Einstein is known to have said, “I want to know the mind of God.” Nobel laureate Leon Lederman in his book The God Particle, writes about the quest for the single equation in physics that would combine Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum theory into a single unifying theory. This Theory of Everything is the holy grail of physics. Will we ever know the mind of God?

Let us examine what we already know about the human mind and its relation to the mind of God. We know that all of existence is a creation of our minds. It is as if our mind projects a movie that we mistake for reality. Our senses gather the material from which our mind creates our reality. This material is energy. Imagine, for a moment, that this energy is like jello, and our senses interact with this jello as it jiggles and wiggles, sending signals to the brain; our brain processes these signals and presents them to us as reality. But, this reality, for the most part, is not unique to us. It is a shared reality. The brains of the hundreds of billions of humans who have ever existed have created and recreated the same physical reality for all of humanity. When we see a tree, we all agree that it is a tree, we give it different names and have different associations with it, but we agree that it is a tree; this is true for all that exists. A rose by any other name is still a rose.

So, it seems, our brains are similarly wired for all humans. Every object or form in the universe has a corresponding pattern or representation in the human brain. This pattern is identical in all humans. It is this pattern that we recognize as our universe. We call this the objective universe because it is the same for all of us. The experience of this objective universe is different for each of us and hence subjective. We can all agree on what a rose looks like but usually have different opinions of its fragrance. The rose is objective, but the fragrance is subjective. The objective world has the same representation in each of our brains; it is almost as if there is a universal brain or mind- the mind of God.

According to physicists, all matter, energy, and forces were created fourteen billion years ago in what is known as the Big Bang. Everything that exists in the universe, including us humans, has evolved out of the Big Bang. Humans have a relatively recent history in the universe. Homo sapiens, the first modern humans, evolved from their hominid predecessors about 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. The three scientific theories that are the scaffolding for our understanding of the universe are Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and Quantum Theory. Darwin’s theory explains how from inert matter life evolved; Einstein’s Theory of Relativity explains space-time, energy, and matter and their interaction on a macro scale; the quantum theory explains the working of matter, energy, and forces at the smallest scale of subatomic particles. No single theory explains the macro world of planets and galaxies and the micro-world of quarks and leptons. Physicists are in search of the Theory of Everything or the mind of God.

Allow me to speculate why western science has been unable to know the mind of God and perhaps will never know it. My thesis is that western science has cleaved the universe into objective and subjective domains. The objective domain is, as previously described, the world that we perceive through our senses, that is, the world outside us; the subjective world is the world inside us. The mind of God does not make this distinction, I believe. There is only one in God’s mind: it is all that exists; there is no separation between the outside and the inside worlds. There can be no theory of everything until there is a theory of everything-the subjective and objective.

Vedic sages did not distinguish between the inside and the outside worlds; they came to a different understanding of Reality than the western scientists. Their view was that an individual could meld their mind with the mind of God; this is a radical view and easy to reject out of hand. Vedic practices of yoga and meditation are how ancient sages accomplished this union with God. In the west, we are only recently discovering the benefits of yoga and meditation; we have yet to realize the inherent potential in these practices.