In the Garden

In a 1986 interview with Mick Brown that appears on Morrison's website, Van Morrison said: "There's a song on the album called 'In the Garden' where I take you through the meditation program. From about half way through the song until the end. But I take you through a definite meditation process, which is a form of transcendental meditation. It's not TM. So forget about that. That takes you right from the middle to the end. and if you listen to the thing carefully, you should have gotten yourself some sort of tranquillity by the time you get to the end. So when this happens in the song, I say, 'And I turn to you and I said, 'No Guru, No Method, No Teacher. Just you and I and nature, and the Father and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.'' So really - you have to do the whole line to know what it means." "And we were going put the rest [the whole line] on the album. But we realized that would be too long. But that's the whole thing. 'No Guru, No Method, No Teacher. Just you and I and nature, and the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.' Its the whole thing in a nutshell. Its much longer than that." "On another level what it says is that due to what popular opinion says and all this sort of stuff, its been implied that I - you know, this guy and that guy and the other organization was my guru. That's all speculative and it's not real. So you know this is a statement. You know you could call this a press statement. Also a press release. It's making it quite clear that I'm not affiliated with anyone or organization. I don't have a guru. I don't have any teacher. And there's no method that I subscribe to. And that's really what its saying as well. So that's what it saying in the song." Brown then asked if the song was rejecting dogma, to which Morrison replied: "You could put it like that. Yeah."