"Man is behind many closed doors, imprisoned. Knowledge comes first to the senses; then the senses carry it through the nervous system; it reaches the brain, and then the brain delivers it to the mind; and then the mind delivers it to you, to the consciousness. It is a vast process, and you don't have any direct approach to the source of knowledge.

"It happened in the Second World War… A soldier was hurt very deeply in his toe and the leg, and the toe was in severe pain. The pain was so much the soldier became unconscious. The surgeons decided to operate on the whole leg. It was so damaged it could not be saved, so they cut it off. The soldier was unconscious so he never knew what happened.

"Next morning, when the soldier came back to consciousness, he again complained about the pain in his toe. Now this was ridiculous: when the leg didn't exist, the toe and all the leg had been completely removed, how could pain exist in a toe which didn't exist?

"The nurse laughed and she said, 'You are imagining, or you are in a hallucination.' She uncovered the blanket and showed to the soldier: 'Your whole leg has been removed, so no pain can exist now in the toe because the toe doesn't exist.'

"But the soldier persisted. He said, 'I can see that the leg is not there and I can understand your viewpoint – and I am ridiculous, but I still say the pain is severe and unbearable.'

"Doctors were called; surgeons consulted amongst themselves. This was absolutely absurd! The mind was playing some trick. But they tried to understand what was happening. Then the whole body was x-rayed, and this was the thing they came upon: the nerve that was carrying the message of the pain in the toe was still carrying it. It was trembling in the same way as it would tremble if there was a toe and there was pain in it.

"When the nerve is bringing a message, of course the brain has to decode it. The brain has no way to check whether the nerve is carrying a right message, a wrong message, real, unreal."