Spiritual Friendship: The Hard Way

I'm going to write this slightly different today...kind of in a stream of consciousness.

Reading The Hard Way definitely got me thinking. It was something I read at the right time in my life for it to leave an impact, mostly about the importance of friendship and human connection. The Hard Way is described, by Chogyam Trungpa, as simply the open meeting of two minds. I realized that, yes, this is probably one of the hardest things to do.

In general, people don't like to be vulnerable. To be vulnerable means you are capable of being hurt physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Most people don't wake up and say, "Today, I think I'm going to go out and see how much hurt I can collect!" (Well, perhaps, that's the voice of a masochist, but they're an exception.) Living in a safe, comfortable bubble is all well and good, but you don't really learn anything of value.

"The process of dismantling, undoing, opening, giving up, is the real learning process."

The best way to become vulnerable is to open yourself up to another person. You are sacrificing your security, and reaching out a trusting hand. Now, that person can either respond by also opening up to you, or they can take advantage of you and cause you pain. Sometimes, this pain happens immediately, while, others, a friend, whom you have known for a long time will, ultimately, end up hurting you the most. I think this hurt provides the most learning, but you cannot receive this learning until you take a risk and give up something of yourself.

"You have to have a spiritual friend in order to completely open yourself."

I like this idea of a spiritual friend, but I don't think you have just one. You have many throughout different stages of your life. Perhaps, you have a few at one time. Perhaps, you are alone (which we all must do from time to time). A spiritual friend can help "expose ourselves to ourselves" which causes greater learning and understanding. A spiritual friend makes this learning more real to you. You can bounce ideas and comments off of them to gain a better understanding. We are social creatures for a reason. Perhaps, that's the answer to everything. Maybe we're here for human connection, and all the answers lie in that.

"The only way to get to the heart of the matter is to experience it for yourself..."

You could sit in a circle and talk about the theory of roller skating, love, marriage, friendship, religion, or under water basket weaving all you want, but you'll never gain any understanding of it, if you don't experience it yourself or with your spiritual friend. There are so many things hidden in the doing that cannot be attained by just talking about doing it. If you just talk about doing everything, then you get nothing done, you don't learn anything, and your life was just a waste. People need to experience pain in order to understand it. People need to experience joy to fully grasp it. People need to lose something or someone in order to glean any insight. We're emotional beings, believe it or not and everyone experiences things differently, so we'll never know what these things are really like, unless we experience them.

Spiritual friends can help you experience things. You can really only experience passionate love with people, laughter with people, anger with people, and, of course, you can feel the most pain from people.

Really makes you think about how useless schooling actually is, doesn't it?



Image from: http://abkm.info/About_Us.html