RINGO: The four of us have had the most hectic lives We have got almost anything money can buy. But when you can do that, the things you buy mean nothing after a time. You look for something else, for a new experience. We have found something now which fills the gap. His Holiness, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, I feel great.
PAUL: I now realize that taking drugs was like taking an aspirin without having a headache.
JOHN: If we'd met Maharishi before we had taken LSD, we wouldn't have needed to take it.
GEORGE: We haven't really started yet. We've only just discovered what we can do as musicians, what thesholds we can cross. The future stretches out beyond our imagination.
JOHN: The main thing is not to think about the future or the past, the main thing is just to get on with now. We want to help people do that with these academies. We'll make a donation and we'll ask for money from anyone we know with money, anyone that's interested, anyone in the so-called establishment who's worried about kids going wild and drugs and all that ...
With Brian dying it was sort of a big thing for us. And if we hadn't had this meditation it would have been much harder to assess and carry on and know how we were going.
GEORGE: We've all come together along the same path. We've been together a long time. We learned right from the beginning that we're going to be together.
JOHN: We'd dropped drugs before this meditation thing. George mentioned he was dropping out of it and I said: "Well, it's not doing me any harm, I'll carry on." But I just suddenly thought, I've seen all that scene. There's no point and what if it does do anything to your chemistry or brains? Then someone wrote to me and said that whether you like it or not, whether you have no ill effects, something happens up there. So I decided if I ever did meet someone who could tell me the answer, I'd have nothing to do with it.
GEORGE: There's still the craze. Usually the people who establish something that is a craze, well, they're usually very sincere people. It's just when all the publicity comes, then it turns bad.
JOHN: There's a big academy of this medication scene out in California and even if just two hundred of them try it, just because of what we say, they'll turn the next two hundred on themselves as soon as they've done it, and that might have been worth all the Haight-Ashbury and all the dropouts. The point about how the English are taking it now seems to me to be better. It's not drop out, it's drop in and change it.