Authority of the Senses
Our senses are sacred and spiritual. The body is the instrument of the soul. “The body is the living temple of God.” There is nothing profane or impure about the body. The only limitation in terms of the body is the identification of consciousness in terms of our happiness or peace on earth with the body. As Jesus said, “Man shall not live by bread alone.” By this statement he acknowledged that human life requires attention and care in its material provision and well-being (“bread”), but he also express that something else is required for our living. We also live by spirit and should conduct our life by spirit.
Why should we not totally accept the authority of our senses? See what reality the “light of the world” brings you: Scientists have been aware of the alarming limitations of man’s senses. Anyone who has ever thrust a a glass prism into a sunbeam to see the shadow colors of the solar spectrum refracted on a wall has looked upon the entire range of visible light. For the human eye is sensitive only to the narrow band of radiation that falls between red and violet. A few one hundred thousandths of a centimeter in wave length makes the difference between visibility and invisibility. Our sense faculty of “vision” fails to respond to most “lights” of the world. Yet we know that the sun emits many more lights that are used by our minds and upon which we rely in our daily experience: infrared rays, ultraviolet, x-rays, radium, radio, cosmic and gamma rays—all detected in various ways. The world would appear far different if our eyes were sensitive, for example, to x-rays!
A curious order of the universe runs through our perceptions. Existence is known to us other than merely through our objective perceptions, and understanding the limitations of the senses can augment the user of our higher faculties. The mind colors even the perceptions brought to it by the senses, and the quality of “things” depends on the universe of order that is within man subjectively. We act as if “green,” and “tickling,” and “bitter,” and “sweet” were existing the atoms, but they are not as properties of the external objects. Such qualities exist in opinion and not in reality. They have been ascribed by the mind. Upon analysis we readily see—as did Democritus and Galileo as scientists—that the mind is the authority behind the senses. There simply is no “objective world” for us. The meaning of the world as brought to us by fact of objectivity is hardly knowable, since it is always interpreted within us by the mind.
The authority of the senses alone is a contradiction. We act as if we believe in it, seeking pleasures which we know are evanescent; yet it dashes us at every turn.
The sage, the unenlightened, the beggar, the king—all know that life on earth is temporary; everything on earth dies. All progress, reform, luxuries, vanities, wealth and discovery will certainly end in time. Somehow we refuse to believe this, clinging to the ephemeral, weeping at its going, craving its coming. When all proceeds pleasantly according to our comforts we are optimists; when the current of the eventual goes agains us we become pessimists.
What is most precious to us? Our house may burn down; our business may fail; we may lose money or even the association of dear ones—but if we lose the authority over our spiritual remembrance we have lost everything. Losing sight of God, the equilibrium of our life is doomed. Without our spiritual idealism as the foundation of our life, eventually the objective structures of life will collapse and crush us. The authority of the soul must pervade even the awareness and perception of our senses.
—Swami Kamalananda
Frontiers of the Spirit