WHAT IS REAL?

For thousands of years philosophers have debated about what is real. Yet if you were to ask a common person on the street if the world that he or she sees is real, then the answer would be almost invariably yes.

The fact is that the human mind tends to assign external objective reality to its sensory perceptions. For example, take the perception of an apple: If an apple is placed on the kitchen table and we are then asked whether or not the apple is real or imaginary, almost everyone would agree that it is real because we can see it, touch it, smell it, taste it, and even hear its crunch as we bite into it. No one doubts the reality of the external world, because it is the realm of our common experience. According to the ancients, however, what we perceive as the external world is not external at all, but is rather an appearance in consciousness—a set of mental impressions created within our own mind. This may seem paradoxical, but such an understanding is consistent with modern scientific principles.

Take the process of visual perception. According to modern physics, an apple is composed of atoms. In order to see the apple, the atoms must emit electromagnetic waves that propagate from the apple to our eyes. When the electromagnetic waves impinge upon the retina of the eye, they induce certain structural and chemical changes. These changes, in turn, stimulate the nerve cells in the eye. Nerve impulses then travel along nerve fibers from the eye to the visual cortex of the brain, where they cause the cells of the brain to fire in certain patterns. Based upon this brain activity, a mental impression of the object is created in the mind.

At this point in the process, however, modern science must insert a big black box, indicating that the mechanics are unknown. We do not yet understand how brain activity structures a mental impression on the level of consciousness.

Once the mental impression has been created, it is then experienced as a pattern of color within the mind. We interpret this pattern of color intellectually as an apple on the table—but in truth, we never actually see the apple; all we see is a pattern of color created within our mind on the basis of brain activity.

This same process can be applied to all five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. In every case, the senses stimulate the brain, which then gives rise to a mental impression created within the mind. All we ever actually experience on the basis of sensory perception are our own mental impressions of the world; we never actually experience the world as it is in itself. Nevertheless, we externalize our mental impressions so that they are conceived as the objective realities of the world. In the final analysis, this represents a mistake of the intellect: The effect is mistaken for the cause.

In the Vedic tradition, this type of false attribution, where one thing is mistaken for another, was called superimposition (abhasya), which may be understood as a form of ignorance or illusion. The common analogy used to explain this concept concerns a snake and a rope: In a dark room we might see a coil of rope and mistake it for a snake. Because of this perception, adrenaline is pumped through the system, and we experience a state of fear. In truth there is no reason to be afraid. The fear has its source in the false notion that the rope is a snake. In this analogy, the coil of rope represents our mental impression of the world, while the snake represents our mistaken belief that this mental impression is an external object.

Plato used another analogy to explain the same concept: Since the time of their birth, a certain number of individuals are chained as a group within a cave, with the back of each of them facing the entrance.

Thus, the radical solution proposed by the ancients involved breaking the attachment to the physical senses and transcending the cave of the human mind. Only then can we enter into the light of the real world—the world as it is in itself. Those who accomplished this miraculous feat were said to be enlightened, and were deemed true seers.