meditation – Page 3 – Notes from the Far Beyond

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.

Time is Endless and the World is Wide

“This is one of the virtues of meditating…“, said I to the three student doctors. We had just started reviewing my cancer readings. I was at the Royal Cornwall Hospital. The specialist had just told me that my ECG readings (heartbeat) were good and steady. “That’s rather a surprise“, I said, looking at the students, “Because I’m electrosensitive and I’ve just been sitting in the company of thirty mobile phones, with humans attached, for forty-five minutes. But once you get used to meditating and you build it into your life, it works wonders“. The specialist continued studying her papers.

“You’ve responded well to the new treatment. Your paraproteins have gone right down quite quickly, from 21 to 5. I’m beginning to expect that of you now…“

Again, as an aside to the students. “I’ve been a wholefood vegetarian since 1971 and done supplements and complementary therapies since the early eighties. For your consideration… there might be a connection.“

Then I turned to the specialist. “With your help, I’m alive now and I wasn’t expecting that. So bless you for that. Five years ago I thought I had up to three years. Yet here I am. I’m on extra time. I’ve been given a bonus. It has changed my perspective and since I’ve been given extra time, I won’t be complaining when I get to dying.” Aside to the students: “Attitude makes a big difference“.

And, to be honest, there’s a positive kind of disorientation that has come with that bonus, since I seem to have found a new mission in life, as a decrepit, vibrant old codger of a rainbow warrior and a slightly reluctant elder – with a little literary and audio output on the side.

I’ve been with this specialist for four years now, and she’s got used to me. She’s one of several remarkable goddesses looking after me nowadays. Though I’m an oddbod in their eyes, I’m congenial, good at elucidating symptoms and feelings, discerning but I don’t moan or make things difficult, and I’m not rigidly ideological, and my medical results are good – and the results are the clincher for the doctors. They think it’s good luck, of course – a very scientific conclusion, to be sure. I still regret that, five years ago, when I suggested that they set a student on me to monitor me, they didn’t do that. After all, in these straitened times of cost-cutting, ageing populations and expensive medical advances, they badly need to study people like me to find out how we do it.

To which, the main thing I’d say is this: if you’ve been looking after yourself for a few decades, both in a bodily and a psycho-spiritual sense, then that will build a basic resilience which, if or when you get plunged into the rigours of old age, will help you a lot. The moral of this wee story is this: if you haven’t started, start now.

Cloudscape from Carn Gloose, near St Just

Today’s the day when I pop my cancer pills – mainly Len, Ix and Dex.[1] I’m on a four-week cycle, with three weeks on drugs and one week off – during which time my bodily balances can restore themselves. Pharmaceutical drugs do charge their price, though I’m okay with that – I use holistics and innerwork to ease that out and improve the results.

However, when dying is on the agenda anyway, it’s good not to be precious about life. I feel I’m not quite finished here on Earth, though if the gods want to take me out beforehand, it’s okay. I’ve been and done enough. It doesn’t worry me. Paradoxically, such an attitude can be life-prolonging.

The other side of the deal is that, if I use this extra time to serve a purpose that the gods like, then the chances are they’ll help me stay alive to do it until it’s done. Though it’s also true that this might be a glib belief that doesn’t really hold up – it depends so much on one’s life-story – and that’s something that reveals itself as life goes on. Or perhaps having a mission becomes a healing device in its own right – which I’ve found to be true.

When I first contracted cancer five years ago, the immensity of it all, and what it meant, caused me to do a big let-go. I was lying in bed in hospital, helpless and in pain anyway, and that was the best response to an overwhelming situation. I let go of expectations and of those beliefs I’d adopted because I wanted them to be true. I decided to be patient and open, to allow myself to live or to die – whichever was most on the cards – and to see what happened.

Within two months this ‘good results’ thing started showing itself. It’s not that I’m in remission – this is not an option with Myeloma – but I’m doing alright, as it goes. It’s the consequent peripheral issues arising from cancer that bug me more than the cancer itself. I have stomach issues, back issues, peripheral neuropathy, osteonecrosis and a few other weird things. This means that I hover on the edge quite a bit – six weeks ago I was paralysed with pain, and movement was excruciating. I’ve had a few bouts of illness beforehand. It’s a matter of making use of these strange borderline states for the evolution of heart and the soul. For gifts come with them. Pain, for example, has a way of wringing out of us truths we don’t want to face but we need to.

The Longships Rocks and the Isles of Scilly, from Chapel Carn Brea, the last hill in Britain

Many people have to go on courses or retreats to learn things I’ve been given for free. Illness is a fascinating gift, if we choose to take it that way: it’s an opportunity for inner journeying, cogitation, letting be, and the resolution of deep life-issues. One of the key life-issues is the big Saturnine question that hits us particularly around ages 14, 29ish, 45ish, 58ish, 72ish and 86ish: what am I here for? Am I doing it? Where have I got to? What comes next? – all rolled up into one. And the answer lies deep, beyond a threshold of fear and self-doubt.

There’s one thing, our dream, and there’s another thing, our life as it presents itself. It is the grating of these two that characterise our lives and learning processes while in incarnation on Earth. It involves squeezing through the cog-wheels and roller-mills of Time, which stretches things out into threads, sequences, causes and effects. What you seek is also seeking you, but the process stretches out over time.

I had a big lesson in this: in 2000, during a life-crisis (Pluto square Sun and Chiron Return), I dreamed of the perfect place to live – and, as my life then was, it was distinctly out of reach, a fantasy. I forgot about it, got on with life, went through big changes, and then one day in 2012, I was lying flopped on my mattress, having just then got it into place, while in process of moving into the cabin where I now still live, and… gosh… I suddenly realised that this was exactly what I had prayed for, twelve years earlier.

Not only this, but it was the perfect place in which to go through a cancer process and a complete life-change, seven years later. Something in me knew this and fixed it. Yes, our souls know things that we do not. And sometimes there’s a guiding hand that pushes us that way.

Regarding missions, I’m really happy doing the monthly Aha Classes in Penzance – and for those of you who can’t attend, there are recordings on my site and on Spotify.[2] I’m seeking to share some esoteric general knowledge – stuff it’s good for people to think about and know a bit about, even if they’re not specifically interested. Things they already half-know, but hadn’t quite figured them out.

I’m rather an autodidact and, though educated in university (LSE), the knowledge I’m known for was not gained there. My self-education began as I was leaving university, and much of it didn’t exactly involve learning – it involved remembering. And observing. And watching. And gaining insights from within. This means that I don’t quote the usual old stuff, the derivative, fashionable or easy stuff you get in many of the books, videos and courses – you get original thinking.

The gift in this for me is that, no longer very interested in self-promotion (which self-employed people usually have to do), I can just express myself creatively – whether or not anyone publishes it or even reads it. It’s all going into my online archive on my site, and hopefully my rather techy son can keep it there in future times. In the front of my book Shining Land, about ancient sites in Cornwall,[3] is a quotation from Bhavabhuti, a mathematician in India in the middle ages, who said:

‘If learned critics publicly deride my work, then let them. Not for them I wrought. One day a soul shall live to share my thought, for time is endless and the world is wide.‘

Gods bless you, everyone. Look after yourselves. Eat your greens and do your inner growth, okay?!

With love, Paldywan.

www.palden.co.uk

NOTES:

Lenalidomide, Ixazomib and Dexamethasone, with Co-Trimoxazole (against pheumonia), Apixaban (stops blood clots) and Aciclovir (antiviral).
The Aha Class: www.palden.co.uk/aha.html and on Spotify search for ‘Pods from the Far Beyond’.
Shining Land: the ancient sites of West Penwith and what they say about megalithic civilisation. 2023, available online. www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/

Mighty hulkers over the Carn Galva mine, and abandoned tin mine

Contemplation

Sunday meditation… yes, it continues… it doesn’t pause or stop!

In North America it is as from now an hour earlier than during summertime.

We’re at a parting of the ways. My feeling is that those around the world who have been pushing and asserting their agenda will not necessarily achieve their goals but slide into a soupy funk. We shall see.

There are hopes, plans and intentions, and then there is evolving reality. Sometimes they converge and sometimes not. Things are not as they seem.

There’s a gentle tipping going on. It’s all about an outer-planet astrological triangle that has been forming this year, and it will be with us for a few years. A few years back I wrote about it here: https://penwithbeyond.blog/2020s/ and it’s shown in the ‘Florescence under Duress’ image here.

Something is opening up. And remember (this is particularly important at this time): listen more closely to things than to people.

Speaking as a regular prognosticator in past times, I currently feel it’s best not to prognosticate – or at least not rigidly so. Possible realities, speculations and prognoses are worth bearing in mind but they should not obscure our seeing of what actually is emerging. Not just the surface stuff squirted at us through the news channels but the stuff underneath. And underneath that too.

We’re in a strangely tender time when possibilities are being incubated. There are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and lots of them.

So in your meditation, get a feeling (repeat, feeling) of the energy-dynamics of what’s under the surface. The future is pulling us toward it. Though stay in the now, and let’s lift it up a notch.

I’ve written this rather late… been inner-journeying and detached from the world for two days over newmoon. Meta-processing. All is well.

Love from me. Palden.

Current meditation times, on Sundays:
UK, Ireland & Portugal 7-7.30pm GMT
W Europe 8-8.30pm
E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 9-9.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm
PST North America 11-11.30am

The pictures are all from Gurnard’s Head, West Penwith, Cornwall

Reviving

The outer-planet thrum that’s in operation now

I realised on Friday that I must be reviving. I started back to work. Well, in a slow, step-by-step way. It was relatively easy work – checking and updating maps. Throughout life I’ve tended to run two tracks in parallel (being a Gemini mooner): harder work that takes a lot of thinking and creativity, and routine work that, while it’s necessary to do, it demands less focus and intensity.

I’ve been doing the latter, updating a series of online maps I made between 2014 and 2020, showing the ancient sites and alignments of West Penwith, and also of Scilly and Cornwall as a whole. They contain every known and identified site in Cornwall, precisely positioned. The alignments are most properly researched in West Penwith, the bit at the very end where I live, though the rest of Cornwall is covered too. If you click on any site or alignment on the map, you’ll get a popup providing further information and links concerning that site or alignment.

The maps are here: www.ancientpenwith.org/maps.html

So that’s what I’ve been doing, as a way of getting my brains back into gear, after two weeks of energy-suppressing opioid painkillers. They blanket you in an insulated fog of unwittitude and swimmy drowse – or at least, that’s what they do for me. Opioids are not good for the brains – I can testify to that.

But they kept the pain at bay until the problem I had started subsiding – a painful spasmic tightening of the muscles in my back and torso. For two weeks my muscles had pulled tight and rigid, as if a neurological overreaction to the deterioration of my bones. My psyche was fearing disintegration of my bony frame, and it was overreacting though seeking to protect me. This deterioration was stemmed last month by the first round of my new cancer treatment and, today/Saturday, I’m starting the second cycle of this treatment. It’s a maintenance treatment that I’ll be taking for a while, until it becomes clear it’s no longer working, or there’s a better alternative. Myeloma, a blood cancer that erodes the bones, cannot be cut out or irradiated surgically, like tumorous cancers, so it has to be regulated and held in check.

I still have residual pain and difficulty, but it’s at a 30%, not a 90% pain-level, and it’s in my manageable zone. Yesterday I visited John Tillyard, a gifted chiropractor in Hayle, who worked his magic on me, balancing up my bony frame. Claire, who took me to the appointment, reported that I walked back to the car in a very different way.

So I’m re-entering ‘normal’ life, such as it is. I re-start cancer treatment today. It’s pills, taken in a four-week cycle for three weeks, with one week off. On the first day I take a big dose of cancer drugs, then for the rest of the week I’m on a tick-over regime until, next week, the routine starts again. But on the fourth week I get a week off.

Recently, during the Sunday meditation, I’ve had a funny twist in the experience while I’ve been on opioids. During the meditation itself I find I’m very present, quite centred and ‘in the zone’, despite the opioids. Over the years I’ve found that the ‘channel’ distinctly switches off dead on time (currently at 8.30pm UK time) – I get a definite feeling of it – and this has been happening clearly in recent weeks. After the shut-off I sit there for a while and then the opioids take over, seeping into my psyche, and I drop off for an hour. It’s funny, that.

I find the ‘switch on’ of the channel is less distinct – it’s as if a space opens up, though it takes me a while to grow into it, or perhaps to slow my churning psyche – sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes. But when the ‘switch off’ comes, it’s quite noticeable. Fascinating. Over the last thirty years since I started doing this Sunday meditation, on the few occasions when I’ve lost track of time and forgotten the meditation (often because of jetlag after travelling), I’ve even experienced an altered state coming on of its own accord – only then to realise that it’s meditation time.

You’re welcome to join the meditation on Sunday (or any Sunday).

The clocks are changing soon. In UK and EU it’s Sunday 27th October, and in USA/Canada it’s on Sunday November 3rd. The meditation will be one hour earlier from those dates onward and through winter. (In UK it goes from 8pm to 7pm.) Remember: the ‘real’ time of the meditation doesn’t change – it’s just that our clocks change. Nature doesn’t change its clocks either. Changing our human clocks is connected with our modern human preoccupation with diaries, lists and appointments – it started particularly with industrialisation and urbanisation, particularly when trains arrived, running to strict timetables.

This has led to an exaggerated dissonance between ‘objective’ ticktock time and natural, inner, ‘subjective’, intuitive cosmo-time – the time-waves by which the Earth and cosmos resonate and reverberate. One of the core problems of our civilisation is that we impose ticktock time, with its plans and timetables, on natural time. This produces a disharmonic grating and grinding within nature and our own psyches. This friction lies at the heart of our psychological issues, our ecological and climatic situation and in the self-destructive nature of our civilisation. Put another way, we need to re-attune to our natural timings.

That’s what the next Aha Class is all about: time. Since getting cancer five years ago I’ve become curiously time-rich, while most people around me are time-poor, so this could be interesting. This matter of time, and our experience of it as we live our lives, is a key ingredient of the Earth experience – this is what we chose to engage with by getting born in this world. Everything on Earth is a matter of time – and also timing. That’s at times frustrating and yet it’s what we came here to evolve through, psycho-spiritually. Time is what stops everything happening all at once.

The talk is astrologically-based, but if you don’t understand astrologese, a multidimensional language, you’ll still get pings and lightbulb moments. One intention behind the Aha Class is to help broaden your general knowledge – concerning things it’s useful to know about even if we focus mainly on other things. Most of you will have a smattering of astrologese though and, since we’ll be talking about fullmoons, solstices, planetary line-ups and energy-configurations, all of you will have lived experience of these, and the talk will help you make more sense of them. I’ll explain how they work. Each talk is audio-recorded and, where relevant, maps and diagrams are put online afterwards, and they’re all found on the Aha page on my site.

On the day of the talk there’s what I’d call a ‘magnitude three’ planetary configuration or thrum-pattern, involving outer and inner planets, and the atmosphere of the evening will thus serve as an example of how it works. This rather fleeting configuration is an illustration of something that has recently started happening, a Uranus-Neptune-Pluto triangle for a few years, which is a door-opener for the world (see ‘2020s’ below). Whenever the faster planets swing round to activate that triangle, energy-changes are triggered, and the chart for the day and time of the class will be an example. The full astrological details of all this are laid out in my book ‘Power Points in Time – ancient festivals, lunar phases, planetary line-ups and historic moments’.

Classically, for an evening talk about time, Maria and I got mixed up with the dates. It’s now on Wednesday 23rd October at The Hive in Penzance, inshallah. After my illness I needed more time to get my body-psyche systems up’n’running properly, so the class has now been set to the new date. Which just goes to show, it’s all a matter of time. Even though I’m time-rich, I needed more time.

And now it’s time for breakfast. Love from me. Palden.

The Aha Class: www.palden.co.uk/aha.html
The Astrology of the 2020s: https://penwithbeyond.blog/2020s/
Power Points in Time: https://penwithpress.co.uk/product/power-points-in-time/
Meditations: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
Site and Archive: www.palden.co.uk

Chart of the 1999 solar eclipse in Cornwall – not just an eclipse but also a major configuration of planets and energy-thrum.

Acquiescence

“Where is the world?“, cried a desperate woman in Omdurman, Sudan – in ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ on BBC World Service today. Lebanese will be feeling this feeling right now, though the Sudenese perhaps have it worst. Well, the world is busy with other things. That’s where the world is.

One of the stange paradoxes of our time is that, as world population has grown – exploding to over eight billion – individuals and communities have become more isolated, alienated and dehumanised. In recent years, wars, witnessed onscreen like disturbingly realistic video games, have been stumbled into as if people, cities and landscapes were expendable and there were few consequences to worry about.

We wring our hands, feel smidgeons of the sorrow and pain, grumble and get on with our lives. Others blank it out, as a survival mechanism that allows them to keep going with a daily round of never-ending pressures. And yet others love it, as if feeding on the tensions, the bangs and flashes, and the numbers, and the power of it all.

For the triumph of evil it is necessary that good people do nothing. I keep banging away about this quote from the philosopher Edmund Burke because it sums up the world today and the tenor and background of what is to come.

When wars take place, we easily latch onto the proposition that it’s about Israelis and Palestinians, Russians and Ukrainians, rival generals, or government and rebels – and thus has it ever been. Well, yes, but here we blind ourselves. This is the way it looks, but there’s something else here.

At root it is about the battle for the hearts and minds of humanity – a well-worn phrase which describes what we have been in for a very long time. It seems now to be coming toward a crescendo. This goes right back into prehistory. There are two fundamental mindsets here.

One perceives strangers as a threat, territory and resources as possessions, people as individualised objects, power and wealth as advantages, competition as the sole mechanism by which everything operates, Earth as the universe’s only inhabited world and physicality as our baseline reality.

The other generally likes, loves and trusts fellow humans, tends to treat others as it would like to be treated, identifies with nature, thinks mutually and cooperatively, understands that there is something greater than what we know, and it tends to prefer living relatively simply, sharing resources and staying within its means.

Something like that. These mindsets are more easily felt than defined in words.

All of us hover around various places on the spectrum between these two poles of perspective and experience. We all have to establish a balance between self-interest/sovereignty, and mutuality/shared sovereignty. They both bevel into one another. They can shift quickly in crisis situations. Often the values that position us on this spectrum are formed in teenage and early adult years, though they can shift if life jogs us into it, or through periodic epiphanies.

Seen this way, many of today’s wars aren’t between the commonly-agreed sides. They are wars by people with a competitive mindset against two kinds of people: those with a cooperative mindset, and those who aren’t sure, who acquiesce in whatever situation prevails at the time.

The competitive side is also made up of two main kinds: the oligarchy that drives the mindset and cracks the whip, and those who lock step, join in, to become the executors, officers, influencers, reinforcers and beneficiaries of the oligarchy (to gain advantage or for fear of not joining in).

But it’s not simple and clear-cut. It’s not a goodguys/badguys scenario where one side can blame the other side for the world’s problems, striving then to dominate or eliminate them in order to solve those problems. It’s far deeper and it’s not fully conscious. It’s the frequencies we tune into. Even if we cleave the world into ‘woke’, ‘anti-woke’ and ‘don’t know’, within those divisions are heartless wokes, good-hearted anti-wokes, and a large number of people unwilling to takes sides when the options are presented in such a binary, with-us-or-against-us way.

This last lot is a broad majority – except perhaps temporarily at times such as the outbreaks of wars, when polarisation waxes strong. And this is one reason, deep down, why wars are fomented – to keep polarisation and dehumanisation on top of the world agenda, and to dull people’s sensibilities with scenes of tragedy and destruction.

There are different kinds of ‘don’t knows’ too, and the matter is kept confused because few people have time to think and reflect clearly on what’s happening and what they can do about it. The acquiescent are constrained in what we can do – despite all the hoohah about democracy. We have delicately-balanced, busy lives, and the cost of disruption can be high. Bills must be paid. Some people don’t want to know. Some feel helpless and frustrated. Some try hard to make a difference and don’t get far. Others simply pursue their careers or their lives as best they can.

The key thing here is that acquiescence is the source of the world’s problems. Some like to rail against the perpetrators, the oligarchies and power-structures, and there’s some relevance in this, but really this concerns a deeply-embedded tendency in humanity to shrug shoulders and go along with things it has instinctive reservations about.

This gives oligarchies operational space by which to determine the agenda and co-opt majorities into buying or accepting it. Throughout history it has allowed them to drag humanity through mass experiences they otherwise wouldn’t have chosen. The devastation going on today in Lebanon is but the latest example, and there will be more next year and the year after that.

I’ve spent my life exhorting, encouraging and facilitating people in their change processes, and by no means have I been the only one doing it. In the stretch of history in which I and my generation have participated, some progress has been made, though the fundamental issue has not been resolved. That is yet to come.

It’s the battle for the hearts and minds of humanity. In recent years we’ve had distressing instances presenting us with deep choices. Do we actually want this devastation to continue? If not, to what lengths are we willing to go to end it? If, as it seems, the future is intensifying, the disasters are getting bigger, the pain and costs are rising and we’re heading for a precipice, when will the world’s majority consensus shift sufficiently to tilt the balances and head another way?

This is the bottom-line agenda for the coming decades. Events and collective feelings are moving that way – something is fermenting underneath and, one day, it will come out. We’re approaching an historic choice-point, or a series of them, and we all know what it’s about. Evidential statistics are hardly necessary.

This question lies within all of us. It’s tempting to give a nice, easy answer that looks like a solution, so that everyone can go home and feel okay, but so many of us have done this before so many times, and it doesn’t necessarily help.

It’s the process. We have to go through the process. Globally. Everyone. And it’s a cliffhanger.

I’ve been reflecting on all this as I’ve gone through what has felt like a long-dark tunnel of illness in recent weeks, as detailed in three recent blogs. I’m gradually reviving, and the muscular pain I’ve had, at 90% two weeks ago, is now around 30% and within my manageable zone. Though I haven’t been close to death medically, at times it has felt like dying, as if the pain might squeeze and pop me out of my body, leaving a curled-up pile of bones behind. Since getting cancer five years ago, I’ve visited that close-but-not-there point a number of times, and perhaps my body-soul connections are a bit loose.

It’s feelings like pain that make us more human. Times when we’re overwhelmed with our own feelings, our phantasmagorical inner dramas, locked inside our personal reality-bubble and struggling through the nettles and brambles overgrowing the path toward finding out who we are. Those bouts of suffering we impose on ourselves or which come at us, just when we were busy making other plans – they can have a humanising effect.

I guess I’m feeling a microcosmic version of what Gazans will feel when the firing at last stops. What then? Will I revive, to return to something resembling the life I had before? Or have I dropped to a new level where my possibilities have shrunk and my dependencies have grown, and that’s what I must accept? We shall see. It’s that post-devastation phase that happens after an enormous struggle. Actually, it’s the mindset that those of my age-group were born into, just after WW2 – a ‘whither the future?’ phase, experienced amongst the rubble of what used to be.

My life has reduced to the size of my cabin – and when the fog is down, as it does here in Penwith, the shrouding is complete. Even so, I’ll still be there every Sunday at the meditation, because that’s something I can do that breaks free from the physical confinement my body has given me. You’re welcome to join our little group and enter the energy-zone of the meditation. It can help greatly in the uncovering of answers. (There’s a link below, explaining more.)

The view from the hill on our farm – that’s St Michael’s Mount

Over the last few weeks, lying there in bed, dead still, propped up on pillows, at times I’ve travelled far and wide, visiting many of you, and visiting people I’ve known through my life (not least friends in the Middle East) to be with you. And to be in the world’s crisis zones, with people who are there. And to swim around in the tangly firmament of the world’s heart-mind, planting love-mines and stockpiles of psychosocial aid for people to draw on, in places I’m drawn to.

I’m not doing it all the time. Often I’ve been just lying there in an opioid-painkiller daze, wondering dreamily whether I have the energy to arise from bed to take a pee. But on occasions I’ve gone deep, through and out, visiting Darfur, Dneipro, Sidon, Bethlehem… or far further out, beyond this world, into the realms of light, timelessness and beatitude, and laying connections between the two.

Which goes to show, even in your darkest days it’s still possible to do something. A candle lit in darkness sheds far more light than a candle in sunshine. And this is what we’re here for. The first Tibetan Lama I met, Akong Rinpoche, taught me that times of enlightenment, freedom and joy are like a holiday, which heals us because it is brief and different, but the times when the real progress is being made are the times when we’re wading through the swamp, struggling to find our way. And it seems to go on and on.

In writing this, I’ve just realised that Lama Akong taught me this in November 1974, almost exactly fifty years ago. Half a century later, I’ve had a reminder of it, and I’m still learning that lesson. But it also says something also about the tribulation humanity is in. We do actually know what is needed on Planet Earth, more or less, and we now have to wade through the mud, the crossfire and the floods to get there. Hearts and minds. For the triumph of humanness, it is necessary that good people do something.

With love, Palden

PS: The next Aha Class in Penzance is re-timed to Wednesday 16th October – I’m not ready to do it on 9th. Ironically, the class is all about time.

The Aha Class: www.palden.co.uk/aha.html
Sunday Meditations: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
My website and archive: www.palden.co.uk
Recent public talks: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

Young swallows in the barn next to my house. But, worryingly, the swallows didn’t breed young this year – probably insufficient food around (insects)

Sunday Meditation

Sunday has crept up and, here I am, reminding you of the Sunday meditation. (Usually I do it weekly on Facebook, but I don’t have the capacity to post it on multiple platforms – sorry).

It’s the same as before. You’re welcome to join. Times in different countries are below, and further details are here: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

I woke up early this morning, remembering a series of four dreams I had around age 27 on my Saturn Return in the late 1970s. It might or might not be apposite to mention them here, but I’m moved to do so anyway. You see, quite a few people think I’m brave. But that’s not my perception – actually, I get shit scared over things, like anyone, and currently I’m biting nails over the next stage of my cancer treatment or, more specifically, about facing it alone. So I’m needing to be brave anyway, whether I like it or not, since there isn’t much option. That’s the way the cookie sometimes crumbles.

In the first dream I was standing on a hill with some others, looking over a grand panorama. Yet down there, there were enormous nuclear explosions going on, with amazing mushroom clouds (this was in the time of the Cold War). What was bizarre was that this was a beautiful scene, and the explosions were crystal-clear and radiant – really, like wow, amazing. Then came the fizzing, and I could feel a wind coming from the direction of the explosions, and my body was beginning to fry. I could feel it sizzling, though it wasn’t actually painful. Gradually I was dissolving and dying. The scene went blank, and then suddenly I was in a kind of loft or attic, on my knees on the floor, reaching down through a trapdoor and hauling people up. The feeling was beatific, almost blessed, and peaceful, and the people coming up were relieved, awakening from a nightmare as they emerged through the trapdoor.

That was that. In the next dream, I was at home and They came for me, to take me away (a kind of forced conscription). I was really scared. Somehow I managed to evade them, and they went away. I awoke in the morning feeling really stirred and upset. In the next dream, they came, saying that if I didn’t come with them they would take my children. This really got me. Again, I awoke feeling disturbed, anxious, traumatised.

In the fourth dream I was being chased down a street by some gun-toting thugs from the security forces. I managed to get into a big building and into an apartment where there were people I knew. I shut and locked the door behind me and we hid. There was battering on the door and eventually they got in. It was really scary. Suddenly, there was a machine gun, right there. Now, at this time I was going through my training with Tibetan Lamas, and taking hold of a machine gun was totally incongruous and out of keeping for me. But I levelled it at them and killed them all! The others looked at me with a sense of both shock and relief. I woke up next morning feeling wonderful, on top of things and irradiated with light and a can-do attitude.

My soul was clearly teaching me something. Within five years I was to take on a strong leadership role, and one thing you must get over, to take on such a role, is your self-doubt over your worth as a leader, and your fear of standing alone against what can sometimes be seemingly overwhelming opposition (this is an issue for dear Donald and Kamala right now!). Within a few decades I was to stand amidst gunfire, and with no machine gun (or blue helmet), and a surprising calm-headedness.

On occasional hot moments in Palestine I used to say out loud, and totally neutrally, “Ah, we have a situation“. This at first was regarded by Palestinian friends as a strange yet forgiveable thing, yet after a while they started cracking up with it because it would completely dissolve their panic and insert them solidly into the present moment, so that they would be less reactive and more aware of what they were doing and what their options were. Some years later, I heard that this had become something of a meme that had gone around, and even Abu Mazen had used it in a speech.

But I think the main teaching was this. When you receive the call you need to swallow hard, muster your energies, stand up and do it. Because there are also big and frightening consequences to not doing it. Most of the world’s ills arise from what has not been done, at the time when it was necessary. And it’s probably what you’re here for yourself – to stand up, within the sphere of your own reality-bubble. Most people don’t get seemingly dramatic callings like the ones I’ve recounted – it’s just the story of my karma unfolding – but we all get called in some direction or other, even if it is ‘just’ growing cabbages, planting trees, or ‘just’ raising kids, or caring for the old lady down the road. It’s often quite specific, even designed for us – or we were designed for it.

In 2015 I supported a young Gazan male nurse in escaping Gaza. He was one of the boat people crossing from Turkiye to Greece at that time. He managed to get to Belgium and, discovering a Gazan nurse, they snapped him up quickly. Fast-forward to 2022 and he died, working in a Covid ICU ward in Brussels, far from home. Yet, tragic as this was, he was doing what he was here to do, and he was good at it. He had followed his calling. I think Allah will have looked after him and he’ll have done well in heaven. He might well have achieved far more for the progress of his soul than staying in Gaza or having a comfortable life of freedom in Belgium. We cannot know, but it’s likely. I hope we’ll meet again.

So that’s what came up for me today. See you at the meditation.

Love from me. Palden.

The photos are from Bannau Brycheiniog or the Brecon Beacons in Wales.

Current meditation times, on Sundays:
UK 7-7.30pm GMT
W Europe 8-8.30pm
E Europe and the Levant 9-9.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm
PST North America 11-11.30am

Acting like a Mountain

Here’s honouring the great and the mighty

SUNDAY MEDITATION

You’re welcome to join the Sunday meditation – it’s good medicine. Take a break – life can do without you for half an hour.

Do your meditation, astral travelling, mindfulness, mantras or whatever, as you normally do it, together with everyone else doing the same, wherever we are. Enter the zone, an enhanced energy-field, and the wind will inflate your spiritual sails.

My current feeling is that we’re in a chickens-coming-home-to-roost phase, after the events of the last 6-9 months and more. A tide is turning. Nothing is ever permanent. This cuts all sorts of ways: both the benefits and the harms we have brought come back at us, and the overall trajectory is all to do with learning. The learning of the soul.

We’re now in a phase of collective learning (Pluto in Aquarius), of learning together as a mass of people. Our challenge is to mature as a human race, at a time when we truly need to do so. For our social subgroups, our social tribes, nations and the world are themselves beings with their own karmas, behaviours, choices and lessons to learn.

Sometimes it feels as if everything is going backwards. Gaza, Sudan, Yeman, Ukraine, Myanmar, they all seem like retrogressions, and certainly for the people in the thick of these maelstroms, they are.

But look underneath. What has been achieved in recent times has been a maturing of human values worldwide. It’s underneath, beyond the politics, the opinions, the propaganda, the polarisation. It’s historic.

It’s happening particularly in the majority world where 80% of the world’s population lives. Sadly, the Global North, including Europe, America, Russia and Japan – our time was back in the 19th-20th Centuries – are in a rather self-deluding, hubristic phase at present. We’re quite good at alienating that global majority. But people of conscience in the West are deeply unhappy with what has been happening too. It’s people of conscience who need to be the ones in power.

It concerns the matter of conflict itself and of man-made devastation and suffering. Forget this side or that side, who is right and who is wrong – conflict, polarisation and dehumanisation are themselves the problem. Humanity is growing tired of this stuff. And, strangely, exhaustion is one of the greatest of history’s peacemakers.

The sacrifices made by people oppressed by war are fuelling up the collective psyche toward an historic shift. It’s taking place deeper down. That’s where the learning is happening, and in coming times it will be tested. Humanity needs to come out of hiding, and we’re moving inch by inch toward such a time.

Do join us in the meditation. Help the world rise an inch higher. Help humanity see things from another viewpoint.

Times are below, and if you have questions, try here: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

With love, Palden
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Current meditation times, every Sunday:
Iceland 7-7.30pm
UK & Portugal 8-8.30pm
W Europe 9-9.30pm
E Europe and the Levant 10-10.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 3-3.30pm
PST North America 12-12.30am

Blessings that Bones Bring

The Wisdom of Insecurity

Fortuitously, five years ago I started a blog a few weeks before going down with cancer, with no idea that it would turn into a cancer blog. I just had a feeling to start blogging. That says something about intuition: it has ways of knowing things in advance that our conscious minds don’t.

Intuition knows or understands things in the back brain without needing to think about them in the front brain. But it’s a matter of giving it attention and credence, and learning to avoid overriding our feelings with obstructive and over-thought rationales, conditioned responses, fears or doubts – or science.

Cancer was a great surprise when diagnosed in November 2019. Signs were appearing nearly a year beforehand in January 2019, but they weren’t recognisable. Something wasn’t right. It was as if I was in a downward spiral, getting tired of life and losing my spark. Neither my then partner nor I could figure out what it was.

In August 2019, while working in her garden, my back cracked – two of the lowest vertebrae in my back fractured and two collapsed. At the time it seemed I had an excruciating, immobilising back problem.

A cranial osteopath recommended I get scanned in hospital – he felt something more was going on here (thanks, Simon Perks). Getting to hospital was a long process. Eventually, in A&E, the junior doctor, in a quandary, called in a specialist, who entered, looked intently at me for a while, then said, “Test him for Myeloma”, and walked out. Brilliant. This man nailed it at first try. Two months later I met him in the hospital corridor and managed to thank him. Before long I was having treatment. I had Multiple Myeloma or bone marrow cancer.

When the news of cancer hits you it’s like a thunderbolt and soulquake. Yet it also brought me a strange element of relief, at last knowing what was actually happening after three months of spirit-wringing pain. For decades I had looked after my health quite well, with a view to avoiding such things as cancer. Had I got things wrong? Seriously ill, if I had arrived in hospital a month later I was unlikely to have survived. When cancer comes it can come fast and strong, even if its buildup is long and slow.

After a few days I asked one of the cancer specialists whether he had any clues about the causes of Myeloma. He looked at me straight, saying quite simply, “Radiation exposure”. The next day he brought a map in The Lancet, a medical journal, showing the clustering of Myeloma cases in UK around nuke stations. For 28 years I had lived 15 miles downwind of Hinckley Point nuke station, and I’d had two instances of nuclear radiation exposure in other contexts. His opinion just went ‘ping’. I had known since 1975 that I was electrosensitive. This was not a great problem until around year 2000 when mobile phones and wi-fi became commonplace. That’s what finished me off.

Certain chemical neurotoxins may also be a cause of Myeloma for some. Once, when in hospital, I met a man with Myeloma, asking him what his work had been. “A merchant seaman”, he said. “We have all sorts of strange chemicals on the ships”. I asked what his specific job had been. “Radar”. There you go: radiation exposure.

Another chap said he had been a freight train driver. “What kind of freight?”. “Oh, nuclear waste from Sellafield. It was good pay.”

Many doctors say the causes of Myeloma are unknown. This perhaps deliberate unclarity probably arises because of the court cases and compensation claims that would erupt if such electronic or chemical toxicity became public knowledge. There’s a lot of money in it, and everyone loves their mobile phone.

Back in 2000 I had a ‘dark night of the soul’ crisis and a long illness, going down into the deep dark, questioning all I had done over the previous three decades and wondering what value it had really brought. It was a profound honesty session, a struggle with Weltschmerz – the pain of the world. Then aged fifty, I think my susceptibility to cancer started brewing around that time.

As time went on the electrosensitivity got worse, especially after 4G smartphones emerged around 2008. By 2014 periodic overdoses of radiation (in a restaurant, meeting, supermarket or train) were giving me rapid-onset flu symptoms, and by 2017 I was getting heart palpitations. It took until 2019 for cancer to show itself.

That year I was working on my prehistory research and mapmaking in a rather urgent, driven way. I completed it in early August, just two weeks before my back suddenly went crack and my life changed. Well, the research was at least done – perhaps a hidden hand of fate had known what was going to happen next.

When diagnosed in November I was now very much in the hands of the doctors, my partner Grace, my son Tulki and a few others – and way out of my depth, flat on my back. It was an exercise in surrender and acceptance – there was no alternative.

Having been a health-conscious, vegetarian meditator for decades and rarely getting ill, I had always assumed I would be exempt from cancer. Well, life has a way of teaching us other things! In our culture, cancer is regarded as something going wrong, as if a failure, but it didn’t quite feel like that to me, once I accepted it was happening. There was something strangely fitting about it, even though life was being hard on me. I decided to suspend all my foregoing beliefs and to do my best to trust that, whatever was to happen, everything would be alright in the end. I held on to one belief though, and I have a suspicion you know what it is: whatever life presents, there is a gift in it.

Earlier in life, rigorous experiences as a mountaineer, camper and humanitarian taught me energy-management, attitude-maintenance and steadfastness. Having got through plenty of crises and survived, I felt it was possible to do so now, whether that meant living or dying. At one point I said to the haematologist that I felt I had gone past the allotted nine lives (of a cat) and was on my tenth. She laughed but, dealing every day with people with terminal aliments, she probably knew what I meant.

Trusting the doctors was my only option. Nearly all of them were really good people. My experience of NHS treatment has largely been positive, once I gained the right attention. As the Covid period went on, by 2022 Treliske hospital became much more efficient and better organised. That helped a lot.

I had done alternative medicine for decades, yet I did not have the knowhow, energy, facility, support, time or money to opt for a holistic approach while in the depths of cancer, and already it was too late, too urgent. Chemotherapy was the only doable alternative. Accepting it contravened beliefs I’d held until that moment, yet it felt right to do my best with it. If the angels wanted me alive, they’d keep me alive, and if they didn’t, they’d take me out.

I’m pretty good at handling crises and, here was I, going through a full-on crisis, a test of spirit. I had to grasp life’s reins. Healing means fully allowing healing to take place, handing ourselves over. This goes as far as dropping any expectation of what healing means – it doesn’t only mean ‘getting better’. Whether I am to live or die, may it be for the best, all round – this was my prayer.

Pharmaceuticals shocked my system, though clearly they could also save my life. I asked for inner help in handling whatever was to come. One profound message came through: use your feelings and intuitions. My brains were not working well – I couldn’t get my head around all the medical research and terminology – though my intuitive senses were easier to read off. Intuitions just say Yes or No – and then it’s up to us to figure out why, or to bear witness to the way it becomes true.

I went inside myself, connecting with the angels like never before. This might sound spurious to some readers but, believe me, when you’re in a situation like this, that’s what you tend to do, whatever your foregoing beliefs. I asked them to help me adapt to a changed life. But when you ask for help, you need also to offer something: I offered my life, however it was to be. May it happen well and may I make it easy – that was another key prayer. I think this approach really helped, not just psycho-spiritually but medically too.

I used holistic supplements, helpers and good nutrition judiciously, careful not to mix them or create conflicts with the pharmaceuticals. Over time, various healers and healing circles weighed in – thank you everyone. Some of these interventions made a big difference. And old Tomten, Grace’s cat, would lie on my pelvis, the most painful place, giving genuine pain-relief.

So, doctors saved my life and healers gave me a new life.

I feel immense gratitude to Grace, who gave balm to my heart and helped me through the process – she was a true healer and a great soul. Her love, care and protection made a critical difference in a bleak time. I was a heavy weight for her to carry. There was no financial help for a ‘family carer’ like her, she had a business to keep going and a life already filled with issues and concerns. And I’m a tricky and complex character at the best of times. My son Tulki was a constant companion and support, though he could be present only sometimes. These two good souls made a big difference in that dark time.

So I followed an intuitive route through the cancer tunnel. I worked at getting the doctors on my side, showing them that I was not a member of the awkward squad – ideologically rigid, argumentative health-freaks with antipathies to match – though I did have my own ways and preferences. Two things helped: the doctors and nurses found me interesting and, lo behold, as the months went by, my medical results were surprisingly good. This gave me leverage.

Still, I had to badger them about drug dosages. I didn’t need blasting with explosives. Eventually the doctors got the message. One or two drugs were withdrawn and one was reduced – Dexamethasone, which had had positive effects on my cancer and distressing behavioural side-effects. My dose was reduced and, lo behold, it worked better.

Initially I was supposed to have eight cycles of chemotherapy but they stopped treatment after five, saying I could go. Later on, one specialist said, “Mr Jenkins, I don’t know what you’re doing and I don’t want to know, but whatever you’re doing, keep doing it”.

Myeloma is a blood cancer that causes the bones to hollow out and weaken. It’s not as complex to treat as other cancers – there’s just chemo, with no radiation or surgery since no tumours are involved. I responded well and quickly. I think my use of holistic practices, supplements and remedies helped, together with, to me, an almost palpable influence from my inner doctors. They scanned and treated me on an energy-level, and it worked. I think they worked through the hospital doctors in mysterious ways too.

I’ll add a few more things: walks on the hills and clifftops; a lovely place to live on a wildlife-rich farm with low EM radiation; unchlorinated springwater from just up the hill; a positive attitude; and coming to peace with as many life-issues as possible.

And sunshine. And love. These aren’t available all the time, and they don’t just come when requested, but they work.

At the time I wrote this, I was on an immunotherapy maintenance treatment, Dara. I had a subcutaneous Dara injection every four weeks – a nurse came round, inserting a short needle into the flesh of my stomach. This made the Dara disperse slowly (in contrast to an injection in a vein or artery). She took my temperature, oxygen count and blood pressure.

Every twelve weeks she took a blood sample and sent it off, and it’s from this that my condition was judged. Later I was taken off Dara and currently I’m chugging along with no pharmaceutical cancer treatment – only holistics – but I’ll probably go on ‘third line’ medical treatment eventually.

With Myeloma, most people don’t get ‘remission’, just a delay in dying – some get a year of life and some get ten, even fifteen. In my fourth year, I’m still alive. Yes, just checked, I’m still here.

After decades of living a holistic life, your system evolves differently to that of ‘normal’ people. When you’re doing spiritual work and you have some pretty amazing healers as friends, normal medical rules get bent and broken. But still, there’s a deeper karmic story that goes on underneath cancer, with a trajectory of its own. I did well at first but after two years I was ailing, hit a crisis and got ready for the possibility of dying within the year.

Yet by summer 2022 I was reborn, even attending a week-long Oak Dragon camp. This itself was a healing boost, as much from the people and the ambience as from the campfires and outdoor life. As Oak Dragon’s founder (in the 1980s) I felt so welcomed, and this in itself was medicinal.

By now I was in a state of positive shock, realising I was still alive and that there was indeed a future. Perhaps I needed to get a new coat for winter.

I’m doing well with the cancer but the side-effects are problematic and these might fell me in the end. It’s all about bones. Four of the lowest vertebrae in my back subsided. Reducing my height by over an inch (4cm), this squeezed my stomach, leading to digestive and eliminative difficulties. It caused the outer gluteus muscles in my backside, which do the major pulling when walking, to lose their tension, making long walks strenuous and painful. Added to this I have osteonecrosis of the jaw – a dying jawbone – stopped by medication but still an area of susceptibility. If I break any bones, repair and revival could be difficult. These side-issues affect my life more than cancer does.

Then there is chemo-brain. Chemotherapy chemicals destroy brain-cells and nerve-endings. Chemo-brain has had mixed effects, reducing my left-brained ‘executive’ thinking and my memory for details, yet improving the right-brained intuitive-imaginative side. It has pushed me into the present moment. My sense of time, sequence and duration have dwindled. I’ll remember something that was said by someone, but not who it was or when. I screw up when things get complex.

Yet my creativity – through writing, podcasting and websites – has never been better. This can deceive other people because, if they read my writings or see a photo, they get the impression I’m in better shape than I am. “You’re looking well, Palden!” Gosh, do I? It doesn’t quite feel like that.

At one stage I asked myself what I would be doing if I didn’t have cancer. Just carrying on, was the answer. Instead I have been given a new relationship with life, an experience-rich chapter, however long or short it is to be – miraculously paid for by the government and the noble taxpayers of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Life is twice as difficult but, in compensation, it has changed in shape and content.

I’ve had some pretty amazing spiritual initiations in my life, and this has been one in a sequence, as if it was meant to be that way all along. Twice coming close to dying in the last four years, I’ve had some training for the inevitable journey that is yet to come.

So, did I go down with cancer, or did I go up?

In our time, we’re all faced with many unknowns. Most people can however safely assume they will be alive later in life. The removal of that assumption has a strangely spiritualising effect – and that’s another bizarre gift that cancer has given. It’s what the psychedelic guru Alan Watts used to call the wisdom of insecurity. Earlier in life I knew it was good to appreciate life and all that it gives us, but cancer has taught me what that means in far more real-life terms.

It’s funny how things go.

Sunday Meditation

I don’t always post here about the Sunday Meditation, but they continue regularly every Sunday, and here’s a reminder (should you need one).

You’re welcome to join the meditation this week – or any week – on Sunday. Times are below. We’re a loose group spread across various countries, who meditate together simultaneously. Meditate, contemplate, pray or inner-journey in the way you normally do it.

No sign-up, fees or strings – it’s a group of us sitting together, simply sharing a wish to contribute to raising the vibe of our world and helping it break through to a new level of being.

Since the eclipse the tide has changed direction. However, the powers that be, plus general habit and intertia, fail to recognise this and seek to carry on as before. This will come apart and derail at some point and the current frenzy of wars, arguments and dissonances will start unravelling. But right now it’s tentative, not a foregone conclusion.

It’s good right now to reaffirm the direction the tide is now starting to head in. It hasn’t yet picked up momentum, though events are likely to push things that way as time goes on. It’s a flow moving toward resolution and sanity, following a paroxysm of madnesses and injustices that, through their excesses, have shifted public consciousness deep down.

Gandhi-ji called it satyagraha – truth force. The power of reality to overcome delusional beliefs. Getting real. ‘Smelling the coffee’.

Do join us. If you want to find out more: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

Love from me, Palden.

Current times, on Sundays:
Iceland 7-7.30pm
UK & Portugal 8-8.30pm
W Europe 9-9.30pm
E Europe and the Levant 10-10.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 3-3.30pm
PST North America 12-12.30am