Cancer blogs – Notes from the Far Beyond

Soulquakey Tragedies

As it goes, I’m not a bad holy warrior. By ‘holy warrior’ I mean someone who is willing to get in there and fight for truth – setting out not exactly to win, but to reveal truth and to deal with assholes. To stand up for what is good and right when bad things are happening. But in the saga I’ve been involved with, the battle is pretty much lost. That’s been hard to face. But it’s real life.

It started back in October when a British man, working as an anti-fraud investigator in Ghana, contacted me to ask if I would lend him some money (30ish GBP) to get out of a tricky situation. Yes, sure. Quite quickly things started going crazy – he was being chased by gun-toting, crack-driven gangsters because he had busted them, scrubbed their computers and taken some important information of theirs. He had been sheltering with a friend who first introduced him to me, Felicia. Suddenly they were captured, together with Phyllis, Felicia’s three year old daughter, and taken to the north of Ghana, near Bolgatanga, and kept in captivity for a week. I helped them with money for food and phone.

Then Andrew, the investigator, was taken away across the desert to South Sudan. I managed to negotiate Felicia’s and Phyllis’ freedom and they were dumped in a nearby town. I had to get them home. That took ages, and I ran out of money. We scraped along for a week, and then Felicia needed to meet another investigator, Dennis, in order to carry out some online actions that would free up some money – the company had rigid protocols over this and we could not access funds until this was done. Dennis and Felicia were then attacked, rammed by a car and left dying. A taxi-driver, Kofi, who witnessed this, bravely took them to hospital. They were cared for by Dr Isaac Acquah.

The company had promised me they would pay for everything. Then there were delays, then complications, and then the money didn’t come. They didn’t even pay Dennis’ hospital bills, even though they agreed with the hospital management to do so – he eventually died because of that. The story went on and on. Isaac rescued Phyllis and Felicia and took them home, but then the gang was after him. They raped and captured his wife and teenage daughter Antoinette. His wife was never seen again and Antoinette was returned, ravaged and traumatised. More complications, and then eventually they all fled to the refuge of a native healer, Okomfo Ayensuwaa. The Okomfo and I did a powerful healing on Felicia and Antoinette but the gang came again, killing Antoinette and the Okomfo. Isaac and Felicia escaped to Togo, the neighbouring country – all helped by me.

Sunset over the Celtic Sea, from Woon Gumpus

It went on and on like this… I shall tell the whole story sometime. Every single day there were crises and scrapes, and we were perpetually hampered by lack of money. The company had now balked because, after their failure to pay, in late November I had made a public appeal for support – which they did not like. But I could not just dump people in need, even though friends were beginning to encourage me to do so – or at least, they encouraged me to look after myself (a worthy thought) without really considering the consequences for the Africans.

All the time Felicia was guarding a memory stick belonging to the gang, to get it to the company. It contained all the details they needed for accessing their money, so they were desperate for it. When the gang discovered she had it, they chopped off two of Phyllis’ fingers in revenge and multi-raped Felicia.

Around Xmas the company had at last promised to send £8,000 – £5k to repay me and £3k for Felicia, as compensation. But the money did not come. My handler said that some of the company directors had blocked supporting us – I think there was a hard-nosed faction there who didn’t care.

At New Year, more complexities came, and Felicia and Pyllis were again kidnapped, then dumped in Niamey, Niger. Then there was a long saga trying to save Phyllis – she eventually died of infection and tetanus (the gang had used a dirty knife). Felicia then found she was pregnant, and she was also deeply traumatised. This week, after hospital treatment with a fine doctor who cared for her, we tried to get her back to Ghana but she was too weak, and started bleeding. As I write this, her life is again in question, and she’s back with the doctor having blood transfusions I am paying for.

That’s a short version of the story. All the time I was caught in deep dilemmas: financially I could not keep supporting them, but I didn’t want to abandon them. I had seriously misjudged the company and their integrity, though I had had cause to trust them, since my handler promised 6-7 times to pay up. Some friends thought I was being scammed by West Africans, but no, it was not them but the ‘secret’ company, an anti-fraud investigation contractor to a big Australian bank. Well, they defrauded me. Part of me would like to expose them and exact a price, but I must think it through carefully. First I must restore my finances, since I am £6k down – that’s a rather daunting prospect.

Despite everything, I am on the whole happy about the way I have handled this, except for two things: I allowed myself to be defrauded by the company, and I am useless at fundraising and asking for help. As a cancer patient I already have to ask for help quite a lot, and this operation was too much, and complex in its implications, and I was unhappy about asking too much of my online friends and followers. In these two issues I failed.

The shortage of money made everything so much more complex – if the company had paid up I would have been able to finance solutions and end this sorry saga back in November. If they had paid up, at least eight people would still be alive today, and I would not be in dire financial straits. Morally and in terms of duty of care, the company is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Feeling the weight of failure, yesterday I went deep and reviewed the whole situation. One positive thing emerged: on several occasions we had clearly demonstrated the power of remote healing. At times when I appealed for healing support amongst my readers, it really worked. In December, when I was working with the Okomfo, a lovely lady, we did a powerful healing for Felicia and Antoinette, and it really worked.

At one stage I was sending information I had psychically picked up to the Okomfo and she asked, “How do you know this?“. She could not believe that a white man in Britain could do what Okomfos and Mallams (witchdoctors) do. We both realised we had reached across a wide cultural divide: an Akan native healer meets a whiteskin aged hippy, and we clicked.

These spiritual experiences have been remarkable, and my thanks to all those who participated in prayer and healing – particularly Susan in Nova Scotia, Kate in Devon and Zoey in Seattle. Many thanks also to those who have donated money – I wish I could have done more with fundraising, but the ongoing task of crisis-management and spiritual work was well enough to deal with.

So, as I write, on Friday evening, Felicia is again on the edge of death and being given blood transfusions. I have been approaching women’s organisations in Niamey asking if they would take in Felicia for a week or two, if she survives. She cannot travel anytime soon. I now have fundraising to do – short term (£1k) to pay off medical bills and support Felicia until I can get her home (a hard, three-day journey), and longterm to try to rescue my own situation (£6k).

I am weary now. I want to reclaim my life. Did I do the right thing, standing by these people and ruining my own life? Should I have been more sensible? It will take time to answer these questions. I’m certainly paying a high price. Yet despite the tragic and painful things that have happened – I’ve cried tears so many times – I feel quite clean in my heart, since I have managed this whole process, I believe, pretty well. I would have taken on a weight of guilt if I had turned away from them.

Most of them have died anyway. Dr Isaac and his daughter Adjoa, 6, are still alive as far as I know, but I have lost contact with them. He has lost his wife and two kids, his job and home and everything, except Adjoa. I don’t know what happened to Kofi either.

The story has been tragic, lives have been lost, remarkable cruelty has been carried out and, worst, the assholes have won – both the gangsters and the company. I do not like that. One thing that upsets me most is that ‘good samaritans’ in Africa who have helped out have all paid a high price for doing so. Meanwhile, the gangsters are all free and continuing their trade, and the company and its directors… well, I won’t write what I would really like to say about them. Shame on them.

I’m now in a test of faith. I’ve brought big money problems on myself. Thirty years ago, when I was working for the Council of Nine, someone asked them why they did not help with money. They explained that they can help with energy, but money is a human invention, and only humans can work with that. Certainly I have prayed many times for a cascade of money to come my way, and I’ve had to face up to the fact that it is us humans who decide over money, not higher powers.

Nevertheless, just before Christmas, the Okomfo and I did an inner process to remove the conflict within the company, to free up the atmosphere that was blocking payment – and, guess what, a few days later, my handler wrote to say he was going to send that £8k. But somehow, it still didn’t work. Someone blocked it. There’s a lesson in that. Money is very human stuff. Higher powers can help progress things on an energy level, but money is not in their realm. So we did well with healing and energy-support, but the money issue was different.

We’ve been through a time recently where the world’s assholes have been rather successful.

But underneath something else has been happening. There’s a deeper meaning to this whole saga: I can sense it though I cannot see it. Yet. For those of you who understand astrologese, the transit I’m on at present is Uranus opposition my Mars in Scorpio. That’s the holy warrior in me. A few years ago I wondered what this transit would bring, and now I have my answer. And the story is not complete yet. Another transit going on is Saturn conjuncting my Jupiter in Pisces – Jupiter is the humanitarian and deep-spirited part of me, and it’s under test right now. Tested by the agency of money. Saturn.

So while I have a lot to regret, something in me doesn’t regret doing it. There’s a saying that goes: ‘It’s not what you get for it, but what you become by doing it’. Something is changing in me. A battle has been pretty much lost, something in me that feels glad I didn’t walk away from it.

So, dear friends, keep praying for Felicia. She’s a very brave woman. She has dealt with stuff that would scare people like you and me. God bless her for that. After all she has lost, I cannot tell whether life is worth living for her now. But we shall see: she’s in the hands of Spirit and under the care of Dr Mark. Now it is time to get off the computer and make myself some soup.

Thank you all for being with. I’ve been alone for a long time, and your company means a lot to me.

With love from a rainy Cornwall, Palden

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/palden.jenkins
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Godrevy Lighthouse, East Penwith, Cornwall

Grace

Ishmael. As it happens, this photo was taken in Hawara, Palestine, recently in the news

Ishmael, my trusty taxi driver and fixer in Bethlehem, Palestine, twelve years ago, rang me up a few days ago. “Balden, when you come visit us in Beit Lahem?“. OMG, yes indeed. If only I could… I know why he was ringing. Things are edgy and intense there right now, and my friends used to feel a bit safer when I was around. I had to explain to him that getting to Palestine is no longer on the cards for me. Besides, I’ve been dealing with another, rather different battle.

I’ve been pulling back from the West African mission I’ve been involved with in recent months. It has worn me out, got me into financial difficulty and lost me some friends, and I can no longer help. I don’t actually regret what I have done. These are choices I have made. I trusted in a series of promises by an Australian security company to reimburse me for money I put forward on their behalf from the beginning of this saga in October, having saved one of their men, though I misjudged them.

They have not followed up on their promises and this has led to a series of deaths and difficulties. One day I shall tell the whole story, but there are dangers to doing so and I must think it through carefully. Felicia did her best to deal with my withdrawal from supporting her, but things were getting worse for her. She was in Niamey, in Niger – a French-speaking country, and different from Nigeria.

I found out on Thursday that Phyllis had died of septic infection. I debated what to do with this news, and how best to tell it. So I’ve decided to relay the last conversation I had with Felicia, on Friday 3rd March. It is filled with the pathos of a mother who has just lost her child.

[I have edited Felicia’s words to make them more readable.]

Felicia
I don’t want to leave Phyllis’ dead body here in Niamey. She has been through so much. I will miss her, but I get that she needs rest. No matter what, I shall not leave her here like this. But I have no other option than to get her to be buried here at the Infants’ Hospital Morgue [in Niamey]. I have no money. I am so sad it has come to this.
Palden
God bless Phyllis. If she is buried at the children’s hospital, at least she will be with other children. Her soul is in good care – I know that, since I am watching her.
Felicia
I have to pay for the land at the cemetery. I have no other option than to bury her in a foreign land without family. I love her. Can’t help crying. I must pay for a cremation. Thanks for your love and help towards her. She loved you and I wish she had the chance to meet you in person. Thanks for all you have done.
Palden
I’d have loved to have met her too. But I shall watch over her now [psychically]. This must be such a moving time for you. This has all been far too difficult, with complications and tragedies at every stage.
Felicia
Yes. Phyllis has suffered a lot of drug overdosing, physical and psychological trauma, defilement, beating, threats, hunger, homelessness.
Palden
There was a stage a few weeks ago when I wondered whether she would have a good life if she survived. Especially with no hands [they had been medically amputated], and possibly with her mind affected permanently. When she died I had a feeling of relief for her. Poor child – she was such a little angel. But perhaps that is part of the story behind her short life. God bless her.
Felicia
She’s been without anyone. And I have been raped, starved, homeless and running for months. It’s by God’s grace that I had you to support us. We would have died long ago. The money you invested to saving Phyllis is gone to waste, gone and lost, like Phil, never to return. I am sorry. I feel so bad. I don’t know where to go with this pregnancy [Felicia was multiple-raped in January]. I don’t know how to take care of myself. I am beaten. Life has not been fair to me. Why does this happen to me?
Palden
One thing at a time. Try to get home to Ghana next. Then meet some friends, talk it through and cry your tears.
Felicia
I can’t forgive the company for not coming to my child’s aid. To help us.
Palden
I still want justice from them, and I am telling them clearly that they have an obligation to compensate and support you, as they promised. Not just me.
Felicia
I am burying her alone. Money has been the problem, and had the company helped, I would still have Phyllis now. I can’t make my way home now. I can’t find money for an abortion. I don’t want this child and shall not bring it forth to the world.
Palden
Wait and see. I really understand how you feel. Try not to make decisions now. Do what’s in front of you.
Felicia
Alright. Thanks for your advice and love and help. You have been of immense help to me, even though I can’t repay you for the money lost.
Palden
It is the company who should repay me, not you. You have done your best. It will make me happy to see you getting your life back and being able to make a new start. But that will take time. I hope it can start soon.
Felicia
Am so sorry for depending too much on you, am so sorry for having caused you so much financial difficulties, kindly forgive me, pls
Palden
You do not need forgiving. No blame upon you – you have been a heroine. Forgive me too for not being able to help at critical moments which could have made such a big difference. I was just not rich enough and the company undermined us. I regret that.
Felicia
I feel so bad all has been lost after all the care, love and support I have had. I have been thru so much, and I have lost all, and now where do I start from? Your help has been more than enough. You have helped too much. Thanks.
Phil will be burnt and her ashes will be given to me. I miss her already and have been crying for days. If only I had gotten her home, maybe I could have got her to a good hospital, where she could have had the best treatment she would have needed. But it’s too late. Such a tragedy she died so far away from home.
Palden
Maybe. But maybe also the pain and difficulty for her might have been too great. Two weeks ago I felt her soul was tired, tired of trying to stay alive. It is important now not to think too much about “What would have happened if…?”. Unfortunately we must be dead real. We must get you home and safe, so that you can be more protected and release your tears and fears.
Felicia
Yes. This is the time for the whole story to be told to the world. I don’t fear the dangers any more. Got nothing to lose now. And when you write about it, pls do seek help for me. Maybe a good soul may pity me and help me get home and help with some money to start a new life and abort my worse pain in my life. For if I carry the child, I will never forget it. I don’t have any life here, and I don’t want to keep the memories of these past months with me. Got to abort it. I can’t keep a baby of bandits.
I have lost my entire family. I have nothing to call my own. I have lost hope, and my dreams are dead. I know I am not safe from the gang, but am not worried about dying any more. I have nothing to live for, no family and hope lost, alone.
Palden
Bless you, Felicia.

That was the last I heard from her. In the evening I heard from a doctor at the Niamey Roundabout Hospital in Niger. Felicia had been found unconscious. He said she was short of blood, looking starved and had a fever. Well, as she said, she has nothing to live for. So on Friday evening I held her and committed her to her angels. She was at a point of soul-choice. On Saturday morning the doctor informed me Felicia had lost a lot of blood and remains unconscious.

And me, I’m tired, had enough. Throughout, I’ve been faced with a choice, whether or not to ‘be sensible’ and walk off, leaving them to die. This would have been sensible from a commonly-held British viewpoint, but to do so I would have had to block off a part of myself. Rightly or wrongly I chose to remain true to something deep inside that is very fundamental, at least to me. Some may not agree, and they might have good reason, but I feel that, on the whole, I’ve done the best thing. Now I pay a price. In life, you don’t win every battle.

In my humanitarian work I have always felt unhappy getting pushed by circumstances into raising money. It is not my speciality – I work as a healer, counsellor and adviser, not a fundraiser. I am reluctant to start raising money now, for a number of reasons. I think the best thing to do is this: if anyone wishes to support Felicia financially (medical needs and getting home) then I shall assist them, but I can no longer take on funding responsibilities myself. Some have cast doubts too, judging that Africans are scamming me, and questioning my integrity and judgement. I’m sad about that, and life is not quite that simple. But this is life. In a way, this has been a three-way battle, with a drug gang, an errant company and people’s considered opinions.

If on the other hand you wish to send healing and spiritual uplift to Felicia, currently lying in hospital in Niamey, Niger, then it has definitely helped before and I believe it would help now. This is what I and many of my readers are good at. This is very welcome, and you are welcome to join me in ‘holding’ Felicia and bathing her in light.

In my life I have met some remarkable, courageous women. I’m reminded of an old friend Gillian, from Devon, whom I last met in Bethlehem twelve years ago. She’d been involved in Bosnia, Kosovo and Palestine, and suddenly she died in a car accident ten years ago in, of all places, Luton, England, when arriving back from a conflict zone. Life moves in strange ways. Felicia has a bravery like Gillian’s. When people pass away they are gradually forgotten, buried in the rubble-heaps of subsequent events. I’m reminded of Gillian now.

Some suspect I had a romantic involvement with Felicia: no, it was her courage and fortitude that I supported. Only some people in this world are willing to stake their lives on what they believe in. She was a bystander, suddenly swept up with her child, Phyllis, into a drama of violence and horror, and she did her level best at all stages of that drama. The Australian company, having promised to compensate and support her for what she did, should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

Dear readers, I’m sorry to ply you with this stuff. I seek simply to share it. When I went down with cancer three years ago I resolved to share my story openly. This is a strange part of it and I take the risk of sharing it now. It’s the story of a man who, in late life, seeks to round out his life’s threads, and I’m yet again being taught one of life’s more ultimate riddles: some things just don’t make sense and should not happen, but they do, and that’s life. Planet Earth is a very weird world, where the depth and intensity of life-experience definitely burnishes the soul.

It’s funny how, as life goes on, we get small prompts that say it like it is. A few days ago I fell upon one by the child psychologist Jean Piaget, who said: ‘Intelligence is not what we know, but what we do when we don’t know‘. Life presents us with challenges we don’t know what to do with, and it doesn’t always tell us which path to follow. But then, Rico Rose, a Berliner I once met in the Sinai Desert, once gave me a really fizzly truth, there under the hot desert sun: ‘Everything is okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end‘.

With love, Palden

Grit and Stuff

a new podcast

I think I need to make some new ‘album covers’…

Sometimes life is a real grinder, shoving us through things that can test us to the limits, whether or not we like it.

But there’s always something to learn from it all.

I went down to the woods below our farm to sit by the stream with my recorder to capture bird sonics, though actually a podcast is what came up.

It’s a streamside chat about going through stuff – in my case, cancer is a large part of that – and dealing with this very strange situation of living on Planet Earth.

It’s a place full of goodness and badness and everything in between. When you approach the end of your life and see it a bit more from the outside, you can’t help but wonder, “What was all that really for?“.

Short answer: the evolution of the soul, through learning from what life teaches us and making a contribution.

Though of course it’s much more complex than that.

With music by an Oregonian friend, Galen Hefferman. Recorded on a mossy log in West Penwith, Cornwall – near Land’s End – with the help of some twittering birds, jackdaws, the stream and some Atlantic breezes. 24 mins long.

With love from Cornwall, Paldywan

Listen to the podcast:
on Spotify
on Apple
on Google, or
on my website

Pearls and Gold

Despite everything, here I stand, weak, strong, wobbly and firm

Chapel Carn Brea, the first and last hill in Britain, where the national beacon light-ups start from. That’s a bronze age chambered cairn on top.

One of the best books I ever wrote, ten years ago now, I couldn’t publish. It concerned a plot I helped uncover, involving American financiers funding settlement building in the West Bank, a well-known international meditation organisation making a big error and rogue elements in the Israeli and Palestinian intelligence services. I had to get out of the country pretty quick after dishing up that lot!

The story was quite sensational, though I didn’t publish it because it could endanger people’s lives, many issues would be twisted and misinterpreted in the West, American lawyers would have had a field day, some people would seek revenge, and my friends back home would ask me why I bother risking my life for a few darned Palestinians. Well, it has happened again, except it’s Africans this time. If I told you the story that’s happening now, you’d have difficulty believing it’s for real.

That’s one reason I’ve been rather quiet. It has been difficult knowing what to say. Telling the story can endanger lives, sabotage others, and much of it would, again, be misinterpreted. The number of seriously incorrect diagnoses of the situation that I have received recently has been disturbing, particularly because of their implied racist undertones. Many friends believe I’ve been scammed by West Africans, but the problem comes from a whiteskin company in the rich world, not from Africans. We have been stuck between Western corporate negligence and a crime gang’s violence. Meanwhile, people were getting murdered by the gang, whose market for cocaine, crack, people-smuggling and prostitution is in Britain and Europe. If we want to change the world, we need to end this turning away.

In the last few months I have gained an adopted granddaughter, Phyllis, whose life I have now saved several times. Looks like we might lose her now. She is on the edge of dying, due to a drug overdose and having had two fingers on her left hand cut off by the crime gang. Her mother, Felicia, was gang-raped. The bastards. Felicia is Liberian in origin: when she was young, civil war broke out around her and she was forced to watch her parents and three sisters being shot. When Phyllis’ fingers were being cut off Felicia cried out to me, online, “Why, dear God, is this happening to me AGAIN?”. Phyllis is all she has left.

So while I have a cracker of a story, I cannot tell it. I feel bottled up, but it is safest for those involved that I do not say more. Some good book sales would have been really useful though. This nightmare has cost me a lot and, until the company honours its multiple promises to pay me, I’m seriously in debt. They promised to compensate Felicia for all she has been through, and Felicia is now destitute. This has set me back a lot, affecting my plans for the coming year. But my conscience is as clear as it can be in such a gruesome situation, and I am glad I have not obeyed the advice of many friends to look after my own interests and, in effect, abandon these people to let them die. If I lose friends over this, then so be it.

*Bridging gaps.* Porthmoina Cove, West Penwith, Cornwall

Last year was a testy year. It wasn’t just the hair-raising story I’ve been involved with. It started a year ago. I was unwell and down, in a mess. My partner suddenly left me – she had her reasons – and I lost another adopted grandchild in the process. Gaining and losing grandchildren is a theme for me at present. Looking back, I was unconsciously picking up forewarnings for nine months beforehand, feeling insecure but unable to figure out why. Something needed to change between us, but I wasn’t ready for total, enforced relationship destruction. I got the blame, though whatever crime I truly committed, in the final analysis, has been far outclassed by the response. I miss her still, and her family. Giving myself a year to get over it, I’ve partially succeeded and also I haven’t. I believed we would go through to the end of my life. But no, I had a big lesson to learn there.

So, I wish her good fortune and many blessings for all that we had together. She is free, and I sincerely hope she finds rebirth and flowering in her new life. She deserves it – she saved my life in my worst cancer days. I am so grateful for our time together. Now a free man with mixed feelings, I’m not managing very well alone. But that’s my problem. It has its plus side though: I’ve used the pain of loss to fire up my creativity, rebirth myself and give the rest of my life, if I can, to starting something new. Or it’s starting me. It concerns a world-healing project. There’s a feeling of rightness to it, like a little seed currently hiding under the snow, awaiting its moment.

In the last year my cancer process has changed. Medically I am more or less stable, and the focus has turned to relationships and the psycho-emotional side of living with cancer. Cancer strips a layer off you and the shields come down. Issues get amplified. A last-chance-saloon feeling takes over. You suddenly find friends and loved ones committing micro-aggressions they didn’t know they were doing. Life becomes raw and unprotected. You get hurt. It has changed my capacity to relate and slowed my capacity to process things through, emotionally. While I’m kinda managing, being on my own means that, if I deteriorate, I have little or no fallback. Sometimes I just need someone to hold me. Sometimes I just want someone around.

One or two friends have suggested that I move upcountry to England, to be closer to people. But I’m electrosensitive and I can’t hobnob in parties and groups or walk down the street without getting zapped and needing to retreat back home – it can take 48 hours to get over it. In effect, to be with friends and loved ones I have to permit them to harm me with radiation. So I could be just as isolated there as I am here. Folks up in England are all very wired-up, busy keeping timetables and treading mills, and that is the central cause of the care crisis we have today – we don’t have time and space to be human, and people in situations like mine demand too much of it. Meanwhile, Cornwall feeds my soul, and the movements of my soul and its expressions seem to be valued nowadays, by you lot. So this seems to be the right place for me. I’m happy doing forays into England, or even elsewhere, but I’d need a lot of persuading to move because I would lose my taproot.

I haven’t been doing well on the family front either. That’s a complex story – another I won’t tell. What with my disability and their busy family lives, it’s difficult for us to meet up, and online relationships don’t really work for me. Mercifully though, all of my offspring get on really well, though they have three different mothers and live in two Brexit-sundered countries. They’re a lovely bunch, and their husbands and children too. In many people’s judgement I’ve been a useless father, and I guess I’m supposed to feel bad about it. Or perhaps I have had Mandela’s dilemma: a conflict between ‘my people’ and ‘my family’, which I have not been able to integrate – and neither did he. However, as an Aspie and weirdo in late life, I’m tired of apologising for being who I am, and I’m not as wrong as I’m often judged to be. It’s time for a change.

In the distance, Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall, as seen from the Boscregan Cairns, one of my favourite haunts

My health is kinda okay, though my back is slowly deteriorating, as if gravitation were increasing. My cancer, Multiple Myeloma, affects blood and bones – will-to-live (blood) and capacity to be active in the world (bones). That’s a wee bit fundamental. Even so, my haematologist is surprised I’ve lasted so long on my current cancer drug, Daratumamab. But, to me, it makes sense that I would do well with it. Dara isn’t a form of ‘chemo’ designed to kill cancer cells. It works by flagging up cancer cells as they emerge so that my immune system can deal with them itself – that’s a brilliant approach, and it’s just right for me. So I’m doing well with Dara. My immune system is in pretty good nick too.

Here’s an observation. I think there are two kinds of immunity: one is to do with the nutrients we take in on a daily basis, which can provide fight-back if our immune system is under pressure or feeling low. Whenever I get the slightest sign of an infection, such as a sneeze, I take a gram of Vit C straight away – and it works. But there’s a deeper immunity level I’d call resilience. If you’ve done immunity-boosting things for a decade or more – good vits, good oils, good everything, though not too fanatical about it – then you’re in a different league. If you’re dabbling with veganism or health-awareness, take note: it truly works if you stay with it for decades, allowing your body-psyche to go through deeper structural changes. Combine this with inner growth, and your cells and genes become transformed. I can verify this from experience.

Longterm resilience has been a life-saver for me, now I have cancer. At root, it lies in attitude. When I’m having a hard time, I look for the gift that’s available. Sometimes I’m forced to lie in bed, watching the buzzards wheeling around over the fields. Sometimes I’m being given a gift of pain to teach me how to move through it and out the other side. Recently I’ve been given a loneliness that has allowed me to spend a lot of time reflecting on life, writing and recording things from my eyrie out here in West Penwith, the Far Beyond.

Immunity is intimately connected with psychic protection too, and right now I’m working on that. Whenever we feel down and got at by life, we have both a protection and an immunity issue. If you want to work positively with cancer or any other adversity, work positively with your protection. This isn’t about throwing up barriers around you – it’s about working on the fears, shame and guilt that grind away underneath, undermining the integrity of your being and giving an opening that outside interference can hook into, draining your power. Sometimes it’s like having fleas, getting nibbled at by lots of small things, and sometimes it’s like a big thump in the stomach. Protection is about the light within us and the degree to which we withhold ourselves behind our shame, guilt and fear.

When I first went into cancer treatment, I hadn’t had pharmaceutical drugs for many years. Suddenly I was getting pumped with chemicals. I called on my inner doctors. “Let it be. We’ll fix it, and follow your instincts on what else will help“. I don’t get it in words like that, but that’s what the message was. I decided to trust, deeply. I started on things like CBD, carefully selected supplements, received healing from many wonderful people, and worked on generating an attitude of yielding and acceptance. On the whole it worked. I’ve balked at a few of the drugs given me, but not many, and in some cases I’ve dosed myself more sensitively to my own actual needs. But I’ve had fewer side-effects than many other people seem to get. That’s resilience: it’s all about strengthening our capacity to handle whatever life throws at us.

Pendeeen Watch, a neolithic cliff sanctuary looking out toward Ireland over the Celtic Sea

At some point, when I can restore my finances, I’ll start doing some events. A monthly online ‘magic circle’ is shaping up, and I’ll be doing some live Magic Circles or talks sometime, though I don’t have it in me to organise them myself. The capacity to handle life’s details and intricacies is one thing that chemo and cancer have taken away – though I’ve gained a widened and deepened understanding of life instead. The only booking I have at present is the Legends Conference in Glastonbury on 8th-10th April, and I shall announce other events when they get fixed.

When I die I shall have no money or property to leave, but I do hope to leave a legacy. We shall see if it works in real life, if I can keep going long enough. When I was young I was heading for a career in diplomacy or government, but then around age 21 I went through an awakening and changed course. I began treading a spiritual-political alternative path. In starting the camps movement in the 1980s I attempted working with the heart and soul of Britain, to transform it from within – with limited success (it was the Thatcher period, after all). In the Hundredth Monkey Project in the 1990s, we attempted direct spiritual work with world events, with some success. With the Flying Squad that followed, we developed the techniques, ethics and practices of such work, forging a synergistic unity and a group bonding that compensated for our lower numbers. This built up a body of experience. There’s further to go, and the world has a need for it.

When cancer came along in 2019, I thought that was it with the world-healing work but, no, reviving last spring from the enormous emotional hit I had a year ago, I got the message, “Ah, there’s one more thing, before you can come home…“. I realised that no one else really had the experience and capacity to take the world-healing work one stage further. In a way it was incumbent on me to do it. I now have a plan, and it’s now a matter of finding out whether and how it will work in real life. It has already started with the Sunday evening meditations, and we’ll let things develop from there.

It involves a group process for which I can prepare the ground, plant seeds and help them germinate, but that’s all. I don’t have much time left, and the events of the last year have shown me how beat up and worn out I am. You see, what decides things for me is not medical prognoses but how long I can keep going, in heart and soul, pushing the limits and remotivating myself to face another day. My current aloneness has tested me profoundly and, while I’m holding up, it has been a big systems check on what I can and cannot do. Overloaded with issues, I’ve been trying hard not to fuck up but only just managing. But then, this is my life, I’ve created it this way, that’s my karmic pattern, and it is as it is. Mashallah – thus has it been ordained. This next chapter is my last dance, and I’m going to give it what I can.

Wolf Rock lighthouse, 11 miles or 17km out to sea, as seen from St Levan, Penwith

But first, there’s business. I want the company to right some wrongs, financially, and I want to get Felicia and Isaac and their remaining children safe and stabilised in a new life. True heroes, they have paid a high price for being good people. Even as a tottering old man, I choose to stand by them, whatever anyone says. Then there’s that gang, who have deprived at least seven people of their lives. This included an Akan native healer, Okomfo Ayensuwaa, with whom I had close miracle-working dealings for a week or so just before Christmas. Killed for protecting Felicia and Isaac and their families, she has decided to work with us on the world healing project, from the other side. She is with us now, in our meditations. A strong, big and good-hearted lady she was, and the river spirits she worked with miss her.

I have shed so many tears over these unjust tragedies, and several times I have been faced with a painful moral choice I would not wish upon any of my readers: the choice between playing safe, prioritising my own interests and security, and standing by my principles in order to keep some good people alive and to stand up for what is good and right. I’ve made that choice, I’m paying that price and, despite everything, I am glad to have done so. The bravery of these people has been a big lesson for me, and my standing by them has been a big lesson for them. Whitemen have a way of walking off. The fates have now separated Felicia and Isaac, and they struggle on alone. I’m still with them, supporting them even though I can’t send money.

Please pray for them, for their safety, healing and relief from their trauma and misfortune – they, and Phyllis, and Isaac’s one remaining child, Adjoa, aged about 6-7, truly need it. They are struggling, materially, emotionally and spiritually. Please be with them in spirit.

One of my missions in life has been to do with righting some of the wrongs committed by the British empire. One grandfather was in Allenby’s invasion of Iraq and Palestine in WW1 and the other was in the Battle of the Somme. My father fought in Egypt in WW2. Northern Ireland started me off on this path, fifty years ago, and I seem to be at it still. Interestingly, it was the Akan, the Ashanti, who, together with the Maoris of New Zealand, were the only peoples who successfully stood up against the empire – at least until the amoral Brits tricked both of them into losing. The empire had its merits and demerits and, while we should forget neither, we do need to own up to the demerits we forced on so many millions of people. For the world cannot progress while unredeemed shadows such as these hang over us all. Every country has its shadow to face.

This has been a difficult time. I’m still here though! As I write, Felicia is watching her only child Phyllis die slowly, in a coma, in hospital, unable to afford treatment. They’re stranded with nothing in a foreign country. That’s the score today. That’s life, as it presents itself. This has been a difficult and risky blog to write – I hope to goodness that I’ve done it right. Meanwhile, I’ll be there as usual at the meditation on Sunday evenings. Bless you all for being my friends, especially the ones closer to me. We all need each other.

Helen, my peerless homoeopath, gave me Pearl last year (beauty out of pain) and Gold this year (lighting up darkness) – spot on. She’s brilliant. If you happen to need an inspired homoeopath who can do it remotely from Cornwall, try her.

Lots of love from me, Palden.

Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Meditations: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

*The path goes ever on and on…* Zennor Head, West Penwith, Cornwall

Happy Gregorians

and tempus fuckit

Happy Gregorians, everyone.

Though really, I’m not greatly concerned about new year.

You see, one of the problems with our calendar is that it has no particular basis in natural energy. As a dating system it has managed to get itself used worldwide, renamed the ‘Common Era’. But it is European, instituted by Pope Gregory Thirteenth in 1582, as a correction to the foregoing Julian calendar, which was even more useless than our current one.

Luckily, the Gregorian New Year’s Day is near enough to the winter solstice and, if anything in a cycle can be called its beginning, solstice qualifies as the beginning or the root-point of a year. So New Year’s Day is close enough to the solstice to fool our underlying perceptions into believing that New Year is solsticial in flavour. But the thing is, New Year’s resolutions would probably work better if they were resolved at winter solstice.

There’s an interesting flavour to this New Year of 2023. It feels like we’re tipping into a long slide, a growing cascade of accelerating, compounding events, all scrunching up against each other. There’s that stomach-churning anticipatory feeling that you get just before doing a high-dive or heading down a slalom run. It’s too late to back out now, and the stage is set for a cliffhanger, the full plot of which nobody knows.

In the end, wobbliness isn’t such a bad thing, because this intensification is by necessity loosening things up, and we need that. The world has been held in a state of denial for at least fifty years, and reality is dawning. At last. Yes, the shit is hitting the fan in myriad ways throughout society and, globally, and this is very difficult for large numbers of people, and some are buckling – especially those at the bottom of the pile. But that’s a question of economic justice, not just the bad luck of a tough world. This fan-hitting is necessary because things have been held in arrest for too long. We’ve been burning up the world. This is a planetary emergency. We have to get real. It’s happening.

Longships Rocks, off Land’s End, Cornwall

But a paradox comes with the pending avalanche of events we’re likely to see in the mid-to-late 2020s. As acceptance and mobilisation increase, things will in some respects get easier, even when they’re getting more difficult. At present we are burning up so much energy trying to keep an obsolete show on the road, trying to resist facing the fullness of our situation. That uses up a lot of energy and it creates a lot of friction. It concerns a simple rule of car-driving: before you depress the accelerator, release the hand-brake – otherwise you wear out the engine. But also, you wear out the brakes – and that’s what’s happening now, in 2023. The brakes are wearing thin.

In some respects the grating, grinding prelude to a crisis is worse than the peak of a crisis. During an actual crisis, real, cathartic change happens – positions shift, facts emerge, stuff happens and the consequences of old problems become the starting place for the new. Like it or not, that’s the way it is.

I’ve had a tendency in life to gravitate toward edgy, dodgy situations. We humans are quickly stripped down and, to survive, we have to pull out everything we have. We have to cooperate like never before, often with people we’ve never met, and do things we never thought we’d land up doing. This is an amazing process and, throughout life, some of the most profound relationships I’ve had have been in situations like this – short yet intense, a sharing of mutual risk, adversity or insecurity.

It bonds you. It calls upon abilities you didn’t think you had, or you didn’t think were useful. But when necessity and urgency are tugging at you, you just do what’s necessary, as best you can, with what you have. It’s full-on. Very alert. At times miracles happen amidst the tragedies, against the odds. One reason I started the camps in the 1980s is that camping takes us out of our comfort-zones, making us available to new things – it’s a form of positively-induced suffering that suddenly morphs into the best time you had in your life.

Of the camps I ran in the 1980s, some of the best had the worst weather. At one camp, in 1987, we had a force eight gale on the first night. We brought down the marquees, people had to abandon their tents and everyone piled into the geodesic domes, the soundest structures in a gale. I lived in a small dome and thirteen people joined me, huddled together, all privacy and comfort lost, waiting out what seemed like an endless nightmare. Morning came. We crept out slowly, blinking. The morning was sunny, dripping and quiet. The storm had gone.

A new camper came to me, saying that she had to leave – she couldn’t manage this. She looked wan and shellshocked. At that very moment, a member of the site crew came down the field with a big tray filled with mugs of tea, nonchalantly calling out “Tea, anyone?“. The lady burst out crying. She accepted her tea, and a biscuit… and she stayed. Fifteen years later she was still with us, by then doing world-healing work in the Flying Squad. Moments like that are really touching. When you tread the edge and cross the threshold, change happens. Comfort zones aren’t the best place for finding a new life.

Over the decades I’ve come upon heart-wrenching moral choice-points where the options have been playing safe, being sensible and putting my own wellbeing first, or making a big, sometimes decisive, occasionally life-saving difference in the lives of people by taking a risk. There’s often an unbridgeable gulf between them. I’ve tended toward taking the second option. This has happened again recently. It gives me a feeling of ‘this is what I’m here for’.

In late life, I’m happy about people I’ve helped or saved. It has charged a heavy price, not only to me, yet it was worth it in the end. For better or worse, it has been my choice and, in some people’s view, an avoidable pathology they’d have preferred me not to live out. That’s difficult. I seem to have spent my life apologising for being myself. But I did it anyway.

Sadly I have not been able to tell some of my best stories because they can endanger people or lead to unwanted outcomes. You might have noticed that I’ve gone quiet about the story I was recounting to you recently. Well, it’s now one of those. It’s a real test of my mettle. If you’re so inclined, please do keep praying. Apart from that, I’m going to rabbit on about other things for a while.

This seems to be a family pattern: my aunt was not permitted to talk about what she did in WW2 until 1988, poor woman, and she received a medal for it only in 2008. She worked with Alan Turing at Bletchley Park. After that, she was probably the world’s first government UFO investigator, without really knowing it – on debriefing bomber pilots returning from Germany in WW2, she was logging their encounters with ‘foo fighters’. At first they thought it was the enemy’s secret weapon, until they found out that the enemy thought the same thing. I don’t work at that level, though I do have a few eyebrow-raisers to tell. But it isn’t wise or right to do so.

There are some good stories too. I happened to follow the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem through a checkpoint, entering Israel from the West Bank. Guns go up. Oh shite. They’re all aimed at the Patriarch, but I’m standing a few yards behind him. “Do you have any weapons?“. Now that’s a silly thing to ask a Patriarch, but lots of silly things do happen in that benighted land… Silence. “Yes“, says the Patriarch. Uh-oh. More guns go up. “Reach down slowly and get it out.” Right now I’m wondering whether I ought to move. Nope, better stay there, Palden. Don’t lift a finger.

The Patriarch, not exactly young and sprightly, reaches down slowly, pulls out and holds up… his Bible. Quite a few of us were trying hard not to crack up laughing, including a few of the soldiers. He had fifteen soldiers by the short and curlies. They’ll remember that for the rest of their days. That’s an example of psycho-spiritual peacebuilding through the teaching of pertinent lessons.

Ships passing in the day, and Wolf Rock lighthouse

It was a hot day in Al Khader, near Bethlehem, and a new squad of Israeli soldiers was taking over in our area (they changed every couple of months). Eight or so were standing around down the hill, where the boundary lies, sweating in their uniforms. I moseyed down slowly, deliberately relaxed, to see if I could do some bridgebuilding. I had a bottle of water. One, with a French accent, asked where they could get some. I said there was a shop 200 metres back. Pushing my luck, I said I could take one or two of them there – they’d be alright. They weighed it up. They seemed to like me. I told them to keep their guns down and just relax – Israelis get really nervous and edgy in Palestinian areas, because of course all Palestinians are terrorists – and we walked slowly up and along to the shop. You could feel eyes watching.

We went into the shop, they got some things, the shopkeeper was quite friendly and chatty, and we walked back. There was a moment of connection where we all saw the ridiculousness of the situation we were in. When we got back to their mates, I said, “These people in Al Khader are alright if you’re alright with them. They won’t give you trouble if you let them be. You’ve just had a demonstration“. I think they got it. In the coming days it seemed to work. Besides, the soldiers weren’t really bothered. They were probably rather relieved to have an easy posting.

People sometimes ask me who or what I work for. I work for good-hearted humanness, however best I can judge it at the time. If I am financially supported, which is unusual, I accept contributions only if the sole requirement is that I use the money well – if there are any other strings, I say No.

I had to learn this the hard way. Shortly after the intifada, I went to Bethlehem with some financial backing and a list of nine tasks, then to spend the next month learning that it would be possible to achieve only one of those tasks – the circumstances just weren’t right. I got nervous: how would I explain that? One day, not long before leaving for home, I gave up, accepting my fate. An hour later, in rolls a van and, lo behold, every person I had needed and failed to see during the last month was inside. It was all sorted within hours. Phew. Magic.

But that made me decide to free myself from such concerns in future, because in high-chaos situations, improvisational freedom of action is absolutely necessary. Going into a chaos zone with plans, as too many Westerners do, is like trying to swim with a weighed-down straitjacket on, and it causes everyone else too much run-around. Yet strangely, high-chaos zones do allow magic to happen.

Magic happened there. But there’s one problem with trusting that magic will happen, because it doesn’t happen just because you want it to, or because you believe your agenda should be everyone else’s agenda. It happens when it is in line with the Universe’s bigger chess game. We get occasional glimpses of this but, quite often, we don’t – not at the time. Quite often we just have to make a choice and do our best. And remember: not doing something also has consequences. In our time we are getting lots of consequences from things not done, in recent decades and throughout history. We live in a time of consequences.

We are more free now to get things right than ever we have been in human history. Life is asking us not to give up on the brink of a miracle. Well, that’s one of the big lessons I seem to be learning at present. Don’t give up just because everything seems to be against you. Though sometimes we must change tactics in order to progress with our overall strategy. In the end, if you’re trying to move a mountain, it’s all about ‘Thy Will be Done’ and ‘the highest good’.

In the Middle East, whenever they make a statement about something yet to happen, they tack the word ‘inshallah’ into the sentence – ‘If it is the will of God’. In English we say ‘All things being well’, or ‘With luck’. We need a neat new word like ‘inshallah’. It would help us get over the arrogant belief that we are masters of destiny. Which we aren’t. At times The Great Cosmic Steamroller hoves into view, and woe betide us if we’re moving slower than it does.

Now that’s a pleasant thought for the new Gregorian year! But there’s truth in it. The more we’re willing to shake things up, the easier it gets in the long run. In the next year or two we’re moving from a time of rules to a time of crowds.

I saw a joke yesterday. It went…
Breaking News: aliens now implementing a points system for people who want to be abducted. Too many requests.

If you’re on your own this New Year’s Eve, so am I, so we can be together in the ethers.

Here’s a hug to everyone, with love from me, Palden.

An interesting radio programme on BBC World Service about the current state of people on humanity’s frontlines: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct380b

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

Carn Barra, Carn Les Boel and Carn Boel, as seen from Carn Guthensbras, Land’s End, Cornwall

Thriller

with a plot still unfolding

It’s that silver lining. And can you see what I see?

Well, it’s a bit like that. For those of you who are interested, here’s the latest lowdown.

Sunday morning, wet and windy here in Cornwall. Early on, and Dr Isaac and I were dealing with an emergency, yet again, on Skype. We’ve become quite a team, he and I.

Felicia is hanging in there, just about. We had to take her back to hospital last night for intensive care, and a doctor there has allowed it on promise of payment later, bless him. Dr Isaac has sold his TV and sound system this morning to pay for oxygen and a drip. He’s such a dedicated doctor. I am sniffing around amongst contacts in the NGO sector, to see if there’s a good job waiting for him somewhere – he’s a true asset and he deserves better. He and his family risk having an Unhappy Christmas, though if I can change that, I shall. They are looking after Phyllis, who is doing well, and she’s a good kid too, and everyone loves her. We need to get her Mum Felicia back.

This is sharp-edged stuff. It’s really testing our mettle and our capacity to keep finding remarkable solutions. But we’re also both weary, fed up and in debt. Something needs to change now.

As you might imagine, this has been an enormous learning experience. It started with my doing a return favour for one of the company’s agents, to get him out of a tight scrape. Then it mushroomed from there. Quite a few people have been questioning whether I’m getting things right – to be honest, I don’t know, and we shall see. But I feel it’s right to keep these people alive.

The Moon emerges from an eclipse over Bethlehem, 2011.

So now it is a waiting game. Mercifully, my beating heart works well under pressure, and I’m not unused to being under fire. Though one thing we cancer patients have is greater sensitivity to and higher impacts from life’s buffetings, as if a layer of emotional armouring has been stripped away and we’re less protected. I’ve realised this in the last year since I became a single man again – fewer fallbacks, everything is up to me.

My response to this vulnerability has been a greater readiness to get down to the bottom line faster than before. Perhaps there’s a certain aged recklessness too, that comes when you know you’re in last-chance saloon and your time is limited. So, in a way, within the scope of the capacities I have left, I guess I’m playing for high stakes.

I’ve dealt with one-to-three crises every day for two rather long months, with no days off, unpaid, and I’m still in the running. Phew. I do want a rest and a break – even, dare I say it, some fun! But while Felicia, Phyllis and Isaac are in trouble, whatever anyone says, I’m staying with them. It means a lot to me, and I’m willing to lose friends over it – probably already have. This crunch period of the last week has really made me get down to first principles. What is my life about, really?

Burning. Sweatlodge fire at the Oak Dragon camp, 2022.

A friend in Nova Scotia, Susan, who has recently been my chief confidante, sent me a really pertinent lesson, written by someone called Paul Weinfield. Here are key lines from it.

“Leonard Cohen said his teacher once told him that, the older you get, the lonelier you become, and the deeper the love you need. This is because, as we go through life, we tend to over-identify with being the hero of our stories. This hero isn’t exactly having fun: he’s getting kicked around, humiliated and disgraced. But if we can let go of identifying with him, we can find our rightful place in the universe, and a love more satisfying than any we’ve ever known. Everyone from CEOs to wellness-influencers thinks the Hero’s Journey means facing your fears, slaying a dragon, and gaining 25k followers on Instagram. But that’s not the real Hero’s Journey.

“In the real Hero’s Journey, the dragon slays YOU. Much to your surprise, you couldn’t make that marriage work. Much to your surprise, you turned forty with no kids, no house and no prospects. Much to your surprise, the world didn’t want the gifts you proudly offered it.

“But if you are wise, you will let yourself be shattered and return to the village, humbled, but with a newfound sense that you don’t have to identify with the part of you that needs to win, needs to be recognised, needs to know. This is where your transcendent life begins.“

Gosh, well, yes. That hit me right on the nose! Yes, and that’s life. Planet Earth is a school – for some of us a real crash-course – and our purpose here is to graduate with honour.

But we do need to keep the school going, to enable our descendants to get born into a planetary body, to have a decent chance to do something with this strange privilege of life on Earth. And, you never know, we might one day have Heaven on Earth.

But today, we’re still on the case. If you are so inclined, please stay with those healing and helping thoughts, because we aren’t out of the water yet. I want these guys to have a Happy Christmas too – unlike me, they are Christians, and good Christians who do seem to live by the teachings of their master. That is, they’ll bust a gut for their fellow humans.

Meditation acts as a complement but not a replacement to action. In the Majority (‘developing’) World there is a higher proportion of spirited people who do bust guts for people and for justice.

Not that such people are lacking in the rich world, but here we play safe and stay within our comfort zones – we behave ‘properly’. It’s not very good karma, in the end.

This is one reason all those poor faceless people are coming over to Britain in flimsy boats – we are attracting them unconsciously in order to help us learn how to be more human, how to share. We are in a ‘cost of living crisis’ to teach us how to pull together and look after each other. We have problems with our politicians and bosses because we as a society have not taken life in our own hands. We have problems with race and gender because we labour under the belief that other people are deeply different from us.

Ridin’ that wave. Cape St Vincent, Portugal.

The good news is that, once the Great Correction really starts, life is going to get easier. Why? Because inequality and injustice are inefficient, energy-wasting, murderous ways of running a world. It doesn’t work. We need to make life easier. At last, increasing numbers of people are realising this. But the test lies in what we actually do. Leaving your job (or whatever) and changing your life is just the first step.

To get a country like Britain to a sustainable level, we need to reduce our consumption to 1960 conditions. Those of you who remember that time will know that, though there were problems, as there are today, life was alright. We had more time for each other. It’s doable, and we can be happy with that. It’s all to do with how everything is shared.

Bless us all. Life is tough at present, for many people. History takes a long time, and it’s grinding hard. But the Great Correction has actually already started – Covid was a tipping point and we’re now sliding inexorably into accelerated change. Now we just gotta get it over the hump, so that we achieve the necessary momentum to really crack our world problems.

Thank you so much to all those who have helped and contributed. There have been times when this has brought tears to my eyes. You’ve made a real difference – Felicia and Phyllis are still with us. However, this has become more of a marathon than a sprint, and there’s more to go.

It’s good practice. That’s how it’s going to be in coming decades. There’s no going back now. If I could hug you all, I would, but I’m down’ere in glorious isolation in Cornwall, so please feel it imaginally.

Love from Paldywan, and remember, stay human.

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

The mountains of Sapmi, or Lappland. Padjelanta national park, above Kvikkjokk, northern Sweden – where, right now, the sun does not rise.

It’s Coming

Though it is a question of ‘What?’

This is not a christmas card. This is Kvikkjokk in the north of Sweden, north of the polar circle, last year. It’s where my daughter Maya lives. It was -30C there last night.

There’s one robin that comes from the thicket above my cabin, and another who lives in the brambles down below the barn.

Problem is, being male robins, and with breeding season coming, they’re doing their territoriality trip – much to the consternation of the tits and the blackie, who also want to get to the feeder just outside my door.

When you spend much of your time alone, issues like this do matter! But it’s a welcome diversion too because, as you might imagine, my thumbs haven’t exactly been twiddling very much recently, and I’ll welcome an off-duty break one day.

It hasn’t snowed here in Penwith, though it went sub-zero and icy in the last few nights. Stuck out in the Atlantic and bathed in water that not too long ago passed Miami Beach, we’ve been about 5 degrees warmer than most of Britain. But then, though Brits love to complain, whatever the weather, up where my daughter Maya lives, north of the polar circle in northern Sweden, it was -30C last night – and the sun won’t rise until mid-January. Welcome to Planet Earth, dear friends – this is what you get on this world, and this is what you chose when you decided to come here.

I get cold feet. I’ve got this weird thing called Peripheral Neuropathy – a side-effect of chemo drugs where your nerve-endings die off. So I can feel the inner feelings in my feet but not the outer ones – and I never knew there was a difference until the Good Lord (or whoever) gave me cancer. This also means I don’t feel the cold in my feet very much – which goes to show how, in life, you win some and you lose some, and that’s the deal. I still have warm double socks on though.

An Indonesian Christian rock band in Bethlehem

One of the narratives of my life has been about dealing with paradox. My mother did love and care for me but she didn’t have the time and presence to mother me in the way I needed – that kind of thing. But that’s alright: it gave me some mother patterns to work with. Or this: my Tibetan name means ‘radiant merit’, my Arabic name ‘servant of the light’ and my Brahmin name is god of the sun, but there’s a shady side to me too, who gets involved in gritty, underworldy, heavy stuff. I’ve been exposing this side of me in the last month, with the strange thriller I’ve found myself in.

It goes to show, I’m not a holyholy meditation teacher at all, but a lawbreaking aged hippy charlatan who does nasty things, corrupts dishy young ladies, leads people astray and ought to be locked up forthwith – a danger to civilised society. Be warned.

I’ve been breaking the law recently, paying bribes. In West Africa, if you don’t pay enablement payments, nothing gets done. However, as my late senior barrister friend Keith used to say, in his endearingly bombastic Leo kind of way, “I, dear boy, am a purveyor of the Law of Man, but you, sir, are a purveyor of the Law of God”. Well, that’s a bit over the top, but there’s truth in it too, and sometimes divine will does need to prevail, whatever anyone thinks. So I’ve paid some bribes because, actually, it’s usually just to pay the guy’s phone bill or taxi fare so that he can do what you’re asking for and perhaps take a few bob home to his missus.

Well, if they want to arrest me for that, I’m over here. It’s a professional expense, and not the least of the sins I’ve committed. I’ve been a traitor, consorted with terrorists, smuggled tofu though Israeli checkpoints (they think it’s Semtex), taken on false guises and a few other things I’d better not mention.

But on the other hand, bad as I am, my life-saving stats measure well against any doctor or paramedic, and I’ve had the pleasure of uplifting thousands of people, and many of the bad things I once did, or decidedly didn’t do, are now, a few decades later, strangely approved of. It took a while. Some people think I’m brave, though my rather naive Aspie response is simply, ‘But why is that unusual?’.

Manger Square, Bethlehem, full of people

I have another weird Aspie thing too. I have an aversion to Christmas. I don’t do it. I’ve always felt unhappy feeling obligated to be happy and congenial when, at the time, I’m feeling contemplative and quiet. So I have a no-compromise approach that, before Xmas, is frowned on and, after Xmas, is envied.

On Xmas Day, if the weather allows, I’ll be out on the moors or the cliffs with a flask and a pie, attending to the top of my head and a few related matters, and if the weather is bad I’ll be huddled round the woodstove, propped in my chair or inner journeying in bed, busy not drinking sherry. Unless I find another person who would delight in an utter non-Xmas with me, I’ll be on my own, and that’ll be alright. You might wonder why.

Well, it’s a time for wrapping up the past and looking toward the future, and I have rather a lot of both at present. That’s solstice, the turning of a tide.

But it’s also a time when, rarely, the Christian and Westernised elements in the world suddenly get excited about peace and goodwill for a day or two. This is really good. My only reservation is that it suddenly ends around lunchtime on Xmas Day, when everyone starts blotting themselves out with food and booze, only to regret it afterwards.

Manger Square, Bethlehem, Palestine, at Christmas

Nevertheless, as a guerrilla planet-fixer with an esoteric style, I find it’s worth scooping up some of this goodwill for good use. After all, there are at least a billion people on Earth who really need some peace and goodwill to be shoved their way right now. If not, truth be told, the whole eight billion of us.

So I spend my solstice-to-Xmas doing consciousness work. It’s secret – don’t tell anyone. It’s a good time for doing some gentle infiltration of the collective psyche, to strengthen that thought: goodwill. If you’re on your own this Christmas, then, wherever you are, stick up your antennae and see whether you can find me in that ‘reality-field’ and come join me. Try 11am and 2pm GMT, Xmas Day.

I’m always there on Sunday evenings at 7pm GMT too, for half an hour.

Ten years ago I was in Bethlehem at Christmas. The slightly sad thing is that Christian numbers for the Christmas Pilgrimage are much diminished nowadays, so Muslims make up the numbers – Palestinians do appreciate Bethlehem’s global name-recognition in such a forgotten land, and Jesus is also one of the prophets of Islam.

The Catholic Xmas is a bit like ours in NW Europe, with a lot of the jingle-jangle, and big concerts in Manger Square with Christian singers and bands from Germany, Indonesia and Nigeria, and a few Papal delegates thrown in. And why on earth do they import Father Christmas to Bethlehem, already replete with Christ Mass primacy, when most Palestinians have no idea where Estonia is or what slieghbells are?

Then comes the Orthodox Xmas, which is a bit more sedate, very ornate and quite delightful to a jaded old heathen like me. The chanting is done with deep faith and mystique, and the archangels and cherubim really do seem to hover around.

Then in mid-January comes the Armenian Xmas, which actually, if I were Christian, is the kind of Christmas I’d prefer – ruminative and richly calm. Either way, they’re all resplendent with candles, incense, chant and reverence – that’s very different to the mosques, where there’s nearly no ceremony or pizazz, just quiet prayer. They both have their virtues, but give me an ocean clifftop or a desert outcrop anyday, and I’ll be happy.

It looks like I’ll still be on duty over Christmas, monitoring the West Africa situation daily. Here’s the latest news from there.

Phyllis, the child, is happy and in good shape. She underwent an amazing turnaround last week, going from fever and coughing blood to wanting an ice cream in two days flat. I think you lot, with your prayers, played a key part in that. She is now staying with Dr Isaac and his family. Phyllis seems to be a great kid, easy to have around, and everyone loves her. I’m so happy about that. She’s special, that one.

Felicia… well, she’s improving, but we hit a setback two days ago. She has been reviving, and three days ago we moved her out of hospital into accommodation near the doctor and his wife. She was awake and becoming able to function, but she fell over, and it was bad. She needed two blood transfusions, a drip and medication. I’ve managed to finance that. So, it’s tenuous with her at present.

Those of you who have been giving your prayers, healing and positive thoughts to Felicia… may I ask for another round? Please hold her and raise her up. She has brain injuries from the ‘accident’ two weeks ago (they were rammed, actually). We think she’ll be alright, and she’s in good care, though she isn’t out of danger yet.

I want to put in a word for Dr Isaac and his partner Millicent and their children. They have taken in Felicia and Phyllis. They live simply and have their own family concerns, but they care a lot, and they’re definitely not in it for the money.

One of the greatest benefits I’ve had from my humanitarian work has been meeting simple, good-hearted folk like these who are the real saviours of our planet. They just get on with it and hold the world up. They do so much of the mopping up of the world’s mess.

The people I’m involved with in West Africa, and also my handler with the fraud investigation company, are all good and remarkable people. In this business, you develop ways of finding out who you can and cannot trust, and everyone depends on each other, and there’s a certain implicit code of behaviour, and you bond closely with people you encounter when sharing intense situations with them.

The Syrian Orthodox church, Bethlehem, Palestine

In something like this, to use an old sexist term, it sorts out the men from the boys. The people who hang with you through thick and thin are often amazing people. Dr Isaac is like that. He lost his job for us (though I think he’ll get it back). He risked his and his family’s lives. He’s gone several extra miles. He’s a man of faith and a good doctor who deserves more than a one-room home for his family.

I’ve met many remarkable people, and he ranks high, a true server, a doctor of whom Hippocrates would be proud. We’ve known each other for three rather long weeks. God bless you, Isaac. People like you convince me that this world will survive. My daughters, son and grandchildren do that too.

I guess I’m a sucker for crisis situations because it brings out the best in many people, and I like working with them, and it brings out the best in me. I’m not good at normality, you see. I’ve always felt I’m there to help the helpers, the social healers and the frontline people, and it’s an area of deep late-life satisfaction now.

Here’s the Mosque of Omar on the other side of the square. Sensibly, when they invaded, the Muslims under Caliph Omar didn’t take over and convert the church. Bethlehem has had very good Christian-Muslim relations throughout history. I wonder why?

As an independent ‘freelance humanitarian’, for want of a better term, I’ve held to certain principles I feel are important such as: ‘don’t give a person a fish, but teach them how to fish’, and ‘teach a man and you teach a man, but teach a woman and you teach a generation’. There’s even William Blake’s statement: ‘the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’ – and war is excess to human need, in my judgement.

I feel also that, as an educated, white, male, privileged Brit whose ancestors built the empire and kept it going, and living through its downfall and seeing its very mixed outcomes, I have a bit of an urge to complete the job. I’m not a great believer in reparations, guilt or sorrow – I just like to get in there and do something to help people have a better life and rise to their full potential. To the extent I can.

People have asked who or what I work with. To my surprise, at present it’s for a big bank – though that’s not my style. One of my PodTalks, The Only Planet of Choosing, gives clues. I’ve worked with all sorts of people, but the bottom line for me is their humanity, and progressing humanity’s evolution. My focus has been community-building, conflicts and crises, and helping social leaders stay on the rails.

You have to have your wits about you. This is strange because, as an Aspie, I can be at times apparently naively open but it’s not exactly that – it’s because I sense people’s hidden motives and agendas, and I often get delayed-action clarity on what’s really happening. So I look blank for a while. Then it all comes. So I’m best working with others, inputting what I’m good at. Such as total attention, hyper-focus. When I’m on form, I’m brilliant, and when I’m not, I’m best back here in Cornwall, out of everyone’s way.

Which is where I am now, on the farm, and it’s a dark and rainy pre-solstice night, and the owls and crows are all tucked under their wings down in the woods and hiding from the feather-ruffly wind. Wherever you are, may all be well with you.

Don’t worry too much about your circumstances, even if they’re tough at present – look at your attitude, and be innovative. Find simple ways to be happy. We all get inner friction and pain, but these are things we can reduce, even if we can’t reduce the adversity. That’s what’ll get us all through.

Well, that’s what I try to learn, anyway.

With love from me, Palden.

Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
PodTalk | The Only Planet of Choosing (1h 13m):

The Church of the Nativity began as a goddess temple (hence the Virgin Mary came here), then a Greek Apollo temple, and only then did it become a Christian Church. The front entrance is really low and you have to duck to go through – this is to force Crusaders to dismount and it stopped their hunky stallions from entering the church. But the Israelis just roll bombs in. Interestingly, in Bethlehem, I don’t get a feeling of Jesus – it’s Mother Mary’s or Mariam’s town, and the matriarchs there definitely let you know it

Cancer Tales

and that hidden Factor X

St Michael’s Mount from Cudden Point, with Penzance behind

I had my three-monthly phone chat with Liz the haematologist today. I have a blood cancer, Myeloma or bone marrow cancer, so the specialist who’s running me is a haematologist, a blood expert.

I seem to be doing well. The critical measure of myeloma is paraproteins, and they are found with a blood test done by the nurse who comes round monthly to administer my cancer drugs. My paraproteins have been on 5 since March, and Liz is happy with that. In early 2021 I got down to 2, but my illness of late 2021 and early 2022 took it up to 5 and it has stayed there. I can’t remember what it was when I was diagnosed three years ago, but it was in the hundreds or the thousands. I wasn’t far from popping my clogs.

But I got a reprieve. Well, you never get rid of myeloma – you just keep it within safe bounds. But the chemo worked – they had planned up to eight cycles of treatment and I was complete in five. As a blood cancer with the effect of hollowing your bones and making them eventually break and collapse, there are no tumours to be removed – though I have had Zolodronic Acid to strengthen my bones and stop their deterioration. I seem to be doing well, staying within safe bounds.

She also asked me about my covid and flu jabs. I told her I had had none and wasn’t interested – I hadn’t had covid and I tend not to get flu, and I have my ways of keeping my immunity high. “I won’t ask you about those, Mr Jenkins. I’m sure you know what you’re doing, and you seem to get good results, so just carry on”. She has got to know me by now.

I’m not ideological about medicine and healing. When I started on this journey three years ago I plumped for following my intuitions in all medical decisions, finding some sort of balance between allopathic and holistic methods, and trusting in the capacity of my bodymind to modulate things so that side-effects and harm are minimised. So I don’t have the jabs because intuitively I feel they aren’t a net gain or needed, in my case, and that is my choice. Not because of politics or conspiratorial suspicions. Just following my intuition.

In front, Cudden Point, behind, St Michael’s Mount, with the hills of Penwith in the distance

There’s a hidden Factor X too: inner doctors. I’m mentioning this because, if you have a serious illness, you might try this. Go into yourself and ask for help, for the attention of a set of inner doctors/healers. Your soul and your inner teacher will help with this. Train yourself to let them in – to open yourself up, give permission to be examined, follow the process, point out areas and issues that concern you, and allow them to do things. Let them look inside you, including at your psychology, your fears, concerns and guilty bits. You might or might not experience being showered with light, or infused with rays or instruments of light, or ‘etheric wires and rods’ are inserted, or you might feel warmth or colour in parts of you – be open to whatever happens, even if it is simply a feeling of relaxation.

There was one time when I had a worrying appointment the next day – I was anxious about what would happen. I asked my inner doctors for attention. It seemed they ummed and aahhed, but I didn’t get the feeling anything was happening. Oh well. Next day I went to hospital and the staff I met were fantastic, the doctor found an unexpected solution, the treatment was simple and easy and the prognosis was a relief. Ding. My inner doctors had clearly delegated the matter to the outer doctors (one Irish and one from Belarus, with a Nigerian radiologist) and guided their thoughts and hands. It is through this combination of metaphysical and physical medicine and healing that, at least for me, the staying-alive process works best.

I take well-chosen supplements and helpers too. Forget cure-all wonder drugs and regimes, but a selection of helpers, each making a 5% difference, can add up to 40% and make a critical difference. Number one is vitamin C (I take 1.5g per day, quite a lot). Then I take selenium, zinc and a really good multivitamin, colloidal silver in my water, Turkey Tail tincture, blueberry powder, a green algae mix, homegrown beansprouts, tahini and ground up nuts (for oils), probiotics, flower remedies… it goes on. I’m not fanatical about it. But it does make a positive difference to my underlying condition, immunity and cancer.

As do the various treatments I’ve had over time. It’s important to do just one at a time and leave them space to sink in – don’t get neurotic about it. I’ve had homoeopathy, radionics from Canada, chiropractic, naturopathy, e-Lybra machines, herbs, CBD oil, a variant of Alexander Technique, an energy treatment from Czechia that I can’t remember the name of (by a Swedish friend in USA), and crystal healings, laying-on of hands, remote healing, prayers – the only thing missing has been massages. I’ve been fortunate to have good friends and contacts, and I’m grateful for all the healing and support I’ve been given. It does work.

To be honest, although I wouldn’t rate cannabis specifically as a cancer drug, it’s a definite helper – it helps deal with a surfeit of time, a degree of pain, and it encourages a certain creativity, self-enquiry and understanding that itself can be a healer. It can help you change your attitude. (I do meditation and other things too.)

I don’t do all of these tharapies and supplements all of the time. It has rolled incrementally over the last few years. I follow what feels right at the time. When I was on my initial chemo treatment in the four months after diagnosis in late 2019, I had to take between 12 and 35 pills each day – and that drove me off getting neurotic about taking too many pills, supplements and treatments. Why? Because there is one medicine that tops all others.

Looking across Mounts Bay from Halzephron Cliff on the Lizard to Treryn Dinas on the south coast of West Penwith

Happiness. Yes. Happiness. I have really found this definitely to be true. Stay happy and, whatever happens, you’ll be alright, even when life isn’t alright. Go down, and you descend into a loop that’s hard to rise out of again. So, above all things, stay happy. Make that a top-priority rule, not just a hope.

This means a few things. Happiness is about attitude: it doesn’t just happen at you when the circumstances are right – it is created, a decision of the heart. You can either give yourself a hard time over life, or you can make it easier by seeking the silver lining – what’s right about life and what’s being given. It’s also about being happy with whatever life throws at us. Stop moaning – or at least, feel it and then let it go. Just going for a walk in nature can work wonders.

This is not necessarily easy, but the price of not doing so is higher, so it’s worth it. Thank your adversaries, enjoy your illness, appreciate the virtues of being short of money, and enjoy the wind and rain. There’s good to be had from that kind of approach, and when you’re facing the handicap and the uphill grind of longterm illness it becomes a central issue. Above all else, do whatever it takes to get happy and be happy, whatever is going on in life.

If it lifts you up, do it, and if it weighs you down, don’t. This statement is much more of a practical proposition than you would think.

In the last year I’ve had quite a bit of adversity, pain, sorrow and challenges. I’m certainly not happy all the time, and at times I’ve been grinding my stuff, suffering over things and falling into states I’d prefer not to be in. This isn’t about pretending to be happy, like Christmas, or escapism, or taking a hyper-positive attitude that seeks to override real life.

Carn Du at Lamorna, with the Lizard behind

It’s about returning. Returning to centre. To a place inside us where things are alright. Remembering to pull ourselves out of our morasses and scrapes, to see things from a wider perspective. The world isn’t ending. Change is constant. There’s joy and relief in truth. And pain and joy are contrasting poles of the same spectrum.

It’s a matter of coming back and habituating ourselves to doing so. Coming back to ourselves, to something bigger, wider, deeper and more enduring than our own little lives. The more we make a habit of this, the more it works, and after a time we start doing it more automatically. Sometimes, if I’m in a mood or a state, I give myself an hour to be angry, grouchy, down, fucked off and had enough, and then I drop it and come back to look at it from the other side.

In the last year, I’ve gone through a lot of pain over the loss of my partner. At times I got really lost in it – though it truth, in the end it was good, actually, as a way of grinding through the feelings to come out the other side. I started coming through and realising what a gift she had given me – a gift of pain that opened me up and kept me bleeding (metaphorically), which in itself has been a great gift. I cried and wobbled for months. It helped me dig out deep truths about my mother and my experiences as a young, estranged Aspie, in the early 1950s when I was 3-5 years old, and wondering why I was here, what this place was and who these people were.

So, bizarrely, that gift of pain was a gift of love. She reached parts others haven’t reached. And the present and future have now taken over from rueing the past. I’m not quite finished yet but I’ve come a long way. I feel it was the last really close relationship of my life, and from now on I’ll do things differently. For a modern woman, it’s not fair taking on an awkward customer and partially-disabled cancer patient like me – it’s too much to ask. So I must spread it around so that it’s more fun and less of a burden for anyone. I’m not talking about sex here, but about the various virtues of relationship that, in my current state, I miss. I’m managing, but I’m not doing that well as a single man with cancer.

Such as someone to talk to, who knows me well and accepts me as I am, and acts as a ‘second brain’. And I need three occasional minders, for adventures and trips, so that it doesn’t weigh too heavily on any one of them. I need different things with different people, since my intention for the rest of my days is to be more public, more open to larger numbers of, well… you lot. I’m a hermit too, but that part of me gets well serviced down’ere on the farm in Cornwall. Even though I’m quite a loving soul, it’s tricky for a woman to be close to a hermit who spends long hours and days writing books rather than paying attention to servicing loving relationships or stopping work when dinner is ready.

St Michael’s Mount from Penzance harbour

So I’m making a change. With only a few years left, everything has come into a different focus. I can’t wait around or let things drift in the way that I once did, when death seemed much further away. This is last chance saloon, and if I don’t do it now or soon, I’m not going to do it. Quite a few things have to be accepted as non-doable or non-repairable. Some are a relief, and some are painful. But the issue here is that it’s better to process things through in life, because when I get to death, there’s quite a lot else to pay attention too – such as moving forward – and a load of encumbrances from the past is not very helpful.

I’ve been finding that life has been accelerating that last-chance clearance process. In the recent six months, my health has been stable and I feel better now than I have felt since contracting cancer. So my primary focus on handling cancer and its effects has reduced, and now I have the rest of life to deal with. What has come up instead has been a lot of social and human issues. My brains and psyche have changed as a result of cancer, chemo, ageing and a few big Neptune transits, and I’m experiencing things very differently now.

Many physical capabilities, including car driving and easy mobility, are gone. I get through life at half the speed I used to, and my capacity to multi-task, remember details, remember names and figure out problems is reduced. Getting through each day is much more difficult than before, though I’m more adapted to it now and I accept it. I’ve simplified things to a degree where I can function more easily. I do a lot of writing, podcasting and online stuff, which I’m good at – if I had been a farmer or engineer needing physical mobility, with my kind of cancer, I’d have been in much deeper doodoo than I am.

It’s almost as if this particular kind of cancer was tailor-made for me. The specific trials and tribulations it has brought – a recent one is that my left arm is slowly going numb and tingly – have offered me a focus and challenge that seems karmically right for me. I’m glad I contracted cancer at this stage of life though, in my seventies, and not earlier. I’ve done enough in life to be kinda satisfied enough with it – though I do have some reservations and regrets. But in another way it has opened up a new phase of life. By cutting down my life-possibilities, other possibilities have emerged. I’ve been given a gift of time and space – time to ruminate and pay attention to things I didn’t have time for earlier in life. Or a new aspect of them is emerging because I have time and space. This is a privilege.

If someone reacts with ‘sorry’, when I tell them I have cancer, I can’t agree. I don’t advocate getting cancer or other serious ailments but, if they come your way, do your best with them. It’s not just about staying alive, and ‘getting better’ isn’t necessarily what you always need to do. The main thing is to ‘get good’ – whatever that means. Happiness is a key ingredient. Too many old, ill and disabled people are unnecessarily unhappy.

Carn Du, Lamorna, with the Lizard behind

It’s about optimising the soul-opportuinities we have been offered. It’s an opportunity to confront our fear and get to grips with things we have long feared – I had to get over an aversion to having needles stuck in me, or having x-rays. I do have, or have had, a fear of being disabled – and, bingo, I’ve been given half-disablement, specially customised for me. For me, this blood cancer is about my will to live. That’s always been a major life-issue for me too.

It’s also about my will to die. I’ve decided to take charge of my death – whatever that means. Deep in my soul, I’ve clarified and decided that I shall carry on until I don’t want to continue any more. There comes a point where there’s no more point fighting or pushing, and that’s just fine. Up to that point, it is my spirits that keep me alive, and if I keep my spirits up, I’ll be in the right state to handle whatever else comes. The main point here isn’t about staying alive as long as I can. It’s about optimising the experience of my soul, and doing the best things for its progression and for the all-round benefit of everything and everyone. I shall be where it’s most useful to be, and sometimes the opportunities can be greater on the other side.

That’s when I’ll go, and until then, there are a few things to do. Earth is a funny old place, but one thing is true. You don’t get these kinds of experiences anywhere else, so savour them while you can. The toast on Arcturus is just not as good as here, and on Alpha Centauri they’ve never even heard of ice cream or baked beans, let alone maxed-out credit cards or flat tyres. On some worlds you don’t even get the experience of being born – you just create yourself.

Lots of love from me, Palden.

PS: For those of you who have been following my recent adventures, please pray for Phyllis, three, who is struggling. We’ve identified that she has yellow fever, not cholera, and she has something more too. She is being transferred to a herbal hospital where the hope is to build up her immunity. After her experiences of the last month, she is weak. Thank you. Meanwhile her Mum, Felicia, in her thirties, is ticking over but not out of the woods yet.

Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Eye-candy: www.palden.co.uk/photos/best-photos.html

Events

And the way they change things

Hello everyone. Where have I been? Well, Paldywan’s back on the holy warpath.

Sounds a bit strange, that, but it has indeed been strange. Mars, customarily the god of war, is to me a god of encounter resolution. Sometimes, life leads us into a fight – but the destruction involved depends a lot on how well we deal with the conflicts within ourselves. A great general in history once said, “Every drop of blood spilt charges its price” – it’s true. So the aim is to achieve the best all-round outcomes with the minimum of damage, but it’s a rollercoaster, the stakes are high and often the full results are slow in coming.

It wasn’t my choosing – I fell into it. I have this strange karmic pattern where I’m standing there, suddenly finding myself in the thick of it and sometimes able to pull off a remarkable solution – or at least, avoid the worst. In this instance I served as a honeypot, unwittingly attracting and exposing a crime ring involved in fraud, kidnapping, drugs and probably anything. By dint of doing the right things in the opening moments, I landed up being the only one who could follow it through – online from my desk, here on the farm.

But then, I wasn’t exactly unwilling. I’ve been feeling frustrated recently, physically unable to complete my humanitarian work, and this kind of stuff is the kind of thing I’m good at. Being rather hyper-focused, I’m calm in crises. “Ah, we have a situation” – some Palestinians used to quote me, trying to imitate my English accent, with a cheeky smile. As an Aspie, while I’m seemingly not very good at close relationships, in other contexts I can get inside the head of a person with a gun and talk them down, if necessary. Well, thus far it has succeeded, though there have indeed been ‘situations’.

I thought I’d left all that behind when cancer came my way three years ago, but the universe had other ideas – a few weeks ago I was requisitioned to play the role of a knight or a bishop in someone else’s chessgame. Again.

It’s an anti-fraud operation, now in a few countries. It’s delicate, changing hourly and daily, and I’m handling part of it. The short story is that, when I was blackmailed a few weeks ago, the first three blackmailers were small-time amateurs trying their luck to make a few bucks (two apologised afterwards), but the fourth was different – it emerged later that he was part of a crime gang, though we didn’t know it at the time. An anti-fraud agent – a really good chap, from Britain – handled the case and eventually had it wrapped up, deleting the fraudsters’ computers. Peace descended. Or so we thought.

Then suddenly, I received cries for help – the gang were coming after him, armed, and he needed to get away, pronto. They captured him, together with a woman, Felicia, who had bravely sheltered him, and her three-year old child, Phyllis. Suddenly, I was their only lifeline… and it went on from there. I managed to connect with his anti-fraud company (they work for banks), and since then I’ve been helping them.

The story went on through all sorts of complexities for twelve rather long days – it was demanding and I had to pace myself. That’s why I haven’t been blogging. After a week I managed to free Felicia and Phyllis, then further complications happened, and following that Felicia and another anti-fraud agent working for the company were attacked while driving in a car. Both have been in hospital at death’s door for some days, though on Wednesday (newmoon) I heard from the doctor that she had regained consciousness – what a relief. Meanwhile, he’s still on life-support. The unfolding situation is still rather hair-raising.

Poor little Phyllis is for now in the caring hands of strangers (I’m fixing arrangements for her), and the original British agent is still in captivity somewhere. Here am I, hidden in the far beyond, coordinating online with doctors, agents, taxi-drivers, handlers and sundry oddbods, fixing money, fixing heads, and with three or four lives at stake. Just a normal day on Earth, haha.

You meet some amazing people. A taxi-driver witnessed the attack, took the two people to hospital, then took them to another hospital and stayed with them for two nights and a day. I have just heard that he has lost his job as a result. What a good man – we’ll help him restore things. The doctor I’ve been dealing with has also been remarkable, though his wife probably doesn’t see him much.

Many people urge me to stay out of this kind of thing. Well, yes, but you’re also asking me to let these people die. That’s an option I don’t spend much time thinking about. In the middle of a crisis like this, you bond quite quickly and deeply with people. The first agent, in our last exchange on Skype before they got him, said he’d like to visit me on the farm one day, and I said, “You’re on, that’s a deal”. We haven’t spoken since, but I’m holding that thought, and I think he, wherever he is, is holding it too.

This hyperfocus business is strange. Another task I needed to do at the time was to reduce the length of my book Shining Land and remove some of the pictures – the removed stuff will go on the website. Bruce in Glastonbury, who is typesetting the book, recommended cuts because book production costs are rising and I want to keep it manageably priced. I’d been putting off this job but, when the above operation started up, happening in bursts throughout each day, I used the betweentimes for re-editing the book. It was a way of staying focused during a testy, turbulent, unsettling fortnight. So the book is now done and sent back to Bruce.

When I was diagnosed with cancer in November 2019 my life changed. Then last winter a crisis took me down deep and, by summer, it bounced me back up again, raked out but sensing there was something in life left to do. I seem now to be in a new chapter. My relative disability, aloneness and isolation, more a problem six months ago than now, mean I have time and space to do things – at least, those things I can nowadays do. Near-death and ‘chemo-brain’ have taken me through a level shift in the way I see and understand things, and while in some respects I’m saying similar stuff to 30-40 years ago, something is coming out between the lines that’s deeper, wider and stronger. Which goes to show, even fearsome things like cancer can have their blessings, if we let things be that way.

Having emerged from my shell during 2022, I’ve been cogitating what to do in 2023. What’s taking shape is this…

First, a number of Magic Circles – covering 21st Century esoterics and living as a stellar soul with an earthly contribution to make. Some will be like the Magic Circles of 2022 and at least one will involve a talking stick circle and energy-work.

Second, an online series of monthly Magic Moments (in the far beyond). These are for friends in other countries, those unable to attend Magic Circles and any Magic Circle attendees who wish to join in. Each month I’ll highlight a bundle of useful knowledge and insights, about the universe, time, the nature of our times, ancient wisdom, parapolitics, psychic geoengineering, inner aid work, healing, rescuing souls and whatever else comes up at the time – that kind of thing.

Each of these events will stand for itself, so you can join whatever you like, whenever you can. They will roll along, each rather different, unfolding as they will. They’ll all be reasonably priced and as accessible as possible. I might do one or two events for fellow cancer and terminal patients, if that is sought. Details will follow in the New Year. If you’re good at organising and have outreach in your area or network, please contact me if you’d like to host an event.

Then, third, while doing the above, I’ll be watching to see if some participants are up for starting a world-healing project with longterm aims, to continue and grow after I’ve gone. This is Version Three of earlier world-healing projects of the 1990s and since (the Hundredth Monkey Project and the Flying Squad born out of it). If and when a workable quorum of people forms, such a project can start.

There are people and bits to fit into place, and it’s an organic group process resting on who turns up and how it develops. I have a packet of seeds to hand over, with a little experience in growing them, but the garden will be evolved by the group itself – my shelf life is limited. In the 2023 Magic Circles, amongst other things we’ll have some tasters of this kind of inner work that will be useful to you whether or not you’re interested in the project. Without wanting to sound grandiose about it, there’s something ‘heaven blest’ about this, and some people might like to work within a reality-field of this kind.

Ultimately it’s all about gradually cranking up group synergy to a level where a group’s healing power is greatly increased – and the world needs it. This takes time, since a group is as strong as its weakest links, and it needs approaching in a somewhat matter-of-fact, steady and diligent way, starting at the beginning and giving it time. The Flying Squad managed 20 years, doing amazing work, though where we didn’t succeed was crossing generations and replacing ourselves with new members – so we ran out of numbers and steam. Third time lucky?

I might have only three or four years left for midwifing this idea: its success rests on the circle of people who step in and work together. The project will be pitched so that it is not too demanding in terms of commitment, because beavering away at this work longterm is more important than creating dramatic firework displays that then fizzle out. The basic commitment involves a meditation, wherever you are, once a week on Sundays, plus two or three weekend meetings per year, and there will be scope for greater and lesser involvement, to reflect everyone’s circumstances and availability, which can also change over time.

If there are people who feel right doing this, and if the right critical bits fall into place, then we can start, perhaps in late 2023 or in 2024. It will start in Britain, but folks in other countries will be able to participate remotely and, you never know, it might spread. If this sets a bell dinging, think about it over wintertime, and I’ll come out with more in a while. This is just a tender germinating seed at present, but it might one day become a tree. We shall see. Also, if option three doesn’t lift off, then options one and two will still be good.

If there’s one message I’m moved to convey, it’s this: whatever your path, and whatever your calling, do pursue it.

Now is not the time for holding back and awaiting another day. In whatever way works for you and lifts you up, whatever is your ability and contribution, it is time to come out with it and do it. If I can be of assistance in that, by doing what I do, then welcome. As I keep quoting, ‘For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing’.

I have some personal bits to put in place. Any offers? I need a part-time, nimble-fingered, literate PA with digital and communication skills and the sort of character and availability that would work well with a person like me. You don’t have to be in Cornwall, though that might be helpful, but the main thing is that we need to be able to sync well with each other. I also need an experienced techy Zoom moderator for the online classes, located anywhere, for a few hours each month. I’m looking for a further minder and companion too, living in Cornwall or Devon, to work alongside Penny – it’s occasional, not hard, you need to be a driver, there might be trips away, and I’m looking for someone for whom it would be uplifting and right. I can pay only expenses but, when it works well, there will be ample magic payoffs.

I’ve been quiet yet it hasn’t been quiet. Been going through some big emotional let-gos too, which have been both a wrench and the lightening of a weight. When I’ve wrapped up this operation sufficiently I’ll enjoy a getaway trip away sometime, somewhere. West Penwith, stuck out in the Atlantic, is a windy place in winter, and it sure has been whistling and whooshing around, with sunshine and monsoons in quick succession.

The cattle are down in the lower fields and the birds hide in the bushes and trees when they find the Atlantic coming at them with full-on gusto. The crows and jackdaws down in the woods, hundreds of them, work up a racket when dawn is coming – they’re my alarm clock – and in the evening they do flighty, crarking displays before settling in the evening, reminding me that it’s time to start thinking about dinner. I forget these things, you see – it’s an unhelpful aspect of hyper-focus.

Please put in a prayer for Felicia, child Phyllis and the two agents, both of them good men. I want them all alive and okay. It means a lot to me. Thank you for that. This is not the greatest of the world’s troubles, but if we all deal with our own little chunk of reality, together we’ll make inroads into turning this world of ours into the kind of place it really needs to be. Gaia needs a laying on of hands.

Thank you for reading. You mean a lot to me too.

With love, Palden

Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html (or on Spotify, Apple and Google)
Shining Land: www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/
All the photos here are from West Penwith in Cornwall, where I live – and a reminder of summertime.

Archiving

The past commutes toward the future

I’ve just done another upload to my audio archive of talks from former decades. It’s taking shape, gradually – my wintertime project.

This one is about ancient British time systems and the way they are built into ancient remains from the neolithic and bronze ages. It discusses key issues such as solstices, equinoxes, eclipses, lunar maxima and minima, the rising and setting of stars, zodiacs and subjective inner time.

I’ve just listened to a rather inspired one, which I did in Byron Bay, Australia, in 1992, shortly after writing the book ‘The Only Planet of Choice’. If you’re a TOPOC freak, you might be interested in this one. It’s called ‘An ET View of Terrestrials and What’s Happening on Planet Earth‘. Trivial, mad, timewasting stuff, of course…

I’m learning a lot from these talks – it’s funny, that. But when you’re in life’s last chapter, it’s really fascinating trawling through old stuff, just to get a balanced view of things you’ve been involved with through life. It’s a bit like putting yourself on the scales to see how it all balances up. You gotta look at the plusses and the minuses.

When I was 24 I had a near-death experience that changed my brains and removed a lot of my memory and capacity to remember the events of my life. This is why, if I haven’t seen you for over a decade, I might look vaguely at you while a memory is slowly emerging (sorry about that).

So it can be quite a surprise, actually, to hear myself rabbiting on from around thirtyish years ago – and I’ve come across some gems – but the thing is, was it the same life?

We have hundreds of crows living down in the woods below our farm. They assemble after autumn equinox and spend the winter together, dispersing around Penwith around spring equinox. In the evenings they get worked up, crarking a lot until, around dusk, they go into swoopy formations and an impressive tribal synergy process.

It’s like the corvid tribe has an identity and mind of its own, which the individual crows plug into as they do these dusk rituals, before they all settle in the trees to spend the night together, as one tribe – all of them probably related.

This is one of the blessings of my life at present. Another is the little birds, robin and tits that feed at the feeder hanging in the dogrose bush outside my door.

With love, Palden

www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

The two top photos and this one are from St Loy, in West Penwith, Cornwall