In the 200 years that Eastern spiritual teachings have been filtering into American life, the disseminators have included great artists as well as gurus, scholars, and scientists. We have absorbed the principles of Hinduism, Buddhism and other Asian traditions through the poems of T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats; the novels of Herman Hesse, Somerset Maugham and J.D. Salinger; the films of Satyajit Ray and Merchant-Ivory (not to mention Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi); the music of John Coltrane and Philip Glass; and through various forms of dance, painting, and sculpture. But no artist has ever done more for this cross-cultural pollination than George Harrison. The so-called “quiet Beatle” was a dedicated yogi who was not at all quiet about his spiritual beliefs and practices. With the tenth anniversary of Harrison’s death on November 29, Martin Scorsese’s documentary Living in the Material World recently appearing on HBO, and the GRAMMY Museum’s current exhibit on him open in downtown LA through February 12, it is a good time to appreciate George as a teacher and transmitter of yogic teachings.
The most conscientiously spiritual of the Beatles, Harrison learned from a number of well-known gurus, living and dead: Swami Vishnudevananda, whom he met when the Beatles were filming Help! in the Bahamas; Paramahansa Yogananda and Swami Vivekananda, whose books he read while studying sitar with Ravi Shankar in India; A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, whose Krishna Consciousness movement Harrison supported as enthusiastically as he chanted the familiar Hare Krishna Mahamantra; and most famously, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, from whom he and the Fab Four learned Transcendental Meditation in 1967 after George’s then-wife, Pattie Boyd, told him about it. That meeting of celebrity and guru triggered a media frenzy that put words like mantra, guru and ashram into the vocabulary and ushered meditation—and, as a byproduct, the full repertoire of yogic practices—into the mainstream.
Once he found value in India’s spiritual heritage, Harrison promoted the message with the same passion he brought to his guitar. When Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein died, George’s funky explanation of reincarnation was heard around the world: “There’s no such thing as death anyway. I mean, it’s death on a physical level, but life goes on everywhere, and you just keep going up really.” When the Beatles departed for their famous sojourn in India, George told the press why: “For every human, it is a quest to find the answer as to ‘Why are we here? Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?’ That, to me, became the only important thing in my life. Everything else is secondary.” When he discovered Krishna bhakti (the devotional form of Yoga), Harrison funded the London Hare Krishna temple and the printing of one of Swami Bhaktivedanta’s books, for which he penned a foreword. Prefiguring today’s kirtan explosion by decades, he also produced and performed on an album of chants called “Radha-Krishna Temple” that reached a global audience.
Harrison became as Hindu as a Westerner is likely to be without taking swami vows, and his urge to express what he’d discovered in the tradition is palpable in some of his lyrics. Listen to “Within You Without You” on the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and you’ll hear lines like “Try to realize it’s all within yourself” and “When you’ve seen beyond yourself, then you may find peace of mind is waiting there.” I think of the song as the first rock ‘n’ roll Upanishad and those lines as rock mahavakyas (great utterances). But it is in his post-Beatles solo career that George the guru steps onto center stage. On “My Sweet Lord,” the first number one single by an ex-Beatle, he voices the yearning of a God seeker: “I really want to see you,” he cries, “I really want to know you … I really want to be with you …” As he intones variations on “my sweet Lord,” the chorus sings “Hallelujah,” then “Hare Krishna,” then a traditional verse invoking Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva (called Maheswara). Harrison said he wanted to show that Christian and Hindu sounds of praise “are quite the same thing.”
On “Give Me Love,” from the album Living in the Material World, he again gives voice to the primal spiritual yearning: “Give me love / Give me peace on earth / Give me light / Give me life / Keep me free from birth.” “Beware of Darkness” warns of the dangers of worldly attachment, counseling us to beware of “falling swingers” and “thoughts that linger.” On “Awaiting on You All” he tells us: “chant the names of the Lord and you’ll be free.” He advises us to learn “The Art of Dying,” a classic metaphor for transcending bodily identity, and he states the case for reincarnation: “There’ll come a time when most of us return here / Brought back by our desire to be / A perfect entity.”
Philip Goldberg has been studying the world’s spiritual traditions for more than 50 years, as a practitioner, teacher, and author. An Interfaith Minister, public speaker, and workshop leader, his numerous books include Roadsigns on the Spiritual Path; American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West; The Life of Yogananda: The Story of the Yogi Who Became the First Modern Guru, and his latest, Spiritual Practice for Crazy Times: Powerful Tools to Cultivate Clarity, Calm and Courage. He blogs on Elephant Journal and Spirituality & Health, cohosts the popular Spirit Matters podcast, and leads American Veda Tours to India. His website is www.PhilipGoldberg.com.