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George
Harrison: Emissary for India’s Spiritual Culture
by Joshua M. Greene [You
may also be interested in the George
Harrison book section]
 1974,
George Harrison and Ravi Shankar pose in front of musicians
from the album Ravi Shankar Family and Friends. Virtuoso
violinist L. Subramaniam is seating at far right. Photo
© Rex Features |
“The
people of India have a tremendous spiritual strength,
which I don’t think is found elsewhere. The spirit of
the people, the beauty, the goodness—that’s what I’ve
been trying to learn about.” -
George Harrison, 1966
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From
1966, when he first heard an album of Ravi Shankar playing
ragas, to his death from cancer thirty-five years later at
age fifty-eight, George Harrison was a lover of India and
an advocate for Indic spirituality.
As
a fellow student of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, founder-acarya
of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, it
always astonished me to see how this world-renowned artist
distanced himself from stardom to better cultivate his inner
self. How many celebrities have ever done that? His dedication
meant even more since he wasn’t just any celebrity. He was
a Beatle. In the 1960s, my generation viewed the Beatles not
just as the most successful pop group in history but as Western
sadhus, wise souls in tune with deeper secrets of the universe.
George first visited India in 1966, and within a few years
he became a dedicated mantra chanter, vegetarian, and spokesperson
for bhakti or devotional practices. If these disciplines were
okay with him, a generation of young people around the globe
was inclined to at least give it a try.
In
those days, the impression most Americans had of Hinduism
derived from books distorted by British missionary prejudice.
By publicly declaring his commitment to yoga, meditation,
karma, dharma, reincarnation, and other concepts identified
with India, George helped reverse nearly three hundred years
of anti-Hindu ignorance and bias. Even most impressive was
the depth of his commitment, for which he was prepared to
risk his career and his credibility. On one occasion in 1970,
when George visited the Radha Krishna Temple in London where
I was studying, he told us that his worldly success, first
as a Beatle and then in his phenomenal solo career, proved
to him there was some greater magic out there. Success, he
said, had given him the freedom and the courage to seek it
out. That freedom, he said, was a privilege given to him after
millions of births and deaths in the material world and he
felt a responsibility to engage what God had given him wisely,
for the benefit of others.
“If
I don’t use this opportunity,” he told us, “then I’ve wasted
my life, haven’t I?”
As
a boy, George had been an indifferent student, but once he
discovered spiritual India he was rarely without a book in
his hands. Among his favorites were Swami Vivekananda’s Raja
Yoga, Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography
of a Yogi, and Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada’s Science
of Self-Realization. What these books revealed about Indic
spiritual wisdom amazed him. Unlike institutional religions
that barely tolerate one another, here was a worldview that
encompassed everyone and everything. All living beings are
eternal souls, part and parcel of God, the texts declared.
Our job is to manifest that divinity. This, the Hindu tradition
said, is sanatana-dharma, the eternal religion, which
dwells in all beings. “Through Hinduism I feel a better person,”
he told a reporter. “I just get happier and happier.”
The
other Beatles, John, Paul, and Ringo, were his closest friends,
and in 1968 he induced them to join him and his then wife,
model Patty Boyd, on a retreat to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s
ashram in Rishikesh. The group arrived in Delhi at three o’clock
one morning in February 1968, and by noon their hired cars
were weaving down Rishikesh’s dusty streets crowded with cows
and bullock carts. They 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 River flowing from a source high in the mountains.
The
Beatles’ 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. George and his friends found their creative
energies heightened in the peaceful atmosphere of the retreat:
in Rishikesh, the Beatles composed more than forty songs.
Many were recorded on the White Album, and others would
appear on their final LP Abbey Road. Still, George
encouraged his friends to make best use of their time in India,
not by writing songs but by practicing yoga and meditation.
This is a land of yogis and saints, he reminded them, and
people hundreds of years old. “There’s one somewhere around,”
he said, “who was born before Christ—and is still living now”
and then went looking, climbing paths that snaked high into
the mountains.
George’s
commitment to communing with these mystic beings impressed
the other Beatles. “The way George is going,” John said with
admiration, “he’ll be flying a magic carpet by the time he’s
forty.”
On
return to London, George met Krishna devotees who had come
to open a temple. George identified with the young Americans,
people his own age who had rejected materialism for higher
ground. In their company, George began to chant the Hare Krishna
mantra daily and to read the Bhagavad-gita.
George
held India’s sacred texts in high regard, but his realizations
were experiential rather than academic. In his post Beatles
songs, he only occasionally referred to philosophical terms
and preferred writing simple, sing-along lyrics. In “Living
In The Material World” (1973), for instance, his declared
“Senses never gratified/Only swelling like a tide/That could
drown me in the material world.” The lines offer a terse rendering
of several verses from Gita chapter two, which describe “While
contemplating the objects of the senses, a person develops
attachment for them, and from such attachment lust develops…then
anger…then delusion…then bewilderment of memory…then loss
of intelligence…[after which] one falls down again into the
material pool.”
Inspired
by the Gita’s injunction that the divine energy animating
all life has no material name, George referred to himself
as a “spirit soul” rather than a Hindu. Perhaps it was because
of this deep respect for God’s universality that he never
took formal initiation into any one tradition. “The guru-shishya
(teacher-disciple) relationship is an exceptionally powerful
one,” he wrote in Ravi Shankar’s autobiography Raga Mala.
“In order to gain the benefits of the received wisdom of the
ages, the student must yield completely to the demands of
the guru in a submission of the ego [and] must accept without
question what he is taught.” If he’d learned anything as a
Beatle it was to question authority, and pledging himself
exclusively to one teacher, it seems, was a step he never
felt prepared to take.
Still,
George appreciated those who had sincerely dedicated themselves
to God, and as often as his busy life allowed, he spent time
with his fellow chanters. On several occasions, after a day
of recording, he invited us to his home in Friar Park north
of London. We’d arrive at Henley-on-Thames, a quiet town thirty-six
miles west of London, and George and Patty would greet us
at the gates of their sprawling property with a wave and a
smile. When devotees visited, George flew an Om flag from
the tower of his gothic manor.
Signs
of George’s devotion to yoga and meditation filled his home.
Incense sweetened the air. A small altar sat on the mantle
of the fireplace. Pictures of favorite teachers and paintings
of deities from India’s scriptures decorated the walls: Lakshmi,
the Goddess of Fortune; elephant-headed Ganesh; Krishna playing
with his friends in the cowherd village of Vrindavan. George
found Indian theology exciting and sensual, filled with meditative
music, tasty food, fabulous stories of eternal worlds, and
all the satisfactions a newcomer to the spiritual journey
could ever hope to find.
But
George’s spiritual journey was not an easy one. His wife Patty
left him, in large measure because his commitment to God grew
stronger than his commitment to their partnership. Fans derided
him for taking his faith onstage and exhorting them to “Chant
Krishna! Jesus! Buddha!” when it was rock and roll they wanted.
The press was occasionally cruel in its judgment of his post
Beatles music. And for a while, some bad habits from his rocker
days—in particular alcohol and drugs—returned to haunt him.
Salvation
from the material world can come in many forms. For George,
struggling with depression after the Dark Horse debacle, it
came in the form of Olivia Arias, a fellow yoga practitioner
who nursed him back to health and later became his loving
wife. It came in the form of their son, Dhani, a gentle, talented
boy who in time became George’s closest friend.
In
later years, George retreated from his pop celebrity into
the life of a humble gardener. He took great pleasure in tilling
the earth, in planting jasmine bushes, in freeing a magnolia
tree from wild brambles, and bringing his neglected Friar
Park grounds back to a state of beauty. In India, he had seen
people worshiping nature. The Gita calls the earth God’s “Universal
Form.” Trees are the hairs on that divine form, mountains
and hills are its bones, clouds form the head, and rivers
are the blood flowing through its veins. Gardening from that
vantage point takes on holy dimensions, a caressing of God’s
body.
Gardening,
caring for his family, and meditating became the focus of
his life. “The best thing anyone can give to humanity is God
consciousness,” he told Mukunda Goswami, a devotee friend,
in 1986. “But first you have to concentrate on your own spiritual
advancement. So in a sense, we have to become selfish to become
selfless.”
In
April 1996, he began work on an album of traditional Indian
songs and mantras with Ravi Shankar. The album was released
in 1997. George considered Chants Of India one of his most
important works, as it allowed listeners to “turn off your
mind, relax, and float downstream, and listen to something
that has its roots in the transcendental…beyond intellect.
If you let yourself be free…it can have a positive effect.”
George
never stopped making music or trying to put a spiritual message
out into the world. But these callings seemed less urgent
to him in his later years than they had as a young man. He
once described himself as someone who had climbed to the top
of the material world, then looked over to find that there
was much more on the other side. There, on the other side
of the material mountain, was the call of his eternal self
and his relationship with the Divine. As he approach death,
with his missionary years behind him, that vision became all
that mattered. “Now I understand about ninety-year-old people
who feel like teenagers,” he said less than a year before
his death. “The soul in the body is there at birth and there
at death. The only change is the bodily condition.”
George’s
life started in music and ended in music. In Los Angeles,
surrounded by family and friends and the chanting of God’s
holy names, his soul left its body on November 29—only a few
weeks after the tragedy of 9/11. For those of us who had been
inspired by his example, it was impossible to avoid seeing
these two events in macabre orbit around one another: the
terrible consequences of turning away from the light, and
the miracles that can come when we put the light of spirit
at the center of our lives.
In
August 1966, a reporter had asked George to describe his personal
goal. “To do as well as I can do,” he replied, “whatever I
attempt, and someday to die with a peaceful mind.”
He
was twenty-three years old when he set that goal for himself.
He never gave it up.
“You
know, I read a letter from him to his mother that he wrote
when he was twenty-four,” his son Dhani said. “He was on tour
or someplace when he wrote it. And it basically says,
‘I want to be self-realized. I want to find God. I’m
not interested in material things, this world, fame—I’m going
for the real goal. And I hope you don’t worry about me,
mum.’ And he wrote that when he was twenty-four! And
that was basically the philosophy that he had up until the
day he died. He was just going for it right from an
early age—the big goal.”
After
returning from twelve years in Hindu monasteries, Joshua M.
Greene became an author, filmmaker, and communications consultant
specializing in issues of faith. His book Witness: Voices
from the Holocaust (Free Press, 2000) was made into a
feature film for PBS. His book Justice at Dachau (Broadway
Books, 2003) traces the largest series of Nazi trials in history.
His editorials on war crimes tribunals have appeared in major
newspapers and magazines. He is the author of Here Comes
The Sun: The Spiritual and Musical Journey of George Harrison
(John Wiley & Sons, January 2006). For information, visit
the George Harrison book
section
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