Some days I have days where inspiration-levels droop, so I rattle off a podcast or a blog, if I can muster up a gem to start with – a starting thought. It’s a way of getting inspiration-channels moving, and sometimes something good comes out. Not always – I have quite a few rejects.
A few days ago I was feeling a bit like that – the cancer drugs were affecting me, I’d been on my own too much, it was raining and foggy, and I was casting around for a spark to give me some ignition. Oldies sometimes need a bit of that – ignition. And going to rest in bed isn’t that inspiring once you’ve done it for some years. Yes, even with the amazing view I have out of the window from my bed.
Bosigran Castle, a cliff sanctuary, West Penwith, Cornwall
It has been one of my pathologies in life – a wee ability to ignite people and things, providing a spark that sets things in motion. This is part of the role of an astrologer, but I’m one of those who has got his fingers in various pies over the decades, for all sorts of reasons. Some of these spark-moments I hear about or see the results of, often years later, and some I hope have happened anyway, somewhere, sometime, whether or not Schroeder’s Cat was watching, and unbeknownst to me. I’m happy about that. It has been a privilege to participate in people’s lives in that way.
I’m still at it – helping our proud nation raise, widen and deepen its true productivity levels, the true GDP of our people, through helping people fix their souls, and periodically managing to pass them occasional keys that open doors. Except nowadays I’m doddering around like an old fogey on sticks, wondering when the next seat is likely to appear. I go at about one-third of the pace of most people. I’ve passed my best-before date, so at times I have to work at finding a spark to ignite the old creativity-plugs.
I made a deep, bone-level decision during this winter. I’d been building up for it ever since getting stricken with cancer in late 2019. Perhaps it wasn’t a decision, more a confirmation or full acceptance of something I knew was the case but perhaps didn’t have the confidence to really go the whole way. It was like a conversion.
I decided that I shall not die for medical reasons.
Before you start overthinking and wondering what I mean, I mean this… I’ll die because it’s time and I’ve had enough, I’ve done what I came to do and to be (well, more or less), and because the angels no longer need to prop me up, and because I’m ready and cooked. Whenever that happens, I imagine I’ll go out quite quickly – y’know, an armchair job, or in my sleep, or a quick illness.
We shall see. Or perhaps tha angels might pull another trick and give me another lesson to learn. Sorry, mate, you don’t always get what you want! And what do you mean by ‘a good death’ anyway? Are you kidding?
Anyway, there’s not far to go – it’s months or a few years, as far as I can tell. But this isn’t to do with time. It’s to do with the fulfilment of all that needs fulfilling. Or a decent enough amount of it to lay it all to rest and hand in my cards.
There’s another thing too: dying is a part of life, not different from it, or a disjunction. It’s not ‘things going wrong’. It’s a continuity, a transition into another state, and the bits need to be in place for that, ideally. But once the bits are in place, you need to do it, to give permission for the tide to lift you up and take you away.
However, as you might already have found, our ideals often lead us along trackways that lead us all over the place – life on Earth is really complex and easy to get lost in. The path is rarely as straight and simple as it looked on the map. Or perhaps ideals trick us into doing things we’d run away from otherwise.
Who knows when I’ll drop off my perch? Do you know when or how you’ll drop, yourself? Probably not. I’ve been an astrologer for fifty years and I can’t answer that one. I don’t even try.
We don’t exist as individual selves as much as we would like to believe. We Westerners value ourselves very highly – y’know, it’s 400 Palestinians exchanged for six Israelis. And we make a big deal when people pop their clogs and remind us of our own impermanence, frailty and helplessness. We make stone memorials to them, as if to keep them pinned down in our world. We think of dying as a loss, as things going wrong, as loved ones leaving us.
In life we’re supposed to be on top of things – clearing that list, keeping to the timetable, doing what’s required, being responsible. But in the other world, well, that’s irrelevant. It’s necessary to allow ourselves to immerse and drown in the void and float through the vortex, to that far-off place where you no longer need to pay bills or fill in forms.
Ah, correction… unless you create that reality for yourself up there too! This can arise out of the illusion that, as long as we’re doing something, we must be alive. So we keep trying to do things, even when death is busy netting us.
But the big secret is, when you get there, to that expanded moment when your heart stops, there is nothing more you can do about all that, about that life you had. It’s over. Kaputt. Gesloten. Finito. Gone.
Then you’re in another world.
Palden at Bosigran, recently. Photo by Selina al-Mukhtar.
The fascinating thing is that we have karmic threads that permeate our lives and crop up in all sorts of ways in those lives. Since the soul does not exist within the experiential and sequential narratives of time, it lives all of its lives, from its viewpoint, at the same time. No time. Therefore, there is interchange and multilogue going on between our different lives, both on Earth and off it, and continually.
Think about it for a while… that’s rather a big thought.
For me, one of those karmic threads over several lives has been about calling together groups, clans, armies and throngs. This is a bit weird, because I’m quite a hermit too, or I prefer beavering away in the background. I’m not always doing that pulling-people-together trip, but in certain lives I’ve had that (shall we call it) calling or duty. In the life I’m now speaking from, it was called ‘The Camps’, and a number of readers will have been at them in former decades. And they still progress whether I’m there or not. Loads of other gatherings, groups, circles and networks too, and not only in this lifetime.
Some good people were key souls in making the camps happen – sister and brother souls who formed a constellation of energy and logistics to pull off a miracle. I dropped in the seed-idea, which was quietly formulated with a small number of people in our kitchen at the time, bless their souls, who ended up ‘holding the energy’ at the camps. A few are dead now, and others ageing. I get the feeling we’ll find ourselves meeting up again upstairs though.
In unconscious anticipation of this, the name of the cafe at the very first three seasons of camps around Glastonbury in the mid-eighties was called ‘Pie in the Sky’. Precisely. You’re welcome to come along, when you get to heaven.
Bosigran Castle as seen from Pendeen Watch direction
Anyway, when I started writing this it was intended to be a few paragraphs. As you see, it turned into more than that. But then, with loads of planets in Pisces right now, whaddya expect except slippery, bouncy dollops of the Great Unknown? So you got this diatribe. Apologies – I’ll go away in a moment. Nevertheless, it’s AI-free and much better than just re-posting neat memes with someone else’s pictures in the background. I hope.
The idea was to tell you about a new podcast. Recently I’ve been going on a bit about other worlds, other millennia, flying souls and random outbursts of imagineering and, this time, I thought I’d say a few things about life on Earth. If you’ve been there, or if you find yourself there now, it might give you a few interesting perspectives, while you’re busy doing the ironing or trying to figure out how to fix your car.
Or not, as the case may be. Who knows? Eitherwhichway, the pod is what came out of my brainbox and voicebox one rainy day when no one was looking. Except for the robin who sits outside eyeballing me expectantly and wondering what I’m doing.
Oh, and by the way, remember the Sunday meditations. They happen every Sunday on a cushion near you. Follow the link below if you need details. Keep it simple. Just do it.
Love from me. Paldywan.
The found sounds at the beginning and end are from recent early mornings on the farm in West Penwith, Cornwall.
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.
Swans near Falmouth
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.
Gulls at Gurnard’s Head
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.
A peregrine falcon at Carn les Boel
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.
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
“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.
The view from my bed
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.
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.
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
Chapel Carn Brea, the last hill in Britain, topped by bronze age and neolithic cairns
I’ve just started a job that I’ve been putting off for six months. I wasn’t clear about what I needed to do, and it’s a lot of work. And I’m supposed to be retired. But it came clear a few days ago, amidst a down-time when I was sitting here alone, feeling rather rudderless and wondering what to do. I decided to do a complete revision of a rather big website I wrote and created 6-9 years ago, Ancient Penwith. It’s about the ancient sites of West Penwith, here in Cornwall.
In some respects it’s more difficult to revise a website than to create a new one, because you have to take the existing material and re-shape it along completely new lines. But there’s a tendency to simply recycle the old stuff and stay in the same mind-frame as before. So each page is taking time for me to revise – one a day, and forty to go. I’m going to make the site briefer, more to-the-point, with more maps, pics and straight statements about the geomantic issues my research of the last ten years has aroused.
The detailed stuff has gone into a book, written and not yet published, called Shining Land. I can’t self-publish it – brain issues, and I want it to stay available after I die. So I’ll try finding a publisher when I get brain-space to focus on it.
That’s what it’s like. My psyche doesn’t process stuff like it once did. I can’t multitask and hop from thing to thing any more. When faced with memory issues I have to give myself full permission to utilise and trust my intuitive brain – intuition works by faster, more direct neural pathways than logic does, and that matters in ageing brains.
In this sense, being an educated Westerner is one of the causes of many old peoples’ brain-processing issues: we have been trained to disable and constrain a significant part of our brains, in order to fit into the requirements of the system we live in. Though, frankly, many people with dementia and Alzheimer’s are simply brain-tired, worn out, and we ought to recognise this instead of deluding ourselves that we can extend our busy lives forever.
It’s not just about slow brainz. It’s about a slowing psyche – the whole lot. It’s part of the life-cycle and a wonderful way of rounding out a life. Instead of facts and figures, you get understanding and you see things in a different light.
Here’s the summit cairn on the top of Chapel Carn Brea, a chambered cairn about 4,000 years old, for retreat, conscious dying and the energy-treatment of seeds and other items (many archaeologists would probably disagree)
Right now I am celebrating the second anniversary of the sudden separation of my partner and me, after six years together. I’ve been surprised how slowly I’ve moved through the stages of coming back to myself. It has been a struggle. On the other hand, since in a late-life context I’m in the last-chance zone, there has been far more stuff to get through, for this concerns all my relationships. My very first girlfriend, Jane, is dying too, in Northumberland. It’s all about finalising a life in which I’ve been involved with some amazing women and we’ve shared remarkable experiences. But I’m happy to say that, though I regret what happened two years ago, I made it through and I live to see another day.
I’m rather surprised I got through that. But then, that’s another gift of a lapsing memory: life and its experiences become more of a surprise. Well, I’ve got through 90% of releasing my partner and seem to have crossed a critical threshold in the last month or so. When a person refuses to talk and to debrief openly after a major life-crunch together, it opens up a new level of soul-searching, understanding, guesswork and forgiveness. It’s necessary to understand and release, regardless of whether the other person responds, helps or cares – otherwise it’s a weight around your own neck and emotionally a killer. It has been painful getting through this stuff but, in the end, something has cleared and a weight of bereavement has lifted. I’m happy about that, and I hope it’s happening for her too.
When a single issue such as relationship breakdown comes up, it widens out into other areas of life – those areas that remain unreconciled and which perhaps cannot be reconciled. One recent example, for me, has been watching much of my work in Palestine come to pretty much nothing. There’s something of it still there, but really it’s a matter of writing off this chunk of life and its efforts – letting it be. It’s in the ‘life’s a bitch, then you die’ department of reality.
In a way, all our big ideas, our plans, ambitions and efforts, come to nothing. It’s a fart in the void. This is not entirely true, but it’s an aspect of life that we do need to face. We’re locked in a groove of exaggerated, self-generated meaningfulness, desperate to explain our lives and justify our existences, when often the true meaning of our lives is completely different from what we believe. Quite often our track record is better than we ourselves tend to judge. After all, we’re all useless, error-prone shits, really, and it has taken us thousands of years to get to this point – and look where we’ve got to! We humans are the kinds of people our parents warned us about – or they should have done.
Fifty years ago I might have become a professor, but I became an independent polymath instead, covering quite a wide range of seemingly disparate subjects. I mean, what’s the connection between humanitarian work in Palestine and the geomancy of stone circles? What’s the connection between astrology and geopolitics, between ETs and the history of the Crusades, or between group circle-working and leylines?
For me, it’s all about reaching across rather large gaps and seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. I guess that’s one thing that drew me toward Israelis and Palestinians – if your aim is to bring peace to these poor people, that’s noble, but it’s highly unlikely to happen in your lifetime, so get used to it and soldier on anyway. That’s what I needed to learn. It took a few years, and my work out there lifted off as soon as I learned it.
Even so, things haven’t been working out well for me in recent years. Life has been an uphill struggle and I’ve had some rather earth-shaking experiences. In the last year, quite a few people under my care have died and I’ve faced some ridiculous challenges. Some think I ought to avoid such things but, in a way, for better or worse, this is my chosen life-path. It all hangs around the question of how deep into the water you’re prepared to go, and whether you trust that you can swim. Once you go deeper, you find out that you survive, so you go a bit deeper next time, and on it goes. Having someone shoot at you for the third time is not the same as the first.
Since October 2022 I’ve been involved in another irreconcilable problem that has weighed heavily. Recent news about the Post Office scandal here in UK has been heartening because I’ve been caught in a smaller but similar scandal. It’s a bank in Australia which, through corporate negligence, has caused the deaths of at least twelve people under my care. It is in denial of its responsibilities and has broken its promises. Like the PO scandal, the story sounds improbable and incredible. Even the consultant the bank brought in to help them with this problem recommended in our favour.
The short story is that, in October 2022, I got involved in a rescue operation in Ghana to save one of the company’s men, a Scotsman whom I knew. At the time I agreed to do it, it should have lasted 2-3 weeks. The anti-fraud security arm of the bank he worked for promised to pay all expenses if I acted as handler for this part of a larger operation – for them it was a confrontation with a large multinational crime gang. I have the right skills and experience, so I did it, in good faith.
In a crisis, there’s no time for written agreements: you either trust or you don’t trust the person, make a handshake deal and get on with it, since minutes matter. Despite repeated assurances of payment over twelve months up to September 2023, the bank has not paid. Twelve people have died as a result – some of you will remember Felicia and her child Phyllis, who died a year ago. And I am financially down. They owe Maa Ayensuwaa, me and a number of others £40,000 to help compensate all the damage done – not a vast amount.
During this time I met up with Maa Ayensuwaa, a native healer in Ghana with whom I’ve been working for the last year. Since December 2022 she and I have been alone on this, working to rescue people and both of us paying a high price for it. But we’re topping out now – the company has not managed to kill us, and neither has the crime gang.
The bank might not have intended to kill anyone, but its lack of integrity and its corporate dishonesty have killed people, and they’re continuing to err in this way even now, when a simple settle-up would not be difficult. Had they paid up as agreed at an early stage, many bad things would not have needed to happen – including Felicia’s and Phyllis’ deaths and the circumstances leading up to them.
Maa Ayensuwaa is now in Kumasi, Ghana, slowly reviving from a series of hospital operations for fibroids. Papa Nkum, her former student, and I are at present trying to find funds to get her home to her shrine at Nzema, to recuperate (£150). I’ve grown tired of fundraising. We need to get her home. It has been a long grind, keeping her alive, but we’ve done it. Gods bless her, she’s a tough cookie who seems to be able to hover around in the near-death state quite well without dying, and she’s made it through. If you feel any kind of connection with her, please send her supportive, healing vibes.
We’ve got through a crisis that neither Papa Nkum nor I reckoned we’d get through. He’s a good man. He has stood by her when others didn’t care – West Africans can be hard toward one another. But we’re quite a team, she, him and I, grossly underfunded yet resourceful and enduring. It’s quite an interaction too, between two native healers and one aged hippy – an esoteric bridge across cultures. We’ve learned a lot from each other.
The Mên an Tol, the Stone with the Hole
The issue here is about crossing gaps, reaching across cultural chasms and bridgebuilding between disparate realities that talk different languages and see things in fundamentally different ways.
The connection between humanitarian work in Palestine and the geomancy of stone circles is this. It’s about bridging gulfs. When you’re in a stone circle, you are communicating with an intelligence, genius loci, the spirit of the place. It has a very different viewpoint from you, and it’s a whole lot bigger and older than you. It’s a stretch, but the interaction is really helpful in both directions. Meanwhile, in Palestine: when in quick succession you find yourself in the company of a right-wing Israeli settler and a Muslim radical, you’re straddling a gap where the two live in very different worlds, even if living only a mile apart. It’s the same thing. It’s the vulnerability of doing the splitz.
What’s the connection between astrology and geopolitics? Well, astrology provides a way of seeing things that sheds light on the course of events, and it’s a source of hidden intelligence on the trends, tracks and timings that such events are likely to follow. It helps us understand the threads that move through history and the way they move and evolve. If astrology were used in international relations and intel gathering, diplomacy would work far better.
What’s the connection between ETs and the history of the Crusades? Well, the Crusades, for Europe, were a pattern-setting colonial adventure that have defined the history of the last thousand years, and we’re watching the latest round in Gaza and the West Bank right now. At the time of the Crusades, there was a choice between cultural interchange or cultural rivalry between the Muslim and Christian worlds, and rivalry and misunderstanding were chosen. If one person were responsible for that, it was Richard the Lionheart.
It created a gap not only between Muslims and Christians but a separatist mindset in Europeans. That is, we choose to call Hamas terrorists rather than freedom fighters. We call ETs ‘aliens’, with the expectation that they are hostile. We again say the word ‘Russia’ with an intonation and undertone that portrays Russians as ‘them’ – it’s a return to the safe hostile territory of the Cold War. Having an enemy helps us feel better about ourselves.
There’s another connection too, observed by none other than Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik nearly 40 years ago: if ETs suddenly presented themselves to us, our differences here on Earth would quickly dissolve. We’d have to change our mindset overnight. If we put up a fight, we’d lose, instantaneously – they wouldn’t even allow us to get to that point. Because it’s not about a winning-and-losing, threat-based mindset or expectation. At that very moment we as Earthlings would be challenged to do what we’ve long needed to do – cooperate and stand together. Standing against things is not the way to go.
I’ll say that again. Standing against things is not the way to go.
What’s the connection between group circle-working and leylines? Well, leylines constitute a subtle energy-system spanning the world, concentrated in certain areas (Britain and Palestine being two) and they act as network channels that pump up energy-centres dotted around the world. Group circle-working involves people sitting in a circle, using a talking stick and other methods of entering into a synergistic group-mind state. It is ancient, archetypal and very modern, the basis of deep, para-political democracy. In such a situation, a group can generate an amplified energy-field which can at times have pattern-changing effects around the world, somehow aiding or influencing events to turn in certain directions.
This is a shamanic principle that is a key principle today in the resolution of the world’s multiplex ills. ‘When three or more people are gathered in my name, there shall I be‘ – that’s ‘God’ talking in the Bible, and it’s true, and every single reader of this blog will have experienced this in some way, however you perceive divinity. This is what people did at power-centres, and that’s why they were built – to enter into advanced mass-consciousness states, to go into deep thought and to engage with the core intelligence of nature and the universe.
Spirit operates beyond the framework of time, space and dimension. We all have sisters and brothers of the soul, dotted around the world and the universe, with whom we are in regular communication on an inner level. We’re part of networks, lineages and soul-families and, consciously or not, energy passes through these connections. That’s one reason I like to run the Sunday Meditations – it’s not necessary even to do anything in the meditation. It’s more a matter of making ourselves meditatively available for whatever need there is, and much of it operates on a very deep level, of which sometimes we only get glimmers.
On Earth, we’re at a critical time where we need to understand that we really are all one. Sounds easy, but it involves a painful, drawn-out transition. We’re one human family living on one small world. We face a big emotional transition in which we shall have to learn to trust and agree more than ever before. Or, at least, we need to find ways of disagreeing and cooperating at the same time, and feeling good about each other. This concerns identities, nations, cultures and also species.
The iron age fogou at Carn Euny – a women’s space inside the heart of the village
It’s the bridging of gaps. Not only seeing and understanding those gaps, but stepping over them. We people in the rich world hold back more than is wise for us. We stay in our comfort zone, where we won’t be confronted with big moral issues that actually we need to confront, for the good of our souls. That’s why people are sailing to our shores on flimsy boats, sacrificing their lives to bring us this question.
I’ve repeatedly been faced with a question like this: “Is it better to give my last money to save a person’s life, or should I play safe and side-step the issue (and let them suffer or die)?”. The fear that causes us to turn away from facing such a question turns out to be unjustified, in my experience. It’s a question of undertaken risk and commitment – and such heat-of-the-moment choices introduce a new magic that is otherwise unavailable. I’ve found that, having faced this edgy question quite a few times over the years, I’ve managed intuitively to make good decisions, with but a few mistakes, and while it has involved making personal sacrifices, I survived – and so did they. And that’s the main thing.
It’s not what we get for doing things. It’s what we become by doing them.
Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall, a neolithic cliff sanctuary
Wednesday was a bad-news day. I cried myself to sleep afterwards. I’m crossing a threshold. My cancer readings are beginning to rise. My medication is going to be changed. There are five options available, and this is the third. Part of me wants my Mummy to hold my hand while I go through the next stage. I shall lose my four-weekly nurses’ visits – the next phase involves pills, Lenidalomide (a form of Thalidomide). I lasted well for three years on the last form of medication, Dara, but it’s now losing efficacy.
I’ll have to go to hospital in Truro once a month. There will be medical side-effects, apparently. I’m feeling similar warning signs to those I had ten months before I was diagnosed with cancer – a feeling of being up against it, drizzled with feelings of hopelessness and garnished with a creeping tiredness – and a strange manic drivenness to work on creative projects. I’m doing Reishi, Astragalus, Vits C, D3, multivits, blueberries, cider vinegar, grapefruit seed extract, beansprouts and my friend Kellie’s multicoloured carrots, and took a break from blogging for some sun-medicine too.
This is the life of an eccentric cancer patient. Who knows how the next stage will develop? This year I would certainly love resolution of the bank issue and the ex-partner issue. It’s time, and life doesn’t have to be so difficult. I would love to help Maa Ayensuwaa to get back on her feet and do something for the Tuareg too (I need to find people to replace me). The Tuareg have had to send their young and their old people to a refugee camp over the border, since they are under threat from government troops, Wagner Group mercenaries and Jihadis. This isn’t the World War Three that some people seem to want, but things are escalating. Need is rising.
And here’s my quote of the day. It cropped up on a new friend’s FB page (shukran, Selina). It’s by Austrian psychologist Carl Jung. It applies to the whole of humanity as well as to individuals or nation peoples.
“Nobody can fall so low unless they have a great depth. If such a thing can happen to a person, it challenges their best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.”
It’s amazing what we humans do to justify our existences. This is my fiftieth blog entry, would you believe.
It takes a few hours to do a blog but it takes days beforehand, churning through ideas and possibilities… and then, one day, I wake up, forget all that, and just start writing. That’s what happened here. I was refilling my tea mug, having just got up – vanilla tea with a dash of coconut. It came. I had to get it down before it was lost in the side-alleys of lapsed memory. It’s all to do with opening up a space inside where creativity erupts, as if out of nowhere. Though actually it comes from the compost fermented in the preceding few days.
Sometimes, as a writer, you can plan things out, but sometimes you just have to start – start with anything. Well, something interesting. It’s all about having something to say, and creating it using words that draw in readers regardless of what you’re actually saying, and the combination makes for good writing. Plus a shot of inspiration – something sparky that comes out of nowhere, oozing out between the lines. We humans communicate in far more frequencies than words, and gifted writers can say more than words.
This might surprise you, but in my own life it took a long time to find my words. It came in stages – ages 14-16, 20ish, 30ish and 36 – having written five unpublished manuscripts. Before that, as an Aspie with a rather complex brain, I was in a kind of deep, silent confusion. The world was telling me things that didn’t accord with my experience. It told me things about myself I couldn’t identify with. It made me into a ‘strange boy’ who would sit in the corner, while everyone else did normal things. At school, I just didn’t understand what we were there for. I was an autodidact, just waiting to go home to get on with my studies and projects.
The Council Chamber at Bosigran Castle, West Penwith
Why should A + B = C? Will someone explain? Why should children suffer to go unto Jesus? If God is Love, why should we fear Him? (And why use capital letters)? Why do cars pump exhaust at you? Why should God specifically save the Queen? With Jupiter in Pisces and Moon in Gemini, these kinds of questions irked the young me.
I was the boy with glasses who got picked on and beaten up. But around age fourteen something clicked. I remember two things (my memory is shot, so this is remarkable in itself). Feeling inadequate and holding back, I was nevertheless pushed into speaking at the school debating society. Some kids were getting ready to laugh at me. I won hands down, completely forgetting my notes and holding forth fluently. I found my voice and, well, from then on I was good on-stage. But I still had a struggly quandary going on in myself, especially with understanding my personal position in life and how to work relationships.
The other thing was cross-country running. In Liverpool, football was everything, and speccy-foureyes was no good at it. But when we started long-distance running, Mars in Scorpio found his power. I delighted in hanging round mid-field for the first half of the run, and then accelerating just as the big football heroes were flagging – and I’d love passing them, heading for the front, hehe. That was great! It taught me that anything is possible if I have the will. This lesson applies just as much now, going through a cancer-induced endurance test. Out of this come a second strength and miracle possibilities.
Stone of the Hole, Men an Tol, West Penwith
It was LSD that changed everything. Age 16 (it was legal in 1966), I was given some California acid by a Scouse poet and we tripped out on the dockside in Liverpool. Suddenly I slotted into myself. I had a clue – saw the light, the beginnings of a calling. Uranus and Pluto were conjuncting over the Sun in my astrological chart (historic in itself), and my life changed, on that day. It was a ‘turning in the deepest seat of consciousness’. The strange boy went stranger, and something snapped together. It was okay to be me, as I was. From then on I was on a search for truth.
Well, I found some, only some, though it was worth the journey and it continues today, even in late life. Truth is big and deep and wide. So big that you can’t actually fully get it, and there’s no final answer – though we humans have indeed tried. Anyone claiming The Truth is missing something. When I was involved with the Council of Nine, they’d always refer to ‘What you call God’. Yet it’s here within us, a kind of deep knowing, a feeling of alignment, integration, anchoredness and vastness that reveals itself to each and every one of us at certain moments in life. What we do with that – many people reach for the next can of beer or stand in queues at airports – is entirely up to us, and some of us do say Yes. Hello, you.
But even then, over the decades, for me it has been an ongoing battle between saying Yes and saying No – and also I’ve studiously avoided the question, as we all do. It’s criminal, really – the crime of avoiding doing what we’re really here to do. The crime of retraction. It’s kinda easier to ‘settle down’, get a job and get drunk at Christmas – there’s so much pressure to join the Great Turning-Away. We must conform to some extent, even if you’re a weirdo like me, because we’re all here amongst humanity and, unless you close yourself away somewhere, way away in the Siberian taiga, or even attempt a compromise version like me at the far end of Cornwall, our fellow humans are all around us and we live in the civilisation and time of history that we live in. And we chose to come here.
Aspies call our so-called syndrome ‘Wrong Planet Syndrome’. Problem is, it’s tricky looking at the world from the viewpoint of a stranger. Sometimes you even look at your own mother or your lover and think Who is this?. It’s double-tricky, because most people around you think you have a programming error – a mental health issue – when actually it’s simply that an Aspie is programmed up with a different operating system (like Apple and Android). But Aspies are in a minority, and now we’ve been lumped into an autistic spectrum that some wisecracker with a doctorate thought was a nifty way of reclassifying everyone. And other neurotypical thinkers thought, yay, that’s useful, that explains things… and now we’re stuck in a new, more padded, box. Well, fuckit, I’m not having any of it.
I’ve been a victim many times over, yet something in me deeply believes that victimhood doesn’t really exist. Even if I’m ‘mentally ill’ – and that depends on your viewpoint – it’s still my prerogative to rise up. With some success and quite a lot of failures, I’ve made some progress. It’s about fully occupying one’s space and knowing, deep down, that you’re up to it – you embody it, it’s yours and you can do it. Even when you get beaten down, you can rise up, resist, turn the tables, make things good, move forward. Some of the most exemplary people I’ve known have been through the jaws of total disaster. From this viewpoint, Ukraine is now a crucible of accelerated soul evolution.
Though it can be hard, I prefer being unusual than normal, even when I’m misunderstood today and pay a high price, even charged by close loved ones. For loved ones it’s difficult too, and I really recognise that. I’m a strange mixture of a hermit and a public figure – and it’s the bit in between where I screw up, in personal and closer relationships. I fail to meet up with expectations and behavioural norms, or to deal well with some aspects of human guile and complexity.
Psycho-normals see Aspies as complex beings, but to ourselves we’re simple and straight-up and the rest of the world is complex. It becomes more complicated because most neurotypicals regard themselves as normal when they’re far more way-out and human than they allow themselves to be.
Boscawen-un stone circle, from Creeg Tol
It’s like French and English: both peoples think they stand at the centre of reality in comparison to the others over there – and all sorts of trouble arises as a result, even though we’re related. My reality is better than yours. We’re doing this to Russians and Chinese at present, reducing and dehumanising them in order to justify things we do to them – and they do the same back, and look at the mess we’re in.
Yes, I’m a victim, so that entitles me either to droop in self-pity or to strike back hard, and to feel fully justified in either. That’s a really complex syndrome, and it affects individuals, social groups and nations. I’m one of the downtrodden, so let’s fuck the banksters, the toxic males or the rich whiteys because there’s not a single human amongst them, and they deserve it.
But there’s something very, very real to victimhood too, and you definitely feel it when you’re locked up in jail, refused your fortieth job application or looking down the barrel of a gun. We should indeed support victims, and injustice is a key issue in today’s world. But just because we were victims earlier in life, or even in another life, it doesn’t make us victims now.
The ancient power of Boswens menhir and the modern power of a major air traffic control beacon. Where truly lies the power?
Just because I have elements of PTSD from seeing a few too many really bad and wrong things, it doesn’t justify my being hard-hearted toward my friends and loved ones – and I’m so sorry to those who have had this from me. I really mean it. (I’ve been on a Neptune opposition Saturn over the last year, and that’s why this confessional stuff is important just now.)
It’s complex though, and nothing exists in a vacuum. Palestinians often say, ‘Why do Jews give us such a hard time, when it was Europeans who gave them a hard time?’. (Also, a wide-eyed, naive Aspie might ask, why do some Palestinians give Israelis a hard time back?) This is the kind of thing we must resolve, and Ukraine is its current nexus of attention, but there will be more horrors until we stop. Please don’t act shocked and surprised when the next round breaks out. This goes deeper than diplomacy: this concerns mass psycho-spiritual, social and cultural change. We just gotta do it, if we are to survive. As much in our own lives as in war zones.
I have been party to this crap too – I have dirty hands, and I’m not unique. It’s important to feel the responsibility and consequence but not to shut ourselves down with guilt and shame. I did it, yes. It’s time for me to forgive everyone who has done similar to me. The past cannot be undone, and it all hangs around what we learn and what we do from now on. Stepping over the craters to hug our adversaries is a really crucial thing to do. Because we’re all in this mess together.
You might wonder why I’m writing this stuff on a cancer blog. Well, these kinds of thoughts are part of my healing, the resolution of my own story. I’m trying to work on this stuff so that I can be a bit more at peace when I pop my clogs. Hopefully. That’s the idea. Not that this kind of cancer (myeloma) or my disabilities can be undone, but it’s all to do with happiness. Basic happiness is the greatest healer around. If you’re underlyingly happy you can make something good of anything. The happiness of opening up, unburdening, forgiveness, understanding, acceptance. And of having some food in your belly and a roof over your head. And the happiness of togetherness.
Here’s something. I’m cooking up tentative plans – yes, plans, for the first time in nearly three years, since going down with cancer. If I can muster the energy and some people to help set it up, I’m thinking of doing a ‘magic tour’ of a few places in Britain, to create an opportunity to meet up. One might be round Glastonbury. I don’t know if it’ll work yet, but this idea has quickened my heart. I want to bring something to you. It’s early stages, and much hangs around finding a good local organiser in each place. I’m in process of writing a proposal and blurb. So watch this space. One of my podcasts sums it all up: the one called Soul Evolution.
Here in my faraway eyrie, I think of you all – I really do. I’ve been alone, feeling rather desolate, for what feels like a long time, and something has come from it. Since I can welcome guests at my home only in ones or twos, I want to create some temporary magic spaces, perhaps round campfires, for friends and soul-relations elsewhere in larger numbers, for a few hours of time-travel, close encounters and lightbulb moments. Would that interest you? I have a strange gift of frail strength, love and tears to share, and I have a few friends upstairs. But I’ll need a good armchair. And you’ll need to switch off your phones if you want me at my best.
Bless you all, and bless everyone. Bless even the world’s worst assholes. The swallows outside my window have just burst into tuneful twittering, as if to agree. And it’s now lunchtime and I forgot my breakfast and pills, so I’d better stop…
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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