Scientists

Scientists

If I may speak to the scientists among my readers, as you might have guessed by now, as a data-point of theoretical reference, transcendental method is nothing less than completely personal and completely intimate and, if you understand it fully, you must understand this as so. At the very least, the personal—even intimate--aspects of the present work should explain to you why I have used first-person in my writing of many of the passages here.

However, TM is not only personal. Rather, like any theory, TM is developed first as speculative and experimental, where terms and relations are worked out in well-defined technical-theoretical concepts. Verification procedures are then offered here for any scientist to take up so that, like any theory, this speculative theory can become verified theory. In this way, TM is a product of the most critical and discerning aspects of scientific method--generalized from, and then applied back to, the data—in this case, of human consciousness.

Further, TM’s other name is general empirical method where empirical method's data, again, is generalized to include the discernible universal aspects of human consciousness as its data of concern and, in this case, of the scientist’s interest. Again, the scientist can turn the speculative theory into a verified theory by going through the verification process. Your discovery and verification of TM in you, then, which is the central guiding purpose of this book, is thoroughly and completely dependent on the critical application of scientific method to the data under review—the human mind and, as inference, your human mind. TM (or GEM), then, is a speculative theory that calls for verification in order to become a critical theory.

Furthermore, let us speak for a moment to the larger historical projects of learning, of the sciences, and of culture. That is, the critical self-discovery of TM that is self-appropriation-affirmation also has within it a remarkable moment that holds the potential to lay bare what is common to all in critical-theoretical fashion, or what Lonergan refers to as the trans-cultural base (1972). However, if this is so, then we hold within our range the potential to heal and unify the heretofore broken relationship between the now-disparate fields of formal and informal inquiry, on the one hand, and the completely subjective and personal domains, on the other—not to collapse these fields of discourse, but to show how they are related and unified. For self-appropriation adheres to both a completely critical-objective moment and a completely personal-intimate moment of human understanding and of coming to know in a most critical fashion. TM uses common and scientific procedures to refine a working theory of knowledge, and then sticks to that theory, or applies it, to come to know our own conscious order.

Transcendental method--not as a theory, but as your experience of the quest already in operation in you--continues to radiate from within you. As such, TM is the fully fueled engine at the center of all of your inquiry, including your self-inquiry, and including your casual awareness of your present surroundings, and your interest as you read these words right now. Through TM-the-theory, then, you can also come to know your own knowing processes in a critical way, or know TM-the-operating-reality in you, whatever you want to name it.

Here we move beyond mere “intuition” or the hints of resonance to a full awareness-of and conscious identification-with the most intimate workings of our own hearts, minds, and spirits. If so, and because all discovery, science, education, and culture begin in the passion of that inquiry, then TM is also the empirical base of all science and education, both formal and informal, in all institutions, and in all cultures.