I have a couple of half-written blogs that didn’t get the whole way. One was my current thoughts and tips for other cancer patients – I’ll complete that another time. I’m a bit distracted and unfocused at present. I’m going away tomorrow (Thursday) to join friends old and new at the Oak Dragon Camp in a field in Somerset, upcountry from Cornwall – that’ll do me a world of good, inshallah.
It’s funny because, although it’s perfectly safe and I’ll be with lots of friends, I feel quite wobbly about it! I think that’s cancer-vulnerability. Since getting cancer I’ve not had the same insensitivities and protections as I had previously. I can’t handle stuff as well, and get impacted more by things that other people just pass on by. If a lot of life happens, it gets a bit much. It’s a bit like being a little boy again, needing someone to hold my hand. But it’ll be okay – it’s change-apprehension. I’ve been on my own a lot – perhaps too much – and in my own world, and stepping out of that feels like quite a step.
There are things in life I’d like to change before long, though I’m not sure how or where, because it’s a set of circumstances I seek, really. To have someone covering my back and keeping their eye on me, and to be amongst people who can help me with the small things I need help with – often it’s just the fetching of a prescription, or a lift or adventure, or people popping round, and stimulus, or even a cup of tea.
Sitting with old friend Barry Hoon, sorting out the world, at last year’s camp
Anyway, that’s for another day. I’m off camping. I love it, and have camped through every decade of my life, ever since being in Cubs and Scouts. I was amazed at last years’s camp – I went through quite a healing. Beforehand, I could stand for two minutes without support (such as two sticks), and afterwards I could stand for up to ten minutes. It has stayed more or less like that, except perhaps when I’m tired and gravity gets heavy.
Last year was a time of relative rebirth, after the main cancer shock of 3-4 years ago, and I’m not expecting quite the same this year, though I feel I’ll either strengthen myself up or it will be time to accept that my limits are closing in – one of the two. It’s all part of the journey. Perhaps I have some emotional stuff to work out this time – after all, the theme of the camp is ‘the Triple Goddess’.
So, I’m almost packed – boxes and bags are all over the floor – and I’m quite amazed I have managed. Some issues that I’ve been trying to bring to completion have not come to completion, which means I can’t put them away entirely, but perhaps they might resolve while I’m away, or perhaps not.
At these camps, we leave the world for a week and have no contact with it. On the other hand, we’re close to the earth, and in a really nice location. So I’m off to another world for a while – it feels a bit like jumping into Cerridwen’s Cauldron or going through a wormhole! I’ll be back around 10th August.
I shall be doing the Sunday meditation as always, on the next two Sundays.
Love from me, from a rainy Cornwall.
Palden
At the ancient yew tree at Compton Dundon church, on a trip from the camp with historian Ronald Hutton
The Longships Rocks, with the Isles of Scilly Behind
There are two routes to the farm where I live, and they are shown on online maps. The problem is, one route is easy and good, and if you follow the other – as recommended on satnavs – then you’re likely to lose your exhaust pipe and damage your car, unless it’s a Land Rover.
Claudia Caolin took this
We’ve tried to get the satnav people to change the instructions, but they won’t do it. They look at a satellite photo and see a road there, without knowing what its surface is like. So they even disbelieve evidence that we, who live here, send them – because the satellite says there’s a road there. Well, at your peril.
So when people come to visit, I send a map and instructions but some rather slavishly follow their satnav. They trust it more than they should, because it tells them what to do. As a result, they arrive late, flustered, after having made a few extra phone calls to me to find out the way. That cuts down our time together.
This highlights a big problem in our time. Many people – even quite aware ones, and even those who otherwise distrust a lot of things handed down to them from the corporate and governmental world – believe and obey what we are told. We set aside our own thoughts, experience, finer judgement and intuition, because the instructions say that we ought to follow this route, not that.
Precarity at Porthmoina Cove, Penwith, Cornwall
But if the satellite system breaks down (almost inevitable sometime), and if we lose our map-reading skills and intuitions, then we’ll get lost. Not only with finding the way, but also because we’re addicted to obeying orders. We all do it, in varying degrees! Even if you are a dissenter, an ‘alternative type’, or a sensitive soul, there will be areas of life where you snap to and do what you’re told, even at a price.
Even with conspiracy thinking, there’s an element in it where people disagreeing with the ‘official line’ transfer all their need for certainties to other things they’re told by other people, who sound as if they know what they’re talking about, and uncritically they follow a new set of rules.
Move along please… Bosigran, Penwith
One of my bugbears is typical: we are told that mobile phones and wi-fi are safe and okay, and we are addicted to all that phones have brought us (it’s an amazing technology). Yet, just consult your feelings, consult your body and your psyche, and something is not right. This radiation is changing you. It changed my life – I have a cancer caused by radiation, and when I mention this to others, or when I walk out of a room because I can’t handle being in the company of six phones with humans attached to them, there’s often an awkward silence. Ooops, I’ve said something wrong. If I mention the effects this has on nature, the world’s climate and on earth energy and subtle energies, most people just don’t want to know – even if they’re nature-lovers. Yet this is suicidal. And you don’t need a PhD to understand that.
We all do this. It arises from the fear that “I do not have the knowledge, authority and whatever else it takes to cut my own line through life“. This is the way that the Megamachine retains control – through imposing a fear of what might happen if you don’t obey, through telling us what’s right and what’s wrong, infantilising us and making us conform.
Listen guys, I’m in charge, okay?
In the end, this is not about Them – it’s about Us. It’s about our deepest psychology – profoundly stilted and stunted by fear, guilt and shame, the big blockers of inner progress and of correction of the world’s ills.
We all do it – I do too.
I did this last year. I was accused of being a narcissist. Bewildered and feeling at a loss, I took it upon myself and carried that for about nine months, feeling bad. It was a burden of guilt – my own guilt from the past. Not about being a narcissist, but simply about feeling inadequate and flawed.
But I was bewildered and confused about it too. Perhaps I am a narcissist? Perhaps the person who put that on me was right.
But then, a good friend came along and grilled me – she could see I was unhappy and weighed down with it. She had experience of this, having been a ‘victim’ of a narcissist herself. Though she pointed out how a victim is part of the equation too. She questioned me about what had happened, saying in the end, “Hang on, it wasn’t you – it was the other person. The actual behaviour of a narcissist was displayed not by you but by the other person, and this was projected on you”.
The Universal Solution to Everything
Now this was a big revelation. Suddenly a weight started falling off my shoulders. It was like a forgiveness. It didn’t just dissolve the issue – it gave me a new perspective. It allowed me to look at the narcissistic tendencies within me – after all, I do like standing on stages, and I’m what Facebook would label a ‘public figure’. Part of me is shy and a hermit, and part of me loves attention. So there’s stuff to take ownership of here, and it has helped me understand much about my life.
I’ve always been something of a reluctant leader. There’s pain in my psyche over matters of power. But this has made me focus on ‘right leadership’. The world does need leaders, but of a certain kind. In my 2003 book Healing the Hurts of Nations, in a chapter about power and legitimacy, I give three quotes.
Rioters and vandals at the Oak Dragon Camp
“A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation. A politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service.” – Georges Pompidou, French prime minister, in 1973.
“You can erect a throne of bayonets, but you cannot sit on it for long.” – Boris Yeltsin, Russian president, in 1991 (Mr Putin, take note!).
“Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.” – Winston Churchill, Hansard, November 11, 1947.
These photos of me are by Claudia Caolin
This concerns right leadership. In my life I’ve learned a lot about this, and the question still continues. I’ve often felt like a monarch without a kingdom, a bishop without a church and a professor without a university – and this has been my karma in this life. It concerns service. It’s a big question for Virgos like me: the difference between service and slavery.
Service is willing, intentional and conscious. Slavery is reluctant, grudging and involuntary. Slavery is about resorting to type, conforming to what we feel is expected of us by those who seem to know better, and doing our best to avoid punishment.
If you’re going to be a shining star in the public firmament, then rightly or wrongly you need to fulfil what you feel are people’s needs and expectations. In this context, staying in power starts becoming more important.
The matter of staying in power is a difficult one. It’s not just a form of corruption and powermongery. It might be the case that, in a position of power, you actually are the best person for the job – it’s arguable that Mr Putin was the best for the job 10-20 years ago, and many a strongman is like that. But then your star starts falling and times start changing – Xi Jin Ping will experience this in coming years. The tide goes out on you, as it does.
But if you’re good at what you do, then you’re faced with the possibility that the person or the oligarchy that replaces you could actually be worse. I’ve faced this myself. Many people who rail at leaders are, frankly, covertly envious. Watching things that I’ve started deteriorate in others’ hands has been a big and painful lesson to me, bringing me back to a difficult truth: while holding onto power is not advisable, letting go of it can also be problematic.
It comes down to our motivation, and to being honest, often while standing in the spotlight in the ‘court of public opinion’, ruthless as it sometimes can be. Remember the British politician Paddy Ashdown? When he was caught with his pants down he owned up immediately – and everyone thought, “Good on you, Paddy – at least you’re honest”. Meanwhile, others were caught with pants down but they went into denial – they were clearly ‘in office but not in power’.
Tony Blair then came along – he looked like a clean pair of hands. But Tony, after a few years of doing some pretty good things, himself made a classic error – he sucked up to the big guys and took Britain into the Iraq war, when most people in Britain knew this wasn’t right. He sucked up to the Americans and PNAC, a cabal of believers in ‘The New American Century’, which now, chaps like Putin and Xi are showing to be empty and hubristic – America was being what Chairman Mao once called a ‘paper tiger’. Hm, fatal error, Tony – and he’s paid a price for it.
It’s all in the motivation. When I was a young acid head revolutionary in a former millennium, I realised then that it wasn’t just a question of replacing one evil system with another, whether through revolution or reform. It concerned the hearts and minds of the people actually sitting in seats of power. No one system has The Answer. No system is perfect.
Democracy has big problems, and we cannot say that our democratic governments truly represent what the people of our countries need. But autocracies like China and ‘managed democracies’ like Turkiye, though at times they can deliver the goods, have their problems too. It’s all to do with the matter of succession.
Some people moan about our king, here in Britain, but would an elected president and House of Lords really be a better solution? Hmmm, that’s questionable. King Charles III, well, you might or might not like him, but he’s okay, actually, as a person. Though his limited and mainly moral power is inherited, he happens to be an interesting person, and his son isn’t bad either – compared with what we could have.
I remember standing on stage at the Glastonbury Festival in the early 1980s, saying, as an astrologer, that Prince William, born during the festival during an eclipse, would be an interesting character as a future monarch. And he is likely to be so. Do we want to get rid of this guy and his missus?
Why do we expect perfection of our leaders? Why do Americans place so much belief in their elected presidents when they have lots of evidence that such belief is futile? Why do we continue electing the same old political parties, even when we’re disappointed in them?
I remember in 2005, many Palestinians asked me, “Why, after you had the biggest demonstrations in British history against the Iraq War, did you re-elect Tony Blair a third time?”. Well the answer was, “Because he’s still better than the other lot”. Twenty years on, that’s why quite a few people might vote for Biden or a clone of him – because of the other lot.
That’s the dilemma of democracy – it gives us second-best solutions. It is based not on consensus and agreement but on argument and dissension, meaning that 49% of the population land up dissatisfied, unhappy to support their government. Actually, through the quirks of our supposed constitution here in Britain, Margaret Thatcher only ever really achieved about 25% support of the whole electorate, even at the peak of her power. Is that democracy?
Sometimes you just have to stand on your own – a baby swallow on our farm
Well, it’s a common quirk of majoritarian democracy. In some countries, we vote for a plethora of parties, and then the biggest, or not even the biggest, cobbles together a coalition that might not at all resemble what voters wanted – as Israelis have discovered. It relies on conformity and grudging acceptance of bad political outcomes – AND we, the public, customarily disunited, then fail to support our governments wholeheartedly, even when we vote them into power.
The result is that it’s a recipe for failure, because someone somewhere is always opposing it. So this concerns the responsiveness of political systems to public need. And, besides, it isn’t democratic governments that really decide things: such governments exist to ease the cruel grating between the priorities of the Megamachine (the apparently ‘free’ market), and the needs of The People (whoever we truly are).
It’s all down to right leadership and right use of power. But that’s difficult, because sitting in the power seat is not comfortable, and it’s a 20 hour a day job, under a lot of pressure, and subject to cruel judgements from the public – witness those promising leaders, many of them women, who choose not to sit in that seat because it’s painful to get exposed to the sheer negativity of the commentariat and people on the street who land up even hating you.
You get there in the end
So, if we want good leadership, we need to treat our leaders with greater empathy and support, remembering that they actually are human beings, with sensitivities. And we need leaders with human sensitivities. But we need also to hold them to account. We need them to change when they get things wrong.
It doesn’t always work to jettison old leaders and put new leaders in place – it can lead to a cycle of deterioration where we get leaders who are either bombastic and imposing, or leaders who say one thing and do another, or they make it sound as if they’re doing things when actually nothing is changing at all.
In fact, it might be valuable sometimes to welcome back old leaders – to give Theresa May or Tony Blair a second chance. Why? Because they’ve had a period in the wilderness, a time to think things over, and they might well have a deep need, in later life, to get things right. Well, perhaps. Second-term presidents can be a bit like that. They don’t want to go down in history for the wrong thing.
Anyway, so I might well be a narcissist. It’s a convenient accusation to make, for which one is guilty unless proven innocent – but even then one might not be believed. Just to be suspected is enough to ruin a person’s life. What’s needed here is owning up, in public, and self-correction.
It gets a bit rough sometimes
Mistakes are allowed. Learn first time round and you’re doing alright. Learn second time round and you have a problem but it might be excusable. Leave it to third time round and you have a deeper issue going on, and it’s best to go – whatever his merits, Boris Johnson got to that point.
Human error. There’s accountability and there is forgiveness. Just because someone fucked up, it doesn’t necessarily mean they should be blacklisted – it means they need to self-correct, and genuinely so. And everyone, everyone, is a mixed bag – yes, even Bill Gates, who does both some questionable things and some laudable things (and, as an Aspie, he also has an exaggerated capacity to be misunderstood).
So, it might be that I’m a narcissist. To be honest, I really do not know, and it’s up to people’s own judgement. It has caused the person who accused me to completely cut off all contact and unfriend me, perhaps obeying the strictures of a famous psychologist in Canada who says that the only way to deal with narcissists is to cut off all contact.
Standing there for 2,500 years and not going anywhere
Well, I experience that to be rather cruel, actually, throwing out both the baby and the bathwater. I sincerely hope the accuser was right, because otherwise this fierce separation was a very destructive strategy. I’ve learned a lot from it and, for my sins, I now live in glorous isolation, and that’s my karma and life-lesson, and on some level there’s something good about it. Because, for better or worse, it enables me to write yardages of verbiage to you lot, and I sincerely hope it’s useful!
Life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans. In the end, there is no right or wrong – there are simply outcomes. And life is for the learning. So, whatever my fuckups, I’d like to be remembered at least for trying to redeem those fuckups and make things good. But there are some who would even question whether I’m getting anywhere with that.
In the end, it’s necessary to listen and to take in the feedback that people, life and its learning experiences give us. But not too much, because otherwise we become guilty of another crime – the crime of holding back our gifts, believing that someone else can do it better. However, if it’s a gift, it’s highly unlikely. The secret lies somewhere between taking a stand and keeping your antennae up.
One who Speaks does not Know. One who Knows does not Speak.
Discuss. This issue has been rather a preoccupation for me throughout life. Not least because I’m articulate and reasonably persuasive. It took until my mid-thirties though for that articulateness to really come out.
Over the decades I’ve created yardages of verbiage in writing and sound, onstage, radio and video and in groups, so does this make me someone who does not know? Well, it could be true. I could, after all, be twisting your brains in a very nifty way, so that you don’t notice. I might be manipulating you, deluding you.
And there would be truth in it. Not the whole truth, mercifully.
Besides, I find I can’t just rattle off stuff just to fill column inches, sell something or meet a deadline. So I didn’t become a journalist or copywriter, even though I could – I can’t just write stuff to fill space. I find I have to wait until something meaningful and creative comes up, something to really write about. It has to come up and out.
Gurnard’s Head, West Penwith
One gift cancer gave me is reduced concern about my career path – a release from the ties of what I believe other people believe about me. Or, as a blogger, a compulsion to write stuff just to retain eyeballs, for fear of losing readers if I don’t. There are times when I go silent. My feeling is that, without originality, my work is second rate – and I’m a Saturnine Virgo and relentlessly self-critical in these things.
But the funny thing is, the more I’ve got used to this, the fewer the quiet times have become – what some call ‘writer’s block’.
There’s an advantage to self-criticism, in the long term – as long as you relax about it as you mature. Since self-critical people set high standards for themselves, they do actually rise to some pretty high standards. Even if, when they get there, they’re still digging away at themselves and running themselves down.
With some of my writing, I go over and over it again and again. And again. Neurotic. What often shocks me, positively, is that I post stuff online that I think is, well, good enough, when readers enjoy and appreciate it in no uncertain terms and it seems to be far better than I’d have guessed! Phew.
I have a retrograde Mercury in Libra that mulls things over a lot, attempting to reach a balanced view. So I go though periods of quietness, mulling and cogitating. Sometimes I might be having an Aspie meltdown, where everything gets terrible tangled, to the point where I’m short-circuited and go into a space of aghast inner blankitude, like a rabbit caught in headlights, a sort of void space out of which, at some point, there suddenly springs a guiding light of an idea and… ping, I’m back – I got it.
Then I’m off again. One of the little gladnesses I’ve had is that I’m a good reserve speaker – someone who can be called in last minute because another speaker dropped out. Give me ten minutes, a mug of tea, and tell me how much time I have, and I’m off. Mercifully, as rather a polymath, I have a number of subjects up my sleeve that I can rattle on about in quite a fired-up way.
I had to learn how to do that, and it broke through when I was about 32. I discovered that, no matter how much I planned my talks, the best were those where, at the beginning, I found I had no idea at all about what to say, even if I’d prepared something. I just had to set aside my fear, take three deep breaths, take in the audience, and start with the first thing that came into my head. Nowadays, it just comes naturally.
St Michael’s Mount from Penzance harbour
I wouldn’t call that channelling. It draws on my own knowledge, experience and character. But there’s something where, if Friends Upstairs want to drop something in, it’s easy for them to do so. Sometimes I get nudged, occasionally jolted. Sometimes they pull the plug on what I thought I was about to talk about, and I launch in deep, straight away, into something that feels like it’s coming out specially for the particular people in the audience. I’m always amazed that, when people tell me the clincher for them, it’s a really wide variety of my utterances that they mention. It’s fascinating.
But at the end of a talk I can feel a bit bereft because I can’t remember what happened – I’m the one that missed it.
So I’m fine about being filmed or recorded, because it helps me know what I’m actually saying to people! Not only this but, sometimes, when I’ve heard a recording afterwards, it’s as if some of the stuff I said was precisely for me – me teaching myself out loud, in public. Other people seem to like it too, which is a relief. So it balances out – Mercury in Libra.
I’m not one who repeats myself too much, and working from notes doesn’t work for me. I often have three or four talking points in reserve, and I cycle around those, but that process is still spontaneous, a wandering, a looping and a returning back to base. These anchor points kinda keep me on track amidst a wide ocean – a Gemini Mooner like me can go off sideways and add too many footnotes, so that people can’t remember what on earth I was talking about.
Gurnard’s Head again
Part of the reason for this is that it wasn’t on earth. But I have had to learn how to anchor to a few key points, to give my poor audiences a few memorable nuggets to lodge in their brains. Judging by the ramblingness of this piece, I still need to learn it, even at my age.
As a Gemini Mooner, one of the issues I had to learn was this. People remember three things. Repeat: people remember three things. In any talk, book or radio programme, I always try to look for three core points that need bringing through. I might not know how I’ll do it, but I kinda flag them up in my back-brain for covering. If I don’t do this, I go into too much intricacy and people can lose track. It was an interesting talk but they can’t remember what it was about.
What’s changed, since I had cancer 3-4 years ago, is that, more and more, I find myself anchoring back spontaneously to a wellspring inside. I clear my psyche, the process starts up, something comes up and off we go.
This very blog is an example. I was sitting there drinking rose congou tea, contemplating Lao Tzu’s saying: One who Speaks does not Know, and One who Knows does not Speak.
Well, that’s true. But there’s a way round it. The resolution of this dilemma comes spontaneously. Part of the deal is that, when it comes, it’s necessary to get down on it and write it there and then. Because that creative streak doesn’t stay. It’s a momentary thing, and part of the creative process of the universe. It speaks for that moment. If you don’t catch it, like a sailor with the wind, it comes and it’s gone.
So Lao Tzu’s statement is true. I as a voluble person need to take note, repeatedly. Yet it has something to do with the message and the vibe that’s concealed between the lines. It’s that direct mind-to-mind and heart-to-heart communication that hides behind the clattering of expressed words. Something that AI will have difficulty falsifying since AI is imitative, not originative. It doesn’t come from that wellspring.
Up to the 18th-19th Century, it was part of an author’s remit even to use flexible spellings, even on the same page – and that was part of the poesy of prose.
True authors are here to authorise authoritative authenticity. I didn’t go on a creative writing class – I just did the however-many thousand hours and years needed to gain a certain mastery in the craft of wordsmithery. That where those aspects of life that we habitually consider to be problems can become assets in disguise. I’ve been complaining of aloneness in the last two years and, well, it has given me space to create. To do so, it’s necessary to be alone and ‘antisocial’. Life has its strange compensations.
That’s a realisation that particularly comes toward the end of life. Everything has its compensations, its reason for being as it is, or was. Often it’s not at all easy to see how this is, when we’re busy struggling through life’s relentlessly tangled web of attention-seeking demands that present themselves for free on a daily basis. Until, that is, you die.
Atlantic storm at Carn Les Boel
Then other stuff starts happening and, with luck, you begin to see the real, full, all-round reasons why life needed to be the way it was. Going through this process allows us then to pass through the gate and move on.
Not going through that process tends to make us take a left turn, a quick road back to incarnate familiarity – the hope for chocolate and the fact of blizzards and droughts. We have a strange addiction to being stuck between rocks and hard places. The Council of Nine called this ‘bottlenecking’. It’s the primary reason why Earth’s population has swelled so quickly to, now, over eight billion.
Many of us have repeatedly been forgetting why we came, recycling back into life again without fully working things out. We’ve forgotten that this is a training, an initiation into dense physicality, for the deepening and broadening of the scope of our souls.
But there is the option to go on to other realms and worlds – some familiar, a few of them ‘home territory’, and a lot more that we become ready to encounter by dint of what we have already become.
The Road goes ever on and on. Out from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone. Let others follow, if they can.
There was a cuckoo on the farmhouse roof just now, making quite a cuckoo racket. But the swallows have gone to bed – busy day tomorrow. The crows and jackdaws have mostly dispersed around Penwith for the summer. And a nightjar sometimes haunts my roof late in the night, after the bats have disappeared into the dark.
Paldywan sends love from The Lookout – especially to YOU. Yes, you.
Second in a series of thoughts and observations about world healing. For people interested in helping the world evolve and break through, by using meditation and innerwork.
When I was organising gatherings and camps in the 1980s, some quite remarkable things took place that demonstrated the capacity of innerwork to change things. Here’s a quote, about something that happened in 1983:
“The high point of the weekend came when we spent twenty minutes sending meditative support to forty or so Glastonbury women who, that weekend, were at Greenham Common USAF base near Newbury on a major protest action against cruise missiles. The meditation seemed profound – we all were quite stirred by it. Later that day, Lydia, one of the women at Greenham, returned to report that the Glastonbury women had instigated a tearing down of the perimeter fence of the base. “We did it!”, she exclaimed. It turned out they had started doing this spontaneously at the very same time that we had sent our meditative support, earlier in the day.“
I’ll always remember that look on Lydia Lyte‘s face….
In the early 1990s I was asked to write a book on behalf of the Council of Nine, some cosmic beings, not of this Earth, who had a lot to say about world healing, and this set me off on a path.
This later developed into two innerwork projects – the Hundredth Monkey Project and the Flying Squad. In these we developed a bundle of techniques and a body of experience, building up a momentum over a twenty year period and working with all sorts of issues during that time.
Now, in late life, and while I can, I’m bringing together my thoughts on world healing in writing and podcasts, to leave to posterity. This is part two (there might be five-ish).
32 minutes long, with bumbly evensong from our farm, and music by my friend Galen in Oregon.
As usual I shall be vegetating from 8-8.30pm UK time, with a number of soul-friends dotted around this weirdly spinning planet, and you are welcome to join!
There’s no sign up or log on or subscription. It’s open. Just find a nice place to sit, and join at that time (adjust for your time-zone – follow the link for details). Be in peace, or practice whatever meditation or form of uplift or consciousness work you normally practice. Do it your way. This is all about spiritually-diverse souls working together toward one basic aim…
…to help humanity and our world progress and evolve in positive ways, to find solutions to our global issues, healing to our wounds and transformation of our historic patterns.
Or words to that effect. You know what I mean, and we know what we need to do.
The bonus here, especially for those of you who often do meditation on your own, is that there is an open channel at that specific time, for half an hour, and it has a way of upstepping the frequencies and giving extra meaning to your meditation. Anyone who joins in participates in that energy-stream.
The beings that have fixed this simply seek to assist us in doing what we need to do, in terms of consciousness work to help our world. They don’t need us to adopt their mantra or perform their method, since they like the variety and uniqueness of each person who participates. It interests them, and they can weave together an energy-stream from that.
It’s just that ‘God’ has a staff shortage here on Earth, and so they welcome all the help they can get, to help us pull off some sort of a miracle on our planet. And this is one way of doing it.
Besides, it’s really quite nice sitting there on your own in the etheric company of a really good bunch of people! So do join if this tweaks you. We’re there every Sunday evening at the same time.
Though really, I’m not greatly concerned about new year.
You see, one of the problems with our calendar is that it has no particular basis in natural energy. As a dating system it has managed to get itself used worldwide, renamed the ‘Common Era’. But it is European, instituted by Pope Gregory Thirteenth in 1582, as a correction to the foregoing Julian calendar, which was even more useless than our current one.
Luckily, the Gregorian New Year’s Day is near enough to the winter solstice and, if anything in a cycle can be called its beginning, solstice qualifies as the beginning or the root-point of a year. So New Year’s Day is close enough to the solstice to fool our underlying perceptions into believing that New Year is solsticial in flavour. But the thing is, New Year’s resolutions would probably work better if they were resolved at winter solstice.
There’s an interesting flavour to this New Year of 2023. It feels like we’re tipping into a long slide, a growing cascade of accelerating, compounding events, all scrunching up against each other. There’s that stomach-churning anticipatory feeling that you get just before doing a high-dive or heading down a slalom run. It’s too late to back out now, and the stage is set for a cliffhanger, the full plot of which nobody knows.
In the end, wobbliness isn’t such a bad thing, because this intensification is by necessity loosening things up, and we need that. The world has been held in a state of denial for at least fifty years, and reality is dawning. At last. Yes, the shit is hitting the fan in myriad ways throughout society and, globally, and this is very difficult for large numbers of people, and some are buckling – especially those at the bottom of the pile. But that’s a question of economic justice, not just the bad luck of a tough world. This fan-hitting is necessary because things have been held in arrest for too long. We’ve been burning up the world. This is a planetary emergency. We have to get real. It’s happening.
Longships Rocks, off Land’s End, Cornwall
But a paradox comes with the pending avalanche of events we’re likely to see in the mid-to-late 2020s. As acceptance and mobilisation increase, things will in some respects get easier, even when they’re getting more difficult. At present we are burning up so much energy trying to keep an obsolete show on the road, trying to resist facing the fullness of our situation. That uses up a lot of energy and it creates a lot of friction. It concerns a simple rule of car-driving: before you depress the accelerator, release the hand-brake – otherwise you wear out the engine. But also, you wear out the brakes – and that’s what’s happening now, in 2023. The brakes are wearing thin.
In some respects the grating, grinding prelude to a crisis is worse than the peak of a crisis. During an actual crisis, real, cathartic change happens – positions shift, facts emerge, stuff happens and the consequences of old problems become the starting place for the new. Like it or not, that’s the way it is.
I’ve had a tendency in life to gravitate toward edgy, dodgy situations. We humans are quickly stripped down and, to survive, we have to pull out everything we have. We have to cooperate like never before, often with people we’ve never met, and do things we never thought we’d land up doing. This is an amazing process and, throughout life, some of the most profound relationships I’ve had have been in situations like this – short yet intense, a sharing of mutual risk, adversity or insecurity.
It bonds you. It calls upon abilities you didn’t think you had, or you didn’t think were useful. But when necessity and urgency are tugging at you, you just do what’s necessary, as best you can, with what you have. It’s full-on. Very alert. At times miracles happen amidst the tragedies, against the odds. One reason I started the camps in the 1980s is that camping takes us out of our comfort-zones, making us available to new things – it’s a form of positively-induced suffering that suddenly morphs into the best time you had in your life.
Of the camps I ran in the 1980s, some of the best had the worst weather. At one camp, in 1987, we had a force eight gale on the first night. We brought down the marquees, people had to abandon their tents and everyone piled into the geodesic domes, the soundest structures in a gale. I lived in a small dome and thirteen people joined me, huddled together, all privacy and comfort lost, waiting out what seemed like an endless nightmare. Morning came. We crept out slowly, blinking. The morning was sunny, dripping and quiet. The storm had gone.
A new camper came to me, saying that she had to leave – she couldn’t manage this. She looked wan and shellshocked. At that very moment, a member of the site crew came down the field with a big tray filled with mugs of tea, nonchalantly calling out “Tea, anyone?“. The lady burst out crying. She accepted her tea, and a biscuit… and she stayed. Fifteen years later she was still with us, by then doing world-healing work in the Flying Squad. Moments like that are really touching. When you tread the edge and cross the threshold, change happens. Comfort zones aren’t the best place for finding a new life.
Over the decades I’ve come upon heart-wrenching moral choice-points where the options have been playing safe, being sensible and putting my own wellbeing first, or making a big, sometimes decisive, occasionally life-saving difference in the lives of people by taking a risk. There’s often an unbridgeable gulf between them. I’ve tended toward taking the second option. This has happened again recently. It gives me a feeling of ‘this is what I’m here for’.
In late life, I’m happy about people I’ve helped or saved. It has charged a heavy price, not only to me, yet it was worth it in the end. For better or worse, it has been my choice and, in some people’s view, an avoidable pathology they’d have preferred me not to live out. That’s difficult. I seem to have spent my life apologising for being myself. But I did it anyway.
Sadly I have not been able to tell some of my best stories because they can endanger people or lead to unwanted outcomes. You might have noticed that I’ve gone quiet about the story I was recounting to you recently. Well, it’s now one of those. It’s a real test of my mettle. If you’re so inclined, please do keep praying. Apart from that, I’m going to rabbit on about other things for a while.
This seems to be a family pattern: my aunt was not permitted to talk about what she did in WW2 until 1988, poor woman, and she received a medal for it only in 2008. She worked with Alan Turing at Bletchley Park. After that, she was probably the world’s first government UFO investigator, without really knowing it – on debriefing bomber pilots returning from Germany in WW2, she was logging their encounters with ‘foo fighters’. At first they thought it was the enemy’s secret weapon, until they found out that the enemy thought the same thing. I don’t work at that level, though I do have a few eyebrow-raisers to tell. But it isn’t wise or right to do so.
There are some good stories too. I happened to follow the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem through a checkpoint, entering Israel from the West Bank. Guns go up. Oh shite. They’re all aimed at the Patriarch, but I’m standing a few yards behind him. “Do you have any weapons?“. Now that’s a silly thing to ask a Patriarch, but lots of silly things do happen in that benighted land… Silence. “Yes“, says the Patriarch. Uh-oh. More guns go up. “Reach down slowly and get it out.” Right now I’m wondering whether I ought to move. Nope, better stay there, Palden. Don’t lift a finger.
The Patriarch, not exactly young and sprightly, reaches down slowly, pulls out and holds up… his Bible. Quite a few of us were trying hard not to crack up laughing, including a few of the soldiers. He had fifteen soldiers by the short and curlies. They’ll remember that for the rest of their days. That’s an example of psycho-spiritual peacebuilding through the teaching of pertinent lessons.
Ships passing in the day, and Wolf Rock lighthouse
It was a hot day in Al Khader, near Bethlehem, and a new squad of Israeli soldiers was taking over in our area (they changed every couple of months). Eight or so were standing around down the hill, where the boundary lies, sweating in their uniforms. I moseyed down slowly, deliberately relaxed, to see if I could do some bridgebuilding. I had a bottle of water. One, with a French accent, asked where they could get some. I said there was a shop 200 metres back. Pushing my luck, I said I could take one or two of them there – they’d be alright. They weighed it up. They seemed to like me. I told them to keep their guns down and just relax – Israelis get really nervous and edgy in Palestinian areas, because of course all Palestinians are terrorists – and we walked slowly up and along to the shop. You could feel eyes watching.
We went into the shop, they got some things, the shopkeeper was quite friendly and chatty, and we walked back. There was a moment of connection where we all saw the ridiculousness of the situation we were in. When we got back to their mates, I said, “These people in Al Khader are alright if you’re alright with them. They won’t give you trouble if you let them be. You’ve just had a demonstration“. I think they got it. In the coming days it seemed to work. Besides, the soldiers weren’t really bothered. They were probably rather relieved to have an easy posting.
People sometimes ask me who or what I work for. I work for good-hearted humanness, however best I can judge it at the time. If I am financially supported, which is unusual, I accept contributions only if the sole requirement is that I use the money well – if there are any other strings, I say No.
I had to learn this the hard way. Shortly after the intifada, I went to Bethlehem with some financial backing and a list of nine tasks, then to spend the next month learning that it would be possible to achieve only one of those tasks – the circumstances just weren’t right. I got nervous: how would I explain that? One day, not long before leaving for home, I gave up, accepting my fate. An hour later, in rolls a van and, lo behold, every person I had needed and failed to see during the last month was inside. It was all sorted within hours. Phew. Magic.
But that made me decide to free myself from such concerns in future, because in high-chaos situations, improvisational freedom of action is absolutely necessary. Going into a chaos zone with plans, as too many Westerners do, is like trying to swim with a weighed-down straitjacket on, and it causes everyone else too much run-around. Yet strangely, high-chaos zones do allow magic to happen.
Magic happened there. But there’s one problem with trusting that magic will happen, because it doesn’t happen just because you want it to, or because you believe your agenda should be everyone else’s agenda. It happens when it is in line with the Universe’s bigger chess game. We get occasional glimpses of this but, quite often, we don’t – not at the time. Quite often we just have to make a choice and do our best. And remember: not doing something also has consequences. In our time we are getting lots of consequences from things not done, in recent decades and throughout history. We live in a time of consequences.
We are more free now to get things right than ever we have been in human history. Life is asking us not to give up on the brink of a miracle. Well, that’s one of the big lessons I seem to be learning at present. Don’t give up just because everything seems to be against you. Though sometimes we must change tactics in order to progress with our overall strategy. In the end, if you’re trying to move a mountain, it’s all about ‘Thy Will be Done’ and ‘the highest good’.
In the Middle East, whenever they make a statement about something yet to happen, they tack the word ‘inshallah’ into the sentence – ‘If it is the will of God’. In English we say ‘All things being well’, or ‘With luck’. We need a neat new word like ‘inshallah’. It would help us get over the arrogant belief that we are masters of destiny. Which we aren’t. At times The Great Cosmic Steamroller hoves into view, and woe betide us if we’re moving slower than it does.
Now that’s a pleasant thought for the new Gregorian year! But there’s truth in it. The more we’re willing to shake things up, the easier it gets in the long run. In the next year or two we’re moving from a time of rules to a time of crowds.
I saw a joke yesterday. It went… Breaking News: aliens now implementing a points system for people who want to be abducted. Too many requests.
If you’re on your own this New Year’s Eve, so am I, so we can be together in the ethers.
Here’s a hug to everyone, with love from me, Palden.
A scene from the Buckfastleigh Magic Circle. Galen and Jahnavi, behind, had just finished playing music and we were ready for lift-off
With some pics from the Buckfastleigh Magic Circle, Sept 2022
We’re going through a really scrangly time at present, and I’m hearing of a number of people going through it, and I am too. There’s an astrological transit, Saturn square Uranus, which is turning out to be sharp-edged, hard and grating – a conflict between ideas-perceptions-expectations and evolving hard, factual reality. It’s all crunching hard in the public sphere and in our personal worlds. This seems to be a gritty threshold point on an evolving process.
A Saturn square Uranus would normally have quite a strong effect on events and atmospheres, but it wouldn’t be earth-shattering. However, at present the world is tense, insecure, ill at ease and loaded with hazard. It’s the kind of thing where the death of one woman can cause an uprising in a place like Iran – the Arab revolutions ten years ago started like that too. Social wildfires break out. It’s all to do with bottled-up, high-pressure underlying feelings in humanity that are so loaded and volatile that a ripple of energy can set things off. This Saturn square Uranus is a bit like that. Its influence is pumped up by eight billion people going through an intense time.
But there’s more to this too, and it’s longer term. We are in times of historic, planetary change, and the stakes are high. I’d break down the various intensities into three.
Jackie Juno does the introduction. She and Jeanne Hampshire organised it.
One is the bottled-up energy left over from around 2009-2012: this was an opportunity for change but little really happened, and the genie was more or less stuffed back into the bottle. In 2012 the future turned into the present, and everyone was forced to realise things were getting really serious. This bottled-up feeling means that there’s a big glob of unprocessed frustration, regret, loss, injustice and need for change that is sitting there in the collective unconscious, simmering and waiting to explode. The heat needs to rise only a little to start the fizzing – and there’s an uprising every few months somewhere in the world now. So it doesn’t necessarily need a major astrological configuration to spark off major events, in conditions like this. There’s a lot of pent-up energy left over from previous big configurations where fundamental issues failed to be processed – the current war in Ukraine, for example, arises from issues not sorted out around the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1993.
The second is a tidal shift that’s going on now and by 2024, when Pluto moves into Aquarius for twenty years until 2044. Twenty years of Aquarian issues. We’ve been through a period since the 1980s where Capricorn has been strong – money, law, technology, governments, corporates, tradition, hierarchies, resources – and now it’s going to change. Briefly put, this is about the wisdom and the madness of crowds – the world public. Do the people serve the system or does the system serve the people, and how much of which? It also concerns social control, mass beliefs and behaviours, the rights of individuals and of collectivities, inclusion and exclusion, the competing interests of nations and the world, the battle of new against old ideas, the forces of polarisation and solidarity, and human issues in the social context. This shift of themes is beginning to gain momentum, but it will take two years more.
I’m leading an inner journey to find the source of our souls. I was in there with everyone else, far gone.
When the economy rises, society falls, and when the economy sinks, society rises. The seesaw is tipping over to a new direction right now, especially for the rich world. Here’s another issue too: we cannot really resolve the ecological and climatic issues before us unless society itself goes through a fundamental shift – because it is society, humanity, which has to do the resolving. To do this we need to agree sufficiently on what we are trying to do and work together to pull off a miracle.
The third is a case where the future can exert a causative influence on the present. In the late 2020s, around 2025-28, it’s all going to be going like the clappers. So right now it’s a bit like the low-tide, eerie silence of an impending tsunami – the future is sucking us toward it. The bad news is that it’s going to prove to be all too much for everyone and, the way the world is, some people will get scrunched. The good news is that this avalanche of events and changes will loosen up many stuck, interrelated issues, and it will also bring a rush of solutions. It’s an acceleration.
The key issues of the time will be social priorities (Pluto in Aquarius), new and changing ideas and perspectives (Uranus in Gemini) and leadership and power issues (Neptune in Aries). These three will form a triangle, or an energy-thrum, which actually will be very positive, a florescence under duress. But, since we have so many unresolved issues in the world, unatrtended to in recent decades, things could get difficult. If we had started the necessary changes fifty years ago, this would likely have been a very productive time.
Look, I’m standing without sticks – lifting up others lifts me up too
But it will perhaps not be as nasty and depressing as we saw in the 2010s. There we had bad stuff with few solutions, while in the late 2020s we’ll get bad stuff with lots of solutions – if, that is, we treat them that way. Things are likely to start rushing so fast that fundamental changes will need to start happening, urgently and pragmatically, simply to deal with the onrush of events and cascading outcomes arising from them. The gift in the situation is that, at last, things will be loosening up and accelerating. The Millennial generation will also be stepping into positions of influence.
So we’re in a time of tension where there are forces pulling in a variety of directions, and the future is currently like a coin spinning in the air. There’s a sense that something is coming, and there’s fear and anticipation around it in the collective psyche of humanity. There’s also a lot of frustration and disagreement about what to do about it. Questions we have been avoiding for decades are all suddenly crowding in, and this will continue. There’s a feeling of jaded disappointment and disaffection in the collective psyche, after a trail of horrendous scenes in recent decades – atrocities, wars, refugees, hunger, disasters – and this adds to the bottled-up, stuck feeling of our time, a feeling that, no matter what we do, nothing will change. Energies of growth are being held down by the weight of accumulated past decisions, habits and procedures, and by the manic busyness of a coffee-driven modern culture that is running so fast it has forgotten where it’s running to and why everyone is running so fast in the first place. There’s a lot of opposition, division, diversion, distraction and blocking going on.
So that’s why it’s rather intense at present. It’s going on for me too – it feels like I’m processing too many issues to be able to be clear any of them properly, and all of them depend on something else. I’ve been missing loved ones, particularly one of them, and fed up with my own patterns and with being single, and groaningly facing the fact that I might have to write another book, and dreading winter, and fed up with tribal politics, and feeling overloaded with things to pay attention to, and all sorts of stuff like that. The usual grinding stuff in which I sometimes get lost. Which I did today – I got quite down about it.
So I went to bed this afternoon to go inside myself, rumbling around in the netherworlds, then to surface and eventually reach above the clouds. One result was that it came upon me to get up and write this blog. It was Caroline in Glastonbury who had jogged me to do it this morning – she has a way of constructively jogging me – so thanks, Caroline. But I had resisted – the thought of sitting at my keyboard didn’t light me up. When she or others give me the elbow, I do sometimes resist at first, but that’s just an Aspie thing – I ruminate over such prompts once they’ve gone and eventually come to the rightness of what they tried to say. If, that is, it was right, and if it was not quite right, it helped me work things out and was a gift anyway. So this blog came out eventually, and I hope it gave some useful clues.
[Devon and Cornwall were once united as Dumnonia until the Saxons took Devon a millennium ago and ethically cleansed it. I’ve always felt that was one of history’s mistakes.]
If there’s a swarming of UFOs over Buckfast Abbey on Saturday afternoon, it’s okay, it’s just our lot doing a quickie. They’re doing some frequency modulation and levitatory assistance while us lot downstairs are cranking up a transdimensional forcefield down at Southpark community centre.
Yes, the Cornish are coming back, bearing a load of insight detonators and love-bombs but, since Dartmoor is geologically stable, we’re not setting out to create too many earthquakes. Just some gentle, barely-perceptible humming, though it might make a few loose bits in the vicinity rattle surreptitiously.
Penny will be making sure the urn is hot for a cuppa afterwards. It’ll be okay – not exactly routine maintenance, but we don’t anticipate major security breaches, though we might stretch the laws of nature a wee bit, but it won’t hurt. We’ll have it sorted by the time we’re finished. And we’ll wash up the dishes afterwards – though there might be a whiff of incense left behind.
There’s a jackdaw on my roof, crarking away trying to wake me up, but it hasn’t twigged that I’m already up – my computer keyboard is already being finger-pounded and all is well here at The Lookout. Bags almost packed, walking sticks at the ready, blueberry muesli waiting for nutritive ingestion, and I’m finishing everything off before Penny comes in a van to pluck me up, collect Jahnavi and Galen and teleport us up the A30 toward England. She’s dropping me off near Scorhill stone circle to meet Rebecca and they’ll camp down near Holne tonight. Rebecca and I have some homework to do – we’re cooking up something for the future and getting aligned for tomorrow. Then we all meet up late morning, ready for… um… well, I’ve got something prepared, but….
At my last gig in Glastonbury we went off on a completely different trajectory, and all my prep, such as it was, just evaporated. So who knows where this will go? But I’m hoping to fix things so that people in the circle can back plug back into the place they came from, and this might prove useful in coming times. You see, it’s not much point trying to figure out where we’re going next unless we have a clearer grasp of where we’re coming from and why we’re here in the first place. So, getting anchored back to that is critical in clueing in to what to do next and how to do it. Not that there’s anything there that we don’t already know, but, well, problem is, living in this strange, intense, contradictory and rather heavyweight world, we forget this stuff.
I do too. I struggle too, believe me. But the stuff I wade around in becomes fermenting compost for something else, and the slough of despond eventually turns into a healing spring, and it all works out in the end. That’s what we’re here for, after all – to make the best out of a pretty tricky and convoluted situation called ‘life on Earth’.
Nowadays I’m blessed with the emergent presence of a growing circle of bright souls who really make a difference for me. As a cancer patient I have to struggle through each day, more than many of my fellow mortals, and it’s uphill most of the way. I’m so heartened by people’s response and support to my writings, utterings and appearances. It’s really meaningful that, in my current constrained state, I can make a contribution that others seem to value. I’m one of those souls who, if he can’t make a contribution, tends to wander off to find somewhere he can.
I’m lucky to have two really sharp characters around me nowadays who don’t let me get away with anything. It’s great. They’re on my case in the most caring of ways, and I’m much blessed. They scrape me up when I’m in a splurge, and if I’m going off track, somehow they seem to nudge me back again, often with one short sentence or one little action that flips the situation and lights up my smile. This summer, Penny and Rebecca have been minding me on my journeys upcountry, and it has worked really well. I’ve got both of them this weekend, lucky boy.
There’s something going on here, with them and with others who are hoving into view and making connections. One thing I’m really liking about this is that, since my life-span is short, as far as I can see, my hope is to leave something behind for people to continue and take forward from there. As a rather mission-driven person, it looks like I’m being given a last chance to see if I can fulfill something that’s meaningful to me and potentially valuable to folks like you. I have Jupiter in Pisces, and it doesn’t look as if I’ll be leaving money and estates, mashallah (as God has willed it), but I might be able to leave something else instead, inshallah (if it is the will of God).
Oh, and by the way, I’m not big on God, actually, but, by using that term, I’m alluding to something many people will, I think, understand. Since That Which Can Be Named is Not What It Is – and neither is it something else either. Perhaps I spent too much time in the Holy Land and God rubbed off on me. But actually, he’s rather an interesting chap – very busy and in demand.
Anyway, regarding plans, we shall see. All I can say is that something is likely to emerge in 2023, and events and developments will guide and shape it. It seems I am being given the grace of time – even though, medically, I do have problems, and I do feel rather tired deep down and ready to go home. It feels as if I’m being given a gift, and this has perked me up. When I’m standing before you, holding forth, you see me change before your eyes and my posture rises as I get flooded with a blessing-wave drawn through by you. Because it’s for you.
I rather like doing this – it’s something I can do, while I can, and it’s a capacity that came as a bizarre compensation for having cancer. It’s nothing big, but it is necessary, and I’m not by any means the only one doing it. All of us are challenged to do it, each in our own ways, expressed through our actions of thought, word and deed in the situations we conduct our lives in. We’re here to bring solutions, at a time when the world is in deep trouble. If what I am doing resonates with you, then stay tuned because, inshallah, all things being well, something will happen. It’s in gestation stages at present.
And time is what stops everything happening all at once. Which is one of the experieces we came to Earth for – to live inside time, so that our experiences are strung out along a stream of present moments, on one level sorted sequentially into days, weeks and years, but on another level sorted by the quality and depth of those experiences, in impactful more than sequential order.
For those of you who’d like to be there at the Magic Circle but can’t, keep your antennae up at the time and, if you ‘get’ us at any moment, that’s because you’re there with us – hello, and welcome. One way to do this is to listen to my recent podcast, ‘Soul Tribes’ (link below), and that’ll help you tune in. We’re in session from 12 noon to 5ish on Saturday, a few hundred yards from Buckfast Abbey in Devon.
There will probably be two twentyish minute occasions of inner process and meditation, but I can’t say exactly when. In the world healing process (unless something changes) we’re likely to be visiting Pakistan to help with the inner aspect of the mop-up – millions of souls are going through it there. So have a think about that. This is an exercise in using your spirit, your experience and your imagination in working with ‘inner aid’, and the trick is to find the ways you’re good at it, and the ways you can ease people’s hearts and help them find answers, or talk to the Himalayan glaciers, or help the helpers. When we do this kind of ‘surgical’ approach in larger groups, a lot can get covered – it has a homoeopathic, radiative, channel-clearing effect on the general situation in Pakistan and in the wider world. There will be a protective force field around us, so if you experience difficulty entering, check your motivation and try entering more slowly, because that’s the key.
Bless you all. Time to go. Thanks for being you. Hopefully there will be sound recordings of the Magic Circle online within a week or so afterwards.
It’s fascinating. I’m in a state of positive shock. Six months ago I was in the lap of darkness, falling, flailing, falling… and it has all completely reversed.
This is weird, and I wasn’t quite ready for this! It has happened so fast and completely. So I’m making some big adjustments. This is one of the things about cancer – as least, for me – since everything impacts so much more than it did BC (before cancer). I’ve become more permeable, more affected and vulnerable, in all areas of life. This has its good and tricky sides. At times in the last month I’ve been overcome with pure joy, rather childlike and overwhelmed – I break out in tears so easily nowadays. Perhaps I should hire my services to a water company to help them restore the water table.
Some months ago I asked myself what I would have been doing if I hadn’t contracted cancer. Answer: just carrying on. What has happened since cancer joined me? I’ve been living each day quite intensely, in a very here-and-now way, and the difficulties I’ve had have given me a completely new focus. It’s now all about staying alive, staying happy, living life fully and resolving the loose threads of my life as best I can, while I can. In a bizarre and at times painful way, that’s called ‘a new chapter of life’. And I’ve been given it.
This is where free will comes in. Free will is not about Toyatas and Volkwagens, or left-wing, right wing, or this or that. Free will is all about how we deal with what we’ve got and what’s in front of us and, particularly, staying true to the root reason why we chose to come into life in the first place. Because we did choose. No one is here by accident.
This then leads to the question: what kind of life am I setting out to live? Well, the issue with me is that watching TV, eating, socialising and carrying on with a routine don’t tend to lift me up – I lose interest quite quickly. That’s an aspect of life on Earth that doesn’t do much for me. I have this strange obsession with having a deeply meaningful life. Some or all of you might suffer this syndrome too.
I can’t sit around waiting for something – though much of my life has involved a lot of abiding and patience. And strangely, at times when life has been most difficult, I get deeply motivated to do things. Not necessarily about the problem at hand, but more about some sort of strategy that changes the game more than it changes the situation. I seem to be at it again. Strangely, it took the cancer experience to really get me fired up. Or perhaps sufficiently desperate that I have no alternative! Free will is sometimes about making a choiceless choice.
I wake up with instructions, sometimes. Well, it feels like that. Something fizzy is inserted in my psyche and it starts fermenting. Before long, a whole picture of possibilities has formed. But nowadays, I’m wise enough to know that, first, I must put it on the ‘perhaps’ shelf in my psyche, to let it sit there for a while. This will show whether what I see is solid and feeling dead right. If it isn’t, it fades away or changes, as life progresses. But there’s a central issue or motivator to it, an aim and strategy which, if it is solid, can form the core idea or axis or pattern of something that could take shape in the next few years. Here’s the rub: the intended fulfilment date is around 2050. If I’m incarnate at that time, I’ll be a young’un. I get the feeling I’ll return a bit later, but that’s not entirely my own choice, and it’s subject to review.
There’s an interesting twist to this. I have a limited shelf-life. I do know this. Some people will try to dissuade me from such ‘negative, deathist thinking’, but often they need to learn something about acceptance, surrender and the otherworlds. Here’s a riddle: we do not and cannot choose the time and manner of our dying, yet, in another way, we can. Sort of. Particularly through attitude and power of spirit, though also with the helping hand of medications, supplements, healers and so on. However, ‘the hand of God moves in strange ways’, and when facing death we do need to hand ourselves over, to accept our progressive loss of control. Why? Because such acceptance leads to another kind of control. Metaphysically, it’s the control of a slalom-skier, where you have to lose control in order to gain a new kind of balance. It’s not fear-driven, though it’s one helluva ride.
This happens in life too, and many people stand on this precipice at present – it’s the Great Unknown, gaping at us and shaking us out of our comfortable stupours. Yes, folks, shit’s happening and there’s little we can do about it. We’ve been in ‘good’ times, and now it’s going to be ‘bad’ times. Many people resort to complaining – that’s unwise and gets no one anywhere. It’s necessary to get real, make it simple, focus on what’s essential, stay happy and look for the gift in this evolving situation. Do this, and you’ll survive. Dig in your heels and trouble’s coming.
However, when the economy rises, society declines, and when the economy subsides, society rises. So what is our choice here? What do we really want?
Photo by Rebecca Brain
I too must square with this one. My cancer immunotherapy (Daratumamab) comes in a little refrigerated phial once a month by special delivery, and a nurse comes to administer it (Janice or Nicola – they’ve been really good and helpful). This phial costs £4,500 each month. I am privileged to live in a country where this is possible – elsewhere I would be dead or, if so blessed, rich enough to pay ridiculous sums for treatment. During my life there is a possibility that the state support I receive will dwindle or disappear. Yes. One of the existential risks we face that no one talks about, is ‘sovereign insolvency’. Government and national bankruptcy (it’s happening in Sri Lanka). Caused mainly by debt, by excessive public and private borrowing on a rosy future that didn’t happen.
That’s life. And it’s okay. I don’t have money but I have some social cred and survival instincts, and I’ll manage somehow – worse has happened, and I’m not in receipt of incoming mortar shells. A number of us will have to go – as was the case with Covid. Some might think it’s Big Brother pulling this off, and there’s a smidgeon of truth in that, though not as much as some might like to think. But are we going to sit around blaming others for our plight, or are we going to rise up and come out to help our fellow humans? Sorry to be blunt, but it does come down to that. That’s one reason I live in Cornwall – we do this down’ere.
I have a limited time left – current estimate, 3-5-7 years. When I’m performing in public I brighten up and come alive, so that’s not a truly accurate read-out of how I am overall. I go down too, megaflopped, with gravity running double-heavy and systems creaking along on three cylinders. Though, on average, I’m doing much better now than some months ago, and things are looking up. I no longer have to strive for hope or optimism: it’s coming at me in torrents! This is the positive shock I mentioned earlier. I guess I’ve fallen into a kind of miracle zone in which, at first, you have to go right down into the depths of The Pit before revival kicks in. Revive I did. It might be true to say that conventional medicine has kept me alive, but healing from so many people and from ‘friends upstairs’ has given me a new life.
In early May a message was dropped into me which said, ‘We have one more thing we’d like you to do…’. Part of me said, OMG, not again, leave me alone, and another part sparked up and was fascinated with what might happen and what exactly this might be. I have some starting notions and I’ve twigged the core objective, but this must unfold in its own time and way. Next we come to the earthly manifestation bit. Thing is, since I most likely have only some years to play with, anything I do, unless it’s something brief, is to give to others to take forward. I need to sit on that and mull it over, and some of those others might need to do so too. It’s necessary to let various things take shape, which will serve as indicators from Real Life that there’s support for it in all worlds and that it has some chance of actually working. I have a wee bit of experience in that matter, and I’m a ‘sensible Virgo’ (I am told), and nowadays I look before I leap. But I don’t tend to sit on my hands and hang back either.
One of my weird gifts is a capacity to articulate things that people already half-understand, or things that are coming up for them that they hadn’t quite ‘got’ – and also to make connections between things people hadn’t quite seen before. Such as the relationship between humanity’s psychospiritual condition and climate change – think about it. I tend to look a bit further than the next horizon and the narrowness of short-term fixes. Thirtyish years ago I realised what this was about, for me: I came here not exactly to bring change, but to bring suggestions about what comes after that change.
As a former revolutionary (we lost), I’m now dedicated not to bringing down the old but to bringing up the new. This is what I told young Syrians and Egyptians in 2011 in Amman, Jordan, as their revolutions were failing… Yes, you lost, but, Allahu akbar, God is great, history is on your side and, look guys, I’m still here decades later, still at it, so you do that too. It’s hard and it takes a long time, but real change does take time, and that’s no reason to give up. They got it. I told them to tell their friends.
The Nine once said something interesting, that the revolutions of the late 1960s were meant to bring social-spiritual change but, instead, in the 1970s, they brought personal change to a relatively small number of people. This did lay the foundations for future developments, but it was a slower path to take. The social change is yet to come: a big opening for this starts in 2024, as Pluto enters Aquarius, accelerating rapidly through the late 2020s, and the complete process continues for a few decades. (For more about this, try here: https://penwithbeyond.blog/2020s/ ). It depends, of course, on what we humans do about it, and a wide range of issues, problems and solutions will come up. We shall see both the wisdom and the madness of crowds. The questions of social trust and care and also good leadership are biggies to sort out.
On my recent trip upcountry to England, I was really happy to meet many remarkable people, and impressed with the quality of those who attended the two magic circles. Attending the OakDragon camp was like a turnaround for me, rather like reaching the top of a high mountain pass, suddenly to see the vista on the other side. I felt welcomed, included and valued, and it was warming to heart and soul. At the magic circles, it felt as if people were right there, and they definitely seemed to understand what I was sharing. Also, I survived the magic circles myself, better than I expected (after all, it’s 5-6 hours), and I’m up for more.
If you’re the kind of person with the connections in your area or network to organise one, you’re welcome to get in contact – I go where invited! The next Magic Circle is in Buckfastleigh, Devon, on Saturday 24th September (see palden.co.uk/magic-circles.html). I’m really looking forward to that.
In Devon we’ll have a little music from Galen and Jahnavi, two musicians coming all the way from Portland, Oregon, to join us. As I wrote this they were stuck at Heathrow, waiting for the plane to Newquay, Cornwall. Such are the ways of this world. Penny is picking them up – they’re staying in a bell tent in the Field of Dreams, our wild-camping field here on the farm (thanks, Jo!). An old friend, Kevin, is here too – he’s an old Flying Squad member, and he, with Sian and Sarah, three core members, came to the Avebury circle. I was so happy and moved to see them – we’ve been through so much together, for so long. We’re realising in a new way that perhaps we prototyped something more valuable for the future than we thought at the time (flyingsquad.org.uk). So we’ll have a campfire in the field and share dinner together. Guess who sorted that out? The Rt Hon Dame Penny Cornell MBE, haha.
Lots of good stories have happened for quite a few people in recent weeks, and I’ve met with new friends and old. Bless you all for that, and thank you to Bruce, Ivan, Pia, Lily and particularly Rebecca, with a host of others, for lighting up my life and helping me on my way.
If you live in Glastonbury or within easy reach, I’m giving an evening talk at the Assembly Rooms on Friday 9th September – called The Tipping of the Scales. It’s for Glastafarians of all generations. A Glastonbury veteran (1980-2008) returns to his old home to meet the folks. I’m coming up the Michael Line with some messages from the end of the world. (Info here.)
I need to hobnob with people through doing talks, magic circles, blogs and podcasts because, as a cancer patient, I don’t have the energy it takes to meet so many people except in EM-free groups. I love you all, but I can’t get round everyone. Yet magic happens too, and I’ll get round everyone who somehow matters – whatever that means.
The EM-bombardment my dearest friends give me, even if accidentally, makes meeting you extra tricky. It takes three seconds to be infected and two days to get back on balance. What proportion of the population has electroesensitivity? One hundred percent. It’s just that only some people notice it, and I fear for the rest.
Recently I’ve been talking about dying as a gradual process. Here’s a quote from the website of my root Lama, Rangjung Rigpe Dorge, the Sixteenth Karmapa, about his death of cancer at Samhain in 1981, in a research hospital in USA:
“The hospital allowed the body of the Karmapa to remain in the room where he had died, because it was obvious that this was not an ordinary death. Even though he had died, for three days he remained in the Tugdam, a state of meditation. This was clear from signs such as the area around the heart remaining warm and the body remaining supple. The signs were witnessed by the medical staff present.” (karmapa.org/life-16th-karmapa/)
Though the quality of my meditation isn’t anywhere close to his, I don’t believe only Tibetan lamas or similar can work with their death process in this way. But we shall see, won’t we?
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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