Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru to the Beatles

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru to the Beatles who introduced the West to transcendental meditation, died yesterday at his home in the Dutch town of Vlodrop, a spokesman said. He was thought to be 91.

Bob Roth, a spokesman for the Transcendental Meditation movement, which the India-born Maharishi founded, said the death appeared to have resulted from "natural causes - his age."

Once dismissed as hippie mysticism, Transcendental Meditation, the Hindu practice of mind control that Maharishi taught, gradually gained respectability in the medical community.

He began teaching TM in 1955 and brought the technique to the United States in 1959. The movement really took off after the Beatles visited his ashram in India in 1968, though he had a famous falling-out with them when he discovered them using drugs at his Himalayan retreat.

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.

About five million people devoted 20 minutes every morning and evening to 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 mantras.

Donations and the $2,500 fee to learn TM financed the construction of Peace Palaces, or meditation centers, in dozens of cities around the world. The money paid for hundreds of new schools in India.

In 1971, he founded a university in Fairfield, Iowa, that taught meditation alongside the arts and sciences to 700 students.

In 1990, he moved onto the grounds of a Franciscan monastery in the Dutch village of Vlodrop. Concerned about his health, he secluded himself in two rooms of the wooden pavilion he built on the compound, speaking only by video to aides.