Roots of TM

’Roots of TM’ is intended to enable readers to better understand how and why Maharishi Mahesh Yogi spread the teaching of Transcendental Meditation around the world.’Roots of TM’ provides background information on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his master, Guru Dev, Swami Brahmanand Saraswati, and provides a source book of information about their teachings and techniques. ’Roots of TM’ is not intended as a general guide to Indian philosophy, or as a study of the many ancient spiritual practices of India, nor as a mantra handbook.’Roots of TM’ offers information about Maharishi’s ’missing years’, from the time when his master passed away through to the gradual build up of his stated mission to spiritually regenerate the world; ’Why can’t we spiritually regenerate the world through this technique?’ he asked.’Roots of TM’ contains numerous quotations and rare transcripts of lectures by Guru Dev and by Maharishi. Furthermore, it details the course of events that would eventually find Maharishi lecturing at the Masquers Club, an actor’s social club in Hollywood. It also tells how Maharishi came to adopt quite a businesslike attitude to money matters, and how he planned to create a headquarters high in the Himalayas where he intended to train others to teach transcendental meditation.’Roots of TM’ digs deeply into rare materials in order to give detailed profiles of the teachings of both master and disciple, thus affording readers an opportunity to make informed comparisons of both these teachers’ methods and their objectives.Author Paul Mason explains:-'By the mid-1960’s the term ’Transcendental Meditation’ became fixed after Maharishi Mahesh Yogi spread the message of meditation far and wide across the free world. Maharishi then became very famous himself, largely due to his public association with celebrities, and in particular the world famous pop group The Beatles who in 1968 attended an advanced training course with him in India.When I traveled to India in 1970 I did so by hitch hiking from Britain, across many countries of the Middle East before finally finding myself in North India. Possibly because The Beatles had done so before me, I decided to visit the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, just for ’a cup of cocoa and a chat about philosophy’, and therefore made my way to the pilgrimage town of Rishikesh, surrounded by jungle. Having crossed the River Ganges and climbed up to Maharishi Ashram, I was introduced there to a practice referred to as ’transcendental’ meditation. The teaching of this ’Transcendental Meditation’ or ’TM’ is preceded by a short ceremony called a puja, conducted before a portrait of an Indian teacher, an ascetic called Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, known to TM meditators as ’Guru Dev’.Surprisingly, despite the fact that Swami Brahmanand Saraswati was a prominent and influential public speaker, Maharishi’s organisations share but scant information about Guru Dev’s life story and disclose nothing about his teachings. Little was then known about the early life of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, or about the origins and history of the teaching of Transcendental Meditation, so I set myself to uncover as much information as I could find.In the 1990’s I was commissioned by Element Books to write the biography of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, which was published as ’The Maharishi: The Biography of the Man Who Gave Transcendental Meditation to the World’.Later, in 2007 an ambition was fulfilled when a 3-volume set of books on Guru Dev was published, all based on my translations of Hindi works on Swami Brahmananda. ’Roots of TM’ is really the distillation of decades of research into the teachings of Maharishi, Guru Dev, and the Shankaracharya tradition.'