This is all about the current battle for the hearts and minds of humanity - something that is unfolding behind and beneath the torrent of world events we experience today.

'The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom'. Thus said William Blake over two hundred years ago. Well, true. But do we really need to pursue excess in order to achieve wisdom?

Recorded in Botrea Woods, Grumbla, Cornwall. Yes, Grumbla is a real place!

This concerns people and power. We're faced with a big question: how to balance effective governance with popular participation. Every kind of system needs to embrace everyone unless we want a world where some thrive and others suffer - the world is crowded, interdependent and networked, everything is affected by everything else and we live in a time of amplifying consequences.

This is an age of throngs. Occasionally people mass in the streets or online, swaying unpredictably between the wisdom of the majority and the madness of crowds. A kind of democratisation and dispersal of power is re-shaping political process, causing authoritarian regimes to become more responsive to their publics and democracies to become more confused by them. This bypasses conventional party, class, local and sectoral loyalties, articulating emergent public instincts, hopes, issues or grievances more than it shapes coherent ideologies.

This podcast covers power in society, governance, oligarchies, socio-political change, gender politics and artificial intelligence - big issues in our time. It's taken from a report I wrote in 2017 about the future of the world, at Possibilities2050.org. It is a comprehensive and readable report spanning all major issues and risks facing the world today. This podcast is a reading of the chapter on politics and power. It might help sort out your perspective on things.

Best wishes, Palden

palden.co.uk

Let me introduce you to a soul-friend, Ibrahim Issa, director of the Hope Flowers School and Centre in Bethlehem, Palestine. I worked at this school for some years, helping them with outreach and hassle-busting.

His talk is about the school and its world-leading work in dealing with war-trauma, peace-building and the reconstruction of communities.

Palestinians have experience in this that few other nations have, since their war experiences have stretched over 70-100 years. The school now trains teachers from all over the West Bank in trauma-recovery and front-line handling of the social consequences of conflict.

Ibrahim also talks about the situation today in the West Bank - very different from that of Gaza, but equally painful and destructive. Whatever happens, even if its own campus is taken over by Israeli settlers, the school's work will continue - as it has done through two intifadas and many years of obstacles and horrors.

They live by an exemplary philosophy of hope, and it's well worth listening to Ibrahim's talk, in Gloucester, UK, on 3rd May 2025.

https://hopeflowers.org

This is mainly for my generational peers - if you're in your 70s, 80s or 90s, your bones are getting creaky and your mind is getting sluggish.In the life-cycle we're given, we grow up and later we grow down. In steps.

It's also about karma-clearance. Sorting out our stuff at the end of life, so that we don't carry all of it with us when we go over to the other side - to the realm of the Ancestors.

I've been involved in humanitarian work, and recently I've needed to work on my patterns around givingness and compassion fatigue. Commitment. Success and failure in helping people. Deep heart stuff.

And it's about acceptance. That's one of the biggest learning experiences life ever gives us.

Introduced and outroduced by the birds of Grumbla, in the far beyond down'ere in Cornwall.

Inner journeying, meditation, remote healing and peace-building.

Praying for peace or showering light over a benighted area are good, though often they are of a generalised nature. But it's possible to get closer in.

It's possible to penetrate actual situations and play a more targeted part in them - literally rescuing people or souls, or participating in situations, meetings and crux-points at the frontline of human experience.

In part two we visit Sudan in an inner journey. The 20 minutes of silence have been cut out. If you want the full version, find it on my site at www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-geo.html

Inner journeying, meditation, remote healing and peace-building. Doing our bit toward tackling the world's problems.

In recent times many of us have been moved to join meditations, prayers and link-ups when major crises break out. Waves of mass empathy and concern over such crises can have a wide and deep psycho-spiritual influence - it goes deeper than mere 'public opinion'.

Praying for peace or showering light over a benighted area are good, though often they are of a generalised nature. But it's possible to get closer in.

It's possible to penetrate actual situations and play a more targeted part in them - literally rescuing people or souls, or participating in situations, meetings and crux-points at the frontline of human experience. That's what this talk was about.

In part two we visit Sudan in an inner journey.

Some days I have days where inspiration-levels droop, so I rattle off a podcast or a blog, if I can muster up a gem to start with - a starting thought. It's a way of getting inspiration-channels moving, and sometimes something good comes out. Not always - I have quite a few rejects.

A few days ago I was feeling a bit like that - cancer drugs were affecting me, I'd been on my own too much, it was raining and foggy, and I was casting around for a spark to give me some ignition. Oldies sometimes need a bit of that - ignition.

It has been one of my pathologies in life - an ability to ignite people and things, providing a spark that sets things in motion. I'm one of those who has got his fingers in various pies over the decades. Some of these spark-moments I hear about or see the results of, often years later, and some I hope have happened anyway, somewhere, sometime, whether or not Schroeder's Cat was watching, and unbeknownst to me. I'm happy about that. It has been a privilege to participate in people's lives in that way.

I'm still at it. Except nowadays I'm doddering around like an old fogey on sticks, wondering when the next seat is likely to appear. I go at about one-third of the pace of most people. So at times I have to work at finding a spark to ignite the old creativity-plugs. This is about that.

With love, Palden.

I've been a member of the Honourable Company of Cancer Patients for over five years now and, amazingly, I'm still alive, and against the odds. I have a blood cancer, Multiple Myeloma, and I didn't expect to live this long.

I waded through the tough grind of chemotherapy and dealing with physical disablement. I went down, nearly fell through the cracks, and found myself emerging from a dark tunnel around three years ago.

I found myself starting a new life - well, kind of. I have no idea how long I am to live - it could be next month or five years. But I found a reason to be alive.

This is for cancer patients and people with serious or terminal illnesses. It's not about the medical stuff: it's about the experience of cancer and what it can do to us. Deep in our soul.

This is my fiftieth podcast from the far beyond. The rest are on Spotify or on my site at www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html - I'm leaving some (I hope) interesting thoughts before I go back to the stars.

Love, Palden

This is part two of the sixth Aha Class, held in Penzance in February 2025. It's all about what happens after you die, and how this reflects on our lives now.

Life takes on a very different hue when we're leaving it. First we go to the 'holding bay' where we detox, decompress and defragment after an intense life on Earth. When we've sufficiently got over all that, we're ready to progress through the 'pearly gates' into a completely different world. That's what this talk is all about.

With love, Palden.

http://www.palden.co.uk/ahanotes-dying.html

This is part one of the sixth Aha Class, held in Penzance, Cornwall in February 2025. And it's all about dying.

We get born and then we get dead. Things happen in between that we call 'life'. Seen from the viewpoint of the Other Side, our lives are short, rather like a dream, and what happens during our lives takes on a very different hue and meaning when seen from there. After all, we were just visiting Earth.

Part Two of this talk follows. With love, Palden.

www.palden.co.uk/aha.html