Stop Sacrificing the Relative on the Altar of the Absolute

Many spiritually inclined people, burdened by the weight of existence, are in a hurry to earn or learn their way off the planet. Countless teachings—ancient and modern, Eastern and Western—reinforce this narrative, either trivializing the world’s significance or dismissing it as mere illusion, a fleeting appearance. The relative is sacrificed on the altar of the Absolute.

Yet this is not my understanding. I find myself in a magical realm—a tapestry of infinite creativity and diversity, breathtaking beauty and poignant depth, where impossible possibilities abound. The universe’s vast complexity, at both macro and micro levels, defies human comprehension.

At the level of Source, nothing ever happened. There is no coming or going, no one to arrive or depart. But we live in the relative world of form—the life we see, touch, and are part of. The felt sense "I am" may be the only certainty we have: that we exist. And because we exist here, we must navigate the messy, human challenges of this realm. We cannot escape them by dismissing the world as a dream or denying our own reality.

Of course, I’m not suggesting we are only this relative world. We participate here because we sense there is more—that we are part of (or even, in essence, identical to) something far greater, more mysterious, more profound. We long to know and embody that truth.

The flaw in the "nobody here" perspective, as I see it, is that it denies the reality of the relative world—our bodies, our lives—in the mistaken belief that only the Absolute is real. But are we not both? Human beings in a tangible world, and divine expressions of pure awareness?

 Is the relative not itself an expression of the Absolute, just as we are?