Where Unconditioned Love Meets Relative Reality

A practitioner recently asked me: If Dzogchen always speaks from the ultimate, how do we account for the relative love we feel in daily life?

It’s a fair question. In Dzogchen, we talk constantly in ultimates—ultimate bodhicitta, ultimate truth, unconditional love and compassion. But daily life doesn’t happen in ultimates. It happens in karmic relationships: the love of a parent for a child, affection for a spouse, responsibility toward aging parents. If the view is ultimate, how do these relative expressions of love and compassion fit?

Relative love is the love we all know: I love my spouse, my child, my friend. Ultimate love is without reference point. It's immeasurable, boundless love and compassion for all beings, the natural expression of Buddha nature itself.

In Dzogchen, the view is always from the ultimate, but we don’t float through our lives as formless clouds of emptiness. We move through karmic connections and relationships. The reality of those karmic connections means that our love and compassion shows itself differently for different people based on conditions, responsibility, and our karmic history. To call that grasping or fixation misses something important. These connections are not mistakes or evidence of delusion. They are reflections of mind appearing in relationship.

Each connection arises differently. With your child, you appear as a parent. With your spouse, a partner. With your parents, a child. With colleagues, something else. These are not false roles. They are karmic connections, each carrying its own identity and responsibilities. In the western world we might call these different identities, but in a Buddhist context we can call them different emanations.

I have an emanation with you. We have some kind of karmic connection. This is not the same reality that I experience with my daughter. It's the same with my wife, we have our own kind of karmic connection. We have our own kind of reality that we are experiencing, which is somewhat similar to my daughter's because we have a shared environment, but it's also very different.

The problem begins when we get trapped in one identity and we try to force that one role in every situation. That's not natural because that's not what those people need in that situation. My daughter doesn't need me to be her Buddhist teacher. She needs me to be her father. My parents don't need me to come in to that relationship and start teaching them Dzogchen. For them, that would be a very unnatural relationship.

So the reality of our karmic connections is that we play many different roles based on the reality of our life. And none of those is who we truly are. I am not the father. I am not the spiritual friend. I am not the son. I'm all of those things, and also none of them.

Love and compassion take different shapes in each karmic container.

Many practitioners struggle because they are trying to bring the buddhanature that they experience on the cushion out into the world, but they are still fixating on one identity: the conception of the meditator on the cushion. They try to bring that one manifestation of buddhanature out into the world where everything is different and changing.

On the cushion, they can recognize that natural abundance. They can see the natural wealth of their buddhanature, the natural dignity. But at work, or with family, that recognition collapses. They're not realizing that that buddhanature can be present in a different way, in a different form.

We all move through multitudes of karmic emanations: at work, on vacation, with extended family. Each is its own small universe, yet in every one the capacity for love, compassion, and generosity is present. It simply takes different shapes according to the karmic connections that are unfolding.

This is why so many practitioners struggle when they return to their families. In most Western households, your family isn’t Buddhist and they don’t care that you are. They only see the son, daughter, or sibling they’ve always known. Your perception of yourself as a practitioner doesn’t match how they see you. Without openness, responsiveness, and compassion, you get pulled back into all that old conditioning and karma. It's hard to liberate that if we're not really grounded in the presence of our buddhanature in all of its different manifestations.

The mistake is clinging to one rigid idea of buddhanature. In reality, buddhanature is actually very playful. It's spontaneous, dynamic, flexible. It's not this cardboard saint moving through life in a single, homogenous mask. That's not our buddhanature. That’s just a projection of awakening, not awakening itself. Genuine buddhanature appears in infinite ways, meeting each karmic connection without losing ground.

So the real question is not: Do I practice ultimate love or relative love?

The question is: Am I present enough to let buddhanature express itself fully in this moment, in this role, with this person?

That’s the training: bringing the recognition of awareness into every relationship. Not clinging to one identity, not rejecting relative bonds, but letting the ultimate show itself through the relative.

Ultimate love is not somewhere else. It’s right here, in the way you speak to your child, care for your parent, or meet a stranger. Each moment is the ground for liberation, if you show up without rigidity, without pretense, and with the full abundance of your awakened nature.