The next Aha Class on Weds 12th Feb 2025 at The Hive, Penzance, Cornwall.
Receiving cancer into my life five years ago, I’ve looked in the face of death several times, and quite experientially. In fact, at present I’m surprised, even rather disoriented, to be alive. But it didn’t start there – this has been an evolving theme of my life. So in this Aha Class I’ll be sharing some insights and perceptions I’ve picked up along the way.
I had a life-changing near-death experience at age 24 – accidental food poisoning (hemlock, actually). I was unconscious for nine days, awakening with much of my memory wiped clean. Not long afterwards I met up with Tibetan Lamas, who taught their perceptions of life and death, about the bardos, the differing realms of existence, of which life is but one. Frankly, their blessings and kindness kept me on the rails during a very difficult time.
Then I became involved with campaigning for home-birth, following the births of two of my daughters. To me, a good natural birth made inherent sense with no need for rational explanation. Later in life I was even able to communicate with a soul before his birth, and he talked to me about what it was like being in his (to us) little world.
Later, from the 1990s onwards, I found myself working psychically with dying people, helping them over to the other side. Some were people I knew, and others were in conflict zones experiencing tricky deaths. Having been to the edge of death myself, I was able to help them transition – holding their hand and going over with them. It was remarkable how variable their experiences were. I was also part of a group (the Flying Squad) in which amongst other things we did psychic soul-rescue work in earthquake and disaster zones.
Since getting cancer five years ago, I’ve been hovering close to the threshold myself a few times. This has been a true education. Hovering on the boundaries really made me aware of the contrasting issues in both worlds. I feel reasonably comfortable about dying: in my way of seeing things, I’ll be going home. Well, at least for a while. I’m a bit beat-up and in need of deep healing.
I see things from the viewpoint of reincarnation. Looking at things this way, getting born, being alive and getting dead take on a new light. There’s something of us that continues through all of this. A newborn baby is not a blank slate devoid of character, and a person who dies doesn’t just stop existing – it’s a journey of the soul. Not only this but, as many of you might have found, being a witness to a birth or a death can be a wondrous and spirit-showered experience in its own right.
Dying is like an assessment of where we’ve actually got to after living a life. In the end it’s our own assessment, though it might take the shape of St Peter, or a wrathful deity, or a wise old angel. It comes from a place of truth, perspective and far-seeing that dawns in us during the dying process. This dawning can happen before, during or after clinical death, depending on where we are at – in terms of what we have truly become. This sounds serious, though it can also be joyful and a relief. It all depends on what we have done with our lives and where we have come to with it all.
This isn’t about judgements like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. It’s about seeing the true and full range of causes and consequences arising from all that we have been part of – what we have done and not done during those defining moments, those periods of time and those dramas we were in. There’s an understanding, a forgiveness, a grace and mercy to it. We come to understand why things went that way.
Dying before we die: this can make the dying transition easier, decongesting the process. Getting stuff sorted before we go – and not just writing our will, but clarifying things in our heart and soul, in truth and ‘before God’. We all need to do a reckoning, a forgiveness, a resolution and a releasing, with ourselves, people and the world.
It was as it was. What have I learned from it and what have I become? I’ve made mistakes and done things I’m not happy about, and it’s a process of owning up and squaring with it. In some cases I’ve done things to rebalance or rectify things, and in others I have not. Even with unresolved issues, it’s necessary to accept their unresolution.
There’s also a balancing factor – the things we’ve done that we can be happy with, that brought forwardness to others and the world, some of which we did precisely to redeem our own shadows, to pass through a karmic gateway. Part of this reckoning involves acknowledging our strong points and things we are glad about.
So this talk is for anyone facing death, or witnessing it in a person close to them, or feeling bereaved, or working with dying people, or preoccupied with the deep-seated questions that life and death raise. Actually, if truth be known, that’s everyone, but we have room for thirty-fiveish people at the Aha Class! It will be recorded and posted online afterwards.
I take a rather left-field and spiritualistic approach to all this. Whether or not you agree, I hope this talk might help get you into the zone, elasticise some ideas and set some things in motion. In our modern Western culture we have a big taboo around questions of birth and death, and this is very strange and not to our advantage. Even so, every one of us got born (well done) and every one of us is heading for the exit (good luck). So perhaps it’s worth giving this matter a little attention.
Do come if you can. If you can’t, the audio recording is posted online about a week afterwards.
Yes, that’s the drug I’m on today, together with Lenidalomide, Dexamethasone, Apixaban and Aciclovir – it’s enough to make pharma-paranoiacs run a mile. Many have been the messages I’ve had which recommend all sorts of alternative means of staying alive. No doubt well intentioned, I nevertheless find myself writing back to ask whether they have actual experience of what they recommend – which has mostly not been the case. Most seem to think I have a ‘normal’ cancer, without actually knowing I have Multiple Myeloma, an incurable blood cancer and definitely not normal.
I’ve listed all the holistic supplements, remedies and methods that I use in my cancer treatment in my book and audiobook ‘Blessings that Bones Bring‘. With a philosophy of counting my blessings, I’m doing both pharma and holistics, and it works, and the ideological contradiction between them that many people set up for themselves is something I gladly omit to subscribe to.
Just as well really – I’m alive against the odds. But the biggest medicine of all is this. If you are practicing your life-purpose, the reason why you came here to Earth, as a priority, then you’re likely to stay alive until it’s reasonably complete – whatever that means. However, here’s the rub: for some people, dying and the manner of their death can also be part of that life-purpose. Princess Di was an example.
It’s an initiation. You might be a smart-arse with a masters or a doctorate, but they will not qualify you for this. What’s needed is every single cubic inch of humanity you have in you. It comes at you, takes away your control and takes you off, out of your body to another place.
Or perhaps you believe it all goes dark and the you that is you somehow suddenly stops being you – you’ve become a useless pile of dust returning to the dust. Well, good luck with that, though you might be heading for a few surprises. In my experience, the journey doesn’t stop there. Just as well really.
I do have a strange tendency to believe that there’s more to existence than that. The last five years, since cancer gave itself to me, have reinforced that belief. If indeed it is a belief. After all, do I believe in breakfast? Do I believe in trees, rain and sunshine? I’ve been really close to dying, several times. Actually, I shouldn’t be alive – and that’s not a medical opinion but my own observation. I’ve made it through thanks to a series of miracles, a few acts of faith and a strange capacity to rebirth myself. Plus the prayers and goodwill of friends, the blessings of guardian angels, and… work. Yes, work. Working at the reason why I came, and whether I’ve done enough of it to feel satsified with a job well enough done.
Much to my surprise. I wasn’t expecting to be alive after five years, and it leaves me in rather an open space. I thought that at most I had three years, and now I’m on extra time. It’s a matter of figuring out how to make plans while knowing that I’m vulnerable enough, and my grip on life is tenuous enough, to pop my clogs tomorrow or the next day.
For me, it’s a matter of taking charge of my death. It’s my decision – not anyone else’s. Except perhaps for those angels. A year ago, my haematological specialist at the Royal Cornwall hospital said to me, “Well, Mr Jenkins, I don’t know what you do, and I don’t want to know but, whatever you’re doing, keep on doing it“. Indeed, I did, and I’m still here. I’m an easy customer for her – I get few complications, I’m uncomplaining though I’m also calm and clear about certain issues, and she leaves me to my own devices. No, not toxic digital devices, but devices such as intuition… and inner doctors.
Yes, I’ve got some inner doctors. I called them in at an early stage. My angels shunted a few in, too. Once a week, I have a session with them (and at no charge). I go into myself, breathing myself down into a deep state, and I open myself up to them, and there they are. They examine and scan me – using psychospiritual technologies that make Startrek look primitive. I feel them umming and aaahing over things, and consulting, and sometimes I’m flooded with light, or they insert a light-tube into me, or they focus on an organ, and often I’m not at all sure what they’re doing but I can feel them doing it.
At times they raise me up to their level and it feels so friendly, inclusive and welcoming there. I kinda hover there, on my back, held in the middle of their energy-field and jiggled, poked, massaged and blessed by invisible forces. After a while they drop me back down again.
It’s funny how it works. The doctors at Treliske have been worrying about the fact that I’ve been a lifelong smoker – it helps my brains and, as a psychic, also helps me stay on Earth – since I am not a foodie, which is the other way many psychics stay on Earth. So I was to go in for a lung scan. But during my last session with the inner doctors, I did two things. One was to ask for their help in cleaning out my lungs and removing anything that’s unhelpful, and the second was to offer myself up and release all hopes, fears and expectations, to get to a state of full acceptance that, whatever is to happen will happen, and it will be good.
So they flooded my lungs with light and I felt them doing something there. I continued with this in the days that followed but, the day before the scan, the thought came, “Hmmm, this needs more time…“. Claire, a trusty helper from over the hill, took me for the scan. I walked into chaos – the power had gone off – but eventually, on the second interview, the nurse said, “Ah, Mr Jenkins, I’m sorry to say that we can’t scan you because you had a PET scan last August and we cannot scan you more than once a year“. I quietly chuckled. Yes indeed, this needs more time, and I’d just been given it. The nurse didn’t notice me looking upwards and smiling. This is how it sometimes works.
I thanked her for her consideration, saying I am electrosensitive and it matters to me. “Ah, that’s interesting“, said she, proceeding to ask questions as if she knew about it. This was refreshing: in the last five years only one doctor has indicated interest. He showed me a paper in The Lancet which correlated incidences of Multiple Myeloma with proximity to nuke stations. Since then I’ve met other Myeloma patients who have worked operating radar systems, driving nuclear-waste trains from Sellafield, working as high-tension power cable or mobile phone engineers, or as programmers who’ve used a lot of wi-fi…
Once information about EM-radiation is finally made public, everyone will no doubt bleat, “But why weren’t we told?”. To which the answer is: “Why didn’t you feel it and use your commonsense? Did you think it would be alright to irradiate yourself all day and every day without consequence?”.
Well, we humans… we find quite intricate ways of limiting our possibilities and making life difficult. The same applies to me. However, while I have my own self-immolating patterns, I’ve also looked after myself and now find myself still alive as a result – if proof be needed. I’m definitely glad that, at an early age (21) I went vegetarian and changed my life – it has paid off. Yes, I got cancer, but my capacity to deal with it is far greater than most people’s, because on the whole I’ve had a good diet and lifestyle, having built up a good reserve stock of resilience.
But here’s what in the end is the key bit: I’ve been following a growth path, with fewer diversions and denials than most ‘average’ people. If you live on purpose and in purpose, it gives you distinct reasons for staying alive.
But even then, the stories of our lives are multiplex and not limited to being alive in a body. Many of us aren’t even fully installed in our bodies, even when emotionally attached and afraid of losing them. The Council of Nine put it quite well…
“Your Planet Earth is the most beautiful that exists in the universe. It has a physical variety that no other planet has. It has a varied climate that no other planet has. In all the universe there is no planet in existence that has the physical characteristics of Planet Earth. It is the rarest of beauties, and it does attract souls which, once they have come, would like to come back again. This has created a bottleneck of souls recycling on Earth.
“It is of a different nature from any other planet. It has aspects of all planets: it is like a composite of the Universe, with all the positive and all the negative aspects, and all in between, and this is what attracts souls.
“It has with it a gravitational pull that is different from other planets, and because of this a soul begins to feel a physicalness. Souls become adapted to their physical bodies, and they forget the freedom and pleasures they have without it.
“The Earth was created to be a paradise. When souls achieve harmony it will become a paradise again. Planet Earth is the only one of its kind, the only planet of free [individualised] choice in the entire universe, the planet created for the balancing of the spiritual with the physical – in other words, the creating of paradise.“
To some extent this ‘paradise’ business is an attitude of mind. In a funny sort of way, since getting cancer and becoming partially disabled I’ve been happier than before. It’s all to do with how we deal with the life we’ve been given. Nowadays, a lot of people do a lot of complaining about life, as if it’s all someone or something else’s fault. But my best recommendation is, just go to Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, Belarus, Syria, Ukraine, Xinjiang or Myanmar – there are plenty of options – and do a full-spectrum re-assessment. You might find that you come to feel differently about things. That’s what happened to me.
Yeah, life’s a bitch, then you die. However, here’s another gem from the Nine: no one is here by accident.
So, you see, even on pharmaceutical cancer drugs, you can do something with it to make it good. That’s where that free, individualised choice truly lies. It’s on us, not anyone or anything else.
Pendeen Watch as seen from Bosigran Castle, Penwith, Cornwall
The amazing thing with dying is that it really is about setting sail into the Great Unknown. In aviation terms, it feels more like a landing procedure than a take-off procedure. Over the last twentyish years I’ve psychically tracked and handheld perhaps forty souls through the life-death transition – very interesting, rewarding and also wearing – and what has been striking has been the sheer variety of experiences people seem to have had while transitioning through death. For myself, the closer I come to dying, the more I find I’m needing to loosen up my preconceptions.
And my preconditions. Ultimately futile, they’re all about clinging on to the known. But it’s loss of control that is the key issue here, and it has already started. Dying is a challenge to go with the flow, to let be, to have done with it, to trust in the process and feel a way forward. Suddenly perspectives I harboured about life are changing and revealing themselves very differently. I have to ‘make a deal with God’ (as Kate Bush once sang).
It’s not binary. We aren’t either alive or dead. We’re all a mixture of both in varying proportions, all through life, and it changes slowly, sometimes in phases and sometimes suddenly. Medical thinking has it that death means clinical death, when your life-signs hit zero, but no, that’s a stage of dying. You still exist afterwards and you exist before, though you might be half-dead. When you’re on the other side, for a while you’ll see and hear people back in the land of the living whom you knew in life, though unless they are receptive to listening, they won’t see or hear you – and that can be tricky.
We’re all part-dead. I’m more dead than many of my readers, though there might be one or two who are more dead than me – hello! In February I think I went up to 95% dead – close – but by spring equinox I was down to 80%, and now I’d put myself at 70%. But only last week I had a lurch and drooped, getting older again for two days. This happens with cancer – you go up and down. Small things can have big effects.
Above Porthmoina Cove, Penwith
In the near-death experience I had at age 24 – I was unconscious for nine days – it permanently changed me. I was very different afterwards, having gone through substantial memory-loss and brain-changes. Some would call it a ‘walk-in’. When I first came to, I didn’t even recognise my parents, with no sense of where I was or the time we were in.
As I revived, the experience made me mission-driven, pushing me to do whatever it was that I had come here to do. It took about seven years after the NDE to ‘come back’ sufficiently, to be fully functional. After three more years, by 1983, my mission presented itself – I started the camps movement. Or it started through me.
The near brush I had with dying in February this year shook, squeezed and wrung me out. By April, to my surprise I was served new instructions. An astoundingly clear voice in my head said, “Ah, there’s something more we’d like you to do…” – and I both perked up and groaned at the same time. I crawled from the slough of despond in February to the beginnings of a new vision by May.
I have been presented with serving an emergent grandfather-type role in the lives of many people. Additionally, there’s something incomplete about the ‘world work’ – world healing-oriented group consciousness-work – I’ve been involved with since the 1980s. And my writing and podcasting are appreciated. So there are things to do. A few years ago I wouldn’t have anticipated this.
There’s something here about sinking into the deep dark and then reviving with an armful of light. Shaky as I am, I’m being given something new to do, even though time is not really on my side. Yet this fact is a motivator: it is urging me to do what I can do while I still can and to enjoy doing it.
It might be a swansong or the beginning of something – I cannot tell. I have osteonecrosis (a dying jawbone), peripheral neuropathy (feelingless feet), a deteriorating back, a troubled stomach, a low-level permanent ache, I’m sensitive to radiation and, even with my thin body, gravity weighs heavily. Oh, and I have a cancer of the blood and bones.
Life is hard in a way I’ve never encountered before, and sometimes it gets me down – this last six months I’ve had a bit too much of it. I nearly buckled. So, if this gets much worse, it could be a relief for me to go. Can you see how this might be a positive thing? Though it does look as if there are positive reasons to stay alive too.
If you want to meet me before I go, then I am still alive in a body and here I am – alone much of the time. I serve good tea. Leaving it to another time, another year, might not be the best thing. Yes, when I go a gap will be created by my absence, but another kind of presence is possible which, in the end, might be valuable too. After all, here on Earth time and geography keep us separate anyway. There comes a point where a soul has done enough for this lifetime. We need to be released. But we haven’t gone away.
Bosigran Castle
I had a good friend, Mike Blackwood, who died a seemingly sad death on booze, drugs and despair. Uncomfortable in this world, he was a spirited man, a solid part of our team in the camps of the 1980s – the site manager for many of them. When I heard of his death, I tracked him over to the other side and he was in the ‘holding bay’ – a buffer zone you 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 greatly. The funeral can be a key moment. But not always.
Well, in the holding bay, Mike was tripped out of his skull on acid and having a great time – he had loved happenings, festivals and raves during his life. He was blissfully happy, flowering, glowing, almost Buddha-like. This was a surprise, but that’s what you get in this game. I returned a day or two later and, unusually, he had completely gone beyond. He didn’t wait around for his funeral.
I guess he was relieved to end his life. I felt happy for him. It just goes to show how the judgements made of our behaviours and our lives on Earth don’t necessarily match who and how we actually, truly are, deep down. Sometimes, in the education of our souls, we need to plumb the depths and go where others fear to tread. Our judgements about the rightness or wrongness of others’ lives can clatter badly on the cobblestones of reality. Mike’s death was characteristic of him, and probably a relief for him. The manner of people’s deaths always seems to be true to character.
Ruth, my mother, couldn’t really handle death, even at age 92. Born during WW1, her generation trained themselves to survive, but it could not go on forever. Around death, she had that confusion many people have – an ill-considered mixture of Christian heaven-and-hell stuff and secular it-all-goes-blank stuff. Neither is very useful. She died and, not knowing how to handle it, went straight to sleep, curled up and unresponsive.
This felt okay at first because of what she’d been through, though after a while I got a feeling she wasn’t facing the fact of being dead. Her funeral was approaching and, since she was a popular figure, I wondered what to do. I wanted her to witness people’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.
Then came a solution. Her little terrier Pepper, who had died some years earlier, came along, yapping at her. She woke up and my mother was able to witness her funeral, with Pepper on her lap. I think she was surprised at the gratitude and recognition that came her way from the crowd. Bless her, she hadn’t appreciated the value of the contribution she had made during life. “It’s only me”, she would say when she rang up or came through the door. Only you?
She and I had some leftover issues at the time she died, but the changes she went through after death allowed her to encompass her strange son and the person he was. All was forgiven between us. It happened one day when I was in Palestine. I experienced her strongly while at an ancient church at Burqin, near Jenin in the West Bank – the place where Jesus healed the lepers – and found myself deeply wishing I could have brought her there.
In her life she would never have entertained the idea of coming to Palestine, but she loved old churches. She came in spirit and I felt her there with me. I shed tears of release, and I think she did too. All that lay between us was made good and each of us came to fully understand why we had entered each other’s lives. Thank you, Jesus, for that. Ironically, it was a Muslim friend, Wael, who had brought me there to meet the Prophet Jesus – and my Mum.
What’s interesting here is that, today, I’m going through a lot of early-life patterns of vulnerability, unsupportedness and loss, and feeling like a five year old – mother stuff – while being completely at peace with my Mum. We smile to each other occasionally.
Going home. On the slopes above Bosigran Castle.
When my old philosopher friend Stanley Messenger died, he wasn’t interested in witnessing his funeral – as a mystic Christian, psychic and Anthroposophist, he didn’t like the conventional church funeral his family organised.
I sat there in a pew with Stanley gruffly urging me to take over the service, while the vicar was up there trotting out the usual stuff. I told Stanley to stay and watch, because the people present did care about him. Actually, when we were all sitting in the pub afterwards, he was happier because it was informal, and I sensed him around, communing with us.
In the weeks that followed he loitered in the ‘holding bay’, sitting enjoying a pleasant landscape and a blissful absence of worldly hassles, still looking frail. In the last few years of life he had dementia, which can dissipate a person’s selfhood, so I guess he lacked momentum to go further in the dying process. After a while I came along, took his hand and pulled him up what seemed like a lot of steps until we reached the ‘pearly gates’ – the full transition point into the after-death state. He was met by people who welcomed him and took him in – I think one was Rudolf Steiner himself, whom Stanley had known when he was a young man. Goodbye, Stanley, and thanks for being you – see you again.
My cousin Faith’s husband Albert was a good-hearted man, rather secular and empirical in viewpoint though gentlemanly and worldly-wise with it, and I think at first he thought me weird and extreme. Then he got prostate cancer and started changing, slowly becoming more open, doing tai chi and becoming more attuned to matters of spirit. Just before he died, he was clearly edging into the otherworld, far away and in a state of grace. I had been working with him remotely but came to visit in his last days.
At one point his eyes opened slightly, he saw me, and he gave me the thought, “You’re here?!” Then after a pause he thought, “But you were there”. I could sense him computing that. “Yes”, I thought back, “I went there to pull you over”.
He had seen me on the other side, and here was I on this side, with him at the hospice. That’s not supposed to happen, or is it? He had a peaceful death. My cousin Faith really did well with him – he expired with her hugging him. She felt his last breath. After a while she got up, went out into the hospice garden, and a heron flew in, did two loops round the garden and sailed off past the trees – heaven was signalling.
I had helped sort out his connection with the otherworld, making sure there was someone to meet him, and myself going over to give him a hand. Since his death we have nodded and smiled whenever he has popped up – he’s even done me a few favours that only someone on his side of reality can do.
Jaggedy granite at Bosigran
Often I’ve been able to say who will be there waiting. It melts the last doubts and resistances people might have. When I told my Dad that his brother Laurie, who died in WW2, would be there, he went quiet and a tear came to his eye. Something in him knew this was true. From that moment I sensed that he felt alright about going – his long lost brother would be there.
On the day before he died he was unconscious. I held his hand, telling him all I knew about what would next happen to him, and what to do. I knew he could hear me and took it in. A while after his death he and I had a psychic chat and he thought to me, “You’ve done your duty to your father by becoming my father”.
In my twenties he had felt I had let him down by making the dissident life-choices I made at the time. My parents had done their level best but they could never quite encompass me – their strange boy who became a hippy revolutionary, a disappointment and embarrassment. In my mother’s eyes the only sins I had failed to commit were running off with a black woman and being gay – such was the moral atmosphere of the late 1960s. Poor them, they must look down on me now and think, “OMG, is he still at it, getting himself into trouble, even at his age?”. But I think they now understand why I’m like that and why I had been their son.
What happens in death has a lot to do with how we deal with life. If during life we are willing to own up when necessary, then owning up in death gets a lot easier. Life on Earth is such a screwed-up and tacky thing that we’re all damaged, up to our eyeballs in karmic cobwebs. Living in a body on Earth isn’t and cannot be about being perfect – it’s about getting through. It’s about leaving the world a slightly better place than when we started – not only because it’s good and right to do so but also in case we need to come back. Or in case other members of our soul-tribe need to come here. Or for the sake of our grandchildren and everyone else who shares our world.
At death you can’t do anything more about anything. Life was as it was, and that’s that. The task is to come to peace, to hand in your resignation without reservation – well, as much as possible. There’s a good chance an emergent feeling of relief will help with this. It involves releasing and forgiving, letting be. It’s too late to do anything. So working on at least some of the issues we’re likely to meet at death is well worth doing before we get there.
There’s more. The better we’re able to get through our life-crises and make them good during life, the more we establish a pattern of dealing well with crisis. When death comes, it makes dying easier because the ‘growth choice’ has become a habit we can latch onto at the moment of death – instead of the ‘fear choice’. The more we are centred, flexible and okay about handling life, the more we will handle death and ride the wave.
At death it matters who we truly are and what we have become – no glosses or pretences are available any more. It’s an honesty process, yet also a relieving and healing process in which a weight is lifted off us – the weight of being who we were, with our character traits, habits, stuck bits and karmic patterns. A lot of forgiveness and understanding comes. But look at this another way…
When we die we’re entering a new world. As with this world, the way we are born into that world greatly affects what happens afterwards. When we sally forth to the other world, if we die well and do our best with it, we’ll start well on the next bit. By ‘dying well’ I don’t mean the right circumstances – it could even be a car crash – but the right approach when we encounter it. Even if it is a car-crash, or you get shot, time stretches immensely in that moment, and there can even be a surprising calmness about it. In such a circumstance, your soul pops out of your body before the impact hits you and you will feel no pain. People who die in wars, shocks or tragedies get scooped up by soul-paramedics and helped quickly.
Dying is like an examination to test what we’ve truly learned and worked out in life. It affects subsequent decisions about what we’ll take on next – our next incarnate life on Earth, if that is our path, or whatever happens instead, if that is our path.
Our soul-family, soul-tribe and angels help us get things sorted out. It’s a process, and it involves referencing all of our existences and their overall storyline and purpose. It concerns the role we play in our soul-tribe and the agenda, priorities and evolution of our tribe. We aren’t solely individuals but part of something much larger. There’s bliss, relief, healing, love, rest, fellowship, education and soul-melding to be had too, in the after-death state.
A deep choice is presented. The choice lies between opening up to such a path or walling ourselves into an imaginal reality that carries us off somewhere else – if perhaps we believe that we don’t deserve better, or if we can’t let go of the identity, feelings and attachments we had in life. Then we might well get another round of life, with a bleed-through of elements from the past that can be both helpful and difficult, until a turning in the deepest seat of consciousness redirects us to our true, core path.
Above Porthmoina Cove – rock climbers love it
Part of our reason for being here on Earth is to evolve and train ourselves as super-trooper souls – souls who’ve been through the mill, shed blood, sweat and tears and learned lessons from it – experiences that aren’t available elsewhere. It’s one helluva training – a ton of both difficult and joyous stuff is to be found here on Earth, and we have a profound option to become greater souls through wrestling with it.
There’s something many ancient peoples instinctively knew: the souls of the living and the souls of the dead walk alongside each other in parallel worlds, helping each other out. We’re in the same tribes and networks, all still here. You can talk to your Mum (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 when the souls of the dead call.
After I’ve gone, if any of you feel me twiggling the top of your head, please acknowledge it and signal back. It depends on whether you pick me up sufficiently, giving it full credence, and whether it is in your scope and growth to respond.
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 experienced this yourself, actually. Search back in your memory and you’ll find it. So if you get a buzz from me after I’ve gone, please work on the basis that I am actually there.
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, for no charge: you are all going to die. The choice lies in how we do it. That involves the full and proper exercising of free will. Whatever your faults, you’re a fine person. Don’t you forget it. I’ll try not to either. As a Virgo, I’m so bloody self-critical that I have to remind myself.
With love, Palden
Crossing the divide
I have reposted this blog from two years ago, and it’s also part of my cancer book Blessings that Bones Bring. While reading out out loud for the audiobook version of the book, it struck me as a really good piece. So here it is again.
We manifest cancer in our lives for all sorts of reasons, and they go deep. In our day we have medicalised it, rendering cancer treatment into a physical process that can be fixed with pharmaceuticals, surgery and radiation or, for holistic types, rigorous dietary, miracle cures and other regimes. This focus on the mechanical causes of cancer – diet, lifestyle, life-conditions, stress – is often personalised and privatised to place responsibility on ourselves as individuals, or to put it down to genetics, and this is partially correct. Even so, we still tend to regard cancer as a stroke of bad luck that happens to some people and hopefully not to us.
Meanwhile, the spread of cancer is a symptom of a world that badly needs correction and of a spiritual crisis in the heart of humanity. These causes of cancer are kept quiet – pollution, radiation, poverty and, when it boils down to it, the very nature of our societies. But there’s much more to it than even these, because some people get cancer and others don’t, even when living similar lives under similar conditions. There’s a deeper meaning to it all, for each and every one of us.
Nowadays there’s a growing movement of people ‘fighting cancer’ – making it their mission to overcome this threat to their life. Many more people are succeeding in ‘beating cancer’, thanks particularly to advancement in treatments, whether medical or holistic, and this is good – the knowledge and experience around it is growing.
I myself have followed an integrated medical approach – bridging the medical divide and partaking thoughtfully in the virtues of both conventional and complementary medicine. A few things stopped me from taking an entirely holistic route:
it was already too late, I was an emergency case and I could hardly move an inch;
it would have cost a lot (it’s private treatment);
I needed a comprehensive local service (doctors, paramedics, ambulances, nurses), which is not available in the holistic sector;
and here comes the key issue… I did not have the willpower.
Some things also stopped me from taking an entirely medical route:
I’ve been doing holistics all my adult life;
Conventional medicine can be brutal;
It fails to address psycho-spiritual issues (as does society in general);
Using holistics can reduce side-effects and problems involved with pharmaceuticals.
When water crashes, froths and swirls it’s at its most beautiful. As with life.
The matter of willpower is central and critical. When cancer hits you, your situation and where you stand at the time matter a lot. But the critical question is this: what is the life-lesson that cancer, as a psycho-spiritual catalyst, is bringing you? Since cancer is life-threatening, it certainly does bring up big, fundamental questions about why we’re alive and what we’re doing about it. Some people look deep into this question and some avoid it or hope it will go away. The story varies a lot for different people. I’m one of those who went deep.
By the time I was diagnosed in November 2019, I had already exhausted much of my stock of willpower, after 2-3 months of excruciating pain which had worn me down, scraped my edges and taken me to the far boundaries of toleration. I had had a life where at times I had played for high stakes, using up a lot of my willpower credits. Approaching 70, I didn’t have enough in my batteries to face yet another full-on, miracle-working, crunchy push against the odds, doing battle with the Fates. There’s something of a warrior in me (Mars in Scorpio), but a warrior still has to choose his battles carefully.
So I had a choiceless choice, to take the treatment that was available there and then, offered by the NHS. It had taken me in, half-dead on a stretcher, diagnosed me and given me the options. It took only minutes to realise there was no option. I just had to ‘trust in Allah’ and trust myself, the doctors and the process.
And, believe me, even the most hardened atheist utters a prayer at this point.
I was helpless to do much except to fully and completely accept what was happening and do my best with it. I made a deep prayer to my ‘angels’ to regulate and modulate the process in a spiritual sense – not least because, in my rather helpless state, this was pretty much all I could do. I decided to suspend all previous positions and attitudes and to see what would happen – this was a truth moment. I would live or die, and my choice lay in doing my best with whatever happened.
There are some who are in a good position to ‘fight cancer’ and overcome it, medically and attitudinally, and there are some who must take another route. Those who fight cancer can go through a life-changing initiation in self-care and rearranging their lives to fit their new situation. They go through a change of diet and lifestyle, get into meditation, walking, helping others and all sorts of life-improvements, perhaps changing their lives significantly.
A spirited life-change like this, for someone who has lived a stressed, imbalanced life, given over to careers, family and life’s rigours, is such a boost, energywise, that it can kick the cancer. It’s a positive shock to the system, a shedding of a load, a serious course-correction. And it can work and change a person’s life.
This strategy can work first time round but, in my observation, the second time round can often be different – again, because willpower credits are more used up. Life returns to teaching us about acceptance and death. A recurrence of cancer can corner a person more seriously than before, since willpower and hope can be weaker and tiredness stronger. Heavyweight medical treatments or death often follow.
This was one reason I took an integrated medicine path and a path of acceptance from the beginning. I decided to take the hit, live with cancer and pace myself, energywise – given that I had only a certain amount of charge in my inner batteries.
And something in my heart told me that I had been given a strange kind of gift.
Abiding, watching, holding firm.
Some time ago I wrote that doctors saved my life and healers gave me a new life. In the end, I was impressed with the doctors and medical staff I encountered. There were some problems because I’m a strange guy who doesn’t obey normal medical rules, but I worked at being pleasant and cooperative because I knew they were doing their best and my life rested in their hands. This has always been my technique for getting through scrapes and it usually gets me through somehow – or at least it reduces the crunchiness of it.
I’m so grateful to the various meditators, prayer circles, healers, practitioners, spirit-gifts, remedies and inner help I have received, on top of medical treatment – and this is what has given me new life. It has also made the pharmaceutical process work better and easier. I give details in my book Blessings that Bones Bring.
‘Fighting cancer’ was not really an initiation I needed to go through, to prove that I could do it, because I’ve already proven I can pull off some miracles. Some cancer patients don’t need to fight cancer, and some would do well to consider a befriending rather than fighting approach. Some need to die as well as they can, and some, like me, need to accept cancer into our lives and live with it. I’m now partially disabled, and I can only tinker around the edges of that to make it a bit easier.
It’s likely that these seemingly peripheral issues will kill me, not the cancer itself. The well-meaning people who weekly send me information about miracle cancer cures miss the point – I’m doing fine with cancer, thank you, and the problems lie with other things.
Part of me is a holy rainbow warrior, yet I’m a peacemaker at heart and cancer is a negotiation – with the Spirit of Cancer, with Soul and with The Management. It’s a truth process, a karmic cards-on-the-table session. In some respects peacemaking takes more bravery than fighting cancer.
Some months after my cancer diagnosis I had got through chemo and a few things about my new life had clarified. I’d had time to get to grips with the situation. I was deeply weary yet I wasn’t dead, and tentative signs of revival were emerging. My life-expectancy grew from months to about three years.
I realised that decades of inner growth and an alternative-leaning life had not failed me – they were giving me strength and rebirth-potential. My chemo process was concluded after five cycles of treatment, when eight cycles had originally been planned. All the tests I went through showed good signs. This was heartening.
Acceptance and surrender are a fundamental secret in healing. In my life I’ve come close to dying several times and, each time, when I have fully yielded to it, something deep down has started reviving. Obviously this rebirth capacity will not go on forever and at some point I shall die but, even then, surrender is still the best way to go.
Dying involves a loss of control, yet another kind of balance or control emerges underneath if control – our grip on life – is released wholeheartedly and we’re willing to hand ourselves over. It’s like surfing – you have to give yourself to the wave. It’s the same in life: at times we just have to accept facts and there is no longer any point struggling against them. At that point our capacity to shift perspective and change our approach determines much of what follows.
That’s one of life’s big lessons: sometimes taking a difficult path is the easier path.
There’s another deep shift involved here. When we die, we have a choice about how to actually go. Will we wait or struggle until death takes us, squeezing us out of our earthly lives? Or will we die by making a deep choice to relax into it, let it be and enjoy the blessing? We can make these deep decisions before we reach that time – not in our heads but in our cells and bones. It’s an emotional decision, fed by tears. We do this during our lives by accepting the crises that come to us and dealing with them well.
A few months after diagnosis with cancer I made a deep decision. I decided that medical issues will not be the ultimate deciding factor for me in my death. Clearly they do play a big part in the calculus of dying, but I am not a machine.
Willpower decides it. Where there’s a will, there really is a way. Thus far, having lived with cancer for five years, I’ve gone through some crises and some miracles and I’m outliving my initial life-expectancy estimates of some years ago. But my life will not go on forever – it hurts, and daily life is twice as difficult. I shall continue for as long as I am willing and able to do so.
Then there comes a point where willpower runs down and acceptance takes over. Around that point I’m likely to pop my clogs, having reached a stage where I’ve had enough of holding myself up and keeping on going. It will be a decision.
We all have to make it. But it is possible to make it earlier, without too much avoidance, balking and fighting, rather than fighting it out to the last moment – and possibly missing some of the more beatific, grace-infused elements of the experience of dying.
There’s a chance I might go out quite quickly. Having worked on myself quite a lot, I have fewer resistances, fears and blocking issues to struggle through. I’m sure I have more to face, but feel okay about getting through them – it’s a matter of giving ourselves permission to make it easier.
It is in this sense that the story of our lives is but a preparation for death and the afterlife. I don’t feel that I shall need to struggle through a long, slow dying process – and resistance is not actually very interesting as an activity. However, this said, what actually happens at death is not something any of us is in control of. That’s the wonder of it.
The Isles of the Dead – the Scillies. In ancient British tradition, souls go to the Western Heaven when they pass on.
There’s more. Frankly, I’m fine about going home – home to where my people are, home to where I came from – for some R&R with my soul-tribe. Life on Earth has worn me out. It’s had big rewards. Since we leave life as naked as we entered it, all we take with us is what we have become as a result of being alive. I’ve made some progress on that path, and I’m happy enough with it. In some respects we learn more from our errors and inadequacies than we learn from our successes and pleasures.
Near-death experiences earlier in life and since getting cancer have had a funny outcome. Each time, I’ve come out of them with a new mission and a new reason to be alive. This is happening even in the fucked-up carcinogenic state I’m nowadays in. I’ve been given a new, shortish life, with new constraints and new advantages. Something deep inside has changed and I find myself with new instructions. Or a new iteration of the instructions I’ve always had.
It’s not as if the Voice of God comes down, booming out what you’re supposed to do. It’s just that circumstances, happenings and inner feelings lead us that way, almost like an unfolding movie-plot. There comes a point where you realise that it all clicks together and that life is prompting your thoughts and sucking you into a new mission. Or at least, that’s how it works for me.
That’s one key reason that recently I did an Ayahuasca ceremony, to make a pilgrimage to a deeper place. It’s what earlier esotericists used to call the Causal Plane, the place where the magic of life and the deeper laws of karma are rooted. I needed to clarify things and clear some impediments standing in the way. I managed to exorcise one of the ghosts that has been haunting me for the last two or more years, and that has been a relief and release. I progressed with another one but there’s more to go on that.
That’s what life is about: there’s always more to go.
Our life purpose and the way we are to carry it out do not announce themselves in advance, neither in words nor logical propositions. Yet a sense of rightness appears at each stage, if we stay on track, guiding decisions in the context of a vision or an instinctual feeling. The mission is to follow that feeling and to do whatever is needed to stay on track.
Strangely, right now I have a public role that is rooted in isolation: I spend most of my life alone, down here in a cabin on a farm in Cornwall. Yet almost every day I’m playing a part in people’s lives in multiple countries. Rather psychic, I’m at times really close to people far away – we are together in quantum space even if sundered by long distances. My psyche is a bit like a telephone exchange, even when I’m not fully conscious of it.
Though I’ve been quite isolated, and partially because of it, my work has been appreciated more than ever before. That’s funny, especially since I haven’t really been trying. Furthering my career, making money or collecting ‘likes’ don’t motivate me, though sharing some insights and experience before I go is amazingly medicinal.
I learned something from an old friend, Hamish Miller the dowser: he didn’t write down his knowledge of the geomancy of West Penwith, and it died with him. A few years after his death I’d have loved to interview those details out of him. But he’s been hovering around me while I’ve been doing my researches, so perhaps that exchange has happened anyway.
So I’m communicating as much as I can of what I’ve learned, in those subjects I’ve given focus to over the decades, since it’s useful to those following in the tracks of folks like me. I won’t be leaving money or property when I die, but I’ll leave a voluminous archive (it’s on my site).
I’ve been privileged to be involved in the origination stages of many things, having been active in an historic germination phase between the 1960s and 1980s. For me and people like me it’s our duty to hand down what we’ve learned and created, because there’s still a long way to go.
It’s your turn, and you have your own slice of human history to work within. We’re in a prolonged historic process of redeeming the complex issues of a profoundly screwed-up world, and we aren’t here solely for the chocolate, sex and tax-paying. This process takes time, and there are chapters, layers and levels to it. Our planet hosts eight billion souls, originating from across the universe, and a big global fermentation is going on, and we’re all part of it.
[For an audio talk about this fermentation, from 2013, click here.]
Back to willpower. With cancer, or with any other earth-shaking adversity or crisis, we are offered a choice. Modern medicine and current social values encourage us to ‘get better’ and fight cancer, but this is only for some people. It can serve as a powerful initiation and empowerment, though in some cases it can also be an escape, an avoidance of the bigger life-and-death questions that cancer can bring up. These questions inevitably return, sooner or later. There is also the option to learn acceptance in life, and bravely to look into the eyes of death when the opportunity arises, even if it’s not our time to go.
The paradox here is that getting friendly with death can often give us new life – it opens up channels, it makes uncanny healings or revivals possible, and life no longer needs to teach us that lesson. If it doesn’t give us new life, it leads to a more peaceable and benign death, giving us a good start in the afterworld. Death comes inescapably to all of us and it is not the end of our journey. And cancer, if it doesn’t kill us, gives us a practice run for dying – a preparation for later.
It changes the very focus of our remaining lives. I had a near-death experience at age 24 and it was a life-changer – I was unconscious for eight days, awakening with much of my memory scrubbed. I can safely say that many of the things I have done since then were sparked by that near-death experience. It made me fully aware of what I was here for. Now in my seventies, near-death has happened again, through the agency of cancer. My shelf life and possibilities are limited but cancer has sharpened my focus.
People tell me I shall live a long time yet. Living in the bodily condition I’m in, I’m not so sure. I’m not sure that I want to – I’m finding it hard work. But I’ll be alive until I’m done, and I’m not done yet. And acceptance means accepting life as much as it means accepting death.
Since a very Saturnine life-crisis of 2-3 years ago my life prospects seem to have extended, to my surprise, and I’m now on my 124th blog and 49th podcast! Gosh. But then, when in my early forties, three people separately told me I would reach my peak in late life, and now I understand what they were saying. It’s funny how life goes. In a way, I needed cancer in order to rebirth myself.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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