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
Cloudbusting by Kate Bush
Dear readers, It hasn’t always been on my playlist. It has been a bit “out of ear, out of mind” over the years. It is now, though. According to Spotify, it was my third or fourth most listened to song in 2023. My mother would dance around the kitchen to it while preparing the Sunday roast, and I would sit at the kitchen table for mum to keep an eye on me, ensuring that I would, maybe, attempt to do my homework. I would hover around taking in the aromas of roast lamb, pork, beef or chicken with potatoes and veggies in the oven, but also in the hope mum would do my maths and business studies homework, because I didn’t have the spark or motivation for that nonsense, but I did for football, budgerigars, computer games and Oasis. Yes; regrettably, I was a lazy oik at school. English and PE were the subjects what I rolled out of bed for. Maths I hated, and it is still a weakness today. I miss crucial cognitive numerical problem-solving tools, mathematically dyslexic so to speak, meaning my calculator or Chat GPT to do the brain work, as it does for billions more humanoids these days. Robots are taking over. You’ve been warned. If my memory serves correct, the first time I heard the song was on a wintery afternoon. It was greyish and cold outside, and there was something on BBC Radio 4 with Kate Bush talking of her inspiration behind the song. I don’t remember if it was a Desert Island Discs episode, which I think usually aired on Sunday, but I remember mum being captivated by it and I was curious why. I can’t recall my age, but I guess I was still in junior school; anywhere between 7 and 11. But it was that afternoon I heard the song for the first time, and the looping orchestral rhythm of the “dum da da dum, da da dum, da da da da da dum…” which became a lifelong ear-worm that will happily echo in my mind until my death. The song comes and goes from my life, but it seems to return when I pass through a major life event. It certainly did so when my father passed away. The song certainly eased with the grieving process, as highlighted in one of my previous blog posts, A Game of Grief. There is something very harmonic about the song. It is rich and varied, using lush chord voicings and harmonic progressions that create depth and complexity. There are extended chords, which I researched are in major 7ths and suspended chords, adding colour and texture to the song’s palette. Bush uses strings and synthesisers and percussions, along with her voice, to give the song a melodic texture, something atmospheric. All these ingredients give Cloudbusting a strong emotional impact; it’s haunting. It is also storytelling, which I will come to shortly. The chorus and dramatic build-up convey a yearning, a connection, a transcendence, between the listener and the narrator. Kate Bush reminds me of David Bowie, a real musical artist, mixing elements of pop, rock and avant- garde genres, with inventive lyrics and innovative production techniques. She was 19-years-old when she burst onto the scene with Wuthering Heights in the late 1970s, and she has retained a certain esteem among the masses and the music industry. Cloudbusting was released in 1985, but it has a timeless quality. It’s relevant today and is an inspiration amongst contemporary artists, thanks to the unconventional and catchy rhythm. Only great artists can do that: produce music, novels or portraits that are relevant for many generations. Kate Bush’s music is just that: evergreen. One of her other songs, Running Up That Hill, returned to the public ears a couple of years ago thanks to the Netflix show, Stranger Things, becoming a hit with younger generations for similar reasons: its evergreen pull. When I first heard the song, I admit, it wasn’t the lyrics that caught my attention, which is odd as words and narratives often hook me more than the music itself. As stated, it was the looping tempo: a lifelong earworm that I often nod my head in rhythm to as it plays out in my mind while working or waiting in a supermarket queue. I guess I was too immature to grasp the lyrics at the time. They are based on Peter Reich’s memoir, A Book of Dreams, about his father Wilhelm Reich, evoking themes of imagination, longing and the power of human spirit. My sister bought me the book for Christmas in 2022, and I gobbled it up by New Year’s Eve. It is an emotive read with a kind of “us against the world” narrative that Bush cleverly discloses in her lyrics to her song. It also focuses on a cloudbusting machine invented by Wilhelm that produced cloud formations and rain to arid areas using orgone energy, something as new to me as it is to you. I enjoyed the book. As stated, I ate it up in a week. My mum and sister also gifted me with a print of the song which is currently in storage in Malvern as I sort my life out. I can’t go on without a bit more context of Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst known for his controversial theories and contributions to science. Initially associated with Sigmund Freud, Reich developed the concept of “orgone energy,” presenting it as a universal life force found in all living organisms. He founded orgonomy, a branch of psychotherapy focused on orgone energy’s role in emotional and physical well-being, and created orgone accumulators for therapeutic purposes. Despite initial prominence, Reich’s work faced widespread criticism for lacking empirical evidence, leading to legal troubles with the U.S. FDA, which ultimately resulted in his imprisonment and death in 1957, which his son focuses on in the memoir, as does Bush in her song. Back to the lyrics: it is storytelling. So colourful