In 1968, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr took the friends, girlfriends, and wives of The Beatles to India. They had previously heard Maharishi Mahesh Yogi speak about Transcendental Meditation and agreed to join him at his ashram. While the experience was initially a positive one, especially for Lennon and Harrison, it did not end well. Jenny Boyd said Lennon had such a crushing disappointment that it could have been dangerous.
John Lennon urged The Beatles to leave India
The Beatles arrived in India in February. While Starr and McCartney left earlier, Lennon and Harrison were still there in April. Boyd thought that Lennon had begun to look for a reason to leave. When he heard a rumor about the Maharishi, he urged the remainder of the group to return to England.
“[S]omebody, whether they made up a rumor or it was true about Maharishi, that he tried to have sex with one of the girls, sort of shocked us, in particular John, who wanted a reason to get away,” Pattie Boyd said in the book All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. “That’s why he left.”
Boyd’s sister, Jenny, was also with the group. She recalled leaving in a rush the morning after they heard the rumor.
Jenny Boyd said John Lennon had a bigger disappointment than the rest of The Beatles
After they left the ashram, the remaining Beatles group drove away. As they went, Lennon grew increasingly distressed.
“We drove for miles, miles, hundreds of miles,” she said. “I remember at one point, all the cars stopped and suddenly John screamed! Suddenly just screamed. He was desperate to leave.”
Jenny Boyd thought Lennon was frustrated because his strong belief had crumbled.
“But see, he believed in the Maharishi, absolutely believed,” she said. “The whole thing was, you’d spend as long in meditation as you could, which would mean you’d go down supposedly and get rid of whatever the core grievance was within everybody.”
She said that Lennon had initially been hesitant to believe in meditation, but then had thrown himself into it wholeheartedly. Because of this, he felt more let down than any of the others.
“I think it affected him the worst,” she said. “Because he was suspicious originally, then he started to believe. I think he got the spiritual belief cut off, which is far more dangerous than any other belief [to lose].”
He later wrote a song about the experience
After this experience, Lennon wrote the song “Sexy Sadie” about the Maharishi.
“That’s about the Maharishi, yes,” he told Rolling Stone in 1970. “I copped out and I wouldn’t write ‘Maharishi what have you done, you made a fool of everyone.’ But, now it can be told, Fab Listeners.”
Yoko Ono, who was a part of the interview, said Lennon had expected too much from the Maharishi.
“I always do, I always expect too much,” he replied. “I was always expecting my mother and never got her. That’s what it is, you know, or some parent, I know that much.”
