I read Reply #55889, but not everything in the embedded links, and thought about it.
For the question “Why is this not a ‘big deal?'”, I must admit I do not (yet) see the “big deal” with it in terms of realizing nibbana. I mean no disrespect nor to trivialize this in anyway; I’m just churning all of this in my mind at the moment — very slowly.
(1)The fact that subjective reality differs from objective reality (for example colors are mind-made), all of us must have encountered this fact in our lives. A couple of examples from my mundane life:
(a) I used to play Chinese chess, a board game with 32 pieces, 16 red and 16 green. I once played with someone who was color blind, between red and green no less. He often had to pick up a piece to examine it closely. I realized that my subjective reality of the chess board with is pieces was very different from his.
(b) During covid time, a doctor friend got covid bad. He lost the senses of smell and taste, on top of flu symptoms. Food, whether a breakfast taco or an omelet, “tasted” like a chew toy. It was easy to see that “taste” did not come from the taco or the omelet.
The question then is “So what?”, in the sense of “We know that this is mind-made, so what can you do about it?”. In a way, this reality is all we have: it’s the reality for a particular person (or any sentient being) at that time, dictated by paticca samuppada.
The more relevant question, at least for me, is how we process that reality: is it leading further into samsara or to nibbana?
My covid friend knew that “taste” did not come from the food, but he experienced dukkha vedana just the same, which quickly led to domanassa vedana.
Another situation could easily be something opposite: someone experiences a sukha vedana (from something mind-made), which leads to sonamassa vedana, which leads to craving of more of that somanassa vedana.
There are many old posts about this: that a puthujjana spends his time seeking sukha/somanassa vedana and avoiding dukha / domanassa vedana, since this is all he knows in the absence of Buddha Dhamma. He is not aware of the 3rd kind of happiness: niramisa sukha or nibbana.
All of this is to say that vedana is the critical juncture, at least for me, ie, seeing that sukha/somanassa vedana as anicca, dukkha, anatta.
Understanding that subjective reality — experiences of the five senses produced by saññā — differs from objective reality; how does this lead to magga phala is still beyond me.
Thank you!