This is a note I posted on Facebook in response to feedback about this blog.
Neolithic placed stones on Zennor Hill, here in Cornwall
Thanks everyone, for your comments. While the compliments are heartening, what I find most interesting is the variety of ways my blogs go ding and clang with different readers in differing ways. That’s just fascinating.
With these blogs I don’t really have a clear intention. I’m just trying to record things that come up along the strange path of being a cancer patient with twiggling antennae and a lot of time on my hands to reflect, look at things from one step back, and to use my wordsmithing skills to try to squeeze them into written lines of verbiage.
Believe me, when I was young I struggled hard to write down my artesian aspie thoughts, and it took a long while – decades.
This is one of those things about living on Earth – stuff doesn’t come easily and we have to work at it. We have to serve time, slogging through loadsa shite to get really good at things. This is a key part of our soul-honing process and one of the big reasons why each of us chose to come here.
That’s what I’m trying to do. So I have cancer. So my challenge is to get good at cancer, to exploit its openings. Writing this blog is part of my medicine.
I don’t pre-think it. I’ll just sit on it until, one morning, I wake up with a nugget, a starting place – it kinda fizzles – and it comes out of the present. Which is how sometimes you’ll hear about my toilet challenges and other times it’s about meta-cozmickle panoramas.
Thanks for being with, and I’m really glad that the stuff that gets dredged up here brings insights, connects a few things together and reminds you of what you already know – though perhaps put differently so that it can be seen with another optic.
As someone said here, who knows if I am right? That doesn’t matter. What matters is to bounce things around because it helps our seeing, helps us see things from other angles, and it loosens us up.
Actually, I’d be quite glad and relieved to find out I’m wrong in many of the things I say and write, but I’m not sure whether I’ll be allowed that privilege. We shall see.
This isn’t really a question of politics or ideology any more. The word ‘crisis’ comes from ancient Greek. It means a situation prompting us to distinguish, choose and decide.
Lynne and I went adventuring, visiting a 2,000 year old iron age settlement here in West Penwith. What I love about these places is that it’s possible to get a feeling of the lives of people who once lived there, long ago – of grandparents sitting by the fire, children playing, grown-ups coming and going, busying themselves with tasks and chores.
This settlement, Goldherring, had a workplace feeling: it looked as if many of the buildings were functional workshops and stores while only some seemed to be residential.
There was a chill, rather cutting springtime wind, even in the milky sunshine, so we squatted down in the sheltered remains of a roofless iron age building, erected about a hundred generations past. Out came the tea flask and biscuits – necessary ingredients in antiquarian investigations – and we sat there chatting about life two millennia ago and life as it is now.
Goldherring was occupied in three or so phases in the late iron age, the Roman period and early medieval times. Apparently the first lot came from abroad, since items from Brittany were found in the lower archaeological layers. Later on the place seems to have been a forge, the home and workplace of a specialist craftsman. The Romans didn’t have a great impact down here, since they never invaded Cornwall – stopping at Exeter – though they influenced the place, rather like USA or China influence us now, here in Europe.
Like many people I’ve been quite shut away and mostly alone for what seems like a very long time, so when Lynne comes to stay it’s A Big Event, and when she leaves there’s rather a large gap. We aren’t unused to it: over the last five years we’ve had a hundred-ish long weekends together and we’ve developed strategies for dealing with it, but there’s still a gap, and sometimes it yawns vulnerably.
Sometimes it gets tested too. During the first lockdown in 2020 Lynne couldn’t visit for quite a while. It activated that ‘distance makes the heart grow fonder’ experience you can sometimes get when you’re a human on a planet, locked into time, geography and circumstance. This might happen again too, now. Covid has hit Lynne’s business (she’s mainly an astrologer), she’s been bumping along fending off the wolves from the door, and now her car has suddenly failed its MOT test, needing big repairs or replacement. And Covid has drained her money-pot. Uh-oh, looks like we might miss some weekends!
This is a small, personal part of an incremental, degenerative social and economic hollowing out, as the cascading impacts of Covid work their way through. We look a little too closely at the pandemic to see clearly what’s going on. In the end, the pandemic will be forgotten – it was a catalyst of a bigger process of change – and what the longterm future will reveal is that in 2020 we crossed a tipping point – though really this tilting of history started perhaps in 2008-12. Or around 1989-93. Or perhaps around 1965-70.
It concerns the scaling down of an overinflated economy running on coffee, cocaine, excess and shady dealings, the power of people to have agency and influence in that economy, the hearts and minds of crowds and publics worldwide, the willingness and consent of society to go through changes we know to be urgent and necessary, and the relationship between the world’s ecosystems and human behaviour. Big questions – quite bottomless societal, environmental and psycho-spiritual questions. We’ve gone too far, something fundamental needs to change, and there’s something very factual about that.
This isn’t really a question of politics or ideology any more. The word crisis comes from ancient Greek. It means a situation prompting us to distinguish, choose and decide. We spend a lot of our lives engaging in avoidance strategies, and of course crises are uncomfortable, threatening, often painful and cruelly indiscriminate. They present truth and facts, whether or not we like it – there’s no stopping an earthquake, hurricane or an advancing army. But a crisis is also an opportunity, an integral part of the pattern of change. There can be unpremeditated, instinct-led possibilities available, and sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes you get a tragedy, sometimes a miracle. For better or worse, crises tend to force and resolve multiple issues at the same time. Crunch, bang, that’s it.
I personally am not in an immediate crisis right now – I’m kinda chugging along – though I’m in an ongoing one as a cancer patient. Since I was diagnosed in Nov 2019 I’ve had three crunchy crises and others will follow, and one will cut me down one day. But it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that my own problems are bigger than other people’s, since they involve confronting death and quite high levels of difficulty and pain. Yet, looking at Lynne and the bill-paying concerns and daily-life complications she’s labouring through, I find myself wondering what’s genuinely harder – a long, hard grind like hers or a red-flashing-lights crisis like I sometimes get?
Two thousand years ago in Goldherring they didn’t have money worries – they didn’t have money! They bartered, gifted and negotiated, and a large part of that negotiation was with nature itself. A bad harvest or a cold winter made a big difference. An Atlantic gale could rip the thatch off your roundhut roof, at the wrong season for replacing it. They faced the tough realities of living on Earth, just like we do.
But they didn’t live in our particular kind of civilisation, with its copious discontents and MOT tests. Living in their own culture and just outside the big-booted Roman empire will have had its own issues, but perhaps those issues were a little more real than ours. Not least because, in our day, simulated realities seem to be replacing manifest reality: belief seems to be overriding what’s standing in front of us. This isn’t new in human history, but the scale of it is new. There are more souls alive today than ever before, experiencing that simulation and, unfortunately, believing that it’s reality.
Philosopher Teilhard de Chardin invented the idea of the noosphere (pronounced no-osphere), the constructed world of human belief – what we think is going on. It becomes a self-programming mega-algorithm that then defines our collective reality as we perceive it. Early in prehistory the ecosphere largely conditioned people’s beliefs and behaviours, and human history since then has been one long story of the development of an ascendant cultural consensus, the noosphere. It has replicated to a point where, in our globalised, urban-industrial-digital society, it shouts louder than the ecosphere, especially to city-dwellers, who also tend to make the decisions on everyone’s behalf.
Nowadays, if the ecospheric world impacts on the noospheric world, we dynamite and bulldoze it, setting scientists, doctors, engineers and politicians on it to chase it away. But the noosphere increasingly resembles a house of cards, resting on shaky dependencies and rising so high that its foundations have cracked, and the ecosphere is impinging on us anyway.
The pennyworts were poking up into the sun and a buzzard wheeled overhead as Lynne and I sat there, huddling together in the iron age with our tea and Nairn’s biscuits, reflecting on life. For the plain fact is, while Lynne is scraping along to pay the bills and my pension is modest, as inhabitants of the rich world we are still in the top 25% of wealthy people. For many people worldwide, Covid means not illness but hunger, and many of these people – farmers, favelistas, enterepreneurs, employees – were doing alright enough before Covid came along.
Yet within our own sphere of reality, each of us has our problems. Some are really dire (think of many Syrians or Yemenis, or of people keeling over with Covid in Brazil) while many people are confronting ‘grindstone mentality’, the uncomfortable feeling that we’re not doing enough to solve our problems and we must do more, setting aside our main priorities to do so – yet again. Then we worry about our ‘mental health’ when many of us, and society as a whole, are having a spiritual crisis. WTF are we here for, and is this the world we really want?
I’m psychologically quite self-sufficient but Lynne nevertheless makes a big difference in my life. She’s one of those who is willing to prioritise things that aren’t in her immediate self-interest, doing so with a lot of love and care – not only for me but for lots of people. And for the plants and microbes in her garden.
It rests on this kind of person to save the world: this has been demonstrated during the Covid crisis. It has been a case of ‘amateurs built the Ark and professionals built the Titanic’. Society has leaned heavily on dedicated people who have an altruistic bent and the skills of service. It has leaned especially on non-professionals acting out of goodwill, service and commitment – in the rich world social care and healthcare have been over-professionalised, while family and community support systems have been asphyxiated by ‘progress’ and the busyness of a demanding modern life. Lynne is one of those non-professionals, a quiet supertrooper. Though some professionals have done a heroic job too: I’ve seen this with the doctors and nurses I’ve met, and through the eyes of my son, who’s in the air ambulance business.
It’s also a joy, as a disabled cancer patient, to get up in the morning, light the stove and bring Lynne tea in bed. For in truth there is no such thing as helping: it’s an energy-exchange. Lynne brings so much goodness into my life yet mercifully she seems to feel that it’s reciprocated.
By healing we become healed. By giving what we can, even when we have limited possibilities, we do receive. It is possible for a whole economy to work like this – and I’ve seen such principles at work in Palestine, where officially there is high unemployment and a lot of destitution yet everyone is busy and more or less catered for, even under the duress of living under longterm military occupation. Sometimes, when we need help, the best thing to do is to help someone else. Help the world.
One awkward question we need to face in the coming time concerns social roles and their tendency to get fixed: whether we’re a net helper or a net recipient, male or female, black or white, progressive or resister, we mustn’t get too attached to any positions in the spectrum. Because help and support flow around society in the most miraculous and amazing of ways. If we permit it. For this to work, everyone, no matter how helpless or seemingly useless, has something to give and we need to give it. Withholding our humanity and creativity holds the world back.
Over the last month I’ve been chugging away at completing a five year research project. It’s something I can give to the world, in my reduced capacity. Its value will be appreciated only by a small number of people, but it contributes to society’s cultural capital and it’s a contribution I can make. I’ve just finished it. It’s an online map and database of the thousands of prehistoric sites in Cornwall, providing online resources for use in researching prehistoric sites and their meaning and purpose. It’s here: Map of the Prehistoric Sites of Cornwall.
If you’d like to sample some music I’m enjoying right now, try this – Trance Frendz.
All is as well as can be. Beeee goooood. Lots of love from me. Thanks for reading.
When this world was set up, they were creating something that hadn’t been done before. By a combination of intervention and natural evolution, they tried to make Earth into a suitable place for the cultivation of individualised free-will amongst a growing mass of volunteer souls coming from everywhere in the universe.
Fungiforms at St Loy, West Penwith, Cornwall
In the last few days, in my chemo-fatigued floaty reveries, I’ve thought of lots of things to write in this blog, and they all went thataway into the ethers – so if you picked up on any of them, just remember, our thoughts are less our own than we like to believe, and they might have come via me and not necessarily from me! This said, I’m reasonably good at elucidating things on the inner levels as well as in words, and throughout life I’ve often felt my psyche operates a bit like a telephone exchange, so you never really know…
Steps on the path, St Loy.
A lot has changed in the last week or two. The new round of chemo treatment kicked in last week, and a rather nice, diligent nurse has visited me twice now to administer it. My perceived age went from 80ish to 95ish in a few days, and it has been at times difficult. But I learned a lot through last year’s chemo experiences and am much better prepared and adjusted than then. Much of the secret lies in reducing goals, simplifying, disengaging from former concerns and abilities, and keeping everything doable and within reach. I fall back on my methodical Virgo side and, that way, I can get through my daily routines quite well, and slowly, with rests in between.
I’ve stopped my creative writing (except this blog) because this draws on my bigger-brains, and they are taking a rest. Complexity, length, perseverance and big thinking aren’t available. Anyone who brings me complication or requests can wait or sort themselves out by other means. But I do manage smaller tasks when my energy is up – and I have to wait for it. I can write this blog today because I’m powered up on Dex, an anti-cancer steroid.
Cove at Morvah – Penwith is an arty place
To keep myself focused and kid myself I’m doing something useful with the remains of this incarnation, every few days, when I can, I’ve been working on the Meyn Mamvro online archive – a gradual process of scanning magazine pages, image-editing them, inserting them into a bookflip app and making PDF files of them, sorting out the web-page for each issue, and uploading. That takes 2-3 hours for each issue, and I’ve reached issue 35 out of 100. This sounds complex and long, but when you’re a natural archivist and editor with decades of drudge behind you, and if you’re a Saturnine Virgo like me, well, I can do it on autodrive – when I can.
Soon afterwards I engage in landing procedures (tea and munchies, music and, if I have the brains for it, something to read) and head for bed, flagged out. I’ve also been doing bits of work on the online ancient site maps of Cornwall that I’ve been developing since 2014. It’s good to do this, and it’s great when it ends too.
A rather magic place too
Well, we all develop our excuses for being alive. These are our chosen forms of self-punishment as the price we pay for a life on Earth – exciting and stimulus-rich as it is. If, for you, it isn’t, it might be take-off, not landing procedures, you need to develop further.
You see, when this world was set up, they were creating something that hadn’t been done before. By a combination of intervention and natural evolution, they tried to make Earth into a suitable place for the cultivation of individualised free-will amongst a growing mass of volunteer souls coming from everywhere in the universe. It is an advanced supertrooper training for those who are ready. What they didn’t then know was that strong gravitational fields of the kind that exist on this planet would have such a downward-pulling effect on consciousness, causing us to forget why we came, and to doubt that readiness. Also, they did not anticipate that we would build whole cultures and civilisations around this forgetting, such that we would lose track, locking ourselves into believing that our physical reality and our interpretation of it is the only reality that exists, that we are alone in the universe, that there is only one life we can live, and that ‘me’ is the most important thing in it.
Mysterious… (this is Gurnard’s Head, ‘the desolate one’)
What’s interesting with this is that they didn’t quite know how possible it was for beings like us to split and divide our psyches so thoroughly as we do, such that our two or our multiple sides would start operating semi-independently – our left and right sides, our conscious and unconscious. Westerners are particularly good at this, but every people has its own ways of defying its true nature. This has led to flights of possibility, genius and creativity that are utterly new (God would never have thought up the Beegees, condoms or nuclear bombs), and to a situation where we humans have developed a habit of working against our own best interests, causing ourselves and each other immense suffering in the process and even risking destroying this world, our playground, and thus even undermining our capacity to rectify the straits we’ve got into.
That’s pretty unique and very strange, and the problem is that no one else in the universe has had this kind of experience, so they’re not sure what to do. If I got my son Tulki to helicopter you over to Idlib province in Syria, or Yemen or Borno state in Nigeria, and drop you there, you wouldn’t know what to do either. Mercifully he’s in the air ambulance business, so if you’re nice to him he might fix for you to be saved! But The Management don’t interfere like that, because we came here to develop free will, and free will must develop freely. Humanity suffers a particulary psychological ailment called CSOCDS – compounded sense of consequence deficiency syndrome. This syndrome obstructs our free will, reducing us to the belief that one party or another in government, or VWs and Toyotas, or chattering on Facebook, or believing any belief you like, is what freedom means.
The view southwards from Carn Gloose
Anyway, as you can see, when I get into the right state, my crown chakra still can cough up a few gems. Please understand, you’re doing me as much a favour as I might be doing you, by being there for me to write to. I spend a lot of time alone, and there’s something special about this advanced ninetysomething age I’ve been thrust into and the perspectives it gives. It’s good to share it.
It has something to do with the loss of powers that comes with advancing age, and the question of whether we can make something positive and useful of it, for what it is. It’s part of the life-cycle, part of the completion that many souls omit to make as death approaches – the repair, the forgiveness, the releasing, the remembering, the forgetting. The dedication of one’s life to nothingness, to the fact that even we, in our self-preoccupation, will be forgotten, washed away in the ongoing tide of human history.
Bumbling at Porth Ledden
I feel strengthened by the prospect of reincarnation. This isn’t a belief – except inasmuch as the idea that tomorrow will come is a belief too. It’s a knowing, a deep knowing, a bit like knowing that you are the you that you are.
Our current incarnate lifespans are made up of quite different lives – the person I was in my teens, twenties and thirties is not who I am now. Though there’s a continuity too. In my observation, up to the age of about forty I was learning and developing new things, with a peak around ages 15-24, and after forty, in a way, it wasn’t about learning new things any more – the task was to uncover the further nuances, dimensions and intricacies of what I had already learned and developed. To really do them and work them out to a degree where, by the end of my life, I could own up to my successes and failings and come to some sort of completion, some sort of peace and balanced assessment of where I’ve really got to, and its genuine net worth.
I’m happy to say that, seen from this viewpoint, I think there’s a net positive result – but it’s not for me to mark my own homework. I’ll leave that to Yamantaka, St Peter, the Holder of the Scales and the Guardians of the Gateways. I have regrets too, and in the 16 months since I was diagnosed with cancer, starting on a different journey, there has been a lot of letting go, forgiving and self-forgiveness to do. Letting go of capacities and vitality, of my driving licence and freedom to travel, even to walk, and letting go of making plans for the future.
Grumbla
After all, in this last week I’ve already entered spaces inside myself where I’ve wondered how much it’s worth carrying on much further. Carrying my body around and being in this world has become so much more difficult. My bones are creaky and sometimes I have to push them to move. Making a cup of tea requires energy-saving procedural strategies.
But I’m a survivor too, and I’ve been granted a tenth life, alhamdulillah, and I shall be here until I am better somewhere else. I’m also blessed with such good support from Lynne and others, and it makes me happy that they seem to enjoy and benefit from doing it, as far as I can tell. Even the nurse this week – who had grown up in South Africa – was questioning me about my humanitarian work, and I felt I was saying more to her when answering than was apparent.
My commitment is that I shall recognise the moment to disengage from life when it comes and I shall make it a conscious choice made in peace and made totally, with all of my being behind it. I’ll die because I did it. If anyone starts fussing about wanting me to stay alive, or to save or heal me, just to avoid addressing their own fears or regrets, well, take the lesson, because it will knock on your door too one day, and it’s best working this one out in advance.
The good thing is the inner states I get into. I started meditating in 1975 and got serious about psychic innerwork by 1985, and somehow, years later, I didn’t expect to receive such a remarkable spiritual boost as cancer has brought me now, at physical age 70, currently leapfrogged to 95. Opening up to pharmaceutical medicine – I’ve been clear of all that for decades – has been a mixed experience of violation and revelation, trial and blessing.
When I go into these chemo-induced, fatigued, dulled-out reveries, I’ve been going a long way away. I’m so grateful that Lynne has what it takes to witness me floating off and for that to be alright – and perhaps she’s getting a ‘contact high’ which might be useful to her one day. It certainly gives her space to get through the compelling four-volume novel she’s reading! When I return I sometimes have an innocent, wide-eyed, childlike look, rather like an ET getting a first glimpse of this world through the sensual peripherals of eyes, ears and body, and I think she knows that’s also true, and that it’s not wholly the Palden she knows that she is seeing for that infinite moment of timeless seeing. Which she allows herself to see, because she can.
But then, as the Council of Nine would say: ‘No one is here by accident’. Did you really believe that your journey begins and ends on Planet Earth? If so, why honestly do you believe that, and is it worth re-examining?
Home
But now I’m losing energy and I must end here. Thank you for letting me share a few tasters of the strange life I am living now, here at the end of a long peninsula on an isolated farm in Cornwall that even trusty satnavs take people the wrong way to. When I tell people about this, they still follow their satnav and not my directions. The irony is that it’s so easy: just turn right at Penzance and left onto our farm road. But no, the satnav must be obeyed, and doubt rules okay.
I must get a drink, take my pills, sort out a few things… and if I have enough energy I’ll get out a seat and go and sit in the sun for a while, before bed. If these tasks empty my batteries, it’s straight to bed. That’s what life is like right now.
Seal tribe at Godrevy
Oh, and here’s a last throw-in – another of those insights I’m getting. It just popped up from behind. The future is not going to be as difficult as many people anticipate, and amazing solutions are coming in the 2020s-30s, and everything balances out in time. This is not a message of complacency since we do not yet have a sense of the scale of the mobilisation humanity is going to enter into in the coming decades – and it is this mobilisation that will make things easier by quite magical means, particularly by generating increased social and global resonance and the incremental overriding of dissonance – cognitive dissonance, well known by teenagers as hypocrisy and doublethink.
The cork popped when Covid came, and the fizzing is building up wave by wave, in just-more-than-digestible doses. It’s the people who find themselves at the frontline – today in Belarus and Myanmar, and just round the corner from you, and particularly in the developing world – who are pushing things forward. The main message came through ten years ago in the Arab Revolutions: it’s all about losing our fear. This is the project for the coming years: losing our fear.
Love from me. Thanks for being you and being with.
Drug and therapy list, if it interests you: Pharma: DVD (Daratumamab, Velcade, Dexamethasone), Aciclovir, Co-trimoxazole, Zolodronic Acid. Holistic: Quality natural-source multivits, Magnesium Citrate, Astaxanthin, blueberry powder, probiotics, cold-milled oils – mixed into breakfast. CBD oil, colloidal silver, shilajit, kombucha, Vit D+K2, lysine, unchlorinated springwater from up the hill, an E-Lybra machine, periodic homoeopathics and radionics, and a Schauberger Harmoniser. I keep a time-gap between taking holistic and pharma meds to avoid conflicts. Spiritual: Lynne’s presence and dedication; prayers, support and healing from family, soul-family and people close and distant; adventures at the cliffs and ancient sites of West Penwith; life-lessons learned and being learned; positive thinking; and People Back Home (I open myself to their inspection and consciously let them in).
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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