Page 32 - Quick Grasp of Faith 1

30 QUICK GRASP OF FAITH - 1

Both the book you are now reading and the boundless
landscape you see when you gaze at the horizon fit into this
tiny space. This adjustment in scale holds true also for the dif-
ferent perceptions we obtain through our other senses.

24. What does it mean “not to have direct
experience of the real matter”?

All the information that we have about the world in which
we live is conveyed to us by our five senses. The world we
know of consists of what our eyes see, our hands feel, our
noses smell, our tongues taste, and our ears hear. Modern
research reveals that our perceptions are only responses cre-
ated in the brain by electrical signals. In this regard, we mere-
ly deal with the copy images reaching our brains of people,
colours, and everything we own in the external world.
For instance, let us take a piece of fruit: Electrical signals
pertaining to the taste, smell, appearance, and hardness of
the fruit, reach our brains through our nerves and build up a
picture of the fruit there. If the nerves that travel to the brain
were disrupted, the perceptions relating to the fruit would dis-
appear. What we perceive as a fruit is actually a collection of
perceptions reaching our brains. The fruit exists in the outside
world, but we can never know its original external existence.
In other words, we can never have direct experience of the
original of this “collection of perceptions” that exists on the
outside. We have no means of getting outside our brains to
contact anything: we have only our perceptions.