‘All you need is love’: John Lennon and Yoko Ono on Love

‘All you need is love’… and why do we struggle to find and maintain loving relationships?  “The opposite of love is fear, not hate” Yoko Ono, a Japanese multimedia artist wrote on her Twitter wall, almost six years ago.

It is a handsome observation that how most of us live in fear, fear of getting hurt, fear of the future — we live our days from past learnings and experiences, this is how we judge, analyse and sometimes give the opportunity to our past to ruin our present, even our actions or no-action comes from fear, and we work in the ‘now’ from deep-rooted pain, traumas, or anxieties of the past.

Ever wonder how sometimes, it’s easier for a teenager to find true love than for someone who has experienced life without having ever tasted the essence of love. One must have struggled a lot in relationships and will always be, definitely, live his life full of fears, the one may lack ‘purity of being’ and always find troubles in ‘accepting true love’‘.

“Fearlessness is what love seeks… Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now,” wrote a political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt in her book, Love and Saint Augustine. Love “should be put ahead”. It is the only solution to building a world that is better and more just, and it is also the way to eternal happiness and peace.

An elemental truth we might glimpse is that we live in a state of tension between the need to reveal and the need to conceal ourselves, we also carry an urge to share our true feelings, but we fear that we will become vulnerable, or we will be rejected or criticized. As a result, we tend to settle for commonplace discussions about the superficialities of life.

We don’t need to acquire bigger things in life, one doesn’t die if he doesn’t get a bigger house or more vitamins. Human needs are few, and it takes a little to acquire them, in spite of the advertisement on the internet.

The late husband of Yoko, the greatest singer-songwriter,  musician, and peace activist who achieved worldwide fame as the founder of the Beatles— John Lennon once said. “There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance.”

“We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”

Most of us haste always, try to escape our feelings by tranquilizing ourselves, either with alcohol or pills.

In a Podcast available on thesmithtapes.com “INTERVIEWS WITH ROCK STARS & ICONS FROM 1969-72, UNHEARD SINCE”, named  John Lenon and Yoko Ono — Howard Smith, an American Oscar-winning film director, producer, journalist, screenwriter, actor and radio broadcaster asked John and Yoko about their love for each other, here you have ‘John Lennon and Yoko Ono on Love’ when Smith asked them “People seem to be having a lot of trouble getting along with each other. I mean a couple. Both of you seem very very close, what’s your  secret?”

“It’s called love,” replied John, and Yoko chuckeled cutely. “And there is nothing that splits that up. I mean you gotta work on it like it’s a precious gift and its a plant that you have to look after it, and water it, you cant just sit on your backside and think, oh we’re in love, so that’s alright. But that’s the secret, you know! It’s all true folks. All you need is love. I can’t give you the formula for meeting the person you are going to love. But it’s around and it happens. I mean it happens to me at 29 and Yoko Ono at 32. And again Yoko giggled lovingly after John.”

“And it’s a long wait, you know, I thought it was an abstract thing when I was singing about, “All you need is love.” I was talking about something I hadn’t experienced. I had experienced love for people in gusts and love for things and trees and things like that, but I hadn’t experienced what I was thinking about. It’s like anything, you sing about it first or write about it first and find out what you were talking about after.”

After listening to John, Yoko spoke, “Well I never thought that it will happen in this late stage of my life. I mean I’m just sort of starting to give up hope. That kind of a thing. Becoming very cynical and all that. But it happened and it’s very very very good. “

John’s music in the backgroung, “… love is real, real is love…”

John said, “it’s no good having…being with people you can dominate all the time. Or being with someone who can dominate you all the time. Because either one is boring. But if you’re with somebody who has a ticking mind which was the best part about being with the Beatles when they were ticking, is that they were ticking. But it began to slow down. But with Yoko it’s like living with 4 or 5 people… it’s far out.”

LET’S LOVE EACH OTHER
by Rumi (translated by Haleh Liza Gafori)

Let’s love each other,
let’s cherish each other, my friend,
before we lose each other.

You’ll long for me when I’m gone.
You’ll make a truce with me.
So why put me on trial while I’m alive?

Why adore the dead but battle the living?

You’ll kiss the headstone of my grave.
Look, I’m lying here still as a corpse,
dead as a stone. Kiss my face instead!