George Harrison on "My Sweet Lord" and Leaving the Catholic Church

by Carl Wiser

George Harrison was "the quiet Beatle," but he sure had a lot to say. Throughout his life, he was always examining and evolving. "There's no point in dying having gone through your life without knowing who you are what you are or what the purpose of life is," he told Rolling Stone in 1979.

Harrison expressed his thoughts in his songs, but also in his words, which are chronicled in George Harrison On George Harrison, a collection of his most insightful interviews (including the above-mentioned Rolling Stone piece), starting in 1962 and ending with his last words shortly before his death in 2001.

Below is an excerpt from an interview Harrison did with Timothy White in 1992 for a story published in Billboard. By this time, Harrison was able to clearly articulate his thoughts on the connection between music and the divine, a challenge when trying to explain Eastern philosophy to Westerners. He also explains with blunt force what drove him away from the Catholic church.

We pick up the action with White asking about Harrison's 1968 Beatles song "The Inner Light." The full interview, which is much longer, is printed in the book.
Timothy White: What was the story behind "The Inner Light"?

George Harrison: At the time we were doing TM [Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India], that guy David Frost used to have a TV show, and John and I were on that show, and they had done interviews with the Maharishi. And they had an audience made up of people who were for and against meditation. In the audience there was a guy who was called Juan Mascaró, and he was the Sanskrit teacher from Cambridge University. He's written the Penguin Classics books, the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, and various Vedic literature.

Somebody had played him "Within You, Without You," and he thought it was such an inspiring song. He wrote to me, and he said, "I hope you will go on and write more of these kinds of songs, and I'll send you this little book I've written called Lamps of Fire." They were all translations from various different philosophies, and he said, "This one on such and such a page would probably make a good song."

I turned to the page, and it was called "The Inner Light." His translation of a thing from [the Chinese classic text] Tao Te Ching. And so when I read this little thing, it was very nice, and I had a little extra time after I'd finished the music for Wonderwall [the 1968 film Harrison did the soundtrack for]. I got the band of Bombay musicians, and I just made that tune up to fit the words of "The Inner Light." I took the tape back to England and then put the vocal on that.

White: This was 20 years before Paul Simon or Peter Gabriel or David Byrne got interested in other cultures and making it accessible without diluting it, making people curious.

Harrison: It was such a buzz for me. The whole thing about Indian was somehow awakened for me after I had LSD. It unlocked this enormous big door in the back of my consciousness. That music and the whole idea of Indian; I just had this thing inside of me saying "Indian."

And Ravi [Shankar], he was like my contact. And then I went off into India with him, and I started checking out the yogis of the Himalayas; basically, the music was part of the thing. I don't want to get too soppy, but in the Indian philosophy the music has been very important. Different instruments are shown being played by different gods. The percussion instruments - there's an instrument called damaru, and it's played by Lord Shiva; it's a little drum that has these little strings with lead weights on them. They swing it 'round, and the little lead weights rattle on the skin. [Makes rapid purring noise.] So that represents the percussion.

And there's this Goddess Saraswati that plays this stringed instrument known as the veena, and the veena is the forerunner to the sitar. And consequently all other stringed instruments come from out of that. But then the woodwind is represented by Krishna, who plays the flute, a wind instrument.

Now, if you read in the philosophy of Lord Krishna, it explains how through Krishna's flute - it's symbolic - one by one we are awakened by the divine music of the Lord. He wakes us up. And when people get turned on to something, that's what happens. In a way, when I heard "Heartbreak Hotel" by Elvis coming out of somebody's radio when I was a kid on my bike, that is still Krishna's flute. The music is still that mystical sound that's saying, "Hey, come on!"

For me that sitar music, it was such a turn on. And it wasn't just because I'm interested in string instruments or because I thought Ravi was good. It was a very deep thing. Something was calling me. And I'm still trying to head in that direction.

White: It's like that "Wake Up My Love" song, that music is such an agent of awareness.

Harrison: In India, Ravi did a movie in 1967 called Raga, and in that film he said, "Music is the only language I really understand, for I believe in nada brahma, meaning 'the sound is God.'"

All sound and all music is created deep in the cosmos. The sound that's manifest is the original sound. "In the beginning was the Word." As they say in the Bible, "Thus spaketh the [Lord], amen." And that is Om, the basic sound vibration. And all other sound is coming from that.

And the music, whether it's very subtle or it becomes more gross into the physical world and into the radio stations, it's still based upon that original sound vibration. The subtlest manifestation of God is the Word, and then the Word turns into time and the atom, and then it keeps going until it ends up as all this big dream that we're in now.

White: In Egyptian theology, in the beginning was the word, and the word was God, and the word was with God. Were you raised in the Catholic Church?

Harrison: My mother was. My father wasn't. So it wasn't that strict. It wasn't like, "You've got to go to church." But I still went there a bit as a kid.

Usually when you're young, you don't have much option, because you're just going with your mother wherever she goes. And I went there up until I was about 11. Around that time, I thought, "Wait a minute. I don't really like this." I could see on the wall they had the paintings of the Stations of the Cross, and I thought, "Something really heavy's going down here." And yet when I looked around the church, it just looked stupid, all the people just - it was like bullshit. And so I got out of it.

By the time I was 12, I didn't really count myself very religious at all. I shy away from the word "religion," actually. India, in a way, turned me back on to Christ. The Christians have never been able to explain Christ. What they do, they do because of their own inability for realization, because basically that's what it was all about: trying to tell everybody how to have that consciousness. Because it's political isn't it, the whole Christian Church was based on politics - "We couldn't get rid of this guy, and he won't go away, so let's cash in on him," and that's basically where it came from.

White: And it's been a power struggle for the last 2,000 years.

Harrison: And there's a few books I've got, and I keep thinking I'm just going to go down to the Vatican and have big boxes of these books and throw them through the window, saying, "Read this, you bastards!" So I got out of the church because I couldn't relate to it.

White: It's based on a lot of fear. As you say, there's very little spirituality in religion.

Harrison: This gets to why I wrote "My Sweet Lord," because after going to India, I wanted to know about the swamis and yogis, and I got a book off of Ravi by the first Indian swami who ever came to the USA, who was called Swami Vivekananda. Vivek means discretion; ananda means bliss. And he was a great swami. He came to Chicago in about 1890, I believe.

Anyway, in his book he said, "If there's a God we must see him. If there's a soul we must perceive it. Otherwise, it's better not to believe. It's better to be an outspoken atheist than a hypocrite."

And when I read that after all that stuff I'd been through with the Church, with "You just believe what we tell you. And don't ask questions." Whereas the Swami's saying, "If there's a God we must see him." I thought, "Right on, that's the one for me!" If there's a God, I want to see him.

There's this thing about people who are great believers, but they've got no proof, the Billy Grahams of this world who rant and rave and yet have had no contact, no direct perception. Religion is supposed to be about how to have direct perception, so it no longer is an argument whether it is or it isn't - you just know because you've had your own experience. But how do you do that? They can't tell you how to do it in Christianity. In India, they can show you: This is how you do it.

This excerpt of George Harrison on George Harrison, by Ashley Kahn, is presented with permission from Chicago Review Press. For more information or to order a copy please visit Chicago Review Press, Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Bookshop.org. In this Q&A with Ashley Kahn, he talks about how Harrison's relationship with his bandmates changed over time, and picks some of the most revealing interviews in the collection.

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Comments: 3

  • Dean from AmericaHarrison was an enlightened being. Sadly Catholicism wasn't for him. Maybe his experiences as a child turned him against the Church but still could find comfort in that Hinduism religion. I've recently converted to Catholicism and I feel the same as George told in this interview so I would end up thinking different religions to different people. But God is the same for all of us.
  • Bernardo Soares from BrazilSadly too lazy to understand catholicism and choose to jump into pagan heresy before he could see the truth...Still a great person and one of the best artists imo.
  • Sheils from Western AustraliaI'll keep it short and sweet . I couldn't agree more with George Harrison . A Catholic for 65 years but never understand . I stopped going to church when my 3 children did after turning 18 . I realised some of the Catholic religion I couldn't explain
see more comments

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