Obituary
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
Malise Ruthven
Wednesday February 6, 2008
Guardian Unlimited
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, often known simply as "Maharishi" or "The
Maharishi," achieved world renown as the Indian guru who inspired the
Beatles and was said to have persuaded them to give up drugs. He has
died has died at his home in the Dutch town of Vlodrop, and is
believed to have been around 90.
In the summer of 1967, the year of Flower Power and Sergeant Pepper,
he made headlines when the four Beatles, with their wives and
girlfriends, as well as Mick Jagger, Jane Asher and Marianne Faithful,
followed the whiskered Swami from London to Bangor in Wales to sit
very publicly at his feet imbibing his message of universal love and
peace. The Beatles announced that they had decided to abandon LSD: "We
think we're finding new ways of getting there."
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Though disillusionment soon set in for everyone except George Harrison
- John Lennon's song Sexy Sadie ("You made a fool of everyone") is
said to refer to Maharishi - the guru's reputation continued to
thrive. A gifted publicist, as well as a charismatic religious teacher
of a more traditional kind, he carefully directed his teachings to
suit changing fashions in the West. As the era of flower power and
psychotropic revelation faded into the hard-nosed commercialism of the
Reagan-Thatcher years, Maharishi's message became more focused.
While he never abandoned his claim to be transforming humanity's
consciousness in the direction of universal harmony and peace (he was
happy to claim credit for ending the cold war), he built a highly
successful empire out of selling the spiritual techniques practised by
yogis and brahmins for millennia to companies as aids to stress
management.
With executives who learned to meditate, improving their performance
and productivity, large corporations such as IBM and Toyota had no
more qualms about sending staff on transcental meditation courses than
they had about the development of other personal skills.
Known from his early days in India as the "giggling guru" because of
his sparkling eyes and bubbling witticisms, Mahesh succeeded in making
TM his personal trademark, netting for his organisation assets that
came to be measured in billions.
As is often the case with those who have entered the religious life in
India, details about Maharishi's early life are sketchy. Various dates
have been given for his birth (1911, 1917 and 1918), in the central
Indian city of Jabalpur, in Madhya Pradesh, though the celebration of
his 80th birthday in 1998 made 1918 official for his followers. He was
born Mahesh Prasad Varma. His father was a member of the kshatriya, or
warrior caste, and worked as a mid-level official in the department of
forestry.
After completing his secondary education, Maharishi attended Allahabad
University, where he read mathematics and physics. It was here that he
began to practise yoga with Swami Brahmananda Saraswati Maharaj (known
by his more familiar name of Shri Guru Deva).
In April1941, while Maharishi was still at university, Guru Deva
became the Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math, one of the four main leaders
of the Hindu community. Maharishi wanted to abandon his studies to
become the new Shankaracharya's disciple, but Guru Deva demanded that
he graduate first. After leaving university, Maharishi spent more than
a decade with Guru Deva at his retreat at Uttar Kashi in the Himalayas.
A follower of Sankara, India's most famous religious teacher, Guru
Deva belonged to the Advaita Vedanta tradition of philosophy which
teaches that spiritual ignorance or illusion is caused by the
superimposition of a false self onto the true self, considered to be
ontologically identical with the absolute (brahman). Liberation
(moksa) achieved through meditation enables one to distinguish between
pure being and worldly phenomena. While true liberation may only be
achieved by adepts who follow their masters in a rigorous programme of
ascetic disciplines and spiritual techniques, Maharishi realised that
some of these techniques could be used to beneficial effect outside
the confines of the Advaita Vedanta tradition.
Two years after the death of Guru Deva in 1955, he travelled south to
Kerala, where he began to broadcast his message. On January 1 1958, at
a conference in Madras, he announced the formation of a world-wide
Spiritual Regeneration Movement aimed at the spiritual revival of
humanity by spreading the teachings of Transcendental Meditation.
Shortly afterwards, Maharishi left India for a round-the-world tour
that took him to Burma, Malaya, Hong Kong and Honolulu. He spent most
of 1959 in the US, where he worked on a three-year plan to introduce
Transcendental Meditation to all the countries of the world. Further
world tours followed in 1961 and 1962.
In 1963, he finished his first major book, the Science of Being and
Art of Living. He completed his English translation and commentary on
the Bhagavad-Gita in 1965.
Although Maharishi's grandiose claims to be saving the world through
Transcendental Meditation and other spiritual techniques such as
levitation or "flying" attracted ridicule as well as curiosity, he was
shrewdly aware that publicity, however negative, could be used to gain
converts and to broaden his base of recruitment. While several
scientific papers have been published demonstrating that meditation
can relieve stress, and hence improve the quality of an individual's
life, his claims that collective meditation by followers or sidhas can
create a "spiritual force field" capable of bringing about such
effects as a reduction in crime or a rise in the stock market have
been treated much more sceptically.
In 1972, he announced his world plan for reorganising society in such
a way as to solve the basic problems of humankind. An umbrella
organisation, the World Plan Executive Council, was formed to
co-ordinate the various activities of his increasingly complex empire.
One of the organisations spawned by his teachings, the Natural Law
Party, regularly contests elections in several countries, including
Britain. In 1971, he opened the Maharishi International University in
Los Angeles; it moved to Fairfield, Iowa, in 1974, where there are now
some 300 businesses owned by his disciples, bringing new activity to
an economically depressed region. His first European "university"
opened in Switzerland in 1975.
While rooted in the discourse of Sankara and his disciples, Maharishi
took issue with interpretations of Hinduism that stress renunciation
and asceticism over the call to this-worldly action. Far from leading
to worldly renunciation, the call to Transcendental Meditation he saw
was central to the message of the Bhavagad-Gita represented a "dynamic
philosophy" intended to "inspire a disheartened man and strengthen a
normal mind ... he who practises Transcendental Meditation and becomes
acquainted with the inner divine consciousness truly enjoys the
greatest fruits of action in the world."
ยท Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Indian guru, born around 1918; died February
5 2008
