Transcendental Meditation Is Key To World Peace, Says Maharishi

Sitting cross-legged amidst urns of brightly colored flowers and gently fingering a string of red beads. His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Monday night told an overflowing Sanders Theatre audience what was wrong with American higher education.

"The present system of education has the capacity only to excite the thirst for knowledge, not to satisfy it," said His Holiness, spiritual adviser to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and 115,000 other meditators around the world.

A Law School Forum crowd of more than 1200 jammed Sanders to hear him speak on Transcendental Meditation. Among these was a small band of the Guru's disciples, including Mia Farrow, who sat on the stage meditating. Another 1000 listened in Lowell Lecture Hall.

The crowd remained standing silently until Maharishi ('The Great Sage') had sat down on a deer-skin, meditated for a few seconds, and smiled transcendentally. But after a half hour of his message people began to chat and filter out.

The message was how to find total peace and put an end to all world suffering. The technique is to seek the inner being, the level of consciousness below thought, through transcendental meditation.

"Once this 'bliss consciousness' has been reached and the mind is free to wander in and out of it, there is no reason for any more suffering," the Guru said. True happiness and "harmony with the cosmic law of nature" are attained, and the stress and strain of Western civilization will be relieved, he added.

Transcendental meditation is also the solution to the shortcomings of our system of education, he said, since "true knowledge is only gained through a meeting of the inner and outer minds."

Maharishi's metaphysical nonsequiturs appealed to the audience. "You don't have to give up the material world," he said, although he is both celibate and a vegetarian. "We can live 200 per cent of life by experiencing both the material and the spiritual."