By Joachim Claes, Founder and CEO
Better Natural really started in the early 2000’s, when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of a global non-profit organization that is often referred to as the “TM Movement”, started projects in many different industries at the same time, but all related to one single goal. Maharishi may have been mostly known for bringing Transcendental Meditation to the world, but he had an equally strong passion for green technologies to make the world a better place, and invested more than $30 million towards these goals.
As part of this, Maharishi sent me to Ukraine, to manage the largest organic farm in the world at the time, a 120,000 acre farm, and learn the best organic farming techniques from the world’s top experts. They were all eager to participate in such a large organic farming project.
He also had me experiment with new building technologies, and discover the amazing benefits of truly massive walls. Around the same time he had a separate team in Fairfield, Iowa experiment with insulating foamed cement technologies, and build one of the world’s most advanced cement foaming systems. He also trained an army of architects in a specific architectural system that promotes harmony and happiness of the inhabitants. These architects have overseen a combined $1 Billion in construction by now.
At the same time he sent one of my best friends to India to set up a complete solar cell and solar panel production facility, while yet another member of his global organization spent more than 35 years becoming a top hydropower engineer.
Even though these seeds were all planted and started living their own life, my life first took me in a different direction. I decided to become a Transcendental Meditation teacher and then focused on helping the TM Movement improving their marketing efforts. I designed a website and an internet marketing strategy that eventually tripled their revenues in 55 countries, with the website getting more than 20 million visitors.
Once that was running well, I felt it was time to go to back to these other technologies, so we founded Better Natural as a kind of TM Movement spin-off (with the vast majority of the profits being used to support the TM Movement’s larger non-profit goals to create a better world), and I started putting all of the pieces of the puzzle together and gathering all the experience from their global network of experts and their 10 million members.
Eventually this resulted in 4 spectacular technologies in the areas of Organic agriculture, construction, solar energy, and hydropower that all had one thing in common. They could each make a significant difference in mitigating climate change.
Construction