I sat down at my desk tonight and, randomly, my computer cued up the Beatles song Sexy Sadie. Then I got an email from John Hagelin, the oft-disappointed candidate for the Transcendental Meditation Movement's Natural Law Party. I'm not superstitious, but these seemed signs that I should, nay, must, bore you readers with some personal notes on my own religious state this week.
I've felt a bit off since I got an email from a childhood friend, with news that TM Movement founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was gravely ill and had given his official farewell to the movement he's led for 60 years.
"I think I have done whatever can be done," he said in his speech last Saturday. According to Maharishi's spokesperson, he had a few delicate days but is doing better.
I've been apart of the TM Movement, for better or worse, since I was born. My parents fell in love at a meditation retreat, I learned to meditate when I was four years old and I went to a private school that focused on Maharishi's teachings for much of my early life. Even when I go home for the holidays now, my bed sits near a large framed photograph of Maharishi that looms over me while I sleep.
Maharishi came to the U.S. in 1959 with the mission to teach the West about meditation and his inteprertation of Vedic knowledge. His movement gained popularity by the 1960s when musicians such as the Beatles and the Beach Boys professed their devotion to his teachings. He was hailed and followed by thousands, who believed he was an enlightened guru who could change the world.
It's been forty years since the Beatles wrote Sexy Sadie after leaving Rishikesh, Maharishi's ashram, where John Lennon felt disappointed with his new guru.
I've had my own sense of disappointment with Maharishi. It's hard not be disappointed in a person who is held up to you as a flawless being, god-like, with teachings that must be studied and lived fervently. Still, the news that he might be, well, mortal, was startling. This is somebody who has fundamentally shaped the lives of my family and many of my closest friends. All of us owe our ethics, our sense of self, reality and society at least in part to this tiny Indian man and his tireless crusade of personal enlightenment.
I imagine this is a somewhat odd predicament to be in, but here we are. Most people weren't raised or affiliated with a religious or spiritual group based on a living person. There are a lot of questions about succession and sense of purpose that are up in the air. There are a few major American religious groups that have had to deal with these questions -- the Mormons and the Scientologists come to mind -- of what to do when your conduit to the divine or eternal stops breathing.
