by Palden Jenkins
for Paldywan Kenobi's column, Dragon's Quest Magazine, California, 1992

It's raining. Not a bad thing. The British climate has changed visibly, in the drier, warmer direction. Things are taking on a browner hue, in what is normally a very green and verdant country. The whole topography here, geared to draining water, is under-employed. Like many humans. Something is afoot, something deeper than just a recession. The nation seems poised in suspended animation, before a looming skidpan of history, a reckoning, in which normality might become something of the past.

What I relish particularly is the exposure and truth which is emerging: we have lived in a world where untruth has been institutionalised, and people in power have got away with outrageous rip-offs, delusions and PR stunts, from politicians to business stars to realtors, not to mention doctors, scientists, judges and others in our constellation of modern, mortal, deities. People have developed short memories and a turgid complacency, as a time-passing way of life on an essentially rudderless ship. The jobs of defence workers are prioritised over dying frogs and luridly toxified rivers.

Like everywhere, we in the former Islands of the Mighty stumble backwards into a Great Assessment, disastrously pretending that everything's just fine: a few filters on our power-stations will fix it, or the odd reform or interest-rate adjustment here or there – as long as the blame for the Great Disaster doesn't fall on us. The Megamachine no longer hums meaningfully, yet we wish to ignore the grating and scrunching going on.

Yet all is not lost. Just last Saturday I witnessed a microcosmic miracle which demonstrated that, under the concrete, the weeds are doing well. In 1983 I had the blessing of starting a movement of consciousness-raising events in Glastonbury, reformulated in 1986 as the OakDragon Project, running week- long initiatory educational camps around Britain, on a variety of enlightening subjects. The name embodied a reconnection with the soul of these islands: the sheltering stability of the oak, and the dynamic, bullshit-blasting power of the dragon.

At the Harmonic Convergence of 1987, this movement reached a flowering and a breakthrough. And the dragon then blasted us: we had to learn what togetherness truly was. When the bottle was uncorked, out came a plethora of diverse genies, all heading in different directions, blurting individual uniqueness at the cost of commonality – as has since happened in the uncorked former Soviet Union. Chaos ensued for the OakDragon, and motoring on was hard. Ideas and people were filched, rivals started up, and OakDragon was almost laid waste by the shadow-play and enthused myopia of freshly-awakened rainbow-souls all individually doing their thing. We were acting out the dynamics of future world change, stage one: 'the schism game' – with a few power-thieves thrown in. Some stayed with it, others shuffled off mumbling or disgusted. Big mouths were heard and sensitivities were trampled. A fine mess.

In today's world, fear of chaos is precisely what keeps people in their debt-ridden, stressful, affluent stupor, half-heartedly treading the mill in fear of threatened misfortune or personal loss. There's a quietly- growing guilt accumulating – guilt over our complicity in supporting a suicidal world-system. We were warned 25 years ago, but the bulldozers and the tempting adverts kept coming. Yet, we didn't make the changes we then knew we needed to make. So we're heading for a Reckoning, a situation where order is overwhelmed by chaos. Once chaos and disorientation break out, what happens afterwards?

Chaos quickens growth, but the difficult bit, chaos, comes first. The devastation we experienced when reality hit the OakDragon camps, for three years from 1988, threw people back on themselves – it was heartbreaking to some. In situations such as this one realises that no dream at all is far better than a failed dream. I was rapidly 'Gorbacheved' out of the OakDragon, and hid in an attic to 'process my stuff'. The movement seemed doomed to miss its purpose. Our theory had been this: that by putting ourselves through the time-gulping discomfort and inspiration of group process, where hearing could prevail over pontification, we could forge a miracle of reconciliation, overcoming our powerless, muted isolation to hear a group voice, to dance the dance of humanity. That was the theory: it worked well at first, but then, with tantalising exceptions, the practise seemed to split people more than to join them. We were stuck with our generational Pluto-in-Leo neurosis: 'don't step on my toes, man, I'm doing my own thing' – yet in doing so, we unconsciously justify treading on others' toes.

The flip-side of doing our own thing is loneliness, the quiet despair arising from broken relationships and betrayed trysts in profusion. And, like the proudly-independent, shakily-confederated former Soviet states, we stand, resplendent in our uniqueness, lost, looking around for company and help. And lo, what happens? People eventually grow tired of isolation. They peer out of their holes and decide, each in their heart-of-hearts, to get it together with others! Like the Community of Europe, nations tired of battling, tired of having the same cornflakes packaged in dishonestly different packaging.

In these days when freedom and democracy are advertised like detergents, as if a panacea for any self- respecting society, we forget the major ingredients which allow freedom and democratic social forms: awareness, care, vigilance, responsibility, cooperation. Without this, any society is lost. How can united nations be born without the conscious, voluntary decision and action of all individuals in them? Not a 51% majority, but everyone! Voting doesn't do this, but 'working the circle', hearing others, does produce such miracles: unity and diversity can become friends, in the hearts of people who are heard.

Feminist historians such as Riane Eisler lamented the destruction of ancient partnership-oriented societies by male-dominated individualistic aggressors, without ever elucidating the likely factors which made partnership societies fail: when a circle of social power has holes, and when individuals, not knowing the price and isolation of individualism, omit to hold together with each other, they under-support the circle of power they live in. They omit to make an effort to reinforce the circle, wandering off on their own paths. In its time of crisis, the circle thus breaks, and once broken, it cannot be revived. Humanity was thus divided and ruled.

The miracle of that Saturday, for me, was to witness the reunification and re-integralising of the circle of the OakDragon. There was a laying-to-rest of old niggling patterns, and a careful and considerate selection of a new leadership. Watching OakDragon return to power in reconciliation and unity made me aware that we were healing historical patterns, in our own little microcosmic way. The OakDragon meeting was a gift by everyone to everyone, for everyone. The meeting ended on time with everything cleared, everyone happy, all questions covered. The family had been through its times of troubles, and was emerging into synergy.

If groups such as we could handle such a molecular fusion, a reconciliation, the future of the world looks a little shinier: the outbreak of chaos and disruption in the West, which we highly likely to see whenever the glue of the Western system falls apart, could lead to the beginning of a true democracy. It could lead to a conscious, active, participatory social process which is genuinely democratic – if, in our hearts, each individual elected to join hands with others rather than run away. The peoples of Russia are establishing the precedents: although there is much chaos and debilitation in Russia, there has not been civil war – this in itself is a miracle.

When we yearn for things ancient, we are secretly yearning for an interweaving of hearts, with people, nature and the spirit. In the modern day we have truly lost our heritage, our communities and tribes way back in the dust-storms of history, and each of us stands alone. The human race is in a state of cold war, dividing women and men, rapists and assaulted, liberals and fundamentalists, heads and hearts, thems and usses. The human circle is broken, betrayed, injured – though not yet fatally (because we're still alive). But it's time for a change.

Within the barrenness of schism, new love, new unification is born. E pluribus unum. In the 1990s, we are in a time of truth, a revelation of the consequences of our collective heresy: we now take the risk that, in the relative disorder of the decade, we might not make it through. We fear pulling together, loving all humanity. Love of friends, love of enemies, love for nature, love of life. We live in underdeveloped nations, starved of trust, seemingly fed by coercion, suspicion, regulation and the artificial security of 'defence' and 'insurance'.

There is no time. When we visit a megalithic stone circle, give birth in joy to a child, or shamanistically talk with the power-animals, we invoke a unitive, magical reality-field. We invoke ourselves as we have been and shall be – one human family, timeless and true-to-soul. Having individuated into five billion separated squabbling souls, we seek now reunification and return. Yet, meantime, we have altered reality: the paradise we are about to create on Earth will be a different paradise from that in which our history started. The wilderness is now a proto-garden. The deadly formula, population-equals-destruction, is about to be changed. Roots to branches.

This will make previous social, scientific and industrial revolutions look like child's-play. You and I have chosen to be alive at this time, at the time when the Big Decision is to be made. We have awaited it for millennia. Who wants to be one of 144,000 evacuees to be lifted off by ETs or angels, when there's a world of promise here? It's time to move on, to complete this laboratory-experiment called 'Spaceship Earth', an experiential hybridisation of angel-souls. A hybrid race of many colours, created for the purpose of finding out whether the Creator's creations can create even more creatively than the Creator itself.

At the end of the 1991 crop-circle season in Britain, the Circle-makers gave us a beautiful Mandelbrot Set design, engraved in wheat outside Cambridge – one of the places where Chaos mathematics was developed. Zoom in to one place on the Mandelbrot Set, and you see the same pattern repeated microscopically. Zoom into one part of that, and another minuscule reproduction of the pattern emerges. This is a mathematical theory of evolution: the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Guadalajara creates a gale in the mountains of Wales. Zoom down to the life and choices of an individual, and zoom back to the Great Turn-Around on planet Earth: the small and the great are causally intertwined. You and I make a difference, even when there are five billion others. We all know this, though we're yet to reach critical mass on doing it.

Need we believe our politicians, telling us to defend our interests against foreign cars, drugged criminals or errant Gadaffis? That's the old story. Presidential elections are nothing compared to the magnitude of choice in the Great Turn-Around. If twelve people can steadily hold one healing thoughtform for ten minutes, the world can shift. If the human race can hear the voice of its participants, the world will already have changed. In Britain, the patterns in the cornfields are teaching us to drop our neurotic search for conclusive answers and reinforced paradigms, and to live in peace with nothingness. Opening ourselves to the fullness of the Mystery is sufficient – the answer lies in this state of being. Our politicians stand on the far periphery of real power, lambasting each other, believing there is something to win. Reality is taking a nosedive into the infinite.

Or is it? Make your own decisions. Meanwhile, it's still raining. That's a relief.

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© Palden Jenkins, 1992. All of these articles are copyright. They may individually be copied and shared with others in a spirit of knowledge-sharing and fair play, but they may not be sold, printed or reproduced in quantity or changed in form without the permission of the copyright holder. Magazine and other editors may e-mail me for permission to reprint. E-mail: