The Beatles Were Right

by Matt Johnson

I was raised as a Lutheran. Lutheran traditions are very similar to Catholic or Episcopalian/Anglican traditions. Everything is highly structured and ritualistic. There was a time when I found this to be very boring, dry and lifeless. 

I later realized that none of that is true. Every Sunday we would repeat the same words in the form of the Lord’s Prayer, the Nicene Creed, the Apostle’s Creed and various other things. We would take part in Communion in a very precise manner. The words never changed. The ritual never changed. It was performed the exact same way every single Sunday.

Without thinking about it, I had memorized the entire thing as a young boy. My next door neighbors had a young son named Dale. Dale and I would play and run around the neighborhood with the other kids. One day, we went inside his house for a snack and his mother asked me if I wanted to see something cool. She had a necklace around her neck with a strange bauble hanging from it. She told me to come closer and look into it. I looked into it and inside was the entire Lord’s Prayer. 

I thought, wow, that is pretty cool! She asked me if I knew what that was and I said yes. Then, without looking into the bauble, I repeated the entire Lord’s Prayer from memory. She was astonished. How did I do that?!.. she asked. I told her that we read it every Sunday in church. She was truly impressed. I didn’t really think about it much for a long time. 

Years later, I became involved in theater as a teenager. I never had much more than a small role, but it dawned on me that memorizing material was something we do naturally all the time. I knew all the lines from every single Star Wars movie. I enjoyed them and I watched them over and over so it was easy. I also knew all the lyrics to dozens of music albums. I was not special in this way. Most people do this if it is something they like or care about. 

Over the years, I have come to understand the power of words. Words communicate ideas. Words can be read silently or made into sounds with our mouths. Sounds resonate at different frequencies. It is all a form of magic and manifestation. I can write something down, you can read it and then it produces an image in your mind. You can say it out loud and it vibrates through the air. Words are incredibly powerful. If something is repeated enough times by someone, it can become their truth. This can be anything from a religion to simply the desire to go eat food because someone has seen a TV commercial and said out loud “I am hungry”.  Well, now you are!

Many of the great teachers have taught that anything you follow “I am” with becomes your reality. If large numbers of people hear something enough times, it becomes a larger reality. This can be used for good reasons or bad reasons. I read a quote once that music is the highest form of magic. 

This got me thinking. I wrote a previous article called “The Prayer” with this similar theme. I wrote that prayer with the hope that people would pray it and make the world a better place. “You may say I’m a dreamer…but I’m not the only one”. Getting people to pray is not always easy. However, getting people to sing or even dance is. All you have to do is put a song on and if people know it they will start to sing it or even start moving to the beat. 

I got the idea…I need to write a song! I had all sorts of ideas. I started listening to music I thought was meaningful. My first go to band was Queen. Queen has a lot of amazing songs. They are all about love and life. They were also massive fans of the Beatles. I looked up an interview and Freddie Mercury, in his famously charming way, said he did things John Lennon could never do, but John Lennon did things he could never do as well. It was not a criticism or a boast. Freddie was just stating a fact. He had tremendous love, respect and affection for Lennon and wrote a very beautiful song dedicated to him after he was murdered. 

So Freddie Mercury being my hero, I decided to take up his advice and see what the Beatles had to offer. I grew up with the Beatles so I already had a pretty good idea. The song “All You Need Is Love” had already been bouncing around in my head because of Christine Breese’s teachings on total unconditional love. I listened to the song…not as a kid, but as a 48 year old man with years and years of study and experience under my belt. I had listened to the song many times before, but this time I felt like I HEARD it for the first time. 

Everything you ever need to know is in that one song. And it is a catchy, great song that you can’t get out of your head! It teaches the height of mastery: Love. This is THE song. The only other thing that I can think of that hits me the same way is 1 Corinthians 13 in the New International Version of the Bible. While that is in the Christian Bible, it can be read as a stand alone peace of teaching for anyone of any point of view.

You can read stacks of books, you can meditate, you can tap into the Universal Mind and develop psychic abilities. Those of us who study metaphysics KNOW these things are real. They give us proof that all of this is real and encourage us to keep going. We can also use them to help others. However, the highest “power” of all is to have a heart full of love for everyone and everything. 

I don’t know if the Beatles knew what they were doing, but they certainly did it. And they were right. As Queen says, it’s a kind of magic…the good kind. All you need is love. Pass it on. 

Matt Johnson is a spiritual teacher. His calling in life is to teach humanity the truth behind all truths…Universalism. He teaches this in his book “Universalism” which is available for free online. He is also a graduate of the University of Metaphysical Sciences. You can learn more about him at: universalismofficialpage.blogspot.com