Throughout
this book, apart from my own thoughts, I have
quoted words of several great Masters, and now,
although I do not consider him one, I want to
mention John Lennon, from whose words, if not
from his example, I got something. If nothing
else, he was a spokesman for his generation,
and wisdom can be found in some of his songs.
In Strawberry Fields Forever, for example, he
sang: "Living is
easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all
you see". Yes, it seems easier to
live when we are ignorant and feel no sense
of responsibility, to just let ourselves be
carried along by the stream, not knowing, and
maybe not caring much, where it is taking us.
But when our eyes are open, and we become aware
of how we share this Earth with countless others,
a sense of responsibility dawns, and we can
no longer live negligently or carelessly; living
then becomes harder than previously, because
we now have a sense of direction in life.
I am
not such a starry-eyed idealist as to think
that the conditions in his utopian song, Imagine,
can ever become realities, but I do think that,
individually, we can work towards some of them,
pulling down artificial barriers that have been
erected in our minds by others since before
we could think and reason for ourselves; it
is possible to overcome the false information
that we were impregnated with as children; we
can discover what is true! |
