Preface

The seeds for this book were planted in 1970 during a recording session with George Harrison at EMI Studios in London. This was during my Christmas break from college, just at the time George was producing an album of Sanskrit hymns with devotees from the Radha Krishna Temple. On a visit to the temple, I happened to mention that I played organ in a university band, and the devotees invited me to sit in.

We arrived at EMI in the early afternoon. George looked up from behind a mixing console and smiled. He appeared very relaxed. His long brown hair hung loose around his shoulders. He wore blue jeans and an open vest with a purple Om button pinned to it. The devotee men wore saffron-colored robes wrapped Gandhi-style around the waist and tucked in front and back. The women wore silk saris draped over their hair. George came over and exchanged hugs with some of the devotees. He and I shook hands. Then George and his devotee friends started chatting about chanting sessions they’d had and laughing about people’s reactions to a singing group with shaved heads.

“You know,” he said after a while, “this studio is costing us forty pounds an hour. We better get started.” That impressed me. He may have been one of the most successful pop stars in the world, but he was quite practical. George took up his guitar, and the devotees positioned themselves behind traditional Indian instruments, including a two-headed mridanga drum, a stringed tambura, and brass hand cymbals. I sat down at a hand-pumped keyboard harmonium in the middle of the floor while technicians positioned microphones around us. George signaled the sound room, gave us a nod, and the devotees began singing a medley of Indian prayers. Respecting the album’s devotional purpose, he kept voices prominent and instrumentation simple. During a crescendo, from force of habit I fell into an embellished riff. George looked up and calmly raised an eyebrow.

“Really?” he seemed to say, an impish grin challenging me to disagree.

It was just a moment, but in retrospect it summarizes my impressions of a man who understood that simplicity lies at the heart of spiritual life. As the medieval Indian philosopher Chanakya put it, “Eloquence is truth stated concisely.” That’s a skill I have had to learn from scratch. For George, it was bred in the bone.

Nonetheless, the spiritual message that pervaded his life after the Beatles was not always understood. What was he trying to say about souls and karma and getting “liberated from the material world”? Why had he committed himself so deeply to a spiritual journey? And where did it take him? In putting together this story, I’ve tried not to embellish on what George thought or felt. Some interpretation was required, as happens in all biographies, and when that became necessary I based my judgment on recorded conversations, verbatim quotes, first-person accounts, or, on occasion, my own experience from thirty-five years of bhakti-yoga practice.

No assumption has been made regarding readers’ familiarity with George’s early life or his career as a Beatle, and the first few chapters cover this well-documented period. Childhood influences, no less than teachers and traditions, helped determine the path he took as an adult; his extraordinary success with history’s most successful pop group underscores how remarkable it was that he took to a spiritual path at all.

It was clear to me after conducting a number of interviews that George’s simple virtues were more important to people than his inner complexities. What people remembered about him was his external life. Everyone interviewed talked about his selfless and generous nature, and hardly anyone talked about his theology. He was a spiritual doer; people liked that about him. In the past, developing an inner life meant retreating into mountains or caves to escape the world’s distractions. In his later years, George did want that kind of retreat for himself, yet he remained active and used his fame and resources to serve others. That was innovative behavior for someone on a spiritual path in those days, and it helped redefine “holy people” as individuals deeply engaged in the world they long to transcend.

Sadly, his efforts “to get a message through,” as he sang in Living in the Material World, were not always well received. Critics panned him, claiming he was exploiting his Beatles fame to preach about God. The record-buying public deserted him. Fans invaded his home. Some even physically attacked him and his family. George desperately wanted to help the world. Eventually, he wanted just as much to leave it behind forever.

 

Of the many books George studied on his spiritual journey, one he found most helpful was Hinduism’s principal text, the Bhagavad Gita (Song of the Supreme). The Gita is a call to action in which the speaker, Krishna—the Sanskrit name for God—instructs His warrior-disciple Arjuna on the eve of a great battle in about 3000 B.C. Arjuna’s efforts to reclaim his family’s kingdom from the hands of usurpers have failed, and war is inevitable. Krishna encourages Arjuna to follow his duty and fight the aggressors, but the compassionate warrior prefers to retreat and meditate. To inspire him to action, Krishna describes five basic truths of traditional Indian belief: the immortality of the soul, the impermanence of the material world, the influence of time, the relationship of the soul to God, and active devotion as the highest path. Arjuna accepts Krishna’s challenge to “stand and fight,” and the battle is waged and won. In her preface to a tribute published shortly after George’s death, Olivia Harrison compared her late husband to Arjuna, saying that George faced his own battles with similar spiritual courage and unwavering conviction.

All practicing Hindus honor the Bhagavad Gita, even though Krishna never describes Himself as Hindu. Nor did George, who from an early age looked askance at organized religion. His spiritual passion grew from what the Gita calls “the most secret of all secrets”: knowledge that the soul lives on after leaving its physical body. If prepared by a life of devotion, a soul can come face-to-face with the Divine.

Here is the story of a man who gave up one of the most spectacular careers in entertainment history for that goal of seeing God face-to-face and who succeeded beyond his greatest expectations. The sound track of his spiritual journey begins with the explosions of battle and ends fifty-eight years later with the harmonies of eternal peace. And like all good stories, this one starts when the hero was just a child.