The theme of friendship has always been a red thread in my life. It is an incredibly important part of human relations. Today I want to talk about like-minded people and friends and understand the essence and importance of them in our lives. A year before writing this article, I began to draw a picture that represents opening of heart center. In the end, the art was about a deep female friendship. Many wonderful transformations came in my life while I was making this picture. I rethought the importance of friendship completely and understood the subtle aspects of its manifestation. I would like to share this experience with you. Once I was searching an inspiring article topic and when my friend suggested this one, I exclaimed: "YES!».
Like a chameleon a human changes the color after communication with different people. People influence us greatly. If you want to understand who you are – look at your social circle. Look at people with whom you spend most time of your life. Our personality has our own distortions and distortions of people around, those who are manifested through our own karma caused by actions in the past, previous incarnations. You may be surprised but habits are transmitted energetically. So, when we concentrate on somobody, we can get his patterns of behavior and personality.
Human communication can have different levels of vibration. These levels are connected with three gunas of material nature and their combinations. Your choice of close people determines whether you will develop or degrade together. To be honest, a true friendship is a development always. It is a joint movement forward, bilateral cooperation, requiring a sufficiently high qualification of a person in matters of moral, ethical and spiritual development.
Further we will talk about different types of people communication without singling out the relationship of parents and children or the relationship between spouses, because they are built on the same principles.
Collective degradation is wasting time during pointless entertainment, idleness, bad habits, gossip, harmful and criminal activities.
In this case people waste the energy on level of lower chakras. They do not have the opportunity to see the teachers among each other. They show familiarity often and are not tolerant if somebody do not share their view. Such people change one relationship to another easily as soon as common interests end. This relationship represents the gune of ignorance (Tamas) or a mixture of gunas of passion (Rajas) and ignorance.
Teaching is another type of relationship. There is a person who has knowledge about the ecological way of life, methods of self-development. He makes a positive effect on the other, who takes the position of the student. It seems that only one side benefits, but actually both sides develop in such case. When you have some valuable knowledge and begin to share it with others, you open up the opportunity to get a new "portion" of developing information. For allegory we can imagine a cup of water. If we want to pour new water, the old water should be poured into another cup.
Being near a wise man calms and cools the mind. Thoughts about God, Saints, Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, highly spiritual beings, reflections on the Scriptures connect you with a cloud of high vibrations — and this is also a form of relationship that leads forward. If you didn’t meet spiritual friends yet, then use this method actively. You will attract the appropriate people changing the way of thinking and action, raising your vibrations.
Sometimes it turns out that a person is able to appear as a teacher in the opposite sense, showing the qualities and actions that lead to degradation. Then you have an opportunity to learn from other people's mistakes.
There is another situation when your current friend was your enemy in past incarnations. Then your lesson is to learn how to be friends in this life. It can take a lot of efforts. It is important to understand if this connection is necessary. We should realize do we have enough skills to manifest as a good teacher to our friend with bad habits and not to fall under his bad influence. Often we have to act in this role with relatives with whom we are connected in this life.
We exchange energy and influence each other. On the path of development a human has to make a strong effort to stay on his level and move forward. Not many people are able to resist the prevailing tendencies in society. One who walks yoga path learns to lose and restore the positions in society. He forms «immunity» to external influences. Over time, external factors will not affect on his condition (the quality of energy, vibration, level of awareness), but he will begin to influence on his environment. Also it is not good idea to impose your view of the world by force. Please respect the freedom of choice of the Soul and the speed of its evolution. All we are unique and have our own individual path. Remember about the non-obvious phenomenon of fate. Sometimes family members accept a part of the negative karma. Thus they lighten your path. And you do not even know about it. And the last: remember that the environment is our mirror, so focus on self — development.
Equal communication
There is type of cooperation and co-creation directed to the benefit for living beings. In this category we can name like-minded people. In fact, these are people who share with you positive interests. This is any activity focused on transformation of surrounding space and people in an evolutionary way. When harmonious people surround us and we exchange the energy with them, we grow. We can get the qualities that we lacked. We can open the previously hidden sides of our Soul.
The theme of searching like-minded people is good because people united by one goal can gradually refocus their attention, directing the vector not on themselves, but outside, on care about others. Such type of relationship can easier be transformed into true friendship than another situation where people go in different ways, forced to spend more time and effort to understand each other.
For example of value of friendship I will tell you a story about broom.
One old man had three sons. The sons didn't get along. And the old man wanted them to live in peace after his death. He decided to teach them. One day the father asked them to break a broom in the middle. The eldest son tried first with effort but couldn’t. Other sons couldn’t break it too. Then the father untied the broom and asked each son to break a few straws. Of course, they did it easily. After that, the head of the family said: "That's the same in life — when you are separate – it is very easy to win you. And when you are together, then no one will break you.
This story reminds that people should unit their power vectors in one common direction.
There is no tree without branches.
There is no glory when you’re one.
In the Mahabharata Krishna tells to Arjuna that the basis of our happiness is the relationship. In fact only the relationship between Souls is the value of this world. Our development is based neither on the siddhi or knowledge but on experience of connection. Think about it.
The evolution of relationships is the process of moving from acquaintance to deeper interaction. While it is not difficult to find like — minded people (I hope, in a positive sense), it is a great job and great gift to build real friendship. "Friend" – is the qualification higher than " companion".
Friendship has a spiritual eternal nature. It is one of the highest forms of interaction between people. It's a precious gift. You need to develop as a person for opportunity to have Friends. At first stage you should have companions. You can build a bridge to friendship gradually through communication, opening your heart. You need to make some transformation inside yourself, develop ability not to envy, selflessness and patience in order to create a deep connection with other. Friendship is an open heart, the courage to show your weaknesses and become vulnerable.
Sometimes it seems that friendship is something so natural that should not be learned. Wrong. We need to learn the friendship, the commonwealth and cooperation. All these qualities need to be brought up in a constant work. We should develop mutual trust. There is no friendship without mutual trust. Let ignorant people make any insincere smiles. They do not know about the basics of life. But everyone who knows the importance of moral foundations, understands perfectly well that sincerity and cooperation will be strong foundations on which the improvement develops. Helena Roerich 24.03.1939
In the Orthodox tradition the concept of friendship is based on love for one's neighbor, respect and desire to help the spiritual growth of the person whom we call a friend. A good and faithful friend is another manifestation of the Lord's concern for man.
Sometimes spiritual friendship is defined as the practice of reducing self-esteem. People are not similar to each other. In spiritual friendship we learn to admire those qualities that we do not have in oneself. We care about other people, we want to see them growing and developing morally in the direction of greater wisdom, virtue, understanding.
Unfortunately, the concept of friendship is distorted very much nowadays. The reason is not only that fact that communication is based on common interests connected with the power of gunes of ignorance and passion. The reason is also energetic field of the city. A metropolis especially.
Big cities are full of business contact vibrations, which go into all other spheres of relations. Sometimes even families are created more with a pragmatic calculation than on a cordial relationship and a common spiritual goal. Partners enter into a relationship based on the principle "you give something to me – than I give something to you". Communication here is build on mercantile expectations about the second half, forgetting about unselfishness. The same thing happens with true friendship. We devalue this relationship being lazy to create this connection, because then we will have to start serious internal work.
Paisius the Saint, one of the most respected spiritual teachers of the Greece in XX century, said: "If you plant a watermelon and a pumpkin nearby, the pumpkin will take all the sweetness from the watermelon and the watermelon will become tasteless and unsweetened. But pumpkin, whatever took the sweets, will still be a pumpkin. Therefore, if we want to have sweet and delicious watermelons, we need to put them away from the pumpkin."
I would like to change a proverbial and say: one new friend is better than two old». Let your environment be significantly reduced, but it will bring much more benefit to you and others. I urge you to be very clear on this question.
True friendship is essentially yoga (unification), it is synergy. People united by friendship become a huge force and, most importantly, they become happy.
We can compare a misfortune with a mad elephant, and friendship — with a rope woven from thin threads that can stop this elephant. I thank the universe for real friends in my life. To be honest all of them appeared in my life through yoga. Yoga united us together, so different and unique. Today one of our favorite forms of leisure (not only) is a joint practice of mantra yoga.
Acquaintance with some people on the course of teachers of Oum club, who first became my like-minded people, also developed into a deep and close relationship. Such relationship means that friends are not always people who are on one wave with you. But they are people who can show you true path in right time. They can tell you that you are wrong sometimes and even hurt you destroying your illusions. And it is incredibly important. Such relationship is mutually significant communication and support in a difficult moment, sharing spiritual practices.
I am very glad that this theme appeared for me. It made me think about friendship deeply. While I was writing this article, the space responded very strongly: someone wrote a post about friendship in social networks, someone saw me in dream, there were many meetings and rich communication with spiritually close people, including a trip to the yoga camp "Aura".
And even my laptop wallpaper changed to the photo where I hug one of the closest friends mysteriously. I am very happy, because in my life there is a lot of sincere, heartfelt friendship. And I wish every living being to know this great divine state, to understand what power is behind it.
I thank Olga Bedunkova for inspiration for this article. I send the light of my heart to all my friends. I wish everybody to develop a circle of true deep spiritual relationship. OM