Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: Teacher, Scientist, Controversialist

On a February afternoon in 1968, a small, bearded Indian man in white silk robes sat cross-legged on a deerskin at the front of a modest lecture hall in Rishikesh, a dusty pilgrimage town wedged between the Ganges and the Himalayan foothills. Around him, on thin mattresses and cushions, sat four of the most famous people on the planet. John Lennon had a notebook open on his lap. Paul McCartney looked skeptical but attentive. George Harrison, who had engineered the whole expedition, gazed at the teacher with something approaching reverence. Ringo Starr, by his own later admission, was mostly thinking about the food situation.

Within days, photographers and journalists from three continents would descend on the ashram. TIME, Newsweek, and the BBC all sent correspondents. Suddenly, a meditation technique that had been quietly spreading through drawing rooms and community halls for a decade was front-page news around the world. The teacher at the center of it all — Maharishi Mahesh Yogi — had been working toward exactly this kind of moment for years. Whether it was the best thing that ever happened to him or the beginning of his undoing depends very much on who you ask.

Born Mahesh Prasad Varma

The man who would remake himself as “Maharishi” was born Mahesh Prasad Varma, almost certainly in 1918, though he was not especially forthcoming about dates. His birthplace was Jabalpur, a railway and military town in what was then the Central Provinces of British India — present-day Madhya Pradesh. His family belonged to the Kayastha caste, a literate, administrative class with a long tradition of government service and education. His father, Ram Prasad Varma, worked as a revenue official.

Details of his childhood are sparse and largely come from hagiographic sources within the TM organization. What is established is that the young Mahesh excelled academically, eventually enrolling at Allahabad University — one of India’s most prestigious institutions — where he earned a degree in physics in 1942. The physics background would prove important later. Throughout his career, Maharishi displayed an unusual comfort with scientific vocabulary and concepts. His critics called it window dressing. His supporters called it genuine interdisciplinary thinking. Either way, it distinguished him from nearly every other Indian spiritual teacher of his generation.

Thirteen Years with Guru Dev

Sometime around 1941 — the chronology is disputed — Mahesh Prasad Varma traveled to Jyotir Math, one of the four cardinal monasteries established by Adi Shankara in the eighth century, high in the Himalayas near Badrinath. There he met Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, known to his followers as Guru Dev, who had recently been installed as the Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math after the seat had been vacant for over 150 years.

By all accounts, the meeting was transformative. Mahesh became Brahmananda Saraswati’s personal secretary and devoted disciple. He remained in that role for approximately thirteen years, until Guru Dev’s death on May 20, 1953. During this period, Mahesh lived an austere monastic life, handling correspondence, managing visitors, and — crucially — absorbing his teacher’s interpretations of Advaita Vedanta and the practical meditation techniques rooted in the Shankaracharya tradition.

Guru Dev’s death created an immediate succession crisis at Jyotir Math. Mahesh was not in the running; as a Kayastha, he lacked the Brahmin caste status required for the Shankaracharya title. This exclusion would haunt the TM movement for decades. Orthodox Shankaracharya institutions later distanced themselves from Maharishi, claiming he had no authority to teach or represent the tradition. Maharishi, for his part, always maintained that Guru Dev had given him a specific mission: bring the technique of meditation to ordinary people, householders, not just monks.

After a period of seclusion — reportedly two years in the caves of Uttar Kashi, though this too is difficult to verify independently — Mahesh Prasad Varma reemerged as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and began to teach.

From Madras to the World

His first public lectures took place in the southern Indian state of Kerala in 1955, with a more substantial series following in Madras (now Chennai) later that year. The response was encouraging enough that Maharishi formalized his approach. On January 1, 1958, he officially inaugurated the Spiritual Regeneration Movement in Madras, declaring his intention to “spiritually regenerate” the entire world. The name was grandiose. The plan was even more so. He would circle the globe, teaching Transcendental Meditation — a simple, mantra-based technique that he said required no religious belief, no lifestyle changes, and only twenty minutes twice a day.

He moved fast. By 1959, Maharishi had embarked on his first world tour, lecturing in Rangoon, Hong Kong, Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and London. He established centers and trained the first wave of Western TM teachers. He was tireless, charismatic in a soft-spoken way, and possessed of an unexpectedly shrewd media instinct. He smiled constantly. He carried flowers. He giggled — a high-pitched, infectious sound that became his trademark and that journalists found either endearing or infuriating.

The early 1960s saw steady, unglamorous growth. TM centers opened in major Western cities. Maharishi gave hundreds of lectures, appeared on television, and began articulating what he called the Science of Creative Intelligence — an attempt to explain meditation’s effects using the language of physics and neuroscience rather than Hinduism. He never abandoned the Vedic framework, but he deliberately foregrounded the experiential and measurable aspects. This was a strategic choice that set TM apart from every other Eastern practice arriving in the West during those years. Hare Krishnas chanted on street corners. Zen Buddhism appealed to the literary counterculture. Maharishi went after the mainstream. He wore suits for television appearances. He talked about stress reduction and increased productivity.

The Celebrity Eruption

Then the sixties happened.

In August 1967, all four Beatles attended a lecture by Maharishi at the Hilton Hotel in London. George Harrison had already been exploring Indian music and philosophy for two years, ever since meeting Ravi Shankar. Harrison persuaded the others to attend. Impressed, they followed Maharishi to a ten-day retreat in Bangor, Wales, that same weekend. It was there, on August 27, that they received the news of manager Brian Epstein’s death. Maharishi counseled them to find solace in meditation. The bond was sealed — at least temporarily.

Through late 1967 and into 1968, the Beatles’ association with Maharishi generated a tidal wave of publicity. The Beach Boys’ Mike Love was also a devoted practitioner and helped spread TM in California. Mia Farrow, Donovan, the jazz musician Paul Horn, and a revolving cast of actors, musicians, and socialites turned up at Maharishi’s lectures and retreats. The counterculture, already primed to embrace Eastern mysticism, went wild.

The apex — and the breaking point — came with the Rishikesh retreat of February to April 1968. The Beatles, their wives and girlfriends, Donovan, the Beach Boys’ Mike Love, Mia Farrow and her sister Prudence, and some sixty other Westerners gathered at Maharishi’s ashram above the Ganges for an advanced meditation course. The setting was idyllic. The songwriting output was extraordinary — many of the songs that would appear on the White Album were composed or sketched in Rishikesh, including “Dear Prudence,” “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” and the bulk of Harrison’s contributions. Paul Horn recorded his landmark album Inside in the Taj Mahal, having been inspired by the silence practices at the ashram.

But the retreat ended badly. Ringo left after ten days, citing the food and homesickness. Paul departed after about a month. John and George stayed longer but left abruptly in mid-March amid swirling rumors. The most damaging allegation — that Maharishi had made sexual advances toward Mia Farrow or another female attendee — was never substantiated. Lennon initially wrote the scathing “Sexy Sadie” (originally titled with Maharishi’s name) in response, but years later publicly retracted the accusation. In a 1970 interview, he said: “I don’t know what happened. We made a mistake.” Harrison remained broadly sympathetic to Maharishi for the rest of his life and continued practicing TM.

The Rishikesh fallout dominated headlines and cast a shadow, but it did not destroy the movement. If anything, the sheer volume of publicity — even the negative kind — ensured that millions of people who had never heard of Transcendental Meditation now knew the name.

The Science of Creative Intelligence

Maharishi’s response to the post-Beatles turbulence was characteristically strategic: he doubled down on science. In the early 1970s, he formalized the Science of Creative Intelligence (SCI) as an academic discipline and began pushing for research into TM’s physiological and psychological effects.

The timing was fortunate. Robert Keith Wallace, a young American physiologist, had completed his doctoral research at UCLA on the physiology of TM, publishing a landmark paper in the journal Science in 1970 and a follow-up in Scientific American in 1972. Wallace’s work documented what he termed a “wakeful hypometabolic physiologic state” — decreased oxygen consumption, lowered heart rate, increased skin resistance — during TM practice. The papers gave the movement something it desperately needed: peer-reviewed credibility.

Maharishi moved quickly to institutionalize this scientific turn. In 1973, he founded Maharishi International University (MIU) in Fairfield, Iowa — a fully accredited institution offering undergraduate and graduate degrees with TM and SCI integrated into every curriculum. Fairfield, a small town of about 10,000 in southeast Iowa, would gradually become the de facto world capital of the TM movement, attracting thousands of practitioners who settled there permanently. The cultural collision between rural Iowa and robed meditators produced decades of local tension and eventual, grudging coexistence. By the 2000s, Fairfield had become one of the most unusual small towns in America — home to organic restaurants, Vedic architecture, an entrepreneurial tech community, and the world’s largest meditation domes, each capable of seating nearly two thousand people.

Through the 1970s, TM’s institutional infrastructure grew rapidly. Teacher training courses produced thousands of certified instructors worldwide. National organizations were established in over a hundred countries. Maharishi launched a series of “World Plan” initiatives, each more ambitious than the last, with the stated goal of establishing one TM teacher for every thousand people on Earth.

The Maharishi Effect and Yogic Flying

In the mid-1970s, Maharishi introduced a concept that would become one of his most celebrated and most ridiculed ideas: the Maharishi Effect. The claim was straightforward in principle and staggering in implication. If one percent of a population practiced TM, Maharishi said, measurable improvements in quality of life — reduced crime, fewer accidents, lower hospital admissions — would follow. For the advanced TM-Sidhi program, introduced in 1976, the threshold was said to be even lower: the square root of one percent.

The TM organization funded and published a series of studies claiming to demonstrate the Maharishi Effect in cities and during periods of group meditation. Some of these studies appeared in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Conflict Resolution and Social Indicators Research. Critics — and there were many — challenged the methodology, the statistical controls, the selection of data, and the fact that much of the research was conducted by TM-affiliated scientists. The sociologist Barry Markovsky published a detailed critique in 1992 arguing that the claimed effects were artifacts of poor experimental design. The debate was never resolved to anyone’s full satisfaction and remains one of the most contentious topics in the TM literature.

Even more controversial was the TM-Sidhi program itself, particularly its centerpiece: “yogic flying.” Practitioners of the TM-Sidhi technique, which Maharishi derived from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, claimed to experience stages of levitation during meditation, beginning with a “hopping” phase. The TM organization held public demonstrations and even “yogic flying competitions” in the 1980s and 1990s. Photographs invariably showed meditators cross-legged on foam mattresses, caught mid-bounce. Skeptics were not impressed. The image of adults bouncing on cushions became an easy target for ridicule and damaged the movement’s carefully cultivated scientific image. Even sympathetic commentators found it difficult to defend. Yet the organization never backed away from the program, insisting that the hopping was merely a preliminary stage and that full levitation would eventually follow.

Money, Structure, and Power

By the 1980s, the TM movement had become a substantial global enterprise — and this, too, drew scrutiny. The cost of learning TM rose steadily over the decades. What had once been a modest fee — sometimes as little as a week’s salary, in Maharishi’s original formulation — climbed to several hundred dollars by the 1980s and eventually to $1,500 or more for the standard course in the United States. The TM-Sidhi program cost additional thousands. Critics accused the organization of pricing a supposedly universal technique beyond the reach of ordinary people. The movement responded that fees funded teacher training, research, and global infrastructure, and that scholarships were available.

The organizational structure was hierarchical and, by most accounts, intensely centralized around Maharishi himself. He made all significant decisions, from curriculum at MIU to architectural standards for TM buildings (which he dictated should follow Maharishi Sthapatya Veda, a system of Vedic architecture involving specific orientations and proportions). Former insiders described a culture of deference bordering on obsequiousness. Maharishi’s word was final. He communicated via closed-circuit television from the 1980s onward, addressing followers and administrators from his private quarters rather than in person. This remoteness fed suspicion among outsiders and frustration among some long-serving devotees.

A number of former TM teachers and administrators left the organization over the years and published critical accounts. Some described authoritarian management practices, intellectual insularity, and a tendency to suppress internal dissent. Others, however, spoke of genuine personal transformation and insisted that the organization, for all its flaws, had done more to bring meditation to the Western mainstream than any comparable institution.

Maharishi’s relationship with governments was another source of controversy. In the 1990s, he pursued an aggressive campaign to establish TM programs in national education systems, militaries, and prisons. Some governments — notably in Latin America and parts of Southeast Asia — engaged with these proposals. In Mozambique and several other countries, TM was briefly integrated into school curricula. In the United States, efforts to introduce TM in public schools ran into Establishment Clause challenges. A 1977 federal court ruling in Malnak v. Yogi found that the SCI/TM program, as taught in New Jersey public schools, constituted religious instruction and violated the First Amendment. The ruling was a significant legal setback, though the TM organization disputed the characterization and continued to advocate for TM in educational settings under different frameworks.

The Global Country of World Peace

In his final decade, Maharishi’s ambitions grew more eccentric — or more visionary, depending on one’s perspective. In 2000, he announced the formation of the Global Country of World Peace, a “country without borders” dedicated to promoting peace through meditation. He appointed a “king,” Maharaja Nader Raam (Dr. Tony Nader, a Lebanese-born neuroscientist who had been one of Maharishi’s closest collaborators). The Global Country issued its own currency, stamps, and passports — none recognized by any sovereign state. It was part publicity stunt, part organizational restructuring, part genuine expression of Maharishi’s increasingly totalizing worldview.

Around the same time, Maharishi moved his base of operations from India to the Netherlands, settling in a former Franciscan monastery in the village of Vlodrop, near the German border. He called it the Capital of the Global Country of World Peace. From Vlodrop, he continued to direct the worldwide TM organization via video link, issuing directives on everything from foreign policy proposals (he offered, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to send groups of yogic flyers to conflict zones) to building codes for TM communities.

His health declined through the 2000s. He retreated further from public view. In January 2008, Maharishi announced his retirement from all administrative responsibilities, declaring that he would spend his remaining time in silence. He died on February 5, 2008, in Vlodrop, at what was generally reported as the age of ninety-one. His body was flown to India and cremated on the banks of the Ganges in Allahabad (now Prayagraj), with full Vedic rites and Indian government honors. Thousands attended. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh issued a statement praising him as “a great son of India.”

A Divided Legacy

Assessing Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s legacy requires holding multiple truths simultaneously, which is not comfortable work.

On one side of the ledger: he introduced millions of people to meditation. Before Maharishi, meditation in the Western imagination was something monks did in mountaintop monasteries. By the time of his death, it was something office workers did during lunch breaks. That shift did not happen solely because of him — Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness-based stress reduction, the Zen tradition, Vipassana teachers like S.N. Goenka all played roles — but Maharishi was the first to make the case at scale that meditation was a practical, everyday technique with measurable benefits. The body of research on TM, whatever its methodological disputes, helped establish the broader field of meditation science. When Harvard researchers began studying the relaxation response in the 1970s, they were building, in part, on the questions Maharishi’s movement had raised.

He built institutions that endured. Maharishi International University, renamed Maharishi University of Management and then back to Maharishi International University, continues to operate as a fully accredited institution in Fairfield, Iowa. The David Lynch Foundation, established by the filmmaker in 2005, has introduced TM to hundreds of thousands of at-risk students, veterans, and prisoners. Lynch credits Maharishi as the single most important influence on his creative life. The TM organization maintains centers in dozens of countries.

On the other side: the movement’s insularity, its escalating costs, its resistance to external scrutiny, and its sometimes grandiose claims alienated many who might otherwise have been sympathetic. The yogic flying program became a punchline. The Maharishi Effect studies remain, at best, unpersuasive to mainstream social science. The organizational culture around Maharishi was, by numerous accounts, authoritarian. And the fundamental question of whether TM is meaningfully different from other mantra-based meditation techniques — or whether it simply benefited from superior marketing and institutional support — has never been satisfactorily answered. Herbert Benson, the Harvard cardiologist who studied TM practitioners in the early 1970s, famously concluded that TM produced the same “relaxation response” as other meditative practices and could be replicated without a mantra, a fee, or an organization. The TM movement disputed his findings vigorously.

There is, too, the matter of Maharishi’s personal conduct. He lived simply in some respects — vegetarian, celibate by all credible accounts, sleeping little — but wielded enormous unchecked power over a global organization with substantial financial resources. The lack of transparency, the personality cult, and the spiritual authoritarianism are not features unique to the TM movement, but they are real, and they caused real harm to people who entrusted their spiritual lives to the organization and later felt deceived or manipulated.

Perhaps the most honest assessment is also the least satisfying. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was a man of genuine spiritual attainment and considerable organizational genius who built something larger than himself and then could not resist trying to control every aspect of it. He brought meditation to the world. He also built a movement that often seemed more interested in its own perpetuation than in the liberation it promised. These two facts do not cancel each other out. They coexist, awkwardly, the way they do in most human lives — just on a much larger scale.

When David Lynch was asked in 2014 what Maharishi would want people to remember, he paused for a long time. “He’d want them to sit down and close their eyes,” Lynch said. “Twice a day. Twenty minutes. That’s it. Everything else was just the delivery mechanism.”

It may be the most generous interpretation available. It may also be the truest.