You can hear something and think that you don’t like it, and think that it’s not influencing you. But you are what you eat, you are what you see, what you touch, what you smell and what you hear. Music has always had a transcendental quality in as much as it reaches parts of you that you don’t expect it to reach. And it can touch you in a way that you can’t express. You can think that it hasn’t reached you, and years later, you will find it coming out. I think, as Beatles, we were fortunate that we were open to all kinds of music. We just listened to whatever happened to be on the radio. That was the main thing in those days.

Awaken: Bob Dylan was also one of your heroes…

George: The music of Bob Dylan has always been my favorite. He said more in one song than the average songwriter said in many lifetimes. I always have been a fan of Dylan‘s and I think I always will be because somehow Dylan has always managed to upstage everybody. When it comes down to being aware and also of being able to put into words … we can feel and see a lot of things, but when it comes down to writing a tune and being able to communicate this through words, he’s very good at being able to put words down.

Awaken: You’re one of the very few that has collaborated with him. You worked with him on “I’d have you anytime”…

George: What he wrote was so simple. “All I have is yours, all you see is mine, and I’m glad to hold you in my arms. I’d have you anytime.”

Awaken: Weren’t you there when he went electric? With the success of A Complete Unknown, there is more interest than ever in his life… What was your experience of that moment like?

George: Bob did a set at the beginning… the show was in two halves. In the first half, he came out and did his usual thing with the guitar and harmonica. And then in the second half, he came out with the band. He knew this was gonna happen anyway, but most of the audience in the Albert Hall… I mean, they were nouveau folk fans… they had just got into folk, so they were kind of disturbed. A lot of them were really uptight because they were like, “hey, he’s forsaken folk,” and all of this, but Bob just came out and he said “Well, you may know this song… here’s how it goes now!”

And they just went off wailing. It was good. It was a great show. It was ragged, but that’s the nature of Bob. It was very good though. But through that second half, people were getting up and walking out, shouting. It was controversial. It was interesting. And it was kinda natural, really, you know? Because there’s a limit to what you can do just with acoustics. I mean, it didn’t seem like Bob should particularly be limited to just doing that. It seemed like kind of a natural progression.

ON THE BEATLES—

Awaken: From your first album, Please, Please Me, in ’63, to your last, Let It Be, in ’70, there is such a transformation… you just kept expanding and experimenting, and yet, this was only a seven year period of recording activity! It’s hard not to imagine what would’ve come out had you stayed together. But as John explained when we spoke to him recently, the end was inevitable. Were you all ready to move on?

George: Some people will go on forever, singing the same tune, playing the same gig, if they were making some money, you know? I think we’d all rather give that up and try going on our own and try doing something we really wanna do and if we don’t make it, then hard luck. As it happens, we’ve all got such a lot of goodwill hanging over from being Beatles.

Awaken: So, it wasn’t all because of Yoko!

George: The group had problems long before Yoko came along. Many problems… I don’t really remember anything about the Beatle days… It seems like a previous incarnation, when I think about it. It was good, but it was also good to carry on doing something else. In fact, it was a relief. Some people can understand that… Because Beatles were such a big deal. They can’t understand why we should actually enjoy splitting up, but there’s a time… you know? There’s a time when people grow up and they leave home, or whatever they do, and they go for a change, and it was really time for a change.

Over the years, I had such a lot of songs mounting up, that I really wanted to do, but I only got my quota of one or two tunes per album and that way I would’ve had to record about 100 Beatle albums just to get out the tunes I had in 1965.

This was one of the main faults of John and Paul… They were so busy being John and Paul, they failed to realize what else was around at the time.

Awaken: Like the saying goes, it was fun, until it wasn’t! I remember John saying that at some point, it just became routine. Sounds like it had just run its course and each was feeling pulled by other interests that felt more compelling at the time…

George: It may sound like a lofty thing to say, but basically, you know… what are we doing on this planet? I think, through the Beatles experience, we had grown so many years, within a short period of time. I had experienced so many things, and met so many people, but I realized there was nothing that was giving me a buzz anymore. I wanted something better. I remember thinking, I’d love to meet somebody who really impressed me. I mean somebody who could really impress me and that’s when I met Ravi (Shankar), which was funny because he’s this little fellow playing this obscure instrument, from our point of view, and yet it led me into such depths.

ON METAPHYSICS—

Awaken: After India, you became increasingly committed to pursuing your interests in eastern mysticism. Is this what you mean when you say that meeting Ravi led you to greater depths?

George: For me, fame helped me get to that point, where, when you finally reached the top, then you realize you’re at the bottom. And so, then you have to look somewhere else. And where do you look for this?

Awaken: You became more interested in the bigger questions about life… and death. Did you find your answers, and if so, how did your explorations in Hinduism shape your beliefs?

George: What I believe basically, is… we all live from birth to death. We all create a lot of action, which is…action/reaction. They call Karma. It’s like credit and debit. You know, just like an account, but but in death… Death is actually when your physical body “packs in.” We keep going, and some period later we take another body, and we try again. But at that point of birth, even with somebody born today… it’s not just something totally new because you know… all those scriptures tell us there’s never a time when we weren’t, and there will never be a time when we’re not, you know?

Awaken: In the west, we tend to shy away from the topic of death, but it seems to be an integral focus of yours…

George: I think that’s the most important thing… It still is for me. You know, I get confused when I look around at the world and I see everybody’s running around. As Bob Dylan said, “he, not busy being born, is busy dying.” And yet nobody’s trying to figure out what’s the cause of death, and what happens when we die. I mean, that to me, is the only thing really, that’s of any importance. The rest is all secondary.

Awaken: Let’s flesh out why the topic of birth and death is so essential… how does it impact us in our lives here and now?

George: The whole idea of, say… how come Tchaikovsky, when he’s three, can play the piano better than Liberace can when he’s 50… You know, how come one kid at eight can do mathematics better than an IBM computer? There’s people like that. What we are now is really the effect of whatever we’ve been in the past. And I do, through Hinduism, believe in reincarnation, and all that, so…

Awaken: We are just a continuation of what we were before…

George: Everyone that’s alive is in someway born into a position, or a situation, or a country, or a time, which is the direct result of the previous actions and reactions of past lives. It’s only the physical body which goes through the changes and which is impermanent.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say, “I was this in my past life” … but I do believe in karma and rebirth… which go hand-in-hand. That whole thing of action/reaction… Life, death. They’re the same really, life and death. It does get heavy philosophically.

Awaken: Yet, not so different than western religious teachings…

George: It’s what the Lord teaches in every passage.

Awaken: Yet, there’s so much fear and worry around dying!

George: Everybody’s worrying about dying, but in order not to die, you just don’t have to get born because the moment you get born, you’re automatically gonna die because birth and death go hand-in-hand… and so does action/reaction, karma and rebirth.

Awaken: Along these lines, I suppose it’s karma that explains the magic that the four of you created, as The Beatles…

George: This is getting pretty far out to say how come the Beatles did that… All I can put it down to is… whatever it was, the chemistry of four people being born in that period, based upon whatever we’d been in our past… In that place, in that time, with everybody else… You meet people in your life… a lot of your friends are people who were your friends in other lives.

It’s magic… It’s all down to karma.

Awaken: And karma goes both ways… when we have sour feelings toward someone, that too, would follow us, wouldn’t it?

George: If you hate somebody, I’m sure you’re going to keep coming through, life after life, hating… It’ll be the same people.

Awaken: I love that you used the word “magic”… it does feel magical sometimes, the way we can just knowsomething without having learned it. Do you think we carry that knowledge from previous lifetimes?

George: Sometimes you don’t have to have experience to learn something… Sometimes something just triggers something else off and you somehow know intuitively… You just know. I believe that’s because of whatever happened in the past.

ON GOING TO CHURCH—

Awaken: You’ve been open about your Catholic upbringing. And as you mentioned, the metaphysical underpinnings of Hinduism aren’t as different as many would think. So, how do you identify now, and how you reconcile the two paths?

George: After being brought up as a Catholic ‘till I was about 13, I couldn’t take it any longer because it was just full of hypocrisy. I was taken to communion and all that sort of thing, so I was young and maybe I misinterpreted it, but what I felt was pain, fear, and that type of thing… as opposed to the thing I found from the Indian point of view, which was…it’s playful. It’s to enjoy… It’s to try to enjoy the moment.

Awaken: How did you first discover Hinduism?

George: There was a period in the 60s, when everybody freaked out on acid and everybody started getting into this and that, and I read a bunch of different things… and I was very attracted to Hinduism, but then one of the things that Hinduism teaches is that there’s a truth which underlies all religions. So I’m a Hindu at heart, but all that means is that I can relate more to the teachings in the Gita (Bhagavad Gita) more than I can of the Bible.

But that’s no put down of the Bible. It’s just that from a Christian point of view, they always taught us how painful… you know, the crucifixion and the whole thing. Whereas from the Hindu point of view, it’s all playful.

Awaken: Yes, all of reality is a divine play, which they call Lila. Tell me how you interpret this idea…

George: To feel that your whole life is just a play… To be pleased to be playing the part that you play. ‘Cause that’s all we’re doing… I’m playing the part of ex Beatle George… to enjoy it, as opposed to seeing it as a dead end. And that’s what Hinduism is like… ‘cause Krishna… the whole thing is a play. He acts out in order to show people how to play!

The teaching by (Swami) Vivikenanda, which really impressed me, said “If there is a God, we must see him, if there is a soul, we must perceive it; otherwise it is better not to believe.”

Awaken: Very different to the pressure we encounter in the west, to be a believer.

George: It’s better to be an outspoken atheist than to be a hypocrite.

Awaken: It sounds like it’s mostly the church hypocrisy, rather than the philosophy, that turned you off western religion… When did you first become aware of the hypocrisy?

George: They built a large church out of all the donations. Before that, there was a temporary church in a big wooden hut. It had the stations of the cross around it, and that’s my earliest remembrance of wondering, What’s is this all about? OK, I could see Christ, dragging his cross down the street, with everybody spitting on him, and I got the gist of that. But it didn’t seem to make any sense.

I felt then that there was some hypocrisy going on, even though I was only about 11 years old. It seemed to be the same on every housing estate in English cities: on one corner they’d have a church and on the other corner a pub. Everybody’s out there getting pissed and then just goes into the church, says three Hail Marys and one Our Father and sticks a fiver in the plate.

It felt so alien to me. Not the stained glass window or the pictures of Christ; I liked that a lot. And the smell of the incense and the candles. I just didn’t like the bullshit. After communion, I was supposed to have confirmation, but I thought, I’m not going to bother with that. I’ll just confirm it later myself.

From then on, I avoided the church, but every Thursday, a kid would come ‘round to herald the arrival of the priest. They’d go round all the streets, knock on the door and shout, “The priest’s coming!” And we’d all go, “Oh shit,” and run like hell up the stairs and hide. My mother would have to open the door and he’d say, “Ah Mrs. Harrison, it’s nice to see you again, so it is. Eh be Jesus…” She stuffed two half-crowns in his sweaty little hand and off he’d go to build another church or pub.

ASTRAL PROJECTION—

Awaken: I too, was steeped in Catholicism when I was young, as I was partially raised by my Italian Catholic grandmother. Like you, I loved the aesthetic of it all, and similarly was later attracted to Hinduism for similar reasons. I must admit that I love the magical element in both traditions! With that said, let’s jump forward again, to India, when you really started to get deep into your meditation practice. I remember reading that you had some pretty far out experiences! Would you share some with us?

George: I had a strange experience when I was in Rishikesh. I went on a meditation course where the object was to meditate deeper and deeper and deeper for longer periods of time and to plug into divine energy and to raise your state of consciousness and tune into the subtler states of consciousness.

And all those things like walking on the water and dematerializing your body at will are just the sort of things that happen along the way, so it’s hard to actually explain it, but it was just this feeling of… the consciousness traveling. It wasn’t up down, left or right. No BODY there. But at the same time, you don’t feel as if you are missing anything. You know, the consciousness is complete.

How I see it, is that the soul is in this body for a period of time and then it leaves the body. In a way, the body is like a suit that you put on.

Awaken: But again, aren’t there parallels to these things, in western religious teachings?

George: Christ said, in the Bible, about the three cages for the bird of paradise… the soul being the bird of paradise. And the three cages being the three bodies that house the soul. They call it “the causal body.” And then, around that is “the astral body,” and then there’s “the physical body.” So, death is really when the physical body falls off, but the soul is still in two other bodies, so, it’s then on the astral level.

People think, “this is me.” This isn’t me. This is just a bag of bones! Basically, everyone is spirit, which is really what Christ was here to tell everybody about. The kingdom of heaven that lies within, which is a state of being… pure consciousness.

Through many years of pollution of consciousness… Through material energy, we’ve all ended up in a fallen state. But everybody is potentially divine. So, Yoga… All these methods are really ancient methods just to stir the pollution out of your system and consciousness, and to mend the system. The purity that they talk about in religion, is really just a mental and spiritual purity which is obtained through discipline and through practice.

Awaken: What was it about meditation that first attracted you

George: I can’t explain that one… It’s just something that’s always been in me from sometime in the past. And I had an opportunity to find out about it in India… I got into meditation through music… Indian music. I went to India to learn a bit of Indian music, and inside I always had a desire to know the Yogis… and consequently, that led into meditation because the only reason to be living is to have complete knowledge or “bliss consciousness.” Everything else is mundane and secondary.

I wanted to know some method of enlarging my own consciousness. And that’s meditation. It’s been around for millions of years.

Awaken: To play devil’s advocate here… There are those who say “And, how does expanding my consciousness help the world?” How would you respond to that?

George: The world is government, you know? We get into government… We get into any situation in life… and we get the reflection of our own consciousness. We can’t really complain about what we have because that is us! It’s a reflection of our own being.

Now, if we could have people who are actually conscious in a spiritual sense, then all the underlying problems in society… I mean, it wouldn’t be able to change just overnight… but over a generation, or two generations, you could have things work.

For instance, say in England… And I’m sure it’s the same here… You get disease… So, you’ve got a lot of expenditure on hospitals and on fixing up people who’ve had disease. Now the problem is that most doctors… they study disease. They don’t know about health. So, you’d need to reprogram stuff, so that you teach people about how to be healthy. That way, you don’t spend so much money on disease. You’d be able to use that money for something else.

So, the natural law that operates on this planet, or in the universe… Everything works in a perfect order and there’s a scheme to things. There’s a certain intelligence that drives it and makes everything work.

Now, if we as individuals could go to that level of consciousness where we could bring it into our being… like from being children… Teach people about health, about their bodies, about consciousness… Because it’s all got to do with consciousness. Raise the level of consciousness, and then everything automatically becomes better!

Awaken: At this juncture in time, as always, we really need to raise the level of consciousness! So, with that, I’ll thank you once again, for spending this time with us. We are truly honored.

This is one of Awaken’s Dream Interviews, conducted by Donna Quesada, and all answers are verbatim from George Harrison, by way of interviews and articles.