Perceptions are not governed by one statement alone

Perceptions are not governed by one statement alone, but by individuals reacting to the basic elements. When individuals react to air, water, fire, space, or earth, they have different responses. Individually, they have different perspectives on all that. Those differences do not become uniform at all -- they are ongoing. The magic lives in that individuality. We are relating individually to all kinds of basic things in life that we seemingly share. But we have no idea, exactly. None of us has had a chance to tell each other precisely what our perception of water is like. We could use all kinds of words and ideas and concepts and terms, but that still would not make it clear. That would be somebody else's concepts....There is a basic iconographic pattern in the universe, like the existence of the seasons and the elements, but how we react to that is individual. --Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, rom "Choiceless Magic" in DHARMA ART pages 91-92.