Consciousness Beyond One Life: Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone

Bob Dylan, Azkena Rock Festival 2010

I used to wonder what constitutes the fascination of Bob Dylan songs. In my early 20s I used to sing and play songs at camp fires from time to time, more or less poorly. A couple of Dylan songs were among my favorites, including It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (Bringing It All Back Home, 1965). I felt like so many others: while I didn’t really “get” the song, it struck me as something magical. read more

Bob Dylan: Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts – A Spiritual Transformation

Blood on the Tracks album cover

Dylan’s intriguing Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts lured in the background of my consciousness for a long time – now I feel it has matured enough to share my, certainly subjective, perspective of the song as a spiritual transformation. It is the second song of Dylan’s highly acclaimed 1975 album Blood on the Tracks, voted No. 9 in the Rolling Stone Magazine’s 2020 list of the 500 Greatest Albums of all time (and confirmed at that position in the 2023 update) covered here. The first song from this album on this blog was Shelter from the Storm (for a video see here). read more

Bob Dylan: Shelter from the Storm

Flammarion: A traveller puts his head under the edge of the firmament

Bob Dylan’s Shelter from the Storm, to me, signifies two fields of life: on the one hand, our well-known world of opposites, struggles, and desperation, and on the other hand the world of the living soul. I see a path described in the song from experiencing the borderline in our physical world up to a new state of being, based on the immortal soul. read more