Is GCWP a borderless Hindu country? Is RAAM currency accepted in US and Europe?

YouTurn Editorial

April 19, 2023

Claim

GCWP is a borderless Hindu Country located in Iowa, USA. The currency of the country is RAAM with pictures of Prabhu Ram and 1Raam = 10 USD. The currency is accepted in US and Europe.

Rating: Misleading 

Explanation

Visuals of currency with Lord Ram’s image are shared widely on social media with the claim that RAAM is the currency of GCWP, a borderless Hindu Country located in Iowa, USA, and 1Raam = 10 USD. The posts further claim that the currency is accepted in US and Europe. The viral video also mentions the same. 

What is the truth?

When searching for GCWP, we found the website ‘globalcountry.org’ mentioning itself as a consortium of educational organizations in more than 100 countries working to create peace, progress and prosperity in the world. The organization is said to be founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and is being led by Dr. Tony Nader.

The website further mentions itself as a “nation without borders”. It is also mentioned as “Maharishi Vedic City, Iowa, USA: the city by-laws state that every building has to be designed and constructed according to Maharishi Sthapatya Veda.” When we checked for location, it is mentioned that the International Headquarters of the Global Country of World Peace is in the Netherlands.

When searching for Maharishi Vedic City, we found that it is set on 3.5 square miles of rural land with the city boundaries marked on the ‘maharishi vedic city’ website.

The viral currency with the image of Lord Ram in denominations 1, 5 and 10 is found under the ‘Finance and Planning’ section of the ‘globalcountry’ website mentioning it as Global Development Currency. The RAAM is said to be utilized to develop unused fertile agricultural land for the profitable export of organic food. The website further mentions that the currency was issued by Maharishi Global Financing, The Netherlands. The RAAM currency is said to be a farmer’s currency for agricultural development projects.

We found India Today and BBC articles reporting that the Dutch Central Bank allows the currency RAAM within a closed-off circuit of users as long as the notes are not used as legal tender. The Raam notes are accepted in 100 Dutch shops in 30 villages and cities at a fixed rate of 10 euros per raam. Another India Today article mentions that a Raam is equivalent to 10 dollars in the Vedic city of Lowa, USA and in 35 American states.

Conclusion

It is found that the claim is misleading due to the below reasons.

GCWP is not a country but a city in Iowa, USA.

The Raam currency-bearing deity Ram is released in the denominations 1, 5 and 10.

One Raam is equivalent to 10 dollars in the city limits and is equivalent to 10 Euros in Dutch shops in 30 villages and cities.

The currency is not used all over the US and Europe but in 30 Dutch villages and cities and 30 American states.

The currency is not to be used as legal tender.

https://en.youturn.in/factcheck/gcwp-raam-currency.html

Louise Hay, AIDS advocate who became leading voice of the New Age movement, dies at 90

California/U.S./WorldLouise Hay, AIDS advocate who became leading voice of the New Age movement, dies at 90

The Washington Post
September 01, 2017

Louise Hay, a self-help guru and AIDS advocate whose book, “You Can Heal Your Life,” preached the power of love and affirmation, sold tens of millions of copies and made her a leading voice of the New Age movement in the 1980s, died – or “transitioned” – on Aug. 30 at her home in San Diego, California. She was 90.

Hay House, the publishing company she founded in 1987, confirmed her death but did not disclose the cause.

Described in a 2008 New York Times profile as “the queen of the New Age,” Hay was a child-abuse victim who had dropped out of high school, given a baby up for adoption, worked as a model and divorced an international-trade expert by the time she discovered “the power of positive thinking” in her 40s.

She read the works of Norman Vincent Peale and early 20th-century mystics, attended the Church of Religious Science in Manhattan, New York, and studied with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the onetime guru to the Beatles, at his “Vedic city” in Iowa.

Eventually, she developed a belief system based on the idea that medical maladies are inextricably linked with negative thoughts. Alzheimer’s disease, she wrote in her “little blue book,” the 1976 pamphlet “Heal Your Body,” was caused by “a desire to leave the planet.” Leprosy, she said, was related to an “inability to handle life at all.”

Wellness – relief from disease, depression, anxiety and stress – was merely a matter of positive thinking, honed by reciting mantras such as “I approve of myself” several hundred times each day.

It was a lesson that, Hay said, came from her own personal experience.

Diagnosed with cervical cancer in the late 1970s, she chose to go against the advice of doctors and begin what her website described as “an intensive program of affirmations, visualization, nutritional cleansing and psychotherapy,” focusing especially on childhood memories of sexual abuse.

“I . . . had to love myself a great deal more than I did, and I had to clear the patterns of resentment that I had held from when I had been a battered and sexually abused child,” she said in one audiobook, “Cancer: Discovering Your Healing Power.” “It was imperative for me to let go of the blame.”

Within six months, she said, the cancer was gone.

Hay’s account of the disease was central to the rise of her Carlsbad, Calif.-based publishing empire, which offers self-affirming coloring books, can-do desk calendars, inspirational card decks, meditative audio recordings and mobile apps.

A website for Hay offers daily “affirmations” (“in the infinity of life where I am, all is perfect, whole and complete”), and her company organizes conferences and seminars featuring self-described psychics, clairvoyants, “angel therapists” and holistic healers. A streaming radio station was launched in 2005.

Hay House grossed $100 million in 2007, the Times reported, and Hay’s second book – “You Can Heal Your Life” (1984) – has remained a strong performer in print, selling more than 50 million copies around the world, according to its publisher.

The book was given a boost when Hay appeared on daytime talk shows with Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey in March 1988, discussing her advocacy for people with AIDS.

She had been a relatively unknown spiritual counselor in Southern California when, in 1985, she began holding small gatherings in her living room for gay men with the disease. The support group, known as the Hayride, soon ballooned to a Wednesday night gathering of more than 800 people, filling an auditorium in West Hollywood.

Held at a time when AIDS was widely stigmatized, the meetings were “often the only time a person with AIDS might be touched, hugged or massaged with care, not rough disdain,” the Los Angeles Blade wrote in an obituary of Hay.

Hay reportedly presided over the funerals of some AIDS patients – “Who else was going to do it?” she said – but drew the ire of doctors and some members of the gay community for giving the impression that the disease could be cured, and cured with love.

“Love is the most powerful stimulant to the immune system,” she said at one gathering in 1988, the L.A. Times reported. “What we’re doing here is practicing love, unconditional love.”

She was born in Los Angeles on Oct. 8, 1926, and for decades kept her birth name closely guarded. But she acknowledged that her last name was Lunney – “the kids used to call me ‘lunatic,’ ” she wrote in one book – and said that she was beaten by her stepfather and raped by a neighbor when she was about 5.

She dropped out of high school at 15 and became pregnant, giving her infant daughter up for adoption on the day she turned 16. Louise Hay was a name she took after moving to New York in 1950, where she became a model for Bill Blass, Pauline Trigère and Oleg Cassini and married Andrew Hay, an Englishman, in 1954.

Hay reportedly left her for another woman 14 years later, leading Ms. Hay to begin visiting the First Church of Religious Science, a metaphysical institution led by Raymond Charles Barker. She returned to California in 1980, and, according to Hay House, left no immediate survivors.

Hay founded a charity organization, the Hay Foundation, in 1986, and appeared in a 2007 movie adaptation of “You Can Heal Your Life.” For many years, she traveled the country delivering lectures, finishing them by spending hours behind a lectern, standing on her feet while signing books for her fans. She alway stood, she told the New York Times, “because they all want to hug me.”

http://www.dailyrepublic.com/california-us-world/louise-hay-aids-advocate-who-became-leading-voice-of-the-new-age-movement-dies-at-90/

Building a Meditation Commune in Small-Town IowaWhy one rural town is full of Maharishi Vastu architecture

AARON SEWARD

Curbed

February 24, 2016

 

The Tower of Invincibility

On the last few miles of the drive to Fairfield, Iowa, a two-lane blacktop, which up to this point curves, climbs, and dips through hills and dales, straightens out on a high, flat plane. You feel much closer to the sky here. The regular features of the Midwest countryside—orderly corn and soybean fields; whitewashed farmhouses with their barns, silos, and other outbuildings; copses of trees poking out of ravines—take on an almost Platonic idealness. It’s the heartland as Edward Hopper would have painted it: stark and quiet with hard, white light. It is a fitting approach to the American center of the global Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement, home of the Maharishi University of Management (MUM), the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment (MSAE), Vedic City, Utopia Park trailer park, and the largest collection of Maharishi Vastu architecture in this hemisphere.

The first Vastu building you encounter is well outside of town. Sitting far back on the west side of Highway 1, it is a large structure, almost classical in style and apparent symmetry. An east-facing, three-story central mass anchors the edifice. An orthogonal cupola tops the roof, with an exotic crown detail that resembles a miniature onion dome. From this stately center extend, north and south, two wings, punctuated by their own small cupolas and domes. A white picket fence surrounds the site.

It looks like a knock-off of a grand 19th-century hotel erected in India by the British Raj. But it’s not a hotel—it’s an office building. A sign by the highway lists the tenants: Lisco, a local internet service provider; Maharishi Ayurveda, which manufactures and sells Vedic health products; Cambridge Investment Research, a broker-dealer; two law offices; something called Prairie Hills Management; and Fortune Creating Buildings, the North American headquarters of Maharishi Vastu architecture.

 

Founded by the TM movement in 2001, Vedic City was the first newly incorporated town in Iowa in 60 years.

Maharishi Vastu, also called Maharishi Sthapatya Veda, is the architectural corollary of the practice of Transcendental Meditation. It evolved as part of the TM movement’s effort to extend its brand to cover all aspects of life. The movement and its followers have been designing and erecting Sthapatya Vedic buildings for the past 20 years, primarily in Fairfield and its environs, but also in communities throughout the world. My trip last autumn was, in part, to slake a professional curiosity—I’m an architectural journalist. My investigation also had a personal dimension. This was far from my first trip to Fairfield. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I went through one year of junior high and two years of high school at MSAE. My parents, practitioners of TM since the late 1960s, taught my brother and me to meditate when we were seven years old. We were one of many TM families who came from large cosmopolitan centers—Houston, Texas, in our case—to be part of this community of spiritual seekers located incongruously in the corn belt of Jefferson County, Iowa.

Taste of Utopia Street is the main drag of Utopia Park trailer park: affordable TM housing in the pre-Vastu era.Aaron Seward

Sthapatya Vedic architecture was only just becoming popular among TMers when I left Fairfield to go to college. Like many children of the movement, I spent the subsequent years questioning and discarding the philosophical propositions of TM, but I never completely turned my back on Fairfield. The town holds formative memories for me. It’s where I met many of my life-long friends. Some of them still live there, and it is they who have kept me informed, with a certain amount of dismay, of the rise of Vastu. Sthapatya Veda buildings looked cheap, they said. They were ugly, unsuited to the local landscape, and ignored common sense. Nonetheless, the true believers were selling their homes in town and doing whatever they could to build Vastu homes in new developments on the outskirts. The movement began to redevelop the campus of MUM to bring it in-line with Vedic principles, a process that included draining its beautiful pond and barricading the southern entrance. It also demolished several early-20th century masonry academic buildings, among them a handsome stone church, and replaced them with gold-painted timber frame structures built according to Sthapatya Vedic principles.

Architecture is a cultural phenomenon, and it reflects the consciousness of those who design and build it. The culture and consciousness of the TM movement evolved from a single source: its founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who died in 2008. Maharishi (which means "great seer") was an Indian spiritual leader who began teaching TM in the 1950s. As early as 1958, he visited the United States to promote his form of mantric meditation, but it wasn’t until the late 1960s that his teachings attracted a mass audience and became a full-blown movement. At that time, Maharishi gained a number of celebrity followers—including The Beatles—and soon an entire generation of young people, dissatisfied with the world their parents had laid, were tuning in to his philosophical teachings and meditating on his mantras. The TM movement had approximately 700,000 followers in 1977, more than a million by the 1980s, and as many as five million in recent years.

Aside from the heavy tile roof and onion dome detail, this Vastu home would fit in easily among the Midwestern vernacular.Jon Lipman

While a large portion of Maharishi’s following is in India, his main focus was on expansion in the West, and his great success was in adapting Hindu spiritualism to Western sensibilities. (So dedicated to the West was he that he established his primary residence in Vlodrop, Holland, after a series of lawsuits curtailed his visits to the United States.) Western celebrities helped his cause, but his real genius was in tailoring the practice of TM to fit Western lifestyles. The elaborate mantras and invocations that make up Hindu religious practice were stripped down to a single-syllable sound—the mantra—repeated quietly to oneself for 20 minutes twice a day: once in the morning between waking and going to work or school, and once in the evening between returning from work or school and eating dinner. Far from prepping one for the loss of individuality, the practice of TM was said to help the practitioner rest, relieve stress, and achieve full potential spiritually and materially.

The men's Golden Dome, at the entrance of the MUM campus, erected in 1980, has since been renovated to bring it in-line with Vastu principles.Aaron Seward

During the practice of TM, the meditator—who "effortlessly" repeats the mantra in a sitting position with eyes closed—is said to transcend through levels of consciousness, shedding all thoughts, and all self-referential mental or physical activity, until reaching a state of "pure Being." "It is neither matter nor energy," wrote Maharishi in his 1963 book The Science of Being and Art of Living. "It is pure Being, the state of pure existence…Everything is the expression of this pure existence…which is the essential constituent of all relative life." TM only brings the practitioner into contact with pure Being for brief moments. The human mind, being a naturally restless and querulous entity, soon buoys one back up into the mess of one’s own inner life. But, through regular practice, one would be able to spend longer and longer periods of time in touch with pure Being. And eventually, after some period of time—perhaps a very long period spanning several lifetimes, depending on one’s karma—a TM practitioner might achieve cosmic consciousness, or God-consciousness: "Then is the selfishness of man the selfish end of God; the individual mind of man the cosmic mind of God; the individual breath of man the cosmic breath of God; the individual speech of man the expression of cosmic silence."

In promoting TM in that way, Maharishi bundled the seemingly opposite poles of spirituality and materialism. "…The use of his full potential would enable a man to think, speak and act in such a manner that every thought, word and action would not only accomplish the maximum in material life but would also become a means of his remaining in tune with almighty God," Maharishi wrote. It was the perfect blend to attract the generation that was then coming of age in the West.

Located on Highway 1 north of Fairfield, this grand structure looks like a knock-off of a 19th-century hotel in India, but it's a Vastu office building.Aaron Seward

As the movement grew—today, it is estimated to have a net worth of some $3.5 billion—Maharishi, the Steve Jobs of Indian gurus, released a series of branded products to satisfy all aspects of spiritual and corporeal life. He told his followers to limit themselves to only his products, which included the TM-Sidhi program, an expanded meditation practice that professes to enliven particular aspects of life and speed one’s journey to enlightenment; Maharishi Ayurveda, a system of alternative medicine that is practiced clinically and involves a line of dietary supplements; and Maharishi Gandharva Veda, music that is said to create balance in nature and peace in the world. And then there is the most visible product of all: Maharishi’s system of Vedic architecture, which, the guru promised, would "provide cosmic harmony and support to the individual for his peace, prosperity, and good health — daily life in accord with Natural Law, daily life in the evolutionary direction."

I met Jonathan Lipman, the chief architect of Maharishi Vastu, in the all-vegetarian cafeteria on the MUM campus. "Vastu, or Sthapatya Veda, is part of the Vedic literature," he explains. "It is the architecture aspect of Natural Law. ‘Sthapatya’ means to establish. One of the qualities of the structures of nature is that they are holistic and integrated into the web of nature. In the Sanskrit language, the word that means a structure should be balanced between the parts, and the whole, and the cosmos, that word is Vastu."

This Vastu office building in Fairfield, with its vaguely classical pediment and columns, has a cupola that brings daylight to the center of the building, onion dome details, and PV arrays.Aaron Seward

All of Maharishi’s products are based in Vedic literature, ancient Hindu texts that were passed down orally by generations of priests before being written down. Unlike Ayurveda and Gandharva Veda, whose precepts are well described in the literature, the texts that describe Sthapatya Veda are arcane, difficult to understand, and thus open to wide interpretation. In India there are several lineages of Sthapatis—practitioners of Sthapatya Veda—who each have their own way of doing things. To develop his system of Vedic architecture, Maharishi went through a 15-year process of interpreting the Vedic texts in consultation with the most prestigious Sthapatis. Maharishi Vastu is the result of this effort, a complete practice of architecture with well-defined rules.

The Vedic texts, which were composed untold thousands of years ago, don’t have much to say about office buildings, or hospitals, or schools.

The first of these rules is that a building should face east. "The most powerful influence of natural law on the surface of the earth is the sun," says Lipman. "It rises in the east, sets in the west, and has different qualities of energy at different times of the day. The surface of the earth is moving, it’s rotating on its access to the east at this latitude about 700 miles per hour all the time, so the sun and everything outside of the earth come at us from the east because we’re rotating that way. When we’re facing that direction, our direction of travel, we’re kind of facing natural law, and we’re receiving it, we’re more in the flow of it."

The picket fence that surrounds Vastu buildings is another way of enforcing eastern orientation and extending the positive and protective influences of the architecture through the site. While eastern entrances are favored, northern entrances are acceptable. Southern and western entrances, however, are inauspicious and are avoided. In fact, many TM followers (called "roos," short for gurus, by the locals) who live in existing houses in Fairfield closed their homes’ south entrances and opened up new entrances on the east to bring them somewhat in line with Sthapatya Veda.

The white picket fences surrounding these Vastu office buildings enforce eastern orientation and extend the architecture's positive influence throughout the site.Aaron Seward

Whenever possible, Sthapatya Vedic buildings are designed to admit light to the center. In India this is often done via a courtyard. In Iowa, where the climate isn’t conducive to courtyards, it is done through skylights and raised cupolas with clerestory windows. Daylight infused all of the Vastu buildings that I visited during my trip to Fairfield—sometimes pleasantly so, and sometimes to the point of producing an uncomfortable amount of glare.

Unlike in much contemporary architecture, where solar orientation is calculated in order to optimize building performance, in Vastu the relationship of the structure to the sun is determined by the arcane prescriptions of the Vedic source texts. For example, according to Lipman, the Veda says that the sun has different qualities of energy at different times of the day. By locating specific residential functions in particular quadrants of a plan the Sthapatya Vedic architect is said to enliven certain qualities in the residents. "The dining room is where digestion is greatest, the living room is where conviviality is promoted, a study is where our mind is clear," says Lipman.

This Vastu office building in Fairfield shows some Eastern influence in its ziggurat-like column bays and prominently featured onion dome detail.Aaron Seward

This is less true with other building types. The Vedic texts, which were composed untold thousands of years ago, don’t have much to say about office buildings, or hospitals, or schools. As a result, Maharishi Vastu doesn’t dictate the placement of rooms in these facilities. But this hasn’t stopped the movement from building these sorts of structures according to its interpretation of the Veda. "In part what we are doing is identifying how we can apply these principles to the building types that exist today," says Lipman.

Besides the sun and its influences, Vastu incorporates a Vedic system of measurement and proportioning (the smallest unit, 1 nel, is equal to 11/64ths of an inch, and all ratios are determined by multiplying or equally dividing the chosen module); prescriptions for material choices (steel, for example, is not used, as it is considered inauspicious), and site planning guidelines. ("For instance, if there was a hill to the east of a building then clearly it would block the influence of the rising sun," says Lipman. "We wouldn’t build on such a site.")

While Vastu has many rules, it does not govern the style of a building. Just as Maharishi dressed Hindu spiritualism in Western garb to promote TM in Europe and America, his system of architecture is adaptable to the prevailing tastes of a region. Most of the Vastu houses I saw in Fairfield conformed to the local or other American vernacular styles. One was even designed to resemble a mountain lodge, complete with Douglas fir logs imported from the Pacific Northwest and an impressive stone fireplace. The Vastu buildings on the Maharishi University of Management campus, however, sought to embody what Lipman called a "Vedic style": a dull golden color with hipped roofs, white pilasters and trim, and wedding cake cupolas.

The women's Golden Dome, now dusty blue in color, was also built in 1980 and has since been renovated to Vastu standards.Aaron Seward

"The Vastu principles are not really style-giving," says Lipman. "The direction the building faces, the proportions, don’t contribute to style generally, so it is compatible with almost any different style." "Almost" is the operative word. Bilateral symmetry is a key aspect of Vedic architecture, and therefore, in Lipman's words, "Zaha Hadid would be very challenged to do a Vastu building and Frank Gehry might be too, because there are certain principles of a central main mass with additional masses, and completely fluid, non-hierarchical building style would be really challenging to overlay on a Vastu building."

Another defining feature of Vastu architecture is the Brahmasthan, the geometric center of the structure, which is marked on the floor in one way or another: a polished stone, a piece of demarcating furniture, a slab of glass etched with a Mandala. If the mystical underpinnings of Vastu were not clear before, here they become undeniably so. According to the Vedic view of cosmology, the universe arises from and collapses back to a single, "unmanifest" point in an unending cycle—much the way the Big Bang theory described nature until scientists discovered that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, destined to stretch out and grow cold, probably never to contract again. In Vastu architecture, this point is acknowledged in order to bring the house and its inhabitants into harmony with the Vedic laws of nature. And the onion dome detail at the crown of the building serves as an intermediary, a junction point between the heavens and the environment below.

You can buy a t-shirt online that reads, "Fairfield, IA: 5.7 Square Miles Surrounded by Reality." It’s a play on what Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kanther once said about San Francisco, that it is 49 square miles surrounded by reality. The comparison is an apt one. Many people who moved to Fairfield for TM left the movement but stuck around to pursue other New Age spiritual practices. And many children of TM, who left for college or professional reasons, returned to raise families and start businesses.

This town of around 10,000 inhabitants smack in the middle of conservative "Silicorn Valley" has many of the markers of "up-and-coming" towns everywhere: an art gallery, an organic health food store, a performing arts and convention center, the best burger in Southeast Iowa, a cider works, a hip coffee shop, and a nightclub that books touring indie bands. The seat of Jefferson County, it is home to an impressive courthouse that is on the National Register of Historic Places. It has a town square complete with a gazebo at its center, ringed with brick buildings occupied by a variety of active storefronts housing everything from a cell phone store to something called the Divine Mother Church. There are a number of stately Victorian mansions along the main thoroughfares, and blocks and blocks of quiet, tree-lined residential streets. You can easily walk its entire length and breadth, and traffic is minimal.

This Vastu home near the MUM campus turns its back on Heavenly Lane, which is to the west of the site. The entrance is on the east side, a key precept of Vastu.Aaron Seward

Little Maharishi Vastu architecture exists in the center of Fairfield. A few commercial buildings make themselves known with eastern orientations and onion dome details. And then there is the campus of the Maharishi University of Management, with its new Vastu academic buildings, its drained pond, and the old Golden Domes, which were built in 1980 as group meditation halls, one for women, one for men. Today they are hemmed in by white picket fences, their entrances reoriented to face east, their tops crowned by onion dome details. The ground between them, as of 2007, is occupied by The Tower of Invincibility, a dull golden obelisk bearing inscriptions that glorify those who erected it and commemorate something called Invincibility Day, which is apparently helping to bring about world peace. The Tower of Invincibility has its own white picket fence to protect it from inauspicious influences.

A number of existing homes have been modified to bring them in line with Sthapatya Vedic principles, though Lipman says the movement no longer authorizes existing home retrofits. It is simply too difficult, he says, to meet the stringent requirements of Maharishi Vastu and obtain the full benefits of what the movement calls a Fortune Creating Home. So, to live in Vastu, you have to build from the ground up.

Most of the Vastu architecture being built in Fairfield today is rising in small subdivisions on the outskirts of town and in nearby Maharishi Vedic City, which was incorporated in 2001. Out there, on the tabula rasa of the Iowa cornfields, it is possible to see Vastu in unadulterated surrounds, as well as to catch a glimpse of Vedic town planning.

At first glance, there is little that distinguishes these Vastu homes from any other American contemporary residence built on a similar budget. They are almost entirely symmetrical; the same could be said for many developer tract homes throughout the country. They are composed of walls set on foundations and topped by roofs, with windows for daylight and views and doors through which to enter and leave. The materials are also, if not always standard, certainly not unique to Vastu. Most of the homes I saw were wood-framed and sided with asphalt shingle roofs and vinyl windows, though Lipman also showed me a more modern house he had designed with concrete panel cladding. He also took me to a subdivision called Abundance EcoVillage, which exists completely off the grid, where many of the homes are made with straw-bale construction. Maharishi, he pointed out, was an early proponent of solar energy, and indeed photovoltaic arrays, in addition to wind turbines, are to be seen throughout Fairfield in general.

Abundance EcoVillage, built in the middle of the cornfields, exists completely off the grid, drawing all of its power from a wind turbine and PV arrays.Jon Lipman

There is something eerie about a close collection of buildings all facing the same direction — east, in this case. The setup also creates very real urban planning impracticalities, which Lipman grappled with when the movement was laying out Vedic City. "We are engaged in a kind of experiment in introducing these principles into this culture," he says. "We are figuring some of those things out as we go along. For example, on the face of it, it would sound like you cannot lay out the blocks that compose a city if all the houses face north or east. How can you lay out a grid of blocks with houses on both sides of the streets? Several of us have really tried to figure out what the solutions are, because to say that you’re going to single-load every street means that infrastructure costs are going to be vastly higher."

Whether planners and architects are Vedic Sthapatis or Mies van der Rohe, it is the residents who ultimately decide how buildings and cities will be put to use. In laying out Vedic city, Lipman and his team did indeed create single-loaded blocks, with houses facing the backsides of the next row of houses. These single-loaded grids were placed within rings, expressed in landscaping and walkways, with several such rings surrounding a central ring. "When I moved in there, what I discovered is that once or even twice a day somebody, or a couple, will step out of their house and they’ll go for a walk around the loop. And as they walk other families will see them and they will hop out of their house and they’ll join them. They’re all just chatting and stuff, but it looks like a parade….I had no clue. I’m just following these ancient patterns. And so it’s very interesting to watch what’s actually happening."

For those of us outside of the Movement, it can be easy to scoff at attempts to force an ancient and mystical system of architecture into modern life. On the other hand, it’s hard not to be charmed by that same fact, especially when you compare it to the seemingly mercenary motivations of many housing builders in the United States, whose developments are devoid of both architecture and substance. With Maharishi Vastu there is at least the striving for something beyond the profit margin (though there is that as well). Its aim is spiritual and utopian, values that modern architecture once tried to promote before becoming simply a style.

Editor: Sara Polsky

http://www.curbed.com/2016/2/24/11100572/commune-architecture-iowa

Missing Pandit Brutally Killed

August 30, 2014
hi INDiA

CHICAGO (IL) — Nobody knows. Nobody cares. Well, Hi India was right when it published an article on the sorry plight of Vedic Pandits in its January 24, 2014 edition.

Ajit Panday, aged around 23 years, has been shot dead by an unknown suspect at Big Brother 2 Food Mart on 878 Norwood Road, Southeast Atlanta, Georgia.

Ajit was gunned down late in the night on August 24 as he approached the main gate to close for the day around 10 p.m.. He was found dead, with multiple gunshots, near the front door by the owner of the store – Poltu Roy.

Though Poltu Roy said store closed at 10 pm, the video recording of murder shows the time as 11.28 pm.

Ajit, a native of India, was brought to the US by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi University at Fairfield , Iowa, more than two years ago. Ajit had left O’Hare airport in March to flee and wander into the strange world to find his living.

Missing Pandit was Brutally Killed

Hi India Live

September 3, 2014

CHICAGO (IL) — Nobody knows. Nobody cares. Well, Hi India was right when it published an article on the sorry plight of Vedic Pandits in its January 24, 2014 edition. Ajit Panday, aged around 23 years, has been shot dead by an unknown suspect at Big Brother 2 Food Mart on 878 Norwood Road, Southeast Atlanta, Georgia.

Ajit was gunned down late in the night on August 24 as he approached the main gate to close for the day around 10 p.m.. He was found dead, with multiple gunshots, near the front door by the owner of the store – Poltu Roy.
Though Poltu Roy said store closed at 10 pm, the video recording of murder shows the time as 11.28 pm.

Ajit, a native of India, was brought to the US by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi University at Fairfield , Iowa, more than two years ago. Ajit had left O’Hare airport in March to flee and wander into the strange world to find his living.

All this is done to obtain more profit at the cost of life of people like Ajit Panday. In their brazen statements, Poltu Roy and Guru Chand shrugged off responsibility by informing that they had cautioned Ajit Panday to be careful in night time–no other measures were taken–though as per him, Ajit was only volunteering.

Ajit was working in the store for more than two months and was working from 8 am when it opened till the closing time of 11 p.m.–more than 15 hours a day–all the seven days of week. No proper food, sanitation or security was provided at the backroom, where Ajit was lodged after work. In fact, Ajit was housed in in-human conditions with a 15-hours-seven-days-a-week schedule.

The video released by the police/store owner Poltu Roy shows the victim Ajit walking outside to close and lock the security gate on the front door when his attention is drawn away from the building. He freezes in place as the armed robber approaches with his gun raised and forces himself inside.

Ajit was first struck in the face with the gun and after he falls, the gunman shoots him seven times at the door. All the shots were in the upper torso of the body. After that, the murderer is seen scavenging the cash registers, stopping, turning around, and shooting Panday again. After taking money and merchandise, the killer/robber takes to his heels and vanishes into the darkness.

In the South Asian community, there is fear that many more of such incidents of gruesome murders can happen if no Indian governmental action is initiated soon. The community believes that though Ajit is the first casualty that has come to light, there might be many more unknown cases of harassment and other kinds of inhuman treatments meted out to Vedic Pandits somewhere in the US.

While time is ripe for some urgent action by powers that be, it is also strange that despite the Hi India’s expose of the shady happenings in its January 2014 issue, no community leader or community organization has come forward to inquire or show their support to locate and take appropriate action to help Vedic Pandits.

Probably it is not one of those photo opportunities with some political leaders or bigwigs of the Indian government which they can proudly hang in their living rooms and brag about to friends and families. Well, the pathetic conditions of Vedic Pandits do not fit into one of those ‘Who’s Who’ or big names, but there is no doubt that humanity demands that all those attention-seekers come forward and initiate some action.

We can go to prayer places, build big prayer places and get our names engraved on brass plates at the entrance as big donors but let us not forget that ‘Service to mankind is service to God,’ and that being humane is important than self-aggrandizement.

Now is the high time for community to wake up and come forward to support the bereaved family of slain Ajit Panday, whose body was still in mortuary after six days of murder, in want of funds to send his mortal remains to India. Hi India took the initiative and tried reaching to the people concerned with shipping of the last remains of the murdered Ajit Panday to India but everyone of them avoided the direct question and pushed the blame on family in India to send the permission.

The family, which is still in shock after the loss of their eldest child and its only earning member, could not talk properly on phone. Gaur Chand, operator of the convenience store, flatly refused to do anything with it and dis-connected the phone and did not respond to several calls made later on. Poltu Roy, owner of the business and the building, pushed the liability on family to send a clearance. Ajay Prakash Shrivastava, nephew of Mahesh Yogi and head of global operations of the sponsoring University, also passed the buck to the family and said that he could not trace the family though all the information is available in office records.

This story originally appeared on Hi India Live.

http://us.india.com/illinois/missing-pandit-was-brutally-killed-137524/

Only 5 Per Cent Pandits Missing: Maharishi Vedic University

Lalit K Jha
PTI
January 28, 2014

The Iowa-based institutions of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi have said about only five per cent of the 2,600 Vedic pandits, who were brought to the US from north Indian villages, have gone missing in recent years.          

"Each of these cases the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been informed about Vedic pandits leaving their United States Citizenship and Immigration Services and State Department approved programme at its Iowa campus," said William Goldstein, Dean of Global Development and General Counsel to the Maharishi University of Management.      

"Only a small number of the over 2,600 pandits, about five per cent, who have come on this unprecedented Vedic programme to the US have gone AWOL (absent without leave)," Goldstein told PTI in an email.

"For the first four years of this programme, it was a very small number. In recent months this number has been unfortunately increasing," he said.        

He alleged that they appear to have been induced by individuals providing false and bad information of high earnings, or by unscrupulous employers taking advantage of them.

He also denied allegations of mistreatment of the priests, including giving them low wages.  

In an investigative report, Chicago-based ethnic weekly newspaper Hi India alleged that 163 Vedic pandits brought to the US lived in pathetic conditions and were paid less than 75 cents an hour.      

Danielle Rossingh 

BBC News Online business reporter

February 5, 2003

A new "currency" issued by a group founded by Beatles guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi may be used and has not violated Dutch law, the Dutch central bank has said.

The Global Country of World Peace, set up by the Indian mystic, issued the brightly coloured notes of one, five and 10 "raam" last October.

Since then, more than 100 Dutch shops, some of them part of big department store chains, in 30 villages and cities have accepted the notes.

A spokesman for the Dutch Central Bank told BBC News Online the bank was keeping a close eye on the raam, although he added that the Maharishi movement had done everything according to the law.

"The raam can be used as long as the notes are not used as legal tender and it stays within a closed-off circuit of users," he said.

Over 150 pandits go missing from US university, consul probes allegations

firstpost.comJan 28, 2014

Washington: While a media report has claimed that as many as 163 Vedic pandits, who were brought to the US from north Indian villages, have disappeared from the Maharishi Vedic City in Iowa during the past year, the institute's management has denied any wrongdoing.

In an investigative report, Chicago-based ethnic weekly newspaper Hi India alleged that the Vedic pandits brought to the US lived in pathetic conditions and were paid less than 75 cents an hour.

"They have jumped the fence for immigration purposes or for chasing their American Dream," the head of the university was quoted as saying by the newspaper.