The Scientific Journey of Knowing the Universe and the Yogic Journey of Knowing the Knower
Yogi Priyavrat Animesh
Founder- OOJ Foundation
New Delhi | 24 September 2026: You are reading these words right now. It appears to be an entirely ordinary event, but if you pause and look a little more closely, the whole mystery is hidden within this seemingly simple act. The eyes are seeing the letters, the mind is forming their meaning, somewhere one thought is agreeing, somewhere another is resisting, the breath is moving on its own, the body is sitting in a certain posture, and amidst all of this you also know that you are reading. This is where the question arises. The letters are being seen, thoughts are being seen, the body is being experienced, the breath is being experienced; but what is that for which all of this is becoming known? The journey of science generally begins with the object outside; the journey of Yoga turns inward at precisely this moment. Where, then, is the conflict between them? Perhaps the conflict lies in our haste. We have divided science into the domain of matter and spirituality into the domain of God, while at their deepest level the question is far subtler: what is reality, and who is the one who knows it?
When a human being first begins to understand science, many things break apart, and that breaking is good. Lightning is no longer merely the anger of the gods, disease is no longer merely the consequence of some invisible punishment, the planets moving through the heavens do not obey human imagination, and the Earth is no longer the centre of the universe. Again and again, science takes the human being beyond the boundaries of his own imagination. This is why a little science can sometimes take away the old God, the God who sat behind every unknown phenomenon as an immediate answer. And perhaps this is necessary, because a God who can be destroyed by a new discovery may have been less a truth than a refuge for our ignorance. Yet something strange happens here: as science goes deeper, instead of eliminating mystery, it makes mystery more subtle. Answers increase, but the questions do not become smaller; they become more fundamental.
You look at the night sky. With the naked eye, a few stars are visible; place a telescope before the eye and galaxies begin to open; look through instruments of still greater depth and you encounter light that has taken billions of years to reach us. By reading that light, the human mind can tell us which elements exist in a distant star, how fast it is moving away from us, and what its approximate age may be. This is an extraordinary triumph of intelligence. But at that very moment another question arises, one that no telescope can see. Why is the universe of such a nature that it can be known? Why does nature contain regularities that mathematics can express? How has our brain, itself only a small biological event within this universe, become capable of understanding the laws of the universe? To give a simple religious answer to this would be as hasty as declaring the question meaningless.
Science can tell us how a process occurs; and wherever it can do so, it should be allowed to speak with complete freedom. There is no need to hide God in the dark corners of ignorance. If tomorrow science explains some phenomenon that we call a mystery today, nothing has been lost from truth; only our ignorance has diminished. But behind every answer to “how”, another depth of “why” can sometimes open. How laws operate is one question; why there are laws at all is another. How the universe developed is one question; why there is existence at all, why there is something rather than nothing, is another. To confuse these two kinds of questions is a mistake, but it is equally mistaken to assume that the second has already been dissolved by the first.
The beauty of the Nasadiya Sukta of the Rigveda lies precisely in this: having approached the origin of creation, it possesses the courage to acknowledge the limits of human knowledge. To call it an ancient version of modern cosmology would be unfair to it; its significance does not lie in any scientific prediction, but in the humility that can say before the ultimate question: perhaps our certainty is greater than our actual understanding. Deep science does not necessarily lead a human being towards any particular belief; great scientists have been theists, atheists and agnostics. But deep knowledge can certainly do one thing. It makes simple certainties more difficult. The person who knows very little may quickly say, “I have understood everything”; the person who goes very deep begins to see the limits of his understanding more clearly.
And as soon as that limit becomes visible, the question begins to move from the outside towards the inside, because the scientist studying the universe does not stand outside the universe. The matter he studies arises from the same cosmic history from which his own body has emerged; the elements he identifies in a star are the same elements from which his body is formed; and at some point, that very matter became sufficiently complex to begin asking questions about its own origin. To say that “the universe is knowing itself” may be a beautiful poetic statement rather than a scientific conclusion; yet the actual fact is hardly less astonishing. Within the universe there exists a structure capable of writing the mathematics of the universe.
Now put the telescope down for a while and observe your breath. You do not have to manufacture it. Even while you sleep, it continues. Yet for a few moments you can alter its rhythm. Fear comes and the breath changes; anger comes and it changes; love, running, sleep, anxiety, meditation, every state leaves its signal upon this rhythm of the body. Perhaps this is why the ancient yogis gave such importance to the breath. They did not regard it merely as the movement of air in and out; a wider language of prana developed in which the movement of life and the relationship between body, mind and inner experience were observed. To call prana today simply oxygen, electricity or the nervous system would be incorrect; these belong to different languages of knowledge. But the question remains valid even today: in what ways do breath, body, emotion and attention influence one another?
And while observing the breath, one begins to understand for the first time that the mind is not merely some abstract cloud of thoughts inside the head. Hear a single sentence of insult, and the body changes. Imagine something frightening, and the heart and breath may change. Merely bring into the mind the possibility of losing someone you love, and the body can begin to carry the weight of an event before it has even occurred. What, then, will you call “mind” and what will you call “body”? The boundary no longer remains as clear as language has made it appear. The yogi enters precisely into this indistinct boundary. He does not go inward in order to escape the body; for the first time, he begins to see how deeply body, breath, emotion, memory and thought enter into one another.
Then the senses come before us. The Katha Upanishad says that the senses are directed outward; the human being goes on seeing external objects, while a discerning person turns the vision within. No forest is required to understand this in contemporary life. Look at your phone. A notification appears and the hand rises. You have not even consciously decided, yet the reaction has already occurred. Someone praises you and something within expands; someone criticises you and something contracts. You think you are using the world, but sometimes the world is using your attention. This is where the question of pratyahara becomes alive. Is merely closing the eyes enough, or is real freedom that condition in which every external stimulus does not automatically become an order within you?
And if, even for a moment, a space becomes visible between stimulus and response, the mind begins to reveal itself. A thought appears. You did not call it. An old memory arises. A fear creates an image of the future. A desire says, now. Ordinarily we become entangled with every mental event that arises and say, I. But if at some moment a thought is present and there is also knowledge of its presence, then a subtle question is born: are the thought and the knowing of the thought exactly the same event? This is the doorway at which Patanjali’s question of the seer and the mind becomes alive. The famous Yoga Sutra, “yogash chitta vritti nirodhah”, should not be read merely as a command to forcibly stop thoughts; immediately after it comes the statement concerning the seer abiding in its own nature, and at other times identifying with the modifications of the mind. The problem, therefore, is not only that thoughts arise; the problem is also that we become so completely absorbed in them that no distinction remains visible between the thought and ourselves. The yogi does not wage war against thought; he begins to observe his identification with it.
There is a very subtle deception possible here. Earlier the person said, “I am the thought”; now he learns to say, “I am the witness of thoughts.” He feels the journey is complete. But if the thought “I am the witness” is itself known to you, can that thought be the ultimate witness? This is precisely the point where ordinary spirituality often gives an answer too quickly, while deeper enquiry asks the question again. The question of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad remains equally sharp today. By what shall the knower be known, when it is through the knower that everything else is known? Allow this to remain within you for a while. The body is known. The breath is known. Pleasure is known. Pain is known. Thought is known. Memory is known. Even the sense of “I am” is, in some sense, known. If every known thing can appear before me, where is the knower? And if I capture the knower itself in some form, location, light, experience or concept, then it too has appeared before me, which means it too has become an object of knowledge. Then what? Do not hurry to answer. This very hurry gives the human being doctrine; remaining within the question can sometimes be the beginning of meditation.
And then the mystery of the dream returns. While dreaming at night, you often do not know that you are dreaming. The people there are real, the fear is real, the body seems real, the entire world possesses the immediacy of reality. In the morning the eyes open, and in a single moment its status changes. This does not prove that waking life is “false”; but it does show that the fact that an experience feels real is itself something worthy of examination. The Mandukya Upanishad opens a profound enquiry into consciousness through waking, dreaming and deep sleep, and then speaks of turiya; but to reduce turiya to some fourth brainwave would be the modern version of the very haste from which we need to protect ourselves.
Modern sleep science and neuroscience continue to study the neural processes associated with waking, dreaming, deep sleep, anaesthesia and conscious report. This work is extremely important, because experience does not appear to occur in some disembodied void; major changes in brain-state can profoundly influence conscious experience. Yet one question remains. However close the relationship between brain activity and experience may be, does a neural description entirely eliminate the first-person aspect of “being in pain”, “seeing red”, “feeling fear” or “being me”? Some philosophers say yes, that a sufficiently complete physical explanation will ultimately be enough; others say the explanatory gap remains; some describe consciousness as emergent, some as fundamental, some in dual-aspect terms, some through idealist or neutral foundations. Science has not yet closed this debate within a final ontology.
It is here that the statement “a little science takes one away from God, deep science brings one back towards God” may acquire its proper dignity. Do not understand this to mean that the more physics you study, the more religious you will become. There is no such rule. Profound scientists may also be atheists. The deeper meaning of the statement is that superficial knowledge often breaks our old idea of God, while deep knowledge can also break the simplicity with which we had declared that no ultimate question remains.
Because if God is merely an answer for those things that science has not yet understood, then the position of God is very weak. Tomorrow an explanation for some unknown phenomenon is found, and God will be pushed further back. Such a God stands only at the boundary of ignorance. In Indian philosophical enquiry, the question of ultimate reality has always been far broader than this. The question of Brahman, the question of Atman, the question of Ishvara, the question of Purusha, the question of Bhagavan; and remember, these are not all the same technical term. In one tradition, ultimate reality is understood as an attributeless ground; in another as a special Purusha; in another as the supreme Purushottama; in another as consciousness in the nature of Shiva; in another, the very idea of a permanent self is challenged. The greatness of the Sanatana search lies not in uniformity, but in the depth of the question.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says to Arjuna, “aham atma gudakesha sarvabhutashayasthitah, aham adish cha madhyam cha bhutanam anta eva cha”, meaning, I am the Self dwelling in the hearts of all beings, and I am the beginning, the middle and the end of beings. If we use this to claim that modern physics has proved this verse, we diminish both the Gita and physics. It is not an energy equation. Its question is far deeper. Is ultimate reality merely a creator sitting outside the universe, or does it have a relationship with the innermost being of the creature and with existence itself?
It is here that the science of the outer world and the Yoga of the inner world come so close to one another that there is no longer any need to merge them. Science asks, how does an event occur? Yoga asks, how does that event appear in experience, and how does the structure of the experiencer change? Science places observable regularities before public testing; the finest yogic traditions make attention, perception and the sense of self the subject of disciplined observation. Their criteria are not the same. Their errors are also different. The scientist may mistake a model for reality; the practitioner may mistake an interpretation of experience for final truth. Both require the same medicine: discernment.
And this may be the most difficult part of Yoga. Asana may be difficult, pranayama may be difficult, silence may be difficult; but relinquishing one’s favourite interpretation may be even more difficult. A practitioner sees light and immediately says, God. Something moves upward in the body and he says, Kundalini. A deep peace comes and he says, Samadhi. Perhaps the interpretation corresponds to some tradition; perhaps it does not. The depth of the yogi does not lie in giving a grand name to an experience, but in being truthful enough to say, “This happened; this much I know. What its final meaning is remains open.”
Science too needs the same humility. Finding a correlate of an experience in the brain does not immediately solve the question of what the experience is ontologically; and failing to find such a correlate does not prove the existence of a soul. If meditation produces measurable changes in attention or emotional regulation, those findings should be welcomed; but the appearance of some pattern in an EEG does not mean that “Samadhi has been scientifically proved.” Where there is measurement, let there be measurement. Where there is experience, let there be experience. Where there is interpretation, let there be interpretation. Where there is mystery, let there be mystery. Truth does not need adulteration.
And as this becomes clearer, the word “God” also begins to change. The God of childhood may have been a person sitting above, directing the world. Science can question that image. But if the meaning of God gradually shifts towards the question of the ultimate ground of existence, the possibility of consciousness, the foundation of truth, or that reality within which matter, life, experience and knowledge all become possible, then the debate becomes larger than “Does God exist or not?” We must first ask what we mean by “God”. And perhaps this is why a little information can make a person quickly atheist or quickly theist. Haste is possible in both directions. One says, “Science exists, therefore God does not.” Another says, “Mystery exists, therefore God is proved.” Both have closed the question too quickly. Deep enquiry makes both uncomfortable, because it says, keep looking.
To look. This is the root of Yoga. Not merely to accept what another person says. Not to become enchanted by one’s own belief. Not to reject scripture, but also not to turn scripture into a substitute for experience. See how anger arises. See how praise changes you. See where the breath goes when fear appears. See how the sound of a phone pulls attention. See how a thought arrives and for a few moments becomes your entire world. And then see that even after the thought has gone, something remains. But do not be in a hurry to give a name to what remains.
Here the Buddhist challenge of anatman becomes profoundly useful. If you say there is a permanent Self within, Buddhism asks: where exactly did you find it? Whatever you observed, does it not change? The body changes, feeling changes, perception changes, formations change, states of consciousness change. Where, then, is the permanent “I”? On the other side, the Upanishad asks: if everything is changing, on what basis is the knowledge of change possible? These two questions need not destroy one another; they can cut human certainty from two directions.
And then even the word “witness” ceases to be a safe refuge. You say, “I am the witness.” Very well, to whom is this statement known? If it too is a thought, do not hide behind the thought. If a thought-free state appeared, that state too came and went; what does its coming and going mean? If light appeared, who knew it? If emptiness appeared, where was the knowledge of emptiness present? If bliss appeared and later disappeared, can ultimate truth be that which comes and goes? These questions slowly move Yoga from experience towards ontology. The body is important, but not final. The breath is important, but not final. The experience of prana may be important, but it is not final. Meditation is important, but the question of the meditator still remains. The witness may be an important inner experience, but the nature of the witness itself remains a question. This is why the path of the yogi may not be an exhibition of attainments, but a continuous dismantling of the layers of the “I”.
And then returning towards God is no longer merely a return to a temple. Perhaps returning means returning to that humility in which the human being first acknowledges that reality is greater than his thought. Perhaps prayer is not merely the name of a final answer, but can also be the name of that moment when intelligence, knowing its own limits, still does not turn away from truth. Perhaps meditation is not about capturing truth, but about becoming quiet enough for what is to reveal itself on its own terms. And perhaps spiritual Yoga begins precisely where science does not end, but where the human being, alongside the exploration of the outer world, includes the seeker himself within the question.
This is why, if true knowledge returns us towards God, it does not do so by proving a doctrine. It returns by making the ego smaller. It makes your “I know” more honest. It shows that an equation is magnificent, but the consciousness that understands the equation is itself also a mystery; the telescope is magnificent, but the experience of the eye looking through the telescope is also a question; neuroscience is magnificent, but the discussion concerning the relationship between neural description and lived experience is not yet complete; scripture is magnificent, but truth that has been read is not yet truth that has been lived.
And when all of this begins to appear together, science and spirituality no longer remain two opposing armies. They may become two windows, one opening towards reality from the outside, the other opening towards it from within. This is not a claim that both will ultimately see the same thing. Perhaps they will not. But if both are honest, both pull the human being beyond the comfort of his assumptions. Science says, your perception is not proof. Yoga says, your thought is not you. Science says, observe, test, repeat. Yoga says, observe, observe before reaction, observe before identification. And the deeper the seeing becomes, the more unstable the old centre of the “I” begins to become.
Then the original question returns. But now it is no longer the same. Earlier the question was, does God exist? Now the question is, what is existence? Earlier the question was, where is the soul? Now the question is, what is this entire process by which we say “I”? Earlier the question was, who created the universe? Now the question is, what is the nature of the reality within which the universe, life, consciousness and the search for truth have all become possible? Earlier we were searching outside for an answer. Now the one who searches has himself become the question. And perhaps this is the ultimate turning point of spiritual Yoga.
You are not being asked to believe in any answer. For one moment, simply observe yourself. The breath is moving. The body is present. Thoughts are appearing. The world is present. There are stars. There is mathematics. There is life. There is death. There is love. There is fear. And somehow, all of this is being known. If science can tell us how the processes behind all of this operate, honour it. If scripture says that it is possible to enter more deeply into this knowing, listen to that too. But do not cling to a conclusion borrowed from someone else. Because it is possible that true knowledge returns towards God not through an answer, but by purifying the question so completely that the one who asks the question begins to become visible within it. And when the questioner himself becomes the question, perhaps only then does the door of Infinite Truth open for the first time.