St Michael’s Mount as seen from Botrea Hill, the hill on our farm
I don’t post on a weekly basis here, about the Sunday meditations, but whether or not I do, we continue meditating together every week, wherever we are, and at the same time. There’s no mantra or prscription: just do the meditation, prayer, inner journeying or just sitting as you usually do, together with us.
If this interests you, you’re welcome to join us. For more details, there’s a link below. I do make weekly announcements on Facebook though.
In UK and Europe the clocks change this weekend, so the meditation is now between 8 and 8.30pm. My apologies: in USA and most of Canada the clocks changed on 10th March! Add one hour to the time you previously meditated. In other parts of the world, please check online.
But the real time stays the same, and that’s why we do this – it’s only clocks, not life, that have changed. Nature and the planet carry on as before. Also, during summertime, the later time works well in terms of the patterns of our daily lives, as the days grow longer.
In the meditation, feel free to ‘fly’ where you’re needed. But if you want something to give some focus to, I’d suggest humanitarian organisations and their work – not only what they do, but also the awkward and sometimes dangerous position they are in, in places like Sudan, Gaza, Haiti, Yemen and Congo. And the way that the world signs up to noble goals while failing to fund and support them fully and properly.
You’re welcome to join us in the zone, to meditate together wherever you are, and however you do it. For details:
What unites us is meditating together at the same time, and a shared basic intent to raise up the world and assist in its, and our, positive evolution. A once-a-week, simple, undemanding meditation can be a really good habit to fall into.
The Mount as seen from Caer Bran, an ancient hilltop gathering place
And…
For you who are a regular or semi-regular, I have two questions. You’re welcome to give feedback below or write to me about it. 1. Do you think there would be benefit in starting a dedicated page on Facebook for the meditations, together with a discussion group? 2. If a discussion group, do you think it would be better to have it password-protected (closed), or open, or both?
The background thought to this is: there will come a time, sometime, when I am no longer here or active. So I seek to find out whether there is momentum for the meditation to continue when I’m out of the game. This process can start small, slowly and organically, so that something has consolidated by the time it’s needed. If or whenever it will be needed.
With love. Palden.
St Michael’s Mount from the other direction, with Penzance behind, on the left
Second in a series of thoughts and observations about world healing. For people interested in helping the world evolve and break through, by using meditation and innerwork.
When I was organising gatherings and camps in the 1980s, some quite remarkable things took place that demonstrated the capacity of innerwork to change things. Here’s a quote, about something that happened in 1983:
“The high point of the weekend came when we spent twenty minutes sending meditative support to forty or so Glastonbury women who, that weekend, were at Greenham Common USAF base near Newbury on a major protest action against cruise missiles. The meditation seemed profound – we all were quite stirred by it. Later that day, Lydia, one of the women at Greenham, returned to report that the Glastonbury women had instigated a tearing down of the perimeter fence of the base. “We did it!”, she exclaimed. It turned out they had started doing this spontaneously at the very same time that we had sent our meditative support, earlier in the day.“
I’ll always remember that look on Lydia Lyte‘s face….
In the early 1990s I was asked to write a book on behalf of the Council of Nine, some cosmic beings, not of this Earth, who had a lot to say about world healing, and this set me off on a path.
This later developed into two innerwork projects – the Hundredth Monkey Project and the Flying Squad. In these we developed a bundle of techniques and a body of experience, building up a momentum over a twenty year period and working with all sorts of issues during that time.
Now, in late life, and while I can, I’m bringing together my thoughts on world healing in writing and podcasts, to leave to posterity. This is part two (there might be five-ish).
32 minutes long, with bumbly evensong from our farm, and music by my friend Galen in Oregon.
One of the big themes of my life has been time – dealing with the present, understanding the past and envisioning the future.
The future has preoccupied me since I was a late teenager – sitting around with friends, discussing things, trying to see which way the world will go. That’s still an open and evolving question, though for me the issues are clearer now [see:The World in 2050] and my perceptions of fifty years ago, honed by experience and the passing of time, in essence remain quite consistent.
Looking at the future led me to the past. As a student at the London School of Economics during the ‘troubles’ of 1969-71, I’d experienced what it’s like being in a revolution that is suppressed and fails – a devastating transition from inspired ferment to cruel disillusionment. Many are the peoples round the world who have experienced similar since then.
Trying to deal with my ‘political pain’, I studied the movements of change of the past, seeking clues. Then I was given a gift.
Ragged and burned out, one summer’s day I hitched out of London, landing up two days later in the Orkney islands. I found the Ring of Brogar, a big stone circle, and innocently I decided to sleep in the middle of it. I wasn’t expecting a major soul-intervention that night. But it came.
I had a profound lucid dream in which hundreds of people danced around the circle. Chanting and stamping rhythmically as they moved round it, they made the earth resound like a deeply donging bell, generating a charged magical atmosphere.
Loving my favourite stone at Carn Lês Boel
One of them came, reached down and said, “Come and join us“. Which I duly did. From then on I was a smitten megalithomaniac. A deep memory of ancient times was reawakened. Back then too I was involved with time, responsible for organising longterm observances and rites to work with Metonic, Jupiter, Saturn and other longer cycles of time.
Guess what, in this life, by the mid-1980s I was initiating consciousness-raising camps, doing a modern version of the same thing. And they were astrologically timed. After one of the camps I had a moving inner experience where the modern I and the ancient me were dialoguing, sharing our perspectives from our contrasting points in time.
So, I’ve been an astrologer, historian, antiquarian and futurologist. I didn’t particularly plan this but that’s the way it unfolded, in paragraphs and chapters through life. While studying astrology in the 1970s it felt more like remembering than learning afresh. By 1990 I had compiled The Historical Ephemeris of historical cycles with a timeline of events, showing how major-scale changes in human ideas and activities can be identified by observing such cycles. A labour of love, much ignored by historians, it needed doing and I did it.
For the last decade I’ve been studying and mapping West Penwith’s prehistoric sites. We have lots of them. One day I realised why the ancient Penwithians had gone to all the trouble of building these things. Experiences gathered in world healing [see:The Flying Squad] over the previous 35ish years led to a lightbulb moment that came up at Bosiliack Barrow, where I go whenever I seek insights. It’s funny how a revelation often simply uncovers something obvious and already there, though until then it is unseen.
I’m not particularly into earth healing, lightworking or healing and prayer circles, though it’s important that people do these. I’m more into working surgically with specific issues that obstruct progress, in an inner journeying and energy-working sense. It involves addressing fundamental social and cultural patternings, tendencies and institutions that become spotlighted by current events, digging down to get closer to the heart of things, unconcealing and helping to heal the layered pain and damage that humanity has brought upon itself over time. In our own time, these issues are getting in the way of necessary change.
CASPN members, after doing maintenance work at Boscawen-ûn
Consciousness work is upstepped immensely when groups of people work together. Over time, in activities with others that I’ve been involved with, remarkable outcomes have occasionally arisen from it. The Council of Nine (I wrote a book for them in the early 1990s) had emphasised this too: “If there are thirty-six with one mind, focused together, then the entire world, even the universe, may be changed“.
However, an undistracted, unwavering, one-minded focus is needed for that, and it’s not easy. If a group or network knits itself together over time, melding as a group, it can build up a momentum and focus that can take us at least part way along that track.
Sometimes it even happens unintentionally in the public sphere – moving moments experienced at a captivating music concert, a funeral, an uprising or even in a football crowd. Notable in particular are those moments that shake the awareness and feelings of mainstream people in their millions – poignant events, situations and crises that can sometimes evoke a one-mindedness in millions of people at the same time.
When the numbers rise, the intention and energy-holding are good, and there is real feeling behind it, the work people do in this field does have a positive effect, incrementally raising the world’s vibrational level. I encourage you to include this kind of work as a slice of attention in your life, in whatever way is best for you.
Brane chambered cairn, near Carn Euny
Back to ancient sites. The key sites are those that enclose space – stone circles, enclosures, chambered cairns, caves, wells and dolmens. Here intense vibrational fields can be built up within that space. That’s what the people in my dream fifty years ago were doing.
In many ancient sites we can still feel vestiges of those energy-fields, built up over the centuries during the megalithic era. A presence is in residence. At Boscawen-ûn stone circle, a couple of miles from me, it’s quite common that, when you arrive, someone else is leaving, and when you leave, someone else arrives. There’s something bigger going on here.
Being a peninsula at the end of a bigger peninsula (Cornwall and Devon), West Penwith has definite edges, bounded by the sea. Even the landward side in the east is guarded by three hills in a dead straight line (St Michael’s Mount, Trencrom Hill and St Ives’ Head), creating a threshold and energy-shield. (Interestingly, the G7 conference held in Cornwall in 2021 was located exactly on this line.)
Bosiliack Barrow
As I did my research, it came clear that this was not just a fascinating collection of ancient sites – they constituted one big, integrated system, roughly 10×15 miles in size, and purposefully built. It was rooted in the landscape, anchored to key hills (neolithic tor enclosures) and promontories (cliff sanctuaries). The location of major sites such as stone circles is largely determined by these.
These sites are also variously plugged into underground water-energy systems beneath them. Stone circles and dolmens are sited on top of ‘blind springs’, energy-springs emerging as a vortex on the surface, which the ancients then entrained and focused by building an ancient site on top.
They’re also plugged into the wider cosmos by alignments to the rising and setting points of the sun and moon at key times of year, as well as, in some cases, certain key stars – marked out by alignments to menhirs, cairns or natural features. The designs, geometry and mathematics of many sites also embodied principles such as the Metonic cycle, a 19-year cycle of relationship between the solar and lunar calendars, both of which were used at the time.
Tregeseal
Stone circles and other sites are placed in remarkable locations, with a visible relationship with the lay of the land. Tregeseal stone circle, near me, lies in the apex of a U-shaped bowl of hills which meld together to highlight a gap in the west, toward the sea and the distant Isles of Scilly, which float on the ocean like a mystic realm on the edge of the world.
Stone circles, enclosures and certain hills and features were amped up by cairns, menhirs and other markers that were aligned to them, acting as feeders, relays and batteries. These integrated the system as a whole into a network. In some cairns, bodies were buried not for the memorialisation purposes we now practice with our dead, but to bless and light up the land and the network by burying the relics of revered people at carefully-chosen places – rather like the medieval reverence for saints’ relics.
It was all for the engineering of conditions in which advanced consciousness levels could be achieved – though there were other purposes too. Enclosed energy-spaces such as stone circles and chambers are insulated, charged-up spaces. In Penwith, background radiation in a stone circle is much lower inside than outside it, and this applies also to background psychic noise. A protected, charged space like this allows clearer and stronger psychic, shamanic and healing work – and many of you will have experienced this yourselves.
At the Hundredth Monkey camps of the mid-1990s we built up an energy-field in the circle that resembled those that they built up at ancient sites. An energy-field morphs into a reality-field, where the framework of reality changes gear and things become possible that are not available under normal circumstances.
This was noticeable at the end of a camp when we closed the circle – the mood would subside like a slow puncture, ‘normality’ would restore its grip and the background noise and clamour of the busy world around began intruding again. We had been in a magic space with very different character, norms and rules.
Treen chambered cairn
Inside chambered cairns there’s a profound quietness providing ideal conditions for solitary meditation, vision-questing, innerwork and conscious dying, and also for the treatment of seeds, tools, elixirs and magical objects. Insulated from outside by stone and earth, such cairns sit on energy-vortices generated by the intersection of two or more underground water streams underneath. This makes the chamber into an energy-bath or orgone accumulator, valuable for entering into altered states.
Apart from ‘getting high’, why did they bother with all this? It had a direct bearing on the fortunes of people and tribes, as an investment that paid good dividends. Although their civilisation was materially simple, it was culturally and spiritually sophisticated. They had an advanced technology that worked esoterically with the essence of life, the core dynamics within all things, with which they could carry out forms of genetic modification, long-distance communication, medical procedures, ecological and climatic regulation and societal problem-solving.
They weren’t manipulating genetics the way we do today: instead they created energised conditions within which organisms could modify and enhance themselves, and this has been demonstrated to be possible in modern-time experiments too. They needed no telegraph wires or radio waves for communication: trained psychics, often some of society’s neurodiverse people, trained up, would enter a state in which time and distance ceased being an issue.
As for weather-modification, by siting menhirs, mounds and stones on top of energy-conductive water and metal veins and magnetic anomalies, they could neutralise the excesses of bioelectric charge between land and sky, reducing climatic extremes and damaging weather events. Conducting sometimes long and complex rites they focused on keeping Gaia and the spirits of land, sea and sky happy.
Caer Brân
Different kinds of sites evoke different responses – this concerns consciousness-engineering. Just over the valley from me is Caer Brân, a circular hillbrow enclosure surrounded by earth banks, which could hold a gathering of at least 300 people – I believe it was the parliament site for Penwith in the bronze and iron ages. Parliament-moots were probably held annually at a fullmoon around summer solstice, exploiting the virtues of the time and the site, which is exactly aligned with two other circular enclosures (Castle an Dinas and Pordenack Point), with a summer solstice orientation. Though it has a remarkable panorama encompassing Mount’s Bay and the Isles of Scilly, you can’t really see the view from inside because the surrounding banks obscure it. This entrains consciousness upwards and inwards.
Chapel Carn Brea from Boscawen-ûn
Meanwhile, on a neolithic tor hill or a hill camp, awareness opens out over a wide vista, invoking an upward-and-outward feeling. Or at some sites our attention might be entrained in certain directions – at Boscawen-ûn we are drawn toward Chapel Carn Brea, the very last hill in Britain, a beacon hill topped with a neolithic longbarrow and bronze age cairns. In contrast, in a chamber or holy well a deep interiority arises. Ancient sites had added properties engineered into them.
People did ongoing magical work over many generations, well-trained, focused and serious in intent. To crank it up further, they chose power points in time – an eclipse, solstice or planetary configuration – amplifying and pushing their energy-work over a critical potency hump.
There are things to learn from all this. I’m not suggesting building new stone circles everywhichwhere, but there are ways we can amp up world healing work by learning from the shamanic methodology and philosophy that megalithic peoples used. One key element is groupwork and another is the focus such a group can build up. In some respects this was easier for the ancients since they were mostly related, well accustomed to it and also much less psychologically scatterbrained than we. But we moderns have our virtues, such as psychospiritual diversity, a lot of creativity and a good measure of despair regarding the state of the world.
My feeling is that, in the coming decades, events on planet Earth will reach moments of intensity where everyone worldwide gets a deep and clear sense of the full extent of what’s at stake. Events have a way of manifesting scenarios before us that stir us up, press our collective buttons and present sharp dilemmas – whether they’re big events such as the recent earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria, or small, highly poignant events such as a refugee baby washed up dead on Greek shores. These experiences focus minds and hearts, invoking archetypal imagery, stirring sentiments and moral choices. This global process will intensify in coming times and there’s an inevitable crunchpoint approaching, or a few of them, where we’re faced with events of a ‘this really is it‘ kind.
Chapel Carn Brea
It all hangs around whether we pull together globally or atomise into a tangled mess of narrow interests. It’s not just a matter of practical cooperation, effort and peacemaking, but also one of one-minded and one-hearted inner consensus. We’re faced with a mountain of global issues that require a miracle, or a stream of them, and normal means of fixing our problem are too slow and clunky. Only a quantum shift of approach and priorities is likely to prevent disastrous levels of hardship and disruption in coming decades.
A miracle requires the focusing and intensification of an energy field to the extent that our former understanding of reality flips. Nothing much might immediately change, but everything looks and feels very different. A new reality-field supersedes the previous one. The rules change and remarkable things happen. This depends greatly on how, collectively, we see and judge things – a disaster can be made good if if leads to fundamental changes.
This involves going to the heart of things, dealing with them in a psychospiritual way. Not to the exclusion of practical solutions, but complementing them. Making a big step in the collective heart of humanity. Creating a resonance that overrides the psychic disarray and disturbance of today – a central cause of today’s global problems.
‘Disaster’ means out of tune with or loss of the stars. Out of sync with nature, human nature and the cosmos. Out of sync with the guiding light within. The ancients did their shamanic energy-work to keep things resonating well, knowing that everything is interconnected and interdependent. Fixing the world today involves a big cooperation in every possible sense, between humans and with nature and the cosmos.
We have this in our collective memory – it’s a taproot memory in humanity’s collective soul. If we read the underlying meaning of current events to be a manifestation of all that we semi-consciously fear, dread, need and hope for, it is possible to see how events are leading us toward a crunch point, a truth point. A point of focus where everyone’s awareness potentially comes together to think a new and deep thought.
Mên Scryfa and Carn Galva
So something in our deep memory from former millennia holds a key here. And it concerns the future.
Time is a strange thing, and dimensional. When I went down with cancer, my life expectancy was shortened yet strangely I was given a gift of expanded time. In a time-poor world I became time-rich. Not long ago I asked myself whether I’d like my old life back, and I realised I didn’t really. Though life is more difficult now, and serving time as a cancer patient, 70% dead and hovering there, mostly alone, has tested me to the limit, time has morphed toward a more timeless zone where other things start happening. Loss of physical capability has led to something of a gain in inner ability. Life on Earth always has its compensations!
Perhaps that’s where the world is heading. Global loss of traction caused by increasing crises and disruptions could well lead to a similar compensating factor, experienced by growing numbers of people. I’ve discovered this in the crisis zones I’ve been in – such intensity can pull out the true human in us. When your life is at risk you play for high stakes, and there’s no alternative. You’re drawn into the immediacy of now, and time changes in power and potency. That’s where root-questions are met. From a world healing viewpoint, that’s where the crunchpoint lies, and from it will be born the next world, whatever shape that takes.
First of a series about my thoughts and experiences around world healing consciousness work.
Over time I’ve gathered quite a lot of experience in this, in my own explorations and working in groups. In the 1990s I ran the Hundredth Monkey Project – camping retreats for 100 people doing inner work with world issues of the time. Afterwards I was involved in the Flying Squad, a smaller group that worked together intensively for twenty years.
Last year I got the message that I should write and record all I know and understand about this. My aim here is to set people thinking about translating their concerns about the world into activities to help it. Together with activism, campaigning, pursuing our life’s work, volunteering, fundraising and things like that, consciousness work is also something worth attending to. We need to co-create a new reality on planet Earth by working with its underlying patterns.
We need to think through the issues around this. Not because everyone should do the same thing, but because, whatever we do, and whatever method we use, whatever faith and belief we have, it’s good that we’ve clarified a few things, for ourselves and with others.
That oft-quoted adage, ‘be careful what you pray for’ is quite profound. So that why I’m doing this series, to bounce things around and give some things to consider. Sometime it will emerge in website form as well as audio.
In the podcast I’m asking questions about what we’re really aiming to do, and underlying considerations about how to go about it. If you’re interested in helping the world, or if you practice any kind of meditation or spiritual work, this might interest you. Because we have a big problem in our world today, and it’s all hands on deck.
It’s 33 minutes long. Music by Galen Hefferman.
If it interests you, there are also the Sunday evening meditations, which loosely concern this very matter. A regular weekly meditation that anyone may join with, wherever you are. Information here.
Walking meditation on St Michael’s Mount, Cornwall
I’ll be doing the meditation this evening as usual at 7-7.30pm GMT and, if it feels right, you’re welcome to do the same.
Some of you might want to do your normal practice, whatever that is. Some might just wish to be still for a while, to get some space inside. Some might be called to focus on the earthquake and the people affected by it. Do whatever is right for you. This is a half-hour open space.
It’s about making a choiceless choice to pursue a pathless path through a gateless gate. That’s a Zen saying.
The main thing that connects us is that we’re doing it at the same time, with an underlyingly shared intent of positive wishes for humanity and Earth.
If you want the full lowdown on it, read this – the first page is the short, need-to-know one, and the rest give additional thoughts.
If you live in another timezone, than adjust the time to your location. If in doubt, just google ‘time now in GMT’ and work it out.
The view from my window on a rare snowy day – it melted in a few hours. It’s not cold enough down’ere in West Penwith, and we’re surrounded by the ocean
There’s something interesting about doing it at the same time each week. Often we might do meditation at varying times when we feel right for it. But doing it at a fixed time means that we do it regardless of our current state and situation.
It becomes a kind of reality-check. What is the is-ness and the beingness of you at 7pm GMT each Sunday?
Some weeks it might even be a bit of a struggle, other weeks it can be inspiring and other weeks it can be just a tick-over thing, nothing special. And that’s the beauty of it.
At present, as you might have noticed, I’ve been rather in the thick of it and, believe me, it stirs me up. I’m being tested and beaten into shape. But the great thing with a meditation at a fixed time is that if I do it regardless of anything, whatever’s happening or wherever I am, it kinda highlights the way in which my inner life and my outer life are both connected and also somewhat independent and unconnected.
Some of the most amazing meditations I’ve had over the years have been in busy or dodgy circumstances – in one, there was distant gunfire going on, but somehow the gunfire prompted me to focus on the heart of the matter. Or there might be loud music next door, or I might be meditating in a busy car park, or I might simply be in a rather stirred-up state. The nature of the meditation, as it unfolds, is often not what was anticipated shortly before.
So in the meditation today I personally shall be offering up all that has happened to me recently, with a wish that it is all for the best, leading to good outcomes. Otherwise I’ll be leaving it open. Perhaps I need a bit of a rest too.
No big deal. If you don’t have time-space this week, that’s okay – just join whenever it works to do so. We’ll be there anyway, whether or not it’s announced online. If you’re happy joining every week, of all the habits we can develop during our lives on Earth, it’s not a bad one, is it?
Love, Palden
This is me at work in The Lookout. (Photo by Penny Cornell, soul-sister extraordinaire)
Despite everything, here I stand, weak, strong, wobbly and firm
Chapel Carn Brea, the first and last hill in Britain, where the national beacon light-ups start from. That’s a bronze age chambered cairn on top.
One of the best books I ever wrote, ten years ago now, I couldn’t publish. It concerned a plot I helped uncover, involving American financiers funding settlement building in the West Bank, a well-known international meditation organisation making a big error and rogue elements in the Israeli and Palestinian intelligence services. I had to get out of the country pretty quick after dishing up that lot!
The story was quite sensational, though I didn’t publish it because it could endanger people’s lives, many issues would be twisted and misinterpreted in the West, American lawyers would have had a field day, some people would seek revenge, and my friends back home would ask me why I bother risking my life for a few darned Palestinians. Well, it has happened again, except it’s Africans this time. If I told you the story that’s happening now, you’d have difficulty believing it’s for real.
That’s one reason I’ve been rather quiet. It has been difficult knowing what to say. Telling the story can endanger lives, sabotage others, and much of it would, again, be misinterpreted. The number of seriously incorrect diagnoses of the situation that I have received recently has been disturbing, particularly because of their implied racist undertones. Many friends believe I’ve been scammed by West Africans, but the problem comes from a whiteskin company in the rich world, not from Africans. We have been stuck between Western corporate negligence and a crime gang’s violence. Meanwhile, people were getting murdered by the gang, whose market for cocaine, crack, people-smuggling and prostitution is in Britain and Europe. If we want to change the world, we need to end this turning away.
In the last few months I have gained an adopted granddaughter, Phyllis, whose life I have now saved several times. Looks like we might lose her now. She is on the edge of dying, due to a drug overdose and having had two fingers on her left hand cut off by the crime gang. Her mother, Felicia, was gang-raped. The bastards. Felicia is Liberian in origin: when she was young, civil war broke out around her and she was forced to watch her parents and three sisters being shot. When Phyllis’ fingers were being cut off Felicia cried out to me, online, “Why, dear God, is this happening to me AGAIN?”. Phyllis is all she has left.
So while I have a cracker of a story, I cannot tell it. I feel bottled up, but it is safest for those involved that I do not say more. Some good book sales would have been really useful though. This nightmare has cost me a lot and, until the company honours its multiple promises to pay me, I’m seriously in debt. They promised to compensate Felicia for all she has been through, and Felicia is now destitute. This has set me back a lot, affecting my plans for the coming year. But my conscience is as clear as it can be in such a gruesome situation, and I am glad I have not obeyed the advice of many friends to look after my own interests and, in effect, abandon these people to let them die. If I lose friends over this, then so be it.
Bridging gaps. Porthmoina Cove, West Penwith, Cornwall
Last year was a testy year. It wasn’t just the hair-raising story I’ve been involved with. It started a year ago. I was unwell and down, in a mess. My partner suddenly left me – she had her reasons – and I lost another adopted grandchild in the process. Gaining and losing grandchildren is a theme for me at present. Looking back, I was unconsciously picking up forewarnings for nine months beforehand, feeling insecure but unable to figure out why. Something needed to change between us, but I wasn’t ready for total, enforced relationship destruction. I got the blame, though whatever crime I truly committed, in the final analysis, has been far outclassed by the response. I miss her still, and her family. Giving myself a year to get over it, I’ve partially succeeded and also I haven’t. I believed we would go through to the end of my life. But no, I had a big lesson to learn there.
So, I wish her good fortune and many blessings for all that we had together. She is free, and I sincerely hope she finds rebirth and flowering in her new life. She deserves it – she saved my life in my worst cancer days. I am so grateful for our time together. Now a free man with mixed feelings, I’m not managing very well alone. But that’s my problem. It has its plus side though: I’ve used the pain of loss to fire up my creativity, rebirth myself and give the rest of my life, if I can, to starting something new. Or it’s starting me. It concerns a world-healing project. There’s a feeling of rightness to it, like a little seed currently hiding under the snow, awaiting its moment.
In the last year my cancer process has changed. Medically I am more or less stable, and the focus has turned to relationships and the psycho-emotional side of living with cancer. Cancer strips a layer off you and the shields come down. Issues get amplified. A last-chance-saloon feeling takes over. You suddenly find friends and loved ones committing micro-aggressions they didn’t know they were doing. Life becomes raw and unprotected. You get hurt. It has changed my capacity to relate and slowed my capacity to process things through, emotionally. While I’m kinda managing, being on my own means that, if I deteriorate, I have little or no fallback. Sometimes I just need someone to hold me. Sometimes I just want someone around.
One or two friends have suggested that I move upcountry to England, to be closer to people. But I’m electrosensitive and I can’t hobnob in parties and groups or walk down the street without getting zapped and needing to retreat back home – it can take 48 hours to get over it. In effect, to be with friends and loved ones I have to permit them to harm me with radiation. So I could be just as isolated there as I am here. Folks up in England are all very wired-up, busy keeping timetables and treading mills, and that is the central cause of the care crisis we have today – we don’t have time and space to be human, and people in situations like mine demand too much of it. Meanwhile, Cornwall feeds my soul, and the movements of my soul and its expressions seem to be valued nowadays, by you lot. So this seems to be the right place for me. I’m happy doing forays into England, or even elsewhere, but I’d need a lot of persuading to move because I would lose my taproot.
I haven’t been doing well on the family front either. That’s a complex story – another I won’t tell. What with my disability and their busy family lives, it’s difficult for us to meet up, and online relationships don’t really work for me. Mercifully though, all of my offspring get on really well, though they have three different mothers and live in two Brexit-sundered countries. They’re a lovely bunch, and their husbands and children too. In many people’s judgement I’ve been a useless father, and I guess I’m supposed to feel bad about it. Or perhaps I have had Mandela’s dilemma: a conflict between ‘my people’ and ‘my family’, which I have not been able to integrate – and neither did he. However, as an Aspie and weirdo in late life, I’m tired of apologising for being who I am, and I’m not as wrong as I’m often judged to be. It’s time for a change.
In the distance, Kilgooth Ust or Cape Cornwall, as seen from the Boscregan Cairns, one of my favourite haunts
My health is kinda okay, though my back is slowly deteriorating, as if gravitation were increasing. My cancer, Multiple Myeloma, affects blood and bones – will-to-live (blood) and capacity to be active in the world (bones). That’s a wee bit fundamental. Even so, my haematologist is surprised I’ve lasted so long on my current cancer drug, Daratumamab. But, to me, it makes sense that I would do well with it. Dara isn’t a form of ‘chemo’ designed to kill cancer cells. It works by flagging up cancer cells as they emerge so that my immune system can deal with them itself – that’s a brilliant approach, and it’s just right for me. So I’m doing well with Dara. My immune system is in pretty good nick too.
Here’s an observation. I think there are two kinds of immunity: one is to do with the nutrients we take in on a daily basis, which can provide fight-back if our immune system is under pressure or feeling low. Whenever I get the slightest sign of an infection, such as a sneeze, I take a gram of Vit C straight away – and it works. But there’s a deeper immunity level I’d call resilience. If you’ve done immunity-boosting things for a decade or more – good vits, good oils, good everything, though not too fanatical about it – then you’re in a different league. If you’re dabbling with veganism or health-awareness, take note: it truly works if you stay with it for decades, allowing your body-psyche to go through deeper structural changes. Combine this with inner growth, and your cells and genes become transformed. I can verify this from experience.
Longterm resilience has been a life-saver for me, now I have cancer. At root, it lies in attitude. When I’m having a hard time, I look for the gift that’s available. Sometimes I’m forced to lie in bed, watching the buzzards wheeling around over the fields. Sometimes I’m being given a gift of pain to teach me how to move through it and out the other side. Recently I’ve been given a loneliness that has allowed me to spend a lot of time reflecting on life, writing and recording things from my eyrie out here in West Penwith, the Far Beyond.
Immunity is intimately connected with psychic protection too, and right now I’m working on that. Whenever we feel down and got at by life, we have both a protection and an immunity issue. If you want to work positively with cancer or any other adversity, work positively with your protection. This isn’t about throwing up barriers around you – it’s about working on the fears, shame and guilt that grind away underneath, undermining the integrity of your being and giving an opening that outside interference can hook into, draining your power. Sometimes it’s like having fleas, getting nibbled at by lots of small things, and sometimes it’s like a big thump in the stomach. Protection is about the light within us and the degree to which we withhold ourselves behind our shame, guilt and fear.
When I first went into cancer treatment, I hadn’t had pharmaceutical drugs for many years. Suddenly I was getting pumped with chemicals. I called on my inner doctors. “Let it be. We’ll fix it, and follow your instincts on what else will help“. I don’t get it in words like that, but that’s what the message was. I decided to trust, deeply. I started on things like CBD, carefully selected supplements, received healing from many wonderful people, and worked on generating an attitude of yielding and acceptance. On the whole it worked. I’ve balked at a few of the drugs given me, but not many, and in some cases I’ve dosed myself more sensitively to my own actual needs. But I’ve had fewer side-effects than many other people seem to get. That’s resilience: it’s all about strengthening our capacity to handle whatever life throws at us.
Pendeeen Watch, a neolithic cliff sanctuary looking out toward Ireland over the Celtic Sea
At some point, when I can restore my finances, I’ll start doing some events. A monthly online ‘magic circle’ is shaping up, and I’ll be doing some live Magic Circles or talks sometime, though I don’t have it in me to organise them myself. The capacity to handle life’s details and intricacies is one thing that chemo and cancer have taken away – though I’ve gained a widened and deepened understanding of life instead. The only booking I have at present is the Legends Conference in Glastonbury on 8th-10th April, and I shall announce other events when they get fixed.
When I die I shall have no money or property to leave, but I do hope to leave a legacy. We shall see if it works in real life, if I can keep going long enough. When I was young I was heading for a career in diplomacy or government, but then around age 21 I went through an awakening and changed course. I began treading a spiritual-political alternative path. In starting the camps movement in the 1980s I attempted working with the heart and soul of Britain, to transform it from within – with limited success (it was the Thatcher period, after all). In the Hundredth Monkey Project in the 1990s, we attempted direct spiritual work with world events, with some success. With the Flying Squad that followed, we developed the techniques, ethics and practices of such work, forging a synergistic unity and a group bonding that compensated for our lower numbers. This built up a body of experience. There’s further to go, and the world has a need for it.
When cancer came along in 2019, I thought that was it with the world-healing work but, no, reviving last spring from the enormous emotional hit I had a year ago, I got the message, “Ah, there’s one more thing, before you can come home…“. I realised that no one else really had the experience and capacity to take the world-healing work one stage further. In a way it was incumbent on me to do it. I now have a plan, and it’s now a matter of finding out whether and how it will work in real life. It has already started with the Sunday evening meditations, and we’ll let things develop from there.
It involves a group process for which I can prepare the ground, plant seeds and help them germinate, but that’s all. I don’t have much time left, and the events of the last year have shown me how beat up and worn out I am. You see, what decides things for me is not medical prognoses but how long I can keep going, in heart and soul, pushing the limits and remotivating myself to face another day. My current aloneness has tested me profoundly and, while I’m holding up, it has been a big systems check on what I can and cannot do. Overloaded with issues, I’ve been trying hard not to fuck up but only just managing. But then, this is my life, I’ve created it this way, that’s my karmic pattern, and it is as it is. Mashallah – thus has it been ordained. This next chapter is my last dance, and I’m going to give it what I can.
Wolf Rock lighthouse, 11 miles or 17km out to sea, as seen from St Levan, Penwith
But first, there’s business. I want the company to right some wrongs, financially, and I want to get Felicia and Isaac and their remaining children safe and stabilised in a new life. True heroes, they have paid a high price for being good people. Even as a tottering old man, I choose to stand by them, whatever anyone says. Then there’s that gang, who have deprived at least seven people of their lives. This included an Akan native healer, Okomfo Ayensuwaa, with whom I had close miracle-working dealings for a week or so just before Christmas. Killed for protecting Felicia and Isaac and their families, she has decided to work with us on the world healing project, from the other side. She is with us now, in our meditations. A strong, big and good-hearted lady she was, and the river spirits she worked with miss her.
I have shed so many tears over these unjust tragedies, and several times I have been faced with a painful moral choice I would not wish upon any of my readers: the choice between playing safe, prioritising my own interests and security, and standing by my principles in order to keep some good people alive and to stand up for what is good and right. I’ve made that choice, I’m paying that price and, despite everything, I am glad to have done so. The bravery of these people has been a big lesson for me, and my standing by them has been a big lesson for them. Whitemen have a way of walking off. The fates have now separated Felicia and Isaac, and they struggle on alone. I’m still with them, supporting them even though I can’t send money.
Please pray for them, for their safety, healing and relief from their trauma and misfortune – they, and Phyllis, and Isaac’s one remaining child, Adjoa, aged about 6-7, truly need it. They are struggling, materially, emotionally and spiritually. Please be with them in spirit.
One of my missions in life has been to do with righting some of the wrongs committed by the British empire. One grandfather was in Allenby’s invasion of Iraq and Palestine in WW1 and the other was in the Battle of the Somme. My father fought in Egypt in WW2. Northern Ireland started me off on this path, fifty years ago, and I seem to be at it still. Interestingly, it was the Akan, the Ashanti, who, together with the Maoris of New Zealand, were the only peoples who successfully stood up against the empire – at least until the amoral Brits tricked both of them into losing. The empire had its merits and demerits and, while we should forget neither, we do need to own up to the demerits we forced on so many millions of people. For the world cannot progress while unredeemed shadows such as these hang over us all. Every country has its shadow to face.
This has been a difficult time. I’m still here though! As I write, Felicia is watching her only child Phyllis die slowly, in a coma, in hospital, unable to afford treatment. They’re stranded with nothing in a foreign country. That’s the score today. That’s life, as it presents itself. This has been a difficult and risky blog to write – I hope to goodness that I’ve done it right. Meanwhile, I’ll be there as usual at the meditation on Sunday evenings. Bless you all for being my friends, especially the ones closer to me. We all need each other.
Helen, my peerless homoeopath, gave me Pearl last year (beauty out of pain) and Gold this year (lighting up darkness) – spot on. She’s brilliant. If you happen to need an inspired homoeopath who can do it remotely from Cornwall, try her.
Here’s a new podcast and also an update on recent developments with the ‘operation’ I reported recently.
The podcast is about World Healing.
It’s a notion that can at times be rather lightly taken, but it’s really important, this. Especially if you feel a need to make a contribution to the world’s future, increasingly shaky as it is becoming.
There are different ways of doing world healing innerwork, and this is what Palden has learned along the way, especially from the Council of Nine, and through gaining experience by running the Hundredth Monkey Camps in the mid-1990s and being part of the Flying Squad thereafter.
There are many applications of this general method of working, in relation to world events as they arise, and particularly to the underlying issues and deep learning experiences that lie beneath and behind them.
This podcast looks into a few of the issues around healing the world. Recorded down in the woods on our farm on Monday 28th November 2022. 30 mins. It’s here:
The ‘operation’ is kinda progressing, a bit edgy, but getting there. The latest crisis is that child Phyllis, 3, has just contracted cholera. The children’s daycare centre in whose care we left her was not the best (it was urgent, though Phyllis thus avoided the car crash), and we need to bring her and Felicia back together – they need each other.
Phyllis
So we’re going to retrieve Phyllis tonight (it’s a five hour drive each way) so that she’s under the care of the doctor I’m working with, who is a 100% good Christian man, and we’re getting on well. The taxi-driver who saved the lives of Phyllis and the agent, bringing them to hospital, I gave the job of fetching Phyllis – he’s another really good man, and I’m going to try to give him work over time, to reward him for his efforts.
Felicia is conscious and steadying, and agent no 2 is in intensive care under the doctor. Agent no 1 is still in captivity somewhere, though I’m not focused on him much, except holding him psychically (as things calm down, I’ll be able to focus on him a bit more – see if I can get some clues).
New funds are coming thru today or tmrw – that’s a relief. Corporations and their accounts depts can be annoyingly slow when you’re in the middle of a metaphorical gun battle. How is it that Paldywan suddenly finds himself working for a transnational bank? I was supposed to be retired and frittering away practicing independent self-care and watching TV. Or moaning about the government…
Anyway, if you are able, please surround child Phyllis, 3, with love and healing, and we hope she will be back on Tuesday so she can be treated by the doctor. Without really knowing it, with her mum Phyllis has been a heroine. I get a feeling this is a formative experience for a potentially formidable lady, in coming times.
My prayer is that Felicia and Phyllis will emerge from this in a positive way. Under great pressure, Felicia has acted very sanely and effectively, hanging in there through a traumatic time, and I would have no difficulty recommending her to an NGO or similar for a good job.
All is well enough with me: this is challenging but I’m holding up, and there are some occasionally really rewarding moments. I’m not at it all the time – it comes in bursts through the day, but they can be full-on when it happens.
One thing my parents gave me, for which I am eternally grateful, is a gift of diplomacy. I’m not sure where I got patience and perseverance from, but thanks for that anyway! Erk.
Hello everyone. Where have I been? Well, Paldywan’s back on the holy warpath.
Sounds a bit strange, that, but it has indeed been strange. Mars, customarily the god of war, is to me a god of encounter resolution. Sometimes, life leads us into a fight – but the destruction involved depends a lot on how well we deal with the conflicts within ourselves. A great general in history once said, “Every drop of blood spilt charges its price” – it’s true. So the aim is to achieve the best all-round outcomes with the minimum of damage, but it’s a rollercoaster, the stakes are high and often the full results are slow in coming.
It wasn’t my choosing – I fell into it. I have this strange karmic pattern where I’m standing there, suddenly finding myself in the thick of it and sometimes able to pull off a remarkable solution – or at least, avoid the worst. In this instance I served as a honeypot, unwittingly attracting and exposing a crime ring involved in fraud, kidnapping, drugs and probably anything. By dint of doing the right things in the opening moments, I landed up being the only one who could follow it through – online from my desk, here on the farm.
But then, I wasn’t exactly unwilling. I’ve been feeling frustrated recently, physically unable to complete my humanitarian work, and this kind of stuff is the kind of thing I’m good at. Being rather hyper-focused, I’m calm in crises. “Ah, we have a situation” – some Palestinians used to quote me, trying to imitate my English accent, with a cheeky smile. As an Aspie, while I’m seemingly not very good at close relationships, in other contexts I can get inside the head of a person with a gun and talk them down, if necessary. Well, thus far it has succeeded, though there have indeed been ‘situations’.
I thought I’d left all that behind when cancer came my way three years ago, but the universe had other ideas – a few weeks ago I was requisitioned to play the role of a knight or a bishop in someone else’s chessgame. Again.
It’s an anti-fraud operation, now in a few countries. It’s delicate, changing hourly and daily, and I’m handling part of it. The short story is that, when I was blackmailed a few weeks ago, the first three blackmailers were small-time amateurs trying their luck to make a few bucks (two apologised afterwards), but the fourth was different – it emerged later that he was part of a crime gang, though we didn’t know it at the time. An anti-fraud agent – a really good chap, from Britain – handled the case and eventually had it wrapped up, deleting the fraudsters’ computers. Peace descended. Or so we thought.
Then suddenly, I received cries for help – the gang were coming after him, armed, and he needed to get away, pronto. They captured him, together with a woman, Felicia, who had bravely sheltered him, and her three-year old child, Phyllis. Suddenly, I was their only lifeline… and it went on from there. I managed to connect with his anti-fraud company (they work for banks), and since then I’ve been helping them.
The story went on through all sorts of complexities for twelve rather long days – it was demanding and I had to pace myself. That’s why I haven’t been blogging. After a week I managed to free Felicia and Phyllis, then further complications happened, and following that Felicia and another anti-fraud agent working for the company were attacked while driving in a car. Both have been in hospital at death’s door for some days, though on Wednesday (newmoon) I heard from the doctor that she had regained consciousness – what a relief. Meanwhile, he’s still on life-support. The unfolding situation is still rather hair-raising.
Poor little Phyllis is for now in the caring hands of strangers (I’m fixing arrangements for her), and the original British agent is still in captivity somewhere. Here am I, hidden in the far beyond, coordinating online with doctors, agents, taxi-drivers, handlers and sundry oddbods, fixing money, fixing heads, and with three or four lives at stake. Just a normal day on Earth, haha.
You meet some amazing people. A taxi-driver witnessed the attack, took the two people to hospital, then took them to another hospital and stayed with them for two nights and a day. I have just heard that he has lost his job as a result. What a good man – we’ll help him restore things. The doctor I’ve been dealing with has also been remarkable, though his wife probably doesn’t see him much.
Many people urge me to stay out of this kind of thing. Well, yes, but you’re also asking me to let these people die. That’s an option I don’t spend much time thinking about. In the middle of a crisis like this, you bond quite quickly and deeply with people. The first agent, in our last exchange on Skype before they got him, said he’d like to visit me on the farm one day, and I said, “You’re on, that’s a deal”. We haven’t spoken since, but I’m holding that thought, and I think he, wherever he is, is holding it too.
This hyperfocus business is strange. Another task I needed to do at the time was to reduce the length of my book Shining Land and remove some of the pictures – the removed stuff will go on the website. Bruce in Glastonbury, who is typesetting the book, recommended cuts because book production costs are rising and I want to keep it manageably priced. I’d been putting off this job but, when the above operation started up, happening in bursts throughout each day, I used the betweentimes for re-editing the book. It was a way of staying focused during a testy, turbulent, unsettling fortnight. So the book is now done and sent back to Bruce.
When I was diagnosed with cancer in November 2019 my life changed. Then last winter a crisis took me down deep and, by summer, it bounced me back up again, raked out but sensing there was something in life left to do. I seem now to be in a new chapter. My relative disability, aloneness and isolation, more a problem six months ago than now, mean I have time and space to do things – at least, those things I can nowadays do. Near-death and ‘chemo-brain’ have taken me through a level shift in the way I see and understand things, and while in some respects I’m saying similar stuff to 30-40 years ago, something is coming out between the lines that’s deeper, wider and stronger. Which goes to show, even fearsome things like cancer can have their blessings, if we let things be that way.
Having emerged from my shell during 2022, I’ve been cogitating what to do in 2023. What’s taking shape is this…
First, a number of Magic Circles – covering 21st Century esoterics and living as a stellar soul with an earthly contribution to make. Some will be like the Magic Circles of 2022 and at least one will involve a talking stick circle and energy-work.
Second, an online series of monthly Magic Moments (in the far beyond). These are for friends in other countries, those unable to attend Magic Circles and any Magic Circle attendees who wish to join in. Each month I’ll highlight a bundle of useful knowledge and insights, about the universe, time, the nature of our times, ancient wisdom, parapolitics, psychic geoengineering, inner aid work, healing, rescuing souls and whatever else comes up at the time – that kind of thing.
Each of these events will stand for itself, so you can join whatever you like, whenever you can. They will roll along, each rather different, unfolding as they will. They’ll all be reasonably priced and as accessible as possible. I might do one or two events for fellow cancer and terminal patients, if that is sought. Details will follow in the New Year. If you’re good at organising and have outreach in your area or network, please contact me if you’d like to host an event.
Then, third, while doing the above, I’ll be watching to see if some participants are up for starting a world-healing project with longterm aims, to continue and grow after I’ve gone. This is Version Three of earlier world-healing projects of the 1990s and since (the Hundredth Monkey Project and the Flying Squad born out of it). If and when a workable quorum of people forms, such a project can start.
There are people and bits to fit into place, and it’s an organic group process resting on who turns up and how it develops. I have a packet of seeds to hand over, with a little experience in growing them, but the garden will be evolved by the group itself – my shelf life is limited. In the 2023 Magic Circles, amongst other things we’ll have some tasters of this kind of inner work that will be useful to you whether or not you’re interested in the project. Without wanting to sound grandiose about it, there’s something ‘heaven blest’ about this, and some people might like to work within a reality-field of this kind.
Ultimately it’s all about gradually cranking up group synergy to a level where a group’s healing power is greatly increased – and the world needs it. This takes time, since a group is as strong as its weakest links, and it needs approaching in a somewhat matter-of-fact, steady and diligent way, starting at the beginning and giving it time. The Flying Squad managed 20 years, doing amazing work, though where we didn’t succeed was crossing generations and replacing ourselves with new members – so we ran out of numbers and steam. Third time lucky?
I might have only three or four years left for midwifing this idea: its success rests on the circle of people who step in and work together. The project will be pitched so that it is not too demanding in terms of commitment, because beavering away at this work longterm is more important than creating dramatic firework displays that then fizzle out. The basic commitment involves a meditation, wherever you are, once a week on Sundays, plus two or three weekend meetings per year, and there will be scope for greater and lesser involvement, to reflect everyone’s circumstances and availability, which can also change over time.
If there are people who feel right doing this, and if the right critical bits fall into place, then we can start, perhaps in late 2023 or in 2024. It will start in Britain, but folks in other countries will be able to participate remotely and, you never know, it might spread. If this sets a bell dinging, think about it over wintertime, and I’ll come out with more in a while. This is just a tender germinating seed at present, but it might one day become a tree. We shall see. Also, if option three doesn’t lift off, then options one and two will still be good.
If there’s one message I’m moved to convey, it’s this: whatever your path, and whatever your calling, do pursue it.
Now is not the time for holding back and awaiting another day. In whatever way works for you and lifts you up, whatever is your ability and contribution, it is time to come out with it and do it. If I can be of assistance in that, by doing what I do, then welcome. As I keep quoting, ‘For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing’.
I have some personal bits to put in place. Any offers? I need a part-time, nimble-fingered, literate PA with digital and communication skills and the sort of character and availability that would work well with a person like me. You don’t have to be in Cornwall, though that might be helpful, but the main thing is that we need to be able to sync well with each other. I also need an experienced techy Zoom moderator for the online classes, located anywhere, for a few hours each month. I’m looking for a further minder and companion too, living in Cornwall or Devon, to work alongside Penny – it’s occasional, not hard, you need to be a driver, there might be trips away, and I’m looking for someone for whom it would be uplifting and right. I can pay only expenses but, when it works well, there will be ample magic payoffs.
I’ve been quiet yet it hasn’t been quiet. Been going through some big emotional let-gos too, which have been both a wrench and the lightening of a weight. When I’ve wrapped up this operation sufficiently I’ll enjoy a getaway trip away sometime, somewhere. West Penwith, stuck out in the Atlantic, is a windy place in winter, and it sure has been whistling and whooshing around, with sunshine and monsoons in quick succession.
The cattle are down in the lower fields and the birds hide in the bushes and trees when they find the Atlantic coming at them with full-on gusto. The crows and jackdaws down in the woods, hundreds of them, work up a racket when dawn is coming – they’re my alarm clock – and in the evening they do flighty, crarking displays before settling in the evening, reminding me that it’s time to start thinking about dinner. I forget these things, you see – it’s an unhelpful aspect of hyper-focus.
Please put in a prayer for Felicia, child Phyllis and the two agents, both of them good men. I want them all alive and okay. It means a lot to me. Thank you for that. This is not the greatest of the world’s troubles, but if we all deal with our own little chunk of reality, together we’ll make inroads into turning this world of ours into the kind of place it really needs to be. Gaia needs a laying on of hands.
Gurnard’s Head, on the north coast of West Penwith, Cornwall. Its Cornish name means ‘the desolate one’.
Here in Britain and across the rich world, the problem we have now with our economies arises from our not having had a full and proper cultural revolution in the 1960s-70s. What has happened is that the exaggerated materialism we adopted in the 1980s is seizing up, and we don’t want to recognise that it’s all going awry, tripping over its own shoe laces. Let me explain.
As Buddhists say, the only constant is transitoriness or change. The more we get involved in materialism, the more we attach ourselves to things that begin and end. And they do come to an end. A country, a people or a culture experiences an ascendancy if it answers a need, if it steps into a greater potential that somehow does something that people seek or history accepts or the future demands. But when it loses the plot and rests on its laurels, history starts passing it by.
Britain grew great in the industrial revolution on the basis of technology, sheer inventiveness and the capture of lands and resources worldwide that it could exploit. This was its mission 200 years ago. But in the 20th Century that leading edge, based on coal and steam power, was eventually lost, and the empire was lost at around the same time. The critical point came around the 1960s, and what arose at that time was a potential cultural revolution in our own country. One centre of it was Liverpool, where I grew up – once the world’s greatest port and then declining terribly.
Gurnard’s Head from Carn Naun, with Pendeen Watch behind
This possible cultural revolution arose within the centre of society, mainly amongst educated and socially advantaged young people like me. We were society’s beneficiaries, not necessarily the underprivileged and downtrodden – though many of our parents and grandparents had started there. Holistic and adventurous in perspective, this movement covered most of the world issues that then were visible and important, from civil rights and social change to peace, to health, to farming, to the arts, to matters of spirit – the global village had arrived and, with it, the possibility of something completely new.
It was a means by which the West tried to renew itself, to begin reorientating its goals in order to redeem, correct and further develop what it truly was aiming for. It was aiming to make life better for everyone, globally, to free people from the drudge of hard labour, to free them up for more meaningful creative and spiritual possibilities. Instead, another, more materialistic, acquisitive, frenetic, consumptive future was chosen in the Reagan-Thatcher period – what I then called amphetamine economics. Many people bought into it or went along with it, hoping they might get rich. It is now seizing up. The whole model of material development is coming apart, eroded by its own inherent weaknesses.
Today in Britain we have a new prime minister originating from one of the former colonies – the biggest and richest, the Indian Raj. During its latter years, the Roman empire was similar – its emperors were Syrians, Spaniards, Brits and Croatians – and Rome’s vanquished and colonised peoples propped up the empire because they quite liked its benefits. Or perhaps they had already lost enough of their old ways to prevent them going back.
Having long been preached the virtues of democracy, the world’s majority, the relatively unrich, are now asserting majority rights. The world is going through the beginnings of a social-cultural globalisation process, no longer determined and steered by the rich world. What’s interesting here is that while, materially and our ways and values, we humans are becoming globally standardised (we all use roughly the same gizmos, supermarkets, burgers and plastic bags), socially and culturally we’re going through a re-diversification, a multiplication of differences, subgroups and identities – new tribes and nations are forming, based on internal connections rather than tradition or external imposition.
In the face of the standardising globalisation process, issues of personal and group identity and diversity are growing just as fast. We’re becoming a predominantly urban race – we topped 50% of large-city dwellers around 2008 and it could well be 70% by mid-century. This is a very fundamental change, affecting the psychology, experience and spirit of humanity. When people move to a city they move to a different world.
But we still have a big question. If you were an ET approaching Earth and wishing to talk to the people of planet Earth, where would you find our leader? Who can speak on behalf of all of us and legitimately make decisions on behalf of Earth’s people?
These are times of much more fundamental change than we currently see or understand. We’re immersed in it, entering the future facing backwards, and in too much of a hurry keeping the show on the road to stand back and smell the coffee. The full change has not broken out yet – we’re dealing right now in late 2022 with powerful undercurrents and rumblings. This rapidly rising wave is likely to peak in the late 2020s, when we tip into an utterly new process. A new age cannot come until the old age stops sabotaging it. When the critical, decisive, overwhelming change-wave comes, we enter a new phase lasting decades, probably fifty years. We stand right now on the edge of an avalanche of events and shifts, likely to start cascading in this decade. (The astrological details are here).
This will introduce a new, insecure, yet fast-moving period where, on the whole, the world transits toward big adaptational changes, toward solving the problem, but it will take decades before we know that the problem is sufficiently resolved. So much needs sorting out that we need to find a new, pragmatic way of doing it.
We’re entering a whitewater rapids phase in the 2020s-30s before we go over the waterfall, probably in the 2040s. We’re likely to be crossing the Great Divide in the 2040s-60s, around which time we cross into a new landscape – and the coin is spinning in the air to determine what it will look like.
The necessary shifts of global-scale values, ideas and priorities will, I think, take at least 25 years from now to slot properly into place, but the process has already started – it was sub-surface up to 2020 and the outbreak of Covid, and it’s accelerating. It’s like a rising tide – boats get lifted out of the sand and mud, and they float, and if the waves overtop the harbour walls the boats can break free of their moorings and a safe haven becomes a chaotic nightmare, even though the only thing that happened was a rising of the tide.
In geology, the erosive power of a river increases as the square of its volume – that is, if the volume increases three times, its erosive power increases nine times. Psycho-socially, and worldwide, this is what is happening. The flow is now turning into a more of a flood, the erosion is increasing, and there’s a long way to go before our imperilled civilisation is safe and okay to move into the future.
At some point, the incoming tide will breach the harbour walls and we enter a different movie – the power and the glory of the open ocean. Paradoxically, this critical change could happen quite surreptitiously – it could be that, one morning, we wake up and everything suddenly looks and feels totally different. Though on some level of our being, we knew this was happening.
It’s time now for us to transition onwards, ride the waves and get more used to doing so, because we’ll have more of this in future.
Try to identify those stuck parts of your life that aren’t moving – things that no longer lift or light you up, or not as much as before. Entertain the idea of changing things more than you previously thought. Be ruthlessly honest and fiercely real – getting real is an important process, since it’s about recognising and taking ownership of the truth of things in your life, including the beliefs and justifications you’ve lived by thus far.
It’s okay to get stripped naked (metaphorically): vulnerability and insecurity bring with them amazing gifts. Safety and security are ebbing away, and the more we get used to changing, shifting times and circumstances, the better we shall be.
Pain is made up of two things: the issue that creates the pain and the way we choose to experience it. Do we make it bigger, with all the fuss, drama and inner friction we create for ourselves? Or do we realise that, no matter how difficult life seems to be, there’s a way forward, things’ll work out, and there’s cause to be grateful for what we have?
Get down to bottom lines and worst fears. If you bring your fears to the surface, looking at what you fear, often it becomes clear that you can actually move forward, you will make it, and you don’t need to let fear stop you from doing what you know you need to do. Use fear as a way of moving forward: if you fear it, consider actually doing it. Because, whether or not your fears come true, you’ll be far better prepared for the worst than if you hadn’t ever faced this stuff. If you’re prepared for the worst, the chances are that you’ll either survive it or, more likely, it won’t actually come – because many of the adverse events of our lives come to us precisely because we fear and avoid the issues that lie beneath and behind them.
I’m not saying this because I myself have mastered it. Issues like this are what I myself have been facing recently – Saturn-Pluto stuff – and this is what I’m trying to remind myself. (Partially, you see, I teach myself though communicating with you.) When you’re faced with bigger-than-nornal adversity – in my case, cancer and all that goes with it – the feeling tones and experiential intensity of life get amplified and you can get rubbed up deeply and movingly, sometimes by quite small things.
One of the issues for me has been a combination of loss of mobility, infection risk, increasing electrosensitivity, dependency on others and relationship breakdown which has meant my social life has dwindled catastrophically. I can’t hang out with people (unless they switch off their phones – sometimes a big ask). One advantage, however, is that, to plug the gap, I’m writing blogs, making podcasts and doing forays up to England to do events instead. So you win some and lose some.
I’ve been using this time for ruminating over the next step in my life. Time is not on my side, but it’s worth spending it well. It’s now nearly three years since I was diagnosed with cancer, and I’ve got used to my new reality. I seem still to be alive, to my surprise, and I seem to have a few years left. The last year has been something of a nightmare, though in the process something new has dropped into me. So I want to change things.
I have evolved a plan, and I’ve visualised a small and a big version and worked through many details, and something is clarifying here in my eyrie down in Cornwall. For me, it’s phase three of a forty year evolution – not new stuff at all, but I have realised it has not been taken as far as it can go. The big question I’m ruminating over is whether I have what it takes to do it – and the bucket is there to be kicked anytime. Actually, inshallah, I think I might have what it takes, but I’m a strangely realistic visionary and in a weak position in life, and I want to get to a 100% feeling inside. That’s why I’m sitting on it.
If you can get to that 100% feeling in your bones, you then move into a position where it might be possible to move a mountain. We come here to Earth to find out. While a potential might be there, its actualisation is no twenty-minute procedure. It’s that wee matter of 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
As for the cabin where I live, on an organic farm at the centre of West Penwith, it’s called The Lookout, because that’s what you do through its big windows. Except it’s as much a look-in as a look-out. Especially on rainy days. In winter I stay warm with and cook on a lovely warm woodstove.
So now I’m sitting on it, gestating, cogitating, writing notes, checking my feelings. Being time-rich, I can do this. I’ve given myself until winter solstice to clarify things and until Imbolc (early February) before committing and coming out with it. All I have, really, are insights, experience, a vision and a wee bit of social cred.
But it’s not time to talk about it yet. The basic intent is clarifying, but there’s more to go on the method and the manifestation. If any of my readers feel a jiggling of something when you read this, please cogitate it and whether you might be up for it. I shall need to find out during 2023 whether there are sufficient people prepared to give this years, and to stick with it – including after my death. Because, for me, there’s no point starting it otherwise. I’ll find out by doing more events and putting out feelers and seeing who turns up.
It concerns world healing. But just keep it under wraps for now and cogitate it, please. If I get to that 100% feeling, I’ll tell you fully what it is, with my usual lucidity. And if I don’t, I shall leave a body of ideas behind, which will help someone else pick this up and run with it. And I might be able to help from the other side.
Toward this end, this week I started a new project, building an audio archive of twentyish of my best talks and workshops from the 1980s-2000s – because these will form part of that body of work.
Weighty stuff, on a rainy, drippy Scorpio day. Time for a round of tea. Jon the farmer rumbles past, down in the yard, on his tractor. Someone in the workshop is banging something metallic. Our cattle herd is being moved down from the hill to the lower fields by the woods. The bronze age barrows up the hill are shrouded in wet mist. And life goes on at our farm.
A scene from the Buckfastleigh Magic Circle. Galen and Jahnavi, behind, had just finished playing music and we were ready for lift-off
With some pics from the Buckfastleigh Magic Circle, Sept 2022
We’re going through a really scrangly time at present, and I’m hearing of a number of people going through it, and I am too. There’s an astrological transit, Saturn square Uranus, which is turning out to be sharp-edged, hard and grating – a conflict between ideas-perceptions-expectations and evolving hard, factual reality. It’s all crunching hard in the public sphere and in our personal worlds. This seems to be a gritty threshold point on an evolving process.
A Saturn square Uranus would normally have quite a strong effect on events and atmospheres, but it wouldn’t be earth-shattering. However, at present the world is tense, insecure, ill at ease and loaded with hazard. It’s the kind of thing where the death of one woman can cause an uprising in a place like Iran – the Arab revolutions ten years ago started like that too. Social wildfires break out. It’s all to do with bottled-up, high-pressure underlying feelings in humanity that are so loaded and volatile that a ripple of energy can set things off. This Saturn square Uranus is a bit like that. Its influence is pumped up by eight billion people going through an intense time.
But there’s more to this too, and it’s longer term. We are in times of historic, planetary change, and the stakes are high. I’d break down the various intensities into three.
Jackie Juno does the introduction. She and Jeanne Hampshire organised it.
One is the bottled-up energy left over from around 2009-2012: this was an opportunity for change but little really happened, and the genie was more or less stuffed back into the bottle. In 2012 the future turned into the present, and everyone was forced to realise things were getting really serious. This bottled-up feeling means that there’s a big glob of unprocessed frustration, regret, loss, injustice and need for change that is sitting there in the collective unconscious, simmering and waiting to explode. The heat needs to rise only a little to start the fizzing – and there’s an uprising every few months somewhere in the world now. So it doesn’t necessarily need a major astrological configuration to spark off major events, in conditions like this. There’s a lot of pent-up energy left over from previous big configurations where fundamental issues failed to be processed – the current war in Ukraine, for example, arises from issues not sorted out around the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1993.
The second is a tidal shift that’s going on now and by 2024, when Pluto moves into Aquarius for twenty years until 2044. Twenty years of Aquarian issues. We’ve been through a period since the 1980s where Capricorn has been strong – money, law, technology, governments, corporates, tradition, hierarchies, resources – and now it’s going to change. Briefly put, this is about the wisdom and the madness of crowds – the world public. Do the people serve the system or does the system serve the people, and how much of which? It also concerns social control, mass beliefs and behaviours, the rights of individuals and of collectivities, inclusion and exclusion, the competing interests of nations and the world, the battle of new against old ideas, the forces of polarisation and solidarity, and human issues in the social context. This shift of themes is beginning to gain momentum, but it will take two years more.
I’m leading an inner journey to find the source of our souls. I was in there with everyone else, far gone.
When the economy rises, society falls, and when the economy sinks, society rises. The seesaw is tipping over to a new direction right now, especially for the rich world. Here’s another issue too: we cannot really resolve the ecological and climatic issues before us unless society itself goes through a fundamental shift – because it is society, humanity, which has to do the resolving. To do this we need to agree sufficiently on what we are trying to do and work together to pull off a miracle.
The third is a case where the future can exert a causative influence on the present. In the late 2020s, around 2025-28, it’s all going to be going like the clappers. So right now it’s a bit like the low-tide, eerie silence of an impending tsunami – the future is sucking us toward it. The bad news is that it’s going to prove to be all too much for everyone and, the way the world is, some people will get scrunched. The good news is that this avalanche of events and changes will loosen up many stuck, interrelated issues, and it will also bring a rush of solutions. It’s an acceleration.
The key issues of the time will be social priorities (Pluto in Aquarius), new and changing ideas and perspectives (Uranus in Gemini) and leadership and power issues (Neptune in Aries). These three will form a triangle, or an energy-thrum, which actually will be very positive, a florescence under duress. But, since we have so many unresolved issues in the world, unatrtended to in recent decades, things could get difficult. If we had started the necessary changes fifty years ago, this would likely have been a very productive time.
Look, I’m standing without sticks – lifting up others lifts me up too
But it will perhaps not be as nasty and depressing as we saw in the 2010s. There we had bad stuff with few solutions, while in the late 2020s we’ll get bad stuff with lots of solutions – if, that is, we treat them that way. Things are likely to start rushing so fast that fundamental changes will need to start happening, urgently and pragmatically, simply to deal with the onrush of events and cascading outcomes arising from them. The gift in the situation is that, at last, things will be loosening up and accelerating. The Millennial generation will also be stepping into positions of influence.
So we’re in a time of tension where there are forces pulling in a variety of directions, and the future is currently like a coin spinning in the air. There’s a sense that something is coming, and there’s fear and anticipation around it in the collective psyche of humanity. There’s also a lot of frustration and disagreement about what to do about it. Questions we have been avoiding for decades are all suddenly crowding in, and this will continue. There’s a feeling of jaded disappointment and disaffection in the collective psyche, after a trail of horrendous scenes in recent decades – atrocities, wars, refugees, hunger, disasters – and this adds to the bottled-up, stuck feeling of our time, a feeling that, no matter what we do, nothing will change. Energies of growth are being held down by the weight of accumulated past decisions, habits and procedures, and by the manic busyness of a coffee-driven modern culture that is running so fast it has forgotten where it’s running to and why everyone is running so fast in the first place. There’s a lot of opposition, division, diversion, distraction and blocking going on.
So that’s why it’s rather intense at present. It’s going on for me too – it feels like I’m processing too many issues to be able to be clear any of them properly, and all of them depend on something else. I’ve been missing loved ones, particularly one of them, and fed up with my own patterns and with being single, and groaningly facing the fact that I might have to write another book, and dreading winter, and fed up with tribal politics, and feeling overloaded with things to pay attention to, and all sorts of stuff like that. The usual grinding stuff in which I sometimes get lost. Which I did today – I got quite down about it.
So I went to bed this afternoon to go inside myself, rumbling around in the netherworlds, then to surface and eventually reach above the clouds. One result was that it came upon me to get up and write this blog. It was Caroline in Glastonbury who had jogged me to do it this morning – she has a way of constructively jogging me – so thanks, Caroline. But I had resisted – the thought of sitting at my keyboard didn’t light me up. When she or others give me the elbow, I do sometimes resist at first, but that’s just an Aspie thing – I ruminate over such prompts once they’ve gone and eventually come to the rightness of what they tried to say. If, that is, it was right, and if it was not quite right, it helped me work things out and was a gift anyway. So this blog came out eventually, and I hope it gave some useful clues.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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