Perception is a big part of our existence. We perceive and we draw conclusions, and the conclusions that we draw have impact on us. Not everybody draws the same conclusions from the same set of circumstances; not everybody sees things the same way.
There’s an app now called Fandango, which has to do with movies, and each movie has something they call “rotten tomatoes” and people vote as to whether they liked the movie or not, and they’ll give you a read-out, and it will say 18%, or 32%, or 92%, or 88%, or some percentage of the people who went to see the movie liked it.
Now, what I find interesting is that no movie has 0; they all got some percentage, which means for some of the people who went to see it the movie was a great experience. Maybe it was raining outside and their great experience was they got out of the rain, but they had a great experience. Other people didn’t like it at all.
I have found, unusually, that if a movie is over 85% it’s probably worth seeing, if it’s in the 20% range it probably isn’t worth seeing. Yet, for some people, it was worth seeing and they had a wonderful experience at that movie. Their perception of what went on was positive, others perception was they had to walk out.
Well, that means that lots of people can be in the same place, apparently doing the same thing, but an entirely different set of circumstances are going on inside of them.
When we were with our sheikh, one of the things that should have been noticeable was that his demeanor and his appearance were consistent; and his demeanor was kind, and loving, and generous, and merciful. And there was a whole room of people there whose attitudes towards him and towards each other were all quite different. Yet at the core of it, at the center of it, was this benign merciful demeanor.
So we can be sitting in a room together with other people, or even in a car, and some of us can be embroiled in the fact that the car next to us got a little too close to our car, and somebody else could not even have seen it and had no reaction at all and be calm.
The world’s funny like that, and we need to understand that we can change our demeanors, and that a lot of what we go through in our existence is because of the way we react to things, and our attitude towards things. And if we can maintain a positive attitude in the face of difficulty, difficulty becomes something other; it’s no longer a difficulty, it’s just a circumstance. And it’s not a personal circumstance; it’s just a circumstance…
