Senses Can Be Illusionary

In Heart Sutra Lecture 5, Venerable Guan Cheng shared that our senses can be subjective and illusionary. When we perceive through our senses, getting sensation, we have three kinds of sensations-pleasant, unpleasant and neutral. Perceiving through our senses give empirical evidences. So we also call reality existent as empirical reality which is different from experiential thinking. 

When we use our senses, we attach to what we can touch, what we can see, what we can hear and taste. So empirical evidences could be illusory. Everybody could be a little different in the empirical senses. But we can generally agree that when we see red, it is red unless the person is colour blind. Or howling is from dog and other might say its from the wolf.  It depends on how you perceive. So senses are not really trustworthy. 

We have to go introspective to see what we are seeing. For example, people who see a half moon from the sky will just think the moon is semicircle if he has no knowledge on how the position of earth, sun and moon results on how we see the different shape of the round moon. 

The Buddha said we cannot totally trust our senses. The Buddha's teaching is not on what you are seeing but to research on how you see it. The process of seeing it. Is what you are seeing right or wrong. You have to know how you see it, then you know how right you are.