Seven years ago my life changed thanks to cancer. I was given a year or two to live and I’ve been hovering around the edge ever since. It yields insights. One insight is this: the more we work with change within ourselves, habituating ourselves to shedding skins and starting over, the more adept we become for the time when the big change really comes.
It might not look like it, but another world is birthing itself and it’s already in labour. The big squeeze is happening and, by being alive today, you’ve chosen to be part of it.
Everything that begins comes to an end. Yet we don’t die: we’re reborn into another world. This is what I’m facing at the end of my life, and eventually it comes to each and every one of us.
I’m a former astrologer, geomancer, original thinker, consciousness-worker, project-founder and humanitarian, a veteran of the 1960s and the late 20th Century alternative society. I have a few perspectives to share, and that’s what this talk was about.
Two limited-edition evening talks with Palden Jenkins
at The Hive in Penzance, Cornwall, TR18 4TP. Fridays 25th Sept and 30th Oct, 7.00pm.
We stand on a threshold, peering over the edge.
These two talks are about our personal lives, our circles and communities and our national and global futures. Limited-edition because these might be the last public talks I give – I’m on my way out, standing on my own edge and peering over it.
The funny thing is that, soon after deciding to do these talks and announcing them, I plummeted into a deep and rather nightmarish illness. Already a cancer patient living on extra time, I wondered whether I’d make it through. It looks like I did. So I come to you having recently wobbled on that edge.
Back in 2020 I described the late 2020s as an ‘avalanche of events’. Well, here we are. Personally and globally we are being squeezed, stretched, shaken and squirted into a new, change-rich, insecure reality in which it’s difficult to see what is to come next. But it’s coming anyway and it’s getting bigger and deeper.
Here’s the nub of it: this grinding, fear-inducing process is the very mechanism by which the changes that are needed will come. In our own lives, we’re challenged to step into our true selves, and so it is with Planet Earth. Earth seeks to realign with her purpose, her soul, and we, as itchy nits on her skin, are a part of that process.
Avebury. Photo by Rebecca Brain.
In a sense, we humans are losing control. But don’t fall for the fearsome idea that we’re doomed, that World War Three is coming – that’s a trap of the mind and heart. It’s time to choose.
Losing control, there’s another level of balance and magic that comes up underneath. It’s all about riding that wave. Overcoming fear.
Seven years ago my life changed thanks to cancer. I was given a year or two to live and I’ve been hovering on the edge ever since. It yields insights. One insight is this: the more we work with change within ourselves, habituating ourselves to shedding skins and starting over, the more adept we become for the time when the big change really comes.
It might not look like it, but another world is birthing itself and it’s already in labour. The big squeeze is happening and, by being alive today, you’ve chosen to be part of it.
Everything that begins comes to an end. Yet we don’t die: we’re reborn into another world. This is what I’m facing at the end of my life, and eventually it comes to each and every one of us.
I’m a former astrologer, geomancer, original thinker, consciousness-worker, project-founder and humanitarian, a veteran of the 1960s and the late 20th Century alternative society. I have a few perspectives to share, and that’s what these two evenings are about.
Pics in this blog are of my father, Julian Jenkins – no longer on this Earth. Here he is, noble at his wife’s, my mother Ruth’s, funeral
I’m getting a feeling that, unless something changes or I’m getting things wrong, it might not be too long before I join the ancestors. That’s not a heavy feeling – there’s a dawning sense of relief to it. Of course, you never get to know when and how death will come, until it actually happens. So I’m faced with rather a strange choice: is it best to talk about this while I can, in case I keel over quite soon, or am I overdramatising something that is not actually imminent?
There is indeed a feeling of migration going on, a gradual shifting from here to there which, at some point, will mean that my heart stops pumping. The time will have come to go over to the otherworld – whatever that lands up truly meaning.
But the otherworld doesn’t start there. I want to return to a thought I shared a couple of years ago, about dying. Dying is a gradual psycho-spiritual process, and every one of us is dead to some extent, at this very moment. You might be only 10% dead, but part of you is over there. I’d estimate myself to be 80ish percent dead at present, up from the 70ish percent of a few months ago – though it’s a non-measurable perception.
Whether or not you’re aware of it, your psyche is much more bendy, pulsating, edgeless, multilevel, imaginal, transdimensional and empathic than you think. We’re addicted to the idea and the feeling of individuality, as if there is a clear boundary between what is me and what is not me, when actually there isn’t.
Julian at Castle Rigg stone circle, Cumbria, in his final years
Part of our deeper psyche oozes over to the other side, and on a more regular basis than we might think. This happens especially when a loved one, or a person who is important to us, dies. Part of us goes over with them, and it’s important to give time and space to experience that. It’s a blessed, spacious feeling, and a great gift. That feeling of inner connection with a deceased soul can be quite strong in the first few weeks. Over the course of a year, that emigrant soul will come back clearly at times. You get a flash of them – if only a glimpse – and you feel them and their vibe quite distinctly. So listen and talk back – this is important.
That’s how it works with ancestors. Early in human history, when we lived in genetically-defined tribes, souls would tend to recycle within the tribe’s psycho-spiritual field. We modern people have now burst out of our tribes, seeking experiential variety and following a multiplicity of possibilities. Both genetically and as souls we have become remarkably mixed and mongrelised. We’ve been at it for millennia.
But there are also specific threads that pertain to our own personal life-stories and interpersonal histories. People in our past have acted as beacons of light, rescuers, enemies, teachers, harmers, questioners and friends to us, and they live within us now, and it’s a personal thing. Or it might be a tribal or group-soul thing – a concatenation of souls with a shared identity and purpose.
Ancestors continue to live through us. They watch and witness from another place, sometimes lending a hand or dropping thoughts into our heads, or acting as an element of memory, as a model of how to do things, or how not to do things, that helps us shape the lives we live now.
One of my key guiding ancestors was a man who was alive in the mid-19th Century in South Wales, where he was well-known as a healer of last resort. Doctors would refer patients to him if they felt they could do no more. Apparently he was a curmudgeonly, difficult old git, with a big, white, Karl Marx beard, though he had a glint in his eye too. At times he would disappear up into the mountains on his horse, leaving the world behind, to collect herbs and spend time on his own. Yet he was gifted with a wondrous ability. He would reappear, back from the mountains, and people would come to him.
I first met him, inside myself, when I was young, during an inner journey on my third acid trip, in 1967. Over time he has returned, as if watching me, especially at critical points in life. It took some years of questioning relatives to find out who he was. He had been an embarrassment to the family, so he was not well remembered. But he was well-known and he did apparently save a lot of lives. He still turns up on the movie-screen of my psyche every now and then, and he’s both a genetic and a spirit-ancestor to me. And I am a bit like him too.
In this life I’ve been involved with large numbers of people, organising events, running groups, standing on stages, muttering down microphones, writing books and building websites, connecting deeply with many amazing souls. I’m aware that, having played a catalytic, key-turning role in many people’s lives, that makes me a kind of spirit-ancestor to at least some of them – once I’ve popped my clogs, that is.
So, after I’ve gone from this life, please do remember to check me out every now and then. Or if you find me checking you out, please do say hello. See whether there’s a message in it for you. I’ll pop up in your thoughts for a micro-second, and you’ll get a distinct feeling of me that comes with it.
Adventuring
But it’s not just that. This is a two-way thing. Being up in ‘heaven’, lacking an earthly body, it means that, if we ancestors want to get stuff done on Earth, we need to get people to do it on our behalf. This gets tricky. Modern humans suffer doubt, thinking that such thoughts are ‘just imagination’, and setting them aside. This can be frustrating for a soul on the other side: try talking to someone on Earth and they just ignore you and walk away! However, we can meet you in your dreams, and sometimes such interactions percolate through into waking-life – into what we call consciousness.
One of the things I am glad about is that, throughout life, I have often followed these promptings. I wake up with a feeling, an inspiration or a compulsion to do something, big or small (this blog about ancestors being one example), and I feel driven to do it. There’s a certain magic that comes with such downloads, a feeling that the prompting points towards something that is genuinely supposed to be. The outcomes from prompts like this can be much bigger than anticipated too.
Acting as an ancestor is rather a choice and a commitment. It’s a resolution to be available and of service to souls who remain in the land of the living, and service to the universe’s wider agendas. You don’t automatically become an ancestor just by dying: it’s a choice to be present, accessible and involved.
It also depends on how others see you, as a sort of role model or example. On some level, and whether or not people are conscious of it, you become a star in their inner firmament. You become a watcher. You cannot interfere, though you can lay seeds of possibility and simply be there for people.
Here’s the main reason I’m dwelling on this. From an earthly viewpoint, my health and condition have been deteriorating in recent months. I find I’m becoming less focused on, and interested in, the world around me. More often, I find myself floating off and disengaging, interiorised and seeing the world more like an outsider, once-removed.
I remember this when my Sagittarian father was in his nineties. I’d take him on adventures – he liked that. He would fall asleep during the journey but, when the engine stopped and he awoke, there before us would be a panorama over the mountains or the sea. We’d sit there sharing a flask of tea, sometimes going for a slow walk. Or I would go for a walk and he’d fall asleep. I was giving him a last look at the world, and we’d visit some of his favourite places. He died over a decade ago, but we still nod and wink to each other across the dimensions. Those were valuable moments.
We certainly are multidimensional intelligences, and this becomes more and more apparent as we approach death. Except, as intelligences, we don’t always use our full intelligence. Jean Piaget, a sociologist, once said, ‘Intelligence is not about what you know, it’s about what you do when you don’t know’.
Indeed. This is the story of life on Earth. It’s a life filled with paradox and improvisation, and we each have a different instruction manual and a unique experiential path to follow, just to complicate things.
I’ve just begun revising my cancer book, Blessings that Bones Bring – it needs to be shortened and sharpened. The book is a distillation of relevant material from my cancer-and-life blog, Notes from the Far Beyond. It’s in both digital and audiobook formats.
Next there is a question of how to end the book, since a cancer story, in my case at least, ends when I die. However, I’m not dead yet and, after death, I won’t be able to write the final chapter. That’s one of those paradoxes. I haven’t figured out what to do about ending the book, but something will work out.
So that’s my project for the next few weeks – apart from getting through each day. At this late-life stage, it’s a matter of completing what I can of the flapping threads of my life, while I still can, even though existence is twice as difficult as it used to be before cancer along.
I hope this rather rambling blog makes some sense. Perhaps I’ll return to this ancestor theme another time. I might be losing the plot, going off at tangents, but something else is dawning inside. In the land of the living it looks as if things are going wrong and I am deteriorating, but in the land of the soul something new is starting up. Or perhaps I’m getting a re-training in how to function in the rather rarefied consciousness-realm where ancestors spend much of their timeless time. I wonder if they serve good tea there?
This doesn’t really feel like a journey into the Great Unknown: instead, it feels like going home. It was this life that was all about the Great Unknown – a life in a world where we drive bulldozers through the laws of the universe. We flail around in the choppy seas of earthly experience, bumping up against things and people, struggling to make sense of a pervasive fiction that we call ‘reality’. However, at the end of it we are permitted to go home, and our bruises and wounds are attended to – if, that is, we allow it. If we don’t allow it, we start our next life carrying the baggage, hurt and aberrations of the life or the lives we had before.
Meanwhile, if you’re in the mood for some seriously moving rock’n’roll, here’s a remarkable musical rendering of the dying process, in a Christian cultural context: Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPI3E0Sxs0E
For people of my generation this can be a shock – we weren’t prepared for this. You get creaky. You can’t handle things you used to be able to do.
Gravity gets heavier, bodily frailties set in, people forget you and doctors start taking over your life.
But there’s something special about this last stage of life – it’s a chance to complete the story of our lives and bring things to some sort of conclusion. If we ignore this, there can be quite a lot of baggage to carry into the afterlife.
This is about the deepest and potentially the richest time of our life-cycle, when we can advance psycho-spiritually in ways that, earlier in life, we used to pay large amounts for, going on courses and retreats and doing snazzy practices.
I can’t chop logs and climb hills like I used to, but another mobility has arisen instead, deep down inside.
Getting old is about growing wiser, not getting stiff, conservative and grumpy.
Once I encountered a paper bag, and on the side was printed, ‘Recycled materials – do come again’. Yes indeed, if that is your path. There’s also the option of going beyond.
But that depends a lot on what we do with the life we have, and the way we played our hand of cards.
This is one of the best blogs I’ve written and it’s time to give it another spin. It’s all about dying, and prepping for it while we’re alive.
It happens again this week, on a cushion just under your bum – and the times in different countries are below. Do it your way: there’s no prescribed method, faith or mantra – just a bunch of good souls scattered around, meditating together. No need to sign up, be online or subscribe – just be there, wherever you are.
This meditation was started in 1994 in response to a request from the Council of Nine that we humans do so. It’s at a fixed time so that The Nine can create a field that surrounds us, for that half hour. You’ll feel it, and it begins and shuts off bang on time. To find out more about The Nine: www.palden.co.uk/nine.html
They do not seek followers. Follow your spirit, soul, heart, mind and intuitions and, together, we’ll get there.
I’ve been working through the book I compiled for them thirtyish years ago, ‘The Only Planet of Choice‘, as a kind of revision course. It’s good to re-learn things I learned earlier in life. Or was that another life? They had a big influence on me.
I found some interesting lines from them…
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You must understand that your thoughts are a living reality. If you do not monitor and guard your thoughts, exchange joy for dissension, exchange compassion for disdain, then it is difficult for planet Earth to move forward. We mean planet Earth collectively. If you have gathered but a small understanding of the importance in your moving forward, to benefit the elevation of planet Earth, then you have attained a great step forward for humankind.
It is not necessarily a path of great difficulty, for it is a joyful path, if you understand the truth of who you are. It is a path of happiness, for when you find the essence within yourself, then fear, which creates conflict, cannot completely control you. It is also true that on your path there will seem to be times of trailing backward. What is important is always to understand who you truly are, for you will then move forward. This is your planet, and you have not come here in error.
Every human being who is upon planet Earth has come here by choice. At this time in particular there are many who have come for the purpose of service to planet Earth. Because of the variety and the beauty of planet Earth, and also because of the density that has come into being through unbalanced-negative influences, many souls are now stuck on planet Earth. For these influences try to be in competition with Creation, not understanding that in reality they are of Creation itself – and yet they choose to be in competition, not in obedience, and not in forwardness.
When we talk about obedience, we do not mean that obedience should be blind, not in the way used in your world. We mean that you need to be conscious and aligned to the forward evolution of the universe.
At this time we wish you to appreciate that planet Earth is congested and bottlenecked, since many have chosen to reincarnate here when they could have gone on to other experiences. They became entrapped in what they believed to be reality. It is now time to transcend that.
There are many upon Earth who are trapped in their addictions – if it be addiction to power, addiction to ingestion of substances, addiction to physical sexuality, and to habits, or addiction to attempting to find one’s self in others – and humankind has desecrated planet Earth because of lack of understanding, when in reality it is undoubtedly the most beautiful planet available to experience.
It is important that you not give your free will away: you do it when you permit yourself to lose control of yourself, whether it be with ingestion of addictive substances, or in anger, or other things. You are always responsible: that cannot be removed. This does not mean that you should not have joy in dancing and singing, and all those wonderful attributes that are generated in humankind, for we wish only joy upon planet Earth, and we wish you to enjoy all that has been provided for you. For variety in experience of this kind does not exist in any physical civilisation in the universe.
Always walk in gentleness, in kindness, in joy, and remember this: when you are laughing, the universe is also in laughter and joy. Many of you humans have lived before on planet Earth, as you have all lived in other places of existence. This time you have come here to help planet Earth transform itself. You will continue in future to live also in other planetary civilisation systems, but that does not mean you can escape the responsibility of this existence.
You are a universe within yourself, and your universe affects all universes. As you generate love and kindness, you touch other universes and infuse them. As you generate despair and anger, you also do that to others, for you each are powerful individuals within yourselves.
Some would say that when they die, when they make the transition, they are transformed. But that is not what we mean by transformation. For if in their transition they take with them their problems which they maintained upon planet Earth, then they have created a transformation that is heavier than what transformation truly is on planet Earth.
We wish them to know the importance of transforming who they are during their life on Earth, their direction and their understanding of their responsibility for planet Earth, its inhabitants, its life in all forms, including the seas and the minerals within the Earth – to have respect and to bring about the transformation of planet Earth by elevating it out of darkness. That begins with the individual. Is that explanatory enough?
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With love, Palden
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Current meditation times, on Sundays: UK, Ireland & Portugal 7-7.30pm W Europe 8-8.30pm E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 9-9.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm EST, Cuba 2-2.30pm CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia 1-1.30pm PST, West Coast North America 11am-11.30am
When cancer came into my life nearly six years ago, I found myself adapting some inner visualisation techniques I had learned earlier in life to my new situation. It was a spontaneous thing and a way of dealing with my situation.
I met a group of ‘inner doctors’, engaging in dialogue with them and allowing them to examine me and work on me. The amazing thing is that, in my experience, it has really worked.
So this podcast is about the inner doctors. It’s for people with life-changing or terminal ailments or disabilities, or their helpers, friends or families. But it could be useful to anyone, if only for future reference – after all, especially as you grow older, all sorts of things can happen. They did to me.
I’ve been greatly helped by the inner doctors. They even seem to have helped my outer doctors in hospital, as they treat me. So this might interest you and prove useful.
Though you do need to believe.
Note: in the podcast, at times I did not distinguish sufficiently between inner and outer doctors! Sorry for the confusion.
This is mainly for my generational peers – if you’re in your 70s, 80s or 90s, your bones are getting creaky and your mind is getting sluggish.
In the life-cycle we’re given, we grow up and later we grow down. In steps.
It’s also about karma-clearance. Sorting out our stuff at the end of life, so that we don’t carry all of it with us when we go over to the other side – to the realm of the Ancestors.
I’ve been involved in humanitarian work, and recently I’ve needed to work on my patterns around givingness and compassion fatigue. Commitment. Success and failure in helping people. Deep heart stuff.
And it’s about acceptance. That’s one of the biggest learning experiences life ever gives us.
47 mins long. Introduced and outroduced by the birds of Grumbla in the Far Beyond, down’ere in Cornwall.
Yes, you’ve probably done it before -getting dead, that is. While this involves falling into the Great Unknown, swimming in the Vastness, it’s in your personal bundle of knowhow, somewhere deep down.
This February 2025 Aha Class was about the process of dying and what happens afterwards. The talk comes in two parts. They’re here:
I’m drawing on personal experience. This is what it’s like from the inside – at least, as I have experienced it, and the way I see it.
The range of possible dying experiences is vast, actually, and tailor-made for every soul according to our karmic dispositions and where we have got to in the lifetime we’ve just had.
The audio recordings of this two-part talk are ready and out now. Save them for a good moment – this is a special one.
Next month’s Aha Class is about geopolitical healing – working inwardly with wars, disasters and the deeper levels of the issues at stake on our planet at present.
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