myeloma – Page 5 – Notes from the Far Beyond

Back down on the Farm

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Recently my emotions have been really close to the surface. I quite easily burst into tears over the slightest thing – a piece of music or even just a feeling of simple gratitude for being alive. Meanwhile, I’m being presented with lists of things to do, while beset with ‘chemo-brain’ and feeling unready to do them – sometimes this feels like an overload bringing up more tears! My immune system, close to zero as part of my cancer treatment, seems to bring an emotional permeability too.

I’m fed up of being unwell, and tired out, of spilling things, missing the toilet when peeing, of early morning aches, being so bloody helpless and dependent. Sometimes I can’t handle it any more and it’s more wet cheeks.

I’ve felt the grief of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations, from two world wars. Grief from the ‘wrong’ deaths I have seen and helped to deal with in the Middle East, in my humanitarian work. Regret over an avoidable incident I was involved with in 2014, killing 200-odd Syrian villagers, that deeply hit my humanitarian instincts. Grief over two previous lives in which I have been a general. Grief remembering my chronologically last life, ending in Austria in WW2 – the memory of an aristocratic altruist in such a ridiculously big humanitarian crisis in war that only small acts of goodness could be done, only some people could be saved, and only some good sense could be inculcated into the madness.

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I’m back home on the farm in Cornwall. It feels safer down here, pandemic-wise – for now. The farm is quite isolated. I was supposed to return to Devon next week for a hospital consultation, blood tests and new medication but I’m staying here – we’ll have to fix things in other ways. The farm is the best place to be: I’m fortunate to be here.

Lynne is at her home in Devon, picking up the pieces after the enormous task of caring for me for the last few months. Bless her: she has saved my life and gone many extra miles for me. I was lucky that someone like her saved me in my time of need. It’s good now to give her space, and for me to sort out the details of living independently – we might not see each other for a while. As an astrologer she has clients and students to deal with, and teenagers at home.

I’m used to a hermit’s life and can look after myself most of the time. I’ll need a local helper for an hour a day, and it will take time for me to build up strength and establish a new normal. With the crowd-funded money you people have kindly donated I am kitting myself up with necessaries: the first items are a fridge, a new work chair and a mattress.

The ‘care crisis’ in Britain and similar countries derives particularly from the death of the community and the extended family. A Palestinian family of forty could take in a person like me with no great change to its routines. Often the old people sit at the centre of the compound, with the kids playing around them and people coming and going, though ‘social distancing’ – something that East Asians and Westerners might find more easy than Arabs – will prove difficult there.

An old friend from Leeds, Sian, is with me for two weeks. She’s heading home on Thursday. We used to work together in the Hundredth Monkey Project in the mid-1990s and the Flying Squad that followed after it. These geopolitical healing projects used group process, meditation and other pressure-cooking techniques to work with events and trends in the world. It’s good to spend time together again since we and the others in the group spent a lot of time pressure-cooking, and it bonded us as souls even though we’ve now closed the project – we could not find new recruits with sufficient commitment.

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On Saturday we went to Boscawen-un stone circle, which is 4,500 years old. We did the usual things you do, circumambulating, visiting the stones, being quiet, and sitting by the quartz stone drinking tea. After a while a couple came along. We started talking. Before long I was undergong a profound healing given by the woman, who spoke in tongues, looked me straight in the eyes, grasped and shook my hands, bringing through a very strong energy from beings that seemed to be definitely of the not-of-Earth kind. I let them examine me from the inside. They told me that shadows of grief were around me. I felt energy rippling through me – I was being energy-massaged and manipulated. Since then I’ve been leaking tears by the gallon. Thank you Estelle, whoever you are, for bringing a gift of God in a stone circle.

Cancer opens a doorway to karmic clearing, pattern-changing and a sharpening of life-purpose. Amongst cancer people I have met, a proportion seem particularly to be taking on a deep challenge of the soul. In my own case, there are shadows of the past to clear, murky things I have touched, errors I have made and things I could have done better, but this soul-challenge now seems to come more from the future than from the past.

Being dealt a bucketload of uncertainty is one of the ways this inner challenge reveals itself. I don’t know how long I’ll live – it could be just weeks. This issue variously faces everyone, but cancer has a way of bringing it to the surface, reminding us how vulnerable we are as humans. We need to talk about this more, to address a cultural taboo around death: one of coronavirus’ many gifts is a reminder of our mortality and insecurity. We need this.

Ironically, I’m on this vulnerability-trip at a time when the whole world is suddenly wobbling with uncertainty. Whenever this pandemic ends, things will not go back to normal. Values are changing. Everything that was safe is now questionable. We’re being levelled out. The consequences of this shared mass experience are far greater and deeper than anyone can see. Society, community and the human family are on the mend.

Here’s a simple rule that they don’t teach in university: when the economy rises, society falls, and when the economy falls, society rises. The next crisis, or the one after that, will concern ‘sovereign insolvency’ – government bankruptcy. That’ll be a shock – gilt-edged guarantees going belly-up. Our current economic crisis in 2020 is, I reckon, the first of three or four to come.

The good news is this: these are mechanisms by which the global economic system is correcting and adjusting itself. To function, it must reflect the ecological and human needs of the time. It’s overdue. Capitalism is plummeting into transformation, stumbling from a competitive, exploitative model toward a cooperative model of operation. Is the system here to serve the people or are the people here to serve the system? This change will be painful. You might have to clean your ass without toilet paper. But working together and looking after each other is the societal model of the future.

Here we go, into the unknown. Saturn is entering Aquarius, heralding a period lasting until 2043 where the emphasis is on society. Not the economy and markets. Not gizmos. People and society: the social contract, its freedoms, benefits, controls and responsibilities. The capacity of humans to live and work together. Exceptionalism. Solidarity. New politics. Equality. Justice. Many hands make light work. These are important because the other major issues of our time will not progress well if social-political issues fail to progress. It’s all a question of human willingness to do whatever it takes to change the world.

The ill, the old and the infirm have been forgotten and sidelined in recent decades. There’s tragedy to this inasmuch as, now and in future, we might have to accept being culled by circumstances such as coronavirus. In wealthy countries we’ve had the luxury of long lives and medical support for the ill and disabled, and this won’t be as possible in future. The therapy for this is to address the question of dying, and the meaning of life. It’s easier to pass away if you’ve fulfilled at least some of the reason why you came – the contract you signed up to before birth.

For Death is lurking on our streets and fear is the wrong response. Coronavirus brings us a taste of reality. It brings gifts: a chance for society to reconstitute. A new political expediency that cares more for people. A need to cooperate and care. A change of values regarding consumption, production and the true worth of many social and economic activities – is arms production really what we want? Are cruise holidays, throw-away fashions, flashy cars and sumptuous restaurants really necessary? Is it more important to earn money or care for our families? And how will we deal with the subterranean rage that lies in the collective psyche?

If you don’t hear from me again, I’ve probably kicked the bucket. In which case, stay tuned and you’ll hear from me sometime, from Upstairs. If this happens, it releases me to help out on the other side – a humanitarian’s work is never done! I’ll be wherever I’m most useful. If I stay on Earth, I’ll write again in due course and keep you posted. Bless you for being with me on this journey.

May you be safe and well. I wish upon you something that the Palestinians have mastered: making the best out of a bad situation and staying happy under duress. When a Palestinian smiles, it shows that they have not lost and cannot lose the war, for they retain their humanity and live to see another day.

If misfortune strikes, ask yourself ‘Where is the gift?‘ – and therein lie answers and avenues of progress. The world is changing and, amidst the tragedy, good things are unfolding – humanity is coming back after decades of cruel, destructive economism with far more losers than winners. This nightmare is beginning to end. But it will take time and many crunchpoints.

Everything is okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end. We all came here to bring light to a benighted world, and we’ve just been given a big opportunity.

Greetings from West Penwith, Cornwall, the shining land of Belerion.

Love, Paldywan Kenobi.

Coming up for air

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I’m beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. My cousin Faith visited recently, bless her, pointing out how my life has become one of super-concentrated uncertainty. It’s funny, when you’re caught up in the intricacies and subjectivities of your own life-bubble, how a simple observation like that really helps see things more clearly.

I’m on cycle five of a planned six cycles of chemo and steroids and am expected to plateau at a stable level when all the intense treatments I’ve been having end in April. My readings are still improving.

At the three-weekly meeting with the haematological specialist, Deborah, I asked whether there would be follow-up drugs and she said No, none at all. That was a surprise, but it now frees me up to design my own myeloma self-management regime, so it feels like a release. But into what? Swimming in a sea of uncertainty, hazard and possibility.

It’s a challenge to maintain a good state of being and spirits. There will be periodic blood checks to make sure my myeloma levels haven’t risen and, if they do, I’ll go back on chemo and steroids if necessary and if it feels right. I hope to delay that through good self-management – and we’ll see how that pans out in real life.

Bone marrow cancer doesn’t go away – you just get minimisation. Myeloma or a related issue will eventually do me in. If I’m one of those unfortunates to catch coronavirus and kick the bucket, then there will be work to do Upstairs with others who die, who are perhaps struggling, unready for death-transition – helping them get their relationship with their soul sorted out. So all is not lost.

But then, every one of us gets done in somehow, sooner or later. So, when Life does you in, do it well! It’s one of the great breakthrough opportunities Life gives us. Screw the workshops, trainings and books – this is for real and it comes for free.

I’ve treated this bone marrow cancer as a spiritual challenge, but it’s very much a human one too. I’ve been digging around in all the fears I seem to have, and they’ve been digging me out too – there will be more.

Mercifully, I don’t get depressed. When I was young I had terrible dark depressions until I realised, during an inner journey, that there’s always a lump of gold down there in the dark depths. I met the dragon guarding the treasure, knowing it would annihilate me if I were afraid. Yet somehow my depressions had made me more fearless, making me give up on many customary defences and attachments since they seemed to do no good. Suddenly I saw depression as an asset. Since then, things have been different: depressions have transformed into times of interiority where I go quiet – unsociable and shut off to some – and it’s often a creativity-cooking period. A time for meta-processing, preparing the ground for breakthrough.

This chemo-induced tunnel I’ve been drifting through recently has been weird and difficult. I would have been depressed if I were inclined that way. Fatigue, spaced-outness, a kind of dementia, feeling I was getting nowhere, feeling of lack of progress and perspective… but the end is now coming into sight. When this intense phase of chemo ends in April or May I shall move back down to Cornwall.

And start again. Again. Much of my preceding life has been zeroed, and now I need to find a new level that works, for whatever time I have left. A life-redesign.

Guess, what, after that down period, my body has made a breakthrough. I can now stand unsupported for a longer time and walk short distances. It’s like going back to toddlerhood – the moment when you start standing up. It’s not a gradual process – it’s a sudden overnight activation of circuitry that allows you to do all the necessaries to make you stand and walk. It’s suddenly there, as if you’d always been doing it.

Talking of uncertainty, I’ve been thrown into it and now I’m watching the world getting pushed that way too. Despite the best efforts of those addicted to the status quo and striving to preserve it, things are slipping out of control, and this is symbolised by the coronavirus outbreak. We’re helpless whatever we throw at it, in the hands of fate. We actually need this – collectively at least. Blessings to those individuals, particularly doctors, nurses and helpers, who pass away – they make this sacrifice for us all, though it is meaningful only if we actually change and learn lessons.

We need this loss of control. There’s too much feigned certainty in our world and it’s a defence mechanism, a wall of groupthink denial. It needs to melt and break up faster than the icecaps of the Arctic and Antarctic. We need to lose our fear: and the fear epidemic is growing larger than the coronaviral epidemic. Fear, guilt and shame: in these three big blockers of global progress, the personal and the collective interlock through groupthink.

But we humans… we have a determined need to stage a “Final Clearance Sale – Everything Must Go!” orgy. It’s a perverse unconscious wish for what Mahatma Gandhi called satyagraha, truth force, the power of consequence, of inevitably, unavoidably changing facts. Something to stop us in our tracks, giving us an epiphany opportunity. To get through the 21st Century, we need this to go viral. It needs to rock the hearts and souls of billions, at the same time and with one underlying, shared thought and priority. That’s how the world will change.

Some of us have worked with this question for decades and we haven’t yet pulled it off. How it will happen has, in the last decade, looked more difficult than it did in, say, the late 1960s or around 1989-93. Another window opens in the later 2020s, driven largely by a younger generation – whom my generation would be well advised either to assist or to get out of the way of. We oldies have to get used to less comfort. We don’t actually need chocolate and holidays in Tenerife to be happy.

The astrological conditions of the late 2020 (a mutual sextile of Uranus in Gemini, Neptune in Aries and Pluto in Aquarius) could be given the description ‘florescence‘, a flowering of ideas whose time has really come and an overdue rising to the surface of what was underneath. The past suddenly becomes visibly obsolete. This could go either way – toward social control or mass-empowerment – but there’s a window of opening soon.

It’s getting rehearsed right now with coronavirus: the issue here is firm, appropriate, good governance and leadership under conditions of duress, and the key issue is public trust, discipline and intelligent behaviour. Accountability applies in every direction – we must give leaders the power they need while we, the human crowd, retain the power to determine key issues. But we must do it wisely, pulling power back also from extremists, spoilers, corrupters, fighters and advantage-takers. Public wisdom is the big question.

It’s rather like that toddler standing up for the first time, as if it were a habit that always had been there. It will be like that. We saw it in the Velvet and the Arab revolutions – remarkable acts of crowd bravery, discipline and good behaviour. It was damaged and corrupted only by the tear gas and bullets of the authorities – and this can be stopped only when satyagraha, the truth-force of what is really happening, overwhelms the habit of repression.

Dare I say a politically unwelcome truth, we have a well-habitualised addiction to being repressed – the threat of loss of this addiction gives us our fear, the fear of being unable to pay our bills and so being exiled from normality and security, all alone, shunned, helpless and wrong, a sinner who failed.

It’s in those darkest times that the buildup of truth-force happens – and that’s the meaning of our time. The Trumps, the conservatives, the warmongers, the toxic males and rampant capitalists have won. But they haven’t. They stand on precarious ground. It’s in the balance, right now. Something is building up.

When I was young, I made a vow that I’d do my best to help bring the world to an irreversible tipping-point of change in my lifetime – only then would I feel ‘mission accomplished’ and the release it brings. Since around 2000, growing older and seeing how the world wasn’t really, fully changing, I let go of this, transferring my efforts to work that might bear fruit posthumously.

But while I’ve recently been facing cancer a glimmer of hope has revived in my heart. It gives reason to stay alive. I want to see it and contribute to it. An ageing old crock of a dissident can do it just as well as a youngster. Come brothers and sisters throughout the land, the times they are a-changing.

An old friend and soul-sister, Sian, is taking me home to Cornwall next weekend for nine days, on a reality-testing mission to see how well I cope on the farm. Lynne can have a break from me. Sian and I have worked together for over 20 years in a tight group called the Flying Squad, doing ‘world work’ – consciousness work and group process to work with the underlying issues behind world events. We’ve been through a lot together, and her offer to take me home and through a reality-initiation is a magic initiative.

That’s what happens next. In gradual jumps, I’m coming back to life, returning from the bardo.

Thank you all so much, who have sent me healing and good vibes to help me on my way. I really appreciate that. Thanks also to Tomten the cat, who has slept dedicatedly on my bed, at times lying on my most painful parts and acting as an amazing pain reliever. Thanks to the amazing nurses and doctors in Torbay – remarkable people working within a very complex and rather screwed up health system.

Above all, thanks to Lynne, who has busted a gut for me, borne a heavy load and worn herself out looking after me. That’s amazing. She has been a star. Something like that can never be repaid. There’s an enormous life-lesson in that, for both of us.

With love, Paldywan.

Another Fullmoon

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It was the nurse Victoria who delivered a valuable truth. When I asked the doctor about my prospects – and whether and when I’ll get my brains back – he fudged. But Victoria, sitting behind him, came in to say I shall return to a new level and it will be different, and I must accept this. It will take a few months after completing chemotherapy for my brains to return, and they won’t return to what they were before.

I’ve been getting a secondary wave of realisation that my life has really, really changed – and the extent to which this is so. It has brought a sense of loss, but something else has been coming up in its place. I’ve made a decision. I’m taking life in my hands, and I’m going to take on a self-management strategy rather than have a stem cell transplant – the default treatment that seems to work for many people, mainly younger than me.

In my own case, a strong intuition tells me a transplant will either not work or it will bring no advantage. After such a transplant – where they take stem cells from your bone marrow, clean them and pump them back in – it also involves 3-6 months of dependency on relatively intensive care to get over it. In many cases it gives some years of remission. In my case I don’t get the feeling I shall have that payoff. Some people just get six months, and some people die from the procedure. Besides, I can’t realistically manage up to six months of dependency on care – I want to get on with life to the extent that I can.

So I’m choosing another route, an integrative medical route that is partially medical and partially holistic. This has its risks, but so does anything, and it seems to me I can do at least just as well with it as with a transplant. It will be a challenge to monitor and look after myself, drawing healing through my soul, and to be willing to go back on chemo and steroids if necessary.

Few people take this choice voluntarily. Most people take a self-management route only if their condition prevents them from having the transplant.

I have between one and ten years to live, I guess. I want to die well, whenever and however that happens. I’ll stay around until my useful life is done – and then I shall go in grace, inshallah, if life permits this! Since shit also happens. But I think my chances of doing this are greater if I take life in my hands, and it will be my own choice and responsibility.

I shall not be returning to where I was before. For both Lynne and I, my contracting bone marrow cancer was not part of our plan, but it has happened anyway. Facts have overruled everything else. To some extent this is harder on Lynne than on me – it’s really hard being a voluntary carer and there is little support for them.

But I now have a new life: it brings new possibilities amongst the constraints I’m served with. Not least the threat of death, of accepting the Great Unknown like I’ve ever accepted it before. But that opens up possibilities. The edginess of mortality sharpens life’s issues, making every moment a bit more poignant.

Life is a preparation for the moment of our passing.

This said, I’m becoming a bit more capable every few weeks. It’s a long, slow process. My back still cannot support me for more than a minute – enough time to get an item of clothing over my head before I need to hold myself up again! It’s amazing how an experience like this renders small issues, such as going to the toilet, into a big event. It has made me feel grateful for small things – a biscuit, a walk on the moors, a close time with Lynne, a phone chat with my son or hearing about what’s happening with my faraway daughters and their families.

My readings are good. I’m not sure exactly what these mean, but my light-chain readings have gone from 2,000 to 350 to 134 to 103, and my paraproteins have gone from 13 to 7 to 4.9. So in haematological terms, I’m doing well. But the hospital is tending to ignore the other aspect of my condition, physical disablement – this side-effect of myeloma derives from the collapse of two lower-back vertebrae. Unless stopped, myeloma eats up your bones, and this is what has happened. Luckily, I have a really good cranial osteopath, Simon, who is helping me with my back.

I’ve been learning about fatigue. I just can’t manage sometimes to follow through on a conversation. I can shower myself but drying and clothing myself is a step too far. I have new limits. I get totally worn out. There comes a point where I just zone out with exhaustion, having crossed that limit. There’s nothing much I can do about it. It’s a big lesson in acceptance.

My goal, to be able to walk to my favourite power-point, Carn Les Boel, over three miles of rough though inspiring clifftops, might never be achieved, but at least I have a goal to aim for. It’s a place where, as the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan once said, I could dance my last dance, with the ancient spirits and the Atlantic winds as my witness. But I’ve been there enough times to be able to dance that dance by inner visualisation. I’m still determined to get there though.

It’s funny how, in some respects, I learned everything I need to know in my formative young-adult years as a young hippy and student revolutionary, aged 16-23ish, reading books like Carlos Castaneda’s about Don Juan, forming profound values and making life-decisions that have enacted themselves ever since in the karmic threads of my life.

Everything that has happened since then has simply illustrated the point, testing my capacity to integrate the lessons I learned – on acid trips, particularly – and to manifest those learnings in real, workable terms. Life has been a series of clarifications of lessons learned then, which have remained generally true over the spread of the decades. So do we really learn much as life goes on? Well, yes and no.

I’ve succeeded in some things and not in others – and this is what life on Earth is about. It’s a place to manifest our dreams, knowing that only some will be permitted. We as souls came here to learn such lessons and to make a contribution on the basis of what we have become. I think it was Jefferson who said, ‘it’s not what you get for doing it, it’s what you become by doing it’.

Isn’t it an amazing planetary situation we find ourselves in? Life is a predicament, yet a path of light leads through its intricacies. We’re challenged to stay true to the indwelling spirit within. Falling asleep, the default human pattern in our time, is so easy. But in the end it is the difficult path, a path of self-destruction.

As the 18th Century philosopher Edmund Burke once said, ‘For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing’. This sums up our global situation today. The world is sleepwalking into a big crunch of its own making. A great awakening is due. It has taken longer than my friends and I foresaw fifty years ago. And what and when is ‘too late’?

I’m thankful for the gift that cancer has given. The looming challenge of death sharpens life’s contrasts, offering an opportunity live a bit more fully. My relative disability presents a challenge but it’s doable, and I still hope I’ll be able to walk reasonably freely sometime soon. This will enable me to go home to Cornwall, and I’m so much looking forward to that.

It’s time to go – my energy is flagging, even though I’m writing this in bed. Bless you. Thanks for reading. See you again.

But then, who knows? Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.

Your friend, Paldywan.

Rejoice

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I managed to walk about 500 metres on Sunday. We drove up on Dartmoor on a bright, cold day and I staggered along over the close-cropped grass with my walking frame. I didn’t expect to reach my goal – a gateway over the field – but I got there, and back too. That was a great achievement!

It’s funny how a susceptible and weak state like mine can produce a sense of immense gratitude for small things. Afterwards, Lynne and I sat in the car with tea and blueberry biscuits and I was happy to be alive – though my back was aching and I was thoroughly shagged out. This morning, sharp stomach pains brought up leaking tears of vulnerability and, grasping Lynne’s hand, I felt so grateful for her presence at that moment. It must be worrying for her to see me in this state.

At present, as far as ‘getting better’ is concerned, it’s ‘mixed signals’. I’m in a long tunnel, experiencing complications and drug side-effects. ‘Perseverance furthers’. Only ten days ago I was struggling to stay alive, with an infection. As part of the cancer treatment my immunity is by necessity reduced, and one kind of generosity I don’t want is free donations of infections! Especially from the lax teenagers living in and visiting this house, who see the quarantine restrictions placed on them as an infringement of their rights and freedoms.

On the other hand, my medical results are good. Para-protein levels, 40 two months ago, are now down to 7, and light chain readings, 2,000 two months ago, sank first to 350 and now to 134. Don’t ask me what those terms mean, but it’s encouraging. The aim is to stabilise as close to zero as possible.

The cancer specialist I’m with said something interesting: the average family doctor meets up with only two or three cases of bone marrow cancer in their whole career, so they can fail to diagnose it. A week ago, when visiting hospital, in the corridor I saw the Indian doctor who had been called in by a junior doctor when I was first taken into A&E in November. He had stood there looking at me thoughtfully, then saying “Test his blood for myeloma”. This was an act of inspired intuition, considering that my main symptom was a lower back injury. When we met in the corridor last week I thanked him for that. Good man: he had zeroed in on a rare condition that wasn’t easy to spot.

After stabilisation comes another phase. I’m inclined not to go for a stem cell transplant, the standard procedure for most myeloma patients, though I’m not fixed on that yet. It doesn’t feel right, and I trust my intuitions. I don’t get the feeling that the price – a few months of debilitation and sickness – will yield the benefits some people get from a stem cell transplant – a form of remission that, for younger people at least, can last a few years. One successful transplant graduate on our myeloma discussion group said he enjoyed not having to take endless pills after his transplant and this indeed is an incentive, but I still don’t feel quite right about it.

Bypassing the transplant means taking on a challenge to monitor myself and maintain a good condition, with the chance that I might have to return to bouts of chemo and steroids if things worsen. It’s the low-points that are crucial. However, my advantage is that I’m starting from a different starting place from many cancer patients – I’ve had a different life and I haven’t fought against myself as much as many people do.

paldenShipleyBridge-45573 Sure, I’ve beaten myself up with fear, guilt and shame in my own way, but generally I’ve learned and moved forward from there, whatever my resistances. This does pay off. Yet I’ve still been hard on myself, workaholicky and living intensely, and now I have bone marrow cancer.

Radiation exposure (nuclear and mobile phones) seems to be a key cause in my case, but there will surely be deeper roots to it. It’s also a matter of how we choose to see things: is this cancer something wrong with me, arising from lifestyle or toxicity issues, or has my soul given me a late-life gift by forcing me into a fundamental spiritual and emotional initiation? The best answer is probably both, and it’s what you make of it that matters.

In my life I’ve been close to death a number of times, in illness or in risky situations in conflict zones. Each time, coming to rapid acceptance of the full situation has turned something around, deep inside. It has allowed my will-to-live to take charge if I am ill or, if I’ve been in a dangerous situation, to help me stay calm and simply get out of danger. These edge-treading experiences have helped me deal with my current tenuous situation and I’m grateful for that.

It’s remarkable how life prepares us in advance for challenges it brings us later on – as if it knows something. As if the past, present and future are not as linear and sequential as we like to think. “Spirit has a plan“, my old humanitarian friend Pam Perry used to say, “but the conundrum is seeing it“.

In choosing to have no transplant – in which they draw stem cells from me, clean them of cancer and then pump them back in to stimulate a revival of the blood and bone marrow – I’ll be taking on a challenge to maintain health and spirits. I’m not 100% there yet in terms of commitment to this path, but that’s the way I’m going unless persuaded otherwise. I must get myself totally behind this strategy if I want it to work.

There need to be good motivational reasons for staying alive too. This process has already started. I’m writing a book about the ancient sites of West Cornwall, where I live. I’m suggesting that the subtle energy engineering the people of the neolithic and bronze ages engaged in, building quoits, stone circles, standing stones, barrows and sacred enclosures, had a corrective effect on the land, climate and themselves that we need to learn about today. These ideas aren’t entirely new but I’m taking them much further. There will be opposition, yet I feel it’s necessary to present the evidence and state these ideas without hedging, in the hope of jogging the discussion forward.

So this is stage one of a new life-strategy. The next quandary concerns my humanitarian work and the extent to which it can continue. Much of it is done online nowadays but there can be intense moments, worries, costs and issues nonetheless. I miss friends in Palestine and would love to visit the Tuareg village in Mali that I’ve worked with, but such travel might be beyond me now. I might just have to come to terms with this. But I’m open to surprises.

Big ideas, insights galore, loads of pills and a good dose of back pain – a strange combination. Slowly getting stronger, I’m shocked at the extent to which my muscles have shrunk and my body is frail. When I was 15-20 years old I was an ace mountaineer and cross-country runner! Was that in another life? We think of our existence as a continuity, as one life stretching between physical birth and death, but perhaps it is not. I could count at least five lives since I was born back in 1950. The life I have now is so different even from just a year ago when I could still roam the cliffs of Cornwall – something no longer on the agenda.

“Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice but to carry on…” sang CSNY decades ago. Just gotta keep going. That is the way of things. Treat each day as if it’s the first and last day of your life‘ – I used to try so hard to observe this maxim, but now it’s becoming easier!

Love from me, tapping on my laptop here in bed… Palden.

Nearly Went

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I did wonder whether I would make it through the night. In the 1990s I was editor for a publisher called Gateway Books, and we did a book called Today is a Good Day to Die. In the middle of the night, struggling for breath, it felt a bit like that. If I really had to go, this would be a good night to do it. But then, in the deep dark of night, sometimes it feels like that.

I had caught one of the throaty infections that are going around at present. With my immune system suppressed, as a necessary part of my cancer treatment, such an infection could kill me.

During the week I had been labouring. My spirits had been subsiding. Indistinct feelings, hovering between hope and despair, were bugging me. I had been looking ahead to the possible years to come where keeping my spirits up, no matter what, would be a key issue. If I felt bad or were faced with too much adversity, my health could deteriorate rapidly.

I was concerned about money, going back home to Cornwall, care and support issues… and one big, inevitable question. What kind of plans can I make? “Take it one day at a time”. Well, yes, but people and authorities want plans and timetables. When can they visit, when can I do an astrological session, can I take them on an ancient site tour next September? Um, the answer is, I really do not know!

In the morning, when Lynne came in, she was really worried. I was ‘out of it’, wheezing for breath and a shadow of my former self. Poor Lynne – I’m putting her through such a lot. She called the hospital. Anticipating possible sepsis, they called an ambulance. Bring him in. Quick.

The ambulance guys were great. They exuded competence and calm. One of the paramedics was in training, and I was impressed even with him. They listened to my lungs, took blood pressure, asked questions, tapped on their rather amazing mobile computer… Then the main paramedic decided it would be safer, given the infections that are rife right now, for me to stay at home rather than to go to hospital. Indeed, that made sense, but it was a bizarre truth too. There I was, ready to get whisked off to Torbay hospital with blue lights flashing, dressed in my Arabic jalabya and slippers, and suddenly I was back in bed again!

I was prescribed antibiotics, which Lynne later got from the local pharmacy. I don’t like antibiotics. But they are an integral part of the cancer treatment, counteracting the immuno-suppressant chemo and steroids. It’s a brutal system of medicine, but this is what was available when I was diagnosed, back in November. There was no holistic GP or hospital to turn to.

This sad fact goes back to the 1970s, when wiser heads could have adopted an integrated medicine approach to healthcare rather than suppressing complementary medicine and denying it facilities and funding. Had they done so then, we might not have the health and social care crisis we’re having now. It concerns money, politics and social control.

A holistic approach to myeloma would interest me but, in my current condition, I’d need proper supervision from someone who really knows their stuff. I’d need to pay lots for it and I’d need an emergency fallback system, as was needed yesterday. Also, if it involved fasting, forget it, because I’m already down to 60kg (9.5 stone) – there isn’t much of me left to detox! The only person I’ve found thus far who has specific knowledge of bone marrow cancer is Chris, a homoeopath who also has myeloma. But he’s going through the mill too, poor chap. Meanwhile, being treated remotely online without examination by someone in Oregon or Germany doesn’t quite give me confidence.

The paramedics left, and there I was, back in bed, with the fullmoon about to rise behind the hill outside the window. Quite a humdinger fullmoon lining up with Saturn, Pluto and Mercury for a hard-facts, gear-grinding, seismic few days of intensity that are part of the larger Saturn-Pluto conjunction happening at present. Not an easy time – except perhaps for viruses and their propagation needs.

I had a privileged glimpse into the dying process last night. When you approach the moment of death, the world narrows down as if like a funnel to squeeze through, and all the ten thousand things we normally concern ourselves with evaporate into irrelevance. The issue simply becomes taking your next breath. That is, until that ends too. You step through, over the threshold. Suddenly, a big, wide space appears – light-filled if you choose to see it that way. There can be feelings of relief and release.

It’s easier than you think and it’s important not to struggle against it. I know this because, when I was 24 I had a near-death experience. I went to the Pearly Gates and the Guardian told me, “Sorry, not your time yet”, but he took my friend Mike. So I came back, minus most of my childhood memory. I had been unconscious for nine days.

Life is precarious for the best of us, but cancer has brought me closer to the edge. I’m in a myeloma Facebook group where new entrants join, saying they were diagnosed just last week. But also people leave. Their carer comes online to announce that, sadly, their ward died two days ago, so they will now leave the group. It must be one of the more profound Facebook groups around. The solidarity is immense.

Yay, I’m still here! I’m more ‘with it’ today. Lynne was able to leave me alone (with tea and flapjacks) in order to go out shopping – and I hope she finds a friend to hang out with. She is so good to me, looking after me so caringly and tolerating me. It takes its toll on her. A sign at the hospital says that unpaid carers like her save the government £18,000 per year. Well, that’s good. But she is getting zero support herself for doing so. If she pulled out, the price-tag for professional carers and other issues would sky-rocket.

More another time, inshallah. ‘Inshallah’ is a useful word. In secular English it means ‘with luck’. In Arabiyya, the Middle East, it means ‘if it is the will of God’, and whenever they make a statement about anything, they tack the word onto the end of the sentence. It’s a statement of realism. It acknowledges the role of the Great Unknown in our lives.

God bless you all. Still your friend, still here. Palden.

Mild Despond

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I’d love to be there – at the place in the picture. It’s Pordenack Point. I thrive on walking the cliffs, feeling the wide-ocean sense of space you get at Land’s End in Cornwall, with Mexico over the horizon.

But I can’t. Most of the time I’m stuck in bed, though sometimes I clatter around the house with my walking frame.

Bone marrow cancer or myeloma has two elements. There’s the cancer of the blood and bone marrow, with a weakening, ultimately death-dealing effect if untreated, and there are skeletal issues typifying this kind of cancer, arising from weakening of the bones. In my case, two lower-back vertebrae (L1 and L5) have fractured and partially collapsed. This means I can’t stand without holding myself up.

And I get a lot of pain. It hurts, and hurting has become normal. I’ve got used to assessing pain levels. As I write I’m on 3-4 (out of 10) – manageable, but it’s wearing. It niggles, grates and aches. It goes up and down, and part of it is an issue of perception. It’s in my pelvis and lower back. When things are good, I’m down to 1. Nine is a killer – mercifully I get only moments of that, when heaving my creaky bones around.

My spirits are sagging – otherwise they have a way of holding me up. There’s a relationship between spirits and the law of gravity: when your thoughts are light and rising, gravity morphs toward levity, and when your mood is flagging and drooping, this bodily contraption we all wear gets bedraggledly heavier.

Well, I’m weighed down today. If I weren’t a compulsive optimist, I’d be depressed. Probably like Boris feels on a bad day, wondering how on earth to pull off the Brexit promises he’s made. Well, at least I’m not fat like him.

Overweight is normal in our country. I’ve been reflecting on ‘normal’, the yardstick in conventional healthcare and medicine. Last week I got some good blood test results. My para-protein count is down from 40 to 13 in the first of four cycles of medical treatment – the aim is zero. The registrar at hospital thought that was good. It was a nice surprise to me, but in another way it made sense.

It’s because I’m not ‘normal’. It isn’t that difficult being better than normal, because normal means unhealthy, rushed, out of balance – a normal state for many people. In the cancer ward I was in a few weeks ago, the guy in the bed opposite me – a nice chap – had a cup of coffee with three sugars in before bed, and that was situation normal for him.

For decades I’ve been a wholefood vegetarian and vegan, camping out, walking the hills, working with spiritual uplift and holding beliefs that, for many people, are way off their map. As part of my treatment now, I’m imbibing oils, vitamins, nutrients, homoeopathics and other helpers that most ordinary people would never touch or even know about.

I’m even connected radionically to an intelligent E-Lybra computer that’s vibing me with healing radiations from 25 miles away. In my meditation yesterday I let my ‘friends upstairs’ – spiritual guides, if you will – look into and through me. They see me from the inside out.

They examined my pelvis, ribs and blood, my energy-system and psyche, and I was glad to let them in. I let them see my guilt, shame and fears, for their interest, and offered up my life and efforts. To some this will simply be a sign of eccentricity or madness but, to me, it’s part of my spiritual toolkit and a source of relief, insight and sanity.

So when the doctors look at my better than normal results, an eyebrow rises but it goes no further. Perhaps it’s just an exception or good luck. Of course, according to the official line, there’s only scanty evidence that a holistic approach works and they assert repeatedly that there are horrendous risks and dangers to it.

Well, I’m doing it anyway, in the hope and belief that it will help. And faith matters. And the prayers, goodwill and reiki that you good friends out there have been sending me, for which I am genuinely grateful.

I don’t know what my life is going to be like in future. It’s grinding at me. Will I be able to stand on my own two feet? Will I be able to walk to Pordenack Point again? Will I be dependent and struggling or reborn? As yet unknown, these questions depend greatly on how these pharmaceuticals, these holistics and my life-force and spirits progress.

It involves a deep decision. An act of will. A resolve that infuses my bones. A re-irradiation of spirit. Today, that feels a remote possibility. But on other days, especially when I’m bubbling on steroids, it feels more doable. We shall see.

Life gets like this. My first Tibetan teacher in 1974, Akong Rinpoche, told me that when you’re lost and wading through treacle, that’s when the real work is happening, and when you’re inspired by clarity and vision, that’s like a holiday – good for you and nourishing, but not what really makes the difference. He was a Capricorn realist, yet the truth he served me is valuable now.

So, Happy New Decade, everyone. We deserve it. I conclude with a few observations.

When you think you’ve had enough and can’t handle any more, that’s when you’re being stretched into a new capacity to deal with what’s evolving here on Earth.
Second, there’s more, and it’s coming.
Third, it’s all going to be alright, even when it isn’t. This is a tricky truth to live with, and I’ve really learned this one by sharing time with people living in conflict zones.
Finally, to quote a sign at old rural railway crossings in Britain: STOP, LOOK AND LISTEN.

A new decade is a human, post-Christian construct but it makes us think longer term, and this we need to do more of. But remember: listen more closely to things than to people. Stop, look and listen.

And I’ll try to do that too.

With love, Palden

Forgiveness

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Staggering around with a zimmer frame at the age of 69 wasn’t part of my plan. But then, I’m being taught a new level of acceptance: what is, is, and that’s that. Simple. It’s fascinating, because this process brings up issues, issues about the acceptance I’ve faced in life.

I’ve been searching inside myself for the causes of my bone marrow cancer. There are the obvious causes such as radiation exposure, environmental toxins, vaccines, fillings… though I’ve had a reasonably good diet and lifestyle for fifty years, for what it’s worth. But there are deeper causes too.

I’ve been going through a deep forgiveness process with my late mother. I don’t think she really wanted me or felt ready to have me when I came along. During pregnancy my father went far away to start a new job and she was, in effect, a single mother at my birth and for the first 4-5 months until she, my elder brother and I moved to join my father in our new home. Things had not been at all easy after WW2, but my parents made sacrifices, worked hard and did their best in a hard situation, and bless them for that.

I was reluctant to be born. I knew I had to do it, but it was a teeth-gritting thing. I didn’t come for the chocolate and rewards: I came because my soul knew there was a job to be done. In my birth chart the Moon squares Saturn and the Sun conjuncts it – a lot of rock-and-hard-place stuff. So my mother and I matched each other, and we did what we had to do. Don’t complain. Don’t make a fuss. Think how lucky you are. So we did. We made do. Throughout my life I’ve accepted many things that weren’t easy. Not least having loads of shit dumped on me and terrible dishonesties, and dealing with it.

This has made me good at working in war zones and other challenging situations, and without this gritty attitude a lot of things wouldn’t have happened and a lot of people wouldn’t have been inspired to break through in their lives. So it has paid off and I’m happy about that. I’m grateful too for a heart and a conscience that is relatively clean – as they go. This cancer experience allows me to drop stuff, forgive the past and draw a line on it, starting a new life. It has been my story – starting over again and again.

So cancer, for me, is a gift in disguise. Right now, I’m filled up with chemicals, my hands shake, I’m behaving weirdly on steroids, yet I’m growing stronger. I can now get out of bed to fetch something or go to the toilet! This is a big achievement. Sounds funny. But it gives me more freedom and relieves Lynne of some of her carer’s duties. So the chemicals are beginning to work. They’re doing so partly because of the compensatory holistic remedies I’m taking and also, I believe, because of attitude.

This is a core issue around healing: spirit, belief and will-to-live. Without these, the healing juncture I’m in becomes more empty. What am I doing this for? What is there to live for? What will I do differently with a possible five, ten or fifteen years? If my spirits are infused with hope and a reason to keep going, I shall stay alive as long as I need – this I believe, and I’m betting on it. I’m also starting to write a book – my eleventh.

I’m writing down all that I understand about the prehistory of West Cornwall, dense as it is with ancient sites. To me, these ancient sites represent a neolithic and bronze age geoengineering project working with the very issues of climate, biodiversity and human society that we face today. There’s even a chance that the bronze age megalith-building project was a response to an earlier climate catastrophe or a plague that severely reduced the people of neolithic Cornwall around 3000 BCE.

For fifty years I’ve been confronting sceptics, in the form of archaeologists, academics and people who believe they’re being rational when actually they’re being emotionally subjective, hanging on to a worldview that lacks imagination and doesn’t really work when it comes to understanding the megalithic culture.

This came to a head in September when I published some research in a Facebook group, asking for people’s insights. What I got was a put-down, with ideological scepticism from two characters who closed down the conversation from its start. These are what astrologer Rob Hand calls ‘Saturnine brain-police types’, or people who consider it their duty to protect others’ thoughts from subversion and self-questioning.

These two shut down all debate amongst the other people in the group. So much for peer review. Then came the cancer diagnosis. After that I made a deep-seated decision: to come out with it, speaking my truth and ideas more clearly, in a well-put way, to give these quasi-rationalists a counterswipe and lay out a completely different picture. Because beliefs such as theirs are destroying the world.

It’s already part-written on the Ancient Penwith website, but I’m sharpening it and no longer hedging. This is stage one of my revival process. With other interests – parapolitics, society, humanitarian work, extraterrestrials, the world’s future – there’s more to do before I pop my clogs. If, that is, life gives me the time and grace.

Problem with mission-driven people is that we don’t let up until the job is done. It’s relentless. Meanwhile, the vision of love and peace with which I emerged into adulthood in the 1960s hasn’t happened. That’s been hard to live with, but it’s what happened anyway.

There’s a choice here to shrug shoulders and give up – resignedly getting stuffed and drunk at Christmas instead – or to beaver away endlessly toward a historic-scale goal that won’t be fulfilled quickly, though in the next life or the one after that there’s a greater chance. This motivates me now. In between cups of tea.

This is the core of our healing process, whether or not it’s cancer egging us on. What are we here for and what are we doing? Right now, a Saturn-Pluto conjunction is happening, with its peak on 6th-14th January. Last time this happened it was the Falklands War and the Polish Solidarinosz uprising in 1982. It’s about ruthlessly hard facts – not what you want, but what you get. What actually works? What’s really true? How hard are we willing to work for it? When actually will we lose our fear?

Solstice and Christmas are a time for reflection and there are things worth contemplating instead of getting blotto. Do we really want to go along with a mass-murder of turkeys or do we truly support ecological sustainability? I’m one of the awkward squad on such matters, an Aspie like Greta, who keeps bloody well stirring things up. Cancer is sharpening my wits and undermining my hypocrisies. Yet this honesty process brings a feeling of relief, an unburdening of complicity. It’s literally enlightening my weak hips, making them more able to support me.

To the extent that I can now stand up, leaning precariously on my ‘walker’ (zimmer frame), tottering into the kitchen to cheer up Lynne, who is valiantly working away at all hours to earn a living because our wondrous system of social care in Britain doesn’t actually support cancer carers like her. Saturn and Pluto are doing their business here with cringeing efficiency.

So, Happy Everythings, everybody. This is what we get! Choose your devils to blame (good old Boris), but don’t forget the devil within. We can turn this round. Everything is a gift. A clock is ticking. Now it’s time to make good. That’s what’s happening for me, at least – that itchy feeling inside that winkles out a further turning in the deepest seat of consciousness.

Forgiving first involves remembering, and not forgetting. It’s worth remembering awkward things, and things that need repeated re-forgiveness. Forgive the world. Yes, it’s hard. But forgive the world. Because it’s an uncanny kind of mirror.

With love, Paldywan

Great Fart in the Void

landsend-29107 — At Pordenack Point, West Penwith, Cornwall

All my adult life I have been an astrologer. People make the mistake in believing that it’s about predicting the future. Not so. It’s about understanding the present and the inner-outer situation we’re in.

Lo behold, my situation seems to be evolving in tune with new and full moons. At these points, key decisions are made (such as to come to Devon for treatment on one fullmoon, and receiving the diagnosis around the next fullmoon), or health developments evolve in stages.

So, it seems to be that, around the recent fullmoon on Thursday, I seem to have been getting a bit stronger, a bit more capable, a bit less spaced out with medications and the shock of it all, and a bit clearer about the coming time. It’s a process.

Nothing miraculous is happening, and this isn’t ‘recovery’ or ‘getting better’ (people seem so anxious about that!). But, provisionally, I can report that something is moving forward. We shall see what happens as time passes.

I’ve been on chemo and steroids. The medications for bone marrow cancer are not as intensive and gut-ripping as for other cancers. It concerns life-blood and bones though, and it can disable and kill, so it isn’t less serious.

The chemo is not thus far affecting me badly – I’m not losing hair, getting nausea or suffering over it. The steroids are weird: they deal with aspects of the cancer, yet they also have a psychoactive effect that I would rate as close to cocaine. It makes me mentally buzzy, a bit heartless, assertive and more confident, and it gives me shaky fingers and a busy head.

I have to be careful with my behaviour, avoiding saying things too abruptly, bossily or directly, inconsiderately. I imagine that, for mainstreamer muggles who encounter this drug, there can be difficulties. But, as you might guess, I have plenty of experience with psychoactive substances, and these symptoms are not strange to me.

Some people press me to go along a holistic healing route, and this I am doing, partially. I’m following an integrated path, trying to exploit the best of both tracks. Many holistic methods are under-proven, and when people advocate them I ask them for actual experience and real information, not just advocacy and sales-talk. The same is true for conventional medicine – it assumes it is the only way, and it is not. We have to form our judgements on these things and get the consequences.

I am on colloidal silver, vitamins, homeopathics, CBD, am considering Essiac, and I’m also being helped by an intelligent, biofield-balancing E-Lybra machine which reads me off and sends me corrective subtle energy-fields in response. I feel that all of these are having a strengthening and transforming effect.

They might mean that I can modify my copious consumption of medications as time goes on. Because, frankly, I seem to be popping pills endlessly, rendered into a peeing, pooing, farting wreck of a man!

This brokenness seems to be a key question. I’m a broken man and I know it. Life has gone ‘wrong’ on me. I’m incapable of standing up and bearing a man’s load – like Atlas who dropped the world and went “Oh no, I’ve totally screwed up”. I’m dependent on the love and care of Lynne, the support of the taxpayer and the help of nurses and doctors. But that’s okay: this is the 21st Century, and we men need to get broken.

There’s another side to this. At age 69, I’m glad to say I’ve done some stuff, seen a lot of things, saved and changed many people’s lives, been places, written some good books, given loads of speeches, started a load of initatives, done some secret manoeuvrings… and, with some regrets, I am happy enough with what I’ve done.

It will be different for people who set aside their true life-path for security, fear, guilt, status or circumstances – they will have regrets.

So, if necessary, I can feel sufficiently satisfied that I did what I could – to an extent. It involves letting go of hopes and aspirations – after all, at age twenty, I did want to change the world, and fifty years have passed and progress has been slow, especially in my chosen areas of war and peace and community transformation.

But that’s life. We didn’t actually come here to fulfill our dreams, though we try. We came here to stand willingly between a rock and a hard place and to do our best with that – to learn from it and to contribute toward making things a wee bit better while we have the chance.

Because that chance evaporates. We do not live forever. We taste the chocolate and the blood, sweat and tears, and sooner or later find out that nothing is quite as we were told.

The most wonderful moments of our lives come and then they go. As you grow older more appears behind you than in front of you, yet there are opportunities for rebirth and transformation at every age – at some ages more than others. The Saturn Returns at age 29ish, 58ish and 86ish are critical junctures, for example.

So it’s okay. Being broken is not such a crisis – it’s an opportunity and a healing. If we take it that way. Live or die, it will be alright. But having this attitude arises from having made life-choices earlier in life that have at times cost me high – I’m ageing and broke, with no medals or gongs, a threat to some and a bringer of blessings to others, and that’s okay.

I’ve made mistakes, I’m an imperfect Virgo, I’ve been accused of murder and treachery, I’ve failed to make a million, I haven’t been the father, taxpayer or employee I should have been and, while in some people’s eyes I’m just a pile of crap and a burden, there’s a deep smile in my heart.

There’s more to do and, if I live, I feel this cancer crisis is bringing things into focus. If I pass away, transitioning to another world, I’m sure there will be plenty to do there too. Even the best of astrologers cannot foresee what happens next. This is the way of things. As my Tibeten lama guru in the 1970s, the Karmapa, said at the time, the final truth is simply like a fart in the void. Not long afterwards, he passed away too.

Bless you for being you, and thank you for being with me on this trip.

Love, Paldywan Kenobi

Knowing

Bethlehem, Palestine — That ‘little town of Bethlehem’, today. There is room at the inn for you to go visit it.

It’s funny how we know things.

A few people have remarked how Lynne and I have been comparatively unfazed by the discovery, just one month ago, that I have bone marrow cancer. Well, both of us indeed were fazed and deeply shocked – this was not on our roadmap – but, in another way, neither was it a total surprise.

The first concrete symptoms came up in late August when I cracked my back while gardening. I went to an osteopath and this helped, but soon I deteriorated. A soul-sister, Miriam, a psychic surgeon, successfully sorted me out, and this lasted some days and then I got even worse. Then Simon, a cranial osteopath, helped a lot, but there came a point where, perceptively, he said that something more was wrong than he could fix. I went to hospital for tests and that’s when the diagnosis eventually came.

But we knew. The first signs were back in January 2019. I was labouring, struggling, melancholic and lost. Nothing specific was wrong except my money situation, but my spirits and inner resilience were losing ground. With an ominous feeling of dread, I felt unable to lift myself out of a mud-bound feeling of stuckness – sandbanked though not quite on the rocks. I was going nowhere except down.

By May 2019 things got worse: I had an increasingly sinking feeling – one of those where, the more you try to raise yourself up, the more you seem to sink back into a hole. I live on hope and have considerable resilience, but this was getting at me in a deep place.

There’s more. With my prehistoric research, I knew I had to assemble more evidence. This detailed, meticulous work just had to be done before I could progress with drawing conclusions from the research. From May to August I slogged away on mapping the ancient sites of West Cornwall. I was driven, doing long hours. I did get it finished – just one week before I damaged my back. Something in me had known that, if I didn’t get the work done, it wouldn’t get done. I didn’t know why – I just knew. It was a relief to complete it.

When the cancer diagnosis eventually came in November, I was deeply shocked and yet, in another way, relieved. Relieved because, suddenly, I knew at last what the problem was. The cancer had been developing for some time, unbeknownst to me – and yet somehow I knew this.

There’s a lesson to draw from this. We modern, socialised, educated Westerners have had the knowingness drilled out of us. We override our instincts and intuitions with reasons, rationales, analyses, plans, excuses and science. We do what we’re told, for the reasons we’re given, even when we know it’s better to do otherwise. We do this even when giving birth to our chidren, even when it hurts, even when it harms others or ruins our world. The over-consumptive institution of Christmas provides a very good example of this kind of willful self-destruction.

It took until I was 42 to give myself permission to open up to the knowingness within me. That’s a long time: over-educated, it took twenty years of painful experiences, crises and inner work before I got it. I can’t call myself proficient even now but, since then, I have followed a simple rule, and I commend it to you for your consideration. Here it comes. It’s dead simple.

If it lifts you up, do it. If it weighs you down, reconsider. Reconsider really seriously. This is no joke. It’s not a spare-time activity. It isn’t actually even an option. It concerns our life-purpose and whether or how much we will fulfil it. It concerns our and others’ happiness and the success of any venture we undertake. It’s a methodology, not an ideal.

We do know things. Events or the words or actions of people put it in front of us, full square – but we often know the truth before this happens. So it’s helpful to pay attention, because it helps us get the message life is telling us. I knew I was going downhill nearly a year ago. And the bizarre thing is, when I was given the truth, the diagnosis, it was a relief.

Which goes to show that, for growing souls like you and me, with a glimmer of awareness, the buildup to a crisis is bigger, worse and more threatening than the crisis itself. When crisis really comes, we can pull out the stops and go for broke – 100% commitment to facing the facts.

This gives hope for the future. Because we humans, here on Earth, have a big one coming. When crisis really hits us, miracles become possible. We can break the rules and change the game. Live or die, this is what I am now setting out to do. Somehow I knew I was approaching point like this. And now the chips are down.

Your friend, Palden.

More to Life

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Pills. I’ve been taken over by an incessant stream of pills. Not just cancer drugs but painkillers, semi-psychedelic steroids, vitamins and homoeopathics, with squirts of CBD and colloidal silver, all meticulously ticked off on the list by Lynne, Virgo that she be.

Today we’ve been to hospital for a bone survey, a blood test and a chemo jab – and we managed to get a cuppa and some glutton-free cake… and the hospital cafe was free of sickeningly culturally-insensitive Christmas music too!

This cultural sensitivity thing is an issue that has been coming up today. As a pedigree aged hippy and an Aspergery type (with ‘wrong planet syndrome’), believe me, I’ve had sixty years of prejudice, projection and, worst, actions taken and decisions made, that have been outrightly discriminatory and definitely a multiple breach of human rights. The pain of this is the current phase of my clearance and reconciliation process.

I’m glad to say it’s working through alright. It’s the past, and the past concerns memory and ingrained patterns. Here I have a message for friends in their 20s, 30s and 40s. It’s this. Whatever psycho-spiritual path you follow (this will change and develop over time), do follow your path and keep on following it. Why? Because I can report that I’m really benefiting from having 50ish years of shit-shifting, magical and transformative experience. It works and it’s worth it.

If, when you’re younger, you build a default pattern of inner growth, it will serve you well when you come to the tests of late life. I started on psychedelics, nature and prehistoric sites at age 16, meditation at 25, therapy at 30 and all sorts more after that, and these act as a spiritual bedrock on which I now stand. I’m really glad that this is so. I’m struggling with my situation so much less than otherwise would be the case.

In particular this concerns death. Life is precarious and a preparation for dying. When your time comes, you need to be reasonably at peace with yourself, with people and with life. This makes dying a very different thing, in comparison to people who pass on with lots of unfinished business. I could die in a month or in 15 years’ time, but I’m doing the business of it now, releasing, re-examining, forgiving, asking forgiveness, and incrementally laying the past behind me. This frees things up and opens doors. It also makes me a better and more interesting person for Lynne to look after. She actually enjoys witnessing my process.

It helps in her own process. This cancer issue has been a rocking side-swipe from life for both of us. She is dedicatedly setting aside much of her life for me. This is enormous and not easy. To add to it, benefits agencies are really mean (they should at least throw £150 per week her way for three months, to help with real financial needs now). Our country is so heartless in this regard.

But it’s not just this. It’s a big psycho-emotional challenge, bringing up deep stuff for her. I really admire her for that and am so blessed by being looked after by Lynne. Tulki, my son, has also helped enormously – not just ‘call of duty’ but in a heartfelt act of solidarity with his dad, even though he lives some way away.

I’m not exactly getting better, but I am in process. In this three-ish month period we’ll discover whether or not this bone marrow cancer is going to subside and what my future life-chances are. Myeloma cannot be got rid of, but it can be managed. My intention is to shift toward increasingly holistic treatments after this deep-shit phase is done – immunity-building.

In the end it all hangs around matters of spirit. Happy spirits mean happy cells and bones. Life is an act of will, and spirit drives our will – and it’s blocked by our won’t. Inner conflict leads to inevitable, inescapable challenges from which no one is exempt. However, relative inner peace leads to challenges too: our soul, given space and attention, has ways of stretching us and moving us forward into new initiations, and this does not stop in late life. At times this stretching can feel to be too much, but it isn’t – you’re simply being taken further.

This is what we came into life for, to learn and to make a contribution. Planet Earth and its people need a lot of contributing right now. Even as an older person, if I am to stick around some years more, I seek still to be a net contributor. There is no such thing as retirement: the work is not done. Earth is not safe, neither is it a secure home for all of its beings. Too many people, animals and environments are having a hard time and are under threat. I don’t like the idea of passing on from a world where this is so. But it’s going to happen anyway.

This is one of life’s final secrets. We think we are so significant but, actually, we get munched up by the passage of history and, in time, we are totally forgotten. Even those who are remembered are not necessarily remembered for reasons they’d prefer. We are important only in the small domain and timeframe we have existed in, and then we evaporate and are gone.

One day you’ll become a memory, and then even this will disappear. So, get a life while you’re here. Try not to hang on too much to things and situations that have a beginning and an end: there’s something more in the silence within your soul – an alignment to the unborn and the undying. The rest is a kind of multidimensional movie. And for me, right now, the current episode involves guzzling a load of pills!

Bless us all. Your friend, Paldywan Kenobi.