Page 50 - Eternity Has Already Begun

ETERNITY HAS ALREADY BEGUN

George Politzer, for example, an ardent Marxist and one of the
twentieth century's biggest advocates of the materialist philosophy,
gave the "bus example" supposedly as an important evidence on this
subject. According to Politzer, even those philosophers who espouse
the fact that we merely deal with the copy of matter in our brains
run away when they see a bus about to run them over. 8
Samuel Johnson, another famous materialist, was told that one
can never have direct experience of the original matter, and tried to
deny this reality by giving one of them a kick. 9
There are similar examples in the books of famous materialists
such as Marx, Engels, Lenin, and others along with impetuous sen-
tences such as, "You understand the real nature of matter when you
are slapped in the face."
The point where materialists are mistaken is that they think the

concept of "perception" only applies to the sense of sight. In fact, all
sensations, such as touch, contact, hardness, pain, heat, cold and wet-
ness also form in the human brain, in precisely the same way that vi-
sual images are formed. For instance, someone who feels the cold
metal of the door as he gets off a bus, actually "feels the cold metal"
in his brain. This is a clear and well-known truth. As we have already
seen, the sense of touch forms in a particular section of the brain,
through nerve signals from the fingertips, for instance. It is not your
fingers that do the feeling. People accept this because it has been
demonstrated scientifically. However, when it comes to the bus hit-
ting someone, not just to his feeling the metal of the indoor—in oth-
er 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 perceived 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 talk-
ing, his family's arrival at the hospital, and that he is crippled or suf-

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