TL;DR:
- John Lennon’s “Imagine” advocates a life with “no possessions.”
- He later said “You can transcend possessions without walking around in a robe.”
- The former Beatle then ruminated on what Jesus Christ said about wealth.
John Lennon‘s “Imagine” has a famous antimaterialistic message. Later on, John said he didn’t think having money would deter him from reaching nirvana. During an interview, John said intellectuals would have a harder time achieving enlightenment than he would.
John Lennon stopped trying to transcend possessions like he did in ‘Imagine’
The book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono features an interview from 1980. In it, John said money couldn’t buy him happiness, but he still enjoyed making lots of money because of what it provided. The interviewer wondered what happened to “transcending possessions,” which was likely a reference to the lyric “imagine no possessions” from “Imagine.”
“You can transcend possessions without walking around in a robe,” John replied. “Possessions can be in the mind. A monk who’s off in a cave dreaming about f******, sucking, and eating is in a far worse position than me who has so-called money in his back pocket. I’m over the conflict that says you can’t be awake and have money. That’s absolute rubbish.”
John Lennon ruminated on a famous quote about possessions from Jesus Christ
John then referred to one of Jesus Christ’s most famous quotations. “When Christ said, ‘It’s as easy for a rich man to get to heaven as to go through the eye of a needle,’ I took it literally — that one has to dump possessions to get through to nirvana, or whatever you call it.
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“But an intellectual has less chance of getting through than me,” John added. “They’re possessed of ideas. An intellectual with no money who’s living the ascetic life — no TV and all that — well, they’re possessed of ideas, ideas of what they’re supposed to be. I’m no longer possessed of ideas.”
Subsequently, John said he wasn’t always materialistic. For example, he didn’t want to own more clothes than he could wear. Because of that, he donated his own clothing to the Salvation Army once per year.
‘Imagine’ was the former Beatle’s biggest hit in the United States up to that point
Regardless of John’s attitude toward its sentiment, “Imagine” became an international hit. The tune reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it his highest charting single at the time. John wouldn’t best his record until he released “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” which was his first No. 1 single.
According to The Official Charts Company, “Imagine” was a much bigger hit in the United Kingdom. There, it was No. 1 for four weeks, lasting on the chart for 50 weeks in total. Notably, “Imagine” greatly outperformed “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” in the U.K., as the latter merely hit No. 36 and stayed on the chart for four weeks.
John liked possessions after all — but “Imagine” is still a classic.
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