The mystery of five eyes

When I reread anything I have written, I often find something I could have written better. When I think of exchanges with other people, particularly exchanges that did not go well, I feel I should have done better. Why didn't I?

- IT CAME TO MIND | MANISH NANDY

When I mention this to friends, they ruefully mention dozens of examples from their past where they feel they did not fare well in a key exchange. Whether it was with a spouse, a colleague or a daughter, the discussion went awry, with unpleasant repercussions. They could have - should have - done better but didn't. "I saw it differently then. Small things looked big, trivial issues seemed critical," they explain.

It all depends on how we see things. The way we deal with people and tackle our affairs depends on how we perceive them. I have watched and marveled the way our perceptions affect how we clinch our business, craft our relationships and careen our lives.

I was fascinated by the Buddhist concept of five eyes. Nagarjuna, a second-century scholar and philosopher, developed the concept in some detail. Let me offer my twenty-first century take on it.

At the basic level, most of us make the most rudimentary use of our first eyes, the physical eyes with which we are born. We see what is most easily apparent to us or is accessible to our sight. We see the top of the desk we work on or the magnitude of a large tree that is outside our window. When we encounter a person, all we observe is that the person is quite tall and has brown eyes. Our dealings with people around us are based on this limited perception and those often go wrong because our view is so limited.