Meditation guru who taught Beatles 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.\n“He died peacefully at about 7 p.m.,” said Bob Roth, a spokesman for the Transcendental Meditation movement that Maharishi founded. He said his death appeared to be due to “natural causes, his age.”\nOnce dismissed as hippie mysticism, the Hindu practice of transcendental meditation gradually gained medical respectability.\nHe began teaching Transcendental Meditation 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.\nMaharishi retreated last month into silence at his home on the grounds of a former Franciscan monastery, saying he wanted to dedicate his remaining days to studying the ancient Indian texts that underpin his movement.\n“He had been saying he had done what he set out to do,” Roth said late Tuesday.\nWith the help of celebrity endorsements, Maharishi – a Hindi word for “Great Seer” – parlayed his interpretations of ancient scripture into a multi-million-dollar global empire. His roster of famous meditators ran from Mike Love of the Beach Boys to Clint Eastwood and Deepak Chopra, a new age preacher.\nAfter 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.\nHis rise to fame came with his association with the Beatles, who first attended one of his lectures in August 1967 in Wales as they looked for a way of attaining higher consciousness in the aftermath of that year’s Summer of Love.\nThe Beatles were so charmed by the self-effacing guru that they agreed to stay with him at his India compound, starting in February 1968, an astonishing choice for what was then the world’s most celebrated music group.\nHis followers say that some 5 million people devote 20 minutes every morning and evening reciting a simple sound, or mantra, and delving into their consciousness.\n“Don’t fight darkness. Bring the light, and darkness will disappear,” Maharishi said in a 2006 interview, repeating one of his own mantras.\nDonations and the $2,500 fee to learn transcendental meditation 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.\nIn 1974, 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.\nIn 2001, his followers founded Maharishi Vedic City, a town of about 200 people a few miles north of Fairfield. The city requires the construction of buildings according to design principles set by Maharishi for harmony with nature.\nMaharishi was born Mahesh Srivastava in central India, reportedly on Jan. 12, 1917 – though he refused to confirm the date or discuss his early life.\nHe studied physics at Allahabad University before becoming secretary to a well known Hindu holy man. After the death of his teacher, Maharishi brought his message to the West in a language that mixed the occult and science that became the buzz of college campuses.\nIn 1990 he moved onto the wooded grounds of a monastery in Vlodrop, about 125 miles southeast of Amsterdam.