Second in a series of thoughts and observations about world healing. For people interested in helping the world evolve and break through, by using meditation and innerwork.
When I was organising gatherings and camps in the 1980s, some quite remarkable things took place that demonstrated the capacity of innerwork to change things. Here’s a quote, about something that happened in 1983:
“The high point of the weekend came when we spent twenty minutes sending meditative support to forty or so Glastonbury women who, that weekend, were at Greenham Common USAF base near Newbury on a major protest action against cruise missiles. The meditation seemed profound – we all were quite stirred by it. Later that day, Lydia, one of the women at Greenham, returned to report that the Glastonbury women had instigated a tearing down of the perimeter fence of the base. “We did it!”, she exclaimed. It turned out they had started doing this spontaneously at the very same time that we had sent our meditative support, earlier in the day.“
I’ll always remember that look on Lydia Lyte‘s face….
In the early 1990s I was asked to write a book on behalf of the Council of Nine, some cosmic beings, not of this Earth, who had a lot to say about world healing, and this set me off on a path.
This later developed into two innerwork projects – the Hundredth Monkey Project and the Flying Squad. In these we developed a bundle of techniques and a body of experience, building up a momentum over a twenty year period and working with all sorts of issues during that time.
Now, in late life, and while I can, I’m bringing together my thoughts on world healing in writing and podcasts, to leave to posterity. This is part two (there might be five-ish).
32 minutes long, with bumbly evensong from our farm, and music by my friend Galen in Oregon.
And here’s a thought. I’m not certain about this, but it’s worth contemplating. In the world’s collective psyche, there’s a certain amount of infection with the psychological thought-virus of war. On the whole, it cannot spread and grow any more than the host body, humanity, will allow – the extent to which it is susceptible. But this thought-virus does not decrease unless humanity as a whole shifts its values to build increased immunity to it.
I’m not talking about conscious thoughts or thought-through policies or actions. It’s on an unconscious level. But I’ve sometimes noticed how, when a conflict subsides in one area, another conflict will come up elsewhere, as if the virus hops from an arena where people have developed immunity (often exhaustion and a desire for normality), to an area where the population is susceptible. It will be vulnerable because of divisive politics, ethnic tensions, oligarchic manipulation, outside intervention and proxy-warring, and sometimes outright madness.
I first noticed this in 1990, when the long Lebanese civil war ended and the multiple wars that broke out as the former Yugoslavia disintegrated.
This dynamic happens in other ways too, and we’ve recently had an example. It’s as if the outbreak of war in Sudan has vacuumed up some of the available violence energy, draining some of it away from Ukraine, where a much talked-about escalation of conflict isn’t really happening – some of its motivating energy has been siphoned off by Sudan.
Sometimes the grief that is experienced in conflicts can be overridden by other forms of grief. This we see in eastern Congo at pesent, where recent flooding has sucked much of the energy out of the complex conflict there. it has shifted the emotional focus.
The recent earthquake in Syria came at a time when the Syrian civil war was subsiding, converting the sump of conflict-grief in Syria into another kind of tragedy. On the other hand, in 1999, earthquakes in both Turkiye and Greece brought a simmering longterm conflict between them to an end.
So if we look at humanity’s collective psyche as an enormous, seething ball of blobs, representing mindsets, and interweaving threads, representing themes and issues, all in perpetual motion, then on the whole there will be a fluctuating balance over time between different forces at work.
This includes positive and multifaceted beliefs too – at times there can be outbursts of negativity or positivity which, over time, balance out. Though despite this, there will also be a slow net shift of values happening underneath. In the last century or so, deaths and injuries from conflict, seen in proportion to the size of population, have actually been decreasing significantly.
It’s useful looking at things this way. This isn’t about Russians and Ukrainians, Democrats or Republicans or the people and the regime: it’s about conflict and polarisation, whoever the current puppets and victims are, and whatever they’re in conflict over – which, to confuse things, might not even be the same issue for each side. It affects all of us variously.
So when we look at current events, it’s important to step back, looking behind and underneath those reported events at the underlying dynamics prompting them. One interesting polarity which I have been personally experiencing is this: strangely, as world population has risen (and dramatically so in recent decades) so too has social isolation and loneliness. That is, with much of the world feeling crowded out with other people, a compensating grouping of isolated people has been growing too.
Even so, those with busy lives and lots of people to relate to will often have a shallowness of relationship leading to an underlying loneliness, even if well-distracted, while those with lots of time tend to be factually isolated, left behind in distant villages or shut in unknown rooms, and they feel it in a different way.
We live also in a world where there are hunger and obesity, and extremes of wealth and poverty, advantage and disadvantage. The issue here is that these polarities have become more extreme, and the natural relationship between them has dwindled – and they live in different worlds.
Same planet, different worlds. Yet even though New York City and the Tian Shan mountains are like different worlds, and though our current obsession with identity obscures our common ground, we are all unwitting participants in one planetary group psyche.
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.
One of the big themes of my life has been time – dealing with the present, understanding the past and envisioning the future.
The future has preoccupied me since I was a late teenager – sitting around with friends, discussing things, trying to see which way the world will go. That’s still an open and evolving question, though for me the issues are clearer now [see:The World in 2050] and my perceptions of fifty years ago, honed by experience and the passing of time, in essence remain quite consistent.
Looking at the future led me to the past. As a student at the London School of Economics during the ‘troubles’ of 1969-71, I’d experienced what it’s like being in a revolution that is suppressed and fails – a devastating transition from inspired ferment to cruel disillusionment. Many are the peoples round the world who have experienced similar since then.
Trying to deal with my ‘political pain’, I studied the movements of change of the past, seeking clues. Then I was given a gift.
Ragged and burned out, one summer’s day I hitched out of London, landing up two days later in the Orkney islands. I found the Ring of Brogar, a big stone circle, and innocently I decided to sleep in the middle of it. I wasn’t expecting a major soul-intervention that night. But it came.
I had a profound lucid dream in which hundreds of people danced around the circle. Chanting and stamping rhythmically as they moved round it, they made the earth resound like a deeply donging bell, generating a charged magical atmosphere.
Loving my favourite stone at Carn Lês Boel
One of them came, reached down and said, “Come and join us“. Which I duly did. From then on I was a smitten megalithomaniac. A deep memory of ancient times was reawakened. Back then too I was involved with time, responsible for organising longterm observances and rites to work with Metonic, Jupiter, Saturn and other longer cycles of time.
Guess what, in this life, by the mid-1980s I was initiating consciousness-raising camps, doing a modern version of the same thing. And they were astrologically timed. After one of the camps I had a moving inner experience where the modern I and the ancient me were dialoguing, sharing our perspectives from our contrasting points in time.
So, I’ve been an astrologer, historian, antiquarian and futurologist. I didn’t particularly plan this but that’s the way it unfolded, in paragraphs and chapters through life. While studying astrology in the 1970s it felt more like remembering than learning afresh. By 1990 I had compiled The Historical Ephemeris of historical cycles with a timeline of events, showing how major-scale changes in human ideas and activities can be identified by observing such cycles. A labour of love, much ignored by historians, it needed doing and I did it.
For the last decade I’ve been studying and mapping West Penwith’s prehistoric sites. We have lots of them. One day I realised why the ancient Penwithians had gone to all the trouble of building these things. Experiences gathered in world healing [see:The Flying Squad] over the previous 35ish years led to a lightbulb moment that came up at Bosiliack Barrow, where I go whenever I seek insights. It’s funny how a revelation often simply uncovers something obvious and already there, though until then it is unseen.
I’m not particularly into earth healing, lightworking or healing and prayer circles, though it’s important that people do these. I’m more into working surgically with specific issues that obstruct progress, in an inner journeying and energy-working sense. It involves addressing fundamental social and cultural patternings, tendencies and institutions that become spotlighted by current events, digging down to get closer to the heart of things, unconcealing and helping to heal the layered pain and damage that humanity has brought upon itself over time. In our own time, these issues are getting in the way of necessary change.
CASPN members, after doing maintenance work at Boscawen-ûn
Consciousness work is upstepped immensely when groups of people work together. Over time, in activities with others that I’ve been involved with, remarkable outcomes have occasionally arisen from it. The Council of Nine (I wrote a book for them in the early 1990s) had emphasised this too: “If there are thirty-six with one mind, focused together, then the entire world, even the universe, may be changed“.
However, an undistracted, unwavering, one-minded focus is needed for that, and it’s not easy. If a group or network knits itself together over time, melding as a group, it can build up a momentum and focus that can take us at least part way along that track.
Sometimes it even happens unintentionally in the public sphere – moving moments experienced at a captivating music concert, a funeral, an uprising or even in a football crowd. Notable in particular are those moments that shake the awareness and feelings of mainstream people in their millions – poignant events, situations and crises that can sometimes evoke a one-mindedness in millions of people at the same time.
When the numbers rise, the intention and energy-holding are good, and there is real feeling behind it, the work people do in this field does have a positive effect, incrementally raising the world’s vibrational level. I encourage you to include this kind of work as a slice of attention in your life, in whatever way is best for you.
Brane chambered cairn, near Carn Euny
Back to ancient sites. The key sites are those that enclose space – stone circles, enclosures, chambered cairns, caves, wells and dolmens. Here intense vibrational fields can be built up within that space. That’s what the people in my dream fifty years ago were doing.
In many ancient sites we can still feel vestiges of those energy-fields, built up over the centuries during the megalithic era. A presence is in residence. At Boscawen-ûn stone circle, a couple of miles from me, it’s quite common that, when you arrive, someone else is leaving, and when you leave, someone else arrives. There’s something bigger going on here.
Being a peninsula at the end of a bigger peninsula (Cornwall and Devon), West Penwith has definite edges, bounded by the sea. Even the landward side in the east is guarded by three hills in a dead straight line (St Michael’s Mount, Trencrom Hill and St Ives’ Head), creating a threshold and energy-shield. (Interestingly, the G7 conference held in Cornwall in 2021 was located exactly on this line.)
Bosiliack Barrow
As I did my research, it came clear that this was not just a fascinating collection of ancient sites – they constituted one big, integrated system, roughly 10×15 miles in size, and purposefully built. It was rooted in the landscape, anchored to key hills (neolithic tor enclosures) and promontories (cliff sanctuaries). The location of major sites such as stone circles is largely determined by these.
These sites are also variously plugged into underground water-energy systems beneath them. Stone circles and dolmens are sited on top of ‘blind springs’, energy-springs emerging as a vortex on the surface, which the ancients then entrained and focused by building an ancient site on top.
They’re also plugged into the wider cosmos by alignments to the rising and setting points of the sun and moon at key times of year, as well as, in some cases, certain key stars – marked out by alignments to menhirs, cairns or natural features. The designs, geometry and mathematics of many sites also embodied principles such as the Metonic cycle, a 19-year cycle of relationship between the solar and lunar calendars, both of which were used at the time.
Tregeseal
Stone circles and other sites are placed in remarkable locations, with a visible relationship with the lay of the land. Tregeseal stone circle, near me, lies in the apex of a U-shaped bowl of hills which meld together to highlight a gap in the west, toward the sea and the distant Isles of Scilly, which float on the ocean like a mystic realm on the edge of the world.
Stone circles, enclosures and certain hills and features were amped up by cairns, menhirs and other markers that were aligned to them, acting as feeders, relays and batteries. These integrated the system as a whole into a network. In some cairns, bodies were buried not for the memorialisation purposes we now practice with our dead, but to bless and light up the land and the network by burying the relics of revered people at carefully-chosen places – rather like the medieval reverence for saints’ relics.
It was all for the engineering of conditions in which advanced consciousness levels could be achieved – though there were other purposes too. Enclosed energy-spaces such as stone circles and chambers are insulated, charged-up spaces. In Penwith, background radiation in a stone circle is much lower inside than outside it, and this applies also to background psychic noise. A protected, charged space like this allows clearer and stronger psychic, shamanic and healing work – and many of you will have experienced this yourselves.
At the Hundredth Monkey camps of the mid-1990s we built up an energy-field in the circle that resembled those that they built up at ancient sites. An energy-field morphs into a reality-field, where the framework of reality changes gear and things become possible that are not available under normal circumstances.
This was noticeable at the end of a camp when we closed the circle – the mood would subside like a slow puncture, ‘normality’ would restore its grip and the background noise and clamour of the busy world around began intruding again. We had been in a magic space with very different character, norms and rules.
Treen chambered cairn
Inside chambered cairns there’s a profound quietness providing ideal conditions for solitary meditation, vision-questing, innerwork and conscious dying, and also for the treatment of seeds, tools, elixirs and magical objects. Insulated from outside by stone and earth, such cairns sit on energy-vortices generated by the intersection of two or more underground water streams underneath. This makes the chamber into an energy-bath or orgone accumulator, valuable for entering into altered states.
Apart from ‘getting high’, why did they bother with all this? It had a direct bearing on the fortunes of people and tribes, as an investment that paid good dividends. Although their civilisation was materially simple, it was culturally and spiritually sophisticated. They had an advanced technology that worked esoterically with the essence of life, the core dynamics within all things, with which they could carry out forms of genetic modification, long-distance communication, medical procedures, ecological and climatic regulation and societal problem-solving.
They weren’t manipulating genetics the way we do today: instead they created energised conditions within which organisms could modify and enhance themselves, and this has been demonstrated to be possible in modern-time experiments too. They needed no telegraph wires or radio waves for communication: trained psychics, often some of society’s neurodiverse people, trained up, would enter a state in which time and distance ceased being an issue.
As for weather-modification, by siting menhirs, mounds and stones on top of energy-conductive water and metal veins and magnetic anomalies, they could neutralise the excesses of bioelectric charge between land and sky, reducing climatic extremes and damaging weather events. Conducting sometimes long and complex rites they focused on keeping Gaia and the spirits of land, sea and sky happy.
Caer Brân
Different kinds of sites evoke different responses – this concerns consciousness-engineering. Just over the valley from me is Caer Brân, a circular hillbrow enclosure surrounded by earth banks, which could hold a gathering of at least 300 people – I believe it was the parliament site for Penwith in the bronze and iron ages. Parliament-moots were probably held annually at a fullmoon around summer solstice, exploiting the virtues of the time and the site, which is exactly aligned with two other circular enclosures (Castle an Dinas and Pordenack Point), with a summer solstice orientation. Though it has a remarkable panorama encompassing Mount’s Bay and the Isles of Scilly, you can’t really see the view from inside because the surrounding banks obscure it. This entrains consciousness upwards and inwards.
Chapel Carn Brea from Boscawen-ûn
Meanwhile, on a neolithic tor hill or a hill camp, awareness opens out over a wide vista, invoking an upward-and-outward feeling. Or at some sites our attention might be entrained in certain directions – at Boscawen-ûn we are drawn toward Chapel Carn Brea, the very last hill in Britain, a beacon hill topped with a neolithic longbarrow and bronze age cairns. In contrast, in a chamber or holy well a deep interiority arises. Ancient sites had added properties engineered into them.
People did ongoing magical work over many generations, well-trained, focused and serious in intent. To crank it up further, they chose power points in time – an eclipse, solstice or planetary configuration – amplifying and pushing their energy-work over a critical potency hump.
There are things to learn from all this. I’m not suggesting building new stone circles everywhichwhere, but there are ways we can amp up world healing work by learning from the shamanic methodology and philosophy that megalithic peoples used. One key element is groupwork and another is the focus such a group can build up. In some respects this was easier for the ancients since they were mostly related, well accustomed to it and also much less psychologically scatterbrained than we. But we moderns have our virtues, such as psychospiritual diversity, a lot of creativity and a good measure of despair regarding the state of the world.
My feeling is that, in the coming decades, events on planet Earth will reach moments of intensity where everyone worldwide gets a deep and clear sense of the full extent of what’s at stake. Events have a way of manifesting scenarios before us that stir us up, press our collective buttons and present sharp dilemmas – whether they’re big events such as the recent earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria, or small, highly poignant events such as a refugee baby washed up dead on Greek shores. These experiences focus minds and hearts, invoking archetypal imagery, stirring sentiments and moral choices. This global process will intensify in coming times and there’s an inevitable crunchpoint approaching, or a few of them, where we’re faced with events of a ‘this really is it‘ kind.
Chapel Carn Brea
It all hangs around whether we pull together globally or atomise into a tangled mess of narrow interests. It’s not just a matter of practical cooperation, effort and peacemaking, but also one of one-minded and one-hearted inner consensus. We’re faced with a mountain of global issues that require a miracle, or a stream of them, and normal means of fixing our problem are too slow and clunky. Only a quantum shift of approach and priorities is likely to prevent disastrous levels of hardship and disruption in coming decades.
A miracle requires the focusing and intensification of an energy field to the extent that our former understanding of reality flips. Nothing much might immediately change, but everything looks and feels very different. A new reality-field supersedes the previous one. The rules change and remarkable things happen. This depends greatly on how, collectively, we see and judge things – a disaster can be made good if if leads to fundamental changes.
This involves going to the heart of things, dealing with them in a psychospiritual way. Not to the exclusion of practical solutions, but complementing them. Making a big step in the collective heart of humanity. Creating a resonance that overrides the psychic disarray and disturbance of today – a central cause of today’s global problems.
‘Disaster’ means out of tune with or loss of the stars. Out of sync with nature, human nature and the cosmos. Out of sync with the guiding light within. The ancients did their shamanic energy-work to keep things resonating well, knowing that everything is interconnected and interdependent. Fixing the world today involves a big cooperation in every possible sense, between humans and with nature and the cosmos.
We have this in our collective memory – it’s a taproot memory in humanity’s collective soul. If we read the underlying meaning of current events to be a manifestation of all that we semi-consciously fear, dread, need and hope for, it is possible to see how events are leading us toward a crunch point, a truth point. A point of focus where everyone’s awareness potentially comes together to think a new and deep thought.
Mên Scryfa and Carn Galva
So something in our deep memory from former millennia holds a key here. And it concerns the future.
Time is a strange thing, and dimensional. When I went down with cancer, my life expectancy was shortened yet strangely I was given a gift of expanded time. In a time-poor world I became time-rich. Not long ago I asked myself whether I’d like my old life back, and I realised I didn’t really. Though life is more difficult now, and serving time as a cancer patient, 70% dead and hovering there, mostly alone, has tested me to the limit, time has morphed toward a more timeless zone where other things start happening. Loss of physical capability has led to something of a gain in inner ability. Life on Earth always has its compensations!
Perhaps that’s where the world is heading. Global loss of traction caused by increasing crises and disruptions could well lead to a similar compensating factor, experienced by growing numbers of people. I’ve discovered this in the crisis zones I’ve been in – such intensity can pull out the true human in us. When your life is at risk you play for high stakes, and there’s no alternative. You’re drawn into the immediacy of now, and time changes in power and potency. That’s where root-questions are met. From a world healing viewpoint, that’s where the crunchpoint lies, and from it will be born the next world, whatever shape that takes.
This evening, Sunday, at 8pm UK time (7pm GMT) you are welcome to join our little circle of souls meditating together, wherever we live, for half an hour each week. (Check out the right time in your time zone.)
Do it your way – however you meditate, pray, chant or whatever you usually do – or simply spend some quiet time with us.
It’s all for encouraging forward progress, resolution and repair to humanity; benefit to nature and all beings; uplift to our planetary world, and welcoming higher powers to work with us and through us – HP Source.
Here’s a prayer for the people and the land of Sudan. This is an attempt by self-oriented forces in our world to take control and overpower a people’s movement for democracy. The ordinary people of Sudan have been making admirable progress in constructing a new way of being and designing their society, and this has, for now, been destroyed by force. It is now time for this kind of control agenda, force and destruction to come to an end. So may these sad events in Khartoum become a profound learning experience for the world, a revelation of the fundamentals that are involved and a moment of social re-empowerment and collective healing for the people of planet Earth, holding the Sudanese in light. May we as a people learn collective maturity so that we can steadily hold the circle of power, holding true to the needs and rights of humanity and all of the species that we share this world with.
There’s no sign-up, subscription, logon or strings – just join us in the energy-field of our circle of souls at the time when the channel is open.
As usual I shall be vegetating from 8-8.30pm UK time, with a number of soul-friends dotted around this weirdly spinning planet, and you are welcome to join!
There’s no sign up or log on or subscription. It’s open. Just find a nice place to sit, and join at that time (adjust for your time-zone – follow the link for details). Be in peace, or practice whatever meditation or form of uplift or consciousness work you normally practice. Do it your way. This is all about spiritually-diverse souls working together toward one basic aim…
…to help humanity and our world progress and evolve in positive ways, to find solutions to our global issues, healing to our wounds and transformation of our historic patterns.
Or words to that effect. You know what I mean, and we know what we need to do.
The bonus here, especially for those of you who often do meditation on your own, is that there is an open channel at that specific time, for half an hour, and it has a way of upstepping the frequencies and giving extra meaning to your meditation. Anyone who joins in participates in that energy-stream.
The beings that have fixed this simply seek to assist us in doing what we need to do, in terms of consciousness work to help our world. They don’t need us to adopt their mantra or perform their method, since they like the variety and uniqueness of each person who participates. It interests them, and they can weave together an energy-stream from that.
It’s just that ‘God’ has a staff shortage here on Earth, and so they welcome all the help they can get, to help us pull off some sort of a miracle on our planet. And this is one way of doing it.
Besides, it’s really quite nice sitting there on your own in the etheric company of a really good bunch of people! So do join if this tweaks you. We’re there every Sunday evening at the same time.
I’ve been visiting Glastonbury for Easter weekend, and I’ve done two speaking gigs, one podcast interview and a lot of hobnobbing. And cake.
and other tales…
Glastonbury Tor, as seen from Pilton
Tuesday morning, 11th April, Butleigh, near Glastonbury… Today my friend Claudia from Cornwall is taking me home, bless her – she’s driven up here to pick me up. Typically for one with a Moon in Gemini, I’m looking forward to going home and also I am not. I’m looking forward to it because, as a partially-disabled cancer patient, my lovely little home is, well, my refuge. Also I can detox from the generously donated phone radiation I’ve taken in over the last few days – almost everyone I pass or sit near to has a toxic radiation generator on them, and it gets sprayed all over me. It’s weird.
I’m not really looking forward to going home because, in the last year or two, since losing my partner and my capacity to drive, I’ve been isolated in a way I’ve never experienced before. This winter I crossed that strange boundary between aloneness and loneliness, and while I manage quite well with loneliness, compared to many, I don’t like it – it’s an inward-turning vortex, and it’s easy to get sidelined and forgotten by other people, busy as they are with other things.
This said, being alone has its value, and many of us don’t get enough of it. But over winter I’ve been drying up inside and talking to myself too much. If my health condition deteriorates, there is no one to watch over me. It says something about our society when, as was recently mentioned in the UK news, a person’s death is discovered because of the smell. If that’s the case with me, then so be it – after all, my creaky body will already have been abandoned and I’ll be somewhere else. Our society has big issues around death.
Glastonbury Abbey
But then, I’m a strange mixture of a hermit and public figure – it’s the bit in between, personal relationships, where in the end I don’t do so well. That’s classic for an Aspie: I don’t sit easily in the expectation-fields many people quite reasonably have, as a friend, neighbour, partner or parent, and I’ve never sat easily in the boxes society seems to need each of us to sit inside.
This said, as soon as I was diagnosed with cancer in 2019 I found myself sitting inside a neat, simple ‘cancer’ box, unexpectedly eligible for levels of social, financial and medical support that previously were outside my reach – and without that support I would now be dead. It’s a bit strange, being valued by officialdom and mainstream society, at a time of life when my productive value has declined dramatically. I’m now costing society around £200,000 per year. Just my cancer medication costs £4,000 per month. In contrast, twenty years ago I was Glastonbury’s online PR man (running www.isleofavalon.co.uk) and Somerset County Council reckoned I’d raised the town’s local GDP by at least 5-7%, but I still made nothing from it – so this late-life support is rather bizarre, even though welcome.
Yet, when I was lying there in December 2019, newly diagnosed with cancer, hovering just outside death’s door and gulping down large dollops of acceptance together with large numbers of pills and infusions, I decided to make the best of my new situation, come what may, and certainly it is true that I’ve started a new chapter of life. A while ago I revisited an experience I had around age six, in which I feared growing up and going through the full human life-process. I wanted somehow to skip straight from childhood to old age. Now, prematurely aged and reduced by cancer, being an old crock does strangely suit me, and I’ve found a new expression and creativity in this situation, blogging, podcasting and now writing a second post-cancer book (the first was about ancient sites and the second is about world healing).
In the early months of dealing with cancer, I started assessing my condition on a basis of perceived age. After a life in which I had only rarely had illnesses, suddenly I was flattened and floored by cancer. I shot twenty years forward into my nineties, in terms of physical ability and inner perspective, doddering around like the Ancient of Days. As time went on and I started reviving, I grew a bit younger and settled around my mid-eighties. Nowadays I’d put myself around age 80, varying between better and worse days, though physically I’m 72. So I’ve been fast-tracked into a new phase. Yet my spirit has brightened, as if to compensate for a loss of physical strength, ability and vitality – spirit kinda holds me up, now that life is twice as weighty.
Glastonbury High Street
My cancer story started very suddenly one day in late August 2019 in my former partner’s back garden (she was out somewhere): life fundamentally changed that day. I was pulling on a tussock, clearing space for a log-pile, and my back suddenly cracked, very loudly. It was both an external and an internal sound. I was stunned, standing stock still, swaying giddily, and the pain gradually came on over a few minutes until I could do nothing except stagger inside and slowly sit down, seriously excruciated with searing pain.
Four of the bottom vertebrae of my back had collapsed and I was in agony for months. It took ten weeks to find out that I didn’t have just a back problem – I had cancer, and it had me. In the NHS they often ask you to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, and it was seven on a good day and nine on a bad day – though nowadays I just get one to three, more of a perpetual stiffened inertia and achiness.
With Myeloma or bone-marrow cancer, permanent changes to the blood cause bone-formation to stop, leading to a softening and hollowing out of the bones. It’s a toxicity-related cancer caused in most cases by electromagnetic and nuclear radiation or by certain specific neurotoxic chemicals – in my case it’s quite safely the radiation, looking back on my past history. I’ve known myself to be electrosensitive since the mid-1970s, when I was 25, though it only became a problem around the Millennium when mobile phones and wi-fi started coming into common use.
Chalice Well
But there’s a deeper dimension to this. It’s a disease of sensitivity in an insensitive world, and there’s something good and right about that. I’m more concerned about people who don’t or can’t feel radiation than about those who do. Myeloma concerns blood – life-force and will-to-live – and bones – the structure that holds us up, enabling us to experience living inside a physically constrained body. These are quite fundamental planetary issues, and I’ve dug around in myself to understand how my own planetary-incarnational challenges have served as a basis for cancer.
In a strange way it has been a gift, giving a new perspective and something to work with – every day is an uphill climb, forcing me to focus my wits on doing life as well as I can, making the best of what I have, and accepting what I don’t and can’t have and do – the sex, thrills and rock’n’roll parts of life (though I’m doing alright with drugs, both prescribed and alternative). Having had a rather full life, cancer has added a new dimension that, strangely, fits my story. It’s the current stage on my path. The whole look-and-feel of life has changed.
I’ve been visiting Glastonbury for Easter weekend (it was my home from 1980 to 2008), and I’ve done two speaking gigs, one podcast interview and a lot of hobnobbing. And cake. It has been wonderful, medicinal to the spirit, and I really appreciate the welcome I’ve been given and the interesting conversations we’ve had. It lights me up.
Chalice Well
It has been a radiation nightmare too. At times my nervous system has been juddering, the amygdala in the back of my head has been screaming a high-pitched whine, and after two days I was bordering into the next stages, flu symptoms and heart palpitations – though I’m learning how to hold them off sufficiently while under fire. As I get more irradiated, symptoms gradually escalate: despite all the miracle cures, crystals and gizmos people advocate and offer to counteract radiation, the only option is to get out, find a low-radiation refuge and spend 48 hours detoxing. So if I walk out on you, please don’t take offence – I just need to get out, and it’s that simple.
It’s a strange, new cause of loneliness – I cannot hobnob easily with people since they literally shoot me (and each other) with a rain of EM jangle and noise. Worse, people are, or seem, mostly unaware of it, even if they’re Greens or members of Extinction Rebellion. Hardly anyone thinks of the disastrous effect mobile phones have on plants, animals, the ecosystem and the world’s climate.
Anyway, that is as it is, and I can do little except partially tolerate it and partially keep my distance. It means I can’t hang out with friends unless I’m okay about being poisoned that day, and unless I have two clear days afterwards to recombobulate my energy-bodies before anything else can happen.
Chalice Hill
Many old friends came to the ‘Evening with Palden’ on Friday, and it was so good to see them and share some insights I’ve been coming up with. This is where being alone has its virtues, since it enables me to step outside current social groupthink, to see things from a more reflective viewpoint, less affected by others’ perceptions and the current preoccupations, social judgements and projections of the time. As a writer and podcaster it has allowed me time and space to invest in conceiving, writing and recording material. I’m really happy that it seems to be saying something to readers and listeners. It gives new meaning to a rather time-wealthy life like mine, and a way of contributing something to time-poor people’s lives like many of yours.
I’m not one who is happy sitting round entertaining myself as pensioners are supposed to, or sitting there like a block of wood. I see no point hanging around on Earth without having a meaningful life and making a contribution. A long life is not the main point. I’ve had a whole lot of life and feel quite happy with what I’ve been given. Well, sort of. Of course things could have been better, but it’s life’s imperfections that are a key element in the Planet Earth experience. In the end, that’s what we’re here for.
Frankly, I’ll be relieved when the time comes to go. Life has been one long saga of feeling as if I’m on the wrong planet. I’ll be happy to go home and be myself again. Well, for a recharge, at least. But before I go, there’s more to do and be. I’ve been much blessed, living in a time when so many ideas have been conceived, and the seeds and roots of a new civilisation have been laid. So I’m leaving traces of what life has given me, in print, sound and online, for folks younger than me to imbibe, if it’s useful to them.
The Tor from Maesbury Castle in the Mendips
When I give talks, I’m usually quite unaware of what I have said. I just hope for the best and try to avoid making big bloopers – us Aspies, sometimes we make what we believe to be a bland statement of fact, when for others it can be thoroughly upsetting, confronting and offensive. But I seem to get through each talk without major mishap. It comes to an end, and everyone seems to be happy and glowing, though I come out of it feeling as if I’ve missed something, slightly bereft, but relieved that people are smiling. I’m used to it now. I made some notes of talking points before leaving for Glastonbury but, typically, by the time I got there, I couldn’t find them. Lo behold, they turned up again after I got home. Magic.
At the Legends Conference on Sunday I delivered an entirely new talk. After what seemed like fifteen minutes, Tor came along to say my hour was nearly up, and I was really surprised. I think I managed to make my main point, squeezed in at the end, but I could have made it better. The talk started with an overview of the geomancy of ancient sites, using my home area of West Penwith in Cornwall as a working example, moving on to climate and environmental control and geopolitical healing through consciousness work. This is the gist of my new book, ‘Shining Land’, about the megalithic engineering of consciousness. I’m having difficulty getting it published, but it’ll come out sometime.
Thank you to Lillah Lotus and Rose Temple Morris for putting me up, and to Samia and Dave, Tor and Matthew Fellows for staging things. And to people I met, for being present in this world and sharing a wee slice of their lives. And to Briony, who comes from a similar world to my own, and who had me sussed in minutes. Also to Cho Hopking for teleporting me to Glastonbury, and Claudia Caolin for returning me to Cornwall.
During 2023 I have two objectives, over and above enjoying life: first, to develop more ways of spending time upcountry, with one or two bolt-holes where I can stay – the trick is to find somewhere I fit easily and am no hassle to have around, as a person with special needs; and, second, to see whether the world healing project I am proposing is actually likely to fly – that’s interesting because, with only a few years to live, I cannot lead it. So that’s my agenda for this year, and enough to be getting on with.
Today, Saturday, is spring-like and, having done my clothes-washing duties, I’m summoning my energies to get up the hill behind the farm, to the bronze age platform barrows up on top, 4,000 years old and still doing their geomantic thing. The badgers have dug a new sett on one of the barrows – I’m sure the archaeologists will love that! You can see for fifty miles up there, with a 360° panorama, eastwards to Carn Brea, Mount’s Bay and St Michael’s Mount, and westwards to the Isles of Scilly. I’ll mosey past the main badger sett (apparently it has been there for centuries) and the iron age courtyard house (a mere 2,000 years old). That’s my adventure for today. Well, apart from the blueberry muesli I had for breakfast.
Thanks and well done for reading this! And, guess what, this blog was written using full-on, genuine, certified Human Intelligence. For better or worse.
Love from Pennwydh, the Far Beyond, Paldywan
All of the photos of Glastonbury I took around 2004-7
This is supplementary to my last blog entry, for those of you who are following that story. Here are some comments, thoughts and bits of further news posted on my Facebook page, which might interest you.
Jo A heartbreaking story. I’m so sorry Paldywan. Love you. X
Palden Jo, it’s the pathos of human life and death. Over so many lives it has been part of the human condition. I still believe we can wind it down though, over time, to make this world a happier, friendlier and safer place. Big hug, Paldywan.
Stella Only today have I read this story in full. I’ve been putting it off as I knew it would be harrowing. It is impossible and undesirable to make any judgements as none of us are privy to the complete truth in all its details. I can only admire you, Palden, that despite your own serious health challenges you took this on and tried your utmost to help. I feel diminished and ashamed that I would not have been prepared to do the same. In trying to make no assumptions, a deadly sin in my view, I feel that although her story is unbelievably harsh, on some higher level it serves a purpose for humanity and her own sacred contract would have made this clear to her before her life began. Easy for me to say, I know, but all of us who read this story will be deeply affected by it and the wider it is known, the greater the lesson for humanity will be. Blessings to you, Palden. You did an extraordinary deed.
Palden Stella, hello. Yes indeed, the world can be a really harsh place. These events are taking place in an unstable zone as well. In countries like Britain, with notable exceptions, we live in a zone of rights and relative comfort and decency, sort of. It can therefore be difficult to believe some of the things we hear happening elsewhere. Despite such dramas – in the Sahel it’s a mixture of criminality, smuggling, jihadism and foreign interference – normal life goes on too. In our own media-dominated countries we tend either to ignore such places or to over-exaggerate the dramas going on there, when the cameras look, so we have a rather distorted view of what goes on, and also of what doesn’t go on. It wasn’t my plan to get sucked into all this, and it has been a stirring and disruptive experience. But I understand it as part of my pattern, having been involved in similar ‘borderline’ things before in life. This kind of work – as is the case with nurses, firefighters, soldiers, first-responders, aid-workers and activists – does tend to lead to a kind of vocational dedication that many people prefer to steer clear of, and I don’t blame them. But for me it has also met up with a difficulty in being able to hand over such duties to others when I can no longer continue – and this has been the case in my work in Palestine, with the Tuareg in Mali and now with this. It works better when you work for an NGO, where employees can be hired, or they can resign or retire, but there’s a price to pay for working inside that sphere too – not the same closeness to the ground, and not quite the same deep human feeling that draws many people into this field in the first place.
Palden Last night (Saturday 4th March) after talking to the doctor in Niamey (a good man) it was clear to me that Felicia had reached a crossing point. She was drawn to follow her daughter Phyllis, and I could feel her tiredness with everything – in a way, blocked at every turn. She had tried so hard. I felt it was important to nudge the process – not in the sense of encouraging her to die, but in the sense of helping her face that ultimate question of whether to live or to die. To get clear on it. She has been confronted with so much darkness and badness that I took her hand and led her to the light, to love, care and protection of a kind she sorely deserves. I can do this because I’ve been there myself. I gave her to the angels, asking them either to take her or to pump her up with new life and return her – but not the grey zone in between. The important thing is that, if she returns to life, she needs the strength, heart and will to make something good of it. She’s a special person, but she has been up against too much – even when a child she watched her family being killed in front of her, in the Liberian civil war. So I have handed her to the angels. I await news from the doctor as to what has happened at his end (Sunday midday).
Jennifer Palden Jenkins I was seeing/holding the same for her: seeing her held in golden angelic light while she made her decision, telling her either way was ok, and asking the angels to give her all she needed 💛🙏💛
Liz Thank you for sharing. So very sorry to read this – really shocking. I hope you can focus on yourself ❤️
Palden Liz, I wish I could but, unfortunately, it is incumbent on me to get her home and safe. If I worked for an NGO I could sent for reinforcements or be replaced, but I cannot, and this is a price you pay for being an independent humanitarian. But then, I chose to be involved and take responsibility for this, so it’s up to me. Focusing on myself is not right now very easy.
Liz Palden, I understand the need to help, truly. I perhaps haven’t followed everything but hoped so much the money that covered the operation for the little girl would be life saving. I hoped dearly I had made that difference. Again, it’s also important you focus on yourself. Take care ❤️
Palden Monday morning, 6th March. Latest report…. Felicia is alive and conscious and requesting food. She has returned. The doctor (he is Rwandan) reported that she has been near starvation and needs building up. So that is what needs to happen next.
Jennifer Palden, wow, what an amazing, strong woman!
Palden I think the reason she keeps coming back to life (third or fourth time now) is that she has a mission.
Palden Tuesday 7th March. Felicia seems to be improving and has been discharged from hospital, now staying with a nice lady in Niamey. The doctor who has been looking after her has been helpful and good. We hope to get her a ride on a truck back to Ghana in a few days’ time. She is missing Phyllis a lot though. It’s difficult raising money to support these developments while I’m struggling for money myself, and I’m looking forward to bringing this saga to a close, but somehow we’ll get there. Prayers for her and for all of this are welcome! It’s fullmoon, and hopefully a turning-point. Love from me, Palden.
Zoey Paldywan! I just took in the entire thread here. This is real life! So many people are plugged into screens, trying to escape thr collective despair. I don’t know how Felicia is alive,yet i will join in strong prayer for her today.
Palden Zoey, yes indeed, very real life! There’s a lot of it going on. I shall not forget that moment some weeks ago when you and I worked together to revive Phyllis – thanks for being there at that moment, when needed. Even though eventually we did not succeed in keeping her alive, I hope that, in Phyllis’ own journey, she was helped by the intervention of helper souls who supported her. God bless her little great soul. She is being looked after by the Okomfo Ayensuwaa, the Akan native healer who was involved in December, who was killed by the gang for doing so. I miss the Okomfo – for a few days we connected deeply across space and a cultural divide that both of us were able to reach across, to work together on healing Antoinette (Dr Isaac’s daughter, who later died) and Felicia. This whole saga has been so moving and, even now, my cheeks are dripping with tears over the pathos of it all. This is, indeed, real life.
Kath Dear Palden. A harrowing, heartbreaking read. But in its sharing, I hope that it has lightened the load…a little at least. Those who heal, in the reading of your words will pick up the threads, and in compassion and humanity, help to hold them as Felicia makes her way. Blessings to you too Palden, be gentle with yourself. ❤️🙏
Palden Kath, hello. Doing my best, though I’m really ready now to end this saga and bring it to as good a conclusion as I can. Yes, it has been harrowing, even for one who has been involved from a distance. Wearing too. I seem to have held up better than I would have thought. But now I need less uphill grind, sailing against the wind and upstream, and more of at least a level pathway. This has not been the only challenge I’ve been facing, having manifested a number of them, the overall meaning of which I accept but don’t yet fully understand. There is meaning in it though (I can sense it), and that’s why I’ve done my best to stick with it to the end. Thanks to you and everyone else for your heartening messages.
Palden Wednesday 8th March. Things are progressing. My hope is to bring this whole matter to a conclusion by getting Felicia home – Niamey is not a good and safe place for her. So it’s a big push now to try to fix that – involves raising 600 GBP to pay for medical bills in Niamey, for the fare back to Ghana (already paid and booked for tomorrow/Thursday) and for survival money on the journey. The journey will be on the back of a truck going west to Burkina Faso and then another south to Ghana. Today I’m focusing on that.
I shall be so relieved if we can pull this off, because I badly need to get focused back on my own life and needs – this whole saga has been a bit too much for me (though it would have been so different, and so much shorter, if the company had paid up as promised). The doctor is being very helpful, as is a lady who is a pharmacist, who has taken Felicia into her home until it’s time to leave, and thanks so much to both of them. (The doctor wishes to join our Sunday evening meditations.)
Both Felicia and I need to get our lives back, and Felicia needs to be with her friends and in known territory so that she can start rebuilding her life and getting over the loss of Phyllis, her three-year old daughter. I’m really sad about losing Phyllis, having fought so long and hard to keep her alive. Thank you so much to those of you who have sent invaluable healing and support. At some stage I shall be able to tell the whole story, but that’s quite a lot of work, and it involves some tricky issues about what is safe and good to tell and what is not. Meanwhile, the challenge now is to make that final push and pray hard that I can get Felicia home again safely and without further challenges – with luck, by Sunday or so.
So that’s where things stand today, Wednesday 8th March. I hope to report further in a few days’ time. Sometimes I wish I were better at fundraising and hustling money, but my strength is in other areas such as human- and soul-support, negotiation, counsel, remote healing and crisis-management. You can’t do everything. NGOs can be good at providing stuff and facilities for large numbers of people (such as in Turkiye-Syria right now), but they are often not quite so good at the person-to-person stuff.There’s need for both.
Ishmael. As it happens, this photo was taken in Hawara, Palestine, recently in the news
Ishmael, my trusty taxi driver and fixer in Bethlehem, Palestine, twelve years ago, rang me up a few days ago. “Balden, when you come visit us in Beit Lahem?“. OMG, yes indeed. If only I could… I know why he was ringing. Things are edgy and intense there right now, and my friends used to feel a bit safer when I was around. I had to explain to him that getting to Palestine is no longer on the cards for me. Besides, I’ve been dealing with another, rather different battle.
I’ve been pulling back from the West African mission I’ve been involved with in recent months. It has worn me out, got me into financial difficulty and lost me some friends, and I can no longer help. I don’t actually regret what I have done. These are choices I have made. I trusted in a series of promises by an Australian security company to reimburse me for money I put forward on their behalf from the beginning of this saga in October, having saved one of their men, though I misjudged them.
They have not followed up on their promises and this has led to a series of deaths and difficulties. One day I shall tell the whole story, but there are dangers to doing so and I must think it through carefully. Felicia did her best to deal with my withdrawal from supporting her, but things were getting worse for her. She was in Niamey, in Niger – a French-speaking country, and different from Nigeria.
I found out on Thursday that Phyllis had died of septic infection. I debated what to do with this news, and how best to tell it. So I’ve decided to relay the last conversation I had with Felicia, on Friday 3rd March. It is filled with the pathos of a mother who has just lost her child.
[I have edited Felicia’s words to make them more readable.]
Felicia I don’t want to leave Phyllis’ dead body here in Niamey. She has been through so much. I will miss her, but I get that she needs rest. No matter what, I shall not leave her here like this. But I have no other option than to get her to be buried here at the Infants’ Hospital Morgue [in Niamey]. I have no money. I am so sad it has come to this. Palden God bless Phyllis. If she is buried at the children’s hospital, at least she will be with other children. Her soul is in good care – I know that, since I am watching her. Felicia I have to pay for the land at the cemetery. I have no other option than to bury her in a foreign land without family. I love her. Can’t help crying. I must pay for a cremation. Thanks for your love and help towards her. She loved you and I wish she had the chance to meet you in person. Thanks for all you have done. Palden I’d have loved to have met her too. But I shall watch over her now [psychically]. This must be such a moving time for you. This has all been far too difficult, with complications and tragedies at every stage. Felicia Yes. Phyllis has suffered a lot of drug overdosing, physical and psychological trauma, defilement, beating, threats, hunger, homelessness. Palden There was a stage a few weeks ago when I wondered whether she would have a good life if she survived. Especially with no hands [they had been medically amputated], and possibly with her mind affected permanently. When she died I had a feeling of relief for her. Poor child – she was such a little angel. But perhaps that is part of the story behind her short life. God bless her. Felicia She’s been without anyone. And I have been raped, starved, homeless and running for months. It’s by God’s grace that I had you to support us. We would have died long ago. The money you invested to saving Phyllis is gone to waste, gone and lost, like Phil, never to return. I am sorry. I feel so bad. I don’t know where to go with this pregnancy [Felicia was multiple-raped in January]. I don’t know how to take care of myself. I am beaten. Life has not been fair to me. Why does this happen to me? Palden One thing at a time. Try to get home to Ghana next. Then meet some friends, talk it through and cry your tears. Felicia I can’t forgive the company for not coming to my child’s aid. To help us. Palden I still want justice from them, and I am telling them clearly that they have an obligation to compensate and support you, as they promised. Not just me. Felicia I am burying her alone. Money has been the problem, and had the company helped, I would still have Phyllis now. I can’t make my way home now. I can’t find money for an abortion. I don’t want this child and shall not bring it forth to the world. Palden Wait and see. I really understand how you feel. Try not to make decisions now. Do what’s in front of you. Felicia Alright. Thanks for your advice and love and help. You have been of immense help to me, even though I can’t repay you for the money lost. Palden It is the company who should repay me, not you. You have done your best. It will make me happy to see you getting your life back and being able to make a new start. But that will take time. I hope it can start soon. Felicia Am so sorry for depending too much on you, am so sorry for having caused you so much financial difficulties, kindly forgive me, pls Palden You do not need forgiving. No blame upon you – you have been a heroine. Forgive me too for not being able to help at critical moments which could have made such a big difference. I was just not rich enough and the company undermined us. I regret that. Felicia I feel so bad all has been lost after all the care, love and support I have had. I have been thru so much, and I have lost all, and now where do I start from? Your help has been more than enough. You have helped too much. Thanks. Phil will be burnt and her ashes will be given to me. I miss her already and have been crying for days. If only I had gotten her home, maybe I could have got her to a good hospital, where she could have had the best treatment she would have needed. But it’s too late. Such a tragedy she died so far away from home. Palden Maybe. But maybe also the pain and difficulty for her might have been too great. Two weeks ago I felt her soul was tired, tired of trying to stay alive. It is important now not to think too much about “What would have happened if…?”. Unfortunately we must be dead real. We must get you home and safe, so that you can be more protected and release your tears and fears. Felicia Yes. This is the time for the whole story to be told to the world. I don’t fear the dangers any more. Got nothing to lose now. And when you write about it, pls do seek help for me. Maybe a good soul may pity me and help me get home and help with some money to start a new life and abort my worse pain in my life. For if I carry the child, I will never forget it. I don’t have any life here, and I don’t want to keep the memories of these past months with me. Got to abort it. I can’t keep a baby of bandits. I have lost my entire family. I have nothing to call my own. I have lost hope, and my dreams are dead. I know I am not safe from the gang, but am not worried about dying any more. I have nothing to live for, no family and hope lost, alone. Palden Bless you, Felicia.
That was the last I heard from her. In the evening I heard from a doctor at the Niamey Roundabout Hospital in Niger. Felicia had been found unconscious. He said she was short of blood, looking starved and had a fever. Well, as she said, she has nothing to live for. So on Friday evening I held her and committed her to her angels. She was at a point of soul-choice. On Saturday morning the doctor informed me Felicia had lost a lot of blood and remains unconscious.
And me, I’m tired, had enough. Throughout, I’ve been faced with a choice, whether or not to ‘be sensible’ and walk off, leaving them to die. This would have been sensible from a commonly-held British viewpoint, but to do so I would have had to block off a part of myself. Rightly or wrongly I chose to remain true to something deep inside that is very fundamental, at least to me. Some may not agree, and they might have good reason, but I feel that, on the whole, I’ve done the best thing. Now I pay a price. In life, you don’t win every battle.
In my humanitarian work I have always felt unhappy getting pushed by circumstances into raising money. It is not my speciality – I work as a healer, counsellor and adviser, not a fundraiser. I am reluctant to start raising money now, for a number of reasons. I think the best thing to do is this: if anyone wishes to support Felicia financially (medical needs and getting home) then I shall assist them, but I can no longer take on funding responsibilities myself. Some have cast doubts too, judging that Africans are scamming me, and questioning my integrity and judgement. I’m sad about that, and life is not quite that simple. But this is life. In a way, this has been a three-way battle, with a drug gang, an errant company and people’s considered opinions.
If on the other hand you wish to send healing and spiritual uplift to Felicia, currently lying in hospital in Niamey, Niger, then it has definitely helped before and I believe it would help now. This is what I and many of my readers are good at. This is very welcome, and you are welcome to join me in ‘holding’ Felicia and bathing her in light.
In my life I have met some remarkable, courageous women. I’m reminded of an old friend Gillian, from Devon, whom I last met in Bethlehem twelve years ago. She’d been involved in Bosnia, Kosovo and Palestine, and suddenly she died in a car accident ten years ago in, of all places, Luton, England, when arriving back from a conflict zone. Life moves in strange ways. Felicia has a bravery like Gillian’s. When people pass away they are gradually forgotten, buried in the rubble-heaps of subsequent events. I’m reminded of Gillian now.
Some suspect I had a romantic involvement with Felicia: no, it was her courage and fortitude that I supported. Only some people in this world are willing to stake their lives on what they believe in. She was a bystander, suddenly swept up with her child, Phyllis, into a drama of violence and horror, and she did her level best at all stages of that drama. The Australian company, having promised to compensate and support her for what she did, should be deeply ashamed of themselves.
Dear readers, I’m sorry to ply you with this stuff. I seek simply to share it. When I went down with cancer three years ago I resolved to share my story openly. This is a strange part of it and I take the risk of sharing it now. It’s the story of a man who, in late life, seeks to round out his life’s threads, and I’m yet again being taught one of life’s more ultimate riddles: some things just don’t make sense and should not happen, but they do, and that’s life. Planet Earth is a very weird world, where the depth and intensity of life-experience definitely burnishes the soul.
It’s funny how, as life goes on, we get small prompts that say it like it is. A few days ago I fell upon one by the child psychologist Jean Piaget, who said: ‘Intelligence is not what we know, but what we do when we don’t know‘. Life presents us with challenges we don’t know what to do with, and it doesn’t always tell us which path to follow. But then, Rico Rose, a Berliner I once met in the Sinai Desert, once gave me a really fizzly truth, there under the hot desert sun: ‘Everything is okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end‘.
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.
Looking south from Carn Gloose, near St Just, Cornwall, toward Sennen
The ongoing battle for the hearts and minds of humanity now approaches a crunch point in human history. I’ll start with a little astrology to flesh out this thought, though you don’t have to understand it to get what I’m referring to: it’s visible in the underlying messages and impressions that current events convey.
This year (23rd March to 11th June 2023, to be precise) and next year (21st January to 1st Sept, and finally from 20th November 2024 onwards) the planet Pluto moves into Aquarius. It will then chug slowly through Aquarius until 2043-44, for twenty years. It has been in Capricorn since 2008-9, the time of the banking crisis and a deeply historic tilt in the world’s power and wealth away from the rich West or Global North, toward the majority world, the East and the Global South.
Why doesn’t Pluto move into Aquarius just once? The reason is this. Though the planets all orbit the Sun in roughly constant orbits, and in the same direction, we see them from a moving viewing platform, Earth. This leads to a two-steps-forward, one-step-back motion of these planets as seen from Earth, rather like moving trains where a faster train, overtaking a slower train, makes the slower train look as if it is going backwards. It isn’t – it’s just their relative motion.
So Earth, orbiting faster than planets further out in our solar system, makes them seem to go backwards, or retrograde, for periods. Hence the multiple dates given above. This year Pluto enters Aquarius, stops and retreats back into Capricorn, then it edges a bit further during 2024, again backing out slightly, until finally it stays in Aquarius from November 2024.
Pluto takes 250ish years to orbit the Sun. It deals with historic-scale stuff. It’s in the same position now as it was at the time of the American declaration of independence in 1776 (which is one reason why USA has a major constitutional problem right now). This was also the buildup to the French Revolution of 1789-92. It last entered Aquarius in 1778 and left it in 1798, after the French Revolution had turned bad and the progressive dictator Napoleon took over. The industrial revolution, with its dark, satanic mills, was also lifting off.
These weren’t just big events: they marked the beginning of a long cycle of development and dominance of Western culture – an age of urbanisation, industrialisation, mass movements, voters and consumers – that, by now, has hit the sandbanks.
Meanwhile, during this time, the world’s population swelled from one to eight billion. Paradoxically, as the crowds grew, with it came the breakdown of families and communities. And, guess what, an underlying theme of Aquarius is human collectivities, our individual involvements in them and our feelings of belongingness. Our sense of identity hangs around the social groupings we identify with.
Home. Near Pendeen Watch, West Penwith, Cornwall
Together with Uranus (85ish years) and Neptune (165ish years), Pluto tends to influence underlying, history-spanning issues – the rises, transitions and declines of megatrends, nations and peoples. Except during rare moments when we see current events in a more historic perspective, we tend to ignore such critical tilts in the drift of history. But these moments do hit us. The fall of the Berlin Wall was not just an isolated dramatic event – it marked the end of a chapter and the start of a new one, a key tipping point in the tilting of wealth and power from North to South and from West to the East.
We all thought it was about the capitalist and socialist worlds. Yes, it was, but it was also a power shift from the urban-industrial-materialistic North to the South, itself part of a still larger process, levelling up the Global South and levelling down the Global North. And this, wait for it, is a preparation for something even larger, which will be relevant by the latter half of this century – the eventual global integration of humanity into one planetary people.
Out of necessity: the big issues before us are global, and humanity’s divisions and inter-tribal frictions, though still relevant, are getting in the way. In this context, the conflicts between Russia and Ukraine, or the rivalry between China and America, are already rather obsolete as a way of solving our world’s current main pressing problems.
Pluto has been dragging through Capricorn for 16 years, and this also marks the end of a 35ish year Capricornian period, beginning in the 1980s-90s when Uranus and Neptune chugged through Capricorn. The transition to Aquarius marks a shift of focus. We’re emerging from a time of the Megamachine – finance, technology, institutions, corporations, regimes, oligarchies, laws and regulations – to a time of people and crowds, of very human and societal issues. It concerns the collective wisdom and madnesses of people in our millions.
Classic symptoms of this shift are the people scenes we’ve witnessed in the Turkiye-Syria earthquakes and the Ukrainian war. Two aspects of the Aquarian dilemma present themselves: in Ukraine we’ve seen the power of social solidarity in response to man-made threat, and in Syria and Turkiye we’ve seen social disintegration and helplessness, decreed by the full force of nature. Both provided suggestive images for the future, prompts that draw our attention to a basic hard fact of public and social life.
In our post-industrial age, it’s now all about a dratted cloud. Tin mines near Bosigran, Penwith.
That is: we hang together or we hang separately. The choice is ours.
It’s that simple. What matters more: shared interest or self-interest? Global or national-regional-local priorities? Where do we as sovereign individuals stand amidst an eight billion strong throng? Covid-19 and its lockdowns flagged up these issues for all to see, starting a process which will escalate over the coming decades.
The image of People-against-the-Megamachine has been symbolised in the many uprisings and protests of the last few decades, recently in Belarus, Myanmar, Hong Kong, Peru, Sudan, China and other places, and in the Arab revolutions. These were based not on high-faluting philosophies or beliefs: they were straight expressions of human need and preference. While Pluto was in Capricorn, the People lost.
But this is changing – and that change could be a mixed blessing, not only for those at the top of the Megamachine. This concerns the dynamics of public sentiment, opinion and collective action, which sometimes is inspired, sometimes brutal and unfair. We’ve seen a lot of polarisation in recent years – the opposite dynamic to what is needed right now. For in the 21st Century, together we stand and divided we fall.
Here we come to the battle for the hearts and minds of humanity. I’m not talking here about Russia against NATO, Iran against Saudi Arabia, Palestinians against Israelis or people on the streets against the army, or any other divisively oppositional scenarios that the media do love to exaggerate. It’s not about goodbuys and badguys, Us and Them, or right and wrong – though these, on a certain level, are nevertheless relevant. It goes much deeper.
It’s all to do with a deep-rooted condition that emerged millennia ago, a fundamental perception of threat – threat against which we must fight and defend ourselves. It is rooted in a belief that They, over there, are different from Us, and that We are more important, right and good than They are.
It’s a mindset, a projection, a mega-meme rooted largely in past pain and in fear. It’s a set of pre-programmed, knee-jerk reactions that can easily be manipulated by anyone with a neat narrative to spread around, if it hooks into a lurking public feeling bubbling up from underneath. It rests on a feeling of victimhood, which that lot, the badguys over there, are to blame for.
Israelis call this hasbarah – repeatedly accusing the other side of intentions and crimes that our side is itself doing. It provides cover and justification for many bad things to happen. It’s often aimed at the wrong targets too: Palestinians often say, “Why are Israelis having it out with us, when it was the Europeans who gave them such a hard time?“.
The coast between Bosigran and Pendeen Watch, West Penwith.
In any rivalry or conflict, both parties play a part in the same game. This doesn’t make them equal or relieve the primary perpetrator or the stronger party of its own responsibility. But both sides are in the same game. They see badness in the other side, believing that they themselves are not like that. But the trouble is that, at least to some extent, our side of the argument is always flawed. As Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount: “Thou hypocrite, first cast the plank out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote of dust from thy brother’s eye“.
Brits and Germans, though neighbours and of the same blood, still live under the lurking shadow of two world wars. It came up over the supply of tanks to Ukraine. The Brits were enthusiastic because we have a winners’ mentality and almost desperately want to keep it that way, to prove that we aren’t as small and insignificant as we actually are. Such victors’ bravado conveniently obscures the war crimes we committed in WW2 such as the systematic bombing of German cities – which, when the Russians are doing the same in Ukraine, we find to be abhorrent. Meanwhile, the Germans were understandably reluctant to enter another war, for historic reasons – some would say guilt, others would say a sense of responsibility.
These shadows from the past cloud our responses to real-life situations now. They are cover-ups and avoidances. International relations are riddled with this stuff.
Dig deeper down and, in Ukraine, we’re faced with a dilemma. Most people would prefer to avoid war but we don’t usually do the necessary work in advance to stop it happening. There is a current risk of civil war in USA, and not many people are doing anything about that – Reds and Blues simply think the other side is plain wrong, and that’s that.
Sting once sang, ‘The Russians love their children too‘, yet today we Brits, and NATO, are busy killing those very children, conveniently using Ukrainians as our proxies, and feeling somehow glad when lots of Russians die. Even so, there is good reason to support the Ukrainians in their plight. However, we didn’t pay attention to proper peace-building processes in the 1990s. We failed to see that NATO and EU encroachment on Russian security space would cause trouble – even though some observers, including me, raised this matter back then.
Many of us are thus caught in a dilemma: on the whole we support peace, but in this situation we support Ukrainians in fighting a war. This is problematic, but it highlights a key issue: if we wish to avoid wars, we all need to unsubscribe from the habit of projecting threat on the other side. And that lies at the core of the battle for the hearts and minds of humanity.
The underlying problem here is, to quote Mahatma Gandhi, ‘An eye for an eye turns the whole world blind‘. The end-product of most conflicts is not resolution of the issues at hand, but damage, devastation and consequences cascading from it – such as food shortages and economic disruption, in the case of the current war. Often I quote Bertrand Russell here: ‘War is not about who is right, it’s about who is left‘.
Cities can be rebuilt and battlefields can become farmland again, but the damage to people is worse and deeper. Dead people can’t be brought back, and the living bear the scars of trauma, shock, hardship, atrocity and the sheer ugliness and pain of conflict. It lasts generations, even after the memory fades.
Granite, and the funny forms it takes
I’m not naively suggesting that everyone ought to just declare peace and go home – it just doesn’t work like that. Conflicts have their reasons, they can be complex, and both sides have a point. Conflicts end when both sides accept that there is no gain in carrying on. Half of all conflicts end simply because of weariness.
The main issue here is mindsets: are we against other people and their leaders, or are we all in the same boat? This same issue concerns the world’s ecological and climatic crisis. We won’t succeed with the 21st Century by continuing our ongoing war against nature, animals, enemies, competitors – and ourselves.
We’re stuck in a vortex of competitiveness, attack and defence. In our personal lives, the same mentality is cloaked in neatly ‘civilised’ ways like dressing up, pursuing careers, buying houses, insuring ourselves against risk or even, in my case, ‘fighting cancer’. It’s a mentality of us-against-the-world.
Yet it is destroying the world, making humanity even more unhappy and threatened. It’s a self-destructive momentum where, the rarer and more exhausted anything becomes, the higher its price and profitability – our economic system leads inexorably toward extinction. As natural environments are cleared and communities die off, young generations grow up without knowing they had even existed.
The emergent paradigm of the 21st Century is different. By necessity it’s one of cooperation, arising from the bottom-line observation that we are all in the same boat whether or not we like it, and we sink or swim together. This is a pragmatic, sensible, economic solution, no longer idealistic. This is being presented to us in the current drift of events. There is mighty resistance to this paradigm shift, taking the form of social and political polarisation, exceptionalism, populism and fear of being overcome by change.
In many countries we fear being flooded by migrants, whom we believe will change our societies and take away our privileges and comforts. Well, we did it to native Americans, Africans and Aboriginals, so, as Aussies would say, fair dinkum.
Such resistance can take softer forms in which we favour change as long as it doesn’t affect us. Or we make a big fuss over anything we might lose – the plenteous food and consumables, or the perceived right to assert our personal freedoms whatever the cost to others. We forget that only some of us have such privileges, while the rest pay the full price.
There’s more to this Aquarian question. It concerns social control and the capacity of masses of people to control ourselves. In the digital era new forms of social control have crept up on us while we have studiously avoided getting our heads round it.
The trouble here is that railing against people at the top is only half of the issue, and it’s rather an avoidance and escape. Collectively we permit them to do what they do by failing to stop it. The real issue here is social solidarity, vigilance and the behavioural changes we need to make if we really do believe in freedom and social-economic justice.
This issue arose in the Arab revolutions and in many uprisings since then. People come out onto the streets to protest over issues they face but, if or when the regime falls, people are often not organised to handle what follows. Or repression from above or intervention from outside squash, corrupt or divide the movement for change.
So this goes deep. Inevitably, the need for self-preservation can override the urge to sacrifice ourselves for the general good. Revolutionaries still need to pay their bills if they want a home or to support their family, unless they retreat to the jungle or escape the country, thereby marginalising themselves.
Portheras Cove
Meeting up with disillusioned young revolutionaries from Egypt and Syria twelve years ago, I found myself telling them my story. The uprising I was a part of, like theirs, didn’t succeed, and it led to a decade of pain and self-examination for its participants. Since then, to the extent I could, and with others, I’ve tried contributing toward a deeper, psycho-spiritual and behavioural change.
Standing on the top of a mountain at age 22, I made a commitment to give my life to helping the world tip into irreversible positive change. I had realised that a mass change of perception and consciousness is the key. Well, the world hasn’t tipped – yet. Now, near the end of my life, I’ve had to let go of that ‘in my lifetime’ bit, though I still believe we’ll get there. But I must still own up to a bottom-line truth: this is a belief, not a foregone conclusion, whatever I might hope for.
Yet in my life I’ve had multiple demonstrations that the new paradigm works – recently readers of this blog have shown that their remote healing efforts do indeed work. Or, larger-scale, I’ve been involved with circles of people where we have worked on a world issue, such as forest fires or the Bosnia war and, shortly afterwards, a fundamental change to such situations actually occurred. While we cannot definitely prove ‘we did that’, it nevertheless is the case that we did the consciousness work and the fires were doused and the war came to an end. Though it doesn’t happen every time.
It all boils down to a simple rule: together we stand and divided we fall. When people work together, acting with one mind, miracles can arise. A miracle is an event that no one thought possible until it happened. It’s one-mindedness that is crucial here.
Here’s the punchline. The pressure of crises, together with the Aquarian themes mentioned above, point to a likely existential crunchpoint, a time when our very existence on Earth comes into question – not just theoretically, but, like, now, this week. Even presidents and billionaires will share in such a fate. There is a possibility that such a sitation could catalyse a deep realisation, an emotionally-powered thought that, above all, and whatever it takes, we must survive and we must get through. Or we’ve all had it. Even if some people survive, it will not be a happy outcome for them.
That, ladies and gentlemen, represents a potential for a breakthrough and a miracle that no one thought possible: a global one-mindedness in which everyone everywhere – or at least, enough people – have one shared thought, and they think and feel it powerfully.
Which leads us to the bottom line. Whatever our disagreements, it is not a case of who is right and who is wrong, who will win and who will lose. For in the end we all lose. Or we all win. That’s the formula.
A little dog came to visit me.
In the last year I’ve had some crunches and battles in my own life – with cancer, with my ex-partner’s departure and with a few other issues, and in West Africa I’ve been caught between two parties battling each other and killing people in the process. A big lesson I’ve been re-learning is that true victory lies in everybody winning together. It’s a neat notion that’s not difficult to subscribe to, but carrying it out in real-life terms is another matter, and it’s taking all I’ve got to do that.
Because we do hang together, or we hang separately. That’s the way things are. So the battle for humanity’s minds and hearts goes really deep. It’s a button-presser, confronting all of us. It involves making friends with and profoundly understanding even the people that we don’t like or agree with. That’s how we’ll get through the 21st Century.
In my own life and in yours too, this is the issue. Events are shepherding us painfully in that direction. I can’t say I’ve succeeded with this in my own life but I still have thunder in my heart, running up that road, running up that hill. It’s quite a struggle, but then, that’s one reason we’re all here, isn’t it?
With love, Paldywan Kenobi.
If, like me, you have sufficient madness to be into astrology, try this chapter about the outer planets in history, from my 1987 book Living in Time. If you’re seriously mad, try my Historical Ephemeris, an astrological resource about the way planetary motions influence the tides of history.
Caught, bent over my work (photo by Penny Cornell)
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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