Mahari**** Mahesh Yogi, Spiritual Leader, Dies
By LILY KOPPEL
Published: February 6, 2008
Mahari**** Mahesh Yogi, who introduced transcendental meditation to the
West and gained fame in the 1960s as the spiritual guru to the
Beatles, died Tuesday at his home and headquarters in Vlodrop, the
Netherlands. He is believed to have been in his 90s. Steven Yellin, a
spokesman for the organization, confirmed the Mahari****'s death but
did not give a cause.
On Jan. 11, the Mahari**** announced that his public work was finished
and that he would use his remaining time to complete a long-running
series of published commentaries on the Veda, the oldest sacred Hindu
text.
The Mahari**** was both an entrepreneur and a monk, a spiritual man who
sought a world stage from which to espouse the joys of inner
happiness. His critics called his organization a cult business
enterprise. And in the press, in the 1960s and '70s, he was often
dismissed as a hippie mystic, the "Giggling Guru," recognizable in the
familiar image of him laughing, sitting cross-legged in a lotus
position on a deerskin, wearing a white silk dhoti with a garland of
flowers around his neck beneath an oily, scraggly beard.
In Hindi, "maha" means great, and "ri****" means seer. "Mahari****" is a
title traditionally bestowed on Brahmins. Critics of the yogi say he
presented himself with the name, which he was ineligible for because
he was from a lower caste. The Mahari**** originated the transcendental
meditation movement in 1957 and brought it to the United States in
1959. Known as TM, a trademarked name, the technique consists of
closing one's eyes twice a day for 20 minutes while silently repeating
a mantra to gain deep relaxation, eliminate stress, promote good
health and attain clear thinking and inner fulfillment. Cl***** today
cost $2,500 for a five-day session.
The TM movement was a founding influence on what has grown into a
multibillion-dollar self-help industry, and many people practice
similar forms of meditation that have no connection to the Mahari****'s
movement.
Over the years since TM became popular, many scientists have found
physical and mental benefits from mediation in general and
transcendental meditation in particular, especially in reducing stress-
related ailments.
Since the technique's inception in 1955, the organization says, it has
been used to train more than 40,000 teachers, taught more than five
million people, opened thousands of teaching centers and founded
hundreds of schools, colleges and universities.
In the United States, the organization values its assets at about $300
million, with its base in Fairfield, Iowa, where it operates a
university, the Mahari**** University of Management. In 2001, disciples
of the movement incor****ated their own town, Mahari**** Vedic City, a
few miles north of Fairfield.
Last March, a branch of the organization, Global Financial Capital of
New York, moved into new headquarters it bought in Lower Manhattan.
The visibility and popularity of the organization can largely be
attributed to the Beatles. In 1968, the band, with great publicity,
began studying with the Mahari**** at his Himalayan retreat, or ashram,
in Ri****kesh, in northern India. They went with their wives, the folk
singer Donovan, the singer Mike Love, of the Beach Boys, the actress
Mia Farrow and Ms. Farrow's sister Prudence.
They left in the wake of rumors of ***ual improprieties by the
Mahari****, an avowed celibate, though no ***ual-misconduct suits were
filed and some of the participants later denied that anything untoward
had occurred.
Nevertheless, public interest in the movement had been aroused in the
West, and it continued to grow in the 1970s as the Mahari**** took his
movement around the world and as its techniques gained respectability
in the medical world.
Later in life, the Mahari**** refused to discuss the Beatles. Another
one of his disciples was the Indian spiritualist Deepak Chopra, who
was a friend of the former Beatle George Harrison and who now promotes
his own teachings based on traditional Indian Ayurvedic medicine and
meditation.
The Mahari****'s movement began losing followers the late 1970s, as
people were put off by the organization's promotion of a more advanced
form of TM called Yogic Flying, in which practitioners try to summon a
surge of energy to physically lift themselves off the ground. They
have never gone beyond the initial stage of flying, described as "frog
hops."
Mahesh Prasad Varma was born in northern India into a family of
scribes. Called Mahesh, he studied physics at Allahabad University and
for the next 13 years became a student and secretary to a holy man,
Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, who the young disciple Mahesh called Guru
Dev.
"Right from the beginning the whole purpose was to breathe in his
breath," the Mahari**** wrote in his "Thirty Years Around the World:
Dawn of the Age of Enlightenment," published in 1986. "This was my
ideal. The whole purpose was just to assume myself with Guru Dev."
After the death of his master in 1953, Mahesh went into seclusion in
the Himalayan foothills. He emerged two years later and began teaching
a system of belief, which grew into the worldwide TM movement.
"It would appear that Mahari**** cobbled together his teaching after
his master died, when he found himself unemployed and out-of-grace
with the ashram," said Paul Mason, a critic of the Mahari**** and the
author of a biography, "The Mahari****: The Biography of the Man Who
Gave Transcendental Meditation to the World." "He reinvented himself
and became a 'mahari****' and wanted to be seen as a messiah."
Since 1990, the Mahari**** had lived in Vlodrop with about 50 of his
adherents, including his "minister of science and technology," John
Hagelin, a Harvard-educated physicist, who is expected to oversee the
organization in the United States.
Late in life, the Mahari**** tried to breathe new life into TM,
establi****ng in 2000 his "Global Country of World Peace," with the
goals of preventing war, eradicating poverty and promoting
environmental sustainability. One effort tried to reach young people
across the United States with the sup****t of celebrities like Donovan
and the filmmaker David Lynch, who went on a speaking tour of colleges
to promote the cause.
The Mahari**** also sought to rebuild the world according to Vedic
principals. He called for the demolition of all toxic buildings and
unhealthy urban environments, even the demolition of historic
landmarks if they were not built according to "Vedic architecture in
harmony with Natural Law." The Mahari**** contended that the White
House was wrongly situated. He said that a more suitable location for
the capital of the United States was the small town of Smith Center,
Kan.
In the last years of his life he rarely met with anyone, even his
ministers, face-to-face, preferring to speak with followers almost
exclusively by closed-circuit television.
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