Transcendental Meditation in America: How a New Age Movement Remade a Small Town in Iowa

6. Higher Ed, Higher Realms

higher ed, higher realms ° 71 Each morning and evening, students, teachers, and other meditators from Fairfield file into a pair of sprawling, golden-domed buildings that rise above the bucolic Maharishi University of Management north of downtown . Men enter one dome, women the other. Using mantras given to them by TM teachers, they slip into altered states of consciousness. Some settle into a state the TM Movement calls “pure awareness” or “restful alertness.” Some have been known to nap. And some soar, mentally at least, above the mattress-laden dome floors, practicing Yogic Flying.1 Between these daily group meditation sessions, students wander off into gleaming new amber-colored buildings—designed according to architecturalprincipleslaiddownbyMaharishi —fortheirdailystudies.AtMUM,an accredited university that grants bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees, students study mainstream subjects such as business, computer science, education, art, media and communications, math, literature, and physiology. Some pursue more specialized areas, such as sustainable living and Maharishi Vedic Science, exploring the guru’s teachings in depth. But for the roughly 625 students on campus—most drawn from outside the United States and most pursuing master’s degrees—classroom studies and the meditation practices in the domes are seldom far apart, since the curriculum is shot through with the guru’s insights. The teachers, most of whom joined the TM Movement in the belief that the guru’s revival of ancient wisdom could change the world, drive home the point in lectures and texts. No topic, whether the poems of T. S. Eliot, the principles of computer science, 6 Higher Ed, Higher Realms 72 ° chapter 6 or the practices of business, stands outside the guru’s intellectual reach. Classrooms sport posters that link the subjects to the Maharishi’s ancient wisdom, or Maharishi Vedic Science. This is no ordinary university. Take computer science, as taught by Gregory Guthrie, a Purdue-educated PhD who also serves as dean of MUM’s College of Computer Science and Mathematics. In his class, computer science and the guru’s teachings are like strands of DNA, inextricably bound together. As twenty-four students from across the globe enter Guthrie’s classroom on one spring morning in 2012, for instance, they see on one wall a colorful poster that spells out the connections. Detailed columns and rows link terms from computer science with ancient Indian thought. Such wall charts reflect attempts by Maharishi and his followers to unify all knowledge under common principles. If students want to pursue the connections further, they can explore them in depth in Consciousness-Based Education and Computer Science (2011), a text published by the Maharishi University of Management Press that features Guthrie as a contributor. Guthrie aims in his section of the book to redefine computer science in the light of the guru’s teachings. He includes a grid— titled “Veda—The Unmanifest Structure of Natural Law”—that lists the terms Algorithms, Software, and Machines in a box with Computing Systems . This sits above boxes labeled Symbolic Computation, Symbolic Mathematics , and then Vedic Computation and Vedic Mathematics. Off to the side are the terms Concrete Relative, Abstract Relative, and Absolute. The point is that the guru’s teachings unify “traditional objective science and a new subjective science.”2 Guthrie, a tweedy sort who sports a jacket and tie in the formal style common at MUM, underscores the idea in a slideshow presentation. Amid descriptions of proxies and chains of responsibility and objects—terms computer science students everywhere might know—appear messages such as this: “All desires (requests) that are in accord with Nature find immediate fulfillment in higher states of consciousness because they get the support of all the Laws of Nature.” To drive the idea home, Guthrie elaborates in the slideshow: “The level of support of Nature we experience depends on the level of consciousness, higher ed, higher realms ° 73 Nature can handle any request. The more we are in tune with Nature, the more fulfillment we will experience.” Balding and bespectacled, Guthrie brings to his classroom both a scientist ’s gimlet eye and the eye of someone focused on other realms. Guthrie ’s science background includes working at Bell Laboratories in processor development before he joined MUM in 1983. He helped set up the computer science program that he directs at the school. He also runs his own consulting firm, working for such outfits as IBM and AT&T, even as he does research that his school biography describes...