Paper: Describing Communal (Meditating) Fairfield, Iowa
Doug Hamilton
Describing Communal (Meditating) Fairfield, Iowa
by Doug Hamilton
October 2017
When traveling outside of Fairfield, Iowa, even just traveling around the State of Iowa, people frequently ask, “What is going on in Fairfield?” one condensed answer can be, “Oh, we are just a bunch of Transcendentalists”.
In 2016 a visiting Washington Post writer witnessing a Bernie Sanders Presidential campaign rally in Fairfield, Iowa described the meditator community in Fairfield, Iowa as, “The Transcendental Meditationists”.
A sourced mission definition of this peculiar community combining with that of the New England American Transcendentalists’ Brook Farm would read,
The Fairfield Meditating Community:
“We are a group of people who have come together and created a community for a transcendentally important common purpose, which of course was to practice the Transcendental Meditation program and the TM-Sidhi program together as a group, for the sake of bringing coherence to local, national and world consciousness, based on balancing labor and leisure to meditate while working together for the benefit of the community. Our Super-Radiance meditating community includes families and households of all the TM-Meditators and TM-Sidhas in the Fairfield, Vedic City and Jefferson County area.”
Looking for Communal Elements of a Meditating Fairfield, Iowa,
starting from the outside looking in can seem like one is standing looking at a monolith. As easy as it is to make assumptions about Fairfield, Iowa, and its meditators it is also difficult to discern what is going on inside the meditating community there. But looking in need not be difficult at all once some handles are provided. This paper is the attempt to put handles on the subject. The Fairfield meditating community has matured in time, now for over four and a half decades, and is developed with many communal features to find and look at. Fairfield, Iowa in fact can provide a large and living laboratory for communal societies scholars to look at.
Provided in this paper are sourcing links to communal elements that are good ways of accessing what is going on inside a communal meditating Fairfield, Iowa.
In Fairfield, Iowa as happened with the Shakers also in a longer narrative, there are now many projects and activity enterprises which accompany the meditating community of Fairfield, Iowa that have come to be commonly seen as definitional and often over-riding. For the Shakers, these items have come to be their distinctive design in architecture, furniture, hat boxes, and their enterprises in textiles, broom making, a seed business, preserved food goods, and health supplements. For the Fairfield meditating community, these are distinctive sthapatya ved architectural designs or ayurvedic health supplements.
Nonetheless, for either community the formative communal reason with both was more essentially about facilitating their spiritual practice of meditating. In fact these are both ashram-like spiritual practice communities.
One can see the centrality of meditation for the Shakers within statements in their texts. For instance, “Believers are required by the orders of God, to retire to their rooms in silence for the space of a half an hour, and labor for a sense of the gospel, before attending meeting, ..and none should have any conversation upon anything whatever, neither should they sleep nor idly lounge away the time, or leave the room except it be very necessary.”
““Retirements”, “retiring time” refer to times set aside for meditative prayer and reflection, and especially before coming together for common worship”.
“Attend strictly to your meetings, for when you are out of meeting, and there is a gift of God administered you lose it, and you do not realize how much you lose in this way. It is the order of God, to attend to your retirements, meetings and meals, and not to let trifles hinder you; and when the signal is given, either for retireing time or for meals, drop your work, go into the house and sit down and retire, and have no loud or unnecessary conversation.”
Likewise, looking now within texts of the meditating community of Fairfield, Iowa,
this excerpt is drawn from a 2015 web page (http://www.invincibleamerica.org/tallies/)
that solicits meditators to come to Fairfield, Iowa:
“The immediate urgent priority for national invincibility and world peace is to join the Invincible America Assembly at MUM (Maharishi University of Management). Only 2000 Flyers (people simultaneously meditating in groups) in Fairfield/Maharishi Vedic City will bring security to America and defuse the precarious escalation of conflict in the world.”
Hopefully this similarity with the Shakers as to the primacy of facilitating meditation in spiritual practice is useful as a way of looking at meditating Fairfield, Iowa, as a community.
In Organization,
For communal studies scholars looking in on the meditating community of Fairfield, Iowa, a good way to understand its scope is to also relate it to the old Shaker village as an organizational structure. In the center of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement is the equivalent of a Shaker “Ministry Family” or upper administration. In circles that are concentric around this core are meditators who feel affiliated with the TM movement to varying degrees and in different ways, many of which are communal in nature. The upper level of organization is more exclusive and currently tends to live together in an adjacent new town called Maharishi Vedic City to the northwest of Fairfield, Iowa proper. A meditating university as an academic community, the Maharishi University of Management (MUM) in Fairfield lives largely on a campus . But there is more, as the greater part of the meditating community lives throughout Fairfield and Jefferson County, Iowa, either singly as individual meditator households or in neighborhoods. Most meditators who have come to live in the area reside in Fairfield proper or out in the County, living outside of both the university campus and the Maharishi Vedic City area.
In Perspective:
A surrounding Jefferson County Iowa population according to the U.S. Census is about 15,000, the Fairfield population is about 10,000. Subset of these larger population numbers are about 2,500 adult- age meditators who live in the larger Jefferson County Iowa area. The university campus (MUM) houses many hundred meditators. The recent U.S. Census found about 250 people living in Maharishi Vedic City, and there are approximately 25 Vedic pundits currently on temporary visas living to the north of Maharishi Vedic City in a compound that was constructed for them.
Fairfield, Iowa is a secular Iowa municipality with a meditating community living within it that has special features. Separately, ‘Maharishi Vedic City’ lays as a communal grouping incorporated as Iowa’s newest municipality functioning effectively as a theocratic municipality not unlike those described by Folk in the Journal of Communal Societies V 31.2, 2011. Two available sources of information about Maharishi Vedic City, Iowa authored by people living there are a wikipedia page for Maharishi_Vedic_City and a Maharishi Vedic City municipal website. Fairfield, Iowa proper as a secular Iowa municipality has its own website to find separately.
Maharishi Vedic City and the university community on a campus each function with obvious communal aspects, such as people living in housing close together, working together for their community, educating their children, socializing together, and sharing resources, etc., all with the intention of facilitating meditation. A larger surrounding meditating community also functions similarly, although perhaps not in all these aspects nor at the same level as those living at the university or in Maharishi Vedic City. But like the Shaker movement in the height of its time, the common feature linking these ‘families’ as groups of meditators in the Fairfield area is that they moved to Fairfield in order to be living near and practicing meditation with other meditators, all with some connection to the larger TM enterprise as a cultural movement. A Venn Diagram with circles of meditators that overlap may better illustrate these internal communities.
In context, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was a proponent of Transcendental Meditation for 60 years in the West, and there has been a meditating community in Fairfield, Iowa for about 45 years. The Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement purchased a bankrupt Parsons College campus in Fairfield, Iowa and moved a university there in 1974. The Maharishi International University (MIU) was teaching then a wide liberal arts curricula where the students and faculty were also practicing TM meditators. The university functioned as a unit in Fairfield for about a half decade when, at a large gathering of meditators meeting with Maharishi in 1978, it was suggested that meditators of the TM movement move to the Fairfield, Iowa community to be able to meditate regularly in large group meditations. That was the start of the Fairfield meditating community where practicing meditators moved to Fairfield, Iowa generally to live even though not employed necessarily by the University or the TM organization. Through the later 1970's, 1980's, 1990's, and the 2000's to present time, meditators have come to Fairfield from all over the world and thousands of meditators have lived in Fairfield, Iowa.
In a process of Developmental Communalism, the evident developed and intended Communal Features inside the Fairfield Area Meditating Community currently would include these aspects:
The Facilitation of Group Meditation
In the late 1970's and early 1980's, anticipating the arrival of large daily group meditations held in community facilities the gathering meditating community initially re-purposed buildings of the old Parson College Campus to house these communal group meditations. In the daily ebb-and-flow of meditating in Fairfield, Iowa there is this particular communal aspect of group meditation as a central feature which happens everyday, twice-a- day, and it has been that way for a long time. Today the TM movement maintains 11 locations for group meditations in the Jefferson County area.
The “Golden Domes”
In the late 1970's and early 1980's, the meditating community undertook the construction of two large wooden dome structures to house the community group meditation. There is a site currently on Wikipedia about these buildings. This Wikipedia 'Golden_Domes' site is very well sourced.
The Meditating University Community and Education
In order to conduct a large test of the hypothesis that meditation could be an integral part of an accredited educational institution, as “Consciousness-Based Education”, the university was created intentionally to attempt this. The university in Fairfield effectively functions now as its own communal group, which also is part of or conjoined with the larger meditating Fairfield community. University faculty, staff, and students are housed close together on campus, they take their meals together, meditate together, work together, and their children go to the meditating primary and secondary community school together, and sustaining resources are shared from the community.
In schooling a ‘next generation’, likewise the meditating community's elementary and secondary schools function as another communal group or 'family' in a Venn Diagram of the area with communal features similar to those in the university community. The Maharishi School for the Age of Enlightenment (MSAE) developed as a means for meditating families of the community to have a primary and secondary education for their children where the practice of meditation was incorporated as an integral part of the education. Both MUM and the MSAE maintain web pages which are good sources for study.
The Communalism of the Larger Meditating Fairfield Meditator Community:
Previously in the West, when Transcendental Meditation was culturally popular around the time when the Beatles were followers of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Transcendental Meditation movement often drew heavily from college and university communities. As a result, the immigration of TM meditators to Fairfield has evidently brought together an educated and cosmopolitan group in a small Midwest town. When one combines this with the meditators’ peculiar visionary mission or Utopian values, the larger community of meditators living outside of the university campus and outside of Maharishi Vedic City deserves to be looked at with merit as its own distinctive communal society with features. The greater or larger Fairfield meditator meditating community often is more distinctly defined locally by its communal arts, civic activities, and businesses alongside the indigenous Fairfield and Jefferson County Iowa population. With all the attention that popularly has been given to the University as a predominant artifact of the meditating community, the less tangible cultural features of the meditating community at large becomes its own large area in communal Fairfield, Iowa about which less has been written. despite much other institutional material published in feature newspaper and magazine articles about TM and Fairfield, for example a more recent Oprah documentary film production as a form of overview journalism.
Concluding Remarks
Has the meditating community in Fairfield, Iowa been successful as an intentional community? Miller asserts five criteria broadly as features in Communal Societies Vol. 30 No.1, 2010, "A Matter of Definition: Just What Is an Intentional Community?". According to Miller these features would be:
-A sense of purpose and distinctiveness, with deliberate intent to be a community.
-Some kind of shared living space.
-Some shared resources.
-Critical mass.
Yes evidently, looking at the sheer scale of a built facilitating physical plant and looking inside at communal elements as features of community one can chart sustaining features relatively as the development of a communal group that quite evidently was formed intentionally.
In conclusion,
As a place in which to reside, I have found communal meditating Fairfield, Iowa to be an alive and vital society with strong communal elements and now to be one of the older aspiring new-age places currently operating in North America. While meditating Fairfield was intentionally founded to facilitate the spiritual practice of meditation in a group, we can see from the discussion here and by looking in somewhat from the outside a number of communal features in groupings within the meditating Fairfield community. That one can look at these features easily from the outside, and with the descriptions here to introduce outsiders into the subject, it should be clear that meditating Fairfield, Iowa is old enough and mature enough to deserve closer study by communal societies scholars. I hope these links and descriptions are found to be both interesting and fruitful in the larger studies of communal societies.
-Doug Hamilton
Fairfield, Iowa