Tuesday, November 19, 2019

The Shining Void as the Eternal Song: John Lennon's Tomorrow Never Knows was a response to George Harrison's Within You Without You

from Rubbersoul - Tomorrow Never Knows

When I heard this Shining Void lyric of John - I thought this is really awesome. I used to listen to this record when I was eight years old - a lot. The first record I ever bought was Sargent's Peppers and I listened to it Over and Over and Over and Over - alone in my basement - and I bought that record when I was about 12 years old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Within_You_Without_You - this song was the most intriguing to me on the album. I'm sure it had the most influence with its nonwestern tuning and nondual lyrics! Thank you George!
For the Beatles' 2006 remix album Love, the song was mixed with the John Lennon-written "Tomorrow Never Knows", creating what some reviewers consider to be that project's most successful mashup
So now I'm sure that JOhn Lennon was responding to George!

 When writing the song, Lennon drew inspiration from his experiences with the hallucinogenic drug LSD and from the book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner.
  Westerners get brainwashed to not understand it. But us blues musicians know better - by bending and crunching the equal-tempered tuning we hear how the Perfect Fourth and PErfect Fifth are truly complementary opposites of noncommutative phase into the Eternal One (that is formless light of the Void). Oh cue John Lennon's song from RubberSoul. that reminds me - I'm sure he was "competing" with George Harrison. Just as Paul was competing with John's STrawberry Fields when Paul wrote Penny Lane. The Light of the Void - John's song - was an "up" against Within You, Without You of Sargent Peppers.

The Mashup

Wow - news to me!

 We were talking, about the space between us all And the people, who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion Never glimpse the truth, then it's far too late when they pass away We were talking, about the love we all could share When we find it, to try our best to hold it there, with our love With our love we could save the world, if they only knew Try to realize it's all within yourself, no-one else can make you change And to see you're really only very small And life flows on within you and without you. We were talking, about the love that's gone so cold And the people who gain the world and lose their soul They don't know, they can't see, are you one of them? When you've seen beyond yourself Then you may find peace of mind is waiting there And the time will come when you see we're all one And life flows on within you and without you.
Well the Mashup really doesn't do much for me.... I think I like the two songs better separately.
 On the Love album, the rhythm to "Tomorrow Never Knows" was mixed with the vocals and melody from "Within You Without You", creating a different version of the two songs.[100][101]
So here is Cirque du Soleil doing their "show" based on the mashup song


1:50 - 2:00 this part makes have little orgasm R.I.P Georgie
 http://www.beatlesebooks.com/tomorrow-never-knows

  Since his intention was to mimic the Indian music they were coming to admire in early 1966, the format used on this track completely diverted their attention away from any pop structure with normal bridges, refrains or choruses. Even the ultra-Eastern songs “Love You To” and “Within You Without You” included refrains. However, “Tomorrow Never Knows” did include an instrumental section, so the structure ends up as ‘verse/ verse/ verse/ instrumental/ verse/ verse/ verse/ verse’ (or aaabaaaa). And of course, a droning introduction and conclusion round out the proceedings.

 As for an interpretation of the lyrics, this is best left to George Harrison himself: 

“The lyrics are the essence of Transcendentalism…Basically it is saying what meditation is all about. The goal of meditation is to go beyond (that is, transcend) waking, sleeping and dreaming…From birth to death all we ever do is think; we have one thought, we have another thought, another thought, another thought. Even when you are asleep you are having dreams, so there is never a time from birth to death when the mind isn’t always active with thoughts. But you can turn off your mind, and go to the part which Maharishi described as ‘Where was your last thought before you thought it?’”
 “The whole point is that we are the song. The self is coming from a state of pure awareness, from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in the outward manifestation of the physical world (including all the fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions) is just clutter. The true nature of each soul is pure consciousness. So the song is really about transcending and about the quality of the transcendent. I am not too sure if John actually fully understood what he was saying. He knew he was onto something when he saw those words and turned them into a song. But to have experienced what the lyrics in that song are actually about? I don’t know if he fully understood it.”

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