March 27, 2014: The visible, the seen world, is a conglomeration of action and reaction. The world that you see before you, the objects that are presented before the senses, the solid substances and the tangible presentations in front of us, are not what they are. Experience as it is presented through the senses is nothing but a network of reactions. The way in which reactions are set up by objects in their relation to the senses and the mind, produces an illusion in our consciousness. Depth can be seen where there is only a flat surface, as in a cinema, for example. There is only a flat screen. There is no depth or three-dimensional picture. But when you go and see a picture, you see a three-dimensional personality and movement. You can see miles of distance projected through the screen, though the screen is only a surface. It is only two-dimensional. If you have a concave or a convex glass put on your eyes, a lens of a particular kind, you will see ups and downs where there is only a level ground, and vice versa. Your vision is, therefore, not trustworthy. Your tongue will tell you different things when your bodily temperature is of a different degree. Tastes and visions, auditions and touches, smells, etc. are not reliable agents of knowledge. They produce an illusion of experience on account of a particular type of reaction they set up due to a given type of contact established between them and the objects of a given nature at a given moment of time. This is why we say that the world is relative. It is relative in the sense that every experience is dependent on some factor or the other. The world is not made up of one or two factors alone but hundreds and thousands of constituents form the world of experience. Just as a piece of cloth is made up of several threads—one thread cannot make a cloth—the world is not made up of one type of experience, one factor alone that is conditioned. The mind of man, being wedded to the report of the senses, is able to grasp only an aspect of experience, totally oblivious of other factors which are also equally contributory to this particular type of experience. As medical men sometimes tell us, a particular visible form of disease is not always caused by one factor alone. It is an effect of cumulative conditions that were gradually growing from within, without our knowledge of them. You do not suddenly fall sick. You have been tending towards it for days together or perhaps for months. It is not a sudden experience. The whole universe is made up of items of determining factors. It is one single pattern created by God, if you would like to call it a creation at all, and no factor of it can be isolated from other factors.

                                                ---Excerpts from Sri Swami Krishnananda’s preaching from Katha Upanishad