Lewis Lapham - With the Beatles

Pattie Harrison, Nancy Jackson, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, George Harrison, Mia Farrow, Johnny Farrow, Donovan Leitch, Jane Asher, and Cynthia Lennon at the ashram.

TO OTTO FRIEDRICH

(1929 1995)

MY OWN GURU DEV

THE DEEPER YOU GO THE HIGHER YOU FLY.
THE HIGHER YOU FLY THE DEEPER YOU GO.

EVERYBODYS GOT SOMETHING TO
HIDE EXCEPT ME AND MY MONKEY

On the phone Friedrich had mentioned a journey to the east, and two days later when I met him for lunch at a Chinese restaurant on West 55th Street, I expected the conversation to turn in the direction of Saigon and Da Nang. The Vietnam war in January 1968 was showing unmistakable signs of an American defeat; Otto Friedrich was the managing editor of the Saturday Evening Post, I was a staff writer due for assignment, and where else do journalists forage for the news if not in the deserts of misfortune? Friedrich proposed as an alternative the mountains of infinite bliss. Instead of presenting me with a set of military map coordinates, he handed across the table two song albums recently released by the Beatles together with a newspaper clipping that described the New York appearance, earlier in the month, seated among marigolds and yellow hyacinths in Madison Square Gardens Felt Forum, of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. For some years the yogi had been wandering the world with what he called the message of the flower, bringing to the disaffected children of bourgeois capitalism the sweet science of transcendental meditation. While traveling in England the previous summer he had introduced the Beatles to the technique, and it was their endorsement of the result (hello happiness, goodbye Mary Jane) that had filled the Felt Forum with 3,800 would-be adepts, most of them college students, nearly all of them dressed as if for a street demonstration or a rock concertlove beads, tie-dyed T-shirts, peasant dresses, go-go boots. To the Maharishis suite at the Plaza Hotel the Beatles had sent a large basket of pink tulips, and within the week they were scheduled to further expand and consolidate their knowledge of cosmic consciousness by making a pilgrimage to the yogis ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Where you will join them, Friedrich said, on the eternal path to enlightenment.

The proposition amused him. The tone of his humor was sardonic; he was familiar with the journeys to the east undertaken by the heroes dreamed of in the novels of Herman Hesse and Somerset Maugham, and he recognized the story as one that usually went nowhere except into bankruptcy or an asylum. The traffic in religion Friedrich regarded as an over-the-counter variant of the cocaine trade, but if the old stories could be trusted to sell magazines, they were hard to come by when the plot line was hidden in a cloud of radiant celebrity, and he guessed that I wouldnt find it easy to open the doors of perception. The Beatles were said to be intent upon a session in the recording studio of the world soul, beyond the reach of all requests for press coverage from the