This question points to one of the core kōans or perennial riddles that practitioners grapple with as they journey deeper and deeper into non-dual awareness. On one level, there is a very real sense in which the initial breakthrough into awakening reveals all conceptual frameworks and maps of the territory to be nothing more than temporary, ultimately illusory superimpositions on a seamless reality that utterly transcends and cannot be captured by any of them. The natural impulse at this point is often to dismiss the relative dimension entirely, to declare all appearances to be “empty” or “unreal” in light of the singular Absolute.

And yet, as the journey continues to unfold, there is a kind of organic gravitational pull back towards the relative realm, a growing recognition of the undeniable way it shapes and textures our moment-to-moment experience. Even as we see clearly that all of the different threads and perspectives and worlds are fundamentally “not-two,” we cannot deny the very tangible and consequential differences in how they actually present themselves.

In my own journey, I went through many profound swings of the pendulum, from privileging the absolute pole to the relative and back again, as I suspect is quite common. It was only over a long period of time and through many cycles of expansion and contraction that a more integrated, intrinsically paradoxical understanding began to emerge. A felt sense that the absolute and the relative dimensions are themselves ultimately non-dual: different expressions of an infinitely faceted yet single co-arising.

What integration looks like in practice is a growing capacity to fully inhabit, honor and respond to the very different experiential textures that each thread and stage of the journey presents. An ability to wholeheartedly adopt different relative perspectives and maps as appropriate without solidifying around any particular one as the final word. In the end, approaching all of this playfully is the best way of ensuring that we do not fall into the subtle trap of clinging to any one as the definitive statement of what is.