Dear readers,
For the past 7 or 8 months, as a way of getting to learn myself a little more, I’ve been answering introspective questions, using the book Question Yourself: 365 Questions to Explore Your Inner Self & Reveal Your Inner Nature by Dave Edelstein and I.C. Robledo.
The book was chosen pretty much at random. You can find quite a few on any online bookstore or platform. I would answer two or three a day in a personal journal, then sometimes go a week or even a month without a word. The questions have ignited my unknown quest to understand where I stood on a whole number of emotional and spiritual subjects, which before I was just ambivalent or somewhat apathetic about. As you can imagine, asking such questions is a wonderful cathartic and enriching experience, almost a cleansing or purging toxins with a firm scrubbing of the soul and shedding light on old habits and ways of thinking that no longer serve me. To put it another way, a search for my own truths and values, without contamination of thought or opinion of another maje*…I mean, person, in a peaceful solitude and armed with a nice fruity cup of tea. In some ways, it has been part of a healing process, for reasons you can find in my post The Game of Grief.
Saying that, sometimes I enjoyed the contamination of thought from others and asking majes…I mean, friends, aleros**, questions, particularly when they were drunk, dazed and confused, just to see what nonsense they’d come up with. Then, I would horrendously bully and ridicule them and their deepest, precious thoughts and make them believe their ideas were dogshit, but then still steal their genius pearls of amazement and redesign it as my own wisdom, intelligence and emotional maturity. Plagiarism, theft of thought and toxic manipulation at its very best [cue sarcastic bow]. I am of course joking. My friends barely have a brain cell between them. Yes, now I really am joking. It was good fun winding them up while they bumbled through their answers in intoxicated states. But more so, it was fascinating to hear reflections and the life stories that helped them come to such conclusions.
I will share some of the questions and answers now and then. Feel free to write your own answers in the comments below. I invite them. Or, write them in your personal journal; I hope you receive the same mental benefits as myself.
Is This Just a Station on Your Soul’s Journey?
A nice facile question to begin with, then: the soul, or more so, “the soul’s journey”. I found it easy to answer when I did so in my journal. Now I think of it on a deeper level, the question raises so many more questions in my beliefs, and our belief systems as a society, loaded with concepts of faith and/or philosophy, that it makes it a little difficult knowing where to start. I am not particularly religious, nor do I pretend to be a philosopher, but I guess this question crosses all our minds at some stage (or station) of our lives (or soul’s journey), and while we all want to believe or come to a conclusion of what happens after we die, the truth is we never really know. Therefore, if this were a school essay, I would probably receive an F, “for sitting on a metaphysical fence”. Nonetheless, let me try.
There are a couple of ways to interpret this question. The way we answer it hinges on what is meant by the “soul’s journey”, and whether it transcends to different lifetimes as many faiths believe, or does the journey end when the heart stops beating and we become a lush banquet for worms. A slightly morbid thing to say, I know, but I am a fan of The Walking Dead, so please accustom yourself with my ghast. It’s almost appropriate to mention The Walking Dead actually, as one of my favourite characters, Negan, a villainous yet humorous psychopath, walks around with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire which he named after his dead wife who he believes (or just says) is reincarnated into the bat. This very bat he uses for ending the lives of the dead and the living by hitting them rather hard over the head. Sorry for the spoiler.
I will answer the question by first exploring whether the “soul journey” extends other to lifetimes, with “station” referring to this current lifetime. I also look at the alternative that the soul ends when this lifetime finishes and “station” refers to the here and now, and whether there are any benefits to this way of thinking.
The Soul Journey
So how can we define the Soul’s Journey?
Something of a spiritual progression or evolution that a soul undergoes throughout its existence, which includes experiences, growth, learning, and ultimately, transcendence or reunification with a higher power or cosmic consciousness.
When one thinks of “higher powers”, we can’t help but connect it to religion, faith and spirits. As mentioned above, there are many religious beliefs on the soul and what happens to the spirit once our physical body dies.
- In the Christian faith, there concept of the afterlife in Heaven, Hell or Purgatory. It all hinges on the judgement of an omnipresent being named God who analyses the sins we’ve committed during this lifetime. For more information, read the Bible. Otherwise, I recommend The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri; a nice bedtime read.
- As part of Mexican and Latin American culture Mexico is Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, when families craft ofrendas, marigolds, photographs, and beloved foods and beverages of their loved ones who have crossed over to the other side. The ofrendas are thought to beckon the souls back, as they listen to prayers, and savour the scents of their favourite dishes. For more information, go to Mexico. Otherwise, watch Coco.
- Islam is similar the Christian faith on this matter, although I also read it is believed Muslim men that die waging jihad against the enemies of Islam will be rewarded by Allah as martyrs with 72 virgins. 72 seems a bit of an arbitrary number to me, but I am sure with deeper reading it has reasons (maybe).
- Reincarnation, rebirth, transmigration, are highlighted in Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism and Jainism, as well as some pagan beliefs.
I am sure there are many more, but due to time, personal willpower and the fear of boring you, I will stop there.
Back to the soul’s journey. I desperately want many of these beliefs to be true. Especially reincarnation. There is a romance to it, the parapsychology, and it brings a lot of relief to feel there is something else….this isn’t it. Not that I have any complaints about this lifetime. I’m a happy man. I’ve had a good 44 years. If I die in my 80s, I’ve lived half my life up to this point. Mind you, I feel it’s all going to deteriorate from here on. Brittle bones, hurting limbs, loss of hearing and eyesight, sagging man tits, pot belly, greying hair, loss of labido. Fuck, kill me now. I’m giving myself an anxiety attack and existential crisis simultaneously by writing these very words.
We have all been asked what animal or creature we would be if we were reincarnated. I’ve already chosen mine. Actually, it’s a toss between two. My first is an orca. That’s right. I want to patrol the seas like a king and ride the waves with my pod, chomp on baby seals like bubble gum, smack, bully and torment other apex predators such as great white sharks to pass the time, chase Flipper so he’s beached in front of hundreds of tourists, perv on mermaids, sink boats and dodge harpoons. I’m really ruining the rep of the mighty killer whale here. All jokes aside, it is a dream of mine to see an orca in the fresh.
My second choice is a bird of prey, for no other reason than I’d like to fly very high and be higher up the food chain than a pigeon or sparrow. To add, I was a cat in my previous life (see my post dedicated to cats: The Phase of the Feline: Felis Catus).
Even though I write with jest, there are those who speak about past lives and different physical forms they once had, with very lucid visions and thoughts they once were. YouTube is full of documentaries on the topic, and some faith healers offer regressions and even provide therapeutic support for those who feel they need healing from past life traumas. Seriously, be careful before searching yourself: you could find yourself falling into a past life rabbit hole that in itself could last a lifetime. I suppose it lies in the area of parapsychology and psychic phenomena, which like many of you reading, I am sceptical about, more so because of the lack of empirical evidence. Yet still, I am sometimes at the point of practising conscious avoidance of my scepticism in order to try and believe it. Again, there is a certain lure to feel that there is something else waiting for us, or we have derived from a different form, and I want to believe in the witness statements of those who claim to have visions or accounts of a past life. But I suppose that’s where my answer to the question lies: I want to believe, but I struggle to, especially where past lives are concerned.
Saying that, believing in the soul’s journey can be helpful in the grieving process of a loved one, as I did with my dad (read my post, The Game of Grief). It has been helpful to think that in some way he looks over us, or that we will meet again, however and whenever that may be. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the death of someone; it could be when a relationship breaks down, or unrequited love, someone who we thought was our soulmate turns out not to be. In a way, it is a coping mechanism to cope with loss, of saying goodbye. When I reflect on my own losses, one of the ending lines from the movie Vanilla Sky never fails to cheer me up, “I will see you in another life, when we are both cats.”
Soul Journey in This Lifetime
Above, I wrote of how souls transcend from lifetime to lifetime, giving a definition of the soul journey, as well as highlighting theories of the afterlife from different faiths. Now I will entertain the idea that the soul exists just over this one lifetime. Now I think it’s important just to get a definition of the soul, and which better thing to ask than Chat GTP, a machine without a conscious (as far as we know) created by humans:
The spiritual or immaterial essence of a living being, representing its deepest nature, consciousness, and identity beyond the physical body.
I feel this is a better way to look at it. The journey itself is to delve into our soul and understand ourselves better, for growth and evolving through experience and educating ourselves. It ends when it ends, but the soul and spirit lives in the minds and memories of others, rather than a heaven, hell, “Mictlan” in the Aztec world or an afterlife with 72 virgins. It’s a healthy way to see it and accept morality as a goodbye to the soul.
From speaking with friends about the soul journey being just one lifetime is that on some level, it puts us in the here and now, motivating us to accomplish things in this body, in this soul, rather waiting for tomorrow, so to speak, a transition to another world or reincarnation. That’s not to say that people who believe in these things don’t live or believe in the present. Actually, Buddhism practises elements of mindfulness and reincarnation. Nonetheless, it’s more of a thought to those who are waiting or expecting something better, when their current station might not be a destination or cycle they are particularly happy with. It’s fun to be curious about what it’d be like to be something or someone else in another lifetime, and I like to think of myself as somewhat open-minded and spiritual, but I believe that’s all it is: something of a fantasy.
So, to conclude, I suppose the present moment is our station, or part of our current cycle. We need to decide if we are happy with our current station, or what we can do to improve it, and therefore, improve our soul.
What are your thoughts on the soul’s journey? Did you get anything else out of the question? Did you read the question in a completely different way? Do you feel I missed out on something or you disagreed with something?
Include in the comments below.
*Maje – m. slang 1. punk; jerk, idiot. [¡No seas maje! Don’t be a jerk!] 2. guy, buddy, dude, man — also used as a familiar address, esp. among young people who are close friends. – Dictionary of Honduran Colloquialisms, Idioms and Slang
**Alero, ra m./f. slang friend, buddy, crony – Dictionary of Honduran Colloquialisms, Idioms and Slang