I share this with some reservation as it’s a subjective work in progress and as seeing clarifies it could all change)

Lately I have noticed that I am in love with two beautiful realities. I’m not even sure what they are. One is perhaps the perception from Self Essence and the other as the perception from burdened parts.

Perfection Reality

This is the dimension where everything is already innocence, beauty, radiance, and wholeness.

Nothing is lacking.

Nothing is out of place.

It is the effortless recognition that the essence of each of us, including every part and every burden and every gesture of life, is pure and untouched perfection.

In India, this is known as the Dance of Leela, the cosmic play. I often call it The Joy of Life, inspired by the name of a favorite painting by Matisse in my living room, shown below, which for me expresses this sense of universal intrinsic radiance.

Perfection Reality is perhaps the perception that arises through the eyes of Self. It sees only what Self sees.

Relative Reality

Then there is the reality of our precious humanity expressed through our burdened parts. This is the realm of protections, longings, charged emotions, preferences, and the countless ways our burdened parts speak and respond to life. This is where parts love, fear, react, protect, ache, reach, soften, and open.

This reality is also beauty beyond words.

This is not a lesser realm.

Here we grow, heal, express, relate, love and live.

How the Two Meet

One is not better than the other.

One is the sun.

The other is the stained-glass window that refracts the light into the colors of our humanity.

Both are precious. Together they form the astonishing mystery of being human.

From the lens of Perfection Reality every part is already shining. From the lens of Relative Reality every part longs to return to being that shine.

And the beautiful twist is this.

Even the longing, the forgetting, the remembering, and the returning are all movements of the same perfection, the same shine.

This is why this whole terrain can feel confusing at times, at least to me.