All I am saying (everybody all together now) is give Maharishi's Peace Palaces a chance.
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/living/religion/15993215.htm
Phila. region to give peace palaces a chance
Maharishi sees the centers as havens for TM practitioners to meditate on world peace.
By Jeff Gammage
Inquirer Staff Writer
The world can seem like a chaotic mess - war in Iraq, nukes in North Korea, suffering in Sudan.
But Bill Sands has good news: That's all going to change, and soon, within our lifetime. What's more, this region will play a happy role in the transformation.
Maharishi Peace Palaces are going to be built in West Philadelphia and Cherry Hill, among thousands planned worldwide, Sands says. They will serve as havens where devotees of Transcendental Meditation will alter the physical reality of the planet through the power of their collective thought.
Can TM succeed where the United Nations and Angelina Jolie have failed?
"The outlook is very bright," Sands says. And he should know.
The director of the Maharishi Enlightenment Center in Paoli has practiced TM for 36 of his 55 years, holds a doctorate from the Maharishi University of Management in Iowa, and lived for a time near the Maharishi himself, in the Netherlands.
Yes, the Maharishi is that maharishi. The one-time guru to the Beatles now presides over the Global Country of World Peace, a Dutch village he converted into "a country without borders for peace-loving people everywhere," complete with its own currency.
The Maharishi, thought to be 89, calls his work of the last half-century, in which he introduced TM to millions, but a prelude to eradicating violence.
"My coherence-creating groups are going to put out all this mischief-mongership in the world," he recently told the New York Times. "The world is going to come out to be a neat and clean world."-
Sands is as sincere a guy as you could want to meet and as relaxed a person as you could hope to find. His longish gray hair is swept behind the stems of gold-rimmed glasses that front piercing blue eyes. His voice is soft and earnest.
He grew up in Delaware County, in the town of Wawa, birthplace of the convenience-store chain, his father a stockbroker and his mother the former head of the Agnes Irwin School.
Today he's the point man for creating up to 10 local peace palaces and so far, he concedes, the pace has been a bit slow. Plans for the first, on the Main Line, were announced 31/2 years ago and remain just that - plans.
The Maharishi wants to build in 3,000 of the world's largest cities, and drafting a uniform design took time, Sands says. An architect's rendering shows a grand, rigorously symmetrical two-story structure with a dome and rows of windows. The country's handful of existing palaces are slightly modified.
Now, says Sands, the pace is quickening. Global Country of World Peace has purchased property at 1929 Greentree Rd. in Cherry Hill and 5400 Wynnefield Ave. in Philadelphia.
The city locale, a corner lot acquired for $400,000, is just southeast of St. Joseph's University and across from the sprawling Pinn Memorial Baptist Church complex. A derelict two-story house on the grounds will be razed, Sands says.
The Cherry Hill site, which cost $375,000, is a sloping woodlands near a shopping center and within walking distance of several homes. Building a palace on the property, which is zoned residential, would require a variance, township officials said. The city site is also zoned residential, but allows the conditional placement of other types of structures.
Sands says Philadelphia construction could start within months. The building will adhere to tenets of Vedic design, in which - like feng shui - the shape and placement of the structure and everything around it are seen as crucial to good health and clear thought. The Vedic age of India, the Maharishi's homeland, saw the creation of scriptures called Vedas, a basis of Hinduism.
Vedic influence helped the group settle on its Paoli office. Rental space requires compromise, Sands notes, but at least the Lancaster Avenue building had a north-facing entrance.
Palaces in Maryland, Kentucky, Iowa and other states are centers not only for teaching TM but for Maharishi-brand spas and Vedic vibration technology, which proponents say enhance inner-intelligence. Sands expects those services to be available locally, as well.
Earlier this year, TM leaders in Western Pennsylvania announced the purchase of property for the first of four palaces near Pittsburgh. No date has been set for ground-breaking.
-
The Maharishi, formally known as His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, inspired the Beach Boys to write the song "Transcendental Meditation." The singer Donovan put the Maharishi's picture on an album cover, and comedian Andy Kaufman followed his teachings.
While other '60s and '70s movements faded - does anyone still get Rolfed? - TM prospered. Last year film director David Lynch announced creation of the Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education, through which he hopes to raise billions to train children in TM.
Despite its aura of Eastern mysticism, TM is not a religion. It's a practice - and a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Thousands swear by it, meditating in twice-daily, 20-minute sessions. They say it enlivens the body and mind, producing a sense of bliss.
Michael Baime, a medical doctor who runs the University of Pennsylvania's Stress Management Program, says TM differs from other forms of meditation in a couple ways.
"It costs several thousand dollars," he says. "That's the biggest difference."
The initial TM course costs $2,500. By comparison, the Philadelphia Shambhala Meditation Center asks $15 for an introductory weeknight program, $35 all day on Saturday, or $100 for a full weekend course.
Yes, TM costs serious money, but the benefits are priceless, Sands says. Who wouldn't pay $2,500 for better health and a longer life?
For years, researchers have known that mental stress can cause physical harm, disrupting the immune system and even weakening the heart. Authorities at Harvard Medical School found that meditation can help - slowing breathing, lowering blood pressure, and increasing the flow of endorphin, a brain chemical that elevates mood.
But TM has been criticized for claims that go well beyond a healthier, happier outlook.
The Maharishi says TM can boost your intelligence, improve your memory, even raise students' grade-point-averages. When practiced by a group, he and his followers promise, TM can reduce the world's crime and unemployment, a boast scientists dismiss as hooey.
Meditation definitely has health benefits, says University of Maryland physics professor Robert Park, author of Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud. But "as far as reduction in crime, I suppose if people are sitting around meditating, there's a lot less crime. It's totally unrelated to the fact that they're meditating."
-
So how will TM adherents get insurgents in Iraq to lay down their arms? End the suffering in Gaza? Persuade North Korea to play nice?
As their memberships grow, Sands says, palaces here and elsewhere will generate what followers call "the Maharishi effect." By enlisting just 1 percent of a community to meditate, he and others say, negative energy and violence are banished. When that positive force is duplicated in hundreds or thousands of places, the ripples will expand like rings in a pond, changing cities, countries and, eventually, the world.
Sands knows people are skeptical.
"The thing is, it works. It absolutely works," he says. "We can create world peace."
For more on plans to build at least 3,000 Peace Palaces, go to http://go.philly.com/maharishi
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/living/religion/15993215.htm
Phila. region to give peace palaces a chance
Maharishi sees the centers as havens for TM practitioners to meditate on world peace.
By Jeff Gammage
Inquirer Staff Writer
The world can seem like a chaotic mess - war in Iraq, nukes in North Korea, suffering in Sudan.
But Bill Sands has good news: That's all going to change, and soon, within our lifetime. What's more, this region will play a happy role in the transformation.
Maharishi Peace Palaces are going to be built in West Philadelphia and Cherry Hill, among thousands planned worldwide, Sands says. They will serve as havens where devotees of Transcendental Meditation will alter the physical reality of the planet through the power of their collective thought.
Can TM succeed where the United Nations and Angelina Jolie have failed?
"The outlook is very bright," Sands says. And he should know.
The director of the Maharishi Enlightenment Center in Paoli has practiced TM for 36 of his 55 years, holds a doctorate from the Maharishi University of Management in Iowa, and lived for a time near the Maharishi himself, in the Netherlands.
Yes, the Maharishi is that maharishi. The one-time guru to the Beatles now presides over the Global Country of World Peace, a Dutch village he converted into "a country without borders for peace-loving people everywhere," complete with its own currency.
The Maharishi, thought to be 89, calls his work of the last half-century, in which he introduced TM to millions, but a prelude to eradicating violence.
"My coherence-creating groups are going to put out all this mischief-mongership in the world," he recently told the New York Times. "The world is going to come out to be a neat and clean world."-
Sands is as sincere a guy as you could want to meet and as relaxed a person as you could hope to find. His longish gray hair is swept behind the stems of gold-rimmed glasses that front piercing blue eyes. His voice is soft and earnest.
He grew up in Delaware County, in the town of Wawa, birthplace of the convenience-store chain, his father a stockbroker and his mother the former head of the Agnes Irwin School.
Today he's the point man for creating up to 10 local peace palaces and so far, he concedes, the pace has been a bit slow. Plans for the first, on the Main Line, were announced 31/2 years ago and remain just that - plans.
The Maharishi wants to build in 3,000 of the world's largest cities, and drafting a uniform design took time, Sands says. An architect's rendering shows a grand, rigorously symmetrical two-story structure with a dome and rows of windows. The country's handful of existing palaces are slightly modified.
Now, says Sands, the pace is quickening. Global Country of World Peace has purchased property at 1929 Greentree Rd. in Cherry Hill and 5400 Wynnefield Ave. in Philadelphia.
The city locale, a corner lot acquired for $400,000, is just southeast of St. Joseph's University and across from the sprawling Pinn Memorial Baptist Church complex. A derelict two-story house on the grounds will be razed, Sands says.
The Cherry Hill site, which cost $375,000, is a sloping woodlands near a shopping center and within walking distance of several homes. Building a palace on the property, which is zoned residential, would require a variance, township officials said. The city site is also zoned residential, but allows the conditional placement of other types of structures.
Sands says Philadelphia construction could start within months. The building will adhere to tenets of Vedic design, in which - like feng shui - the shape and placement of the structure and everything around it are seen as crucial to good health and clear thought. The Vedic age of India, the Maharishi's homeland, saw the creation of scriptures called Vedas, a basis of Hinduism.
Vedic influence helped the group settle on its Paoli office. Rental space requires compromise, Sands notes, but at least the Lancaster Avenue building had a north-facing entrance.
Palaces in Maryland, Kentucky, Iowa and other states are centers not only for teaching TM but for Maharishi-brand spas and Vedic vibration technology, which proponents say enhance inner-intelligence. Sands expects those services to be available locally, as well.
Earlier this year, TM leaders in Western Pennsylvania announced the purchase of property for the first of four palaces near Pittsburgh. No date has been set for ground-breaking.
-
The Maharishi, formally known as His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, inspired the Beach Boys to write the song "Transcendental Meditation." The singer Donovan put the Maharishi's picture on an album cover, and comedian Andy Kaufman followed his teachings.
While other '60s and '70s movements faded - does anyone still get Rolfed? - TM prospered. Last year film director David Lynch announced creation of the Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education, through which he hopes to raise billions to train children in TM.
Despite its aura of Eastern mysticism, TM is not a religion. It's a practice - and a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Thousands swear by it, meditating in twice-daily, 20-minute sessions. They say it enlivens the body and mind, producing a sense of bliss.
Michael Baime, a medical doctor who runs the University of Pennsylvania's Stress Management Program, says TM differs from other forms of meditation in a couple ways.
"It costs several thousand dollars," he says. "That's the biggest difference."
The initial TM course costs $2,500. By comparison, the Philadelphia Shambhala Meditation Center asks $15 for an introductory weeknight program, $35 all day on Saturday, or $100 for a full weekend course.
Yes, TM costs serious money, but the benefits are priceless, Sands says. Who wouldn't pay $2,500 for better health and a longer life?
For years, researchers have known that mental stress can cause physical harm, disrupting the immune system and even weakening the heart. Authorities at Harvard Medical School found that meditation can help - slowing breathing, lowering blood pressure, and increasing the flow of endorphin, a brain chemical that elevates mood.
But TM has been criticized for claims that go well beyond a healthier, happier outlook.
The Maharishi says TM can boost your intelligence, improve your memory, even raise students' grade-point-averages. When practiced by a group, he and his followers promise, TM can reduce the world's crime and unemployment, a boast scientists dismiss as hooey.
Meditation definitely has health benefits, says University of Maryland physics professor Robert Park, author of Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud. But "as far as reduction in crime, I suppose if people are sitting around meditating, there's a lot less crime. It's totally unrelated to the fact that they're meditating."
-
So how will TM adherents get insurgents in Iraq to lay down their arms? End the suffering in Gaza? Persuade North Korea to play nice?
As their memberships grow, Sands says, palaces here and elsewhere will generate what followers call "the Maharishi effect." By enlisting just 1 percent of a community to meditate, he and others say, negative energy and violence are banished. When that positive force is duplicated in hundreds or thousands of places, the ripples will expand like rings in a pond, changing cities, countries and, eventually, the world.
Sands knows people are skeptical.
"The thing is, it works. It absolutely works," he says. "We can create world peace."
For more on plans to build at least 3,000 Peace Palaces, go to http://go.philly.com/maharishi
