Here Comes The Sun
The
Spiritual and Musical Journey of George Harrison
Excerpted
with permission of the publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc., from Here Comes
the Sun:
George Harrison's Spiritual and Musical Journey. Bantam Books will
publish the UK edition in July 2006.
It
is the fall of 1966. The Beatles have just held their last live concert, in San
Francisco, and George Harrison has declared, “That’s it. I’m no
longer a Beatle.” For the past several months, his discovery of yoga,
meditation, and the sitar have pushed him in a new direction—away from
the external world of pop stardom and toward the internal world of
self-realization.
From the window of their suite in Bombay’s Taj Hotel, George and his
wife Pattie Boyd looked out onto a traffic jam of beeping cars, rumbling
bullock carts, trumpeting elephants and ringing bicycles. Ravi Shankar arrived
at the hotel, and George’s sitar lessons picked up where they
had left off in England.
At
first, no one in the hotel recognized him. But after a few days, overconfident
of his anonymity, George took an elevator down to the lobby intending to do some
shopping and drew the attention of a teenage elevator operator. Could it be? The
next morning, George and Pattie awoke to crowds of Indian Beatlemaniacs outside
their window shouting, “We want George!”
To
find some privacy, George and company took a train north to the province of
Kashmir, a lake-filled state bordered by Pakistan to the west and China to the
north. Kashmir was the retreat of royalty, an idyllic land of fruit orchards and
flowering gardens. The group took up residence in a large wooden houseboat on
the largest of the city’s many lakes. Through carved wood windows, George
looked out on the Himalayas rising in the distance and savored freedom from life
as a Beatle.
Among the books that Ravi had brought was Raja-Yoga by Swami Vivekananda. In Raja-Yoga, George learned Vivekananda’s central message: all people possess innate and eternal perfection. “Tat tvam asi—That thou art,” Vivekananda declared. “You are that which you seek. There is nothing to do but realize it.”
One passage in particular held George’s attention. “What right has a man to say that he has a soul if he does not feel it, or that there is a God if he does not see Him? If there is a God we must see Him…otherwise it is better not to believe.” Better to be an outspoken atheist, Vivekananda advised, than a hypocrite.
George discovered that the word yoga meant “to link,” as in the English words yoke or union. In its early stages, he read, yoga involved physical exercises, but its goal was to link the soul with the Supreme Soul or God. To reach that goal a yogi must also practice yama or self-restraint, which included no killing and, by inference, a vegetarian diet; no lying; he must refrain from stealing, which by extension meant not taking more than needed of anything. Along with qualities such as cleanliness, austerity and dependence on God, these formed the basics “without which no practice of yoga will succeed.”
True
yoga, Vivekananda wrote, did not depend on being Christian, Jew, Buddhist,
atheist or theist. The benefits of yoga were available to every human being
through daily practice. Practice mornings and evenings, the revered teacher
advised. Refrain from eating until after morning yoga is done. And try to
control sex drive. When contained, sexual energy transforms into nourishment for
the brain. Without chastity, one loses stamina and mental strength. Above all,
never produce pain in any living being, not by thought, word or deed. “There
is no virtue,” Vivekananda wrote, “higher than this.”
Where was George’s childhood now, or his career? What sense did the history of
his one short life make compared to the eternity opening up before him? However
exciting his achievements looked from the outside, something grand and majestic
was transporting him beyond the minutiae of that world. What other people
perceived of him—a working-class Liverpool boy who became part of history’s
most successful rock group, who then married a top model and had more fans than
Elvis—dwindled to mere facts. What he was finding in India spoke to the
quintessence of experience, to the meaning and significance of his life.
The books George read in Kashmir kept him enthralled with their descriptions of
powers lying dormant within the soul. He
read essays on how meditation could lower metabolic levels, increase spiritual
awareness, and eventually help his soul escape further reincarnations. As a
child, George had little taste for reading. In Kashmir, he was rarely without a
book in his hands.
He was twenty-three years old and as far back as memory allowed his sense of
himself had been guided by what others told him, by childhood and family, by
fame and by caricatures in the press. If, as he now read, he had nothing to do
with any of those Georges, then who was he? If after this life ended, he
did not end but moved on, then precisely who moved on? His body would
fall away and with it the accumulations of a lifetime, but he, the soul within,
would remain. The books explained that the person he thought himself to be, the
George whom others saw and judged, was real but temporary, a gross body built
from five elements—earth, air, water, fire, and space—and a subtle body
consisting of mind, intelligence and ego. It was his true self, the soul inside
those coverings that provided the energy to make them work. At death, when the
temporal coverings fell away, earth again merging with earth, water with water,
air with air, that true self would move on to some other destination.
He had to share this knowledge with his mates. Pattie seemed happy to be there
with him, but what about John or Paul or Ringo? Would they agree to spend time
in India? And if they did, would they catch spiritual fire the way he had? There
was no guarantee they would find such ancient wisdom meaningful, and soon George
Harrison would discover that answering a spiritual call involved tough choices
and a willingness to break free of old bonds.
Author Joshua M. Greene has taught bhakti (devotional) yoga for the past 35 years. He can be reached through his website www.herecomesthesunbook.com.
