The Beatles, Maharishi and I
- A Kind of memoir
by Conny Larsson


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For more than thirty years, Conny Larsson was completely engrossed by two Eastern sects. Finally he managed to break out of that existence and has now taken to the pen to write off the euphoric hell he had walled himself into.This is his attempt to understand the mechanisms and patterns he followed.

"The new music, the Beatles, drugs, sexual liberation, theater, meditation, the Eastern sects. All that engulfed me and my friends in the environment I was in as a teenager. I was at stage school in Malmö in 1965 as a theater for children, to the big surprise of some. Soon I was, like many others, devoured by the abuses of the Oriental movement led by Maharishi Maharishi Yogi, later famous as the Beatles' yogi. Lost in Maharishi's charisma and meditation, I became his private secretary, traveled around the world with him and was drawn increasingly into the world where denial was at the heart of what I actually experienced.

After far too long a time, I left the TM movement ('Transcendental Meditation) only to end up in another sect. In the absence of a father image, I was not yet mature enough to live without religious role models. I assumed the task of setting up a treatment center for drug addicts and difficult criminal and mentally disturbed persons. All this in the conviction that, as my guru said, I would 'be the right man to lead this home'.

I lived in these sects for a total of 31 years. I managed to leave my last guru only after I have seen through his approach and realized that I was compromised as an acomplice. In my naivety I thought that the local or national cult leaders would find an understanding of what I and others lived through. I turned first to them without getting any response. Instead, I was the victim of personal persecution and death threats.

Now that I look back over the whole period I also see how the insulation of those who dared to leave the movement gained momentum in increasingly unpleasant forms. This has strengthened my belief that a book written by me and by this to be a help for all those people who are still in the movement or under peer pressure, be it Knutby, Jehovah's Witnesses or other of the same nature. "

Conny Larsson