JOHN LENNON ESSENCE AND REALITY PART FIVE: GOD

PART FIVE: GOD

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JOHN LENNON: ESSENCE AND REALITY
PART FIVE : GOD
By its very nature, real love is a road leading in the direction of God. It is, after all, an emanation of God. It is therefore transcendental: it includes the immediate experience, but always exists beyond it, continually ramifying in unexpected directions. I am reminded of what George Adie Jr once said to me about Gurdjieff: “He was an on-going surprise.” The same is true of love, and more so, of God.
Most of what we believe or even vehemently assert to be love and God is, from a Gurdjieff-educated point of view, in fact obsession and infatuation, delusion and fantasy. In a group meeting of December 1941, Gurdjieff quoted a Hindu saying, “Happy is he who loves himself, for he can love me.” The speaker, I think, is speaking as a manifestation of God, or the Absolute. And when he says “Happy is he who loves himself”, the speaker does not refer to those who are merely self-satisfied. The paradox is based on the truth that everything real is – in God – a unity, and thus love is one, although all we may see are only fragments.
But there is nothing wrong in starting from a fragmentary point of view: the problem is identifying with it to the degree where one denies that there is anything else. Lennon’s journey illustrates this, as he started to make sense of the jigsaw pieces of his life and experience. My last Lennon blog considered “Grow Old With Me”, and how God and religious concepts were central to that song. I described it as an “anthem for the sacrament of marriage”, not just a love song, and pointed out that it directly quotes the Catholic prayer, the “Glory Be” – which is not the sort of thing which happens by chance.
And what was Lennon’s concept of God? It had definitely changed over the course of his life. In 1970, on the John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band album, he had a very different view to express. In the striking, and almost dramatically original song “God”, Lennon sang:
God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
I’ll say it again.
God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
Yeah … pain … yeah.
I don’t believe in magic.
I don’t believe in I-Ching.
I don’t believe in Bible.
I don’t believe in tarot.
I don’t believe in Hitler.
I don’t believe in Jesus.
I don’t believe in Kennedy.
I don’t believe in Buddha.
I don’t believe in mantra.
I don’t believe in Gita.
I don’t believe in yoga.
I don’t believe in kings.
I don’t believe in Elvis.
I don’t believe in Zimmerman.
I don’t believe in Beatles.
I just believe in me, Yoko and me, and that’s reality.
The dream is over.
What can I say?
The dream is over, yesterday.
I was the dream-weaver, but now I’m reborn.
I was the walrus, but now I’m John.
And so, dear friends, you’ll just have to carry on.
The dream is over.
As is apparent, the song doesn’t use the standard verse/chorus arrangement. The music follows and completely serves the lyrics, yet it also adds a further dimension to them, and significantly, it removes any cynicism the naked words might have suggested. In the DVD on this album in the Classics Album Series, Klaus Voormann relates that Lennon said to Billy Preston, who played one of the two pianos on this track, “Come on Billy, do a little of your Gospel piano. It’s about God you know.”
One might say that the song is about there not being a God at all. But this is a superficial view: Lennon himself said that it was about God. It took quite a long while before I realised that in the litany of non-belief, Lennon does not actually say “I don’t believe in God.” Compare these statements from the song “Love” on same album: “Love is you, you and me. Love is knowing we can be.” Do those words mean that Lennon believed that only he and Yoko experienced love and that it was a belief that they could “be”, meaning perhaps “be together”, or “be together without interference”?
What he says about God is similar to those lines from “Love”. Lennon might mean either (a) that God is nothing but a concept, or he might have meant (b) that whatever else God may be, God is as a concept. Either reading is open, but I think he intends the second. Remember, these are the lyrics of a song, not words from a train timetable or mechanic’s manual, and so they have to be read poetically.
If God is nothing but a concept by which we measure our pain, what would that mean? That atheists can cope with pain better? Or that belief in God is like the meter at a petrol station: the more you believe in God the more pain you are trying to sweep under the carpet? This simply doesn’t make sense, and Lennon always made sense or non-sense (splendid examples of Lennon’s nonsense can be found in “I Am the Walrus” and “Cry, Baby Cry”).
I am not suggesting that Lennon had an exhaustive and systematic theology, and expressed it here: I think the idea would have horrified him, or made him laugh, or both at the same time. What I am saying is that Lennon’s song raises these questions. I am not, I think, projecting my own concerns and thoughts into it. Lennon opened a perspective, and would have been glad to see that other people peered through the window. Neither do I think he would have placed demands or limitations on where they might pause or what might see.
This was one of the themes of Lennon and Ono’s avant-garde art: they wished to promote engagement between the artist and the audience. The artist presents something borne out of their reflections on life. The audience responds not just be appraising the artist’s work, but by reflecting on their own lives, and perhaps then presenting something else. For Yoko Ono and also for Lennon, who was – at least in this respect – her disciple, the artist is more of a stimulus than a teacher or performer. Art was not a separate plot in the field of life with neat stone dividing-walls. Thus when Lennon first attended one of Ono’s exhibitions, he saw a display where the clientele were invited to hammer in a nail.

He wished to, but was asked to pay five shillings. He then if he could pay an imaginary five shillings and hammer in an imaginary nail. Yoko was impressed: he had grasped the idea of using he imagination in response to her art, and of thus engaging with it.
In an interview, Lennon once said that he had been considering something different for “God”. The idea was to have a “do-it-yourself-I-don’t-believe-in” verse. That is, Lennon would sing “I don’t believe in …”, and then not sing anything else for the next word. It was to be a sort of “karaoke of disbelief”. However, he decided against it. I can see the point: some of Lennon’s inclusions such as “Hitler” and “kings” do seem odd. Surely Lennon did not imagine anyone but a few crack-pots do now believe in Hitler and kings? A blank line would allow the song to become more immediate to the listener.
I suspect that the point is that Hitler and kings, Kennedy and magic, are major elements in culture. They are magnets for all sorts of fears, hopes, beliefs and outlooks. They are social and cultural monuments. One only needs to consider how often advertisers use adjectives like “royal” and “regal”. Lennon could not cover everything, but he could cover his own experience: hence the inclusion of many eastern phenomena such as yoga, Gita and mantra, and his personal idols Elvis and Dylan. If I recall correctly, Lennon said that he sang “Zimmerman” rather than “Dylan” because “Dylan” was “bullshit”. This all seems, perhaps, conceited, and in one of the demo sessions, he prefaces the song by saying “Hear this brothers and sisters”, that he has a message, and that “the angels must have sent me to deliver this to you”.
The genesis of the song is interesting. Dr Arthur Janov, who was treating John and Yoko in 1970 with his “primal therapy”, said in the same DVD, that he and Lennon had been in Bel Air discussing various subjects, when Lennon had asked him: “What about God?” Janov said that he had then gone on at some length about how people with deep pain generally tend to believe in God with fervency. “Oh, you mean God is a concept by which we measure our pain”, said Lennon.
And I think there is a truth in it, although it is not the entire truth. Pain and suffering are major issues for the human race, and for religion. Many people say, not without some reason, that the entirety of religion is a response to these questions. Now, for some people this may true: their religion may be a way of dealing with suffering, or they may emphasize those aspects which help them.
This is understandable. Further, I cannot see that this is necessarily wrong in those situations. But one does not have to stop there. And this is where I think Lennon went wrong. I think that there is an extent to which Lennon was saying that anyone who used their concept of God to deal with their suffering was on the wrong path. The solution, he said, was to deal with reality. Again, very good advice, it is just that I think God is the very heart of all possible realities.
This brings me then, to the last part of this song, where Lennon sings of dreams, reality and life. Speaking of these monuments as a whole, he sings: “The dream is over.” He has awakened. He then strikes an even heavier note: “The dream is over, yesterday.” In other words, we have been too long asleep. Then comes the hope: “I was the dream-weaver, but now I’m reborn. I was the walrus, but now I’m John.” The artist is no longer performing as someone else, as if in a pantomime. He can speak in his own name. “And so, dear friends, you’ll just have to carry on.” There is relationship, and there is practical truth. “The dream is over.” And so at that moment, it was.
Depending on how one listens to it, one can find in this song a concept of dreams and reality which raises one to a level of wonder.
So, I think that Lennon is not purporting to damn God: but I think that he is trying to dip our concept of God into acid, or better, to encourage us to do the work ourselves. He does not propose a new concept: I think that is not his purpose at all. In the final analysis, Lennon does not preach about God. If he preaches, it is about concepts and dreams.
Finally, I once knew something who considered this album to be “boring”. Whatever one may make of it, I would suggest that any boredom one experienced listening to this album must be a defence mechanism, to avoid feeling the enormity of it. Once more, we are dealing with pain and suffering. And in the next Lennon blog we shall look at more enormous issues, when we consider “Happy Xmas (War is Over)”.
Joseph.Azize@googlemail.com
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Joseph Azize has published in ancient history, law and Gurdjieff studies. His first book “The Phoenician Solar Theology” treated ancient Phoenician religion as possessing a spiritual depth comparative with Neoplatonism, to which it contributed through Iamblichos. The third book, “George Mountford Adie” represents his attempt to present his teacher (a direct pupil of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) to an international audience.