Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru to the Beatles who introduced the West to transcendental meditation, has died at his home in the Dutch town of Vlodrop, a spokesman said Tuesday.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, seen in a video in 2006, died in his home in the Netherlands.
(APTN/Associated Press)

He was thought to be 91 years old.

"He died peacefully at about 7 p.m.," said Bob Roth, a spokesman for the transcendental meditation movement that the Maharishi founded. He said Maharishi's death appeared to be due to "natural causes, his age."

Once dismissed as hippie mysticism, transcendental meditation, the Hindu practice of mind control that Maharishi taught, gradually gained medical respectability.

Maharishi began teaching it in 1955, and brought the technique to the United States in 1959. But the movement really took off after the Beatles visited Maharishi's ashram in India in 1968, although he had a famous falling out with the British rock stars when he discovered them using drugs at his Himalayan retreat.

The Beatles - John Lennon, left, Paul McCartney, centre background, Ringo Starr, second from right, and George Harrison, right - join the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, centre, in Wales in 1967.
(Associated Press)

With the help of celebrity endorsements, Maharishi — a Hindi-language title for Great Seer — parlayed his interpretations of ancient scripture into a multimillion-dollar global empire.

After 50 years of teaching, Maharishi turned to larger themes, with grand designs to harness the power of group meditation to create world peace and to mobilize his devotees to banish poverty from the earth.

Maharishi's roster of famous meditators included The Rolling Stones, actor Clint Eastwood and new age preacher Deepak Chopra.

Some five-million people devoted 20 minutes every morning and evening reciting a simple sound, or mantra, and delving into their consciousness.

"Don't fight darkness. Bring the light, and darkness will disappear," Maharishi said in a 2006 interview, repeating one of his own mantras.

Peace Palaces built in dozens of cities

Donations and the $2,500 U.S. fee to learn transcendental meditation financed the construction of Peace Palaces, or meditation centres, in dozens of cities around the world. It paid for hundreds of new schools in India.

In 1971, Maharishi founded a university in Fairfield, Iowa, that taught meditation alongside the arts and sciences to 700 students and served organic vegetarian food in its cafeterias.

Supporters pointed to hundreds of scientific studies showing that meditation reduces stress, lowers blood pressure, improves concentration and raises results for students and businessmen.

Skeptics ridiculed the plan to raise $10 trillion to end poverty by sponsoring organic farming in the world's poorest countries. They scoffed at his notion that meditation groups, acting like psychic shock troops, can end conflict.

Over the years, Maharishi also was accused of fraud by former pupils who claim he failed to teach them to fly. "Yogic flying," showcased as the ultimate level of transcendence, was never witnessed as anything more than followers sitting in the cross-legged lotus position and bouncing across spongy mats.

Never talked of childhood

Maharishi was born Mahesh Srivastava in central India, reportedly on Jan. 12, 1917, although he refused to confirm the date or discuss his early life.

He studied physics at Allahabad University in India before becoming secretary to a well known Hindu holy man. After the death of his teacher, Maharishi went into a nomadic two-year retreat of silence in the Himalayan foothills of northern India.

With his background in physics, he brought his message to the West in a language that mixed the occult and science that became the buzz of college campuses. He described transcendental meditation as "the unified field of all the laws of nature."

Maharishi's trademark flowing beard and long, graying hair appeared on the cover of the leading news magazines of the day.

In 1990, he moved onto the wooded grounds of a historic Franciscan monastery in the southern Dutch village of Vlodrop, about 200 kilometres southeast of Amsterdam.

Concerned about his fragile health, he secluded himself in two rooms of the wooden pavilion he built on the compound, speaking only by video to aides around the world and even to his closest advisers in the same building.