A bronze age chambered cairn at Treen, near Morvah, in Penwith. I think these were used for, amongst other things, conscious dying.
Dying consciously isn’t something to leave for the future. It starts now. Yes, even when we’re young. It’s about our lives now. Let me explain.
Dying is a process, a continuum. All of us are part-dead already, at least psychologically, even if we’re in good health. Most people are only 10-20% dead, and most are unconscious of it, except when we schmooze into the otherworld in our dreams or when we’re ill or facing overwhelming circumstances in which we are obliged to ‘die into the moment’, to let go of all of all that went before, as if this is our last moment or it is soon to be so.
It’s all to do with our relationship with the otherworld and how comfortably we function in it. This depends on the extent to which we trust our ‘subjective’ perceptions. When a close loved one pops their clogs, part of us goes with them as if by osmosis, and we can be in quite an altered state thereafter (for at least a month though also up to a year).
This is a form of privileged access to the otherworld, empathically piggybacking the loved one who has died. It’s a gift from them to you. If we indulge in loss, buying into the mindframe that causes people to say, for want of something better, “Sorry for your loss“, we’re missing the point. Is it a loss or a gain? Here lies a choice.
If it’s a loss, then you’re afraid of dying. Go on, be honest. You’re afraid, and you see it to be a negative thing. But wait, when it’s 150 Palestinians who pop their clogs in one night, in some respects I’m happier for the people who died than for those who survive. Bloody hellsbells, that’s a version of earthly life that it’s quite good to get out of, if that is the fate that befalls you.
If it’s a gain, something in you is open to dying. And, as it happens, you’ll tend to be more open to living too. Living fully, and switching up the risk factor to a healthier level. It means you are likely to die more easily, when your time comes, because this isn’t just a goodbye. It’s a hello. It’s an entry into a new world. You’re going home.
Some people will relax into it and float off when they come to the point of passing over – when they come to the medically critical point of taking a last breath. But even then, this is but a stage on an intensely transitional dying path. Death starts long before and continues afterwards. Even with a sudden or unexpected death there are often signs, which can be seen in retrospect, of foreknowledge of death – something was fixed in preparation, on some level.
Sometimes I’m told of someone’s death and I’m not surprised at all – I didn’t expect it, but once it came, it made sense in some way. Then there are some deaths where it doesn’t feel right. I’ve felt that about quite a few of the deaths that have occurred around me in the last year or more – not only were they avoidable, but also, in my judgement, it was not right that they happened. I felt that about a family, the Gaza branch of the Issa family in Bethlehem, who died en masse, over thirty of them, in October. My first response was, no, that shouldn’t have happened. There was something bad about that. But then, ‘the hand of God moves in strange ways’.
How you feel at the bucket-kicking critical point is greatly affected by your readiness for it. Some people experience it a bit like falling off a cliff – scary at first, but then you discover that you can fly. Some people can’t handle it at all, going off at a tangent, or to sleep, or they fight like hell. Some people relax into it, floating over the threshold with a gentle, sighing smile of recognition, release and relief. Then of course, there’s the question of what you choose to do next.
Well, the general rule is, if you’ve done reasonably well thus far, you’ll manage with the next bit. It depends a lot on how you’ve set this up, how ready you are. This might not take a vastness of preparation: it’s mainly about forgiveness and releasing, and how easily we do it. Letting things be.
Summer sunset over the Isles of Scilly, as seen from Tregeseal stone circle
Recently I’ve been finding out about things in my own life that I haven’t found easy to let go of. So it isn’t easy, even for one who is quite used to it.
One gift I’ve had from cancer has been the advance notice I’ve been given. I’ve been given time to pre-process dying. I’m willing to do so – and that makes a difference. Becoming disabled and debilitated started me on a change-process, and I’m grateful for having been given a time of debriefing and unwinding from life. At times it has been lonely and bleak, but that’s a necessary part of the process, part of the full spectrum of life-experience. Especially for someone who has had quite a public life.
One aspect of this is that, as an author and broadcaster, a communicator, I’ve been very productive since getting cancer. Being given notice of death gave me impetus to write and record things I haven’t said, to finalise and bring to completion many of the different threads I’ve followed in my work. It’s all going up on my growing online archive.
Completion is important because, to die consciously, we need to be reasonably at peace with things. Successful dying involves letting letting ourselves float off, and that requires that we feel okay doing so. We need to feel finished and done, with no major regrets that divert our energy and attention at death, making us struggle when it’s already too late. There will be regrets, but they need to have been dug over and sifted through, to uncover the abiding truth of them. Often these regrets come from judgements, tropes and memes of the time we’ve lived in and, ‘in the eyes of God’, they tend to look a bit different.
In recent years, as part of a self-forgiveness process, I’ve become aware of guilt and shame I have carried for things that quite often were other people’s projections – projections I had taken on – and they were not quite as big and real and bad as they had been made out to be. In some cases, though I was deemed to be wrong, I was right, or at least more right than I was judged to be – though sometimes it takes decades. I realised that my own responsibility for what happened was different from the responsibility people had laid on me – often to cover their own asses. Even so, I am responsible inasmuch as I manifested these experiences, and they’re my responsibility and creation. And it always, always, always takes two to tango.
When you die, you can’t do anything more about life – you’ve had it, and that was it. You can’t fix anything, correct anything, re-run the movie or click the ‘undo’ button. Not that you could do so earlier in life, but at least you could delude yourself you could. You can do so to some extent while you have some life left, since there are things you can correct, reconcile, heal or re-work. But as you approach death, especially if disablement and disability are involved, your capacity to do things reduces, your world grows smaller and it becomes too late to do anything. You just have to accept that that is that. Bombs that were thrown cannot be unthrown, even when the craters are covered over.
It’s still possible to come to peace about things inwardly, without reconciliation having to come from outside. We have to accept what we did and what we omitted to do – especially the latter – and own up, examine our regrets, say sorry at least within ourselves, accept that we could have done things differently, understand what it was like being affected by the things we did or omitted to do, look at the true, enduring outcomes, engage in self-forgiveness and forgiving others, and then let things be. It was as it was, and that’s that.
My old friend Charley Barley, roaming around Carn Kenidjack. We dropped out of university together, fifty years ago.
There are wider and greater significances to things, and it helps to start seeing them. A friend, Mike, died of despair, drugs and alcohol and, of course, everyone deemed that this was not good. Well, from the viewpoint of the living and the default judgements of society, this might be so. But I followed him over to the other side to check him out, and he was happy, radiant, relieved to have died and actually having a lot of fun – and I was happy for him when I found out. Those who prefer to stay with the default judgement of his seemingly regrettable death see his death as a sad thing, and I do not. I’m glad for him. It’s all in how we see and judge things.
I’m sure we’ll meet again, upstairs, Mike and I. As is the case with a good soul-brother, Terry, who unexpectedly blipped out during a hernia operation – he was the caterer at the Hundredth Monkey Camps in the mid-1990s. At the very first of the Glastonbury Camps in the mid-1980s, the camp cafe was called ‘Pie in the Sky’ and, guess what, we’ll revive it on the other side, and you’re welcome to come along when your time comes. It’s free. For the good souls who ran it back then – people like Diana and Bron – the good news is that no washing up will be needed and the food will be self-cooking!
I’ve come to the end of my ‘second line’ cancer treatment (of five). I’m receiving no more treatment of Dara, the immunotherapy drug that has kept me alive for three years. It has worked well and now it’s losing efficacy and my readings are rising. Right now, I’m on nothing – this is an eight-week ‘wait and watch’ phase, to see what happens, before I start a new treatment called Lenidalomide, or Len. This is probably what will happen, though it depends on further blood samples and observations. I’m in rather a limbo.
I can feel the cancer right now. My bones are beginning to twinge with stripes of pain. My spirits are sagging. I feel the dying process accelerate.
However, I’m better off than before because I’ve learned a lot in the last four years about living with a blood cancer. (It’s Myeloma, a form of radiation sickness). In the six-ish months before my first clear symptoms appeared (my lower back collapsed), technically I was in good health, but something was not right. A dark cloud was settling on me. I was feeling constrained, tied and weighed down. My hope and light were fading. Something in me felt desperate, despairing, as if something was wrong, though I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
Well, right now I’m getting those feelings again. Except the difference is that, this time, I can recognise the feeling and I know more about what to do, and not to do. I’m not pushing against it or trying to ‘get better’, or trying to prove that everything is alright and normal when it isn’t. I’m not anxiously looking for remedies and escape routes (though actually I’m on some new holistics), because I’ll die at the right time, in the right way, if I have anything to do with it, and that’s the way it’s going to be. The angels will take me out at the right time. It’s necessary to entrust myself to this process. It’s an act of will.
So yesterday I went to bed with my hot water bottle, a mug of tea and some munchies and I lay there, out of my head, unable to marshall myself, feeling wan and weepy, missing company and watching the jackdaws sitting on the wind.
I was stuck in a loop. Problem is, people say to me, “Just give me a ring if there’s a need”. But then, when I ring, I have to explain how I’m feeling, discussing the matter at some length, then to have to make more calls when I find out that they’re not available right now, though please feel free to ring me if ever there’s a need – which I just did.
I’ve instituted a new rule of dropping it when I’ve made three attempts. Sometimes I just have to look after myself. Problem is, nowadays, everyone is so busy, and since they’re volunteering to help out of the goodness of their hearts, I cannot complain about the quality of service! I tend to get lots of advice, and sometimes I have to say, “But I need actual help!“. “Oh, perhaps you ought to ring social services…”. The tricky bit here is that I’m often in a state of mind where due diplomacy and tact are not easy, and I cannot talk at length or discuss grand philosophisms, miracle cures or lists of things I should do.
“Would it work if I came next Thursday?“. Well, the way I’m going, I have no idea what next Thursday will be like, and life doesn’t go according to plan when your body-mind are shutting down and you’re heading for a big, yawning chasm of unwellness. The best remedy is a hot water bottle, a bit of ‘there there’ and someone to sit with you. Just the sound of those knitting needles clacking away can be very comforting when you’re in a highly altered state and hovering on the edge.
Anyway, the feeling I have right now is a bit like that point in an airplane flight where, 200 miles from landing, the pilot powers down the engines and you go into a long glide. It feels like that. There’s something rather relaxing about it. It’s a bit more effortless. Internally, it has caused me to lapse into greater levels of forgiveness and acceptance, to accelerate the flow of letting-go.
Yet something else in me wants to do a few things before I go. I want to share a few outstanding issues, to complete the story. One of these is local to me: I’ve proposed a series of three workshops on the ancient sites of West Penwith. We shall see whether the venue I’ve approached is interested. But something is different now: if someone says to me, ‘not this year, but perhaps next year’ they’re not getting it. I’m unsure I shall be on good form, or even alive, next year. People say, “Oh, don’t be pessimistic – of course you’ll be around, and besides, we need you!“. Well, perhaps, but if you need me, please get me while I’m here – and that could well mean this year.
Alternatively, please do not express regret and loss when I pop my clogs, because I was indeed here and then the angels took me out. I think I’ll manage one more Oak Dragon camp, this year, and one reason I’m inviting friends to come to the camp is not just because I want to bring the Oak Dragon tribe (a lovely bunch) a few new members. It’s because we can be together for a week in the same magic space, and it could well be the last time this is possible. This is why I invite you to consider coming.
If you can’t, then a second option is that I’ll be speaking at the Glastonbury Symposium (in Glastonbury Town Hall) on Sunday 28th July. With luck I’ll be doing a few, but not many, gigs in Glastonbury and elsewhere – this year, while I still can, and if there are organisers for it. Next year, 2025 – that’s in the lap of the gods and I don’t get the feeling my head, heart and soul will be good for it. We’ll have to wait and see. But it’s not so cool if I forget my lines half way through a talk, staring blankly at you, as if to ask, “Where am I? And why am I standing here?“.
The Pathless Path to the Gateless Gate. Near Zennor, Penwith.
This kind of stuff is important. When I ‘went up’ with cancer, I made a prayer. At the time it looked like I might have one year to live. I was a ragged pile of bones. I prayed that I might be able to bring as many things to completion as I could. In my last blog I told of how one issue – my unfinished humanitarian work – bugged me at the time, and I made a prayer for resolution. Well, BAM, it came to me in Sept-Oct 2022 and afterwards – the Ghana mission I wrote about last time, the Tuareg, about whom I’ve also written, and then in October 2023, the Palestine disaster. I can’t say I’ve resolved those issues, and none are looking good for the future. But something has been happening inside. A cleansing and releasing.
For it’s not the specific worldly issues that need completing – they can’t, and each of these three missions will resolve themselves after, not before, my death. But it’s the inner stuff. It’s not just about the worldly outcomes of the work I’ve done – much of which has on the surface been undone in recent months – but it’s the inner process of engagement with these issues, and the pain and the satisfaction, the dilemmas and truths and the intensity and pathos of it all, which is the important stuff. How to forgive myself and release it when someone in my care dies.
Just before she died, a year ago, Felicia Otoo thanked me deeply for all I had done for her and for her child Phyllis. We cried together, thousands of miles apart. She was dead the next day. Two months earlier I had adopted Phyllis, to give Felicia a sense that at least someone cared. Phyllis was renamed Phyllis Kenobi Otoo. I had saved their lives at least four times in the preceding months. I told her that I shall be joining them soon. And I shall.
There are two former students in Gaza from whom I have not heard for over two months. They’re now in the ‘missing, presumed dead’ category. I’ve been talking to them inwardly. There’s a great gift here that wasn’t there before. I can assure these dying people that I shall be joining them soon – and this gives them some comfort. Yes, a dead (psychic) humanitarian worker can still be useful, even after death!
Life always has its compensations. To be honest, though I can feel death creeping closer – I’d estimate myself to be 75% dead and rising – there’s some relief that comes with it. I’ve found the last few years difficult, facing much of it alone, and while this has had worthy rewards and I’m not complaining, I shall also be relieved when it ends, when I can drop it all, consign these matters to history and go home.
Cloud beings at Praa Sands
I’m finding life in the 2020s to be more complex than I can handle. I got scammed by an Indian guy online in December. He was part of a really neat scamming operation, pretending to be a BT engineer. Usually I’m really astute with things like this and rumble them quickly, but this time I was tired and not thinking clearly. I found my PayPal account quickly being raided for £300, sent to some address in China – but I got there just in time to stop another £1,200 following after it. Though I managed to save the day, it was costly and I can’t handle this kind of stuff any more. I was a tech pioneer thirty years ago, and look at me now.
Even so, this spacing-out process has its virtues. It causes me to pull back, excluding increasing swathes of things from my life – things that are too much to handle. Such as train journeys where I can’t trust whether the train will actually come. Or shopping trips in busy supermarkets where I have to stand in a queue with ten mobile phones around me, killing me slowly. Or long conversations where I can’t keep up with long-winded diversions, footnotes and appendices when I just need to get to the punchline while I still remember what the story was all about.
This pulling back is part of the conscious dying process. It starts now. It’s a winding-down process, and I feel I’m somewhere around the age of seven, growing down. I can still stand though!
It involves setting up circumstances, if I can, where I won’t be plagued with people asking favours of me when I just need to go to bed and be left in peace. It involves setting up head-spaces where I’m feeling reconciled even with people who don’t want to reconcile (or they don’t have time, or they’re afraid, or they’re leaving it till a ‘later’ that never comes).
It involves laying things to rest, applying the ‘Fuck-it‘ mantra, putting stuff down and letting things be. Dropping the burdens. Forgetting my fucking pills. Making a mandala of the life that I have had. Enjoying the semi-weightlessness of lying on my back in bed, listening to the Desert Dwellers and the raindrops on the skylight.
Usually, today I’d be buzzing on steroids and cancer drugs, and quite often I would write a blog or record a podcast on that day – it channels the buzzing into something productive. But I’m not buzzing on steroids any more. Instead, two friends over in Botallack took me to the Dog and Rabbit in St Just and I had coffee and pear cake, and that set me buzzing instead. That, and what we talked about there, is what produced this sudden, unpremeditated blog.
Penwith is bathed in sea fog. The woodstove is burning aromatic silver birch. Dinner is warming up on the stove. And the Atlantic winds are whooshing through the bare tree branches to the occasional hooting of owls.
Thanks for reading. With love, Palden.
PS. For those of you who listened to my audiobook, remember the allegations of corruption that were used to discredit the school where I worked, leading to the withdrawal of foreign funding at exactly the wrong moment? And remember what I wrote some blogs back about hasbarah – the telling of stories that are the opposite to what is actually happening? Well, in the recent accusations against UNRWA, which has 30,000 employees, exactly the same tactic is being used again, twelve years later. This is classic dirty hasbarah. The nations that have withdrawn funding should be ashamed of themselves – and my own nation, Britain, is one of them.
An eclipse over Penwith. The Earth and Moon are a co-orbiting double planet. The only other one in our solar system is Pluto-Charon.
In August and September I’m going to be doing three ‘magic circles’ – An Afternoon in the Far Beyond with Palden Jenkins.
I’m really happy about the way these are working out. They’ll be in Glastonbury, Avebury and Buckfast, near Totnes, in Devon.
If you’re able to come, it would be really good to see you and share this with you.
Since getting cancer in late 2019, and with only some time left, I’ve been reflecting on what I need to pass on before I go. Over the decades I’ve had privileged exposure to profound experiences and played my part in the movement for change, and there’s something from all this that I want to share, while I still can.
Photo: Sunny Tresidder
I’ve always worked on creating energy-spaces, tastes of the world we’re heading towards, taking people deep and high, though keeping it simple. You get a taste of this in my blogs and podcasts. I can be quite metaphysical and political too, with a way of connecting wide-apart dots and helping people see and feel things they half-knew but hadn’t quite got.
I have a few friends Upstairs who will be in on this, so everyone present will get some personal treatment! You see, in this ‘last chapter’ phase of my life, though I’ve done all this kind of thing many times before, it feels like it’s going to a new level. It feels right to do this. We’ll do three ‘magic circles’ to see how it goes, and how I hold up, and then see what’s next.
So I shall be venturing upcountry from the far beyond (I live right at the far end of Cornwall), and if you’re able to make it I’d love seeing you.
I’m doing an evening talk in Glastonbury too (date not fixed yet) called The Tipping of the Scales. If you live in or around Glastonbury or are visiting at the time, you might find it rather interesting!
Gurnard’s Head, an ancient cliff sanctuary on the north coast of West Penwith, Cornwall
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.
Higher Hill Wood, Lelant, West Penwith
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.
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.
Pordenack Point, Lands End, Cornwall
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.
The ancient sage at Pordenack Point
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.
Pordenack Point
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.
Mayan star-watcher, Porthcurno
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.
It’s the Chief, at Pordenack Point
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.
Near Tol Pedn Penwith
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.
About having cancer. All about keeping spirits up and dealing with adversity, about working with both modern pharma and holistic treatments and some thoughts on how it all ends up – actually, you die (so it helps to start preparing).
It’s for anyone with cancer or a similarly soul-rocking ailment, and for interested carers or anyone who knows a cancer patient.
I’m no expert or doctor but I do have cancer, I go through the grinder, I get swamped in fears and tears, and I try to do my best with it all. So this is from me to you, if it’s useful to you.
It’s the second of two, but you don’t have to hear the first one first. When I finished editing this and put the podcast to bed, I just burst out crying. You might hear my heart and soul in this podcast. It means a lot to me and might be one of my best.
Not finished yet though! There’s more to come.
It’s 30 mins long, and you can hear it on Spotify, or on Apple or Google Podcasts
As a cancer patient, for me it’s the complications that are now more problematic than the cancer itself. Recently I had some potentially bad medical news about a new complication, and this of course brought up a lot of stuff, provoking some deep processing and cogitation.
So this podcast is about dying – something that is optional for none of us, though more pressing for some than for others. If you get born, you’ll die, and that’s that.
But there’s a bit more to this too, and this podcast ranges around in some of the nooks and crannies of an area of life we don’t look at very much.
Recorded in the woods down below where I live, and introduced by the sound of the stream in the woods.
Nowadays I’m rather frail, yet there’s a deep resilience in me too. I’m not unused to crisis and tend to fight back and rebirth myself through it. The more you allow crisis, the more you can use it as a launchpad for revival.
Rocks and hard places – Porthmoina Cove, Cornwall
I’m still alive. Crisis over. I spent last week coming back fully, also working with taking chemo. I seem to be taking it quite well, though it affects my brains and energy – my perceived age is now that of a perky 90 year old and I have to simplify my life and activities to match.
Since starting chemo a month ago I’ve gone into a pharma-induced weekly cycle where I’m ‘up’ on Dex (a steroid) on Mondays and Tuesdays and then I subside into what could be a ‘down’ time by Friday – except I relax into it and let it be, and I don’t get depressed as some people do. The challenge is to hang in there and go through the long tunnel.
The signs are good. Liz, the haematologist, reported last week that my results were ‘surprisingly good’. She forgets that I had said this was likely, but now at least she has some evidence.
When my cancer journey started in autumn 2019, I really didn’t know how well I would do: the shock of getting cancer obliged me to abandon previous ideas and beliefs and really get to grips with the facts of my situation. I was dying and the cancer was quite advanced – I was caught in the nick of time.
My treatment in the last month has worked well – again, to their surprise, and despite the crisis I had. I had encouraged them to set a student on me to observe and monitor me for their research, because I’ve been a meditating vegetarian for decades. But no, such knowledge wasn’t deemed necessary.
Though when the visiting nurse came on Monday this week to administer my drugs, she was fascinated with my story. She’s clearly quite interested in alternative pathways, but most people she talks to about this will tend to be relatively new to the game, and perhaps they won’t have changed and evolved as far.
She nodded, agreeing, when I said that five decades of a good diet and lifestyle and 45 years of meditation must have a significant effect, especially since I started this while young: I (and people like me) have evolved differently from many people, psychospiritually and physically, and decades of it makes a difference.
Nowadays I’m rather frail, yet there’s a deep resilience in me too. I’m not unused to crisis and tend to fight back and rebirth myself through it. The more you allow crisis, the more you can use it as a launchpad for revival. Part of me needs it since it activates my systems, and that’s one reason why I’ve tended to live quite an edgy life, involved with risky, frontline, limit-pushing activities.
If you’re part of a revolution when you’re young, even if it fails, there’s no going back – and many are the people around the world who have crossed this line in the last decade or two, yesterday in Belarus and Hong Kong, today in Myanmar.
Though I have contracted a blood cancer, this seems to arise from specific toxicities – electromagnetism and nuclear radiation – rather than from the patterns of my lifestyle. But I’ve had to face a raw fact: I have opened myself to energy and energy-fields. This has been a thirty-year theme in my talks and writings on astrology, cereology, ancient sites and the state of the world.
Perhaps I opened myself to these energy-fields a bit enthusiastically and unwisely earlier in life, or perhaps this openness made for a problem with mobile phones and wi-fi, making me undefended and increasing the effect of radiation exposure. Even so, although I have cancer, my overall body-mind system is in quite good nick, and this gives me good medical results, also helping me avoid some of the side-effects other people get during treatment.
Chapel Carn Brea, Cornwall
There’s a deep truth here: everything in life is a gift. Everything. Including those things we do not count as gifts.
Here we come to crises. Since diagnosis I’ve had three crises and it seems that, when these happen, more gets resolved than was immediately apparent at the time. Last October I contracted shingles (a side-effect of chemo drugs). But, as a result of that crisis my arthritis reduced, my fatigue disappeared and I went through quite a lift and breakthrough afterwards. The crisis mobilised a greater healing process than just dealing with the shingles.
The advantage of a crisis is that you can resolve lots of issues at once, rather than dragging them out over time and through much complexity. It raises the stakes, accelerating change.
Last week’s crisis – a total stomach explosion lasting 4-5 days – rendered me helpless and weak. I did the necessaries and dealt with it. Put me in a crisis and I am calm and collected – well, at least, in the heat of the moment. Astrologers amongst you will understand that, for a person with Sun and Saturn in Virgo, an exploding stomach is a big issue – a symptom of the transiting Neptune that is currently opposing my Saturn.
In my meditation at the time I opened myself up to my ‘inner doctors’ more than ever before. I went a level deeper than I knew I could. Most of them seem never to have had earthly bodies, but I think they’ve taken on a couple of former humans to help them get closer in – otherwise they can work only with my energy-fields without actually knowing how my body anatomy works. This sense of being closely examined was profound particularly because, for the healing to really work, you have to let these beings into your darker corners – the bits of your life you don’t want others, or even yourself, to see, and the stuff you feel guilty and ashamed about. For here is where the causes of illness lie.
Over the next day or two I felt myself getting sorted out from top down, starting at the highest level and working down through energy-body stuff to the physical issues. It’s difficult to convey how this felt, but I felt myself being pulled up and flooded with light from the centre and working outwards, while also being pulled down and re-grounded after a rather nightmarish experience, from outwards in. The crisis was resolved as the week progressed, and I feel I’ve been realigned, rewired and recharged, and that my soul is now more in the driving seat.
Here there’s a lesson in letting go. Before you ‘let go and let God’, it’s difficult knowing what that newly-opened space will be like and the way the game-plan rules will change when you step into it – and we have this cringeing habit of entering the future facing backwards. Letting go is, in a way, more about adopting the future than releasing the past. It can be hard work, sometimes, especially when you’re digging into deep patterns. But we also make it harder than it needs to be.
This is true for individuals but also, in the 2020s, this is very much the condition of the world, and it’s manifesting as a sense of urgency for change in the young: they don’t want to face the crap they’re faced with in the world as it stands, because they want to get on with the real stuff, not with the embedded illusions and attachments of former generations. But they’re faced with presented reality and legacy situations, and this is hard. Harry and Meghan have been demonstrating this in full public view.
One blessing arising from hovering close to death has been that I’m looking not only at the patterns of this life and of my life story. I find myself looking at patterns beyond this life, noticing the abiding threads, relationships and connections I have with people, and with karmic themes that go further than this life. Such a viewpoint shifts our perspective greatly – which is one reason why most people avoid it like the plague.
My son has signed up for the Army Reserves (Royal Signals), and he’s really motivated, and I know he’ll do it well. This is challenging for a wizzened old peace-freak like me, but I support him in following his path. When you’re a parent of a child joining the armed forces, you have to get used to the idea that they might get killed. In his case, I don’t think my son will, but you never know. I’ve had plenty of death-opportunities myself and I’m still here, now on my tenth life. But my response to this risk of death is, ‘Well, he and I have a contract lasting many lives, so if he dies I’ll be there to meet him on the other side, and we’ll have more to do with each other anyway, another time – this life is a chapter in a long story’.
I feel this with my three daughters too: we arrived in each other’s lives because we all have an interlocking karmic story, and we are here to enact those threads and experiences that we give each other – both intentionally and not. It has had its painful times. Here I have some regret, but in retrospect not as much as some people have judged I ought to have. This is important because, with children, though we generally want to do the best for them, we as parents are also here to give our children problems, issues and patterns. We have to give them a pile of shite to deal with. What they do with that is ultimately their choice, and it takes time to make it good and turn things around. They are new people, not just products of their heritage, and a proportion of souls alive today are new to earthly life too – some youngsters experiencing gender dysphoria are like that.
These new souls are programmed with the memories of other souls who have had earthly lives, to make them fit to face the challenges and details of life in a body on a high-gravity, spinning planet. These are not their own memories, and they don’t have the same emotional connection to them as souls would who draw on personal experience. So many of these souls seek to achieve their goals without really knowing fully how to deal with the dilemmas and screw-ups that happen on the way, or without fully developing the necessary skills. Developing patience and perseverance is a key issue.
My son is drawing on trans-life military memory – he’s inherently experienced in it, and the same has been true for me as a humanitarian and social activist. In the 1980s-90s, when I was organising gatherings and camps, I had an inherent gift of pulling people together – calling up armies – and many of them were former souls who knew me from other lives. When you’ve been a chief, a khan, a sheikh and a general, for better or worse you can be known by many thousands of souls.
This insight has helped me understand how and why, throughout life, some people have loved and been noticeably loyal while others have hated me and even taken revenge. One of life’s big lessons has been to forgive yet not to forget. Though the funny thing is that, since a near-death experience I had at age 24, I’ve had significant memory problems and I don’t actually remember my past very well, and this has helped immensely with forgiving. Our hang-ups are rooted in memory and the emotional armouring we develop as a result of pain and hardship, and I’ve had less of this than many people, owing to memory-loss.
One of life’s big lessons, for all of us, is how to make something good out of a bad situation. The Palestinians are masters at this, and they’ve taught me a lot. Life’s a pile of shit, and why do we delude ourselves otherwise and suffer so much over that delusion? Even eating chocolate causes suffering. But it’s delightful too, and you just do not get tomato ketchup up in heaven, so enjoy it while you can. But the big issue now is that enjoying life’s ketchup can no longer be done at the expense of others, and everyone deserves their fair share of ketchup, though not at the expense of our home planet.
Boscregan, looking toward Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall
Another big lesson is staying true to our calling and purpose – not letting the world’s diversions get in the way too much. Sure, there are bills to pay, but this is not what we’re here for. We have to face these diversions because they’re part of life and they do lead us into places and situations we otherwise wouldn’t experience. They force us to develop life-skills. I’m a good writer but it is a developed skill, honed through mega-thousands of hours sitting at desks and computers, and it has been both a gift, a bane and at times a burden.
In my life I’ve made choices to prioritise my calling more than my security, and there has been a price to that, not only for me. I’ve made mistakes too, but I don’t fundamentally regret it. I’ve often been accused of being an unrealistic idealist, but actually I’m very much a Virgo realist, more preoccupied with working with human wrongs than with human rights, and looking further into the future than many people care to do. What in the 1960s were visionary ideals are now pragmatic policy imperatives.
One day at a time. With chemo-brain this approach is necessary. My capacity to handle complexity is much reduced. But it has its virtues. One thing in life we cannot control is the time and manner of our passing away. Paradoxically, the more we accept that lack of control, the more control we gain within that context. Life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans.
Thanks and blessings to all guardian angels. Thank you too for letting me share these thoughts. Salam alekum: peace in your soul. And what next? Time is what stops everything happening all at once.
Human wrongs, and the future: Possibilities 2050 | www.possibilities2050.org (website and free PDF download). A visionary realist report on the world in 2050.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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