The Vedantic view is, in fact, radically different from the orthodox scientist’s view. The scientific view is that what we observe as the external universe is the whole of reality. But Vedanta regards the fundamental reality as consciousness itself, while the whole of creation has only a phenomenal existence within it. Far from being a chance product of evolution, consciousness is the unchanging reality within which the creation and evolution of the world takes place.

But being that in which empirical experience takes place, consciousness itself can never become an object of experience. This sounds very strange at first sight, and it needs thinking about. It is not, say the yogis, that we do not know that we are conscious; it is that consciousness is always the subject of experience and can never be an object of it. What we think we see as consciousness is only its light reflected in the objective contents of the mind as thoughts and perceptions.

The most ancient classic of Vedanta, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, describes the Sage Yajnavalkya being questioned about the nature of the underlying reality, Consciousness Absolute, by one of his pupils:

‘Yajnavalkya’, he said, ‘explain to me Brahman [the absolute Consciousness] that is immediately present and directly perceived, who is the self in all things’. [The Sage replied]: ‘This is your Self that is in all things ’. ‘Which is within all things, Yajnavalkya?’ ‘He who breathes in with your breathing in and out with your breathing out is your Self which is in all things’.

To this the pupil responds:

‘This has been explained by you as one might say: “This is a cow” or “This is a horse”.’

And the Sage replies:

You cannot see the seer of seeing, you cannot hear the hearer of hearing, you cannot think the thinker of thinking, you cannot understand the understander of understanding. He is your Self which is in all things.

One gets the same teaching in other religious traditions. For instance, in the Sufi tradition it is said:

Body is not veiled from soul, nor soul from body, Yet none is permitted to see the soul. (Rumi, Mathnawi, I.8.)

How is it then, one may ask, that pure consciousness has got mixed up in the world? In fact, very much the same question was put to the Moslem Caliph Umar, by an ambassador:

O Umar, what was the wisdom and mystery of imprisoning the pure spirit in this dirty place? [As a consequence] the pure water has become hidden in the mud; the pure spirit has become bound in bodies. Umar replied that it was done by God for good purposes, but that we are at present blind to those hidden benefits. (Rumi, Mathnawi, I.1515-1522.)

The Light of Experience
Consciousness in its fundamental nature is described in the Upanishads as the real Self (Atman) which is not born, nor does it ever die. It does not come from anywhere, nor can it be pointed to as anything in the objective world, because, as the subjective light of experience and the substratum of the play of energy which creates the world, it never becomes a direct object of experience, and is glimpsed only from its reflected radiance in the mirror of the mind.

In its real nature it is (in the words of the Katha Upanishad) ‘unborn, eternal, everlasting and [therefore] most ancient. It survives the death of the body.’ As Dr Shastri says in his commentary on this verse:

The statement ‘It is not born’, implies [clearly] that the Self is not produced by chemical [or, for that matter electrical] action, or as a compound or secretion of the brain. Intelligence [or consciousness, called Chit in the Vedanta philosophy] is indestructible, because it transcends the range of causation and is not limited by time and space. Atman [the Self] in the body can be compared figuratively to the space (akasha) in a pot, which is not affected when the pot is destroyed. (Verses from the Upanishads, pp. 26-27.)

These two principles: the creative power or energy which drives the ever-changing world of what is fundamentally electromagnetic energy, called in Vedanta Jagat or ‘the moving thing’, on the one hand, and the Light of Experience, or Consciousness, called in Vedanta Consciousness (Chit) or Self (Atman), form the two poles of our experience of the world. They are described at some length in the 13th chapter of the Bhagavad Gita as the Field and the Knower of the Field (Kshetra and Kshetrajna) respectively.

The Knower of the Field abides as the Self in the heart of every living being, but being the observer or subjective light of experience, it is itself not directly knowable as an object by study or intellectual enquiry. In fact the Upanishads declare that only a true and earnest seeker will attain to a knowledge of the nature of the Self [Atman].

In contrast to this unchanging and undying element in experience, everything in the empirical world is transient, consisting of a stream of ever-moving, ever-changing elements, each of which is successively born, exists for a time, and is finally destroyed. Not only is this true of the world of living things; it is also true of the non-living world of so-called matter. Born in the Big Bang, the cosmos develops as a vast, expanding system of galaxies, destined eventually to die and give way to new worlds. (This is the world described in modern terms by Stephen Hawking in The Universe in a Nutshell.) But beyond this changing world of energy is the unchanging background of consciousness absolute which supports it. As the Lord says in the Gita [XV.l2]:

That Light [of Consciousness, Chaitanya] which, residing in the sun, illumines the whole world, that which is in the moon and in the fire, that light do thou know to be Mine.

The 13th Chapter of the Bhagavad Gita gives a fuller and clearer picture of this view, when it speaks of the body and the knower of the body:

This, the body, is called ‘The Field ’; he, the one who knows it, is called ‘The Knower of the Field ’. And do thou also know Me as [being] the Knower in all the Fields... As the one sun illumines all this world, so does the embodied One illumine all bodies.

So in the Vedantic world-picture, consciousness — far from being a fortuitous emergent product of the world of power or energy — is the fundamental basis for the world, and the subject of the experience of it. And the point is made:

As the all-pervading space (akasha) is, from its subtlety, never soiled, so the Self seated in the body everywhere is not soiled. (Bhagavad Gita, XIII. 1, 2, 32 and 33.)

The Evolution of Conscious Mental States
Vedanta is in many ways expressing a view about the world astonishingly like that of modern science, in so far as it sees the world as created out of power or energy, and being essentially ‘the moving thing’, but it adds another whole dimension to that world-picture when it comes to what Crick calls ‘the problem of consciousness’, because it sees the unchanging consciousness (Chit) as the real substratum [and experiencer] of the whole moving universe. Put at its simplest Vedanta says that the world as we see it is made up of two elements: energy (Shakti) and consciousness (Chit). Objectively the whole of the universe consists of a play of energy or power (shakti) just as science sees it as fundamentally electromagnetic energy — but in both cases it is energy appearing or manifesting in the form of the familiar external world as we know it — the world of matter, solid, liquid and gaseous, investigated by science and discovered to be governed by the laws and principles of science.

Subjectively, however, Vedanta holds that there is an altogether different element — consciousness — which is not a creation of that energy, but the possessor and supporter of it, ever-present but transcendent, like the space occupied by the universe, because it is not itself part of the world of energy, but remains independent from it.

Consciousness is ‘reflected’ in matter in living things and especially in the higher animals and man, but is not contained in the world of energy. It is only reflected or revealed in those parts of matter which are in Vedantic terms characterised by energy in a harmonious, revealing, so-called sattvic mode. The brain is clearly the empirical seat of what the Vedantins speak of as the ‘inner organ of experience’ (antahkarana), in which the light of the Self is ‘reflected’ as the empirical ego [‘I’] of the individual.

This is why the world is characterised in Vedanta as ‘the moving thing’ Jagat, and why Consciousness, in its pure and highest nature, is characterised as changeless.

In Vedantic terms the evolution of life and the individual is viewed as the gradual awakening of consciousness from its deep sleep state in matter, to its first stirrings as life in its most primitive forms in the world of plants, sensitive to light and dark, warmth and cold, and able to respond by turning towards the sun or to grow downwards towards water or nourishment; then reaching its dreaming state in the animal world, where consciousness is virtually limited to the level of the senses and feeling at the level of the lower mind (manas); its awakening to the world of self consciousness and developed thought, with the awakening of the intellectual faculties of reason and judgement (buddhi) in man.

This concept of the progressive evolution of matter and mind is not just a contemporary bolting-on of the modern scientific, Darwinian concepts onto an older spiritual tradition. The idea in Vedanta is not just one of the biological evolution of consciousness in an unconscious world as a fortuitous epiphenomenon of the brain, but a progressive spiritual awakening in the individual in the course of its whole history to full consciousness and to a final revelation of the fully spiritually awakened state of self realization.

Long before Darwin, this evolutionary progress was to be found clearly enunciated by Rumi in the twelfth century (Mathnawi Book IV verses 3637-3656), and it is implicit in the much, much older doctrine of the progressive awakening of the five levels of man’s being, to be found documented in the ancient Taittiriya Upanishad.