Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: the guru the Beatles made famous

A technique built to travel

TM was engineered for the modern world. It asked nothing of belief: a practitioner received a Sanskrit mantra, sat with closed eyes for twenty minutes twice a day, and let the mind settle. Maharishi presented it not as a religion but as a scientific method for reducing stress and unfolding human potential — a framing that let it slip easily into secular Western life, into classrooms and corporations and, eventually, clinical studies.

The Beatles in Rishikesh

His breakthrough was a chance meeting. In August 1967, George Harrison and his wife Pattie Boyd persuaded the other Beatles to attend Maharishi's lecture in London. In February 1968 all four travelled to his ashram above Rishikesh for an extended meditation course, alongside Donovan, Mia Farrow and the Beach Boys' Mike Love. The retreat became one of the most creatively fertile periods of the band's career: they wrote much of the White Album on the banks of the Ganges, and the world's press followed them to the foothills of the Himalayas. Overnight, Maharishi became the most recognisable Indian spiritual figure on earth, on the covers of Life, Time and Newsweek.

An empire of meditation

Maharishi built an organisation to match his fame. He founded Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa, where his "Science of Creative Intelligence" was taught for academic credit; he launched the Natural Law Party in 1992, which contested elections in dozens of countries on a platform of meditation-based governance; and he developed Maharishi Vedic City and a sprawling network of teaching centres. At its height the movement claimed millions of practitioners and a real-estate and educational footprint spanning continents.

Yogic flying

It also strayed into the unfalsifiable. In the 1970s Maharishi unveiled the advanced TM-Sidhi programme, which included "yogic flying" — a technique in which cross-legged practitioners hop across foam mats — and the claim that if the square root of one per cent of a population practised it together, crime and conflict in the surrounding society would fall, the so-called "Maharishi Effect." Even the head of the movement's own David Lynch Foundation has conceded that no one has ever been observed to hover or fly, and independent scientists dismiss the Effect as lacking any causal basis. To critics it confirmed that the brand had outrun the evidence; to believers it was the next frontier.

The afterlife of a brand

Maharishi died in 2008 in the Netherlands, where he had run his worldwide operation for years. But Transcendental Meditation outlived him comfortably. The filmmaker David Lynch, a devoted practitioner, founded the David Lynch Foundation to teach TM to schoolchildren, military veterans and trauma survivors, and a substantial body of research into the technique's effects on stress and blood pressure has given the core practice — whatever one makes of the flying — a genuine foothold in mainstream medicine.

The physicist of the mantra

The boy from a small Indian town who studied physics turned the mantra into a movement, and proved, more conclusively than any of his contemporaries, that the West would not only receive Indian meditation but pay for it, study it, brand it and fold it into its own institutions. For all the showmanship and the mockery, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi did more than perhaps anyone to carry the simple act of sitting quietly with a mantra out of the Himalayas and into the everyday vocabulary of the modern world.