John Hagelin poses the questions, "What is consciousness?  Where does it come from?" He answers that with the discovery of the Unified Field, the Super String Field, "we now understand that life is fundamentally one. At the basis of all life's diversity there is unity, and that unity, the basis of mind and matter is consciousness."

If all aspects of the universe are manifestations of the same essential constituent - whether it be called consciousness, Being, the Super-String Field, or something else - we might expect that there are fundamental patterns, or tendencies, that can be observed at all levels of the universe. These tendencies occur in the interactions and transformations of molecules, of cells, of people, or communities, and perhaps of celestial bodies. Appreciating these tendencies and their pervasiveness may be an advantage for learning and understanding phenomena across different fields, since we will already be familiar with the modes of behavior.

What are examples of such recurrent, or pervasive tendencies?  Here are some possibilities:

• Processes require resources, such as energy, inputs, and disposal of output.
• Many processes involve oscillation/pulsation/cycling, on various scales of time and space, as a consequence of physical laws of motion (rotation, revolution) and their implications for dark-light, rest-activity, inspiration-expiration, etc.
• Competition and cooperation occur at every level.  Molecules, cells, organisms, corporations, institutions, nations, ideas, desires - all compete and cooperate.
• Related to competition and cooperation are trust and deception. Both are strongly tied (e.g., deception requires trust, trust requires protection against deception.)
• Change and evolution are ongoing and intertwined. Evolution changes the environment thereby prompting further evolution.
• Evolution and change breed diversity and complexity. No one solution will work or be optimal in all situations.
• Whether we are talking about an appliance, a building, an institution, an organism, or a good reputation, construction is more complex than destruction.
• There are dynamic balances between opposing principles, such as diversity vs. uniformity, distributed vs. centralized, 
• Advantages often accrue from cooperation, interdependencies, and greater size, so that aggregations (a form of cooperation) are more able to compete successfully and are more robust to environmental fluctuations. But interdependencies create vulnerability as well, and when larger assemblages fail there are greater impacts ("to big to fail"). So there are tendencies for smaller units to combine (mergers, buyouts), but then when a failure occurs it may be harder to contain.
• Concepts of economics - e.g., consumption, investment, maintenance, inventory - occur in innumerable contexts.

The concept that fundamental knowledge underlies all of the branches of learning was described in the Science of Creative Intelligence (SCI), which Maharishi Mahesh Yogi began to develop in 1971. As explained on the Maharishi University of Management (MUM) website (http://www.mum.edu/home/about/history), "Maharishi envisioned SCI as a supplementary course that could be taught at universities around the world. It would make all fields of knowledge meaningful, revealing the laws of nature at the basis of math, art, biology, and every other area of study. After studying SCI, a student would easily be able to connect any subject to his or her own Self."  Maharishi International University, as MUM was originally known, was founded on those concepts, and in the first year of the undergraduate program each discipline was presented in relation to SCI. SCI "directly addresses the integrative goal of interdisciplinary study by describing universal principles of creative intelligence that can be found in all academic disciplines" (https://www.mum.edu/pdf_msvs/v07/interdiscipline.pdf).  In this way SCI makes all knowledge more fulfilling.