Here Comes the Sun

From the window of their suite on the top floor of Bombay’s Taj Hotel, George and Pattie looked out onto a traffic jam of beeping cars, rumbling bullock carts, bleating elephants, and ringing bicycles. Ravi Shankar and an assistant arrived at the hotel. Windows were closed against the noise. George’s sitar lessons picked up where they had left off in England. When George developed back pains from sitting so long in unfamiliar positions, Ravi called in a yoga instructor who tutored George in postures and breath control, and with the addition of these simple daily exercises he was able to practice comfortably as his lessons progressed.

At first no one in the hotel recognized him. But after a few days, overconfident of his anonymity, he took an elevator down to the lobby, intending to do some shopping, and drew the attention of a teenage elevator operator. Could it be? The next morning, George and Pattie awoke to crowds of Indian Beatlemaniacs outside their window shouting, “We want George!”

Learning that a Beatle had come to India, the press chased him down and he agreed to an interview with a BBC correspondent. Even after so short a time as a student of Indian thought, he felt comfortable making the declaration, “I believe much more in the religions of India than in anything I ever learned from Christianity. The difference over here is that their religion is every second and every minute of their lives—and it is them, how they act, how they conduct themselves, and how they think.”

To find some privacy, George, Pattie, Ravi, and Ravi’s partner Kamala took a train north to the province of Kashmir, a lake-filled state bordered by Pakistan to the west and China to the north. Kashmir was the retreat of royalty, an idyllic land of fruit orchards and flowering gardens. They arrived at the city of Srinagar, nestled at the foot of the Himalayan mountains.

Golden saffron fields glowed in the morning sun, and flowers from the fabled Shalimar Gardens filled the air with their sweet fragrance. The group took up residence in a large wooden houseboat on the largest of the city’s many lakes. Each evening the boat’s owner stoked its heavy cast-iron stove with apple wood and placed hot water bottles between the blankets of their beds. Each morning he folded napkins into the shape of mosque domes and balanced them in crystal goblets on their breakfast table. Vases of freshly picked saffron flowers colored the deck of their houseboat. Through carved wood windows, George looked out on the Himalayas rising in the distance and savored freedom from life as a Beatle. Each morning, he breathed in the bracing mountain air and performed yoga exercises, then practiced on the sitar, eyes shut, his fingers familiarizing themselves with notes along the instrument’s long wooden neck. When his exercises ended, he read books on self-realization and in the peace and calm of an ancient land discovered teachings that would permanently change the course of his life.

Among the books that Ravi had brought for George was Raja-Yoga by Swami Vivekananda. A tall, urbane Bengali, Vivekananda had made a dramatic impact at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions Conference in Chicago, the first Hindu ever to address such a gathering of religious leaders in America. Before that speech, British missionaries had depicted Hinduism as a “heathen” religion. Liberal Unitarians were looking to reverse that impression by stimulating interfaith dialogue, and in Vivekananda, who held degrees in science and philosophy, they found an ideal spokesperson.

In Raja-Yoga George learned Vivekananda’s central message: all people possess innate and eternal perfection. “Tat tvam asi—That thou art,” Vivekananda declared. “You are that which you seek. There is nothing to do but realize it.”

One passage in particular held George’s attention: “What right has a man to say that he has a soul if he does not feel it, or that there is a God if he does not see Him? If there is a God we must see Him . . . otherwise it is better not to believe.” Better to be an outspoken atheist, Vivekananda advised, than a hypocrite. Raja-Yoga was not a big book—a small paperback with a simple red cover—but its contents were vast.

George discovered that the word “yoga” meant “to link,” as in the English words “yoke” or “union.” In its early stages, George read, yoga involved physical exercises, but its goal was to link the soul with the Supreme Soul or God. To reach that goal a yogi must also practice yama or self-restraint, which included no killing and, by inference, a vegetarian diet; no lying; and no stealing or taking more than needed. Along with qualities such as cleanliness, austerity, and dependence on God, these formed the basics “without which no practice of yoga will succeed.”

True yoga, Vivekananda wrote, did not depend on being Christian, Jew, Buddhist, atheist, or theist. The benefits of yoga were available to every human being through daily practice. Try to practice mornings and evenings, Vivekananda advised. Try not to eat before morning yoga is done. And try to control the sex drive. When contained, sexual energy transforms into nourishment for the brain. Without chastity, one loses stamina and mental strength. He wrote that the spiritual giants all knew this secret. Above all, never produce pain in any living being by thought, word, or deed. “There is no virtue,” Vivekananda wrote, “higher than this.”

From their houseboat, George and Pattie could hear the muezzin of a nearby mosque calling the faithful to prayer. A small wooden ferry tied to the dock bumped gently against its moorings. Sunlight glistened off lake water, creating veils of mist that grew into thick clouds. The clouds hovered over the Himalayas in the distance, pouring a gentle rain that snaked down the mountainside to nourish farmlands and fill reservoirs in an endless, perfect cycle.

Where was his childhood now, his career? What sense did the history of this one short life make compared to the eternity opening up before him? However exciting his achievements looked from the outside, something grand and majestic was transporting him beyond the minutiae of that world. What other people perceived of him—a working-class Liverpool boy who became part of history’s most successful rock group, who married a top model and had more fans than Elvis—dwindled to mere facts. What he was finding in India spoke to the quintessence of experience, to the meaning and significance of his life. He had come for this without knowing its name or shape or depth.

Among the books stacked in George’s room on the houseboat was another, Autobiography of a Yogi. The cover featured a photo of the author, Paramahansa Yogananda. Long black hair framed Yogananda’s youthful face. His aquiline nose flared slightly and his mouth offered a Mona Lisa smile, as if he were amused by the fuss of being photographed. His eyes were startling white with deep pools for pupils. “The moment I looked at that picture of Yogananda,” George later said, “his eyes went right through me.”

Many seekers read Yogananda’s book in the fifties and sixties. Published in 1946, it offered Westerners one of the few available portraits of mystic India. The book described Yogananda’s search for spiritual masters and accounts of the supernatural events he witnessed in remote mountain retreats.

Empowered beings and mystic powers fascinated George. “I’d heard stories about men in caves up in the Himalayas who are very old and wise,” he explained years later, “and about people who could levitate . . . mystic stories that had permeated my curiosity for years.”

In his autobiography, Yogananda described meeting recluses such as the Levitating Saint. This yogi had mastered the circulation of “life airs” that govern physical and mental functions. By manipulating these airs, the Levitating Saint was said to raise himself off the ground and hover in midair for hours. The book also described Trailanga Swami, a giant of a man reputed to be more than two hundred years old and weighing nearly three hundred pounds. Trailanga lived in Benares and had a habit of sitting stark naked in the middle of busy streets, chanting the names of God, and disrupting traffic. Police tried locking him away from time to time, but rumor had it that by exercising yogic ability Trailanga reduced himself to the size of a pea, sneaked out under the door of his cell, and went back to chanting in the streets.

Other books George read described other popular mystics, such as Swami Haridas and his disciple Mian Tansen. By playing particular ragas, these fifteenth-century musicians were known to ignite fires, cause rain showers, bring flowers to blossom, and calm wild animals.

Yogananda’s book talked about the Yoga Sutras, India’s classical yogic text. The author, Sage Patanjali, described eight kinds of mystic powers a yogi could acquire by controlling breath and manipulating energies circulating in the body, by which masters of these techniques could make their bodies smaller or lighter or even invisible. They could generate as many as eight bodies identical to their own, make new physical worlds appear in the sky, and materialize objects from thin air.

Such feats, George read, occurred when the soul’s unlimited energy was stimulated. The texts described the soul as small, “one ten-thousandth part of the tip of a hair,” but as powerful as “ten thousand suns” that filled the body with consciousness. Even a little of the soul’s energy could produce startling results. In his Yoga Sutras Sage Patanjali minimized such events, calling mystic displays “incidental flowers” along the sacred path. Advanced yogis never confused such power with yoga’s true purpose: to reawaken love for God, and through that relationship, love for all creatures.

Mystical yoga in these stories seemed to George a lot like LSD. Was what yogis saw in meditation perhaps something like what he had seen on the drug? Did people who attain cosmic consciousness see under the earth, like Superman, and watch spiritual energy flow up through roots to nourish plants and flowers? Did they feel energy pulsating around them and realize they were one with that energy?

The books George read in Kashmir kept him enthralled with their descriptions of powers lying dormant within the soul. He discovered the Indian explanation for why pure souls would fall into the material world to be born into physical bodies and how they reincarnated from one species to another. He read essays on how meditation could lower metabolic levels, increase spiritual awareness, and eventually help the soul escape further reincarnations. As a child, George had little taste for reading—he had felt smothered in school and grown impatient with lessons and skipped classes. In Kashmir, he was rarely without a book in his hands.

He was twenty-three years old and as far back as memory allowed his sense of himself had been guided by what others told him, by childhood and family, by fame, and by caricatures in the press. If, as he now read, he had nothing to do with any of those Georges, then who was he? If after this life ended, he did not end but moved on, precisely who moved on? His body would fall away and with it the accumulations of a lifetime, but he, the soul within, would remain. The books explained that the person he thought himself to be, the George whom others saw and judged, was real but temporary, a gross body built from five elements—earth, air, water, fire, and space—and a subtle body consisting of mind, intelligence, and ego. It was his true self, the soul inside those coverings, that provided the energy to make them work. At death, when the temporal coverings fell away, earth again merging with earth, water with water, air with air, that inner self would move on to some other destination.

The way for him to reach his inner self, it seemed, was the same way he had reached his outer self—through music. “Our tradition teaches us that musical sound and the musical experience are steps to the realization of the self,” Ravi explained. “The highest aim of our music is to reveal the essence of the universe it reflects, and ragas are among the means by which this essence can be apprehended.”

To play a raga properly, he said, could take a lifetime of practice, and Ravi made sure George understood how deep the commitment had to be. Ravi’s music guru, Allauddin Khan—Baba, as he was called by disciples—had practiced twenty hours a day for twelve years, just learning basic vocalization, scales, and études. Baba was nearly seventy when he finally agreed to accept Ravi, then only eighteen, as a disciple. “Taking a guru,” Ravi said, “was the biggest decision of my life. Baba demanded absolute surrender, years of fanatical dedication and discipline. At least twenty years of such work and practice are necessary to reach maturity in performing ragas,” he told George.

What good fortune, George thought, to know a man like Ravi who had been through the disciplines and could point him in the direction of wisdom. As George’s respect and admiration for Ravi grew, he came to see the elder musician as more than a mentor. It seemed that he had found in the mannerly Bengali with penetrating eyes a second father, a spiritual father.

“Throughout the Beatle experience,” George said years later, “we’d grown so many years within a short period of time . . . but I wanted something better, and I remember thinking, ‘I’d love to meet somebody who will really impress me,’ and that’s when I met Ravi—which is funny, because he’s this little fellow with this obscure instrument, from our point of view, and yet it led me into such depths. . . . I mean, I met Elvis—Elvis impressed me when I was a kid and impressed me when I met him because of the buzz of meeting Elvis—but you couldn’t later on go round to him and say, ‘Elvis, what’s happening in the universe?’”

After Kashmir, George and Pattie traveled to Benares, an ancient city built on the banks of the Ganges River. Thousands of pilgrims had assembled there to hear a month-long recitation of Ramayan, the story of Rama, God incarnate and ideal king who, according to Indian scholars, walked the Earth around 3500 B.C.E. As far as the eye could see, thick burlap tents filled the Benares festival grounds. Colorful flags and banners waved in a brisk wind blowing off the river. From thousands of campfires drifted the scent of burning wood, incense, and camphor. The Raja of Benares arrived, riding an elephant. Descending by the riverbank, the king knelt down and offered prayers. Behind him, a brilliant orange sunset filled the evening sky. Legions of shaven-headed priests chanted in unison. Musicians playing brass shenai horns and beating large copper kettledrums launched a volley of sound over the plain. George and Pattie gazed out on the colorful tent city while around them a universe of music mingled in the air.

George began to look more kindly on the price he had paid to be a Beatle. Was this glimpse into his soul’s immortality not the real reward for years of hard work as a rock and roller? Not fleeting moments of celebrity—that was only temporary and illusory—but the privilege of waking up and looking out to see what sages had seen for centuries, sacred mountains and rivers and hints of an eternal existence beyond this one life. Here was the real payoff for whatever good karma they had accrued.

He had to share this knowledge with his mates. Pattie seemed happy to be there with him, but what about John or Paul or Ringo? Would they agree to spend time in India? And if they did, would they catch spiritual fire the way he had? There was no guarantee that they would find those discoveries as meaningful as he did, and he would soon see that answering a spiritual call involved tough choices and a willingness to break free of old bonds.

After six weeks, George and Pattie returned to England. To reporters gathered at the airport to cover their arrival George said, “Too many people have the wrong idea about India. Everyone immediately associates India with poverty, suffering, and starvation. But there’s much more than that. There’s the spirit of the people, the beauty, and the goodness. The people there have a tremendous spiritual strength, which I don’t think is found elsewhere. That’s what I’ve been trying to learn about.” Ravi arrived from India a few days later wearing a Western suit. George greeted him at the airport dressed in an Indian kurta shirt and yoga pants.