By Dipankar De Sarkar, IANS
London : Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the man who turned the world on to meditation and yoga, has died at his retreat in the Netherlands after setting his multi-billion-dollar global empire in order.
“Maharishi’s work is complete. He has done what he set out to do in 1957 – to lay the foundation for a peaceful world. Now, Maharishi is being welcomed with open arms into heaven,” said Tony Nader, a Lebanese neurologist chosen by the Indian guru to succeed him.
Mahesh Yogi, thought to have been 91 years old, died in his sleep Monday at Vlodrop, a former Franciscan monastery in the Netherlands where he had set up the headquarters of a movement that is said to have six million followers worldwide.
The Indian guru introduced his technique of Transcendental Meditation to the West in 1959, and helped popularise Indian spiritualism across the Atlantic in the 1960s and 70s – most famously through his association with The Beatles in Britain.
By the time of his death, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Foundation – which he renamed the Global Country of World Peace – had grown into a spiritual empire with branches in more than 100 countries and was said to be worth two billion pounds.
Mahesh Yogi also helped develop the cult of the Indian guru in the West.
After Beatles John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr visited his ashram in the Himalayas, millions of young men and women from America and Europe began retracing their footsteps – a trend that continues to this day.
At the same time, droves of Indian gurus began making their way to the West to teach meditation and yoga to a generation fed up with materialism and war – another trend that has only gained in momentum since the early 1960s.
Among the first Indians to make it to the cover of Time magazine, he also embedded the Sanskrit word ‘Om’ into Western consciousness – to the extent that it is today synonymous with meditation.
Mahesh Yogi’s death comes three weeks after he announced his retirement and retreated into “active silence”, nominating Nader – whom he named Maharaja Adhiraj Rajaram – and 48 ‘ministers’ and ‘administrators’ to carry on his movement after him.
And in a weird coincidence, it comes just a day after the US space agency NASA beamed into outer space a Beatles song with the refrain, ‘Jai Guru Deva, Om’ – said to be a reference to Mahesh Yogi’s famous teacher, Guru Deva.
News of his death was received “with invigoration” in Britain – whose youth were among the first the first in the world to take to Transcendental Meditation (TM) – said his press spokesman Charles Cunningham.
“The Maharishi’s parting task was for us to organise a series of lectures by the quantum physicist John Hagelin proving the scientific basis of the Maharishi’s Vedic message,” Cunningham told IANS.
Apart from The Beatles – most prominently George Harrison – Mahesh Yogi counted a large number of celebrity followers, including the award-winning filmmaker David Lynch, singer Donovan and Hollywood star Clint Eastwood.
“There are too many of them, they keep coming and going, and we tend not to emphasise his star followers,” Cunningham said.
One of Mahesh Yogi’s best-known followers is Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano, who has credited meditation for bringing an end to the 16-year-conflict that once racked his southern African nation.
However, the Maharishi’s forays into the world of politics have been less than successful in spite of the formation of a political party – the Natural Law Party – by his followers.
John Hagelin contested three American presidential elections under the Natural Law Party ticket, and the party failed to win a single seat in Britain in spite of contesting several general elections.
Mahesh Yogi was born in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, as Mahesh Prasad Varma and read mathematics and physics at Allahabad University, where he began to practise yoga with Swami Brahmananda Saraswati Maharaj – also known as Guru Deva.
In April 1941, while Mahesh was still at university, Guru Deva – who belonged to the Advaita (non-dualistic) Vedanta tradition of philosophy – became the Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath.
Mahesh, who was tutored in meditative techniques that are thought to lead to a non-dualistic state of mind, realised that some of these techniques could be used to beneficial effect outside the Advaita Vedanta tradition.
Two years after the death of his teacher in 1955, he travelled to Kerala, where he began to broadcast his message. A year later he launched a global Spiritual Regeneration Movement from Madras, now Chennai. It would be based upon the technique of Transcendental Meditation.
He then embarked on a world tour with the mission to spread the message of peace.
Fifty years on, his followers claim the world is a better place because of the spread of Transcendental Meditation. Mahesh Yogi himself preferred to describe it as “the power of Om.”