Here’s a little astrology lesson, pertinent to what’s happening at present. Take a look at the chart here, for this morning, Thursday 7th August. Even non-astrologers will notice a pattern, a configuration, that is quite orderly and structured.
When this happens, the energy-fields of the planets of our solar system start syncing with each other and creating a mega-twang, a super-thrum, a chord, and in these energy-circumstances things start happening. They start shaking up and rattling loose.
What’s interesting here is that, astrologically, this is not exactly a crisis situation. This configuration is dominated by sextiles (30 degrees) and trines (120 degs), which are aspects (angles) of flow, movement, progression, slip-sliding, letting go and accelerating evolution. It’s not exactly about crunches, shocks, crises and disasters.
It’s about things simply progressing fast. It’s an avalanche of events that push things forward – with an element of overload that itself forces issues out, up and forward. There’s an element of inevitability to it too – that is, things happening now relate to things that happened or failed to happen before, and also (get this) things that are yet to become visible and come into being. This is a case of the future having a formative influence on the present.
If you look at the green lines in the chart, the core issue here is a triangle that is being formed by the slow-moving outer planets, Uranus (in Gemini), Neptune (in Aries) and Pluto (in Aquarius). This is rare, slow, and happening now and over the next few years. It has been building up since Covid-time and it is historic in effect.
A lot is going to change during the late 2020s, and the key issue here is overload. An overload that makes everyone think differently, choose their priorities, urgently seek fundamental solutions and juggle hard to keep everything going.
There’s a useful analogy in geology. The erosive power of a river increases as the square of its volume. In other words, if the volume of flow increases three times, the erosive power increases nine times. We’ve seen this in recent floods worldwide, though a flood is simply a dramatic increase of flow, a releasing of energy. Yes, it destroys a lot and is difficult or deadly for the poor people at the receiving end of it, but the river is constructing a new path by which things can flow better. It is preparing the future.
These three planets will shimmy in and out of exact aspect over the next few years, and they ard pretty exact right now. Since they move slowly, they influence slow-moving, historic processes and mega-trends. Often we don’t notice these except at critical junctures.
An example is Gaza: this is a longstanding issue spanning many decades, even centuries, but the recent famine and starvation event and the war before it made it into a global issue in the forefront of the world agenda. And it concerns bigger and wider global-scale issues than Gaza itself.
When faster-moving planets move into configuration with these three, we start getting a mega-twang. In this chart, Saturn, Mars and Mercury are involved. A day later (8th Aug), the Moon will swing into it too, just for half a day, cranking it up even more. In other words, events happen that precipitate the bigger issues that lie underneath.
This concerns not just world events, ‘out there’, but individuals too – depending on how your own astrological chart works. If you have planets in the first degrees of certain signs, then you might have quite a few planets aspecting one or more planets in your chart. Stuff happening. Make the best of it – seize the time.
How much this is a crisis depends a lot on you. Yes, it’s difficult when stuff is rattling and banging and it’s all too much, but this is also a mechanism by which things change, and you can make that change easier or more difficult.
And here’s something: the advantage of a crisis is that a lot of issues can get resolved at once, and pragmatically in response to real-life circumstances – instead of dragging out over a long period of time, or being avoided or sidelined. We are being given a future instead of simply trudging along through life living with the effects of the past.
This is a time of accelerating solutions hiding behind apparent problems. It depends how we see things, and how much we are willing to let go of old ways of seeing things. This is about the future, not the past.
There will be more of these configurations in the coming few years and it’s worth keeping an eye out for them. This isn’t the end of the world, or the beginning of the new age, but it is definitely a time of white-water canoeing through a fast and rough stretch on the river of life and of history. By 2030 more will have happened and progressed than we thought possible.
Yes, it’s Sunday, and the meditation continues whether or not I announce it here. You’re welcome to join me and us in this open meditation. There’s no formula, mantra or prescribed method: do it your way, as you always do or have done.
It’s a joining together of souls, to share inner space togther by entering the zone and bathing in a universal energy-stream. No need to be online – switch off your technology to be more, not less, in contact. There’s no sign-up and there are no strings.
Sometimes I can’t or don’t announce the meditation, but I’m there every week anyway.
I’m feeling rather tired of the daily round being alive, mostly alone and untouched, and of an aching body and the rather uphill climb of being lodged inside it – with a blood cancer, radiation-related, that affects my bones and various parts of this creaky body.
So, if you freely will, keep on with the meditation whether or not I announce it. For there are other people doing it with us, at the same time, in a number of countries – not just us in this group. Hidden away in the world’s quiet corners, we form a network of light, holding the world in place. Holding hands with people of all cultures, backgrounds, faiths and times. Perhaps it’s a secret conspiracy.
We’re sliding into a time of accelerated change, a growing avalanche of events. It’s good to hold the tiller and keep it steady while the world goes into an increasingly swirly, crunchy period of intensity before breakthrough comes. Which it will.
There are, in the end, no winners or losers – we’re all in this together, all humans, sharing a planet that seems big, yet it is so small.
It’s no longer a matter of taking them to our leader – there is none, despite the beliefs of many. It’s a matter of where humanity really is at, as a whole.
One thing that life has taught me is this: those times when everything seems stuck, unlikely to change and seeming to get worse and worse… these are times of prelude to change. So stay with the process.
Such times are part of the cycle of life. They come to oblige humanity to clarify what it truly, ultimately wants and is choosing to create. Then come times when the wave breaks. So getting used to riding our psychospiritual surfboards is a good thing to do. Or perhaps the only thing to do.
It falls on some of us to help bring about that change. Yet it also falls on some of us to look further, to help lay the tracks for what unfolds afterwards and as a consequence. It’s good to look further than the reflective boundaries of our own reality-bubbles.
Bless us all, and here’s a hug to you from me.
With love, Palden.
Current meditation times, on Sundays: UK, Ireland & Portugal 8-8.30pm GMT W Europe 9-9.30pm E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 10-10.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm EST, Cuba 3-3.30pm PST North America 12noon-12.30pm
Aluna, the Void, the Lap of the Mother, out of which everything emerges.
I posted this video a few years ago and it’s worth another spin. Because it speaks of matters I talk about too, though the Kogi Mamas state it far more clearly and unequivocally. It concerns the basis of the way nature works, and it starts in the realm of spirit.
It concerns connecting the power points with each other – the Kogi call them Esuamas – and helping the Earth hum and sing as an energy-being, a conscious being. If she is happy, all will be well, and nature can fix itself when damaged. Ecological reintegration. Rewilding.
This is what we, ‘the younger brother’, are failing to do. Then we wonder why we get flash floods, droughts and storms. We do this by blocking up the energy centres and obstructing their connections.
So, to help the world it is necessary to unblock them.
The Kogi, descendants of the pre-Columban Tairona civilisation, live in the Sierra Nevada of northern Colombia. In a recent article about Caer Brân, a Bronze Age gathering site here in West Penwith, Cornwall, I mentioned the sense of enhanced centrality you can feel at many ancient sites – the feeling of being at the centre of everything – and the Kogi feel that too. It’s a key element in the energy-geography of an area like theirs or like Penwith. They feel that the mountain area where they live lies at the Heart of the World. And it does.
They feel they cannot carry the world any more. In this film, Aluna, they speak of making payments, paying back to the Mother, caring for her and keeping her happy. They practice land management and agriculture that does just this.
In my rants and ramblings about the Neolithic and Bronze Age landscape of Penwith, I suggest that the 600-odd ancient sites in Penwith actually constituted one big ancient site, one big cliff sanctuary. Ancient Penwithians sought to make the land and the wider world hum and glow. Hence the ancient name for Penwith, ‘Belerion’ – the shining or scintillating land. They did it by connecting up the energy-centres to amp them up, to make them operate as one.
The Kogis’ ideas are not unique to them. We in Britain have known them too, a long time ago. We have forgotten. But if, when the time and your mood are right, you watch this film, you too might remember.
I’m not sure how many people join the Sunday meditations. In a way it doesn’t matter. I know and feel some people are there and joining in, including people doing it because of their own relationship with the same spiritual source as mine, the Nine.
Eitherwhichway, I’m always there, every single Sunday, whether or not I say so. Those of you who like to join in, whether often or occasionally, are welcome to continue. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, it’s all explained here:
and the meditation times for different countries are below.
As a cancer patient with my ups and downs, there are times when I cannot do my customary pep talk. However, even if I’m really unwell, I’ll still be there at the meditation. Even when I kick off my earthly clogs, you might even sense me there on the other side. It’s an inner commitment I made to the Council of Nine thirty years ago, and I just keep beavering away at it.
Whatever path you follow, it makes a difference if you stick with it for a long time, since nowadays there’s a spiritual commitment problem that itself is rather problematic for world transformation. We all need to step up, each in our own way, to contribute proactively to something much larger than ourselves – personal growth and fulfilment is only the start of the great pathless path through the gateless gate.
An ancient pathway on our farm, here in Cornwall
But that’s not what I wanted to write about. I want to give an astrologer’s insight. It’s all about Neptune in Aries, which started at the beginning of April 2025. It has been in Pisces since 2011 – a time of reality-slippage, geopolitical confusion, underlying transition, flailing beliefs, mental ill-health, tech dreams and military and climatic nightmares.
We have Neptune in Aries for 14-15 years until 2039. So this is a chapter, a phase, in which the world lives out Aries-type experiences, hopefully to progress them forward. On a 165 year cycle, Neptune last did this between 1861 and 1874 – the time of Abraham Lincoln, Gladstone and Disraeli, Bismarck, Queen Victoria, Karl Marx, and of roaring, steam-powered industrialisation, warfare, power battles, nationalism, early popular movements and Euro-American colonial expansion.
As Neptune trawls its way round the zodiac, chapter by chapter, it pushes us through periods of preoccupation with certain themes – the rise and fall of beliefs and perspectives which themselves influence the way the world sees things, acting out its anticipations, beliefs, fears and its light and its darkness. There’s a visionary side, a place where dreams and big ideas are born, of revelatory situations and realisations, and there’s an illusory and delusory side, mingled with fantasy, fakeness, projection, hypocrisy, glamour and horror. It’s all dreamstuff, yet it percolates into our reality, both helping and harming us and the wider world.
When Neptune is in Aries restlessness, impatience and frustration come up. Though there’s a lot of noise about freedom and identity, there’s a seeking for social-political-cultural examples to follow, align and identify with – it becomes a parade of leaders, public figures, accidental heroes/heroines (Florence Nightingale was one, last time round), who manifest the best and the worst of human possibility.
Some prominent people represent what is hoped for and dreamt of, or perhaps they represent integrity, genius or a human touch, with their finger on the pulse. Some represent what we most fear and dread, or they capture the hearts and minds of followers to promote or impose their own agenda. Either way, they have a lot of push, even of force – or also they reveal or portray themselves and their flock as victims, as the weak. This often gives rise to strong resistance and counter-measures – last time we had the rise of socialism and workers’ movements. It’s then a matter of how intelligent the wider public is in choosing what ideas and initiatives to subscribe to, and how clear their sight is to exert an influence on the strong.
I think you’ll be gtting the gist of this by now, and seeing how this is playing out round the world today. We’re seeing reformed terrorists gaining power as reformers, Popes calling out the status quo, dictators and billionaires acting out their fantasies, a massive generational change and an ongoing movie in which the best and the worst of human power-plays and moral choices process before us. This action-packed movie demands that we get off the fence to exert a moderating influence on those who lead the public discourse or precipitate evolving facts, whether helpful or harmful.
We’re getting an array of leaders and prominent figures who variously represent different aspects of these issues – and different people will see different facets of them, judging them differently. We’re getting a diversity of realities and viewpoints that partially clarifies things and partially adds confusion. It’s all a matter of perceptions and viewpoints, inspired sometimes with vision and purpose and sometimes with false hope or coloured by predisposition or prejudice. It’s a question of whether big ideas and beliefs attempt to override reality or whether reality clips them back to workable proportions.
There’s a conquering undertone to this – ranging from taking territory or power to overcoming obstacles and pioneering new possibilities. The bottom line is that, in the final analysis, there are no winners, and the idea of winning is inherently flawed. Victory is transitory, and everything turns to its opposite in the fullness of time.
Aries is ruled by Mars which, customarily seen as the God of War, in our time is showing itself also to be a God of Peace – a peace arising from stalemate and from the calculus that further conflict means that even the winner becomes a loser. There are limits to the extent to which the strong can push their agenda.
Each sign unconsciously faces its opposite – in this case, Libra, the sign of agreement-disagreement, values, fair-dinkum and relationship. Neptune was last in Libra in 1942-1956, leading to the formation of the United Nations and the ‘rules based’ order that is now disintegrating as the Global North loses its primacy and the Majority World accrues its true power in world affairs.
This has best been symbolised in Gaza, which in the end is a war between the People and the Megamachine, acting as a tipping point where the power of the Global North betrays itself and the Global South is challenged to find a unified position and agenda of its own, sufficient to replace the old order.
Thus spake Zarathrustra, looking over St Just toward Scilly
Underneath this lies a necessary historic tilting of all and everything, a slow and fundamental shifting from a competitive to a cooperative model in the very nature of society and civilisation. Multiplex issues are bound up with this, and we’re sliding into an avalanche of events that push those issues forward. This multiplicity of issues is pushing us out of our habits, avoidances and complacencies, demanding attention, backed up by the threat of unwanted consequences that will surely arise from inaction.
Historically, we’re surreptitiously entering a new chapter. Last year Pluto shifted into Aquarius and next year Uranus shifts into Gemini. Such shifts or ingresses create a change of themes, realities and atmospheres, which themselves indirectly prompt and colour events and developments. History moves slowly most of the time, though sometimes it moves really fast, and we’re entering such a period.
But it’s all in the way we see things and do things. We can make it easier or more difficult. Our problem is that we have a habit of entering the future facing backwards, of obeying fear, thereby complicating, undermining or blocking the very developments we deeply seek. Our own freedoms, benefits and rights can no longer impose themselves on the freedoms, benefits and rights of others or of nature, reality and the collective good. Change does not have to be as difficult as many people visualise. Its reward is eventual relief from the oppressions we already carry on our shoulders.
With love, Palden
PS. Here’s an example of a new leader who is taking on a big agenda and putting himself on the line. This man, part of the Megamachine and Old Order, is seriously acknowledging the agenda of a younger-generation military dictator who is playing a strong hand of cards. We’ll see more of these agenda-changers in coming years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=navBX2A37ls
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Current meditation times, on Sundays: UK, Ireland & Portugal 8-8.30pm GMT W Europe 9-9.30pm E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 10-10.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm EST, Cuba 3-3.30pm PST North America 12-12.30am
It’s the Sunday meditation again, and I have revived sufficiently from an illness that floored me last week to be able to elbow you about it! That is, you’re welcome to join us in the zone – times for different countries are below. It’s an open meditation space lasting half an hour. To quote Van Morrison: no guru, no teacher, no method – just you and me in the garden… Follow your own path, together with us following ours. We shall be blessed.
The illness was a fluey thing. My energy was low, and I’d been pushing hard and under pressure in my remote humanitarian work. So when I got cold and wet during a trip to Falmouth, my soul pulled the plug and I went down through it. Next day I was semi-conscious, stiff and hurting, with sluggish brains, wobbly balance, burning feet (peripheral neuropathy) and I was right out of it, gone, hardly here.
A pertinent sign at Gurnard’s Head, in West Penwith
My predominant emotion was grief, over things that have happened, and particularly over moral dilemmas and painful moments in my humanitarian work over the years. I’ve seen people face hardship, suffer and die who, in my estimation, should not have died, and at times I’ve been unable to help – often quite simply I did not have the funds needed for medical treatment for an amputation or to save a life.
This is a deep dilemma being faced by many humanitarians now, as governments blithely withdraw funding and the public shrugs its shoulders. For me, in late life, it has left traces of regret, even though I know that the net value of my work was positive overall, and there’s a lot I’m glad about.
But the illness enabled me to go deep, deep down to a place where the hidden roots of life’s experiences and events ferment and bubble. This is one of the big virtues of illness that many people try their best to avoid – the consciousness changes it can bring about. Sometimes our soul needs to cut us down and render us helpless, to help us work through something – burn through something. Whether or not we actually do this is a life-choice and an exercise of profound free will.
Seals asleep at Godrevy
It is an act of free will to choose to go through a turning in the deepest seat of consciousness. You have to go over the edge and take the plunge. Getting into the habit of doing this throughout our lives sets us up for one of life’s greatest and most moving of experiences – dying.
As you approach death, life tends to take you down in stages – a series of crunch moments or crises where your worldly powers and agency are reduced, your world shrinks, and you bodily functions deteriorate. This incremental withdrawal yields the possibility of a new seeing, a new understanding, if we so choose it. Though it involves perceiving truths that can at first be uncomfortable. Yet facing and accepting these revealings becomes a relief too, an understanding, a forgiveness. For this life had simply been a short visit on an ongoing pathway. It begins and it ends.
Sir George, looking straight at you
Back in the 1990s I was privileged to help and spend quality time with Sir George Trevelyan, who was in effect the grandfather of the New Age movement in Britain. Very much a man of the Twentieth Century, born in 1906 and dying in 1996, he was an aristocratic philanthropist, thinker and educator, planting the seeds of the new age and the green movement in the 1940s-70s. He was a four-planet Scorpio. At the very end, he died by decision, announcing that he should not be disturbed or given any food or drinks. He was gone in 4-5 days.
Here’s a video of him talking in 1988, in his eighties. Thank you, Sir George, for being you, for what you did with and for so many people, and for pointing the way in my life too.
Meanwhile, if you care to join today’s meditation… see you there!
Love, Palden
Current meditation times, on Sundays: UK, Ireland & Portugal 8-8.30pm GMT W Europe 9-9.30pm E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 10-10.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm CST, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm EST, Cuba 3-3.30pm PST North America 12-12.30am
Bosigran Castle, a cliff sanctuary in West Penwith
I wasn’t expecting to be alive now. Just over five years ago, it genuinely felt as if it was ‘game over’. But after a year or two I was still here and marginally improving – as it goes with the blood cancer I have, Multiple Myeloma. I’d become partially disabled, ageing ten or more years (it felt different on different days), and squeezed through a big change with no going back. Many elements of my old life were now outside my range of physical and mental possibilities – though, to compensate, my spirits went through a big boost.
This boost was partially a ‘gift of God’ and partially I chose to take it that way. Though perhaps there was only one option. It was a choiceless choice, really. Gifts of God can be like that.
Even so, after two years, early in 2022 I sank into a deep, dark, muddy, wintertime crisis. Hm, this gift was grinding me down, squeezing and pushing me to see how far I could go. Astrologically, Neptune was opposing my Saturn – a revelation of uncomfortable truths, old shadows, limitations, inhibitions and self-sabotaging patterns. Again, I got used to the idea that I might be approaching ‘game over’. There I was, deteriorating, 90% dead and hovering. Part of me was withdrawing from life, giving up, feeling worn out. My hope account was overdrawn.
Then something started happening which, again, wasn’t on my roadmap. By springtime 2022 I started emerging from the shadowlands and reviving. Not back to where I’d been before, but to a new place. I wasn’t ‘better’, yet something in me was lighting up. Something was slotting into place.
Looking back from here, I was going through an archetypal, deep-self change. It necessitated a systems-reboot – a slough of despond trip. Archetype-change is a deep thing, hardly conscious, though clues come through at odd moments. I had no sense of the archetypal identity I was receiving or adopting, yet I could feel the change. There was a feeling of lostness, a lack of anchorage, together with an as yet shapeless feeling of new-foundness. I was switching tracks.
At different phases of our lives, deep down, we live out a succession of selfhoods and archetypes. An archetype is universal, but archetypes of a more personal kind mould themselves around us, our characters and our trans-life storylines. Through these selfhoods we plug into more universal archetypes, acting them out in the context of our lives and our available life-possibilities. These change and develop over time. That is, we learn – sometimes whether we like it or not!
In my experience, one selfhood can be dominant for a period of life while others operate as sub-threads or sub-personalities. Then, at critical points, major life-changes come and a rearrangement can occur. This, for me, is connected with other lives I’ve had, or am yet to have.
In Jungian psychology they talk of twelve classic archetypes: everyman, the innocent, the hero, outlaw, explorer, creator, ruler, magician, lover, caregiver, jester and sage. Well, that’s not a bad attempt, though such classifications of higher-dimensional forms can be rather limiting.
What was slotting into place was perhaps a variant of the sage, spiced with a dash of the creator and the ruler. Deep down, I’ve always been rather old in character, an inbuilt patriarch and natural leader, but something didn’t quite fit when I was younger. I didn’t handle it well and, though a lot was achieved, I came in for painful criticism. As an older soul in a younger body and personality, there was a disjunction. There was guilt hiding in there too, with impostor syndrome and a feeling I wasn’t good enough.
I managed to step out of that around age 42 – helped, no less, by a bunch of ETs. When I asked them whether I was the right person to work with them, they simply said I was the first person they’d encountered for a long time who needed no preparation. Boom – that rather changed things. I’d been kinda talent-spotted by them.
But there’s an advantage to self-doubt, as long as you don’t loiter too long in its shadows: it makes you work hard at life and become good at whatever you’re attempting to do. During my forties I was getting things more right.
Later in life, this ‘old soul’ thing suddenly began making more sense. Cancer came along, inducing a rapid ageing, physically and psychologically. I was in my early seventies and cancer pushed me into my eighties. Suddenly, ‘old soul’ started to fit.
I was starting on a new path. Which was strange, because I had thought I’d reached the end! People were beginning to call me an elder, though I had reservations – especially when standing alongside my friend Ba Miller, who is a sprightly 92. Certainly I was a veteran, having been through stuff that ‘sensible’ people wouldn’t touch. But in true Aspie fashion, I tend not to do fashionable things, and elderhood was becoming fashionable and I didn’t want to sit in that box.
However, in 2022, when I had to work hard at staggering five metres from my bed to the kitchen, I realised something about elderhood. If you’re wizened with experience and advancing in age, and getting to a disabled stage where you just can’t do things and participate in things as you once did, you start moving from veteran to elder. But if you’re still involved in all sorts of concerns and rushing around fixing the world, you might be a veteran but something hasn’t happened yet.
It has to do with dependency and helplessness. Worldly reality and our involvement with it change bigtime. There’s a lot you can no longer do, and death’s hollow eyes are eyeballing you. On the approach to death you acquire a growing incapacity to control things. Ultimately, death is pretty much the most out-of-control thing we ever encounter in life – though birth, sex and life’s rollercoaster do at times come close.
This helplessness forces levels of acceptance that are deeply transformative. Acceptance leads to revelations about the true nature of things. At death, the money you earned and spent is of little relevance – and if it is, perhaps you have a problem. What’s important is what you’ve reallydone – and what you’ve not done and might have done. It’s about the balance of goodness and harm you’ve brought, the lessons you’ve learned and taught, and the net effect and the underlying meaning of it all – and how it all ended up.
I had an earlier archetypal change at age fifty on the year of the Millennium – astrologically, on a Pluto square Sun and Chiron Return. It was a dark-night-of-the-soul year when I was obliged to question everything I’d done thus far, after thirty years ‘on the campaign trail’. Had I got it all wrong? Was the world going down the tube?
Two deep messages came through: head for the heart of darkness, and do only those things that people ask you to do. Not long after, Palestinians asked me, and I found myself getting involved more and more with them. It was a risky decision but it had an overwhelming feeling of rightness and inevitability to it – it was a classic choiceless choice.[1]
Archetypally, this represented a transition from the imprint of a medieval Muslim holy warrior during my life in the 1980s-90s, to that of an early 20th Century Austrian aristocratic philanthropist in the early 2000s. With the first, I was running camps, editing books and playing a prominent role in Glastonbury, working in the ‘new age’ sphere, and with the second I was involved in humanitarian and geopolitical issues, particularly with Palestine and Syria.
As for the aristocrat, our dynasty, the Habsburgs, had fallen when I was twentyish and I’d spent my twenties and thirties in that life campaigning with other Habsburgs for the uniting of Europe. In WW2 I was a diplomat, involved in discreet manoeuvrings and string-pulling.
And guess what? In this life, when I was sixteen in 1966, I won a schools’ public speaking championship giving a notes-free talk on, of all things… why we should join theEuropean Community (as it was called then). That’s an example of the way that stuff leaks over from other lives into our current life – whether or not we’re aware of it.
In that early 20th Century life, it all ended suddenly at age 46 in a bombing or fire, at the end of WW2. I died with a painful feeling that demanded deep self-forgiveness: despite my efforts as a philanthropist and diplomat, people’s needs in WW2 were so great that I and others like me just couldn’t do enough to help. I felt that responsibility heavily. For every person I could save, ten or a hundred would die. It was an enormous, tragic challenge riddled with oversized moral dilemmas.
Many things suddenly ended in this life too when, in 2019, I keeled over with cancer. Except the chop didn’t come down fully. Instead I was shoved through the mill and squeezed into a different shape – literally. One day, as I was emerging from the 2022 crisis, a rather loud voice within said, in no uncertain terms: “Ah, before you go, there’s something more we’d like you to do”. Part of me groaned and part of me lit up – that’s my pattern.
So now I’m sitting in a new archetypal selfhood. I’ve got the gist of it and am sitting in it, and it’s playing itself out as life goes on each day. In character it’s aged, wizened, megalithic British, fragile and yet strangely strong and lively in spirit.
The Oracle’s Chair
I did a regression with my friend Jen.[2] When she counted me down I was immediately there, in that version of me, in that time – perhaps the early Bronze Age around 2200 BCE. I was at Bosigran Castle, here in Penwith, at a summertime gathering of our people – a few hundred of them. I was sitting in what I call the ‘druid’s chair’ – people who know Bosigran will easily guess the place. As Jen was counting me down I sank into the granite, melding with it. Despite its solidity, something in me was expanding and extending toward infinity. I realised this wasn’t the ‘druid’s chair’, it was the ‘oracle’s chair’. I wasn’t the oracle, though I was permitted to sit in the chair.
There was an emotional twist to this. As a Bronze Age druid I was peripatetic – I had renounced my home as part of my druidic vows. Here at Bosigran I felt as if I was amongst ‘my people’, except they weren’t my people, though they were welcoming and I stayed with them when I could. I was in charge of the longterm festivals in the isles of Britain – the ones that happened once every twelve or sixty or 500 years. I was at home here in Penwith, but I had to move on – the next stop was in the Glastonbury direction. That’s my story: I’ve always been part of many tribes, always having to move on.
Archetypal shifts come to us all at certain times, though it depends greatly on how much we tune into them and act them out, in the context of our lives and possibilities. Or do we conceal ourselves, playing safe and hanging back from the callings of our souls? This is where free-will comes into play, though ultimately there is only one answer and we know what it is.
Spirit has a plan. When I was younger, I feared disability more than death. The idea of landing up in a wheelchair put the shits up me. Well, the soul delivers specially customised lessons. Eventually I was indeed given disability, though it came later in life so that I could do other things first. It was tailor-made for me – a partial disability, carefully designed to confront me on issues that were specifically mine and even give me a few benefits. The disability was enough to change my life but not too much to completely incapacitate me. It has opened up a new, strangely different chapter of life, with some lenience and mercy to it. Brilliant. Just enough, and not too much.
Seeing things this way has been really useful. What I like about working with past-life regression is this: it isn’t just a matter of gaining information about other lives. That’s useful, but it’s not the whole deal. For me, regression connects me up with those lives more consciously and kinetically – an energy-exchange is set up. The interactive circuitry between me and my other lives has been more fully activated, and they’re cooperating far more.
Inputs from other lives into this life can happen unconsciously, or they can be permitted more consciously – that’s our choice. Bringing them to greater consciousness tends to make them less problematic and more of an asset. Besides, they are there anyway, operating as aspects or sub-personalities of ourselves that sometimes jostle to express themselves.
In a few of my lives I’ve been a public figure – known by large numbers of people, for all sorts of reasons – and, in this life it has helped greatly to understand things in these terms. That’s quite complex. Old lieutenants, friends, wives, foes, fathers, rivals and followers have reappeared and, while this is the stuff of life, it’s also an enactment of bigger narratives on a deeper level. Some of these narratives we can tap into, and others remain a mystery – something that we will perhaps only see and understand in the fullness of time.
Photo by Selina al-Mukhtar. (The rest are by me.)
For this is not really about time, about the linear passage of the future through the present to the past. We are all extensions of the soul, and each of our lives is a bit like an arm of an octopus. Soul exists in a ‘quantum’ realm where time and space do not exist. It extends and inserts itself into time and space through the different lives we live. These are lived in differing situations and historical periods, each acting out amazing variations of a basic, core story that threads through all of our lives.
But, from the viewpoint of soul, all of these lives are being lived and experienced simultaneously. Not exactly at the same time, because there is no time when you’re outside time. But the same soul experiences and computes the whole lot. It doesn’t get involved in the day-to-day details, but it does attend to the overall story.
In these day-to-day, year-to-year details we have a lot of free-will, if we exercise it. This involves aligning a multiplicity of day-to-day details with the wider, deeper story – at least to the extent that we can do it in each life. But equally we can choose to resist, divert or screw up the narrative – and the consequences go into a pile of learnings and corrections we sooner or later will need to go through.
Looking uphill from Bosigran. Carn Galva, a Neolithic Tor, is on the left
Going back to the starting theme of this blog… I still have no idea how long I’m supposed to be here. Many people blithely instruct me to think positively and have a determinedly long life, as if to protect them from facing the facts of death. But then, once in a while, I’ll have a choking fit or a sudden dangerous wobble to remind me that my account could be terminated at any moment. Sorry, but we don’t choose in advance the moment and manner of our passing. It’s possible to feel it coming, but the time and circumstance are unknowns.
This is the case for everybody, but it’s rather different when cancer or another terminal illness comes along. It becomes an acute question that can’t be set aside. Before cancer came, I assumed life would go on and I didn’t have to think about it. But cancer placed a yawning gap in front of me, demanding a fundamental change in attitude. Life became a very temporary thing.
This unpredictability seems to have been a necessary precondition for the emergence of the new archetype that has been surfacing over the last three years. I seem to be on a new mission, though the duration and extent of it remains a mystery. It’s all a matter of making provisional plans based on contingencies and possible realities.
I mean, what on Earth am I doing starting (with others) a new project, when my life’s going down the drain? But there’s something about the approaches to death that accentuates remaining, outstanding issues – things that need to come to some sort of completion before we go.
At present I’m involved with starting the Belerion Project, researching the ancient sites of West Penwith.[3] I cannot be its leader because the clock is ticking on me, so I need to render myself expendable from the beginning. That’s a happy challenge and a refreshing change, for a rather reluctant and jaded leader-type like me.
This project means a lot to me on a deep level – something to do with connecting with the deep memory of an ancient British selfhood. A selfhood who sat in the Oracle Chair at Bosigran, shrinking into the quartz to probe the depths. A man of knowledge who had realised that – as my Tibetan teacher Gyalwa Karmapa once put it – it’s all just like a fart in the Void.
The whole lot… a pile of crap. Life is a surprisingly rapid foray into a very strange world. And here we all are, doing a funny dance on Planet Earth. But remember, the idea behind educational courses is to graduate and then move on, readied for service.
The seventh Aha Class, in Penzance, Cornwall Weds 12th March, 6.30pm, at The Hive
A settler incursion and tricky situation in the historic souk in Hebron, Palestine
Inner journeying, meditation, remote healing and peace-building. Doing our bit toward tackling the world’s problems – instead of wringing hands and feeling helpless.
In recent times many of us have been moved to join meditations, prayers and link-ups when major crises break out. Waves of mass empathy and concern over such crises can have a wide and deep psycho-spiritual influence – it goes deeper than mere ‘public opinion’.
Praying for peace or showering light over a benighted area are good, though often they are of a generalised nature. They can affect the collective psyche and sometimes help swing things.
But it’s possible to get closer in. It’s possible to penetrate actual situations and play a more targeted part in them – literally rescuing people or souls, or participating in situations, meetings and crux-points at the frontline of human experience.
That’s what this evening is about. This might be a valuable inner tool to add to your repertory. This is not ‘lightworking’ but spiritual humanitarian work – bringing in truckloads of spirit, rescue and healing.
This is not simple. It carries responsibilities, and it’s not a matter of imposing our wishes – benign or biased – on world situations. The key issue is to help humanity learn, to become more aware in making the choices it makes, for the longterm resolution of what are often deep-seated problems.
In the first half of this evening, I’ll outline considerations and issues involved in such work, how we choose issues and crises and work with them, and the blessings, delusions and dangers involved and what it’s all for.
In the second half we’ll go on an inner journey to work with a particular area of focus that is currently afoot in the world. (And, first time round, we won’t be working with polarised Trump-related issues!)
You might or might not wish to go into this kind of work but, even if you don’t, world situations do come up at times, touching our hearts, to which we respond, and inner journeying (conscious dreaming) is one way we can play a part in world affairs as situations arise. Once you get the gist of it, it can be applied in areas that interest you – socio-cultural, ecological, geopolitical or simply encouraging forward-moving change.
If you’ve done this kind of thing before, this class might help you clarify a few things and take it a step further. If it’s new territory, it’s a good place to start.
Since most of you will not be able to come, audio recordings will be posted online within days after the class (no charge) – just follow the link below. Recordings of all of the Aha Classes can be found here.If geopolitical healing interests you, you might find this site useful: The Flying Squad.
Without uncertainty there would be no faith. I heard that on the radio this morning. It’s true.
Faith is not just about religion – it’s about beliefs of all kinds. Even belief (or disbelief) in that voracious phantasm called Donald Trump. Uncertainty makes us build a body of interconnected, multi-level beliefs, a world-view, by which we attempt to navigate the mizmaze of reality we’re presented with when we get born on earth and attempt to live out our lives.
This is where change starts, in our beliefs. Occasionally they need shaking up because they can coagulate into set ways and conventions that are not ultimately helpful. This applies to us as individuals and to human collectivities.
If we wish to contribute to changing things and making the world good, we can do so on many different fronts, whether working with overarching principles or with the building of buildings. This is where meditation comes in, because its realm is that of spirit, beliefs and the roots of human thought, feelings and actions.
We can have revolutions or other radical changes, but where revolutions fail is that basic beliefs don’t automatically change with them – though things can indeed get shaken up, stimulating uncertainty and thus a potential reformulation of collective belief and faith. Change needs to start both from above and below.
In meditation, by generating positive vibes and working within the vibrational field of collective human awareness, we’re working with change from the bottom up. We might not see things that way – we might simply be wishing to calm down, or do our practice, or pray for healing or peace – but that’s what happens anyway.
Whatever we seek in meditation, it’s worth adding a prayer that we help humanity raise its level, to look again at its realities, to see things in new ways and to become more conscious. Just this creates world change.
That’s my thought for the day (or the week).
Last week I lost my internet for three days, so no message was possible. So much for uncertainty! But as always I was there in meditation at the appointed time and I felt others of you there too.
You’re welcome to join us in the Sunday meditation. Just join us at the appointed time (see below) and do your meditation in your own usual way, together with us. If you’d like more information, click here:
On Wednesday 12th February I’ll be doing another Aha Class here in Penzance, Cornwall, and it’s called ‘Getting Dead, and what happens afterwards‘. Since many of you don’t live in Cornwall, audio recordings of the class will be online within a week afterwards. If the thoughts I wrote above are of interest to you, the next Aha Class in March will be about inner aid and geopolitical and planetary healing, consciousness work to help the world progress and to participate spiritually in specific world crises and issues. It will include an inner journey to do some work on that front.
With love from me, Palden
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Current meditation times, on Sundays: UK, Ireland & Portugal 7-7.30pm GMT W Europe 8-8.30pm E Europe, Turkiye and the Levant 9-9.30pm Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 2-2.30pm PST North America 11-11.30am
The next Aha Class on Weds 12th Feb 2025 at The Hive, Penzance, Cornwall.
Receiving cancer into my life five years ago, I’ve looked in the face of death several times, and quite experientially. In fact, at present I’m surprised, even rather disoriented, to be alive. But it didn’t start there – this has been an evolving theme of my life. So in this Aha Class I’ll be sharing some insights and perceptions I’ve picked up along the way.
I had a life-changing near-death experience at age 24 – accidental food poisoning (hemlock, actually). I was unconscious for nine days, awakening with much of my memory wiped clean. Not long afterwards I met up with Tibetan Lamas, who taught their perceptions of life and death, about the bardos, the differing realms of existence, of which life is but one. Frankly, their blessings and kindness kept me on the rails during a very difficult time.
Then I became involved with campaigning for home-birth, following the births of two of my daughters. To me, a good natural birth made inherent sense with no need for rational explanation. Later in life I was even able to communicate with a soul before his birth, and he talked to me about what it was like being in his (to us) little world.
Later, from the 1990s onwards, I found myself working psychically with dying people, helping them over to the other side. Some were people I knew, and others were in conflict zones experiencing tricky deaths. Having been to the edge of death myself, I was able to help them transition – holding their hand and going over with them. It was remarkable how variable their experiences were. I was also part of a group (the Flying Squad) in which amongst other things we did psychic soul-rescue work in earthquake and disaster zones.
Since getting cancer five years ago, I’ve been hovering close to the threshold myself a few times. This has been a true education. Hovering on the boundaries really made me aware of the contrasting issues in both worlds. I feel reasonably comfortable about dying: in my way of seeing things, I’ll be going home. Well, at least for a while. I’m a bit beat-up and in need of deep healing.
I see things from the viewpoint of reincarnation. Looking at things this way, getting born, being alive and getting dead take on a new light. There’s something of us that continues through all of this. A newborn baby is not a blank slate devoid of character, and a person who dies doesn’t just stop existing – it’s a journey of the soul. Not only this but, as many of you might have found, being a witness to a birth or a death can be a wondrous and spirit-showered experience in its own right.
Dying is like an assessment of where we’ve actually got to after living a life. In the end it’s our own assessment, though it might take the shape of St Peter, or a wrathful deity, or a wise old angel. It comes from a place of truth, perspective and far-seeing that dawns in us during the dying process. This dawning can happen before, during or after clinical death, depending on where we are at – in terms of what we have truly become. This sounds serious, though it can also be joyful and a relief. It all depends on what we have done with our lives and where we have come to with it all.
This isn’t about judgements like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. It’s about seeing the true and full range of causes and consequences arising from all that we have been part of – what we have done and not done during those defining moments, those periods of time and those dramas we were in. There’s an understanding, a forgiveness, a grace and mercy to it. We come to understand why things went that way.
Dying before we die: this can make the dying transition easier, decongesting the process. Getting stuff sorted before we go – and not just writing our will, but clarifying things in our heart and soul, in truth and ‘before God’. We all need to do a reckoning, a forgiveness, a resolution and a releasing, with ourselves, people and the world.
It was as it was. What have I learned from it and what have I become? I’ve made mistakes and done things I’m not happy about, and it’s a process of owning up and squaring with it. In some cases I’ve done things to rebalance or rectify things, and in others I have not. Even with unresolved issues, it’s necessary to accept their unresolution.
There’s also a balancing factor – the things we’ve done that we can be happy with, that brought forwardness to others and the world, some of which we did precisely to redeem our own shadows, to pass through a karmic gateway. Part of this reckoning involves acknowledging our strong points and things we are glad about.
So this talk is for anyone facing death, or witnessing it in a person close to them, or feeling bereaved, or working with dying people, or preoccupied with the deep-seated questions that life and death raise. Actually, if truth be known, that’s everyone, but we have room for thirty-fiveish people at the Aha Class! It will be recorded and posted online afterwards.
I take a rather left-field and spiritualistic approach to all this. Whether or not you agree, I hope this talk might help get you into the zone, elasticise some ideas and set some things in motion. In our modern Western culture we have a big taboo around questions of birth and death, and this is very strange and not to our advantage. Even so, every one of us got born (well done) and every one of us is heading for the exit (good luck). So perhaps it’s worth giving this matter a little attention.
Do come if you can. If you can’t, the audio recording is posted online about a week afterwards.
Yes, that’s the drug I’m on today, together with Lenidalomide, Dexamethasone, Apixaban and Aciclovir – it’s enough to make pharma-paranoiacs run a mile. Many have been the messages I’ve had which recommend all sorts of alternative means of staying alive. No doubt well intentioned, I nevertheless find myself writing back to ask whether they have actual experience of what they recommend – which has mostly not been the case. Most seem to think I have a ‘normal’ cancer, without actually knowing I have Multiple Myeloma, an incurable blood cancer and definitely not normal.
I’ve listed all the holistic supplements, remedies and methods that I use in my cancer treatment in my book and audiobook ‘Blessings that Bones Bring‘. With a philosophy of counting my blessings, I’m doing both pharma and holistics, and it works, and the ideological contradiction between them that many people set up for themselves is something I gladly omit to subscribe to.
Just as well really – I’m alive against the odds. But the biggest medicine of all is this. If you are practicing your life-purpose, the reason why you came here to Earth, as a priority, then you’re likely to stay alive until it’s reasonably complete – whatever that means. However, here’s the rub: for some people, dying and the manner of their death can also be part of that life-purpose. Princess Di was an example.
It’s an initiation. You might be a smart-arse with a masters or a doctorate, but they will not qualify you for this. What’s needed is every single cubic inch of humanity you have in you. It comes at you, takes away your control and takes you off, out of your body to another place.
Or perhaps you believe it all goes dark and the you that is you somehow suddenly stops being you – you’ve become a useless pile of dust returning to the dust. Well, good luck with that, though you might be heading for a few surprises. In my experience, the journey doesn’t stop there. Just as well really.
I do have a strange tendency to believe that there’s more to existence than that. The last five years, since cancer gave itself to me, have reinforced that belief. If indeed it is a belief. After all, do I believe in breakfast? Do I believe in trees, rain and sunshine? I’ve been really close to dying, several times. Actually, I shouldn’t be alive – and that’s not a medical opinion but my own observation. I’ve made it through thanks to a series of miracles, a few acts of faith and a strange capacity to rebirth myself. Plus the prayers and goodwill of friends, the blessings of guardian angels, and… work. Yes, work. Working at the reason why I came, and whether I’ve done enough of it to feel satsified with a job well enough done.
Much to my surprise. I wasn’t expecting to be alive after five years, and it leaves me in rather an open space. I thought that at most I had three years, and now I’m on extra time. It’s a matter of figuring out how to make plans while knowing that I’m vulnerable enough, and my grip on life is tenuous enough, to pop my clogs tomorrow or the next day.
For me, it’s a matter of taking charge of my death. It’s my decision – not anyone else’s. Except perhaps for those angels. A year ago, my haematological specialist at the Royal Cornwall hospital said to me, “Well, Mr Jenkins, I don’t know what you do, and I don’t want to know but, whatever you’re doing, keep on doing it“. Indeed, I did, and I’m still here. I’m an easy customer for her – I get few complications, I’m uncomplaining though I’m also calm and clear about certain issues, and she leaves me to my own devices. No, not toxic digital devices, but devices such as intuition… and inner doctors.
Yes, I’ve got some inner doctors. I called them in at an early stage. My angels shunted a few in, too. Once a week, I have a session with them (and at no charge). I go into myself, breathing myself down into a deep state, and I open myself up to them, and there they are. They examine and scan me – using psychospiritual technologies that make Startrek look primitive. I feel them umming and aaahing over things, and consulting, and sometimes I’m flooded with light, or they insert a light-tube into me, or they focus on an organ, and often I’m not at all sure what they’re doing but I can feel them doing it.
At times they raise me up to their level and it feels so friendly, inclusive and welcoming there. I kinda hover there, on my back, held in the middle of their energy-field and jiggled, poked, massaged and blessed by invisible forces. After a while they drop me back down again.
It’s funny how it works. The doctors at Treliske have been worrying about the fact that I’ve been a lifelong smoker – it helps my brains and, as a psychic, also helps me stay on Earth – since I am not a foodie, which is the other way many psychics stay on Earth. So I was to go in for a lung scan. But during my last session with the inner doctors, I did two things. One was to ask for their help in cleaning out my lungs and removing anything that’s unhelpful, and the second was to offer myself up and release all hopes, fears and expectations, to get to a state of full acceptance that, whatever is to happen will happen, and it will be good.
So they flooded my lungs with light and I felt them doing something there. I continued with this in the days that followed but, the day before the scan, the thought came, “Hmmm, this needs more time…“. Claire, a trusty helper from over the hill, took me for the scan. I walked into chaos – the power had gone off – but eventually, on the second interview, the nurse said, “Ah, Mr Jenkins, I’m sorry to say that we can’t scan you because you had a PET scan last August and we cannot scan you more than once a year“. I quietly chuckled. Yes indeed, this needs more time, and I’d just been given it. The nurse didn’t notice me looking upwards and smiling. This is how it sometimes works.
I thanked her for her consideration, saying I am electrosensitive and it matters to me. “Ah, that’s interesting“, said she, proceeding to ask questions as if she knew about it. This was refreshing: in the last five years only one doctor has indicated interest. He showed me a paper in The Lancet which correlated incidences of Multiple Myeloma with proximity to nuke stations. Since then I’ve met other Myeloma patients who have worked operating radar systems, driving nuclear-waste trains from Sellafield, working as high-tension power cable or mobile phone engineers, or as programmers who’ve used a lot of wi-fi…
Once information about EM-radiation is finally made public, everyone will no doubt bleat, “But why weren’t we told?”. To which the answer is: “Why didn’t you feel it and use your commonsense? Did you think it would be alright to irradiate yourself all day and every day without consequence?”.
Well, we humans… we find quite intricate ways of limiting our possibilities and making life difficult. The same applies to me. However, while I have my own self-immolating patterns, I’ve also looked after myself and now find myself still alive as a result – if proof be needed. I’m definitely glad that, at an early age (21) I went vegetarian and changed my life – it has paid off. Yes, I got cancer, but my capacity to deal with it is far greater than most people’s, because on the whole I’ve had a good diet and lifestyle, having built up a good reserve stock of resilience.
But here’s what in the end is the key bit: I’ve been following a growth path, with fewer diversions and denials than most ‘average’ people. If you live on purpose and in purpose, it gives you distinct reasons for staying alive.
But even then, the stories of our lives are multiplex and not limited to being alive in a body. Many of us aren’t even fully installed in our bodies, even when emotionally attached and afraid of losing them. The Council of Nine put it quite well…
“Your Planet Earth is the most beautiful that exists in the universe. It has a physical variety that no other planet has. It has a varied climate that no other planet has. In all the universe there is no planet in existence that has the physical characteristics of Planet Earth. It is the rarest of beauties, and it does attract souls which, once they have come, would like to come back again. This has created a bottleneck of souls recycling on Earth.
“It is of a different nature from any other planet. It has aspects of all planets: it is like a composite of the Universe, with all the positive and all the negative aspects, and all in between, and this is what attracts souls.
“It has with it a gravitational pull that is different from other planets, and because of this a soul begins to feel a physicalness. Souls become adapted to their physical bodies, and they forget the freedom and pleasures they have without it.
“The Earth was created to be a paradise. When souls achieve harmony it will become a paradise again. Planet Earth is the only one of its kind, the only planet of free [individualised] choice in the entire universe, the planet created for the balancing of the spiritual with the physical – in other words, the creating of paradise.“
To some extent this ‘paradise’ business is an attitude of mind. In a funny sort of way, since getting cancer and becoming partially disabled I’ve been happier than before. It’s all to do with how we deal with the life we’ve been given. Nowadays, a lot of people do a lot of complaining about life, as if it’s all someone or something else’s fault. But my best recommendation is, just go to Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, Belarus, Syria, Ukraine, Xinjiang or Myanmar – there are plenty of options – and do a full-spectrum re-assessment. You might find that you come to feel differently about things. That’s what happened to me.
Yeah, life’s a bitch, then you die. However, here’s another gem from the Nine: no one is here by accident.
So, you see, even on pharmaceutical cancer drugs, you can do something with it to make it good. That’s where that free, individualised choice truly lies. It’s on us, not anyone or anything else.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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