“The plan,” says John Buckley of the Maharishi Enlightment Center of Buffalo, “is to build centers, palaces, in all the major population centers around the world and offer the programs for enlightenment that Maharishi teaches. Basically as you meditate individually—your brain becomes more coherent and your actions become more in tune with nature and natural things in a more life-supporting way.”

Buckley and former Buffalo Philharmonic piccolo player Larry Trott are seated in the dining room of a beautiful West Ferry mansion, temporary home to the Maharishi Enlightment Center of Buffalo, which offers community to practicers of the Maharishi’s transcendental meditation (TM) techniques and introductory sessions every other Tuesday evening for the curious-minded.

Temporary because a larger project is afoot: Buffalo—or rather a 6.5-acre plot of land on Transit Road—has been designated a site for one of 3,000 Peace Palaces, a network of centers that the Maharishi hopes to realize in coming years. These centers, it is imagined, will provide a full suite of facilities and services to both veteran and fledgling meditators, ranging from Ayurvedic treatments to training in advanced techniques—most importantly yogic flying, or levitation, the effects of which, when practiced in groups, devotees of the Maharishi’s teaching say, “spreads throughout the environment, reducing negative tendencies and promoting positive, harmonious trends throughout society.”

Meditation, they say, has a net positive effect on humanity’s condition. The idea, in effect, is to bring harmony to our region and—with 3,000 Peace Palaces planned around the globe—throughout the world by increasing the number of people who practice TM.

“There have been studies that show that if one percent or more of a city is practicing TM, balanced against other cities with similar populations and demographics, that they found that tremendous changes, various statistically significant changes,” Buckley says. “Productivity went up, crime rate went down and all the different criteria and good stimuli improved. So the idea is to get more people to practice in these meditation programs and to raise consciousness and to alleviate the crime and the rest of the things that bring productivity down.”

Both Trott and Buckley have been adherents of the Maharishi’s teaching since the 1970s, the heyday of the Indian holy man’s influence in the US. Most famous for his tutelage of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the Maharishi first brought his teaching to the West in the late 1950s. Currently the global network which he guides runs numerous learning and research institutions around the world, including a university in Iowa, and claims to have instructed more than five million students in TM techniques. That’s not one percent of the world’s population, of course, but it’s a lot. And Trott says that peer-reviewed studies have shown that if 1/10th of one percent of the world population were to practice Sidhi-TM, the advanced techniques that include yogic flying, that would be enough to significantly reduce the disharmony in the world.

“The Maharishi’s purpose has always been the same, essentially—to help people be all that they can be, to bring peace to the world, to save us from ourselves,” Trott says. “Therefore there is this huge thrust now to do this and to make groups as large as possible, groups with the advanced techniques.

“For us the fabulous thing is that years and years ago there was a center in Buffalo and there hasn’t been a center in 25 years,” he adds. “And so for us this is so exciting that Buffalo is on this list of places to host a Peace Center.”

The building on Transit Road will be paid for by the national organization, which has commissioned a common design for all the centers, using all natural materials and aligned to Indian astrological principles, as dictated by Stapatyaveda, the Indian science of design. It will be about 12,000 square feet.

Buckley acknowledges that TM and the Maharishi have lost ground in the public consciousness in the US since the early 1970s. Back then, the Buffalo area enlightment center had a list with 5,000 names on it. Many of those, he concede, were transient—students, mostly. The new center, which he and Trott started in January, has no more than a dozen active members right now. But he reckons that many meditators practice in private, disengaged from the community. A new TM center, he hopes, will bring those veteran meditators back into the fold, as well as recruit new students.

And he thinks the evidence—the popularity of yoga, of Ayurvedic medicine and massage, of organic food and even of Vedic principles of design—suggests that the time is right for a resurgence in the Maharishi’s popularity.

“Certainly more people know they ought to be better to themselves then in the 1950s or 1960s,” Buckley says. “And organic food is a burgeoning market now—the fact that the government is trying to tamper with it shows that there is big money there. That’s a huge indicator right there.”

Buckley and Trott are awaiting the final plans for the Transit Road Peace Palace, but construction is expected to begin this year. They are content, in the meantime with their digs, at 665 West Ferry.

“We hope we can keep this building, too,” Trott says. “We need enlightment right here in the city as well.”