Does Consciousness Cause the Cosmos? | Subhash Kak

Subhash, one of the most remarkable, startling concepts that come out of Vedic philosophy, which I find many people believe today, not just people from the Indian tradition but more broadly, is that consciousness is a fundamental reality and indeed that consciousness is the cause of physical reality. That's an astonishing claim. You subscribe to it. Consciousness is the reality from which the physical universe emerges, helps us understand a lot of things. It helps us understand how our minds work or how our intuitions are obtained, but it also tells us in what sense our linguistic narratives related to our discoveries are limited because our descriptions, for them to be totally consistent, must bridge this divide between the physical and the extra physical, which is what is consciousness. And since no language can do this, since consciousness is not grounded in space and time, therefore our descriptions would always be paradoxical or limited. Now, the Vedic Rishis stated this in terms of the great statement, Mahavakya, which is, Paroksha is the Sanskrit word for what is paradoxical and Deva is like divine or divinity and what it means is that gods love what is paradoxical and they detest what is obvious, what is self-evident. So the answers could not be obvious because if they were obvious, then they would be linguistic, then they would be rational, then they could be fitted into an ideology. So the whole central focus of the Vedic system is that any description in any logical or ideological framework would be limited, but essential and necessary. Why? Because in order to make that intuitive leap within one's own process of self-understanding, we must first be grounded in some linguistic discipline, in some logical discipline. It's only when we are grounded in such a fashion that we'll have the capacity to go beyond it. At Bedrock, I know the physical reality and we are struggling to define consciousness in terms of neuroscience, that I admit, but it seems such a gigantic leap to then say, because we don't quite understand consciousness from a scientific point of view, and it is very difficult, that therefore consciousness is this big mysterious thing that pervades the universe, and indeed to go to the next big leap that it created or is responsible or is the ground of all reality. I mean, it seems like you're making at least two massive leaps of faith, not logic. Well, to say that consciousness is what created physical reality is to indulge in mind games, because after all, we are using language, we are using a narrative, and reality must be beyond all such narratives, the underlying consciousness reality. And therefore, in a certain sense, it doesn't really matter whether we say it or not, because the claim in the Vedic system is that the deepest secret can only be intuited, it can only be felt, it cannot be described at all. But it leads us to an interesting question, which is that, can we see some projections of it as in the cave of Plato, of this inexpressible, of this ineffable, in terms of ordinary phenomena, which would convince us that it's not something that we are doing it as an article of faith, and it is something much deeper to it. Because if there were something much deeper to it, that would transform the world, because after all, the world as we know it, our institutions, our educational system, and everything else is based on a certain conception of reality, and that conception is that of materiality. If we can, by making use of projections onto the materiality of this astonishing, inexpressible thing which we call consciousness, if we could do so, then this would be the most amazing thing to happen in our lifetimes, in history. I agree, but the fact that it is not happening, maybe just shows the whole thing is a mythology. Well, it is happening in a variety of ways. I think we've reached one of those points of change, or transitions from one age to another. And how do we see it? Well, in physics itself, or in sciences itself, we have gone from materiality to higher abstraction. We have gone from classical physics, where there were only objects moving around defining properties, which we could then make sense of in our physical world, to things such as relativity theory, where time itself moves with different speed for different observers, to quantum mechanics, where we have superposition, where we have collapse, where we have an observer influencing events in many different ways. And as one of the creators of quantum mechanics thought that it was this idea from the Vedic text, and I'm talking of Schrodinger's allusion to the Vedic claim that the small is a mirror of the entire universe. So in that sense, it's already done a lot of change. And it's quite possible that we may be at a point due to whatever crises are confronted by societies both in the West and East, that what would rescue the world would be a radical repositioning of our understanding.