Mine, George Harrison recalls that he was inspired to write "The Inner Light" by Juan Mascaró, a Sanskrit scholar at Cambridge University. Mascaró had taken part in a debate, televised on The Frost Programme on 4 October 1967, during which Harrison and John Lennon discussed the merits of Transcendental Meditation with an audience of academics and religious leaders. In a subsequent letter to Harrison, dated 16 November, Mascaró expressed the hope that they might meet again before the Beatles departed for India, where the group were to study meditation with their guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Mascaró enclosed a copy of his book Lamps of Fire, an anthology of religious writings, including from Lao-Tzu's Tao Te Ching. Having stated his admiration for the spiritual message in Harrison's composition "Within You Without You", Mascaró enquired: "might it not be interesting to put into your music a few words of Tao, for example no. 48, page 66 of Lamps?" Harrison wrote the song during a period when he had undertaken his first musical project outside the Beatles, composing the soundtrack to the Joe Massot-directed film Wonderwall, and continued to study the Indian sitar, partly under the tutelage of Ravi Shankar. When writing "The Inner Light", he made minimal alterations to the translated Lao-Tzu text and used the same title that Mascaró had used. In I, Me, Mine, Harrison says of the changes required to create his second verse: In the original poem, the verse says "Without going out of my door, I can know the ways of heaven." And so to prevent any misinterpretations – and also to make the song a bit longer – I did repeat that as a second verse but made it: "Without going out of your door / You can know all things on earth / Without looking out of your window / You can know the ways of heaven" – so that it included everybody. After "Within You Without You", "The Inner Light" was the second composition to fully reflect Harrison's immersion in Eastern spiritual concepts, particularly meditation, an interest that had spread to his Beatles bandmates and to the group's audience and peers. The lyrics espouse meditation as a means to genuine understanding. Theologian Dale Allison describes the song as a "hymn" to quietism and comments that, in their attempt to "relativize and disparage knowledge of the external world", the words convey Harrison's enduring worldview. Author