Deconstruction and Maharishi Vedic Science

Literary theorists today tend to locate the source of the meaning of liter­ ature in its structure or context (the known) rather than in the author or reader (the knower). Maharishi Vedic Science, on the other hand, locates an absolute value of meaning in the integration of the knower, known, and process of knowing and provides a means of experiencing this value in tran­ scendental consciousness. Post-structuralists, among other theorists today, replace transcendental consciousness with the notion of cultural and other differences. On the basis of difference, they attempt to undermine the pos­ sibility of absolute meaning or universal truth. Since introducing his theory of deconstruction in the 1960s, Jacques Derrida has challenged the traditional ideas of absolute meaning and a unified knower through his influential "play of differance." In practice, however, deconstruction leads toward an experience of unbounded abstraction sugges­ tive of the very transcendental consciousness it rejects in theory. Maharishi's descriptions of the levels of language and their relationship to higher states of consciousness resolves this and other contradictions between deconstructive theory and practice. Moreover, the experience of pure, transcendental con­ sciousness provided by the practical aspect of Maharishi Vedic Science con­ stitutes the three-in-one collectedness of knower, known, and process of knowing sought by literary theory in general and inadvertently approximat­ ed through deconstructive analysis.