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Lyrics by Paul McCartney.  Comments by me.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

All of our lives, as spiritual people, we have been outsiders.  Or we have been asleep, or following other spirtual schools.  Now we are finding our own answers.  We are finding the teachings of Higher Balance in greater and greater numbers.  We are starting to awaken in greater and greater numbers.  We are starting to flex our wings.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free.

We are learning to use our sixth sense.  We are litterly and figuratively learning to see.

Blackbird fly   Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

The dark side surrounds us but we will not be kept down.  We will learn to access that which is deep inside.  We will become a force for positive change.

Blackbird fly    Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

See part I: Loving The Beatles Part I

See part II: Loving The Beatles Part II

Eric talked about his interpretation of The Beatles’ song “Across the Universe” in Hawaii at the 2006 retreat.  Here is an exerpt:

The lyrics are John Lennon.  The comments are Eric Pepin.

Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup,

“Words are flowing to me is teaching and trying to vocalize knowledge into human format.  The paper cup are minds trying to hold what they are hearing from me. Paper cups are small and disposable and tossed away once used. How many of my words will remain within them? How much of my efforts will be appreciated? I have no regrets.”

They slither while they pass, they slip away across the universe

“Words. They slither because the words are alive that I am speaking, transforming rapidly. They are hard to hold or to catch, and for many they slip through the mental finger tips back across the universe.”

Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my open mind, Possessing and caressing me.

“Bitter-sweet is this dimension. I move myself through memories that I have so far experienced in this world, both good and bad.  Without them I am not who I am now.“

Jai guru deva om

“It is about God, the one… OM I am in the presence of God, all I have to do is think on it and it is so. I am humbled and overjoyed.”

Nothing’s gonna change my world,
Nothing’s gonna change my world.

…

For those of you that are members of the HBI Navigator web site forum, you can read the rest of Eric’s words at a blog titled “Eric’s Deep Song Reflections“.

If you are not a member of the forum, why not?  You are missing valuable spiritual information.  Purchase the Foundation meditation system from HBI and received a free lifetime membership to the forum.  The current price is only $49 for the mp3 download version.

Jai guru deva om

Continued from Loving the Beatles Part I. 

Why are song lyrics (and movies) sometimes important?  My teacher teaches and I believe that the collective consciousness of the Earth, also known as Gaia, seeks ways of reaching out to people and teaching them.  Teaching people ideas that increases their understand of the universe and how it works, so the level of their consciousness is raised.  Songs and movies can reach a large number of people world-wide and can affect how they think.  Which, in turn, affects how the collective thinks.  Hopefully creating an every spirially upward increase in knowledge and understanding.

The last 15 songs in the 23 song mix:

While My Guitar Gently Weeps, The Beatles [the White Album]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/While_My_Guitar_Gently_Weeps

According to Harrison, inspiration for the song came from reading the I Ching, which, as he put it, “seemed to me to be based on the Eastern concept that everything is relative to everything else, as opposed to the Western view that things are merely coincidental.”

Rocky Raccoon, The Beatles [the White Album]

Octopus’s Garden, The Beatles [the White Album]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus%27s_Garden

Harrison commented: “‘Octopus’s Garden’ is Ringo’s song. It’s only the second song Ringo has ever written, mind you, and it’s lovely.” Ringo’s first solo composition had been “Don’t Pass Me By” on The Beatles album. He added that the song gets very deep into your consciousness “because it’s so peaceful. I suppose Ringo is writing cosmic songs these days without even realizing it.”

Cry Baby Cry, The Beatles [the White Album]

Help!, Help!

Day Tripper, B side single

Blackbird, The Beatles [the White Album]

Here Comes the Sun, Abbey Road

I’m So Tired, The Beatles [the White Album]

Carry That Weight, Abbey Road

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I’m_So_Tired

Lennon wrote the song at a Transcendental Meditation camp when he couldn’t sleep. The Beatles had gone on a retreat to study with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, India. After three weeks of constant meditation and lectures, Lennon missed his soon-to-be wife, Yoko Ono, and wrote this song. The fact it was recorded at three in the morning enhances the sentiment.

Across the Universe, No One’s Gonna Change Our World

From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Across_the_universe

The flavor of the song was heavily influenced by Lennon’s and The Beatles’ short-lived interest in Transcendental Meditation in late 1967–early 1968, when the song was composed.

In his 1970 interview with Rolling Stone, Lennon referred to the song as perhaps the best, most oetic lyric he ever wrote.

Glass Onion, The Beatles [the White Album]

Sexy Sadie, The Beatles [the White Album]

Hey Jude, single

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hey_Jude

In 1968, John Lennon and his wife Cynthia Lennon separated due to his affair with Yoko Ono. Soon afterwards, Paul McCartney drove out to visit Cynthia and Julian, her son with Lennon. “We’d been very good friends for millions of years and I thought it was a bit much for them suddenly to be persona non gratae and out of my life,” McCartney said. Later, Cynthia Lennon recalled, “I was truly surprised when, one afternoon, Paul arrived on his own. I was touched by his obvious concern for our welfare…. On the journey down he composed ‘Hey Jude’ in the car. I will never forget Paul’s gesture of care and concern in coming to see us.”

The song’s original title was “Hey Jules”, and it was intended to comfort Julian Lennon from the stress of his parents’ divorce. McCartney said, “I started with the idea ‘Hey Jules’, which was Julian, don’t make it bad, take a sad song and make it better. Hey, try and deal with this terrible thing. I knew it was not going to be easy for him. I always feel sorry for kids in divorces …

A Day in the Life, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

I am too young to remember The Beatles.  I can barely remember the day John Lennon was shot.  I was not really exposed to their music growing up.  I do know a few of their commercially successful songs that have appeared in movies, etc. since then.  I recently watched a documentary “The U.S. vs. John Lennon” that I loved.

After watching the movie, I remember a CD mix titled “The Beatles Mix” I got from the cabin in the summer of 2007 that I had never listened to.  I didn’t know the music, so I had to search the Internet with the lyrics to find the song titles.  I spent a few hours listening to lyrics, reading the back stories to the songs, and reading about the history. 

It not only dawned on me how brilliant John Lennon and The Beatles were, I also realized that each of the songs in this mix could be interpreted through a spiritual perspective.  I suspect that some one equally or even more brilliant chose the songs and placed them in this particular order.

The entire mix is 23 songs.  All songs are the version are performed by The Beatles.  I also attempted to list the album which I believe the track came from.  Here are the first 8 songs with some excerpts from Wikipedia:

Dear Prudence, The Beatles [the White Album]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dear_Prudence

The song is about actress Mia Farrow’s sister, Prudence, who was present when the Beatles visited Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India. Prudence, focused on meditation, stayed in her room for the majority of their stay. Lennon, who was worried that she was depressed, wrote this song for her, inviting her to “come out to play“. While the Beatles left the course, Mia, Prudence, Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and others, stayed and became Transcendental Meditation teachers. Prudence now teaches elementary school along with her husband, and they both still practice TM and advanced versions of it.

The Fool on the Hill, Magical Mystery Tour

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fool_on_the_Hill

 McCartney said of the song:

 

‘Fool on the Hill’ was mine and I think I was writing about someone like Maharishi. His detractors called him a fool. Because of his giggle he wasn’t taken too seriously … I was sitting at the piano at my father’s house in Liverpool hitting a D 6th chord, and I made up ‘Fool on the Hill.’

 

Alistair Taylor, in the book Yesterday, reports a mysterious incident involving a man who inexplicably appeared near him and McCartney during a walk on Primrose Hill and then disappeared again, soon after McCartney and Taylor had conversed about the existence of God; this allegedly prompted the writing of the song.

With a Little Help from My Friends, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

You Never Give Me Your Money, Abbey Road

Polythene Pam, Abbey Road

She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, Abbey Road

Happiness is a Warm Gun,  The Beatles [the White Album]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_is_a_Warm_Gun

According to Lennon, the title came from the cover of a gun magazine that producer George Martin showed him: “I think he showed me a cover of a magazine that said ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun.’ It was a gun magazine. I just thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you just shot something.”

Martha My Dear, The Beatles [the White Album]

Coming Soon: Part II

 {HBI Across the Universe}

HBI Across the Universe.

Eric Pepin.

The Higher Balance Institute.

The Kalani resort on the Big Island of Hawaii.

May 31 - June 6, 2009.

SOLD OUT.

Because, as Milton Friedman (1912-2006) wrote in an 1928 essay, “Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. When the crisis occurs the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” (emphasis added)

The New York Times was already re-evaluating Friedman’s legacy in April, 2008 with a short article titled “A Fresh Look at the Apostle of Free Markets“.

The chief object of their scorn was John Maynard Keynes, and his message that government had to juice the economy with spending during times of duress. That notion dominated policy in the years after the Depression. Mr. Friedman would spend much of his career assailing it: He argued that government should simply manage the supply of money — to keep it growing with the economy — then step aside and let the market do its magic.

So firm was his regard for market forces, so deep his disdain for government, that Mr. Friedman once said: “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there would be a shortage of sand.”

Friedman, in a 1976 essay, claimed “the Great Depression was produced by government mismanagement.”

See also:

My previous post “Blogger Changes A Country” from June 2008.

Wikipedia entry for Milton Friedman.

AlterNet has a good primer on how home loans, banks, investment banks and insurance companies caused our current global financial problems called Financial Meltdown 101.  And it has really good illustrations.

In 1996, the Fed allows regular banks to become heavily involved in investment banking, which opens the door to conflicts of interest in banks pushing sketchy financial products on customers who poorly understood the risks. In 1999, under intense pressure from financial firms, Congress overturns Glass-Steagall, allowing banks to engage in any sort of activity from underwriting insurance to investment banking to commercial banking (such as holding deposits).

Low interest rates make borrowed money cheap for everyone from homebuyers to banks. This ocean of credit was one factor that led to a major shift in the home-lending industry — from originate to own to originate to distribute. Low interest rates also meant that homebuyers could take on larger mortgages, which supported rising prices.

Of all net job growth from 2002 to 2007, up to 40 percent was housing-sector related: mortgage brokers, appraisers, real-estate agents, call-center employees, loan officers, construction and home-improvement store workers, etc.

There was a conflict of interest, however, because the rating services earned huge fees from the investment banks. Moody’s earned nearly $850 million from such structured finance products in 2006 alone.

Furthermore, the banks would hedge the tranches, another way of distributing risk, by purchasing credit default swaps(CDSs) sold by companies like AIG and MBIA. The swaps were a form of insurance… But CDSs started getting brought and sold all over the world based on perceived risk. The market grew so large that the underlying debt being insured was $45 trillion — nearly the same size as the annual global economy!

For instance, Merrill Lynch had a leverage ratio of 45.8 on Sept. 26. That means that if Merrill had $10 billion in the bank, it was playing around with $458 billion. The Federal Reserve is supposed to regulate reserves to limit the growth of credit, but the SIVs were one method to get around this rule. More leverage also meant more risk for the bank, however, because funds could disappear quickly if a few bets went bad.

This system kept the U.S. economy chugging along for years. For some 35 years, real wages have been stagnant for most Americans, but as house values skyrocketed over the last decade, many homeowners refinanced and cashed out the equity — turning their homes into ATMs… By 2004, Americans were using home equity to finance as much $310 billion a year in personal consumption. This debt-driven consumption was the engine of growth.

From 2004 to 2006, nearly 20 percent of all mortgage loans were subprime loans. As the vast majority were adjustable-rate mortgages(ARMs), this created a time bomb. 

When all is said and done I think the root cause of the global financial crisis will come down to two causes.  The first is the approval and implementation of new global financial regulations on collateral called Basel II.  These regulations were designed to decrease the risk of a world wide banking meltdown.  Adoption started in 2005 in the United States and is also happening in many world wide countries.  (Note: Turkey just decided to delay implementation because of the current crisis.) 

Then global insurance company AIG created a financial product (basically insurance) for banks to meet the new regulations with out increasing the amount of cash they need to keep on hand.  Banks did not want to keep more cash on hand because this would lower profitability.  This new financial product was initially extremely profitable for AIG but also very risky.  From the 2007 AIG annual report to shareholders, they created this loan insurance for banks…

“for the purpose of providing them with regulatory capital relief rather than risk mitigation.”

Unfortunately these facts are not yet well known or reported upon.  With billions in government bailouts happening across the world and the US Presidential elections at stake, one has to wonder if we are following the best path to fix the problem.

References:

Forbes, “Why Wasn’t AIG Hegdged?” 9/28/2008

(American Internation Group) AIG 2007 Annual Report to Shareholders

FT Alphaville, “AIG and an overlevered Europe?” 10/01/2008

Wikipedia has a (poor) entry on the Basel II Accords

The Daily Wealth.com, “How AIG’s Collapse Began a Global Run on the Banks“, Porter Stansberry, 10/04/2008

We approach January 2009 and a new Presidential adminstration in the United States.  Soon it will be time to look back at the last eight years of government and evaluate it.  Here is a view from the movie “The U.S. vs. John Lennon” (2006):

“Lennon was somebody who was a born enemy of those who govern the United States.  He was everything they hated.  So I just say he represented life and was admirable.  And Mr. Nixon… and Mr. Bush represent death.  And that is a bad thing.”

- Gore Vidal, Author/Historian