SoulJahm Blogs
12/7/2023
Just a reminder, the Europe Is The Soil blog is still available to read for those unfamiliar with it. On the SoulJahm page of this website there is a link to the old SoulJahm website with links to the blogs we put out back at that time. Since they are kind of tucked away, and may go unnoticed, I'm posting them here to make them more visible.
I didn't set out to write a blog. We had our laptop stolen early on and were without any devices at all for several months. This was before we had any musical instruments with us. Winter of 2010/11 came and we were hibernating in our Berlin bunker apartment over Christmas and New Year. There wasn't much to do and we had to visit internet cafes to communicate with anyone. I started documenting our journey, just to amuse myself and we had a bunch of photos from our travels and so it grew from there. There were already so many spiritual and new age type blogs around back then, all with a very similar feel, tone and language. I didn't see the point of going down that road and being another clone using cliched spiritual/new age terms that have been so overused they've become almost meaningless now so I decided to write the Europe Is The Soil blog in third person, with a light-hearted tone and a sense you were following the journey of these two characters - Dave and Kate. That's how it was for us at the time. It literally felt like I was simultaneously observing myself with detachment and still somehow in the thick of the action. So writing in third person seemed the best way of getting across my actual real-time living experience. I used to write a lot back then in third person to emphasise the nature of reality - that we are not the body or the mind, but our true place is the Observer, witnessing the character (body/mind/personality) aspect of ourselves within this movie we call life. Some people got freaked out by this way of talking, thought I was possessed or schizophrenic! So later on I gave up using this way and resorted back to first person!
My main aim was to document all the signs and synchronicities that were occurring for us to show how spirituality can work in real life situations. The common thing you hear from "normal system folk" is that spirituality is all very well but we have to get back to "real life". Whatever that means! I was trying to show people our life was as real as theirs, in fact, more real and that the things we were speaking of we were also living! Spirituality is usually presented in this very calm setting, with the speaker either in a satsang environment away from the rest of society, talking to an audience who are all there specifically to hear the speaker, or nowadays its often a lone person in the comfort of their house talking to the camera. What the speaker is saying seems valid and often makes sense but as soon as people go back out into the world in a busy city environment, for example, they can't apply what they've learned, then they get disheartened and slip back into what they call "real life".
We are infinite beings and its absurd that in all of the possibilities that exist we operate in such a narrowband which we call "real life". I saw this long before I knew of spirituality in the field of music. Of all the ways potentially available to create and be a musician why does it always have to narrow down to either studying at college or university and then becoming a jazz or classical musician, or getting a rock band together, playing gigs in pubs, hoping to get signed, then going through the whole cycle of making albums and doing long tours with all the additional bullshit required? Or you go on X Factor or The Voice or whatever. Are those the only three options if you want to get noticed and be successful as a musician? I suppose now some people are thriving as musicians on social media and sadly, any potential there for something new and fresh seems to have already been killed off and to me it just looks like the same old same old with all the branding and algorithms going on. The social media platforms and the computer programmers seem to be trying to be the new record labels. It's all so sad and predictable. But this is for another post.
What Kate and I were doing in SoulJahm didn't fit into any of those boxes and yet life still supported us - at least, up to a point. So we wanted to show it was possible to break away from the mould and still be guided through life by something other than politicians, royalty, and system authorities. That was the main purpose of those blogs, to encourage others to break out of the mould and maybe if it caught on we'd have a much more colourful, happy and harmonious world.
In the years since what I see is the system of control has tried to take those qualities and create a fake version of it, mostly focussed online. When the system feels under threat by real spirituality that is what it has always done. If it senses it can't easily suppress the natural flow and energy it tries to superimpose on top its own restricted version of it to entice and fool the people. Give them the feeling they are free to express themselves when in actual fact its just more of the same system of control. Like Prince sang:
"Everybody wants to sell what's already been sold
Everybody wants to tell what's already been told
What's the use of money if you ain't gonna break the mold?
Even at the center of the fire, there is cold
All that glitters ain't gold
All that glitters ain't gold"
So now you have a lot of people seemingly thriving, doing what they want, expressing themselves and collaborating with each other on social media in all kinds of fields. It looks sparkly and fun on the surface, and some swear we've never had it better, but take a closer look and it smells like shit. How do I know this? Well, whenever I've tried it out it doesn't leave you feeling satisfied but instead with a yucky, dirty feeling you want to shake off. I know what the real thing feels like - when your outer life is in alignment with the inner - because I experienced that alongside Kate in those SoulJahm years. It's because of that experience I cannot be fooled by what is being offered in these times. Thankfully there are still some who crave that experience Kate and I had and won't settle for less but its pretty rare to find because most people are entranced by all the technology that is being shoved at us and think this is progress or they have given up and are longing for the "good old days" which we can't go back to.
The SoulJahm blogs give a glimpse into what is possible if only more people were brave enough to break away from the chains of society. Europe Is The Soil covers the period October 2010 until Spring 2011 when we got instruments and the focus came back to Music. The Sketches Of Europa carried on from that point until 2014 but was much more sporadic and just random musings, not so much a travel blog.
