Relationship

Relationship In Depth

To the mind, a relationship is the experiencing of a role play where people's roles and responsibilities are defined with consequent expectations. A relationship is like a world with its own rules and consequences, which allows one to experience scenarios, problems, dramas, emotions, thoughts that otherwise could not have been experienced if not for the relationship. 

For instance, through being a parent, one can experience the scenarios of responsibilities. Through being an employee, one can experience the roles of obedience and even roles of standing up for oneself. Through being a lover, one can learn the lessons of love and loss.

Different relationships thus can help The Self to learn about different things, all helping one to Know more about oneself. Through relationships, one can explore the different sides of one's mind—of Oneself.

Realize that everything one experiences in life, one is simply the experience of Self. For instance, when one is having a joyous conversation with someone, at a deeper level, one is simply experiencing one's beliefs about the experience. Why is the experience a positive one? Because one is experiencing one's perception of the experience.

So, the world can serve as a mirror to show us who we are, i.e. how we react, what our core beliefs are. Relationships help to bring the mirror closer; the deeper the relationship, the more vivid the self-experience will become.  

Relationships thus can help one to see what one cannot see. Often, it can be too difficult to see ourselves when we are without relationships. The eyes are designed to look outwards rather than inwards. That is why the practice of meditation is helpful because it can help one to turn their sight inwards. And coupled with the help of relationships, one can become aware of their reactions and their cause much easier.

You can create relationships with anything!

In life, one can have relationships with anything; not just with another person, but also with an object, an experience, an idea, a piece of art—basically everything imaginable because to the mind, all is The Self.

So one can have a relationship with a car, a flower, a mobile phone, an expensive pair of shoes, or even a far-away planet, which would be quite a long-distance relationship! 

The point of this section is not so much to make one overthink about the mechanics of the relationship; rather, it's simply to make one aware that relationships can help one to see themselves clearer. Knowing this can help one greatly if one desires to transform their suffering states of mind because relationships can help us to accelerate the process of discovering them as these dark states of mind often are hidden from sight.

Realize that the quality of one's relationship to anything will always come back to the relationship one has with oneself. As explained previously, this is because whatever one is experiencing in life, one is simply experiencing their mind. 

So the part that one cannot accept in the other will always reflect the part one cannot accept in oneself. For instance, that arrogant person you hate is simply a reflection of how you see the arrogant part of yourself. In other words, the beliefs we create about what is a "Perfect Self" and what is not will not just apply to others, but to ourselves as well. And relationships can help these ideas of Self-Rejection to surface because frictions, i.e. disagreements within relationships are bound to occur sooner or later.

Without this knowledge, one can be stuck in the question as to why one is always suffering whenever they meet someone they don't like, not realizing that it's simply a reflection of how one dislikes oneself.