Integral education is poised to become a unifying principle for global higher education that is suffering from fragmentation and disconnection from the essence of being human. Integral education does everything that conventional education does, and also categorically more by integrating multiple domains of learning and growth. Integral education can identify its roots with Integral Yoga and the integral philosophy developed contemporaneously by Sivananda and Aurobindo as a grand synthesis of all psychospiritual practices and theories, both Eastern and Western. These common roots can be traced in a direct line to two institutions founded specifically for integral education in the U.S.: the California Institute of Integral Studies (ciis) founded by Haridas Chaudhuri and also to the California Institute for Human Science (cihs) founded by Hiroshi Motoyama. Although the founders independently developed their philosophies of integral education, they identified their roots in the Aurobindo-Sivananda Integral Yoga synthesis. Motoyama was a realized yogi as well as an educator and scientist. The educational and operational principles by which he founded cihs included the practice of methods for embodied psychospiritual growth. (All such methods are called “yogas” in the Vedanta tradition.) Although Motoyama developed his philosophy independently, his yoga roots mesh with those of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga which is commonly thought of as the origin of integral education in the West. Moreover, Motoyama approved of Aurobindo's educational approach (Timothy Laporte, private communication).
