Here Comes the Sun

George felt awkward being back in London. He didn’t want to be a fab Beatle again. The band was his job, and as a responsible member he would continue to play lead guitar and sing harmony, but meditation was revealing to him an inner person with creative energies and original ideas straining to be expressed.

One such idea was to play compositions backward. “He would play the solos normal,” recalled former Beatles engineer Richard Lush, “then we’d flip the tapes and he’d listen to them backward, just to see how they sounded. This would go on for maybe seventy takes, turning the tape over, listening, turning it back again—it would take literally hours to accomplish.” Once John and Paul realized that George had found new ways of maximizing sound, they started coming to him with rough sketches of their songs and asked that he embellish them in the studio as he saw fit. The results were often revelatory.

“You listen to a song like ‘Dear Prudence,’ ” said singer-songwriter Ian Hammond, “and you realize that they did it all without the aid of an orchestra—even though the closing climactic section is a natural candidate for brass and/or strings. How? They relied heavily on Harrison, who came up with these great moving inner lines in the last verse and chorus.”

At the time, George’s contribution to Beatles music was not widely acknowledged. “Everybody talks about Lennon and McCartney and what a great songwriting team they were,” noted Beatles historian Andy Babiuk, “but when you listen to some of the original rough demos, they’re just okay. Had they left them like that, would they still have become these great songs that we’ve come to know and love? That’s where George played such an important part.”

In January 1967, George sat in the sound room of EMI Studios working with the other Beatles on their eighth album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, wishing it were done. He had hardly spent a day together with John, Paul, or Ringo since returning to London. Other things filled his mind. He was smitten with spirituality like a young man in love, and even commonplace events reminded him of India. Someone riding a bicycle recalled a street scene in Delhi. A walk through a park brought back images of Kashmir. Only his sensible nature stopped him from abandoning the studio and boarding the next plane back to Bombay.

“I’d give up everything if I could be a monk who walks from one side of India to another,” he told artist Peter Max. George wanted to know who he was and who God was, and anything unrelated, however innovative, failed to hold his interest. Paul had come up with an innovative idea for their current album. The Beatles would pretend to be someone else, a make-believe group called Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and every time one of the Beatles sang, he would pretend to be someone in the made-up band. The idea left George cold and bored. They had been working on the album since November, and there was still no end in sight.

To keep up his spirits, he added little bits and pieces of India whenever possible. Using a technique he had seen musicians use in Bombay, he imitated John’s voice on guitar during “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” On March 10, in a session that ran until 4:00 A.M., he overdubbed a tambura’s drone on “Getting Better.” And when the group turned its attention to designing the album’s historic cover, he brought in images of revered gurus. To photos of Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan, Marlon Brando, Laurel and Hardy, and other twentieth-century icons, he added Yogananda, Yogananda’s grand guru Lahiri Mahasaya, and Mahasaya’s guru Sri Mahavatara Babaji. The photos, he would explain in later years, were “clues to the spiritual aspect of me,” but such moments merely made bearable a job he no longer cared to do.

He loved John, Paul, and Ringo, yet he wanted to wean himself from them. Professionally he still stood outside the Lennon-McCartney songwriting circle, something Paul in particular would not let him forget by correcting his guitar playing and issuing directions on what to do differently. “George was having to put up with an awful lot,” said recording engineer Norman Smith. “As far as Paul was concerned, George could do no right. . . . I take my hat off to George that he swallowed what he had to swallow in terms of criticism.”

Finally John and Paul invited George to contribute a song to Sergeant Pepper. One night after dinner with Pattie at the London home of Hamburg artist-musician Klaus Voormann, George walked into an adjoining room, sat down at a pedal harmonium, and summoned up not a song but a universe.

“Within You Without You,” a remarkable microcosm of Indian music and philosophy, became many people’s first meaningful contact with meditative sound. On the album, the song played just after “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” a throwaway John had written to fill in the LP’s running time. Compared with Mr. Kite’s hackneyed calliopes and merry-go-rounds, “Within You Without You” flowed like music from another world.

George opened the song in classical Indian form: a tambura’s drone invited listeners to shut the door and sit quietly. Tablas followed, setting a quick, quiet pulse. George entered singing a sargam, an atonal melody like those he often practiced with Ravi. A wall of illusion separates us from each other, he sang. We believe the illusion real, which only turns our love for one another cold. Peace will come when we learn to see past the illusion of differences and come to know that we are one—life is everywhere, within and without. A santoor, a zitherlike instrument played with two metal forks, echoed the melody. Cellos made their entrance, then violins, drawing listeners through a forest of vibrating strings. The music paused for two beats, then listeners were off on a series of toe-tapping musical dialogues. One instrument offered a brief statement, which was echoed by a second and then by a third—sitar then santoor, violins then cello, back and forth, truth, illusion, truth, illusion. The song faded out at the end, but not before offering a surprise coda: a few seconds of George laughing, his way of reminding listeners not to take his pontificating seriously—search for God but don’t lose your sense of humor, he seemed to admonish himself as much as his listeners.

“When I first met George in 1963, he was Mister Fun, Mister Stay-Out-All-Night,” said Apple employee Tony King, who attended Voormann’s dinner that night. “Then all of a sudden, he found LSD and Indian religion and he became very serious. Things went from jolly weekends where we’d have steak and kidney pie and sit around giggling, to these rather serious weekends where everyone walked around blissed out and talked about the meaning of the universe.”

“Within You Without You” was the longest track on the Sergeant Pepper album. It was the most complex, involving three changes of time signature, something never done before on a Beatles song. It was also the only song on the album in which only one Beatle performed; this was George’s accomplishment and his alone. Juan Mascaro, a professor of Sanskrit teaching at Cambridge University, heard the track and wrote George to say, “it is a moving song and may it move the souls of millions; and there is more to come,” Mascaro predicted, “as you are only beginning on the great journey.”

Sergeant Pepper was released in June 1967 and, despite George’s lack of enthusiasm over its creation, quickly earned a reputation as the most remarkable album of the decade—possibly of all time. Music critic William Mann hailed Sergeant Pepper as more genuinely creative than anything else in pop music. The album staked its place at number one on the U.S. charts and did not budge for fifteen weeks, and in the United Kingdom it stayed number one for twenty-two weeks.

Journalists feasted on every move George made. His fascination with India provided fodder for a new round of interviews, and the aspiring yogi did his best to explain a theology that has baffled scholars for generations. “The realization of human love reciprocated is such a gas,” he told the International Times that year. “It’s a good vibration which makes you feel good. These vibrations that you get through yoga, cosmic chants, and things like that—I mean, it’s such a buzz. It buzzes you out of everywhere. It’s nothing to do with pills. It’s just in your own head, the realization. It’s such a buzz. It buzzes you right into the astral plane.” Like someone learning a foreign language, George explained sophisticated concepts with the vocabulary he knew. “The only thing which is important in life is karma. That means roughly actions,” he ventured. “Everything that’s done has a reaction, like dropping this cushion down. See? There’s a dent in it.”

To promote their new album, Brian Epstein hosted a dinner party for selected journalists at his Belgravia, London, home. Music journalist Ray Coleman asked George about his turn to Indian music. “I don’t fancy myself as the next Ravi Shankar,” George said, “but I still prefer Indian music to any other form of music. It has taken over 100 percent in my musical life. . . . Just learning the sitar has inspired me.”

He wanted to say more, to substantiate for the writer something that still eluded him, and he groped for the words. “You know how God is a, sort of, untouchable thing?” George asked. “Well, that’s how it is with Indian music. It’s a very spiritual thing, so subtle and related to philosophy and life. It’s not easy to understand the music at first, but it’s beautiful when you get it.

Sergeant Pepper had absorbed nearly six grueling months of studio work, nearly seven hundred hours. The intensity of production had put a strain on relations among George, John, Paul, and Ringo. In July 1967 they decided to celebrate the album’s completion and renew their friendship by taking a trip to Greece. Despite Epstein’s mismanagement of certain contracts, money still flowed their way, and John had proposed that they look for an island to buy. Designed properly, such a place might show the world how to lead a utopian life.

Utopia was hardly a new idea. By 1967, hippie communes dotted the American landscape, and England’s Summerhill, an experiment in unstructured childhood education, was celebrating forty-six years of operation. John proposed that Beatle families and friends find an island where they could live in a circular arrangement of houses connected by tree-lined avenues. At the hub would be a central glass-enclosed arena, a biodome that would serve as stadium and playground. “They’ve tried everything else,” he said, “wars, nationalism, fascism, communism, capitalism, nastiness, religion—none of it works. So why not this?” The entourage arrived in Athens, rented a boat, and sailed up the Greek coast looking for an island to renovate.

Before leaving for Greece, George purchased an album of Sanskrit prayers. One prayer in particular became the group’s theme song while on the boat. “Attention all eternal wayfarers on the shores of earth,” declared the album’s back-cover notes. “Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta leads his devotees in an authentic rendition of the Vedic mantra Hare Krishna, better known in India as the maha-mantra, sung on the banks of the Ganges for more than five thousand years.” The cover notes went on to explain that the Swami had been a successful businessman when in 1922 he met spiritual master Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati and became his disciple. Bhaktisiddhanta urged him to spread the chanting to English-speaking countries, and in 1965, at age seventy, Bhaktivedanta sailed to the West with the message entrusted to him nearly three decades earlier. The Swami arrived in New York without funds and barely survived that first winter. Soon, though, he attracted the interest of young idealists wandering the streets of the East Village, an immigrant neighborhood turned hippie-bohemian quarter. By the summer of 1966 the Swami had acquired a small group of followers and with their help opened a tiny storefront temple.

The album consisted of the Swami leading American disciples in a rousing chant to the rhythm of clay drums and the clang of brass hand cymbals. A liner quote from beat poet Allen Ginsberg explained, “chanting brings a state of ecstasy.” Sailing a smooth Aegean Sea under a brilliant clear sky, George and John perched on the prow of their boat, played ukulele banjos, and chanted “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.”

“Six hours we sang,” George recalled, “because we couldn’t stop once we got going. As soon as we stopped, it was like the lights went out. It went on to the point where our jaws were aching, singing the mantra over and over and over and over and over. We felt exalted. It was a very happy time for us.”

George and friends sang into the night. The boat’s captain held a steady course along a highway of moonlight rippling off the surface of the sea. “It seemed as if we were sailing up through the heavens, right up to the moon,” remembered Epstein’s assistant Alistair Taylor. “It was a wonderfully relaxing night as George picked out the notes of the Hare Krishna chorus on his ukulele, and John, Mal and I quietly chanted the words. Beatlemania seemed to have finally been left behind.”

The next day, the boat docked at a small island just as a light rain began to fall. George stepped onto a pebbled beach, looking like a vagabond on the road to Damascus, a twenty-four-year-old man in white kurta shirt and drawstring cotton pants, wandering the shore for the good of his soul. Seagulls cawed overhead; rain dripped from his long hair.

George was becoming cleansed of the world, and he yearned for the others to understand his passion. Were they not best friends? Despite a few squabbles now and then, had they not always looked after each other’s interests? After all they had been through, becoming self-realized together would make their partnership perfect. Surely they would see that all they had done so far was only a moment in cosmic time. The possibilities that lay ahead were infinite.

The rain stopped, and the young men and their companions boarded the boat and sailed away. The idea of creating heaven on earth was short-lived. “We were great at going on holiday with big ideas,” Ringo said, “but we never carried them out. It was safer making records, because once they let us out we’d just go barmy.”

Some time later, John did buy an island, a small outpost off the coast of Ireland used by farmers to graze goats. He spent only a short time there. Eventually he leased the land to a hippie community and never went there again. Sharing Utopia together as a group was a dream that never came true.

According to astrological calculation, by 1967 Earth was supposed to be emerging from a thousand years of confusion under the sign of Pisces—two fish swimming in opposite directions—and entering a golden age under the sign of Aquarius. Writers and poets prophesied that this new age would be one of harmony and understanding, and underground newspapers depicted San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district as its epicenter, the home of LSD consciousness, filled with beautiful people in colorful costumes, dancing to psychedelic music and living the dream of the Aquarian Age. LSD had played a significant part in George’s awakening, and he was excited to see what kind of culture the drug had inspired.

After returning from Greece, George and Pattie flew to San Francisco to visit Pattie’s sister Jenny and her husband, drummer Mick Fleetwood, who lived near Haight-Ashbury. Together with a group of friends who included road manager Neil Aspinall and press agent Derek Taylor, they set out to explore the fabled capital of love. They parked their limo a block away from a corner of Haight-Ashbury and walked along the street like natives. George had dressed in psychedelic pants, tassled moccasins, and heart-shaped sunglasses, expecting to be part of something beautiful “with groovy people having spiritual awakenings and being artistic.” What he found left him dismayed. Garbage littered the streets. Hippies lay sprawled on benches and sidewalks. Panhandlers—“horrible, spotty dropout kids on drugs,” George called them—haunted the streets begging for coins in the name of love and peace.

Others approached him with offerings of LSD. George turned them down, swearing to himself then and there that he would never take “the dreaded lysergic” again. The hippies were “hypocrites,” he told a reporter from Creem magazine. “I don’t mind anybody dropping out of anything, but it’s the imposition on somebody else I don’t like. I’ve just realized that it doesn’t matter what you are as long as you work. In fact if you drop out, you put yourself further away from the goal of life than if you were to keep working.”

George had grown up in a postwar culture that respected work. He may not have wished for himself the kind of manual labor his brothers had chosen, but he did not have a lazy bone in his body, and the sight of so many young people wasting their lives was a turning point for him. As their car pulled away, George took from his pocket a picture of Paramahansa Yogananda and held it up for the hippies outside to see.

On a Learjet flying out of San Francisco, George sat behind the pilots. Shortly after take-off the plane stalled, lurched, and went into a dive. From his seat, George could see lights in the cockpit flashing UNSAFE. “Well, that’s it,” he thought and started chanting “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna” and “Om, Christ, Om.” Former Beatles press agent Derek Taylor, sitting next to him, took the hint and also began chanting “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna.” After a few harrowing moments, the plane pulled out of its stall and landed safely in Monterey. To recover from their ordeal, the group made a beeline for the nearest beach.

George’s visit to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood had been big news for San Francisco locals. A few days later, an interview published in the underground paper the Oracle quoted him as saying that spiritual music helped people reawaken their eternal selves and that mantras were the starting point. “Through the musical you reach the spiritual,” George told the reporter.

In a storefront Hare Krishna temple just two blocks from Haight-Ashbury, temple leader Michael Grant read the article, thinking that was not quite right. A former pianist for saxophone legend Pharoah Sanders, Grant knew something about music. He also knew something about mantras from his teacher Bhaktivedanta Swami, an authority on the subject. Bhaktivedanta Swami had recently initiated Grant into the practice of bhakti, or devotional yoga, and awarded him the spiritual name Mukunda, “servant of Krishna the giver of liberation from birth and death.” Mukunda had no way of knowing that his guru’s album had provided George and John with their theme song while sailing around the Greek islands.

Mukunda and an old college buddy, Sam Speerstra, had helped Bhaktivedanta Swami open his Haight-Ashbury temple a year earlier. They called their teacher “Prabhupada,” a term of respect that meant a master (prabhu) at whose feet (pada) other masters gathered. To raise funds, Sam had conceived of a mantra rock concert, held at the city’s famous Avalon Ballroom. The concert, which took place a few weeks before George’s visit, featured Big Brother and the Holding Company, Moby Grape, and other big-name bands from the area. When Prabhupada arrived at the ballroom, thousands of hippies respectfully stood to receive him with applause and cheers. He climbed to the stage and seated himself on a cushion next to Allen Ginsberg, an admirer who had come from New York.

To an enraptured audience Ginsberg described his experiences with chanting and recounted how the Swami had opened a small storefront temple in New York’s East Village in 1965, where they met. He invited everyone to the new Haight-Ashbury temple. “I especially recommend the early-morning kirtans [group chanting],” he said, “for those coming down from LSD who want to stabilize their consciousness upon reentry.” He started playing a harmonium and chanting while projectors flashed fifty-foot-high images of Krishna on the walls. People played drums and flutes and blew conch shells. Then Prabhupada stood up, lifted his arms, and began to dance, swaying back and forth, gesturing for everyone to join him. The audience rose to their feet, held hands, and danced in circles.

It was, in the words of historian Robert Ellwood, “perhaps the ultimate high of that era.” Ginsberg called it “the height of Haight-Ashbury spiritual enthusiasm, the first time that there had been a music scene in San Francisco where everybody could be part of it and participate.”

When a visitor to the temple asked Prabhupada if he was Allen Ginsberg’s guru, the seventy-year-old teacher said, “I am nobody’s guru. I am everybody’s servant.” His response was not intended to be clever. It reflected humility that George would later deeply admire.

After returning to England, George encountered a teacher who was to have a lasting influence on his daily practices, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who had earned a degree in physics from Allahabad University before turning to the study of meditation. In 1958, at age forty-two, he moved to the United Kingdom and founded the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, which taught fundamentals of yoga, breathing, and mantra meditation. When George was a boy, he had seen the bearded teacher on Granada Television’s current-affairs show People and Places. He didn’t know much about him, but by 1967 George had reached a point in his studies where he wanted to meditate and knew he would need a mantra—“a password to get through into the other world.”

In August, Pattie urged George to come with her to a lecture the Maharishi was scheduled to give in London. The press reported that the Maharishi had initiated more than ten thousand people into a technique he called Transcendental Meditation, and this would be his last lecture before leaving on a retreat with students to North Wales. George bought tickets to the lecture and, still hoping his mates would join him in this new dream, invited John and Paul to come along. Ringo, caring for his wife, Maureen, who had just given birth to their second son, was unable to attend.

On the evening of August 24, the fifty-one-year-old teacher took his seat on a raised platform in a conference room of the London Hilton. His bright eyes and ready smile greeted the assembly. He wore white silk robes, and a garland of marigolds hung from his neck and was entwined in his long hair and gray beard. Those sitting closest to him caught a faint scent of sandalwood oil. In a high voice accompanied by gentle chuckles, he proposed a simple program to his audience: meditate on a mantra twenty minutes in the morning and twenty minutes in the evening. The rewards, he promised, would be improved quality of life and relief from mental stress. The word “mantra,” he said, is comprised of two parts: man (mind) and traya (liberation), and repeating a mantra calms the mind and brings inner peace. Wars, epidemics, famines, and earthquakes were all symptoms of tension, he said, as contagious as any other disease. If even one percent of the world’s population followed this easy method of meditation, it would be enough to reduce tension and dispel the clouds of war for thousands of years.

After his lecture, the Maharishi invited George and his friends to join him for his ten-day course in North Wales, where they could learn Transcendental Meditation. The group accepted his invitation and placed a call to Brian Epstein, hoping he would also come along. For five years the boys had never gone anywhere without their manager or someone appointed by him to look out for them. “It’s like going somewhere without your trousers on,” John said. Epstein declined, suggesting he might drive up toward the end of the retreat.

The following Saturday, reporters and fans crowded into London’s Euston Station to watch the Beatles embark on what the Daily Mirror described as a “Mystical Special”—the 3:05 local to Bangor. As the train departed, the Maharishi sat cross-legged in his compartment looking out at the crowds, appearing amused by all the attention. George, John, and Paul entered his compartment, and the Maharishi explained they would find his meditation technique quite convenient, like funds in a bank. “You don’t have to carry money around with you,” he said, “just make a withdrawal when needed.”

What if you’re greedy, asked John, and want another meditation after lunch and another after tea? His question sent the Maharishi into fits of laughter. “He was laughing all the time,” said Ringo, who had managed to join them on the retreat. “That really struck home. This man is really happy, and he’s having a great time in life.”

The train pulled in to Bangor, a small seaport town on Wales’s northern coast, and George looked out onto a crowd of three hundred students assembled to greet their teacher with offerings of flowers. Classes began the following day in the auditorium of a local school. In his course, the Maharishi gave students a word or syllable. Over time, he added more words or syllables until the pieces fit together to form one of India’s traditional mantras. He took George aside, then his mates, and whispered a mantra in their ears.

“The Maharishi provided us with a device that allowed us to look at our own thoughts,” explained singer Donovan Leitch, who also attended the Bangor program. Donovan’s popular song “Mellow Yellow” had brought him into contact with George, and George had suggested that Donovan start sitar lessons. At a public program years later, Donovan explained that the Maharishi divided mantras into smaller syllables to make repeating them easier and acceptable to students with no interest in religion. “He said our thoughts were like bubbles in the ocean, some of hope, others of fear. You could see the thoughts passing if you set yourself apart to look at them. To do that, you chanted the mantra inside, breathing in, breathing out. The mantra he gave the Beatles was ‘EE-ng’—just a sound to help follow the thoughts, which pass before you like a movie.”

On the first day of the Bangor retreat, a telephone rang in one of the university offices. Paul, with typical Beatles levity, told a reporter, “I’ll have to go and see who it is.” He picked up the receiver and listened. “Oh, no,” he said. “Oh, God, no.” It was an assistant from Brian Epstein’s office, reporting that Epstein had been found dead in his home. Later it was determined that their manager had died from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, but at that moment no one knew what had happened.

When word of what had occurred circulated, classes were halted. George and his friends approached the Maharishi and asked what they should do. You are a powerful force, he told them. If you hold on to Brian it will stop his soul from going to its next evolution. “You know you have to grieve for him and love him. Now you send him on his way.”

George had lost only one person close to him before, Stuart Sutcliffe, and Brian was as close to George as anyone had ever been. All Brian had ever wanted for George was his success and happiness. Brian did well for himself, too, and if he owned a Bentley, a Rolls, an Austin Mini, and enough fine clothes to be selected as one of England’s ten best-dressed men, he had earned that privilege. When the Beatles had been honored as MBEs, Members of the British Empire, George liked to say that MBE stood for Mr. Brian Epstein. But when the Beatles retired from live performances to work exclusively on studio recordings, Brian’s involvement in their lives dwindled.

“What is it you fear most in life?” a reporter from Melody Maker magazine had asked him only two weeks before his death. “Loneliness,” Epstein answered. “I hope I’ll never be lonely, although, actually, one inflicts loneliness on oneself to a certain extent.”

Just before leaving for Bangor, George had talked with Brian about India. It was their first and only serious discussion about spiritual interests. “I felt with Brian that he was interested in India and in what I was thinking and feeling,” George said. “Maybe he would have liked to meet the Maharishi, but unfortunately it didn’t work out like that.” George’s reflections were tinged with regret, as though admitting that he had failed to help someone he loved.

Wanting to keep media coverage to a minimum, the Beatles did not attend Brian’s Liverpool funeral. Instead, on October 17, 1967, they gathered at New London Synagogue in St. John’s Wood for a memorial service. George sat with the others, dressed in a suit and wearing a black paper yarmulke. They were only three blocks from the spot where Epstein had cabled them in Hamburg five years before, bursting with the news that EMI had offered the Beatles a recording test.

Shortly after Epstein’s death, the Maharishi announced that he would conduct a retreat at his academy in Rishikesh, India. George invited a group of friends to join Pattie and him on the retreat. The group included John and his wife, Cynthia; Paul and his fiancée, actress Jane Asher; Ringo and his wife, Maureen; Beatles road manager Mal Evans; and musician friend Donovan Leitch. Prompted partly by a desire to put sadness over Epstein’s death behind them, partly by their natural spirit of adventure, and partly by a curiosity to better understand George’s fascination with meditation, they agreed.

George hoped the trip would give his friends what his previous visit to India had given him: an intuition of immortality. Hiking up the sides of primordial mountains, breathing in air that had once filled the lungs of avatars or divine incarnations, plunging into crystal river water that locals swore flowed to Earth from Heaven—what better way to distance themselves from the sadness of Brian’s death and from the shackles of their career as Beatles? If ever John and Paul and Ringo were to join him on his spiritual journey, shared time in the land of gods would tell.

“I am very excited that the Beatles will shortly follow me to Indian shores in order to further study Transcendental Meditation,” the Maharishi told reporters at Madison Square Garden prior to a lecture in January 1968. “Because of the conscious mind expansion brought on by meditation, the Beatles’ records will show changes in the future, which I feel will bring out the depths in their talents that even they haven’t reached yet.”

The group arrived in Delhi at three o’clock one morning in February 1968. Rishikesh lay at the end of a bumpy ride over crumbling bridges and 150 miles of open country. By noon their hired cars—battle-weary Ambassadors without springs or suspension—were weaving down Rishikesh’s dusty streets crowded with cows and bullock carts. The caravan passed by open-air markets filled with mounds of red mangoes, jackfruit, ripe bananas, and green coconuts. Vendors draped in wool chadors smoked pungent beedies, hand-rolled cigarettes, while stirring vegetable fritters in woks of oil simmering over wood fires with long wooden ladles. The air was thick with spices. A dirt road hooded by arched trees led down an embankment to the edge of the Ganges. Their cars jumbled down the incline, the noise of busy markets fading behind them. Ten minutes later the group stopped, got out, and climbed a path leading to a bluff above the river’s eastern bank.

Before them, stone huts and wooden bungalows mushroomed out from groves of teak and guava trees. Looking out over the bluff, the group traced the Ganges up the mountains. Over the centuries, schools for meditation and the study of sacred texts had been built along the banks of the river, and carved domes peeked out from forested hillsides. The group unpacked, wandered the grounds, and watched as day faded into evening and a blue horizon turned pink, indigo, and orange. Across the Ganges, flocks of bright green parrots settled for the night in flowering trees. Peacocks’ cries echoed in the stillness.

The Maharishi’s bungalow perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the swiftly flowing river. Shortly after their arrival, the London party took off their shoes and entered a twenty-foot-long meditation hall inside the teacher’s bungalow. A handful of other students were already seated inside, and the London guests joined them on white futons arranged before a slightly raised dais. George had recently composed the sound track for a film titled Wonderwall, and he carried the results into the meeting on a portable tape player. The film told the story of a man who loses hope and of a mystical woman who saves him by entering his life through a magical “wonderwall.” It was less than inspired filmmaking, but the project gave George his first chance to create music independent of the Beatles. The album comprised several short pieces played on a variety of instruments in different Indian styles.

“A new song,” George replied. He pushed the play button and “The Inner Light” wafted through the hall. Never one to limit his interests, George had written lyrics inspired by the Chinese wisdom text Tao Te Ching. In soft, simple tones he sang of meditation and how it permitted him to know all things and understand the meaning of Heaven. A high-pitched bamboo bansari flute echoed his voice while a gentle tapping of tablas supported a melody as unassuming as a nursery rhyme. It was approachable, pleasant music anyone could appreciate.

Among the other students present at the meeting was Paul Saltzman, a twenty-three-year-old from Toronto who had arrived on assignment for the National Film Board of Canada. After hearing the Maharishi lecture at New Delhi University, he headed straight to Rishikesh. Like many young people in the sixties, Saltzman’s first contact with mystical thoughts had come from the Beatles 1966 album Revolver, which included George’s India-inspired “Love You, Too” and the sitar instrumentation on the Lennon/McCartney track “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which urged listeners to abandon all thoughts and surrender to the shining self who dwells within.

“A little over two years,” George said. “We were filming and there was a sitar around. I was curious, but the first time I really listened to sitar music was off a Ravi Shankar album—” A baby monkey dropped onto their table, grabbed a crust of bread, and scampered off. “I’m going to play for a while,” George said. “Would you like to listen?”

Sunlight filtered through the window of George’s bungalow. He lifted his sitar and secured its large gourd against his left foot. They closed their eyes and George played, reaching deep to evoke his soul’s yearning for God as he had learned from Ravi. Twenty minutes later, sympathetic strings echoed the final strains of his exercises.

“You can have everything in life,” George told Saltzman. “Like we’re the Beatles, aren’t we? We can have anything that money can buy and all the fame we could dream of, but then what? It isn’t love. It isn’t health. It isn’t peace inside.” Meditation and the Maharishi, he said, had enriched his inner life.

George’s days in Rishikesh consisted of a casual breakfast, morning meditation classes until lunch, leisure time in the afternoons, and sometimes as many as three more hours of meditation in the evenings. Some days the pattern varied, and students sunbathed or shopped for clothes in nearby villages. There were perhaps two hundred students and teachers present for the retreat.

Actress Mia Farrow had come with her younger sister Prudence, and though they had never met George before, they talked like old friends, as if picking up a conversation in midstream. Introductions were unnecessary in Rishikesh: theirs was a generation of perpetual dialogue. Having come halfway around the world in 1968, just being together in that spot overlooking India’s most sacred river was all the introduction anyone needed. They were advance scouts reconnoitering the terrain of consciousness for their generation, and where you were born or when or to whom were mere details.

“We didn’t need to say a lot about our past because we all shared the same past,” one student recalled, “and knew we were there to do something about it. Reaching out to something higher was the next step for our generation, since there were no answers coming from parents or the government, and we were truly afraid the world might destroy itself. Looking for God was in the air. It was the only thing that mattered, and the people who understood that recognized one another, at least in a place like Rishikesh.”

There was something else George discovered in Rishikesh, something that did not immediately announce its presence. After a while, once his eyes adjusted to the clarity of the air and the timbre of things, he saw it: Nature. Perfected creation. Ecology, flawless as fresh cloth, washed and ironed and uncorrupted, whole and healthy, a partnership of earth and air and water and sky. Flowering herbs opened their leaves each morning. Medicinal plants such as primula, sausaurea, and aconitum grew green and yellow with the rising sun. Purple ipomea, blue and yellow Himalayan poppies, and downy white thistle colored his view of steep gorges, overhanging cliffs, and vast stretches of forests and meadows. The area abounded with wildlife, and every so often a musk deer or Indian porcupine would poke out its snout from under a bush or from behind a tree.

Whatever other gods there were, however many more he would meet on this magical journey, this goddess of nature spoke to him in commanding tones, a goddess of magnificent things as large as a mountain and small as a leaf. She was called by many names: Bhumi, goddess of the Earth; Maha-Shakti, the divine mother; Kali-Ma, the personified universal energy. Everyone in Rishikesh, from the Maharishi to the truck driver who delivered the daily produce, paid her homage. They wore garlands made of her flowers; thin strands of bright orange marigolds; and, for special occasions, thick strands of puffy white carnations. They burned incense made of her fragrant woods and distilled oils. They lit candles in her honor, offering back to her a bit of herself, the way old people who bathed each morning in the Ganges cupped their hands to offer a taste of water back to the river. The goddess of nature cared for them with her food: chickpeas mixed with cumin seeds and toasted in clarified butter for breakfast, thick rounds of whole wheat dough rolled and baked over wood flames and spiced eggplant and potatoes harvested in nearby fields and served up for lunch. And these, too, were offered back with prayers and hymns before eating, a simple courtesy, a gesture of thanks, a gift of love.

At day’s end, John, Paul, Ringo, and Donovan joined George on the roof of his bungalow. Back in London at this time of evening there would be a rush of traffic, a rattle of buses and trucks heading home, and a chatter from evening crowds escaping the drudgeries of offices and factories. Here, in their Himalayan retreat, George and his friends sat quietly listening to the swoosh of Ganges water as it blended with a whisper of wind blowing through gnarled trees and across ancient valleys in the distance.

In Rishikesh, John and Paul composed more than forty songs. Many were recorded on the White Album, and others would appear on the Beatles’ final LP, Abbey Road. Too much time spent writing, though, struck George as a distraction from their purpose in coming to India, and he said as much. “We’re not here to talk music. We’re here to meditate.”

George argued that they needed to make best use of their time. This is a land of yogis and saints, he said, and people hundreds of years old. “There’s one somewhere around who was born before Christ—and is still living now.” He went looking, climbing paths that snaked high into the mountains.

One of the classes led participants into a meditative state deeper and longer than they had attempted before. George felt himself traveling along subtle paths of consciousness. “It’s hard to actually explain it,” he said, “but it was just the feeling of consciousness traveling. I don’t know where to. It wasn’t up, down, left, right—but there was no ‘body’ there. You don’t feel as though you’re missing anything, but at the same time the consciousness is complete.”

Prudence Farrow had similar experiences in meditation. Having taught yoga in Boston before accepting the Maharishi as her guru, she was proficient in its techniques and would on occasion spend so many hours in deep trance that it worried George and John, who lived in bungalows next to hers. One of these prolonged absences prompted John to pick up his guitar and write an invitation for her to come out. Dear Prudence, he sang, the day is beautiful and so are you. Won’t you come out and play?

George saw his friendship with John, Paul, and Ringo as a continuation from past births. He quoted a lecture by Paramahansa Yogananda in which the kriya-yoga master described associations in this life as a carryover from previous lives. “There’s more to friendship than meets the eye,” George said. Still, the others had their own reasons for accepting his invitation to India. Ringo went for the fun of it and stayed only two weeks. His childhood peritonitis had left him sensitive to spicy foods, and the ashram’s abundance of houseflies made him and his wife, Maureen, uncomfortable. “It was a good experience,” he said. “It just didn’t last as long for me as it did for them.”

Paul wanted to see how far the Maharishi could take him in knowing himself spiritually. “Did you transcend?” he asked the others after hours of private meditation. “I think I transcended.” No one seemed to have achieved blinding enlightenment, and one month into the three-month program Paul decided, “This will do me.” That suited his fiancée, Jane Asher, just fine. Asher was outspoken—if she disagreed with something, she said so. She had little interest in the Maharishi and told Paul they would achieve enlightenment on their own.

John had come with stronger ambitions. If they mastered Transcendental Meditation, then they could help others do more than groove to good music. Popular media insisted on enshrining the Beatles as youth leaders; why not be spiritual leaders, too? “Within three months,” the Maharishi told press shortly after the retreat started, “I promise to turn [the Beatles] into fully qualified teachers or semigurus of Hindu meditation. George and John have progressed fantastically in the few days since they arrived here.”

Promises of turning them into qualified teachers could not compete with rumors alleging that the Maharishi had acted inappropriately toward women disciples. When the rumors reached John, he packed his bags. What sort of teacher is this? Where is his renunciation? Where is his freedom from ego and the senses?

George could not confirm the rumors, but neither could he deny them. He knew women who had given themselves to gurus but hesitated to judge anyone else’s way to God. If someone saw the divine manifested in a teacher’s human body, who was he to say no? He felt so ill equipped to judge other people’s inner workings and so unwilling to try that all he could do was urge John to see the positive side of their stay. “All [the] Maharishi ever gave me was good advice and the technique of meditation, which is really wonderful,” George said. “I admire him for being able in spite of all the ridicule to just keep going.”

John had wanted to return to London to rejoin his new love, avant-garde artist Yoko Ono, and his disenchantment with the Maharishi provided a convenient excuse. It also reinforced a personal philosophy that bordered on existential despair. “I haven’t met anybody full of joy,” he said later that year, “neither the Maharishi nor any swami or Hare Krishna singer. There is no constant. There’s this dream of constant joy—it’s bullshit as far as I’m concerned.” Rishikesh ended John’s interest in spiritual masters. “There is no guru,” he said. “You have to believe in yourself. You’ve got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate.”

By contrast, George credited the Maharishi with orchestrating one of the greatest experiences of his life. He never shared John’s pessimism over accepting help from teachers or his friend’s disbelief in a dream of constant joy. Still, a dream did take work, and a dictum of Vivekananda’s, one George often quoted, said, “Each soul is potentially divine. Our job is to manifest that divinity.”

The trip affected each of the Beatles differently. The fact that they had taken it at all affected the entire world. Their pilgrimage to Rishikesh was reported by press in every country and added impetus to a spiritual culture that had been gathering momentum for several years. By the end of 1968, courses on yoga and vegetarian cooking were flourishing, meditation centers had opened across the United States and Europe, and Ravi Shankar was a celebrity in his own right. The Beatles’ film Yellow Submarine , released that July, confirmed George’s new role as the mystic Beatle by depicting him in the lotus position, wearing wooden beads and veiled in a cloud of incense. Predictably, other bands followed his example by adding Indian instrumentation to their records, and a new category of programming, soon to be known as world music, appeared on radio stations. “We are now setting ourselves the highest possible goal: a development of consciousness where the whole of humanity is at stake,” avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote that year. “If we comprehend that, we will also produce the right music, making people aware of the whole.”

That stronger something—a palpable sense of spiritual purpose—was providing George with extraordinary musical inspiration, and original compositions flowed. His White Album song “Long, Long, Long” conveyed a simple message of love for God lost and then found, set to chords borrowed from Bob Dylan’s ode “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Low Land.” George framed the hushed message in a dreamy tempo built with Indian instruments and folk guitar phrasing. He was unapologetic, even in this early solo composition, about amalgamating elements that pleased him from a variety of sources and cultures.

From Rishikesh, too, was born a very different tune, “Piggies,” a raucous send-up of establishment types: little piggies in dirt and bigger piggies in white shirts, so filled with self-importance that they failed to see the cannibalism in their bacon dinner. Grandiose harpsichord flourishes underlined the absurdity of their predicament. George was stuck for a line in the middle that would rhyme with “lacking,” and it was his mother who suggested “a damn good whacking,” a practice she herself never employed in parenting.

Donning an advertiser’s persona to promote the benefits of meditation, George transformed aphorisms from the Sanskrit text Visvasara Tantra into another tune penned in Rishikesh: a heavy rock number called “Sour Milk Sea.” Is life getting you down? Not getting the breaks you want? Try illumination. He wanted to express a simple rule of thumb and chose a hard-driving, blues guitar medium to do so: If you’re in the shit, don’t go around moaning. Do something about it.

The pilgrimage to Rishikesh unleashed the most productive period of George’s career, a phenomenon he attributed to having awakened to his higher purpose. “The more aware I’ve become,” he told Look magazine that year, “the more I realize that all we are doing is acting out an incarnation. . . . not for yourself particularly but for everyone else, for whoever wants it.”

By July 1968, recording sessions had become so tense that EMI engineer Geoff Emerick quit, no longer able to tolerate the lost tempers and frequent swearing. When it came to illuminating others, George concluded, it was up for grabs as to who would get turned on and who wouldn’t, a thought he put into a new song, “Not Guilty,” recorded in August 1968 at Abbey Road Studios. “Even though [the song] was [about] me getting pissed off with Lennon and McCartney for the grief I was catching,” he explained, “it said I wasn’t guilty of getting in the way of their careers or of leading them astray in our all going to Rishikesh to see the Maharishi. I was sticking up for myself.”

In public he continued to respect the group’s interests, telling Time magazine in September, “We haven’t really started yet. We have only just discovered what we can do as musicians, what thresholds we can cross. The future stretches out beyond our imagination.”

In private, though, his life as a Beatle was drawing to a close. Rishikesh turned out to be the last time George traveled together with John, Paul, and Ringo. George was for the moment alone in his spiritual interests and, despite Pattie’s companionship, without friends with whom to share his life-transforming discoveries.