Return of the Maharishi

Eoghan Harris is talking shite, but not necessarily his own. The shite of an Indian vulture, possibly. Vulture shite, you see, is one of the substances you can find yourself chewing as you meditate on Ayurvedic Medicine.

The news that Ayurvedic Medicine has become Eoghan’s latest craze emerged in the Sunday Independent on March 14 under the enigmatic headline, “A passage to India to cleanse mind and body.” The genial Corkonian revealed that he’d come to Delhi for the panchakarma, the annual ritual which adherents of Ayurveda believe will cleanse the body of toxins and the mind of negative thought.
Ayurveda isn’t the first exotic belief-system Eoghan has endorsed. Some 30 years ago, he was a prominent member of a group enthusiastically promoting the thoughts of the “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung, philosopher-king of North Korea. Anybody daring to denounce acolytes of the Great Leader as deluded fools was tongue-lashed as a pro-terrorist Trot.
Now, he seems smitten once more. “I believe (Ayurvedic Medicine) successfully deals with the functional disorders that Western doctors don’t do much about: feeling tired, sick to your stomach or suffering from chronic mysterious pains,” he writes. Personally, I always find that a night’s sleep helps remedy tiredness. A sick stomach can be eased by consuming less Sunday Indo. But that’s all too obvious for Eoghan. In Delhi, he consulted VR Raju, “one of the most respected raidyas in India.”
“You don’t tell him what is wrong with you: he takes your pulse and tells you,” says Eoghan. Raju laid a light finger on Eoghan’s palpitating wrist and immediately diagnosed an illness of the duodenum. Eoghan was astonished at this proof of the validity of the Ayurvedic approach.
With such quick-fire diagnoses, devotees who come to Delhi for the panchakarma have time on their hands. How do they while away the hours? “We get massaged by two-man teams using special herbal oils, get our sinuses cleared, get our bowels moved and meditate as much as possible.”
But there’s a little more to Ayurvedic Medicine than that. Eoghan may have felt reluctant to give away the secrets. Here at hotpress, we are made of stuff both tenderised and tougher.
The piss and dung of animals are key ingredients of Ayurvedic Medicine. Cow’s urine is especially potent and versatile, cows being sacred. Elephant urine, goat dung and bird droppings are among other favoured “fecal ingredients”. One authoritative website www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/1335 tells that the shite of the vulture is the job for duodenal ulcers.
“Meditation” involves the chanting of mantras aimed at eliminating particular illnesses, the most auspicious time for each chant being determined by the alignment of the stars.
Cow’s urine, “gomutra”, is an excellent antidote for obesity, or eliminating vermin from an ulcer, or abdominal dropsy. Mixed with bitumen, it cures jaundice.
Goat dung, “ajashakrt”, is an excellent accessory to surgical cauterization. In powdered form, compounded with honey and cow’s urine (again), it’s an all-purpose linctus. Goat urine, “ajamutra”, restores scar tissue to its natural state.
Elephant urine, “gajamutra”, cures malignant sores. Cocks’ dung, “kukkutapurisha”, clears up skin diseases. A paste made from powdered donkey hooves grows hair on bald heads. The urine of a bear mixed with cow’s saliva is a proven cardiac stimulant.
The disease known as “amanushadosha” – of particular interest to Eoghan, perhaps? – involves “swollen eyes, foaming mouth, shameless conduct, cruelty, extreme bodily strength and a fetid smell” and requires the chanting of a mantra at a time decreed by an ayurvedic medical authority in communion with the celestial serpent, (“divyasarpa”).

How come Westerners are trekking to India seeking health and happiness via Ayurvedic Medicine? It’s largely down to Deepak Chopra.
In the last 10 years, Chopra has made millions from books, lectures, videos and seminars marketing the message of Ayurveda to the alienated of North America. One of his books, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, has sold more than a million in hardback, including 137,000 in a single day following an appearance on Oprah Winfrey.
Another, Return Of The Reishi, gives instruction on approved methods of meditation and on how to levitate. He provides an account of his own experience of “lifting off” – “the first threshold in yogic flying”.
“I was sitting on a foam rubber pad, using the technique which I had been taught. Suddenly my mind became blank for an instant. When I opened my eyes, I was four feet ahead of where I had been before. I realised immediately that I must have flown. It was a remarkable experience.”
Chopra has taken stick from “resisters”, as advocates of conventional medicine are known to those who have glimpsed the Ayurvedic light. Forbes magazine dismissed him a decade ago as “the latest in a line of gurus who have prospered by blending pop science, pop psychology and pop Hinduism”.
The attacks have served only to strengthen devotees’ conviction that he is the possessor of ancient transformative truths which upholders of ignorance have reason to fear.
Followers of Chopra claim that the origins of their “philosophy” are lost in the mists of time. But the version currently being promoted dates from the early 1980s, when it was popularised by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, then in his post-Beatles period.
Chopra, the son of a New Delhi cardiologist, was born in 1947 and graduated from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in 1968 before training at a New Jersey hospital and later filling a senior medical position in New England. In Return Of The Rishi, he describes his first meeting with the Maharishi in 1984, an experience which was to totally transform his life, not least on the economic front.
Chopra founded and became president of the American Association for Ayurvedic Medicine and Maharishi Ayur-Veda Products International (MAPI). By 1993, he was executive director of the San Diego-based Sharp Institute for Human Potential, a “treatment facility” charging $1,125 to $3,200 for week-long “purification” programmes.
In health-food magazines, MAPI heavily advertised an “ancient herbal formula” which had “brought perfect health to the Vedic civilization thousands of years ago” and could “restore balance and order to the entire physiology by enlivening the connection between mind and body.”
MAPI catalogues have promoted a cascade of herbal formulas and teas, “designer foods,” personal-care products, cough syrups and mineral supplements, as well as books, audi- and video cassettes and CDs variously promising to “nourish,” “cleanse,” “balance,” “protect,” “energize,” “vitalize,” “invigorate,” “enliven,” “soothe,” “strengthen,” “correct,” “stabilize,” “improve,” and “regulate” the mind and body. MAPI prescribes its potions and practices as remedies not just for ailments of the spirit but for cancer, epilepsy, polio, schizophrenia, tuberculosis, etc.
Chopra has explained that each bodily organ is constructed from a unique sequence of “vibrations at the quantum level”. Illness in an organ results from disruption of the sequence of the vibrations. This can be detected from the patient’s pulse. The answer is a herbal or animal concoction which possesses the proper vibratory sequence.
Desperate people resort to desperate remedies. I’ve no idea how desperate Eoghan is, or what ails him. I hope he comes home in good fettle. But if he does, I don’t think it will have been on account of him making the journey, boing-boing, by yogic transportation while munching on the shite of an Indian vulture.