Cancer blogs – Page 6 – Notes from the Far Beyond

Headland Hopping

A pilgrimage

This being Britain, as soon as the tourists went home, the sun came out. It seems to be a law of British meteorology. My wooden cabin, with its big windows, gets quite hot when it’s sunny. I sat outside today, soaking it up. One of the very best cancer medicines is sunshine – and it’s free. I need to rest, because I’m shagged out – my legs in particular. Yesterday – pat me on the back, please – I did it. And it well and truly did me.

A friend, Kellie, came round and we did the hike from Land’s End to Carn Lês Boel [map here]. For me this was rather special – a personal pilgrimage to a special place. It’s the place where, if I could, I would dance my last dance. I go there whenever I need to say prayers and come home to my soul.

But it’s a long haul, for me in my condition – my walking sticks, serving as legs three and four, get tired too. It’s two miles each way, with a lot of up and down, but it feels like four. I was not at all sure I would make it, but part of me realised that this was my last chance – now or never. There’s a shorter route from Porthgwarra, but this route is special, and I wanted to do it while I could.

Pordenack Point (see the people on top?)

Heading south from the car park at Land’s End, first you come to Pordenack Point, a high cliff bastion which, from the first time I went there fourteen years ago, I knew to be a major clifftop sacred site. But back then there was little evidence of that – to local archaeologists it was just one more of Palden’s crazy, rather left-field ideas. That evidence has appeared since then. It’s a friendly, strangely homely place where you can sense happy gatherings, unions and reunions, even choral singing. The panorama over the sea is spectacular.

Pordenack has a prominently-placed chambered cairn, which would have been used 4,000 years ago as an initiatory chamber for deep retreats in this definitely cosmickle place. Also it would probably have been used for dying – it’s a great place for disincarnation, an esoteric spaceport for soul-takeoff toward the Western Heaven. Or it would have been a repository for relics and revered personages put there, at least for a while, to bless the landscape – rather like charismatic saints’ relics in medieval times.

The new discovery was that of a circular enclosure at Pordenack Point, perched on the edge of a near-vertical cliff. That changed things. It was found using LIDAR, a brilliant new form of aerial radar mapping that can pick up hidden remains under the earth’s surface.

Here comes the interesting bit: the enclosure is lined up exactly with two other circular enclosures inland – Castle an Dinas and Caer Brân (pronounced ‘Care Brain’). Both of these enclosures are large enough to host gatherings of a few hundred people, though at Pordenack the enclosure might hold twentyish people. These were all concerned with the coming together of people.

By my reckoning, Caer Brân – it’s just over the valley from the farm where I live – was the parliament and moot site for the tribes of Penwith in the bronze and iron ages. Archaeologists are far more cagey. It is right at the centre of the peninsula, at the intersection of two major trackways. One goes west-east from Sennen (for the Scillies) to Madron and upcountry, and the other, NE-SW, links all of Penwith’s stone circles, from the Nine Maidens and Tregeseal to Boscawen-ûn and the Merry Maidens. This trackway goes past four bronze age platform barrows at the top of Botrea Hill on our farm and over the valley to Caer Brân – I made a podcast about this trackway two years ago.

Castle an Dinas was a further gathering site further east, probably for the meetings of tin traders and for fairs and celebrations at Beltane and Lammas. This is deduced from two astronomical alignments emanating from the enclosure, aligned to the rising and setting points of the sun at those times – the sun rises over Trencrom Hill and sets over Conquer Cairn.

My feeling is that Caer Brân was rather more for formal and jurisdictional assemblies, while Castle an Dinas was more of a marketplace and social gathering site. Just up the hill from Caer Brân is Bartinney Castle, a hilltop circular enclosure with cairns inside it, which has a distinctly spiritual-religious character and a remarkable panorama. Legend has it that the Devil can never get at you inside the enclosure on Bartinney.

But, get this, three of these circular enclosures – Pordenack, Caer Brân and Castle an Dinas – are exactly aligned along a summer solstice sunrise orientation. Gatherings and festivals were really important to ancient peoples, and the people of the tribes of Penwith would come together at these enclosures at special times of the year.

In those days, folks weren’t as peopled-out and time-pressed as we are – there weren’t so many people around and, if you went anywhere, you walked. Much of the land was wooded, which gives a different space-perception to the open farmed landscapes we’re used to nowadays. Jumping in the car to visit friends wasn’t an option, so you met with them periodically, when you could, at gatherings like these, particularly at the solstices and cross-quarters.

You’d meet your relatives, distant friends, old acquaintances and new people too – at Castle an Dinas there would be interesting people from abroad, even in ancient times. There would be discussions, decisions, the making of deals and the settling of disputes. There would be trading, flirting, celebration, partying and morning-after hanging out, with moments of invocation, spectacle and holiness. They’d troop there from their living places around the peninsula, stay for 2-3 nights and troop back home again.

Pordenack Point is special not just for the above reasons. It hosts what must be one of the world’s largest collections of rock simulacra – natural rock shapes resembling ancient beings. There are whole gaggles and convocations of them – guardian rock-beings who face the vastness of the Atlantic at the far end of the Isles of Britain, holding the winds and waves at bay and protecting these isles from the storms, currents and weather gods. Some of the simulacra stand there chatting, and some are watchers, peering toward the far horizon. Some are Keepers of the Law, some are the Chanters of Intonations, and some are grumbly earth beings who resent the dwarvish bane they carry.

Then you head onwards to Carn Boel, the next headland along the coast. Carn Boel (‘headland of the axe’) and Carn Lês Boel (‘headland of the court of the axe’) form the bounding headlands of Porth Nanjizal (Nanjizal Bay, pronounced ‘Nanjizzle’). Carn Boel has a big outcrop with a hooked nose, on top of which is a rather magical stone and sitting place, looking out to sea. Perhaps a place for consulting ancient seers and soothsayers.

Then you follow a cliffside path – a bit challenging if you have vertigo – alongside Porth Nanjizal, past a fascinating granite outcrop called Carn Cravah. We had a good sit and a round of tea there – I was already having to pace myself because, since I got cancer four years ago, I have few energy reserves to draw on. So it’s an exercise in prana-management, energy-management, pushing myself but not pushing too much. Often there are seals hanging out in the water below, but they weren’t around yesterday, possibly because of all the humans frolicking happily in the water.

Then you get to Nanjizal, a lovely sandy cove. It lost all its sand in the storms of 2014, but the sand has returned now. It was quite busy. It was lovely to see children getting lost in the magic of the place and playing in the waves, without a care. At least half of the people present seemed to have foreign accents – central Europeans, accustomed to being landlocked, love Cornwall and its wide-open, oceanic coastline. Since Covid we’ve had a new wave of non-white, second-generation Brits coming to Cornwall, laying claim to the extremities of their homeland, to plant their hearts in the landscape and tune in to its roots, and I really like that – they’re welcome.

Then it’s a steep climb up endless steps to the top of Carn Lês Boel, a few hundred feet above the sea. This was a killer and I had to take it slowly, step by step, with two pauses and one sit. An old dog came puffing up the steps like a steam engine, gave me some friendly slobber and continuing on its way, followed by a puffing human, smiling as he passed at this old hippy sat there in his Arabic jalabiya.

The path onto the carn is on the right of the propped menhir

But I got up there. It was painful, but the Carn makes the price worth paying. Its energy-field is strong and uplifting. It’s a place of transformation and healing, with a lightening (levitational) and enlightening (uplifting) effect. You can feel it as you approach. There’s an ancient ditch crossing the neck of the Carn, marking the boundary of its sacred space – I stop there to ask permission to enter but the answer is always ‘Yes, welcome back‘.

Then there’s a gateway marked by two menhirs, one now fallen. At times, before cancer, I had a sneaky urge to come here one night with a few friends to re-erect it, but it never happened. The other gateway stone is a rare propped, crystalline granite menhir – raised up on small stones so that there’s a gap underneath, so that the menhir doesn’t itself touch the ground. The purpose of this is difficult to tell, but there’s quite a concentrated energy-field in the gap underneath. A similar thing happens at two other such stones: one at Trevean, half a mile away and probably built by the same builders at the same time, and the other a few miles up the coast at Carn Creis, amongst the Boscregan Cairns.

At the top of the carn is a rock platform with an energy-vortex that makes my body sway involuntarily when I stand on it. A nearby tipped-over stone probably stood on this vortex in former days. There’s another energy-centre further along the carn – a natural rock pile with a vortex emerging from the top – and, yesterday, over this and the first energy centre there were swarms of flying ants, swirling around psychedelically in the heat, following the flow of the energy-vortices.

When I’m there I settle and eventually lie down, finding myself drawn deep inside the carn. Esoterically it feels hollow. It does have seal caves in it, but this is a different kind of hollowness, as if there is an enormous atrium of vastness and voidness underneath, Tardis-like and bigger than the already enormous carn itself. There’s a feeling of very ancient beings here – geological beings who were here long before humans were ever thought of. There’s also a wide-open, upwards-and-outwards, infinite-space feeling to the carn, with its oceanic vista. The next stop across the ocean, thousands of miles away, is the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico, the Mayalands.

Carn Lês Boel marks the western end of the Michael Line, a line stretching across southern Britain along its widest axis, crossing Glastonbury Tor, Avebury and other major sites along the way. That’s one reason why this site seems to me to be working at a higher level than many other sites around Penwith – the carn is on a global great circle energy-line.

I needed to come here because I feel I’m at a junction point. I’m drawing a blank on where the roads lead from here. Unusually for me, at present I see no future – no sense of where I’m going or what happens next, or even what I want or need. I’m not sure how to interpret this, but I see three possibilities. One is that I’m just plain blank and need to feel alright about that. One is that I am on the edge of something, a new chapter, the form of which I should not even try to pin down at this stage, in order to allow it the space and freedom to develop. Or the third possibility is that my life might end quite soon, and that I see no future in life because there isn’t one – the path leads through a threshold to another, less physical world.

I can accept any of these, for although I turn 73 on my birthday (Tuesday 5th September), and I’m not that old, I feel like a hundred years. Life has been an uphill grind in recent years and I feel rather worn out. Tired of pushing hard to get through life, tired of all the palaver and complexity. But I’m not set on that either. I’ll be wherever it is most useful for me to be.

I’m rather a mission-driven kind of chap, and if there is something meaningful and manageable for me to do here on Earth, then I’m up for it. But my life has developed a kind of emptiness. I miss my family, my partner and her family. In the wider world I am well liked but not greatly included. Regarding will-to-live, it does make a difference when there’s someone to live for, and perhaps I haven’t appreciated this sufficiently, earlier in life. I’m not good at doing nothing, staying alive just to stay alive, and I’m uninterested in watching TV, entertaining myself, feeding my face and living in glorious isolation. There’s more to life than this, and if there isn’t, then perhaps I’ll be better off going back home.

That’s why I went to Carn Lês Boel, to place myself before the Vastness, to make a ‘here I stand‘ life-statement, to ask a question and make a prayer. I chose the hard path to get there since it might be the last time I can do that route. It’s special to me because, this time in particular, I have to work at it, wear myself out, and that’s a quality that pilgrimages need to have. I needed to open myself up to whatever is to come. To ask for clues.

I didn’t get anything definite for an answer except for one thing: when leaving the carn I paused and asked, “Is this my last visit?” and the answer was definitely ‘No’. That perked me up. But instead of giving answers, this pilgrimage brought a change in me, a change of state. The questions started mattering less, and I came to a feeling that everything is alright, okay and perfectly in order.

Even so, I had to build myself up for getting back. Part of me didn’t want to leave. Another part of me knew that I had to start now, while I still had energy and before my body stiffened too much. Being on the carn had recharged and reconditioned me, and I knew I just had to apply mountaineer’s grittiness, persevering through the next bit to get myself home – well, back to Kellie’s car.

So I psyched myself up and went for it. My legs and back were hurting and my strength wasn’t great, but I just had to do it. At times like this, when I’m out in the wilds, I have a secret wish my dear son would winch me up into one of his helicopters and teleport me back to the farm. But this is Planet Earth, and he’s busy with other things.

This said, the whole trip was really worth it. Kellie was great company too – a right-on lady who’d been a road campaigner in the 1990s and who, I sense, stands on the edge of taking on a new mission of her own sometime soon. She’s one of those women whose kids are hitting twenty, who finds herself standing in front of a rather big, wide-open space. She was attentive to my needs, pace and timings, which was great, but she didn’t fuss over me, letting me stagger along at my own pace – and this old cripple likes that! She also seemed to like the Queen Mary’s Rose Garden tea that I brought in a flask. And I liked the lunch she had brought, which we had at Nanjizal Bay, just before climbing up to the carn. Thanks, Kellie – and I hope the trip was auspicious for you too.

Another person who came along, in spirit, was the Okomfo Akue Ayensuwaa – a new soul-sister I’ve never met, and queen priestess of the Ayensu River in the Gold Coast of West Africa. We have worked together on a shared mission for the last nine months and, while Kellie and I were doing this pilgrimage, Maa Ayensuwaa was at her shrine, accompanying us in spirit. This lady is deep, and if she so chooses she really is with you. There’s a Nepali seer who has also entered the equation, and we form a sparky triangle. I’ll tell you more about this and our story another time, when it’s safe and proper to do so.

Today, on the day following our walk, my legs ache, and I’m happy. Sometimes I have a question but it turns out that I don’t really need an answer. Sometimes it’s just a matter of changing my state. Something is reintegrating. What I love about visiting a power point like Carn Lês Boel is that it can transport me out of the confines and coordinates of my life and raise me to another level. I get more of a panoramic sense of life – a sense of context and meaning that seems to slot everything into place. It’s a shift of viewpoint that casts another light on things so that they look different – and this in turn leads to different outcomes.

On this walk something else came clear. There are advantages to being aged, especially if I accept it fully and completely. There’s no longer a need to hurry. It isn’t a time of goal-orientation but a time of allowing. The urge to get there, to achieve objectives, and to get on with the next thing, fades into the past – almost as if it was another life. As my physical powers have declined, my psyche has become more spacious since I’ve been obliged to drop many of the concerns, activities and preoccupations that used to fill it. It means that, with an undertaking such as walking to the Carn, I can take each stage, each footstep, as it comes. I just keep on going, step by step, neither pushing nor giving up, and I keep on going until, suddenly, I surprise myself by finding I’ve actually got there.

Life is nowadays more of a here-and-now thing – not least because the past is fading in memory, and there isn’t a lot of future ahead, and when I spend a lot of time alone, other people aren’t around me, keeping me attuned to the issues, struggles and woes they face. So I lose track of most people’s sense of reality, floating off in my own bubble. That makes the present time expand into more of a timeless zone. It has a beatific effect, adding an enlivening sparkle to life, giving a rather childlike sense of spontaneous discovery of every moment. The urge to get there, to reach the destination, to tick off everything on the list, is a compulsion that touches me much less than ever before.

Yet again, Carn Lês Boel gave a gift of time, out of time. At life’s junction-points it’s a good place to go, as if to clock in to the universe to renew my contract with the Great Wide and Wonderful, to go through a reassessment turnstile, to get worked over by the spirits of the ocean and vibrational field of this holy cliff sanctuary.

So that’s what I did on Saturday.

Lots of love from me, Palden

The photos here were taken on earlier trips – I wasn’t in a photographic mood yesterday.

Website and archive: w ww.palden.co.uk
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcast s.html
Audio Archive: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

The Turning of Wheels

It’s raining. Unwittingly, we were teleported into October. Well, that’s the case down’ere in Cornwall. I’ve even lit up my woodstove to cheer things up.

Then I started working on a half-finished website – a shortened version of my 2003 book ‘Healing the Hurts of Nations’. I wrote that in Glastonbury as the Iraq War was building up. It’ll be ready dreckly – a Cornish word meaning ‘whenever’.

One of the funny things that has happened in my life has been that I’ve given focus to quite a wide variety of different subjects and areas of activity. I give each of them total attention, lots of time and energy, sometimes to the annoyance of people close to me.

Something comes out of it that lands up as a book or a project of some sort. And then, once it’s complete and wrapped up, I have a tendency to move on to something different. Sag rising and Gemini Moon. Four planets in the Ninth. Or manic Aspie obsession, perhaps.

Which means that, over my lifetime, I’ve accumulated a range of bits of work. This one here, ‘Silk Roads’, represents the para-political and geopolitical side of me, fed by the historian and feeding the stuff I’ve done in humanitarian activities and world healing.

The other side of this is that I’ve made contributions to many fields – astrology, geomancy and cereology are other ones – though I haven’t stuck around long enough to really milk any of them fully. Other people got better known than I. By the time the ideas I’ve put forward start gaining traction, I’m off somewhere else.

This traction process seems to take around 30 years – a Saturn cycle. It’s frustratingly slow when you’re younger, but it starts making more sense when your bones start creaking. It’s necessary to let go of the urge for fame and success, let others get the accolades and royalties, and instead enjoy feeding the collective psyche with ideas and impulses that take on a life of their own. After all, ideas don’t come from us – they come through us. It’s all to do with feeding future history with ideational fertiliser. Planting seeds.

At the end of life, that process seems to be turning around, for me. I’m leaving an online archive of much of my stuff on my now rather labyrinthine 600-page website, and it’s all there for anyone who wishes to trawl through it. Or for anyone who find the parts that are waiting for them. It has become a kind of wholeness – at least to me. But for most of you, bits of it will be valuable.

I’m now approaching what might be a crisis. I’m running out of stuff that needs revising and entering into the archive, and also my capacity to cook up new stuff is diminishing. Blogs and podcasts work quite well, because I can get them done in a matter of hours, but books, no, I can’t do books any more.

I can do single intense workshops like the Magic Circles I did last year, but these are in-the-moment one-offs, never to be repeated. I can’t do longer courses or series any more. For both better and for worse, chemo-brain and ageing have put me more into my right, intuitive-imaginal brain. It kinda trundles along like an old steam engine, but the livery is a tad smart.

I’m able to do a few more five-hour Magic Circles, if you’re an organiser who’d like to host one. I can’t organise them myself, but on the night you’ll get something really memorable, special for that moment and for the needs of those present. I’m contemplating doing some online… er… I’m looking for a term like ‘master class’ but better… one a month for 4-5 months. But really, I prefer now to work amongst people, not online. People power me up.

In my last life-chapter, I find myself looking for something new – there’s something that needs to come right. I need to find a situation where, as a partially-disabled but rather interesting old crock with cancer, I can play my part and make the contribution that I can make, and not be difficult to have around – and have someone cover my back or even consider hosting a good decline and death.

Investigating an iron age settlement in Penwith

I want to fix this sometime before long, in the coming year. Before it’s too late for me to make a change. I’m not sure whether it involves moving – I do love it where I live, but I’m too alone here now. It’s circumstances rather than location that matter most. Perhaps my world is gradually shrinking.

Anyway, here’s a re-posting of an interesting chunk from Healing the Hurts of Nations, in case your eyeballs needed something to get down on, to feed your synapses with some interesting stuff. It’s all about humanity’s largely unconscious attempts at becoming a planetary race.

That’s rather important, a key ingredient in the next stage of human evolution. All of the issues before us, including local and personal ones, are now planetary in context and thoroughly affected by global-scale influences. Like it or not, we’re becoming one humanity. It’s an at times painful process, and at times it’s amazing.

It’s a kind of destiny. It was not foreordained how we would get here, and the process has been in many ways cruel, but it’s what humanity is heading toward. It’s a bit like an acorn that is programmed to become a mighty oak – it’ll get there somehow.

The uniting of humanity is necessary because we can then join the wider, greater universal order, but only as a unified race of beings. At present we can’t handle that idea, but it’s coming. Also, the only way we can fix our own problems on Earth is by becoming a unified race of beings. It all boils down to simple questions: who decides and who gains? Well, now, by necessity, we’re a team, currently with 8 billion players.

We’re in the critical part of that process now. I’d suggest the process properly started in the 1960s and will, at least in principle, be worked out by the 2060s-70s. That is, by then, I think we will know the state of play on Earth, what we have to work with, and we will have started doing it. Whatever that entails at the time. (For more on this, click ‘The 2020s’ above.)

So, Silk Roads and Ocean Winds…

With love, Palden

Oak Dragon

Guess what? It rained.

Not all of the time, but at times it rained quite a bit. Nevertheless, Oak Dragon has been doing camps for 35 years, and British weather doesn’t stop it, even in force nine gales. Under the shelters, into our tents and vans, or into the domes we went, and sat it out, chattering. When I came home my joints and muscles ached, and it took three days for that to go.

But the compensating factors, the payoffs, far outweighed all that living in a planetary-body decrepitude I now live with. It was great. There’s a deep, magical spiritual uplift that dawns on everyone, and a family feeling, and there’s something special about disconnecting from the world for a week, as if going to another planet (which it is) – something captivating and engaging, moving and clarifying to the spirit. It’s like a multilevel recharge, and people’s souls start shining through.

In a way it’s a taste of future society. Conditions while camping are quite simple (we’ve got all the kit for it though), yet there’s somethinghere about a potential society where people have reunited and re-entrusted themselves to each other, and where the energy-saving effect of living in a community lifts off, opening out the possibilities for everyone.

One of the biggest things is the profound everyday sharings between people. Exchanges and connections, with an openness that allows us to experience more of the soul more and less of the adopted, conditioned behaviours in each of us. But group events – simple yet moving ceremonies, mystery-journeys, shared meals and the amateurishly uproarious show on the last night – create a kind of experiential sharing that is memorable to have been a part of.

One day, a wicker coffin was built in the middle of the camp. We all thought about ancestors of ours with whom we sought to reconnect, and wrote messages to them, during the day. Meanwhile an enormous pyre was built, with a flower-bedecked coffin containing our messages. With due aplomb, up in flames it went, and our thoughts and prayers went with them, and we could feel the ancestors close, and all of us were entranced by the enormous blaze.

Special moments. The theme of this year’s camp was ‘the Triple Goddess’ – the maiden, the mother and crone (though I think ‘the biddy’ is better). The camp was divided in three parts and we explored each aspect of the Goddess sequentially through the week. That was great. On the first night we were taken in small groups on a journey in the dusk to meet the goddesses, one by one (enacted by members of the camp), and we were given teachings and face-paintings and oracular moments.

As the founder of Oak Dragon (our first season was 1987), I was deeply moved by all this – I was shedding tears daily! In sharing circles I’ve even learned how to talk lucidly while crying buckets! They’re still here and at it, the Dragons, and many of them thought this was the best camp for many years. It’s particularly touching on a deep level to realise how, had I and we not started this, hardly any of these people, this family, would even have met. Many children would not have been born. Many lives would not have been reset and restarted. Many other miracles would not have happened. There’s something deeply moving about this and I felt privileged to witness it and play a part in it, as the Dragons’ kinda grandfather.

Also, I was so happy and relieved to see twenty- and thirty-somethings taking the reins, leading the circles, making the rules and teaching us wisdoms afresh. Many Millennials give me a feeling of confidence that the world will be alright in future times – they’ve got hearts and brains, good hands and broad shoulders. There was a good spread of ages at the camp, and there are signs that Oak Dragon might still be around in 35 years’ time.

You missed it. But there are coming years (it happens in late July and early August at Lughnasa). If I can, I’m going back. You can do that: you can come and go each year, and return years later, and the family, the tribe, rolls on, and you become part of it – your presence is your membership. You can come for the first weekend of the camp if you wish – though everyone who does so tends to regret leaving just as the camp is gaining momentum, so I don’t recommend it!

Now it’s true, I’m good at writing PR blurbs for things I like supporting, but actually, though clearly I am thoroughly biased, what I’ve written here isn’t too biased, actually. So it might sound like a sales pitch, but actually it’s pretty close to the mark. I had a great time, and it has changed my perspective, and I’m looking at life in a different way from just three weeks ago. Personally, I was honoured to be there, and I seem to be under strict instructions to come back next year. I’ll try. For me, it’s a bit like taking medication for the soul. I’ll leave it at that.

I even had the sneaky thought that it might be really good dying at a camp! What a way to go.

Meanwhile, I’m back in West Cornwall, and there’s more to come. And I have a pile of campfire smoke-infested clothing awaiting a sunny day for washing and drying them. Blimey, living on Earth ain’t half complex sometimes.

With love, Palden

www.palden.co.uk – here’s my site
Here’s an audio talk I gave at the camp, about t he Decline of the Goddess Cultures of Ancient Britain (1hr 30mins)

Pictures mostly by me, with one taken of me by Chrissie Ferngrove (another of the founders of Oak Dragon), without whom lots wouldn’t have happened…

Off

The sweat lodge fire at last year’s camp

I have a couple of half-written blogs that didn’t get the whole way. One was my current thoughts and tips for other cancer patients – I’ll complete that another time. I’m a bit distracted and unfocused at present. I’m going away tomorrow (Thursday) to join friends old and new at the Oak Dragon Camp in a field in Somerset, upcountry from Cornwall – that’ll do me a world of good, inshallah.

It’s funny because, although it’s perfectly safe and I’ll be with lots of friends, I feel quite wobbly about it! I think that’s cancer-vulnerability. Since getting cancer I’ve not had the same insensitivities and protections as I had previously. I can’t handle stuff as well, and get impacted more by things that other people just pass on by. If a lot of life happens, it gets a bit much. It’s a bit like being a little boy again, needing someone to hold my hand. But it’ll be okay – it’s change-apprehension. I’ve been on my own a lot – perhaps too much – and in my own world, and stepping out of that feels like quite a step.

There are things in life I’d like to change before long, though I’m not sure how or where, because it’s a set of circumstances I seek, really. To have someone covering my back and keeping their eye on me, and to be amongst people who can help me with the small things I need help with – often it’s just the fetching of a prescription, or a lift or adventure, or people popping round, and stimulus, or even a cup of tea.

Sitting with old friend Barry Hoon, sorting out the world, at last year’s camp

Anyway, that’s for another day. I’m off camping. I love it, and have camped through every decade of my life, ever since being in Cubs and Scouts. I was amazed at last years’s camp – I went through quite a healing. Beforehand, I could stand for two minutes without support (such as two sticks), and afterwards I could stand for up to ten minutes. It has stayed more or less like that, except perhaps when I’m tired and gravity gets heavy.

Last year was a time of relative rebirth, after the main cancer shock of 3-4 years ago, and I’m not expecting quite the same this year, though I feel I’ll either strengthen myself up or it will be time to accept that my limits are closing in – one of the two. It’s all part of the journey. Perhaps I have some emotional stuff to work out this time – after all, the theme of the camp is ‘the Triple Goddess’.

So, I’m almost packed – boxes and bags are all over the floor – and I’m quite amazed I have managed. Some issues that I’ve been trying to bring to completion have not come to completion, which means I can’t put them away entirely, but perhaps they might resolve while I’m away, or perhaps not.

At these camps, we leave the world for a week and have no contact with it. On the other hand, we’re close to the earth, and in a really nice location. So I’m off to another world for a while – it feels a bit like jumping into Cerridwen’s Cauldron or going through a wormhole! I’ll be back around 10th August.

I shall be doing the Sunday meditation as always, on the next two Sundays.

Love from me, from a rainy Cornwall.

Palden

To consort with a dragon — At the ancient yew tree at Compton Dundon church, on a trip from the camp with historian Ronald Hutton

Conformity

and the price of locking step

The Longships Rocks, with the Isles of Scilly Behind

There are two routes to the farm where I live, and they are shown on online maps. The problem is, one route is easy and good, and if you follow the other – as recommended on satnavs – then you’re likely to lose your exhaust pipe and damage your car, unless it’s a Land Rover.

We’ve tried to get the satnav people to change the instructions, but they won’t do it. They look at a satellite photo and see a road there, without knowing what its surface is like. So they even disbelieve evidence that we, who live here, send them – because the satellite says there’s a road there. Well, at your peril.

So when people come to visit, I send a map and instructions but some rather slavishly follow their satnav. They trust it more than they should, because it tells them what to do. As a result, they arrive late, flustered, after having made a few extra phone calls to me to find out the way. That cuts down our time together.

This highlights a big problem in our time. Many people – even quite aware ones, and even those who otherwise distrust a lot of things handed down to them from the corporate and governmental world – believe and obey what we are told. We set aside our own thoughts, experience, finer judgement and intuition, because the instructions say that we ought to follow this route, not that.

Precarity at Porthmoina Cove, Penwith, Cornwall

But if the satellite system breaks down (almost inevitable sometime), and if we lose our map-reading skills and intuitions, then we’ll get lost. Not only with finding the way, but also because we’re addicted to obeying orders. We all do it, in varying degrees! Even if you are a dissenter, an ‘alternative type’, or a sensitive soul, there will be areas of life where you snap to and do what you’re told, even at a price.

Even with conspiracy thinking, there’s an element in it where people disagreeing with the ‘official line’ transfer all their need for certainties to other things they’re told by other people, who sound as if they know what they’re talking about, and uncritically they follow a new set of rules.

One of my bugbears is typical: we are told that mobile phones and wi-fi are safe and okay, and we are addicted to all that phones have brought us (it’s an amazing technology). Yet, just consult your feelings, consult your body and your psyche, and something is not right. This radiation is changing you. It changed my life – I have a cancer caused by radiation, and when I mention this to others, or when I walk out of a room because I can’t handle being in the company of six phones with humans attached to them, there’s often an awkward silence. Ooops, I’ve said something wrong. If I mention the effects this has on nature, the world’s climate and on earth energy and subtle energies, most people just don’t want to know – even if they’re nature-lovers. Yet this is suicidal. And you don’t need a PhD to understand that.

We all do this. It arises from the fear that “I do not have the knowledge, authority and whatever else it takes to cut my own line through life“. This is the way that the Megamachine retains control – through imposing a fear of what might happen if you don’t obey, through telling us what’s right and what’s wrong, infantilising us and making us conform.

In the end, this is not about Them – it’s about Us. It’s about our deepest psychology – profoundly stilted and stunted by fear, guilt and shame, the big blockers of inner progress and of correction of the world’s ills.

We all do it – I do too.

I did this last year. I was accused of being a narcissist. Bewildered and feeling at a loss, I took it upon myself and carried that for about nine months, feeling bad. It was a burden of guilt – my own guilt from the past. Not about being a narcissist, but simply about feeling inadequate and flawed.

But I was bewildered and confused about it too. Perhaps I am a narcissist? Perhaps the person who put that on me was right.

But then, a good friend came along and grilled me – she could see I was unhappy and weighed down with it. She had experience of this, having been a ‘victim’ of a narcissist herself. Though she pointed out how a victim is part of the equation too. She questioned me about what had happened, saying in the end, “Hang on, it wasn’t you – it was the other person. The actual behaviour of a narcissist was displayed not by you but by the other person, and this was projected on you”.

Now this was a big revelation. Suddenly a weight started falling off my shoulders. It was like a forgiveness. It didn’t just dissolve the issue – it gave me a new perspective. It allowed me to look at the narcissistic tendencies within me – after all, I do like standing on stages, and I’m what Facebook would label a ‘public figure’. Part of me is shy and a hermit, and part of me loves attention. So there’s stuff to take ownership of here, and it has helped me understand much about my life.

I’ve always been something of a reluctant leader. There’s pain in my psyche over matters of power. But this has made me focus on ‘right leadership’. The world does need leaders, but of a certain kind. In my 2003 book Healing the Hurts of Nations, in a chapter about power and legitimacy, I give three quotes.

Rioters and vandals at the Oak Dragon Camp

“A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation. A politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service.” – Georges Pompidou, French prime minister, in 1973.

“You can erect a throne of bayonets, but you cannot sit on it for long.” – Boris Yeltsin, Russian president, in 1991 (Mr Putin, take note!).

“Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.” – Winston Churchill, Hansard, November 11, 1947.

These photos of me are by Claudia Caolin

This concerns right leadership. In my life I’ve learned a lot about this, and the question still continues. I’ve often felt like a monarch without a kingdom, a bishop without a church and a professor without a university – and this has been my karma in this life. It concerns service. It’s a big question for Virgos like me: the difference between service and slavery.

Service is willing, intentional and conscious. Slavery is reluctant, grudging and involuntary. Slavery is about resorting to type, conforming to what we feel is expected of us by those who seem to know better, and doing our best to avoid punishment.

If you’re going to be a shining star in the public firmament, then rightly or wrongly you need to fulfil what you feel are people’s needs and expectations. In this context, staying in power starts becoming more important.

The matter of staying in power is a difficult one. It’s not just a form of corruption and powermongery. It might be the case that, in a position of power, you actually are the best person for the job – it’s arguable that Mr Putin was the best for the job 10-20 years ago, and many a strongman is like that. But then your star starts falling and times start changing – Xi Jin Ping will experience this in coming years. The tide goes out on you, as it does.

But if you’re good at what you do, then you’re faced with the possibility that the person or the oligarchy that replaces you could actually be worse. I’ve faced this myself. Many people who rail at leaders are, frankly, covertly envious. Watching things that I’ve started deteriorate in others’ hands has been a big and painful lesson to me, bringing me back to a difficult truth: while holding onto power is not advisable, letting go of it can also be problematic.

It comes down to our motivation, and to being honest, often while standing in the spotlight in the ‘court of public opinion’, ruthless as it sometimes can be. Remember the British politician Paddy Ashdown? When he was caught with his pants down he owned up immediately – and everyone thought, “Good on you, Paddy – at least you’re honest”. Meanwhile, others were caught with pants down but they went into denial – they were clearly ‘in office but not in power’.

Tony Blair then came along – he looked like a clean pair of hands. But Tony, after a few years of doing some pretty good things, himself made a classic error – he sucked up to the big guys and took Britain into the Iraq war, when most people in Britain knew this wasn’t right. He sucked up to the Americans and PNAC, a cabal of believers in ‘The New American Century’, which now, chaps like Putin and Xi are showing to be empty and hubristic – America was being what Chairman Mao once called a ‘paper tiger’. Hm, fatal error, Tony – and he’s paid a price for it.

It’s all in the motivation. When I was a young acid head revolutionary in a former millennium, I realised then that it wasn’t just a question of replacing one evil system with another, whether through revolution or reform. It concerned the hearts and minds of the people actually sitting in seats of power. No one system has The Answer. No system is perfect.

Democracy has big problems, and we cannot say that our democratic governments truly represent what the people of our countries need. But autocracies like China and ‘managed democracies’ like Turkiye, though at times they can deliver the goods, have their problems too. It’s all to do with the matter of succession.

Some people moan about our king, here in Britain, but would an elected president and House of Lords really be a better solution? Hmmm, that’s questionable. King Charles III, well, you might or might not like him, but he’s okay, actually, as a person. Though his limited and mainly moral power is inherited, he happens to be an interesting person, and his son isn’t bad either – compared with what we could have.

I remember standing on stage at the Glastonbury Festival in the early 1980s, saying, as an astrologer, that Prince William, born during the festival during an eclipse, would be an interesting character as a future monarch. And he is likely to be so. Do we want to get rid of this guy and his missus?

Why do we expect perfection of our leaders? Why do Americans place so much belief in their elected presidents when they have lots of evidence that such belief is futile? Why do we continue electing the same old political parties, even when we’re disappointed in them?

I remember in 2005, many Palestinians asked me, “Why, after you had the biggest demonstrations in British history against the Iraq War, did you re-elect Tony Blair a third time?”. Well the answer was, “Because he’s still better than the other lot”. Twenty years on, that’s why quite a few people might vote for Biden or a clone of him – because of the other lot.

That’s the dilemma of democracy – it gives us second-best solutions. It is based not on consensus and agreement but on argument and dissension, meaning that 49% of the population land up dissatisfied, unhappy to support their government. Actually, through the quirks of our supposed constitution here in Britain, Margaret Thatcher only ever really achieved about 25% support of the whole electorate, even at the peak of her power. Is that democracy?

Sometimes you just have to stand on your own – a baby swallow on our farm

Well, it’s a common quirk of majoritarian democracy. In some countries, we vote for a plethora of parties, and then the biggest, or not even the biggest, cobbles together a coalition that might not at all resemble what voters wanted – as Israelis have discovered. It relies on conformity and grudging acceptance of bad political outcomes – AND we, the public, customarily disunited, then fail to support our governments wholeheartedly, even when we vote them into power.

The result is that it’s a recipe for failure, because someone somewhere is always opposing it. So this concerns the responsiveness of political systems to public need. And, besides, it isn’t democratic governments that really decide things: such governments exist to ease the cruel grating between the priorities of the Megamachine (the apparently ‘free’ market), and the needs of The People (whoever we truly are).

It’s all down to right leadership and right use of power. But that’s difficult, because sitting in the power seat is not comfortable, and it’s a 20 hour a day job, under a lot of pressure, and subject to cruel judgements from the public – witness those promising leaders, many of them women, who choose not to sit in that seat because it’s painful to get exposed to the sheer negativity of the commentariat and people on the street who land up even hating you.

So, if we want good leadership, we need to treat our leaders with greater empathy and support, remembering that they actually are human beings, with sensitivities. And we need leaders with human sensitivities. But we need also to hold them to account. We need them to change when they get things wrong.

It doesn’t always work to jettison old leaders and put new leaders in place – it can lead to a cycle of deterioration where we get leaders who are either bombastic and imposing, or leaders who say one thing and do another, or they make it sound as if they’re doing things when actually nothing is changing at all.

In fact, it might be valuable sometimes to welcome back old leaders – to give Theresa May or Tony Blair a second chance. Why? Because they’ve had a period in the wilderness, a time to think things over, and they might well have a deep need, in later life, to get things right. Well, perhaps. Second-term presidents can be a bit like that. They don’t want to go down in history for the wrong thing.

Anyway, so I might well be a narcissist. It’s a convenient accusation to make, for which one is guilty unless proven innocent – but even then one might not be believed. Just to be suspected is enough to ruin a person’s life. What’s needed here is owning up, in public, and self-correction.

Mistakes are allowed. Learn first time round and you’re doing alright. Learn second time round and you have a problem but it might be excusable. Leave it to third time round and you have a deeper issue going on, and it’s best to go – whatever his merits, Boris Johnson got to that point.

Human error. There’s accountability and there is forgiveness. Just because someone fucked up, it doesn’t necessarily mean they should be blacklisted – it means they need to self-correct, and genuinely so. And everyone, everyone, is a mixed bag – yes, even Bill Gates, who does both some questionable things and some laudable things (and, as an Aspie, he also has an exaggerated capacity to be misunderstood).

So, it might be that I’m a narcissist. To be honest, I really do not know, and it’s up to people’s own judgement. It has caused the person who accused me to completely cut off all contact and unfriend me, perhaps obeying the strictures of a famous psychologist in Canada who says that the only way to deal with narcissists is to cut off all contact.

Standing there for 2,500 years and not going anywhere

Well, I experience that to be rather cruel, actually, throwing out both the baby and the bathwater. I sincerely hope the accuser was right, because otherwise this fierce separation was a very destructive strategy. I’ve learned a lot from it and, for my sins, I now live in glorous isolation, and that’s my karma and life-lesson, and on some level there’s something good about it. Because, for better or worse, it enables me to write yardages of verbiage to you lot, and I sincerely hope it’s useful!

Life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans. In the end, there is no right or wrong – there are simply outcomes. And life is for the learning. So, whatever my fuckups, I’d like to be remembered at least for trying to redeem those fuckups and make things good. But there are some who would even question whether I’m getting anywhere with that.

In the end, it’s necessary to listen and to take in the feedback that people, life and its learning experiences give us. But not too much, because otherwise we become guilty of another crime – the crime of holding back our gifts, believing that someone else can do it better. However, if it’s a gift, it’s highly unlikely. The secret lies somewhere between taking a stand and keeping your antennae up.

With love, Palden

www.palden.co.uk
www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

Sunday Meditation

You’re welcome to join the weekly Sunday meditation this week.

It’s at 8pm UK time, 7pm GMT, 8pm in Western Europe, and for other places, plus more details, check out times lower down this page: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

This week I’m going to pay attention to Israel-Palestine and also to Sudan – in both places the virus of violence is running rampage. It’s as if, as Syria and Yemen die down as conflicts, the virus has shifted. The earthquake in Syria tapped and released the conflicted feelings of people in the Syrian civil wars, taking the fire out of the conflict. Yemen, meanwhile, has demonstrated one of the most regular causes of peace – sheer exhaustion.

It’s important not just to try to impose peace – this doesn’t necessarily heal the causes of conflict. What’s important is to seek to transform the sheer expression of violence and resentment into something that does something – something to address the fundamental causes of the problem. This requires some imagination and exploration.

Palestinians in Manger Square, Bethlehem

It means that people might suffer or die, which is tragic. But if hardship and death lead us toward a realisation that resolution must happen, this is more valuable suffering – a soul-sacrifice, in a way, which might save lives and hardship further on in the future. What is most important is the collective learning experiences that build a basis for resolution.

The Elders, Mary Robinson and Ban Ki Moon, have made a strong statement about this which is worth a read (link below). What they say about the demise of the two-state solution between Palestine and Israel isn’t new – it was visible 15 years ago at least. But at least they are acknowledging that the two-state framework is now obsolete, and a more fundamental rethink is necessary – this is back now as an international issue (itself an important development).

In Sudan, the eruption of wild violence is such a sorry thing. Sudan has so many unhealed wounds, from recent decades but also it goes way back. It is by nature a mature nation which could have a steadying effect on the Middle East, where an experiment in people power had been thriving until this dual coup d’etat fomented by two fighting generals and their men, overriding the people’s movement – and this, globally, is a worrying sign of our times.

So, if you’d like to join in, please consider the thoughts above. Praying for peace can work before a conflict erupts but, once it has started, it’s necessary to make use of what is happening, seeking to turn it to a more positive direction, to create situations and openings where positive developments may emerge. Sometimes a showdown or even a tragedy is necessary in order to turn around the local and the global consensus. Sometimes a ray of light needs to come into the situation in an unexpected way.

With love, Palden.

Here’s the Elders link: https://theelders.org/news/elders-warn-consequences-one-state-reality-israel-and-palestine

Some Austrian musicians who once came to Palestine to entertain and uplift the locals in Bethlehem – and the locals loved it.

Quacking Fakery

It rained. It’s strange for this to be important in a customarily wet country like Britain. But it rained down’ere in Cornwall.

We’ve had the best sunny weather in Britain in recent weeks, and we got the first rain – it came north from Brittany. I had been away for a few days in East Cornwall and, as the train home neared Penwith, the landscape changed colour and smell. It had rained.

The last two miles of the trip, pulling into Penzance station, is the best bit – cruising alongside the waves of Mount’s Bay, with St Michael’s Mount standing there majestically like a mythic castle transplanted from Gondor… When you return on the train from London (takes 5-6 hours), it’s like the real world opens up before you, bathed in the light of Penwith.

It was good to get away from home, to see things from another viewpoint. I seem to have been facing a variety of adversities for a really long time, and feeling rather locked into a loop where seemingly I had to accept a lot and couldn’t do a lot to change it. So going away was good, to spend time with an old friend I’ve known for forty years. It really helps to be in the company of someone who’s seen me through various chapters of life – there’s a mutual understanding there that I appreciate. Being a rather incomprehensible and inscrutable one-off oddball, it can mean a lot.

Regarding adversities, one thing I give thanks for is that it has really pushed me. With reduced capacities to handle things in the way I used to, instead I can draw on a tankfull of experience. That’s a blessing of old age – you’ve done it all before. Well, kind of.

Each day, spending a lot of time alone, I have rather a lot of available time, so I can go gradually though things to get them right. Takes ages. On the whole I think I’ve dealt with it all quite well – with a few errors and misjudgements thrown in. Could have done a lot worse.

The tide might even be turning, you never know, and the various nightmares I’ve been through might turn around. Perhaps I was being tested. After all, it is always the case that there is more to life than this, even in late life. Or perhaps life just gets like that sometimes, and it needs no reasons for doing so. Now that’s a thought.

Going down with cancer in late 2019 (or up, depending on your viewpoint), I decided to try to resolve as many as possible of the patterns of my life before I died. Actually, some of them have moved much further from resolution since then, becoming more complex and irresolvable. This has been disconcerting. Part of the reason for this is my own reduced capacity to remember, manage and handle things. They call it ‘chemo-brain’ but I find it’s ‘chemo-psyche’, since my capacity to process emotional and profounder things has changed too – it’s not just about brains.

But I’m being taught something here as well. Life’s been throwing googlies. I had a strange one recently. The cancer drugs I’ve been on produce funny neurological symptoms – funny feelings around my body. Well, some weeks ago I thought I had nits. But a few examinations and treatments have shown nothing at all there. It’s another of those funny neurological things. But the interesting thing is what this phenomenon put me through, in terms of self-esteem, feelings of failure and no-goodness, and all the stuff I’ve been carrying all my life that, only in late life, is coming clearer and visible. And I didn’t have nits!

I’ve written earlier (somewhere in this blog) that, as we come close to dying, we go through a progressive loss of control. When we are actually at the point of dying, there is absolutely nothing more we can do. It’s over. It’s all about what we truly have become – not what we aim, try, aspire or pretend to be, or avoid being, but what we have actually become. Not where your eyes are looking, but where your ass truly is at. I’ve wondered whether this escalating disarray is a kind of overload-lesson, to teach me to disengage further from at least some of life’s complexities.

For I am slowly deteriorating. My back is weakening, and I have a physical stomach issue and osteo-necrosis, and these are consequences of my cancer but having a worse effect on me than the cancer itself (I’m doing well with that). As I get worse I shall need real support (not just advice, which I get lots of), and I’m not currently managing to manifest it. So this might cause me to cut out earlier than otherwise I might. For me, the point of death is not exactly a medical thing – it’s more to do with willpower and how much I’m motivated to carry on.

You see, if you see your death as a home-going, it’s rather different. Most people see death as a loss or a departure, with little sense of what they’re heading towards. I’m rather looking forward to it, to be honest. So I’m not gnashing my teeth over dying – it’s living that’s more troubling. It isn’t about being on planet Earth – I quite like it here – but it’s more about living in the particular kind of civilisation we find ourselves living in at this moment in time. I’ve always felt a misfit. This might be the case for you too.

But there’s a job to do first. I’m not quite finished. After all, it’s a bit of a waste of time leaving before you’ve done what you came for. Earth is important for the progress of the rest of the universe, and many of us came because of that. Most people don’t realise Earth’s importance. This problem arises from the strange belief that we’re the only intelligent beings in this universe, and that Earth is a godawful provincial planet that we somehow got stuck on… and look at the mess we made of it. Well, there’s a larger story than that. I can’t relate it here, but I’ve done so in a few of my podcasts and podtalks (see notes below).

So these adversities have faced me with some quite big questions. One that I was facing during the winter was this (regarding the Africa mission I’ve been on): do I prioritise my own financial position and security, or do I let a person that I know and like die? That’s been quite a sharp question, often with only minutes to answer it. I had to face it several times, and it was difficult. But I’ve made my choices and stand by them, for better or worse.

Sometimes I find it really demanding to turn a problem into an asset and advantage, but that’s what I try to do. At this point in time it feels as if a coin is spinning in the air, in slow-mo, regarding all the various show-stopper questions coming up in life right now.

In a way, we all came here to get ground down, between rocks and hard places. We’re here to get burnished by struggling through impossible conditions. We enter life naked and helpless, and that’s how we leave it, and everything that happened in between is quickly blown away in the winds of time, well and truly forgotten and gone. We all have multi-generations of ancestors, hardly any of whom we know or remember – and, like them, you’ll be forgotten too. Even those who go down in history are often remembered for things they themselves might not want remembering for.

I became aware of this once on the Isle of Iona in Scotland. I ‘met’ Saint Columba, and he was troubled. In his view, everyone remembered him for the wrong reasons. He’s fondly regarded as a saint, but in his view he was a murderer, doing penance for his sins. This is what can happen for people who make a mark on history: what they’re seen as and remembered for doesn’t necessarily correspond with their own experiences and their own assessments of life.

I write this for the person who not long ago accused me of being a complete fake. Well, there’s truth in everything, dear sister, and you’re right. And also, as it happens, you’re incorrect. Fakes tend not to stake their lives on the kinds of things I’ve been foolish enough to stake mine on. Though you’re entitled to your opinion. It’s all in how we see things, really.

Talking of how we see things, it’s meditation time again on Sunday (and every Sunday). 8pm UK time, 7pm GMT. All the details are here. You are welcome to use up a precious half hour ‘doing nothing’ with us, if you so wish!

The photos from a lovely place in East Cornwall that I forget the name of, in the Lynher valley on the side of Bodmin Moor, near Rilla Mill.

Oh, and I’ve made a new soul-friend. The funny thing is, I’ve never seen a picture of her, and we might never meet in person, but we have done a lot of psychic and rescue work together since December, and it has been remarkable for us both. Maa Ayensuwaa, queen priestess of the Ayensu River in Ghana, wishes to send her greetings to you. She is a healer and priestess of the Akan or Ashanti people, who have deep roots stretching back to the same roots as ancient Egypt, and their cosmology resembles the Jewish Tree of Life.

Greetings to all of you from me too, across the void. Paldywan loves you. Don’t go away… because, inshallah, there’s more to come.

Palden

A podtalk about the significance of Earth (1h 17mins):
www.palden.co.uk/podcasts/PPArchive-Millnm3-LifeOnEarth.mp3

Further podtalks are here:
www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

Website and archive:
www.palden.co.uk

Conundratisms

One who Speaks does not Know.
One who Knows does not Speak.

Discuss. This issue has been rather a preoccupation for me throughout life. Not least because I’m articulate and reasonably persuasive. It took until my mid-thirties though for that articulateness to really come out.

Over the decades I’ve created yardages of verbiage in writing and sound, onstage, radio and video and in groups, so does this make me someone who does not know? Well, it could be true. I could, after all, be twisting your brains in a very nifty way, so that you don’t notice. I might be manipulating you, deluding you.

And there would be truth in it. Not the whole truth, mercifully.

Besides, I find I can’t just rattle off stuff just to fill column inches, sell something or meet a deadline. So I didn’t become a journalist or copywriter, even though I could – I can’t just write stuff to fill space. I find I have to wait until something meaningful and creative comes up, something to really write about. It has to come up and out.

One gift cancer gave me is reduced concern about my career path – a release from the ties of what I believe other people believe about me. Or, as a blogger, a compulsion to write stuff just to retain eyeballs, for fear of losing readers if I don’t. There are times when I go silent. My feeling is that, without originality, my work is second rate – and I’m a Saturnine Virgo and relentlessly self-critical in these things.

But the funny thing is, the more I’ve got used to this, the fewer the quiet times have become – what some call ‘writer’s block’.

There’s an advantage to self-criticism, in the long term – as long as you relax about it as you mature. Since self-critical people set high standards for themselves, they do actually rise to some pretty high standards. Even if, when they get there, they’re still digging away at themselves and running themselves down.

With some of my writing, I go over and over it again and again. And again. Neurotic. What often shocks me, positively, is that I post stuff online that I think is, well, good enough, when readers enjoy and appreciate it in no uncertain terms and it seems to be far better than I’d have guessed! Phew.

I have a retrograde Mercury in Libra that mulls things over a lot, attempting to reach a balanced view. So I go though periods of quietness, mulling and cogitating. Sometimes I might be having an Aspie meltdown, where everything gets terrible tangled, to the point where I’m short-circuited and go into a space of aghast inner blankitude, like a rabbit caught in headlights, a sort of void space out of which, at some point, there suddenly springs a guiding light of an idea and… ping, I’m back – I got it.

Then I’m off again. One of the little gladnesses I’ve had is that I’m a good reserve speaker – someone who can be called in last minute because another speaker dropped out. Give me ten minutes, a mug of tea, and tell me how much time I have, and I’m off. Mercifully, as rather a polymath, I have a number of subjects up my sleeve that I can rattle on about in quite a fired-up way.

I had to learn how to do that, and it broke through when I was about 32. I discovered that, no matter how much I planned my talks, the best were those where, at the beginning, I found I had no idea at all about what to say, even if I’d prepared something. I just had to set aside my fear, take three deep breaths, take in the audience, and start with the first thing that came into my head. Nowadays, it just comes naturally.

St Michael’s Mount from Penzance harbour

I wouldn’t call that channelling. It draws on my own knowledge, experience and character. But there’s something where, if Friends Upstairs want to drop something in, it’s easy for them to do so. Sometimes I get nudged, occasionally jolted. Sometimes they pull the plug on what I thought I was about to talk about, and I launch in deep, straight away, into something that feels like it’s coming out specially for the particular people in the audience. I’m always amazed that, when people tell me the clincher for them, it’s a really wide variety of my utterances that they mention. It’s fascinating.

But at the end of a talk I can feel a bit bereft because I can’t remember what happened – I’m the one that missed it.

So I’m fine about being filmed or recorded, because it helps me know what I’m actually saying to people! Not only this but, sometimes, when I’ve heard a recording afterwards, it’s as if some of the stuff I said was precisely for me – me teaching myself out loud, in public. Other people seem to like it too, which is a relief. So it balances out – Mercury in Libra.

I’m not one who repeats myself too much, and working from notes doesn’t work for me. I often have three or four talking points in reserve, and I cycle around those, but that process is still spontaneous, a wandering, a looping and a returning back to base. These anchor points kinda keep me on track amidst a wide ocean – a Gemini Mooner like me can go off sideways and add too many footnotes, so that people can’t remember what on earth I was talking about.

Part of the reason for this is that it wasn’t on earth. But I have had to learn how to anchor to a few key points, to give my poor audiences a few memorable nuggets to lodge in their brains. Judging by the ramblingness of this piece, I still need to learn it, even at my age.

As a Gemini Mooner, one of the issues I had to learn was this. People remember three things. Repeat: people remember three things. In any talk, book or radio programme, I always try to look for three core points that need bringing through. I might not know how I’ll do it, but I kinda flag them up in my back-brain for covering. If I don’t do this, I go into too much intricacy and people can lose track. It was an interesting talk but they can’t remember what it was about.

What’s changed, since I had cancer 3-4 years ago, is that, more and more, I find myself anchoring back spontaneously to a wellspring inside. I clear my psyche, the process starts up, something comes up and off we go.

This very blog is an example. I was sitting there drinking rose congou tea, contemplating Lao Tzu’s saying: One who Speaks does not Know, and One who Knows does not Speak.

Well, that’s true. But there’s a way round it. The resolution of this dilemma comes spontaneously. Part of the deal is that, when it comes, it’s necessary to get down on it and write it there and then. Because that creative streak doesn’t stay. It’s a momentary thing, and part of the creative process of the universe. It speaks for that moment. If you don’t catch it, like a sailor with the wind, it comes and it’s gone.

So Lao Tzu’s statement is true. I as a voluble person need to take note, repeatedly. Yet it has something to do with the message and the vibe that’s concealed between the lines. It’s that direct mind-to-mind and heart-to-heart communication that hides behind the clattering of expressed words. Something that AI will have difficulty falsifying since AI is imitative, not originative. It doesn’t come from that wellspring.

Up to the 18th-19th Century, it was part of an author’s remit even to use flexible spellings, even on the same page – and that was part of the poesy of prose.

True authors are here to authorise authoritative authenticity. I didn’t go on a creative writing class – I just did the however-many thousand hours and years needed to gain a certain mastery in the craft of wordsmithery. That where those aspects of life that we habitually consider to be problems can become assets in disguise. I’ve been complaining of aloneness in the last two years and, well, it has given me space to create. To do so, it’s necessary to be alone and ‘antisocial’. Life has its strange compensations.

That’s a realisation that particularly comes toward the end of life. Everything has its compensations, its reason for being as it is, or was. Often it’s not at all easy to see how this is, when we’re busy struggling through life’s relentlessly tangled web of attention-seeking demands that present themselves for free on a daily basis. Until, that is, you die.

Then other stuff starts happening and, with luck, you begin to see the real, full, all-round reasons why life needed to be the way it was. Going through this process allows us then to pass through the gate and move on.

Not going through that process tends to make us take a left turn, a quick road back to incarnate familiarity – the hope for chocolate and the fact of blizzards and droughts. We have a strange addiction to being stuck between rocks and hard places. The Council of Nine called this ‘bottlenecking’. It’s the primary reason why Earth’s population has swelled so quickly to, now, over eight billion.

Many of us have repeatedly been forgetting why we came, recycling back into life again without fully working things out. We’ve forgotten that this is a training, an initiation into dense physicality, for the deepening and broadening of the scope of our souls.

But there is the option to go on to other realms and worlds – some familiar, a few of them ‘home territory’, and a lot more that we become ready to encounter by dint of what we have already become.

The Road goes ever on and on. Out from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone. Let others follow, if they can.

There was a cuckoo on the farmhouse roof just now, making quite a cuckoo racket. But the swallows have gone to bed – busy day tomorrow. The crows and jackdaws have mostly dispersed around Penwith for the summer. And a nightjar sometimes haunts my roof late in the night, after the bats have disappeared into the dark.

Paldywan sends love from The Lookout – especially to YOU. Yes, you.

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https://penwithbeyond.blog

– if you sign up as a ‘follower’, my blog posts will be sent to you by e-mail, whenever they come out

www.palden.co.uk

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If you wish to find out more about bottlenecking, here’s a podcast: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts/PFB13-210906-SoulEducation.mp3

Tol Pedn Penwith – the hole at the end of Penwith

Punch Cards and Power Points

A website goes archaeological

My website has just gone through its Saturn Return – 28 years old. Erk.

Born in the antediluvian days of the ‘information superhighway’, when John Major was prime minister…

Every coupla years I’ve added an extra bit to it, and it’s like a new age minefield now. Tread carefully.

Unless I suddenly earn a million between now and the time I pop my clogs (with Jupiter in Pisces, such things can sometimes happen, as a kinda cosmic joke!), this is the legacy I’m leaving.

Wurdz. Bl**dy loadsa them.

Perhaps you might now understand why, in late life, I’ve developed a slight allergy to sitting at my computer to chat with people… (‘cos computer keyboard=work, for me).

It started with pink and green punchcards on tea trolleys in 1971. I was on the world’s fourth largest computer at the time (London Univ), and it had a memory of 56k – hot shit! We had the latest tech too – dot-matrix printers! But no keyboards or screens – they came later.

It was my dear old friend Sig Lonegren who nudged me to get on internet in 1994. Initially I had reservations. Perhaps part of me knew this would be a life-changer. I’d been in printing and publishing for some time, but this… well, I had to get ready for it.

Actually, I was on my Saturn opposition, at age 44. This was a step-change. And then… whoosh… egged on my whizz Avalonian programmer friend Barry Hoon, before long, with him, I was creating www.isleofavalon.co.uk which, by 2002, was getting a million visitors per year. (Apart from the content, people liked it because it had zero advertising – no estate agents or shop adverts in sight, and it worked, for the town as a whole.)

One thing I’m looking forward to when I die is the possibility of returning to direct mind-to-mind and heart-to-heart communication. Paper, print, messages and web-pages, well, they have their virtues, but when we’re talking about ‘sharing’, internet just doesn’t measure up.

As an early adopter of internet, one thing that disappoints me about the way things have gone is that too many people, imho, quote and re-post other people’s stuff and media stuff, and too few actually speak for themselves and create from themselves.

I get five-ish friend requests every day, and I look at everyone’s FB page. If you speak for yourself, you interest me more, and you’re more likely to become my friend. People who hide behind re-posted material or blankish pages… well, please come out and give us a sign of who you actually are!

I do have a way of making uncomfortable statements (a bit like Martin Amis, wordsmith, my age, who’s just died)…

One of them is that withholding is a crime against humanity.

I submit this for your consideration.

Having lived through a remarkable slice of time (1950 to now), I’ve been privileged to be surrounded by and adding to a pool of emergent knowledge that lays foundations for the future. My website’s Saturn Return is significant (at least to me) because it marks a transition from a website to an archive.

An archive of an old codger who saw some stuff and did some things to add to what’s changing in this world. This, on the offchance that, like William Blake, my stuff might be valued more after my passing than during my life!

But then, a Saturnine soul like me has to accept that time makes its own decisions, and his Jupiter in Pisces speaks from the Void, and it can take time for time to catch up with Voidness.

www.palden.co.uk

If you wish, join me and us in meditation this evening (Sunday) at 8-8.30pm UK time (7-7.30pm GMT). Let’s give this world a push to get through the rather dangerous Mars-Jupiter-Pluto triangle that’s been firing off for the last few days. Angry stuff – facing the music – grasping the nettle – time to be brave.

Love, Paldywan

Time

It’s multidimensional

One of the big themes of my life has been time – dealing with the present, understanding the past and envisioning the future.

The future has preoccupied me since I was a late teenager – sitting around with friends, discussing things, trying to see which way the world will go. That’s still an open and evolving question, though for me the issues are clearer now [see: The World in 2050] and my perceptions of fifty years ago, honed by experience and the passing of time, in essence remain quite consistent.

Looking at the future led me to the past. As a student at the London School of Economics during the ‘troubles’ of 1969-71, I’d experienced what it’s like being in a revolution that is suppressed and fails – a devastating transition from inspired ferment to cruel disillusionment. Many are the peoples round the world who have experienced similar since then.

Trying to deal with my ‘political pain’, I studied the movements of change of the past, seeking clues. Then I was given a gift.

Ragged and burned out, one summer’s day I hitched out of London, landing up two days later in the Orkney islands. I found the Ring of Brogar, a big stone circle, and innocently I decided to sleep in the middle of it. I wasn’t expecting a major soul-intervention that night. But it came.

I had a profound lucid dream in which hundreds of people danced around the circle. Chanting and stamping rhythmically as they moved round it, they made the earth resound like a deeply donging bell, generating a charged magical atmosphere.

Loving my favourite stone at Carn Lês Boel

One of them came, reached down and said, “Come and join us“. Which I duly did. From then on I was a smitten megalithomaniac. A deep memory of ancient times was reawakened. Back then too I was involved with time, responsible for organising longterm observances and rites to work with Metonic, Jupiter, Saturn and other longer cycles of time.

Guess what, in this life, by the mid-1980s I was initiating consciousness-raising camps, doing a modern version of the same thing. And they were astrologically timed. After one of the camps I had a moving inner experience where the modern I and the ancient me were dialoguing, sharing our perspectives from our contrasting points in time.

So, I’ve been an astrologer, historian, antiquarian and futurologist. I didn’t particularly plan this but that’s the way it unfolded, in paragraphs and chapters through life. While studying astrology in the 1970s it felt more like remembering than learning afresh. By 1990 I had compiled The Historical Ephemeris of historical cycles with a timeline of events, showing how major-scale changes in human ideas and activities can be identified by observing such cycles. A labour of love, much ignored by historians, it needed doing and I did it.

For the last decade I’ve been studying and mapping West Penwith’s prehistoric sites. We have lots of them. One day I realised why the ancient Penwithians had gone to all the trouble of building these things. Experiences gathered in world healing [see: The Flying Squad] over the previous 35ish years led to a lightbulb moment that came up at Bosiliack Barrow, where I go whenever I seek insights. It’s funny how a revelation often simply uncovers something obvious and already there, though until then it is unseen.

I’m not particularly into earth healing, lightworking or healing and prayer circles, though it’s important that people do these. I’m more into working surgically with specific issues that obstruct progress, in an inner journeying and energy-working sense. It involves addressing fundamental social and cultural patternings, tendencies and institutions that become spotlighted by current events, digging down to get closer to the heart of things, unconcealing and helping to heal the layered pain and damage that humanity has brought upon itself over time. In our own time, these issues are getting in the way of necessary change.

CASPN members, after doing maintenance work at Boscawen-ûn

Consciousness work is upstepped immensely when groups of people work together. Over time, in activities with others that I’ve been involved with, remarkable outcomes have occasionally arisen from it. The Council of Nine (I wrote a book for them in the early 1990s) had emphasised this too: “If there are thirty-six with one mind, focused together, then the entire world, even the universe, may be changed“.

However, an undistracted, unwavering, one-minded focus is needed for that, and it’s not easy. If a group or network knits itself together over time, melding as a group, it can build up a momentum and focus that can take us at least part way along that track.

Sometimes it even happens unintentionally in the public sphere – moving moments experienced at a captivating music concert, a funeral, an uprising or even in a football crowd. Notable in particular are those moments that shake the awareness and feelings of mainstream people in their millions – poignant events, situations and crises that can sometimes evoke a one-mindedness in millions of people at the same time.

When the numbers rise, the intention and energy-holding are good, and there is real feeling behind it, the work people do in this field does have a positive effect, incrementally raising the world’s vibrational level. I encourage you to include this kind of work as a slice of attention in your life, in whatever way is best for you.

Back to ancient sites. The key sites are those that enclose space – stone circles, enclosures, chambered cairns, caves, wells and dolmens. Here intense vibrational fields can be built up within that space. That’s what the people in my dream fifty years ago were doing.

In many ancient sites we can still feel vestiges of those energy-fields, built up over the centuries during the megalithic era. A presence is in residence. At Boscawen-ûn stone circle, a couple of miles from me, it’s quite common that, when you arrive, someone else is leaving, and when you leave, someone else arrives. There’s something bigger going on here.

Being a peninsula at the end of a bigger peninsula (Cornwall and Devon), West Penwith has definite edges, bounded by the sea. Even the landward side in the east is guarded by three hills in a dead straight line (St Michael’s Mount, Trencrom Hill and St Ives’ Head), creating a threshold and energy-shield. (Interestingly, the G7 conference held in Cornwall in 2021 was located exactly on this line.)

As I did my research, it came clear that this was not just a fascinating collection of ancient sites – they constituted one big, integrated system, roughly 10×15 miles in size, and purposefully built. It was rooted in the landscape, anchored to key hills (neolithic tor enclosures) and promontories (cliff sanctuaries). The location of major sites such as stone circles is largely determined by these.

These sites are also variously plugged into underground water-energy systems beneath them. Stone circles and dolmens are sited on top of ‘blind springs’, energy-springs emerging as a vortex on the surface, which the ancients then entrained and focused by building an ancient site on top.

They’re also plugged into the wider cosmos by alignments to the rising and setting points of the sun and moon at key times of year, as well as, in some cases, certain key stars – marked out by alignments to menhirs, cairns or natural features. The designs, geometry and mathematics of many sites also embodied principles such as the Metonic cycle, a 19-year cycle of relationship between the solar and lunar calendars, both of which were used at the time.

Stone circles and other sites are placed in remarkable locations, with a visible relationship with the lay of the land. Tregeseal stone circle, near me, lies in the apex of a U-shaped bowl of hills which meld together to highlight a gap in the west, toward the sea and the distant Isles of Scilly, which float on the ocean like a mystic realm on the edge of the world.

Stone circles, enclosures and certain hills and features were amped up by cairns, menhirs and other markers that were aligned to them, acting as feeders, relays and batteries. These integrated the system as a whole into a network. In some cairns, bodies were buried not for the memorialisation purposes we now practice with our dead, but to bless and light up the land and the network by burying the relics of revered people at carefully-chosen places – rather like the medieval reverence for saints’ relics.

It was all for the engineering of conditions in which advanced consciousness levels could be achieved – though there were other purposes too. Enclosed energy-spaces such as stone circles and chambers are insulated, charged-up spaces. In Penwith, background radiation in a stone circle is much lower inside than outside it, and this applies also to background psychic noise. A protected, charged space like this allows clearer and stronger psychic, shamanic and healing work – and many of you will have experienced this yourselves.

At the Hundredth Monkey camps of the mid-1990s we built up an energy-field in the circle that resembled those that they built up at ancient sites. An energy-field morphs into a reality-field, where the framework of reality changes gear and things become possible that are not available under normal circumstances.

This was noticeable at the end of a camp when we closed the circle – the mood would subside like a slow puncture, ‘normality’ would restore its grip and the background noise and clamour of the busy world around began intruding again. We had been in a magic space with very different character, norms and rules.

Inside chambered cairns there’s a profound quietness providing ideal conditions for solitary meditation, vision-questing, innerwork and conscious dying, and also for the treatment of seeds, tools, elixirs and magical objects. Insulated from outside by stone and earth, such cairns sit on energy-vortices generated by the intersection of two or more underground water streams underneath. This makes the chamber into an energy-bath or orgone accumulator, valuable for entering into altered states.

Apart from ‘getting high’, why did they bother with all this? It had a direct bearing on the fortunes of people and tribes, as an investment that paid good dividends. Although their civilisation was materially simple, it was culturally and spiritually sophisticated. They had an advanced technology that worked esoterically with the essence of life, the core dynamics within all things, with which they could carry out forms of genetic modification, long-distance communication, medical procedures, ecological and climatic regulation and societal problem-solving.

They weren’t manipulating genetics the way we do today: instead they created energised conditions within which organisms could modify and enhance themselves, and this has been demonstrated to be possible in modern-time experiments too. They needed no telegraph wires or radio waves for communication: trained psychics, often some of society’s neurodiverse people, trained up, would enter a state in which time and distance ceased being an issue.

As for weather-modification, by siting menhirs, mounds and stones on top of energy-conductive water and metal veins and magnetic anomalies, they could neutralise the excesses of bioelectric charge between land and sky, reducing climatic extremes and damaging weather events. Conducting sometimes long and complex rites they focused on keeping Gaia and the spirits of land, sea and sky happy.

Different kinds of sites evoke different responses – this concerns consciousness-engineering. Just over the valley from me is Caer Brân, a circular hillbrow enclosure surrounded by earth banks, which could hold a gathering of at least 300 people – I believe it was the parliament site for Penwith in the bronze and iron ages. Parliament-moots were probably held annually at a fullmoon around summer solstice, exploiting the virtues of the time and the site, which is exactly aligned with two other circular enclosures (Castle an Dinas and Pordenack Point), with a summer solstice orientation. Though it has a remarkable panorama encompassing Mount’s Bay and the Isles of Scilly, you can’t really see the view from inside because the surrounding banks obscure it. This entrains consciousness upwards and inwards.

Meanwhile, on a neolithic tor hill or a hill camp, awareness opens out over a wide vista, invoking an upward-and-outward feeling. Or at some sites our attention might be entrained in certain directions – at Boscawen-ûn we are drawn toward Chapel Carn Brea, the very last hill in Britain, a beacon hill topped with a neolithic longbarrow and bronze age cairns. In contrast, in a chamber or holy well a deep interiority arises. Ancient sites had added properties engineered into them.

People did ongoing magical work over many generations, well-trained, focused and serious in intent. To crank it up further, they chose power points in time – an eclipse, solstice or planetary configuration – amplifying and pushing their energy-work over a critical potency hump.

There are things to learn from all this. I’m not suggesting building new stone circles everywhichwhere, but there are ways we can amp up world healing work by learning from the shamanic methodology and philosophy that megalithic peoples used. One key element is groupwork and another is the focus such a group can build up. In some respects this was easier for the ancients since they were mostly related, well accustomed to it and also much less psychologically scatterbrained than we. But we moderns have our virtues, such as psychospiritual diversity, a lot of creativity and a good measure of despair regarding the state of the world.

My feeling is that, in the coming decades, events on planet Earth will reach moments of intensity where everyone worldwide gets a deep and clear sense of the full extent of what’s at stake. Events have a way of manifesting scenarios before us that stir us up, press our collective buttons and present sharp dilemmas – whether they’re big events such as the recent earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria, or small, highly poignant events such as a refugee baby washed up dead on Greek shores. These experiences focus minds and hearts, invoking archetypal imagery, stirring sentiments and moral choices. This global process will intensify in coming times and there’s an inevitable crunchpoint approaching, or a few of them, where we’re faced with events of a ‘this really is it‘ kind.

It all hangs around whether we pull together globally or atomise into a tangled mess of narrow interests. It’s not just a matter of practical cooperation, effort and peacemaking, but also one of one-minded and one-hearted inner consensus. We’re faced with a mountain of global issues that require a miracle, or a stream of them, and normal means of fixing our problem are too slow and clunky. Only a quantum shift of approach and priorities is likely to prevent disastrous levels of hardship and disruption in coming decades.

A miracle requires the focusing and intensification of an energy field to the extent that our former understanding of reality flips. Nothing much might immediately change, but everything looks and feels very different. A new reality-field supersedes the previous one. The rules change and remarkable things happen. This depends greatly on how, collectively, we see and judge things – a disaster can be made good if if leads to fundamental changes.

This involves going to the heart of things, dealing with them in a psychospiritual way. Not to the exclusion of practical solutions, but complementing them. Making a big step in the collective heart of humanity. Creating a resonance that overrides the psychic disarray and disturbance of today – a central cause of today’s global problems.

‘Disaster’ means out of tune with or loss of the stars. Out of sync with nature, human nature and the cosmos. Out of sync with the guiding light within. The ancients did their shamanic energy-work to keep things resonating well, knowing that everything is interconnected and interdependent. Fixing the world today involves a big cooperation in every possible sense, between humans and with nature and the cosmos.

We have this in our collective memory – it’s a taproot memory in humanity’s collective soul. If we read the underlying meaning of current events to be a manifestation of all that we semi-consciously fear, dread, need and hope for, it is possible to see how events are leading us toward a crunch point, a truth point. A point of focus where everyone’s awareness potentially comes together to think a new and deep thought.

So something in our deep memory from former millennia holds a key here. And it concerns the future.

Time is a strange thing, and dimensional. When I went down with cancer, my life expectancy was shortened yet strangely I was given a gift of expanded time. In a time-poor world I became time-rich. Not long ago I asked myself whether I’d like my old life back, and I realised I didn’t really. Though life is more difficult now, and serving time as a cancer patient, 70% dead and hovering there, mostly alone, has tested me to the limit, time has morphed toward a more timeless zone where other things start happening. Loss of physical capability has led to something of a gain in inner ability. Life on Earth always has its compensations!

Perhaps that’s where the world is heading. Global loss of traction caused by increasing crises and disruptions could well lead to a similar compensating factor, experienced by growing numbers of people. I’ve discovered this in the crisis zones I’ve been in – such intensity can pull out the true human in us. When your life is at risk you play for high stakes, and there’s no alternative. You’re drawn into the immediacy of now, and time changes in power and potency. That’s where root-questions are met. From a world healing viewpoint, that’s where the crunchpoint lies, and from it will be born the next world, whatever shape that takes.

Oh, and by the way, if you like bathing in the timeless, you’re welcome to join our circle of souls meditating together every Sunday!

Time to go. Thanks for reading this (it was a bit long). Written using human intelligence (what’s left of it).

Love, Paldywan Kenobi