The Brahma Sūtras present a vision in which consciousness, identified with Brahman, is the sole ultimate reality and the very ground of all that appears as matter. Brahman is portrayed as pure, non-dual awareness, the inner ruler and Self (ātman) of all beings, from which the entire universe of names and forms arises. Matter—whether gross or subtle, including body, senses, and mind—does not enjoy any independent status; it is an effect (kārya) whose being is wholly dependent on Brahman as cause (kāraṇa). In this way, consciousness is not one principle among others, but the substratum in which all plurality appears and upon which it relies.

The Sūtras further clarify this dependence by affirming Brahman as both the intelligent (nimitta) and material (upādāna) cause of the universe. The world of matter is thus a manifestation within consciousness, not a second, self-standing reality alongside it. Traditional interpretation describes this manifestation as an apparent transformation (vivarta): Brahman seems to become the world without undergoing any real modification in its own nature. Analogies such as clay and pot or spider and web are used to suggest that while forms change, the underlying reality remains untouched.

From this standpoint, the experienced material world belongs to a dependent, empirical order of reality, while Brahman as pure consciousness is the absolute. The Sūtras reject any doctrine that posits an eternal, independent matter, such as the dualism of Sāṅkhya, which separates puruṣa and prakṛti. Instead, all diversity and materiality are treated as appearances within the one consciousness, sustained by it yet never truly other than it. Consciousness is self-luminous and does not require matter either to exist or to know; matter, by contrast, is intelligible only within consciousness.

This understanding has profound implications for the status of individual experience. The individual self (jīva) appears as a limited consciousness because of association with the body-mind complex, which is material and subject to change. Yet the Brahma Sūtras maintain that the true nature of this self is none other than Brahman, the changeless witness of all states. Bondage arises from misidentification with what is material and transient, while liberation (mokṣa) consists in recognizing that the conscious Self was never truly bound by matter at all. In that knowledge, the world may continue to appear, but it no longer obscures the underlying non-dual reality of consciousness.