One Object, Many Perceptions

“Your mother is my sister. My sister is someone else’s daughter. She is Tony’s sweetest love, and Sam’s bitter enemy.” She is one object, experienced in various ways. What makes for these very different perceptions of this one person? People’s minds. The mind is what determines our experience.

Furthermore, this truth also tells us that the sense of something being good or bad is not in the object itself. If it truly possessed the quality of being good or bad, then there couldn’t be this dual experience of it. It could only be experienced as good or bad. And that would be consistent, whoever was experiencing it.

So we can see that all of our experience come from our own mind and way of thinking. And it’s on that basis that the Dharma teaches us to work at changing the mind. Trying to change the external objects will be exhausting. But if you change your mind for the better, everything else will be changed for the better too.

Drupon Khen Rinpoche. Thrangu Sekhar Retreat Centre. 4 February 2016.