Is This Just a Station on Your Soul’s Journey?
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
The Phase of the Feline: Felis Catus
Dear readers, I’ve always loved cats. Those people who don’t like cats, I consider completely and utterly devoid of humour and personality. I struggle to comprehend someone who can’t appreciate a feline’s aloofness, nor love the way they fuck up from time-to-time, like misjudging a jump, but always gracefully landing on all fours. The way they swagger along fence tops with the arrogance of Eric Cantona, or stroll where they please over random pieces of furniture which to the humanoid thought is insane but to the cat brain is, “So the fuck what?”, a valuation the humanoid has to succumb to and accept because their inferiority and lower status in the hierarchy and food chain of life under the might of the fierce felis silvestris catus, also known as a “the common house cat”. One glare is enough to tell you that you’re just a worthless shit compared to their Lordship, and there’s nothing you can do about it except feed them and pet them – always only on their terms. They purr with such sensuality and smug charm, but you must always forget that this love is not a two way street: you may adore your moggy, but you are merely their humanoid slave. They police their territories with complete randomness: sometimes with a demonic prowl, other times complete and utter hueva – negligence. They sleep on window ledges, just centimetres away from a death drop, and they do so while sticking up a middle paw finger to the grim reaper, with the purred meows of “take your best shot. I’ve eight more lives.” Their fur balls give you allergic reactions and a sharp swipe of the claws at your toes first thing in the morning stings like a bitch, yet it’ll put a painful spring in your step for all. They catch rodents and gift their carcasses on a pillow in Godfather style, while decimating the local bird wildlife populations, “just because we want to”, then toying with the poor creature until its last breath, again, “just because we want to”. The randomness of their cruelty is slightly psychopathic by humanoid standards, yet it has been the muse and inspiration of many thousands of hours of video reels on social media. Have you ever asked yourself how many hours you have misspent going down cat video rabbit holes on YouTube? Or is it just me? Maybe it’s just a question for myself and my procrastinating tendencies. But fuck, I do love feline narcissism. I return to the point in the first paragraph, if you can’t appreciate a cat’s traits, you a really are a humourless eejit, aren’t you. And if you dislike them due to superstition, then I really think you don’t have the mental capacity to vote either. Cats are sinners and they don’t care, nor do they give a fuck about not going to heaven. They’re already living in one. I love dogs too. I love all animals. They talk more sense than most humanoids I know [note to reader: yes, I could well be talking about YOU], and they don’t even say a word. Well, apart from parrots. But let’s get back to felines. I used to have two cats. Not at the same time. They were family cats. Saying that, no humanoid truly owns a cat. As the cliché goes, they own you. So let me start again, my family and I were owned by two cats over two different periods. The first was named Oscar, with beautiful light brown, beige and black stripes to help camouflage himself in the foliages of Southam Road, sporting the genetics of a Welsh feral cat and a farm feline. Oscar had a wild glint in his eye, not a cat to be messed with, but beautiful to look at and admire. He attacked dogs and stalked foxes that entered his backyard, and sometimes came off worse when claws were thrown, but other cats in el barrio were petrified of him, which I must admit still today gives me an unhealthy feeling of pride. He was only with us for four years, before he perished after being hit by a car. The second cat was named Huey after the 80’s band Huey Lewis and the News in my mum’s eyes, but I tagged him after the lead singer and writer of the Fun Lovin’ Criminals, a band I was listening a lot to at the time. We adopted him just a few weeks old from a rescue centre, a black and white moggy with asymmetrical markings on his face which always made him look a bit confused or inquisitive. Mum insisted he just wasn’t very bright, but I believed he was just pondering shit a bit too much, just shilly shallying over whether to nap, nip at your toes or eat. I can see my mum’s point though; when running down the stairs, he seemed to refuse to use his legs for the bottom few steps and just roll down. He was less of a hunter than Oscar (i.e. without doubt, his success rate was much lower and less ambitious, but it is an unfair comparison: Oscar had wild hunting genetics from a feral cat father and had better instincts than most cats, making Huey look distinctly average, which like comparing a Ferrari to Hyundai [note to self: you’re thinking about this way too much. Your readers don’t give a shit]) and was less bothered about protecting his territory. Other cats could randomly walk into the house and he would just look on witb a chilled expression. Huey was amazing at eating. He was obese and struggled to get through the cat flap or even jump onto sofas, which was both funny and sad to watch. This is where my mum underestimated Huey’s intelligence, or maybe more so, his greed. For some time, he would have his breakfast at home every morning, and then go to our neighbour and eat her cat’s food as well. We cottoned