Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: the guru the Beatles made famous
Part 5 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. He turned meditation into something anyone could do in twenty minutes — and for one luminous moment in 1968, the most famous band on earth came to sit at his feet.
The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean — Part 5 of 12.
Some masters crossed the ocean to teach the few. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi crossed it to teach the millions — and for one strange, luminous moment in 1968 he was the most famous guru on earth, because the most famous band on earth had come to sit at his feet.
The physicist who became a monk
He was born Mahesh Prasad Varma, on a date that remains genuinely uncertain — accounts give 1911, 1917 or 1918 — in the Central Provinces of British India. Unusually for a future guru, he took a physics degree from Allahabad University in 1942 before becoming a close assistant to Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, the Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math — the master he revered as "Guru Dev" and credited for everything that followed.
Transcendental Meditation
After Guru Dev's death in 1953 and two years of seclusion, he emerged in the mid-1950s teaching a technique he called Transcendental Meditation — TM. Its genius was its simplicity: no renunciation, no doctrine, no religion required — just a personal mantra, practised twice a day for twenty minutes, that anyone could learn. From his first world tour in 1958–59, he built meditation centres across Asia, Europe and America.
The Beatles in Rishikesh
His leap to global fame came in 1967–68, when The Beatles embraced him. In February 1968 the band travelled to his ashram in Rishikesh — a worldwide media event that turned TM into a household word and made the Maharishi the very face of Eastern spirituality for the Western counterculture. The friendship later soured amid rumours of impropriety toward the actress Mia Farrow — claims his defenders, George Harrison among them, dismissed. But by then the publicity was done, and it was priceless.
The meditation empire
He went on to build an organisation unlike any guru before him: Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa; the Students' International Meditation Society on more than a thousand campuses; the TM-Sidhi programme with its much-mocked "Yogic Flying"; the Natural Law Party (1992), which contested elections in dozens of countries; and the Global Country of World Peace (2000). Critics called it commercial and controlling; supporters pointed to millions of practitioners and a substantial body of scientific research into meditation that he helped spur.
Vlodrop
From 1990 he directed the whole enterprise from Vlodrop in the Netherlands, increasingly by video and satellite. He died there on 5 February 2008, around ninety years old, leaving an estimated $300 million estate — and the single largest role in making meditation a mainstream Western practice. Whatever one makes of the showmanship, the world meditates more because he lived.
Next in the series: A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, who arrived in New York at sixty-nine with seven dollars and built a global movement.
Sources: Wikipedia: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Continue the series · The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean
