User:David Saunders

Hi, I'm David Saunders.

I have been using WikiPedia for a long time, and love it, and love to show it to people. Now I'm just starting to dip my feet the tiniest bit into editing and adding, as a way to experience working in an open collaborateive environment.

All I've done so far is add a tiny bit to the Discussion page on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi citing some of the scientific research on Transcendental Meditation and the Maharishi Effect that I'm aware of, and indeed took part in.

I was born in the UK in 1947 -- I note other people make wonderful tables of personal information but I'm not up to that yet. I am a businessman more than an academic, but I kind fo broke out of that when I trained as a teacher of TM in 1975. My first ever website was a little TM tribute piece, now stored at http://www.ceu.org.uk/dns/TMCafe

That's enough for now. I just wanted there to be more than a blank against my name. You can write me at david@dns.org.uk. No user talk page just yet.

Interests
My interests include personal development, computing, innovation, walking, swimming, community and the environment.

I've though a lot about Sustainable Community (hmm, better write something about it). And come to the conclusion that a new kind of Environmental University would be a good idea. I wrote a first proposal for such a thing and placed it on a website at http://www.ceu.org.uk

I am still working on the concept, and now helping with creating an eco-village for 200 working students in East Sussex, which is a step in the right direction.

Thoughts towards an article
Lately I've realised that my own thinking is supersetted and improved on by Maharishi's plans for Global Reconstruction announced at his TM Movement's 50th anniversary celebrations at Gurupurnima, Full moon, July 21-25 2005, held in Vlodrop, Netherlands.

This plan involves inviting architects, developers and builders to create new housing settlements Peace colonies and workspaces using the Indian Vedic architecture system of Stapathya Veda or Vastu. Profits from these commercial developments are to be split three ways, one third for the developer, one third for building public facilities in their countries -- to include universities, colleges, schools, hospitals, health spas, and Peace Palaces, and another third to create housing, workspaces, public facilities and Vedic organic farms in poorer countries.

This is a sort of privately funded Marshall Plan to redevelop the world, and it is as hopelessly ambitious as the idea that everyone might have a telephone, or that the world might need more than 5 computers, or that poverty can be eliminated. It rests on the vision that Vedic architecture creates housing that itself raises consciousness, creates coherence, and promotes health. According to the same principles, most present buildings and settlements are inauspicious and have life-damaging effects, and people arer advised to run from them as if there was an earthquake! And

The expectation is that once experienced, people will want to live in such housing, and so the plan will mushroom. Vastu applies not just to the architecture of housing, but also to the layout of settlements. Indeed the term Stapathya Veda means knowledge about 'establishing in space and time' -- at it's highest, Stapathya-Veda is about universal architectiutral principles, and is said to be equally applicable to the design of an atom, a cell, a galaxy or a cosmos, and everything in between.

Some builders, developers and architects are already adopting this system and are receiving favourable press coverage.

More information at http://www.globalreconstruction.org