A year ago the giggling, bearded 4'9" prophet moved Maharishi International University to Fairfield, Iowa, in the hope that MIU could do for meditation what MIT has done for engineering. For $2.5 million the TM organization bought the 150-acre, 82-building campus of defunct Parsons College, an academic last resort known as "Flunkout U." The Maharishi, whose MIU previously had been located in Switzerland and California, explains, "This campus was the largest facility in the U.S. available when we wanted to move to a new site."
The Maharishi flew in tourist class to Iowa from TM European headquarters in Zurich to announce that henceforth MIU will be the Mecca for an "Age of Enlightenment. More than one million people now have enjoyed the knowledge provided by MIU that life does not have to be a struggle," the Maharishi told 600 students in a nasal, two-and-a-half-hour Founder's Day oration. The students greeted him with roses, carnations and mums. "The purpose of TM," the Maharishi went on, "is to improve the quality of life, and therefore we must bring an ideal society to our world."
An incurable optimist, the Maharishi declared that TM is already having a beneficial effect. "In the 400 cities [around the world] with one percent TM participants," he said, "we find that sickness, crime and accident rates are substantially down." MIU statistics show, however, that the only American city with one per cent TM followers is San Francisco, which has been having a somewhat less than tranquil autumn.
The TM movement began 17 years ago in the Himalayas when the Maharishi came down from a mountain cave and decided to go public. His early converts included the Beatles, Shirley MacLaine, Mia Farrow, Marlon Brando and the Rolling Stones. Joe Namath, basketball's Bill Walton, and golfer Gary Player have all been intrigued by TM's promise of improved performance resulting from its method of relaxation.
The core of the meditative experience is the repetition twice a day of a single sound (or mantra) for about 20 minutes to achieve tranquillity.
At MIU such meditations supplement the liberal arts courses, which lead to a standard bachelor's degree. Well-scrubbed, well-motivated and well-behaved, the students have hit it off with Fairfield's 9,000 residents. Some 300 townspeople, in fact, have taken up TM themselves.
To the Maharishi (a college man with a degree from India's Allahabad University) this is a good omen. "The Age of Enlightenment," he says, may bring town and gown together into the "ideal society." Or in other words, today Iowa, tomorrow the world.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
