Beatles' meditation guru dies
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - February 5, 2008 "He died peacefully at about 7 p.m.," said Bob Roth, a
spokesman for the Transcendental Meditation movement that the
Maharishi founded. He said his death appeared to be due to
"natural causes, his age."
Once dismissed as hippie mysticism, the Hindu practice of mind
control that Maharishi taught, called transcendental meditation,
gradually gained medical respectability.
He began teaching TM in 1955 and brought the technique to the
United States in 1959. But the movement really took off after the
Beatles visited his ashram in India in 1968, although he had a
famous falling out with the rock stars when he discovered them
using drugs at his Himalayan retreat.
With the help of celebrity endorsements, Maharishi - a
Hindi-language title for Great Seer - parlayed his interpretations
of ancient scripture into a multi-million-dollar global empire.
After 50 years of teaching, Maharishi turned to larger themes,
with grand designs to harness the power of group meditation to
create world peace and to mobilize his devotees to banish poverty
from the earth.
Maharishi's roster of famous meditators ran from The Rolling
Stones to Clint Eastwood and new age preacher Deepak Chopra.
Director David Lynch, creator of dark and violent films,
lectured at college campuses about the "ocean of tranquility" he
found in more than 30 years of practicing transcendental
meditation.
Some 5 million people devoted 20 minutes every morning and
evening reciting a simple sound, or mantra, and delving into their
consciousness.
"Don't fight darkness. Bring the light, and darkness will
disappear," Maharishi said in a 2006 interview, repeating one of
his own mantras.
Donations and the $2,500 fee to learn TM financed the
construction of Peace Palaces, or meditation centers, in dozens of
cities around the world. It paid for hundreds of new schools in
India.
In 1971, Maharishi founded a university in Fairfield, Iowa, that
taught meditation alongside the arts and sciences to 700 students
and served organic vegetarian food in its cafeterias.
Supporters pointed to hundreds of scientific studies showing
that meditation reduces stress, lowers blood pressure, improves
concentration and raises results for students and businessmen.
Skeptics ridiculed his plan to raise $10 trillion to end poverty
by sponsoring organic farming in the world's poorest countries.
They scoffed at his notion that meditation groups, acting like
psychic shock troops, can end conflict.
"To resolve problems through negotiation is a very childish
approach," he said.
In 1986, two groups founded by his organization were sued in the
U.S. by former disciples who accused it of fraud, negligence and
intentionally inflicting emotional damage. A jury, however, refused
to award punitive damages.
Over the years, Maharishi also was accused of fraud by former
pupils who claim he failed to teach them to fly. "Yogic flying,"
showcased as the ultimate level of transcendence, was never
witnessed as anything more than TM followers sitting in the
cross-legged lotus position and bouncing across spongy mats.
Maharishi was born Mahesh Srivastava in central India,
reportedly on Jan. 12, 1917 - though he refused to confirm the date
or discuss his early life.
He studied physics at Allahabad University before becoming
secretary to a well known Hindu holy man. After the death of his
teacher, Maharishi went into a nomadic two-year retreat of silence
in the Himalayan foothills of northern India.
With his background in physics, he brought his message to the
West in a language that mixed the occult and science that became
the buzz of college campuses. He described TM as "the unified
field of all the laws of nature."
Maharishi's trademark flowing beard and long, graying hair
appeared on the cover of the leading news magazines of the day.
But aides say Maharishi became disillusioned that TM had become
identified with the counterculture, and he spent more time at his
ashram in Rishikesh in the Himalayan foothills to run his global
affairs.
In 1990 he moved onto the wooded grounds of a historic
Franciscan monastery in the southern Dutch village of Vlodrop,
about 125 miles southeast of Amsterdam.
Concerned about his fragile health, he secluded himself in two
rooms of the wooden pavilion he built on the compound, speaking
only by video to aides around the world and even to his closest
advisers in the same building.
John Hagelin, a theoretical physicist who ran for the U.S.
presidency three times on the Maharishi-backed Natural Law Party,
said that from the Dutch location Maharishi had daylong access to
followers in India, Europe and the Americas.
"He runs several shifts of us into the ground," said Hagelin,
Maharishi's closest aid, speaking in Vlodrop about his
then-89-year-old mentor. "He is a fountainhead of innovation and
new ideas - far too many than you can ever follow up."
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Amsterdam-based Associated Press writer Arthur Max contributed
to this report.