Pushing Peace a Hop, Skip, Jump at a Time

This is a very small city with a very ambitious dream: to bring about world peace by teaching thousands of people to fly--as in levitate and swoop.

“I don’t think I’m kooky,” said John Revolinski, a leading advocate of the plan.

Out here, it seems, he’s positively mainstream.

This city in the Iowa cornfields was founded this summer for the specific purpose of eliminating evil around the globe through the magic of “yogic flying,” a technique developed by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru who bedazzled the Beatles and millions of others with his program of Transcendental Meditation in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Nearly everyone who lives here is a meditator. And though they’re not actually flying yet--the best most can manage is a blissful hop--they are convinced that they hold the key to preventing horrors such as the recent terrorist attacks in New York and at the Pentagon.

The idea is this: If enough people come together to meditate side by side, they will create a sort of force field that can repel hatred and spread happiness. The trick is gathering enough meditators in one place. So folks in Vedic City plan to build a theme park here in southeastern Iowa to attract tourists who, they hope, will do a little yogic flying in between rounds of golf and nature hikes.

“This will be the Center for Perfect Health and World Peace,” said Bob Wynne, a rumpled-looking developer in line to become Vedic City’s first mayor.

It may sound a bit presumptuous to give a town a subtitle. But Wynne figures Vedic City will measure up.

The city, population 125, is an offshoot of the Maharishi University of Management in nearby Fairfield, Iowa. Meditators moved the university here from a too-cramped campus in Santa Barbara in 1974. Despite the harsh winters and isolated location, the school began drawing followers from around the world.

They set up a private school, where children start learning Sanskrit in first grade. (“Vedic” comes from the Sanskrit word for “knowledge.”) They also built two huge, gold-painted domes for “group flying” twice a day. Revolinski estimates that more than 30 million hours of transcending have taken place inside the domes--which are padded inside with wall-to-wall mattresses to cushion yogic fliers who come thumping back to Earth.

Individual meditators swear that TM has changed their lives: bringing down blood pressure, focusing the mind, boosting both health and wealth.

Maharishi devotees have, in turn, transformed the stolid town of Fairfield. The central square looks as Midwest button-down as can be, with a bandstand and park and an elderly couple selling kettle corn from a whitewashed cart. But there are vegetarian restaurants at every turn and three sushi bars--this, smack in the middle of cattle country, in a meat-and-potatoes-with-bacon-bits state.

Yet meditators want to do more than broaden Midwest cuisine.

That’s where Vedic City comes in.

Rising literally from the cornfields, with monarch butterflies dancing along each newly paved street, Vedic City is the first community to be constructed entirely according to the architectural principles that the Maharishi has laid out. Entrances must face east, for instance, to absorb the energy of the rising sun. Kitchens should be in the southeastern corner of a house.

Each structure needs to have a central core, a sacred space that no one can walk through. Each must be topped with at least one kalash, a mysterious symbol that is supposed to draw in positive energy. (It looks like a swirl of soft ice cream in an egg cup.) An architect trained in the Maharishi principles must review every floor plan to approve details such as the dimensions of each room and the distance from the front door to the mandatory fence. And the building materials must be as natural as possible--fortunately, cement and insulation make the cut.

Buildings designed according to these rules are supposed to ensure better health, more joy and greater prosperity for their occupants.

“The whole idea seemed a little preposterous to me at first. But when I moved in, I was immediately won over,” said businessman Bob Daniels, 55, a longtime meditator who moved into a Vedic City home at his wife’s insistence. “I slept better. I felt better. I was more positive. You feel like you’re on vacation.”

As more homes are constructed in Vedic City--at prices of $300,000 and up--residents anticipate a multiplier effect: The whole community should radiate serene benevolence. And once tourists start coming and meditating by the thousands, they theorize, that harmony should envelop the globe.

Local skeptics are not so sure.

Relations between the meditators and more traditional farm families have been fairly good in recent years. Not too many locals dine regularly on chickpea curry, and fewer still venture to the Maharishi spa for sesame oil balms and herbal enemas. But over the years, a mutual respect has developed: Meditators even have served on Fairfield institutions such as the school board, the city council and the chamber of commerce.

Still, the recent incorporation of Vedic City and plans for the $27-million theme park have raised some tensions.

Folks in Fairfield grumble about the university’s decision to tear down all south-facing buildings on campus, including a 90-year-old chapel where many local couples were married. They also resent the relentless hype about yogic flying and world peace. “To put that out on the national news, well, some people say it makes us look like fools,” said Tom Thompson, a Fairfield councilman.

Undaunted, Vedic City meditators press on.

They opened up model homes for tours over the summer and drew more than 800 visitors in two days. They have applied for a $10.5-million state grant for the theme park. And day by day, more homes take shape--along with two hotels, office buildings and a celestial observatory with a ring of ancient instruments that are supposed to promote psychic peace in all who behold them.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on America, with the president talking of war and calls for vengeance ringing loud, meditators here are more convinced than ever that their mission is urgent.

“Many people will look back on this community a generation or more from now as . . . the most important contribution ever to improving the quality of life of mankind,” Maharishi architect Jonathan Lipman predicted. “To think, it was first rolled out in Vedic City, Iowa.”