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ALMOST 50 YEARS LATER, WE ARE STARTING TO �IMAGINE� WHAT JOHN LENNON TRIED TO TELL
US
BY RICHARD ENOS
When John Lennon released the song Imagine in 1971, the public was not fully ready to
embrace it. Sure, the embers of the Hippie Movement and its emphasis on peace and love
were still aflame, but this song offered a lofty vision that was beyond the reach even
of staunch supporters. The simple, graceful melody belied its far-reaching profundity.
Today, that vision, and the future world that he imagined, is just starting to become accessible
to us in its fullness.
Lennon had said that he got the initial idea from Yoko Ono�s book Grapefruit, which encourages
us to �Imagine the sky crying,� or �Imagine you�re a cloud.� Still, Imagine evinces
his signature militant challenge to widely-accepted conventions of our collective perception.
His Words Imagine there�s no heaven
It�s easy if you try No hell below us
Above us only sky Imagine all the people living for today
Lennon starts with perhaps the most controversial statement in the whole song: that the very
concept of heaven, so intrinsic to the Christian teachings adhered to by many of his followers
at the time, was a fabrication that was actually preventing us from living in the moment�the
true experience of Christ Consciousness and the creation of �Heaven-on-Earth.� Lennon
asks us to reject a life motivated by the fear of future retribution, and the false
promise of future salvation.
Imagine there�s no countries It isn�t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace
In one swipe, Lennon attempts to wipe away all the artificial structures that give rise
to opposition: country vs. country, religion vs. religion, race vs. race, etc. To suggest
that countries in our world could suddenly cease to exist is a stretch for most�but
just imagining it helps us all to give up the need to identify with those labels that
polarize us and prevent us from seeing ourselves as one.
Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world
Here Lennon challenges the Capitalistic notion of private property, but more deeply the perception
advocated by the Western world that life is founded on the survival of the fittest, that
we actually need to live in competition with one another in order to thrive. He invokes
one of the hallmarks of the hippie movement�a willingness to share the Earth�s available
resources with all of humanity.
You may say I�m a dreamer But I�m not the only one
I hope some day you�ll join us And the world will be as one
Finally, Lennon concedes that his listeners might think him unrealistic, a dreamer. But
he is undeterred. He seems to have realized, to a large degree at least, that what is thought,
intended�imagined�has the potential to manifest into reality. And indeed, the more
people that join together and focus on the same vision, the more immediately that vision
manifests in the world.
Imagining a New World The awakened community has become well-versed
in our ability to manifest through intention, both in our personal lives and as a collective.
Films like What the Bleep Do We Know? has shown us that Quantum physics is on board
to support this principle of natural law, and more and more of us are gaining confidence
in manifesting by focusing our imaginations on what we want.
We are at a watershed moment in the evolution of our consciousness, where we are coming
to know not only that the world John Lennon described is possible, but that we have the
collective power to imagine it into existence.