Page 69 - Timelessness and the Reality of Fate

The Secret Beyond Matter 67

forget that these are actually perceptions. Yet no matter how complete and
flawless the perceptions in the mind may be, that does not alter the fact that
they are still perceptions. If someone is hit by a car while walking along the
road, or is trapped under a house that collapses during an earthquake, or is
surrounded by flames during a fire, or trips up and falls down the stairs, he
still experiences all these things in his mind, and is not actually confronting
the reality of what happens.
When someone falls under a bus, the bus in his mind hits the body in
his mind. The fact that he dies as a result, or that his body is completely shat-
tered, does not alter this reality. If something a person experiences in his
mind ends in death, Allah replaces the images He shows that person with
images belonging to the hereafter. Those who are unable to understand the
truth of this now on honest reflection will certainly do so when they die.

The Example of Connecting the Nerves in Parallel
Let us consider the car crash example of Politzer: In this accident, if the
crushed person's nerves travelling from the points of impact to his brain,
were connected to another person's, for instance Politzer's brain, with a par-
allel connection, at the moment the bus hit that person, it would also hit
Politzer, who was sitting at home at that moment. Better to say, all the feel-
ings experienced by that person having the accident would be experienced
by Politzer, just as the same song is listened to from two different loud-
speakers connected to the same tape recorder. Politzer would feel, see, and
experience the braking sound of the bus, the impact of the bus on his body,
the images of a broken arm and the shedding of blood, fracture aches, the
images of his entering the operation room, the hardness of the plaster cast,
and the feebleness of his arm.
Every other person connected to the man's nerves in parallel would
experience the accident from beginning to end just like Politzer. If the man
in the accident fell into a coma, they would all fall into a coma. Moreover, if
all the perceptions pertaining to the car accident could be recorded by some
sophisticated device and if all these perceptions were then transmitted to
another person, the bus would knock him down many times.
So, which one of the buses hitting those people is real? The materialist
philosophy has no consistent answer to this question. The right answer is
that they would all experience the car accident in all its details in their own
minds.