A day aptly dedicated to remember, and extend the gratitude to friends and the spirit of friendship.
Happy Friendship day to you all - my friends!
Friends - what does the word imply? Is it a group of individuals forming an inner circle for an my social group, who share my interests, and laugh with me at the same joke? Or is it a group of those, who know me and understand my idiosyncrasies. Or are they the people who as they say, "a friend in need is a friend indeed"?
I think the word friend is much more beyond that exclusive set of people who make me feel accepted and comfortable. Equally indebted am I to those, who do not like me. Those, who make me feel small, wretched and embarrassed. For only due to the second group, do I know who I am, and who I am not. Only through the second group, do I know from gut, about my barriers and shortfalls. At the same time it paints in-front of me the immense diversity of the nature! More than the sense of loss, it is a sense of gathering new knowledge and new points of view! They show one the depth of the truth of life. How can one call them foes, and not friends? Do, they not equally contribute to one's growth as a fully developed man, to be able to relate to one's existence more closure to what it is, rather than what false conception one has, about oneself and life per se?
The point is that the journey is three fold. First is about getting stuck in that smallness of considering the other, not friends. That space is that mean narrowness of considering the other different from the self. That space is rightly termed by Marx and other masters of humanity, as the state of "alienation". This primarily is a state of melancholy, where one perceives himself as a lonely entity, on whom the world ("others") are throwing stones. The most challenging part of this stage is not to give way to death, slipping the downhill of various symptoms of neurotic separateness, manifested as hatred, sadness, emptiness, depression, jealousy etc.
The next stage is about identifying the barriers of the self, which makes one alienated, and appear separate and disconnected from the other. It is about curling inside and knowing oneself more fully. This stage is difficult as it is about going beyond what is felt or seen on surface, through the tapestry of personal biases. It is about being able to move out one's own self out of the center of the world, and putting someone else in that place. It is about relating to the other from that vantage point, as they are the center of the world. Compassion represents succinctly this state of being. It is about relating to the other from the vantage point of love, with the attitude of respect towards diversity, with the knowing that what appears so alien, is something that points oneself to something so profound that one would have never even made a sense of that profundity relating to the world, by a lone self.
Obviously when these barriers are identified the task is to remove them, leading one to connect to his fellow humans, and relating to one and all as true friends. This stage of transcendence of one's own barriers, ushers one to that unbounded openness from which life springs out in love. This stage is un-folding outside in the one's pristine nakedness.
These three states are not separate from one another in the real life's stage. They happen together, and and happen always. It depends on one's capacity and skill how much one can beautifully play this game of dynamism, progressing from one stage to the next, and then suddenly regressing with a fall, and again getting up, fully determined to climb the next level, and go on - in the dance - enjoying every moment of the play. It is like a child learning to walk. He crawls, stands, falls, and again decides to stand and continue, only to fall again. The dance continues. But the beauty is that after every fall, he decides to start all over again! What a beauty!
And again, it appears to me, whether friendship is limited to fellow mankind? Does it not obviously and naturally extend to non-humans; to nature as a whole; to the entire cosmos? Thinking more about it, it increasingly appears that friendship is universal. In fact it is very hard to clearly know for certain, where our individuality ends, and the surrounding starts. The point is that it is very difficult to demarcate the boundary where the self ends, and his surrounding starts; where "I" end and "my friends" start. May be both directs to the same? May be one is visible only due to the other? May be both - self and the other, appear together; always?
Like, for example we have more than 10,000 different species of friendly microbes on and inside our body. They operate in the level of our DNA, capable of switching them on and off, selectively, impacting our mood, perception and our perception. Similarly in our external world, we are increasingly dependent on both people who love us, and those who hate us - For only through the pain of rejection, do we realize for sure the glory of acceptance. Without one, how could we have even comprehended the other. Sometimes it occurs to me, this world both within and outside, comprises of just friends, whose member I myself am. Certainly major part of these friends are non-humans, though unfortunately we are fixated at humans, at most of the times!
Books, ideas, inspirations, visions, purpose, art, vocation, etc are another genre of our friends, who add new meaning to who we are. Certainly such friends are the most special. For they know only one thing - To Give!
The elements - air, water, fire, earth - for sure are friends magnanimous! No complaints, no need, no ego, no quarrels! They only know to give, to inspire, to seed a new idea! The transience and energy of fire, the tranquility and humility of water, the omnipresent space of the everlasting company of the air, the unconditional openness from the unbounded openness of the Earth - reminds of the archetype of friendship!
Friends are also, the times both good and bad! Good times nourishes us, and the bad strengthen! Can there be any friend better than time - epiphanies and trials?
Those memories of love and warmth. Those memories of pain and indifference. Are they not friends of equal importance! For memories are the friends who are permanent with us - Till eternity - leaving the footprints on the vast expanse of the fleeting time.
More I think, more it comes so real to me that may be the self and the other both is encompassed in the spirit of friendship. May be even calling some other entity is a friend, indirectly points that I am separate from the other. May be it is just another illusion. In reality probably I would be absolutely unable to experience who I am and who I am not, without the other. So, does it even makes sense to consider myself as a separate entity from the other? For example how can I experience standing, if there is no earth to stand on. In that case, does the process of standing not comprising of seeing myself only in relation to me and the earth? Can one makes sense of itself, without the other? This dance of dialectics makes life really interesting!
Coming back to friendship day, I take this opportunity to pay my highest homage to the spirit of this complex connectedness, some aligning with the other, and some opposing the other, in an eternal process of transient dynamism of an un-ending transactions, creating an illusion of a varied sparkle of this physical life. From childhood this amazing cosmic play used to be fascinating to me, each time I used to review the periodic table. Just by change of one electron, and the pattern of their arrangement, we have such apparently varied perception of elements. How different is hydrogen from gold! But the difference between them is just a pattern of arrangement of the same electronic wave, and their dance of interdependence.
To that cosmic dance of interdependence, here I offer my worship, on this Friendship Day!
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