Among the white barns, brick silos and verdant farmlands of Middle America is the city that Maharishi built. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of the Transcendental Meditation (T.M.) movement and former spiritual adviser to the Beatles, decided in 1974 to expand his quickly growing empire to, of all places, Fairfield, Iowa. That year, he founded Fairfield's Maharishi International University, a learning center for consciousness-based education, and began to attract wide- eyed idealists from all over the world to the American heartland.





During the 1970s and '80s, some of these newly arrived devotees -- called gurus, or 'roos for short -- came as families, seeking heightened consciousness for themselves and their kids. So how does the second generation of Fairfield meditators, a small crop of far-flung men and women born in the second half of the '70s, look back on the town and relate to its cosmic ideals?





"It sounds like I got high before this, but I didn't," says journalist Claire Hoffman as she tells me about what prompted her family to relocate from New York City to Fairfield. She traces their move to the Taste of Utopia gathering in December 1983, where thousands of followers were called upon to take part in what was called "the Maharishi Effect." She explains: "If the square root of one percent of the population got together in one place and meditated, they would create world peace." That meant convening 7,000 people in Fairfield, many of whom used Maharishi's Yogic Flying technique -- an advanced practice in which participants sat cross-legged while hopping forward. According to Maharishi and his followers, this critical mass of meditation would result in a decrease in poverty, crime and war. "All these people went there and meditated together for weeks in the middle of a crazy, subzero Iowan winter," says Hoffman. "That's what brought us there, and we stayed."





Hoffman grew up with fellow guru kids Benjamin Myers, aka Sergio of the dance-music duo Benoit & Sergio, and Eli Lieb, now an L.A.-based singer-songwriter. Myers says of moving to Fairfield in seventh grade, "I was really bummed out to leave California for the wasteland of Iowa. Superficially, it seemed to be a place full of vegetarians in flowing yoga attire with big dreams of world peace through meditation. But I always found the community strange and fascinating, even when I found it, at times, frustrating." Lieb's affection for the Fairfield way of life predated his family's move. He recalls attending Maharishi's events in his native Washington, DC: "He would be sitting there, and I would run down and give him a rose." Lieb's parents relocated the family to Fairfield to be a part of the colony. "It was a super supportive community," says Lieb, "and everybody was your friend."