I wrote this piece below and have been e-mailing individually to a number of scholarly folks who I met at an academic meeting studying Utopian and communal groups that I attended recently out in upstate New York. I came away with about 50 business cards from scholars who I met and talked with at the conference. I wrote this to be able to send to them something descriptive about (meditating) Fairfield, Iowa as a 'communal' group. Of course what I set out to write became longer than I intended. Here is the unabridged version with the links. I hope you'll like the Shaker comparison and I think you'll appreciate the links. Best Regards from Iowa, <paste>:
Communal (Meditating) Fairfield, Iowa On returning home from the annual meeting I find myself wanting to catch up by sharing some links on 'communal' Fairfield, Iowa with you that might better give insight in to a scale and circumstance of the communal society I come from and have lived in for 40 years. Starting from the outside looking in on meditating Fairfield it can seem like looking at a monolith. Evidently it is easy to make assumptions about Fairfield and its meditators as it is also tough to discern what is going on inside the meditating community. But it need not be difficult at all once there are handles on it. The Fairfield meditating community has matured in time and is quite developed with many communal features to find and look at. I see Fairfield, Iowa in fact can provide a large and living laboratory for communal community scholars to look at. Beginning with Tim Miller's Communal Societies Vol. 30 No.1, 2010 paper in mind I'll give you some things further below to look at for yourselves, "A Matter of Definition: Just What Is an Intentional Community?" -A sense of purpose and distinctiveness, with deliberate intent to be a community -Some kind of shared living space -Some shared resources -Critical mass For communal studies scholars looking in I believe one of the best ways to understand the scale of the Fairfield Meditating community is to relate to it in a form like the old Shaker villages as organizational structure back while the Shakers were up and running. In the middle of TM is the equivalent of a Shaker 'Ministry Family' of upper administration and then elements of communal families of meditators that are in concentric circles around the middle including meditators who live well outside the middle in town but come inside to meditate also as members. The upper level is a more exclusive level (only for sake of an analogy though, they do not use that term 'ministry' to describe themselves) which currently now tends to live more exclusively out in an adjacent new town area called Maharishi Vedic City to the northwest of Fairfield proper. The university community lives more on their campus in Fairfield. The larger meditating community lives through out Fairfield and the County area either disperse singly or in meditator households in neighborhoods. Maharishi Vedic City and the university community each function with obvious communal aspect with people living together, working for their community together, housing close together, educating their kids together, socializing together, sharing resources etc. The larger surrounding meditating community also functions that way. The common thing to these Shaker-like 'families' of meditators in the Fairfield area like the Shakers is that they moved to Fairfield as meditators to be practicing meditators in something larger. In starting, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was a proponent of Transcendental Meditation for 60 years in the West and there has been a meditating community in Fairfield, Iowa for about 40 years. The Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement purchased a bankrupt college campus in Fairfield, Iowa and moved a university there in 1974. The university was teaching a wide liberal arts curricula where the students and faculty were also practicing meditators. That functioned as a unit in Fairfield for about a half decade when at a large gathering of meditators meeting with Maharishi it was suggested that folks as meditators move to the Fairfield community to be able to meditate regularly in large group meditations. That was the start of the Fairfield meditating community where meditators moved to Fairfield, Iowa generally. Through the later 1970's, 1980's, 1990's and even up to present time thousands of meditators have lived in Fairfield. Like happened with the Shakers there are now lots of projects that go along with meditating that start to be defining otherwise but still the formative communal reason here is more essentially about the spiritual practice of meditating. Hopefully this is useful as a way of looking at it. I am providing here below some source links to these elements that I think are good ways of accessing what is going on inside of a communal meditating Fairfield. The Group Meditation: Large daily group meditations are held in community facilities the meditating community built in the early 1980's intended to house large group meditations. This source link gives an overview to this aspect of the community: http://invincibleamerica.org/tallies/ Notice clear down at the bottom of this page are daily tallies that in this record go back to 2006. The point is that in the daily ebb and flow of meditating in Fairfield is this particular communal aspect of meditation which happens everyday twice a day and has for a long time. The 'Golden Domes': Back in the 1980's the meditating community built two large wooden dome structures to house the community meditation. There is a site on Wikipedia about these buildings. This Wiki 'Golden Domes' site is very well sourced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Domes The meditating university community as 'Consciousness-based Education': The university in Fairfield functions as its own communal group which is also part of the larger meditating community in Fairfield. University faculty, staff, and students housed close together on campus, take their meals together, meditate together, work together, their kids go to the meditating primary and secondary community school together, and sustaining resources are shared from the community: http://www.mum.edu Likewise the meditating community's elementary and secondary school function as another communal group or 'family' with similar communal features as the university. http://www.maharishischooliowa.org/ The Larger Meditating Fairfield Meditator Community: Most meditators who have come to live in the area live in Fairfield proper or out in the county area living outside of both the university campus and the Maharishi Vedic City area . The general Jefferson County Iowa population is about 15,000. The Fairfield population is about 10,000. In the Jefferson County/Fairfield area there are about 3,000 adult age meditators living still. The university campus houses many hundred people. The recent census found about 250 people living in Maharishi Vedic City and an approximate additional 1,000 pundits on temporary visas living to the north of Maharish Vedic City in a compound that has recently been built. When Transcendental Meditation was culturally popular previously around the time that the Beatles were followers of Maharishi, Transcendental Meditation (TM) often drew heavily from college and university communities. As a result the immigration of TM meditators to Fairfield has brought both an educated and cosmopolitan group together in a small midwest town. This aspect combined with its Utopian values in the larger community of meditators living outside of campus and outside of Vedic City deserves a look as its own distinctive communal society. The greater or larger Fairfield meditator meditating community often gets more defined locally by its communal arts, civic activities and businesses alongside the indigenous Fairfield and Jefferson County Iowa population. This becomes its own large area in communal Fairfield studies that has not been written about so much other than feature articles appearing in newspapers and magazines and now more recently in an Oprah film production in a form of overview journalism. The Maharishi Vedic City Communal Grouping: Maharishi Vedic City functions effectively as a theocratic municipality in the vein of Holly Folk's paper on the subject about theocratic municipality in Communal Societies V 31.2, 2011. Two sources of information on the internet that are authored by people in the community of Maharishi Vedic City are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maharishi_Vedic_City,_Iowa and their own website: http://www.vediccity.net/ In conclusion generally I have found Fairfield, Iowa to be an extremely vital and fun communal place to live as one of the larger and older Utopian places currently operating in the U.S. I see now that it is old enough and mature enough to deserve some study by scholars so I wanted to share these link with you to help you become introduced. These then are the three or four communal groupings within the meditating Fairfield community that you can look at easily from outside. I hope you find their links and descriptions both useful and interesting to the studies of communal societies. And, of course there is Fairfield itself: http://cityoffairfieldiowa.com/ With Kind Regards from Fairfield, *** --- In [email protected], "Buck" wrote: > > A couple months ago I attended an academic conference with about a hundred > scholars who study our kind of group. They were generally unaware of > Fairfield. In conversing with these scholars over several days time it was > as if 'TM' had dropped off the planet. These were tenured professors, > department chairs, directors of collections who teach at real universities > from all over the country. Basically zip understanding of TM let alone > Fairfield. TM seemingly disappeared from culture from the 1980's and on and > suffers still from that amnesia of inertia. It got to the point even in > Fairfield where the Dome numbers had dropped in the y-2000's to just a couple > hundred people meditating together. Nearly died out except for the > resuscitation of the urgency of the invincible America meditation program > (2006) and the last ditch efforts of some few people (Bob Wynne) in Vedic > City to actually bring pundits to Fairfield > http://www.vediccity.net/welcome.html > It is an amazing thing going on in Fairfield. It is real interesting to be > in the middle of communicating that to people outside in the world. > -Buck in the Dome > > --- In [email protected], "Buck" wrote: > > > > It is interesting, that most people out in the world, even educated people, > > have no idea what is going on here let alone the gravity of it. We should > > all be unperturbed by their general old-age ignorance of it though and > > rigorously just attend to our meditations. Great is our method and science > > of peace here. The New Jerusalem is coming, > > -Buck > > > > --- In [email protected], Share Long <sharelong60@> wrote: > > > > > > Buck, forget emailing. Have him visit FF for Dec 7 Art Walk. As > > > George somebody, former Redskins coach said, the future is now. > > > > > > > > > Your brave enthusiasm and still makes me smile just about every day (-: > > > > > > > > > > > > ________________________________ > > > From: Buck > > > To: [email protected] > > > Sent: Saturday, December 1, 2012 11:51 PM > > > Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Reducing Tension in the Middle East > > > > > > > > >  > > > > > > > > > --- In [email protected], "Buck" wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > --- In [email protected], "emptybill" <emptybill@> wrote: > > > > > > > > > > Buckyball > > > > > > > > > > "A perennial philosophy of all major cultural traditions that there > > > > > exists a transcendental field at the most fundamental level of natural > > > > > law ..." > > > > > > > > > > If this is true then it is not "transcendental" but rather a > > > > > supporting > > > > > ground. > > > > > In other words, it is prakriti/pradhâna/avyakta (an unmanifest). > > > > > It is nature, but not transcendent. > > > > > > > > > > > > > Bill, Yep I know what you mean, that's my experience too. As I was > > > > editing that piece I chose to stick with the western language and stay > > > > away from the Vedic so as not to confuse the ignorant lurker here. > > > > Going with the 'Transcendental' field was good enough for the release > > > > posted here. Best Regards, -Buck > > > > > > > > > > I went to a lecture at the U. of Ia. in Iowa City the other nite given by > > > a visiting classicist professor and went out to dinner with him after. > > > In discussing Fairfield he broke from what we were saying at a point and > > > declared he could not understand what Utopia could possibly be. That he > > > lives in the past and present but could not understand what I was saying > > > about a future Utopia this way. It was not the time to say anything more > > > but we are e-mailing. It is a challenging thing to communicate. > > > -Buck > > > > > > > > > > > > > --- In [email protected], "Buck" wrote: > > > > > > > > > > > > A perennial philosophy of all major cultural traditions that there > > > > > exists a transcendental field at the most fundamental level of natural > > > > > law, which can be directly accessed as the silent transcendental level > > > > > of the human mind. Hundreds of studies have shown that experience of > > > > > transcendental consciousness breaks the chain of conditioned reflexes > > > > > coming on from past behavior, as seen in reduced addictive behaviors > > > > > of > > > > > all kinds, decreased prison recidivism, and reduced behavioral > > > > > problems > > > > > in inner-city children. > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Now there is hope because a proven technology of consciousness to > > > > > create peace is available. This novel approach establishes a filter of > > > > > coherence and order in collective consciousness in the present, which > > > > > is > > > > > capable of transforming the flow of negativity from the past into a > > > > > more > > > > > harmonious future. > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Meditation is certainly the answer, > > > > > > > -Buck in the Dome > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >
