Living consciously with cancer | and some thoughts and interests | Palden Jenkins
The Aha Class
Here are the audio recordings from the latest Aha Class, held in Penzance on 23rd October 2024. All about Time – living in it and being more in tune with it. It’s in two one-hour parts.
Whether you were there or you missed it, you can listen to it here:
http://www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-time.html
With love, Palden
I realised on Friday that I must be reviving. I started back to work. Well, in a slow, step-by-step way. It was relatively easy work – checking and updating maps. Throughout life I’ve tended to run two tracks in parallel (being a Gemini mooner): harder work that takes a lot of thinking and creativity, and routine work that, while it’s necessary to do, it demands less focus and intensity.
I’ve been doing the latter, updating a series of online maps I made between 2014 and 2020, showing the ancient sites and alignments of West Penwith, and also of Scilly and Cornwall as a whole. They contain every known and identified site in Cornwall, precisely positioned. The alignments are most properly researched in West Penwith, the bit at the very end where I live, though the rest of Cornwall is covered too. If you click on any site or alignment on the map, you’ll get a popup providing further information and links concerning that site or alignment.
The maps are here: www.ancientpenwith.org/maps.html
So that’s what I’ve been doing, as a way of getting my brains back into gear, after two weeks of energy-suppressing opioid painkillers. They blanket you in an insulated fog of unwittitude and swimmy drowse – or at least, that’s what they do for me. Opioids are not good for the brains – I can testify to that.
But they kept the pain at bay until the problem I had started subsiding – a painful spasmic tightening of the muscles in my back and torso. For two weeks my muscles had pulled tight and rigid, as if a neurological overreaction to the deterioration of my bones. My psyche was fearing disintegration of my bony frame, and it was overreacting though seeking to protect me. This deterioration was stemmed last month by the first round of my new cancer treatment and, today/Saturday, I’m starting the second cycle of this treatment. It’s a maintenance treatment that I’ll be taking for a while, until it becomes clear it’s no longer working, or there’s a better alternative. Myeloma, a blood cancer that erodes the bones, cannot be cut out or irradiated surgically, like tumorous cancers, so it has to be regulated and held in check.
I still have residual pain and difficulty, but it’s at a 30%, not a 90% pain-level, and it’s in my manageable zone. Yesterday I visited John Tillyard, a gifted chiropractor in Hayle, who worked his magic on me, balancing up my bony frame. Claire, who took me to the appointment, reported that I walked back to the car in a very different way.
So I’m re-entering ‘normal’ life, such as it is. I re-start cancer treatment today. It’s pills, taken in a four-week cycle for three weeks, with one week off. On the first day I take a big dose of cancer drugs, then for the rest of the week I’m on a tick-over regime until, next week, the routine starts again. But on the fourth week I get a week off.
Recently, during the Sunday meditation, I’ve had a funny twist in the experience while I’ve been on opioids. During the meditation itself I find I’m very present, quite centred and ‘in the zone’, despite the opioids. Over the years I’ve found that the ‘channel’ distinctly switches off dead on time (currently at 8.30pm UK time) – I get a definite feeling of it – and this has been happening clearly in recent weeks. After the shut-off I sit there for a while and then the opioids take over, seeping into my psyche, and I drop off for an hour. It’s funny, that.
I find the ‘switch on’ of the channel is less distinct – it’s as if a space opens up, though it takes me a while to grow into it, or perhaps to slow my churning psyche – sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes. But when the ‘switch off’ comes, it’s quite noticeable. Fascinating. Over the last thirty years since I started doing this Sunday meditation, on the few occasions when I’ve lost track of time and forgotten the meditation (often because of jetlag after travelling), I’ve even experienced an altered state coming on of its own accord – only then to realise that it’s meditation time.
You’re welcome to join the meditation on Sunday (or any Sunday).
The clocks are changing soon. In UK and EU it’s Sunday 27th October, and in USA/Canada it’s on Sunday November 3rd. The meditation will be one hour earlier from those dates onward and through winter. (In UK it goes from 8pm to 7pm.) Remember: the ‘real’ time of the meditation doesn’t change – it’s just that our clocks change. Nature doesn’t change its clocks either. Changing our human clocks is connected with our modern human preoccupation with diaries, lists and appointments – it started particularly with industrialisation and urbanisation, particularly when trains arrived, running to strict timetables.
This has led to an exaggerated dissonance between ‘objective’ ticktock time and natural, inner, ‘subjective’, intuitive cosmo-time – the time-waves by which the Earth and cosmos resonate and reverberate. One of the core problems of our civilisation is that we impose ticktock time, with its plans and timetables, on natural time. This produces a disharmonic grating and grinding within nature and our own psyches. This friction lies at the heart of our psychological issues, our ecological and climatic situation and in the self-destructive nature of our civilisation. Put another way, we need to re-attune to our natural timings.
That’s what the next Aha Class is all about: time. Since getting cancer five years ago I’ve become curiously time-rich, while most people around me are time-poor, so this could be interesting. This matter of time, and our experience of it as we live our lives, is a key ingredient of the Earth experience – this is what we chose to engage with by getting born in this world. Everything on Earth is a matter of time – and also timing. That’s at times frustrating and yet it’s what we came here to evolve through, psycho-spiritually. Time is what stops everything happening all at once.
The talk is astrologically-based, but if you don’t understand astrologese, a multidimensional language, you’ll still get pings and lightbulb moments. One intention behind the Aha Class is to help broaden your general knowledge – concerning things it’s useful to know about even if we focus mainly on other things. Most of you will have a smattering of astrologese though and, since we’ll be talking about fullmoons, solstices, planetary line-ups and energy-configurations, all of you will have lived experience of these, and the talk will help you make more sense of them. I’ll explain how they work. Each talk is audio-recorded and, where relevant, maps and diagrams are put online afterwards, and they’re all found on the Aha page on my site.
On the day of the talk there’s what I’d call a ‘magnitude three’ planetary configuration or thrum-pattern, involving outer and inner planets, and the atmosphere of the evening will thus serve as an example of how it works. This rather fleeting configuration is an illustration of something that has recently started happening, a Uranus-Neptune-Pluto triangle for a few years, which is a door-opener for the world (see ‘2020s’ below). Whenever the faster planets swing round to activate that triangle, energy-changes are triggered, and the chart for the day and time of the class will be an example. The full astrological details of all this are laid out in my book ‘Power Points in Time – ancient festivals, lunar phases, planetary line-ups and historic moments’.
Classically, for an evening talk about time, Maria and I got mixed up with the dates. It’s now on Wednesday 23rd October at The Hive in Penzance, inshallah. After my illness I needed more time to get my body-psyche systems up’n’running properly, so the class has now been set to the new date. Which just goes to show, it’s all a matter of time. Even though I’m time-rich, I needed more time.
And now it’s time for breakfast. Love from me. Palden.
The Aha Class: www.palden.co.uk/aha.html
The Astrology of the 2020s: https://penwithbeyond.blog/2020s/
Power Points in Time: https://penwithpress.co.uk/product/power-points-in-time/
Meditations: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
Site and Archive: www.palden.co.uk
“Where is the world?“, cried a desperate woman in Omdurman, Sudan – in ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ on BBC World Service today. Lebanese will be feeling this feeling right now, though the Sudenese perhaps have it worst. Well, the world is busy with other things. That’s where the world is.
One of the stange paradoxes of our time is that, as world population has grown – exploding to over eight billion – individuals and communities have become more isolated, alienated and dehumanised. In recent years, wars, witnessed onscreen like disturbingly realistic video games, have been stumbled into as if people, cities and landscapes were expendable and there were few consequences to worry about.
We wring our hands, feel smidgeons of the sorrow and pain, grumble and get on with our lives. Others blank it out, as a survival mechanism that allows them to keep going with a daily round of never-ending pressures. And yet others love it, as if feeding on the tensions, the bangs and flashes, and the numbers, and the power of it all.
For the triumph of evil it is necessary that good people do nothing. I keep banging away about this quote from the philosopher Edmund Burke because it sums up the world today and the tenor and background of what is to come.
When wars take place, we easily latch onto the proposition that it’s about Israelis and Palestinians, Russians and Ukrainians, rival generals, or government and rebels – and thus has it ever been. Well, yes, but here we blind ourselves. This is the way it looks, but there’s something else here.
At root it is about the battle for the hearts and minds of humanity – a well-worn phrase which describes what we have been in for a very long time. It seems now to be coming toward a crescendo. This goes right back into prehistory. There are two fundamental mindsets here.
One perceives strangers as a threat, territory and resources as possessions, people as individualised objects, power and wealth as advantages, competition as the sole mechanism by which everything operates, Earth as the universe’s only inhabited world and physicality as our baseline reality.
The other generally likes, loves and trusts fellow humans, tends to treat others as it would like to be treated, identifies with nature, thinks mutually and cooperatively, understands that there is something greater than what we know, and it tends to prefer living relatively simply, sharing resources and staying within its means.
Something like that. These mindsets are more easily felt than defined in words.
All of us hover around various places on the spectrum between these two poles of perspective and experience. We all have to establish a balance between self-interest/sovereignty, and mutuality/shared sovereignty. They both bevel into one another. They can shift quickly in crisis situations. Often the values that position us on this spectrum are formed in teenage and early adult years, though they can shift if life jogs us into it, or through periodic epiphanies.
Seen this way, many of today’s wars aren’t between the commonly-agreed sides. They are wars by people with a competitive mindset against two kinds of people: those with a cooperative mindset, and those who aren’t sure, who acquiesce in whatever situation prevails at the time.
The competitive side is also made up of two main kinds: the oligarchy that drives the mindset and cracks the whip, and those who lock step, join in, to become the executors, officers, influencers, reinforcers and beneficiaries of the oligarchy (to gain advantage or for fear of not joining in).
But it’s not simple and clear-cut. It’s not a goodguys/badguys scenario where one side can blame the other side for the world’s problems, striving then to dominate or eliminate them in order to solve those problems. It’s far deeper and it’s not fully conscious. It’s the frequencies we tune into. Even if we cleave the world into ‘woke’, ‘anti-woke’ and ‘don’t know’, within those divisions are heartless wokes, good-hearted anti-wokes, and a large number of people unwilling to takes sides when the options are presented in such a binary, with-us-or-against-us way.
This last lot is a broad majority – except perhaps temporarily at times such as the outbreaks of wars, when polarisation waxes strong. And this is one reason, deep down, why wars are fomented – to keep polarisation and dehumanisation on top of the world agenda, and to dull people’s sensibilities with scenes of tragedy and destruction.
There are different kinds of ‘don’t knows’ too, and the matter is kept confused because few people have time to think and reflect clearly on what’s happening and what they can do about it. The acquiescent are constrained in what we can do – despite all the hoohah about democracy. We have delicately-balanced, busy lives, and the cost of disruption can be high. Bills must be paid. Some people don’t want to know. Some feel helpless and frustrated. Some try hard to make a difference and don’t get far. Others simply pursue their careers or their lives as best they can.
The key thing here is that acquiescence is the source of the world’s problems. Some like to rail against the perpetrators, the oligarchies and power-structures, and there’s some relevance in this, but really this concerns a deeply-embedded tendency in humanity to shrug shoulders and go along with things it has instinctive reservations about.
This gives oligarchies operational space by which to determine the agenda and co-opt majorities into buying or accepting it. Throughout history it has allowed them to drag humanity through mass experiences they otherwise wouldn’t have chosen. The devastation going on today in Lebanon is but the latest example, and there will be more next year and the year after that.
I’ve spent my life exhorting, encouraging and facilitating people in their change processes, and by no means have I been the only one doing it. In the stretch of history in which I and my generation have participated, some progress has been made, though the fundamental issue has not been resolved. That is yet to come.
It’s the battle for the hearts and minds of humanity. In recent years we’ve had distressing instances presenting us with deep choices. Do we actually want this devastation to continue? If not, to what lengths are we willing to go to end it? If, as it seems, the future is intensifying, the disasters are getting bigger, the pain and costs are rising and we’re heading for a precipice, when will the world’s majority consensus shift sufficiently to tilt the balances and head another way?
This is the bottom-line agenda for the coming decades. Events and collective feelings are moving that way – something is fermenting underneath and, one day, it will come out. We’re approaching an historic choice-point, or a series of them, and we all know what it’s about. Evidential statistics are hardly necessary.
This question lies within all of us. It’s tempting to give a nice, easy answer that looks like a solution, so that everyone can go home and feel okay, but so many of us have done this before so many times, and it doesn’t necessarily help.
It’s the process. We have to go through the process. Globally. Everyone. And it’s a cliffhanger.
I’ve been reflecting on all this as I’ve gone through what has felt like a long-dark tunnel of illness in recent weeks, as detailed in three recent blogs. I’m gradually reviving, and the muscular pain I’ve had, at 90% two weeks ago, is now around 30% and within my manageable zone. Though I haven’t been close to death medically, at times it has felt like dying, as if the pain might squeeze and pop me out of my body, leaving a curled-up pile of bones behind. Since getting cancer five years ago, I’ve visited that close-but-not-there point a number of times, and perhaps my body-soul connections are a bit loose.
It’s feelings like pain that make us more human. Times when we’re overwhelmed with our own feelings, our phantasmagorical inner dramas, locked inside our personal reality-bubble and struggling through the nettles and brambles overgrowing the path toward finding out who we are. Those bouts of suffering we impose on ourselves or which come at us, just when we were busy making other plans – they can have a humanising effect.
I guess I’m feeling a microcosmic version of what Gazans will feel when the firing at last stops. What then? Will I revive, to return to something resembling the life I had before? Or have I dropped to a new level where my possibilities have shrunk and my dependencies have grown, and that’s what I must accept? We shall see. It’s that post-devastation phase that happens after an enormous struggle. Actually, it’s the mindset that those of my age-group were born into, just after WW2 – a ‘whither the future?’ phase, experienced amongst the rubble of what used to be.
My life has reduced to the size of my cabin – and when the fog is down, as it does here in Penwith, the shrouding is complete. Even so, I’ll still be there every Sunday at the meditation, because that’s something I can do that breaks free from the physical confinement my body has given me. You’re welcome to join our little group and enter the energy-zone of the meditation. It can help greatly in the uncovering of answers. (There’s a link below, explaining more.)
Over the last few weeks, lying there in bed, dead still, propped up on pillows, at times I’ve travelled far and wide, visiting many of you, and visiting people I’ve known through my life (not least friends in the Middle East) to be with you. And to be in the world’s crisis zones, with people who are there. And to swim around in the tangly firmament of the world’s heart-mind, planting love-mines and stockpiles of psychosocial aid for people to draw on, in places I’m drawn to.
I’m not doing it all the time. Often I’ve been just lying there in an opioid-painkiller daze, wondering dreamily whether I have the energy to arise from bed to take a pee. But on occasions I’ve gone deep, through and out, visiting Darfur, Dneipro, Sidon, Bethlehem… or far further out, beyond this world, into the realms of light, timelessness and beatitude, and laying connections between the two.
Which goes to show, even in your darkest days it’s still possible to do something. A candle lit in darkness sheds far more light than a candle in sunshine. And this is what we’re here for. The first Tibetan Lama I met, Akong Rinpoche, taught me that times of enlightenment, freedom and joy are like a holiday, which heals us because it is brief and different, but the times when the real progress is being made are the times when we’re wading through the swamp, struggling to find our way. And it seems to go on and on.
In writing this, I’ve just realised that Lama Akong taught me this in November 1974, almost exactly fifty years ago. Half a century later, I’ve had a reminder of it, and I’m still learning that lesson. But it also says something also about the tribulation humanity is in. We do actually know what is needed on Planet Earth, more or less, and we now have to wade through the mud, the crossfire and the floods to get there. Hearts and minds. For the triumph of humanness, it is necessary that good people do something.
With love, Palden
PS: The next Aha Class in Penzance is re-timed to Wednesday 16th October – I’m not ready to do it on 9th. Ironically, the class is all about time.
The Aha Class: www.palden.co.uk/aha.html
Sunday Meditations: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
My website and archive: www.palden.co.uk
Recent public talks: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html
I was physically unable to post my previous blog, so it sits below this one, for your interest. But first, here’s the latest…
My next Aha Class in Penzance, if I am able to do it, is all about time. On Earth we are locked into time of two kinds – ticktock time and ‘cosmo-time’ – and they interweave in ever-fascinating ways. Whether or not I can do the class is, I hope, mainly a matter of dates. A matter of time. Stay tuned.
I’ve been learning a new level of being with time, and facing the deep and simple Buddhist truth of impermanence. Everything that begins also ends. With no exceptions. The only constant is change. At times recently, sitting or lying in overwhelming pain, I’ve been tested on this. Because pain often feels like it will go on forever. Cosmo-time, subjective time, stretches out as if striving for permanence. Though it never quite gets there.
All things must pass. Not necessarily in ways we might prefer, but they do pass. The experience of life on Earth is about this. It takes time for things to happen, and for us to learn how to make them happen, and for us to digest the consequences. It’s a pilgrimage, and it’s the travelling thereof that matters most. Besides, in the end, we die anyway. Our empires crumble and, however much we seek to immortalise ourselves, we are forgotten. We disappear into the dustbin of time.
I knew this long ago. But life has a way of bring back old lessons and taking them a level deeper. I’ve been an astrologer for decades and I’m still learning about time. And at those times when coughing or crying sets off muscle spasms lasting minutes, I’m being tested on it – bigtime!
I am still not well – it’s mainly muscle spasms in my torso, that are painful and debilitating. It’s a by-product of cancer, a kind of neurological overreaction to weaknesses in my bones, though I seem to be doing quite well with the cancer itself and the new medication I’m on – according to my guardian haematologist angel at the hospital. But the spasms are a killer. It has been two weeks of at times extreme pain, with extra added opioid-induced haze and sluggishness.
I seem also to have fallen into an NHS black hole, trying and failing to get a muscle-relaxing drug I was given five years ago (they’ve lost the records, no one is taking charge, I’m being bounced back and forth too much and, after ten days, I’ve got nowhere). Since getting tense induces more muscle-spasms, I’ve had to drop it. All things shall pass.
I’m spending too much time on my own, and that’s difficult. Endless digital messaging, questions and advice are no substitute for human contact. I do understand how everyone is busy, I dislike being a burden and it’s not nice asking so many favours, so this presents a dilemma, and I’m chipping away at resolving it.
So I’ve been missing company. I appreciate offers to help, heal or do shopping, though it’s actually company that tops the needs list. I don’t need company all the time, but some of it. So if you have time, you’re welcome to hang out with Paldywan (though you might have to make the tea).
After nearly three years since she left, I still miss my former partner and her family – I’ve found that hard, and hopefully her life has improved without me. In our day, our friends, family and people we’ve bonded with over time are so widely spread. Salam, peace, to all of you with whom I have bonded, whether closely through time or in just a deep twenty-minute connection. Time and space separate us, though somewhere deep down we are together still.
Writing is physically difficult and one-fingered for me at present – I have to hold myself up with the other arm. It raises a question about how I shall continue with my blogs and podcasts as my abilities decline. One day I guess I’ll just go silent and, from then on, I might need someone to pass messages or upload soundfiles. But we’ll face that when we get there – my illness of the last fortnight has flagged this up.
I had a past-life memory that came up, possibly from several lives, of being a scribe, of writing things down for others. Pain squeezes interesting jewels of insight from our psyche when we yield to it.
This illness has also flagged up a need to get a support system better organised, so that it works well both for me and for those who choose to do supportive things. I’m really grateful to those of you who have helped. And life is a busy thing, squeezed inside a vice of time. I’ve been like that too – I do understand.
The recording of my last Aha class about Activism will be ready soon. Sorry, the production team is on a go-slow, haha. The next class is about time, conjunctures of time and the way ticktock and cosmo-time intersect and interact through such things as fullmoons, solstices and planetary line-ups – power points in time. I’ve written a book about it too (see below). The date will either be confirmed or changed before long.
The Sunday meditations continue, whether or not I announce them. I’ll return to writing reminders sometime but, until then, I shall still be there on Sundays, and you’re welcome to join when you can, wherever you are. Come and join us in the zone – it’s like plugging into a wormhole leading to the shining realm of the timeless.
Now it’s time to make breakfast. I was awake at 4.30 this morning, got up, made a drink (quite an operation), and propped myself up in bed to watch the dawn. After I’ve uploaded this I’ll go back to bed. Bed gets boring, but it’s what life is like at present – an exercise in horizontality.
With love from me. Palden
The Aha Class: www.palden.co.uk/aha.html
Sunday Meditations: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
Power Points in Time: https://penwithpress.co.uk/product/power-points-in-time/
My website and archive: www.palden.co.uk
HAMMERED
21st September 2024
I’m still alive. Made it through another long night. I’m still in pain, from muscle-spasms clamping my torso – it fluctuates and moves around my torso throughout the day – but while it was 90% pain a week ago it’s now 60-70%. Better, but still rather crippling at times. Though being muscle spasms driven by a deep underlying tension arising from the recent weakness of my bones, it’s a really good mindfulness exercise too. I have to monitor my mindset to provide no worry-hooks for the spasms to latch onto. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
They gave me opioids to deal with it. I’m not happy on opioids – and I’m speaking as an aged hippy with good first-hand experience of drugs. They weigh down my psyche, drain willpower and fog my brainz – though they do deal with the pain. I wanted a muscle-relaxant that I was given five years ago but for some reason I’m getting no action on that. I’m being well treated by the doctors, but too many doctors and nurses are involved, all of them working from my NHS computer records while only one or two have actually met me.
This went wrong last week. A doctor who knows me would prescribe dosages at around 70% of normal strength. A meditating, vegetarian psychic non-muggle who’s wired up rather differently from ‘normal’ people, I don’t need sledgehammering with medications – my system and my ‘inner doctors’ process them pretty well, thank you.
So there I was, on my first day on opioids – it brought relief from the searing pain – and the recommended dose knocked me out. My temperature suddenly rose, I broke out in a sweat and suddenly felt faint. Next thing, I woke up on the floor. But I fell well, semiconsciously, because I was lying quite comfortably (as it goes) and I had no bruises or headache when I awoke. I lay there, weak and drugged. Eventually I managed to get vertical – quite an operation taking at least an hour – and later a friend dropped by and saved me.
I’ve been given notice. I must sort out my support system – it’s not really working. It’s too complex – I land up with lots of visitors quizzing me and looking worried, while only some are useful or know what to do. I need one person to ring when I have a crisis, on whom I can rely to fix something amongst the wider circle of helpers. At one point, one visitor simply held my hand, and that was so good – such a small act of humanity can be really touching at wobbly, pained moments like that. A few days later she came and cleaned my house – and that, to a Virgo, is a great relief. Shukran jazilan, Selina.
The doctors are being good with me – once I was escalated up the list, that is. And people are being good too, though they have no time and such busy lives or other issues to deal with, especially on the recent fullmoon. But something is not quite right – I’m on my own too much. Just as well I’m a good survivor, even if a seized-up cripple of a crock. Clearly, Allah doesn’t want to take me away quite yet, even though he had a good chance to do so – so that’s a reality-check worth having. But I’ve been given notice that something needs to change if I’m going to get through the next chapter in reasonable fettle.
Today I have my weekly mega-blast of cancer drugs, Lenalidomide, Ixazomib, Dexamethasone, Allopurinol, Apixaban and Aciclovir. Sounds exotic. I’m a bit concerned about taking a steroid (Dex) and opioids together, but I’ll play it by ear and tough it out. The accelerating deterioration I was going through has stopped – I can feel it – and the cancer drugs are gaining the upper hand. But the drugs have shocked my system – and that’s part of the cause of the muscle spasms.
We have dramatic thunderstorms here this morning. It’s quite energising to my poppy-suppressed old body and its shattered nervous system. Recently a young Gazan welcomed the thunderstorms they were having there because they drove the drones away and there was some peace. We must remember how lucky we are.
And whenever anyone asks me ‘How are you?‘ – like, fifteen times every day – my best answer is, “Well, I’m like this, really‘.
May spirit bless you and keep you, and cause its light to pervade you, and guide your way home.
For all of us, a time comes when it’s our turn to go home.
Love from me. Palden.
I’ve been very ill since Friday – it’s cancer-related. Muscle spasms up my back and all round my torso. It feels like cramp but it’s also different and it doesn’t end, and movement is a killer, painwise. Paradoxically it came on when I went to Penzance hospital for an infusion of Zoledronate, to strengthen my weakening bones. By the time I got home I was dying on my feet – well, it felt like that.
I think my body is reacting to bone-weakness, and starting new cancer meds nine days ago, plus the infusion – and I’ve been pushing it a bit recently too. But there are always deeper dimensions: at one point I felt as if I’d been stabbed in the back. I think that was a prompt from deep memory. It’s amazing, the insights that can squeeze out of the psyche when in deep pain.
Recently I wrote about how illness and pain can concentrate and focus the psyche and soul. Staying alive and performing such normally trivial things as getting to the toilet can be major operations. It’s an exercise in mindfulness and staying steady within, even when your body is yelling at you, oppressing and constraining you. For pain is partially a perceptial thing. And I’m being tested on this now.
How far have I actually come on dealing with pain? After the excruciatingly similar experience I had in October-November 2019, around the time I was diagnosed with cancer, I’m dealing with pain quite differently. But it still really hurts, affects my breathing and stiffens me. I feel like I’m in my late nineties.
A nice Indian doctor came round this afternoon, to do a medical assessment on behalf of the haematology dept at Treliske in Truro (35ish miles away). He was good, new to West Penwith and day by day discovering the fascinating and rather isolated place he has landed up in. He took bloods etc, and I’m quite normal in temp and blood pressure – though a bit on the low side. It’s the crippling muscle-spasms, really – that’s the min problem. He thought to prescribe morphine, after he’d consulted Treliske. This is not the first time I’ve been saved by an Indian doctor. Bless them all.
So, if I’m on morphine for a while, it will knock me out. Today I’ve been working at alerting my local friendship network – that’s complex, and the system isn’t working right yet for situations like this. But I’m making progress and hope one or two (virus-free) people will be able-willing to come round in the coming days.
This is clearly a classic fullmoon crisis, and I reckon it will take at least a few days. Saturn is bearing down on me – time. Serving time. But then, I’m a saturnine person – perhaps even a textbook case. And one consequence of Saturn’s pressures is that this blog is (for me) remarkably short.
I cannot sit at the computer very long, so staying in touch is not easy. Just send positive thoughts – I can pick them up in bed! Thanks.
This is what can happen in a human life on Earth – it’s part of the deal. Not to punish us but to teach us – and it’s fast-track evolutionary learning at that. Especially if it hurts.
Well, if you choose to take it that way.
Bless you all. Beeee goooood. Palden
…and why ETs have spindly legs
This is the audio recording of a wide-ranging talk by me in Glastonbury in early September 2024, with the Inner Light Community.
It’s all about consciousness and levels of reality. I speak about ancient sites, the awareness power of groups of people, close encounters, altered states, consciousness engineering, crop formations, otherworld beings, cancer, dying… and a few anecdotes from my life.
A thoughtful journey through the alternative realms of reality.
You’re welcome to listen!
With love, Palden.
And it’s also on my website: http://www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html
“Suffer the little children to come unto me“, said That Man, the prophet Issa (Jesus). But the children didn’t suffer. They were suffered, or allowed, to visit Jesus, and it might have been a high-point in their lives, or even his.
For cancer ‘sufferers’ of today, it’s all a matter of how we define suffering and how we deal with it. I’ve harped on about this in my audiobook Blessings that Bones Bring, and in my blogs.
Permitting or even welcoming cancer isn’t easy. It involves a lot of inner struggle. You don’t have much option about what’s happening, yet there’s a big, yawning option about how to deal with it in your mind, heart and soul. For me, squaring with cancer has been a boundary-stretching exercise. I’ve also had to learn how to stretch myself manageably, neither overstretching nor understretching.
Though I’m rather frail and unable to handle life in the way I once did, there have been compensatory advantages. One was mentioned in my last blog – a tenuous strength that can come from weakness and from dealing with rapid successions of truths, crises and scrapes. Fragility has a way of focusing heart and mind. It’s a matter of keeping my head above water as the water gets deeper and more swirly. I’ve kinda succeeded thus far, since I’m still here, though at times I’ve felt out of my depth and overwhelmed.
Now, five years in, I’m at a turning point and rather surprised to be alive. A new line of cancer treatment starts on Friday 30th August. I decided to bring it forward and start, regardless of my fears and reservations. It’s time to get started and get it over with, instead of prevaricating, biting nails and suffering over it.
If I suffer and grind myself up too much, I just wear myself down, and it doesn’t help. I just can’t burn up energy resisting things. I do go through resistances – especially when it all feels too much and something in me wants to dig in my heels – but I seem to come out the other side. It’s all a process.
Since January 2024 I’ve taken no cancer medication. However, I’ve been on homoeopathic treatment and also Resveratrol, an extract of Japanese Knotweed (of all things). It’s an antioxidant that is specifically good for my kind of cancer, Multiple Myeloma, and it’s taken with Quercetin. Before that, the previous pharmaceutical treatment, an immunotherapy called Daratumamab (Dara), succeeded for three years (longer than for most patients, apparently) but its efficacy started declining.
The haematologist overseeing my case reckoned I’d done well with Dara and, six months ago, we chose to pause treatment to wait and see. She knew my results had been consistently good and that I have strange ways of handling things – even if she and her colleagues are singularly uninterested in what those strange ways are. So we waited until my blood tests started showing deterioration. This took a bit longer than expected.
But recently, my readings started rising. A key reading, paraproteins, stood at three a year ago and now it’s at 25. I was already feeling a downward droop in my condition, and these readings confirmed that feeling. It’s exactly five years since cancer suddenly changed my life, and I recognise the subtle buildup-symptoms that I experienced then.
The main, though rather indistinct buildup-symptom was low life-energy. I’m feeling that again now. Six months ago I would have three up-energy days and one down-energy day, and now it’s more like three down days to one up. I feel my bones getting weaker – they start hollowing out. Following a recent PET scan, the haematologist told me that this is happening in both ribs, in vertebrum T5 in my lower back, and in my pelvis and my thighbones.
Many people tell me how well I look, but my smile and shining eyes don’t necessarily mean I’m in the best of conditions. They simply show that soul is propping me up with light, focusing my energy, and adversity is brightening me. That luminosity says little about the downward direction my body is heading in – even if my soul is heading the other way.
Down-energy days are wearing. On these days I wish I didn’t live alone. I get low life-energy and lack of motivation, dull brains and droopy heart – and the best place to be is in bed or a comfortable chair, where I’ll read or drift off. I can stay slowly active during such a day if I have a mid-afternoon rest, though I have to give myself permission to do it and also I need to fend off external pressures to perform, socialise and answer messages. I have to stay abreast of chores, cooking and daily-life demands too. Taking rests means I fall behind on those demands. Sometimes I catch up on up-energy days and sometimes I don’t.
Up-energy days can be challenging because on those days there’s so much to do to catch up. I need to wash clothes, clean the house, do shopping, think things through, fire off requests for help, answer copious messages and, with luck, take a walk. The problem with that is that these days are when I’m in my best state for writing blogs and making podcasts, and it all gets a bit much.
This increase of down-energy days, plus a feeling of weakness in my bones, forced me to address my fears. I had anticipations about the next combination of cancer drugs I shall be taking, Lenalidomide (Len), Ixazomib and Dexamethasone (Dex). Len is a variant of Thalidomide. [If interested, details here.] My mother took Thalidomide for morning sickness when she was pregnant with me in 1950, and I was lucky to avoid serious deformity – thus I have an instinctive wariness over this drug. I have wondered whether Thalidomide activated the Asperger’s Syndrome I’ve lived with throughout life.
That’s okay, and that’s how life has been for me, but I noticed that, during initial cancer treatment 4-5 years ago, my Aspergers tendencies seemed to be amplified, particularly by Dex. This leads to difficulties managing my life and communicating my needs, without someone to speak for me or to talk to. No one covers my back and I have no reliable, close-by fallbacks. My son, who is good toward me, lives four hours away and is a busy man – and this kind of sociological issue affects many seniors.
Our communities and families have broken down. People like me are supposed to be given independence as a remedy for this. Well, yes, in a way that is good, but in another way it means loneliness and isolation.
There’s another side to Aspergers though – ‘Aspie genius’. It’s a heightened capacity to think outside the box, apply intense intelligence, to be amazingly creative and innovative and to find solutions in quirky ways. I’ve been very creative and a new spirit has settled upon me since getting cancer. Which goes to show that, to every apparent problem, there’s another side.
I have plenty of lovely friends who do small, occasional helpful things, and that’s great, but there’s no proper backup and it’s all rather haphazard and unreliable. That’s where my fear lay around the next line of cancer treatment. I felt unprotected.
After grinding through my stuff about it for some time, I came to a conclusion. It was simple. Palden, get over it, give thanks, take the plunge and all will be well, somehow. And if it isn’t, make that okay too.
It’s a choice of consciousness: to follow the fear path or the growth path.
The alternative to taking the new cancer drugs I’ve been prescribed is to continue declining slowly, with increasing down-energy days, foggying brains and a likelihood that my bones start collapsing or breaking. There’s no alternative really – and I risk attracting multiple volleys of suggested miracle cures by saying so – yet I was hesitant to make the choice. It wasn’t exactly the treatment that bugged me. It was my background worry about vulnerability and facing the future alone. So, I decided to get over it. The issue isn’t resolved, but my fear around it has changed.
The haematologist said two more things. A new treatment is coming online in a year or so, which she thinks will be good for me. That sounded interesting, and a welcome glimmer of light for the future. The other was a big surprise. She reckoned that, unless something else happened, it looks as if I have five to seven years left. Gosh, it doesn’t feel like that – I’d have estimated three. But then, I estimated three years about four years ago, and here I still am!
‘Suffering’ cancer has involved floating in a kind of plan-less, timeless void, taking each day as it comes – and chemo-brain has put me in that space too. But now, having survived five years, and with a growing sense of having at least a few years left, I feel an unexpected need to make some plans.
I have to adopt a new balance-point. I stand between being locked in the here and now, never knowing how much time I have left, and the need to make plans and arrangements, because that’s the way the world works. After all, I really don’t know what I’ll be like in a month’s time, or even next Tuesday. But then, there’s more to do before I go, so some planning is necessary.
I’m going to do more public talks – these are what’s within my scope right now. I’m in Glastonbury on Wednesday 4th September, doing a talk called Sludging through the Void with Muddy Boots (and why ETs have spindly legs). [Info and tickets here.] It’s all about the ins and outs of being a conscious soul living in a dense-physical world like ours. And a few other mildly interesting things, hehe – I range wide. Let me take you on a journey.
In addition I’m starting a monthly series of talks in Penzance called the Aha Class – a kind of master-class from an old veteran, for those who need something more than the usual stuff. The first, on Wednesday September 11th, is about Changing the World, Life-purpose and Activism. [Info and tickets here.] It concerns the personal and wider issues around making a difference in the world, the things we need to get straight about in ourselves, and the soul-honing, magical and deep-political dimensions behind it. Later Aha Classes will go into the workings of time, extraterrestrial life, the ancient sites of West Penwith, and in 2025, world healing, the movements of history, talking-stick processes, the Shining Land of Belerion, and close encounters.
Nowadays I often wonder what state I’ll be in on the night, but it always works out somehow. That’s what comes of years of training myself to stand in front of people, inspirationally holding forth, whatever state I’m personally in. It lights me up and it heals me. I realised this in the 1990s when I was booked to do a speech and I was really quite ill and ‘out of it’. Guess what, I did one of the most brilliant talks I’ve done in my life and, not only that, but I started quickly getting better in the days that followed.
Doing what I’m here to do helps Spirit keep me alive, regardless of medical conditions and diagnoses. If there’s good reason to be alive, I’ll stay alive, and if those reasons dwindle or I’ve reached the end, then it’s time to go.
So I’m starting a new cancer treatment and a new series of talks at roughly the same time. Well, life is for the living, and that’s the way things panned out, and there is presumably something right about it – we shall see. Thus far, some of the altered states that cancer drugs have taken me into have been quite interesting and, since I’m a stream-of-consciousness kind of speaker, you might get some good streaming!
Also, having stood on stages and clutched microphones for more times than I can remember, I’ve trained myself to be alright on the night. But it’s still an energy-management thing. I might be on stage for 60-90 minutes, but the buildup and unwinding process takes about four days in energy-management terms.
Sludging through the Void. Our lives on Earth feel quite long but actually they’re rather short interludes on a much longer and rather winding path through many lives. The Tibetans have an interesting understanding of this. Our waking lives constitute one of six bardos or states of experience. Others are the dream state (when we’re asleep), meditative and altered states, the transitional period of death, pregnancy and the moment of birth, and the after-death state. The nature of the after-death state varies greatly in shape and form, depending on where each person is at. Each of these states is, from the viewpoint of the experience of the soul, equal in magnitude.
Yes, the process of getting born, or the process of dying, is as big in impact as the whole of the process of living life in the world (waking life). The duration of a birth process is measured in hours while a lifetime is measured in years and decades, but the scale and intensity of each of these experiences is pretty much the same. Also our inner dream states and our altered states are as great in magnitude as our waking lives. It’s the same soul experiencing them all.
If you’re on a magical ceremony or meditative retreat, or you’re tripped out on psychedelics, or you’re ill to the extent that you’re right out of it, such an experience might objectively last hours or days but in the psyche it can last an aeon, stretching to infinite proportions. The more you have such experiences, the longer your life will be in evolutionary terms, as measured not in years but in volume and meaning of experience. In this sense, although my 74th birthday soon approaches, I feel like 120 years old.
So even though our waking lives are locked in time, and for many of us our lives seem to last a long time, the magnitude of experience gained in waking life is only equal to that which happens in the roughly nine months that it takes to get born, from conception to birth. Anyone who has been present at a child’s birth will know how time and experience take on a different dimension during the birth process. The same is true at death.
We cherish and hang on to our lives so much. Yet, for every one of us, the story of our lives inevitably comes to an end and we return to another realm – a place where we’ve been before many times. Whether it feels like home, and how well we do with it, depends a lot on the extent to which we’re attached to the narrative and the mindset of the lives we’ve just left. If, during life, we have tended toward being open or being shut off, it makes a big difference.
Whatever prevails in our psyche during life tends to replicate itself after death – though there are possibilities during the dying process to shift tracks, forgive the past and move to a different level. It all hangs around the way we habituate ourselves to respond to momentous situations in daily waking life: do we follow the growth choice or the fear choice? Because that sets the patterns.
When you die, you lose control. Your available choices are minimal. It really does hang around the question of what you’ve done with your life and what you have become since you were born. What have you habituated yourself to do, regarding the growth or the fear choice? Did you predominantly open up or close down? That’s what you’ll face when you’re dying. Dying is a test of where you’re really at – not where you would like to be at. But also, what we fear about death generally doesn’t actually happen.
Dying is not something to attend to later. We’re all setting the tracks and patterns for the manner of our passing right now, today, in our waking lives, in dreams and altered states, and our death from this life is a rebirth into another world. The process is not fixed and immovable, and there are redemption opportunities at every stage, and that’s the way it works.
In our culture we do little to attend to these matters, and we tend to believe unthinkingly that everything just goes dark when you die, and that’s it, and it all just shuts down. If this is our belief, then dying can be a bit like being pushed over a scary precipice with no knowing what happens next. But if we have developed a strong sense of knowing and trust that there is something that follows after dying, then it’s more like a relieving float, following the current through a portal of light. Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream – it is not dying, it is not dying… Good old John Lennon – he came up with some good ones.
Love from me, Palden.
Site: http://www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Podcasts: http://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Sunday has crept up and, here I am, reminding you of the Sunday meditation. (Usually I do it weekly on Facebook, but I don’t have the capacity to post it on multiple platforms – sorry).
It’s the same as before. You’re welcome to join. Times in different countries are below, and further details are here: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
I woke up early this morning, remembering a series of four dreams I had around age 27 on my Saturn Return in the late 1970s. It might or might not be apposite to mention them here, but I’m moved to do so anyway. You see, quite a few people think I’m brave. But that’s not my perception – actually, I get shit scared over things, like anyone, and currently I’m biting nails over the next stage of my cancer treatment or, more specifically, about facing it alone. So I’m needing to be brave anyway, whether I like it or not, since there isn’t much option. That’s the way the cookie sometimes crumbles.
In the first dream I was standing on a hill with some others, looking over a grand panorama. Yet down there, there were enormous nuclear explosions going on, with amazing mushroom clouds (this was in the time of the Cold War). What was bizarre was that this was a beautiful scene, and the explosions were crystal-clear and radiant – really, like wow, amazing. Then came the fizzing, and I could feel a wind coming from the direction of the explosions, and my body was beginning to fry. I could feel it sizzling, though it wasn’t actually painful. Gradually I was dissolving and dying. The scene went blank, and then suddenly I was in a kind of loft or attic, on my knees on the floor, reaching down through a trapdoor and hauling people up. The feeling was beatific, almost blessed, and peaceful, and the people coming up were relieved, awakening from a nightmare as they emerged through the trapdoor.
That was that. In the next dream, I was at home and They came for me, to take me away (a kind of forced conscription). I was really scared. Somehow I managed to evade them, and they went away. I awoke in the morning feeling really stirred and upset. In the next dream, they came, saying that if I didn’t come with them they would take my children. This really got me. Again, I awoke feeling disturbed, anxious, traumatised.
In the fourth dream I was being chased down a street by some gun-toting thugs from the security forces. I managed to get into a big building and into an apartment where there were people I knew. I shut and locked the door behind me and we hid. There was battering on the door and eventually they got in. It was really scary. Suddenly, there was a machine gun, right there. Now, at this time I was going through my training with Tibetan Lamas, and taking hold of a machine gun was totally incongruous and out of keeping for me. But I levelled it at them and killed them all! The others looked at me with a sense of both shock and relief. I woke up next morning feeling wonderful, on top of things and irradiated with light and a can-do attitude.
My soul was clearly teaching me something. Within five years I was to take on a strong leadership role, and one thing you must get over, to take on such a role, is your self-doubt over your worth as a leader, and your fear of standing alone against what can sometimes be seemingly overwhelming opposition (this is an issue for dear Donald and Kamala right now!). Within a few decades I was to stand amidst gunfire, and with no machine gun (or blue helmet), and a surprising calm-headedness.
On occasional hot moments in Palestine I used to say out loud, and totally neutrally, “Ah, we have a situation“. This at first was regarded by Palestinian friends as a strange yet forgiveable thing, yet after a while they started cracking up with it because it would completely dissolve their panic and insert them solidly into the present moment, so that they would be less reactive and more aware of what they were doing and what their options were. Some years later, I heard that this had become something of a meme that had gone around, and even Abu Mazen had used it in a speech.
But I think the main teaching was this. When you receive the call you need to swallow hard, muster your energies, stand up and do it. Because there are also big and frightening consequences to not doing it. Most of the world’s ills arise from what has not been done, at the time when it was necessary. And it’s probably what you’re here for yourself – to stand up, within the sphere of your own reality-bubble. Most people don’t get seemingly dramatic callings like the ones I’ve recounted – it’s just the story of my karma unfolding – but we all get called in some direction or other, even if it is ‘just’ growing cabbages, planting trees, or ‘just’ raising kids, or caring for the old lady down the road. It’s often quite specific, even designed for us – or we were designed for it.
In 2015 I supported a young Gazan male nurse in escaping Gaza. He was one of the boat people crossing from Turkiye to Greece at that time. He managed to get to Belgium and, discovering a Gazan nurse, they snapped him up quickly. Fast-forward to 2022 and he died, working in a Covid ICU ward in Brussels, far from home. Yet, tragic as this was, he was doing what he was here to do, and he was good at it. He had followed his calling. I think Allah will have looked after him and he’ll have done well in heaven. He might well have achieved far more for the progress of his soul than staying in Gaza or having a comfortable life of freedom in Belgium. We cannot know, but it’s likely. I hope we’ll meet again.
So that’s what came up for me today. See you at the meditation.
Love from me. Palden.
The photos are from Bannau Brycheiniog or the Brecon Beacons in Wales.
Current meditation times, on Sundays:
UK 7-7.30pm GMT
W Europe 8-8.30pm
E Europe and the Levant 9-9.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm
PST North America 11-11.30am
It’s funny how, even though I, with a small group of people, started the Oak Dragon family back in 1986-7, I find it really moving now, approaching forty years later and in my current rather decrepit state, to be part of this family.
It had started with the Glastonbury Camps that friends and I ran between 1984 and 1986, which were the prototype for the then-new camps model, which was to launch itself more properly in 1987, the year of the Harmonic Convergence, as the Oak Dragon Camps (Ddraig Dderw in Welsh).
I’d started Glastonbury Camps quite spontaneously, and many Glastafarians joined in, but by 1986 the whole team was burning out – the camps had been so momentous, moving and transformative that they couldn’t continue as they were. Some of the team came to me saying ‘We can’t continue – we have lives to live‘ and this was true. This was the Thatcher period in Britain, when there were pressures to be economically viable and to get organised. Charitable, good-hearted voluntarism was seen to be a mug’s game and there was ‘no such thing as society’ – thus spake Margaret, the handbagging thunderbolt witch.
So, wondering what to do next, I went to my hideaway of the time in Snowdonia, North Wales, to contemplate things and pray for an answer. One wet day I went up alone into the mountains, stripped naked and prayed from the bottom of my soul for an answer. Was it all over? Or was there a next step to make? I stood there, sopping wet and shivering by a rushing mountain stream, with the rain washing my tears down. I waited. And it came.
“Oak Dragon“. That’s what came up. Oak Dragon what? Oak Dragon Camps… Within a long-seeming hour I had it, a complete vision. I went back down to dry out by the fire, digest all this and write down the details that had erupted. Thus began the Oak Dragon, with our first season of seven camps in 1987. It was somehow wanted and needed. The very first camp was a Beltane Camp in West Penwith, Cornwall. Ironically, it was just one mile from where I now live, and hosted by the same farmer landlord that I have now – and he and I didn’t twig that until a few months after I’d moved onto the farm in 2012! Well, magic happens. Out of these early camps many other camps organisations started, some of which are dead and gone and some of which are nowadays quite big, taking different formats and serving different interest-groups.
I left Oak Dragon around 1990, myself rather burned out, returning to camps only in 1993 and 1999. I was getting on with other things (such as writing the book The Only Planet of Choice and starting the Hundredth Monkey Project). The Oak Dragon carried on, going through its highs and lows and a deeper bonding and group identity-forming process. A family is something that is bonded on a deeper level than an ordinary group or community of interest – it’s something you don’t leave.
Three years ago they invited me back. I’ve attended camps as a grateful recipient, not as an organiser. It’s great leaving all that to others and leaving the plans and decisions to their wisdom! But there’s something new about the camps that wasn’t present in the 1980s: there’s a core to this family of people that knows how to do it and what needs to be done, and it doesn’t need an organisational team as before. Not only this, but the younger ones are taking it on, giving it new life and pushing it forward – and the oldies are not foot-dragging either because this is regeneration.
At the camp we (mainly the women) did an overnight a Rite of Passage for two sixteen-year old women who had been formerly toddlers and children in earlier camps. These are people who will take things on into future times, as the Millennials grow older. The women took them through initiations and teachings in the evening, the two slept out alone in a neighbouring field, and they were welcomed back as women next day – dressed replendently in red and blessed by the whole family, young and old. Would that more youngsters could have such initiatory treatment.
A camp isn’t just a camp – it’s a process and a journey. Short-term guests are allowed in on the first weekend and then the gates close. We are off-planet, out in space, switched off for the following six days, building the patterns for another world and being a family in its own space. You join the family by coming to a camp, and you may return whenever you wish. One couple, former regulars, hadn’t been to camp for eight years, and it was like coming home for them.
There was a forging workshop and a wood-bodging workshop throughout the camp, and other things too – workshops, ceremonies, group processes and campfire circles – evolved over the years and forming the particular character of the Oak Dragon. There’s no entertainment except what we create – even so, the cabaret at the end, put together by participants, is spontaneously comical.
Something really interesting happened. As the camp progressed, we were oblivious to what was going on around us in Britain – riots, dismay and dissension. I wrote the following observations to the Dragons after the camp…
I remember saying to a couple of people early on in the camp how harmonious and calm the camp was – and when would the trouble start? Often there’s something big that comes up – weather, a group issue, one or a few people going into a big process… but this camp just glided through, and we even had good weather in the take-down day!
I said to someone how the camp had started with the Sun in Leo and the Moon in Aries (both fire signs, not easygoing), and a few other potentially wobbly issues were hovering around (such as the buildup of a Mars-Jupiter conjunction in Gemini – good for arguments and polarisation). So I was half-expecting something erupting. Yet it didn’t hit us – in terms of friction, disruption or mega-wobbles.
Meanwhile, the rest of the country was catching fire. At the camp, I had no idea such a thing could be happening, and no one else seemed to either, to my knowledge.
There’s something interesting about this. Ages ago I picked up an interesting observation from somewhere. Speaking in terms of personal growth, it said that first you get problems to face within yourself. Then, when you’ve progressed with that you manifest people around you presenting problems for you to work through and resolve. Then, when you’ve harmonised your relationships to some degree, you manifest issues in the wider world (society, the environment, the state of the world).
I found myself wondering whether this is a commentary on Oak Dragon, as a beingness, a family and stream of consciousness in its own right, with a reality-bubble of its own that has some continuity and character to it. The growth levels at the camp were, in my observation, pretty good, and we weren’t particularly in denial about or blocking off the darker ways of the world around us.
Yet our nation had caught fire, while we seemed to be a pool of relative calm – and quite oblivious to what was happening around us. We had few quakey internal rumblings, few problems with the surrounding world, yet we manifested trouble around us in the wider world – and we were distinctly not part of it.
It says something about creating our reality. Also about reality-bubbles that all of us live in – we humans live on one planet yet in very different worlds. When those worlds fail to interact healthily, there’s trouble.
I also wondered whether, unwittingly, we were balancing out the collective psyche of Britain and the British. We were probably not the only ones who were unconsciously or semi-consciously doing this. Anger, oppo and polarisation were happening on the streets of the ‘United’ Kingdom while also calm, creative and harmonious realities were being experienced in the Oak Dragon world, on the same islands, at the same time. Perhaps the island reality-bubble of Britain as a whole fixed things so that such a balancing could occur.
Perhaps the collective psyche of the Brits was fixing a few things.
I was digging around in some old writings about the camps and found this description from thirty years ago. It described of one of the magical initiations we’ve done at Oak Dragon:
In 1994, at the Myth and Magic Camp, we planned a magical heist for the climax day of the camp. The idea was that the nine teachers at the camp would dress up and station themselves at different points along a pathway through a limestone gorge some miles away, presenting to unsuspecting campers on a magic journey a series of choices and situations representing stages along the spiritual path.
Luckily, we worked out a ‘plan B’, in case of inclement weather. Inclement weather indeed came, so we staged it at the camp site. Each teacher occupied a geodesic dome, dressed up. Campers were released in ones and twos at five-minute intervals, to follow a trail from dome to dome, meeting an archetypal encounter at each stage.
So there I was, acting as the last stage in the line. By the time they reached me, people had already met a fairy, a sky-god, a druid, a goddess, an oracle or two, and I was a wizard – Merlin to some, a Mongolian or a space-being to others. I was dressed in my Hungarian pointed hat and Chinese dragon robes, meditatively transmogrified into an archetype-rich, altered state of being.
On announcing themselves at the door and being invited in, they encountered me in my arcane state, addressing them. I said: ‘The road is long, and you have already travelled far. The journey through your many lives has seemed like an infinity. There have been many turns of the way, and there are many more turns yet to come. I am going to ask you a question, and the question is this: when you have completed your life, you are preparing to pass on and you are looking back over your life at all you have seen and all you have done, what is it that you most would like to have done before your days are over?‘. For youngsters, I asked them what they would like to do when they were adults.
The pauses were sometimes long. One boy wanted to be a sky-diver, and another a good father. A girl wished to be a famous film-star and another wished to plant lots of trees. One grown-up wanted to resolve things with his father, and another wished to travel the world. Some wished to prove that they could truly be a good person, and others sought peace of mind. Another wished for a child.
They then, to their surprise, received a florid and fullsome blessing through me, giving them full permission to entertain and achieve their wish. ‘And when you are there and you have attained what you seek, just remember that you asked for it. And you received.‘ Already bowled over by their previous encounters, this one finished them off!
This kind of special fairytale occasion, a journey into dreamtime, changes the patterning of people’s lives. Even if, back in Manchester, Massachusetts or Milton Keynes, they bury the occasion in busy amnesia, the experience stays there, lodged beneficently in deeper consciousness, acting as a seed of future growth and awakening. It makes a difference. It doesn’t go away.
Nowadays we are rarely genuinely blessed or initiated into new realities. We often make do with the lives we get. We struggle on without encouragement, seeking to rise to our true greatness. Through experiences such as these people are deeply healed of woe, fear and self-limitation. And a splendid time is had by all – kids and adults, women and men, under the sun and moon, watched by trees.
I’m so happy to have been part of all this. I’m so grateful to return to Oak Dragon in the closing chapter of my life.
Whether physically I have what it takes to do another camp next year, I really do not know – it was hard on my bony body this year, though the spiritual compensations lifted me up. At the back end of life a growing number of ‘last occasions’ comes your way and there’s something poignant and beautiful about that – including the more sad and regretful last occasions. But it comes to the best of us, sooner or later.
And that, my good friends, is life. And we shall see. Life also gets compressed into an evolving nowness in the closing chapter, and everything becomes contingent on all sorts of other things – such as dropping off your perch. With a smile. Or living to see another day – sometimes with a pleasant sense of surprise.
With love, Palden
Hub site: http://www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Cancer audiobook: http://www.palden.co.uk/boneblessings.html
Palestine Audiobook: http://www.palden.co.uk/bethlehemblog.html
Audio Archive: http://www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html
Oak Dragon Camps: https://oakdragon.org
The story of the camps (my rendering): http://www.palden.co.uk/camps.html
PS: on Facebook, instead of sending a friend request, please ‘follow’ me. I’m at my friends maximum, needing to reserve the rest for people I know or am likely to meet, or unless you write to me to introduce yourself, or you live locally to me. Thanks.
I’m away for two weeks, at the Oak Dragon Camp (I was its founder nearly 40 years ago) and speaking at the Glastonbury Symposium – so you won’t be hearing from me for a while! Recently I’ve been rendering my cancer book Blessings that Bones Bring into audiobook format, and that’s now complete.
Just in case you were desperate for something to read, haha, here’s a chapter from my 2012 book O Little Town of Bethlehem – Christmas in God’s Holy Land (here). Compared with the situation now, Palestine in 2011 was much better but, even then, people were beset with issues to deal with, and this excerpt gives some examples. It’s also about one of the key activities a foreigner visiting Palestine needs to be willing to do – listening. Bearing witness.
When I went to town to check out various friends, many of them were gloomy, beset with problems. It was one of those days. Each person had their own particular issues, but they all add up to a morass of collective difficulty which the customary Palestinian good humour cannot penetrate.
Naturally, our perception of life is made up of an interaction of circumstances and our feelings about them, and these are two rather different things. For Palestinians living under occupation, the circumstances side of the equation bites and scrapes harder than for most people across the world. Especially since the occupiers deliberately go about making life difficult, complex and insecure for the occupied, in military, administrative, legal and quite everyday ways. This is what Jeff Halper, a critical Israeli thinker, calls ‘the matrix of control’. The ultimate goal is to make Palestinians submit to Israeli rule, give up, go quiet and preferably leave the country.
But they don’t give up, despite the muddy mire of problems they can be beset with – or perhaps it’s a dust-storm where it’s impossible to see far and sand gets in the engine and all the moving parts. Palestinians have a life-philosophy which is admirable. But some days they go down into the doldrums and they need a good moan.
That’s one of the roles of foreigners who come here: bearing witness. This often means letting Palestinians have a good moan, describing to you with a full spectrum of feeling how difficult everything is. It can be quite challenging though if you have something in your own life that’s nagging you too – happily, this wasn’t the case for me today. So I was able to listen fully and, when a person ground to a halt, I could start up something that might change the context of things, so that they see the situation in a different way – for the difference between a situation and a problem lies in our state of heart and mind.
There’s a Christian grocer in town who stocks a lot of things I like, so I went to his place. While wandering around looking through the densely, intricately packed shelves, a guy comes in and starts up. I don’t understand much Arabic, but the tone of his voice translated easily – he was on a down day, overwhelmed. He and the grocer were so engaged in this man’s inventory of problems that I had to stand there patiently waiting to pay, listening too.
Little did he know, but in the process I did a little psychic healing on this man – smoothing out his aura, shifting the movement of his energy and the orientation of his aura from downward to upward and reconnecting him with his guardian angel. After a while, the grocer turned, noticed me, apologised and started totting up my buys. Suddenly, his friend said to him (it could have been), “And guess what…?”. The grocer grunted, to say go on, and the guy burst out laughing and said something. The grocer turns to me and said, “He tell me all these problem, and now he say his wife just got pregnant again – fifth. He say only now. Why not before, eh?”. Well, looks like the healing did something to loosen things up.
With goods in hand, I wandered off down Faraheih Street, turned left through the market, to be how-arre-youed and wherre-you-frommed by stall-keepers as I strolled past. Mid-afternoon, they were all sitting around wondering whether to close for siesta.
I’m always amazed that being British is regarded positively by Palestinians, despite what we’ve done in the past. Announcing Britaniyya to them always seems to elicit a good response. Perhaps they think we’re less bad than others, therefore good. Just as well. A Danish guy I met a few days ago had complained that Denmark is notorious for offensive cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, and he often had to prove to people that he didn’t agree with it.
Down the passageway and some steps leading from the market I was accosted by a sweet-seller. He asked how arre you, as they do, and I joked back hamdulillah – thanks God (I’m okay). It was a joke because, last time I was here, I couldn’t manage responses in Arabic. He has a hand-pushed cart parked at the top of the main steps down toward the Omar Mosque and Manger Square. Palestinian sweets are gooey, rich, soft cakes of honey, almond and who knows what, often eaten by dropping a cubic inch of the stuff straight into the mouth and swilling it down with coffee. I got some, in order to augment my weight-gain programme. Yes, folks, one of the ways I differ from many people is that I’m thin and bony, so I actually have to eat calorie-rich things to gain weight.
I then proceeded down the steps and met up with a shopkeeper I know who was sorely troubled by the lack of trade. The pilgrim and tourist business is down and the Israelis have creamed off most of the business. Most visitors come in shepherded groups for just a few hours in an Israeli coach from Jerusalem, visiting the Church of the Nativity and an approved souvenir shop, from which 30% of the takings are paid to the Israeli tour operators. Then they’re shuttled back to Jerusalem. The Israelis have niftily captured the income from Bethlehem’s pilgrimage tourism.
Independent travellers who arrive here – not exactly in floods – tend to run on a tight budget, so they aren’t big consumers. Norwegians seem to be the richest at present. Instead of money, these visitors mainly bring ‘witness’ and interaction, a social currency, worth perhaps more than money, if truth be known.
The shopkeeper complained that he had made only 100 shekels today – about £20 or $30. He thrust tea before me and carried on. Usually he has quite positive attitude, but this time he was struggling. I let him run with it, and it did him good. It does give them some assurance to be able to offload like this and to gain some understanding from another person – it helps them objectivise their lives.
Then I went round the corner to a café run by Adnan’s brother. I had falafel, hummus, pitta, salad and sage tea, as a late lunch. In came Adnan, plonking himself straight down and huffing. He starts up. His story is always complex, but he’s in the tourist souvenir trade too and he’s almost bankrupt. I know some of the things he could do to improve things (such as trading on eBay), and I have told him about them, but he doesn’t get it. He perpetually hopes things will work well next time, things will get better, but they don’t. Or someone else is making his life difficult and he wishes they would stop. So I usually let him blurt out his complaints, in the hope that some relief of pressure might lead him to form new conclusions.
The souvenirs he sells are lovely – especially if you’re a Christian. Lovely hand-carved olive-wood effigies of Jesus, Mary, the saints and the Nativity. Bedouin carpets, lovely Arabic dresses, inlaid boxes – all made within a few miles of here. But they don’t sell, the overheads are high, the checkpoints scare visitors away and, if your spirits are down, it’s a disaster.
Round and round in loops he goes. Adnan requires perseverance because he’s quite resistant. It’s the world that’s wrong, not him. But he appreciates the listening ear anyway, and soon we were talking about other things – mainly about the carpets his grandmother had diligently woven throughout her life, adorning the floors of many of his vast Bedouin family’s network of homes. Well, that’s that done. Now to see Jack, down in the Christian Quarter.
Jack is not a complainer, but he is in a sorry state. One year ago he had a major accident at work, fracturing his skull, haemorrhaging his brain and breaking some ribs. Then his wife, who had suffered MS, had died. Understandably, he had plummeted. His capacity to work is now much reduced, though he carries on all the same. He’s 52 and worn out. He works as a security guard for UNRWA, and he also clears out old wells and builds walls for a living. His spare-time obsession is billiards – his friends come round to play. He’s a real character – altruistic, humorous, maverick, but nowadays much faded. I cannot tell whether this is a low patch of life, or whether he’s on his way to dying. Bless him.
But he doesn’t moan. In fact, we started up a really good conversation, but it was still about his difficulties. He talked about how, at the bottom of some wells – many of them centuries old, some millennia old – there is no air and he has sometimes nearly suffocated. In a few others there are underground toxic flows of petrol or sewage, which he refuses to work with. At his work at UNRWA a few days ago, he was caught sleeping – not a good thing for a security guard – and given a warning. But they seem to like him too.
But then he started up telling his stories of former days. There was one time he took his wife to an Israeli hospital without having a permit. He managed to get her in by a combination of charm, bluster and play-acting and then, having sat with her for hours, made his way home. But in the lift he had a heart attack – he was found lying there by a doctor, who rushed him to a ward and saved him. When Jack came to, the doctor came to visit him and simply said, with a wry smile, “Next time, get a permit if you’re going to have a heart attack, won’t you?” The doctor fixed him a lift to a checkpoint, to get back home. You do indeed get remarkable acts of compassion in this strangely conflicted country.
Jack’s son came in, looking really annoyed – fuming, in fact. I understood he had had an argument with his sister in his grandmother’s house next door. He’s 21 and quite a special young guy – plays Liszt and Chopin on the piano and works with computer hardware – but he had recently flunked his mathematics at college and, for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom, could not re-take the exam. Which meant he couldn’t go to university, and they couldn’t afford it anyway. So he was in a state.
He sat there listening – his English is good – and then he perked up when he told me about the free trip he had had with the Salesian Brothers (a Catholic order) to see the Pope in Spain, visiting Italy on the way. He was selected from a large crowd of applicants and he was away for three weeks. He’s a Sagittarian, our Shukry, and travelling the world is what he would love to do – but he’s imprisoned behind walls instead, living in a world-famous city, Bethlehem, that’s strangely isolated. If I could wave a magic wand I’d love to fix him three years at the Royal College of Music in London. He deserves it, and his frustration at getting nowhere in life was probably the underlying cause of his argument with his sister.
Jack was falling asleep. The drugs the doctor had given him to deal with the after-effects of his brain haemorrhage last year make him drowsy. I told him to get to bed instead of forcing himself to stay awake. “Yes, doctor”, he replied, and we parted company. I made my way out, walking back through the narrow stone streets of the Old Town to Manger Square. Another shopkeeper tried waylaying me but, by this time, I was tired and I didn’t want tea. I wanted a taxi home.
But even then, the taxi-driver, whom I knew from previous years, had a tale to tell. One of his children had died – I think about a month ago. Of what, I don’t know, because the word he gave me was in Arabic. In limited English he said he had not had enough money for the hospital. I could tell by the tone of his voice he was cut up about it, probably feeling like a failed father.
When we got to the school at Al Khader, I asked him how much he wanted for the trip. Thirty, he said – the evening rate (usually it’s twenty shekels). I only had 25 in change, and otherwise only a 200 shekel note (£40), which he couldn’t change. So I dug around in my bag, leafing through my carefully-stashed collection of Euros, Swiss Francs, Pounds, Kronor and Dinars to find him a Jordanian ten dinar note. He smiled. This was worth 50 shekels. “God bless you, Mister Balden. I like you. Thanks God. Ma’assalam.” The only trouble is, I’m not a banker or an oil sheikh, but it was worth it – even a bit of money can raise the spirits sometimes.
Sometimes I wonder what good I bring by being here. It’s as if the mountain of life-obstacles people experience in this place is too large for someone like me to make a difference. But then, as the Dalai Lama is quoted to have said: “If you think you’re too small to make a difference, try spending a night in a room with a mosquito”.
With love, Palden
http://www.palden.co.uk
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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