Writing for Rough Guides, Chris Ingham admires the track as "beautifully put together"; he describes it as both "some of the most exotic music released under The Beatles' name" and a "philosophical meditation on life and love beyond self ... [that], once surrendered to, is a central part of the Pepper experience". In his book on the history of ambient music, Mark Prendergast includes "Within You Without You" among the album's "three outstanding cuts" and deems it to be "the most timeless piece of dronal psychedelia ever recorded". AllMusic critic Richie Unterberger admires the melody, but he considers the track overlong and notes the potential for offence in this, "the first Beatles song where [Harrison's] Indian religious beliefs affected the lyrics with full force". Musicologist Allan Moore says that Harrison's "command of the quasi-Indian medium is of a very high order" and, with regard to the song's message, he writes: "In its explicit, prescient call to the me-generation, perhaps 'Within You Without You' is a key track [on the album] ... expressing the deepest commitment to the counter-culture." PopMatters Ross Langager has attributed a similar significance to the track: Sgt. Pepper is about Britain, and the Summer of Love was always about America. The only song on the album that approaches the ideology and rhetoric of the hippie counterculture was George Harrison's sole contribution, the lush sitar-washed "Within You Without You", and it follows that Harrison was the only Beatle to have visited Haight-Ashbury at the peak of the scene. Even then, Eastern philosophy informed the lyric more deeply than did acid culture, and it's still a dense and stunning composition no matter its ideology. Writing for Rolling Stone in 2002, David Fricke included "Within You Without You" on his list of the "25 Essential Harrison Performances". He described it as, variously, the Beatles' "purest excursion ... into raga", and "at once beautiful and severe, a magnetic sermon about materialism and communal responsibility in the middle of a record devoted to gentle Technicolor anarchy". In his review of the 50th anniversary edition of Sgt. Pepper for the same publication, Mikal Gilmore said that only "Within You Without You" and Lennon's "A Day in the Life" transcend the album's legacy as "a gestalt: a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts". In 2017, "Within You Without You" was ranked at number 50 on a list of the best