After graduation I started at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana and became deeply absorbed in knowledge and studies. In the second semester, new values led me to begin seeking more fundamental knowledge and wondering about conventional knowledge and values, and I began reading about spirituality and changed my lifestyle and life opened up.

My sophomore year was pretty experimental. At its end, I was accepted to a Junior Year Abroad Program in Varanasi (Banaras) India. I had worked on a farm in Norway the summer after freshman year and hitchhiked and trained around Europe, Alps, to Rome and Venice and had a taste of the excitement and exhilaration of different values and the charm of other cultures, and the expansion and development which comes from exposure to new and different perspectives and orientations.

So I selected one of the most non-Western cities in the world (Varanasi) to go to. Junior Year in India has to a great extent defined my life. To a great extent, I started all over. But before I went, I met up with a man at DePauw who made a strong impression on me which has defined my life even more. He was a visiting teacher of Transcendental Meditation. After 1-2 minutes, I saw this man had something that none of my professors or anyone else I had ever met had. Some kind of silence and knowledge, knowingness, and the power that comes from it, and he was friendly and natural. I knew right away that I was going to give this a try and learned it in Madison, WI during my orientation for my year in India. It was easy and the theory impressed me more than the approach of any other meditations and spiritual I had come across. I knew that there was something very fundamental that all religions and philosophies had in common and this seemed the most effective and practical and charming way to get it. No faith was required and started without thinking much about it. (http://tm.org)

This technique later saved my father's life after he became judge and I feel the same way about it now as I did then, having been very thoroughly exposed to countless forms of spirituality and relaxation techniques since then, my life has centered around spiritual matters and their application to helping people and society solve problems and make progress. He and my mom (who is still living in Country Club Retirement Center) meditated most of their life since 1974 when I taught them, and he promoted it widely and made a videotape and wrote a letter on his court letterhead which both traveled around the world and have been seen and read by millions of people.

Passing over the 38 years since then, my wife of four years Mary Cathryn (from Texas) and I are living in a very exciting model community of Fairfield, Iowa, in SE Iowa, where I've lived most of the time since 1979. 40% of the start-up investment capital in the state of Iowa comes to this town of 10,000, mainly because of the 600 mostly small businesses started by Meditators here, and green projects and arts projects are everywhere.
Obama came here twice during his campaign and said this town is the model for the New America. Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment (http://maharishischooliowa.org), elementary and high school, has averaged one state championship per month since 1987, and this is a very different and special town. About a third of the citizens practice Transcendental Meditation, although in greatly varying degress of involvement.  

Although new Meditators only spend about 20 minutes twice a day in meditation, my wife and I are paid $800 per month each to spend 7 1/2 hours every day in deep meditation and associated practices. A wealthy couple is donating $1 million per month in perpetuity to 1400 Meditators here to form a group of 2,000, because 50 of the 600 published studies on these programs show dramatic reductions in crime, accidents, hospitalizations, health care expenditure, drug abuse, and many other problems when a tiny percent of a population practices advanced techniques of this meditation. DJIA has been closely statistically correlated with the attendance in these group programs and these and many other studies have been published in Wall St. Journal, Barron's, NY Times, Washington Post, and virtually all the other main public and scientific publications in the U.S. over the past several decades.

Paul McCartney's and Ringo Starr's recent concert at Radio City Music Hall this past April to raise millions of dollars to fund school programs to teach Transcendental Meditation created massive global publicity and more concerts like this are planned (Michael Jackson was a long-time Meditator and had 8 Advanced Meditators on his staff). High schools turn around from desperation to ease and fulfillment in a few weeks when the admin, faculty, and students learn this and their consciousness grows and their stress gets released from a level far deeper than sleep, and the winner of the Best H.S. Principal of the Year in the US award last year credited his introduction of Transcendental Meditation into his school as one of the main reasons he and his school have achieved what they have.

In addition to being selected as one of the 12 most significant Green Cities in the U.S in at least three national surveys, Fairfield is home to Maharishi University of Management (http://mum.edu), which offers Unified Field-based knowledge integrated with traditional disciplines. Its organic vegetarian program was the first in the country and has received widespread attention regionally and nationally, and two 1-acre greenhouses grow a lot of its own food, and the company which manages the food service has just decided to shift entirely into organic and roll it out across the country in many other institutions.

I've also gotten involved in many auxiliary sciences from the same 'Vedic' tradition, including the oldest and largest system of natural medicine and prevention of aging and disease, called Ayurveda. The focus is on adjusting one's dialy routine and diet so that stress and impurities do not accumulate in the body, because they are the cause of about 85% of health problems (a study published in American Journal of Cardiology in May 05 showed Meditators lived 23% longer than matched controls, and another study showed 48% reduction in health care expenditure in a Blue Cross Blue Shield study of thousands of people in Canada. Fairfield is also the home to one of the most awarded and reputable natural health destination spas in the U.S. called The Raj (http://theraj.com), which offers Ayurvedic programs to release stress and increase health and longevity which have been shown to be far, far more powerful than conventional medicine offers, and a lot more pleasant. We go there sometimes for birthday parties.

Despite a lot of sociological and economic purification taking place now, many long term statistical trends suggest the dawning of a new time for mankind taking place now, in which new principles, which are eternal and scientific principles, are replacing the partial and untrue principles that have been guiding life and society the past few thousand years. Physics has discovered the Unified Field, one unbounded, unmanifest field of which everything is made, and we are saying that this one field is another perspective on what most or all of the main traditions of spirituality and philosophy in the world have been holding as most fundamental. There's room for different perspectives, and the Unity that is the true nature of oneself and what every truth and natural practice have in common.

Mary Cathryn and I drove to Bula every month for over a year to see my mom and are taking a break now, partly to save money and because of a lot of responsibility here in the activity here to create world peace and national invincibility. Our phone is 641 469 2002. There's an office of our organization, called the Global Country of World Peace, in Cleveland (216 464 7300).

Thank you for reading and having some attention on this, and Best Wishes to you and yours and Ashtabula, the part of cosmic reality that we have all called home,

- Einar