aspergers syndrome – Notes from the Far Beyond

Blessed Be the Assholes

and the light of desolation

It’s amazing what we humans do to justify our existences. This is my fiftieth blog entry, would you believe.

It takes a few hours to do a blog but it takes days beforehand, churning through ideas and possibilities… and then, one day, I wake up, forget all that, and just start writing. That’s what happened here. I was refilling my tea mug, having just got up – vanilla tea with a dash of coconut. It came. I had to get it down before it was lost in the side-alleys of lapsed memory. It’s all to do with opening up a space inside where creativity erupts, as if out of nowhere. Though actually it comes from the compost fermented in the preceding few days.

Sometimes, as a writer, you can plan things out, but sometimes you just have to start – start with anything. Well, something interesting. It’s all about having something to say, and creating it using words that draw in readers regardless of what you’re actually saying, and the combination makes for good writing. Plus a shot of inspiration – something sparky that comes out of nowhere, oozing out between the lines. We humans communicate in far more frequencies than words, and gifted writers can say more than words.

This might surprise you, but in my own life it took a long time to find my words. It came in stages – ages 14-16, 20ish, 30ish and 36 – having written five unpublished manuscripts. Before that, as an Aspie with a rather complex brain, I was in a kind of deep, silent confusion. The world was telling me things that didn’t accord with my experience. It told me things about myself I couldn’t identify with. It made me into a ‘strange boy’ who would sit in the corner, while everyone else did normal things. At school, I just didn’t understand what we were there for. I was an autodidact, just waiting to go home to get on with my studies and projects.

The Council Chamber at Bosigran Castle, West Penwith

Why should A + B = C? Will someone explain? Why should children suffer to go unto Jesus? If God is Love, why should we fear Him? (And why use capital letters)? Why do cars pump exhaust at you? Why should God specifically save the Queen? With Jupiter in Pisces and Moon in Gemini, these kinds of questions irked the young me.

I was the boy with glasses who got picked on and beaten up. But around age fourteen something clicked. I remember two things (my memory is shot, so this is remarkable in itself). Feeling inadequate and holding back, I was nevertheless pushed into speaking at the school debating society. Some kids were getting ready to laugh at me. I won hands down, completely forgetting my notes and holding forth fluently. I found my voice and, well, from then on I was good on-stage. But I still had a struggly quandary going on in myself, especially with understanding my personal position in life and how to work relationships.

The other thing was cross-country running. In Liverpool, football was everything, and speccy-foureyes was no good at it. But when we started long-distance running, Mars in Scorpio found his power. I delighted in hanging round mid-field for the first half of the run, and then accelerating just as the big football heroes were flagging – and I’d love passing them, heading for the front, hehe. That was great! It taught me that anything is possible if I have the will. This lesson applies just as much now, going through a cancer-induced endurance test. Out of this come a second strength and miracle possibilities.

Stone of the Hole, Men an Tol, West Penwith

It was LSD that changed everything. Age 16 (it was legal in 1966), I was given some California acid by a Scouse poet and we tripped out on the dockside in Liverpool. Suddenly I slotted into myself. I had a clue – saw the light, the beginnings of a calling. Uranus and Pluto were conjuncting over the Sun in my astrological chart (historic in itself), and my life changed, on that day. It was a ‘turning in the deepest seat of consciousness’. The strange boy went stranger, and something snapped together. It was okay to be me, as I was. From then on I was on a search for truth.

Well, I found some, only some, though it was worth the journey and it continues today, even in late life. Truth is big and deep and wide. So big that you can’t actually fully get it, and there’s no final answer – though we humans have indeed tried. Anyone claiming The Truth is missing something. When I was involved with the Council of Nine, they’d always refer to ‘What you call God’. Yet it’s here within us, a kind of deep knowing, a feeling of alignment, integration, anchoredness and vastness that reveals itself to each and every one of us at certain moments in life. What we do with that – many people reach for the next can of beer or stand in queues at airports – is entirely up to us, and some of us do say Yes. Hello, you.

But even then, over the decades, for me it has been an ongoing battle between saying Yes and saying No – and also I’ve studiously avoided the question, as we all do. It’s criminal, really – the crime of avoiding doing what we’re really here to do. The crime of retraction. It’s kinda easier to ‘settle down’, get a job and get drunk at Christmas – there’s so much pressure to join the Great Turning-Away. We must conform to some extent, even if you’re a weirdo like me, because we’re all here amongst humanity and, unless you close yourself away somewhere, way away in the Siberian taiga, or even attempt a compromise version like me at the far end of Cornwall, our fellow humans are all around us and we live in the civilisation and time of history that we live in. And we chose to come here.

Mulfra Quoit – a neolithic energy-generator, I believe it was deliberately decommissioned

Aspies call our so-called syndrome ‘Wrong Planet Syndrome’. Problem is, it’s tricky looking at the world from the viewpoint of a stranger. Sometimes you even look at your own mother or your lover and think Who is this?. It’s double-tricky, because most people around you think you have a programming error – a mental health issue – when actually it’s simply that an Aspie is programmed up with a different operating system (like Apple and Android). But Aspies are in a minority, and now we’ve been lumped into an autistic spectrum that some wisecracker with a doctorate thought was a nifty way of reclassifying everyone. And other neurotypical thinkers thought, yay, that’s useful, that explains things… and now we’re stuck in a new, more padded, box. Well, fuckit, I’m not having any of it.

I’ve been a victim many times over, yet something in me deeply believes that victimhood doesn’t really exist. Even if I’m ‘mentally ill’ – and that depends on your viewpoint – it’s still my prerogative to rise up. With some success and quite a lot of failures, I’ve made some progress. It’s about fully occupying one’s space and knowing, deep down, that you’re up to it – you embody it, it’s yours and you can do it. Even when you get beaten down, you can rise up, resist, turn the tables, make things good, move forward. Some of the most exemplary people I’ve known have been through the jaws of total disaster. From this viewpoint, Ukraine is now a crucible of accelerated soul evolution.

Though it can be hard, I prefer being unusual than normal, even when I’m misunderstood today and pay a high price, even charged by close loved ones. For loved ones it’s difficult too, and I really recognise that. I’m a strange mixture of a hermit and a public figure – and it’s the bit in between where I screw up, in personal and closer relationships. I fail to meet up with expectations and behavioural norms, or to deal well with some aspects of human guile and complexity.

Psycho-normals see Aspies as complex beings, but to ourselves we’re simple and straight-up and the rest of the world is complex. It becomes more complicated because most neurotypicals regard themselves as normal when they’re far more way-out and human than they allow themselves to be.

Boscawen-un stone circle, from Creeg Tol

It’s like French and English: both peoples think they stand at the centre of reality in comparison to the others over there – and all sorts of trouble arises as a result, even though we’re related. My reality is better than yours. We’re doing this to Russians and Chinese at present, reducing and dehumanising them in order to justify things we do to them – and they do the same back, and look at the mess we’re in.

Yes, I’m a victim, so that entitles me either to droop in self-pity or to strike back hard, and to feel fully justified in either. That’s a really complex syndrome, and it affects individuals, social groups and nations. I’m one of the downtrodden, so let’s fuck the banksters, the toxic males or the rich whiteys because there’s not a single human amongst them, and they deserve it.

But there’s something very, very real to victimhood too, and you definitely feel it when you’re locked up in jail, refused your fortieth job application or looking down the barrel of a gun. We should indeed support victims, and injustice is a key issue in today’s world. But just because we were victims earlier in life, or even in another life, it doesn’t make us victims now.

The ancient power of Boswens menhir and the modern power of a major air traffic control beacon. Where truly lies the power?

Just because I have elements of PTSD from seeing a few too many really bad and wrong things, it doesn’t justify my being hard-hearted toward my friends and loved ones – and I’m so sorry to those who have had this from me. I really mean it. (I’ve been on a Neptune opposition Saturn over the last year, and that’s why this confessional stuff is important just now.)

It’s complex though, and nothing exists in a vacuum. Palestinians often say, ‘Why do Jews give us such a hard time, when it was Europeans who gave them a hard time?’. (Also, a wide-eyed, naive Aspie might ask, why do some Palestinians give Israelis a hard time back?) This is the kind of thing we must resolve, and Ukraine is its current nexus of attention, but there will be more horrors until we stop. Please don’t act shocked and surprised when the next round breaks out. This goes deeper than diplomacy: this concerns mass psycho-spiritual, social and cultural change. We just gotta do it, if we are to survive. As much in our own lives as in war zones.

I have been party to this crap too – I have dirty hands, and I’m not unique. It’s important to feel the responsibility and consequence but not to shut ourselves down with guilt and shame. I did it, yes. It’s time for me to forgive everyone who has done similar to me. The past cannot be undone, and it all hangs around what we learn and what we do from now on. Stepping over the craters to hug our adversaries is a really crucial thing to do. Because we’re all in this mess together.

You might wonder why I’m writing this stuff on a cancer blog. Well, these kinds of thoughts are part of my healing, the resolution of my own story. I’m trying to work on this stuff so that I can be a bit more at peace when I pop my clogs. Hopefully. That’s the idea. Not that this kind of cancer (myeloma) or my disabilities can be undone, but it’s all to do with happiness. Basic happiness is the greatest healer around. If you’re underlyingly happy you can make something good of anything. The happiness of opening up, unburdening, forgiveness, understanding, acceptance. And of having some food in your belly and a roof over your head. And the happiness of togetherness.

Here’s something. I’m cooking up tentative plans – yes, plans, for the first time in nearly three years, since going down with cancer. If I can muster the energy and some people to help set it up, I’m thinking of doing a ‘magic tour’ of a few places in Britain, to create an opportunity to meet up. One might be round Glastonbury. I don’t know if it’ll work yet, but this idea has quickened my heart. I want to bring something to you. It’s early stages, and much hangs around finding a good local organiser in each place. I’m in process of writing a proposal and blurb. So watch this space. One of my podcasts sums it all up: the one called Soul Evolution.

Here in my faraway eyrie, I think of you all – I really do. I’ve been alone, feeling rather desolate, for what feels like a long time, and something has come from it. Since I can welcome guests at my home only in ones or twos, I want to create some temporary magic spaces, perhaps round campfires, for friends and soul-relations elsewhere in larger numbers, for a few hours of time-travel, close encounters and lightbulb moments. Would that interest you? I have a strange gift of frail strength, love and tears to share, and I have a few friends upstairs. But I’ll need a good armchair. And you’ll need to switch off your phones if you want me at my best.

Bless you all, and bless everyone. Bless even the world’s worst assholes. The swallows outside my window have just burst into tuneful twittering, as if to agree. And it’s now lunchtime and I forgot my breakfast and pills, so I’d better stop…

With love, Paldywan.

Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
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Carn Les Boel – lift-off place for the far beyond

Tears and Fears

Sometimes, early at dawn when it’s too dark to photograph it like the other birds shown here, a little wren flits to my window. It surveys the scene, sees a few crumbs on the breadboard, flutters down, feeds and looks around, then flutters back up and out. What a gift. It doesn’t know that it has become a healer of the highest order – or that news of this would stretch across the world. So wren and I are doing a good business in crumbs – and this morning, guess what, it had crumbs from the last of Lynne’s Christmas Cake! Bonus.

Slightly soppy Jupiter in Pisces that I am, I’ve been leaking tears recently, and it’s fascinating to discover what it’s all about. Several things seem to connect up to get it going – some are very positive, such as the little wren. One is about me, one is about people I know and have a connection with, and one is about the wider world.

I’m starting chemo on Monday 1st February and this will last 5-6 months, probably followed by a few months of fatigue and other side-effects. If I don’t do chemo, then the blood cancer I have will gradually hollow out my bones, I will get more collapses of vertebrae in my back and bones going brittle, I’ll become seriously disabled and eventually I’ll die, quicker than otherwise. I don’t have great expectations, but the chemo might give me a few more years with which to complete things, inshallah.

To holistic crusaders who think there’s a better path to follow: I’m on the same side as you, and if something had come up that was sufficiently convincing, based on real experience with my particular cancer and who and where I am, and if there had been a sufficient support system that I could afford, I would have done it. So thanks, and I know you mean well, and I have chosen this path, and here we go…

But it scares the hell out of me too. Mercifully, I’m not unused to that: before working in conflict zones or entering risky situations I’d grind through my stuff in the days and weeks preceding, though increasingly I found that, on the day, I was fine, balanced and fully present. It worked, mostly, in those things I could affect. In those things I could not affect, which are many in chaotic situations, I just had to take my chances. And here I still am.

So at times I’ve been feeling vulnerable and shaky, digging around in my fears. One big thing to overcome is lingering resentments over the way things have been in my life, that have not changed for the better, despite all that I and so many others have done over the years. This is coming up now with the doctors I’m working with. As a longterm vegetarian, meditator and consciousness-explorer, also very underweight, I believe I should be dosed with medications about 30% below the norm. In the last few days I haven’t taken a single pill or shot of chemo yet, yet my body and psyche are already going there, as if autonomically inducing it. My medical results have been pretty good: last year my chemo treatment, standardly eight cycles, was cut to six, then five. These results the medical profession just calls ‘good luck’. In this they are incorrect. I’m lucky, yes, but these outcomes arise from choices I have made and positive inputs that are way outside their zone.

Back to the fear. It is activating pain from the past, about being, or feeling, misunderstood and treated inappropriately, being judged and penalised for being who I am – and I’ve had a good load of that! But it’s still going on now to some extent, and I’m unhappy about that. On the other side, I do trust my doctors, and while they do want the best for me and to get things right, they can also make my life more difficult than it needs to be. Owing to institutionalised taboos against alternatives in medicine, and because doctors lack experience of holistic solutions and odd people like me, they don’t take seriously those things that are serious for me – particularly concerning pharmacological side-effects.

To be honest, this is also the case with some holistic practitioners too, who might be qualified, and who might think they know, and they mean well, but some of them also try teaching their grandmother to suck eggs, or they err a little too far on ideology, or they lack specific experience, incorrectly applying knowledge about tumorous cancers to my much rarer leukaemia-like blood cancer. With a rare disease and an unusual person, this can be problematic, being misjudged from both directions! Though I don’t want to seem entirely critical either, since doctors and healers are genuinely helping me too. However I am yet to find someone who is competent, experienced and unbiased in complementary and conventional medical fields together – integrated medicine.

One other thing I’ve had anticipation about is the task of training friends and people how to behave with me, as a cancer patient. Most people don’t know how, so they leave me alone, and this isn’t a solution – especially with people I’d like to see. Others get awkward, or try too much to help, or they’re so sorry or anxious for me – and I just need people to slow down, make us both a cup of tea, be a friend and act naturally!

Here’s a tip for dealing with someone with brain-fog: instead of asking me what I want, tell me what you’re proposing and let me say yes or no. Or just do it anyway – keep it simple. This gets around chemo-brain and the frontal-lobe issues it brings – making decisions, finding words, remembering details and following long explanations.

Here’s another one: please don’t ask me ‘How are you?’! I am asked this multiple times per day, and you’re requiring me to do a systems check and report this to you verbally and then to deal with your responses and concerns – and, believe me, it’s tiring and repetitive. I write these blogs to report what’s happening. If we do meet or talk, please just treat me like a ninetysomething, have a good conversation or communion with me and you’ll then find out how I am. My state can change on an hourly basis anyway.

Anyway, I was feeling vulnerable over all sorts of things. It’s good to bring it up, stir it round and get some of it out of the way – because many of the experiences we have in life are there to teach us. If we learn quickly and willingly, on or ahead of time, we unmanifest certain kinds of difficult learning experiences. Or they become testing experiences instead, where the Universe checks whether you really mean it, emotionally and in your cells and bones. Again, progress in tests depends on our capacity and willingness to go make something good out of a bad situation – and working through fear, guilt and shame in advance really helps us deal with such situations when we’re actually in them. And what we fear and what actually happens are two very different things.

So I am working on welcoming and befriending the process I’m about to go through and doing the best I can with it, on all levels of my being. Really, it’s the only option.

I get emotional over other people too. There’s a woman I know in Ghana whose child died on Friday night – Kwame was perhaps three or four years old and he died of pneumonia. I paid for some medicines but it was too little, too late. God bless Kwame, little soul – he had only a short life. His mum doesn’t even have enough money to bury him, so she’s stuck and rather overwrought. This is the case for many people in countries where health and social support systems are weak, or where paying for healthcare makes the difference between life and death. I cried not so much for Kwame, who returns to his Maker, but for his mother Grace, and for people like her (Lynne is one), who are left with a gap and a shadow of loss or regret when such things happen.

Then I get emotional about the overall world situation. Problem is, I’ve been dedicated to world transformation for fifty years and the new age hasn’t started. I could perhaps have done more, though I’ve done my best, but I’m now deeply sad for the world. The price it has paid for not getting the message fifty years ago is enormous – and there’s more to go. If necessary change leading toward ecological rebalancing, social and economic justice, peace and appropriate development had started back then, the situation we face today would be very different.

I’m a philosophical guy with a longterm sense of history, and I deeply believe things will work out better than many people fear – eventually. But I feel such grief over the way things have gone, and the pain and damage involved. Yes, there have been advances, but the fundamentals have not yet been addressed. This grief is what Germans call *weltschmerz* – the pain of the world. In my meditations I work to reduce the heat and increase the light in world situations and I’m very much a believer in the maxim ‘Don’t complain about the darkness – light a candle’.

When I go to my Maker, then to see things from that perspective, I have a feeling this innerwork, of all the things I’ve done, might be what I’m most satisfied with – even though, here on Earth, it is difficult to see what benefit it has brought, and even though, especially in the now-defunct Hundredth Monkey Project and Flying Squad, we did have definite instances where miracles happened.

Sometimes my tears come up from nowhere. I think of someone, or I hear something on the radio and, whatever I’m doing, I start wobbling, so I stop and give space to that precious and revelatory emotion that’s surfacing. Personally, this is important: I learned to cry only when I was about 30 – and it was an enormous loss that did it. Back then, it wasn’t just my own self-pity, but I felt so much regret for the others who also had lost in that situation. It cracked me up and cracked me open, affecting them a lot too. This experience was important for me as an Aspie: it taught me to look people in the eyes. Aspies are often regarded as feelingless and emotionally neutral, but actually we’re flooded with feeling, often confused where to put it and how to deal with it – so we go blank and get short-circuited.

This loss set me on a path of commitment to pursuing my purpose. It’s the case for many altruists and server-souls: intense pain and dilemma can unleash one’s superpowers, if one so chooses. One supporter of Alexei Navalny in Russia recently said, when asked why she was risking so much by demonstrating in the streets, “I could not bear the thought of not being there” – and this is what changes history. There comes a point where you lose your fear – or, at least, a crucial chunk of it.

Fear is natural. In the animal part of ourselves it warns us of danger, alerting us. But the deadening, sleep-inducing, inculcated and inherited fear we all have challenges us to use it to move forward, to do what we fear, to do it anyway. Though intelligently.

So I start on Monday, getting shot up with Dara, Velcade and Dex, and a load of other stuff to compensate. It involves three visits to Treliske hospital and multiple home visits from a nurse. I reduce my holistic treatments during this period, to minimise complication and avoid conflicts between holistics and pharma. Certain things, like CBD, Vit C, colloidal silver, basic nutrients and other things, I continue because they help the process (Lynne’s flapjacks too). There are other helpers, including an eLybra machine (radionics-like) and homoeopathy. There’s a mighty inner influence from Upstairs, from healers, meditators and well-wishers round the world, from Lynne and close-by supporters, from my adopted homeland of West Penwith and the landscape of the farm where I live. And my tears are part of my arsenal as a warrior-soul. And, fuckit, the past is past and this is today, the next stage on the path. All is forgiven that I’ve uncovered so far, and I’ll try to deal with the rest when I get to it.

I hope to report the whole process, as and when I can. If possible to the end. This said, I must be self-focused in the next few months, and I won’t be very interested in or respond to many people’s questions, concerns, worries and neuroses. Or endless Youtube videos. But personal, briefly-put, interesting thoughts are welcome – I’ll probably see it but you might or might not get a reply. My day will gradually go down to about six hours, probably.

I’ve said this before and it’s worth repeating…

Everything is okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

This is one of those that’s worth writing on your toilet wall for further contemplation.

Now for the next bit.

Love, and thanks for being alive,

Palden

The pics are of birds who have visited my home in earlier years – including one wren who seemed to like hanging by a Tibetan thangka on my wall.