This is dedicated to my old friends Jaki Whitren and John Cartwight – they eloped upstairs together a few years ago. They’re the greatest rock band you never heard of, big in Glastonbury in the 1980s-90s.
And this podcast isn’t what you might at first think it’s about… this is about reincarnation.
Introduced and outroduced by the Massed Corvid Choir of Lower Grumbla, Cornwall – crows and jackdaws that live in the woods below the farm. At dawn they get worked up and suddenly they all take flight, hundreds of them, and they settle on the roof of the farm. You can hear them arriving and landing just before the music starts.
So this is about reincarnation, and the many lives we live in this life. For me, towards the end of my current life (I’m currently 72, with cancer) this takes on a special significance, since I know in my bones, and always have, that it doesn’t just go blank and dark when you die. It doesn’t end there. You carry on – but without a body or a slot in Planet Earth’s rather bumpy reality.
And when you get born, you aren’t a blank sheet – you come with character, proclivities and tendencies already there, brought with you from before.
Oh, and, for your interest, this is Paldywan on steroids. Yes, literally. I had my cancer treatment today (Weds 7th Dec), and part of it is a steroid called Dex, or Dexamethasone. After my treatment, as you might imagine, I’m buzzing. This time I thought I’d do a podcast to harness the buzzing.
The steroids tend to loosen my vocal chords, so if you’re one of those who likes my voice, this is a good one! But I’m a little slurred too, in places, not entirely in my body.
With love from West Penwith in Cornwall – a rather magic place. Thanks for listening. There’s more to come. 35 mins.
For those of you who are interested in the kinds of things I gibber on about, you might find this video really interesting. It’s down below.
Jeffrey Mishlove comes at matters of the soul and psyche from a completely different angle from me, yet I completely agree with what he says. He’s a psychologist with a really open mind, while my qualifications in this subject are zilch, haha, yet I draw on my own experiences. Which, over the years, have become a bit of a list…
These have included a near-death experience, talking to a soul (my son) before he was born, talking to souls after they’re gone and even handholding them over the threshold, re-experiencing a good number of ‘past’ lives and a couple of ‘future’ ones, and all sorts of other out-of-time experiences of many kinds. These qualify me as a madman or rather sane, depending on your viewpoint. (Actually, for all of us it’s somewhere in between – Gurdjieff used to call people of the muggle variety ‘mad machines’.)
I don’t actually consider myself very good at this stuff. Believe me, when meditating, I get booming brains and endless diversions at least as much as anyone reading this. But the issue here is giving it attention and going into it, giving it time and space and doing it over a period of time – such as the rest of your life. Simply do this, and you do pick up experience. Keep doing it. Occasionally, you’re lit up with grace, wonder, healing, resolution and light.
So, I am not a good meditator. I’ve been with people who go far deeper than I do. But the issue here is to sit with it and do it – at your own pace, with no shoulds or oughts, as a part of your life like breakfast and lunch. Give space for the world within to speak.
I’ve been doing a weekly meditation without fail on Sundays at 7pm GMT (8pm BST) for half an hour, since 1994. This is the Nine slot when the channels are open, run by Altea. If you wish to join, just do it – though pls take your boots off before entering and spend the first few sessions just listening and, if necessary, waiting. It works like that.
Otherwise I meditate randomly when it’s right to do so. Sometimes I’m just sitting there churning over my stuff and nothing much seems to be happening – as far as what a meditative state ought to be (ahem). But then I draw out, up and back from myself and see it differently. ‘Removing self from self’. I see myself churning around and it looks very different. It changes instantaneously.
One day I had a breakthrough. It was when I was with the Nine in the early 1990s. I found myself letting my watchers upstairs enter right into my psyche, allowing them to see parts of me I didn’t want them to see. I didn’t want to see them either, and I’m still discovering new hidden shadows down there in the depths. It goes on and on – there’s no retirement in this game.
Letting them in was like an enormous burst of self-forgiveness. They didn’t do anything except take a look inside an interestingly fucked-up humanoid on Earth, but for me it was a release and relief, an opening up and a step forward. I saw myself as I was, not as I told myself I wanted to be, or feared I was, or believed others saw me to be.
My birth chart. Jupiter, down the bottom (like a 4), holds the key to my chart – it’s called a bucket-handle. My chart is a bit like a foolproof instruction manual on how not to be a billionaire.
For a Jupiter in Pisces type like me, this kind of thing is an undoubted peak experience.
Whenever I am troubled, I open myself up for them to take a look. After a while it becomes more of a habit. That opens out a load of things. It shifts the context, I see things more as they are, and this helps me do an update on myself. It’s not as easy as it sounds, because guilt, shame and fear are so deeply embedded and sometimes demand some wrestling, but it helps me move forward.
It’s like mindfulness practice: whether it’s you or your ‘inner guides’ being aware of what’s happening in your psyche, it’s essentially the same awareness being aware of it.
We are not the separate individuals we believe ourselves to be. Here on Earth we’re swimming in an enormous and rather busy psychic collectivity, and it’s like a swirling, whirling, jangly cacophony. We’re all members of tribes and groups that go way beyond this life.
At this time of history we’re being asked to recognise something further: that we’re all of the same tribe, the same people. We’re all so different yet we’re part of one planetary tapestry, one species. We all breathe the same air and see the same Moon in the sky.
Without recognising this in our hearts and in our bones, we will give ourselves a very hard time in coming times, and we’re already well advanced in this. It’s that simple.
Tibetans have a philosophy of doing good and of practicing loving kindness not only because they’re good things to do, but also because they set up conditions for our forthcoming incarnations. It means that, in future, there will be less of a pile of difficult issues to deal with if we make progress on them now. It helps us stop causing problems we don’t really need. Perfection isn’t required: all we need is forward motion. Whether or not you subscribe to such a perspective, it’s worth contemplating. It’s ecological, sustainable and just. It involves what Buddhists call non-duality…
…recognising that the inner and the outer worlds are two sides of the same coin, of equal reality, and they’re thoroughly interactive and mutually-responsive in detail and down to the subtlest of nuances. The toxicity, injustice and tragedy out there in our world are totally connected with those that lurk within our own psyches. Oh shit.
If humanity gets this equation, sometime, somehow, we will make it through the crisis we have here in our world – and we’ll make good use of it. Miracles will happen because we will be creating reality differently. For some (not all) of us here, this concerns our future lives as well as those of our grandchildren, who could become our parents. What we’re doing now creates conditions in which, in coming times, we and everyone may thrive and fulfil our purpose.
Everyone has specific instructions programmed into our psyches and genes, but the two main purposes we all share are… to learn and to make a contribution. No one is here by accident.
This video is by an old friend, Tim Walter, a film-maker and dowser who’s interesting in his own right – check out his videos on YouTube, such as this…
Nowadays I’m rather frail, yet there’s a deep resilience in me too. I’m not unused to crisis and tend to fight back and rebirth myself through it. The more you allow crisis, the more you can use it as a launchpad for revival.
Rocks and hard places – Porthmoina Cove, Cornwall
I’m still alive. Crisis over. I spent last week coming back fully, also working with taking chemo. I seem to be taking it quite well, though it affects my brains and energy – my perceived age is now that of a perky 90 year old and I have to simplify my life and activities to match.
Since starting chemo a month ago I’ve gone into a pharma-induced weekly cycle where I’m ‘up’ on Dex (a steroid) on Mondays and Tuesdays and then I subside into what could be a ‘down’ time by Friday – except I relax into it and let it be, and I don’t get depressed as some people do. The challenge is to hang in there and go through the long tunnel.
The signs are good. Liz, the haematologist, reported last week that my results were ‘surprisingly good’. She forgets that I had said this was likely, but now at least she has some evidence.
When my cancer journey started in autumn 2019, I really didn’t know how well I would do: the shock of getting cancer obliged me to abandon previous ideas and beliefs and really get to grips with the facts of my situation. I was dying and the cancer was quite advanced – I was caught in the nick of time.
My treatment in the last month has worked well – again, to their surprise, and despite the crisis I had. I had encouraged them to set a student on me to observe and monitor me for their research, because I’ve been a meditating vegetarian for decades. But no, such knowledge wasn’t deemed necessary.
Though when the visiting nurse came on Monday this week to administer my drugs, she was fascinated with my story. She’s clearly quite interested in alternative pathways, but most people she talks to about this will tend to be relatively new to the game, and perhaps they won’t have changed and evolved as far.
She nodded, agreeing, when I said that five decades of a good diet and lifestyle and 45 years of meditation must have a significant effect, especially since I started this while young: I (and people like me) have evolved differently from many people, psychospiritually and physically, and decades of it makes a difference.
Nowadays I’m rather frail, yet there’s a deep resilience in me too. I’m not unused to crisis and tend to fight back and rebirth myself through it. The more you allow crisis, the more you can use it as a launchpad for revival. Part of me needs it since it activates my systems, and that’s one reason why I’ve tended to live quite an edgy life, involved with risky, frontline, limit-pushing activities.
If you’re part of a revolution when you’re young, even if it fails, there’s no going back – and many are the people around the world who have crossed this line in the last decade or two, yesterday in Belarus and Hong Kong, today in Myanmar.
Though I have contracted a blood cancer, this seems to arise from specific toxicities – electromagnetism and nuclear radiation – rather than from the patterns of my lifestyle. But I’ve had to face a raw fact: I have opened myself to energy and energy-fields. This has been a thirty-year theme in my talks and writings on astrology, cereology, ancient sites and the state of the world.
Perhaps I opened myself to these energy-fields a bit enthusiastically and unwisely earlier in life, or perhaps this openness made for a problem with mobile phones and wi-fi, making me undefended and increasing the effect of radiation exposure. Even so, although I have cancer, my overall body-mind system is in quite good nick, and this gives me good medical results, also helping me avoid some of the side-effects other people get during treatment.
Chapel Carn Brea, Cornwall
There’s a deep truth here: everything in life is a gift. Everything. Including those things we do not count as gifts.
Here we come to crises. Since diagnosis I’ve had three crises and it seems that, when these happen, more gets resolved than was immediately apparent at the time. Last October I contracted shingles (a side-effect of chemo drugs). But, as a result of that crisis my arthritis reduced, my fatigue disappeared and I went through quite a lift and breakthrough afterwards. The crisis mobilised a greater healing process than just dealing with the shingles.
The advantage of a crisis is that you can resolve lots of issues at once, rather than dragging them out over time and through much complexity. It raises the stakes, accelerating change.
Last week’s crisis – a total stomach explosion lasting 4-5 days – rendered me helpless and weak. I did the necessaries and dealt with it. Put me in a crisis and I am calm and collected – well, at least, in the heat of the moment. Astrologers amongst you will understand that, for a person with Sun and Saturn in Virgo, an exploding stomach is a big issue – a symptom of the transiting Neptune that is currently opposing my Saturn.
In my meditation at the time I opened myself up to my ‘inner doctors’ more than ever before. I went a level deeper than I knew I could. Most of them seem never to have had earthly bodies, but I think they’ve taken on a couple of former humans to help them get closer in – otherwise they can work only with my energy-fields without actually knowing how my body anatomy works. This sense of being closely examined was profound particularly because, for the healing to really work, you have to let these beings into your darker corners – the bits of your life you don’t want others, or even yourself, to see, and the stuff you feel guilty and ashamed about. For here is where the causes of illness lie.
Over the next day or two I felt myself getting sorted out from top down, starting at the highest level and working down through energy-body stuff to the physical issues. It’s difficult to convey how this felt, but I felt myself being pulled up and flooded with light from the centre and working outwards, while also being pulled down and re-grounded after a rather nightmarish experience, from outwards in. The crisis was resolved as the week progressed, and I feel I’ve been realigned, rewired and recharged, and that my soul is now more in the driving seat.
Here there’s a lesson in letting go. Before you ‘let go and let God’, it’s difficult knowing what that newly-opened space will be like and the way the game-plan rules will change when you step into it – and we have this cringeing habit of entering the future facing backwards. Letting go is, in a way, more about adopting the future than releasing the past. It can be hard work, sometimes, especially when you’re digging into deep patterns. But we also make it harder than it needs to be.
This is true for individuals but also, in the 2020s, this is very much the condition of the world, and it’s manifesting as a sense of urgency for change in the young: they don’t want to face the crap they’re faced with in the world as it stands, because they want to get on with the real stuff, not with the embedded illusions and attachments of former generations. But they’re faced with presented reality and legacy situations, and this is hard. Harry and Meghan have been demonstrating this in full public view.
One blessing arising from hovering close to death has been that I’m looking not only at the patterns of this life and of my life story. I find myself looking at patterns beyond this life, noticing the abiding threads, relationships and connections I have with people, and with karmic themes that go further than this life. Such a viewpoint shifts our perspective greatly – which is one reason why most people avoid it like the plague.
My son has signed up for the Army Reserves (Royal Signals), and he’s really motivated, and I know he’ll do it well. This is challenging for a wizzened old peace-freak like me, but I support him in following his path. When you’re a parent of a child joining the armed forces, you have to get used to the idea that they might get killed. In his case, I don’t think my son will, but you never know. I’ve had plenty of death-opportunities myself and I’m still here, now on my tenth life. But my response to this risk of death is, ‘Well, he and I have a contract lasting many lives, so if he dies I’ll be there to meet him on the other side, and we’ll have more to do with each other anyway, another time – this life is a chapter in a long story’.
I feel this with my three daughters too: we arrived in each other’s lives because we all have an interlocking karmic story, and we are here to enact those threads and experiences that we give each other – both intentionally and not. It has had its painful times. Here I have some regret, but in retrospect not as much as some people have judged I ought to have. This is important because, with children, though we generally want to do the best for them, we as parents are also here to give our children problems, issues and patterns. We have to give them a pile of shite to deal with. What they do with that is ultimately their choice, and it takes time to make it good and turn things around. They are new people, not just products of their heritage, and a proportion of souls alive today are new to earthly life too – some youngsters experiencing gender dysphoria are like that.
These new souls are programmed with the memories of other souls who have had earthly lives, to make them fit to face the challenges and details of life in a body on a high-gravity, spinning planet. These are not their own memories, and they don’t have the same emotional connection to them as souls would who draw on personal experience. So many of these souls seek to achieve their goals without really knowing fully how to deal with the dilemmas and screw-ups that happen on the way, or without fully developing the necessary skills. Developing patience and perseverance is a key issue.
My son is drawing on trans-life military memory – he’s inherently experienced in it, and the same has been true for me as a humanitarian and social activist. In the 1980s-90s, when I was organising gatherings and camps, I had an inherent gift of pulling people together – calling up armies – and many of them were former souls who knew me from other lives. When you’ve been a chief, a khan, a sheikh and a general, for better or worse you can be known by many thousands of souls.
This insight has helped me understand how and why, throughout life, some people have loved and been noticeably loyal while others have hated me and even taken revenge. One of life’s big lessons has been to forgive yet not to forget. Though the funny thing is that, since a near-death experience I had at age 24, I’ve had significant memory problems and I don’t actually remember my past very well, and this has helped immensely with forgiving. Our hang-ups are rooted in memory and the emotional armouring we develop as a result of pain and hardship, and I’ve had less of this than many people, owing to memory-loss.
One of life’s big lessons, for all of us, is how to make something good out of a bad situation. The Palestinians are masters at this, and they’ve taught me a lot. Life’s a pile of shit, and why do we delude ourselves otherwise and suffer so much over that delusion? Even eating chocolate causes suffering. But it’s delightful too, and you just do not get tomato ketchup up in heaven, so enjoy it while you can. But the big issue now is that enjoying life’s ketchup can no longer be done at the expense of others, and everyone deserves their fair share of ketchup, though not at the expense of our home planet.
Boscregan, looking toward Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall
Another big lesson is staying true to our calling and purpose – not letting the world’s diversions get in the way too much. Sure, there are bills to pay, but this is not what we’re here for. We have to face these diversions because they’re part of life and they do lead us into places and situations we otherwise wouldn’t experience. They force us to develop life-skills. I’m a good writer but it is a developed skill, honed through mega-thousands of hours sitting at desks and computers, and it has been both a gift, a bane and at times a burden.
In my life I’ve made choices to prioritise my calling more than my security, and there has been a price to that, not only for me. I’ve made mistakes too, but I don’t fundamentally regret it. I’ve often been accused of being an unrealistic idealist, but actually I’m very much a Virgo realist, more preoccupied with working with human wrongs than with human rights, and looking further into the future than many people care to do. What in the 1960s were visionary ideals are now pragmatic policy imperatives.
One day at a time. With chemo-brain this approach is necessary. My capacity to handle complexity is much reduced. But it has its virtues. One thing in life we cannot control is the time and manner of our passing away. Paradoxically, the more we accept that lack of control, the more control we gain within that context. Life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans.
Thanks and blessings to all guardian angels. Thank you too for letting me share these thoughts. Salam alekum: peace in your soul. And what next? Time is what stops everything happening all at once.
Human wrongs, and the future: Possibilities 2050 | www.possibilities2050.org (website and free PDF download). A visionary realist report on the world in 2050.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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