Pan, pan, psychist.

Part two, death, evil and suffering.

So for many Hindus, the Brahmin of the early texts, as we've mentioned in the last section, is one of pure consciousness.

We say that Brahmin is identical with the world.

We mean that he encompasses all of matter.

And then we say that all matter is consciousness.

But why is it then that Hindus see fundamental reality in this way? Why do they think that the world is an ocean of pure consciousness?

There's a major tradition within Vedanta that says that consciousness is the stuff of which

all reality is made. Not everyone does, just to clarify,

generally most of the traditions would acknowledge that in some sense it's not just matter,

but consciousness that constitutes everything, right? So it's sometimes linked to panpsychism.

Why is a good question. There are a number of reasons, but one of the most important ones is I think for, let's say, the Vedantic traditions, also the Kashmiri Shiva tradition, which is a very developed sort of super idealist monism. They would say that we can see it. We can always confirm that reality is made of consciousness at any given moment in any given context,

because simply by reflecting on all things, anything that we can know, see, experience is

always constituted of consciousness. Right. So it affects that kind of twist of ontology that in

the West phenomenology touches on that says, look, is it that

my telephone here is made out of plastic and metal? Or is it that it is made out of my consciousness?

If I touch it, the sensations are consciousness, the smoothness, the sound of it, the visuality

are all consciousness. So someone like the famous

medieval philosopher Abanava Gupta, Kashmir is Shive, it's from Kashmir, he said, we're always

self-reflexively confirming that consciousness is the true character of everything. And I can see it,

even if I'm not perceiving anything else, even if I take out all the

specific contents, I can perceive it as the one thing that's always left over. In the dark, in my

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