Transcendental Meditation in America: How a New Age Movement Remade a Small Town in Iowa
212
Transcendental Meditation in America: How a New Age Movement Remade a Small Town in Iowa
212eBook
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Overview
The Indian spiritual entrepreneur Maharishi Mahesh Yogi took the West by storm in the 1960s and ’70s, charming Baby Boomers fed up with war and social upheaval with his message of meditation and peace. Heeding his call, two thousand followers moved to tiny Fairfield, Iowa, to set up their own university on the campus of a failed denominational college. Soon, they started a school for prekindergarten through high school, allowing followers to immerse themselves in Transcendental Meditation from toddlerhood through PhDs.
Although Fairfield’s longtime residents were relieved to see that their new neighbors were clean-cut and respectably dressed—not the wild-haired, drug-using hippies they had feared—the newcomers nevertheless quickly began to remake the town. Stores selling exotic goods popped up, TM followers built odd-looking homes that modeled the guru’s rules for peace-inspiring architecture, and the new university knocked down a historic chapel, even as it erected massive golden-domed buildings for meditators. Some newcomers got elected—and others were defeated—when they ran for local and statewide offices. At times, thousands from across the globe visited the small town.
Yet Transcendental Meditation did not always achieve its aims of personal and social tranquility. Suicides and a murder unsettled the meditating community over the years, and some followers were fleeced by con men from their own ranks. Some battled a local farmer over land use and one another over doctrine. Notably, the world has not gotten more peaceful.
Today the guru is dead. His followers are graying, and few of their children are moving into leadership roles. The movement seems rudderless, its financial muscle withering, despite the efforts of high-profile supporters such as filmmaker David Lynch and media magnate Oprah Winfrey. Can TM reinvent itself? And what will be the future of Fairfield itself? By looking closely at the transformation of this small Iowa town, author Joseph Weber assesses the movement’s surprisingly potent effect on Western culture, sketches out its peculiar past, and explores its possible future.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609382612 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2014 |
| Series: | Iowa and the Midwest Experience |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 212 |
| Sales rank: | 838,324 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Transcendental Meditation in America
How a New Age Movement Remade a Small Town in Iowa
By Joseph Weber
University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2014 University of Iowa PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-261-2
CHAPTER 1
Classic Americana, with a Twist
AT FIRST BLUSH, the town square in Fairfield, Iowa, seems no different from hundreds like it that grace small communities from New England to California with a pretty gazebo where bands play, a stretch of grass ideal for sunbathing, a monument to historic local events. And all of it surrounded by businesses that offer clothes, medicine, food, and, perhaps, a drink or two. Such town centers are so classically American that Disney and Hollywood have turned them into clichés, timeworn settings for amusement parks, Fourth of July celebrations, political speeches, and romance.
But a closer look at the heart of Fairfield shows how far this place is from ordinary. Hard by a couple of real estate sales offices and kitchenware shops is the Health and Wholeness shop, a retailer of herbal teas, aromatherapy products, and "total health solutions" said to be inspired by ancient Eastern teachings. Nearby, Thymely Solutions offers extracts, homeopathic remedies, and "heaven in a bottle" in planetary gem elixirs that offer "infusions of solar and lunar light with 'blueprints' of rare and superior quality gems." Two vegetarian places serve up savory Indian food on other corners of the square. Across the way you can "feed your head"—to borrow a cherished Baby Boomer phrase—at Revelations, a used books shop and eatery that stocks well-thumbed copies of a dazzling array of spiritual texts along with mysteries, sci-fi, and other fare.
Walk into Café Paradiso, an espresso bar and coffee shop that doubles as a small concert hall for the indie likes of The Roches and Wendy Waldman, and you are apt to overhear conversations a far cry from any found in most of Iowa. Talk of auras, mind-body connections, crystals, and novel health-restoration approaches may ring out, along with less ethereal conversations about music and undergraduate and graduate-student life. A visitor may hear lively chatter about visiting mystics or speakers in town promoting programs such as Brennan Healing Science, something "based on the living dynamics of our Human Energy-Consciousness System and its relationship to the greater world of which we all are intimately a part."
A good number of Fairfield's residents—up to a quarter of the ninety-five hundred or so here, by some estimates—regularly train their minds on realms far beyond this pleasant farm town, which dates back to 1839. Devotees of the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his TM Movement, they gather by the hundreds—more than a thousand at a time on some days—to meditate together twice a day in two sprawling golden-domed buildings at the Maharishi University of Management (MUM), a college a short hop from the town square. Some residents, preferring to "transcend" privately, do so in posh newer homes scattered around town that comply with the guru's architectural principles—with east-facing entrances said to foster enlightenment, affluence, and fulfillment, not the fear, destruction, and quarreling supposedly bred by south-facing entrances. Some such homes carry price tags well above $500,000, far above the reach of most longtime locals. Some can be found in Maharishi Vedic City, a new town created by devotees just outside of Fairfield that is home to the Global Country of World Peace and other TM Movement affiliates. Hundreds more meditators, brought in from India expressly for the purpose, meet to meditate and chant in Maharishi Vedic City each day, for hours at a stretch.
This southeastern corner of Iowa is the unlikely home of TM in the United States. From here the movement that burst onto the global scene when the Beatles took to the giggling guru in the late 1960s has touched several million people worldwide. For many, the touch has been a glancing one, a few sessions that cost as little as a few dollars or more than $2,500, depending on when one signed on. For their investment, the curious learned a simple relaxation-based technique, got a mantra, and were urged to meditate twice a day for twenty minutes at a time. Many fell away when promises of better mental and physical health and expectations of material success bore little fruit, or they moved on to more or less pedestrian pursuits. But for a few thousand people—a constantly shifting group of passionate followers—the exhilaration of meditation and the sense of belonging to a group that promised to usher in world peace meant a far deeper commitment. It meant advanced studies in Europe or India, the pursuit of Yogic Flying—a belief in meditation-induced levitation—or missions to meditate in dangerous places around the world. For some, it meant a move to Fairfield.
Fairfield became a magnet for meditators beginning in 1974, a time when the stars aligned just right for the TM Movement. Flush with contributions, the movement bought the campus of bankrupt Parsons College that year and made it the home of its American university. The lure of Iowa grew for meditators in 1979, when the guru issued a call for them to move to that state so they could gather together daily in the belief that their group practice would spread peace across the United States. The movement built great golden domes on the MUM campus to accommodate the group meditation sessions, one for men and, later, one for women.
While some of the faithful just passed through, as students at MUM or visitors who came for periodic gatherings, others stayed. They built families and careers—in some cases, creating major businesses that employed many non-meditators from Fairfield and beyond. The adherents anchored their lives around TM, studying the Vedic knowledge that their guru espoused and taking advanced training in meditation.
Those who remain today are a diverse lot. Among them are people such as Laura Bordow, who abandoned the affluent suburbs of Chicago's North Shore in 1983 to give her newborn son a less materialistic place—a spiritual place—to grow up. There's Richard Beall, an Ohio farm boy who aspired to a life as a professional baseball player and ended up teaching TM in Ohio, California, and even Bulgaria. Bordow and Beall both took leading roles in the TM community's school. Then there's Eric Schwartz, who was smitten with the TM Movement while in college and ultimately changed schools—moving from tony Amherst College to the less prestigious University of Massachusetts—so he could pursue meditation. With no business training, he built a business that now employs hundreds. Their ranks include Pamela K. Slowick, who found more meaning in TM than in her academic pursuits and so quit Hampshire College to join the movement, a step that led her over time to run for Congress from Arizona for a movement-related political party and to open a homeopathy shop in Fairfield. (More about these folks later.) The group also includes co-authors of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series of inspirational books, about a dozen of whom live or have lived in the Fairfield area.
Now, however, these Baby Boomers and others like them who flooded into Fairfield from Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and points overseas are graying. Their movement is at a turning point, its fate uncertain. Their guru died in early 2008, leaving behind no successor with anywhere near his charisma. The leaders he installed run a pocket-sized university and a still smaller school for students in preschool to grade 12 in Fairfield, as well as overseeing properties here and in several other spots around the world.
These days, an air of uncertainty afflicts the movement. Supporters, including some serving at high levels in movement institutions, wonder privately about whether their leaders are making the right choices, whether they are adapting to times far different from when they joined as idealistic twentysomethings. Is their movement destined to remain passé, a throwback to the days of bell-bottom jeans and tie-dyed shirts? Or can it adapt and find ways to spread the wisdom and practices that the guru's followers say are timeless?
Maharishi first drew notice from many Americans in the late 1960s, when the Beatles and other pop icons embraced him. Cover stories appeared in such diverse places as Look and MAD magazines, reflecting the mixed reception he got in the United States—an odd blend of curiosity and derision. Later, in 1975, the guru reached tens of millions—with resulting surges in recruits—when he appeared on the Merv Griffin Show and on the cover of Time magazine.
But nowadays, the movement garners comparatively few mentions beyond those by Oprah Winfrey, Dr. Mehmet Oz, ABC newsman George Stephanopoulos, a couple CNN journalists, and other enthusiasts who serve smaller audiences in today's fragmented media scene. Even academics who keep track of intentional communities and movements say they rarely hear much about TM anymore.
To be sure, TM still commands attention from a coterie of celebrities, many of them Boomers who came of age with the movement. Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Donovan joined forces, for instance, for a benefit concert in New York in 2009 to raise funds for the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. Lynch, a distinguished filmmaker (Eraserhead [1977], The Elephant Man [1980], Mulholland Drive [2001]) is a devotee who presses for meditation to be taught in schools, and his passion for TM garners ink regularly in such prominent places as the New York Times. TM leaders muster praise from such disparate practitioners as comedian Jerry Seinfeld, CNN journalist Candy Crowley and former CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien and ABC's Stephanopoulos, TV talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres, and shock-jock Howard Stern. Wealthy figures such as billionaire hedge fund operator Ray Dalio, founder of the $140 billion Bridgewater Associates, offer encouragement and support. Another supporter, Winfrey, meditated for her Oprah Winfrey Network cable-TV audience in early 2012 in a long, admiring program called "America's Most Unusual Town." Some of the famous stop by Fairfield at times.
But the worry for insiders is whether the movement is on a flight path all too familiar to historians who've studied the lifecycles of intentional communities and religious or cultural movements. Few survive for more than a few years past the retirements, deaths, or disenchantments of their leaders or large number of followers. The Unitarians and freethinkers who created American Transcendentalism, including such intellectuals as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, failed to make a go of Brook Farm and the Fruitlands communities in Massachusetts in the early 1800s. A bit later, the Oneida Community in upstate New York—a community of plural marriage practitioners whose unconventional mores infuriated neighbors—dissolved after founder John Humphrey Noyes sought to hand over leadership to his son. And not far from Fairfield, in eastern Iowa, German Pietists of the mid-1800s established the Amana Colonies, which thrived for nearly eighty years—one of the longest runs of any such groups—but the seven towns carry on now only as tourist sites.
Already, signs of strain are showing up in the TM Movement, many involving people in Fairfield. Internal frictions, including an intolerance of dissent, have led to what amounts to excommunication of longtime backers. Some former followers now provide anti-cult therapy to help practitioners pull away. A small but vocal group of critics derides the movement regularly on websites with names such as TM-Free Blog and The Honest Truth about TM. And ex-devotee Judith Bourque, in her Robes of Silk, Feet of Clay (2010), a tell-all book about her secret love affair with Maharishi in the 1970s, alleges other assignations by the supposedly celibate guru at the peak of his prominence.
More troubling for insiders, few second-generation members—including some educated at movement schools from childhood through college—seem interested in taking top leadership roles. Perhaps worse, they lack the opportunity to do so, as sixtysomethings hang on to power. Some of the young people, moreover, reject doctrines that took TM well beyond a once-popular simple meditation technique. They look askance at such beliefs as the idea that practitioners can defy gravity and hover off the ground unaided. Some even bristle at the notion of following a guru at all, preferring to school themselves in esoteric wisdom from many sources.
Furthermore, enrollments have been problematic at MUM and the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment, which serves students from preschool to high school. After peaking at 3,231 in 1989, enrollment at MUM slipped to 1,134 in an official reported count in the fall of 2011, and most were grad students. Just 75 undergraduates earned degrees from the university in the 2012–13 academic year, while 241 students collected master's degrees and three earned doctorates. At the Maharishi School—located on a corner of the MUM campus and designed initially to serve university-affiliated meditators—enrollment has dropped from as many as 700 students in the early 1990s to about 200. Class sizes in some lower grades are now down in single digits, and the 2013 high school class totaled just 19.
Financially, the movement has seen better days, too. Long gone are the times when Maharishi and his followers could jet around the world, drawing tens of thousands of supporters whose payments helped buy property in several spots across the United States as well as in areas such as the TM world headquarters in Vlodrop, Holland. The most recent filings in the United States from several arms of the movement suggest that most of its American assets, net of liabilities, are now worth about $168.4 million, down from $270.9 million as recently as the end of 2008, and much less than the wealth former devotees say the movement once controlled. (Regrettably, no full accounting of the often-secretive movement's fortunes has ever been made public, so comparisons are difficult. But the movement was once awash in cash and real estate, including downtown buildings in major U.S. cities such as Chicago. It appears to be less so now, even though the late guru in the early 2000s was collecting as much as $1 million each for special projects from some wealthy donors.) Reports in publications such as India Today suggest that millions of dollars were plowed into twelve thousand acres of land across India, including land in prime areas such as Delhi and Goa, and heirs of the late guru and followers have battled over the legacy ever since the guru's death.
Perhaps as a result of the tumult and the lack of strong central direction, marketing and recruitment efforts are a shadow of what they once were. Where college groups once promoted TM to legions of curious American students from coast to coast, StudentMeditation.org in early 2013 listed outposts on just fifteen campuses in the United States and four abroad. While the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) and the Church of Scientology hawk their wares with well-produced TV commercials, TM has fallen below the radar. For their part, advocates say the movement is working quietly—but effectively—in such areas as persuading corporations to offer TM as a benefit to employees and with such organizations as the Veterans Administration to provide meditation as therapy for traumatized war veterans. It's just less of a retail, storefront operation now, one advocate says, and more of a wholesaler, providing TM teachers in strategic areas where needed.
Decline, of course, could prove troublesome for Fairfield residents, including the seekers who moved to Fairfield to raise families, build businesses, open churches and a synagogue, and put in their daily meditation sessions. Some TMers in town take a cool attitude about it—it doesn't matter if the movement dies, they say, since the knowledge the guru imparted will live on. The guru himself lives on in a bevy of videos. Still others—"townies" long hostile to the "roos"—say the movement can't fade soon enough, even if that means all those odd shops and trendy restaurants shut their doors. As for MUM, the campus might make a nice regional medical complex or some such if the school goes bust, the critics say.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Transcendental Meditation in America by Joseph Weber. Copyright © 2014 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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