Legacy MattersMaharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru to the Beatles, dead at 91.
From the Telegraph obituary
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who died on Tuesday, probably aged 91, had a profound influence on the Beatles' late career and repackaged ancient Hindu methods of transcendental meditation; TM, as it was known, was aimed at enabling western disciples to achieve a blissful oneness with the infinite in the still depths of the self - at the cost of minimum inconvenience.
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The Maharishi pursued his mission in India until 1958, when he conceived "the idea of the regeneration of the whole world through meditation". If one per cent of the world's community practised it, he reasoned, the flow of good vibrations would overwhelm mankind's natural urge to violence.
His claim that it was not necessary to pursue a life of monastic asceticism to attain enlightenment, and that, through TM, practitioners could enjoy "the positive experience of Heavenly Bliss" during their lifetimes, proved immediately attractive to westerners. In 1959 the Maharishi established a base in Hollywood, where he founded the Spiritual Regeneration Movement and set about marketing TM worldwide as the "Science of Creative Intelligence"
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Early on in his mission the Maharishi began to show messianic tendencies, dismissing as obsolete virtually every other means of developing self-awareness and claiming that all the wisdom of the ages was distilled in TM. During the 1970s he came up with yogic flying, the ultimate transcendental bliss that causes men and women to levitate.