Peace Palaces Break Out In Iowa

File under: Gurus Bringing The New Age™

It's begun. The Global Country of World Peace is coming to a mall near you.

Formerly known as the Age of Enlightenment, the GCWP is the Maharishi's attempt to engender a massive expansion of influence by opening "Peace Palaces" in Iowa and then "every state."

The peace palaces, planned as $3 million [dollar] projects, will include space for learning and practicing Transcendental Meditation, a day spa, classroom space and retail outlets for herbal products.

And just in time, too! With murders happening in the dining halls of their own university—where all that TM™ is being practiced—you know there's an urgent need for Peace Palaces.

When we were in college, folks from Fairfield came out to promote Age of Enlightenment centers. They revealed that at the dawn of the New Age™ a new government will take root, led by the Maharishi and administered through his centers. They were quite adamant about the future legitimacy of their "government." We told them we thought the idea was crazy but thanked them for the ride anyway.

We believe they were a bit too aggressive and got the conspiracy theorists whispering. So The Age of Enlightenment got rebranded as the Global County of World Peace. Same old delusions of grandeur in an ever so slightly more palatable presentation:

Worldwide, 3,000 peace palaces are to be constructed. In the United States, they already exist in Bethesda, Md.; Lexington, Ky.; and Houston, as part of a plan outlined in 2003 by Maharishi, the Indian spiritual leader who introduced the West to Transcendental Meditation.

The goal is to "crown humanity with its rightful destiny - to live in permanent peace and radiate Total Natural Law - the light of God - on Earth, thereby ending the age-old legacy of problems and suffering," TM leaders have said.

We don't know what they're smoking over in Fairfield, but we want to get us some. It's got to be radically psychotropic shit to have them talking to the press like that.

But it's just another pseudo-Utopian scheme by another grandiose guru out to smear himself all over the world by opening more centers than the next guru. There are enough of those around for the next seventeen New Ages™. We're thinking there may be a major turf war brewing between all these world-beating gurus. Despite the Peace Palaces or because of them, we predict some eyeball lightning striking before this all gets worked out.

We can't see the Maharishi worrying about that right now. We imagine him languidly lazing about with various flavors of faux-groupies and simulated supergroups in his super 60s vedic love pod deep beneath the MUM auditorium. He's got minions to work the world domination schemes now. It's time to slow down and relive former glories as he waits (and waits) for new ones to unfold.