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An unremarked passing
WCBS-TV reports thus:
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru to the Beatles who introduced the West to transcendental meditation, died Feb. 5 at his home in the Dutch town of Vlodrop, a spokesman said. He was thought to be 91 years old. Once dismissed as hippie mysticism, the Hindu practice of mind control known as transcendental meditation gradually gained medical respectability. He began teaching TM in 1955 and brought the technique to the United States in 1959. But the movement really took off after the Beatles attended one of his lectures in 1967. Maharishi retreated last month into silence at his home on the grounds of a former Franciscan monastery, saying he wanted to dedicate his remaining days to studying the ancient Indian texts that underpin his movement.
The BBC reports that he was cremated on an open pyre, in traditional Indian fashion, with thousands attending. How most of the US media missed this, I don't know, other than to think that most people thought of him as irrelevant, a relic of the Sixties. Some even asserted that he was a fraud. How you square those reactions with the respect afforded the Dalai Lama, not to mention the obvious phonies such as Ted Haggard, I will never understand.
As a one-time practitioner of TM, I had wondered years ago whether the old guru still lived. His public appearances had been limited to video at least thirty years ago. At left is is photo that WCBS ran with the story; it must have been made when he was about sixty.
It's too bad the meditation "movement" never truly took off, because the guru had this theory that if you got enough meditators together in one location, good things would begin to occur. He had the audacity to believe that if you got a few thousand people meditating in the political capitals of the world, peace would break out. A revolutionary idea, for certain, and one that flies in the face of Judeao-Christian doctrines that say each person is responsible for his or her own salvation from the wrath of an angry, jealous, difficult-to-please deity who appears to go about the universe looking for any excuse to smite people who don't follow seemingly arbitrary orders to the letter. ("If you really loved me, you'd cut off that nasty foreskin." or "You can only put certain kinds of food on the same plate.") There was little actual theology in what Maharishi preached: his message seemed to be that if you'd only shut up and listen, the universe would tell you things that could empower you in useful and productive ways.
I have seen the effects of the presence of one truly dedicated meditator. In the 1980s I worked in a defense-electronics company, where one of the engineers was one Vinod Patel, who had introduced me and several others to TM. For a time, three or four of us would skip lunch and sit in someone's car in the company parking lot, meditating together. Enough time has passed that I cannot say I genuinely recall any synergistic effect from this. But Patel himself was remarkable. Meetings in this engineering department were frequently loud and contentious, owing to the presence of several gigantic egos, whose owners had conflicting opinions on how things ought to be done. As a "components engineer," Patel was sometimes, but not always, present at these meetings. And not much time had passed before people noticed that any time Mr. Patel was in a meeting, things went smoothly and tempers did not flare, regardless of the issue at hand, or the fact that Patel rarely spoke a word in the sessions. He found himself invited more frequently, and on thinner pretexts, because of this phenomenon.
In death, Maharishi joins a number of other visionaries whose ideas failed to become commonplace, not because of any lack of absolute merit, but because of the manner of their presentation. In my opinion, the "vedic flying" business was just a little too loopy for most people. Better it had been presented as "hopping" rather than flying. There's also the matter of how much money all Maharishi's enterprises took in. There, I believe he was treated unfairly. Countless TV evangelists, mega-church ministers and other Christian luminaries live in comparable, if not superior luxury. And the flap over Dr. Chopra's alleged conflict of interest seems out of proportion, when measured against the standards of evangelical Christian pundits. At the root of these problems, I suppose lies the unbridgeable gap between East and West.
All things considered, I am grateful that he lived and took the path he did.