Peace by Tsem Rinpoche

Author:Tsem Rinpoche
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Career Press
Published: 2015-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

15 PEACE ENTAILS…

… Cutting the Cycle of Catch 22

Taking responsibility is not about who is right or wrong. Taking responsibility is about finding a solution.

No one gives us suffering. No one has put suffering in front of us. We create the suffering because of our wrong view and our wrong perception of what is going on around us. This could be wrong perception of a person or a message, of what is going on around us or of what is being communicated, and our reaction to that wrong perception.

When we react to that wrong perception, more wrong perception arises. For example, we may have spent a lot of time on a favorite shirt in our favorite color; we have taken care of it, sent it to the cleaners, dry-cleaned it and done everything we could to maintain it. Someone might then come along and say to us, “You know, that shirt is nice but you should wear this color and this type of shirt instead because it will make you look much better.”

That person may have been trying to be open by sharing his opinion with us and he did not mean to criticize. But we might have a wrong perception. When we were very young, we might have been a fashion victim and been criticised about our clothes for a long, long time. Recently, we became fashion conscious, so if anyone says anything to us about our clothes, we become highly sensitive, although it is not a big deal to anyone else.

We shout, we scream, we say, “I don’t want to be his friend anymore, I don’t want to be near him anymore.” We take a very small situation, blow it out of proportion and make it very big.

You might call it miscommunication. I like to call it misperception. What people say to us and what people perceive of us is completely different from what we perceive within the same situation. How we act and react to the other person is dependent on how narrow or broad our mind is. If our mind is very narrow—due to the lack of exposure, lack of study and, mostly, the lack of application of Dharma—we will be very sensitive and get very angry, we will hold grudges, always show a sour face and always show ourselves not to be wrong.

Wrong perception is based on wrong experiences. Wrong experiences arise from wrong perception. Wrong perception is again fed by wrong experience. This becomes a Catch 22 situation. It goes back and forth, back and forth, becoming stronger and stronger. Most of us operate on wrong perception fed by wrong experience. What is a wrong experience? When someone tells us that our shirt could be changed to something better and we become very insulted or hurt by the comment. This is because previous experiences have taught us that that is the way we should react: we reacted this way before so we must also react this way now.

The danger in this is that while

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