Page 251 - For Men of Understanding

ry nerve travelling from receptors in the nose to the brain would interrupt the
sense of smell completely. Simply put, that apple is nothing but the interpreta-
tion of electrical signals by the brain.
Also consider the sense of distance. The empty space between you and this
page is only a sense of emptiness formed in your brain. Objects that appear
distant in your view also exist in the brain. For instance, someone watching the
stars at night assumes that they are millions of light-years away, yet the stars
are within himself, in his vision centre. While you read these lines, actually you
are not inside the room you assume you're in; on the contrary, the room is
inside you. Perceiving your body makes you think that you're inside it.
However, your body, too, is a set of images formed inside your brain.
The same applies to all other perceptions. When you believe you're hear-
ing the sound of the television in the next room, for instance, actually you are
experiencing those sounds inside your brain. The noises you think are coming
from meters away and the conversation of the person right beside you-both are
perceived in the auditory centre in your brain, only a few cubic centimetres in
size. Apart from this centre of perception, no concepts such as right, left, front
or behind exist. That is, sound does not come to you from the right, from the
left, or from above; there is no direction from which sound "really" comes.
Similarly, none of the smells you perceive reach you from any distance
away. You suppose that the scents perceived in your centre of smell are those
of outside objects. However, just as the image of a rose exists in your visual
centre, so its scent is located in your olfactory centre. You can never have direct
contact with the original sight or smell of that rose that exists outside.
To us, the "external world" is merely a collection of the electrical signals
reaching our brains simultaneously. Our brains process these signals, and we
live without recognizing our mistaken assumption that these are the actual,
original versions of matter existing in the "external world." We are misled,
because by means of our senses, we can never reach the matter itself.
Again, our brain interprets and attributes meanings to the signals that we
assume to be "external." Consider the sense of hearing, for example. In fact,
our brain interprets and transforms sound waves reaching our ear into sym-
phonies. Music, too, is a perception formed by-and within-our brain. In the

same manner, when we see colours, different wavelengths of light are all that
reaches our eyes, and our brain transforms these wavelengths into colours.
There are no colours in the "external world." Neither is the apple red, nor is
the sky blue, nor the trees green. They are as they are only because we per-
ceive them to be so.
Even the slightest defect in the eye's retina can cause colour blindness.

Matter and the External World 249