Answer: Matter itself without a conscience is not alive and life does not appear out of dead matter. Life has always existed, so it does not come suddenly into existence from matter. Life or conscience of a certain being takes a form (body) according to its karma, so we can say that conscience inhabits matter, not matter becomes conscious.

Also, conscience precedes matter because matter appears due to the personal karma of one conscience and the collective karma of many consciences. Thus, the outside world we see around us as matter is actually the karmic manifestation of conscience. It is the dream and the illusion of conscience. When we dream at night we also see various worlds and outside objects but when we wake up in the morning we realize they are not real but the effects of our minds and thoughts during the daytime.

However, not even when we wake up in the morning we are not awake as we are still in the samsaric dream, so the dream at night is just a dream within a dream.

We believe that a dream is something not real when compared with our waking life, which we regard as truly real. For Buddhas, however, neither our dreams during the night nor our perceptions during the day are real. So, the matter we see around us appears due to our minds and as a correspondence to our minds. If we have minds filled with cruelty, then the matter around us will appear as fire and various punishments and our bodies will be the bodies of hell dwellers. If our minds are filled with stinginess then our bodies will take the form of hungry spirits, if our minds are dominated by animal instincts for food and sex our bodies will take the form of animals and so on. Thus, again, mind precedes matter.