Well, how do you differentiate between perception through sensation and perception through a particular sense-organ?

Question: Well, how do you differentiate between perception through sensation and perception through a particular sense-organ?

Shri Shri Thakur: The perception which comes while partially penetrating into an object and yet remaining above it, is what I call sensation – just like when we feel the shock from a electric battery. On the other hand what we see through our eyes or hear through our ears does not affect our being. Sage Kanad or Kekule's vision about the dancing of atoms and molecules was verily with sensation. Even St. Augustine¹, Swedenborg² etc., what I have heard, seemed to have similar thing. The sensation of a saadhak is like the reflection of some light on a piece of glass – the glass may apparently look coloured but actually it does not become like that.

 Foot notes:

¹ – "Saint Augustine – one of the four great fathers of the Latin Church. None can deny the greatness of Augustine's soul – his enthusiasm, his unceasing search after truth, his affectionate disposition, his ardour, his self-devotion. No single name has ever exercised such power over the Christian Church, and no mind ever made so deep an impression upon Christian thought. He was more profound than Ambrose, his spiritual father. In him scholastics and mysteries popes and the opponents of the papal supremacy, have seen their champion. He was the function on which Luther rested the thoughts by which he sought to lift the past of the Church out of the rut"

² – "It is not the exceptional individual in this world who is to enjoy this supreme vision by means of some process of self-discipline or self-abnegation: it is rather the soul-principle in every individual that at all times possesses the universal knowledge, as that of a queen in her realm, and that makes the mind and the senses in their respective lower planes to acquire a knowledge of both the macrocosm and the microcosm — of the universe at large and of the smaller but equally perfect universe of its own body. This knowledge even includes many things that never come to the individual's conscious intelligence, but remain in the secret and sacred sanctuary of the subconscious, where only the universal control of a divine guardian is active…..the delights which the body and soul are capable of enjoying together are not genuine and true unless they have some further connection, and terminate in the veneration and love of God ; that is, unless they have reference to this love and ultimate end, in a connection with which the sense of delight most essentially consists……..Swedenborg's transition from the attitude of the rigidly mechanical physicist and the speculative philosopher to that of the illumined seer and the exponent of a philosophy no longer human only, but angelic constitutes an experience unique in the annals of human thought." - Swedenborg and the 'Sapientia angelica' by Frank Sewall

[Ref: Nana Prasange Vol.1, Ninth Edition, Dec-2001, Page 46-47]