In 1987, George Harrison Said There Wasn’t Much Else He Needed to Know
In 1987, George Harrison claimed there wasn’t much else he needed to know. Ever since he embarked on his spiritual journey in the mid-1960s, George craved knowledge and answers. Once spirituality answered most of his burning questions, his quest stopped.
The Beatles’ press agent said George Harrison craved knowledge
From the beginning of his life, George was curious about everything. However, it’s ironic that the boy who craved answers and knowledge hated school. He called it one of the darkest periods of his life.
Eventually, after getting a series of bad report cards, George dropped out of school completely. In the footnotes of George’s 1980 memoir, I Me Mine, The Beatles’ press agent, Derek Taylor, wrote that the future Beatle never stopped craving knowledge.
“George’s distaste for school—hatred even, resentment certainly—is puzzling because, quite soon after leaving, he became an eager, earnest seeker after information, truth and learning,” Taylor wrote.
“George, now, is a success in all the conventional meanings of that word, yet school was unable to strike a single chord in the boy who later, and as you read this now, craved and obtained available details on almost everything.”
Once George became famous with The Beatles, he had even more questions that needed answering. Why him? Why was he a famous rock star? More importantly: What is life? Thankfully, a few things thrust him onto his spiritual path, and started learning more about the universe and his place in it.
However, after more than 20 years of reading, chanting, meditating, and learning from some of the best gurus, George found himself in a seemingly impossible situation. The one person who thirsted for knowledge knew all he needed to know.
By 1987, George claimed there wasn’t much more he needed to know
During a 1987 interview (per George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters), Anthony DeCurtis asked George where his spiritual beliefs were at that moment. He asked, “I mean, if you could say, you know, ‘This is what I think about, or how that’s all sort of shaken out for me.'”
“Well, it’s still very much there,” George replied. “But I think to just sum it up, it’s probably when I was younger and with the aftereffects of the LSD, that sort of … opened up something inside me—1966, I’m going back to—it made this flood of other thoughts and situations came [sic] into my head, which led me into India with yogis. I just had to know about the yogis, the Himalayas, and then this Indian music, that whole bit.
“Well, at that time, it was very much my desire to find out what it was—and it still is, although I have found out a lot and gone through the period of questioning and being answered, and I think I’ve got to the point where there isn’t anything, really, that I need to know.
“Maybe in my youth, I was more exuberant about it. Now I’ve had more experience of it, and it’s inside of me. I don’t talk about it that much.”
All that was left was to have deeper experiences
After learning all that he could about the ways of the universe and his path, the only thing left for George to do was have deeper experiences.
“The only thing I need is to develop my experience that I got from all of that, and have more, deeper experiences,” he said.
Those more profound experiences turned out to be forming a carefree band that he’d always wanted, The Traveling Wilburys, traveling to Fiji or Maui and being alone with his wife Olivia and spending long hours in the recording studio or the garden with his son Dhani.
When it came time for George to die in 2001, he used his more than 30 years of spiritual knowledge to help him through it. According to Olivia, he lit the room.
