The most ancient Vedic sacred texts of Hinduism, dated usually from 2000 – 1000 BCE, were concerned with the worship of many different gods, goddesses and divine beings who oversee the many aspects of the universe and human affairs.
However, starting around 1000 BCE a group of philosophical texts began to emerge with a different model for the universe and reality as a whole. Not concerned with gods or divine beings, these texts propose the basis of the universe as a singular absolute pure reality as such. This was sort of like their version of the Grand Unified Theory of Everything. All the diversity of the universe is derived from a unitary, undifferentiated, unconditioned, source in which all the properties, attributes, and conditions of the universe are latent. This was neither god nor supreme being nor any being but absolute existence per se.
The masters of the schools developed a form of mental experimentation which they taught students who would study under them. Masters and students left society and went into the forests and jungles to live in complete isolation learning to focus the mind so completely that they could consciously control not only the mind but the body as well. They trained themselves to become first aware of and then to deliberately and consciously control and deliberately manipulate breathing, heart rate, circulatory system, digestive and metabolic system and other bodily functions.
We are all familiar with a similar process we go through as children. We have to learn to recognize the sensation of a full bladder; then we have to figure out how to control the muscles that close and release the bladder, and finally we gain complete control and only release our bladders with a direct deliberate decision. I had a brother who learned to control pain with his mind and could go through very intense treatments not only without medication, but without pain. Some women are consciously aware of the moment of conception, and some people are able to recognize the physical sensations leading up to death.
By controlling interior physical functions, energy going toward the body could be minimized and re-directed to focus resources exclusively to the mind which was being used to increasing levels of concentration. The concentration of the mind was first trained on the functions of the body, gaining awareness of the most subtle changes in the many different physiological processes. Then when all physiological functions could be recognized and deliberately manipulated, they were minimized and full concentration focused on consciousness itself.
The novices first had to master a series of physical postures; they had to be able to put the body into particular specific positions and then hold those for increasing durations of time without having detrimental reactions when the posture was changed or released. For the fully skilled adept the goal was to be able to place the entire body on minimal maintenance, withdraw input from the senses, and engage in completely focused attention to some mental object, idea, or point of reference for periods of days or weeks without moving physically.
It would take many years or even decades to master the necessary physical postures and full and complete conscious control of physiological functions. It would take many more to gain the needed single pointed focus of the conscious mind on the object of concentration. Some, as it is when learning any skill, were better at learning and performing than others. Very few had the necessary concentration to reach the most highly skilled levels of practice.
The most skilled in using these techniques were able to observe characteristics and attributes with respect to the nature of the universe, reality, consciousness and everything. They found that consciousness itself was capable of purposeful agency; they were able to not only know but to act through consciousness itself. They found that consciousness and its capacity for action was non-local and a- temporal, not restricted by or dependent on the properties and parameters of the space-time continuum. Although normal human experience of individual consciousness is restricted to and delimited by our specific life experience and the personal ego-self, when pushed to the meta level, conscious was seen to be an unlimited universal field. The individualized awareness could become diffused into the meta consciousness and suffused throughout.
From these observations they concluded that consciousness was the unconditioned and undetermined unitary basis for all the conditional manifest diversity of the observed and experienced universe. The material experienced universe was derived from, conditioned by, and dependent on the primary reality which was the undifferentiated source.
No divine beings, no revelations, no worship, no religion. Just extremely stringent techniques for manipulating the body, the mind, and consciousness and the resultant observations about the nature and agency of consciousness.
Because the techniques could be demonstrated to have very effective and purposeful agency, and to make available to the skilled practitioner non-local and a-temporal action, the techniques and practices began to be used for simple empowerment rather than for intensive inquiries into the nature of reality, consciousness, and existence.
This early work gave rise in the next millennia to six schools of philosophical thought as well as several sciences engaged in intensive observation and study of the properties, processes, and functions of the world and the universe. One school of thought was completely dedicated to extensive analytic classifications systems of everything that could be known about the material universe and the mental universes of thought and consciousness. Several different schools of medical science were developed. And schools extending the body-mind practices of the earlier work expanded the range and focus of these techniques.
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