Abstract
The Vedic model of mind is a ‘consciousness-based’ approach in which consciousness is primary to nature. It contrasts with the ‘unconscious-based’ approach that places mind in the unconscious brain underlain by insentient random quantum fields. Advances in quantum physics to deeper levels, and in psychology toward higher development, converge on the Vedic model. Adding to the ‘objective’ third-person indirect experimental method the first-person direct experiential method is extending modern science to this more coherent model. These advances, the Vedic model of mind, and some of its practical applications are overviewed in this paper.
Introduction
Modern science involves observing the natural world through our ordinary senses. We then apply our abstract reasoning to build theories that help explain and predict the orderly functioning of what we observe to be the real world. Experience and reason are the established means to gain knowledge in modern science. To protect against unreliable subjectivity inexperience and reason, the ‘objective’ approach relies on consensual validation – which is based on inter-subjective agreement among scientists. Historically given little consideration, it is now increasingly recognized that scientific consensus depends on the level of functioning or developmental state of contributors to the consensus. Experience and reason are common processes in the ordinary waking state of consciousness.This state is a representational or reflective mode of knowing characterized by a separation of objects observed and the observer. It is the basis for the assumption of the independence of object and subject that has been a fundamental principle in scientific methodology. Though experiencing objects as separate from the observer is assumed to be ‘given by nature,’ dualistic object-subject independence is imposed upon nature by ordinary waking experiences. Given this epistemological approach, it is not surprising that modern scientific experimental methodology is fragmented into matter/mind duality with ‘objective’ object/subject independence, and that the relationship of mind to matter has been extremely difficult to address in modern science.