The Mystery of the Missing Self

Why a science of mind must make room for the one who knows

Oct 19, 2026 ·

V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy.

 

"My brain made me do it"

Listen to how we talk about ourselves today. My brain decided. My brain produced this dream. I got a dopamine hit. We're wired for connection. Joy, choice, love and hurt are translated into the language of neurons and chemicals and tissue before we allow them to count. It sounds scientific, even humble. But a strange question hides inside it. If my brain made me do it, who is the me?

This is not a quibble about words. It is the visible edge of a deep choice made at the foundation of modern science, a choice that has served us brilliantly in understanding the outer world and left the inner one almost untouched. In the name of objectivity, science set the observer aside. Four centuries later, it has no place for the Self: the one who sees, feels, knows and chooses.

This essay argues three things. First, that the Self was left out of science not by discovery but by method. Second, that without the Self there can be no serious or lasting science of mind, and that the cost of its absence reaches far beyond the laboratory. Third, that the Self can be brought back in, rigorously, and that the Indian tradition offers an unusually rich resource for doing so.

 

 

How the Self was left out

Modern science rests on two pillars. Objectivity asks that knowledge be independent of the observer: anyone, anywhere, with the right instruments, should get the same result. Empiricism asks that knowledge come from evidence of the senses and their instrumental extensions, tested against observation rather than accepted on authority. Joined to mathematics, these two pillars have given us four centuries of extraordinary discovery.

But look at what objectivity requires in practice. To make knowledge independent of the observer, the observer has to be removed from the picture. The scientist's own experience becomes noise to be eliminated.

The removal began with a precise decision. Galileo divided the qualities of things in two. Primary qualities, such as size, shape and motion, could be measured, and they became the subject of science. Secondary qualities, such as colour, taste, smell and warmth, were declared to exist only in the perceiver, and they were set aside. Descartes completed the move by splitting reality into extended matter, which science would study, and thinking mind, which it would not. The body became a machine; the one who lives in it was left outside the inquiry.

What remained, once the observer was subtracted, could only look like mechanism: parts, forces and causes, with no one inside. So the metaphor of the machine took hold. Newton's laws suggested a clockwork cosmos. Deism made God its builder, who wound it up and stepped away. Darwinism, in Richard Dawkins' phrase, made the watchmaker blind. At every stage the argument was only over who built the machine. That the universe and the organism are machines was never questioned. Today the same metaphor lives on as the brain-as-computer.

The point is not that this was a mistake. Leaving out the observer was a brilliant methodological choice for studying falling bodies and chemical reactions. The mistake came later, when a method for studying objects was quietly taken as a description of everything there is.

What objectivity cannot reach

One thing falls through the gap between the two pillars: consciousness itself. It is the one thing that cannot be observed from outside, and the only thing we know directly from within. Science studies everything through consciousness while excluding consciousness itself.

Consider sensation. Physiology explains its mechanism superbly: how a photon changes a molecule in the retina, how hair cells in the ear turn vibration into nerve signals, how the brain codes colour and pitch. What it cannot explain is why any of this is felt: why there is redness as experienced, and not merely processing in the dark. Yet the felt quality is the most important part of sensation. It is what sensation is. Take it away and what remains is detection, which a thermostat or a camera also performs. A science of sensation that explains everything except the feeling has explained everything except sensation.

Philosophers have named this gap many times. Thomas Nagel argued that every objective fact about a bat's echolocation still leaves out what it is like to be the bat. David Chalmers called the question of why brain processes are felt at all "the hard problem". Methods that study consciousness from outside, through reports and brain correlates, map its edges. They do not touch its nature.

The Indian tradition goes further and states the gap as a principle. The Upanishads approach the Self through neti, neti: not this, not that. Anything you can point to and call "that" is an object, and so is not the Self, the one to whom every object appears. Yajnavalkya says it in a single line: you cannot see the seer of seeing. On this view the Self is not a gap science has yet to fill. It lies structurally beyond objectivity, as the eye never appears in its own field of vision. No future instrument will close that gap, because objectivity, by definition, deals only with what can be made an object.

The Sanskrit language itself carries this vision. The word for world, loka, is traditionally derived as "that which is seen", from the root lok, to look, the same root as āloka, light or seeing. Where English names the world as something simply there, Sanskrit names it by its appearing to consciousness.

Why a science of mind without the Self cannot last

A science of mind that cannot account for the one who has a mind is built on sand, and three cracks show where.

Agency is moved, not removed. Materialism set out to take agency out of the world, and it could not. It moved agency from the person to an organ. "The brain decides" smuggles intention back in, but gives it to a piece of matter, while the person is demoted to a spectator of their own life. The neuroscientist Max Bennett and the philosopher Peter Hacker called this the mereological fallacy: attributing to a part what only makes sense of the whole. The Indian critique goes deeper still: not even the whole organism is the Self.

Method becomes metaphysics. Statements such as Marvin Minsky's "free will is an illusion" or Robert Sapolsky's arguments in Determined are not experimental findings. No experiment shows them. They are conclusions drawn by extending a method beyond its scope, mistaking the edge of a method for the edge of reality. This is not science but scientism.

The hard problem does not go away. After a century of increasingly precise brain science, we know vastly more about what the brain does, and no more about why any of it is felt. A science of mind that leaves out experience leaves out the very thing it set out to explain.

What it costs us

The absence of the Self does not stay in the laboratory. It enters language, institutions and how people understand themselves, it permeates culture, it shapes a civilization.

We are, in effect, locked out of our own homes. For most of history, inward was where you went to find out who you were. The Upanishads place the Self in the guha, the cave of the heart; Augustine urged a return within. Today we ask strangers what is inside: metrics tell us how we slept, expertstell  us what our distress means, algorithms tell us what we are supposed to want. Worse, others hold the keys. Platforms that model and shape our behaviour often have more access to a picture of our inner life than we are encouraged to have ourselves.

And the Self lives like a citizen waiting for a green card: tolerated, but only provisionally, and only with papers in someone else's language. Even the inner life's defenders apply for its visa. Meditation is good because it lowers cortisol; gratitude is good because it improves sleep scores. First-person testimony ("this brings me peace") is inadmissible; a brain scan, however crude, is evidence.

There is a historical parallel. Today we have handed our minds, and their interpretation, to intermediaries: the expert, the machine, the analytics. Five centuries ago, religion in Europe placed the Church between the individual and the highest principle; salvation passed through the priest. Martin Luther challenged that mediation. Proclaiming the "priesthood of all believers" and translating the Bible into German so that ordinary people could read it for themselves, he urged each person to cultivate a direct inner relationship with the divine. A similar movement is awaited in the sciences of mind: one that returns to each person the right, and the means, to know their own mind directly. Restoring selfhood to people.

Carl Jung saw where this leads. In Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933) he wrote that about a third of his patients suffered from no definable neurosis but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives, "the general neurosis of our time". What is denied as inner reality does not vanish, he observed; it returns as symptom. In The Undiscovered Self (1957) he warned that a person without inner foundation becomes mass man, easily absorbed by whatever offers an identity. The Indian traditions also say the separate doer is an illusion. The difference is what replaces it. There, the small self dissolves into something vaster: the witness, consciousness as ground. In materialism, it dissolves into nothing.

The worldview did not cause every modern ill. Industrial capitalism, urbanisation and technology did much of that. But it legitimized and accelerated them, and it removed the language people would need to resist: if the inner life is not real, no one has ground to stand on to say, "I am more than this."

Voices at the frontier

This is not only an Eastern complaint. Within Western science itself, a line of first-rate minds has been moving toward the same frontier for a century.

Pauli and Jung. Wolfgang Pauli, a founder of quantum mechanics, worked with Jung for over two decades. In their joint volume The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (1952) they came to see psyche and matter as two aspects of one underlying reality, which Jung called the unus mundus, the one world. Jung's idea of synchronicity, meaningful coincidence between an inner and an outer event with no causal link, made sense only if mind and matter shared such a common ground. The physicist F. David Peat developed the idea in Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind (1987). Pauli believed physics would one day have to speak of the psyche in its own terms.

Schrödinger. Erwin Schrödinger, another founder of quantum mechanics, drew openly on the Upanishads in his reflections on mind, arguing that consciousness is singular, not many.

Bohm and Krishnamurti. The physicist David Bohm argued in Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980) that the separate objects we observe unfold from an enfolded wholeness, and that mind and matter are two projections of one ground. Around 1959 he came across J. Krishnamurti's The First and Last Freedom in a library and found, in the words of an Indian teacher, the very problem he had wrestled with in physics: the relation of observer and observed. Krishnamurti's central insight strikes directly at the first pillar of science: the observer is the observed. The separation between the one who looks and what is looked at is, in the inner world, a product of thought. The two men held dialogues for a quarter of a century, published in books such as The Ending of Time (1985): a physicist of the first rank and an Indian sage examining together thought, time, the observer and consciousness.

These voices do not form a consensus, and their boldest ideas remain unproven. But together they show that the founding picture, a world of objects observed from outside by a detached spectator, no longer satisfies some of science's own finest minds. Physics has its own cracks here: a century after quantum mechanics, there is still no agreed account of what a measurement is, and why observation turns possibilities into one definite outcome. What these voices offered were visions and theories. What they did not offer was a method.

What the Indian tradition offers

Where Western science pointed toward the frontier from outside, India went there directly, and brought back three things a science of mind needs.

A map: mind belongs to nature, the witness does not

Samkhya, the oldest systematic Indian philosophy of consciousness and nature, sets two principles side by side. Purusha is pure consciousness, the witness; prakriti is nature, everything that can be witnessed. Crucially, Samkhya places mind, intellect and ego on the side of nature. This turns out to be exactly the division a modern science of mind needs. Everything about mind that can be observed, including thought, memory, emotion and the brain processes behind them, belongs to prakriti and can be studied objectively without limit. What lies beyond is not another object but the witness for whom all objects appear. The two do not compete, because they do not occupy the same space.

Samkhya also reverses the materialist order. In its account of how the world unfolds, the tanmatras, pure sense-qualities, come before the gross elements, panchabhhutas: quality before substance. Matter is quality condensed. Where modern physiology hopes to produce feeling at the end of a long chemical chain, and cannot say how, Samkhya places it at the root.

An axiom: Force is conscious

Sri Aurobindo took this one step further. In the chapter "Conscious Force" of The Life Divine, he reads the five elements as successive states of one energy, from vibration and contact through light and heat to diffusion and cohesion, "the liquid state" and "the solid state". He then asks the decisive question: is this Force only blind energy, or is it Chit-Shakti, conscious force? "On this essential problem all the rest hinges." His answer is that matter is not an emptiness of consciousness but "a sleep of consciousness", and that "Mind and Matter are rather different grades of the same energy, different organisations of one conscious Force of Existence." Nothing can evolve out of matter, he insists, that was not already involved in it.

In this framework consciousness is not a late arrival or a by-product. It is the mother, not the stepchild; the star of the show, not a sidekick.

A method: refining the inner instrument

Western science refines its external instruments and assumes the observer is fixed and neutral. The Indian tradition holds the opposite: the ordinary observer is itself an instrument, and a distorted one, clouded by restlessness, desire and habit, the vrittis of Patanjali. The mind is the antahkarana, the inner instrument. Practice clears and steadies it until, in Patanjali's words, "the seer abides in its own nature".

This method already has the structure of a science. It has protocols (defined practices of posture, breath, concentration and meditation), calibration of the instrument (stilling the mind), trained observers (years of practice), a notion of expertise (adhikara, competence to inquire), review (a teacher checking reports against experience and the maps), theory (detailed maps of states and stages), and an epistemology that counts trained yogic perception as a valid means of knowledge. It is an experimental method, turned inward, in which the practitioner is both apparatus and observer.

A caution

These resources must be read with discipline. Traditional concepts are often not clearly interpretable: the five elements mean different things in different schools, and Ayurvedic practitioners can give strikingly different accounts of the doshas. Every age, moreover, reads the tradition through its own science. Brajendranath Seal’s careful The Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus (1915) read the gunas as mass and energy, and the tanmatras as “infra-atomic unit-potentials”, in the language of Victorian physics. Seal’s scholarship was meticulous, but his example shows the trap. Such interpretations simply relabel Sanskrit concepts in scientific jargon: tamas becomes “mass”, rajas becomes “energy”, and nothing new follows. A translation that only restates what physics already knows adds nothing to physics and little to our understanding of the tradition. It is a futile exercise.

The test of an interpretation is not whether it sounds scientific, but whether it does scientific work: whether it yields new insights, new questions or new predictions that could turn out false. The point is not to claim that the ancients knew modern science. It is to take their insights as tentative hypotheses, and to ask what they let us see and test that we could not before.

 

Bringing the Self in, rigorously

How, then, can the Self be given a fair place in a science of mind without abandoning rigour? Not by suspending standards, but by adding a third pillar beside objectivity and empiricism: a disciplined first-person method, with standards of its own.

Two meanings of objectivity

The first step is to separate two things that "objectivity" has come to mean. Objectivity as method means results anyone, with the right training and instruments, can check. That must stay; it is our best protection against self-deception. Objectivity as worldview means the belief that nature is only object, without inside, and that the observer is an accident within it. That is what must go. The crack runs through the worldview built on the method, not through the method itself.

Candidate axioms

A science of mind that includes the Self would rest on axioms such as these, each held as a hypothesis, not a creed:

1.       Mind belongs to nature; the witness does not. Everything about mind that can be observed is open to objective study; the witness is reached only from within.

2.       Quality precedes substance. The felt side of experience is fundamental, not a late by-product.

3.       Subtle and gross are grades of one energy. Thought and molecule are continuous, not two substances in need of a bridge.

4.       Knowledge by identity. Trained first-person experience is a valid source of evidence.

5.       The instrument must be refined. An observer's mind must be trained and steadied before its reports count. Just as instruments vary in quality, some distorted and some finely made, so does the human instrument: an untrained mind, clouded by restlessness and bias, gives distorted readings, while a refined one can register what a coarser one misses.

Standards for first-person knowledge

Trained introspection was tried once before in Western psychology, around 1900, and collapsed when laboratories reached incompatible results with no way to settle them. A new method must be built around that failure:

•         Inner empiricism: claims rest on direct, repeated experience, not doctrine.

•         Convergence: independent observers trained in the same discipline should find the same territory.

•         Honest logs: dated records, written before interpretation.

•         Fruits in life: a real discovery changes something measurable, such as attention, health or behaviour.

•         Willingness to be wrong: the explorer must be able to recognize a wish mistaken for a truth.

Krishnamurti's warning belongs here too: any method repeated mechanically becomes the old machine in new clothes. The method serves seeing; it must never replace it.

Bridges where both kinds of knowledge meet

The most promising ground is the human scale, where inner reports and outer measurements can be taken from the same person at the same time:

•         Meaning and molecule. Placebo research shows that meaning has precise chemical effects. In 1978 Levine, Gordon and Fields showed that placebo pain relief could be blocked by naloxone, an opioid-receptor blocker: a belief was releasing the body's own opioids. In 2001 de la Fuente-Fernández and colleagues showed that expectation releases dopamine in people with Parkinson's disease.

•         Breath and the autonomic system. The yogic model says mind (manas) acts on body through the vital layer, pranamaya. That layer corresponds strikingly to autonomic, hormonal and immune regulation, and breath is the one point where it comes under voluntary control. Slow breathing measurably raises heart-rate variability through the vagus nerve.

•         Trained and untrained observers. Francisco Varela's neurophenomenology used trained participants' reports of their inner states to sort brain recordings, revealing structure in the data that would otherwise have been lost. First-person and third-person data constrained each other, and both were better for it.

From interpretation to measurement

Many traditional concepts are not yet clear enough to test. That is normal. The historian Hasok Chang has shown in Inventing Temperature (2004) that temperature itself had no agreed meaning until it was fixed by cycles of provisional definition, measurement and revision. Traditional concepts can follow the same path: start where they were used rather than where they were defined; check whether trained practitioners agree in applying them; build provisional measures and let rival interpretations compete; and revise in light of what holds.

A first demonstration

A science that includes the Self will be accepted not by argument but by results. One convincing demonstration would be enough to begin: trained practitioners' reports predicting physiological or behavioral outcomes that untrained reports and standard measures cannot; or a traditional category, such as the three gunas treated as dimensions of mind, shown to predict how people learn or respond to stress better than existing measures. Done rigorously and replicated, a single result like this would show that the Self is not a philosophical pastime but a proper subject of science.

The inner frontier

Medieval European navigators hugged the coastline, not because all of them believed the earth was flat (some educated people knew it was round), but because they had no way of finding their position out of sight of land. Our sciences of mind are in a similar place. They stay close to the shore of the measurable, the brain scan and the behavioural score, not because nothing lies beyond, but because they have no method for navigating out of sight of the physical coast.

The Polynesian wayfinders show that another way is possible. They crossed thousands of miles of open Pacific without instruments, reading the swells through their bodies and the stars from memory, trained over years from master to apprentice, preserving the knowledge inheritance for millennia. They became the instrument. That, in essence, is what the Indian tradition proposes for the inner ocean: not a better scanner, but a trained and steadied observer, working with honest logs, independent checks and results that show up in life.

All this gives a far larger meaning to what has been called the "human potential" movement. Just as athletes are trained to physical feats once thought impossible, and the four-minute mile, once a barrier, is now routinely broken, human beings can develop their mental and inner capacities to unprecedented levels. Attention, memory, intuition, creative insight and emotional steadiness are not fixed endowments; they are faculties that respond to training, as the Vedic reciters who held entire texts in memory with near-perfect fidelity for generations have shown. The seemingly miraculous intuition of Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose theorems arrived, as he said, as gifts, could become less a rare marvel and more a cultivated possibility. Schools would train the inner faculties as deliberately as they now train arithmetic and athletics. A science of mind would study and refine those methods as sports science studies the body. Sri Aurobindo saw in this the next step of evolution itself: not a new organ, but a new and wider consciousness.

Nothing here asks science to give up a single finding. Quantum mechanics did not abolish classical mechanics; it made it a limiting case, still exact for bridges and engines, but no longer the whole story. In the same way, an objective science that leaves out the observer could become the limiting case of a fuller science of mind, one in which the one who knows is no longer an embarrassing remainder, but the starting point.

The Self has been waiting for its green card long enough. It is time it was recognized not as a provisional visitor in the house of science, but as the one in whose light the whole house stands illumined.

 

 

References

How the Self was left out

• Galileo Galilei. The Assayer (Il Saggiatore), 1623. [On primary and secondary qualities.]
• René Descartes. Meditations on First Philosophy, 1641.
• Richard Dawkins. The Blind Watchmaker. Longman, 1986.

What objectivity cannot reach

• Thomas Nagel. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–450.
• David J. Chalmers. “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3 (1995): 200–219.
• Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 2.3.6 (neti, neti) and 3.4.2 (“you cannot see the seer of seeing”).
• Monier Monier-Williams. A Sanskrit–English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899. [Entries loka, āloka.]

Why a science of mind without the Self cannot last

• M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Blackwell, 2003.
• Marvin Minsky. The Society of Mind. Simon & Schuster, 1986.
• Robert M. Sapolsky. Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. Penguin Press, 2023.
• Augustine. Of True Religion (De vera religione) 39.72.
• Martin Luther. To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, 1520. German New Testament, 1522; complete Bible, 1534.
• C. G. Jung. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Kegan Paul, 1933.
• C. G. Jung. The Undiscovered Self, 1957 (English translation 1958).

Voices at the frontier

• C. G. Jung and W. Pauli. The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, 1952 (English translation, Pantheon, 1955).
• F. David Peat. Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind. Bantam, 1987.
• Erwin Schrödinger. Mind and Matter. Cambridge University Press, 1958. See also What Is Life? (1944), Epilogue.
• David Bohm. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
• J. Krishnamurti. The First and Last Freedom. Gollancz, 1954.
• J. Krishnamurti and David Bohm. The Ending of Time. Harper & Row, 1985.

What the Indian tradition offers

• Ishvarakrishna. Samkhya Karika. See Gerald James Larson, Classical Sāṃkhya, 2nd ed. Motilal Banarsidass, 1979.
• Patanjali. Yoga Sutras 1.2–1.3. See Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali. North Point Press, 2009.
• Sri Aurobindo. The Life Divine, Book I, Chapter 10, “Conscious Force.” Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, vols. 21–22. Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2005.
• Brajendranath Seal. The Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus. Longmans, Green and Co., 1915.

Bringing the Self in, rigorously

• Kurt Danziger. “The History of Introspection Reconsidered.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16 (1980): 241–262.
• J. D. Levine, N. C. Gordon and H. L. Fields. “The Mechanism of Placebo Analgesia.” The Lancet 312, no. 8091 (1978): 654–657.
• R. de la Fuente-Fernández et al. “Expectation and Dopamine Release: Mechanism of the Placebo Effect in Parkinson’s Disease.” Science 293, no. 5532 (2001): 1164–1166.
• A. Zaccaro et al. “How Breath-Control Can Change Your Life: A Systematic Review on Psycho-Physiological Correlates of Slow Breathing.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 12 (2018): 353.
• Francisco J. Varela. “Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 3, no. 4 (1996): 330–349.
• A. Lutz, J.-P. Lachaux, J. Martinerie and F. J. Varela. “Guiding the Study of Brain Dynamics by Using First-Person Data.” PNAS 99, no. 3 (2002): 1586–1591.
• Hasok Chang. Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress. Oxford University Press, 2004.

The inner frontier

• Robert Kanigel. The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan. Scribner, 1991.

 

What Entrepreneurship means to me

Entrepreneurship is usually presented in economic terms. We associate it with starting companies, raising capital, identifying markets, managing cash flows and generating profit. These are certainly important aspects of entrepreneurship. But they are not its essence.

At a deeper level, entrepreneurship can be understood as an approach to life itself.

Its starting point is autonomy. The entrepreneur does not me
rely ask: What role is available for me? Who will employ me? What task has been assigned to me? The more fundamental questions are: What do I want to create? What problem do I want to solve? What kind of life and work are truly mine?

This does not mean refusing cooperation or rejecting institutions. Quite the opposite. Entrepreneurship requires intense engagement with other people. But there is a difference between working with others and allowing one's purpose to be completely determined by others. An entrepreneurial person seeks collaboration without surrendering inner autonomy.

From this perspective, entrepreneurship is closely related to agency. An entrepreneurial person does not see the world merely as something to which one must adapt. The world contains possibilities. Something can be changed, created, reorganised or improved.

This may take the form of a company, but it need not.

A scientist who opens an entirely new line of investigation can be entrepreneurial. A teacher who creates a new educational programme can be entrepreneurial. A doctor who develops a new model of healthcare delivery can be entrepreneurial. An artist who builds an independent creative practice can be entrepreneurial. Even someone working within a large organisation can possess a strongly entrepreneurial orientation.

What connects all these cases is the willingness to move from “this is how things are” to “this is what could exist, and I will try to bring it into existence.”

This orientation requires many of the qualities normally called soft skills: persistence, teamwork, the ability to diagnose failure, the courage to begin again, the judgement to know when to abandon an approach, and the resourcefulness to find people, knowledge and materials that one does not possess oneself.

But these qualities are not alternatives to entrepreneurship. They are part of it.

There is also a still deeper dimension. Genuine autonomy eventually raises the question: Where should my direction come from?

If it does not simply come from parents, employers, social expectations, prestige or money, one must begin to discover an inner source of direction. Entrepreneurship can therefore become a form of self-discovery: an attempt to understand one's deepest relationship with oneself, with other human beings, with nature and, ultimately, with the larger universe.

In that sense, entrepreneurship is not merely independence. Nor is it individualism. The mature entrepreneur discovers that autonomy and relationship are not opposites. One becomes more fully oneself precisely by finding the right way to participate in something larger than oneself.

Where, then, does money enter this picture?

Money is extremely important. It should neither be worshipped nor dismissed.

Any creation that operates in the material world has to obey material constraints. People must be paid. Equipment must be bought. Buildings must be maintained. Products must be manufactured. Organisations must survive. An enterprise that continuously consumes resources without generating or attracting sufficient resources cannot endure.

Finance therefore provides a powerful reality test.

Revenue tells us, imperfectly but importantly, whether somebody values what we have created enough to exchange resources for it. Costs tell us what the creation demands from the world. Profit, when properly understood, is not simply personal enrichment; it can represent the surplus that allows an enterprise to survive, improve, expand and remain independent.

Financial competence is therefore an essential part of entrepreneurship. Young people should learn about costs, prices, investment, cash flow, risk, ownership and value creation.

But finance is a dimension of entrepreneurship, not its definition.

The mistake of much contemporary entrepreneurship education is that it starts too far downstream. It teaches business plans, accounting, marketing and pitching before asking the more fundamental questions: What is worth creating? What kind of person creates it? What does it mean to take responsibility for an idea? What relationship should exist between one's work, one's inner life and society?

A financially successful enterprise without any deeper purpose may be commercially effective, but it represents only a narrow form of entrepreneurship. Conversely, vision without financial discipline often remains merely aspiration.

The fuller ideal requires both.

Perhaps, then, entrepreneurship education should not aim primarily to produce more startup founders. It should aim to produce more self-directed, creative and responsible human beings—people capable of discovering problems, imagining possibilities, organising resources, working with others, learning from failure and creating sustainable forms through which their ideas can enter the world.

Some of them will create companies. Others will become scientists, teachers, artists, doctors, administrators or social innovators.

But all of them will have learned something more fundamental: not merely how to find a place in the existing world, but how to participate consciously in creating the world that ought to exist.

When Silence Becomes Evidence

 

There is an incident from many years ago that I have never forgotten.

An undergraduate student from Electrical Engineering wanted to do his final-year project with me. During one summer, he went to Japan for an internship at a prestigious neuroscience institute. He worked there with a well-known researcher in the field of the hippocampus and spatial navigation.

When he returned, he was full of enthusiasm about what he had learnt.

During one of our discussions, I told him that spatial navigation should not be thought of as something driven solely by the hippocampus. The hippocampus is of course central to spatial cognition, but navigation involves cooperation between multiple systems. The basal ganglia, particularly the striatal system, also play an important role. Different systems support different kinds of navigation strategies, and they interact.

He disagreed.

There was nothing unusual about that. A student should disagree with his teacher when he has reason to. That is how science should work.

So I asked him what his counterargument was.

His answer stunned me.

He said, almost literally:

“This person at Yale and this person in Japan do not think so. They never said that.”

I still remember my reaction.

What exactly was the argument here?

It was not that he had come across an experiment contradicting what I was saying.

It was not that he had found evidence showing that the basal ganglia had no role in spatial navigation.

It was not even that the two famous researchers had explicitly argued against such a role.

They had simply not said it.

And somehow their not saying it had become evidence.

That was the part I found extraordinary.

I had spent decades working on the basal ganglia, reinforcement learning and related problems. I had spent many hours with this student in careful discussion. Yet my claim carried little initial weight in his mind.

By contrast, a casual reading of work from Yale and a two-month internship in Japan had apparently been enough to settle the matter.

The asymmetry was remarkable.

Their silence counted.

My explicit argument did not.

So I did what one should do in science. I went back to the evidence.

I spent hours with him going through experiments by Packard, Knowlton and others on multiple memory systems. We discussed studies showing that animals can solve navigation problems using different strategies, and that hippocampal and striatal systems make distinct but interacting contributions.

Experiment by experiment, the picture became harder to dismiss.

The episode stayed with me because it exposed something deeper than one student's misunderstanding of neuroscience.

It revealed how authority is assigned.

Students, of course, cannot independently verify every claim they encounter. None of us can. We all use reputation as a shortcut. If a scientist has done outstanding work for decades, it is reasonable to give his or her statements greater initial credibility.

Prestige can be a useful prior.

But a prior is not a verdict.

The danger begins when institutional prestige replaces scientific reasoning.

“This person at Yale says so” becomes “this is what neuroscience says.”

“This famous person in Japan never mentioned it” becomes “there is probably nothing important there.”

At that point, authority has quietly displaced evidence.

There was another layer to the incident that bothered me even more.

The student had not merely assigned greater authority to experienced scientists. That would have been understandable.

He had assigned greater authority to distant scientists than to a scientist available to him in his own institution.

This is a pattern I have seen repeatedly in India.

Knowledge from certain places arrives pre-certified.

A statement from Yale, MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge or a prestigious Japanese institute is granted a high initial value.

A statement made locally may have to prove itself from the ground up.

There seems to be an epistemic exchange rate.

The same intellectual currency is valued differently depending on where it is issued.

This is not an argument that Indian students should defer to Indian professors.

Quite the opposite.

I would have been delighted if the student had said:

“I disagree because experiment X shows the opposite.”

That would have been a scientific argument.

The problem was precisely that he was not arguing scientifically.

He was arguing from authority.

And more strikingly, from omission.

“These famous people did not say it.”

That sentence reveals an entire hierarchy of knowledge.

It assumes that if an idea were important, the recognised centres of knowledge production would surely have articulated it.

If they have not, the idea becomes suspect.

That is a profound form of intellectual dependence.

The problem is no longer merely that we admire foreign institutions.

It is that we may unconsciously grant them the authority to define what questions are important, what explanations are legitimate, and even what facts deserve to exist.

Once that happens, researchers outside those recognised centres do not merely have to produce evidence.

They have to overcome an additional burden.

They must first establish their right to be heard.

That burden is especially visible when the person making the argument is close to us.

A professor in one's own department is familiar.

He is seen walking in the corridor, attending meetings, teaching classes, perhaps struggling with administrative forms.

The scientist abroad is encountered through papers, institutional websites, conference talks and reputation.

One appears ordinary.

The other appears canonical.

Distance creates authority.

And familiarity discounts it.

What disturbed me in that old conversation, therefore, was not that a student disagreed with me.

It was that the burden of proof was distributed so unequally.

The famous scientist abroad did not have to make the argument.

He merely had to exist.

The local scientist had to reconstruct the entire argument from experimental evidence.

That is a serious problem for any society that wants to develop an independent intellectual culture.

Science cannot function by reversing the hierarchy and declaring local authority superior.

That would be equally foolish.

The only durable solution is to restore the proper hierarchy:

Evidence first.

Reasoning next.

Reputation after that.

Prestige may tell us whom to listen to.

It should never tell us what to believe.

That student taught me something I have remembered ever since.

Sometimes intellectual dependence reveals itself not in what we believe, but in whose silence we are willing to treat as evidence.

When Knowledge Comes Back to Us from the West

 

Something happened in the parking lot today that left me thinking.

I met an undergraduate student from my department. He had taken one of my courses earlier. He was excitedly telling me about a book he had been reading — Max Bennett’s A Brief History of Intelligence. He spoke about it with the unmistakable excitement of someone who had suddenly seen something important.

It was almost as though he had had a revelation.

I listened for a while, slightly puzzled. Much of what he was describing seemed quite familiar to me — questions about how intelligence evolved, how different parts of the brain contribute to increasingly sophisticated behaviour, how neuroscience and computation might be brought together into a coherent story.

Eventually I asked him:

“Have you read my book?”

He looked uncertain.

“Is that Demystifying the Brain?”

Yes.

He had not read it.

There was a small irony here. This was not a student from some distant university. He was a student in my own department. He had actually taken my course on broadly the same subject. Yet somehow the ideas had not registered then with anything like the force with which they were now arriving through a book written by a Western author.

I do not mention this to criticise the student. Nor is this about Max Bennett’s book, which may well be an excellent book.

What interested me was the phenomenon itself.

I have seen versions of it for decades.

An idea presented by an Indian professor in an Indian classroom often remains simply course material. The same or a similar idea, encountered later in a book by a well-known Western author, suddenly becomes an intellectual discovery.

Why?

The Familiarity Discount

Part of the explanation is probably universal.

We tend to undervalue what is close to us.

The professor whom one sees walking down the corridor, drinking tea in the department, arguing in meetings and occasionally struggling with a projector in class does not possess much mystery. He belongs to everyday life.

The distant author does.

A beautifully produced book, written in confident prose, published internationally, reviewed widely and surrounded by the invisible machinery of intellectual prestige arrives with a certain authority.

The idea is not merely heard.

It is announced.

And therefore the mind attends to it differently.

There is probably a kind of familiarity discount operating here. What comes from nearby appears ordinary. (In fact, when I asked "Why" the student promptly said "familiarity".) What travels a great distance acquires value.

But in India, I think something deeper is happening.

Who Has the Right to Explain the World?

Modern Indian education has trained us remarkably well to acquire knowledge.

But it has not trained us equally well to believe that knowledge can be organised, interpreted and given a new framework from here.

There is a subtle hierarchy operating in our intellectual life.

Western scholars are often allowed to produce the grand narrative.

Indian scholars are expected to contribute details.

A Western scientist may write a book explaining how the brain works, what intelligence is, how consciousness emerged, how civilisation developed or how economies function. We approach such a book prepared to encounter a worldview.

When an Indian scholar attempts the same synthesis, we often approach it differently. We ask: Where was this published? Who has cited it? Which internationally recognised authority supports it?

The difference is profound.

It is not simply that Western work is considered better.

It is that Western work is unconsciously granted the right to define the intellectual landscape itself.

Indian work, meanwhile, is treated as something that may occupy a small region within that landscape.

The Map and the Footnote

This produces a peculiar asymmetry.

The Western narrative becomes the map.

Indian work becomes an annotation on the map.

Once that happens, Indian scholarship becomes strangely optional — even to Indian students.

One may become a neuroscientist in India without reading major books written by Indian neuroscientists. One may study economics without seriously encountering Indian economic thought. One may study psychology, philosophy, history, sociology or education largely through conceptual structures developed elsewhere.

Indian authors may certainly be cited.

But citation is not the same thing as intellectual authority.

The more important question is: Whose framework are we thinking inside?

This is where the parking-lot conversation becomes more than an amusing personal anecdote.

The student had already encountered some of this intellectual territory.

But perhaps he had not encountered it as a territory.

He had encountered lectures, concepts, models, equations and examinations.

Then a book arrived and said, in effect:

Here is the great story. Here is how these pieces fit together. Here is how intelligence emerged.

Suddenly the pieces became a landscape.

The Power of Narrative

This also points to something Indian academics themselves must recognise.

It is not enough to produce good research.

It is not even enough to produce original ideas.

Ideas need narratives.

A civilisation that wishes to become intellectually self-confident must develop the ability not merely to discover facts, but to organise facts into meaningful wholes.

Books matter.

Textbooks matter.

Popular science matters.

Terminology matters.

Diagrams matter.

Public lectures matter.

History matters.

The stories we tell about knowledge matter.

Western academic culture has become extraordinarily effective at this. An idea may begin as a set of technical papers, but gradually an ecosystem forms around it. Review articles integrate it. Books explain it. Conferences reinforce it. Textbooks canonise it. Popular writers carry it into society.

Eventually the framework begins to appear inevitable.

We forget that somebody constructed it.

India produces a considerable amount of research today. What it produces much less frequently are canonical narratives emerging from its own intellectual centres.

That is a serious limitation.

This Is Not a Call to Reject Western Knowledge

The answer, obviously, is not to stop reading Western authors.

That would be absurd.

Science belongs to humanity. Ideas must travel freely. We should read Bennett, Damasio, Dehaene, Friston, Sapolsky and every other thinker who has something interesting to say.

The question is not whether we should listen to them.

The question is whether we can also listen to ourselves.

Intellectual self-confidence does not mean declaring Indian work superior because it is Indian. That would merely replace one prejudice with another.

It means being able to encounter an idea without first asking where it came from.

It means allowing an Indian researcher the same intellectual possibility we instinctively grant a researcher elsewhere: perhaps this person is not merely adding another brick to an existing structure.

Perhaps he or she is proposing a different structure.

When Does an Idea Become Knowledge?

That, ultimately, is what stayed with me after the student walked away.

At what point does an idea become important to us?

When we first hear it?

When we understand it?

Or when somebody with sufficient cultural authority tells us that it is important?

There is something troubling about a society in which an idea can be born locally, taught locally, discussed locally — and yet remain almost invisible until it travels abroad, acquires another voice, and returns wearing the clothes of authority.

Then we welcome it enthusiastically.

Sometimes we even experience it as a revelation.

Perhaps one of the tasks before Indian intellectual life is therefore not merely to produce more knowledge.

It is to recover the confidence to recognise knowledge before it comes back to us from elsewhere.

Roots and Branches: Civilization as the Foundation of India's Economic Growth

 

In recent years, India has witnessed an unprecedented wave of optimism about its economic future. The vision of Viksit Bharat by 2047, projections that India could become the world's third-largest economy, advances in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, manufacturing, and startups—all these have generated tremendous hope about the nation's future.

Yet, amidst this excitement, a fundamental question is rarely asked. What is the true foundation of a nation's long-term prosperity? Is it investment? Technology? Government policy? Or is there something deeper?

Reflecting on this question, one notices two distinct schools of thought in contemporary India.

One school argues that we should follow the path taken by the West. Better infrastructure, industrialization, foreign investment, world-class universities, cutting-edge research, advanced technology, and Nobel Prizes—these, they believe, are the keys to development. In short, their aspiration is to make India "another America."

The other school emphasizes rediscovering India's ancient civilizational heritage—its culture, languages, philosophy, and traditional knowledge. They argue that development remains incomplete if a nation loses touch with its roots.

These two viewpoints are often seen as being in conflict. Each tends to view the other with suspicion. To the first group, the second appears trapped in the past. To the second, the first seems captivated by a rootless modernity.

But this conflict is largely an illusion.

Economic development and civilization are not opposing forces. They represent two different levels of the same evolutionary process.

Economics tells us how wealth is created.

Civilization builds the psychological and social foundations that enable a society to create wealth generation after generation.

In a recent interview, the Indian economist Sanjeev Sanyal made an important observation. Societies that have preserved a deep sense of civilizational confidence over centuries are also better equipped to sustain long-term economic growth. Respect for history, trust in institutions, and the willingness to invest for the future are all qualities that grow within a culture.

Interestingly, the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, despite coming from a very different political tradition, arrives at a similar conclusion. He argues that economies cannot be understood merely in terms of markets, interest rates, or monetary policy. History, social institutions, the stories people tell themselves, and their shared beliefs are integral to the functioning of an economy.

The two economists may differ in their political outlooks, but they converge on one important point: an economy does not function in a vacuum. It is deeply rooted in a culture, a civilization, and a shared social consciousness.

This brings us to an important distinction.

Cultural pride does not mean empty slogans. It does not mean romanticizing the past or looking down upon others.

Authentic cultural renewal means providing higher education in our own languages, studying our classical texts, making modern scientific knowledge available in Indian languages, reinterpreting our arts, literature, and intellectual traditions for contemporary times, and maintaining a living connection with our civilizational heritage even as we pursue world-class scientific and technological research.

Such cultural confidence nurtures self-respect. Self-respect fosters creativity. Creativity builds institutions. Institutions generate wealth. Economic growth then ceases to be a temporary miracle and becomes a living stream of prosperity flowing across generations.

A tree does not stand because of its branches. It stands because of its unseen roots.

Likewise, the strength of a nation's economy does not rest merely on its industries, highways, and factories. The invisible roots that nourish them—history, culture, language, education, and civilizational self-confidence—are the true foundation.

If India is to become a developed nation by 2047, it will need not only stronger branches, but even stronger roots.

(English translation of my article in Eenadu published today)

 

A Country Becomes Beautiful When Its People Begin to See

 

We live amidst extraordinary landscapes—temple streets layered with history, villages that wake to mist and birdsong, coastlines that shift colour by the hour. And yet, our everyday surroundings often feel neglected. A wall peels and remains unattended. A street gathers clutter until it fades into the background of daily life. Public spaces slowly become no one’s responsibility. We pass through them without really looking.

This is not only a failure of governance. It is a failure of attention.

No policy can beautify a country whose people do not feel beauty in their surroundings. Cleanliness drives can remove dirt; regulations can impose order. But they cannot create the quiet desire to make a place aesthetically alive. That desire emerges only when people begin to see their environment differently—not as a backdrop, but as something worth caring for.

History suggests that such a shift often begins with artists.

In nineteenth-century France, painters like Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Cézanne left the city and turned their attention to villages and countryside. They painted fields, cottages, rivers, and narrow streets—ordinary places, rendered with extraordinary attention to light and colour.

Houses on the Hill by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

 

What changed was not the landscape, but perception. The everyday acquired dignity. Villages became objects of admiration. Over time, these images entered public imagination, and places like Provence and Arles came to be seen not just as locations, but as aesthetic identities.

Art did not merely depict beauty. It taught people how to notice it.

A similar sensibility took shape in Japan. Artists such as Hiroshige Ando captured fleeting scenes—a road in the rain, a bridge at dusk, travellers in passing moments. There was no spectacle, only attention to the transient and the ordinary.

This way of seeing did not remain within art. It entered life itself—into how spaces were arranged, how streets were maintained, how small details were treated with care. Over time, it produced an environment where even the simplest settings appear intentional and serene.

Japan’s aesthetic refinement did not arise by accident. It emerged because people learned, gradually, to see.

Cherry Blossoms under the Full Moon by Utagawa Hiroshige

 

In the United Kingdom, this relationship between art and environment has evolved into public participation. The landscape tradition shaped by artists like J. M. W. Turner and John Constable continues today through competitions and programs that bring artists into real settings. People watch, engage, and begin to look more closely at landscapes they might otherwise ignore.

Flatford mill, John Constable

 

Beauty becomes not distant, but shared.

India has already shown, through initiatives like Swachh Bharat Mission, that collective behavior can change. But cleanliness is only a beginning. A place can be clean and still feel lifeless. The deeper challenge is to move from cleanliness to care, from compliance to pride.

That transition cannot be enforced. It must be felt.

What might such a shift look like? It could begin with artists turning their attention to the lived environments of India—streets, neighborhoods, villages, small towns. Painters, photographers, and students could treat these spaces not as problems to be fixed, but as subjects worthy of attention.

When a place is painted, it changes—not physically, but perceptually. A familiar street, seen through an artist’s eye, reveals patterns and relationships that were previously overlooked. Those who live there begin to see it differently.

And that difference matters.

A shopkeeper who sees his street as something that can be beautiful may think twice before adding to its clutter. A resident who sees her locality represented with care may feel pride. A child who sketches her surroundings begins to notice details others miss, forming a relationship with her environment that is attentive and responsible.

Such changes are small, but they accumulate. They influence behavior. They shape expectations. Over time, they create a culture in which beauty is not exceptional, but normal.

Institutions can support this shift—through competitions, exhibitions, and platforms that celebrate local environments. Schools can encourage students to observe and represent their surroundings. Media can highlight places for their aesthetic potential, not only their problems. But these are enablers. The transformation itself is personal.

It lies in how we look.

Do we move through our surroundings without seeing them? Do we accept visual disorder as inevitable? Or do we pause, even briefly, to notice light, colour, and form?

A country becomes beautiful when its people begin to feel that their environment is not neutral. It reflects what we value.

This awareness cannot be imposed from above. It must be cultivated through repeated acts of attention.

The beginning is modest. An artist paints a street. A student sketches a corner. A community takes pride in its surroundings. These acts may seem small, but they reshape perception. And when perception changes, behavior follows.

India does not need to discover beauty. It is already present. What we need is to recover our ability to see it—and, having seen it, to care.

Perhaps the first step is not to clean a street, though that is necessary. It is to look at it, quietly and attentively, as if it were worth painting.

Reclaiming India’s Place in the Story of Science

 

 

When people speak about “history,” they usually mean the history of kings, conquests, wars, and political revolutions. Even when textbooks are revised or reforms are debated, the focus remains on dynasties and battles — as though the scientific imagination of a civilization were somehow secondary. But if one truly wants to understand a nation’s intellectual heritage, one must look not only at its rulers, but at its scientists, mathematicians, and thinkers — the people who shaped how we understand the world itself. And it is here that an irony in the global story of science becomes clear.

The history of modern science often begins with a dramatic image: Galileo climbing the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropping two stones to show that objects of different masses fall at the same rate. His demonstration overturned Aristotle’s ancient belief that heavier objects fall faster — an idea that persisted, unquestioned, for nearly 1,500 years in Europe.

This story is taught worldwide as a triumph of reason over authority. But there is an uncomfortable detail hiding in plain sight: for a millennium and a half, no one in Europe bothered to test a simple experiment that even a school student could try today. Galileo’s brilliance is celebrated, as it should be, but Europe’s long intellectual stagnation before him is quietly forgiven.

Meanwhile, during these very centuries, India was witnessing one of the brightest periods in the global history of mathematics, astronomy, and scientific thought. Aryabhata proposed that Earth rotates on its axis, offered remarkably accurate astronomical constants, and developed sophisticated trigonometric methods. Brahmagupta formalized rules for zero, negative numbers, and algebra. Bhāskara II anticipated concepts of calculus and described gravitational attraction centuries before Newton. The Kerala school produced infinite series expansions that echoed what would later become central ideas in European calculus.

These contributions were not scattered accidents. They emerged from centuries of organised scholarship, rigorous debate, observational astronomy, and mathematical innovation. India’s intellectual tradition produced treatises, commentaries, and scientific lineages comparable to the great schools of Greece, China, and the Islamic world.

And yet, in global science histories, Europe’s forgotten errors are remembered, while India’s extraordinary achievements are often forgotten. Western narratives celebrate their breakthroughs while softly glossing over the gaps. Indian contributions, by contrast, are frequently reduced to footnotes or are treated as curiosities rather than foundational milestones. This asymmetry has shaped how generations of students — including in India itself — have come to understand science: as something invented elsewhere, in languages they do not speak, in cultures they do not inhabit.

This disconnect matters, because a nation’s confidence in shaping the future depends on its understanding of its past. The countries that dominate science today — from the United States to Israel to Japan — carry a deep cultural belief that scientific inquiry is part of their identity. India, paradoxically, is one of the world’s oldest scientific civilizations, yet its modern scientific institutions were built on colonial-era foundations that often ignored or dismissed indigenous knowledge systems.

But India is now re-emerging as a scientific power. From ISRO’s lunar missions to India’s digital public infrastructure, from breakthroughs in vaccine manufacturing to the rise of AI and semiconductor ambitions, India’s scientific and technological momentum is unmistakable. What is missing is not capability, but continuity — the sense that modern Indian science is not an imitation project, but the latest chapter in a civilizational story.

Reclaiming this continuity requires three shifts.

First, India’s scientific heritage must be taught with scholarly rigor.
This does not mean romanticizing the past, but recognizing genuine achievements. Aryabhata should be taught alongside Kepler, Sushruta alongside Hippocrates, the Kerala school alongside Newton. Students should encounter India’s intellectual traditions not as cultural trivia but as part of the global conversation of science.

Second, we must acknowledge the ruptures honestly.
The destruction of ancient universities, the loss of scientific lineages, and the colonial dismissal of indigenous knowledge created a deep break in India’s intellectual history. Understanding these ruptures is essential for rebuilding confidence without myth-making.

Third, India must integrate its civilizational identity with its modern scientific aspirations.
We are entering an era where Indian science is visible, ambitious, and globally relevant. But it will gain even greater strength when rooted in a longer tradition — when young scientists see not only the laboratories of Bengaluru and Hyderabad, but also the intellectual l
egacy of Ujjain, Nalanda, and Kerala as part of their story.

Science is not the property of any one civilization. It is a human inheritance shaped by many cultures, traditions, and languages. The story of science is richest when we recognize its multiple origins and the dialogues between them.

For India, reclaiming this place in the story of science is not an act of nostalgia. It is an act of confidence. It is a reminder that the spirit of inquiry — the courage to ask questions, to observe, to experiment — has lived here for millennia. And as India rises once again on the scientific frontier, it is time the world remembered this, and time India remembered it too.