http://www.latimes.com/travel/la-tr-vedic10sep10,1,6052345,full.story
A lotus amid the Iowa corn
A new Midwestern town has the teachings of a well-known maharishi at
its heart.
By Carina Chocano, Times Staff Writer
September 10, 2006
WHEN I booked my trip last April to attend a conference on
Transcendental Meditation at the Maharishi University of Management
in Fairfield, Iowa, I had no idea I would be visiting another
country. My airline ticket clearly indicated Cedar Rapids, and from
there I would rent a car and drive about two hours to a small town 50
miles from the Mississippi River. I was a longtime fan of filmmaker
David Lynch, one of the conference's keynote speakers, and I was
interested in meditation, occasionally popping in for a guided
meditation at a neighborhood Buddhist temple.
By the time I had made the travel arrangements, I knew I would be
spending two nights at the improbably named Raj, an ayurvedic spa-
hotel improbably located in the middle of a cornfield. I knew I would
be attending a conference entitled "Consciousness, Creativity and the
Brain," where John Hagelin, the onetime Natural Law Party
presidential candidate would also speak. Hagelin once offered to
deploy 400 "yogic fliers" to Kosovo to meditate for peace (then-
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declined).
What I didn't know is that the Raj is not in Fairfield but just
outside of it, in a brand-new town called Maharishi Vedic City, which
happens to be the North American capital of the Global Country of
World Peace.
So to say that Maharishi Vedic City exists on a plane of its own is
not quite to speak metaphorically. The town, which consists of
several still-sprouting residential developments, is surrounded by
cornfields dotted with barns and gloomy Victorians. The area is no
stranger to sectarian lifestyle experiments: Not far away is the
Mennonite community of Kalona, where bearded men and bonneted women
drive around in buggies.
When I arrived, the sky looked as though it had been carpeted in a
gray Stainmaster Berber. Fairfield proper looked as though it had
seen better days specifically 1854, when it hosted the first Iowa
State Fair. It has the stately but melancholy air of a once-
prosperous Midwestern town in decline.
By contrast, M.V.C. displays all the architectural characteristics of
a new exurban development: gaudy, oversize construction that has no
stylistic relation to its environment but instead vaguely alludes to
a theme-park version someplace sort of magical and far away.
The first thing that alerted me to the existence of the Global
Country of World Peace was a bright yellow flag with an orange
sunburst design, which I took at first to be an expression of
meditator pride, the TM equivalent of a rainbow flag. Checking in at
the Raj, I noticed a display of the Global Country's paper
money, "the ideal currency of the city" (though they did take my
American Express).
*
Think pink
STEVE YELLIN, my guide and PR liaison for the weekend, met me at my
room, which was bright and plush, done in a smoothed-over rustic
style I decided to call Santa Barbara Provençal. He was wearing a
radiant pure pink cashmere sweater, which I initially took for a
fashion statement. But it turned out pink was everywhere. It was the
color of the media room at the Raj, where pastel Barcaloungers faced
a TV permanently tuned to the Maharishi Channel. And it was the color
of the private plane that first delivered the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
to rural Iowa in 1971.
Over a vegetarian buffet lunch, I got a brief history of the town.
The maharishi (now an octogenarian billionaire living in the
Netherlands) introduced TM to the West in the 1950s. He founded the
Maharishi University of Management in 1971, around the time he became
one in the long line of "fifth Beatles." (John Lennon would go on to
write the none-too-flattering "Sexy Sadie.")
Vedic City grew around the school, incorporating in 2001. "Vedic"
refers to "Veda," the Sanskrit word for "knowledge," which the
maharishi claims to have distilled into a comprehensive system for
living. TM is just the beginning. The "complete Vedic science of
consciousness" encompasses architecture, education, health,
agriculture, administration, economy and defense.
There are, according to the TM organization, more than 6 million
practitioners worldwide. Fairfield/M.V.C. is home to a few thousand
of them and offers, beyond individual daily practice, an all-
inclusive lifestyle.
After lunch, my guide took me on a tour of the town. All of the
structures in M.V.C. are built in strict adherence to Maharishi
Sthapatya Veda technique, which requires that all buildings face
east, include a central "quiet space," and be adorned with a golden
dollop called a kalash.
The houses cost $200,000 to $800,000, including consultation fees and
royalties, which sounded like a lot for rural Iowa, but I was told
that "people who live and work in these buildings report that they
think more clearly, make better decisions, feel happier and
healthier, feel more alert and refreshed throughout the day, have
more restful and refreshing sleep, have more energy and less fatigue
and experience less stress and greater peace of mind."
(Blurting, "Oh, like feng shui," in response to an initial
explanation of how it all works is the wrong thing to do.)
I came to Iowa on a lark or as close to a lark as you can come
while on assignment for a major newspaper. The TM organization courts
the press with an interest that borders on ardor and, as a result,
throughout the weekend, I felt less like a fly on the wall than the
elephant in the room.
Because Vedic City wants you to visit. It believes in the creativity-
enhancing, stress-reducing, intelligence-increasing, health-promoting
and world-peace-increasing properties of TM, and it really, really
wants you to believe in them too.
Vedic City also wants you to know that Vedic City is for foodies. It
wants you to sample its desultory smattering of ethnic restaurants
and conclude that here you'll want for nothing. The town of 285 has
big plans for expansion, for attracting tourists and potential
meditators. Mayor Bob Wynne (a longtime meditator) has said that the
idea is to expand to 1,200 residents by 2010, and eventually reach up
to 10,000. Since it incorporated, the city has purchased more than
100 acres of farmland, which someday will be the site of a theme
park, a golf course and botanical gardens.
There was something about Vedic City's architecture, not to mention
the mammoth vehicles parked in the driveways, that was disconcerting
yet familiar; it was exoticism snugly tucked into a marketable
lifestyle brand. Vedic McMansions, Vedic lodges, Vedic Cape Cod
bungalows and Vedic condos commingled within a short distance of
giant his-and-hers Golden Domes of Pure Knowledge where the yogic
fliers congregate. On the way back to the hotel, I passed a mobile
home park called Utopia Park ("The Homes by the Domes"), which is
just off Heaven and Taste of Utopia streets.
The organic grocery was like the hippie co-op in every college or
lefty town except the bulletin board was disproportionally
dedicated to guru services and the "for-rent" fliers list Eastern
orientation as an amenity.
After the tour, I went back to the Raj to rest before the weekend's
welcome reception. I wandered around the calming lobby, stopping to
check out the scale model of the Vedic Observatory on my way to the
gift shop. I hung out in the media room for a bit. The maharishi was
on TV, talking about the unified field. (You couldn't spit without
hitting a portrait of the maharishi around here.)
In the gift store, I bought some beautiful Indian-themed notecards.
The woman at the register was very edgy and stressed out for someone
working in a shop where, at that moment, there was only one customer
standing there without so much as a pricing question. When a
colleague came in with a technical problem, she melted down. I went
back to my room, clutching my relaxing bath salts, feeling sort of
jittery myself.
A few hours later, I joined Steve and his wife for dinner at a now-
closed restaurant called Regina's. I ordered the salmon on a plank of
flaming cedar, which, I was surprised to discover, actually came on a
plank of flaming cedar. My fish was on a wood chip that was on fire.
When the flames failed to subside, I smothered them discreetly with
mashed potatoes. It was delicious.
The bulk of the weekend, though, I spent in a big room something
very much like a hangar, in fact attending a conference
on "Creativity, Consciousness and the Brain," listening to talks on
the relationship between quantum physics and peace-creating energy
fields, and watching the brain waves of a young student of meditation
hooked up to an EEG as a group of bald men stood around beaming.
The conference constituted the last leg of a 12-campus tour
introducing college students to TM and promoting Lynch's new
scholarship program, "The David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-
Based Education and World Peace." If the need for meditation
scholarships sounds strange, considering the ease with which
meditation instruction can be obtained, you should know that the
formal four-day TM instruction and a personal mantra (plus future
adjustments) will run you $2,500.
Early on Saturday morning, Lynch graciously took questions from the
conference-goers, who were encouraged to ask him about anything,
whether it be meditation or movie-making. Judging from the questions,
what many of the young attendees sought were grand unifying answers.
They worried, perhaps prematurely, about how to retain their
integrity and creativity in Hollywood, an industry known for its bone-
headedness and venality. They wanted to know should they shoot on
film or digital video? They wanted to understand what releases
creativity, what its limits are.
"The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi talks about an ocean of creativity and
consciousness," Lynch replied. "Then modern science says it's true
everything that is emerges from this thing. Quantum physics and the
unified field."
*
So, what's the secret?
THE questions were much like those aspiring filmmakers ask directors
during a Q&A at a film festival. In those sessions, it's generally
been my experience that directors are rarely asked about aesthetics
or ideas.
What people want to know and sometimes they ask this cleverly,
sometimes clumsily is how they can stop being themselves and start
being the actor/director/famous person. They want answers, in other
words, on how to transform their lives. They want the secret formula,
the treasure map, the magic phrase, the secret mantra.
There's something indescribably alluring about a "simple, effortless"
daily practice that purports to alleviate everything that ails the
21st century brain. And like most indescribably alluring things,
there's something unsettling about it too. TM sells itself very
aggressively as the one true meditation practice, a practice unlike
other practices that require contemplation or analysis or some other
form of effort.
And here, in southwestern Iowa, just in time for the baby boomers'
twilight years, is their Eastern-philosophy utopia. What 40 years ago
might have been an "alternative lifestyle" is now a marketable
lifestyle product; an entropic mix of spirituality and materialism;
self-betterment and self-absorption as a cure for all of humanity's
ills; consciousness-expansion as a way to building wealth and saving
the world. For the not-so-low price of $2,500, you're offered inner
peace, world peace, reduced blood pressure and the sense of yourself
as a maverick pioneer, a "cultural creative."
Meanwhile, neither the square footage of the average house (in an non-
temperate year-round climate) nor the size of the gas tank of the
average car seems to factor into the peace equation.
As Fred Travis, director of the Psychophysiology Center at MUM,
softly droned on about "the delightful flow of fine feeling and soft
thinking" brought on in the college brain by TM, I wandered off. I
think I was suffering from severe scientific proof fatigue. From the
moment of my arrival, I had been regaled with tales of millions of
dollars in research grants from the National Institutes of Health,
the findings published in prestigious medical journals, the studies
conducted in partnership with major university hospitals. Nearly
every conversation, whether it concerned elementary-school academic
performance or cholesterol or crime-rate reduction, at some point
included the phrase "There was this study
. "
Maybe someday we'll look back on these early years of the 21st
century as the moment when it became clear that money, competent PR
and, above all, frank and unabashed banality have the power to
normalize anything. When life itself transformed into a mall
of "lifestyle choices," laid out end to end on a flat, infinite plane
of possibility.
I wandered into the student union bookstore, which carried no books
except for the maharishi's. In the admissions building, I perused a
display detailing the maharishi's blueprints for an "ideal city." It
is grid-like and built around gardens. Examples of bad cities include
Paris and New York.
Later, another journalist asked one of the PR guys whether the
maharishi would really prefer to see a big square suburb where Paris
is. I mean, it's Paris, she said.
He considered this and then replied, "Well, it might be nice for us
to visit, but think about the people who have to live there."
*
TM zone
GETTING THERE:
>From LAX, Delta, American, United and Northwest have connecting
service (change of planes) to the Eastern Iowa Airport in Cedar
Rapids. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $314.
Driving from Cedar Rapids, it's 78 miles to Fairfield and Vedic City.
Go south on U.S. 218, then south on Iowa 1. Fairfield is also 114
miles from Des Moines.
WHERE TO STAY:
The Raj Health Center and Spa, 1734 Jasmine Ave., Vedic City, IA
52556; (800) 248-9050, http://www.theraj.com . An ayurvedic health
spa that has a maximum of 18 guests for three-, five- or seven-day
stays. Rates vary.
Rukmapura Park Hotel, 1702 Rukmapura Park, Vedic City, IA 52556;
(866) 472-1008, http://www.rukmapuraparkhotel.com . Maharishi
Sthapatya Veda-style lodging in 30 hotel rooms and 35 free-standing
chalets for longer stays. Doubles from $99.
WHAT TO DO:
Maharishi Vedic City tours, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Fridays and Sundays.
Includes the Raj, Vedic observatory, the university, Sthapatya Veda-
style buildings and vegetarian lunch buffet. $30, ages 12 and younger
$15. Reservations required. (641) 472-9580, Ext. 0, or
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Self-guided tour maps available at the
Raj.
TO LEARN MORE:
Maharishi Vedic City Office of Tourism, 1734 Jasmine Ave., Vedic
City, IA 52556; (641) 470-7070, maharishivediccity.net.
Fairfield Iowa Convention & Visitors Bureau, 204 W. Broadway,
Fairfield, IA 52556; (641) 472-2111, travelfairfieldiowa.com.
Carina Chocano
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