(To part 1)
There’s a World
There’s a world you’re living in
No one else has your part
All God’s children in the wind
Take it in and blow hard
Look around it, have you found it
Walking down the avenue?
See what it brings
Could be good things
In the air for you
We are leaving, we are gone
Come with us to all alone
Never worry, never moan
We will leave you all alone
In the mountains, in the cities
You can see the dream
Look around you, has it found you?
Is it what it seems?
There’s a world you’re living in
No one else has your part
All God’s children in the wind
Take it in and blow hard
Young wrote these lyrics in the early 1960s, in the early days of all the increasing resistance among young people against the established order that did not want to leave room for changing structures, and that is how it can be read. As an appeal to the older generations and the leaders of society:
There is something new in the air, look around you, is everything you see really what it is? We’ll get out of here, you can come if you want.
On another level, when you read about the life Young leads and his attitude toward (lack of) attachment to material things and to people, he’s like an old Indian [i]. I have the feeling that this text can also refer, consciously or not, to the many Indian tribes with their ancient wisdom, who were driven from their common lands and who saw that the settlers often treated everything that lived there in a very disrespectful way. ‘We shall leave you all alone‘, we leave you alone with your selfishness and your struggle for possessions.
But on a deeper level of consciousness there also seems to be a great desire for liberation. I also hear a longing for an underlying, original world, the sacred dialectic in which the earth is embedded, and the task that awaits humanity in it. To make one, to return everything to the original state of wholeness, of completeness. The new ‘wind’, the Aquarius radiation, radiates through humanity and wants to propel it to a new awakening. Ultimately we are each held responsible for choosing or not to choose and follow this call.
We will leave you all alone.
Here the addressee is thrown back on himself, with an underlying goal: to find his true self deep within himself – and this thought is reinforced I feel by the version ‘God will leave you all alone’, as Young sings in the 1971 performance. In both interpretations, ‘alone’ in that case can also be read as all-one. ‘We’ is then the experienced human being, who wants to leave the materialistic world to return to the original field of life, ‘new’ for the present humanity, and who calls the ‘stragglers’ to awaken. Never worry, never moan, no worry, complaint or fear, breathe in the new wind, let it pass through you without any inclination to hold on and let it go free again, dare to pass it on – take it in and blow hard – and thus follow the path to the new field of life, where the all becomes Oneness. In that case, ‘we’ applies to all of us, written down with a certainty, which can simultaneously instill fear but also instill confidence. To the materialistic man a folly, to the seeker a dream that is perhaps more realistic than the material world of the senses known to us.
Suddenly a sentence wells up in me:
Receive everything, give up everything and thereby renew everything.
The gnostic Jan van Rijckenborgh writes about this in The Egyptian Arch-Gnosis part IV [ii]:
That is why the candidate (that is, the seeker for liberation from the material world of the senses, from time-spatiality), after having received everything before its grand becoming, after having inhaled everything, immediately giving up the immediately present again. The candidate should not dwell on anything. He may not say to any thing, “That is mine.” (…) If one receives everything in this way, and resists this reception by nothing, the great process of renewal will also proceed unimpeded, to the absolute end. “You have received all things freely, even give them freely,” it sounds to us from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). This is true not only with regard to gross matter, but with regard to all that you desire; it applies to all that is for your true peace.
This quest of receiving and relinquishing goes hand in hand with the development of the heart of gold in our own being.
It’s such a fine line, that keeps me searching for a heart of gold, and I’m getting old.
When we discover that we have seen and experienced everything before, and experience the emptiness of everything, the calling voice from deep inside can come to us. Then we become sensitive to that fine line. The line from the divine heart of the world, which lets us freely search through life and gain experiences on our life path, until we discover from within that true, lasting love cannot be found in this field of life. Then we are called to the search for the heart of gold, which wants to unfold in the depths of our hearts.
We are all given the opportunity to innovate. The new field of life awaits, patiently, lovingly and yearningly, for all of us, without exception.
There’s something new in the air, look around you, is everything you see really what it is? We’re getting out of here, you can come if you like.
From the interview in Times magazine 2012:
“I like people, I just don’t have to see them all the time,” he said, laughing.
“Too many decisions to make with no sign of what to do,” he said.
“I didn’t care and still don’t,” he said, then went on: “I experimented, I tried things, I learned things, I know more about all of that than I did before.”
I asked if he was a good person to work with or for. “The fact is that I can be really irritable when I’m unhappy about stuff,” he said. “I can be a nit-picker about details that seem to be over the top. But then again I’m into what I’m into, so a lot of people forgive me because of that.”
Sources:
[i] Neil Young Comes Clean – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
[ii] J. van Rijckenborgh, The Egyptian Arch-Gnosis part IV, Rozekruis Pers, Haarlem 2018
