Right from the time that he attracted the attention of such noteworthies as the Beatles and Mia Farrow, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has become the symhol of oriental mysticism and life-style to the awed Westerner. Recently, the yogi arrived with several thousand disciples from their headquarters at Seelisburg to attend a Vedic conference in New Delhi.
INDIA TODAY reports on the event which caused quite a stir and drew many a curious eye.
S. Mitra
India Today
November 30, 2013
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: Skill in selling packaged spiritualism
It was a carnival, a Marwari wedding, a Kumbh Mela and a political campaign in the USA - all rolled into one. From the moment His Holiness the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi arrived at Palam Airport, New Delhi, on November 5 by an Air-India Boeing 747 - followed by his 3,470 disciples from all over the world - the religious capital of the 2.5 million-strong "transcendental meditation" (TM) enthusiasts shifted to Delhi from the international headquarters at Seelisburg in the cool shadow of the Swiss Alps.
The Express Building on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, the venue of the TM jamboree, was converted overnight from a newspaper office to something like the transit lounge of a busy international airport. Cymbals clanged, bells pealed, and Vedic hymns were chanted every morning and evening as the huge TM congregation sat cross-legged before the Maharishi in the large air-conditioned hall of the newly-constructed building.
The lecture session over, the crowd milled around in the spacious lobby where huge no-smoking signs were posted. At the gates, a tight security cordon kept oglers out. Grim-faced whites belonging to the Maharishi's praetorian guards waited at the gate of the guest enclosure, checking the identity of each person entering the sanctum sanctorum where the holy man lived. Under a shamiana erected nearby, gigantic pots boiled all day long to cook the vegetarian community meals.
The Guru in deep thought: Consciousness as a 'holistic projection of the activity of all the neurons and all the cells'
And, pacing up and down the corridor, was the figure of Ramnath Goenka, 71, the old patriarch of the Express empire, the host to the Maharishi's world conference on Vedic science, and the newest convert to the cult of transcendental meditation. The conference, which is being attended only by those who have gone through the Maharishi's "TM-Sidhi" programme, is said to be the first of its kind.
The TM-Sidhi programme is an advanced course for those who have mastered the TM techniques. The Maharishi has 14,000 TM-Sidhi experts among his 2.5 million TM-trained disciples. The Sidhi experts, or Siddhas (derived from the Sanskrit word siddhi, meaning "achievement") are all urbane, taciturn young men and women in their 30s who have austere habits and who claim to practise levitation during the TM session.
Says Goenka, who began his levitation lessons last fortnight under the Maharishi: "I see these 3,000 people flying in the air every morning and evening right here, in Express Building. I don't require any other proof, nor do I have any doubt that I too will be able to fly in a month or so." However, even repeated requests could not persuade Goenka to throw open the flying sessions to the press.
Build-up: The conference on Vedic Science, for which the delegates are spending I over Rs 10 crore-including price of air I tickets-is a unique combination of hard-selling and spiritualism. The ostensible aim of the conference is to discuss the philosophy of the Vedas in the light of the findings of modern science. It is accompanied by an amazing build-up of a personality cult around the Maharishi. Clad in a silk dhoti. his salt-and-pepper beard hugging his chest, the holy man steps out of his heavily guarded living room only twice a day. As he hurries down the corridor with its plush wall-to-wall carpets, the guards form a ring around him, and the hallway resounds with a choric incantation of "Om". His path is strewn with broken petals of marigold. While walking down, he showers on onlookers smiles which may be variously read 'as amused, contemptuous and blank. The smile breaks out into an infectious, schoolboyish giggle as he settles down for a bath in the open, with two aides scrubbing his back.
He begins his sessions seated on a raised pedestal and often in full glare of video cameras. He utters "Jai Gurudev" and the crowd cheers him in Sanskrit with a pronounced Yankee twang. Their greetings mean: "I bow down to him who breaths out the Veda and creates the universe from it, remaining uninvolved. And who is the cherished shrine of pilgrimage for all the streams of knowledge."
Investment Blitz: On another plane, the conference is being used as a massive springboard for the Maharishi's globe-girdling empire (net worth: over Rs 100 crore) to launch a colossal investment blitz in India, putting to shade the achievements of so many other competing godmen. The immediate plan of the Maharishi, as Goenka admitted in a forthright interview, is to set up a "Vedic university" in Delhi at a mind-boggling cost of Rs 22 crore.
After overtures made to the private owners of a five-star hotel in New Delhi for outright purchase of the building drew a blank, the financial whiz-kids in the Maharishi outfit are now planning to acquire a plot of Delhi Development Authority land It will be fitted out with a residential complex for international students, a series of modern laboratories, computer facilities and, possibly, a landing strip for the half a dozen executive jets owned by the Maharishi European Research University (MERU) at Seelisburg.
The university will largely cater to the international crowd, and will even teach Ayurveda, the ancient medical science of India. "It'll be," as one of the Maharishi's aides says, "a synthesis of the Vedas and the computer, a unique mix of academic disciplines." Goenka echoes: "India is going to be put back on the map of world education after a few thousand years. The university will be respected just as Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard are respected."
The university is perhaps the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and the size of the actual investment planned in India may be five times more. The plan. about which the Maharishi's inner circle is tight-lipped, includes setting up TM centres in all state capitals, expanding the Maharishi Institute of Creative Intelligence at Rishikesh, and erecting a huge Vedic study centre on a recently acquired 150-acre plot of land at New Okhla industrial Development Area (NOIDA) in the trans-Jamuna belt. The Indian investment plans of the Maharishi work out as the single largest inward remittance ever made by any Indian earning abroad.
The Past: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, by far the biggest tycoon of the Karma-Cola circuit, comes from Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh. In the best tradition of Indian godmen, he too tries to fudge the details of his early years, or purbashram, as the jargon goes. But various sources in Allahabad identify him as one J.N. Srivastava, the eldest son of a local schoolteacher, who had a none-too-distinguished career as a B.Sc student in a local college.
Those who knew him aver that he graduated sometime in the early '40s, and calculate his age as between 60 and 65. Peter Wur-burton, his suave, Cambridge-educated press secretary, affirms: "The Maharishi read physics in Allahabad University." However, the only mark of scientific training that the Maharishi seems to carry is his capacity to rattle off, in measured bursts, jargon of physical and biological sciences during his lecture sessions. Example: "Awareness does not produce entropy. It does not produce disorder," or "What consciousness is, is a holistic projection of the activity of all the neurons and all the cells." A scientific abracadabra, in short.
During the Second World War, probably in 1943, Srivastava (or, the Maharishi) gave up his studies and moved up to Jyoti Math, north of Rishikesh, where His Divinity Swami Brahmananda Saraswati Bhagwan Jagadguru Shankarcharya ruled the roost. Brahmananda was attracted to Srivastava even though he was a Kayastha, and not a Brahmin. He made him his secretary in 1950.
Srivastava's skill in managing large funds and in selling packaged spiritualism was evident from the day he took over as Brahmananda's secretary. Reportedly by his single-handed efforts, an aura was created around Brahmananda and the myth went round the country's spiritual grapevines that the swami could produce wads of currency notes from nowhere.
For the assembled crowds at Jyoti Math, the newly-appointed secretary would put a strict ban on all kinds of offerings, including cash. This only deepened the mystery of the currency notes. However, Brahmananda died in 1954, and the grapevines were again agog with reports of a large sum disappearing from Jyoti Math's coffers, the contents of which were not known.
Greener Pastures: Srivastava gave up the subsequent succession struggle at Jyoti Math largely because he, being a Kayastha, would not even be considered for appointment as Shankaracharya. The young science graduate from Allahabad surfaced back as late as 1957, this time in full regalia as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and as the founder of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement. The Madras show was a damp squib and it forced the Maharishi to seek a greener pasture, this time in California.
For the Maharishi, the West was not won easily. In 1959, he held the first international conference on his method of spiritual exercise, by then known as transcendental meditation, at Sequoia National Park, USA. He wove back into India a couple of years later, and went back to Europe in 1963. By that time four lads from Liverpool had hit it big as the 'Beatles' and had sung their way into the heart of the long-haired freaked-out Woodstock generation.
The Maharishi met the Beatles around 1964. Soon afterwards, together with Ravi Shankar, the sitar player, a unique packaging formula for music, orientalism and exotic life-style emerged in Europe. It swept the USA in the wake of the Woodstock Festival, to which the Maharishi lent his magnificent presence.
However, unlike Ravi Shankar, whose popularity faded away with the end of the Beatles era, the Maharishi did not have to look back after Woodstock. In fact, he changed his slot quickly and assumed leadership of the new worldwide fad for "cleanliness" as opposed to the culture of the junkies, the pot-addicts and the pushers.
Transcendental Meditation: The '70s opened new horizons for the Maharishi's "science of creative intelligence", with Stanford University in California introducing a course in it. The basic idea is simple: by forcing the mind to concentrate on a mantra, the inherent disorderliness gives way to a relaxed condition, a state of "alert restfulness".
The keyword of TM is concentration. The reduction in the levels of stress, as brought about by TM, can also be achieved through hypnosis. Says Dhirendra Nath Ganguly, who practises Pavlovian hypnotherapy in Calcutta: "Meditation may be just another way of bringing the mind to a state where it can receive suggestions."
However, the US Government, reeling under an unprecedented wave of drug abuses, saw its only ray of hope in TM. It was prescribed for the US Army soon, and many states recommended it for prisoners. In 1970, the scientific folklore around TM began mushrooming for the first time, with the famous US journal. Science, publishing a paper on it. Largely through the Maharishi's spell-binding marketing skill.
TM acquired a unique respectability. Brian Josephson the British Nobel Prize-winning physicist, was drawn into the fold. Various universities began accepting PhD. theses on TM, and a number of state governments in the USA made official proclamations supporting "the science of creative intelligence".
The TM community today has 2.5 million members, not to speak of the 18,000 trained teachers. In the USA, a TM client normally pays 200 dollar (Rs 1,600) for a course of seven sessions. There are 2,000 centres spread over 140 countries in which TM lessons are given. For the advanced course, or the TM-Sidhi programme, the fees are much higher. Says Goenka: "I am sure they charge something around 7,000 US dollars (Rs 56,000) for a month-long Sidhi course". The Maharishi's avowed universalism is more evident in spiritual matters than in temporal.
In the "World Government of Creative Intelligence", inaugurated by him in 1976, the list of executive administrators is dominated by the Srivastava clan. There are five Srivastavas, including a woman, Kirti Srivastava, directly involved in the running of the world-wide TM empire. Inside sources hint that the Srivastavas are really the Maharishi's four nephews and a niece.
"This is a remarkable coincidence." said a retired Supreme Court judge who had arbitrated in a number of temple disputes, "because spiritual, attainment is normally not known to be a family trait." However, repeated queries regarding the identity of the Srivastavas elicited only one reply from the Maharishi's camp: "He does not like to discuss his past life".
Incredible Claims: The Maharishi claims that his Sidhi programme is a spin-off from the writings of the Hindu philosopher, Patanjali, which claim that supernatural feats, such as flying in the air, are within the realm of possibility. "It's not our fault if modern science cannot explain the TM-Sidhi programme. On the other hand, it's a failure of modern science if it cannot explain the programme", he repeats in his lectures.
Some of the claims made recently in New Delhi by the Maharishi's outfit are mind-boggling. Says Wurburton: "We have noticed that whenever a TM-Sidhi programme is launched anywhere in the world, a peaceful effect is felt on the political scene. And even when the square root of one per cent of the total population of a country practises TM-Sidhi, it can still have a profound impact on the society."
The Maharishi's aides claim that within three months of practising TM-Sidhi in the tiny state of Rhode Island there was a 44 per cent drop in "all the negative indicators". Wurburton announces the Maharishi's "desire" to keep a TM-Sidhi programme going round the year in India, and hopes that it will bring down the negative indicators in India too, "including the rising prices and the trouble in Assam".
He claims with a straight face that within weeks of starting the programme in New Delhi, the Chinese Government announced its intention to solve the border problem with India across the table. "Is that not a clear sign that the programme's effect is being felt", he asks with a quizzical smile. Then he emphatically adds that it is only the TM-Sidhi programme that remote-controlled Mrs Gandhi's "positive action" of convening a session of the National Integration Council.
The present Indian operation of the Maharishi is a certain indicator that the headquarters of his international operations will shift to India from Seelisburg where meru is currently situated by the side of the picturesque Lucerne Lake. Such a shift, the spiritual bliss apart, would attract at least one lakh foreigners to India every year, resulting in annual foreign exchange earning of about Rs 10 crore.
The well-known Indians who are currently being drawn towards him include, apart from Goenka, V.R. Krishna Iyer, a retired judge of Supreme Court, and a member of the Union Cabinet whose name is a closely-guarded secret. Says Iyer: "Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is going to bring infinite good to the country" Om Shanii Om.
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