Article from Intro magazine: 23rd September 1967

Beatles’ transcendental meditation: For twenty minutes every morning the Beatles sit down quietly, think about a secret yogic word and then slip into a state of meditation. They have been taught this ancient technique by an Indian holy man.

Their clothes, their houses, their music, all reflect India, the sitar and tabla sound from the hi-fi. George Harrison has already spent some time in India; all are planning to spend two or three months there.

They say they hope to use their influence to show young people everywhere what Yoga can do for them, putting their energies and money behind a scheme to set up academies and teachers throughout this country.

Why? Are they cynics, astutely using a way-out gimmick for publicity? Are they sincere, but victims of, at best, a mysterious Eastern religious sect or, at worst, a confidence trick? Or have they finally gone round the bend as a result of success and all the money in the world?

Intro finds out

INTRO decided to find out exactly what the Beatles are up to. We drove to George Harrison’s Surrey home—through the gap in the twelve-foot brick wall, past the flowers and up to the house with the psychedelic paint job.

George, barefooted, led us through an archway hung with bells into a forty-foot room filled with things Indian and a poster-painted rainbow fireplace covering half a wall.

Already seated on the purple carpet: George’s wife Patti, John Lennon and a pale beige cat. But let’s get one thing straight, The Beatles are sincere.

Beatles’ transcendental meditation

After talking with them, we’ve come to the conclusion they’ve never been more sincere about anything they’ve done. The Beatles have been searching and they think they’ve found the way.

And what the Beatles have been looking for millions of young people around the world have been looking for too. As John Lennon puts it:

“The youth of today are really looking for some answers.

For proper answers the established church can’t give them, their parents can’t give them, material things can’t give them.”

experimenting with drugs

The Beatles’ search is for inner happiness, peace and strength, and the saga that took them all over the world, sold over £200 million in records. They amassed an enormous fortune and led them to experiment with drugs, didn’t find it for them.

Now the trail has taken a new turn, first to the Hilton Hotel and then to Bangor, to listen to the teaching of an Indian mystic, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

At Bangor they were initiated into the Maharishi’s technique of meditation, and were each given their own sound or mantra—‘‘it’s an old Indian scene really.”

Thereafter the mantra sound or syllable is used to keep the mind clear of thought during the meditation period.

But let John and George explain:

Mick Jagger involvement

JOHN: Bangor was incredible, you know. Maharishi reckons the message will get through if we can put it across. What he says about life and the universe is the same message that Jesus, Buddha and Krishna and all the big boys were putting over.

Mick came up there and he got a sniff and he was on the phone saying: send Keith, send Brian, send them all down. You just get a sniff and you’re hooked.

GEORGE: But with meditation you don’t have to bother with religion or anything. When you come out after meditating in the morning, you forget it completely and let it work for you.

JOHN: Yeh, and there’s none of this sitting in the lotus position or standing on your head. You just do it as long as you like. (In a heavy accent) Tventy minutes a day is prescribed for ze verkers.

Tventy minutes in the morning and tventy minutes after verk. Makes you happy, intelligent and more energy. I mean look how it all started. I believe he just landed in Hawaii in his nightshirt, all on his own, nobody with him, in 1958.

Beatles’ transcendental meditation

GEORGE: It helps you find fulfilment in life, helps you live life to the full. Young people are searching for a bit of peace inside themselves.

JOHN: The main thing is not to think about the future or the past, the main thing is just to get on with now. We want to help people do that with these
academies.

We’ll make a donation and we’ll ask for money from anyone we know with money, anyone that’s interested, anyone in the so-called establishment who’s worried about kids going wild and drugs and all that.

Another groovy thing: everybody gives one week’s wages when they join. I think it’s the fairest thing I’ve ever heard of. And that’s all you ever pay, just the once.

Patti’s secret

GEORGE: Patti started it all really.

PATTI: A girl friend told me about it and I’d been going several months.

JOHN: I didn’t believe it at the time. She said: “They gave me this word but I can’t tell you, it’s a secret”. And I said: “What kind of scene is this if you keep secrets from your friends?”

GEORGE: She joined the Maharishi place a long time ago. We’d been looking for this thing and suddenly it’s there. First of all it was the Indian music and when I was in India I was lucky enough to meet Ravi Shankar.

JOHN: With Brian dying it was sort of a big thing for us. And if we hadn’t had this meditation it would have been much harder to assess and carry on and know how we were going.

Now we’re our managers, now we have to make all the decisions. We’ve always had full responsibility for what we did, but we still had a father figure, or whatever it was, and if we didn’t feel like it—well, you know, Brian would do it.

Now we’ve got to work out all our business, everything. And maybe a lot more to do with NEMS and all the things that Brian left behind. It threw me quite a bit. But then the Maharishi talked to us and, I don’t know, cooled us out a bit.

Beatles’ transcendental meditation

GEORGE: We’ve all come along the same path. We’ve been together a long time. We learned right from the beginning that we’re going to be together.

JOHN: Even if you go into the meditation bit just curious or cynical, once you go into it, you see.

We ‘weren’t so much sceptical because we’d been through that phase in the middle of all the Beatlemania like, so we came out of being sceptics a bit.

But you’ve still got to have a questioning attitude to all that goes on. The only thing you can do is judge on your own experience and that’s what this is about. You know, I’m less sceptical than I ever was.

George disappears to make tea. Suddenly there’s a fantastic, unearthly musical screech. It stops. “It’s the cat,” says George, “she’s jumped on the organ, key of E.”

He comes back with a tray of big, friendly teacups with bluebirds on them, and goes back for a plate of biscuits. He pours.

GEORGE: We don’t know how this will come out in the music. Don’t expect to hear transcendental meditation all the time.

JOHN: I don’t honestly know how anything I’ve felt has come out in my music, it’s usually in retrospect I’ve seen what I’ve been saying.

GEORGE: It’ll take us time. You see we don’t want this thing to come out like-Cliff and Billy Graham. You know how that just comes out and then it’s
finished straight away. We mean it.

JOHN: Well, so does Cliff.

GEORGE: Right. I’d rather not use any obvious things until you can see how it’s naturally affected the music.

pot and drugs

JOHN: The same as we didn’t really shove our LP full of pot and drugs, but I mean there was an effect.

You were more consciously trying to keep it out. You wouldn’t say: “I had some acid, baby, so groovy,” but there was a sort of feeling that something happened between Revolver and Sgt. Pepper. I mean, whether it would have happened anyway is speculation.

GEORGE: Well, when I went to San Francisco this was great. This was the first thing that turned me off drugs. Seeing the Haight-Ashbury.

JOHN: We’d dropped drugs before this meditation thing. George mentioned he was dropping out of it and I said: ‘Well, it’s not doing me any harm, I’ll carry on.” But I just suddenly thought, I’ve seen all that scene.

There’s no point and if it does do anything to your chemistry or brains? Then someone wrote to me and said that whether you like it or not, whether you have no ill-effects, something happens up there. So I decided if I ever did meet someone who could tell me the answer, I’d have nothing left to do it with.

Beatles’ transcendental meditation

GEORGE: There’s still the craze. Usually the people who establish something that becomes a craze, well, they’re usually very sincere people. It’s just when all the publicity comes, then it turns bad. The thing that happened with this movement, the hippy thing, is that in Haight-Ashbury . .

JOHN: (interrupting) It couldn’t make it with a name like Haight-Ashbury.

GEORGE: People who live in America and live round there, they told me that most of the original people that came in there with the love and flower thing, well, they’ve cleared out into the country. They’re just living in communities of farms or tents.

When I was there I expected something like the King’s Road, only more. Somehow I expected them all to own their own little shops because I’d heard they’ve all bought out blocks. I expected them all to be nice and clean and friendly and happy. And then the first thing you see is just lots of dirty people just lying round the floor.

Which just puts you off for a start. With the Hippies there’s the good side and the bad side. There were so many nice people that I saw. It was obvious, you can see people who just vibrate a little happiness.

druggies

And then there’s the other sick part of it where you see people so out of their minds with drugs and who really believe the drug’s the thing that’s doing it. That’s the sad bit and that overpowered the good bit for me.

And that was the thing. Right there and then. It was the identification with all those druggies—if you want to call them that, I call them that—because they’re the people. It’s different if somebody takes a drug for things or even for kicks, but when they start believing in the drug . . .

JOHN (interrupting): Worshipping it.

GEORGE: Then it’s wrong. With this thing of us becoming so related to the hippies, that’s why it’s so important. .

meditation scene

JOHN: There’s a big academy of this meditation scene out in California and if even just two hundred of them try it, just because of what we say, they’ll turn the next two hundred on themselves as soon as they’ve done it, and that might have been worth all the Haight-Ashbury and all the drop-outs.

The point about how the English are taking it now seems: to me to be better. It’s not drop out, it’s drop in and change it.

GEORGE: It’s drop out of the old established way of thought, the narrow concept of life.

To act and try to make as many changes as possible—this is the thing, to drop in with this changed concept of life and try to influence as many people.

Patti collects the big blue and white cups on to the tray and carries them away. There’s a smell of fish baking in an oven, dinner’s almost ready and it’s time we went.

JOHN: You know, I feel I can handle anything at the moment and I never felt like that before.

You know, I’ve had good days, bad days, periods when things are going right, but I mean this is a bad period for us in the material sense, in the physical sense. But greatest period in an inner sense.

Beatles’ transcendental meditation

What I Believe

by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

“As youth is presented with the gifts of life by generations which have gone by and the generation which has brought him up, nourished and cultured him so that he might enjoy the maximum in life.

In return he makes his own contribution towards advancing the glories of life and living which are to be shared and enjoyed by-those who come after him.

“A youth has a responsibility to himself and an equal responsibility to society.

“He must make good his own life, he must enjoy the maximum, create the maximum and grow to the maximum in knowledge.

“The source of the alphabet—the source of thought—is the reservoir of energy and intelligence. A thought is built up of energy—due to which it flows—and intelligence which gives it a direction.

“The knowledge of the source of the alphabet is easily taught through a very simple and natural method known as Transcendental Meditation.

fields of thought

“This meditation is like pulling the arrow back on the bow to invest it with the possibility of great activity in the fields of thought and action.

“It is the birth right of every man to gain knowledge of the source of education.

And the knowledge of the source of the alphabet is equally vital because it unfolds and cultures the inner potentialities of life. “Such integration, by improving the efficiency of thought and action, does not allow stress to be accumulated and makes a man more creative, more full of happiness, harmony and peace.

“It lies with the present adult generation to offer a gardener’s tender care to its growing youth who want to be more full of joy in life. Be more creative, more progressive, so that they can contribute their share towards a glorious future for mankind.

“The interest of young minds in the use of drugs, even though misguided, indicates their genuine search for some form of spiritual experience.

transcendental meditation

“With the interest of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones in Transcendental Meditation, it has become evident that the search for higher spiritual experience among the young will not take long to reach fulfilment.

But it is for the older generation to provide facilities for the teaching of Transcendental Meditation. “It is an indication of progress that The Beatles are thinking of having their own academy for teaching.

In London to start with, and I congratulate the Archbishop of Canterbury who has expressed his satisfaction with The Beatles’ interest in Transcendental Meditation.

“The youth of today need the support of their elders and I hope they will extend their grace.”

(Written exclusively for INTRO by the Maharishi after the Bangor conference, and before he left for his continental tour.)

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