buckfastleigh

A scene from the Buckfastleigh Magic Circle. Galen and Jahnavi, behind, had just finished playing music and we were ready for lift-off

With some pics from the Buckfastleigh Magic Circle, Sept 2022

We’re going through a really scrangly time at present, and I’m hearing of a number of people going through it, and I am too. There’s an astrological transit, Saturn square Uranus, which is turning out to be sharp-edged, hard and grating – a conflict between ideas-perceptions-expectations and evolving hard, factual reality. It’s all crunching hard in the public sphere and in our personal worlds. This seems to be a gritty threshold point on an evolving process.

A Saturn square Uranus would normally have quite a strong effect on events and atmospheres, but it wouldn’t be earth-shattering. However, at present the world is tense, insecure, ill at ease and loaded with hazard. It’s the kind of thing where the death of one woman can cause an uprising in a place like Iran – the Arab revolutions ten years ago started like that too. Social wildfires break out. It’s all to do with bottled-up, high-pressure underlying feelings in humanity that are so loaded and volatile that a ripple of energy can set things off. This Saturn square Uranus is a bit like that. Its influence is pumped up by eight billion people going through an intense time.

But there’s more to this too, and it’s longer term. We are in times of historic, planetary change, and the stakes are high. I’d break down the various intensities into three.

Jackie Juno does the introduction. She and Jeanne Hampshire organised it.

One is the bottled-up energy left over from around 2009-2012: this was an opportunity for change but little really happened, and the genie was more or less stuffed back into the bottle. In 2012 the future turned into the present, and everyone was forced to realise things were getting really serious. This bottled-up feeling means that there’s a big glob of unprocessed frustration, regret, loss, injustice and need for change that is sitting there in the collective unconscious, simmering and waiting to explode. The heat needs to rise only a little to start the fizzing – and there’s an uprising every few months somewhere in the world now. So it doesn’t necessarily need a major astrological configuration to spark off major events, in conditions like this. There’s a lot of pent-up energy left over from previous big configurations where fundamental issues failed to be processed – the current war in Ukraine, for example, arises from issues not sorted out around the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1993.

The second is a tidal shift that’s going on now and by 2024, when Pluto moves into Aquarius for twenty years until 2044. Twenty years of Aquarian issues. We’ve been through a period since the 1980s where Capricorn has been strong – money, law, technology, governments, corporates, tradition, hierarchies, resources – and now it’s going to change. Briefly put, this is about the wisdom and the madness of crowds – the world public. Do the people serve the system or does the system serve the people, and how much of which? It also concerns social control, mass beliefs and behaviours, the rights of individuals and of collectivities, inclusion and exclusion, the competing interests of nations and the world, the battle of new against old ideas, the forces of polarisation and solidarity, and human issues in the social context. This shift of themes is beginning to gain momentum, but it will take two years more.

I’m leading an inner journey to find the source of our souls. I was in there with everyone else, far gone.

When the economy rises, society falls, and when the economy sinks, society rises. The seesaw is tipping over to a new direction right now, especially for the rich world. Here’s another issue too: we cannot really resolve the ecological and climatic issues before us unless society itself goes through a fundamental shift – because it is society, humanity, which has to do the resolving. To do this we need to agree sufficiently on what we are trying to do and work together to pull off a miracle.

The third is a case where the future can exert a causative influence on the present. In the late 2020s, around 2025-28, it’s all going to be going like the clappers. So right now it’s a bit like the low-tide, eerie silence of an impending tsunami – the future is sucking us toward it. The bad news is that it’s going to prove to be all too much for everyone and, the way the world is, some people will get scrunched. The good news is that this avalanche of events and changes will loosen up many stuck, interrelated issues, and it will also bring a rush of solutions. It’s an acceleration.

The key issues of the time will be social priorities (Pluto in Aquarius), new and changing ideas and perspectives (Uranus in Gemini) and leadership and power issues (Neptune in Aries). These three will form a triangle, or an energy-thrum, which actually will be very positive, a florescence under duress. But, since we have so many unresolved issues in the world, unatrtended to in recent decades, things could get difficult. If we had started the necessary changes fifty years ago, this would likely have been a very productive time.

Look, I’m standing without sticks – lifting up others lifts me up too

But it will perhaps not be as nasty and depressing as we saw in the 2010s. There we had bad stuff with few solutions, while in the late 2020s we’ll get bad stuff with lots of solutions – if, that is, we treat them that way. Things are likely to start rushing so fast that fundamental changes will need to start happening, urgently and pragmatically, simply to deal with the onrush of events and cascading outcomes arising from them. The gift in the situation is that, at last, things will be loosening up and accelerating. The Millennial generation will also be stepping into positions of influence.

So we’re in a time of tension where there are forces pulling in a variety of directions, and the future is currently like a coin spinning in the air. There’s a sense that something is coming, and there’s fear and anticipation around it in the collective psyche of humanity. There’s also a lot of frustration and disagreement about what to do about it. Questions we have been avoiding for decades are all suddenly crowding in, and this will continue. There’s a feeling of jaded disappointment and disaffection in the collective psyche, after a trail of horrendous scenes in recent decades – atrocities, wars, refugees, hunger, disasters – and this adds to the bottled-up, stuck feeling of our time, a feeling that, no matter what we do, nothing will change. Energies of growth are being held down by the weight of accumulated past decisions, habits and procedures, and by the manic busyness of a coffee-driven modern culture that is running so fast it has forgotten where it’s running to and why everyone is running so fast in the first place. There’s a lot of opposition, division, diversion, distraction and blocking going on.

So that’s why it’s rather intense at present. It’s going on for me too – it feels like I’m processing too many issues to be able to be clear any of them properly, and all of them depend on something else. I’ve been missing loved ones, particularly one of them, and fed up with my own patterns and with being single, and groaningly facing the fact that I might have to write another book, and dreading winter, and fed up with tribal politics, and feeling overloaded with things to pay attention to, and all sorts of stuff like that. The usual grinding stuff in which I sometimes get lost. Which I did today – I got quite down about it.

So I went to bed this afternoon to go inside myself, rumbling around in the netherworlds, then to surface and eventually reach above the clouds. One result was that it came upon me to get up and write this blog. It was Caroline in Glastonbury who had jogged me to do it this morning – she has a way of constructively jogging me – so thanks, Caroline. But I had resisted – the thought of sitting at my keyboard didn’t light me up. When she or others give me the elbow, I do sometimes resist at first, but that’s just an Aspie thing – I ruminate over such prompts once they’ve gone and eventually come to the rightness of what they tried to say. If, that is, it was right, and if it was not quite right, it helped me work things out and was a gift anyway. So this blog came out eventually, and I hope it gave some useful clues.

If you want to read the bigger picture of astrological trends in our time, try this: https://penwithbeyond.blog/2020s/

Love from me. I’m in a much better mood now, by the way! So thanks for that.

Paldywan

Photos are by Penny Cornell.
Audio recordings from the Buckfastleigh Magic Circle: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

Blogs: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Everything: www.palden.co.uk

Tea break, even when in the fifth dimension

It’s raining and blustering, grey, with low cloud over Bartinney Castle outside my rain-bespattered window.

I’ve been fiddling away at home on the recordings of my Magic Circle in Buckfastleigh, Devon, and now they’re ready.

The first is about our origins as souls and about the people we come from, ending with an inner journey to uncover your own particular story – where you came from and what your people are like.

The second is about world healing, where we visit Pakistan to work with the psycho-emotional aspect of the devastation that people there are going through.

The third is about the gift of living on Earth and what we can do about the predicament we’re in, living as we do in a currently rather crunchy and crazy world.

They’re here: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

That’ll keep you busy for a while, I hope! It kept me busy this week, and it was a great way of finding out what I actually came up with during the Magic Circle. Sometimes there are teachings in there for me too.

Since getting cancer I’ve gone through a big systems reset. It has changed my psyche and partially disabled me, so that I can’t carry on in life in the way I used to. Though I’ve stood on stages and led workshops and events for yonks and I’m drawing on lots of experience, cancer has made me start afresh and feel my way forward in a new context, with a rather different me who is doing it.

That’s partially what these Magic Circles were about – to feel my way forward in a new way, following a level-shift that cancer, and my way of dealing with it, seem to have given me – together with a few big Neptune transits that floored me and brought an unexpected rebirth. I’ve needed to start again, feeling out a new way of doing things that reflects where I’m now truly at. Each of the Magic Circles has therefore been part of a progression.

But another reason I’m doing this is also because my old friend Hamish Miller taught me a lesson. At the time when I was staying with Ba Miller and him, twelve years ago, I was fresh to Cornwall and didn’t know enough about it to dredge his memory for his own local knowledge, while he was still alive. Unthinkingly, I assumed he would be around for a while. Then suddenly he was gone and then, four years later, I embarked on a research project into the prehistory of this area, West Penwith. I’d really have liked to sit down with Hamish to raid his brains. Well, he did nudge me occasionally from upstairs, as did John Michell (another pair of shoulders on which I stand), but with dead souls you don’t get the detail and information you can with living souls – you might get energy and support, but not maps, diagrams and details. So that knowledge is gone.

When cancer came along and I thought of my own recyclability, something in me realised I needed to disgorge as much of my stuff as I could, in useful ways that people can make use of once I’ve gone. Three years later, they’ve taken the form of a book, a blog, podcasts and events. I haven’t given my life to fame or capital accumulation, but this is something I can leave behind. I’ve got Jupiter in Pisces after all – treasures in heaven, even though my bank account rarely did well.

We all have a contribution to make, and this was mine, acting out a planet-fixer’s karma in a world heading the other way, as best he could, with a few goals scored, and a lot missed. That’s the way the cookie crumbles, and that’s what life’s about. I regret the ways I’ve made life more difficult or painful for some people, and I’m glad for those whose lives I’ve helped or lifted up. It’s really a mixed bag, this Earth business, and I’ve been pretty mixed, and mixed-up, too. Though something gets distilled amongst all this and, in the end, this is what survives death. It survives as a bundle of experiential memory for the soul that passes on, and as a legacy for those left behind.

So editing and preparing material for uploading and leaving to posterity is what I’ve been doing this week, and now it’s done, uploaded and ready. Thank you to you who organised the Magic Circle and helped me through the weekend, and to those who came and those who couldn’t or didn’t.

Something else is brewing, and it has surfaced through these Magic Circles, and I’m making no decisions about it until at least winter solstice – it needs careful mulling over. Also, for future events, I’m taking my lead from requests that come from people who are happy to organise things.

I must go at the pace of a cancer patient who must manage his energy well. I have few energy-reserves, so every period of activity needs to be followed by a time of quietness and downtime. Energy-management has been a fascinating learning experience in the last three years – how to stay within my scope of possibilities, pace myself, and particularly how to recognise in advance the signs that I’m drooping and need to go into self-protect mode.

That’s a fascinating challenge. As is this: anything I start now will be intended to outlast me, and to grow forward from where we left it when I pass away. With all that I have done in group process, world healing, astrology, geomancy, geopolitics, history and other things, it’s all incomplete, a ‘work in progress’ that I hope will be taken forward by others from the place where I was able to leave it.

So, for people who were there and couldn’t be there, and for those of you who are interested, here are three pod-talks from the Magic Circle in Buckfastleigh, with love from me. Some vitamins and enzymes to feed the soul.

And now, guess what, it’s time to put the kettle on.

Palden

Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
PodTalks: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html