It was with a brief advertisement in The Times in late 1959 that the Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who devoted his life to changing the world through “Transcendental Meditation”, announced his arrival in Britain.
He had by then already toured the world and successfully established a number of branches of his movement, but it was not until 1967 that he truly began to excite public interest through his connection to the Beatles - an association that would make him an iconic figure overnight.
The Maharishi lectured in London that summer, and George Harrison, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who were already keenly interested in Eastern influences for their music, went to see him speak at the Park Lane Hilton on August 24.
George later recalled: “After the lecture, we went - because, you know, that was one of the privileges of the Beatles, we could get in anywhere. So we got backstage, met Maharishi, and, you know, I said to him, ‘Got any mantras? Give us a mantra’. And he said ‘Well, we’re going to Bangor tomorrow. You should come and get initiated’.”
Taking up the offer, accompanied by Ringo Starr, they boarded the “Mystical Express” at Paddington and headed to Bangor, where the Maharishi was holding a seminar. During this function, in exchange for a fee of one week’s earnings, the members of the band were each given a personal mantra and initiated into the movement. They were instructed to use their mantra while meditating for 20 minutes, twice a day. Its repetition, the Maharishi claimed, would enable initiates to attain a “deeper level of consciousness” and “harmonise with the infinite”.
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The exercise was the linchpin of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) system, which claimed that meditators could have “the ability to perceive things which are beyond the reach of the senses, the development of profound intimacy and support from one’s physical environment, and even such abilities as disappearing and rising up or levitating at will.”
If TM were performed by just 1 per cent of the population, the Maharishi insisted, the flow of “good vibrations” would flood over the nations of the world and bring about a universal state of “bliss consciousness”.
Interviewed by David Frost, George Harrison explained the system: “The energy is latent within everybody. It’s there anyway... meditation is a natural process of being able to contact that, so by doing it each day you contact that energy and give yourself a little more. Consequently, you’re able to do whatever you normally do just with a little more happiness.” Although the mantra is usually in Sanskrit, Harrison revealed that his was an English word that is included in the lyrics of I am the Walrus.
After the Beatles’ initiation, celebrities rushed to be associated with the Maharishi. Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, the Beach Boys, Mia Farrow, Kurt Vonnegut and Vidal Sassoon were all involved with the movement. It was at a TM meeting that the Doors first met.
The number of wealthy celebrities contributing to the cause made many observers suspicious of how the money would be used. The Maharishi explained: “It goes to support the centres, it does not go on me. I have nothing. But my wants are simple. I do not drink or smoke. I have never been to the theatre or to the cinema.”
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Many were sceptical of the impish “giggling guru” who was by this time known for conducting his frequent evangelical tours in a Rolls-Royce. Private Eye ridiculed the mystic with a character named “Veririchi Lottsa Money Yogi Bear”.
Matters came to a head the following year in what was dubbed the “Indian Summer”, when the Maharishi played host to the fab four and other celebrities, including Mia Farrow, Donovan and Jane Asher, at his International Academy of Meditation at Rishikesh in the Himalayan foothills of India.
At the spiritual retreat - or “Butlins of Bliss” as Lennon called it - things went awry after the arrival of Alexis Mardas, head of the Beatles’ Apple Electronics, who declared: “An ashram with four-poster beds? Masseurs, and servants bringing water, houses with facilities, an accountant - I never saw a holy man with a book-keeper!”
Neil Aspinall, the Beatles’ road manager, was surprised to find that the spiritualist employed a full-time accountant and was relentless in negotiating an additional 2.5 per cent when negotiating the rights for a proposed feature film. He recalled thinking: “This guy knows more about making deals than I do. He’s really into scoring, the Maharishi.” Rumours that the guru expected the Beatles to donate 10 to 25 per cent of their annual income to a Swiss account in his name aroused further bad feeling.
But it was sex, not money, that proved to be the final straw. Accusations surfaced that the Maharishi had been improper in his relations with female members of the ashram, including Mia Farrow, and the group left under a cloud. Lennon spoke out against the Maharishi in an interview with Rolling Stone: “There was a big hullabaloo about him trying to rape Mia Farrow and trying to get off with Mia Farrow and a few other women.” Lennon, angered by the allegations, wrote the song Sexy Sadie about the guru, which included the lyrics such as “Sexy Sadie what have you done / You made a fool of everyone” and “Sexy Sadie you’ll get yours yet / However big you think you are”.
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“That’s about the Maharishi, yes,” Lennon later confessed. “I copped out and I wouldn’t write ‘Maharishi what have you done, you made a fool of everyone’.”
Although the Guru’s association with the Beatles was brief, the publicity it created was invaluable. Converts to the cause grew and he made a series of canny property investments with the funds that he amassed. In England alone he bought Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire, Roydon Hall in Maidstone, Swythamley Park in the Peak District and a Georgian rectory in Suffolk. He was reported to have an income of six million pounds.
Thousands joined the movement and in 1966 the Students’ International Meditation Society was founded. It proved to be a phenomenal success. In 1968 Maharishi announced that he would withdraw from public activity and began training meditators at his global headquarters in Seelisberg, Switzerland, to take over the teaching of disciples.
In the mid-1970s TM began targeting business professionals, promising “increased creativity and flexibility, increased productivity, improved job satisfaction, improved relations with supervisors and co-workers”, and the movement itself came to be structured increasingly as a multinational corporation. The Maharishi International University was founded in 1974 in Fairfield, Iowa, combining courses in TM with an academic curriculum.
The movement then began a steady incursion into the American mainstream. TM claimed to be useful in reducing crime and was adopted by government agencies that awarded grants of thousands of dollars. It was even adopted in 1975 by public high schools, but in 1977 a US court declared the movement to be religious, and in breach of the First Amendment guaranteeing separation of Church and State.
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Despite claims of fraud by disaffected former disciples in the 1980s, and increasingly outlandish claims about the power of TM - whose disciples supposedly could hover in the air through “yogic flying”- the movement continued to expand.
With the advent of video the Maharishi embraced the new technology and, using it to propound his message, became a virtual recluse in his top-security base in a converted monastery in Vlodrop, Holland, built in January 1992.
He was equally enthusiastic about the internet and would make regular webcasts to his disciples, and formed Veda Vision, a subscription-based satellite TV channel broadcast in 22 languages to 144 countries.
As his empire grew, so did his ambition, and increasingly he talked of forming a world government to further his goal of world peace.
With this in mind, in the 1990s the TM movement formed the Natural Law Party, which fielded candidates in Britain, the US, Canada and Australia. The party sought to combine politics and TM on a platform based on the appealing, if unlikely, promise of low taxes for all and the complete elimination of disease, crime and pollution. The party launched its campaign in Britain with a full-page advertisement of its manifesto in The Times beside another full page portraying 119 of its candidates. Despite printing 12 million copies of their manifesto, advertising on radio, TV and 7,000 billboards and having the backing of George Harrison, the candidates had little success. In December 2000 the Natural Law Party was disbanded, amid jokes about the failure of yogic flyers to win over floating voters.
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Despite this costly political failure, the Maharishi remained committed to his global vision. In 2002 the Maharishi Global Financing Research Foundation issued the Raam, a “currency”, worth ten euros, dedicated to financing peace-promoting projects. That year the Maharishi declared: “I came to teach in the world, and I felt successful results on the individual, and now I am going to have a successful result on the basis of nations. National governments everywhere, whatever they are now, I think they are groping in darkness. And I have the lamp.”
The Maharishi was born Mahesh Prasad Varma in Jubbulpore in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India, the third of four children. His date of birth is variously given as 1911 or 1917 and little is known of his early life, though it is thought that his father was a civil servant. After graduating with a degree in physics at Allahabad University in 1942, and a period working in a factory, Mahesh left for the Uttar Kashi in the Himalayan mountains to begin a 13-year spiritual apprenticeship to the Indian guru Shankaracharya Swami Brahmanand Saraswati, or, as he would call him, Guru Dev — “divine teacher”. When his mentor died in the early 1950s, the Maharishi dedicated his life to spreading the teachings of his guru.
He set out on his international mission to achieve this vision in 1959, beginning in Los Angeles, where he established his movement with an initial following of 25 devotees. From this small beginning the Maharishi over his lifetime developed a global organisation with nearly 1,000 TM centres, property assets valued in 1998 at $3.5 billion and an estimated four million disciples.
He continued to oversee his organisation until last month, when he announced he was retiring to concentrate on the study of ancient Indian texts.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, spiritual leader and businessman, is thought to have been born on January 12 1917. He died on February 5, 2008, aged about 91