Break-up of the Beatles Lennon was in a fragile state of mind after returning from the band's sojourn in India in early 1968 and was disillusioned and resentful that their Transcendental Meditation guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, had not fulfilled Lennon's expectations. Lennon became discontented over his personal identity and his artistic role within the Beatles and entered another period of drug use, which coincided with a deterioration in his marriage and family life. He began to develop an intense interest in the work of Yoko Ono, a Japanese-American conceptual artist whom he had first met at one of her exhibitions in 1966. The pair
The Beatles in India unconventional self-awareness trip to another"; Harrison intensified his interest by embracing Krishna Consciousness, or the Hare Krishna movement, under A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada; and McCartney exchanged "consciousness expansion" for "more bourgeois preoccupations". Philip Goldberg, in his book "American Veda", writes that the Beatles' trip to Rishikesh "may have been the most momentous spiritual retreat since Jesus spent those forty days in the wilderness". Despite their rejection of the Maharishi, the Beatles generated wider interest in Transcendental Meditation, which encouraged the study of Eastern spirituality in Western popular culture. Chopra credits Harrison with spreading TM and other Eastern spiritual practices to