Maharishi DIES!

[B]

newspostindia.com/report-34097

Mahesh Yogi Steps Down As Head Of TM Empire
Tuesday 29th of January 2008

"Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the guru most responsible for making meditation a household word in the world, has stepped down this month as the head of the global TM organisation he founded in 1958.

Ken Chwkwin, a media relations official in Maharishi's organisation based in Iowa, confirmed the news to IANS.

The Jabalpur born 91-year-old guru had announced his retirement Jan 11. He normally makes major announcements every year around that time after going into silence for a week or so in the New Year. Jan 12 is his birthday.

Maharishi, who was a jet-setting guru once, had been withdrawing himself from public life for the past many years. In the recent past, he only spoke to the press and others through video conferencing.

His plans now include working on a commentary of the Vedas.

A Lebanese doctor, 'Maharaja Nader Raam', a name given to him by the Maharishi, will take over the TM organisation, according to reports.

Many associate the guru's name with the Beatles who stayed with him in his Rishikesh ashram in the 1960s, but the Maharishi would go down in history as the man who brought meditation to the West, making it available irrespective of colour, creed, nationality or religion.

He simplified meditation and welcomed its validation through scientific research. He also trained hundreds of teachers who taught it through structured courses to millions.

TM involves using a monosyllabic mantra without concentrating on it. It helps the mind to quieten down, in turn giving deep rest to the body.

Maharishi later introduced TM-Sidhis and held yogic flying demonstrations, which were not convincing. His claims that a large percentage of population meditating will usher in peace and harmony in a country or the world also remain unproved.

A votary of all things Vedic, the Maharishi also promoted ayurveda, traditional form of Indian medicine, jyotish or astrology and vastu shastra, the ancient Indian science of architecture. He set up educational institutions including the Maharishi University of Management in Iowa, USA, which now has over 1,000 students.

Not many would know that Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Art of Living founder, and Deepak Chopra, author and New Age guru, were under his tutelage before they branched out on their own.

Maharishi himself was a disciple of the Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath, near Badrinath in the Himalayas. He avowedly belongs to the Yoga-Vedanta or Sanatan Hindu Dharma tradition."

see also:
www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20080129/maharishi-meditates/

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news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080205/ap_on_re_eu/obit_maharishi_mahesh_yogi

By MIKE CORDER, Associated Press Writer
32 minutes ago

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi dies

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - 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 that Maharishi taught, called 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 visited his ashram in India in 1968, although he had a famous falling out with the rock stars when he discovered them using drugs at his Himalayan retreat.

With the help of celebrity endorsements, Maharishi — a Hindi-language title for Great Seer — parlayed his interpretations of ancient scripture into a multi-million-dollar global empire.

After 50 years of teaching, Maharishi turned to larger themes, with grand designs to harness the power of group meditation to create world peace and to mobilize his devotees to banish poverty from the earth.

Maharishi's roster of famous meditators ran from The Rolling Stones to Clint Eastwood and new age preacher Deepak Chopra.

Director David Lynch, creator of dark and violent films, lectured at college campuses about the "ocean of tranquility" he found in more than 30 years of practicing transcendental meditation.

Some 5 million people devoted 20 minutes every morning and evening reciting a simple sound, or mantra, and delving into their consciousness.

"Don't fight darkness. Bring the light, and darkness will disappear," Maharishi said in a 2006 interview, repeating one of his own mantras.

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.

Supporters pointed to hundreds of scientific studies showing that meditation reduces stress, lowers blood pressure, improves concentration and raises results for students and businessmen.

Skeptics ridiculed his plan to raise $10 trillion to end poverty by sponsoring organic farming in the world's poorest countries. They scoffed at his notion that meditation groups, acting like psychic shock troops, can end conflict.

"To resolve problems through negotiation is a very childish approach," he said.

In 1986, two groups founded by his organization were sued in the U.S. by former disciples who accused it of fraud, negligence and intentionally inflicting emotional damage. A jury, however, refused to award punitive damages.

Over the years, Maharishi also was accused of fraud by former pupils who claim he failed to teach them to fly. "Yogic flying," showcased as the ultimate level of transcendence, was never witnessed as anything more than TM followers sitting in the cross-legged lotus position and bouncing across spongy mats.

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 that mixed the occult and science that became the buzz of college campuses. He described TM as "the unified field of all the laws of nature."

Maharishi's trademark flowing beard and long, graying hair appeared on the cover of the leading news magazines of the day.

But aides say Maharishi became disillusioned that TM had become identified with the counterculture, and he spent more time at his ashram in Rishikesh in the Himalayan foothills to run his global affairs.

In 1990 he moved onto the wooded grounds of a historic Franciscan monastery in the southern Dutch village of Vlodrop, about 125 miles southeast of Amsterdam.

Concerned about his fragile health, he secluded himself in two rooms of the wooden pavilion he built on the compound, speaking only by video to aides around the world and even to his closest advisers in the same building.

John Hagelin, a theoretical physicist who ran for the U.S. presidency three times on the Maharishi-backed Natural Law Party, said that from the Dutch location Maharishi had daylong access to followers in India, Europe and the Americas.

"He runs several shifts of us into the ground," said Hagelin, Maharishi's closest aid, speaking in Vlodrop about his then-89-year-old mentor. "He is a fountainhead of innovation and new ideas — far too many than you can ever follow up."

___

Wow. Everybody plays "Across the Universe" with the 'Jai guru deva om" in it, and it roughly
translates: "Hail guru Dev!" and then the OM - and then the Maharishi goes to meet
his teacher "guru Dev" on the other side!

[MikeNL]

NOOOO!!! everyone keeps dying

stop dying everyone, just come back .. great loss

[The Deceptionist]

still - he lived to a ripe old age, and accomplished much..

do you think he knew when he stepped down as head of TM the other week?