Absolute & Relative III

Every spiritual path talks about the Absolute and the Relative in some form or another, using its own language. The Absolute is spacious, aware, and compassionate. The Relative includes all of our day-to-day experiences, with the full range of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and sensations. Sometimes it seems that our goal in spiritual practice should be to escape the relative world, with its highs and lows, its focus and distraction, its joys and sorrows, and finally ‘get to’ or ‘attain’ the state that is the Absolute peace of our true nature.

Sounds good, right?

This is like walking on a mountain path, trying to get to the peak, so we can better see the ‘ground’ on which we stand, not realizing that we are walking on the ground all the way up.
What we come to understand is that the nature of reality, our true nature, is spacious, aware, and compassionate. And that all the relative experiences we have are expressions of the innate capacity of the absolute nature of our mind. So, we don’t really need to go anywhere to ‘get to’ or ‘attain’ anything. We just need to connect with our ever present innate wholeness.

When we cling to our relative experiences, we are so caught up in our experiences, feelings, and emotions that we can’t see their source. Our habitual patterns of thinking and reacting actually obscure the true nature of our experience.

The Relative practices that we engage with, by recalling our benefactors or inhabiting a caring moment from some time in our life, are designed to bring to mind the positive qualities that are present in those experiences, and allow them to resonate with the same qualities that are present in the nature of our own minds. These are the qualities that are inherent in the Absolute nature of mind. The practices of love, care, and compassion are the bridge that connects the relative and absolute. We see that our relative experiences are all an expression of our own true nature, which is spacious, aware, and compassionate, and unchanging.