Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, His TM Movement, and Me

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian seer who taught music legends The Beatles to meditate, passed away on February 5, 2008 in his home in Vlodrop, Holland, leaving the story of his upbringing largely unknown. He preferred not to talk about it--thus discrepancies exist. His given name was probably Mahesh Srivastava and his birthplace, in Central India, was likely Jabalpur. His birth year could be 1917. The adult Maharishi chose to celebrate his birthday on January 12.

Born to a prosperous Hindu family of the Kashatriya caste (warrior class)--one of the four Indian castes, based on heredity--Maharishi grew up with three siblings. He earned a degree in Physics at Allahabad University. In 1939, he became a disciple to Brahmananda Saraswati, also known as Guru Dev--the Shankaracharya (great spiritual leader) of both Jyotir Math (Northern India) and Dwarka Math (Western India)--who, to have been conferred such a position, was necessarily born of the Brahmin caste (priestly class). Maharishi served as his secretary.

When Guru Dev passed away--or dropped the body--in 1953, his casket was lowered into the Ganges River, under the gaze of tens of thousands of devotees. Some eyewitness accounts relate that Maharishi, then called Brahmachari Mahesh, dove into the water and held onto the Shankaracharya's casket as it sank to the riverbed. According to a Guru Dev biography, Maharishi said that he himself dropped the body while underwater but Guru Dev sent him back to physical life, despite Maharishi's resistance, with the telepathic thoughts--'Where do you think I am going? You are not through here. You should stay.'

After this funereal event, Maharishi went to the Himalayas to Uttar Kashi, where Guru Dev himself had become spiritually enlightened. Maintaining deep silence, he lived in a cave. After two years, he traveled to Southern India where a stranger asked him to share his 'wisdom of the Himalayas'. Thus, Maharishi began to give lectures, on consciousness and bliss. And, in 1957, he founded The Spiritual Regeneration Movement. In 1958, he embarked on a world tour and lectured.

In 1959, Maharishi transported his technique of meditation, Transcendental Meditation (TM) to the USA. He arrived in California and was taken in by Roland and Helena Olson for three months. Word-of-mouth spread the news of his ongoing lectures, drawing an ever-increasing number of followers, whom he initiated into TM. He was to later institute Teacher Training Courses.

In 1967, Maharishi met and initiated The Beatles. But during another get-together in Rishikesh, India, the rishi and his famous students parted ways. Among the varied versions of the reason given for the split was that Beatle John Lennon--swayed by his prior guru Yanni Madras--thought that Maharishi had made a pass at actress Mia Farrow and had thus 'made a fool of everyone' (from Lennon's Sexy Sadie lyrics, about Maharishi). The main version from Maharishi's camp was that The Beatles had been ousted because they were using drugs.

After The Beatles debacle, Maharishi continued to draw many more celebrities and wealthy benefactors into his TM Movement and he continued to develop a global empire of business and real estate that today has an estimated worth of 700 million US Dollars--some estimates are lower while others exclaim billions. In the last fifty years, since he began the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, in 1957, Maharishi has achieved an overwhelming number of accomplishments that would fill an encyclopedia set. His brand is on all of them.

This brings me to my unpresumptuous participation in what has often been called a cult or a religion, the TM Movement. As a girl who had been manic about The Beatles in the '60s, I had yet paid scant attention to their association with Maharishi and so when, in 1981, I noticed my new boyfriend occasionally sitting quietly with his eyes closed for about twenty minutes, I never considered that he might be meditating. But after fifteen years--which covered our eighteen-month European travels, our wedding in England, the birth of our son in California (1986), our business ventures in Indiana and Massachusetts--I discovered TM through a Deepak Chopra book. The year was 1996. When I asked my husband (once the 'new boyfriend') if TM was a good idea, he admitted that he was a long-time TM Meditator.

Once you stop laughing at my naivete, you may read on.

So, I asked our son, age nine, if he wanted to learn to meditate. And I asked one of my brothers if he wanted to. When they agreed, I was ecstatic. Thus, when my son turned the minimum age of ten for TM in April, the four of us--husband, wife, son, and brother--trekked with roses in hand to a TM Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A TM Teacher initiated us three recruits and gave my husband, John, a refresher course. After our days of instruction ended, the bliss for John and me began.

Recently divested of a multi-level marketing scheme, we launched a new routine. For the rest of the school year, every weekday morning, John and I dropped off our son at his Newburyport school. Then, we drove to Maudslay State Park, situated along the Merrimack River, and meditated in our car for twenty minutes. We experienced charming and profound states of consciousness. After taking a brief sublime rest, we went to Abraham's Bagels on Liberty Street where we devoured fresh bagels and swilled down hot tea. Then, we returned to the park to walk and talk under towering pines along the rushing river. After the day had meandered by and we were home with our son, we meditated again.

In the summer of the same year, 1996, we moved to Florida. Our family trio continued to meditate twice a day. In love with the process, I began reading books by Maharishi and I wrote a fervent article about his Natural Law Party and physicist Dr. John Hagelin, who was running as its presidential candidate --the article was published in The Florida Times-Union. In fact, just six months after our arrival, my fervor for Maharishi and TM whisked us from Florida and to Fairfield, Iowa, home to Maharishi University of Management (MUM).

John and I worked for MUM for three years. Our son attended Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment (MSAE) for two years and home-schooled for one year. John and I attended taped Advanced Lectures by Maharishi four to five nights a week. We eventually took the TM-Sidhi Course to become Sidhas, a.k.a. Yogic Flyers. For a while, we did our program in the golden domes--one for men, one for women.

In the spring of 2000, our family trio moved to California to begin a round of new experiences, while continuing our explorations in consciousness. We spent four years in Oceanside and then moved to Hollywood, where our son became an actor. And herein lies a scrap of irony. In the spring of 2007, our son, Jack, began to talk about his returning to Fairfield, Iowa. John and I latched onto the idea for ourselves. Then, Jack changed his mind. We didn't.

Thus, John and I headed for Fairfield in early September. We arrived to find that TM Meditator-Sidha Ed Malloy, President of Danaher Oil, is the Mayor and has been in office for six years. We learned that Maharishi's Vedic City, situated on the outskirts of town, had been incorporated six years earlier.

As of today, February 7, John and I have been in Fairfield for five months. We miss our son terribly. Yet, we are glad to be where TM flows, the arts flourish, esoteric bookstores thrive, organic foods satisfy, and nature trails abound. John is involved with his inventive art and I write.

It feels odd to have returned to Fairfield not long before our spiritual teacher would pass away. I will always be grateful to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his TM Movement for awakening me to Vedic knowledge, to the Science of Creative Intelligence, and to the processes of TM Meditation and the TM Sidhi Program. Through them, I have become an independent thinker with a sense of complete freedom. And for that, I am utterly thankful.