urban@spp3.UUCP (10/22/84)
From the Los Angeles Times, 12 Oct 84 By BOB SECTER, Times Staff Writer MANILA -- The Philippines is reeling from devastating typhoons, volcanic eruptions, civil unrest and economic collapse, but help is at hand. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is rushing to the rescue. The maharishi has not come in person, at least not yet, but about 1,200 of his followers, flashing beatific smiles and bulging bankrolls, have descended on Manila from Europe and the United States. They promise to cure all the country's ills -- from hangnails to the national debt -- through transcendental meditation and a hazy theory of physics they call the "maharishi technology of the unified field." The unified field people have become permanent fixtures in some of the city's finest hotels, resorts and restaurants, where they order up lavish vegetarian banquets. They have been flooding the airwaves and newspapers with advertisements featuring labyrinthine diagrams and complex mathematical formulas purportedly proving that transcendental meditation is the path to utopia. One such ad, appearing days after 2,000 people died and more than 2 million were left homeless by a storm, was headlined: "Students Invited To Avert Typhoons." In a ceremony at the presidential palace, they crowned President Ferdinand E. Marcos and his wife, Imelda, the "founding father and mother" of the movement and proclaimed as its "founding day" the 67-year-old Marcos' birthday. At first, many Filipinos seemed amused, even curious, about the invasion of free-spending foreigners in suits and granny dresses conducting seemingly nonstop symposia and spouting bizarre scientific-sounding jargon. An example: "All possible local gauge-invariant operators are generated by non-perturbative quantum gravitational effects at the Planck scale." But last week, humor turned to alarm when the group, acting through a local front called the Age of Enlightenment Foundation, bought the financially beleaguered University of the East, one of the largest private universities in Asia with three campuses and 47,000 students. Officials of the Education Ministry then disclosed that the maharishi's people had made overtures to buy at least half a dozen other debt-ridden educational institutions. The deputy minister of education said the group had brought millions of dollars into the country and was keeping the money in three local banks. On Tuesday, after it was learned that the maharishi's people were about to buy the Centro Escolar University, about 8,000 students, deans and professors from several institutions marched on the offices of Education Minister Jaime Laya. Carrying placards reading "Christianity Not Hinduism" and "Education Not Meditation,", they demanded that Laya void the sales. Cardinal Jaime L. Sin, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Manila, warned that the group had the trappings of a cult, and convened a conference of educators, scientists, theologians and philosophers to study its potential impact. Meanwhile, Parliament ordered an investigation of the group's activities after some members expressed fear that a foreign ideology was being foisted on this poverty-stricken Roman Catholic country by people trying to buy property at fire-sale prices at a time of economic distress. "Honestly," said Helena Benitez, the independent assemblywoman who spearheaded the legislative investigation, "it looks to me like either an invasion from Mars or an invasion of locusts that have come to feast on the grain when it's ripe." Officials of the maharishi group profess to be amazed that anyone would question their motives. Geoffrey Clements, vice chancellor of a maharishi-run university near London, said he organized the Philippine program three months ago to try to save the troubled country from political and economic disintegration. "We feel it is our responsibility, as custodians of this knowledge, to make it available where there is need," he said. According to Clements, the group's studies have shown that if 7,000 people, approximately the square root of 1% of the world's population, chant mantras together on a regular basis, the problems of the world will be eliminated. Even smaller groups can cause major improvements in the fields of health, agriculture, intelligence, creativity, business, education, weather and other aspects of life, he said. He pledged to remain in the Philippines until a permanent cell of 7,000 local followers has been established. The maharishi movement, headquartered in Switzerland, says it has followers throughout the world. It runs several universities in the maharishi's native India and elsewhere. Perhaps the best-known of these institutions is the Maharishi International University at Fairfield, Iowa, formerly Parsons College, which was acquired 10 years ago when it lost its academic accreditation and went bankrupt. Last winter, the maharishi flew into Iowa from Europe to preside over a two-week convocation of 7,000 of his flock, who had paid $600 each to meditate together in what was called a "taste of Utopia." The group said that a lull in world crises had taken place while it was together. Supporters started arriving in the Philippines in substantial numbers shortly before the anniversary of the Aug. 21, 1983, slaying of opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. They assumed credit for preventing violence at a mass anti-government rally to mark Aquino's death. Since then, however, their record seems spotty. The most destructive and deadly typhoons since World War II hit the country, there was a strong earthquake, a volcano forced thousands of people to flee their homes, inflation soared to 60%, and demonstrators twice clashed with soldiers in the worst Manila street violence in months. Clements acknowledged that the group has been "negligent" in its duties. "We have not yet produced a strong enough effect," he said. "There is a buildup of stress in the collective consciousness." Organizers said that the money used to buy the university, more than $1 million, came from a maharishi fund in England, but they are vague about where the rest of the money is coming from to pay for all the advertising and restaurant and hotel bills. The group runs its operations from the recently bankrupt Mirador Hotel, a 340-room facility it leases from the government's Development Bank fo the Philippines. Members have also been put up in several first-rate hotels. They have 70 rooms at the historic Manila Hotel, the country's most expensive and luxurious guest facility. Gen. Douglas MacArthur once called it home. They have reserved the $200-a-day presidential suite there and the $500-a-day penthouse suite for the next six months. The elegant Champagne Room is frequently booked for maharishi functions, for which the European chefs prepare special gourmet vegetable feasts. Resentment and suspicion of the maharishi group is growing in some sectors of the population. Student leaders at the University of the East have called a boycott of classes to protest what they say is foreign intervention in their school. Luz Bogal, president of the student council of the university's College of Business Administration said, without producing any evidence, that the maharishi people were brought in by the government in a bizarre scheme to cool growing dissatisfaction with the Marcos regime. "They think this thing will pacify the students," Bogal, a 21-year-old senior, said. "We forget about our problems and then we become more passive and submissive to the present rule." Posters hung around the campus by a radical student group ask the question: "Maharishi -- ploy of U.S.-Marcos clique?" The Physics Society of the Philippines has labeled the unified field notion "a distortion of established scientific findings." Dr. Roger Posadas, dean of the College of Science at the University of the Philippines, described the maharishi group as "pseudo-scientific charlatans" and dismissed their theories as "pure hogwash." At the meeting convened by Cardinal Sin, Andrew Gonzales, president of the De La Salle University, asked, "Why the sudden blitzkrieg into the Philippines at this Time?" Some Filipinos think they have the answer -- Marcos. President Marcos, a deeply superstitious man who believes in numerology, mysticism and faith healing, has been a practitioner of yoga since he was a teen-ager. His authorized biography says that as a guerilla leader in World War II, he diminished the pain of Japanese torture by using a yoga discipline to separate his mind from his body. An official of the maharishi group said the organization had approached several heads of state offering its services, but that so far Marcos is the only one who has responded positively. On the president's birthday, Sept. 11, the group took out several pages of ads in all the Manila newspapers and saturated television stations with commercials to congratulate Marcos. Then Marcos entertained about 600 of the group's members at the presidential palace. In a moment captured on government television, he rang the group's ceremonial "bell of invincibility" and accepted their titles. In addition to becoming the group's "founding father," Marcos was also named "president of the world government of the age of enlightenment in the Philippines." Imelda Marcos not only became the "founding mother" but was given the "crown of consciousness of the royal order of the age of enlightenment." In his remarks to the group, Marcos praised the "scientifically tested and proven technology of the unified field to create life in the world in full accord with natural law, to bring fulfillment to the aspirations of the wise throughout the ages and the aspirations of all the constitutions, all the religions of the world, all the cultures of the world, to make the world a beautiful mosaic of different cultures, of different economic systems, and of different social orders, through the maharishi technology of the unified field.