Page 68 - Timelessness and the Reality of Fate

66 TIMELESSNESS AND THE REALITY OF FATE

demonstrated scientifically. However, when it comes to the bus hitting
someone, not just to his feeling the metal of the indoor-in other words when
the sensation of touch is more violent and painful-they think that this fact
somehow no longer applies. However, pain or heavy blows are also per-
ceived in the brain. Someone who is hit by a bus feels all the violence and
pain of the event in his brain.
In order to understand this better, it will be useful to consider our
dreams. A person may dream of being hit by a bus, of opening his eyes in
hospital later, being taken for an operation, the doctors talking, his family's
anxious arrival at the hospital, and that he is crippled or suffers terrible
pain. In his dream, he perceives all the images, sounds, feelings of hardness,
pain, light, the colors in the hospital, all aspects of the incident in fact, very
clearly and distinctly. They are all as natural and believable as in real life. At
that moment, if the person who is having that dream were told it was only a
dream, he would not believe it. Yet all that he is seeing is an illusion, and the
bus, hospital and even the body he sees in his dream have no physical coun-
terpart in the real world. Although they have no physical counterparts, he
still feels as if a 'real body' has been hit by a 'real bus.'
In the same way, there is no validity to the materialists' objections along
the lines of "You realize that the real nature of matter when someone hits
you," "You cannot doubt whether you see the original of matter when some-
one kicks your knee," "You run away when you meet a savage dog," "When
a bus has hit you, you understand whether it is in your brain or not," or "In
that case, go and stand on the motorway in front of the oncoming traffic". A
sharp blow, the pain from a dog's teeth or a violent slap are not evidence
that you are dealing with the matter itself. As we have seen, you can experi-
ence the same things in dreams, with no corresponding physical counter-
parts. Furthermore, the violence of a sensation does not alter the fact that the
sensation in question occurs in the brain. This is a clearly proven scientific
fact.
The reason why some people think that a fast-moving bus on the
motorway or an accident caused by that bus are striking proofs of the fact
they are dealing with the physical existence of matter is that the image con-
cerned is seen and felt as so real that it deceives one. The images around
them, for instance the perfect perspective and depth of the motorway, the
perfection of the colors, shapes and shadows they contain, the vividness of
sound, smell and hardness, and the completeness of the logic within that
image can deceive some people. On account of this vividness, some people