My Cup is Half Filled

The most beautiful thing in your eyes may not be as beautiful as you beheld in the eyes of mine and the same could be the reverse. That totally depends on how we perceive things individually. That is why we say beauty is subjective.

Beauty is just one mentioned here but in life there are many things we see differently. We encounter good and bad in our journey of life. Good and bad here could mean anything that we come across: people, things, situation, etc. But it all depends on how we take it. There are no mistakes as all mistakes we make are lessons in life or in other word as the old famous saying goes “failures are the pillars of success”. There is nothing to be dejected when we fail. It is known that to reap the joy of success, we will have to experience first the pain of failure. If we do not experience the pain, how will we know the taste of success? For example if we have toothache and we don’t feel any pain, there will be no happiness when the toothache has been cured. The point here is, only because we suffer the pain of toothache, we get the taste of relief and joy when it has been cured by the Dentist. So mistakes and therefore a failure should not be seen as an unbreakable barrier, it has to be looked as a seed of success and happiness ultimately.

Our perception could sometimes deceive us like the mirage in the desert. We have to see and think beyond. People often say; seeing is believing but even after seeing, it is always wiser to look and contemplate beyond what we see or touch. Our mind is used to perceiving and interpreting what our eyes see and body touches then that has been articulated by our mouth without storing the information and thinking beyond. Although this activity is involuntary, it has to be put into practice that we should give a second thought before anything has been decided or spoken. That will be the wisest decision. Why do we hate people, because we see something bad in them and we love someone because we see in them something admirable. But we have to know that unless we are Buddha or in other words unless our Buddha nature has come out after all the obscuring defilements have been removed, we are never perfect. If not fifty-fifty, certain portion of us will be either bad or good.

People often say a coin has two sides; it is in fact the fact. That is why we have to look beyond what we see and study well before any comment is made. In our Buddhist monasteries, we build statues to be kept in the altar for the visitors to worship. While making the statue, a builder never leave the backside of the statue untouched or unfinished because it will be facing the wall and no one will know; even if the backside faces the wall and cannot be viewed by the viewers, the builder takes into consideration that the statue is built complete from all sides. In a similar way, we as the beholder should not judge anyone or anything just by seeing what can be seen rather like the statue builder; we have to know that there is also other half which has to be taken in consideration though it cannot be seen whether good or bad. Only then decisions followed by action have to be taken.

If we are given a half empty coffee cup, how will we interpret? It is obvious that many of us will see a cup is half empty. This is how we are used to with our brain interpretation. We always fail to enjoy the other side of what we see. If we see the other side of what we see, many of the decisions that we have made earlier and failed miserably could have been a success story. Do not be deceived by what you see and make a hasty decision. See it from a different angle and try to see the other side of what we actually see. Contemplate and meditate over it if you can. Judge everything positively and everything turns out to be positive. Only then when you are given a half empty coffee cup, you will be the one to say “My cup is half filled”.