Fairfield and the Meditators

In nineteen seventy-three, a college in Fairfield, Iowa called Parsons College closed after going bankrupt. It had been a struggling institution for years, and its accreditation had been revoked. The campus sat empty.

That same year, an organization called the World Plan Executive Council purchased the campus. The organization was the institutional arm of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian teacher who had introduced Transcendental Meditation to the Western world and who had become famous in nineteen sixty-eight when the Beatles traveled to India to study with him. The purchase moved Maharishi International University from a temporary location in California to Fairfield.

Faifield in nineteen seventy-four was a quiet southeastern Iowa farm town of about nine thousand people. What followed over the next decade was unusual by any measure. In nineteen seventy-nine, Maharishi issued a call for meditators to relocate to Fairfield so that large groups could practice together twice daily. He believed, based on research he commissioned, that this collective practice would reduce crime and conflict in the surrounding region and eventually the world.

They came. Hundreds of practitioners moved to Fairfield, opened businesses, built homes designed according to Vedic architectural principles, and established a community within the community. Two enormous golden-domed buildings were erected on the university campus, one for men and one for women, where hundreds gather each morning and each evening to meditate collectively.

Estimates of the share of Fairfield residents who practice Transcendental Meditation run from about one-quarter to one-third. The town has more restaurants per capita than almost any place its size in Iowa, a farmers market with a cosmopolitan range of offerings, and a reputation as one of the more unusual small cities in the Midwest. The university reverted to its original name, Maharishi International University, in twenty nineteen.