Post by JoJo on Jan 9, 2006 18:55:36 GMT -5
This is a facinating post at the Lennon.net forum, it's long, but quite worth it.
www.lennon.net/community/view_topic.asp?tid=355
A few paragraphs:
Some say I’m Only Sleeping is aesthetically the best song he ever composed.
In terms of anthropology, this is the first orientation of the shaman getting his feet in the Underworld – the creative unconscious – the world under the earth, where he will take you down with him into the density of the earth, but the subtle realm of the earth, the Underworld, where “nothing is real” in Strawberry Fields. And there he finds clarity and confidence, but in a new world, the world of the unconscious where there is understanding of all you see with eyes closed, and the old world becomes a shell, a mere charicature of psychic life. The shaman then ascends out of the earth and into the sky, like Jesus rising out of the tomb and entering heaven. John and the Beatles rise then to the very height of their work in Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. And here at their best work is the shaman’s archetypal ascent to the heavens in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Like the Underworld of Strawberry Fields, the astral heavens also have otherworldly features, like newspaper taxies and magical rivers with tangerine trees and marmalade skies (like the tree “showered with reddish blossums” blazed in light in Jung’s “vision of unearthly beauty” that was his Liverpool dream)*.
At the peak, John wrote a song called “I am the Walrus” in which he invoked the Upanishads, which along with The Autobiography of a Yogi was very popular back in those days. John wrote, “I am he,” about the swimming together of all of us at the peak of the Sixties, and “we are all together.” “I am the Eggman,” he sang, with his characteristic Liverpool humor, “. . . they are the Eggmen. I am the Walrus*.”
It is all comic and hidden, but it reflects an awareness he had about being a man like Jesus, at the center of a world in transformation. The words, “I am he,” are from the core of Eastern spirituality and are well known to its practitioners*. This expression reflects the sentiment of the Upanishads in which the Atman (the Eggman) or the individual soul, finds itself at one with another individual soul, then another, then the whole soul, the world soul, the God consciousness, the Brahmin (the Walrus). It is what Jesus had become after he had gone through the Transfiguration, referring to himself as at one with the God force, at one with the Father. This is the Brahmin consciousness.
The Beatles were at their peak with Sergeant Peppers. There John would find fulfillment, anthropologically speaking. Then he would journey to the East, although Paul and Ringo were bored, and find the mystic Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a father figure to him, but a Great Father, a spiritual father, not an earthly father.
That is it. The shaman’s work is essentially over by then, except to bring the gift idea to the community. The shaman has brought the tribe with him through the transformation of the unconscious and then his role is up. It is up to us after that, with the idea he brought us from the dead.
www.lennon.net/community/view_topic.asp?tid=355
A few paragraphs:
Some say I’m Only Sleeping is aesthetically the best song he ever composed.
In terms of anthropology, this is the first orientation of the shaman getting his feet in the Underworld – the creative unconscious – the world under the earth, where he will take you down with him into the density of the earth, but the subtle realm of the earth, the Underworld, where “nothing is real” in Strawberry Fields. And there he finds clarity and confidence, but in a new world, the world of the unconscious where there is understanding of all you see with eyes closed, and the old world becomes a shell, a mere charicature of psychic life. The shaman then ascends out of the earth and into the sky, like Jesus rising out of the tomb and entering heaven. John and the Beatles rise then to the very height of their work in Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. And here at their best work is the shaman’s archetypal ascent to the heavens in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Like the Underworld of Strawberry Fields, the astral heavens also have otherworldly features, like newspaper taxies and magical rivers with tangerine trees and marmalade skies (like the tree “showered with reddish blossums” blazed in light in Jung’s “vision of unearthly beauty” that was his Liverpool dream)*.
At the peak, John wrote a song called “I am the Walrus” in which he invoked the Upanishads, which along with The Autobiography of a Yogi was very popular back in those days. John wrote, “I am he,” about the swimming together of all of us at the peak of the Sixties, and “we are all together.” “I am the Eggman,” he sang, with his characteristic Liverpool humor, “. . . they are the Eggmen. I am the Walrus*.”
It is all comic and hidden, but it reflects an awareness he had about being a man like Jesus, at the center of a world in transformation. The words, “I am he,” are from the core of Eastern spirituality and are well known to its practitioners*. This expression reflects the sentiment of the Upanishads in which the Atman (the Eggman) or the individual soul, finds itself at one with another individual soul, then another, then the whole soul, the world soul, the God consciousness, the Brahmin (the Walrus). It is what Jesus had become after he had gone through the Transfiguration, referring to himself as at one with the God force, at one with the Father. This is the Brahmin consciousness.
The Beatles were at their peak with Sergeant Peppers. There John would find fulfillment, anthropologically speaking. Then he would journey to the East, although Paul and Ringo were bored, and find the mystic Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a father figure to him, but a Great Father, a spiritual father, not an earthly father.
That is it. The shaman’s work is essentially over by then, except to bring the gift idea to the community. The shaman has brought the tribe with him through the transformation of the unconscious and then his role is up. It is up to us after that, with the idea he brought us from the dead.