Dear Guru,
My boyfriend loves to say "perception is reality," which I wouldn't mind except his perception is totally whacked. He has an opinion about everything and any time someone argues with him, he just goes "well, it's my perception." It's actually starting to hurt our relationship because he's said and done some really hurtful things, then takes no responsibility for his actions. I'm ready to whack him over the head. What should I do?

Signed,
Whacked out by his perceptions

Dear Whacked,

Everyone looks at life from a different angle. Even if we see the same thing, we don't have the same experience of it. The big question in life is do we perceive reality or is reality just a perspective we have?

It's OK to experience and believe anything you want. That's the joy of life. It only becomes a problem when we use excuses like "perception is reality" to justify bad behavior. We need to respect all of Life around us. To do harm is to create an unbalance that must be balanced some place else.

As for you, you have several choices. You can spend all your time and energy trying to change his perspective. You can change everything about yourself in order to fit into his reality; or you can be true to yourself and create your own reality. You can always see if he perceives the pain of a whack on the head, but I'm not sure that will solve much. (Buddha has been known to whack a monk or two over the head until they saw the light, so maybe that is a good idea.)

My advice is to stay true to yourself and just tell him whenever he questions you, or you protest about something he's done, just say "well, that's MY perception and as you know. Perception is Reality."

Keep the light on,

Gurustu