Maharishi University of Management
MUM HAWAII
Another World is Possible ● Imagine. Create. Advocate.
MUM Hawaii Overview
Welcome to MUM Hawaii
Maharishi University of Management
College of Sustainable Living
“The real journey is not going to other landscapes, but to have other eyes.”
-Marcel Proust
Explore a New Way of Living
MUM-Hawaii's Laboratory for Deep Sustainability and Transformative Leadership is based at the Kohala Institute on Big Island, Hawaii. Our robust learning community consists of people concerned with the relationships between self, culture, social systems, and nature. Together, we uncover our unique places in an evolving world.
Our learning community offers two programs:
(a) the 4-month Hawaii Semester and
(b) the 8-week Emerging Leaders in Sustainability Certificate.
The Hawaii Semester program includes four courses delivered in Hawaii:
(1) Consciousness, Sustainability, and the 21st Century,
(2) Hawaiian Studies, World Wisdom, and Deep Sustainability,
(3) Sustainable Living: Practical Solutions for Individual and Community Sustainability, and
(4) Integrative Capstone Project.
Semester-long students can also earn the Emerging Leaders in Sustainability Certificate.
The stand-alone certificate is delivered through distance education, combined with a field experience in Hawaii.
Mauo, the Hawaiian word for sustainability meaning perpetual well-being, is the lens through which we view education for sustainability and leadership. Through this lens, we educate for the perpetual well-being of personal, cultural, social, and planetary life. Key themes, including consciousness, community, sustainability, and leadership, cultivate an awareness of the leading-edge cultural worldview necessary for flourishing in the 21st century and beyond.
Student, Danny, watches the sunset from 9,500 ft on Mauna Loa
Going Deeper, Seeing Further
The MUM Hawaii Semester is an intensive exploration of the intellectual idea that there is an underlying unity to the surface diversity of the universe and the direct experience of this unity through meditation and immersion in nature.
Countering modernity’s nihilism is a thread of intellectual thought and practical experience rooted in holism. It includes ancient ideas and includes discoveries in systems thinking, physics, and biology. It has spawned new disciplines like ecology, Gaia theory, sustainability, holistic medicine, holistic science, sustainable economics, localism, and permaculture/ecological design pioneered at cutting edge institutions like Gaia University, Schumacher College and Maharishi University of Management. It has spawned movements working on issues of inequity and discrimination in gender, race, class, gender, and sexuality. We’re not looking to go back. We’re looking at inspiration from the past and new ideas from science and the humanities to guide our application of technology and science, to create something new..
Deep Sustainability is a new way of being and doing which sees the universe as connected, full of sentience, intelligence, and consciousness. We’ll explore the practical application of this connectedness in all fields of human endeavor including the redesign of the infrastructure, institutions, and technologies of modernity. Energy, buildings, city design, water systems, economics, education, agriculture and food, work . How are they connected, how can they be informed by indigenous wisdom and a holistic rethinking of modern science? What does holism have to say about human relationships, ethics and a sense of purpose and meaning?
We’ll work together to learn about leadership and group dynamics to better be able to organize and integrate these ideas into your work going forward.
Live
What You Learn
In this program, we explore a postmodern sustainable world. Another world is possible - how can we imagine, create, and advocate for it?
We look at how we design, build, and maintain the technologies, infrastructure and institutions that support society.
Jerry Koninui explains the vital role of taro in ancient Hawaiian culture.
An Integrated Approach
For 300 years, a reductionist approach to the natural world and the place of humans in it has been dominant. Neoclassical economics is the dominant intellectual theory and organizing principle of modernity. The industrial revolution was founded on a mechanistic world view which sees the world as a storehouse of resources for humans. People and communities are seen as sources of labor and as consumers. These ideas were useful in their time, when people were few, technology and access to energy was limited, and human society didn’t have the ability to meet the material requisites of a good life. Wealthy countries have had unprecedented increases in access to a diversity of food, water, energy, housing, clothing.
But modernity has consequences. In many cases, people living in industrialized countries lack rich social connections and a sense of purpose beyond their role as consumers. The industrial economy creates pollution, global warming, inequity, and entropy. We’ve changed unity into uniformity and diversity into division. We’re using up nature and people for the mindless pursuit of profits. Soon it may be too late for us to fix the damage to our people, to ourselves.
Student, Amber, reflects after a long hike into Pololu Valley.
Why Hawaii?
Hawaii is an excellent place to explore both ancient and modern ideas about sustainability. It’s got a displaced native population that continues to fight against colonization. Hawaiians have created a renaissance in ancient cultural values of wholeness, interrelatedness, and sustainability. Hawaiian music and craft, traditional Hawaiian spiritual practices, traditional systems of health care, conflict resolution, aquaculture and agricultural systems, traditional systems of land management, and technologies like wayfaring - we’ll explore how Hawaiians are reinventing these and more to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
The Hawaiian Islands are the most geographically remote inhabited place on the planet. All the issues related to sustainability like soil fertility, energy, building materials, transportation, urban planning, employment, water are a day to day reality here.
There are great disparities in wealth and access to satisfying employment and housing, so issues of inequity and right livelihood are also in the fore in Hawaii.
Hawaii has a diversity of ecological zones, from 15,000-foot-high peaks, deserts, and rainforests, all within just a few short miles. It has a long history of dealing with invasive species. It is one of the few places in the world you can get up close to an active volcano. Hawaii is a unique place to explore the biological and geological systems of our living planet up close.
