See Never-Before-Published Photographs by Budding Beatle George Harrison
Then he describes that, as the meditator “reduces the thoughts below mental-thinking level,” he will eventually arrive “at a very subtle level which is beyond all relative experience” (there, at the quiet bottom of the ocean he’s sketched).
“This,” he writes, “we will call Transcendental Consciousness.
“As most of us haven’t experienced this state before,” he writes, “the first few times, you don’t even know that you have reached this state, because it isn’t a relative experience, and there’s nothing to compare it to, but from the very beginning—you will start to feel very relaxed, and start to get more energy—happiness and intelligence because the ‘pure state of consciousness’ is the reservoir of energy, happiness, and intelligence—and it is the place where we have got it all from in the past, but then it was unconsciously, and the meditation is a way of tapping this great natural source of energy, and consciously arriving at this level.”
Around the time George passed away, in 2001, I was making my first inroads into meditation, discovering all the wonders therein, and I found in my mind some trace of George, looking as he’d looked during his discovering-Maharishi era (white kurta, aviator shades, cowboy mustache), saying, reassuringly, “See? We were on to something back then. And now you’re on to it, too.”
To have seen this admired and beloved figure making his way down his spiritual path, humbly, insistently, happily, was a form of validation.I was not wrong, or lost, or losing my moorings; I was retracing steps George Harrison had taken. It was as if he’d scrawled a message on a doorway: Keep going; this leads to a profound place.
This was, we might say, a form of action at a distance—of generosity at a distance.
Source: vanityfair.com/George Saunders
