And it needs no mention that while it is possible that the known can be material or unconscious, the knower cannot be so. The knower should be conscious. It follows that the knower should be consciousness in substance and essence, and it is consciousness that knows phenomena. The accepted fact is that there is such a thing as knowledge, which should prove that not only is the knower a centre of consciousness but even the relation between the knower and the known has to be a process of consciousness. Further, as this relation between the knower and the known, namely, the process of knowing, has itself to be somehow connected with the object known, and its connection would be a second relation, which has now to be explained, the final conclusion would be that it is impossible to have a connection between the knower and the known unless the object also is a phenomenon of consciousness itself.
Consciousness knows consciousness through consciousness.
This is reality, the conclusion we arrive at by pure logical analysis. This inductively obtained conclusion is corroborated by the Upanishads which speak of the Supreme Absolute, willing itself to become a subtle causal form of potential being. This original potential condition is termed, in the Vedanta, Isvara, or the Supreme Creator. This latent potentiality of manifestation then gets accentuated into the faint outlines of the future contingence and form of the universe, and this state of universal manifested being is called Hiranyagarbha. There is a further process of completion of the functioning of manifestation when the outlines drawn in the earlier stage become ways for the grosser visible shape of the universe known as Virat.