THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS, February 5, 2008: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru to the Beatles who introduced the West to transcendental meditation, died Tuesday at his home in the Dutch town of Vlodrop, a spokesman said. He was thought to be 91 years old.
“He died peacefully at about 7 p.m.,” said Bob Roth, a spokesman for the Transcendental Meditation movement that the Maharishi founded. He said his death appeared to be due to “natural causes, his age.”
Once dismissed as hippie mysticism, the Hindu practice of mind control known as meditation gradually gained medical respectability.
Maharishi Yogi 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 and visited his ashram in India in 1968.
Donations and the $2,500 fee to learn TM financed the construction of Peace Palaces, or meditation centers, in dozens of cities around the world. It paid for hundreds of new schools in India. In 1971, Maharishi founded a university in Fairfield, Iowa, that taught meditation alongside the arts and sciences to 700 students and served organic vegetarian food in its cafeterias.
Maharishi was born Mahesh Srivastava in central India, reportedly on Jan. 12, 1917 — though he refused to confirm the date or discuss his early life. He studied physics at Allahabad University before becoming secretary to a well known Hindu holy man. After the death of his teacher, Maharishi went into a nomadic two-year retreat of silence in the Himalayan foothills of northern India.
With his background in physics, he brought his message to the West in a language mixing occult and science that became the buzz of college campuses. He described TM as “the unified field of all the laws of nature.” But aides say Maharishi became disillusioned that TM had become identified with the counterculture.
In 1990 he moved onto the wooded grounds of a monastery in Vlodrop, about 125 miles southeast of Amsterdam. In fragile health, he secluded himself in two rooms of the wooden pavilion he built on the compound, studying sanskrit and scripture until his passing.