View of the Seelisberg capital Ambitious plans |
Chitra Subramaniam
India Today
May 31, 1984
As governments go, this one is as close to Utopia as it is possible to be, even to the extent of the location of its capital.
Perched atop a snow-covered hill some 60 km from Zurich in the Seelisberg region, one of the most picturesque in Switzerland, stands the seat of the government; a sprawling mansion that resembles one of India's palace hotels complete with fluttering rows of flags and' expensive-looking cars lining the driveway.
Inside, the opulent decor is straight out of a Hollywood movie set, as are the plaques that proudly announce "Ministry of Celebrations and Fulfilment" or "Ministry of Information and Aspirations". But this is no movie.
Genuine metal detectors guard each entrance. Neither is it a government in the accepted sense of the word. It is, according to its expensively-produced brochures, the capital of the World Government of the Age of Enlightenment and its leader none other than the bearded modern-day messiah, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
The act, however, has undergone a transcendental transformation. Gone is the image of the giggly guru on stage at Woodstock in the '60s or meditating with the Beatles. The Maharishi is currently on what is easily his most ambitious trip ever - solving the problems of the world.
If the United States and the Soviet Union are serious about disarmament, the experts at the International Capital of the Age of Enlightenment at Seelisberg will be only too glad to oblige. If India is serious about waging war on poverty or solving the Punjab tangle, Seelisberg has the answer.
In fact, advertisements to that effect have been appearing in major international publications ever since the "Taste of Utopia" Conference last January convened by the Maharishi at the Maharishi International University (MIU), in Iowa, US.
At the conference, 7,000 people meditated together in an effort to "harmonise the world". The theory behind the meditate-in was that through the collective power of 7,000 meditators, the stock-markets would rise, accident and crime rates would decline, world leaders would make positive policies and the level of love in the world would rise.
"We have received many applications and they are under consideration by our team of experts. We cannot divulge any more because our clients are assured confidentiality."
Marco Steifel, President, Association of World Government
Meanwhile, researchers kept track of 17 indicators (including President Reagan's moods) during the conference and MIU personnel claim that there were "positive developments all over the world".
The indicators, however, did not include the situation in the Lebanon or in the Punjab but according to Beat Odermatt, professor of cultural research at the Maharishi European Research University (MERU), Seelisberg, "we were stimulating a deep underlying unifying field which was going to organise the whole world. We demonstrated our theory that the square root of 1 per cent of the world population (7,000 individuals) is sufficient to enliven the evolutionary qualities of the unified field in the world consciousness".
To the uninitiated, all that may sound like scientific gobbledegook but to the Maharishi's people, their discovery of the so-called unified field is very serious and the culmination of years of research. Says Odermatt: "We can solve any problem with the Maharishi technology of the unified field. Our technology has been developed, tested and proved. Now, it is only a matter of applying it and gaining the invincible authority of the total potential of natural law."
The "proof" they offer is the elaborate charts and graphs they produced after the MIU conference which supposedly showed an upturn in stock-markets, a lessening of international conflicts and a drop in accidents in the US among others.
But that was enough for the Age of Enlightenment to offer its services to the governments of the world. Naturally, there is an undisclosed fee for professional services rendered, with the money being deposited in a Swiss bank. The fee varies with each country depending on the kind of problem involved and services required.
Whether any country has actually sought the new "technology" is debatable though Marco Steifel, a former hotel executive and now president of the Association of World Governments, Seelisberg, claims: "We have received many applications from various countries and they are under consideration by our team of experts. We cannot divulge any more because our clients are assured confidentiality." Success, according to him, is assured.
The "unified field" theory was one that Albert Einstein tried to arrive at for the last 30 years of his life and never got anywhere near. According to a recent article in the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) journal, Spectrum, many scientists are currently at work on unified theories but, as the magazine concluded, "such a theory is still quite distant".
The term itself is borrowed from modern physics which recognises four fundamental forces in nature - gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force (which holds atomic nuclei together) and the weak force (which is involved in radioactive decay).
Mahesh Yogi and his World Government in session at Seelisberg: Tall claims
A theory of the unified field, when proved, would combine these four fundamental forces in one system of formulae. Pioneering research in the field of particle physics (which could provide a model to arrive at the theory) is currently under way at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, one of the world's leading centres for research in this field.
Scientists at CERN, however, dismiss Maharishi's claims. "We are facing a major problem of ignorance," says Professor Carlo Rubia, "he (Mahesh Yogi) is using many concepts that we use in high-energy physics but it has nothing to do with stock-markets or politics."
For physicists, the term unified field is strictly a mathematical concept. But the Maharishi's people see it quite differently. The Maharishi himself has stated that "the objective approach of modern science has located the unified field as a self-interacting, self-referal reality. The subjective approach of ancient Vedic science brings the experience of self-referal reality in the simplest state of human awareness - transcendental consciousness."
Adds Odermatt: "We have discovered the unified field by linking Vedic science and modern physics. Scientists are welcome to come and verify it."
So far, nobody has bothered to do so. But the Age of Enlightenment is blissfully unconcerned and their capital in Seelisberg continues to thrive. Built on the earlier success of the Maharishi's transcendental meditation technique, Seelisberg is now the seat of various centres of "enlightenment" and also boasts an International Association for the Advancement of the Science of Creative Intelligence and MERU.
MERU accepts 300 students a year for a two-year course. On completion, they receive a bachelor's degree in the Science of Creative Intelligence. However, the university is not accredited or recognised outside. The students pay 900 Swiss francs (Rs 4,500) a month for food and lodging. The fee for the course is paid at the TM centres in their respective countries.
"We are facing a major problem of ignorance. He (Mahesh Yogi) is using many concepts that we use in high energy physics but it has nothing to do with politics."
Professor Carlo Rubia, European Centre for Nuclear Research
During the course, students are not permitted to speak to visitors and live in separate dormitories for men and women. Seelisberg also has a modern press which churns out their publicity material.
"The education the students get here enables the students to experience finer level of thinking until they arrive at the unified field," says K.M. Chandrasekhar, one of the TM teachers.
The various departments are called ministries and the centre itself is known as the government because Seelisberg is meant to serve as an example of how organised governments can be. "We have no political ambitions," says Chandrasekhar, "though we work with politicians because they are the mirror of the collective consciousness of the society." Right now, according to Steifel, people from Seelisberg are travelling and meeting politicians to inform them about recent discoveries and sell them their technology of the unified field.
Apparently, what this involves is for the leaders to get a certain number of people to meditate together in his or her country. The numbers are predetermined: 1,600 for North America, 1,900 for South and Central America, 2,900 for Europe, 2,200 for Africa, 5,000 for Asia and 500 for Australia and the Pacific. "In short," says Odermatt, "if 14,100 people meditate practising the Maharishi technology of the unified field, there will be world peace."
That figure, naturally, was arrived at after much "scientific thought". Meanwhile, of the Maharishi himself, there is no sign. Questions about his whereabouts are warded off. Officials in Seelisberg claim not to know where he is. Questioners are informed that he is "somewhere" and will materialise in Seelisberg "when the need arises". Obviously, his new technology does not require his august presence to be effective.