But that is the thing about miracles: it is perception that determines them as such, not facts.
Interpretation
Miracles are defined by how we perceive them rather than by the objective facts surrounding them.
This quote emphasizes the subjective nature of miracles, suggesting that what we consider miraculous is heavily influenced by our personal perception and interpretation. While objective facts may not support the occurrence of a miraculous event, it is our emotional response and belief that often define it as a miracle in our lives.
In practice
During a speech about resilience, one might quote this when discussing how positive thinking can shape our experiences.
That idea is strange to me. People keep on loving? People keep on loving even if you are not there in their face everyday to remind them? People keep on loving even if they no longer see you at all? People keep on loving even if they are loving someone else? Impossible: to believe you can be loved in absence when you don't even know how it feels to be loved when you are there.
Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made.
One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.
Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible.
Those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters, for without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves we collude with it through our apathy.
I am a weak and sinful man, but God put His hands on me, that is all.
Truly thou art damned, like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side.
The white man is not inherently evil, but America's racist society influences him to act evilly. The society has produced and nourishes a psychology which brings out the lowest, most base part of human beings.
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