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Vedic City formally gets new name

Fairfield Ledger, USA
Nov. 18, 2003
Erik Gable
www.zwire.com

ReligionNewsBlog.com • Wednesday November 19, 2003

City drafts statement of philosophy, begins first road project.

MAHARISHI VEDIC CITY — Iowa’s newest city and Fairfield’s neighbor to the north has a new name.

The city council in Vedic City, incorporated in July 2001 by followers of Transcendental Meditation guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, decided about two years ago to add “Maharishi” to their city’s name.

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Under state law, any change to a city’s name must be approved by the voters at a regular city election, so the new name didn’t become official until the results of the Nov. 4 election were delivered to the Iowa Secretary of State’s office Friday.

“The reason we want the name ‘Maharishi’ on it is because ‘Vedic’ is a tradition that goes back thousands of years but Maharishi has made it predominant in the world in this generation,” said Bob Wynne, mayor of the city.

Maharishi Vedic City’s city council also recently passed, then decided to revise, a resolution outlining some of the city’s principles. The resolution was numbered No. 51 and entitled “Continuity and Effectiveness of Government.”

A draft of the resolution sent to local media detailed “the latest discoveries of modern science and the age-old Vedic science, which has been brought to light in this day and age by His Holiness Maharishi as his Vedic Science and Technology of Consciousness.”

It also described Maharishi Vedic Citys belief that negative trends in a society will decrease if 1 percent or more of the society’s population practices the Transcendental Meditation program or the square root of 1 percent practices an advanced form of meditation called TM-Sidhi.

The draft resolution closed with three main points.

First, it resolved “that a portion of each tax collected by the City shall be allocated to support a permanent group of peace makers in the City, and that state and federal funds, as well as individual and institutional support, shall be sought to maintain a total of 8,000 peace makers in the City on a permanent basis so that the age-old problems of mankind can be eliminated forever.”

Second, it encouraged other cities to support groups practicing the TM and TM-Sidhi programs “through city taxes or other permanent revenue sources” and “to offer Consciousness-Based Education for their school children to ensure development of their total brain potential and life spontaneously free of problems, fully in accord with national law and Natural Law.”

Third, it encouraged cities, states and national governments that support such groups to consider “how to minimize the disruptive, costly, and unnecessary process of changing governments every two, four or six years.”