Soul Potion is back from distant lands, returning only for his sounds to take us away again.

In Japanese aesthetics, there is a concept called “Yūgen” that refers to an awareness of the profound grace and subtlety of the universe — an awareness which evokes feelings that are inexplicably deep and too mysterious for words.

If you’ve read Aldous Huxley’s The Doors Of Perception/Heaven & Hell, you might consider that Yūgen is the Japanese equivalent of taking a trip to the Mind’s Antipodes, or the Other World (if not a trip, then certainly a glimpse, a feeling in some unconscious part of our mind).

While a definition for Yūgen can be elusive, Soul Potion describes it as “an expansive feeling, a mystical awareness, an almost soaring reverence for existence that is summoned forth by a poignant confrontation with the ineffable details of reality.”

How do you capture that concept in sound?

Hit play and listen as Soul Potion gives his hour-long interpretation below:

Download your copy of Soul Potion Journey 002: Yūgen here.

“There is no English word for a type of feeling which the Japanese call yūgen, and we can only understand by opening our minds to situations in which Japanese people use the word […] ‘To watch the sun sink behind a flower-clad hill, to wander on and on in a huge forest without thought of return, to stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that disappears behind distant islands, to contemplate the flight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds.’ (Seami) All these are Yūgen, but what have they in common?” asked Alan Watts, commenting on Yūgen.

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