First of a series about my thoughts and experiences around world healing consciousness work.
Over time I’ve gathered quite a lot of experience in this, in my own explorations and working in groups. In the 1990s I ran the Hundredth Monkey Project – camping retreats for 100 people doing inner work with world issues of the time. Afterwards I was involved in the Flying Squad, a smaller group that worked together intensively for twenty years.
Last year I got the message that I should write and record all I know and understand about this. My aim here is to set people thinking about translating their concerns about the world into activities to help it. Together with activism, campaigning, pursuing our life’s work, volunteering, fundraising and things like that, consciousness work is also something worth attending to. We need to co-create a new reality on planet Earth by working with its underlying patterns.
We need to think through the issues around this. Not because everyone should do the same thing, but because, whatever we do, and whatever method we use, whatever faith and belief we have, it’s good that we’ve clarified a few things, for ourselves and with others.
That oft-quoted adage, ‘be careful what you pray for’ is quite profound. So that why I’m doing this series, to bounce things around and give some things to consider. Sometime it will emerge in website form as well as audio.
In the podcast I’m asking questions about what we’re really aiming to do, and underlying considerations about how to go about it. If you’re interested in helping the world, or if you practice any kind of meditation or spiritual work, this might interest you. Because we have a big problem in our world today, and it’s all hands on deck.
It’s 33 minutes long. Music by Galen Hefferman.
If it interests you, there are also the Sunday evening meditations, which loosely concern this very matter. A regular weekly meditation that anyone may join with, wherever you are. Information here.
Sometimes life is a real grinder, shoving us through things that can test us to the limits, whether or not we like it.
But there’s always something to learn from it all.
I went down to the woods below our farm to sit by the stream with my recorder to capture bird sonics, though actually a podcast is what came up.
It’s a streamside chat about going through stuff – in my case, cancer is a large part of that – and dealing with this very strange situation of living on Planet Earth.
It’s a place full of goodness and badness and everything in between. When you approach the end of your life and see it a bit more from the outside, you can’t help but wonder, “What was all that really for?“.
Short answer: the evolution of the soul, through learning from what life teaches us and making a contribution.
Though of course it’s much more complex than that.
With music by an Oregonian friend, Galen Hefferman. Recorded on a mossy log in West Penwith, Cornwall – near Land’s End – with the help of some twittering birds, jackdaws, the stream and some Atlantic breezes. 24 mins long.
Some of you will be having a quieter Christmas than many, and some creatives will be using this time as a way to get down to some work.
In this podcast I share some thoughts about writing. I’ve been an author, editor and online content creator, and I have no idea how many hours I’ve sat at typewriters and computers for sixtyish years, creating yardages of verbiage in print.
I guess my mother handed me that gene – she was a prizewinning shorthand secretary in the 1940s.
This isn’t about sentence structure or punctuation. It’s about getting on the flow. Getting it down – it involves a lot of fingerwork on keyboards.
That’s what copyright is actually about: ideas are free and flow freely, but it’s the fingerwork, the iteration of ideas in text, that gets copyrighted. The work done to encapsulate ideas on paper or onscreen.
It’s a load of slog. You spend hours and hours and come out with a coupla sheets of paper or a screenload of web-page. People loom at it and think, ‘Is that all?’.
If you’re writing a book it stays inside a computer for months, and no one sees it, and then suddely it comes out as a printed or audio book, and it’s almost like giving birth.
So this might be interesting and useful to a few listeners. Recorded in October 2022 during a storm.
This is dedicated to my old friends Jaki Whitren and John Cartwight – they eloped upstairs together a few years ago. They’re the greatest rock band you never heard of, big in Glastonbury in the 1980s-90s.
And this podcast isn’t what you might at first think it’s about… this is about reincarnation.
Introduced and outroduced by the Massed Corvid Choir of Lower Grumbla, Cornwall – crows and jackdaws that live in the woods below the farm. At dawn they get worked up and suddenly they all take flight, hundreds of them, and they settle on the roof of the farm. You can hear them arriving and landing just before the music starts.
So this is about reincarnation, and the many lives we live in this life. For me, towards the end of my current life (I’m currently 72, with cancer) this takes on a special significance, since I know in my bones, and always have, that it doesn’t just go blank and dark when you die. It doesn’t end there. You carry on – but without a body or a slot in Planet Earth’s rather bumpy reality.
And when you get born, you aren’t a blank sheet – you come with character, proclivities and tendencies already there, brought with you from before.
Oh, and, for your interest, this is Paldywan on steroids. Yes, literally. I had my cancer treatment today (Weds 7th Dec), and part of it is a steroid called Dex, or Dexamethasone. After my treatment, as you might imagine, I’m buzzing. This time I thought I’d do a podcast to harness the buzzing.
The steroids tend to loosen my vocal chords, so if you’re one of those who likes my voice, this is a good one! But I’m a little slurred too, in places, not entirely in my body.
With love from West Penwith in Cornwall – a rather magic place. Thanks for listening. There’s more to come. 35 mins.
Here’s a new podcast and also an update on recent developments with the ‘operation’ I reported recently.
The podcast is about World Healing.
It’s a notion that can at times be rather lightly taken, but it’s really important, this. Especially if you feel a need to make a contribution to the world’s future, increasingly shaky as it is becoming.
There are different ways of doing world healing innerwork, and this is what Palden has learned along the way, especially from the Council of Nine, and through gaining experience by running the Hundredth Monkey Camps in the mid-1990s and being part of the Flying Squad thereafter.
There are many applications of this general method of working, in relation to world events as they arise, and particularly to the underlying issues and deep learning experiences that lie beneath and behind them.
This podcast looks into a few of the issues around healing the world. Recorded down in the woods on our farm on Monday 28th November 2022. 30 mins. It’s here:
The ‘operation’ is kinda progressing, a bit edgy, but getting there. The latest crisis is that child Phyllis, 3, has just contracted cholera. The children’s daycare centre in whose care we left her was not the best (it was urgent, though Phyllis thus avoided the car crash), and we need to bring her and Felicia back together – they need each other.
Phyllis
So we’re going to retrieve Phyllis tonight (it’s a five hour drive each way) so that she’s under the care of the doctor I’m working with, who is a 100% good Christian man, and we’re getting on well. The taxi-driver who saved the lives of Phyllis and the agent, bringing them to hospital, I gave the job of fetching Phyllis – he’s another really good man, and I’m going to try to give him work over time, to reward him for his efforts.
Felicia is conscious and steadying, and agent no 2 is in intensive care under the doctor. Agent no 1 is still in captivity somewhere, though I’m not focused on him much, except holding him psychically (as things calm down, I’ll be able to focus on him a bit more – see if I can get some clues).
New funds are coming thru today or tmrw – that’s a relief. Corporations and their accounts depts can be annoyingly slow when you’re in the middle of a metaphorical gun battle. How is it that Paldywan suddenly finds himself working for a transnational bank? I was supposed to be retired and frittering away practicing independent self-care and watching TV. Or moaning about the government…
Anyway, if you are able, please surround child Phyllis, 3, with love and healing, and we hope she will be back on Tuesday so she can be treated by the doctor. Without really knowing it, with her mum Phyllis has been a heroine. I get a feeling this is a formative experience for a potentially formidable lady, in coming times.
My prayer is that Felicia and Phyllis will emerge from this in a positive way. Under great pressure, Felicia has acted very sanely and effectively, hanging in there through a traumatic time, and I would have no difficulty recommending her to an NGO or similar for a good job.
All is well enough with me: this is challenging but I’m holding up, and there are some occasionally really rewarding moments. I’m not at it all the time – it comes in bursts through the day, but they can be full-on when it happens.
One thing my parents gave me, for which I am eternally grateful, is a gift of diplomacy. I’m not sure where I got patience and perseverance from, but thanks for that anyway! Erk.
I’ve just done another upload to my audio archive of talks from former decades. It’s taking shape, gradually – my wintertime project.
This one is about ancient British time systems and the way they are built into ancient remains from the neolithic and bronze ages. It discusses key issues such as solstices, equinoxes, eclipses, lunar maxima and minima, the rising and setting of stars, zodiacs and subjective inner time.
I’ve just listened to a rather inspired one, which I did in Byron Bay, Australia, in 1992, shortly after writing the book ‘The Only Planet of Choice’. If you’re a TOPOC freak, you might be interested in this one. It’s called ‘An ET View of Terrestrials and What’s Happening on Planet Earth‘. Trivial, mad, timewasting stuff, of course…
I’m learning a lot from these talks – it’s funny, that. But when you’re in life’s last chapter, it’s really fascinating trawling through old stuff, just to get a balanced view of things you’ve been involved with through life. It’s a bit like putting yourself on the scales to see how it all balances up. You gotta look at the plusses and the minuses.
When I was 24 I had a near-death experience that changed my brains and removed a lot of my memory and capacity to remember the events of my life. This is why, if I haven’t seen you for over a decade, I might look vaguely at you while a memory is slowly emerging (sorry about that).
So it can be quite a surprise, actually, to hear myself rabbiting on from around thirtyish years ago – and I’ve come across some gems – but the thing is, was it the same life?
And that’s just some of them
We have hundreds of crows living down in the woods below our farm. They assemble after autumn equinox and spend the winter together, dispersing around Penwith around spring equinox. In the evenings they get worked up, crarking a lot until, around dusk, they go into swoopy formations and an impressive tribal synergy process.
It’s like the corvid tribe has an identity and mind of its own, which the individual crows plug into as they do these dusk rituals, before they all settle in the trees to spend the night together, as one tribe – all of them probably related.
This is one of the blessings of my life at present. Another is the little birds, robin and tits that feed at the feeder hanging in the dogrose bush outside my door.
An old pathway at our farm, certainly centuries old, could even be four millennia old
I’ve been at it again – beavering away on quite a few things, including coddling plans for my next round of events and activities in 2023. And for however long I stay standing.
It’s a product of spending a lot of time alone – as you might imagine, it makes me find things to do I wouldn’t otherwise do, if I could run around being busy like most people.
One outcome is a new podcast, and it’s called Earth – one of a series of ET-related podcasts I’m doing at present. It’s all about my understanding of the perspective that people who don’t live on Earth have about our planet and our acute situation.
It brings into focus a big reason why dealing with our world problem is important not only to us but across the universe. Sounds like a strange and rather human-centric viewpoint, but it isn’t. This podcast explains how and why.
Food for cogitation. 33 minutes of it. Enzymes for the soul.
Download or listen to it here www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html or on Apple, Google or Spotify (look for Pods from the Far Beyond).
Dans Meyn, or the Merry Maidens stone circle – 4,500 years old.
There’s more. If you’re really interested in this particular issue and want more, then I’ve unearthed an inspired talk I gave to the PAN conference in 1996, giving more details about the cosmic situation that Earth is in. It’s now a PodTalk, The Only Planet of Choosing.
I gave this talk not long after having written the book The Only Planet of Choice and during the time I was running the Hundredth Monkey camping retreats, working with world healing issues. It’s all about the wider reasons why world healing work is an important part of the mega-project of fixing Planet Earth.
I’ve uploaded it as a podtalk: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html – but this one is for those of you who are specifically interested in this (it’s 1hr 15mins long).
My aim with creating this audio output is to build up a body of material about those subjects and issues I’ve been involved in, for leaving after I’ve gone – they’ll come in useful in a future time.
With love from me, Palden
A cloud over Zennor, here in West Penwith, Cornwall
It’s raining and blustering, grey, with low cloud over Bartinney Castle outside my rain-bespattered window.
I’ve been fiddling away at home on the recordings of my Magic Circle in Buckfastleigh, Devon, and now they’re ready.
The first is about our origins as souls and about the people we come from, ending with an inner journey to uncover your own particular story – where you came from and what your people are like.
The second is about world healing, where we visit Pakistan to work with the psycho-emotional aspect of the devastation that people there are going through.
The third is about the gift of living on Earth and what we can do about the predicament we’re in, living as we do in a currently rather crunchy and crazy world.
That’ll keep you busy for a while, I hope! It kept me busy this week, and it was a great way of finding out what I actually came up with during the Magic Circle. Sometimes there are teachings in there for me too.
Since getting cancer I’ve gone through a big systems reset. It has changed my psyche and partially disabled me, so that I can’t carry on in life in the way I used to. Though I’ve stood on stages and led workshops and events for yonks and I’m drawing on lots of experience, cancer has made me start afresh and feel my way forward in a new context, with a rather different me who is doing it.
That’s partially what these Magic Circles were about – to feel my way forward in a new way, following a level-shift that cancer, and my way of dealing with it, seem to have given me – together with a few big Neptune transits that floored me and brought an unexpected rebirth. I’ve needed to start again, feeling out a new way of doing things that reflects where I’m now truly at. Each of the Magic Circles has therefore been part of a progression.
Hamish Miller
But another reason I’m doing this is also because my old friend Hamish Miller taught me a lesson. At the time when I was staying with Ba Miller and him, twelve years ago, I was fresh to Cornwall and didn’t know enough about it to dredge his memory for his own local knowledge, while he was still alive. Unthinkingly, I assumed he would be around for a while. Then suddenly he was gone and then, four years later, I embarked on a research project into the prehistory of this area, West Penwith. I’d really have liked to sit down with Hamish to raid his brains. Well, he did nudge me occasionally from upstairs, as did John Michell (another pair of shoulders on which I stand), but with dead souls you don’t get the detail and information you can with living souls – you might get energy and support, but not maps, diagrams and details. So that knowledge is gone.
When cancer came along and I thought of my own recyclability, something in me realised I needed to disgorge as much of my stuff as I could, in useful ways that people can make use of once I’ve gone. Three years later, they’ve taken the form of a book, a blog, podcasts and events. I haven’t given my life to fame or capital accumulation, but this is something I can leave behind. I’ve got Jupiter in Pisces after all – treasures in heaven, even though my bank account rarely did well.
We all have a contribution to make, and this was mine, acting out a planet-fixer’s karma in a world heading the other way, as best he could, with a few goals scored, and a lot missed. That’s the way the cookie crumbles, and that’s what life’s about. I regret the ways I’ve made life more difficult or painful for some people, and I’m glad for those whose lives I’ve helped or lifted up. It’s really a mixed bag, this Earth business, and I’ve been pretty mixed, and mixed-up, too. Though something gets distilled amongst all this and, in the end, this is what survives death. It survives as a bundle of experiential memory for the soul that passes on, and as a legacy for those left behind.
So editing and preparing material for uploading and leaving to posterity is what I’ve been doing this week, and now it’s done, uploaded and ready. Thank you to you who organised the Magic Circle and helped me through the weekend, and to those who came and those who couldn’t or didn’t.
Something else is brewing, and it has surfaced through these Magic Circles, and I’m making no decisions about it until at least winter solstice – it needs careful mulling over. Also, for future events, I’m taking my lead from requests that come from people who are happy to organise things.
I must go at the pace of a cancer patient who must manage his energy well. I have few energy-reserves, so every period of activity needs to be followed by a time of quietness and downtime. Energy-management has been a fascinating learning experience in the last three years – how to stay within my scope of possibilities, pace myself, and particularly how to recognise in advance the signs that I’m drooping and need to go into self-protect mode.
That’s a fascinating challenge. As is this: anything I start now will be intended to outlast me, and to grow forward from where we left it when I pass away. With all that I have done in group process, world healing, astrology, geomancy, geopolitics, history and other things, it’s all incomplete, a ‘work in progress’ that I hope will be taken forward by others from the place where I was able to leave it.
I’ve been away on Dartmoor and in Glastonbury, where I delivered a talk on Friday evening. It was really moving to see everyone who came, to feel their good vibes and interest and the atmosphere that evening in the Assembly Rooms. Hostess Samia Gelfling’s intro and outro to my talk were remarkable.
I wish it were possible to get round everyone in the audience personally, but nowadays three meaningful conversations a day are all I can do, and it would take ages to do justice to everyone.
Doing these talks, it’s my way of connecting with as many people as I can, within my energy-range. There’s a deep smile lurking in my heart. I’m now enjoying being back in Cornwall for a necessary reflection pause and for my cancer treatment (and its after-effects).
Magic Circle in Devon
Next up comes a ‘Magic Circle’ in Buckfast (near Totnes) on 24th September 2022. This will be a 5-6 hour session in three segments. It’s all about our origins, the soul tribes we come from, passing over to the otherworlds, bringing otherworlds into our lives, world healing and the way the world is going.
Stuff like that. You’re really welcome. We’ll also have a dash of chi gung with Jeanne Hampshire, garnished with some live music from two friends visiting from Oregon in Turtle Island, Jahnavi and Galen. And me, rabbiting on at you and lifting the cork off your crown chakra, with a little help from my friends.
Are we visitors from far away having a human experience or humans blessed with periodic uplifts? Soul-food for folks who’ve been at it for some time and are looking for new angles on this strange experience called life on Earth.
A new PodTalk
Following my talk in Glastonbury, I’ve now uploaded a recording of it (you can stream it or download it as an MP3). It’s 1hr 47mins long. The last quarter of it was taken up with some really interesting questions and contributions from the floor. Find it here:
It was great visiting Glastonbury. It is, after all, a pilgrimage place, and that’s what it is and does well. On Saturday I braved the town, had a maca smoothie, a few of those deeply meaningful conversations, some path-crossings with old friends in the street, and retreated twice to the calmness of the Abbey to ‘just sit’ and to defrag from the buzzy atmosphere and dense electromagnetics.
Glastonbury is a vortical place of contrasts, a karma-exchange and somewhere between an experiential kaleidoscope and a transdimensional roundabout. In vibe, it’s rather like Jerusalem, actually – though much less extreme – while both equally share a similar craziness, intensity and bizarre sanctity.
Thanks to Lily Lionheart for her hospitality, to Jonathan and Penny for trans-Dumnonian teleportation and to Rebecca Brain for her magical companionship and for being a superb minder and a really interesting person.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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