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’.
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
I wrote this as a comment to a posting on Facebook about the Sunday meditations, and part way through I realised it was worth making a full post out of it… I seem to be churning out a lot of stuff right now but, don’t worry, I’ll calm down!
Groupwork at the OakDragon Camp. Are you coming this year?
There’s a definite reason why the timing of the weekly meditation changes in terms of clock-time, though not in natural time. When I was with the Council of Nine thirty years ago (I compiled a book for them), they asked the human group involved with them to start meditating regularly in coordination with them, and they gave us a choice about when it should happen.
We decided on Sunday at 7pm GMT – the most available time that could work for everyone living between the Middle East and North America. But when we wondered about time-changes on the clock, they asked us to keep the time constant (that is, in Britain, 7pm in winter and 8pm in summer).
When asked why, they explained that, since they are beings that do not live in a world or on a planet, they have a technical challenge creating a connection between the timeless zone they’re in and the time-full zone we’re in. We live on (or in) a spinning, solar-orbiting planet where the changes involved with time (day/night and seasons) are a major part of the Earth experience.
Actually, the technicalities of fixing this up are sorted out by a hyper-civilisation called Ultima or Altea. They are one of twenty-four hyper-civilisations that work with and for The Nine, covering different aspects of the universe’s management and in a manner of speaking acting as creation and maintenance crews. The Alteans live in a timeless realm too, but they’re closer to us than the Nine, metaphysically speaking, so they have a capacity to reach into our world to set up the energy-field, the zone, around this meditation.
This allows the energy-field around this meditation to be established and ‘held’ for that half-hour time-period, as we experience it here on/in Earth.
This matter of The Nine and the Twenty-Four is not a universal hierarchy – more a bundle of reality-bubbles of enormous proportions, with some toward the centre and others toward the periphery yet all of them interlocking and interlinked on a multidimensional basis.
What I’ve found fascinating over the years is the accuracy of timing of the meditation – it’s as if the field noticeably switches on at the beginning, dead on time, and it shuts off and closes exactly at the end.
I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this. There’s something about this half-hour time-slot which, when it ends, makes one’s meditation change back to a more ‘normal’ kind that we would experience when meditating at other times. There’s no problem with that since both kinds of meditation have their value and function.
You don’t have to ‘believe’ in The Nine to experience, benefit from and participate in this energy-field – they are not interested in picking up a throng of followers. They have spoken their truth in the book I compiled – The Only Planet of Choice – and that’s all they wish to say, because they prefer us not to follow a scripture or set of instructions – they want us to use our inner experience and inner senses to feel our way into a spirit-field that connects with the essence of what all faiths are addressing – minus the cultural claptrap that they can be encumbered with. They just want to help the people of Earth wake up and get on with the business we came here for.
Personally, I like and respect people who have their own beliefs and ways of seeing things, who can stretch beyond them to see the spirit and soul in anyone, or any culture or faith, and somehow embody their beliefs in their lives, especially in their actions – even if they’re labelled as terrorists, infidels or unworthy souls. As the Dalai Lama would say, we’re all trying to achieve happiness, each in our own ways. Though each culture and time of history has its own misconceptions of what happiness truly implies.
If you wish to read more about The Nine, start here: www.palden.co.uk/nine.html – but even this is not necessary.
A Palestinian lady at the Sulha, a gathering of peacemakers in Israel, in 2005
I recommend you simply go by your inner sensitivities. If you resonate with the energy-field around this meditation, then that’s all that is necessary. That’s why I encourage all participants to do their meditation as they normally do it – and let it develop. What bridges us is that we all do it at the same time, with a similar basic motivation to help raise the level of the world and bring healing. It’s the motivation, not the method, that really matters – though methods can help, as long as we don’t get too stuck in them. If we get stuck in them, we narrow the vibrational frequency-range of our humanness and spirituality.
One thing we found in the Flying Squad (www.flyingsquad.org.uk) is that, if you step up to do the meditation every single week – 100% attendance – it does get easier, stronger and more fruitful. Though obviously this can only be done if it’s right for you at this stage of your life, and joining the meditation when you can, or even sporadically, is fine too. There’s no rulebook here.
For a short answer on who or what The Nine are, they’re part of what you could call the management structure of the universe, and they’re in charge of regulating the balances between polarities (light-dark, male-female, yin/yang). They refer to themselves as nine principles. But these principles each have beingness and individuality too, in a wordless kind of way. When I have experienced their presence in my inner journeys, I experience them as bodies of light and presence, without form, though they do have character and vibe-differences.
When asked about their relationship with ‘God’ they said something interesting (and this appealed to me, as someone with a Tibetan Buddhist background). They said that, when all of the consciousnesses of the universe attune to each other they become, in their words, ‘what you call God’. So when the Nine co-attune as nine beings, they are ‘God’, and when we co-attune with each other as humans, we also become ‘what you call God’. I am sure there are people reading this who have experienced that.
The Sulha, 2005
What I liked about them was that, in their communications in the 1970s-90s, they were uninterested in creating a cult or persuading people to align with their way of seeing things. They saw such a thing as part of our problem on Earth. We make a cult or religion out of our beliefs. This applies even to scientific rationalists, even to people with progressive political beliefs, the believers of which can act like a cult with a priesthood and a doctrine.
I distilled a 400-page book out of thousands of pages of channelled transcripts, working full-time for eighteen months, often for ten hours a day, six days a week – and only occasionally did it deplete me. So I’d take a break, but then I’d quiickly get fired up again. I was uplifted and much challenged by it.
Seemingly, they chose me because I have a universalist psycho-spiritual attitude. This is partially because I started on my inner path very experientially, as a hippy on psychedelics, rather than as a believer in a traditional faith. Though I am aligned somewhat with Buddhism, neo-paganism, Islam, megalthic shamanism and at least some of the whole panoply of teachings and blessing-streams available today, I’m not aligned with any of them, anchoring instead to my soul-origins and roots.
This was an advantage when working in Palestine – I could be in a mosque, church or synagogue and enter into the spirit that was present. I’ve become a kind of modern Western freebooting Imam, oscillating between being a saint and a sinner and, like everyone, struggling to reconcile the two in the way I conduct my life, fuckups’n’all.
Anyway, this is a rather long explanation for why the meditation time changes when the clocks change – we’re simply keeping to the same time-slot, as do the birds, the winds and the worms.
An ex-Islamic Jihad fighter and an ex-IDF soldier speaking peace at the Sulha
It was an immense privilege working with them. I found out later that they chose me for this work because, as a soul, they had actually placed the order for the seeding of my soul in the first place. As rather an individualist, a one-off case, I didn’t even properly fulfil what they had constructed me for – I worked as a kind of planet-fixer and morphological thought-energy engineer. For better or worse, I followed my own path.
But they found that what I became, through doing what I did, enabled me to take on certain kinds of assignment that they hadn’t anticipated. As a soul in service, I was on the edge of (in a manner of speaking) retiring, but they asked me to do one more job, please. So I came to Earth as a consultant to the sages of the time, around 5760 BCE, during a troubled period and a serious downturn in human development. And I kinda got stuck.
This karmic pattern, I guess, is repeating itself now – I was given cancer in 2019 and it has tipped me into the same pattern, of discovering a new mission just when I need to retire! In my involvement with seriously-bifurcated Israel-Palestine, I took a rather un-zealous approach, which can come when you’ve been at this kind of thing for a long time.
And there’s an important truth here: if you go to ‘the holy land’ expecting to bring peace, you will fail. It’s guaranteed. Just like Planet Earth! You have to go into the maelstrom with the simple motivation of adding your bit in whatever way you can to help people be as happy as possible in a shite bunch of circumstances. Then it works much better.
All that I have said doesn’t make me special – it’s just that I have gone into all this metaphysical claptrap more than most (I’ve got Jupiter in Pisces), so I’ve dug it up. Or bits of it, at least. Like an archaeologist, you can stand on an ancient site but you won’t learn a lot from it unless you do some digging, or at least some subtle way of seeing under the surface to find out more about what’s buried there. For me, doing past-life regression helped a lot.
But it also involved saying Yes when offered the opportunity to discover something new in the inner realms and in life’s experiences. Too often, we say No, or we block it with fear or distraction. Actually, it took me until age 42 to give myself full permission to do it – just before I worked for the Nine, as it happened.
As an inner experience, I had to allow myself to tip backwards over the edge of a cliff, the Abyss, in trust. I went over, not without trepidation, spinning and falling through infinity, only to find suddenly that I could fly! Whoooeee!!! From then on I was much more proficient in space travel.
Circle-working at the Sulha in Israel
Doing the Nine book happened like this. I was sitting working as an editor for a small publisher in 1991, Gateway Books. The phone rang, and the publisher, Alick Batholomew (bless him) answered, chatting some time with what seemed to be an old friend. Then he turned to me and asked, “Fancy editing a book of kind of ET channellings?“. No, I wasn’t interested – at that stage I’d rather had enough of a lot of the psychic claptrap that was flying around at the time. I shook my head. I returned to my work and he to the call. But suddenly there was a knocking or ringing on the top of my head. “OMG”, thought I. I told Alick to put the guy on once he’d finished.
It was Sir John Whitmore. We clicked immediately, a bit like we already knew each other. He invited me to an interview. I went to meet him and Phyllis Schlemmer in Kent, and we had the interview, and they seemed happy with me. We had lunch. Then John said, “Now for the interview“. Oh! I honestly thought we’d done it already, but no – I was to speak directly with The Nine. They were in charge.
It got all set up, and Phyllis worked herself down into a trance. It took about 20 minutes and a lot of focus – she went really deep in ways that most psychics cannot. I talked to the Nine. I can’t remember much of it, but I was concerned that I might not be the right person for the job. In the previous year my life had been an utter mess, and I didn’t feel good about myself. But the Nine simply said words to the effect of: “We know you, you know us, you need no preparation, and there is no one else“. I fell off the floor. This was a form of validation that, at the time, was a deep shock. Isn’t it funny how things go?
So I spent the next eighteen months under voluntary lockdown, out of this world, with a force-field around my house in Glastonbury (Chilkwell Street). I had just three visitors during that time. The phone stopped ringing, and people in Glastonbury thought I’d gone away. The amazing thing was that, on the very day I delivered the manuscript to the publisher, the phone started ringing and people started coming to the door saying “Where have you been?“. All I could do was smile. Yes, where had I been?
I trawled through mountains of transcripts on computer, picking out good chunks, saving them as files – using a very Virgoid filing system – and, after a year of this, I had 700 files saved and edited to make them more readable.
I had to edit the text a lot, thoughtfully and sensitively. The Nine, never having lived in a realm where words are necessary, had to raid the brains of Phyllis and all of us to find words. So it was a slow process, with a lot of seeking of terminology and phraseology, and their wordage was cumbersome… ‘that of the essence of that which you are…‘, and ‘that of what you call God‘, and things like that. A lot of searching and debating went on, both with the other eight members of The Nine and amongst us. Quite often Tom, the spokesbeing, consulted back with the Nine. We wanted to get this right, and they made sure there were no misunderstandings.
So there I was, faced with 700ish files. OMG, what do I do now? I decided to climb the Tor (I went to Brean Down too – a special place), and I slept on it. One morning I woke up with the idea, ‘Just start‘. Perfectly obvious, really, but as a brainy, educated Brit, something that simple was difficult to get to!
I sat there looking at all these files, got my mouse and just clicked the cursor on one of them. This is the edited version of what came out:
“GUEST: Tom, it’s nice to meet you. Could you define who you are, please? TOM: I am Tom, I am the spokesman for the Council of Nine. We are the Council of Nine, we oversee what you term the universe. We are of nine principles of the universe. GUEST: Whom do you represent – a higher authority above you that commands you and directs your ways? TOM: This is difficult to explain to you, for the world has no similar situation, but we would say to you, yes, we are in connection with one that is higher, but in totality together we are one, as that of all the universe is one. GUEST: Do you have any purpose in our world, any major purpose or message? TOM: We wish you to know first that we are not physical beings. Your world is the manifestation of Creation, and of the Creator manifest in your world, in the form of humankind. You ask if we have a message to humankind? GUEST: Yes I do. TOM: We say to you: you have been created in the image of the Creator. This world has lost identity with Creation. What is of necessity is to understand the importance of going forth and creating action and deed that bring you to completion in who you are. It is not enough to pray, it is not enough to gather groups of humankind for meditation. What is of importance is to act.“
[‘Guest’ was, if I remember rightly, someone who came for a session with the Nine with Gene Roddenbery. The ethics behind Startrek were based on Gene’s discussions with them. Tom was actually Atum, an Egyptian god. The Nine never manifested on Earth, but their existence was known in various ancient cultures. Understanding the human propensity to create glittery stars and daunting gods, Tom deliberately and wisely demystified himself by using the name Tom, to reduce the perceptual distance between him and humans.]
Wow, I’d picked a good way to start – randomly, but obviously it was not random at all. That’s how the book unfolded. If I came to a blockage, I’d sleep on it, take a walk and wait, and the answer would come, just like that. I guess you could call that ‘psychic editing’.
Note the teaching here: such things as prayer and meditation can help us and the wider world greatly, though they are not a substitute for action and stepping over the line.
Paldywan with Sir George, in the 1990s
I had the same ‘psychic editing’ thing some years later when building an online archive for Sir George Trevelyan (who died in 1996, age 96 or so). He was one of the founders of the new age movement in Britain in the 1940s-1970s, a spiritual grandfather to many people and projects. I was one of his minders in his final years. The archive is still there: https://sirgeorgetrevelyan.uk
If I couldn’t figure out a detail – where to put a photo or what colour to use – I’d just deep-think about him and say, “George, whaddya want here?“, and he’d answer – not usually in words, but I got to know what to do. He got the website he wanted by supervising me, even after death. Amazing. It was a great privilege, believe me. In fact, right now, tears have come up and they’re dribbling down my smiling face.
I wrote this in year 2000: “Sir George has been fondly referred to as ‘the Grandfather of the New Age Movement’, a title somewhat misunderstood by those who did not know him. His ‘New Age’ did not involve cult, fad and woolly notions. It involved a non-sectarian, holistic outlook, scientific and practical as well as mystical. It involved a compassionate, global humanitarianism very pertinent to our day.“
Anyway, back the The Nine. If it interests you, there’s a PDF copy of the original manuscript of the Nine book here: www.palden.co.uk/nine.html – and download the second PDF offered there, the pre-publication version.
The other version is a pruned version that was prepared for translation into other languages. I submitted the pre-pub version to the publisher in November 1992, just before the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1993, during which year the book was published. Some bits were by necessity edited out of the first edition by John and Phyllis, partially because they might have put members of the human Nine group in danger (concerning mainly ET and geopolitical issues).
But since they are all now dead, I feel there’s no harm now in including those bits – and I get the feeling The Nine are nodding Yes. John, Andrija, Phyllis and the others are safe in another world now. I miss them, but we shall meet again.
There were a few different editions of the book, and I did the first, the 1993 edition. The first edition now has collector’s value and it can be ridiculously expensive. The second was by Mary Bennett, with her take on it. You can get a newer printed edition (with my commentaries removed, but they’ve retained much of the work I did) from USA: www.theonlyplanetofchoice.com – or try Amazon and other sources.
Making a wicker coffin at the Oak Dragon – later we put it on a pyre with all our thoughts and prayers, and up it went
Those of you who recognise the vibe, somewhere in the recesses of your soul, like a little bell tinkling, will inherently know The Nine, and they will know you. But even if you don’t recognise them, it doesn’t matter – they’re friendly, and it’s okay, diverse and inclusive.
You see, the Universe has a staff shortage on Earth – we Earthlings are so distracted with our earthly joys and woes, and we argue so endlessly about things like ceasefires or politicians’ bloopers instead of really getting in there and helping sort things out. It drives Gazans crazy, giving them the impression no one cares.
But there are things we can do within the sphere of our own lives. The main one is: be a good person and do your best with the life you have and the situation you’re in. There are gifts and specialisms we can develop too – anything from knitting to driving buses to running a business well to attending COP conferences in Baku. Wherever you’re called to go, whatever you’re called to do, the issue is to do it and not to hang back, delaying to another day. And it’s just not good enough to believe you’re not good enough!
The Universe has a staff shortage of willing and active volunteers, so any help at all is welcome, and small things make a bigger difference than we tend to believe – especially when millions do it. Such as staying human and treating each other as we would like to be treated ourselves. If there is one single formula for our future world, it’s that. I’m good at churning out yardages of verbiage, and a few other things, and that’s what I do. And the meditations are one way of tuning into a taproot within yourself, whence your inspiration and inner promptings come.
Being a good human doesn’t involve being perfect. Get real – this is Planet Earth and it’s bloody difficult. But it does involve working on ourselves and with others so that we get better at being human and at doing what we’re here for. A nuclear physicist once asked this of the Nine: if there were one thing we could do that would really change the world, what would it be? Tom answered simply, and in a unique way that I cannot imitate: “If everyone pursued their life-purpose“. It’s that simple. Do what you’re programmed up to do. It’s there in you.
Ibrahim Abu el-Hawa, a spiritual grandfather from the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem, talking with a Native American and an Israeli hippy at the Jerusalem Hug in 2011
Oh, and there’s something else. A number of people claim to speak on behalf of or channel The Nine. Sorry, not true – though they might nevertheless be communicating with a civilisation that has connections with The Nine. Consider this: if you lived in Sudan or Palestine, if a UN representative showed up, you’d consider them to be the UN and to have a direct line into UN HQ (whether or not they do). It’s similar here. The Nine are involved with an enormous network of civilisations and beings, working with and through them, and during the meditation you’re plugging into that network.
Claims to authority are not what validates the content of channelled material: what matters is the quality of the content itself. It doesn’t matter whether the source claims to be Jesus or Lord Sananda if what is being conveyed is dazzling, weak, meaningless and it’s all been said before.
The Nine do not live on a world, or a moon of Saturn, or anywhere else. They are not at present speaking out, no matter what anyone says. There is no need: they have said all they need to say for this period of history, and things haven’t fundamentally changed since the late twentieth century, so there’s little more to say until we progress to the next stage.
In the Nine book, it’s not the words and details that are the main thing, it’s what comes between the lines, and the connection and re-wiring that we get when we read it. It jiggles our cells and reminds us of things we know, deep in our hearts. So while many of the contents of the book pertain to the 1970s-90s, with a little intelligence it’s easy to apply such insights to current events of our time. They don’t want followers – they seek simply to encourage us to get on with what we know we need to do.
One thing I like about the book is that it does not try to change our way of seeing things, and we don’t even have to believe what they say. But it’s full of winking lightbulbs. It can add to the way we see things, articulating things that many of us half-know but hadn’t quite realised yet. It has a way of extending our field of vision – but you can still continue along the path you were already on. The issue is, whatever you do, do it as well as you can, and the rest will follow.
So that’s the story of the book, and also some background to the reason why I’ve started these meditations. I continue with them whether or not anyone else is there, but it sure does make a difference when people are there. Because when we meld in consciousness, even at a distance, ‘what you call God’ is there and present. Because ‘God’ (however you wish to see it) is us. We are the creators of the universe, and the job isn’t finished yet.
Sometimes people ask me, “Do you believe in UFOs?“. To which the only good answer I can think up is: “Do you believe in cars?“.
St Michael’s Mount as seen from Botrea Hill, the hill on our farm
I don’t post on a weekly basis here, about the Sunday meditations, but whether or not I do, we continue meditating together every week, wherever we are, and at the same time. There’s no mantra or prscription: just do the meditation, prayer, inner journeying or just sitting as you usually do, together with us.
If this interests you, you’re welcome to join us. For more details, there’s a link below. I do make weekly announcements on Facebook though.
In UK and Europe the clocks change this weekend, so the meditation is now between 8 and 8.30pm. My apologies: in USA and most of Canada the clocks changed on 10th March! Add one hour to the time you previously meditated. In other parts of the world, please check online.
But the real time stays the same, and that’s why we do this – it’s only clocks, not life, that have changed. Nature and the planet carry on as before. Also, during summertime, the later time works well in terms of the patterns of our daily lives, as the days grow longer.
In the meditation, feel free to ‘fly’ where you’re needed. But if you want something to give some focus to, I’d suggest humanitarian organisations and their work – not only what they do, but also the awkward and sometimes dangerous position they are in, in places like Sudan, Gaza, Haiti, Yemen and Congo. And the way that the world signs up to noble goals while failing to fund and support them fully and properly.
You’re welcome to join us in the zone, to meditate together wherever you are, and however you do it. For details:
What unites us is meditating together at the same time, and a shared basic intent to raise up the world and assist in its, and our, positive evolution. A once-a-week, simple, undemanding meditation can be a really good habit to fall into.
The Mount as seen from Caer Bran, an ancient hilltop gathering place
And…
For you who are a regular or semi-regular, I have two questions. You’re welcome to give feedback below or write to me about it. 1. Do you think there would be benefit in starting a dedicated page on Facebook for the meditations, together with a discussion group? 2. If a discussion group, do you think it would be better to have it password-protected (closed), or open, or both?
The background thought to this is: there will come a time, sometime, when I am no longer here or active. So I seek to find out whether there is momentum for the meditation to continue when I’m out of the game. This process can start small, slowly and organically, so that something has consolidated by the time it’s needed. If or whenever it will be needed.
With love. Palden.
St Michael’s Mount from the other direction, with Penzance behind, on the left
Every Sunday at 7-7.30pm GMT I and a morphing collection of people meditate together at the same time, wherever we live. The different times in different countries are below.
You’re welcome to join us. There’s no prescribed method or mantra: just do the kind of meditation, innerwork, prayer or mindfulness you usually do.
What connects us us that we’re doing it together and we’re all motivated to contribute to raising the energy and awareness level of our world, to aid in resolution of its compound issues.
Should it interest you, I’ve recently done a 30-min podcast sharing some thoughts on meditation, and that’s found here.
Come and join us, from a sitting place in your world, to be together in the zone. It happens once a week without fail, same time, same space. Join us whenever you can, and if you’re able to do it regularly you’ll find that something starts lifting off…
Saturn is currently in Pisces for two years – it returns here once every 28 years. The last times were 1965-66 and 1994-5. At these times terrible wars were going on (Vietnam and Bosnia) yet these were also times for the seeding of new things. Similar is the case today. These wars show humanity how not to do things, and they oblige deep-level decisions of principle.
In the Mid-1960s, today’s modern ‘global village’ period started, and in the Mid-90s was born the digital era and mass travel. Now we stand on the edge of another cycle taking us to 2053-54, when the Millennials will be old and today’s teenagers will be running around being busily middle-aged.
Pisces concerns the vision and the principles by which future developments will unfold. Saturn in Pisces is about doing the prep work before the action starts. It’s about seeds and their pre-germination arousing. It’s also about the matter of war and peace.
It’s a time for firming up the possibilities and groundrules for the next phase.
Perhaps the international figure who at present gives the most valuable running commentary on the state of the world and its prospects is Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General. His pleas frequently fall on closed ears, but he’s the one who is spelling it out globally, speaking for Saturn in Pisces.
With love, Palden.
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
Pictures: looking out into the void from safe territory. Porthgwarra, West Penwith, Cornwall, looking out into the Atlantic. Look closely in the top picture, and you’ll see a seal there, and here it is, below.
SUNDAY MEDITATION 7pm GMT every Sunday and… a new podcast
The meditation gives a chance to pay some attention to matters way beyond ourselves, to do a little volunteering at the spiritual frontline, a little world-maintenance. You can do it wherever you are. All you need is a decent place to park your body while you go within.
There’s a zone, a field, that’s open from 7-7.30pm GMT every Sunday (see below for different times in different lands). After a while you’ll probably feel it, as you tune in to it and it tunes in to you.
It’s a benign encouragement-beam or carrier wave, amplifying the meditations and prayers of all who enter and sit within it, like an uplift-field. It helps us in the underlying resolution of issues in our lives, yet the emphasis is on the world.
There’s no sign-up, no method, no mantra, no fee, and people of all paths are welcome: do your own meditation-prayer-journeying as you usually do it. We are connected by doing it at the same time and by a simple shared intent to raise the world’s level an inch, to help it progress on its evolutionary path. And by being friends in spirit.
On the fullmoon on Saturday it came upon me to do a podcast about meditation, and I recorded it down in the woods, sitting by the stream, editing it together back home this evening. It’s 34 mins long. It’s available online…
The fullmoon has brought a shift of perspective (Virgo-Pisces). Nothing much has changed, but suddenly and rather surreptitiously we’re seeing things differently. Looking back, so what was all that really about? And where does it leave us now? The world is settling into a more resonant, steady thrum for a short while. Even so, there’s an underlying acceleration going on over the next three-four years – the waves are progressively getting bigger and coming in clumps.
So we’re in an in-between-waves period. The bad news is that we have more crunches and crises coming, and the good news is that solutions are growing too, shared consensuses are forming and whatever is standing in the way is likely to come under pressure.
The sign of this is the crazy acts of resistance to change that are going on right now – it always happens as a change approaches. It’s a digging in of heels. Except such as strategy doesn’t work in tsunamis – you just gotta run. Metaphorically speaking. It’s not here yet, but we’re getting advance waves.
With love from me Palden
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
Pedn Vounder and Porth Curno, Penwith, Cornwall, from Treryn Dinas
SUNDAY MEDITATION
7-7.30PM GMT every Sunday (different times in different time zones – see below). You’re welcome to join. Do the meditation however you normally do it – mindfulness, prayer, visualisation or your own way, or simply being present with us.
Our purpose is to uplift our world an inch, to relieve the shadows of the past and to encourage decency and sanity in humanity’s thoughts, words and deeds.
Carn Du, Lamorna, and The Lizard in the background
This weekend we’re all at a rather historic juncture, astrologically speaking: Pluto moves into Aquarius for 15 years and, obligingly, the Sun conjuncted it today (Saturday), to give it an extra kick. It’s a change of chapter in the longer world story.
Last time Pluto changed sign (into Capricorn) we had the financial crisis of 2008 and the near-collapse of world currencies. But largely these sign-changes (ingresses) signify a change of theme, viewpoint, context and setting. Such shifts become big events when there are unexploded bombs lying around – unresolved matters from the past and trigger issues everyone hoped would go away.
In recent decades things have been steered top-down, but now it’s shifting to bottom-up – to some extent whether we like it or not. It’s less about economics and megastructures and more about people, societies, crowds and values.
Sunset at St Levan, Penwith, Cornwall
It’s a time of truth and transition. There’s a surreptitious tilting of balances, a crossing of a threshold. Warmakers currently feel trigger-happy and exempt from liability, yet something else is creeping up behind. A change of values.
A key issue now is ‘the people’ expressing their consensual view. Also it’s a question of whether ‘the people’ will be captured by propaganda and populism, waylaid by ‘bread and circuses’, or whether we express a new kind of moral-setting collective wisdom.
So it’s good at this time to put in a prayer for the people of planet Earth. We need some sanity and sensible behaviour.
Current 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
If at this time you’re working inwardly with Gaza (or Ukraine, or Sudan, or…), there’s not a lot we can do right now except care for people, to ease their hearts, mop up the dead and help people make the best of a hellish situation.
It’s tragic, but the bit we can do is to etch these events in the collective psyche of humanity and to help the world come to a very necessary conclusion, that this kind of thing is not part of our future.
This needs the building or reinforcing of a world consensus, deep in the heart of humanity. This isn’t as impossible as it seems since so many people are now tilting that way, many of them quietly and surreptitiously within themselves, and the real problem we face concerns what I keep quoting over and over, from the 18th C philosopher Edmund Burke…
“For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing.“
It’s arguable that, on Earth, the goodguys actually outnumber the badguys (though that’s over-simplistic and reality is more like shades of grey). Yet the energy-balances are tilted the ‘wrong’ way, giving much more apparent power to the Netanyahus and the conflict-stirrers of this world than they deserve.
Yet in the final analysis, the energy-balances actually tilt the other way.
As humans, we are mixed – there is darkness and light within each one of us. We’re challenged to examine those balances within ourselves, since the state of the world and the state of our selves are intimately connected. Buddhists call this ‘non-duality’. Christians call it ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’. I am he as you are she as you are me, and we are all together.
One of the best ways the losses and pain can be redeemed is to shine a psychic spotlight on these events, to help build up a tidal wave of awareness in the world psyche which simply says ‘May this be the defining event that makes this the last time it happens‘.
Perhaps we cannot right now save people like Gazans from their plight, but we can turn their sufferings and deaths into meaningful sacrifices for wider change.
We don’t want to set up a new conflict – this isn’t about a battle between light and darkness since both are part of reality. It’s about bringing the light and the dark into stronger relationship so that they interact properly and come to a new balance.
In personal growth this is called ‘owning our stuff’. The world needs to own its stuff.
With love, Palden
Both pictures come from Beit Lahem or Bethlehem in the West Bank, Palestine in 2011. The boy below is now a young man: I wonder what he’s thinking nowadays?
MEDITATION today, Sunday. And every Sunday, regardless, whether or not announced.
We’re in a deep time when the hidden and not-so-hidden feelings of humanity are coming up in all sorts of ways – not just around Gaza, though it does symbolise the world’s situation.
The Scorpio newmoon comes at 9.30am GMT on Monday morning. This is an angry, restive, frustrated, oppositional time (Sun, Moon, Mars, Uranus), yet underneath it there’s an exposure of human truths and motivations, powered by pain and memory from the past and a need to make a big step into a new future.
A future where humans and our heart-sensitivities prevail over horror, disaster and grief, the cruelty of explosions and the bulldozing facelessness of the Megamachine.
‘Disaster’ means ‘out of tune with the stars’. A sustainable future involves tuning back into the stars, to nature and toward our fellow humans. A harmonisation of human feeling that incorporates uncomfortable truths, healing them and bringing a turn-around in the deepest corners of the human heart.
One member of our group is close to the volcanic eruption in Iceland – even the Earth is speaking.
There will be more of this in coming times, as we face the uncomfortable truths that stand in the way of progress on our shrinking, quaking planet.
Peace is not just about cease-fires – it’s far bigger, deeper and wider.
You’re welcome to join us for half an hour (times below). Thanks for being with.
Current times, on Sundays: UK | GMT 7-7.30pm 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
Jeez woz ‘ere. Looking over the Judaean Desert toward the Dead Sea and Jordan
Last night (Sunday 22nd October) I had a very profound meditation, more like trance – I was carried away and ‘out of it’, surfacing far later than the usual time, after more than an hour. I felt quite at peace. This morning I feel quite changed – a bit wobbly yet feeling alright too. A few thoughts came up this morning that might be of interest or value.
It’s important to remember that those who are killed in disasters like this are well dealt with. They are withdrawn before pain or horror cloud their passing. They are pulled out in micro-seconds and instantly taken into care, as appropriate to each soul. They don’t seem to experience the impact of whatever hits them or whatever is the cause of their death. If they do experience it, they are detached from it, without accruing psycho-emotional damage. They witness it (for the soul-learning therefrom) but they are put into a kind of state of grace and objectivity where they are not damaged by it. It’s a kind of fast-tracking transitional process.
I’m more concerned about the living and what they are going through.
A Palestinian dove
There are Christians in Gaza as well as Muslims – and also seculars, who are often forgotten. Many of the Christians belong to ancient pre-Catholic, pre-Orthodox churches. (By the way, Arab Christians also call God Allah – which means ‘the God’, to distinguish it from a pantheon of gods.)
Yet I find Christians can have more difficulty passing over – more of a struggle – than Muslims, who seem to have a clearer sense of returning to Allah. Perhaps Christians and Jews have more of a feeling of distance and separation from God, involving more striving, more doubt, more questioning, while Muslims seem to have more inner confidence in their relationship with Allah. Not totally, yet they seem inherently more inclined that way. Hence, perhaps it is the case that they manage dying a bit more easily. In my observation. Speaking as an aged-hippy esotericist with Buddhist inclinations.
If you’re tracking Gaza inwardly, remember the people of the West Bank and the Palestinians in Israel and Jerusalem. ‘Arab Israelis’ are 20% of the population of ‘Israel proper’ and 40% of the population of Jerusalem. Some are Christians and many are Muslims – and they’re both friendly to each other. Arab Israelis aren’t dying in numbers, but they’re going through extreme discrimination and insecurity. Meanwhile, the West Bank is simmering and in danger of boiling over.
However, as an individual, while being aware of the complexity of this situation, it’s better to do small things well than big things badly, so give attention to those aspects of this situation that you are drawn to. Between us, we’ll cover a variety of things.
A boy in Jenin. He knows the sound of flying bullets.
This is big – a paroxysm of human madness where the heat gets high and the light grows dim. Negative influences are having a field day and, to some extent, we cannot stop this and must let the fire burn out. We cannot really affect what actually happens (the forces at play are big and complex), but the secret lies in seeing if we can flip, ease or assist the way it happens, so that there are glimmers of light, more opportunities for redemptive things to happen amidst a disaster.
There’s a lot of opinion and propaganda flying around. Well, in the ‘fog of war’, everyone is right and everyone is wrong. So take note of what people say and understand what lies behind it for them, while also observing your own responses, biases and predilections. Don’t necessarily block off from it, but try to avoid buying into the frenzy. Form judgements slowly. This is a battle of thoughts and feelings, intermixed with anger, and it’s good to try to hold that perspective.
It is possible to hold such a perspective while still having your own personal leanings – if, for example, you are Jewish, or you empathise with Arabs, or you have friends on one or both sides, or whatever. It is possible to run these in parallel, at least for the duration of this madness-epidemic. It’s an awareness exercise.
Barr al-Khalil or the Judaean Desert
This part of the world is often called ‘the Holy Land’. Yet holiness manifests itself there in emphatically unholy, paradoxical terms. It is a magnified microcosm of the whole planet, like a crucible, and Earth’s core issues are all present there. It’s a very small patch of land, the same size as Wales, Albania or New Jersey, in which there is immense complexity, intensity and confusion.
Still, there’s a lot of light there, and the contrast makes the issues so much starker. As a microcosm, what happens there affects everywhere else far more than its size and population would otherwise suggest. It has a similar population to Tajikistan, Togo, Sierra Leone, Laos, Austria, Portugal and Greece, Virginia or Washington state.
The situation in Is-Pal is very much affected by influences from elsewhere – not just military and economic but much deeper, more profound and hidden.
This includes positive influences too: there has been no shortage of Native American medicine wheels, Tibetan pujas, Bah’ai prayers and interfaith ‘encounters’ in this land, and while I was there I met amazing people from all over – even Siberia, Indonesia and the Amazonas. Amongst Israelis and Palestinians there are amazing people. Do not fall for the idea that this is just a simple two-sided battle of hearts and minds – it is multiplex, and the quality of souls in the ‘holy land’ is surprisingly high.
Young peacemakers from a variety of countries, with the mayor of Al Aqaba (who was injured in the first intifada in the late 1980s – he spent ten years in Israeli jail too)
To some extent we must let it play out, and to some extent we can bring some relief, space and blessing to this conflagration. This is a classic high-magnitude soulquake. Above all, stay steady. Keep returning to centre. Stay benign and well-wishing. If you get steamed up and in a mess, go take a walk, get some space and let the knots within you unravel – and take that relieving walk on behalf of those who cannot.
As Pluto enters Aquarius, we’re entering at least 15 years of ‘the battle for the hearts and minds of humanity’. This conflict is one such situation and there will be more, so get used to it and try to work with it. Because it is necessary. As is the case with Is-Pal right now, many of the world’s problems arise from issues we have not tackled and sorted out before. Chickens are coming home to roost in droves, in every department of life and every country. Issues are being brought to our awareness through the events manifesting in our time. These are the material through which we work out these issues.
There will come a point in coming decades when we get to The Big Issue. In this sense we are being given a gift, a collective training, through being given escalating waves of crisis to face. We’re being loosened up and forced to think, to see things in different ways from before, and from a larger perspective.
Palestinian kids on the whole have good fathers
In this sense, something right is happening here – we’re at a ‘never again’ point. This isn’t about cease-fires: this is about ending war and oppression, historically, and events like this will repeat until we get it and do it.
Oh, and by the way, put in a prayer for people in the UN and NGO sectors, from all over the world, who represent a neutral, global viewpoint in the conflict, and who take the strain in very practical ways. For some of them, it’s at great risk to themselves and, for others, it’s round the clock, every hour of the day and night. Stressful and often unthanked – they’re holy warriors.
With love, Palden.
Marwan Barghouti, regarded as Palestine’s Mandela. He’s been in Israeli jail for the last 20 years and they’re likely to keep him there. A mural on the separation wall at Qalandia, West Bank
In the 1990s I ran some meditation camping retreats called the Hundredth Monkey Project (M100). We worked in a circle of 70-80 people with world issues. We didn’t prescribe meditative methods but, to help people get oriented and give them ideas, a method was suggested as a basis to work with. If this interests you, it’s here: www.palden.co.uk/cs06-m100meditation.html
If you’re a member of a group working with issues such as these, then you might be interested in this material about talking-stick processes: www.palden.co.uk/cs07-talkingstick.html
Finally I’ve written an autobiography. It’s online and shortish, the equivalent of ten pages. I was reluctant to write an autobiography, partially because I feel it’s not greatly important and partially because my memory of past events is foggy. In it I explain why this is so. Lots of people have said I ought to write one. I dragged my feet. Standing on stages in front of people comes naturally to me, but I’m also a quietish, Saturnine Virgo who’s happy beavering away behind the scenes and not making a big deal about it.
Yet writing it has been therapeutic. I did it in two rounds. In the first, a year or so ago, I wrote down all I could remember. Letting time pass and recently reading it again, I remembered more events, details and issues. Though really, it’s not life’s events that matter: it’s what goes on inside, prompted partially by those events and partially by stuff coming up from within.
There are general, lifelong issues and patterns too, which are difficult to weave into a short autobiography without making it lengthy. Even so, while working on it I’ve been reminded of something that has been important throughout my life. I’m not sure what to call it. It’s all to do with working with contradiction and paradox. In a way I’m a radical extremist in my spiritual-political views and, to some people, I’m right off the map, not even a decently normal left-winger, conspiracy buff, new age glitteratum or a proper anything. But in another way I have always been measured, considered, anchored in lived experience and seeking balance in my thinking.
My politics – particularly in international relations – comes from my heart. Being with Tibetan Lamas in the 1970s clarified this. They showed me how everyone suffers, rich or poor, privileged or deprived, and that we need to practice compassion and loving kindness toward each and every person and living being. The secret here is to put ourselves in others’ shoes, to see what life looks like from where they stand. You don’t have to agree, just to bear witness and comprehend their situation. I firmly disagree over a lot of things, though I’m not into pointing fingers or demonising people. Such a non-polarised approach isn’t complacency but a way of seeing life that can unlock doors to effective activism or concrete action.
Revolution, to me, involves building the future while letting the past dwindle of its own accord and in its own time, perhaps with an occasional strategic shove. I’ve always been focused not so much with rousing people to rise up as with looking beyond the next perceived horizon and laying the ground for what happens afterwards.
Of course, everyone needs to do whatever they’re moved to do, and to do the best they can with it, preferably without harming others. In the end we all learn from what life has taught us. It’s all part of a bigger, wider movie with a cast encompassing the whole of humanity. If people die in war or by starvation, it is indeed tragic and wrong – one young friend in Gaza has just been killed – yet it is also a sad part of humanity’s learning process, its aversion therapy. It happens because we humans have not remembered the main agenda and what the endgame is.
It’s both a personal and a collective process and, today, the pendulum is swinging toward collective priorities. Our attention is being drawn to the collective dynamics involved in facing the future, which are incrementally overriding the personal preferences and envisionings we all variously might have. In the Global North there’s a lot of braying about personal rights and sovereignty, but much of this is the sad complaining of affluent Westerners, scared of losing the power, advantages and comforts we have had. The future no longer lies with us whiteskins, though we do have a place in it. Around 15% of the world’s population, having banged on about democracy and human rights for decades, to our surprise we’re faced with being but a minority, with equal, not superior, rights to everyone else.
Porthmoina Cove, West Penwith
For better or worse, I’m seriously moderate. I regard Bilderbergers as humans. They do things that are beneficial and things that aren’t. They’re like you and me, really – thoroughly imperfect beings. Yes, they have a certain power to swing things their way, though not as much as some of their critics believe. We need to help them change their thinking, their hearts and their behaviour, since no system of social-political organisation will work well without people’s hearts being in the right place.
If we see those at the top of society as Them, by implication making Us into their underdogs, we tend to reinforce the masters-and-slaves mentality. Even so, we apparent slaves far outnumber them, and we aren’t always stupid sheeple who obey our masters, so ‘the Cabal’ doesn’t control everything. We are co-responsible.
It’s all to do with how we choose to see things. Personally, I see a transformation of the current system to be inevitable and unavoidable. It’s taking longer than many of us first thought, but it is happening. It’s up to us to do what we can to nurture and channel that inevitability, in order not to prolong the agony, since what’s really at stake is the amount, the depth and intensity of suffering and damage that people and the world must go through before we reach a breakthrough point.
Seen in this light, the latest outbreak of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, or between rival factions in Sudan, is a tragic saga of the thrashing of the tail of a slowly dying dragon. In WW2 we had an example of dying dragons: the greatest destruction in the war took place after 1942, when its course had already pretty much been decided at Stalingrad, Alamein and Midway – yet it took a lot of further destruction to confirm that inevitability. Mainly because of masculine bull-headedness. But the matter was eventually harrowingly resolved amongst the ruins of Berlin and Hiroshima.
Carn Kenidjack, West Penwith
In the last thirty years, on top of other projects and activities, I’ve worked with meditation and psychic work. Many political types and rationalists think this is woo-woo, a joke, or peripheral or impractical, and they may hold that view if they wish. The way I see things, a tide is turning, nothing is permanent and we’re working with the historic trends of centuries and millennia. We’re working with the underlying thoughts, feelings and beliefs of people, and that’s what shapes the future.
Those of us who elevate our individual freedoms as benchmarks upon which everything else should be judged are having to swim against a growing tide moving the other way. Individualised self-interest, though indeed relevant and part of life’s equation, is not actually in everyone’s best interest – and the endangered state of our world demonstrates that. Our world problem derives from self-interest. We’re at a stage in history where the survival and benefit of humanity and of the natural environment as a whole have become the top priority. Global circumstances push things this way, and the big question is how fast and fully we respond and adapt. The future is nowadays having a greater causative influence on the present than the past has. We’re being sucked toward the future.
So I don’t rail against the banksters, the billionaires and the secretive manipulators, though I do twiddle their knobs while they aren’t looking, when I can. I do my bit. In my innerwork I sometimes penetrate the backrooms of Davos, or tweak the energy-fields around certain cloud computers, or drop thoughts into prominent people from afar. This probably sounds like fantasy or even megalomania, and there’s truth in that observation too, but feeding and seeding the collective psyche with such perspectives is the beginning of change. All man-made change begins in the psyches of people.
I tend not to see things in black-and-white, good/bad, right/wrong terms – that, to me, is a prejudicial, blinkered comfort-zone allowing us to avoid seeing clearly. When working in Palestine I was not really like many of the other activists. I believed in staying in Palestine for long periods and participating personally in people’s lives, rather than visiting in an activist group for an exhausting and short week picking olives, doing conflict tours and leaning on the copious hospitality of Palestinians.
I wasn’t anti-Israeli either, even though I found some Israelis difficult to relate to, especially if politics came up. Also I don’t agree with the agendas of the state of Israel. But I don’t agree either with the minority of Palestinians who wish, at least in heated moments, to eliminate Israel or drive the Israelis out. To me, it’s not about Palestinians and Israelis – it’s about people, and I worked with those who sought my kind of input.
So when I went through Israeli checkpoints, I regarded the soldiers scrutinising me as real humans, and my behaviour and body-language reflected that – and I got through, often by simply brightening up their day and being a nice guy. I wasn’t there to do battle with the poor grunts on whose shoulders it fell to protect a screwed-up system.
It is easy, popular and sexy to bang on about the badguys at the top of the pile and to dish out neatly packaged certainties about the solution to the problems we face. It gets the hits, royalties and votes, but those who do it then become part of the psychosis of the divisive system that they oppose. Yes, it’s easy to regard Them as the reptilians, the child-molesters, the evil ones, the exploiters, and this neatly places Us in a position of being the pure, the innocent and deserving – and anyone who disagrees with this is clearly on the side of The Cabal.
Near Carn Boel, West Penwith
For me it all started at the London School of Economics in 1969, when I was a student. A situation was brewing where quite a few students were getting confrontative, hurt by the treatment the police and authorities were meting out to us. But I did not believe in confrontation or violence – this would not get the people of Britain on our side. Even if we, the goodguys, won, violence wouldn’t simply subside since it would already be baked into the character of the revolution itself, leading to new atrocities and the subsequent rise of Napoleons and Stalins. So I advocated working toward creating a new future rather than fighting the agents and symbols of the past – a fight we would not win, given the circumstances we were in. I and people like me lost that argument, and eventually the revolution sadly exhausted itself, mainly by tilting at windmills.
I’ve always held a gap-straddling line. Only as I grew older did I come to understand why. I came to see the situation on Earth as part of a larger, deeper, wider scenario. Here comes the button-pressing extremist in me: I fundamentally believe we are not alone and isolated here on Earth – though we are to an extent quarantined. Many people who are into ETs focus on galactic locals such as Pleiadians, Arcturians or Zetas, but it gets bigger, wider and deeper than that. [Here’s an audio talk of mine about this: Life on Earth, Life off Earth.] This has big implications for us on Earth. Bizarrely, the only public figure of recent times to mention this was Ronald Reagan, who once said, “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world“.
Beings from other worlds are mostly not ‘aliens’, and our origins as human-type souls lie amongst them. But we earthlings do like to see things in polarised terms, and we need to understand that we also are rather daunting to ETs since we’re fitful, unpredictable, inconsistent and we even have divided selves.
It’s a matter of how we choose to see things, and how much fear we weave into it. If you want to see lizard beings and regard them as dangerous, that’s what you’ll tend to see. The same goes for our relationships with all ‘others’, including foreigners, criminals or simply people who share our planet while living in different worlds. It applies also to creepy-crawlies and sharks, or cancer cells, Covid viruses, refugees or lightning strikes.
It’s time to step beyond the judgemental constraints of good and bad, right and wrong. There’s more to life than this. We need also to look carefully at the notion of ‘evil’, which is so easily bandied around – again, to make ourselves look like goodguys. I’ve been accused of being a criminal, traitor, toxic male, dictator and asshole myself, but that doesn’t make me so unless I buy into it. However, it’s still my duty as a human to work on those aspects of myself where I do fuck up.
The way I see things, evil doesn’t exist in itself – it is simply poisoned, blocked, polluted, diverted life and naturalness. The Tibetan story of Padmasambhava is instructive. When he took the Buddha-dharma to Tibet, he did not cast out the old gods and render them into evil entities, as Christians did over in Europe. He made friends and, as a teacher, he raised their perspective so that they could see beyond their situation. He co-opted them to become wrathful protectors of truth – scary, yes, but embodying the fears and defilements that we must face in the process of progressing spiritually. They were given a bigger, broader and deeper job.
This is similar to the legend of Lucifer, the angelic bringer of light, who sheds light on our darker sides, obliging us to learn through hard but necessary lessons. Except the notion of Lucifer got twisted, he was made into a badguy, the light and awareness bit was removed and his badness was made permanent. Poor chap, he’s misunderstood.
Yet there is always redemption, and we can do things to further it. I’m not at all perfect in this, and there are issues I need to sort out before I’m gone. But the main thing is to work at it. The Council of Nine were emphatic about this. [The Nine was a group of cosmic beings I compiled a book for thirty years ago and continue to work with.] They didn’t prescribe an ideal world or state of enlightenment that we should strive to attain – because there’s always further to go, and this is what evolution is all about. They spoke instead of simply creating forwardness and a feeling of progress, because the more it happens, the more it grows in momentum.
That in itself, in any situation big or small, is all that is needed. Whether it’s gardening your allotment, bringing up your kids, doing your work, being socially active or weighing in on large-scale issues, creating forwardness is what we’re here for, as souls. It all adds magnitude to a growing current. It’s about making Earth a good, safe and happy place to live.
In our time, our big advantage is this. Amidst darkness, one candle makes a big difference. In the sunshine, a candle is hardly noticed. We’re in a time when small things matter more than we tend to believe, even though it sometimes feels like the darkness is overwhelming. Yet keeping our eyes on an aged neighbour, changing nappies (diapers), fishing plastic from a river, cooking a nourishing meal for hungry people, or even joining a meditation once a week can make a difference in a beshadowed world.
On Pordenack Point, looking toward Carn Boel and, behind, Tol Pedn Penwith
I have not done well in terms of money or status, though toward the end of my life I’m happy about what I’ve done in other spheres. I’m aware also of times I’ve failed or omitted to step up, but the net balance is, I hope, positive. It feels that way, and in recent years this feeling has helped me deal with cancer: I chose to treat cancer as a crash course in being alive and making the best of what I’m given. Over many years I had gathered a quiverful of growth-tools that have served me well in my cancer journey, and I’m glad I did that. Because cancer and, later, dying, involve a loss of control, and our success in handling them rests on where we’re really at, not in what we’re trying to be. It’s our actual spiritual fitness and muscle-tone that matter here.
This gives us access to a miracle zone where it’s possible to bend, break or bypass the constraints of normality and expectation. Life is a strange dance and, if the one we are dancing with doesn’t dance to the same tune, or seems to oppress or constrain us, then the secret is to step out of the way, out of the set patterns and moulds in ourselves that render us into being victims. The degree to which we feel oppressed, and what we do about it, is something we can change. It can take time and it can be a struggle, but that’s the direction to go in.
A good friend wrote to me as I was writing this. She was concerned about the new outbreak of violence between Palestinians and Israelis. It’s happening yet again. It’s terrible, and it’s easy to get locked into hand-tied consternation about it. Peace will indeed come to the Holy Land, and many people there already subscribe to it. But the dragon’s tail is still thrashing, and it’s tragic and painful for those who are personally affected and involved. Sadly for Israelis, it’s also shutting down an enormous domestic dialogue about the future of their divided nation – predictably, that suppression will charge a high price later on. Yet step back from this conflict and look at it another way, and this is not a war between Israelis and Palestinians so much as a war between the dehumanising drivers of conflict on both sides and ordinary people of both sides.
We can do things about this. We can visit Palestine or Israel to add our bit, or we can make friends with an Israeli or a Palestinian online, or we can donate money, or in meditation we can work at creating a vibe where the people involved are raised up to see things another way, to see the futility of their situation and get a clearer sense of what is genuinely best for the future. It’s not for us to prescribe what that might be, but it is for us to help create a psychic field in which they might progress with what’s genuinely right for them.
Once a conflict starts, it’s not helpful simply to oppose it – it’s too late and, as is often the case, the opportunity for preventing conflict came earlier and we missed it. The trick is to take the situation as it stands, working to twist and weave it another way, to introduce new, unlocking factors, to help those who are suffering, to work with wider public awareness, and even to conduct direct dialogues with generals and fighters in our inner universe.
It’s not a matter of taking sides: we need to step beyond our preferences and biases. No matter how much we believe that past history is important in this or any conflict, it’s the future that really matters.
A young friend in Gaza, Basma, is going to have a baby any day now. What a way for a child to be born. Her brother Moh, a male nurse, escaped Gaza in 2015 and was one of the boat people crossing from Turkey to Greece. He landed up in Belgium, working as a nurse, and died of Covid in 2022. What a life these people have. He had been the hope of the family.
In this week’s meditation, if you join it, I encourage paying some attention to this issue. However, this world is full of worrying problems, and good-hearted people can get overwhelmed with it all. To deal with this, it’s advisable to do small things well rather than big things badly – that is, to focus on the particular issues that mean a lot to you, and to stay with them and proactively do something with them. If we all do that, we’ll cover things better.
It’s also true that everything is interrelated. What’s happening in the Holy Land affects other people and places. Each time something like this breaks out, the collective psyche of the world becomes more disappointed, dismayed and depressed. Explosions and bloodbaths make sensitive, delicate, human issues seem irrelevant, and the problem with this is that empathic sensitivity is a key ingredient in making the world a better place. Wars, meanwhile, are useful to the status quo – they suppress not only the people in war zones, but also the spirits and hopes of humanity as a whole. They make the public jaded, accepting conflict as a given, shrugging shoulders and turning away.
We’re faced with many paradoxes and knife-edge choices in our day. It isn’t simple. This has been the saga of my own life, and many of you might share a similar story. Yet it’s what we’re faced with, and we can fret and worry about it or we can do something, within the scope of our lives and possibilities, and at times beyond it. That is our choice.
Back in 2011 I gave a speech at a conference called ‘Will they still serve tea in 2023?‘. This was the moderate in me, speaking. Some people thought the world might end, or at least radically change, in 2012. Well, life went on after 2012 passed. So, apparently nothing happened. The catastrophists were proven wrong and the normality-freaks seemed to win. But this was a lot to do with the dramatic utterings of advocates who desperately wished to be the one who got a big prediction right. Things did happen. Discreetly, the tide turned. Before 2012 we had a future global problem and, after 2012, we had an actual problem, and as the decades roll on, we’re going deeper into it.
In Britain there’s a legend that King Knut (Canute) tried to demonstrate his power by turning back the tide – and he got wet feet. No, historians are now seeing this differently. He sought to demonstrate that even he, with all his worldly power, could not turn back the tide. He didn’t write an autobiography either.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
You must be logged in to post a comment.