiding taking responsibility for anything much more than ourselves, those close to us, our properties, concerns and beliefs, and only for the next three years.
We’ve become hyper-privatised, socially atomised. The world is crowded but we don’t even know our neighbours. It’s crowded, yet loneliness is at its historic zenith.
The world we omit to save now is the same world that many of us will wish to return to in another life – after all, we have the best chocolate in the universe, and in most worlds getting rich, being a star or a tall poppy is distasteful and antisocial – that’s best done here, if you want it. Even if we don’t come back here, it still matters – after all, once we’ve ascended to the fifth dimension, Andromeda, heaven or wherever, it’ll still be necessary to account for ourselves, to explain the incomprehensible to the souls we meet there.
Sleeping seals at Godrevy Head
Why did you lot screw up your planetary home? After all, being a distinctly desirable residence, billions of souls want to live there. And, (you might have to take my word for this) most worlds in this universe don’t host souls in billions. If I remember rightly, the Nine once said that the optimum population of planet Earth is around two hundred million.
It is a planet of amplified choice – we are each and all given a capacity to create our lives as we feel best. This isn’t just a choice between Toyotas and Mitsubishis, or between Copenhagen and Buenos Aires. It’s deeper, and when we are confronted with earth-shaking crises, we’re given the gift of amplified choice. We’re dragged into fundamentals.
Disaster – which means ‘out of sync with the stars’ – is a gift. This is what we need to get straight about. We need to meet the future facing forwards.
Me too, with my cancer, which will inevitably kill me sometime. It’s alright. My bones could disintegrate, my stomach could block up, an infection could floor me. I could die alone with nobody noticing, nobody here to hold my hand. I could be floored by a blast of phone radiation given to me by someone who loves me and didn’t mean to be so generous. If such is the case, so be it – it’s all for the learning. Soul-learning, about the true and full nature of existence as a human.
I’ll be going home. Done. Cooked. But even then, it doesn’t stop there.
I’m tempted to quote the lyrics of a song, ‘I just wanna be there’, by a late, great soul-friend, John Cartwright, and it went:
“I just wanna be there / When we all start to re-pair / All the damage to our Mother / And our sisters and our brothers / All deserving to be fed / In the spirit and the body… / It is doing in my head / There is nothing to be said / Time is running out… “Seeds bursting to grow / Dying of hunger, under the snow / My need, bursting my heart… / Where do we wander? Where do we start? / “My soul… silently smiles / Laughs as the water falls from my eyes. / Each tear, spelling it out… / Rise or go under… Rise here and now!“
[Glastonbury friends will know John and Jaki’s band, Court of Miracles – ‘the best band you never heard of’, to quote the late Justin Credible. I couldn’t find an online version of this song, but here’s one of their uplifting albums from the 1980s, called International Times.]
Peace, brothers and sisters. Despite everything, it’s okay – just remember that.
St Michael’s Mount from Botrea Barrows (telephoto shot)
One of the strange gifts that cancer gives is the prospect of dying soon. It’s is a motivator. You can’t leave things till later or leave them incomplete. So I’ve been moved to bring things to completion as much as I can – with success in some areas and less in others. One area I’m focusing on wrapping up now is my study of the Megalithic period of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.
For the last ten years I’ve been researching ancient sites in West Penwith, where I live, drawing on fifty years of study and experiences in Britain, Scandinavia, Greece, Jordan and Palestine. Having done an alignments map of Glastonbury twenty years ago,[1] in 2014 I started making a map of the ancient sites and alignments in Penwith.[2]
West Penwith, the shining land of Belerion, has more ancient sites per square mile than anywhere in Europe. It’s the far promontory at the very end of the long southwestern peninsula of Britain. Surrounded by cliffs on three sides, it has a distinct energy-boundary on the landward, eastern side, made up of three hills lying in a straight line – St Michael’s Mount, Trencrom Hill and St Ives’ Head. On the A30 to Penzance it crosses the road by the shop in the village of Crowlas.
Alignments in Penwith have been studied over the decades by John Michell and a number of other researchers. John wrote the 1974 book ‘The Old Stones of Land’s End’, identifying around ninety alignments involving mainly Bronze Age and early Christian sites. Checking these alignments with online satellite mapping, not available in John’s day, I found that only two of the ninety were inaccurate and questionable.
Cape Cornwall or Kilgooth Ust, with the Brisons Rocks behind
Then late one night came a Eureka moment, after an evening working on the Penwith map. I was tired yet unready to go to bed. I sat there musing about St Michael’s Mount, a roughly conical hill in a marine setting, and then about Cape Cornwall, a prominent headland near me, with a similar character. Both were prominent ancient sites on either side of the peninsula.
Spontaneously I got out a ruler, placing it between the two sites to see if an alignment was there. Lo behold, indeed there was. It passed through a set a four barrows up on the top of the hill on our farm, not far from my house. Gosh, that was a surprise.
One of the Botrea Barrows
I spend a lot of time up at Botrea Barrows and, though they don’t look impressive, they have a remarkable panorama and they certainly have that distinct feeling you get at an ancient site that is still energy-alive. It’s a feeling of being changed in mood and perspective, energy-bathed, both calmed and energised.[3]
A lightbulb lit up. I started checking to see whether there were further alignments like this. The Mount and Cape Cornwall are both cliff sanctuaries. They form a necklace of magic headlands around Penwith, and also much of Cornwall and parts of Devon (there’s a big one in Somerset called Brean Down). So I started checking other cliff sanctuaries and suddenly a lot of new alignments appeared. Normally called cliff castles, they aren’t defensive, and they’re not just beautiful places but also they have a special feeling of being consecrated, so I call them cliff sanctuaries.
I found about eight alignments in twenty minutes – a record never again repeated, since usually they don’t come easily. Not only this, but many of the alignments connected with Neolithic tors, the very first dedicated ancient sites in Penwith, Cornwall and Dartmoor. There are five in this area: Carn Brea, the Mount, Trencrom Hill, Carn Kenidjack and Carn Galva.
Something interesting emerged. Three of these newfound alignments crossed exactly at Lanyon Quoit. One came from Carn Brea near Redruth (a Neolithic tor), through Trencrom Hill (a Neolithic tor), Mulfra Quoit and Lanyon Quoit (Neolithic quoits or cromlechs). It continues to the Tregeseal stone circle complex and eventually to the Brisons Rocks off Cape Cornwall. This implies that, when it was built in the Bronze Age, Tregeseal was deliberately placed on this alignment, or that the site was known in the Neolithic even if it took a millennium to build a stone circle on it.
Another alignment went from St Michael’s Mount (a Neolithic tor) through Lanyon Quoit to Pendeen Watch (a cliff sanctuary). A third alignment went from Treryn Dinas (a cliff sanctuary) through Boscawen-ûn stone circle and Lanyon Quoit to Bosiliack Barrow and a proxy menhir at the Nine Maidens stone circle. Thus, the location of stone circles is significantly determined by these alignments (though multiple interlocking factors are usually involved).
Lanyon Quoit, with Carn Galva behind. Lanyon Quoit is not in its original shape – it fell down in Victorian times and was incorrectly re-erected.
That sounds straightforward, but the implications are quite big.
Lanyon Quoit was built around 3700-3500 BCE, as were the enclosures built to encircle the Neolithic tors. Since the quoit’s precise position is fixed by these three alignments, each aligning with tors or cliff sanctuaries, it means that cliff sanctuaries date back in their first us to at least that time. In one fell swoop, the number of Neolithic sites in Penwith doubled.
Cliff sanctuaries are not usually regarded as major ancient sites.[4] This discovery changes that. Archaeologists ascribe them to the Iron Age around 2,500-2,000 years ago. But we now have geomantic evidence that they were far older in first use and far more important. They were consecrated – you can feel this when you visit them, since they don’t have the same feeling as other headlands. To test this, visit Zennor Head, an ordinary headland, and then neighbouring Bosigran Castle and Gurnard’s Head, both cliff sanctuaries. They’re special. The discovery of Neolithic archaeological remains at some of them hasn’t caused archaeologists to drop their attachment to Iron Age fortresses though.
These new alignments I call ‘backbone alignments’. They are different from the alignments John Michell and most ley-hunters studied, involving Bronze Age sites such as stone circles, cairns and menhirs. In Penwith, what’s special about the backbones is that they represent a more coherent order than the Bronze Age alignments. I’m surprised no one has discovered them before.
More implications… The backbones reveal a coherent structure to the 600 ancient sites of West Penwith. They hint at a master plan – a plan to make Penwith into one big landscape temple, one big cliff sanctuary. This idea hasn’t caught on down here, except with one archaeologist (David Giddings) who struck upon it independently, using a different logic and terminology from me.
We aren’t looking at a random collection of ancient sites splattered across Penwith wherever anyone fancied. We’re looking at a planned, integrated network and system of ancient sites.
It evolved according to basic protocols but not a rigid plan. Here’s an analogy. The Internet was not planned, and what has emerged in recent decades is not what was foreseen and intended early on. However, it evolved according to consistent protocols – a bundle of coding that operates internet networks in a coherent, expandable, adaptable way. Although it grew organically, there was system to it.
Similar applies to the principles established in the Neolithic 3000s – principles first developed in Iberia and brought to Britain around 3700 BCE with a wave of incoming migrants at that time. (They spoke a language related to Basque.) Later, in the Early-to-Mid Bronze Age (2500ish to 1200ish) the Brits took these principles further than anyone, to high degrees of astronomical, mathematical, geomantic and cosmological sophistication.
According to Knight and Lomas [1] even the Egyptians are likely to have learned some mathematical tricks from the Brits concerning the curvature and size of the Earth and the precession of the equinoxes. The Bronzies were doing Pythagorean and Euclidean mathematics two millennia before Pythagoras and Euclid, and they understood the astronomical Metonic cycle two millennia before Meton, another Greek philosopher, wrote it down and got the kudos for it.
This gets bigger when we look at the reasons why the megalith-builders went to so much trouble building megaliths. Here we go right outside the scope and beliefs of archaeologists into the wilder territory of geomancers. When the Neolithics and Bronzies built ancient sites, they plugged them into astronomical variables, underground water, networks of energy-lines, networks of alignments (those are two different things), and they built them using advanced mathematical and astronomical systems. They locked time into space through the designs, orientations, proportions and alignments of ancient sites, particularly stone circles, the ‘cathedrals of the Bronze Age’. Why?
The Nine Maidens stone circle
Well, go to an ancient site and spend time there. You’re entering a multidimensional energy field. The evidence lies in observing our feelings, registering those feelings and taking them seriously. The depth and significance of experience is magnified at ancient sites. When you leave, it’s worth noting what’s different in your state, mood and optic. It’s far more than the uplift you might gain from a walk in the countryside. Test it out.
The character and feeling of this experience depends on several factors, contingent on the time you visit, your motivation and respect, how openly you and the place interact with one another, how the place itself is feeling at the time, what you do, what you don’t do, and also there’s a mysterious ‘factor X’, a magical concatenation of conditions that makes some visits extra memorable, even transformative. These variables influence the character of our experience of ancient sites when we visit them – and their experience of us.
This is a consciousness effect. We don’t understand how it works, but it does, and there are hints of proof in neuroscience and parapsychological research. You don’t have to take my word for it: simply visit ancient sites and try it for yourself. The principle here is that containing, fixing and enhancing energy fields seems to be the key reason why ancient sites were built, and why they were placed and designed as they were. This was a technology of consciousness.
It isn’t difficult to feel or sense subtle energy, at least instinctually or semi-consciously. If you’re capable of feeling love, you’re capable of feeling energy, and this is a capability we are born with. But it is more difficult to square this with our overlaid, educated rationality which, together with fears, conditioning, insecurities and emotional armouring, tends to edit, dull, obstruct, corrupt or suppress our sensitivities.
To many people, what I’ve written about consciousness effects makes little or no sense – it’s imagination, woo-woo and hocus-pocus. ‘No evidence’ – though actually, there is. Academics and archaeologists are missing something really big here.
Boscawen-ûn stone circle
The consciousness effect was valued because these people worked magically – shamanically. This matter lay at the heart of their culture. They worked with the inner components of reality, knowing that what happens within us is entirely connected with what happens around us (called non-dualism). Ancient sites of different kinds were built to exploit various opportunities of consciousness.
Some sites train our awareness upwards, some out to the landscape, some to the earth-sky relationship, some downwards (such as wells) and some inwards (such as chambered cairns and fogous). Stone circles, the reactors, telescopes and laboratories of megalithic times, create a palpable and measurable energy-intensity within their enclosed space.
This would be used at auspicious times for high-pressure magical-ceremonial workings. A few hundred people would surround the circle, fasting, chanting, dancing and visualising, probably with the help of mind medicines, while inside it ‘proto-Druids’ would perform the specifics of the work. They did this to create an intensified energy-field to perform healings, balance the etheric bioelectronics of land and sky (affecting fertility and climate), carry out ceremonial consciousness work in connection with the environment and the welfare of the people, make decisions through an oracle, communicate over long distances, protect the land and keep the spirits of land and sky happy.
But this is not all, since West Penwith is one big ancient site made up of hills, tors and headlands, stone circles, menhirs, cairns and barrows, quoits, enclosures, holy wells and other sacred spaces. These represent a significant buildup of geomantic infrastructure designed around the landscape itself, using subtle energy technologies. It took until the peak of the Bronze Age around 2000-1800 BCE for the infrastructure to take full shape.
However there are signs of a trial run in the Neolithic 3000s in the northern highlands of the peninsula, where most people then lived: the quoits were arranged in a structure involving astronomical and parallel alignments, suggesting that the quoits were built to a coordinated plan. They might all have been built around the same time.[5]
Recently I’ve been studying landscape temples in Penwith. These are areas that hang together in terms of the psycho-geographical, perceptual and magical lie of the land and its features. It is likely that these roughly coincided with the social subgroups or tribes of Penwith. Everyone was related somehow, but social subgroups occupied certain areas, calling them ‘home’. These were not days of territorial frictions, and what mattered most was heartlands more than boundaries.
Based on my knowledge of the area, I’ve drawn a map of what I think those landscape temples and tribal areas might be, as they might have been seen in the Bronze Age, around its zenith. It is hypothetical with little backup, but it’s an interesting thought-experiment and it makes some sense in terms of the lie of the land and the way ancient sites are arrayed.
Here’s an example. On the west coast of Penwith, between Mayon Cliff near Sennen in the south and Cape Kenidjack in the north, a landscape temple is marked out by a series of clifftop cairns.[6] They all face the sea, toward the setting sun and the Isles of Scilly, with the Longships Rocks and Chapel Carn Brea acting as focal points of attention. From every one of these cairns you can see Chapel Carn Brea, the first and last hill in Britain – it has a Neolithic longbarrow and Bronze Age cairns on top. Sennen was the main landing beach for Scilly boats, and the people of this area will have been involved with Scillonians and probably related to them.
Caer Brân from above
I live in another landscape temple made of four hill sites and a valley between them, at the centre of the peninsula. Bartinney Castle is a high, convex, rounded hill with a circular enclosure, eight cairns and a well on top, probably used for quite high-level magical purposes. Caer Brân is a circular enclosure on a hillbrow with a remarkable panorama – I think it was the parliament site for the whole of Penwith and, within its magic circle, a neutral space. Sancreed Beacon feels to me as if it was a ceremonial centre and seat of power for the local tribe. Botrea Hill has four large platform barrows on it, likely to have been used for ceremonial-magical purposes. All four hills are within view of each other, part of the same perceptual landscape and complementing each other in character.[7]
Caer Brân (pronounced ‘care brain’) as seen from Botrea Hill
Penwith was one large landscape temple with a variety of localised areas within it, each with its own character and geomantic facility.
Gradually I’ve been building a picture of life in Penwith in the Neolithic 3000s and the Bronze Age. These periods were quite different, not least in population numbers, which were much bigger in the Bronze Age. But what many people miss is the esoteric depth of the culture of the megalithic period. The bottom-line issue is that megalithic sites cannot be understood without appreciating the crucial role of subtle earth energy in their construction, location and reason for being.
It’s also important to acknowledge the role of shamanic consciousness work in the way the people of the time managed their affairs. This was a theocratic, magical civilisation and, while it didn’t build cities, roads and empires, its thinking was advanced.
This is not just a captivating fascination with the past: it has something to do with our future and the healing of our world. My work in West Penwith has led me to this.
Mulfra Quoit, with St Michael’s Mount behind. I think Mulfra Quoit and Zennor Quoit were both intentionally decommissioned.
This year I wish to bring this work to completion so that I can drop it and pass it on, while I can. It’s not just about completing a body of work. It’s about resolving something inside myself. With others like me, I’ve lived in a time where people like us are not believed – the tide of convention and groupthink has gone the other way. When I was young I knew it would take time but I believed that, by the end of my life, the tide would have turned. Astrology would be accepted, geomancers respected, healers would be accepted as a mainstream medical option, war would be going or gone, the world would be changing and oddbods like me would be seen and heard. This hasn’t happened, so completion now involves leaving clues for others to pick up in future.
For me, it’s also about resolving and healing personal pain. The pain of having ideas rejected because they don’t fit with the prevailing ideology of our time. Things aren’t properly discussed or peer-reviewed, people like me get rubbished, discredited, sidelined, we don’t get the grants and we’re kept off the BBC. Being a vegetarian, meditatator, aged hippy, astrologer, crop circle researcher, social healer and Palestine activist has not been popular with the mainstream. Some things I’ve done have even been illegal – talking to terrorists, delivering babies or using mind medicines – and it is disgraceful that these are still considered crimes.
The pain of being misjudged and discriminated against is a big learning experience for a sensitive soul, and since getting cancer I’ve become more aware of how it has affected me throughout life. I’m working on it by rattling away on my computer, creating an online archive of material which I hope people will find and make use of after I’ve gone.
But it’s a forgiveness process too, because ultimately the weight of unforgiveness rests most heavily on our own shoulders. Time is a healer, and what goes around, comes around. To quote Bhavabhuti, an Indian mathematician and philosopher of the 700s CE: “If learned critics do deride my work, then let them. Not for them I wrought. One day a soul shall live to share my thought, for time is endless and the world is wide.” Until he came along, in mathematics the number Zero did not exist.
A quick preen at Porthmoina Cove, Penwith, Cornwall
Greetings, King Charles, from that far-off Duchy down’ere at the other end of the A30, out past Windsor. Welcome to the Honourable Company of Cancer Patients. By appointment with Divinity.
Some people want to be astronauts, yet there’s another way of visiting other worlds, and it’s called ‘cancer’. From what I’ve heard thus far on the news, you’re taking the right approach to it. Good on you. Your life has just become a whole lot more difficult, yet moments like this open the curtains – something gets released and empowered too.
You’ve started a new life and, as a king and public figure, and with your background, you’ve had a training in public fortitude. So (pls don’t read this wrongly), when I heard you’d got cancer and cancer has got you, it felt that it fits. In some way it fits with the story of your life. There’s something good and right about it. As was the case with me – speaking as one with bone marrow cancer, and two years younger than you.
This is not a punishment but a challenge, and many of us are getting it. The reasons why we get cancer are many and intricate – it’s not just about ‘bad lifestyle’. The main reason is simple: we humans are living longer and this is the pricetag. But there’s something bigger and deeper too: it’s about facing the core reason why we are alive.
Cancer prompts a major review of the story of our lives, giving us an opportunity to realign, to do a course-correction. Even if not a lot can be done about our lives after cancer hits us, it is at minimum a time of understanding, re-computing, acceptance, reconciliation and choice. A choice between making something of it or being a victim of it. You can go down in glory or you can go down in sorrow.
Though, as I have discovered, you can also go up, not just down, with cancer, and it outclasses all of the workshops, trainings and pilgrimages you could possibly imagine.
Our civilisation has based itself on setting aside life-purpose in order to conform to the demands and requirements of keeping the show on the road, earning its rewards and avoiding its punishments. We get jobs, get debts and tread the mill, only some of us following something akin to our true vocation. This kind of life has its stresses and strains, causing many people to lose their way. They get stuck in it. Then they need an earthquake like cancer to change everything.
Choughs and a gull at Kenidjack Castle
I have done a lot throughout my life to follow my vocation, though after I got cancer I realised I’d been missing something important. Cancer gave me a gift. It partially disabled me, making life, even just dressing and cooking, far more difficult. Yet it caused me to review my life, to do the best I could with it. It re-focused me. In a strange kind of way I stepped into a truer version of myself. Actually, I didn’t have a lot of option.
Yet this was a choice. It happened in the first few hours and days following diagnosis. There I was in hospital, immobilised, in pain, dependent on others, helpless to do much except fully accept the situation. The shock of it all actually gave me rocket-fuel: it was too big to handle, so I did the only thing I could do – handing myself over to ‘HP Source’. Surrender to ‘The Management’.
I had suddenly entered a test of all my beliefs and all that I stood for. The chop had come down and I was helpless, except to make that choice. It was a choice to trust that, whatever happened, everything would be alright.
Quickly I got to a point where I realised that, if there was a purpose in my staying alive, my angels, or the powers of regeneration inside me, would keep me alive. If it was time to go, that would be alright too. This is an important moment. This is where the big choice is made. It’s a choiceless choice, deep and multidimensional. It’s all to do with reconnecting with the true reason why we came to Earth.
Before entering this life we made an agreement.
To be given the gift of life we had to have a reason, a purpose, a task and a storyline, a particular bundle of joys and sorrows that we wished or needed to go through. Vacancies on Earth are in short supply, and no one is here by accident. Perhaps the choice had been made earlier, implicitly, as a result of things done or not done before this life, and it’s a matter of committing to a crash course in dealing with the karmic consequences. Some consequences can be testing and others can be a gift.
How we see things is critical here. Is cancer a gift or a burden, a life-giver or a killer? What matters more – longevity or meaning in life?
We made an agreement before coming and, the way that life is nowadays, the world has discouraged most of us from fulfilling it – for each of us in different ways, depending on our story as a soul. We went through growing-up and we lost our way. Some go through an awakening in youth (I did), some have a life-crisis in middle age or around age 60, and some awaken toward the end of their lives.
Gorse-perching demonstration, Carn Gloose
Life on Earth is challenging and thorough in the way it grinds and sieves us, to the extent that, even if we don’t lose our way, we still lose our way. For me, as an author, I was doing okay before cancer, yet cancer has propelled me into the most creative period of my life. I didn’t anticipate this, though now it has happened, I’m glad it happened. I had to lose some of my mind – to get ‘chemo-brain’ – to gain this benefit. Well, you win some and you lose some.
I was also given a gift of time, literally and psychospiritually. For the first time in my life I fitted safely inside a category – suddenly I was ‘a cancer patient’ with eligibilities – and this entitled me to benefits. This is a relief because, although I’ve brought benefit to the world worth millions, possibly billions, I haven’t done well financially, doing what I have done. So for the first time in my life I’ve had a regular income – a lean one, but if I’m broke now I don’t have to worry about next month. I’ve always been self-employed and public-service oriented, bumping along the bottom, so this is a big and welcome change.
This time business has led to a new issue. Most people around me lack time and, although I have great friends, our times together are short – or, worse, they’re mainly digital. That gives me even more time.
This time-wealth means that, as an author, I can ruminate on things more than ever before. Often this is semi-conscious, a fermentation going on underneath. Then suddenly, I wake up one morning, up it comes and, armed with a mug of tea, my fingers start up on the keyboard. This morning’s blog was prompted by the news of Charles and his cancer – and particularly of the approach he seems to be taking. You’re doing it right, Charles – carry on, and good luck. I’m with you on this.
And lay off him! Everyone’s suddenly worried about constitutional issues and how and when he’ll get better. The answer is: it’s a process, it takes time, and nothing definite can be said about anything because, with cancer, you can easily choke on your food and blip out in three minutes flat. So give it a break. Poor chap, let him be ill.
The one thing that does concern me about Charles is this. Cancer strips away our defences, making us more vulnerable and sensitive than before. This is a core part of the course-correction mentioned above, because insensitivity, fear and defence mechanisms are how we lost our way. So to get back on track we have to lose our defences. We have to feel vulnerable, stare death in the face, quake before The Abyss, and get real inside ourselves.
Cancer patients become more highly impacted by the prejudices and micro-aggressions that others unconsciously lay on us. We find ourselves crying tears and taking emotional impacts that, to normal people, would just mean ‘a bad day’ or ‘a tiff’, or ‘joshing’. This gets difficult at times because insensitive people can trample, act dishonestly, manipulate, harm and offend without being aware of it. When you have cancer and you’re in the public eye, subject to people’s hopes, fears and expectations, it gets complex and the best thing to do is to hobble away and leave them to it.
Charles will get fed up of being asked ‘How are you?’, and the worried looks, the repeated declarations of ‘Sorry‘, as if something wrong has happened, and of the people avoiding him, and of other people coming too close, and people being neurotic. He’ll be obliged by coffee-driven people to think clearly when he has brain-fog and he’s out of his head on fatigue and chemo side-effects.
Peregrine falcon at Carn Les Boel
Though the funny thing is, this is a gift. Charles has lived with an image problem all his life, and cancer is ending all that. In a strange kind of way, cancer brings him forgiveness in the eyes of many – though what he is to be forgiven for, over and above the normal foibles of being human, is an open question. Perhaps society needs to forgive itself for being so unforgiving and judgemental toward him for too long.
Charles now has an excuse to be himself. He can create his own image as a vulnerable, human, thoughtful and life-experienced people’s king. He can open up an important role for a constitutional monarch with limited powers: the possibility of teaching and tone-setting, exercising moral sway. If he wants to retreat to Highgrove or Balmoral to potter in the garden, he may – that’s a good way of being a king, in our day. If he wants only to do rare public appearances, that’s fine. If he needs to die, that’s okay too – but I suspect he has a few years left for redeeming something and giving the nation a gift. He’ll be more on purpose, with an enhanced moral right to speak his beliefs and suggest ideas to the wider public. We need a Carolingian Renaissance, mark two.
In a funny kind of way he’ll give new leadership to a country, Britain, that is rudderless, thrashing around bombing people instead of searching its conscience, or reviewing its history and revising its currently over-inflated, arrogant self-image. It’s called being human. We’ve failed to do it in Gaza and we Brits, as a nation, do need to do it, to prove that we are true, decent humans.
We need to do something about undoing the mess we’ve played a big part in creating – my own grandfather was in General Allenby’s invading force in Iraq and Palestine in WW1, and that’s where the trouble started. That’s one reason I’ve been involved with Palestine – my grandfather inserted it into my DNA.
We Brits have a certain standing in the world – it’s our covenant as a nation – and we’re failing to rise to our full stature, to fulfil that role. It isn’t about banking, manufacturing, property or wealth-generation. It concerns creativity, content of character, ideas, music, literature, principles, decency and moral integrity. Not religion, but spirituality.
Also, the future is too big for nations like Britain (or Germany, Israel, China, Russia or USA) to puff themselves up, acting as if they own the place, possessing some supposedly God-given right to impose on others and determine their sorry fates. Sorry folks, that was the Twentieth Century.
Hawk at Carn Les Boel
This gets interesting. What I have learned from cancer is this. When I was diagnosed and flat on my back in pain, I gave up. I realised that the game was up and I just had to accept reality. I realised that I’d had a pretty good life, all in all, and though I have regrets I also have joys, and it’s okay if it all comes to an end, if it must.
After about two years I went through a rebirth. I had got over the shock, learned some tricks, thought things through, screwed up several times and found some new benefits from a cancer patient’s life. Even though nowadays I have no professional aspirations, the fulfilment of my life-purpose has been going surprisingly well, without my really trying. All I’m doing is keeping my spirits up, filling time being creative, and people seem to appreciate what I churn out, getting something useful from it.
Deeper down, I guess I’ve stepped into a new archetype – the archetype of a rather beat-up old hierophant. Being an elder is not just about getting old and creaky. It’s about harvesting the value you’ve gained from life-experience, from what you’ve truly learned. It manifests in your behaviour, your manner and your vibe – what Maoris call Mana, your spiritual heft.
I’ve spent much of my life as an astrologer and speaker, volubly sharing my insights into the nature of life but, since having cancer, something has deepened. Life: it’s about what you become by living it. You take nothing with you when you die, except for what you have become. That’s what matters.
In 2022 I asked myself what I would be doing if I didn’t have cancer. The answer came straight: I’d be carrying on as before. Cancer wiped the slate pretty clean. Yet I’ve been gifted a new set of rules and parameters – I can’t drive a car, climb trees, make love, use a mobile phone, go to far-off places, earn money or do what I want. It’s almost like living on a different planet. Someone changed the rules of engagement.
And actually, I’m glad. It’s hard, and I’m unsure whether or not to recommend it, and I don’t think I’m just rationalising, but actually I’m glad.
From this viewpoint, I can safely say I’m glad for King Charles. Poor sod, he’s had to face a lot in life, including more than his fair share of antipathy from the public and a posse of judgemental hypocrites, though these experiences have prepared him for this, and it gives him a redemptive opportunity. This is the story of his life. This wasn’t part of the plan, and cancer is distinctly inconvenient for him as a king, but it authorises him to be himself and to take command of his position.
I’m not a royalist, by the way. However, I look at the different political systems we have around the world and I’m not excited by most presidents, dictators and other figureheads either – they do not convince me that another system would be better.
It comes back to something I realised after my time at the London School of Economics, where I had the opportunity to sample every kind of radical and academic political thinking that was available at the time. I realised that it’s not the type of system that matters, or laws or constitutions. It all hangs around the soul and content of character of the people who occupy the seats of power. In this, Charles is doing well. Meanwhile, most of our politicians are lightweights facing a heavyweight situation.
The problem with royalty is the matter of succession – it depends on who inherits the post. In Britain we’re doing quite well with our monarchs, at present. If you get a difficult monarch, you’re stuck with them unless you wish to engage in regicide or revolution. However, in our time, we can get stuck with apparent democrats too, and with oligarchies. So it returns to the question of the quality of people in power, not the system we live in.
If a dictator wishes to stay in power she or he still needs to keep their nose close to the wind, doing the right thing for the people and treating them well. If they fail in this then eventually they come to a sorry end. Revolutions and coups, and electoral landslides too, happen only when people feel things aren’t right.
A seal at Portheras Cove
But it’s not just about them. It’s about us. If we buy sensationalist newspapers or give clicks to online deceivers, if we pressurise leaders by expecting too much of them, or by criticising and blaming unfairly, or we fail to look at things in the round, then we’ll get leaders who ring-fence themselves for protection, distancing from and increasingly deluding the public with statements more than actions.
To quote President Georges Pompidou (in old sexist 1970s language), ‘A statesman is a politician who places himself at the nation’s service, and a politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service‘. Meanwhile, the good-hearted, well-motivated, listening, sensitive leaders – the ones who should be in the seats of power – wisely seek other jobs, or they land up in places like Cornwall.
We, the public, need to be more intelligent, aware, constructive and mature in our practice of democracy if we are to retain it. If politicians need security guards and spin-doctors they become inaccessible and democracy will not work. If the media and interest-groups engage in propaganda, manipulation and twisting the social discourse, democracy dies.
If electorates continue accepting this, we might as well also accept that we live in a ‘managed democracy’ – something we accuse Russia of having. That is, an opinion-manipulated democracy where there is no actual choice available and, even if the incumbent loses the election, nothing much really changes with the new lot, and the same oligarchy stands behind the scenes pulling strings.
To quote a 1970s bumper-sticker, ‘If democracy really changed things they’d make it illegal‘. And strangely, democracies are the most warlike nations of all. On behalf of whom?
So, Charles, hang in there. You aren’t involved in politics, and your job is to introduce some non-partisan wisdom, perspective and continuity to the equation. You’ve taken on a new mission.
Follow your intuitions, and when advice you’re given doesn’t ring true, follow your wisdom and preference. You’re in uncharted territory, but that’s not for the first time, and it’s likely that the public will think well of you if you handle this well.
Take time, don’t be pushed and don’t push yourself. Tell people that you’ll decide by tomorrow or next week. Enjoy the gardening. Be spontaneous.
When you feel up, be up, and when you’re down, be down, and teach people a new way of treating their king – more free of expectation and protocol and more happy with a happily human king. It’s okay if that crown is heavy – just take it off. We don’t mind. We don’t need the regalia and protocol – we need you.
That’s why your cancer is a gift, and I think you have the capacity to make it so.
With love, Palden.
This blog is guaranteed AI-free, crafted with Earthling-humanoid brainz and fingerz.
In my audiobook and various of my postings you’ll have heard of Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem, Palestine (here’s a brief intro). I used to work there.
Here’s a newsletter from Ibrahim Issa, the school’s director. It gives a taste of what it’s like running a school in occupied Palestine at present.
With love, Palden
—————————-
Dear Friends,
Thank you for all your support and solidarity with the Hope Flowers School (HFS). I am trying through this letter, to share with you what happened on 6 December 2023 at the HFS. It is a bit long; I believe that some of you have received a big number of pictures and videos on that day.
It is almost 21 years ago, when James Bennet wrote an article in the New York Times about HFS: “Arab Coexistence school falls victim to violence” you can read this article on: https://www.nytimes.com/…/arab-coexistence-school-falls…
Between December 2002 and December 2023, HFS battle for Peace continues.
The school-day at HFS starts early in the morning. Children and staff start arriving at 07:15 A.m. It is quite difficult to predict the day and whether clashes between Palestinians and Israeli army will erupt that day. Clashes could erupt at any moment of the day. HFS staffs have to be prepared to act in case any violence erupts at a sudden.
Elegant vehicles, huh?
On Wednesday, December 6th 2023, in my way to HFS at 7:15 AM. I have to pass Deheisha refugee camp and Al Khader village. In my way I found tens of Israeli military vehicles and armed personal carriers about to enter the refugee camp and the village. Despite military presence on the way, but I managed to reach HFS at 07:30 A.m. The neighborhood of HFS was quite. I did not see any Israeli soldiers in the neighborhood.
I started to receive calls at about 07:45 from HFS staff that they could not reach the school because of Israeli army presence and clashes between the army and Palestinians. So we decided to start the school day with the absence of two staff members who could not reach the school.
At 8:30 am, I was in my way from HFS to another meeting. On the corner of the school, I was stopped by tens of Israeli soldiers who were just arriving to the street and started to block the road with large concrete blocks using a bulldozer. The soldiers were very tense, especially I found myself with my car surrounded by big number of soldiers. The one soldier asked me to continue driving while another asked me to return backwards to HFS. I decided to stay unmoved because of unclearity in soldiers demands. Any wrong movement at this situation may be interpreted as an attack on soldiers and could kill me.
At this moment a military vehicle stopped next to me and there was apparently the commander of the unit. I talked to him in English and explained the situation that one soldier is asking to drive backwards and the other is asking me to drive forwards, I asked him if I could drive backwards (back to HFS), but he refused and asked me to continue driving forwards. He also instructed the soldiers to allow me moving forwards. I also told the army officer that I am a principle of a school located on the corner, and that I have 350 children aged 4-13 years old right now in the school with some children with special needs, and that I would appreciate if the army could give me 30 minutes to evacuate the school before they enter further in the neighborhood. The commander refused and he told me that in one hour they will finish their operation and that the army will reopen the road.
I cancelled my meeting and decided to stay nearby the HFS. I immediately called the staff at the HFS and asked them to take all measures (according to emergency plan) to protect the children and staff at the school and warned them that soldiers are in the neighborhood near the school.
At about 09:00 I received a call from vice-principle of HFS informing me that soldiers are near the school and that few armored vehicles have blocked the school parking and the main gate of the school and that leaving the school or entering the school is not possible.
A paramedic comforts an upset boy
At 09:10 I received another call informing me that children with autism spectrum disorder (32 out of 358) are terrified and that social workers and staff need help to calm them down. Then I continued to receive calls from HFS informing me that children are totally in panic after soldiers started to fire teargas and heard of sounds of explosions nearby HFS due to clashing with Palestinian youth outside the HFS.
At this point I asked teachers and all staff of HFS to pay attention for the physical safety of children and to avoid sitting beside windows or even trying to look outside from the windows. I also informed the education department in Bethlehem that we have an emergency at HFS and explained the situation inside the HFS.
Everyone was concerned that the situation will get worse especially that some schools in Bethlehem and in the West Bank have encountered similar problems in the past few weeks.
Some children have reacted strongly to fear like inability to breathe, others were crying, etc. Therefore, I asked the health department to help sending ambulances to help the staff to deal with stressed and fearful children at HFS. Indeed, 6 ambulances from Palestine Red Crescent Society arrived few minutes later, but the Israeli army prevented the ambulances to reach the HFS justifying that the area is “a military closed area”.
A teacher tries to calm the children
At this moment I started to realize the danger that children are in and started to call the Palestinian-Israeli military coordination office and asked them to speak to the Israeli military to allow the ambulances to reach the school. I decided to call other international organizations and asked them to urgently reach out for Israeli army to allow ambulances to reaching HFS.
The Israeli army has finally agreed to allow the ambulances to reach the school and finally allowed me to get back to the school in one of the ambulances. A detailed inspection of each ambulance was conducted by the army before it was allowed to move ahead. All ambulances were accompanied by an Israeli patrol.
At HFS, children were extremely fearful; in addition we were concerned that clashes between Palestinian and Israelis will erupt further.
Evacuation
Therefore, in consultation with the paramedics in the ambulances, we decided that it would be better to evacuate the whole school and take children to transport children to a safer place. The ambulances started to transport groups of children (maximum 10 in each ambulance accompanied by one teacher) to a nearby hospital.
Due to intensity of the situation, the general director of the education department arrived at HFS with one of the ambulances to support HFS’s staff and children. With the heroic work of paramedics of the Red Crescent society we managed to get all children and staff out safely.
A neighbour got shot. Well, he might have thrown stones at soldiers twenty years ago in the intifada, but he doesn’t have to die for that. He was just protecting his home.
During the evacuation, it was clear that a ‘demolition order’ was being carried out, and three neighbors’ houses right next to the school were razed to the ground by heavy demolition machines. Much violence was used by the army. Soldiers tried to prevent photos or videos from being taken, neighbors’ and teachers’ phones were roughly taken and broken. Three neighbors were injured, one seriously, he was shot in the head.
Some children have seen this happen. Hundreds of parents have heard about evacuation of the school. Parents started to reach the area of the school asking about their children. They were very scared. We asked parents to wait in hospital, you can imagine hundreds of parents were waiting every ambulance to arrive to see of their child/ren is/ are being safe. At the end of this difficult day, three families were left homeless, three people are injured, one of whom is in danger of life, and hundreds of children are further traumatized.
The impact of this violence on children, families is immense.
Teachers and counselors at HFS will have lots of extra work to do in trauma care in the weeks and months to come. It is therefore as urgent as ever that HFS work continue to provide trauma counseling for children and their families. We are very thankful for all of you who helped us on December 6th and many thanks for your solidarity and support to HFS.
The trauma counseling program at HFS aims to:
• To provide help for the children at the school and for families in Bethlehem to address the effects of the downward-spiralling cycle of violence and trauma that has arisen from violence and the occupation, and to remove the basis for future hostile behaviour.
• To create a model for wider use in Palestinian schools, to become a centre of excellence and dissemination for psychological support for people of the West Bank, and to share our accumulated knowledge and experience with the wider world.
Your support to HFS and trauma counseling program will be highly appreciated. Our battle for peace will continue!
Best regards, Ibrahim Issa, Director of HFS. hopeflowers@palnet.com www.hopeflowers.org Cell: +972(0)599294355
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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