1968 was for John Lennon a year of intense search for social and personal liberation. He had already been to the Maharishi and later would enter primal therapy and left-wing politics. He was going through a lot of changes; he had married Yoko Ono in March of '69, and the Beatles were about to break up.
On September 14, 1969 John, Yoko, and George Harrison, after enjoying an Indian vegetarian meal prepared by the Krishna devotees at the Temple, walked over to Srila Prabhupada's quarters for their first meeting. Three months before in Montreal, some of the Hare Krishna devotees had sung with John and Yoko during the recording of Give Peace a Chance.
The movement won a lot of free publicity in 1969 when George Harrison's wrote, My Sweet Lord, with its "Hare Krishna" refrain. The Hare Krishnas were pursued with notoriety by arch-skeptic Ted Patrick, a deprogrammer who forcibly rescued young people from cults and returned them to worried parents. A former staff member for then-Governor Ronald Reagan in California, Patrick falsly warned that the Krishnas were a cult as dangerous as Charles Manson's.