Soul Soup

Adventures in the Spirit Pool

(Damon Runyon and Mae West are the counselors Matt’s unconscious has selected to be his guides. Their meeting place is the Alpha Lab, a mental construct popularized by the Silva Foundation)

The door leads into a small antechamber with what looks like a large glass mirror filling the whole of the end wall. Mae and Damon and I file in.

I see a row of pegs along the wall at head height, like a junior school cloakroom. Mae reaches behind the back of her neck and shucks off her body, clothes and all, the way you might pull a sweater off over your head.

Now what looks like a floppy rubber Mae West suit is hanging on a peg and a watery transparent outline is moving down the hall towards the mirror.

— It’s not as hard as it looks, says Damon, just think of your body hanging up there rather than how to do it.

He stands on his cigarette, coughs and seems to shrug his shoulders, then another body suit is hanging up in front of me.

— This time only we’ll help you out, Mae’s voice whispers.

I feel them tug simultaneously at every part of my body. The hardest separation is around my heart, where the operation feels like a sticking plaster being pulled off.

— It’s easier after the first time, says Mae.

I am looking at my body hanging there now, looking crumpled and old and empty, like a rubber witch costume waiting for Halloween. Then I turn my attention to the mirror, where two watery shapes are now blending through its surface into whatever lies beyond.

In the space of a thought I am there with them and plunge in, as though it were a swimming pool which by some gravitational trick has been stood on end without shedding its water.

The impression is of a large, brightly-lit white room, which has been flooded with something to allow its occupants to move freely in three dimensions. The medium seems thicker than air but substantially lighter and finer than water.

There is some illusion of traction which means that as soon as you will yourself into any part of the pool you can move there, at whatever speed you want.

I immediately start to swoop and dive and indulge in every human’s dream of effortless flight. How long I do this I can’t say, but when I finally slow down I become more aware of other jellyfish-like presences around me.

Less substantial than jellyfish of course, just barely distinguishable from the medium in which they move, which itself is barely thicker than air. They are moving aside as I fly about, sometimes swooping with me, or moving around me, once or twice feeling as though they are moving through me.

— Are you Mae? I ask one indistinct figure which appears to be staying by my side.

— I’m not sure I remember, comes back the calm response.

Over the next weeks I spend increasingly large sections of my time at Alpha level making use of the spirit pool. When I go for my second session I am so eager to get in there that my body is hanging up and I’m taking the plunge before I even consciously think about it.

Whenever I step back into my suit of flesh, bone and clothing, I find I feel more spritely, my posture has improved, my skin looks clearer and there’s a definite sparkle in my eye. I highly recommend it as a beauty therapy treatment.

The thing is, after the first rush of doing the flying business, I start to find other much more interesting aspects to explore.

For example, the other watery shapes around me.

As with the stars at night, the more you look, the more of them you see. If I keep spotting them they finally all overlap and merge and become the medium I’m moving through.

Then the boundary between me and them becomes blurred and there’s only us. I can merge completely with one or more of them individually or I can do the bodiless equivalent of inflating my chest and expand my boundaries to take in the whole contents of the pool.

It’s hard to maintain a sense of my separate identity during these frolics so I end up absent-mindedly absorbed for much of the time, forgetful even of the Alpha lab outside, let alone the Beta levels above the lab.

One time I ask someone I have just emerged from “So am I you, then?”

— In essence, yes, comes the reply.

But much as I forget them at the time, the outer levels do start to feel the effects. The more times I use the pool, the harder it is to maintain some of my old attitudes at the outer levels, all of which were rooted in my separate identity.

If we’re all one with each other in essence, how can we sensibly attack each other, sit in judgement, be proud of our superiority, be ambitious for preferment or withhold our forgiveness and love.

Whatever I do to someone at Beta, for good or bad, I feel like I’m doing to myself and I immediately start to feel its effects. It has quite an impact on how I treat people.

— So the spirit pool, I ask Mae, is that just there to show me that we’re all one with each other?

— I think it’s there because you were ready to find that out.

— But is it literally true, are you and I one and the same in essence?

— That’s an easy one to answer yes to. Remember that you selected me to be your counsellor. All I tell you is what you already know but need someone like me to tell you.

— What about the historical Mae West, am I one in essence with her?

— What do you notice about time when you’re in the pool?

— It’s like Narnia time. However long I spend in there it just turns out to be about twenty minutes when I count myself out to Beta.

— And how does travelling different distances work in the pool.

— Well, I can move as slowly or as fast as I want, including instant transfer if that’s what I’d like to happen.

— So time and distance don’t have any real meaning in the pool. Do you have any reason to think they are any more real when you are in your flesh clothes and walking about at Beta level?

— I see what you’re getting at. If all that separates me from Mae is time and distance, and both of those are fictions, then…

— Are you sure you haven’t already swum around with her in the pool?

— Who is in the pool?

— Why not assume, unless you discover otherwise, that everyone who has ever lived is in the pool.

— Are you saying the pool is Heaven?

— I don’t know squat about Heaven. I think of the pool as Soul Soup.

Extracted from The Alpha Lab by Mark Kelly, available on Kindle