The blueprint for this challenge comes from the widely debated writings - thought by western Sanskrit experts to date back to 2,500 B.C. or earlier - of ancient Indian Rishi, or seers, who claim to have intuitively­ ­understood the laws of physics, the science of nature, and the cosmos, among other things. In these nonscholarly texts, they concluded the human body is somehow reactive to the movements of the sun, as well as spatial orientation. Over centuries of interpretation, the original Sthapatya Veda text - one of 40 dealing with everything from music, art, and philosophy to medicine and city planning - was modified and, some say, morphed by the Chinese into the similar but even less-scientific concept of feng shui.

Twenty-five years ago, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru who introduced Transcendental Meditation to the world in the 1960s, made it his mission to put the pieces of the original Sanskrit text back together.­ In 1997, he established Maharishi Global Construction in the U.S. to create a prototypical development, Maharishi Vedic City, just outside Fairfield, Iowa, that would put this ancient architectural knowledge to the test. Today, that city is a thriving community containing more than 150 homes priced from $200,000 to $2 million, a 272-acre Maharishi University of Management (formerly Parsons College) campus, and a recently built College of Vedic Medicine, partially funded by an endowment from the National Institutes of Health, which often provides money for alternative sources of medicine. The area is also quite prosperous, with Cambridge Investment Research and other locally based firms filtering as much as $8 billion in managed funds through Fairfield County and Maharishi Vedic City within the last year. That, combined with several other statistics, prompted Wired magazine to facetiously dub the farming community "Silicorn Valley."