Maharishi Mahesh Yogi PassesMaharishi Mahesh Yogi, the controversial Indian guru–briefly adopted by the Beatles–who introduced Transcendental Meditation to the West, died Feb 6, 2008 in the Netherlands. He was in his 90s.
“The Maharishi was both an entrepreneur and a monk, a spiritual man who sought a world stage from which to espouse the joys of inner happiness. His critics called his organization a cult business enterprise. And in the press, in the 1960s and ’70s, he was often dismissed as a hippie mystic, the “Giggling Guru,” recognizable in the familiar image of him laughing, sitting cross-legged in a lotus position on a deerskin, wearing a white silk dhoti with a garland of flowers around his neck beneath an oily, scraggly beard.”
Read the full obituary in the NYTimes.
in History.
The Maharisi Mahesh Yogi once spoke, in a film about Yoga, that the Western mind was not ready for Eastern Philisophical concepts (c.1966-69) and that to overcome their natural tendency to reject such notions from a Judeo-Christian based belief system, that the introduction of Yoga as a missionary outreach for Hindu could eventually transition an acceptance of Hindi concepts in an American culture. He personally established the beginnings of Weastern Style Yoga during the era of the Beatles as a missionary outreach to spread Hindu across the this Nation as the rest of the world.