George Harrison Said His Only Ambition Was to Be God-Conscious
George Harrison said his only ambition was to be God-conscious, not to be a rock star. Although, his career as a guitarist led him to spirituality.
George Harrison became God-conscious in the mid-1960s
If George never became a rock star, he might not have become spiritual.
Spirituality came to George after a series of coincidental events. First, he heard Indian music on the set of The Beatles’ Help! When he started learning sitar, friends told him about Ravi Shankar.
Around this time, George took LSD for the first time and said it opened his mind up to “God-consciousness.” However, he didn’t know what that meant.
In 1965, George met Shankar, who immediately wanted to teach George everything he knew. The most important lesson Shankar taught George was that God is sound and that by playing the right notes, one can connect to God.
In 1966, George, his wife, Pattie Boyd, and Shankar took a six-week trip to India. George began learning about meditation and yoga. A year later, George learned Transcendental Meditation from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
In Raja-Yoga by Swami Vivekananda, Geoge learned “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,'” Joshua M. Greene wrote in Here Comes The Sun: The Spiritual And Musical Journey Of George Harrison.
Soon, all George did was meditate and do yoga. “He read essays on how meditation could lower metabolic levels, increase spiritual awareness, and eventually help the soul escape further reincarnations,” Greene wrote. George knew his mission was to find his true self through these practices. It was the answer to all his questions.
Greene added, “When asked about his future ambitions, George said, ‘I want to be God-conscious. That’s really my only ambition, and everything else in life is incidental.’ Success may have been incidental to God-consciousness and something that didn’t stop him from being an ordinary bloke, but as his stature in the music world continued to rise, George would confront challenges he could never have imagined.”
George tried to show young people that it was good to be God-conscious
When George wrote “My Sweet Lord,” he hoped it would provoke God-consciousness in the younger generations, who he felt were wasting their lives. No one was putting religion into popular music.
“At that time,” George later explained, “nobody was committed to that type of music in the pop world. There was, I felt, a real need for that. So rather than sitting and waiting for somebody else, I decided to do it myself.
“A lot of times, we think, ‘Well, I agree with you, but I’m not going to actually stand up and be counted—too
risky.’ Everybody is always trying to keep themselves covered, stay commercial. So I thought, ‘Just do it.’ Nobody else is, and I’m sick of all these young people just boogying around, wasting their lives, you know.”
George believed most people weren’t religious because of ignorance. It came down to the fear of the unknown. “It’s some sort of instinct in people,” George explained in Martin Scorsese’s documentary, George Harrison: Living in the Material World. However, didn’t want to hold back from saying things about religion anymore.
In his memoir, George wrote, “The point was, I was sticking my neck out on the chopping block because now I would have to live up to something, but at the same time I thought, ‘Nobody’s saying it; I wish somebody else was doing it,'” he said.
He learned that meditating and doing yoga can show your true self
George believed that to become God-conscious, one needed to mediate and find their true self.
During a 1967 interview on The Frost Programme (per George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters), George explained that you could see your true self by doing yoga and meditating.
“Because the thing is, your true self isn’t on this level; again, it’s on a subtler level,” George said. “So, whatever the true self is, the way to approach it is through that meditation or some form of yoga. We’re not saying that this meditation is the only answer; it’s obviously not.
“Yoga incorporates lots of different techniques, but the whole point is that each soul is potentially divine, and yoga is a technique of manifesting that, to arrive at that point that is divine.”
During an interview with his former sister-in-law, Jenny Boyd, George added, “Meditation is only a means to an end. In order to infuse energy and power and get it flowing through our bodies, we have to meditate. You infuse that energy into your being, and so when you are in activity, it rubs off onto that creatively. To really
be in touch with creative energy, you will find that it lies within the stillness.”
Music might’ve been George’s first love, but once he became spiritual, he only cared about being God-conscious. Then, his love of music stemmed from his spirituality. If he played a certain note, he’d connect with God.
