This is about the ancient sites of West Penwith in Cornwall, where I live. It runs through the prehistory of this area from the Mesolithic, through the Neolithic and the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, featuring particularly the megalithic periods of the Neolithic and Bronze Age – the time of the quoits, menhirs and stone circles.
It will be of interest to locals in Cornwall, or people from elsewhere who visit our ancient sites, or people with a general interest in prehistory and megalithic times.
It’s in four episodes – and for binge-listeners there’s a three-hour omnibus edition. If you prefer reading, there’s a PDF version of this short book that can be read on-screen or printed out.
Originally it was part of my book Shining Land, about the ancient sites of West Penwith, but I took it out because it made Shining Land too long. It works well on its own.
Britain has had two periods of national greatness. One was the 250-year empire-building period in relatively recent times, and the other was the Bronze Age and a megalithic civilisation that lasted a thousand years. This is its story, as it happened in West Cornwall, one of the hubs of megalithic activity in NW Europe 4,000 years ago.
If this interests you, I hope you enjoy the book! It’s free to stream or download.
The next Aha Class on Weds 12th Feb 2025 at The Hive, Penzance, Cornwall.
Receiving cancer into my life five years ago, I’ve looked in the face of death several times, and quite experientially. In fact, at present I’m surprised, even rather disoriented, to be alive. But it didn’t start there – this has been an evolving theme of my life. So in this Aha Class I’ll be sharing some insights and perceptions I’ve picked up along the way.
I had a life-changing near-death experience at age 24 – accidental food poisoning (hemlock, actually). I was unconscious for nine days, awakening with much of my memory wiped clean. Not long afterwards I met up with Tibetan Lamas, who taught their perceptions of life and death, about the bardos, the differing realms of existence, of which life is but one. Frankly, their blessings and kindness kept me on the rails during a very difficult time.
Then I became involved with campaigning for home-birth, following the births of two of my daughters. To me, a good natural birth made inherent sense with no need for rational explanation. Later in life I was even able to communicate with a soul before his birth, and he talked to me about what it was like being in his (to us) little world.
Later, from the 1990s onwards, I found myself working psychically with dying people, helping them over to the other side. Some were people I knew, and others were in conflict zones experiencing tricky deaths. Having been to the edge of death myself, I was able to help them transition – holding their hand and going over with them. It was remarkable how variable their experiences were. I was also part of a group (the Flying Squad) in which amongst other things we did psychic soul-rescue work in earthquake and disaster zones.
Since getting cancer five years ago, I’ve been hovering close to the threshold myself a few times. This has been a true education. Hovering on the boundaries really made me aware of the contrasting issues in both worlds. I feel reasonably comfortable about dying: in my way of seeing things, I’ll be going home. Well, at least for a while. I’m a bit beat-up and in need of deep healing.
I see things from the viewpoint of reincarnation. Looking at things this way, getting born, being alive and getting dead take on a new light. There’s something of us that continues through all of this. A newborn baby is not a blank slate devoid of character, and a person who dies doesn’t just stop existing – it’s a journey of the soul. Not only this but, as many of you might have found, being a witness to a birth or a death can be a wondrous and spirit-showered experience in its own right.
Dying is like an assessment of where we’ve actually got to after living a life. In the end it’s our own assessment, though it might take the shape of St Peter, or a wrathful deity, or a wise old angel. It comes from a place of truth, perspective and far-seeing that dawns in us during the dying process. This dawning can happen before, during or after clinical death, depending on where we are at – in terms of what we have truly become. This sounds serious, though it can also be joyful and a relief. It all depends on what we have done with our lives and where we have come to with it all.
This isn’t about judgements like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. It’s about seeing the true and full range of causes and consequences arising from all that we have been part of – what we have done and not done during those defining moments, those periods of time and those dramas we were in. There’s an understanding, a forgiveness, a grace and mercy to it. We come to understand why things went that way.
Dying before we die: this can make the dying transition easier, decongesting the process. Getting stuff sorted before we go – and not just writing our will, but clarifying things in our heart and soul, in truth and ‘before God’. We all need to do a reckoning, a forgiveness, a resolution and a releasing, with ourselves, people and the world.
It was as it was. What have I learned from it and what have I become? I’ve made mistakes and done things I’m not happy about, and it’s a process of owning up and squaring with it. In some cases I’ve done things to rebalance or rectify things, and in others I have not. Even with unresolved issues, it’s necessary to accept their unresolution.
There’s also a balancing factor – the things we’ve done that we can be happy with, that brought forwardness to others and the world, some of which we did precisely to redeem our own shadows, to pass through a karmic gateway. Part of this reckoning involves acknowledging our strong points and things we are glad about.
So this talk is for anyone facing death, or witnessing it in a person close to them, or feeling bereaved, or working with dying people, or preoccupied with the deep-seated questions that life and death raise. Actually, if truth be known, that’s everyone, but we have room for thirty-fiveish people at the Aha Class! It will be recorded and posted online afterwards.
I take a rather left-field and spiritualistic approach to all this. Whether or not you agree, I hope this talk might help get you into the zone, elasticise some ideas and set some things in motion. In our modern Western culture we have a big taboo around questions of birth and death, and this is very strange and not to our advantage. Even so, every one of us got born (well done) and every one of us is heading for the exit (good luck). So perhaps it’s worth giving this matter a little attention.
Do come if you can. If you can’t, the audio recording is posted online about a week afterwards.
This is another of my Palestine tales from 12-15 years ago, from a book called O Little Town of Bethlehem, which recorded a five-month stay in 2011-12. In my writings and photos at the time my aim was to humanise Palestinians. Because, like you and me, they’re real humans with real human lives to live.
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As the sun went down, a wonderful atmosphere settled upon Bethlehem. The town was in a genial mood – people chatting and hanging out in the streets. At Cinema, a busy intersection with taxis and taxi-vans, I saw a six year old girl standing on some steps simply singing out loud to the street. This was not only touching but also rather refreshing because, for some reason, Palestinians tend not to sing.
Aisha, an English friend who teaches English at the Hope Flowers Centre and stays at my place one night a week, uses the large, empty, echoey conference room in the school for practising opera – she’s an accomplished singer but, living in Ramallah and surrounded with people who would find opera rather strange, doing her scales and practicing her arias doesn’t quite work easily. So she loves practising at the school, where she won’t be heard – and the conference room echoes quite nicely too.
Nevertheless, a neighbour discretely enquired of me what was happening. I explained and he smiled. He’d seen opera on TV, and was interested when I said that operas were like plays sung out loud, with stories to them. I asked him why Palestinians tend not to sing, and he said back, “Since the Nakba we haven’t had much to sing about”. Well, true, but I know that’s not the real answer, which I am yet to find out.
The Nakba, by the way, was ‘The Disaster’, the 1948 war during which the Israelis staked out their nation militarily, by ethnically cleansing and killing the Arabic inhabitants of hundreds of villages and towns in what became Israel. In the space of a few months, the population of Bethlehem quadrupled with refugees and they have never gone home – there’s no home to go back to. As a symbolic act, refugee families keep the keys to their old, lost houses, like a family totem, proof of having torn-up roots in their own land.
This afternoon was one of those times when people set their cares aside and enjoy the moment. That’s one thing I like in Palestine: people do their best to keep their spirits up and enjoy life. There is no alternative. Or at least, the alternative, dwelling on your problems, is far worse.
As my friend Ghada once put it, at a time when she was feeling pessimistic a few years ago, “In Palestine we don’t have up days and down days, we have down days and worse days”. She was at that moment manifesting symptoms of the strange collective bipolarity Palestinians live by, thanks to their circumstances: generally they keep their mood positive in spite of everything, but when they lose their strength and fortitude, they plummet into deep despond. That was where she was when she said this.
Palestinians wear their emotions inside out: love and sadness, friendship and disgust, humour and anger, they share them openly, men perhaps more than women. Their feelings spill out liberally. Mercifully it’s their positive emotions they show most. I have never seen a sign of violence except on a couple of occasions when Israeli soldiers are around, acting provocatively, but even then Palestinians suppress it because they usually don’t feel like getting shot, beaten up, arrested or hounded. They got tired of that ten years ago, and it doesn’t achieve much.
But on a lovely, tranquil afternoon like today, there was still a problem. On the way home, passing through Deheisheh and Duha, there was smoke everywhere. People were setting fire to the skips in which they put their rubbish. They do this because civic rubbish disposal is patchy at the best of times, and the skips were full. It’s not only smoky but dangerous, since so much of their rubbish contains plastics and other toxic materials, and the slow smoulder of the rubbish means that it doesn’t even burn properly. They have a blind spot around this issue. When Westerners like me raise the matter, they shrug it off as if it is no problem. But it is a problem and a big one.
Before you disapprove of these apparently backward people, let me remind you that we in the West started seriously addressing issues such as this only 20-30 years ago, when it was already too late for us. Before that, we trusted in modernity and slavishly paid the price in smog, toxicity, fumes and ugliness. Even today, when I speak to Westerners of the dangers of mobile phones, microwave ovens, wireless internet and electro-smog, people smirk or frown, as if to say “Oh no, he’s one of them”, since this is a current blind spot. One day an enormous scandal will erupt about it and people will yell “Why weren’t we told? Who is responsible for all this?”. We are responsible. We know. But we don’t want to face it.
So blind-spots – areas of life that people deliberately ignore, ultimately to our own cost – are not unique to Arabs. In fact, Arabs look on Westerners as backward because we turn our backs on God – Europeans by becoming increasingly secular and Americans by turning God into a heavily-armed, consumptive patriot with conservative politics.
Every race and nationality covers its insecurities by looking on others as inherently deficient. The less contact they have with other kinds of people, the stronger the negative projection on outsiders – this is one reason for the separation wall, so that each side can project its fantasies about the other onto a concrete screen untainted by reality. This is why Iran is currently a bogeyman – no one goes there to meet the people, so it’s easy to dehumanise them.
This said, Palestinians must still address the issue of rubbish – creating less of it and disposing of it properly. Battery recycling, vegetable waste composting and plastics disposal? Forget it, it doesn’t exist here. But probably it will exist in 10-20 years’ time – Palestine is at a similar stage to the West in the early 1970s. Yet regarding social values, sharing and human warmth, Palestinians are advanced, at a stage that I hope the West will reach in a few decades’ time.
I went into town to do my shopping. I’ve been sitting slogging away at the computer for the last week, so I don’t have many events to report. The trouble with computers is that people hardly see the results of your work because it’s digitally concealed, distinctly not in your face. Much of the work is for people far and wide, so that people around you see little significance in what you’re doing – you’re just sitting at a computer, twiddling fingers and looking serious. I’ve been building a website, dealing with issues for Hope Flowers, doing bits of work and answering questions online – many questions, from many people.
When shopping I went to an old lady I visit regularly. She has a small stall on the streetside in the Old Town. By stall, I mean a stool and a few boxes and bags. She sells herbs and figs. She’s a lovely old lady, clad in her embroidered traditional dress. She walks into town daily with her husband, who leads their donkey, which carries the herbs – then he returns home to work on the land, and he comes back to pick her up later.
Palestinians are big on herbs – they have mint or thyme in their tea and they eat parsley, sage, coriander, spinach and chillies copiously. I buy my herbs from her – big bunches of them, far too big to use on my own, for 1-2 shekels per bunch (20-40p in British money). She likes her pet Englishman. She eyes me closely when she thinks I’m not looking. I think she knows intuitively that I’m roughly the same age as she is, except she’s an old woman and I look younger – apart from a rather wrinkly face which has clearly seen some things. She hasn’t figured me out yet. Life wears out Palestinians.
Then I went down to the market to get vegetables. Two stallholders were trying to steal me off the stallholder I usually go to, but he has the best vegetables. One thing many Palestinians don’t quite understand is this. They tend to think one is obliged to shop with them out of a duty to support them – after all, fair’s fair, isn’t it? Well no, I’m a Westerner, and I go for the best stuff and the best deal. Sorry about that. Also, annoyingly, I buy things only when I need them.
The souvenir shopkeepers down in town think similarly. I’m a Westerner, therefore I have money, therefore I ought to buy from them. Not so. I buy presents only because there are people I know and love to whom I wish to give things, and I buy specifically for them. There’s also the question of how to get it back to England, so I cannot buy much. I’m not a buying machine – well, at least, not in my own head.
Dear reader, this might seem elementary, but it’s not so for Palestinians. This is a walled-off cooperation and mutual-support economy, an economy where everyone depends on everyone else for keeping each other alive, so the emphasis here is on supporting your fellow citizens by trading with them, to some extent whether or not you need what they’re selling.
Nevertheless, when one of the traders, a young chap of seventeen who helps his elder brother run a shop, moaned to me today about having no money to buy schoolbooks, I took pity on him. He had said there had been no business today, and he needed 50 Jordanian Dinars (250 shekels or £50) for the books tomorrow. He was worried and depressed. So I wandered off to do other chores, including raiding a bank machine, and slipped him 50 JDs on the way back. He lit up and hugged me, shedding a tear. Now he could get his books.
I told him that this is a life-lesson we all need to learn: solutions often come when you’ve given up. When you give up, it means you’re opening up to Allah, handing over your problems since you couldn’t solve them yourself. This money is a gift from Allah, through a random Englishman. So give thanks to Allah.
“You are a good man, Mr Balden. I pray that Allah, he will pick you up when you have a need.” Well thanks, I might need your prayer to come true one day. This young Palestinian, poor yet intelligent, has better English than some of the 17-year old Brits I know. Good luck to you, mate – I sincerely hope you get a future.
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My three Palestine books are: – Pictures of Palestine (in print and as a downloadable PDF) – Blogging in Bethlehem (an audiobook and PDF) – O Little Town of Bethlehem (PDF only) Available here: http://www.palden.co.uk/pop/order.html
Yes, that’s the drug I’m on today, together with Lenidalomide, Dexamethasone, Apixaban and Aciclovir – it’s enough to make pharma-paranoiacs run a mile. Many have been the messages I’ve had which recommend all sorts of alternative means of staying alive. No doubt well intentioned, I nevertheless find myself writing back to ask whether they have actual experience of what they recommend – which has mostly not been the case. Most seem to think I have a ‘normal’ cancer, without actually knowing I have Multiple Myeloma, an incurable blood cancer and definitely not normal.
I’ve listed all the holistic supplements, remedies and methods that I use in my cancer treatment in my book and audiobook ‘Blessings that Bones Bring‘. With a philosophy of counting my blessings, I’m doing both pharma and holistics, and it works, and the ideological contradiction between them that many people set up for themselves is something I gladly omit to subscribe to.
Just as well really – I’m alive against the odds. But the biggest medicine of all is this. If you are practicing your life-purpose, the reason why you came here to Earth, as a priority, then you’re likely to stay alive until it’s reasonably complete – whatever that means. However, here’s the rub: for some people, dying and the manner of their death can also be part of that life-purpose. Princess Di was an example.
It’s an initiation. You might be a smart-arse with a masters or a doctorate, but they will not qualify you for this. What’s needed is every single cubic inch of humanity you have in you. It comes at you, takes away your control and takes you off, out of your body to another place.
Or perhaps you believe it all goes dark and the you that is you somehow suddenly stops being you – you’ve become a useless pile of dust returning to the dust. Well, good luck with that, though you might be heading for a few surprises. In my experience, the journey doesn’t stop there. Just as well really.
I do have a strange tendency to believe that there’s more to existence than that. The last five years, since cancer gave itself to me, have reinforced that belief. If indeed it is a belief. After all, do I believe in breakfast? Do I believe in trees, rain and sunshine? I’ve been really close to dying, several times. Actually, I shouldn’t be alive – and that’s not a medical opinion but my own observation. I’ve made it through thanks to a series of miracles, a few acts of faith and a strange capacity to rebirth myself. Plus the prayers and goodwill of friends, the blessings of guardian angels, and… work. Yes, work. Working at the reason why I came, and whether I’ve done enough of it to feel satsified with a job well enough done.
Much to my surprise. I wasn’t expecting to be alive after five years, and it leaves me in rather an open space. I thought that at most I had three years, and now I’m on extra time. It’s a matter of figuring out how to make plans while knowing that I’m vulnerable enough, and my grip on life is tenuous enough, to pop my clogs tomorrow or the next day.
For me, it’s a matter of taking charge of my death. It’s my decision – not anyone else’s. Except perhaps for those angels. A year ago, my haematological specialist at the Royal Cornwall hospital said to me, “Well, Mr Jenkins, I don’t know what you do, and I don’t want to know but, whatever you’re doing, keep on doing it“. Indeed, I did, and I’m still here. I’m an easy customer for her – I get few complications, I’m uncomplaining though I’m also calm and clear about certain issues, and she leaves me to my own devices. No, not toxic digital devices, but devices such as intuition… and inner doctors.
Yes, I’ve got some inner doctors. I called them in at an early stage. My angels shunted a few in, too. Once a week, I have a session with them (and at no charge). I go into myself, breathing myself down into a deep state, and I open myself up to them, and there they are. They examine and scan me – using psychospiritual technologies that make Startrek look primitive. I feel them umming and aaahing over things, and consulting, and sometimes I’m flooded with light, or they insert a light-tube into me, or they focus on an organ, and often I’m not at all sure what they’re doing but I can feel them doing it.
At times they raise me up to their level and it feels so friendly, inclusive and welcoming there. I kinda hover there, on my back, held in the middle of their energy-field and jiggled, poked, massaged and blessed by invisible forces. After a while they drop me back down again.
It’s funny how it works. The doctors at Treliske have been worrying about the fact that I’ve been a lifelong smoker – it helps my brains and, as a psychic, also helps me stay on Earth – since I am not a foodie, which is the other way many psychics stay on Earth. So I was to go in for a lung scan. But during my last session with the inner doctors, I did two things. One was to ask for their help in cleaning out my lungs and removing anything that’s unhelpful, and the second was to offer myself up and release all hopes, fears and expectations, to get to a state of full acceptance that, whatever is to happen will happen, and it will be good.
So they flooded my lungs with light and I felt them doing something there. I continued with this in the days that followed but, the day before the scan, the thought came, “Hmmm, this needs more time…“. Claire, a trusty helper from over the hill, took me for the scan. I walked into chaos – the power had gone off – but eventually, on the second interview, the nurse said, “Ah, Mr Jenkins, I’m sorry to say that we can’t scan you because you had a PET scan last August and we cannot scan you more than once a year“. I quietly chuckled. Yes indeed, this needs more time, and I’d just been given it. The nurse didn’t notice me looking upwards and smiling. This is how it sometimes works.
I thanked her for her consideration, saying I am electrosensitive and it matters to me. “Ah, that’s interesting“, said she, proceeding to ask questions as if she knew about it. This was refreshing: in the last five years only one doctor has indicated interest. He showed me a paper in The Lancet which correlated incidences of Multiple Myeloma with proximity to nuke stations. Since then I’ve met other Myeloma patients who have worked operating radar systems, driving nuclear-waste trains from Sellafield, working as high-tension power cable or mobile phone engineers, or as programmers who’ve used a lot of wi-fi…
Once information about EM-radiation is finally made public, everyone will no doubt bleat, “But why weren’t we told?”. To which the answer is: “Why didn’t you feel it and use your commonsense? Did you think it would be alright to irradiate yourself all day and every day without consequence?”.
Well, we humans… we find quite intricate ways of limiting our possibilities and making life difficult. The same applies to me. However, while I have my own self-immolating patterns, I’ve also looked after myself and now find myself still alive as a result – if proof be needed. I’m definitely glad that, at an early age (21) I went vegetarian and changed my life – it has paid off. Yes, I got cancer, but my capacity to deal with it is far greater than most people’s, because on the whole I’ve had a good diet and lifestyle, having built up a good reserve stock of resilience.
But here’s what in the end is the key bit: I’ve been following a growth path, with fewer diversions and denials than most ‘average’ people. If you live on purpose and in purpose, it gives you distinct reasons for staying alive.
But even then, the stories of our lives are multiplex and not limited to being alive in a body. Many of us aren’t even fully installed in our bodies, even when emotionally attached and afraid of losing them. The Council of Nine put it quite well…
“Your Planet Earth is the most beautiful that exists in the universe. It has a physical variety that no other planet has. It has a varied climate that no other planet has. In all the universe there is no planet in existence that has the physical characteristics of Planet Earth. It is the rarest of beauties, and it does attract souls which, once they have come, would like to come back again. This has created a bottleneck of souls recycling on Earth.
“It is of a different nature from any other planet. It has aspects of all planets: it is like a composite of the Universe, with all the positive and all the negative aspects, and all in between, and this is what attracts souls.
“It has with it a gravitational pull that is different from other planets, and because of this a soul begins to feel a physicalness. Souls become adapted to their physical bodies, and they forget the freedom and pleasures they have without it.
“The Earth was created to be a paradise. When souls achieve harmony it will become a paradise again. Planet Earth is the only one of its kind, the only planet of free [individualised] choice in the entire universe, the planet created for the balancing of the spiritual with the physical – in other words, the creating of paradise.“
To some extent this ‘paradise’ business is an attitude of mind. In a funny sort of way, since getting cancer and becoming partially disabled I’ve been happier than before. It’s all to do with how we deal with the life we’ve been given. Nowadays, a lot of people do a lot of complaining about life, as if it’s all someone or something else’s fault. But my best recommendation is, just go to Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, Belarus, Syria, Ukraine, Xinjiang or Myanmar – there are plenty of options – and do a full-spectrum re-assessment. You might find that you come to feel differently about things. That’s what happened to me.
Yeah, life’s a bitch, then you die. However, here’s another gem from the Nine: no one is here by accident.
So, you see, even on pharmaceutical cancer drugs, you can do something with it to make it good. That’s where that free, individualised choice truly lies. It’s on us, not anyone or anything else.
It’s funny how sometimes we fall into things unwittingly, then to find that they take up years of our lives. This is what happened with my research into the ancient sites of the area where I live, in West Penwith, Cornwall. It all started one day when I was sitting chatting with Cheryl Straffon, an archaeologist and goddess-oriented pagan who for decades has been a key person here, bringing together a full spectrum of prehistorians, from archaeologists to pagans, and editing Meyn Mamvro, a magazine about Cornish archaeology and earth mysteries.
We were talking about John Michell who, in the 1960s-70s, brought the idea of leylines, sacred landscapes and earth mysteries to wider attention in a seminal 1969 book The View over Atlantis. John came to Penwith, doing fieldwork here to demonstrate his point, producing a catalogue of ninetyish ancient site alignments in Penwith, about which he wrote in his 1974 book The Old Stones of Land’s End.
I asked Cheryl whether anyone had made a map of the alignments John had found. No, she said. Hmmm. In former times, I had made a map of the alignments around Glastonbury… “Would it help if I made an alignments map of Penwith?“. “Oooh, yes, it would.“
I thought at first that it might be easier than it turned out to be. It landed up being seven years of work, starting in 2014, and it still gets tweaks and updates now. I’d had one of those falling-into-things moments, just then.
Carn Galva, a classic Neolithic Tor and the axis mundi or world centre of Neolithic Penwith – as seen from Caer Brân
Things had changed since I did the Glastonbury map, hand-drawn in 1982 and revised around 2003. Aerial satellite mapping had arrived on internet. For alignment-oriented geomancers like me this greatly changed the equation, opening up many new possibilities and making alignments maps easily accessible online to the public.
At the beginning it came clear that a genuinely useful map would need to show all of the known ancient sites in Penwith. But there are more than 800 of them, big and small, surviving or destroyed, so this was no small job. They were listed in a variety of online databases which, to complicate things, sometimes gave differing or inaccurate information, so every single site had to be examined closely.[1] I spent months trawling through these sources and building up a base map on which later to mark alignments. Later on I continued the mapwork to cover Scilly and the whole of Cornwall.
Some sites were difficult to confirm, being disappeared, disputed or subject to discussion. Some were visible in the field and others, now destroyed, were beyond trace, though many are mentioned in antiquarians’ records from former times – especially those of one called Dr William Borlase, who tramped around Penwith in the mid-1700s.[2]
Eventually I completed a map of Penwith’s sites. Then it was a matter of working through John Michell’s list of ninetyish alignments, plus others found since his time and listed in Meyn Mamvro.
One can argue till the end of time about the validity of megalithic alignments and sceptics love to do so, claiming an assumed authority of scientific rationality when, to me, all that these complaints demonstrate is that sceptics have not properly researched the matter. There is a simple, evidential, inescapable fact: ancient sites are commonly located in exact alignment with each other. This can be seen and checked by anyone on maps and in the field.
That’s the evidence, whether or not we have an explanation. It happens too much, too exactly and with too many supporting details to be a case of chance or randomness. There are discernable patterns to the specific nature of differing alignments – some are made up solely of cairns or menhirs (standing stones), or they link sites of similar antiquity, or they make some sort of sense in a wide variety of ways. Some alignments are even parallel.
If you look at the online map of Penwith’s alignments [3] it looks like a meaningless jumble with only a modicum of order to it. There’s a ridiculously large number of alignments and it’s difficult figuring out how and why the megalith builders went to the trouble of setting things up like this.
But when you look closer at individual alignments and the sites they connect, they begin making more sense. It’s worth remembering that the ancients walked everywhere, so a lot more happened for them in the space of a mile than it does for us, speeding along in our cars and looking at overview maps.
What is most interesting is that alignments stretch not just between man-made sites, but they also involve natural sites such as hilltops, carns (outcrops) and cliff promontories. The whole system is based on these prominent points – I call them ‘base sites’. The pattern of ancient sites is draped over the three-dimensional canvas of the Penwith landscape and arranged around it. There are also astronomically-oriented alignments and other factors such as energy-vortices, underground and overground energy lines, site intervisibility and even geometry that are involved in the positioning of ancient sites. [For more on this, here’s a talk by me.]
Entering Michell’s ninety alignments on the map, I found that only two were inaccurate and implausible, and I removed them. He had done good, accurate work. While making the map and checking the alignments, I started finding new ones and, before long, the list of alignments grew bigger. Some were found logically, by examining a chosen site to check for alignments, and some were found intuitively, happening on them ‘by chance’. After visiting sites around the fields and moors of Penwith, I would come home to examine their location and possible alignments, sometimes adding a few that way.
Late one evening I had a Eureka moment. I was thinking about Cape Cornwall, a conical-shaped headland in a marine context, and St Michael’s Mount, a conical-shaped island in a marine context (though originally it stuck out of the forest on dry land). They are rather similar. I wondered whether there was a connection. I looked on the map and, lo behold, a line between them intersected a collection of four Bronze Age barrows on top of the hill on the farm where I live!
Gosh. I had sat many times on those barrows.[4] They are not well-known because, being on what’s now a boggy heather-moorland hill, they look unimpressive, but their 360-degree panoramic location is spectacular. In the Bronze Age they would have been far more attractive, situated on sweet hilltop meadows – the climate was more agreeable 4,000 years ago than it is now.
Then I started looking for further alignments emanating from St Michael’s Mount and Cape Cornwall. Within an hour I had found quite a few. This doesn’t happen very often – I’ve never had such a big discovery of new alignments before or since. These proved to be a new kind of alignment that John Michell and others had not seen.
John was looking at constructed Bronze Age sites such as stone circles, menhirs, cairns and barrows, which were built from around 2400 BCE onwards. The new alignments I had found involved Neolithic sites from a millennium earlier, and natural sites such as granite tors and cliff headlands. These alignments acted differently to Michell’s Bronze Age ones, covering longer distances and with fewer points on them. I called them ‘backbone alignments’ – alluding to the main system of fibre-optic cables that connects the internet globally. Connecting Neolithic and natural sites, these alignments were clearly far older than John’s Bronze Age ones.
The very first constructed sites in Penwith, Neolithic tor enclosures, were built around 3700 BCE – over a millennium before the stone circles. There were four – Carn Galva, Carn Kenidjack, Trencrom Hill and St Michael’s Mount – and one outside Penwith that features in its landscape, Carn Brea near Redruth.
Many of the newly-discovered backbone alignments also stretched to what I call cliff sanctuaries. Archaeologists call them cliff castles – a term that persuades many people to believe they were used for defensive purposes, which I would argue they were not. They are customarily dated to the Iron Age around 300 BCE, long after the megalithic period, because Iron Age remains are found on them. But the new alignments, associating them with Neolithic sites, suggest they were much older in the first use. Neolithic artifacts have been found at some cliff sanctuaries, but these have not caused them to be properly re-dated to this early time.
Then came the clincher. I found that Lanyon Quoit, one of the key Neolithic sites of Penwith, built around 3600 BCE, was located exactly at the intersection of three of these alignments. In other words, Lanyon Quoit could not have been placed where it is without these three alignments being known at the time – it was positioned to align with two cliff sanctuaries and three Neolithic tors. This definitely re-dates the cliff sanctuaries to the Neolithic, also making them far more important than they previously were understood to be.
Penwith’s four surviving stone circles are all located on backbone alignments. The Merry Maidens, for example, are located exactly on an alignment stretching between Carn Brea and St Michael’s Mount, both Neolithic tors, and Treryn Dinas, a cliff sanctuary. These three natural sites happen, strangely, to be aligned with each other (there are a number of such cases in Penwith). So the stone circle was located there to reinforce the alignment and to draw on the antiquity and earlier primacy of the three Neolithic sites, which came from what in the Bronze Age was a distant former time, some 1,500ish years before.
Eventually, the alignments map of Penwith became really busy with alignments – around 250 of them. They were all genuine alignments, accurate to within 10ft or 3 metres, checked and verified by three people – so this was not a product of sloppy mapping, wishful thinking or ley-hunting zeal.
Alignments are not energy-lines of the kind that is picked up by earth energy dowsers. They are different, even though overground energy lines, like alignments, are also straight. Some overgrounds coincide with alignments, but we yet need to find out the extent to which this is the case.
Trencrom Hill (foreground) and Carn Brea (background) – two Neolithic tors
I’m of the opinion that alignments are not actually lines that are detectable in the landscape. Some dowsers might disagree, but I think they might be picking up on overground energy-lines, or perhaps the thought that links the two sites involved. Instead, it seems that, when a new site was being built, it was simply aligned with other sites in order, presumably, to associate it with them. If you line up five or six objects on a table with gaps between them, aligning them nevertheless gives their distribution some order and coherence. Rendering order out of seeming chaos was important to the ancients. But aligned sites don’t seem to have a connecting current like overground energy-lines do.
It seems to me that aligned sites are instead programmed with the same algorithm, so that they pulsate and resonate with each other, as if tuned to each other. But there isn’t a ‘wire’ connecting them – it’s an internal, implicit connection. It works a bit like what physicists call ‘quantum entanglement’, and as an informational rather than an energetic relationship. An energetic relationship is created by energy-lines that dowsers identify, but alignments don’t do this. So we’re talking here about two different circuitries that each focused on the same ancient sites. And it’s the sites, not the lines, that matter most.
Many ancient sites are thus placed exactly where they are to align them with other sites, though there is no ‘pipe’ connection between them. Instead, they seem to be remotely associated, programmed with the same intent, frequency or behavioural patterns, so that they do similar things at similar times and in similar ways. But they aren’t necessarily directly connected, unless there is also an energy-line between them.
Thus, the Boscregan West cairn, a prominent clifftop cairn on Penwith’s west coast, is aligned with the Neolithic longbarrow on Chapel Carn Brea, and with the now-destroyed Tregurnow stone circle, which was part of the Merry Maidens complex. So these three sites, associated with each other, somehow co-resonated. Or, put another way, two Bronze Age sites, Boscregan cairn and Tregurnow stone circle, were plugged into a Neolithic site on Chapel Carn Brea.
The cliff sanctuaries, embracing the Radiant Land
Interesting, huh? The megalith-builders had quite sophisticated ideas. They weren’t building ancient sites just to decorate the landscape or because it was a nice thing to do. It was a lot of work. They can only have done it because they perceived a definite benefit.
Here’s a much bigger idea. The density of sites and alignments in Penwith, and the way they seem to be integrated into complex relationships with each other, suggest that they operate as one big system. The fundamental substructure is marked out by backbone alignments (yellow on the map), and while the profusion of local alignments (red on the map) seems chaotic to our eyes, it has a certain order of its own. They all seem to make up one big system.
This leads us to the idea that Penwith is an integrated and perhaps super-charged landscape with hundreds of constituent components to it, big and little. That’s the way we should think about it, and not as a disparate scatter of separate sites. After all, Penwith’s ancient name is Belerion – the radiant land – and a place doesn’t pick up a name like that without good reason.
While Penwith’s stone circles and other sites are each modest in size when compared with Stonehenge, Avebury or Callanish, together they make up an enormous system contained by a necklace of cliff sanctuaries and studded with many subsystems. They constitute what can be regarded as a single, big ancient site that is draped over the peninsula’s natural topography and energy-centres.
Each stone circle has a complex or constellation of lesser sites around it – mainly menhirs and barrows. These supporting sites and the surrounding landscape vista exist as an integral part of the stone circle to amplify its purpose – a stone circle doesn’t exist in isolation. In the case of Boscawen-ûn and the Merry Maidens the surrounding agricultural landscape of hedges and fields obscures their wider complexes, but at Tregeseal and the Nine Maidens, located in wilder landscapes, they are more visible.
Tregeseal, for example, sits in a perceptual bowl of hills with a westward vista featuring the Isles of Scilly – almost as if the sweep of hills collects energy from the cosmos to funnel it toward the Scillies. Each stone circle is associated with a hill or tor that is visible from it and a key part of its landscape setting. These complexes are whole systems. In turn, they are aligned with other sites further away, knitting the whole of Penwith into a wholeness.
The stone circles are located on backbone alignments plugged into Neolithic sites – tors and cliff sanctuaries which, in the heavy-forested Neolithic, were the only places where people could get out of the wildwoods. This changed in the Bronze Age, with far more cleared land, which enabled the building of stone circles, menhirs and cairns, but the stone circles, as the ‘cathedrals’ of the system, drew their primacy, authority or blessing from earlier Neolithic sites.
They are key nodes planted in a landscape energy-system with a natural, topographic, geological and subtle-energy foundation. The system fashioned itself around the lay of the land. Here we come to the idea of landscape temples, or whole landscapes that have been developed and consecrated by amping up the natural energies inherent in the land. This was done not only through ‘megalithic geoengineering’ at sacred sites but also through repeated, longterm consciousness-work by successive generations of people. This was an advanced deep-shamanic culture. They imprinted their sacred sites and landscape with repeated and reinforced psychic traces of the shamanic and spiritual practices they conducted over many centuries. They loved the land that gave them a life to live.
An approximate timeline for megalithic Penwith
There is a key aspect of ancient sites that archaeologists miss, and without it ancient sites cannot truly be understood: it concerns earth energy and its psychoactive effects, especially when they are focused and enhanced at man-made ancient sites. These effects cannot easily be detected scientifically, but any person with a modicum of awareness can feel them when visiting sites. We become changed in mood and spirit, sometimes feeling inspired, healed or as if our problems have evaporated. Some people are changed for life – for me, five decades of preoccupation with ancient sites began in 1970 in the Ring of Brogar, a stone circle in the Orkney Isles off Scotland.
These psychoactive effects are a key factor that should be considered ‘legitimate evidence’, regardless of whether or not it can be measured or slotted into existing scientific frameworks. You do not need a doctorate to feel these effects: simply note your feelings and state of being before you enter and after you leave a stone circle. There will be a real change of feeling. Fascinatingly, it can also be quite different in quality and effect each time you visit.
This, I suggest, is a key reason why the ancients went to so much trouble heaving stones around, digging and piling up earth, and doing regular, intentional, collective consciousness work at ancient sites. They spent centuries building up a sophisticated landscape-wide energy-system, and they must have perceived this massive infrastructure investment to be beneficial and worth the effort.
If they had been deluding themselves, it is unlikely that the Bronze Age megalithic period would have lasted 1,200 years. Delusions don’t tend to last that long. There was something very sensible and realistic about the megalithic geoengineering they developed. With our planetary problems of today, we might do well to learn more about what they were up to.
Here’s a final thought. Since right now the world is rather obsessed with warfare, we might also ask ourselves how and why West Penwith is one of the few parts of Britain that has never been invaded – not by Romans, Saxons, Vikings or Normans. In later times Penwith was quietly regarded as lying ‘beyond the reach of the king’s men’. We’ve had some medieval Corsair raids and in the last century or so a seasonal tourist invasion, but Penwith has never actually been invaded. But that, of course, is pure luck and chance, isn’t it?
NOTES:
The main sources were: Heritage Gateway, Historic England, Cornwall Council, Megalithic Portal, Modern Antiquarian, Meyn Mamvro, The Holy Wells of Cornwall map, The Atlas of Hillforts and snippets from other books and sources.
I didn’t expect to be alive today. Yet here I am and here we are, and this is it. We’re a quarter of the way through the 21st Century.
Born mid-century in 1950, it’s rather an age-marker for me. In my twenties in the 1970s, I didn’t really expect that the world would still exist in 2025 – it seemed an age away, and back then the world’s prospects seemed very much at risk. They still are.
It feels as if I’ve lived several lives since then. A new one started in 2019. As a cancer patient since then, I haven’t expected to be alive now either. Five years ago it felt like I’d reached the end, with just one year left. My body was on its last legs, wrung out with pain, I felt like a ninety-something and it seemed as if my angels were close, eyeing me and laying the tracks to receive me.
Or perhaps they were hovering there discussing what to do with me next. Two years later, reviving from a crisis, I woke up one morning with a voice in my head, saying, “Ah, there’s something more that we’d like you to do…”.
Here I am, wondering what’s next. Life is still very provisional. I have a form of blood cancer that can’t be holistically melted away, medically cut out or irradiated. It has permanently changed my body, giving me partial disablement and about 7-8 different side-issues. It’s called Multiple Myeloma because it shows itself in many diverse forms in different people, though it particularly affects the bones – it’s also called Bone Marrow Cancer.
Things indeed are provisional: recently I took on a booking to speak at a conference in May and I wondered what state I’d be in then. However, I’m accustomed to performing in whatever state I find myself in, and if I’m wobbly and unwell I’ve found that, onstage, I can nevertheless be right on form, with my thinking, planning mind already nudged to the side. So unless I’m actually dead, the conference talk should be alright.
But I still get anticipations and, over Christmas, I worked through a good few of them – one being a fear that my cancer might be spreading and becoming something else, something more. I’m having tests later in January.
To be honest, the fear comes from a creeping feeling that whatever happens next might be too big for me, that I can’t handle it. It’s precipice-fear, ‘little me’ stuff, and the kind of fear a little boy gets when looking up at the big, wide world, feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of getting to grips with it all. I spent a few days grinding through this stuff. Then I started emerging from the other side as the newmoon came.
In life, having been through quite a lot of grinding and scraping, I seem to have made it through. So there’s a good chance I’ll make it through the next lot, somehow. They call that resilience. Though, for me, it’s as if that resilience is rooted in a strange mixture of wobbly vulnerability and an accumulated knowing that I’ve done it before and I can do it again.
If I work through my fear in advance, I tend to unmanifest whatever I fear because I’ve already faced it – or at least I start facing it and showing willing. Or it becomes changed, turning out differently and easier than it looked. Or it becomes advantageous to feel the fear and do it anyway, since it then becomes a nexus of breakthrough. I learned this in conflict zones: I’d shit bricks before I went and often I’d be dead calm and on form when I was in the middle of crunchy situations. There were only some cases of bullets flying (I was quite good at not being in places where trouble happened), but there’s a lot of chaos, tension, mess, pathos, pain and complication in conflict situations, and the psycho-emotional aspect of war was very much there.
Right now, I’m not as close to dying as I have been at various times in the last five years. Cancer came during 2019 with no detectable warning, so I didn’t have to go through anticipatory tremors about cancer beforehand, like some people have to when they’re given a diagnosis. I hadn’t felt good in the preceding six months, though it had seemed like a classic down-time that I would hopefully pull out of. But then one day my back cracked while I was gardening. The four lowest back-vertebrae had softened, and in that moment they collapsed. From that moment my life was irreversibly changed. Even after that, for two months it seemed like I had a very bad back problem, though eventually a brilliant specialist in hospital identified Myeloma. Already half-dead, the news hit me really hard – also hitting my then-partner and son, who were involved too.
But when disasters strike, I tend to be quickish to adjust, crashing through the gears of my psyche and getting really real – I don’t waste time fighting it once I realise it’s a full-on crisis. There I was, in total pain, hardly able to move, feeling wretched, and the doctors were saying I had perhaps a year or, if I was lucky, I might survive – they couldn’t tell. I wasn’t expecting this.
There’s something rather special about coming close to death. Everything simplifies dramatically, and many of life’s normal details and concerns evaporate. You’re faced with the simple, straight question of surviving or dying – and the meaning of life. Is this it? Is this the end?
This simplification is a necessary part of the dying process. Many of life’s details that we believe to be important are not actually so. On the other hand, certain experiences and life-issues come to the fore – things we’re glad about, things we regret, things we missed, things we sidelined, things we got right and things we screwed up.
Many of the things that people and society judged to be wrong, bad or inadequate… well, these are the judgements, narrownesses and prejudices of the time and the social environment we’ve lived in. Things that conventional society considers good – money, success, status, property, fame – become diminished, or they flip, turning inside out so that the price we paid for them reveals itself. We might have had a million, but were we wealthy in spirit? We might have a doctorate, but did we really understand? We might have taught a thousand people, but where have they gone?
It depends on how we respond to the arrival of death, and a key part of this is forgiveness of others and of the world, for what they did and didn’t do. There’s also self-forgiveness for all, or at least most, of the ways we have let ourselves down, got our hands dirty or avoided the main issues and the bottom-line truths. Forgiveness lets new, non-judgemental perspectives come through – seeing how things actually were, from all sides, as seen in front of the backdrop of posterity. This deep simplification and clarification is a necessary part of the dying process, and the more we can accept it and make it our own, the better things tend to go.
The more we have faced the music during our lives and amidst our life-crises, the easier this gets at death. Dying is a gradual, cumulative process for many of us, unless we pass away suddenly – it’s not just about our last breath. There’s the matter of dying before we die – going through at least some of those squeezy, grindy processes that we’ll meet at death while we’re still alive. It shortens the queue of issues that can come up around the moment of death.
When I was younger I thought that my growth would slow down in old age – this is not so. It’s going like the clappers. My capacity to process emotions and profound issues has slowed, though it has also deepened to compensate. Nowadays, when faced with a crunchy issue, I need more time to process it through. But there’s a cathartic element to it that makes it easier – a bit like writing a resignation letter and having done with the whole thing. So the big let-go and the forgiveness process seem to accelerate inner growth in the final chapter of life.
Strangely, in late life, recent memory fades relatively and longterm memory comes forward. The recent and the more distant past rearrange themselves, taking on a different perspective. I’ve found myself working through issues deriving from decades ago, together with lifelong patterns that are exposed by things happening now, and sometimes by feelings or memories that blurt up from the hidden recesses of my psyche. In late life we’re strongly encased in our patterns, laid down, routinised and reinforced over the decades, like clothing we can’t quite peel off.
After all, if you are, say, 72 years old, you’ve eaten over 26,000 breakfasts. There’s not a lot we can change because it’s already done. The consequences are with us and there’s no Undo button. But that stuckness in our karmic patterns can be repaired too, if we let it.
We can change our feelings, our standpoint, by learning from the lessons that life has thrust at us – the deeper, more abiding, more all-round lessons. In the end, there is no right or wrong to what has happened in life, though there certainly are consequences – and that’s where our choice and options lay. But it was done, time has moved on and the page has turned.
It was as it was, and now there’s the future, and whether we actually change our behaviours, beliefs and befallings. We need to sort it out with ourselves and with others, if that’s necessary and possible, or accept it, or change the way we feel about it, or own it, or drop it – or do whatever brings some sort of forwardness. That’s a key aspect of life on Earth: living in a perpetually-changing dimension of time and creating forwardness out of the situations we encounter along the way.
If only it were that simple. It’s so easy to forget and lose our way. We get brought back to it when we get to the end of our lives. What was all that for – that life? Am I happy with what happened? Have I become something more than what I was when I started? Did I do what I came here to do?
I’ve been a good boy and a bad boy. I’ve done things I feel happy about and things I regret. I’ve helped a lot of people and hurt a good few. Some things I got right and some things I misjudged. My feelings around all sorts of things have changed as life has progressed. Mercifully, it seems to get lighter as I sift through the piles of detritus left over from a life that has been lived, committing it to posterity one spoon-load at a time.
Though I’ve had a few close runs with dying since getting cancer, a funny thing has happened. I’ve gone through an unexpected inner rebirth – not ‘getting better’ but, as Evangelicals would put it, being born again. The consequence is that, as my spirit-propped condition has improved, life has become more complicated. Part of me seeks that, because I’m not one who can easily sit around weighing down seats, acting like a passive old crock with his head plugged into a TV. Being a passive care-recipient doesn’t turn me on at all.
Partially the complexity comes at me from the world around, even though it’s me unconsciously manifesting it – recently I’ve been getting five friend requests a day on Facebook, presumably because an algorithm decided I’m a somebody. Oh, thanks. I do like friends, but keeping track of it all is beyond me now. To me, a friend is someone who mutually brightens up my life like I might theirs. (Please ‘follow’ me instead!).
I’ve even been setting a few things in motion. Whether they will work is another matter, since I cannot organise them myself as I used to. The three main ones concern the Tuareg, the Sunday Meditation and the ancient sites of West Penwith.[1] My likely short shelf-life, being unpredictable, and the dysfunctions of my brains, make me thoroughly unreliable in organising things.
Also, there’s not a lot of point starting something if it subsides when I pop my clogs. So I’m scattering some seeds of possibility for other people to take care of, if they will, to see whether or not they take root. Which they might, or they might not, and that’s okay. As a reserve option I’m leaving a biggish archive of work online in case someone picks it up, sometime in the vastness of the future. There’s a remarkable loss of control that accompanies dying, and this is one aspect of it.
So dealing with complexities has been quite a big one. I’m asked “How are you?” seven times a day. The answer is, “Well, I’m like THIS, really!” Do you yourself do a systems-check seven times a day to monitor your condition, and can you articulate it in words each time? Even so, I appreciate your concern and good wishes, and I write these periodic blogs to let you know how I am. When they stop, you’ll know I’ve gone, or I’m on my way.
I’ve written before about dying being a gradual process, and I’d call myself seventy-ish percent dead at present, and stable (as it goes) – I go up and down each day. Today (Wednesday 1st January) I’m working myself up for a hospital visit tomorrow for a three-monthly check-up, and a generally friendly but virologically-dangerous period of waiting for it in waiting rooms. Meanwhile, my stalwart friend Claire will sit outside in her car, reading books and twiddling thumbs in a shopping-mall car park – very exciting. I have to work myself up for events like this, and the day after I’m often rather wiped out.
It’s worth thinking about this continuum. Yes, part of you is already dead. That is, part of you is in the otherworld, where your soul, in the timeless zone, is closer to eternity than you currently feel yourself to be. This is of course an illusion – it’s more a matter of where we place our awareness and what we give attention to while we’re alive. That’s one reason I do the Sunday Meditations: to give busy people a manageable, uncomplicated, regular time-slot in which to give the soul a little attention. Do it for a year and you’ll have done it fifty times. It’s like a weekly shot of cozmickle multivitamins. Good for helping face life and its rigours.
Oh, and by the way… lots of people use funny ways of talking about dying, as if not wanting to mention or face it. Like, ‘passing’. Be honest: it’s called ‘dying’. It happens to all of us, inescapably, and you’ve done it before. Even Elon Musk won’t be able to buy himself out of it, on Earth or on Mars. It’s an integral part of our life-cycle, just like getting born. In the Tibetan way of seeing things, the whole of our waking lives are equal in experiential magnitude to the apparently much shorter processes of getting born or getting dead. It’s all about experiential intensity.
During life, moments of crisis that come up can be rather like dying. They’re moments when time stretches in duration while compressing in intensity, when everything comes to a head, crunching together – and these climactic experiences are our training for the expanded moment of death, when we transit, float or squeeze ourselves into another world, whether in peace or struggling with it. How we deal with our crises in life has a big effect on how we deal with our dying. We can make it easier or we can make it harder. The funny thing is that, though dying involves a complete loss of control, it involves possibly the biggest choice and free-will opportunity of our lives since we got born.
My Mum did that. At the end of her life, at age 92, she just could not handle more hospital stays, medications, discomforts and indignities. She made a big decision to stop taking her medication, and she was gone in a few days. Good on you, Mum: you made that choice. It was a big choice, and you did it. Believe me, my Mum wasn’t into meditation and cosmic stuff at all but, in the end, she exercised her choice, a soul-choice. I have a feeling she has flowered in the otherworld.
If you have cancer or any longterm, life-changing ‘condition’, this might interest you. Or if you’re a friend, family member or helper. It’s an audiobook about my cancer process and what I’ve experienced and learned through it. There’s also a text version if you prefer reading.
I have a blood cancer called Multiple Myeloma – typically for me, it’s not one of the common cancers. It has particularly affected my bones, leading to a clutch of other issues too, partially disabling me. Hence ‘multiple’.
This book is for you who might seek a different, deeper, wider approach toward cancer, not so much medically as attitudinally. Here I simply share my experiences, which have worked for me, and it might well give you a few lightbulb moments.
Medically, I have done both chemotherapy and holistic remedies and helpers – a middle path – and my results are good thus far. But the main focus of this account is psycho-spiritual. Yet very real too.
It starts in September 2019, before diagnosis, shortly after my back cracked and my life changed. It covers four years. I guess the story ends whenever I leave my body and life behind. If I am able, I’ll keep writing until I no longer can, and a later edition might take the story to its end. We shall see.
Distilled from a blog, this book more or less retains its blog format, with adaptations and improvements. In a blog of this kind you write whatever comes up on the day, and it doesn’t have to follow from what you wrote before or lead on to what you write next. So that’s how this book unfolds – a bit diary-like, with thoughts and observations that came up as life went on.
As an avid, lifelong communicator, I have always sought to stimulate people’s own thinking, not simply to persuade them to adopt what I say or write. Some readers might find some of the ideas expressed here difficult to accept. If that is so, I hope these writings help you clarify your own way of seeing things. These are my perceptions and experiences, submitted to you for your consideration.
In a way I went down with cancer. In another way I went up with it. It is very much a matter of how we see things. This profound issue affects our experience of being alive with cancer or any other serious terminal illness. It affects the way we create our future, even if we’re seriously ill. Yes, you and I might be dying, but there still is a future, and not just in this body. At least, that’s what I’ve found.
So this is the story of my cancer journey. It’s free, with an option to donate. Gratitude to all of you who have been part of it and helped it along.
This is for people living in or near Cornwall. Audio recordings of the talk, with accompanying material, will appear online a week or so after the talk, for those who cannot attend.
In my talk in June about the ancient sites of West Penwith (worth a listen) I proposed that the whole of Penwith is one big ancient site – an enormous cliff sanctuary. It’s not just a scattering of stone circles, quoits, carns, menhirs and cairns. Why did ancient Penwithians bother to build so much of this ‘holy machinery’? What was their thinking and what did they seek to achieve?
I’ve been studying ancient sites since around 1970 in Britain, Scandinavia, Greece and Palestine. Since moving to Penwith in 2009, I’ve been working on mapping Penwith’s sites, researching their (John Michell-style) alignments, and divining some valuable psychic-intuitive clues concerning their possible meaning and function. These observations are outlined on the Ancient Penwith website and in my book Shining Land.
In the first half of this evening’s talk, I go further into the sacred energy-technology of Neolithic and Bronze Age Penwithians, and the patterns that suggest that they function as one big megalithic system. We’ll look into how it all took shape from the beginning, the functions of different kinds of ancient sites, and how it all fits together into one big geomantic system.
In the second half I propose what I feel needs to happen next, in terms of researching and working with Penwith’s ancient sites. We need to find out more about how they actually work, geomantically and energetically, and what we can do now to enhance and re-enliven their energy-fields and world-healing qualities – not just an hour-long ceremony now and then, but sustained energy-work, learning more about the specifics of how to do it.
Penwith is an ideal area for this kind of work because it is concise and contained, with plenty of ancient sites and people interested in them. Also, this is Cornwall, not England, and Oxbridge-style archaeological thinking is not the only way to understand megalithic civilisation – here in Penwith, out of sight and out of mind, we have an opportunity to frame things in a rather different way.
There is the possibility of starting a research project involving 10-20 people, in which (say) about forty local sites are surveyed, mapped and chronicled by dowsers and sensitives over (say) a three year period, for their subtle energy characteristics and place-memory. (See below for a shortlist of sites.)
Steadily and systematically, we can visit the sites and truly listen to what they want to say – not imposing our own ideas and predilections but letting the sites and the landscape speak, using methods such as pendulums, meditation, inner journeying and talking stick as research methodologies. Then a report (or a series of them) or a website can report on the findings uncovered by the project.
So I’m wondering out loud whether we need now to take things further, stepping beyond a ‘Wow’ stage to try realistically to penetrate the minds of the Neolithic and Bronze Age megalith builders, to uncover more about ancient sites’ energy-mechanics, their intention and usage, and what we can do about them now. That’s what this evening is all about and, if you can, you’re welcome to come and join in.
It’s amazing to be part of a revolution – even if it’s temporary. The relief of getting rid of an oppressive regime creates an expanded nowness, a special moment of intensified significance, before the serious stuff that follows inevitably sets in. There’s a shedding of a deep sense of social burden and self-suppression, of unwilling, shoulder-shrugging complicity with something that few were happy with. In Syria, those who took the regime’s side did so because they saw it as the lesser of two evils, or they made a living or gained advantage through it.
But when the cork pops, a deep collective-emotional eruption bursts out, spreading like wildfire around the country, even spreading around the world. It reminds people everywhere, on a deep, hardly-conscious level, that it is possible to change things from the bottom up, that society has power.
It’s also emotionally tragic to be part of a failed revolution – a dashing of hope and faith, a reimposition of fear and oppression, a paroxysm of despair. It can crush spirits. It nearly did so with me – I was part of flower power and a student uprising at the LSE in London – but after a lot of pain and process the experience ended up making me more resilient.
Forty years later in 2011 in Amman, Jordan, I met some Egyptians and Syrians, fresh from their uprisings, proud and uplifted to have been part of them, yet fearful. They were in Amman because they had been chased out of their own countries, regarded as dangerous. The repression of both uprisings had polluted the joy and impetus of revolution, and these guys were vexed about what to do.
I told them that, in the case of the uprising I had been a part of, though we were beaten and broken, the flowering of issues and dynamics that emerged during that short yet long time had withered but not died. It re-emerged slowly over the years, filtering in through society’s back door. Those of us committed to change had continued quietly, developing our green ideas, healing methods, lifestyle changes, music, feminism, back-to-nature instincts and our psycho-spiritual transformations, and it was a all matter of time before these infiltrated wider society – and it still is. Here I was, four decades later, still here, still working for the change I believed in.
I reminded them that change is deep and it is not truly fulfilled by a revolution, which merely clears the way for whatever happens next. It would take time and it would be difficult, but the lava-streams of change would work under the surface, seeping out or erupting over time and over the generations. What makes the spirit of revolution survive, like a dormant seed buried in the soil? Well, whatever its faults, it was essentially right, and it constituted the direction that humanity needs to follow. History takes time to unfold, but time is on the side of change. The issues that bubble up in such change-moments are bigger and more historically-transformative than we often see at the time, and this process takes time. For me, in late life I’ve come to accept that it can take longer than a lifetime.
Now, in Syria, here we have it – the consequences of 2011. The Syrians of the Arab Spring are 12 years older and a new generation has grown into adulthood. Media outlets round the world are wrong to harp on about terrorism and Al Qaeda – they don’t see where the true roots of this lie. They suspect Islamism of malign, threatening things, when Islamism itself is simply a philosophy and social reform movement, the behaviour of which depends very much on the people doing it.
The Taliban in Afghanistan, while dominated by old Muhajedin fighters from former decades, is also stocked with thoughtful, pragmatic, younger and more travelled people who will inherit the reins. Hamas in Gaza was far more (as it goes) progressive, liberal and socially competent than outside commentators and their paymasters wish to see, and the Israeli killing of Ishmael Haniyeh a few months ago, Hamas’ leader, meant the loss of one of the world’s better political leaders. In my humble opinion.
When so-called terrorists have a constituency of local support, and when they are fighting on their own turf for the liberation of their land and people, they are freedom fighters. Terrorists lack empathy, caring little for the people they live amongst, their agenda is geopolitical and ideological and their method is to use violently dramatic actions to create fear and terror, to scoop up media attention. One well-executed bombing can set the world on edge.
HTS is not a terrorist organisation and neither are most of the other militias in Syria (though one or two might be). Other countries would be wise not to oppose or obstruct the new regime – though perhaps it will need moderating with sweeteners. The uprising in Syria is locally-driven, in distinction to the ongoing conflict in Syria since 2011, which has been a viper’s nest of external intervening powers, influencers and financiers. Now their influence is weakened, withdrawn or undermined.
When I went there in 2014 there were about seven sides to the conflict and it was terribly confusing. I went briefly to Deraa and Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp outside Damascus. Since it was likely that I’d be thrown out of Palestine by the Israelis, under suspicion, and banned for at least ten years, I felt a need to do something else. When asked to visit Yarmouk by a Palestinian tribe with refugee relatives in Syria, I decided to help them, as a kind of courier and emissary.
But it finished me off. Things happened that deeply affected me. Perhaps also I was in denial,lready feeling burned out, with elements of PTSD accumulated over previous years. But this finished me off. I lost my hope and patience in Syria, afterward feeling lost in a smothering cloud of dismay and disappointment. It was the last humanitarian mission I did. I wasn’t happy about that. But life had other designs.
I spent the following years on a self-healing path in Cornwall, doing remote humanitarian work (such as with the Tuareg in Mali), prehistoric research and walking the cliffs and moors. A loving relationship from 2016 to 2022 brought me back to life. Only when I went down with cancer in 2019 was I healed of the clamping shadows I had been struggling with – they were subsumed by the prospect of death, which prompted an enormous inner let-go of all and everything, bringing something of a spiritual breakthrough and a rapid process of forgiveness of myself, others and life.[1]
This is deep stuff. When, as an individual, you ‘lose your fear’ and come out into the streets in an uprising, you align with a collective tidal surge of vision, emotion, ideas and spirit that feels truly like a springtime, a release. All sorts of amazing things happen. People come alive, emerging out of the woodwork, progressing a long way and finding a new mission in life. People’s lives change in bulk, and a rising tide of hope lifts up even those people who normally are sunk in a life of drudge, stuck in a state of reluctant complicity. The splintered social dissonance that allows oppressive regimes to gain and hold power melts away, and there’s an eruption of resonance, mass concurrence and shared wishes. This resonance-field fizzes and sparkles, motivating people to do quite remarkable things.
But it all depends on what happens next. It depends on the new leaderships that take power and, even more, on the wisdom, patience and fortitude of crowds. Once the change happens, eveyone wants normality to be restored – the economy, public services, reconstruction, and freedom from excessive and unnecessary obstructions in daily life – though this is not simple and fast. After the joy of change, there’s a lot of hard work to be done.
The wisdom of crowds… this is a delicate matter. After regime change in Sudan, the democratic movement did quite well for a time. There was a maturity to the way that people dealt with their tender democratising situation after a long period of dictatorship. But it was delicate, involving a lot of mutual trust, and there are people who manipulate unstable, transitional situations to their own advantage – they can act quicker and more decisively than collectivities of people. They have a contrarian need to break the magic ring of mutualised social power, aiming to restore public dissonance at any cost. In Sudan, it became a slugging match between two oligrchies, each headed by generals, each supported by different outside powers and financing. The democratic movement was killed off, tragedy ensued, and it continues today. Most of the world isn’t interested. Hope is not currently available in Sudan.
Ten years ago I was involved with a small group called the Flying Squad.[2] We did geopolitical healing work and, by 2014, the group had been working together for sixteen years – so we had some experience. It involved a weekly group meditation, wherever we were, and three or four weekend meetings each year – and membership involved committing to 100% presence and involvement in all meditations and meetings, to take group synergy to a higher level.
We did a lot of work with Syria and its uprising and civil war, even travelling to Greece to get closer. There were times when we felt we were getting somewhere in our efforts, but each time a new set of events would re-ignite the situation and make things worse – often prompted by outside intervention by state and non-state actors. Were we getting things wrong? Or was this simply an intractable situation?
This was a big learning. As a planetary healer, you have to learn and accept that sometimes it doesn’t work. There was a point where, in our inner investigations, we discovered an enormous ancient telluric ‘worm’ or dragon in the Euphrates valley in Syria and Iraq, and it was deeply upset. We tried to ease its concerns and help it clarify its aims – it was deeply unhappy about the fighting, oppression and oil extraction in its patch. After we did this work there was indeed a brief pause in events, providing a glimmer of hope, but it soon was dashed by new developments.
We had to learn that there are some things you cannot help. The reasons often emerge later, even years later. Sometimes we can be too restless, short-termist and attached to immediate outcomes. It’s unwise and even egocentric to expect results, just because you feel you’ve put your heart and soul into it and, by rights, it should work. But there can be reasons why it doesn’t work. The idea of creating a ceasefire in Gaza, for example, while desirable, doesn’t actually resolve the problem and its causes, and it might not bring a fundamental healing of a bad situation.
Deep down, countries like Syria and its neighbours are developing a social immunity to conflict and oppression. This is at street-and-village level, and it’s a semi-conscious thing fermenting underneath. The key mechanism is that a society must reach a level of exhaustion with war and oppression, to the extent that it firmly and behaviourally no longer permits it. Society stops responding to the methods that oppressors and warring factions use to divide people and set them in fear. This is pretty much the case in Lebanon nowadays – they’ve had enough of strife, havig been through many decades of it.
The seat of such social power rests a lot with women: if women collectively no longer accept a bad situation and are tired of going along with what men are doing, the violence ends, sooner or later. It’s a buildup of firm and settled emotional consensus. This was one of the key dynamics of the peace that came to Northern Ireland in the 1990s – women put pressure on men to make a change. They just stopped making sandwiches for them and washing their underpants.
There’s another force at work that generates this immunity. After a while, everyone just wants to go home, sleep in their own bed, be with their family and feel safe. This is another rather feminine feeling. When fighters get tired, conflict ends, somehow. It’s a deep tiredness with the privations and dangers of war and oppression. It’s what made the Syrian soldiers recently melt away as the militias advanced – they were fed up. They’d lost the sense of purpose that soldiers need to have if they are to put themselves in the way of danger.
So we now have a full-on situation in Syria. A lot hangs around the international community and the way it responds. A lot hangs on leaderships and their behaviour. A lot hangs on social solidarity, forgiveness of the past, de-corruption and a buildup of trust and integrity in society.
We’ve had a lot of failed uprisings in recent times – in Myanmar, Belarus, Hong Kong, Iran, Venezuela and Sudan – but something has recently changed. Astrologically, Pluto has moved from spending 16 years in Capricorn – a sign that generally hangs on to stability and convention and doesn’t like change – to spending 20 years in Aquarius. The emphasis has shifted from the prevalence of governments and institutions to the prevalence of crowds and public attitudes.
There is a possibility here of a real turning of the page. Not just the replacement of a Captagon-driven, oppressive narco-regime with an Islamist one, but also a change in Islamism itself, and a change in the behaviour of the public. All over the world, the style of governance of countries has come into focus – both democratic systems and authoritarian regimes are in trouble, and people at the top no longer sit securely in their seats. We shall see.
I’m wondering how the Palestinians in Syria (around 450,000 of them) feel about all this. Assad had treated them well, in comparison to many other countries, so they were grateful for that, but the Palestinians could not accept his violent response to the 2011 uprising, and this put them in a difficult situation. Palestinians do not like Muslim extremists either – Al Qaeda or the Islamic State – and in the last twelve years of instability they have come under attack from various directions. I hope they’re feeling some relief today.
This has stirred me quite deeply and personally – helped by the winds and storms raging here in Cornwall in the last two days. It’s a glimmer of hope. It reminds me of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. At that time I was contemplating suicide – the only time I’ve ever felt that feeling. I felt blocked by life from every direction. Everything seemed to be going wrong. But, on the weekend when I might have done it, the Iranian Revolution happened, and this suddenly gave me a spark of hope. It went bad soon after, but on that weekend it looked as if something quite big was changing. I forgot suicide. For me, amidst a dark night of the soul, it was a turning-point: my soul was asking me to make a big and deep commitment to my life’s work. It involved the end of a marriage, the loss of my children and a return to Britain after a time of exile in Sweden.
It was the beginning of a new path in life that brought me to where I am now, affecting thousands of people along the way. For better or worse, that is, since there are times when I’ve screwed up too. However, the posterity-perspective of late life seems to be telling me that it was, on balance, positive. Just above my desk is a Healing Buddha with a little sign at its feet which says ‘Time is a Healer’. Well, yes, though it’s also a decider, an accounting, a process of judgement by posterity. We ourselves can only make an accounting, but time, the wider world and other people judge the balance of benefit our lives have brought.
The same goes for revolutions and regime changes. The Assad and Makhlouf families and the deposed Syrian oligarchy have a lot of accounting to do, and history is unlikely to be sympathetic – as with Saddam Hussein, Ghaddafi and possibly, in future, Netanyahu. Together with many others, too many to name. But, in our own smaller lives, we face an accounting too since many of us are guilty of a shared crime that also needs to end: to quote 18th Century philosopher Edmund Burke, ‘For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing‘. That is a crime we all variously have a stake in.
However, here’s something. We need to be careful about the way we label some people as goodguys and others as badguys. We get dictators because we didn’t stop them coming. So, instead of focusing all the blame on them – or all the Trumps and Al Fayyads of the world – we ned to remember to look at our own part in the equation. As old Jesus once said: ‘Let the one who is without guilt cast the first stone‘.
The building of social capital and the amassing of power to the people involves a lot of deep forgiveness.
Photos from trips I made to Geneva 12-14 years ago. These are The Dispossessed
If you’re in your forties or fifties this is for you. Oh, and by the way, this is what’s nowadays called a ‘long read’, and, guess what, no AI was involved.
It’s about the care crisis and what needs to happen before you yourself grow old. I’m not going to harp on about pensions and savings, or the rights or wrongs of privileged old people currently being relatively prosperous at the expense of younger people. Neither will I repeat the implicit message that says ‘Look after yourself because no one else will’. There’s much more to it than that.
Nowadays I’m a net recipient of care and support, as a creaky old cancer patient. Similar things will probably happen to you. For Millennials and today’s younger people, it looks like you have a problem building up for when you get old, and that’s daunting. But there’s time to prepare, and magic solutions are available.
We’ve got to get real about the future. My own postwar generation has avoided much of this, and our behaviour has not necessarily matched our beliefs and ideologies. There’s a lot of hot air about growing old gracefully, but my generation still hangs on to our independence, sovereignty and property, and we have difficulty letting go (Pluto in Leo, and the Pluto in Virgos of the Sixties can be pretty control-freaky too). When we were young we had big visions of community (we have Neptune in Libra), and it hasn’t happened – not in a way that works in our old age. We have omitted to pool our financial and social capital. Here’s a tip: try not to do the same as you lot grow older!
Many of my generation have landed up on our own, stowed away in our centrally-heated, often over-sized houses or isolated in some godforsaken room somewhere. Society, in a perpetual hurry, quietly elbows us and dependents like us to the side. People largely don’t mean to do this, but they just don’t have time to be human – and this creates a social crisis. It’s the human aspect that, to children, to the chronically ill, the disabled and the old, becomes critically important: we humans have a bizarre need to feel that somebody loves and cares about us, that we matter to someone.
Geneva
Palestinians used to ask me, ‘How can you talk about human rights when you stuff your grandparents away in front of a TV in a padded prison?‘ – and they have a point.
This is a Pluto in Aquarius question – a key issue for the next twenty years. In the West we’ve gone through a period of (arguably) excessive prosperity, enabling us to venture into possibilities that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. One of these is lengthened lives – it’s now reasonable to expect reaching our eighties while, when I was young, it was the sixties or seventies. If I had contracted cancer 30-40 years ago I’d soon have been decisively dead – but not now.
Along the way we have professionalised and medicalised social care, and this is unsustainable, clunky, expensive and without limits. There’s a shortage of carers, nurses, teachers, cleaners, cooks and midwives, and we neither pay them well nor honour them properly, even though they hold up society. It’s all costing more than we are able or willing to pay, and we’re going deeper into debt, trying to maintain a lifestyle that’s already past its time. We’ve reached the end of a period in which the West got rich off everyone else, and now that we’re in an historic downward-curve, we need to get focused on a soft landing.
We’ve lapsed into a rather decadent kind of denialism: “I’m all in favour of change as long as it doesn’t affect me“. Thus we’re heading toward a likely crash landing… shock, horror… only to realise that we can’t continue living as we have lived, and our precious lifestyle has become unserviceable. Why didn’t someone warn us? Well, they did, decades ago, and no one wanted to listen.
Well, we’ll get what we get, though there are options.
Geneva has never been an imperial capital or the capital of anything, but it has a certain style to it…
In the rich world we’ve become materially wealthy while becoming socially and spiritually poorer. We’ve set aside social and community matters, even our humanness, in favour of wealth-generation and consumption, as if happiness comes from material plenty and security. But it does so only up to a point, and above that we hit diminishing happiness-returns. Just enough is good for us, and too much is definitely not. Treats are not a substitute for happiness.
This dilemma revealed itself to us during the Covid lockdowns. We became a tad more human for a month or two before grudgingly restoring normality. Meanwhile, having lectured the world about democracy in recent decades, we whiteys (or pinkies?) now find we’re an ethnic minority in a big, wide world where we’re far outnumbered and outclassed. We British think we’re different from Hungarians, but to the rest of the world we’re all Europeans and pretty much similar. Over half of the world’s population is Asian. Things are moving on.
I learned a lot when working with Palestinians – they are socially wealthier while being materially and circumstantially poorer. Their families, clans and communities pretty much hold together, even under extreme duress – and that’s what social wealth looks like. From the late 1960s to the 1990s they lived virtually without government, organising themselves so that everybody was provided for and most essential social functions were catered for from the ground up. A simple consensual rule held sway: help, support and do no harm to fellow Palestinians. Or, for that matter, to anyone deemed a ‘good person’. This included ‘good’ Jews. It’s not about ethnicity or religion – it concerns content of character. Guess what? There was little crime, pretty good road safety and a woman could walk down the street alone at night and feel safe.
A ‘generosity economy’ survives through mutual support and collective adaptation. You need no qualifications to participate or to benefit richly – you just need to do your bit, whatever you can do. It’s not perfect, but in another way it is exemplary. Even in Gaza we have not seen the kind of destitution and social disarray that we sometimes see in other places that plunge into crisis. While Palestinians are always the losers, they are not beaten.
The world – the work of some famous artist whose name escapes me.
From this I learned a big lesson. It wasn’t a case of me, a well-meaning Westerner, a ‘humanitarian’, going out to Palestine to help these poor benighted folk in their dire circumstances. No, I had to get over that one. All I needed to do was to be amongst them, to add my bit when appropriate, to listen a lot and learn from these people. Being fully present was sufficient. Their generosity and sincerity was, at first, button-pressing to me as a European – we’re programmed with a neurotic need to pay for everything. But in Palestine you should never offer to pay if something is ofered or given, because you will deprive a good Muslim of giving you a gift of God – even if they’re poor, with nothing for tomorrow.
Instead, you learn to enter the cycle of mutually-circulatory social generosity and you play an active part in it – keep the benefits moving around. As a relatively rich outsider, you spend thoughtfully and you quietly drop people occasional monetary gifts of God, to help them on their way, simply because it’s good to do so.
However, I had further advantages I could offer. As a European, it was easier for me to level with an Israeli soldier than it was for a Palestinian. I could use my privileged position in the apartheid system to eyeball an Israeli, practice street-level diplomacy and improve the overall outcomes – you see, in a roughly nine-level apartheid system, foreign visitors come in third, just below Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, but above the Druze, four kinds of Palestinians and the Bedouin. It’s complex.
Often, the poor soldier was 30-40 years younger than me anyway, doing his or her conscription-slavery, and I pulled age on them. I used my influence as a Westerner to turn round the interaction and calmly hold the power, even though the soldier had the gun. Exploiting the hidden rules of apartheid, I projected an image of a politely self-confident, imperialistic Brit visiting one of his country’s former colonies.
After all, my grandfather was in General Allenby’s invasion force in WW1 when we took Palestine from the Ottomans, and my father fought in Egypt in WW2, and my aunt was a periodic Jew-rescuer – so it could be construed that Israel owes my family a favour, if truth be known. My ruse was that I was an historian interested in studying early Christian fonts. Yeah, me, a Christian – but it worked. Israeli border guards tend to regard Christians as rather stupid, sometimes awkward, but largely harmless.
Of course, to see many of the UN buildings, you have to go on a tour. But there are security issues they do need to stay on top of.
At times these interactions were rather comical. When searching my bags once, they found some plastic-wrapped tofu I’d bought in a healthfood store in Tel Aviv, suspecting it was Semtex… well, it took a few minutes to sort that out (such as reading the Hebrew labelling) and we all landed up chuckling… and, in a better mood, they let me through, waving a load more people through after me. Bingo.
It’s all about societal energy-exchange. In that instance I used my strengths as a Brit to give both the Israelis and the Palestinians what they needed. It works best when there’s some sort of balance of benefit that can equalise both parties – however that benefit is perceived. A change of mood and spirit can make the whole situation flip quite quickly, and the all-round benefit gained often grows greater than the sum of all the individual benefits.
After all, the soldiers at Checkpoint 500 were bored shitless, and the Palestinians standing in line were equally bored, and it just needed the right thing to happen. The magic catalyst was tofu – Romanian-style and marinated. But if I’d reacted to those soldiers as ‘the enemy’, tightening up my body-language and doing oppo, trouble would have ensued and I’d have given away my power – since they did have the guns – and the Palestinians would have got home from work even later than they did.
So, here am I, older and more decrepit, in need of a few hours of help a week, and also for times of company, love and tenderness. These three matter a lot in late life – you might get hugged but real cuddles can be rare. I’m quite self-sufficient, though there are times when I go downhill and I need more intensive help and attention. In recent months a lot has come together on the support front and I am really happy about it: a group of lovely people has come together, and it’s working. Friends of Palden (FoP) – thank you all and bless you. It was a health crisis I had in September that precipitated the change.
For my part, what needed to happen was an opening of my own heart – and the illness and physical pain cracked me open. I had been in a state of emotional recoil for two years, after the sudden and, for me, reluctant end of a loving relationship early in 2022. After that, I wasn’t interested in opening up to others. I’d lost my trust and felt stuck in my hermit-like Saturnine isolation pattern – the ‘anti-social’ thinker and writer with one foot in society and the other in the mountains.
There was something I needed to face – a big and rather final, late-life change – and it took two years to adjust to it emotionally. I’d realised that this was the last close one-to-one relationship I would have in this lifetime. That sounds a bit sad, or dramatic, but no, it isn’t. It’s quite a settled feeling. I’ve had some good relationships over the last half-century, and there’s more to life too. Things have changed. Actually, don’t tell anyone, but it was Ayahuasca wot did it. The focus of my love extends now to a wider circle of people, and I’m playing a new and different role in their lives, and they in mine, whether they’re near or far.
Geneva is in a rather idyllic setting.
Here we come to energy-exchange. Caring for an new age codger like me can at times be hard work. So I’m working at making it good for everyone, if and however I can. I can’t run around servicing relationships in the way I used to in pre-cancer days, but I can do certain things. I can give a listening ear and sometimes a few astute observations – as a wizzened old retired astrologer who’s figured a few things out. I can give them an hour’s break in a warm, calm, phone-free cabin on a farm in a magical place, with springwater tea and an oakwood fire, so that they can draw a line between the last thing and the next thing, departing a little clearer and more ‘sorted’ than when they came.
There’s something deep to this. It’s about being there for people – it’s the grandfather or patriarch archetype. I don’t have to do anything, and they don’t even need to be with me to benefit from it. It’s just that I’m here, and that in itself is perceived to add something to others’ lives. Spending a lot of time on my own, I range around in my mind, pastorally thinking of people as they pop into my attention, I monitor their souls and pick up on them when they’re unconsciously signalling. They themselves feel supported, deep down. This motivates them to do things that benefit me.
This sounds terribly transactional but, actually, if you keel over with cancer or something similar, or with misfortune, you do have to think transactionally and make sure you’re getting enough of what you need. Otherwise, you won’t get it. You have to be carefully selfish, yet also understanding of others since you’re relying on their goodwill and generosity.
For what it’s worth, ‘elderhood’ is where I now find myself. I’m something of a natural at it, though I’m also somewhat reluctant (I prefer thinking of myself as a veteran). Perhaps I’ve been here and done this before in other lives. It’s all about quietly standing behind people and being there for them. It gives them a certain security whereby, if they feel they’re out of their depth, or fucked off with life, or at their wits’ end, they can anchor back to someone like me, even just in their thoughts.
To which my response is, Yes, that happens, it’s life, it’s okay, hang in there, and the world isn’t ending… though I’d put it more subtly, and much of it lies in the vibe I give out. The fact that I’m standing there is living proof that you can and do survive life’s hard knocks. Or at least, I have, thus far, and perhaps you can too.
It’s not about having opinions and telling people what’s best. There’s a challenge to overcome the reactive, self-satisfied conservatism of age and, from a rather more transcendent, slightly dementia-liberated viewpoint, to think afresh, seeing things from a new place, contributing not opinions but perspectives. But even then, only when asked. Be pleasantly surprised if younger people actually do take heed. Besides, they’re the ones making the decisions now.
So, although I depend on the help, support and company of friends, there’s something I can offer, and this is important. This is ‘social capital’ and if, like me, you haven’t been focusing on building up financial capital, then you need to work on building up social capital, on cultivating your assets, your character and transferable skills. This means that, when you too become relatively useless, with luck you’ll be liked, valued and a little bit useful, even then.
It’s him.
In my life I’ve had phases of organising volunteers to help me run projects I’ve started. While they liked doing it and it brought them benefit, it was also hard work, with a fair measure of wind and rain thrown in. I tried to help them gain a growth-payoff, a soul-payoff, from it. That is, something in them would progress, and some started a new life from that time on. There’s a certain joy in being part of something that works well and is good to be part of.
My father taught me that. He had been in industrial relations in the 1960s-80s and his philosophy was that, if your workers are happy working with you, they’ll be motivated to work well and and everyone will benefit. He’d encourage the directors to eat lunch in the canteen rather than at the golf club, and to avoid driving their Jaguar to work. Sounds obvious, and it’s true, but it was not what was happening in British workplaces at the time, and it does so only for some workers now. It’s how a generosity economy works, in which everyone is a stakeholder and beneficiary, together.
It’s about ‘we‘, not ‘I‘. However, while the relationship of ‘I’ to ‘we’ is still important, in the end ‘we’ are the overriding priority, and each of us needs to learn to do the best we can with that, as individuals.
Pluto is now in Aquarius. We need now to focus on strengthening society. Not the economy, not technology, not government, not business, but society and the mechanisms by which it works.
Do people exist to serve the system, or does the system exist to serve the people?
Pluto likes to dig out the bottom-line hard truths of things, and this is the big question for at least the next twenty years.
There’s something substructural going on. In richer countries, our time is done, our economies are subsiding and we’ve got to get real about this. It is a necessary historic adjustment of economic levels. For Britain, Europe and America real wealth-generation is sinking, overall costs, complications and debts are rising, and things are approaching a crunchpoint.
We in rich countries are not enjoying treading the mill of work and consumption as we once did. We’re supposed to be excited about the latest gizmo, scientific discovery or tech advance, but many of them arouse mainly a yawn. We’ve reached a certain level of satiation. There’s now a deep-level exhaustion, a declining motivation to bust a gut for what might anyway prove to be dubious outcomes. There’s an element of laziness and decadence to this, yes, but it’s also genuine, deep down. We’re discovering a need to become more human and for society to become more humane.
This historic shift will affect Millennials and currently younger people as you grow old. Compared with my (Pluto in Leo) postwar generation, you have more inherent social wealth than we, with a greater sense of implicit togetherness, and this is driving a deep reconstitution of society that is only now gaining momentum.
There is a fundamental law of economics that few mention, yet it’s abidingly true: when the economy goes up, society goes down, and when the economy goes down, society goes up. We’re at an inflection point in this oscillatory equation.
When you yourselves are old, there might be care-bots to help you, and there will still be people who hold society together by acting as committed care-givers, but there’s unlikely to be the capacity to finance the full care and medical facilities that we have today. So this needs tackling another way, especially by building up social wealth.
Here we return to people like Palestininans with their family survival mechanisms – and most Mediterranean cultures are (or were) like this. They have families often of fortyish people, young and old, which are part of a larger clan that can number hundreds or thousands. The old people and the kids spend a lot of time together, often at the centre of the compound where everyone lives, freeing up middle-aged people to do their daily duties. The older kids look after the younger kids, both look after the old people, and the old people oversee the kids. People come and sit for a chat and a cup of tea, then to continue on their way. It’s an integrated system with the oldsters and the youngsters at the centre. Everyone does something toward the family, to the extent that they can, and someome is usually available to step in with a solution if there is a need.
Western researchers would come to Palestine, finding unemployment levels standing at 20-30%, yet no one was hanging around looking unemployed. This was simply the generosity economy at work – lots of people had no paid job, but they had a place in the family and community economy – and it doesn’t show up in the statistics. Everyone is catered for and everyone contributes. In Bethlehem, a little boy would help me with runaround tasks and occasionally I’d give him some loose change, and he’d run home to give it to his Mum because it was more important to him to contribute to his family than to sneak off to the sweetshop to feed his face.
This is the way to go. It lies in social values. So teach your children well. To get through the future, countries like Britain need to work on social wealth and resilience. Social love and solidarity. Hanging together. Making life easier for each other. Sharing lifts. Keeping an eye out for each other.
That’s not as easy as it sounds, because it involves dealing with disagreement – what’s politely called ‘diversity’. In the 2020s we’re pretty good at arguing, disagreeing and detracting, pretty unwilling to hear others’ viewpoints, or even to acknowledge that they’re actually real, valid people, just like us. We have issues about who’s in and who’s out. There’s a lot of shadow stuff lurking in the social psyche – trust issues, historic pain and resentment, unresolved questions, pending problems.
Migration is one of those issues we have to face because it is happening anyway, and we have to get sensible about it. It is changing our societies and we need to do this well. We can’t evade the facts, pretending that we can stop it or send people home – it’s happening, and we in rich countries have been a substantial part of the cause. We cannot supply munitions to Israel and expect Palestinians to stay at home without seeking refuge in Manchester – sorry, that’s two-faced, narrow, poor thinking, and if such thinking were applied to you, you’d hate it. Yet, on the other hand, we need to take in numbers that we can realistically absorb, so that there are enough housing, teachers, facilities and space to cater for them, to give them what they need and to get what we need too – and this is a very real issue without easy answers. It brings up quite primal emotions – it’s not solely socio-logical.
My generation failed, when it reached its sixties, to pool its capital and engage in creating mutual support systems for late life. We didn’t think we would actually get old. Those of us who have done well financially do what we can to enjoy our position, and the rest of us get by as best we can. Our sense of generational fairness and equality has been compromised by incentives and bonuses that have successfully splintered us. We might disapprove of businessmen getting stinking rich, though strangely we nevertheless believe it’s kinda okay for a rock musician to own five houses, a stack of glossy, carbon-belching sports cars and an art portfolio for which the insurance can cost a quarter million. [Even so, here’s a perceptive song from one of them, Roger Waters: Is this the Life We Really Want?]
This kind of thing is not really good for the future – unless of course we permit it, allowing an oligarchy to burn up resources while we dutifully catch the battery-bus to save energy. World circumstances are changing, and if the excesses of the past are to continue into the future, then you Millennials have a problem before you. And here’s an awkward question (sorry): do you want to leave this problem to your children, as my generation has done with you? Or will changing circumstances and shifting values perhaps force the issue before you reach that point?
Strengthening society – from the bottom up. To face the future we need to build social resilience. This means looking after each other and sharing what’s available and what we have. It means pitching in together when there are floods, pandemics, economic downturns, supply-line blockages, power-brownouts and gaps on the supermarket shelves. Governments and institutions can certainly facilitate the process, but it needs to come from ordinary people.
In 2025 Neptune enters Aries for 14 years. This is about Big Men and our neurotic need, during insecure times, for leaders who will fix things for us and keep control. This is why we have Putins, Trumps, Modis and Xis dominating the world and holding it to ransom. We need to overcome this illusion. However, the real issue here is not about getting rid of leaders – that’s something we’re generations away from, realistically.
It’s about right leadership and – more important – astute, intelligent, thoughtful citizens who think a bit further than our noses, and who don’t allow populists and pranksters to capture our support and run off with the agenda. Perhaps we also need to support and respect our leaders a bit more, holding them to account but with more empathy and understanding – it’s a lonely and shitty job, with plenty of holes to fall into and minefields to navigate. The worst bit is that, even if you’re a great reformer, someone, somewhere, gets hurt and loses out.
During this Neptune in Aries period we might also see some exemplary, Mandela-esque leaders. To quote Georges Pompidou, a French politician of the 1970s (in old sexist language): “A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation. A politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service“.
One such leader I’m watching at present is the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley – she’s lucid, justice-seeking, solid, with a good sense of proportion, likeable, and she’s the sort of person who, with luck, will leave a good track record behind her. [Click here to see her recent UN General Assembly speech.]
Leaders can catalyse helpful social processes – at least for their first ten years in office – but it is not for them to determine our future. Society needs to take control of itself. We need to train ourselves to form, develop and hold to social consensus, to make fair deals between competing interests, to stand back from sectoral disagreements and responsibly to keep hold of the power and influence that society itself should hold. Government is important as a coordinating influence, but placing responsibility for fixing society on government and institutions inevitably leads to a disjunction of values and aims between oligarchies and ordinary people.
Since the demographic pyramid currently favours the old, weighing quite heavily on the young, we oldies need to pull together to look after each other to lighten the load. We have resources. We don’t need a paid carer to come in to make a cup of tea and hold our hand when a friend, a neighbour or a grandchild is far better. We need professional help only in those things that we cannot do ourselves – I can keep my house in good shape on a daily basis, but I find vacuum-cleaning physically difficult. I can mostly cook for myself, but there are occasions when I’m worn out and really appreciate the application of someone else’s culinary gifts.
Being rendered into a passive recipient of care – especially in old people’s homes – is disempowering, dispiriting and it costs a bomb. It’s healthy to keep going with the daily tasks that we can do – and it’s far more healing to do it with and for others, not just for ourselves. And a single oldie doesn’t need a whole house to live in – I live in a one-room cabin where it’s just five steps from my bed to my kitchen, and it’s great! Let’s liberate our oversized homes for people who truly need them.
Social capital. The strongest social bonding force is crisis. When a society goes through a crisis, triumphing over the odds by sharing and cooperating, the social ring of power gains strength. It’s a transpersonal feeling, a feeling of being in it together and being mutually reliant and reinforcing. It is in the interests of oligarchies meanwhile to keep society splintered, dissonant and competitive. The social ring of power is activated when collective resonance and solidarity rise and hold firm – and this is why organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah are unbeatable, since you can bomb them out as much as you like but the need for such movements doesn’t go away. So they remain and revive, even when shot to pieces.
But solidarity can be dangerous if social blindness or denial is tangled up in it. When at war, Israelis have remarkable national solidarity, but the big question is, toward what ultimate end? Israelis need a safe homeland where they can pursue their lives in peace. Yet, feeling the world to be against them, they do tend to create conflict around themselves – and this is an example of the way a people can be captured by an oligarchy which harnesses and exploits their solidarity for narrow, ultimately unwise ends – in this case, it’s Zionism, but Israel is not the only place where such things happen. But for Israelis, subservience to Zionist aims and values leads to a situation where war is needed as a way of generating solidarity – national unity in an otherwise rather culturally-argumentative country. Here herd mentality fails to serve the true and lasting interests of the whole herd. Israelis will find peace when they become friends with their neighbours. Period. And so it is worldwide.
The initiative lies with people at ground level. It concerns cultivating the wisdom of crowds. Often this happens through encountering nexus-points of occasion and crisis where there are opportunities for social healing, for the airing and resolution of unprocessed social issues. In Britain we’ve just had a rumpus over ‘assisted dying’ – a rumpus because we have a cultural fear of death and an unwillingness to even think about it, so we start panicking when we’re forced to.
There’s also the possibility of a future characterised by the madness of crowds and a lack of societal connectedness, leading amongst other things to the marginalisation of the old and the unwell by the fit and the healthy. The solution to the ‘problem’ of the old and infirm is a fundamental reconstitution of society. And perhaps this escalating social crisis is a gift in disguise. The crunch will come when our economies can no longer support the standards we have become used to.
Good luck, you lot, in addressing a problem I don’t think my own generation has cracked. We need to look after each other a lot more, and to get into proportion what’s really abidingly important in life. Because, believe me, at the end of my life it’s not the pounds, shillings and pence that I earned and spent that I remember – it’s the closenesses I’ve had with fellow humans, the magic moments and the rustling of the leaves in the trees.
The pictures are from trips I made to Geneva in Switzerland (an incredibly expensive place) 12-14 years ago – one of the UN capitals. As you might gather, I’m distinctly internationalist in my geopolitics!
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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