During that same period, the Beatles were in search of a guru of their own. It was Pattie Boyd who first had the idea. Browsing through the Sunday newspapers in February 1967, she chanced upon an advertisement for a Transcendental Meditation course in central London. ‘Perfect. Off we went to Caxton Hall and enrolled in the Spiritual Regeneration Movement. In the course of a long weekend we were initiated and given our mantras.’
The leader of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, was a somewhat mysterious figure, either fifty or sixty years old, or somewhere in between: it was his belief that such personal considerations distracted from the universality of his message. The son of a civil servant, Mahesh Prasad Varma grew up in the central Indian city of Jabalpur, going on to take a degree in physics and mathematics at the University of Allahabad. In 1940 – the year John and Ringo were born – he became a disciple of a swami known as Shri Guru Deva, who, alone among Indian mystics, was to crop up in a Beatles song, ‘Across the Universe’.
On the death of Guru Deva in 1953, Mahesh Prasad Varma restyled himself Maharishi (‘great seer’) and carved out a career of his own. By 1958 he had developed a ten-year plan for ‘the regeneration of the whole world through meditation’. To this end he developed spiritual techniques such as levitation, or ‘yogic flying’, in which participants either fly, hop or bounce, depending upon their relationship with gravity. The Maharishi’s promise of ‘the positive experience of Heavenly Bliss’ proved especially attractive to well-heeled Westerners, and in 1959 he set up a base for his Spiritual Regeneration Movement in Hollywood, from where he embarked upon an annual worldwide tour, taking in Hong Kong and Hawaii. Far from timid, he called for a new Spiritual Regeneration Movement Centre for every million people on the planet: each of these centres would then train a thousand initiators, who would each initiate a thousand more, and so on, until all mankind had been cured of suffering.
For Pattie, his classes were ‘life-changing. I couldn’t wait to tell George. As soon as he came home I bombarded him with what I had been doing, and he was really interested. Then, joy of joys, I discovered that Maharishi was coming to London in August to give a lecture at the Hilton Hotel. I was desperate to go, and George said he would come too. Paul had already heard of him and was interested, and in the end we all went – George, John, Paul, Ringo, Jane and I.’ The session went well. ‘We were spellbound.’
The next day, Friday, 25 August 1967, the Beatles cancelled a recording session and boarded a train to Bangor, where the Spiritual Regeneration Movement was holding its ten-day summer conference. Cynthia Lennon came too, along with Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull and Pattie’s sister Jenny. Brian Epstein had been tempted, but was already committed to hosting a house party in Sussex. To be without Brian’s guiding hand made the Beatles uneasy. It was, complained John, ‘like going somewhere without your trousers on’. Within hours, they realised how much they relied on him: that evening they ate in a Chinese restaurant in Bangor, only to discover that they had no money to pay the bill. Over the past few years they had grown as demanding and defenceless as infants.
That Sunday morning, they heard of the sudden death of Brian Epstein. John, Paul, George and Ringo immediately went to the Maharishi for guidance. Marianne Faithfull looked on as the Maharishi told the Beatles, ‘Brian Epstein is dead. He was taking care of you. He was like your father. I will be your father now.’ It struck her that the Maharishi was exploiting their grief, and she found it creepy: ‘These poor bastards just didn’t know. It was the most terrible thing.’
The Beatles were soon surrounded by press and TV crews, anxious to gauge their reactions. John had never been more subdued. He seemed punctured: ‘I can’t find words to pay tribute to him. It is just that he was lovable, and it is those lovable things we think about now.’
Paul said: ‘This is a terrible shock. I am terribly upset.’
Deep down, John was scared. ‘I knew we were in trouble then,’ he recalled. ‘I didn’t really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music, and I was scared. I thought, “We’ve fuckin’ had it.”’