podcasts – Notes from the Far Beyond

The Slow Demise

of a new age pontificator

I’m moving towards the end of six decades of public speaking and teaching. I feel it in my aching bones and sluggish brains – what’s left of them. My synapses have run almost enough marathons for this lifetime. But I think I’ll last until the end of this year, inshallah. So I’m going to do a few talks and classes during the rest of 2026. That is, if people invite me, and if it’s doable.

I was thinking recently about my capacity earlier in life to hold and convey vastnesses of information and big, wide perspectives. In my audio archive there are talks from thirtyish years ago, and some of that stuff surprises me now. Gosh, was that me? Was it in this life or another? The audio archive is here: https://www.palden.co.uk/audio-archive.html

I’ve always been rather a polymath, covering a range of subjects. A typical hyper-focused Aspergers type, I became a veritable expert in each subject I took on, and subject to occasional bursts of genius. But that’s what I did in mid-life, and now I’m rather a worn out, ponderous old hippy veteran who’s seeing things in more of a reflective way. More transdimensional. But I still have a few more things to share.

I’m doing a talk in Penzance as part of the Golowan Festival around summer solstice, courtesy of an old friend and neighbour, Na Nook. (Info: The Cornish Sacred Landscape.) I’ll be holding forth on the prehistoric society of West Penwith in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.

This is about the ancients’ worldview, their optic, their magic and their society, as demonstrated in the ancient sites they left behind. That’s fascinating, though what’s most important is that we need to learn from the ancients – it’s growing in relevance today. I’m really happy with the discoveries I’ve made about Penwith’s ancient sites in the last fifteen years. This is a kind of final statement of where I’ve come to on that matter.

As usual for me, it’ll take 20-30 years for people to really get what I’m talking about – being ahead of the times has been both a blessing and a bane in life. Hence, I’m leaving an extensive online archive which, I hope, will stay intact and available for at least thirty years! Perhaps its time will come. In the archive there’s some interesting stuff from the 1990s – some of you might enjoy Paldywan Kenobi’s Millennial Master Class from 1995.

At the JustLiveCamp at Morvah, in Penwith, Cornwall, 23–29 May, a community camp in sacred Cornwall, I’ll be giving a talk about quoits, stone circles and cliff sanctuaries. Chun Quoit is just up the hill from the camp, and I’ll happily transport those who are present on a journey into the Neolithic, 5,000 years ago, to connect with those times – the much-forested times when Chun Quoit and Chun Castle were first built.

If I can, I hope to make a trip around parts of Britain during this year, to see old friends and haunts. As you might gather, my health and mental acuity are approaching a stage where making coherent talks is becoming less possible, but if there are invitations to speak, and if it’s doable (I have to be brought by a driver-minder) then I’ll do my best!

I hope to be able to keep on with podcasts – they’re still doable. Blogs are more difficult because my fingers no longer work well. A lot of people think voice recognition programmes are a solution but, no, they take so much re-editing and correction work that I find they don’t necessarily help. Besides, written English is a little different from spoken English.

Perhaps I need a digital assistant – someone living nearby with networking and literacy skills who would like to manage my online process as I pass away. To the right person this could be really interesting, since I have a large archive of material which can easily be recycled. We shall see. Magic happens – and sometimes it doesn’t, and something else happens instead!

Anyway, here’s a new podcast about ancient sites. I pose the simple question, why do people like visiting ancient sites? We need to look at this question. We need to be honest about a few things. I believe we need to get a bit more serious about ancient sites and what they mean for us now. It’s here:

All things being well, my penultimate book, Shining Land – the ancient sites of West Penwith and what they say about megalithic civilisation, might come out in printed form before long. It already exists in digital and audiobook format, and it’s here: https://www.palden.co.uk/shiningland/

My final book, Blessings that Bones Bring, is going through a review and hopefully will emerge as a second edition by the end of the year. Or sometime – in Cornwall we say ‘dreckly‘. Clare, one of my helper-angels, is assisting with that. It’s made up of re-edited cancer-related extracts from my cancer blog.

It gives the inside story about being a spiritually-oriented cancer patient, and about cancer as a spiritual path and process – a path of awakening, acceptance and completion. As I say somewhere in the book, doctors saved my life and healers gave me a new life – and this is how it has been.

Everything that begins and is born eventually comes to an end. This is the nature of life. This is our learning. We come here to master this. It’s all in the grand scheme of things and, guess what, it’s a training for a greater life. Yes, folks, there’s further to go.

Just remember: you are on a journey, and this life in a physical body, on a dense, spinning and rather troubled planet, is but a stage along that path.

Oh, and while we’re here, I invite you to join me and a widely-spread group of shining souls in the Sunday Meditation, any and every Sunday. Come and waste half an hour with us, for a homoeopathic dose of infinity.

Whether or not you do so, please put in a prayer for all those people round the world whose lives are being devastated by the military actions of fucking assholes who believe they can bend people to their will and their geopolitical delusions by bombing hell out of them. Both the bombers and the bombed are to be pitied, each for their own reasons, and may the 21st Century be the final century in which this kind of insanity is permitted to happen.

Yes, permitted. You can go on as much as you like about Illuminati, Reptilians, Bilderbergers, Oligarchs or any Them you can name, but, in the end, it is we, humanity, who permit all this madness to happen. It is in our hands. We can do it. It has to be done.

With love, Palden

BTW: I was given the nickname Paldywan Kenobi in 1986 by a boy, then aged about eight, in a rather deep, hot and heavy talking-stick sharing circle at the time of Chernobyl, and the name kinda stuck. He stood there with the stick before him like knight holding a medieval standard, uttering words of power that I can’t remember but I’ll never forget. He’s William Cartwright, nowadays a rock musician in Glastonbury. This is where children become our teachers. And our parents.

World Work

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…“.

It’s here on my site:

https://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

or on Spotify:

With love, Palden

Amidst the Chaos and Dismay

Bombs are falling, strongmen are flouncing their stuff and the Megamachine happily strafes another family. It looks as if everything is going wrong.

In a way, it is, though not quite. These are the growing pains of the global community. We are learning how not to do it. And there’s more going on underneath.

Perhaps you could call this psycho-spiritual geopolitics. Or parapolitics.

I wrote this piece in 2003 on the buildup to the Iraq War and it’s pertinent to give it another spin as the Iran War unfolds. It’s an extract from my 2003 book ‘Healing the Hurts of Nations‘.

That’s what this is about. The unconscious pain, guilt and shadows in the psyches of nations, which cause them to act as they do. And what we need to do to deal with our divisiveness and wars.

With sound collected from the birds of Grumbla in Cornwall, on an early February morning this year, 2026.

Love, Palden

It’s here:

https://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

or here on Spotify (also on Apple and Google):

Old Blighty

Britain: Librator and Oppressor

A short audio history of the Isles of Britain – in one hour flat.

We Brits, we’re proud of our history but most of us just know snippets about the Romans, 1066, Henry VIII and World War Two.

Let me take you on a 6,000 year journey to see the forming of a nation.

It’s the story of an island people and their gifts and tribulations, and a succession of periods, phases, invasions, migrations, ups and downs.

It’s not just about kings, battles and acts of parliament – the usual stuff dished up as history. It’s about the collective experience of the British, the effect we’ve had on the world and the way this story affects us now.

It’s a chapter from my 2003 book Healing the Hurts of Nations. Whether or not you’re British, you might find this interesting.

Love, Palden

It’s here:
https://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

or here on Spotify (it’s on Google and Apple too):

Late Life

Sooner or later, it hits us – old age.

For people of my generation this can be a shock – we weren’t prepared for this. You get creaky. You can’t handle things you used to be able to do.

Gravity gets heavier, bodily frailties set in, people forget you and doctors start taking over your life.

But there’s something special about this last stage of life – it’s a chance to complete the story of our lives and bring things to some sort of conclusion. If we ignore this, there can be quite a lot of baggage to carry into the afterlife.

This is about the deepest and potentially the richest time of our life-cycle, when we can advance psycho-spiritually in ways that, earlier in life, we used to pay large amounts for, going on courses and retreats and doing snazzy practices.

I can’t chop logs and climb hills like I used to, but another mobility has arisen instead, deep down inside.

Getting old is about growing wiser, not getting stiff, conservative and grumpy.

It’s here:

or here: https://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

With love, Palden

Making a Difference

This is a short talk I gave recently in Penzance, Cornwall, during a Palestine-support event.

Many of us get caught up in the big issues around Palestine, often paying a lot of attention to our own countries’ or international politics and inadvertently forgetting actual Palestinians in places like Gaza. Anyway, the politics is a nightmare that’s going nowhere anytime soon.

This is about making friends with an actual Gazan, taking a person-to-person approach. It can have a bigger effect that you might at first imagine. And the friendship and benefit goes both ways.

You can also find it on my podcast page at https://palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

In the talk I recommend a website run by Gazan young people: www.wearenotnumbers.org – check it out.

Thanks to Gershon Baskin of Jerusalem – a good-hearted Israeli – for a quote from his recent writing. Well done Adam Stout and Alison Dhuanna for organising the event – and thereby raising 600 GBP to help a few Gazans.

A correction: to get out of Gaza costs $5,000, and it is paid to the Egyptians at Rafah Crossing, who pay the Israelis, and both take their cut. It’s just as bad, whatever the excuse and whoever does it – exploiting people in need.

With love, Palden

By the seaside. Photo by Refaat Ibrahim of wearenotnumbers.org

Fingers

I find that, as I’m growing down, I’m going into transitional phases where things change and I have to review and revise what I can do and can’t do, and all sorts of other things in between. This get tricky when the abilities I’m losing are a deep part of my identity.

So, as a writer and communicator I’ve spent bazillions of hours, days and weeks banging away on typewriter and computer keyboards. But my fingers are losing their accuracy, and I can’t do it like I used to be able to.

It’s called peripheral neuropathy in medical speak – loss of feeling and coordination in the fingers and feet. It’s a funny sensation of non-feeling where feeling ought to be, a bit like music that’s turned down too low.

I’m getting an impression my blogs are too long for some readers – they’re a 15-minute read – and they tend to stretch synapses quite a bit.

So I think I’m going to do more podcasts. Or, in some cases, both.

Here’s my last blog, about pain, as a podcast, and you can find it on Spotify, Google and Apple Podcasts, such as here:

or on my podcast page here:

https://palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

And you’re welcome to lend it your ears!

Love, Palden

Paldywan stands on the power spot at Boscawen-un stone circle

Consciousness Fields

Here’s my latest podcast. It’s all about why the ancients built their sacred sites. Well, my perception of it.

The Nine Maidens, West Penwith, Cornwall

There are thousands of megalithic sites around Britain and in other lands. The ancients didn’t build them for frivolous reasons – it had to bring them definite benefit to make it worth it, however they saw that. It was a big investment with longterm payoffs, going on for many centuries.

It’s all to do with cranked-up consciousness fields and the possibilities that become available when we do focused consciousness work inside them – at power points in space and during power points in time.

Reality’s rules can change and remarkable things can be achieved, even with practical, real-life outcomes. That’s what this podcast is all about. It’s about the way reality can be changed through inner work – or inner work combined with outer work.

Also, we become changed by doing so – this helps solve problems in remarkable ways, also reducing impediments we ourselves create.

It’s here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6yNZhWIWJjbC8skroDcfx3?si=MQ-5F_cWTbKCuN1iat0SLw

or on my podcast page:

https://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

With love, Palden

Tipping into the Future

A new podcast

Here are some thoughts on the current vexatious world situation and some of the threads that lie behind it. It’s all about the incremental North-to-South shift of world power, about people against the Megamachine, and Gaza and Israel, the decline of the West, and a few things like that.

Are we entering the future facing forwards or facing backwards? This is a key question in our time.

Listen on Spotify (it’s also on Apple and Google Podcasts):

or go to my podcast page: https://palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

Should it interest you, here are two relevant articles I’ve written in former times:
+ An astrological article I wrote about the 2020s, written back in 2020:
⁠https://penwithbeyond.blog/2020s/
+ And here’s something I wrote in 2011 when in Bethlehem during the Arab Revolutions, about Hamas and its relationship with Fateh (the Palestine Authority in the West Bank). It’s pertinent now, for those of you who are into more in-depth thinking around Palestine.
⁠www.palden.co.uk/pop/hamas-and-fatah.html⁠

With love, Palden

Reality Fields

A new podcast

The ancients worked with a kind of consciousness technology, and they designed their sacred sites for this purpose. They located them carefully, building them over underground water and energy-vortices, orienting them to the rising and setting points of the sun and moon, constructing them to reflect and embody the fundamental principles of the universe.

They did this to create spaces – crucibles – in which to go into altered states of consciousness. Here they could generate reality-fields that enabled them to reach into things and fix them from the inside.

They lived in a very different world to ours, with no need to build cities or empires since they were advanced in a completely different way. There’s something about this that we need to re-learn in our day, because it concerns our future. And that’s what this podcast is all about.

With love, Palden

It’s an extract from my book Shining Land, which is available online. A new update of the book is coming out soon.

Or go to my podcast page: https://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html