Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation and guru to the Beatles, among others, died yesterday on February 5th. While I'm sure someone else has figured this out, I have not yet noticed any mentions in the news that he died the day after Across The Universe Day, when NASA beamed the famed Beatles song into space via satellite antenna in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the song's release. The song's chorus includes the mantra "Jai guru deva om" which, according to my beloved and overused Wikipedia "is a sentence fragment whose words could have many meanings, but roughly translate to "salutations to the guru", then the mystic syllable om". While Maharishi was a controversial figure for many reasons, he did believe that TM, a form of meditation using mantras, could help heal the world and bring peace.
So. . . salutations to the guru and the mystical 'om' were beamed quite literally across the universe, to unknown effect, and then he died.
Salutations to the guru. Om.
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For a while in my younger days I was a television reporter in northeast Iowa. Home of the town of Fairfield, Iowa. Which is home to the Maharishi University of Management, founded by the great Maharishi Mahesh Yogi himself. I visited Fairfield a number of times for stories and was always struck by how strange it seemed to have this type of school with this type of culture stuck smack dab in the middle of middle America.
But I was always impressed with how the 'local' folks seemed to accept the school, its students, and its faculty and staff. I don't think a lot of people really claimed to understand what was going on there...and I'm certain most people thought it was flat out strange. I don't think they embraced it, but they tolerated it. And that's pretty good, too.
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