The Most Spiritually Important Entertainer of Our Time

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Around that time, Ravi Shankar began to tell Harrison about a tragedy unfolding in Bangladesh, a province of Pakistan. The combination of a hurricane and internal civil war was causing the starvation of hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis.

Harrison did something that had never been done before: He pulled together a lineup of rock superstars for a concert, the proceeds of which were supposed to go to victims of tragedy. It's significant that his cause was not particularly trendy--like, say, opposition to the Vietnam War--but rather focused on a problem that most people never knew existed. At first other musicians were reluctant.

		In His Own Words Harrison on spirituality, meditation, and more. Deepak on George Deepak Chopra on his friend's relationship with eastern religion and Jesus Christ. Quiz How much do you know about the spiritual side of the Fab Four?

"When I did the Bangladesh concert," Harrison said later, "I spent a couple of months day and night on the phone trying to trick people into doing it and making a commitment. Nowadays, it's such an accepted part of life that every so often you give something back to charity."

Indeed, the Live Aid and Farm Aid concerts and the "We Are the World" album--which together have raised tens of millions of dollars for charitable causes--can trace their lineage to the concert for Bangladesh. "It was the inspiration and the model for all of the major rock benefits," says David Bender, co-author of "Stand and Be Counted," a history of the movement.

Harrison may have even had an effect, ironically, on the growth of Christian rock. For one thing, he made it okay to be overtly religious in rock music. Perhaps more important, he prompted evangelical Christians to seek an alternative. "Everyone was listening to that kind of music and saying "Let's get our groups going," recalls Robert Wuthnow, professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton. "I remember people in campus Christian groups, campus ministries, Intervarsity, saying that we want to have our own alternatives."

He remains a hero among even some younger Christian rockers. "The first record I remember hearing was "Rubber Soul," and basically that's why I do what I do," says Stephen Mason, lead guitarist with the band Jars of Clay. Mason feels a kinship, he says, with Harrison's "struggle to figure how it's going to satisfy that longing that we have inside."

Following the murder of John Lennon, Harrison became even more private, more focused on gardening. According to his friend Deepak Chopra, he still meditated several hours a day. "About four years ago I spent a week with him in Hawaii completely in silence where we would practice almost four hours of meditation, and even recently he would practice two to three hours of meditation in the mornings and another half an hour in the evenings and the rest of the time he was either writing, working in his studio, or gardening."

Interestingly, Chopra said Harrison was very interested in Christianity as well, especially more "Eastern" interpretations like the Gnostic Gospels and the Gospel according to Thomas. "When he signed a letter he would always put an Eastern symbol and also put a cross. He very much had a relationship with Christ as well," Chopra notes.

A testament to how deeply ingrained these notions were came on Dec. 30, 1999 when he was stabbed repeatedly by his an intruder. In order to try to scare or sedate him, Harrison shouted, "Hare Krishna! Hare Krishna!"

Clearly Harrison's spiritual impact was not always specific and direct. There has not been a huge boom in the number of Hare Krishna followers in the last twenty years. When dealing with sweeping cultural trends, it's hard to know what was inevitable and what was determined by a human action.

But it is clear that George Harrison's impact can now be seen as far greater than believed during Beatlemania. Musically, it was the songwriting of Lennon and McCartney that most altered pop music. Surveys by fan magazines during Beatlemania pronounced him the least popular of the Beatles. Yet history will show that in terms of his spiritual impact, Harrison is the one who helped transform the American landscape.