Chidabhasa -appearance of consciousness in living beings

One of the hard problems of modern consciousness research is to scientifically explain why subjective experience occurs in living beings but not in lifeless matter (including the very intelligent computers of today). The ancient Indian philosophy, Vedanta solves this problem by proposing a phenomenon called Chidabhasa which means “appearance of consciousness”. According to Vedanta, a non-dual (one and only one) Universal Consciousness manifests itself in various forms in the universe (which has both living and lifeless beings) and the mind of living beings is also part of the insentient Nature and hence the mind is not conscious. If so, how and why do we have so much of conscious experience in our lives?
Vedanta explains the answer using the following analogy: When sun light falls in a pot containing water, the light is reflected by the water creating an image of the sun. The image has some brightness but its origin is in the sun light and not in the pot nor in the water. If the pot is broken, water is scattered, the reflection is gone but the sun and his rays are all still there. In this analogy, a living being is a body with a mind and similar to a pot containing water; the mind is like water and the body is like the pot. The consciousness appearing in a living being is like the image of the sun in water. If there are more than one pot with water, images of the sun appear in all the different pots. The Supreme knower, the Ultimate Consciousness who manifests Himself as consciousness of each individual living being is like the sun light; sun light is just one but the reflections are many and distinct. Just as there is no reflection in an empty pot, there is no appearance of consciousness in lifeless matter but only in living beings because they have minds. Just as the water needs a pot to hold it, and the reflection is gone if the pot is broken, the mind cannot exhibit the apparently conscious behavior after the death of the physical body.

Consciousness, mind, and  body relations in Vedanta

• There exists Universal Consciousness which is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent.
• Every living being is associated with its own soul (Jiva) which is a part of that infinite Consciousness, who draws to itself the senses and the mind that are part of Nature (Bhagavad Gita Chapter 15, verse 7). Being part of the eternal Consciousness, the soul is eternal also and survives the death of the physical body. 
• The Self (Atma) is Consciousness seated in the hearts of all beings (Bhagavad Gita chapter 10, verse 20).  Kenopanishad (Swami, 1920) says that the mind and senses are able to perform their respective functions willed and initiated by Consciousness and without It, the senses and the mind cannot function. 
• The mind consists of ego (ahankara), ability to think (manas), desires, aversion, emotions, experiences, etc. (chitta), and intellect (buddhi) which includes the ability to make decisions based on memory. The five elements are the earth, water, fire, air and the sky. The five senses are hearing, touching, seeing, tasting and smelling; objects of the senses are sound, touch, form and color, taste and smell. 
• Bhagavadgita describes the distinctions between the body mind complex and the one who ‘knows’ them (shetrajna).  The Field (shetra) consists of the body, the senses and sense objects, the body's environment (Nature), and the mind.
• All contents of the Field, namely, the body, its environment, and the mind are said to be insentient (Bhagavad Gita, 7:4).
• The knower of the Field (shetrajna) is Consciousness Himself and His infinitesimal projection, jiva who assumed this function within this body.
• As to the interaction of the body and the mind, in the chapter called Karma Yoga, Gita says that the senses influence the body, and manas and chitta influence the senses; buddhi influences the manas and chitta, and jiva influences buddhi, which is in its turn, influenced by  jiva.

 Living being-computer analogy
These descriptions of Consciousness, mind, and body, suggest the following analogy:

• A living being is similar to a computer whose hardware is the physical body. The body is made up of matter. The living being has an accumulation of experiences, desires, etc. i.e., an accumulation of information in a memory which we call the mind in this paper. The mind is like a computer memory containing data and programs.
• Just like a computer's hardware and software do not know what they are doing, their own existence, and the meaning of their memory contents, both the body and the mind of a living being also do not “really know” anything but there is a certain Consciousness (apart from the mind mentioned above) that "knows". Consciousness is like the computer operator, as it were, and the one who "really knows" everything that is going on in the living being’s life.
• Similar to the computer software, the mind being an instrument, cannot act as an agent and needs initiation from an external agent, which is often, a desire/purpose (thoughts), or sensory inputs; the soul being a part of the omnipotent Consciousness can also intervene just like a computer operator can intervene in the operations of the computer.  Thus action of mind on the body is accepted in Vedanta.

The principle of reincarnation - A possible explanation
In a computer, we know that the stored information is not “real information” but a mapping of some “real information” existing in the programmer’s head because the programmer assigns meaning to states (bits or qubits) of the computer’s hardware elements. Hence the information in the computer in a way, exists independently of the computer. When the hardware of a computer is broken and cannot work in it, the same software can be loaded into the hardware of another computer and can run again if the software was copied and stored on a storage device. The reincarnation principle of Vedanta conveys a very similar scenario for beings that have mind. This principle states that some of the subtler contents of the mind called vasanas survive physical death and are carried by the individual soul (jiva) into another life and get at another chance for expression in the observable world.

Vedantic theory of the mind is interactive dualism but NOT Cartesian Dualism.

• Vedanta affirms the existence of supreme Consciousness and an individual Jiva who are immaterial and beyond the mind. 
• According to Vedanta, the ego (the I-feeling called ahankara)  is part of the mind and not conscious. 
• Not only the individual soul (Jiva) but the subtle mind also survives physical death.  
• Hence neither Jiva nor the ego is the ‘I’ of Descartes who presumes that the mind, the ‘I’, and soul are more or less the same thing and that it is conscious. 
• Not only does Vedanta accept mind’s action upon the body  but Vedanta accepts also the converse that the brain/body creates experience; Sankhyakarika verse 40 (Swami 1995) states that the world can be experienced only when both sthula and sukshma sarira are present.  
• Vedanta claims that the senses and the mind cannot perceive Consciousness, and no scientific theory can describe Him (Kenopanishad), and therefore no scientific experiments can detect Him either. The same thing is true about jiva, the individualized Consciousness.

References

1. Mukherjee B D. (2002).The Essence of Bhagavad Gita. Academic Publishers, Kolkata.
2. Raghavendra. (2000). Ishavasya Upanishad. SRG Publishers.
3. Sivananda.  Divine life Society, Bases of Vedanta
4. Swami Shravananda. (1920). Kenopanishad. The Ramakrishna Math, Mylapore, Madras.  S
5. wami Virupakshananda. (1995). Sankhyakarika. The Ramakrishna Math, Mylapore, Madras.

What does all this have to do with tachyons?  - Vedanta also said very frequently that the mind is restless; one thought after another keeps coming as long as we are awake and each thought comes and goes very fast. Considering that neural transmission speeds are in msec range it is surprising how  our thoughts occur in succession with such fastness.  The emphsis placed in Vedanta about the uncontrollable fastness of thought and description of mind as insentient suggests that mind/thought may consist of the so called tachyons in modern physics.  Existence of these objects is not inconsistent with Einstein;s special relativity but they have not been found so far in experiments done in labs.  In a Scientific American article, Feinberg conjectured that it is possible that tachyons cannot be produced from matter but they may exist and interact with matter.  This is the position we take, namely, that mind cannot be produced from matter but it exists and interacts with the body consisting of biological matter.