A podcast about inner meditative work to help the world.
A marketplace in Hebron, Palestine, in 2012
This is a recording of a talk I gave in 2022 in Avebury, about the ins and outs of inner-working with crises, wars and acute situations around the world. Places such as Iran may seem a long way away, but it is on the same planet as we, and crises happening elsewhere are very much a part of our own lives.
On the inner planes there is no distance at all – only the psycho-social distance, the uncloseness that we create ourselves. Those people over there are just like us.
So this is about world work. There is lightworking – working with light beings to bathe our planet in healing vibes – and there is world work, which is about getting inside critical situations to work more surgically, bringing whatever is needed to a situation to help it resolve itself constructively.
I’ve done quite a lot of this over the years, in groups large and small, and on my own. In this talk I share experiences of what can happen when we apply ourselves to this kind of thing.
If you are vexed by events unfolding around the world, this is one way to be involved. Ever thought of flying alongside a missile and tipping it so that it lands in a harmless place? Ever thought of ministering empathically to the needs of souls devastated by floods or bombing? Or standing alongside a mother who has just watched her family die?
Ever thought of sitting alongside a fighter to try to understand what drives him and how he feels about life? And then to witness a woman fighter (Kurdish or Burmese, perhaps) and what drives her?
In retrospect this is one of the most meaningful activities of all that I’ve done in my life. You can do it wherever you are. This is one of the key things I do during the Sunday meditations – working consistently and regularly with the issues of the time. I’ve learned so much from beavering away at this. Paradoxically, since becoming semi-disabled as a result of cancer, I’ve got better at it – as physical capacities have declined, inner capacities seem to have grown.
I’m reminded of George Harrison’s song, The Inner Light, adapted from the teachings of Lao Tzu. “Without going out of your door, you can know all things on Earth. Without looking out of your window, you can know the Ways of Heaven. The farther one travels, the less one knows, the less one really knows…“.
The good news is that most of the world is not at war – despite exaggerated claims by some talking heads that this is WW3. Catastrophising things doesn’t help, since it gives power to fear.
When meditating in times of war and polarisation, it is important not to take sides. If you find yourself on one side, one thing to do in meditation is empathically to explore what it is like being on the other side – whether as an ordinary person or as a combatant. Experience it, within you. Know that, despite media-driven appearances, people on the other side will not themselves be of one mind and in agreement – they will have a variety of reactions to their situation.
It’s also important not to judge things or take firm positions – such as wanting peace or cease-fires after a conflict has started. It is already too late, and often such a wish is premature, not doable.
There’s an honest question to ask yourself too. Is your wish for peace genuine and deep, or does it reflect a wish to stay inside a comfort zone of indifference?
I’d suggest two approaches that can help give focus to neutrality and peacebuilding. The first is humanitarian – working to understand and ease the suffering of people and environments on both sides, and to note your feelings when working with people on the other side, since this involves bridgebuilding, forgiveness and healing.
The second is to look for opportunities amidst disaster. Wars and the events that take place in them change many things, changing people’s lives and those of neighbourhoods and localities, in many cases permanently. Wars are crucibles of change, however cruel that may be, and such changes are not always negative. So meditate on those glimmers of light and possibility – on the longterm and the future. The past is being burned up, and not all of that destruction is regrettable.
So focus on possibilities, on lessons actually being learned – some of them really fundamental – and on planting seeds of healing and forwardness in the devastation of the moment. Infuse the collective psyche of humanity with these thoughts and visions.
While warfare as a whole is something that needs to end during the 21st Century – it is a tragic distraction from the main issues before us – it does shake things up and change things, and here lie opportunities. In our time, we need to make good use of the lessons that Life presents us with, because the main problem on Planet Earth is not change but ‘business as usual’. Normality is destroying our world, leading humanity down a path that will not solve the problems that it faces.
Bless the soldiers, fighters, terrorists and advocates of war and remember this: every act of violence arises from an unhealed wound. So we need to heal the wounds that lead humans to fight. These are personal, ancestral and collective.
Try to free up your thoughts and beliefs at times like this. Humanity needs to do this. We have a habit of entering the future facing backwards but, that way, we fall over more easily.
I hope this useful. I was part of a group, the Flying Squad, working with issues such as this, and we learned a lot about approaches to meditation. We disbanded the group in 2017 after twenty years of working together (it was shrinking numbers and ageing, mainly) but, as individuals, we all still do the weekly Sunday meditation. It’s a good thing to do. We left a website behind, for the record: https://www.flyingsquad.org.uk
If you need details about the Sunday meditation, go here:
Next week, in UK and Europe, the clocks change. So, from next weekend onwards, the meditation starts an hour later in UK and EU. In other words, the meditation stays at the same actual time when the clocks change. So, if it’s 7pm this weekend, next weekend it is 8pm. Times this weekend are below.
Love from a sunny Cornwall, Palden
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Current meditation times, on Sundays: GMT: UK, Iceland, Ireland & Portugal: 7-7.30pm W Europe: 8-8.30pm E Europe, Turkiye, Israel, Palestine, Egypt: 9-9.30pm Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, UAE: 10-10.30pm Pakistan: midnight-00.30 Monday India: 00.30-01.00 Monday Oz: AEST 5-5.30am Monday NZ: 8-8.30am Monday Greenland: 5-5.30pm Brazil, Argentina, Chile: 4-4.30pm EST, Venezuela, Bolivia: 3-3.30pm CST, Colombia, Cuba, Jamaica: 2-2.30pm MST, Mexico: 1-1.30pm PST, West Coast North America 12noon-12.30pm
Having done battle with the Furies of Storm/Hurricane Goretti, and by the grace of hard-working local tree surgeons and power engineers, I’m back online and able, yet again, to elbow you about the Sunday Meditation!
Usually I do it weekly on Facebook and occasionally here on my blog. From now on I shall do this more occasionally, since I’m slowly losing my capacity to sit easily at a keyboard and activate it in a manageable way.
That is, though I sound lucid and coherent, as a meticulous Virgo and retired editor I go over and over it at least five times, and that’s getting laborious. A life of service to keyboards is slowly grinding down as finger-coordination declines and brains slowly decouple from this World of Ten Thousand Things.
But meditation is another thing, and I’ll be there, regardless, at the appointed time, whatever the weather or circumstances, at least until my passing and possibly for a while afterwards. The times are below, and if you are so moved, you are welcome to find a place to park yourself and join a holy party! And if not this week, then another week.
It’s also a good, doable and undemanding life-habit to establish, since the blessing-channel will be open and operative at 7-7.30pm GMT whatever happens. Times in other timezones are below. For me, over the last thirty years, and having had a life with little regularity to it, it has been like a cosmic timecheck – one thing that has been constant and unchanging over time, whatever is going on and wherever I have been – even in car parks, trains, deserts and cow fields. Funny, that.
It’s easy. Meditate, contemplate, be mindful, go quiet, make prayer, go inner-journeying, drop out for half an hour, and do it in your customary way. There’s no prescribed method or mantra, no sign-up and no need to be online. Just be present. I sometimes call it ‘cosmic availability’. We’re just a bunch of bright souls sitting together in inner space, at an appointed time. It amplifies the outcomes.
It is overlighted by a collective of cosmic beings I’ve worked with for decades, the Council of Nine, and if you resonate with me, then you’ll probably resonate with them. But they don’t meddle with us. They put it this way: if you meddle too much with your children you’ll drive them against you, and that is what free will is all about. So they don’t meddle – they subscribe to the Prime Directive (and that Startrek concept came from them). But they do like to support us in exercising our free will – our true and deep free will. More about them here: www.palden.co.uk/nine.html
As for times of passing, it’s funny how things go. If you’re spiritually oriented then other forces tend to take over, and the timing of death is not just a medical matter involving normal probabilities. It’s now six and also four years since I should have died, medically speaking, but here I am, and though I experience deterioration and decline of capacities and fascinating changes of viewpoint, I have no idea at all whether I have weeks, months or years ahead. This weekend my ‘perceptual age’ is in my mid-90s, though on a good day it’s 80-85ish, and my physical age is 75.
Thanks to all of you who have flown alongside over recent times, and may it continue, and may it bring benefit to you and to our benightedly shining planet. This isn’t a resignation letter but it’s always good to say things that need saying while we still can – or perhaps, when in the mood! Perhaps the Furies shook me up.
Love from me, Palden.
Current meditation times, on Sundays:
GMT: UK, Iceland, Ireland & Portugal 7-7.30pm W Europe 8-8.30pm E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 9-9.30pm Iran: 10-10.30pm Pakistan: midnight-00.30 Monday India: 00.30-01.00 Monday Oz: AEST 5-5.30am Monday NZ: 8-8.30am Monday Greenland: 5-5.30pm Brazil-Argentina: 4-4.30pm Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile: 3-3.30pm EST, East Coast North America, Cuba: 2-2.30pm CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia: 1-1.30pm PST, West Coast North America: 11am-11.30am
Yes, it’s Sunday, and the meditation continues whether or not I announce it here. You’re welcome to join me and us in this open meditation. There’s no formula, mantra or prescribed method: do it your way, as you always do or have done.
It’s a joining together of souls, to share inner space togther by entering the zone and bathing in a universal energy-stream. No need to be online – switch off your technology to be more, not less, in contact. There’s no sign-up and there are no strings.
Sometimes I can’t or don’t announce the meditation, but I’m there every week anyway.
I’m feeling rather tired of the daily round being alive, mostly alone and untouched, and of an aching body and the rather uphill climb of being lodged inside it – with a blood cancer, radiation-related, that affects my bones and various parts of this creaky body.
So, if you freely will, keep on with the meditation whether or not I announce it. For there are other people doing it with us, at the same time, in a number of countries – not just us in this group. Hidden away in the world’s quiet corners, we form a network of light, holding the world in place. Holding hands with people of all cultures, backgrounds, faiths and times. Perhaps it’s a secret conspiracy.
We’re sliding into a time of accelerated change, a growing avalanche of events. It’s good to hold the tiller and keep it steady while the world goes into an increasingly swirly, crunchy period of intensity before breakthrough comes. Which it will.
There are, in the end, no winners or losers – we’re all in this together, all humans, sharing a planet that seems big, yet it is so small.
It’s no longer a matter of taking them to our leader – there is none, despite the beliefs of many. It’s a matter of where humanity really is at, as a whole.
One thing that life has taught me is this: those times when everything seems stuck, unlikely to change and seeming to get worse and worse… these are times of prelude to change. So stay with the process.
Such times are part of the cycle of life. They come to oblige humanity to clarify what it truly, ultimately wants and is choosing to create. Then come times when the wave breaks. So getting used to riding our psychospiritual surfboards is a good thing to do. Or perhaps the only thing to do.
It falls on some of us to help bring about that change. Yet it also falls on some of us to look further, to help lay the tracks for what unfolds afterwards and as a consequence. It’s good to look further than the reflective boundaries of our own reality-bubbles.
Bless us all, and here’s a hug to you from me.
With love, Palden.
Current meditation times, on Sundays: UK, Ireland & Portugal 8-8.30pm GMT W Europe 9-9.30pm E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 10-10.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm EST, Cuba 3-3.30pm PST North America 12noon-12.30pm
You’re welcome to join the Sunday meditation – it’s good medicine. Take a break – life can do without you for half an hour.
Do your meditation, astral travelling, mindfulness, mantras or whatever, as you normally do it, together with everyone else doing the same, wherever we are. Enter the zone, an enhanced energy-field, and the wind will inflate your spiritual sails.
My current feeling is that we’re in a chickens-coming-home-to-roost phase, after the events of the last 6-9 months and more. A tide is turning. Nothing is ever permanent. This cuts all sorts of ways: both the benefits and the harms we have brought come back at us, and the overall trajectory is all to do with learning. The learning of the soul.
We’re now in a phase of collective learning (Pluto in Aquarius), of learning together as a mass of people. Our challenge is to mature as a human race, at a time when we truly need to do so. For our social subgroups, our social tribes, nations and the world are themselves beings with their own karmas, behaviours, choices and lessons to learn.
Sometimes it feels as if everything is going backwards. Gaza, Sudan, Yeman, Ukraine, Myanmar, they all seem like retrogressions, and certainly for the people in the thick of these maelstroms, they are.
But look underneath. What has been achieved in recent times has been a maturing of human values worldwide. It’s underneath, beyond the politics, the opinions, the propaganda, the polarisation. It’s historic.
It’s happening particularly in the majority world where 80% of the world’s population lives. Sadly, the Global North, including Europe, America, Russia and Japan – our time was back in the 19th-20th Centuries – are in a rather self-deluding, hubristic phase at present. We’re quite good at alienating that global majority. But people of conscience in the West are deeply unhappy with what has been happening too. It’s people of conscience who need to be the ones in power.
It concerns the matter of conflict itself and of man-made devastation and suffering. Forget this side or that side, who is right and who is wrong – conflict, polarisation and dehumanisation are themselves the problem. Humanity is growing tired of this stuff. And, strangely, exhaustion is one of the greatest of history’s peacemakers.
The sacrifices made by people oppressed by war are fuelling up the collective psyche toward an historic shift. It’s taking place deeper down. That’s where the learning is happening, and in coming times it will be tested. Humanity needs to come out of hiding, and we’re moving inch by inch toward such a time.
Do join us in the meditation. Help the world rise an inch higher. Help humanity see things from another viewpoint.
Current meditation times, every Sunday: Iceland 7-7.30pm UK & Portugal 8-8.30pm W Europe 9-9.30pm E Europe and the Levant 10-10.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 3-3.30pm PST North America 12-12.30am
I don’t always post here about the Sunday Meditation, but they continue regularly every Sunday, and here’s a reminder (should you need one).
You’re welcome to join the meditation this week – or any week – on Sunday. Times are below. We’re a loose group spread across various countries, who meditate together simultaneously. Meditate, contemplate, pray or inner-journey in the way you normally do it.
No sign-up, fees or strings – it’s a group of us sitting together, simply sharing a wish to contribute to raising the vibe of our world and helping it break through to a new level of being.
Since the eclipse the tide has changed direction. However, the powers that be, plus general habit and intertia, fail to recognise this and seek to carry on as before. This will come apart and derail at some point and the current frenzy of wars, arguments and dissonances will start unravelling. But right now it’s tentative, not a foregone conclusion.
It’s good right now to reaffirm the direction the tide is now starting to head in. It hasn’t yet picked up momentum, though events are likely to push things that way as time goes on. It’s a flow moving toward resolution and sanity, following a paroxysm of madnesses and injustices that, through their excesses, have shifted public consciousness deep down.
Gandhi-ji called it satyagraha – truth force. The power of reality to overcome delusional beliefs. Getting real. ‘Smelling the coffee’.
Current times, on Sundays: Iceland 7-7.30pm UK & Portugal 8-8.30pm W Europe 9-9.30pm E Europe and the Levant 10-10.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 3-3.30pm PST North America 12-12.30am
Pedn Vounder and Porth Curno, Penwith, Cornwall, from Treryn Dinas
SUNDAY MEDITATION
7-7.30PM GMT every Sunday (different times in different time zones – see below). You’re welcome to join. Do the meditation however you normally do it – mindfulness, prayer, visualisation or your own way, or simply being present with us.
Our purpose is to uplift our world an inch, to relieve the shadows of the past and to encourage decency and sanity in humanity’s thoughts, words and deeds.
Carn Du, Lamorna, and The Lizard in the background
This weekend we’re all at a rather historic juncture, astrologically speaking: Pluto moves into Aquarius for 15 years and, obligingly, the Sun conjuncted it today (Saturday), to give it an extra kick. It’s a change of chapter in the longer world story.
Last time Pluto changed sign (into Capricorn) we had the financial crisis of 2008 and the near-collapse of world currencies. But largely these sign-changes (ingresses) signify a change of theme, viewpoint, context and setting. Such shifts become big events when there are unexploded bombs lying around – unresolved matters from the past and trigger issues everyone hoped would go away.
In recent decades things have been steered top-down, but now it’s shifting to bottom-up – to some extent whether we like it or not. It’s less about economics and megastructures and more about people, societies, crowds and values.
Sunset at St Levan, Penwith, Cornwall
It’s a time of truth and transition. There’s a surreptitious tilting of balances, a crossing of a threshold. Warmakers currently feel trigger-happy and exempt from liability, yet something else is creeping up behind. A change of values.
A key issue now is ‘the people’ expressing their consensual view. Also it’s a question of whether ‘the people’ will be captured by propaganda and populism, waylaid by ‘bread and circuses’, or whether we express a new kind of moral-setting collective wisdom.
So it’s good at this time to put in a prayer for the people of planet Earth. We need some sanity and sensible behaviour.
Current times, on Sundays: UK 7-7.30pm GMT W Europe 8-8.30pm E Europe and the Levant 9-9.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm PST North America 11-11.30am
If at this time you’re working inwardly with Gaza (or Ukraine, or Sudan, or…), there’s not a lot we can do right now except care for people, to ease their hearts, mop up the dead and help people make the best of a hellish situation.
It’s tragic, but the bit we can do is to etch these events in the collective psyche of humanity and to help the world come to a very necessary conclusion, that this kind of thing is not part of our future.
This needs the building or reinforcing of a world consensus, deep in the heart of humanity. This isn’t as impossible as it seems since so many people are now tilting that way, many of them quietly and surreptitiously within themselves, and the real problem we face concerns what I keep quoting over and over, from the 18th C philosopher Edmund Burke…
“For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing.“
It’s arguable that, on Earth, the goodguys actually outnumber the badguys (though that’s over-simplistic and reality is more like shades of grey). Yet the energy-balances are tilted the ‘wrong’ way, giving much more apparent power to the Netanyahus and the conflict-stirrers of this world than they deserve.
Yet in the final analysis, the energy-balances actually tilt the other way.
As humans, we are mixed – there is darkness and light within each one of us. We’re challenged to examine those balances within ourselves, since the state of the world and the state of our selves are intimately connected. Buddhists call this ‘non-duality’. Christians call it ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’. I am he as you are she as you are me, and we are all together.
One of the best ways the losses and pain can be redeemed is to shine a psychic spotlight on these events, to help build up a tidal wave of awareness in the world psyche which simply says ‘May this be the defining event that makes this the last time it happens‘.
Perhaps we cannot right now save people like Gazans from their plight, but we can turn their sufferings and deaths into meaningful sacrifices for wider change.
We don’t want to set up a new conflict – this isn’t about a battle between light and darkness since both are part of reality. It’s about bringing the light and the dark into stronger relationship so that they interact properly and come to a new balance.
In personal growth this is called ‘owning our stuff’. The world needs to own its stuff.
With love, Palden
Both pictures come from Beit Lahem or Bethlehem in the West Bank, Palestine in 2011. The boy below is now a young man: I wonder what he’s thinking nowadays?
MEDITATION today, Sunday. And every Sunday, regardless, whether or not announced.
We’re in a deep time when the hidden and not-so-hidden feelings of humanity are coming up in all sorts of ways – not just around Gaza, though it does symbolise the world’s situation.
The Scorpio newmoon comes at 9.30am GMT on Monday morning. This is an angry, restive, frustrated, oppositional time (Sun, Moon, Mars, Uranus), yet underneath it there’s an exposure of human truths and motivations, powered by pain and memory from the past and a need to make a big step into a new future.
A future where humans and our heart-sensitivities prevail over horror, disaster and grief, the cruelty of explosions and the bulldozing facelessness of the Megamachine.
‘Disaster’ means ‘out of tune with the stars’. A sustainable future involves tuning back into the stars, to nature and toward our fellow humans. A harmonisation of human feeling that incorporates uncomfortable truths, healing them and bringing a turn-around in the deepest corners of the human heart.
One member of our group is close to the volcanic eruption in Iceland – even the Earth is speaking.
There will be more of this in coming times, as we face the uncomfortable truths that stand in the way of progress on our shrinking, quaking planet.
Peace is not just about cease-fires – it’s far bigger, deeper and wider.
You’re welcome to join us for half an hour (times below). Thanks for being with.
Current times, on Sundays: UK | GMT 7-7.30pm W Europe 8-8.30pm E Europe and the Levant 9-9.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm PST North America 11-11.30am
Jeez woz ‘ere. Looking over the Judaean Desert toward the Dead Sea and Jordan
Last night (Sunday 22nd October) I had a very profound meditation, more like trance – I was carried away and ‘out of it’, surfacing far later than the usual time, after more than an hour. I felt quite at peace. This morning I feel quite changed – a bit wobbly yet feeling alright too. A few thoughts came up this morning that might be of interest or value.
It’s important to remember that those who are killed in disasters like this are well dealt with. They are withdrawn before pain or horror cloud their passing. They are pulled out in micro-seconds and instantly taken into care, as appropriate to each soul. They don’t seem to experience the impact of whatever hits them or whatever is the cause of their death. If they do experience it, they are detached from it, without accruing psycho-emotional damage. They witness it (for the soul-learning therefrom) but they are put into a kind of state of grace and objectivity where they are not damaged by it. It’s a kind of fast-tracking transitional process.
I’m more concerned about the living and what they are going through.
A Palestinian dove
There are Christians in Gaza as well as Muslims – and also seculars, who are often forgotten. Many of the Christians belong to ancient pre-Catholic, pre-Orthodox churches. (By the way, Arab Christians also call God Allah – which means ‘the God’, to distinguish it from a pantheon of gods.)
Yet I find Christians can have more difficulty passing over – more of a struggle – than Muslims, who seem to have a clearer sense of returning to Allah. Perhaps Christians and Jews have more of a feeling of distance and separation from God, involving more striving, more doubt, more questioning, while Muslims seem to have more inner confidence in their relationship with Allah. Not totally, yet they seem inherently more inclined that way. Hence, perhaps it is the case that they manage dying a bit more easily. In my observation. Speaking as an aged-hippy esotericist with Buddhist inclinations.
If you’re tracking Gaza inwardly, remember the people of the West Bank and the Palestinians in Israel and Jerusalem. ‘Arab Israelis’ are 20% of the population of ‘Israel proper’ and 40% of the population of Jerusalem. Some are Christians and many are Muslims – and they’re both friendly to each other. Arab Israelis aren’t dying in numbers, but they’re going through extreme discrimination and insecurity. Meanwhile, the West Bank is simmering and in danger of boiling over.
However, as an individual, while being aware of the complexity of this situation, it’s better to do small things well than big things badly, so give attention to those aspects of this situation that you are drawn to. Between us, we’ll cover a variety of things.
A boy in Jenin. He knows the sound of flying bullets.
This is big – a paroxysm of human madness where the heat gets high and the light grows dim. Negative influences are having a field day and, to some extent, we cannot stop this and must let the fire burn out. We cannot really affect what actually happens (the forces at play are big and complex), but the secret lies in seeing if we can flip, ease or assist the way it happens, so that there are glimmers of light, more opportunities for redemptive things to happen amidst a disaster.
There’s a lot of opinion and propaganda flying around. Well, in the ‘fog of war’, everyone is right and everyone is wrong. So take note of what people say and understand what lies behind it for them, while also observing your own responses, biases and predilections. Don’t necessarily block off from it, but try to avoid buying into the frenzy. Form judgements slowly. This is a battle of thoughts and feelings, intermixed with anger, and it’s good to try to hold that perspective.
It is possible to hold such a perspective while still having your own personal leanings – if, for example, you are Jewish, or you empathise with Arabs, or you have friends on one or both sides, or whatever. It is possible to run these in parallel, at least for the duration of this madness-epidemic. It’s an awareness exercise.
Barr al-Khalil or the Judaean Desert
This part of the world is often called ‘the Holy Land’. Yet holiness manifests itself there in emphatically unholy, paradoxical terms. It is a magnified microcosm of the whole planet, like a crucible, and Earth’s core issues are all present there. It’s a very small patch of land, the same size as Wales, Albania or New Jersey, in which there is immense complexity, intensity and confusion.
Still, there’s a lot of light there, and the contrast makes the issues so much starker. As a microcosm, what happens there affects everywhere else far more than its size and population would otherwise suggest. It has a similar population to Tajikistan, Togo, Sierra Leone, Laos, Austria, Portugal and Greece, Virginia or Washington state.
The situation in Is-Pal is very much affected by influences from elsewhere – not just military and economic but much deeper, more profound and hidden.
This includes positive influences too: there has been no shortage of Native American medicine wheels, Tibetan pujas, Bah’ai prayers and interfaith ‘encounters’ in this land, and while I was there I met amazing people from all over – even Siberia, Indonesia and the Amazonas. Amongst Israelis and Palestinians there are amazing people. Do not fall for the idea that this is just a simple two-sided battle of hearts and minds – it is multiplex, and the quality of souls in the ‘holy land’ is surprisingly high.
Young peacemakers from a variety of countries, with the mayor of Al Aqaba (who was injured in the first intifada in the late 1980s – he spent ten years in Israeli jail too)
To some extent we must let it play out, and to some extent we can bring some relief, space and blessing to this conflagration. This is a classic high-magnitude soulquake. Above all, stay steady. Keep returning to centre. Stay benign and well-wishing. If you get steamed up and in a mess, go take a walk, get some space and let the knots within you unravel – and take that relieving walk on behalf of those who cannot.
As Pluto enters Aquarius, we’re entering at least 15 years of ‘the battle for the hearts and minds of humanity’. This conflict is one such situation and there will be more, so get used to it and try to work with it. Because it is necessary. As is the case with Is-Pal right now, many of the world’s problems arise from issues we have not tackled and sorted out before. Chickens are coming home to roost in droves, in every department of life and every country. Issues are being brought to our awareness through the events manifesting in our time. These are the material through which we work out these issues.
There will come a point in coming decades when we get to The Big Issue. In this sense we are being given a gift, a collective training, through being given escalating waves of crisis to face. We’re being loosened up and forced to think, to see things in different ways from before, and from a larger perspective.
Palestinian kids on the whole have good fathers
In this sense, something right is happening here – we’re at a ‘never again’ point. This isn’t about cease-fires: this is about ending war and oppression, historically, and events like this will repeat until we get it and do it.
Oh, and by the way, put in a prayer for people in the UN and NGO sectors, from all over the world, who represent a neutral, global viewpoint in the conflict, and who take the strain in very practical ways. For some of them, it’s at great risk to themselves and, for others, it’s round the clock, every hour of the day and night. Stressful and often unthanked – they’re holy warriors.
With love, Palden.
Marwan Barghouti, regarded as Palestine’s Mandela. He’s been in Israeli jail for the last 20 years and they’re likely to keep him there. A mural on the separation wall at Qalandia, West Bank
In the 1990s I ran some meditation camping retreats called the Hundredth Monkey Project (M100). We worked in a circle of 70-80 people with world issues. We didn’t prescribe meditative methods but, to help people get oriented and give them ideas, a method was suggested as a basis to work with. If this interests you, it’s here: www.palden.co.uk/cs06-m100meditation.html
If you’re a member of a group working with issues such as these, then you might be interested in this material about talking-stick processes: www.palden.co.uk/cs07-talkingstick.html
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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