By Dipankar De Sarkar, IANS
London : Three years after winding up his British operations to protest the invasion of Iraq, Indian meditation guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has restarted meditation schools in Britain because – apparently – the world is changing for the better.
The Maharishi’s multi-million dollar global outfit for Vedic education and transcendental meditation wound up its schools across Britain in 2005 in disgust at the re-election of Tony Blair as prime minister.
“In 2005, the Maharishi closed his interests in Britain because he felt the invasion of Iraq signified a destructive approach to a problem,” said Peter Warburton, head of the Maharishi Foundation in Britain, where the Indian guru counts 200,000 followers or practitioners of his technique known as Transcendental Meditation.
“But since last year, indications are Britain are changing. Then, we weren’t creating enough influence to change the national consciousness. Now, if you notice, there is a much more conciliatory approach in the world,” Warburton added.
Warburton puts down recent changes to the “positivity” created by an elite group of 500 Indian yoga teachers who have been imported to the US by the Maharishi Foundation and more than 1,000 American instructors – known as Yogic Fliers.
Mahesh Yogi, who is said to be at least 91 years old, went into silent retreat this week after 50 years of spreading the word about Indian spiritualism, with the pop group the Beatles counting as among his early followers. He continues to live in the foundation’s global headquarters at Vlodrop, a village in the Netherlands.
“He spends his days in meditation and he receives the news of the day, and we have the Maharishi channel broadcasting the news of the organisation which is with him all the time,” said Benjamin Feldman, the foundation’s Global Director of Finance and Planning and a key aide to Mahesh Yogi.
“He has not received visitors for quite a few years,” Feldman said on the telephone from the Netherlands.
“Full wakefulness and alertness are completely with him. He is now focussed on the field of lively silence – the silence of transcendental consciousness that he has taught the world for 50 years,” he said.
Feldman said Mahesh Yogi was satisfied that his organisational work had been done.
Funding is also in place, including a pledge of a million dollars a month by the Howard and Alice Settle Foundation for Invincible America to finance the board and sustenance of 2000 Yogic Flyers in Iowa, US.
“We have also created reserve funds of $20 million, from the interest, to support the training of Vedic pundits from India,” Feldman said.
He said Mahesh Yogi’s successor, a Lebanese medical doctor known by his given name of Raja Nadar Ram, “embodies that level of silence in which the whole activity is anchored.
“He was crowned Raja Nader Ram in 2000 and in 1998 he received an award of his own weight in gold for the discovery of the structure and function of the Vedas in the structure and function of human physiology,” Feldman added.
He said Nadar Ram will “not replicate the exact role of the Maharishi”.
“What the Maharishi has left in place is a whole structure” that will be carried on by his successor along with 12 directors appointed in the last few weeks.
The Transcendental Meditation movement claims six million practitioners worldwide, and centres in more than 100 countries.