no more maharishi

This past winter Ian and I decided to go to India. It just so happened that upon arriving in our first holy city we read in the paper that maharishi had died. Its funny how things work out…with timing and all that…we managed to get ahold of a paper that day…which was rare…and got the news. It was such a shock really…all cut and dry…just another standard reporting…but not to us. Its hard to even write about it really…i was there, and so many weren’t, it was a special time to be in India, and we witnessed a historic event…the funeral of our childhood guru, maharishi mahesh yogi.
So, we immediately contacted our parents who told us when and where the ceremony would be and left immediately for delhi. The next day we got on a night train to allahabad after spending the whole day trying to book a ticket. It was rough…we arrived at four in the morning to a city booked for a mini kumbh mela and drove around for two hours in a rickshaw looking for a room just before sunrise. We ended up in the worst guesthouse ever where the people were rude and charged way more than our crappy room was worth…basically shit.
We sharred a mini taxi out of town through some small villages on dusty little roads with some other meditators staying at our hotel, and made our way onto the grounds. Maharishi was on display in a flower decorated room on some chair for people to see…his body had already been carted off by the time we got there…but I guess it was a bad scene anyways, with people taking flash pictures and crap like that. There was all sorts of snobbery and unfriendliness from the beginning…even from people that we knew…and I was surprised at how few actually showed up for the event…and the vibe was way different then I was expecting.
As the ritual began to get underway, the group was split up between men and women…the women stayed where maharishi’s body was on display to watch via video link up while all the guys walked down the road to the actual cremation location. I mean what a dis…to have traveled half way around just to get locked in a room at the cremation of your spiritual master for being a woman…the movement is so sexist it kills me. The whole thing was rubbing me the wrong way from the start…we were traveling with our girl friend noamy from Budapest at the time who knew nothing of the movement and it all just seemed so fucked trying to explain to her what was going on.
Anyways, we split up and walked out to where the cremation was held on a large slab of concrete overlooking the sangam…where the ganga and yamuna rivers meet…it is supposedly the holiest place in India…where the full kumbh mela happens every twelve years…40million people went to the last one…so the location was pretty powerful, and we could see thousands of people bathing at the holy point in the distance.
The slab itself was about 250ft square and in the middle was a small decorated concrete stage covered in orange flowers and roped off…it was nice…but nothing spectacular. The outer perimeter was lined orange flowers as well and was guarded by policemen who had been hired to keep the locals and women out. There were seats reserved for vip members like purusha and dudes that donated way too much over the years, aswell as a huge lifted media stage crowded with giant cameras and videos crews. The majority of the space was just dusty covered concrete where the majority of people were left to fend for themselves. There was no shade, food, or water available.
It mush have been a couple hours that we sat around just waiting for something to happen…conversing with people that we knew and getting told to fuck off by purusha and other snobs in the vip seats when we’d try and talk to our friends. We quickly began to realize how bad things had gotten over the years with the hierarchy of king arthurs court and the stupid gold crowns and creamy attire and all that shit…I mean you’d think that all these enlightened dudes would at least be nice or understanding after dedicating their lives to meditation. We were expecting a friendly supportive crowd…but it just wasn’t that way…at least not for us…who had already been traveling in india for a month and were looking very unmovement…so we just kept to ourselves after that.
Then maharishi’s body finally arrived, surrounded by a parade of a thousand or more people, mostly Indians, all of whom stormed the barricade to join the ceremony. It was a super sketchy stampede of sorts like ive never seen …with people making human chains by holding hands to chorale the crowds and we just tried to stay out the fucking way and not get trampled…not the serine peaceful meditative experience we were expecting.
People threw garlands and flowers as maharishi’s body made its way to the stage and the crowds slightly calmed down while people clamored for a glimpse. Inside the perimeter around the stage about a dozen Indian men carefully constructed a bonfire once the body had been placed. A horribly redundant chanting blared over the load speakers from some guy that couldn’t hold a tune saying like ram ram over and over for eternity while the fire began to blaze and maharishi went up in smoke…it all just seemed more like a big media frenzy than anything actually spiritual or respectful.
The big fucker stunt of the event was some asshole hired a helicopter to fly overtop of maharishi’s body raining rose petals from the heavens…however grand that may sound in some retards imagination, it was a fucking disaster…dust was flying everywhere, flags got ripped down, and all I could do was duck and cover like it was desert storm or some shit. They finally flew off only to come back again and do it all over despite everyone waiving them off…the holy flowers were heaped out in plastic bags…its like who the fuck rains garbage from a helicopter on maharishi at his funeral and thinks hes somehow contributing to “holy” celebration. I swear some of these jokers in charge must be retarded.
Despite all the madness and the fact that Ian and I had only eaten shit for the past three days on no sleep, we sat out in the sun for six more hours without water until the end of the ceremony. The end of the ceremony was the most powerful part though, when all the crowds thinned out, and we walked around maharishi’s body and bowed down and touched our heads to the ground…it was hard not too cry really…and its hard to write about this too…but there were only so many honest people among the crowd…and I feel its necessary to report on what actually happened. Anyways, we found bobby roth in the inner circle and we sat down on either side of him holding hands…the sensation was very strong…bobby taught me how to meditate when I was five years old and he’s like our godfather…I couldn’t help but cry…as I do now, in this room, in varanasi, sitting on the bed, with bromaster…struggling to cope, with India, and eating and life and everything.
But who gives a fuck about that…after we meditated we walked out with bobby through the north gate and meet his good friend david lynch who is also a devotee of maharishi…nice to finally meet him…had some food and saw more friends and we all walked to sangam and hired a boat and bathed in the holy ganga…three times dunked under is the tradition…I still have a nasal infection from it…got off easy…turns out the sangam has some unique water born diseases that just straight kill people. But maharishi only dies once…and we didn’t go through all that just to wimp out on the dunks…even though in retrospect we probably shouldnt have.
We left the sangam and got some really sketchy rides back to town and that’s my story of the cremation of maharishi. With all that said, and with maharishi’s army of retards aside, I still respect his tradition and teachings to the fullest…im sure he taught me more about life than ill ever realize…and even though the ceremony was far from perfect or even what I was I expecting…im still glad I went…if for no other reason than to report on it from my own perspective…without having to hear it from some watered down movement news letter about how perfect it all really wasn’t. code