This morning, after I meditated, I took the subway and reflected on how the experience of meditation is often similar to the one you hear on the “Revolution #9” track of The White Album. Riots, parades, protests, peccadilloes, fires, bombings, orchestras, orgasms, sci-fi scenes – all rising and falling, ebbing and flowing with each inhalation and exhalation, each coming and going of breath - rising and falling - like the emcee’s mantra: “Number 9…Number 9…Number 9.” Incidentally, Charles Manson envisioned the apocalypse happening to the same tune. I shudder to think that my mind is joined with his, but, if we’re all interconnected, interpenetrated, and interdependent, then I guess mine would have to be. But, by the same logic, my mind would also have to be linked with those of the Beatles, both dead (like John and George) and alive (like Paul and Ringo).

The Beatles were the ones who first turned me on to the idea of meditation. I was 12 years old and watching A Current Affair. They had a special on the spiritual practices of celebrities. They flashed to a picture of the Fab Four, where they were all propped up, cross-legged, on cushions and surrounded by a harem of British blondes in a genie-bottle room. The narrator said: “At their creative peak, The Beatles explored eastern religions, studying Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi.” This scandalized my parochial schoolboy mind.

My family was Catholic of Irish descent. You didn’t leave your religion. That would land you in hell as sure as pre-marital sex or masturbation would, neither one of which I’d attempted yet, apart from a few feels. The Beatles started out as Liverpool Protestants. That afforded them so much more freedom than I knew, growing up in the archdiocese of Chicago. Protestants had flouted Rome’s authority long ago. They were not bound by the same rules as I. They were free to explore. Oh, how I coveted their freedom! On the sly, I asked around the neighborhood and heard that meditation could be used as a substitute for LSD. I didn’t want to do drugs and end up like the burn-outs in the park, but I did want to trip, so this was good news.

That was 1987, the summer Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was first released on CD with the sales slogan, “It Was 20 Years Ago Today,” commemorating the album’s 20th Anniversary. My brother Kent bought it the same afternoon it hit the racks. At the time, I didn’t know what meditation was, but I sensed it had something to do with what I was about to start a habit of doing: cueing up my brother’s Sergeant Pepper’s CD and closing my eyes as I leaned up against my bedroom wall, never stopping my mind from wandering into a pseudo-lysergic trance.

Well, that was just shy of twenty years ago to the day. On the F train out of Brooklyn this morning, I put my hands in a Cosmic Mudra, breathed deeply and contemplated how much has changed for me since then. Today, I’m a member of a Buddhist sangha. Formal meditation has become the mainstay of my everyday life. I’m a writer. I live in New York. I’m openly gay. I never even had to drop acid or become a burn-out or a Mansonite to acquire this freedom, just as I’d suspected.

But, then, meditation is not what I’d suspected. It’s not a means of escape. It’s a means of presence. You train in keeping your mind from wandering by bringing it back to the vacuous narration of the breath - over and over and over again. Once, I would have considered anything that curbs imaginative transports to be nothing less than fascist. But now I see that, in the present moment, to which our breath binds us back again and again, there exists a kaleidoscopic experience – more luscious than Strawberry Fields - that you never would have had if you’d allowed your mind to go too far afield. So, my thanks to the Beatles for loosening my shackles, giving me vision and starting me on this path. And my love to the Interdependence Project for helping to fine-tune my vehicle and for accompanying me on this most meaningful of journeys.