It’s amazing to be part of a revolution – even if it’s temporary. The relief of getting rid of an oppressive regime creates an expanded nowness, a special moment of intensified significance, before the serious stuff that follows inevitably sets in. There’s a shedding of a deep sense of social burden and self-suppression, of unwilling, shoulder-shrugging complicity with something that few were happy with. In Syria, those who took the regime’s side did so because they saw it as the lesser of two evils, or they made a living or gained advantage through it.
But when the cork pops, a deep collective-emotional eruption bursts out, spreading like wildfire around the country, even spreading around the world. It reminds people everywhere, on a deep, hardly-conscious level, that it is possible to change things from the bottom up, that society has power.
It’s also emotionally tragic to be part of a failed revolution – a dashing of hope and faith, a reimposition of fear and oppression, a paroxysm of despair. It can crush spirits. It nearly did so with me – I was part of flower power and a student uprising at the LSE in London – but after a lot of pain and process the experience ended up making me more resilient.
Forty years later in 2011 in Amman, Jordan, I met some Egyptians and Syrians, fresh from their uprisings, proud and uplifted to have been part of them, yet fearful. They were in Amman because they had been chased out of their own countries, regarded as dangerous. The repression of both uprisings had polluted the joy and impetus of revolution, and these guys were vexed about what to do.
I told them that, in the case of the uprising I had been a part of, though we were beaten and broken, the flowering of issues and dynamics that emerged during that short yet long time had withered but not died. It re-emerged slowly over the years, filtering in through society’s back door. Those of us committed to change had continued quietly, developing our green ideas, healing methods, lifestyle changes, music, feminism, back-to-nature instincts and our psycho-spiritual transformations, and it was a all matter of time before these infiltrated wider society – and it still is. Here I was, four decades later, still here, still working for the change I believed in.
I reminded them that change is deep and it is not truly fulfilled by a revolution, which merely clears the way for whatever happens next. It would take time and it would be difficult, but the lava-streams of change would work under the surface, seeping out or erupting over time and over the generations. What makes the spirit of revolution survive, like a dormant seed buried in the soil? Well, whatever its faults, it was essentially right, and it constituted the direction that humanity needs to follow. History takes time to unfold, but time is on the side of change. The issues that bubble up in such change-moments are bigger and more historically-transformative than we often see at the time, and this process takes time. For me, in late life I’ve come to accept that it can take longer than a lifetime.
Now, in Syria, here we have it – the consequences of 2011. The Syrians of the Arab Spring are 12 years older and a new generation has grown into adulthood. Media outlets round the world are wrong to harp on about terrorism and Al Qaeda – they don’t see where the true roots of this lie. They suspect Islamism of malign, threatening things, when Islamism itself is simply a philosophy and social reform movement, the behaviour of which depends very much on the people doing it.
The Taliban in Afghanistan, while dominated by old Muhajedin fighters from former decades, is also stocked with thoughtful, pragmatic, younger and more travelled people who will inherit the reins. Hamas in Gaza was far more (as it goes) progressive, liberal and socially competent than outside commentators and their paymasters wish to see, and the Israeli killing of Ishmael Haniyeh a few months ago, Hamas’ leader, meant the loss of one of the world’s better political leaders. In my humble opinion.
When so-called terrorists have a constituency of local support, and when they are fighting on their own turf for the liberation of their land and people, they are freedom fighters. Terrorists lack empathy, caring little for the people they live amongst, their agenda is geopolitical and ideological and their method is to use violently dramatic actions to create fear and terror, to scoop up media attention. One well-executed bombing can set the world on edge.
HTS is not a terrorist organisation and neither are most of the other militias in Syria (though one or two might be). Other countries would be wise not to oppose or obstruct the new regime – though perhaps it will need moderating with sweeteners. The uprising in Syria is locally-driven, in distinction to the ongoing conflict in Syria since 2011, which has been a viper’s nest of external intervening powers, influencers and financiers. Now their influence is weakened, withdrawn or undermined.
When I went there in 2014 there were about seven sides to the conflict and it was terribly confusing. I went briefly to Deraa and Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp outside Damascus. Since it was likely that I’d be thrown out of Palestine by the Israelis, under suspicion, and banned for at least ten years, I felt a need to do something else. When asked to visit Yarmouk by a Palestinian tribe with refugee relatives in Syria, I decided to help them, as a kind of courier and emissary.
But it finished me off. Things happened that deeply affected me. Perhaps also I was in denial,lready feeling burned out, with elements of PTSD accumulated over previous years. But this finished me off. I lost my hope and patience in Syria, afterward feeling lost in a smothering cloud of dismay and disappointment. It was the last humanitarian mission I did. I wasn’t happy about that. But life had other designs.
I spent the following years on a self-healing path in Cornwall, doing remote humanitarian work (such as with the Tuareg in Mali), prehistoric research and walking the cliffs and moors. A loving relationship from 2016 to 2022 brought me back to life. Only when I went down with cancer in 2019 was I healed of the clamping shadows I had been struggling with – they were subsumed by the prospect of death, which prompted an enormous inner let-go of all and everything, bringing something of a spiritual breakthrough and a rapid process of forgiveness of myself, others and life.[1]
This is deep stuff. When, as an individual, you ‘lose your fear’ and come out into the streets in an uprising, you align with a collective tidal surge of vision, emotion, ideas and spirit that feels truly like a springtime, a release. All sorts of amazing things happen. People come alive, emerging out of the woodwork, progressing a long way and finding a new mission in life. People’s lives change in bulk, and a rising tide of hope lifts up even those people who normally are sunk in a life of drudge, stuck in a state of reluctant complicity. The splintered social dissonance that allows oppressive regimes to gain and hold power melts away, and there’s an eruption of resonance, mass concurrence and shared wishes. This resonance-field fizzes and sparkles, motivating people to do quite remarkable things.
But it all depends on what happens next. It depends on the new leaderships that take power and, even more, on the wisdom, patience and fortitude of crowds. Once the change happens, eveyone wants normality to be restored – the economy, public services, reconstruction, and freedom from excessive and unnecessary obstructions in daily life – though this is not simple and fast. After the joy of change, there’s a lot of hard work to be done.
The wisdom of crowds… this is a delicate matter. After regime change in Sudan, the democratic movement did quite well for a time. There was a maturity to the way that people dealt with their tender democratising situation after a long period of dictatorship. But it was delicate, involving a lot of mutual trust, and there are people who manipulate unstable, transitional situations to their own advantage – they can act quicker and more decisively than collectivities of people. They have a contrarian need to break the magic ring of mutualised social power, aiming to restore public dissonance at any cost. In Sudan, it became a slugging match between two oligrchies, each headed by generals, each supported by different outside powers and financing. The democratic movement was killed off, tragedy ensued, and it continues today. Most of the world isn’t interested. Hope is not currently available in Sudan.
Ten years ago I was involved with a small group called the Flying Squad.[2] We did geopolitical healing work and, by 2014, the group had been working together for sixteen years – so we had some experience. It involved a weekly group meditation, wherever we were, and three or four weekend meetings each year – and membership involved committing to 100% presence and involvement in all meditations and meetings, to take group synergy to a higher level.
We did a lot of work with Syria and its uprising and civil war, even travelling to Greece to get closer. There were times when we felt we were getting somewhere in our efforts, but each time a new set of events would re-ignite the situation and make things worse – often prompted by outside intervention by state and non-state actors. Were we getting things wrong? Or was this simply an intractable situation?
This was a big learning. As a planetary healer, you have to learn and accept that sometimes it doesn’t work. There was a point where, in our inner investigations, we discovered an enormous ancient telluric ‘worm’ or dragon in the Euphrates valley in Syria and Iraq, and it was deeply upset. We tried to ease its concerns and help it clarify its aims – it was deeply unhappy about the fighting, oppression and oil extraction in its patch. After we did this work there was indeed a brief pause in events, providing a glimmer of hope, but it soon was dashed by new developments.
We had to learn that there are some things you cannot help. The reasons often emerge later, even years later. Sometimes we can be too restless, short-termist and attached to immediate outcomes. It’s unwise and even egocentric to expect results, just because you feel you’ve put your heart and soul into it and, by rights, it should work. But there can be reasons why it doesn’t work. The idea of creating a ceasefire in Gaza, for example, while desirable, doesn’t actually resolve the problem and its causes, and it might not bring a fundamental healing of a bad situation.
Deep down, countries like Syria and its neighbours are developing a social immunity to conflict and oppression. This is at street-and-village level, and it’s a semi-conscious thing fermenting underneath. The key mechanism is that a society must reach a level of exhaustion with war and oppression, to the extent that it firmly and behaviourally no longer permits it. Society stops responding to the methods that oppressors and warring factions use to divide people and set them in fear. This is pretty much the case in Lebanon nowadays – they’ve had enough of strife, havig been through many decades of it.
The seat of such social power rests a lot with women: if women collectively no longer accept a bad situation and are tired of going along with what men are doing, the violence ends, sooner or later. It’s a buildup of firm and settled emotional consensus. This was one of the key dynamics of the peace that came to Northern Ireland in the 1990s – women put pressure on men to make a change. They just stopped making sandwiches for them and washing their underpants.
There’s another force at work that generates this immunity. After a while, everyone just wants to go home, sleep in their own bed, be with their family and feel safe. This is another rather feminine feeling. When fighters get tired, conflict ends, somehow. It’s a deep tiredness with the privations and dangers of war and oppression. It’s what made the Syrian soldiers recently melt away as the militias advanced – they were fed up. They’d lost the sense of purpose that soldiers need to have if they are to put themselves in the way of danger.
So we now have a full-on situation in Syria. A lot hangs around the international community and the way it responds. A lot hangs on leaderships and their behaviour. A lot hangs on social solidarity, forgiveness of the past, de-corruption and a buildup of trust and integrity in society.
We’ve had a lot of failed uprisings in recent times – in Myanmar, Belarus, Hong Kong, Iran, Venezuela and Sudan – but something has recently changed. Astrologically, Pluto has moved from spending 16 years in Capricorn – a sign that generally hangs on to stability and convention and doesn’t like change – to spending 20 years in Aquarius. The emphasis has shifted from the prevalence of governments and institutions to the prevalence of crowds and public attitudes.
There is a possibility here of a real turning of the page. Not just the replacement of a Captagon-driven, oppressive narco-regime with an Islamist one, but also a change in Islamism itself, and a change in the behaviour of the public. All over the world, the style of governance of countries has come into focus – both democratic systems and authoritarian regimes are in trouble, and people at the top no longer sit securely in their seats. We shall see.
I’m wondering how the Palestinians in Syria (around 450,000 of them) feel about all this. Assad had treated them well, in comparison to many other countries, so they were grateful for that, but the Palestinians could not accept his violent response to the 2011 uprising, and this put them in a difficult situation. Palestinians do not like Muslim extremists either – Al Qaeda or the Islamic State – and in the last twelve years of instability they have come under attack from various directions. I hope they’re feeling some relief today.
This has stirred me quite deeply and personally – helped by the winds and storms raging here in Cornwall in the last two days. It’s a glimmer of hope. It reminds me of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. At that time I was contemplating suicide – the only time I’ve ever felt that feeling. I felt blocked by life from every direction. Everything seemed to be going wrong. But, on the weekend when I might have done it, the Iranian Revolution happened, and this suddenly gave me a spark of hope. It went bad soon after, but on that weekend it looked as if something quite big was changing. I forgot suicide. For me, amidst a dark night of the soul, it was a turning-point: my soul was asking me to make a big and deep commitment to my life’s work. It involved the end of a marriage, the loss of my children and a return to Britain after a time of exile in Sweden.
It was the beginning of a new path in life that brought me to where I am now, affecting thousands of people along the way. For better or worse, that is, since there are times when I’ve screwed up too. However, the posterity-perspective of late life seems to be telling me that it was, on balance, positive. Just above my desk is a Healing Buddha with a little sign at its feet which says ‘Time is a Healer’. Well, yes, though it’s also a decider, an accounting, a process of judgement by posterity. We ourselves can only make an accounting, but time, the wider world and other people judge the balance of benefit our lives have brought.
The same goes for revolutions and regime changes. The Assad and Makhlouf families and the deposed Syrian oligarchy have a lot of accounting to do, and history is unlikely to be sympathetic – as with Saddam Hussein, Ghaddafi and possibly, in future, Netanyahu. Together with many others, too many to name. But, in our own smaller lives, we face an accounting too since many of us are guilty of a shared crime that also needs to end: to quote 18th Century philosopher Edmund Burke, ‘For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing‘. That is a crime we all variously have a stake in.
However, here’s something. We need to be careful about the way we label some people as goodguys and others as badguys. We get dictators because we didn’t stop them coming. So, instead of focusing all the blame on them – or all the Trumps and Al Fayyads of the world – we ned to remember to look at our own part in the equation. As old Jesus once said: ‘Let the one who is without guilt cast the first stone‘.
The building of social capital and the amassing of power to the people involves a lot of deep forgiveness.
With love, Palden.
PS: It was not cool to take my camera to Syria, so the pictures here are from Amman, Jordan.
FOOTNOTES
- The story of my cancer process is recounted in my audiobook ‘Blessings that Bones Bring’ – it’s at www.palden.co.uk/boneblessings.html
- The Flying Squad is now closed, but the group worked together for twenty years – this website explains it all: www.flyingsquad.org.uk
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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