prayer – Notes from the Far Beyond

Nine Principles

...and the weirdness of living on Earth

I wrote this as a comment to a posting on Facebook about the Sunday meditations, and part way through I realised it was worth making a full post out of it… I seem to be churning out a lot of stuff right now but, don’t worry, I’ll calm down!

Groupwork at the OakDragon Camp. Are you coming this year?

There’s a definite reason why the timing of the weekly meditation changes in terms of clock-time, though not in natural time. When I was with the Council of Nine thirty years ago (I compiled a book for them), they asked the human group involved with them to start meditating regularly in coordination with them, and they gave us a choice about when it should happen.

We decided on Sunday at 7pm GMT – the most available time that could work for everyone living between the Middle East and North America. But when we wondered about time-changes on the clock, they asked us to keep the time constant (that is, in Britain, 7pm in winter and 8pm in summer).

When asked why, they explained that, since they are beings that do not live in a world or on a planet, they have a technical challenge creating a connection between the timeless zone they’re in and the time-full zone we’re in. We live on (or in) a spinning, solar-orbiting planet where the changes involved with time (day/night and seasons) are a major part of the Earth experience.

Actually, the technicalities of fixing this up are sorted out by a hyper-civilisation called Ultima or Altea. They are one of twenty-four hyper-civilisations that work with and for The Nine, covering different aspects of the universe’s management and in a manner of speaking acting as creation and maintenance crews. The Alteans live in a timeless realm too, but they’re closer to us than the Nine, metaphysically speaking, so they have a capacity to reach into our world to set up the energy-field, the zone, around this meditation.

This allows the energy-field around this meditation to be established and ‘held’ for that half-hour time-period, as we experience it here on/in Earth.

This matter of The Nine and the Twenty-Four is not a universal hierarchy – more a bundle of reality-bubbles of enormous proportions, with some toward the centre and others toward the periphery yet all of them interlocking and interlinked on a multidimensional basis.

What I’ve found fascinating over the years is the accuracy of timing of the meditation – it’s as if the field noticeably switches on at the beginning, dead on time, and it shuts off and closes exactly at the end.

I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this. There’s something about this half-hour time-slot which, when it ends, makes one’s meditation change back to a more ‘normal’ kind that we would experience when meditating at other times. There’s no problem with that since both kinds of meditation have their value and function.

You don’t have to ‘believe’ in The Nine to experience, benefit from and participate in this energy-field – they are not interested in picking up a throng of followers. They have spoken their truth in the book I compiled – The Only Planet of Choice – and that’s all they wish to say, because they prefer us not to follow a scripture or set of instructions – they want us to use our inner experience and inner senses to feel our way into a spirit-field that connects with the essence of what all faiths are addressing – minus the cultural claptrap that they can be encumbered with. They just want to help the people of Earth wake up and get on with the business we came here for.

Personally, I like and respect people who have their own beliefs and ways of seeing things, who can stretch beyond them to see the spirit and soul in anyone, or any culture or faith, and somehow embody their beliefs in their lives, especially in their actions – even if they’re labelled as terrorists, infidels or unworthy souls. As the Dalai Lama would say, we’re all trying to achieve happiness, each in our own ways. Though each culture and time of history has its own misconceptions of what happiness truly implies.

If you wish to read more about The Nine, start here: www.palden.co.uk/nine.html – but even this is not necessary.

A Palestinian lady at the Sulha, a gathering of peacemakers in Israel, in 2005

I recommend you simply go by your inner sensitivities. If you resonate with the energy-field around this meditation, then that’s all that is necessary. That’s why I encourage all participants to do their meditation as they normally do it – and let it develop. What bridges us is that we all do it at the same time, with a similar basic motivation to help raise the level of the world and bring healing. It’s the motivation, not the method, that really matters – though methods can help, as long as we don’t get too stuck in them. If we get stuck in them, we narrow the vibrational frequency-range of our humanness and spirituality.

One thing we found in the Flying Squad (www.flyingsquad.org.uk) is that, if you step up to do the meditation every single week – 100% attendance – it does get easier, stronger and more fruitful. Though obviously this can only be done if it’s right for you at this stage of your life, and joining the meditation when you can, or even sporadically, is fine too. There’s no rulebook here.

For a short answer on who or what The Nine are, they’re part of what you could call the management structure of the universe, and they’re in charge of regulating the balances between polarities (light-dark, male-female, yin/yang). They refer to themselves as nine principles. But these principles each have beingness and individuality too, in a wordless kind of way. When I have experienced their presence in my inner journeys, I experience them as bodies of light and presence, without form, though they do have character and vibe-differences.

When asked about their relationship with ‘God’ they said something interesting (and this appealed to me, as someone with a Tibetan Buddhist background). They said that, when all of the consciousnesses of the universe attune to each other they become, in their words, ‘what you call God’. So when the Nine co-attune as nine beings, they are ‘God’, and when we co-attune with each other as humans, we also become ‘what you call God’. I am sure there are people reading this who have experienced that.

What I liked about them was that, in their communications in the 1970s-90s, they were uninterested in creating a cult or persuading people to align with their way of seeing things. They saw such a thing as part of our problem on Earth. We make a cult or religion out of our beliefs. This applies even to scientific rationalists, even to people with progressive political beliefs, the believers of which can act like a cult with a priesthood and a doctrine.

I distilled a 400-page book out of thousands of pages of channelled transcripts, working full-time for eighteen months, often for ten hours a day, six days a week – and only occasionally did it deplete me. So I’d take a break, but then I’d quiickly get fired up again. I was uplifted and much challenged by it.

Seemingly, they chose me because I have a universalist psycho-spiritual attitude. This is partially because I started on my inner path very experientially, as a hippy on psychedelics, rather than as a believer in a traditional faith. Though I am aligned somewhat with Buddhism, neo-paganism, Islam, megalthic shamanism and at least some of the whole panoply of teachings and blessing-streams available today, I’m not aligned with any of them, anchoring instead to my soul-origins and roots.

This was an advantage when working in Palestine – I could be in a mosque, church or synagogue and enter into the spirit that was present. I’ve become a kind of modern Western freebooting Imam, oscillating between being a saint and a sinner and, like everyone, struggling to reconcile the two in the way I conduct my life, fuckups’n’all.

Anyway, this is a rather long explanation for why the meditation time changes when the clocks change – we’re simply keeping to the same time-slot, as do the birds, the winds and the worms.

An ex-Islamic Jihad fighter and an ex-IDF soldier speaking peace at the Sulha

It was an immense privilege working with them. I found out later that they chose me for this work because, as a soul, they had actually placed the order for the seeding of my soul in the first place. As rather an individualist, a one-off case, I didn’t even properly fulfil what they had constructed me for – I worked as a kind of planet-fixer and morphological thought-energy engineer. For better or worse, I followed my own path.

But they found that what I became, through doing what I did, enabled me to take on certain kinds of assignment that they hadn’t anticipated. As a soul in service, I was on the edge of (in a manner of speaking) retiring, but they asked me to do one more job, please. So I came to Earth as a consultant to the sages of the time, around 5760 BCE, during a troubled period and a serious downturn in human development. And I kinda got stuck.

This karmic pattern, I guess, is repeating itself now – I was given cancer in 2019 and it has tipped me into the same pattern, of discovering a new mission just when I need to retire! In my involvement with seriously-bifurcated Israel-Palestine, I took a rather un-zealous approach, which can come when you’ve been at this kind of thing for a long time.

And there’s an important truth here: if you go to ‘the holy land’ expecting to bring peace, you will fail. It’s guaranteed. Just like Planet Earth! You have to go into the maelstrom with the simple motivation of adding your bit in whatever way you can to help people be as happy as possible in a shite bunch of circumstances. Then it works much better.

All that I have said doesn’t make me special – it’s just that I have gone into all this metaphysical claptrap more than most (I’ve got Jupiter in Pisces), so I’ve dug it up. Or bits of it, at least. Like an archaeologist, you can stand on an ancient site but you won’t learn a lot from it unless you do some digging, or at least some subtle way of seeing under the surface to find out more about what’s buried there. For me, doing past-life regression helped a lot.

But it also involved saying Yes when offered the opportunity to discover something new in the inner realms and in life’s experiences. Too often, we say No, or we block it with fear or distraction. Actually, it took me until age 42 to give myself full permission to do it – just before I worked for the Nine, as it happened.

As an inner experience, I had to allow myself to tip backwards over the edge of a cliff, the Abyss, in trust. I went over, not without trepidation, spinning and falling through infinity, only to find suddenly that I could fly! Whoooeee!!! From then on I was much more proficient in space travel.

Doing the Nine book happened like this. I was sitting working as an editor for a small publisher in 1991, Gateway Books. The phone rang, and the publisher, Alick Batholomew (bless him) answered, chatting some time with what seemed to be an old friend. Then he turned to me and asked, “Fancy editing a book of kind of ET channellings?“. No, I wasn’t interested – at that stage I’d rather had enough of a lot of the psychic claptrap that was flying around at the time. I shook my head. I returned to my work and he to the call. But suddenly there was a knocking or ringing on the top of my head. “OMG”, thought I. I told Alick to put the guy on once he’d finished.

It was Sir John Whitmore. We clicked immediately, a bit like we already knew each other. He invited me to an interview. I went to meet him and Phyllis Schlemmer in Kent, and we had the interview, and they seemed happy with me. We had lunch. Then John said, “Now for the interview“. Oh! I honestly thought we’d done it already, but no – I was to speak directly with The Nine. They were in charge.

It got all set up, and Phyllis worked herself down into a trance. It took about 20 minutes and a lot of focus – she went really deep in ways that most psychics cannot. I talked to the Nine. I can’t remember much of it, but I was concerned that I might not be the right person for the job. In the previous year my life had been an utter mess, and I didn’t feel good about myself. But the Nine simply said words to the effect of: “We know you, you know us, you need no preparation, and there is no one else“. I fell off the floor. This was a form of validation that, at the time, was a deep shock. Isn’t it funny how things go?

So I spent the next eighteen months under voluntary lockdown, out of this world, with a force-field around my house in Glastonbury (Chilkwell Street). I had just three visitors during that time. The phone stopped ringing, and people in Glastonbury thought I’d gone away. The amazing thing was that, on the very day I delivered the manuscript to the publisher, the phone started ringing and people started coming to the door saying “Where have you been?“. All I could do was smile. Yes, where had I been?

I trawled through mountains of transcripts on computer, picking out good chunks, saving them as files – using a very Virgoid filing system – and, after a year of this, I had 700 files saved and edited to make them more readable.

I had to edit the text a lot, thoughtfully and sensitively. The Nine, never having lived in a realm where words are necessary, had to raid the brains of Phyllis and all of us to find words. So it was a slow process, with a lot of seeking of terminology and phraseology, and their wordage was cumbersome… ‘that of the essence of that which you are…‘, and ‘that of what you call God‘, and things like that. A lot of searching and debating went on, both with the other eight members of The Nine and amongst us. Quite often Tom, the spokesbeing, consulted back with the Nine. We wanted to get this right, and they made sure there were no misunderstandings.

So there I was, faced with 700ish files. OMG, what do I do now? I decided to climb the Tor (I went to Brean Down too – a special place), and I slept on it. One morning I woke up with the idea, ‘Just start‘. Perfectly obvious, really, but as a brainy, educated Brit, something that simple was difficult to get to!

I sat there looking at all these files, got my mouse and just clicked the cursor on one of them. This is the edited version of what came out:

“GUEST: Tom, it’s nice to meet you. Could you define who you are, please?
TOM: I am Tom, I am the spokesman for the Council of Nine. We are the Council of Nine, we oversee what you term the universe. We are of nine principles of the universe.
GUEST: Whom do you represent – a higher authority above you that commands you and directs your ways?
TOM: This is difficult to explain to you, for the world has no similar situation, but we would say to you, yes, we are in connection with one that is higher, but in totality together we are one, as that of all the universe is one.
GUEST: Do you have any purpose in our world, any major purpose or message?
TOM: We wish you to know first that we are not physical beings. Your world is the manifestation of Creation, and of the Creator manifest in your world, in the form of humankind. You ask if we have a message to humankind?
GUEST: Yes I do.
TOM: We say to you: you have been created in the image of the Creator. This world has lost identity with Creation. What is of necessity is to understand the importance of going forth and creating action and deed that bring you to completion in who you are. It is not enough to pray, it is not enough to gather groups of humankind for meditation. What is of importance is to act.“

[‘Guest’ was, if I remember rightly, someone who came for a session with the Nine with Gene Roddenbery. The ethics behind Startrek were based on Gene’s discussions with them. Tom was actually Atum, an Egyptian god. The Nine never manifested on Earth, but their existence was known in various ancient cultures. Understanding the human propensity to create glittery stars and daunting gods, Tom deliberately and wisely demystified himself by using the name Tom, to reduce the perceptual distance between him and humans.]

Wow, I’d picked a good way to start – randomly, but obviously it was not random at all. That’s how the book unfolded. If I came to a blockage, I’d sleep on it, take a walk and wait, and the answer would come, just like that. I guess you could call that ‘psychic editing’.

Note the teaching here: such things as prayer and meditation can help us and the wider world greatly, though they are not a substitute for action and stepping over the line.

I had the same ‘psychic editing’ thing some years later when building an online archive for Sir George Trevelyan (who died in 1996, age 96 or so). He was one of the founders of the new age movement in Britain in the 1940s-1970s, a spiritual grandfather to many people and projects. I was one of his minders in his final years. The archive is still there: https://sirgeorgetrevelyan.uk

If I couldn’t figure out a detail – where to put a photo or what colour to use – I’d just deep-think about him and say, “George, whaddya want here?“, and he’d answer – not usually in words, but I got to know what to do. He got the website he wanted by supervising me, even after death. Amazing. It was a great privilege, believe me. In fact, right now, tears have come up and they’re dribbling down my smiling face.

I wrote this in year 2000: “Sir George has been fondly referred to as ‘the Grandfather of the New Age Movement’, a title somewhat misunderstood by those who did not know him. His ‘New Age’ did not involve cult, fad and woolly notions. It involved a non-sectarian, holistic outlook, scientific and practical as well as mystical. It involved a compassionate, global humanitarianism very pertinent to our day.“

Anyway, back the The Nine. If it interests you, there’s a PDF copy of the original manuscript of the Nine book here: www.palden.co.uk/nine.html – and download the second PDF offered there, the pre-publication version.

The other version is a pruned version that was prepared for translation into other languages. I submitted the pre-pub version to the publisher in November 1992, just before the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1993, during which year the book was published. Some bits were by necessity edited out of the first edition by John and Phyllis, partially because they might have put members of the human Nine group in danger (concerning mainly ET and geopolitical issues).

But since they are all now dead, I feel there’s no harm now in including those bits – and I get the feeling The Nine are nodding Yes. John, Andrija, Phyllis and the others are safe in another world now. I miss them, but we shall meet again.

There were a few different editions of the book, and I did the first, the 1993 edition. The first edition now has collector’s value and it can be ridiculously expensive. The second was by Mary Bennett, with her take on it. You can get a newer printed edition (with my commentaries removed, but they’ve retained much of the work I did) from USA: www.theonlyplanetofchoice.com – or try Amazon and other sources.

Making a wicker coffin at the Oak Dragon – later we put it on a pyre with all our thoughts and prayers, and up it went

Those of you who recognise the vibe, somewhere in the recesses of your soul, like a little bell tinkling, will inherently know The Nine, and they will know you. But even if you don’t recognise them, it doesn’t matter – they’re friendly, and it’s okay, diverse and inclusive.

You see, the Universe has a staff shortage on Earth – we Earthlings are so distracted with our earthly joys and woes, and we argue so endlessly about things like ceasefires or politicians’ bloopers instead of really getting in there and helping sort things out. It drives Gazans crazy, giving them the impression no one cares.

But there are things we can do within the sphere of our own lives. The main one is: be a good person and do your best with the life you have and the situation you’re in. There are gifts and specialisms we can develop too – anything from knitting to driving buses to running a business well to attending COP conferences in Baku. Wherever you’re called to go, whatever you’re called to do, the issue is to do it and not to hang back, delaying to another day. And it’s just not good enough to believe you’re not good enough!

The Universe has a staff shortage of willing and active volunteers, so any help at all is welcome, and small things make a bigger difference than we tend to believe – especially when millions do it. Such as staying human and treating each other as we would like to be treated ourselves. If there is one single formula for our future world, it’s that. I’m good at churning out yardages of verbiage, and a few other things, and that’s what I do. And the meditations are one way of tuning into a taproot within yourself, whence your inspiration and inner promptings come.

Being a good human doesn’t involve being perfect. Get real – this is Planet Earth and it’s bloody difficult. But it does involve working on ourselves and with others so that we get better at being human and at doing what we’re here for. A nuclear physicist once asked this of the Nine: if there were one thing we could do that would really change the world, what would it be? Tom answered simply, and in a unique way that I cannot imitate: “If everyone pursued their life-purpose“. It’s that simple. Do what you’re programmed up to do. It’s there in you.

Ibrahim Abu el-Hawa, a spiritual grandfather from the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem, talking with a Native American and an Israeli hippy at the Jerusalem Hug in 2011

Oh, and there’s something else. A number of people claim to speak on behalf of or channel The Nine. Sorry, not true – though they might nevertheless be communicating with a civilisation that has connections with The Nine. Consider this: if you lived in Sudan or Palestine, if a UN representative showed up, you’d consider them to be the UN and to have a direct line into UN HQ (whether or not they do). It’s similar here. The Nine are involved with an enormous network of civilisations and beings, working with and through them, and during the meditation you’re plugging into that network.

Claims to authority are not what validates the content of channelled material: what matters is the quality of the content itself. It doesn’t matter whether the source claims to be Jesus or Lord Sananda if what is being conveyed is dazzling, weak, meaningless and it’s all been said before.

The Nine do not live on a world, or a moon of Saturn, or anywhere else. They are not at present speaking out, no matter what anyone says. There is no need: they have said all they need to say for this period of history, and things haven’t fundamentally changed since the late twentieth century, so there’s little more to say until we progress to the next stage.

In the Nine book, it’s not the words and details that are the main thing, it’s what comes between the lines, and the connection and re-wiring that we get when we read it. It jiggles our cells and reminds us of things we know, deep in our hearts. So while many of the contents of the book pertain to the 1970s-90s, with a little intelligence it’s easy to apply such insights to current events of our time. They don’t want followers – they seek simply to encourage us to get on with what we know we need to do.

One thing I like about the book is that it does not try to change our way of seeing things, and we don’t even have to believe what they say. But it’s full of winking lightbulbs. It can add to the way we see things, articulating things that many of us half-know but hadn’t quite realised yet. It has a way of extending our field of vision – but you can still continue along the path you were already on. The issue is, whatever you do, do it as well as you can, and the rest will follow.

So that’s the story of the book, and also some background to the reason why I’ve started these meditations. I continue with them whether or not anyone else is there, but it sure does make a difference when people are there. Because when we meld in consciousness, even at a distance, ‘what you call God’ is there and present. Because ‘God’ (however you wish to see it) is us. We are the creators of the universe, and the job isn’t finished yet.

Sometimes people ask me, “Do you believe in UFOs?“. To which the only good answer I can think up is: “Do you believe in cars?“.

With love, Palden.

If this stuff interests you, then there are talks I’ve done in past years about it in my audio archive.
This one in particular: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts/PPArchive-ETViewOfTerrestrials.mp3
and the whole lot is here: www.palden.co.uk/podtalks.html

Site: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Palestine Audiobook: www.palden.co.uk/audiobook.html
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

The Greatly Unknowable

Zarathrustra spake thus, all over the Isles of Scilly

The world was on tenterhooks. After the assassination of Trump’s vice-president by a white South African, America could no longer play off different groups of nations against each other. Netanyahu’s threat to drop nukes on Turkey had put NATO in an acutely difficult position, exposing its double standards. Trump was raging at Israel’s intransigence and Putin, looking haggard in his hospital bed, uttered boisterous words in support of him when everyone knew that, in his tenuous position, and now being undermined by the Moscow oligarchy, he could promise nothing.

The Israeli civil disturbances were brutal, with neither side willing to step back – the media were under strict instructions not to call it a civil war. The mowing down by the Judaean Settler Army of Palestinians trying to escape over the Jordan valley had variously dismayed the world, exposing the inevitable consequences of their inaction. Even Israelis were not allowed out of Israel – at Ben Gurion airport and the two remaining land crossing points, only approved Israelis could leave. There had been a full-scale call-up of reservists but they were taking different sides, taking their weaponry with them. India had at last withdrawn its support for Israel. China had remained silent, concerned as usual about its markets, oil sources and leverage in the newly denominated West Asia.

After the establishment of the Sahelian Dirham, the currency of the new Sahelian Alliance, other small countries flooded to join it, abandoning the Dollar and distancing also from the newly-minted Renminbi-Rouble bloc – after all, the Russians and Chinese were resource-gulping imperialists too. The resignation of the UN Secretary General, saying he had done his best but it had led only to this, was rejected by a uniquely united Security Council. Then Netanyahu, looking taut-faced and cornered, put the cat amongst the pigeons. He boldly declared in Hebrew that, if threats against Israel continued, he would detonate his country’s nukes and incinerate the country – by implication, a second, self-imposed holocaust, as if to prove his version of history to be correct. Chaos broke out not only in Israel but also in the steets of Damascus, Beirut, Amman and Cairo as crowds panicked.

Trump’s speech from Mar a Lago (since Washington DC had become too dangerous) had been surprisingly firm and calming – the invasion would be paused for now. Secretary Blinken, drafted from his thinktank job by Trump to deal with a situation he had played a large role in creating, was to be given a last chance to pacify the Israelis. Gaza, left with only stragglers and people unable to escape, already looked as if it had been nuked, though it hadn’t. Saudi Arabia had reluctantly opened its borders to Palestinians to relieve refugee pressure on UAE and Egypt – well, it swelled the numbers moving into Neom, the new desert city not too far from Sinai and Gaza. Meanwhile, UNHCR, backed by the first Polish and Swedish battallions in the new European army, had taken over refugee operations in Greece. Refugees were coming in big numbers. Now there was a new crowd from the Tashkent earthquake and nuclear disaster.

In the English Channel, disaster came when a container freighter and an oil tanker collided. An oil and chemical slick was spreading and most shipping through the busy Channel was blocked. Both ships had been trying to avoid refugee boats. The UK authorities were now running ferries to Calais to pick up refugees who were endangering shipping in yet another of the world’s maritime choke-points. This caused further supply-line disruptions in crisis-ridden Europe as shipping was diverted north of Scotland, exposing it to both Russian and American naval attentions. Europe was on its own, suddenly sandwiched between two big powers.

A wee visitor at my home, aspiring to do the washing up

Possible realities… Improbable, yet all the same possible.

A big problem we face is that the world approaches the future facing backwards. We see the future on the past’s terms, afraid to make a leap, afraid to acknowledge that we’re lost at sea, afraid that everything could go wrong – and in so doing, we’re making things even worse. Consequence-delivering chickens are coming home to roost, in waves. This might go on for a number of decades, because the world seems so determined to drag its feet through every single learning experience that comes to face it. Such global brinkmanship arises from a collective failure to own up to the full consequences of what we have done. A multipolar deadlock has unfolded. The powers that be are all busily making sure nothing really changes – not fundamentally.

But there is another kind of brink we’re slipping over. It started around 2012 or, further back, perhaps 1989. Or perhaps 1967-68. It’s this: even if the world decided tomorrow to mobilise humanity, wholeheartedly embracing fundamental change, we would tip into a new, anxious period of at least a few decades. Whatever we do, we would not know for some time whether and how much the solutions we attempt will actually bear fruit.

It takes time for a forest to grow, for an invention to be trialled, for society to change its values and for the fruits of systems-redesign to show themselves. Not all solutions will work, some might backfire, and the world is hamstrung, riddled with complexity, interdependence and conflicting interests. We’ve sidled into a minefield. This creates an underlyingly edgy and anxious atmosphere, stoking up an already insecure and volatile situation.

I’m happy to report that my little visitor did not lay a plonker on my bed while hopping around on it

I was reflecting on all this a few nights ago while lying in bed, listening to the owls hooting and screeching outside. It reminded me of my own cancer story. We all face an underlying, nagging issue, and cancer patients get it in a big, pressing dose, thrust in our faces.

When and how am I going to die?

And here’s the rub: you get no answer.

It could be anytime, anyhow.

Making plans gets difficult when you know there’s a good chance that anything can come along to scupper them. Whether or not you’re going to die soon, this still comes up, variously for everyone, when we’re scared enough to look at it. With cancer, I’ve found I’ve become much more sensitive to anything charged with any feeling at all. It’s not fear, exactly – it’s an insecure, creeping anticipation that hovers in the background. Worse, no one wants to talk about it.

In my own case, I’m rather surprised to be alive. I’m unsure what plans to make, and with what time-perspective. So I tend to keep my perspective open, but with the headlights shining on only the next three months, and anything beyond that is unanswerable. This has a remarkable effect on everything. It’s tenterhooky, no matter how philosophical or optimistic I might be, and no matter how much others encourage me to ‘get better’, not to dwell on morbid things – as if dying were a failure and living a success.

Sorry, dear Kate, Princess of Wales, while I understand your wish to assure everyone by saying you’re getting better, this is unwise. You do not know. It’s unwise to yield to that implicit social pressure to make everything look alright, because it isn’t alright.

When I lie in bed, drifting with fatigue, this is the view. On top of the hill in the left-hand window is an ancient site called Caer Brân (mentioned a couple of blogs back)

This is our world situation. We’ve stumbled into a mire of uncertainty and complexity. We have squads of scientists, super-forecasters and expert-texperts, and mega-millions of people with armchairs and opinions, yet we’ve become unable to accept the obvious – that the future is not as clear and fixable as we would like it to be. It’s left mostly to the young to point this out, while they’re still at an age where they are uncompromised by fear of loss and chaos.

Cancer patients, in my observation, divide into roughly three camps. Some are in denial – they take the pills, do the chemo, get the op, and do their best to appear and return to normal – it was just a bad dream and it’s over now. Some are heroic, fighting, striving to overcome and conquer cancer, and some of these will succeed while they have the willpower to do so, but it’s experienced as a fight, not a gift. And some come through to a level of acceptance and forgiveness that allows them to live and die in greater peace, whatever is to happen. To some extent all cancer patients hover between these three in different ways and proportions because cancer does indeed have a convincing way of putting the fear of God up you.

I have my struggles with this. I get fed up with all the pills, disciplines, diets and doctors’ appointments a valiant cancer patient is supposed to appreciate, to save their life and relieve others of the pain of loss, and sometimes I just want to say ‘fuckit’, to be normal, get my life, or even my ex-partner, back (fat chance). Other times I work on rising up within myself, trying to be a good human, in case God notices and gives me a reprieve – which won’t really happen since it’s a pointless, guilt-ridden belief.

Anyway, I’m doing quite well with my cancer, and I think it has something to do with full-on acceptance, yielding to The Force. I’ve lost control – yet, like a slalom skier, or when you first learn to ride a bike, or even like sex, by losing control you find a new balance.

In times of despair, hope sometimes stretches far further than it realistically should – like the vain hope that many Gazans entertain, that the decent people across the world will step in to save them. But just because something should happen, it doesn’t mean that it will.

At times I’m given deep truth-moments and gifts of spirit. I go down into the depths and up to the heaven-worlds, handing myself over in a humbled acceptance of my powerlessness and the overwhelming force of my circumstances, dependency and weakness – and the paradox is that, every time I drag myself through such a crunch-period, something in me is healed and reborn.

Here I still find myself, alive in a body and wondering what exactly for. Am I just here because I’m here? Or is there more to life? Yet my inner growth process has been ramped up to three times the speed, with a lot more depth, breath and height, and with a vulnerability that has amplified the emotional impacts, the feelingful fullness of being alive. That’s what I’ve been given.

My little house. It’s called The Lookout. That’s what you do there.

So it is with the world. The world has cancer, depression, anxiety, diabetes, fentanyl addiction, ME and a strange mixture of obesity and hunger. Part of us wants everything to return to normal, if only we could just buy an electric car, and part teeters on the edge of an abyss, flummoxed and hovering between lightbulb moments and flounderous resignation.

A nightmare is unfolding. However, while plenty of horror, injustice and destruction are going on, World War Three is now mainly a hearts-and-minds matter, not one of nuclear bombs or evil terrorists.

This is what we have been given. Or, collectively and unconsciously, it’s what we gave ourselves, to teach us something. We’ve created a situation where, kicking and screaming, we’re being arm-twisted into change. This is the great value of the Trumps, Putins, massacres, disasters and tragedies we face: they’re putting options before us. The stakes are rising until, sometime, we get it – we get the fundamental lesson, the lesson that will save us and redeem the damage and pain. So it is with cancer.

What none of the pundits in the commentariat mention is the spiritual crisis the world is in. Mental illness is not limited to those who are diagnosed with it, as if a certification of our woes would contain the crisis: it’s a disease of a psychotic world society, taking different forms in different places. All of it points to one core issue.

We have lost our way, lost our humanity. We’re deeply worried about what’s going on. We don’t know how to make it go away. Even the wisdom teachers, psychologists and solution-bringers are lost. As an astrologer I can often see when a wave is coming, but what will actually happen is at best qualified guesswork.

We’re faced with the Great Yawning Gap, like a black hole sucking us into some sort of final battle for the hearts and minds of humanity. Well, that’s what it feels like, sometimes. This presents heightened choices. These choices have been around for quite a time – I was one of those harping on about it when a Sixties teenager – but the stakes are rising with each year and decade.

It’s highly symbolic of the state of humanity, particularly for the global minority, for the one billion of us privileged to live in the rich world, that cancer has become a big issue. Because cancer hits you like a battering ram, with immediate life-changing consequences and a threat of imminent termination. Loss of control. Loss of everything. When you die you take nothing with you except what you have become.

The biggest, deepest choice we are faced with is this. Just because life doesn’t go the way we want, does this mean it’s going wrong? If we get faced with cancer or similar terminal or disabling ailments, or earth-shaking experiences such as war, disaster, loss, hardship or death, is this something going wrong or something going right?

But when I’m alive and kicking, this is where I spend a lot of my time. It’s the bane of being a pathological wordsmith.

This is a very deep question. But in it lies a solution that lies at the foundation of our situation, from personal to global.

With cancer, in my experience, the secret is to embrace it and make friends with it. I manifested it and, whether or not I understand why, it came for a reason, not by chance or bad luck, and it gives me a deep learning for the soul. It’s a life-changer of a high order. Something is going right. Similarly, it might be difficult to see this at present, what with all that’s going on around us, but something is going right in the world.

To see this, it is necessary to step out of life somewhat, out of the mill and the grindstone, to see things from another viewpoint – the viewpoint of a soul visiting Earth. We came into life to do something with it – not only to learn but also to make a contribution. Society doesn’t think that way – it encourages us to snap out of it – but in the cultural, institutional and societal mass-avoidance of our time we miss something crucial about life.

Have we each made our contribution?

In Western culture we even believe that we get only one life, and that when we die we cease existing. This belief is unthought through, ideological and deeply problematic. It’s a key part of the world’s problem today – a way of blanking out the longterm and avoiding taking responsibility for anything much more than ourselves, those close to us, our properties, concerns and beliefs, and only for the next three years.

We’ve become hyper-privatised, socially atomised. The world is crowded but we don’t even know our neighbours. It’s crowded, yet loneliness is at its historic zenith.

The world we omit to save now is the same world that many of us will wish to return to in another life – after all, we have the best chocolate in the universe, and in most worlds getting rich, being a star or a tall poppy is distasteful and antisocial – that’s best done here, if you want it. Even if we don’t come back here, it still matters – after all, once we’ve ascended to the fifth dimension, Andromeda, heaven or wherever, it’ll still be necessary to account for ourselves, to explain the incomprehensible to the souls we meet there.

Why did you lot screw up your planetary home? After all, being a distinctly desirable residence, billions of souls want to live there. And, (you might have to take my word for this) most worlds in this universe don’t host souls in billions. If I remember rightly, the Nine once said that the optimum population of planet Earth is around two hundred million.

It is a planet of amplified choice – we are each and all given a capacity to create our lives as we feel best. This isn’t just a choice between Toyotas and Mitsubishis, or between Copenhagen and Buenos Aires. It’s deeper, and when we are confronted with earth-shaking crises, we’re given the gift of amplified choice. We’re dragged into fundamentals.

Disaster – which means ‘out of sync with the stars’ – is a gift. This is what we need to get straight about. We need to meet the future facing forwards.

Me too, with my cancer, which will inevitably kill me sometime. It’s alright. My bones could disintegrate, my stomach could block up, an infection could floor me. I could die alone with nobody noticing, nobody here to hold my hand. I could be floored by a blast of phone radiation given to me by someone who loves me and didn’t mean to be so generous. If such is the case, so be it – it’s all for the learning. Soul-learning, about the true and full nature of existence as a human.

I’ll be going home. Done. Cooked. But even then, it doesn’t stop there.

I’m tempted to quote the lyrics of a song, ‘I just wanna be there’, by a late, great soul-friend, John Cartwright, and it went:

“I just wanna be there / When we all start to re-pair / All the damage to our Mother / And our sisters and our brothers / All deserving to be fed / In the spirit and the body… / It is doing in my head / There is nothing to be said / Time is running out…
“Seeds bursting to grow / Dying of hunger, under the snow / My need, bursting my heart… / Where do we wander? Where do we start? /
“My soul… silently smiles / Laughs as the water falls from my eyes. / Each tear, spelling it out… / Rise or go under… Rise here and now!“

[Glastonbury friends will know John and Jaki’s band, Court of Miracles – ‘the best band you never heard of’, to quote the late Justin Credible. I couldn’t find an online version of this song, but here’s one of their uplifting albums from the 1980s, called International Times.]

Peace, brothers and sisters. Despite everything, it’s okay – just remember that.

With love, Paldywan Kenobi.

————————
Site: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Audiobook: www.palden.co.uk/audiobook.html
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

The Islands of the Dead. Sometimes the islands seem to hover *above* the ocean.

The Space Unrace

SUNDAY MEDITATION
7pm GMT every Sunday
and… a new podcast

The meditation gives a chance to pay some attention to matters way beyond ourselves, to do a little volunteering at the spiritual frontline, a little world-maintenance. You can do it wherever you are. All you need is a decent place to park your body while you go within.

There’s a zone, a field, that’s open from 7-7.30pm GMT every Sunday (see below for different times in different lands). After a while you’ll probably feel it, as you tune in to it and it tunes in to you.

It’s a benign encouragement-beam or carrier wave, amplifying the meditations and prayers of all who enter and sit within it, like an uplift-field. It helps us in the underlying resolution of issues in our lives, yet the emphasis is on the world.

There’s no sign-up, no method, no mantra, no fee, and people of all paths are welcome: do your own meditation-prayer-journeying as you usually do it. We are connected by doing it at the same time and by a simple shared intent to raise the world’s level an inch, to help it progress on its evolutionary path. And by being friends in spirit.

More information here: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

And a podcast on meditation…

On the fullmoon on Saturday it came upon me to do a podcast about meditation, and I recorded it down in the woods, sitting by the stream, editing it together back home this evening. It’s 34 mins long. It’s available online…

On Spotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/palden-jenkins/episodes/Meditation-e2g7ptd/a-ab0glk0
On my site: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
It’s on Google and Apple too.

The fullmoon has brought a shift of perspective (Virgo-Pisces). Nothing much has changed, but suddenly and rather surreptitiously we’re seeing things differently. Looking back, so what was all that really about? And where does it leave us now? The world is settling into a more resonant, steady thrum for a short while. Even so, there’s an underlying acceleration going on over the next three-four years – the waves are progressively getting bigger and coming in clumps.

So we’re in an in-between-waves period. The bad news is that we have more crunches and crises coming, and the good news is that solutions are growing too, shared consensuses are forming and whatever is standing in the way is likely to come under pressure.

The sign of this is the crazy acts of resistance to change that are going on right now – it always happens as a change approaches. It’s a digging in of heels. Except such as strategy doesn’t work in tsunamis – you just gotta run. Metaphorically speaking. It’s not here yet, but we’re getting advance waves.

With love from me
Palden

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

Maa Ayensuwaa

Okomfo Akua Ayensuwaa, Queen Priestess of the Ayensu River, West Africa

Those of you who know me well and have been following my story for the last year will have heard me mention the Okomfo Akua Ayensuwaa (Maa Ayensuwaa). An Okomfo is a priestess or priest. This is her.

She is a native healer in Ghana who has been working with me to save lives of people in Ghana, Togo and Niger who have been under attack from an international crime gang, since October 2022. The gang do drugs and people-smuggling over the Sahara, for the British-European market – hard, ruthless men who care little about rape, violence and crime.

She has been in hospital with fibroids, which are spreading. This arises from the privations she’s put herself through during this year – she tends to put others first and is a real heroine. I have not been able to finance her hospital treatment and aftercare (£500). So it looks as if she will die before long.

I am really sad about this. Our meeting last December was very special and, between us, we’ve pulled off some amazing miracles. The problem we have had is that the security/anti-fraud wing of the ANZ Bank in Australia, promising to pay all the expenses for this operation, have failed to fulfil their promise and pay up. Perversely, the bank has turned out to be a bigger problem than the crime gang, whom we have disabled considerably.

This debt from the bank now amounts to some £40k, for the repaying of debts incurred (£15k) and for compensation (£25k) to those ‘good samaritans’ who have sought to help and who have paid a high price as a result. This whole story started when I saved one of their men, Andrew, a Scotsman, whom I knew, from attack by the gang – and the crime gang was uncovered in the pursuit of the bank’s anti-fraud business in West Africa.

As a result of this failure to pay, I cannot pay the fees to save Maa Ayensuwaa now. In circumstances like that, hospitals simply dump people outside, since they do not want liability for them. The bank is in a state of corporate denial, yet they are indirectly responsible for the deaths of at least ten people. They owe the Okomfo and me a lot of money.

I am not appealing to you for money, and I do not like to. The best I can do is to fix for some good-hearted person in Ghana to take care of the Okomfo, so that she can at least have a noble and peaceful death, which she deserves. She is currently semi-conscious and about to be dumped. (The doctor I have been dealing with is a good man, and regrets this himself, but he is bound by the rules.)

I do however ask for prayers and inner support for her. May she manifest the support she needs and deserves, and may her likely end be filled with light and with grace. May she be blessed by the angels, gods and spirits. If she is to live, may she find healing and revival – whichever way the Universe chooses. Please surround her in love. She has given so much to so many people, risking her life for them, and she is a true heroine – rather saintly, actually.

I am working on writing the full story, for the time is now coming to tell it in public and expose the bank. Sometimes the pen is mightier than the sword.

For now, may I ask you to put in a prayer for Maa Ayensuwaa? She is 53 years old, a Gemini, and she is Queen Priestess of the Ayensu River in western Ghana. Her magic and her considerable healing powers are rare. She is is one of the most remarkable psychics I have ever met – and I’ve met a good few. She is a sincere woman who gives freely of herself and her abilities, and she is deeply committed to truth and justice. The photo of her here is the only one I have – our contact has been psychic and online only.

I am really sad that it comes to this and I shall miss her. But we shall continue communicating whether she is alive or dead, and we shall meet again. I was aware that she and I could have done so much together in the area of world healing. Whether this is to be or not to be, may the Universe make the best choice, and may Maa Ayensuwaa go well on her journey and be truly blessed. She is one of the most remarkable women I have ever known.

Thank you. Love, Palden

World Work

Inner work to aid humanity’s evolution

The Isles of Scilly from the West Penwith mainland, Cornwall

I’m not a lightworker or a conventional prayer-circle type. But I believe we need to take a multi-pronged approach to ‘world work’ – meditative, religious, psychic and process work to assist the world. I’m esoterically more activist and gutsy – it’s born out of a political background, humanitarian experience and an aged-hippy approach to life.

If you do psychic work over a period of time, in conjunction with inner friends or ‘guides’, then you’ll tend to develop an operating style between you – and that’s what happened to me. It’s not that I’m an advanced psychic. It’s more that I’ve been at it for a long time, with formative and defining inner experiences along the way.

An example: when I was 41, in an inner process I found myself walking backwards toward the abyss – a vulnerability we humans just aren’t happy with. I had tremors of fear but just had to go over the edge anyway. Tipping backwards, I fell into the void, falling, falling… until an instinct made me turn, spread my arms like wings and fly… Since that moment, I’ve been able to set my mind more free, and my busy brains don’t interfere so much.

One bizarre benefit of cancer has been the inner experiences that have come with it. Forced to spend time in bed, I went on adventures. It gave me a sense of usefulness at a time when I was wondering whether it was all worth it. But no, the management clearly said “Don’t ring us – we’ll ring you“. Well, you do get some comedy sometimes!

I’m of the opinion that, if you give a flower to an asshole or shower them with light, it will likely be a turn-off and inappropriate, with the opposite effect to what was intended. Billionaires and terrorists don’t change just because you want them to, and you wouldn’t either. You have to get in there, make friends, gain trust and work it out, as if there, relating to a real person – albeit perhaps to their wiser, more feelingful self.

Sometimes I’ll give a backrub to a mountain jihadi, or sympathise with the rigours of a politician’s life, or make an etheric cup of tea for an old lady – ‘confidence building measures’. It goes on from there. Dialogue with them as a guest in their space. When someone can see it’s in their own best interests to change, they’ll change (though not always). Typically for stroppy humans, if you push them around, they’ll resist.

If you want to penetrate a computer, work with climate issues, deal with a natural disaster, do longterm work with ‘megatrends’ (like population growth or deforestation), it’s a question of getting right inside the matter, stepping into people’s shoes, seeing what life looks like to them, getting into the back office, ferreting through the datachips or feeding helpful ideas to people in need.

One key thing is social attitudes and particularly the freeing up of groupthink, cover-ups and polarised positions. These can involve societal resistance or oligarchies who like to believe they’re in control. Changes in attitudes form the basis of world change. A valid notion here is unconcealment, the exposure of things people should know of and think about – whether withheld, or people don’t want to know, or it is simply thitherto not known.

This is not about steering things in ways we want to see things go: it’s about helping humanity accelerate its evolution. Humanity’s group soul knows what it’s doing even if we humans don’t. Sometimes the ‘wrong’ thing seems to have to happen in order to catalyse a wholesome and fundamental change. This concerns defining moments – events embodying big issues and forcing critical shifts or decisions. By this means the collective unconscious and force majeure leak into real life.

In 1995 a circle of eighty or so of us worked with Bosnia – a powerful and moving session lasting some six hours. We heard later that, while in session, some drunken Serbs had bombed a marketplace in Sarajevo, killing 60. This was sobering, shocking – definitely not our intention. What had gone wrong? Yet, a week or so later, this defining event made NATO go in, ending the war within a short time. Something ‘bad’ led to something ‘good’ – though we couldn’t and wouldn’t have designed it that way. We can’t say we made NATO go in, and that wasn’t our thought, but the synchronicities, considering the war had gone on for three years, were too close. We must assume some involvement, even if but to oil the works or connect some dots.

One of the big lessons here is: carefully consider what you pray for. Also, only take on doable challenges, and be willing to follow them through later on.

The main idea is to help foster forwardness and a sense of progress – it’s like midwifery. We cannot force progress but we can do our best to facilitate it. Deep change doesn’t happen overnight, and sometimes we must work at it over time. Humanity’s problem is that it feels blocked, jaded and discouraged, as if nothing will make any difference. So the key issue is to help people gain a sense of relief and momentum – get a taste of the benefits of accelerating evolution.

It’s a matter of getting our politics, cultural judgements, ideologies, values and comfort-zones out of the way. This isn’t easy. It helps to have travelled outside the rich world to see things from another angle. Be aware of the way the media and your education shape your thinking, and listen more closely to events than to what people say. Study a little history, background and smallprint. Step over your beliefs and conditioning, using sensitivity, imagination and intuition to experience things from the inside, to see the dynamics going on underneath. It’s a challenge to set ourselves aside – though just for half an hour or so.

There are many ways to do world work, and if you resonate with what’s written here, then give attention to feeling your way forward, developing your own path. Use the inner tricks, tools and background you already have.

Here’s a crucial, human bit: we need to connect our own issues, pain and challenges into this, to power it up emotionally. We know what our own pain is like, and plenty of people round the world are in similar or worse situations. So they can act as a psychic entry-point. You can see life through their eyes. In recent months I’ve experienced heartbreak, and plenty of people in Ukraine, or Palestine and Yemen (the two main places I regularly focus on), have heartbreak too, and we all need a bit of there-there, and thus we can serve each other well.

With cancer, I tune into cancer patients, because it means something personal to me and I know what it’s like. The feeling-tones around this gives the work more grace, astuteness and firepower. If you’re a nurse, a truck-driver, a gardener or a pensioner, tune in through your own situation and its problems and joys and use this empathically to connect with others.

There are holistic and surgical/pharma treatments for disease. In this context, disease can encompass riots, volcanoes, storms, wars, famines, insecurity, collapses and ‘black swans’ – events no one expected. Holistic treatment works best for building conditions for good health and immunity, while surgery and pharma are best when it’s too late or too serious. This kind of meditation is more surgical, applicable when deep matters of principle are at stake.

But it depends really on whether this is your thing. Or perhaps you might be best continuing with what you already do, with a new slant to it.

There are all sorts of methods and procedures, such as mopping up dead souls after disasters, working to raise the level of the collective mood, inwardly supporting threatened species, love-bombing and truth-mining a conflict zone, or working with whatever comes up in the news that really gets to you. If it’s Ukraine, work with Ukraine because you will also assist other places and situations where similar issues apply. One longterm aim is to remove enough problems from the overall system so that its inherent, homoeostatic self-healing capacity can revive.

Sometimes it’s an A&E and intensive care job, and cutting out a tumour or infected organ can save the whole body, if that is the only option left. That’s how focusing on specific acute issues and crises can help the world as a whole. Don’t forget to support the helpers too: the on-the-ground activists, good-hearted people, dedicated public servants, people who hold society up and do the donkey-work, and people who take brave initiatives. I’ve even found myself sitting with an abandoned dying person in an apartment block in Sian, China, and it was good for both of us. He found a comforting welcome on the other side.

If you do this once a week for a year, out of fifty meditations, ten will be really worth it. When done in a group (three upwards), even if remotely at a chosen time, it powers it up. Stick with it. Don’t seek results – just do it. Give it time. This is a life-long work. It can empower other stuff you’re doing or give meaning to what you might believe to be a meaningless, insignificant life.

Based on earlier experiences in the 1970s-80s, in the 1990s I started a large-group project doing ‘inner aid’, the Hundredth Monkey Project, which pioneered much of this approach, and later a smaller group, the Flying Squad, continued in this work for twenty years. They’re both closed now, but the meditation time-slot, agreed with the Council of Nine thirty years ago, is still open every week on Sundays at 7-7.30 GMT (8-8.30 BST). I’m there, every week, wherever I am, dead or alive, and with a number of others (I know not how many). Tune in on that channel if you wish. If you continue over time the management will give you a direct line.

In my experience there is more personal growth in ‘world work’ than in personal growthwork. You find that out by doing it. The more you do it, the better you get. So just work at it, don’t make a big deal, keep motivation simple and intelligent and, remember, it is for the highest good, for the wide, longterm benefit of humanity, our planet home and all who live in her.

Thanks for reading. We’ll be covering this in my forthcoming ‘magic circles‘.

Love from me, Palden

If this subject interests you, here is an article and a report I wrote in the 1990s. My thoughts have developed and changed in some respects but it all still holds. I’ll revise them sometime. Or not, as the case may be.
www.palden.co.uk/consciousness-work.html
www.palden.co.uk/psychic-work.html

The Flying Squad site is worth a look:
www.flyingsquad.org.uk

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