cancer – Notes from the Far Beyond

Cancer Tales

and that hidden Factor X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carn Du at Lamorna, with the Lizard behind

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

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

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

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

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

St Michael’s Mount from Penzance harbour

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

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

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

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

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

Carn Du, Lamorna, with the Lizard behind

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

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

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

Lots of love from me, Palden.

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

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

Gravity

and blood and bones

Mighty cloud above Penwith, as seen from Bosigran

Recently I’ve been working on straightening up my back. When I went down (or even up) with bone marrow cancer, the four bottom vertebrae of my back collapsed, altering the architecture of my pelvis, legs and back. I lost bone mass and my back grew weaker to the extent that I’ve had to use sticks ever since to hold myself up. Since then I’ve had an unconscious tendency to stoop, which gets exaggerated in the later part of the day or when I’m tired or my energy is down. This gets interesting though – there’s more to this.

For me, taking on cancer involved taking on a burden and making it mine. Living became more difficult and dragging myself around is more of an effort than it used to be. I feel heavy even though I’ve always been slim, and now I’m bony. In a way, I’m quite a big presence, yet my body has been lean, and nowadays rather frail. I deal with that fragility with willpower, by resorting to ‘second strength’ – the strength that, as a runner or mountaineer, you get through to when you’ve broken through your initial tiredness. Mars in Scorpio – that’s me, and Uranus is doing an opposition to it.

This Saturnine burden-bearing thing has been a life-issue for me – somewhere between karma-yoga and self-punishment – so it’s fascinating that I get a cancer that concerns the blood (life-force and will-to-live) and bones (gravitation and carrying that weight). I’ve sometimes wondered whether I was an elephant in a past life.

Nowadays, when my spirits are flagging and I’m tired or feeling burdened, I tend to droop. So I’m retraining myself to stand straighter, reminding myself over and over to lift myself up. I’m being helped in this by a lovely man in St Just, Alan, who does his own version of Alexander Technique, and whose firm hands and ways of manipulating me give a satisfying feeling of being opened up, stretched, uplifted and balanced.

It has become really clear to me how much my current posture relates to my state of mind and spirits. When I’m up, I’m up, and when I’m down, I go down in posture. So I’m working on the centre of willpower in my solar plexus and also on the character of my thoughts – astrologically, Uranus is opposing my Mars in Scorpio, bringing up these kinds of issues.

When I was a mountaineer when young, I learned that cultivating uplifting thoughts has a levitational effect, getting you up that mountain much more easily and happily. But if you’re grinding your stuff, worrying about how far you still must go and indulging in tiredness, then it gets terribly difficult, longer, more painful, and your rucksack gets heavier.

The same applies to living with cancer. It’s a mountain to climb with only a few let-ups, a mountain with no summit till you finally give up and die – whereas, as a mountaineer, you can descend and have a hot bath afterwards. There can be longterm wear-and-tear and challenges to the spirit – it’s all about will-to-live. These challenges can be weighty – they have been so for me. But facing this stuff has sorted me out inside quite a lot.

As a mountaineer and cross-country runner I trained my will to stay focused and to hang in there by working with my mind. But when I got involved with ETs in my forties I started imbibing ideas they put forward and started connecting things together. The Nine had talked about a difficulty connected with the downward-pulling effect on consciousness of gravity and dense physicality, as we have them on Earth. This has a twofold effect: the direct effect of gravity itself, and the effect of accumulated human habits, beliefs and institutions, which tend to embed a deep, guilt- and fear-ridden, downward-pulling effect on society and human culture as a whole.

Our conditioned beliefs, fears, guilt and shame are means by which we allow ourselves to be controlled, giving power to those who would control us. We constrain the scope and depth of our awareness, fitting inside boxes, clipping wings, subscribing to channels of belief, conforming to perceived expectations, setting aside our deeper feelings and perceptions and generally losing the plot, losing perspective and losing ourselves. It’s a comfort-zone which, if everyone does it, makes everyone feel safe. Except we aren’t safe, since the basic premises of such a life-structure are unsustainable longterm, hollow. We’ve become addicted to quite sophisticated avoidance strategies.

I learned about this key gravitational issue from two sources: the Nine, who mentioned this as a key factor in bringing us to our current rather imperilled condition, and the Austrian scientist Viktor Schauberger, who proposed that the law of gravity and the law of levity are equal and opposite, and that their balancing and utilisation are a matter, in the end, of consciousness. In other words, uplifting thoughts are levitational, and depressive thoughts are gravitational. Think about it – but not too much!

It’s all to do with vibrational frequencies. Dense physical matter isn’t just stuff – it’s energy vibrating at wavelengths that make it appear physical. Gravity-levity occupy a range of frequencies, as do light, thought, emotion, subtle energy, different forms of consciousness and their moods and states. These interact with each other. When I’m walking on the cliffs and feeling inspired, my power increases and walking gets easier. In connection with the relative rebirth I’ve gone through this summer, I can stand upright without sticks for longer now than I could a year ago (five minutes instead of two) – so the levitational force is increasing in me. Though it still depends on my energy-state at the time. I can overcome tiredness by working with my state of mind and heart, if I’m on a long hike, or if it has been a long day, though I usually pay a price the next day. That’s a matter of pacing myself and energy-management – dipping out, resting my mind and degravitationalising my body.

When I experienced a lot of fatigue in 2020-21, by late afternoon I would lose energy and start drooping. My mind would start slowing and switching off, I’d lose my mind and my words, and my life-energy would dwindle rapidly. Sometimes this would happen in minutes, as if I was being taken over. Those are moments when I really value having someone around for a bit of support and TLC – it doesn’t happen much nowadays. But it’s okay if I can retreat to bed, take the weight off my back and drift off into a fatiguey kind of trance. If I can’t, I’m in trouble, unable to marshal myself and do what’s necessary, and needing to focus a lot of energy just on staying upright, taking one step at a time.

I feel more in sync with myself now, in October, and my life-energy has improved since spring. But one year ago I was going down, ill and struggling in a nightmarish in ner reality, sinking into the dark, and eventually to lose my partner – a disaster for me, and probably for her. It was a major Neptune transit to my Saturn. I lost my way and came close to losing my life. But I’m a survivor: my starting thought, when I’m lost in the dark, is to ask myself where the gift lies.

It was hard, that time, but it put me through the grinder and I emerged from the other side in springtime, blinking and rather surprised, surfacing with a new sense of mission – something to keep me alive. That’s important because, when you’re old and disabled, society shoves you to the side and forgets you unless you do something to bring yourself back in. And, regarding grinders, in order to be gifted with miracle solutions such as a rebirth after a crisis, it’s often necessary to make the downpayment first. The universe tests us, wanting to know whether we’re 100% behind it, because it’s only hundred-percentness that enables us to override the normal default rules of life and nature, bringing a higher level of rules, norms and magic into operation.

When I was ill, wondering whether I was leaving life, the threads in my life that remained incomplete came into sharp contrast. Something was coming clear that I could not lay them to rest. Paradoxically, the most immediately painful one, the loss of my ladylove, left me with a big, simmering, unresolved issue, and it had a strange way of keeping me alive! It was so bad that it activated the fightback in me. But the realisation that there was something more to do with life before I go – that was the clincher. I realised that, if I were up in heaven, I would regret not having done all I could to set in motion some serious work in the area of world-healing. This has been a major thread in my life since I was about sixteen. It’s an incomplete thread. Mission not accomplished.

Working on my posture has a direct relationship with – when it boils down to it – fulfilment and happiness. Not just because of the structural, bony corrections that might happen, raising my life-energy, but also because it’s all about developing the levitational power within – the power to rise up. In my observation, in my cancer process, the medical treatment has saved me and kept me alive (and I wouldn’t have lived had it not worked), but the healing I’ve received, from people, from HP Source and from my own inner processing, has created something of a rule-breaking miracle. I’m now more alive than otherwise I would be.

Gravity has a relationship with time too. Our capacity to deal with time is a key issue in consciousness. Time spreads out events along a perceptual, developmental continuum such that, on our densely physical, time-bound, spinning planet, life is a process of working with physicality and with life-experience in a very gradual and drawn-out way – at times frustrating, and often technically complex. My Tibetan teacher, the Karmapa, once taught that patience is applied timelessness. That is, all of our wishes are fulfilled in the fullness of time, and we really need to worry much less about how things happen and how to steer and control them. They will all come.

One of the Boscregan clifftop cairns. Sennen behind.

Getting old and being partially disabled, I’m losing my powers, and there’s quite a sense of loss to that. But then, from a time-released perspective, throughout life I’ve had my powers and all sorts of experiences with them, and that was good, and now life is about something else. Other powers have become available that I didn’t once have. I’m doing better on the wisdom, acceptance, insight, inner journeying and gratefulness-for-being-alive fronts, and my writing and podcasting have improved. My vibe and inner archetype have changed.

I’ve lost many ‘executive’ functions in my brains and cannot multi-task or do rapid-fire attention switches or complex situations any more, but something on the other, imaginal, intuitive, creative side has actually improved. So there’s a gift in everything, and we can focus on what we’ve lost or don’t have, or we can give attention to what we’re gaining and what’s available. That’s our choice.

When you come close to the end, you’ve had your time. It was given, you had it and you did it, and what you did and didn’t do with it were, in the end, your choice. It goes through stages and it eventually comes to an end. That’s life. Hopefully, in the course of life, you can go through most or all of those stages – and pity those who get cut short, culled before their time, mown down by a karmic wave that is larger than their own personal one.

To live in this kind of physical existence, we needed to live on a time-bound planet defined by its rotational and orbital patterns, because a planet like this produces multiple evolutionary circumstances in which enormous experiential diversity can grow. It has local environments, seasons and climatic patterns that stimulate beings like us, prompting us to explore and extend ourselves. We weren’t meant to destroy this world in the process, however.

But physicality means that we enter into close relationship with things and circumstances that get born, live and die, and it happens to us too. The big mistake is the belief that this kind of physical, perpetually-changing existence is the only one that is real. Even though, in our sleep and altered states, we go into completely different worlds and existences on a regular basis.

So it’s our constrained awareness that binds us to ticktock time. But there’s another kind of time too – evolutionary time – and it has little relation to ticktock time. In evolutionary time, you can make ten years’ progress in twenty minutes, in an intense growth situation. If you block your growth through fear, then you lock yourself into ticktock time and you ‘serve time’ – some people do it for the whole of their lives. The more we invest in working on ourselves, allowing the magic of life to work through us, trusting in our spirit and serving humanity, the more that our relationship with time changes – since time doesn’t constrain energies that come from beyond time and beyond self. You’re capable of being old when young and young when old. You don’t worry so much. You realise there’s more to life than paying bills and doing your perceived duty. The laws of life start changing, and things start happening which, in that time-bound world and the groupthink that goes with it, were deemed improbable or impossible.

Light, energy, thought, gravity, consciousness – they are connected, all of them operating in a range of frequencies. What I’ve been finding is that, as my body and my life-possibilities become more limited, I’m learning more about the intimate relationship of all of them. It’s directly connected with my backache, mood, happiness and choices at any moment. Giving them all attention is helping my healing process. This, for me, doesn’t mean ‘getting better’, since I won’t, but it does mean being in a better state than otherwise. Being happier about the life I have. The funny thing is that, with this kind of acceptance, I’ve been getting marginally better!

Life is, after all, filled with paradox.

Love from me, Paldywan

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

Chapel Carn Brea, the last hill in Britain

The Tipping of the Scales

A PodTalk and a Magic Circle

I’ve been away on Dartmoor and in Glastonbury, where I delivered a talk on Friday evening. It was really moving to see everyone who came, to feel their good vibes and interest and the atmosphere that evening in the Assembly Rooms. Hostess Samia Gelfling’s intro and outro to my talk were remarkable.

I wish it were possible to get round everyone in the audience personally, but nowadays three meaningful conversations a day are all I can do, and it would take ages to do justice to everyone.

Doing these talks, it’s my way of connecting with as many people as I can, within my energy-range. There’s a deep smile lurking in my heart. I’m now enjoying being back in Cornwall for a necessary reflection pause and for my cancer treatment (and its after-effects).

Magic Circle in Devon

Click to book for the Buckfastleigh Magic Circle

Next up comes a ‘Magic Circle’ in Buckfast (near Totnes) on 24th September 2022. This will be a 5-6 hour session in three segments. It’s all about our origins, the soul tribes we come from, passing over to the otherworlds, bringing otherworlds into our lives, world healing and the way the world is going.

Stuff like that. You’re really welcome. We’ll also have a dash of chi gung with Jeanne Hampshire, garnished with some live music from two friends visiting from Oregon in Turtle Island, Jahnavi and Galen. And me, rabbiting on at you and lifting the cork off your crown chakra, with a little help from my friends.

Are we visitors from far away having a human experience or humans blessed with periodic uplifts? Soul-food for folks who’ve been at it for some time and are looking for new angles on this strange experience called life on Earth.

A new PodTalk

Following my talk in Glastonbury, I’ve now uploaded a recording of it (you can stream it or download it as an MP3). It’s 1hr 47mins long. The last quarter of it was taken up with some really interesting questions and contributions from the floor. Find it here:

palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

It was great visiting Glastonbury. It is, after all, a pilgrimage place, and that’s what it is and does well. On Saturday I braved the town, had a maca smoothie, a few of those deeply meaningful conversations, some path-crossings with old friends in the street, and retreated twice to the calmness of the Abbey to ‘just sit’ and to defrag from the buzzy atmosphere and dense electromagnetics.

Glastonbury is a vortical place of contrasts, a karma-exchange and somewhere between an experiential kaleidoscope and a transdimensional roundabout. In vibe, it’s rather like Jerusalem, actually – though much less extreme – while both equally share a similar craziness, intensity and bizarre sanctity.

Thanks to Lily Lionheart for her hospitality, to Jonathan and Penny for trans-Dumnonian teleportation and to Rebecca Brain for her magical companionship and for being a superb minder and a really interesting person.

Inshallah, there will be more.

With love, Paldywan

Booking for the Devon Magic Circle:
trybooking.com/uk/events/landing?eid=30869
About the Magic Circles: palden.co.uk/magic-circles.html
Podcasts: palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Website: palden.co.uk

World Work

Inner work to aid humanity’s evolution

The Isles of Scilly from the West Penwith mainland, Cornwall

I’m not a lightworker or a conventional prayer-circle type. But I believe we need to take a multi-pronged approach to ‘world work’ – meditative, religious, psychic and process work to assist the world. I’m esoterically more activist and gutsy – it’s born out of a political background, humanitarian experience and an aged-hippy approach to life.

If you do psychic work over a period of time, in conjunction with inner friends or ‘guides’, then you’ll tend to develop an operating style between you – and that’s what happened to me. It’s not that I’m an advanced psychic. It’s more that I’ve been at it for a long time, with formative and defining inner experiences along the way.

An example: when I was 41, in an inner process I found myself walking backwards toward the abyss – a vulnerability we humans just aren’t happy with. I had tremors of fear but just had to go over the edge anyway. Tipping backwards, I fell into the void, falling, falling… until an instinct made me turn, spread my arms like wings and fly… Since that moment, I’ve been able to set my mind more free, and my busy brains don’t interfere so much.

One bizarre benefit of cancer has been the inner experiences that have come with it. Forced to spend time in bed, I went on adventures. It gave me a sense of usefulness at a time when I was wondering whether it was all worth it. But no, the management clearly said “Don’t ring us – we’ll ring you“. Well, you do get some comedy sometimes!

I’m of the opinion that, if you give a flower to an asshole or shower them with light, it will likely be a turn-off and inappropriate, with the opposite effect to what was intended. Billionaires and terrorists don’t change just because you want them to, and you wouldn’t either. You have to get in there, make friends, gain trust and work it out, as if there, relating to a real person – albeit perhaps to their wiser, more feelingful self.

Sometimes I’ll give a backrub to a mountain jihadi, or sympathise with the rigours of a politician’s life, or make an etheric cup of tea for an old lady – ‘confidence building measures’. It goes on from there. Dialogue with them as a guest in their space. When someone can see it’s in their own best interests to change, they’ll change (though not always). Typically for stroppy humans, if you push them around, they’ll resist.

If you want to penetrate a computer, work with climate issues, deal with a natural disaster, do longterm work with ‘megatrends’ (like population growth or deforestation), it’s a question of getting right inside the matter, stepping into people’s shoes, seeing what life looks like to them, getting into the back office, ferreting through the datachips or feeding helpful ideas to people in need.

One key thing is social attitudes and particularly the freeing up of groupthink, cover-ups and polarised positions. These can involve societal resistance or oligarchies who like to believe they’re in control. Changes in attitudes form the basis of world change. A valid notion here is unconcealment, the exposure of things people should know of and think about – whether withheld, or people don’t want to know, or it is simply thitherto not known.

This is not about steering things in ways we want to see things go: it’s about helping humanity accelerate its evolution. Humanity’s group soul knows what it’s doing even if we humans don’t. Sometimes the ‘wrong’ thing seems to have to happen in order to catalyse a wholesome and fundamental change. This concerns defining moments – events embodying big issues and forcing critical shifts or decisions. By this means the collective unconscious and force majeure leak into real life.

In 1995 a circle of eighty or so of us worked with Bosnia – a powerful and moving session lasting some six hours. We heard later that, while in session, some drunken Serbs had bombed a marketplace in Sarajevo, killing 60. This was sobering, shocking – definitely not our intention. What had gone wrong? Yet, a week or so later, this defining event made NATO go in, ending the war within a short time. Something ‘bad’ led to something ‘good’ – though we couldn’t and wouldn’t have designed it that way. We can’t say we made NATO go in, and that wasn’t our thought, but the synchronicities, considering the war had gone on for three years, were too close. We must assume some involvement, even if but to oil the works or connect some dots.

One of the big lessons here is: carefully consider what you pray for. Also, only take on doable challenges, and be willing to follow them through later on.

The main idea is to help foster forwardness and a sense of progress – it’s like midwifery. We cannot force progress but we can do our best to facilitate it. Deep change doesn’t happen overnight, and sometimes we must work at it over time. Humanity’s problem is that it feels blocked, jaded and discouraged, as if nothing will make any difference. So the key issue is to help people gain a sense of relief and momentum – get a taste of the benefits of accelerating evolution.

It’s a matter of getting our politics, cultural judgements, ideologies, values and comfort-zones out of the way. This isn’t easy. It helps to have travelled outside the rich world to see things from another angle. Be aware of the way the media and your education shape your thinking, and listen more closely to events than to what people say. Study a little history, background and smallprint. Step over your beliefs and conditioning, using sensitivity, imagination and intuition to experience things from the inside, to see the dynamics going on underneath. It’s a challenge to set ourselves aside – though just for half an hour or so.

There are many ways to do world work, and if you resonate with what’s written here, then give attention to feeling your way forward, developing your own path. Use the inner tricks, tools and background you already have.

Here’s a crucial, human bit: we need to connect our own issues, pain and challenges into this, to power it up emotionally. We know what our own pain is like, and plenty of people round the world are in similar or worse situations. So they can act as a psychic entry-point. You can see life through their eyes. In recent months I’ve experienced heartbreak, and plenty of people in Ukraine, or Palestine and Yemen (the two main places I regularly focus on), have heartbreak too, and we all need a bit of there-there, and thus we can serve each other well.

With cancer, I tune into cancer patients, because it means something personal to me and I know what it’s like. The feeling-tones around this gives the work more grace, astuteness and firepower. If you’re a nurse, a truck-driver, a gardener or a pensioner, tune in through your own situation and its problems and joys and use this empathically to connect with others.

There are holistic and surgical/pharma treatments for disease. In this context, disease can encompass riots, volcanoes, storms, wars, famines, insecurity, collapses and ‘black swans’ – events no one expected. Holistic treatment works best for building conditions for good health and immunity, while surgery and pharma are best when it’s too late or too serious. This kind of meditation is more surgical, applicable when deep matters of principle are at stake.

But it depends really on whether this is your thing. Or perhaps you might be best continuing with what you already do, with a new slant to it.

There are all sorts of methods and procedures, such as mopping up dead souls after disasters, working to raise the level of the collective mood, inwardly supporting threatened species, love-bombing and truth-mining a conflict zone, or working with whatever comes up in the news that really gets to you. If it’s Ukraine, work with Ukraine because you will also assist other places and situations where similar issues apply. One longterm aim is to remove enough problems from the overall system so that its inherent, homoeostatic self-healing capacity can revive.

Sometimes it’s an A&E and intensive care job, and cutting out a tumour or infected organ can save the whole body, if that is the only option left. That’s how focusing on specific acute issues and crises can help the world as a whole. Don’t forget to support the helpers too: the on-the-ground activists, good-hearted people, dedicated public servants, people who hold society up and do the donkey-work, and people who take brave initiatives. I’ve even found myself sitting with an abandoned dying person in an apartment block in Sian, China, and it was good for both of us. He found a comforting welcome on the other side.

If you do this once a week for a year, out of fifty meditations, ten will be really worth it. When done in a group (three upwards), even if remotely at a chosen time, it powers it up. Stick with it. Don’t seek results – just do it. Give it time. This is a life-long work. It can empower other stuff you’re doing or give meaning to what you might believe to be a meaningless, insignificant life.

Based on earlier experiences in the 1970s-80s, in the 1990s I started a large-group project doing ‘inner aid’, the Hundredth Monkey Project, which pioneered much of this approach, and later a smaller group, the Flying Squad, continued in this work for twenty years. They’re both closed now, but the meditation time-slot, agreed with the Council of Nine thirty years ago, is still open every week on Sundays at 7-7.30 GMT (8-8.30 BST). I’m there, every week, wherever I am, dead or alive, and with a number of others (I know not how many). Tune in on that channel if you wish. If you continue over time the management will give you a direct line.

In my experience there is more personal growth in ‘world work’ than in personal growthwork. You find that out by doing it. The more you do it, the better you get. So just work at it, don’t make a big deal, keep motivation simple and intelligent and, remember, it is for the highest good, for the wide, longterm benefit of humanity, our planet home and all who live in her.

Thanks for reading. We’ll be covering this in my forthcoming ‘magic circles‘.

Love from me, Palden

If this subject interests you, here is an article and a report I wrote in the 1990s. My thoughts have developed and changed in some respects but it all still holds. I’ll revise them sometime. Or not, as the case may be.
www.palden.co.uk/consciousness-work.html
www.palden.co.uk/psychic-work.html

The Flying Squad site is worth a look:
www.flyingsquad.org.uk

My podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Carn Les Boel and its seal caves. This cliff sanctuary sits at the western end of the Michael Line

ET, go home

Getting real about another reality

The amazing thing with dying is that it really is about setting sail into the great unknown.

I can say this because, over the last twentyish years, I’ve tracked and handheld perhaps forty souls through the transition, and what has been striking has been the sheer variety of different kinds of experience people seem to have. And, for myself, the closer I come to dying, the more I’m needing to loosen up my preconceptions.

And my conditions – which are futile, because they’re all about clinging on to the known, and it’s loss of control that is the key issue here. It’s a challenge to go with the flow, to let be, have done with it, to trust and feel your way forward. Suddenly the perspective you harboured about life can change and reveal things very differently. You have to make a real deal with God. Or however you see it.

It’s not binary. We aren’t either alive or dead. We’re all a mixture of both. Medical ideology has it that death means ‘clinical death’, when your life-signs hit zero, but no, this is but a stage of dying. You’re still alive afterwards, and you might be able to see and hear people for a while, but unless their psyches are receptive, they won’t see or hear you – and that can be problematic.

But we’re all part-dead. This is a useful way of looking at it. I’m more dead than most readers, though there might be one or two who are more dead than me (hello!). Last February I think I went up to 95%, very close, but I was reviving by spring equinox, down to perhaps 80%, and now I’d put myself at 70%. But only last week I had a lurch and drooped for two days. This happens with cancer – you go up and down a lot. Small things can have big effects.

I had a near-death experience at age 24 – I was unconscious for nine days – and that permanently changed me. I was very different before and after, going through substantial memory-loss. It made me mission-driven, uncompromising on certain basic issues, though it took about seven years after the NDE to ‘come back’ enough to be fully functional. Two years after that I started the camps movement and the mission began.

Fascinatingly, my near miss in February this year shook, fried, drowned and wrung me out, and by April, to my surprise I was served some new instructions. I went from the slough of despond to a new vision – amongst other things to do my ‘far beyond’ tour upcountry. There’s something here about sinking into the deep dark, then reviving with a new impulse. Shaky as I am, I’ve been given something new, even though time is not on my side. But this is a motivator, to do it while I can and enjoy it.

It might be a goodbye tour and swansong, or the beginning of something. I cannot tell. I have osteonecrosis (a dying jawbone), peripheral neuropathy (feelingless feet), a deteriorating back, my stomach is in permanent trouble, I have a low-level permanent ache, I’m now super-sensitive to all kinds of radiation and, even with my thin body, gravity weighs heavily. Oh, and I have a cancer of the blood and bones called Myeloma. In case you needed to know, those are all my moans! Life is bloody hard, and sometimes it gets me down, and this last six months I’ve had a bit too much of it. I nearly buckled.

So can you understand that, if this gets much worse, it could be a relief for me to go? Can you see how this might be a positive thing?

When I’ve gone, please don’t get into this ‘sorry for your loss’ thing with each other. Why be sorry when I’m being given pure relief? And yes, a gap will be left by my absence, but another kind of presence is possible which, in the end, might be really valuable. After all, time and geography keep us separate anyway, here on Earth. There comes a point where people have done enough for this lifetime – even when, sometimes, their lives are quite short. We need to be released. But we haven’t gone away.

I had a good friend, Mike, who died a seemingly sad death on booze, drugs and despair. Always uncomfortable in this world, he was a spirited man, a solid part of our team in the 1980s. When I heard of his death, I tracked him over and he was in the ‘holding bay’ – a buffer and between zone you usually go to initially, to process the life you’ve just left and make yourself ready to go further. In terms of Earth time, this often takes weeks, though it varies. The funeral (in the West, some time after death) can be a key moment. But not always.

Well, in the holding bay, Mike was tripped out of his skull and having a great time, really happy, flowering, almost Buddha-like. This was a surprise, but that’s what you get in this game. I returned a day or two later and he was completely gone, even before his funeral. I felt happy for him. He had had no resistance to passing over once he got to his death – if anything, perhaps he was in a bit of a hurry. Just goes to show, the judgements made of our behaviours and lives here on Earth don’t necessarily match who and how we actually, truly are, deep down. But this was also characteristic of Mike. The manner of people’s deaths always seem to be true to character.

My mother couldn’t really handle death, even at 92. She had that confusion many people have – a weird mixture of Christian heaven-and-hell stuff and secular it-all-goes-blank stuff. Both are fictitious and unrealistic. She died and went straight to sleep, curled up and unresponsive. This felt kinda okay, because of what she’d been through, and because of that contradiction, though after a while I got a sense she wasn’t facing the fact of being dead. Her funeral was approaching and, since she was locally a popular figure, I wondered what to do. I wanted her to witness poeple’s love and regard for her. On the day of the funeral I tried waking her up but she wouldn’t surface. I made a prayer, feeling a bit clueless.

Not Pepper. This one is trotting around the Boscawen-un stone circle, near where I live.

Then came a solution. Her little terrier Pepper, who had died some years earlier, came along, yapping at her, waking her up, and she was able to witness her funeral. Bless her, she hadn’t really appreciated the contribution she had made. She and I hadn’t reconciled by the time she died, but the changes she went through after death allowed her to encompass what her strange second son had been. What’s interesting here is that, right now, I’m going through a lot of early-life patterns of vulnerability, unsupportedness and loss – mother stuff – while now being completely at peace with my Mum.

It might surprise you that, across the world, one faith that is in relative decline is secularism. [This might interest you, about faiths and secularism]. Most other faiths have some form of afterlife – somewhere to go to when you pass over – so dying can be different for them than for modern seculars, who have nowhere to go. Seculars think this is ‘just’ belief or superstition, but when they die they discover something else is happening, and of course different souls react differently to this.

My cousin’s husband Al was a bit like that, a good-hearted man though solidly secular. Then he got cancer and he started changing. By the time he died, he was ready, and he saw the world of spirit. He was far away and in a state of grace. At one point his eyes opened, he saw me, and he gave me the thought, “You’re here!” After a pause he thought, “But you were there“. “Yes“, I thought back. I could sense him trying to figure that out. Al had a good death – my cousin Faith really did well by him – and I sorted out his connection with the destination, making sure there was someone there to meet him, and going over to give him a couple of tweaks from the other side. It worked. Since his death we have nodded and smiled to each other, and he helped me solve some issues with exorcisms I was doing on two occasions, from the other side.

Sometimes I’ve been able to say who will be there waiting. It melts the last doubts and resistances. When I told my Dad that his brother Laurie, who had died in WW2, would be there, he went very quiet and a tear came to his eye, and from that moment I knew he was more ready to go. He felt safe. His bro would be there.

On the day before he died, he was unconscious and I held his hand and told him all that I knew about what would happen and what to do. I knew he heard it and took it in. After his death we were having a chat and he thought to me, “You’ve done your duty to your father, and you became my father“.

My parents did their level best but, in their lives, they could never encompass me – their strange boy who, as he grew up, became a hippy revolutionary and a total disappointment and embarrassment. The only sins I failed to commit were running off with a black woman and being gay (I became a ‘womaniser’ instead). Poor them, they got the lot.

They must look at me now and think, “OMG, is he still at it, still getting himself into trouble, even at his age?“. But I think they now understand more about why I’m like that. When my Mum used to say she knew me better than I knew myself, she was incorrect, but now it might actually be true, from where she now stands.

Trencrom Hill, a Neolithic Tor and Iron Age hill camp going back 5,500 years.

What happens in death has a lot to do with how we deal with life. If we are willing to own up in life, as much as we can, the matter of owning up in death gets easier. Life on Earth is such a fucked-up and complex thing that we’re all damaged and up to our eyeballs in karmic cobwebs, so this isn’t about being perfect – it’s about getting through. Leaving the world a slightly better place than when we started. At death you just can’t do anything more about anything. It all was as it was, and that’s that. The task is to accept that as much as possible and come to peace about it, to hand in your resignation wholeheartedly. This involves releasing and forgiving, letting be. It’s too late. Working on this before dying does help.

But there’s more to this. The more we are able to get through our life-crises and make them good, the more we establish a pattern of doing it. When death comes, it makes dying easier because the ‘growth choice’ is a habit, and we habitually do it even in death. The looser, more centred and psychospiritually flexible we are in handling life, the more we handle death. Though also, as I mentioned in a recent blog, we also get taken a level deeper, with new hoops to jump through. But look at this another way…

When you die you are entering a new world, and the way you get born into it, as is the case with incarnate life, greatly affects what happens afterwards. That is, as a (retired) astrologer, I can tell you revealing things about yourself on the basis of the time, date and place of your planetary birth, even without meeting you. So, when you sally forth to the other world, if you die well and do your best with it, you’ll start well on the next bit. This is important. It affects the decisions that are made about what you’ll take on next – your next incarnate life on Earth, if that is your path, or whatever happens instead, if that is your path.

But remember, you don’t get chocolate up there – if you want chocolate, Earth is the place. It’s a pretty good place for abuse, pain, violence, toxicity and insensitivity too. Get a load of that – it’s special, and it really rubs you up and grinds you down.

Your family, tribe and angels up there will help you get all this sorted out. It’s rather a process, and it involves referencing to all of your existences and their overall storyline and purpose. And your place in the tribe and its own wider evolution – we’re not just individuals but part of something much larger. There’s some bliss, relief, love, healing, rest, fellowship, education and soul-melding to be had too.

Unless perhaps you believe so strongly that you don’t deserve them that you wall yourself into an imaginal reality that carries you off somewhere else. Then you get another round of the same old thing, until you get it – a turning in the deepest seat of consciousness.

Part of our reason for being here is to evolve and train ourselves as supertrooper souls – souls who’ve been through the mill, shed some blood, sweat and tears and learned from it – experiences that just aren’t available elsewhere, in this way. Loads of shit flies here, and we have the profound option to become greater souls through handling it.

Very much alive – just sleeping. Godrevy Head, Cornwall

This is some of the stuff we’ll be covering in my forthcoming ‘magic circles’ in August and September. Standing where I am right now, not too far from popping clogs, I can share some clues.

You see, there’s something many ancient peoples knew: the souls of the living and the souls of the dead walk alongside each other and help each other out. We’re in the same tribes and networks. We’re all still here. You can talk to your Mum (well, not anytime, but sometimes). They knock on our heads every now and then. It’s important to take note, to listen within and to answer.

I’m wondering whether it might be possible to set something up here. After I’ve gone, if any of you feel me twiggling the top of your head, please acknowledge and signal back. With one or two people I’d like to see whether it’s possible to drop information and impressions into you, and for you to get it down somehow, in whatever format works for you. See if we can do something with it. I’ll request permission first. If I know you well, I shall tell you something only you and I can know, to confirm the connection.

But it depends on whether anyone picks me up sufficiently, giving it full credence, and whether it is in their growth to do so, at that time (it might be hard work). From my end, I think I can do this, though I’m not absolutely sure – we shall see. It’s not uncommon for anyone with a dash of intuition and receptivity to pick up on the dead – go on, own up, you’ve had it lots, actually. So if you get a buzz from me, please work on the basis that I am actually there.

Also, for prospective parents, get this: you can talk to your future child. Back in the 1990s, my then partner Sheila and I called in a soul. We made a deal. We talked with Upstairs about our characteristics, what we could offer and what we needed, and we asked for a soul who would benefit from that kind of deal and find it helpful, so that we would work well together. It did work. He’s now in his mid-twenties, and what’s fascinating here is that there has been a consistent thread between the impressions we got of him before birth and the person he has become. I think Sheila would agree.

In life, it’s not primarily what we do that matters – it’s how we do it. And how much we make it good in the end. As an astrologer, there’s one prediction I can safely make: you, ladies and gentlemen, are all going to die. The choice lies in how we do it, in that moment of peaceful intensity. That is the full-on exercising of free will.

Bless you. Whatever your faults, you’re a fine person. Don’t you forget it. I’ll try not to either.

With love, Palden

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

Rare albino bluebells, at Treviscoe, West Penwith

The Stones of our Motherland

Another ‘last’ has passed

Happy Solstice, everyone.

This is something of a turning point for me. I hope it is so for you, and in a benign way. After a disastrous winter I feel I am now moving on, step by step. One small symptom of this is that I’ve just completed the Meyn Mamvro Archive.

After two years’ work, I’m rather relieved to complete it. Who knows how many mouse-clicks were involved, but it would be thousands. What’s significant here, for me, is that it’s the last such project I shall do. I’ve done a good few over the years.

It’s an archive of 100 copies of the magazine Meyn Mamvro, about archaeology and earth mysteries in West Penwith and wider Cornwall, edited and published by a friend and soul sister, Cheryl Straffon. I’m glad to have done it.

There have been a number of lasts in my life since getting cancer, and a few more are to come.

In West Penwith, where I live, I’ve done a number of projects in the prehistory area, apart from this. This subject really interests me, and I so much love West Penwith.

One is a series of maps of the ancient sites and geomantic alignments in West Penwith and wider Cornwall (six years’ work) – they’re here: http://www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/maps.html

Another is the Ancient Penwith website, a very comprehensive site providing alternative ideas about West Penwith’s prehistory. It goes through the different kinds of sites in Penwith, and it highlights the role of ancient site alignments in the creation of the whole system of ancient sites in Penwith.

It’s here: www.ancientpenwith.org

Another is my forthcoming book Shining Land – the ancient sites of West Penwith, and what they say about megalithic civilisation. It’s not out yet though. But there’s some interesting material on the book’s website to be getting on with. It’s here: www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/

I’ve been overwhelmed with things since my partner departed some months ago, so I’ve been unable to focus on the book to get it published. But that will happen in due course, inshallah. Being a cancer patient, I can’t push myself as most people do, or multitask and remember all the details involved in living a modern life. I go at half the rate of most people.

My support system isn’t working well – if I had my way I’d like a digital PA, a minder or two for adventures (such as in a month’s time) and a close companion. But that’s life – you get what you get, especially on Saturn transits!

The uphill grind of the last 6-9 months has taught me a lot, squeezed and raked me out, pushed me through an accelerated change process and moved me a long way. I can feel it moving without yet knowing where it is going. The process isn’t complete, though things are brightening up.

In August and September I shall be doing the first three events of my ‘Far Beyond’ magic tour, in Glastonbury, Avebury and Totnes area, plus a couple of talks. Full details to be announced soon, when everything is hammered out. I’m really looking forward to that and, if you’re pulled to join me, I’d love seeing you. I have a feeling this is going to be rather special.

It’s great working with each of the local organisers, and many thanks to them. This is limited-edition, one-off stuff, since my capacity to do such things will decline in time. I hope to go to Wales and the North too (organisers sought), perhaps during autumn-winter, inshallah.

The good news I’ve had recently is that my cancer is not deteriorating, according to the latest tests. In February my cancer indicators (such as paraproteins) started climbing – I was very ill and in a dark tunnel – but as I improved they have pegged at a new level. It means I don’t have to change cancer drugs. This is a relief, since the new drug is a kind of thalidomide, which my mother took when gestating me, and intuitively I just don’t feel safe with the prospect of taking it.

There’s another benefit too. The nurses from a private healthcare company (Pharmaxo) who visit me monthly to administer my drugs are really nice, and they answer questions and take on issues in ways that NHS nurses and doctors don’t. If my drugs are changed, I shall lose them (because I’ll be taking pills, not injections). This has been important, since I feel quite neglected by the NHS, and I’ve lost my medical confidante too (my ex-partner), so the advice and support of the nurses has been really valuable.

It’s the peak of the year – it comes so fast – the time when fruition begins, when the drift of our lives since winter solstice reaches a climax and it turns a corner. Something has taken shape, and now we need to do something with it – harvest it and then put it to use. If you’d like to read something about solstices and equinoxes, then here’s a book I wrote 35 years ago, Living in Time, that explains all – now archived free online. Living in Time: The Ancient Festivals.

Love from me to all of you, from down’ere in Cornwall.

Beeee goooood. Palden.

Emergence

and scraping myself off the floor of life

Bluebells in the woods down below the farm

My Mum taught me not to be a problem. As a quiet Virgo, I wasn’t much of a problem – it didn’t take a lot of doing. But her and my concepts of ‘problem’ were different – mine didn’t encompass spotlessly white collars on my school shirt or holding my knife and fork properly. This pattern has at times itself been in itself a problem – not putting myself forward when I should, or accepting loss more than was right. But it’s also an asset which has helped me in my peacemaking work and generally makes people believe I’m a good guy, and this has got me through some mighty scrapes.

It’s an important thing for the 21st Century. We all have to scale things down that we reduce the extent to which we are other people’s problem or can become one. This is tricky. For me, I’ve often been a problem for others in terms of the way they see things, but not necessarily a problem in an ultimately real way. This is common in all sorts of social and intercultural interactions – we project stuff on each other. I’ve been in many situations where the worse option, not the one I present, has been chosen, just to cover people’s asses or allow them to avoid facing something that is important. I’ve sat in clink, been an exile and lost my kids over this. There have been times when I’ve been plain wrong too – and it’s important to own up to these.

It’s all about attentiveness to others. I’m very attentive in certain ways, though sometimes I seem deficient too, on the personal front. My attention is taken up quite a lot with the world and at times with things not of this world. Perhaps as a psychic type I tend to forget some of the more outward niceties and considerations others need, and they don’t necessarily register the support I might be giving them inwardly. Generous in certain ways, though spontaneously, I forget birthdays and little behaviours that matter to others but I don’t really register in my lexicon. I guess this is an Aspie issue.

Since my life encompasses a large number of people, those close to me can sometimes wonder how much I care specifically for them. This can be reinforced by my at times dispassionate and inscrutable demeanour, or an absentmindedness when I’m focusing on work or innerwork that looks like I don’t care. Or perhaps I’m lost in space, processing situational intricacies, or keeping a presence in the Donbas, or monitoring someone who is ill or dying. Or just floating off. Mad professor stuff. I do change, but I’m slow, sure and thorough in it, especially when on a major Saturn transit like recently, and sometimes people can’t wait. Sometimes I change further than others were expecting.

I’ve had a time of scrangly challenges for the last year – the duration of a Neptune opposition Saturn transit, starting in May 2021 and completing in February this year. It has taken 3-4 months since then to surface and survey the new landscape. In February I felt I had perhaps one year left, and now I feel I have longer – it’s important not to try to pin down how much. For me there’s an extra calculation of two things: the time I can stay in active service and the time to drop it and focus on staying alive, or departing well. I don’t want to drag things out though, because I’m also rather tired in my soul and I want to go home for a while.

One of the transformative gifts here is that everything is so much more provisional than it was before, or than it is for most people. We usually have a sense of a roadmap, plans, expectations and logical steps to our lives, whether it’s framed in terms of things feared or things loved and hoped for. But now, in every arrangement I make I must calculate whether and how much I’ll be able to actually do it when the time comes. It helps to be an astrologer, though much of the decision-making I do intuitively. For important arrangements I tend to take a rather military, or a performer’s attitude, managing my energy to make sure I’m alright on the night whatever state I’m in. It’s the before and after that matter more – and nowadays it’s during those times I need a minder.

I always used to say to astrological clients that, when they had a major Saturn transit, they would get a download and a re-purposing of their life and mission, a new chapter in their work. Or (I’d tell them this carefully) they would get consequences from not doing so. On the approach to the transit two years ago I was going through my cancer struggle and reckoned, well, there’s not a lot more for me to do, so I can’t see how it could work that I’d get a new mission. But on the other hand, before cancer came along, something in me had been saying ‘There’s one more major mission to do’. But I could not see what that might be. When cancer came along I packed away that idea.

But cancer gave it back to me. It changed my life. It aged me, putting me up against the wall. It forced me to look at hard truths. It is now yielding fruits I did not expect – yet, the way it feels now, in a funny sort of way, all my life I’ve been unwittingly preparing for this. It shows how taking a hard path can sometimes shift things much more than following a seemingly easier or safer path. I peeped into hell during the depths of last winter, struggling with demons in the desolate places of my soul. But it shifted a pile of crap too. It’s strange to say, in my condition, that I’ve been given a new life, but there’s some truth to it, even if it lasts only a few years.

On the cliffs with the sheikh and friend Julia Aisha

This week I was visited by the Green Sheikh Saad Iddeen AlMaghrebi AlQudsi. He came with a dear Palestine soul-sister, Julia Aisha, with whom I worked in Bethlehem, and by his minder Said Julia Adams. Both Julias are very English, yet Muslims and well versed in Middle Eastern ways, and the Green Sheikh lives in London and goes regularly to Jerusalem, where he was born. He’s involved with many of the spiritual peacemakers I’ve worked with out there, on both sides of the conflict, nowadays calling themselves the Abrahamic Reunion (though formerly they were Jerusalem Peacemakers – it was founded in Glastonbury).

Julia Aisha played the oudh and sang some lovely Palestinian songs, and we formed a little bubble of Palestine here under the cloudy skies of Cornwall. Transfixed, we were. Then I took them to Carn Gloose, a dramatic clifftop nearby, and they made prayer there, facing Makkah. Cornwall weaved its oceanic magic on them and they were shining. We came back and the sheikh said prayers for me, giving me the healing of Allah. He lit up as he was chanting. I was being blessed and felt it. Allah was giving permission to move forward. Alhamdulillah – thanks be to That Which Cannot be Named.

So I want to create some magic spaces and invite you in. I’ll be doing some talks too, captivating in their own way, but this is different – this is circle-working. I’ve always been a good teacher, threading things together and causing a lot of lightbulb moments, but this isn’t primarily about teaching. It’s more about what Tibetans call transmission. Not from me but through me, and through the rather amazing people working with me and through those who are present. This will take some input and focus by everyone for the duration of each event (lasting perhaps 5-6 hours altogether). Something special becomes possible when it’s all well engineered and everyone’s in there with it. I cannot tell you exactly what this will be, but you’ll know it when it comes. I feel I’m in a position now to bring such a thing through, with your help.

At present, there are three areas where I feel I can contribute something. The first is about life and death and our lives and paths, the second is about ‘inner aid’ work to help the world, and the third concerns connecting with the source of our souls and the places and soul-tribes we come from.

I’m not interested in converting anyone or starting a following – I’m not around for long, and that kind of stuff really doesn’t matter any more. This is a series of one-offs – they are not going to get routine. I’m interested in drawing together people who feel a resonance with me and the signal I put out, because in some way that makes us soul-relatives or soul-friends, and we thus have a resonance between us. The coming together of a group of souls with such a connection means that energy-levels can be upstepped to a higher voltage. It means that everyone present needs to be a bit stretchy, willing to overcome reservations and swim in deeper water, but if we hold the circle well, everyone will be safe and the outcomes can be memorable. I and many of you have experience in this and we can do it.

The overall aim of this is to help everyone get connected up better, within yourself and with some good people and beings. I hope it will encourage you to follow your path and pursue your mission, whatever it is. My personal aim here is to fulfil one of the major threads of my life and hopefully to do something of assistance to The Management and to you. Those that I work for don’t seek believers and followers and they are not important in themselves: they want us as souls to rise to our full stature and to do what we’re here for and what we need to do. They’ll support anyone who does, and I want to strengthen in you ways in which this may be done.

Get this. One of the greatest crimes against humanity of today is withholding. We all do it – me too. It’s embedded in our cultures and it’s quite a heave to pull out of its clutches. With it go self-doubt, not-good-enough little-me syndrome, fear of risk or shame and that creepy feeling that the holy spirit somehow left us behind, or that we’re not up to it. Withholding involves setting aside and even forgetting the reason we came, and the true gifts and purpose we have. We get on with other things that seem important at the time, but when we approach the end of life, the money, property and success we’ve had and the chocolate we’ve eaten matter little, while the enduring truths of what we have been and what we have become stare us in the face.

Withholding lies at the root of our planetary problem today. If everyone increasingly got on with their true calling, things on Earth would start resolving quite rapidly. It’s amazing what comes out when the channels start getting unblocked. And yes, the toilets would get cleaned, because there’s a way of making even cleaning toilets a divine act of soul-enriching service.

Climate change, war, systems disintegration, injustice, poverty, toxicity – all these we can resolve. It’s going to take more effort, time, energy, sacrifice and change than we currently believe, but we’re going to do it and we can’t not. There will be payoffs, good news and miracles amidst the crises and crunches. What’s interesting here is that the drift of events in the world is forcing us to face big questions and do something about them for our own survival. There’s an urgency to it. It’s becoming clear that it is in our self-interest to work together and prioritise collective interest. We have to devise a way of coexisting on Earth in a way that fosters diversity and cultural variegation while becoming one planetary people, consensually cooperating in maintaining our world, rendering it safe and decent, and building a new world out of the structures and rubble of the old.

Here’s a question worth addressing, regarding death and what happens afterwards. Do you choose to return to live out one or more further lives on Earth, to contribute toward that planetary resolution, and perhaps to be here when the breakthrough happens or afterwards? It’s hard and risky work though it has its rewards, as you probably know. Or would you opt for heading off to other realms and leaving the Earth issue to those of us who remain? This has its validity too, and this life might be designed to be your last. Consider this carefully because you will face it sometime. Sorting out this question can help you refocus your current life so that, whatever your choice, you do it well while you’re alive.

Because once death comes, there’s no going back. There’s no delete or undo button. That’s when you set sail for other horizons and, if indeed you are to come back or move on, that will be finalised later on, once you’ve gone through the full post-death process. You’ll have a conference with your angels and members of your soul tribe.

I awoke at six this morning with a cacophony of thoughts that permitted me only to make a round of tea before getting on with them. That’s what I’m like. But also I’ve been on Dexamethasone for the last two days, a once-monthly part of my cancer treatment, and as a steroid it gets my mind buzzing. Something usually comes out of it – I’ve trained myself to make use of it. That’s perhaps why you got another blog thrown at you quite quickly after the last one.

I’m on antibiotics too for an osteo-necrosis infection, which I’m not happy about, but I do not see any alternative to them at present, so I’ll continue till I find one that actually works – since this is potentially a killer issue and I can’t mess around. My back is getting weaker, and exercise doesn’t necessarily help it. Cancer caused four of my lowest vertebrae to soften and collapse and my bones shrank marginally – you ought to hear my back clicking when, several times a day, I click myself back into place…

Myeloma is a blood and bones issue, and that’s pretty fundamental. It’s not tumorous, but it permanently changes your constitution. Blood is about life-force and will-to-live, and my bones hold me up, allowing my body to hang itself onto them for the purpose of functioning on a densely-gravitational planet. Myeloma is not very common but it’s one of the fastest growing cancers today – because of increasing EM radiation and use of certain neurotoxic chemicals. My functionalities are much reduced, but I manage, with a little help from my friends. Sometimes, by late afternoon, I can’t hold myself up any more, it hits my life-force tremendously and my brains conk out. I have to hit the horizontal, allowing myself to relax and float off for a regeneration session – it takes about half an hour. That’s when visitors need to get out their knitting.

A number of Paldywan events are taking shape in Glastonbury, Avebury and Totnes in the coming months and, when things are firmed up, I’ll let you know. This will be networked, not greatly advertised. For those of you who cannot come, it will be possible to devise a way of tuning in – news about that later. Other places are possible in due course, though I must pace myself and my helpers. These events will perforce be ‘limited edition’, even if I manage to continue with them for two or three years. Electrosensitivity means I cannot work in cities. Besides, everyone will be far more in contact with things with their phones switched off.

It’s time for breakfast. The sun is shining and I’m going to potter in the garden. I might or might not be alone this weekend, depending on whether anyone chooses to come visit. One other gift cancer has given me has been loss of agency – control over my circumstances. I’m in Neptune’s capable hands, and have gone through another lesson in acceptance. In life, we get what we get, and that’s the way it is, and we’re here to do the best with that. But the amazing thing is that other things happen instead, even if we don’t get what we want, and the universe does indeed look after us.

Love from me, Paldywan

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

Photos by me (in the woods), Miriam Naccache and, on the cliffs, Julia Aisha

The view from my window one early morning

Blessed Be the Assholes

and the light of desolation

It’s amazing what we humans do to justify our existences. This is my fiftieth blog entry, would you believe.

It takes a few hours to do a blog but it takes days beforehand, churning through ideas and possibilities… and then, one day, I wake up, forget all that, and just start writing. That’s what happened here. I was refilling my tea mug, having just got up – vanilla tea with a dash of coconut. It came. I had to get it down before it was lost in the side-alleys of lapsed memory. It’s all to do with opening up a space inside where creativity erupts, as if out of nowhere. Though actually it comes from the compost fermented in the preceding few days.

Sometimes, as a writer, you can plan things out, but sometimes you just have to start – start with anything. Well, something interesting. It’s all about having something to say, and creating it using words that draw in readers regardless of what you’re actually saying, and the combination makes for good writing. Plus a shot of inspiration – something sparky that comes out of nowhere, oozing out between the lines. We humans communicate in far more frequencies than words, and gifted writers can say more than words.

This might surprise you, but in my own life it took a long time to find my words. It came in stages – ages 14-16, 20ish, 30ish and 36 – having written five unpublished manuscripts. Before that, as an Aspie with a rather complex brain, I was in a kind of deep, silent confusion. The world was telling me things that didn’t accord with my experience. It told me things about myself I couldn’t identify with. It made me into a ‘strange boy’ who would sit in the corner, while everyone else did normal things. At school, I just didn’t understand what we were there for. I was an autodidact, just waiting to go home to get on with my studies and projects.

The Council Chamber at Bosigran Castle, West Penwith

Why should A + B = C? Will someone explain? Why should children suffer to go unto Jesus? If God is Love, why should we fear Him? (And why use capital letters)? Why do cars pump exhaust at you? Why should God specifically save the Queen? With Jupiter in Pisces and Moon in Gemini, these kinds of questions irked the young me.

I was the boy with glasses who got picked on and beaten up. But around age fourteen something clicked. I remember two things (my memory is shot, so this is remarkable in itself). Feeling inadequate and holding back, I was nevertheless pushed into speaking at the school debating society. Some kids were getting ready to laugh at me. I won hands down, completely forgetting my notes and holding forth fluently. I found my voice and, well, from then on I was good on-stage. But I still had a struggly quandary going on in myself, especially with understanding my personal position in life and how to work relationships.

The other thing was cross-country running. In Liverpool, football was everything, and speccy-foureyes was no good at it. But when we started long-distance running, Mars in Scorpio found his power. I delighted in hanging round mid-field for the first half of the run, and then accelerating just as the big football heroes were flagging – and I’d love passing them, heading for the front, hehe. That was great! It taught me that anything is possible if I have the will. This lesson applies just as much now, going through a cancer-induced endurance test. Out of this come a second strength and miracle possibilities.

Stone of the Hole, Men an Tol, West Penwith

It was LSD that changed everything. Age 16 (it was legal in 1966), I was given some California acid by a Scouse poet and we tripped out on the dockside in Liverpool. Suddenly I slotted into myself. I had a clue – saw the light, the beginnings of a calling. Uranus and Pluto were conjuncting over the Sun in my astrological chart (historic in itself), and my life changed, on that day. It was a ‘turning in the deepest seat of consciousness’. The strange boy went stranger, and something snapped together. It was okay to be me, as I was. From then on I was on a search for truth.

Well, I found some, only some, though it was worth the journey and it continues today, even in late life. Truth is big and deep and wide. So big that you can’t actually fully get it, and there’s no final answer – though we humans have indeed tried. Anyone claiming The Truth is missing something. When I was involved with the Council of Nine, they’d always refer to ‘What you call God’. Yet it’s here within us, a kind of deep knowing, a feeling of alignment, integration, anchoredness and vastness that reveals itself to each and every one of us at certain moments in life. What we do with that – many people reach for the next can of beer or stand in queues at airports – is entirely up to us, and some of us do say Yes. Hello, you.

But even then, over the decades, for me it has been an ongoing battle between saying Yes and saying No – and also I’ve studiously avoided the question, as we all do. It’s criminal, really – the crime of avoiding doing what we’re really here to do. The crime of retraction. It’s kinda easier to ‘settle down’, get a job and get drunk at Christmas – there’s so much pressure to join the Great Turning-Away. We must conform to some extent, even if you’re a weirdo like me, because we’re all here amongst humanity and, unless you close yourself away somewhere, way away in the Siberian taiga, or even attempt a compromise version like me at the far end of Cornwall, our fellow humans are all around us and we live in the civilisation and time of history that we live in. And we chose to come here.

Mulfra Quoit – a neolithic energy-generator, I believe it was deliberately decommissioned

Aspies call our so-called syndrome ‘Wrong Planet Syndrome’. Problem is, it’s tricky looking at the world from the viewpoint of a stranger. Sometimes you even look at your own mother or your lover and think Who is this?. It’s double-tricky, because most people around you think you have a programming error – a mental health issue – when actually it’s simply that an Aspie is programmed up with a different operating system (like Apple and Android). But Aspies are in a minority, and now we’ve been lumped into an autistic spectrum that some wisecracker with a doctorate thought was a nifty way of reclassifying everyone. And other neurotypical thinkers thought, yay, that’s useful, that explains things… and now we’re stuck in a new, more padded, box. Well, fuckit, I’m not having any of it.

I’ve been a victim many times over, yet something in me deeply believes that victimhood doesn’t really exist. Even if I’m ‘mentally ill’ – and that depends on your viewpoint – it’s still my prerogative to rise up. With some success and quite a lot of failures, I’ve made some progress. It’s about fully occupying one’s space and knowing, deep down, that you’re up to it – you embody it, it’s yours and you can do it. Even when you get beaten down, you can rise up, resist, turn the tables, make things good, move forward. Some of the most exemplary people I’ve known have been through the jaws of total disaster. From this viewpoint, Ukraine is now a crucible of accelerated soul evolution.

Though it can be hard, I prefer being unusual than normal, even when I’m misunderstood today and pay a high price, even charged by close loved ones. For loved ones it’s difficult too, and I really recognise that. I’m a strange mixture of a hermit and a public figure – and it’s the bit in between where I screw up, in personal and closer relationships. I fail to meet up with expectations and behavioural norms, or to deal well with some aspects of human guile and complexity.

Psycho-normals see Aspies as complex beings, but to ourselves we’re simple and straight-up and the rest of the world is complex. It becomes more complicated because most neurotypicals regard themselves as normal when they’re far more way-out and human than they allow themselves to be.

Boscawen-un stone circle, from Creeg Tol

It’s like French and English: both peoples think they stand at the centre of reality in comparison to the others over there – and all sorts of trouble arises as a result, even though we’re related. My reality is better than yours. We’re doing this to Russians and Chinese at present, reducing and dehumanising them in order to justify things we do to them – and they do the same back, and look at the mess we’re in.

Yes, I’m a victim, so that entitles me either to droop in self-pity or to strike back hard, and to feel fully justified in either. That’s a really complex syndrome, and it affects individuals, social groups and nations. I’m one of the downtrodden, so let’s fuck the banksters, the toxic males or the rich whiteys because there’s not a single human amongst them, and they deserve it.

But there’s something very, very real to victimhood too, and you definitely feel it when you’re locked up in jail, refused your fortieth job application or looking down the barrel of a gun. We should indeed support victims, and injustice is a key issue in today’s world. But just because we were victims earlier in life, or even in another life, it doesn’t make us victims now.

The ancient power of Boswens menhir and the modern power of a major air traffic control beacon. Where truly lies the power?

Just because I have elements of PTSD from seeing a few too many really bad and wrong things, it doesn’t justify my being hard-hearted toward my friends and loved ones – and I’m so sorry to those who have had this from me. I really mean it. (I’ve been on a Neptune opposition Saturn over the last year, and that’s why this confessional stuff is important just now.)

It’s complex though, and nothing exists in a vacuum. Palestinians often say, ‘Why do Jews give us such a hard time, when it was Europeans who gave them a hard time?’. (Also, a wide-eyed, naive Aspie might ask, why do some Palestinians give Israelis a hard time back?) This is the kind of thing we must resolve, and Ukraine is its current nexus of attention, but there will be more horrors until we stop. Please don’t act shocked and surprised when the next round breaks out. This goes deeper than diplomacy: this concerns mass psycho-spiritual, social and cultural change. We just gotta do it, if we are to survive. As much in our own lives as in war zones.

I have been party to this crap too – I have dirty hands, and I’m not unique. It’s important to feel the responsibility and consequence but not to shut ourselves down with guilt and shame. I did it, yes. It’s time for me to forgive everyone who has done similar to me. The past cannot be undone, and it all hangs around what we learn and what we do from now on. Stepping over the craters to hug our adversaries is a really crucial thing to do. Because we’re all in this mess together.

You might wonder why I’m writing this stuff on a cancer blog. Well, these kinds of thoughts are part of my healing, the resolution of my own story. I’m trying to work on this stuff so that I can be a bit more at peace when I pop my clogs. Hopefully. That’s the idea. Not that this kind of cancer (myeloma) or my disabilities can be undone, but it’s all to do with happiness. Basic happiness is the greatest healer around. If you’re underlyingly happy you can make something good of anything. The happiness of opening up, unburdening, forgiveness, understanding, acceptance. And of having some food in your belly and a roof over your head. And the happiness of togetherness.

Here’s something. I’m cooking up tentative plans – yes, plans, for the first time in nearly three years, since going down with cancer. If I can muster the energy and some people to help set it up, I’m thinking of doing a ‘magic tour’ of a few places in Britain, to create an opportunity to meet up. One might be round Glastonbury. I don’t know if it’ll work yet, but this idea has quickened my heart. I want to bring something to you. It’s early stages, and much hangs around finding a good local organiser in each place. I’m in process of writing a proposal and blurb. So watch this space. One of my podcasts sums it all up: the one called Soul Evolution.

Here in my faraway eyrie, I think of you all – I really do. I’ve been alone, feeling rather desolate, for what feels like a long time, and something has come from it. Since I can welcome guests at my home only in ones or twos, I want to create some temporary magic spaces, perhaps round campfires, for friends and soul-relations elsewhere in larger numbers, for a few hours of time-travel, close encounters and lightbulb moments. Would that interest you? I have a strange gift of frail strength, love and tears to share, and I have a few friends upstairs. But I’ll need a good armchair. And you’ll need to switch off your phones if you want me at my best.

Bless you all, and bless everyone. Bless even the world’s worst assholes. The swallows outside my window have just burst into tuneful twittering, as if to agree. And it’s now lunchtime and I forgot my breakfast and pills, so I’d better stop…

With love, Paldywan.

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Carn Les Boel – lift-off place for the far beyond

Generations

and doing time on Earth

Something is beginning to come together, and that’s a relief. I went through a big loss and crisis nearly three months ago, with my world disintegrating and hope plummeting, but I plugged on through it, taking it day by day. A blessing arose in that darkness that I didn’t see at the time. As my health and spirits sank it felt as if I was coming close to dying. As I mentioned in my last blog, we’re all partially dead, and at that time I went from (perhaps) 50% to (perhaps) 80% and started feeling pre-death shutting-down feelings. (Today I’m back around 50% again.)

There comes a point where you have to accept that you could be going. However, what I find is that, when I reach that place, everything changes. I go further toward dying, or my homoeostatic, self-healing capacities kick in, and a revival of some kind follows. You might have experienced this yourself in a breakdown or overwhelming crisis with death-like characteristics, even if it was mainly a psychospiritual wrenching out of the past and a squaring with the present.

Pordenack Point, with Wolf Rock lighthouse behind

The great thing about dying or near-death is that it clarifies and simplifies a lot. You see things more as they actually are, not what we tell ourselves they are. You’re less caught up in life’s ins and outs and see more clearly the underlying threads, meanings, connections and inevitabilities of things. And life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.

So the rather deep and murky experience I had in February seems to have started me on a new chapter of exploration. I’ve decided to probe the inner experiences leading toward disincarnation, to see what I can do about sensing or perhaps experiencing some of the post-death stages – at least as they might apply to me. It strikes me that, if I am willing and give it attention, it’s possible to disentangle many of the processes that occur around death, and to work with them in a different order or a different way.

I’m finding hints of this already. It has something to do with making good use of the end-of-life phase, when much of the stuff and processing that comes up around death can be done. This phase can last from days to years, and everyone’s story is different. I realised that, with issues currently emerging in my life, if I don’t process them now, I’ll need to do so at death. There’s a kind of quiet urgency to it. So from this came the idea of taking some of the pressure off the moment of death – removing some of the unnecessary confusion from it.

Several people have been contacting me as a result of things I’ve written and podcasted, and this is where something is coming together. The beginnings of a team is perhaps forming. I do wish to share as much as I can of the process with anyone who is interested. On the other hand, when I’m on my way out, I’ll probably need a small, tight team, with relatively little to-ing and fro-ing of people in the last stages.

It’s like childbirth: in the births I’ve been involved in, there is usually a need for about 5-6 people, no more, each of whom take different roles, either close-in and personal or managing the phone, the food or the people, with one person sitting quietly in the corner holding the energy, and I think the same applies in the case of dying. Besides, if anyone wants to see me, please do so while I’m alive, since there’s no point feeling sadness and loss once I go. And if you seek a true sharing, it’s best to come alone.

But there’s more to this. I’m finding that visitors can find it challenging stepping their energy down to where I’m at. They’re living with busy timetables and agendas while I am not, and their minds are racing compared to mine. My energies do quicken when people visit me, and I can come half-way, but I do need people to sensitise themselves and come half-way too, to connect on the level that we need, and which most people visiting me actually seek. It’s not just to do with talking, it’s do do with what Hindus would call ‘darshan’ – inner connection and communion. I don’t have a lot of time and energy to mess around, and there might not be a ‘next time’.

This vibrational issue will probably intensify around the time of my passing, and the people who will be welcome will be those who are sensitive and empathic enough to step themselves down sufficiently, vibrationally speaking. There’s a profound quietness involved. Without this, the ‘angelic connection’, the vortex, the wormhole we need to go through when we pass over, doesn’t function so well.

But then, all of this might be the stuff of imagination. How and when we pop our clogs is not something that is controllable. It can happen to any of us tomorrow. Some of us have this truism facing us more hauntingly than others. We shall see how this all pans out when we get there. However, the experiences of the last few months, having shoved me through the grindstone, seem now to be yielding some fruits. And it’s springtime. And I’m still alive.

This end-of-life perspective has led to other things too. In my teens and twenties I chose a path of change, seeking, with so many yet so few others, to change the world. Well, it has taken a far longer and far more than I, or people like me, first thought. Even when being realistic, we still thought it would happen by the time of the Millennium. The purposes for which many of us were born have not been able fully to come about.

In my own case, I feel I was born not exactly to help bring about the big change in the world, but to lay tracks for what needs to happen after it. Much of my life purpose has been predicated on that, and I feel I haven’t done all that I might have done, though what I have done is good enough in the rather adverse circumstances of recent decades. With this in mind, I’m leaving quite a big archive of material on my website, just in case folks in my grandchildren’s generation, or even one or two of my own grandchildren, find it useful.

This issue, for me, has involved quite an internal struggle. And I’ve come to this…

Change takes seven generations. Several ancient cultures say this. That’s rather thought-provoking and difficult to face if you’re a change-making activist, but it’s true. Starting out in adult life as a revolutionary, this is what I’ve had to learn in order to make sense of the way my life and the world unfolded thereafter. Because it isn’t what I and we dreamt of. The world didn’t give peace a chance. However, there’s progress, even if, to us with our limited life-spans, it’s really slow. A lot of groundlaying has been done, and a lot of possibilities have been explored and trialled. Free energy is available, though it awaits its time.

If you count the enormous global change we’re a part of to have started moving in the 1960s, with my generation being the one that started shifting things, then our children’s generation, now mostly in their 30s and 40s, and their kids, now young or up to 25ish, make three generations. Those two younger generations have already shown signs of pushing the process further along than my generation could.

There are four generations to go. That takes us into the 22nd Century. If you come back once you’ve popped your clogs, you might perhaps see this completion in your next life or the one after that. Depending of course on how things go. We earthlings have, after all, chosen to go for a cliffhanger. Not even God Almighty knows what we humans are going to do next. It rests in our hands.

My feeling is that my grandchildren’s generation, the children of today, will shift things sufficiently to swing the overall tide of change in the world – especially in the so-called ‘developing’ or majority world, where young people currently form majorities. I sense that the crunch will come around the 2050s, when they are in mid-life and in power. (For more on this, see here.) That is, the world could well tilt from a net-damaging to a net-fixing mode around then, in de facto terms, but it will still take time.

Yet each generation stands on the shoulders of those who came before, expressing its missed or repressed possibilities. My generation brought us the Summer of Love in 1967 but Britain’s unmentioned, more secret history tells a story of widespread free love, free-thinking and spiritual growth during WW2, amidst the pain and disaster of war. The biggest orgies of recent centuries took place in Hyde Park and similar places on VE day on 8th May 1945, not in 1967. This upwelling of energy got shut down and bottled up when the war ended, and my generation therefore needed to bring it out of hiding (and The Pill helped).

Similarly, the gender-loosening going on in Gen-X today stands on the shoulders of the gays and lesbians of former decades, and the abuses and deaths they went through, and the more communitaire values of many young people today are moving things toward a more human, just and caring kind of society that some in my generation dreamt of and strove to build, even if our rampant individualism rather got in the way.

In terms of longterm change, two things are going on here: one is long and slow, the stuff of centuries, and one is more intense, the stuff of decades. They’re confusingly intermixed. The long, slow one is all about becoming a planetary people, a sustainable and genuinely civilised global culture capable of taking its due place in the universe. That’ll take a while, since it involves healing the damage and trauma of millennia.

The shorter one is the crash-response period we must go through to stop the damage we’re causing and deal with its immediate effects, during this century and in the coming decades. This period of instability and change started in the 1960s and, after a delayed-action start, it’s beginning to gain momentum. Kind of. Hopefully. I think that, by the late 2020s, things could be moving much faster – we could actually be in for an avalanche of events and developments, for which Covid and Ukraine were but the foothills.

If we had started with necessary changes in the 1960s-70s, many of the problems we have now would be very different – we’d be further along the road toward sustainability, justice and peace, though it’s likely that we would not have progressed sufficiently to be ‘out of the woods’ by now. It takes time to fix planets and planetary races, and ultimately it has to be done at every level of reality and in all of the micro-worlds that make up this highly variegated planet we call Earth.

A planet is a mass experience with a particular flavour. Our planet has quite strong gravity-fields, and we therefore have to have quite robust bodies to handle it. Like some kinds of beings of other worlds, we can operate both in the physical and the metaphysical realms, except here, rather psychotically, we separate it into ‘waking life’ and ‘sleep and dreams’, while on other worlds the process is more integrated and conscious. Problem is that the intricacy and immersive quality of life here, together with the strong gravitational fields, pull our thoughts and beliefs downwards and we lose the plot, forgetting the real reasons why we came, the main agenda of life. We’ve made cultural institutions of this and we build our belief systems around quite alienated, separative, distrusting, competitive, threatened assumptions. That’s really weird.

This getting lost business is a big one. We all do it. It is a key part of the planet Earth process. The big question is whether we are able and willing to return to balance, to centre, to sanity, to proportion and to peace, when we do get lost. If we’re willing, the challenge is then to make a habit of returning – however we do that – so that it becomes an inbuilt, default pattern. This becomes important when we face death because marshalling all our forces at that time can be quite an operation. In death, you tend to go the way you habituated yourself to during life. Though it’s also important when we confront a moment of truth or a reality-crunch at any time of life: if habituated to centring and collecting ourselves, we resort to it as a default behaviour. This is important because, when we have a crisis, our control over things drops dramatically. So if you’re able to surf with it, drawing on experience, you’re more likely to make progress in life and in dying – and afterwards. You become psychospiritually more flexible.

So really, the way we deal with our crises and crunch-points in life sets the patterns for the way we die. If avoidance or denial are our default patterns, this makes for a more difficult death, since there can often be far more ‘stuff’ to deal with when death comes. So acceptance, non-resistance, becomes important. You can neither block nor push the river. Even if we feel we can’t handle it, it’s happening anyway, so acceptance is vital.

Even in the new age movement, many people, so anxious to heal and make things better, and somehow thinking that death is some sort of failure, something wrong or perpetually avoidable, suffer big acceptance problems – and this syndrome, not unique to them, stretches across society.

So what are the fears that we each have, that cause us to turn away from dwelling on something that is going to come to every single one of us anyway? Dying is inevitable and unavoidable. The best preparation for death is a full life, lived as well as possible, and there is no standard recipe for it since the answers for each of us are innately programmed within us. So near, yet, sometimes, so far.

So if I seem to be harping on about death and dying, it’s because I feel our society doesn’t talk enough about it, and it’s part of my exploration. Being a pathological communicator, and long ago having tied my growth path to that of the world by taking a spiritual-and-political stand on things, I feel it’s worth going on a bit about it. Or perhaps I don’t have a lot else to do. Even so, I’m grateful for your reading this: it gives me a reason to be here!

Here’s a re-tweet that I keep re-learning over and over: it’s all okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

And… so involved in writing was I that I forgot my breakfast, and now it’s past lunchtime. That’s the kind of thing that happens on Earth, especially with me. Time to put the kettle on.

With love from me, Paldywan Kenobi.

Here’s my website: www.palden.co.uk
and here are my podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
and if you like the simulacra in this blog: palden.co.uk/photos/simulacra.html
and if you want to find out where Pordenack Point is, try here.

And there you are, and bless you for that.

When It All Gets Too Much

My latest podcast

In some of my podcasts I share some very personal things, and this is one of those.

We’re all going through it – that feeling of OMG, this is all too much – and it’s gone global. It hits the best of us.

This is about my own little version of it, which nevertheless is rather heart-rending for me. With a few insights into the process of riding with truth – it can propel us along.

It was recorded in the woods below our farm, on a sunny springtime day, and edited and uploaded same day, 24th March. 18 minutes long.

Thanks for listening! Love, Palden.

Find it on my site at www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

or listen on Spotify – and it’s also on Apple and Google Podcasts.