Shambhavi talks about true friendship as wholeheartedness and wanting the best for the other person. She talks about constancy and being willing to be inconvenienced as important aspects of friendship. A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi
STUDENT 1
Can we talk about friendship?
SHAMBHAVI
Friendship? Mmm. Well, friendship is one of the great topics that seems to span all spiritual traditions, all philosophical traditions. Every culture, there's some kind of discourse about friendship, which is really fascinating.
And of course, in the traditions from the part of the country that this tradition is from, Trika Shaivism, the friend is one of the names of God. And also the one of the names of the teacher.
So there's a lot of teachings on how we relate to a teacher, both in Trika Shaivism and in Dzogchen. There's a lot of teachings on the different ways, the different flavors in which people relate to teachers.
One of them, of course, is as a friend. As a spiritual friend, to help me. There's that whole discourse about friendship and how there's a sense of friendliness and receiving a kind of more wholesome friendship between you and your teacher.
Then there's a whole other discourse around God being a friend. Of course, this is something that I was aware of from a very young age, although I would have never used the word God. But when I was really little, I had this idea of the friend. There was something called the friend.
I used to write poems to the friend and think about when I met this friend. I really didn't think it was a normal person. It wasn't like I just wanted a regular old friend.
There was some other idea that I had, and I couldn't really articulate it. But it was really a lot like later when I got much older and I read the poetry of Rumi and his poems to Shams Tabrizi, his preceptor and probably his lover and his friend, his spiritual friend.
And of course, he wrote very, very eloquently about the friend. And I realized, oh, that's what I was talking about. So in some sense, that sense of the way that a friend wants nothing but the best for you.
The friend wants your well-being and supports you to express yourself in your most unique way and to live as well as you can. Even to their own inconvenience or something like that.
No matter what you do, that friend that's everywhere is only wanting the best for you. So there's this sense that we can feel that friend when we do practices in the heart space, and then when that overflows the heart space.
We feel it everywhere. We feel that sense of friendliness and mercy and sweetness and compassion and that there's no conditions. We don't have to show up any particular way.
We don't have to earn that friendship. We don't have to do anything to maintain it either. We just have to become aware of it. That's really our only job.
Then, of course, there's the idea of the Dharma friends. Ma talked a lot about it and talked about the importance of having friends on the path, people who are loosely going the same direction, and how supportive that is for us.
So people who share something of your values. And of course, we know that when we participate in any spiritual tradition, whether it's an Abrahamic tradition or Dzogchen or Trika or anything, there are ways of talking about reality that we hold in common.
Ways of talking about human life and about our practice. That we can share these deeper communications using that language. And that's very supportive for people.
So the friend is really everywhere. It's all over the Western philosophical tradition and also every spiritual tradition that I've ever been aware of. There's something magical and uncanny about friendship.
It's more elusive, in a sense, than romantic love or parental love or something like that. There's something magically elusive about it. And I think that has captured people. It magnetizes people to that idea of a friend.
This friendship that has no conditions doesn't have to be earned. It's all for you. There's nothing held back. This is the friendship of God and the friendship of at least good teachers and the friendship of good dharma friends.
If we're doing friendship in an ordinary but extraordinary way, so let's just say ordinary friendship—uttama uttama, highest, highest, right? Not the friendship that we offer everybody when we're experiencing that capacity because the heart is open enough. That's something else.
But just ordinary friendship, but in a very exalted mode. That would be a very wholehearted kind of friendship, but it wouldn't be aggressive in its wholeheartedness.
Wholehearted, meaning that there was a willingness to go along with that person regardless of how that person was showing up. And regardless of whether you could be around however they were showing up at all times.
That there would always be an open door. That would be one thing. There would always be an open door. And then that you always want the best for that person. You're there for them.
You're enjoying your friendship with them. But if they need to go somewhere or do something that isn't what you would prefer, you're there for them 100% to do that.
The whole discourse around, relationships have to meet my needs, is so impoverished. Your needs will be met when you're generous. Your needs will not be met when you're trying to get stuff from other people.
That's a very impoverished way of being in the world. So when we say, I have these needs and you have to meet them, we're basically saying, I don't have what it takes. We're basically saying to ourselves, I'm missing something. That is completely antithetical to this tradition.
You are not missing anything. You just haven't discovered the fullness of your incarnation. And when I say you're not missing anything, I do not mean that in a cartoon-like way, you could do anything if you just set your mind to it. I do not mean that.
We all can do some things and we can't do other things. None of us can do everything, and we don't all have a genius. We're not all spectacularly something or other. This is just a very baby and titan kind of concept.
There are many, many things I cannot do in this life, but I can feel contentment. I can feel fulfillment. I can feel love for everyone. I can discover my innate generosity. I can feel full, even though I will never be a downhill skier. I can feel full.
So this is what I mean by you already have everything you need. You just haven't discovered it yet. If you offload your happiness onto somebody else, then you're basically announcing that you're going to suffer. You're basically announcing that.
Fulfillment comes from discovering our real nature and being generous to others. Our real nature is like a fountain of generosity. When we discover that, when we can feel it actually, and then we just have this natural impulse to be generous toward other people, then we're fulfilled.
That's how we're fulfilled, not by having our needs met. When we can be that for a friend, and even when someone does something that we would prefer they didn't do, that's what I call a friend.
I like to quote Jacques Derrida sometimes, and he said, friendship is the willingness to be inconvenienced. I think that's a sweet definition of friendship. Willingness to do for others, even if it inconveniences you. Or to support others in something, even if it inconveniences you.
Then sometimes people get into things that we can't be around for whatever reason. At the same time, if we're really offering them friendship, we're still going to hold the door open for them forever.
STUDENT 2
Can you elaborate on how you keep the door open? For example, if somebody is a drug addict.
SHAMBHAVI
Yeah. You're always ready when there's an opening to reconnect. You're always ready. You never damn them because they did something yesterday. You're always ready to forget everything that ever happened, and open your heart to them and welcome them into your life again.
Yeah. Sometimes people are doing stuff that we just can't be around, either because we can't digest it or it's just bad for us in some way. I mean, we also want to be our own best friend, right? We don't want to treat ourselves badly.
But the minute there's an opening, you're going to be there wholeheartedly. And there's going to be endless chances. If we're talking about that higher ordinary friendship.
One thing I learned doing sadhana over these years is that we always get chances. No matter how badly we screw up, we always get another chance. God gives us infinite chances. And we should try to be like that.
If we offer friendship to somebody. In the ordinary sense, you're not offering friendship to everybody. In the ordinary sense, you're choosing, Well, this person is my friend, and that person is not.
So if we choose to be friends with someone, we should do it in that wholehearted way. And not, I'll be friends with you if you behave like this or if you don't behave like that. That's not friendship.
But then you have everyone around you walking on eggshells. And how healing is it for someone who has some issue, like addiction problems? How healing is it to know that no matter what they do, at the end of the day, you're going to come back and be there for them when they're ready.
That's a beautiful thing to be able to offer someone. And the difference between that and when you're really living in the heart is when you're living in the heart, you're not choosing. You're offering that to everybody.
And it looks very different for each person. Very, very different, depending on people's conditions. But that feeling of friendship toward everybody is always there. It's really relaxing not to have to choose. It's a lot of work, making all these distinctions between people. [laughter]
STUDENT 3
Does true friendship come without expectation?
SHAMBHAVI
Well, ordinary friendship does because it can't be one-sided. But that doesn't mean if someone doesn't meet your expectations, that you're not still going to hold the door open.
Don't think that you're going to get friendship. Like, get it, like, grock it. Friendship is something that people just spend their whole lives meditating on and exploring and trying out and experimenting with. It's not something that you get.
It's like a wisdom tradition. It has incredible depth and nuance.
STUDENT 4
Is loyalty one of the attributes of friendship?
SHAMBHAVI
I really think loyalty is an impoverished way to relate to people. And I've thought about this a lot over the years because a teacher that I formerly had demanded people sign loyalty pledges. Which I didn't. It was very soon before I left, and that was one of the reasons why I left.
Loyalty seems to me to be kind of a somewhat stupid version of leaving the door open. Leaving the door open allows for constancy, but it's the constancy of a river where things can change.
And you can respond to the nuances of things, and you're swimming along together. So you're being constant, but it's in an ever-changing situation. And so you can adapt to that.
Loyalty, it seems to me, at least from all of the martial arts movies I've watched [laughs] and the people that have demanded loyalty, is almost like brute force. I'm just going to play my same role in this un-nuanced way, no matter what is happening.
I'm always going to support you, even in this sort of gross way. Even if you do things that are really harmful to other people, I'm not going to say anything about it, and I'm not going to contradict you or contravene you in any way. It seems like an almost non-responsive version of constancy.
In some ways, I can see where someone in a certain condition could benefit from that, but it seems very unrefined to me. There's something unalive about it. I've only seen loyalty invoked when there's an abuse of power. So that makes me think that it's not a great thing.
I mean, even in the Samurai movies, the loyalty issue only springs up when there's some abusive sword master. Who is using his men to support his nefarious goals. And then they die on their swords for him. That's the loyalty narrative, right?
And certainly the teacher that I'm referring to, that's what he wanted. He just didn't want people to leave, basically. No matter what he did, he just didn't want people to leave.
Sometimes, even if you're being constant in a friendship, you have to leave for a time or even forever. But still hold the door open and still love that person and still wish that person the best.
And help them as soon as you have an opportunity, even if it doesn't come for lifetimes. So I think there's much more room in friendship with the idea of constancy than loyalty.
STUDENT 5
Why is it so much harder to be a friend to ourselves than to other people?
SHAMBHAVI
It's really not. Because friendship, if it's actually what it purports to be, can't really be offered in a pure way if we're not friends with ourselves. If we don't like ourselves, we can't really offer whole-hearted friendship to others. We just can't.
When we don't care for ourselves, we feel anxious about ourselves or sad about ourselves or something. Whatever we feel. Desperate, lots of people feel desperation. A lot of energy is bound up in that. A lot of our vital energy is just in there trying to deal with that.
It's like me with my hip arthritis. When I was having a a lot more pain, a lot of my awareness was just trying to manage that and trying to figure out how to walk from one place to another.
And I was tired because of that. And because I was tired, I didn't have as much to give others because there was energy bound up in that. So it's the same as when we dislike ourselves or hate ourselves or feel worried about ourselves. There's just this constant drain, constant attention going to that.
And then what happens is, this is what we call the realm visions, the six realms. The six realms are patterns of bound energy. And one of the signal characteristics of that way of thinking about a human being, through the six realms, is that they demand participation from other people.
Each of the six-realm karmic visions, God, titan, human, animal, hungry ghost, and hell realm, they aren't just like things happening internally. They're ways that we relate to others.
And we are trying to connect to other people through those realm visions, through those patterns. And we're also trying to get other people to confirm our view of things.
So that can look like intimacy. That can look like friendship or some version of it. It definitely looks like connection of some sort. But it is all actually predicated on that realm vision continuing.
So for instance, somebody, just to use pop-psychology language, someone who's codependent, that's like a hungry ghost type of an orientation, they'll look like your best friend. But really, they're trying to get something from you. They're giving to get. And that is the mechanism of all those realm visions.
And they all represent some quantity of some contact, but a loss of intimacy. When we relax and when we discover and feel more of our own innate value. We begin to like ourselves more and just get more relaxed. That energy gets freed up.
Then we can be more for the other person in a real sense. We're no longer like, okay, I need you to participate in my realm vision, and I need to make contact with you in this particular way.
And all these machinations and manipulations that are going on, that really aren't the kind of friendship I'm talking about. They're very contractual in some way, transactional and contractual.
My experience as a teacher is that, because it's my job to try to help people to relax these things, that there are certain times when things are just so powerful for people that they need to be around people that are entering into those contracts and transactions with them. They get very, very angry if you don't do that.
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