Consciousness-Based Education - Maharishi University of ...

introduction to the seriesis not compartmentalized—an elephant is not a trunk, a tusk, and atail. Academic disciplines, consequently, are criticized as inadequate,in themselves, for understanding and addressing today’s challengingsocial problems.Today, more than ever, we need a means of looking at issues comprehensively,holistically. We need a way of discovering and understandingthe natural relationships among all the complex elements that composethe world, even among the complex elements that compose our owndisciplines.Various attempts to address this need have been made under therubric of interdisciplinary studies—programs or processes that aim tosynthesize the perspectives and promote connections among multipledisciplines. Some of these efforts have been criticized as superficialjoinings of disciplinary knowledge. But the chief criticism of interdisciplinarystudies—leveled even by its proponents—is that lookingat an issue from multiple perspectives does not, in itself, enable oneto find the common ground among contrasting viewpoints, to resolveconflicts, and to arrive at a coherent understanding.The diverse academic disciplines can be properly unified at onlyone level—at their source. All academic disciplines are expressions ofhuman consciousness—and if the fundamental principles of consciousnesscan be identified and understood, then one would gain a grasp ofall human knowledge in a single stroke.This brings us to the theoretical component of Consciousness-Basededucation. Consciousness-Based education does precisely this—andnot as an abstract, theoretical construct but as the result of students’direct experience of their own silent, pure consciousness. In this sense,practice of the Transcendental Meditation technique forms the laboratorycomponent of Consciousness-Based education, where the theoreticalpredictions of Consciousness-Based education can be verifiedthrough direct personal experience.This theoretical component offers a rich and deep yet easy-to-graspintellectual understanding of consciousness—its nature and range, howit may be cultivated, its potentials when fully developed. This theoreticalcomponent also identifies how the fundamental dynamics ofconsciousness are found at work in every physical system and in everyacademic discipline at every level.5