The Creation of Pleasure and Pain : 14.

The whole world is thus mistaken in its totality. The mistake we have committed through the mind in its cognition is not partial, but total. There is a total, complete upsetting of values, so that we are literally standing on our heads instead of standing on our legs. What is above seems to be below. What is to the right seems to be to the left. If you stand on the bank of the river Ganga and look at your own reflection on the water, you will see that the head, which is topmost, is the bottommost there, and the feet, which are the lowermost, appear uppermost. And if you see yourself in a mirror, the right eye is seen as the left, the left is seen as the right. In the Kathopanishad it is told that the world of perception is distorted completely in the same way that objects are seen in a mirror. That which is right is seen to the left, and so on.


It is not merely this distortion that has taken place, but much more. It is a reflection, but also at the same time, it is a limitation. It is a distortion in many ways. This is the reason why the mind is unable to understand what has actually happened to it. The mind has the inveterate habit of believing what it sees. Whatever it sees, it trusts fully, not knowing that the seeing may not be correct. We have the famous instance of eyes with cataracts seeing the moon as double. If we trust our mind on the basis of the perception of the moon through cataract eyes, we are mistaken. We see two moons, while the moon is one. We cannot entirely believe what we see.

But the mind believes what it sees through the senses. The mind perceives the world through the sense organs. Through the eyes it sees, through the ears it hears, and so on. But these five senses are distorted lenses, through which a completely wrong picture of the object outside is presented to the mental cognition. Unfortunately, the mind has no other avenue of knowledge. It has to trust the eyes, trust the ears, trust the palate, and other things. But all these senses are distorted structures. We can compare them to broken lenses completely out of order, which will never give a correct picture of the object outside. But what can we do? These are the only lenses available, and these are the only avenues of perception; there is no other way of knowing truth, and we see things only as these are. So this is the predicament we are in. This is the world for us.

Swami Krishnananda

To be continued  ...