R.I.P. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 02.06.08 | 11:50 AM ET
The 1960s icon and one-time Beatles guru helped put Rishikesh on the counterculture map and inspired countless young Westerners to wander East across the Hippie Trail. He died Tuesday at his home in the Netherlands at the age of 91. Just how great was his influence on travel?
A 2006 London Times review of Rory MacLean’s “Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India”—due out in the U.S. next year—helps put it into context:
By 1967, the year that the Beatles went to meditate with the Maharishi in Rishikesh, the Indian government estimated that there were 10,000 “youthful” foreigners in the country. Five years later the same number crossed the border from Pakistan in a single week, and in 1973 the French reckoned that India was where 250,000 of its citizens had taken up temporary and sometimes permanent residence.
Of course, the influx of visitors wasn’t all a result of the Maharishi’s influence, but along with the sounds of George Harrison’s sitar and a wide range of other influences, the Maharishi played a pivotal role in Westerners’ attraction to the East—a topic writer Gita Mehta famously explored in Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East.
We recently noted plans to turn the Maharishi’s Rishikesh ashram into an eco-hotel.
Related on World Hum:
* ‘Beatles’ Ashram’ in India to Become Eco-Hotel, School
* The Hippie Trail and ‘A Season in Heaven’
Time magazine cover from Oct. 13, 1975.
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
sheela 02.10.08 | 2:59 AM ET
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
One of the greatest teachers to cross this earth…one of humanities most modest despite his
fantastic achievements….an UNSUNG hero .....
Thanks for having walked this way
Thanks for bringing light into our lives
Thanks for helping better our lives by the super simple 15 minutes a day meditation technique that one
could practise with ease anywhere, anytime, anyplace
Thanks that there were no religious, spiritual,any other strings attached
THANKS FOR WALKING THIS WAY
THANKS! THANKS!THANKS
May your soul rest in peace
Life will never be the same again!
TRULY JAI GURUDEV
Bryan 02.11.08 | 10:33 AM ET
With thanks to a great man who made the experience of inner reality accessible to the world’s whole population.
A truly remarkable life’s work. He will be remembered for thousands of years.
And he always gave all the credit to his master Swami Brahmananda Saraswati and the tradition of Vedic masters through whom the purity of this profound knowledge has been maintained over countless centuries.
‘There is nothing greater than the guru’
Ieva Sture Blukis 02.12.08 | 11:20 AM ET
I met Maharishi at a teacher’s training course in Belgium in 1974! He has been a great influence in my life, a source of warmth and strength. I will always be thankful to him for the understanding and the tools for peace that he brought into my life. May he have an enjoyable journey home.
Joe Connors 08.12.08 | 5:43 PM ET
Maharishi was the greatest spiritual teacher of our time. The followers of a master feel the fascination of the teaching - being unable to rise to it they drag it down to them. So it is!
Om mane padme hum === Jai Guru Dev!