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Maharishi International University occupies a 185-acre campus in Fairfield, Iowa, and is offering 600 students courses in such ordinary subjects as administration as well as such esoterica as "Astronomy, Cosmology and the Science of Creative Intelligence" (SCI, as it is always called, is the grand and somewhat amorphous theory behind TM). The revenues of the World Plan Executive Council-U.S., the umbrella name for the burgeoning American TM movement, now amount to $12 million a year.
At national headquarters in Los Angeles, 60 full-time employees oversee a conglomerate of euphoria that includes the Students International Meditation Society, which has programs on 100 campuses; the International Meditation Society, which gives both beginning and advanced TM courses; and the American Foundation for the Science of Creative Intelligence, which caters to businessmen. In addition to the many TM centers, there are also five fully owned and hundreds of rented country retreats offering lectures, seminars and advanced meditation (up to 120 minutes a day, or three times the usual dosage). One such center that the movement owns is set amid 465 acres of unspoiled countryside at Livingston Manor in New York's Catskill Mountains. It has a 350-room hotel, a sophisticated printing plant for the masses of TM newsletters and other literature, and a videotape and sound-recording complex worthy of a TV network.
TM is even setting up a television station in Los Angeles. Channel 18 is scheduled to go on the air in November with taped lectures by the Maharishi and variety shows featuring such famous meditators as Stevie Wonder, Peggy Lee and the Beach Boys, who have written a one-line TM song ("Transcendental Meditation is good for you"). Station KSCI will report only good news. there is talk of a TM network sending smiles from sea to sea.
TM is often mistaken for other nostrums of the '60s and '70s, but it has little or no relationship to most of them. For example, Esalen, which inspired the encounter movement in the '60s, in cludes such therapy as nude communal bathing and rolfing—deep-probing, painful massages that are supposed to release the unawakened consciousness. Arica, a nationwide spiritual organi zation, searches for "the Essential Self through, among other things, Egyptian gymnastics and African dances. Meditation is only incidental to Arica, and involves concentrating on the plan ets Jupiter and Saturn and the colors blue and black. Est, a San Francisco-based group, puts large numbers of people together in a room and keeps them there for up to 15 hours at a time, with only three toilet breaks. This supposedly forces modern man to look at his existential roots and discover, as Founder Werner Erhard phrases it, that "what is, is." Because of the confusion of names, the Maharishi is also often mistaken for the junior guru, the Maharaj Ji, 17, the pudgy, high-living "Perfect Master" of the Divine Light sect. In contrast to all of the other consciousness-raising groups, TM appears refreshingly dull and commonplace.
The only exotic component of TM, indeed, is the some what mysterious figure of the Maharishi himself. Questioned about his past, he roars with laughter. "You see," he explained to TIME'S Robert Kroon, "I am a monk, and as a monk I am not expected to think of my past.