Two former-Beatles encourage troubled kids to meditate

Author: UNI
Publication: Webindia123.com
Date: Mar 6, 2009
URL: http://news.webindia123.com/news/Articles/World/20090306/1192131.html

More than 40 years after they traveled to India to study transcendental meditation (TM) from their Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, two of the former Beatles team, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, will reunite next month for the same cause. The only difference is that they will teach TM to troubled children, so they could become useful citizens, according to the Star Ledger, a New Jersey daily newspaper. The only two surviving Beatles, who rarely appear in public together, will perform at a public concert on April four at New York's Radio City Music Hall. Billed as ''Paul McCartney and Friends: Change Begins Within,'' the benefit concert proceeds will go to the meditation-promoting David Lynch Foundation, with the goal of teaching a million at-risk children to meditate. McCartney said in a press release that he has benefited from practicing meditation over the last four decades. ''In moments of madness, it has helped me find moments of serenity,'' he said. Of the goal to help children learn to meditate, he added, ''I would like to think that it would help provide them a quiet haven in a not-so-quiet world.'' In the same news release, Starr called the aims of the charity ''wonderful''. Other performers will include Donovan, Eddie Vedder, Paul Horn, and Jim James. Tickets for the benefit concert will be priced at 79.50 dollars to 504.50 dollars. Donovan and Horn studied transcendental meditation along with the Beatles in India, in 1968. Their instructor, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, died last year. But in the last four decades the Maharishi has established a huge ashram in Iowa, the sprawling Maharishi University of Management, which has 563 students on campus from 68 countries. The University's Argiro Student Center -- a 50,000 square-foot facility that houses student lounges, an auditorium, student government, meeting rooms, the dining hall and the World Peace Cafe, which serves only vegetarian food. Though the transcendental meditation movement began in 1957 and was brought to the United States in 1959. Classes now cost 2,500 dollars for a five-day session. The TM movement has now grown into a multibillion-dollar self-help industry, and many people practice the meditation technique of closing one's eyes twice a day for 20 minutes while silently repeating a mantra to gain deep relaxation. In the United States, the organisation values its assets at about 300 million dollars, with its base in Fairfield, Iowa, where it operates a university, the Maharishi University of Management. In 2001, disciples of the movement incorporated their own town, Maharishi Vedic City, a few miles north of Fairfield.

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