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RELIGIONS AND FREEDOM after 1945 (3 of 7)

From India a variety of movements spread abroad. Transcendental Meditation, also known as TM, had as its spiritual leader Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. His interactions with the Beatles beginning in 1967 helped make him well known in the West. His meditation involved chanting mantras, to relax people physically and remove mental stress. In the early 1970s, every month in the United States an estimated 10,000 people were attending TM centers. Some business corporations adopted TM to relax their employees. Some universities also began employing TM, and physicians and psychologists became interested in measuring the psychic value of meditation. Maharishi claimed that his meditation techniques were a part of Vedic science. Some of his followers began to claim that they were able to levitate and that TM could go beyond individual psychic benefit to remove social and world conflict. Maharishi also claimed that his Vedic science gave one an ability to know anything and everything in the universe. And with these claims, the popularity of TM began to decline.

The old phenomenon of religious diffusion was taking place, more so than millennia before because of increased travel and migration. It included the spread of the Hare Krishna movement. This movement was genuine Hinduism transported by Srila Prabhupada when he arrived in New York aboard a merchant ship. Prabhupada opened a small store at 26 Second Avenue in the city's Lower East Side. At his store front, people came to chant and to hear his lectures. There were Sunday feasts and chanting sessions in nearby Tompkins Square Park which attracted attention and converts. Prabhupada founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. It described itself as monotheistic, Krishna being another word for God.

Srila Prabhupada expanded his society to the San Francisco Bay Area. There it was joined by some described as hippies, and many confused it with the "hippie" subculture. Soon Prabhupada's society spread to London, to Berlin, and back to India. Srila Prabhupada, according to his society, became the world's largest publisher of Vedic literature. The Hindu Bible, the Bhagavad-gita, was a major component of its reading. And Srila Prabhupada wrote fifty volumes of works, writings described by the Hare Krishnas as wishing the best for all people and all "living entities."

Members of Prabhupada's society were instructed to avoid intoxicants. Joy was to be derived from chanting God's holy names. It was held that grievous sins were removed by worshipping Lord Sri Hari, the Lord of all lords, and by chanting the holy mantra," Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare." And they held to a diet that avoided meat, fish, eggs, onions, garlic and mushrooms because of the adverse effects of these on the consciousness of the eater.

The Hare Krishna movement met with hostility and government repression, and members were imprisoned in the Soviet Union. The U.S. Supreme Court decided a case against the movement in favor of a prohibition on Hare Krishna members soliciting donations or selling religious literature at Miami International Airport. The court rejected the argument that such restrictions violate free-speech rights.