Welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast. This is episode number 175.

I am your host Noah Rosheta.

Take a moment to imagine what is the most beautiful thing you've ever seen.

Can you picture it? Can you recall?

Put that image in your mind for a moment, the most beautiful thing you've ever seen.

And now imagine someone comes along, they look at the same thing and they think out loud.

Wow, that's so ugly.

It's true that it's beautiful and it's also true that it's ugly.

Both are true, but how can that be?

Today I'm going to share my thoughts about the Buddhist teaching of the two truths.

As always, keep in mind you don't need to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist.

You can use what you learn to simply be a better whatever you already are.

So jump in right in, what is truth?

In Buddhist teachings, you'll encounter the concept of the two truths.

The teaching of the two truths, the exact meaning of this teaching varies between the various Buddhist schools and traditions.

But they are not to be understood as two separate truths, but rather two separate dimensions of a single reality.

I like to think of them as two levels of truth, where perhaps one is superficial and the other is more deep.

Or sometimes I like to think of them in the context of truth, where one is truth with a capital T,

and the other is truth with a lowercase T.

The two truths are often referred to as absolute truth and relative truth,

where absolute truth is that capital T truth and relative is the lowercase T.

Absolute truth is how things really are and relative truth is how things seem to be.

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