The levels of truth with relationships eg.

Its funny, but there are different truths at different levels, all equally true from that corresponding level. In other words, truth can look different depending upon where you stand.

In the figure shown alongside, I've shown a kind of analogy.

1. For a person living in the cave, the truth is that he cannot see anything beyond the cave ceiling. This is the truth for him.

2. For a person living in the ground above, the first cloud he sees above him is his ceiling

3. At the next level he sees the cloud above him and so on

4. At the final level you just see infinity all around you which is above all the clouds.

Each jump radically alters your perspective. Its very hard to even conceive what a level above might feel like and what kind of insights may lie there. Its like trying to imagine a 4th dimension.

In relationships,
1. At the first level you think that this person is actually responsible for how your feeling and that object is directly controlling/manipulating you, creating a heaven or hell for you.

2. At the next level, you realize that it is actually the concept of this person that is causing you suffering/pleasure. The concept is more like a projection of what we want them to be, a dream. Since they can never be what you exactly want there is always some amount of suffering. Once you realize that it is the concept that is controlling your emotions and not the person himself, then you see that the next level of reality happens within you. If you can rewire that, the external object will not affect you anymore. So now you see the person and the concept of the person in your mind as 2 entities and you know that the concept is the real thing to be worked with because many other external objects can trigger the same reaction in you. You also realize that it is not just this one person who can bring about these feelings. Any object that satisfies the concept can fulfill you.

3. At the third level, you realize that feelings become emotions only after judging them as pleasant/unpleasant etc. So you separate feelings and emotion and objectively observe all feelings. At this level you can also observe that it is your attachment to certain thoughts that are causing suffering. The real emotions by themselves happening in the moment are like ripples in water. We just multiply their effect using memory.