I woke up at 6:30 this evening and I'm not happy about it. I didn't need to work and there were no additional reading materials for me to devour so I figured: why not sleep the day away? But, no, it's not turning out as "okay" as I thought it would be. I know I'm not gonna be able to get any more shut-eye until daylight or 4AM at the very least. Ergo, I'll wake up just about the same time tomorrow night. The idea pisses me off - big time!
In addition to all that, I'm hungry and I don't feel like cooking. And it's not that nobody else can cook around here. It's just that I don't trust them. They'd probably end up with some salty Filipino overkill I'd have a hard time swallowing. And for some reason, Melvin doesn't cook these days anymore.
Anyway, if you caught the title, this is just an intro.
Here's the third installment of the Old Entries Series.
This was originally posted on Aug 13, '07 8:13 PM on Multiply.com.
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I just finished listening to a song. It was entitled “Imagine”. It was composed by John Lennon and performed by Lea Salonga.
I used to hear it all the time on the stereo but I didn’t really pay much attention to the lyrics until I heard it sang by my favorite artist. It used to be just one of the many songs I’d change the radio channel on when I heard. But when Lea sang it with perfect pronunciation of the lyrics, the song’s meaning was just magnified. It found its way into me. It really moved me the way it should have before.
The first line which says, “Imagine there’s no heaven,” may sound negative and unconstructive to several people; much more with the proceeding statements where we hear the line, “above is only sky.” But if we try to internalize it, we will find that it really makes a lot of sense. Heaven is a communal moss of hopefulness among people. We take comfort in the prevailing idea of its existence after this life ends. Going further in the stanza, we will hear the line that says “no hell below us”. The idea of hell, for me, is nothing but a human being’s self-infliction of albatross if he/she chooses to believe it actually exists.
Another line in the song says, “Imagine there’s no countries.” [It’s grammatically incorrect. But what the heck! Songs are excluded from grammar conventions.] Going further, we will hear the lines “nothing to kill or die for”. Now, this speaks of reality. We are all aware of the fact that, throughout history, people have killed and died for their countries. Remember the Holocaust and the Tutsi genocide. At present, this is still even happening. Racism is still ubiquitous. Now, imagine if all these things didn’t exist. People would be living life a lot more peacefully. There would be less to fight about.
The same goes with the line that says, “Imagine no possessions… No need for greed or hunger… Imagine all the people sharing all the world.” Damn! This just hits the spot. Materialism and greed are the very things that make this world chaotic; they are the very things that drive people and nations to utter anarchy and turmoil. So many rich people lavish themselves with luxuries and what not, and yet far more than a million times their number are dying of sheer poverty and hunger. Yes, there are good people but they are not capable of saving the entire world. There are people like Jesus of Nazareth, Siddhartha Gautama, Mohandas Gandhi, Oskar Schindler, Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama. But sadly, up until today, they are outnumbered by the likes of Adolph Hitler, Niccolo Machiavelli and Ayn Rand. And that’s just plain depressing. Try to lie down and ponder on this with your eyes closed.
Books such as Rand’s “The Virtue of Selfishness” and “Harnessing Zonpower” are less read than the Holy Bible, the Qur’an, and the Bhagavad Gita, but people seem to be showing traits that are more subservient to the former than what the latter books teach. To say that it is “human nature” to be greedy is such a lame and abused excuse for sheer evil. And also, the idea of the world being nothing but a huge arena for the “survival of the fittest” is nothing but complete gibberish.
The song tells us many things. It speaks of an unfeasible utopia. And it may provoke sundry reactions among different people but if you listen to it [I mean really listen to it], you will realize something you can’t quite put in words—not even inside your head. It will get you nodding and smiling without you knowing why. It will lead you to a new light.
Why don’t you go listen to it yourself?
