Having picnicked peacefully with friends on a grassy lawn beside a canal yesterday and watched the folks participating in the Leiden Marathon run by, I found myself wondering what Maharishi Mahesh Yogi -- at least the one from Squaw Valley 1967 and for years afterwards, before any traces of a certain "teaching" were eradicated from tapes -- would have thought of them.
Based on what he said on that course and several afterwards, I suspect he would have said that these people running by were committing a form of suicide. They were, after all increasing their breath rate. And, as he explained in so many of those lectures, according to the Hindu superstitions he believed we are all born with a predetermined, finite number of breaths. So anything that increases the breath rate is BAD FOR YOU. It'll shorten your life and make you DIE. Sooner than your predetermined time, although I never quite understood how he managed to work the free will that allowed people to enjoy running or exercising into his notions of predeterminism. :-) Like so many of his teachings that "fell by the wayside," this theory was carefully excised from his books and tapes to make the older ones more consistent with his latest, greatest "takes" on the human condition. They were deemed Not Ready For Prime Time and censored. This all strikes me as funny because I'm in the process of writing up some research from the University of Basel that indicates that endurance sports not only change the condition and fitness of muscles but also simultaneously improve the neuronal connections to the muscle fibers based on a muscle-induced feedback. Not only does running make you fitter and enable you to live longer (that has been proven so often as to no longer be in question), it improves the functioning of your nervous system and your brain's ability to interact with your muscles and respond to outside stimuli in a more accurate manner. But you'll never find the "Maharishi teaching" that disputes this in any TMO publication, because they've all been censored to remove any traces of his earlier superstition-based "teaching." Yet another example of how the "enlightened" can be shown to never have been wrong. Just practice "revisionist history," remove all traces of the earlier idiotic idea, and voila! -- the teacher is made to look perfect, and all traces of the wrong ideas are gone.
