Page 165 - Allah is Known through Reason

actually experiencing the sound inside your brain. You can prove neither

that a room exists next to yours, nor that a sound comes from the televi-
sion in that room. Both the sound you think to be coming from metres
away and the conversation of a person right next to you are perceived in
a centre of hearing a few centimetres square in your brain. Apart from in
this centre of perception, no concept such as right, left, front or behind
exists. That is, sound does not come to you from the right, from the left or
from the air; there is no direction from which sound comes.
The smells that you perceive are like that too; none of them reaches
you from a great distance. You suppose that the end-effects formed in your
centre of smell are the smell of the objects in the external world. However,
just as the image of a rose is in your centre of vision, so the smell of the
rose is in your centre of smell; there is neither a rose nor an odour per-
taining to it in the external world.
The "external world" presented to us by our perceptions is merely a col-
lection of electrical signals reaching our brains. Throughout our lives, our
brains process these signals and we live without recognising that we are
mistaken in assuming that these are the original versions of things existing
in the "external world". We are misled because we can never reach the
matters themselves by means of our senses.
Moreover, again our brains interpret and attribute meaning to signals
that we assume to be the "external world". For example, let us consider the

sense of hearing. Our brains transform the sound waves in the "external
world" into a symphony. That is to say, music is also a perception created
by our brains. In the same manner, when we see colours, what reach our
eyes are merely electrical signals of different wavelengths. Again our
brains transform these signals 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 just because we perceive them to be so.
The "external world" depends entirely on the perceiver.
Even the slightest defect in the retina of the eye causes colour blind-
ness. Some people perceive blue as green, some red as blue, and some
perceive all colours as different tones of grey. At this point, it does not mat-

A Very Different Approach to Matter 165