Jump to content

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, RIP


Recommended Posts

The Maharishi has died. Here's his AP obituary:

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-...1,4208394.story

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 91; taught Beatles meditation

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who introduced the West to transcendental meditation, died Tuesday at his home in the Dutch town of Vlodrop, a spokesman said. Maharishi, who was thought to be 91 years old, saw his movement take off because of his association with the Beatles in the late 1960s.

From the Associated Press

4:29 PM PST, February 5, 2008

THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru to the Beatles who introduced the West to transcendental meditation, died today at his home in the Dutch town of Vlodrop, a spokesman said. He was thought to be 91 years old.

"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."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

smart guy - I remember an appearance on, of all places, the Mike Douglas show, probably late 1960s; funny guy, clever and self-aware; hope he wasn't a crook -

don't know if anybody remembers the Robert Klein routine about seeing him at Madison Sqaure Garden; jokes about the "intimacy" of the venue and the great echoes in the hall: "transcendental-dental-dentaldentaldental...."

Edited by AllenLowe
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...

"What have you done / you made a fool of everyone"

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Feb 14th 2008

From The Economist print edition

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru and tycoon, died on February 5th, aged 91 (probably)

Magnum

0708OB1.jpg

VISITORS entering the World Bank in Washington one sweaty day in 1987 might have been surprised to come upon a team of smiling young men, legs neatly folded into the lotus position, hopping like frogs. In fact, most visitors were probably not surprised at all. Like many happenings connected with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, this display of “yogic flying” had been well advertised. The only surprise was that the bank, usually cast as a bastion of hard-headed rationality, should provide such a ready audience for an event whose aim was not physical fitness but world peace.

Thirty years earlier the maharishi, who had studied maths and physics at Allahabad University, had calculated that one person practising the transcendental meditation he promoted could induce virtuous behaviour among 99 non-meditators. He had already, in 1944, helped to get 2,000 Vedic pandits, learned followers of one of the four holy books of the Hindus, to chant mantras in an effort to bring the second world war to an end. He had again assembled meditators in 1963 to solve the Cuban missile crisis. But his ambitions were bigger—world peace, no less—and by the 1980s he had come to realise that to bring harmony to a world of 5 billion people, he would need 50m meditators.

Undaunted, he did the arithmetic again, this time factoring in meditation of deep purity and concentration (including yogic flying), and happily found he needed a number no greater than the square root of 1%—a mere 7,000 or so. Accordingly, 7,000 flyers were assembled during the Taste of Utopia conference in Fairfield, Iowa, in 1984. Annoyingly, though, the “wide range of positive effects worldwide” ended with the conference. Something similar happened after 7,000 students gathered for yogic flying and Vedic chanting near Delhi in 1988. The Berlin Wall came down all right and the cold war ended, but the money needed to keep the group airborne ran out and, dammit, “new tensions” started to arise in the world.

If only the maharishi had had the necessary funds. Actually, he had. He may not have known how to make peace, but he certainly knew how to make money. After years studying under a Hindu divine in the late 1950s, he had pronounced himself a maharishi (great seer) and set up the Spiritual Regeneration Movement. This took transcendental meditation, which he had trademarked, to the world, with Hollywood one of the first stops. Disciples paid $2,500 for a five-day course, learning how to reach a “deeper level” of consciousness by inwardly repeating a mantra twice a day for 20 minutes.

Real fame came when the Beatles beat a path to his door, seeking enlightenment and spirituality through good vibrations. George Harrison had already fallen under the spell of the sitar and the maharishi's message appealed to John Lennon's angry pacifism. Before long the Fab Four were ensconced in the maharishi's ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas. Their stay was only a modified success, though, with Lennon and Ringo Starr complaining about the food, and all of them, perhaps, beginning to resent their host's transcendental interest in using them for publicity, if not an outright percentage of their earnings.

No matter. Plenty of others were ready to step forward for a dose of spiritual bliss, and not all were celebrities. In America meditation was judged to be just the tonic for a variety of people ranging from underperforming executives to recidivist prisoners. An army general even joined the board of Maharishi International University, set up in Fairfield in 1974. All in all, some 5m people are said to have been taught the maharishi's techniques since 1955.

His other ventures blossomed, too. A property empire was valued at over $3 billion ten years ago. A television station offered meditation courses to subscribers in 144 countries. Companies sold unguents, books, videos and Ayurvedic treatment. His political movement, the Natural Law Party, which in the 1990s pursued the goal of world government by fighting elections in America, Britain and several other countries, was less successful, and eventually folded. This, however, did not stop the maharishi then launching the raam, a global currency intended to foster development.

Imagine (all the things he didn't do)

Crank? Crackpot? Charlatan? Maybe all three. Yet the maharishi was generally benign. He did not use his money for sinister ends. He neither drank, nor smoked, nor took drugs. Indeed, he is credited with weaning the Beatles off dope (for a while). He did not accumulate scores of Rolls-Royces, like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh; his biggest self-indulgence was a helicopter. Nor was he ever accused of molesting choirboys; his greatest sexual impropriety, it was said, was to make a pass at Mia Farrow. He giggled a lot, and plainly had no lack of self-esteem. But his egotism did not mean he was always wringing his hands at pop concerts or blethering at Davos; after the 1960s he seldom appeared in public.

Moreover, his message was entirely laudable. He did not promote a cult or even a mainstream religion preaching original sin, purgatory and the likelihood of eternal damnation. He just wanted to end poverty, teach people how to achieve personal fulfilment and help them to discover “Heaven on Earth in this generation”. And yogic flying, of course.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 years later...

I am in (legitimate) web marketing/communications and that kind of spam is more common nowadays, though considered targeted.

Kids in their 20's with fancier job titles than me are now considered marketing managers or social media specialists. But the reality is, many actually just troll sites based on keywords and add these types of links. Apparently it is called "engagement" and that link/click counts as something measurable :rolleyes:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I wish all spam were as inoffensive as this. If this were a thread about a topic I was interested in, and someone posted that he is in the business, and that anyone interested could learn more by visiting his site, that wouldn't bother me.

In fact, I don't think that it would meet the criteria of spam as originally considered by the guy who referenced the Monty Python joke. If the post is nothing more than an honest suggestion to visit a legitimate website where one could indeed learn more about the subject at hand, I don't think that I would consider it spam. Self-serving, of course!, but not spam.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...