Author: Jan Olof Bengtsson

There is much criticism of Maharishi. If we disregard the perhaps somewhat one-sided understanding of vedanta, there are also some adaptations to modern western mentality that can certainly be questioned.

His charging money for his TM-courses, his selling meditation as a mere technique, of course disqualifies him in orthodox “Hindu” circles and among many others. Maybe he shared Rajneesh/Osho’s discovery that for most westerners, that which costs nothing seems to be worth nothing, and that a price is therefore necessary to to make meditation sufficiently attractive; that people want to pay, and pay much, in order to enjoy a feeling of being special by thus gaining access to something rare and exclusive. His marketing by means of mystical powers, siddhis, making possible so-called “yogic flying”, appears obviously over-the-top and fraudulent, even though I understand the point was not the flying itself but the coherence between transcendental consciousness and bodily function that it advanced and signified. It seems to be in stark opposition to the line taken with regard to siddhis of almost all other teachers in the tradition (and indeed also western esotericists), even those who made other adaptations in spreading their teaching in the west. Many formulations in his books are too vague. It is understandable that his view of a current “age of enlightenment” and his idea of a TM-based “government” of nations and the world are viewed as problematic. And his parallels between the vedas and contemporary science can certainly appear to be unduly speculative. 

Most centrally, I don’t think – and it isn’t my experience – that transcendental consciousness (turiya, samadhi) is so easily, naturally and quickly reached by his meditation technique as he says it is. He in fact seems to simplify the spiritual practice and its description so much that in reality he might make the process of realization harder.

It is quite as striking in Maharishi as in Vivekananda and his followers, and indeed in all major sophic texts in “Hinduism”, older and newer, how the elements of sankhya, yoga, karma-mimamsa and vedanta are all present and drawn on in his teaching and commentary. They seem almost always, and increasingly in modern times, to appear together, variously combined in the individual sub-traditions, schools, and gurus or swamis. Maharishi even holds that a full understanding of the Bhagavad-Gita is possible only through a combined elucidation by separate commentaries written from the perspectives of all of the six darshanas. 

Vivekananda’s conception of what he calls “the yogas” (jnana yoga, bhakti yoga, karma yoga and raja yoga) adds further confusion. And then there is hatha yoga, kundalini yoga, laya yoga, kriya yoga, maha yoga… – all partly, and unclearly, related to Vivekananda’s categories. It never ends. There were always other forms of yoga in addition to Patanjali’s ashtanga yoga, which is seemingly identical with raja yoga. And countless variations of teachings of centres, energies, currents, lines, channels, airs, humours, luminous orbs and colourful circles and wheels and points and stars inside the body, “traditional sciences” in all areas (medicine, architecture etc.), worship of images, stones and plants, and innumerable little folk-superstitions of all kinds. For a long time, most of it was also inextricably intervolved with Buddhism. And, not least, and perhaps most fundamentally, everything in this compact whole is mixed up with the endless and ever-changing mythological stuff and a never-ceasing flood of new avatars (nowadays only in human form, I think). An unfathomable chaos. A tangle. A mess. It cannot be sorted out.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be sorted out. In addition to being impossible (not just all rational-empiricist scientific questioning with regard to this totality, but all genuinely philosophical, is finally met with a wall of a kind of incomprehension, and everything is just carried on in what can look like blind faith), that is in fact both unimportant and uninteresting. One “only” needs to discern and ascertain what is true and real. Most of those important components are present in undifferentiated seed form in the classical texts, and not at all organized in accordance with the later, seemingly never strictly maintained or upheld distinctions and divisions.

As for yoga, Maharishi’s understanding of it (in the sense of the practice of ashtanga yoga, not that part which, as a darshana, it shares with sankhya) is that it starts with samadhi, and that perfection in all the other limbs is achieved through its prior attainment. The mantra meditation, leading to transcendental consciousness, the goal of the act of meditation itself, for which the mantra is merely a means, is to be supplemented by a natural life and activity in ordinary, waking consciousness which infuses transcendental consciousness into it, so that these states finally coexist permanently in what Maharishi, using Richard Maurice Bucke’s term, translates as “cosmic consciousness”, which, in turn, culminates in full God consciousness.

What Maharishi’s technique of quiet, inner focus on short bija mantras does is certainly to take us closer to transcendental consciousness (that is of course always there – and here – and what we already really are, not in itself in need of any “realization”). It is, it seems, primarily a form of dharana, which can be developed into dhyana. What is definitely reached, and indeed easily, naturally and quickly, is subtler levels of the mind. This not only leads us in the direction of samadhi, but also, as Maharishi emphasizes, in itself sharpens the mind, makes it clearer, increases its conscious capacity and range of perception.

But in my view, much more needs to be said about meditation, in line with how ashtanga yoga has traditionally been taught, i.e., the other seven limbs too need to be separately focused on to a greater extent – not least since, again, Maharishi’s transcendental meditation is, primarily and initially, a form of two of them, not of attained samadhi. It does seem clear that the partial goals of the other angas are indeed reached through samadhi as realized through Maharishi’s form of meditation. But if it isn’t thus realized, or before it is thus realized, it is difficult to see why the other angas and their special practices should be ignored. Of course, yama and niyama are for the purification of the mind and the development of character that are needed even in order to acquire the motivation to practice yoga in the full sense. Asana and pranayama, it seems to me, may or may not be necessary or helpful, depending on the individual character and nature of the practitioner. But as for the higher limbs, it isn’t easy to see (at least not for me, but that may be because of my strong sensual attachments and general lack of spiritual advancement) how dharana, and therefore also dhyana, can normally be practiced with success without prior accomplishment in pratyahara, the interiorizing withdrawal of the senses and the mind from the objects of the senses, which, at least in the west, seems to be a much neglected and probably misunderstood anga. But it should certainly be accepted that such practice, without them, is in principle possible with Maharishi’s technique. When what Maharishi calls cosmic consciousness is attained, and then, of course, God consciousness, pratyahara (and interiorization in general) is clearly not needed, but it helps in overcoming attachment to the objects of the senses on lower levels.

What must also be taught however – and Maharishi does speak about it in the chapter ‘Intellectual Path to God Realization’ in his book Science of Being and Art of Living – is that even the complete practice of ashtanga yoga isn’t the only method of spiritual development and self-realization: there is also the purely intellective path of jnana, with its discrimination (viveka) and concentration of the consciousness or awareness which is always already there, that in which our whole being and experience already rests, and which only needs to be purified and liberated from the various layers of mental and sensual content. Elsewhere, it seems Maharishi does perhaps not stress this enough, relying instead on sankhya only even when he speaks of jnana, and on the related yoga only as the practice of realization. The jnana and spiritual realization of vedanta goes beyond the goal of yoga.

Transcendental consciousness isn’t, it seems, in its basic nature radically different from and other than waking consciousness. It is just that, covered by ignorance, the veiling of delusion, we can’t appreciate its true and full nature. Indeed, the consciousness in which we experience our “ordinary” self and its “ordinary” world is in itself strictly the same as that of the most elevated, transcendent “mystical” experience, of the highest God consciousness. This only needs to be realized, and this realization is attainable also without the process of bija mantra meditation. The mantra is only a means, allowing consciousness to reach subtler levels of the mind and ultimately to transcend both the mantra and the mind with its contents with the help of it. The process is one of the awareness or the con-sciousness that is always already there in ordinary perception and in the attention to the mantra; it is about the awareness or the consciousness that is already there, but as gradually elevated from its ordinary level of sensual entanglement. More precisely, it is about on the one hand what I think should be the right referent of William James’s term sciousness, consciousness con nothing, in itself, as transcendental, without phenomenal contents, and the process leading to it. But, since samadhi isn’t reducible to that pure sciousness, it is also about how it exists, preserved through the practice of meditation, in its transcendental purity along with its contents in the form of the phenomenal manifestation of the “cosmos” on a new and altogether higher and subtler level, as “cosmic consciousness”; and ultimately as the God-consciousness of the oneness of all in God. It is what is always already there and real that, as it were, needs to be realized. And this can be done also without yoga and mantra meditation, by means of the vedantic insight that Maharishi also strongly affirms. But the practice of more than one spiritual technique or discipline can of course be beneficial and helpful. 

Maharishi is typical of the gurus and swamis who took the spiritual practices of the vedic tradition to the west in that he deemphasized the mythological legacy of the vedas, the upanishads, the itihasas and puranas so much that it is almost wholly absent in his books and other presentations. This is a correct approach, one of the fruits of, on the one hand, the thousands of years of patient, systematic interpretation, exegesis and refinement of the teachings of the vedic tradition, and on the other of the insights into the necessity of a certain adjustment of their presentation to the cultural and intellectual specificities of time and space.

His advaitic tradition does, in itself, retain the legacy in its own way, either as representing realities on a lower level, in the phenomenal manifestation, the world of illusion, and/or – it seems to me – as something that isn’t necessarily accepted and never even intended to be necessarily accepted as literally true. It isn’t wholly absent in Maharishi. Although they are only very few, residues of the unquestioned literalist outlook of tradition are found in his understanding of the history of the universe, the succession and cycles of the yugas, and the dates of authorities like Vyasa, Adi Shankara, and indeed, although less unambiguously, Krishna himself.

Sri Aurobindo is known to have grappled with the issues raised by the evolutionism of modern science, and I suppose many other intra-traditional scholars must have done so too. But it is remarkable that the disciplined minds of vedantic exegesis haven’t reached any kind of consensus or made up their minds with regard to how these questions are to be addressed, so that to this day it is possible for vedanta and yoga teachers to simply restate the traditional accounts as they are, without any kind of explanation or commentary, to simply present them as literally true. Attempts to defend the literalist understandings in explicit polemics against modern science, even seeking to refute it using its own assumptions, accepting its empiricist methodology, are rare, although they can be found in the branch of “Hinduism” that are based precisely on the literalist acceptance of the mythological legacy, such as Vaishnavism, as that tradition has been taken to the west.

Maharishi presents no direct challenge of this kind, but there is at the very least an indirect one in his mere unquestioned restating of the view of the yugas on pp. 253-55 of his commentaray of the Bhagavad-Gita. It should be noted that, also quite independently of modern science, there is, as with regard to the combinations and the coordination of the various components of the amorphous, chaotic and starkly contradictory mythological legacy in general, in reality no consensus on this teaching within the tradition itself: Sri Yukteswar, the guru of Paramahamsa Yogananda, for instance, held a completely different view of the order of the succession of yugas and of which yuga we now live in than that found among others authorities. But the assertion of any version of this teaching about the age and history of the universe and humanity of course starkly contradicts the scientific findings regarding the history of man, the life on earth, the geological time scale, etc. Readers with even just the most superficial familiarity with science will unfortunately be inclined to reject much or all of the other teachings when they encounter such passages.

An example of relatively serious criticism of Maharishi (and also of Aurobindo and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh/Osho) can be found in a lecture by Rama Coomaraswamy. Yet it is also poorly written and somewhat simplistic, and Coomaraswamy’s endorsement of the more superficial and strained version of the Guénonian, perennialist-traditionalist interpretations of Catholicism (and indeed Christianity in general), and his consequent, largely failed personal engagement as a Catholic, in my view in important respects disqualifies him too as a critic. He neither speaks as a strict “Hindu” traditionalist, nor does he address the complex issues regarding the specific difficulties of spreading anything of vedic spirituality in the modern west, or the partial compromises and adaptations which many found to be necessary because of them. These decisive weaknesses are the same as those that, unfortunately, vitiate the otherwise in some respects important criticism of writers like Lee Penn (False Dawn: The United Religions Initiative, Globalism, and the Quest for a One-World Religion (2005)).

Then, as in the case of almost all Eastern spiritual teachers in the west, there is also criticism of Maharishi’s personal life. Almost all are accused of sexual abuse of their followers. In some cases, including Maharishis, it is perhaps not so much a case of accusations of sexual abuse, but, as it were, merely of use. But none of this is something I can judge about. Some of it is probably true. In cases where, if so, it contradicts their teaching or their claims, it is clearly serious. But it is probably also the case that some accusations are false, and produced for other reasons and because of psychological disturbances and characterological flaws of those followers. But these questions can and should, I suggest, be distinguished from the substance of the teachings themselves, quite apart from what is true about the individual teachers.

In reality, despite my own remarks above, Maharishi’s commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita is in some respects an “original” contribution, in the sense in which originality must always be understood within a general traditional framework, i.e. in terms of original claims regarding traditional meanings lost or obscured by other commentators and interpreters. As far as I can see, it has been generally underrated as a result of the mentioned, legitimate criticisms. Indeed, the critics never seem to have studied Maharishi’s interpretation of the first six chapters of the Bhagavad-Gita closely. Not all formulations are too vague; in fact, his account of the process of meditation in all aspects is often very precise. I find that in important respects the interpretation actually marks a step forward in the gradual, new transmission of the vedic tradition to the west which has been going on since the late 18th century. Given the particular, unavoidable difficulties of this transmission, a similar attitude should be taken to Maharishi’s work as to the whole of the so-called neo-vedantist current, and indeed, mutatis mutandis, to modern western New Ageism. Discernment, not wholesale acceptance or rejection, is what is called for. The historical importance of these currents for the spread of the vedic tradition in the west cannot be denied, even as proper attention is brought to their errors and incompleteness.

With regard to western adaptations in his interpretations of his own tradition, it isn’t clear that there is more of them in Maharishi than in Vivekananda and the Ramakrishna mission, in Aurobindo, or in other, earlier transmitters of the vedic tradition to the west. And such adaptations are indeed necessary and in many cases even desirable. Moreover, his teachings are sharply at odds with the still further developed romanticism of the hippiedom which shaped the west at the time when he spread them here – a fact that was obscured by the fact that hippies, and the Beatles, were attracted by and came to be associated with him.

It also seems to be a fact that very few are in reality capable of practicing regularly his adapted form of meditation, even as they dismiss it as unduly simplified. As long as this is so, there can be no doubt that they have much to learn from him. I was initiated into Maharishi’s practice of transcendental meditation by his student, now Professor Bengt Gustavsson, at the TM centre in a beautiful building from the 1880s or 1890s in Skeppargatan in Stockholm, in 1978. I find it important that I sensed deeply the spiritual purity, peace, and power of those rooms on that occasion, and of the beautiful ceremony, with the flowers, fruit, and white handkerchief I had been told to bring, the pictures of Maharishi and Brahmananda Saraswati, the incense, etc., and the mantras Gustavsson recited. On this occasion, transcendental meditation was certainly not just a technique, although it was that too and was, above all, marketed as such; it was very definitely also a distinct initiation into Maharishi’s branch of the vedic tradition. Moreover, there was no trace of either Indian bazaar kitsch or countercultural hippie aesthetics. Gustavsson always wore a suit and tie.

The practice immediately led to experiences described in Gustavsson’s introductory teaching and in Maharishi’s books and other literature on TM. Since then, I have also studied other branches of the vedic tradition and practiced other forms of meditation etc., but I still find Maharishi’s transcendental meditation, understood in terms of his own scriptural commentary, to be of considerable importance. He, and Gustavsson, remain more than just vartma-pradarshaka gurus (gurus who show the path) in the sense that, to this day, Gustavsson’s initiation remains my only formal “initiation” (of course not accepted as such by “Hindu” traditionalists) in the vedic tradition, although I have subsequently had closer association with other teachers. Although I have alternated and supplemented with other techniques, in terms of initiation and practice, this is basically where I still remain. And it is where I think I ought to remain. Non-adapted forms of vedic spirituality seem to me in many ways problematic in the west.