Maharashi Mahesh Yogi, who soared to worldwide fame as the guru to the Beatles and creator of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique, has retreated into near silence and turned over the day-to-day running of his global network to senior aides, a close adviser said on Tuesday.“He had been involved very dynamically in his worldwide movement for over 50 years, so it’s quite a significant change to see him dive back into knowledge and let others take care of the administration,” adviser John Hagelin, an American physicist, said on telephone.The silver-bearded Maharishi is thought to be 91 and is losing the strength to keep up his punishing administrative workload. “He is not as young as he once was,” said Hagelin. “I think he probably has a more limited reserve of physical energy to draw upon. He was working 20-hour- a-day for years.”The Maharishi told senior aides at a January 8 meeting in the Netherlands of his plan to withdraw from administration duties and spend time absorbed in the ancient Indian texts that underpin his movement—catching many followers off guard. Many people have been trained for years to carry on the Maharishi’s various tasks, he added.The Maharishi now spends his days in silence contemplating and preparing a commentary on the Vedas from which he evolves solutions for today’s troubled world. “I think everybody’s quietly feeling some sense of celebration that he’s finally going to complete his commentary on the Vedas, which probably will have a longer-term impact. It’s a vitally important body of literature,” Hagelin said.The Maharishi, believed to have been born on January 12, 1917, began teaching Transcendental Meditation in 1955 and took his technique to the US four years later. Half a century later, he claims some six million people have become practitioners. But it was not until the Beatles visited his ashram in India in 1968, as they struggled to come to terms with the death of their manager Brian Epstein, that the guru became an icon of the counterculture movement of the late 1960s. Other stars who followed the Maharishi’s teachings included Donovan, Mia Farrow and the Beach Boys.The attention his famous followers focused on the Maharishi’s movement turned it into a global phenomenon with outposts in some 130 countries. For the last 17 years he has run it from a Franciscan monastery in a secluded forest near Vlodrop, an eastern Dutch village near the German border.
