Holding Two Truths
Moving beyond spiritual bypassing and movement burnout
I wrote about the Buddhist teaching of the Doctrine of Two Truths in my book Fierce Vulnerability, but it feels like such an important teaching in these times that I wanted to expand on it a little bit here.
Specifically, I continue to see how many political movements are struggling with fractures and burnout while many spiritual communities are lost in spiritual bypassing. I believe that this teaching can help us bridge the gap between the two, and offer a different way forward.
In a Restorative Justice training I attended years ago, someone introduced to me the idea of “200% truths.” When we are presented with two different perspectives, we have a tendency to try to reconcile it in a binary way (either your truth OR my truth is correct) or as a zero sum (your truth is 40% true, and my truth is 60% true).
But truth is complex and does not have to neatly add up to 100%. My truth can be 100% true, and your truth can also be 100% true.
Physicist Niels Bohr once said that “the opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.”
The Jain teaching of Anekāntavāda actually speaks of the seven truths that are present in all truths:
In some ways, it is
In some ways, it is not
In some ways, it is and it is not
In some ways, it is and it is indescribable
In some ways, it is not and it is indescribable
In some ways, it is, it is not, and it is indescribable
In some ways, it is indescribable
Despite us living in an infinitely complex world, modernity tells us that everything exists in a binary, that all the pieces have to fit perfectly together, and if there is a problem, we need to “figure it out.”
And I am so tired of trying to figure it all out.
Recently, I was inspired by the spiritual writings of a teacher that I had never heard about. I thought this person must be a great spiritual teacher. Then I read an online Reddit thread warning us against the abuses and cult-like behavior of this teacher, and I was turned off. Then as I kept reading the thread, I saw other posters pointing out that the original poster had been banned from Reddit for spreading false rumors. So I was again intrigued by the wisdom of this teacher.
How quickly my mind changes, and how desperately it wants to cling to a simple narrative. Is this teacher good or bad? It’s exhausting.
The point of a Zen koan (what is the sound of one hand clapping) is not to “figure it out.” It is simply to be in the practice of being with an unanswerable question. And perhaps the Doctrine of Two Truths, a teaching that was developed mostly in later Mahayana canons of Buddhism, can help us remember that.
According to the teaching, we are constantly living in two realms of reality, two realms of truth.
There is what is often called the relative, mundane or conventional reality. This reality describes our daily interactions with the concrete world. It is predictable, linear, stable and makes sense to our logical minds.
And then there is what is referred to as the ultimate or absolute reality. Here, our ordinary Newtonian intuitions about reality no longer seem sufficient, and we enter the mystery of the quantum realm. Things no longer make sense to us when we look at it through the conventional realm that we are accustomed to.
In the relative realm, things tend to be dualistic and binary. In the ultimate, things are non-dualistic and infinitely complex.
We can interact with the relative realm with our ordinary sense perceptions of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. But in the ultimate, we can access insight into a deeper nature of reality.
In the relative realm, I am typing these words and you are reading them. In the ultimate, there is no separation between you and me.
In the Heart Sutra, the gender-bending Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (often known as Guan Yin, Kuan Yin or Kannon) teaches us that we are all empty of an individual self. According to the Buddhist teaching of anatta, there is nothing outside of deep interdependence with the rest of existence.
In the relative realm, our identities genuinely matter. One of the most important communities that I am a part of is the Asian Diaspora Jam. Our shared identity as Asian is partly what makes our sense of belonging so deep.
But in the ultimate, the identities that we cling so hard to are all so fleeting. Even scientifically, if we go back far enough, we all share common ancestry. So what does it mean that I call myself “Asian?” Is it simply based on how I look? Is it because the science of DNA testing can only trace my ancestry back so far?
Despite the fact that we label one of these truths “relative” or “mundane” and the other “ultimate” and “absolute,” it is always taught that both truths matter and both are necessary to achieve liberation.
Nāgārjuna, a second-century monk often credited for expanding our understanding of this teaching, wrote:
Without a foundation in the conventional truth
The significance of the ultimate cannot be taught
Without understanding the significance of the ultimate,
Liberation is not achieved.
As I wrote in Fierce Vulnerability:
The two truths exist in interdependence with each other; one cannot be understood without the other. Kazu does exist. My fingers are typing these words into my laptop. That is happening. The delusion is in thinking conventional truth is all that exists. If I am wearing a dirty pair of goggles, they obscure what’s in front of me. This doesn’t mean the dirt on the goggles isn’t real, just that it may keep me from seeing beyond it. The goggles and the dirt are there. The delusion is in believing the entire world must be dirty.
In the conventional world, there is war, poverty, and injustice. We’re hurting, suffering, and traumatized. However, in the ultimate realm, time isn’t linear, and we’re already free. Separation doesn’t exist, and we already belong to each other. We’re already whole.
As Ram Dass taught, “You need to remember your Buddha nature and your social security number.” In the ultimate realm, each of us has the innate potential to become fully awakened. Meantime, in the conventional world, we do have social security numbers!
The Delusion of the Conventional
In dominant Western culture, we prioritize the conventional realm. It is the only realm that we recognize as “true.” Everything is binary, everything is linear, everything has to be logical and material.
Even in our social movements, the goals that we aim to achieve are mostly in this realm. Passing legislation or ousting a politician from office are things we can try to “figure out” by assessing which levers to pull, where the weaknesses are that we can exploit, how we can have more power than “those people” so that we can “win.”
But the rhythm of life is that of pulsation. In breath, out breath. Day, night. Summer, winter. Expansion, contraction.
We are living in a time when the changes that we need, the changes that are happening on our planet regardless of what we do, are at such a scale that the only way to truly understand them may be with the lens of ultimate reality.
I support legislation to increase the minimum wage to $25. But I would rather us question the foundation of capitalism.
I support abolishing ICE, but I wonder why so many people are willing to risk their lives to cross an imaginary border leaving behind their families and ancestral lands?
I support Palestinian people having safety, freedom, dignity, and self-determination, but I wonder whether the creation of another nation-state - or any purely state-centered solution - will ever lead to lasting peace.
I would love to see Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez become president, but I would much rather us work to abolish the office of the presidency and stop centralizing so much power.
To figure out how we walk in those directions, we have to have a relationship with a deeper, more complex truth.
I want to share a story about Cynthia and Richard, something that I also wrote about in Fierce Vulnerability. The conversation that I got to facilitate between them was one of the greatest gifts I have ever received in my life.
Twenty-years before their dialogue inside Old Folsom State Prison, Richard had been involved in the brutal murder of Mitch, Cynthia’s 14-year-old son.
Quoting again from the book:
I remember getting Cynthia settled into the room where the dialogue would take place, leaving her with Bonnie [my co-facilitator], and going around the corner to the holding tank to get Richard. He was shaking. I gently put a hand on his shoulder and talked to him for a while. At some point, I asked if he was ready. I immediately realized how silly the question was. How do you ever get “ready” to have a conversation with the mother of the person you murdered? Despite this impossible question, he told me he was “As ready as I’ll ever be,” got up, and slowly walked around the corner.
As soon as he saw Cynthia, he broke down. I watched Cynthia gently stand up, open her arms, and embrace Richard as he collapsed into her. They embraced for what felt like an eternity. For the next six hours, they talked. In one moment, Cynthia took Richard’s hands in hers and told him, “I dreamt I had to hold your hands, because these are the hands that took my son’s life, and I need to have a different relationship with them.”
In the mid 1980s, Cynthia had moved to a Tribal Ranchería* in Northern California to be closer to family. She settled in the small town where Richard grew up. He and Mitchell, who were about the same age, used to play baseball together. Cynthia mentioned driving Mitchell to all of those practices and always seeing Richard walking by himself. She told Richard she felt bad for him—she knew he came from a broken home and there was no one to drive him to practice. Richard said during those difficult years, he felt like no one saw him, no one cared. And now, to hear from the mother of the person he killed that she had seen him, she had cared. . . . Through his tears, he managed to say, “You saying that just now helped me heal something I’ve been holding for thirty years.”
In the relative realm, Cynthia is the “victim” in the story. But in outer-space, there is no backwards or forwards, no up or down. There is just space.
And here, in this small room typically held for parole hearings where a commissioner gets to decide if someone is worthy of freedom or not, the space between “victim” and “perpetrator” disappeared. There was only pain, and the possibility of healing from it.
Here, in the ultimate realm, was Cynthia – a mother who had lost her son to murder – holding, supporting and helping to lift the trauma of the man who took her son’s life away.
Transformative healing cannot happen in the relative realm alone. Clinging too strongly to a black/white narrative only limits the healing that is possible.
The relative realm is real. And in this realm, there are people who oppress, and people who are oppressed. But in the ultimate, we are all hurt by the dynamic of oppression.
In the relative realm, people wield power in ways that are abusive, and they need to be stopped. And in the ultimate, our liberation is bound with those who wield that power.
Sometimes, when I feel like we are “fighting the oppressor,” I feel like we are fighting a delusion. I feel like we are fighting “the man” inside of the Matrix. We may be gaining incremental victories, but we are still fighting within the binary framework of the Matrix. And no matter how much we win minor victories within the Matrix, we will never truly be free until we break out of it and see the world beyond it.
What if the “us/them” worldview of the relative realm, the “right/wrong” perspective of the conflicts we enter and the “win/lose” mentality of so many of our social movements are actually at the heart of what is destroying our planet? It is a worldview built upon a false truth – that you and I don’t belong to each other and that I can become more free by defeating you.
The Danger of the Ultimate
While there is a possibility for deep transformation in the ultimate realm, there is also a danger in clinging to it and losing sight of the wisdom of the relative.
Vanessa Andreotti, author of the book Hospicing Modernity, writes:
While one thing may be useful in the existential realm (e.g. practices that mobilize a sense of oneness), the same thing could be detrimental in the political realm (e.g. mobilizing oneness as an argument to shut down legitimate challenges to power relations, including challenges to racial violence).
“All lives matter” is a truth that is true in the ultimate realm. Every life is sacred, and we should do all that we can to defend it everywhere we can.
And, “all lives matter” is not a truth in the day-to-day experiences of the relative realm. In the relative realm, our world needs a powerful Movement for Black Lives because in the eyes of the state, Black lives simply don’t matter as much. Clinging to the ultimate truth that all lives matter without recognizing the truth that Black lives are being oppressed every single day denies the experiences of Black folks every single day. It denies the truth of the relative realm.
Those of us who spend much of our time in communities dedicated to spiritual practice are in constant danger of losing sight of the relative truth, leading to spiritual bypassing – uses of spiritual truths to deny, suppress and bypass the injustices that exist in the concrete world.
All lives matter. We are all one. It’s God’s will. Accept reality for what it is. Accept suffering, for it can be redemptive.
Those may all be true in the ultimate sense, but it is dangerous, potentially even violent to accept them as the only truths. And depending on the context, it can be unskillful and even harmful to express these truths to someone who is struggling.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote that, “any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned about the social and economic conditions that scar the soul, is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried.”
Too often, misinterpretations of spiritual teachings lead to messages that tell oppressed people, “This is God’s will.” “Just meditate and you will feel better.” “Suffering is only in your mind.” “Pray, and once you die, you will go to heaven.”
The more deeply we understand the ultimate, the more skillfully we can respond to the relative. It is not about bypassing the relative truth. It is about connecting with a deeper wisdom so that we can relate to the relative truth with compassion.
When we cling to the ultimate truth, it can lead to bypassing. “We are all one, so why focus on our difference?”
But when we cling to the relative, it can lead to fractures and burnout. When we see people are irredeemable, when we lock people into a permanent identity of “oppressor,” when we kick people out of belonging, we are living in the delusion of separation. Every moment we operate from that worldview, our minds have to work overtime to deny a truth that we know to be true in our bones: that we belong to each other.
When we lose relative truth, we abandon people. When we lose ultimate truth, we abandon possibility.
Relative truth gives us direction – what needs to change? Ultimate truth gives us ground – how do we change?
Relative truth tells us what we are up against. Ultimate truth reminds us who we are in the midst of it.
Thank you.
Thank you!