Levitation, world peace, and blissful enlightenment were all essential to the hippie counterculture. But it came at quite a price. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi made billions selling magical mantras and the promise of perfect happiness. Most well-known for being endorsed by the Beatles and David Lynch, he was also feted by world leaders and prestigious universities. The true story behind this 5’1” marketing genius is complex and layered: illicit sex, paranormal promises, alternative medicine, palatial estates, overpriced courses, bogus quantum physics, indoctrinated children, and mass group meditation combined with “yogic flying” would supposedly bring about world peace.
For his latest stand-alone episode in the Roots of Conspirituality series, Julian dives deep into the money-scented blissful waters of Transcendental Meditation and reports back on the sharks that swim beneath the surface. Stay tuned for some reflections at the end about the differences between cults and more familiar, normalized religions.
Show Notes
David Wants to Fly
Robes of Silk, Feet of Clay
The Deceptive World of ™
Maharishi Exposed
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Because of his association with the Beatles, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi became not only iconic of the Western fascination with Indian spirituality in the 60s and 70s, but also the prototype for how hugely lucrative spiritual organizations could be built around charismatic holy men,
promising esoteric and exotic enlightenment, paranormal powers, and even world peace to practitioners ready to devote their lives and bank accounts to the purported mission of the guru.
At just over five feet tall, he was tiny with twinkling eyes and the long hair and full beard that appealed to the emerging hippie counterculture that would embrace him at that time he wore loose fitting white robes and mala beads the media called him the giggling guru because of how he often responded to interview questions
did you envision it growing as rapidly and becoming as big as it has i expected this growth about six years ago I thought that in the West all the people are scientifically advanced and technologically grown up very widely intelligent.
As such, Mahesh is a fascinating figure in what I refer to as the roots of conspirituality, illustrating how stigmatized knowledge, contrarian truth claims, and charismatic influence can draw huge numbers of idealistic people into a cultural vortex of outlandish beliefs that becomes central to their most consequential life decisions, often to their detriment.
Yes, there is a shadow side to the giggling guru and what he represents.
We'll explore his story today in another standalone episode that nonetheless belongs to my Roots of Conspirituality series, which you can access after joining our Patreon via the Collections tab at the very top of the homepage.
I believe this is episode 12 in that series, but not to worry, you can follow along just fine without having listened to any of the previous ones.
Let's dive in.
This is a donut.
It is very sweet and very good.
But if you'd never tasted it a donut, you wouldn't really know how sweet and how good a donut is if you'd never had that experience.
Transcendental meditation is like that.
Transcendental meditation gives an experience much sweeter than the sweetness of this donut.
It gives the experience of the sweetest nectar of life.
pure bliss consciousness.
As Mahishi says, those who don't know, they don't know.
Those who know, they enjoy.
So that's oddball genius American filmmaker David Lynch, well known for both his disturbing and dreamlike arthouse films and his eccentric personality.
His clipped, high-pitched speech pattern, sculptured buffant hair, and wholesome golly G attitude when being interviewed clashes somewhat with the repeated themes that characterize his films.
idyllic settings corrupted by hidden evil, sexual violence, fragmentation of identity, and nightmarish descent.
This makes it perhaps fitting that he was, until his death earlier this year, one of the most prominent celebrity proponents of transcendental meditation.
On the surface, it's a hugely successful, branded, and simplified approach to inner peace and happiness, but underneath that, there are disturbing depths, which we'll explore today.
Now, if the work I've been doing so far in this series has traced the threads of new religious movements of the last almost 200 years, their apocalyptic, charismatic, and messianic qualities, associations with pseudoscience and con artistry,
and their proclivity for the same stigmatized or esoteric knowledge that gives conspiracy theories their forbidden appeal, TM, Transcendental Meditation, and its inventor, Maharishi Maheshyogi, may be at the root of the particular synergy of commercialized meditation, alternative medicine, and fake quantum physics that came to characterize New Age spirituality over the last 50 years or so.
But more on that in a minute.
Let's have David Lynch explain more of his understanding of what TM is working with.
You've been listening to a conspirituality bonus episode sample.
To continue listening, please head over to patreon.com slash conspirituality where you can access all of our main feed episodes ad free as well as four years of bonus content that we've been producing.
You can also subscribe to our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
