It’s just to try and work on the good bit of you. – John Lennon
In 1969 a young man snuck into a hotel room and got this interview with John Lennon.
Especially poignant to me … and resonating with the work of the ManKind Project and our circles is a short piece at about 2:00 minutes, where John says, “We’re all violent. We’re all Hitler inside and we’re all Christ inside …”
So much of the time, it’s our natural reaction to the violence and suffering we see in the world to say, think, and act like it is “out there”, part of someone else’s reality rather than part of our own mental landscape. Jung’s conception of “the shadow”; unconscious driving forces for our behavior, continues to gain credibility in neuroscience, in sociology studies, and even in best-selling publications like David Brooks’ new book The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. What we are not conscious of in our thinking and feeling bodies has a direct impact on how we make decisions and how we react to the stimulus in our lives.
The willingness to take ownership of, and share with other how similar we all are (even those that we despise) is a revolutionary act.
People who ‘wake up’ to their unconscious motivations and break the social agreement to vilify those who carry traits that we don’t want to look at in our own lives … are often considered a threat. John Lennon was certainly one of those people.
– is a deeply personal issue that everyone decides for himself. Sometimes the price is high, sometimes low. But this is not very important for life. Life is an interesting thing. And the price on Viagra – too.
