The Material Universe Is the Result of Consciousness, Not Its Cause

0:00 It is a human tendency rooted in our foundation and our physical being to try to understand everything is being created first and foremost from a basis in matter. In the Taitarya Upanishad, a similar situation occurs when a young seeker approaches his father to understand the nature of existence. He is asked to focus on that from which these creatures are born, whereby being born they live, and to which they go hence and enter again, for that is the eternal. His first insight was that matter was the answer. He was then sent back to continue his concentration and came to successively deeper insights as to the source of existence.

0:48 Western scientists have followed a similar path. They start from matter and look at the evolution of forms. At some point they discover that this is insufficient and does not truly answer the question as to the origin, nature and mechanism of the universal creation. Eventually they discovered that there is a strict encoding of data in what is called DNA, and it is this encoded data which determines the form. And the capabilities? Of the form to be created, just as the physical box we call a computer did not create purely from its physical substance the software the computer code needed to carry out its.

1:31 Functions. So the physical bodies do not create. The code that directs them in their existence and action. The scientists continued to follow. This thread and eventually. Conclude that the. Physical form. Is the result. Not the cause of conscious. Existence they. Plot the vital energy and move on, as did the. Student in the Tytteria Upanishad to understand. That the plane of mind is. More basic. Than the vital or physical planes. And that. There is yet behind that a causal plane and a plane of pure existence, consciousness and bliss, from whence this entire creation proceeds. Sri Aurobindo.

2:14 Observes quote we find. These higher worlds in our vision and experience of them to be in no way based upon the material universe, in no way it's results, but rather greater terms of being larger and freer ranges of consciousness. And all the action of the material plane looks more like the result and not the origin of these greater terms derivatory from them, even partly dependent on them in its evolutionary endeavor. Immense ranges of powers, influences, phenomena descend covertly upon us from the over mind and the higher mental and vital ranges.

2:57 But of these only a part, a selection, as it were, or restricted number, can stage and realize themselves in the order of the physical world. The rest await their time and proper circumstance for revelation in physical term and form, for their part in the terrestrial evolution, which is at the same time and evolution of all the powers of the Spirit. Necessarily by terrestrial we do not mean this one Earth and it's period of duration, but use Earth in the wider root sense of the Vedantic pretty V the Earth principle creating habitations of physical form for the soul. End Quote.

3:42 Reference Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Hidden Forces of Life, Chapter 6, Hidden Worlds and Evolutionary Forces, pages 1:44 to 1:45.