John Lennon & Primal Therapy
Emotional depth in his solo music
Hi Everybody!
Aaron discovered that I have a connection with John Lennon that usually doesn’t get covered, and asked me to write a piece. John and Yoko both did a course of Primal Therapy with Arthur Janov in 1970. I, also, did Primal Therapy with Jules and Helen Roth in the 1970's.
Arthur Janov, for those who don’t know, developed and popularized Primal Therapy in the late ‘60’s, into the ‘70’s, and even later. His best seller, The Primal Scream, also in 1970, put the new therapy into the international imagination, and, as new things often do, led to crazy misunderstandings and cultural memes lasting to this day — 50 years later!
My one degree of separation: Jules was the Directer of Therapist Training at Art’s Primal Center in LA. Helen was one of the best therapists there. In 1974, they and some of the other therapists from LA came out to Denver to start their own Primal Center. They left due to a difference of opinion with Janov about Birth Primals. (They, of course, were right, but that gets into a whole other story.)
What is Primal Therapy, anyway? I like to explain it in two ways: First of all, it’s like hypnosis, except you don’t go “under.” You stay completely conscious. What I mean is that, with hypnosis, you can access hidden traumatic memories in the Unconscious, but, of course, you gotta be hypnotized! What Janov was able to luck into in the late 1960’s was a technique to “drop” into the Unconscious while staying completely Conscious.
Well, how cool can you get? If you can access any kind of trauma, whether it’s childhood, or later PTSD stuff, relive it, get it out of your system, and learn for yourself what’s been driving all the negative shit in your life, well, that is pretty good.
Later, I came to express the process in this way: We have ancient areas in our brain which store trauma overloads. A lot of it has to do with the amygdala, but, as we do research with scanning actual brain activity, we find more and more circuits and areas which are involved….
OK, so, when you learn to “Primal,” what you’re doing is establishing a circuit between the conscious mind and these really ancient areas whose job it is to store traumatic overloads. Cab drivers, musicians, mathematicians all develop mental circuit areas more robust than the average guy. So do Primalers.
And once you learn how to ride that bicycle, you’re really never the same. You never need a therapist to tell you what’s up with yourself ever again. You know how to find out for yourself. It really is so cool.
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So … the album John did after coming out of his first bunch of Primals is Plastic Ono Band, and, to a Primaler, boy, does it make sense:
Mother, you had me, but I never had you
I needed you, but you didn’t need me
………
Children, don’t do what I have done
I couldn’t walk, but I tried to run
Wow! You see, he was remembering, feeling it, crying deep like it was happening right now, because that’s how Primals are. When you “drop” into that “inner tape,” you actually completely relive things, but when you come out of it, you’re so relaxed because you’ve relieved the pressure, you’ve brought the Unconscious into the Conscious. It was beating at your doors, wanting to get out — But you didn’t know how to do it. And now you do!
Wisdom, boys. That’s what it is.
A Working Class Hero is something to be
If you want to be a hero, then just follow meOr I Found Out
I heard something ‘bout my ma and my pa
They didn’t want me so they made me a star
I, I found out…People say we got it made
Don’t they know we’re so afraid
Isolation
………
Just a boy and a little girl
Trying to change the whole wide world
IsolationAnd, of course, God
God is a concept by which we measure our pain
………
I don’t believe in magic
I don’t believe in I-Ching
I don’t believe in Bible
………
I don’t believe in Elvis
I don’t believe in Zimmerman
I don’t believe in Beatles
I just believe in me
Yoko and me
And that’s reality
The dream is over….
Wow, friends. Once you start accessing your own unconscious, your sense of feeling and wisdom just starts growing. You do feel reborn.
But, as they say in the funny papers (or maybe it’s somewhere else,) it ain’t over till it’s over. Arthur Janov thought he had discovered the key to fucking everything (unintentional double entendre, however, it works,) but he hadn’t. Supposedly, you were going to “drain the Primal Pool.” (Sorry for the current allusion that reminds us of. Really.)
But no one ever did. It never got fully “drained.” (It’s actually not that bad. I use the Primal Technique, that loop I have into the Unconscious, as a little background program I run. Whenever I get tense over something, I can ask my own Unconscious what’s going on, rather than project and cause trouble. It’s nice to have.)
Primal Therapy is not the answer to everything, and John caught on, just like the Beatles earlier did with the Maharishi. (Sexy Sadie, what have you done? You made a fool of everyone.)
There’s a great song on Walls And Bridges:
Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down And Out)I’ve been across the water now so many times. (That means having a Primal.)
I’ve seen the one eyed witchdoctor leading the blind. (Yep, the witchdoctor is Janov.)
The thing that Arthur Janov didn’t get (which I had to discover on my own) is that, if you start any kind of deep feeling therapy, there’s a lot more to access than just buried trauma in the old amygdala. Eventually, if you look close enough, you’ll start to notice that there are feelings you’re experiencing which are independent of you. The Universe itself is alive, and that, folks, is all gravy. I know that John was getting there:
People asking questions
All lost in confusion
Well, I tell them there’s no problems
Only solutions
So, there you go, John, Yoko, and Primal.
Like the goof-wahs all say, “The Hidden Chapter.”
Anyway, I had a ringside seat, and I guess I still do.
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PS — Just a couple more…
Jealous Guy, from the Imagine album
I was dreaming of the past
And my heart was beating fast
He was having a Primal, (and wasn’t doing a good job. He dumped on Yoko.)
It’s So Hard, also on Imagine
Sometimes I feel like going down
We actually would “go down” on a mat to feel.
But, in some ways, the one that gets me the most is this song,
Scared, on Walls And Bridges:
Hatred and jealousy, gonna be the death of me
I guess I knew it right from the start
Sing out about love and peace
Don’t want to see the red raw meat
The green eyed goddamn straight from your heart
John had already been Primaling for some years by the time he did Walls And Bridges. The longer you go with this process, the deeper your understanding of yourself gets. So, for instance, on Jealous Guy, when he was still only a year into “feeling,” as we say in Primal, he was still making excuses for himself: “I’m just a jealous guy.” Four years later, he’s owning it, all the anger inside, which was underneath all the nice guy stuff. That is really amazing, for someone to penetrate that deeply. I really respect it.
Five years later, with Double Fantasy, I can tell that he never stopped feeling, as in Primal, because he’s gone even deeper, to penetrate to a joy and an understanding that’s authentic, not just “love and peace.”
But, that gets us to the other part of the story, unfortunately. A worthless piece of moron shit then shot him. That’s how stupid the world is. I’m sorry. It sucks, but I have to be honest. That’s how it sometimes happens.
This is also true: I just happened to be working at a record store in a mall for Christmas that year. Within a day or two after he got shot, some fuck came by the store with John Lennon t-shirts he was already hoping we would sell. He could have gotten the manager, and I don’t know what he would have done. Fortunately, he ran into me first. I told him to get lost.
But, in a way, and this is the meditator in me speaking: We don’t really lose someone like John Lennon. If this sounds weird, just file it away for a later time. Someday, it may make sense. Nothing ever really dies. The Universe itself is alive, and it stores all the thoughts, feelings, memories … of not just us, but rocks and trees and planets and suns — and whatever Aliens there may be, wherever in the freaking Galaxy they are. So all the beauty that John Lennon perceived and communicated to the rest of us hasn’t gone anywhere. And it can’t.
So, how do they put it? “Are we cool now?”
Why not?
Thanks for reading! This was really fun to write.
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© “John” Lesly Levin 2020
