My website has just gone through its Saturn Return – 28 years old. Erk.
Born in the antediluvian days of the ‘information superhighway’, when John Major was prime minister…
Every coupla years I’ve added an extra bit to it, and it’s like a new age minefield now. Tread carefully.
Unless I suddenly earn a million between now and the time I pop my clogs (with Jupiter in Pisces, such things can sometimes happen, as a kinda cosmic joke!), this is the legacy I’m leaving.
Wurdz. Bl**dy loadsa them.
Perhaps you might now understand why, in late life, I’ve developed a slight allergy to sitting at my computer to chat with people… (‘cos computer keyboard=work, for me).
It started with pink and green punchcards on tea trolleys in 1971. I was on the world’s fourth largest computer at the time (London Univ), and it had a memory of 56k – hot shit! We had the latest tech too – dot-matrix printers! But no keyboards or screens – they came later.
It was my dear old friend Sig Lonegren who nudged me to get on internet in 1994. Initially I had reservations. Perhaps part of me knew this would be a life-changer. I’d been in printing and publishing for some time, but this… well, I had to get ready for it.
Actually, I was on my Saturn opposition, at age 44. This was a step-change. And then… whoosh… egged on my whizz Avalonian programmer friend Barry Hoon, before long, with him, I was creating www.isleofavalon.co.uk which, by 2002, was getting a million visitors per year. (Apart from the content, people liked it because it had zero advertising – no estate agents or shop adverts in sight, and it worked, for the town as a whole.)
One thing I’m looking forward to when I die is the possibility of returning to direct mind-to-mind and heart-to-heart communication. Paper, print, messages and web-pages, well, they have their virtues, but when we’re talking about ‘sharing’, internet just doesn’t measure up.
As an early adopter of internet, one thing that disappoints me about the way things have gone is that too many people, imho, quote and re-post other people’s stuff and media stuff, and too few actually speak for themselves and create from themselves.
I get five-ish friend requests every day, and I look at everyone’s FB page. If you speak for yourself, you interest me more, and you’re more likely to become my friend. People who hide behind re-posted material or blankish pages… well, please come out and give us a sign of who you actually are!
I do have a way of making uncomfortable statements (a bit like Martin Amis, wordsmith, my age, who’s just died)…
One of them is that withholding is a crime against humanity.
I submit this for your consideration.
Having lived through a remarkable slice of time (1950 to now), I’ve been privileged to be surrounded by and adding to a pool of emergent knowledge that lays foundations for the future. My website’s Saturn Return is significant (at least to me) because it marks a transition from a website to an archive.
An archive of an old codger who saw some stuff and did some things to add to what’s changing in this world. This, on the offchance that, like William Blake, my stuff might be valued more after my passing than during my life!
But then, a Saturnine soul like me has to accept that time makes its own decisions, and his Jupiter in Pisces speaks from the Void, and it can take time for time to catch up with Voidness.
If you wish, join me and us in meditation this evening (Sunday) at 8-8.30pm UK time (7-7.30pm GMT). Let’s give this world a push to get through the rather dangerous Mars-Jupiter-Pluto triangle that’s been firing off for the last few days. Angry stuff – facing the music – grasping the nettle – time to be brave.
I’ve been visiting Glastonbury for Easter weekend, and I’ve done two speaking gigs, one podcast interview and a lot of hobnobbing. And cake.
and other tales…
Glastonbury Tor, as seen from Pilton
Tuesday morning, 11th April, Butleigh, near Glastonbury… Today my friend Claudia from Cornwall is taking me home, bless her – she’s driven up here to pick me up. Typically for one with a Moon in Gemini, I’m looking forward to going home and also I am not. I’m looking forward to it because, as a partially-disabled cancer patient, my lovely little home is, well, my refuge. Also I can detox from the generously donated phone radiation I’ve taken in over the last few days – almost everyone I pass or sit near to has a toxic radiation generator on them, and it gets sprayed all over me. It’s weird.
I’m not really looking forward to going home because, in the last year or two, since losing my partner and my capacity to drive, I’ve been isolated in a way I’ve never experienced before. This winter I crossed that strange boundary between aloneness and loneliness, and while I manage quite well with loneliness, compared to many, I don’t like it – it’s an inward-turning vortex, and it’s easy to get sidelined and forgotten by other people, busy as they are with other things.
This said, being alone has its value, and many of us don’t get enough of it. But over winter I’ve been drying up inside and talking to myself too much. If my health condition deteriorates, there is no one to watch over me. It says something about our society when, as was recently mentioned in the UK news, a person’s death is discovered because of the smell. If that’s the case with me, then so be it – after all, my creaky body will already have been abandoned and I’ll be somewhere else. Our society has big issues around death.
Glastonbury Abbey
But then, I’m a strange mixture of a hermit and public figure – it’s the bit in between, personal relationships, where in the end I don’t do so well. That’s classic for an Aspie: I don’t sit easily in the expectation-fields many people quite reasonably have, as a friend, neighbour, partner or parent, and I’ve never sat easily in the boxes society seems to need each of us to sit inside.
This said, as soon as I was diagnosed with cancer in 2019 I found myself sitting inside a neat, simple ‘cancer’ box, unexpectedly eligible for levels of social, financial and medical support that previously were outside my reach – and without that support I would now be dead. It’s a bit strange, being valued by officialdom and mainstream society, at a time of life when my productive value has declined dramatically. I’m now costing society around £200,000 per year. Just my cancer medication costs £4,000 per month. In contrast, twenty years ago I was Glastonbury’s online PR man (running www.isleofavalon.co.uk) and Somerset County Council reckoned I’d raised the town’s local GDP by at least 5-7%, but I still made nothing from it – so this late-life support is rather bizarre, even though welcome.
Yet, when I was lying there in December 2019, newly diagnosed with cancer, hovering just outside death’s door and gulping down large dollops of acceptance together with large numbers of pills and infusions, I decided to make the best of my new situation, come what may, and certainly it is true that I’ve started a new chapter of life. A while ago I revisited an experience I had around age six, in which I feared growing up and going through the full human life-process. I wanted somehow to skip straight from childhood to old age. Now, prematurely aged and reduced by cancer, being an old crock does strangely suit me, and I’ve found a new expression and creativity in this situation, blogging, podcasting and now writing a second post-cancer book (the first was about ancient sites and the second is about world healing).
In the early months of dealing with cancer, I started assessing my condition on a basis of perceived age. After a life in which I had only rarely had illnesses, suddenly I was flattened and floored by cancer. I shot twenty years forward into my nineties, in terms of physical ability and inner perspective, doddering around like the Ancient of Days. As time went on and I started reviving, I grew a bit younger and settled around my mid-eighties. Nowadays I’d put myself around age 80, varying between better and worse days, though physically I’m 72. So I’ve been fast-tracked into a new phase. Yet my spirit has brightened, as if to compensate for a loss of physical strength, ability and vitality – spirit kinda holds me up, now that life is twice as weighty.
Glastonbury High Street
My cancer story started very suddenly one day in late August 2019 in my former partner’s back garden (she was out somewhere): life fundamentally changed that day. I was pulling on a tussock, clearing space for a log-pile, and my back suddenly cracked, very loudly. It was both an external and an internal sound. I was stunned, standing stock still, swaying giddily, and the pain gradually came on over a few minutes until I could do nothing except stagger inside and slowly sit down, seriously excruciated with searing pain.
Four of the bottom vertebrae of my back had collapsed and I was in agony for months. It took ten weeks to find out that I didn’t have just a back problem – I had cancer, and it had me. In the NHS they often ask you to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, and it was seven on a good day and nine on a bad day – though nowadays I just get one to three, more of a perpetual stiffened inertia and achiness.
With Myeloma or bone-marrow cancer, permanent changes to the blood cause bone-formation to stop, leading to a softening and hollowing out of the bones. It’s a toxicity-related cancer caused in most cases by electromagnetic and nuclear radiation or by certain specific neurotoxic chemicals – in my case it’s quite safely the radiation, looking back on my past history. I’ve known myself to be electrosensitive since the mid-1970s, when I was 25, though it only became a problem around the Millennium when mobile phones and wi-fi started coming into common use.
Chalice Well
But there’s a deeper dimension to this. It’s a disease of sensitivity in an insensitive world, and there’s something good and right about that. I’m more concerned about people who don’t or can’t feel radiation than about those who do. Myeloma concerns blood – life-force and will-to-live – and bones – the structure that holds us up, enabling us to experience living inside a physically constrained body. These are quite fundamental planetary issues, and I’ve dug around in myself to understand how my own planetary-incarnational challenges have served as a basis for cancer.
In a strange way it has been a gift, giving a new perspective and something to work with – every day is an uphill climb, forcing me to focus my wits on doing life as well as I can, making the best of what I have, and accepting what I don’t and can’t have and do – the sex, thrills and rock’n’roll parts of life (though I’m doing alright with drugs, both prescribed and alternative). Having had a rather full life, cancer has added a new dimension that, strangely, fits my story. It’s the current stage on my path. The whole look-and-feel of life has changed.
I’ve been visiting Glastonbury for Easter weekend (it was my home from 1980 to 2008), and I’ve done two speaking gigs, one podcast interview and a lot of hobnobbing. And cake. It has been wonderful, medicinal to the spirit, and I really appreciate the welcome I’ve been given and the interesting conversations we’ve had. It lights me up.
Chalice Well
It has been a radiation nightmare too. At times my nervous system has been juddering, the amygdala in the back of my head has been screaming a high-pitched whine, and after two days I was bordering into the next stages, flu symptoms and heart palpitations – though I’m learning how to hold them off sufficiently while under fire. As I get more irradiated, symptoms gradually escalate: despite all the miracle cures, crystals and gizmos people advocate and offer to counteract radiation, the only option is to get out, find a low-radiation refuge and spend 48 hours detoxing. So if I walk out on you, please don’t take offence – I just need to get out, and it’s that simple.
It’s a strange, new cause of loneliness – I cannot hobnob easily with people since they literally shoot me (and each other) with a rain of EM jangle and noise. Worse, people are, or seem, mostly unaware of it, even if they’re Greens or members of Extinction Rebellion. Hardly anyone thinks of the disastrous effect mobile phones have on plants, animals, the ecosystem and the world’s climate.
Anyway, that is as it is, and I can do little except partially tolerate it and partially keep my distance. It means I can’t hang out with friends unless I’m okay about being poisoned that day, and unless I have two clear days afterwards to recombobulate my energy-bodies before anything else can happen.
Chalice Hill
Many old friends came to the ‘Evening with Palden’ on Friday, and it was so good to see them and share some insights I’ve been coming up with. This is where being alone has its virtues, since it enables me to step outside current social groupthink, to see things from a more reflective viewpoint, less affected by others’ perceptions and the current preoccupations, social judgements and projections of the time. As a writer and podcaster it has allowed me time and space to invest in conceiving, writing and recording material. I’m really happy that it seems to be saying something to readers and listeners. It gives new meaning to a rather time-wealthy life like mine, and a way of contributing something to time-poor people’s lives like many of yours.
I’m not one who is happy sitting round entertaining myself as pensioners are supposed to, or sitting there like a block of wood. I see no point hanging around on Earth without having a meaningful life and making a contribution. A long life is not the main point. I’ve had a whole lot of life and feel quite happy with what I’ve been given. Well, sort of. Of course things could have been better, but it’s life’s imperfections that are a key element in the Planet Earth experience. In the end, that’s what we’re here for.
Frankly, I’ll be relieved when the time comes to go. Life has been one long saga of feeling as if I’m on the wrong planet. I’ll be happy to go home and be myself again. Well, for a recharge, at least. But before I go, there’s more to do and be. I’ve been much blessed, living in a time when so many ideas have been conceived, and the seeds and roots of a new civilisation have been laid. So I’m leaving traces of what life has given me, in print, sound and online, for folks younger than me to imbibe, if it’s useful to them.
The Tor from Maesbury Castle in the Mendips
When I give talks, I’m usually quite unaware of what I have said. I just hope for the best and try to avoid making big bloopers – us Aspies, sometimes we make what we believe to be a bland statement of fact, when for others it can be thoroughly upsetting, confronting and offensive. But I seem to get through each talk without major mishap. It comes to an end, and everyone seems to be happy and glowing, though I come out of it feeling as if I’ve missed something, slightly bereft, but relieved that people are smiling. I’m used to it now. I made some notes of talking points before leaving for Glastonbury but, typically, by the time I got there, I couldn’t find them. Lo behold, they turned up again after I got home. Magic.
At the Legends Conference on Sunday I delivered an entirely new talk. After what seemed like fifteen minutes, Tor came along to say my hour was nearly up, and I was really surprised. I think I managed to make my main point, squeezed in at the end, but I could have made it better. The talk started with an overview of the geomancy of ancient sites, using my home area of West Penwith in Cornwall as a working example, moving on to climate and environmental control and geopolitical healing through consciousness work. This is the gist of my new book, ‘Shining Land’, about the megalithic engineering of consciousness. I’m having difficulty getting it published, but it’ll come out sometime.
Thank you to Lillah Lotus and Rose Temple Morris for putting me up, and to Samia and Dave, Tor and Matthew Fellows for staging things. And to people I met, for being present in this world and sharing a wee slice of their lives. And to Briony, who comes from a similar world to my own, and who had me sussed in minutes. Also to Cho Hopking for teleporting me to Glastonbury, and Claudia Caolin for returning me to Cornwall.
During 2023 I have two objectives, over and above enjoying life: first, to develop more ways of spending time upcountry, with one or two bolt-holes where I can stay – the trick is to find somewhere I fit easily and am no hassle to have around, as a person with special needs; and, second, to see whether the world healing project I am proposing is actually likely to fly – that’s interesting because, with only a few years to live, I cannot lead it. So that’s my agenda for this year, and enough to be getting on with.
Today, Saturday, is spring-like and, having done my clothes-washing duties, I’m summoning my energies to get up the hill behind the farm, to the bronze age platform barrows up on top, 4,000 years old and still doing their geomantic thing. The badgers have dug a new sett on one of the barrows – I’m sure the archaeologists will love that! You can see for fifty miles up there, with a 360° panorama, eastwards to Carn Brea, Mount’s Bay and St Michael’s Mount, and westwards to the Isles of Scilly. I’ll mosey past the main badger sett (apparently it has been there for centuries) and the iron age courtyard house (a mere 2,000 years old). That’s my adventure for today. Well, apart from the blueberry muesli I had for breakfast.
Thanks and well done for reading this! And, guess what, this blog was written using full-on, genuine, certified Human Intelligence. For better or worse.
Love from Pennwydh, the Far Beyond, Paldywan
All of the photos of Glastonbury I took around 2004-7
I’m doing a series about cliff sanctuaries in West Penwith, Cornwall, where I live. I forgot to post the first one here when I did it, so you’re getting a bonus blog this time, about two cliff sanctuaries. The first is about Cape Cornwall and the second about Bosigran Castle. Also, at the bottom is mention of my forthcoming visit to Glastonbury at Easter – if you happen to live in or around it.
Cape Cornwall as seen from Nancherrow valley
Cape Cornwall
Down’ere in West Penwith, Cornwall (right at the end) we have an important coastal feature called cliff castles – though I call them cliff sanctuaries, a far better descriptor. Archaeologically they are customarily dated back to the iron age (from 500 BCE on), though actually they go back to the neolithic 3000s BCE.
Cape Cornwall and the Brisons rocks from near Cape Kenidjack
That is, when this area was mostly forested, the main places you could get out of it, ‘get some space’, were on the neolithic tors and hills and the cliff sanctuaries. So these formed the first major ancient sites in the area.
This is one cliff sanctuary, Kilgooth Ust (pr: ‘east’), the Gooseback of St Just, or Cape Cornwall, and it’s near St Just. It was severely affected by the tin trade 150ish years ago – hence the remnant chimney and the houses. But it is a classic, and it’s one of the major alignment centres of Penwith. Originally it had four barrows on its neck. Here’s an alignments map: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/d/viewer…
Cape Cornwall as seen from Carn Gloose
Around Cape Cornwall were some of the richest deposits of metals in ancient times, with arsenic-rich tin, gold and other rare metals used in metal smelting to create different qualities and finishes, from around 1800 BCE. On either side of Kilgooth Ust was a landing bay where metal ingots were exported.
The rocks offshore are called The Brisons. It’s the left-hand, southern one that is the energy-centre there. In neolithic and bronze age times they were probably not islands.
Cape Cornwall as seen from Sennen
I’ll post a few more cliff sanctuaries as time goes on. See the map to see the other cliff sanctuaries in the area, forming a necklace around Penwith, the ancient Belerion, or ‘radiant land’. These were sanctified spaces, and you can feel it.
Until someone did a proper theodolite job in late Victorian times, this was regarded as the Land’s End. But actually, what’s now called Land’s End is a matter of yards further west. But this, in a way, is the energetic Land’s End.
Bosigran Castle
Bos chy carn, ‘home house [under the] crag’, often translated as ‘Ygraine’s home’ (Map ref: SW 4169 3688)
This is one of my favourite cliff sanctuaries, mainly because of its friendly atmosphere. There’s a story that it was the home of a queen – Ygraine, after King Arthur’s mythic mother, but it has other possible meanings too. It has a hospitable, sociable feeling. So, this queen, whoever she was, might well have been a great lady, leaving a strong imprint.
Today, it attracts lots of rock climbers – avid Bristolians in VW vans. You can be sitting there listening to the waves, looking wistfully over the sea toward Ireland, when a clinking starts up and, sooner or later, a helmeted climber appears over the parapet, trailing ropes and looking pleased. On one occasion a school of minke whales cruised past and the climbers were spellbound, frozen to the spot, hanging in weird positions on their ropes. I was moved too, preoccupied as I had been with my prehistoric ponderings and customary flask of anthropocene tea.
The top of Bosigran Castle is rocky and divided into a number of different natural spaces. Carn Galva is behind
Bosigran has a pleasantly healing and relieving feeling. Good for spending time when the weather is pleasant, it’s a great place for picnics, in both Neolithic and modern times. It could easily accommodate around 200 people for a summer weekend shindig, though there is no evidence and little likelihood of permanent occupation (too exposed in winter). Summer nights spent around a campfire would have been wonderful. It lies below Carn Galva, the magic mountain of Penwith, and perhaps the tribe that had Bosigran Castle lived around Carn Galva, coming down to the cliff sanctuary for special occasions. Summer sunsets there can be special.
The ‘throne’
A rocky Iron Age rampart sections it off from the surrounding land, though defence is only one possible reason it is there. More likely it was simply an energy-threshold, since when you cross it you get the feeling you’re entering special space. There are several distinct areas on top of Bosigran, each with rock platforms that could serve as outdoor ‘rooms’ – so it’s a place where a number of things could happen at the same time. At one of these areas is a throne-like rock where one can imagine a chief, wise-woman or druid sitting, with their flock arrayed around them.
The logan rock
The top of Bosigran is littered with earthfast rocks and, apart from the boundary rampart, there are few signs of rock-moving or the placing of stone, except in two instances. There is a logan or rocking stone on the top, near the ‘throne’. These are flattish granite boulders balanced in such a way that they could be rocked. It’s possible they were natural, or placed there or adjusted slightly to make them rock. What the purpose of logan stones was, we do not know, but the ancients clearly thought them special. These were the bass drums of the Neolithic era. Perhaps people drummed along to the deep rocking sound, building up a stirring, thumping beat.
The ‘council circle’
Further along the left side of the headland and down a bit, there is a sunken, west-facing area with an array of rocks which suggest a ‘council circle’, as if it were a place for undisturbed discussions.
Nearby is a line of three rocks with their lined-up edges aligned toward Pendeen Watch, a neighbouring cliff sanctuary. These are (I think) deliberately oriented stones intended to highlight the relationship between the two cliff sanctuaries.
The zawn (inlet)
Bosigran is a good example of a cliff sanctuary potentially serving as a coastal beacon site – the prehistoric equivalent of a lighthouse. A few of the cliff sanctuaries will have been connected with trade, but this is unlikely at Bosigran. This was a place for gatherings and events. It’s a pleasant half-mile walk down from the road, and it’s worth going down into the zawn (inlet) on the western side too, to watch the seabirds, waves and climbers. There are some interesting tin-mining remains in the valley, with signs of tin-streaming methods having been used in centuries past.
I shall be in Glastonbury over Easter and doing two gigs while there.
One is at the Legend Conference in the Assembly Rooms on Sunday 9th April at 10am on Sunday morning, and here’s the blurb…
———–
Consciousness work and the way it can affect our reality
My talk will be focusing on consciousness work and the way it can affect our reality. I’ll be going back to our roots, in the neolithic and beyond, to the early inner imaginal work that gave root to the core stuff of our culture, to our beliefs and ways of perceiving things. Using my home area, West Penwith in Cornwall, as an example, I’ll show how ancient sites were built for consciousness work in order to penetrate and engineer the heart of reality – amongst other things affecting the climate, the ecosystem and human society. Which happen to be issues that are a wee bit important today.
Forty years ago, the Assembly Rooms hosted some very early experiments in ‘working the circle’ – something that is now accepted and common – and Glastonbury is a place with deep historic and esoteric roots too. So the heart of my talk is about consciousness work in the imaginal sphere, how this might be used in jogging the prevailing reality-field of our world, and how it all started several millennia ago.
I shall also be doing ‘An Evening with Palden Jenkins’ on Friday evening, 7th April, hosted by the Inner Light Community, and that will be announced on their site and on my Facebook page soon.
On Saturday I’ll be around if anyone wishes to meet up. However, I’ll need you not to wear me out, and to have your phone switched off! I’m a bit of an old crock and I’m electrosensitive (my cancer is caused by EM radiation). Still here though!
I’ve been away on Dartmoor and in Glastonbury, where I delivered a talk on Friday evening. It was really moving to see everyone who came, to feel their good vibes and interest and the atmosphere that evening in the Assembly Rooms. Hostess Samia Gelfling’s intro and outro to my talk were remarkable.
I wish it were possible to get round everyone in the audience personally, but nowadays three meaningful conversations a day are all I can do, and it would take ages to do justice to everyone.
Doing these talks, it’s my way of connecting with as many people as I can, within my energy-range. There’s a deep smile lurking in my heart. I’m now enjoying being back in Cornwall for a necessary reflection pause and for my cancer treatment (and its after-effects).
Magic Circle in Devon
Next up comes a ‘Magic Circle’ in Buckfast (near Totnes) on 24th September 2022. This will be a 5-6 hour session in three segments. It’s all about our origins, the soul tribes we come from, passing over to the otherworlds, bringing otherworlds into our lives, world healing and the way the world is going.
Stuff like that. You’re really welcome. We’ll also have a dash of chi gung with Jeanne Hampshire, garnished with some live music from two friends visiting from Oregon in Turtle Island, Jahnavi and Galen. And me, rabbiting on at you and lifting the cork off your crown chakra, with a little help from my friends.
Are we visitors from far away having a human experience or humans blessed with periodic uplifts? Soul-food for folks who’ve been at it for some time and are looking for new angles on this strange experience called life on Earth.
A new PodTalk
Following my talk in Glastonbury, I’ve now uploaded a recording of it (you can stream it or download it as an MP3). It’s 1hr 47mins long. The last quarter of it was taken up with some really interesting questions and contributions from the floor. Find it here:
It was great visiting Glastonbury. It is, after all, a pilgrimage place, and that’s what it is and does well. On Saturday I braved the town, had a maca smoothie, a few of those deeply meaningful conversations, some path-crossings with old friends in the street, and retreated twice to the calmness of the Abbey to ‘just sit’ and to defrag from the buzzy atmosphere and dense electromagnetics.
Glastonbury is a vortical place of contrasts, a karma-exchange and somewhere between an experiential kaleidoscope and a transdimensional roundabout. In vibe, it’s rather like Jerusalem, actually – though much less extreme – while both equally share a similar craziness, intensity and bizarre sanctity.
Thanks to Lily Lionheart for her hospitality, to Jonathan and Penny for trans-Dumnonian teleportation and to Rebecca Brain for her magical companionship and for being a superb minder and a really interesting person.
Carn Les Boel, Land’s End, Cornwall. Click for info about my evening talk in Glastonbury
Paldywan Kenobi beams down in Glastonbury, next week, on Friday evening, 9th September. If you live in or around Avalon, whether or not you know me, it’d be great to see you! I’m really looking forward to this.
I’ll share some tales from my time there, rattling the bars through the eighties, nineties and naughties. Also I wish to share with you a parapolitical panorama of where we stand in the long planetary revolution we’re all variously a part of.
A lovely quote popped up on Radio Four a week or so ago (from an American evangelical, no less) and it’s really pertinent now in the 2020s:
Don’t give up on the brink of a miracle.
I’m an old LSE student protester who didn’t quite give up, an old acid head who’s now tripped out on bone marrow cancer, staggering around on his sticks like a cripple on the wrong planet. Recently I’ve had to align to spirit like never before, to stay alive – death is my personal trainer and the therapy comes for free.
I’ve always been a strange combination of an esoteric extremist and a socio-political activist. The last three years squaring with cancer have been like ten – it was dark down there but there’s gold there too, and I brought some up.
Then suddenly a voice inside said, ‘Ah, we’ve got one more job for you…’. Oh shit, not again. I wasn’t expecting that – I thought I was on my way out. But then, when you enter an edge-treading miracle zone where it feels like your life is at stake three times a week, anything can happen, and it does. So I’m under new instructions, and this gig at the Assembly Rooms is a small part of that.
So this might be ninety minutes of utter crap (though it’s usually interesting), or a special sharing that you might remember longer than the next day. We shall see. That’s why I’d really like you to come – if, that is, you hear a little tinkling in your heart when you read this.
The pic here is of Carn Les Boel, a cliff sanctuary near where I live, and it’s a really strong place at the southwestern end of the Michael Line – next stop, the Mayalands of Yucatan, Mexico.
Greetings from the Far Beyond, West Penwith, Cornwall, with love from me. Palden.
Mount’s Bay, Cudden Point and St Michael’s Mount, as seen from Halzephron Cliff on the Lizard
A deep rumble shook my cabin. Six in the morning. Tuesday. Heavy atmosphere. The rumbling came from the south, over the sea. I got up, made tea.
One of those expectant, crackly intensities was in the air, where the clouds take on an ethereal, colourful irridescence. Suddenly, an enormous crash close-by. A flash crackles out of the phone socket and the lights go off.
Hm, just as well I had made tea first. The power was restored in an hour or so but, while the landline worked, the internet didn’t – an engineer’s visit would be necessary, according to the friendly Yorkshirewoman on the helpline. Ah, I was to get an unforeseen break from being online. Actually, that was a bit of a relief. Even so, in the afternoon I wrote this blog, ready for uploading when I could. But the engineer came on Thursday and found that the fault would take longer. So I’m over at Penny’s, doing my online stuff.
In recent weeks I’ve had a lot of solitude. A big question has been this: if I need to hit the red button, who do I turn to? Who will check me out and do something? At present I can rely on only one person – my helper Penny, a real trooper, though she can’t cover everything, always. She’s often busy with other clients or the rigours of life, though she does down tools and come if it’s an emergency. A person in my situation needs to be able to rely on that. Suddenly offline, I decided to see who would ring up that day. In the end it was just Penny and my son Tulki – he’s good like that.
St Michael’s Mount from Penzance harbour
Unconsciously, I create this situation myself. I give off a positive vibe, my tolerance levels are high, I seem to take things in my stride, and everyone therefore assumes I’m alright. Often I am, and sometimes I’m not, and that’s the tricky bit. Forty years ago in a men’s group we did an exercise: we were stuck in a boat in the middle of the ocean, and one of us had to jump out to save the others. Reckoning I could handle it better than any of them, they chose me. That’s the pattern. I vowed then to release and change it, but life doesn’t quite work out like that. Our patterns remain and they are what we are. What can change is the way we handle them. Sometimes life takes us back to square one, to get us down to the pattern’s roots. And one problem with addressing shadows is that we can convince ourselves we’re worse persons than we actually are.
When I’m not alright I naturally go quiet and often no one checks me out. There’s a societal issue here: everyone is so busy. NHS staff are run off their feet. People tell me to ring if I need help but most times it hasn’t actually worked. Back in December I was really ill and it took five days and twentyish phone calls to get nowhere. So I have a problem, I haven’t cracked it, and it’s also bigger than me.
In a week’s time I’m sallying forth from furthest Cornwall. But first, on Wednesday this week a nurse came along to shoot me up with Dara and Dex, my cancer drugs. That gives me time to get over the ensuing problems and go through the most immuno-suppressed part of my monthly maintenance cycle of cancer treatment. Well, at least the drugs are free, legal and prescribed!
St Michael’s Mount and Penzance from Cudden Point
I’m really looking forward to meeting some people, at last! Loads of you! Penny, her delightful daughter Ruby and I are first going to the Oak Dragon camp near Glastonbury. It’s a case of ‘the old founder returns, thirty years on’, and rather a heart-gladdening honour, actually. Though my bones will probably ache and it could wear me out, camping is a blessing I’m reluctant to let go of. But, you never know, this might be the last time.
On Tuesday 2nd August I’ll dip out of the camp for a day to do the first, now fully booked ‘magic circle’ in Glastonbury. I’ve spoken publicly, broadcast, written and taught for decades but, after some years’ break, and acquiring cancer along the way, a lot has changed. A new approach has emerged, consistent with everything I’ve done before but now coming from a different, deeper place. Cancer and hard truths such as the grief of loss do hone your soul, yielding gifts of light. I might be experiencing battlefield-madness but, somehow, in my current weakness, a certain cards-on-the-table openness has come about, prompted by having reduced options and a limited time left. So, while I can, it’s time to share a few of the insights and secrets that have grown out of this – and spend some time with those of you who are able to come.
When the camp ends at the weekend, I’ll either find someone to spend time with or go back home to Cornwall for the week (I’m kidnappable).
Then comes the magic circle in Avebury on Saturday 13th August – right next to the stone circle. If you couldn’t join the Glastonbury event, try this. Of all three magic circles I’m doing this summer, this could be the most ET-related. I have a feeling the Devon magic circle on Saturday 24th September could be more ancient-oriented and soul-familyish. The Glastonbury one, well, that’s Glastonbury, and what comes up is what comes up, and that’s the wonder of the place. For local Glastonbury friends old and new, later on I’m doing a talk in the Assembly Rooms on Friday 9th September called ‘The Tipping of the Scales’, and that’s for you.
Cudden Point
What will happen at the magic circles? A mixture of me doing my thing with some inner processes and group sharing, but there’s a hidden Factor X here. What I call my ‘friends upstairs’ will also be quietly beavering away – well, that’s the way I see things, though you don’t have to. If we get things right, a background override can set in and something deep arises. You see, I don’t work to a script. We get what comes up. I don’t do standard old channelling either – I stay myself and speak for myself, though prompted and jogged by something more. I hope to cover three main themes, with breaks in between. That’s all I really know in advance. Sorry about that. This is why we ask you to come at the beginning and leave only at the end.
If you can’t come and you wish to ‘be there’ with us, send your name to me before 28th July. It will be written down and placed under a motherly rose quartz crystal at the centre of the circle. With her mate, a big hunky quartz, she has sat at the centre of countless such gatherings since 1983. Please keep this simple: I can’t handle complexity – just send in your name. After 28th July you’ll be included in the next circle.
Here’s the first theme. Astronomers want us to believe intelligent life in the universe, if indeed it exists, is yet to be found. I humbly disagree – we already have contact. So you’ll get a taste of the dimensional vastness of the universe and the diversity of its inhabitants, as I understand it. Us lot, we’re one variant, living on, or in, a very unique world. A world is a greater thing than a planet, since it includes the sumtotal of all of the experience happening on a planet, and there are eight billion incarnate humanoids here, all having human experiences, and some really intensely so. A world is an experiential process, and we all came here for a dose of it.
So we’ll look at our place in this rather bizarre world and what we’re here for – from the outside. It concerns not only our personal paths through life, but also helping to fulfil the aims and objectives of the soul-families and the worlds we each originate from and unconsciously work with. Gurdjieff called this partkolg duty (a Russian term), meaning our duty to the universe.
Note that dread word, duty. We, exercising our dubious freedoms, often forget duty. One of the end-of-life hard facts I’ve had to own up to is the multifarious ways in which I have avoided and erred in rising to my own duty – and screwed up and regretted some of it, caused pain and also paid a price. The funny thing is that the ultimate act of free will is to rise to our partkolg duty. If we humans did so, this planet’s problems would get fixed much quicker.
Here’s the second theme: planet-fixing and ‘world work’. My preceding blog on ‘world work’ was a taster. The idea here isn’t to get you to change path and do it the way I do it – it’s to work with the tools you have and the path you follow, perhaps giving them a shift of context and new application. Some of the tricks and experiences I’ll share will be useful and, for some, it might be the start of something new. I take both an activist and a spiritual approach to world work, and I believe combining the two is important.
The third theme is about dying. It’s something imminent for me, but it’s coming to a heart like yours, sooner or later. There’s the small matter of having a ‘good death’, whatever that really means, and there’s also the matter of the life-issues that come into sharp relief toward the end of your life. There’s something of a karmic crescendo to it. What have you been and done, and what have you not been and done? Death is potentially a great resolution of life’s story. Or it can be a crunchy confrontation with all those things we didn’t want to look at. It throws new light on everything and pulls the plug on delusions and lapsed possibilities. We’re powerless to do anything more – life’s deeds are done. The choice available is how we deal with it. We can build a habit of dealing with it in life, or we can do a crash course when dying, and each path has its ins and outs. Inevitably it’s a bit of both.
Predannack Head on the Lizard, looking into Mount’s Bay toward Tregonning Hill
These magic circles, quite simply, are something I’m moved to do before I go. When you’re in decline there are things you have to accept you can no longer do, and there are certain things you still can do and, for me, this is one. Well, I hope so, but if I die in the process, I died doing things I wanted to do, didn’t I? I don’t get the feeling that’ll happen though. For all of us, the prospect of dying brings up the question of why am I truly here and what am I doing about it? Our society is geared to setting such questions aside in favour of paying bills and staying out of trouble, and yet this is important, and many people have an itching in their hearts over precisely this question. Perhaps it’s not a question of what we want to do, but more one of what we must do. It’s that relentlessly choiceless choice – it keeps coming up at certain times of life.
For the two or more weeks I’m away, new blogs or podcasts will depend on time and circumstance. I won’t be available on mobile phone. If you need to contact me then I might occasionally pick up messages online. For enquiries about magic circles, please contact the respective organisers – all great people I’m really happy working with. By September I might know whether I can do further magic circles in autumn or winter, if wanted – it depends mainly on my cancer, energy, infection avoidance and the viability of travelling. And an organiser or two.
This is my sixtieth blog. That’s rather amazing. Someone suggested I make a book out of it, but four big issues come up: 1. I can’t do the last bit of the story about my passing away and what happens afterwards (I’ll be otherwise occupied); 2. I don’t know what is most enduringly valuable to my readers (someone else will know better); 3. when I’m dying, I can’t do all the publishing business, and, 4. gimme a break – I might be rather a workaholic, but this is ridiculous! So I’ll just carry on writing blogs until I can’t.
So much rests on how we see things. That is a matter for each of us and now it’s going global.
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
Paldywan’s ‘magic tour’ is starting in Glastonbury on Tuesday 2nd August – details below.
It will continue to Avebury (right next to the stone circle) in August (date not finalised yet), and then it goes to Totnes area on Saturday 24th September (by Buckfast Abbey). Full details about these two are to follow soon.
The Glastonbury details given here will be common to all of them, but these circles will be different in each place and at each time. You see, these aren’t rehearsed. I have some basic themes to work around, but it arrives on the spot and it’s a process.
Some people might say it’s channelled, but I don’t really use that notion much – it has been corrupted and romanticised. Let’s just say it arrives on the spot. If you’ve seen me on stage, you’ll notice I stand in front of you silently, fumbling with my ear and I look at everyone in the audience. It gets a bit weird, just for a second or two. Then I just come up with the first thing that arrives, and we’re off.
If you’ve heard my podcasts, they’re unrehearsed too, and that’s how I work. When you’ve done this kind of thing countless times for many years, it kinda sinks into your bones. Since I have a bone cancer (myeloma), it looks like it’s coming out!
That was one of my wry jokes – please excuse me. After all, life is rather a joke – when we’re in a position to see it that way. Which does happen sometimes, amidst the treacle-journey of earthly existence, during partings of the fog. It’s all about getting lost in our stuff and then getting found again. The regularity of this as life goes on obliges us to ride it a wee bit better as we go along.
It never ends, and this is paradoxical. The more accumstomed you get to riding life’s waves, and the more tools you gather, the deeper the challenges that Life presents us with. You clear the last lot and become eligible for the next lot. You become ready to handle stuff a level deeper. So, really, it never ends. It’s relentless.
When I was a young Buddhist I used to think that, once you attained enlightnment, you’d be at peace and everything would be alright. But, watching my Lama teachers, HH Gyalwa Karmapa XVI and various other remarkable rinpoches, it became clear that, the more they resolved things inside themselves, becoming more enlightened, the more deeply they were involved with the woes of the world.
This process of inner growth really doesn’t end. Dead or alive, it goes on, and at any age of life. Cancer and other recent experiences have rather put me through the mill, and the grinding action really has helped me become a better version of myself.
Well, I hope. It’s not really for me to judge. Cancer is an amazing crash course in navigating a much altered reality, and it goes on for the length of time you survive in this life. And then you’re free.
So, people who wish me a long life, and I appreciate the thought, but it’s not necessarily as easy and welcome as it sounds! My approach instead is to be straight-up with myself and others about my real prospects and to do the max with the time I have left – hence this tour. Because cancer is wearing, and it depends how much I really want to struggle, hurt, worry and endure. And for what? How much more willpower do I have left in my account?
Well, I’m doing alright at present, and excited about the tour, and enjoying the summertime, but I cannot rely on holding up longterm. In a way the tour is an experiment to see how much I can take. But it feels really good to be doing it. If I get through these three, then I might be able to do another three – it depends on organisers, on being pulled there and on whether it feels right.
If your antennae twitch over this, please consider coming. With the Glastonbury event, don’t leave enquiring about it until late, if you want a place. Otherwise you might have to head over to Avebury – which has its virtues too. The organiser in Glastonbury is my old friend Bruce Garrard, a well-known character around town.
Three themes: 1. transitioning (about incarnation and excarnation); 2. world work (inner aid and disaster response) and, 3. our personal origins, roots and purpose as souls. And the way these knit together. They have knitted together for me, and some of you might get some vital clues for yourselves.
If you cannot come (perhaps you live too far away or just can’t break out) but you’d like to play a small part, then this is what to do. Put your name on some paper, or send a small photo, or a very small item like a bead or a very small stone or piece of wood – anything, but pls keep it small and keep it simple! These will be put at the centre of the circle in each of the circles we do, and they will be dealt with mindfully afterwards (they can’t be returned).
Send it by post before 25th July to: Palden Jenkins, Botrea Farm, Penzance, Cornwall TR20 8PP, UK.
I shall be at the OakDragon camp in early August (the founder returns on his sticks!) and I’ll do an evening talk in Glastonbury (the Inner Light Group) – to be announced. Then in September I’m really looking forward to the Devon circle. News about Avebury and Devon soon.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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