Personal and Cosmic Consciousness in Indian Philosophy

Theories of consciousness that developed in the ancient Indian subcontinent, based on the Vedic scriptures, focus on the relationship between individual human consciousness and cosmic consciousness. Roughly, there were two major views: each individual human consciousness is a “piece,” as it were, of the cosmic consciousness, or each individual human consciousness, in some mystical sense, is the entirety of the cosmic consciousness, even though there are innumerable instantiations of the same thing (Sarvapriyananda, 2023a, 2023b; Medhananda, 2023).

Individual and Cosmic Consciousness

These centers of individual consciousness would reincarnate through countless cycles of birth, death, and rebirth before a final disposition would be made, with the individual consciousness being absorbed back into the cosmic consciousness, as if a single drop of rain, having evaporated from the ocean, condenses back into it.

While the main Advaita Vedanta tradition is nondualist, meaning that consciousness is the only fundamental existent and all else, including the entire physical world, is derived from consciousness, there are minority schools that maintain that the physical world has realist existence (Medhananda, 2022, 2023).

Samkhya’s Dualism of Spirit and Matter

Historically, and perhaps ironically, one of the oldest Indian philosophical schools, Samkhya, advocated the fundamental existence of two distinct, universal realities: prakriti is matter or nature (time, space, energy), and purusha is consciousness or spirit. While the entirety of our perceived universe is nature (prakriti), including our bodies and brains, even our minds and emotions, that which experiences the external world and the internal world of the mind is consciousness or the self (purusha). Hence, dualism (Sarvapriyananda, 2020). Swami Sarvapriyananda explains: “The Samkhyans were strict dualists. They said there is no larger consciousness. Each of us is an individual consciousness” (Sarvapriyananda, 2023b).

According to Swami Medhananda, Samkhya is indeed dualist. It is founded on the eternal purusha (spirit or self), which alone is sentient; it is the witness-consciousness; it is absolute, independent, free, beyond perception, above any experience by mind or senses, and impossible to describe in words. Everything else (including the mind) is only a modification of insentient prakriti (primordial nature); it is inactive, unconscious, and is a balance of the three gunas (qualities or innate tendencies) (Medhananda, 2022; "Samkhya,” 2024).

As Swami Vivekananda explains, the English word “mind” corresponds to what Samkhya philosophers call the antaḥkaraṇa (internal organ), which comprises four aspects: the cogitating or thinking faculty; the will (or the intellect); the self-conscious egotism; and the substance in and through which all the faculties act, the floor of the mind, as it were. Swami Vivekananda describes the Samkhyan approach to consciousness: “Mind, intelligence, will, and everything else is insentient. But they are all reflecting the sentiency, the cit [consciousness] of some being who is beyond all this, whom the Samkhya philosophers call puruṣha.” Thus, Samkhya has a metaphysical dualism between conscious spirit and insentient matter. Fundamentally, even the mind (antaḥkaraṇa) is actually a subtle form of insentient matter, but it appears to be conscious because of the “light” of the puruṣha behind it (Medhananda, 2022). In other words, the body/brain is “a gross form of matter,” and the mind is “a subtle form of matter”—and the soul is necessary to “illuminate the mind with consciousness” (Medhananda, 2023).

Individual and Cosmic Consciousness

Souls have always existed; souls are not created by God or by anything else; souls are part of the divine consciousness. How then do we each have our own unique conscious perspective? Swami Medhananda's mechanism is that "the one divine consciousness playfully limits itself" in the form of each person's private consciousness (Medhananda, 2023).

To enrich contemporary debate about consciousness, Swami Medhananda calls for considering the relevance and epistemic credentials of meditative techniques and spiritual experience. Doing so, he says, would bring philosophy of mind into fruitful dialogue with philosophy of religion (Medhananda, 2022).