An intense wish to see Barbados

Yesterday, Bruce Charlton posted "Life Hacks and Bucket Lists are symptoms of profound spiritual degeneracy," criticizing the two expressions in the title and the implied philosophy underlying them. Maolsheachlann commented:

I think people always used to say things like: "I want to see Paris before I die". (It always seemed to be Paris, didn't it?) It was spontaneous, heartfelt, and quite tender. But "bucket list" makes it routine and prosaic, people just toss it off: "Oh yes, that's on my bucket list..."

This made me think of the Tori Amos's "Me and a Gun," an autobiographical song about a woman who, undergoing a life-threatening ordeal, keeps telling herself, "But I haven't seen" -- is it Paris? -- "so I must get out of this." I haven't listened to the song in decades and couldn't remember what place it was that she hadn't seen. I looked it up later, and it turns out it's not Paris but Barbados:

You can laugh, it's kind of funny

The things you think at times like these

Like I haven't seen Barbados

So I must get out of this

"I haven't seen Barbados / So I must get out of this" is repeated five times in the song. It's an unusual choice. Paris is, as Maolsheachlann says, the one you always used to hear. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say they specifically wanted to see Barbados before they die.

This morning, I read this in Gary Lachman's Dark Star Rising:

Neville [Goddard] had an experience of [thoughts determining reality] during a difficult time in New York. He wanted to see his family in Barbados for Christmas but lacked the money for a ticket. [His guru] Abdullah told him to act as though he was already there, and he would be.

Goddard proceeds to imagine, as vividly as he can, being in Barbados. In the end, this intense visualization appears to bear fruit:

Neville did this with perseverance. Just before the last ship for home sailed, he received a letter from a brother he hadn't heard from in years; with it was fifty dollars and a steamship ticket for Barbados.

Lachman immediately follows this with a similar story about Paris -- not about wanting to go to Paris, but about August Strindberg being in Paris and wanting to be back home in Sweden. He reportedly imagined this desired location so intensely that an apparition of himself manifested there and was seen by his mother-in-law.