Then he describes that, as the meditator “reduces the thoughts below mental-thinking level,” he will eventually arrive “at a very subtle level which is beyond all relative experience” (there, at the quiet bottom 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 passed away, in 2001, I was making my first inroads into meditation, discovering all the wonders therein, and I found in my mind some trace of George, looking as he’d looked during his discovering-Maharishi era (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 figure making his way down his spiritual path, humbly, insistently, happily, was a form of validation.I was not wrong, or lost, or losing my moorings; I was retracing steps George Harrison had taken. It was as if he’d scrawled a message on a doorway: Keep going; this leads to a profound place.
This was, we might say, a form of action at a distance—of generosity at a distance.
This book is, then, one more chance for George Harrison to act on us generously from a distance, and I’m very glad to have experienced it.
Looking through it, noticing my responses to the photos, offered me the interesting opportunity to reflect on why I was responding.
What was it inside that was rising up to meet the work? What was the nature of the delight and uplift I felt? From what part of me were those feelings coming?
The uplift and delight weren’t being produced by George all on his own; it was something the two of us were cocreating, something coming from a shared place.
Consider any one of the photos. Years ago, he had a brief engagement with reality, just as it was in that moment, and snapped the shutter and froze that moment in amber, so to speak, and then I looked at the image and it came alive again, something in me rising to meet it. What had stirred in him, stirred in me.
The experience of this book had the effect, as art tends to do, of reminding me that this thing I’ve been calling “freshness” still exists, right this minute, everywhere—and that I’m still capable of experiencing it.
From THE THIRD EYE: Early Photographs by George Harrison, to be published on October 6, 2026, by Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All photographs and Essay by George Saunders copyright © 2026 by G.H. Estate Limited.