 warns us against unwittingly subscribing to the childish idea of "seeing is believing." This idea, known in philosophical parlance as naïve realism, is the primitive belief system in which one imagines that reality is the way it appears to be. This belief system is based on an unquestioning trust in our senses as conveyors of reality. However, such trust is highly questionable because the senses provide us a link to reality that is ontologically inadequate and operationally unreliable. Let's see how:
1. Ontologically inadequate: The senses being material can never give us access to the nonmaterial dimensions of reality: God, the soul, the spiritual world.
2. Operationally unreliable: The senses subject us to a variety of misperception by making us see what doesn't exist, as in the case of, say, mirages.
No wonder then that Gita wisdom deplores as misled those who unthinkingly trust their senses and imagine that what looks good is actually good. Such people self-righteously sentence themselves to the sufferings of material existence. Worse still, they deprive themselves of the life of meaning and fulfilment that awaits them at the invisible spiritual level in loving service to Krishna.
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Based on Bhagavad Gita Chapter 15, Text 10
The Bhagavad-gita (15.10) warns us against unwittingly subscribing to the childish idea of “seeing is believing.” This idea, known in philosophical parlance as naïve realism, is the primitive belief system in which one imagines that reality is the way it appears to be. This belief system is based on an unquestioning trust in our senses as conveyors of reality. However, such trust is highly questionable because the senses provide us a link to reality that is ontologically inadequate and operationally unreliable. Let’s see how:
1. Ontologically inadequate: The senses being material can never give us access to the nonmaterial dimensions of reality: God, the soul, the spiritual world.
2. Operationally unreliable: The senses subject us to a variety of misperception by making us see what doesn’t exist, as in the case of, say, mirages.
No wonder then that Gita wisdom deplores as misled those who unthinkingly trust their senses and imagine that what looks good is actually good. Such people self-righteously sentence themselves to the sufferings of material existence. Worse still, they deprive themselves of the life of meaning and fulfilment that awaits them at the invisible spiritual level in loving service to Krishna.
