The Observer, Sunday 14 December 2008
The guru who introduced Transcendental Meditation to the west died on
5 February aged 91. He's remembered by the renowned spiritual writer,
a close friend for more than 20 years Deepak Chopra
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi started out as one kind of cultural curiosity -
a lone Hindu monk who aimed to teach meditation to the world - and
ended up as a different kind of cultural curiosity: the one-time guru
to the Beatles. He came remarkably close to fulfilling his original
intent. Millions of westerners learned Transcendental Meditation
(TM), and a new word, 'mantra', was added to the English language. He
survived long after the departure of the Fab Four, who decamped
almost as soon as they sniffed the thin air of Maharishi's Himalayan
retreat (excluding George Harrison, who turned into a genuine seeker
and quiet ally).
Maharishi owed his survival to two things. He was sincerely a guru,
a 'dispeller of darkness', who had the good of the world at heart,
despite the wags who turned TM into the McDonald's of meditation and
the caricatures that morphed his white-bearded image into a pop
cliché. Sincerity would have served him little if Maharishi hadn't
also been a gifted teacher of India's ancient tradition of Vedanta.
Many visitors who came to gawk went away moved by both qualities.
Beginning in the mid-Eighties, I had the opportunity to know
Maharishi as a friend. Whenever my medical practice permitted, I
joined his inner circle. It wasn't necessary to be reverent in his
presence. He made a point of not being seen as a religious figure but
as a teacher of consciousness. Of the many memories I could offer,
here is the most intense ... Maharishi had fallen mysteriously and
gravely ill on a visit to India in 1991. My father, a prominent
cardiologist in New Delhi, ordered him to be rushed to England for
emergency care. Soon, I was standing outside the London Heart
Hospital, watching an ambulance navigate the snarled traffic, sirens
wailing.
Just before it arrived on the hospital's doorstep, one of the
accompanying doctors ran up with the news that Maharishi had suddenly
died. I rushed to the ambulance, picking up Maharishi's body - he was
frail and light by this time - and carrying him in my arms through
London traffic.
I laid him on the floor inside the hospital's doors and called for a
cardio assist. Within minutes he was revived and rushed to intensive
care on a respirator and fitted with a pacemaker that took over his
heartbeat.
I became his primary caretaker during this crisis, tending to him
personally at a private home outside London. It quickly became
apparent that he was totally indifferent to his illness, and there
was an astonishingly rapid recovery. The hospital expected lasting
health problems, but there were apparently none. Within a few months
Maharishi was back to his round-the-clock schedule - he rarely slept
more than three or four hours a night. When I approached him one day
to remind him to take his medications, he gave me a penetrating look.
In it I read a message: 'Do you really think I am this body?' For me,
that was a startling moment, a clue about what higher consciousness
may actually be like.
As he saw himself, Maharishi knew that he had come tantalisingly
close to changing the world, as close as any non-politician can who
doesn't wage war. He held that humanity could be saved from
destruction only by raising collective consciousness. In that sense
he was the first person to talk about tipping points and critical
mass. If enough people meditated and turned into peaceful citizens of
the world, Maharishi believed, walls of ignorance and hatred would
fall as decisively as the Berlin Wall. This was his core teaching in
the post-Beatles phase of his long career before he died peacefully
in seclusion in Holland, at the age of about 91, his following much
shrunken, his optimism still intact.
--
Here's the article with a picture you've probably only seen
a million times:
http://tinyurl.com/6f5wc9
Or:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/dec/14/deepak-chopra-remembers-
maharishi-mahesh-yogi
