spiritual blogs – Page 4 – Notes from the Far Beyond

About Caer Brân

A Bronze Age gathering place in West Penwith, Cornwall
Palden Jenkins, June 2025

Recently I was at Caer Brân (pronounced Ker Brayne) on a Belerion Project field trip. Nowadays partially disabled, I hadn’t been there for years, even though, when I look out of my window from my desk, it’s on the ridge over the valley, less than a mile away. So I gaze at it a lot.

In former years I had come to the idea that, in the Mid-Bronze Age, Caer Brân served as a kind of parliament site for the whole of Penwith. This came to me after news came out some years ago about a circular enclosure, found using LIDAR scanning, on the cliffs at Pordenack Point, just south of Land’s End. This revealed something: Pordenack, Caer Brân and Castle an Dinas, three circular enclosures, were built in a straight line, oriented to the summer solstice sunrise.

This suddenly gave these three sites a lot more significance than had been seen previously.

However, if we take a line from the centre of the Pordenack clifftop enclosure to the centre of Castle an Dinas, it passes through Caer Brân though not accurately through its centre. It passes across the southeast side of Caer Brân, though within the enclosure. I’m not sure whether there is any meaning to that, but these details are worth observing.

At ancient sites, the main thing I do is a kind of psychic archaeology. That’s not as esoteric or complex as it sounds. All I do is sit there, relax, give it time, and I let feelings and ideas come up. It’s not a matter of trying, but of allowing. Often I use a pendulum, which helps engage both thinking and intuition. I do this in two ways, flipping between them: I use a pendulum while doing ‘intuitive free-thinking’ – it indicates when I’m ‘on track’ or ‘off track’ – and also I ask specific questions about details and dates, seeking a Yes/No answer. I note it all down or speak what’s coming up into a sound-recorder.

As an historian, I’m attentive to historic plausibility before jumping to conclusions arising from these ‘subjective’ researches. Mistakes can often be made in the interpretation of impressions and ideas, more than in their initial psycho-intuitive reception. It’s important to avoid allowing existing ideas, knowledge and preferences to shade and bias such findings, though it’s important afterwards to see how new insights fit with foregoing ones – if indeed they do.

If they don’t somehow fit, then the observation might either be incorrect or something is yet to be discovered that will make sense of it. In one case I had to wait twenty years. You get surprises. Findings might at first make no sense, or no concrete or logical evidence backs them up, but later on things can fall into place. So for much of the time they remain working hypotheses, not facts. One trick is to consider their plausibility and whether they shed light on anything else. Some archaeological findings suffer this problem, or their interpretation is conjectural – as is the case with a few seemingly authoritative statements on the signboard below Caer Brân (more below).

Here are some findings from my recent visit to Caer Brân.

It seems to me that it is not the inherent earth energy of this place that matters, as is the case at a stone circle. There isn’t the same sense of energy here. It seems that the landscape positioning of Caer Brân matters more: there’s a strong visual connection with other key sites in Penwith and beyond, including Scilly, the Lizard and Carn Brea near Redruth. It has a wide, thirty-mile panorama.

Very noticeable are the sightlines from Caer Brân to Neolithic sites which, at the time of Caer Brân’s building, would themselves have been regarded as ancient – about 1,800 years older than Caer Brân.

All of Penwith’s Neolithic sites are visible except Trencrom Hill. Carn Kenidjack and Carn Galva poke above the horizon as if placed there by an enormous geological chess-player’s hand; Carn Brea is distant yet prominent; St Michael’s Mount sits resplendently down in Mount’s Bay. The Isles of Scilly hover in the gap between Chapel Carn Brea and Bartinney Castle. So visual connectedness with other sites was clearly important. Caer Brân is not prominently visible from these sites – it’s a one-way visibility.

Apart from sightlines, it has several alignments (leylines) associating it with other ancient sites, yet these are largely rather unspectacular except for two. Alignments don’t seem to be a dominant factor here – sightlines are more important. (Click for an alignments map of Penwith.)

One alignment (83) goes from the summit cairn on nearby Chapel Carn Brea through Caer Brân’s SW edge to St Erth church (on an Iron Age round that might be older) and finally it heads for the Neolithic tor of Carn Brea.

The other (199) goes from Cape Cornwall to Caer Brân, then to the Blind Fiddler menhir and Kerris Round, then over Mount’s Bay to Predannack Head, a clifftop site on the Lizard that feels a bit like a geomantic control tower – it’s worth a visit. The first alignment links two Neolithic hills and the second links two major cliff sanctuaries.

Caer Brân doesn’t feel like a high-energy place, though it does have atmosphere. However, as a former gathering place, it feels to me as if it misses the human attention and ‘hwyl’ that it once witnessed and hosted. (Hwyl is Welsh for fun and stirring, special experiences).

Archaeologists commonly use the term ‘ceremonial’ for sites like this, but this is inaccurate. This was a gathering place, a people place. The enclosure uphill on Bartinney Castle was clearly ceremonial and magical, but I believe Caer Brân was mainly social in character and purpose.

These two adjacent sites, hardly a mile apart, formed a pair – Bartinney more spiritual and Caer Brân more worldly. During their moots, people assembled at Caer Brân probably trooped up to Bartinney for the spiritual high point of their gatherings, or to seal the deal. Tradition has it that inside the enclosure on Bartinney evil cannot touch you.

Sancreed Beacon, Caer Brân and Bartinney, arrayed along a ridge, were part of a local landscape temple also comprising Botrea Hill, Chapel Carn Brea and Boscawen-ûn stone circle. This ridge seems to act as a kind of fulcrum for the whole of Penwith, and Chapel Carn Brea, Botrea Hill and Boscawen-ûn anchor and stabilise it on either side.

This is all about a geomantic quality we could call ‘perceptual centrality’ – the feeling that you’re standing at the centre of everything. This is common at many ancient sites: a subtle sense of emphasised hereness and nowness that is one of their key psycho-spiritual effects. It seems odd that Boscawen-ûn acts as a peripheral anchor to this string of three hills. Yet this is how it seems at Caer Brân, standing at the centre of its own psycho-geographic gravity-field. Yet at Boscawen-ûn, sitting at the centre of its own perceptual gravity field, it seems as if Caer Brân and Chapel Carn Brea are peripheral appendages to it.

Each major site in Penwith is a gravity-centre of psycho-geographic experience. In one sense this is a perceptual matter, while in another it’s a very real, a repeatable experience shared by many people. In a pre-literate society with no maps or aerial photos, people were psychologically part of their world and it was part of them. They perceived their world differently to us.

This was particularly so in the Neolithic. As the Bronze Age progressed, man-made landscape expanded in extent and people started developing more of a sense of mastery of nature rather than of being guests in it. Even so, their ancient sites were stretched over and fitted to nature and the landscape without imposing on them. Bronzies’ nature-interventions were largely sympathetic. Rampant resource exploitation came later in history.

On the signboard downhill from Caer Brân I think they got a few details wrong. They associate Caer Brân with Carn Euny, a nearby ancient settlement, suggesting that the villagers had built and used it. That’s logical, though I think it is incorrect.

The impression I get is that Caer Brân was a Penwith-wide social-infrastructure project. People were called up from all over Penwith to build it. It was to be a neutral space, owned or hosted by no individual clan. It was to act as a meeting place for all of the Penwithian clans, or their representatives. It’s possible there were around ten clans.

Its geographic centrality in Penwith and its location at the crossroads of two major ancient trackways are clues suggesting this (see trackway map below), together with the solstice alignment of the three circular sites. So while Carn Euny looks like a logical ‘owner’ of Caer Brân, I don’t think this was so. Neither was Castle an Dinas, Penwith’s other big gathering site, controlled by one clan. It is likely it was built around the same time as Caer Brân, and that they were built with different purposes in mind.

Using a pendulum, I asked how long it took to build Caer Brân: I got ‘two summers’. That was surprising: I expected longer (such as five years). This would have involved quite a mobilisation of available hands and backup support, including supplying tools and food and maintaining life’s normal demands back home. They wanted to get the job done quickly.

Perhaps there was an urgent need. Perhaps they had reached a kind of political juncture in Penwith, where a pressing need came up to reorganise things, reflecting emergent needs and realities. Or perhaps there was a generational shift in a time of social change and population growth, necessitating the building of new gathering places.

The signboard got one thing right: the ‘ring cairns’ inside Caer Brân are older than the enclosure. I date-dowsed them to the 2200s BCE, while the enclosure came 400ish years later in the 1830s. Except that the ‘ring cairns’ were roundhuts. The one in the centre of Caer Brân gave me the sense of a Hopi Kiva, a place for focused magical-spiritual work – I got the image of a crucible. It was placed there not because of a major energy-vortex at that place, but because of its visual, almost geometric connections with other places in the wider landscape.

I found that three main gatherings were held each year: on the fullmoons around Imbolc and Lughnasa, and another in early December. I asked why this third one was not at winter solstice and got a straight reply, ‘Everyone wanted to be at home then’. Well, indeed. And since fullmoons light up the night, often marking shifts in the season or in weather patterns, the Bronzies were probably not as concerned with exact cross-quarter days as with the fullmoons near to them. The moon provided no-cost solar-powered lighting. And a taste of magic.

The climate was a bit warmer then, less windy, stormy and Atlantic-dominated than it is now. This changed around the 1200s at the end of the Megalithic period – the jetstream moved south, bringing more wind, rain and changeable weather. It made sense in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages to be on panoramic hilltops like Caer Brân. In the Late Bronze Age after 1200ish, people moved downhill, abandoning or sidelining many of the megalithic sites.

Date dowsing suggests that Caer Brân was built in the 1830s BCE and was in use until the 1330s. This is longer than archaeologists reckon – it’s that signboard again. They give Caer Brân a short active life, on the basis that a gap in the ‘ramparts’ in the southwest of the enclosure represents an unfinished segment, and that, ergo, the enclosure was abandoned at the end of its construction.

This seemingly logical conclusion seems to me to be flimsy. Abandoning a project that is 95% complete is a bit strange. The abandonment idea was probably adopted in the days when archaeologists saw Caer Brân as a ‘hillfort’ built for defensive purposes. But, nationwide, the majority of hillforts were not built for this – especially in Penwith, where there are no signs of prehistoric conflict. There is no evidence of outright abandonment of Caer Brân either – it’s a best guess. No, I think that gap was deliberate. However, I cannot figure out why it was built so, and this question needs more work.

While we’re here, it’s worth observing that the second roundhut toward the southwest edge of the enclosure, marked on Craig Weatherhill’s survey, is also at the crossing point of four local alignments and close to the Pordenack to Castle an Dinas solar alignment, which crosses Caer Brân off-centre. From this we can surmise that this was probably no ordinary residential roundhut, instead having some sort of magical meaning. If alignments pass through a roundhut, in my experience it is likely that it was not residential in purpose.

In a moment of vision, I saw twentyish elders sitting in an arc, presiding over long discussions. I feel this was the political meeting place in Penwith. What came to me was this: it took until 1800 BCE to build Caer Brân because only by that date had the newly-colonised south of Penwith really been fully established. The south was colonised in the Bronze Age as population grew and bronze tools for clearing trees and land came into common use, probably around 2200-2000 BCE. A gradual southward population move would follow, shifting the balance of population. Until then the traditional power centre was around Chûn, Carn Galva and Zennor Hill in the north.

So by 1800 the centre of gravity had shifted south. The Boscawen-ûn and Merry Maidens stone circle complexes had been built, together with strings of menhirs, and the area had been opened up. By then, about half of Penwith was forested. Areas were cleared with landscape perspectives and sightlines in mind – these avenues highlighting features in the wider landscape were a key part of an ancient site and the geomantic thinking behind it. The Bronzies were not the nature-rapists that we moderns have become, and felling trees manually and harvesting their timbers was a big, slow job. They did it thoughtfully, needing to keep the gods and spirits happy too. So they felled trees selectively, creating a parkland landscape with open, grazed areas and patches of wildwood.

This is probably why it took until 1800 BCE for Caer Brân to be built. Only by then did people realise there was a need for it. Or perhaps only then did the perceived need override the inertia of carrying on as they’d always done. It’s the connectedness and centrality of this place that is a large part of its reason for being. But in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age it was not central to people’s lives – it became so in the Mid-Bronze Age, by 1800 BCE.

Castle an Dinas, Penwith’s other big gathering site, is very visible from Caer Brân. The summer solstice sun rises above it. Clearly they were connected, though they probably served contrasting or complementary purposes. There is evidence of trading at Castle an Dinas, and it is likely that it hosted gatherings at other times of year such as Beltane and Samhain. Two astronomical alignments from its centre suggest this: one to Trencrom Hill and the other to Conquer Cairn. Gatherings were possibly held at summer solstice too – suggested by the solstice alignment from Caer Brân. I get the feeling there was more socialising and celebration at Castle an Dinas than at Caer Brân. Perhaps Castle an Dinas needs further investigation.

Caer Brân stood near the crossroads of two major trackways. So I think this is an ideal place for a kind of parliament, for decision-making moots and occasions for the settling of inter-clan issues. Decisions would not only have involved discussion but also deep-level processes, consultation with the gods and the ancestors – perhaps up on Bartinney. There would be meetings with relatives and old friends from around the peninsula, social rites, discussions and late-night ceilidhs around campfires – a festival for a few hundred people, for 3-4 days.

Downhill there’s a smaller, non-circular enclosure. I asked what this was for. A simple answer came: animals. I saw two possibilities. In between gatherings they probably kept animals in Caer Brân to graze and mow it, moving them down to the lower enclosure for the duration of a festival. Alternatively, when horses came into use around the 1500s, it was where they kept the horses. In other words, methinks the lower enclosure was built to serve practical purposes.

The Belerion Project is a citizen research project and stream of consciousness in West Penwith. We seek to encourage psycho-intuitive investigation of the ancient sites of West Penwith, and hopefully to make such work more systematic. It’s in its early stages at present. At minimum participants will acquire a habit of building up their skills in such intuitive work, and keeping and collating notes. Possibly, after a few years, a comprehensive body of work might emerge too – an energy survey and magical assessment of Penwith’s major ancient sites.

If it interests you to join the project and you live in or near Penwith, check out the Belerion link below and come on a field trip. This project can run alongside archaeological research and, I believe, contribute many clues. Of which I hope this study has a few!

So this has been a study of a site that is, I believe, underestimated in its significance and importance. It is very central in Penwith, and its main remains are simply a circular embankment in a prominent hilltop place. But I suggest that it was the place where people periodically assembled to discuss and sort out tribal matters concerning the whole of Penwith. And if not this, then what?

LINKS
ancientpenwith.org – about Penwith’s geomancy and alignments (the original Ancient Penwith website)
ancientpenwith.org/maps.html – maps of Penwith’s and Cornwall’s ancient sites and alignments
ancientpenwith.org/even-more-maps.html – loads more maps
palden.co.uk/shiningland/ – Shining Land, a book by Palden about Penwith’s ancient sites
ancientpenwith.org/belerion.html – about the Belerion Project
palden.co.uk/caspn.html – The Geomancy of West Penwith, a recent two hour illustrated audio talk given at the annual CASPN Pathways to the Past weekend.

Freedom of Attitude

I’m continually reminded of the extent to which the present is a gift. Everything comes from Spirit, from the Void, from what we call God, and everything returns to Spirit, to the Void and to God. And everything exists within them.

It doesn’t matter how we see the nature and meaning of life, the universe and everything – it’s still the same. We are the eyes, ears and hands of existence-consciousness-beingness. It’s dead easy to forget, to get lost in our stuff, but it remains true.

Some people are in the midst of nightmares right now. Some days ago I did a joint online presentation to a support group in Britain with Ibrahim Issa, director of the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem, in the West Bank of Palestine. Western governments, aid agencies and donors have withdrawn a lot of support, so we’re having to do some remedying of that, especially since life in the West Bank is getting harder and harder.

I was amazed at his composure. Or perhaps he was just too tired. He and everyone around him had been kept awake through the night by missiles, planes and sirens. And fear.

Even so, they keep on at the school, driving by the seats of their pants – attending to the needs of the children, their families and the local community. On a shoestring.

The latest measure they’ve taken – since Israeli roadblocks all over town make movement difficult – is to take trauma-support services to the people, in a Volkswagen van. It’s a sort of trauma-ambulance, for people losing their rag because of the tensions, dangers and offensive experiences they’re living through.

In my contribution I mentioned the Arabic term, sumud – hanging in there, never giving up. The secret is to stay in the present, to make the best use of the gifts it yields. When the past is being obliterated and the future holds little to hope for, there remains the present – the only time we actually have agency.

My own body is gradually deteriorating – a new health issue is slowly immobilising me – yet I’m continually amazed at the gifts that life presents. One is this: lessons I’m learning from people younger than me. In this case, it’s Ibrahim, teaching-reminding me about the present moment. Doing what you can with whatever is available right now and making the best of it. Because the past is gone and the future is but an idea.

People bang on a lot about freedom of speech, though really we need to learn more about exercising our freedom of attitude.

In the immediately-impending future, on Sunday (times below, for different countries), there comes the Sunday Meditation, and you’re welcome to be present with it. It’s free, no sign-up, no strings, do it your way, and wherever you are.

Perhaps give some attention to feeling what it’s like to stand in the shoes of someone whose life could be snuffed out tonight, for no understandable reason or purpose. Hold their hand. There’s no shortage of available souls in need of good-hearted soul-company, in plenty of places. This is what we can do.

With love from me. Palden.

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Current meditation times, on Sundays:
UK, Ireland & Portugal 8-8.30pm GMT
W Europe 9-9.30pm
E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 10-10.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm
EST, Cuba 3-3.30pm
PST North America 12noon-12.30pm

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More about the meditation: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
About Hope Flowers school: www.hopeflowers.org – click ‘support’ to find out how to make donations from different countries.
Here’s an interesting talk by Ibrahim, during a recent visit to UK (36 mins long): https://open.spotify.com/episode/0gW1m1QSbrknFftmjzkA2f…

The Geomancy of West Penwith

Or at least, some of it!

Last Saturday, at the Pathways to the Past weekend in St Just, Cornwall, organised by CASPN, I gave a rather kaleidoscopic talk with copious maps about a big idea: Penwith as one big ancient site with 600 components to it.

If you were there, you might want to peer through the maps and hear it again. If you weren’t there and it interests you, well, you can hear it whenever you wish.

It’s two hours long, so save it for a rainy day or a quiet evening.

I really enjoyed giving this talk. It was great speaking to a group with local knowledge and an understanding of the subject.

If you don’t know Cornwall but you’re into ancient sites, you’ll still get something from this. For Penwith, dense with sites, is one of the fifteen or so key megalithic regions of the Isles of Britain.

At the other end of Britain is Orkney. Penwithians and Orcadians, between us, anchor Britain and stop it floating away.

I believe we’re coming to a time now where it will help to widen and deepen the spectrum of evidence we deem to be acceptable in studying prehistory, to see what else we find and come to understand. The schism between archaeology and geomancy is something best left in the twentieth century, methinks.

With love, Palden

https://palden.co.uk/caspn.html

Big Chief, a simulacrum at Pordenack Point

#leylines #Penwith #cornishancientsites #neolithiccornwall #cornisharchaeology #bronzeagecornwall #penzance # caspn # paldenjenkins #geomancy #dowsing

Meditations

And a meditation on leadership

I’m not sure how many people join the Sunday meditations. In a way it doesn’t matter. I know and feel some people are there and joining in, including people doing it because of their own relationship with the same spiritual source as mine, the Nine.

Eitherwhichway, I’m always there, every single Sunday, whether or not I say so. Those of you who like to join in, whether often or occasionally, are welcome to continue. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, it’s all explained here:

www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

and the meditation times for different countries are below.

As a cancer patient with my ups and downs, there are times when I cannot do my customary pep talk. However, even if I’m really unwell, I’ll still be there at the meditation. Even when I kick off my earthly clogs, you might even sense me there on the other side. It’s an inner commitment I made to the Council of Nine thirty years ago, and I just keep beavering away at it.

Whatever path you follow, it makes a difference if you stick with it for a long time, since nowadays there’s a spiritual commitment problem that itself is rather problematic for world transformation. We all need to step up, each in our own way, to contribute proactively to something much larger than ourselves – personal growth and fulfilment is only the start of the great pathless path through the gateless gate.

An ancient pathway on our farm, here in Cornwall

But that’s not what I wanted to write about. I want to give an astrologer’s insight. It’s all about Neptune in Aries, which started at the beginning of April 2025. It has been in Pisces since 2011 – a time of reality-slippage, geopolitical confusion, underlying transition, flailing beliefs, mental ill-health, tech dreams and military and climatic nightmares.

We have Neptune in Aries for 14-15 years until 2039. So this is a chapter, a phase, in which the world lives out Aries-type experiences, hopefully to progress them forward. On a 165 year cycle, Neptune last did this between 1861 and 1874 – the time of Abraham Lincoln, Gladstone and Disraeli, Bismarck, Queen Victoria, Karl Marx, and of roaring, steam-powered industrialisation, warfare, power battles, nationalism, early popular movements and Euro-American colonial expansion.

As Neptune trawls its way round the zodiac, chapter by chapter, it pushes us through periods of preoccupation with certain themes – the rise and fall of beliefs and perspectives which themselves influence the way the world sees things, acting out its anticipations, beliefs, fears and its light and its darkness. There’s a visionary side, a place where dreams and big ideas are born, of revelatory situations and realisations, and there’s an illusory and delusory side, mingled with fantasy, fakeness, projection, hypocrisy, glamour and horror. It’s all dreamstuff, yet it percolates into our reality, both helping and harming us and the wider world.

When Neptune is in Aries restlessness, impatience and frustration come up. Though there’s a lot of noise about freedom and identity, there’s a seeking for social-political-cultural examples to follow, align and identify with – it becomes a parade of leaders, public figures, accidental heroes/heroines (Florence Nightingale was one, last time round), who manifest the best and the worst of human possibility.

Some prominent people represent what is hoped for and dreamt of, or perhaps they represent integrity, genius or a human touch, with their finger on the pulse. Some represent what we most fear and dread, or they capture the hearts and minds of followers to promote or impose their own agenda. Either way, they have a lot of push, even of force – or also they reveal or portray themselves and their flock as victims, as the weak. This often gives rise to strong resistance and counter-measures – last time we had the rise of socialism and workers’ movements. It’s then a matter of how intelligent the wider public is in choosing what ideas and initiatives to subscribe to, and how clear their sight is to exert an influence on the strong.

I think you’ll be gtting the gist of this by now, and seeing how this is playing out round the world today. We’re seeing reformed terrorists gaining power as reformers, Popes calling out the status quo, dictators and billionaires acting out their fantasies, a massive generational change and an ongoing movie in which the best and the worst of human power-plays and moral choices process before us. This action-packed movie demands that we get off the fence to exert a moderating influence on those who lead the public discourse or precipitate evolving facts, whether helpful or harmful.

We’re getting an array of leaders and prominent figures who variously represent different aspects of these issues – and different people will see different facets of them, judging them differently. We’re getting a diversity of realities and viewpoints that partially clarifies things and partially adds confusion. It’s all a matter of perceptions and viewpoints, inspired sometimes with vision and purpose and sometimes with false hope or coloured by predisposition or prejudice. It’s a question of whether big ideas and beliefs attempt to override reality or whether reality clips them back to workable proportions.

There’s a conquering undertone to this – ranging from taking territory or power to overcoming obstacles and pioneering new possibilities. The bottom line is that, in the final analysis, there are no winners, and the idea of winning is inherently flawed. Victory is transitory, and everything turns to its opposite in the fullness of time.

Aries is ruled by Mars which, customarily seen as the God of War, in our time is showing itself also to be a God of Peace – a peace arising from stalemate and from the calculus that further conflict means that even the winner becomes a loser. There are limits to the extent to which the strong can push their agenda.

Each sign unconsciously faces its opposite – in this case, Libra, the sign of agreement-disagreement, values, fair-dinkum and relationship. Neptune was last in Libra in 1942-1956, leading to the formation of the United Nations and the ‘rules based’ order that is now disintegrating as the Global North loses its primacy and the Majority World accrues its true power in world affairs.

This has best been symbolised in Gaza, which in the end is a war between the People and the Megamachine, acting as a tipping point where the power of the Global North betrays itself and the Global South is challenged to find a unified position and agenda of its own, sufficient to replace the old order.

Thus spake Zarathrustra, looking over St Just toward Scilly

Underneath this lies a necessary historic tilting of all and everything, a slow and fundamental shifting from a competitive to a cooperative model in the very nature of society and civilisation. Multiplex issues are bound up with this, and we’re sliding into an avalanche of events that push those issues forward. This multiplicity of issues is pushing us out of our habits, avoidances and complacencies, demanding attention, backed up by the threat of unwanted consequences that will surely arise from inaction.

Historically, we’re surreptitiously entering a new chapter. Last year Pluto shifted into Aquarius and next year Uranus shifts into Gemini. Such shifts or ingresses create a change of themes, realities and atmospheres, which themselves indirectly prompt and colour events and developments. History moves slowly most of the time, though sometimes it moves really fast, and we’re entering such a period.

But it’s all in the way we see things and do things. We can make it easier or more difficult. Our problem is that we have a habit of entering the future facing backwards, of obeying fear, thereby complicating, undermining or blocking the very developments we deeply seek. Our own freedoms, benefits and rights can no longer impose themselves on the freedoms, benefits and rights of others or of nature, reality and the collective good. Change does not have to be as difficult as many people visualise. Its reward is eventual relief from the oppressions we already carry on our shoulders.

With love, Palden

PS. Here’s an example of a new leader who is taking on a big agenda and putting himself on the line. This man, part of the Megamachine and Old Order, is seriously acknowledging the agenda of a younger-generation military dictator who is playing a strong hand of cards. We’ll see more of these agenda-changers in coming years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=navBX2A37ls

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Growing Down

A new podcast

This is mainly for my generational peers – if you’re in your 70s, 80s or 90s, your bones are getting creaky and your mind is getting sluggish.

In the life-cycle we’re given, we grow up and later we grow down. In steps.

It’s also about karma-clearance. Sorting out our stuff at the end of life, so that we don’t carry all of it with us when we go over to the other side – to the realm of the Ancestors.

I’ve been involved in humanitarian work, and recently I’ve needed to work on my patterns around givingness and compassion fatigue. Commitment. Success and failure in helping people. Deep heart stuff.

And it’s about acceptance. That’s one of the biggest learning experiences life ever gives us.

47 mins long. Introduced and outroduced by the birds of Grumbla in the Far Beyond, down’ere in Cornwall.

With love, Paldywan

https://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Paldywan at Treen chambered cairn, April 2025 – a place where (I think) people went to die.
Photo by Torr MacFarlane.

The Plughole

It’s the Sunday meditation again, and I have revived sufficiently from an illness that floored me last week to be able to elbow you about it! That is, you’re welcome to join us in the zone – times for different countries are below. It’s an open meditation space lasting half an hour. To quote Van Morrison: no guru, no teacher, no method – just you and me in the garden… Follow your own path, together with us following ours. We shall be blessed.

If needed, details are here: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

The illness was a fluey thing. My energy was low, and I’d been pushing hard and under pressure in my remote humanitarian work. So when I got cold and wet during a trip to Falmouth, my soul pulled the plug and I went down through it. Next day I was semi-conscious, stiff and hurting, with sluggish brains, wobbly balance, burning feet (peripheral neuropathy) and I was right out of it, gone, hardly here.

A pertinent sign at Gurnard’s Head, in West Penwith

My predominant emotion was grief, over things that have happened, and particularly over moral dilemmas and painful moments in my humanitarian work over the years. I’ve seen people face hardship, suffer and die who, in my estimation, should not have died, and at times I’ve been unable to help – often quite simply I did not have the funds needed for medical treatment for an amputation or to save a life.

This is a deep dilemma being faced by many humanitarians now, as governments blithely withdraw funding and the public shrugs its shoulders. For me, in late life, it has left traces of regret, even though I know that the net value of my work was positive overall, and there’s a lot I’m glad about.

But the illness enabled me to go deep, deep down to a place where the hidden roots of life’s experiences and events ferment and bubble. This is one of the big virtues of illness that many people try their best to avoid – the consciousness changes it can bring about. Sometimes our soul needs to cut us down and render us helpless, to help us work through something – burn through something. Whether or not we actually do this is a life-choice and an exercise of profound free will.

It is an act of free will to choose to go through a turning in the deepest seat of consciousness. You have to go over the edge and take the plunge. Getting into the habit of doing this throughout our lives sets us up for one of life’s greatest and most moving of experiences – dying.

As you approach death, life tends to take you down in stages – a series of crunch moments or crises where your worldly powers and agency are reduced, your world shrinks, and you bodily functions deteriorate. This incremental withdrawal yields the possibility of a new seeing, a new understanding, if we so choose it. Though it involves perceiving truths that can at first be uncomfortable. Yet facing and accepting these revealings becomes a relief too, an understanding, a forgiveness. For this life had simply been a short visit on an ongoing pathway. It begins and it ends.

Back in the 1990s I was privileged to help and spend quality time with Sir George Trevelyan, who was in effect the grandfather of the New Age movement in Britain. Very much a man of the Twentieth Century, born in 1906 and dying in 1996, he was an aristocratic philanthropist, thinker and educator, planting the seeds of the new age and the green movement in the 1940s-70s. He was a four-planet Scorpio. At the very end, he died by decision, announcing that he should not be disturbed or given any food or drinks. He was gone in 4-5 days.

Here’s a video of him talking in 1988, in his eighties. Thank you, Sir George, for being you, for what you did with and for so many people, and for pointing the way in my life too.

Meanwhile, if you care to join today’s meditation… see you there!

Love, Palden

Fullmooning

Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall, with The Brisons behind

First things first… The Sunday Meditation continues, whether or not I announce it. Sometimes I can’t, and there’s no one to cover for me. Yet I’m always there meditating at the appointed time, and so are quite a few other people.

You’re welcome to join us. It’s a recipe-free open meditation, especially for independent souls who follow their own path or live relatively isolated from others. All you need is half an hour, a cushion and your inner presence. Join us in the zone. No need to be online.

I might not be able to do regular meditation calls from now on. A lot of things are happening and I’m rather overwhelmed! Much of it is good stuff, and some is difficult – mainly my humanitarian work.

I three-quarters wrote a blog about this, about compassion fatigue, but I’m not fully clear how to write about a few delicate issues, so that’s gone into in the ‘later or never’ pile. For me, as a lifelong author and editor, getting stuck on some writing is unusual and strangely frustrating!

Even so, things are happening.

– I’m doing a talk on Tuesday 15th April, 7.30 at Gwithti an Pystri, the Museum of Folklore and Magic in Falmouth (book ahead);

– then there’s a visit to Gloucester to see my old friend Ibrahim Issa from Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem, Palestine, on 2-4 May (I’m still looking for a driver-minder for that, or a workable way to get there and back);

– and a talk at the Pathways to the Past conference in St Just, Cornwall, on Saturday 24th May (I’m really happy about that);

– and another at the Just Live Camp near Morvah in Penwith a day or two after, on 25th or 26th May.

Then there’s the Belerion Project, about which I’m really happy too. It’s a research project into the subtle energy and psychoactive effects of the system of ancient sites in Penwith. We did our first field trip to Portheras Common Barrow recently and, despite weather challenges, it went really well. Thanks to everyone who came. The next is on Wednesday 7th May.

I’ve always been rather workaholicky but, age 75 and doing a cancer trip, recently I’ve been running at capacity. Just getting ready to go out can wear me out, requiring a rest, and everything requires twice the effort it took in pre-cancer days. My brains aren’t handling all the messages, chats and enquiries involved – apologies to people I fail to answer.

I’m a hyperfocused Aspie, you see – good at concentrating for hours in a right-brained way but bad at hopping from thing to thing in a left-brained way. Aged brains do get creaky and slow! This is a mixed gift that has come with cancer: I’ve done some of the best creativity of my life, though I have a decreased capacity for admin, lists, names, timetables and even time itself. Or remembering to have dinner.

That’s the way it goes. Ideally I need an assistant (who lives close by and knows me well – not online). But I cannot pay such a person. That’s been one of the issues of my life that I was trying to write about in the latest, as yet unpublished blog: I’ve never had an expense account to finance projects and missions. It’s mostly come out of my own pocket.

A plus with this is that I’ve pulled off some mighty stunts on a slim budget, and I’ve been a free agent, but it is wearing too, and many good things could have happened if I’d had better funding.

For those who suggest I should ‘just’ do some crowd-sourcing (takes ten minutes, it’s easy and the money floods in, haha), I ask, do you require soldiers to fund their service at the frontline? Soldiers are paid salaries and pensions while peacemakers are told it’s our choice, our risk and why don’t we get a proper job?

You might hear a thread of resentment there. That’s why I didn’t complete the blog. I’ve got stuff around it. It’s still happening now: I and others I’m working with in Ghana, Mali and Palestine are all being seriously obstructed by, would you believe, the actions, errors, denials and avoidances of two banks, one in USA and one in Australia.

It’s not simple, this game. Paldywan Kenobi stares down the banksters! Who’d have thought I’d get sucked into teaching banks how to be human, at my age? Oh, and dealing with a few crime gangs, Wagners and drug-addled murderers along the way, remotely from my eyrie here in Cornwall. Well, I’m quite good at it, actually, and many people give up on such things when things get big or dangerous. I tend to hang in there.

When you step into what used to be called The Great Work, the rules of normal life seem to levitate out of the window and disappear. Retirement is something other people do.

For astrologers, I’ve just gone through Saturn opposing my natal Saturn (and square Moon and Ascendant). So I’m doing Saturn, yet again. When I started my cancer trip five years ago, I thought I had 1-3 years left, so I put my rather mission-driven, saturnine sense of life-purpose to the side. But it has started up again!

Well, my dear old late Mum used to say, “There’s no rest for the wicked!”. Well, yes, perhaps so, or perhaps not. She was a do-gooder too, handing me down that pattern, bless her. In our self-centred times, it’s not a sensible strategy, doing good, but some of us choose it or get sucked into it anyway.

Compassion fatigue, versus ‘To give and not to count the cost’. Non-attachment to the fruits of our labours, versus ‘Give me the compensation you owe for your frigging corporate errors’. Yes, these things have been rattling around in my heart during those Saturn transits. Well, life is for the learning.

I’ve been reminding myself of something a young Berliner taught me while standing (as you do) in the Sinai Desert. I repeat this here, particularly for people infected with the Trump virus:

It’s okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

Love from me – as you might sense, in a rather saturnine mood on this fullmoon!

Palden

Geopolitical Healing

The seventh Aha Class, in Penzance, Cornwall
Weds 12th March, 6.30pm, at The Hive

A settler incursion and tricky situation in the historic souk in Hebron, Palestine

Inner journeying, meditation, remote healing and peace-building. Doing our bit toward tackling the world’s problems – instead of wringing hands and feeling helpless.

In recent times many of us have been moved to join meditations, prayers and link-ups when major crises break out. Waves of mass empathy and concern over such crises can have a wide and deep psycho-spiritual influence – it goes deeper than mere ‘public opinion’.

Praying for peace or showering light over a benighted area are good, though often they are of a generalised nature. They can affect the collective psyche and sometimes help swing things.

But it’s possible to get closer in. It’s possible to penetrate actual situations and play a more targeted part in them – literally rescuing people or souls, or participating in situations, meetings and crux-points at the frontline of human experience.

That’s what this evening is about. This might be a valuable inner tool to add to your repertory. This is not ‘lightworking’ but spiritual humanitarian work – bringing in truckloads of spirit, rescue and healing.

This is not simple. It carries responsibilities, and it’s not a matter of imposing our wishes – benign or biased – on world situations. The key issue is to help humanity learn, to become more aware in making the choices it makes, for the longterm resolution of what are often deep-seated problems.

In the first half of this evening, I’ll outline considerations and issues involved in such work, how we choose issues and crises and work with them, and the blessings, delusions and dangers involved and what it’s all for.

In the second half we’ll go on an inner journey to work with a particular area of focus that is currently afoot in the world. (And, first time round, we won’t be working with polarised Trump-related issues!)

You might or might not wish to go into this kind of work but, even if you don’t, world situations do come up at times, touching our hearts, to which we respond, and inner journeying (conscious dreaming) is one way we can play a part in world affairs as situations arise. Once you get the gist of it, it can be applied in areas that interest you – socio-cultural, ecological, geopolitical or simply encouraging forward-moving change.

If you’ve done this kind of thing before, this class might help you clarify a few things and take it a step further. If it’s new territory, it’s a good place to start.

Since most of you will not be able to come, audio recordings will be posted online within days after the class (no charge) – just follow the link below. Recordings of all of the Aha Classes can be found here. If geopolitical healing interests you, you might find this site useful: The Flying Squad.

https://www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-geo.html

With love, Palden

Site: http://www.palden.co.uk
Podcasts: http://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Books: https://www.palden.co.uk/books-by-palden.html

Gandhi-ji, in residence at the UN in Geneva. His life was his message.

Being Alive

This time it’s a blog and a podcast…

Some days I have days where inspiration-levels droop, so I rattle off a podcast or a blog, if I can muster up a gem to start with – a starting thought. It’s a way of getting inspiration-channels moving, and sometimes something good comes out. Not always – I have quite a few rejects.

A few days ago I was feeling a bit like that – the cancer drugs were affecting me, I’d been on my own too much, it was raining and foggy, and I was casting around for a spark to give me some ignition. Oldies sometimes need a bit of that – ignition. And going to rest in bed isn’t that inspiring once you’ve done it for some years. Yes, even with the amazing view I have out of the window from my bed.

Bosigran Castle, a cliff sanctuary, West Penwith, Cornwall

It has been one of my pathologies in life – a wee ability to ignite people and things, providing a spark that sets things in motion. This is part of the role of an astrologer, but I’m one of those who has got his fingers in various pies over the decades, for all sorts of reasons. Some of these spark-moments I hear about or see the results of, often years later, and some I hope have happened anyway, somewhere, sometime, whether or not Schroeder’s Cat was watching, and unbeknownst to me. I’m happy about that. It has been a privilege to participate in people’s lives in that way.

I’m still at it – helping our proud nation raise, widen and deepen its true productivity levels, the true GDP of our people, through helping people fix their souls, and periodically managing to pass them occasional keys that open doors. Except nowadays I’m doddering around like an old fogey on sticks, wondering when the next seat is likely to appear. I go at about one-third of the pace of most people. I’ve passed my best-before date, so at times I have to work at finding a spark to ignite the old creativity-plugs.

I made a deep, bone-level decision during this winter. I’d been building up for it ever since getting stricken with cancer in late 2019. Perhaps it wasn’t a decision, more a confirmation or full acceptance of something I knew was the case but perhaps didn’t have the confidence to really go the whole way. It was like a conversion.

I decided that I shall not die for medical reasons.

Before you start overthinking and wondering what I mean, I mean this… I’ll die because it’s time and I’ve had enough, I’ve done what I came to do and to be (well, more or less), and because the angels no longer need to prop me up, and because I’m ready and cooked. Whenever that happens, I imagine I’ll go out quite quickly – y’know, an armchair job, or in my sleep, or a quick illness.

We shall see. Or perhaps tha angels might pull another trick and give me another lesson to learn. Sorry, mate, you don’t always get what you want! And what do you mean by ‘a good death’ anyway? Are you kidding?

Anyway, there’s not far to go – it’s months or a few years, as far as I can tell. But this isn’t to do with time. It’s to do with the fulfilment of all that needs fulfilling. Or a decent enough amount of it to lay it all to rest and hand in my cards.

There’s another thing too: dying is a part of life, not different from it, or a disjunction. It’s not ‘things going wrong’. It’s a continuity, a transition into another state, and the bits need to be in place for that, ideally. But once the bits are in place, you need to do it, to give permission for the tide to lift you up and take you away.

However, as you might already have found, our ideals often lead us along trackways that lead us all over the place – life on Earth is really complex and easy to get lost in. The path is rarely as straight and simple as it looked on the map. Or perhaps ideals trick us into doing things we’d run away from otherwise.

Who knows when I’ll drop off my perch? Do you know when or how you’ll drop, yourself? Probably not. I’ve been an astrologer for fifty years and I can’t answer that one. I don’t even try.

We don’t exist as individual selves as much as we would like to believe. We Westerners value ourselves very highly – y’know, it’s 400 Palestinians exchanged for six Israelis. And we make a big deal when people pop their clogs and remind us of our own impermanence, frailty and helplessness. We make stone memorials to them, as if to keep them pinned down in our world. We think of dying as a loss, as things going wrong, as loved ones leaving us.

In life we’re supposed to be on top of things – clearing that list, keeping to the timetable, doing what’s required, being responsible. But in the other world, well, that’s irrelevant. It’s necessary to allow ourselves to immerse and drown in the void and float through the vortex, to that far-off place where you no longer need to pay bills or fill in forms.

Ah, correction… unless you create that reality for yourself up there too! This can arise out of the illusion that, as long as we’re doing something, we must be alive. So we keep trying to do things, even when death is busy netting us.

But the big secret is, when you get there, to that expanded moment when your heart stops, there is nothing more you can do about all that, about that life you had. It’s over. Kaputt. Gesloten. Finito. Gone.

Then you’re in another world.

Palden at Bosigran, recently. Photo by Selina al-Mukhtar.

The fascinating thing is that we have karmic threads that permeate our lives and crop up in all sorts of ways in those lives. Since the soul does not exist within the experiential and sequential narratives of time, it lives all of its lives, from its viewpoint, at the same time. No time. Therefore, there is interchange and multilogue going on between our different lives, both on Earth and off it, and continually.

Think about it for a while… that’s rather a big thought.

For me, one of those karmic threads over several lives has been about calling together groups, clans, armies and throngs. This is a bit weird, because I’m quite a hermit too, or I prefer beavering away in the background. I’m not always doing that pulling-people-together trip, but in certain lives I’ve had that (shall we call it) calling or duty. In the life I’m now speaking from, it was called ‘The Camps’, and a number of readers will have been at them in former decades. And they still progress whether I’m there or not. Loads of other gatherings, groups, circles and networks too, and not only in this lifetime.

Some good people were key souls in making the camps happen – sister and brother souls who formed a constellation of energy and logistics to pull off a miracle. I dropped in the seed-idea, which was quietly formulated with a small number of people in our kitchen at the time, bless their souls, who ended up ‘holding the energy’ at the camps. A few are dead now, and others ageing. I get the feeling we’ll find ourselves meeting up again upstairs though.

In unconscious anticipation of this, the name of the cafe at the very first three seasons of camps around Glastonbury in the mid-eighties was called ‘Pie in the Sky’. Precisely. You’re welcome to come along, when you get to heaven.

Bosigran Castle as seen from Pendeen Watch direction

Anyway, when I started writing this it was intended to be a few paragraphs. As you see, it turned into more than that. But then, with loads of planets in Pisces right now, whaddya expect except slippery, bouncy dollops of the Great Unknown? So you got this diatribe. Apologies – I’ll go away in a moment. Nevertheless, it’s AI-free and much better than just re-posting neat memes with someone else’s pictures in the background. I hope.

The idea was to tell you about a new podcast. Recently I’ve been going on a bit about other worlds, other millennia, flying souls and random outbursts of imagineering and, this time, I thought I’d say a few things about life on Earth. If you’ve been there, or if you find yourself there now, it might give you a few interesting perspectives, while you’re busy doing the ironing or trying to figure out how to fix your car.

Or not, as the case may be. Who knows? Eitherwhichway, the pod is what came out of my brainbox and voicebox one rainy day when no one was looking. Except for the robin who sits outside eyeballing me expectantly and wondering what I’m doing.

Oh, and by the way, remember the Sunday meditations. They happen every Sunday on a cushion near you. Follow the link below if you need details. Keep it simple. Just do it.

Love from me. Paldywan.

The found sounds at the beginning and end are from recent early mornings on the farm in West Penwith, Cornwall.

Podcasts: http://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Notes from the Far Beyond: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Sunday Meditations: http://www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
Latest Aha Class – Getting Dead and What Happens Afterwards: http://www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-dying.html
About The 1980s Camps: http://www.palden.co.uk/camps.html

On Being Given a New Life

A Pod from the Far Beyond about Cancer

This is particularly for people affected by cancer or any other serious or terminal illness.

I’ve been a member of the Honourable Company of Cancer Patients for over five years now and, amazingly, I’m still alive, and against the odds. I have a blood cancer, Multiple Myeloma, and I didn’t expect to live this long.

I waded through the tough grind of chemotherapy and dealing with physical disablement. I went down, nearly fell through the cracks, and found myself emerging from a dark tunnel around three years ago.

I found myself starting a new life – well, kind of. I have no idea how long I am to live – it could be next month or five years. But I found a reason to be alive.

This podcast is not about the medical stuff: it’s about the experience of cancer and what it can do to us. Deep in our soul.

This is my fiftieth podcast from the far beyond. The birds in the intro and outro were recorded here on the farm early in the morning on 19th February 2025. To me, they’re medicine birds – especially the geese, who overwinter here.

Love from me, Palden

http://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

and it’s also on Spotify, Apple and Google Podcasts.