books – Notes from the Far Beyond

Uninspiration

I can’t remember who gave me this pic, but thanks anyway! It is taken on the coast path from Land’s End to Pordenack Point – one of my favourite haunts.

Recently I’ve been feeling rather uninspired. Saturn and Neptune are in opposition to my natal Mercury, and I’m feeling it. Mercury is a key planet in my chart and, since the age of fourteen, for better and for worse, I’ve been a big communicator, and the struggle to clarify my ideas and make myself understood has been a key part of my growth. When I was a boy I was quiet and shy – would you believe? – and it took until my teenage years to find my voice and until age 36 to become good enough as a writer.

It’s kind of like drying up, this uninspiration. It’s a feeling that I’ve said all that I can say – and I’m not one for repeating myself. I’ve also been wondering how much people are interested – though this is often solved by spending time with someone to find out what’s going on for them.

And so I took another tack – after all I’m rather a workaholic, continually looking for new things to do to keep myself occupied. Nowadays, although I’m reasonably noisy online, I spend most of my life alone and quiet. In another world.

This is the farm where I live, in the far west of Cornwall

Over the last few years I’ve been turning my website into an archive. After all, it’s thirty years old now (started in 1994), and I’ve been adding bits to it every few years which, with a bit of tweaking has been gradually turned into an archive over the last two years. I don’t have money or property to leave to my descendants but, for what it’s worth, they are getting a digital estate, and I’ve often had the feeling that a few of my seven grandchildren might find some treasure there.

A while ago, I was tooling through some old radio programmes which I made twenty years ago, when I lived in Glastonbury, and they were surprisingly good. Especially since, in comparison to many of the talking-heads podcasts which are pouring out now online, the content was really rich, good, original and quite unique. This is partially because Glastonbury is a place which is a source of new ideas and initiatives, and some of the people living there are true originators in their fields.

It was not difficult to bring in old friends to provide interesting material for this programme. I called it This is the Light Programme. That’s a bit of an older generation joke: it refers to a time before about 1970 when BBC Radio had just three channels – the Home Service, the World Service and the Light Programme.

So I have been reviving many of the interviews in those programmes and creating a new section of my archive called Recycling Light – this was the Light Programme. The first few programmes will be coming out soon on the new moon, and I shall continue reworking more of them, making them ready to add to the list of Recycled Light programmes.

And yes, on the whole, when I post a blog or a podcast, I do it at astrologically auspicious moments – this matter of timing is more important than most people think. So this blog was uploaded with Jupiter rising, Mercury on the Midheaven and lots of planets in the tenth house. That’ll do.

I’m recycling these programmes because of the quality of the ideas coming through them. The first is the story of two Glastonbury characters who had been involved in the Middle East – one, Colette Barnard, was in Tehran at the time of the ayatollahs’ revolution in the late 1970s, and the other, Tom Clark, has been involved with funding and supporting progressive projects in the Middle East, particularly women’s and backchannel diplomacy projects. So the first programme is a really interesting interview with these two characters.

The second programme is an interview with Peter Taylor, a critical scientist, ecologist and shaman. He and I have been dialoguing for decades, cousins of the soul, sharing a political-spiritual activist approach to our respective areas of work. He used to be a scientific adviser to Greenpeace in the 1980s and also to government and United Nations bodies on ecological matters, and he is a detractor in the climate question and also one of the inventors and early advocates of the concept of rewilding, a concept which is now accepted but, thirty years ago, it was an entirely new idea and quite radical. What? Wolves? Beavers? Weeds and scrub? Well, yes.

The third programme involves two old friends who, like me, have been involved in researching alternative archaeology and prehistory. One, Sig Lonegren, is a dowser, who can find information about ancient sites which the majority of us have no access to at all. Now in his eighties, he has been a major contributor to the field of earth mysteries. The second, Bruce Garrard, has been doing a lot of thinking about the early origins of human society – particularly of the question of gender and the historic formation of gender roles. So they have interesting things to say.

That’s where I rest and sleep. When resting I can watch the swallows, buzzards and jackdaws outside.

It was a great privilege to make that programme. It was weekly, and we did it for a year. Each programme was three hours long. Unfortunately I have had to take the music out, for rights reasons, and to rework it into a new format, but it turned out that this was a good thing to do. My son Tulki, who was then eleven years old, was the studio manager – he used to run the controls. He and I work well together. Now he’s turning thirty. Time moves on.

So in a few days time, I’m coming out with something new on my website. It’s become a really big site over the years, as I have added bits and chunks to it every couple of years. Partially it’s a manifestation of the story of my life, of being one who has advocated ideas which, in general, are right for the world, but which the world is not ready for or interested in accepting.

This has been the story of my life and that of many other people of my generation – particularly the drop-outs. We’ve had to live and work as ‘alternative types’, playing our part in society from the periphery, not from the centre.

When I was lying in a hospital bed with cancer six years ago, being eyeballed by Death and reviewing my life, I realised that I needed to leave as much as I could online, just in case it becomes relevant and useful in the future. Because the need can arise to refer back to the original people who first thought up the ideas which have become commonplace as time has gone on.

Many of the things that I’ve believed in and advocated have been roughly twenty to thirty years ahead of their mainstream adoption – or at least the beginning of it. So I’m leaving this archive in the hope that it becomes useful to someone in the future.

So when the new moon comes along I’ll be launching this new segment of my website called Recycling Light, and I hope you find it useful and interesting.

That’s the view from my bed. On that hill is an ancient site called Caer Bran – around 3,500 years ago it was the parliament site for the clans of Belerion, or West Penwith.

Now it’s time to have breakfast – before it’s lunchtime. And I have to work out what pills to take this morning. As a cancer patient I am given lots of pills, but if you adopt a holistic approach to cancer treatment, then it’s double trouble because there are loads of supplements and other therapies to take pills for too! Groan.

(Though if you follow this route, I recommend keeping the pharma drugs and the holistics separate – taking them at different times of day, with food between them – since they operate according to different principles and in some cases can conflict.)

There’s a gift in everything. A state of uninspiration has led to a state of audio-recycling.

With love, Palden
www.palden.co.uk

This is why my wee hoose is called The Lookout. On the right is my desk, where I do much of my work – such as this blog.

Shining Land

The ancient sites of West Penwith and what they say about megalithic civilisation.

Audiobook version

I’m happy to say that the audiobook version of Shining Land is now done and ready. I’ve been working on it for the last month.

I tried to finish it before my birthday (on Friday 5th) but, well, life always has something to teach. I had one episode (of eleven) yet to record, but for two days there was a lot of noise from the rain, and from things going on around the farm, and I couldn’t do it! C’est la vie. I got it done eventually.

So now there is an audiobook version of Shining Land. Although it’s about the ancient sites in this area, West Penwith, at the far end of Cornwall, UK, I’ve adapted the audiobook to make it interesting to listeners far and wide who might never have been here.

The nub of this book and audiobook is megalithic civilisation. It was deeper and far more advanced than we are taught. Their high-tech achievements involved consciousness and energy, working on the nature of matter and the issues that life presents from the inside. It was a sustainable civilisation – in Britain, the megalithic periods of the Neolithic and Bronze Age lasted 500 and 1,200 years respectively.

And there’s a wee chance this might interest you! Audiobooks are great for listening to during long journeys, or while doing other things, or if you’re stuck in bed, or if you need a rest from radio stations.

Both the online book and the audiobook are available free, and voluntary donations are welcome.

https://www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/audiobook.html

With love from me, Palden

Amendments

Life has been quite a grind and a test recently. Living as a partially disabled cancer patient makes wading through life twice as difficult, and sometimes I get deeply weary with it. That’s been happening recently.

But there’s a weird psychological program in me that has meant that some of the best work I’ve ever done has been done during such periods, when my Saturnine tough-it-out programming gets activated by life and its grinding difficulties. I tend to tough it out by engaging myself in doing something. A project.

It’s an Aspie hyperfocus thing: if you can’t change your circumstances, change your mood by doing something creative and ultimately useful – even if it yields no immediate benefits. That’s how the program goes – for me, at least. Except there is one big benefit: it changes my mood. And, bit by bit, that can change everything.

That’s how, somehow, over the last forty years, I’ve managed to write fifteen or so books on quite a variety of subjects. Many were written amidst difficult circumstances, or arising out of them. The gratifying thing is that I still agree with pretty much everything I’ve written – or spoken about, broadcast or taught. I have few regrets about it. Which is quite remarkable, really.

Just recently I’ve been at it again. I had a crisis a month ago where I felt uninspired, feeling that I’d said everything I needed to say, and were people interested anyway? Well, as such crises do, it represented a deeper fermentation process going on in the nether recesses of my psyche, and an inner repositioning was going on, unbeknownst to me. I started looking at ‘outstanding issues’ and ‘unfinished bits’ in what I have done. After all, as a disabled oldie who spends more time alone than I would prefer, I do have lots of time.

Just yesterday, my friend Brian Charlton was here. He’s another Glastonbury defector now living in West Penwith – there’s a little secret cabal of us, actually. He lives the other side of St Just, our local village, and he is part a local support group, the ‘Friends of Palden’, that is a blessing in my life. He was on his weekly visit, and benignly badgering me about these unfinished bits. Very perceptive. I realised he was right. I needed to beaver away at clarifying and finalising the signals I’ve been putting out, and there are unfinished bits, and bits yet to evolve further, if life allows.

But there was more: I realised was already instinctively doing it, though I hadn’t realised it until then. It had started with two podcasts, both of which came up spontaneously, about Inner Doctors and Intuition. That got me flowing again, unblocking the logjam that had scrangled up my psyche. That’s one secret that many creators need to understand: if you get blocked up, do something, anything, to get yourself unblocked. And it’s best to forget what you think you ought to be doing, and to be spontaneous and creative instead – because that’s where the taproot of creativity lies.

Then suddenly I found myself starting doing a revision of one of my books, Shining Land, about the ancient sites of West Penwith. Well, there were some typos, readability issues and tweaks to attend to. So I thought. But as things progressed, I realised that new work I have done in the last few years, since I wrote the book, needed adding. I’d gained some new perspectives too, blessed as I am with lots of thinking time.

Most of the book has just needed tweaks and small improvements, but the chapter on Hill Camps has had a rewrite, adding my thoughts on Bronze Age circular enclosures such as Caer Brân, built around the 1800s BCE for tribal gatherings, and their significance. Also, I’ve added new material to the final part of the book, about Megalithic Geoengineering, breaking the last chapter into two and adding new work to both, about landscape temples, wildwood cover in the Bronze Age and ancient trackways in Penwith. And there are some new maps and pictures. I’ve worked on the indexing too (it’s rather tedious).

But here’s the rub. I can’t write books any more. My brains can’t do it. I can do blogs, podcasts and small projects, because they are done and dusted in a day or two. But books? No, they’re big projects. Even so, I can revise books I’ve written before, and the great virtue of revising a book is that the big thinking has already been done. So I can focus on style, details, text-flow, images, maps and new ideas. I can make it a better read.

I discovered this ten years ago when revising an astrology book first published in 1987, Living in Time. It was a good book but it had dated, with out-of-date examples in it from the 1960s to the 1980s. It also needed another spin, since times had changed and many more people were aware of what the book writes about. This is how Google’s AI assesses it:

“Power Points in Time is the title of a book by Palden Jenkins that explores the concept of time and its influence on various aspects of life, drawing on astrology and other cyclical patterns. It examines how understanding these patterns can provide insights into events, decisions, and even the meaning of life. The book uses examples like lunar phases, planetary alignments, and ancient festivals to illustrate how time can be understood as more than just a linear progression.“

Actually, that’s a pretty good summary. That’s the first time I’ve used AI in any of my writings, and it’s likely to be one of the last, since I am decidedly AI-free and Patreon-free in my outpourings. And, for better or worse, I prioritise eyeballs and ideas over monetisation too.

So I revised Living in Time and it came out in 2015 as Power Points in Time. I really enjoyed doing that revision, precisely because the big thinking had been done, so I could focus on other things. But there was another matter too: in 1987 I had pitched the book to people interested in astrology, though later I found that it was most popular with people interested in ancient sites – a different circle of readers. Meanwhile, over the quarter century that followed, I had developed a clearer idea of the combined importance of power points in space (ancient sites) and power points in time (peak periods). So I re-pitched the book toward this ‘power points’ idea.

Then a few years passed, and a big change came to my life – getting cancer and becoming disabled – and, reviewing my life, I realised I hadn’t written a book about ancient sites, even though, on and off, I had studied the matter for fifty years and had done a lot of research in Cornwall for ten years. So along came Shining Land – the ancient sites of West Penwith and what they say about megalithic civilisation. My core proposition was that ancient sites were built for conducting shamanic consciousness work, and that the 600ish ancient sites of West Penwith actually constituted one big, integrated ancient site.

By making a ‘landscape temple’ out of the whole cliff-bound Penwith peninsula, it was possible to raise this consciousness work to a higher level, to benefit not only the local area and its people but the whole planet. The planet is one being, that we have come to know as Gaia, and if the ancients got themselves into enough of an elevated state to do so, they could commune with Gaia, adding a human touch to her work as a planet-being.

They were practicing what I’ve come to call Megalithic Geoengineering. Big stuff. Planetary stuff. And, of course, there’s something to learn from this today.

So, you see, in health and life circumstances I have been labouring somewhat, though in other respects I’ve been quietly chiselling away at generating uplift and raising my spirits by doing those things that I can do, and being creative with it. It fires up my circuitry. Meanwhile I’m de-focusing on those things I can’t do and can’t have – things that weigh me down. As a result, a new, 2025 version of Shining Land will come out shortly as an online book. So there are results to this. Results germinated out of a time of hardship.

Two things happened to help turn things around. One was the spontaneous eruption of the ‘Inner Doctors’ podcast, which revived my creative spirits, and the other was a session with a homoeopath, my neighbour Anna Jenkins (no relation – we Jenkinses are a big Welsh clan). I think the remedies she prescribed have dislodged some fixities and rigidities within me. Well, to be honest, I cannot tell yet, because the last week has been low, lonely and dark and I cannot tell whether my cancer and demise are getting worse or whether this is what homoeopaths call a ‘healing crisis’. But I think I’ll opt for the latter.

It has more hope in it. And hope and belief are motivators. Not as an imposition on evolving reality, but as a way of intersecting fruitfully with it. Hopefully.

Changing the way we see things: inside every problem lies a solution, as long as we allow ourselves to see it.

Sometimes I struggle with that. So, in case you thought you were the only one in this vast universe who struggles with it, think again, for you are not alone.

Love, Palden

Shining Land: https://www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/
Power Points in Time: https://penwithpress.co.uk/product/power-points-in-time/
Podcasts from the Far Beyond: https://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Notes from the Far Beyond: https://penwithbeyond.blog

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