BOOK CATALOG
The catalog of books on this website are offered as free monthly installments on request by contributors of the conscious transformation quest, or, are for sale as complete books. They are not available in bookstores.Each book is related to the subject matter of the primary book, Of Love and Wisdom, and to the conscious transformation quest in general.
Each book is professionally desktop published, is of 8½ by 11 page size, and is spiral-bound with cardboard stock cover. EXCEPTION: Of Pathics and Evil: A Philosophy against Evil is a commercially published book, available for sale.
All books are authored by Joseph Sguigna, unless otherwise noted.
For more information regarding book availability and prices, contact us at
BOOK LIST
[Selections]
1. Human-Transcendence: A Love Wisdom [See sidebar at "The New Wisdom"] (345 pp)
BOOK SAMPLE
THE EROTIC SPELL
[A Soul-Struggle]
INTRODUCTORY NOTES
Since erotic love is the life force of Love which turns our world round, so to speak, this aspect of love is analyzed from two main perspectives: self-destruction and self-transcendence. This book of the ascendancy concentrates on the self-destructive aspect of erotic love in which the attraction between the man and woman is unbalanced, inappropriate; and so detrimental to one or both of them. [Contrast the transcendent aspect of erotic love BOOK 4, In Beauty and Passion.]
Considering this vital purpose of this life-force, it is no awakening, then, to understand how dominating the attraction of the sexes, in all its subtle and not-too-subtle manifestations, is to human life. It is love at its most primal, basic, erotic phase. In one way or another, it takes up nearly all of our energy, attention, and interest throughout the prime of our lives, however seemingly diverted we seem to be at times by our work and other interests. As Herman Hesse put it, from the perspective of men that all that men do they do for women -- and vice versa, I might add.
It is this erotic truth that takes the reader into the white heat of the man-woman attraction as presented in my book, The Erotic Spell. It is a true account of a middle-aged man (37 years old)) who falls into the throes, the spell, of infatuation for his 18-year-old student. It is love turned upside down, so to speak, love gone awry; yet blinded to its purpose. The work records the day-to-day turmoil that this man undergoes in struggling to resist, to overcome, this infatuation that he knows is not only wrong, but destructive to his well-being.
The point, or theme, of the work is to pinpoint the almost insurmountable frenzy of this entrapment; and how giving in to it, can ruin everything for an individual. This can be summed up in one of my aphorisms that says Sex may be the one life force, yes; but no, it is not all of life's worth."
____________
FORWARD
This forward is being written 18 years after the fact. And fact this chronicle was.
Eighteen years ago, I fell into an infatuated swirl with one of my senior high school students from which I almost never recovered. Being a writer, and accustomed to observing my thoughts and feelings, it was natural for me to record the event as it happened day by day. This probably turned out to be my saving grace, since it provided an outlet to channel the tumultuous soul-struggle (as I called it then) I was undergoing at the time.
I learned and grew from the ordeal; for it humbled me dramatically to the full force of the erotic in me which I had up to then underestimated by all my psychological defenses and transcendent yearnings.
As for my emotional and sentimental effusions while under this erotic spell, they are not exaggerated; they are recorded as they occurred, and I need not apologize for them. I am not normally an emotionally charged person; yet as I came to see, somehow when my depths are plumbed, these emotions emerge, or more to the point: erupt - But isn't that what erotic love is all about: that we mere mortals have not a chance in a million against its purpose when it's on us? We all know how erotic not merely sexual love can blind us, can hurl us, into impulsiveness that jeopardizes friendships, marriages, careers, and who knows what else. And do we not justify this enflamement as "the way of all flesh."
Well, this is what nearly happened to me. The same age-old scenario. What this work clearly demonstrates, however, is the intense vital, moral, struggle to keep the integrity of my being, of my well-being, intact. There is clearly a transcendent factor involved here; and not simply a matter of bio-psychology -- "I'm infatuated now, so I'm going to have to suspend my better judgment whatever the consequences. I'm just a pawn of the life force, as everyone else is; so what more need be said."
What this work shows, if nothing else, is that "giving in" to the life-force is not as simple as that rationale for my type of person, who are in vast numbers, I'm sure. If this work accomplishes nothing more, it shows that a fierce inner (soul struggle wages between the human and the transcendent in us when the equilibrium between the two is off; and shows the nature of that struggle to maintain one's balance and integrity, one's commitments, one's fidelity, one's friendships, one's whole way of life, rather than to passively submit to the "inevitable." And probably my reason for not writing this experience down in diary form, but rather as letters to a fictional friend, was the realization that a person in such a cauldron desperately needs a sympathetic confidant to help ease his struggle, calm his turmoil, give him the proper perspective. This alone I think justifies not only the work, but writing to a fictional friend; whom, because I didn't have one at the time, I created. I was unburdening myself to another "person" in writing my letters, instead of just recording my day-to-day experiences in diary form. And we all know that in writing a letter to a friend, we can be much more intimately ourselves, than when we are face to face, which makes it more difficult to articulate our thoughts and feelings.
As the intensity of my infatuation, lessened, I gradually came to a beginning understanding of the meaning of love, not only in its erotic heat, but in its broader human unity; to which previously I was fairly much oblivious to while my search for Truth, or call it what you will, prevailed. Truth, I have come to learn is Love at its core.
As emotionally and erotically, charged as this chronicle is, its main purpose, however, is the mollification of this vital side of us in preparation to a more expansive wisdom.
In hindsight, I would say that the theme of this work is one man's dubious victory, over the most powerful life force when it strikes the wrong two people.
====================
PHASE ONE
June 1st
I'm struck, Edmund! -- A woman again....and I'm hurting! Can you believe it of me with all my defenses: my dedication to knowledge and wisdom, to my writing, to my precious life with Celeste. And all along I thought it was the idea of love that fascinated me; not a chance, Edmund; she's the one who fascinates me! And what a devastating way and look about her! Not particularly beautiful, but pretty. And her eyes! God, how they mesmerize me. In their depths I see the Eternal-in-Woman of which Goethe and others write. Her soul seems to emanate through them as though beckoning me into the mystery of her being. Nothing physical about my attraction to her at all; it's her soul that draws me. . . or at least so I imagine; and this is the magic word, isn't it: imagine! Everything is in the imagination. Without it there exist not man and woman, but male and female; not love, but sexual mating. But with the imagination, ah, then, chemical transformations alchemize into spiritual affinities; physical features etherealize into angelic contours; natural movements, expressions, mannerisms, metamorphose into goddess-like graces; "making the beast with two backs" transmute into nothing less than Man and Woman embraced in beauty. I marvel at how nature has generated such an incredibly complex design to draw men and women together. What a miracle! If there is any reason for believing in an intelligent order underlying reality, this is it as far as I'm concerned.
I'm certainly being uncharacteristically romantic, aren't I? I don't know what's come over me; I feel like a love-sick adolescent me, a 37 year-old "mature" man who claims to be seeking higher, deeper, realities of life. Wisdom, knowledge, beauty, justice, transcendence, were-note the past tense here to be my life's ideals. And now look at me, enmeshed in the web of erotic captivation again. I don't know what went wrong. I thought for sure that the nature of my pursuits, my "higher calling," as it were, secured me from the bidding of that little fellow that devil-god, rather! Eros. But no such luck, as it's turned out.... God, Edmund, what am I to do?! I want her more than anything; yet I know I can't have her; not because she's necessarily unobtainable, but because for some reason I dare not let myself go: become the romantic wooer. Everything I stand for seems to belie romance, especially with this darling girl and I mean "girl"; she's only seventeen, twenty years my junior! I realize that this age difference is not always so serious a discrepancy; but in my case, it is, and I know it. She is simply too naive and immature for me, and that is the fact of the matter....Yet the thought that I can't have her tears at me. All I have are my fantasies. My emotions are like exposed nerve ends, like raw, open sores. A deep ache disorients me. I can't, nor do I really want to, stop thinking of her. When by myself, all I seem to do is sit hour upon hour musing over her: entranced by her smile, her voice, her words, her expressions, her gestures, her walk. I replay over and over again everything I remember about her, project myself into various situations with her: emotional, intellectual and physical intimacies, marriage, family.
I have to stop here, Edmund; I'm quite embarrassed by all this. I feel like a comic figure. Please don't think any the less of me for my folly. I'm simply not the overman I fancied myself. As a matter of fact, this whole idiotic notion of Nietzsche's overman has no more reality than a unicorn.
I'll write you in a day or two once my glands have settled down a bit if they do; since I'll be seeing her tomorrow.
I'm suddenly reminded of Romeo's lines, "hang up philosophy! Unless philosophy can make me a Juliet." Precisely my sentiments at this moment.
Evening
I was about to mail this letter when I realized how thoroughly disconnected it was. Not like me at all. I simply plunged in without giving you any details of the matter, such as, her name Marianna. Ah, that name! where I met her, how I became infatuated with her, what she feels about me, and other such particulars. I'm too wrought up to write anything more this evening; I'll be more consistent in my next letter.
I hope you won't mind my unburdening myself to you like this, but I have no where else to turn to relieve my confused and troubled mind. If you consent to reading my outpourings, please don't feel obligated to answer all, or even most, of my letters. There's no need to. I just have to write these emotions out of myself whether you answer them or not. But of course whatever consolation or advice you might have to offer will be more than welcome-though I can't guarantee to follow good advice in my present condition. I'll wait to hear from you. Don't be long!
June 4th
Received your letter this morning, and appreciate immensely your understanding and believe me, I need it! - and your willingness to follow me through this tempest, whatever happens. I'm undergoing so many rushing thoughts, so many subtle feelings, such searing emotion so much suffering, that have been lying dormant for the past seven years. Not to say that I haven't been attracted to this woman or that, or have not entertained the thought of an affair or two; but I truly believed that my higher leanings, and my loving companionship with Celeste were enough to keep me insulated from the surge of my erotic emotions. My first defense, so I thought, was the attitude: I don't have time for love but I have since found the time, Edmund, my friend!
So, armed with these "rock" defenses, what then went wrong? How did the unforeseen happen? How did this bewitching young woman wrench me from my purpose, usurp my quiet pattern of life? Quite unexpectedly, I can assure you. I had no intention of pursuing her, nor did I invite her attentions. . .well, not much any way; nor did I even give her a second thought. She meant no more to me than any other passing woman...But I'm getting ahead of myself; let me explain how I came to know her. It's very simple; she's one of my senior high school students. There's nothing exceptional about her academically for me to have taken special notice of her. But slowly, imperceptibly, she grew on me-in me, would be more to the point-as the academic year progressed; until now she has practically engrossed my entire consciousness and physiology. And, as any one who has experienced this knows, I can truly say, "I didn't know what hit me." From nowhere came that fatal shaft of love that struck me silly and jolted her into my being. At that moment my emotional equilibrium was shaken from its seven-year slumber. Suddenly she meant something vital to me. Here was a woman to be won!
Let me describe to you the trauma of that moment. The class hadn't begun, and she was present with two or three other students. Quite casually I happened to ask her if she were going on to college, but she didn't answer me. Her eyes were off in a distance, in an aloof, enigmatic expression as though she didn't hear, nor care to, hear me. But I knew she did; I felt it. That was the instant she claimed me! Pain of rejection shot through me like a bolt. I couldn't believe what had happened to me. My whole being erupted. I immediately collected myself, as though her attitude meant nothing to me...but it did, Edmund, it did! Although quivering inside, I managed to pull myself through the period fairly well. But since that initial jolt, I've not been the man you know so well; I am now Everyman.
I don't mean for you to think that my infatuation I suppose that's what it is began precisely at that moment of impact; we know that nothing of such eruptive magnitude happens without some preliminary build-up. There had been for about two months previously a number of small nuances of attraction between us. You know what I mean: casual, though meaningful glances, smiles, and expressions; subtle innuendoes, a mutual sense of being kindred spirits. I began to look at her especially, to look for her, to anticipate seeing her in class. I observed her walk, her dress, her mannerisms-and of course her enchanting smile! (I punctuate this point strongly, because it is so much a woman's smile that wins a man). I saw in her a gentleness; a simple, though profound soul, a woman of the earth; and, in seductive contrast to her seeming innocence and melting passivity, I recognized a pert insolence about her: what I interpreted as the female instinct (if I may call it that) to be dominated by the force of a man's character; and heaven help the man who does not measure up to it! I read somewhere that a man's weakness is a threat to a woman's well-being, and I have always believed it; and I see in Marianna this primitive need for a man's strength to the nth degree. And, do you know, Edmund, I'm almost certain that it is this consciousness of the female in her that magnetizes me so urgently to her; because I notice of myself that my masculine protective elements have been roused to a pitch -- ready for action.
We men complain about the wiles of women; but I wonder, would we honestly want them any other way, even though they drive us to distraction at times? What would there be to win and "rein" were women as gentle and innocent as we idealize them? Women are far more incisive in these mating matters; they know (consciously or unconsciously) that men require challenge, adventure, uncertainty, conquest, in order to feel their manhood, their existence; and women furnish us these freely in their quiet, unarming submissive ways. And normally we haven't the faintest idea of what they're about; we attribute their "mysteriousness" to the so-called feminine mystique. To give you an instance of their subtlety, a woman once told me that she had to learn early in her marriage to let her husband permit her to do what she was going to do anyway! I tell you, Edmund, this "weaker" sex has it all over us; and we think we are "in charge." At this moment I am convinced that it is women, not men, who ultimately control events given their inborn resourcefulness, and their sway over men, especially in the first raptures of love; and thank the gods this rapture subsides, otherwise we'd never return to our senses. Still, even when we do, a woman wise in her ways will have her man well grounded and attached if only by domestic routine, not to mention commitment, responsibilities, her support. And should he lean toward activities not in her best interests or threatening to her security, she easily goes to work on his conscience (if he has one), on his vulnerabilities, until he comes around to the "practical" side of things. And gradually she has him realize that he can't live without her, that she is indispensable to his well-being. And if all that doesn't work, or no longer works, then she inversely tackles the situation by subtly impressing upon him through various moods, charms, innuendoes, susceptibilities, that she cannot live without him, that her well-being, and yes, even her emotional stability, her life, depend upon him. I don't think women as a whole are ever going to relinquish these "submissive" powers over men regardless of all the aggressive rhetoric of the feminists.
You see, Edmund, I'm not so naive when it comes to women. I certainly don't have the complete picture; though I do have considerable insight into their psyche.... But, so what! I want that woman regardless of my insight.
June 6th
I agree, Edmund, I shouldn't feel embarrassed by these most natural feelings. I appreciate your reassurance. And after all, as you said, I'm still young enough to be very much in the mainstream of love and lust don't I know it! Lust (my wild dog) is ever present in me, lurking behind my dignified calm. But romantic (or "erotic" I don't know which it is) love I had forgotten; had (so I thought) sublimated it for the intellectual life; and here I am right in the middle of it again!...though I do have to confess, Edmund, that despite the pain, it's rather exciting to be reeling in these emotions once again; they assure me that I'm still flesh and blood, am not a mere intellectual abstraction. Once more I'm feeling the heat and force of my manhood; am down to my fundamental self, am desiring a woman erotically, with my whole being; and so know that I'm still normal. I want to be normal! I dread the thought of ever be coming a walking shell of a man viewing everything as a concept, or as a proposition for analysis. As it is now, dear friend, my blood has not yet turned into writer's ink. I'm not yet dead to the throb of life. Who knows what tomorrow will bring!
As a passing remark, I notice that for some reason I'm relating loving a woman erotically to loving her soul - by "soul," I mean that which animates her being as this woman. Don't we normally attribute sex to the erotic and not to the soul? There seems to be a discrepancy here somewhere, but I can't put my finger on it. . . .or maybe there isn't a discrepancy; I don't know. Well, I'm in no condition now to make fine distinctions; so I'll leave it and perhaps consider the question at another time.
June 7
She came to class today, smiled at me on the way in, and sent me for a spin. She looked so enchantingly feminine, her hair tossed up in back with full bangs over her forehead, which has always appealed to me in the fair sex "fair sex" I'm certainly waxing poetic these days, aren't I.
Strange! I was at her desk helping her with a problem, and deliberately brushed her hand slightly. . .but nothing miraculous happened: no rapturously tingling sensations stirred me. To be sure, the anticipation of the contact was thrilling enough, but the actual touch itself-scarcely anything (!?). At the same time, I noticed how unattractively small her hands were; and that her dark complexion clashed with the delicate milk-white texture I find so sensuously appealing in women. You would think that in the throes of my attraction, even these slight detractions would be appealing to me; but paradoxically, I actually hoped to discover more enough so that I might lose interest in her! Could this be an unconscious defense mechanism resisting my impulse to love her? If so, then truly the unconscious is a marvel.
But physical features aside, what disarm me are her soft voice, her halting words, her shy reserve as though frightened to speak; and I'm sure these aren't a deliberate ploy, since she's no match against the other students who dominate the discussions. I realize, of course, that her timidity in class in no way means that she is the same in her own circle of friends and family; she might very well be a tigress with them. All the same, since I'm presently being swayed by appearances, her shyness radiates to me a helplessness that does not fail to stir my sympathy. Could my attraction to her then be merely sympathetic? No, I don't think so. I'm sure she doesn't need my sympathy; because, believe me, she is strong in her weakness! What is it about her, then, if my attraction is neither predominantly physical nor sympathetic? Might I want to be a father figure to her? No, I'm sure not; my blood is too heated for that. Well, whatever the reason, I have a strong desire to know her; to hear of her ideas on life and love and marriage and family, of her daily activities, of her future plans.
I feel a deep tenderness for her, Edmund; and on that thought, I'll close this letter.
June 8th
I hope you don't mind my writing so frequently, Edmund, but I have to give these surging emotions an outlet, otherwise I'll burst. So be prepared for some heavy reading.
As you know, the school year is near its end, and classes have all but come to a standstill since final examinations are over. Marianna won't be attending school with any regularity this week, as she's rehearsing for graduation exercises.
Tonight is the annual school dinner, and I'm hoping-"hoping" is too mild a word for what I really feel - to see and speak with her.
You can imagine the ferment churning in me, Edmund; and yet not for a moment can I let it show, to her, or to anyone else. As always, I'm to be composed and in control my self-respect, you know! Evening
I didn't see her at the dinner. ... An empty and frustrating evening.
June IOth
Let me tell you something else she said, and with which the other two girls agreed. Apparently, she believes that it isn't a husband's occasional sexual foray that makes him unfaithful to his marriage, but only a love affair; since that involves emotional intimacy. And as it is this very intimacy which binds a marriage, he would betray it by sharing with another woman what he pledged exclusively to his wife. -- (As a side remark, one might ask if a husband would be betraying his marriage if this emotional intimacy no longer existed between him and his wife; and as this occurs in so many marriages, one might further question the validity or value of taking marriage vows. You can't pledge emotion- al intimacy. Well, it's something to consider.)
But back to Marianna. Quite a progressive young woman, isn't she. I hadn't considered this piece of feminine psychology before. But there it is. I'm sure this is not the attitude of most women (certainly not Celeste's, I'm sure), even though I realize the various circumstances that would force a wife to tolerate her husband's extra-marital dalliances. Nor do I think it would be a pleasant prospect for a sensitive wife to accept regardless of how open-minded she might be. Even Marianna conceded that, despite her resignation to men's promiscuity, she nevertheless wouldn't prefer her husband that way. I suppose the most a woman (or man) can do is to continually foster the emotional intimacy between them.
And I might add that I don't agree that all. or even nearly all, men are sexually promiscuous; whether a man is or not depends in large part on his basic moral character and sympathetic sensibility (both essentially related, I believe), two traits which, if they are relatively strong in a man, would make it difficult for him to hurt his wife unfairly no matter how inciting the sexual attraction. Still, I do admit that nearly all men can be enticed by an attractive woman (that "certain" smile, gesture, interest, will often do it); but that is not the same as promiscuity, but rather a matter of male susceptibility. I think, in general, wives know this of men, and so are considerably tolerant of this susceptibility. So, given a man's love of wife and family, his sense of fairness toward her; and fortunate circumstances so that his love and fairness are not put to proof unremittingly, this susceptibility remains mostly in the fantasy stage.
This has been more a tract than a letter, hasn't it. I'll stop here.
Evening
Before mailing this letter, I'd like to mention a couple of other matters. She told me today that she saw me at the annual dinner the other night. I melted at that, and responded that regretfully I hadn't seen her. I was moved because she sounded as though she had made it a point to see me,-which of course can't be conveyed in these matter-of-fact words I'm writing you. But if you had heard the way she said, "I saw you at the dinner the other night," you too would have heard something endearingly intimate about her intonation. The meaning I sensed behind her words wafted a magic that drew me even closer to her. This was the first direct suggestion that she cared; and you know, Edmund, what that can do to a man.
A little innocent scheme I had in mind will give you another indication of how far gone I am. I lent her a textbook about a month ago in place of one she had lost. She hadn't returned it; and since I wasn't expecting to see her in class anymore, I assumed that she had forgotten about it (if only she had deliberately forgotten!). So-o-o, I figured I had the perfect excuse to call her at home and offer to drop by and pick up the book, thereby saving her a trip to school how very considerate of me! If my plan worked, I would be with her in her own surroundings; and who knows what might happen from there....You can imagine how my expectations collapsed when she returned the book today. But then, she did remember; which means that she thought of me. . .and what did she think, I wonder?!
Just before the period ended, she suddenly looked up at me and asked if I were going to the graduation ceremony - and so meaningfully, Edmund! Another sign that she cares....Of course I'm going, dear girl; you're going to be there, aren't you!
June IIth
When Celeste and I arrived at the ceremonies this evening, I immediately began looking for her, but she hadn't arrived yet. Despair gripped me at the thought that I wouldn't see or speak to her before the exercises commenced, because I knew it wouldn't be likely that I'd have the opportunity to speak to her afterwards. I moved about, socializing for awhile, though no more interested in what was being said than I was in seeing anyone but her. Finally I spotted her. When she saw me, she smiled and came to me. At last!...we were together outside of class. At once I began inquiring about her: how she felt about her graduation, what her plans were for the summer. . .but before we got very far, she was called away. And as thwarted as I felt, I nonetheless savored those few minutes together. They would suffice for now, I thought. And I consoled myself that there would be other opportunities.
During the ceremony, I was seated in such a position that I could see only her back except when she occasionally turned her face sideways and presented her lovely profile to my feasting eyes. At one point, she casually raised her finger to lightly scratch her cheek, and do you know what I thought, Edmund?-don't think me ridiculous, but here it is: "Imagine, she scratches her cheek too!" I have her in my mind as demigoddess! What's become of me? And she did it so gracefully that I idealized this insignificant, natural gesture into a celestial touch. I then proceeded to picture her eating, dressing, sleeping, combing her hair; and I wanted so much to be with her in these intimacies. Do you see to what extremes I've been reduced-or increased, as the case may be. I know better, but I can't help myself; these thoughts happen with no volition of my own. I have no idea where they come from. . . . Yes, I do! From Mother Nature, that's where!
Ah, my friend, I feel so empty without her presence, so uninterested in any thing except her. My intellectual activities have stagnated, and all I'm able to write are these "love" letters. An old, old story all this love-mooning, isn't it, Edmund. I'm reminded of a phrase of yours that sums up life so succinctly, "ever ending, never ending." Life goes its way, and has its way; and all we poor mortals can do is succumb. I have to laugh at the free will proponents who think we're in control of our actions. "It's your choice," they declaim, as though they have the omniscience to witness, or intuit, the chain of events that lead to any person's behavioral patterns. Illusionists, the lot of them!
June I2th
Nothing. A blank, flat, stale day. No classes, and no Marianna. I expect- rather I pray-to see her tomorrow, the last day of school when the seniors come for their report cards. Need I tell you that before tomorrow arrives an eternity will have passed!
Ah, what a fool I am, Edmund. What am I doing sighing for a 17 year-old girl? Have I lost my senses? Don't I realize the consequences of such folly? What about Celeste? My direction in life? The unalloyed joy I find in my mental world? Am I to turn my back on all this for the fever of infatuation? I tell you, Edmund, it's as though she has awakened a sleeping giant in me. Every thing mental is now sterile and insipid compared to my romantic musings. I'm in a delirious cauldron! I feel like Faust now, about to sell my soul for the thrall of the senses.
June 13th
A day that has run me ragged. A day of victory, a day of defeat, a day of torment, a day of euphoria; a day of hope, a day of despair-the day I left my wits behind.
As I describe my little episode, you'll clearly see what a madcap I've turned into; not at all like the reclusive "scholar" you once knew.
=====================================
BOOK SAMPLE
IN BEAUTY AND PASSION
INTRODUCTORY NOTES
Since erotic love is the life force of Love which turns our world round, so to speak, this aspect of love is analyzed from two main perspectives: self-destruction and self-transcendence. This book of the ascendancy concentrates on the self-transcendent aspect of erotic love in which the attraction between the man and woman is balanced appropriately; and so beneficial to them both.
[Contrast the self-destructive aspect of erotic love BOOK 3, The Erotic Spell.]
FORWARD
This part, In Beauty and Passion, reveals the intimate details of being in love in the deepest, most intense, most complete, sense of the phrase, from the beginning through the birth of our first child.
This book takes this theme of erotic love one step further beyond The Erotic Spell into the realm of beauty and passion; hence, the title of the work In Beauty and Passion. This book records the same man (myself) falling in love, but this time with the right woman and in the right circumstances. It is an almost daily account recorded on audiotape of the thoughts and feelings and response that go into falling in love, being in love, and right through to the birth of their first child. This all takes place within a period of two years.
The theme of the work is to reveal the beauty and passion involved in love in its transcendence as well as its humanness; and that it is surely the most powerful power in life, as life; and its fulfillment for human beings, beyond it underlying biological purpose.
These details (recorded on cassette tape) capture the beauty and passion of a man and woman so deeply in love - and still are, 21 years later that the work stands in a class of its own as a glory to erotic love in its full human and transcendent array. It covers the whole range of erotic love - the sexual, the sensual, the sensuous, offspring, passion, compassion, lust, jealousy, rage, possessiveness, obsession and the transcendence of this love that balanced and guided the extremes of this love through the straits of personal and interpersonal growth and closeness.
The enclosed pages are a sample of an approximately 300-page manuscript titled In Beauty and Passion. It is a true, intimate, spontaneous account of a dramatic love between my wife and me as written and recorded on audio tape as it happened from falling in love, through marriage, to the birth of our first child. The time span ranges from September 1982 through September 1984.
The contents of this works comprises thoughts, feelings, discussions, and experiences of the psychology and transcendence of man-woman sexuality and relationship.
The main theme, that is expressed throughout the work is the experience of erotic love as transcendence; or, more particularly, of the sacredness of love as experienced through sex in its orgasmic, primal explosion coursing through human consciousness as idealism, or transcendence.
The purpose of publishing this work is to make an inspiring contribution to freeing the minds of men and women from psychological and sexual repression, fear and ignorance that bar them from a broader, more expansive, panorama of man-woman love.
The work is sometimes very graphic in matters of our sexual acts and talks yet always in keeping with
the aesthetics of our purpose; and highly controversial in ideas and beliefs -- yet always in keeping with what we believed to be true about us and human nature. There was little or no holding back on our parts; we had agreed to that from the beginning. It came very naturally for us to speak our minds from their depths, however consciously and unconsciously inhibited we might have been by our natural human limitations and insecurities.
My wife and I are convinced that this work, as controversial, and disturbing as it is, will contribute to the ongoing intuitive understanding of human consciousness, and so of human relationships. We are both willing to weather the consequences that this work is likely to generate-to some extent.
=====================
THE BEGINNING
September 1, 1982
She's back from England!
Went to lunch together, sat closely, our knees just barely touching. Talked mostly about her trip and our tutoring school. Mild transports of joy suffuse me.
September, 7
Went to lunch with her again. We talked of each other, revealing this and that, and ever so subtly, our growing mutual feeling. She is receptive (I think). I am receptive (I know).
Afterwards in her car outside my home. We both reveal further in disguise but in such obvious disguise our feelings for each other. I can't help but declare myself to her, and speak of myself as a man, and no mere intellectual, as she knows me to be. She responds so beautifully, as I want - need -- her to. During this time, I'm urged to kiss her, to make a physical touch; but I'm unsure of myself, of her possible rejection. It's been over twenty years since I've felt such delicate sensibilities.
We're still talking, winding down, getting ready to part. Am I going to do it?...Am about to, but she makes a parting response that stops me.
This is not the time, if ever there will be. ...Then a few more words, and she makes that "certain" response, gesture, that ineffably invites me to her. We look at each other in the unmistakable love gaze; and I reach over and kiss her softly on the lips; then gently cup her one cheek as I kiss the other. She responds givingly.
This kiss, both on her lips and cheek,was a kiss of beauty , with passion subdued. And now I know that our life together will be one of beauty, grace, tenderness: as misty falling rain, with the sun about to break through the clouds in golden beams.
She is my soulmate. I know it; and so does she.
She says to me: "I want us to grow old together, Joseph. ...In whatever direction our relationship goes, we must keep the transcendent part of it always."
I respond: "This may sound strange, even ridiculous, but this morning it flashed through my mind that somehow I'm going to be able to get to the soul, the being, of me in such a way that others will be able to get to it too; and not just rarely."
Her response: "I know we can."
I think she is to be the inspiration of my further human and transcendent development.
O, her being enhances my own!
Sept. 8
It's raining today, much out of season for Los Angeles. She loves the rain. I call her,after much hesitation as to whether I should so soon after seeing her. She answers with such a gorgeous, lilting hello that I suffuse in delight. I tell her I had to call her about the rain, and how it seemed like an omen for us. I'm not sure she understood my meaning. But then, I hardly did myself.
Sept. 9!
We confessed our love for each other this evening on the telephone! "I love you, Joseph," she wafts through to me in beauteous intonation. And, with the ease of a bird in flight, I respond in the same way. We then go on to talk in words of love. She says to me all the things about us that I want crave to hear.
She said of herself, and the same applies to me, that our confession of love for each other leaves her in a peaceful -- though with a measure of excitability state of mind. Nothing blind about what is happening to us: a calm fulfillment.
"I want to hold you," she spoke softly. ..."I want to sleep with you," she delicately intoned. "Yes," I responded, wanting the same.
She tells me that she had never had a more beautiful experience than my kiss yesterday. "And I love your name, and I love your eyes, and I love your lips, and I love your legs a few of the endearments I expressed to her.
We simply poured out ourselves to each other this evening without reservation : our love, our desire, our need, of each other. How saving to be so unreserved. This unreservedness must be the earmark of our life together.
I have my woman and what a woman!
I can't believe it! I am loved! I love! The only woman for me loves me!
Oh, she is so right for me
Nothing will be the same for me again, for us again. It is so right between us that I'm reeling with felicity.
She is me through and through.
I will grow much as a person because of her. I know it.
No pretenses, no pettiness, no possession of each other.
We will give ourselves to each other first, and in so doing, will give ourselves to mankind.
What we have is an organic marriage of souls where the quick of us beats. She is my soul-wife.
I can hardly believe it, I gasp at the thought, that I'm going to hold a woman my woman in my arms again, after all these many years.
I love her mind, her body, her spirit, her whole being; I love her grace, and I love the gross about her all her contrasts...and they are myriad. What striking eyes! They flash her soul through them.
By freeing ourselves from the old psychology in us, we will pave the way to the freeing of others. Together we will break through the wormwood of human relations, and arrive at a truer, fresher, brighter perspective that is long overdue. On to the new man and woman!
Is this real? My own woman? Yes!...and more real than anything or anyone before.
Am I relieved that we "declared ourselves" tonight. I don't know how much longer I could have gone on in the suspense of "Does she love or does she not?" I was prepared to wait it out, though. But all is right now, and we can have the patience for our love to evolve in its proper channels, because, as she said, "We now know."
No games, no games none of the male-female games between us. We fervently agreed.
Oh, am I going to delight, to thrill, in getting to really know her: her shifting moods, her changing expressions, her intricate thoughts, her varying feelings, sentiments, urges, drives, fears, passions.
She loves me! She loves me! I can do anything now.
She has herself a good catch in me, I think; and what a catch I have in her! How fortunate I am!
Ah, Sharon, you are my woman, and nothing more need be said. Amen.
Sept.10 ! [3:30 a.m.]
I can't get to sleep; but who cares. She will carry me through the coming day. And what a day it promises to be!
O, my darling woman, I love you so much!
I want my ego to dissolve into her being. With that, the full force of my humanity will come through.
I almost feel like crying, I'm so happy. I've been on the verge of doing so a number of times tonight.
I am so joyed to give myself to her; so full, that she has me. And this is not my ego speaking, but my whole being.
My first verses to her:
I love you deep my precious heart,
You've felled me with your loving dart;
And what you mean to me is this:
Your womanness is my earthly bliss.
I've never written a truer poem, nor a more lovely one on the theme of love for a woman. It is perfect in form and expression, and took me no more than five minutes to write. Only love could have inspired me to write so freely.
[8:45 a.m.]
Fell asleep about 4 a.m., and woke up about 4:40 a.m., and have been up since. A misty, overcast day - our kind of day. How appropriate for our first time together as lovers.
I'm somewhat churned up inside for her. I'm not sure if it's because I can hardly wait to be with her tonight which can't be denied; or because of the momentousness of what is happening to me, of what is about to catapult me into another dimension of reality. I choose to think of it as both. My feelings are mixed between fear and awe.
Our love, I know, is going to be two-fold: erotic and transcendent; and it is the transcendent element that will preserve and expand the erotic element in us.
2nd poem to her:
There is a wild will about you, my sweet,
That I love as I do your compassionate breast;
This wild in you I am challenged to meet,
While your compassion keeps me at your behest.
I want, need, to experience the totality of her being!
She loves me! What meaning! What completeness!
I am to be with her tonight all night! No need to go into the ecstatics of that anticipation.
Sept.11
We slept together last night, but did not consummate our love sexually. We loved:kissed, caressed, fondled, but no penetration. It has to be resolved with the others before we can begin our life.
Sept.12
Now that everything has been revealed and partially settled, both on her side and on mine not without climactic emotional havoc, I'll tell you we have consummated our love tonight. Now our love epic begins.
I feel myself a moving ocean of force and effect.
She poeticizes my whole being.
She is so intense, so real, so complete a woman...so mine!
Oh, am I going to thrill at coming to know you in your myriad ways and byways, my woman of the ages!
Her body, my body, is now our body.
O, my heart! My woman,
I throb with blood and rapture for you;
O, my soul! My woman,
I fuse with you in eternal flame.
I kiss and soothe and caress every curve, fold, and part of her adorable body. What a trackless wonder! What an inexhaustible array of sweet sensations! Her love's body is infinity incarnate.
She: We are making this (the intensity and profundity of our love) happen; not anything outside of us; no God, no Jesus.
I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you! She bursts out at me.
Am quivering in anticipation of seeing her.
I've never felt so free, so uninhibited, with a woman, or anyone even with myself, it seems as I feel with her.
I sigh in sheer delight that we love each other. Tears are almost to my eyes.
One day the world will read these love effusions and those to come and marvel that a man and a woman loved each other so deeply, so intensely, so fully; and will aspire to such a love; and that will be part of our contribution. Our love is the world's love.
This is going to be the love of the century or at least the recorded love of the century.
We look closely, adoringly, at each other; and for the first time I see that she looks like me! : her visage, the shape of her face.
There is no lust sex-lust whatsoever in our lovemaking. There is animal in it, but the animal humanized with graceful, undulating movements.
I enter her...slowly, gently, unexcitedly, without thrust; and I bathe in her female folds. Calm, soothing, easy. No grunting, no sweating,no urgency for ejaculation, for that excruciating pleasure-release. I become soft in her, and we stop movement, and look lovingly into each other's eyes. This is not the ultimate act for us. Everything we do, for, each other is ultimate: my kissing her eyelids, the nape of her neck, the underside of her arm, her wrist, her fingers, her fingernails...every gesture is an act of love.
Her skin is as silk, satiny.
I would die for her.
Loving her body is an inter-flow of passion and beauty, is the body and mind's spiritual experience the earth's image of Love's eternal meaning and bliss.
She: I want to share music with you. I want to share everything with you.
It's all right to be wrong with her. I doesn't matter. No ego stances, no prerogatives, between us.
No perfume, no make-up, on her; no seductions, no allurements - just the natural; and how sweet and arousing is her natural to me!
Our love is not exclusive to ourselves; it must go out to others, especially to those closest to us.
Our love is not romantic alone, is not sexual alone, is not erotic alone, is not transcendent alone; it is all these, which makes it humanly transcendent.
She has given me another dimension of life, a fullness of understanding, that no words of knowledge could ever give. Out the window with all the books, all the words; Love with a capital "L" gives it all.
Sept.13-15
My golden princess, feel not the least fear
That ever I should be far and you near;
My self you have to the quick of your soul,
Our life together is my wondrous goal.
She excites me to no end.
The truth between us, no matter how painful, no matter how hard.
Humor and wit are shot through our togetherness, as it must always be.
She to me: "What a man!"
I to her: "And what a woman!"
Our love has no past. I wouldn't care if she had murdered someone. We
start from the beginning of us.
We wrap our legs around each other in every way, and cling for dear love.
Yes, we are in love; but "in" love in the sense that we are in the center, in the flow, of that mighty, all-encompassing force.
I to her: "You are mine you are ours."
To me (as I am worshipping her body with kisses): "I love to be loved this way."
Sex or the male-female elements of our nature is the physical manifestation of the love force. [My thought as an ideal] : One day we are to get to that source as we sit naked to each other, crosslegged, hand in hand, in deep concentration of each other; and as the concentration intensifies, our hands tighten until we dissolve out of our bodies into the soul-being of each other. And love is where this fusion is.
The female in her, the feminine in her, the womanly in her, the girl in her, all add up to the whole being of her: her soul:
She puts my finger in her mouth and I explore its moist interior, as her tongue wraps itself about my finger. Her mouth and my finger transform into the male and female sex organs.
She nestles her head in my lap, and sighs: "My daddy." And I say "Yes,and your child, and your lover, and your friend." She smilingly nods in assent.
She is my woman and that is all that needs be said about my fulfillment as a man.
I to her: "Why did you want that we sleep together our first time together?"
She to me: Because I wanted to experience you totally.
We are both a force of one, of a four-fold energy: I in her = 2 forces; she in me = 2 more forces.
We have the purity of love, and the beat of it.
O! her living eyes! The glow, the flow, the soul, of Love beams from them.
Not only do I tenderly kiss the nape of her neck, the crook of her arm, the billow of her abdomen, the..., but I sink, melt, into them with a sighing groan of total surrender to the kiss, to the flesh of her, to the living being of her. Words are vacuous to convey the full sensation, the full meaning, of the experience.
She: I'll die if I ever lose you, I have never said that to anyone, I've thought it; but I've always known that I would survive somehow if I lost what I love. I can't say that of you.
She to me: You make me love my body.
I to her: You have added another dimension of life to me.
We have such a mutual understanding that it is not my sexual prowess or performance that defines me as a man, but that there are much more essential factors to the meaning of manhood moral integrity and honor, for one; force of character, for another; unswerving purpose, for still another.
She fits to me so perfectly in all facets the intellectual, the transcendent, the moral, the aesthetic, the sensual, the humorous, the practical, the ideal. She is cultured, she is not cultured and that underscored "not" says it all.
I just thought of having a child with her, and heaved, wrapping my arms around my torso in awe of such a miracle.
To her (as I kiss her shoulder): I feel like sinking into your whole being; I really do.
You quicken my breath.
I'm waiting to experience her next emotion.
I'm always concerned for her comfort not because she is my woman, but because she is my love.
Christ: "Be you perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect." And I add to this eternal truth: "Yes, do be perfect: love another human being truly, fully."
What we are to do together is to spiritualize the sexual act to make it truly a love act.
With my finger in her fount, I feel this inner push for my whole body and being to be absorbed in it to become it.
She is sensitivity embodied.
I glory over her womanhood! I gasp at her soulhood!
Her words: "I adore you" echo and waft through my being.
In caressing her body with my lips and hands, I want to be as delicate as a feather; and yet I will grip her in a fierce love bite just enough that she feels the slight pain, much as a loving dog holds back the pain of its play bite.
I stand before her naked as a man, and I rise and fall on that. All my intellectual accomplishments, personable qualities, creative force and abilities, are nothing in comparison.
A note to me from her:
Beloved,I want you to know: I love you, I care about you, I want you, I need you, I cherish you. I am vulnerable to you raw. You have the power to hurt me; I trust you with that power. I surrender 99% of my consciousness. I support you in all.
Love is the truth no corner of falsehood escapes it's glaring eye.
She writes to me: Thank you for loving me more than I love myself. Your understanding, support, and adoration give me the strength to weather the unpleasant parts of my life.
I am your knight at night between the sheets.
Sharon flesh of my flesh, spirit of my spirit.
She to me: "It feels good to be with you. It feels so wholesome."
A note to me:
My Love,
At this moment all I want is to see you again and hold you in my arms. You move me forward, freeing me from guilt and anxiety. This morning I'm a sparrow enjoying freedom with the sun and trees as my companions.
She "Thoughts": When I grow up I want to be a Joseph. You are my playmate. Your trustworthiness makes me feel safe and allows the child in me to express its playfulness.
She: Everything else seems so insignificant when I'm with you...I hope it always stays that way.
I: That's our quest.
...
NOTE: The following samples of our book are talks or more precisely, explorations that were recorded "on the spot," so to speak. In transcribing the tapes to paper, some of what we spoke were not clear on the tape, and so were lost. Ellipsis indicate this loss. What, however, was transcribed is exactly what we spoke without adding literary refinements or precise expression except for some word changes or additions placed in brackets where clarity is necessary.
What we my wife, especially have to say is so important and urgent, and in some cases, groundbreaking, that we don't have to apologize for speaking so gropingly as we all normally do when speaking extemporaneously.
November 5th
Joseph: (humorously)You love having a lot of sex with me, huh?
Sharon: Yes, I love having a lot of sex with you. I love being intimate. It's the intimacy of it. That is what it is: that closeness that I feel emotionally and mentally that only sex seems to be able to really get across.
Joseph: In its fullness.
Sharon: Yes, in its completeness, that makes it complete. I was thinking, you can be intellectually close, emotionally close, but you need words to express those. It seems when we're having intercourse, there's this bond that words would be insufficient, words would be weak; there's this cementing, that closeness; I hunger for, that I revel in it. That's why I need to have a lot of sex with you. Sex itself is really not what's important.
J: It's not the sex first and foremost.
S: Right. It's this feeling, this closeness.
J: The only way you can get to it is to be sexually aroused. Very deep. I understand it.
S: That's why we always need to make time for sex, and to have time for sex, because it's more important to us than sex itself; at least for me. I need that bonding; and, of course, maybe as time goes on, and the more secure I am with you; maybe I wouldn't need it as much. But I love it; and it's wonderful and beautiful and good for me, and good for you.
J: I know myself when I want to kiss you all over, it is that getting so intimate, so close to you, and the more intimate I get with you physically, the closer it seems I get to you feelingly and spiritually; but it's hard to decipher that when the sex feeling is on that's the predominant thing but it's not really and I started off straight with you wanting to caress hold you and not worrying about all the ejaculations and erections and so forth and it's still there. ... You were saying about my climaxing?
S: Wanting to take the birth control pill. It's more than just wanting you to climax in me; that's not even logical. That doesn't even have to do with reason; it's not just a matter of: well , this is what I want , because this is nice or something like that. It has to do with some kind of deep-seated psychological ancestral need within me; and I can feel it clearly when we're making love and you're ready to climax; and when you pull out, it's as if I'm being torn; and it's not a physical kind of tearing. I don't know what it is, really; but it's like a completion of a life cycle, of: I want to have this man's child, and the tearing away from me it feels somewhat damaged; it's sort of like pretending each time: this time I'm going to become pregnant with the man's child, this man that I love. Something like that .
J: Even though with the birth control pill it wouldn't be.
S: Right. But that would satisfy the woman-man-children-propagation; life goes on.
J: Erotic, all erotic.
S: Yes. but today the feeling was so tearing that it made me cry ;and I don't think that's good for me. I mean, I could go on; I can just change my attitude; but I'd rather not.
J: It's just a matter of attitude
S: It's much deeper than that. In fact, it has to do with the message.
J: Why do you call it a message?
S: Because it gives me a message, an ancestral message that I am to go with this man wherever he wants to go even if it means tearing up my own roots. ...That's what it means to me. It's a very tribal kind of thing; very native. It Makes me think about my dog. I had a dog, and we never had her fixed and we never let her have intercourse and every once in a while this poor dog would go through this whole thing of false pregnancy. She needed to be pregnant; she needed to fulfill that maternal need and she would go through this whole thing. She'd even swell physically and she'd stop her period; and she'd make her little butt close. It was just so pathetic because there was nothing happening; not on the physical level, anyhow. But her whole being needed this, and it was being thwarted.
The pill probably is dangerous to a certain degree. The rationalization would be everything's dangerous; everything has a price. There are other methods. I can't see myself putting on diaphragms before we make love; that kind of thing. It's not spontaneous enough for my particular nature. I'm willing to take a small risk. If I thought it were a big risk, I wouldn't do it; but I don't believe it's a big risk right now. I think that it would be safe for at least a year; and my hopes would be that by then there would be a better method. They are working on one right now in which you'd have a shot once every three months; it's supposed to be very safe, very effective. I have a low impulse control. There's a tendency in me to be impulsive. You have a high impulse control which means you can control yourself before jumping into something. I'm not so good at that. I read somewhere that women with low impulse control should be taking the pill ,because at the climactic moment nothing else matters; and that's the way I am; like when we made love today I didn't want to let you go. I was willing to take the risk. It didn't matter at that moment. But I am afraid this is going to become a problem. I don't want it to; and I don't know what to do about it because I don't want to displease you because you're right [about withdrawing].
...
November 6th
J: You feel so relaxed with me you can be mine.
S: Right. I can be your little girl, I can be your teenager,I can be your whore, I can be your adult ,I can be your mother. I can be it all for you.
J: You're that free?
S: You made me that free.
J: That animal thrusting: it transforms you, it frees you, from inhibitions; and you become this thrusting animal , but with a consciousness of all that's going on. The pleasure, the closeness, the gripping, the whole idea of trying to get into you as far as possible, and to mate, to propagate our species. This is a male and female, woman and man, going at it. (laughter) ... I still don't think I've captured what it really is.
S: (humorously) We'll have to practice it more ... to get the right words.
J: Something is there a transformation that's quite delicious.
...
November 8th
J: Today I was thinking being with Tom I'm sure he sensed something in the air between us that was separating us the tension that we weren't really relaxed and happy I remember one time he hadn't seen us for a couple of weeks and one other time I wouldn't even let him near the house because the argument I grabbed him outside and took him to a restaurant before he could come in
S: And then last week you had him at the other house
J: Right and I thought "Boy, I'm sure he feels that we're gradually slipping apart."
S: I don't give a damn what he thinks. Anyway, it's good for him to see that no matter how much you love someone it is so difficult it's a myth to think that everything is fine between us, and that love makes everything fine and good and so on. It is so difficult to get two human beings together and on the same track and moving in the same direction. In fact, I think it's almost a miracle when it happens; there are so many things in the way; so many. It takes so much work. And I think it's fine for him to see us with our problems; but yet we're together and that's the key ...That's the way we interact. You can see that there's love ,there's strife; but there is love and we're trying to overcome the strife; and it's not right or fair for anyone to think that it goes smoothly just because people love one another; because it doesn't. ... It's so unfair to the other people too. It's like you're treating them like idiots; you're not giving them the credit for any kind of understanding or knowledge of life It's like: "We're going to pretend, because this idiot can't understand anything else. In fact, I have a cousin who was the happiest man I ever knew. Married, and she was the happiest woman. Perfect couple. Everybody loved them. they've been married for years - thirteen years. I went up there one Christmas, and I had a wonderful time. I thought "Oh God, the happiest couple in the world!" Well, they were separated a month later. They divorced and actually married other people. So, they're putting on all this for the relatives, and so on; and I did feel hurt; I did feel insulted, because I cared about them; I loved them, and not because they were a happy couple; I mean, as individuals. And it lowered them in my eyes to think they didn't think enough of me or any of the other people there to be what they were.
...
Later
S: You know what's really beautiful about the kind of lovemaking we just experienced is that it can only be you and me; only with you and you with me could we be that free. It's beautiful to know that it's sacred. I have never been like that with anyone and I know you haven't either; so that it's like two virgins and that's what I think makes it so excellent
J: And sacred, as you said.
S: Because it can only be us.
J: Or people like us who love as fully as deeply. you mention how sacred it is to be so completely animal free that we engross ourselves in the animal aromas and everything about us, all the orifices that we just love of each other. There's a sacredness to it; an inverse type of sacredness to what the word "sacredness" is usually meant to be; and that's why when I say that it would be a desecration to love anyone after you to be with anyone else if you were to die or I were to die for us to love so fully so uninhibitedly so primevally with someone else; it would be a desecration to have this with anyone else I really feel that..
...
November?
S: As we get close to orgasm I begin to feel things happening internally and each time I get a feeling that I couldn't identify an image I wasn't sure what it was but now it seems very familiar so maybe I was knowing it but now it's to my conscious.
J: You can articulate it
S: Right I can articulate it now but the image is rain; and right at the moment I feel that I am rain; and then right from there usually I go right into the speed of light experience. As a child I use to go out and sit in the rain with an umbrella or something or on the porch I use to pray because there was some connection with the rain and God for me I use to feel god as a little girl in the rain.
...
November 13th
[After another of her eternal orgasms she says:]
S: That the experience of miracle and I realize that it has nothing to do with life; and that's why it's so miraculous because everything we do in life no matter how fun or how blissful or fulfilling you feel the gravity of life there's never any let up of it; you're always aware you're in that body. But this is [different]; you're not in that body you're no longer tied to life.
J: Even though your body is twitching.
S: You don't even know what the body is doing. The body and the soul are separate in those moments. In the beginning, I feel my body moving; and then I don't know what's going on. I'm gone; it's fantastic, beautiful miraculous, experience. You know what's really ironic?: it just doesn't fit in with life at all. It just seems so strange to be here now and think "Why even have something like that?" It doesn't fit here at all. It's like graph going up and down life experiences; and here's this one that goes way off. It just has nothing to do with life. Strange. Wonderful.
J: I wanted to say that when I orgasmed you, that I just love the way you moved and held me... it showed such unity of our two-into-oneness. Your body just nestled into mine, just slithered into mine.
S: When I'm feeling that love for you it always bewilders me that I'm even capable of hurting you and I do hurt you -- the things I say or do; because the feeling that we have at that moment, this moment; that's the true feeling; that's how I really feel about you: pure love; all that is good. And I don't understand why I hurt you.
J: Your body expresses it. I guess that's when the day-to-day egos, or ourselves, get in the way of what we truly feel.
S: And life getting in the way; because at the moment there's nothing else; there's just you and me and our love.
J: That's what holds us together amidst all the conflicts of life and ourselves.
S: Because we know that that's the truth. And we don't hurt each other very much. But the little hurts; I don't even want to do those; I want the time to come when those don't even happen the little irritations; not even those. They don't belong in this love. They're not true, because they have to do with frustrations or fatigue or pain that have nothing to do with you.
...
A continuation of the earlier talk of the orgasm.
J: You said there's something very interesting that...
S: When become more and more aroused,and closer and closer to the orgasm, my mouth becomes terribly dry inside; so dry, that I almost choke on the dryness and it makes me think that there must be some chemical change going on in the body for that to happen. And the only other time that I've experienced that is the few times in my life that I've been terrorized by certain experiences; my mouth had gone that dry in a matter of seconds.
J: It's like almost when that happens you go into a state of trauma where you release your self-consciousness. You're going into a state where you lose all sense of the agonizing pain that would happen. Maybe it's related to animals. We see the lion attacking the deer; but it's known that they get into this state that they don't feel anything; they're in an ultra state of consciousness; the terror shifts them into another state of consciousness: a blank consciousness of just physical movement and escape so there isn't that agony that we seem to think they're in; that what they say, the scientists. But it's related I think; to the similar symptom of going into a different state of consciousness beyond the self-consciousness which happens to you. It's like the similarities well the excitement that you feel when getting a new car and the excitement you feel being with the one you love for the first time. It's the same basic physiology going on except one is more intensified and more complex than the others. the same symptoms are going on: the agitation; similar symptoms, only varied intensity and complexity which makes your experience from a physiological point of view, and therefore, from a scientific point of view, valid. From that point of view, something radical is happening here. Scientist might say "Let's not put it into a mystic experience." Or maybe it is a mystic experience; but whatever it is, it is different than self-consciousness call it what you will.
S: A person I know suffered from manic depression and when this person would go into the manic phase which is an elation phase of bliss and hyperactivity the mouth would become very dry during the whole manic phase so dry that it would crack and bleed as time would go on and during this time. Some articles came out in Newsweek and Time Magazines about manic depression, because lithium had just come out, which was not the cure but the stabilizer; and they said that for sure when a person goes through the manic phase a chemical change takes place and they can tell in the saliva. And they do brain scans; and the chemical are rearranged differently in the brain than when the person was in the depressive or the normal state; so that these chemical changes taken place do alter the consciousness in the brain chemicals which effect the salivitory system. What I'm trying to say is the manic phase is a different state of consciousness.
J: You said an elation. Is it like a madness?
S: As it goes on it gets more out of control. The first half let's say is really a very positive kind of thing: highly creative, strong, confident; all the plus things. Many famous people suffered from manic depression their greatest achievements were during the manic phase.
...
J: I think in discussing this mystic orgasm ...a sense of the universal, of everything, purity, and so forth; if it were available to everybody simply by manipulate or caress the clitoris in a certain way, or by injecting something chemically to make that chemical change, what would be the value of it? It would just be another high a super-high. If that's all it is, [of what spiritual value is it?]. Somehow, we have to relate it to something for it to have meaning. I think it would have to be related to something more universal, something beyond, as you've said, this life.
S: I don't see how anyone could experience this, and not know that it is God; that it isn't just another high. It's death; it's death to life while in life.
J: It does tell of another consciousness. If that's the case, then, to me, the value of it would be that if one could take that "Experience," quote unquote with a capital 'E', it's that experience that could go into the transforming of the psychology of human nature and that would validate the whole push towards "higher consciousness," "advanced consciousness" or whatever it is in relation to the new man. It can be done. I never did think I could do it, or that anybody could transform his psychology by his own humanity alone. It does have to have a definitely strong sense of a super consciousness that is somewhat determinant of everything.
S: There's a feeling that takes place, that I talked about, before hurling through time and space accelerated, that makes me know that there's distance involved; it's not like outside the wall. It's not nearby it's very dark. It's like a deep dark perfect river. It's like water. It fascinates me. Miracle.
...
November 17th
J: When I'm in you I control you as does the male the female
S: And I love it. You're the power that has kidnapped me from the English ship you can do anything you want to me and I'm your slave and your prisoner
J: Hold you down ram against you
S: I resist; but it's to no avail anything you tell me to do I will do.
J: But let me try this [male dominance over the female] other than the bed, then, there you have a different story nothing but resistance with a little giving in.
S: You wouldn't want it any other way. That's what the beauty of our relationship: we melt right into the roles at the right moment.
December 3
J: This morning we're in bed and she's reading transcending I'm lying next to her I have her fingers in my mouth and I'm kissing them adoring them and caressing them sucking them and I'm feeling such waves of delight and love just loving her fingers.
S: How come I invite you to be a little bit rough with me in our lovemaking. I kind of enjoy you being a little bit rough, forceful. Is it because I'm a female? Is that the female coming out of me.
J: That's what I was just talking about:about control the male over the female.
S: That's okay?
J: Yes it is the female being dominated by the male I think that's the primitive years and you need that. I think also that when the male comes out of me like that strong, and it holds and spreads your genitals and your behind and grips you and grunts at you, you know that this is the male animal at you; and that's the male animal that will protect you, that will defend you; that's where it comes out. If I were passive: just easy-going, a beautiful soul only; you probably couldn't bear. It's like that limp handshake; you know you don't have much strength there. But when I'm able to I give way to the grunt; then you know that this is the male animal that will protect your territory that will be your mate. It comes out most forcefully there; because other than that, it's just the intellect and my character -- which are fine and my ego my ego is the masculinity that comes out that why a woman would say I love his pride and the intellect of course kind of takes the place of the physical attractiveness of the physical control that the animal has over the female and the character of course is the human the man we're two miracles to each other for each other. That's where I belong inside you it's not sex it is being inside you. It takes up strength to love to surrender to it to transcend your self-concern for the other who needs it so badly that's where the strength is not in resisting that's the easy way out the masculine way out this is psychology we're use to that it takes up strength to have faith in love to the point that you know we won't be taken advantage of to overcome all those fears of becoming a slave or puppet to the other to forgo all that and surrender yourself to the force of love
...
December ?
J: After another of her spiritual orgasms she says to me:
S: Experiencing the bliss consciousness for me is the experience of my life nothing could come even close to it. I use to think that feeling like that feeling at one with nature that people have every once in a while: the ocean the sunset. I use to think there could be nothing more beautiful than that feeling and that is a similar out-of-body experience as I said before. Words are cheap when comes to trying to describe this transcendent bliss consciousness experience; and what I realize is. that it could only happen with you because for me it's a testimony of our love our trust our respect what we are to one another and I'm sure that's why I never did experience it with anyone else because of the sacredness for me it would have to be experienced with someone like you
J: Your whole body goes through contortions as you've talked about and you look like you're possessed somebody might think you're possessed by the devil and it would take someone as it turns out it's me that could look at you and not be frightened this is a woman this is a creature completely out of control. It's awesome to see; to know what's happening, what's going beyond your body. You don't see yourself you don't see anything, do you? You asked earlier "Where is this? In the mind?" and I said "No it's in every hair" to quote Jesus: count all the hairs on your head; however it goes. But, you get right to the meaning of your being, of being itself somehow. I mean it's there; it exists. It's some kind of structured order. it's almost as though this [infinite vastness that you experience] is what that you [essentially] are, what I am, what everyone is and what everything is .. .I can't capture it now, but what I thought in a flash is that somehow we are the ones who make it happen. Yes, we are the world! it's through us that this consciousness exists.
S: Does it really look awful when I go into it
J: Now the word "awful" separate it awful it's awesome full of awe I mean something is happening here that is not in any way the normal human response to anything except as we see being possessed by something. It is a matter of [being possessed]. It looks that way. That's the way we interpret it; but for me, it's not a matter of possession it's a matter of breaking through [to the other side, the other Reality]. It Ultimate Reality has to do all kinds of things for it to happen; for it to push itself to it's ultimate...But it's not awful, no. When you do [contort], I feel for you; my eyes are almost to tears. I feel that I know what you're going through at that moment or what your body is going through your mind is having a great time no it's not awful in that sense I can see where it would be frightening or scary to an average man. I wouldn't think that just any man would know [ what was really going on in a woman in that contorted state.]
S: Maybe people don't talk about it
J: [They don't, I would think.] It can't be what they [the authorities] talk about when describing a woman's orgasm whether vaginal or clitoral; it can't be what they experienced --or if they have, have no clue, or are so fearsome, of it]; otherwise it would be so well documented.
S: Do you think maybe they don't know what it is?
J: The description itself, whether they know what it is or not, the mere fact that there's such a tremendous volcanic upheaval going on [It is perhaps too much for words; it's your genius in finding the words to describe it, and my prompting you with this tape recorder, on the spot, so to speak.]
December?
S: If someone said to you Joseph what is this self-transcendence what does it mean what do you do
J: It's the next step in human evolutionary growth that is not being any physiological change whatsoever. This would be totally spiritual in mind growth and advancement. And what this would mean is that you would have a larger spectrum of encompassing life and the universe and are basing it on what our goal is and that everything is ... what our values are, what should our goals be, what's in the future? Those things would be answered by changing to that point of awareness; being receptive to all different types of ideas and concepts and being able to choose the strongest qualities from all of these. Learning capabilities would be enhanced and attitudes would be more flexible not really flexible but truer in the sense that now you've been able to encompass all these different ideas and opinions. You wouldn't have such a narrow view point on yourself as [the end and all] instead you'd have a whole different perspective. Does that answer your question?
S: No
J: Why, what's wrong
S: That's what it is in a universal kind of understanding but I wanted to know how Mrs. Barrel can try to be more self-transcendent is it something you do try or you wait for it to come to you
J: What again is self-transcendence?
S: Rising above ourselves.
J: Of our own psychology.
S: Our human limits.
J: What makes us rise above our human limits?
S: Seeing that if we stay in this mode we'll only go backwards
J: But how can we get out of this mode?
S: By rising above ...
J: But you're going in a circle now.
S: How do you rise above by taking it upon yourself to do what you want to do what you know is right not what you think is right, what you know is right.
J: Morally right
S: Not morally right; just if you have commonsense of what is right for you.
J: Now are we suppose to put aside other people[ their feelings] in that?
S: Yes, you have to be independent you can't let anybody else push you around psychologically; that's why you're feeling horrible in the first place
J: So it looks like you have some kind of cosmic wonder and the way we can tap that a piece of that cosmic wonder is to rise above our psychology [our humanness], destroy the ego. Is that what you mean?
S: I don't think we should destroy the ego. I think you have to work at placing it where it belongs. I think it's displaced in most people
J: In which way?
S: That it's become more important [than it should be]. Our whole lives revolve around how our ego filters information and puts information out.
J: And around our needs and desires.
S: And there's nothing wrong with that, but it's got to be tuned again; we don't need this type of ego anymore. I think at one time it was necessary for survival, but it really isn't anymore. I think it's got to be reshaped, it's got to be returned.
J: Exactly.
S: It's like, clean up your life so you can think clearly; and then start working on the ego and at the same time start dealing with the wonder of life and facing that there is more than just what we experience. I need that I need to feel that trust that I can put my life and body into your hands and that you will bring it joy and love. I give myself to you uninhibitedly things I've never given myself to even myself
J: In everything.
S: Yes in everything; but in sex especially; and you love it you love me and you love my body and my uninhibitedness you return that trust which makes me then love you all the more instead of rejecting my vulnerability.
J: That is part of the freedom I've always wanted you to have: that you can be vulnerable with me without remarks without repercussions of any sort. I love your uninhibitedness
S: As long as I'm alive, no matter how important things become, I would never ever allow myself to lose this with you because to me this is the key that makes many of the other things possible
J: What is the key: our sex contact?
S: Yes, the intimacy
J: When you stop to think of it, it's silly to say that sex will no longer be a part [of our self-transcendence], because it's through sex that you reached that [infinite Love experience] as we found out. That's been a part of our whole mission right from the beginning. When I said that we're going to spiritualize sex, I didn't quite know what I meant; but I knew that that was what was going to happen; and it's happened.
S: Yes I remember you felt like going back to the animal that was one of the main steps
J: You brought that to my consciousness the animal to me the first part of it was beauty there was such beauty in what we were doing the movements and everything somehow I thought that could be elevated even higher transmuted even more and then you released the animal in me and then I realized of course that you do have to go through that even though I may have said it before you made it happen. Sex is a manifestation of our [human] love yes but it's also a spiritual manifestation too; and that's what it should become more and more and I guess that's what D. H. Lawrence meant when he said to get sex out of their head
What has to be realized in our times is the reason there are so many sexual frustrations and so much is against sex in many people's minds is because they have the wrong attitude toward it and that is because of a very crucial piece of ignorance which is they've never really loved that's hard to face but it isn't in the long run. There are some individuals who are indiscriminate and they need more than one body but there are many people who have very strong reservoirs of love and since love is so intense it can only be shared with one person really and not having found that person that's very difficult there are them out there they think by the cultural education that if you're not sexually exciting or sensual then you're the odd man out; something's wrong with you sexually, you have some kind of dysfunction or some kind of neurosis. It goes on and on. Love is such a delicate flower; sex is too. It's not enough just to love, since sex is so integral to love. A man has to be from the beginning, patient, gentle, and gradual. it just can't be a sex act. It's not a matter of women are more emotional, that they need to be emotionally worked up and embraced and cuddled, and all that; but there's more to it they've got to shown this is a love act not a sexual release. it takes a lot of patience for men, because men have the impulse to finish immediately, to get it over with that's the animal in them. And that's where the human part comes in when he's able to curb that animal and turn it into a love act.
December
S: It's always been my belief that people wanted Jesus who was free from sin because they can't by any means come close to that so therefore they don't have to bother to change. The great cop out is: "I can never be that good, so I won't even try." Whereas you take somebody like Lennon who sees that everybody, the people, can be these things [self-transcending].
J: What things?
S: Have the power, have the understanding, the forgiveness, the truth. It's like we live in an unreal world. He knew it can be a better world it can be happier it can be freer with more realization of the quality of life
J: Can continually change for the better.
S: Right but you have to change your way of thinking; and people mock at that because it takes work; and that makes you feel insecure, and so on. And that's why he'll always have trouble being accepted as a prophet, because he is so credible, because the idea is "Gee, if somebody with all these weaknesses: emotional and mental, and so on, can still see what's...
J: Beyond
S: Yes the utopia that is possible and within our grasp. Anyhow that makes people very uncomfortable because they realize they too have that power.
J: That means they are obligated; they can no longer get on their knees and pray for forgiveness or ...
S: Be comfortable watching TV all evening long.
J: That means they have to get out there and do it for their own credibility, their own self-respect.
S: In tying together his gospel, your voice is coming through connecting the things he said and what you have to do is show that he is the embodiment of this revolution, of this transition, in mankind; and that what he went through, we're all going through in some way or another, some more than others; and that that's what we're all moving toward: his belief, his gospel, that that's what will come; that's what you have to bring out.
...
December 31
Here comes our summary of the year but before we get to it, she says ... and we were so tired but we couldn't separate from each to go to sleep; she says:
"I wish that we could sleep together and have each other's dreams like to be together in sleep as we are in waking."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OF LOVE AND THE MAN
John Lennon
CONTENTS
PART ONE: Man in Transition: John Lennon
Forward
Preface
Introduction
First Perspective: The Quest
Second Perspective The Medium
Third Perspective: The Life
Fourth Perspective The Man
Fifth Perspective: The Artist [in the Man]
Sixth Perspective: The Man [in the Artist]
Seventh Perspective: The Hero
Eighth Perspective: The Mystic
Ninth Perspective: The Visionary
Tenth Perspective: The Musician
PART TWO: The Lennon Testament
First Aspect:: Transcendent Love
Second Aspect: Human Love
Third Aspect: Human-Transcendent Love
PART THREE: Revolution and the Beatles
Introductory Notes
Preface
Editor's Introduction
Chapter 1 The Effervescent Revolutionaries
Chapter 2 Comments from MusIcians and Others
Chapter 3 The Musical Phenomenon
Chapter 4 The Social Phenomenon
Chapter 5 The Spiritual Beatles
Chapter 6 An Historical Perspective
THE LENNON TESTAMENT
First Aspect
TRANSCENDENT LOVE
[Our Transcendence]
[Love as the bond that attracts and binds all things together in unity through meaning. Oneness, pure existence, pure consciousness, eternal bliss are its human concepts and experience]
I
Love-As-Essential-Being
Love conceived as the Universal Principle or Essence of all things of the Power or Will or Meaning that binds all things into unity of which we all essentially are.
[Lennon has a mystic vision of Love as not only universally human but as transcendently underlying
all things of the universe. This will be the message that he delivers to the world during his brief stay here]
I And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of Love as something new
- In My Life
I:1 It sort of dawned on me that love was the answer. The first expression of it was a song called "The
Word."
I:2 Say the word and you'll be free
Say the word and be like me
Say the word I'm thinking of
Have you heard the word is love.
It's so fine, it's sunshine,
It's the word love.
- The Word
1:21 All those bits from religion about love being all-powerful is true, you know.
II
Love-As-God
[God, as the spiritual word given to Love as the bond of all unity - that which binds all things and creatures into individual and absolute unity. The term "God" has been given a personal demarcation so that human beings can identify with It anthropomorphically.]
[Lennon identifies transcendent Love as a unitive universal Power that we call God; not as a
father figure conceived by man who metes out rewards and punishments in life in preparation
for the afterlife; but then, neither did Jesus believe in such a God: "There will be no marriages
in heaven..." Lennon's conception of God is as a pure spirit, or the oneness , the power, of Love.]
II I always sort of suspected that there was a God, even when I thought I was an atheist - (humorously) You know, just in case! I believe it.
II:1 I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right;
it's just that the translations have gone wrong.
II:2 When I refer to God ... I'm talking about "It" more than One Old Man in the Sky.
II:43 I have found out personally - not for the whole world that I am responsible for it, as well as them. There's
no separation; we're all one; so in that respect, I look at it all and think, "Ah, well, I have to deal with me
again in that way. What is real? What is the illusion: I'm living or not living? And I have to deal with it every
day. The layers of the onion. But that is what it's all about.
III
Love-As-Divinity
[Love conceived aesthetically as "beauty is truth, truth beauty," (Keats); as the God of creation apart from all created things; and as that which is sacred, spiritual, holy, and metaphysical]
[Lennon was best able to express his mystic vision of Love through lyrical music; and it was
through the aesthetics of his music that he was most consistently in touch with its pure spirit.]
III:1 I basically feel that I'm a poet. ...I'm not a formalized poet, I have no education, so I have to write in the
simplest forms usually.
III:2 I had always considered myself an artist or musician or poet or whatever you want to call it, and the so-called
pain of the artist was always for by the freedom of the artist. And the idea of being a rock 'n' roll musician
sort of suited my talents and mentality.
III:3 I do think in terms of the long term. I'm an artist. I have to express myself. I can't be dominated by gold
records the art is more important than the thing, and sometimes I have to remind myself of it. Because
there's danger there, for all of us, for everyone's who's involved in whatever art they're in, of needing that
love so badly. I never enjoyed [the craftsmanship of writing songs]; I like it to be inspirational.
III:4 The message is the medium. [i.e. in particular, his message of Transcendent Love manifests itself through
music.]
III:5 The real music comes to me, the music of the spheres, the music that surpasses the understanding, that has
not to do with me, that I'm just a channel ... So for that to come through, which is the only joy for me out of
the music, is for it to be given to me and I transcribe it like a medium. But I have nothing to do with it other
than I'm sitting under this tree and the whole damn thing comes down and I've just put it down. that is the
only joy for me.
III:31 I think the Beatles were a kind of religion.
...
Second Aspect
HUMAN LOVE
[Our Humanness]
[ As an affectionate bond of compassionate unity between persons including oneself either positively or negatively
or both.]
I
Self-Love
Love as Essentially Self Preservation, Self-Identity
[This aspect of love expresses the predominant concern for one's own preservation and well-being, excluding or including the concern for, and well-being of, others.
[Lennon is sure of his genius and task, and wants the world to know it.]
IV:1 I made the decision at sixteen or seventeen that what I did, I wanted everybody to see. I wasn't going after the aestheticism or the monastery or the lone artist who supposedly doesn't care what people think about his work. I care a lot whether people hate it or love it, because it's part of me and it hurts me when they hate it, or hate me, and it's pleasing when they like it. But as many public figures have said, "The praise is never enough, and the criticism always bites deep." That's just the predicament of being some ... artist .
IV:2 I suppose you could put me aside Gogh, Renoir and Shakespeare. That's always been my hangup trying to be Shakespeare.
IV:3 People like me are aware of their so-called genius at ten, eight, nine ....I always wondered, "Why has nobody discovered me?" In school, didn't they see that I'm cleverer than anybody in this school? That the teachers are stupid too? That all they had was information that I didn't need. I got fuckin' lost in being at high school. I used to say to me auntie "You throw my fuckin' poetry out, and you'll regret it when I'm famous," and she threw the bastard stuff out. I never forgave her for not treating me like a fuckin' genius or whatever I was, when I was a child. It was obvious to me. Why didn't they put me in art school? Why didn't they train me? Why would they keep forcing me to be a fuckin' cowboy like the rest of them. I was different, I was always different. Why didn't anybody notice me? A couple of teachers would notice me, encourage me to be something or other, to draw or paint ¯ express myself. But most of the time they were trying to beat me into being a fuckin' dentist or a teacher. And then the fuckin' fans tried to beat me into being a fuckin' Beatle or an Engelbert Humperdinck (a romantic crooner), and the critics tried to beat me into being Paul McCartney. ... Nobody says it, so you scream it: look at me a genius, for fuck's sake! What do I have to do to prove to you son-of-bitches what I can do, and who I am? Don't you dare, don't you fuckin' dare criticize my work like that. You, who don't know anything about it. Fuckin' bullshit!
IV:4 If there is such a thing as [a genius], I am one. [When was about twelve] I used to think I must be a genius but nobody's noticed. I used to think whether I'm a genius or I'm mad, which is it? I used to think, well, I can't be mad because nobody's put me away; therefore, I'm a genius. I mean genius is a form of madness and we're all that way...If there is such a thing as genius, which is just what ...what the fuck is it, I am one, you know, and if there isn't, I don't care. I used to think it when I was a kid, writing me poetry and doing me paintings. I didn't become something when the Beatles made it, or when you heard about me. I've been like this all me life.
IV:5
No one I think is in my tree,
I mean it must be high or low.
That is you can't, you know, tune in
But it's all right, that is I think
it's not too bad.
- Strawberry Fields
[In the end, genius or no genius, pop seer or no pop seer, mystic insight or no mystic insight, life still despairs him.]
IV:58 Age 39. Looking out of my hotel window wondering whether to jump out or get back in bed. And so I've gone back in bed.
V
Erotic Love
Love as the Erotic Bond of Life
[This aspect of love manifests itself between the sexes that attract them to each other sexually, sensuously, sensually, relationally, so as to mate them as one; or more precisely: two-as-one. Offspring normally results from this love which binds parents to children, children to parents, siblings to siblings. This erotic love extends into a vital relationship in which "blood-to-blood" defines the intense bond between family members.]
V:4
Help! I need somebody,
Help! Not just anybody.
- Help
V:5 She was having a show at this gallery and I knew the fellow that ran it so it wasn't - it's a bit embarrassing being a Beatle anyway, going into a shop, never mind going to a gallery, because they either all leap on you thinking "he's another mug, like a Texan, he'll buy anything" and I had a bit of a hang up about art too, having been to art school, and disliked the attitude of the so called artists, you know. So anyway, I finally got to this show, and she had all these things on like hammer / nail things and that clock there you listen to with a stethoscope, all the things. And at first I reacted like a mug you know, like the ones that were saying "We don't get a badge" you know, so I thought "Ha ha - you don't fool me with all this junk" you know, so then there was this ladder and a thing on the ceiling, so I climbed the ladder and on the ceiling it said 'Yes', you see, so I thought, I agreed then, it's ok - you know, I mean it's like those jokes "While you're looking up here you're dribbling down your trousers" (Big laugh from audience)
I mean, it's all sort of connected, people get a buzz out of that in the toilet, but if you put it on in a room, it upsets them a bit, because they've got preconceived ideas about where those messages should be. But it said 'Yes'. And if it had said 'No' I would have carried on with my preconceived ideas about art and artists, that they're all sort of "Yeah yeah, sure, sure". But it said 'Yes' and that was enough and then she came up and said - she didn't know who I was - and [she] was saying "Do you like to hammer a nail in? it's five shillings", So I said, I didn't have any money either, so I said "I'll hammer an imaginary nail in and give you an imaginary five shillings" Which she agreed with and she accepted that, on the same basis that I accepted her work , you know, and (In camp voice) that was how we met actually.
V:6 I'd always had a fantasy about a woman who would be a beautiful, intelligent, dark-haired, high-cheekboned, free spirited artist (a la Juliette Greco).
My soul mate.
Someone I had already known, but somehow had lost.
After a short visit to India on my way home from Australia, the image changed slightly-she had to be a dark-eyed Oriental. Naturally, the dream couldn't come true until I had completed the picture.
Now it was complete.
I finally met Yoko and the dream became a reality.
The only woman I'd ever met who was my equal in every way imaginable. My better, actually. Although I'd had numerous interesting "affairs" in my previous incarnation, I'd never met anyone worth breaking up a happily-married state of boredom for.
Escape, at last! Someone to leave home for! Somewhere to go. I'd waited an eternity.
Since I was extraordinarily shy (especially around beautiful women), my daydreams necessitated that she be aggressive enough to "save me," ...
V:38 A Heart Play
John
Oh my love for the first time in my life
My eyes are wide open
Oh my lover for the first time in my life
My eyes can see.
I see the wind, oh I see the trees
Everything is clear in my heart
I see the clouds, oh I see the sky
Everything is clear in our world.
Oh my love for the first time in my life
My mind is wide open
Oh my lover for the first time in my life
My mind can feel.
I feel sorrow, Oh I feel dreams
Everything is clear in my heart
I feel life, oh I feel love
Everything is clear in our world.
Yoko
Yes, I'm your angel
I'll give you everything
in my magic power
So make a wish
And I'll let it come true for you
Tra, la la la
You give me everything
I ever wanted from life
I'm in your pocket
You're in my locket
Our hearts are one
Our bodies too.
V:40 We're not presenting ourselves as the perfect couple because we don't want to get into that bag either. Right? Because we're trying to present what it is, you know: a relationship that lots of other people are having, but they're maybe not songwriters, and they don't express it that way. ...We have our problems, we had our problems, and we'll have our problems. But, you know, we're trying; we want to stay together. We want to be a family.
VI
Vital Love
Love as the Vital [blood] Bond to Life and between Human Beings
[This aspect of love expresses itself as the intense force that binds us to life, or to another human or sentient being. Sympathy, affection, compassion and empathy are the main binding sentiments of this form of love. It is this form of love that is organic to our being as indicative of our self-preservation, physical homeostasis, psychic balance. Agony, grief, despair, anguish, loneliness, compassion, futility, empathy, horror, rage, fear, the sense of tragedy; and the "blessed" relief or appeasement of these various types of suffering -- are some of the incisive emotions associated with vital love.]
[Having and loving Yoko, his life is saved, both literally and figuratively; yet his underlying anguish for the loss of his mother remains. Not having his mother as a child and adolescent, cut deeply into his being and remained scarred.]
VI:4 The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realizing your parents do not need you in the way you need them When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind. Mine is an extreme case, you know. My mother and father split and I never saw my father until I was 20, nor did I see much of my mother.
VI:5 The copper came to the door to tell us about the accident. It was just like it's supposed to be, the way it is in the films. Asking if I were her son and all that. Then he told us, and we both went white. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I thought, I've no responsibilities to anyone now.
So that was another big trauma for me. I lost her twice. Once as a five-year old when I was moved in with my auntie, and once again at fifteen when she actually, physically died. And that was very traumatic for me....And that was ...really a hard time for me. It just absolutely made me very, very bitter. the underlying chip on my shoulder that I had as a youth got really big then. Being a teenager and a rock 'n' roller and an art student and my mother being killed just when I was re-establishing a relationship with her ... it was very traumatic for me.
VI:6
Mother, you had me,
but I never had you
I wanted you, you didn't want me
So I, I just got to tell you
Goodbye, goodbye
Father, you left me,
but I never left you
I needed you,
you didn't need me
So I, I just got to tell you
Goodbye, goodbye
Children, don't do what I have done
I couldn't walk and I tried to run
So I, I just got to tell you
Goodbye, goodbye
Mama don't go
Daddy come home
- Mother
VI:7
My mommy's dead
I can't get it out of my head
Though it's been so many years
My mommy's dead
It's hard to explain
So much pain
I could never show it
My mummy's dead
- My Mummy's Dead..
[That inseparable, excruciating bond that holds together man to woman, and woman to man, has the dire consequence for many - Lennon being one of those many - of not being able to live without that other.]
VI:34 She is my other half. I'm always scared that she will die or something and I won't be -because I wasn't prepared for losing my mother when I was a teenager. I'm terrified of that deep down all the time. I need her so much. How will I survive when Yoko is gone?
Third Aspect
III: HUMAN-TRANSCENDENT LOVE
[Our Human-Transcendence]
[As the aspiration and feat to balance our humanness (human love) with our
transcendence (transcendent love)]
VII
Humanistic Love
The Love of Humanity
[The concern we feel and show toward other human beings, exclusive of erotic
or self love. Mild affection, sympathy, are some of the sentiments of humanistic love.
Comradeship, camaraderie, companionship, sociability, cordiality, moral acts,
loving-kindness are a few of the manifestations of humanistic love.]
[Having the love of his life by his side, and in full support of him, he leaves the Beatles, and continues on to the next main phase of his world task: his personal growth, both psychological and transcendent, and his humanistic efforts to propagate his message of Transcendent Love through his music and various social and artistic activities. Whereas Love was his main implementation with The Beatles, Peace was his next endeavor: social and personal peace - peace of mind - with Yoko.]
VII:1 Ah, well, I'm not a do-gooder about things. I won't go around marching or
I'm not that type. It just so happens that my feelings about coloured people, or religion, or anything like that, do happen to work with the way I write. I make fun of coloured people in the book [In My Own Write] and Christians and Jews, but really, I'm not against them.
VII:2 I'm not a cynic. They're getting my character out of some of things I write or say. They can't do that. I hate tags. I'm slightly cynical, but I'm not a cynic. One can be wry one day and cynical the next and ironic the next. I'm a cynic about most things that are taken for granted. I'm cynical about society, politics, newspapers, government. But I'm not cynical about life, love, goodness, death. That's why I really don't want to be labeled a cynic."
VII:3 I'm concerned all right; I'm concerned with people.
VII:6 I'm interested in concepts and philosophies.I am not interested in wallpaper, which most music is. ...I'm interested in things with more of a world-wide ...I'm interested, what's it called? something that means something for everyone, not just for a few kids listening to wallpaper. I am just as interested in poetry, or whatever, or art, and always have been. That's been my hang-up, you know-continually trying to be Shakespeare or whatever it is. That's what I'm doing. I'm not pissing about. I consider I'm up against them. I'm not competing myself against Elvis. Rock just happens to be the media which I was born into, it was the one, that's all. Those people picked up paint brushes, and Van Gogh probably wanted to be Renoir or whoever went before him just as I wanted to be Elvis or whatever the shit it is. I'm not interested in good guitarists. I'm in the game of all those things: of concept and philosophy, ways of life, and whole movements in history ; just like Van Gogh was or any other of those fuckin' people-they are no more or less than I am or Yoko is-they were just living in those days. I'm interested in expressing myself like they expressed it, in some way that will mean something to people in any country, in any language, and at any time in history.
A Human-Transcendent Revolution
[Toward a conscious transformation --: a balance, harmony, between love of self , love of others, and love of being (soul)]
[The revolution of which Lennon refers is a revolution of the mind ("You better free your mind instead"), through which a social revolution will eventually take place, individual by individual. This revolution of the mind is to change (revolve into new patterns) age-old patterns that has kept us from progressing, evolving, into more complete human beings. As these patterns change, through the wisdom of transcendent Love, there will occur a major conscious transformation in the human mind personally, interpersonally, and socially. This conscious transformation will happen through a human-transcendent wisdom that balances both our human and our transcendent sides of our humanity.]
VII:16 The one thing the Beatles did was affect people's minds.
VII:17
You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world.
But when you talk about destruction,
Don't you know that you can count me out-in.
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan.
But if you want money for people with minds
that hate,
All I can tell you is brother you have to wait.
You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know
You better free your mind instead.
But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao,
you ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow.
- Revolution
First Perspective of The Revolution:
FREEDOM FROM INSTITUTIONALIZED RELIGION - [that bars the way to the spirit of religion]
[His first step in declaiming this revolution was his so-called infamous statement that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ, a year after his disguised barb against Christian doctrine in his song "Girl." With his perspective of God as Love, it comes as no surprise that Lennon would reject the mesh of organized religion; Christianity, in particular, since he was an occidental. He is all for Jesus, but not in favor of Christian church organizations.]
VII:25 I always sort of suspected that there was a God [as spirit], even when I thought I
was an atheist.
Second Perspective of the Revolution:
FREEDOM FROM IMPERIALISTIC GOVERNMENT - [that makes war for gain]
[Another aspect of this revolution is for the people to speak and stand up for their beliefs and rights not just by the usual way through elected officials, but through educated awareness and procedure and consolidarity.]
VII:58 I've never not been political, though religion tended to overshadow it in my acid days; that would be around
'65 or '66....Religion was an outlet for my repression. I thought "Well, there's something else to life, isn't
there? This isn't it, surely?"
VII:59 I was always a little political. But I got to be hanging around with political people
I become whoever I'm
with. If I'm with a madman, I become mad, and if I'm with somebody I love, I become lovely. I'm like a cloud in
the wind.
VII:60 The people must be made aware that it's up to them. (humorously) You know, just in case! I believe it.
The concept of love is a too internal, ephemeral reality to hold on to for most people other than in erotic terms; but the meaning of peace is a more empirical, social concept which can be easier assimilated into the under-standing. What must be done then is to emphasize the word peace: its meaning, its feasibility. Get it out of the subconscious up into the conscious mind. Even beguile the mind with the beauty of its meaning. Having accomplished that venture, then begin the next by tracing its roots to love and the individual. And once the internal relationship between love and peace is understood to be essentially an individual matter, this understanding will invariably spread from one individual to another, and to another, and another, until the fabric of social relations undergoes a radical change for the betterment of all.
Then a true transformation of values will be taking place, and a "brave new world" will come into being a conscious transformation! This is the real revolution that is underway, and which is Lennon's vision and his mission to advance.
And so at this stage of his life, Lennon works toward hammering the idea of peace into human consciousness.]
VII:82 I am an artist and my art is peace and I happen to be a musician.
VII:83 Let's call God peace and do it that way, you know.
VII:84 What goes with love, we thought, was peace.
Third Perspective of the Revolution:
FREEDOM FROM CAPITALISTIC EXPLOITATION - [that takes from the poor and disadvantaged to give to the rich and advantaged]
[Still another stage of this revolution of the mind is for the people to take control of their lives economically and not be intimidated by those in control. They should be part of the administrative process of business and corporate economy rather than exploited by it. Justice, equity, interaction are the goals to aim for.]
VII:126
As soon as you're born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you're clever and they despise
a fool
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
VII:161 I'm sure we'll get there. It's just a matter of what conditions. We won't play games with governments.
Fourth Perspective of the Revolution:
FREEDOM FROM GENDER DISCRIMINATION - [that determines superiority or inferiority on a person's sex]
[With Yoko, Lennon began the gradual process of growing out of his cocoon of male superiority that he had been conditioned to by his environment. This broadening of his perspectives made it possible for him to open up to her influence so that he could understand the man-woman relationship in its manifold dynamics.]
VII:163 And the women are very important too; we can't have a revolution that doesn't involve and liberate women.
It's so subtle that way you're taught male superiority. It took me quite a long time to realize that my
maleness was cutting off certain areas for Yoko. She's a red-hot liberationist and was quick to show me
where I was going wrong, even though it seemed to me that I was just acting naturally. That's why I'm always
interested to know how people who claim to be radical treat women. ...How can you talk about power to the
people unless you realize that people is both sexes.
VII:204 The female message has not been heard or listened to for centuries and it's only starting to come
out. Although there is a thing called the "women's movement," it's like society took a laxative and
just farted. They haven't really had a good shit yet. It really hasn't started. The seed was planted
sometime in the Sixties, but the real changes are slow to come down.
Fifth Perspective of the Revolution:
FREEDOM FROM PARENTAL NEGLECT - [that treats children with disrespect]
[Having had a traumatic childhood by being abandoned by his parents, Lennon experienced firsthand the psychic disorientation and dysfunction that results from parental neglect, however well everything else might be in one's life. Having Repeated the same situation with his own first son, he was determined not to let that happen with his second son; and so he put his career on hold and stayed home with his son for his first five years]
VII:205 You can talk about Jews, you can talk about the Third World, and you can talk about everything, but
underlying that whole thing, under the whole crust of it, is the woman; and beneath them, the children. As
Dick Gregory said to us in 1969 in Denmark, "Children's liberation is the next movement." Because they
have no rights whatsoever, absolutely none; women have a certain amount. But children is the next thing -
children power -- but the women will liberate the children.
Sixth Perspective of the Revolution:
FREEDOM FROM SEXUAL REPRESSION
[Sexual arousement is as natural as there are men and women present to incite it. As everyone knows on reflection, sex is essential to our nature; so it makes little sense to repress it, or feel guilt or shame about it, except when its excess or deviation, or misuse harms ourselves or others. Yes, for many there is a certain embarrassment, and need for modesty, related to our genitals and sex acts, that requires a modest privacy, perhaps because of its animal origins that we would rather not be reminded of; or on the other side, because of its sacredness as the life-creating principle in us. In either case, we are in awe of its beauty, physical forms, arousements, lusts; and so love it in us and in others in its proper place in our lives. Yes, it can be addictive, but it is a natural addiction, is not stimulated by foreign substances, such as tobacco, or alcohol, or drugs that can ravage our bodies and, or, minds. Yet just as overeating can overtax our bodies and rule our minds, so can oversexing do the same. So, what is even natural can be taken to excess, and that is what wisdom can do for us to moderate our inclination to overdo anything kind of pleasure.]
VII:225 The thing is, I started it [the frontal nude photograph of him and Yoko on their album "Two virgins"] with a
pure ...it was the truth, and it was only after I'd gotten into it that I'd realized what kind of scene I was going to
create. and then suddenly you show it to people and then you know what the world is going to do to you, or
try to do. But you have no knowledge of it when you conceive it or make it. Originally, I was going to record
Yoko, and I thought that the best picture of her for an album would be her naked. I was just going to record
her as an artist. We were only on those kinds of terms then. So after that, when we got together, for both of
us to be naked. We're naked in front of a camera-that comes over in the eyes. Just for a minute you go!! I
mean you're not used to it, being naked, but it's got to come out [editor's italics]
Seventh Perspective of the Revolution leading to a conscious transformation:
FREEDOM FROM SELF-IGNORANCE
VIII
IDEALISTIC LOVE
Love as Ideal Perfection
[Love conceived or intuited, as perfection, purity, order, beauty; the good, truth, moral excellence, as
exemplified in Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Gandhi, etc. et al and the human inspiration, aspiration, and
struggle to approximate this ideal love, this ideal state, through morality and its virtues; in brief, to
balance our humanness with our transcendence]
[The overall point of the following maxims by Lennon is that however transcendent or spiritual, we may aspire to be, we have to always keep in mind the limitations of our frail humanity. And that if we are to gain a good measure of transcendence, we need a wisdom of love and understanding to be able to balance our human limitations with the ideals of our transcendence. We must never give up the struggle to be the person we have always wanted to be]
ON HIMSELF IN PARTICULAR
VIII:1 I prefer it [honesty about oneself]. Because it's harder to live with the phony that it is with the real sort of causes, harassments in a physical sense or an outside sense. I found that the other way causes internal problems. You've been conning yourself or fooling yourself, which is quite easy for all of us. we're all so good at it, you know, that you don't even realize you're doing it. But in a way you pay a different kind of price for that.
VIII:2 The hardest thing is facing yourself. It's easier to shout "Revolution" and "Power to the People" than it is to look at yourself and try to find out what's real inside you and what isn't, when you're pulling the wool over your own eyes.
VIII:100 There isn't one answer to anything
IX
SELFLESS LOVE
Love as a purifying and mystic experience
[The stripping of one's ego-sensuality so as to approximate, and make one receptive to, the unity
of Love that could lead to the "blissed" experience beyond self of Oneness, All, Nothingness, the Void,
Satori, Nirvana, Bliss-Consciousness, Purity, or whatever else it may be - though having no name]
[Lennon recognized that only by freeing one's mind from the trap of our ego-sensuality, could we experience the oneness of Love both humanly and transcendently. As Love is free (from all dualities), this is where our own freedom lies.]
IX:1 I want to be free!
IX:2 Even then (1965 - 25 years old) my eye was on freedom.
IX:3 You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know,
You better free your mind instead.
IX:4 One thing I can tell you
is you got to be free.
IX:5 It's all in your mind.
IX:6 Freedom is in the mind.
IX:7 All we've got to solve is our own head.
IX:42 You can't be powerful and pure.
IX:43 Well I can see the promised land
And I know I can make i
__________
MAN IN TRANSITION
I've read everything on everything...I'm an avid reader.
- Lennon
Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.
- Boris Pasternak
Forward
The purpose of this aspect of the conscious transformation is to reach those millions who would not normally read, nor consider, the intellectual pinnings of this conscious transformation. John Lennon's life and music exemplify, represent, this wisdom-love unity in the popular aesthetics. For many, Lennon also represents a Christ-like figure in a way considering his charisma, Love-message, mystic experiences, and violent death.
Preface
1
Lennon and the Beatles' monumental revolutionary impact on music, society, and culture, are capsulated in this book. Part One is an exploration of John Lennon's premier role in this impact; Part two, traces Lennon's psycho-philosophic autobiographical role in this impact; and Part Three, follows the Beatles' phenomenon of this impact.
This Part One explores the muliti-faceted person and world task of Lennon in ten perspectives: (1) The Quest, (2) The medium, (3) The Life, (4) The Man, (5) The Artist [in the Man], (6) The Man [in the Artist], (7) The Hero, (8) The Mystic (9) The Visionary, (10) The Musician.
Of these ten perspectives, the most important aspect of Lennon, I believe, is that he was first and foremost a mystic; and that whatever else he was: musician, poet, peacemaker, even a kind of artist-philosopher, was peripheral and related, and consequential to this one inherent trait. The proof of this theme is stated in his own words, in both his lyrics and his interviews.
Mysticism, as defined in Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, as "the experience of mystical union, or direct communion, with ultimate reality
the doctrine or belief that direct knowledge of God, of spiritual truth, of ultimate reality, or comparable matters is attainable through immediate intuition, insight, or illumination and in a way differing from ordinary sense perception or ratiocination."
The word mystical derives from the Greek mystos, "keeping silence." Mystical experience reveals phenomena that are usually silent and inexplicable. This expanded consciousness, this whole-knowing, transcends our limited powers of description. Sensation, perception, and intuition seem to merge to create something that is none of these.
2
It is my contention that Lennon, as a mystic, that is, as being in touch with Ultimate Reality, Love, God, Meaning, or whatever we want to call It, was the reason and perhaps, the only reason that the Beatles could have become such a world-wide phenomena, musically, culturally, socially, and, if I daresay at this point, spiritually. I believe that receptive, sensitive readers of this book will themselves glean this awareness as they read, and reread, this book.
I think it important to relate my own experience in this Lennon-mystic regard that reinforces the theme of this book. As part of my research for this book, I, of course, would listen to all his relevant songs over and over again to grasp the feel, the meaning, of his lyrics in blend with the music. On a particular occasion, on listening to his gorgeous "Across the Universe," I was of a sudden transported out of my conscious mind into the universe of everything, "across the universe." It only lasted a second or two; but when I came back to myself, I leapt up from my seat and kept pacing back and forth rapt with what I had just experienced. It was such a wondrous immensity that I remember it to this day. This had never happened before, nor since then, on listening to any kind of music. For me, this proves without a doubt the Artist in Lennon, the mystic in Lennon, that his music could so transcend me out of myself and others, I'm sure.
Introduction
1
The following ten perspectives have as their underlying theme the growing awareness that we are on the eve of a conscious transformation in which the ascendancy of justice and wisdom will begin to prevail over injustice and ignorance, in which intuition will begin to prevail over reason, in which the God-within reality will begin to prevail over the God-without reality. It has been long coming, and it is here now at our doorstep in our times thanks to the many great minds, in all walks of life, who have forged the foundation and directed the way, especially over the past 150 years - from Schopenhauer, to Nietzsche, to Bergson, to Freud, .to Jung, to Wittgenstein, to D.H. Lawrence, to Kazanzakas, to Breton, to Camus, to Sartre, and so forth.
It is time now to get to the consolidation of this transformation, and this consolidation comes down to a wisdom, its Love source, and a man : the wisdom: human-transcendence; the man: John Lennon. "I sort of wanted to bring a new message to the public, at least new to me."; "I'm trying to do something different...I'm trying to change people's minds, to change their attitudes to things." This book concentrates on the man and his outline of a wisdom for this conscious transformation.
The first step is to identify the inward push toward the emergence of this conscious transformation. The following perspective identifies this inward push, and its charismatic emissary, John Lennon.
First Perspective
THE QUEST
I want to be free! The inward cry of our age.
And what is this freedom that is so cried-out for? Not political freedom; assume we have that. Not personal freedom; assume we have that too.
Then what? Is it not freedom from our all-too-human self in its suffering and vulnerability, in its lusts and violence, in its frailty and self-absorption? ...That's it! the target for a type of individual whose eye is on his-her more-than-human self.
Such individuals are troubled, frustrated, even oppressed, by their humanness, regardless of their practicality, regardless of their social status, regardless of their age, regardless of their success, regardless of their biology; and however they attempt to assuage or discount this eternal insignia of their (human) nature, they fail either comically or tragically. They feel severely limited compared to the limitless power they intuit inwardly.
So what we have is a person who is in touch with his transcendence, and who aspires to, and struggles toward, a balanced harmony with it in relationship to others. This is his-her freedom, his self-freedom for which his daily struggle is carried on; never attaining to its ideal, but ever advancing toward it. He takes the world by storm: a poet-artist-musician whose life and work have chronicled more fully than any other public figure in our times or in any other times, his vision of freedom, and his struggle to realize that vision. John Lennon is his name: John Lennon of The Beatles; John Lennon, husband of Yoko Ono; John Lennon whose music with and without the Beatles changed not only the face of music but the face of society as well. Not many people who are familiar with the Beatle phenomenon would dispute this influence; yet equally, not many people have any idea of the full impact this man had on our consciousness of freedom-personal freedom to be oneself, especially; and even less people have only the faintest idea of his lifelong struggle for self-freedom.
We need an exemplar, a model, a proof, a testimony, a real person who is/was "one of us," to give us the inspiration, to carry on, through, our long lifelong trek, toward the Goal, the Omega. And John Lennon is that man. And in tandem, we need a man who carries that inspiration unto wisdom. Where is that man?
Second Perspective
THE MEDIUM
Next we might ask ourselves, "What qualifies Mr. Lennon for such a high-minded task? After all, was he not simply a rock musician of the highest caliber, I grant; yet a rock'n'roller, nonetheless." The following perspective places Lennon in the proper setting for the task at hand.
1 The Beatles in general, and John Lennon in particular, spearheaded not only the youth movement in the 1960's, but an overall youth consciousness as well.
2 It could be considered that the Lennon-Beatle cultural phenomenon helped open wider the intuitive consciousness of mankind.
3 Elvis Presley's music said, in effect: Free your body; Lennon's music-with and without The Beatles-said, in effect: Free your mind.
4 Lennon on the quintessence of the Beatles and their music: "The whole point of it is communication. We've got a chance to smile, like All you need is love; so that's me incentive for doing it. Good cheer and play; that is his message along with love, peace, and self-freedom.
5 Whereas the other Beatles were musicians first, and you might say, artists second, Lennon was an artist first and musician secondarily. His music served as the blood flow through the lifeline of his ideas and ideals
46 The dreamer was slain, but the dream goes on-always, and in gathering momentum.
47 Christ is said to have died for our sins; Lennon, we might say, died for our repressions.
48 Ernest Newman, on composer Richard Wagner, eminently appropriate to Lennon:
Wagner [Lennon, as well] was one of those dynamically charged personalities after whose passing the world can never be the same as it was before he came-one of the tiny group of men to whom it is given to bestride an old world and a new, but to sunder them by a gulf that becomes even more impassable; one of the very few who are able so to fill the veins of a whole civilization with a new principle of vitality that the tingle of it is felt not only by the rarer but by the common spirits-some new principle from which whether a man likes it or not, he will find it impossible to escape.
49 Yoko Ono on the meaning of her husband's death as martyrdom:: Its like this event-isn't that a terrible way of putting it?-affected us all in different ways, but we are all stronger for it, and probably for the better....I can't think it was all for the worse. ...When John and I were saying, "The world is one, one world," it's almost like fate told us, "Okay, prove it. Prove it with your life." and that's what John did. At the time of his death, the world definitely became one. And though we might forget it, we're never going to lose that sense. It's in us, and it always will be. Somehow we're going to be different. And the sense of oneness that we preached, well, John actually had to show it physically, and somehow he did it. That was his fate. And I keep thinking of it. It's like preaching is not enough. Let the whole world feel it. Let it happen."
50 A thought : Did Yoko play her own destined part in Lennon's life to make sure he followed his destiny to the end to "screw his courage to the sticking place."? Was this the source of her soul-love for him?
Third Perspective
THE LIFE
This next perspective portrays Lennon's life and music in capsulation so as to give an overall view of the drama and achievement of his life.
CHILDHOOD: Liverpool, 1940-1953
At birth, John Lennon's mother and father are separated. His mother, unable, unwilling, to care for the boy, leaves him to be reared by her sister. The father returns years later to claim his five-year old son. He makes the child choose between him and his mother. The boy chooses his father. His mother walks away...A sudden, frantic, change of mind! He runs to her.
He has made his choice.
She returns him to her sister, and goes her way, seeing the boy only occasionally throughout is growing years.
Mother, you had me but I never had you
I wanted you but you didn't want me.
...
Mamma, don't go!
-Mother
The pain sears his mind, consciously and unconsciously. The stage is set.
I heard something 'bout my Ma and Pa
they didn't want me so they made me a star.
- I Found Out
He is of a soft nature, and is a cheerful, sunny boy despite his mother-father trauma. He lives a normal, uneventful, middle-class life with his aunt and uncle.
And then it ends in the explosion of four gunshots. John Lennon is dead.
It's a funny thing, but I've always felt I wasn't going to grow old.
- John Lennon, age 19
I don't want to die at 40.
- John Lennon, 1940-1980
Fourth Perspective
THE MAN
What is the moral character of this exceptional man who is to offer mankind the way to self-freedom, who wants us to just follow him? Is he a saint? a madman? a seer? a demon? an avatar? a neurotic-or just like you or I with all our human frailties and weaknesses? The following perspective sheds some light on this matter.
I want to be free!
- Money
Lennon's cry for freedom at the height of the Beatle craze. This freedom has nothing to do with the freedom that money buys, as the song suggests, but rather a freedom in the mind, where elsewhere he sings:
In my mind there's no sorrow
...and there's no time
-There's a Place
I know freedom is in the mind, but I couldn't clear my mind.
So, what we have is a person who is basically soft-natured but with a strong enough streak of the hard in him to balance his soft interior; who is devastated in early childhood by his parents-devastated especially his mother- who didn't want him; who is raised in a harsh environment ; and who is catapulted into world renown in his early twenties, and so, rarely ever to pause to reflect on his life without someone knocking at his door, so to speak, wanting something from him "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." Yet it was not enough for him to "change the whole wide world," as he set out to do, he had to change, transform, himself as well. There could not be the one without the other.
Fifth Perspective
THE ARTIST [in the man]
As Lennon was an artist of the first order, as witnessed by the originality, range and depth of his music, we have next to consider what makes him a universal Artist, with a capital `A' as regards the oncoming emergence of our intuitive consciousness-the consciousness emanating from our life-being.
1
John Lennon's life and work exemplified the tension between the artist in the man and the man in the artist: the artist in quest of ideals of beauty, truth, and freedom; and the man immersed in the blood of life, in the pulse of reality seeking wisdom. He could not, nor would not, deny either the ideal or the real world. And this was the conflict in his life, the struggle, the "good fight"; just as it is, more or less, any person's who has a strong sense of Transcendence beyond the normal, psychological consciousness. And he set out early in his career to share with the public the unfolding of his frail humanity striving to merge with his vision of an inward reality so potent in us that it can literally evolve us into a new consciousness, a new psychology, a new spirituality-all essentially the same.
As the Artist reveals and expresses the universal truths of our human nature through emotional channels rather than through intellectual channels, as do philosophers, psychologists, he is first and foremost concerned with man in relationships and in society, in relation to his own experiences; from which he universalizes them in his art. This concern applies to Lennon as is traced in the following perspective.
Sixth Perspective
THE MAN [In The Artist]
As the Artist reveals and expresses the universal truths of our human nature through emotional channels rather than through intellectual channels, as do philosophers, psychologists, he is first and foremost concerned with man in relationships and in society, in relation to his own experiences; from which he universalizes them in his art. This concern applies to Lennon as is traced in the following perspective.
1
It is perhaps everyone's wish to have all his desires gratified. Imagine: all the success and fame one would want, all the wealth and luxuries, influence and prestige, respect and honor; all the lovers and friends, all the leisure and pastimes. That would be the supreme good, would it not? .. .No, certainly not for everyone; and certainly not for John Lennon; for who had more worldly success than this man, and yet who at the same time had been more troubled, more confused, more disoriented, more insecure, more on the edge of despair? Here was a man who had "everything"; yet who at the same sang such desperate lyrics as Help! I need somebody; I'd give you everything I've got for a little peace of mind; Yes I'm lonely wanna die; Hate and jealousy gonna be the death of me.
After a long, storming, world-renowned career, all that came to really matter were his family and musings. Even his music came to be of only secondary importance; so much so, that he wouldn't even bother recording without Yoko. "Bloody boring" he said it would be without her. Yet something still eluded him. Yoko sang of him that his mind had "changed the world," that he had all he could carry, and yet still felt "somehow empty."
What was missing? What "holy grail," what "philosopher's stone," what answer, did he lack for his ultimate fulfillment? In a word, it was freedom-self-freedom: an inward freedom in which love, equanimity, and wisdom habitually prevail over the demands and tensions of the psychological self. In the maelstrom of the Beatle craze, he cried out at the end of a song "I want to be free!" But he was encased in his bubble celebrity.
Seventh Perspective
THE HERO
Lennon, as he developed from artist to Artist, creates his music for the public, laced with his quiet, unassuming messages of redemption; yet more was required of him if he were to make more of an impact than mere mass popularity. He had to put his life on the line: "What's the good of being a Beatles if you don't do something with it"-somehow to startle people into the process of developing self-realization at the same time as he was going through that self-same process. What needed to be done required a person of heroic stature; and he believed himself to be of that stature, flaws and all.
If you want to be a hero then just follow me.
- Working Class Hero
Does John Lennon mean that he himself is a hero? Can only a person of heroic stature advise others to follow him? If so, then what kind of hero is he referring to? Clearly, a working class hero, as he sings in his song. But what is a working class hero? What is a hero, for that matter or more specifically, a hero of the people, a grand hero?
Lennon, with the Beatles, is singing simple love songs, but set in a new, fresh, dynamic key. The magic of their music and charisma is what fused the burst of freedom-license, many would consider it-let loose.
And so he goes on to create the Beatles, and to transform the world, and himself as well.
In its way the second political thing I did was say "The Beatles are bigger
than Jesus."
And the creation of the Beatles was "in its way" the first political thing he did.
This is no mere rock musician speaking. This is the man who, with his Beatles, initiated a revolution of conscious freedom that changed the world.
"His mind changed the world. "
- Yoko Ono
He [John Lennon] definitely was a hero....In the mythological sense he was an
innovator ....The public hero is sensitive to the needs of his time. The Beatles
brought a new spiritual depth into popular music which started the fad, let's call it,
for meditation and Oriental music had been over here for years, as a curiosity, but
now, after the Beatles, our young people seem to know what it's about. We are
hearing more and more of it, and it's being used in terms of its original intention
as a support for meditations. That's what the Beatles started.
- Joseph Campbell, mythologist
Eighth Perspective
THE MYSTIC
What gives Lennon the daring to publicly make the claim I am of the universe and you know what it's worth; to beckon people to come together right now over me; to show ev'rybody the light; who even goes so far as to exclaim I think I'm Jesus Christ. I'm back again? It must be the implacable inward Vision that possesses him over which he has no control other than to be Its emissary, like it or not.
Introductory Comments
There happens to many of us on rare occasions a suffusing sensation if I can call it that of such pure, beauteous, glowing elation that we seem transported into a world of radiant pure-conscious-bliss. It generally is of only short duration; seconds, minutes perhaps; and then is gone irretrievably in its intensity. It is the type of experience one never forgets, and one which we long to experience again. It instills in us a new understanding of ourselves in relation to the world. There are lesser experiences of the same, but none ever quite reach the intensity, the purity, the divinity, of that one "Big" experience. Some people consider it a spiritual or mystic vision; but whatever it may be, it generally manifests itself as a oneness with the totality of the world; a sublimity surpassing all sensuous and natural beauty; a benign resignation to one's mortal fate. It is an experience that makes one gasp with its ineffability; an experience that moistens, if not floods the eyes with emotion; an experience that etherializes us for the moment; one that makes us shake our head in sheer wonderment. The cause of it may be a delicate fragrant breeze that wafts through the nostrils, a glorious sunset, the vast sea or sky, or the presence of a saintly personage, or a sudden illumination of understanding, or of any of the myriad natural phenomena.
1
Since Lennon's mystic, as well as surrealistic, bent of mind is crucial to grasping the integral meaning of his life and work and influence, I feel it imperative at this point to delve into this mystic reality a bit to give the reader an overall view from the ideas and experiences of others.
At age 28, Lennon announces to his friend and other band members that he believed himself to be Jesus Christ.
I think I'm Jesus Christ. I'm back again. I've got to tell everyone. I've got to let the world know
who I am. ... I just think this is it. This is my reason for being here on this earth. ...This is my thing.
Then he places himself in the same situation of crucifixion as Christ in his "Ballad of John and Yoko."
Christ you know it ain't easy,
You know hard it can be,
The way things are going
they're going to crucify me.
Is this madness? Was John Lennon mad? Mad with egomania? Or mad with God? Which? Certainly he was a vain man, as his public life attests; and as an artist-musician, he himself says, "If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do: in my art or music; in that respect, you can call me that. I believe in what I do, and I'll say it." This is a fairly normal and respectable assessment of Lennon as man and artist considering that he was the premier pop musician in his day. Nothing mad in that. What then would make him declaim that he was Jesus Christ? - or more to the point, that he was God? Again, Lennon himself answers an interviewer who questioned his seriousness in once saying that he was God:
We're all God. I mean Christ said the kingdom of Heaven is within you. That's what it means. The
Indians say that, and the Zen people say that. It's a basic thing of religion. We're all God. I'm not a
God, or the God not the God. But we're all God; and we're all potentially divine and potentially
evil. We have everything within us. And the kingdom of heaven is nigh and within us. And if you
look hard enough, you'll see it.
Lennon states and describes his "in-touchness," his mystic experience, of the oneness of All, or God or Soul, or Love, or Being, or Power. It will be clear from these brief descriptions that this experience was with him all his life, and was not a result of drugs, or LSD, especially.
I've been aware of soul. I've been aware of that power.
I've been aware of the Power ...There is a Power which people tap and they use it for whatever
ends they use it.
You come out of a [pure experience] and you know "I've been there," and it was
nothing, it was just pure; and that's what we're looking for all the time, really.
I've been through it the eye of the needle, [nirvana, pure-conscious-bliss] and back a few times.
I remember an incident in my life when I was walking in the mountains of Scotland, up in the
north. I was with an auntie who had a house up there; and I remember this feeling coming over,
you know, I thought: This is what they call poetic, or whatever they call it. When I looked back,
I realized I was kind of hallucinating. You know, when you're walking along and the ground starts going beneath you and the heather, and I could see this mountain in the distance, and this kind
of FEELING came over me -- I thought, This is SOMETHING. What is this?...
The following passages from recognized mystics taken from all times and all places clearly validate the mystic experience.
Tennyson
1 . ...till all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was almost a laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life. . . . I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said that the state is beyond words?
Aldous Huxley, From Doors of Perception
"I was sitting on the seashore, half listening to a friend arguing violently about something which merely bored me. Unconsciously to myself, I looked at a film of sand I had picked up on my hand, when I suddenly saw the exquisite beauty of every little grain of it; instead of being dull, I saw that each particle was made up on a perfect geometrical pattern, with sharp angles, from each of which a brilliant shaft of light was reflected, while each tiny crystal shone like a rainbow. . . .The rays crossed and recrossed, making exquisite patterns of such beauty that they left me breathless. . . .Then, suddenly, my consciousness was lighted up from within and I saw in a vivid way how the whole way how the whole universe was made up of material which, no matter how dull and lifeless they might seem, were nevertheless filled with this intense and vital beauty. For a second or two the whole world appeared as a blaze of glory. When it died down, it left me with something I have never forgotten and which constantly reminds me of the beauty locked up in every minute speck of material around us.
Ruysbroeck / mystic-writer
"When love has carried us above all things . . . we receive in peace the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding us and penetrating us. What is this Light, if it be not a contemplation of the Infinite, and an intuition of Eternity? We behold that which we are, and we are that which we behold; because our being, without losing anything of its own personality, is united with the Divine Truth."
From The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
R. W.Bucke
"I had spent the evening in a great city with two friends reading and discus- sing poetry and philosophy. We parted at midnight. I had a long drive in a hanson to my lodging. My mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images, and emotions called up by the reading and talking, was calm and peaceful. I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking, but letting ideas, images and emotions flow of themselves, as it were, through my mind. All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, and immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city.; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exaltation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but it, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life; but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things worked together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love. . . .The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed."
Anonymous (This contemporary Episcopalian author (a woman), prefers to remain anonymous
There came a night when I passed beyond Ideas, beyond melody, beyond beauty, into vast lost spaces, depths of untellable bliss, into a Light. And the Light is an ecstasy of delight, and the Light is an ocean of bliss, and the Light is Life and Love, and the Light is the too deep contact with God, and the Light is unbearable Joy; and in unendurable bliss my soul beseeches God that He will cover her from this most terrible rapture, this felicity which exceeds all measure. And she is not covered; and being in the last extremity from this most terrible joy, she beseeches Him again: and is immediately covered from it.
...
Wonderful, beautiful weeks went by, filled with divine, indescribable peace. The presence Of God was with me day and night, and the world was not the world as I had once known it-a place where men and women had fought and sinned and toiled and anguished and wondered horribly the meaning of this mystery of pain and joy, of life and death. The world was become Paradise, and in my heart I cried to all my fellow-souls, "Why fret and toil, why sweat and anguish for the things of earth when our own God has in His hand such peace and bliss and happiness to give to Every man? O come and receive it, Every man his share."
And the glamour of life in Unity with God became past all comprehension and all words.
a man
"I have on a number of occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period of intimate communion with the divine. These meetings came unasked and unexpected, and seemed to consist merely in the temporary obliteration of the conventionalities which usually surround and cover my life. . . .Once it was when from the summit of a high mountain I looked over a gashed and corrugated landscape extending to a long convex of ocean that ascended to the horizon, and again from the same point when I could see nothing beneath me but a boundless expanse of white cloud, on the blown surface of which a few high peaks, including the one I was on, seemed plunging about as if they were dragging their anchors. What I felt on these occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity, accompanied by an illumination which revealed to me a deeper significance than I had been wont attach to life. It is in this that I find my justification for saying that I have enjoyed communication with God. Of course the absence of such a being as this would be chaos. I cannot conceive of life without its presence."
a woman
How can one go within oneself to find God? Isn't that just a glorification of the ego? I believe not. I believe that going within one's own being is a path to finding God.
As a child and well into adulthood, I believed that God, like a loving father, was "out there" above and beyond our world -- all knowing, judgmental, yet caring. "He" was accessible by prayer. Through prayer, God would look over us, take care of us and guide our lives, if we but ask.
By mid-adulthood I could no longer experience God in this anthropomorphic male image. I struggled, but through meditation and study, I came to experience God as the vital loving force, the primary energy of all creation. God is in all things. God connects all of life. This means God is within me. It means God is within every human I meet. We are connected in a profound way, but all too often we ignore or never establish that connection. The stories of the Bible and other world religions are metaphors and guides to help us understand this.
My search for God within is an effort to align myself with the loving force of reality, which I believe can only occur at a deeply personal level. If I connect with God within, I am connecting to all of life in a spiritual dimension beyond material explanation. With this intent, going within does not lead to glorification of one's own ego in narcissistic contemplation. This would be impossible. Rather it promotes community, connection to others, and a sense of oneness with God.
a woman
There came a night when I passed beyond Ideas, beyond melody, beyond beauty, into vast lost spaces, depths of untellable bliss, into a Light. And the Light is an ecstasy of delight, and the Light is an ocean of bliss, and the Light is Life and Love, and the Light is the too deep contact with God, and the Light is unbearable Joy; and in unendurable bliss my soul beseeches God that He will cover her from this most terrible rapture, this felicity which exceeds all measure. And she is not covered; and being in the last extremity from this most terrible joy, she beseeches Him again: and is immediately covered from it.
...
Wonderful, beautiful weeks went by, filled with divine, indescribable peace. The presence Of God was with me day and night, and the world was not the world as I had once known it-a place where men and women had fought and sinned and toiled and anguished and wondered horribly the meaning of this mystery of pain and joy, of life and death. The world was become Paradise, and in my heart I cried to all my fellow-souls, "Why fret and toil, why sweat and anguish for the things of earth when our own God has in His hand such peace and bliss and happiness to give to Every man? O come and receive it, Every man his share."
And the glamour of life in Unity with God became past all comprehension and all words.
These passages, then, should give the reader a general introduction to the tradition and wonderment of mystic Reality, and as it relates.to the God-within reality, and to transcendent Love; a tradition and wonderment of which Lennon obviously belongs.
Does Lennon have the earmarks, the qualities, of the charismatic spiritual leader despite his human flaws and failings? Bluntly, yes - in appearance and deed. Will he become a mythical hero in the course of time? By all accounts, most likely. Where is the evidence? Let me provide it, by traversing through his life, music, and words. Before commencing, however, be continuously alert to Lennon's natural humility and courage that shine through everything about him; for humility is the foremost human characteristic of a great soul, as it is the sign of his-her great love for humanity "I'm concerned all right; I'm concerned with people"; and courage is the forceful characteristic that makes it possible to live this humility.
Look at it this way. Imagine you had evidence enough to believe that you, as a man, were an incarnation of God I mean we all are at our essence; but you, in particular had the gift, the "third eye" to intuit this incredible truth. Now consider further that you want to spread the word through a medium that would resound throughout the world of this ineluctable truth about our spirituality in our day and age. What medium would you choose to reach the most people? Music, right? Rock music in particular; since it is this beat music that rouses to high energy, and inspires to action the "innermost recesses of the soul" most easily.
He has accomplished his first feat: the unleashing of a buoyant consciousness of freedom throughout western culture not the freedom of self, but the freedom to be oneself regardless of conditioned values and beliefs anyone raised in the 1950s and before will know exactly what I mean. And the youth movement of the Sixties gets underway in full force with tumultuous consequences, boding both good and ill.
Considering all that has been said of the Beatles - so far in this book, and in so many others - regarding them as a kind of religion (and to emphasis the phrase "kind of,") all the evidence points in that direction, as will be seen especially in the third part of this book, "Revolution and The Beatles." By the word "religion" is certainly not meant a formulated nor organized, church religion, but a religion inasmuch as their music, and Lennon's life and mission, are an aesthetic experience, par excellence that inspires good will and love and joy, and inspiration - inspirational in the sense that the magic and meaning of their music and charisma uplift us unto the flow of transcendent Love in grace, beauty, and power. And the effect stays with us, off and on, permanently; it never pales. What more would we want of a religion?
Paul McCartney:
I'm really glad that most of the songs dealt with love, peace, understanding. There's hardly any one of them that says, "Go on, kids, tell them all to sod off. Leave your parents." It's all very "All you Need is Love" or John's "Give Peace a Chance." There was a good spirit behind it all, which I'm very proud of anyway. It were a grand thing, the Beatles.
John Lennon:
This [the Beatles] isn't show business. It's something else. This is different from anything that anybody imagines. You don't go on from this. You do this and then you finish.
Ninth Perspective
THE VISIONARY
A Dream Vision
Rejoice! a visionary is in our times! Gone from life, but here in spirit-in the spirit of beauty and of truth: beauty in music and truth in deed.
Into the Vision
The Voice: (of Vision):
There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
. ..All you need is love
The mind (of Lennon):
I know it! .. .but what is love? It must be something more than human, because with it, in it, I we, every-one can do anything. There isn't anything that can't be done with love. I know that ... but how do I know
it? I can't put it in words. No, I don't know it as I normally know something; and yet I do somehow.
Out from the Vision
John Lennon came with a vision that changed the world a vision of love as "the underlying theme to the universe." That vision, through Lennon, changed the world in that it raised our consciousness of freedom personal, social, and self-freedom.
Having all the elements for his world task residing in his being, Lennon must first become world famous, which he does through his creation of the Beatles, and their creation of a music that will mesmerize millions upon millions year by year. Using the Beatles as a medium, Lennon then proceeds to unravel and reveal himself as he begins his quest to transform the consciousness of his fellow beings.
Tenth Perspective
THE MUSICIAN
Forward
Yes, Lennon considered himself a torchbearer for the enlightenment of the popular consciousness --"I sort of wanted to bring a new message to the public, at least new to me."; "... we're (he and Yoko) carrying that torch, like the Olympic torch, passing it from hand to hand, to each other, to each country, to each generation. That's our job". For when he disbanded the Beatles, he took their magic wand, snapped it in two, and tossed it on the rubbish heap. That magic was a mere frivolity compared to the real magic that was about to be set loose on the world; and Lennon was marked to be a medium through which it would course its way through human consciousness. This was not to be a magic of fantasy and play, but a magic of high seriousness: a magic expressive of the ideal, but realistic; of transcendence, but human. Something much more substantial was in the offing for collective man than his traditional values and beliefs had yet been able to accommodate. To be sure, this tradition had been suffering one blow after another since approximately the mid-nineteenth century from the thought of Darwin and Schopenhauer, through Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, and of the many other thinkers, and artists who have contributed to the advancement of human thought and expression. But the complexity of their works has always reached only a minor segment of society: the intelligentsia and artistic-minded, in general; the remaining two-thirds, more or less, of the population has remained in its old, moldy thought-patterns.
It is all too intellectual and frightening, for the majority. Yet truth has a particularly subtle way of making itself felt however long it may take, however long it is rejected. It seeps into the recesses of the individual and collective mind until gradually it cracks through the wall of resistance. If this dawning truth will not be recognized and accepted directly, easily, then it will take subversive, enticing, perverse measures until insidiously alienates more and more people from the conventional status quo; thereby setting society at odds with itself, as the vine of dissent, in all its guises, creeps indiscriminately but always with its set purpose in focus in all directions. Disorientation prevails; and from it, the teething process of growth gets underway amidst much anxiety and groping.
Steadily, he was advancing toward a self-integrated freedom, when in one explosive moment it ended; and what remains is the testament of his character, his example, his message, and his music.
And now the message through his music.
1963
This year the Beatles are making their mark on their own country from which they will go on to the world. Lennon introduces in the simplest form two of his three basic themes that course through his music and life: human love-which includes self-love (Love as essentially self preservation, self-identity), erotic love (as the male-female sexual-sensual-sensuous attraction normally leading to offspring) and vital love (as the vital [blood] bond to life and between human beings especially those closest to us as of an umbilical cord); transcendent love-which includes Love-as-God (as the creator and destroyer of all being) Love-as-Purity (Love as essential being), and human-transcendent love-which includes humanistic love (the concern for the well-being of mankind), idealistic love (as ideal perfection), and selfless love (as mystic experience of the oneness of all)
SELECTED REPRESENTATIVE SONGS:
Human Love:
.
."Please Please Me"
Transcendent Love:
"There's a Place"
Human-Transcendent Love:
No sooner does Lennon become a world-wide phenomenon with the Beatles, than he begins his "father's work," as though this is the moment he had been waiting for "I had decided at sixteen or seventeen that whatever I did I wanted everybody to know it." Right from the beginning, then, Lennon reveals to the world his two sides our two sides his humanness (the all-too-human in us), and his transcendence (the more-than-human in us) To balance these two sides of himself, to attain to a kind of wisdom, will be his lifelong struggle; and he wants the world to witness this struggle, so that he can serve as an example, a witness, for others to do the same. This is what he means when he says that "I am a representative of the human race," "If you want to be a hero, then just follow me," "I am of the universe / and you know what it's worth."
1964
This year, Lennon, with the Beatles, solidifies his impression upon the world by singing traditional love songs, though in their own unique style of music, lyrics, and voice, coupled with their charismatic appearance and wit. This is the pivotal year from which all else follows.
SELECTED REPRESENTATIVE SONGS:
Human Love:
.
. "I'm a Loser"
Transcendent Love:
Human-Transcendent Love:
.
"Money" [cover song]
1
The Beatles are worldwide. Their success is unprecedented. They changed the world as though from out of the dark ages. They put a smile on our faces and a lift to our spirits. We got a chance to put a smile on our faces ..." [George Harrison] The Beatles are the Apollo of the dream, the light of the sun-Sun Gods. Their music uplifts, their personalities entice. They are magic, the dream weavers.
And Lennon?... Well, as much as he may be enjoying his glory, he nonetheless has his father's work to do underlying all the Beatle "to-do." "The one thing those Beatles did was to affect PEOPLE'S MINDS." [Lennon]
Another minimally transcendent message issues from him in the cover song "Money, in which he cries out at the end "I want to be free!"
Free? Free from what? Doesn't he have the world in his hands; all the money, women, influence, power, prestige that anyone could imagine for a young man in his early twenties? Yet something is wrong, somewhere, somehow? He fought every inch of the way for this victory. Why is it not enough? Why can't he bask in his fame? Live the good life, the high life to the hilt?
1965
This is the year Lennon discloses to the world in no uncertain terms his intent to "show ev'rybody the light." And this light is Love as manifested humanly, transcendently, and human-transcendently. Regarding human love, he reveals his need of love ("Help!"), the violence of it ("Run for Your Life") and the tenderness of it ("In My Life"); regarding transcendent love, he announces his vision of Love ("The Word") and its meaning to him ("In My Life"); and regarding human-transcendent love, he reveals his humanistic concerns in light of it ("Girl").
SELECTED REPRESENTATIVE SONGS:
Human Love:
.
. "Help" / "Run for Your Life" / "Nowhere Man"
Transcendent Love:
.. "The Word" / "In My Life"
Human-Transcendent Love:
.."Girl"
1
Help! I need somebody
Help! not just anybody
- Help
These are the desperate lyrics Lennon sang during the halcyon Beatle days that first sounded, in no uncertain terms, in no boy-girl format, a personal note of a mind, a heart, a soul, in trouble; of a man locked inside himself, a man of expansive potentials constricted into a bleak sense of guilt, futility, rage, and worthlessness; a man whose tremendous musical and social successes only magnified his personal failures; a man isolated from the soundings of his true self -- his Love being.
Though the track has a commercial up-tempo beat, still an urgent vulnerability comes across as he drives through the song. Here for the first time he or any musician, for that matter reveals his soft underbelly in no uncertain terms. Yes, he was fiercely independent in his early youth, and "never needed anybody's help in any way"; but now his defenses are collapsing, his "independence seems to vanish in the haze"; and he is desperate for "not just anybody," but for that one special woman, his "dream girl," as he called her, who would not only love in return, but would help free his bound and hurting mind. She had to be of his caliber, and his present wife simply was not. Something in him is pressing to be known, to be freed; and he is wise enough to know that only the love of the right woman can start him on the way to self-freedom. But there would be no one to help get his "feet back on the ground," back to reality, until he fell in love with Yoko almost three years later. For know he is crying out for help.
I meant it it's real. The lyric is as good now as it was then. It is no different, and it makes
me feel secure to know that I was aware of myself then. It was just me singing "Help!"
and I meant it.
2
Yet, through the eye of all this Beatle pandemonium comes the Beatles' "Rubber Soul" album which first introduces the world to John Lennon, the lyrical and melodic poet of the first order who envisions love "as something new"; the humanist who pains over man who "must break his back to earn his day of leisure;" the sentimentalist (in the best sense of the word) who will "never lose affection for people and things that went before."
It is his vision of Pure Love and his humanistic deeds that Lennon will insinuate into the public conscious- ness for the next fifteen year; and these have their missionary beginnings on this album: his love vision in The Word, and his humanism in Girl.
It sort of dawned on me that love was the answer. The first expression of it was a song
called "The "Word." Love seemed like the underlying theme to the universe. Everything
worthwhile got down to this love, love, love, you know: the struggle to love and be loved.
There's something about love that's fantastic. Even though I'm not always a loving person,
I want to be that. I want to be as loving as possible, or in the Christian sense, as Christ-like
as possible; or in the Hindu sense, as Gandhiesque as possible.
We started putting out messages. Like "The word is love," and things like that. I write
messages.
And so Lennon's and pop music's first anthem of human-transcendent love is ushered into our consciousness in a bright, upbeat of optimism. He now has the answer to the freedom "in the mind" he is seeking, and it is love; not simply erotic love, but a vaster humanistic, spiritual Love: the love of which Jesus, St. Paul, Buddha, and all the seers and sages down through the centuries have taught. Even the title of this song, "The Word," has something profoundly, yet simply, sacred about it; as witness the sublimity of these two words conveyed in the opening lines of St. John's Gospel:
"In the beginning was the Word; the Word was in God's presence and the Word was God."
And the divine promise of Christ's words:
"And the Word will set you free."
There's no question that Lennon meant this phrase to have a similar impact And in Lennon's meaning, the Word is Love; just as it is in the Christian meaning: "God is love." And Jesus, believed to be the Son of God-"The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us," is, by exchange of words: the Son of Love; or in more human terms, the personification of Love. And love is what he lived, and what he taught, and why he "made his dwelling among us."
So taken all in all, love has far more, vaster, meaning than our normal understanding and use of the word. It is no mere feeling, yet feeling is our consciousness of it; it is not exclusive to thee and thine, yet this is our human contact with it; it transcends the erotic in us, yet the erotic binds us to life. Love in its fullest meaning is no less than the universal power that orders everything as it is, to its place. And this is Lennon's meaning when he speaks of love as "the underlying theme to the universe, and when he thinks of love as something new and when he sings his poetry of love in such songs as "Tomorrow Never Knows," "Across the Universe," "And your Bird can Sing," "All you Need is Love," and more. To give an idea of the company Lennon is in regarding his vision of love, the following select minds have this to say about love.
Alexander Pope / English poet
Look round our world; behold the chain of love
Combining all below and all above.
Rumi / sufi poet
Love is the energizing elixir of the universe, the cause and effect of all harmonies, light's brilliance and the heat in wine and fire, it is the aroma in perfumes and the breath of the Divinity; it is the Life in all being. Love is the quickening solvent in maya and the coalescing agent in union. It is all the texts have to say, and the more that remains unspoken. 'What is love? Thou shalt know when thou becomest me.'
Vivekananda / Indian philosopher-seer
Where should man go to prove the existence of God? Love is the most visible of all things. It is the force that is moving the sun, the moon, and stars, manifesting itself in men, women, and in animals, everywhere and in everything. It is expressed in material forces as gravitation and so on. It is everywhere, in every atom, manifesting everywhere. It is that infinite love, the only motive power of this universe, visible everywhere, and this is God Himself.
Shakespeare / English playwright-poet
Love is a spirit all compact of fire
These passages clearly evince the awesome impression that we are in fact faced with the essence, the principle, the might, the Meaning, of reality, of existence, in this matter of Love. It is no mere sentiment, it is, as Lennon put it, "the underlying theme to the universe." And in the human realm of meaning, love is the bond that unifies man to woman, woman to man, and man to man, woman to woman, and men and women to their common humanity.
Lennon envisioned somehow mystically, or intuitively, or surrealistically, or conceptually the meaning of love in both its universal and particular perspectives; and being gifted with musical genius and personal magnetism, he set forth to "spread the word"-which makes it all the more significant that his first preachment would be his bright, optimistic, upbeat song "The Word."
Beauty through lyrical imagery and melodic nuances is to be Lennon's medium through which he evokes the message of love; which is what his wife, Yoko Ono meant when she said, "John's stuff is like the message is the medium; it's the message. ...it's like an urgent message, I feel. " And love is the message heralding its way through the medium of beauty: as expressed musically in Lennon's genius of musical expression.
3
It is for this reason of being in touch with this Love Reality that Lennon can boldly announce to the world in "The Word" that he is to be a messenger of love.
Now that I know what I feel must be right,
I mean to show ev'rybody the light.
-The Word
4
Lennon's enterprise then is twofold: humanistic-the way to love; and transcendent-the way of love. These two master themes will interweave in both his music and his life.
It is his humanistic strain "I'm concerned with people, all right" that fairly much dominates the Rubber Soul album and all his future solo albums in particular, as well as his life in four specific songs: "In My Life," "Girl," "Run for your Life," and "Nowhere Man." These songs earmark three distinctive features of his humanistic concern: sympathy, justice, and truth. His sympathy reveals itself in "In My Life" in a sentimental air of nostalgia for his past:
I know I'll never lose affection
for people and things that went before,
I know I'll often stop and think about them...
Yet even in this flush of human sentiment, he considers love transcendently:
and these memories lose their meaning
when I think of love as something new.
His justice unfolds in his sighing madrigal "Girl", which serves as the genesis of his crusade "to save humanity"
Was she told when she was young
that pain would lead to pleasure?
Did she understand it when they said
that a man must break his back
to earn his day of leisure,
will she still believe it when he's dead?
These closing verses lodge a subtle attack against religious doctrine and social inequity that both exploit
and oppress the people. The first two lines strike at Christianity.
1966
This year Lennon's main concern is to infuse his public with the spiritual aspect of his world task-the God-within. Having done that, he would expect that the enlightened person would have done with the God-in-the-sky concept and all its religions. Accordingly, he makes his controversial statement against institutional Christianity, and thereby puts his life and security on the line by compounding enemies by the millions-the stuff of which heroism is made.
SELECTED REPRESENTATIVE SONGS:
Human Love
Transcendent Love:
.. "Rain" / "She Said, She Said" / "And Your Bird Can Sing"
/ "Tomorrow Never Knows"
Human-Transcendent Love:
"Rain"
1
Lennon has discovered something of monumental importance: that everything is a state of mind. Change your state of mind, or your attitude, and you can change yourself.
Everything is its opposite.
And this is the optimism that shines through his song, "Rain." First, he introduces in imagery of rain and sun our usually resisting, ineffectual state of mind when faced with change or effort.
If the rain comes they run and hide their heads.
They might as well be dead,
If the rain comes, if the rain comes.
When the sun shines they slip into the shade,
And sip their lemonade,
When the sun shines, when the sun shines.
Lennon assures us that he himself will not give way to the discomforts of rain or shine: change and effort.
Rain, I don't mind,
Shine, the weather's fine.
The meaning here is not so much a matter of self-control, or forbearance, or moral courage, as it is more a change of mind: of outlook, of attitude. With this change of mind, the pain from which we flee, ends almost miraculously! We are transformed. We probably have experienced this ourselves when we have decided "once and for all" to end a long term habit. Suddenly our worst fears are dissolved. No more urge, no more pain. We have made up our mind. The miracle, of course, is coming to this "making up our mind." All the reasoning in the world won't reconcile us to the pain of withdrawal, to the breaking a long-term habit of mind. Just as we can't make ourselves fall in love, so we can't persuade ourselves to welcome pain. Something "miraculous " has to happen to us, something transcendent of reason and self has to occur.
Lennon touches on this miracle in this same song:
This will be an ongoing motif of Lennon's, that you "feel your own pain." He doesn't mean this merely in a psychological sense that is too much to expect from most of us-but in a transcendent sense of drawing to the pain, being that pain, loving that pain; in which case the pain dissolves.
And this is the freedom, the power, the love, in the mind, that needs only to be tapped. All that is required is the right perspective on everything and that is everything: the wisdom of all. Everything else we might attain in this life comes nowhere near this attainment: this jewel of human understanding, this wisdom which frees the mind unto self-freedom; and love is its center, force, and meaning.
This is the meaning that comes through in Lennon's "And Your Bird Can Sing". The "me" to which he refers can be interpreted as Love: "the underlying theme to the universe." "Me" is the Love in you, in me, in everyone.
You tell me that you've ev'rything you want,
And your bird can sing,
But you don't get me,
You don't get me.
No matter what you possess, what you experience, what you achieve, everything falls short of the ultimate prize - freedom in the mind: Love. And where in the mind does this Love reside? In the mystic center of it: the void, wherein nothing exists except the pure light-power of Love itself. And it is this Love that we "don't get," that we "can't see," that we "can't hear," so long as we are entranced by the swoon of our senses and pandemonium of our ego. Dazzled by love of self we are blinded to love of Love.
This is not to make a judgment as to whether we should or should not be dazzled by life to the exclusion of Love itself, but a truth. And the truth simply stated is: the less we love life through the eye of self, the more of Love we become; and so, the more loving beyond our self. By dying to self we live to Love. Yet people feel that this dying to self is a dying to life; which is as far off the mark as to say that the less we love, the more we are loved.
Nonetheless, the dread of dying to self so as to reach the mystic center of Love is far too overpowering for far too many people. Lennon however attempts to dispel this dread in his visionary "Tomorrow Never Knows. " It is the vision of the mystics throughout the ages, experienced as pure bliss-consciousness. It has been named differently according to different cultures: God, Nirvana, Satori, Truth, Spirit, the Void, the Kingdom of Heaven, the One, the All. Lennon calls it Love. Regardless of the name-though It cannot really be named-the Reality is the same.
Turn off your mind relax and float downstream,
it is not dying, it is not dying,
lay down all thought surrender to the void,
it is shining, it is shining.
That you may see the meaning of within,
it is speaking, it is speaking,
That love is all and love is ev'ryone,
it is knowing, it is knowing.
And as this self-freedom, this Love, is in the mind, and not in some formalized religious catechism, or ritual, or dogma, it can be tapped; one can be his own priest. It has something to do with the truth that everything is "just a state of mind," and that somehow we have the power to change our states of mind; and that somehow this power is identified with the divinity of Love: of God.-"God is love."*
All we've got to solve is our own heads.
With this self-oriented perspective of God, it comes as no surprise that Lennon would reject the mesh of organized religion; Christianity in particular, since he was an occidental.
Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that. I'm right and I will
be proved right. We're [the Beatles] more popular than Jesus now. I don't know which
will go first -- rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick
and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.
In its way the second political thing I did was say The Beatles are bigger than Jesus
....I nearly got shot in America for that." [The first political thing he did was the creation
of the Beatles.]
I believe what Jesus actually said -- the basic things he laid down about love and
goodness -- and not what people say he said. If Jesus being more popular means
more control, I don't want that. I'd sooner they'd all follow us even it's just to dance and
sing for the rest of their lives. If they took more interest in what Jesus - or any of them --
said, it they did that, we'd all be there with them. ...I am [religious] in the respect that I
believe in goodness and all those things.
I've nothing really against the idea of Christianity and their ways. I suppose I wouldn't
make that remark about Jesus today [that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus].
I think about things differently. I think Buddhism is simple and more logical than Christianity,
but I've nothing against Jesus. I'll let Julian [his son] learn all about Jesus when he goes
to school, but I'll also tell him there have been lots of other Jesuses. I'll tell about the
Buddhist ones; they're good men as well.
I don't need to go to church. I respect churches, because of the sacredness that's
been put on them over the years by people who do believe. I think a lot of bad things
have happened in the name of the church, in the name of Christ; and therefore, I shy
away from churches. As Donnovan once said, "I go to my own church, in my own temple,
once a day. I think people who need a church should go; and others who know the church
is in your own head, should go visit that; because that's where the source is.
Everything you read about, all the religions, are all the same basically. It's just a matter of
people opening their minds up.
Lennon's central point regarding the Christian religion is, in effect: Lay aside all religious paraphernalia: dogma, catechism , ritual, practices, church attendance, homilies; and center in to the purity of religion: its spirituality, which is in our own church: our mind. God is in our mind, not in church. No one person, has an exclusive priority on God; we are all essentially God that is our meaning. Life, we might say, is one of the dimensions of God; and so long as we are living, we are that dimension in our own individual form. So, in reality, we are two realities removed from God: first, our own individual form of life; and second, the dimension or form of life itself. Yet we have our intimations of God, our images, symbols, and signs to represent the God of our mind-twice-removed.
And for those who are finely in touch with the God in their mind: Love-Meaning, they are to inspire and guide others to that Source. But that they vest themselves in the pride and honor, of being the chosen ones to preach to their flock (of sheep)-that Lennon will not abide. Humility is what Christ taught, and what Buddha taught, and what Krishna taught, and what Zarathustra (Nietzsche's Zarathustra) taught. You cannot "be powerful and pure," Lennon said-or otherwise stated: You cannot both love yourself ego-directedly and be of Love, simultaneously.
The message, then, is: seek God in your mind with the inspiration and guidance of those who, in humility, have found It-as far as that is humanly possible.
And Lennon has images of God as Love radiating Itself across the universe.
1967
Lennon's songs this year continue his emphasis on transcendent Love, mostly in surrealistic, psychedelic imagery. Human-transcendently, he gets across the idea that not only is he of special import, meaning, to this life ("Strawberry Fields Forever"), but that so is everyone else in his/her own unique way ("Baby You're a rich Man")
SELECTED REPRESENTATIVE SONGS:
Human Love:
.
. "All You Need Is Love" / "A Day in the Life"
Transcendent Love:
... "All You Need Is Love" / "Fixing a Hole" / "Across The Universe" / "I Am the Walrus"
Human-Transcendent Love:
"Strawberry Fields Forever" / "Baby You're a rich Man"
1
Images of broken light which dance before me like million eyes,
That call me on and on across the universe.
. . .
Limitless undying love which shines around me like a
million suns,
It calls me on and on across the universe
- Across the Universe
This gorgeously lyrical song* of cosmic love alone places Lennon in the hallmark of the great mystic poets. This song represents his vision of God-as-Love in the surreal imagery of lyrical music. In this beauteous song, Lennon has translated his vision of universal love into a transcendental swirl of endless images that "fly out," that "slither," that "wave," and "drift," and "dance," and "meander," and "tumble," "ring," and "shine." Whereas his "Tomorrow Never Knows" evokes the unity of love set in the still of the void, the eye of the storm, "Across the Universe" attempts to name the nameless in images that evoke the multiplicity of love in its perpetual play of energy forces and forms. Yet Lennon contrasts this multiplicity of Love with the unifying still of Love in the lines, "Nothing's gonna change my world"; which is to say: everything changes except Love in its eternal unknown Meaning "my world."
So to interpret Lennon's lyric "all you need is love" simply, or essentially, in erotic or humanistic terms is by far to miss his point. The love that all we need, for him, is the love that moves mountains, that is the kingdom to which Christ refers in his words "Seek first the kingdom of heaven and all else will be given you." And to change the wording slightly in Christ's answer to the woe of this life, Lennon is in effect is singing: Seek first the kingdom of Love, and all else will be given you. By this exchange of word-meaning, it will be easier to understand the meaning of Lennon's whole body of work, and of his mission; which is to sing his soul in urgency for his, and, for man's, human realization of this Love.
The more humanistic message of "All you Need is Love" is the one we are more familiar with: universal brotherhood love. Lennon has this to say about this interpretation of his song:
And how do we tap this world Love? Meditation is one way. Still, as Lennon exclaims:
O, my soul!...It's so hard.
1968
This year Lennon falls deeply in love with Yoko Ono, a Japanese artist. Love in its erotic phase is at the fore of his life. This love-relationship fits appropriately into his scheme of things, as it merges the western world with the eastern world. His transcendent songs are more obscure, yet otherworldly nonetheless. Human-transcendently, he initiates his social-political statement that before institutions can be fundamentally changed we must first "change our heads." ("Revolution")
SELECTED REPRESENTATIVE SONGS:
Human Love:
.
. "Dear Prudence" / "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" / "Julia"
Transcendent Love:
.. "Glass Onion" / "Everybody's Got something to Hide
Except Me and My Monkey" / "Hey Bulldog"
Human-Transcendent Love:
.. "Revolution"
1
Lennon, with the Beatles, is in India in the early months of the year meditating under the guidance of the Guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
We [the Beatles] dropped drugs long before we met the Maharishi. It had
done all it could do for us. There was no going any further.
. . .
Yes, he is "of the universe," and yes, "Love is all and love is ev'ryone," and yes, Love is the underlying theme to the universe"; and for all his insight and vision into transcendent love, he sings, "And you know what it's worth" which is not very much for him without the gift of human love between a man and a woman. And this he still does not have; and he is desperate, and suicidal.
Yes, I'm lonely wanna die
. . .
Home from India, Lennon falls completely in love with Yoko, and she with him. Her love is to be for him the synapse to the Love source that possesses him. She opens a channel in him through which can flow his full artistic creativity. She makes him see that he is a true artist in his own right apart from the Beatles. The second stage of his mission gets underway: the humanizing of his transcendent vision of Love.
I've never known love like this before, and it hit me so hard that I had to halt my marriage to Cyn. And I don't think that was a reckless decision, because I felt very deeply about it and all the implications that would be involved. Some may say my decision was selfish. Well, I don't think it is. Are your children going to thank you when they are eighteen? There is something else to consider too-isn't it better to avoid rearing children in the atmosphere of a strained relationship?
No sooner do they get together than they initiate a series of artistic and social events which carry with them consequences of far-reaching magnitude. Yoko inspires Lennon's courage to the task.
. . .
So there is a case for us all to put society right; and that is basically why there is unrest all over the world; because a revolution must come.
4
Yes, "a revolution must come" but a revolution of epic grandeur, the likes of which humanity will ever stand in awe. This is first and last an individual revolution, and only subsequently a social, political revolution. In this revolution, psychological fears will be largely dispelled, fears of the unknown, of death, of insecurity, of failure, of rejection, of inadequacy, and so forth.
Lennon's "Hey Bulldog" touches on this future state of mind.
There is a kind of happiness, a kind of child-like innocence, a kind of solitude in the soul of our mind that last "miles" and "years"; a state of mind which will enable us to "listen to our fears," which we can turn to when we're "lonely." We may have had glimpses, intuitions, momentary surges of this state of mind, and think that is all there is to it, that it can have little or no effect on our daily lives. Lennon thinks differently; he sings that we "haven't got a clue" to the limitless power of the mind-to our power to will. In comparison to this power, our "smile" i.e. self-pride-is not so very "special." That we have this limitless power to will changes of mind, enhances us far beyond mere self-pride into a sphere of self-worth that makes us all essentially beautiful. And this is Lennon's drift in his "Baby You're a Rich Man," recorded a year earlier. The song is a projection into the future of man's mind.
And were we to interpret Lennon's song "Happiness is a Warm Gun," as a redemptive salvation by the means of erotic love then I think we would be close to the song's meaning.
Let me put this interpretation in as simple terms as possible: Yoko saved Lennon from suicidal despair. Let us start with that as the main theme to the song.
She's not a girl who misses much
. . .
She's well acquainted with the touch of the velvet hand
The "she" is the aware woman who knows what is going on with the lecherous type of man with the "velvet hand."
Like a lizard on a window pane.
. . .
The man in the crowd with the multicoloured mirrors
On his hobnail boots
Lying with his eyes while his hands are busy
Working overtime
A soap impression of his wife which he ate
And donated to the Nation Trust.
There he is, lizard-like, looking up women's skirts, and the like, flattering them at every turn with a turn of the phrase for his sexual pleasure, while treating his wife like s - - t: A soap impression of his wife which he ate/ And donated (as excrement) to the Nation Trust.
This type of lusting behavior of men himself included, I'm sure he would include and the whole depravity aspect of sex depresses him, despairs him so searingly that he needs "a fix" to relieve him.
I need a fix 'cause I'm going down
Down to the bits that I left uptown
I need a fix cause I'm going down
But in the end the fix relieves him only temporarily, and he's back to his despair over and over again to the point the suicide seems the only way of the pain. And for his suicidal state of mind happiness would be a warm gun, since he would be out of his misery after shooting himself out of existence.
But Yoko - "I occasionally call her Mother, because I used to call her Mother Superior; remember `Happiness is a Warm Gun'? She is Mother superior" comes to the rescue, and saves him from the gun to the head.
Mother Superior jumped the gun
And so, the actual gun transforms into the warm feel of his woman-savior in his arms and in his touch.
Happiness is a warm gun
When I hold you in my arms
And I feel my finger on your trigger
I know no one can do me no harm
Because happiness is a warm gun
It is love as erotic that now has embraced him, that has freed him from his "deep despair." His vision alone could no longer sustain him. He needed the right woman for his equilibrium, if not for his sanity; and he has her in Yoko Ono.
. . .
1969
There is scant mention of transcendent Love this year, as Lennon is now absorbed in his erotic love of Yoko and their artistic, social, political activities. The over-coming of his drug addiction ("Cold Turkey") to ease the pain "when we were without hope, as he put it. lets his public know just how frail he is however his world status may seem to the contrary. He carries his political message from song to deed in their bed-in for world peace using the Viet Nam War as a leverage point, which many Americans considered unjust. He interjects brief mention of his transcendent message in two of his songs as though to remind his public that is where he remains essentially centered.
SELECTED REPRESENTATIVE SONGS:
Human Love:
.
. "Don't Let Me Down" / "I Want You" / "Cold Turkey"
Transcendent Love:
.. "The Ballad of John and Yoko" / "Because"
Human-Transcendent Love:
"Give Peace a Chance" / "Come Together" / "Dig a Pony"
1
Having found his other half in Yoko, Lennon's mind descends from the cosmic dance of "undying love" to the sensual bond of erotic love. He celebrates his descent from the heights in two extraordinary songs that capture both the sensuality (passion thrust) and the sensuousness (passion-beauty) of their erotic love. In "I Want You," the beat clearly evokes the drive and thrust of the sex act, while at the same time, a subtle, inflowing rhythm particularly noticeable during the instrumental section, tempers the animality of the act into a surging act of love. Words are hardly necessary, and appropriately Lennon pares the lyrics to the essentials.
I want you so bad
It's driving me mad, it's driving me mad.
She's so heavy
- I Want You (She's So Heavy)
War is over if you want it.
We all have Hitler in us, but we also have love and peace. So why not give peace a
chance for once.
Ev'rybody's talking about
Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism,
Ragism, Tagism,
This-ism, that-ism, is-m is-m is-m
All we are saying is give peace a chance.
- Give Peace a Chance
I was...pleased when the movement in America took up "Give Peace A Chance" because I
had written it with that in mind really. I hoped that instead of singing `We Shall Overcome'
from 1800 or something, they would have something contemporary. I felt an obligation even
then to write a song that people would sing in a pub or on a demonstration. That is why I would
like to compose songs for the revolution now.
The newspapers said, say what're you doing in bed
I said we're only trying to get us some peace.
- The Ballad of John and Yoko
We are both artists! Peace is our art. We believe that because of everything I was as
a Beatle and everything that we are now, we stand a chance of influencing other young
people. And it is they who will rule the world tomorrow.
Early in the evening I'm giving you the feeling
Everybody's nothing
And nothing to lose.
- (extemporaneous singing)
"Everybody's nothing" in the sense that at our core we are pure nothing but Love, Being, Soul-God. So whatever we seem to lose in this life, we actually do not lose anything in the end, since every-thing is a manifestation of Love; and so, in a sense is as real as no-thing.
Because the world is round it turns me on.
Because the world is round
- Ah - love is old, love is new,
Love is all, love is you.
- Because
This proper perspective also includes the realization of one's humanness, and its searing pain in the addictive extreme.
Temperature's rising
Fever is high
Can't see no future
Can't see no sky.
Cold turkey has got me on the run.
. . .
Oh I'll be a good boy
Please make me well
I promise you anything
Get me out of this hell.
Cold turkey has got me on the run.
- Cold Turkey
This harrowing song of frenzied despair is on the surface level a compelling evocation of heroin withdrawal.
. . .
Lennon has the intuition that to even begin to be free relatively free from desires of the ego and needs of the self: self-freedom-we have to face the understanding of the fears, insecurities, defenses, hostilities that accompany these desires and needs. We must work through them in pain and in joy. He invites us to follow his soul-struggle.
1970
Lennon's landmark solo album John Lennon Plastic Ono Band centers him right in the throb of human love balanced by his humanistic endeavors. His suffering humanity shines through as he strips himself of his false personas thereby preparing the way for others to do the same. It is the God of Love, not the idols of man, that inspire and guide him. It is his love for Yoko, and her love for him, that embolden and support him.
SELECTED REPRESENTATIVE SONGS:
Human Love:
.
. "Mother" / "Love" / "Well Well Well" / "Look At Me" /
"Isolation" / "Look at Me" / "My Mummy's Dead"
Transcendent Love:
.. "Love"
Human-Transcendent Love:
"Hold On" / "I Found Out" / "Remember" / "Love" / "Working Class
Hero" / "God"
1
The Beatles are over, and John Lennon, the man and artist, emerges about to begin the trek through the jungle of his psyche, through the desert of his soul in search of his soul. He intends to work through to his being here and now, in life; and not to leave the consequences of his actions to some cosmic karma, or re- incarnated destiny, of past and future existences. We make our own karma, our own destiny, is the message.
Instant Karma's gonna get you
Gonna knock you right on the head
His [Janov] thing is to feel the pain that's accumulated inside you ever since your childhood.
I had to do it to really kill off all the religious myths. In the therapy you really feel every painful
moment of your life it's excruciating. You are forced to realize that your pain, the kind that
makes you wake up afraid, with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of
somebody up in the sky. It's the result of your parents and your environment. As I realized his
it all started to fall into place. This therapy forced me to have done with all the God shit. All of
us growing up have come to terms with too much pain. Although we repress it, it's still there.
The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realizing your parents do not need you in the
way you need them. When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the
ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into
my mind. Janov doesn't just talk to you about this but makes you feel it. Once you've allowed
yourself to feel again, you do most of the work yourself. When you wake up and your heart is
going like clappers or your back is strained, or you develop some other hang-up, you should
let your mind go to the pain and the pain itself will regurgitate the memory which originally
caused you to suppress it in your body. In this way the pain goes to the right channel instead
of being repressed again, as it is if you take a pill or a bath, saying, "Well, I'll get over it."
Mine is an extreme case, you know. My mother and father split and I never saw my father
until I was 20, nor did I see much more of my mother. But Yoko had her parents there and it
was the same. [Yoko: Perhaps one feels more pain when parents are there. It's like when
you're hungry, you know it's worse to get a symbol of a cheeseburger than no cheeseburger
at all It doesn't do you any good, you know. I often wished my mother had died so that at least
I could get some people's sympathy. But there she was, a perfectly beautiful mother.] And
Yoko's family were middle-class Japanese, but it's all the same repression; though I think
middle-class people have the biggest trauma if they have nice imagery parents, all smiling
and dolled up. They are the ones who have the biggest struggle to say, "Goodbye mummy,
goodbye daddy."
Mother! you had me
but I never had you
I wanted you
you didn't want me
- Mother
So opens Lennon's marvelous landmark album, John Lennon Plastic Ono Band, an album about pain set in a stark, Spartan, echo sound of rock, beat, and lyricism. In the simplest terms, he plumbs his deepest, most incisive fears and pains; unmasks his various personas one by one until he stands as emotionally naked to the world as he stood physically naked on his "Two Virgins" album. Yet each song subtly registers a measure of hope, of courage, of human sympathy and understanding. It is a work of inspiration, a work of timeless and universal meaning. It inspires regeneration.
"John Lennon is my doctor. Whenever I want therapy, I put on his new album [John
Lennon, Plastic Ono Band]. He has lived the didactic. The songs are what every
patient experiences. The genius of the Beatles is proved. It is John. In this record,
John has made the universal statement. I believe it will transform the world."
- Arthur Janov, psychologist, founder of the primal scream therapy
And, as is his wont, he carries his personal predicament to the world for it to hold on too; that you're gonna see the light-the light of the truth of one's life and of life itself.
Hold on world, world hold on
It's gonna be alright
You gonna see the light
Having bid his parents farewell, he next assures himself to "hold on, It's gonna be alright." He now has Yoko, the love of his life. He now has his other half; he is complete. And however indelibly scarred he may be from his mother-father trauma, with Yoko, he can now at least psychologically stabilize, if not completely normalize, the destructive elements of his psyche. Also, he has his transcendence, the integrity, the unity, of his self with others to help brave the pain of this life.
When you're one
Really one,
You get things done,
Like they've never been done
And, as is his wont, he carries his personal predicament to the world for it to hold on too; that you're gonna see the light-the light of the truth of one's life and of life itself.
Hold on world, world hold on
It's gonna be alright
You gonna see the light
In Working Class Hero, he now points out the pain that has to be gotten through: the pain that is inflicted by family, bureaucracy and fellows. A pain so deep and restricting that one can hardly ever relieve it entirely.
. . .
At this point of his life, it is becoming clearer and clearer to Lennon that he realizes himself to be a guide out of the abyss and malaise of the contemporary "nowhere man." Yet he is as vulnerable as the next man under the scrutiny and influence of his fellow beings, as he sings in "Isolation."
And so in Love, he reminds us of our ultimate origin, Love, and how vulnerable we are to Its manifestations in this life of loving and being loved. If we are not loved nor can love, we are ruined as human beings in one way or another.
Yes, he has the vision that the word is Love that it is free, that it is you, that it is me, that it is touch, that it is sunshine, that it is being; but the din of human desire and need, and impulse, and suffering, drown it out. and though both he and Yoko "sat and talked of revolution," of women's liberation, "of how the hell we can get things done,"-still, they're only human, and don't know how to get things done, and both are "nervous, feeling guilty" that they're not coming up to what they know and preach. Their whole enterprise is frightening, elusive, seemingly impossible, too much, too vast for "just a boy and girl trying to change the whole wide world." He screams out his frustration in the refrain "Well, well, well." This frustration casts grave doubt on the whole meaning of their mission, his vision, as plaintively expressed in his next song.
He surely is lost, confused. He doesn't know who he is; yet he does really know
Nobody knows but me.
Nobody else can see
Just you and me.
- Look at Me
He is convinced what he is eternally, what he is here on earth to do; it is the human element that confuses him and foster so much doubt and fear and pain. But his vision of eternal Love cannot ever be denied, as he sang in his 'Across the Universe: "nothing's gonna change my world the world of "limitless, undying love which shines around him in the purity of his mind.
That he believes in World-Love as the ultimate reality of life, of existence dismisses not only all need of organized, ritualistic, dogmatic religion of the God of those moth-eaten religions that have man either on his knees in prayer or on his haunches in meditation. And this applies also for the so-called avatars of those religions or philosophies "from Jesus to Paul" as he sang in "I Found Out! " from Buddha to any leader who says , in effect, "Follow me as charismatic god-person.
He may have the way in his mind and in his message, but the man himself is to be forgotten. In other words, be concerned with what is being said, not who said it.
And this is the point of his next to last song, "God."
He believes only in this reality, in himself, in himself and Yoko.
The dream is over...
I just think it's a lot of bullshit, I think it's the biggest joke on earth that everyone's talking
about some imaginary thing in the sky that's going to save you and talking about life after
earth which nobody has ever proved or shown to be feasible. Why should we follow Jesus?
I'll follow Yoko, I'll follow myself
It's the same as I did when I went looking for gurus, It's because you're looking for
the answer which everybody is supposedly looking for. You're looking for some kind
of super-daddy. The reason for this is because we're never given enough love and
touch as children.
Turn to yourself, he is singing. Be your own leader, be your own priest. Be guided, yes, but take that wisdom unto yourself; don't idolize it or those who preach or teach it, whatever high place that person may be in: cardinal, pope, Dama Lama. You are not only your own person, you are your own God. God is in your temple, not in a church or holy Eucharist, or creed, except symbolically. God is the meaning of your life and existence, however we may never know that meaning. There is a meaning to our reality, to all reality itself, and it is inherent to all of us, to everything; and so is us apart from our bio-psychological self. And that Meaning can be called God or Love or Spirit or Mind, or whatever else; it does not matter. What does matter is that essentially, eternally, we are that Meaning. Lennon-and others St John: God is Love believe that Meaning, God, is Love; mainly because of the creative force and intelligence of which somehow, if we can tap into, we share in our Godhood, our Lovehood, in this life, and not only at death. And the most important way to experience this love is through acts of love: both deeds and creations, whether artistic, or as artisan, or scientific, or morally, or spiritually (meditation, contemplation). There is a beauty to love that surpasses understanding so that you reach the truth in intuition, in vision, or in reality.
Lennon had the intuition, the vision, and struggled all his life to make his vision of Love a human reality, whether in his peace activities...in his life. And he recognizes that to happen, one must strip himself of false notions, personas, pretenses, idols; and face the truth of one's pain and fear and insecurities so as to reach a kind of wisdom of insecurity which, in effect, is not relying of the appearances of security which, in fact, never really or fully gives security; but to rely on oneself as a frail, vulnerable human being, who however has a transcendence about him that is the infinite power and intelligence of the world-Love. This is the keystone concept underlying this masterful album.
But for all this "wisdom of insecurity," for all his iconoclastic stripping away of false personas and idols, for all his visions and intuitions of humanistic, universal love, still he closes his album crying out for the lost love of his "mummy". This loss pangs him to the soul, and always will for all his therapy, his gurus, his drugs, his meditations, his genius, his grand love in Yoko, his world success.
This extended diversion from Hesse's novel, Goldmand and Narcissus, to the origins of the Earth Mother, to the Divine Mother, to Nietzsche's Venus, deepens our understanding of Lennon's "fixation," you might call it with his absent-lost mother, and his devotion to his wife, Yoko, who apparently embodied all aspects of the Mother. His following remarks will have more meaning now.
I occasionally call her [Yoko] Mother
She is Mother Superior, she is Mother Earth,
she is the mother of my child, she is my mother, she is my daughter. The relationship
goes through many levels, as in most relationships; it does not have any deep-seated
strangeness about it.]
And I can do no better than closing this topic by summarizing with a statement by Hermann Hesse regarding the man-women relationship: "Everything we men do we do for women."
Of course this truth does not apply to every man at least not by their outward actions and attitude toward women. Yet, Do we really know the depths of even the man who lords it over women, or who are independent of them? What if he were not able to control women, would he then calmly accept that fact, or rather would he become suicidal, murderous, neurotic, and so forth? And, of course, to give men their due, the same psychology can be applied to women.
And as a final remark, all this Mother-Woman ideal leads to a deeper understanding of why Lennon's lay naked in fetal position while lying in Yoko's clothed arms in the last public photograph of them together in the Rolling Stone magazine.
1971
Lennon mostly lightens, "sugarcoats," his message, in his next major album, Imagine as though he were saying, "See, it isn't that fearful to `feel your own pain'; it's actually liberating once you come through it-The truth will set you free. [Observe the happy jaunt of "Crippled Inside" or the whistling in "Jealous Guy"-two serious topics] Once you feel the inebriating lift of this self-freedom, then it is easy rid yourself of false beliefs and exploitive institutions. From that point on, we can move ahead psychologically, socially, and spiritually." And Yoko is still by his side loving and goading him on.
SELECTED REPRESENTATIVE SONGS:
Human Love:
.
.. "Crippled Inside" / "Jealous Guy" / "It's So Hard" /
"I Don't Want to be a Soldier" / "Oh My Love" / "How" / "Oh Yoko"
Transcendent Love
Human-Transcendent Love:
...."Power To The People" / "Imagine" / "Give Me Some Truth"
1
The driving humanistic message free yourself, and himself of false idols, ideals, parents, leaders, religions of "JL Plastic Ono Band" leads Lennon into the next major step of his development and work-free the people. Whereas all along his prime message had been free your mind, now at this stage, he realizes more fully than earlier (in his 'Revolution' period) that before one can effectively free oneself, the tenor of society and its norms and attitudes and institutional structure and patterns have to be modified enough to make this individual freedom possible. An instance of his would be, say, I believe that as a lawyer or a doctor, I should give some of my time to defending the poor for a minimal fee; yet, my wife and colleagues convince me that in doing so, I will be jeopardizing my financial status when this aid conflicts with my high paying clients. The present social mindset is financial security above all else; and so, I give in to it.
Accordingly, since the power structure presently in control resists changes that might threaten the security and traditions of that structure, we cannot expect them to foster changing the rules in the interest of the people just enough to keep them off the streets in protest-is the attitude. Power, profit, prestige are what especially matter to the executives,and whatever will promote the security of these, they will adopt whatever the value, whatever the price.
Thus Lennon first step is to get the people up and about, waken them from their "dogmatic slumbers," stir them to action; and this is what the sound and lyrics of "Power to the People" effectively does.
Say you want a revolution
We better get on right away
Power to the people
Power to the people, right on
. . .
Having exorcised his mother trauma, demystified his god complex, and reaffirmed his human reality, Len- non sets sail to plow unknown waters toward the "promised land" of the new mind of man.
He envisions this promised land in his beguiling, doleful tune, "Imagine."
This is the classic utopian ideal set in the stately beauty of poetry and music-the ideal at which all realists scoff or smile indulgently. Lennon himself is realistic enough to know the objections
In his next track, It's So Hard,, he really gets to rock bottom of the problem of psychological change. And he sings it as in the bowels of the problem.
So we see that the problem of change is much more complex and stupendous than so many of our false optimists and our gurus and love sages present. Lennon is tired of all the false hopes and promises and theories and programs to enlighten mankind. Such people are either completely naive or ignorant of the intensities of human bondage or they skim over it or ignore it, or disdain it .They think they can advance man's happiness by bandaging the cysts. They have no idea how to lance and heal them --though they think they do in their books and lectures and talks, ad nauseum.
Lennon rings this out in his Gimme Some Truth.
In his ''Oh My Love,'' Lennon shows that all this harshness of our human connections is eased in the deep clear love of another. That love has opened his eyes. He can now see. Everything is clear in his head, ''in our world." That love has opened his mind so that for the first time "I can feel." What he is saying essentially is that the love of a woman, or a man, is the first step toward easing the grip of our bondage. This love does help to free us, give us wider perspectives, greater, more complete experiences and understanding. The love of the opposite sex is the complement of our being.
In How, he shows that he has been, and still is, just as lost as anyone else despite his celebrity and wealth; and is just as afraid to "go forward into. ..." But that does not stop him as his life has eminently proved.
1972
A heavily political year, both actively and musically. By releasing the provocative Some Time In New York album, and by associating himself with political radicals, he alerts the American government to him as a possible threat to their status quo. Now he is in deep water; for he is not just singing harmless songs of injustice, not just having a lark in bed for peace, but is actively challenging the government's policies by his non-American activities and by his political statement, Some Time In New York. It deems him an insurrectionist; and accordingly, goes after him with the intention of deporting him. Here Lennon stands tall again as hero inasmuch as he puts forth his beliefs, regardless of the damning conesquences. In tandem with these humanistic is his extended concern for the liberation of women ("Woman Is The Nigger of the World"), which he had mentioned in his song "Power to the People" the previous year.
SELECTED REPRESENTATIVE SONGS:
Human Love:
.
.
Transcendent Love:
..
Human-Transcendent Love:
[the album Some time in New York City]
. . .
1973
Interspersed with Lennon's apologetic, love chants for Yoko, Lennon's Mind Games album, is, in good part, a rallying call for those of like mind to come together to "get things done / like they've never been done." What we need to do is to get in touch with our intuition through the "absolute elsewhere in the stones of your mind"; and from there we can change ourselves and change society; so let's "come together over me
over you."
SELECTED REPRESENTATIVE SONGS:
Human Love:
.
. "Tight A$" / "Aisumasen (I'm Sorry)" / "Out Of The Blue" / "I know (I
Know)" / "You Are Here"
Transcendent Love:
.. "Mind Games" / "Intuition"
Human-Transcendent Love:
"Mind Games" / "One Day (At A Time)" / "Bring on The Lucie (Freda
People)" / "Only People"
The year Lennon and Yoko separated for 18 months. His social-political activism is over, though he is still singing about them. The year he releases his album "Mind Games." Again, he starts off with a mighty positive theme of pushing human consciousness beyond its far too limited boundaries of ego and its ignorance and injustice into the "spirit of peace and love."
But as before, Lennon is ever the realist. We have this human factor of ego and self and sensuality to come to terms with, and it is not easy; not only with our own wild urges, but with our need for success and recognition that keeps us ''tight.'' In this cut, he conveys to us the ''high'' of being somebody, of ''making it'' and the price we pay (1) ''Just as tight as a dope fiend's fix my friend. '' (2) You cannot both serve mammon and God'' is his basic message. Mammon gets you ''laid'' all right but you'd better tow the line, follow orders, or be replaced, oh dispensable one! And so tense your buttocks as you ''make it big''. If ''you can take it fine; but if '' You can't stand the heat......shade, '' which means, take your choice God or mammon. Each is all right, only know then to what you belong, what you prefer.
Depression strikes into us hard too, especially when things don't go our way consistently. And it make us act contrary to our better intentions, and we hurt those closest to us; since we need an outlet for the anger that sweeps through us; because when we're ''down'' we lose perspective, we lose hope, we lose the vibrancy, the drive forward; we lose direction, and so we get angry at our selves, and at life, and at others. All our negativities arise, and we are confused, and so we become impatient, bitter, spiteful, and our bitterness and spitefulness seems to be our only defense, our only strength; and so we strike out in barbs at the complacency and faults of others those that we even loved when all is well....
And this is Lennon's problem, as is sung in his gentle apologetic Aaisumasen (I'm Sorry)
But something seems to be missing in their love and life, for he apparently sings of the past when she would support him in his down periods.
All I had to do was call
So having realizing the inseparable dependency on his love for Yoko, and in general, of the sexes-and not just a romantic "smoke gets in your eyes" affair Lennon realizes that this transcendent revolution cannot exclude the man-woman relationship That must be revaluated and transformed as well as the personal. So this revolution is both a personal and inter-personal one, which culminates in a social revolution. remember his "Revolution" change your head, free your mind first. This can be seen in his optimistic, rousing "Only People" in the lyric 'we can't be denied with woman and man side by side' The same theme was stated in his "Power to the People:" 'I gotta ask you comrades and brothers / How do you treat you own woman back home / She got to be herself / So she can free herself.' It is a man-woman revolution among the people.
As seen, Lennon does not condemn the present bureaucracy; it is merely the reflection of our individual and collective ignorance; nonetheless, we have to move ahead beyond our ignorance, beyond the control of injustice. There has to be a conscious transformation in which justice and wisdom take precedence over injustice and ignorance. Government, as it is, and has been, historically has had its day-as a matter of fact, has been having its day for some time now; it just takes so long for the leviathan to sink.
Free the people from your repressions and exploitations he sings out at them. Get smart before it's too late.
So, what we will have is a growing number of overmen (and overwomen), to use Nietzsche's terminology; or mind guerrillas, to use Lennon's terminology.
The strong, intelligent, sensitive individual-millions of them (a million heads are better than one); and therein lies the continuing success of the human-transcendence of the intuitive man and woman.
Intuition is the new order of the day. The ascendancy of knowledge has run its course as the reigning queen of the mind. Through intuition, we know by "feel," by "sense," by vision; and this intuitive knowing is just as valid as rational knowing, even though intuition does not fall into the logical categories of thought. Intuitions are too nebulous, too fleeting, too undetermined, too random, to be put under the eye of the logical microscope. Intuition is of the unconscious; and more so, of the transconscious. And so our rational mind is ill-equipped to discourse philosophically much less scientifically, on the finding of the intuitive part of us. This intuitive part of us knows instinctively through the wisdom of the species-or collective unconscious, to use Jung's term-without having to rise to the level of rational discourse. It also sends messages from the center, the bowels, the meaning of our being. We can presently only capture these messages through the poetics of our imagination; similarly with the messages from the unconscious dream world. [quote Lennon interview about we can only use language as a means of interpreting our dreams]. Those who are predominantly of a rational turn of mind can see little or no value of murky, fantastic or mystic "feels" or visions expressed in kaleidoscopic imagery. It is all poetry or religion to them often meaningless poetry and religion. So these rationalists close off communications with those whose intuitions prevail predominant over their rational thought.
But the gathering evidence, and numbers, of the intuitive realm are eventually going to have to open the minds of the rationalists if they themselves are not be deemed "irrational!"
Lennon invokes us to recognize and respect our intuition in his lilting song "Intuition."
1974
The melancholy, Walls and Bridges, finds Lennon fairly much where he had been four years earlier-in a state of personal chaos. In 1970 he had channeled his buried feelings about the loss of his parents, and its neurotic in the Plastic Ono Band album. Here, 4 years later he channeled his feelings of the loss of his soul-mate Yoko into Walls and Bridges. In this album, he turns out psychological ballads that are desperate, soulful, angst-ridden, haunting. It is the multiple Lennon at its peak. Finished with the political-social activism of prior years, and separated from his wife, his life is at a standstill and in shreds; yet he still sings songs of transcendence and humanism. He is still carrying the torch, though on his knees practically.
SELECTED REPRESENTATIVE SONGS:
Human Love:
.
. "Going Down on Love" / "Bless You" / "Scared" / "Surprise, Surprise
(Sweet Bird Of Paradox)" / "Steel And Glass" / "Nobody Loves You
When You're Down And Out"
Transcendent Love:
.. "#9 Dream" / "Here We Go Again"
Human-Transcendent Love:
"Whatever Gets You Through The Night"
The separation practically destroys him as he wastes himself in alcohol, drugs, and carousing.
Yet the spirit unfolding is still with him as he sings in wonderment in his mysterious Here We Go Again.
Here we go again
Well I know I've seen this place before
Someone keeps on moving the door
In keeping with the transcendence of Lennon's mystic mind, he captures his wonderment of being here before, repeatedly here we go again and in different times and places and forms -- someone keeps on moving the door. One can interpret this eternal recurrence Nietzsche's term) as reincarnation, as Lennon himself interpreted it I've been a woman
.Or more mystically, as experiencing one as the universal mind of all things past present, and future, all rolled into one -- Oneness; and at that moment of awareness, one somehow has tapped into that universal mind thereby knowing, being, all things. And so, yes, you have been here before and have slipped into a particular time warp of recognition so that what you perceive psychically is an instance of time, either past or future; that is, that has happened or will happen. Reincarnation does no seem to take into account the apperception of future events that one experiences, and that actually occurs in our normal future. There have been numerous accounts of this phenomenon down through the ages, from all places.
At all events, what Lennon is describing is that mystic sense, that so many of us have experienced at least once in our lives, in one sense or another, in which we know with our third eye, so to speak, that this has happened before; I've been here before. It is such an overwhelming experience, that one never forgets it, that makes one know, not merely believe, that something universal is implanted in our minds somewhere,somehow that includes everything and I mean EVERYTHING! Lennon has been there, as his song attests to.
His next album, Walls and Bridges, records his state of mind during this 18 month separation ["It's all about hate, growing old, God, etc. ... "] It's a desperate album opening with his mysterious "9 Dream." He is seeking his vision, his muse, which has long left him. The last real divinity was recorded in his Revolution #9 represented in that second of the burst into eternity.
Without Yoko, he is "down and out" and he laments the truth that without the love of your life(s) by your side, we really are not much more than a commodity to others, no one else really cares for us other than lip service; as everyone else has their own lives to live, their own relationships to deal with day in and day out. That you are a star, or a genius, well, that's fine so far as admiration goes; but love is something quite different. We don't live with and love a person because we admire him or consider him a genius. We spend some time with them, and then we return to our own lives. And though Lennon has seen it all from A to Z, and beyond, has been to the uppermost success and popularity, has revealed himself, weaknesses and all, still he wonders why that is not enough to be loved for what he is. All this he sings in his Nobody Loves You (When You're Down And Out).
And for all his genius and resounding success and charisma, still he feels himself to be a person of bad faith, and the very same he perceives in others as well.
Well your mouthpiece squawks as he spreads your lies
But you can't pull strings if your hands are tied
Well your teeth are clean but your mind is capped
You leave your smell like an alley cat
- Steel and Glass
We steel ourselves with all our defense when in fact our psyche is as fragile as glass when it comes down to being alone like a rolling stone.
We're made of "steel and glass," and Lennon at this period is glass
What emotional havoc being without that one person who matters everything to you. You are prepared to let down all your defenses, get down on your knees, if necessary, to ask for forgiveness for being such a cad to the one you love.
And yet, on the other side of the coin, is the recognition that all this suffering that he is going through is all part, and the consequences, of being all-to-human; a condition that we can never fully extirpate ourselves from. Yes, we must ever strive to transcend our humanness, but not to despair over our failure to come up to our transcendence. We all have our particular thorn in the side"; and short of out -and-out moral and loving betrayal of our loved ones, we are to forgive each other seventy-times seven, as Christ put it. But he lifts himself up out of the depths to see things in a positive, self-forgiving attitude in his driving optimistic "Whatever Gets You Through The Night."; and that title is just his message along with:
The next song, his gorgeous "Bless You," continues his up side, his loving side. He blesses Yoko wherever she is, whoever she's with. even though they're apart, "now and forever our love will remain."
The anguish returns in his closing song on the album, the harrowing "Scared." This is the poetic, musical testament on the anguish of guilt and fear. He's scared of the fear invoked by the terrifying drone of the howl of killer wolves-with which the song begins. But he assures us:
And so he returns to Yoko, and soon after retires from public life for the next five years. These years are occupied with his continuing soul-struggles, raising his son Sean, and living with Yoko. They were not all happy years, they were lost years of not finding his vision, of losing his muse; and so his music. And he suffered too.
But they stayed together through it all. And then his muse returned, and the music returned, and his love returned, and family happiness returned.
1980
The songs he composed during his final year reveal a resurgence of hope, cheer and wisdom; though still, if not enmeshed in, then bothered, troubled, by, the entrapments of his humanness.
SELECTED REPRESENTATIVE SONGS:
Human Love:
.
. "(Just Like) Starting Over" / "Cleanup Time" / "I'm Losing You" /
Beautiful Boy / Woman / "I'm Stepping Out" / "I Don't Wanna Face It" /
"(Forgive Me) My Little Flower Princess" / "Grow Old With Me"
Transcendent Love:
.. "I Don't Wanna Face It"
Human-Transcendent Love:
"Watching The Wheels" / "Nobody Told me" / "Borrowed Time" / "Serve
Yourself"
Lennon is at sea where the heroic in him emerges again, but this time against a tempest of nature. He comes through it victoriously with a flood of music coming through him that, as it turns out, will be his last testament to his loved ones, to the world, and to his mission of Love.
It was my first time at sea: three thousand miles, seven days. There [were] four of
us on this forty-one foot boat, and it was the most fantastic experience I had ever
had. I loved it!
It is a celebration of family, man-woman relationship oriented, mostly positive; yet revealing the negatives as well.
The opening track "(Just Like) Starting Over" is a perfect beginning by Lennon
All seems well with the Lennon family after their stormy, rocky 12 years together in the public eye and privately. Yet Yoko's next track , "Kiss, kiss, Kiss," let's us know that this "precious life together" that Lennon has just sung about, as needful and inspiring as it may be, is not enough to chase away the anguish of life, and fear of death.
Lennon continues on his merry way with the happy jaunt "Cleanup Time," and everything is fine with himself on his side of the relationship:
You and me...place
We cast the magic spell.
He is where he belongs with his wife and child making music together [quote Len: I wouldn't want to make music without Yoko...] Yet, in Woman, he is still apologizing for his thoughtlessness, causing her sorrow and pain, and all the rest that seems to continue as ever in their relationship.
Yoko continues expressing for both of them the dark side of living together, of her inner anger with him :
Your eyes are cold
Your voice is hard
And she sings of the dark side of getting through life.
The money's hard
The living's hard
And yet she loves him, as she has, nor will, anyone else.
Yes, I'm your angel
I'll give you everything
. . .
Yes, our hearts are one
Our bodies, too
And it's so good (um) everytime
And I'll let it come true for you
And yet she has something to say about his women lusts:
Save your sweet talk for when you score
Keep your Monday kisses for your glass lady
I want the truth and nothing more
I'm moving on, moving on you're getting phony
And yet she loves him, and she's his for life, despite his male sexuality, his masculine bluster. At least be honest about it; she knows after all. Whatever you do, do not become a plastic human being.
You didn't have to tell a white lie
You knew you scored me for life
This leads Lennon to his apologia "Watching the Wheels," for the contemplative stream of consciousness way of life that he has always preferred to the active life [I'm part monk...]
People say I'm crazy doing what I'm doing
His friends and fellow musicians do not understand how he can let it go for the reclusive life. but Lennon sings that "I just had to let it go" so that he can find himself [quotes from Japan], and just as importantly, keep himself. He now has control of his life. He is beginning to be the master of his soul. He's found it again; and this time, more permanently expressed in character and daily life; it no longer only comes through him his art, his music. Now he's "just sitting here doing time." He knows now. It is not just a dream. [quote #9 dream]. He has found his essence again: Love; and for him, it is divine and eternal. The rest of his life surely is "doing time." and he doesn't have much time left.
He still has to get through this life. He loves life. He loves love; and he wants more than ever to live love. And his last two songs of their heart play re devoted to his expression of his love and need of the great love of his life, and his apology for causing her so much pain and sorrow; and his gratitude for giving him the fulfillment of his life.
You're a beautiful boy
With all your little ploys
Your mind has changed the world
And you're now forty years old
You got all you can carry
And still feel somehow empty
Don't ever be afraid to fly
If anything, the running theme in this last of Lennon's recordings, "Milk and Honey, " reveals the cyclical pattern of Lennon's life, ideas, and ideals. These songs, including his diary entrees, bring home the recurring issues of a man still struggling with his demons of depression, loss, despair, jealousy, but now in his fortieth year, tinged with a softening, lighthearted, attitude toward them. Yes, he has made progress toward self-freedom; yes, he now knows where his priorities lie; yes, he is a much happier man overall with his wife and child and growing wisdom of life; and yes, he is closer than ever to the self-freedom he has struggled and striven for all those years ["His spiritual pursuit; that's John" - Yoko]. His heroic experience at sea centered him with the cosmos, as he said; so, even in this case, he was at the center of his being his soul,
The songs on "Milk and Honey" show the interplay between the various facets of, and between, his humanness and transcendence.
In his song, "I'm Stepping Out," his humanness shows in that he can take only so much of his inner solitude; he has to get out of the house to feel that he is alive and throbbing.
"I Don't Wanna Face It" is a masterpiece of self-accusation. It reveals Lennon's disillusionment with himself. He wants his solitude and to be free from the public eye and its assessment of his work, yet he can't completely let go of its enticing influence.
In this next verse, he touches the truth-nerve of his whole life's enterprise; perhaps the falsity of it. He loves humanity on the whole, but not individuals in particular. They don't come up to his high standards. People overall are too wrapped up in themselves and so are not open to the finer reaches of their humanity. This stagnate condition of so many people renders them tedious, selfish, ignorant, untrustworthy, and even dangerous in a pinch; that is, when it comes to money or their pride, or their position. This state of affairs not only pains Lennon, but it questions the validity of his peace and love enterprise
The following verses questions the value of his musical career and achievements in the long run; that it is of no value at all when it comes down to the serious business of living as a "real" man with a "real" job.
Well I can sing for my supper
But I just can't make it
For all his truth-seeking, all his love and peace efforts, all his striving to better the world; nonetheless, he has to face the truth that these efforts, noble as they are, have been excuses from having to refine himself. After all, his world task is more important than himself; yet there he is, preaching, freedom and truth and love and changing your mind; and he is hardly up to them himself.
Well now you're lookin' for a world of truth
Trying to find a better way
The time has come to see yourself
You always look the other way
I don't wanna face it oh no
Still, for all his shortcomings, all his flaws, he still is in touch with his inward purity, his God within, the pure Love that shines around me like a million suns. Yet, he doesn't want to face that fact that he keeps procrastinating from taking the steps to get in touch with his purity. Much the same as St. Augustine so long ago cried out for purity but not just yet.
Well I can see the promised land
And I know I can make it!
I don't wanna face it I know
He is so close to his Source, his Center, his Purity, and yet
I just can't face it no more
Every time I look in the mirror
In "Nobody Told Me," Lennon next voices his disillusionment with people and life in general. In a series of striking one-liners, he makes his points that, one, for all our talk about this and that, this and that rarely happens; two, do we really love much more than our selves; three, we are so self-preoccupied, so self-loved, that we don't even recognize the evil that comes upon us in front of our very eyes (Nazis, for example), or if we do we ignore it hoping or expecting it to go away, which it usually doesn't.
We take all our pills to help us get through the day, some uppers, some downers; but it turns out to be an endless cycle that takes us nowhere except to the next pill. However high, inspired, we might be at times, we nonetheless reach our peak experience that enlightens us to the truth of our inwardness, our purity, our Love. And if there are UFO's? What then? We are not the only intelligent beings in the universe. And if not, then what? There then is much more to our petty little lives than ourselves. Why not open ourselves up to the unknown? We might find ourselves in that case.
Everybody's smoking and no one's getting high
Everybody's flying and never touch the sky
There's a UFO over New York and I ain't too surprised
Nobody told me there'd be days like these
. . .
Yet for all his transcendent wisdom, he still has a family with all its domestic responsibilities, unpredictable- ness, emotional highs and lows, all its busyness, so to speak. Dealing with his day-to-day life practical affairs successfully, harmoniously, requires a practical wisdom. This practical wisdom needed does not easily blend with transcendent wisdom. How to balance, integrate, his transcendent wisdom with a practical wisdom, I suppose would have been the ongoing task of the last segment of his life had he lived.
I'm over the conflict that says you can't be awake and have money.
In the end, however, Lennon remains ever the man of vision, the visionary who was in touch with the oneness, the purity, of all that is -- pure Love.
Grow old along with me
The best is yet to be
When our time has come
We will be as one
God bless our love
God bless our love
And yet he has ever the specter of depression, despair, shadowing over him when least expecting its presence.
[from his diary] Well, here we are. Age 39, looking out of my hotel window wondering
whether to jump out or get back in bed; so I got back in bed.
CONCLUDING PERSPECTIVE
How do we fittingly conclude this mighty saga of John Lennon who came into a dreary world and lit it up with mystic vision, enlightening intuition, unique heroism, dazzling persona, humble humanity, and, not the least of all, musical genius? I suppose by summarizing these traits.
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REVOLUTION AND THE BEATLES
It [music and poetry] would be harmless...were it not that little by little,
this lawless spirit gains lodgment and spreads imperceptibly to manners
and pursuits; and from thence with gathering force invades men's dealings
with one another, and next goes on to attack the laws and the constitution
with wanton recklessness, until it ends by overthrowing the whole structure
of public and private life.
- Plato The Republic
INTRODUCTORY NOTES
The purpose of this volume, Revolution and the Beatles, is to emphasize the Beatles' contribution to the transformation of our consciousness as a social phenomenon through their music and charisma. Their aesthetic, personal, and social influence influenced standards and values that led to a burgeoning of personal freedom unheard of before their arrival. This personal freedom was a necessary stage out of the confines of psychological repression before the next stage could be taken toward a self-freedom, which is slowly happening now everywhere, and to which the human-transcendent wisdom is contributing.
We might say, then, that the Beatles spearheaded a revolution toward personal freedom; and that the human-transcendent wisdom is spearheading a transformation toward self-freedom. Thus the title of the book, of which the following passages are selections: Revolution and the Beatles.
As a defensive note: I do not say that the Beatles started this revolution, consciously or unconsciously; but that they spearheaded it; since all the ingredients from other sources paved the way for their contribution. Similarly, with this transformation. The human-transcendent wisdom is not starting this transformation; it is just giving it a semantics, a unifying structure, and a guidance.
_____________
PREFACE
This book is a compilation of first-hand accounts of how the Beatles spearheaded the social and cultural revolution of the Sixties with their music and charisma. These edited passages are taken from published articles, inter- views, and books by journalists, musicians, Beatle historians, etc selected published writings and depict the Beatles leading role in the sweeping youth movement of the sixties a movement that turned into a social-cultural revolution through to the mid-Seventies. This approximately 10-year revolution served as the precursor to the conscious transformation that has been slowly developing since the eighties. The Beatles role in general was the expression of an effervescence that freed millions to be themselves regardless of convention and rebuke.
An introductory essay by the editor myself discusses the magnitude of this revolution.
Editor's Introduction
The Beatles! What can be said of them? They blazed unto a generation like sun gods. In them the magic of music fused so dynamically with the magic of personality that society opened at its seams. Through their music, manner, appearance, and dazzling presence, they radiated an abandon, an innocence, a gaiety, an irreverence, that mesmerized millions upon millions of the young and not a few adults. They were frivolity incarnate, casting an illusion of a care-free-world-come-true. The following excerpts from press conferences of their early fame convey the charm of their wit in a hitherto drear, dispirited world:...
And for the times, the Beatles were the magic that mainly initiated the "vast social revolutionary movement", upheaval, of freedom, peace, love, and magic and nightmare! for those who resisted, resented, and suffered from this youth movement of song and ideals. Nonetheless, for countless millions they were a celebration, a breath of fresh air breezing through a stuffy room. What they sang, said, did, or wore, made news and served as examples to be followed. They traveled to India to study meditation and the sitar, and thereupon popularized Indian philosophy-religion and music in the West. they embodied a freedom of creativity, expression, action. And this free spirit spread like a contagion that not only helped release many of the traditional shackles binding the young, but also helped bring them into prominence as persons in their own right.
In keeping with this social emergence, American rock and folk music took its own course; and with its personalities, contributed in no small way in reshaping the attitudes, manners, and morals of the young and many of their elders. Long hair, loose, colorful, disheveled, or outlandish dress, sexual permissiveness, psychedelic drugs, communal living, rock festivals, political and social activism; the idealisms of love, peace, freedom, anti-materialism, universal brotherhood and equality, spiritual enlightenment all these and more came into vogue as representative of the new youth movement: the counterculture, as it came to be known in its beginnings.
In our times, a Christian author, David Noebel, who effectively represents the segment of conservative Christian traditionalists against what they deem as the nefarious effects of rock music, deplores such music as decadent, destructive, and satanic; including the sexually perverted, drug addicted, barbaric lifestyles of its musicians. For him, this music has polluted, and continues to pollute, the minds of countless young people who would otherwise be morally and religiously sound. And he has the evidence to prove his case his one-sided case, that is:
"America's youth are bombarded with bizarre themes rhythmically hidden within the rock 'n' roll cultural matrix. Lennon and the Beatles supplied this receptive pop culture with lyric approval for dirt, drugs, and social rebellion.
"Formerly taboo perversions and the occult spice up their songs or the songs of their followers.
"The assault on Western values has been absolutely fierce. It is moral war! The undeclared battle to subvert the values of our youth is without parallel, so far as I know, in the history of the world.
"Neither John Lennon nor his legacy is ethically attractive. John Lennon was a purveyor of moral trash, a drug connoisseur, a driving force of the revolution...."
"The present rock 'n' roll scene (1982), Lennon's legacy, is one giant, multi-media portrait of degradation, a sleazy world of immorality, venereal disease, anarchy, nihilism, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, death, Satanism, perversion, and orgies."
Such is the topsy-turvy world confronting us in our day. And did the Beatles incite it all. Of course not. For one thing, it was the intellectual, liberal, and affluent conditions and social consciousness of the times that produced the Beatles, and made it possible for the young to make such strides as they did. As far as the musical influence of this youth revolution was concerned, it started with the rhythm and blues of the blacks, and wove its way through rock and roll where the fuse was lit by the popularity of Elvis Presley; and with him, you might say that the youth culture began. The explosion came with the Beatles. Certainly they did not consciously set out to turn our culture inside out or did they?
