life – Page 2 – Notes from the Far Beyond

Ixazomib

Yes, that’s the drug I’m on today, together with Lenidalomide, Dexamethasone, Apixaban and Aciclovir – it’s enough to make pharma-paranoiacs run a mile. Many have been the messages I’ve had which recommend all sorts of alternative means of staying alive. No doubt well intentioned, I nevertheless find myself writing back to ask whether they have actual experience of what they recommend – which has mostly not been the case. Most seem to think I have a ‘normal’ cancer, without actually knowing I have Multiple Myeloma, an incurable blood cancer and definitely not normal.

I’ve listed all the holistic supplements, remedies and methods that I use in my cancer treatment in my book and audiobook ‘Blessings that Bones Bring‘. With a philosophy of counting my blessings, I’m doing both pharma and holistics, and it works, and the ideological contradiction between them that many people set up for themselves is something I gladly omit to subscribe to.

Just as well really – I’m alive against the odds. But the biggest medicine of all is this. If you are practicing your life-purpose, the reason why you came here to Earth, as a priority, then you’re likely to stay alive until it’s reasonably complete – whatever that means. However, here’s the rub: for some people, dying and the manner of their death can also be part of that life-purpose. Princess Di was an example.

It’s an initiation. You might be a smart-arse with a masters or a doctorate, but they will not qualify you for this. What’s needed is every single cubic inch of humanity you have in you. It comes at you, takes away your control and takes you off, out of your body to another place.

Or perhaps you believe it all goes dark and the you that is you somehow suddenly stops being you – you’ve become a useless pile of dust returning to the dust. Well, good luck with that, though you might be heading for a few surprises. In my experience, the journey doesn’t stop there. Just as well really.

I do have a strange tendency to believe that there’s more to existence than that. The last five years, since cancer gave itself to me, have reinforced that belief. If indeed it is a belief. After all, do I believe in breakfast? Do I believe in trees, rain and sunshine? I’ve been really close to dying, several times. Actually, I shouldn’t be alive – and that’s not a medical opinion but my own observation. I’ve made it through thanks to a series of miracles, a few acts of faith and a strange capacity to rebirth myself. Plus the prayers and goodwill of friends, the blessings of guardian angels, and… work. Yes, work. Working at the reason why I came, and whether I’ve done enough of it to feel satsified with a job well enough done.

Much to my surprise. I wasn’t expecting to be alive after five years, and it leaves me in rather an open space. I thought that at most I had three years, and now I’m on extra time. It’s a matter of figuring out how to make plans while knowing that I’m vulnerable enough, and my grip on life is tenuous enough, to pop my clogs tomorrow or the next day.

For me, it’s a matter of taking charge of my death. It’s my decision – not anyone else’s. Except perhaps for those angels. A year ago, my haematological specialist at the Royal Cornwall hospital said to me, “Well, Mr Jenkins, I don’t know what you do, and I don’t want to know but, whatever you’re doing, keep on doing it“. Indeed, I did, and I’m still here. I’m an easy customer for her – I get few complications, I’m uncomplaining though I’m also calm and clear about certain issues, and she leaves me to my own devices. No, not toxic digital devices, but devices such as intuition… and inner doctors.

Yes, I’ve got some inner doctors. I called them in at an early stage. My angels shunted a few in, too. Once a week, I have a session with them (and at no charge). I go into myself, breathing myself down into a deep state, and I open myself up to them, and there they are. They examine and scan me – using psychospiritual technologies that make Startrek look primitive. I feel them umming and aaahing over things, and consulting, and sometimes I’m flooded with light, or they insert a light-tube into me, or they focus on an organ, and often I’m not at all sure what they’re doing but I can feel them doing it.

At times they raise me up to their level and it feels so friendly, inclusive and welcoming there. I kinda hover there, on my back, held in the middle of their energy-field and jiggled, poked, massaged and blessed by invisible forces. After a while they drop me back down again.

It’s funny how it works. The doctors at Treliske have been worrying about the fact that I’ve been a lifelong smoker – it helps my brains and, as a psychic, also helps me stay on Earth – since I am not a foodie, which is the other way many psychics stay on Earth. So I was to go in for a lung scan. But during my last session with the inner doctors, I did two things. One was to ask for their help in cleaning out my lungs and removing anything that’s unhelpful, and the second was to offer myself up and release all hopes, fears and expectations, to get to a state of full acceptance that, whatever is to happen will happen, and it will be good.

So they flooded my lungs with light and I felt them doing something there. I continued with this in the days that followed but, the day before the scan, the thought came, “Hmmm, this needs more time…“. Claire, a trusty helper from over the hill, took me for the scan. I walked into chaos – the power had gone off – but eventually, on the second interview, the nurse said, “Ah, Mr Jenkins, I’m sorry to say that we can’t scan you because you had a PET scan last August and we cannot scan you more than once a year“. I quietly chuckled. Yes indeed, this needs more time, and I’d just been given it. The nurse didn’t notice me looking upwards and smiling. This is how it sometimes works.

I thanked her for her consideration, saying I am electrosensitive and it matters to me. “Ah, that’s interesting“, said she, proceeding to ask questions as if she knew about it. This was refreshing: in the last five years only one doctor has indicated interest. He showed me a paper in The Lancet which correlated incidences of Multiple Myeloma with proximity to nuke stations. Since then I’ve met other Myeloma patients who have worked operating radar systems, driving nuclear-waste trains from Sellafield, working as high-tension power cable or mobile phone engineers, or as programmers who’ve used a lot of wi-fi…

Once information about EM-radiation is finally made public, everyone will no doubt bleat, “But why weren’t we told?”. To which the answer is: “Why didn’t you feel it and use your commonsense? Did you think it would be alright to irradiate yourself all day and every day without consequence?”.

Well, we humans… we find quite intricate ways of limiting our possibilities and making life difficult. The same applies to me. However, while I have my own self-immolating patterns, I’ve also looked after myself and now find myself still alive as a result – if proof be needed. I’m definitely glad that, at an early age (21) I went vegetarian and changed my life – it has paid off. Yes, I got cancer, but my capacity to deal with it is far greater than most people’s, because on the whole I’ve had a good diet and lifestyle, having built up a good reserve stock of resilience.

But here’s what in the end is the key bit: I’ve been following a growth path, with fewer diversions and denials than most ‘average’ people. If you live on purpose and in purpose, it gives you distinct reasons for staying alive.

But even then, the stories of our lives are multiplex and not limited to being alive in a body. Many of us aren’t even fully installed in our bodies, even when emotionally attached and afraid of losing them. The Council of Nine put it quite well…

“Your Planet Earth is the most beautiful that exists in the universe. It has a physical variety that no other planet has. It has a varied climate that no other planet has. In all the universe there is no planet in existence that has the physical characteristics of Planet Earth. It is the rarest of beauties, and it does attract souls which, once they have come, would like to come back again. This has created a bottleneck of souls recycling on Earth.

“It is of a different nature from any other planet. It has aspects of all planets: it is like a composite of the Universe, with all the positive and all the negative aspects, and all in between, and this is what attracts souls.

“It has with it a gravitational pull that is different from other planets, and because of this a soul begins to feel a physicalness. Souls become adapted to their physical bodies, and they forget the freedom and pleasures they have without it.

“The Earth was created to be a paradise. When souls achieve harmony it will become a paradise again. Planet Earth is the only one of its kind, the only planet of free [individualised] choice in the entire universe, the planet created for the balancing of the spiritual with the physical – in other words, the creating of paradise.“

To some extent this ‘paradise’ business is an attitude of mind. In a funny sort of way, since getting cancer and becoming partially disabled I’ve been happier than before. It’s all to do with how we deal with the life we’ve been given. Nowadays, a lot of people do a lot of complaining about life, as if it’s all someone or something else’s fault. But my best recommendation is, just go to Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, Belarus, Syria, Ukraine, Xinjiang or Myanmar – there are plenty of options – and do a full-spectrum re-assessment. You might find that you come to feel differently about things. That’s what happened to me.

Yeah, life’s a bitch, then you die. However, here’s another gem from the Nine: no one is here by accident.

So, you see, even on pharmaceutical cancer drugs, you can do something with it to make it good. That’s where that free, individualised choice truly lies. It’s on us, not anyone or anything else.

Love from me, Paldywan

http://www.palden.co.uk
and if you live in Cornwall, check out the Aha Class:
http://www.palden.co.uk/aha.html

And look, no footnotes!

The Squirty Squeeze

I didn’t expect to be alive today. Yet here I am and here we are, and this is it. We’re a quarter of the way through the 21st Century.

Born mid-century in 1950, it’s rather an age-marker for me. In my twenties in the 1970s, I didn’t really expect that the world would still exist in 2025 – it seemed an age away, and back then the world’s prospects seemed very much at risk. They still are.

It feels as if I’ve lived several lives since then. A new one started in 2019. As a cancer patient since then, I haven’t expected to be alive now either. Five years ago it felt like I’d reached the end, with just one year left. My body was on its last legs, wrung out with pain, I felt like a ninety-something and it seemed as if my angels were close, eyeing me and laying the tracks to receive me.

Or perhaps they were hovering there discussing what to do with me next. Two years later, reviving from a crisis, I woke up one morning with a voice in my head, saying, “Ah, there’s something more that we’d like you to do…”.

Here I am, wondering what’s next. Life is still very provisional. I have a form of blood cancer that can’t be holistically melted away, medically cut out or irradiated. It has permanently changed my body, giving me partial disablement and about 7-8 different side-issues. It’s called Multiple Myeloma because it shows itself in many diverse forms in different people, though it particularly affects the bones – it’s also called Bone Marrow Cancer.

Things indeed are provisional: recently I took on a booking to speak at a conference in May and I wondered what state I’d be in then. However, I’m accustomed to performing in whatever state I find myself in, and if I’m wobbly and unwell I’ve found that, onstage, I can nevertheless be right on form, with my thinking, planning mind already nudged to the side. So unless I’m actually dead, the conference talk should be alright.

But I still get anticipations and, over Christmas, I worked through a good few of them – one being a fear that my cancer might be spreading and becoming something else, something more. I’m having tests later in January.

To be honest, the fear comes from a creeping feeling that whatever happens next might be too big for me, that I can’t handle it. It’s precipice-fear, ‘little me’ stuff, and the kind of fear a little boy gets when looking up at the big, wide world, feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of getting to grips with it all. I spent a few days grinding through this stuff. Then I started emerging from the other side as the newmoon came.

In life, having been through quite a lot of grinding and scraping, I seem to have made it through. So there’s a good chance I’ll make it through the next lot, somehow. They call that resilience. Though, for me, it’s as if that resilience is rooted in a strange mixture of wobbly vulnerability and an accumulated knowing that I’ve done it before and I can do it again.

If I work through my fear in advance, I tend to unmanifest whatever I fear because I’ve already faced it – or at least I start facing it and showing willing. Or it becomes changed, turning out differently and easier than it looked. Or it becomes advantageous to feel the fear and do it anyway, since it then becomes a nexus of breakthrough. I learned this in conflict zones: I’d shit bricks before I went and often I’d be dead calm and on form when I was in the middle of crunchy situations. There were only some cases of bullets flying (I was quite good at not being in places where trouble happened), but there’s a lot of chaos, tension, mess, pathos, pain and complication in conflict situations, and the psycho-emotional aspect of war was very much there.

Right now, I’m not as close to dying as I have been at various times in the last five years. Cancer came during 2019 with no detectable warning, so I didn’t have to go through anticipatory tremors about cancer beforehand, like some people have to when they’re given a diagnosis. I hadn’t felt good in the preceding six months, though it had seemed like a classic down-time that I would hopefully pull out of. But then one day my back cracked while I was gardening. The four lowest back-vertebrae had softened, and in that moment they collapsed. From that moment my life was irreversibly changed. Even after that, for two months it seemed like I had a very bad back problem, though eventually a brilliant specialist in hospital identified Myeloma. Already half-dead, the news hit me really hard – also hitting my then-partner and son, who were involved too.

But when disasters strike, I tend to be quickish to adjust, crashing through the gears of my psyche and getting really real – I don’t waste time fighting it once I realise it’s a full-on crisis. There I was, in total pain, hardly able to move, feeling wretched, and the doctors were saying I had perhaps a year or, if I was lucky, I might survive – they couldn’t tell. I wasn’t expecting this.

There’s something rather special about coming close to death. Everything simplifies dramatically, and many of life’s normal details and concerns evaporate. You’re faced with the simple, straight question of surviving or dying – and the meaning of life. Is this it? Is this the end?

This simplification is a necessary part of the dying process. Many of life’s details that we believe to be important are not actually so. On the other hand, certain experiences and life-issues come to the fore – things we’re glad about, things we regret, things we missed, things we sidelined, things we got right and things we screwed up.

Many of the things that people and society judged to be wrong, bad or inadequate… well, these are the judgements, narrownesses and prejudices of the time and the social environment we’ve lived in. Things that conventional society considers good – money, success, status, property, fame – become diminished, or they flip, turning inside out so that the price we paid for them reveals itself. We might have had a million, but were we wealthy in spirit? We might have a doctorate, but did we really understand? We might have taught a thousand people, but where have they gone?

It depends on how we respond to the arrival of death, and a key part of this is forgiveness of others and of the world, for what they did and didn’t do. There’s also self-forgiveness for all, or at least most, of the ways we have let ourselves down, got our hands dirty or avoided the main issues and the bottom-line truths. Forgiveness lets new, non-judgemental perspectives come through – seeing how things actually were, from all sides, as seen in front of the backdrop of posterity. This deep simplification and clarification is a necessary part of the dying process, and the more we can accept it and make it our own, the better things tend to go.

The more we have faced the music during our lives and amidst our life-crises, the easier this gets at death. Dying is a gradual, cumulative process for many of us, unless we pass away suddenly – it’s not just about our last breath. There’s the matter of dying before we die – going through at least some of those squeezy, grindy processes that we’ll meet at death while we’re still alive. It shortens the queue of issues that can come up around the moment of death.

When I was younger I thought that my growth would slow down in old age – this is not so. It’s going like the clappers. My capacity to process emotions and profound issues has slowed, though it has also deepened to compensate. Nowadays, when faced with a crunchy issue, I need more time to process it through. But there’s a cathartic element to it that makes it easier – a bit like writing a resignation letter and having done with the whole thing. So the big let-go and the forgiveness process seem to accelerate inner growth in the final chapter of life.

Strangely, in late life, recent memory fades relatively and longterm memory comes forward. The recent and the more distant past rearrange themselves, taking on a different perspective. I’ve found myself working through issues deriving from decades ago, together with lifelong patterns that are exposed by things happening now, and sometimes by feelings or memories that blurt up from the hidden recesses of my psyche. In late life we’re strongly encased in our patterns, laid down, routinised and reinforced over the decades, like clothing we can’t quite peel off.

After all, if you are, say, 72 years old, you’ve eaten over 26,000 breakfasts. There’s not a lot we can change because it’s already done. The consequences are with us and there’s no Undo button. But that stuckness in our karmic patterns can be repaired too, if we let it.

We can change our feelings, our standpoint, by learning from the lessons that life has thrust at us – the deeper, more abiding, more all-round lessons. In the end, there is no right or wrong to what has happened in life, though there certainly are consequences – and that’s where our choice and options lay. But it was done, time has moved on and the page has turned.

It was as it was, and now there’s the future, and whether we actually change our behaviours, beliefs and befallings. We need to sort it out with ourselves and with others, if that’s necessary and possible, or accept it, or change the way we feel about it, or own it, or drop it – or do whatever brings some sort of forwardness. That’s a key aspect of life on Earth: living in a perpetually-changing dimension of time and creating forwardness out of the situations we encounter along the way.

If only it were that simple. It’s so easy to forget and lose our way. We get brought back to it when we get to the end of our lives. What was all that for – that life? Am I happy with what happened? Have I become something more than what I was when I started? Did I do what I came here to do?

I’ve been a good boy and a bad boy. I’ve done things I feel happy about and things I regret. I’ve helped a lot of people and hurt a good few. Some things I got right and some things I misjudged. My feelings around all sorts of things have changed as life has progressed. Mercifully, it seems to get lighter as I sift through the piles of detritus left over from a life that has been lived, committing it to posterity one spoon-load at a time.

Though I’ve had a few close runs with dying since getting cancer, a funny thing has happened. I’ve gone through an unexpected inner rebirth – not ‘getting better’ but, as Evangelicals would put it, being born again. The consequence is that, as my spirit-propped condition has improved, life has become more complicated. Part of me seeks that, because I’m not one who can easily sit around weighing down seats, acting like a passive old crock with his head plugged into a TV. Being a passive care-recipient doesn’t turn me on at all.

Partially the complexity comes at me from the world around, even though it’s me unconsciously manifesting it – recently I’ve been getting five friend requests a day on Facebook, presumably because an algorithm decided I’m a somebody. Oh, thanks. I do like friends, but keeping track of it all is beyond me now. To me, a friend is someone who mutually brightens up my life like I might theirs. (Please ‘follow’ me instead!).

I’ve even been setting a few things in motion. Whether they will work is another matter, since I cannot organise them myself as I used to. The three main ones concern the Tuareg, the Sunday Meditation and the ancient sites of West Penwith.[1] My likely short shelf-life, being unpredictable, and the dysfunctions of my brains, make me thoroughly unreliable in organising things.

Also, there’s not a lot of point starting something if it subsides when I pop my clogs. So I’m scattering some seeds of possibility for other people to take care of, if they will, to see whether or not they take root. Which they might, or they might not, and that’s okay. As a reserve option I’m leaving a biggish archive of work online in case someone picks it up, sometime in the vastness of the future. There’s a remarkable loss of control that accompanies dying, and this is one aspect of it.

So dealing with complexities has been quite a big one. I’m asked “How are you?” seven times a day. The answer is, “Well, I’m like THIS, really!” Do you yourself do a systems-check seven times a day to monitor your condition, and can you articulate it in words each time? Even so, I appreciate your concern and good wishes, and I write these periodic blogs to let you know how I am. When they stop, you’ll know I’ve gone, or I’m on my way.

I’ve written before about dying being a gradual process, and I’d call myself seventy-ish percent dead at present, and stable (as it goes) – I go up and down each day. Today (Wednesday 1st January) I’m working myself up for a hospital visit tomorrow for a three-monthly check-up, and a generally friendly but virologically-dangerous period of waiting for it in waiting rooms. Meanwhile, my stalwart friend Claire will sit outside in her car, reading books and twiddling thumbs in a shopping-mall car park – very exciting. I have to work myself up for events like this, and the day after I’m often rather wiped out.

It’s worth thinking about this continuum. Yes, part of you is already dead. That is, part of you is in the otherworld, where your soul, in the timeless zone, is closer to eternity than you currently feel yourself to be. This is of course an illusion – it’s more a matter of where we place our awareness and what we give attention to while we’re alive. That’s one reason I do the Sunday Meditations: to give busy people a manageable, uncomplicated, regular time-slot in which to give the soul a little attention. Do it for a year and you’ll have done it fifty times. It’s like a weekly shot of cozmickle multivitamins. Good for helping face life and its rigours.

Oh, and by the way… lots of people use funny ways of talking about dying, as if not wanting to mention or face it. Like, ‘passing’. Be honest: it’s called ‘dying’. It happens to all of us, inescapably, and you’ve done it before. Even Elon Musk won’t be able to buy himself out of it, on Earth or on Mars. It’s an integral part of our life-cycle, just like getting born. In the Tibetan way of seeing things, the whole of our waking lives are equal in experiential magnitude to the apparently much shorter processes of getting born or getting dead. It’s all about experiential intensity.

During life, moments of crisis that come up can be rather like dying. They’re moments when time stretches in duration while compressing in intensity, when everything comes to a head, crunching together – and these climactic experiences are our training for the expanded moment of death, when we transit, float or squeeze ourselves into another world, whether in peace or struggling with it. How we deal with our crises in life has a big effect on how we deal with our dying. We can make it easier or we can make it harder. The funny thing is that, though dying involves a complete loss of control, it involves possibly the biggest choice and free-will opportunity of our lives since we got born.

My Mum did that. At the end of her life, at age 92, she just could not handle more hospital stays, medications, discomforts and indignities. She made a big decision to stop taking her medication, and she was gone in a few days. Good on you, Mum: you made that choice. It was a big choice, and you did it. Believe me, my Mum wasn’t into meditation and cosmic stuff at all but, in the end, she exercised her choice, a soul-choice. I have a feeling she has flowered in the otherworld.

With love from me, Palden.

PS: a blog about the Tuareg will come soon.

JUST ONE FOOTNOTE, this time:

The Tuareg: http://www.palden.co.uk/the-tuareg-of-mali.html
The Sunday Meditation: http://www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
Ancient Sites in Penwith, Cornwall: http://www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-penwith.html

Eyes and Ears, Hands and Feet

Treen and Gwella, a gull couple in Falmouth

On Facebook, I seem to be settling into a new habit of announcing Sunday Meditations once a fortnight, not weekly. But the meditations continue weekly, whether or not they are announced. So if you’ve been meditating with this group thus far, keep going, and if you’re hovering around wishing or meaning to do it but not quite doing it, well, that’s up to you.

It concerns intention and what we give our time and attention to – and here lies the root of freedom of choice. It’s all about what we do with our psyches – our hearts, minds and behaviour. Nowadays there are tremendous diversionary, distracting pulls and pushes that we encounter every day – pressures, needs, imperatives, concerns – and this is the way of our lives in our time. Here we’re offered a choice to ricochet our way through life – as victims of our distractedness – or to anchor back to the roots of our being, to remember why we came into life and to do something toward giving that some priority.

The meditations are designed to be entirely doable. You can participate every week, or dip in and out when you can. It’s important to keep it simple and just do it. But there’s a funny paradox too: if you do it 100% every week, it gets easier. If we’re clear about it, life rearranges itself around it so that distractions start unmanifesting. Besides, meditation is simply a state of mind, and sometimes doing meditation on a bus can actually work really well because the stimuli and noises around us can help us focus within.

We can get so serious about things like this, and it’s not like that at all. Last night, before the meditation, I lost track of time and I was a few minutes late. Typical me, I had been trying to finish something I was doing, and my friends upstairs were tapping on the top of my head, as they usually do just before the meditation… and there I was, standing there at the toilet having a pee and feeling the meditation starting.

Here’s a footnote. Since becoming a cancer patient, when I get the need to pee, I do have to pee quickly – some of you will know this problem! But also, as a creaky old man, I pee really slowly, and it can take ages.

So there I was, sensing ‘them’ chuckling at me and the comedy of my earthly situation, and my psyche was already sinking into meditation-mode while I was standing there peeing… and this is what happens when you take on a regular date with ‘higher powers’. I’ve meditated in airports, motorway service area car parks, in fields surrounded with heavy-breathing cattle, in side-rooms at parties, on buses I have to disembark from in the middle of the meditation… and that’s the deal. And at times it can be really funny.

In situations like that I’m aware that my ‘friends’, being non-earthly types, quite appreciate getting a look into our world through my senses. I remember, a few years ago, some hooting geese flying over my house during the meditation, and I got a distinct sense of “What’s that?” coming from ‘upstairs’. So I visualised geese, explaining that they are birds in our world and they make that rather haunting sound that geese can do. And they got it. So, in instances such as that, I’m acting a bit like a drone or a remote sensor for them – and that’s fine.

It has led me to quite an inner breakthrough, actually. If these guys can see inside me, they need to see the whole lot. They are interested in us humans and our amazing complexities – our sub-personalities and sectioned-off, often conflicting parts of our psyches – and they do seek to understand us. This has meant letting them into those guilty, fearful parts of myself that I even hide from myself. That has been amazingly cleansing. When I first did it, it was an immense relief. I was letting these beings see the whole of me. In doing so, I started seeing myself more clearly too.

For they do not judge. We judge ourselves a lot, but they don’t judge. That’s something we do here on Earth, and it has its roots in our religious traditions, and also it feeds off our hidden guilt for things we have done, as individuals, as societies and as a planetary race. Bad shit. So we tend to feel judged by others and by ‘God’, and we judge ourselves in ways that really clip our wings.

There have been times when I’ve done meditative double-tracking – that is, I’ve been in a situation I can’t get out of, while also being in meditation mode. This can work if the situation is not too demanding – perhaps kids are present but they don’t need much attention, or perhaps other people are doing most of the talking – and at times it’s necessary to focus on the situation at hand and then return back to centre, to the meditation, when it’s possible to do so. Building that habit of returning is important and really valuable, as a general life-practice.

Once upon a time I was quite deep in meditation and gunfire broke out outside – this was in Bethlehem, Palestine. Something in me decided instinctively not to stir, and I stayed where I was, in meditation. I did some energy-working to spread calm to the situation outside and carried on – and, lo, the firing soon stopped. One of my neighbours down the road – a nice chap, and now disabled – had been a fighter in an armed showdown in the Church of the Nativity in 2002, during the second intifada, and the Israelis often used to come for him. I have no idea whether my input had had any effect, but the important thing was to hold steady. And trust. Trust like hellsbells.

Back in the 1990s, in the Hundredth Monkey camping retreats, participants signed an agreement to stay for the whole camp – there were good reasons for this since there can be dangers sallying forth into the world in an altered state. There was also a mobile phone and outside-contact ban – it was like a week out of this world, as if on a spaceship. One year, one participant broke this rule, only to find out that her father was dying. She was immediately upset and wished to leave. We could not and would not stop her leaving, but it didn’t feel right. It took a long process, but eventually she realised that she could better serve her father by staying with us in a more spiritual and empathic state, rather than going home, to be amongst anxious family members who would be acting out all sorts of strange behaviours around her father’s death. So she stayed. After the camp she reported back that she was really glad she did what she did because, with us, she had been able to mind her father’s soul and stand by him inwardly as he died – instead of panicking, obeying her guilt and rushing off in a car to go back home, probably arriving too late for her father’s death anyway.

Anyway, I finished my pee and settled down for the meditation, all the while dialoguing with those ‘friends upstairs’ in quite a jocular fashion. They sympathise with our situation and they feel lucky not to have to face such things. And they do not judge.

As usual I tuned in to others meditating in the group. Now this is fascinating because, while I know some of the people who are there and can feel them – in Wales, Nova Scotia, Iceland and Sweden – there are others flying along with us that I do not know of. I sense them there sometimes, and other times I really don’t know. It depends on the state I’m in, quite a bit – how much I feel others.

Recently, in my last Aha Class, I was recounting the story of the close encounter I had, in 1972. It seemed that the ETs were making use of me to solve a problem they were working with – it was a problem with nuclear technologies in use at the time. It’s not that I had specific knowledge of nuclear issues. So why did they want me? Well, I figured out that they needed access to an Earth-human’s brain and psyche in order to help them figure out the strange logic by which this errant piece of nuclear technology was put together, so that they could fix it. That’s what they needed.

This means a lot to me. Throughout life I’ve often felt myself getting used – as if part of a larger chess game in which I’m a pawn or a rook, getting moved around the board for the execution of agendas beyond my perception – or perhaps I just get faint glimmers of it. There’s something in me that’s willing to do that. I call it ‘actional channelling’. It’s not just about ‘being the eyes and ears of God’, but also the hands and feet too – doing things the universe needs to have done.

Sometimes I’ve even felt requisitioned. I felt that some years ago. I had found myself doing research into the ancient sites of West Penwith, here in Cornwall, and coming up with results that were quite astounding. It felt almost as if I had been moved to Cornwall because I was eligible, with my background and experience, to do a job on behalf of the spirits and ancient places of Penwith. It was as if they wanted to speak, and I’d been shunted in to give them a voice. I felt that earlier in life when I founded the camps – as if I’d been called up and given that job because the job needed doing and I was the only one in a position to do it. It was an idea whose time had come, and it needed someone to make it come into manifestation.

That’s one thing that lies behind this meditation – for me, at least. It’s about ‘meditative availability’ – making myself available to ‘higher powers’ so that they can carry out their actions and manoeuvres through me – if they so wish, or have a need, that is. And it just so happens also that other things happen during the meditation too – it has been important to me in the cancer process I’ve been through in the last five years. And it acts as a half-hour island of sanity each week – a bit like locking the door, shutting out the world for half an hour and taking a warm bath. I’ve been doing it for thirtyish years now.

Having had a rather irregular life for decades as a ‘new age professional’ – with lots of late nights, weekend working and hyper-flexible timetables – the funny thing is that the regularity of this once-a-week meditation allowed me to set my inner clocks. In the very few weeks in recent decades that I’ve missed the meditation, my life lapsed into foggy chaos. It’s funny how an appointment with The Timeless has become the way by which I’ve set my inner clocks – re-setting my psyche’s gyroscope.

By now you might be aware that I work with some beings called the Council of Nine. It was an arrangement with them, thirty years ago, that prompted this weekly meditation – and various streams of people over time have done it, and still do. This is my own personal commitment, and I don’t evangelise about it. But I am aware that there are some souls out there who also, in some part of their being, resonate with me and with The Nine, who are drawn to join this meditation, as a way of making themselves available to that energy-stream.

For we all have quiet agendas we’re acting out – partially consciously. I had an old friend, Gabrielle, who was one of the Oak Dragon family. She was a quiet soul and a committed meditator. She lived at Alton Barnes in Wiltshire, which happened to be ground zero of the crop circle phenomenon. Gabrielle never rated herself very highly. Well, humility is good, but sometimes it can distort our perceptions of ourselves too. What she did during her life (she died a couple of years ago) was much bigger than she was aware of. Through her meditation, she was ‘holding the energy’ in Alton Barnes. In an esoteric sense she was carrying out a really big job. In the world of humans she gained no medals for that (and didn’t seek them either), but in the greater universe she was performing an important act as a kind of energy-moderator in a major transdimensional diplomatic mission that was being conducted between worlds.

She made herself available and, in her quiet way, carried out a duty that no one else was doing, or possibly even capable of doing – as if she was requisitioned or drafted for the job. And she did it, right through to the end of her life.

This stuff might sound weird to some readers, but others will, I think, know what I’m talking about here. There’s something deep to this. Something about quiet service to a greater cause, to a deeper dynamic. Something about making ourselves available to participation in a larger chess-game. It’s a rather big act of trust too.

So, apart from the fact that it’s a good practice to invest half an hour a week to such a thing as this meditation – though it’s an entirely free choice – and I’m happy to encourage friends to do so, there’s something a bit bigger than this going on. In my recent Aha Class, about extraterrestrials, I talked about the need we each have to penetrate back to our roots as souls. We all come from somewhere, as souls, and we all come from soul-tribes, soul-nations and soul-worlds to which we still belong. There’s something in deep memory that remembers this. Following from this, it is possible to anchor back to those roots, to our family and soul-clan. For, here on Earth, whether or not we are aware of it, we are acting on behalf of our people. Our soul-clans have their own agendas.

So if the energy-stream that I am on resonates with yours – that on a soul level you and I might be relatives, friends or associates in some way – then you might find that, by doing the Sunday meditation, it helps you anchor back to your own roots. Or perhaps you have an inherent connection with The Nine. Or perhaps it’s simply a case of resonance. It doesn’t matter. The main thing is that there’s a channel open once a week at the specified time and, if you sit within it in meditation, then you’ll be bathed by it, and you might well find that interesting inner experiences follow!

If you don’t resonate with it, that’s fine too. The main thing is, whatever your path, follow it and pursue it. That’s what will, in the end, change the world. Some years ago a nuclear scientist asked The Nine whether there was one single thing which might change the world, and the Nine simply said, “Yes, the world will change if the people of planet Earth all pursue their life purposes”.

What am I here for? A lot of us are on that quest. Well, you find out by doing it, by doing what you’re drawn to doing. And by flapping your wings and getting on with it. Here’s a good guideline for finding out what it is: if it lifts you up, do it, and if it weighs you down, don’t.

It’s entirely our own choice. This is the bottom-line issue with free will: we are free to do whatever we feel is best. Making choices and dealing with the consequences is our learning path here on Earth. And we’re here not just to learn and to grow as souls, but also to make a contribution.

With love, Palden.

Website: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Extraterrestrials: www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-ets.html

Dying Ahead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over and out. With love, Palden

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

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

Bridging Gaps

Chapel Carn Brea, the last hill in Britain, topped by bronze age and neolithic cairns

I’ve just started a job that I’ve been putting off for six months. I wasn’t clear about what I needed to do, and it’s a lot of work. And I’m supposed to be retired. But it came clear a few days ago, amidst a down-time when I was sitting here alone, feeling rather rudderless and wondering what to do. I decided to do a complete revision of a rather big website I wrote and created 6-9 years ago, Ancient Penwith. It’s about the ancient sites of West Penwith, here in Cornwall.

In some respects it’s more difficult to revise a website than to create a new one, because you have to take the existing material and re-shape it along completely new lines. But there’s a tendency to simply recycle the old stuff and stay in the same mind-frame as before. So each page is taking time for me to revise – one a day, and forty to go. I’m going to make the site briefer, more to-the-point, with more maps, pics and straight statements about the geomantic issues my research of the last ten years has aroused.

The detailed stuff has gone into a book, written and not yet published, called Shining Land. I can’t self-publish it – brain issues, and I want it to stay available after I die. So I’ll try finding a publisher when I get brain-space to focus on it.

That’s what it’s like. My psyche doesn’t process stuff like it once did. I can’t multitask and hop from thing to thing any more. When faced with memory issues I have to give myself full permission to utilise and trust my intuitive brain – intuition works by faster, more direct neural pathways than logic does, and that matters in ageing brains.

In this sense, being an educated Westerner is one of the causes of many old peoples’ brain-processing issues: we have been trained to disable and constrain a significant part of our brains, in order to fit into the requirements of the system we live in. Though, frankly, many people with dementia and Alzheimer’s are simply brain-tired, worn out, and we ought to recognise this instead of deluding ourselves that we can extend our busy lives forever.

It’s not just about slow brainz. It’s about a slowing psyche – the whole lot. It’s part of the life-cycle and a wonderful way of rounding out a life. Instead of facts and figures, you get understanding and you see things in a different light.

Here’s the summit cairn on the top of Chapel Carn Brea, a chambered cairn about 4,000 years old, for retreat, conscious dying and the energy-treatment of seeds and other items (many archaeologists would probably disagree)

Right now I am celebrating the second anniversary of the sudden separation of my partner and me, after six years together. I’ve been surprised how slowly I’ve moved through the stages of coming back to myself. It has been a struggle. On the other hand, since in a late-life context I’m in the last-chance zone, there has been far more stuff to get through, for this concerns all my relationships. My very first girlfriend, Jane, is dying too, in Northumberland. It’s all about finalising a life in which I’ve been involved with some amazing women and we’ve shared remarkable experiences. But I’m happy to say that, though I regret what happened two years ago, I made it through and I live to see another day.

I’m rather surprised I got through that. But then, that’s another gift of a lapsing memory: life and its experiences become more of a surprise. Well, I’ve got through 90% of releasing my partner and seem to have crossed a critical threshold in the last month or so. When a person refuses to talk and to debrief openly after a major life-crunch together, it opens up a new level of soul-searching, understanding, guesswork and forgiveness. It’s necessary to understand and release, regardless of whether the other person responds, helps or cares – otherwise it’s a weight around your own neck and emotionally a killer. It has been painful getting through this stuff but, in the end, something has cleared and a weight of bereavement has lifted. I’m happy about that, and I hope it’s happening for her too.

When a single issue such as relationship breakdown comes up, it widens out into other areas of life – those areas that remain unreconciled and which perhaps cannot be reconciled. One recent example, for me, has been watching much of my work in Palestine come to pretty much nothing. There’s something of it still there, but really it’s a matter of writing off this chunk of life and its efforts – letting it be. It’s in the ‘life’s a bitch, then you die’ department of reality.

In a way, all our big ideas, our plans, ambitions and efforts, come to nothing. It’s a fart in the void. This is not entirely true, but it’s an aspect of life that we do need to face. We’re locked in a groove of exaggerated, self-generated meaningfulness, desperate to explain our lives and justify our existences, when often the true meaning of our lives is completely different from what we believe. Quite often our track record is better than we ourselves tend to judge. After all, we’re all useless, error-prone shits, really, and it has taken us thousands of years to get to this point – and look where we’ve got to! We humans are the kinds of people our parents warned us about – or they should have done.

Fifty years ago I might have become a professor, but I became an independent polymath instead, covering quite a wide range of seemingly disparate subjects. I mean, what’s the connection between humanitarian work in Palestine and the geomancy of stone circles? What’s the connection between astrology and geopolitics, between ETs and the history of the Crusades, or between group circle-working and leylines?

For me, it’s all about reaching across rather large gaps and seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. I guess that’s one thing that drew me toward Israelis and Palestinians – if your aim is to bring peace to these poor people, that’s noble, but it’s highly unlikely to happen in your lifetime, so get used to it and soldier on anyway. That’s what I needed to learn. It took a few years, and my work out there lifted off as soon as I learned it.

Boscawen-ûn stone circl e, around 4,300ish years old

Even so, things haven’t been working out well for me in recent years. Life has been an uphill struggle and I’ve had some rather earth-shaking experiences. In the last year, quite a few people under my care have died and I’ve faced some ridiculous challenges. Some think I ought to avoid such things but, in a way, for better or worse, this is my chosen life-path. It all hangs around the question of how deep into the water you’re prepared to go, and whether you trust that you can swim. Once you go deeper, you find out that you survive, so you go a bit deeper next time, and on it goes. Having someone shoot at you for the third time is not the same as the first.

Since October 2022 I’ve been involved in another irreconcilable problem that has weighed heavily. Recent news about the Post Office scandal here in UK has been heartening because I’ve been caught in a smaller but similar scandal. It’s a bank in Australia which, through corporate negligence, has caused the deaths of at least twelve people under my care. It is in denial of its responsibilities and has broken its promises. Like the PO scandal, the story sounds improbable and incredible. Even the consultant the bank brought in to help them with this problem recommended in our favour.

The short story is that, in October 2022, I got involved in a rescue operation in Ghana to save one of the company’s men, a Scotsman whom I knew. At the time I agreed to do it, it should have lasted 2-3 weeks. The anti-fraud security arm of the bank he worked for promised to pay all expenses if I acted as handler for this part of a larger operation – for them it was a confrontation with a large multinational crime gang. I have the right skills and experience, so I did it, in good faith.

In a crisis, there’s no time for written agreements: you either trust or you don’t trust the person, make a handshake deal and get on with it, since minutes matter. Despite repeated assurances of payment over twelve months up to September 2023, the bank has not paid. Twelve people have died as a result – some of you will remember Felicia and her child Phyllis, who died a year ago. And I am financially down. They owe Maa Ayensuwaa, me and a number of others £40,000 to help compensate all the damage done – not a vast amount.

During this time I met up with Maa Ayensuwaa, a native healer in Ghana with whom I’ve been working for the last year. Since December 2022 she and I have been alone on this, working to rescue people and both of us paying a high price for it. But we’re topping out now – the company has not managed to kill us, and neither has the crime gang.

The bank might not have intended to kill anyone, but its lack of integrity and its corporate dishonesty have killed people, and they’re continuing to err in this way even now, when a simple settle-up would not be difficult. Had they paid up as agreed at an early stage, many bad things would not have needed to happen – including Felicia’s and Phyllis’ deaths and the circumstances leading up to them.

Maa Ayensuwaa is now in Kumasi, Ghana, slowly reviving from a series of hospital operations for fibroids. Papa Nkum, her former student, and I are at present trying to find funds to get her home to her shrine at Nzema, to recuperate (£150). I’ve grown tired of fundraising. We need to get her home. It has been a long grind, keeping her alive, but we’ve done it. Gods bless her, she’s a tough cookie who seems to be able to hover around in the near-death state quite well without dying, and she’s made it through. If you feel any kind of connection with her, please send her supportive, healing vibes.

We’ve got through a crisis that neither Papa Nkum nor I reckoned we’d get through. He’s a good man. He has stood by her when others didn’t care – West Africans can be hard toward one another. But we’re quite a team, she, him and I, grossly underfunded yet resourceful and enduring. It’s quite an interaction too, between two native healers and one aged hippy – an esoteric bridge across cultures. We’ve learned a lot from each other.

The issue here is about crossing gaps, reaching across cultural chasms and bridgebuilding between disparate realities that talk different languages and see things in fundamentally different ways.

The connection between humanitarian work in Palestine and the geomancy of stone circles is this. It’s about bridging gulfs. When you’re in a stone circle, you are communicating with an intelligence, genius loci, the spirit of the place. It has a very different viewpoint from you, and it’s a whole lot bigger and older than you. It’s a stretch, but the interaction is really helpful in both directions. Meanwhile, in Palestine: when in quick succession you find yourself in the company of a right-wing Israeli settler and a Muslim radical, you’re straddling a gap where the two live in very different worlds, even if living only a mile apart. It’s the same thing. It’s the vulnerability of doing the splitz.

What’s the connection between astrology and geopolitics? Well, astrology provides a way of seeing things that sheds light on the course of events, and it’s a source of hidden intelligence on the trends, tracks and timings that such events are likely to follow. It helps us understand the threads that move through history and the way they move and evolve. If astrology were used in international relations and intel gathering, diplomacy would work far better.

What’s the connection between ETs and the history of the Crusades? Well, the Crusades, for Europe, were a pattern-setting colonial adventure that have defined the history of the last thousand years, and we’re watching the latest round in Gaza and the West Bank right now. At the time of the Crusades, there was a choice between cultural interchange or cultural rivalry between the Muslim and Christian worlds, and rivalry and misunderstanding were chosen. If one person were responsible for that, it was Richard the Lionheart.

It created a gap not only between Muslims and Christians but a separatist mindset in Europeans. That is, we choose to call Hamas terrorists rather than freedom fighters. We call ETs ‘aliens’, with the expectation that they are hostile. We again say the word ‘Russia’ with an intonation and undertone that portrays Russians as ‘them’ – it’s a return to the safe hostile territory of the Cold War. Having an enemy helps us feel better about ourselves.

There’s another connection too, observed by none other than Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik nearly 40 years ago: if ETs suddenly presented themselves to us, our differences here on Earth would quickly dissolve. We’d have to change our mindset overnight. If we put up a fight, we’d lose, instantaneously – they wouldn’t even allow us to get to that point. Because it’s not about a winning-and-losing, threat-based mindset or expectation. At that very moment we as Earthlings would be challenged to do what we’ve long needed to do – cooperate and stand together. Standing against things is not the way to go.

I’ll say that again. Standing against things is not the way to go.

What’s the connection between group circle-working and leylines? Well, leylines constitute a subtle energy-system spanning the world, concentrated in certain areas (Britain and Palestine being two) and they act as network channels that pump up energy-centres dotted around the world. Group circle-working involves people sitting in a circle, using a talking stick and other methods of entering into a synergistic group-mind state. It is ancient, archetypal and very modern, the basis of deep, para-political democracy. In such a situation, a group can generate an amplified energy-field which can at times have pattern-changing effects around the world, somehow aiding or influencing events to turn in certain directions.

This is a shamanic principle that is a key principle today in the resolution of the world’s multiplex ills. ‘When three or more people are gathered in my name, there shall I be‘ – that’s ‘God’ talking in the Bible, and it’s true, and every single reader of this blog will have experienced this in some way, however you perceive divinity. This is what people did at power-centres, and that’s why they were built – to enter into advanced mass-consciousness states, to go into deep thought and to engage with the core intelligence of nature and the universe.

Spirit operates beyond the framework of time, space and dimension. We all have sisters and brothers of the soul, dotted around the world and the universe, with whom we are in regular communication on an inner level. We’re part of networks, lineages and soul-families and, consciously or not, energy passes through these connections. That’s one reason I like to run the Sunday Meditations – it’s not necessary even to do anything in the meditation. It’s more a matter of making ourselves meditatively available for whatever need there is, and much of it operates on a very deep level, of which sometimes we only get glimmers.

On Earth, we’re at a critical time where we need to understand that we really are all one. Sounds easy, but it involves a painful, drawn-out transition. We’re one human family living on one small world. We face a big emotional transition in which we shall have to learn to trust and agree more than ever before. Or, at least, we need to find ways of disagreeing and cooperating at the same time, and feeling good about each other. This concerns identities, nations, cultures and also species.

The iron age fogou at Carn Euny – a women’s space inside the heart of the village

It’s the bridging of gaps. Not only seeing and understanding those gaps, but stepping over them. We people in the rich world hold back more than is wise for us. We stay in our comfort zone, where we won’t be confronted with big moral issues that actually we need to confront, for the good of our souls. That’s why people are sailing to our shores on flimsy boats, sacrificing their lives to bring us this question.

I’ve repeatedly been faced with a question like this: “Is it better to give my last money to save a person’s life, or should I play safe and side-step the issue (and let them suffer or die)?”. The fear that causes us to turn away from facing such a question turns out to be unjustified, in my experience. It’s a question of undertaken risk and commitment – and such heat-of-the-moment choices introduce a new magic that is otherwise unavailable. I’ve found that, having faced this edgy question quite a few times over the years, I’ve managed intuitively to make good decisions, with but a few mistakes, and while it has involved making personal sacrifices, I survived – and so did they. And that’s the main thing.

It’s not what we get for doing things. It’s what we become by doing them.

Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall, a neolithic cliff sanctuary

Wednesday was a bad-news day. I cried myself to sleep afterwards. I’m crossing a threshold. My cancer readings are beginning to rise. My medication is going to be changed. There are five options available, and this is the third. Part of me wants my Mummy to hold my hand while I go through the next stage. I shall lose my four-weekly nurses’ visits – the next phase involves pills, Lenidalomide (a form of Thalidomide). I lasted well for three years on the last form of medication, Dara, but it’s now losing efficacy.

I’ll have to go to hospital in Truro once a month. There will be medical side-effects, apparently. I’m feeling similar warning signs to those I had ten months before I was diagnosed with cancer – a feeling of being up against it, drizzled with feelings of hopelessness and garnished with a creeping tiredness – and a strange manic drivenness to work on creative projects. I’m doing Reishi, Astragalus, Vits C, D3, multivits, blueberries, cider vinegar, grapefruit seed extract, beansprouts and my friend Kellie’s multicoloured carrots, and took a break from blogging for some sun-medicine too.

This is the life of an eccentric cancer patient. Who knows how the next stage will develop? This year I would certainly love resolution of the bank issue and the ex-partner issue. It’s time, and life doesn’t have to be so difficult. I would love to help Maa Ayensuwaa to get back on her feet and do something for the Tuareg too (I need to find people to replace me). The Tuareg have had to send their young and their old people to a refugee camp over the border, since they are under threat from government troops, Wagner Group mercenaries and Jihadis. This isn’t the World War Three that some people seem to want, but things are escalating. Need is rising.

And here’s my quote of the day. It cropped up on a new friend’s FB page (shukran, Selina). It’s by Austrian psychologist Carl Jung. It applies to the whole of humanity as well as to individuals or nation peoples.

“Nobody can fall so low unless they have a great depth. If such a thing can happen to a person, it challenges their best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.”

With love, Palden

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

Written using Human Intelligence (what’s left of it)