MARCH NEWSLETTER

ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE REALITIES

"The real does not die, the unreal never lived. Once you know that death happens to the body and not to you, you just watch your body falling off like a discarded garment. The real you is timeless and beyond birth and death. The body will survive as long as it is needed. It is not important that it should live long."

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Anyone who has been a spiritual student has, at one time or another, brushed up against some form of teaching on the absolute. The absolute is unchanging, radiant, cannot be harmed or destroyed, perfect, and immortal. It is called God, Bodhicitta and ultimate reality. We learn from great teachers and enlightened beings whose wisdom we trust that this is the ultimate truth. And yet, we wake up in the morning and have a hungry family to feed, our body may ache, we may feel tired or angry or restless. We look at a world filled with incredible cruelty and pain and ask, if life is perfect why is there so much suffering? If I am, at my core, perfect why do I feel all these painful emotions and physical sensations? These are the questions that plague many sincere truth seekers on the path. How can this revelation on the absolute nature of reality have any relevance to our lives of flesh and blood as parents and householders?

Absolute and relative are a paradox and, like contemplation on a Zen koan, the contemplation on relative and absolute reality can lead to deep insight that has practical application in our lives. Just as there are masculine and feminine, day and night, wholesome and unwholesome actions, pain and pleasure, and many many other apparent dualities, there is the duality of absolute and relative.

The absolute, the core, is perfect ultimate truth. Deeper understanding of the absolute helps guide us by bringing our present condition into perspective. Yes, our body will die, but we are not our body, so what are we? Everything which comes into being is impermanent, so what is permanent? To rest in what is permanent is bliss, our trust in that which is impermanent leads to sorrow. In relative reality there is wholesome and unwholesome actions. Wholesome actions lead to peace of mind. Unwholesome actions lead to more pain. So we cultivate what is wholesome and loosen our grip on what is unwholesome. In relative reality we love our family, we feel identified with our family, we care for our families well being. If we did not do this the human species would not be able to survive. This is relative truth and it is very important. Many times students armed with half truths will tell us to not get caught up in the things of the world, that we are not our bodies or our emotions so we needn’t feel bad. Yet, when our child is sick, when we feel tired, when our world seems to be falling down around us, when we realize what humans are doing to the environment, we do feel bad and no amount of intellectualizing will make us feel better.

Most of the spiritual literature that has come down to us was written by men who either left the family life or remained monks free to live a large portion of their lives contemplating the absolute. Householders have been guided by these monks and, although many monks have an enlightened perspective, few know how to translate this perspective for us householders. Yet this essential view of the absolute is of supreme importance for us who are furthering the human species, the householders.

With a grounding in the absolute we do not become as attached to our thoughts and feelings leaving us freer and lighter. We love our families but realize that they are each separate centers of the absolute and we are not responsible for their karma. We worry less because we realize that every single person is radiant, beautiful, and good to their core, regardless of appearance. It is a great contemplation to apply this realization to someone we dislike or find difficult. This contemplation of the perfection at the core of all things, even where we initially don’t see it, can open us to forgiveness and a more expansive perspective. We tend to worry less about aging, our careers, what our lives look like on the outside, what could have been or what will be. We rest in the center of our goodness and open to guidance, trusting unfoldment. Then we act from a place of love and clarity. By acting from this basic goodness, this absolute perfection at our core, we are led to wise action and the bliss of union with our absolute nature.

The absolute perspective informs the relative reality of our lives. The relative reality of our lives opens us more deeply to the realization of the absolute. Not one or the other but both working together like a healthy marriage of two good friends.

Jacqueline