My favorite Beatle, George Harrison, playing one of my favorite pop classics, My Sweet Lord. George  always seemed to me to have more musical talent than Paul, and more intellectual and spiritual depth than the rather self-preoccupied John. Here’s a Spanish version I found as well.

The lyrics include the following lines in Sanskrit:

Gurur Brahma, gurur Vishnu, gurur devo Mahesvarah

gurus saksat param Brahma, tasmai sri gurave namah

(The teacher is Brahma, the teacher is Visnu, the teacher is the Lord Mahesvara, Verily the teacher is the supreme Brahman, to that respected teacher I bow down)

What an amazing devotional feeling the music has. And what incredibly open souls these working class boys from Liverpool had that they could go across the globe and create something so different from what they grew up in.

I guess to many people in the West, it brings up negative images of “hippies,” “drop-outs,” Hare Krishna cultists, and so on. An image that is completely counter-cultural (in a negative sense) and Luddite. But that may be the result of speaking only one cultural language.  As an observer with a foot in the east and west (and in a few other places as well), I can feel, almost immediately, the very traditional aspect of this so-called counter-culture – the longing for community, for self-transcendence, for self-discipline,  for rootedness, for leadership based in hierarchy and particularity – everything, which, in a perverted form, ends up making people vulnerable to the mass spectacles of the state, but, in its natural form, makes possible the inward life that the individual and the community both need in order to exist.

Actually, it was ordinary suburban post-WW II culture, shaped by the military, the state, and the CIA, that was anti-traditional, even though it might have worn the outward trappings of family values and religious tradition. It was ultimately only a  whited sepulchre (Matthew 23:27).  There was, in  many cases, nothing inside.

Nature abhors a vacuum. The Beatles and everyone after them began to fill the vacuum from sources (Eastern, mystical, ‘primitive,’ psychedelic, folk) that somehow connected them more intensely to history and tradition than their own dominant culture, from which, therefore, they felt they had to escape.

Wordsworth captured something of the same feeling when he wrote about a very similar move at the turn of the nineteenth-century, from rococo brittleness to the psychological depth of Romanticism. Thus,  in The World Is Too Much With Us:

I ‘d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, So might I,
standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less
forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton
blow his wreathed horn.”

On a different level but in the same vein as Harrison’s popular hit, here’s a lesser known masterpiece of devotional feeling,  written by jazz legend JohnMcLaughlin — Lotus Feet of the Lord, played here by Domenico Lafasciano.

I’d like to find a link to the original Mahavishnu version, but here’s another beautiful version, by flamenco virtuoso Paco di Lucia and McLaughlin.

I’ve been playing a lot of these classics, because I’ve been wondering how all that spiritual ferment was sucked out and siphoned off. Where did it go to, that tremendous fusion of eastern and western sensibility, of subconscious and conscious impulses, spiritual and emotional intuitions, social and individual struggles?

I don’t mean artistically….. because it bore plenty of artistic fruit.

But socially…politically…