The Two Truths

Buddhism talks about 2 Truths, the relative and the absolute.

The relative truth in the world of relativity, duality. Of Form. Of movement. Our physical form, body the world, ourselves, our individuality. The world of mind, of thoughts, of feelings, where we can compare, differentiate between individual person, place and things. The relative truth always has an individual 'me' (I am) in relation to something 'else'. A subject and objects in space and time. I call it the head realm and its been oh so familar to the 'me'. What We Witness. What we are Aware Of. What we are conscious Of.

The absolute truth is headless, not just the Witness, or Awareness, or Consiousness or God, there is no name for it, no state for it. Where all things, me, you, inner, outer, subjects, objects are empty of inherent existence in themselves. There is no actual person, place or thing. No space or time, ultimately. All that exists only in the context of our mind, our thoughts, our feelings, in the head realm. The relative realm.

Some accept these Two Truths as One Truth. Not Two. Where the two worlds, the two truths, are inter-dependant and inseparable, paralleling the tenets of the Heart Sutra "form is emptiness, emptiness is form". The two is One, not two.

Another way of seeing the two truths, which resonates with me, is like bubbles and waves of the ocean. The bubbles represent the relative world of mind-body-form, which is still water, still the ocean, but not independently, not inherently existing.

The irony is despite knowing all this, despite all the enlightenment practices one can carry on for decades, or lifetime, we almost never get hooked onto the Absolute Reality. We are almost always hooked on the relative and on what we are Aware of, looking at, searching for, striving towards, struggling to improve, to evolve, to get somewhere, spiritually, materially, or both.

So even striving to be with God, or merge into God or Spirit or awake or be enlightened or ascend or whatever, is still a condition of mind, of thought, of visioning a goal. Of the Relative world.

Like someone once said "You need to have a self before you can lose one" and eventually the "I am" lets us go.

Richard Rose put it very well. "You need to fatten your head before you chop it off".