John Hagelin

John Samuel Hagelin is a physicist and the leader of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement in the United States. He is president of Maharishi International University (MIU), formerly Maharishi University of Management (MUM), in Fairfield, Iowa, and honorary chair of its board of trustees. The university was established in 1973 by the TM movement's founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, to deliver a "consciousness-based education". Hagelin's work and research connected to TM has attracted criticism from former colleagues and fellow scientists. In 1981, Hagelin graduated with a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University and then did several months of post-doctoral research at CERN. He went on to do post-doctoral work at the SLAC. In 1984, he became a professor of physics at Maharishi International University (MIU), and later became the university's president. Hagelin postulates that his extended version of unified field theory is identified with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's "unified field of consciousness", a view that was rejected by "virtually every theoretical physicist in the world" in 2006. Hagelin stood as a candidate for President of the United States for the Natural Law Party, a party founded by the TM movement, in the 1992, 1996 and 2000 elections. He is the author of Manual for a Perfect Government (1998), which sets out how to apply "natural law" to matters of governance. Hagelin is also the president of the David Lynch Foundation, which promotes TM.