healing – Notes from the Far Beyond

World Work

I’ve been involved for a long time now in world healing work – or world work.

That’s to say, using the psycho-spiritual practices that I, and others, have learned over the years, and applying them in the context of world events as they are actually happening. The idea is simple enough: when something is happening in the world which causes fear, suffering, conflict or upheaval, we can work with it inwardly.

We fell upon this whole saga almost accidentally. A series of ‘coincidences’ happened, through which we discovered that this kind of thing does actually work.

For me, and for quite a few other people involved, the big breakthrough came in 1986, during the Chernobyl crisis. I was running an Earth Mysteries camp near Glastonbury for Beltane. People were arriving at the camp having just heard on their car radios that Chernobyl had gone up.

This of course brought up deep nightmarish feelings of dread in many people. Is this it?

There were about 150 earth-loving people at the camp, and we used a technique we called powwow. It was a talking-stick process. We sat in a circle, the stick went round, and people were invited to speak from the heart – their feelings, observations, intuitions and whatever they knew about what was happening. The purpose wasn’t simply to talk about Chernobyl. It was to do some healing and clarification around it.

So that’s where it really began.

In the mid-1990s this developed further when I started the Hundredth Monkey Project, which ran for three years. The story of that is on my website at https://www.palden.co.uk/m100.html.

After that came the Flying Squad, which continued for about twenty years, started by a caucus of ‘Monkeys’. That was a smaller group, but totally committed. The commitment was actually quite manageable: one meditation every week, and then three or four gatherings during the year – either weekends or week-long camps – both of these without fail.

Each week we would take a theme – conflicts, forest fires, nukes, apartheid… Sometimes a theme would stay with us for several weeks.

Once a month we would have an open session, where people could simply go where they were drawn to go. It was a way of fishing, really – fishing for the issues that needed attention, and for possible solutions, answers and ways through.

I’ve written and talked about these methods elsewhere, so I won’t go into all that here but you can find out more at https://www.flyingsquad.org.uk and at https://www.palden.co.uk/psychic-work.html .

But there was something we discovered that surprised me. When you do this kind of work, you can actually go through more personal growth than when you deliberately set out to do personal growth work.

That was quite an eye-opener.

It gave us an indication that perhaps we are programmed with quite a lot of ideas about our individuality and ‘sovereignty’ that aren’t necessarily correct. Because the world’s issues are our issues. Refugees. Hunger. War. Earthquakes. Climate extremes. Racial tensions. Economic problems. All of it.

And in some way, the world outside reflects the world inside of us. The Buddhists have a word for this: non-duality. The world within and the world without are one and the same.

Afghanistan and the shadow of the world

More recently I’ve continued this work on my own, although there are still people doing it in various ways. Recently I’ve been focusing on Afghanistan – on the shadow of Afghanistan, what it reflects about the world today, and what it might be trying to teach us.

We have to get out of the good guys and bad guys mentality. We have to get out of judging people from other cultures as though our way of seeing the world is automatically the right one. We have as much to learn from them as they have to learn from us.

This is particularly important for those of us in the West. We’re rather proud of ourselves and we’re rather stuck on the idea that we know best – and that needs to end. Many of the problems on Planet Earth come from precisely that sense of superiority.

So, what does it mean, to work with Afghanistan? Well, first of all, I try to find out what’s going on. I read up on the matter. I watch videos. I look at all sorts of things. I’ve watched material about the Taliban, about ordinary people in Bamiyan Provence, about the British forces in Qandahar, about the Panjshir valley, and the ins and outs surrounding the whole thing.

I get into it. I get to learn what the issues are for people, and the variety of those issues. That creates what I think of as a kind of psychic anchor point.

You can visualise people as psychic beacons – people who, simply by being who they are and living through what they are living through, can bring something into the collective field. Perhaps some blessing can come through them that we couldn’t bring ourselves. And that’s an important thing.

It’s important to know something about the actual situation. Not just the statements politicians make. Not just what Trump does. Not just what the newspapers say. Forget the politicians. Forget the propaganda. Bone up on the stuff and find out what is actually happening. Nowadays we’re blessed with enormous sources of information. But we also have to be discerning.

The discipline of doing it

Then I meditate. Once a week. That’s my world-work meditation.

What I’ve discovered is that perhaps one meditation in ten is blitzingly amazing. One of those experiences where something opens up and you think, woo, something just happened. The rest vary enormously. Some bring insights. Some bring subtle changes. Some seem to do very little.

And sometimes I just fall asleep. The Tibetan lamas taught me something useful about that. They said not to feel guilty about falling asleep during meditation. The Buddhas might simply want to work with you on another level. Well, may it be so.

So one meditation a week becomes fifty-something meditations a year. Do that for ten years and you’ve done about five hundred. That’s quite a lot of work. It’s amazing what can happen when you simply keep doing something regularly, for years.

I visualise some of the people I’ve encountered. Sometimes I’ve actually met people who become part of the work. Here’s an example.

I remember one evening at Bosigran Castle, a cliff sanctuary here in Cornwall. It was beautifully still and a friend and I heard bagpipes. The sound carried a long way. We walked towards the car park and found a man there who had recently come back from Afghanistan.

He was playing his bagpipes to the wind – for his dead comrades and for all the people he had known there.

It was a moving thing to witness. He was relieved to talk to us.

Having worked in war zones myself, I could understand something of the weight he was carrying. That’s one of the problems for soldiers and humanitarian workers. They come home and nobody understands. Nobody really knows what it was like. And yet, in another sense, it’s not as bad as all that either. It’s human life. Full-on human life.

What the comfortable West has forgotten

We live such switched-down, comfortable lives here in countries like Britain. And I’m afraid we may be in for a bit of a shock. Because the reality experienced by the majority of people on Planet Earth is very different from the reality experienced by relatively wealthy, comfortable Westerners.

We are not the bees-knees any more. Increasingly we exist by the good grace of people who are not Euro-American, not white-skinned – people who make up the majority of humanity. There’s something we need to learn here.

One of the ways to do this is through the Tibetan practice of Tonglen. The basic idea is that you start with something you know yourself. For me, I have cancer. My body is fucked. Life is difficult. These are things I understand from the inside. That becomes the anchorage. Then I reach outward.

I might think about people in Gaza who have cancer. There will be thousands of them. And unlike me, many of them may not have access to the medication I have been fortunate to receive.

But there is something else. They may have something I don’t have. Depth of care. A humanity, an empathy which is far greater than we sensible Westerners care to show. And this raises a fundamental issue. Forget the Judaeo-Christian idea that has motivated the humanitarian and the charitable sector, for so long. This isn’t really about helping other people.

This is about energy exchange.

If I went back to Palestine as a cancer patient, the care I would get from other people would be better than what I receive in Britain because they have large families and a different attitude and priorities. It works easily in a family of forty. So the funny thing is, they have no medication and we have little care – we need to swap some of each. Our society is geared towards material things and that is both our strength and our problem.

Even in the last few years since the whole Gaza thing and the West Bank has kicked off again, Palestinians can actually be happier than people in countries like Britain, Europe and North America. They are strangely socially wealthier.

This might sound strange but it’s because they have faced stuff which we still fear. We fear loss. We fear danger. We fear pain, violence, rainstorms, droughts, having no chocolate. All sorts of stuff. Using our fear, we conform to the requirements of the machine we live in, and as a result of this we have lost quite substantial degrees of our humanity.

This is what people in Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Pakistan, South East Asia, Latin America and Asia can show us. Ubuntu. This is about caring for our fellow humans. It’s one of the key things which people like Palestinians can teach people like us.

So really this is an energy exchange.

I can visualise somebody receiving medication or help, or comfort for their soul, or light in their darkness, and in doing so I too become healed – and this is how it works. It’s not about us helping others, it’s about us swapping what we are strong in, with what they are strong in.

We, in countries like Britain, are a bunch of softies nowadays. We are incapable of dealing with a lot of basic things – finding food after an earthquake or sharing our last loaf of bread with our friends and neighbours. We’re going to have to relearn this because things are going to go down in the West. When I say down, I don’t mean necessarily mean ‘bad’.

I remember a professor at the London School of Economics once saying something. He said that when the economy goes up, society goes down, and when the economy goes down, society goes up.

And this is what we have ahead of us.

We’re coming into a time where society will go up, even if the economy goes down. And this is going to be a very fundamental thing. This is going to change the whole sociology of our nation.

Energy exchange

Look at me. I’m old. I’m disabled. I need some care and attention. But I’m not helpless. There are things I can still do, up to a point, that are good for me to do – and for others too. I can contribute. I could cook a meal once a week for ten people (though not more). And because I have the time, I can do something that somebody else doesn’t have the time to do. I’m not just a recipient of care. And that matters.

People can go through extraordinary loss and still have something remarkable to offer. I know of a woman in Gaza, a journalist, whose family was bombed out while she was away working. She came home to find her house levelled and her family gone. And yet, somehow, it made her more committed to a life of peace-building.

You get the arrival of amazing peacemakers, fully qualified to bring about social healing because they’ve been into the depths of suffering and have come out the other side. They don’t want revenge, they want peace – and there’s something here which is important.

To get back the world work, we’ve got to change our philosophy. It’s natural that a person like you or me should want peace and that would be our social-political preference. But the thing is, you can’t wish peace on people, you can’t oblige it. People have to come to peace in their own way, and that often involves a lot of forgiveness.

It often involves a lot of exhaustion, actually. It means that people have to come to a point within themselves where they have had enough. They just want to go home, lie in bed and twiddle their toes. They want to do some shopping, just like everyone else does. They want to have a holiday.

That’s what brings peace. But people have to come to it in themselves.

So don’t wish peace upon people – it doesn’t necessarily help. These people are hurt, and they’ve got to work things out for themselves but you can wish forwardness and progress on them.

Take Ukraine.

At the moment, no matter what we might wish about peace and ceasefires and all the rest of it, it’s not going to happen anytime soon – unless of course, there is a miracle. So it’s not worth it really. It’s more to do with encouraging people to have good attitude, fortitude, perseverance, looking after each other and looking after themselves. Wish that upon people because, that way, they will get to peace quicker.

Getting underneath the story

This kind of work has got to be realistic, and that’s important. Not just idealistic. There’s enough idealistic meditation. There are enough people praying for peace, transformation and ascension and all the rest of it and that’s good. But this is about digging around in the dungeons. Digging around in the undergrowth and looking at the deeper causes of what’s really going on.

Take the situation in Iran at the moment. The fascinating thing is that it’s not going to resolve itself anytime soon, or very easily, and yet the aspirations of the Gulf states are getting ruined and Iran itself, a country with such a history, is getting ruined. Its people are paying a high price for the intervention that’s going on. What right have we or the Americans to do this, really?

I say ‘we’ because we British have been involved in Iran’s history. Back in the 1950s we brought about a coup d’etat there to work in our favour. What was it about? Oil and money. No wonder Iranians have difficulty trusting British people, even though we’re not involved in this war.

Technically speaking, it’s Mr Trump’s own war, such a desperate soul that he is. But he himself is channelling a force which is alive in the collective psyche of humanity. He wouldn’t have any power if there were no people who implicitly support him and are persuaded by him. And so the story goes on.

Our own shadow

We’ve got to get out of these judgements. Donald Trump is shaking things up. He is showing us plenty of things that we don’t want to do or to see in future.

We humans and our societies are a key issue, now and over the next decade or two. Because humanity has a leadership problem. We have a big crop of pretty bad leaders at the moment. We also have a good crop of pretty good leaders whom many think are bad leaders. And we have a crop of bad leaders who many people think are good leaders.

There is something we need to straighten out here. This has to do with social power and healing the past, healing history and the pain that we have had.

We might pride ourselves of living in a democratic country such as Britain but we’ve had our riots, violence and oppression. Just because the system now uses carrots rather than sticks, it doesn’t necessarily mean everything is better.

Part of world work is therefore to do with working with the shadow of our own country. Britain has an imperial past. We have hidden guilt about it, inherited from our ancestors. It’s not our responsibility to correct everything they did because it was something of a past generation, but nevertheless we can use our privileged position as British people, Americans and Europeans, to bring about good.

Palestine, personally

One reason I became so involved with Palestine is because it is a former British colony. My grandfather was involved in General Allenby’s British invasion of Palestine during the First World War. It’s personal, and in order to heal my own personal shadow stuff and that of my nation it has been good to go to Palestine and work with people there.

I’m so happy that I’ve done that and it’s brought me such joy – even though it has been tragic and we’ve made no progress, really. I’ve been involved in this whole thing for twenty-fivish years and it’s been backwards progress. Well that’s what it appears to be, but underneath there’s something really, really important going on, and so we can’t judge events too superficially. Don’t just tut tut at Israeli settlers – they are teaching us something. What is it? And what are we going to do about it?

This isn’t about feeling guilty about antisemitism either. This is about humans and human needs. All of us.

A friend once said something which stayed with me. She said that nowadays we talk about human rights, whereas in former times we talked about natural justice. There’s something in that.

So what now?

Do you believe in world healing? Do you want to heal this planet? Do you believe in a positive future?

If you’re going to be one of the people that join the Great Ascension, do you really feel ready? Really? Have you done the homework? And, if you haven’t started, what then?

It only really needs to take an evening every week or perhaps a month or two every year. You can get involved in things like this and it has a way of gladdening the soul on a very deep level. Even though there is plenty of blood, sweat and tears that goes on, this is the stuff of life. This is Planet Earth. This is what we’re working with.

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Recorded by Palden, and transcribed by Emma Cass – thank you, Emma.

Geopolitical Healing

The seventh Aha Class, in Penzance, Cornwall
Weds 12th March, 6.30pm, at The Hive

A settler incursion and tricky situation in the historic souk in Hebron, Palestine

Inner journeying, meditation, remote healing and peace-building. Doing our bit toward tackling the world’s problems – instead of wringing hands and feeling helpless.

In recent times many of us have been moved to join meditations, prayers and link-ups when major crises break out. Waves of mass empathy and concern over such crises can have a wide and deep psycho-spiritual influence – it goes deeper than mere ‘public opinion’.

Praying for peace or showering light over a benighted area are good, though often they are of a generalised nature. They can affect the collective psyche and sometimes help swing things.

But it’s possible to get closer in. It’s possible to penetrate actual situations and play a more targeted part in them – literally rescuing people or souls, or participating in situations, meetings and crux-points at the frontline of human experience.

That’s what this evening is about. This might be a valuable inner tool to add to your repertory. This is not ‘lightworking’ but spiritual humanitarian work – bringing in truckloads of spirit, rescue and healing.

This is not simple. It carries responsibilities, and it’s not a matter of imposing our wishes – benign or biased – on world situations. The key issue is to help humanity learn, to become more aware in making the choices it makes, for the longterm resolution of what are often deep-seated problems.

In the first half of this evening, I’ll outline considerations and issues involved in such work, how we choose issues and crises and work with them, and the blessings, delusions and dangers involved and what it’s all for.

In the second half we’ll go on an inner journey to work with a particular area of focus that is currently afoot in the world. (And, first time round, we won’t be working with polarised Trump-related issues!)

You might or might not wish to go into this kind of work but, even if you don’t, world situations do come up at times, touching our hearts, to which we respond, and inner journeying (conscious dreaming) is one way we can play a part in world affairs as situations arise. Once you get the gist of it, it can be applied in areas that interest you – socio-cultural, ecological, geopolitical or simply encouraging forward-moving change.

If you’ve done this kind of thing before, this class might help you clarify a few things and take it a step further. If it’s new territory, it’s a good place to start.

Since most of you will not be able to come, audio recordings will be posted online within days after the class (no charge) – just follow the link below. Recordings of all of the Aha Classes can be found here. If geopolitical healing interests you, you might find this site useful: The Flying Squad.

https://www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-geo.html

With love, Palden

Site: http://www.palden.co.uk
Podcasts: http://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Books: https://www.palden.co.uk/books-by-palden.html

Gandhi-ji, in residence at the UN in Geneva. His life was his message.

Dying Ahead

Chambered cairns in West Penwith. This is Bosiliack Barrow. It has been taken apart and reconstructed by archaeologists, but they did it well, and the cairn seems happy as it is. Many cairns are far more wrecked.

Just over a week ago, as reported in my last blog, I went to hospital, caught a virulent cold infection there, and I’ve spent the last week coughing, spluttering, wheezing and snotting as a result. I’m on immuno-suppressing cancer drugs, so my defences are down. I live rather a sheltered life on a farm, so my immune system doesn’t get much exercise, fighting off the kinds of infections most people encounter on a daily basis. An extra irony is that I couldn’t attend a further hospital visit yesterday (Friday, fullmoon day), because I was too unwell from the last visit to hospital! But we did a telephone consultation instead.

Being more vulnerable than otherwise I would be if I didn’t have cancer, small illnesses can get big. My snotty cold pushed me into quite an altered state. Fullmoon approached, I got fed up with it and I wanted to turn things around. I had been invited to attend a special healing ceremony, which would probably have helped, but the prospect of being with a large group of people overnight, most of them 20-30 years younger than I, was a bit too much – especially since I was due to take my weekly main dose of cancer drugs the next day. The illness I had had just over a month ago (muscle spasms) had warned me not to push it. So, reluctantly, I decided not to push it and I stayed at home. In parallel with the group, some miles away, I did my own inner journey instead.

One of the blessings of cancer is that, if you’re seeking truth and breakthrough in your heart and soul, you don’t need to look very far – truth comes to you, free of charge. Your life changes, and death stares you straight in the face. When I was healthy, I would do innerwork, or tramp the hills and clifftops, or join a group process, or somehow do a spiritual workout, but actually, with cancer, all I need to do is catch a cold and I’m pitched into a truth process at the deep end! When my energy is down or my health is poor, I find my perceived age, the psychological feeling of age, climbs upwards from my seventies into my eighties and sometimes into my nineties.

Brane chambered cairn near Carn Euny, with a neat hair-do

Besides, I’m not really seeking truth at this stage of my life – cancer gives me enough of that, and at times, I even get rather tired of it. No, it’s not truth I seek. It’s forgiveness and release. Which itself involves a truth process, but it’s different. It’s all to do with letting myself go through elements of the psycho-spiritual process of dying before I get there and actually pop my clogs – dying in advance. Doing the business before the business does me. The main part of this concerns processing issues accumulated during the life I’ve had – clearing the decks so that, when I get to death, I don’t have too large a deluge of issues to face. This enables me, theoretically, at least, to move more easily toward the next stage, rather than having to be preoccupied with untangling the past.

Except, the more I dig up, the more I find there’s stuff underneath I hadn’t really been aware of, or I’d forgotten it or buried it. This is helped by a strange rearrangement of memory. Toward the end of life I’ve found that the time-bound sequentiality of life’s events decreases in life’s inner chronicle of memory. I’ve started remembering things from earlier life that had been crowded out and overwritten by subsequent events. It’s not time-sequentiality but process-sequentiality that comes forward.

Our inner process rises and falls at different stages of life, accelerating and decelerating, and it doesn’t travel in a straight line – sometimes we even seem to go backwards, screwing up over issues we’d thought we’d resolved and repeating old errors and patterns. At other times we move forward more easily, the cork pops and the fizz and froth spill out all over the place. Such is the nature of inner time and of the threads of evolution within our psyches.

So here am I, staggering through late life and discovering how little I have learned. Last night, while inner-jouneying, I was particularly, and tearfully, aware of the way I’ve screwed up with the close women in my life – particularly my three daughters and my last partner. This is rather paradoxical because, ever since I was about 20, I’ve stood alongside feminists and been supportive to so many women carving out their lives and destinies, and I’ve done a lot of emotional processing, yet I still seem to be fucking up, even in late life. When I was younger I thought I’d be wiser in late life. Perhaps I’m not much wiser, but in less of a hurry instead.

Inside Brane cairn. Many archaeologists would disagree with me, believing they were for burial. No, I don’t think so. They were built for retreat, for actually dying in, for energy-bathing crops, seeds, medicines, mind-medicines and tools, and as an energy-bath for healing and initiation.

I asked within for forgiveness. For anything I have done or omitted to do, or failed in doing, which might have hurt or harmed them or set them back, I acknowledged it, asking their souls for forgiveness and release from past shadows. It hurts and harms me too. It always takes two to tango, and the bit that I can influence and change, even if only in retrospect, is my own part in that tango.

The funny thing is that, especially in late life, I’ve been popular with womankind. Many women seem to think I’m the kind of man they’d like to be with, or to have as a brother, father or son – since I have quite an open heart, as it goes, at least when I’m hyperfocused on matters of the heart, and I have sensitivities that are unusual for a man.

Perhaps this is one of those dilemmas that arise from being an Aspie (with high-function autism or Aspergers Syndrome). Haha, it’s not a syndrome at all. It’s a different operating system and a minority one which, in ‘normal’ people’s acquired beliefs, is called a syndrome – for which one is supposed to get fixed so that one can have a ‘normal’ life.

One facet of this ‘syndrome’ that applies to me is that I’m pretty adept at standing up in public and putting myself on the line, and pretty adept at being alone too, but in the space between – personal, close relationships – I’m not very good. I forget people’s birthdays, I don’t do Christmas, I get the wrong roses, or I cannonade off on my crazy, driven missions, forgetting those that I’m close to. This hurts them. Understandably. Problem is that, right or wrong, it’s me.

There’s a dilemma that the families of public people often face: their public and private personas can be quite different. Perhaps you’re a brilliant musician, author or leader but, as a person in private, you can appear quite dysfunctional, detached, seemingly hypocritical, or even regarded as a thorough asshole. It can be quite difficult in particular pandering to people’s wee foibles – those behaviours that demand conformity with seemingly strange requirements, such as coming home before 10pm or reminding them that you love them, or following proper recipes when cooking, saying “Sorry for your loss” at funerals, or ‘acting responsibly’ by feeding your kids at set times of day.

Here’s the chambered cairn on the summit of Chapel Carn Brea, the last hill in Britain. It’s around 4,000 years old.

So, last night, on the fullmoon, I was processing this stuff, and I sincerely hope it has brought some release and forgiveness to my daughters and ex-partner too – and anyone else who needs it. For forgiveness involves moving to a level where wrongs dissolve and the deeper patterns, causes and effects of life’s sorry events suddenly start fitting together into a more meaningful whole.

Here’s another paradox: those to whom we are closest are often those who uncover and expose in us the deepest of shadows and pain. And vice versa – we do it for them too. This is one of the strange tragedies of love and closeness. I’m sure every one of my readers knows that one from cruel experience!

It’s also a manifestation of the advanced soul-honing opportunities that are available here on Earth. That is to say, it fucking hurts. It gets you deep down, dredging the depths of heart, mind and soul, digging out the hidden ghosts and ghouls lurking in the darkness of buried ‘stuff’. You don’t get this in many worlds. Life might seem easier in the worlds of our dreams and aspirations, or on Arcturus, or the Pure Land, but actually, the grinding action of life on Earth is not only a gift, but also we chose it by coming here. We wanted to do some fast-track soul-evolution. We wanted to get arm-twisted and flogged into transformation. We sought to go for the heavier stakes and to find out what it’s like wading through the slough of despond.

This is not just a personal process but also an evolutionary process for every group and nation and for the whole population of Earth as a planetary race – especially when Pluto is entering Aquarius.

Not because all that shite is important, really, in itself. But it obstructs our process of lighting up as souls, of finding true freedom – the kind of freedom that can sit in a jail cell, accepting one’s lot and making good use of it. Like Nelson Mandela and his ANC friends on Robben Island, who decided to co-educate each other with everything they knew, since there was nothing else they could do. Or like King Wen in ancient China who wrote down the texts of the I Ching while sitting in jail. Like Malcolm X, who waded through the full Oxford Dictionary while banged up in a cell. Like so many less-known women who have carried a heavy weight of families and social mores through many years, even many lives, yet turning out to save the day when the chips were down, feeding the troops or ministering to the needs of people who hardly deserved it.

Here’s one at Pordenack Point. In some cases I think these served as geomantic spots where they’d bury someone they considered a great soul, for the blessing and protection of the land, and I think that was the case here. It was a bit like the preservation of the relics of medieval saints, as a blessing.

So, to the women in my life, bless you all. Thank you for being teachers to me. I sincerely hope there has been some sort of pay-off for you. It’s all in how we see things, really – whether and how much we can allow ourselves to forgive and be forgiven. I’m finding, in myself, that this goes deeper than I was aware it could.

Thank you Maria and the meadows of Penwith for your alchemical gift, helping me walk alongside your group in spirit as you did your fullmoon ceremony. It’s amazing how gifts of grace arrive at our door. Frankly, with my snot-filled porage-head, yesterday I was feeling like a pile of rotting compost as the fullmoon was rising, yet at night I emerged under sparkling starlight with a glint in my eye, a knowing that all is well and a deep appreciation for the wonderful souls, past and present, who play a part in my life. Forgiveness comes in its own time, sometimes when we aren’t looking.

Over and out. With love, Palden

Website: http://www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Podcasts: http://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Cancer audiobook: http://www.palden.co.uk/boneblessings.html

Here’s a cairn on Mayon Cliff near Sennen – another geomantic cairn, placed in a carefully-chosen spot. Yes, probably someone was buried there, but the bodies would be changed around and the cairn would have other uses too. It wasn’t a memorial to a person, like our graves today. It was a geomantically hallowed spot where they put the bodies of special people, to bless the land. Or where it was a good place to die consciously.

Compassion

I quite recommend not being a retired humanitarian. Or, for that matter, trying to retire from many other helping and caring roles and professions. Because people come back for more, often for very good reasons, even if they’d prefer not to, and levels of genuine need in the world are rising sharply. So pulling out isn’t as easy as in a normal job. And when it comes to helping a person find food or pay an emergency hospital bill, it’s not a matter that can wait. “Is there a doctor on board?“, “Granny’s had a fall…” and “Could you just…?“.

This presents a dilemma, because the world needs people who help. Not advisers but actual helpers – people who do things. While some people are called to do it since they are by nature server-souls, it’s often foisted and dumped on them by a society that lacks time for being human, and server souls are not remembered and honoured very often.

Capitalism is not geared to accommodate compassion and empathy: you’re supposed to look after your own interests and, if you don’t, that’s your responsibility, and tough luck. The tragedy of this is that genocides happen and we as a society regret it yet we implicitly permit them, always busy with other things. That’s one of the great tragedies of our day, and we tend to worry more about Donald Trump than people in Gaza.

It’s not that enormous sacrifices are necessary, since £10 from a thousand people does make £10,000. Theoretically, many hands make light work. But it’s easier raising money for pussycats than for humans who live far away. Part of our problem is that our societies are so privatised – everyone’s supposed to look after themselves, and that’s the way the world is supposed to work.

But it doesn’t – there are too many things such an approach fails to cover. We have delegated caring to professionals, leaving it to them, yet there aren’t enough professionals, and many are under-supported. Also it’s personal closeness and family and community involvement that often are most needed, not regulated care administered according to official guidelines, done by stressed-out, underpaid people in uniforms.

We all get genuinely overloaded with issues and concerns… another war, another famine, another hurricane, another vexatious issue, another person needing concern. Compassion and empathy grate with the heartless pressures of staying alive in a capitalist system.

One of the frustrating issues I’ve faced in my humanitarian work is that I was always pressured to raise money, and that’s not my strong point. Philanthropists are regarded as rich gits who are there to disburse money, but my wealth is rooted in healing, reconciliation, communication and concocting occasional bursts of sheer magic. Even so, money needs are critical for many people, and often these needs are urgent. So it often defaults to money.

On Monday night I attended an all-night spiritual ceremony, processing this kind of thing in my heart through the night. It was a chance to step outside such concerns and look at them from a soul level, getting focused on inner healing. At present I have a friend in Gaza, with baby, who needs rescuing, plus a village of Tuareg people who need help (they’re under attack), plus a spirit-granddaughter, Phyllis, aged about six, whom I thought was dead. She has recently been found, rescued from Niamey in Niger and has now contracted malaria while in transit. So she’s in hospital in Ghana, in a country where, if you don’t have funds to pay, they dump you outside and leave you to your fate. That’s because of privatisations that rich countries imposed on developing countries in the 1990s, as a requirement for lending them money.

But we have achieved one thing: she’s safe in Ghana with Maa Ayensuwaa, who will look after her. I always suspected Phyllis was one of those rather special kids – her dead mother Felicia was a special soul too. Eighteen months ago, Phyllis had the fingers of one hand chopped off by a drug-crazed, murderous criminal, all because her mother refused to hand over a memory-stick that his gang wanted. I hard-talked with him just before he did it but I could not dissuade him. Perhaps Maa Ayensuwaa will train her as an Okomfo, a traditional healer – she needs to pass her remarkable knowledge and gifts on to someone, and perhaps that’s why Phyllis is still alive today, to inherit the secrets of Maa Ayensuwaa’s line of healers and bring their heritage of knowledge into the future.

Lo behold, as soon as I returned from the ceremony, tired yet in good spirits, in comes an urgent request from a hospital doctor for £100 for medication for Phyllis. Which, of course, I do not have, since I’ve already paid for her rescue and that emptied me out. The doctor cares about Phyllis but, if he breaks the rules, he loses his job. Telling them to seek support elsewhere is no help at all since they have already done so (and it’s rather callous and discouraging a response too).

So I’m back in the loop, begging people for money, yet again. I used to be much better in a team, when working with my old soul-sister Pam Perry – she could get on the phone and rustle up funds and action much better than me. With only one lung, she’d sit in bed with her oxygen tank, phone and laptop, raising money for Jerusalem Peacemakers and the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem, Palestine. We were a dynamite pair because I gave her brains, backing, online outreach and magical input, and she was great at what she did.

In magical operations I work best as a battery-backup, a reserve warrior for heavyweight situations, a standard-holder and a protector and minder for those at the frontline. Or, at least, that used to be the case – but cancer went for my lower back and bones, and I cannot carry the same weight I used to bear.

Still, as one with a conscience and a heart that some regard as too soft, and with the involvements I’ve had over the years, I’m still at it, scrabbling for money to save someone yet again. In one sense it brings gladness to my heart and meaning to what remains of my life, and in another sense it’s a weighty bane. It’s difficult finding people to replace me. I have personal relationships with the people I work with in Palestine, Mali and Ghana – I’m unhappy about just dropping them during a time when it’s getting harder for them.

So that’s the story for today: raising money for a rather special child who’s struggling to stay alive.

In September I’ll be doing an AHA workshop on this issue, in Penzance, called ‘Changing the World’. It’s for helpers, activists, meditators and change-agents of any kind, and it will cover real-life questions concerning personal risk, life-purpose, commitment, psycho-emotional issues, burn-out, energy-management, holding true to your core beliefs, staying with it despite everything, and tricks for getting through. And planetary healing too.

Not that I’m the world’s greatest expert on this (is anyone?), but I do have some real-life experience. I’m still accumulating it, even as an old crock, and today it concerns one of those small yet big hurdles you come upon: how to create a miracle and raise £100 out of thin air when you don’t feel like it and you’re already worn out.

If you’d like to contribute even just a fiver to help Phyllis get better, that’d be really welcome. Drop me a message and I’ll give details about a bank transfer in UK or PayPal from elsewhere. Alternatively, please send her and Maa Ayensuwaa a healing, supportive prayer. Thank you, and bless you.

From a personal growth viewpoint it’s common to talk about boundaries. Well, yes, that’s true, but that’s not really the goal: after all, most wars and disagreements concern boundaries and we can go on forever being anxious about what separates us. It’s really about sharing and how to do it well, for sharing is a healing thing – personal, societal and global.

We too can become refugees, fall through the net and need help – too often we forget that. Giving is a concept with problems around it – it’s sharing that is really the big issue. It’s always an energy-exchange. It’s in our mutual interests to share what we have. Recipients share too, what they have – if it’s only their humanity and efforts.

However, even then, sometimes we’re tested, especially when we seek to treat others as we would have them treat us and they don’t return it. In such a situation I just try to keep going forward in faith without giving up.

There’s a level deeper too. To survive in this game I’ve really had to learn it in my cells. As a mantra of perseverance it gets me through the difficult stuff, and I’ve quoted it before…

It’s alright in the end, and if it’s not alright, it’s not the end.

With love, Palden

Site: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Cancer Audiobook: www.palden.co.uk/boneblessings.html
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Ascension

Latest podcast

This is about pitying the winners, social healing and walking our talk.

The core issue is this: ascension and the birth of a new world will take place only when we are truly ready for it.

We wish for peace, ecological restoration, socio-economic justice and change in every sector of life that we can think of.

But the big question is whether and how much we’re ready and willing to do what’s necessary to allow such things to happen.

Until we become ready and willing, we’re holding back progress on planet Earth. As philosopher Edmund Burke put it: ‘For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing‘.

37 mins. Recorded while sitting in the ruins of a 2,000 year old Iron Age courtyard house, down’ere on the farm.

With love from me, Paldywan Kenobi.

Or you can find all my podcasts here:
http://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Social Healing

One of the themes of my life has been social healing – stimulating social and community psycho-spiritual growth. This took shape through the camps of the 1980s and 1990s, community events and early online social networking in Glastonbury and working at the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem – it was, and still is, focused on trauma recovery and social reconstruction in the militarily occupied West Bank of Palestine.

Modernity has brought individualism with it – the development of an urban-industrial society required the breakdown of community bonds and social sharing. Nowadays so individuated, each responsible for our own lives whether or not we like it, we tend to over-personalise our hurts, complexes and issues. Some of us take more personal responsibility than is due too, out of compassion, guilt or charitable activism.

But this individualism arises from a social-cultural pressure, like an endemic viral infection that is well embedded in the rich world, though in some societies it has only recently hit them, not least through the medium of the mobile phone. Such societies start breaking down when the brainiest and most enterprising of their members start leaving, heading for cities, jobs and universities.

Many of our difficulties arise from being part of a society, a culture, and their institutions, values and customs – and their webs of power. So if, for example, you grow spiritually or in terms of human potential, people and situations can frequently obstruct or resist these changes in you, or cause you disadvantage, and it gets difficult, and profound choices arise.

One of them is: should I pursue my own path or should I stay in this situation to try to improve things over time? This is not easily answered – it’s not just a matter of selfishness, and it goes much deeper. Nowadays many people leave their communities in order to work in cities or abroad, and to send remittances back home to help the family, and they perceive it as their only option. Many people in Gaza would like to leave, but also they don’t want to leave their families (and the Egyptians charge $5,000 per person to get out of Gaza).

This is a dilemma that all of us variously face at times – a conflict between fitting in or doing your own thing that is a big factor in social churn, divorce, family and community breakup – and it has very mixed outcomes. This inner struggle is a side-effect of intense change.

Nelson Mandela, who took a big destiny on his shoulders, once wrote that he felt he had failed to resolve key dimension of this question: for him it was a conflict between duty to his family and duty to his people. I’ve faced this question quite a few times and, looking back, I still have mixed feelings about it.

But in recent decades, those of us who are more awake than most people have been faced with a barrage of cultural, social and institutional opposition to or rejection of the kind of beliefs we hold. These beliefs have a lot of variety, colour, contradiction and value to them, but in the end they all boil down to a key issue: whether or how much to prioritise either personal or collective benefit.

Another issue lurks behind this, summed up in Jesus’ words, ‘by their works shall you know them‘. Not ideas, advocacy, explanations, disinformation or ideology but actual actions and the way we walk our talk.

The future is not just about economics, resources, AI, ecosystems, carbon sequestering or even space travel. At the heart of all these issues lies the small matter of social healing. For me, it started off during ‘the Troubles’, a student uprising at the London School of Economics, where I was a student. [For a 15-min video about it, try this.] We got squelched. As I experienced this, feeling the impact of suppression of our movement for change, I saw also how we ourselves had screwed up our own cause. People had slipped into endless argument, disagreement and a confrontative approach to protest, and there were regrettable scenes mixed in amongst the brilliance, excitement and flowering that went on at the heart of our attempted revolution.

It wasn’t at the time clear to me exactly why and how this had happened, but it set me on a path. During the 1970s, in my twenties, I went through a lot of inner growth, learning more about awareness, psychotherapy and social dynamics. I went through my own process, where I found myself screwing up even when I didn’t mean to, and faced with a mountain of young person’s acute dilemmas that sometimes felt too big to handle.

At one stage, during my Saturn Return around age 29, I contemplated suicide. Actually it was a ruthless truth process and soul-searching, and it led me to committing to my calling. That calling wasn’t clear and distinct, but I had to make myself available and willing to be given a task. The shape and expression of it surfaced within a few years.

I had accumulated a bundle of experiences during my teens and twenties that made me feel like a jack of all trades and a master of none, but the fascinating thing was that when my mission did take shape, all of those skills and abilities gelled together, suddenly making sense. I had the full range of skills needed. It was as if life had been preparing me for it without my knowing.

Looking across St Ives Bay toward Godrevy lighthouse

Fast-forward to the 1980s, and something drove me to start the camps movement, as well as a stream of conferences and gatherings in Glastonbury that developed thereafter. I didn’t know this was going to happen – I was just driven, or shoe-horned, even to some extent tricked into it. The Great Cosmic Trickster has greater designs than we can see, and sometimes we must be thrown into things and presented with a choiceless choice.

It was an old friend, Jamie George, who did it. He asked me to help him organise a gathering in the Assembly Rooms in 1983. At the time they were threatened with demolition, and several of us set about creating events there, to bring energy into it and stop the demolition. One late-summer’s evening Jamie and I sat in his garden brainstorming it and coming up with an innovative formula for running the gathering. It’s what came to be called circle-working. Though it’s as old as the hills, ancient and archetypal, circle-working was not at that time practiced in our society, whether alternative or ‘straight’.

Time went on, Jamie beetled off, leaving me to it and, before long, I and a squad of Glastonbury friends I brought together were organising week-long holistic educational camps, usually for 100-500 people. Each had a theme (Astrology, Earth Mysteries, Music and Dance and, later, Arts and Crafts, Healing, Ceremony), with transformative intent, group process and a foundation of circle-working – mainly use of the talking stick.[3] We were improvising and innovating in a seat-of-the-pants kind of way, but it was dynamite.

In the 1990s I took this further with the Hundredth Monkey Project – consciousness-work camps specifically addressing world problems of the time, where we applied to world issues methods and ways drawn from the personal-growth sphere. Again, it was based on circle-working.

One of the big unexpected discoveries we made was this: by focusing on ‘world work’, personal growth was vastly accelerated as a by-product. The idea was to set aside our personal growth, to serve a greater sphere – the wider world. But for participants the personal growth implications were enormous. In fact, this led to an unforeseen problem, because each summer camp had such a transformative effect on participants that they tended not to return in later years – it had had such big consequences for them that they were already ‘cooked’ and busy getting on with what had started for them as a result of the camp.

But there was more. Here we come to the social healing bit. For me, it was a big learning. The idea with camps was to create an accelerated growth environment in which people could truly step back into themselves and flower as souls. In this we were very successful. It wasn’t just some people who experienced breakthroughs: it was everyone, without exception. Together, through social bonding and working at it together, we had lifted each other up – we had risen together.

Some of the best camps were those that were the most challenged. We had no shortage of weather events hitting us, and also, in 1986, we had the Chernobyl meltdown, which started on the very day that one of the camps began. Yet these experiences pulled us together by shoving us through the grinder. They forced everyone to become really sure why they were there. It generated commitment and group focus, hundred-percentness.

There was a classic moment in 1987, the morning after a Force Eight gale had ripped through on the very first night of a camp in Wales. We had downed all marquees and tents and crammed into the geodesic domes we had, since these were the only safe structures in a gale and monsoon. For some people this was a nightmarish experience – one of those dark, threatening nights with lashing rain and furious winds that can go on forever, bringing up loads of fear and desolation.

Next morning, the storm had gone. All was still, the sun was breaking through and everything was dripping and remarkably colourful, in a sopping, late-summer way. I was standing there outside, blinking and assessing the scene, having hosted fourteen people in my two-person dome. A new camper was standing with me, looking wan and pale, telling me she couldn’t handle this and she was going to go home.

I was quiet, wondering how to respond when, suddenly, from upfield, came a shout, “Tea, anyone?“, and one of the site crew processed down the field like a butler, with a big tray of mugs of tea. It was a poignant moment. The lady just broke down, crying her eyes out. And she loved her tea, and she stayed with us. And her life changed. She made a growth choice there and then – the atmosphere of the camp had prised her open. That’s just one story of many such epiphanies. Another camper once said, “This is what I have always dreamed of, but never thought it could actually happen“.

Though the success of the camps was very much teamwork, resting on the qualities and experience of our camp crews and the innate wisdom of participants, as the key instigator of all this I was going through big epiphanies too. Not just personal, but concerning this matter of social healing.

At every camp there would be a crunch-and-breakthrough point. At the early camps it often took about five days but later on it came after three or so, as the group atmosphere of the camps evolved. There was a point where people had settled into camping, been through a few days of it, and they were lighting up, feeling part of each other’s lives and gaining momentum. There was a rising feeling of this is it, that we were in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing. As if this was meant to be happening. As if this was a model for a future society, where everyone got on, worked together, served each other and enjoyed each other’s presence. The guards came down, shared trust rose, and a brightness started shining in people’s eyes.

And then, something would happen. Often it would come out of nowhere.

It could have been someone snoring through the night and disturbing others (a tolerance issue). One year, a person slept around and spread a sexual disease – a big controversy bringing up loads of stuff. Or it could be someone suffering withdrawal symptoms from meat – the food was vegetarian only. Or tents leaked in the night. Or kids got into a scrap. Or, one year, the Hippy Convoy arrived at the gate, pursued from Savernake Forest by police, demanding that we rescue them and give them a place to camp.

Of course, this fell on me and key members of the crew and facilitators to sort out – to deal with people placing blame or getting upset, and quite often it involved complex, reverberating community situations. But there was enough love and care around for these societal explosions to work through. We turned it into a group process to turn problems into assets. It wasn’t one person’s problem – it was our problem, and all of us were stakeholders, together.

I’m glad to say that, on the whole, we succeeded in this – especially by the 1990s at the M100 camps. This arose from a buildup of collective skill and experience that could contain and channel social energy in all sorts of ways. Also most participants were willing to go that way, contributing their own gifts and inputs, while the rest gave it a try, going along with it and soon realising that this was something amazing to be part of. It became a cauldron of mutualised contribution – powerful sharings and dynamics during talking-stick sessions, or in afternoon workshops, or around campfires.

This is how social healing works. It works particularly through the medium of crisis and shock, precipitated particularly by unforeseen things against which we have few defences. A recent example, in the news recently, was a ship that destroyed a bridge, killed people and blocked a major port in Baltimore, USA – something no one was prepared for. It’s the kind of event that says something. No doubt people will apportion blame for this disaster but, if we’re honest, if we want to have the fruits and luxuries of a developed civilisation, this is what will happen, no matter who actually does it.

It’s not them – it’s us. This truth lies at the nub of social healing. This is a key issue today in the collective psyche (with Pluto in Aquarius for two decades from 2023 to 2043): there are those who opt toward collective, mutually-empathetic solutions and those who resort to self-interest or sectoral interest. Both options have their costs and benefits. But the costs of self-interest are nowadays outweighing their benefits – so historically we’re heading toward more collective awareness.

Human society as a whole has an endemic case of PTSD. History has been traumatic, pretty much everywhere. The pain and behavioural aberrations that arise from this are rooted not just in past events that we know and remember, but also in collective experiences that are long forgotten.

I have written before about a time in Britain around 1200 BCE, over three millennia ago, when the people of Britain underwent a mass trauma which then played a large part in all that happened afterwards, including four invasions of our country over a thousand year period. This trauma happened at the end of the megalithic period around 1200. The megalithic period had stretched back 2,500 years up to that point. A spell was broken, a mainly-sustainable, cooperative, enspirited society fell, and it was replaced by insecurity, social decline, warlords, weaponry, territorialism and grief (also climate change). That’s big.

Today, many young people today won’t remember or care a lot about what happened in WW1 and WW2 – they’re consigned to history – but these two traumas are programmed deeply in their own genes, contributing to their current preoccupations and anxieties – they are descendants of survivors who went through a very hard time. In my own case, my mother spent two years under the Blitz in London and Swansea, my father lost a leg in Egypt, and my grandfathers were in the Battle of the Somme and the British invasion of Iraq and Palestine.

Yet the addictive consumerism that many young activists point out today was induced by trauma, horror and shortage, and the consequent urge, emerging in the 1950s-60s, to cover it all over with food, security, holidays and overconsumption.

So solving a major component of the ecological-climatic crisis involves deep social healing – the healing of trauma and its effects. Not just trauma, but cultural beliefs, intolerances and insecurities, identity and diversity issues and many more.

This healing process won’t happen overnight – it’s multi-generational. But we need to start it, and somehow keep it manageable by building up social processing mechanisms and a body of experience in all sectors of society which can ‘hold the energy’ and help it work through in ways that don’t turn destructive.

St Ives Head, a Neolithic and Iron Age cliff sanctuary

War is a critical issue, as part of this. I read recently that a study had shown that over 90% of Hamas fighters had experienced their fathers being killed. Little explanation is needed – it’s all about pain and how we respond to it. And, take note: if that had been you, you’d probably land up being such a fighter too. Either that, or you might become an exceptionally brave and driven peacemaker if you so chose – one of those who are rarely mentioned in the news.

The world teeters on an edge where a very big collective decision is needed, regarding war. While explosions and horrors go on, other big world issues cannot progress. The world’s sensitivities are dulled. Resources are misdirected into ‘defence’ and wasted in both destruction and reconstruction. Our moral compunction is overlaid with anger and dismay. Our capacity to see that we all sail in the same boat is obscured. We fall for the belief that other people and nations are against us and a danger to us. This is a mass-psychological complex.

There are elements in this world who wish to crank up this belief too – not heal it. Such a belief does have substance, but there are other ways of dealing with it. It’s not just a matter of diplomacy but one of deep social change. Some people deliberately stoke up division and conflict – our good friend Benjamin Natanyahu is a classic case, but he’s by no means unique. Such people have a vengeance to carry out on a world that has mistreated them. Or they’re on a power trip, though this often arises from past pain too. Or they and their oligarch-team are struggling to stay on top. Or they can’t drop the addiction to conflict (or the money).

The majority of people have grudgingly fallen for the habit of accepting division, conflict and war – they regret seeing their children die, but they still fall into this pattern of belief, even financing their own children’s deaths through their work and taxes. Some nations rely on a psychology of fear and division to justify their existence. Some oligarchies cannot exist without it.

In Britain, divide and rule, a power-imposition pattern taught to us a long time ago by our conquerors the Romans and the Normans and nowadays embodied in the ethics of the Conservative party, is a pattern arising from trauma. It’s not uncommon that imperialistic nations – Britain, Russia, China, Turkey, USA, Netherlands, France, Israel and others – generated the historic urge to conquer as a result of being conquered or oppressed themselves, further back in time.

But this is not the only option: Canada, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Costa Rica, and to some extent Germany and Japan, tend the other way. None of these nations are angels, but they see things differently. Peacebuilding is not an impossible task.

We don’t commit acts of warfare only militarily – nowadays economic and psychological warfare are big things.

On the economic front, we smug Brits, we run a neat string of offshore banking centres for the sequestering of wealth and the unaccounted processing of enormous transactions. That’s one of our specialisms – clean, kinda legal and smart corruption. Around one third of all the world’s money goes there. We have straight-laced, official, smart, seemingly law-abiding banks in the City of London, though those same banks have shadow subsidiaries in the Caymans, Belize, Virgin Islands, Singapore, Isle of Man or Jersey to handle the unaccounted stuff (everything from Apple profits to drug barons’ billions to Nigerian oligarchs’ money-stashes to corporate mega-transactions). Good business. However, not good for people and planet (or national government tax-takes).

These kinds of obstructions are not insurmountable: it requires people to hang together, clarify and state our collective wisdom and preference, and vote with our feet (or even fingers). It requires electoral swings, mass consumer choices, campaigns and also – this is the critical one that leads to real action and change – the right kind of response to events and defining moments.

We’ve had one recently with Gaza. All of the demos and campaigns of recent months have not really paid off in terms of ceasefires. But in terms of historic swings and consensual tiltings, Gaza represents a turning-point. The failure of popular will, globally, has consolidated a deeper shift underneath which is far more firm and solid. It’s not specifically about Gaza, though Gaza, following on from Mariupol and Aleppo, has triggered it. It’s about large-scale destruction itself, and people as victims of it. It comes at the same time as the film Oppenheimer and a range of other events that make this a defining moment or period. Doing blanket devastation of this kind will not be so easy in future.

A tide is turning, even if it takes a generation to do so. When tides are turning, nothing much happens except for powerful undercurrents and a buildup of potential for a full-flux tidal flow to follow. That’s what could be happening here. It depends on the world public to carry this through without sitting back, believing the job is done, or forgetting because of the pressure of other concerns.

Hence, in the Sunday meditations, I’ve sometimes suggested building and consolidating a certain thought or image, since strengthening such thoughts in collective consciousness – such as reconciliation or justice – is a key part of this process. It’s all a matter of where the centre of gravity, where the tilting point in the collective psyche, stands. Gaza has shifted it. The sacrifice Gazans are making is not entirely fruitless.

Forty years ago the Greenham Women surrounded the USAF cruise missile base at Greenham Common. They made a really strong point that hit home in the hearts and minds of many people. The base didn’t close right then because something larger was happening – the end of the Cold War, an historic process that came pretty quickly once it came. The base closed during the 1990s. The women’s action worked, even though most scepto-pundits continue to believe there was no relationship between the women’s protests and the geopolitical change that followed around seven years later. Or perhaps it was just chance. Yeah, sure. But there was a connection: the women put in the work on a psycho-spiritual level which gave a big shove of momentum, alongside the efforts of Solidarinosz in Poland and other movements bringing about the Velvet Revolutions. The Iron Curtain just so happened to come down – and in history, seven years is a blink of an eye.

This is how it works. It’s in the psyche of humanity, the collective unconscious. That’s how change comes. A strange twist might also be this: when the moment comes, the actual ignition-event that catalyses such a shift could be quite small and unexpected, in a place and from a source that most people don’t anticipate until it pops. Then suddenly a widlfire starts.

Remember the young Tunisian street seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself alight and sparked the Arab Revolutions? Martyrdom worked for him and he set alight a tidal surge across the Muslim world that has been tamped down for now but it has not gone out. It’s an historic process, and many threads and factors are involved.

Newton’s third law applies to the course of history: to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Yet, while the wheel turns round and round there is a net movement in a prevailing direction. This is one reason why we need to give thanks for the assholes and badguys of this world: they prompt us to pull our fingers out. Because if we don’t, they’ll carry on. They exist because we allow them to exist. They embody the ghouls and devils within the collective psyches of nations and the world, and it is here that, at root, change and immunity need to develop.

Historic processes can be accelerated, and one day in the coming decades (my astrologer’s guess is around 2048-65), we’re heading for a time of intensity, of going through the mangle. We’re already going through it, but there’s more to come, and it’ll get bigger. We can make this easier or more difficult – that’s the main option available. It depends how much we Earth humanoids decide to agree. Or at least to agree to disagree while cooperating over the essentials.

The big historic change we’re going through this century involves addressing issues that go back centuries and millennia. In essence, it’s a transformation from a competitive to a cooperative collective mindset, society and civilisation. Because we’re all in the same boat, and the boat is now rather crowded and unstable.

With love, Palden

Site: http ://www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Audiobook: http://www.palden.co.uk/audiobook.html
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