Mentmore Towers - The Maharishi Era

The Maharishi Era

The empty house, unaltered since the day it was finished, was sold in 1977 for £220,000 to the Transcendental Meditation movement founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In 1992, the TM organization made Mentmore the British national headquarters of its political arm, the Natural Law Party.

From 1977 to 1979, the building housed the national office of the TM organization, and was used for weekend and longer residence courses in Transcendental Meditation, as well as World Peace Assemblies for the practice of the more advanced TM-Sidhi program. In early 1979, Maharishi moved about a hundred young men, all TM teachers, to the property to maintain continuous group practice of the TM-Sidhi program. Mentmore was set up as the UK seat of the World Government for the Age of Enlightenment (founded in 1975) and was used as the launching point to establish City Parliaments in most of the UK's larger cities. For roughly three years (1979 through 1982), Mentmore Towers saw an immense level of activity, with numerous banquets to woo influential academic, government and business figures. A number of laboratories were built in the former servants' wing and used for TM research. These operated under the name Maharishi European Research University (MERU), after the original institution of the same name established earlier at Seelisberg in Switzerland. Several series of seminars were run, aimed at inspiring academics, principally from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, to do research on TM. Visiting speakers included Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson, Professor Ilya Prigogine, Hans Eysenck, and many other leading international academics.

In 1982, Mentmore's role was changed to become the home of Maharishi University of Natural Law. In 1992, it was transformed again, to be the UK headquarters of the Natural Law Party, which launched over 300 candidates from the UK and Commonwealth countries to contest the election in that year.

In a search for sources of income, the TM organisation ran a number of businesses out of Mentmore (including making fudge, selling silk dresses, hosting classical music concerts and using the building as a film location). After 1982, the number of staff at Mentmore decreased to about thirty until the building was sold.