Source: Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/travel/la-tr-vedic10sep10,1,2135006.story?coll=la-tra
On September 10, 2006 the Los Angeles Times reported, "When I booked my trip last April to attend a conference on Transcendental Meditation at the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, I had no idea I would be visiting another country. My airline ticket clearly indicated Cedar Rapids, and from there I would rent a car and drive about two hours to a small town 50 miles from the Mississippi River. I was a longtime fan of filmmaker David Lynch, one of the conference's keynote speakers, and I was interested in meditation, occasionally popping in for a guided meditation at a neighborhood Buddhist temple. By the time I had made the travel arrangements, I knew I would be spending two nights at the improbably named Raj, an ayurvedic spa-hotel improbably located in the middle of a cornfield. I knew I would be attending a conference entitled 'Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain,' where John Hagelin, the onetime Natural Law Party presidential candidate would also speak. Hagelin once offered to deploy 400 'yogic fliers' to Kosovo to meditate for peace (then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declined). What I didn't know is that the Raj is not in Fairfield but just outside of it, in a brand-new town called Maharishi Vedic City, which happens to be the North American capital of the Global Country of World Peace. So to say that Maharishi Vedic City exists on a plane of its own is not quite to speak metaphorically. The town, which consists of several still-sprouting residential developments, is surrounded by cornfields dotted with barns and gloomy Victorians. The area is no stranger to sectarian lifestyle experiments: Not far away is the Mennonite community of Kalona, where bearded men and bonneted women drive around in buggies. When I arrived, the sky looked as though it had been carpeted in a gray Stainmaster Berber. Fairfield proper looked as though it had seen better days — specifically 1854, when it hosted the first Iowa State Fair. It has the stately but melancholy air of a once-prosperous Midwestern town in decline. By contrast, M.V.C. displays all the architectural characteristics of a new exurban development: gaudy, oversize construction that has no stylistic relation to its environment but instead vaguely alludes to a theme-park version someplace sort of magical and far away."