______
The Beatles – I Am The Walrus
LYRIC BREAKDOWN – THE BEATLES – I AM THE WALRUS (REACT)
_____________
THE SONG “THE WALRUS” DOES A GREAT JOB OF PRESENTING HINDUISM TO THE WORLD IN THE OPENING LINE “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”
The Beatles I’m The Walrus
“I Am The Walrus”
I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together
See how they run like pigs from a gun see how they fly
I’m cryingSitting on a cornflake waiting for the van to come
Corporation tee shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday
Man you been a naughty boy. You let your face grow long
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen
I am the walrus, goo goo g’ joobMister City Policeman sitting, pretty little policemen in a row
See how they fly like Lucy in the sky, see how they run
I’m crying, I’m crying
I’m crying, I’m crying
Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye
Crabalocker fishwife pornographic priestess
Boy you been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen
I am the walrus, goo goo g’ joob
Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun
If the sun don’t come
You get a tan from standing in the English rain
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen
I am the walrus, goo goo g’ joob goo goo goo g’ joob
Expert texpert choking smokers
Don’t you think the joker laughs at you? (Ho ho ho! He he he! Ha ha ha!)
See how they smile like pigs in a sty, see how they snied
I’m crying
Semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower
Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna
Man you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen
I am the walrus, goo goo g’ joob goo goo g’ joob
Goo goo g’ joob goo goo g’ joob
Goo gooooooooooo jooba jooba jooba jooba jooba jooba
Jooba jooba
Jooba jooba
Jooba jooba
(Edgar Allan Poe below)
Jim Carrey and I Am The Walrus with George Martin – The Beatles
______________
Oasis – I am the Walrus (live, Berlin 2002)
___________
The Beatles were looking for lasting satisfaction in their lives and their journey took them down many of the same paths that other young people of the 1960’s were taking. No wonder in the video THE AGE OF NON-REASON Schaeffer noted, ” Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. It expressed the essence of their lives, thoughts and their feelings.”
How Should We then Live Episode 7 small (Age of Nonreason)
(Francis Schaeffer pictured below)
Eastern Mysticism
By Gary DeMar
Published April 1, 1989
Man must take a leap of “nonreasonable faith” in the monistic worldview of Eastern mysticism. What makes Eastern mysticism the choice of a new generation of religious seekers, and how does it fulfill man’s spiritual hunger?
1. Eastern mysticism is nonrational and borders on the irrational. In Zen Buddhism, for example, one’s intuition is pitted against one’s reason. The Hindus consider the mind to have all the stability and perception of a “drunken monkey” while the Hare Krishnas refer to the mind as a “garbage pail.” All this might seem contradictory to the Western mind, and it is. But remember that the West has given up on rational explanations for the way the world works. Maybe East is best. If man is nothing more than a machine, why would we hold rationality in such high regard anyway? Western rationalism has failed.
Perhaps another reason behind the popular abandonment of rationalism in the West is its inability to provide spiritual satisfaction. As Zen master D.T. Suzuki explains, “Zen has come to the definite conclusion that the ordinary logical process of reasoning is powerless to give final satisfaction to our deepest spiritual needs.“1
We are often confused by the incessant chanting and the intellectual void associated with meditation on a mandala or some other fixed image. But these are simply the ways of the East. Much of Eastern thought is without intellectual content and meaning. The goal is to transcend the world of things and to reach a spiritual world beyond. The point is not to understand but only to do. This is the appeal of the East.
The Western reliance on rationalism has failed. In the West, the law of non-contradiction reigned (A is not non-A). The East knows nothing of such distinctions. In Western rationalist terms, “to know reality is to distinguish one thing from another, label it, catalog it, recognize its subtle relation to other objects in the cosmos. In the East to ‘know’ reality is to pass beyond distinction, to ‘realize’ the oneness of all being one with the all.“2
2. Eastern mysticism is monistic. The Christian believes in a personal God Who is separate from His creation. We have called this the Creator/creature distinction. God did not create the world out of Himself, using the “stuff” of His own being to bring the universe and man into existence.3 “By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of the things which are visible” (Hebrews 11:3; cf. Genesis 1:1-2).
Eastern thought makes no distinction between man and cosmos. The name for this is monism. Monism “is the belief that all that is, is one. All is interrelated, interdependent and interpenetrating. Ultimately there is no difference between God, a person, a carrot or a rock.“4
Consider the ethical implications of such a view. The way you treat a person and the way you treat an animal are to be no different. This is why many advocates of monism are vegetarian. An animal is sacred; therefore, it cannot be killed for food. All is one. God and evil transcend the world of forms and plurality. God does not overcome evil. There is no value judgment in “good” and “evil.” Ultimate reality is beyond good and evil. These rational and Christian concepts must be jettisoned in favor of an undifferentiated oneness.
The entertainment business has been quick to pick up on monism. In the Star Wars series, monism is quite evident in “the Force,” a benign entity that neither condones the good nor suppresses the evil. The music industry was invaded in the early sixties by the Beatles, who held a monistic worldview.
In 1967, the Beatles made their now-famous link-up with a then-unknown guru, Maharishi Yogi and his occult-sounding product, Transcendental Meditation. In the same year Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote “I am the Walrus” which opened with the pantheistic declaration:
I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together
“Instant Karma” followed in 1970, and the next year saw the release of George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” with its alternating chorus of “Hallelujah” and “Hare Krishna.“5
Charles Manson adopted the monistic worldview of the Beatles, and at the LaBianca murder scene in 1969, he scrawled in blood on the refrigerator door the misspelled “He[a]lter Skelter,” a song title from the Beatles’ “White Album.” The ambiguity of right and wrong became a reality for Manson. In Manson’s words, “If God is One, what is bad?”
3. All is god. It follows from monism that if there is god, then all is god. Pantheism (pan means all; theos means god) is the theology of the East. There is no personal God who stands above creation. In fact, there is no creation as such. To speak of a creation would mean to postulate a Creator, someone distinct from the cosmos. Thus, the pantheist agrees with the naturalist that there is just one level of reality, although the naturalist would not consider it to be “spiritual” or “divine.” In pantheism, there is no God who is “out there.” God and the material world are one and the same. The word god should be used to refer to the sum total of reality rather than to some being distinct from the rest of reality.
In Christianity, God is distinct from creation. God is certainly present with His creation, but He is in no way a part of creation. To destroy the created order would in no way affect God. “The Creator God is not an impersonal force, energy or consciousness, but a living, personal Being of infinite intelligence, power and purity. God is not an amoral entity, but a moral agent who says ‘Thou shalt not’ and calls people to repentance and faith.“6
4. We are god. The consistency of monism brings us to one of its most bizarre features. If all is god, then man is god in some form. “Swami Muktananda – a great influence on Werner Erhard, founder of est and Forum – pulls no pantheistic punches when he says: ‘Kneel to your own self. Honor and worship your own being. God dwells within you as You!’“7
Eastern mysticism teaches some form of “chain of being” or “continuity of being,“8 the idea that man and God are one essence, and that in time, through an evolutionary process or a series of reincarnations, man becomes divine. Ray Sutton writes: “Life according to this system is a continuum. At the top is the purest form of deity. At the very bottom is the least pure. They only differ in degree, not in kind. God is a part of creation. Man, who is somewhere in the middle of the continuum, is god in another ‘form.’ In other words, god is just a ‘super’ man, and man is not a god … yet!“9
Of course, Christianity teaches that there is only one God: “And you are My witnesses. Is there any God besides Me, or is there any other Rock? I know of none” (Isaiah 44:8). Man’s first sin was the attempt to “be like God,” determining good and evil for himself (Genesis 3:5).
5. There is no death. Eastern mysticism makes its “leap of being” from mere man to god through raising the state of consciousness, evolutionary development, reincarnation, or some combination of the three. Death is simply the final stage of growth; it is an illusion. Human beings, because they are of a “divine essence,” are immortal. Ultimately, death does not exist. For death to exist would mean the extinction of part of the One.
Reincarnation is a fundamental pillar of New Age thinking. It “solves” the puzzle of death. Reincarnation has been popularized over the years through the writings of Edgar Cayce10 and most recently, Shirley MacLaine. The Eastern variety of reincarnation would have never been accepted in the Christian West if it had not been stripped of the hideous concept of the “transmigration of the soul.”
Reincarnation, as it is usually understood in Hinduism, states that all life is essentially one (monism): plant, animal, and human life are so interrelated that souls are capable of “transmigrating” from one form of life to another. A person could have been an animal, plant, or mineral in some previous existence. However, this version is unpalatable to American tastes, so in the newer version the movement of human souls is limited to human bodies.11
Modern proponents of reincarnation have cleaned up the Eastern variety. You don’t hear Shirley MacLaine telling people that she was a rock or a slug in a former life. The typical reincarnationist usually believes that he was once some exotic personality. This is not true reincarnationism. This is “I’ve always been a star” reincarnationism.
6 Monism has spawned the New Age movement. John Naisbitt of Megatrends12 fame sees a new age dawning at the corporation level. Old industrial structures must be dismantled to compete in the information society of the future. “Look at how far we have already come. The industrial society transformed workers into consumers; the information society is transforming employees into capitalists. But remember this: Both capitalism and socialism were industrial structures. And the companies re-inventing themselves are already evolving toward that new reality.“13 But there’s more!
Mark Satin has described a New Age Politics14 that will “heal self and society.”
Fritjof Capra, author of The Turning Point,15 sees changes in science that will affect society and culture.
Marilyn Ferguson, whose The Aquarian Conspiracy16 is considered by many to be the manifesto of the New Age movement, describes “a new mind – a turnabout in consciousness, a network powerful enough to bring about radical change in our culture.”
Much of this literature is rooted in Eastern and occult philosophy, which emphasize oneness (monism): the unity and interdependence of all things. There is a clever mix between Eastern religious philosophy and Western religious forms. The sixties counterculture brought the esoteric music and religious ideology of the East into the West.
The Beatles made Eastern music popular on their “Rubber Soul” album when George Harrison introduced the Indian sitar music of Ravi Shankar.17 Transcendental Meditation was also popularized by the Beatles. Some of those in the ecology movement base their concern for the environment on the inherent “oneness” of the universe.18 Man and nature are one in essence. Man is not much different from the animals. He is only higher on the great scale of being. The environment should be protected, not as a stewardship under God, but because we are all god, nature included.
The advance of Eastern thought was gradual, but layer by layer it gained acceptance. As Christianity steadily lost its hold on the heart and mind of the nation, softer forms of religious beliefs were more easily embraced. Christianity’s drift into an emphasis on experience over objective, written revelation has made it easy prey for the pure subjectivism of Eastern thought.
Robert J.L. Burrows, publications editor of the evangelical Spiritual Counterfeits Project in Berkeley, California, writes: “Humans are essentially religious creatures, and they don’t rest until they have some sort of answer to the fundamental questions. Rationalism and secularism don’t answer those questions. But you can see the rise of the New Age as a barometer of the disintegration of American culture. Dostoevsky said anything is permissible if there is no God. But anything is also permissible if everything is God. There is no way of making any distinction between good and evil.“19
Os Guinness wrote about the meeting of East and West in 1973, in what has become a standard Christian critique of the decline of secular humanism, The Dust of Death. He tells us that the “swing to the East has come at a time when Christianity is weak at just those points where it would need to be strong to withstand the East.“20 He goes on to show the three basic weaknesses within the Church that open it up to Eastern influences.
“The first is its compromised, deficient understanding of revelation. Without biblical historicity and veracity behind the Word of God, theology can only grow closer to Hinduism. Second, the modern Christian is drastically weak in an unmediated, personal, experiential knowledge of God. Often what passes for religious experience is a communal emotion felt in church services, in meetings, in singing or contrived fellowship. Few Christians would know God on their own. Third, the modern church is often pathetically feeble in the expression of its focal principle of community. It has become the local social club, preaching shop or minister-dominated group. With these weaknesses, modern Christianity cannot hope to understand why people have turned to the East, let alone stand against the trend and offer an alternative.“21
Western Christians have a faith that is “extremely blurred at the edges.“22 This opens them up to any and all spiritual counterfeits.
New Age humanism is anti-Christian to the core. It is a utopian dream built on a flawed understanding of man’s nature and a devotion to a westernized Eastern philosophy in which God is nothing more than a cosmic idea. The copy on the dust jacket to Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy shows that the Christian’s fears are justified: “A leaderless but powerful network is working to bring about radical change in the United States. Its members have broken with certain key elements of Western thought, and they may even have broken with history.”
With all its seemingly “good” emphasis, the New Age movement is at heart humanistic (man is the center of the universe), materialistic (self-actualization is all-important), and anti-God (the God of the Bible is dismissed in favor of self-deification). The American public, with its inability to distinguish biblical truth from anti-Christian religious subtleties, is easily sucked in by the seemingly harmless religious and cultural goals of New Age humanism.
The college campus is a breeding ground for New Age concepts. New Age ideas are upbeat, optimistic, and seemingly life-transforming. At a time when you are most susceptible to change and influence, the New Age movement can be a dangerous “friend.” Keep far from it.23
1 Pat Means, The Mystical Maze (San Bernardino, CA: Campus Crusade for Christ, 1976), p. 39.
2 James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic World View Catalog (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1976), p. 133.
3 Pagan creation myths abound with this notion. According to one Babylonian account, Marduk, the great stone god, “killed the dragon Tiamat and split her body in half. The upper half was made into the sky, and the lower half the earth.” John J. Davis, Paradise to Prison: Studies in Genesis (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1975), p. 69.
4 Douglas R. Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age: Is There a New Religious Movement Trying to Transform Society? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986), p. 18.
5 Means, The Mystical Maze, p. 21.
6 Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age, p. 21.
7 Idem.
8 Avrum Stroll and Richard H. Popkin, Introduction to Philosophy 2nd ed.; (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1972), pp. 100-101.
9 Ray Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (Tyler, TX: Dominion Press, 1987), p. 37.
10 For an insightful analysis and critique of Cayce’s views see: Gary North, Unholy Spirits: Occultism and New Age Humanism (Ft. Worth, TX: Dominion Press, 1986), pp. 193-225.
11 John Snyder, Reincarnation vs. Resurrection (Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1984), p. 19.
12 John Naisbitt, Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming OurLives (New York: Warner Books, 1982).
13 John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene, Re-inventing the Corporation (New York: Warner Books, 1985), p. 252.
14 New York: Dell 1979.
15 New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.
16 Los Angeles, CA: J.P. Tarcher, Inc., 1980.
17 North, Unholy Spirits, p. 6.
18 Schaeffer, The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer, 5 vols.: Pollution and the Death of Man: The Christian View of Ecology, vol. 5, pp. 3-76.
19 “New Age Harmonies,” Time (December 7, 1987), p. 72.
20 Os Guinness, The Dust of Death: A Critique of the Establishment and the Counter Culture – and a Proposal for a Third Way (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973), p. 209.
21 Idem.
22 Idem.
23 For helpful and balanced treatments of the New Age movement see: Gary DeMar and Peter J. Leithart, The Reduction of Christianity: Dave Hunt’s Theology of Cultural Surrender (Ft. Worth, TX: Dominion Press, 1988); Karen Hoyt, ed., The New Age Rage: A Probing Analysis of The Newest Religious Craze (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming II, Revell Company, 1987); Douglas R. Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age: Is There a New Religious Movement Trying to Transform Society? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986).
If you enjoyed this article, you can write and receive a free, one-year subscription to Gary DeMar’s Biblical Worldview Newsletter. Write: American Vision, P.O. Box 720515, Atlanta, GA 30328.
I Am the Walrus
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“I Am the Walrus”
Cover artwork for the single, as used in America
Single by The Beatles
from the album Magical Mystery Tour
A-side
“Hello, Goodbye“
Released
24 November 1967
Format
7″ single
Recorded
5 September 1967,
EMI Studios, London
Genre
Psychedelic rock
Length
4:33
Label
Parlophone (UK)
Capitol (US)
Writer(s)
Lennon–McCartney
Producer(s)
George Martin
The Beatles singles chronology
“All You Need Is Love”
(1967)
“Hello, Goodbye” / “I Am the Walrus”
(1967)
“Lady Madonna”
(1968)
Magical Mystery Tour track listing
[show]11 tracks
“I Am the Walrus” is a song by The Beatles that was released in November 1967. It was featured in the Beatles’ television film Magical Mystery Tour in December of that year, as a track on the associated British double EP of the same name and its American counterpart LP, and was the B-side to the number 1 hit single “Hello, Goodbye“. Since the single and the double EP held at one time in December 1967 the top two slots on the British singles chart, the song had the distinction of being at number 1 and number 2 simultaneously.
Composition[edit]
The lyrics came from three song ideas that Lennon had been working on, the first of which was inspired by hearing a police siren at his home in Weybridge; Lennon wrote the lines “Mis-ter cit-y police-man” to the rhythm and melody of the siren. The second idea was a short rhyme about Lennon sitting in his garden, while the third was a nonsense lyric about sitting on a corn flake. Unable to finish the three different songs, he combined them into one. The lyrics also included the phrase “Lucy in the sky,” a reference to the Beatles’ earlier song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
The walrus refers to Lewis Carroll‘s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (from the book Through the Looking-Glass). Lennon expressed dismay upon belatedly realising that the walrus was a villain in the poem.[1]
The final piece of the song came together when Lennon’s friend and former fellow member of the Quarrymen, Peter Shotton, visited and Lennon asked him about a playground nursery rhyme they sang as children. Shotton recalled the rhyme as follows:
“Yellow matter custard, green slop pie,
All mixed together with a dead dog’s eye,
Slap it on a butty, ten foot thick,
Then wash it all down with a cup of cold sick.”[2]
Lennon borrowed a couple of images from the first two lines. Shotton was also responsible for suggesting to Lennon to change the lyric “waiting for the man to come” to “waiting for the van to come.” The Beatles’ official biographer Hunter Davies was present while the song was being written and wrote an account in his 1968 biography of the Beatles. According to this biography, Lennon remarked to Shotton, “Let the fuckers work that one out.”
Lennon claimed he wrote the first two lines on separate acid trips; he explained much of the song to Playboy in 1980:[3]
“The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend. The second line was written on the next acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko… I’d seen Allen Ginsberg and some other people who liked Dylan and Jesus going on about Hare Krishna. It was Ginsberg, in particular, I was referring to. The words ‘Element’ry penguin’ meant that it’s naïve to just go around chanting Hare Krishna or putting all your faith in one idol. In those days I was writing obscurely, à la Dylan.”
“It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles’ work. Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought…I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, ‘I am the carpenter.’ But that wouldn’t have been the same, would it? [Sings, laughing] ‘I am the carpenter….'”
Interpretation[edit]
Although it has been reported that Lennon wrote “I Am the Walrus” to confuse those who tried to interpret his songs, there have been many attempts to analyse the meaning of the lyrics.[20][21]
Seen in the Magical Mystery Tour film singing the song, Lennon, apparently, is the walrus; on the track-list of the accompanying soundtrack EP/LP however, underneath “I Am the Walrus” are printed the words ‘ “No you’re not!” said Little Nicola’ (in the film, Nicola is a little girl who keeps contradicting everything the other characters say). Lennon returned to the subject in the lyrics of three of his subsequent songs: in the 1968 Beatles song “Glass Onion” he sings, “I told you ’bout the walrus and me, man/You know that we’re as close as can be, man/Well here’s another clue for you all/The walrus was Paul”;[22] in the third verse of “Come Together” he sings the line “he bag production, he got walrus gumboot”; and in his 1970 solo song “God“, admits “I was the walrus, but now I’m John.”
Eric Burdon, lead singer of the Animals, claims to be the ‘Eggman’ mentioned in the song’s lyric. Burdon was known as ‘Eggs’ to his friends, the nickname originating from his fondness for breaking eggs over naked women’s bodies. Burdon’s biography mentions such an affair taking place in the presence of John Lennon, who shouted “Go on, go get it, Eggman…”[23]
______________________
100 Greatest Beatles Songs
September 19, 2011
By Elvis Costello
My absolute favorite albums are Rubber Soul and Revolver. On both records you can hear references to other music — R&B, Dylan, psychedelia — but it’s not done in a way that is obvious or dates the records. When you picked up Revolver, you knew it was something different. Heck, they are wearing sunglasses indoors in the picture on the back of the cover and not even looking at the camera . . . and the music was so strange and yet so vivid. If I had to pick a favorite song from those albums, it would be “And Your Bird Can Sing” . . . no, “Girl” . . . no, “For No One” . . . and so on, and so on. . . .
Their breakup album, Let It Be, contains songs both gorgeous and jagged. I suppose ambition and human frailty creeps into every group, but they delivered some incredible performances. I remember going to Leicester Square and seeing the film of Let It Be in 1970. I left with a melancholy feeling.
34
‘Eight Days a Week’
Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
Writers: McCartney-Lennon
Recorded: October 6 and 18, 1964
Released: February 15, 1965
10 weeks; no. 1
The title of “Eight Days a Week” came from a chance remark by a driver chauffeuring McCartney out to Lennon’s house. McCartney casually asked the driver if he’d been busy. “Busy?” he replied. “I’ve been working eight days a week.” “Neither of us had heard that expression before,” said McCartney. “It was like a little blessing from the gods. I didn’t have any idea for it other than the title, and we just knocked it off together, just filling in from the title.”
Although McCartney claimed the rest of the song “came quickly,” it lacked a beginning, a middle eight and an ending when he and Lennon brought it into the studio. The Beatles tried a variety of approaches, including a wordless harmony for the intro, but stumbled repeatedly getting the melody right. “We struggled to record it and struggled to make it into a song,” Lennon recalled. “But it was lousy anyway.”
The Beatles were working at least nine days a week in late 1964, which may account for Lennon’s sour take on the song. They’d been touring constantly, had just released A Hard Day’s Night in June and were rushed back into a recording studio the week after they returned from America to record a new album and single in time for Christmas. “They were rather war-weary,” George Martin said. “They’d been battered like mad throughout 1964, and much of 1963. Success is a wonderful thing, but it is very, very tiring.” With little time to write original songs, almost half of the Beatles for Sale LP consisted of covers the group had been playing onstage for years. The same day the Beatles finished “Eight Days a Week,” they knocked out seven complete tracks.
Twelve days later, they settled on the final arrangement, with its innovative instrumental fade-in that gives the song the warm, jubilant “feel[ing] like you’ve heard it before,” as Ray Davies of the Kinks told Rolling Stone in 2001.
Beatles for Sale was released in the U.K. in December 1964. Beatles ’65, its U.S. counterpart, did not include “Eight Days a Week.” The song was released as a single in the U.S. two months later, and it went to Number One. But the Beatles continued to disregard it. It was never a single in the U.K., and in their subsequent two years of radio performances and touring, they never played it live. Despite its popularity, Lennon believes it “was never a good song.”
Appears On: Beatles for Sale
33
‘I Am the Walrus’
John Pratt/Keystone/Getty Images
Main Writer: Lennon
Recorded: September 5, 6, 27, 28 and 29, 1967
Released: November 27, 1967
4 weeks; no. 56 (B side)
After Brian Epstein died on August 27th, 1967, the Beatles were hardly in the mood to be creative. But when the shellshocked band gathered a few days later, McCartney convinced them there was one sure way to handle their grief: by getting back into the studio. When they did, on September 5th, Lennon brought along an eccentric new song inspired by a report that British school kids were studying Beatles lyrics to discern their hidden meanings. Lennon played a solo acoustic version of “I Am the Walrus,” and, as engineer Geoff Emerick recalled, “Everyone seemed bewildered. The melody consisted largely of just two notes, and the lyrics were pretty much just nonsense.” Taking off from the Lewis Carroll poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” the words were a series of non sequiturs about “pigs from a gun,” Hare Krishna and Edgar Allan Poe, winding up with a head-scratching “goo-goo-g’joob!” hook.
“What the hell do you expect me to do with that?” George Martin said. Nonetheless, everyone went to work on the track. Lennon vamped on a simple electric-piano figure, and McCartney switched to tambourine to make sure Starr kept on the beat. (McCartney’s diligence in keeping the band focused, Emerick later said, was “one of Paul’s finest moments.”)
The track sprung to vivid, woozy life in post-production. Despite his initial revulsion, Martin composed a masterful orchestral arrangement that felt like vertigo. Lennon asked for as much distortion on his voice as possible — he wanted it to sound as if it were coming from the moon.
“The words don’t mean a lot,” Lennon said. “People draw so many conclusions, and it’s ridiculous. What does it really mean, ‘I am the Eggman?’ It could have been the pudding basin for all I care.” The lyrics contained plenty of inside jokes: “Semolina pilchard” referred to Norman Pilcher, the London drug-squad cop who’d busted rock stars like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and “The Eggman” was a reference to both Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty and a story Lennon heard from Eric Burdon about the time a girl cracked an egg onto the Animals frontman during sex. On the following year’s White Album, Lennon alluded to the song in “Glass Onion” with the line “The walrus was Paul” — his way of thanking McCartney for helping to hold the group together after Epstein’s death.
Appears On: Magical Mystery Tour
______
(Francis Schaeffer below)
Here is a good review of the episode 016 HSWTL The Age of Non-Reason of HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE?, December 23, 2007:
Together with the advent of the “drug Age” was the increased interest in the West in the religious experience of Hinduism and Buddhism. Schaeffer tells us that: “This grasping for a nonrational meaning to life and values is the central reason that these Eastern religions are so popular in the West today.” Drugs and Eastern religions came like a flood into the Western world. They became the way that people chose to find meaning and values in life. By themselves or together, drugs and Eastern religion became the way that people searched inside themselves for ultimate truth.
Along with drugs and Eastern religions there has been a remarkable increase “of the occult appearing as an upper-story hope.” As modern man searches for answers it “many moderns would rather have demons than be left with the idea that everything in the universe is only one big machine.” For many people having the “occult in the upper story of nonreason in the hope of having meaning” is better than leaving the upper story of nonreason empty. For them horror or the macabre are more acceptable than the idea that they are just a machine.
Francis Schaeffer in his book HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? gives us some insight into a possible answer to that question:
The younger people and the older ones tried drug taking but then turned to the eastern religions. Both drugs and the eastern religions seek truth inside one’s own head, a negation of reason. The central reason of the popularity of eastern religions in the west is a hope for a nonrational meaning to life and values. The reason the young people turn to eastern religion is simply the fact as we have said and that is that man having moved into the area of nonreason could put anything up there and the heart of the eastern religions is a denial of reason just exactly as the idealistic drug taking was. So the turning to the eastern religions today fits exactly into the modern existential methodology, the existential thinking of modern man, of trying to find some optimistic hope in the area of nonreason when he has given up hope on a humanistic basis of finding any kind of unifying answer to life, any meaning to life in the answer of reason.
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William Lane Craig’s book THE ABSURDITY OF LIFE WITHOUT GOD.
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About the only solution the atheist can offer is that we face the absurdity of life and live bravely. Bertrand Russell, for example, wrote that we must build our lives upon “the firm foundation of unyielding despair.”16 Only by recognizing that the world really is a terrible place can we successfully come to terms with life. Camus said that we should honestly recognize life’s absurdity and then live in love for one another.
The fundamental problem with this solution, however, is that it is impossible to live consistently and happily within such a worldview. If one lives consistently, he will not be happy; if one lives happily, it is only because he is not consistent. Francis Schaeffer has explained this point well. Modern man, says Schaeffer, resides in a two-story universe. In the lower story is the finite world without God; here life is absurd, as we have seen. In the upper story are meaning, value, and purpose. Now modern man lives in the lower story because he believes there is no God. But he cannot live happily in such an absurd world; therefore, he continually makes leaps of faith into the upper story to affirm meaning, value, and purpose, even though he has no right to, since he does not believe in God. Modern man is totally inconsistent when he makes this leap, because these values cannot exist without God, and man in his lower story does not have God.
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Francis Schaeffer has correctly argued:
The universe was created by an infinite personal God and He brought it into existence by spoken word and made man in His own image. When man tries to reduce [philosophically in a materialistic point of view] himself to less than this [less than being made in the image of God] he will always fail and he will always be willing to make these impossible leaps into the area of nonreason even though they don’t give an answer simply because that isn’t what he is. He himself testifies that this infinite personal God, the God of the Old and New Testament is there.
Instead of making a leap into the area of nonreason the better choice would be to investigate the claims that the Bible is a historically accurate book and that God created the universe and reached out to humankind with the Bible. Below is a piece of that evidence given by Francis Schaeffer concerning the accuracy of the Bible.
TRUTH AND HISTORY (chapter 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?, under footnote #94)
Consider, too, the threat in the entire Middle East from the power of Assyria. In 853 B.C. King Shalmaneser III of Assyria came west from the region of the Euphrates River, only to be successfully repulsed by a determined alliance of all the states in that area of the Battle of Qarqar. Shalmaneser’s record gives details of the alliance. In these he includes Ahab, who he tells us put 2000 chariots and 10,000 infantry into the battle. However, after Ahab’s death, Samaria was no longer strong enough to retain control, and Moab under King Mesha declared its independence, as II Kings 3:4,5 makes clear:
4 Now Mesha king of Moab was a sheep breeder, and he had to deliver to the king of Israel 100,000 lambs and the wool of 100,000 rams. 5 But when Ahab died, the king of Moab rebelled against the king of Israel.
The famous Moabite (Mesha) Stone, now in the Louvre, bears an inscription which testifies to Mesha’s reality and of his success in throwing off the yoke of Israel. This is an inscribed black basalt stela, about four feet high, two feet wide, and several inches thick.
Ahab’s line did not last long and was brutally overthrown by a man called Jehu. As one walks toward the Assyrian section in the British Museum, one of the first exhibits to be seen is the famous Black Obelisk. This stands about six feet high and was discovered at Nimrud (Calah) near the Assyrian capital at Nineveh. It describes how King Shalmeneser III compelled Jehu to submit to his authority and to pay him tribute. Here one can see a representation of the kneeling figure of either Jehu or his envoy before the Assyrian king. The inscription tells of Jehu’s submission: “The tribute of Jehu, son of Omri: I received from him silver, gold, a golden bowl, a golden vase with pointed bottom, golden tumblers, golden buckets, tin, a staff for a king and purukhti fruits.”
Jehu is referred to by the Assyrian records as a son of Omri, not because he was literally his son, but because he was on the throne which had been occupied previously by the house of Omri. This event took place about 841 B.C.
Putting them all together, these archaeological records show not only the existence historically of the people and events recorded in the Bible but the great accuracy of the details involved.
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Omri in archaeological sources[edit]. The Mesha Stele. Bryant G. Wood .
Bryant Wood is a topnotch archaeologist who I have had the privilege to correspond with and he is pictured below:
In His Service:
Nick Goggin
Editor; www.biblestudysite.com
WATCHMEN BIBLE STUDY GROUP
We at Watchmen Bible Study Group hope that you found these articles informative. As a courtesy we supply the following information from the original author of these articles: Light on Archaeology is a special edition of the Light Magazine. To receive a FREE bi-monthly illustrated copy of the Light Magazine contact: E-mail: bibletruth@biblelight.org
MOAB: The Moabite stone was discovered in 1868. It was found in the land of Moab and was carved with an inscription which its finder, a man named Klein, recognized as being important. He had insufficient funds to purchase the stone and had to go to Europe to raise them. While he was away, the Arabs broke the stone into pieces, so they could make more money out of the deal. (They did the same thing with some of the Dead Sea Scrolls.) Fortunately, a Frenchman, M. Clermont-Ganneau had the good sense to take an impression, so that they were able to piece the stone together correctly and decipher its message.
The language in which the inscription is written is very similar to Biblical Hebrew, and the events it records supplement most remarkably the record from I Kings chapter 16 to 2 Kings chapter 3. Both tell how that during the reigns of Omri and Ahab, Moab was tributary to Israel, but that after the death of Ahab, Mesha King of Moab rebelled. Mesha records on this stone that after this time, he was unable to defeat Jehoram in several battles and rid the land of him. The actual words are:
‘Now the men of God had always dwelt in the land of Ataroth, and the King of Israel had built Ataroth for them: but I fought against the town and took it and slew all the people of the town as satiation for Chemosh and Moab’.
Moab’s fortresses and her cities were restored and made stronger. Her earlier defeats were explained as being due to the anger of her gods.
The stone records the name of Israel’s God, Yahweh. The inscription does contain one error. It boasts that as a result of Moab’s victories ‘Israel perished for ever’. Many a nation has wished for the destruction of Israel as a nation, but it is a wish that will never be fulfilled. The proof of this is a marvelous story indeed and a separate study.
If we compare the events related on the stone with the Bible record, we see again the truth of the Word of God. It is all the more important when we realise that our knowledge of Moab is so small and yet one of the few incidents recorded about her can be proved in this way.
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There is evidence that points to the fact that the Bible is historically true as Schaeffer pointed out in episode 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? There is a basis then for faith in Christ alone for our eternal hope. This link shows how to do that.
The Bible and Archaeology – Is the Bible from God? (Kyle Butt 42 min)
You want some evidence that indicates that the Bible is true? Here is a good place to start and that is taking a closer look at the archaeology of the Old Testament times. Is the Bible historically accurate? Here are some of the posts I have done in the past on the subject: 1. The Babylonian Chronicle, of Nebuchadnezzars Siege of Jerusalem, 2. Hezekiah’s Siloam Tunnel Inscription. 3. Taylor Prism (Sennacherib Hexagonal Prism), 4. Biblical Cities Attested Archaeologically. 5. The Discovery of the Hittites, 6.<a href="http://haltin