In August 1967, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney sat together in the front row at a lecture by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at the London Hilton Hotel (their drummer Ringo Starr couldn’t come due to the birth of his second child). The Beatles felt so enthusiastic about the Indian sage that they canceled the following week’s recording session and immediately decamped to Bangor, Wales, where the Maharishi was holding a 10-day transcendental meditation training course. Tragically, the sudden death of their manager Brian Epstein meant that they couldn’t complete the course. However, the following February—after completing work on the Magical Mystery Tour project—all four Beatles traveled to India for a longer meditation retreat.
Research has found that meditation benefits creativity.1 It promotes psychological qualities such as openness to experience and cognitive flexibility, both of which are strongly associated with creativity.2 It also enhances mental clarity and attention, which helps us to express the insights and ideas that we gain.
The Beatles were a remarkable test case of the creative benefits of meditation. Their trip to India was relatively short. Ringo stayed for two weeks, Paul for a month, and John and George for seven weeks. However, in terms of individual songwriting, the meditation retreat was by far the Beatles’ most creative phase. In his recent book The Lyrics, Paul McCartney understatedly refers to the period as “oddly productive.” 3 In fact, the Beatles wrote around 40 songs in India, which formed the bulk of that year’s White Album. Other songs were released years later on solo records, such as George’s “Circles,” Paul’s “Cosmically Conscious,” and John’s “Who Am I?” During his two weeks in India, even Ringo managed to finish his first song, “Don’t Pass Me By,” after tinkering with it for years.
In seven weeks, John Lennon wrote at least 14 songs. These include some of Lennon’s most beautiful and poignant songs, such as “Dear Prudence,” “Julia,” and “Child of Nature.” The latter—in my view, one of the most beautiful songs Lennon ever wrote—was never recorded by the Beatles and was rewritten as “Jealous Guy” for Lennon’s Imagine album in 1971.
Transpersonal Creativity
In my view, the most inspired creativity is not consciously produced. Inspiration flows into the conscious mind from deeper and wider areas of our being. You might say that such creativity is transpersonal, in the sense that it comes from beyond the personal conscious mind. We can try to write songs, symphonies, or poems with conscious intent, but they will never be as powerful as the transpersonal creativity that comes to us involuntarily, when ideas and insights seem to arise spontaneously, as if gifted to us.
Meditation enhances creativity because it softens the boundaries of the conscious mind and allows us access to the transpersonal mind. Meditation does this by quieting our thought-chatter, which normally confines us to the conscious mind. In a good meditation, our minds slow down and settle, like the surface of a lake when wind dies down. As a result, without being sustained by thought, our ego boundaries become softer and more permeable. At the same time, without the agitation and clutter of thought, there is more space for insights and ideas to flourish.
In other words, meditation promotes transpersonal creativity—the creativity that comes through us, not from us. In these moments, we act as a channel for insights and ideas, and our task is simply to express and formulate the material which flows through us.
It is striking that, after their retreat in India, all the Beatles continue to practice transcendental meditation. In particular, George Harrison remained an avid meditator throughout his life. After his death from cancer in 2001, George’s ashes were scattered in the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India, accompanied by a reading from the Bhagavad-Gita. (Some of his ashes were scattered in the city of Benares too.) John returned to meditation in the latter years of his life, when he took a long sabbatical from the music business and lived quietly, focusing on raising his son Sean.
Meanwhile, both Paul and Ringo have stated that they still meditate now—which is perhaps why they are both still highly creative, releasing new albums in their 80s.
(Adapted from my book Across the Universe: The Magic and Mystery of the Beatles’ Creativity)