By Parveen Chopra, IANS
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who passed away Tuesday at age 91 in the Netherlands, was fond of telling a story about his early days of teaching Transcendental Meditation (TM) in the US in the 1960s.
“Some people who learnt meditation could get better sleep from the deep rest the practice grants and must have shared their experience with some reporter. Next morning, the banner headline in the local paper read: ‘Indian yogi has cure for insomnia’,” Maharishi would start telling the story in the courses he took to train TM teachers.
Continuing the story, he would recall, “First I hit my head in disgust. O, I had come here to awaken these people and they want to use India’s deepest knowledge to sleep better! Then better sense prevailed. I thought, no matter for what purpose people learn the technique, once they start to meditate, other, more profound changes will gradually come and they would be hooked.”
The anecdote speaks for Maharishi’s pragmatism and doggedness that withstood him in his mission to spread India’s spiritual knowledge in the world to alleviate human suffering. The incident also inspired him to package the technique with the lure of practical benefit here and now and not the promise of some otherworldly reward.
He succeeded in tailoring his remedy to suit the times because of his background. Born in a Srivastava family in Jabalpur in 1917, he studied science for his graduation degree from Allahabad university. So, even after he soaked in the Yoga-Vedanta tradition while serving his master, Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath at the time, he did not want to start giving discourses like an itinerant swami.
Instead, he demystified and simplified meditation, making mantra-based TM available to one and all, irrespective of religion or nationality. To make meditation more acceptable to the western mind, he encouraged scientific research on its neuro-physiological effects and socio-psychological benefits. It was the first time for science to come forward to validate something as intangible as meditation, but then sophisticated instruments like the EEG had been developed by the 1970s.
For Maharishi, who wanted to reach the entire world with his message, the next challenge was that it was physically impossible to impart the technique-taught in a systematic 5-6 one-hour sessions-to more than a few thousand people in a year.
His solution: multiplying himself by training teachers, and then trainers of teachers. The tried-and-tested system to build mammoth movements has since been employed by some of his predecessor gurus, most notably by his one-time disciple, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Art of Living founder.
It also goes to Maharishi’s credit that sundry Hindu swamis have since incorporated meditation in their discourse-oriented routines. Even Jain gurus Acharya Tulsi and Acharya Mahapragya felt compelled to scour their tradition to revive Preksha meditation.
All said and done, Maharishi was a purist, a flagbearer for the Vedic tradition, unlike his contemporary and fellow guru from Jabalpur, Osho Rajneesh, who presented an eclectic smorgasbord of spiritual systems from all the mystical traditions you can name.
Studying with Maharishi, as this writer did in an advanced course for TM teachers some 30 years ago in Rishikesh, was to come away impressed. He had a sagely presence and inexhaustible stores of energy – often sitting crosslegged and serenely conducting 10-hour-long sessions while you had taken 10 breaks.
He was also one-pointed on the task at hand, the task too being one – spreading the teaching of meditation and other Vedic systems like Ayurveda.
Once, a TV interviewer asked him a frivolous question, “Why do you keep a long beard?” Maharishi’s reply must have stumped him: “No, no, you don’t need to meditate long, just 20 minutes morning and evening is sufficient.”
Swami Vivekananda and Paramahamsa Yogananda had gone to the west before him with India’s spiritual message, but Maharishi is the one who succeeded in taking meditation mainstream, thus creating room for another Indian system, yoga, too to become a household word.
(Parveen Chopra is a trained teacher of TM. He can be contacted at [email protected])