First Indian mystic to give jet-set-go mantra

Gautam Siddharth / TNN / Feb 7, 2008, 10:10 IST

Text Size

Small
Medium
Large

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had touched the lives of the common people and taken it a notch closer to satisfying their craving - a genuine hunger for a mystical experience.

First Indian mystic to give jet-set-go mantra

doweshowbellyad=0;

A file photo of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi with actor Mia Farrow at JFK airport in New York in 1968 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had touched the lives of the common people and taken it a notch closer to satisfying their craving - a genuine hunger for a mystical experience. Not given to hyperbole, actor-turned-MP Vinod Khanna, who first met the yogi in 1973, says, "He did his bit to make people happier than they were, to teach them about their silent mind."
Thousands of Transcendental Meditation (TM) centres had sprung up across the world, run by tens of thousands of teachers, and everywhere he went, the Great White Beard was followed by awe-struck, ecstatic people who could easily be called "fans" than "devotees'.

The fact that these included, for a short period at least, even the Beatles, surely helped.
The flying yogi, as the Maharishi was often called - not because he could levitate, an exercise he tried to worldwide publicity in the ‘80s and failed, but because he was the first of the Indian mystics to give the mantra "Jet-set-go" - was airborne a good percentage of his time: From US to Europe and from India to South America.
At Courchevel, a ski resort in the French Alps, which doubled as a training centre, he kept a two-seater helicopter to save time driving up and down the mountains. He had a 184-acre base in Fairfield, Iowa, that worked as his international headquarters, and his conglomerate's assets are today valued at $300 million.

And yet, none of this would have been possible if his birth, or rather his caste, had not intervened: As Bal Brahmachari, and the foremost disciple of the Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math Swami Brahmanand Saraswati, he couldn't step into his guru's sandals because he wasn't a Brahmin; being born in a Kayastha tax official's family in Jabalpur (the town that sent another luminary to the west, Osho Rajneesh) in 1917. He never revealed anything about his past: "I am a monk. I am not expected to remember my past," was his stock response.

Many in India criticized Mahesh Yogi for "appropriating" the title of Maharishi, which traditionally has a more esoteric resonance in the Hindu schema.
But that's a hidebound interpretation of the high office: There's no doubt that Mahesh Yogi saw the need of meditation in the west, saw the reason to separate it from the common perception there that meditation took one to renunciation, and instead presented it as something that could be added to an active life that enhanced the qualities of human living.
As a matter of fact, it's widely believed that it was after he found himself at odds with the ashram that he reinvented himself and became a Maharishi.
Paul Mason, a critic who wrote his autobiography, "The Maharishi: The Biography of the Man Who Gave Transcendental Meditation to the World", writes, "He cobbled together his teaching after his master (Brahmanand Saraswati) died; he wanted to be seen as a messiah."
That fact very nearly, and inversely, came true: Outside a TV studio in Los Angeles, some Christian fundamentalists once greeted him with placards: ‘Jesus is the Lord, Not Maharishi'.
Stepping into his stretch limousine outside Beverly Wilshire Hotel, the Gurudeva smirked, "We are not a religion."
Mahesh Yogi's disciple, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, says, "He laid the foundation for a new world based on the knowledge of Vedas and spirituality. There was none like him and none shall ever be." Millions of TM practitioners worldwide seeking a higher state of consciousness would readily agree.

End of Article