Episode 99 - Rubber Soul in the Aftermath

The last episode ended on the evening of December 3, 1965 when my father suffered a massive heart attack and died instantly during a nationally televised NBA game between the 76ers and the Boston Celtics.

As I have mentioned previously, this podcast series examines the enormous evolution of consciousness that began to take place in the western world during the 1960s, as well as looking at what happened to me personally during those turbulent times, which led to my life-long commitment to the greater realization of human potential.   

It also seeks to present you with some fundamental ideas that you might find useful as you grow through your own inner evolutions, which is something we all do, whether we’re aware of it or not. That’s just the way our intelligence works.  

So, even though the events surrounding my father’s death were extremely traumatic, this is not an autobiographical look back at them. Rather, I am going to describe some of the realizations I experienced that began to open a pathway to my own inner growth.

Looking back, I can see that without having the slightest awareness of it, I had been living my life with two basic assumptions that I had been taking for granted. As naïve as they may sound, these assumptions were simple - everything was going to stay the same and I would live forever.

Of course, I knew intellectually, as we all do, that that these ideas are ridiculous. In reality, everything here ends and everybody dies. But as we all must learn sooner or later, there is a vast difference between believing a theoretical concept of something and experiencing the actual reality of it. And that’s especially true when it comes to death.  

For me, the aspect of sudden death was a powerful and rather rude teacher. It felt like having to learn how to swim because the luxury cruise ship you had been traveling on suddenly sank. The next thing you know, you’re in a freezing cold ocean and you notice a dark fin sticking out of the water that keeps circling around you. Of course, that’s just a metaphor, but that’s kind of what it felt like.

But the death itself was also accompanied by an additional, mysterious factor. On top of the shock and grief, I had to ponder the series of cryptic omens that had preceded it that were particularly unnerving.

As you may recall, along with several less intense events, I had experienced a jarring, recurring nightmare for three consecutive nights, followed by an incredibly vivid dream that my father had died. Then in the real world, the dream came true the following night, exactly the way I had dreamt it. In metaphysical terms, this is called a pre-cognitive dream, which is more of a prophecy than a premonition.

So, under the surface, there was always this other element that I had to deal with, which was the uncanny experience that I had somehow foreseen the future. It had been incredibly strange and I had to ask myself – “How could that have happened? How could you have seen something in such detail the night before it happened? And, what does that say about time and the nature of life itself?”

There was another deeply troubling aspect to the experience as well.  In real life, when I began living through the events of the dream, I knew exactly what was coming next and I wanted to change the events. But to my severe shock, I found that I had no control over anything whatsoever.

The incredibly odd fact was that I had absolutely no volition. Nothing that I thought, felt, or decided made any difference at all. I was awake. This was real. But it was like I was walking through a movie that had already been made. I knew that nothing could be changed because somehow, I knew that the present had already happened in the past. It was all too overwhelming to even try to understand.

Some years later, I came come across a profound quote from Einstein that seemed related. “The distinction between past, present and future is nothing but a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Of course, I found the idea fascinating, but in trying to grasp it, all I could come up was that my understanding of my life in the world was incomplete, and that there was a lot more that I needed to learn, to say the least.  It’s like you’re living your adult life learning your lessons and something unexpectedly alters your reality. Suddenly you feel like a preschooler enrolled in a babysitting club at an advanced university. 

Everything had changed so fundamentally for me that I felt like I didn’t know this world anymore. As boxer Mike Tyson once put it, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” And believe me, it was quite a heavy punch for this 16-year-old kid to take.

At the foundation of it all, the basic impermanence that underlies all of life had become abundantly clear to me. My father had been an incredibly powerful person, the central figure not just in our family, but in the entire world around him as well. And in less than five seconds, he was gone for good. Vanished without a trace.

So, it quickly drove home the fundamental impermanence of life. Nothing here lasts. Everything ends. Which brings up some deeper questions. Why does this creation even exist in the first place? What are we doing here? What is the real purpose of my life, if there even is one?”

Suffice it to say that I eventually put all these thoughts and questions aside and got on with living the new version of life that had been presented to me. And it picked up pretty quickly. After all, I was in the middle of my junior year in high school and we are blessed with a tremendous amount of resiliency at that age.

As soon as I began to return to my normal school life, a nice little coincidence happened for me. You may remember from a previous episode that my father had made me promise that I would say the Kaddish prayer for him after he died. I made that vow on a Saturday and eight days later, I said the prayer for the first time at his graveside. Amazingly, I had completely forgotten about that promise until those first words came out of my mouth that day in the cemetery.

 I started attending the synagogue near our house twice a day and I had to get into the routine of getting ready to go there every morning and night. A new Beatles album had just come out and I got into the habit of listening to it as I prepared to leave.

Like all their other albums, its songs took up permanent residency in my mind almost immediately upon hearing them.  The album was called “Rubber Soul” and it was quite a departure for the band. Many years later, once the Beatles had become history and were being studied from a cultural perspective, this album came to be viewed a major turning point in their career.

Listening to it was giving me quite an emotional boost and one day, I heard a deejay say that the release date for Rubber Soul had been December 3, 1965, which was the exact day that my father died.  Now, all my life, I’ve been one of those people who are always on the lookout for “signs.” It’s hard to explain exactly why, but if you happen to be one of them, you understand.

Anyway, for me, this information meant that somehow, everything was in synch. As insanely disruptive as the death had been, on some level, it all made sense and in some way the universe was still in good working order. I might very well have been grasping at straws, but who cares? The fact that the dates were identical made me feel a little better. And no matter how small, I needed all the “feel better” I could get.

Importantly, from the larger standpoint of the evolution of the times, the group had a distinctively new sound. Later this would be understood to be the very beginnings of psychedelic music, and the songs were mainly written and recorded while the band was under the steady influence of marijuana. If you listen to the song “Girl” you can hear someone inhaling a joint, and George Harrison once commented that the album was “the first one where we were fully-fledged potheads.”

 But the songs had a new level of depth to them as well. Remember that Bob Dylan had once told the Beatles that he liked their songs, but the trouble was that they weren’t about anything. John Lennon said that he took that comment in on a profound level, and when you listen to him sing “Nowhere Man,” it certainly sounds like it.

“He’s a real nowhere man. Sitting in his nowhere land. Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.” Those words immediately got me. At the time, it sounded like he was talking about everyone, myself included. He continued, “Doesn’t have a point of view. Knows not where he’s going to. Isn’t he a bit like you and me. He’s as blind as he can be. Just sees what he wants to see…”

In the present day, the song is looked at as an absolute classic and we take it for granted, but back then, it was truly incredible to hear these kind of ideas expressed in a Beatles song. In another cut, “Norwegian Wood,” George Harrison played the sitar for the first time ever in western music, which was truly a sign of things to come.

And finally, there was the song, “The Word.” It’s a song about love, but it’s not a standard love song because it’s actually about universal love, which is a theme the Beatles would expound upon seriously over the next few years. “Say the word and you’ll be free. Say the word and be like me. Say the word I’m thinking of. Have you heard the word is love? Now that I know what I feel must be right. I’m here to show everybody the light. Give the word a chance to say that the word is just the way.”

So, at the end of 1965, big changes were underway. The Beatles had evolved into a new level of musical genius and don’t forget, they were the leading force of cultural change in the entire word, so the larger world of popular music was changing in an enormous way as well.

And as difficult as it had been for me, I had gone through the first truly major change in my life, and one of the key parts of it had been the fact that I had gone through an experience that had defied science and logic. But something even bigger was waiting for me just around the next corner.

Let’s take that up in the coming episode, so as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open, and let’s get together in the next one.