Through recognizing the distinction between appearance and illusion, you give yourself permission to acknowledge that some of your perceptions may be wrong or biased, that your ideas of how things are may have solidified to the degree that you cannot see any other point of view but your own. When I began to recognize the emptiness and clarity of my own mind, my life became richer in ways I never could have imagined. Once I shed my ideas about how things should be, I became free to respond to my experience exactly as it was and exactly as I was, right there, right then.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living