I was relieved to learn Des Moines might be getting its own Peace Palace. Not that I spent much time in similar buildings in Fairfield – er, Maharishi Vedic City – nor that anyone outside the Transcendental Meditation movement hung out there much, but it’s still nice to know there could be one close by if I need to go grab some peace.

I lived in Fairfield for five years and know that a lot of people fly – OK, it’s more of a hop in a yoga position – in the Golden Domes, which rise from the Maharishi University of Management campus like two humongous gilded breasts. But I’m a little unclear on what exactly goes on in a Peace Palace, except that building 3,000 of them across the country is a scheme cooked up by the cabinet of “their excellencies” overseeing the Global Country of World Peace, which isn’t a geopolitical entity, but a state of mind.

I know, it’s my job as a journalist to tell you whether you should invest $3 million in a Peace Palace, but frankly, the whole subject hurts my brain and I don’t want to tempt fate, as I moved away from Fairfield to keep it from exploding. So I’ll make an educated guess that whatever the agenda is, it involves mysterious, secret-handshake kind of stuff, which a some people view as highly suspicious and others see as utterly ridiculous.

Meditation’s good, and because it’s an effective relaxation technique that clears away the mental clutter inhibiting success, the TM movement is able to peddle an entire lifestyle, some aspects of which are so far on the other side of bizarre that they’re in another galaxy. No doubt, meditation with a lower-case “m” is an effective way to control blood pressure without drugs. But ask me to believe entering a building from the south will suck me into a black hole of negativity or that daily “elimination therapy” – a hot-oil enema called a basti – will keep me on the path to enlightenment, and three words come to mind: tofu for brains.

Even Californians think the whole basti business is peculiar. A reporter from the San Jose Mercury News camped in my yard when RAGBRAI rolled through Fairfield a few years ago and he found it unsettling that he could treat himself to an enema in dozens of places, but only Wal-Mart carried the socks he needed.

For weirdness magnets, Fairfield is a fantasyland. In what other Iowa town would a town meeting be held to pass along the important information that if you’re not sleeping with the top of your head pointing east, according to the architectural principles of Maharishi Sthapatya Veda, your brain is rotting? Or that living in a building designed in accordance with those principles promotes success in business and relationships, robust health, affluence and a perpetual state of bliss? Indeed, where else in Iowa can people not only learn to spell and pronounce Sthapatya Veda (stuh-POT-yuh VAY-duh), but also work it into their daily speech?

One thing is a sure bet. You’ll enter the Peace Palace from the east for the full benefits of enlightenment, affluence and fulfillment. There will be a Brahma-Sthan, a central court or atrium in the house where “the totality of Natural Law nourishes and upholds the entire structure, connecting individual life with cosmic life, individual intelligence with cosmic intelligence,” according to the Sthapatya Veda Web site. And on its roof will be a kalash, an ornamentation that looks like a giant Hershey’s Kiss in gold foil. I don’t know if bastis will be offered at the Des Moines Peace Palace, if it indeed gets built, but for $3 million, you’d expect that well-known feeling of relief.