John Hagelin

John Samuel Hagelin (born June 9, 1954) is the leader of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement in the United States. He is president of the 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". A physicist by training, Hagelin was a researcher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in the early 1980s. He has argued that the supersymmetric flipped SU(5) model, a unified field theory that he helped to develop, is identical to the "unified field of consciousness" posited by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. This view is rejected by other physicists. 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 president of the David Lynch Foundation, which promotes TM.