The difference 2

The legendary Tibetan poet and yogi Milarepa had a very dramatic life. He was trained as black magician and destroyed his home village before he started to study the compassion and wisdom of Buddhism. After many years of extreme hardship he reached clarity of mind. 

So he himself had experienced the two ways to understand reality, the conventional and the absolute.

The conventional way of understanding reality does not necessarily lead to black magic, but it certainly leads to suffering. The reality will never fit into the categories we believe in and expect to be fulfilled.

Long ago life was quite static for most people - living in one village all the life - so understanding reality as static was almost right.

In the modern world however, all of us are in constant contact with change. Even the remote mountains have satellite television, GPS, Google, blogging and DVD movies. Climate change, swine flu and financial crisis are global.

In this modern world formed by decisions made by humans it gets more and more appropriate to see the absolute aspect of reality and not only the relative.

Milarepa was an example of the lotus principle: purity growing from dirt. From the dirt of black magic, the purity of the saintly poet emerged.