The Gods of an Intersubjective Revolution

I've been listening to the Beatles since I was in the womb (this lifetime anyway), and have loved them ever since.  And now, thanks to the miracles of modern technology, we can all savor their glory endlessly, whether through our 500+ Beatles tracks in our iTunes libraries or by watching multitudes of rare clips on YouTube, such as this one that I stumbled across yesterday:



All you can say to that is: Frakkin' A !!!

Now, if you're a true Beatles fan, you'll also want to know why those of us at What Is Enlightenment? think that what the fab four generated together, betwixt them (and in human culture at large, worldwide), was "A Kind of Innocence We'd Never Seen Before."   That was one of the feature articles in WIE #25, from 2004, which featured an exclusive photo of the Beatles from their famous Shea Stadium performance (also rendered in 3-D to make the b&w shot more intriguing for a magazine cover):



Surveying the power of the Beatles (and the Grateful Dead) to transmit--and unite thousands of individuals simultaneously within--a field of collective consciousness, my fellow WIE editor Ross Robertson wrote:

___________
"As far out as the Dead were, they never broke free of a relatively marginal counterculture. The Beatles, on the other hand--everybody loves the Beatles. 'There was an alchemy in the way they came together that made two plus two equal not four but forty,' journalist Mark Hertsgaard writes. They gave the words 'come together' a whole new meaning.

"In the summer of 1965, when the Grateful Dead (then known as the Warlocks) were still earning their first stripes in the bars and clubs of the San Francisco peninsula, the Beatles played not the largest, but the first-ever concert held in a sports arena in the U.S., at Shea Stadium in Flushing, New York. . . .

"There were 55,000 people there, screaming so loud the Beatles could barely hear themselves playing. At least Deadheads listened to the music; Beatles fans couldn't even get to the first note without succumbing to something like a virus that made them yell till they were hoarse, some sort of 'emotional epidemic.'  It was as if they were ripping holes clean through the walls between them: Who knows the depth of impact this had? How about when the Beatles first performed on the Ed Sullivan show in February 1964, a year and a half earlier? Seventy-three million people were watching. That's forty percent of the U.S. population, roughly equal to the total number of televisions in the country that year. During that hour, precincts across the nation reported the lowest crime rate in half a century--even thieves, thugs, and malcontents took a timeout for the Beatles."
___________

:) And the joy of having a job like mine is that you get to wear headphones all day while you write, rocking out to the sonic soundscapes of an intersubjective revolution in consciousness that retains its soulful power to this day. . . .