Notes from the Far Beyond

Blessings that Book-Writing Brought

Silent Blessings on Dartmoor. Photo: Lynne Speight

I’ve just finished working on the audiobook version of my latest book, Blessings that Bones Bring. It’s done and uploaded to my site, in thirteen instalments of 40ish minutes each. Each audio instalment took around six hours to make. It’s culled from my blog over a four-year period. It’s not a how-to book but the story of a journey.

I cried at the end of it today, after doing a final listen to the last instalment – tears of relief, of discharge, of handing something over. It’s an emotional experience finishing a book, with some parallels to giving birth.

Every second of speech I listened to 4-5 times over, during the editing process – it’s strange listening to myself, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles nowadays, if you want to get something out into the public domain. The theme music is great – from a Ukrainian group called Orangery.

Whether or not ‘Blessings’ is widely read or heard, I’m happy to have done it. I’ve always had such an attitude. At the front of my book Shining Land I quote the 7th Century Indian philosopher-mathematician Bhavabhuti – the guy who conceived the number Zero – and it means a lot to me. It’s the story of my life as an author. “If learned critics publicly deride my work, then let them. Not for them I wrought. One day a soul shall live to share my thought, for time is endless and the world is wide.“

This isn’t a book for everyone, or for any or every cancer patient. But for those with whom it chimes, who are willing to dive into deeper water, it could be significant. It makes me happy to be able to say that. It’s about the psycho-spiritual side of cancer, and the stuff we can grind through not only in a cancer crisis but in life too, during any experience of earth-shaking intensity. It looks at adversity, illness and dying in a different way, and without shame or reservation. I’m not quoting current groupthink but speaking from my own observations.

With those books that have been significant to us, it’s not just the book itself but the timing of its arrival in our life that makes the big difference. This will be the case here. For some people it could be a life-changer if they’re at a critical point in their lives, seeking answers, cracks in the wall and glimmers of light. While this is a cancer patient’s recounting, it’s relevant to anyone experiencing crisis – and cancer is a crisis that is falling upon ever-increasing numbers of people.

That’s partly because we’re living longer and something has to fell us, and partly because of pollution, radiation and the crazy, screwed-up nature of the civilisation we live in, and partly because of things we’ve done to ourselves and choices we’ve made (or failed to make), and partly because the world is in the midst of a spiritual crisis where cancer has become a catalyst for a great awakening.

We don’t stop for rain at Oak Dragon! Pic by Chrissie Ferngrove.

There’s more to this. In my own case, the particular cancer I received, and the effect it has had on me, was tailor-made for me, karmically. It was somehow designed to hit me on all the right buttons, to force me to get to grips with issues that I, as a soul, need to grapple with. Stuff that stretches beyond the present, beyond lives. Including issues I didn’t know I had.

It has brought a wide swathe of things into new focus. But you have to choose to do the course – and it’s not a punishment but a strange kind of gift. You have to have some big honesty sessions with yourself, with your watching soul, and with ‘God’ (however you see her).

It’s not difficult when it comes down to it – when in the middle of a crater, it’s the easiest option available. What’s difficult is our resistances – our fears, guilt, shame, denial, avoidances, inhibitions and ghosts. The more willing we are to turn around and face these, when they present themselves, the easier it gets. Cancer is a crash course in this – if you choose to treat it that way.

Self-forgiveness is deep and difficult in one sense and dead easy and straightforward in another sense. It needs to be wholehearted, final and without reservation, and we need to be happy to live with the consequences.

For there is a consequence to everything. In the end this is neither good nor bad: it just is as it is. Everything creates consequences. Not doing things is no escape route because that creates consequences too. Many of the ills of our world boil down to things that were not done that needed to be done.

In my case, one of the gifts cancer has given has been an increased mindfulness of the effects of anything I do – because my energy-batteries are weak, my body is fucked, my defences are permeable and, theoretically, you could push me over quite easily.

Some talk, and others get the kettle on – that’s called ‘community’.

But there’s something funny about this too. Another strength has come up underneath, and it’s spirit-fired. I might be vulnerable but I’m not defenceless. Right now I am (still) involved with Maa Ayensuwaa in a serious altercation with a big Australian bank and, alive or dead, we’re not going to let them get away with it – and they know it. It’s about justice, and recognition by the bank that they have caused and been party to terrible consequences to which they need to own up.

Maa now has cancer too, so the bank is up against two cancer patients. Maa is a bit like Kali and I’m a bit like Obi-Wan Kenobi, and we’ve become rather a team.

The worst thing that can happen is that she or I could die. But we’re going to die before long anyway, so not a lot is lost. That gives a kind of relentless strength – something Palestinians are pretty good at.

The bottom line is that, in any show-down, winning or losing is not the primary issue. In the end things bounce back on victors and turn around for losers, and ever thus shall it be. So the objective is to make a battle yield a bigger outcome: truth, resolution and healing. That can involve taking a coolly fierce Zelensky approach, but the price might be higher if we don’t.

That is to say, it will not do the Russians good to take over Ukraine, and it will not help the Israelis to take over Palestine – there’s no victory available and chickens will sooner or later come home to roost. History doesn’t allow it, nowadays, and things have changed – though the world is yet to catch up with this small fact.

Maa Ayensuwaa and I seek justice and resolution. We want rightness to prevail. It’s two rather magical cancer patients up against an Austalian bank. Hehe, a bit like the Taliban and NATO, really.

When I started writing this blog I intended to go on about my new book. What I’ve written above is not included in the book, but it’s not a diversion either (even if I do have the Moon in Gemini). It’s part of my cancer process and the resolution of threads in my life. Other issues crop up in the book though – both blessings and challenges.

The great thing with cancer is that vulnerability makes me experience things far more fully. Life is more impactful – both the pains and the pleasures – and I feel the underlying feelings within and behind things much more than before. In a half-dead kinda way, I’m more alive.

There are quite a few cancer books around at present, and the majority of people and cancer organisations will prefer more mainstream accounts that don’t mention the virtues of inner travelling, stone circles, ETs, astrology, cannabis or colloidal silver – career-killers for most writers. However, since I don’t have a career to kill, and killing me off would probably raise my profile, it’s okay. It’s a learning experience for the soul – and not only for my soul. So all is well.

It’s the most personal book I’ve ever written. I’ve always had rather an allergy to writing an autobiography – not least because I can’t remember much about my life unless I recorded it at the time. This said, I have written a short autobiography on my site. Blogs have been useful ways of accumulating creative iterations of whatever has been going on, and this has yielded books and audiobooks on cancer and on Palestine (called Blogging in Bethlehem).

Re-editing a blog into a book does me good, since it helps me review my life. This might sound strange or perhaps narcissistic, but I have little memory of my life except what I have deliberately logged and imprinted as ‘personal history’ – and blogging has helped this. I went through big brain-changes when I had a near-death experience in 1974, when in my mid-twenties – one change involved loss of capacity to remember many but not all events in my life, and another was a rebalancing of my left and right brains to amplify the intuitive, emotional, imaginal right-brained side.

It’s nearly five years since my back cracked and my life changed – this was the first sign of cancer, though it took thee months to be diagnosed with it. It has been a very long and full five years. Not full of events – much of the time I’ve been completely alone, and I live on a farm at one of the far corners of Britain – but my life is full of life, even though I’d estimate myself to be around 70% dead.

Early morning at Oak Dragon. Pic by Chrissie Ferngrove.

So it has been cathartic to produce this book, and now I’m turning it over – for free, though donations are welcome.

It’s specifically of interest to people encountering cancer who choose an integrated medical route – conventional and complentary medicines together – and who have a spirited approach to life. Or people for whom cancer has taken away the blinkers, who want to try out new ideas. Or for people facing death and wondering what to do about it.

I’m not into giving answers, I’m no cancer expert, and I speak for myself alone, yet there’s a load of food for thought there, with a few golden nuggets hidden in and between the lines.

Phew. That’s over. Now I’ll have a few days pacing around, feeling redundant, wondering what to do next. Well, I’m off camping with a load of dragons before long, and perhaps I need to give my dear readers and listeners a break! Now that’s a thought…

With love, Palden

Blessings that Bones Bring: http://www.palden.co.uk/boneblessings.html

Palestine Audiobook: http://www.palden.co.uk/bethlehemblog.html
Short autobiography: http://www.palden.co.uk/autobiography.html
Oak Dragon Camps: https://oakdragon.org

With Brian Oliver at Oak Dragon – sorting out the ways of the universe, of course. It’s another Chrissie Ferngrove pic.

ET, go home

Getting real about switching realities

[Recycled – written in June 2022]

Pendeen Watch as seen from Bosigran Castle, Penwith, Cornwall

The amazing thing with dying is that it really is about setting sail into the Great Unknown. In aviation terms, it feels more like a landing procedure than a take-off procedure. Over the last twentyish years I’ve psychically tracked and handheld perhaps forty souls through the life-death transition – very interesting, rewarding and also wearing – and what has been striking has been the sheer variety of experiences people seem to have had while transitioning through death. For myself, the closer I come to dying, the more I find I’m needing to loosen up my preconceptions.

And my preconditions. Ultimately futile, they’re all about clinging on to the known. But it’s loss of control that is the key issue here, and it has already started. Dying is a challenge to go with the flow, to let be, to have done with it, to trust in the process and feel a way forward. Suddenly perspectives I harboured about life are changing and revealing themselves very differently. I have to ‘make a deal with God’ (as Kate Bush once sang).

It’s not binary. We aren’t either alive or dead. We’re all a mixture of both in varying proportions, all through life, and it changes slowly, sometimes in phases and sometimes suddenly. Medical thinking has it that death means clinical death, when your life-signs hit zero, but no, that’s a stage of dying. You still exist afterwards and you exist before, though you might be half-dead. When you’re on the other side, for a while you’ll see and hear people back in the land of the living whom you knew in life, though unless they are receptive to listening, they won’t see or hear you – and that can be tricky.

We’re all part-dead. I’m more dead than many of my readers, though there might be one or two who are more dead than me – hello! In February I think I went up to 95% dead – close – but by spring equinox I was down to 80%, and now I’d put myself at 70%. But only last week I had a lurch and drooped, getting older again for two days. This happens with cancer – you go up and down. Small things can have big effects.

In the near-death experience I had at age 24 – I was unconscious for nine days – it permanently changed me. I was very different afterwards, having gone through substantial memory-loss and brain-changes. Some would call it a ‘walk-in’. When I first came to, I didn’t even recognise my parents, with no sense of where I was or the time we were in.

As I revived, the experience made me mission-driven, pushing me to do whatever it was that I had come here to do. It took about seven years after the NDE to ‘come back’ sufficiently, to be fully functional. After three more years, by 1983, my mission presented itself – I started the camps movement. Or it started through me.

The near brush I had with dying in February this year shook, squeezed and wrung me out. By April, to my surprise I was served new instructions. An astoundingly clear voice in my head said, “Ah, there’s something more we’d like you to do…” – and I both perked up and groaned at the same time. I crawled from the slough of despond in February to the beginnings of a new vision by May.

I have been presented with serving an emergent grandfather-type role in the lives of many people. Additionally, there’s something incomplete about the ‘world work’ – world healing-oriented group consciousness-work – I’ve been involved with since the 1980s. And my writing and podcasting are appreciated. So there are things to do. A few years ago I wouldn’t have anticipated this.

There’s something here about sinking into the deep dark and then reviving with an armful of light. Shaky as I am, I’m being given something new to do, even though time is not really on my side. Yet this fact is a motivator: it is urging me to do what I can do while I still can and to enjoy doing it.

It might be a swansong or the beginning of something – I cannot tell. I have osteonecrosis (a dying jawbone), peripheral neuropathy (feelingless feet), a deteriorating back, a troubled stomach, a low-level permanent ache, I’m sensitive to radiation and, even with my thin body, gravity weighs heavily. Oh, and I have a cancer of the blood and bones.

Life is hard in a way I’ve never encountered before, and sometimes it gets me down – this last six months I’ve had a bit too much of it. I nearly buckled. So, if this gets much worse, it could be a relief for me to go. Can you see how this might be a positive thing? Though it does look as if there are positive reasons to stay alive too.

If you want to meet me before I go, then I am still alive in a body and here I am – alone much of the time. I serve good tea. Leaving it to another time, another year, might not be the best thing. Yes, when I go a gap will be created by my absence, but another kind of presence is possible which, in the end, might be valuable too. After all, here on Earth time and geography keep us separate anyway. There comes a point where a soul has done enough for this lifetime. We need to be released. But we haven’t gone away.

I had a good friend, Mike Blackwood, who died a seemingly sad death on booze, drugs and despair. Uncomfortable in this world, he was a spirited man, a solid part of our team in the camps of the 1980s – the site manager for many of them. When I heard of his death, I tracked him over to the other side and he was in the ‘holding bay’ – a buffer zone you go to initially, to process the life you’ve just left and make yourself ready to go further. In terms of Earth time, this often takes weeks, though it varies greatly. The funeral can be a key moment. But not always.

Well, in the holding bay, Mike was tripped out of his skull on acid and having a great time – he had loved happenings, festivals and raves during his life. He was blissfully happy, flowering, glowing, almost Buddha-like. This was a surprise, but that’s what you get in this game. I returned a day or two later and, unusually, he had completely gone beyond. He didn’t wait around for his funeral.

I guess he was relieved to end his life. I felt happy for him. It just goes to show how the judgements made of our behaviours and our lives on Earth don’t necessarily match who and how we actually, truly are, deep down. Sometimes, in the education of our souls, we need to plumb the depths and go where others fear to tread. Our judgements about the rightness or wrongness of others’ lives can clatter badly on the cobblestones of reality. Mike’s death was characteristic of him, and probably a relief for him. The manner of people’s deaths always seems to be true to character.

Ruth, my mother, couldn’t really handle death, even at age 92. Born during WW1, her generation trained themselves to survive, but it could not go on forever. Around death, she had that confusion many people have – an ill-considered mixture of Christian heaven-and-hell stuff and secular it-all-goes-blank stuff. Neither is very useful. She died and, not knowing how to handle it, went straight to sleep, curled up and unresponsive.

This felt okay at first because of what she’d been through, though after a while I got a feeling she wasn’t facing the fact of being dead. Her funeral was approaching and, since she was a popular figure, I wondered what to do. I wanted her to witness people’s love and regard for her. On the day of the funeral I tried waking her up but she wouldn’t surface. I made a prayer, feeling a bit clueless.

Then came a solution. Her little terrier Pepper, who had died some years earlier, came along, yapping at her. She woke up and my mother was able to witness her funeral, with Pepper on her lap. I think she was surprised at the gratitude and recognition that came her way from the crowd. Bless her, she hadn’t appreciated the value of the contribution she had made during life. “It’s only me”, she would say when she rang up or came through the door. Only you?

She and I had some leftover issues at the time she died, but the changes she went through after death allowed her to encompass her strange son and the person he was. All was forgiven between us. It happened one day when I was in Palestine. I experienced her strongly while at an ancient church at Burqin, near Jenin in the West Bank – the place where Jesus healed the lepers – and found myself deeply wishing I could have brought her there.

In her life she would never have entertained the idea of coming to Palestine, but she loved old churches. She came in spirit and I felt her there with me. I shed tears of release, and I think she did too. All that lay between us was made good and each of us came to fully understand why we had entered each other’s lives. Thank you, Jesus, for that. Ironically, it was a Muslim friend, Wael, who had brought me there to meet the Prophet Jesus – and my Mum.

What’s interesting here is that, today, I’m going through a lot of early-life patterns of vulnerability, unsupportedness and loss, and feeling like a five year old – mother stuff – while being completely at peace with my Mum. We smile to each other occasionally.

Going home. On the slopes above Bosigran Castle.

When my old philosopher friend Stanley Messenger died, he wasn’t interested in witnessing his funeral – as a mystic Christian, psychic and Anthroposophist, he didn’t like the conventional church funeral his family organised.

I sat there in a pew with Stanley gruffly urging me to take over the service, while the vicar was up there trotting out the usual stuff. I told Stanley to stay and watch, because the people present did care about him. Actually, when we were all sitting in the pub afterwards, he was happier because it was informal, and I sensed him around, communing with us.

In the weeks that followed he loitered in the ‘holding bay’, sitting enjoying a pleasant landscape and a blissful absence of worldly hassles, still looking frail. In the last few years of life he had dementia, which can dissipate a person’s selfhood, so I guess he lacked momentum to go further in the dying process. After a while I came along, took his hand and pulled him up what seemed like a lot of steps until we reached the ‘pearly gates’ – the full transition point into the after-death state. He was met by people who welcomed him and took him in – I think one was Rudolf Steiner himself, whom Stanley had known when he was a young man. Goodbye, Stanley, and thanks for being you – see you again.

My cousin Faith’s husband Albert was a good-hearted man, rather secular and empirical in viewpoint though gentlemanly and worldly-wise with it, and I think at first he thought me weird and extreme. Then he got prostate cancer and started changing, slowly becoming more open, doing tai chi and becoming more attuned to matters of spirit. Just before he died, he was clearly edging into the otherworld, far away and in a state of grace. I had been working with him remotely but came to visit in his last days.

At one point his eyes opened slightly, he saw me, and he gave me the thought, “You’re here?!” Then after a pause he thought, “But you were there”. I could sense him computing that. “Yes”, I thought back, “I went there to pull you over”.

He had seen me on the other side, and here was I on this side, with him at the hospice. That’s not supposed to happen, or is it? He had a peaceful death. My cousin Faith really did well with him – he expired with her hugging him. She felt his last breath. After a while she got up, went out into the hospice garden, and a heron flew in, did two loops round the garden and sailed off past the trees – heaven was signalling.

I had helped sort out his connection with the otherworld, making sure there was someone to meet him, and myself going over to give him a hand. Since his death we have nodded and smiled whenever he has popped up – he’s even done me a few favours that only someone on his side of reality can do.

Often I’ve been able to say who will be there waiting. It melts the last doubts and resistances people might have. When I told my Dad that his brother Laurie, who died in WW2, would be there, he went quiet and a tear came to his eye. Something in him knew this was true. From that moment I sensed that he felt alright about going – his long lost brother would be there.

On the day before he died he was unconscious. I held his hand, telling him all I knew about what would next happen to him, and what to do. I knew he could hear me and took it in. A while after his death he and I had a psychic chat and he thought to me, “You’ve done your duty to your father by becoming my father”.

In my twenties he had felt I had let him down by making the dissident life-choices I made at the time. My parents had done their level best but they could never quite encompass me – their strange boy who became a hippy revolutionary, a disappointment and embarrassment. In my mother’s eyes the only sins I had failed to commit were running off with a black woman and being gay – such was the moral atmosphere of the late 1960s. Poor them, they must look down on me now and think, “OMG, is he still at it, getting himself into trouble, even at his age?”. But I think they now understand why I’m like that and why I had been their son.

What happens in death has a lot to do with how we deal with life. If during life we are willing to own up when necessary, then owning up in death gets a lot easier. Life on Earth is such a screwed-up and tacky thing that we’re all damaged, up to our eyeballs in karmic cobwebs. Living in a body on Earth isn’t and cannot be about being perfect – it’s about getting through. It’s about leaving the world a slightly better place than when we started – not only because it’s good and right to do so but also in case we need to come back. Or in case other members of our soul-tribe need to come here. Or for the sake of our grandchildren and everyone else who shares our world.

At death you can’t do anything more about anything. Life was as it was, and that’s that. The task is to come to peace, to hand in your resignation without reservation – well, as much as possible. There’s a good chance an emergent feeling of relief will help with this. It involves releasing and forgiving, letting be. It’s too late to do anything. So working on at least some of the issues we’re likely to meet at death is well worth doing before we get there.

There’s more. The better we’re able to get through our life-crises and make them good during life, the more we establish a pattern of dealing well with crisis. When death comes, it makes dying easier because the ‘growth choice’ has become a habit we can latch onto at the moment of death – instead of the ‘fear choice’. The more we are centred, flexible and okay about handling life, the more we will handle death and ride the wave.

At death it matters who we truly are and what we have become – no glosses or pretences are available any more. It’s an honesty process, yet also a relieving and healing process in which a weight is lifted off us – the weight of being who we were, with our character traits, habits, stuck bits and karmic patterns. A lot of forgiveness and understanding comes. But look at this another way…

When we die we’re entering a new world. As with this world, the way we are born into that world greatly affects what happens afterwards. When we sally forth to the other world, if we die well and do our best with it, we’ll start well on the next bit. By ‘dying well’ I don’t mean the right circumstances – it could even be a car crash – but the right approach when we encounter it. Even if it is a car-crash, or you get shot, time stretches immensely in that moment, and there can even be a surprising calmness about it. In such a circumstance, your soul pops out of your body before the impact hits you and you will feel no pain. People who die in wars, shocks or tragedies get scooped up by soul-paramedics and helped quickly.

Dying is like an examination to test what we’ve truly learned and worked out in life. It affects subsequent decisions about what we’ll take on next – our next incarnate life on Earth, if that is our path, or whatever happens instead, if that is our path.

Our soul-family, soul-tribe and angels help us get things sorted out. It’s a process, and it involves referencing all of our existences and their overall storyline and purpose. It concerns the role we play in our soul-tribe and the agenda, priorities and evolution of our tribe. We aren’t solely individuals but part of something much larger. There’s bliss, relief, healing, love, rest, fellowship, education and soul-melding to be had too, in the after-death state.

A deep choice is presented. The choice lies between opening up to such a path or walling ourselves into an imaginal reality that carries us off somewhere else – if perhaps we believe that we don’t deserve better, or if we can’t let go of the identity, feelings and attachments we had in life. Then we might well get another round of life, with a bleed-through of elements from the past that can be both helpful and difficult, until a turning in the deepest seat of consciousness redirects us to our true, core path.

Above Porthmoina Cove – rock climbers love it

Part of our reason for being here on Earth is to evolve and train ourselves as super-trooper souls – souls who’ve been through the mill, shed blood, sweat and tears and learned lessons from it – experiences that aren’t available elsewhere. It’s one helluva training – a ton of both difficult and joyous stuff is to be found here on Earth, and we have a profound option to become greater souls through wrestling with it.

There’s something many ancient peoples instinctively knew: the souls of the living and the souls of the dead walk alongside each other in parallel worlds, helping each other out. We’re in the same tribes and networks, all still here. You can talk to your Mum (not anytime, but sometimes). They knock on our heads every now and then. It’s important to take note, to listen within and to answer when the souls of the dead call.

After I’ve gone, if any of you feel me twiggling the top of your head, please acknowledge it and signal back. It depends on whether you pick me up sufficiently, giving it full credence, and whether it is in your scope and growth to respond.

It’s not uncommon for anyone with a dash of intuition and receptivity to pick up on the dead – go on, own up, you’ve experienced this yourself, actually. Search back in your memory and you’ll find it. So if you get a buzz from me after I’ve gone, please work on the basis that I am actually there.

In life, it’s not primarily what we do that matters – it’s how we do it, and how much we make it good in the end. As an astrologer, there’s one prediction I can safely make, for no charge: you are all going to die. The choice lies in how we do it. That involves the full and proper exercising of free will. Whatever your faults, you’re a fine person. Don’t you forget it. I’ll try not to either. As a Virgo, I’m so bloody self-critical that I have to remind myself.

With love, Palden

I have reposted this blog from two years ago, and it’s also part of my cancer book Blessings that Bones Bring. While reading out out loud for the audiobook version of the book, it struck me as a really good piece. So here it is again.

Cancer – fighting and making peace with it

We manifest cancer in our lives for all sorts of reasons, and they go deep. In our day we have medicalised it, rendering cancer treatment into a physical process that can be fixed with pharmaceuticals, surgery and radiation or, for holistic types, rigorous dietary, miracle cures and other regimes. This focus on the mechanical causes of cancer – diet, lifestyle, life-conditions, stress – is often personalised and privatised to place responsibility on ourselves as individuals, or to put it down to genetics, and this is partially correct. Even so, we still tend to regard cancer as a stroke of bad luck that happens to some people and hopefully not to us.

Meanwhile, the spread of cancer is a symptom of a world that badly needs correction and of a spiritual crisis in the heart of humanity. These causes of cancer are kept quiet – pollution, radiation, poverty and, when it boils down to it, the very nature of our societies. But there’s much more to it than even these, because some people get cancer and others don’t, even when living similar lives under similar conditions. There’s a deeper meaning to it all, for each and every one of us.

Nowadays there’s a growing movement of people ‘fighting cancer’ – making it their mission to overcome this threat to their life. Many more people are succeeding in ‘beating cancer’, thanks particularly to advancement in treatments, whether medical or holistic, and this is good – the knowledge and experience around it is growing.

I myself have followed an integrated medical approach – bridging the medical divide and partaking thoughtfully in the virtues of both conventional and complementary medicine. A few things stopped me from taking an entirely holistic route:

it was already too late, I was an emergency case and I could hardly move an inch;
it would have cost a lot (it’s private treatment);
I needed a comprehensive local service (doctors, paramedics, ambulances, nurses), which is not available in the holistic sector;
and here comes the key issue… I did not have the willpower.

Some things also stopped me from taking an entirely medical route:

I’ve been doing holistics all my adult life;
Conventional medicine can be brutal;
It fails to address psycho-spiritual issues (as does society in general);
Using holistics can reduce side-effects and problems involved with pharmaceuticals.

When water crashes, froths and swirls it’s at its most beautiful. As with life.

The matter of willpower is central and critical. When cancer hits you, your situation and where you stand at the time matter a lot. But the critical question is this: what is the life-lesson that cancer, as a psycho-spiritual catalyst, is bringing you? Since cancer is life-threatening, it certainly does bring up big, fundamental questions about why we’re alive and what we’re doing about it. Some people look deep into this question and some avoid it or hope it will go away. The story varies a lot for different people. I’m one of those who went deep.

By the time I was diagnosed in November 2019, I had already exhausted much of my stock of willpower, after 2-3 months of excruciating pain which had worn me down, scraped my edges and taken me to the far boundaries of toleration. I had had a life where at times I had played for high stakes, using up a lot of my willpower credits. Approaching 70, I didn’t have enough in my batteries to face yet another full-on, miracle-working, crunchy push against the odds, doing battle with the Fates. There’s something of a warrior in me (Mars in Scorpio), but a warrior still has to choose his battles carefully.

So I had a choiceless choice, to take the treatment that was available there and then, offered by the NHS. It had taken me in, half-dead on a stretcher, diagnosed me and given me the options. It took only minutes to realise there was no option. I just had to ‘trust in Allah’ and trust myself, the doctors and the process.

And, believe me, even the most hardened atheist utters a prayer at this point.

I was helpless to do much except to fully and completely accept what was happening and do my best with it. I made a deep prayer to my ‘angels’ to regulate and modulate the process in a spiritual sense – not least because, in my rather helpless state, this was pretty much all I could do. I decided to suspend all previous positions and attitudes and to see what would happen – this was a truth moment. I would live or die, and my choice lay in doing my best with whatever happened.

There are some who are in a good position to ‘fight cancer’ and overcome it, medically and attitudinally, and there are some who must take another route. Those who fight cancer can go through a life-changing initiation in self-care and rearranging their lives to fit their new situation. They go through a change of diet and lifestyle, get into meditation, walking, helping others and all sorts of life-improvements, perhaps changing their lives significantly.

A spirited life-change like this, for someone who has lived a stressed, imbalanced life, given over to careers, family and life’s rigours, is such a boost, energywise, that it can kick the cancer. It’s a positive shock to the system, a shedding of a load, a serious course-correction. And it can work and change a person’s life.

This strategy can work first time round but, in my observation, the second time round can often be different – again, because willpower credits are more used up. Life returns to teaching us about acceptance and death. A recurrence of cancer can corner a person more seriously than before, since willpower and hope can be weaker and tiredness stronger. Heavyweight medical treatments or death often follow.

This was one reason I took an integrated medicine path and a path of acceptance from the beginning. I decided to take the hit, live with cancer and pace myself, energywise – given that I had only a certain amount of charge in my inner batteries.

And something in my heart told me that I had been given a strange kind of gift.

Some time ago I wrote that doctors saved my life and healers gave me a new life. In the end, I was impressed with the doctors and medical staff I encountered. There were some problems because I’m a strange guy who doesn’t obey normal medical rules, but I worked at being pleasant and cooperative because I knew they were doing their best and my life rested in their hands. This has always been my technique for getting through scrapes and it usually gets me through somehow – or at least it reduces the crunchiness of it.

I’m so grateful to the various meditators, prayer circles, healers, practitioners, spirit-gifts, remedies and inner help I have received, on top of medical treatment – and this is what has given me new life. It has also made the pharmaceutical process work better and easier. I give details in my book Blessings that Bones Bring.

‘Fighting cancer’ was not really an initiation I needed to go through, to prove that I could do it, because I’ve already proven I can pull off some miracles. Some cancer patients don’t need to fight cancer, and some would do well to consider a befriending rather than fighting approach. Some need to die as well as they can, and some, like me, need to accept cancer into our lives and live with it. I’m now partially disabled, and I can only tinker around the edges of that to make it a bit easier.

It’s likely that these seemingly peripheral issues will kill me, not the cancer itself. The well-meaning people who weekly send me information about miracle cancer cures miss the point – I’m doing fine with cancer, thank you, and the problems lie with other things.

Part of me is a holy rainbow warrior, yet I’m a peacemaker at heart and cancer is a negotiation – with the Spirit of Cancer, with Soul and with The Management. It’s a truth process, a karmic cards-on-the-table session. In some respects peacemaking takes more bravery than fighting cancer.

Some months after my cancer diagnosis I had got through chemo and a few things about my new life had clarified. I’d had time to get to grips with the situation. I was deeply weary yet I wasn’t dead, and tentative signs of revival were emerging. My life-expectancy grew from months to about three years.

I realised that decades of inner growth and an alternative-leaning life had not failed me – they were giving me strength and rebirth-potential. My chemo process was concluded after five cycles of treatment, when eight cycles had originally been planned. All the tests I went through showed good signs. This was heartening.

Acceptance and surrender are a fundamental secret in healing. In my life I’ve come close to dying several times and, each time, when I have fully yielded to it, something deep down has started reviving. Obviously this rebirth capacity will not go on forever and at some point I shall die but, even then, surrender is still the best way to go.

Dying involves a loss of control, yet another kind of balance or control emerges underneath if control – our grip on life – is released wholeheartedly and we’re willing to hand ourselves over. It’s like surfing – you have to give yourself to the wave. It’s the same in life: at times we just have to accept facts and there is no longer any point struggling against them. At that point our capacity to shift perspective and change our approach determines much of what follows.

That’s one of life’s big lessons: sometimes taking a difficult path is the easier path.

There’s another deep shift involved here. When we die, we have a choice about how to actually go. Will we wait or struggle until death takes us, squeezing us out of our earthly lives? Or will we die by making a deep choice to relax into it, let it be and enjoy the blessing? We can make these deep decisions before we reach that time – not in our heads but in our cells and bones. It’s an emotional decision, fed by tears. We do this during our lives by accepting the crises that come to us and dealing with them well.

A few months after diagnosis with cancer I made a deep decision. I decided that medical issues will not be the ultimate deciding factor for me in my death. Clearly they do play a big part in the calculus of dying, but I am not a machine.

Willpower decides it. Where there’s a will, there really is a way. Thus far, having lived with cancer for five years, I’ve gone through some crises and some miracles and I’m outliving my initial life-expectancy estimates of some years ago. But my life will not go on forever – it hurts, and daily life is twice as difficult. I shall continue for as long as I am willing and able to do so.

Then there comes a point where willpower runs down and acceptance takes over. Around that point I’m likely to pop my clogs, having reached a stage where I’ve had enough of holding myself up and keeping on going. It will be a decision.

We all have to make it. But it is possible to make it earlier, without too much avoidance, balking and fighting, rather than fighting it out to the last moment – and possibly missing some of the more beatific, grace-infused elements of the experience of dying.

There’s a chance I might go out quite quickly. Having worked on myself quite a lot, I have fewer resistances, fears and blocking issues to struggle through. I’m sure I have more to face, but feel okay about getting through them – it’s a matter of giving ourselves permission to make it easier.

It is in this sense that the story of our lives is but a preparation for death and the afterlife. I don’t feel that I shall need to struggle through a long, slow dying process – and resistance is not actually very interesting as an activity. However, this said, what actually happens at death is not something any of us is in control of. That’s the wonder of it.

The Isles of the Dead – the Scillies. In ancient British tradition, souls go to the Western Heaven when they pass on.

There’s more. Frankly, I’m fine about going home – home to where my people are, home to where I came from – for some R&R with my soul-tribe. Life on Earth has worn me out. It’s had big rewards. Since we leave life as naked as we entered it, all we take with us is what we have become as a result of being alive. I’ve made some progress on that path, and I’m happy enough with it. In some respects we learn more from our errors and inadequacies than we learn from our successes and pleasures.

Near-death experiences earlier in life and since getting cancer have had a funny outcome. Each time, I’ve come out of them with a new mission and a new reason to be alive. This is happening even in the fucked-up carcinogenic state I’m nowadays in. I’ve been given a new, shortish life, with new constraints and new advantages. Something deep inside has changed and I find myself with new instructions. Or a new iteration of the instructions I’ve always had.

It’s not as if the Voice of God comes down, booming out what you’re supposed to do. It’s just that circumstances, happenings and inner feelings lead us that way, almost like an unfolding movie-plot. There comes a point where you realise that it all clicks together and that life is prompting your thoughts and sucking you into a new mission. Or at least, that’s how it works for me.

That’s one key reason that recently I did an Ayahuasca ceremony, to make a pilgrimage to a deeper place. It’s what earlier esotericists used to call the Causal Plane, the place where the magic of life and the deeper laws of karma are rooted. I needed to clarify things and clear some impediments standing in the way. I managed to exorcise one of the ghosts that has been haunting me for the last two or more years, and that has been a relief and release. I progressed with another one but there’s more to go on that.

That’s what life is about: there’s always more to go.

Our life purpose and the way we are to carry it out do not announce themselves in advance, neither in words nor logical propositions. Yet a sense of rightness appears at each stage, if we stay on track, guiding decisions in the context of a vision or an instinctual feeling. The mission is to follow that feeling and to do whatever is needed to stay on track.

Strangely, right now I have a public role that is rooted in isolation: I spend most of my life alone, down here in a cabin on a farm in Cornwall. Yet almost every day I’m playing a part in people’s lives in multiple countries. Rather psychic, I’m at times really close to people far away – we are together in quantum space even if sundered by long distances. My psyche is a bit like a telephone exchange, even when I’m not fully conscious of it.

Though I’ve been quite isolated, and partially because of it, my work has been appreciated more than ever before. That’s funny, especially since I haven’t really been trying. Furthering my career, making money or collecting ‘likes’ don’t motivate me, though sharing some insights and experience before I go is amazingly medicinal.

I learned something from an old friend, Hamish Miller the dowser: he didn’t write down his knowledge of the geomancy of West Penwith, and it died with him. A few years after his death I’d have loved to interview those details out of him. But he’s been hovering around me while I’ve been doing my researches, so perhaps that exchange has happened anyway.

So I’m communicating as much as I can of what I’ve learned, in those subjects I’ve given focus to over the decades, since it’s useful to those following in the tracks of folks like me. I won’t be leaving money or property when I die, but I’ll leave a voluminous archive (it’s on my site).

I’ve been privileged to be involved in the origination stages of many things, having been active in an historic germination phase between the 1960s and 1980s. For me and people like me it’s our duty to hand down what we’ve learned and created, because there’s still a long way to go.

It’s your turn, and you have your own slice of human history to work within. We’re in a prolonged historic process of redeeming the complex issues of a profoundly screwed-up world, and we aren’t here solely for the chocolate, sex and tax-paying. This process takes time, and there are chapters, layers and levels to it. Our planet hosts eight billion souls, originating from across the universe, and a big global fermentation is going on, and we’re all part of it.

[For an audio talk about this fermentation, from 2013, click here.]

Back to willpower. With cancer, or with any other earth-shaking adversity or crisis, we are offered a choice. Modern medicine and current social values encourage us to ‘get better’ and fight cancer, but this is only for some people. It can serve as a powerful initiation and empowerment, though in some cases it can also be an escape, an avoidance of the bigger life-and-death questions that cancer can bring up. These questions inevitably return, sooner or later. There is also the option to learn acceptance in life, and bravely to look into the eyes of death when the opportunity arises, even if it’s not our time to go.

The paradox here is that getting friendly with death can often give us new life – it opens up channels, it makes uncanny healings or revivals possible, and life no longer needs to teach us that lesson. If it doesn’t give us new life, it leads to a more peaceable and benign death, giving us a good start in the afterworld. Death comes inescapably to all of us and it is not the end of our journey. And cancer, if it doesn’t kill us, gives us a practice run for dying – a preparation for later.

It changes the very focus of our remaining lives. I had a near-death experience at age 24 and it was a life-changer – I was unconscious for eight days, awakening with much of my memory scrubbed. I can safely say that many of the things I have done since then were sparked by that near-death experience. It made me fully aware of what I was here for. Now in my seventies, near-death has happened again, through the agency of cancer. My shelf life and possibilities are limited but cancer has sharpened my focus.

People tell me I shall live a long time yet. Living in the bodily condition I’m in, I’m not so sure. I’m not sure that I want to – I’m finding it hard work. But I’ll be alive until I’m done, and I’m not done yet. And acceptance means accepting life as much as it means accepting death.

Since a very Saturnine life-crisis of 2-3 years ago my life prospects seem to have extended, to my surprise, and I’m now on my 124th blog and 49th podcast! Gosh. But then, when in my early forties, three people separately told me I would reach my peak in late life, and now I understand what they were saying. It’s funny how life goes. In a way, I needed cancer in order to rebirth myself.

With love, Palden

Site: www.palden.co.uk
Cancer Audiobook: www.palden.co.uk/boneblessings.html
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

The Magical Landscape of West Penwith

This is a recording of a talk I gave on Wednesday 19th in Penzance, here in Cornwall. It would interest anyone who knows and loves West Penwith, and also folks interested in geomancy and alternative prehistory.

It’s about energy-fields, ancient site alignments and the geomancy of ancient sites. I make a radical proposition that the hundreds of sites in Penwith all constituted components of one enormous ancient site covering the whole peninsula.

A collection of interesting maps is provided with the recording of the talk, which is 1hr 48mins long.

http://www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-prehistory.html

To follow in autumn in Penzance, there will be four monthly AHA classes, covering activism (changing the world), prehistory (more about Magic Penwith), power points in time (astrology and the way the tides of time move) and extraterrestrials (about life off and on Earth).

I’m speaking at the Glastonbury Symposium on Sunday July 28th, and I return to Glastonbury on my birthday on 5th September. The subject is ‘Sludging through the Void with Muddy Boots – and why ETs have spindly legs‘.

If you want a really special experience, you might consider coming to the Oak Dragon Camp, Friday 26th July to Sunday 4th August in Somerset. I’ll be there. www.oakdragon.org

With love, Palden

The Vine of Death

I’ve been a bit quiet on my blog recently. Lots going on, and I’ve been working on a new audiobook too, Blessings that Bones Bring – it’s my cancer story. However, here’s a new podcast, and a follow-up comes along soon.

Pordenack Point (it comes up in the podcast)

The Vine of Death – latest podcast

Well, it’s not that bad, but there’s meaning in the name. I’ve just been to an Ayahuasca ceremony, to seek some truth and resolution, and the Grandmother came to me, or I went to her, and I surfed a rather big, surging wave.

Ayahuasca, an Amazonian tree-vine, is called the Vine of Death because, while you don’t actually die, what happens resembles the experience of dying and it’s good practice for it. This, of course, is rather useful to me because, as a cancer patient, that journey is not far away. I got some practice.

The Grandmother is the spirit or goddess of ayahuasca, to whom we are challenged to yield, to receive her teaching and blessing. I met her – we all did – and she treated me gently, then to give me a shake-up.

The journey was very much about resolving and re-weaving some key threads in my life, shedding some baggage and opening to the future. Yes, a person at the end of their life does have a future – in a way, quite a big one.

Four men from four countries, plus a magic cat, travelled a light-year or two in the otherworld and returned, and this is the story as seen through my eyes.

It’s in two parts, covering the first and second days of the ceremony. This is a very personal story, with some tears and chuckles thrown in.

Those of you who know me or have been following me, or who have been listening to or reading my cancer story, Blessings that Bones Bring, might find this interesting. If you’re new to my blogs and podcasts, I really have no idea what you’ll think of this one, though I hope you enjoy the ride!

This is part one, and part two follows within days. 33 minutes.

With love, Paldywan Kenobi

Listen on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0SOeSctUMbALMawrcMTuTD?si=B7x-Xv65SOOVmhz3wBohnA

or on my website:
http://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

A Primordial Guardian of Belerion looks out to sea. Pordenack Point.

Acting like a Mountain

Here’s honouring the great and the mighty

SUNDAY MEDITATION

You’re welcome to join the Sunday meditation – it’s good medicine. Take a break – life can do without you for half an hour.

Do your meditation, astral travelling, mindfulness, mantras or whatever, as you normally do it, together with everyone else doing the same, wherever we are. Enter the zone, an enhanced energy-field, and the wind will inflate your spiritual sails.

My current feeling is that we’re in a chickens-coming-home-to-roost phase, after the events of the last 6-9 months and more. A tide is turning. Nothing is ever permanent. This cuts all sorts of ways: both the benefits and the harms we have brought come back at us, and the overall trajectory is all to do with learning. The learning of the soul.

We’re now in a phase of collective learning (Pluto in Aquarius), of learning together as a mass of people. Our challenge is to mature as a human race, at a time when we truly need to do so. For our social subgroups, our social tribes, nations and the world are themselves beings with their own karmas, behaviours, choices and lessons to learn.

Sometimes it feels as if everything is going backwards. Gaza, Sudan, Yeman, Ukraine, Myanmar, they all seem like retrogressions, and certainly for the people in the thick of these maelstroms, they are.

But look underneath. What has been achieved in recent times has been a maturing of human values worldwide. It’s underneath, beyond the politics, the opinions, the propaganda, the polarisation. It’s historic.

It’s happening particularly in the majority world where 80% of the world’s population lives. Sadly, the Global North, including Europe, America, Russia and Japan – our time was back in the 19th-20th Centuries – are in a rather self-deluding, hubristic phase at present. We’re quite good at alienating that global majority. But people of conscience in the West are deeply unhappy with what has been happening too. It’s people of conscience who need to be the ones in power.

It concerns the matter of conflict itself and of man-made devastation and suffering. Forget this side or that side, who is right and who is wrong – conflict, polarisation and dehumanisation are themselves the problem. Humanity is growing tired of this stuff. And, strangely, exhaustion is one of the greatest of history’s peacemakers.

The sacrifices made by people oppressed by war are fuelling up the collective psyche toward an historic shift. It’s taking place deeper down. That’s where the learning is happening, and in coming times it will be tested. Humanity needs to come out of hiding, and we’re moving inch by inch toward such a time.

Do join us in the meditation. Help the world rise an inch higher. Help humanity see things from another viewpoint.

Times are below, and if you have questions, try here: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

With love, Palden
—————

Current meditation times, every Sunday:
Iceland 7-7.30pm
UK & Portugal 8-8.30pm
W Europe 9-9.30pm
E Europe and the Levant 10-10.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 3-3.30pm
PST North America 12-12.30am

Earth as Seen from Outside

A Podcast from the Far Beyond

Planet Earth – quite worth a visit (this is down in our woods).

Down here in Penwith we get a lot of wind – we’re stuck out in the ocean and it loves blowing us away with its power and glory. So it’s a breezy start and finish to this podcast.

It’s one of those things that happen in parts of Planet Earth. And that’s what this podcast is about. Conditions on Earth as seen from the outside.

In coming months I’ll tell you more about things I learned from the Council of Nine – this is the first of a few. What they taught was so multidimensional that it’s difficult to cover it all briefly. In this podcast I present one aspect of it, for your consideration.

It’s all about how our planet was set up and the larger picture on our current global situation. It is the consequence of the application throughout history of human free will. People might legitimately ask, ‘How can the Universe be benign, and how can God be Love when we see things like the disaster in Gaza happening?’, but there is a simple answer.

It is a product of human free will. And collectively as a planetary race we need to apply our free will to deconstruct such tragedies and make them obsolete.

Recorded in May 2024, down in the bluebell woods below our farm. The wind sounds like a powerful gale, but actually it was simply a brisk Cornish ocean breeze rattling in the leaves of the trees. 37 mins long.

With love, Palden.

Listen on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4beqzMmFp94Jryvv2BAMjF

or visit the podcast page on my site: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Another strange experience available on Planet Earth – it’s some stuff called water

A Blog about a Blog

This is interesting. It’s written by an old friend who is himself involved with helping out in a freelance-humanitarian sense with Gaza. But this is something that anyone involved in conflict resolution, or in any kind of change-bringing commitment, needs to ask themselves: what is it that drives me to do this?

https://mike-scialom.medium.com/born-and-raised-in-egypt…

It came up for me too. In my case, my maternal grandfather was in General Allenby’s British invasion force in Palestine in WW1, my father was in Egypt in WW2, and I have Roma and German (though not Jewish) ancestry – Holocaust stuff. That’s what I’ve identified in myself that hooked me into it.

But also, growing up in a polarised and violent city, Liverpool, in the 1960s, played its part – overcoming the effects in myself of being bullied in early life. We teach best what we ourselves have had to learn.

If you have a bee in your bonnet about particular issues, driving you into activism, it’s worth looking into your ancestral background and your history. It can help make it all more conscious.

Many Palestine and other activists would do well to look at the emotional source in themselves of their despair, anger and commitment, because this will help them become more effective, tactical and compassionate in pursuing their vision.

It’s important because issues like this will not be resolved overnight. Yes, a ceasefire has been needed and is still needed, but a ceasefire without resolution of fundamentals might not be the best thing. Sad to say, sometimes the horror has to get worse, until a point comes where peace and resolution are the only options left.

We need to own up to the perverse fact that many of us worry about Gaza and similar places only when blood and horror happen, impinging on our comfort-zones. But actually, the reason why blood and horror happen rests on causes that are brewed and fermented during quieter times. If we’re going to succeed in a mission such as peacemaking of conflicts that have deep roots, it has to be sustained in the longterm.

And here’s an awkward truth. If campaigning for our beliefs polarises society, then we shall fail. Because if others have different beliefs, thinking of them as nasty ‘them’ people itself lies at the root of conflict. People who are anti-anything, who wish to ban things or people, and who dehumanise people with different viewpoints, become part of the problem they’re sincerely trying to resolve.

We really are all in this together, if we wish to resolve the fundamental issues that the world faces today. Peace will not come, and ecological and societal issues will not be resolved, unless we all work together.

This is not idealistic thinking. It is a very real socio-political issue. If we don’t get through this in the coming decades – global consensus-forming – then we’re fucked, really. War arises from polarisation, and there is little value in trying to stop war or save our world by polarising society.

Working to overcome polarisation and build bridges makes things more difficult. It means we must work longer and harder on this. It means we are challenged to walk our talk more consistently and for longer.

When the shooting and dismay stop, if everyone just goes home, back to normality, then peace will not come, because the matter is not sorted. And in this century we really need to sort things out, changing and ending the patterns of centuries and millennia.

That’s my thought for the day. However, there’s something else too – a new podcast.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | HUMAN INTELLIGENCE

I recorded this in January and completely forgot about it! That was a memory question. And that’s why it’s coming out now. I remembered.

Jean Piaget once said that intelligence is not about what we know, but what we do when we don’t know. How we figure things out when we’re in new territory or out of our depth.

The problem with AI is that it works by drawing on data and on what is known, on memory, and on the way things have happened thus far.

That’s not true intelligence. Human intelligence is better at dealing with the unknown. That is, if we humans act intelligently – which we do only occasionally.

So AI is unlikely to be as wondrous in its problem-solving capacities as tech-bedazzled AI cultists would like us to believe.

And there’s a hidden twist here concerning human intelligence – it’s in the podcast! Recorded in January 2024, down by an old silted-up millpond in the stream below our farm. 27 mins long.

With love, Palden.

Listen to it here:
https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/vSPHJFc1FJb

or go to my podcast page here:
www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Irtas, Bethlehem, in the West Bank of Palestine

Blessings that Bones Bring

The Wisdom of Insecurity

Fortuitously, five years ago I started a blog a few weeks before going down with cancer, with no idea that it would turn into a cancer blog. I just had a feeling to start blogging. That says something about intuition: it has ways of knowing things in advance that our conscious minds don’t.

Intuition knows or understands things in the back brain without needing to think about them in the front brain. But it’s a matter of giving it attention and credence, and learning to avoid overriding our feelings with obstructive and over-thought rationales, conditioned responses, fears or doubts – or science.

Cancer was a great surprise when diagnosed in November 2019. Signs were appearing nearly a year beforehand in January 2019, but they weren’t recognisable. Something wasn’t right. It was as if I was in a downward spiral, getting tired of life and losing my spark. Neither my then partner nor I could figure out what it was.

In August 2019, while working in her garden, my back cracked – two of the lowest vertebrae in my back fractured and two collapsed. At the time it seemed I had an excruciating, immobilising back problem.

A cranial osteopath recommended I get scanned in hospital – he felt something more was going on here (thanks, Simon Perks). Getting to hospital was a long process. Eventually, in A&E, the junior doctor, in a quandary, called in a specialist, who entered, looked intently at me for a while, then said, “Test him for Myeloma”, and walked out. Brilliant. This man nailed it at first try. Two months later I met him in the hospital corridor and managed to thank him. Before long I was having treatment. I had Multiple Myeloma or bone marrow cancer.

When the news of cancer hits you it’s like a thunderbolt and soulquake. Yet it also brought me a strange element of relief, at last knowing what was actually happening after three months of spirit-wringing pain. For decades I had looked after my health quite well, with a view to avoiding such things as cancer. Had I got things wrong? Seriously ill, if I had arrived in hospital a month later I was unlikely to have survived. When cancer comes it can come fast and strong, even if its buildup is long and slow.

After a few days I asked one of the cancer specialists whether he had any clues about the causes of Myeloma. He looked at me straight, saying quite simply, “Radiation exposure”. The next day he brought a map in The Lancet, a medical journal, showing the clustering of Myeloma cases in UK around nuke stations. For 28 years I had lived 15 miles downwind of Hinckley Point nuke station, and I’d had two instances of nuclear radiation exposure in other contexts. His opinion just went ‘ping’. I had known since 1975 that I was electrosensitive. This was not a great problem until around year 2000 when mobile phones and wi-fi became commonplace. That’s what finished me off.

Certain chemical neurotoxins may also be a cause of Myeloma for some. Once, when in hospital, I met a man with Myeloma, asking him what his work had been. “A merchant seaman”, he said. “We have all sorts of strange chemicals on the ships”. I asked what his specific job had been. “Radar”. There you go: radiation exposure.

Another chap said he had been a freight train driver. “What kind of freight?”. “Oh, nuclear waste from Sellafield. It was good pay.”

Many doctors say the causes of Myeloma are unknown. This perhaps deliberate unclarity probably arises because of the court cases and compensation claims that would erupt if such electronic or chemical toxicity became public knowledge. There’s a lot of money in it, and everyone loves their mobile phone.

Back in 2000 I had a ‘dark night of the soul’ crisis and a long illness, going down into the deep dark, questioning all I had done over the previous three decades and wondering what value it had really brought. It was a profound honesty session, a struggle with Weltschmerz – the pain of the world. Then aged fifty, I think my susceptibility to cancer started brewing around that time.

As time went on the electrosensitivity got worse, especially after 4G smartphones emerged around 2008. By 2014 periodic overdoses of radiation (in a restaurant, meeting, supermarket or train) were giving me rapid-onset flu symptoms, and by 2017 I was getting heart palpitations. It took until 2019 for cancer to show itself.

That year I was working on my prehistory research and mapmaking in a rather urgent, driven way. I completed it in early August, just two weeks before my back suddenly went crack and my life changed. Well, the research was at least done – perhaps a hidden hand of fate had known what was going to happen next.

When diagnosed in November I was now very much in the hands of the doctors, my partner Grace, my son Tulki and a few others – and way out of my depth, flat on my back. It was an exercise in surrender and acceptance – there was no alternative.

Having been a health-conscious, vegetarian meditator for decades and rarely getting ill, I had always assumed I would be exempt from cancer. Well, life has a way of teaching us other things! In our culture, cancer is regarded as something going wrong, as if a failure, but it didn’t quite feel like that to me, once I accepted it was happening. There was something strangely fitting about it, even though life was being hard on me. I decided to suspend all my foregoing beliefs and to do my best to trust that, whatever was to happen, everything would be alright in the end. I held on to one belief though, and I have a suspicion you know what it is: whatever life presents, there is a gift in it.

Earlier in life, rigorous experiences as a mountaineer, camper and humanitarian taught me energy-management, attitude-maintenance and steadfastness. Having got through plenty of crises and survived, I felt it was possible to do so now, whether that meant living or dying. At one point I said to the haematologist that I felt I had gone past the allotted nine lives (of a cat) and was on my tenth. She laughed but, dealing every day with people with terminal aliments, she probably knew what I meant.

Trusting the doctors was my only option. Nearly all of them were really good people. My experience of NHS treatment has largely been positive, once I gained the right attention. As the Covid period went on, by 2022 Treliske hospital became much more efficient and better organised. That helped a lot.

I had done alternative medicine for decades, yet I did not have the knowhow, energy, facility, support, time or money to opt for a holistic approach while in the depths of cancer, and already it was too late, too urgent. Chemotherapy was the only doable alternative. Accepting it contravened beliefs I’d held until that moment, yet it felt right to do my best with it. If the angels wanted me alive, they’d keep me alive, and if they didn’t, they’d take me out.

I’m pretty good at handling crises and, here was I, going through a full-on crisis, a test of spirit. I had to grasp life’s reins. Healing means fully allowing healing to take place, handing ourselves over. This goes as far as dropping any expectation of what healing means – it doesn’t only mean ‘getting better’. Whether I am to live or die, may it be for the best, all round – this was my prayer.

Pharmaceuticals shocked my system, though clearly they could also save my life. I asked for inner help in handling whatever was to come. One profound message came through: use your feelings and intuitions. My brains were not working well – I couldn’t get my head around all the medical research and terminology – though my intuitive senses were easier to read off. Intuitions just say Yes or No – and then it’s up to us to figure out why, or to bear witness to the way it becomes true.

I went inside myself, connecting with the angels like never before. This might sound spurious to some readers but, believe me, when you’re in a situation like this, that’s what you tend to do, whatever your foregoing beliefs. I asked them to help me adapt to a changed life. But when you ask for help, you need also to offer something: I offered my life, however it was to be. May it happen well and may I make it easy – that was another key prayer. I think this approach really helped, not just psycho-spiritually but medically too.

I used holistic supplements, helpers and good nutrition judiciously, careful not to mix them or create conflicts with the pharmaceuticals. Over time, various healers and healing circles weighed in – thank you everyone. Some of these interventions made a big difference. And old Tomten, Grace’s cat, would lie on my pelvis, the most painful place, giving genuine pain-relief.

So, doctors saved my life and healers gave me a new life.

I feel immense gratitude to Grace, who gave balm to my heart and helped me through the process – she was a true healer and a great soul. Her love, care and protection made a critical difference in a bleak time. I was a heavy weight for her to carry. There was no financial help for a ‘family carer’ like her, she had a business to keep going and a life already filled with issues and concerns. And I’m a tricky and complex character at the best of times. My son Tulki was a constant companion and support, though he could be present only sometimes. These two good souls made a big difference in that dark time.

So I followed an intuitive route through the cancer tunnel. I worked at getting the doctors on my side, showing them that I was not a member of the awkward squad – ideologically rigid, argumentative health-freaks with antipathies to match – though I did have my own ways and preferences. Two things helped: the doctors and nurses found me interesting and, lo behold, as the months went by, my medical results were surprisingly good. This gave me leverage.

Still, I had to badger them about drug dosages. I didn’t need blasting with explosives. Eventually the doctors got the message. One or two drugs were withdrawn and one was reduced – Dexamethasone, which had had positive effects on my cancer and distressing behavioural side-effects. My dose was reduced and, lo behold, it worked better.

Initially I was supposed to have eight cycles of chemotherapy but they stopped treatment after five, saying I could go. Later on, one specialist said, “Mr Jenkins, I don’t know what you’re doing and I don’t want to know, but whatever you’re doing, keep doing it”.

Myeloma is a blood cancer that causes the bones to hollow out and weaken. It’s not as complex to treat as other cancers – there’s just chemo, with no radiation or surgery since no tumours are involved. I responded well and quickly. I think my use of holistic practices, supplements and remedies helped, together with, to me, an almost palpable influence from my inner doctors. They scanned and treated me on an energy-level, and it worked. I think they worked through the hospital doctors in mysterious ways too.

I’ll add a few more things: walks on the hills and clifftops; a lovely place to live on a wildlife-rich farm with low EM radiation; unchlorinated springwater from just up the hill; a positive attitude; and coming to peace with as many life-issues as possible.

And sunshine. And love. These aren’t available all the time, and they don’t just come when requested, but they work.

At the time I wrote this, I was on an immunotherapy maintenance treatment, Dara. I had a subcutaneous Dara injection every four weeks – a nurse came round, inserting a short needle into the flesh of my stomach. This made the Dara disperse slowly (in contrast to an injection in a vein or artery). She took my temperature, oxygen count and blood pressure.

Every twelve weeks she took a blood sample and sent it off, and it’s from this that my condition was judged. Later I was taken off Dara and currently I’m chugging along with no pharmaceutical cancer treatment – only holistics – but I’ll probably go on ‘third line’ medical treatment eventually.

With Myeloma, most people don’t get ‘remission’, just a delay in dying – some get a year of life and some get ten, even fifteen. In my fourth year, I’m still alive. Yes, just checked, I’m still here.

After decades of living a holistic life, your system evolves differently to that of ‘normal’ people. When you’re doing spiritual work and you have some pretty amazing healers as friends, normal medical rules get bent and broken. But still, there’s a deeper karmic story that goes on underneath cancer, with a trajectory of its own. I did well at first but after two years I was ailing, hit a crisis and got ready for the possibility of dying within the year.

Yet by summer 2022 I was reborn, even attending a week-long Oak Dragon camp. This itself was a healing boost, as much from the people and the ambience as from the campfires and outdoor life. As Oak Dragon’s founder (in the 1980s) I felt so welcomed, and this in itself was medicinal.

By now I was in a state of positive shock, realising I was still alive and that there was indeed a future. Perhaps I needed to get a new coat for winter.

I’m doing well with the cancer but the side-effects are problematic and these might fell me in the end. It’s all about bones. Four of the lowest vertebrae in my back subsided. Reducing my height by over an inch (4cm), this squeezed my stomach, leading to digestive and eliminative difficulties. It caused the outer gluteus muscles in my backside, which do the major pulling when walking, to lose their tension, making long walks strenuous and painful. Added to this I have osteonecrosis of the jaw – a dying jawbone – stopped by medication but still an area of susceptibility. If I break any bones, repair and revival could be difficult. These side-issues affect my life more than cancer does.

Then there is chemo-brain. Chemotherapy chemicals destroy brain-cells and nerve-endings. Chemo-brain has had mixed effects, reducing my left-brained ‘executive’ thinking and my memory for details, yet improving the right-brained intuitive-imaginative side. It has pushed me into the present moment. My sense of time, sequence and duration have dwindled. I’ll remember something that was said by someone, but not who it was or when. I screw up when things get complex.

Yet my creativity – through writing, podcasting and websites – has never been better. This can deceive other people because, if they read my writings or see a photo, they get the impression I’m in better shape than I am. “You’re looking well, Palden!” Gosh, do I? It doesn’t quite feel like that.

At one stage I asked myself what I would be doing if I didn’t have cancer. Just carrying on, was the answer. Instead I have been given a new relationship with life, an experience-rich chapter, however long or short it is to be – miraculously paid for by the government and the noble taxpayers of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Life is twice as difficult but, in compensation, it has changed in shape and content.

I’ve had some pretty amazing spiritual initiations in my life, and this has been one in a sequence, as if it was meant to be that way all along. Twice coming close to dying in the last four years, I’ve had some training for the inevitable journey that is yet to come.

So, did I go down with cancer, or did I go up?

In our time, we’re all faced with many unknowns. Most people can however safely assume they will be alive later in life. The removal of that assumption has a strangely spiritualising effect – and that’s another bizarre gift that cancer has given. It’s what the psychedelic guru Alan Watts used to call the wisdom of insecurity. Earlier in life I knew it was good to appreciate life and all that it gives us, but cancer has taught me what that means in far more real-life terms.

It’s funny how things go.

Energy Lines and Power Points

On Sunday, Ba Miller and I shared the floor in Penzance, speaking to a lovely crowd, on the occasion of the late Hamish Miller’s 97th birthday.

Ba herself is 91 – though, with me at 73, a mere stripling, we’re both beat-up and still going strong!

Ba told some anecdotes of what happened when they were following the Apollo and Athena lines from Ireland to Israel, and some really valuable dowsing tips (since it was also World Dowsing Day).

I talked about the energy-landscape of West Penwith, about building megalithic structures for consciousness-engineering and how Penwith is one big ancient site with hundreds of components.

A big thank you to Rachel, Lucy and Lyndz for initiating and organising it, and for their rousing spirit.

To hear our talk (1h 15m), go to my Audio Archive and look for ‘2024 PodTalks’:

palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

With love, Palden

Also: my latest book, Blessings that Bones Bring – a spirited Myeloma patient tells his cancer story, is coming out soon in digital PDF format, and before long as an audio book. Whether it gets published in print remains to be seen. I’ll let you know when it’s available.