The Beatles and spiritual vortices swirling invisibly in the sky

I didn't choose to hate hippies and New Agers. I hated hippies because I discovered punk rock when I was 14, which is right when the whole punk thing was exploding upon the world. And punk rockers loathed hippies. This was required. You had to. It was encoded into the DNA of the universe. It was the Way of Things.

As for New Agers, I began training in Zen under a legendary Japanese Zen master when I was 15, just a year after my punk rock awakening. My Zen master was formal, strict and traditional, like something straight out of feudal Japan. The Zen center where he taught was as austere as fuck. And in this culture of ascetic bald heads, stony faces, arcane Buddhist scriptures, ramrod straight spines, cold spartan hardwood floors, grimly simple food, and a thick monasterial silence you could cut with a knife, let's just say no one was taking kindly to angel guides, quartz crystals, channeled entities, dream catchers, and wooshy, tinkly synthesizer music. New Age stuff was severely uncool.

Here's my point. I've been bred to not believe in things like spiritual vortices swirling invisibly in the sky. Like the ones that are always supposed to be floating around over Sedona or Stonehenge or wherever. You know why? Because hippies and New Agers believe in spiritual vortices swirling invisibly in the sky. Guys named Cosmic Butterfly who wear baggy tie-dyed clothes and beards like Tom Hanks after he'd lived on that deserted island for a decade—that’s who believes in spiritual vortices.

But here's what I'm gonna tell you. If I did believe in them, the spiritual vortices—like if I was forced to, with the cold barrel of an Uzi pressing into my forehead—the only spiritual vortice I could possibly believe in is one created by The Beatles. And it would be a real doozy.

I think you know as well as I do that it would be a huge, swirly funnel of glittery good energy that dumps oceans of shiny positive vibrations into our poor bedraggled planet. A woo woo transmission of light directly into the chakras of the earth. A cosmic infusion of goodness juju into the collective consciousness of humanity. All through the music of The Beatles (not early Beatles, mind you; not the “I want to hold your hand” Beatles, but everything from Rubber Soul and Revolver on).

Even if you don't believe that four Lights Wizards from England could open up a planetary portal of goodness into the heart of humanity (which I wouldn't either but for the Uzi), I think we can all agree that someday therapists will prescribe Beatles songs like medication.

For example, let's say you're standing in your living room in the dark at 2:00 AM engaged in mortal combat with a PTSD flashback from the terror of your alcoholic father's ragey abuse of you throughout your childhood. Just hypothetically.

And so there you are, telling yourself over and over that you're not about to be annihilated, that it's “just a body memory,” as your therapist has coached you to do, but it’s not working. So with trembling hands, you push in your earbuds, slip out the door quietly so as not to wake your spouse, and you start marching fast through your neighborhood. And as you do, you press play on your phone.

And it begins.

You start to receive the unspeakable benediction of George Harrison telling you, “try to see you’re really only very small and life goes on within and without you,” from the song Within You and Without You, from Sgt. Peppers’, while that corny, hokey, wonderful sitar buzzes in the background. The vortex, the very one you would never believe in, opens up, right there above your head.

Similarly, when your flashback, or any hard emotion, is screeching that life absolutely will not and can not go on, John, Paul, George, and Ringo know that, Obladi Oblada, life bloody well does go on, na na na na life goes on, and your antiquated certainty of imminent annihilation simply cannot stand against such a triumphant revelation of this miraculous fact.

In these sorts of purely hypothetical scenarios, the odds are high that you will feel all sorts of inner demons being tamed and ancient fears turning into strange new species of beatitude, right on the spot.

And don't even get me started on the song Let It Be. This song alone, when applied correctly, can replace approximately a dozen therapy sessions. I've crunched the numbers. Because while your therapist and the 20 books on trauma that may or may not fill your bookshelves tell you not to fight those old emotions, nothing—and I do mean nothing—will pacify your white-knuckled resistance like Paul singing let it be, in the universal key of surrender, swooning you into the very heart of acceptance that's encoded into every note of that ridiculously healing song. And because also Mother Mary said it. Crystal words of mother fucking wisdom, bitches. I mean, I'm no Christian, but come on people!

Please understand—I would clarify to the guy with the Uzi—I would never suggest that the boys from Liverpool knew they were creating a vortex of goodness, if there were such things. No, I would emphasize, the four of them brought this radiant downpouring of soul-light into the earth without having the slightest idea what they were doing. They synergistically opened up a super portal in the sky (with diamonds) that was much bigger than them or anything they knew about. They were an unwitting conduit.

And so yes, if I did believe in vortices of spiritual shininess, that's how it would work, and that's who would create it. Or at least, as the great Colin Quinn used to say on SNL's Weekend Update, “That's my story and I'm sticking to it.” And it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong I'm right, where I belong I'm right, where I belong.