Interview for The Saturday Evening Post

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Having voyages to India and satisfied the Maharishi of his good vibrations, our reporter throws toast to a monkey, breathes incense with the students of meditation, listens with Mia Farrow to the scream of a wild peacock and bestows a garland of flowers upon a Beatle.

On the heights of the Maharishi’s academy in the Himalayas, the sweet, wayward discourse never ceased. The Beatles and the less celebrated guests appeared at stray moments between their meditations, wandering through the teak trees to the picnic table at the edge of the bluff. Sometimes holding flowers in their hands, sometimes throwing bits of toast to the monkeys, they talked of dysentery and cosmic consciousness, of poetry and their troubles with the tailor.

The place had an air of timelessness about it, and now when I remember, I think of a succession of bland, vegetarian meals and a random sequence of events held together by the weird logic of images in dreams. The same gentle wind blew steadily from the south, and the Ganges kept up its old and sacred progress to Benares and the Bay of Bengal. Vultures drifted high up in the pale sky, but they watched the other shore, and their affairs, like the affairs of the men and animals they watched, didn’t concern us.

Neither did the clamor at the gates. Every day the reporters from the Indian press assembled in increasing numbers on the lower slope of the ashram, waiting with cameras and tactless skepticism. They remained below the barbed-wire fence, and occasionally in the afternoons the Maharishi ventured among them to speak gently of “the ocean of happiness within” and the “dive toward truth and light.” Behind him walked a bearded monk in a white robe, holding an umbrella aloft to shade him from the sun.

My own presence on the higher ground had been approved only on condition that I not disturb the Beatles or any other celebrity (most particularly Donovan or Mia Farrow if they should happen to arrive) with personal questions. They had come to him, the Maharishi said, in search of enlightenment and must therefore be approached with delicacy and circumspection.

To the Beatles the Maharishi attributed the popular success of his spiritual-regeneration movement, and he doted on them with the proud fondness of a singing teacher or football coach. Often he referred to them as “the blessed leaders of the world’s youth,” and in his happiest moments he described George Harrison as “a sublime soul for whom God and all the angels give thanks.”

Always they came and went as a group, dressed in extravagant costumes and looking like figures from a fanciful romance. They wore chains and beads and heavy pendants, and their long sideburns gave them the swarthy appearance of gypsies. Their wives followed them softly among the trees, smiling vaguely hello and sometimes wearing garlands of flowers in their long hair. At the table in the arbor they sat next to each other in a row, and on miscellaneous occasions they mentioned the reasons for their own pilgrimage.

“We had all the material things,” Harrison once said. “Fame and all that. But there was still something needed, you see. It can’t be one hundred percent without the inner life, can it?”

He called the Maharishi “the big M,” and I remember the intense earnestness in his face, conveying the impression of a man who’d been through a lot of changes, expecting each of them to be the last. Drugs, he said, had filled a gap and showed him many things, but death still remained what he called “a bit of a hang‐up,” which was where philosophy and religion began to get useful.

For more than a year he’d been practicing yoga and playing Indian music, and he’d even read of the Maharishi’s technique of meditation. (The technique requires the silent repetition of a single sound or mantra and promises, among other things, peace, happiness and success in business.)

“Like, in the beginning was the word,” Harrison said, “and I knew the mantras were the words.”

The difficulty was finding them. In the summer of 1967 the Maharishi arrived in London on one of his annual world tours, and Harrison took John Lennon and Paul McCartney to hear the lecture.

“All of a sudden there was this man from India,” he said. “Not in a flash of lightning or anything, but there in the Hilton Hotel.”

The next day they called Ringo, and together with the Maharishi they took a train to Bangor, Wales. There, during a week‐long seminar for his British followers, the Maharishi initiated them in a ceremony involving many flowers.

Concurring in all that Harrison said, Lennon referred me both to their photographs and to their records as diaries of their developing consciousness. In the recent photographs, he said, he hoped people might notice “something going on behind the eyes other than guitar boogie.”

Ringo and McCartney didn’t talk as much about the meditation. Yes, they’d had results with it, and no, it wasn’t a put‐on, but beyond that their attitude implied that it was George’s thing, and if he wanted to go to India, OK, everybody went to India. Ringo and his wife, Maureen, admitted to a little trouble with meditations longer than a few hours, and McCartney regretted the extravagance of the Maharishi’s praise and the grandiose nature of his metaphysics.

“I get a bit lost in the upper reaches of it,” he complained.

Also he wished the Maharishi would avoid talking to them about subjects that he, McCartney, knew something about. In the mornings the Maharishi held private classes for them on the roof of his house, and occasionally he discussed aspects of modern life. McCartney found the Maharishi’s support of the draft laws disillusioning, and his girl friend, the British actress, Jane Asher, wondered aloud from time to time what it would be like to see Bombay or the moon on the Taj Mahal.

The Maharishi’s doting fondness for the Beatles disconcerted a number of the other meditators in residence, some of whom felt themselves too much reminded of headwaiters deferring to show-business personalities in Hollywood. Others, who had followed the Maharishi so faithfully for so many years, at first resented the intrusion of usurpers. Jealousy being so obviously inappropriate to the circumstances, however, most of them managed to stifle it. They argued that the Beatles had attracted wide notice to their movement and had promised, after all, to build a meditation academy in London.

The extreme interpretation I remember hearing from Anneliese Braun, a small, elfin woman who, so it was said, could heal people by a laying on of hands. We were standing under a teak tree, looking at the river, Anneliese thoughtfully examining a dahlia she held in her hands. When she heard about the Beatles, she said, she’d assumed they were all wrong for the movement, big-time celebrities opening the Pandora’s box of press agents and other evils. But on meeting them in Rishikesh she’d found them simple and good-hearted boys, uncorrupted by the temptations of the world. She looked at me in the sly way she had, her eyes glittering with the opaque brilliance of a cat’s eyes.

“It wasn’t for nothing that Christ’s original disciples were simple men,” she said. “… Carpenters and fishermen, you know.”

Through Anneliese I met Geoffrey, and it was he who showed me around and introduced me to many of the others. Like Virgil, he said, pointing out the sights to Dante. He enjoyed learned allusions, and on our walks together we talked of such things as the Punic Wars and the quality of the light in Rembrandt’s last portraits. Yellow flags drooped from long bamboo poles set at random intervals along the paths; an occasional trellis marked the entrance to a vegetable or flower garden, and on the stone walls of the low bungalows, in letters reminiscent of military installations, appeared the designation: SILENCE ZONE.

Geoffrey himself was a painter and a teacher of painting in London. He wore a full beard, and his eyes, which were gray, seemed always to stare into the distance, as if he were estimating remote perspectives.

He was anxious that I should know the other meditators as responsible citizens who wouldn’t tilt at windmills or trudge after a piper playing a popular dance-hall tune. Thus, when introducing me, he would identify Gunther as the Lufthansa pilot, or Nancy as the wife of a television news analyst, or Tony as the blackjack dealer in a Las Vegas casino. All presumably practical people who knew the odds and were accustomed to hard, technological proofs.

Everybody would remain on the ashram for two months, he said, and then they would proceed, by chartered jet, to Kashmir. At Rishikesh they studied to become initiators in their native countries, and at Kashmir, where the Maharishi maintained a second establishment aboard a string of houseboats, they would take written and oral examinations.

In the evenings the Maharishi spoke to us in the lecture hall, a damp and hangarlike building with whitewashed walls and a floor of compressed cow dung. Little paper flags fluttered from the beams across the ceiling; near the wide doors charcoal fires burned in tin pots.

A display of ferns and palm fronds decorated the wooden stage at the far end of the hall. In the center of the stage, behind an array of microphones attached to tape recorders, stood a modest altar dressed with flowers, Christmas tinsel and a painting of the Maharishi’s master, the Guru Dev.

The Beatles and their wives occupied places in the front row of wood and wicker chairs; the rest of us sat scattered through the rows in back. Candles on the armrests of the chairs offered a dim and flickering light; the heavy scent of incense and coal smoke drifted on the night air.

[…]

The Beatles arrived toward evening, and Harrison, who was sitting nearest to me at the table, remarked that if he could turn everybody on to transcendental meditation and Indian music, then he could go. Somebody asked him what he meant exactly, and he said, “You know… out… like on a road tour when you leave for the next town.”

Somebody else asked him about his own meditations, and he said his mantra was an English word. This caused considerable surprise because it was assumed that into most people’s ears the Maharishi or one of his deputies had whispered unintelligible Sanskrit syllables. Nobody, of course, ever told anyone else his mantra, because to do so would damage them, but that was the common understanding. Harrison further astounded everybody by saying he assumed the Beatles all had the same mantra. He didn’t know for sure, but his appeared in Lennon’s song, I Am the Walrus.

The night the balloons appeared in the lecture hall, Geoffrey mistook them for decorations in honor of the god Shiva’s marriage to the goddess Parvati. The musicians seated on the stage, among them a Sikh wearing slippers that curled at the toes, seemed to support his assumption.

“How nice,” he said. “Shiva day.”

We talked of Shiva’s many tricks and disguises, which so pleased Geoffrey that he didn’t mind when it turned out he was wrong about the balloons. Like the musicians, they had to do with George Harrison’s birthday.

The Maharishi brought the Beatles onto the stage with him, and they sat on cushions to one side of his platform while a pundit from Rishikesh, himself a wise man of wide reputation, began a lyrical Hindu chant. Other monks made their way about the stage on their knees, dabbing yellowish smudges of ochre mixed with saffron on the foreheads of the Beatles and their wives.

“To cool the nervous system,” Geoffrey said.

The chant lasted for what seemed like a long time. Every now and then the Maharishi affectionately stroked Harrison’s head, and Edna, in her leopard pajamas, moved discreetly through the audience, handing each of us a garland of wet, fresh marigolds.

“To give to George,” she said.

When the chanting ceased, we all walked up to the stage and placed our garlands around Harrison’s neck, until in the end, embarrassed and smiling sheepishly, he looked like a man in a life jacket. The Maharishi then spoke to us in a long and dreaming soliloquy, his head tilted to the side like a bird’s, and his voice more musical than I’d ever heard it, as if he were conjuring benign spirits from the incense-heavy air.

There was a good time coming, he said, and a great new hope abroad in the world. Ever since he’d seen George Harrison and his blessed friends, the Beatles, he knew his movement must succeed and that men would no longer suffer.

At the end we all sang Happy Birthday to George, to whom the Maharishi presented a cake with two candles and a plastic globe that he offered upside down, saying, “This is the world. It needs to be corrected.”

The laughter and applause subsided, and then the Maharishi led everyone into a meditation, the long silence at last being softly broken by a single note plucked on a stringed instrument. That note I remember as indescribably lovely, holding within it a glimpse of infinite possibility, as if it had arrived from someplace as far off as the calm height from which the Maharishi spoke to us. Slowly the melody took shape, faintly supported by the rhythm of a drum.

Donovan arrived on the evening of the following day, walking up the sandy path to the gate with his guitar over his shoulder and a cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth. His friend, Gypsy Dave, carried their few belongings in a knapsack. From a distance I saw them confer with the Hindu guards, who at first didn’t recognize them, and then a monk came and conducted them up the hill past the charcoal fires burning at the corners of the paths.

Instead of a lecture that night we heard the pundit from Rishikesh in another chant (this time, to Geoffrey’s delight, celebrating Shiva’s marriage to Parvati), and afterward Donovan and George Harrison discussed the music.

They sat across from each other at the table under the trees, the other meditators listening as if for momentous announcements. (As always, when present at conversations between high-ranking celebrities, the others assumed the characteristics of townspeople watching from doorways as the sheriff walked out to meet the man named Slade.) Donovan had light eyes and an almost childish face, and both he and Harrison, conscious of the attendant interest, delayed their opening remarks.

The candles flickered on the table, and across the river we could see the lights of the antibiotics factory built with Soviet foreign aid. At last Donovan said, “It built.”

Harrison nodded approvingly.

“It’s rock,” he said. “That’s what it is.”

Everybody smiled, and there followed a general agreement that the chant had been a groove. Harrison briefly mentioned his idea about ear plugs replacing record players (so that people could hear the music better) and also his conception of the academy the Beatles hoped to build in London. The Maharishi had great hopes for the academy, and Harrison assumed the group could raise enough money to build it by giving a single concert. “Figuring the tax deductions for that sort of thing,” he said. He envisioned a large and colorful place where the kids could dance, and I sadly remembered the proposals of some of the older meditators, who had spoken to me of remote sanitariums surrounded by neat lawns.

The Beatles seldom stayed late at the table, preferring to retire to their bungalows and the comforts they had brought from London. They had tapes of their own and other people’s music, also a large supply of canned goods. They even had their road manager with them, a man named Malcolm Evans who obligingly practiced the meditation, and if they ran out of anything, Evans sent for more.

Before leaving for the night, Harrison and the others filled their hot water bottles from the pots in the primitive kitchen. The nights were still cold at that time of year, and Donovan, who stayed to drink another cup of tea, borrowed an extra blanket.

Donovan seemed as sweet and vulnerable as the others, speaking in a gentle voice and talking about the terrible time last summer at the D.A.R. auditorium in Washington. He’d found the place unsympathetic, and there had been police in the back of the hall, waiting for the riot that never occurred. Meditation calmed him before his concerts, he said, and the kids in the United States he thought very beautiful, in search of spiritual peace instead of a cheap sensation in the pit of their stomachs. Gypsy Dave, a big, shambling man with long sideburns, smiled and poured the tea and didn’t say much of anything.

The next morning it rained, and Mia came back. Simcox confessed his amazement, and people who’d seen her going to the Maharishi’s house reported that she looked much better than when she’d left, less harassed, they said, and with a clearer light in her eyes.

She appeared at lunch, wearing white cotton pajamas and gold-rimmed glasses. In conversation with John Lennon she said she’d been to Goa, and there, with her brother, she’d bought a stove for a few rupees and lived on the beach for a week.

“You’ve got to do it right, to be with the people and never mind the rotten conditions,” she said. “Otherwise you miss the magic of this magical land.”

Her voice had a lost but intelligent quality to it, and with Lennon she could talk as if to somebody who understood. They’d traveled across the same high plateau of fame, where the air is different than in other places, and they had “all of it” at a young age. They mentioned the “boxed-in” generation, the people older than they who lived with silly, artificial rules and insisted on “putting everything in bags.”

Later that afternoon, watching the rain squalls on the river, she talked about her own pilgrimage to the ashram. A romp, she called it, like being a kid again.

“I’m flying from flower to flower,” she said, “looking for a place where people will let me be.”

She said nothing about the tiger hunt or about quitting the place a few weeks before; the Maharishi had been glad to see her and had restored her to her place in the front row, together with Donovan and the Beatles and Mike Love. There was “great wisdom lying around,” she said, but most people missed it because they got hung up with television sets and cars and their names in the paper.

“Oh, wow,” she said. “They think bliss consciousness is when you get those things. But when you make it, when you have it all, what then?”

On my last morning there the storm passed over, leaving behind it one of those freakish spring days that shift between sudden clouds and bright sun. At breakfast a porter brought a note from a man at the gate who, he said, wore a jewel in his turban. The note read: “We have shot a tiger. Anyone interested is welcome to come and see it.”

We’d heard rumors of tigers in the surrounding hills, likewise of elephants, but none of us had ever seen them. Ringo, who also was leaving that day, figured the note to be a photographer’s trick.

“A mile down the road,” he said, “and twenty of ’em pop out of the trees.”

He and Maureen missed their children, he said, and the long meditations he thought he could practice just as successfully at home. Also the flies bothered him. With the approach of the hot weather, the flies had begun to settle on the food, and Maureen liked the flies even less than he did. They had consulted the Maharishi on the subject, but the Maharishi told them that to people lost in their meditations, the flies no longer mattered very much.

“But,” said Ringo, “that doesn’t zap the flies, does it?”

I left him arranging with his road manager about a car and went to say good-bye to the Maharishi. He received me in the small porch off his bedroom, and through the windows I could look out on the familiar view of the Ganges.

We talked mostly of metaphysical things, about his movement and the revival of a religious spirit in the West. He wanted to make sure, however, that I understood about the drugs. Rumors had reached him that certain people on his ashram openly discussed marijuana and LSD, but he hoped I knew they no longer used such things. I said I did, and he smiled in a kindly and satisfied way.

“Meditation brings the satisfaction in the mind which students seek in drugs,” he said.

We talked also about war, which he described as “a nuisance,” and about the American mind, which he thought “so very precious” for the world. The flower of the tree, he said, comparing the other peoples of the earth to the bark and branches.

Like the Indian reporters I asked him about the money invested in his organization, but he only laughed and said he had no idea about budgets. “Somebody must know,” he said. “It’s only unknown to me. I keep saying, ‘Do this, do that.’ How they do it is their headache.”

Neither would he answer questions about himself. From an assistant I’d learned that as a young man, before seeing the Guru Dev in a religious procession, he’d studied physics at the university in Allahabad. Beyond that he told me nothing, explaining that he didn’t think much about himself and that the personality of a man was but a passing and not very important thing. At the end he presented me with a rose.

“Mention my love for my master,” he said. “I consider myself only a loudspeaker.”

Walking through the vegetable garden, I encountered Mia Farrow playing with a flower and smiling at her own secrets. She thought she’d heard the scream of a wild peacock in the woods, she said, and George Harrison had promised to teach her the guitar. Unhappily, she had to go to London next week to do a movie with Elizabeth Taylor, but she knew she would come back to India, and maybe she would buy a place near Bombay.

Geoffrey and Anneliese I met on the sandy path leading down to the river. They gave me marigolds and oranges, and Geoffrey said something about the color of the sky. It reminded him of El Greco, and he wondered if I quite appreciated the subtle textures at the edge of the horizon.

I still remembered them smiling at me as I turned away toward the ferry and the passage across the Ganges. From the opposite shore, I saw them all again, at a distance and for the last time. By a trick of the weather on that sudden, shifting day, it was raining on my side of the river, but they remained in the clear sunlight. I saw them as small bright figures, sitting in a circle on the stony beach against a background of immense trees. I thought I could see the light reflecting from the Maharishi’s white robe, and I knew they had gathered to listen to Donovan sing.