They set out to change the world. Along the way, they created a remarkable human story.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi carried the simple, effortless practice of Transcendental Meditation from India to an emerging worldwide audience. Around him gathered an extraordinary generation of young people who became teachers, researchers, organizers, writers, pilots, administrators, and unexpected pioneers in a global movement for the development of human consciousness.
The Movement: An Anecdotal History, Volume I tells their story from the inside.
Drawn from personal interviews, firsthand recollections, historical accounts, and memories preserved across more than half a century, this collection reveals the movement not merely as a succession of organizations, courses, and public achievements, but as a living community of people trying to accomplish something larger than themselves.
These stories travel from India and California to Switzerland, Massachusetts, Iowa, and beyond. They recall intimate conversations with Maharishi, the beginnings of scientific research on meditation, the creation of new educational institutions, vast international courses, improbable journeys, urgent midnight assignments, unexpected moments of grace, and logistical adventures that sometimes depended on a telephone call, a small airplane, or the correct white Mercedes.
The result is history at ground level: inspiring, affectionate, occasionally astonishing, and often very funny.
At its center is Maharishi, remembered not only as a spiritual teacher and philosopher, but as a brilliant organizer whose vision drew thousands of people into a shared undertaking. Yet this is also the story of those who carried that vision into the world, frequently learning their jobs while doing them and discovering friendships that would endure for a lifetime.
The Movement preserves the human texture of an extraordinary era: its idealism, devotion, ingenuity, imperfections, laughter, and abiding sense of possibility. It is a celebration of the knowledge that inspired the movement and of the people whose lives were transformed by helping to build it.
