From: udcrusd@meaddata.com (Sylvia D'Cruz)
Subject: Report: A holey meeting with the Maharishi
Organization: Mead Data Central, Dayton OH
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1992 13:49:47 GMT
Distribution: soc.culture.indian

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                   Copyright 1992 Newspaper Publishing PLC
                                The Independent

                             April  5, 1992, Sunday

Notebook: A holey meeting with the Maharishi

By MICHAEL FATHERS

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    I WAS embarrassed. Not a light shade of pink, but deep vermilion. After six
hours of travelling, by plane, train, bus, taxi and hitch-hiking, I was about to
be ushered into the presence of His Holiness (self-styled) Maharishi Mahesh
Yogi, founder of the Natural Law Party, and I had holes in my socks.

    It was around nine o'clock in the evening. We were at the Maharishi's
European Continental Capital of the Age of Enlightenment, his current home, a
former friary in a forest at the most south-easterly corner of The
Netherlands, some 100 metres from the German frontier. The devotee who was to
announce me, a flautist from America, waited as I took off my shoes in an
ante-room. Oh my God! It can't be. Three large holes, glowing like stars in the
firmament. The socks being black, my white toes shone through without any
thought for my feelings.

    ''Don't worry, it doesn't matter,'' the flautist's wife said as she realised
my anxiety. The flautist, with no holes in his socks, was deciding how I should
be introduced when the summons came from the Maharishi's secretary. I was led to
His Holiness's presence via a long corridor painted in saffron and gold leaf and
lined with rich green plastic shrubs and flowers. On the walls hung gold-framed
charts, like family trees, of scientific and Vedic formulae. The double doors at
the end of the corridor opened and I stepped into the full glare of television
lights.

    There was not one Maharishi but at least three, looking at me quizzically
from large screens around the room. There was an audience, consisting of some 30
followers, set back from the guru, watching my entrance too. Then my face
appeared on the television screens. I felt intimidated and dazed, and could
think only of my damn socks. The Maharishi told his attendants to move the table
and chair that I was to occupy closer to him. The flautist said afterwards that
I had been given special treatment.

    Dressed in a white cotton dhoti, the Maharishi sat with his legs crossed in
the lotus position on a saffron-coloured sofa surrounded by banks of pink and
yellow flowers (plastic again). He played with a garland of white jasmin hanging
from his neck as he watched me through half-closed watery eyes and smiled. Gold
tinsel garlands and pink and white crepe paper hung in festoons from the
ceiling. Behind the Maharishi was more saffron; swathes of silk curtains covered
the wall. Two large banners declared 1992 to be the Maharishi's Year of the
Constitution of the Universe. Beside his couch was a globe: ''He likes to have
it next to him,'' the flautist said. ''It is very appropriate because he is
thinking of the whole world.''

    How to compare this scene? It was like an Indian wedding, except there was
no bride. The decorations were garish, the white carpet was thick pile, the
fittings expensive. It was exotic, familiar in some ways and totally unexpected
in others. Where else would you see a squad of Vedic scholars, wearing scarlet
shawls, sitting like a row of circuit judges at a bench? The room was too small
to be an auditorium, but there were several rows of comfortable cinema seats
behind what could have been a communion rail. It was a salon, except only one
man did the talking. From time to time there were long deafening silences as he
finished one lecture, or long thought, and made ready to begin another.

    THE MAHARISHI emerged from  India  in 1959 and headed for  London  and
points west seeking, one can only assume, fame and - dare I say it - fortune. At
the time he was just another Indian holy man who advertised his path to
spiritual regeneration through Transcendental Meditation on the walls of the
Underground. In 1967 he was discovered by the Beatles, giving him widespread
recognition: the guru of flower power.

    There was a falling out, though George Harrison apparently remained loyal
because he is giving his first British concert for two decades in the Albert
Hall tomorrow to raise money for the Maharishi's new political party. In the
Sixties there were some 10,000 followers. Today there are an estimated four
million, plus several charitable trusts, universities and headquarters in each
of the five continents, and a property company called the Heaven on Earth
Corporation.

    The Maharishi tends to surprise even his followers. In the 1970s, when
Transcendental Meditation (TM) was firmly established as a therapy for easing
tension and stress, he came up with Yogi-flying, the ultimate transcendental
bliss that devotees say causes men and women to levitate. It is described as the
mechanism that allows the mind to discover pure consciousness, otherwise known
as the natural law, otherwise known as the unified field - all terms for
ultimate perfection, order and goodness. Outside the natural law is
confrontation and chaos.

    Afterwards came the Maharishi Effect, a so-called cosmic boost for goodness
which is the result of mass meditation by the Yogi-fliers. He said he found a
scientific basis for this in the Vedas,  India's  ancient books of knowledge. In
the 1980s, for example, Washington's crime rate was said to have fallen after
continuous mass meditation on the subject.

    At this stage the Maharishi evolved his master plan to create heaven on
earth by using Transcendental Meditation as a blueprint for orderly evolution to
a utopia where crime ceased, people lived longer and everyone was prosperous.
''It was nothing less than perfection in life,'' he said.

    Last month, to give the plan a boost, he founded the Natural Law Party to
fight the general election in Britain. The party formally launched its campaign
on Friday, after announcing its manifesto and a list of candidates in full-page
newspaper advertisements in March (estimated cost, pounds 250,000). A mail-shot,
newspaper and poster campaign follows this week, bringing the cost to more than
pounds 1m. The party said it expected to have candidates in all 651
constituencies.

    ''It was so beautiful. I suddenly thought that by stepping into the field of
politics it would be a short cut to heaven on earth. Get into politics and you
can create heaven in a country,'' the Maharishi told me. ''The practicality of
it was so perfect, I thought we can't wait to give it a try. It is a good time
for the world that the deepest knowledge of nature's functioning

    is coming up to organise society in a nice way.''

    The catalyst was a report from his followers. They quoted television, radio
and newspapers as saying the people had a choice between two evils. The British,
he said, needed to be released from this depression. His followers had 10 days
to form the party and register candidates before constituency lists were closed.

    The Natural Law party, he said, would be ''like a parent for the whole
population''. It would lead to the formation of a national government as
political differences between the ''man-made parties'' disappeared in one great
orgy of transcendental meditation. He described this process as ''a simple act
of aligning the mind with cosmic intelligence''. The ideal, he went on, was to
establish a national government that would ''mirror the absolutely orderly
government of nature''. This, he declared, was perfection.

    TO HIS followers, the Maharishi's philosophy is startlingly simple. As an
outsider, I found real life disappeared rather rapidly behind the saffron door.
It was replaced by an entertaining hour of cosmic babble from an intelligent and
endearing old man.

    The Maharishi will not talk about his background, his upbringing or  India.
When I asked him, he dismissed them as unimportant. To discover anything about
his origins, you have to turn to Delhi, and even then you find a bare and shaky
frame. No one seems to know where he was born or his age, though people say with
conviction that he went to Allahabad university. Oddly for his guru status, the
Maharishi was not born a Brahmin. He is one rank lower - a Ksatriya, the caste
of writers and administrators.

    If there were a pantheon of gurus in  India  he would not rank among the
highest. Indians say his thinking is not ''very deep''. Perhaps as a
consequence, his following is mainly abroad. You could spot this instantly in
the different attitudes of his followers: the western disciples wore beatific
gazes and smiled inanely, whereas the Indians around him carried on as ordinary
human beings. None the less, in Delhi they admire his success - especially
commercial. ''Fairly sly'' and ''a good operator'' are terms you hear often to
describe him, rather than ''enlightened'' and ''true path''.

    Unfair? He may be a prophet without honour in his own country. In the West
he is a sage; not an ordinary sage, but a sage with scientific suppport.

    TOWARDS THE end of the Maharishi's monologue with me, Dr John Hagelin, the
Harvard scientist who said he found evidence in physics to support the
Maharishi's unified field of consciousness, entered the room. He sat alone in a
row of gold-painted chairs opposite the Vedic scholars and gazed contentedly
into space with the universal smile on his face. He was wearing black socks. He
had a small but very noticeable hole in one. I don't think anyone else saw the
joke. The Maharishi was banging on about universal consciousness.
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Sylvia D. D'Cruz                                
Mead Data Central                               Systems & Product Technology
Bldg. VI, 9595 Springboro Pike                          udcrusd@meaddata.com
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