I went down to my bedroom. I pulled out the album “John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band,” which I had bought and listened to back in high school. I put it on the stereo and sat down on my old green bed. I put the pretzels and the beer on a small brown coffee table next to the bed. I hadn’t heard that album in a long time. As I listened to the songs, “I Found Out” and “God,” I suddenly understood what Lennon had gone through. I went throughthe same thing 10 years later. In the words from “I Found Out”:“There ain’t no Jesus gonna come from the sky.”and““Don’t let them fool you with dope and cocaine.”He denounced both religion and drugs, almost as if they were the same kind of thing. And in the song “God,” Lennon denounced his role as an LSD mystic, using references from his song “I Am The Walrus” from the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour” album.After a long list of things he proclaimed he no longer believed in he sang:“I just believe in me,Yoko and me, And that’s reality.”And reality is what I really wanted at that time. I had had enough of seeing the world through a haze of drugs. I had opened the doors of mysticism. Enough was enough. Even religion itself, Christian or otherwise, was an abstraction. Now I wanted to face the real physical world and try to see it for what it was.
-from "Memoirs of a Drugged-Up, Sex-Crazed Yippie" By Steve Otto.