What is the Hotel California?

After getting briefly distracted by some hub comments this morning, I sat down to do as I promised I would do and devote my first couple of working hours to my book. The title has been in my head since the day I landed in Ho Chi Minh City in 2005: This Could be Heaven, from the classic Eagles' song, Hotel California.

I started with the title, then I skipped two lines and wrote "Preface". I've always intended to start right off with a quote from the song, so I went to check the lyrics, just so I got it right:

There she stood in the doorway;
I heard the mission bell
And I was thinking to myself,
this could be heaven or this could be hell

In my metaphoric universe, "she" is Cambodia and the mission bell was my inspiration to call Cambodia home. The connections just keep coming for me in that song, but for some foolish reason I decided to check out a song meanings site and discover for the first time what it meant to the Eagles. That's where things got interesting.

The first interpretation was that it was all about drugs and drug addiction. All the lyrics fit that interpretation perfectly. Then I scrolled down a little further and someone said his university professor asked his students to write their interpretations of Hotel California, but NOT to write that it was about a cult, because that was the most popular interpretation at the time and he wanted the students to use their imaginations. Just about everyone in the class wrote that it was about drugs.

The professor's bombshell was that he had been good friends with Don Henley (Eagles drummer) and had learned from him that Hotel California was neither about a cult nor drugs, but about the music industry in Southern California in the late 60s and early 70s. He went through all the lyrics with the students and they all fell into place, just as they had with the drugs and Satanic cult interpretations.

It got even more interesting when I went on down to some more comments and read one that said categorically that Hotel California was about a Satanic cult because he had read a book that said it was. As the writer who had actually known Don Henley wrote:

Of course! How stupid of me! A book written by some anonymous yahoo is MUCH more accurate that the drummer from the ACTUAL BAND! What was I thinking?

Fortunately, and unusually for a forum, the comments didn't degenerate into an "I'm right and you're an idiot" sh*t fight. One person said, "That's the beauty of poetry and music: it's subject to interpretation."

Hang on, though - shouldn't Don Henley have the final word? Of course his interpretation of the lyrics should be considered the final literal word, but when you're writing in the language of poetry, you're creating words from mental images and you may not even be aware of the layers of meaning of your own words. As Bob Dylan wrote:

I don’t know how I got to write those songs. Those early songs were almost magically written.

Before I go on a tangent about Bob Dylan, I'll direct you to my blog article, Bob Dylan Revisited on Wall Street. Okay, now back to the subject.

I regularly follow a few writers here on Hub Pages. One of my favourites is smethngblue. I like the way he's not afraid to say what he believes at any given time and not afraid to explore further if something doesn't work. Like me, he's trying to deconstruct his spoon fed view of reality and construct a new reality from the ground up.

Needless to say, he gets his share of flack and sometimes his critics are "right." One person, who rather arrogantly declares himself to be an expert on conspiracy theories, herbal cancer cures, etc. (and probably is), has, after "30 years" of research, gotten sick of it all and insists that he be given the final word. He pulls a few examples of charlatans out of his hat to prove his point and if you followed his train of reasoning, you would probably become convinced that he is right. He certainly is.

The problem, as Alfred Korzybski pointed out, is that language is interpretative. The language of science, which, if properly applied, goes from one observable fact to another, is one way to sort fact from falsehood, but it really only applies to science (what happens when you mix 2 parts of hydrogen with two parts of oxygen, for instance). When it comes to opinions, we all consciously or subconsciously arrange them to suit our unconscious needs and one man's truth is another man's falsehood.

I've seen this apply to my own life in "miraculous" ways. Feel free not to believe me, but I cured a woman of a persistent rash just by using muscle testing to find its unconscious source. I cured another woman of a severe allergic reaction just by tapping on her energy meridians. A construction worker here in Cambodia cured a young woman of what our Western geniuses call "multiple personality disorder" in just three sessions.

"Oh, that's 'just' the placebo effect," I hear you say. Well, plenty of studies show that many if not most of the pharmaceuticals we worship in the West are placebos, too. I would argue that all medicines, allopathic, herbal or energetic, are placebos.

We create our own realities in ways we are completely unaware of. As Bob Dylan wrote in one of those early songs:

I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours

Just don't tell me I have to surrender my dream to yours.

Go blue.