"When the Beatles set off for India in February 1968, many of their fans were bemused.
Why were four world-famous young men going to an ashram to study something called transcendental meditation? And what game was their guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, playing?
Back then, ‘meditation’ was something only holy people did, not pop bands.
Had the Beatles found something exciting that, as John Lennon joked, would make him ‘cosmic’? Or were they just gullible?
Over the half century since the group’s sojourn in the Himalayan foothills, the questions have never quite gone away — so fans old and new will be intrigued by the release of a new documentary, The Beatles In India, later this year.
Paul Saltzman, the documentary’s Canadian Emmy-winning director and producer, not only knew the band, but was a young student of meditation at the ashram in Rishikesh when John, Paul, George and Ringo arrived there.
For the Beatles, the whole Indian affair had begun two years earlier when George Harrison bought a sitar and became friendly with the musician Ravi Shankar. An interest in Hinduism soon followed.
Then, during the ‘Summer of Love’ in 1967, when the Beatles released the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album and sang All You Need Is Love, a little man with long flowing hair and a beard gave a lecture at the Hilton hotel in London.
He was the Maharishi and, encouraged by new devotee Harrison and his wife Pattie, John and Cynthia Lennon and Paul McCartney and his actress girlfriend Jane Asher were there to hear him.
John’s attitude until then had been: ‘Why would I want to go and listen to some little fakir from India?’ But after hearing the Maharishi’s pitch for what sounded to him like a way of rising above worldly pressures without too much self-denial, John was intrigued. He was never keen on self-denial of any kind.
The following weekend, the Beatles joined the Maharishi for a seminar in North Wales, only for their meditations to be cut short when their manager, Brian Epstein, was found dead in London.
What they really needed was a full course in transcendentalism, the Maharishi told them. So, six months later, the Beatles led the way to his ashram in Rishikesh, 140 miles north of New Delhi, quickly followed by fellow British pop star Donovan, Beach Boy Mike Love, the actress Mia Farrow and her younger sister Prudence.
None of the pilgrims had any idea what to expect. But Rishikesh, built on gentle hills beside the Ganges, was a pleasant surprise.
For while it may have been third world India outside the walls of the Maharishi’s estate, inside it was never less than comfortable.The mood among the 100 or so visitors already there was friendly, but quiet. And with journalists and photographers locked out, and no telephone and no newspapers allowed, it was an ideal place to relax and reflect.
The guests ate mainly in a canteen where an impudent monkey might swing down and steal a Beatle’s dinner. In the evening there would be communal question-and-answer sessions at which the guests sat garlanded with orange blossom (as in Paul Saltzman’s picture above).
Except for these public meetings and private discussions with the Maharishi, their time was their own — so John and Paul worked on new songs.
One of the first songs John wrote was Dear Prudence, after he and George were sent to try to get Mia Farrow’s sister to come out of her hut. ‘She seemed to go slightly barmy from meditating too long,’ John would later say. ‘She was trying to reach God quicker than anybody else.’
While John was, at first, convinced the Maharishi must have some out-of-body secret he wanted to learn, Paul was simply curious about giving meditation a try — and for straight-talking Ringo and his wife Maureen, it was just a holiday with friends.
Usually John was the leader in any new craze, but in matters spiritual, George, the youngest of the group, was the pioneer. ‘The way George is going, he’ll be flying on a magic carpet by the time he’s 40,’ John would laugh.
For Cynthia Lennon it wasn’t a joke. As alcohol and drugs were banned in the ashram, she hoped their stay might wean her husband off the things she believed were destroying their marriage. She was to be disappointed. On arrival, she and John had been assigned a bungalow with a large double bed, but ‘he would get up early every morning and leave our room,’ she later wrote in her autobiography.
‘He spoke to me very little, and after a week or two he announced that he wanted to move into a separate room to give himself more space.’ From then on he virtually ignored her. She was hurt and upset.
What she didn’t know was that letters were arriving several times a week from Yoko Ono, to be collected in the ashram post office by John. That was why he’d been getting up so early.
The songs Paul penned included Martha My Dear, Blackbird, Back In The USSR, I Will and Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, while John’s included The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill and Yer Blues.
But the creative break wasn’t to last. Ringo and Maureen were the first to leave, setting off home after just ten days — missing the children, they said, and not liking the food or the flies.
Paul and Jane left after a month — and then the serenity of the camp began to fall apart, mainly because a rumour swept the guests that the Maharishi had made a pass at an American girl, believed wrongly at the time to have been Prudence Farrow. No evidence for this was ever offered.
Cynthia Lennon would later say that John had told her he’d already become disenchanted. For a holy man, the yogi was, he had decided, too interested in money, fame and celebrity — all the charges jokily levelled in newspapers before the trip to India.
George was torn. ‘But,’ said John, ‘when George started thinking the rumour [about the American girl] might be true, I thought . . . there must be something in it.’
So he decided to come home.
‘Why are you going?’ the Maharishi asked, when the party went to tell him they were leaving.
‘If you’re so cosmic you’ll know why,’ John snapped back.
And with that the Beatles’ Indian adventure came to an abrupt end, with taxis taking the Lennons and Harrisons back to New Delhi.
John couldn’t quite leave it at that. Believing he had been misled, he sought revenge in song.
‘Maharishi, what have you done, You made a fool of everyone,’ his lines began, until George managed to convince him to disguise the object of his attack.
So, out went the Maharishi and in came Sexy Sadie: ‘Sexy Sadie, oh yes, you’ll get yours yet.’ It was spiteful stuff.
George would always feel bad about how the Beatles treated the Maharishi, and was later reconciled with him. He would meditate for the rest of his life.
But the nearest John ever came to an apology was an admission some years later that: ‘We made a mistake there... We were waiting for a guru, and along he came...’
So, were the Beatles conned? Not really. The Maharishi’s organisation may have been cute in spotting a PR opportunity, but it was hardly the yogi’s fault if too much was expected of him. He died at the age of 90, in 2008.
Really, if anyone made a fool of the Beatles, it was themselves." - Dailymail.co.uk
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