See George Harrison’s By no means-Earlier than-Seen Photographs of the Beatles

Then he describes that, because the meditator “reduces the thoughts below mental-thinking level,” he’ll ultimately arrive “at a very subtle level which is beyond all relative experience” (there, on the quiet backside of the ocean he’s sketched).

“This,” he writes, “we will call Transcendental Consciousness.

“As most of us haven’t experienced this state before,” he writes, “the first few times, you don’t even know that you have reached this state, because it isn’t a relative experience, and there’s nothing to compare it to, but from the very beginning—you will start to feel very relaxed, and start to get more energy—happiness and intelligence because the ‘pure state of consciousness’ is the reservoir of energy, happiness, and intelligence—and it is the place where we have got it all from in the past, but then it was unconsciously, and the meditation is a way of tapping this great natural source of energy, and consciously arriving at this level.”

Around the time George handed away, in 2001, I used to be making my first inroads into meditation, discovering all of the wonders therein, and I discovered in my thoughts some hint of George, trying as he’d regarded throughout his discovering-Maharishi period (white kurta, aviator shades, cowboy mustache), saying, reassuringly, “See? We were on to something back then. And now you’re on to it, too.”

To have seen this admired and beloved determine making his manner down his religious path, humbly, insistently, fortunately, was a type of validation.I used to be not mistaken, or misplaced, or dropping my moorings; I used to be retracing steps George Harrison had taken. It was as if he’d scrawled a message on a doorway: Keep going; this results in a profound place.

This was, we’d say, a type of motion at a distance—of generosity at a distance.

This e book is, then, yet another probability for George Harrison to behave on us generously from a distance, and I’m very glad to have skilled it.

Looking via it, noticing my responses to the pictures, provided me the attention-grabbing alternative to replicate on why I used to be responding.

What was it inside that was rising as much as meet the work? What was the character of the delight and uplift I felt? From what a part of me have been these emotions coming?

The uplift and delight weren’t being produced by George all on his personal; it was one thing the 2 of us have been cocreating, one thing coming from a shared place.

Consider any one of many pictures. Years in the past, he had a quick engagement with actuality, simply because it was in that second, and snapped the shutter and froze that second in amber, so to talk, after which I regarded on the picture and it got here alive once more, one thing in me rising to satisfy it. What had stirred in him, stirred in me.

The expertise of this e book had the impact, as artwork tends to do, of reminding me that this factor I’ve been calling “freshness” nonetheless exists, proper this minute, in every single place—and that I’m nonetheless able to experiencing it.

From THE THIRD EYE: Early Photographs by George Harrison, to be printed on October 6, 2026, by Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All images and Essay by George Saunders copyright © 2026 by G.H. Estate Limited.