When I first encountered Veeresh’s emphasis on friendship at the Humaniversity, I must admit I found it a bit weak. Shouldn’t this all be about love, not simply friendship?
We imagine that friendship is something simple and accessible, something the vast majority of human beings have plenty of experience and little difficulty with.
I am not quite sure where this dumbed-down, commoditized notion of friendship comes from, especially bearing in mind the emphasis on it in the classical philosophical tradition, most famously in Cicero’s De Amicitia. Perhaps we are all so starved of the real thing that we have had to reinterpret what we actually experience as if it were real friendship in order to find some comfort in our daily existence. In any case, I think the lexeme has lost pretty well all of its moral-spiritual connotations in contemporary usage.
Love, on the other hand, has followed a very different historical semantic route. It has become so idealized that no-one at all experiences it. We nonetheless hold it as the highest experience that can happen to a person, or alternatively as the highest value to which he or she can aspire. At the same time, it, just like friendship, is a term we use to label realities that have little in common with the lofty notions of it which we claim to defend.
Whilst I believe that love is the highest state of being of a man, Veeresh has me convinced that friendship is the more practical yardstick and goal. Why? Simply because there is no love without friendship, that state in which the other stands simultaneously in inalienable difference and irreducible sameness to oneself, entirely respected and autonomous and with nothing blocking the flow of identification and compassion.
I suspect actually that the ancient Greeks are to blame after all, for in all their lofty notions of friendship, it is usually opposed to the lesser path of sexual expression and physical love, with eros relegated already in classical times to a position of inferiority to agape, one to which the apostle Paul assigned it irredeemably, or at least until the ideal of courtly love was invented and sung by the Occitan troubadours. It is pretty obvious that in a healthy world, there would be no need to problematize sexuality at all; it is a form of expression of the same love which is present in friendship and in a compassionate relationship to the world. Even if the highest such form, and I am not convinced we need any ranking, it surely presupposes the same type of connection to the other. In the world as we know it therefore, it is perhaps friendship, and not love, that needs to be taught. Once friendship is installed, love flows naturally from it, in many ways, including sexual expression.
This brings me to sannyas, and the realization that I took it, in my own way and outside of any established tradition, some time ago when I resolved this: that whatever pain I had suffered in childhood I was not going to pass it on to others or to the next generation. Whether or not I healed it, I was going to do everything possible to ensure that it ended with me. And as I have just written, this is our one moral imperative. It is also the relationship to the world which allows us to build friendship and all that may follow from it. What we all too frequently call “love”, however, whilst it certainly has qualities of the real thing, all too often falls far short in practice of the ideals of friendship and the position of respect of the other which is its underpinning.
This moral choice then, to renounce all claim on the allegiance of the other, is also the path to compassion and self-realization. It is the path from which flows real love. And right now, I feel immersed in such love, and the more I am able to cease my formerly frantic search for it, the more I find it in my path and experience its power to heal me, and even – yes – my power to heal also others and to move from a position of victimization and emotional poverty to one of originator and channel of love.
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