The baffling complexity of the world’s network of communications serves only to link up eye and forms, ear and sounds, nose and smells, tongue and tastes, body and tangibles, mind and ideas. All the interminable problems of the world arising out of sense-contact are traceable to the eighteen elements at its base:

1. eye - form - eye-consciousness
2. ear - sound - ear-consciousness
3. nose - smell - nose-consciousness
4. tongue - taste - tongue-consciousness
5. body - tangible - body-consciousness
6. mind - idea - mind - consciousness.

The Buddha puts across to us this deep truth in just four simple lines.

The world has arisen in the six.
The world has commune in the six.
Holding on to these very six.
The world finds itself in a fix.