The club car of Amtrak’s California Zephyr was full of Amish families happily and loudly playing Uno as the train rolled west toward the Mississippi. I was heading to Fairfield, Iowa, a town of about 10,000 that’s been called the world’s largest training center for Transcendental Meditation, a form of silent mantra meditation with an estimated five million practitioners worldwide. I was visiting a buddy from Chicago whose life partner grew up in the TM movement in Fairfield. They’d recently moved into a big house in the woods a few miles from the blissful burg to raise their young sons near family and escape the big-city grind.
Thanks to this entrepreneurial spirit, plus the discretionary income of Fairfield’s many affluent residents and visitors, the downtown is lined with handsomely refurbished buildings and an impressive array of bookstores, cafes, boutiques, and art galleries. There’s a surprising variety of international restaurants, offering everything from Caribbean to Vietnamese to Ethiopian to, naturally, Indian cuisine.
They meditate and get focused, focused, focused, They do a little hocus-pocus, And the money just rolls in.
They know all ’bout computers, your New Age, and foreign food, They do all that real good, Fairfield’s where to go.
After such a journey, the large wooden house was an oasis of tranquility. Perhaps that was partly due to the fact that my friend bought it from a TM practitioner and, like most roo homes, it was designed using the feng shui-like principals of Maharishi Vastu Architecture. For example, the front door of a Vastu home is always pointed east to greet the sunrise, and the roof holds a golden ornament called a kalash, shaped like a Hershey’s Kiss, that’s supposed attract positive energy.
Gunn said she’s never actually witnessed a roo become airborne. “But you experience pure consciousness, and apparently if you sustain that you start to hover.” Friends once told her she’d levitated during one particularly euphoric session. “They said I was high enough to drive a Volkswagen under me.”
In 2014 the university decided to send home an older pandit who’d encouraged his proteges to defect, Gunn said. According to a Des Moines Register report, administrators asked a sheriff to be present while the priest was removed, but the plan backfired. Up to 80 pandits swarmed and trashed the lawman’s truck—highly ironic behavior for men who’d made it their mission to promote nonviolence.
Like most relatively young spiritual movements, TM has its share of critics who paint it as a manipulative cult. For example, in Claire Hoffman’s 2016 memoir Greetings From Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood, the Fairfield native argues that the Maharishi’s consciousness movement has evolved into a bottom-line-driven organization that pushes its followers to spend their hard-earned money on expensive classes, products, and housing.
