Toby Johnson writes: Just before this issue of White Crane was to go to press, the passing of George Harrison was announced. Harrison played an important role in my spiritual life, as perhaps in the spiritual lives of many of White Crane readers. Here's a brief excerpt from my book The Myth of the Great Secret.

I came home one afternoon to my room in the dorm where the Servites lived [at Saint Louis University], feeling a little perplexed by a statement about the historical uniqueness of Christianity that had been made in a theology class I'd just attended. From Jung and Campbell I'd learned that Christianity was far from unique in being the "One, true religion" and maybe even wasn't the best of world religions.

My room was small, a room in a once-grand hotel that had slowly deteriorated and then been bought by the University for a dormitory, mainly for graduate students and members of religious orders who attended the school. The walls were an old battleship gray. I had tried to improve the appearance of the room by adding brightly colored accessories. Among them were a number of psychedelic posters, including the Richard Avedon photographs of the Beatles. (A year before I had had my first experience with LSD, the easy access to mystical consciousness Timothy Leary had promised.)

I stood for a while looking out the window at the traffic moving below, wondering what was happening to me. Here I was a Roman Catholic religious, yet somehow I knew that I had seen through the external teachings of that religion. I no longer believed that that man Jesus who lived in Palestine two thousand years ago was so different from the other world saviors--from Prince Gautama, Mohammed, or Lao-tse, or, for that matter, from any of the rest of us who struggle with deep spiritual questions about the nature of our lives.

I turned and looked at a crucifix hanging on the wall. Even Biblical scholarship told us we could never really know what happened that day in Jerusalem. We could only learn of it through the filter of myth and metaphor and the conventions of mystical poetry of the Near East. Common sense told me Jesus was a man who'd taught about goodness and the meaning of life and used those very conventions to talk about God. He was caught up in the swirl of politics of his day and died a martyr to his gentle message of love and respect preached to a culture based on military power and patriarchal, legalistic dominance. In the poems about him he was deified, as symbols were used by the writers to give significance to the events of his life. Jesus wasn't a god exactly who incarnated to save the world by his death in order to repay a sacrificial debt to an angry father-God. I no longer believed in the historicity of such mythical, supernatural events. They were true as metaphors about the Self in every human being, not as historical events.

I understood that Jesus's crucifixion was important because of the faith of two thousand years of believers who found in the religious poetry a significance for their own lives and their own experience of Self. I knew this was a religious sensibility, but how did it fit with my identity as a canonical religious?

I turned away from the crucifix. My eye was caught by the poster on the wall opposite: Beatle George Harrison, in orange and green highlights, a blazing psychedelic vision, his eyes upturned and his hand, marked with a glyph of the all-seeing eye, raised in benediction, the mudra "fear not." And I realized that though I no longer believed in a specific religious truth, I still believed in religious experience. I believed in the possibility of mystical vision. And I saw what my identity as a religious man really was.

The point was not whether Jesus Christ was God, whether he rose again on the third day and would lead us all into heaven in the end, but whether the thought of him and his spiritual acts could lead us to the kind of vision he had had and that was symbolized by the poster of George Harrison. Somehow, in the moment of losing my faith, I found my faith restored. Somehow I had seen beyond the surface of religion to roots that sank deep into my soul and into the collective soul of humanity.

That poster, now framed and matted, still hangs in the most prominent position above my meditation space. Thanks to George Harrison for having changed the world.