Deepak was, let's remember, the TM movement's blue-eyed boy in the mid-80s, plucked from his role as a Western-trained doctor by Maharishi himself. The foreword to Quantum Healing relates how Maharishi encouraged DC to promote traditional Indian healing, Ayurveda, in the simplest, most straightforward terms. Meditators rushed out to buy his first book Creating Health, co-written with other TM-trained Ayurvedic experts, making it a best-seller and launching the Chopra brand.
A good-looking Western-trained doctor and fluent communicator, Chopra soon found an influential position in the TM organization. Yet for his own reasons, he eventually decided to go his own way. Financial constraints may have been among these: after all, he had a family to support and could sense greater opportunities to be had operating for himself. Maharishi always worked his followers hard, too, needing practically no sleep, he was apparently running teams of assistants ragged well into his 70s and 80s.
Yet it is hard to fathom the reasons why a spiritual seeker like Deepak would abandon a bona-fide guru, especially for superficial gains. Chopra is clearly very smart and highly evolved, but seems to have found it hard to accept a student's role rather than the teacher's. The meditation methods he has subsequently promoted under his own name, (Primordial Sound, etc), are very close to the legal limit in their similarity to advanced TM techniques. Chopra would no doubt claim that there is no patent on Yoga, and coming himself from an Indian background, insist that he is simply an exponent of his country's own timeless tradition.
Yet he has absorbed the way Maharishi and his line have re-cognized the Veda and taken it away from the previous emphasis on effort and renunciation. Chopra is steeped in Maharishi's teaching and his decision to separate himself from his guide and inspiration shows there are no guarantees on the path to realization. Let's hope he realigns himself one day.
I was also reminded this week of another former Maharishi devotee, John Lennon. His selected letters were anthologized last year, edited by Hunter Davies, the Beatles' official biographer. He wrote this letter from Rishikesh in 1968, on Spiritual Regeneration Movement (precursor to the Maharishi Foundation) headed notepaper.
Dear Beth:
Thank you for your letter and your kind thoughts. When you read that we are in India searching for peace, etc, it is not that we need faith in God or Jesus we have full faith in them; it is only as if you went to stay with Billy Graham for a short time it just so happens that our guru (teacher) is Indian and what is more natural for us to come to India his home. He also holds courses in Europe and America and we will probably go to some of these as well to learn and to be near him.
Transcendental meditation is not opposed to any religion it is based on the basic truths of all religions the common denominator. Jesus said: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you” and he meant just that “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” not in some far distant time or after death but now.
Meditation takes the mind down to that level of consciousness which is Absolute Bliss (Heaven) and through constant contact with that state “the peace that surpasses all understanding” one gradually becomes established in that state even when one is not meditating. All this gives one actual experience of God not by detachment or renunciation when Jesus was fasting etc in the desert 40 days & nights he would have been doing some form of meditation not just sitting in the sand and praying although me it will be a true Christian which I try to be with all sincerity it does not prevent me from acknowledging Buddha Mohammed and all the great men of God. God bless you jai guru dev.
With love,
John Lennon
A few things strike me on reading this: a) how little MMY's message changed over the years. b) how cogently and enthusiastically John relates Maharishi's message, c) how wise John sounds.
We all know how John's interest in TM came to an abrupt halt amid unsubstantiated allegations and innuendos, subsequently denied by all of the surviving Beatles*. The surprising thing is how long his meditation practice lasted and how enthusiastically he embraced it for a year or so at the height of his powers. In the late 1960s, the Beatles were the most famous and feted people on earth and John was their leader, The Man.
TM was then in its first flourishing of popularity, following Schopenhauer's 'three stages of truth': first ridicule, then violent opposition, then acceptance. After first immersing himself in meditation, to the extent of going on an extended retreat with 8-hour daily sessions, John then boomeranged the other direction. He abandoned the overt spiritual path and within a year was back in the hurricane of the outside world, reportedly battling with heroin addiction.
This is the ebb and flow of life and purportedly it works the same way from lifetime to lifetime. In one incarnation we may be full of spiritual striving and the good karma we accrue propels us on the path of liberation in our next lifetime. But there are no guarantees: we can still stray and become in Paramahansa Yogananda's phrase a 'fallen yogi'.
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*"Maharishi only ever did good for us, and though I haven't been with him physically, I never left him". - George Harrison.
"[Maharishi] was a great man who worked tirelessly for the people of the world and the cause of unity". - Paul McCartney, 2008.
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