In a recent post, I discussed the four tiers of reality, called waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and transcendent. Each successive stage of reality is given greater importance, which means that dreaming is more important than waking. This surprises people—We dream when we sleep; how can sleeping be more important than waking? In this post, I will discuss why dreaming is more...
The physical dogma about the world is that as you look deeper inside things, you get to know smaller and smaller parts of the world. As a result, by looking deeper, you lose the big picture. Thereby, there is a contradiction between depth and breadth. You can be a jack of all trades and a master of none. Or, you can...
For several years now, I have been describing a semantic conception of reality in which all reality is like a book, comprising symbols of meaning. The book expands out of an idea, and the individuality of the idea divides into the individuality of chapters, paragraphs, sentences, words, and phonemes. Once this expansion has occurred, we can say that the book is...
Vedic texts divide experience into the seer, the seen, and the seeing. We can also call these the knower, the known, and the knowing. What we commonly call ‘consciousness’ is the process of seeing or knowing. This seeing or knowing is a property of the soul—the seer or the knower—but it operates under the knower’s control. Thus, the knower is distinct...
In the previous post, we discussed how matter is also consciousness, although a different type of consciousness. We identified three types of consciousness—God, soul, and matter—and discussed their natures. This post extends that discussion and identifies three genders associated with the three types of consciousness—masculine, feminine, and neutral. God has a dominantly masculine gender; His Sakti has a dominantly feminine gender;...
This post discusses how choice arises from conflict, in the act of conflict resolution. The nature of this conflict, how conflict resolution leads to compromises in which one side goes dominant and the other subordinate, and how the dominant-subordinate structure is later reversed, producing a cyclic change, are interesting consequences of this idea. This also leads us to think of matter...
In this post I will explore some philosophical ideas from Vedic philosophy and try to describe what consciousness is and argue that we cannot reduce consciousness to matter, but we can study matter using consciousness as the model. In short, we begin by assuming the soul, and then explain matter. This scientific study of matter—based on the understanding of the soul—can...
The previous post discussed the meaning of sat, chit, and ananda—i.e. consciousness or relation to things, the search for meaning, and the search for happiness. The search for meaning creates a personality—i.e. how others know you. The search for happiness creates an individuality—i.e. what kinds of pleasures one enjoys. The relationship to the world also creates our identity in the form...
“The pursuit of happiness and meaning are two of our most central motivations in life” but “there can be substantial trade-offs between seeking happiness and seeking meaning in life,” writes Scott Barry Kaufman in a thought-provoking Scientific American post. In a stereotypical sense, the pursuit of meaning is one that involves connecting our lives to something larger than our life—e.g. society,...
When John von Neumann introduced the idea of the “conscious collapse” into quantum theory, he committed a heresy—or at least something that would have been considered a heresy up until that point—by introducing a causal agent called “consciousness” within science. Science until that point had worked explicitly to keep mind and consciousness out of the study of the material world, and...
It is commonly assumed that science describes objective facts about the world, which are discovered through measurements of physical properties. The problems in this measurement are generally not understood, and this post describes them, highlighting two key issues of circularity and recursion in the definition of measurement. How these problems are addressed in Indian philosophy is also discussed.
