life – Page 2 – Notes from the Far Beyond

Pain

This and the pics below were taken in Bethlehem, Palestine, in Dec 2012

I was talking to a friend about our different illnesses and she said, “You must be suffering more than I”. This made me think, because suffering cannot be quantified and I can’t really say ‘I am suffering more than you’. Or at least, if I do, I’m making judgements about that person and about me that don’t really hold up. With pain, it’s really difficult being objective – it all hangs around our capacity to accept, tolerate and handle it.

Pain is partially to do with what is happening and partially to do with how we’re perceiving and experiencing it. I knew this before cancer came my way, but I’ve found since then that it is more true than I thought. I don’t instantly reach for the painkillers – avoidance of pain charges its price too. I use them only when I’m worn down, needing a break, to stop myself going into a self-fulfilling pain loop.

It’s not easy. But we do make things more difficult than they need to be. We create more friction inside ourselves than we need to have. We take difficulty and pain as negative experiences, something bad, something wrong – often according to beliefs and predispositions that aren’t very good for us.

Yet pain isn’t wrong – there’s something strangely right about it, if we can but change our perspective and suspend judgement enough to see how this might be so. Too often we compare our pain with how we feel things ought to be, how they used to be or how they could be, and this has a way of increasing the pain. Because it turns us away from facing it.

It comes down to attitude. Attitude might or might not change our circumstances or their causes, but certainly it can change how we experience and handle it all.

I’ve learned a lot from people in conflict zones, especially Palestinians, who have developed such attitude over the generations, in both the personal and the social spheres. They’ve got tragically used to dealing with hardship and they’ve developed ways and means of surviving in situations where levels of hardship and suffering are high – such as sharing what they have and looking after each other. They aren’t angels and they make mistakes, but they’re better than we at protecting and helping each other, and making the best out of a bad set of circumstances.

Many people in the comfortable countries can get really upset over issues that are relatively small, such as a power blackout, a shortage, a traffic jam, or someone not doing what they said they would do. Tolerance levels are low, tight and sharp-edged. We have an unhelpful sense of entitlement to a problem-free life. So when the shit hits the fan we catastrophise it, mishandling it and often creating more problems than were needed.

In all of life’s situations there is a degree of choice, either to make a big deal over something or to square with it, accept it and do the best we can. The choice lies around the friction we put up. It’s an honesty process, and with pain we’re forced to face stuff we don’t like facing.

Spiritually, a key issue is this: we come to Earth to learn, get experience, go through it, learn from it and hone the soul. Because at the end of life, all you take with you is what you have become as a result of having lived a life. Pain is an intense kind of experience that has a way of grinding at us, drilling holes in us, attempting a takeover of our psyche and giving us a truth-and-reality experience.

It’s the price we pay for the pleasure of being in a body and the experiential access that it gives us to the wonders of the world. Without a body we cannot stuff chocolate, have orgasms, go on holiday or bliss out in a field of bluebells. Pleasure and pain, whether emotional or physical, are two ends of the same experiential spectrum, and you don’t get one without the other.

I had a remarkable experience six years ago when first stricken with cancer – a blood cancer called Multiple Myeloma, which erodes the bones and creates all sorts of trouble and pain. Since then I’ve had treatment, though there is no remission from Myeloma, and am now on a maintenance regime of medication, supplements and working on myself. I’m surprised to be alive, actually, though clearly there are reasons to be here.

The cancer came on quickly over a few months and I deteriorated rapidly. At times I was in extreme, 150% pain, immobilised, helpless, rendered into a wreck of a man, at death’s door. One day the pain was so intense that I couldn’t even raise my head from the pillow to drink – moving a millimetre made my bones grind and grate. But I had to drink anyway and tried moving.

The pain was so overwhelming that something in me popped out of my body and I saw myself from above – as a soul having an experience on Earth, lying there, all crippled and useless. There was something strangely comical about this. Something in me could see the poignant humour in it – here I was, suffering, more than I had ever experienced, and it was bizarre. I started chuckling. It really hurt to laugh. My then partner, looking on, thought I was losing my marbles.

The funny thing was that my experience of pain suddenly changed. It seemed to become more distant. I became more at peace with it. I was able to face it and accept it, from more of a distance – it was simply a fact, a situation. Something profound had shifted in the space of several minutes.

Over the next few weeks it decreased further and within a couple of months my pain levels were around 30%. Also, my boundaries had shifted. Previously, I could handle 20% pain without it getting to me too much, but afterwards I could handle 40-50% – my pain threshold had moved and it has stayed there since.

Over the last six years I’ve hovered around 10%, with a permanent, steady and stiff ache. I hardly notice it, having become used to it. Most of the time I accept it – except perhaps in the late afternoon when Sir Isaac Newton seems to switch up the Law of Gravity. But there are times when I do notice the pain and it gets to me, deep down – especially in winter. Usually these are times when my spirits are low and I’m feeling worn out with life.

So there’s something here about being spirit-propped. The pain, disability and precarity of a cancer patient have somehow thinned the membrane between me and spirit – a membrane that I used to try so hard to cross, while now it comes more naturally. There’s something to this about the perspective of experiencing life as a soul in a body, visiting Earth.

Pain hits us all, in all sorts of ways and degrees, and at various times. It can go deep, and we each have our crosses to bear.

For example, throughout my adult life I’ve experienced ‘political pain’ – the pain of being misunderstood and misjudged in public, and paying a high price for it (as a dissident and an Aspie-Autistic). It has impacted me immensely. It’s the pain of being wronged in the social and political sphere – sometimes by evolving facts and sometimes by the wrongdoings and micro-harms of others, or by the madnesses of crowds. Even so, this pain forced me to come to terms with the reality of it, to understand what was going on underneath and to forgive the people involved, and to understand and forgive myself too – and in late life, forgiveness has been a gift to the soul and a lightening of a burden.

The world’s pain levels are escalating in the 2020s, partially because so many souls are alive today having a human experience, and partially because life is getting tougher for everyone, everywhere. Outrageously tough situations such as we have seen recently in Gaza are just the tip of a very big iceberg.

And here’s the rub: no one is exempt. Hence, a generous and charitable attitude toward others in need is wise since the tables can turn. We might one day be glad to receive others’ help.

It’s our choice as to whether or not the future is going to bring hard times. We can make a big deal about things ‘going wrong’, or we can accept things and get on with it. In the end, many problems are not as big as we think they are. What might to one person be a disastrous crisis, to another person is just another boring night of bombing.

We create sufferings simply by complaining, being angry, feeling hurt, self-victimisation, or by doing things which are not the wisest. So the level of actual hardship and difficulty we face is a different matter to the way we handle it, and in the latter lies our choice.

Even so, for some on our planet, life is really hard and, in the short term, they don’t have many options – if, that is, they survive. This is not ‘their karma’: this is the world’s collective karma spilling over onto them.

One of the things I’ve noticed in my peacemaking work is that many of the peoples most beset by longterm war – Bosnia, Ireland, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Lebanon, Sudan, Palestine – can be the nicest people around, and it does not seem fair that such ‘karma’ should fall on them. The people most affected by climate change are mostly not the ones who created it, and the world’s poor are losers in a system steered by others. But even they are faced with occasions when choice becomes available.

If we follow a deeper path through life, over time it changes our emotional responses, perspective and priorities. We don’t need to consume as much, we don’t need to ricochet through life, we don’t need to deny ourselves tender moments with loved ones, and we don’t need to create as much waste and damage as we do.

Because something changes inside. It’s a slowly-distilling sense of basic trust, a simple knowing that, somehow, things are going to work out. Especially if we allow it. The issue isn’t about being perfect – it’s about learning from life’s lessons and making good outcomes out of difficult situations.

So this matter of hardship and suffering depends so much on where we’re looking from. While I have a blood cancer, I’m partially disabled and life is difficult, it doesn’t mean I’m sitting here suffering all the time. Though I must admit there are times when I do.

Sometimes, in down times my spirits seem lost in a fog of fatigue, but even then it’s a matter of being patient and letting it be. I can struggle against it, feeling as if I ought to be doing this or I wish I could do that, when in fact it’s okay to take it as it comes, to flop down in a dull state and let it be. I tend then to revive more easily next day. It’s just that I’ve have been given yet another cameo experience of being on planet Earth.

With love, Palden

Amendments

Life has been quite a grind and a test recently. Living as a partially disabled cancer patient makes wading through life twice as difficult, and sometimes I get deeply weary with it. That’s been happening recently.

But there’s a weird psychological program in me that has meant that some of the best work I’ve ever done has been done during such periods, when my Saturnine tough-it-out programming gets activated by life and its grinding difficulties. I tend to tough it out by engaging myself in doing something. A project.

It’s an Aspie hyperfocus thing: if you can’t change your circumstances, change your mood by doing something creative and ultimately useful – even if it yields no immediate benefits. That’s how the program goes – for me, at least. Except there is one big benefit: it changes my mood. And, bit by bit, that can change everything.

That’s how, somehow, over the last forty years, I’ve managed to write fifteen or so books on quite a variety of subjects. Many were written amidst difficult circumstances, or arising out of them. The gratifying thing is that I still agree with pretty much everything I’ve written – or spoken about, broadcast or taught. I have few regrets about it. Which is quite remarkable, really.

Just recently I’ve been at it again. I had a crisis a month ago where I felt uninspired, feeling that I’d said everything I needed to say, and were people interested anyway? Well, as such crises do, it represented a deeper fermentation process going on in the nether recesses of my psyche, and an inner repositioning was going on, unbeknownst to me. I started looking at ‘outstanding issues’ and ‘unfinished bits’ in what I have done. After all, as a disabled oldie who spends more time alone than I would prefer, I do have lots of time.

Just yesterday, my friend Brian Charlton was here. He’s another Glastonbury defector now living in West Penwith – there’s a little secret cabal of us, actually. He lives the other side of St Just, our local village, and he is part a local support group, the ‘Friends of Palden’, that is a blessing in my life. He was on his weekly visit, and benignly badgering me about these unfinished bits. Very perceptive. I realised he was right. I needed to beaver away at clarifying and finalising the signals I’ve been putting out, and there are unfinished bits, and bits yet to evolve further, if life allows.

But there was more: I realised was already instinctively doing it, though I hadn’t realised it until then. It had started with two podcasts, both of which came up spontaneously, about Inner Doctors and Intuition. That got me flowing again, unblocking the logjam that had scrangled up my psyche. That’s one secret that many creators need to understand: if you get blocked up, do something, anything, to get yourself unblocked. And it’s best to forget what you think you ought to be doing, and to be spontaneous and creative instead – because that’s where the taproot of creativity lies.

Then suddenly I found myself starting doing a revision of one of my books, Shining Land, about the ancient sites of West Penwith. Well, there were some typos, readability issues and tweaks to attend to. So I thought. But as things progressed, I realised that new work I have done in the last few years, since I wrote the book, needed adding. I’d gained some new perspectives too, blessed as I am with lots of thinking time.

Most of the book has just needed tweaks and small improvements, but the chapter on Hill Camps has had a rewrite, adding my thoughts on Bronze Age circular enclosures such as Caer Brân, built around the 1800s BCE for tribal gatherings, and their significance. Also, I’ve added new material to the final part of the book, about Megalithic Geoengineering, breaking the last chapter into two and adding new work to both, about landscape temples, wildwood cover in the Bronze Age and ancient trackways in Penwith. And there are some new maps and pictures. I’ve worked on the indexing too (it’s rather tedious).

But here’s the rub. I can’t write books any more. My brains can’t do it. I can do blogs, podcasts and small projects, because they are done and dusted in a day or two. But books? No, they’re big projects. Even so, I can revise books I’ve written before, and the great virtue of revising a book is that the big thinking has already been done. So I can focus on style, details, text-flow, images, maps and new ideas. I can make it a better read.

I discovered this ten years ago when revising an astrology book first published in 1987, Living in Time. It was a good book but it had dated, with out-of-date examples in it from the 1960s to the 1980s. It also needed another spin, since times had changed and many more people were aware of what the book writes about. This is how Google’s AI assesses it:

“Power Points in Time is the title of a book by Palden Jenkins that explores the concept of time and its influence on various aspects of life, drawing on astrology and other cyclical patterns. It examines how understanding these patterns can provide insights into events, decisions, and even the meaning of life. The book uses examples like lunar phases, planetary alignments, and ancient festivals to illustrate how time can be understood as more than just a linear progression.“

Actually, that’s a pretty good summary. That’s the first time I’ve used AI in any of my writings, and it’s likely to be one of the last, since I am decidedly AI-free and Patreon-free in my outpourings. And, for better or worse, I prioritise eyeballs and ideas over monetisation too.

So I revised Living in Time and it came out in 2015 as Power Points in Time. I really enjoyed doing that revision, precisely because the big thinking had been done, so I could focus on other things. But there was another matter too: in 1987 I had pitched the book to people interested in astrology, though later I found that it was most popular with people interested in ancient sites – a different circle of readers. Meanwhile, over the quarter century that followed, I had developed a clearer idea of the combined importance of power points in space (ancient sites) and power points in time (peak periods). So I re-pitched the book toward this ‘power points’ idea.

Then a few years passed, and a big change came to my life – getting cancer and becoming disabled – and, reviewing my life, I realised I hadn’t written a book about ancient sites, even though, on and off, I had studied the matter for fifty years and had done a lot of research in Cornwall for ten years. So along came Shining Land – the ancient sites of West Penwith and what they say about megalithic civilisation. My core proposition was that ancient sites were built for conducting shamanic consciousness work, and that the 600ish ancient sites of West Penwith actually constituted one big, integrated ancient site.

By making a ‘landscape temple’ out of the whole cliff-bound Penwith peninsula, it was possible to raise this consciousness work to a higher level, to benefit not only the local area and its people but the whole planet. The planet is one being, that we have come to know as Gaia, and if the ancients got themselves into enough of an elevated state to do so, they could commune with Gaia, adding a human touch to her work as a planet-being.

They were practicing what I’ve come to call Megalithic Geoengineering. Big stuff. Planetary stuff. And, of course, there’s something to learn from this today.

So, you see, in health and life circumstances I have been labouring somewhat, though in other respects I’ve been quietly chiselling away at generating uplift and raising my spirits by doing those things that I can do, and being creative with it. It fires up my circuitry. Meanwhile I’m de-focusing on those things I can’t do and can’t have – things that weigh me down. As a result, a new, 2025 version of Shining Land will come out shortly as an online book. So there are results to this. Results germinated out of a time of hardship.

Two things happened to help turn things around. One was the spontaneous eruption of the ‘Inner Doctors’ podcast, which revived my creative spirits, and the other was a session with a homoeopath, my neighbour Anna Jenkins (no relation – we Jenkinses are a big Welsh clan). I think the remedies she prescribed have dislodged some fixities and rigidities within me. Well, to be honest, I cannot tell yet, because the last week has been low, lonely and dark and I cannot tell whether my cancer and demise are getting worse or whether this is what homoeopaths call a ‘healing crisis’. But I think I’ll opt for the latter.

It has more hope in it. And hope and belief are motivators. Not as an imposition on evolving reality, but as a way of intersecting fruitfully with it. Hopefully.

Changing the way we see things: inside every problem lies a solution, as long as we allow ourselves to see it.

Sometimes I struggle with that. So, in case you thought you were the only one in this vast universe who struggles with it, think again, for you are not alone.

Love, Palden

Shining Land: https://www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/
Power Points in Time: https://penwithpress.co.uk/product/power-points-in-time/
Podcasts from the Far Beyond: https://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Notes from the Far Beyond: https://penwithbeyond.blog

Hearts and Minds

A few days ago I thought out loud that I had little to say. Well, this turned out to be incorrect. Forgive me for that! Goes to show, I too have my illusions. Here’s a new Pod from the Far Beyond.

I went on a slow stagger down to the pleasantly unkempt woods below the farm where I live. I sat next to a big hazel tree that’s far older than me, where I usually go. It leans over and there’s a sitting place amidst its roots which is just right for me. It’s my outside broadcast studio, where quite a few podcasts have been made.

This one is all about the battle for the hearts and minds of humanity. This is something that is unfolding behind and beneath the torrent of worrying events that we experience today.

‘The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’. Thus said William Blake over two centuries ago. Well, true. But do we really need to pursue excess in order to achieve wisdom? It causes a lot of damage to our world and to hearts and minds. There is another way.

As a peacemaker (more correctly, a peacebuilder) there hasn’t been a lot of progress since the days of Vietnam and Northern Ireland – the issues I and many others of my postwar generation started out with. The warmakers are still very much at it.

But the matter is still open. We’re coming to the time. And this podcast is about that. It’s here on Spotify:

or on my podcast page, where you’ll also find 60-odd Paldy-podcasts on a range of subjects:

www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

In the weeks and months to follow, I might well come up with further insights about the future. Despite everything, I’m still an optimist. Though we’re in a strange, perverse time of history where humanity is bring taught how not to do things, and it can seem as if everything is going wrong.

A lot of it depends on how we see things.

With love, Palden

Saturn and Neptune

So here am I, a lifelong author and communicator, and I’ve been sitting here in recent weeks with nothing much to say. That’s unusual. It isn’t ‘writer’s block’: it’s a funny feeling of little to say. In my birth chart, Neptune and Saturn are opposing Mercury right now, so I guess this blog is expressing the essence of what that double transit is bringing.

I’m one of those authors who, if I have little that is meaningful to say, I don’t just rattle off material just to fill space, stay regular, fulfil expectations or contractual requirements. I go quiet instead. The best of my writing has always come when there’s a need. I wake up with it, and out it comes.

In life this has given rather uncanny gift which has been both a blessing and a bane: a strange capacity to articulate ideas and perspectives that other people were about to get, but they hadn’t got there yet. As if speaking to people from the future, pointing to how it’s going to be. Or might be. Or could be.

I haven’t always got this right, though there have been times I’ve got things very right. Sometimes I’ve perceived a possible reality that just didn’t happen that way, or I underestimated the influence of obstructors, or got my facts wrong, or suffered wishful thinking or over-optimism, or simply mis-estimated things.

Yet at times I’ve hit the nail right on the head, and it has sparked outcomes or affected people and situations far more than anticipated – sometimes going into the magical-miracle zone. Cosmic catalysis.

It’s a question of whether the benefits from things I got right have outweighed the misfires and problematicals. It feels as if this question is on the weighing scales at present. And, perhaps to prove the point, recently I’ve had little to say. It’s a pause for rumination. Or perhaps a reality-flip is going on. Or a reassessment.

My ongoing cancer saga continues. A new symptom has appeared in recent months: I’m losing the use of my legs. That’s what it feels like, though diagnosis is yet to come, following an imminent MRI scan of my pelvis and a diagnosis in the coming week. My legs are exhausted after a hundred yards, as if I’d just hiked forty miles. Even when just standing still, they turn to rubber, as if they’re about to give way.

It varies on whether it’s an Up day or a Down day. Down days have increased, when I have little energy, drive or inspiration. So something is going on.

It reminds me of six years ago when no distinct symptoms of cancer had yet appeared, but something wasn’t right. It wasn’t possible to put a finger on anything until my back suddenly gave way in August 2019. This was the first concrete symptom of a rapidly developing blood cancer, Multiple Myeloma. It’s ‘multiple’ because it has a range of disparate effects that vary greatly from person to person. This makes it difficult to diagnose.

So it took twelve long weeks to progress from a back-breakage to a cancer diagnosis, though this process was helped by a series of three inspired acts of intuition by, in succession, a cranial osteopath, a GP and a hospital specialist. Bless them all.

I can’t put my finger on what’s happening now, but something is happening. Astrologically, it concerns Mercury, and I’m a Mercurial person (a Virgo with a Gemini Moon). This feels neurological. There’s that ‘nothing to say’ syndrome too. And there’s more.

It concerns ‘growing down’ – losing our powers. This demands a lot of acceptance – getting used to the fact that something is ending. Really ending. In the past I’ve been a cross-country runner and mountaineer, and I find loss of leg-power to be confronting.

Also, as an author, many people are retreating from their phones and social media habits and, thus, many of my readers are simply disappearing. The default answer is to spread into new online media and engage in networking and marketisation strategies. I’m getting loads of e-mails from online promoters who want to marketise my podcasts.

I’d love to reach more of the kinds of people who might benefit from my blogs and podcasts, but I’m not interested in all that promo stuff. My abilities are waning and I can’t manage the work that’s involved. I’m not seeking to set up a business or build my career. This lifelong content creator is sharing his end-of-life process, that’s all.

By nature I am, or was, an integrity-marketer, studiously avoiding falsities, glamours, competitiveness and deceptions in my approach. I used to be a whizzo at this, but not now – my time was 20-40 years ago. Nowadays, online media are changing so much – I can’t keep up, and get my head around all the details. Meanwhile, digital costs and charges are rising, and this obliges monetisation. I can’t do this any more, I don’t have what it takes to crank up a business and I don’t want to leave too many complexities for my son to sort out when I pop my clogs.

So where this goes is anyone’s guess. Anything that increases my workload or demands feats of memory and micro-management will simply not work. Anything I do needs to serve my health and wellbeing without weighing me down, and I’m already going at the maximum pace I can handle. So there’s a dilemma here.

Fresh sets of eyes peer out on the great wide world. In a few weeks they will fly thousands of miles.

Anyway, there’s something to learn from all this. It’s a matter of looking at what’s underneath. It’s about acceptance of What Is. It’s a reduction of options. This happens to those of us who experience a gradual, stepwise end-of-life decline instead of a sudden, drastic one – things narrow and shut down, bit by bit. It’s simply a matter of doing our best with what is, and what we’re capable of doing – there’s little or no option. It can be difficult and rather final, though there’s a joy and fulfilment in it too, if we choose to see the gift in it.

Earlier in my cancer saga I used to measure my condition in terms of perceived age. My physical age is currently 74, and normally I hover around 80-85 in perceived age, but in the last few days I’ve felt like 95 – energyless, wan, off-balance, needing someone to hold my hand, and wondering whether the latest rewrite of my will makes sense.

Yet I’m also transported into the eternal present, propped up in bed, hearing the singing of birds in a crisp, microsecond, sonorous, meaning-rich way, as if they’re teaching me something. Which they are.

They’re teaching me a very special something. A something that words cannot truly encompass because words reduce it. It’s a silence between each frame of life’s movie. A moment of seeing, a shifting of optic, a moment of existential tranquillity. It’s very quiet. It’s momentary yet vast. A glimpse of the Void. A taste of the Silence. A Neptunian slippage of consciousness into a temporary eternity.

So perhaps having little to say has its virtues. After all, I’ve managed to say something about it, so something must be happening right! It just goes to show, there is indeed a gift in everything.

Love from me. Palden

Words and pics here are AI-free!

www.palden.co.uk
https://penwithbeyond.blog

Freedom of Attitude

I’m continually reminded of the extent to which the present is a gift. Everything comes from Spirit, from the Void, from what we call God, and everything returns to Spirit, to the Void and to God. And everything exists within them.

It doesn’t matter how we see the nature and meaning of life, the universe and everything – it’s still the same. We are the eyes, ears and hands of existence-consciousness-beingness. It’s dead easy to forget, to get lost in our stuff, but it remains true.

Some people are in the midst of nightmares right now. Some days ago I did a joint online presentation to a support group in Britain with Ibrahim Issa, director of the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem, in the West Bank of Palestine. Western governments, aid agencies and donors have withdrawn a lot of support, so we’re having to do some remedying of that, especially since life in the West Bank is getting harder and harder.

I was amazed at his composure. Or perhaps he was just too tired. He and everyone around him had been kept awake through the night by missiles, planes and sirens. And fear.

Even so, they keep on at the school, driving by the seats of their pants – attending to the needs of the children, their families and the local community. On a shoestring.

The latest measure they’ve taken – since Israeli roadblocks all over town make movement difficult – is to take trauma-support services to the people, in a Volkswagen van. It’s a sort of trauma-ambulance, for people losing their rag because of the tensions, dangers and offensive experiences they’re living through.

In my contribution I mentioned the Arabic term, sumud – hanging in there, never giving up. The secret is to stay in the present, to make the best use of the gifts it yields. When the past is being obliterated and the future holds little to hope for, there remains the present – the only time we actually have agency.

My own body is gradually deteriorating – a new health issue is slowly immobilising me – yet I’m continually amazed at the gifts that life presents. One is this: lessons I’m learning from people younger than me. In this case, it’s Ibrahim, teaching-reminding me about the present moment. Doing what you can with whatever is available right now and making the best of it. Because the past is gone and the future is but an idea.

People bang on a lot about freedom of speech, though really we need to learn more about exercising our freedom of attitude.

In the immediately-impending future, on Sunday (times below, for different countries), there comes the Sunday Meditation, and you’re welcome to be present with it. It’s free, no sign-up, no strings, do it your way, and wherever you are.

Perhaps give some attention to feeling what it’s like to stand in the shoes of someone whose life could be snuffed out tonight, for no understandable reason or purpose. Hold their hand. There’s no shortage of available souls in need of good-hearted soul-company, in plenty of places. This is what we can do.

With love from me. Palden.

———————

Current meditation times, on Sundays:
UK, Ireland & Portugal 8-8.30pm GMT
W Europe 9-9.30pm
E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 10-10.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm
EST, Cuba 3-3.30pm
PST North America 12noon-12.30pm

—————–

More about the meditation: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
About Hope Flowers school: www.hopeflowers.org – click ‘support’ to find out how to make donations from different countries.
Here’s an interesting talk by Ibrahim, during a recent visit to UK (36 mins long): https://open.spotify.com/episode/0gW1m1QSbrknFftmjzkA2f…

The Plughole

It’s the Sunday meditation again, and I have revived sufficiently from an illness that floored me last week to be able to elbow you about it! That is, you’re welcome to join us in the zone – times for different countries are below. It’s an open meditation space lasting half an hour. To quote Van Morrison: no guru, no teacher, no method – just you and me in the garden… Follow your own path, together with us following ours. We shall be blessed.

If needed, details are here: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

The illness was a fluey thing. My energy was low, and I’d been pushing hard and under pressure in my remote humanitarian work. So when I got cold and wet during a trip to Falmouth, my soul pulled the plug and I went down through it. Next day I was semi-conscious, stiff and hurting, with sluggish brains, wobbly balance, burning feet (peripheral neuropathy) and I was right out of it, gone, hardly here.

A pertinent sign at Gurnard’s Head, in West Penwith

My predominant emotion was grief, over things that have happened, and particularly over moral dilemmas and painful moments in my humanitarian work over the years. I’ve seen people face hardship, suffer and die who, in my estimation, should not have died, and at times I’ve been unable to help – often quite simply I did not have the funds needed for medical treatment for an amputation or to save a life.

This is a deep dilemma being faced by many humanitarians now, as governments blithely withdraw funding and the public shrugs its shoulders. For me, in late life, it has left traces of regret, even though I know that the net value of my work was positive overall, and there’s a lot I’m glad about.

But the illness enabled me to go deep, deep down to a place where the hidden roots of life’s experiences and events ferment and bubble. This is one of the big virtues of illness that many people try their best to avoid – the consciousness changes it can bring about. Sometimes our soul needs to cut us down and render us helpless, to help us work through something – burn through something. Whether or not we actually do this is a life-choice and an exercise of profound free will.

It is an act of free will to choose to go through a turning in the deepest seat of consciousness. You have to go over the edge and take the plunge. Getting into the habit of doing this throughout our lives sets us up for one of life’s greatest and most moving of experiences – dying.

As you approach death, life tends to take you down in stages – a series of crunch moments or crises where your worldly powers and agency are reduced, your world shrinks, and you bodily functions deteriorate. This incremental withdrawal yields the possibility of a new seeing, a new understanding, if we so choose it. Though it involves perceiving truths that can at first be uncomfortable. Yet facing and accepting these revealings becomes a relief too, an understanding, a forgiveness. For this life had simply been a short visit on an ongoing pathway. It begins and it ends.

Back in the 1990s I was privileged to help and spend quality time with Sir George Trevelyan, who was in effect the grandfather of the New Age movement in Britain. Very much a man of the Twentieth Century, born in 1906 and dying in 1996, he was an aristocratic philanthropist, thinker and educator, planting the seeds of the new age and the green movement in the 1940s-70s. He was a four-planet Scorpio. At the very end, he died by decision, announcing that he should not be disturbed or given any food or drinks. He was gone in 4-5 days.

Here’s a video of him talking in 1988, in his eighties. Thank you, Sir George, for being you, for what you did with and for so many people, and for pointing the way in my life too.

Meanwhile, if you care to join today’s meditation… see you there!

Love, Palden

Being Alive

This time it’s a blog and a podcast…

Some days I have days where inspiration-levels droop, so I rattle off a podcast or a blog, if I can muster up a gem to start with – a starting thought. It’s a way of getting inspiration-channels moving, and sometimes something good comes out. Not always – I have quite a few rejects.

A few days ago I was feeling a bit like that – the cancer drugs were affecting me, I’d been on my own too much, it was raining and foggy, and I was casting around for a spark to give me some ignition. Oldies sometimes need a bit of that – ignition. And going to rest in bed isn’t that inspiring once you’ve done it for some years. Yes, even with the amazing view I have out of the window from my bed.

Bosigran Castle, a cliff sanctuary, West Penwith, Cornwall

It has been one of my pathologies in life – a wee ability to ignite people and things, providing a spark that sets things in motion. This is part of the role of an astrologer, but I’m one of those who has got his fingers in various pies over the decades, for all sorts of reasons. Some of these spark-moments I hear about or see the results of, often years later, and some I hope have happened anyway, somewhere, sometime, whether or not Schroeder’s Cat was watching, and unbeknownst to me. I’m happy about that. It has been a privilege to participate in people’s lives in that way.

I’m still at it – helping our proud nation raise, widen and deepen its true productivity levels, the true GDP of our people, through helping people fix their souls, and periodically managing to pass them occasional keys that open doors. Except nowadays I’m doddering around like an old fogey on sticks, wondering when the next seat is likely to appear. I go at about one-third of the pace of most people. I’ve passed my best-before date, so at times I have to work at finding a spark to ignite the old creativity-plugs.

I made a deep, bone-level decision during this winter. I’d been building up for it ever since getting stricken with cancer in late 2019. Perhaps it wasn’t a decision, more a confirmation or full acceptance of something I knew was the case but perhaps didn’t have the confidence to really go the whole way. It was like a conversion.

I decided that I shall not die for medical reasons.

Before you start overthinking and wondering what I mean, I mean this… I’ll die because it’s time and I’ve had enough, I’ve done what I came to do and to be (well, more or less), and because the angels no longer need to prop me up, and because I’m ready and cooked. Whenever that happens, I imagine I’ll go out quite quickly – y’know, an armchair job, or in my sleep, or a quick illness.

We shall see. Or perhaps tha angels might pull another trick and give me another lesson to learn. Sorry, mate, you don’t always get what you want! And what do you mean by ‘a good death’ anyway? Are you kidding?

Anyway, there’s not far to go – it’s months or a few years, as far as I can tell. But this isn’t to do with time. It’s to do with the fulfilment of all that needs fulfilling. Or a decent enough amount of it to lay it all to rest and hand in my cards.

There’s another thing too: dying is a part of life, not different from it, or a disjunction. It’s not ‘things going wrong’. It’s a continuity, a transition into another state, and the bits need to be in place for that, ideally. But once the bits are in place, you need to do it, to give permission for the tide to lift you up and take you away.

However, as you might already have found, our ideals often lead us along trackways that lead us all over the place – life on Earth is really complex and easy to get lost in. The path is rarely as straight and simple as it looked on the map. Or perhaps ideals trick us into doing things we’d run away from otherwise.

Who knows when I’ll drop off my perch? Do you know when or how you’ll drop, yourself? Probably not. I’ve been an astrologer for fifty years and I can’t answer that one. I don’t even try.

We don’t exist as individual selves as much as we would like to believe. We Westerners value ourselves very highly – y’know, it’s 400 Palestinians exchanged for six Israelis. And we make a big deal when people pop their clogs and remind us of our own impermanence, frailty and helplessness. We make stone memorials to them, as if to keep them pinned down in our world. We think of dying as a loss, as things going wrong, as loved ones leaving us.

In life we’re supposed to be on top of things – clearing that list, keeping to the timetable, doing what’s required, being responsible. But in the other world, well, that’s irrelevant. It’s necessary to allow ourselves to immerse and drown in the void and float through the vortex, to that far-off place where you no longer need to pay bills or fill in forms.

Ah, correction… unless you create that reality for yourself up there too! This can arise out of the illusion that, as long as we’re doing something, we must be alive. So we keep trying to do things, even when death is busy netting us.

But the big secret is, when you get there, to that expanded moment when your heart stops, there is nothing more you can do about all that, about that life you had. It’s over. Kaputt. Gesloten. Finito. Gone.

Then you’re in another world.

Palden at Bosigran, recently. Photo by Selina al-Mukhtar.

The fascinating thing is that we have karmic threads that permeate our lives and crop up in all sorts of ways in those lives. Since the soul does not exist within the experiential and sequential narratives of time, it lives all of its lives, from its viewpoint, at the same time. No time. Therefore, there is interchange and multilogue going on between our different lives, both on Earth and off it, and continually.

Think about it for a while… that’s rather a big thought.

For me, one of those karmic threads over several lives has been about calling together groups, clans, armies and throngs. This is a bit weird, because I’m quite a hermit too, or I prefer beavering away in the background. I’m not always doing that pulling-people-together trip, but in certain lives I’ve had that (shall we call it) calling or duty. In the life I’m now speaking from, it was called ‘The Camps’, and a number of readers will have been at them in former decades. And they still progress whether I’m there or not. Loads of other gatherings, groups, circles and networks too, and not only in this lifetime.

Some good people were key souls in making the camps happen – sister and brother souls who formed a constellation of energy and logistics to pull off a miracle. I dropped in the seed-idea, which was quietly formulated with a small number of people in our kitchen at the time, bless their souls, who ended up ‘holding the energy’ at the camps. A few are dead now, and others ageing. I get the feeling we’ll find ourselves meeting up again upstairs though.

In unconscious anticipation of this, the name of the cafe at the very first three seasons of camps around Glastonbury in the mid-eighties was called ‘Pie in the Sky’. Precisely. You’re welcome to come along, when you get to heaven.

Bosigran Castle as seen from Pendeen Watch direction

Anyway, when I started writing this it was intended to be a few paragraphs. As you see, it turned into more than that. But then, with loads of planets in Pisces right now, whaddya expect except slippery, bouncy dollops of the Great Unknown? So you got this diatribe. Apologies – I’ll go away in a moment. Nevertheless, it’s AI-free and much better than just re-posting neat memes with someone else’s pictures in the background. I hope.

The idea was to tell you about a new podcast. Recently I’ve been going on a bit about other worlds, other millennia, flying souls and random outbursts of imagineering and, this time, I thought I’d say a few things about life on Earth. If you’ve been there, or if you find yourself there now, it might give you a few interesting perspectives, while you’re busy doing the ironing or trying to figure out how to fix your car.

Or not, as the case may be. Who knows? Eitherwhichway, the pod is what came out of my brainbox and voicebox one rainy day when no one was looking. Except for the robin who sits outside eyeballing me expectantly and wondering what I’m doing.

Oh, and by the way, remember the Sunday meditations. They happen every Sunday on a cushion near you. Follow the link below if you need details. Keep it simple. Just do it.

Love from me. Paldywan.

The found sounds at the beginning and end are from recent early mornings on the farm in West Penwith, Cornwall.

Podcasts: http://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Notes from the Far Beyond: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Sunday Meditations: http://www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
Latest Aha Class – Getting Dead and What Happens Afterwards: http://www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-dying.html
About The 1980s Camps: http://www.palden.co.uk/camps.html

Getting Dead

…and what happens afterwards

The next Aha Class on Weds 12th Feb 2025 at The Hive, Penzance, Cornwall.

Receiving cancer into my life five years ago, I’ve looked in the face of death several times, and quite experientially. In fact, at present I’m surprised, even rather disoriented, to be alive. But it didn’t start there – this has been an evolving theme of my life. So in this Aha Class I’ll be sharing some insights and perceptions I’ve picked up along the way.

I had a life-changing near-death experience at age 24 – accidental food poisoning (hemlock, actually). I was unconscious for nine days, awakening with much of my memory wiped clean. Not long afterwards I met up with Tibetan Lamas, who taught their perceptions of life and death, about the bardos, the differing realms of existence, of which life is but one. Frankly, their blessings and kindness kept me on the rails during a very difficult time.

Then I became involved with campaigning for home-birth, following the births of two of my daughters. To me, a good natural birth made inherent sense with no need for rational explanation. Later in life I was even able to communicate with a soul before his birth, and he talked to me about what it was like being in his (to us) little world.

Later, from the 1990s onwards, I found myself working psychically with dying people, helping them over to the other side. Some were people I knew, and others were in conflict zones experiencing tricky deaths. Having been to the edge of death myself, I was able to help them transition – holding their hand and going over with them. It was remarkable how variable their experiences were. I was also part of a group (the Flying Squad) in which amongst other things we did psychic soul-rescue work in earthquake and disaster zones.

Since getting cancer five years ago, I’ve been hovering close to the threshold myself a few times. This has been a true education. Hovering on the boundaries really made me aware of the contrasting issues in both worlds. I feel reasonably comfortable about dying: in my way of seeing things, I’ll be going home. Well, at least for a while. I’m a bit beat-up and in need of deep healing.

I see things from the viewpoint of reincarnation. Looking at things this way, getting born, being alive and getting dead take on a new light. There’s something of us that continues through all of this. A newborn baby is not a blank slate devoid of character, and a person who dies doesn’t just stop existing – it’s a journey of the soul. Not only this but, as many of you might have found, being a witness to a birth or a death can be a wondrous and spirit-showered experience in its own right.

Dying is like an assessment of where we’ve actually got to after living a life. In the end it’s our own assessment, though it might take the shape of St Peter, or a wrathful deity, or a wise old angel. It comes from a place of truth, perspective and far-seeing that dawns in us during the dying process. This dawning can happen before, during or after clinical death, depending on where we are at – in terms of what we have truly become. This sounds serious, though it can also be joyful and a relief. It all depends on what we have done with our lives and where we have come to with it all.

This isn’t about judgements like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. It’s about seeing the true and full range of causes and consequences arising from all that we have been part of – what we have done and not done during those defining moments, those periods of time and those dramas we were in. There’s an understanding, a forgiveness, a grace and mercy to it. We come to understand why things went that way.

Dying before we die: this can make the dying transition easier, decongesting the process. Getting stuff sorted before we go – and not just writing our will, but clarifying things in our heart and soul, in truth and ‘before God’. We all need to do a reckoning, a forgiveness, a resolution and a releasing, with ourselves, people and the world.

It was as it was. What have I learned from it and what have I become? I’ve made mistakes and done things I’m not happy about, and it’s a process of owning up and squaring with it. In some cases I’ve done things to rebalance or rectify things, and in others I have not. Even with unresolved issues, it’s necessary to accept their unresolution.

There’s also a balancing factor – the things we’ve done that we can be happy with, that brought forwardness to others and the world, some of which we did precisely to redeem our own shadows, to pass through a karmic gateway. Part of this reckoning involves acknowledging our strong points and things we are glad about.

So this talk is for anyone facing death, or witnessing it in a person close to them, or feeling bereaved, or working with dying people, or preoccupied with the deep-seated questions that life and death raise. Actually, if truth be known, that’s everyone, but we have room for thirty-fiveish people at the Aha Class! It will be recorded and posted online afterwards.

I take a rather left-field and spiritualistic approach to all this. Whether or not you agree, I hope this talk might help get you into the zone, elasticise some ideas and set some things in motion. In our modern Western culture we have a big taboo around questions of birth and death, and this is very strange and not to our advantage. Even so, every one of us got born (well done) and every one of us is heading for the exit (good luck). So perhaps it’s worth giving this matter a little attention.

Do come if you can. If you can’t, the audio recording is posted online about a week afterwards.

Love, Palden

More: www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-dying.html
The Aha Class: www.palden.co.uk/aha.html
Booking: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/goldenthread/1540925
Enquiries, the Golden Thread: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100087774533364

The photo was taken at Woon Gumpus, West Penwith, Cornwall. Guaranteed AI-free.

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