George was quiet and intense but not unfriendly. He was then just a few days away from his twenty-fourth birthday. I asked him how long he had played the sitar, having loved it on their song "Norwegian Wood."

"A little over two years," he answered. "It was when we made Help. We were filming and there was a sitar around. I was curious, but the first time I really listened to sitar music was off a Ravi Shankar album. Later, I was introduced to him in London and asked him to teach me. He agreed but it wasn't until I came here with Pattie last year, to Bombay, where Ravi lives, and studied with him for six months that I really got deeply into it. And into India and all it has to offer, spiritually and otherwise."

A baby monkey dropped down onto the far end of our table from the thatched roof above, scampered four or five feet towards us, grabbed a crust of bread lying there, and chattered off, noisily. We both laughed at its apparent pleasure. "I'm going to play for a while. Would you like to listen?" George asked.

We walked over to his bungalow and into a small meditation room, about eight feet by ten feet, with only a white futon on the floor and his sitar. George sat cross-legged near the center of the room and I sat facing him a few feet away, my back resting against the wall. He nestled the large gourd at the base of the sitar against the sole of his left foot. Soft sunlight filtered through the slightly dusty window panes. Everything was glowing.

I could smell the faint aroma of sandalwood incense from somewhere outside, and George closed his eyes and began to play. The sympathetic strings picked up the vibrations of the melody and the drone strings creating that unique, hypnotic sound of the sitar. As the multilayered music, like a kaleidoscope of exquisite colors, filled the small room, my eyes closed and I drifted dreamily on the waves of sound. Time seemed to slow down. He played an Indian raga for fifteen or twenty minutes. As he finished, the musical reverberations slowly faded into silence and I felt a soft, delicious feeling of peace.

When I opened my eyes, he was gently laying his sitar back down. The sunlight had shifted across the futons and there was a soothing aura in the room.

In the relaxed conversation that followed, he told me that his wife Pattie had learned Transcendental Meditation first and then got him interested. I asked how it was for him. He said it took him higher and brought him more conscious enlightenment than drugs ever could. He said it brought him to blissfulness and added, "You can have everything in life. Like, we're the Beatles, aren't we? We can have anything that money can buy. And all the fame we could dream of. And then what? It isn't love. It isn't health. It isn't peace inside. Is it?"