MAHARISHI VEDIC CITY, Iowa -- Meditator Stephen Cardinal believes this blip of a city in southeast Iowa could soon alleviate world strife.

ince the city's founding in 2001, hundreds of Transcendental Meditation practitioners have meditated in unison, sending what they say is a wave of positivity across the globe. In the coming weeks, nearly 2,000 meditators from around the world will gather to bolster the wave in a mass meditation.

"The solutions of our forefathers haven't worked," said Cardinal, 25, who attends a TM university in nearby Fairfield.

The practitioners will meditate in Maharishi Vedic City as well as in Fairfield. Workers are busy building homes for 500 meditators on fields where sunflowers once stood. A short walk leads to a colony where meditators stay in white houses with gold-colored roofs, topped with onion-shaped domes.

"I do believe that this influence is true and that it is a technology that is valuable," said Ed Malloy, the Fairfield mayor and a TM practitioner.

TM practitioners follow the precepts of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the TM founder and a one-time spiritual teacher to the Beatles.

The Maharishi, said to be about 89, contends that simultaneous mass meditation creates a wave effect that calms the world, influences stock markets, decreases crime rates and prompts other positive societal behavior.

Positive energy's effect

Supporters say the positive energy from this city about 95 miles southeast of Des Moines is already paying off.

Since the number of daily meditators in Maharishi Vedic City and Fairfield reached about 1,200 on July 23, the Dow Jones Industrial Index has hit record levels, the S&P reached a 5 1/2 -year high, and the Nasdaq climbed to a 5-year high, said John Hagelin, the assembly's organizer.

Once the 2,000 meditators are in place for the assembly, called Invincible America, Hagelin predicts the Dow will surge toward 15,000, oil prices will fall below $45 a barrel, the U.S. crime rate will drop 20% and tensions in North Korea and Iran will be resolved.

Violence in Iraq will also dramatically decline, said Hagelin, a former Natural Law Party presidential candidate.

The TM experts, known as pandits, are men 20 to 30 years old who studied with the Maharishi for years, learning chants and other practices of the Vedic tradition from ancient India. The movement claims 6 million practitioners since it was introduced about 50 years ago.

The Maharishi says the men are adept at the art of yogic flying, a deep level of consciousness that causes the practitioner to hop into the air involuntarily. He says meditators tap into a unified field of consciousness that affects society.

The pandits travel to Iowa with their own chefs who prepare specialized organic vegetarian meals. Their 700-square-foot, two-bedroom manufactured homes, which are now being delivered, will meet Vedic specifications. They will face east in alignment with the sun.

The pandits will rarely leave the largely closed community and will return to India after two years, then be replaced by a new group, said Maharishi Vedic City Mayor Bob Wynne.

meditation to solve world problems