Joe: We don’t live by thinking, it’s too slow and passing. Even the way we produce words one after another, the way we feel on waking up, all that has deep subconcious mechanisms within that “illusion”. If a bee stings you, you feel immediate pain. A second later you can say, well, it was really nothing it’s all illusions on the screen. Sort of a lame workaround as far as I’m concerned/ A bee sting is faster and no way less real compared to a thought in your head that it’s just a picture on the screen which is a mere abstraction.
James: It’s true that a bee sting and the thoughts in your head are in the same order of reality, but it’s not true that they are real. We believe them to be real because they are both experiences, one gross and the other subtle, but if you listen to the teachings of Vedanta with without beliefs and opinions…if you just follow the logic of the teachings…you can’t help but conclude that the bee stings and the thoughts are seemingly or apparently real. They are not actually real because they come and go. A bee sting, like a thought, begins and ends. Reality doesn’t begin or end. It is unborn and therefore eternal.
But if you don’t know that you are beginningless and endless then you identify with your thoughts and experiences, which change all the time. So there is dissatisfaction, the mind doesn’t come to rest. It is always disturbed. It knows that what it is experiencing is about to end and it is anxious to know whether then next experience will bring pleasure or pain.Â
