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RELIGION
Heavenward With Mahayogi
By building the world's tallest building at the
"centre" of India in Jabalpur, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi hopes to
bring heaven to earth
By Neeraj Mishra
 Building
heaven on earth is every religion's oldest ambition. And it is going to
be a transcendental edifice in Karondi, near Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh.
Rising from a vastness surrounded by hills and paan orchards is an ashram
that beats all ashrams: 108 buildings spread over 57 acres. A mega campus
of the spirit where 2,500 priests, aged between 12 and 50, chant Vedic
mantras 24 hours a day to save the world. Welcome to Maharishi Mahesh
Yogi's maha gesture in his homeland.
This heavenward journey in concrete will start
from the "navel of India", as followers of Mahesh Yogi call
Jabalpur. For, a building, shaped like a multi-storied Lingaraj temple,
is being built on the Brahmasthanam, apparently the divine centre. Karondi
lies on the Tropic of Cancer and, according to the Maharishi's Vedic calculations,
it is the centre of India. The construction, begun in 1999, was delayed
when bureaucracy collided with spirituality: an earthly tehsildar temporarily
halted it by questioning land acquisition rights and declaring that it
was being built on forest land.
Doesn't matter. When finished, the edifice will
be 2,222 ft high with 20 million sq ft of living space distributed over
144 floors. "There are 11 other similar buildings planned throughout
the 12 (Maharashi) time zones in world. But they will be 1,666 ft tall.
Construction has begun on two buildings in the US and Philippines,"
says P.S. Chauhan who runs the Karondi Ashram. The Maharishi believes
that if 1,00,000 Brahmins sit and chant the Vedic mantras at the same
time in the same place, it will "create coherence in world consciousness".
In the supermarket of consciousness, the Maharishi,
at 82 years of age, is quite a formidable merchant. His Global Country
of World Peace has 10 million citizens with presence in 108 countries.
He has been in the soul business for 43 years and the "peace that
we see in the world today is the direct result of his world peace assemblies
and yogic flying". And celebrities like Madonna, Mia Farrow and Deepak
Chopra will agree with the Managing Director of Heaven on Earth Development
Corporation. They star among the Maharishi's believers who have invested
an estimated $15 billion (Rs 72,000 crore) in their guru-the deliverer
of peace through his patented Transcendental Meditation (tm). His followers
have built for him a 10,000-acre university campus in Fairfield, Iowa,
devoted to teaching the Vedas and management. The Maharishi empire has
120 universities and 1,200 study centres in 108 countries. Now they want
to build the world's tallest building in Karondi.
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SOUL PROPRIETOR: The ashram at Karondi houses 2,500 priests
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The Maharishi's evolution is a personal saga
of "East meets West". In the 1950s, Yogi became a follower of
the Shankaracharya of Jyotipeeth Swami Brahmanand Saraswati along with
the present Shankaracharya Swaroopanand and Swami Karpatriji. But by 1955
he realised he could not become a Shankaracharya because he was a kayastha
by birth. The next two years in his life are shrouded in mystery as he
claims to have gone into the Himalayas to seek enlightenment. He descended
to the real world in 1957 only on the orders of his guru. It is said that
he befriended a rich widow from Kolkata, Sita Saraf, who took him to Switzerland.
In the early 1960s in London, the Beatles showed
interest in his method of Transcendental Meditation. This marked the beginning
of the West's love affair with his yoga techniques and of his own with
celebrities. In these crucial years he also convinced the NATO armies
into trying out his tm method. He offered an easy solution to the war-wary
generals: just 20 minutes of chanting a given mantra in the lotus position.
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