Radhanath Swami on The Manufacturer's Manual

Reality is perceived according to our conditioning, according to our egoistic development in life. It is not possible to be purely objective because we are subjects - we are all subjected to the family we are born in, we are subjected to the community, to the race, to the sex, we are all subjected to the educators who were telling us what they wanted us to believe from the beginning of our life. So how can we be objective? We are all subjective. Scholars try to be objective but they cannot be, in a pure sense. This is the problem with direct sense perception.

Knowledge of the world we perceive with our own senses and the knowledge which we acquire from other conditioned souls who have the same illusions that we do, and the consequent realizations are based on an ascending mode of knowledge - everyone trying to figure things out. As against this, revealed knowledge is evidences that are revealed by the Absolute Truth, by the Supreme Lord.

As a simple analogy, when you buy a complicated piece of machinery there is an owner’s manual. Now, who writes the owner’s manual? The manufacturers. They know how it works, they know what it can do and they now what it is for. Similarly, when the Absolute Truth has created this whole cosmic manifestation that creator, that manufacturer gives us the manuals that cultivate us. The Holy Scriptures have been revealed throughout the ages in different places, in different times according to the capacity of the people to digest. But the Truth is the same.