The Beatles' 1968 visit with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, an Indian guru, helped inspire Western interest in Eastern spirituality.

The yoga guru was invited to begin the legendary 1969 festival and told the massive crowd he believed music “is a celestial sound and it is the sound that controls the whole universe, not atomic vibrations.” The speech leaned into yoga as a philosophy, one that the many concertgoers in attendance could use to guide their collective desire for peace.

Dalio took up transcendental meditation after learning that The Beatles practiced it on a trip to India in 1968. He says the practice allows him to clear his mind, be more creative, and unlock his subconscious.

The Beat Generation championed the transformative power of psychedelics, rebelled against the post-war social order, and called for more radical politics. With a strong foothold in San Francisco, it's no surprise these themes were carried over to the city's 1960s counterculture, informing the larger national hippie movement.

In 1974, Steve Jobs traveled to India after reading a book by the famous American psychologist Ram Dass. Jobs visited the temple of one of Dass’s influences, Neem Karoli Baba. He stayed in India for seven months before returning to the US to found Apple. Jobs’s trip to India helped shape the tech leader’s vision for Apple.

The unassuming setting became one of the most famous attractions in the city and was the cover of the Beatles' last-recorded album. It was shot in the late 1960s, when the Fab Four was the most famous band in the world.

It’s been decades since the legendary British rock band broke up, yet they still managed to snag a Grammy at the 2025 awards ceremony. This feat is thanks to AI, specifically machine-learning technology, to isolate and clean up different components of a late 1970s recording. This mini-documentary shows how the band's surviving members crafted “Now and Then” with the modern technology.

The 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony paid tribute to the recently deceased Beatle with a rendition of one of his most famous songs by Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, and George Harrison's son, Dhani. Several minutes into the performance, Prince suddenly appeared center stage for a virtuosic solo. He ended it by tossing his guitar into the crowd. Tom Petty's drummer would later say, "Everybody wonders where that guitar went, and I gotta tell you, I was on the stage, and I wonder where it went, too."

The Hindu monk’s appearance at the conference, which many credit with introducing the US to Hindusim, emphasized tolerance and bemoaned religious violence and bigotry. “I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism,” he told those assembled.

Founded by Brian Jones, the Rolling Stones emerged during the massive shifts taking place in the 1960s. From the start, they were the edgier version of the Beatles, and their complex reputation gave them a unique profile in the public eye.

The trippy visuals often associated with LSD flourished in the 1960s as the drug became more widespread. Psychedelic design, defined by its undulating text and graphics, ultimately grew beyond just visuals, spawning psychedelia, a term that includes art, music, and cultural experiences based on psychedelic experiences.

First editions of Burroughs’s "The Naked Lunch," Kerouac’s "The Dharma Bums," and Ferlinghetti’s "A Coney Island of the Mind" were just as notable for their text as they were for their design, which anticipated the psychedelic imagery of 1960s countercultural touchstones like Ken Kesey, Andy Warhol, and R. Crumb.

The 1960s counterculture sought to buck traditions, including culinary ones. Hippies believed that healthier food was integral to dismantling the status quo and, in turn, started health food stores, espoused vegetarian diets, and cultivated organic food, which they found to be a welcome alternative to the over-commercialized farming industry. In the decades since the movement’s decline, many of its practices have been absorbed by the mainstream.

Fresh off the success of Nirvana's "Nevermind," band frontman Kurt Cobain reached out to his literary idol, the Beat writer William S. Burroughs, suggesting a collaboration. The correspondence led to "The 'Priest' They Called Him," a hard-to-find recording featuring Burroughs reading a story and Cobain on dissonant guitar.

Elton John, James Brown, Cher, Diana Ross, and many others all have famous photos seen multiple times on album covers, iconic images from events, and more. Rare is the unseen backstage photo of the greats, lounging or rocking out or, like Bo Diddley, frying up some chicken pre-show at the Garden. Peruse this incredible collection of candid shots of 1970s stars waiting in the wings to come on stage.

Frank Veteran was a resident in 1980 on the night John Lennon was shot in New York. For years afterward, he tried to process the sight of seeing the Beatle dying in the hospital, including through art, but he says that the memories from the experience are still vivid.

Few neighborhoods of the world stand out as more productive of a robust music scene than New York City's Greenwich Village, the bohemian launchpad of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and other folk artists of the 1960s and '70s. Expert David Browne discusses why it became so significant in this episode of "Sound Opinions."

His 1943 book “Hatha Yoga: The Report of a Personal Experience” was supposedly based on a 1936 trip through India and Tibet, though it’s believed many of the details were fabricated. Still, the book featured photos of Bernard in numerous postures that were some of the first published in the US, helping to popularize yoga in America.

Much more than simply John Lennon’s partner, Yoko Ono is a prolific multimedia artist in her own right. Her 1964 performance "Cut Piece" invited audience members to come onstage and cut away pieces of her clothing. She described the piece as being about solidarity between women and the possibility for world peace, saying, “By not fighting, we show them that there's a whole world, which could exist by being peaceful.”

A core element of the 1960s counterculture was the idea of dropping out of school and the broader technocratic institutions at the time. This push coincided with paranoia over mind control during the Cold War, and as some rogue psychologists advocated for the liberating use of psychedelics.

The Six Gallery was located in the “Harlem of the West,” where jazz musicians, filmmakers, painters and poets experimented with no regard for commercial success. “If Ginsberg had broken new ground,” historian Rebecca Solnit writes, “the Six had made it possible to go public with it.”