Meditation...

After he appeared with George on the David Frost programme in the television discussion show "The Frost Programme" John commented: "If just one in every thousand viewers who watched the programme was encouraged to look into Transcendental Meditation then it was well worth doing. We want to get the message across to as many people as possible that meditation can help everyone. Not just a special few, or brainy people or cranks but EVERYONE."

The following is an abbreviated transcript of the views and explanations given in London by John and George before they left for India:--

JOHN: Through meditation I've learned how to tap energy that I've had in me all the time. Before I could only reach this extra energy on good days when things were going well. With meditation I find that if it's not too good a day I can still get the same amount of energy going for me. It means I am more use to myself and to others. Put it another way--the worst days I had without meditation were much worse than the bad days I have now, days when it's difficult to get going.

GEORGE: The energy is latent within everybody. It's there anyway. Meditation is a natural process of being able to contact that energy each day and give yourself a little more. You're able to do whatever you normally do with a little bit more happiness, maybe.

Each individual's life sort of pulsates in a certain rhythm. They give you a word or a sound which pulsates with that rhythm. The idea is to transcend to the most subtle level of thought, to replace your ordinary thoughts with the word or sound. Finally you lose even that and you're at a level of pure consciousness.

JOHN: You sit there and let your mind go. You introduce the word, the sound, the vibration to take over from your thoughts. You don't will thoughts away.

GEORGE: When your mind is a complete blank it's beyond all previous experience. That level is timeless, spaceless. You can be there for five minutes or much longer. You don't actually know how long when you come out of it and back to the everyday, the gross level of thinking.

JOHN: It's like sleeping. You don't know you've been sleeping until you're awake again. It seems as though no time has gone at all.

GEORGE: You can't really tell anybody exactly what it is. The teaching of Transcendental Meditation is all based on the individual. If you want to do it you get instruction. That leads to some sort of experience. After that experience you're taught the next part and told how you can go on from there to the next stage.

JOHN: It's like asking someone to say what chocolate tastes like. It's impossible to describe.

GEORGE: Or to tell somebody how it is to be drunk. They've got to be drunk themselves before they know what it is.

JOHN: You don't feel you have more actual knowledge--or at least I don't--but you feel more energetic. You come out of it and it's just a sort of "Let's get going" feeling about whatever work you've got to tackle.

GEORGE: It takes a lot of practice to arrive at a point where you can remain in that frame of mind, that attitude to life, permanently. I've had definite proof after only six or seven weeks that this is something that really works. It'll take a long time to arrive at a state where I can hold the level of pure consciousness and bring it back with me into everyday levels of acting and thinking. That's the eventual aim.

JOHN: One of the Maharishi's analogies is that it's like dipping a cloth in and out of gold. If you leave it in it gets soggy. If you leave it out the sun will fade it. So you keep dipping it in and bringing it out and, eventually, there's the same amount of gold in the cloth whether it's in or out. So you don't meditate ALL the time but you DO meditate regularly if you want to get anywhere with it. Twenty minutes a day. Something like that.

GEORGE: You can take certain drugs which heighten your perception. From there you can go on and try to get on to a subtler level of thought but drugs, in themselves, would never get you there and it's a mistake to believe they will. Drugs are on the same level as sleeping and dreaming and waking they're all relative and comparatively superficial.

JOHN: We dropped drugs long before we met the Maharishi. It had done all it could do for us. There was no going any further. That was more associated with finding out about yourself and your ego. It's more psychological than anything else. Meditation is a bit more gentle and much deeper.

GEORGE: Drugs don't really get to the true you, the real self. The way to approach the real YOU is through meditation or some form of Yoga.

JOHN: Meditation doesn't actually change you, make you different in any way. It's just something beneficial which you can ADD to yourself, add to your routine. When you add to your religion you don't CHANGE your religion. Whatever you are--you carry on. If you ask any of the Maharishi's people to give you a few laws for living by they'd be virtually the same as Christianity. Christianity is the answer as much as this is.

GEORGE: The word God means all sorts of things to me. The first concept I had of a man in the sky, well, I kicked that one a few years ago BUT I'm coming back to that now because, yes, it's a man in the sky as well if you like, it's just every aspect of creation, all a part of God.

JOHN: I think of God as a big piece of energy, like electricity, a big powerhouse.

GEORGE: Or the energy which runs through everything and makes everything one.

JOHN: Everything you read about, all the religions, are all the same basically. It's just a matter of people opening their minds up. I don't know how divine or super-human Maharishi is. He was probably born quite ordinary but he's working at it.

GEORGE: If everybody took up meditation it would help them to sort out their own problems, put their houses in order, if you like. People cause all the world's problems. So if people fix up their personal problems that's it, we're well on the way aren't we. It's up to each individual, every person, to make his own move.

JOHN: The main thing is it's simple. All you've got to do is to be INTERESTED. If you don't believe in meditation and you're cynical about it there's still no reason why you shouldn't try to find out WHAT you're so cynical about. And the only way to find out is to learn about meditation and give it a try. THEN you'll have the right to condemn or otherwise.