Dear Friends Today, Sunday 4 May, is Akshaya Tritiya Day - the day of lasting achievements - an important day in the Vedic calendar. This is a highly auspicious day to start new endeavours. Accordingly, Maharishi's world wide organisation is holding ceremonies in many cities around the world today to launch new projects to establish Peace Palaces, and wherever land is already available, ground-breaking ceremonies are taking place.

The following is a press release issued in the UK to announce this initiative and a special resolve of all the Meditators, Sidhas, and Governors in the UK.

3 May 2003: As the war in Iraq draws to an end, British members of the Global Country of World Peace are this weekend inaugurating new initiatives to prevent the United Kingdom from ever again being the instigator of war. They will achieve this goal not by talk of peace or prayers for peace, but by implementing programmes to create a coherent and integrated national consciousness - the basis of balanced government and a peaceful nation.

The Global Country of World Peace was founded by His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in October 2000 - as a nation without borders, to provide a global home for peace-loving people everywhere. Its administration is based, not on a man-made constitution, but on Natural Law, the Constitution of the Universe, the vast organising intelligence that manages the entire creation.

Central to their plan for Britain is to build Peace Palaces in 51 cities in the UK. This is part of an international initiative by the Global Country of World Peace to establish these buildings in the 3,000 largest cities in the world.

Ground-breaking for the first two Peace Palaces in Britain will take place on Sunday, 4 May 2003, in Skelmersdale, Lancashire, where there is a already a community of 300 experts in Maharishi's peace programmes, and also in Aberdeen.

The Peace Palaces will offer the knowledge and technologies of peace, including prevention-oriented natural health care free from side-effects, organic agriculture, a global programme to eliminate poverty, and the growth of higher states of consciousness - enlightenment - through Transcendental Meditation, whose benefits have been validated by over 600 scientific studies. The Peace Palaces will also be home to groups of Yogic Flyers, who through their daily practice will maintain peace and order in the city.

50 scientific research studies have shown that the group practice of Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation and Yogic Flying creates a powerful and indomitable influence of peace, reducing stress, conflict, and crime in the environment, and creating an integrated collective consciousness. "It is this technology that could have been applied by governments to create peace in the world," said John Collins, director of the project in Skelmersdale. "Now we will apply it ourselves within our own country to prevent future wars starting from here." Negotiation and persuasion - which are ineffective attempts to create peace - form no part of this approach.

A political leader can ignore the will of his people and that of the international community; he can ignore the advice of his own advisors and the statements of religious leaders. But he cannot escape the silent influence of the national consciousness - an unseen but all-pervading influence, like the sap in a tree.

Just as the German people in 1945 resolved to disallow their country to wage war on foreign soil again, so now the citizens of the Global Country of World Peace in Britain are making a similar resolution. But their approach in this case is to create so coherent, harmonious, and peaceful a national consciousness that never again will the country produce a Prime Minister who prefers the path of war to that of peace.

Maharishi's organisation in Britain will also work to maximise its contributions to an international World Peace Fund which has been established with a target of one billion dollars. This would permanently fund a group of 40,000 Vedic experts in India who would create this peaceful effect on a global scale, thereby reducing the political, economic and religious tensions that lie at the basis of today's challenges to world peace and stability. So far, about one tenth of this $1bn has been raised, from donors all over the world, including Britain, and Maharishi is proceeding to train and set up the first groups in India, totalling 16,000 peace-creating experts.

"We consider it vital that Britain makes an even bigger financial contribution to world peace than it is doing at present," Mr Collins said. "This will also go some way towards offsetting the destructive influence of the country's arms exports which give Britain a vested interest in promoting conflict in the world."

Plans also include expanding the national coherence-creating group in Skelmersdale, currently 300 strong. Three years ago, this community, called the Maharishi European Sidhaland, won a prestigious Best Practice award from the British Urban Regeneration Association (BURA), in recognition of its 20-year success in improving the quality of life in the area through "a different and unconventional joined-up approach which addresses education, health, housing, employment and crime in a positive and unusual way."

This Sunday, plans are being launched by the group in Skelmersdale to build upon the achievements so far and to expand to 800 - the figure needed to create a dramatic rise in coherence and positivity in the collective consciousness of the whole country.