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It is not important where I come from. I am totally detached and peripatetic, like Socrates."
This much is known: he was born in India's Central prov ince some time around 1918 (he refuses to give his age) into the Kshatriya or warrior caste. In 1940 he took a degree in physics at Allahabad University. He decided, however, to seek enlightenment in a less scientific and more orthodox Indian way: he spent 13 years, from 1940 to 1953, with Guru Dev, a swami who left home at the age of nine to seek enlightenment. Guru Dev revived a lost meditation technique that originated in the Vedas, the oldest Hindu writings. According to one legend, Guru Dev charged the Maharishi with a mission: to find a technique that would enable the masses to meditate. The Maharishi hid away in the Himalayas for two years. When he emerged, he started the TM movement. In 1956 he took the name Maharishi, meaning Great Seer in Sanskrit. Now in his late 50s—though looks as old as the Vedas themselves—the Maharishi, by all accounts, is a living advertisement for the energy TM supposed to release. He is forever jeting round the world to visit TM centers in 89 countries. Last month, for ample, he was in Courchevel, a ski resort in the French Alps, where the movement has temporarily converted the posh Anapurna Hotel into a training center. In Courchevel, the Maharishi has a two-seater helicopter always at the ready to save driving up and down the mountains. The center is a place of great contrasts. Near the hotel's indoor swimming pool there is a dais covered with a saffron-colored cloth and surmounted by a portrait of Guru Dev. Yet nearby is the inevitable color TV studio, ready to record the Maharishi's every word and gesture.
His aides are always awed and reverential around him. The headquarters of the movement, they say, is not in one physical spot but rather "wherever Maharishi is"—true believers do not use the article before his name. He is the only one in the movement who is not expected to and does not meditate on a regular basis. "He doesn't have to," says Robert Cranson, who served two years as one of his secretaries. "He long ago achieved a perpetual fourth state of consciousness. The clarity of his mind is awesome."
The Maharishi believes that if only 1% of the population any community or country is meditating, the other 99% will feel good effects and crime will be reduced. If 5% meditates, he adds, great things will really begin to happen. "A good time for the world is coming," he says. "I see the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment. I am only giving expression to the phenomenon that is taking place."
Whether the Age of Enlightenment is at hand remains to be seen, but meditating the TM way is in fact as easy as the Maharishi says it is. First off, a would-be meditator must attend two introductory lectures of an hour to an hour and a half. Tl if he is still interested, he pays his fee: $125 for an individual with lower rates for college and high school students and children four (the minimum age) to ten.