

Maharishi: A rare glimpse into the message of meditation from 40 years ago

There are literally tens of thousands of hours of audiotape and videotape footage of Maharishi speaking: on the unbounded nature of human consciousness, on the wide-ranging benefits and subtle mechanics of the Transcendental Meditation technique, on the unity of life that underlies both man and nature. Much of the videotapes come from Maharishi’s keynote addresses over 50 years to government conferences, science symposiums, education seminars, and business meetings in virtually all countries.

There are also countless hours of videotape of Maharishi talking to the press.

In 1968, at the height of one of many spikes of interest in the Transcendental Meditation technique over the past five decades, Maharishi was interviewed by the Canadian Broadcast Corp (CBC) Television while in the midst of leading an advanced meditation course at Lake Louise in Canada. As Maharishi walked along the banks of the lake, he spoke about the inner nature of life and how meditation allows any individual to unfold the limitless energy, creativity, and power that lies, latent, within every human being.

In 1968, the word “meditation” was still an oddity, research on the Transcendental Meditation technique was just in its early stages at Harvard and UCLA medical schools, and there were just a few hundred thousand people meditating around the world.

Today, everything has changed. Just take a look at the content of this blog and the TM.org website.

This classic video provides a rare glimpse into Maharishi’s message from over 40 years ago—a message that inspired a generation of young people, that captured the interest of researchers, and that led Time magazine, in a cover story on “The Science of Meditation” in 2004, to proclaim Maharishi as the teacher most responsible for the upsurge of interest in meditation in the West.

The video is just six minutes, but it tells the whole story.