A talk given by Ba Miller and Palden Jenkins, sharing our thoughts, anecdotes and experiences in dowsing, geomancy, earth mysteries and consciousness.
It happened on Sunday afternoon, 7th December 2025, at The Hive in Penzance, Cornwall, and it’s for you.
It’s ‘limited edition’, with love from both of us. Gratitude to the organiser, Rachel Smart, presenter Lucy Cooper, songstress Lyndz Liquidlight and Hive hostess Maria Stay.
Ba Miller was involved with Hamish Miller and Paul Broadhurst in their research into the Michael Line and the Apollo Line, as detailed in their books ‘The Sun and the Serpent’ and ‘Dance of the Dragon’. Palden Jenkins is an astrologer and geomancer, author of ‘Shining Land’ and of www.ancientpenwith.org
It’s two hours. No charge, no strings. Hope you enjoy it.
I find that, as I’m growing down, I’m going into transitional phases where things change and I have to review and revise what I can do and can’t do, and all sorts of other things in between. This get tricky when the abilities I’m losing are a deep part of my identity.
So, as a writer and communicator I’ve spent bazillions of hours, days and weeks banging away on typewriter and computer keyboards. But my fingers are losing their accuracy, and I can’t do it like I used to be able to.
It’s called peripheral neuropathy in medical speak – loss of feeling and coordination in the fingers and feet. It’s a funny sensation of non-feeling where feeling ought to be, a bit like music that’s turned down too low.
I’m getting an impression my blogs are too long for some readers – they’re a 15-minute read – and they tend to stretch synapses quite a bit.
So I think I’m going to do more podcasts. Or, in some cases, both.
Here’s my last blog, about pain, as a podcast, and you can find it on Spotify, Google and Apple Podcasts, such as here:
Here are some thoughts on the current vexatious world situation and some of the threads that lie behind it. It’s all about the incremental North-to-South shift of world power, about people against the Megamachine, and Gaza and Israel, the decline of the West, and a few things like that.
Are we entering the future facing forwards or facing backwards? This is a key question in our time.
Listen on Spotify (it’s also on Apple and Google Podcasts):
Should it interest you, here are two relevant articles I’ve written in former times: + An astrological article I wrote about the 2020s, written back in 2020: https://penwithbeyond.blog/2020s/ + And here’s something I wrote in 2011 when in Bethlehem during the Arab Revolutions, about Hamas and its relationship with Fateh (the Palestine Authority in the West Bank). It’s pertinent now, for those of you who are into more in-depth thinking around Palestine. www.palden.co.uk/pop/hamas-and-fatah.html
The ancient sites of West Penwith and what they say about megalithic civilisation.
Audiobook version
I’m happy to say that the audiobook version of Shining Land is now done and ready. I’ve been working on it for the last month.
I tried to finish it before my birthday (on Friday 5th) but, well, life always has something to teach. I had one episode (of eleven) yet to record, but for two days there was a lot of noise from the rain, and from things going on around the farm, and I couldn’t do it! C’est la vie. I got it done eventually.
So now there is an audiobook version of Shining Land. Although it’s about the ancient sites in this area, West Penwith, at the far end of Cornwall, UK, I’ve adapted the audiobook to make it interesting to listeners far and wide who might never have been here.
The nub of this book and audiobook is megalithic civilisation. It was deeper and far more advanced than we are taught. Their high-tech achievements involved consciousness and energy, working on the nature of matter and the issues that life presents from the inside. It was a sustainable civilisation – in Britain, the megalithic periods of the Neolithic and Bronze Age lasted 500 and 1,200 years respectively.
And there’s a wee chance this might interest you! Audiobooks are great for listening to during long journeys, or while doing other things, or if you’re stuck in bed, or if you need a rest from radio stations.
Both the online book and the audiobook are available free, and voluntary donations are welcome.
Life has been quite a grind and a test recently. Living as a partially disabled cancer patient makes wading through life twice as difficult, and sometimes I get deeply weary with it. That’s been happening recently.
But there’s a weird psychological program in me that has meant that some of the best work I’ve ever done has been done during such periods, when my Saturnine tough-it-out programming gets activated by life and its grinding difficulties. I tend to tough it out by engaging myself in doing something. A project.
It’s an Aspie hyperfocus thing: if you can’t change your circumstances, change your mood by doing something creative and ultimately useful – even if it yields no immediate benefits. That’s how the program goes – for me, at least. Except there is one big benefit: it changes my mood. And, bit by bit, that can change everything.
That’s how, somehow, over the last forty years, I’ve managed to write fifteen or so books on quite a variety of subjects. Many were written amidst difficult circumstances, or arising out of them. The gratifying thing is that I still agree with pretty much everything I’ve written – or spoken about, broadcast or taught. I have few regrets about it. Which is quite remarkable, really.
Just recently I’ve been at it again. I had a crisis a month ago where I felt uninspired, feeling that I’d said everything I needed to say, and were people interested anyway? Well, as such crises do, it represented a deeper fermentation process going on in the nether recesses of my psyche, and an inner repositioning was going on, unbeknownst to me. I started looking at ‘outstanding issues’ and ‘unfinished bits’ in what I have done. After all, as a disabled oldie who spends more time alone than I would prefer, I do have lots of time.
Just yesterday, my friend Brian Charlton was here. He’s another Glastonbury defector now living in West Penwith – there’s a little secret cabal of us, actually. He lives the other side of St Just, our local village, and he is part a local support group, the ‘Friends of Palden’, that is a blessing in my life. He was on his weekly visit, and benignly badgering me about these unfinished bits. Very perceptive. I realised he was right. I needed to beaver away at clarifying and finalising the signals I’ve been putting out, and there are unfinished bits, and bits yet to evolve further, if life allows.
But there was more: I realised was already instinctively doing it, though I hadn’t realised it until then. It had started with two podcasts, both of which came up spontaneously, about Inner Doctors and Intuition. That got me flowing again, unblocking the logjam that had scrangled up my psyche. That’s one secret that many creators need to understand: if you get blocked up, do something, anything, to get yourself unblocked. And it’s best to forget what you think you ought to be doing, and to be spontaneous and creative instead – because that’s where the taproot of creativity lies.
Then suddenly I found myself starting doing a revision of one of my books, Shining Land, about the ancient sites of West Penwith. Well, there were some typos, readability issues and tweaks to attend to. So I thought. But as things progressed, I realised that new work I have done in the last few years, since I wrote the book, needed adding. I’d gained some new perspectives too, blessed as I am with lots of thinking time.
Most of the book has just needed tweaks and small improvements, but the chapter on Hill Camps has had a rewrite, adding my thoughts on Bronze Age circular enclosures such as Caer Brân, built around the 1800s BCE for tribal gatherings, and their significance. Also, I’ve added new material to the final part of the book, about Megalithic Geoengineering, breaking the last chapter into two and adding new work to both, about landscape temples, wildwood cover in the Bronze Age and ancient trackways in Penwith. And there are some new maps and pictures. I’ve worked on the indexing too (it’s rather tedious).
But here’s the rub. I can’t write books any more. My brains can’t do it. I can do blogs, podcasts and small projects, because they are done and dusted in a day or two. But books? No, they’re big projects. Even so, I can revise books I’ve written before, and the great virtue of revising a book is that the big thinking has already been done. So I can focus on style, details, text-flow, images, maps and new ideas. I can make it a better read.
I discovered this ten years ago when revising an astrology book first published in 1987, Living in Time. It was a good book but it had dated, with out-of-date examples in it from the 1960s to the 1980s. It also needed another spin, since times had changed and many more people were aware of what the book writes about. This is how Google’s AI assesses it:
“Power Points in Time is the title of a book by Palden Jenkins that explores the concept of time and its influence on various aspects of life, drawing on astrology and other cyclical patterns. It examines how understanding these patterns can provide insights into events, decisions, and even the meaning of life. The book uses examples like lunar phases, planetary alignments, and ancient festivals to illustrate how time can be understood as more than just a linear progression.“
Actually, that’s a pretty good summary. That’s the first time I’ve used AI in any of my writings, and it’s likely to be one of the last, since I am decidedly AI-free and Patreon-free in my outpourings. And, for better or worse, I prioritise eyeballs and ideas over monetisation too.
Gurnard’s Head
So I revised Living in Time and it came out in 2015 as Power Points in Time. I really enjoyed doing that revision, precisely because the big thinking had been done, so I could focus on other things. But there was another matter too: in 1987 I had pitched the book to people interested in astrology, though later I found that it was most popular with people interested in ancient sites – a different circle of readers. Meanwhile, over the quarter century that followed, I had developed a clearer idea of the combined importance of power points in space (ancient sites) and power points in time (peak periods). So I re-pitched the book toward this ‘power points’ idea.
Then a few years passed, and a big change came to my life – getting cancer and becoming disabled – and, reviewing my life, I realised I hadn’t written a book about ancient sites, even though, on and off, I had studied the matter for fifty years and had done a lot of research in Cornwall for ten years. So along came Shining Land – the ancient sites of West Penwith and what they say about megalithic civilisation. My core proposition was that ancient sites were built for conducting shamanic consciousness work, and that the 600ish ancient sites of West Penwith actually constituted one big, integrated ancient site.
By making a ‘landscape temple’ out of the whole cliff-bound Penwith peninsula, it was possible to raise this consciousness work to a higher level, to benefit not only the local area and its people but the whole planet. The planet is one being, that we have come to know as Gaia, and if the ancients got themselves into enough of an elevated state to do so, they could commune with Gaia, adding a human touch to her work as a planet-being.
They were practicing what I’ve come to call Megalithic Geoengineering. Big stuff. Planetary stuff. And, of course, there’s something to learn from this today.
Lesingey Round
So, you see, in health and life circumstances I have been labouring somewhat, though in other respects I’ve been quietly chiselling away at generating uplift and raising my spirits by doing those things that I can do, and being creative with it. It fires up my circuitry. Meanwhile I’m de-focusing on those things I can’t do and can’t have – things that weigh me down. As a result, a new, 2025 version of Shining Land will come out shortly as an online book. So there are results to this. Results germinated out of a time of hardship.
Two things happened to help turn things around. One was the spontaneous eruption of the ‘Inner Doctors’ podcast, which revived my creative spirits, and the other was a session with a homoeopath, my neighbour Anna Jenkins (no relation – we Jenkinses are a big Welsh clan). I think the remedies she prescribed have dislodged some fixities and rigidities within me. Well, to be honest, I cannot tell yet, because the last week has been low, lonely and dark and I cannot tell whether my cancer and demise are getting worse or whether this is what homoeopaths call a ‘healing crisis’. But I think I’ll opt for the latter.
It has more hope in it. And hope and belief are motivators. Not as an imposition on evolving reality, but as a way of intersecting fruitfully with it. Hopefully.
Changing the way we see things: inside every problem lies a solution, as long as we allow ourselves to see it.
Sometimes I struggle with that. So, in case you thought you were the only one in this vast universe who struggles with it, think again, for you are not alone.
All about the warfare, strife and trouble we find ourselves in today – the thoughts of an old peace-freak.
A Palestinian Dove
It’s like a virus in the world psyche, ready to pounce on any population that’s losing its way, or damaged, or hurt, or susceptible.
Yet some societies are strong in themselves. Even if they are invaded and occupied, they are not beaten.
What stops many wars is a deep tiredness, a wish to go home and get a life. A societal consensus forms, building resistance to the virus of conflict – an unspoken immunity that decides not to go back there again.
In this episode there’s a moving contribution from two old friends, the late Jaki Whitren and John Cartwright of the Court of Miracles, the greatest rock band you never heard of. They’re making music in heaven now.
Introduced by a stream in Botrea Woods and outroduced by the wondrous birds of Grumbla, Cornwall.
So here am I, a lifelong author and communicator, and I’ve been sitting here in recent weeks with nothing much to say. That’s unusual. It isn’t ‘writer’s block’: it’s a funny feeling of little to say. In my birth chart, Neptune and Saturn are opposing Mercury right now, so I guess this blog is expressing the essence of what that double transit is bringing.
I’m one of those authors who, if I have little that is meaningful to say, I don’t just rattle off material just to fill space, stay regular, fulfil expectations or contractual requirements. I go quiet instead. The best of my writing has always come when there’s a need. I wake up with it, and out it comes.
In life this has given rather uncanny gift which has been both a blessing and a bane: a strange capacity to articulate ideas and perspectives that other people were about to get, but they hadn’t got there yet. As if speaking to people from the future, pointing to how it’s going to be. Or might be. Or could be.
I haven’t always got this right, though there have been times I’ve got things very right. Sometimes I’ve perceived a possible reality that just didn’t happen that way, or I underestimated the influence of obstructors, or got my facts wrong, or suffered wishful thinking or over-optimism, or simply mis-estimated things.
Yet at times I’ve hit the nail right on the head, and it has sparked outcomes or affected people and situations far more than anticipated – sometimes going into the magical-miracle zone. Cosmic catalysis.
It’s a question of whether the benefits from things I got right have outweighed the misfires and problematicals. It feels as if this question is on the weighing scales at present. And, perhaps to prove the point, recently I’ve had little to say. It’s a pause for rumination. Or perhaps a reality-flip is going on. Or a reassessment.
A winding lane in Grumbla, Cornwall
My ongoing cancer saga continues. A new symptom has appeared in recent months: I’m losing the use of my legs. That’s what it feels like, though diagnosis is yet to come, following an imminent MRI scan of my pelvis and a diagnosis in the coming week. My legs are exhausted after a hundred yards, as if I’d just hiked forty miles. Even when just standing still, they turn to rubber, as if they’re about to give way.
It varies on whether it’s an Up day or a Down day. Down days have increased, when I have little energy, drive or inspiration. So something is going on.
It reminds me of six years ago when no distinct symptoms of cancer had yet appeared, but something wasn’t right. It wasn’t possible to put a finger on anything until my back suddenly gave way in August 2019. This was the first concrete symptom of a rapidly developing blood cancer, Multiple Myeloma. It’s ‘multiple’ because it has a range of disparate effects that vary greatly from person to person. This makes it difficult to diagnose.
So it took twelve long weeks to progress from a back-breakage to a cancer diagnosis, though this process was helped by a series of three inspired acts of intuition by, in succession, a cranial osteopath, a GP and a hospital specialist. Bless them all.
I can’t put my finger on what’s happening now, but something is happening. Astrologically, it concerns Mercury, and I’m a Mercurial person (a Virgo with a Gemini Moon). This feels neurological. There’s that ‘nothing to say’ syndrome too. And there’s more.
Rock art, Morvah, Penwith
It concerns ‘growing down’ – losing our powers. This demands a lot of acceptance – getting used to the fact that something is ending. Really ending. In the past I’ve been a cross-country runner and mountaineer, and I find loss of leg-power to be confronting.
Also, as an author, many people are retreating from their phones and social media habits and, thus, many of my readers are simply disappearing. The default answer is to spread into new online media and engage in networking and marketisation strategies. I’m getting loads of e-mails from online promoters who want to marketise my podcasts.
I’d love to reach more of the kinds of people who might benefit from my blogs and podcasts, but I’m not interested in all that promo stuff. My abilities are waning and I can’t manage the work that’s involved. I’m not seeking to set up a business or build my career. This lifelong content creator is sharing his end-of-life process, that’s all.
By nature I am, or was, an integrity-marketer, studiously avoiding falsities, glamours, competitiveness and deceptions in my approach. I used to be a whizzo at this, but not now – my time was 20-40 years ago. Nowadays, online media are changing so much – I can’t keep up, and get my head around all the details. Meanwhile, digital costs and charges are rising, and this obliges monetisation. I can’t do this any more, I don’t have what it takes to crank up a business and I don’t want to leave too many complexities for my son to sort out when I pop my clogs.
So where this goes is anyone’s guess. Anything that increases my workload or demands feats of memory and micro-management will simply not work. Anything I do needs to serve my health and wellbeing without weighing me down, and I’m already going at the maximum pace I can handle. So there’s a dilemma here.
Fresh sets of eyes peer out on the great wide world. In a few weeks they will fly thousands of miles.
Anyway, there’s something to learn from all this. It’s a matter of looking at what’s underneath. It’s about acceptance of What Is. It’s a reduction of options. This happens to those of us who experience a gradual, stepwise end-of-life decline instead of a sudden, drastic one – things narrow and shut down, bit by bit. It’s simply a matter of doing our best with what is, and what we’re capable of doing – there’s little or no option. It can be difficult and rather final, though there’s a joy and fulfilment in it too, if we choose to see the gift in it.
Earlier in my cancer saga I used to measure my condition in terms of perceived age. My physical age is currently 74, and normally I hover around 80-85 in perceived age, but in the last few days I’ve felt like 95 – energyless, wan, off-balance, needing someone to hold my hand, and wondering whether the latest rewrite of my will makes sense.
Yet I’m also transported into the eternal present, propped up in bed, hearing the singing of birds in a crisp, microsecond, sonorous, meaning-rich way, as if they’re teaching me something. Which they are.
They’re teaching me a very special something. A something that words cannot truly encompass because words reduce it. It’s a silence between each frame of life’s movie. A moment of seeing, a shifting of optic, a moment of existential tranquillity. It’s very quiet. It’s momentary yet vast. A glimpse of the Void. A taste of the Silence. A Neptunian slippage of consciousness into a temporary eternity.
So perhaps having little to say has its virtues. After all, I’ve managed to say something about it, so something must be happening right! It just goes to show, there is indeed a gift in everything.
For some reason, throughout life I’ve been preoccupied with Time, as an astrologer and studying both the past and the future. In 1999 I wrote a world history, and in 2017-8 I wrote a report called Possibilities 2050 – a concise assessment of the potential state of our world mid-century. It was about the mid-term future.
I was leafing through it today, and the chapter on Politics and Power jumped out at me. Partly because I’m brewing a new Aha Class, to happen in June, here in Penzance, all about the future. And this podcast is a prequel to it. There might be one or two more to come.
We’re faced with a big question: how to balance effective governance with popular participation.
Every kind of system needs to embrace everyone unless we want a world where some thrive and others suffer – the world is crowded, interdependent and networked, everything is affected by everything else and we live in a time of amplifying consequences.
This is an age of throngs. Occasionally people mass in the streets or online, swaying unpredictably between the wisdom of the majority and the madness of crowds.
A kind of democratisation and dispersal of power is re-shaping political process, causing authoritarian regimes to become more responsive to their publics (despite appearances otherwise) and democracies to become more confused by them.
This bypasses conventional party, class, local and sectoral loyalties, articulating emergent public instincts, hopes, issues or grievances more than it shapes coherent ideologies.
There’s a legitimacy struggle going on in the world’s body politic. Social trust and good governance are in poor supply.
This podcast covers power in society, governance, oligarchies, socio-political change, gender politics and artificial intelligence – big issues in our time.
This is mainly for my generational peers – if you’re in your 70s, 80s or 90s, your bones are getting creaky and your mind is getting sluggish.
In the life-cycle we’re given, we grow up and later we grow down. In steps.
It’s also about karma-clearance. Sorting out our stuff at the end of life, so that we don’t carry all of it with us when we go over to the other side – to the realm of the Ancestors.
I’ve been involved in humanitarian work, and recently I’ve needed to work on my patterns around givingness and compassion fatigue. Commitment. Success and failure in helping people. Deep heart stuff.
And it’s about acceptance. That’s one of the biggest learning experiences life ever gives us.
47 mins long. Introduced and outroduced by the birds of Grumbla in the Far Beyond, down’ere in Cornwall.
Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall, with The Brisons behind
First things first…The Sunday Meditation continues, whether or not I announce it. Sometimes I can’t, and there’s no one to cover for me. Yet I’m always there meditating at the appointed time, and so are quite a few other people.
You’re welcome to join us. It’s a recipe-free open meditation, especially for independent souls who follow their own path or live relatively isolated from others. All you need is half an hour, a cushion and your inner presence. Join us in the zone. No need to be online.
I might not be able to do regular meditation calls from now on. A lot of things are happening and I’m rather overwhelmed! Much of it is good stuff, and some is difficult – mainly my humanitarian work.
I three-quarters wrote a blog about this, about compassion fatigue, but I’m not fully clear how to write about a few delicate issues, so that’s gone into in the ‘later or never’ pile. For me, as a lifelong author and editor, getting stuck on some writing is unusual and strangely frustrating!
Even so, things are happening.
– I’m doing a talk on Tuesday 15th April, 7.30 at Gwithti an Pystri, the Museum of Folklore and Magic in Falmouth (book ahead);
– then there’s a visit to Gloucester to see my old friend Ibrahim Issa from Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem, Palestine, on 2-4 May (I’m still looking for a driver-minder for that, or a workable way to get there and back);
– and a talk at the Pathways to the Past conference in St Just, Cornwall, on Saturday 24th May (I’m really happy about that);
– and another at the Just Live Camp near Morvah in Penwith a day or two after, on 25th or 26th May.
Then there’s the Belerion Project, about which I’m really happy too. It’s a research project into the subtle energy and psychoactive effects of the system of ancient sites in Penwith. We did our first field trip to Portheras Common Barrow recently and, despite weather challenges, it went really well. Thanks to everyone who came. The next is on Wednesday 7th May.
Carn Les Boel and Carn Barra
I’ve always been rather workaholicky but, age 75 and doing a cancer trip, recently I’ve been running at capacity. Just getting ready to go out can wear me out, requiring a rest, and everything requires twice the effort it took in pre-cancer days. My brains aren’t handling all the messages, chats and enquiries involved – apologies to people I fail to answer.
I’m a hyperfocused Aspie, you see – good at concentrating for hours in a right-brained way but bad at hopping from thing to thing in a left-brained way. Aged brains do get creaky and slow! This is a mixed gift that has come with cancer: I’ve done some of the best creativity of my life, though I have a decreased capacity for admin, lists, names, timetables and even time itself. Or remembering to have dinner.
That’s the way it goes. Ideally I need an assistant (who lives close by and knows me well – not online). But I cannot pay such a person. That’s been one of the issues of my life that I was trying to write about in the latest, as yet unpublished blog: I’ve never had an expense account to finance projects and missions. It’s mostly come out of my own pocket.
A plus with this is that I’ve pulled off some mighty stunts on a slim budget, and I’ve been a free agent, but it is wearing too, and many good things could have happened if I’d had better funding.
For those who suggest I should ‘just’ do some crowd-sourcing (takes ten minutes, it’s easy and the money floods in, haha), I ask, do you require soldiers to fund their service at the frontline? Soldiers are paid salaries and pensions while peacemakers are told it’s our choice, our risk and why don’t we get a proper job?
You might hear a thread of resentment there. That’s why I didn’t complete the blog. I’ve got stuff around it. It’s still happening now: I and others I’m working with in Ghana, Mali and Palestine are all being seriously obstructed by, would you believe, the actions, errors, denials and avoidances of two banks, one in USA and one in Australia.
It’s not simple, this game. Paldywan Kenobi stares down the banksters! Who’d have thought I’d get sucked into teaching banks how to be human, at my age? Oh, and dealing with a few crime gangs, Wagners and drug-addled murderers along the way, remotely from my eyrie here in Cornwall. Well, I’m quite good at it, actually, and many people give up on such things when things get big or dangerous. I tend to hang in there.
When you step into what used to be called The Great Work, the rules of normal life seem to levitate out of the window and disappear. Retirement is something other people do.
For astrologers, I’ve just gone through Saturn opposing my natal Saturn (and square Moon and Ascendant). So I’m doing Saturn, yet again. When I started my cancer trip five years ago, I thought I had 1-3 years left, so I put my rather mission-driven, saturnine sense of life-purpose to the side. But it has started up again!
Well, my dear old late Mum used to say, “There’s no rest for the wicked!”. Well, yes, perhaps so, or perhaps not. She was a do-gooder too, handing me down that pattern, bless her. In our self-centred times, it’s not a sensible strategy, doing good, but some of us choose it or get sucked into it anyway.
Compassion fatigue, versus ‘To give and not to count the cost’. Non-attachment to the fruits of our labours, versus ‘Give me the compensation you owe for your frigging corporate errors’. Yes, these things have been rattling around in my heart during those Saturn transits. Well, life is for the learning.
I’ve been reminding myself of something a young Berliner taught me while standing (as you do) in the Sinai Desert. I repeat this here, particularly for people infected with the Trump virus:
It’s okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
Love from me – as you might sense, in a rather saturnine mood on this fullmoon!
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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