In cornfield country, good vibes by the bushel

Things got pretty hectic here on Tranquility Base last week.

There was the seminar for doctors to outline the latest advances in maharishi-based medical care. An architectural conference took up principles of maharishi-inspired building design. Music lovers swooned to unusual rhythms at recitals of maharishi gandharva music, which is said to be completely harmonious with nature.

But the highlight was the special weeklong “Heaven on Earth” assembly, a conclave of 5,000 devotees of transcendental meditation and a mystical theory of physics they call the maharishi technology of the unified field. By meditating en masse twice a day, they vowed to ease international tensions while generating what they refer to as the global maharishi effect--”an upsurge of positivity and progress in world consciousness,” as official literature describes it.

“Did you see the paper today?” asked Patty Schneider, public affairs director of Fairfield-based Maharishi International University. “In East Germany they apologized to Jews for the Holocaust and a couple of days ago those hostages were released in the Mideast. You can’t tell me this stuff doesn’t work.”

The inspiration for all this is the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the gnomish Indian guru who soared to prominence a few decades ago as a spiritual tutor to The Beatles during their psychedelic phase. The maharishi parlayed that fame into a richly endowed worldwide network of TM centers and schools designed to promote his unorthodox notions about science, medicine, economics, politics and just about anything else.

The best known of these institutions is MIU, an 850-student college tucked amid the cornfields of southeastern Iowa. Here, the maharishi’s followers claim to have done extensive scientific research to validate the maharishi effect. They contend that concentrations of trained meditators emit a positive force field that profoundly affects everything and everybody around them. The bigger the group, the wider the impact.

According to the maharishi’s calculations, the world’s problems could disappear if just 7,000 people, about the square root of 1% of Earth’s population, would meditate together daily.

Armed with an elaborate array of charts, graphs and stupefying mathematical formulas, officials say that previous mass meditation experiments both here and abroad have produced traceable reductions in crime, traffic accidents, illness and hostility while pushing up the stock market and even improving the weather.

The thaw in East-West tensions? Thank the maharishi, not Gorbachev, they argue. The success of Reaganomics? Meditation, not voodoo.

The theory may need a little fine-tuning. With the Philippines racked by political turmoil and economic collapse back in 1984, about 1,200 of the maharishi’s followers from Europe and the United States descended on Manila and vowed to meditate away the country’s woes.

At a ceremony at the presidential palace, they declared then-President Ferdinand E. Marcos and his wife, Imelda, “the founding father and mother” of their movement as well as bestowing on Mrs. Marcos the “crown of consciousness of the royal order of the age of enlightenment.”

Unfortunately, while the group was in the Philippines the country was rocked by a devastating typhoon, a strong earthquake and a life-threatening volcanic eruption. Meanwhile, inflation soared to 60% and several anti-government demonstrations resulted in serious street violence.

One place where the maharishi effect is undeniable is Fairfield, a community of 11,000 that is thriving thanks in part to the influx of maharishi acolytes. While most Iowa towns shrunk during the farm crisis of the last decade, Fairfield grew. Several times a year the town’s population soars and cash registers ring wildly as American and Canadian meditators flock here by the thousands for periodic assemblies called to enhance the maharishi effect.

Movement officials recently purchased ads in dozens of newspapers around the globe offering an incredible bargain to President Bush and other world leaders.

To create a permanent global maharishi effect, the governments were asked to underwrite the hiring of 10,000 full-time meditators--a few thousand more than needed just in case some of the regulars got sick or went on vacation. With the maharishi effect in place, most nations could slash their military and domestic budgets because people wouldn’t have many problems anymore, the reasoning goes.

“For $100 million a year we could create an enormous effect on the whole world,” said Bevan Morris, MIU’s president.

To bolster their claims, MIU researchers plan to measure problems around the world immediately before, during and after the latest assembly, which concluded Sunday. As the meditators head home today, tensions and anxieties should rise, they said.

In the United States, at least, such a prediction will almost surely prove true. Millions of Americans face the most nerve-racking, gut-wrenching task of the year today--meeting the midnight deadline for filing their annual income tax statements.