Oudis said

Hey Bewareofchairs, hey everybody,

Well man, it seems I’ll be the first one to post something in reply to the interview you posted. In principle what George says (“Personally, I wanted all that scene as a personal thing. It goes back to the Beatle days, you know, we were always in the public eye, always being photographed and written about, and even if you went to the bog it was in the papers. And I thought, well at least when I find me yogi it’s going to be quiet and in a cave – and it’s going to be a personal thing.”) reminded me of the “George Harrison : Loner?” post and what was discussed there. It seems to me he just wanted to be left alone, to have some privacy.

Aside from that, some of the Maharishi’s teachings (“It’s the whole yin-yang thing, left-right, up-down, black-white, wrong-right – all these things are just equal and opposite. It’s like you can’t have the North Pole if you don’t have the South Pole. You only measure goodness by badness, so in actual fact you can only have good if you have bad… Perfect must have imperfect to measure it.”) sound to me more like Taoist than Yogi stuff –and Taoism is the only Asian philosophy/religion/mysticism that I like and share (and I lived in Asia for ten years). I really dig it, I’m into Good Old Lao Tzu (“‘He who knows doesn’t speak, he who speaks doesn’t know’”). It’s good that he was into that –I didn’t really know– and not into a more, um, Mahatma Gandhi approach (though I think he probably mixed both, and mixed them both with Buddhist Karma). A very ’60’s approach to mysticism, Timothy Leary and LSD and Lenny Bruce with Lao Tzu and the Maharishi –everything mixed.

Thanks for posting the interview, cheers,

Oudis.

Thank you for the reply. That’s something which I’ve always really liked about George – how he picked up on the similarities between different philosophies/religions and used all of them to try and understand the world. This is the final part which I finally got around to typing up: 

IT: Would you say something about the spiritual work that you do? 

G: Well, at the moment I’m doing – it’s like the thing of identification – whatever you identify with you’re one with that, so most people identify with just this gross level of existence – people who identify, at certain parts of the day with transcendental things are trying to become one with that. Like if you were to go around saying ‘Christ, Christ, Christ, Christ’, all day long, eventually you build up such an identification with Christ that you become one with him. It’s the same with the type of meditation I do. To try and become one with that absolute thing. In Maharishi’s teaching – I mean, it’s the same really in everything, but I use his because it’s easier to say – it’s like – to dye a piece of cloth yellow – you dip it in the dye. It gets soggy, and if you bring it out of the dye it fades in the sun. So the process is to dip in the dye, bring it out, let it fade, dip it in the dye, bring it out, let it fade – until finally, that process of going in and out, in and out, makes – you’ve got the cloth out in the sun, but it’s fast – the colour’s fast. So it’s the same with your consciousness, you take your consciousness from this level, and dip it in that Absolute – dive in there – transcend – and you come out, and it wears off, and you go in again, and you come out, and by that process, over years and years of daily meditation, dipping in, coming out, you’re out in the sunlight – but the colour’s fast, you know, that consciousness is instilled there, and it’s fast. That’s what known as cosmic-consciousness, when the Absolute – transcendental consciousness is brought together with the relative states of consciousness. I mean, it’s like the ocean – the top of the ocean, with the waves always chopping and changing, and the bottom of the ocean’s always still and calm and if you’re not anchored to the bottom you’re at the mercy of whatever change occurs on the top of the ocean, so it’s like that – if you picture your consciousness like the ocean top – where we’re at now, and that the transcendental thing being like the still at the bottom of the ocean, then the process is just to dive in – is to get an anchor to it. But gradually the two come together, so that you have that state of consciousness permanently, while you’re acting out the parts – whatever part you have in this life.

Now, I don’t want to put down the Christians, but it was only through India and through Hinduism and through yogis and through meditation that I learned about Christ and what Christ really meant and stood for, and what he still stands for and what he still is, because the Christ-consciousness is like the Krishna-consciousness, which is absolute, and it is in every speck of creation. But this is why I never became a practicing Christian, because like most people they go to church, and it’s all that thing about, you know, Tommy Jones has got a brown suit on, and here comes Mrs. Smith with her new hat. So in church there’s no good vibes to pick up. It’s a bore. It’s like watching a political party broadcast on television, it’s just some guy up there – and it’s the sort of attitude that I felt in church – maybe others get different feelings, but for me personally it was ‘Now, this is what it is, and just believe in what we’re telling you or you’ll get your arse kicked’ sort of attitude; and the thing that turned me really into the Hindu – well, it’s not HINDU, but it just happened to be Hindus who said it, but they teach that it’s all the same, anyway – but the thing was, Vivikananda, who was one of the first swamis who came to the West, said ‘Don’t believe in anything, if there’s a God we must see him, if there’s a soul we must perceive it – it’s better to be an outspoken athiest than a hypocrite’. So the church told me, ‘Just shut up and believe what we’re telling you. Don’t look for any experience’. Whereas they say, ‘Don’t believe in anything unless you experience it for yourself’. If there’s a God we must see him – and I wanna see him, and I’m not going to see him by queueing up at Saint Matthew’s on a Sunday. And it’s like the Negro church, the Gospel thing, now they’ve been doing that for years and years, and they’re still doing it now, and the whole community feeling, the get-together and all rock-it-up and SING, and again it’s like singing Hare Krishna, or singing hymns in church, but with more soul and more understanding and feeling and more RELATION to what it’s all about. And the Gospel thing’s fantastic, like was proved by the success of ‘Oh Happy Day’ by the Edwin Hawkins Singers, and the thing that struck me in the music papers which I read, because you know it’s the game that I’m involved in,  kids wrote in saying – ‘Oh Happy Day, if that was going on in church, I’d be there every day’. And surely that’s what church is all about, to get people to go there every day, and when they’re there, then to lay some good vibes on ‘em! But, if people go to church, I mean, if I was to go next week I’m sure it would be exactly the same as when I went when I was twelve. The best time for me to go to church is when nobody’s there, when I can really feel some sort of spiritual thing going on there. But also, Christ said ‘Don’t build your houses of worship in my image’. And that, you know, ‘the temple of God is in your own body’. And Donovan said a great thing a while back, he said ‘I never went to church much, but since I found the temple in my own mind I visit it very often’. Which is great. That’s what all the meditation thing is about. A friend of mine, Ian Dallas told me a nice one which I’ve been quoting lately about the Muslim saint, Rabea, and she was always meditating and they knocked and said ‘Come on, why don’t you come outside and see the wonders of creation?’ and she said, ‘Why don’t you come inside and see the Creator?’ So that’s where it’s really at. Christ said ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is Within’, and he said, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is AT HAND’, which to my understanding means it’s just ‘ere, lads, you know, it’s – at hand means like this, like this – ashtray, it’s right in front of you. And the Kingdom of Heaven is within, so, why don’t the Christians like, go within?

IT: It’s said that the Great Masters continue their spiritual work on certain disciples after their death, and I’ve heard you talk about Yogananda, who seems to have had a very deep influence on you.

G: Yeah – Yogananda – well, for many reasons – You know, like some people you meet you like more than some other people you meet. It’s the vibration you get from them. Yogananda – his book [Autobiography of a Yogi], for me, was – really explained so much to me. It brought me right back round to understand Christ. It filled me in on all sorts of things to do with the physical world and the other existences, the other frequencies – the astral worlds and the understanding of Karma and things like that. Physical death is like astral birth, and astral death can be like physical birth. We’ve all been here many times – I really believe that. I can’t prove it to anybody, but I don’t have to prove it. So – when you die, your physical body falls off. Christ said something about the three cages for the bird of Paradise, the bird of Paradise being the soul, and the three cages being the bodies that surround it. And the third body is the physical body. Now that falls off and you’ve got two left – but it’s really like having the radio on, and you can have one station on the radio – and without moving the thing, without changing the station, all you can do is change the frequency, and there’s some other station there – but it’s still in exactly the same place. But it’s just on a higher frequency. So, it’s like the physical world is on one frequency, and you press the button and go onto another frequency, and it’s still in the same place, but it’s a whole different thing altogether. [Long Silence] The point is, there’s a lot of things, like, now, I don’t want to talk about, like astral bodies and things like that, because I can’t see any direct way anybody can benefit from that. Now I know so much more than I use to know. I used to be able to speak much more about it when I didn’t know anything about it. And I know a bit more about it, but the more I know about it, the more pointless it is to say anything because I realise how ignorant I am about the whole thing. There’s so much there to know that it’s ridiculous. Ravi Shankar’s guru, Tat Baba, is the only one I’ve seen who’s like you imagine. They tell you about those yogis, or those people who just don’t speak, and you ask them what it’s all about, they give you a flower, that sort of thing. Well, he’s the only one I’ve seen like that. But the point is that those people, you know, they don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say, really – ‘But it’s okay – Good morning, Good morning’. So he just sits there, and he’ll maybe sit there for about three or four hours, or five hours. When we saw him he sat for about two and a half hours, and then he just said something, which was later translated to me, but then he just said, like, about four or five words. Which is like a poem. But so to the point. (Lifts a copy of Yogananda prayers). So – I’ll just pick this and open it up, anywhere just to say – ‘I care not if all things are wrested away from me, by my self-created destiny, but I demand of thee my own, to God , the slender taper of my love for thee’.

I couldn’t find a specific thread about Handmade films in George’s section, perhaps it is somewhere else? in case you haven’t seen it, this is a nice piece about the films and George’s involvement. Some great, some not so great; haven’t aged well in parts. There’s short cut up interviews with George throughout. If you like Handmade films, you might find it interesting, enjoyed the band  at the end following the speech at the dinner, but cut off too quick, George is enjoying himself.