Editorial
Long before spiritual travel had a name, people came to India looking for something they couldn't find at home. Some were artists. Some were scientists. All of them came back changed. Here are some of their stories — documented, verifiable, and still inspiring people to make the same journey today.
The Beat poet spent over a year in India, much of it in Varanasi, sitting with sadhus and meditating at the burning ghats. The trip, chronicled in his own Indian Journals, pulled Eastern chant and imagery into American counterculture poetry for a generation.
Source: Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals (Dave Haselwood Books / City Lights, 1970)
Photo: Subhrajyoti07 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Invited to Calcutta University's anniversary celebrations, Jung toured India for several months and received honorary doctorates from three universities. Deliberately, he avoided meeting any living guru — he wanted to encounter the country's psychology on his own terms, not through a teacher's lens.
Source: C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Pantheon Books, 1962)
In February 1968, Harrison brought the rest of the Beatles to Rishikesh to study Transcendental Meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He was the most committed of the four, and the months at the ashram reshaped his songwriting and his life.
“Everything else can wait, but the search for God cannot wait.”George Harrison
Source: The Beatles Anthology (Chronicle Books, 2000); Living in the Material World, dir. Martin Scorsese (2011)
A Harvard psychologist dismissed alongside Timothy Leary over LSD research, Alpert travelled to India in 1967 and met Neem Karoli Baba at Kainchi. The encounter transformed him; he returned as Ram Dass and wrote Be Here Now, one of the founding texts of the Western spiritual-seeker movement. Read more about Neem Karoli Baba.
“We're all just walking each other home.”Ram Dass
Source: Ram Dass, Be Here Now (Lama Foundation, 1971)
At 19, Jobs travelled to India with college friend Daniel Kottke, hoping to meet the guru Neem Karoli Baba at his Kainchi ashram — only to find he had died months earlier. Jobs spent several months travelling the foothills instead, an experience he later said reshaped how he saw intuition and design.
Source: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 2011)
Photo: Subhrajyoti07 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
During a world lecture tour, the physicist stayed with Rabindranath Tagore in Calcutta and discussed Indian philosophy at length. Heisenberg later wrote that these conversations helped him see quantum theory's paradoxes as less strange in light of ideas Vedantic thought had held for centuries.
Source: Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations (Harper & Row, 1971)