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quite a large number of animals whose sensory faculty is far inferior to that of man. We know that many of them do not possess the faculty of seeing or hearing. Some are denied the gustatory faculty and some the olfactory. Those beings do not, really, have the experience of light, sound, taste or smell. The world of experience of man extends as far as his sense-organs allow it to do, and it will be sheer ignorance if the real world were to be restricted by us to what is projected by our limited knowledge. Were we blessed with more sense-organs, we might possibly have extended our world of experience still further. Scientific appliances have enabled us to do so. This is mentioned only to emphasize that our knowledge is commensurate with our capacity to know, with the powers of our senses to understand and grasp. What is true of the visible world is also true of the existence of the invisible one. Whenever people ask me, "Does God exist?", "Does the soul exist?", I put this counter-question to them, "Do you possess the ability to experience the soul and God?" The real question is that of ability and not of the existence, or otherwise, of God. If you have the ability you will surely experience those truths which are beyond your reach now; in the absence of that ability, those truths will necessarily seem untruths. If some vague fear compels us to accept truths they cannot be real truths, for real Truth is what is experienced as such.
Twenty-five centuries ago a seeker after Truth fell at the feet of Lord Buddha, beseeching his guidance. "How do you visualize it?" he said. "What is your conception?" The Enlightened One said, "What I have conceived may not help you much since you don't have the eyes competent enough to visualise Truth. Whatever I may say will be taken as untruth because you cannot realize the reality of what you cannot experience." Narrating an anecdote the Buddha continued, "I had been to a village where they brought me a blind man, requesting me to convince him of the existence of light. I told them it was no better than madness since he hadn't the instrument of vision, namely the eyes. They should rather take him to a doctor who could rectify
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