It’s important to understand the various appearances of the mind because we all experience sufferings and difficulties, which are caused by our unawareness. We don’t know how things exist: they can appear in distorted ways, not corresponding to reality. Our reactions can be to these projections and not to what is going on. In fact, we usually respond to our projections of complete fantasy rather than to what’s actually going on and this leads to many problems. We need to be able to discriminate among all types of appearances: accurate and inaccurate, pure and impure, tainted and untainted, samsaric and nirvanic.