spirituality – Page 3 – Notes from the Far Beyond

Time

The Mên an Tol – once a stone circle, though rearranged by a zealous Victorian antiquarian

GNASHERS AND MAGIC CARPETS

We’re all stuck in an experiential grindstone called Time. Well, at least, while we’re here in a body on Earth. Actually, after we leave our bodies there are also forms of time too, but that’s different. One can be called ticktock time and the other can be called cosmo-time or psycho-time. But it’s a little more complex and variable than that too – as are all organic, natural processes.

When I was running consciousness-raising camps in the 1980s and 1990s, one of the most pleasing things was watching the children develop and grow. At the camps they would experience the magic of life, and they were allowed to be themselves and explore their possibilities in a community of souls – and they flowered. There were a lot of family healings at the camps. Experientially and evolutionarily, these kids were evolving as much in a one-week camp as they did during the whole of the rest of the year. I’ve met a number of people, now in their 30s and 40s, who have described this and the part it played in their lives. In the OakDragon, with which I’m still involved, at present the reins of power are passing to precisely this generation of former children – and they know exactly what to do because they grew up receiving the kind of treatment they now are giving to and organising for others.

So here we have a situation where, in ticktock time, a week passed, while in psycho-time a year passed. Now look back at your own life and your own formative experiences – whether they were blessed and uplifting, or boring, or hard, or traumatic. To appreciate these moments and periods of time, we have to slip into a similar psycho-time mindset. If we assess and judge them from the viewpoint of ticktock time they are meaningless and lose their power and influence – in ticktock mode we are judgemental about efficiency, compliance or time-wasting unless we label it ‘holiday’ or ‘day off’ or ‘ill’.

Illnesses are a very good way of experiencing cosmo-time/psycho-time – in fact, one of the positive purposes of illness is to slow us down and immobilise us, to switch us into inner time – often, whether or not we like it. It helps us process stuff through that’s lying underneath, that we don’t ‘have time for’ in everyday life. So occasionally our souls need to impose an override, send us to bed, give us some pain and difficulty, forcing us to doze and dream, to give space for deeper things to come through. It’s advisable, once it hits you, to give permission for this to happen – heling and resolution will come quicker that way, usually.

These times can be important, evolutionarily speaking. This is also a clue about the source of illnesses: it lies in our unconscious, in areas that are suppressed, deep and secret or only now emerging into consciousness – perhaps because we have become ready for them. Thus the secret in self-healing is to go down into those hidden recesses to work on the stuff going on in there, to open it up and let it out.

Here the Mên an Tol, the Stone of the Hole, looks more like the stone circle it once was

Time is what stops everything happening all at once. This is a key ingredient in the Earth experience. Everything takes time. Everything that begins also comes to an end, sooner or later. Impermanence is the only constant – everything else changes. We go through a life cycle, and when you’re a kid it’s very different from when you’re an old crock – not only physically but also in terms of understanding, perspective and viewpoint. And both states of being have their blessings, joys, trials, wisdom, perceptions, scrangly issues and special moments.

In my mid-seventies, I am now time-rich – mainly by dint of being strangely blessed with cancer and partial disability – but, like most readers, I was time poor through most of my adult life. I did a lot of rushing around doing important things. I had objectives, timetables, obligations, ambitions and appointments, and often I over-committed myself, always trying to keep up with a never-ending list of things to do. I achieved quite a lot too but, looking back, I could have achieved similar or better results had I known certain things I now know. But of course, now it’s too late. If I were young again I’d start a Wrong Planet Liberation Front for people with Aspergers ‘Syndrome’. Or I’d work more in Lebanon, or spend time with my Tuareg friends in Mali. Or I’d spend more time with my own children.

The Nine Maidens as seen from Mulfra Quoit (telephoto shot)

It’s different now – I’m in a rather timeless, dateless zone that is disturbed only when there are appointments to attend, or when someone tries to book a future date with me. The issue here is that I really don’t know what state I’ll be in on the appointed day, and I can’t drink coffee, get into gear and override it in ways I used to – so I just have to warn people to take me as I come, that day. Even so, time grinds at me as much as before, though differently – mainly because getting through each day is far more difficult than it once was. Nowadays, if I cook a meal, I get worn out and I have to have a rest before I can find the energy to eat it! Crazy. That’s aged decrepitude for you. That’s what happens. I’ve been losing my Virgoid competences, getting more useless. It opens up a very different perspective on life.

This relationship with time and our temporal conditions involves choice. We can make a big deal of it, fighting every inch of the way, or we can make it easier. This involves getting more comfortable working intuitively with the fluxings of psycho-time. It involves getting in touch with our inner senses, giving them more attention, and believing more in our subjective perceptions, without letting the censoring, constraining, explaining rational mind pass off or invalidate these perceptions. For there are things we can know about the way things will go – there are feelings, instincts and intuitions that can save us a lot of trouble if only we give them attention and act more in accord with them.

There are ways of understanding the inner secrets of time too. For me, astrology has been a major tool and influence, and I’ve done a lot of research work and written books about time and the way it moves.[1] Astrology deals with the interface between ticktock time and psycho/cosmo-time. That is, it embraces the regular cycles that give us ticktock time – the rotation of the Earth (giving us day/night) and its orbital motions around the Sun (giving us the year and the seasons) – and also the flexing-fluxing, organic changes in the nature of time, which are affected by the motions of the planets of our solar system.

How does this work? We live on a thrumming, vibrating planet – it rumbles and rings like an enormous bell, in terms of subtle energy. We live within the energy-field of the Earth and are completely affected by it, and it is continually changing in all sorts of subtle ways. The Earth is also part of our solar system, which itself is a thrumming, reverberating energy-system in which all planets and the Sun affect each other, influencing their energy-fields. Therefore, by observing the motions and interrelations of the planets we can understand the fluxings of subtle energy here on Earth – the ‘energy-weather’.

We can forecast rain or sunshine, but we cannot determine in advance how humans and other beings will respond to them. This is where free-will comes in. In other words, you can let fullmoons drive you nuts and keep you awake at night, or you can ride the energies more calmly, utilising such peak periods to achieve or resolve or accept or deal with whatever life throws at us.

At present, we’re in a period where Mars is hovering around in opposition to Pluto, and one option is war and devastation, and another is negotiation and forethought – these are our choices, not just for Israelis, American presidents or Sudanese generals, but for everyone. Mars is just as much a god of peace as it is a god of war – the peace that arises when both sides realise that the costs of conflict outweigh its perceived benefits.

Sometimes, to get to peace, you have to have a showdown, a crisis that forces everyone to put their cards on the table. These sub-acute crises arise simply because wisdom has failed, so we have to go through painful processes to get to the same place more slowly. As William Blake once wrote, ‘The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom‘. Well, yes, as long as you don’t blow up the world in the process.

This process of grinding through issues, procedures, processes, crunches, slack periods and the stuff of life, both in our personal spheres and in the wider world, is precisely what we came here for. We wanted a slice of the physicalness, the passion, the pain and pleasure, and we have a way of getting lost in it, foretting why we came and what we’re here for. This is the big challenge: maintaining consciousness and perspective amidst the fray and bother of daily life. You don’t get this in other worlds – not in the way we have it here.

Here’s a quote from Tom, the spokesbeing for the Council of Nine (some cosmic beings I’ve worked with):

“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. 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 them. The Earth was created to be a paradise. When souls achieve harmony it will become a paradise again. This is your planet of balance, for you to learn to balance between the physical and spiritual worlds.

“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.” [2]

No one is here by accident. We chose to come here. It is also our choice to learn from it, to accelerate our inner evolution, with a view to graduating from this particular kind of education and moving on to other realms – or perhaps to come back to help the rest of us do similar. People who’ve graduated from Earth, having gone through so much, are like super-troopers in the wider universe. We’ve seen and experienced stuff others have not. It was gritty, painful, relentless and difficult.

But you don’t get chocolate on other worlds. When it works well, the sex is amazing too. Money can be a blessing or a burden – whatever our financial status. It’s all about how we deal with this stuff. Power is remarkable when well done and disastrous when abused. The qualities of love, understanding and forgiveness on our planet are remarkable too, when they break through. As they now must, on a planetary level, if we and our descendants are to continue to have the privilege of incarnating here in a world that’s fit to live in.

It all takes time. Not just ticktock time measured in days, months and years, but also in evolutionary time. Peace will not come until there is a world consensus for it – unless humanity has reached a stage where it realises conflict is not the best way forward, and when it acts firmly in that belief. That can take time, but it can be accelerated too, especially during power-points in time when the possibilities for fundamental change are amplified. One way to change the world, therefore, is to work more closely with the fluxings of time so that we can surf its periodic waves and not burn up too much energy when the waves aren’t coming.

It’s all a matter of time.

Now it’s time to put the kettle on. You can’t do that on Alpha Centauri, so enjoy it while you can, because one day that opportunity will no longer be present. Though other things will happen instead, and they might even be quite a relief after going through the grinding and polishing action of a life on Earth.

With love, Palden

If you’re in Cornwall, in the Aha class in Penzance on Wednesday evening 23rd October (this week) I shall be covering this topic. Info: www.palden.co.uk/aha.html

FOOTNOTES!

Three books: Living in Time, 1987, www.palden.co.uk/living/, which is out of print and available as an online archive version,
Power Points in Time, 2014, www.palden.co.uk/time/ published by Penwith Press, and
The Historical Ephemeris www.palden.co.uk/ephem/ which is available online only.
About the Council of Nine: www.palden.co.uk/nine.html

This blog is written using human intelligence – nothing artificial added, however intelligent people might believe it to be.

Reviving

The outer-planet thrum that’s in operation now

I realised on Friday that I must be reviving. I started back to work. Well, in a slow, step-by-step way. It was relatively easy work – checking and updating maps. Throughout life I’ve tended to run two tracks in parallel (being a Gemini mooner): harder work that takes a lot of thinking and creativity, and routine work that, while it’s necessary to do, it demands less focus and intensity.

I’ve been doing the latter, updating a series of online maps I made between 2014 and 2020, showing the ancient sites and alignments of West Penwith, and also of Scilly and Cornwall as a whole. They contain every known and identified site in Cornwall, precisely positioned. The alignments are most properly researched in West Penwith, the bit at the very end where I live, though the rest of Cornwall is covered too. If you click on any site or alignment on the map, you’ll get a popup providing further information and links concerning that site or alignment.

The maps are here: www.ancientpenwith.org/maps.html

So that’s what I’ve been doing, as a way of getting my brains back into gear, after two weeks of energy-suppressing opioid painkillers. They blanket you in an insulated fog of unwittitude and swimmy drowse – or at least, that’s what they do for me. Opioids are not good for the brains – I can testify to that.

But they kept the pain at bay until the problem I had started subsiding – a painful spasmic tightening of the muscles in my back and torso. For two weeks my muscles had pulled tight and rigid, as if a neurological overreaction to the deterioration of my bones. My psyche was fearing disintegration of my bony frame, and it was overreacting though seeking to protect me. This deterioration was stemmed last month by the first round of my new cancer treatment and, today/Saturday, I’m starting the second cycle of this treatment. It’s a maintenance treatment that I’ll be taking for a while, until it becomes clear it’s no longer working, or there’s a better alternative. Myeloma, a blood cancer that erodes the bones, cannot be cut out or irradiated surgically, like tumorous cancers, so it has to be regulated and held in check.

I still have residual pain and difficulty, but it’s at a 30%, not a 90% pain-level, and it’s in my manageable zone. Yesterday I visited John Tillyard, a gifted chiropractor in Hayle, who worked his magic on me, balancing up my bony frame. Claire, who took me to the appointment, reported that I walked back to the car in a very different way.

So I’m re-entering ‘normal’ life, such as it is. I re-start cancer treatment today. It’s pills, taken in a four-week cycle for three weeks, with one week off. On the first day I take a big dose of cancer drugs, then for the rest of the week I’m on a tick-over regime until, next week, the routine starts again. But on the fourth week I get a week off.

Recently, during the Sunday meditation, I’ve had a funny twist in the experience while I’ve been on opioids. During the meditation itself I find I’m very present, quite centred and ‘in the zone’, despite the opioids. Over the years I’ve found that the ‘channel’ distinctly switches off dead on time (currently at 8.30pm UK time) – I get a definite feeling of it – and this has been happening clearly in recent weeks. After the shut-off I sit there for a while and then the opioids take over, seeping into my psyche, and I drop off for an hour. It’s funny, that.

I find the ‘switch on’ of the channel is less distinct – it’s as if a space opens up, though it takes me a while to grow into it, or perhaps to slow my churning psyche – sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes. But when the ‘switch off’ comes, it’s quite noticeable. Fascinating. Over the last thirty years since I started doing this Sunday meditation, on the few occasions when I’ve lost track of time and forgotten the meditation (often because of jetlag after travelling), I’ve even experienced an altered state coming on of its own accord – only then to realise that it’s meditation time.

You’re welcome to join the meditation on Sunday (or any Sunday).

The clocks are changing soon. In UK and EU it’s Sunday 27th October, and in USA/Canada it’s on Sunday November 3rd. The meditation will be one hour earlier from those dates onward and through winter. (In UK it goes from 8pm to 7pm.) Remember: the ‘real’ time of the meditation doesn’t change – it’s just that our clocks change. Nature doesn’t change its clocks either. Changing our human clocks is connected with our modern human preoccupation with diaries, lists and appointments – it started particularly with industrialisation and urbanisation, particularly when trains arrived, running to strict timetables.

This has led to an exaggerated dissonance between ‘objective’ ticktock time and natural, inner, ‘subjective’, intuitive cosmo-time – the time-waves by which the Earth and cosmos resonate and reverberate. One of the core problems of our civilisation is that we impose ticktock time, with its plans and timetables, on natural time. This produces a disharmonic grating and grinding within nature and our own psyches. This friction lies at the heart of our psychological issues, our ecological and climatic situation and in the self-destructive nature of our civilisation. Put another way, we need to re-attune to our natural timings.

That’s what the next Aha Class is all about: time. Since getting cancer five years ago I’ve become curiously time-rich, while most people around me are time-poor, so this could be interesting. This matter of time, and our experience of it as we live our lives, is a key ingredient of the Earth experience – this is what we chose to engage with by getting born in this world. Everything on Earth is a matter of time – and also timing. That’s at times frustrating and yet it’s what we came here to evolve through, psycho-spiritually. Time is what stops everything happening all at once.

The talk is astrologically-based, but if you don’t understand astrologese, a multidimensional language, you’ll still get pings and lightbulb moments. One intention behind the Aha Class is to help broaden your general knowledge – concerning things it’s useful to know about even if we focus mainly on other things. Most of you will have a smattering of astrologese though and, since we’ll be talking about fullmoons, solstices, planetary line-ups and energy-configurations, all of you will have lived experience of these, and the talk will help you make more sense of them. I’ll explain how they work. Each talk is audio-recorded and, where relevant, maps and diagrams are put online afterwards, and they’re all found on the Aha page on my site.

On the day of the talk there’s what I’d call a ‘magnitude three’ planetary configuration or thrum-pattern, involving outer and inner planets, and the atmosphere of the evening will thus serve as an example of how it works. This rather fleeting configuration is an illustration of something that has recently started happening, a Uranus-Neptune-Pluto triangle for a few years, which is a door-opener for the world (see ‘2020s’ below). Whenever the faster planets swing round to activate that triangle, energy-changes are triggered, and the chart for the day and time of the class will be an example. The full astrological details of all this are laid out in my book ‘Power Points in Time – ancient festivals, lunar phases, planetary line-ups and historic moments’.

Classically, for an evening talk about time, Maria and I got mixed up with the dates. It’s now on Wednesday 23rd October at The Hive in Penzance, inshallah. After my illness I needed more time to get my body-psyche systems up’n’running properly, so the class has now been set to the new date. Which just goes to show, it’s all a matter of time. Even though I’m time-rich, I needed more time.

And now it’s time for breakfast. Love from me. Palden.

The Aha Class: www.palden.co.uk/aha.html
The Astrology of the 2020s: https://penwithbeyond.blog/2020s/
Power Points in Time: https://penwithpress.co.uk/product/power-points-in-time/
Meditations: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html
Site and Archive: www.palden.co.uk

Chart of the 1999 solar eclipse in Cornwall – not just an eclipse but also a major configuration of planets and energy-thrum.

Acting like a Mountain

Here’s honouring the great and the mighty

SUNDAY MEDITATION

You’re welcome to join the Sunday meditation – it’s good medicine. Take a break – life can do without you for half an hour.

Do your meditation, astral travelling, mindfulness, mantras or whatever, as you normally do it, together with everyone else doing the same, wherever we are. Enter the zone, an enhanced energy-field, and the wind will inflate your spiritual sails.

My current feeling is that we’re in a chickens-coming-home-to-roost phase, after the events of the last 6-9 months and more. A tide is turning. Nothing is ever permanent. This cuts all sorts of ways: both the benefits and the harms we have brought come back at us, and the overall trajectory is all to do with learning. The learning of the soul.

We’re now in a phase of collective learning (Pluto in Aquarius), of learning together as a mass of people. Our challenge is to mature as a human race, at a time when we truly need to do so. For our social subgroups, our social tribes, nations and the world are themselves beings with their own karmas, behaviours, choices and lessons to learn.

Sometimes it feels as if everything is going backwards. Gaza, Sudan, Yeman, Ukraine, Myanmar, they all seem like retrogressions, and certainly for the people in the thick of these maelstroms, they are.

But look underneath. What has been achieved in recent times has been a maturing of human values worldwide. It’s underneath, beyond the politics, the opinions, the propaganda, the polarisation. It’s historic.

It’s happening particularly in the majority world where 80% of the world’s population lives. Sadly, the Global North, including Europe, America, Russia and Japan – our time was back in the 19th-20th Centuries – are in a rather self-deluding, hubristic phase at present. We’re quite good at alienating that global majority. But people of conscience in the West are deeply unhappy with what has been happening too. It’s people of conscience who need to be the ones in power.

It concerns the matter of conflict itself and of man-made devastation and suffering. Forget this side or that side, who is right and who is wrong – conflict, polarisation and dehumanisation are themselves the problem. Humanity is growing tired of this stuff. And, strangely, exhaustion is one of the greatest of history’s peacemakers.

The sacrifices made by people oppressed by war are fuelling up the collective psyche toward an historic shift. It’s taking place deeper down. That’s where the learning is happening, and in coming times it will be tested. Humanity needs to come out of hiding, and we’re moving inch by inch toward such a time.

Do join us in the meditation. Help the world rise an inch higher. Help humanity see things from another viewpoint.

Times are below, and if you have questions, try here: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

With love, Palden
—————

Current meditation times, every Sunday:
Iceland 7-7.30pm
UK & Portugal 8-8.30pm
W Europe 9-9.30pm
E Europe and the Levant 10-10.30pm
Brazil-Argentina 4-4.30pm
EST, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia 3-3.30pm
PST North America 12-12.30am