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Friday 9 November 2018

Transcendental Meditation

Transcendental Meditation  is a technique of focusing the mind based in part on Hindu meditation.. Meditators are given a special word or phrase called a mantra to chant. Practitioners are warned never to write down or divulge the mantra to anyone else.

After spending two years in silence in the Himalayan foothills, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (January 12, 1918 - February 5, 2008) traveled to the USA in 1959 obeying the commission of his spiritual mentor, Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, who was called "Guru Dev." There he started to teach a basic silent mantra meditation technique, called Transcendental Meditation, which was taken from the ancient Vedic tradition. Such meditation he taught, would bring benefit to the practitioner in a form of release from stress. 

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1978. By Jdontfight - Template:Vernon Barnes PhD,

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi claimed 30 minutes of Transcendental Meditation morning and evening by 1 per cent of the population would create world peace for 1,000 years.

During the late 1960s, the four Beatles were followers of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation movement. Their attraction towards this belief helped make adoption of an Eastern religion a trendy thing among the young.

On May 15, 1968, two of The Beatles, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, said their recent involvement with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was "a mistake". The pair told a press conference in New York: "He was human. For a while we thought he was not."

George Harrison continued his interest in eastern religion and in 1970 he released the single "My Sweet Lord"which topped the US and UK pop music charts. The song blended references to the Hare Krishna faith and Vedic prayer, with some of their mantra written into the lyrics with the Hebrew word "hallelujah." When asked why he added specifically Hare Krishna to the hallelujahs of ‘My Sweet Lord’, George Harrison answered, “First of all hallelujah is a joyous expression that Christians have, but ‘Hare Krishna’ has a mystical side to it."

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi during a visit to the Maharishi University of Management campus 

In 1977, a U.S. district court ruled that a curriculum in Transcendental Meditation being taught in some New Jersey schools was religious in nature and in violation of the First Amendment. 

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