inner growth – Page 4 – Notes from the Far Beyond

Loss and Gain

Life never stops throwing stuff at us. Well, until it does.

Here you can see photos of a man who is 60-70% dead. Though in another way, I’m very much alive. Let me explain.

In our society we’re addicted to defining death as clinical death, when the heart stops. But actually, dying is a gradual process where the psyche, you or me, leave the body we used for becoming incarnate on Earth and we move into another existence. Most people are only 10-20% dead – that is, mostly on an unconscious level, only a small part of them is in touch with the otherworld. This sense of connection might increase at special moments such as being present at a childbirth or at the death of another person – part of your psyche goes over to the other side with them. Especially if you let it. But when near the end of life, you edge gradually closer into dying, often in stages and down-steps. Social attitudes tend to make this a secret process for many people at the end of their lives – no one wants to talk about it.

The black patch on my beard is a staphilococcal infection – neither hospital nor holistic treatments have worked thus far

You can see it in my eyes – there’s more of a once-removed look in them than there used to be, if you knew me some years ago. It’s because part of me has already gone over. This is partially because I came close to dying two years ago and then came back, and partially because I’m more or less okay about dying, so I’m not blocking myself from slipping into that kind of space and awareness. I had a near-death experience at age 24, which made me more easygoing about dying – and having a Buddhist background helps too.

Since I contracted cancer in late 2019, life has been very much a day-to-day, uphill grind, an effort, where I have had to apply myself to the art of living much more decidedly and in a much more focused and mindful way. It can be wearing at times. In that context, when you’re growing tired of staying alive and you’re dying, whenever and however it comes, it is likely to be a relief. After all, for me I shall be going home, where there will be no more gravitation and bodily constraint to deal with.

For now I’m okay about being alive, for there is something quite remarkable about this end-of-life phase. There’s a certain clarity to it that comes from a simplification process in the psyche – my capacity to handle complexity, or even my interest in it, is reducing, and this simplifies things. Complexity, human guile, head-trips, hidden agendas and evasions become rather irrelevant. There’s a deep realism to it. For me, it’s a time of honesty with myself, in the knowledge that if I don’t process truths now, I’ll have to process them at death. I’ve been thrust into this state by cancer and relative disability, with a fair dose of isolation thrown in, and having had quite a life over the last seven decades, starting my life in a completely different and distant time of history, I have plenty to reflect on. There’s quite a lot of past and not a lot of future left for me, at least in a bodily sense.

Even now I’m having deep, earth-shaking learning experiences, and I talked about what’s been going on for me in a recent podcast, ‘When it all gets too much’. Growth never ends – it isn’t the domain only of the young and able. One tricky issue I’m facing at present is that I’ve been fucking up. Life is proving too complex, I get out of my depth and I’m not functioning with the same intensity as most people – life’s intricacies get to be a bit too much. So I fuck up. This complicates things and I find it difficult to deal with.

I seem to be managing though. I don’t have enough life left to get really tangled up with things as I used to, and complexity boggles me. One of the drugs I’ve been given, the steriod Dexamethasone, seems to have exaggerated my Aspergers tendencies – in one sense an incapacity to deal with human headtrips and manipulations, with complexity, and in another sense a rather inspired genius, creativity and deep seeing – the Aspie blessing that brought us the Theory of Relativity, the computer, the iPhone and the Tesla. Though in my case it concerns ancient sites, geopolitics, astrology and other weird subjects I’ve given my life to. I don’t have time to hang around resisting life as it presents itself and feeding my fears and neuroses. This isn’t an avoidance: it’s more to do with zeroing in on the really important, fundamental, underlying stuff, the tough, abiding truths, and leaving the complexities to sort themselves out by themselves.

The next bit I’ve thought about long and hard. I’m not seeking to make a public discussion about this because it concerns two real people who are fine souls and deserve good treatment. Also because, in writing this blog, I undertook to tell you my cancer-and-life story, and I cannot genuinely omit this development. This isn’t about taking sides or making judgements. It concerns something that can and indeed does sometimes happen for some cancer patients and for those involved closely with us.

The biggest challenge I’ve recently had to face was a big shock when it came – the sudden ending of my relationship with Lynne. She had good reasons – it had been really difficult for her when I tipped into cancer and went through big changes, including in my personality – and then I fucked up in January, really upsetting her, and suddenly it was all over. It all became too much for her, and suddenly it was over. For me, I could both empathise with her situation and pain and also feel my own loss and inner bleakness. The next month or so was a deep and dark struggle, with emotional and health issues merging into a churning journey that seemed to last a thousand years. Later blood tests revealed that a key cancer indicator (paraproteins in my blood) had gone up – not a good sign since they’d gone down over the last year and more. When I mentioned this emotional storm to the haematology specialist she said, “Oh, that won’t affect anything”. No, she’s wrong there. I’m amazed how a doctor can say such a thing and believe it.

Leaving a cancer patient is difficult. It can lead to public judgement and that’s not fair. So I honour Lynne for being brave at this time. It is not right for a person to feel tied to another, by force of circumstance. She has a life to live too, and perhaps she’s done her bit.

Around spring equinox I started rallying and reviving – the warrior in me kicked in. Falling helplessly into the great cosmic plughole isn’t really my style – well, not for long. I’m going to try to make my cancer readings go back down again by working on reintegrating myself and getting my life-energies pulsing better. This might or might not work. If it doesn’t work, the haematologist wants to change my cancer drugs to Lenalidomide (a new word for Thalidomide) which my mother happened to take for ‘morning sickness’ when I was inside her before birth – I was lucky not to be born severely disabled, and I’m nervous about taking this drug now since I anticipate that it could worsen my Aspergers symptoms yet more or it could affect my spirits, my core medicine-source.

I go up and down on different days, getting to grips with this strangely new chapter of life and letting myself feel and experience everything that comes up, so that these experiences may evaporate into the vastness of things that never were and things that are best forgotten. But it’s hard work. As always, I look for the gift I’m being given in life, and undoubtedly, through Lynne and her absence I’m being given a gift of truth and reality. My homoeopath prescribed me Pearl 1M – pearls are created as an outcome of irritation and ‘things going wrong’. Thanks, Helen.

I wish to thank Lynne from deeper than the bottom of my heart for all she has been and done with me. She looked after me and saved my life two years ago, and her kindness and love were exceptional, a life-changer. Not many people would be able to do that, nowadays. We’ve been such good companions, lovers and soulmates. I sincerely hope she too has benefited deeply from what I have offered her. My going down with cancer wasn’t part of our plan and we’d been together only three years by then – she didn’t really get enough of the me that I once was. I wish her well, bless her. She’s been such a shining soul in my life. Also she’s a very gifted astrologer, and I miss our discussions. I’ve been difficult for her and she has been really good to me, in the last two years. It’s funny and also tragic how life goes, and what we humans do to each other, even when we don’t really mean to. So now we are both ‘free’. I sincerely hope life works well for her and miss her enormously.

Now it is time to move on and make good use of the life that I have. It will take time to repair, yet I need to keep moving forward. It’s time to do the best with life as it presents itself, to uncover the TLC within my own heart and to let myself receive what support life will provide, as if being carried in the open palms of the Goddess. After all, our existence is all about two things that aren’t entirely connected: life as it factually presents itself and life as we choose to see, experience and respond to it – and in the latter lies our power. But it’s true also that it’s really strange encountering an experience such as this at my current stage of life.

One thing I’ve learned is that separation and aloneness do not mean I have to close my heart and block off, just because I find myself on my own or in an emotionally barren state. Love is something that resides in our hearts, in the core of our being – it generates its own warmth and inclusion without having to be dependent on the closeness or the absence of another soul. Though, this said, I must admit that I have to really work on that, and it really is nice being enwrapped in love! Talking to and caring just for myself isn’t quite the same. After all, even as a crippled cancer patient I still love looking after others to the extent I can.

And I still welcome hassle-free, relaxed visitors, and bring your knitting – I serve really good springwater tea.

Life is all about change. All that starts comes to an end. It really does. This is the nature of life on Earth. The Talking Heads once sang that heaven is a place where nothing ever happens, and there’s some truth in it but not a lot, since life goes on everywhere and the progress of the soul on its long evolutionary journey continues wherever we are. Different forms of existence offer different openings and opportunities. One difference between ‘heaven’ and Earth is that, in ‘heaven’, as in your dreams, you experience what your psyche is capable of tuning into, and it often manifests pretty quickly, while on Earth it’s a lot more complex (and we humans make it even more so) and there’s a much bigger gap between possibility and fulfilment. In heaven you can rebuild the bombed cities of Ukraine in an instant, but on Earth it will take decades and it will involve lots of complications and the future just won’t be the same as the past.

I’ve been thinking about my blogs and podcasts. There will come a point where I can’t continue, so the whole series might not conclude in the same neat way as a fiction story. So in the next few weeks I’m going to write and record a final blog and podcast in advance, for my son Tulki to release when the time comes. The funny thing for him is that I’ll be leaving next to nothing in terms of property and money, but he and his sisters will inherit a load of digital assets instead! The list of passwords and digital details I’m leaving is far longer than my will.

But there’s another question too, that I haven’t resolved. I hope and intend to communicate after I’m gone, at least with folks in my family and inner soul-circle, and I’m wondering who will actually have their receptors open and their antennae up when the time actually comes?

Lots of love from me. Paldywan Kenobi.

You’ll find my podcasts here and my website is here and my forthcoming book is here.

When It All Gets Too Much

My latest podcast

In some of my podcasts I share some very personal things, and this is one of those.

We’re all going through it – that feeling of OMG, this is all too much – and it’s gone global. It hits the best of us.

This is about my own little version of it, which nevertheless is rather heart-rending for me. With a few insights into the process of riding with truth – it can propel us along.

It was recorded in the woods below our farm, on a sunny springtime day, and edited and uploaded same day, 24th March. 18 minutes long.

Thanks for listening! Love, Palden.

Find it on my site at www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

or listen on Spotify – and it’s also on Apple and Google Podcasts.

Having Cancer 2

My latest podcast

About having cancer. All about keeping spirits up and dealing with adversity, about working with both modern pharma and holistic treatments and some thoughts on how it all ends up – actually, you die (so it helps to start preparing).

It’s for anyone with cancer or a similarly soul-rocking ailment, and for interested carers or anyone who knows a cancer patient.

I’m no expert or doctor but I do have cancer, I go through the grinder, I get swamped in fears and tears, and I try to do my best with it all. So this is from me to you, if it’s useful to you.

It’s the second of two, but you don’t have to hear the first one first. When I finished editing this and put the podcast to bed, I just burst out crying. You might hear my heart and soul in this podcast. It means a lot to me and might be one of my best.

Not finished yet though! There’s more to come.

It’s 30 mins long, and you can hear it on Spotify, or on Apple or Google Podcasts

or if you don’t like visiting sites like those, it’s on my website at palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

With love, Palden.

Having Cancer

Here’s my latest podcast

I’ve got cancer and it has me.

It’s full-on and it has been a big life-changer. I have myeloma or bone marrow cancer. I’ve had it over two years and am through the worst stage, I hope, but it’s still hard work.

Every now and then I still get quite ill, not from the cancer but from the secondary issues in my spine and stomach and with infections. You can’t get rid of myeloma – you can only manage it. I probably have a few years left. I’m 71.

So this podcast is for anyone who has cancer or who is involved with someone who has it. It’s about some of the real aspects of keeping your spirits up – the core issue whether you seek to stay alive or to have a good dying process. If you’re feeling kinda okay inside, your whole process will work better, or you’ll handle it better. Failing all else, you’ll be a bit happier.

We have to come to terms with dying, come to peace about it, and about the life we have had, and all its ups and downs. So this is about all that.

Recorded during a howling gale down’ere in Cornwall, Storm Eunice, in late February 2022. The waves are at Portheras Cove in West Penwith, Cornwall, near where I live.

24 mins. One of two podcasts on cancer.

With love, Palden.

Get it on Spotify
Or on Apple Podcasts
Or on Google Podcasts
Or on Palden’s website

Ancestral Passages

Age doesn’t mean the learning stops

So what happens next? This question hovers around me now. It’s not unique to me: even though I’m spending most of my time alone and rather disconnected from society, the whole world is in a similar state and I’m very tuned into it. But the fascinating thing about living with cancer, at least in my case, is that, while death is a prospect facing all of us and it can come at any moment, it comes closer when you have cancer. So, in the last two months or so, I’ve been wondering whether I’ll get to the end of 2022 or whether I have longer.

This was prompted by a new health crisis that started in late October, prompted not by the cancer itself but by its side-effects and the vulnerabilities it and cancer treatments create. In November and December, at times I felt I was losing strength and spirit, deeply worn out. My spirits hold up well if I’m feeling reasonably clear inside, but if my psyche is befogged by illness I labour through a tiredness of spirit that makes me wonder how much longer I can carry on. It was becoming a question of whether to fight for life or hand myself over.

Well, I’ll be wherever is best and wherever I’m most needed. The time and manner of our passing is not in our gift to control. Even so, many of the more awakened souls I know who are currently leaving Earth seem mostly not to have a long illness and a slow decline – their angels pull them out with a quick heart attack or an accident, or they die in their sleep or their armchair and, whoosh, they’re gone.

I’ve had a number of near-death experiences and I know that, when I ‘let go and let God‘, I have, thus far, quite quickly bounced back. It’s not a genuine let-go to do this in order to bounce back, because that’s all about setting conditions, and that doesn’t work with death. The releasing needs to be wholehearted and complete. You just gotta be willing to pass through that door. This permits something else to take over. It takes things deeper onto a soul or a ‘causal’ level, which then can then override the rules and norms of body and psyche, and decisions are made that lie far beyond what we humans are aware of. But, us humans, we struggle for control. We’re addicted to life and, in the modern West, we’ve even persuaded ourselves that being alive in a body is the only reality there is – so we have a bias against dying.

The problem with this is, it’s not like that. And we miss a trick. There’s more to life than this.

A frosty field below the farm, today, at dawn on a magical fullmoon morning

The releasing I went through in late December was in no way dramatic or quick. I just got fed up with holding myself up and keeping going. So I stopped worrying about it and got on with life as it then was – feeling like a 95-year old crock on his last legs. Yet gradually, things picked up and, in early January, I began to see glimmers of a future. Hope tends to keep me going, and somehow my hope had faded. But here, amongst the ashes, something was germinating. Not a roadmap or a sense of how long I have left, but more a sense that there’s something more to do before I go. There’s reason to carry on. As far as I can tell.

It’s funny how the world magically responds to an inner change like this. In the preceding months, Lynne and I had not been able to see each other much – me, because of my immobility and state of ongoing lockdown, and she because of overwork and life-struggles, followed by two months wiped out with Longcovid. She really went through it, last year. By November, both of us were flat out in bed with fatigue and illness, a hundred miles apart. Messaging and phone contact got difficult. But eventually she started reviving and her reappearance was a bit like what it must be like for my eldest daughter Maya and her family, who live north of the polar circle in Swedish Lappland, when the sun first comes up in mid-January after a month or so of darkness. Suddenly life lit up and started looking very different.

That wasn’t all. Maya contacted me to say she was coming over from Sweden – we haven’t seen each other for about six years. Despite Covid restrictions and plane cancellations, and with the help of Tulki, my son, who ferreted out solutions, met her at Heathrow and brought her down here, she came to visit. Wierdly, here in cold, midwinter Britain, the temperature was 20-30 degrees warmer than in Lappland, and on one day we even had sunshine!

On that day we did a clifftop walk from Porthgwarra to Carn Lês Boel, a dramatic headland looking out over the Atlantic, and my favourite pilgrimage place in West Penwith. It’s where, in spirit at least, I’ll probably dance my last dance. I had anticipations about getting back from the Carn to Porthgwarra, nearly two miles, but my spirits were up and antigravity drives were humming, and my legs and sticks teleported me back. Plus the old mountaineer’s trick of avoiding thinking about how far there is yet to go. And the company.

Maya, Tulki and I had some close and meaningful sharings, huddled around the stove while it rained and blew dismally outside. It lifted up my heart, and I think and hope it was the same for them too. Though I have brought together hundreds of people into groups, communities and tribes, I’ve never done well with family and often I’ve been judged as the one at fault in relationships, so this was a healing on a very deep level – or the beginning of one. It felt ancestral as well: I grew up in a dysfunctional nuclear family that was an offshoot of a wider family that had become alienated and atomised in the earlier 20th Century, and it felt to me like this was a cross-generational turning of the tide, a healing of ancestral hurts. Maya’s and Tulki’s generation feel to me as if they’ll bring family back together in a new way.

It’s a new kind of family too: my four grown up ‘children’ are born of three different mothers. In case you think I’m some sort of toxic pervert male, two of those mothers had also had children by multiple fathers, and Lynne has four ‘kids’ by three fathers! So either they are toxic property too, or there’s something new and different going on here. Something transformative and tribal. They and their peers are the founders of the new families, communities and clans that will constitute an answer for the future. As I often say, we’ll only get the the other end of the 21st Century by working together – something my generation made some progress with, but changing the course of human history takes more time than we’d like.

I mention these two events because, late in 2021, I felt there was nothing much to hope for or look forward to. I was feeling leaden, redundant and uncreative – hence that it has been a month since my last blog. Surreptitiously, things changed. Also, I realised that there’s one more writing project to do, which partially I dread (since I’ve sat at so many typewriters and computers for so long that it’s no thrill at all), and partially it gives me a feeling of relief and release, to think of finally getting it out. The added bit is that, at the end of life, I don’t care too much about what others will think – it’s quite liberating for a long-distance author, that. Whether I’ll manage to actually do it, I do not know. I need to write down a good smattering of my inner experiences and extraterrestrial contacts – a story I haven’t told. For the record. And, well, it’s not the first time I’ve broken a cultural taboo or been shat upon for doing it.

As a Virgo I’m rather attached to making a contribution and being useful. Being on Earth hasn’t been a great pleasure, even though I’ve had loads of amazing experiences. It has been a bit like a duty and a mission, a bit like holding your breath underwater while trying to get to the other end of the pool – and it’s further than you thought. So I’ve always had a feeling that, to justify continuing, I must contribute something, to make it worth it. Lots of people have given me lectures about getting over this pathology and about being more realistic and responsible. But from another viewpoint, though such a view conforms to the comfortable groupthink-consensus of our majoritarian society, that’s rather a complacent position. We’re all getting on with our own lives while the world is going down. In the end it’s the reason why we have dictators, hunger, injustice and environmental destruction – we allow it. We’re too busy to worry about it. For some reason, throughout life I’ve felt a strange need to do something about this, driven by Edmund Burke’s enduring statement: for the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing. This presents dilemmas that hit anyone with a conscience.

Six months ago I learned that one factor affecting many or even all cancer patients is that we have spent our lives tuned in to the needs and emotions of others. Cancer comes to pull us back to ourselves. This is true: I’ve had to draw new boundaries and look after myself like never before. But the funny thing is, my soul is still oriented toward service, even as a crippled old cancer-freak. Problem is, this service has benefited others but not my close family. My mother was like this too: at her funeral she was much loved and honoured for all she had done in public, but for me and my brother, while she did her best in a 1940s-50s way, she wasn’t a good mother. If I was hungry she would tell me to go away and play because it wasn’t teatime yet. Thanks. Looking back, I wonder whether she, like me, had Asperger’s Syndrome, with its attendant relationship issues. She channelled her feelings and love into public service, and so do I. To the cost of some and the benefit of others.

Lynne is admirable in this regard. She just about manages to bridge the contradictions here. I’m a very loving man, and I do try, but I don’t and can’t do many of the things in relationship that most ‘neurotypical’ people apparently do. I don’t see and judge life in the same way. I’m programmed up differently, very much in my own bubble-world, and while I’m locked away on a remote farm having cancer treatment, she’s out there in the world, doing battle with its swirling challenges and very much experiencing the ‘too busy’ syndrome that so much plagues our society. As a counsellor and life-wisdom teacher she needs to maintain inner clarity, but mortgage-paying and modernity’s complex pressures pull the other way, and this is a struggle even for the best of souls.

That’s where I was at two decades ago and, bizarrely, as a pensioner and cancer patient, for the first time I have a consistent though modest income, and am more or less released from all that grind. Well, sort of – I’m doing a different kind of grind instead. So Lynne and I have to bridge that wide gap at present, and she also has to deal with the weird Aspie in me, and the possibility that I might pop my clogs any day, and she deserves a medal for all that. All I can give her is delightful chocolate-and rose flavoured tea lovingly brewed in springwater from up the hill – well, I have some pleasant quirks.

Lynne and Maya have made me aware how, through relationships and family, I have unconsciously tried to bridge a gaping chasm between two parts of myself – the mad-professor hermit and the former philosopher-king with no kingdom. I have not succeeded. The only consolation is that there have been benefits in other ways. Nelson Mandela had this problem: a conflict between his allegiance to his family and to his people that he never quite resolved. But in the end it was better for everyone that he did what he did, and perhaps he was supporting his great-grandchildren better than his own children. And life takes many strange turns.

I don’t know how long I shall live. Every estimate of how I shall be tomorrow, in a month’s time or next year is provisional and guesswork. Should I buy a new winter coat or put the money into financing my funeral? Well, there’s only one answer: live day to day, do my best and find out. And be grateful for small things.

The big event yesterday was a hobble down the old trackway into the valley, turning right into the field, balancing my way through a muddy, tractor-ripped gateway and down to where Paget, Andrew and Jon were digging out the old pool by the woods in the low afternoon sun. This will create a revived habitat for pond and stream plants, geese and waders, dragonflies and allsorts. It was great to see, even if at this stage it’s mainly mud and unfinished fencing to keep the cattle out. But then, it’s January, and the right time for it. Capricorn: a time for carrying on regardless and getting on with the digging. And the tax returns. And the daily grind. But underneath, hidden away, something is moving, taking shape.

The corvids are massing and krarking around in the clear, cold sky above the farm, ready for bedding down in the trees down below. They’ve been out and about around Penwith and they gather together to sleep in the woods. The geese will come in soon, settling on the lake shores down the valley. I think it’s time to finish this blog and post it. Time to light the stove and get some dinner on. Thank you to Teri in Australia for prompting me to write this. And bless you all for being you.

Love, Paldywan Kenobi.

Down’ere in Cornwall, right at the far end
www.palden.co.uk

St Michael’s Mount, as seen from the iron age courtyard house on the hill on our farm – probably eight miles away

Heaven Forfend

Stumbling on the Path

I wasn’t ready for it. The crows in the woods below the farm were on form. Each morning they wake up just before dawn and chatter in hundreds, working themselves up and suddenly taking to the air together, swooping around over the fields, doing crazy tribal manoeuvres, crarking and grating, settling and then swooping again as a mass before landing on the rooftops and trees of the farm and the big house next door, to sit there awhile and begin their day as individual crows, each with a life to live.

It shows the power of synergy, when they interlock minds to fly as one being, with no visible leadership, making a deep rumbling as hundreds of wings thrash the air in harmony. Meanwhile, waking up in pain and feeling unwell, I had missed an opportunity to sound-record one of the best dawn crow displays of late (for my next podcast). Oh well. That’s what happens when your life is humiliatingly falling apart and all your well-learned human capabilities start failing you.

Plus some dilemmas. On Thursday afternoon I landed up sitting there crying my eyes out, unable to get help after four days of trying, following a stream of unreturned calls, answering machines, referrals to other numbers, and promises unkept. Yet again I was landing up at the end of the day having got nowhere. I was in pain and going down. The dilemma is that, when I do get someone at the other end, they’re really good – but somehow, the system just isn’t working, and a clock was ticking on me.

Come Saturday morning, I got through to an emergency number and the nurse was really helpful and attentive, assuring me she would ring back within an hour – and she did. “I hate to do this to you, Palden, but I must refer you to yet another service”. OMG. Eventually, by afternoon I was down in the Urgent Care Unit at West Cornwall Hospital in Penzance. By evening I was at last fixed with the medication I had been promised five days before. Penny, busy helping another of her care clients move house, came to pick me up in an enormous van and dropped me home. Staggering around on autodrive, I lit the woodstove, made tea and then had what my mother in her later years used to call ‘a good sit down’. Thus ended a nightmare week during which I had squared with a few rather hard things.

Medically, my prospects are not good – I’m doing alright with the cancer but not with its side-effects, and the prospects are ‘risky’. I’m at a choice-point. It all boils down to a matter of will-to-live. A decision in my soul, in my bones, not my head. Will this crisis be followed by an upswing or a downward slide? This isn’t just about health conditions. Getting through each day has become more difficult and I’ve started getting tired of it, wondering how much it’s worth struggling on.

It’s a bit like climate change: a question of mitigation (trying to solve the problem) or adaptation (getting used to the idea that you can’t). Do I have what it takes to break medical expectations? Or shall I let myself decline in peace, perhaps during the coming year? If I revive, for what and for whom? I am on my own almost all of the time and, recently with diminished creative inspiration, there isn’t a lot to do except talk to myself and deal with a succession of difficulties in a muddle-through kind of way.

Yes, that’s honing to the soul, and there’s always something to learn. But fighting to stay alive is not all there is to life, and there comes a point where it gets a bit stupid resisting a tide that currently seems to want to carry me back home. I’m leaving the question open for now, but it’s sitting with me.

‘Heaven…’, sang Talking Heads a few decades ago, ‘Heaven is a place, where nothing, nothing ever happens…’. I don’t agree. That’s an earthbound perspective arising from the forgetting process we went through around birth and in early life. Forgetting who we are and why we came. So going back to where we came from becomes a scary issue that few wish to face, because it involves remembering who we are, or were, or could be, and why we came. But the rub is, everyone will face it. And things do happen after death, and there’s more to life than what we’ve experienced thus far.

Astrologers amongst you will probably recognise the symptoms: I’m on a Neptune opposition Saturn. I’ve been given cancer to give my life a new focus. The last two years have been like ten. Struggles have changed me a lot, for better and worse, but there comes a point where a new hurdle hoves into view: letting be, letting go and ‘letting God’.

We get these let-gos throughout life, and the more experience of them that we gain, the more we position ourselves well for the final one. But there are some biggies to get to grips with – particularly regrets. Things we did, or didn’t do, that we could have done differently.

If we’ve done something with our lives, if we have at least tried, other things come around too, to show us where we got things more or less right. For me, as I slowly pull out of my temporal life-slot, things are coming to pass that I got used to accepting as unchangeable. World transformation is not an easy thing, and we’re in a painful period, but things are starting to wrench themselves out of their stuckness – also known as ‘normality’. The mechanism by which change is happening is not one that anyone could have forecast. It’s getting us from behind and underneath.

It started with Covid and its cascading consequences, and we’re heading for the next big wave. Again, it will be something that few visualised or expected. It’s a raking-out of all and everything, very thorough, corroding and eroding many things, all separately, and building up into an enormous slow, drawn-out quake, an avalanche of issues that will come to a scrunch-point – and then something else starts happening.

We’re not used to insecurity and uncertainty but we’re being forced to get used to it. Covid, with its consequential effects, was just the start. There’s more (see here). In the end, all will be well, but it’s really difficult now – my 25ish futile telephone calls of the last week were a minuscule example of the cumulative systems breakdown that is coagulating at present. The exception has become the rule, and relative chaos is becoming the new order.

After a life of going against the grain, I’ll be leaving a world where the logjams are at last beginning to free up. In a way, it’s a time of tribulation, but in another way it’s a time of solutions and breakthroughs, goaded by crisis and necessity. But if we truly want a new world, we must truly let go of the old one – and that’s what the coming decades are about.

Hence we see such daunting attempts at social control today. Humanity has started sliding down a ski-slope and it’s shit scared of losing control. Stamp out the virus, rescue the economy, maintain normality, control the future, blame it all on others. Change whatever you like as long as it doesn’t affect me.

This is not all that there is to life. Even fighting against it is not all there is to life. There’s more. Humanity is struggling to figure out why we are here, and what exactly for. It’s an endless process. It’s the Universe trying to find out who it is, by scraping the accumulated experience of billions of struggling humans into an enormous databank of universal experience, fiddling with models and algorithms to find out what it’s here for. And whether the telling of the story really was worth it. Or whether, as my Tibetan teacher HH Gyalwa Karmapa XVI once put it, it was all simply a fart in the void.

Meanwhile, now on medication, I’m beginning to feel ‘better’ and out of danger, but I’ve been knocked down a rung, and this is a different place. Another fullmoon has passed. Here’s sending a hug to those who will be alone at Christmas, and best wishes to all of you, whatever you are or aren’t celebrating, with a reminder and a smile: it’s all okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

Love, Palden.

A new podcast is coming soon when my production team (me) gets its act together. Meanwhile, an optional extra: some music, Pink Floyd’s On the Turning Away

Intelligence

Latest podcast

Intelligence.

One of two – the other comes later.

This is about using our intelligence more deeply. Putting instinct and intuition to work.

I’ve hovered around the edges of the intel world in my humanitarian, peace-activist and consciousness work, and here I tell a few tales of things that happened, some of the ways I’ve done it, and some of the lessons learned. Might be useful to some of you.

This and the podcast that follows soon are also both about ‘higher intelligence’ – drawing on sources far beyond our normal reach.

But first, the waves of Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall, on a mighty-rollers day…

Makes one wonder where the power really lies.

You can find my podcasts on Spotify, Apple and Google Podcasts, as well as here on my own site:

http://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Treading the Edge

New podcast: illness, and hovering on life’s periphery

In my blogs and podcasts I seek to leave a record of the kind of experiences a person like me with cancer goes through, and of course this will include down moments.

There are times when I struggle. Here’s one. It isn’t an easy listen, and perhaps it’s not for everyone. Or if you’re new to these podcasts, listen to another one first, perhaps.

It might be valuable for anyone being touched by death or illness in any way, or thinking about it, because it might give some clues about what it feels like coming close to it – from the inside. It gives a taste of the kind of space you can go into – especially during the dark hours before dawn.

My brains were operating really slowly here, and I was going moment to moment – though I managed to get to the end! I don’t prepare what I’m going to say: I just dwell on it for a while, the moment to start comes, I switch on my recorder and off we go. I have done a lot of radio and public speaking before though, so I’m not unpracticed at this.

Afterwards I clean up the recording a little – I remove some of the ums and ahs, longer pauses, coughs or errors. Then I edit in the intro and outro, with added nature recordings, and that’s it.

I talk about death quite a lot. It’s an area of attention that’s relevant for me, and people like me, at this time. Cancer patients get it. It’s something we all need to face, and society needs to talk more about it. So I’m articulating my perspectives on it. I’ve had a few near-death experiences earlier in life, and I’m a bony old esoteric weirdo too, so I’m a wee bit more prepared for this than many people!

After my health crisis of a week ago, when this podcast was recorded, I’m getting better and ‘coming back’ gradually day by day. I visit hospital again on Monday for a checkup and review.

Unless there’s a change, the next podcast is about soul education. There’s more to come, inshallah.

This is a notion we Westerners need to add to our language for common usage: if it is for the greatest good – usually translated as, ‘if it is the will of God’. Life is something we cannot just impose upon, since it has a way of imposing on us too. You notice this more in late life than in earlier life.

palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Thanks for being with.

Palden.

Out Of It

Inner journeys in the far beyond. And back.

I was awake at 4.30 this morning, listening to the wind rattling in from the Atlantic and wondering which would be better – stay in bed, lost in hypnopompic wanderings, or get up, light the woodstove and start my day? I got up. I’ve been ill this week with a weird infection. Trouble is, when you’re on cancer immunosuppressants, this is to be expected, and I was due to get something sometime. Still shielding after two years, my immune system hasn’t had much exercise. And I’ve been in bed.

But my immune system, though under test, seems to be in good enough shape – I seem not to be under serious threat. I’m so lucky to be able to lie on a raised, built-in bed from which I can look out of my big windows, even though today I’m watching the wind strafing the trees and the birds getting blustered. I’m on Vit C, antioxidants, homoeopathics and allsorts. I lie there with a porage-head, aching body and swollen glands, though I have a normal temperature. I watch the world outside and at times get a feeling as if the folks back home are using my psyche like a camera to get a look at it.

There’s always something to gain from an illness. In the previous weeks I’d been feeling scrambled, dealing with the intricacies of being semi-disabled and mentally constrained in a busy world that has no time for folks in my state. But this illness has zeroed all those concerns. It took the past and future away, dumping me in the moment. And I’ve been travelling again. After all, I’ve lost my driving licence and I’m rather a traveller-soul, so I’ve substituted wings for wheels.

One of the Boscregan Cairns, Nanquidno, West Penwith – a paltry 4,000ish years old

Someone wrote a while ago, asking me to talk more about my meditation methods. Thanks for that, and I’d love to. But there’s a problem. I don’t follow a method. I just follow my well-worn, habituated ways on a pretty spontaneous basis. I do what comes up. That doesn’t answer the question, but in a way it does.

You see, I started exploring consciousness on acid and other psychedelics in the late 1960s. This was a form of direct access to deeper realms, and that’s where I started. My first experience of meditation was when I was sitting in jail (as a student protester), sharing a cell with three Sikh immigrants. I asked them what they were doing when they were praying and muttering to themselves. They taught me something close to Vipassana, mindfulness. Bless them – I never saw them again. They were probably chucked out of Britain.

Then, by age 25 I was doing Buddhist meditation with the Tibetans. This is far more magical than mindfulness meditation, involving visualising the deity sitting on top of your head (in detail), repeating the mantra and making prayer, then letting the deity dissolve into light, which floods into you, so that you become the deity. Then you stay there, in stillness, being the deity. This trained up my inner sensitivities, and the lamas’ blessings, company and teaching really helped. They healed me after the trauma of being in a failed revolution and being hounded and exiled. I had also had a near-death experience at age 24 which had scrubbed much of my memory and identity, and their protection truly saved me. What memory I have of my life before age 24 is reconstructed, not direct – except, interestingly, for glimpses of spiritual and deeply moving experiences earlier in my life. Those memories seemed to have been stored in a different part of memory.

But then, later, one of the Lamas said I was not here in this life to be a Buddhist. This was a shock but, within a few days, I knew this was one of the greatest gifts they had given me. I had always been eclectic, and my psychedelic past had given me a direct experience of the world of spirit. The Lamas had plucked me from the jaws of disaster, put me back on my feet and sent me forth.

By then I had realised I was quite psychic. This isn’t special – any more than, say, making music or cooking food. There’s a burdensome side to it too. Everyone can do it, but some are brilliant at it. I wouldn’t call myself brilliant, but I’ve made deep choices to pay attention to and increasingly trust my inner promptings, funny feelings and periodic inspirations. The more you listen, the more you get it. But here’s the key bit, and this applies to meditation too. You have to choose to give yourself over to it, to learn how to set yourself aside. You have to give permission to energies and entities bigger than you to participate in your life. You have to learn to trust the capacity of your soul to learn, and trust that all will be well. You have to lose your fear. All this happens bit by bit, as you cross various thresholds. It’s a life’s work.

To get back to the question… at present, therefore, I practice a number of things. I do quiet meditation when needed – it’s important to come home to myself, escape the complex spider’s webs of human concern and see things more as they actually stand. As a cancer patient, I do a healing session with my ‘inner doctors’, once every few weeks. I let them examine me and my energy-bodies, and operate on me. I find it really works.

Sometimes I just sit there with booming brains and a never-ending stream of neuroses – though giving proper space to them can also be healing, to a point. Sometimes I do world-healing work, bringing light and healing to other cancer patients worldwide (what Tibetans call tong-len), or to trouble-spots, or I visit crisis places and surround them in light and protection (similar to lightworking), also working to unblock and unconceal things that bring darkness, pain and obstruction to the world.

Sometimes I do inner aid work, where I carry out more specific humanitarian-type work in crisis zones I’m focused on, or I pay attention to a particular issue – mainly global (I tend not to get involved in British politics with this, because of risk of personal bias). Afghanistan has had my attention recently, but I also pay a lot of attention to ignored places such as Yemen, Syria, Myanmar and the Sahel. I do not take my cues from the mass-media. Before this I do some inner prep to get myself in the right state, and if I’m not right, I don’t do it. Afterwards I try to round it up and review it. We used to have a group doing this together, and we’d send in notes of our experiences, so see what common threads were appearing and to observe our work on it.

Sometimes I practice ‘meditative availability’ – I hand myself over to ‘the management’ to let them use my psyche, to give them access to this planet, and to let them do their business through me. Sometimes I go into a stream-of-consciousness, a kind of channelling where I get occasional ‘downloads’ – a bundle of insight that suddenly comes, that sometimes can take weeks or even years to unpack.

One of the stones at Boscawen-un stone circle – a stripling at 4,300 years

And sometimes I sit or lie there feeling utterly useless and uninspired, but I generally keep on with it, because that’s what happens, and it’s part of the game. And sometimes more is going on underneath than we’re aware of. Either way, over a period of years you start notching up loads of inner experience, which interlocks to an extent with daily life, but also it runs independently of it. And there are paradoxes to it: for example, when I’m ill, I sometimes have particularly rich experiences.

Sometimes I scan the consciousness that lies within incoming Atlantic weather systems – in Cornwall we get them full-on, and they carry messages. Sometimes I become aware of old soul-friends, or I spend time with my family, whom I cannot meet in real life. Sometimes I talk with the ancient spirits of West Penwith, the area where I live – sort of inner research. Sometimes I float off, to have completely unexpected experiences. Yesterday, in my illness-delerium, I found myself pulled out and taken back to my home world. That hasn’t happened for a few years. It chirped me up no end to be with my people again – they’re so far away, in consciousness-reality terms.

These are the kinds of things that go on in my so-called, for want of a better word, ‘meditations’.

There’s something important here. When doing innerwork, it is crucial to avoid imposing biases and preferences on others. It’s important also to ask permission – ‘May I?‘ and ‘Can I?‘. If the answer is ‘No’, or ‘Try another approach’, then take note. This isn’t about projecting our own judgements on situations, and it isn’t about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. The primary orientation is ‘the greatest good’, and sometimes that can mean difficult stuff. For those of you interested in this question, there are two links below that discuss the issues more fully (stuff I wrote in 1994 and 2002).

It’s time to end and I must return to bed before my energy-batteries run down. I’m quite unwell, but it’s funny how the psychoactive component in some illnesses can churn up interesting things. Besides, lying in bed all day isn’t hyper-interesting, so taking a break from it now and then, to dodder around my home doing basic chores, can be welcome. This morning, at 7am, I managed to sort out all my monthly payments – phew. The worst bit is answering those anxious messages asking why I hadn’t answered the previous message. When you read this blog you might get a different impression, but the true and short answer to the inevitable how-are-you messages is, ‘Half dead, and still alive!’. But I did manage to write a blog.

Bless us all. We need it. Then spread it around. Lots of people need it. Especially the people we don’t think of so often.

Love, Paldywan

Two articles on consciousness work and psychic work:
About doing consciousness work
Psychic conflict resolution work

Us Together

A podcast about building global consensus for change and survival

Here’s my latest podcast, and it’s about….

US TOGETHER.

About the collective unconscious, beliefs and fundamental questions, and the mechanics of the way that deep change happens in real life.

The ‘official line’ – what we must subscribe to and replicate if we wish to succeed in the existing socio-economic system – is flawed and unsustainable, and the deeper psyche of humanity understands something rather different.

http://palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

With love from me.

Paldywan.