The Global Country of World Peace wants to build a peace palace and a private high school Mayfield Heights. Owned by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the palace would teach transcendental meditation and peaceful enlightenment. But the pacifists say their Mayfield Heights reception has been anything but peaceful.

Global Country of World Peace, which has its U.S. headquarters in Iowa, eventually plans to build what it calls a Peace Palace, which focuses on teaching transcendental meditation.

There are about 1.5 million people in the United States who practice TM twice a day.

These Indian pandits – scholars of Transcendental Meditation with three-year visas – are among 600 advanced-level meditators who began to arrive in late summer. Another 200 are expected to arrive in the next month.

David Lynch, the filmmaker whose darkly inspired works have included Eraserhead, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, is unsettling viewers once again with the release of his newest film, Inland Empire, which stars Laura Dern as an actress in trouble. But what’s really on the director’s mind is not the movie but his new book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity. Much of this autobiographical work, due out in January, is about Lynch’s life as a devotee of Transcendental Meditation.

David Lynch remembers how he recoiled from the concept of Transcendental Meditation when he heard about it in the late 1960s, when the movement — founded by the Indian spiritual leader Maharishi Mahesh Yogi — was experiencing its first wave of popularity among young people in the West thanks to proselytizing by pop stars like the Beatles and Donovan.

The Maharishi may be holding out for rising commercial real estate values in downtown Hartford, but the building is increasingly standing out as a gaping hole in an area that has been abuzz with redevelopment.

Transcendental Mediation Peace palaces promoting holistic health programs will be built in Colorado Springs and 20 other cities across the nation if the Colorado Health Facilities Authority approves a request for $51 million in revenue bonds Monday.

In the coming weeks, nearly 2,000 practitioners of Transcendental Meditation will gather in Iowa in an effort to bolser world peace through meditation and yogic flying.

The man in charge of the “Invincible America Course” is John Hagelin, a quantum physicist who graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth, earned a doctorate from Harvard and was a researcher at Stanford before moving to Fairfield and becoming the director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy at the Maharishi University of Management.

A controversial plan for a Transcendental Meditation program at Terra Linda High School was dropped Wednesday after the David Lynch Foundation withdrew a $175,000 grant.

Marin County may be etched in the public imagination as a liberal land of hot tubs, aging hippies and free thinkers, but even a bastion of alternative spirituality apparently has its limits. Plans for a high school meditation club funded by filmmaker David Lynch evaporated this week after parents caught wind that students would be taught Transcendental Meditation, the method developed by a one-time spiritual teacher to The Beatles, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Amid protests that TM was a form of religious practice and therefore inappropriate for a public school, the David Lynch Foundation on Tuesday withdrew the $175,000 it had pledged to Terra Linda High School in San Rafael.

Mediation has gained growing acceptance in the West as a way to reduce stress and clear the mind. Terra Linda High School’s decision to offer Transcendental Meditation, with the help of a $175,000 grant from filmmaker David Lynch’s foundation, as part of a new wellness program is having the opposite effect.

An information meeting about Transcendental Meditation ended in a shouting match Thursday night at Terra Linda High School. Principal Carole Ramsey hosted half a dozen supporters of the program so they could explain it and answer questions from parents who want to know more about the school’s possible new club. But Ramsey ended the meeting abruptly when a parent stormed the stage, refused to leave and angrily denounced Transcendental Meditation as a cult she’d broken free of after teaching it for 35 years.

Terra Linda High School plans in Marin, California, plans to launch a Transcendental Meditation program with the help of a $175,000 grant from noted filmmaker David Lynch.

« Newer — Older »