Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Quality is Subjective


On the whole, we naturally tend to trust our everyday perceptions; we assume their validity without it even occurring to us to question them. We naively believe that the way we perceive things is identical with the way things are. And so, because events and things, including the self, appear to have objective reality, we conclude, tacitly and often without any reflection at all, that they do in fact have an objective reality. Only through the process of careful analysis can we see that this is not so, that our perceptions do not accurately reflect objective reality.

. . . all sensory experiences of the external world arise through the coalescence of three factors: a sensory faculty, an object, and our mental perception. This perception of an external object then gives rise to a subjective evaluation: we find the object either attractive or unattractive. We then project desirability or undesirability onto the object, feeling the quality to be an objective reality in the object.

---His Holiness the Dalai Lama--- 

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