Film and television director David Lynch and former United Nations assistant secretary general Robert Muller will be among the guests at an event Sept. 26 at Maharishi University of Management.
The day-long event, titled the Creating Peace conference, is being organized by an M.U.M. student club, Students for Peace.
Erin Skipper, who graduated from M.U.M. this year and founded the club in October 2003 with fellow student Elias Tesafye, said the conference will be “looking at the different issues we face and looking for ways we can collectively solve them.”
Although some parts of the day-long conference will promote M.U.M. and the practice of Transcendental Meditation, which the university claims creates peace, Skipper said the Creating Peace conference is open to all kinds of ideas about how to solve the problems of war and violence.
“Only two of the speakers are TM practicioners and will be talking about TM,” she said. “We definitely want to have a broader base and offer different viewpoints and different tools.”
The activities Sept. 26 will begin with a panel discussion from 10 a.m. to noon in the Maharishi School auditorium. Six guests will be on the panel:
— Muller, the former assistant secretary general of the U.N., whom Skipper described as “a very spiritual person” who tries to incorporate spirituality into politics.
— Lynch, an M.U.M. trustee, director of the television series “Twin Peaks” and the film “Mulholland Drive.”
— John Hagelin, director of M.U.M.’s Institute of World Peace and a three-time presidential candidate under the banner of the now-disbanded Fairfield-based Natural Law Party.
— Sue McGregor, a professor at Mount Saint Vincent University in Nova Scotia, Canada, and coordinator of that school’s peace and conflict studies program.
— Maureen McCue, a University of Iowa professor and member of the organization Physicians for Social Responsibility.
— Samite, a musician from Uganda now living in New York.