(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be beneficial!)

Teachers tell us that how we perceive things is an indication of the karma we brought from our past.

Even within the human realm, all of us have our own individual karma. Human beings look much the same, but we perceive things utterly differently, and we each live in our own unique, separate, individual world. As Kalu Rinpoche says:

“If a hundred people sleep and dream, each of them will experience a different world in his dream. Everyone’s dream might be said to be true, but it would be meaningless to ascertain that only one person’s dream was the true world and all others were fallacies. There is truth for each perceiver according to the karmic patterns conditioning his perceptions.” (italics mine) (source: Rigpa Glimpse of the Day, April 16, 2011)

I’d like to tweek this slightly to express an insight I’ve had over the years that keeps returning to me: perception is karma! The fact that I perceive something in the way I perceive it is my karma.

The universe that we inhabit and our shared perception of it are the results of a common karma. ~ HH XIV Dalai Lama

Example: If I perceive some situation to be an obstacle to what I want, that perception is my karma.

“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” – Shakespeare

Another way to put this? We are fooled by our own projections into thinking that what we perceive is solidly “real.”

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche – re dreaming together = reality: perhaps dreaming together is what we all agree to call reality! (Twitter msg. Aug 15’10)

And:

“It was a shared dream we agreed to call Reality.” <source: from the preface of the play called “Doubt” by John Patrick Shanley; now, a movie starring Meryl Street and Philip Seymour Hoffman>

The mantra of some politicians is “Perception is reality.” In other words, if they can get us to perceive an issue in a certain way, that becomes our reality. And if we take the next step and cling\get attached to this perception, it then becomes our karma.

That’s why it is said “change your mind and you change your karma.”

What has been described above is what we might call the profound level of the understanding of karma. If we can attain this profound understanding, then we can cut through our karma and be liberated from it.

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