Here’s my latest podcast. It’s all about why the ancients built their sacred sites. Well, my perception of it.
The Nine Maidens, West Penwith, Cornwall
There are thousands of megalithic sites around Britain and in other lands. The ancients didn’t build them for frivolous reasons – it had to bring them definite benefit to make it worth it, however they saw that. It was a big investment with longterm payoffs, going on for many centuries.
It’s all to do with cranked-up consciousness fields and the possibilities that become available when we do focused consciousness work inside them – at power points in space and during power points in time.
Reality’s rules can change and remarkable things can be achieved, even with practical, real-life outcomes. That’s what this podcast is all about. It’s about the way reality can be changed through inner work – or inner work combined with outer work.
Also, we become changed by doing so – this helps solve problems in remarkable ways, also reducing impediments we ourselves create.
It’s funny how, even though I, with a small group of people, started the Oak Dragon family back in 1986-7, I find it really moving now, approaching forty years later and in my current rather decrepit state, to be part of this family.
It had started with the Glastonbury Camps that friends and I ran between 1984 and 1986, which were the prototype for the then-new camps model, which was to launch itself more properly in 1987, the year of the Harmonic Convergence, as the Oak Dragon Camps (Ddraig Dderw in Welsh).
I’d started Glastonbury Camps quite spontaneously, and many Glastafarians joined in, but by 1986 the whole team was burning out – the camps had been so momentous, moving and transformative that they couldn’t continue as they were. Some of the team came to me saying ‘We can’t continue – we have lives to live‘ and this was true. This was the Thatcher period in Britain, when there were pressures to be economically viable and to get organised. Charitable, good-hearted voluntarism was seen to be a mug’s game and there was ‘no such thing as society’ – thus spake Margaret, the handbagging thunderbolt witch.
Did someone take the kettle away?
So, wondering what to do next, I went to my hideaway of the time in Snowdonia, North Wales, to contemplate things and pray for an answer. One wet day I went up alone into the mountains, stripped naked and prayed from the bottom of my soul for an answer. Was it all over? Or was there a next step to make? I stood there, sopping wet and shivering by a rushing mountain stream, with the rain washing my tears down. I waited. And it came.
“Oak Dragon“. That’s what came up. Oak Dragon what? Oak Dragon Camps… Within a long-seeming hour I had it, a complete vision. I went back down to dry out by the fire, digest all this and write down the details that had erupted. Thus began the Oak Dragon, with our first season of seven camps in 1987. It was somehow wanted and needed. The very first camp was a Beltane Camp in West Penwith, Cornwall. Ironically, it was just one mile from where I now live, and hosted by the same farmer landlord that I have now – and he and I didn’t twig that until a few months after I’d moved onto the farm in 2012! Well, magic happens. Out of these early camps many other camps organisations started, some of which are dead and gone and some of which are nowadays quite big, taking different formats and serving different interest-groups.
I left Oak Dragon around 1990, myself rather burned out, returning to camps only in 1993 and 1999. I was getting on with other things (such as writing the book The Only Planet of Choice and starting the Hundredth Monkey Project). The Oak Dragon carried on, going through its highs and lows and a deeper bonding and group identity-forming process. A family is something that is bonded on a deeper level than an ordinary group or community of interest – it’s something you don’t leave.
Rite of Passage – emergence after a long night
Three years ago they invited me back. I’ve attended camps as a grateful recipient, not as an organiser. It’s great leaving all that to others and leaving the plans and decisions to their wisdom! But there’s something new about the camps that wasn’t present in the 1980s: there’s a core to this family of people that knows how to do it and what needs to be done, and it doesn’t need an organisational team as before. Not only this, but the younger ones are taking it on, giving it new life and pushing it forward – and the oldies are not foot-dragging either because this is regeneration.
At the camp we (mainly the women) did an overnight a Rite of Passage for two sixteen-year old women who had been formerly toddlers and children in earlier camps. These are people who will take things on into future times, as the Millennials grow older. The women took them through initiations and teachings in the evening, the two slept out alone in a neighbouring field, and they were welcomed back as women next day – dressed replendently in red and blessed by the whole family, young and old. Would that more youngsters could have such initiatory treatment.
Rite of Passage – welcoming
A camp isn’t just a camp – it’s a process and a journey. Short-term guests are allowed in on the first weekend and then the gates close. We are off-planet, out in space, switched off for the following six days, building the patterns for another world and being a family in its own space. You join the family by coming to a camp, and you may return whenever you wish. One couple, former regulars, hadn’t been to camp for eight years, and it was like coming home for them.
There was a forging workshop and a wood-bodging workshop throughout the camp, and other things too – workshops, ceremonies, group processes and campfire circles – evolved over the years and forming the particular character of the Oak Dragon. There’s no entertainment except what we create – even so, the cabaret at the end, put together by participants, is spontaneously comical.
Something really interesting happened. As the camp progressed, we were oblivious to what was going on around us in Britain – riots, dismay and dissension. I wrote the following observations to the Dragons after the camp…
I remember saying to a couple of people early on in the camp how harmonious and calm the camp was – and when would the trouble start? Often there’s something big that comes up – weather, a group issue, one or a few people going into a big process… but this camp just glided through, and we even had good weather in the take-down day!
I said to someone how the camp had started with the Sun in Leo and the Moon in Aries (both fire signs, not easygoing), and a few other potentially wobbly issues were hovering around (such as the buildup of a Mars-Jupiter conjunction in Gemini – good for arguments and polarisation). So I was half-expecting something erupting. Yet it didn’t hit us – in terms of friction, disruption or mega-wobbles.
Meanwhile, the rest of the country was catching fire. At the camp, I had no idea such a thing could be happening, and no one else seemed to either, to my knowledge.
There’s something interesting about this. Ages ago I picked up an interesting observation from somewhere. Speaking in terms of personal growth, it said that first you get problems to face within yourself. Then, when you’ve progressed with that you manifest people around you presenting problems for you to work through and resolve. Then, when you’ve harmonised your relationships to some degree, you manifest issues in the wider world (society, the environment, the state of the world).
Thought
I found myself wondering whether this is a commentary on Oak Dragon, as a beingness, a family and stream of consciousness in its own right, with a reality-bubble of its own that has some continuity and character to it. The growth levels at the camp were, in my observation, pretty good, and we weren’t particularly in denial about or blocking off the darker ways of the world around us.
Yet our nation had caught fire, while we seemed to be a pool of relative calm – and quite oblivious to what was happening around us. We had few quakey internal rumblings, few problems with the surrounding world, yet we manifested trouble around us in the wider world – and we were distinctly not part of it.
It says something about creating our reality. Also about reality-bubbles that all of us live in – we humans live on one planet yet in very different worlds. When those worlds fail to interact healthily, there’s trouble.
I also wondered whether, unwittingly, we were balancing out the collective psyche of Britain and the British. We were probably not the only ones who were unconsciously or semi-consciously doing this. Anger, oppo and polarisation were happening on the streets of the ‘United’ Kingdom while also calm, creative and harmonious realities were being experienced in the Oak Dragon world, on the same islands, at the same time. Perhaps the island reality-bubble of Britain as a whole fixed things so that such a balancing could occur.
Perhaps the collective psyche of the Brits was fixing a few things.
Mapping out the future
I was digging around in some old writings about the camps and found this description from thirty years ago. It described of one of the magical initiations we’ve done at Oak Dragon:
In 1994, at the Myth and Magic Camp, we planned a magical heist for the climax day of the camp. The idea was that the nine teachers at the camp would dress up and station themselves at different points along a pathway through a limestone gorge some miles away, presenting to unsuspecting campers on a magic journey a series of choices and situations representing stages along the spiritual path.
Luckily, we worked out a ‘plan B’, in case of inclement weather. Inclement weather indeed came, so we staged it at the camp site. Each teacher occupied a geodesic dome, dressed up. Campers were released in ones and twos at five-minute intervals, to follow a trail from dome to dome, meeting an archetypal encounter at each stage.
So there I was, acting as the last stage in the line. By the time they reached me, people had already met a fairy, a sky-god, a druid, a goddess, an oracle or two, and I was a wizard – Merlin to some, a Mongolian or a space-being to others. I was dressed in my Hungarian pointed hat and Chinese dragon robes, meditatively transmogrified into an archetype-rich, altered state of being.
On announcing themselves at the door and being invited in, they encountered me in my arcane state, addressing them. I said: ‘The road is long, and you have already travelled far. The journey through your many lives has seemed like an infinity. There have been many turns of the way, and there are many more turns yet to come. I am going to ask you a question, and the question is this: when you have completed your life, you are preparing to pass on and you are looking back over your life at all you have seen and all you have done, what is it that you most would like to have done before your days are over?‘. For youngsters, I asked them what they would like to do when they were adults.
In flight and going places
The pauses were sometimes long. One boy wanted to be a sky-diver, and another a good father. A girl wished to be a famous film-star and another wished to plant lots of trees. One grown-up wanted to resolve things with his father, and another wished to travel the world. Some wished to prove that they could truly be a good person, and others sought peace of mind. Another wished for a child.
They then, to their surprise, received a florid and fullsome blessing through me, giving them full permission to entertain and achieve their wish. ‘And when you are there and you have attained what you seek, just remember that you asked for it. And you received.‘ Already bowled over by their previous encounters, this one finished them off!
This kind of special fairytale occasion, a journey into dreamtime, changes the patterning of people’s lives. Even if, back in Manchester, Massachusetts or Milton Keynes, they bury the occasion in busy amnesia, the experience stays there, lodged beneficently in deeper consciousness, acting as a seed of future growth and awakening. It makes a difference. It doesn’t go away.
Nowadays we are rarely genuinely blessed or initiated into new realities. We often make do with the lives we get. We struggle on without encouragement, seeking to rise to our true greatness. Through experiences such as these people are deeply healed of woe, fear and self-limitation. And a splendid time is had by all – kids and adults, women and men, under the sun and moon, watched by trees.
Lord and Lady of the Dance, having a go, hehe.
I’m so happy to have been part of all this. I’m so grateful to return to Oak Dragon in the closing chapter of my life.
Whether physically I have what it takes to do another camp next year, I really do not know – it was hard on my bony body this year, though the spiritual compensations lifted me up. At the back end of life a growing number of ‘last occasions’ comes your way and there’s something poignant and beautiful about that – including the more sad and regretful last occasions. But it comes to the best of us, sooner or later.
And that, my good friends, is life. And we shall see. Life also gets compressed into an evolving nowness in the closing chapter, and everything becomes contingent on all sorts of other things – such as dropping off your perch. With a smile. Or living to see another day – sometimes with a pleasant sense of surprise.
PS: on Facebook, instead of sending a friend request, please ‘follow’ me. I’m at my friends maximum, needing to reserve the rest for people I know or am likely to meet, or unless you write to me to introduce yourself, or you live locally to me. Thanks.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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